of

business of education is to produce successful stockbrokers and enterprising commercial travellers. Men, not bagmen, were the plant he wished to rear. And equally, men, not learned men, we must remember. The primary and universal business of education is with the human being, not with the future specialist, whether his specialism take the form of Assyrian roots or English nails and scissors. His attitude is worth remembering at this moment of educational ferment, when we are beginning to gather the grapes of the vineyard he so painfully dug and planted in the wilderness of thirty years ago. Neither technicalism any kind, nor information-worship of any kind, will meet our needs. If we are carried away by either, the grapes of the now promising vineyard will prove but wild grapes after all. Our bagmen will not be the less enterprising or successful, nor our learned men less learned, for having had their education directed during some impressionable years towards higher, more universal, more essential things than either learning or commerce. Let us try in this matter of education to ask the right questions and not the wrong -not whether a school teaches Greek or natural science, but whether a boy carries away from it a finer character, a more trained and serious intelligence than boys from another school. Let us try to prefer the capacity of thinking to the showy achievements of memory which have so often killed mind, and to honor taste and judgment, which perceive the relations and varying value of knowledge, above the superficial cleverness which displays all alike, with equal interest or equal indifference. Let us remember all that the example of Germany teaches, and not only a part: not only that it is possible to do much more than we do to bring science to the aid of commerce, and to teach modern languages more

effectively, but also that German experience, as well as English, seems to show that, on the whole, the old humanities are the best foundation, and even that the boys trained in them are so much better trained that, if they come later to the modern subjects, they are apt rapidly to overtake those who have had the modern training all along. We hear a great deal about German and American successes in the world, and our own failures; and people have some kind of fancy that the successes come of “modern” education, and the failures of Latin and Greek. It is just as well then to remember, not only such testimony in favor of the classical training as that quoted by Matthew Arnold in 1869 from Dr. Jäger, the director of a great school at Cologne, which united both kinds of studies, but also such facts as those given in Mr. Sadler's recent reports, from which it appears that in the very years in which Germany and America have been supposed to gain upon us, there has been, in the United States, a distinct growth of opinion in favor of Latin, so that more boys in secondary schools are learning Latin than any other subject, and that in Prussia, there has arisen "a new wave of enthusiasm on behalf of the classical humanities," so that the number of boys attending the strictly classical Gymnasien has lately been growing fast. Above all, let us not forget that what Germany has achieved she has achieved by really caring about education and believing in intelligence; and that we can only achieve the same result in the same way. But, whether we are looking at home or abroad, the great thing, Matthew Arnold would say, is to keep our eyes fixed on the true goal. In our education, whether before or after the school age, our business is to hold fast to all that helps us to know ourselves and the world; ourselves that we may not mistake the

part it is for us to play, the world that we may see plainly how and when, with what helps and under what limitations, it is to be played. Life itself is, after all, the one thing round which all the rest must centre. If that be borne in mind, and if the conception of life be really large and generous, we may have the surest faith that we shall not lose our way.

That, at least, was how Arnold saw the problem. In his greatest critical studies the point of view is always of that nature. The question asked about Goethe or Wordsworth or Keats is how we can to-day get actual hold of him. The method is, in the best sense, a practical one. Let us study what we can apply to our life and to ourselves. It is a better thing to learn to appreciate the beauty of a lily or of one of Shakespeare's songs, than to learn the number of square miles in Canada; and that is not only because the one thing is of a higher order than the other, but because the one can be made a part of life, and the other, in most cases, cannot. And so, wherever we follow Arnold, we find this highest sort of practical wisdom. And in nothing he wrote is it more conspicuous than in these Notebooks, written wholly with a view to practice, the direct and immediate practice of the passing day. He draws his supplies, as we have seen, from a wide country, but he accepts nothing that he cannot use. As with the body, so with the mind; the food our system cannot assimilate is worse than useless, it is burdensome, injurious, not far from poisonous. We have seen him at his work of choosing his daily diet on the spiritual and religious side: let us see him at the same work on the merely moral and intellectual side. He is a grown man, and it is strong food, fit for grown men, and fit to stimulate growth. The texts with which he arms himself in the morning to meet the

labors and pleasures of the day are such as these: Vivitur ingenio, caetéra mortis erunt: he who fancies that his mind may effectually be changed in a short time, deceives himself: es ist nicht genug zu wissen, man muss auch anwenden; es ist nicht genug zu wollen, man muss auch thun: pour exécuter de grandes choses, il faut vivre comme si on ne devait jamais mourir: was Friedrichen so gross und einzig gemacht hat, ist dass er jede bedeutende Sache, die er unternahm, so eifrig, so thätig betrieb, als wenn sie die einzige wäre die ihn beschäftigte, und als hätte er noch nie was Anderes zu Stande gebracht: rien ne sauve dans cette vie-ci que l'occupation et le travail: den einzelnen Verkehrtheiten des Tags sollte man immer nur grosse weltgeschichtliche Massen entgegensetzen. This was the sort of daily food he took with him to the schools he inspected, to the country houses he visited, to the study in which he worked at home. It is stimulating fare; and not only for the few who can hope to accomplish "de grandes choses," whether in Frederick the Great's way, or in Matthew Arnold's. Besides things of this sort, there are of course also some extracts, though not so many as one would expect, less general in their application, carrying some suggestion of his own special tastes and habits of life. Not many, indeed, of the passages which he quoted and requoted with such exasperating frequency in his books, reappear in these private notes: not even his favorite "things are what they are,” from Butler. But the special purpose for which that served him was perhaps rather that it could be used as a kind of solemn episcopal excommunication of those who disagreed with him; so it was hardly needed here. Of the rest, scarcely any appear except Monsieur Cochin's praise of Shakespeare, and, many times repeated, St. Paul's

"Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are of good report." And it is curious that he who was before all things an English poet, and a critic of English poetry, hardly takes any of his notes from the English poets. Shakespeare appears only once, I think; Milton only once; even Wordsworth of whom he was so special a student and disciple, only twice. The book is indeed almost entirely one of prose: which is again very curious in the man who insisted, with an earnestness that has about it the ring of personal experience, on the great future that lies before poetry when mankind shall have discovered that it is to poetry that we must turn, far more than we have hitherto, "to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us." Perhaps the best poetry was so much a part of him that he had no need to set it down in this way. Certainly the man who made a practice of reading a Canto of the Divina Commedia the last thing at night was not likely to make less use of poetry himself than he recommended to others. But whatever the cause there is very little poetry here. Still, the poet and critic are in the book, though overshadowed by the moralist. Indeed, the critic comes in rather incongruously at times, in a way his fine taste would certainly not have let pass, if the book could have gone through his own hands on its way to the printer. One feels, for instance, that the entry, "Sophocles: le modèle de l'homme idéal, la plénitude et l'élévation du développement intellectuel, la noblesse inaltérable de la beauté virile," comes in rather strangely between these for Good Friday and Easter, 1868, "By means of death for the redemption of the transgressors," and "Vellem me pluries tacuisse, et inter homines non fuisse"; and it is still more surprising on January 4th of the same year to read, first, "Little Basil died"; and then, "Formerly, la critique n'était que

l'art de tout discuter: now, la critique est l'art de tout comprendre, et de tout expliquer par l'histoire." But in this case the fault lies, at least partly, with the printer; for he has printed the two entries as if they belonged to the same day: which is not the case, as is shown by the facsimile which happens to give this very page. "Little Basil died?" was the only entry that day: and when, a week later, it is followed by "Dear little Basil was buried," it is not any literary or critical note that shares the space, but "Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child." Part of this occasional incongruity may also be due to notes being inserted in the space for a particular day some time before the day arrived. He evidently often did this, as is proved by the strangely significant text inserted for the day on which his funeral took place: "When the dead is at rest let his remembrance rest, and be comforted for him when his spirit is departed from him."

The extracts that refer directly to the life of the man of letters are not very many. He who, I suppose, did not write very easily, and always fancied himself unpopular, draws consolation more than once from "das Hervorbringen selbst ein Vergnügen und sein eigener Lohn ist." Several entries exhibit his interest in the problem of the essence of tragedy. Many bear witness to his profound belief in the value of Art as a whole, and his keen interest in its problems. One day he will enter, "Through the contemplation of works of art, to keep alive in the mind a high, unapproachable ideal," the doctrine, and I suppose the words, of Goethe; another day he will take, I think from Renan, the truth, not new but never yet really learned, that "le plus grand peintre n'aperçoit dans le monde que ce qu'il aime à y voir; il y a une préférence au fond de chaque talent;" on another he will note, in words

which are again, I suppose, Goethe's, the Platonic doctrine of the hope and meaning of Beauty: das Schöne ist eine Manifestation geheimer Naturgesetze, die uns ohne dessen Erscheinung ewig wären verborgen geblieben."

There are also a few extracts bearing on his political speculations, which are, as might be expected, of less interest. In politics he was never more than a suggestive amateur: in literature, and, one may say, in life, he was a master. Enough has been quoted to show how he sustained, and how he used, his mastery. The whole of this admirable little book, a book with real life and use in it, which so few are, is simply a practical example of the truth of those two sayings of his, which his daughter quotes in her preface: "The importance of reading, not slight stuff The Fortnightly Review.

to get through the time, but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live; it is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally quite keen enough, or too keen, about doing that, yet they will not do it in the simplest and best manner by reading." This is from a letter to his sister: the other is from the preface to "Culture and Anarchy": "One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society 'a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it." To go through this little volume is to see how a wise man lived in the best company every day, and kept his ears open.

J. C. Bailey.

The springs which regulate the movement of history are occasionally concealed from contemporary observers, and elude the researches of later students. The character of a Minister or the private conversations of diplomatists may have much more influence on the progress of a negotiation than the formal documents which are periodically published for the information of either Parliaments or Peoples. Women, too, have played their part in the conduct of affairs, and the wife, or the mistress, of a monarch has affected, by her counsel or her caprice, the happiness of mankind. But the lady whose letters to her brother form the text of this article stands-so far as we know-in a niche alone. She is the

"Letters of Dorothea, Princess Lieven, during her Residence in London, 1812-1834." Edited by Lionel G. Robinson. With two Photogravure Por

only instance of which we are aware of a woman, the wife of an Ambassador, practically superseding her husband in his own duties, and, at the same time, actively interfering in the domestic politics of the country to which he was accredited. For no one who is familiar with English history in the reign of George IV., or who has read the letters in this book, or the correspondence which has been published elsewhere, can doubt that Madame de Lieven was the mainspring of the Russian Embassy in London during that reign, or that she exerted considerable influence on the domestic politics of England during the same time.

That influence she secured by the fas

traits. London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1902.

cination which she exercised over some

of the most commanding intellects of the nineteenth century. Prince Metternich, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Grey, Lord Aberdeen, Lord John Russell, and M. Guizot were among those who were either her closest friends or impassioned admirers. With Lord Grey, who had nearly reached his sixtieth year before he made her acquaintance, she was always "dearest Princess;" in letter after letter he professed himself "entirely yours." Her letters to him are at least as warm as his to her. She said of them herself: "Elles sont très intimes, plus intimes que les siennes;" and the feelings which she afterwards inspired in M. Guizot were even stronger than those with which Lord Grey regarded her. Yet we sometimes doubt whether, during the whole of her long residence in England, Madame de Lieven ever allowed her heart to influence her head. She had, throughout those years, one dominating passion, which controlled and overpowered any lighter affection. Whether she was the friend of Prince Metternich, of the Duke of Wellington, or of Lord Grey, her heart from first to last was Russian to the core. She was devoted to the interests of her own country and its rulers. She could tolerate defects in a statesman who was disposed to be on good terms with Russia. She could not forgive a Minister who pursued an anti-Russian policy. She broke from Prince Metternich and the Duke of Wellington-just as she very nearly quarrelled with Lord Grey-because his and their opinions were not sufficiently Russian for her taste. She set no doubt a high value on the intimate relations which she established with the very eminent men whose names are so closely associated with her own. But she was always ready to sacrifice their friendship, their love, on the altar of her country.

If Madame de Lieven had been only

remarkable for her friendships, her memory would have been full of interest. But, in addition, she was not only a very industrious, but a very accomplished letter-writer. Mr. Guy L'Estrange introduced us a dozen years ago to her correspondence with Lord Grey; M. Ernest Daudet has lately given us a few samples of her letters to Prince Metternich and M. Guizot: samples, we may add, which create an appetite for more. And Lord Stanmore has been good enough to lay before us a good deal of her correspondence with Lord Aberdeen, which has been privately printed with the other papers of that statesman. Other letters from her have been published in some or other of the memoirs of the times in which she lived. In all of them there is the same attractive style, the same clear reasoning, the same single-hearted devotion ta the cause of her country and its ruling dynasty. She herself indeed modestly declared that her own letters were inferior to Lord Grey's; and that while "les siennes appartiennent à l'histoire, les miennes peuvent servir à des éclaircissements." But few who have read the correspondence will subscribe to this opinion. There is a passion and a power in Madame de Lieven's letters which is seldom met with in political correspondence; there is a keen desire to influence the conduct of persons and to regulate the course of events which imparts to them an historical importance. They are instinct with the life and breath of a strong and resolute personality.

The letters which Mr. Robinson has now edited are of a different character. They are addressed to her own brother, who for many years held "a post of confidence" at the Russian Court, which "kept him in close relations with the Emperor." They were obviously intended for other eyes than those of her brother, and they probably supplement the communications