but with bidding his creditor good-night "for ever." It is true, he bids farewell to the Giuli also, but only as a theme parted with, not as an account settled. To settle the account would have been to destroy its immortality. Gray, in the course of his 'Long Story,' ingeniously says, "Here five hundred stanzas are lost." A reader of Casti's Giuli Tre may wonder that he did not close his book with a sonnet of the species before mentioned, called the sonnet with a tail. It is one commencing with the usual fourteen lines, but possessing an unbounded privilege of adding to their number; so that the poet might have dismissed his book into space, like a paper-kite, furnished with a tail beyond that of a comet. Of this tailed species of sonnet, more anon. Here follows the sample of Casti : Ben cento volte ho replicato a te Questa istessa infallibil verità, Che a conto mio da certo tempo in quà Ond' io m' appicchi, e vuoi vedermi in giù Pender col laccio al collo? Oh questo no. Risolverommi a non pagarti più, E in guisa tal te disperar farò, I've said forever, and again I say, And it's a truth as plain as truth can be, That from a certain period to this day Pence are a family quite extinct with me. And yet you still pursue me, and waylay, With your insufferable importunity, And for those d-d infernal Giuli Tre Haunt me without remorse or decency. Perhaps you think that you'll torment me so, You'll make me hang myself? You wish to After describing more such curiosities, Leigh Hunt turns to the English sonnet, of which these volumes contain so many choice examples. The oldest known sonnet in our language dates no farther back than the reign of Henry VIII. It is a translation from Petrarch by Sir Thomas Wyat. Leigh Hunt's reasons why Chaucer did not write a sonnet are not good; but how do we know that Chaucer wrote no sonnets? The land was all fulfilled with his songs,' said Gower, or Venus through him, defining the fulness as Of ditties and of songes glade The which he for my sake made; and while Chaucer himself tells us that he produced many balades, roundels, virelays,' only a very few of these small pieces of his have come down to us. We may discover a collection of them yet, as the only collec tion of Gower's Balades was discovered. The songs of Laurence Minot, celebrating national victories Crecy, for example, must have been popular in their day; yet they reach us, so far as we know, in a single MS. which passed unheeded until Tyrwhitt accidentally discovered its contents. When he comes to Sidney and Stella, Leigh Hunt thinks it a "curious circumstance in the history of Sonnets that so many of them turn upon illegal attachments." Here is the old confusion again that it will take a generation or two of fresh study in opposition to traditional blundering to get rid of. The Essayist here talks of "remarkable reasons for the conduct" of Dante, Petrarch, Casa, Sidney and others, reasons" with which readers are unacquainted." They addressed their Sonnets to married women and no husband resented, nobody in their own day cried Fie. The reason is, as we have seen, a very simple one; and should declare itself by the mere statement of the case, but is demonstrable on ample evidence. Our understanding of many such things is obscured by the intervention between those times and these of the French critical school which, knowing nothing of past nationality, saw in the past only Aristotle and those who filled their lamps from Aristotle's oil. It is only within the last twenty or thirty years that we have begun to read for ourselves upon all lesser points of this kind. Although as to the judgments on great writers the reversal of French blunders began when Addison taught us that there was something after all in Milton, and Pope surprised the town by considering it worth his while to edit Shakespeare, outside the beaten track of every-day readers a whole jungle of Frenchborn blundering remains yet to be cleared. From the Saturday Review. THE BOOK OF THE SONNET.*. AMONG the most precious of ancient things that we are in danger of losing is the fine old-fashioned taste for literature proper and pure. We do not love literature as the The Book of the Sonnet. Edited by Leigh Hunt and Samuel Adams Lee. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston. 1867. best sonnets that have ever been written, but he is pleasantly initiated into the mys teries of its composition; the difference between the legitimate Italian sonnet - like Queen Anne men loved it, nor as some of the Johnsonian set loved it, nor as it was loved by a little group of men scarcely more than a generation back. We are all turned publicists and thinkers and aesthetic" Lawrence, of virtuous father, virtuous philosophers. There do not seem to be left, son," for instance where the two quatnor to be springing up, any men of the an- rains have only two rhymes, and the two tique stamp, with a delicate enjoyment of terzettes three- and the illegitimate sonall sorts of books for their own sake, just as net, such as Shakspeare's, where there is a men enjoy good wine for its own sake. We third quatrain, and a final rhymed couplet. dash at a book to eviscerate it as swiftly as Flippant persons have sneered much and we may, and, having got out of it what bitterly at the bare idea of the effusive nutriment we can, rush off pell-mell some- utterance of the poetic heart being forcibly where else. Where is the man who takes confined within the scanty and inflexible up his book daintily and caressingly, as he bounds of just fourteen lines, neither more would take up a glass of good liquor, ancient nor less. Let them learn that a sonnet and of a rare vintage, turning over here a ought to be " a piece of music as well as of page and there a page, enjoying a flash of poetry; and as every lover of music is senits colour, and prolonging his delighted sible of the division even of the smallest air sense of its fine aroma and boquet? The into two parts, the second of which is the old heroes who lingered and brooded over a consequent or necessary demand of the first, book as a bee lingers in the bell of a flower and as these parts consist of phrases and in the sunshine have nearly all gone, and cadences, which have similar sequences and none others step into their places. This cadences of their own, so the composition perhaps is only one of the thousand signs called a sonnet, being a long air or melody, that we are fast stripping ourselves of a becomes naturally divided into two differcapacity for pleasure, and that the rich gift ent strains, each of which is subdivided in of quaint and sober gaiety has passed away like manner; and as quatrains constitute from us into space and emptiness. We the one strain, and terzettes the other, we may get compensation in some shape or are to suppose this kind of musical demand other. Of course new books are all con- the reason why the limitation to fourteen structed on the principle of improving our lines became, not a rule without a reason, minds, and make us ashamed of having any- but an harmonious necessity." After all, thing to do with the genial old writers who there is nothing more absurd, in the nature were innocent of any desire either to improve of things, in having a form of verse which their own minds or those of other people. is perfect in a fixed number of syllables, as Let us be careful only not to improve our the heroic couplet, for example. The very souls out of our bodies. rhythm, rhyme, and melody are more complex in the first than in the second, and demand a finer ear for the subtle changes, interweavings, recurrences. It is not everybody who has a good enough ear for an Italian sonnet, any more than everybody has a good enough ear for all the interdependent harmonies of a quartet or an ottet or a great orchestral symphony. But anybody who is fortunate enough to have an ear does not need to have the sonnet vindicated. He feels at the close of a sonnet composed with skill and just sentiment, as he might feel at the end of a very perfect melody. The melody has come to its own natural termination. He does not wonder why it was not made longer nor shorter. And so with the sonnet. In the hands of a true composer, like Milton or Wordsworth or Keats or Shakspeare, we never dream of asking why it should stop at the fourteenth line, or how it came to reach the fourteenth line. Let anybody turn to Milton's noble One is reminded of all this by an edition of the Book of the Sonnet, with Leigh Hunt's delicious preliminary essay. The genuine aroma of literature abounds in every page, and he writes about the sonnet as an eloquent epicure might talk about truffles with a fine relish and sensibility as of the physical palate. The unctuous zeal with which he goes through the old Italian sonnet writers is quite glorious to behold, for it is a zeal full of refinement and delicacy and nice feeling. His mind shows itself imbued with a rich knowledge of his subject, and this, illumined by the evidence of a thorough and unaffected liking for it, makes him irresistable. And in the midst of graceful criticism he conveys all possible technical information as to the various ways, legitimate and illegitimate, in which the sonnet has been, and may be, constructed. The reader acquires not only an increased sensibility to the music and sentiment of some of the sonnet on his Blindness, "When I consider | be, and in good compositions is, exactly rehow my light is spent." When the end sponsive and complementary to the major. If the sonnet is composed by a man of genius, you could no more take off the last six lines, as in this case, and fancy them fitted on to anything else than you could imagine the last strains of " Dove sono," fitted on to the first strains of the Old Hundredth. Take, for a single instance, the ending of a famous sonnet: Lift not thy spear against the Muse's bower; tower anybody who should be ignorant of what a sonnet is or means, and heard it read, would still, if he had any ear or sensibility, instantly know that this completes the piece. Milton's sonnets are perhaps unsurpassed in this exquisite sense which they give us of musical completeness, whatever faults they may have in other points. Still it is plain enough in Wordsworth's best sonnets also "Death Conquering and Death Conquered." for instance, or the more familiar sonnet composed upon Westminster Bridge. Of This, by the way, is one of the two of Milcourse one notices no perfection of melody ton's sonnets of which Johnson graciously or anything else in bad sonnets. They thought himself justified in saying that they might as well be a thousand lines long as were not bad; the rest were barely entitled fourteen, and they had much better have to this slender commendation : "Milton, been seven or two, or none at all. Madam, was a genius that could cut a ColOne of the sonnets in the present collec-ossus from a rock, but could not carve heads tion furnishes an excellent illustration of the too common type of sonnet, where there is true feeling, but where the poet has not been sufficiently inspired with a sense of the form or genuine sonnet rhythm. It is from the pen of Anna Seward, and, in spite of its imperfection, deserves a place in the book : I love to rise ere gleams the tardy light Where, round the dusky lawn, the mansions With shutters closed, peer faintly through the gloom That slow recedes; while yon gray spires as sume Rising from their dark pile an added height, The grateful thoughts to God, ere they un- To friendship or the Muse, or seek with glee Wisdom's rich page. O hours more worth than gold By whose best use we lengthen life, and free Nothing can be more excellent than the picture in the quatrains, but one has an idea that the sestette is an artificial appendage, not truly and peculiarly antiphonal to the octave, but what might have been tagged on to nearly anything in the world. What has been called the minor of the sonnet should To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. upon cherry-stones." But then Johnson had no patience with the art which he characterized thus disparagingly. He declared that the fabric of the sonnet was unfitted for the English tongue. And yet he must have read Shakspeare's, some of which are nothing less than divine in their beauty and music. For instance, of these in the present collection, the one which begins At sight whereof each bird that sits on spray, And every beast that to his den was fled, Comes forth afresh out of their late dismay, And to the light lift up their drouping hed, So my storm-beaten hart likewise is chear ed With that sunshine when cloudy looks are cleared. "The rhyme," Leigh Hunt says, "seems at once less responsive and always interfering; and the music has no longer its major and minor divisions." And this is just. The final couplet seems to impart a flavour of commonplace. Still the picture is amazingly perfect and sweet, and, as Leigh Hunt says, the single line From the Saturday Review THE CLAVERINGS.* PEOPLE often complain that they cannot find out why it is that they like Mr. Trollope's novels so much, and are able to read so many of them without being bored. There is never very much movement in his stories. One is not excited by a violent plot, nor thrown into a pleasant meditative mood by light and subtle strokes of thought, nor strung up to an almost religious pitch of fervour by profound conceptions of human destiny and the diverse products of human effort. Perhaps there are two reasons which help to explain one's liking for Mr. Trollope's books. First, his pictures of life Through the broad world doth spread his and manners and average human nature are goodly ray exceedingly truthful, so far as they go. The author reproduces the world very much up-in those aspects which it wears in the eyes There is a strange bit of criticism on Shelley. Ozymandyas Leigh Hunt feels to be very good, having" the right comprehensiveness of treatment, and perfection of close." Then he almost finds fault with Shelley for not being able "to content himself in these sequestered corners of poetry. He was always, so to speak, for making world-wide circuits of humanity." Of course This was the very note of Shelley. One might as well wonder at Beethoven for not contenting himself with ballads and lyric music. It was his "world-wide circuits he was. that made Shelley what he was, and to the same temper may be attributed his rare use of the sonnet, which Hunt finds so surprising. We recommend anybody whose soul is weary of personal payment of rates, of Luxemburg, and of Trades' Unions, to turn for an hour, or even half an hour, to this most pleasant book. There are, indeed, far too many sonnets in the collection. But then one can choose. And one advantage of a sonnet is that you can absorb it in a short time and at a short notice. It requires no previous reading or previous thinking. It is short, and yet it is perfect in itself. Brood for half an hour, for example, over Milton's sonnet on his own blindness, and you return to the Franchise Question or anything else with a mind soothed and renewed. of most of us. It is a world where men and women play lightly at cross-purposes with one another about love and money, a bout sentiment and loaves and fishes; where on the whole, and in the long run, there is a ries and small bits of happiness; and where very decently fair distribution of small woranybody who plays his cards as he ought to do can make sure of a competence of cash and a comfortable wife and a thoroughly respectable position before his fellows. In the second place, Mr. Trollope always writes in earnest. He never treats his people as if they were mere puppets, nor his incidents as if they were mere dreams. They are a reality in his own mind while he writes about them; he honestly feels for them as and hence he talks of love-making without if they were actual neighbours in the flesh; any levity, and of little meannesses and small ambitions in the matter of money without any sneering or snarling. world of smallest things is still a serious hidden from him, and the merely funny side place to Mr. Trollope. The tragic side is he does not care to dwell upon. This simple earnestness, this plain sincerity of which, added to the verisimilitude of his thought and vision, has a charm of its own creations, is what lies at the bottom of the pleasure he gives us. The One of the most conspicuous of his characteristics is his strong belief in the general justice of things. He has a wonderful faith in respectability, and he would think ill of himself if he should write anything to make one suppose that iniquity is ever triumphant. *The Claverings. By Anthony Trollope. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 1807. We know that she is in the hands This may be another reason why his stories | ment. are so pleasant. It is a comfort to believe of a writer who, though a fine artist in his that our suspicions as to the cruelty and in- own sphere, is never intoxicated by art. justice stalking around us are, after all, We know that a sober and reasonable without foundation. In the Claverings this vengeance will overtake her, of the kind presence of the respectable god of social jus- which would overtake her in real life. tice is perhaps more remarkable than in any Perhaps, if anything, she escapes too lightly. previous book from the same hand. Every- But then Mr. Trollope cannot bear to think thing turns out just as our belief in the gen- of uncomfortable severity. Now and then, eral comfort of the universe requires that it in his novels, he is obliged to bring some should do. The heroine, one of the most dreadful villain to thorough ruin; but he charming women that even Mr. Trollope gets over it as quickly as ever he can, simhas ever drawn, in a very wicked manner ply putting the villain out of doors and begmarries a debauched peer for the sake of ging us to think no more about him. his money and his title, although she is in love all the time with a more interesting commoner, who, like the majority of interesting commoners, has only a very inadequate income. She never disguises her motives for a moment, either from herself or her lover. "Our ages by the register," she tells him, "are the same, but I am ten years older than you by the world. I have two hundred a year, and I owe at this moment six hundred pounds. You have perhaps double as much, and would lose half of that if you married. . . . Now Lord Ongar has heaven knows what perhaps sixty thousand a year." This is an example of Mr. Trollope's close reproduction of the actual way of the world. A novelist of the sentimental stamp would have made his heroine the heart-broken victim of cruel and rapacious parents, and very likely we should have been dreadfully moved by the young woman's sorrows. But then our emotion would have been fundamentally artificial; we should have felt that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred parents do not drive their daughters into heart-break ing matches, and then we should have been ashamed of ourselves for being accessible to such sham pathos. Mr. Trollope's Pierian spring gives no beverage which leaves a remorse of this sort, but a sober and reasonable tipple, which pleases us at the time and does not bring repentance afterwards. So we are sorry that Julia Brabazon does a wrong and a wicked thing in marrying a lord who had delirium tremens from time to time, when she was in love with a healthy commoner who had no delirium tremens; still we are sure that it was a very probable thing for such a woman to do, and we know that Mr. Trollope, as the agent of the Providence of respectable virtue, will see that she is punished just enough, and not more than enough, to vindicate the ways of society to women. Hence, though very much interested in her, we are not under the influence of any artificial and unreal excite On the same principle, Julia Brabazon's sister having married a hard, selfish, unfeeling husband, one would close the book with a certain amount of uncomfortable sentiment if she had been left in his tormenting hands. So the hard husband is “ mercifully removed," as good people say, and the two widowed sisters are left to give one another such solace as they can. There is nothing sublimely blissful in such a close for a heroine, but still let us remember that she had sinned, and could not therefore, with any regard to social justice, be allowed to go and live happy ever after; and in the same way, as her sister had not sinned in this particular mode, she might well be relieved of her burdensome lord, on the theory that in this world most things come tolerably right if you will only give them time. All wrong doing, again, is complex, and hence it is impossible to bring things back to what their state had been previously to the wrongdoing. You may modify some of the effects, but some of them will remain beyond control. Thrown overboard by Julia, the hero wins the love of another. Here an element is introduced which at once makes the original perfidy absolutely irretrievable by any amount of repentance. Julia may repent and again repent. Her lord may die and set her free. Her lover may still be as much alive as ever to the old fascination. But the new element makes the problem for ever insoluble. You cannot, as George Eliot says, manipulate human beings as if they were only pawns on a chess-board. And the other woman to whom Harry Clavering had given himself after Julia's perfidy cannot in any way be manipulated off the scene. The lover may throw her over, if he likes, but then he would have felt more or less uncomfortable for the rest of his days if he had thrown her over. The unlucky maiden herself would have been left to wear the willow in misery for at least some long time to come. Julia even would have thought the less of her lover for per |