their guilt, but from fear of the displeasure of foreign powers!" (Vol. II, p. 63.) The publisher of the Stamford News was convicted for criticizing flogging in the army, the judge, Baron Wood declaring at the trial: "It is said that we have a right to discuss acts of our legislature. This would be a large permission indeed. Is there, gentlemen [of the jury], to be a power in the people to counteract the acts of Parliament; and is the libeller to come and make the people dissatisfied with the government under which he lives. This is not to be permitted to any man-it is unconstitutional and seditious." (Vol. II, p. 67).

Liberal men of moderate views were convicted along with more intemperate radicals like Tom Paine. Thomas Muir, a "young advocate of high talents and attainments, was convicted at Edinburgh and sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, on charges of having promoted the cause of parliamentary reform. (Vol. II, p. 37). Joseph Gerrald whose "elegant and useful attainments," according to Fox, "made him dear to the circles of literature and taste," was charged with attending a convention in the interests of parliamentary reform, sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and sank into an early death to the great satisfaction of the upholders of law and order. (Vol. II, p. 42.)

Catholics were persecuted for seeking relief from religious disabilities, and the societies for the protection of liberty and property enlisted the mobs of London in support of the violent treatment of Dissenters from the Church of England who sought equality of treatment before the law. Conspiracies were found wherever a few men entertained radical views of a similar character. In vain was it shown that these ideas were common property and entertained by men who were unacquainted with one another. It was sedition to have such ideas and they could not spring from circumstances, but only from pro-French conspiracies against the government!

Juries were packed and allowed to vent their wrath upon unlucky advocates of constitutional reform. Judges were even worse. When the unhappy Muir was defending parliamentary reform he was told by the "judge " that "the landed interest alone had a right to be represented; as for the rabble who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them?"

Another of Muir's judges thought torture "a punishment adequate to the crime of sedition." One of the judges is accredited with the happy thought worthy of the day's law: "Let them bring me more prisoners, I will find them the law." (Vol. II, p. 39). Another Edinburgh judge exclaimed at the trial of a parliamentary reformer: "The right of universal suffrage, the subjects of this country never enjoyed; and were they to enjoy it they would not long enjoy either liberty or a free constitution. You [Gentlemen of the jury] will therefore consider whether telling the people that they have a just right to what would unquestionably be tantamount to a total subversion of this constitution is such a writing as any person is entitled to compose, to print and to publish." (Vol. II, p. 40.) Perhaps only the masculine mind could discover such a splendid and convincing principle of crushing logic! Lord Braxfield termed the British constitution "the happiest, the best, and the most noble constitution in the world, and I do not believe it possible to make a better." This noble lord applied his doctrine with a sweet vengeance when he had occasion to try an advocate of manhood suffrage. Dr. Horsley, bishop of Rochester, in upholding in the House of Lords the conduct of persecuting judges, exclaimed that

he "did not know what the mass of the people in any country had to do with the laws, but to obey them."

While liberal publishers were punished and advocates of reform were transported to penal colonies, those who insulted the House of Commons by abusing it as too democratic went scot free. An ultra-monarchist, Reeves, published a pamphlet in which he represented the king as the ancient stock of the constitution and the Lords and Commons as merely branches which might readily be lopped off without injury. For this attack on the established order Reeves was acquitted by the jury, although his doctrines were condemned (Vol. II, p. 60). The high Tory, hard and relentless in his heresy hunting, rejoiced as his enemies. were one by one silenced, banished, transported to penal colonies or condemned to death. What a glorious day it was for the national safety legion!

In the midst of May's dry pages of constitutional recital there are a few shining lights: among them brave lawyers, like Erskine, "whom neither the displeasure of the King and the Prince of Wales, nor the solicitations of his friends, nor public clamours, had deterred from performing his duty as an advocate" (Vol. II, p. 29), even for the hated Tom Paine whose ringing words in behalf of American liberty startled the British aristocracy like alarm bells. Timid and cowardly lawyers yielded to the terrors of the mob. Erskine and Brougham, though often disliking heartily the doctrines of men whom they were invited to defend, shrank from no obloquy. They were of course accused by a venal press of secret sympathy for sedition and disloyalty, but nothing deterred them from seeking to throw around accused men the majesty of the law, defending it against many an ignorant and brutal judge in speeches which are today among the glories of British liberty and the flowers of English forensic literature.

Last and not least interesting is May's treatment of the Luddites and other industrial workers who, suffering from unjust combination laws, long hours, low wages, and intolerable conditions of labor which are no longer to be found in England, rose in their wrath and smashed the new machinery which seemed to be taking bread out of their mouths (Vol. II, pp. 69ff.) "It was not enough," says May, "that the frame breakers were without work and starving; that they were blind to the causes of their distress. . .; but they were also accused of disaffection to the state." The terrors of the law were rigorously applied to men with economic grievances and protests against conditions of employment were treated as seditious and disloyal. All were grouped together in one traitorous mob"-the cultured and refined advocate of parliamentary reform, the untutored workman who lifted his voice against long hours and unendurable conditions of labor, the crank and the rare seditionary. The harvest was white and the Tory judge, juror and mob reaped while they could.

May goes on to relate in measured terms how all of the ancient abuses were in later days removed; how parliament was reformed, the suffrage widened, the House of Lords reduced almost to impotence; how Catholic disabilities were removed; how Dissenters' grievances were met; industrial reforms instituted; and monuments built to those who suffered martyrdom in the great days of patrioteering and hysteria when the Tory in all his uncontrollable wrath was let loose upon the liberal public.

In reading over this remarkable work, this moving story of how English liberties have been won, many will find cause for gratification that in our trying age we have escaped the evils which marred the domestic life of England during the Napoleonic wars. CHARLES A. BEARD.

A Drummer for the Sonnet

The English Sonnet, by T. W. H. Crosland. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $3.00.

TH

HERE is something actually inspiring about the way that Mr. Crosland sets the bells ringing and the banners flying and the cannon roaring for "that brief poetic form of fourteen rhymed verses ranged according to prescription" called the sonnet. Rossetti and Wordsworth, with their "moment's monument" and "this small lute," would have let the sonnet in through some posterngate, and critics like William Sharp and Theodore WattsDunton would have casually hinted that it might have the franchise of the City of Poetry. Mr. Crosland, as has been said, sets the bells ringing and the banners flying and the cannon roaring. And why not? What has come into the City is something that embodies and reveals a golden. law."

Mr. Crosland is a born pamphleteer, and his book of two hundred and seventy pages is a pamphlet that might have for its title Petrarch Above the Others. He writes about the sonnet as a political enthusiast might write about the Czecho-Slovaks, praising their ancestry, their manifest destiny and their historic achievement and bringing confusion to their ill-wishers and their tepid supporters. Here is a sentence that reveals the hot-gospeller: "As a fact, great poets are not only the sanest people in the world, but physically and temperamentally the toughest, and this in spite of Keats and the 'die-young' theory. Otherwise nine-tenths of them would go under before they got their work done. And, taking them on the whole, sonneteers are a superior kind of poet, and saner and tougher even than the rest. Wordsworth, who wrote a greater number of sonnets than any modern poet, lived to be eighty, and Watts-Dunton, who wrote a greater number of sonnets than Swinburne, outlived him by several years, though he was born a year before him. There may be nothing in it, but for reasons of our own we like to think that there may be."

But if it is a pamphlet, The English Sonnet is a pamphlet opening to intellectual and imaginative vistas. It has, too, the merit that the pamphleteer strives for-conclusiveness. After Mr. Crosland's bit of hot-gospelling the patronage of and the apology for the sonnet will seem jejune; sonnets of the great kind will be more clearly distinguished; it will be understood that the greatest kind of poetry has been embodied in the sonnet, and that it is quite in accordance with a poetic law that poets shall continue to use it as a medium for their greatest utterance. Indeed we may begin to look on Petrarch as something else besides the sentimentalist and the formalist and accept Mr. Crosland's dedicatory praise of him as we accept Swinburne's praise of Villon.

These and a hundred other great blank-verse lines might be the openings of great sonnets. The sonnet rises to sublimity in a swift flight and the sonority provided by its rhyme-scheme; the variety given by the distinction between octet and sestet; the inward motion given by the "onset in the opening of the octet and the " turn " in the opening of the sestet make it one of the great patterns in literature. Mr. Crosland legislates, or rather, he codifies the legislation, for the sonnet. The octet and the sestet must be clearly distinguished-indeed the two must be separate and complementary poems. The "turn" must be shown in the first line of the sestet; the distinct rhyme-schemes of the Shakespearian and the Petrarchan sonnets must not be mixed as several eminent sonneteers have mixed them. A further, and, as I think, a very welcome piece of legislation, is directed against the sonnet-sequence: great sonnets are isolated and do not depend for their significance on what has gone before or on what comes after; besides it is vain to think that one can tell a story in what are, by their very nature, reflective utterances.

The second part of The English Sonnet is taken up with the sonneteers-Wyatt and Surrey; Philip Sydney; the minor Elizabethan sonneteers; Drayton, Spencer, Shakespeare; then Milton, Keats, Wordsworth; and finally the successors of Wordsworth-three poets only, each repre

sented by one sonnet. With Wordsworth the modern English as distinct from the Shakespearian sonnet, has its risea sonnet that is "an affair of the intellect and the brooding spirit as well as of the fancy and the passion." Mr. Crosland recognizes the greatness of the Shakespearian

Understanding Revolution

Fox et La Révolution Française, by Amy-Henri Chardon. Paris: Bossard. 3 fr.

lete by writing the sonnets that generations might have written, and so filling up the pedestal.

There are only three sonnets credited to Wordsworth's

successors the sonnet of Alfred Austin's, beginning

"Within the hollow silence of the night I lay awake and listened"; George Meredith's Lucifer in Starlight and Mrs. Meynell's Renouncement. Even this pick of the pick does not escape Mr. Crosland's critical onslaught. Alfred Austin's has against it, not only that it was written by Alfred Austin, but that "it is villainously rhymed." George Meredith's "has a close rhyme in the sestet" ("scars " and "stars one guesses) and Mrs. Meynell's has "a feminine never, never,' and four 'thees' in the octet with the curiously otiose difficult day' in the first line of the sestet." Nevertheless he adds "We must place it side by side with the Love Parting of Drayton and Wordsworth's Westminster Bridge sonnet and it is a beauteous evening calm and free '-that is to say it is one of the four greatest sonnets of pure emotion in English."

The English Sonnet is valuable and entertaining as exposition and argument. And besides the exposition and argument devoted to the sonnet as such it has a reading of that over-read riddle-Mr. W. H. and the sonnets inscribed to him. Mr. Crosland's argument here is fresh and compels a good deal of assent. Then the series of sonnets that he gives the best of Shakespeare, Drayton, Sidney, Spenser, Milton, Keats and Wordsworthmakes a noteworthy anthology. It is worth while going through a big volume to get such great and little-known sonnets as Drayton's on Secrecy and Philip Sidney's on Desire. I do not think Mr. Crosland would be blamed for partiality to a friend and a colleague if he had added Lord Alfred Douglas's sonnet on Oscar Wilde's death to the three contemporary sonnets he has cited. It is not in the same flight as Lucifer in Starlight or Renouncement. But if my memory is not about to betray me it would not seem halting if placed beside Alfred Austin's. And why has Mr. Crosland failed to cite Blanco White's sonnet Night? Has he ruled it out because the octet being built on the Petrarcan model the sonnet should not close with the Shakespearian clinch.

Why then should we shun death with anxious striveIf Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?

Article 6 in the canon that Mr. Crosland promulgates (It has twenty-one articles, by the way) is condemnatory. "No sestet should contain a rhymed couplet or couplets, and a sestet may not end with a rhymed couplet. The reason for this is, that what virtually amount to three rhymed couplets have already been used in the octet, and a further couplet or couplets in the sestet thus becomes monotonous. The final rhymed couplet belongs exclusively to the Shakespearian sonnet and must not be used in a modern English sonnet in any circumstances." So runs the law, but one might make Blanco White's a test case. It is magnificent in its emotion, its imagery and, in spite of Mr. Crosland's ruling against the couplet, its sonority. Its existence will always make us willing to traverse an article of Mr. Crosland's canon.

PADRAIC COLUM.

that can never grow cold; but he writes with real charm and an evident knowledge of his subject. There is, indeed, a sense in which his pamphlet is, at this time, particularly apposite; for we have grave need, and not in Europe only, of a Fox to stand to the Russian Revolution with the same generous insight that he displayed to its predecessor. Like Fox, it is probable that he would stand in a minority; like Fox also, he would not fail to have the men of property and the churches-the great twin brethren of all significant conservatism-against him. But he would at least serve to utter challenge against the fashion in which the inertia of the masses is used to betray a freedom that they do not understand.

The reputation of Fox has suffered gravely at the hands portraits, to obscure the real insight he had into the temof his admirers. His charm is so great that it tends, in their per of his time. His vast passion for freedom, his immense knowledge of foreign affairs, his mastery of those arts of debate which are so fundamental to a parliamentary system have been forgotten in the description of his broken friendship with Burke, his unwise coalition with North, and the long years of fruitless opposition to the uncreative despotism of the younger Pitt. We too rarely remember the fundamental rightness of his outlook upon every great question of his generation. He was right about America, he was right about Ireland, he was right about slavery, he was right about freedom of the press. The great difference between him and Pitt is that he did not, like the latter, sell his convictions to a blind and obstinate king in exchange for the retention of power. And all this, as M. Chardon emphasizes, is but the prelude to his attitude to the French Revolution. It is not without interest to compare its early moments with those of its Russian offspring. There was, the world over, the same sense of transport at its birth. It seemed to all men as though its coming heralded the dawn of a new renaissance. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Burke-all of them united to welcome it. Burke went into furious opposition so soon as it became evident that political reconstruction implied also economic change. The poets deserted it immediately the ungenerous folly of the émigrés and the criminal stupidity of the sovereigns of Europe involved the misery of successive dictatorships. Fox alone remained true to his original insight that the Revolution was in fact and despite of all its errors a movement of liberation. He saw that once the old regime had been destroyed it could never return. He insisted that the terrorism of the Jacobins, the conception of the Directory, the tyranny of Bonaparte were all the sequel of the European determination to crush what it did not understand. He sympathized with that sense of freedom which made France eager to send its message to the whole world. He understood that the recognition of the Constituent Assembly by Pitt and his active assistance against the unregeneracy of Prussia and of Austria, would perhaps have prevented the Napoleonic wars and certainly have rendered impossible the holocaust of reaction that followed. But once Burke had raised the cry of property in danger, the bloodshed which was inevitable after the émigrés had been loosed upon Europe provided the means to prevent the new freedom from attaining its full fruition. Henceforth Fox was, until Napoleon had seized upon the old despotism as an excuse for the new, an Athanasius against the world.

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