public will allow the scheme to fail for want of funds when the impending appeal is made to them. try, to the benefit alike of the land- ment, and I cannot believe that the owner, the farmer, and the manufacturer. At present, however, there is little hope of State assistance. That individual effort should anticipate the action of the State is however in conformity with all precedent, and the Garden City Association have for some time past been actively engaged in the endeavor to make a practical experiment upon the lines above indicated. The matter is at present so far advanced that a site of some 4000 acres, about 35 miles from London, has been purchased by a company registered under the name of the First Garden City Limited.1 Upon this site it is proposed to found a Garden City. The interest of the shareholders is limited to a dividend of 5 per cent. All further profit will be devoted to the benefit of the residents on the estate. Will the enterprise succeed? I think it will. The readers of this article must judge what weight, if any, attaches to my opinion on the subject. I will only say that I have long studied the question, and that thirty years at the Bar and nine in the House of Commons are calculated to dispel any tendency to extravagant idealism. To me it seems a practical and practicable scheme, the success of which is mainly a question of management and money. A reference to the Garden City Association will satisfy the inquirer that the enterprise is in the hands of business men. With regard to money, some £75,000 has been found by those immediately concerned in the move The Monthly Review Yet, For it holds the field as the only practical suggestion for dealing comprehensively with the questions of overcrowding and agricultural depression, and bears within it the promise of ultimate success. And something must be done. The loss of initiative is the most unsatisfactory symptom our country exhibits at the present time. since we are in a later stage of industrial development than other nations, we are confronted by problems which do not as yet affect them. Waiting for a lead in this regard will be fatal. The greatest of Englishmen (judged by the importance of his message to mankind) has come and gone; yet the influence of his teaching upon the social life of his countrymen is still to seek. It is surely time that the altered view of life to which the doctrines of evolution constrain us should be evidenced by practical conduct. While the conditions of life affecting the majority of the people are inconsistent with sound physical development the best laid schemes for social progress are in vain. The distribution of the people upon the land in the manner suggested is not put forward as a panacea for all ills, but as a necessary preliminary to future advance. It is but the first step in a task, which will tax all the energy and all the intelligence of the country during the twentieth century. Ralph Neville. RESTLESSNESS IN AGE. We are all familiar with the impatience which comes naturally with age and failing health, the intolerance of lit 1 348 to 351 Birkbeck Bank Chambers, Holborn, E.C. tle hindrances, the inconsequence in argument, the petulance in comment, which are the first signs of senility. But there is another kind of impatience which has a wholly different meaning. It comes to the high-spirited, strenuous man when he feels the hand of Age on him, or that premonition of death which the human body in some hidden way can give to its owner. A man whose soul is centred on a great ideal to which his life's work has been given chafes at the thought that he must be taken before seeing its realization. A man, again, of fiery energy, whose days have been spent in conflicts, may redouble his efforts at the prospect of their cessation, and show an almost hysterical vitality in his closing years. It is a commonplace of literature. The men of the greatest power have the least toleration for petty triumphs, the most abiding sense of the smallness of their doings and the magnitude of their task. That line of "In Memoriam" which was one of the last utterances of Mr. Rhodes is a cry on the lips of all who fix their eyes on a far horizon. Haste to justify themselves, either to make practical some idea, or to walk a little further on the road, is the last infirmity of the strongest and best. For them there can be no afternoon. Their view of age is the view of the old huntsman in "The Flight of the Duchess": What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day what his youth took a year to hold. They cannot be content, like Bacon, to leave the understanding of their work and character "to foreign nations and the next ages," or to suffer gladly that others should complete what they have begun. To have led the people to the Promised Land, and then to get no more than a Pisgah sight of it, is a bitter trial for human nature. There are two forms which this restlessness may take. The practical worker, the statesman, explorer, thinker, artist, may chafe at the flat which bids him give up his task before comple tion. A year or so more and the great policy will be a fact, a new State or a new Empire will be created, the barrier mountain will have been crossed and the new continent beyond explored, the great system of philosophy which is to reconcile conflicting creeds will have been given to the world, the last touch will have been added to the picture which has been a lifetime in the making. To weaker souls the thought brings despair; but to the higher spirits it means only an increase of earnestness. And therein lies danger. To the man whose work is of a personal kind, such as the writer or the painter, an access of energy, however feverish, matters comparatively little. But to the maker of nations, the statesman, the sudden quickening of pace may mean the undoing of a life work. When we build successfully we build in tacit alliance with natural forces, biding our time and making broad and deep our foundations. We believe that Time is on our side, and believing also that "the counsels to which Time hath not been called, Time will not ratify," we dare not move too fast. Short-cuts, which policy forbade in those earlier days when we had patience, are not more justifiable now in our old age. The temptation, indeed, is superhuman. It is natural to wish to hurry a work to its completion while you are still there to superintend, for who knows that you may trust your successors? To bring life to some full satisfying close is an essential if you are to say "Nunc Dimittis" with a quiet mind, and the stronger souls have a hunger for finality. They do not see that the gratification of an instinct, which, however noble, is a personal one, may gravely endanger the permanence of that structure at which they have labored. If in the desire to see the tower clear of scaffolding they build the last story hastily, the first north wind may send it down about the ears of their children. "So little done, so much to do," is a fine motto for life, but SO far as concerns methods, Goethe's Ohne Hast, ohne Rast, is perhaps a safer maxim. But there is another form of restlessness in age, which is not concerned with the completion of a particular work. A man of strong natural energy may be content to trust himself and his labors, so far as they have gone, to the mercies of his successors, but may chafe at the thought that with it all he has but realized a fraction of what is within him. The consciousness of latent power may drive him to that strange flare of genius which we find sometimes in the last years of great men. Here there is no need to counsel patience for the sake of their work, for they differ from the man who has been possessed by the idea of some practical achievement. They need not think of the world, but of their own souls,-how to find a balm to soothe the feverish love of living from which they must soon be free. And happily they may find it, like Browning's Grammarian, in the hope of immortality. The one faith which can give patience to the great builder among men is the belief that in his work he has been on the side of cosmic forces, and that these will cherish and perpetuate his efforts. It is a high stretch of human fortitude, and few have reached it. The martyr who, believing that God is fighting for him, is content to leave his cause in His hands, is the most conspicuous example of such a faith. There used to be a theory among certain German historians-a theory for which, unfortunately, we have no warrant in facts-that Cæsar, having brought his country to the brink of an Empire, chose to forego its conThe Spectator. summation, thinking that work better done by other hands, and deliberately courted the sword of Brutus. If the fable were true, it would be a perfect instance of the patience of the great builder, who could so purge all personal vanity from his soul that for his work's sake he could choose to leave the crowning achievement and the glory to another. But there have been many cases of men who died without seeing the fruit of their labors, but in perfect confidence as to the ultimate issue. No restlessness clouded the last days of William the Silent, who seemed to the world to be leaving his country in as ill a plight as ever, but who was sustained by the faith that he had allies whom the world knew not. There is a fragment of a song in one of the "Waverley Novels" which represents the attitude of the great man who has not achieved a small success, but has laid the foundations of a permanent one: The body to its place, and the soul to Heaven's grace, And the rest in God's good time. There is no other sedative for the noble impatience which great workers must feel except the belief in some Power in the universe which will preserve and complete whatever of truth and value their work has contained. It is a presupposition of philosophy that the world is not in league to defeat the efforts of man in the quest of truth or the moral life. In the same way it is a fair supposition that progress cannot be permanently impeded by the hiatus of death. The restless desire to finish off a work is justifiable only when the haste it entails does not do violence to those principles of organic growth on which alone permanence is founded. BOOKS AND AUTHORS. It is intimated that Mr. Edmund Gosse, in his volume on "Jeremy Taylor" in the Macmillan English Men of Letters series, will dispose of certain romantic incidents to which importance has hitherto been attached. The authorship of Blackwood's "Personalia," which readers of The Living Age have had the pleasure of reading in full, is still a mystery, although it might be thought that there was no lack of internal evidence to furnish a clue. Not many Englishmen, surely, can have had so extended a personal acquaintance and be able to write such vivacious chronicles. The latest to deny identity with "Sigma" is Sir Douglas Straight. Next March the only extant portion of the original manuscript of Milton's Paradise Lost, eighteen pages, small quarto, comprising the First Book of the ode, will be sold at auction at Sotheby's in London. It is not in Milton's autograph, of course, for when "Paradise Lost" was published the poet was blind. It bears on the inside of the first leaf the imprimatur of the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, domestic chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Its pedigree cannot be traced in detail, but its genuineness is beyond question. A monument to Hawthorne is to be erected on the site of the Little Red House on the northern shore of "Stockbridge Bowl," in the Berkshires, where he wrote "The House of the Seven Gables" and "Tanglewood Tales." The house was standing until 1890, and although of modest proportions scarcely seemed to merit the strong words that Hawthorne wrote of it when he described it as "the most wretched and inconvenient little hovel that I ever put my head in." The house was situated within the limits of Stockbridge, but so near the village of Lenox that Hawthorne dated his letters from the latter, and in the Hawthorne biographies the house is always spoken of as in Lenox. Replying to the request of the London Academy that he would name the two books published in 1903 which gave him the greatest pleasure, Mr. Austin Dobson wrote: During the year I have looked into many books for a purpose, and seen accounts of others; but I have read for pleasure nothing but "Sévigné's Letters," and some novels of Scott. Edmund Gosse would not commit himself to any two books but questioned "whether any of the new books I did not read can possess more ingenious originality or a finer grace than Mr. Henry James's 'Life of W. W. Story,' which I did read." Morley's "Gladstone" has the first place in the replies of Frederic Harrison, Mrs. Craigie, Robertson Nicoll, W. L. Courtney, and Sir Gilbert Parker. Both H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad put "The Ambassadors," by Henry James, first. Mr. Conrad also mentions Mr. Wells's "Mankind in the Making." Both Mrs. Craigie and Clement Shorter liked Tallentyre's "Voltaire." Sir Norman Lockyer, F.R.S., has a catholic taste, his two books being "Wee Macgreegor" and Dr. Wallace Budge's "Gods of the Egyptians." Both George Gissing and E. V. Lucas favor Conrad's "Typhoon." SEA-TOKENS. Round the timbers of the boat Waifs and strays of ocean float,Carven things of human hands, From some undiscovered lands. And the skipper turns to go Signs that wind and waters bring. As I float upon life's sea, These I take with careful heed, With such course as I discern, Shall I find upon the shore A SONG OF LAMENTATION. I wrote a song for Corydon, "She was untrue, She was unkind, An end to all his woes he'd find In self-annihilation." My verses breathed despair and scorn, When lo! the quarrel was made up A man of evil mind! To call his Chloe aught but kind, They both began to rail at me, |