to me how such a man can find time for his many and diverse studies and occupations, and should never either neglect the work of his life or shut himself away from its reasonable enjoyments. John Morley is indeed a rare and almost unique combination of the philosophical thinker, the vivid biographer, the Parliamentary debater, and the practical administrator. His life of Richard Cobden is one of the most complete and characteristic pieces of biography accomplished during our time. There would not seem to have been much that was congenial between the temperament of Richard Cobden and that of John Morley. Cobden was not a laborious student of the past; he had no widespread and varied literary or artistic sympathies; he did not concern himself much with any scientific studies except those which have to do with the actual movements of man's working lifetime; he was a great practical reformer, not a scholar, a philosopher, or even a devoted lover of books. I do not know that John Morley was personally well acquainted with Cobden, and I am rather inclined to believe that in his biography of the great free-trader he relied mainly on Cobden's correspondence and on the information given to him by members of Cobden's family. Yet he has created a perfect living picture of Cobden as Cobden's friends all knew him, and he has shown to coming generations, not merely what Cobden said and did, what great reforms he accomplished, and what further reforms he ever had in view, but he has shown what Cobden actually was, and made the man himself a familiar figure to all who read the book. So far as I can judge, he has achieved the same success when telling us of Burke, of Voltaire, and of Rousseau, and has made us feel that with his guidance we come to know the men themselves as well as the parts they performed in politics or in literature. Morley has for a long time been engaged in preparing his life of Gladstone, and the mind of England, which has long been distracted by the vicissitudes of war, is now face to turn to quieter thoughts, and to look with eager expectation for the completion of the book. No other living man could have anything like John Morley's qualifications as the biographer of Gladstone. He is one of the greatest masters of lucid and vigorous English prose. He has been what I may call a professional student of the lives of great men; he is a profound political thinker; and he has the faculty of describing to the life and making his subject live again. In addition to all these claims to the position of Gladstone's authorized biographer comes the fact that Morley was for many years intrusted with Gladstone's fullest confidence. To no one did Gladstone make his feelings and his purposes on all political questions more fully known than to John Morley; and I think I am justified in saying that at more than one critical period in his later political history Gladstone chose Morley as his especial and, for the time, his only confidant. I can say of my own knowledge that in the later years of Gladstone's active political life there were momentous occasions when John Morley acted as the one sole medium of private communication between Gladstone and the leaders of the Irish party. I know, too, how careful and methodical Morley showed himself on all such occasions, and with what ample and accurate notes he preserved the exact record of every day's intercommunications. This is, indeed, one of Morley's characteristic peculiarities-the combination of exalted thought with the most minute attention to the very routine of practical work. That combination of qualities will display itself, I feel quite certain, with complete success in Morley's history of Gladstone's life. John Morley has still, we may well hope, a long political career before him. When the Liberal party next comes into power, John Morley will unquestionably have one of its most commanding offices placed at his disposal. Meanwhile he has ample work on hand even for his energy and perseverance. He is just finishing his life of Gladstone, and is to take charge of the magnificent library which belonged to the late Lord Acton, the greatest English scholar and book-lover of our time. Mr. Carnegie's gift of this great library, lately bought by him, to John Morley is an act which does honor to the intellect as well as to the heart of the generous donor. Whatever positions, honors, or responsibilities may be yet before John Morley, it may be taken for granted that he has already won for himself a secure place in the literature and the political life of his country, and that his name will live in its history. By Edward Everett Hale LITERATURE XIII. O, we will not deceive ourselves. N° The physical power at almost every man's hand in the United States is now a thousand times greater than it was in 1801. Thus, there were then only five steamengines in the country. All together they did not use as much power as is used in one large locomotive to-day. Two "power-houses in Niagara " utilize fifty thousand "horse-power" where within ten miles in 1801 there was not so much as one horse serving man or God. An ocean steamship in her six days' voyage from New York to Liverpool develops more power than Cheops had at his command when he built the great Pyramid. But these are only physical victories. They are second to the victories or steps of advance which the country has won in its knowledge of the Eternitiesin men's progress in Faith and Hope and Love. My father was a printer. As printinghouses go, his was one of the very small In more than twenty towns in Massachusetts there are now well-equipped buildings for high schools, each more costly and on a larger scale than any building which Harvard College had when. I graduated in 1839. In 1775 there were thirty-seven newspapers in the United States; one was published twice a week, the others were all weeklies. It would be an overestimate if we guessed that the weekly circulation of them all was forty thousand copies. One New York paper now prints more than five hundred thousand copies every day of the three hundred and sixty-five, and every copy contains more of what is called "matter," by a certain satire, than any one of the 1775 journals printed in a year. Twenty-two thousand newspapers are now regularly published here. The increase of population in the same time is fourteen-fold. The census of 1800 showed a population of five million three hundred thousand, that of 1900 showed seventy-five million. are These fragmentary statements enough to show that the enlargement of the life, whether of individual men or in directions which are utterly outside of women or of the country, has advanced the mechanism of statistics. Now one does not pretend that reading, writing, and arithmetic are the signs of spiritual life or moral victory. But they are excellent tools for a child of God to handle, and we who are trying to study the century, so as to find out whether the kingdom of God or the chaos of the devil made headway, may pay some such attention to the tools which men and women have had in hand as the century went by. Without counting words or pages, it is enough if you will try to read the publications of 1800. Compare the exhibition which they give of the real life of men and women against what we know of the lives of men and women now, and we shall begin to see how it is that the living men and women of to-day can control the senseless giants of physical power which in a hundred years God and his children have called into being. Among a hundred illustrations, the change in literature is one of the most interesting. Its importance must not be overrated, but it is not to be slightly spoken of. It is, for instance, easy to see that whenever an American wanted to enlarge his life in study, he went, of course, to England. It was precisely as Martial went from Spain to Rome. and literary life of England and the rest of Europe offered advantages, not to say temptations, which America could not offer. That is one instance, which could be multiplied indefinitely, which shows the intellectual desolateness of our own country for the first quarter of a century. Joel Barlow, as a matter of course, had published his poem in London. As late as 1821 Alexander Everett published his "Europe" in London and reprinted it in his own country. The remark of Sydney Smith's, so often cited, "Who reads an American book?" has been bitterly resented here. But it implied what was substantially true, and it is a convenient enough guide-post to show where the roadway of that time led men. One has only to look at the early American book catalogues and advertisements, say at the droll list which the great house of Harper published in its first five years, to see that in truth there was no important American literature. Washington Irving, as soon as he had felt his own power, went in 1804 to the south of Europe. At Rome he made the friendship of Washington Allston; and in eighteen months he had traveled through the Continent of Europe. He came back to America and tried to live here, but after eight years, in which he joined in the Salmagundi and published Knickerbocker, he went to Europe again. He then lived there seventeen years. Simply, this means that he could not live here. For a man like him, the intellectual, spiritual, æsthetic, knew. I have given a former chapter to the historians, or to a few of them whom I I did not speak, as I would be Founder of the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard College. glad to do, of Lothrop Motley, or of Francis Parkman, or of John Fiske, all of whom I knew. It is wholly fair to say that there is now a school of American History. Of the poets we can in this number give only a few words to one little company of American poets, who, as it happened, were near personal friends and lived close to each other and ought to be spoken of together. EMERSON Ralph Waldo Emerson returned from his first visit to Europe in 1833. It was soon made known that he would be a lecturer rather than a preacher, and, under the admirable arrangements of the old Lyceum systems, he was engaged to deliver some lectures in Boston in the course of what was called the Useful Knowledge Society. I heard those lectures, of which the one which I remember was that on Mahomet, the substance of which is included in "Representative Men;" and it must have been at that time that I first saw Emerson to know him by name. I first spoke to him at the college exhibition of his cousin George Emerson, a young man who died too early for the rest of us. Young Emerson had, for a few weeks before he entered college, read some of his preparatory Greek with me; and I had become very fond of him. At the Junior Exhibition, so called, in Cam |