Seems the whole work of a life-time

That away the rest have tried.'

These moments, these flashes, these fire-flames are the revelations in this life of the true laws of the other life; the things which for the instant give us the vision of a higher and more enduring order than that of custom and convention:-higher even than that of what we may have been taught to call duty. In at least one poem, The Statue and the Bust, the foregone impulse was an impulse to what would be called a sin, but the lesson of the poem is that even a sin of instinctive ardour, of selfless passion may be less damning and deadening than the self-regarding virtue which narrows the soul and chills the heart. In the greater number of instances, however, the call of the supreme moment is to something which the world condemns much more bitterly than it ever condemns mere sin-to a splendid recklessness, an heroic imprudence, a divine disdain for the vulgar success of fame or pounds, shillings, and pence. The soul asserts itself,— it may be in a great love which calls into life all the possibilities both of rapture and of nobleness,-but in the same instant the world arrays herself against the soul, and whatsoever the issue may be, this at any rate is clear to the poet, that the world's success is the man's, the woman's failure.

Thus, when Mr. Browning strives after an answer to the enigma of the age and the ages, he seeks it not in some wide generalisation concerning law or order or progress or liberty; but rather follows the example of the scientific experimentalist, taking his men and women' one by one, hearing what each has to say, believing firmly that no crisis in any human life is of private interpretation, but that the one Spirit speaks to every human soul, and that any authentic message from the Heavens is a message not only to the individual but to the race. As the husband says in By the Fireside,'—

'How the world is made for each of us;
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment's product thus,
When a soul declares itself to wit,

Be hate that fruit or love that fruit,

It forwards the general Deed of Man,
And each of the many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan;
Each loving his own, to boot.

I am named and known by that moment's feat;
There took my station and degree.

So grew my own small life complete,

As nature obtained her best of me

One born to love you, Sweet !

So the earth has gained by one man more,

And the gain of earth must be Heaven's gain too;

And the whole is well worth thinking o'er

When autumn comes: which I mean to do

One day, as I said before.'

This man has in the largest sense of the word sowed his soul alive by knowing the day of his visitation; by recognising before it was too late the golden thread let down from Heaven, to be a clue through the labyrinth of earth;—just as the two in Youth and Art' lose the soul by letting the day pass, and leaving the thread untouched. She marries a rich lord; he is a knight and an R.A.; and surely this is success and completeness of life. Perhaps they try to think it so; but all the time they are well aware that the angel of opportunity once offered them a better gift, and that they 'missed it, lost it for ever.'

What we said concerning a new standard of values being introduced by the apprehension of an upper breaking in upon the lower darkness is best elucidated in the noteworthy poem entitled An Epistle,' containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.' Karshish in his travels in Palestine comes upon the resuscitated Lazarus, and studies him keenly. To Lazarus the great revelation has come not in the blinding flash which dazes a man so that perhaps he doubts the thing he has seen, but in four days of steady illumination. And what is the result?

The man is witless of the size, the sum,

Or whether it be little or be much.
Discourse to him and prodigious armaments
Assembled to besiege his city now,

And of the passing of a mule with gourds-
'Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact he will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness,

(Far as I see) as if in that indeed

He caught prodigious import, whole results;
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we too see not with his opened eyes!
Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,
Preposterously, at cross purposes.

Should his child sicken unto death-why, look
For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,

Or pretermission of his daily craft—

While a word, gesture, glance, from that same child

At play or in the school or laid asleep,

Will startle him to an agony of fear.'

It will be seen that the life of Lazarus has been thrown out of balance, as it were, by the fullness of knowledge, too great to be fruitfully utilised in the cramped conditions of earth. The thought, 'It should be,' is backed by the other thought, 'Here it cannot be'; and there is little for him but to wait

'For that same death which shall restore his being

To equilibrium, body loosening soul,

Divorced even now by premature full growth.'

He has sight in a world where it is appointed to us to walk not by sight, but by faith-where we may not know, but only realise that there is something to be known. As Rabbi Ben Ezra says

For more is not reserved

To man, with soul just nerved

To act to-morrow what he learns to-day :

Here work enough to watch

The Master work, and catch

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play.'

But even these glimpses of the Master's working, these hints

estimate of the comparative worth of things. We shall not, like Lazarus, be thrown out of harmony with our human environment; we shall still feel the throbbing of every human emotion; we shall recognise with calm delight the order which is the earthly correspondence of divine law; we shall exult in the impulse towards freedom which is, at its best, the stirring within us of that life of God which is a union of perfect liberty with perfect righteousness;—but it will be with the purged eyes of those who have beheld things transfigured by that upper sunshine which reveals their true nature, their real significance, those who-perhaps on a mad journey to some Damascus of mistaken duty-have seen a light and heard a voice, and been thenceforward not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.'

ART. VIII.-SCOTTISH PATRIOTISM AND SCOTTISH POLITICS.

1. The Local Government Board (Scotland) Bill, 1883.

2. A Rectorial Address, delivered before the Students of the University of Edinburgh, Nov. 4, 1882. By LORD ROSEBERY. Edinburgh, 1882.

3. Address by Lord Rosebery at Edinburgh, July 21, 1883, on being presented with the freedom of that city.

4. Scotland's Version of Home Rule. By W. SCOTT DALGLEISH. Nineteenth Century for January, 1883.

ON

N the 21st of August, the Local Government Board (Scotland) Bill was rejected on the Second Reading in the House of Lords, by a majority of forty-seven votes to thirty-one. Before this decision was come to, the leading advocate of the measure, both in the Upper Chamber and on Scottish platforms, gave the members of his own Order this warning, 'If you think fit to reject this Bill—and I am far from saying that the Bill is perfect-I can only say that those who support it must appeal

whom this Bill chiefly affects. It is in the interest of Scotland that it should be passed. It is the desire of Scotland that it should be passed, and I venture to say that the expression of opinion in Scotland as to the fate of this measure, if your Lordships think fit to reject it, the expression of opinion not as to the measure itself, but as to the principle it represents, will convince your Lordships that you make a great mistake, in judging public opinion in Scotland by the opinion of this House, if you think that it is hostile to this Bill.' The same day the House of Lords rejected the Irish Registration Bill, and, on the following forenoon, the Premier was asked by Mr. Parnell what were the intentions of the Government in respect of that measure. Mr. Gladstone at once replied that the Bill would be brought forward early next session and pressed upon the consideration of Parliament. Sir George Campbell then put a similar question as to the Scottish Bill. Mr. Gladstone's reply was significant: My hon. friend will see, I am sure, that the Local Government Board (Scotland) Bill is a measure of general political expediency. The other measure, besides being a measure of general political expediency, is a Bill to supply an obvious demand of justice.' This remark has been taken, and no doubt correctly taken, to mean that while Government are resolved to press forward the Irish Registration Bill next session, they have not come to any such resolution in respect of the Scottish Local Government Board Bill, because they do not consider it of equal importance.

It will be well to take the statements of Lord Rosebery and Mr. Gladstone together, for, between them, they throw some light on the prospects of the defeated measure. Speaking distinctly and emphatically in the name of its champions in Scotland, the late Under-Secretary for the Home Department said that it was the desire of Scotland,' that is, of course, of the people of Scotland in the wide, constitutional and only proper sense, that the measure should pass, that there would be an appeal to the public opinion of Scotland from the House of Lords in the event of its rejection, and that the expression of that opinion would prove such