and have a most glorious little quarrel, mostly conducted by the lady, as he, poor man, gets little chance of saying much for himself. At last she fairly goes for him, and he descends from his throne, but she follows and knocks him down and then returns, sits on the throne in full majesty of conquest, but restlessly comes down again and sits dejectedly down on the ground, at the side, and has a good cry, then he returns to the throne, and tries to pacify her, and wants her to return to his side, but she indignantly refuses until he descends and she re-installs herself while he begs her forgiveness in approved Burmese fashion, by prostrating himself before her, and is finally invited back by the fractious lady, and they are again seated happily together.

I would strongly recommend womens' rights delegates being sent to Burmah for a few wrinkles, just to see how the other side of the question stands. Mrs. Burman does all the work, and Mr. Burman gets sometimes as many as four pretty wives, each of whom has a separate house and keeps her lord in turn, when he comes that way; but she is master and knows and feels it. The stranger recognises it in her independent mien and superior intellectual physiognomy over the lazy and immoral Burman. They all smoke. I mean men, women and children. I saw one child of about seven playing marbles alone, and smoking a huge cigar about the size of his forearm.

D

By THE REV. G. R. GOODALL.

THE great current in English literature which we call Romanticism was fed from many springs. Religion, Philosophy, Politics, all intermingled in the stream. Changes in institutions, beliefs, ideals; a new discernment of the past, and new visions of the future; a sense of fresh depths disclosed in nature and in the heart of man, combined to make this period the most intricate and interesting of all fields for the critic or historian of literature. But if we seek the determining influence in the Romantic Movement it is to be found, not in the realm of Ideasthough at the head of one main tendency there stands the great name of Kant; nor in the world of Action-though the lurid light of the French Revolution falls on every contemporary page; but in the dim region of Sentiment which underlies both. Rousseau is the father of Romanticism. That extraordinary quickening of imaginative sensibility which Professor Herford notes as the chief characteristic of the romantic spirit first manifests itself in the pages of "Emile " and "la Nouvelle Hélöise." The affinity between Rousseau and many of the great figures in English Romanticism may seem remote indeed! Yet his genius was European in its influence, and our literature in the early nineteenth century is permeated with his teaching and his inspiration. And it is with regard to this strain in the spiritual lineage of the leaders in the

new movement that I would venture to define Romanticism as the triumph of a temperament. In poetry and imaginative literature, especially, it was the revolt of certain untamed natures against the urbane, conventional, matterof-fact spirit of the eighteenth century. The "good sense" of Pope, the common-sense of Dr. Johnson, were no longer accepted as supreme canons in literature and life. The eccentrics came to the centre. The world learnt to listen, not without grimaces, to many things that for a century past had scarcely found utterance-naive childish memories, revelations of the inmost life of the soul, minute and faithful notes of "things seen" in the world of nature, and strange moods of awe and exaltation.

The revolt became in time, of course, a cult and an affectation. It ran to a violence of simulated passion of which the world. has long since wearied. The predominance of science has made many minds less sensitive to the "light that never was on sea and land." The burden of social problems has become too heavy for perfect sympathy with the millennial hopes and prophecies of political Romanticism. But the finest fruits of the romantic spirit keep their freshness. No satiety and no reaction can spoil our enjoyment of the great harvest of English poetry in which Coleridge has so large a share.

It is as a leader in the poetic revolt of his age that the fame of Coleridge is most secure. In temperament he was a born romantic, the fibres of his nature thrilling to music, like an Eolian harp, in response to every breath of the thought and sentiment of his age. In his recollections of childhood he was perhaps not entirely free from the romantic weakness for heightening the lights and deepening the shadows. Like Rousseau he declared that he had never been a child. The poetry in which he recalls his early years in the Devonshire village and parsonage is always light-hearted and natural. But it is plain that from birth there was an abnormal strain in his nature." From childhood," says Lamb, the friend

who always best understood him, "he hungered for eternity." The fairy-tales on which his childhood was nourished "habituated my mind to the Vast," he says, "and I never considered my senses as, in any fashion, a criterion as to what I ought to believe. I regulated all my beliefs by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age." The "Arabian Nights" surrounded him with visionary joys and terrors, and long afterwards he remembered how he would watch in the library for the moment when the sunshine, falling on the volumes, gave him courage to take them from the shelves. His father-himself wildly eccentric in character-attempted to break the spell by burning the magic tales. They were the opium of Coleridge's childhood. He was never without some cloudwoven barrier between himself and the hard facts of life. De Quincey said of him that he "wanted better bread than could be made from wheat." It would be truer, perhaps, to say that he was one of those for whom bread made from wheat is the least urgent of needs!

The "shades of the prison-house" closed very early, and in dreary earnest, about Coleridge. In his ninth year, upon his father's death, he was admitted to Christ's Church Hospital, and from that grim Bastille of boyhood he did not once escape to visit the Devonshire home for eight long years. Here, along with some 800 lads, he lived in a state of chronic semi-starvation, under a régime of absurd pedantry and monstrous tyranny. Everyone remembers Charles Lamb's touching portrait of the poor friendless boy, his parents, and those who should care for him, far away, his few acquaintances in the great city, after a little forced notice on his first arrival, tiring of his holiday visits. But Coleridge himself seems to have been, on the whole, strangely indifferent to the hardships of his lot. He shows nothing of Cowper's or Shelley's revolt against the old public-school system. He professes, indeed, his lasting indebtedness to the wholesome discipline which saved him from becoming an infant prodigy! If the "in

spired charity-boy," chanting in the cloisters "the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus, or reciting Homer in his Greek," was not a prodigy, one would be hard put to it to define the term!

The truth is that Coleridge lived through these darkened years of boyhood upon far other resources than those provided by "the grand old fortifying classical curriculum." It was a time of feverish and heterogeneous reading, which laid the foundations of the legend of Coleridge's omniscience. He was placed on the subscription list of a circulating library by a nameless benefactor, encountered in the Strand, who first accused Coleridge of an attempt to pick his pocket, but learnt that the lad's suspicious behaviour was the reflex action of a day-dream in which he was swimming the Hellespont with Leander! "I read straight through the catalogue," says Coleridge, "folios and the rest, understanding or not, and ran all risks to steal out and procure the two volumes a day, to which I was entitled."

It was about this time that he began those studies-or rather browsings-in philosophy to which Lamb alludes in a famous passage already quoted. The speculations and mystical rhapsodies of the neo-platonists and others replaced the magic of the "Arabian Nights." For Coleridge, as for many of his English contemporaries, philosophy was always largely a province of the imagination. It was an escape from, not a pathway to, Reality. The very word Metaphysics is uttered by Coleridge, Hazlitt and De Quincey, with bated breath. From this time onwards Coleridge is continually immersed in mystical and speculative reveries which, however, in these early years, have very little relation to the serious critical and constructive philosophy of the age.

Amid the boyish intellectual ferment of these years, in which he dabbles in surgery, chemistry and atheism with all the ardour of adolescence, the most hopeful sign is his awakening as a poet. The juvenilia of Coleridge, the