The Reviews Reviewed. 



575 



THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. 



The October number is disting-uished by its 

 judicial article on the Ulster question, which is 

 the most formidable criticism of Carsonism that 

 has yet appeared in Conservative quarters. 

 That, and the papers on the Panama Canal and 

 this year's cricket, have been separately noticed. 



browning's achievement. 



A very careful and slig;htly preciose criticism of 

 Browning's poetry comes from the pen of Percy 

 Lubbock. He speaks of Browning- as a spiritual 

 adventurer born out of due time. What turner! 

 him from the set play form to the dramatic 

 monologue " was his lack of power to grasp .a 

 character as opposed to his immense and varied 

 power to grasp a mood." "On that side of 

 character-drawing which is analysis, he cannot 

 be surpassed for certainty and swiftness of 

 touch ; while when it comes to the synthetic 

 grasp of the myriad fragments he fails us." He 

 was later to show a power of character-drawing 

 beyond anything to be found in plays. Guido 

 and Pompilia and Caponsacchi are characters 

 conceived and held in the fullest sense. "It 

 was not because he failed to feel with his charac- 

 ters, but exactly because he felt with them too 

 promptly and easily that his drama wants 

 body." Mr. Lubbock thus appraises Browning's 

 chief distinction : — 



Not the evasion of life, which anyhow claims us again 

 soon enough, but the translation of the whole of it to 

 the level of passion — that was Browning's achievement, 

 and it has almost been his alone. 



No one else, not Shakespeare himself, has written 

 poetry of this" order in an atmosphere where life — life 

 which, whatever happens, has to be lived from day to 

 day — can be susiained and continued. Nothing in the 

 necessities of ordinary existence is contradicted by these 

 poems at their greatest intensity. 



His is the passion which has not for an instant 

 shrunk from the work of understanding itself. In 

 nearly the whole of Browning's poetry there is no touch 

 that is either hysterical or sentimental. 



WHO REALLY RULED THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 



Professor Haverfield reviews Roman history 

 since Mommsen, whose unique and epoch- 

 making power he contrasts to the disadvantage 

 of Ferrero's romantic reconstructions. Over 

 against the Italian's transformation of Augustan 

 history into a romance, the writer says that to 

 the closer view : — 



The Emperors no longer appear to be the Empire. 

 Instead, there comes into view a background of numer- 

 ous officials and administrators, dull, second-rate, even 

 stupid, but capable and competent for their work. 

 These are the men who carry out the routine of the 

 government, who conduct campaigns and rule the pro- 

 vinces. They kept the Roman Empire upright for two 

 hundred and fifty years, through worse and longer 

 assaults of more innumerable enemies than any other 

 Empire has yet faced. 



RO.MAN CANON LAW IN ENGLAND. 



Over against the argument that if the Pope's 

 law ran in our Church Courts until the middle of 

 the sixteenth century and then ceased to do so, 

 the Church before that time and since cannot be 

 one and the same body, Sir Lewis Dibdin argues 

 from Stubbs : — 



First, that the origin of English Church law was 

 chiefly insular ; secondly, that the influence of Rome in 

 modifying and developing it was great, inevitable and 

 progressive, and came through several distinct channels ; 

 thirdly, that there never was any express or formal 

 adoption of the Roman Canon Law, but that it wai? 

 accepted as part and parcel of the Papal Supremacy, 

 with the limitations which almost always accompanied 

 the recognition of that supremacy in England. 



IN PRAISE OF SPINOZA. 



Rev. M. Kaufmann, writing on Spinoza, 

 Goethe, and the Moderns, and attributing per- 

 haps too much of the monistic elements in the 

 latter to his influence, closes with this tribute : — 



Whatever may be advanced in depreciation of his 

 system as a whole, in its metaphysical aspects more 

 especially, its author will never cease to be considered 

 as one of the mighty spirits of our race, distinguished 

 by his evident love of truth and the fervid pursuit of 

 it under great difficulties, and also by his persistent 

 advocacy of a noble ideal which has done much to raise 

 the moral temperature of Europe. In his complete 

 detachment from the world, his noble independence, 

 his intellectual integrity and spiritual elevation, he fully 

 deserves the high encomium of an opponent when he 

 says : " Blessed be thou, great, yea, holy Benedictus, 

 notwithstanding thy vagaries in thoug'nt and word when 

 philosophising on the nature of the most High ! His 

 truth was in thy soul. His love was in thy life." 



AGAINST THE ISOLATION OF THEOLOGY. 



Rev. F. R. Tennant contends that theology 



now finds insufficiently comprehensive any narrower 

 scope than that which it was her glory to claim in the 

 days of the great Alexandrines, or, again, in the golden 

 period of the Scholastic age. Theology must henceforth 

 be competent to appreciate and to assimilate the know- 

 ledge ever being acquired in fields such as science and 

 philosophy ; for many questions raised and answered 

 there, as she well knows, have as profound an influence 

 on theological development as the results of critical and 

 historical research. 



He strongly opposes the endeavour to make 

 theology independent of philosophy, history, and 

 science. 



OTHER ARTICLES. 



Professor J. S. Nicholson discusses the vexed 

 question of the rise in prices along with the rise 

 in interest. He disposes again of the popular 

 fallacy that for this the increased output of gold 

 is responsible. Mr. W. S. Lilly sketches the 

 character and career of Joseph Fouch6, whom 

 he considers the most important figure in French 

 political life after Napoleon. Mr. V. Hussey- 

 Waish discusses the projected Jacobite invasion 

 to support Prince Charles Edward in 1745. ^''• 

 Algernon Cecil recalls the work of Ormonde and 

 Sandwich as two seventeenth century men of 

 action. 



