6

it was brought about. The 'circlet of diamonds,' the substitute invented by Ducis, was abandoned, and it was that tissue work' which raised Othello's jealousy. Desdemona held a handkerchief in her hand, but her husband referred to it only as that tissue,' 'that gift. At last Alfred de Vigny translated the play word for word, and this, or an equally literal translation, was acted at the Théâtre Français in the first quarter of the present century. This caused immense opposition. A compact phalanx of Voltaireans occupied one side of the house; a similar body of Shakespeareans the other. When the latter frantically applauded, the former as energetically hissed. But

between the two factions (says the Duke de Broglie, Revue Française, January 1830, quoted in Guizot's Shakespeare and his Times) the body of the audience in the pit appears to have preserved a reasonable neutrality. They were evidently on their guard, fearing lest their consecrated maxims should be violated, and they be led into some hasty demonstration of feeling; and yet they were sensible, profoundly sensible, of the great beauties of the piece. Accordingly, during the whole course of the representation they appeared constantly astonished, moved, indulgent, submitting with good grace to the boldest departure from received rules. They willingly, though without warmth or violence, joined in the attempt to silence the detractors; and they good-naturedly allowed free scope to the enthusiasts, while taking great care not to enlist themselves on their side or to mingle in their transports.

On this occasion the word 'mouchoir' was bravely uttered without the French Melpomene going into fits; and Shakespeare got a secure footing on the French stage. As between him and Voltaire, M. Guizot says in Shakespeare and his Times, there is no question as to which has the superior genius, but it was still a question with Guizot whether the system of Voltaire be not superior to that of Shakespeare! Dumas père, at least, thought better of Ducis than of Shakespeare, when, after translating four acts of Shakespeare's Hamlet (played so magnificently by the now forgotten Rouvière), he wrote a new fifth act, in which he adopted the absurd idea of making Hamlet live. M. Jules Lacroix, in 1868, constructed a new King Lear on the old classical lines. Nevertheless, Attila Shakespeare,' as the Duke de Broglie called him, has gained a permanent place on the French stage; and Ducis, who first made his name known there, is stigmatised by Paul Foucher, most irreverently, as a versifier of 'lemonade-and-water tragedies!' They are worth reading, those tragedies of the earliest introducer of Shakespeare to the actors and public of France. Well worth studying also is the work of the last of his translators, M. F. Hugo. Between him and Le Tourneur there is a vast difference. The earlier translator conveyed an idea of Shakespeare to his countrymen; the later really naturalised him, and added Shakespeare to the brilliant roll of the dramatic poets of France.

JOHN DORAN.

AN OXFORD LECTURE.1

I AM sure that all in this audience who were present yesterday at Dr. Acland's earnest and impressive lecture must have felt how deeply I should be moved by his closing reference to the friendship begun in our undergraduate days;-of which I will but say that, if it alone were all I owed to Oxford, the most gracious kindness of the Alma Mater would in that gift have been fulfilled to me.

But his affectionate words, in their very modesty, as if even standing on the defence of his profession, the noblest of human occupations! and of his science-the most wonderful and awful of human intelligences! showed me that I had yet not wholly made clear to you the exactly limited measure in which I have ventured to dispute the fitness of method of study now assigned to you in this University.

Of the dignity of physical science, and of the happiness of those who are devoted to it for the healing and the help of mankind, I never have meant to utter, and I do not think I have uttered, one irreverent word. But against the curiosity of science, leading us to call virtually nothing gained but what is new discovery, and to despise every use of our knowledge in its acquisition; of the insolence of science, in claiming for itself a separate function of that human mind which in its perfection is one and indivisible, in the image of its Creator; and of the perversion of science, in hoping to discover by the analysis of death, what can only be discovered by the worship of life, of these I have spoken, not only with sorrow, but with a fear which every day I perceive to be more surely grounded, that such labour, in effacing from within you the sense of the presence of God in the garden of the earth, may awaken within you the prevailing echo of the first voice of its Destroyer, Ye shall be as gods.'

6

To-day I have little enough time to conclude,-none to review— what I have endeavoured thus to say; but one instance, given me directly in conversation after lecture, by one of yourselves, will enable me to explain to you precisely what I mean.

'Left, at the Editor's request, with only some absolutely needful clearing of unintelligible sentences, as it was written for free delivery. It was the last of a course of twelve given this autumn;-refers partly to things already said, partly to drawings on the walls; and needs the reader's pardon throughout, for faults and abruptnesses incurable but by re-writing the whole as an essay instead of a lecture.

After last lecture, in which you remember I challenged our physiologists to tell me how a bird flies, one of you, whose pardon, if he thinks it needful, I ask for this use of his most timely and illustrative statement, came to me, saying, 'You know the way in which we are shown how a bird flies, is, that any one, a dove for instance, is given to us, plucked, and partly skinned, and incised at the insertion of the wing bone; and then, with a steel point, the ligament of the muscle at the shoulder is pulled up, and out, and made distinct from other ligaments, and we are told "that is the way a bird flies," and on that matter it is thought we have been told enough.'

I say that this instance given me was timely; I will say more-in the choice of this particular bird, providential. Let me take, in their order, the two subjects of inquiry and instruction, which are indeed offered to us in the aspect and form of that one living creature.

Of the splendour of your own true life, you are told, in the words which, to-day, let me call, as your Fathers did, words of inspiration-Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove, that is covered with silver wings and her feathers with gold.' Of the manifold iris of colour in the dove's plumage, watched carefully in sunshine as the bird moves, I cannot hope to give you any conception by words; but that it is the most exquisite, in the modesty of its light, and in the myriad mingling of its hue, of all plumage, I may partly prove to you in this one fact, that out of all studies of colour, the one which I would desire most to place within your reach in these schools, is Turner's drawing of a dove, done when he was in happy youth at Farnley. But of the causes of this colour, and of the peculiar subtlety in its iridescence, nothing is told you in any scientific book I have ever seen on ornithology.

Of the power of flight in these wings, and the tender purpose of their flight, you hear also in your Father's book. To the Church, flying from her enemies into desolate wilderness, there were indeed given two wings as of a great eagle. But the weary saint of God, looking forward to his home in calm of eternal peace, prays rather—“ Oh, that I had wings like a dove, for then should I flee away, and be at rest.' And of these wings, and this mind of hers, this is what reverent science should teach you: first, with what parting of plume, and what soft pressure and rhythmic beating of divided air, she reaches that miraculous swiftness of undubious motion, compared with which the tempest is slow, and the arrow uncertain; and secondly, what clue there is, visible, or conceivable to thought of man, by which, to her living conscience and errorless pointing of magnetic soul, her distant home is felt afar beyond the horizon, and the straight path, through concealing clouds, and over trackless lands, made plain to her desire, and her duty, by the finger of God.

And lastly, since in the tradition of the Old Covenant she was made the messenger of forgiveness to those eight souls saved through

the baptism unto death, and in the Gospel of the New Covenant, under her image, was manifested the well-pleasing of God, in the fulfilment of all righteousness by his Son in the Baptism unto life,-surely alike all Christian people, old and young, should be taught to be gladdened by her sweet presence; and in every city and village in Christendom she should have such home as in Venice she has had for ages, and be, among the sculptured marbles of the temple, the sweetest sculpture; and, fluttering at your children's feet, their neverangered friend. And surely also, therefore, of the thousand evidences which any carefully thoughtful person may see, not only of the ministration of good, but of the deceiving and deadly power of the evil angels, there is no one more distinct in its gratuitous, and unreconcilable sin, than that this--of all the living creatures between earth and sky-should be the one chosen to amuse the apathy of our murderous idleness, with skill-less, effortless, merciless slaughter.

I pass to the direct subject on which I have to speak finally today; the reality of that ministration of the good angels, and of that real adversity of the principalities and powers of Satan, in which, without exception, all earnest Christians have believed, and the appearance of which, to the imagination of the greatest and holiest of them, has been the root, without exception, of all the greatest art produced by the human mind or hand in this world.

That you have at present no art properly so called in England at all-whether of painting, sculpture, or architecture 2-I, for one, do not care. In midst of Scottish Lothians, in the days of Scott, there was, by how much less art, by so much purer life, than in the midst of Italy in the days of Raphael. But that you should have lost, not only the skill of Art, but the simplicity of Faith and life, all in one, and not only here deface your ancient streets by the Ford of the waters of sacred learning, but also deface your ancient hills with guilt of mercenary desolation, driving their ancient shepherd life into exile, and diverting the waves of their streamlets into the cities which are the very centres of pollution, of avarice, and impiety: for this I do care, for this you have blamed me for caring, instead of merely trying to teach you drawing. I have nevertheless yet done my best to show you what real drawing is; and must yet again bear your blame for trying to show you, through that, somewhat more.

I was asked, as we came out of chapel this morning, by one of the Fellows of my college, to say a word to the Undergraduates, about Thirlmere. His request, being that of a faithful friend, came to enforce on me the connection between this form of spoliation of our native land of its running waters, and the gaining disbelief in the power of prayer over the distribution of the elements of our bread

2 Of course, this statement is merely a generalisation of many made in the preceding lectures, the tenor of which any readers acquainted with my recent writings may easily conceive.

and water, in rain, and sunshine,-seed-time, and harvest. Respecting which, I must ask you to think with me to-day what is the meaning of the myth, if you call it so, of the great prophet of the Old Testament, who is to be again sent before the coming of the day of the Lord. For truly, you will find that if any part of your ancient faith be true, it is needful for every soul which is to take up its cross, with Christ, to be also first transfigured in the light of Christ, -talking with Moses and with Elias.

The contest of Moses is with the temporal servitude,-of Elijah, with the spiritual servitude, of the people; and the war of Elijah is with their servitude essentially to two Gods, Baal, or the Sun God, in whose hand they thought was their life, and Baalzebub-the Fly God, -of Corruption, in whose hand they thought was the arbitration of death.

The entire contest is summed in the first assertion by Elijah, of his authority as the Servant of God, over those elemental powers by which the heart of Man, whether Jew or heathen, was filled with food and gladness.

And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.'

Your modern philosophers have explained to you the absurdity of all that; you think? Of all the shallow follies of this age, that proclamation of the vanity of prayer for the sunshine and rain; and the cowardly equivocations, to meet it, of clergy who never in their lives really prayed for anything, I think, excel. Do these modern scientific gentlemen fancy that nobody, before they were born, knew the laws of cloud and storm, or that the mighty human souls of former ages, who every one of them lived and died by prayer, and in it, did not know that in every petition framed on their lips they were asking for what was not only fore-ordained, but just as probably fore-done? or that the mother pausing to pray before she opens the letter from Alma or Balaclava, does not know that already he is saved for whom she prays, or already lies festering in his shroud? The whole confidence and glory of prayer is in its appeal to a Father who knows our necessities before we ask, who knows our thoughts before they rise in our hearts, and whose decrees, as unalterable in the eternal future as in the eternal past, yet in the close verity of visible fact, bend, like reeds, before the fore-ordained and faithful prayers of his children.

Of Elijah's contest on Carmel with that Sun-power in which, literally, you again now are seeking your life, you know the story, however little you believe it. But of his contest with the Death-power, on the hill of Samaria, you read less frequently, and more doubtfully.

'Oh, thou Man of God, the King hath said, Come down. And Elijah answered and said, If I be a man of God, let fire come down from Heaven, and consume thee, and thy fifty.'