the future laboring only for the gloriole, after flattering oneself for a while that one was working for the public weal.” It is true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal; but the process is tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is something much more attractive about Condorcet's undisguised disappointment at having to exchange active public labor for geometrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally professed by statesmen when driven from place to their books. His correspondence shows that even when his mind seemed to be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely to stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the strength of justice in society. It would have been, in one sense, more fortunate for him to have cared less for high social interests, if we remember the contention of his latter days, and the catastrophe which brought them to so frightful a close. But Condorcet was not one of those natures who can think it happiness to look passively out from the tranquil literary watch-tower upon the mortal struggles of a society in a state of revolution. In measuring other men of science as his two volumes of Eloges abundantly show-one cannot help being struck by the eagerness with which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social improvement, of anxiety that the lives and characters of our fellows should be better worth having. He was himself too absolutely possessed by this social spirit to have flinched from his career, even if he had foreseen the martyrdom which was to consummate it. "You are very happy," he once wrote to Turgot, "in your passion for the public good, and your power to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to that of study." In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became connected with the Academy; to the mortification of his relations, who hardly pardoned him for not being a captain of cavalry, as his father had been before him. About the same time or a little later, he performed a pilgrimage of a kind that could hardly help making a mark upon a character so deeply impressible. In company with D'Alembert, he went to Ferney and saw Voltaire. To the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has never been any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a great ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the representatives of a powerful organization and an accepted system. Voltaire filled a place before men's eyes in the eighteenth century as conspicuous and as authoritative as that of St. Bernard in the twelfth. The difference was that Voltaire's place was absolutely unofficial in its origin, and indebted to no system nor organization for its maintenance. Again, there have been others, like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more permanent contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the most part labored for the generation that followed them, and won comparatively slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire, during his life, enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was an unsurpassed master of the art of literary expression in a country where that art is more highly prized than anywhere else; he was the most brilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supreme passion; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the learned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by his never-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which lacks. vigor and freshness and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter, and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of all institutions, the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honor and popularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression and injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, and absolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of oppression or injustice whose case was once brought under his eye. THE CHURCH AND THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA' From 'Diderot and the Encyclopædists' HE Church had known how to deal with intellectual insur THE gents, from Abélard in the twelfth century down to Giordano Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were isolated; they were for the most part submissive; and if they were not, the arm of the Church was very long, and her grasp mortal. And all these meritorious precursors were made weak by one cardinal defect, for which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could compensate. They had the scientific idea, but they lacked the social idea. After the middle of the last century, the insurrection against the pretensions of the Church, and against the doctrines of Christianity, was marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most significant feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the scientific idea and by the social idea. Its leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy, and with as wide a range, as their instruments allowed; and they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority. The great symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the 'Encyclopædia.' The Encyclopædia' was virtually a protest against the old organization, no less than against the old doctrine. Broadly stated, the great central moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social improvement since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another. The conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic endeavor to modify the conditions that surround him. WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896) BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE ILLIAM MORRIS was a man of such varied activities and exuberant vitality, that an account of his career as a man of letters can give but an inadequate impression of his personality. The present sketch, however, must be restricted to the single aspect of his life by virtue of which he won a place among the greatest English writers of the nineteenth century; and may mention, thereafter only to ignore them, his epoch making work as a decorative designer, his revival of the well-nigh lost art of printing beautiful books, and the socialist propaganda which he carried on for so many years, and with so much of fiery energy. All of these things belong to the character of the man rather than of the poet; and it is with the poet alone that we are noW concerned. WILLIAM MORRIS With a volume entitled The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems,' published in 1858, Morris made his first appearance in literature. At this time the fame of Tennyson as the greatest of Victorian poets was fully established; the fame of Browning, with fifteen volumes already to his credit, was rapidly growing; and the chief poetical work of Matthew Arnold had already been produced. The affinities of the new poet were, however, with none of these masters, but rather with two men whose voices were yet to be heard. It was not until 1861 that Swinburne published The Queen Mother' and 'Rosamund,' to be followed in 1864 by Atalanta in Calydon,' in 1865 by Chastelard,' and in 1866 by the famous first series of Poems and Ballads.' As for Rossetti, while it is true that some of the most characteristic of his youthful pieces had appeared in the Germ as early as 1850, yet it was not until 1870 that the manuscript collection of his ( Poems' was exhumed from the grave of his wife, and given to the world. XVIII-647 Thus we see that Morris must be considered the pioneer of the poetical movement with which these three men are chiefly identified. Whether we give them the vague title of Pre-Raphaelites, or of apostles of mediævalism, or of representatives of the stained-glass school of poetry, it is evident that they were united, at least in their earlier years, by the possession of common ideals and a common inspiration. The fact is also worth noting that 'The Defence of Guenevere,' a considerable section of which deals with material taken from the cycle of Arthurian legend, was published in the year that gave birth to the first group of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King.' A comparison of these two volumes is instructive; for it shows how divergent were the aims of Tennyson's exquisite but sophisticated art and the simpler and bolder art of the new poet. In diction, in emotional color, and in envisagement of the period with which both are concerned, the two works are very sharply contrasted: that of Tennyson embodies the last and most subtle refinement of a continuous literary tradition, while that of Morris harks back to earlier modes of thought and expression, and sacrifices the conventional trappings of modern song in order to reproduce with more of vital truthfulness the spirit of a vanished past. This point must be insisted upon, because it differentiates, not merely the two singers that have been named, but the two groups to which they respectively belong; and because it offers what justification there may be for the epithet "Pre-Raphaelite" so frequently applied to one of the groups. As the genius of Morris developed, his art became far finer; but it retained to the last those qualities of simplicity and sincerity that had informed it in its beginnings. The distinctive achievement of Morris in English poetry is that of a story-teller by right divine- such a story-teller as Chaucer alone had been before him. But although the poet himself pays tribute to that mastery That from the rose-hung lanes of woody Kent Through these five hundred years such songs have sent Of unrejoicing labor, love them yet,» yet the parallel may not be carried very far. Morris lacks the wit, the shrewdness, the practical good sense, and the dramatic faculty of Chaucer: he has instead the sentiment of romance in a heightened degree, the sense of pure beauty in nature and in life, the melancholic strain of a "dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time," and taking refuge in an idealized golden age of the past from a vain effort to set the crooked straight" in this modern workaday world. As a story-teller in verse, Morris conquered the public with 'The |