leaned over at right angles to her pedestal, suspended in apparently miraculous fashion by the three remaining girders. We flew once more over a countryside of multi-colored crops and fantastic woods, and so to the aerodrome.

Snatches of familiar flying-talk, unheard during the past ten days of leave, floated from the tea-table as Blackwood's Magazine.

I entered the mess: "Came in with drift-dud pressure-right wings fell off as he dived-weak factor of safety -side-slipped away from Archievertical gust-choked on the fine adjustment-made rings round the Hun -went down in flames near Douai."

The machine that "went down in flames near Douai" was piloted by the man whose puppy I had brought from England.

Contact.

Few of us can remember a September like that of the present year and none of us desires to see another autumn of this bitter struggle for liberty in Europe. Things may not have moved in the West as rapidly as some lovers of the good cause had hoped, but they have moved to a harvest; there is a prospect of days when our civilization may at last reap security and new strength from the sacrifices which have been made for the sake of freedom. If men are ever to have their wisdom judged by their hopes, it is surely at an hour like this. Hope is a form of faith, and although neither hope nor faith depends on sight, on visible results and tangible gains, nevertheless both win and are designed to win confirmation from facts; both justify themselves from those facts of achievement which they have themselves helped to create in the outer world as they have acted on their principles and trusted to their intuitions. This is the position which we occupy at the present phase of the Great War. What has been done and won in the field, particularly during the past six months, enhances the moral confidence of those who have staked their all upon the issue. It enables them to apply Byron's lines to the immediate situation:

Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner, torn but flying,

Streams like the thunder storm against the wind;

Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,

The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;

Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind,

Chopp'd by the axe, looks rough and

little worth,

But the sap lasts, and still the seed we find

Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;

So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.

These were September lines of 1817. Byron was in a sour mood against England, partly for private reasons, partly because he shared the suspicion and resentment felt by liberalminded men against the reactionary policy after Waterloo. The earlier part of the year had been marked by the suppression of the Habeas Corpus. Act, after the famous, or infamous, Green-Bag inquiry. It remained to be seen, Byron wrote to his friend Hobhouse in sending him the fourth canto of Childe Harold, whether England had acquired anything more than a permanent army and a suspended Habeas Corpus. Byron doubted it.

It

Hence his rather gloomy lines. must be allowed, however, that there was a real menace to freedom in September, 1817, a menace which was not military but political. The measures taken by the Government to suppress what was believed to be sedition seemed to endanger liberty; they were, at any rate, dictated often by fear, and fear is never more stupid and cruel than in the seat of authority. Things never went in England to the bloody extremes which stained the Bourbon restoration in France. Peterloo was bad, but it was nothing compared to the reign of terror which had lasted at Lyons all this summer, and which Marmont only succeeded in stopping early in September. Still, the position of English politics was critical enough. Mr. Thursfield, in his sketch of Peel, declares that this period was "one of the most disastrous in the modern history of England," and, as a similar crisis may soon be upon ourselves, it is profitable to note his reasons. "The Ministry were strong in the prestige acquired by a war triumphantly waged and a peace honorably concluded, but their title on any other ground to the confidence and respect of their countrymen was slender. They could not understand that methods of government which are tolerated during a prolonged struggle for national existence, become intolerable as soon as the strain of the conflict is relaxed. They did not perceive that new ideas were striving for expression in the national life, that new classes had risen to importance in the State." In addition to this, the economic situation was pressing on the lower classes with such rigor that political disaffection seemed to many to present the one chance of securing room to breathe in England. Distress and hardship seethed into violence now and then. This was the situation which evidently was in LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 383.

Byron's mind as he wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold in far-off Venice. We share his confidence that the cause of freedom will survive the storms of peace, for not the most pessimistic among us would contemplate the possibility that our statesmen after the war could fall as low as Eldon, Vansittart, and Sidmouth; but, meantime, we can say his lines over to ourselves, when Freedom is still menaced by a military tyranny in Europe.

Another English man of letters was in Italy. Landor, who hated political tyranny as keenly as Byron, was at Como, where Southey, the conservative poet laureate, had just paid him a visit. Poor Southey was in low spirits. He was still mourning the death of his bright boy, Herbert, and he had been vexed by the unauthorized publication of a youthful, semi-republican poem on Wat Tyler, out of which his adversaries had ungenerously made capital in the spring of the year. As Professor Dowden argues, "there was nothing in the poem that could be remembered with shame, unless it is shameful to be generous and inexperienced at the age of twenty. But England in 1817 seemed charged with combustibles, and even so small a spark as this was not to be blown about without a care. The Prince Regent had been fired at; there were committals for treason; there were riots in Somersetshire; the swarm of Manchester Blanketeers announced a march to London; before the year was out, Brandeth and his fellows had been executed at Derby." It was decidedly awkward for the poet laureate to be quoted as a firebrand, even from a poem which he had repudiated long ago. He defended himself, and he was defended both inside and outside the House of Commons, but the incident preyed upon his mind, and he went abroad that summer for relief. We can only

imagine the conversation between the two men on the banks of Lake Como, but Southey would not depart uncomforted. "That deep-mouthed Bootian Savage Landor" had a chivalrous regard for Southey; indeed, he preferred him as a poet to Scott and even to Coleridge.

It was during this month, too, that Coleridge came into indirect touch with things Italian, when he struck up a friendship on the seashore at Littlehampton with an English clergyman who turned out to be a translator of Dante. The Rev. H. F. Cary had published his version of the Divina Commedia three years before, in complete form, but it had not won its way to the general public. It was a good hour for him when he met Coleridge, for the poet recommended the book in his lectures next winter, and Cary's fame was established. A third edition was required by the year 1831. So Coleridge was able to do more for Cary than another friend of the translator had been able to do ten years earlier. When Scott visited Miss Seward at Lichfield, in May, 1807, she showed him the passage in Dante, where Michael Scott is mentioned; and the version used was Cary's, for although the second and third parts were not issued till 1814, the Inferno had appeared in 1806. But Scott did not appreciate Dante. He told Miss Seward that the plan of the Divina Commedia seemed to him unhappy, and "the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." No one who thought thus of Dante would kindle over a translator of Dante, and Cary had to wait for the more sympathetic Coleridge.

Eighteen hundred and seventeen was, for Coleridge himself, a year of prose rather than of poetry. Perhaps it was during September that he wrote his lines on The Knight's Tomb, the

last three of which were to be misquoted admiringly in Ivanhoe three years later:

The Knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;

His soul is with the saints, I trust.

Scott said he borrowed the verses "from а contemporary poet who has written but too little," and this made Coleridge sure who was the author of the Waverley novels. But during this very month a shrewd American at Abbotsford was already satisfying his mind on the same point. Washington Irving arrived at Scott's house on August 30th, and he spent the first few days of September there, noting the originals of Edie Ochiltree and Dominie Sampson, and feeling that "many of the rich antiquarian humors of Monkbarns were taken from" his host's own "richly compounded character." Lockhart has quoted amply from Irving's charming account of his visit, but there is one incident which is worth mentioning, in the light of today. Scott showed his friend the tower of Bemerside, the baronial residence of the Haigs, or De Hagas, one of the oldest families on the border, and pointed to it as a proof that Thomas the Rhymer had been a true prophet when he sang:

Betide, betide, whate'er betide, Haig shall be Haig of Bemerside. The Haigs, said Scott, had retained their ancient stronghold through all the vicissitudes of the centuries. "Prophecies, however," Irving reflected, "often insure their own fulfilment. It is very probable that the prediction of Thomas the Rhymer has linked the Haigs to their tower, as their rock of safety, and has induced them to cling to it, almost superstitiously, through hardships and inconveniences that would otherwise have caused its abandonment." Irving's record of these September days at Abbotsford

is a model of reminiscences; it is vivid and personal, and yet it does not violate the sanctities of private life. One of the things which astonished him was that Scott could give so much leisure to his visitors when he was writing his novels. Rob Roy was in hand, and yet Scott "scarce ever balked a party of pleasure or a sporting excursion, and rarely pleaded his own concerns as an excuse for rejecting those of others."

the

We left Coleridge and Cary at Littlehampton on the English Channel. In the first week of the month two ladies there received a letter from Oxford, written by their friend, John Keats. For Keats was having a golden month at Magdalen Hall with his friend, Benjamin Bailey. The two youths rowed on the river, walked, and talked to their hearts' content through what Keats called "the finest part of the year." September in Oxford is a pageant even for people who are not poetic. How it charmed Keats we may gather from his letters. If September was the finest month in the year, he was ready to give the same superlative to Oxford among cities of the earth. He had been only one week in the place when he wrote to his sister that "this Oxford I have no doubt is the finest city in the world. It is full of old Gothic buildings— spires, towers, quadrangles, cloisters, groves, etc., and is surrounded with more clear streams than ever I saw together. I take a walk by the side of one of them every evening, and, thank God, we have not had a drop of rain these many days." The stream must have been the Cherwell, for Magdalen Hall stood close to Magdalen College. Keats was just in time to have the privilege of staying there; two and a half years later it was practically destroyed by fire, owing to the carelessness of an undergraduate. Neither Bailey nor he was idle during

a

this September. The one was studying for holy orders; Bailey became curate, and afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo. And his friend wrote verse steadily. It is to these three weeks at Oxford in the September of 1817 that we owe the third book of Endymion, though there is not any local color in it. Indeed, how could there be? Keats and Endymion were at the bottom of the sea, for the time being.

As he boated on the Isis and its tributaries, Keats found time to read some poetry as well as compose verses. Wordsworth was one of his chosen poets, but 1817 was a scanty year at Rydal Mount. If Keats had only known it, another poet was boating and writing lower down the Thames. Shelley spent all this month at Great Marlow, partly to be near his friend Peacock, who was idling and composing there. Shelley, with characteristic generosity, was helping him financially; but his goodness extended beyond fellow-authors. The wretched lace workers of the district appealed to his compassion. His exertions on behalf of the poor at his gates are a shining page in his life. He gave more than money. He visited the sick in their homes, and it was his efforts to relieve the starving and diseased at Marlow which helped to bring on the breakdown of his health that drove him next spring to Italy. His poems show that social sympathy did not dry up his mind. He was finishing The Revolt of Islam, for example, as he floated under the beech groves of Bisham, or as he wandered over the countryside, and as he spent himself to succor his humble neighbors. "The changes produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest," says his wife, "brought with them the most heartrending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation he could. . . . I mention these things--for this minute and active sympathy with his

fellow-creatures gives a thousandfold interest to his speculations, and stamps with reality his pleadings for the human race." The record of his output for the year is rich, even apart from The Revolt of Islam, and we may assume that his experiences among the poor at Marlow underlay the lines: Dark is the realm of grief; but human things

Those may not know who cannot weep for them.

Another fragment from the same period comes home to ourselves across the century with poignant force:

The fight was o'er: the flashing through the gloom

Which robes the cannon as he wings a tomb,

Had ceased.

If we could say that today, it would be a happier autumn for us.

His infant daughter, Clara, was born on the second of the month. But his friends counted specially at this period. It is to Leigh Hunt, for example, that we are indebted for this account of his life at Marlow. "He rose early in the morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly, wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine), conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed." He visited his friends, as well, particularly Hunt at Hampstead. If we look further into London, during this September, we see two people, a brother and sister, moving to a house in Russell Street, Covent Garden, "Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinöus, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and 'sparagus." Lamb was only on the outskirts of the

Shelley circle, however. He agreed with his friend Hazlitt that "nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Shelley." But to mention London at all at this period is to think of Lamb, even though the main events of the month in his life were the preparations for the removal and the attempt, which he says he began on the last day of August, to "conquer that inveterate habit of smoking." He wrote, or at any rate he published, nothing in the course of 1817. Still deeper in the heart of London, Mrs. Fry was laboring in September at Newgate, to reform the women prisoners. But the crime of the city touched Lamb from a different side. No sooner had he got settled in his new quarters than he noted playfully one of the advantages of these lodgings. "Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and, casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life." Lamb had sympathy, but it was not given to him for philanthropy. "Neglected people in every class," said De Quincey, "won the sympathy of Lamb," but they had usually to be individual cases. De Quincey was not yet on intimate terms with Lamb. He was up at Grasmere, spending the first year of his married life, and happy because he had managed to reduce his daily allowance of opium to a thousand drops. That year was the most cheerful in his life, "though, I confess, it stood as a parenthesis between years of a gloomier character." Poor De Quincey! There was a young schoolmaster at Kirkcaldy who was often to speak of him thus, with a pity and affection which mastered his contempt for the little victim of