Gustave Droz - "Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, v3"

G. A. Henty - "In Freedom's Cause"

Octave Feuillet - "Monsieur de Camors, v2"

Douglas Jerrold - "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




Thus it was impossible that he should be in a very broad sense a poet of
humanity. His fundamental conception of the world was essentially
mediaeval, his ideal was that of cloistered innocence or, still better,
the innocence of untempted and untried infancy. For such perfection his
Lyra Innocentium was strung. When his friend is thinking of the
profession of the law, he conjures him to forego the brilliant visions
which tempted him in that direction for "visions far more brilliant and
more certain too, more brilliant in their results, inasmuch as the
salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing the Magna Charta of
a thousand worlds, more certain to take place since temptations are
fewer and opportunities everywhere to be found. These words remind us of
a passage in one of Massillon's sermons, preached on the delivery of
colours to a regiment, in which the bishop after dwelling on the
hardships and sufferings which soldiers are called upon to endure,
intimates that a small part of those hardships and sufferings, undergone
in performance of a monastic vow, would merit the kingdom of heaven. If
souls are to be saved by real moral influences, Sir John Coleridge has
probably saved a good many more souls as a religious judge and man of
the world than he would have saved as the rector of a country parish,
and if character is formed by moral effort, he has probably formed a
much higher character by facing temptation than he would have done by
flying from it. Keble himself, in his Morning Hymn, has a passage in a
different strain, but the sentiment which really prevailed with him was
probably that embodied in his advice to his friend.

Whatever of grace, worth, or beneficence there could be in the half
cloistered life of an Oxford fellow of those days or in the rural and
sacerdotal life of a High Church rector, there was in the life of Keble
at Oriel, and afterwards at Hursley. The best spirit of such a life
together with the image of a character rivalling in spiritual beauty,
after its kind that of Ken or Leighton, is found in Keble's poetry, and
for this we may be, as hundreds of thousands have been, thankful.

The biographer declines to enter into a critical examination of the
"Christian Year," but he confidently predicts its indefinite reign,
founding his prediction on the causes of its original success. He justly
describes it, in effect as rather a poetical manual of devotion than a
book of poetry for continuous reading It is in truth, so completely out
of the category of ordinary poetry that to estimate its poetic merits
would be a very difficult task. Sir John Coleridge indicates this, when
he cites as an appropriate tribute to the excellence of the book the
practice of the clergyman who used, every Sunday afternoon instead of a
sermon to read and interpret to his congregation the poem of the
Christian Year for the day. The object of the present publication says
the Preface will be attained if any person find assistance from it in
bringing his own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with
those recommended and exemplified in the Prayer Book. This connection
with the Prayer Book and with the Anglican Calendar, while it has given
the book an immense circulation necessarily limits its range and
interest. Yet those who care least for being brought into unison with
the Prayer Book fully admit that the "Christian Year" gives proof of
real poetic power. Keble himself, as his biographer attests, had a very
humble opinion of his own work, seldom read it hated to hear it praised
consented with great difficulty to its glorification by sumptuous
editions. It was his saintly humility suggests the biographer which made
him feel that the book which flowed from his own heart would inevitably
be taken for a faithful likeness of himself, that he would thus be
exhibiting himself in favourable colours and be in danger of incurring
the woe pronounced on those who win the good opinion of the world. If
this account be true it is another proof of the mediaeval and half
monastic mould in which Keble's religious character was cast.

The comparative failure of the "Lyra Innocentium" is probably to be
attributed not only to its inferiority in intrinsic merit but to the
fact that whereas the "Christian Year" has as little of a party
character as any work of devotion written by an Anglican and High Church
clergyman could have, the "Lyra Innocentium" was the work of a leading
party man. The interval between the two publications had been filled by
a great reactionary movement among the clergy, one of the back-streams
to that current of Liberalism, which setting in after the termination of
the great French war, not only swept away the Rotten boroughs and the
other political bulwarks of Tory dominion but threatened to sweep away
the privileges of the Established Church, and compelled Churchmen to
look out for a basis independent of State support. Keble was the
associate of Hurrell Froude, Newman Pusey and the other great
Tractarians. A sermon which he preached before the University of Oxford
was regarded by Newman as the beginning of the movement. He contributed
to the Tracts for the Times, though as a controversialist he was never
powerful, sweetness not strength being the characteristic of his mind.
He gradually embraced, as it seems to us, all the principles which sent
his fellow Tractarians over to Rome. The posthumous alteration made in
the Christian Year by his direction shows that he held a doctrine
respecting the Eucharist not practically distinguishable from the Roman
doctrine of Transubstantiation. A poem intended to appear in the "Lyra
Apostolica" but suppressed at the time in deference to the wishes of
cautious friends and now published by his biographer proves that he was,
as a Protestant putting it plainly would say, an advanced Mariolater. He
was a thoroughgoing sacerdotalist and believer in the authority of the
Church in matters of opinion. He mourned over the abandonment of
auricular confession. He regarded the cessation of prayers for the souls
of dead founders and benefactors as a lamentable concession to
Protestant prejudice. Like his associates he repudiated the very name of
Protestant. He deemed the state of the Church of England with regard to
orthodoxy most deplorable--two prelates having distinctly denied an
article of the Apostles Creed and matters going on altogether so that it
was very difficult for a Catholic Christian to remain in that communion.
Why then did he not with Newman and the rest accept the logical
conclusions of his premises and go to the place to which his principles
belonged? His was not a character to be influenced by any worldly
motives or even by that sense of ecclesiastical position which perhaps
has sometimes had its influence in making Romanizing leaders of the
Anglican clergy unwilling to merge their party and their leadership in
the Church of Rome. There was nothing in his nature which would have
recoiled from any self abnegation or submission. The real answer is we
believe that Keble was a married man. We can hardly imagine him making
love. His marriage was no doubt one not of passion but of affection, as
small a departure from the sacerdotal ideal as it was possible for a
marriage to be. Still, he was married and tenderly attached to his good
wife. Thus it was probably not any subtle distinction between Real
Presence and Transubstantiation, not misgivings as to the exact degree
of worship to be paid to the Virgin, not doubts as to the limits of the
personal infallibility of the Pope or objections to practical abuses in
the Church of Rome--which kept Keble and has kept many a Romanizing
clergyman of the Anglican Church from becoming a Roman Catholic. Nor is
the reason when analysed one of which Anglican philosophy need be
ashamed for to the pretentions of sacerdotal asceticism the best answer
is domestic love.

Keble stopped his ears with wax against the siren appeal of his seceding
chief John Henry Newman and refused at first to read the Essay on
Development. When at last he was drawn into the controversy he
constructed for his own satisfaction and that of other waverers who
looked up to him for support and guidance an argument founded on the
Butlerian principle of probability as the guide of life. But Butler,
with all deference to his great name be it said, imports into questions
of conscience and into the spiritual domain a principle really
applicable only to worldly concerns. A man will invest his money or take
any other step in relation to his worldly affairs as he thinks the
chances are in his favour, but he cannot be satisfied with a mere
preponderance of chances that he possesses vital truth and that he will
escape everlasting condemnation. The analogy drawn by Keble between the
late recognition of the Prayer Book instead of the too Protestant
Articles as the real canon of the Anglican faith and the lateness of the
Christian Revelation in the world's history was an application of the
analogical method of reasoning which showed to what strange uses that
method might be put.

It is singular but consistent with our theory as to the real nature of
the tie which prevented Keble from joining the secession that he should
have determined if compelled to leave the Church of England (a
contingency which from the growth of heresy in that Church he distinctly
contemplated) to go not into the communion of the Church of Rome but out
of all communion whatever. He would have gone we suppose into some limbo
like the phantom Church of the Nonjurors. It is difficult to see how
such a course can have logically commended itself to the mind of any
member of the theological school which held that the individual reason
afforded no sort of standing ground and that the one thing indispensable
to salvation was visible communion with the true Church.

Sir John Coleridge deals with the question as to the posthumous
alteration in "The Christian Year" the discovery of which caused so much
scandal among its Protestant admirers and brought to a stand, it was
said, the subscription for a memorial college in honour of its author.
It is made clearly to appear that the alteration was in accordance with
Keble's expressed desire, and the suspicion which was cast upon his
executors and those who were about him in his last moments is proved to
be entirely unfounded. But, on the other hand, we cannot think that the
biographer (or rather Keble, who speaks for himself in this matter) will
be successful in convincing many people that the alteration was merely
verbal. The mental interpolation of "only" after "not" in the words "not
in the Hands," is surely a _tour de force_, and it must be
remembered that the passage occurs in the lines on the "Gunpowder
Treason," and is evidently pointed against the Roman Catholic doctrine
of the Eucharist. The Roman Catholics do not deny that the Eucharist is
received "in the heart," but the Protestants deny that it is is received
"in the hands" at all, and the vast majority of Keble's readers could
not fail to construe the passage as an assertion of the Protestant
doctrine. Sir John Coleridge does not confront the real difficulty,
because he does not give the two versions side by side, or exhibit the
passage in its context. A more natural account of the matter is
suggested by a letter of Keble, written when he was contemplating the
publication of the "Lyra Innocentium," and included in the present
memoir. In that letter he says:

"No doubt, there would be the difference in tone which you take notice
of between this and the former book, for when I wrote that, I did not
understand (to mention no more points) either the doctrine of Repentance
_or that of the Holy Eucharist_, as held, _e. g._, by Bishop
Ken, nor that of Justification, and such points as these must surely
make a great difference. But may it please God to preserve me from
writing so unreally and deceitfully as I did then, and if I could tell
you the whole of my shameful history, you would join with all your heart
in this prayer."

The biographer, while he proves his integrity by giving us the letter,
of course protests against our taking seriously the self accusations of
a saint. We certainly shall not take seriously any charge of
deceitfulness against Keble, whether made by himself or by any other
human being, but he was liable, to a certain extent, like all other
human beings, to self-deception. His opinions, like those of his
associates, on theological questions in general and on the question of
the Eucharist in particular, had been moving rapidly in a Romanizing
direction during the interval between the publication of "The Christian
Year" and that of the "Lyra Innocentium." In the passage just quoted, we
see that he was conscious of this, but it was not unnatural that he
should sometimes forget it, and that he should then put upon the words
in "The Christian Year" a construction in conformity with his opinions
as they were in their most advanced stage. It is strange, however, that
he and the rest of his party, if they were even dimly and at intervals
conscious of the fact that their own creed had undergone so much change,
should still have been able to take the ground of immutability and
infallibility in their controversies with other parties and churches.

It has been almost forgotten that Keble held for ten years a (non-
resident) Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. His lectures were
unfortunately written, as the rule of the Chair then was, in Latin. He
thought of translating them, and Sir John Coleridge seems still to hold
that the task would be worth undertaking. For the examples, which are
taken from the Greek and Latin poets, it would be necessary to
substitute translations or examples taken from the modern poets. Mr.
Gladstone chooses, the apt epithet when he calls the lectures "refined."
Refinement rather than vigour or depth was always the attribute of
Keble's productions. His view of poetry, however, as the vent for
overcharged feelings or an imagination oppressed by its own fulness--as
a _vis medica_, to use his own expression--if it does not cover the
whole ground, well deserves attention among other theories.

To the discredit, perhaps, rather of the dogmatic spirit than of either
of the persons concerned, religious differences were allowed to
interfere with he personal friendship formed in youth between Keble and
Arnold. With this single and slight exception, Keble's character in
every relation--as friend, son, husband, tutor, pastor--seems to have
been all that the admirers of "The Christian Year" can expect or desire.
The current of his life, but for the element of theological controversy
and perplexity which slightly disturbed his later days, would have been
limpid and tranquil as that of any rivulet in the quiet scene where the
years of his Christian ministry were passed. He and his wife, the
partner of all his thoughts and labours, and the mirror and partaker of
the beauty of his character, died almost on the same day; she dying
last, and rejoicing that her husband was spared the pain of being the
survivor.

"Within these walls [of the Church] each fluttering guest
Is gently lured to one safe nest--
Without 'tis moaning and unrest."

The writer of those lines perfectly as well as beautifully realized his
ideal.