ship of the Liberal party, we feel that he has made noble amends by the service he has done to England and to Europe in his exposure of Ultramontanism. It is worth all that has been done in the present hum-drum session thrice told. It is a service to all civilized nations, and lays bare an evil that threatens the soul's life of free peoples. It prepares the way for a common understanding between the Liberal party throughout Europe; a common understanding based on the idea that resistance to this pernicious tyranny, this paralyzing and degrading ecclesiasticism, this consecration of ignorance, obstruction, reaction, and stagnation, is the duty of the universal Liberal party, in Germany, in Italy, in France, in England; resistance to it in every field, whether it invades domestic privacy, or usurps rights of interference with birth, marriage, burial, or attempts to lay its ghoulish hand upon the education of the young. Earnestly do we trust that, in England at least, it will never be necessary for us to enter into conflict with Ultramontanism except with the weapons of free opinion. Personally we respect Cardinal Manning, though we utterly and infinitely disapprove of and oppose all he represents in Europe and in England. When he tells us that it is better to serve God than man, we shall reply that we cannot treat 'Pope' and 'God' as convertible terms, which is the grand device of Jesuitism, and shall add, with Dr. Newman, that conscience, not the Pope, is the aboriginal vicar of Christ. The retirement of Mr. Gladstone from the leadership of the Liberals having become an accomplished fact, various consequences connected with the organization of the party and the conditions of parliamentary warfare speedily followed. The lead of the party, as a whole, fell, without a dissentient voice, to Lord Granville. The lead in the Commons was committed to Lord Hartington, a choice which deserves, we think, to be approved. His lordship's lead was sure to be judicious and temperate, and it could be counted on that the prominent mem. bers of the party would act harmoniously under him. But the most important occurrence arising out of Mr. Gladstone's retirement was the delivery of Mr. Bright's speech soon after, in Bingley Hall, Birmingham. The advanced section of the Liberal party looked naturally to Mr. Bright, and they were not disappointed. In a brief, moderately-toned, but perfectly lucid and adequate speech, he stated it as his conviction, that the next great work for the party of progress is the disestablishment of the State Churches of England and Scotland. Our readers are aware that we have for some little time explicitly maintained this proposition. Mr. Bright's address was felt to be a word spoken in season by all staunch and undismayed Liberals. We cannot hope that the many Liberals who Necessity for Disestablishment. 499 dread change, even when it has become urgently necessarythe easy-going men of the centres, who have learned to acquiesce in evils which custom has made tolerable-will very soon assent to a policy of disestablishment. But the van of the party,that section of it into which new energy and young blood will flow -is vividly conscious that the various material reforms which have been effected by the Liberals during the present century must be crowned by one grand act of ecclesiastical reform. Monopoly in other provinces has been destroyed; monopoly in the spiritual province must be abolished. It is admitted on all hands that things cannot remain as they are. England is divided into two nations, Church and Dissent, which hardly intermarry, and which fill society with bitterness. The clergy of a Protestant Church publicly rank the clergy of Protestant Churches in the same country along with publicans as obstructives to religious instruction. It is for the common welfare -it is for the strength and harmony of English societythat all organizations having for their object to teach the people to obey God, should feel themselves equally under the protection and sanction of the State. This free and friendly alliance with all Churches cannot subsist while there is an invidious and exceptional alliance with one. It is monstrous that, in the present age, the Parliament of England should practically proceed on the assumption that there is but one Christian Church in England. Not less monstrous is it that Episcopalians should occupy the time of Parliament with their affairs, after it has been proved by the experience of two centuries that Free Churches can manage their own concerns without the smallest inconvenience of any kind to the State. There is, of course, also, the important consideration that great sums of public money, which ought to be appropriated by Parliament to the national use, are in possession of a single sect. But it is not necessary to enter upon the general argument in favour of disestablishment and disendowment. All the best Liberals will, we believe, agree with Mr. Bright that the party must look in that direction. Mr. Gladstone has avowed himself deeply reluctant to undertake the work of disestablishment. But he has abandoned the grounds of defence he once took up; he has gradually, as his powers have matured, become more boldly and comprehensively Liberal; and our surmise, which we give only as such, is that he feels the path indicated by Mr. Bright to be the only one on which the Liberal party can advance. We are able, at all events, to state that his sentiment towards the Nonconformists is one of cordiality and satisfaction. May the day not be very far distant when political relations will be renewed between the Liberal party and the greatest of Liberals! 500 ART. VIII.-Internal Evidence in a Case of Disputed Authorship. (2). Ode to the Cuckoo. Edinburgh, 1770. With Remarks on Ar the end of the year 1763, two lads met in the Greek class in the University of Edinburgh, and, in spite of marked contrast of character, they formed a close friendship, which, notwithstanding that they soon went on very different ways, would seem to have lasted till the sad and early death of the older. There would have been little special in this. College friendships that are life-long are not uncommon; but both the lads wrote poetry-poetry which the world will not willingly let die. One can conjure up a vision of them: the one fair, pale, high-browed, with a certain mingled rusticity and air of distinction, quietly serious beyond his years, haunting the Edinburgh book-stalls, such as they then were, and doting on choice editions of his favourite authors, which he was fain to buy. The other straight of figure, and a little florid, with a keen, dark eye, and a long nose, and the general air of a man of parts, who knows his powers and scents coming distinction, full of talk and anecdote, and determined to get along and achieve greatness somehow. Agility, tact, resource seem marked on the one; shrinking timidity, and pride that mates with self-depreciation, are the characteristics of the other. Friendship, they say, favours difference of temperament, and certainly such difference was here. The relation of these two has become historical, because one or other of them, among various things besides, wrote a song, which for sweetness, simplicity, and truth has hardly been surpassed, and, as coming at a time when poetry in these islands was lost in artifice and trick, stands out as something unique and unexpected in literature. 'The Ode to the Cuckoo' strikes a true note, and not only so, it legitimately 'preluded that melodious burst' which came with Burns and was carried forward by Wordsworth. But its authorship is still a disputed point. Critics and literary men are to this day divided between the claims of Michael Bruce and John Simplicity and Purity of Bruce's Life. 501 Logan, and the matter has come forward to be anew discussed. A few years ago, the Rev. A. B. Grosart (so well-known for his careful reprints of old and rare works) published an elaborate, and so far exhaustive, life of Michael Bruce, in which he made short work of Logan's claims. This stirred up Dr. David Laing, of Edinburgh, to print, with some additions, a pamphlet, which he had written a good many years ago in favour of Logan, and to distribute copies of it among those likely to be interested in the matter. Articles have appeared here and there in reviews and newspapers founded on it, and Principal Shairp, of St. Andrew's, recently published, in Good Words, an impartial résumé of the whole controversy, his judgment upon it decidedly leaning towards Bruce. There is one preliminary remark to be made. We must bewaro of allowing our judgments to be swayed by our sympathies. For it must be admitted that Bruce, far more powerfully than Logan, appeals to the latter. His life had a wonderful unity of its own; and in the pathos of its gentle ambitions and unfulfilled hopes, there is something that assorts so sweetly with our ideal of the poet-loved of the gods, and therefore dying young-that somehow the suffrages of our sympathies are fully enlisted in his favour before we have heard any arguments. The Ode to the Cuckoo,' we feel, is just such as should have been written by such a poet. There is a simplicity and purity about it, a note breaking on the ear, so artless and bird-like sweet, that it seems a final utterance, 'a sweet carol fluted ere the death,' rather than a prelude to more promiscuous efforts. From the early, childish days in Kinnesswood village, nestling at the foot of the green Lomonds on Lochleven's edge, where the boy astonished all who knew him by his aptness in acquiring knowledge, and his love of books; from the days of the 'herding' among the hills, and the evenings with his pious, orderly, hard-working father, the readings by the quiet fireside, when the loom was at rest and the shuttle gave no sound-from the college days, with their subdued enthusiasms, and the recurring vacation-times at home, when he had to excuse himself for such vagaries as writing poems 'about a gowk,' on to his school-teachings and his love for Madeline Grieve, who yet in after " declared that Michael Bruce never asked her,'-in all we years see the shy, sensitive, rarely-elevated poetic nature that commands love and sympathy, wherever love and sympathy exist in generous human breasts. Mr. Grosart may have erred in some points: but certainly literature owes much to him for the careful and conscientious way in which he has gathered together everything characteristic of Bruce. The life itself was a lyric-brief, bright, and touched all through with threads of kindliest interest, such as we see little or no trace of in the lives of some other poets that were like him in passing early away. This, for instance, is a gracious glimpse of childish life, not without its touch of humour and oddity : The father and Michael, then a mere child, having visited a bookstall at one of the market fairs in the village, the poems of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount were inquired for. The vendor of books did not chance to have the volume; but learning that it was asked for the child before him, he was so surprised that he should want it, that he turned up a little volume, entitled "Key to the Gates of Heaven," and promised to let him have it on condition that he would read a portion of it on the spot; which being done to his satisfaction, immediately he awarded the prize.' But the head did not out-run the heart. He was the youngestthe Joseph of the family, without provoking the envy of his brethren, and yet he seems never to have been spoiled or selfish. He was often found, notwithstanding his own delicate constitution, taking the part of the weak against the strong, and in this, certainly, the child was father of the man.' The Scottish Dominie is regarded as the impersonation of unrelenting cruelty-himself a sort of embodied Calvinism-but Bruce, we are told, when he taught a school, never could be induced to use either rod or "taws." And then his capability of attachment! If he found no means of confessing his love for Madeline Grieve, he had friendships that were confessed and perfect. The proprietor of an estate near to Kinnesswood, Mr. Arnot, of Portmoak, had a son, who became a close companion of Michael's when they were boys, in spite of the apparent disparity of their circumstances; but he died in his sixteenth year. 'The removal of this youth, who seems to have been a singularly interesting boy, moved Bruce deeply. The father was a man of fine character, of rare sagacity, and, in his circumstances, of rare culture. To him it was Michael Bruce was indebted for his first introduction to Shakespeare, Pope, Young, and other of the great names of our country. The death of William, so far from sundering Mr. Arnot and the young "student," appears to have drawn them closer and kindlier together. To the end they corresponded, and many an unostentatious present witnessed to the thougthfulness and tenderness of the father's regard for Bruce.' * This doggrel verse still circulates in the neighbourhood of Kinnesswood:'In Cleish kirkyard lies Magdalene Grieve, A lass [sweetheart] o' Bruce the poet; |