hen the little eddy of Tractarianism was
broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. We
touch with reverend pity the volumes without which we should scarcely
know that Young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe
that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are the
mere ashes have wholly passed away. They have become spread over a
wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously
affected by them. Who shall say that some distant echo of the Cherwell
harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his
African martyrdom? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or of the
sword, that have made England what she is. But if every adventurer
succeeded, where would the adventure be?

The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first little heroic expedition
into the land of verses. He published a volume of _English Ballads_;
but this has not the historical interest which makes _England's Trust_
a curiosity. He has written about Church Rates, and the Colonies, and
the Importance of Literature to Men of Business, but never again of
his reveries in Neville's Court nor of his determination to emulate
the virtues of King Charles the Martyr. No matter! If all our
hereditary legislators were as high-minded and single-hearted as the
new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House of Lords would scarcely
be a burning question.

IONICA

IONICA. _Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill_. 1858.

Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You
throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a
deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by
and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire
lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do
get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never
thrown back again to light. But the quantity of excellent verse
produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very
fairly within the same proportions. The verse-market is never really
glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls
"deciduous trash" survive their own generation, only to be carted
away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path
up silently into fame.

These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small
volume of 116 pages called _Ionica_, long ago ushered into the world
so silently that its pub