distinguishes the Sweden of to-day. The total Swedishspeaking population at home and outside the limits of the kingdom does not greatly exceed that of Bavaria or of the London metropolitan district.' It is to a public no greater than this that Swedish authors have to appeal, and the encouragement given to them shows that the proportion of those who can appreciate their works must be large. Compared with the relative smallness of their numbers, the Swedes have contributed an unusually large number of names to the list of celebrities in the various branches of literature, art, and science. Some of these names are and have been long familiar to the civilised nations of the world.

In three-quarters of a century the population of Sweden more than doubled itself, and this in spite of a great emigration. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was 12.56 per cent. of the population of Europe; at the end it was 12.85 per cent., in other words, had maintained its position. The general death-rate in Sweden is 16.94 per 1,000; in England it is 17.7. As is so often observed elsewhere, the birth-rate in Sweden, having steadily increased up to the second half of the last century, is now stationary.* The increase of the urban population has been greatly in excess of the increase of the rural. In about forty years the urban percentage rose from a little over eleven to more than twenty-one. At the same time, agriculture in Sweden appears to be in a fairly prosperous condition. The production of cereals increased between 1860 and 1900 by nearly 100 per cent. The importation of agricultural products of all kinds is, however, greater than the exportation. During the last few years efforts have been made to add to the number of farmers by breaking up the large estates, and of the whole number of farms in 1900 only 15 per cent. were farmed by tenants.

An account of the Swedish people would be incomplete if it did not contain some reference to the temperance movement, and to that Gothenburg system which has been made so familiar to us in this country of late years. The system was really devised in Falun as far back as 1850, and was more fully developed in 1865 in Gothenburg, in which city Peter Wieselgren, the great champion of temperance, was

On p. 150 it is said that 'both the frequency and the fecundity of marriage have increased.' It is probable that effective fecundity due to a lower death-rate is meant.

VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXI.

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dear. The system has been too cen described to need further description here. Is effects are still to some extent a matter of dispone, but it is probable that nearly every stranger, between whose visits to Swedish cities a considerable internal has elated will note that visible drunkenness, at any rate, has muslerably diminished.

The great mining industry of Sweden is represented as in an adranting ecadition. The average yearly mining production in the period 1996-1900 of 2.807,530 metric tons was increased to 3.596,751 in 1912. The export of iron in 1902 was 600,000 tons greater than the 1896-1900 average. Swedish manufacturing industry generally has undergone a marked developement of late years. In 1996 the number of hands employed in it was 202,293; in 1900 the figure had increased to 265,479, and the value of the manufactures had risen in a still higher proportion.

The United Kingdom is Sweden's largest customer, taking in 1902 not less than 38-21 per cent. of the total Swedish exports. There had, however, been a steady decline in the figures since 1875. Of the total imports into Sweden the British accounted for 25.75 per cent. The proportion had fluctuated, but the decline was not large. The German percentage of imports has moderately but steadily increased, whilst that of Swedish exports to Germany had doubled in about fifteen years. The annual value of the German imports has surpassed that of the British for nearly a quarter of a century.

The Swedes retain their characteristic as a maritime nation, which added so much to their importance in former days. Since 1895 their steamer tonnage has doubled, whilst their sailing-ship tonnage has only slightly decreased. Relatively to population the mercantile marine of Sweden stands very high, though it falls far behind that of the sister kingdom. A table giving the statistics for 1898 * shows that the tonnage per head of population was in Norway, 1,162; in the United Kingdom, 634; in Sweden, 186; in Germany, 76. It is worth our while to note such conditions in all neighbouring countries, and not concentrate the whole of our attention on a single one, as we are accustomed to do.

The picture presented in the book under notice is that of a progressive and prosperous people, worthy heirs of the nation that once played so great a part in European history.

La Norvège, p. 420.

The picture, indeed, is not without those shadows which are everywhere cast by our modern civilisation. The increase of the urban population in a country comparatively so sparsely inhabited as Sweden has its dark side as well as the brilliant one indicating developement of commerce and increase of wealth. The great emigration from a land in which there is so little overcrowding cannot but occasion some concern to those to whom it is known. In forty-five years the net amount of emigration is nearly 800,000 persons of a truth, a most material loss for a people counting but five millions' (p. 129). The increase in the number of strikes and lock-outs is another sombre symptom. These have increased from 65 in 1895 to 133 in 1900. 1902 the number of work-days lost on account of strikes and lock-outs was 350,000, against 331,600 in 1900. Notwithstanding these facts, Sweden compares favourably with other industrial States; and as in every picture there must be light and shade, we may say that the lights in the condition of Sweden are quite as bright as they are anywhere else, and that the shadows, though they undoubtedly exist, are less gloomy in the interesting country which we have been describing than they are amongst peoples whose progress we ourselves are much given to extolling.

In

ART. VII.-SPENSER IN IRELAND.

1. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser. Edited, with a new Life, based on original researches, and a Glossary embracing notes and illustrations, by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, LL.D. (Edin.), F.S.A. In ten volumes (whereof only nine appeared). Printed for private circulation only. 1882-4.

2. The Lismore Papers, viz.: Autobiographical_Remembrances and Diaries of Sir Richard Boyle, First and Great Earl of Cork. Edited by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, LL.D. (Edin.), F.S.A. First and Second Series. Ten volumes. Privately printed, 1886-8.

3. Calendars of the State Papers relating to Ireland of the Reign of Elizabeth, preserved in the Public Record Office, 1574-1599. London. Printed for His Majesty's Stationery Office.

IN

4. Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century (Essay No. V. Edmund Spenser, pp. 154-212). By Sidney Lee, Litt.D. London: Archibald Constable & Co., Lim. 1904. N a recent article in this Review we took occasion to observe on the remarkable degree in which the careers of many among the most famous Elizabethans were involved in the affairs of Ireland. Men of action and men of letters alike found on Irish soil a field for adventures and an opportunity for advancing their fortunes, and flocked to it in numbers. In an age when pen and sword were wielded with equal facility by the accomplished courtiers of a sovereign whose favour might be won as readily by a sonnet as at a siege, Ireland had its full share in the activities of those versatile servants of the Crown who were equally ready to serve in Court or in camp. The names of Barnaby Googe, the poet, and Barnaby Rich, the pamphleteer; of Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the translator of Bandello and Guicciardini, and of Bryskett, one of the lyrists of Astrophel,' by no means exhaust the list of those literary stars of lesser magnitude which shone in the Viceregal Courts of Sussex, of Sidney, or of Grey. Mr. Sidney Lee's volume reminds us very forcibly of the part which Ireland played in the fortunes of much more illustrious men. Of the six representative Elizabethans discussed in

* No. 409, July, 1904, p. 206, 'Sir John Davis.'

'Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century,' two were identified in the closest and most direct manner with the wars and politics of Ireland, while to a third, as the son of a statesman who thrice held the reins of Irish Government, the sister kingdom must have been a familiar theme. But of the three great careers of Spenser, Raleigh, and Sidney, it is that of the poet of the 'Faery Queene' which was most closely connected with Irish affairs, and which was most largely influenced by the connection. Sidney, though he visited his father in Ireland in 1577, soon passed to the wider arena in which he was to find his untimely fate. To Raleigh, though his earliest successes were achieved there, and though he acquired the Munster confiscations a princely territory whose developement might well have filled the interests and absorbed the energies of a less mercurial temperament, Ireland was never an abiding home. But to Spenser, from his twenty-eighth year, Ireland was the place of his actual residence and the sole scene of his struggles for worldly advancement.

It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration, though hardly a grave one, to assert that no poet of equal fame is less read than the author of the 'Faery Queene.' The poet's poet, as Charles Lamb truly called him, Spenser has indeed received the fullest meed of fame in the unstinted admiration he has won from so many of the most illustrious of his descendants in the great line of English poets. But, though he has unquestionably found fit audience, it cannot be pretended that the students of his poetry have ever been numerous. And, having regard to the place which he admittedly occupies of right in the history of English literature, it is quite remarkable how little attention has been bestowed either upon the circumstances under which his work was produced, or upon a study of the influence exerted by those circumstances, not merely upon the form and direction which Spenser's art assumed, but upon the actual texture of his poetry.

That this is so is, doubtless, due in part to the extreme length of the work on which Spenser's fame mainly depends. Not all of those who open their Spenser at the first canto of the 'Legend of Holiness' are in, as Macaulay put it, at the death of the Blatant Beast. And Macaulay's reference to that incident proves, as has been pointed out, that the brilliant essayist had not himself reached, or if he reached it, had not accurately remembered, the unconcluded conclusion of this most elaborate and longest drawn of allegories. For the Blatant Beast, though subdued, is not slain. But