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The contrary might be objected by some foreign observer, or by some one who had a larger acquaintance with European history than had he. I can imagine a French or an Irish critic pointing to a mass of assertion with no corresponding admission that it is assertion only: such a critic might quote even from these few pages phrase after phrase in which Froude poses as certain what are still largely matters of debate. Thus upon page 144 he takes it for granted that no miracles have been worked by contact with the bodies of saints. He takes it for granted on page 161 that the checking of monastic disorders, and the use of strong language in connection with them, was peculiar to the generation which saw at its close the dissolution of the monasteries. He takes it for granted on page 125 that what we call "manifestations" or what not,--spirit rappings, table-turnings, and the rest--are deceptions of the senses to which superstition alone would give credence.

REDUCING AGENTS.--The distinction between reducing agents and fluxes (too often ignored) is an important one. Fluxes yield slags; reducing agents give buttons of regulus or of metal. The action of a reducing agent is the separation of the oxygen or sulphur from the metal with which it is combined. For example, the mineral anglesite (lead sulphate) is a compound of lead, sulphur, and oxygen; by carefully heating it with charcoal the oxygen is taken away by the charcoal, and a regulus of lead sulphide remains. If the regulus be then fused with metallic iron the sulphur is removed by the iron, and metallic lead is left. The charcoal and the iron are reducing agents. But in defining a reducing agent as one which removes oxygen, or sulphur, from a metallic compound so as to set the metal free, it must be remembered that sulphur itself will reduce metallic lead from fused litharge, and that oxygen will similarly set free the metal in fused lead sulphide. There is no impropriety in describing sulphur as a reducing agent; but it is absurd to call oxygen one. Some confusion will be avoided if these substances and those which are opposite to them in property be classed as oxidising and de-oxidising, sulphurising, and de-sulphurising agents. Most oxidising agents also act as de-sulphurisers.

Sometimes, indeed, I have been inclined to think that a mystery is being hinted at more dark than any critic has suspected. I do not happen to possess a copy of the poem, but the writer, if I am not mistaken, says that "few could know when Lucy ceased to be." "Ceased to be" is a suspiciously euphemistic expression, and the words "few could know" are not applicable to the ordinary peaceful death of a domestic servant such as Lucy appears to have been. No matter how obscure the deceased, any number of people commonly can know the day and hour of his or her demise, whereas in this case we are expressly told it would be impossible for them to do so. Wordsworth was nothing if not accurate, and would not have said that few could know, but that few actually did know, unless he was aware of circumstances that precluded all but those implicated in the crime of her death from knowing the precise moment of its occurrence. If Lucy was the kind of person not obscurely pourtrayed in the poem; if Wordsworth had murdered her, either by cutting her throat or smothering her, in concert, perhaps, with his friends Southey and Coleridge; and if he had thus found himself released from an engagement which had become irksome to him, or possibly from the threat of an action for breach of promise, then there is not a syllable in the poem with which he crowns his crime that is not alive with meaning. On any other supposition to the general reader it is unintelligible.

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