parliamentary influence, they are so notoriously and obviously out of the reach of nearly all,—that few dream of them, or seek for them, or change their course, or plan their education with a view to them. They do not enter, or scarcely so, into the calculated chances of life. But once adopt the system of "open competition," once turn these sixteen thousand places (as a Contemporary well expresses it) "into so many exhibitions for poor scholars,"-and the effect will be obvious in half a lustrum. Every labouring man who can keep his boy at school a year or two longer than usual, every shopkeeper whose son displays keen "parts," will see their respective offspring in imagination endowed with the dignity of a member of the Civil Service; will hold out to them this object of ambition, till they despise all humbler and more fitting callings, and in qualifying them for a position which only one in ten, or one in twenty, can possibly attain, will encounter serious risk of mentally or morally disqualifying them for others far more natural, more lucrative, and more attainable.*

It is worth while, in the last place, to give one thought to the possible consequence of establishing, virtually for the first time in England, an organised Bureaucracy,-a body of civilians, that is, intrusted with the entire business of the regular and permanent administration; independent of any Minister for their appointment; independent of any Minister as to their removal, so long as their work is average and their conduct good; most of them drawn from the same classes; all of them having entered through the same door; nearly all having passed through the same training, having been moulded by the same influences, and flattened, squared, elongated, compressed by the same educational machine. Such a body of men would soon become terribly like the Prussian functionaries, formidable in power because uniform in action and independent in origin, stereotyped in mind, hating innovation, unwieldy and unimpressible. The only security against the injurious and dangerous tendencies of such a Bureaucracy would be precisely that which it would be most difficult to apply,-viz. the introduction into its middle and higher grades of new men,-men from without,

"The

* Mr. Merivale and Mr. Romilly hinted at something of this sort in their remarks on the proposal for open competition when it first appeared. ultimate result of open competition will be a democratic Civil Service side by side with an aristocratic Legislature. The comparatively moderate prizes of the Civil Service rise in value as you descend in the scale of society. Two or three hundred a year is a much larger fortune to the son of a tradesman or a farmer than it is to the son of a nobleman or a squire; and therefore the great majority of the appointments will fall to the lot of those who are in the lower social position. And the more the Civil Service is recruited from the lower classes, the less will it be sought by the higher, until at last the aristocracy will be entirely dissociated from the permanent Civil Service of the country."

men from whom fresh ideas, original ability, and modifying action might proceed. But who that has had experience of the formidable, and in some respects perfectly just, outery which any such infusion, ab extra, invariably arouses even now, will be sanguine as to the possibility of effecting it under a system which, while needing it far more, will assuredly endure it immeasurably less?

We think we may now fairly claim to have made good every count of our indictment against the menaced scheme for disposing of government offices by open competition. We have shown that it would bring in a class of men who are not wanted at all; -that it would keep out a class of men who are wanted most especially; that it is not needed, that it would do no good, and might do much harm;-that it would most likely fill the public offices from a wholly different social rank from that at present in possession, and thus expose us to possibilities from which we are now almost entirely free;-that it would give us cleverer men, but not fitter men;-that its reaction on the education of the people, and on the independent and enterprising spirit of the nation, would probably be great, and would assuredly be noxious; and finally, that it would create an inflexible body of functionaries whose harmonious working, in conjunction with a Parliamentary Government and an impatient people, is, to say the least, a very doubtful contingency. If the Ministry adopt the scheme, or even if they go much further in that modified introduction of it which has been recently effected, they will do so in opposition to the conclusions of dispassionate reflection and the warnings of nearly all experienced observers. The original plan of test-examinations works very well, and might readily be amended in some particulars. In passing candidates for the lower appointments in the Excise and Customs' Departments, corporeal qualifications should be much more regarded, and intellectual acquirements less than at present; if not, the number of inefficient officers will be increased instead of being diminished, though the inefficiency may spring from a different cause. For the post of "Principal Coast Officer," either the attainments demanded must be reduced, or the emoluments must be increased; for of late the rejections have been more numerous than the certificates. The difficult question as to how far the standard of requirements for a junior clerk should be fixed with reference to the functions he will have originally to perform, or with reference to those to which he may ultimately rise, is one which demands very careful consideration, but on which we have no space to enter here.

ART. VI.-EUGENIE DE GUÉRIN.

Eugénie de Guérin, Reliquiæ. Publié par Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly et G. S. Trebutien. Caen. Ce volume ne se vend pas.

THE "Remains of Eugénie de Guérin" consist of a short Memoir written by a friend, her own Journal, and some of her Letters. The book has not been published, and the papers were never intended to see the light. Mdlle. de Guérin herself was in noways remarkable by her position; she was merely a lady of good family, who lived and died in almost total seclusion from the world. That she numbered one or two men of letters among her friends was due to their connection with her brother, a poet, with some resemblance to Keats in the style of his talent and in his early death. Eugénie de Guérin appears to have shared her brother's artistic temperament; her perceptions of nature were keen, her literary taste good, and her style, commonly of an intense simplicity, is at times relieved by a playful conversational grace. But in all mere intellectual qualities she has been excelled by a dozen women whose names are in every mouth. The matchless charm of her writings. lies in the fact that they are the record of a life, written without affectation but also without disguise, intended only for the eyes of a brother and of a friend from whom no thought was a secret; even the father whom she loved passionately was not suffered to see them, lest their melancholy should distress him. Complete up to a certain point, they are also guarded by a feminine reserve from all sentimentalism; they contain much that could never have been said in public, but nothing that might not have been said aloud. The need of a southern and artistic nature to express a portion of what it feels in words has never been suffered to degenerate into chronic garrulity; it was only from time to time that half a dozen sentences, the expression of many days' experiences, were written down; and the few pages that were thus filled are rather the index of a life than an autobiography.

Eugénie was the eldest daughter of a gentleman whose estate had been reduced by the Revolution to the single chateau of Cayla in Languedoc. The little country-house, with its terrace and garden, in the style of Louis Quinze, lay hidden among mountains and woods; the neighbours consisted of a few cousins and the clergy. When only fourteen, Eugénie, who slept in the same room with her mother, woke up to find her dying. Placed by this bereavement virtually at the head of the family, the young girl, who had been lively and fond of

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laughter, became thoughtful and collected; her life changed all at once; "it was like a flower thrown upon a coffin." To deep religious impressions she now joined an unusual solidity of character. Partly, perhaps, from a wish to share the studies of her brother Maurice, whom she loved passionately, partly that she might better understand the services of her Church, she insisted on learning Latin. Shut out as she was from books and society, she seems to have felt, what Luther so powerfully expressed, that the human heart is like mill-stones, which, in default of other grist, will grind themselves. As her brother grew up, he of course left home to go into the world. His sisters were too well-born to marry into the bourgeoisie, and too poor to be sought in marriage by men of their own rank. Except for the occasion of her brother's wedding, and once after his death, Eugénie never seems to have stayed in Paris; and in her father's house, where a stranger was an event to be recorded and talked over, she was thrown completely upon her own resources. Fortunately the routine of her days has been described by her sister.

"She rose, except when she was unwell, at six o'clock. After dressing she prayed aloud or in thought; and when she was in a town, she never missed going to hear Mass at the nearest altar. At Cayla, after her prayers, she went into her father's room, either to attend to him or to give him his breakfast, during which she read to him. At nine o'clock she came back into her own room, and repeated the prayers of the Mass. If her father was well and did not want her attendance, she employed herself in writing or reading, or in working, of which she was very fond, having the same fairy-like quickness of finger as of mind; or perhaps she looked over household matters, which she managed with great taste and good sense. At noon she went back to her room, and repeated the Angelus; then came dinnertime. After dinner, if the weather allowed, she took a walk to amuse her father, or sometimes that she might visit the neighbouring village, if there was a sick person to see or any one in sorrow to comfort. If, on coming back, about two o'clock, she resumed her reading, she always took her work and knitted as she read, not liking even the shadow of an idle hour. At three o'clock she went back to her room, where she commonly read the 'Visit to the Holy Sacrament,' by St. Alphonso Liguori, or perhaps the life of the saint of the day. After that she wrote till five o'clock, if her father did not send for her. At five she recited the Rosary, and meditated till supper-time. At seven she joined the family circle, but never stopped working. After supper she went to the kitchen, to pray with the servants, or often, during the vintage, to teach some little ignorant boy his catechism. The rest of the evening was spent in needlework; and at ten o'clock she was in bed, having first read over the subject on which she meant to meditate next day, in order that she might fall asleep with this good thought. Lastly, it is right to add, that every month she prepared

herself for death, and chose one of the saints whom she was most drawn to as a model for imitation."

A few details as to the books she read may be gleaned from her Journal. Her favourites are mostly such as a devout woman of strong sense might be expected to choose-" the marvellous thinker Pascal, Bossuet, and St. Theresa, whose passionate mysticism was so wonderfully tempered by shrewd common sense and by the habit of government." Among more profane authors, Molière and Xavier de Maistre seem to have been the best approved; the latter, a friend of her brother, has evidently influenced her style. Modern literature, perhaps fortunately, was a little rare at Cayla; the Mémoires d'Andryane, after some censures, are dismissed with high praise; and De Custine receives more qualified commendation as amusing. Once Victor Hugo's Notre Dame was sent for from a neighbouring town. It had been a question whether she ought to read it; but she was now in mature life, and decided that she might "meet the devil without making him a friend." The book was never procured: but we find her soon afterwards sending back Delphine unfinished and in disgust. "Mme. de Staël," she observes, "is always preaching right and acting wrong. I detest those women who mount the pulpit and lay their passions bare." Scott, and up to a certain point Lamartine, were the only novelists whom she cordially admired. Her reading was evidently intensive rather than wide. But the passages which she quotes are without exception of high merit. The few lines of poetry that occur make us regret that the editor has not indicated the sources. Once she quotes from Shakespeare with a characteristic comment: "There are beings who are taken from the world for little faults; it is in love and to save them from fresh falls.' If one did not know that this thought was Shakespeare's, one would think it Fénelon's. Oh, I know to whom I apply it."

The application in her own mind was no doubt to her brother Maurice. What the little frailties were which his sister felt so deeply we need scarcely ask. Shortly after his marriage he sickened, and in a few months died. "The affection which covered all others, the heart of her heart," was taken from her. The death was not unexpected, for his health had always been weak; even when she danced at his wedding, Eugénie's presaging affection had tormented her with a second-sight of coffins placed round the room; but the blow was not the less terrible; "If the heavens were to fall," she said, "it would add nothing to my distress." Henceforward only two wishes kept her alive, the desire to cherish her father's old age, and the hope of publishing her brother's works. Slight as this last wish may appear, it, for some unknown reason, has never yet been