plation near at hand, or there is a glimpse of the great Gustavus and his meditations of Protestant leadership across the seas. About Buckingham and Charles, on the other hand, with all Mr. Gardiner's willingness to assume their point of view and to find excuses for them, there are phrases again and again that are severe enough. Though revising all the evidence for and against dispassionately, Mr. Gardiner, after all, abides by the main English traditions, and writes like a true Englishman. Then the total effect of his book, whatever he may have intended, is certainly the reverse of neutral. No more damaging book to the character and rule of Charles through the time of the Buckingham ascendency could have been written by the most vehement anti-Caroline. Through the strong, direct, honest, authentic narrative, we see the great minister and his young King as two convicted incapables. They are like two managers-in-chief of a wretched conspiracy of bubble-companies, the one grandiose, mightymannered, fine-tongued, and dissolute, the other close, taciturn, very solemn, and constant at chapel. Their schemes are failing; they have blundered in everything; disappointment to themselves and misery to others have attended their every act; they want money, but conceal the accounts; they promise and break promise; they bully their constituents, resent their want of confidence with indignation, but will never speak a satisfactory word; they want money, must have money, cannot obtain money, and are wildly at the end of their wits. It is incapacity, and worse, ending in collapse. Mr. Gardiner's book closes with the proved collapse of the Buckingham ascendency; and, when it leaves us with Charles by himself, it is with an already formed opinion, gathered from what we have learnt of him, that he was incurably unfit for his post, the most tenaciously and solemnly wrong-headed young King that ever a nation had, and the kind of King with which the English nation, in particular, could not possibly get on.

NEW NOVELS.

DAVID MASSON.

Patricia Kemball. By Mrs. Lynn Linton. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.) Hagarene. By the Author of "Gay LivingBy the Author of "Guy Livingstone." (London: Chapman & Hall, 1875.) The Masters of Claythorpe. By Mrs. J. Lunn. (London: Sampson Low & Co., 1875.) SOMETIMES the purpose of a novel has to be weighed against its artistic execution, and as the purpose is sure to be heavy, the scale goes down on that side. Mrs. Lynn Linton has a charming facility of expression, a happy knack of "catching a likeness." In her descriptions of men and women she is able at once to put in the touches which make them real, human, and recognisable as typical of many acquaintances. This facility makes her books very pleasant to read. She seems to take us into a crowded room, and in a few words to tell us who everybody is, and this in a racy interesting way, which is peculiarly her own; but her books fall off when design and cohesion are needed. They give us an impression of a series of

short articles upon people, rather than of the sustained action and counteraction which are such important parts of a really firstrate work of fiction. For example, there is an elaborate description of the village of Barsands at the beginning of Patricia Kemball; it is clever and humorous enough, but three pages of it are taken up in describing the landlady of the "Lame Duck," who never appears in the story at all. If the entire scene, or even any considerable portion of it, had been laid at Barsands, we should have appreciated the description, but at the end of the fifth chapter, just when we had come to know the place, to be very fond of the old Captain, to enjoy boating in the Mermaid with him, and Patricia, and her young lover Gordon, the Captain dies, Gordon is wafted off, and never appears again until the end of the third volume, and Patricia is taken away from breezy Barsands to dreary Milltown. Not till then does it dawn upon us that the book is being written with a high moral purpose, and that we were given that delightful glimpse of Barsands only to show us the sort of atmosphere in which Patricia became so frank and loyal, and the natural causes of her strong an. tagonism to the Hamley nature. The Hamleys are the most finished portraits in the book. Mrs. Hamley, the querulous aunt, Mr. Hamley, the purse-proud, snobbish millionaire, with his sensuous tastes and vulgar mind, are drawn with considerable skill, and so is Mr. Hamley's niece Dora, the model of all good manners, who is secretly married while she is being held up as an example to Patricia of all virtue. The contrast between Dora's duplicity and selfishness and Patricia's fearless truth and unselfishness is the purpose of the book. The girl, nurtured among sea-breezes, losing her sailor uncle just as she had come in sight of womanhood and most needed him, her engagement to the young naval lieutenant Gordon Frere (which, being of such an outspoken nature, it was curious she should have kept secret from her relations), her conventional and unsympathetic life with the Hamleys, her friendship and subsequent contempt for Dora, her refusal of Lord Merrian, her aunt's anger, and her refuge with the communistic Fletchers until Gordon's return, are well described. So is the use which Dora makes of her unsuspecting friend, and the calmly selfish way in which she allows Patricia to suffer for her sake; but her engagement to Mr. Hamley on the evening of his wife's funeral is revolting, and the final tragedy is unnecessarily sensational.

Gordon Frere is a mere dummy, who appears in the first scene, and again for the final blessing as the curtain drops; and meanwhile all we know about him is that "he has been learning something of the deeper meaning of the Great Riddle." The wise man, Henry Fletcher, and his sister, who calls her servant "my dear" on communistic principles, are too sketchy to be of much value to the story.

the book get no reward in this world, and the wicked flourish at their expense. As a whole the story is readable and interesting, but from its want of due proportion and elaboration it falls short of being first-rate.

And yet we are almost inclined to think it first-rate when we turn from it to the pages of Hagarene. In it the author adds to his other faults that of being thoroughly inartistic, for no true artist will represent an abnormal character, and Mariette the heroine is a woman whose life is worse than that of very many inmates of our gaols. Mariette Locksley's father is an impecunions gentleman who roves over the Continent and goes to all the races in England attended by one faithful friend, Pete Harradine, and his daughter, who might have been called a Bohemian had not the author preferred to call her a "Hagarene." Mr. Locksley falls into bad health, perceiving which Mariette engages herself to Leonard Clyde, a young officer whose only distinguishing characteristic is his liking for strong drink. She conceives a dislike to the second heroine of the book, Sybil Coniston, apparently for no other reason than that she is beautiful and prosperous, and watches her being nearly drowned with fiendish malice. On her wedding day Mariette's father dies, just as he receives the news that he has won a large sum of money on a race. Mariette then goes with her husband to dreary Irish quarters, where she succeeds in making the grave and staid major of the regiment fall in love with her. She also strikes up a platonic friendship with a young subaltern. The Major becomes jealous of this friendship and murders the subaltern. Mariette then obtains for the Major some poison with which he puts an end to himself in prison. Soon afterwards Mrs. Clyde is separated from her husband, and he drinks himself to death. This would all seem to be enough to sadden a woman and induce her to live in retirement for the rest of her life, but it is not so with the irre pressible Mariette. We have only got to the middle of the second volume, and three have to be spun out before her character has had full justice done to it. When the cur tain rises again we find her one of the part ners in a private gambling-house and bent on working the ruin of poor Hugh Standish, who is engaged to Sybil Coniston. Mariette is also encouraging the attentions of "Alured,

Viscount Ormskirke" while she is secretly married to some one else. The author assures us frequently that she committed no sin and broke no commandment, but her morality may, we think, be questioned when she urges on her husband the advisability of giving her up and making a wealthy mar riage with some one else. The book ends with a tragedy, which is told with some pathos: but what is the use of writing books like this?

that "he fears no tergiversation when she is his wife." The young lady is of an "intensive" nature, and has an "intensive cousin Merle Rainforth, whom Clive Colville has in some mysterious way managed to get disbarred. This cousin also loves Ethel Templeton, and after she refuses him he is found in a marsh with a wreath of willow round his hat, though he is not supposed to be an idiot. After he has got out of the marsh he goes to India to find out the secret of his enemy, and is nearly killed by a slave dealer who had been in the employ of Clive Colville's father, and whom Clive takes into his service as gamekeeper. There is a great deal of mystery about the burning of a codicil which made Merle the master of Claythorpe, when his cousin succeeds to the title of Baroness Templehurst, and then Clive's conscience smites him, and he tells his wife that she must no longer be Lady Templehurst, but simply Mrs. Colville Templeton; accordingly "the summer months went by, and Lady Templehurst had quietly dropped her title, and with it, apparently, all the spirit of gladness had gone out of her life." She has an excitable and valgar little mother-in-law, who nearly worries her to death, and has to be sent back to Bombay, and her husband becomes a model country gentleman. Merle Rainforth returns from India, marries the rector's sister, and is lost in admiration of "the grandsouled Clive," who apparently is so kind as to allow him to live on his own property. Such is the outline of the story extracted from "a hubbub of words." The three volumes are full of passages quite as wonderful as this description of a practical and commonplace old maid who has lost her way on a dark night :

"Perfect loneliness under the overhanging heavens had no horrors for Miss Rachel's soul; she could even feel a thrill of solemn joy at the idea that the great spirit of the universe and her own were not being kept in ignorant opposition by any concrete antagonism in the form of man.”

But poor Miss Rachel loses her way in spite of her solemn joy, and

"gives a dreary gaze into the intense uniformity of nothingness, uttering the cry, Lost!" "Her efforts exhausting what little strength was left, in despair of finding her way out of that clinging, charming, fallow field, Miss Cuthbert stretched out her hands. They were suddenly received into a warm and solid grasp. An electric shock, a suppressed scream, a calculation that some masculine material must be in combination, and a characteristic desire to escape from it, were followed by a more rational attempt at deliverance." F. M. OWEN.

MINOR POETRY.

Legends and Memories of Scotland. By Cora Kennedy Aitken. (Hodder & Stoughton.) The "Memories" are written in English, and are not very successful; the "Legends" are ballads in Scotch, and some of them are remarkably good. The authoress has passion, fancy, patriotism and skill in telling a story; she wants nothing but more force to make her a good ballad-writer. The "Legend of the Burnt Dool," which is connected with Craigmillar Castle, is one of the best things in the book. The story of how the young daughter of the Laird of Gilmerton stole out at midnight to meet her lover, the young priest, in the church, and how they were surprised and

murdered by her father and his men, their blood staining the altar-cloth under the very eyes of the Madonna, is very spiritedly given. We are only sorry that it is too long to quote. The book graphs of castles in Scotland. is marred by some very dark and dreary photo

Lyrics of Light and Life. Forty-three Original Poems by Various Writers. (Pickering.) Almost all the best-known living writers of ecclesiastical verse have contributed to this very graceful and prettily-printed volume. Father Newman gives us some very early stanzas, written at Oxford in 1819, on his own birthday. Miss Christina G. Rossetti has a short poem, entitled "A Rose Plant in Jericho," which is too esoteric in its devotional expression to be readily comprehended. Mr. Aubrey De Vere contributes three pieces, all, as is usual with him, distinctly in a minor key, but thoughtful, delicate, and sincere. Perhaps the best is the “Trouvère":

"I make not songs, but only find

Love, following still the circling sun,
His carols cast on every wind,
And other singer there is none !

I follow Love, though far he flies:
I sing his song, at random found,
Like plume some bird of Paradise

Drops, passing, on our dusky bound.
In some, methinks, at times there glows
The passion of a heavenlier sphere;
These, too, I sing;-but sweeter those

I dare not sing, and faintly hear." There is much more originality and brightness scattered over the pages of this little volume than is generally found in compilations of sacred verse.

Preferment. A Poem. By Lindon Meadows. (William Ridgway.) A harmless, nerveless at

tack on the abuses of the Church, by a would-be

Juvenal, who is really too genial to hit hard, and who clothes his satire in heroic verse, and tells a long-winded story in which the characters are named Suavis, Somnus, and the like. This mild allegory is published to assist the cause of the unbeneficed clergy; and should it have no effect, the author threatens to supplement it with an appendix.

The Twilight Land, and other Poems. By Bryan Charles Waller. (George Bell & Sons.) A volume of poems by the nephew of Barry Cornwall deserves at least a courteous welcome. We wish most

heartily that we could speak warmly of them, but in spite of much fancy and grace of expression, they are too evidently imitative to be of much individual importance. Keats and Edgar Poe, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Rossetti, seem to be Mr. Waller's models, and he has been carried away too blindly by the sensuous colour and music of these modern masters. The poems which are nearest to distinct excellence are those which resemble most

closely the charming songs of Mr. Proctor's earlier days. But there is a great deal too much of such servile echoes as these:

"Farewell to the rhyme and the measure,
The notes of the music of youth,
Farewell to the tears and the treasure
Of harvested truth."

In "Desolation" the author seems to have caught the trick of double rhyming from Mr. Marzials.

Hope; its Lights and Shadows. With other Poems. By the Rev. George Jacque. (Blackwood & Sons.) A smooth and harmless volume of didactic verse, containing no expression, sentiment, or suggestion that seems to place it a grade above or a grade below hundreds of similar little harmless volumes.

Spare Minutes of a Country Parson. By Thomas M. Freeman. (Manchester: Heywood.) The Rev. Mr. Freeman feels satisfied that in these little pieces nothing can be found to offend the purest and most delicate mind. Very possibly he is right; but a great deal can be found in them

to offend a pure and delicate ear, as, for instance, this stanza out of many:

"O the beautiful moors, so glorious and free!

With undulating surface, like waves of the sen; Man's busy hand hath scarce touched the place, But an Omnipotent finger we clearly can trace.” other Verses. By the Author of "The Vale of Restormel: a Legend of Piers Gaveston, and

Lanherne." (Longmans.) We do not care at all for Restormel, a rather tiresome epic in imitation of Sir Walter Scott; but the other poems are some of them very fresh and pretty. The Patriot Priest," a tribute to the memory of Enrico Napoleone Tazzoli, who was tortured by the

Austrians at Mantua, and executed at Belfiore in 1852, is full of enthusiasm and fine feeling. It was at the news of Tazzoli's heroism that Garibaldi made the famous remark, "I buoni preti non sono tutti morti!" Mr. Stokes-for we believe we are right in attributing these poems to him-is happy in a judicious blending of pathos and humour, and his descriptions of Cornish and Devonian scenery are good.

Trifles in Verse. By Thomas P. Nicholl. (Aberdeen: James Mackay.) We find that these are the effusions of a self-made man, and therefore have the interest of being an effort in the direction of graceful culture made under difficulties. We cannot say that the verses are very good or original in themselves, but there breathes through them a spirit of manliness, and, dare we say, of truculent vigour characteristically Aberdonian, which assure us that the author is a good master in some work, however unused to handle rhythm and rhyme.

The Story of Boon. By H.H. (Boston: Roberts.) This is a horrible tale of Siam, relating the adulterous loves of a lady called Choy with a person of fashion named Phaya Phi Chitt. These naughty

people plot against the King, whose mistress Choy is, and she is very properly put in prison, with her slave Boon. Boon reveals herself to be Phaya Phi Chitt's wife, and is whipped almost to death, but will not confess; Choy, on the other hand, being stripped and beaten and burned and thumbscrewed, confesses her paramour's name at last. Moral: :

"Ah! true it was, the wife loved best, For love must love, if love loves well!" Juvenal in Oxford. (Oxford: Shrimpton.) "I leave thee, Oxford, and I loathe thee well,

Thy smug, thy saint, thy scholar, and thy swell." That is the unkind spirit in which Juvenal leaves the dreaming city of the silver spires, and when he is not dull he is extremely funny. The richest couplet in the poem is hardly suited to ears polite: it speculates with the boldness of Walt Whitman on the probable estimate of "muscular Christians" in the next world. Nothing, absolutely nothing, pleases this jaundiced individual. The aesthetic section of the University will never survive this cruel blow:

"The dainty tribe whose quaintly fashioned fist (sic) Betrays an eye with mediaeval twist;" and there are horrible revelations of the habits of the minor clergy, who, it appears,

Approach the Throne in hopes its shadow dark May give them some snug corner for a lark!" The Bishop should look to this! The author fears that the conscious common-room will ring with the epithets of "knave, blackguard, and idiot" when they read his poem. Idiot," perhaps, but surely not "blackguard”? EDITOR.

NOTES AND NEWS. WE hear that Admiral Peirse is engaged in

writing a book on the History of the Second Empire.

MR. J. J. CARTWRIGHT is preparing for publication by Messrs. Longmans what may be properly described as a first edition of Sir John Reresby's

memoirs. The book which passes under that name, and which has been quoted as such by Lord Macaulay and other historians, is in reality a mere collection of extracts translated into a language which was supposed to be more acceptable to Englishmen in the eighteenth century than that of the author himself. Mr. Cartwright proposes to give us Reresby's own work, omissions and all. A diary chiefly of the period from the Restoration to the Revolution, written by one who had every opportunity of being behind the scenes at court and in Parliament, cannot fail to be interesting, and it is fortunate that the work of editing it has fallen into hands so competent to do it justice. PROFESSOR LONG FELLOW, albeit "the most visited man in the United States," has managed

to achieve a considerable amount of work since the publication of his Hanging of the Crane. He has almost ready for the press a translation of the Nebelungen Lied into verse, and a sacred tragedy -conceived in the spirit of his Judas Maccabaeus -which extends to no less than fifteen acts.

THE literature of horrors is likely to be soon enriched by the publication of a work that has unaccountably hitherto escaped the keen eye of translator and bookmaker. This disinterred gem is the Memoirs of Sanson the hereditary French executioner, who officiated at the decapitation of Louis XVI. It is said that Sanson's son, who was also on the scaffold on the memorable January 21,

had at the Restoration a secret interview with Louis XVIII., to whom he recounted minutely the death of the last French king. The Memoirs have become very rare even in France. They are written in the turgid and vulgarly sentimental style of a philanthropist whom fate has condemned to officiate at the guillotine. Before he died Sanson founded a perpetual anniversary mass for the repose of the soul of Louis XVI. The Memoirs will be published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus.

also engaged in writing the musical papers for the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

second edition of a worthless book, Histoire de THE Revue Critique notes that the so-called l'Economie Politique des Anciens Peuples de l'Inde, de l'Egypte, et de la Grèce, by Du Mesnil-Marigny (Paris, 2 vols., pp. 487-442), is only the remnant of the first edition with a new title-page. The Revue warns its readers against the sham.

WE understand that the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon have declined the proposed transfer to them by Mr. Halliwell of the site and grounds of New Place, Shakspere's house, because its keeping-up might lead to the loss of a few pounds a year, its expenses having been for some years slightly in excess of the sums received for admittance to the place. Considering the gain of the town from Shakspere visitors, we itself with the duty of preserving such an interestthink the corporation might well have charged ing relic of Shakspere as the site of New Place is. However, we hear that the trustees of Shakspere's birthplace are willing to perform the duty that the corporation declines, and that Mr. Halliwell will accordingly convey to them the site which his liberality, and that of the subscribers to the former New Place fund, have secured for the use of the nation.

THE German Emperor has sent to Miss E. H. Hudson, the author of The Life and Times of Queen Louisa of Prussia, a mark of his approbation in the shape of a valuable bracelet containing the portrait of Queen Louisa.

A CHEAP edition of The Human Race, by Louis Figuier, newly edited and revised by Robert Wilson, Fellow of the Royal Physical Society, Edinburgh, will be published by Messrs. Cassell, Petter, and Galpin in a few days.

MR. EDWARD F. HULME, F.L.S., F.S.A., of Marlborough College, author of Freehand Orna

MR. HENRY NEVILLE'S forthcoming work on The Stage; its Past and Present in relation to Finement, &c., has written a work on The Principles of

Art is an elaborated edition of a lecture delivered by the popular actor two or three years ago before the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts.

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON will shortly have completed two exhaustive political works. One is a translation of part of the works of Auguste Comte, with a prefatory essay; the other is a series of essays on politics and political economy, some of which have already appeared in the pages of the Fortnightly Review. It was at one time considered probable that Mr. Harrison would undertake the editorship of the Weekly Dispatch, but the conduct of the paper has been assumed by the proprietor, Mr. Ashton W. Dilke.

AN ingenious student of the little things of literature has recently been at pains to discover the crests and mottoes of some famous French writers. The result of his researches is somewhat curious. Victor Hugo's device is " Faire et refaire;" that of Michelet, the two words "Des ailes." Lamartine adopted "Spira, spera ;" and Alexandre Dumas, a line not at all in accordance

ith his jovial temperament, "Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse." Balzac's signet bore the device "Raison m'oblige;" and that of Charles Nodier the commonplace emblem of a heart transfixed, with the original explanation "Raison le veut." Nourrit, the dramatic author, adopted the significant words, "Chut! chut! chut!"

DR. HUEFFER's very attractive volume Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future was originally written in the language in which it has been published, the English, although the author is by birth a German. It has recently been translated into German by a lady, under the title Die Poesie in der Musik, which is, indeed, a restoration of the name first bestowed upon his work by Dr. Hueffer;

Leuckart, of Leipzig, is the publisher of the translation. Dr. Hueffer has an important musical article forthcoming in the New Quarterly; he is

Ornamental Art, which will likewise be published by the same firm early in the present month.

WE are informed that Professor Prestwich's Oxford Inaugural Lecture is distinguished from the run of inaugural lectures by containing new and important geological views, and some account of the light that has been thrown on geology by Mr. Lockyer's spectroscopic researches. It is to be published immediately as a pamphlet.

traordinary rarity, many from unique copies in private libraries.

A COLLECTION of autograph letters, &c., of great historical and biographical interest, formed by a foreign nobleman, will be dispersed under the hammer of a well-known firm of auctioneers about the middle of the present month. We understand that among the rarer specimens will be found one of Warwick, the King Maker, addressed to Lewis XI., concerning Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, whom he calls "Le Maudit Bourgignon;" of Bishop Bonner, and of Catherine of Arragon; of Queen Elizabeth's two favourites, the Earls of Leicester and Essex; of Sir John Fastolf; of the Duke of Monmouth and the Duchess of Portsmouth; the Earl of Strafford and Sir Henry Vane. Kings and Queens will be largely represented in this collection, which includes two letters of Mary Queen of Scots, the last specimen of whose handwriting sold publicly realised 957. Literature will be represented by Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, of both of whom specimens are very rare, Addison, Richard Bentley, Lord Bolingbroke, Bishop Burnet, Byron, Burns (a long and very remarkable letter in prose and verse), Hobbes, Hume, Dr. Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tom Paine, Pope, Prior, Samuel Richardson, with many others, including of course the irrepressible Horace Walpole. A letter, also, of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Charles I.'s favourite, dated in 1627, referring to well-known historical facts, will probably excite much competition.

IN the course of next week the fourth edition of the London Library Catalogue will be delivered to subscribers. It is larger and thicker by a hundred pages than the third edition, and great efforts have evidently been necessary to compress the work into one volume. Copious use has been made of small type in double columns in describing the works of voluminous authors, and some of the index of subjects at the end of the Catalogue will titles of books are dangerously abridged. The be found useful to many readers.

AT the meeting of the Historical section of the Academy of Sciences at Vienna, on February 17, Professor Mussafia read a paper on a metrical version of the book of the "Seven Wise Masters," in old Catalonian. It had been found in a manuscript miscellany in the library at Carpentras, and has hitherto been only cursorily referred to by Catalonian scholars. The language is a Provençal Professor form of Catalonian, belonging, Mussafia conjectures, to the early half of the fourteenth century, and the discovery of the manu script is especially important in a linguistic point of view, while the metrical form of the work pre sents many features of exceptional interest to the student of mediaeval poetry.

as

was the

gives an extract from the Leipzig Booksellers THE Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung of February Report for 1874, from which it appears that the number of works printed in Germany largest on record since 1849, and amounted to 12,000, including reprints, and maps of all kinds, During the war of 1870 and 1871 the number of publications scarcely exceeded 10,000, which was a great decrease on the average of the previous ten years.

The last year exhibited a curious change in the relative numbers of works on the leading subjects of literature; thus, theology, which had hitherto stood at the head of the list, fell in 1874 to the third place, jurisprudence and education having both given occasion to the composition of a larger number of books.

MR. J. MEADOWS COWPER has in type for the Early English Text Society the whole of his edition of the "medytacyuns of pe soper of our lorde Ihesu, and also of his passyun, and eke of pe peynes of hys swete modyr, Mayden marye; e whyche made in latyn, Bonaventure Cardynall." Of this Early English treatise only two manuscript copies are known; and as they both occur

at the end of the only two known copies of Robert of Brunne's Handlyng Synne (which Mr. Furnivall has edited), the Medytacyuns are assumed to have been written by Robert of Brunne too. Their dialect and turn of phrase are judged by Mr. Kington Oliphant to be Brunne's. Mr. Cowper will finish his text before he leaves England early in March for a long stay in Lima; and the book will form one of the second issue of the Early English Text Society. Its first issue-of two books for 1875, and three in arrear for the Extra Series of 1874 is now in Mr. Trübner's hands for distribution to members.

Ox March 20 next Henrik Ibsen will celebrate the twenty-five years' jubilee of his literary life; it being exactly a quarter of a century since the publication of his first play, Catalina. His third drama, Fru Inger til Östråt, which has never been acted, will be performed that evening at Christiania, and Haermaendene paa Helgeland at Copenhagen, and on the same day will appear in Copenhagen a new and revised edition of some of his earlier writings, including Catalina, which has become a great rarity. It is understood that he has written a preface to this drama which throws important light on his poetic theories and development.

Naer og Fjern for February 14 contains a new poem by Hans Christian Andersen, singing the praises of the city of Copenhagen with that truly Danish enthusiasm that a world-wide reputation has not been able to extinguish.

Ny Illustreret Tidende for February 14 contains a portrait and a biography by the editor, Hr. K. A. Winter-Hjelm, of Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose efforts to further among his countrymen the knowledge of what is best" in modern Scandinavian literature are very gracefully recognised.

THE favourite Norwegian actor, J. W. N. Wolf, died at Christiania on the 7th ult. He was born in 1825. Another prominent Norseman, Halvor Hansen, an active worker in the organisation of public schools, and a writer on education, died on the 4th ult., at the age of sixty.

Ix Fraser Mr. Carlyle's articles on the History of the Kings of Norway are rather hurriedly concluded. H. H. S. has a very sympathetic article on Sterndale Bennett's place in music, as the last representative of the purely intellectual school, whose instrumental pieces, like Mozart's, " mean nothing, whose disinterested pursuit of perfection, as apart from suggestion or passion, will give him an immortality like that of Miss Austen or Horace (H. H. S. puts the two names too far apart to suggest that they are of equal rank) in literature.

In Macmillan Mr. Pattison has an interesting article on Milton, mainly dealing with Keble's theory that Milton "long choosing and beginning late," must have been a poet of the second order, of a lower order than Scott, for instance. Mr. Fleay in his article on Shakspere's sonnets, makes out a plausible case for a theory that the first 125 are continuous poems addressed to Southampton in 1596, and mainly taken up with apologies for writing plays instead of poems, and with a rivalry with Nash. If the theory bears examination, it would not exclude the profounder interpretation suggested by Mr. Richard Simpson in the North British Review. Mr. Palgrave begins an interesting story of Nejd: the scene opens in a little mud town with gardens round it and within, whose inhabitants seem still more dependent on their flocks than on agriculture.

In the Cornhill there is a charming gossiping article on the disposal of the dead; a very spirited one on the siege of Florence by Clement VII.; a very empty one on Topham Beauclerk, by the author of the dull article on Bennet Langton; an astronomical article on the Sun's surroundings, whence we learn that the nearer the sun is the smaller he is, and the sooner he will burn out;

also a laudatory article on Shelley, from which we learn nothing. In the instalment of "Miss Angel" the fair Kaufmann finally loses Reynolds, but makes little progress towards her final fate of marrying Antonio Zucchi, who by most accounts treated her rather ill, though Miss Thackeray treats him well.

Vers de société seem to be the spécialité of the Saturday Journal. Beside Mr. Walter Bryce, we have a new name to us, John Farnie, with two very light ballads. "A Popular Error " is the best in refutation of the old proverb about the course of true love.

IN the Gentleman's Magazine Mr. Francillon has a very remarkable paper on the Physiology of Authorship. He begins by observing that a family of talent ends in a man of genius; he points out that most men of genius stimulate their brains by more or less deranging their digestions; that Balzac, who carried that system to an extreme, had twenty years of full work at his best, against the twelve of Scott, who lived a very healthy life; and suggests that Goethe's hour of inspiration was the theatre, though the morning was his hour of production; so that he is no exception to the rule that the Muse only comes by night. He has also some interesting observations on indolence as an inseparable, or almost inseparable, accident of the imaginative temperament.

needs." " Don't

IN the Contemporary Review Mr. Matthew Arnold, after giving a sketch of the history of the canon of the Old and New Testaments suprisingly like Mr. Baring Gould in his lectures ad clerum, comes to the rescue of the author of Supernatural Religion, like Apollo to the rescue of a Trojan chief; but rebukes him gently for spending a volume and a half on a position which he had stated in a sentence and proved in a paragraph. "The record of the life of Christ, when we first get it, has passed through at least half a century or more of oral tradition, and through more than one written account." After establishing the superiority of the Fourth Gospel, he looks forward to releasing the reader "from a kind of disquisition always trying to get itself rated above its real importance, and to interest us beyond our real go too far in your books and overgrasp yourself. Alas! you have no time left to peruse your diary, to read over the Greek and Roman history; come, don't flatter and deceive yourself; look to the main chance, to the end and design of reading, and mind life more than notion. I say, if you have a kindness for your person, drive at the practice, and help yourWhat self, for that is in your own power. would Marcus Aurelius have said if he could have seen the lists of references in Supernatural Religion?" Mr. Littledale maintains, in opposition to Dean Stanley, that the ceremonial dress of the Eastern and Western clergy is an adaptation, not of Roman official costume, but of the Sunday dress of Syrian peasants; that in the West for a time this got Latinised, but that after the ninth century, under Byzantine influence, the Oriental type reasserted itself; and that in' the so-called Basilican arrangement the celebrant cannot be seen by the lay congregation whom he faces, and that the object of the arrangement is to let the clergy in the apse see him. From Professor Huxley's article on "The Scientific Results of the Challenger Expedition" we learn that though most of the Globigerinae which make the chalk sand seem to live and die near the surface, after all we may hope that the red clay which forms the bottom of the very deepest parts may be composed of the non-calcareous portions of their

bodies.

In the Fortnightly Review Mr. Cliffe Leslie reviews Maine's Early History of Institutions with enthusiasm, only qualified by a suspicion that actual courts had more to do with the development of Irish law than Sir Henry Maine seems to allow. Mr. Tollemache's article on Mr.

Charles Austin is written to refute the saying that he forsook Benthamism, having loved this present world. Apparently his retirement was due to broken health (a natural result of a delicate constitution, immense work, and a cheerless creed), not to the temper of the rich fool in the parable. The account of such of his opinions as Mr. Tollemache thinks fit for publication is very instructive. He said of the late Mr. Mill, whose later views he did not share: "John Mill is very like this melon. There is a great spot in him just as there is in the melon, and just as the melon owes all its richness to the spot, so it is with John Mill also." Mr. Tollemache concludes as follows: "I am weighing my words when I say, as William III. said on the death of Tillotson, 'I have lost the best friend I ever had, and the best man I ever knew.'" Mr. Leslie Stephen's "Study of William Law" is surprisingly friendly in tone. Mr. Corrance is a practical agriculturist, who thinks Blackstone is an historical authority, whence he deduces the following answer to the land question: let the life owner be restored to the full freedom of allodial property.

NOTES OF TRAVEL.

Ir zeal and industry on the part of the officers of the Arctic Expedition can ensure valuable scientific results, they certainly will not be wanting. But the long delays in settling the appointments, and the dilatoriness of the Admiralty in every matter connected with the work, have materially and very seriously curtailed the time that is left for necessary preparations. Commander Markham and Lieutenants Archer, Giffard, and Fulford, are going through a course of instruction in magnetism with a view to a complete series of magnetic observations in both ships. Lieutenants Beaumont and Rawson will take charge of the pendulum observations. But these will be very difficult and impracticable unless land is accessible to the observers whereon to do their work. Special observations for clock rate are indispensable, and the whole operation is very delicate, the quantity sought being small, and a very slight inaccuracy vitiating the results. At the same time those results, if obtained, are extremely imporLieutenants Parr and May are working at the Observatory at Greenwich, and will have charge of an altazimuth, astronomical telescopes, transit instruments, and spectroscope. Lieutenant Aldrich will undertake the photographic work. Those who stay at home must, however, remember that observations in the Arctic regions are excessively difficult, that the service is one entailing great sufferings and hardships, and with the certainty that everything that can possibly be done will be achieved, all practicable success may be certainly anticipated.

tant.

Cameron's exploration, including an examination THE valuable geographical results of Lieutenant of the southern half of Lake Tanganyika, will be communicated to the Geographical Society at the meeting next Monday. But the results already secured by this young officer are not merely geographical. He has made a valuable botanical collection, which is now in Dr. Hooker's hands. Unfortunately it was damaged by water on the journey to the coast; but 101 specimens are fit • for preservation, of which twelve are entirely new to science. It is probable that a short notice of the collection will be communicated to the Linnean Society for publication. Dr. Hooker able to do so much, for if the collection had was surprised at Lieutenant Cameron having been escaped soaking it would have been a very fine

one.

As it is, it is extremely interesting, independently of the flora to which it belongs being otherwise utterly unknown. Lieutenant Cameron also made a geological collection, which arrived safely, and which will be placed in the hands of Mr. Prestwich. Both as regards his diligence in collecting scientific information, and his work as

a geographical explorer, Lieutenant Cameron has already won a distinguished position; and if, as we hope, he succeeds in overcoming the serious difficulties of an advance into an unknown country, we may confidently anticipate most valuable results from him.

CAPTAIN Moresby's paper read before the Royal Geographical Society on the evening of February 22 was an important one, as it afforded details of a new route between Australia and China, which lies to the west instead of to the east of the Louisiade Archipelago, and is shorter than the present line of communication by 300 miles. Captain Moresby also surveyed the eastern extremity of New Guinea, and found it terminated in a fork, and not in a point, as previously supposed. Several good harbours were here found to exist, and a running survey was made of the unknown portion of the north-eastern coastthus, in Captain Moresby's words, completing the examination of the only remaining strip of unknown coast-line in the habitable globe. other paper on this interesting subject will be read before the Colonial Institute on the 18th instant, his Grace the Duke of Manchester being in the Chair.

An

A RAILWAY is in course of construction which shall cross the Abruzzi and connect the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas. The portion from Pescara to Sulmona is already finished, but beyond the latter point it is not yet decided whether the new line shall go by way of Avezzano, down the Subiaco valley, and past Rivoli to Rome, or incline more to the south, and join the Rome and Naples line at Ceprano, from which point a branch line would run to Gaeta.

THE state of affairs in Kokan during the past year has been most unsettled. The unruliness of the Kipchaks and Kara-Khirgiz has culminated in two plots against the life of Khuduyar-Khan; and though both of these fell through, they had the effect of making the Khan suspicious of all around him. A faithful black slave watched his door day and night, and had orders to admit no one without the Khan's permission, while, through a rich merchant named Mir-Alim, the Khan was supplied with frequent loans, and a vigilant system of espionage was organised throughout the Khanate. Since then two fresh risings have taken place: one under Mamyr-Betcha, a native of Andijan, who in 1873 fled from Kokanese territory to endeavour to stir up the Kirghiz under the sway of the Amir of Kashgar and of Russia, but who met with no success, and was eventually defeated and captured; and the other under Musulman-Kul, a relative of a former governor of Kokan, who at the head of 10,000 men invaded the Khanate and made himself master of Kazan (about forty miles north of the Syr Daria), but was soon routed by two of the Khan's most trusted generals. A third and feeble attempt ended equally disastrously, and the civil war of 1874 was thus terminated; but the utter corruption and oppression prevalent throughout the Khanate make it impossible (according to the Russian journals) for the present

state of affairs to last.

AMONG the various national schemes which are at present engaging the attention of Garibaldi, is one for making Fiumicino the port of Rome. He visited the place on February 11 in company with Captain Baccarino, chief of the Hydrographic Department, on board the Welby Company's steamer Tevere. A depth of upwards of five fathoms was proved at rather more than a thousand yards from the shore, and further examination appears to have convinced him that the creation of the port involved no serious difficulties. Mr. H. Garth, a

civil engineer, took soundings within a radius of 500 yards, and was equally persuaded of the feasibility of the project and of its small cost. The idea has always been a favourite one with Prince Torlonia, and that wealthy nobleman has now conceived the plan of turning the Lake of Trajan

into an interior basin of the proposed harbour. Fiumicino will thus become the chief port for the import coal trade of Italy (at least as far as the central portion of the peninsula is concerned), and from ten to twelve francs per ton on the present cost will be saved by the quicker route, while an active return trade in porcelain clay may be anticipated to develop.

HERR HILDEBRANDT, a German of scientific attainments, has just communicated to the Berlin Geographical Society an account of his recent travels in the East. He visited the ports of Eastern Arabia and Aden, and then, crossing over to Abyssinia, made some interesting researches on the origin of the extensive salt deposits on the plain of Regad. He then journeyed to the south and discovered a volcano called Oerteale, and ascended to the very edge of the crater. If not the first discoverer of an African volcano, as he would claim to be, he is, at all events, the first traveller who has examined one so closely.

THE German papers announce that the Khedive has authorised Dr. Schweinfurth to establish a Geographical Society for Egypt, which may serve as an organ for the encouragement and prosecution of all expeditions and discoveries in the southern parts of the Egyptian territories. The great object of the new association is to promote the extension channels of commerce, and considered from these of African exploration, and the opening of new points of view the projected organisation of the society can scarcely fail to exert a very important and still more on the development of geographical influence on the material prosperity of the country, and ethnological enquiry.

THE Cologne Gazette announces that the Grand Duke of Oldenburg had, according to the most recent communications, successfully effected his expedition to the Great Oasis of Western Egypt, and had thus achieved an exploit which few Europeans have attempted. The Duke was accompanied by Professor Brugsch-Bey, Dr. Lüttge, of Berlin, and several officers who had served in the late Franco-German war, and he carried with him forty camels, attended by an equal number of men of the tribe Beni-Wassal, under the leadership of their Scheik. After four and a half days' march over the Libyan desert they had reached the main station, El Khargeh, where Dr. Brugsch made a careful examination of the ruins belonging to the times of the Pharaohs and to the later periods of the Roman occupation; as he is the first Egyptologist who has visited these interesting sites of Nubian and Roman supremacy, the result of his investigations is especially interesting, and cannot fail to throw new light on the question of the ancient history of the country. Dr. Brugsch was fortunate enough to collect a large number of inscriptions, and he has also, he believes, been able to prove beyond question that the great Temple of Hibe belongs to the age of Darius I. of Persia, whilst the smaller Temple of Nadurah is to be referred the results of this highly interesting African exto the time of Antoninus. It is understood that pedition will be published in the form of a special work on the return of the Grand Duke to Germany.

and

OXFORD LETTER.

Queen's College: March 1, 1875.

Lent seems to cast a shadow over book-making as well as over dinner-parties; at any rate our literary world has been taking a holiday for the last two or three weeks. The holiday, however, is not quite undeserved, and has been more than compensated by what the earlier part of the term brought us. Two such books as Sir H. Maine's Early History of Institutions, and the Rector of Lincoln's Isaac Casaubon are enough for one season. Sir H. Maine's work is a reprint of the lectures he delivered in Oxford as Professor of

Jurisprudence, and is based upon researches into the Brehon law; but it would be impertinent for me to say more about it here. The Life of Isaac Casaubon has an immediate interest beyond that of a mere biography. In his chapter on Casaubon's visit to Oxford, Mr. Pattison holds up before our eyes a picture of the Oxford of to-day, and the picture is so noteworthy and disheartening that only one whose voice is as authoritative on such matters as the Rector of Lincoln's could persuade us of its truth. "We find," he says, a school where much activity prevails in the routine instruction, and where the time and force of the resident instructors is much consumed in the formalities of official duty and the management learning, or the highest culture, there is no trace. of their affairs. Of any special interest in science, . . The ecclesiastical interest absorbs or overwhelms every other. . . . The University thus shows itself as an intimate member and organ of the national life, taking its full share in all the party-feeling, passion, prejudice, religious sentiment which were current in the English nation, but wholly destitute of any power to vivify, to correct, to instruct, to enlighten." To prevent any mistake as to his meaning, Mr. Pattison tells us that these "old and well-established features of the place" make up a character which was not only imprinted upon it before the Reformation," but "belongs to it still, in spite of many superficial changes, as it did in the time of James L The significance of these words is unmistake

66

able, and they will have to be weighed whenever a scheme of University reform is brought forward.

This question of reform is naturally one which still occupies a large share of attention. The explicit declaration of the Prime Minister could not fail to excite hopes in one quarter, fears in another.

A small and select meeting of a private character was convened at the Deanery, and the Dean was requested to inform the Government that the Liberal party in Oxford would make no objection to the appointment of a Commission to enquire into University Reform. The Rev. J. W. Burgon has been seizing the opportunity to urge upon us the claims of " theological learning." He has reprinted some letters which appeared in the Undergraduates' Journal under the title of "A Plea for the Study of Divinity in Oxford." Whatever may be thought of single statements, few will probably be found to subscribe to the pamphlet as a whole. He picks out three blots in our present University system-the reduced number of clerical fellowships, the subordinate position assigned to divinity, and non-resident fellowships, and to the latter in conjunction with combined lectures he attributes "the decay of the tutorial system." Many, doubtless, will join in his wish to see & good school of Theology established here, though few will agree with his definition of the study. It is not fair, however, that the claims of theology should be urged at the expense of philology and natural science, which Mr. Burgon assails somewhat vehemently, and we must protest against his assertion that unbelief is insinuated, much less taught, by college lecturers. Such an opinion may be hazarded by newspaper writers or religious controversialists, but it surely ought not to be endorsed by an Oxford resident.

It is, however, round Dr. Appleton's articles and letters on the Endowment of Research and the Disendowment of Education that controversy is hottest, and his opponents are very busy in trying to find arguments against them. The latest started is that some great discoveries have been made without endowment, and that consequently the endowment of research is either useless or mischievous. This is like saying that because Professor Fawcett is blind, all political economists should dispense with sight. If a good result has been achieved in spite of difficulties, we might have expected a better one had those difficulties not been in the way; and where endowments already exist it is hard to see why we should not