CURRENT LITERATURE.
The British Quarterly Review, April. (Hodder and Stoughton.)-- Nothing is this number pleases us more than a very vigorous reply by Miss Martin to Mr. Frederic Harrison's Positivist teaching. She says, with great truth, of woman in the Positivist system, "Excluded from art, from science, from politics, and from the work of education, she is to become the object of a humiliating worship." And she dwells with force on what may be called the esoteric nature of Positivism. How- over its teachers may talk of the glories of the "proletariat," its hopes are meant only for the few, as to them only are they intelligible. The most important literary article of the number is an able criticism on Victor Hugo. There is another of interest and value, on the discoveries at Mycenre, but leaning too much to heresies about the date of the Homeric Poems, for we take it that the more form of the text is a matter of little importance, just as a modernised Chaucer would still bo authentic testimony about English manners in the fourteenth century. The political articles are numerous. They are, "The First Ten Years of the Canadian Dominion," "The North-West Frontier of India," "Con- stantinople," "The Duke of Argyle and Diseatablishment in Scotland," "The Russian and Turkish War," and " Phases of the Eastern Question." An able plea for the "Proposed Now University in Manchester" is dis- figured and weakened by language which is far from just about the old Universities. This is not the opportunity for dealing with it at length, but surely it is not right to say of Oxford and Cambridge that they are "designedly and impregnably class institutions. They are the private preserves of the wealthy, tempered by the exorcise of capricious charities." The wealthy certainly use them, though, by the way, not more than a third of the Peers belong to either Uni- versity, but colleges could be named where it is quite an exception to find a wealthy student.
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