THE MAGAZINES.

THE first and perhaps the only properly political article in the Contemporary, Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's second essay on Parlia- mentary government, we have noticed at some length elsewhere. Principal Tulloch's very thoughtful essay on dogmatic extremes occupies the second place, and is perhaps the most interesting paper on the class of subjects with which the Contemporary usually deals most carefully, that this number contains. The Principal's object is not to apologise for a via media in the spirit of mere compromise, but to take the broader ground that where there is earnest and competent thought on all sides, and thought on subjects really open to all alike, it is all but certain that truth must conciliate opposite views, and therefore in some sense lie between them. He com- ments very ably on the tone of sectarian passion which is now beginning to characterise the most heterodox as well as the most orthodox views,—the unbelief as well as the belief,—and shows that if religious progress may be assumed as the law of the spirit of reverence at all, then violent sectar- ianism, on either side, must be the blunder of one-sidedness mis- taking itself for strength. He shows that the clearness for which these one-sided thinkers contend as a note of truth, is not, in the sense of definiteness, really applicable to religious truth at all, where the object being infinitely above and beyond us, true thought must be more or less vague thought, more or less inade- quate thought,—thought which apprehends, not thought which comprehends. Then there is a thoughtful notice of the late author of "Paul Ferroll," both her novels and her poems, by the Rev. James Davies, which, while discriminating in relation to merits, a little overrates, we think, one of the novels, namely, "Why Paul Ferrol killed his Wife," and all the poems. We should say that the fame of Mrs. Archer Clive must ultimately depend almost solely on the eerie and powerful novel which she first published. In another article, the Rev. William Mackintosh strives to show—not, we think, very successfully—that compul- sory ethical teaching might be successfully given to all chil- dren in common, in schools where religious teaching is alto- gether forbidden. But what would he do with such a question as that of the sin of suicide, where, without raising religious issues, it would be simply impossible to make it quite clear that suicide would be wrong ? Would be suppress such teaching alto- gether,—suicide is a question of real importance in respect to the class which supplies children to our primary schools,—or would he allow teaching to be based on considerations that it was not lawful to bring forward ? We agree with Mr. Mackintosh that in one sense ethics are more truly described as the root of religion than religion can ever be as the root of ethics, but we doubt whether it would be ever allowable to use the word ' sin ' as dis- tinguished from ' wrong' in a purely ethical lesson,—and at all events, ethics without religion would be the root without the living organs by which the root is fed. In his answer to our own position, he more or less misunderstands it. When we have contended that religion must not be separated from life, and put aside in a category of its own, we have

had reference chiefly, if not exclusively, to the proposal to shut the mouth of the secular teacher altogether on religious subjects, and so shear away the best part of his personal influence, not to any rule as to special hours or places for religious teaching. What we contend for is, that the masters and mistresses, to be the true civilisers they ought to be, should be " anmuzzled " on religious matters, so far as religious matters can be properly taught to the very young ; and we deny altogether that to unmuzzle them on the external and colder side of ethics would be at all to the purpose.

There is a paper of great earnestness and simplicity, by Rev. F. R. Wynne, defending the Evangelical type of belief from the charge of immorality ; but it is defective where the system most needs defence, namely, on the exact meaning of "faith " as the sole con- dition of salvation, and on the moral and voluntary element in such faith. Usually a moral and voluntary element is understood to be denied by the Evangelicals as forming any part of such faith. The Abbe' Michaud, an Old Catholic, writes a very severe paper on the state of religion in France, in which he is exceedingly bitter against the Ullasmontanes, and very bitter also against the Protestants, and seems to say that the form of faith which appears to us the most intellectually untenable of all, the 'Old Catholic' form, is the only one which has either intellectual or moral dignity on its side. Of Sir Henry Thompson's rather feebly and sentimentally written paper on burning the body after death, we have spoken elsewhere.

The best paper in Fraser, which is full this month of readable papers, is one, evidently by a studious historian, attempting to whitewash Archbishop Laud as to his personal ability. The writer regards the evil spirit of the Church of England as its apostle and martyr,—as a hero, if not a sage, as a man who deserved the respect Strafford evidently felt for him, as one who was, in fact, of the great men of a historical tragedy, and not a peevish and small-minded imbecile. That Laud was an assistant in the scheme of Thorough, and a friend of Strafford, the writer shows distinctly enough, but as distinctly also he shows that be was an evil person, only strong in his foolishness and hatred of wisdom and moderation.

Strafford's trust in him was the trust of a Hildebrand in any silly Father who would obey him, the trust of a great mind in a man of great position and no mind, who yet wished well to his supe- rior's ideas. " I am," says Laud," a friend of Thorough," but I want a third conspirator, the King, for otherwise the Common Law will undo my work, which has to be done among people wholly given up to rebellion, heresy, and their own wills ; and Strafford per- petually rebukes him for being impatient. That he was a sincere Anglican, and not a Papist, we do not doubt, for Strafford wanted a sincere Anglican ally, and not a Romanist, inasmuch as a Romanist would have appealed to an authority above the King, but that Strafford's friendship proves the ability of his friend we utterly deny. What man of Strafford's ability, with such a scheme as Thorough in his head, would not welcome an Archbishop of Canterbury and a principal member of the Star Chamber as a friend ? Why, his alliance may, have sanctified Strafford's atrocious plot, to his own mind, as one at least not hostile to the interests of the Church :-

"Land's idea was Anglican Uniformity in England, Scotland, and Ireland ; and any breach of this uniformity seems to have produced in him a fierce and keen irritation, like that physical irritation which we might fancy to be produced by the sting of a wasp in a spot where one had been flayed. He would not tolerate even the worship of foreign Protestants resident in London ; if they did not conform, he worried them out of England. The Anglican discipline and worship were im- posed upon English regiments in foreign countries, and upon the foreign factories of English trading companies. Scudamore, the English Ambassador to the Court of France, was ordered to withdraw himself from fellowship with the Huguenots. This desertion of their struggling Continental brethren went to the heart of the English Puritans. Large numbers of Englishmen took refuge in America; but it vexed Laud to see them thus escape him ; and though it has boon doubted whether, at his instance, Hampden and Cromwell wore detained in England, there can be no doubt that the emigration of Puritans was checked. He even stretched out his rod over the Colonial Churches, trying to bring them, too, into conformity."

Surely if ever man was a fool, Laud was a fool, in irritating a fierce and Protestant people by minute tyranny of this kind ; while as to his sway over Charles, the writer does not produce one single satisfactory instance, except his own complaint that the King is not with him. That Charles, bred, it must be remembered, to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and at heart, like every other king hungry for absolutism, may have liked the ape priest, with his bowings and genuflexions, and little servilities and sermons de- ducing absolutism from obscure texts, proofs of all which are given here, is probable enough, but they do not prove that Laud was a strong man. They only prove that he was a weak one, who rose by flattering two or three ecclesiastics, Strafford, and Charles himself, who was utterly cruel and utterly inept in his cruelty, only branding, scourging, and maiming when he should have slain, and who died at last in a mute surprise that people should have hated him when he was so very right. That he died bravely, as all men did in those days, is true enough ; but no man and no animal dies so bravely as the ferret, and it was to the vermin, not to the animal, far less the human class, that Laud belonged. The most characteristic act be ever did in his life was marrying, in defiance of Canon Law, the Earl of Devonshire to Lady Rich, because she had once had children by the Earl, a just act by divine law, though not by human, but utterly opposed to his own principles—and then keeping the day for ever as a day of humiliation for his sins. He knew well that his motive was neither law nor justice, but to obtain a powerful patron in giving the Earl, under, what to his own mind was, a fictitious sanction of religion, possession of his concubine. And this was the man who, because Prynne could not conform, and had had his ears cut short, had them grubbed out of his head,—the man who recorded in his diary all his dreams, and mistook too much roast-pork for inspiration. He ruled England, says the writer, for fifteen years. For how many years did James I., nearly as great a fool and infinitely greater a scoundrel, also rule it ? And what kind of " ruling " is that which makes an English Archbishop so hated that nothing will content a Free Parliament —for Laud died while Parliament was free—but his death upon a scaffold ?

The Fortnightly is dull this month, though Mr. Fawcett's short paper is curious for its blank denial that wages have increased in a corresponding ratio with wealth, a thesis he partly proves by leaving out the increase of his opportunity for saving which the workman has enjoyed. There is a thoroughly appreciative paper on Mr. Mill's " Autobiography," and a really singular and powerful vindication of Marat, "the conscience of the Revolution." The writer, Mr. F. Bowen-Graves, does not make a hero of Marat or indeed try to make him one, but he clears him of the guilt of September, the massacre of the prisoners, which was sanc- tioned by the Assembly and all Paris, and he makes for him such apology as is contained in the conversion of the mere villain into the fanatic. The man, as Mr. Bowen-Graves reads him and as we should read him, was a Trappist let loose, a man so pene- trated with the sense of human suffering that its causes seemed to him absolutely beyond forgiveness ; only the difference is—and the difference is always the supreme test—that instead of only sacrificing himself, whose heart he had power to read, he sacrificed others, whom he had no power to understand.

"And through all theseyears of struggle in which the bourgeoisie was winning its place and power from the aristocracy, the people, with that simple faith so grand and so sad to look back upon, were starving, enduring, fighting, dying to win the battle for others. Marat, with his clear deep insight, saw on the one hand this 'exploitation' of the working-class, on the other the absence of a true representative and leader, either sprung from the ranks of the people or living their life. This life, then, he felt called upon to live. In no other way could his words come straight from the heart—the cry of human wretchedness from one who felt and sympathised, not merely from sensitiveness of imagination, but from the bitterness of contact and experience. Into this life he threw himself with an intensity of purpose which made him seem less a man than a personified idea. That which brought him home to the hearts of the poor, which gave him his fascination over David the painter and Fabre the poet, which even to us, steeped in the prejudices of a century's middle-class respectability and middle-class literature, makes him an object of such powerful attraction is this,— that in him there was, as it wore concentrated—in all its weakness and all its strength, in its despair and in its faith, in its passsionate hatred audits deep tenderness, in its hideousness and in its strange beauty, in ts degradation and its grandeur —the whole force of human suffering?'

It is a remarkable fact in Marat's life that he always submitted to trial, that he always escaped, and that from first to last he was always protected by the feeling, alike of his accusers and of the people, that he, and lie alone, knew the object of the Revolution,— to terminate the suffering of the mass. It SCRS his and their mis- fortune, rather than their fault, that he could not perceive that suffering being the doom of the human race, neither he nor they could remove it by any scheme, save by tuning their hearts, not to remove pain, which is impossible, but to endure it calmly, trusting in Him who, as Marat probably believed, for His own purposes allows useless pain to be inflicted.

Though Macmillan does not give us anything to compensate for the loss of the "Princess of Thule," the contents of the New Year's number are very interesting and varied. With an utter disregard of conventionality and the compliments of the season, the leading place is assigned to a deeply tragic, beautifully-written story, called "Little Jack," which is dismal reading for New Year's Eve. "Pope's Game of Ombre " is a curious paper. It is a scientific explanation of the famous game described in the Rape of the Lock, of which description the writer of the article justly says :—" Out of the multitudes who read and admire the above lines, how few really understand them I It is seen that they relate to a game of cards for three persons, having some sort of affinity to whist, but the names and the conduct of the play are so strange and unfamiliar, that it is impossible, from the verses alone, to form any defiuite idea of the transaction that they are intended to describe." "The writer is enabled to clear up the mystery from the pages of a little book, callsd "The Court Gamester," written in 1720, for the use of the daughters of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., and which describes the game (El Hombre) as it was played in Pope's time. It is complicated and interesting, and if this article should attract as much attention as did that on "Games at Cards," which appeared in Macmillan for December, 1861, the old game may be revived in England. It should be acceptable, as it is for three players, and there is scarcely any good game now known for that number. A first instalment of Hiller's " Mendelasohn " is most interesting, and an admirable translation. "National Education, from a Denominationalist's Point of View," is a well-written, temperate article, which contrasts strongly and favourably with the intemperance and animosity with which the secularist

views on this subject have lately been urged. The writer honours " secular " with a capital S. The letters on " Spannils Life and Character in the Interior" are continued, and are of increasing interest,—one especially, in which some of the charitable institutions are described, ought to be widely read here, where so much is given for purposes so inadequately carried oat. It contains many admirable suggestions and practical details, and the work done at the "Casa de Hermanos de la Caridad " is of a kind for which there is a great demand in this country. We hope the following brief suggestion by the writer may take root and bear fruit :—" Are not institutions on this system needed in England, where, for a small sum, even ladies and gentlemen with slender means, living perhaps in lodgings or the like, might find a home, and not forfeit their self-respect by being dependent wholly on charity ?"

The readers of the Cornhill are to be congratulated doubly this time,—on the conclusion of " Zelda's Fortune," and on the commencement of an anonymous novel so clever and so re- markable, that though speculation upon the authorship may be indiscreet, it is irresistible. If "Far from the Madding Crowd" is not written by George Eliot, then there is a new light among novelists. In every page of these introductory chapters there are a dozen sentences which have the ring of the wit and the wisdom of the only truly great English novelist new living. The description of Gabriel Oak is too perfect, for it will not bear curtailment, but it has such extractible characteristics as these :—" He was at the brightest period of masculine life, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated ; he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indis- criminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family.

In short, be was twenty-eight, and a bachelor Fitness being the basis of all beauty, nobody could have denied that his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. Yet, although if occasion demanded he could do or think a thing with as mercurial a dash as can the men of towns, who are more to the manlier born, his special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static, owing little or nothing to momentum as a rule." Then the beautiful girl with whom Farmer Oak falls in love is described in passages which bear internal evidence ; here is one :—"There was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be questioned, and this rather saucy assumption failed in being offensive, because a beholder felt it to be, on the whole, true. Like exceptional emphasis in the tone of a genius, that which would have made mediocrity ridiculous was an addition to recognised power." And the in- articulateness of Gabriel :—" He wished she knew his impressions ; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net, as of attempting to convey the iutangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language." There is a passage descriptive of the com- panionship of the stars, so learned and so poetical that it seems to be irrefutable evidence of the authorship. At all events, the Cornhill is giving us a high intellectual treat this time, and we are not the less grateful because it is certainly due as reparation. A very interesting paper on Sir Edwin Laudseer is contributed by Miss Thackeray. It contains a number of amusing anecdotes, some characteristic little notes of the famous painter, and also some brief comments upon his animal pictures, full of correct judgment, delicate appreciation, and true feeling. The writer's analogy between the sympathy and comprehension of the animal world which made Sir Edwin Landseer so successful an exponent of it, and the beautiful description in "Transformation "of Donatello in the forest, is true and eloquent. Mr. Ralston contributes some strange, wild South-Siberian stories, full of the mixture of actual and impossible of genuine folk-lore. A charming poem by Mrs. Webster is an important feature of an unusually good Cornhitl.

The Gentleman's Magazine has also an article on Sir Edwin Landseer,—a most legitimate time-topic. It is trite beside Miss Thackeray's, but the writer has touched a branch of the subject which she has not handled—Sir Edwin's human-figure painting— and we entirely agree with his judgment of it. He concludes with some noteworthy remarks upon the Loan Collection at Bur- lington House. Mr. Sala affords a pleasant peep at St. Peters- burg, and Mr. Archibald Forbes gives a summary of the Bazaine question, in which he corrects the popular notion concerning the number of serviceable men with whom Bar:tine surrendered at

Metz, and sums up the summary thus In fine, Bassinet was, to use a homely phrase, 'a duffer,' but if all the French officers who proved themselves 'duffers' in the late war were to be shot, it may be said at least that no campaign had ever yielded such a flow of promotion."

Long experience has taught a steadily-admiring world how great and various are the resources of Blackwood; so that it is without any misgiving, though with a good deal of curiosity, that we speculate upon what this ever- readable-magazine will do when the Conservatives come in ? Of course there will always be censers of praise to swing before Mr. Disraeli, but that process will only amuse the Conservatives—and even they will grow tired of it, if the Ministry of Perfection should last six months—whereas its political articles amuse everybody now, especially Radicals. The shrill vituperation of Blackwood's summary of our prospects for the New Year reminds one of a naughty child in an ecstasy of rage with a good-bumoured, imperturbable nurse, who lets him kick and scream, because he can't harm either himself or anybody else. Its frenzy is only equalled by its incoherence and its monotony. We regret to find, in an otherwise interesting and able article on Sir Hope Grant's "Incidents in thc. Sepoy War," a revival of the old sensational stories of horror, outrage, and torture which made the Indian Mutiny—bad enough, in all respects, when truth is adhered to—so much worse than the reality. The very tone of the book he was treating of, which he justly describes as "modest and soldierly," should have restrained such violence of expression as the reviewer gives way to in the first pages of his article. He modifies it later, and with the conclusion all must agree. A second article on "International Vanities," which deals with "Forms," is highly entertaining, and calculated to make the general reader congratulate himself on his insignificance. Here is a charming specimen of royal brevity, in a letter from the King of Senegal to the Emperor Napoleon III. in 1858 :—" The King of Guoy, recognising that without an alliance with the French there can be nothing but ruin and misery for himself and his family, demands peace, and gives up to France all the territory between Bakel and the Faleme." An article on Mr. Mill's " Autobiography " is quite the best we have read. "The Parisians" ends, and a new serial. "The Story of Valentine and his Brother," makes a very good beginning.

The Christmas number of London Society is better projected than carried out. It was rather a good idea to tell a set of stories by the aid of talking toys, which stories should be double, shadow and substance ; but they have not been executed up to their design. The ubiquitous Mr. Sala tarns up in London Society also, and with the best story in the toy-shop collection. The New Year's number of London Society is too much occupied with theatrical matters.. One article devoted to subjects of the sort would be sufficient, but after a long discussion of "Popular Actresses," as gravely performed as though they were all real artists, as in by-gone times, a second disquisition on the plays which are being acted at the various theatres at present is out of place. The inevitable paper on Russia, a propos of the Duke of Edinburgh's marriage, is a clever compression of the history of the fortunes of the Imperial family into eight readable pages. The illustrations are much better than usual.

77nsley's appears for the first time without illustrations. The editor entertains a justifiable hope that the excellence of the con- tents will make up for the absence of pictures. It is by no means difficult to console us for the deprivation of such samples of art as the monthly magazines usually favour us with, and in this case it is really a matter for congratulation. The drawings in "London's Heart" were too dreadful, and we shall certainly prefer to form our own ideal of the heroines of the stories with which Mr. Justin McCarthy, Mr. Farjeon, and Mr. James Grant respectively com- mence a new year and a new volume.

There is nothing in the second number of the New Quarterly Magazine to modify the opinion which we formed of the first,— that it is a superfluity, but not a luxury. It would take a very clever writer to render travels in Portugal interesting; the narrative in the New Quarterly is not interesting. The fiction, though not bad, is different, and an article on "The Author of Evelina " is not a happy excursion into the path of critical and biographical essay-writing. The subject has been over- done by minor writers, to say nothing of the essay by Macaulay, which included everything worth knowing. When we find an essayist classing novelists generally as "a host of imitators" of Wilkie Collins and Miss Braddon, we discern a spirit of cliquism which is not favourable to the success of a new literary venture.

Temple Bar is again strong in biographical essays, and has a short story by Mrs. MacQuoid, which reminds us of some of Miss Braddon's best, in by-gone days, with admirable little touches of local colouring, in which the author of "Patty " is a proficient.