THE MAGAZINES.

Blackwood contains a noteworthy article on " Army Organization," which we recommend to our readers, though it will probably cut across many of their prepossessions as it has across many of ours. The writer is a thorough partizan of professional soldiership ; is enthusiastic, for instance, in praise of " discipline," which he defines as " the habit of mind produced by long training and separation from the interests and wishes and feelings of the world at large." Of military govern

ment he sees the ideal in the Continental systems, considering that the constitutional necessity which makes a civilian the chief power in our Army is a deplorable source of weakness. But when he comes to practical suggestions he wisely accepts the situation. He recognizes the paramount necessity of unity of administration, and would subordinate the Commander•in-Chief to the Secretary at War. His comments on the American and Austro-Prussian wars as illustrating his views are remarkable. Some readers will be surprised to find that the campaign of 1866 was really one "between two short-service armies," the Austrian Army having been reduced to the condition of an army of conscripts by the economy which had suggested a system of unlimited furlough. Another curious fact, which is quoted in illustration of the disproof which theories often get from facts, is that at Sadowa the expenditure of ammunition for the breech-loader, so far from being exceptionally large, averaged but one round per man. At Borodino ten rounds per man were fired. " Cornelius O'Dowd" reappears, but is rather bitter than lively. A " Will and Testament," by which he bequeaths sundry

possessions, such as good spirits, wit, credulity, &c., to various persons, gives him a chance of being very smart and unjust. The real personality of Mr. O'Dowd is pretty well known, and some one, therefore, will be much gratified by reading the following:— "I leave my Patience—I have not much of it left—to all who listen to. such sermons as I am weekly exposed to, and entreat them to remember that not the least of the miracles of our Church is its power to survive its paid defenders."

The bequests of Decency and Decorum to the lady novelists, of whom he speaks as " creatures utterly bereft of these gifts, and to whom even the mere rags of virtue would prove an unspeakable luxury," might fairly have been made with a limitation, but that limitations sadly take off the edge of satire. And this is laughable, but possibly exaggerated:— "I have a bottle of very old Irish whisky somewhere. It constitutes what in moments of vainglory I am given to call my cellar.' I leave this to those gentlemen of Ireland who have faith in the present administration ; it will make all of them very jolly, and still leave some in the bottle."

"The Pulpit of the Olden Time" is very good of its kind, the sketch of the great French preachers being specially worthy of notice ; but the writer misses some of the best anecdotes which might illustrate his subject. The rancour of political preachers might be shown by instances of more modern date than Queen Anne ; as by a famous Nonconformist who chose for the text of his funeral sermon on the Princess Charlotte the words, " Write this man childless ;" and the Cambridge practice of 'scraping down' a lengthy preacher has descended to much more recent times than he speaks of. Many men remember how Archdeacon Hare was thus silenced when he encroached ou the Johnian dinner-hour.

Nothing in Fraser is more interesting than Mr. T. E. Cliffe Leslie's account, which is only too short, of "A Visit to La Creuse," a department of Central France, about two hundred miles due south from Paris. Mr. Leslie is an acute observer, and brings out some important facts about the social andtnomical condition of France in a very clear and instructiveay. La Creuse is one of the districts which has suffered for some time a continual decrease of population, till now it numbers fewer inhabitants than it did eighty years ago. The conscription must, of course, bear some part of the blame ; but there is another cause at work less generally recognized, and that is the vast public works of Paris. There must, indeed, be some mistake in the statement thatt 50,000 masons were brought in one year to Paris from a total population of 279,000. But the figure, though it be divided by ten, is still significant enough. Nor is this the healthy flow of labour caused by legitimate demand. The demand is wholly artificial, representing the Imperial policy, not a real need to be supplied. Meanwhile, an old experience is repeating itself. The new Augustus, besides keeping a million of men under arms, is turning his Rome into marble, but the fields of his provinces are going out of cultivation. It is not without its bearing on economical and political problems which press upon ourselves for solution

that the counteracting influence to this depopulating process is, Mr. Leslie thinks, found in the subdivision of land. The rest of the magazine is mostly good stuff. Without pretending to com pare the articles, we may say that " Shirley's " fine criticism on 1Villiam Morris pleases us most. The new tale scarcely seems to promise much. Why, we cannot help asking, a tale at all? Surely Fraser, of all magazines, has a public which is indifferent to this sort of attraction.

St. Pauls does not contain very much beyond " Phineas Finn," which shows the same ease and sub-humorous shrewdness as usual, and an article on "The New Cabinet, and what it will do for us," characterized by much the same qualities, and to be attributed, we suppose, to the same pen. " The Last Lynx " is a contribution to natural history and the literature of sport of some interest and value. The last lynx of France, it must be understood, for the species is still to be found in the Alps and Pyrenees. This particular animal had its lair in one of the forests of Burgundy, and after a very distinguished career met with an end which singularly combined glory and ignominy. lle killed almost instantaneously a cart-horse, sweeping down on him from a tree, and " with one gripe dislocating the vertebra: bones, and plunging his teeth into the veins on either side ;" but he perished himself by the waggoner's pitch-fork. The writer very possibly lives far from dictionaries, but there are slips which an editor ought not to have passed. Equo congress° subeipe for equo covressa

superbe is probably due to the ingenuity of the printer, but the mistake of Lyncus for Lynceus is repeatedly made ; and an epitaph of four lines is called a disticlt. And surely the real Lynceus was

the sharp-sighted Argonaut. We ought not to pass over without mention, though we have not space to discuss, a thoughtful essay on "The Disposal and Control of Our Criminal Classes."

In the Cornhill, " That Boy of Norcott's " continues to be worthy of its place of honour. The sketch of M. Marsac, " the man who travelled for our house," is one of which Mr. Lever might have been proud at his best. "Our Rough Red Candidate" is a story of a French election, somewhat caricatured, we cannot but think, but admirably well told and amusing. " Chirping Crickets," which we are surely right in attributing to the graceful pen which has given us new versions of Cinderella, Jack the Giant Killer, &c., tells about various homes which charity provides for sick and destitute children, and about the Newport Street Refuge in particular. Here is a charming little picture :—

" Upstairs, in a sort of loft, where the bandsmen were practising, while the master beat time energetically. the musicians puffed and blow at enormous instruments, by the music on the stands before them. The little fellows seemed to me like all the champions of Christendom manfully struggling with vomiting monsters and yawning dragons. One boy was solemnly puffing away at an ophieleide quite as big as he was, with an enormous proboscis that seemed ready to gobble him up each time it advanced ; others gallantly grasped writhing brass serpents ; a rosy-cheeked infant was playing on the flute, a boy on a bench was reading a song-book, a charwoman was scrubbing the floor. The sister, in her quaint gay gown, came qp the stairs and stood smiling at the overflowing music and beckoning to us, for we could not hear her speak in the din of their youthful lungs and violent trumpets and trom

bones So we left the musicians playing their triumphant march. Well may they play it, fortunate little musicians, rescued from the darkness without, where no stars are shining, and monsters, not harmless and tameable like these, are wandering ready to make a prey of children, and weakness, and helpless things, vainly struggling against the dark and deadly powers of ignorance and want."

A companion picture to the above,—drawn, too, in the same place, the Newport Street Refuge, where, by all accounts, a work of the very wisest and purest charity is being done,—may be found under the title of "Two Girls of the Period" in Macmillan* The first of the two letters of which the article consists comes from a " Belgravian Young Lady," who tells us that " it would be easy to prove that in the present day there is scarcely any alternative for a girl in fashionable society between reckless dissipation and a convent life." The whole is a fierce demand for work, exaggerated in tone, as may be seen from the sentence we have quoted, but yet with something of undeniable truth and justice in it, and coming from a class which very seldom makes itself heard. The other letter gives one of those rare photographs which accident sometimes throws in our way of the genuine life of the poorest of the poor. The journey of the Ipswich glove-maker to London, in search of employment, as told by herself, has a very genuine look indeed. Mr. Matthew Arnold's "Modern Element in Literature" is a very subtle and skilful piece of criticism, though the author thinks it necessary to apologize for certain defects in method and style. (It was delivered eleven years ago as an inaugural lecture in the Poetry Chair at Oxford.) The meaning which Mr. Arnold gives to the word " modern" is eminently characteristic of him.

"A significant, a highly developed, a culminating epoch, on the one hand ; a comprehensive, a commensurate, an adequate literature on the other; these will naturally be the objects of deepest interest to our modern age. Such an epoch and such a literature are in fact modern, in the same sense in which our own age and literature are modern ; they are founded upon a rich past, and upon an instinctive fullness of experiences."

Such an epoch, such a literature he sees in the Athens of Pericles. He sees the epoch on a far larger scale in the great age of Rome, but the literature he judges to be inadequate, " modern," indeed, but developing some of the weaker aspects of that character. We have seldom met with anything finer in its way than his exposition of the " inadequacy " of the three great Roman poets, Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace. We take this about Lucretius :—

" Yes, Lucretius is modern,—but is he adequate ? and how can a man adequately interpret the activity of his ago when he is not in sympathy with it ? Think of the varied, the abundant, the wide spectacle of the Roman life of his day ; think of its fullness of occupation, its energy of effort. From these Lucretius withdraws himself, and bids his disciples to withdraw themselves ; he bids them to leave the business of the world, and to apply themselves naturam cognoscere reruns,' to learn the nature of things' ; but there is no peace, no cheerfulness for him either in the world from which he comes, or in the solitude to which he goes. With stern effort, with gloomy despair, ho seems to rivet his eyes on the elementary reality, the naked framework of the world, because the world in its fullness and movement is too exciting a spectacle for his disordered brain. He seems to feel the spectacle of it at once terrifying and alluring; and to deliver himself from it he has to keep perpetually repeating his formula of disenchantment and annihilation.'

The magazine often excels in its poetry ; this month it is unusually strong. Mr. F. T. Palgrave gives a beautiful elegy on Lord Strangford, very beautiful and touching, though in a wretched metre, and not without an occasional weakness of expression and melody. It ends thus :

" World that in blatant success has its pleasure,

Little it knows of the soul that was here ; Judgment with learning allied in full measure, Mind of the statesman, and eye of the seer.

On our horizon as danger is growing ' Were he but here !' the heart whispers, and sighs ; Now where earth's knowledge seems hardly worth knowing, He may net teach the new lore of the skies.

Faithful and true ! Affection unsleeping, Wisdom mature, ere thy summer had flown ;Oh ! in thy youth thou wort ripe for the reaping ; He who had lent thee, now calls back His own.

Tender and true ! One look more as we leave thee, Silent and cold in the bloom of thy day ; One more adieu, ere the Master receive thee ; Love that has once been, is Love for aye."

Mr. Myers' "St. John the Baptist," a prison soliloquy, is a distinct advance in thoughtfulness and power on the writer's " St. Paul." We must content ourselves with quoting one fine simile : "For even thus beside Gennesaret In solemn night some demon-haunted man Runs from himself, and nothing knows in heaven But blackness, yet around him unaware With standing hills and high expectancy, With early airs and shuddering and calm, The enormous morning quickens, and lake and tree Perceive each other dimly in a dream ; And when at last with bodily frame forspont He throws him on the beach to sleep or die, That very moment rises full and fair Thy sun, 0 Lord ! the Sun that brings the day."

A crowd of other magazines, of more or less merit, scarcely one without something really good in it, call for a notice which it is simply impossible to give. Mr. Henry Kingsley's " Stretton," in the Broadway, is full of fire and life, with one particularly well .drawn scene of horses embarking in a transport. In the Gentleman's Magazine Mr. Dutton Cook's sketch of Hazlitt, " The New Pygmalion," is excellent. Good Words, though it is slightly given to ecclesiastical " tuft-hunting," is well kept up, and is vastly improved by the change in its typography. With apologies to the rest, we must make our bow.