THE MAGAZINES.

PROFESSOR SEELEY continues his essay on "Roman Imperialism" in Macmillan. The second chapter is as full of thought as the first, but from the natUre of his subject, the fall of the Empire, Mr. Seeley suffers a little more from want of space. Recognizing to the full the unique quality of Rome, her capacity of so conciliating the conquered that in all her centuries of dominion she had never to face an insurrection, he ascribes the fall of the Empire to two causes, the pressure of the barbarians as they ceased to be bar- barians—as they developed, that is, powers, of combination and of strategy,—and the decrease of men within the Empire itself. Men, free human beings, gradually perished out. Mr. Seeley does not give himself space to explain the causes of this decline, but he is evidently inclined to trace it to the abhorrence of marriage which grew upon the Roman world, and which the early Emperors tried to cure by imposing heavy taxes upon celibacy, and to the un- natural lethargy which fell upon the Romans after the Empire had destroyed their one interest in life, military adventure. The fact is, we believe, certain, and has not been sufficiently examined, but we are not quite satisfied with Mr. Seeley's explanation. Why did the Romans, out of Italy as well as in, abhor marriage? Be- cause, we believe, they found among the slaves and freedwomen pleasanter connections. Savagely proud of caste, accustomed to raise women of their own caste to a nearly perfect equality,— for under the Empire the laws of property acted as a complete solvent of the theoretical subjection of women,—surrounded by slaves of all countries, the Roman declared marriage a bore, and, as we see from the history of legislation, did not marry. The harem is the necessary concomitant of slavery, and in Rome the laws allowed the two evils which usually kill each other, the harem and the Haymarket. The population did not decline, but the free population did ; and it was the free population which alone bore arms and cared to fight for Rome. The decline, no doubt, was assisted by an accidental cause to which Mr. Seeley attributes a high importance :— " A society in such a critical position as this can ill bear a sudden shock. The sudden shock came; a swift destruction winged from God!' Aurelius, whose reign I have marked as the end of an age, saw the flash. We might say that Heaven, pitying the long death-struggle of the Roman world, sent down the angel Azrael to cat matters short. In A.D. 166 broke out the plague. It spread from Persia to Gaul, and, according to the historians, carried off a majority of the population.' It was the first of a long series of similar visitations. Niebuhr has said that the ancient world never recovered from the blow inflicted on it by the plague which visited it in the reign of Aurelius. We are in danger of attaching too little importance to occurrences of this kind. The his- torian devotes but a few lines to them because they do not often admit of being related in detail. The battle of Cressy occupies the historian more than the Black Death, yet we now know that the Black Death is a turning-point in mediarral English history. Our knowledge of the series of plagues which fell on the Roman world during the Revolutionary period from Aurelius to Diocletian, is extremely fragmentary. But the vastness of the calamity seems not doubtful, and it seems also clear that the condition of the Empire was just such as to make the blow mortal."

The world was peopled with slaves, overworked, underfed, and hopeless, and upon them typhus, or whatever the plague was, fell, as it would have fallen upon our own factory population, had we not been wise in time, as it falls occasionally upon the hillmen of Asia, and must have fallen upon the people of Cambodia,—the race who flung those flying arches, and then disappeared. It was the institution of slavery which destroyed the Roman Empire, as it nearly destroyed the Spanish, and compelled the Emperors to import colony upon colony of barbarians, until, what with the forest men invited over, and the forest men attracted into the Army, and the forest men held in slavery, Rome had become barbarian before her enemies crossed the frontier. There may have been in addition one of those strange pauses in multiplication which form the most inexplicable of the many problems of history,—why, for example, are not the Jews a hundred millions ?—but the main cause was slavery, a slavery which included, as in the Southern States, the children of the free. Macmillan also contains a romantic account of the Princess Tarakanof, which is stated to be strictly historical, and will be, we doubt not, to most of its readers absolutely novel. It is stated that the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, in 1744, married Field-Marshal Razumovsky, a man who had been originally a chorus-singer, and to whom she was devotedly attached. She bore him two children, a son and a daughter, of whom one was imprisoned, by her successors, in a monastery,

where he died early in the present century, while the other lived happy but secluded in the Ivanovsky convent of Moscow, where she died in 1810. She was the Princess Tarakanof of whom it has long been reported that she was married in Italy by Count Alexis Orloff, arrested, and cruelly imprisoned in a dungeon below the Neva. That fate really happened to a Madame Tremouille, an adventuress of uncertain extraction, who gave herself out to be the lost daughter of the Empress, and who excited such alarm in the mind of Catharine II. that she ordered Orloff to arrest her in Italy at all hazards. Orloff betrayed her as stated, and she died of consump- tion in the dungeon beneath the Neva, a victim to that fear of impostors claiming to be of their race which the Russian Czars have always had so much reason to feel. Once they have been overthrown by such a claimant, Boris Godunoff, and once, by Pugatcheff, they have been menaced with the loss of half their empire.

The Cornhill contains an admirable sketch of the early buc- caniers of the Spanish Main, in the form of a biography of Raveneau de Lussan, a Parisian, who took to the trade in 1684, and joined the great body of English rovers which in that year attacked the Lima treasure fleet, with no great success. The band, however, divided, and the section to which De Lussan belonged pursued the regular course of the buccaneers, defeating soldiers thrice their own number, marching over mountains without food, storming great cities, and carrying off incalculable treasures, which, as a rule, they lost again to each other at the gaming-table. Take this as an illustration of their method of proceeding :—

"Leaving their ships in charge of forty or fifty men near Cape Blanco, they took to their canoes on the 15th, and steered, 260 strong, up the bay ; having a pall of 120 miles before them. Hiding on the islands during the day, and going up with the tide at night, they managed to reach the neighbourhood of Guayaquil on the 19th undis- covered They concealed themselves all the 19th on an island at the entrance of Guayaquil river, and resumed their course after dark. with the flowing tide, intending to land on the farther and weaker side of the town. But the ebb caught them while they were yet some leagues from the spot, and compelled them to go ashore two hours before day. Just then a careless fellow struck a light for his pipe, and this being noticed by a party on the watch, a thundering volley rolled the alarm to the city. Further concealment being impossible, the buccaniers moved sharply forward First went the forlorn hope of fifty Frenchmen, under Captain Picard ; then came fifty Englishmen, conducted by Captain Hewitt ; the main body, 100 strong, under Grogniet, followed; and finally marched the reserve of forty men, commanded by one of the quartermasters. As for the city, that had been in uproar for the last two hours ; lights flashing and guns going off in all directions. Nor were the rovers altogether so silent as they

might have been Nobody among them had the slightest notion of localities. So keeping right on for the spot where the houses were grouped the thickest, they found themselves very unexpectedly brought up by a ditch, a wall five feet high beyond it, and 700 long muskets poked viciously across. And scarcely had they clapped eyes on this pretty obstacle, when out rushed a sheet of flame and a hail of bullets, and down fell a dozen freebooters. Utterly surprised, the others reeled back in very unwonted confusion. Taking the movement for incipient flight, the Spaniards sallied forth amid a very hurricane of Santia- goes.' This was exactly what the buccaniers would have preferred had they been allowed any choice in the matter. And therefore, in some- thing less than five minutes, a small, but not particularly elegant, extract of those heroes re-entered the fortification with the rovers at their heels. Some of the fugitives sought to defend the neighbouring houses, but the grenades soon disposed of them. The others mixed up with the crowd of non-combatants, or gathered into the numerous stockades. The latter were stormed, one after another, by the inde- fatigable Brothers of the Coast, who, as the sun went down, found themselves masters of Guayaquil, with the lose of nine killed and eighteen wounded ; Grogniet, who died shortly after, being amongst the latter. The booty was magnificent—fourteen ships, heaps of mer- chandise, golden ingots, 'a great many pearls and precious stones, and a prodigious quantity of plate, besides 600,000 pieces of eight in coin,' is De Lussan's description."

The one difficulty in all these accounts is the invariable success of the buccaniers. We can understand it at sea, for the Spaniards were not shipbuilders, and the rovers' light ships attacked their heavy galleons as steam gunboats might attack a sailing frigate ; but what is the explanation on laud? The Spaniards were brave, they had not lost their energy or their faculty for colonization, they fought for all that was dear to them,—for the rovers usually took their wives for playthings,—yet, though they outnumbered their adversaries by four, five, or six to one, they were invariably defeated. Mr. Kingsley sets it all down to their physical superiority, but the Spaniards had beaten all the soldiers of Europe, and were considered the most formidable enemy in the world. We cannot but think some cause as yet unknown was at work,—that the Spaniards had either some inferiority in arms, which is unlikely, or that they were cowed by some superstition, which is possible, or that their numbers have been misrepresented, which is the most probable of all. At all events, it is quite certain that even in hand-to-hand fights, when both alike were caught

like rats in a trap, the Englishmen slaughtered the Spaniards as the Spaniards slaughtered the Peruvians, almost without loss. The Correia'11 has also a paper which professes to be a translation of a Japanese sermon, perhaps may be, but it hits some English ways hard ; and this story might do for any Calvinist pulpit, that is, if preachers in Calvinist pulpits had not so lost the art of con- veying truth in parables :— - "With regard to the danger of over-confidence, I have a little tale to tell you. Be so good as to wake up from drowsiness and listen attentively. There is a certain powerful murex, the surzaye, with a very strong lid to its shell. Now this clam, if it hears that there is any danger astir, shuts up its shell from within with a loud noise, and thinks itself perfectly safe. One day a snapper and another fish, lost in envy at this, said, What a strong castle this is of yours, Mr. Murex ; when you shut up your lid from within, nobody can so mach as point a finger at you. A capital figure you make, sir.' When he heard this, the murex, stroking his beard, replied, Well, gentlemen, although you are so good as to say so, it's nothing to boast of in the way of safety: still, when I shut myself up thus, I do not feel much anxiety.' And as he was speaking thus, with the pride that apes humility, there came the noise of a great splash, and the murex, shutting up his lid as soon as possible, kept quite still, and thought to himself what in the world the noise could be. Could it be a not? Could it be a fish-book? What a bore it was always having to keep such a sharp look-out ! Were the snapper and the other fish caught? he wondered, and he felt quite anxious about them : however, at any rate, he was safe. And so the time passed, and when he thought all was safe he stealthily opened his shell and slipped out his head, and looked all around him. There seemed to be something wrong, something with which he was not familiar. As he looked a little more carefully, lo and behold ! there he was in a fishmonger's shop, with a card marked Sixteen cash' on his back ! Poor shellfish !"

Fraser has a paper on "Primary Education" which is well worth reading, though the author " gushes " a little, and is too apprehensive of the effect of bad literature on the unrefined. Its effect is not half so bad as the effect of ignorance, and is sure to be temporary, if only because men once educated are sure to set up a household censorship. If the tendency of reading were towards immorality the cheap newspapers would be immoral, whereas it is perfectly clear that the more respectable they are the wider their circulation. They will before long be the only cheap literature, not, it may be, a pleasant prospect, but still not one to be depre- cated as injurious to the national morals. A mind fed on penny papers would not be a cultivated mind, perhaps, but it would not be specially inclined either to theft or fornication. In all that the writer says of the importance of school books we cordially agree, but we are not quite sure he advises well as to their special direc- tion. We want, no doubt, a school history of England exceed- ingly, but a manual of the Constitution would probably have the effect of making the next generation devotees of the particularly absurd compromise so called in this country, while a manual of law would be old in a twelvemonth, particularly if it were as minute as the writer desires :— " Provisions introduced within the last half-century for protecting the life of operatives in certain modes of labour, for defining the age at which children are to begin work, for facilitating combination for purposes of mutual benefit among working-men, for securing proper sanitary arrangements in towns and villages, and so on, are reduced in many instances to a dead letter, by the fact that the great body of the people know nothing about them. We are too apt to accept the letter of the law for the realized progress of the nation. Most people have picked up some notions concerning our laws, but in the absence of authoritative instruction they must trust to hearsay, and piece together, as they best can, the fragmentary notes of their individual experience in litigation, and their reading of law reports in newspapers. If you take care that the law manual of the national school shall be authoritative, if Parliament sees to it that no judge in England can challenge any of its statements as incorrect, the whole of the Bench having first been con- sulted regarding it there will be no risk of its being unpopular."

Such a manual written this year would contain a whole body of facts as to women's position which next year will falsify. Prin- ciples are all we can hope to teach to lads, and even these would be better taught by a few lectures, however rough, than by any manual. One of these days, when the educational system is organized and Mr. Lowe is dead, we shall probably establish Union lecturers, each to teach, say, twice a week in a dozen schools the general ideas and facts for which the curriculum of a national school can have neither time nor place. A competent lecturer giving two hours a week to his subject would teach village lads more correct law in a year than they would gain from a passé manual in a lifetime. With the writer's idea that education must weaken caste, or rather be in itself a road to status, before it will take full hold of English minds, we cordially sympathize, and we may admit that the quickest if not the best way to this end would be to make it the passport to the Government service, by throw- ing all appointments open to free competition. There is a capital paper of gossip about Ireland, called "Two Irish Tourists," fall

of pleasant little stories, and sound if somewhat shallow reflec- tions, from which we select the following :—

"'Let me give you a wrinkle,' said an old Irish gentleman to me when I was going into Comity Clare for the first time. The real Irish- man is not fond of that hail-fellow well-met style of half-bluster, half- silly nonsense, which the books always put into his mouth. With his equals he is as polite as a Frenchman. We, living here as masters among helots, have got those with whom we've had much to do into a rough, coarse way of speaking. We are seldom at the pains to speak civilly to them, and they've grown in some places to be a little ashamed of their inbred politeness. I remember the first time I went abroad. My brother was brought up in France, and I went to him, and we took horse at Paris and rode, by easy journeys, right down to Bordeaux. He was shocked to hear my brusque way. I would ride on ahead and shout out to the first fellow I met on entering a town, Oil oat le Lion d'Or ?' instead of Ayes la complaisance, monsieur, de m'indiemer,' &c. I shall never forget the wiggings he gave me about this ; but they had one good effect—I brought a little of my ceremoniousness back to Ireland, and it has stood me in very good stead in dealing with the peasantry ; unfortunately, they'll most of them bear bullying, but they like smooth words none the less.'" All races probably throughout the world like grave politeness, politeness approaching to the old French style, better than any other manner, except the English and the Negroes, both of whom prefer a rough, half-kindly, half-indifferent bonhomie, which to other nations is of all forms of manner the most intolerable. A somewhat acid critique of the Lords' conduct in the Irish Church debate contains a sentence worth remembering :—" Should the laity refuse to come forward—thereby saving their pockets whilst they verify their predictions—should episcopacy die out in Ireland, leaving the Presbyterians the sole support of Protestantism, this would prove to our minds, not the evil tendency, but the justice and expediency of the measure. It would prove that the Irish Church was a mere political institution, which had never taken root in the hearts of any portion of the people—a forced product that had never become acclimatized ; that it has hitherto been followed less for the mild religion it taught than for the insulting ascendency it typified and upheld."

Blackwood also has a political article full of admiration of the conduct of the Peers in the debates on the Irish Church Bill :— " Above the House of Commons they rise immeasurably as States- men, as Orators, and as Logicians. There is about their delibera- tions an air of gravity and independence which finds no place elsewhere. They think for themselves and speak for themselves as become men who know that the destinies of a great Constitu- tional Monarchy are in their keeping. Dictation they will not endure, let it come from what quarter it may." It is remarkable, as showing the unanimity of the country about one clause in the Bill, that this writer, who believes that Mr. Gladstone will speedily lose his power over the Commons on account of his arrogance, and that the populace will support the Commons against the Lords because they detest clean shirts, unequivocally condemns the pro- posal to keep Irish Bishops in the Lords :—" In every point of view, therefore,—as well to save the law and custom of the Con- stitution, as to take away from the Roman Catholics a fresh ground of offence,—it is best that the Irish Bishops, ceasing to be bishops of the United Church of England and Ireland, should cease to be members of the British House of Lords." O'Dowd is hardly up to his usual mark this month, though his suggestion of an auction for broken political pledges has in it much of grotesque fun ; but he is sore with the defeat of his party, and not pleased with the signs he has seen on a recent visit to England. This, coming from so keen and tolerant an observer, is noteworthy :— "Whence, I would ask, has come that almost general attack—not on the Church, but on all religion, and all religions profession—so common now in English society? Why is belief regarded as the badge of an inferior intelligence, and the esprits forts of the world alone counted amongst those who proclaim a bold infidelity? There were days when the original talker—the man who illustrated his opinions by happy imagery or a proper anecdote—had his fair share of social success, and who never, to be interesting, was driven to be impious. Now, however, a new school has grown up, unquestionably able, and often witty, who trade for tho most part on the amount of shock they can impart to society by the rude encounter they give to what most of us wore wont to believe as true, and by the amount of ridicule they can bestow on Scriptural incongruity. I found that these men had it all their own' in the world of society. They were the fluent, the witty, the ready in repartee, and the most incisive in sarcasm everywhere. It was plain to see, besides, that mere levity, or the passing ambition to be thought pleasant, was not the spring of these displays, for many of the ablest articles of the daily press took a concurrent tone, and some of the most finished leaders 'were written in a spirit of perfect sympathy with them."

That is true, and the fact is the moat remarkable sign of a great coming change, except it be this. It is open to a man to profess his faith now in society as unblushingly as his want of it, a change of even greater importance. Time was when to argue in favour, say, of the possibility of revelation in a drawing-room would have been con- siderecl monstrous. Now men and women will listen and discuss with all the eagerness of tone and quick incisiveness of speech with which they of old would have discussed the prospects of a ministry or the march of a foreign army, with an evident thirst to hear and to speak and to know, which proves at least this, that religion has become a subject of human interest. Formerly society treated it as something it was quite right to approve, but indecorous in the extreme either to attack or to maintain. We are out of the cycle of indifference to religion.

The Fortnightly is hardly as original as usual. The most read- able paper beyond all question is Mr. Bagehot's review of the "Life of Henry Crabb Robinson, or "Old Crabb," as he says his friend was always called, a review full of kindly appreciation, genial humour, and sly fun which is not satire, but is just near enough to it to make you roll it under your tongue, "searching its subtle flavour," as Southey says, ere you drink. Fun is too patent for the word ever to describe Mr. Bagehot's jesting. This writer did not know Mr. Robinson, but he sees no more possibility of doubting that this is like than of doubting that Hogarth's por- trait of himself is like. We give it because it will just supple- ment a review in our own columns of last week; and has just the faint suspicion of acidity, of critical lemon, wanting in that :— " There are some men who cannot be justly described quite gravely ; and Crabb Robinson is one of them. A certain grotesqueness was a part of him, and unless you liked it you lost the very best of him. He is called, and properly called, in these memoirs Mr. Robinson ; but no well- judging person ever called him so in life. He was always called old Crabb,' and that is the only name which will ever bring up his curious Image to me. He was, in the true old English sense of the word, a ' character ; ' one whom a very peculiar life, certainly, and perhaps also a rather peculiar nature to begin with, had formed and moulded into some- thing so exceptional and singular that it did not seem to belong to ordinary life, and almost moved a smile when you saw it moving there. Aberrant forms,' I believe naturalists call seals and such things in natural history ; odd shapes that can only be explained by a long past, and which swim with a certain incongruity in their present milieu. Now 'old Crabb' was (to me at least) just like that. You watched with interest and pleasure his singular gestures, and his odd way of saying things, and muttered, as if to keep up the recollection, And this is the man who was the friend of Goethe, and is the friend of Wordsworth ! ' There was a certain animal oddity about 'old Crabb' which made it a kind of mental joke to couple him with such great names, and yet he was to his heart's core thoroughly coupled with them. If you leave out all his strange ways (I do not say Dr. Sadler has quite left them oat), but to some extent he has been obliged, by place and decoram, to omit them, you lose the life of the man. You cut from the negro his skin, and from the leopard his spots. I well remember how poor Clough, who was then fresh from Oxford, and was much puzzled by the corner of London to which he had drifted, looking at 'old Crabb' in a kind of ter- ror for a whole breakfast-time, and muttering in mute wonder, and almost to himself, as he came away, 'Not at all the regular patriarch.' And certainly no one could accuse Mr. Robinson of an insipid regularity either in fare or nature."

St. Paul's, apart from the stories, does not shine this month. There is no paper either original or notable for any other cause, and the only sentence we have caught worth quoting is this, which ems up the causes of the lifelong quarrel between Campbell and Lyndhurst in fine lines :—" That a man of humour is an insolu- ble enigma to a man totally devoid of humour is a proposition illustrated with incomparable nairea by Lord Campbell in his life of Lyndhurst. It is entirely evident that, after sixty years of study, Campbell had not the slightest idea what manner of man Lyndhurst was ; and it is almost equally evident, from Campbell's own revelations, that Lyndhurst perfectly understood him, and charitably made allowance for the impossibility of his ever doing justice to his easy-minded friend."