THE MAGAZINES.

ON the whole, the Nineteenth. Century is the most readable of the half-crown magazines. Its reputation in this respect is sustained, however, not by one of those celebrities to whom Mr. Knowles delights to open his pages, but by a humbler contributor. Prince Carl of Sweden and Norway is very tiresome, but Mr. Wake- field is sensible and entertaining. In an article on "New Zealand and Mr. Fronde," Mr. Wakefield (Member of the House of Representatives of New Zealand), with great vigour and ability, disposes of the cloud of not very good-natured fictions raised by Mr. Fronde in his last book concerning the affairs of his Colony. It is very unfortunate that while literary men can produce the most enormous effect on the relations between two peoples, or between two branches of one kindred, they so often seem to feel no responsibility when they write. To get the requisite amount of cleiaro-osearo in the picture, to point an epigram, or to balance an antithesis, they will lightly run the risk of stirring up ill-blood. Macaulay pointed this out long ago in the case of America, and showed how sensitive were young nations to any criticism, and how apt to feel the irresponsible comments of a scribbler as if they were grave judicial censures. Our Colonies are just in that state now, and thus those who knew anything of Colonial public opinion read with a feeling akin to dismay the shallow and ill-considered remarks made by Mr. Froude upon New Zealand. Reckless and self-satisfied, ignorant of the subject and too careless to learn, Mr. Fronde gaily flitted across the world, noting clown what was told him, or what he fancied was told him, without ever thinking of verifying a fact in the commonest books of reference. When he was in good hands, he learned what was true, and the method succeeded well enough ; when he was in bad, the effect was disastrous. Thus it is that Mr. Fronde's book stands to witness how pitiful a thing is mere literary artifice or even Art, when dis- connected from the honest determination to be fair and accurate first, brilliant and subtle afterwards. Mr. Wakefield is unsparing in his exposure of Mr. Fronde's manner of putting things into his book, careless whether they were true, if only they sounded pretty. For instance, Mr. Fronde says," The broad Murray falls into the sea at no great distance to the westward." As a fact, the Murray enters the sea sixty miles east of Adelaide, and when Mr. Fronde was there, its month had been blocked by sand for two months. It is still more typical of his inaccuracy that, in describing the port of Adelaide, he says," The harbour was fall of ships, great steamers, great liners, coasting schooners, ships of all sorts," when, in truth, Port Adelaide cannot be entered by large vessels, and the "great liners" have to lie many miles off. Still more ludicrous are his placing Adelaide in a basin, when it stands on the highest land in the neighbourhood ; his making a river wind through it when, according to Mr. Wakefield, the only river has been dammed up to make a lake ; and, lastly, his talking of it as "a city of a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, not one of whom has ever known, or ever will know, a moment's anxiety as to the recurring regularity of his three meals a day," when Adelaide, with all its suburbs, at the most only reaches seventy-five thousand, and when, at the very moment of writing, the depression of trade was BO acute that a Benevolent Relief Committee was sitting to try and help the distressed and poverty-stricken inhabitants. We cannot, however, follow Mr. Wakefield through all his corrections, nor quote his remarks on the laughing-jackass that has not "the shape of a jay," and that does not find "its chief amusement" in biting snakes' heads off. We must pass to his remarks on Mr. Froude's account of New Zealand. Mr. Wakefield shows how Mr. Fronde's information in respect to this Colony was in reality all got from Sir George Grey. He then proceeds to describe Sir George Grey's Colonial career. We do not intend to vouch for all the details of this picture, but it certainly coincides with the general Colonial opinion. After mentioning the charm of Sir George Grey's manner, and the dignity of his bearing, Mr. Wakefield proceeds : — "Sir George Grey was a troublesome Governor' clever at taking advantage of other's mistakes, but always in hot water with his Ministers with the military, and with the Colonial Office. It ended by his being summarily removed from the Government in 1867, because the Colonial Office saw no other way of terminating the chronic and futile feud which heel so long caused an ill-feeling between the Colony and the Mother Country. He went home and tried to get into Parliament, but only succeeded in keeping Sir Henry Storks out ; and, having offended Whigs and Tories in turn, got the cold shoulder from both. He returned to the Colony thoroughly soured, and shut himself up in gloomy solitude in his lovely island of Kavrau. In 1875 be determined to enter Colonial politics, and easily got a seat in the House of Representatives and the leadership of a considerable party. In 1877 he became Prime Minister, and he ruled the Colony with almost absolute power for two years. It was the darkest period in the political history of New Zealand. Immediately on the assembling of Parliament in 1879, a resolution affirming that Sir George Grey's Ministry had so mismanaged and maladministered the affairs of the country that they no longer possessed the confidence of this House was carried in the House of Representatives by the largest vote ever recorded on a Ministerial question. Sir George Grey appealed to the country, but the con- stituencies endorsed the decision of the House, and be was compelled to relinquish the power he had used so ill. His successors found the Treasury without a shilling in it, and deficiency bills for £200,000 were voted nein. con, for paying salaries and meeting other pressing demands of administration. The payment in London of the interest on the public debt and other engagements of the utmost importance to the public credit had been left unprovided for, and the Govern- ment had to telegraph to the Agent-General to raise a loan of five millions on any terms whatsoever. The public expenditure was reduced by an enormous sum, and a heavy property tax was imposed in addition to an increase of 50 per cent, of the ad valorem. customs duties. The state of native affiairs was such that a serious disturbance was only averted by the most stringent measures on the part of the native Minister, Mr. Bryce, and by the most active efforts of the Commissioners, Sir William Fox and Sir Dillon Bell. The Colony was saved ; but from that day to this Sir George Grey has never exercised any share of political influence."

A man with such a career, even if he was an injured innocent, would be hardly likely to give a fair account of the Colony. He virtually told Mr. Froude that the Colony was going to the devil, and Mr. Fronde wrote it down apparently without the slightest

misgiving that he might be doing a great wrong to the Colony, and a great injustice to her public men. In " Wanted—a Leader," in the same magazine, Mr. Julian Sturgis tells the world what high hopes for social regeneration he had when he was at college, and how very far off they seem now. This is not a very promising subject, nor is its treatment very original. All pes- simism is apt to be sad nonsense ; but political pessimism is abso- lutely unbearable, unless the writer is full of point and cynicism. In his own sphere, Mr. Sturgis is by no means without remarkable literary qualities ; but this delicate and charming author must remember that when a writer of belles lettres takes to handling politics, he is as sure to be clumsy and ineffective as is the politician when he tries the finer work of literature. We cannot honestly find anything worthy of the writer in Mr. Sturgis's article. "Common is the commonplace," and very empty the "vacant chaff well-meant for grain" which he provides us. We trust that he will apply himself again to fiction and to essay-writing, where there is so great an opening, and where he is so well qualified to succeed. Though amusing and full of references to the most delightful treasures of literature, it can hardly be said that Dr. Jessopp, in his article on "Letters and Letter-writers," has dealt adequately with his subject. With such a theme, any man might do tolerably. To do well calls for a type of literary ability somewhat higher. Mr.

Augustine Birrell alone among our living essayists could be predicted to succeed with it. He, indeed, might be trusted to give us an enchanting study, where humour and true literary sympathy should combine with a style at once graceful and pointed.

The National Review is very dull. A tolerable article is Lord Egerton of Tatton's "Agricultural Depression and its Remedies," in which the writer pleads for the adoption in our rural national schools of an agricultural technical education.

His notice of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners' scheme of land sale is interesting. But is there not a misprint in his statement that they have under it already sold "about 700 acres, at a price of £180,000 P" The price is astounding, if the land was agri- cultural. The only essay of real merit in the number is that on "Alexander Hamilton." The story of the great American Federalist is told with care and good sense. There is hardly a parallel in history to the life of the young West Indian who at seventeen flung himself into the great controversies of the War of Independence, and by his speeches and pamphlets invigo- rated the spirits of the Colonists. Before he had finished his eighteenth year, he was taking an important part in war as an officer of Volunteers, while his twentieth saw him a Lieutenant-Colonel and Aide-de-Camp to General Washington. But it was still more wonderful that so successful and so thorough a soldier should have found so little trouble in con- verting himself first into a great Constitutional lawyer and financier, then into a successful party leader, and lastly into the most remarkable advocate of his age and country. His end was as singular as his life. Peel, Wellington, Castlereagh, Warren Hastings, all fought duels and all escaped. It was the fate of Hamilton to fall in a duel He is, curiously enough, almost the solitary instance of a great man whose life was cat short in such an encounter. It is a pity that Mr. Bradley does not give any- thing but a mere allusion to the Federalist. That astonishing series of papers, filled as they are with the profoundest of political maxims, is a repository of Constitutional wisdom such as hardly exists elsewhere. They are certainly the most valuable contribution to political science made by the English race in the New World. If they are without Burke's imagination and rhetoric, they are also without Burke's prejudice and bad taste, and can never be neglected as long as the formation of the State is a subject worthy of study.

The Contemporary, like the rest of the magazines, is full of Ireland, and like the rest, sheds no new light on the subject. Sir C. Gavan Duffy's "After the Battle" is a strange Mixture. There is much that is inaccurate and misleading, much that is dull. There is plenty of talk of Excalibur, of Nemesis, of Satyrs and Bacchantes, of Mr. Swinburne and Professor Huxley, of Robespierre and Marat, and of valleys than which "the eye has seen nothing lovelier"—the ‘. common form" of all Irish political writings—and there are also the widest of controver- sial statements trailed, like the Irishman's coat on St. Patrick's day, for "any gintleman " critic who likes to step on. We quote the following as one of the more reasonable of the writer's con- tentions :—

"The English nation has many great qualities, else it would not have won and maintained its position in the world ; but has it ever once in ita whole history surrendered a prejudice or an interest at the first summons ? When Chatham warned his countrymen that their fellow-subjects in the American plantations were striving for rights which it would be base to relinquish, and which it was base to with- hold, how was his counsel received by Parliament and the nation ? When Wilberforce rebuked the British bourgeoisie for fattening upon the blood and sweat of their slaves in the tropical islands, and besought them in the name of human and divine justice to relinquish this abominable commerce, did they hearken to his appeal ? When the young O'Connell stood up against the cohorts of Protestant ascendancy alone, like the shepherd-boy before the army of Saul, and demanded that an ancient, brave, God-fearing people might be restored to the common rights of humanity, denied them for generations, how long did he appeal in vain ? When Cobden asked that the English artisan might have the price of his scanty bread relieved of a tax levied for the profit of nobles and squires, was there a prompt stir. render of the monopoly ? That demand was met exactly as this one is, by ahrieka of horror and predictions of ruin. Run through the whole catalogue of concessions slowly wrung from power, and it is the same story. The right never succeeded easily, never succeeded without suffering reverses ; but it always succeeded in the end. Con- fidence in God's justice, a fixed reliance that a trne cause, however baffled and impeded, flows on to success as surely as a river to the sea, enabled men to strive and wait, and in good time they had their reward. And so shall we."

This is all very well, but how did Wilberforce, how did O'Connell, and how did Cobden conduct those great agitations which they brought to successful terminations, and what were the ends they had in view ? Did they encourage a form of political propaganda of which the only natural and possible outcome was outrage and murder ? Did they refuse to lift a finger to allay the agitation when it became dangerous ? Did they willingly and wittingly accept aid from plotters of wholesale assassination ? The records of Constitutional agitation, indeed, show wonderful successes. Let us be sure, however, that we have a faithful analogy. Then, too, as to the aims. Wilber- force and Cobden always aimed at changes perfectly consistent with the existing Constitution. O'Connell conducted two great agitations. In one, his aim was only to effect a change in the law. In the other, he attempted a revolution. He obtained Catholic Emancipation. He filled when he tried Repeal, and thus will the Parnellite Party fail, until England sinks into a condition of political coma. There is, we admit, no calculating on what the Irish might have achieved if they had demanded mere changes in the law, however vast. Payment of the priests, land expropriation in the tenants' interests, encouragement of Irish industries,—in such directions, persistent agitation of the Anti-Corn-Law League type might have done everything which Sir C. Gavan Duff believes possible for agitations. For Home- rule, which is virtually Repeal, there are no such possibilities. "The Fray, and Afterwards," by the Rev. J. Guinness Rogers, we cannot do more than refer to. We are amused to notice in it the first public signs of a desire to throw Mr. Morley to the wolves, which is gaining ground among a section of Radicals. On the whole, the paper is moderate, and we are glad to miss the vituperation too often bestowed on Mr. ChamberLin, though why Lord Hartington, of all people in the world, should be accused of " buncombe " and " high-Main' " we are at a lose to understand. Apparently it is because Lord Hartington told people that the issue was a very grave one. Sir John Lubbock publishes in this number of the Contemporary one of those. able and pleasantly written lectures on science which he

manages with so much literary skill. Under the affected title of "Perigot," Vernon Lee gives us her opinion of most things except Home.rnle. The second title—" Random Notea on the Dramatic and Undramatic "— would, indeed, have covered this too ; but Vernon Lee scorns things so common- place, we may be sure. Perigot is the shepherd of Fletcher's,- Faithful Shepherdess. Lady Archibald Campbell has ap- parently discovered that he was "certainly a small peasant-pro- prietor." How enchantingly, with what overflowing humour, with what grace, would Mr. Matthew Arnold have treated thia delightful remark ! How the "small peasant-proprietor" would have been always at his pen's end ! How it would have crept into every ridiculous comparison and antithesis ! Unfortunately, Vernon Lee has not the cunning for such sport. She drags her fish plump out of the water, and then mounting her own little hobby-horse, rides straight away without ever realising how ex- quisitely she might have played her catch to the satisfaction or herself and all the world, had she only known how. She has missed at the very outset a great opportunity. If she had turned to Fletcher's own preface to the play, she would have seem how in that day people thought his Perigots were small peasant- proprietors, "in gray cloaks with cur-tailed dogs in strings," and how the poet scorned the notion. When Perigot is dismissed,. come general remarks on things literary. Of course, they are all wonderfully well put, for Vernon Lee knows how to write. Yet,. when she says, "Give Shakespeare the Wahlverwandschaften read, and see what he will make of it," we cannot help feeling, like the farmer, that we do not get "much forrader " ot. such remarks. Surely, if not absolute nonsense, they are quite- misleading. Vernon Lee has great ability, and we are sure a- considerable future, but she must not write as if she were Ste. Benve, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge rolled into one unerring- apotheosis of the critical faculty. Even if she knows beyond doubt that Shakespeare is unable to develop either character or action, and that for such qualities we must look not to him, but to Goldoni and Racine, she ought, for the sake of the old fogies of literature, to put it somewhat less triumphantly than she does.

The Fortnightly Review appears, for the first time since Mr- Morley's resignation of the editorship, without Mr. Escott'a name on the title-page. It is said that Mr. Escott is going to. retire. His successor, however, seems determined to keep up his immediate predecessor's traditions, and leads off with an, article by the Duke of Marlborough. We cannot say that the writer makes any great contribution to the political wisdom of the age. Intended to be light and sparkling, the result is dill and jejune in the extreme, while the style shows a jaunti- ness which is hardly the medium for such a disquisition as he- gives us. But to be fair, it must be admitted that the Duke of Marlborough never competes with his brother in his peculiar style of literary composition, and leaves to the Chancellor- of the Exchequer the phrases of the music-hall and the refresh- ment-bar. Nowhere is the inadequacy of the writer, whether it be his presumption or his invincible ignorance of history, more clearly shown than in the desire to fasten on some one political) or social phenomenon which has existed as long as society, and to show it to be the peculiarity of the present age and the sign of decadence. Yet this is what the Duke of Marlborough is for ever doing throughout his article. Before the Duke of Marl- borough can develop a philosophy of politics, and show that party government is played out, he must study somewhat more closely the phenomena of political life, not only in our age, but in others. Mr. George Meredith, that most unequal of poets— for he who wrote the snatches of song in "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel "deserves no less a title—contributes a poem of twenty- three stanzas, called "A Preaching from a Spanish Ballad.'" The motive, the old one of the guilty wife, is managed so as to take to some slight extent a new, though far- fetched psychological development. Though every now and- then there are lines of faultless melody, they are not many, and the reader is obliged to admit that in his poetry, as in his prose, the desire for analysis in a medium of unreal and abnormal' abstractions has taken possession of Mr. Meredith's genius, and overwhelmed and beclouded the style and matter of one who,. had he not yielded to these temptations, must have won for himself a very high place indeed in English literature. Blackwood is portentously dull, and the dullest paper in it is the political one, for the excellent reason that being ashamed of Lord Randolph Churchill's performances, it abjures vitupera- tion, and substitutes for that final pulverisation of everything except fine old crusted Toryism, which is so familiar and so funny, a mild regretfulness of tone, not at all amusing. It is merely a trotting calf that runs after the red rag of Liberalism this time ; not a raging bull with down-pointing horns and angry bellow. The writer, having constructed an ideal Cabinet, riot, in the least resembling that which Lord Salisbury has formed, pleads for "a temporary oblivion of party names and party watchwords." By all means, but—Qae Messieurs les assassins commencent—especially Blackwood. There are two or three good things in "Musings without Method ;" but among /the bad is as preposterous an attempt at imitation of an Irish brogue as in the course of a long experience we have ever met with. This wonderful dialect that never was spoken anywhere, is put into the mouths of an officer in the Army and his wife. The amusing person in Oliver Twist who enforces Cs statements with an offer to eat his own head if they are not correct, might safely lay that eccentric wager against the possibility of finding an individual of Irish nation- ality, gentle or simple, between Donegal and Cape Clear, who ever talked of his "guists," or pronounced spelling "spilling," tell"hill," and expressions " exprissions." A pleasant paper on Itanke, with a clever bit of historical summary in it, is the most attractive portion of Blacicwood's contents.

A delightful analysis of La Fontaine's fables distinguishes Macmillan. The writer, Mr. Tilley, begins by remarking that the great fabulist's name did not appear in any of the lists of the hundred best books recently supplied by a number of well- known personages, goes on to tell, in few but striking words, in what estimation La Fontaine is held in his own country, and then enters upon the literary history of the fables. It is mot surprising to learn that the author of them was forty-eight years old when he published the first instalment of that wonderful store of wit and wisdom. It took all his close 'observation and varied experience in aid of his genius to pro- duce such a work. "He had," says Mr. Tilley, "experimented in every sort of literature, in drama and vers de socielg, in licentious tales and mythological idylls, before he discovered that the fable was the instrument he sought." Such brilliant and sympathetic criticism as Mr. Tilley's is as rare as it is charming, and his comparison of La Fontaine, Kriloff, and Gellert, the most successful of German fable-writers, is full of interest. In alluding to La Fontaine's "beast stories," the writer says :—

" He could never have thrown the illusion he does over his animal world, had he not been possessed with a genuine love of animals. It is this, as well as his high poetical endowment, that gives him BO decidedly the first place among fabnlista. In the beast fables of other writers, the moral is too ostensibly the motive for the story ; it is evident that the animals are only introduced for the sake of the lesson they convey. This is the case with Kriloff ; this morality is perhaps higher than La Fontaine's, his humour is possibly more subtle; but in his beasts, as beasts, it is impossible to take any interest. But La Fontaine not only takes a genuine pleasure in telling the story for the story's sake, but he has a real love for the animals whose doings he relates. Nowadays, there is, happily, nothing singular in such an attitude towards the animal world, but in the seventeenth century, especially in France, it was certainly singular."

A remarkably interesting passage in this fascinating paper is devoted to a consideration of the fables as a picture of contem- porary society, and a comparison of the general morality of La Fontaine with that of 2Esop, and the medimval beast-epic, Beynard the Fox. The writer considers that the fables of which the subject is friendship are among the fabulist's masterpieces, and sums up his scheme of positive moralityin the four maxims, —" Love your friends, Help your neighbours, Work hard, Trust in God." The Gordon Boys' Home is well described, and an elo- quent appeal is made on behalf of it by Mr. Aithur Collins. We do not think the hat ought to be sent round for charitable purposes by means of a magazine ; but if there be an exception, it may be granted to this excellent memorial institution. An admirable essay on Charles Lamb—on whom there has been so much written that to write anything which can attract is indeed a feat —has some things in it as good as " Elia's " own. For instance, when speaking of Mr. Walter Bagehot's preference of Hazlitt to Lamb, Mr. Birrell says, "You may live like a gentleman for a twelvemonth on Hazlitt's ideas." The paper is a propos of the Rev. Alfred Ainger's " Notes " on the works of Charles

Lamb. " Ballairai Durg " is a capital " sbikar " story, in which positive pig-sticking and possible ghost-seeing are agreeably mingled, and a very good hunting-song about the "grim, grey boar" is given with excellent effect.

Oornhill has, in addition to its usual allowance of fiction, two striking articles. The first is on the always fascinating topic, "Diamonds," and is at once instructive, suggestive, poetic, and grim. The second is "At the Oybin," a vivid and interesting account of the strange, romantic, weird mountain and the sur- rounding country. No English writer has hitherto dealt with the subject, although the Bohemian mountain and the historic "berg" are easily reached from Zittan by "a pleasant drive through villages that have prosperity stamped upon every linea- ment." In "New Eyes for Science," we have the outlines of a wonderful plan for applying the photographic eye of science to remote suns. The writer explains the vast results that may be expected from the observations of the new eyes of science, and anticipates that "the next half-century will reveal more about the millions of millions of tenants of interstellar space than all the years which have elapsed since Hipparchus, noticing a new star, was led to form th3 first of all known star-catalogues."