THE MAGAZINES.

SIR CHARLES GA.VAN DUFFY, in the Contemporary, writes a most eloquent account of the finding, colonisation, and prosperity of Victoria, which he attributes in great measure to Irishmen, whom he evidently considers superior in all political qualifica- tions, and even in the faculty of making money, to the people of the neighbouring island. He, of course, regards the precedent as final as to the expediency of Home-rule, and forgets that most of his excellently told stories are stories of defiance success- fully offered by the colonists to the Mother-country. If Ireland were like Victoria, and burning with hatred as she is now, Ireland would be independent or under military occupation in three months. The following, though not so good as most of the writer's stories, and not intended to be comic, is full of uncon- scious humour. The first meeting of a responsible Legislature in Melbourne met in St. Patrick's Hall, and the Irish were delighted by its freedom from sectarian bias. "It was proposed to open the sittings with prayer, but the motion was peremptorily negatived upon the grounds that men of all creeds met there as representatives of a community in which all creeds were equal."

Sure we're ahl aiqual, an' there's no God above us,' is an odd creed for a Catholic people; but we fully admit it seems just now the creed of the Irish majority.—Mr. Peek's paper on "The Workless, Thriftless, and Worthless," is full of wise counsel as to the danger of confounding those classes, and its chief teaching, that we should use the offer of work to discrimi- nate them, is sound enough ; but the writer does not tell us what to do with the bad and the incorrigibly idle. He would, he says, carry out the law, and send them back to their parishes-; but as we cannot send them back in custody a dozen times a year, that is really advice to give them no relief unless they will go back. No doubt, if the people are prepared for that, all is easy. One touch of real hunger would soon make useful citizens of the vagrants ; but then, the community is not prepared to apply that terrible remedy. We note, however, with satisfaction, that Mr. Peek, a genuine philanthropist, would make outdoor relief easier, especially in the matter of foods, and work the vagrancy laws much more sharply. The remedy lies somewhere in that twofold course, though the State is as yet too soft to act on the counsel.—Miss Cobbe, in her essay headed "The Lord was not in the Earthquake," protests against the argument that the "law of Nature" must be right. She says Nature is often diabolically cruel. We cannot under- stand much now, and ultimately we shall perceive some reconciling truth ; but, meanwhile, we must appeal to the divine teaching, and not to the teaching of mere facts. True enough, if she means that we must not starve animals because all animals, unless killed by violence or disease, must of necessity die of starvation ; but the doctrine is pushed in her paper rather far. If God is the author of Nature, we must get some teaching out of a revelation which, whatever else it is, cannot be false. Her paper, however, will make many think who now apologise for pitilessness by saying "it is a natural law."—Mr. Osborne Morgan, by pleading that the Welsh are a nation, and may yet ask separate life, does his best to increase the forces which now make for disintegration, and will ultimately compel a conquest such as even England has never yet effected ; and Mr. Haldane, in a most striking paper, asks from the Liberal leaders a more definite programme. His idea, well worked out, is that Liberals are alienated by indefiniteness, and especially by the want of authoritative repudiation of wild ideas, and he asks a remedy for this. Must he not wait till he knows who the Liberal leaders are to be ? Mr. Gladstone, as Mr. Haldane admits, has limited his future work to Ireland, and apart from Mr. Gladstone, where is Liberal guidance to be sought? How does he know that the next leaders will not accept the very pro- gramme he repudiates,—viz., that of the Scotch miners, a State regulation of the hours of labour, a fixed rate of wages, and the nationalisation of all capital ; for the limitation to mining capital is absurd. Note carefully this pregnant sentence from Mr. Haldane, one of the strongest Liberals in the Kingdom :— "Looking at the new electorate as a whole, and the real propor- tion which its influence bears to the upper and middle. class vote, I am convinced that the association, if such an association were contemplated, of Liberalism with Socialism, would result, not in the triumph of Socialism, but in the largest and most enduring Tory majority the country has yet seen." We agree with Mr. Haldane, but we doubt very strongly if the minor Liberal leaders see the truth.

The Nineteenth Century for January places first among its articles an apology for cremation by Sir Henry Thompson. Though the subject is not one which naturally lends itself to humorous treatment, it must be confessed that the writer of the article has, consciously or unconsciously, come near to a touch of humour in his enthusiastic description of the "pure white, dry ash" to which we may be reduced at the Woking Crematory on the payment of £10. "Regarded as an organic chemical product," says Sir Henry Thompson, with a feeling of pride perhaps natural in the President of "the Cremation Society of England," this pure white, dry ash "must be con- sidered as attractive in appearance rather than the contrary." In arguing out the question of cremation, Sir Henry Thomp- son fairly faces the great objection to cremation arising from the temptation to murder by poison which is given by the total destruction of the body. We do not think, how- ever, that he surmounts it. It is not enough to show that, as a matter of fact, very few bodies are exhumed for examination. The danger is not that cases of poisoning which are now discovered would go undetected, but that many murders now prevented by the fear that the body may bear for months the evidence of guilt would, were there no such fear, be actually perpetrated. Sir Henry Thompson's strongest argument is based on the fact of the introduction of poison into the soil by the burial therein of the bodies of those•who have died from such diseases as small-pox, scarlet-fever, diphtheria, typhus, enteric, and other fevers,without cremation. There certainly seems a very strong case for enacting that all corpses so infected should be buried with quick-lime.—Mr. Frederick Harrison's answer to Mr. Balfour's attack contained in the latter's address on the advantages of desultory reading, is contained in a somewhat tiresome dialogue supposed to take place between Wiseman of Balliol, and Papillon of Christ Church. Mr. Harrison is nothing if not serious, and a dialogue intended to be conceived in a light and airy vein from him must be confessed to be very dull reading. Besides, he does not put the case for desultory reading in Mr. Balfour's sense in the least as it is fair that it should be put. Papillon is really a man who is bored with everything he reads, and so really reads nothing through. The desultory reader Mr. Balfour defends is not such a one, but the man who, though he reads widely and superficially, reads eagerly and with intense interest.—An essay by Mr. Matthew Arnold, if not like a farce in every respect, is at least like a farce in this,—it always has a catch-word. This time the catch-word, or phrase—the essay is on Shelley—is : "My God ! he had far better have thought like other people." The phrase, based on a remark once made by Mrs. Shelley; is obvious enough in its application to Shelley. Mr. Matthew Arnold attempts, as far as is possible in an article of sixteen pages, to arrive at a just appreciation of Shelley as a man. On the whole, it must be admitted he does this very successfully, though coming in the end to the somewhat

oommonplace conclusion, that the less we know about Shelley's life, the better we are inclined to like him ; but that still, when

all is said and done, there is something loveable about the man apart from his poetry. In the following passages Mr. Matthew Arnold sums up his regret that the record of Shelley's life up to the time of his second marriage has been given to the world in all its depraved and sordid details :—

"I regret, I say once more, that it has been given. It is a sore trial for our love of Shelley. What a set ! what a world ! is the exelama- tion that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of the occurrences of Shelley's private life.' I used the French word We for a letter of Shelley's ; for the world in which we find him loan only use another French word, sale. God win's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat, and the green-speotacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg, the faithful friend, and Hunt, the Horace of this precious world, and, to go up higher, Sir Timothy Shelley, a great country gentleman, feeling himself safe while 'the exalted mind of the Duke of Norfolk [the drinking Duke] protects me with the world,' and Lord Byron with his deep grain of coarseness and commonness, his affectation, his brutal selfishness—what a set ! The history carries us to Oxford, and I think of the clerical and re- spectable Oxford of those old times, the Oxford of Copleaton and the Kebles and Hawkins, and a hundred more, with the relief Keble declares himself to experience from Reek Walton,— ' When, wearied with the tale thy times disclose, The eye first finds thee out in thy secure repose.'

I am not only thinking of morals and the house of Godwin, I am thinking also of tone, bearing, dignity. I appeal to Cardinal New- man, if perchance he does me the honour to read these words, is it possible to imagine Copleaton or Hawkins declaring himself safe while the exalted mind of the Duke of Norfolk protects me with the world' ?"

—Under the title, "Dethroning Tennyson : a Contribution to the Tennyson-Darwin Controversy," Mr. Swinburne has written an amusing parody of the methods by which it is proved that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, in which he shows that Mr. Darwin was the

real author of Maud, The Princess, and In Memoriam. What could be a surer proof than the line in Mated?— "A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and master of earth." —It is a pity that Mr. Goldwin Smith has, in his article on "American Statesmen," dwelt with such unnecessary violence on the failings of many of the heroes of the War of Independence. Yet he accuses the American biographer of John Quincey Adams

of showing the old traditional hatred of England in his writing. Surely to do so, and at the same time to say things which, how- ever true, and however little intended in reality to be hostile to America, will almost certainly be taken as hostile, is neither reasonable nor wise. This blot on Professor Goldwin Smith's interesting article is all the more to be regretted in considera- tion of the fact that America in reality has no warmer admirer than himself.

The Fortnightly contains the third number of Sir Charles Mike's study of the British Army. Though we do not doubt

that the articles are too pessimistic in tone, and that were we called upon to defend India by adding 50,000 men at once to the white troops already there, we should ultimately manage to do so, it must be admitted that there are some very heavy blots on our present arrangements. Our Army is the most centralised in the world, and yet the experience of Germany has shown that decentralisation is essential to the organisation of any rapid and efficient scheme of mobilisation. We neither keep our Army ready for the field, nor do we lay plans by which, within a given time, we can place it on a war footing. "The German military authorities could sit still and think, and alter the march of armies, because they had not a single detail with which to deal which had not been regulated during peace. This is the effect of the decentralisation." Into Sir Charles Dilke's careful analysis of the German system of organisation we cannot enter here. In the course of his analysis, howeverb he shows by comparison how weak, though costly, is the English system.—By far the best article in the present number of the Fortnightly is Mr. W. S. Lilly's extremely able essay, "Right and Wrong," on which, however, we have already commented sufficiently in our last number.

The National Review is this month distinctly readable, not- withstanding that no one of the articles is of special importance enough to stand out from the rest. In "Personal Experi- ence in Bulgaria," Mr. Leib, M.P., gives a short account of a visit to the Balkan Peninsula. He describes the Prince as "a highly educated, modest, and intelligent man, under no illusions as to the difficulties of his position, and fully resolved to do his duty by his new subjects to the best of his ability." Though up to now the Prince has remained absolutely in the hands of his advisers, and though he is probably not a man of any strong individuality of character, it does not seem at all certain that he will be at all the more likely to fail in his enter- prise on that account. The Bulgarians want a constitutional Sovereign, not a real ruler. Mr. Legh, like all other travellers in the Balkans who have written down their observations, con- cludes by a scheme for partitioning Turkey :—

"Assuming that he is permitted to remain at Constantinople, and perhaps Gallipoli, it is pretty certain that the Turk will have to part with the remainder of his European possessions. Three nations, Greece, &raja, and Bulgaria, dividing his inheritance in advance, all lay claim to Macedonia. The Serviane may, however, be dismissed from the calculation, for they will be forced to content themselves with a district adjoining their own frontier. The Greeks, who urge their cause with considerable bluster, base their claim upon ancient history and upon alleged numerical superiority. The first of these reasons is little short of absurdity, and the second is incorrect. There have been many disputes as to the proportion in which Greece and Bulgaria are represented in Macedonia, but the weight of evidence is decisively in favour of the latter. It is impossible to obtain strictly accurate statistics on the subject, but, according to the most trustworthy authorities, there appear to be over one million Bulgarians, as against about 60,000 Greeks. Obviously, therefore, the Bulgarians will be entitled to claim the lion's share of the spoil, and there is no reason why Greece should not be satisfied with an arrangement which gave her Salonica and the adjoining district. Both from motives of justice and expediency, it should be our policy to secure for Bulgaria as large an extension of territory as possible : a Bulgaria stretching from the Age= to the Black Sea, and com- prising what is now the province of Adrianople, would form a gaarantee of the surest kind for the maintenance of peace in the Balkan Peninsula, and an effective barrier against Russian aggression in South-Eastern Europe."

Under the heading, "Rome and Malaria," Mr. Strachan Morgan gives an extremely curious account of the problem pre- sented to the Italians by the unhealthiness of their capital, and of the various methods which have been tried in order to get rid of malaria. Strange to say, the most successful has been found to be that employed by the Romans. Recent excavations in the Campagna have brought to light the curious system of drains, tier above tier, employed by them to drain the subsoil of the water-logged plains that surround Rome.—Of the paper entitled "Lord Salisbury's Foreign Policy," which obtains the place of honour in the National Review, we need only say that if there is a great deal in it which is very true, there is also very little in it which can lay any claim to novelty.

In the Westminster Review is contained Mr. Gladstone's reply to Dr. Ingram. Replies to replies are seldom interesting, and Mr. Gladstone's effort is no exception. We have searched it in vain for any sentence or phrase which is of suffi- cient interest to be quoted.—The rest of the articles in the Westminster Review are without special interest, if we except one entitled "Dr. Johnson on Ireland," where some curious sayings of Johnson as to Ireland are collected. Dr. Johnson, we pre- sume, is to be asked to step into line with the civilised world in defence of Home-rule.

Blackwood for January has another article on "The War Office." On this occasion, the writer deals nominally with the Outside Departments. By way of preface, however, he attempts to show that it is not fair to compare the cost of the English and German Armies, and then to ask,—Why do we pay as much for our small Army as the Germans do for their great one ? The reason assigned is that our Army is a paid Army ; the German, one recruited by compulsory service. This, how- ever, will not wholly account for the difference, part of which it is greatly to be feared we must put down to careless and extravagant administration.—" The Withered Arm" is a fairly successful attempt to tell a story, based on the strange superstition that the touch of a corpse just cut from the gallows, and still warm, will cure paralysed limbs.—" John Knox and William Mait- land" is an interestingly told chapter from the history of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Macmillan contains, among other articles of note, an in- teresting lecture on "Sir Stafford Northcote," given by Lord Coleridge to the Exeter Literary Society ; and an essay on "Dr. Johnson's Style" by his most recent editor, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. The last of these, dealing as it does with a literary sub- ject of great fascination, is found to be extremely pleasant reading. The criticism in detail of the style of a great master of English can hardly fail to be worth following, for it is sure to bring us into contact either with old favourites or new discoveries in the way of quotations. Dr.

Birkbeck Hill's vindication of Johnson's style from the charge of pomposity of diction seems to us unanswerable. Johnson only wrote Johnsonese when the exigencies of his calling as a

literary hack forced him to assume a discursive form of composi- tion which should at the same time inculcate" wisdom and piety." For essays of this type he could not adopt his own natural, keen, hard-hitting, straightforward style, such as he used in the criticism of " Lycidas," or in the preface to the Dictionary, but was obliged to devise these ponderous antithetical mazes which astonish and amuse us in the Rambler.