SOME OF THE MAGAZINES.

THE Fortnightly is, on the whole, the best of the Magazines this month. Mr. Morley gives us at least five interesting and four valuable papers. The one which is interesting, but not valu- able, is the report of Mr. Senior's "Conversations with M. de Circourt." M. Edmond Scherer may believe M. de Circourt to have been a man of "extraordinary intellectual gifts," and he may have succeeded as Lamartine's representative at Berlin, but he was too entirely lacking in the gift of prevision for us to attach importance to his conversation. He thought the final struggle between the Revolution and the Thrones had begun with the Crimean war; he thought that England would Deems-

sarily annex the Crimea; he thought the partition of Austria all but inevitable ; he thought the United States the natural enemies of Europe; he thought the Union would split up into

three empires after the war (p. 117) ; and he thought Mexico, if not a monarchy, would become a great and miserable slave- holding republic. M. de Circourt knew a great deal, and therefore said some striking things, but his outlook into the

-world was so coloured by prejudices,—so hidden in his manner that M. Scherer calls him passionless,—that his speculations are almost devoid of value. Dr. Nelson Hancock gives us a most sober, thoughtful, and practical paper upon the con- dition of Ireland, and one that will revive hope in many an anxious mind. He believes the discontent of Ireland curable without extreme measures, first, by the concession to Irish Catholics of every educational privilege conceded to English Denominationalists ; secondly, by assimilating the Irish Poor-law administration to the English; and thirdly, by the extension of the Ulster tenant-right to all Ireland, the valuation of the soil on the English plan, and the abolition of all legal obstacles to the transfer by sale of land in small parcels. These propositions, the last excepted, are worked out

in great detail, and the whole paper leaves on the mind the impression that if these improvements did not extinguish

Irish discontent, they would, at least, greatly reduce it, while none of them are contrary to justice or to Irish landlord feeling. Mr. Dunckley contributes a sketch of Mr. Gladstone's public career, remarkable for its impartiality, and for the succinct clearness with which Mr. Gladstone's advance from the "rising hope" of the Tories to the "risen hope" of the Liberals is described. The general effect is greatly to increase one's sense of Mr. Gladstone's aptitude as a practical statesman, and of the force with which logical con- siderations present themselves to his mind. Mr. Dunckley considers Mr. Gladstone's resignation of the leadership some- thing more than a mistake, almost a dereliction of duty :—

"The crowning disaster for the Liberal party was Mr. Gladstone's resignation of the leadership. It is impossible to criticise his decision from a personal point of view without a fuller knowledge of the facts than is accessible to the public, but no reasons that can be seen amount to a justification. There was no pretence for alleging that he had lost the confidence of his party, and his proper place was at the head of the forlorn-hope in the House of Commons. Political influence, moreover, cannot be resigned, except on condition of a swift and final retreat from public life. But though Mr. Gladstone resigned, he has not retreated. The freedom he persuaded himself that he had acquired by retiring from the leadership has been so used as to make him a greater political power than ever, and he stands before his country at this moment as the impersonation of all that is hopeful, bold, and belligerent in Liberalism."

Mr. Dunckley suggests an explanation of Mr. Gladstone's .comparative failure as a writer which will be surprising to those who believe that the orator is more liable to be carried -away by rhetoric than the penman, but which has in it much of truth.—" Something external is wanted to keep this rhetorical affluence within bounds. The pen may run its course unchecked, but the orator has an audience before him, and as an orator Mr. Gladstone never fails. He never forgets that it his business to make the point at issue plain, and to carry- his audience with him. His sympathetic relation to them is sustained throughout, and action and reaction are instantaneous. If for a moment the orator loses himself in the clouds, the necessities of his argument soon recall him, and the lightning-flash never fails to come just when it is wanted to give luminousness to his reasoning and carry conviction home." We mentioned last week Mr. Farrer's paper on the land-laws, and need only refer here to Mr. Train's argument that England is in its decadence, a proposition of which he finds proof in the desire of the people to retain their empire, and the reluctance, possibly of the people, certainly of their leaders, to

spend money about it. The thesis is ably worked out, but, with the editor of the Fortnightly, we doubt the main proposi-

tion. The weakness of the country does not arise, as we believe, from any reluctance to make any necessary sacrifices, but from nneertainty as to the cause for which the people have been asked to make them. Mr. Traill forgets that this country has not been asked by the Government, with its irresistible majority, to make itself strong, to increase its Navy or double its Army, but to snake war, or threaten war, in a cause on which the people were hopelessly divided. They would have granted any- thing for a plan which they heartily believed to be at once moral and essential to the Empire. Statesmen, no doubt, plead. " economy " too often, but they usually do it to cover objections of a much deeper kind. With Mr. Train's observa-

tions, however, on the increasing difficulty Members find in being sure that electors and Parliament go together, we entirely coincide. He has put his finger there on a very great and in- creasing obstacle to strong government, which gravely needs a remedy, and may find one partly in redistribution of seats, and

partly in more frequent appeals to the country. At present twenty petty boroughs, with no weight outside Parliament, can in Parliament neutralise London, with its enormous population, wealth, and initiative in opinion. The Demos rules outside, but not inside. Mr. Traill, we imagine, would not let it rule inside. We would ; though we would, by every possible means, secure that it should be instructed enough to choose worthy agents.

The January number of the Contemporary is not above a fair average, that is to say, it includes no very striking paper. Professor Hillebrand's second paper on "England," though full of passages of keen observation, will not make the impression his first one did. It is nominally a paper on the eighteenth, not the nineteenth century, and is, therefore, more historical and less analytical than his previous essay, and. lacks much of its immediate and pressing interest. We care more for the writer's opinion of England now, than for his opinion of the growth of England in the last century. This paragraph, however, is very curious, coming, as it does, from a

foreign, and, as we gather, a decidedly Conservative observer :—

"Side by side with this movement within the Church, there is also a pagan movement going on, which is equally directed against the spirit of the Eighteenth Century, and which, although apparently opposed to the religious reaction, or at least indifferent to it, arises really out of the same craving for a fuller sensuous life, and similarly seeks its satisfaction in that which is merely external. Its ideal is the Italian Renaissance, with its seeming indifference to substance and reality, and its revelry in forms and colours. Out of this have arisen schools of painting and of poetry, mathetic theories and modes of writing history, which are as hollow and superficial as is the Church movement, and yet, in the country of almighty Fashion, these have become as widely dominant as Ritualism. It would be very unjust, however, to imply for a moment that the historical culture and mental activity of the England of to-day are to be sought in this resthetic school. The elements of true progress will be found pre- eminently in the Darwinian school, the doctrines of which are being more firmly established, more fully developed and widely applied, by such distinguished men as Huxley, W. Bagehot, and (although he himself may be hardly conscious of it) Leslie Stephen. These are the men who have made their distinct mark upon European thought, as, in former times, did Bacon and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Herder and Kant. The great surplice question has but a local and ephemeral significance ; the positivism which for a while prevailed is already almost driven from the field. Both will leave behind only indirect traces of their existence."

Canon Rawlinsou sends a readable and suggestive paper on "Cyrus the Great," the first great king recognisable in history as an individual, whom he believes, on the evidence of his decrees and his buildings, to have been an Eclectic in religion, and not the strong iconoclast and advocate of mono- theism he has hitherto been believed to be. We can- not condense the Canon's argument, but he makes out a good case, though he does not dispose altogether of the very strong Jewish tradition on the other side. The Jews liked Cyrus, no doubt, but that was no reason for re- presenting him as an iconoclast. Mr. Buchanan's poem of " Justinian " is fine, but it wants something. Its effort is to represent the strong Lucretian faith, the faith in cause and effect, as triumphant even over the bitter yearning a father feels not to resign a much loved and dying son for ever; but Mr. Buchanan has hardly left it clear whether the faith does triumph, or whether there is in the instinctive cry of the broken heart for " God " the germ of a higher belief. This, at all events, is a fine description:—

" At last they came

Unto a place most peaceful and most fair, Upon the margin of a crystal lake Set in the hollow of Italian hills.

There an eternal summer seem'd to dwell, In an eternal calm. On every side The purple mountains rose, with filmy lights And slender scarfs of white and melting mist, While down below were happy orange groves And gleaming emerald slopes, and crimson crags Upon whose sides hung chalets white as snow Just peeping from deep fringe of flower and fern, And all, the crag and chalet, grove and wood, With snow-white gleams of silent cataracts For ever frozen in the act to fall, Were imaged, to the tiniest flower or loaf,

In the cerulean mirror of the lake,—

Save when across the stillness crystalline A gondola with purple shade cmwl'd slowly, And blared the picture with its silvem trail."

Why," Bayern," and not silver? The papers on contemporary life

and thought in Russia never please us, they reveal so little ; and S. Roberto Stuart, who gives a similar sketch for Italy, though full of information, leaves an impression on us of being an indiscriminating critic. " Exquisite " is not a descriptive adjective.

The Nineteenth Century opens with a striking paper on Nihilism, striking because it contains so many extracts from Nihilist writings. Its effect is almost to destroy the last, linger- ing hope that anything can come of a movement which is so purely destructive, and which would destroy the social fabric, all religion, and all morality, while still unable to put any- thing in their place. What would come in their place is, of course, human selfishness, under which the strong would prey upon the weak unreservedly. The paper does not con- tain many very new facts, but its author, Mr. F. Cunliffe Owen, while utterly condemning the Nihilists, places in a strong light the tyranny of the Government towards the educated classes, and especially students ; and tells this story of the present Minister of Education, who has just sent in his resignation :—

"Count Tolstoy, by whom he was succeeded, and who still remains in office, has the reputation of being the best-hated man in Russia. We are assured that he has done more to render the Government unpopular than any official now living ; and the following letter, which he received last year from the Central Committee of the Nihilists, goes far to prove the truth of the assertion Your Ex- cellency has nothing to fear from us. We fully acknowledge the value of the services which you have rendered, and still continue to render to our cause. We promise that your life shall always be very precious to us.'" We have spoken of Mr. Mallock's "Atheistic Methodism," his paper in reply to Miss Bevington, and next to this the most read- able is Mr. Archibald Forbes's, on "War Correspondents." Mr. Forbes is, we imagine, personally Conservative, and certainly not disposed to extreme views of rights, but he denounces the new rules for correspondence most bitterly. He entirely acknowledges that the field-telegraph must be in the hands of the army chief, but he adds, as to the supervision of letters :— " No General in the field has the right thus, vicariously, to super- vise the intelligence sent by correspondents to their newspapers.' He can shoot them, or send them to prison, if they transgress, but the despotism of barking is not to be tholed. But to barke their work is not the limit of the powers of his creature, the press censor. To that functionary is accorded the right to 'alter' that work, if he thinks that to pass it would be detrimental to the good of the army.' In other words, it is in his power, if the correspondent perversely de- clines to lie, nevertheless to make a liar of him ! Why not prescribe the torture till he lie at first hand ? Why descend to the nefarious baseness of authorised forgery ?—for virtual forgery it is, thus to alter, to warp, to overturn. Who, among my colleagues, could those who provisionally authorized' this Jesnitical code have imagined so lost to honour as to bow their necks to a yoke so insulting and so ignoble? I will not retort insult on them, by regarding it as possible that they expected to find any man base enough to have the literary offspring, for which he stands responsible to his fellow-countrymen, thus surreptitiously changed at nurse. I prefer to hold that they desired to make the position of a war correspondent untenable by a gentleman. At all events, they have done so." Old officers will perhaps be more influenced by the fact that the German military authorities—soldiers to the bone—after their experience of the Franco-German war, which was throughout

described by correspondents, have declined to make their rules against them more stringent. It is only in the English military department that the truth is feared. Mr. Wallace's plea for the Darwinian law of evolution is as convincing and as readable as all his writings on natural history ; but we can only take one paragraph, which seems to us to state, in an irresistible form, one rider on the law,—that it must always allow of almost infinite variation. The common origin of all horses by no means makes it certain that all horses must be alike :—

" But we may, I think, go further, and say that variation is an ultimate fact of Nature, and needs no other explanation than a refer- ence to general principles which indicate that it cannot fail to exist. Does any one ask for a reason why no two gravel-stones or beach- pebbles, or even grains of sand, are absolutely identical in size, shape, surface, colour, and composition? When we.trace back the complex series of causes and forces that have led to the production of these objects, do we not see that their absolute identity would be more remarkable than their diversity ? So, when we consider how in- finitely more complex have been the forces that have produced each individual animal or plant, and when we know that no two animals can possibly have been subject to identical conditions throughout the entire course of their development, we see that perfect identity in the result would be opposed to everything we know of natural agen- cies. But variation is Merely the absence of identity, and therefore requires no further explanation; neither do the diverse amounts of

variation, for they correspond to the countless diversities of condi- tions to which animals have been exposed, either during their own development or that of their ancestors."

Mr. John Martinean's attack on the sale of livings as a system, though substantially sound in principle, is a little too fierce in form, but his recommendations are exceedingly moderate. He would make the sale of next presentations illegal, giving to the owners only a five-years respite before the Act came into operation, and would place a heavy and increasing tax upon the sale of advowsons. He believes the effect would be that both forms of sale would gradually be abandoned, without lay patronage, which he considers valuable, being abolished. We should doubt the success of his scheme, as the tax would be de- ducted from the price paid ; and would rather abolish the sale of next presentations altogether from a fixed date, and leave the sale- of advowsons to be regulated afterwards as a separate question. If special taxation on such transfers is just at all, which we rather doubt, unless all transfers of property are similarly taxed, the- best way to employ the money would. be to form a fund for the gradual repurchase of all advowsons by the Ecclesiastical Com- missioners. The nation would then gradually repossess itself of its own patronage, and might regulate its disposition by law. The "parochial veto" will sooner or later render advowsons very cheap property.

The Duke of Argyll concludes his interesting paper in Fraser, on his "First Impressions of the New World ;" and there is an article in which an M.P., who strongly denounces the anti- rent agitation, proposes, as a substitute for Home rule, that every Irish Bill should, before its second reading, be submitted to a Committee of Irish Members. Apparently, the Committee is to debate in public, but not within the walls of the House of Commons. Strike out the publicity and the idea would be a sensible one. The contribution, however, which -will be most read is Mrs. Oliphant's "Earth Bound," a weird ghost-story,. so written as to leave a doubt whether the author believes her legend or not.

Blackwood has an excellent paper on "Bush Life in Queens- land ;" another on "Epirus," giving a pro-Turkish view of the situation; and a satire, in which a litiahommedan gives his idea of the civilisation of the West, and its influence. His notion is summed up in this—that the Christian is hungry for money,. and the Mahommedan is not, which is true of most Christians and. some Mahommedans, but is only one-tenth part of the difference between them.

The freshest article in Macmillan is one on the late Mr. Delane, far too exclusively laudatory, and distinctly -wrong as to some points, as, for example, the paragraph about Lord Palmerston, who was abused for years in the Times before he became Premier, but still generous and appreciative. It brings out the fact that Delane was throughout life a country gentle- man, devoted to horses, and so constantly onhorseback that he was at one period of his life nicknamed the "Centaur."