SOME MAGAZINES.
PERHAPS the most instructive paper in any of the magazines this month has been contributed by Professor Seeley to Macmillan. It is the first of a series of papers upon "Roman Imperialism," and is full of striking thoughts. Mr. Seeley holds that a tendency towards monarchy was manifested by the masses of Rome throughout the Republican period, that personal government was established several times, as under Caius Gracchus, Marius, Pompey, and finally Caasar, and that the desire, intensified by a necessity for strong centralized government, finally resulted in the Empire, under which, however, the aristocratic constitution of society was for ages still maintained. The origin of this desire was the in- terest taken by the people in foreign politics, their fear for their independence, their sense, a sense manifested through- out their history, that the aristocracy could not cope with great emergencies. "What made the people give supreme power to Marius, and continue it to him for five years? First, the failure of the aristocratic government to carry on the war with Jugurtha ; afterwards, the imminent danger of the empire from the Cimbri and Teutones. What made them give extraordinary powers to Pompey, and afterwards extend and increase them ? First, the alarming spread of piracy in the Mediterranean, stopping trade and threatening the capital with famine ; next, the necessity of exerting unusual power to crush Mithridates. What made them give extraordinary powers to Caesar ? Rumours of an intended emigration of the Helvetii, raising apprehensions of a danger similar to that which Italy had experienced from the Cimbric invasion." The final revolution was a triumph, not of liberalism over aristocracy, but of military efficiency over inefficiency. The Roman gained material happi- ness from the change, being released from the fear of invasion, relieved from individual oppression,—the Imperial Government being just, merely because it was less troublesome to judge all alike than to pick and choose,—and, Professor Seeley might have added, obtaining a singularly efficient poor law. He paid for these advantages by the loss of his liberty, and at first by a mental disquietude of a very singular kind, an inability to dis- cover an object in life. We must extract a singularly effective paragraph on this change :—
" But, at the introduction of standing armies, the Roman citizen parted with something else, something which lies not less near than liberty to the springs of human character. He parted with the con- ception of war as the business of life. The great military nation of the world—the nation which had bred up its successive generations to the task of subduing mankind, which by unrivalled firmness of cohesion, by enduring tenacity of purpose, by methodic study and science of destruction, had crushed all the surrounding nationalities, not with a temporary prostration merely, but with utter and permanent dissolution —now found its work done and its occupation gone. The destructive theory of life had worked itself out. The army itself henceforth existed mainly for defence, and the ordinary citizen was no longer con- cerned with hostilities of any kind, whether offensive or defensive. Human life was forced to find for itself a new object. The feelings, the aspirations, the tastes, the habits, that had hitherto filled it and given it dignity, became suddenly out of date. It was as if a change had passed over the atmosphere in which men lived, as if the tempera- ture had suddenly fallen many degrees, making all cu.toms obsolete at once, giving an antiquated and inappropriate look to the whole frame- work of life. It was a revolution which struck with incongruousness and abortiveness the very instinctive impulses of men, placed an irre- concilable difference between habit and reason, preconception and fad, education and experience, temperament and reality, the world within and the world without. This might have a bright side. Poets sang of a golden age returned, and they hymned industrialism in exquisite language :— Agricola incurvo terram molitar aratro: But the real enjoyment of the new state of things was still remote, and required to be nursed by habit. It was an uncomfortable transition when the old instincts and ardours were superannuated and no new animating principle yet discovered. The new bottles had come before the new wine: the loss was felt far more keenly than the gain ; the parting guest was shaken by the hand more warmly than the comer. A sullen torpor reigned in the first years of the millennium of peace, listlessness fell upon the dwellers in that uncongenial Paradise; Mara and Quirinus were dead, and He who was to consecrate peace was scarcely born. Men were conscious of a rapid cooling of the air, of a chill gathering round them—the numbness that follows a great loss, the vacancy that succeeds a great departure :—
In urns and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the flamens at their service quaint."
We hope Mr. Seeley, in his next chapter, will give us, if it be only in a note, his view of the mode of election to the Senate. He is surely very bold in talking of it as an assemblage "of Life Peers freely chosen by a people who like neither self-government nor slavery, but liberty to choose their governors." There were very severe limits set either by prescription or law to this free choice, and till later years, at all events, one of those limits was the one incommunicable quality, birth in particular families.—Dean Stanley contributes a curious account of the posture of the Pope in communion, which is an exceptional one, the Catholic Church with its instinct for antiquarian ceremonial, having endeavoured to retain the old sitting posture of the communicants, and combine it with the modern method of kneeling, and also with the standing attitude of the priest. The result is that the Pope in the act of communion "is in his chair, facing the people, leaning against the back of the chair, so as not to abandon entirely the attitude of sitting—sufficiently erect to give the appearance of standing, with his head and body bent down to express the reverence due to the sacred elements," a complex attitude suggestive of the singular dexterity of the Roman Court in compromise. Miss Yonge'e "Children's Literature of the Last Century" is full of entertaining gossip and accurate criticism (e. g., her remark on the bright cold- ness of the " Evenings at Home "), and we quote one passage which conveys a bit of information people will like to bear. The Swiss Family Robinson :—
" Was written by Joachim Heinrich Kampe, tutor to Baron Hum- boldt; and one longs to know whether the pupil's spirit of 'enterprise fired the tutor, or the tutor formed the pupil. The English edition is greatly and advantageously abbreviated. It has been one of the greatest of favourites, until Captain Marryat's nautical criticisms cruelly disclosed its absurdities. To be sure, when one comes to think of it, no one but a German could have thought it practicable to land the whole family in a row of washing-tubs nailed together between planks, and the island did contain peculiar fauni and flora ; but the book is an extremely engaging one for all that, and we dezidedly would prefer reading it at this moment than the rather characterless Master- man Ready by which Marryat superseded it in the youthful library."
Miss Yonge will be glad to hear that the Swiss Family is begin- ning to be read again almost as much as it deserves. Bother Marryat and his nautical knowledge! They did sail in the tubs, and train zebras and ostriches for riding, and grow apples and pines in the same garden, and why should'ut they ? We never met the child yet whom this story did not fascinate, and if some publisher would just have it translated in its old tedious fullness—such a translation we remember thirty years ago—we believe it would have a success like that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The Cornhill .11.fagazine is sufficiently readable, though it con- tains, apart from the two stories, nothing quite so good as Mr. Seeley's essay. The paper, by "A. Cynic," on "Useless Knowledge," will amuse, but is rather laboured, and is only after all a repetition of the old satires upon the British Association, and the savans who were supposed to spend life in ardent researches into the habits of insects. The world will, however, sympathize with the satire on the arrogance which some men of real scientific attain- ment have begun to manifest, an arrogance which sometimes approaches that of the old theologians, and is based on the same assumption, that they and they alone are the depositaries of abso- lute truth. The sketch of "Andrew Marvell," poet, pamphleteer, and politician, will interest a good many whose single idea of him is that he lived in an attic and was paid by his constituents, but we suspect the reviewer ranks his poetic powers a trifle too high. Certainly he does not justify his estimate by quotations or by his descriptions, from which we should judge Marvell to have been an early Barham, applying powers almost identical in kind to political purposes. To our minds, the best paper in the number is a sketch of Greenland, written in the half serious style which is happily disappearing, but still full of keen and not unkindly observation. It appears that coffee plays in Greenland the part played•by alcohol in more civilized regions. The Esquimaux ruin them- selves through their fondness for it. Alcohol is prohibited, except on rare occasions, and coffee is very dear :— " Kavit,' or coffee, notwithstanding its high price, seems to be the article chiefly in demand. Whatever else may be wanted, kavit must be had, and to procure this a woman will allow her children ta go about like half-skinned seals; and her husband to want the most common necessaries. No spirits being allowed to be sold, the natives take coffee instead, and to such an extent that it has been not inaptly styled the curse of Greenland.' For a family to consume one and a half pound per diem, is no uncommon extravagance ; and the polite little trader turns to his books, and shows me that some families, when in luck (the father having killed a white whale or many seals), will use as much as five pounds of coffee daily. Half of this is wasted in the preparation. The green beans are roasted in a pot, or on a flat stone, until they are charred black ; they are then smashed up with a stone in an old leather mitten, without fingers, until they are roughly bruised, when they are thrown by the handful into water and boiled for some time. The result is a liquid, black enough in all conscience, with half-beans floating about in it, and very bitter; but it is strong, and that is the main thing. A bit of caedied sugar is taken into the mouth, and the coffee is sipped, the sugar meanwhile dissolving, and imparting a certain degree of sweetness to the bitter liquid Herr Assistant asks a hulking- looking Greenlander standing at the door with his hands in his pockets why is he not out seal-hunting? He gives a growl and replies, 'I have bad no kavit to-day ;' and then, as if correcting himself, Besides, there is a hole in my kayak, and my boy is not well, and — ;' but the real truth was no ' kavit.' Just as I sun talking to him, a little boy who is working for me begs a few skillings on account, as he is out of kavit,' and finds it impossible to get along without his accustomed beverage. Then arrive two brothers from a distant settlement with blubber and skins, which net nearly £2. What do they buy? Some bread, some butter, some tobacco, a little powder and shot; the rest, all goes in coffee and sugar."
Blackwood, besides a political paper on the Church Bill in the Lords, remarkable for its unhesitating acceptance of the principle of concurrent endowment in its most extreme form, namely, the direct payment by the State of equal salaries to the priests of the three creeds, and for the latent contempt with which the writer evidently regards the Bishops, whose conduct, he says, has done much to accelerate their expulsion from the Peers; and an exhaustive and most valuable sketch of the recent history of the Feejee Islands, written, we should imagine, by the Consul, who pleads with great force for authority to restrain the English settlers at present amenable to no law; contains a very suggestive paper on earthquakes and volcanoes. The writer believes the hypothesis of a sea of fire in the centre of the planet to be untenable, —giving reasons which esrtainly look plausible,—and attributes earthquakes and volcanoes alike to electric action. He thinks that "the zone of electric action in the atmosphere may be regarded (speaking roundly) as extending to a height of six or eight miles ; the grander zone of similar action in the crust of the earth may reasonably be regarded
as having a depth considerably greater. Here, then, have we not an amply adequate and most intelligible cause of the increasing temperature observed in the very small depth of earth's crust which is accessible to us, without any need for the extravagant hypothesis of a central molten mass in immediate contact with the surface of our planet—extending, in fact, continuously almost up to the soles of our feet ?" Earthquakes, then, are thunderstorms in the earth, the electricity which passes easily through metalliferous rocks becoming in places dammed up, and accumulating "at such places until it acquires the power or tension requisite to overcome the resistance; and thereupon it forces a passage explosively, or by a grand discharge,—more terrible by far than if the whole artillery of the world were discharged in a concentrated volley. What is the result ? A vast heat is generated (electricity fuses everything—it is the grandest heat-developer in nature) ; the rocks are expanded, rent, in some cases actually fused ; the subterranean lakes and rivers—the reservoirs of water which exist everywhere below the surface, and which in Genesis are called the fountains of the great deep—are vapourized, instantaneously converted into steam ; and the result of this great expansion, or explosion, in the ground beneath us is a concussion or rupture of the subjacent rocky strata, the effects of which reach the surface, producing the various phenomena of the earthquake."
Fraser contains no paper this month of original or very great interest. The " Comtist Utopia," though readable, is a mere expansion of Professor Huxley's epigram, that Combo's system is Catholicism minus Christianity, and adds nothing either to the world's knowledge of Comte, or to its power of explaining why a philosopher, whose views on many points can be presented in so contemptible a light, should be of all philosophers the one whose followers approach most nearly the character of adoring disciples. It is true enough, no doubt, that the system " would restore authority, but would found it on reason frankly and unre- servedly ;" but that does not explain in the least why some of the most revolutionary minds of our age should desire to restore authority in the extreme form in which it would be restored by Positivism, if once triumphant; or why minds which revolt against the creeds because they are so absolute, should be disposed, in the case of this one creed, to exaggerate absolutism, and to hold that even the aberrations of the master are, in the old technical sense, revelations to be humbly accepted as those of a wisdom beyond the scrutiny of reason. Of all the peculiarities of Comtism, the faculty of adoration it evokes in its disciples is, to our minds, the least explicable, and it certainly is not explained by this very thin essay on Comte's organization of his predicted Church, which, being as it is, a mere copy of the Catholic, is, undoubtedly, the least original work of his powerful mind. The Comtists are as devout as the currency doctors, one of whom in a paper called simply" Currency," advocates a system which we know scarcely how to describe. He is apparently in favour of two alternative plans, free banking, as it is called, or liberty to anybody to issue notes, —a plan which would be unanswerable, were all men competent to judge of the true value of a signature,--and a State issue of gold notes, that is, of notes always redeemable on demand. But he adds to the second alter- native this remarkable rider :—" So far, we do not venture to disapprove ; but if the State restricts its own notes to a gold basis, it must not forbid others from issuing notes (say of ten pounds or twenty pounds and upwards) upon the basis of all tangible property. Then distressed traders, who had property not instantly marketable, would get 'accommodation.'" Why would they more than they do now ? The notion is, we presume, that Smith owning ten houses in the Strand worth £20,000, might in time of panic issue, say, £10,000 worth of notes on the security of his house property. But who would take them except those who knew the value of his property, and knowing it, would take his bill now. His note would be merely a promise to pay by and by, and nothing in the law now stops his issuing such promise except indeed the stamp, and the necessity of signature on each transfer. How would a mere right to make small bills payable to bearer keep such bills from unknown issuers afloat ? If it did not, the power would be useless and confusing ; if it did, surely the system would be equivalent to free banking without its greatest advantage,—the mobility of every species of property, a mobility uselessly restricted by the large amount fixed upon the note. There is a continuation of a slight, but accurate, sketch of Anglo-Indian society ; an extremely well-written account of an ascent of Mount Blanc, made on purpose to break up the absurd Trades' Union once maintained by the guides of Chamouni, and called "Poaching on Mont Blanc a Dozen Years Ago ;" an expla- nation of the reason why "workmen do not go to church," which
least of the nebulm are systems of stars wholly external to that which we call our universe :—
"If these views be accepted, we shall have to look upon the world of stars as made up of all classes of clustering aggregations, besides strange wisps and sprays extending throughout space in the most fan- tastic convolutions. Then also, while dismissing the idea that the nebulas as a class are external systems, we may accept as highly pro- bable the conclusion that some of the spiral or whirlpool nebulas really lie far beyond the confines of our system. For we see in these objects the very picture of what the new views show our sidereal system to be. There are the spiral whorls corresponding to the double ring of the Milky Way ; there are faint outlying streamers corresponding to the phantom star-streams traced by Sir John Herschel ; there also, are bright single stars and miniature clusters,—nay, there also may even be recognized large knobs or lobes of clustering stars, forming no inapt analogue of the Magellanic clouds."
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