THE MAGAZINES.

THE Fortnightly is this month perhaps the most readable of the graver magazines, M. Emile de Laveleye contributing an interest- ing paper on the " European Situation," Mr. G. II. Darwin a quantity of curious statistics on the marriage of first cousins, and Mr. Sidney Colvin a charming history of the pavement in the metropolitan church of the Virgin in the city of Siena. M. de Lavaleye looks upon war in Europe as a certainty, believing that the conquest of Alsace is "an inexpiable cause of war" between Germany and France, and that the Ultramontane party through- out the world mean to destroy German ascendancy, and he re- views the position of the States in the event of the quarrel reach- ing a head. He holds that Russia would arm to preserve peace, and if Germany were aggressive, would be hostile to her to a degree which no territorial concession could soothe, the Emperor Alexander desiring aggrandisement in Asia, and not in Europe. Austria would also be hostile, the Chambers, which are pro-German, being unable to prevent the Emperor, who is necessarily anti-German, from giving orders to the army which would render the maintenance of peace impossible. Italy, shut off from Central Europe by her moun- tains, and inclined always to play the " sagacious " part, would remain neutral, as would Belgium, which would refuse the offer Germany is inclined to make of restoring to her the terri- tories of ancient Burgundy. On the Continent, there- fore, Germany, without any great ally, would have to face France, Russia, and possibly Austria, and it remains only to consider the part which would be played by Great Britain. M. de Laveleye thinks that, supposing Belgium not attacked, in which case England would defend Belgium in order to preserve Antwerp as her port of debarcation on the Continent, she would ultimately be forced to uphold Germany. Germany would be fighting against Ultrainontanism. France is Britain's historic enemy, and the inevitable ally of France is Russia, with which Power Britain has so many causes of difference. The stronger Germany is, the less need would she have to offer Russia concessions in Asia of a kind to be dangerous to Great Britain. This argument seems to us rather weak. That the religious character of the war, if it proved to be religious, might greatly affect English action may be true — though even in that case England could best preserve the integrity of Italy by joining France—but M. de Laveleye greatly over-estimates the English concern for their Asiatic position. They are quite ready to fight for it, but they do not lay plans about it, and they would join in a European war, if they joined in it, without more thought of Central Asia than of a province in the planet Mars. Our own strong impression is that they would not join until one of the combatants seemed likely to be de- feated dangerously, but if they did, they would be guided much more by the sympathies of the moment than by any settled scheme of policy. If they were for once moved by cool reason, they would join France, for only by joining France could England assume the position which M. de Laveleye allows to be her natural one,—that of soul of a great coalition. In joining Germany against Europe, England would, for the first time in her history, be aiding the single Power which has grown too strong against a coalition of its feebler enemies.—Mr. Darwin has been expending a vast amount of trouble, time, and ingenuity upon an effort to discover the number of first-cousin marriages in England, and his impression is " that there is not an error of one per cent. in assert- ing that amongst the aristocracy the proportion of first-cousin marriages to all marriages is 41 per cent., and that for the upper middle-classes, and the urban and rural districts, the error in the per- ceutage is somewhat less, and lastly, for London decidedly less." The basis of his calculation, however, does not satisfy him com- pletely, and it does not satisfy us at all. He takes the number of marriages among persons of the same name, and on the faith of some tables compiled from peerages and the like assumes that a certain proportion of these are cousins. Of course he pleads

only probability for his hypothesis, but he leaves out of the account some possibilities which may materially affect his probability. For example, for cousins to marry they must be thrown together. But the cousins who are thrown together may be sisters' children in an abnormal proportion, and probably would be, the probability that a woman will marry at a distance being indefinitely less than the probability that a man will. He wanders to earn bread ; she stops at home to eat it. If this dis- turbance is serious, it would upset all Mr. Darwin's calculations, his same-name marriages including a lower fraction of cousin- marriages than he assumes ; and in fact all will be doubtful till he has positive figures, either from counting the marriages in some large town, which is quite possible, or from the returns made under an Act of Parliament. Sir J. Lubbock made a mistake in asking for such returns under the census ; he should have asked for the addition of the relationship to the particulars given to the registrar. That would be given at once, without any idea of impertinence in the inquiry, and in ten years would furnish a sufficient body of figures. Mr. Darwin's general con- clusion from his inquiries is that consanguineous marriage has no effect upon the offspring, not even the intensification of morbid tendencies, but he admits that the unquestionable evidence is as yet too little.

The Contemporary of this month calls for very little comment. Its conductors have succeeded in giving to their journal a tone which enables big people to write in it without derogation, and

when Mr. Gladstone explains in it his views about the Act regu- lating Public Worship, and the Duke of Argyll gives his opinion on the automatic character ascribed to animals, its readers are perforce well satisfied. If we were to remark that Mr.

Gladstone judged as a writer is rather wearisome, and the Duke of Argyll judged as a philosopher is just a little thin, they would retort, very justly, that the interest of Mr. Gladstone's views on the Church does not depend on his style, and that they care to know what a Duke who is also a naturalist has to say about the limits of instinct, and there is no just answer to be made. Mr. Gladstone's thoughts of to-day may to-morrow be laws, and the views of the eminent even on subjects on which their eminence cannot help them excite a curiosity which is not illiberaL Apart, however, from these two papers, the number strikes us as very nearly up to the average.—Mr. Matthew Arnold is getting, perhaps, a little too lengthy in his review of objections to "Literature and Dogma," but he propounds in this chapter what is, at all events, a clear theory of the genesis of the Fourth Gospel, and maintains it with a considerable array of evidence.

His theory is that of a Greek of high philosophical acquirements took down from John's mouth all the logics of Jesus he could

obtain, and placed them in a setting of his own,—a very different theory, indeed, from Baur's, and a much more plausible one. It is, as we believe, inaccurate, though St. John may have employed an amanuensis who did not always understand his thought ; but Mr. Arnold defends it in a style which will attract all interested in the discussion, and especially those who can endure his worst critical defect,—his affectation of certainty in most of his deduc-

tions. There is, for instance, grave criticism in this passage, though Mr. Arnold does choose to put his assertions as peremp- torily as if he had just been talking with Jesus over the accuracy of a Times' report of his sayings :— " For, according to all the rules, we will not say of criticism, but of common-sense—according to all rules of probability, and of speakers speaking in character, and not violently and unaccountably deserting H- eim anything be more incredible than that Jesus should have actually spoken to Nicodemus, or John the Baptist to a disciple, the latter part of the speeches attributed to them in the third chapter of our Gospel? Let us take first the speech to Nicodemus. It is probable that the real end of the dialogue is to bo found in the tenth verse : 'Art thou Israel's teacher, and knowest not these things ? ' But our Evangelist had two other logic of Jesus : ' We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen, and ye receive not our testimony ;' and 'If I tell you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things ? ' which admitted of being placed in this connection ; so here i he places them. This, we say, is probable ; but what is certain is, that Jeans did not speak the verse which follows these two logic, the thirteenth : 'And no man hath ascended up into heaven save he that came down from heaven, the Son of Man.' That is a variation on a primitive theme of Jesus. I am the bread that came down from heaven, inserted here by our theological lecturer, because he knew that it was a theme dwelt upon by Jesus, and thought that he saw here a natural place for it. A genuine logion of Jesus follows, bearing every mark of being still quite or almost in its original form, but woven into this con- text by our lecturer, and owing its connection with what precedes simply to his conjunction and: 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth on him may have everlasting life.' Then enters the theological lecturer, and continues (one may almost say) lecturing in his own proper person till the end of the speech, from the sixteenth verse till the twenty-first. For who, that has studied the sayings of Jesus well, can ever believe that Jesus said : For God so loved the world that he gave his only- begotten Son, to the end that whosoever believeth in him should have everlasting life, and the rest ? Our Evangelist does not, how- ever, in these verses think he is inventing; for he is going all the time upon three primitive themes of Jesus : lie that believeth on me hath everlasting lift ; I came not to judge the world, but to save the world; I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. On these genuine logia he is going, and he merely amplifies and repeats them, developing them, in his own judgment, naturally, and as it was to be supposed that Jesus himself did."

—We have read Mr. Pope Hennessy's paper on " The Tory Party and the Catholics" with an attention which, when it was finished, we found it scarcely to deserve. His inner thought seems to be that there is a natural link between Catholicism and Toryism, but he hesitates to state it, probably from a fear that Toryism would scarcely benefit in England from evidence of such an alliance. It is, nevertheless, quite true that in Europe and America Catholics are usually Conservatives, and that they may yet find a bond of union in denominational religious education.—Mr. Grant Duff's Diary in India does not improve, but he tells in the last paragraph of this chapter a capital story .—

" A tigress who lived in captivity at Lahore made her escape onedayt and not unnaturally startled the station pretty considerably. At length the gardener in whose domain her cage was situated went to the proper authority, and begged to be ordered to take the runaway back. Order you to take it back I' was the reply—' I'll give you no such order—it would be ordering you to be killed.'—' Not at all, sir,' said the man. ' Only give me the order, and I will take the tigress back.'—'111 give you no such order, but you may do as you please,' was the rejoinder. Here- upon the man, taking off his turban, walked up to the creature, which was lying in a shrubbery which it had probably mistaken for a jungle, and after a courteous salutation, said to her, 'In the name of the power- ful British Government, I request you to go back to your cage.' At the same time he put his unfolded turban round her neck and led her back. The poor fellow lost his life not long afterwards, while trying the same experiment on a boar, whose political principles were not equally good."

Mr. Grant Duff appears scarcely able to believe in his own story, but there is no inherent improbability in it. The notion that the name of any very powerful entity would act as a charm is widespread in the East, and the Company might easily have had itself worshipped as a deity. The obedience of the tiger was, of course, an accident, probably due to the beast remembering feed- ing-time and the place where it was fed.—Mr. Greg seems to think a great deal of a letter which he has received from Sydney, and which he thinks justifies his recent vaticinations, but he fails to perceive that it may be quoted by his strongest opponents. The writer tells him that the working-men are masters in Sydney, that they always strike at inconvenient times, that they elect the Assembly, and that though New South Wales wants labour dreadfully, no one in the Assembly dare propose to assist immi- gration. The colony is, in fact, to put the letter in brief, governed by a Trades' Union. The result of that must be very shocking, and here it is :—

"The hours of labour are but eight, and wages vary according to the skill of the employed, from ls. to 2s. (occasionally 2s. Gd.) per hour.. These extreme rates, in a country where bread is plentiful and cheap, meat only 4d. per lb., and clothing not dearer than in Europe, are main- tained by the efforts of powerful Trades' Unions, with the knowledge that Parliament dare not propose any scheme of immigration, the effect of which would be to bring competition to the colony and reduce the rate of labour. It must not be imagined that the climate will not per- mit of more than eight hours' daily labour, for most men work on their own account after hours, and will occasionally deign to do so for their employers, under the temptation of extra pay. Land in the suburbs being- cheap, a very large proportion of the labouring class are their own landlords, and many, by the aid of building societies, have erected neat and pretty cottages, surrounded by well-cultivated gardens."

A good many thinkers would be apt to urge that a country in which workmen obtain from 8s. to 20s. a day, and provisions are cheaper that in Europe, and the labourers are not only comfort- ably, but prettily housed, is a country whose organisation has succeeded. Is it Mr. Greg who is going to argue that wealth is an evil, that a country is happy in proportion to the thickness of its population, and that immigration ought to be encouraged even if it makes the population less well off ? If so, why does he not advise that the rich should be heavily taxed, that emigration from Ireland shetkld be forbidden, and that Chinese should be imported wholesale into Australia?

It is a charming number of the Cornhill. Mr. Hardy begins "The Hand of Ethelberta," one of his half-realistic, half-dreamy romances, and if it keeps the promise of these chapters, it will be one of his best. There is a little episode within this fragment, a story hardly two pages long, of the love of a pupil-teacher for a stranger who reeks nothing of her, which is as impressive a tragedy as we remember ever to have read,—a little sorrowful, -crushed poem, that appeals to the reader's heart as long tragedies do not. —The paper on "British Birds and Bird Lovers" is full of

information pleasantly told by one who has closely watched his favourites, and mourns over their destruction, even though it is due, as in parts of Lincolnshire, only to higher cultivation. The larger birds, it would seem, are rapidly disappearing from Great Britain :—"In the case of our larger birds, the enthusiastic col- lector will have to resort, it seems likely, in a very few years, to the dealers. Extermination is rapidly overtaking many of them. The last kite seen in Lincolnshire was shot about 1860. We have only witnessed their magnificent hoverings and great stretch of wing in South Wales. Ravens are banished to the higher mountains like Helvellyn, and to the most inaccessible sea cliffs. Others, such as the snowy owl or Egyptian vulture, are at the best of times very rare visitors, and only driven to us by stress of weather. The eagles, buzzards, and almost all the larger birds of prey are rapidly seeking the furthest corners of the land. The chough is extinct, save in a few favoured localities of the West. Game-preserving and modern agricul- ture do not harmonise with their presence." The smaller birds are driven away by the destruction of their food—the goldfinch, for instance, departing with the thistle—and enormous numbers perish in every sharp winter. Town-bred readers will be sur- prised at the mortality which a " cold snap " can produce :—

" When a bird dies of old age, that curious instinct which is not wholly unknown in the higher animals, warns it to retire into a spot secluded from the busy life of its fellows. It is the rarest thing to find a dead bird save during a frost. Its rigours cause the weaker birds to forget the convenances of happier times, and the stronger instinct of self- preservation supersedes the love of a decorous death. Our northern visitors, the fleldfares and redwings, especially the latter, succumb first to cold. Redbreasts are also speedily affected, and are found before death hopping in yards, outhouses, &c., mere bags of bones. The migratory thrushes, during the severe spell of weather in last Decem- ber, were driven to the abodes of men, and were even picked up dead in West-End thoroughfares. Multitudes of them in their enfeebled condition are knocked down by village boys in the country, and many more shot by the prowling gunners who at such a time appear to spring up from the earth. On the Continent bird-lovers are more humane. During the severe December of 1874, a society formed at Halle gave three meals a day to many hundreds of birds at twenty-two stations in the neighbourhood of the town, believing that the expense will be repaid a

hundredfold by the destruction of noxious insects Few people are aware what havoc a severe winter makes amongst our garden friends. I estimated,' writes Darwin, 'that the winter of 1854-5 destroyed four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds, and this is a tremendous destruction when we remember that ten per cent. is an extraordinarily severe mortality from epidemics with man.'"

Why do naturalists, by the way, as a rule write so well? Is it that no man becomes a naturalist who has not in him a latent poet?—The next paper, the analysis of Horace, " the philosopher of gaiety," is written by some one with keen insight into the nature of the poet who believed a grave philosophy, but lives to mankind as a kind of higher Moore, lives through the gay strains which probably did not express his own nature, but were written to charm the courtlier circles of the society of Rome ; while that on Penelope and other women of Homer is full of fine and thoughtful criticism. We wish we could quote the writer's picture of Nausicaa, the most perfect girl of Greek song, but must content ourselves with this single sentence, which seems to us to describe with great brevity and truth one of the subtlest distinctions in Homer's portraiture of his heroes :- "What is admirable in the description of Circe is its gravity. Circe is not made out particularly wicked or malignant. She is acting only after her kind, like some beautiful but baleful flower—a wreath, for instance, of red briony berries, whereof if children eat, they perish. Nor again is there a touch of the burlesque in the narration The true charm of Circe in the Odyssey, the spirit that distinguishes her from Tannhaiiser's Venus and Orlando's Fate Morgans and Ruggiero's Alcina and Tancred's Armida, lies just in this, that the poet has passed so lightly over all the dark and perilous places of his subject. This delicacy of touch can never be regained by art. It belonged to the con- ditions of the first Hellenic bloom of fancy, to suggest without insist- ence and to realise without emphasis. Impatient readers may complain of want of depth and character : they would fain see the Circe of the Odyssey as strongly moralised as the Medea of Euripides. But in Homer only what is human attains to real intensity. The marvellous falls off and shades away into soft air-tints and delightful dreams."

—The graver paper is on "Art and Morality," a manly, though not thoroughly exhaustive, protest against the doctrine that art is necessarily independent of morals, or rather so far apart from morals that it must be judged by rules in which morality has no place. The writer makes out his case against the fleshly school easily enough, but he has not touched the larger question, whether art can be justified in being untrue,—whether, if Byron had sung, as he could have sung, the praises of asceticism, dis- believing in asceticism all the while, he would or would not have been guilty of an offence against morality. The duty the artist owes to his neighbours is fully expressed, but there is too little of the duty he owes to himself.

Dr. Ferdinand Hiller gives us, in Macmillan, a most attractive

sketch of Cherubini, whom he believes to have been the greatest composer of sacred music in this century, and who seems to have been externally an eccentric and somewhat harsh and rugged man, but internally one governed by his conscience, and full of tenderness and sympathy. He had a peculiarity we never remember to have seen noted before. Noise did not disturb him even in musical composition, but he demanded even of his child- ren that at such moments they should not come too near him. They might make all the row they pleased in a corner of the room, and he was not distracted, but beyond a certain fixed line

in the room they might not go.—Sir Bartle Frere contributes an instructive essay on Zanzibar, which he thinks may be the

centre of a great commerce, but makes the singular blunder of affirming that slavery at its best can only be main- tained and fed by a system of perpetual kidnapping. That statement, often made to induce weak philanthropists to suppress the slave trade, is the exact contrary of the fact, slavery in its worst development being fatal to kidnapping, which reduces the value of slaves too much. The Southern planters of America were deadly enemies of the slave trade, for the simple reason that the importation of foreign stock obtained by the cheap device of stealing them lowered the value of the native breed.—The papers on "Natural Religion," of which the third appears in this number, strike us as, on the whole, rather weak, especially in the writer's estimate of the motives which a man might substitute for the hope of a future life, but there is a profound thought in this :—

" Nature is not heartless or unrelenting ; to say so would be equiva- lent to saying that pity and forgiveness are in all cases supernatural. It may be true that the law of gravitation is quite pitiless, that it will destroy the most innocent and amiable person with as little hesitation as the wrong-doer. But there are other laws which are not pitiless. There are laws under which human beings form themselves into com- munities, and set up law-courts in which the claims of individuals are weighed with the nicest skill. There are laws under which churches and philanthropical societies are formed, by which misery is sought out and relieved and every evil that can be discovered in the world is re- dressed. Nature in the sense in which we are now using the word includes human nature, and therefore, so far from being pitiless, includes all the pity that belongs to the whole human family, and all the pity that they have accumulated and, as it were, capitalised in institutions, political, social, and ecclesiastical, through countless generations."

—Mr. Routledge's sketch of our position in India is well worth reading, though impaired by over-much attention to the opinion of a limited class,—the native who is cultivated, either in the old or the new learning of India. Our rule will not be judged by what we have done for them, which is very little indeed, or as some think, even a minus quantity, but by what we have done for the millions to whom we have secured, by the Roman pcace we have maintained and the ascendancy of Law we have established, exemption from permanent fear. The suppression of Mahratta incursions and dacoit robberies has probably lessened the sum of human misery in Bengal—not by lessening violence only, but by lessening fear of violence—more than all our wars have increased it. That the upper class are becoming disloyal is, however, we agree with Mr. Routledge, too true, and we doubt whether such dis- loyalty is remediable. We can open careers, and we ought to open careers, but our careers give an Asiatic little delight. He does not want " authority " or " influence," so much as the form of power in which the volition of the ruler is an effective instrument.

The most interesting paper in Fraser to us is the history of the International, but the general reader will be most interested in the discussion on politics and the Press. The writer maintains that the secret of the success of the Times is its independence of party, and calls on the conductors of other journals to be equally independent. The illustration is an imperfect one, as the Times, if independent of party, is not independent of the middle- class, whose opinions it anxiously and sometimes, as upon all religious and ecclesiastical questions, timidly reflects. But supposing the writer's theory accepted, has he considered what would be the first consequences of the " independ- ence " he advocates ? Party government would end, for parties would have no means of consistently and perma- nently educating the people in their views. Journalistic debate would end or become a logomachy between individuals, and the representative function of the Press would end, for really independent papers in the essayist's sense would represent men too thoughtful to agree with the usual views of the community. That journalists would elevate their functions by absolute inde- pendence is no doubt true, and we should, with certain reserves, maintain that they were morally bound to express their own ideas ; but then they should be independent not only of party, but of the nation, should be prepared to write the very things which will irritate the mass of their own supporters. The independence ad-

vocated by " E." is nothing but a change of masters, and a party is a better master than either a clique, a middle-class, or a mob.

Blackwood contains an admirable though rose-tinted sketch of "Canada as it now is," from which we learn, among other things, that the statesmen of the Dominion adhere strictly to the English plan of a permanent Civil Service unaffected by political changes ; and the conclusion of the "Abode of Snow," one of those efforts of descriptive geography which are almost peculiar to Blackwood, and among the pleasantest reading offered us by the magazine. The sketch of new books is, as usual, fair and appreciative, the writer, for example, giving full praise to Mr. Green's " History of England," although it is penetrated through and through by Liberal feeling ; but the religious article is sad rubbish. What is the use of asserting that we have no certainty that coal ever was wood ?— " I am perhaps bound to believe my learned informants when they tell me that, had the Creator proceeded as they describe, the result would have been what we see; but I utterly refuse to admit that He certainly did so proceed. Surely more ways than one were open to Him ? He may have performed His work differently from what ap- pears likely to them who think that they follow His footsteps. To take the familiar instance of a bed of coal. It was once, say the men of science, a forest. How can they possibly prove this ? A forest may, by certain processes, be turned into a bed of coal, we will admit. But was the Omnipotent Creator obliged to make a forest first and then to turn it into coal ? What was to prevent Him, if he saw St, from putting such and such an amount of matter at once into the form of coal with- out first making it timber and then transforming it ?"

Grant that the Creator would deceive His creatures in that style, and we have no guarantee for anything, least of all for our belief that He is supremely good. Where is the evidence even of a God, or of our own existence, if reason is to be useless, phenomena illusory, and man merely the victim of a drama played by powers of which he can comprehend neither the methods nor the designs? The theory that God made the world and the Devil made geology, in order that men might disbelieve Moses, is better and more credible than Blacktcood's latest improvement upon Hindooism. The Indian story continues to be lively, but the heroine has made a mistake.