SOME MAGAZINES.

NOVEMBER is always a good month for the Magazines, the pub- lishing trade then beginning to be active, and this time they are so full of matter that it is a little difficult to notice them within any reasonable limits. The three new Magazines take up a great deal of room. As the Rector of Lincoln says in the Fortnightly Review, in the very bitter and humourous paper on "Books and Critics," noticed elsewhere :—" Those vener- able old wooden three-deckers, the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, still put out to sea, under the com- mand, I believe, of the Ancient Mariner, but the active war- fare of opinion is conducted by the three new iron monitors, the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, and the Nineteenth Century. In these monthlies the best writers of the day vie with each other in soliciting our jaded appetites on every conceivable subject. Indeed, the monthly periodical seems destined to supersede books altogether." This is the most readable article in the Fortnightly, though we do not forget Mr. Morley's account of Raynal's "History of the Indies," a book which seemed to Grimm "a monument worthy to pass to the remotest posterity," which raised its author to such a pinnacle of fame that the House of Commons was believed to have suspended its sittings till the Usher had found him a place—a myth, of course, the House being as incapable then of recognising Raynal as of honouring any giant of literature now—and which is now almost totally for- gotten. Mr. Morley says not one hundred persons now living ever read two chapters of it, but that is, we believe, an unwitting exaggeration. Books often drift into little bays, indentations in the ocean of thought, and there are very few Anglo-Indians who read at all who have not bought or read " Raynal," which in an English dress and with quaint cuts has still a kind of circulation on the bookstalls of the Indian Presidency towns. Writing from a recollection of twenty years ago, we should say that Raynal knew more facts than Mr. Morley imagines, and that he had got hold of manuscripts he hardly under- stood, but that is not the secret of the importance of the book, It gave a concrete basis to the horror of Christianity which dis- tinguished the pre-Revolutionary epoch, and asserted the right of the lower races of mankind to equal justice with the higher,— a right which the French, of all civilised races, to this day deny least in theory. Raynal, a profligate abbe, probably believed very little of his own teaching, but it profoundly modified con- temporary opinion, and among other singular effects, probably made the character of Toussaint l'Ouverture, who used to spell over Raynal's volumes in his cabin. Mr. Lowe gives ua the in- opportune speculation on the value of the Colonies and India, to which we replied last week ; and the " Conversations" between Thiers and Nassau Senior are continued, the topic this time being the overthrow of the Monarchy in 1848. M. Thiers' account of those transactions, romancer though he certainly was, looks true, and brings out three new points,—one, that Thiers would have mowed the people down as freely as he did in the 'time of the Commune ; another, that the King was wonderfully obstinate as well as ruse ; and a third, that the Monarchy of July was extraordinarily deficient in physical force. There really was not the force in Bugeaud's hand to conquer Paris, if Paris fought. The narrative, however, though interesting, is scarcely as amusing as Mrs. Crawford's sketch of M. Thiers in Macmillan, to which he himself largely contributed. This is full of gossip of the instruc- tive kind,—at least we feel we know Thiers better when we know that his mother was a Levantine Greek named Amie—Thiers knew a Ilornaie patois by ear, and found it help him in his study of the Iliad—and that his father was a vicious kind of Southern Micawber, claiming Punic descent, who, bred a barrister, sank into a dock porter, having intermediately been, among other things, the M. Blanc of Southern Italy. He was a humorous sort of scoundrel, whom Thiers bad to bribe for his consent to his wedding, and then to keep away from the ceremony by the queer device of buying for three entire weeks alt the places in all the coaches from Carpentras, where Thiers senior lived, to Lyons. The Jews used to arrest him on the speculation that Thiers, then Minister, would pay to be rid of the scandal. Mrs. Crawford says that Thiers was essentially a man of finesse and not of violence, but admits that till later life• he had in him a kind of pitilessness for all below him. Why did they not get on as well as he had done ? He seems, too, if we understand a half-told story, to have behaved outrageously to his first love, a beautiful girl of Aix, to whom he was betrothed. He would not fulfil his engagement, and when her father insisted and insulted him, Thiers challenged him. The match was broken off, the young lady died of grief, and Thiers, 4' in extreme old age, shed tears over her letters." George Eliot should have read that story before she finished her murder- ous dissection of Tito, an early Thiers in all but courage,. the Franco-Greek having, with all Tito's other faults, the daring and energy of a bloodhound. This paper in Macmillan is worth the price of the magazine three times over, though Mrs. Crawford grows tiresome for half a minute over Thiers's upholstery. Of course Tito liked to have pretty things about him.

The Contemporary is very good, too. We do not see how a political paper can be better than Mr. Goldwin Smith's, on " The Slaveowner and the Turk," a singularly moderate and convincing description of the analogy between English opinion of the- American struggle and English opinion on this great Eastern war. The same people indulged in the same shouts over. the first victories of the bad cause, wrote insolences ins favour of the losing side, and when the right triumphed, accepted its ,success with an equanimity hardly distinguish- able from pleasure. The upper classes will be as enthusiastic three years hence for General Lazareff as they are to-day for General Grant. There never was a closer parallel, even to the eternal parade of English interests, which clearly indicated interference against a Power which, once victorious, would in- fallibly declare war on England and overrun Canada. The whole paper may be studied with advantage even by ardent 'rurcophiles, if they wish in good time to bo able to retreat from a position which in a year or two will have become not a little ridiculous.. Professor Newman gives us a denunciation of " the War Power," the right of the British Government to declare war without consulting the people, which we cannot discuss, having no power of comprehending Mr. F. Newman's views of history ; and Professor Beyschlag finishes his extremely able defence of the authenticity of the Gospel of John, a defence based upon a distinct view of the relation of that Gospel to the other three, but full also of shrewd little considerations of external evidence like the following, the first of which, as to the authorship, is nearly unanswerable. Any forger would have attributed the Gospel to an author who might have known the facts 1. The Gospel bears no name : it is only by a complex process of reasoning, for which primitive Christendom was not at all fitted, that we ;conclude the author to be the Apostle John. That is at once an evidence that the ancient Church, when it ascribed it to John, must• have rested its conclusion upon information independent of the sub- stance of the book, and it completely excludes the notion of its spuri- ousness. At least, where is there another instance in literary history of a spurious book not mentioning anywhere the name of the person to whom it was to be ascribed ? 2. The Gospel which concludes xx, 81. has an appendix which is absent in no MS., and is, therefore, very ancient (chap. xxi.). In this some of those who survived the Evangelist (ver. 24) relate a personal incident concerning him, in order to explain a saying of Josue from which it had been wrongly concluded that John would not die (v or. 23). When could there be such an interest concern- ing the death of John as to require this explanation ? Twenty or thirty years after his death, when the saying that he would not die must have received its refutation in the fact that ho was dead ? Or imme- diately after his death, when the expectation that ho would not die, that at least he would survive the return of his Lord, was painfully proved a delusion ? This testimony of the twenty-first chapter, then, in all probability, extends back right up to the open grave of John and into the most familiar circle of his friends."

Equally good, though on points dreamy, is Canon Westcott's paper on "The Resurrection of Christ," a real contribution to the literature of the subject, which leaves in us a regret that the those " lights " in the story of author does not work out for us

the Resurrection which he thinks are only just beginning to dawn.. He means by that, we apprehend, that a more certain and defi- nite view of the relation between body and spirit is obtainable from this narrative than we yet perceive. His reply to the frequent assertion that the idea of Resurrection was in that day " in the air " is almost perfectly complete. The idea of resur-

rection was in the air, but the people expected resurrections either like that of Lazarus, that is, restorations to the conditions of earthly life, or apparitions of a spirit. No resurrection like that of Christ, in the same, yet a wholly transfigured body, had

ever entered their heads ; and so invincible was the prejudice against it, " that the popular conceptions of a carnal Resurrection very speedily overpowered the teaching of the New Testament in the early Church." If the Contemporary will publish, or rather

search for—for it never objected to publish them—strongly reasoned defences of this kind of the orthodox faith, it will fill a considerable place in the great polemic of the age. Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt in " Greek Art at Rome," gives us a thoughtful account of the first development of Christian ecclesiastical architecture, which he traces in great part to the deep impression left by the times of persecution, omitting, however, to mention that recoil against splendour, and adornment, and " earthliness " which was undoubtedly felt for a time, just as it lingers at this moment among English Dissenters ; and Dr. Donaldson offers a paper on the characters of Plautus, which brings out with force some of the characteristics of life in Rome, but otherwise fails to interest us. We want a full description of Plautus's rank among playwrights, which is not precisely settled by denying that he was a poet. We fail to see anything in him to raise him above some such rank as Sheridan holds in our own literature, but his influence was so profound that the defect must be in our own incapacity to comprehend, rather than in him. Was he among dramatists what the author of " Gil Blas " is among novelists, or more, or much less ?

The Nineteenth Century has at least four papers of value. The first, by Mr. Gladstone, on " The County Franchise," has already been discussed as what it is, a political manifesto of grave importance ; and the second, Mr. A. Forbes's account of Russians, Turks, and Bulgarians at the theatre of war has been quoted ad nauseam. Mr. Forbes declares the Russian supply departments to be

corrupt, which is, we have no doubt, true, and the Russian Staff officers to be dilettanti, which is probably true of individuals only, denounces the Turks as barbarians, who murder the wounded, but pours out the vials of his contempt upon the Bulgarians, who, he thinks, have the vices which keep races always subject. They were, he says, debarred from any even the meanest employ- ment, but their " sedulous industry under arduous condi- tions" has made them comfortable, and the Turk could be bribed into letting them alone, and indeed when he might have desolated their country between the Danube and the Balkans, he did not do

so. Mr. Forbes therefore compares them with British labourers, and has evidently no sympathy with them whatever. Indeed he de- clares that when they got the chance, they were as barbarous as the Turks, while in freedom they are unendurably bumptious, and given to avarice and pecuniary cheating. We seem to have heard all those things said before about Irishmen under the penal laws, and Italians before 1860, and Negroes at all times ; and they all, even if true—and they are strongly denied by other observers—form no justification for oppression, which the Englishman somehow is so ready to justify, yet never endures ; and to do him justice, unless maddened by panic, never as a ruler sanctions on his own account. Messrs. Lockyer and Hunter offer a very noteworthy theory on the recurrence of Indian famines in cycles. They affirm, on the testimony of the ablest astronomers, that a reduction in the sun-spots indicates a reduction of solar energy ; that this reduction is cyclical, attaining its maximum

every eleven years ; and that it either causes or is coincident with a decrease in the rainfall, which rises above the mean when 'the spots are frequent, and falls below the mean when they disappear :—

" No famine in Madras has been recorded from 18]0 to 1877 caused by a drought lying entirely outside the minimum group of sun-spots and rainfall (as shown in the foregoing tables). The only drought which could be claimed as an exception, 1858-55, extended over two years 'within the group and the year immediately preceding them. It is :shown as an exception in Table III."

This theory is supported by a mass of facts and tables, and the deduction drawn that we have in some way to conserve the water of the plentiful years, so as to make up for the deficiency of the droughty years. Colonel Chesney, in a subsequent paper, in which the favourable side of irrigation schemes is stated with great force, would effect this by extending irrigation, not as a means of improving cultivation, so much as a method of in- surance, and would secure a dividend on the works by a cess, to be levied and managed by the people. He does not oppose railroads, as most of the irrigation men do, but says they are sure to be made; and our next task must be, not to secure food to the people—the railway would do that—but money to pay for it. Ile does not, however, tell us how we are to provide against the drying-up of our water stores which occurs in famine years, or how we are to persuade the people to stand a new and very heavy addition to their direct taxes, and disposes of the charge of fever produced by irrigation works rather summarily by saying we have not yet perfected the irrigation system. Can we perfect it without excessive cost ? Sir Erskine Perry gives us an account of a morning with Comte, remarkable chiefly for its testimony to Comte's overweening vanity ; and Mr. Wilson offers a history of the Marshalate, which is an invaluable record of facts, but contains rather too many of them. They obscure the drift of the article, which is that the Due do Broglie and the Marshal have from the first persistently endeavoured to compel France to submit to a " Conservative Government,"—that is, a MacMahon dictator- ship, to be followed at the expedient moment by a Monarchy.

Blackwood has its usual political article, in which it is stated that "the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire have been changed from a mere diplomatic expression to an accom- plished fact," a statement already too antiquated for discussion ; but subsides at last into a mild proposal of a federal union of the Danubian States, with which Turkish independence and integrity are hopelessly inconsistent. It has also a good account of Captain Meadows Taylor, the Indian Uncovemanted statesman, but the rest of the " padding" is almost exclusively geographical, and not so interesting as Blackwood's geographical papers gener- ally are. Montenegro is rather a used-up subject, and Captain Burnaby's rides do not teach us much, except that personal courage enables a man to go anywhere, but is not a full substi- tute for judgment. Mr. Theodore Martin continues his trans- lations of Heine, which strike us in their simple directness as singularly good. Take this as a specimen :— " Sie Wen ,rich gequitlet.

"People have teased and vexed me, Worried me early and late ; Some with the love they bore me, Other some with their hate.

They drugged my glass with poison, They poisoned the bread I ate Some with the love they bore me, Other some with their hate.

But she, who has teased and vexed me, And worried me far the most,— She never hated me, never, And her love I could never boast."

By far the hest paper in Fraser, and one of the best in the Magazines, is the terrible account of the hop-pickers, among whom the writer lived some days. There are respectable hop-pickers, but the majority are what they look, the very refuse of the population of London, out for a sort of

picnic, debauched almost beyond conception. " The week," says the writer, " brought Boccaccio home to him," and he gives this account of the only educated woman he met :—

4, In one tent there wore five mon and one single woman. This woman was one of the characters of the encampment. She was not more than twenty-seven, and in other days and different circumstances she must have been beautiful. Her beauty, however, was of the most sensuous type. Slightly under the middle height; long curling brown hair and plenty of it ; round and rather large head ; regular features of the Greek typo ; rich dark olive complexion ; figure as full as con- sisted with grace ; carriage that would have done honour to any ball- room. Such was the person of ' Ellen,' the only name by which she was known. It was evident that she had been highly educated. Her voice was low and cultivated, her language choice, and now and then a French or an Italian phrase would slip from her tongue. There was a slight remnant of old taste in her dress, and of old modesty in her manners. Her complexion was just beginning to show the first trace of fading, and her features and figure were on the verge of that expan- sion which is called bloatednoss, In a very little time Ellen's beauty will be a thing of the past. She occupied her tent by preference, a thing she did not attempt to conceal or excuse. On the contrary, there were times when she made a boast of it. She drank deeply and with every one who would invite her, kasha was never drunk in the common acceptation of the word; she only became communicative—revoltingly so to any one save an habitual hop picker."

There is a fierce article on "The West India Question," advo- cating the supersession of the negro by the coolie ; and a curiously pleasant account of native education in the Burmese provinces, where the priests, who have taught the people for ages, have had the sense to link their system into the new one introduced by Government. They circulate the Govern- ment school books, and compete for Government grants, until 874 monasteries and 255 lay schools, attended by 33,000 scholars, accept strict Government inspection. The lads have a curious aptitude for arithmetic—an American arithmetic trans- lated into Burmese was eagerly bought up—and the teachers seem to have abandoned the Burmese system of numbers for good and all. There is some root of enlightenment in the Burmese priest- hood, which makes them easy to work with, while the attraction they have for Europeans makes the latter much less exigeant and stand-offish than they are on the continent of India.

"For Percival," the novel by an unknown hand, advances easily in the Cornhi//, the writer attracting us rather by flashes of a slightly bitter, but not ungracious humour, than by his situa- tions ; and there is ,a most charming bit of padding, an account of Campanella, the Dominican monk, who in 1G22, while imprisoned for attacking the Papacy, published some philosophical poems. Campanella was one of the small group of Italians, among whom the greatest name is Bruno, who anticipated the modern methods of thought, and declared that knowledge could be gained only from interrogating Nature. This principle was carried out freely, in defiance of Rome, and amid the igorance of that age led sometimes to the strangest results. Campanella, for instance, held that the world was a living organism, on which men lived as lice on an animal. Ile believed, however, strongly in God, and his real thought is, perhaps, best expressed in this sonnet, which Darwin might approve :— " The world's the book where the eternal Sense Wrote his own thoughts ; the living temple whore Painting his very self, with figures fair Ho filled the whole immense circumference. Hero, then, should each man read, and gazing, find Both how to live and govern, and beware Of godlessness; and seeing God all-where, Be bold to grasp the universal mind. But we, tied down to books and temples dead, Copied with countless errors from the life,— These nobler than that school sublime we call. 0 may our senseless souls at length be led To truth by pain, grief, anguish, trouble, strife! Turn we to read the one original !"

We ust quote one more the description of self-love, and send our readers to the collection for themselves ;-

" Self-love fools man with false opinion

That earth, air, water, fire, the stars wo see, Though stronger and more beautiful than we, Feel nought, love not, but move for us alone.

Then all the tribes of earth except his own Seem to him senseless, rude—God lets them be: To kith and kin next shrinks his sympathy, Till in the end loves only self each one.

Learning he shuns, that he may live at ease ; And since the world is little to his mind, God and God's ruling Forethought he denies.

Craft he calls wisdom ; and perversely blind, Seeking to reign, erects new deities : At last 'I make the Universe l' he cries."