THE MAGAZINES.

Fraser contains this month one paper which will attract every reader in England. It is a sketch written by a fellow traveller of Mr. Buckle -while in the East, and is on many accounts a most singular production. Its writer is evidently divided between a respect for the intellect of his hero amounting almost to worship and a profound contempt for the man, and, as he writes with a kind of restrained incisiveness, the impression left on the reader's mind is one of strong interest mingled with annoying surprise. He accuses Mr. Buckle of vanity, of habitual and excessive cowardice, of which he was not ashamed, of a reckless habit of mocking at all things which other men hold sacred, of a meanness in pecuniary matters which frequently degenerated into a contempt for justice, and leaves besides the impression that his hero was one of the most self-indulgent and effeminate of mankind.

"Style also was an often recurring subject of conversation. He had studied all its artifices, and chiefly in Ef utne, Berkeley, and Burke. His remarks en his own style were so frank, and as they might appear to

some so vain, that I hesitate to repeat them."

"To Hamilton, who had a considerable touch of humour, what appeared to Lim the cowardice and effeminacy of Mr. Buckle, were a source of unconcealed and inextinguishable laughter. But Mr. Buckle liked Hamilton—because he confessed ignorance, and listened with deference, though without conviction ; and Hamilton liked Mr. Buckle because—in the dreadful shock he described himself as having recently experienced on firing a pistol for the first time in his life ; in his certainty of getting drowned or eaten by a shark if he ventured to bathe with us ; in his terror of a dead snake; his fear and hatred of the savages around us, and his declaration that vice is better than ignorance '—he showed himself so laughably different from Hamilton's self. Each was thus to the other an unconscious flattery."

"Truth, indeed, compels mo to say that, during these months of inti- mate acquaintance as fellow-travellers, there were instances in which indignation was roused, not only against what appeared to me dis- torted moral views, but against acts wanting in generosity, if not in justice. How much Mr. Buckle's intellectual views were influenced by his moral disposition, and Low much the expression of that disposi- tion was influenced by his intellectual views—that were a subtle ques- tion, not here to have its solution attempted. Was, for instance, the sharpness with which he sometimes carried his political economy into practice owing chiefly to the iufluence of the former, or of the latter ?"

The truth of all this is, we imagine, that Mr. Buckle was a man who had lived in his library, amidst the luxury of wealthy London life, until he had lost his self-confidence, and the habits which out of London seem luxurious had become second nature. Thus he dressed himself for the Arabian thsert :—" An old black dress-coat his butler, he said, would not have worn, a double- breasted cloth waistcoat, and winter trousers, all over thick flannel under-garments ; a wideawake, with an ample puggery, crowned his spare, stooping figure, covered his bald head, and shaded his unshaven face.' The costume killed him, inducing a perpetual sweating and sense of fatigue, which disabled him from resisting the first touch of real fever. This attacked him at Damascus, its first sign being a slight access of delirium.

"His incoherent utterances were most painful to listen to ; at one moment saying 'How nice, very nice!' was the iced orangeade I had brought Lim, and thanking me, then telling me to go away ; in the midst of all exclaiming 0 my book, my book ! I obeli never finish my book !' and after running on quite incoherently, crying, I know I am talking nonsense, but I cannot help it!' and bursting into tears."

The French doctor who attended him had given him opium, of all things in the world, and in a short time he was attacked by "typhus " fever, and, after three days' illness, expired. His fellow traveller tells nothing of his opinions, and, indeed, conceals many of his ways, "lest he should annoy his friends," but he has

written enough to modify very materially and -very unfavourably the popular impression of Mr. Buckle, whose genius all the while he appears to admit to the full. The few extracts given from Mr. Buckle's letters are usually occupied pith accounts of his own precautions against disease, Arabs, fatigue, and discomfort, but we must quote one more paragraph, describing what is perhaps the external peculiarity of the East.

"Perhaps you may remember how much I always preferred form to colour; but now, owing to the magnificent effect of this, the driest atmosphere in the world, I am getting to like colour more than form. The endless variety of hues is extraordinary. Owing to the transparency of the air, objects are seen, as nearly as I can judge, more than twice the distance they can be seen in England under the most favourable cir- cumstances. Until my eye became habituated to this, I often over- fatigued myself by believing that I could reach a certain point in a cer- tain time. The result is a wealth and exuberance of colour which is hardly to be credited, and which I doubt if any painter would dare to

represent."

That notion of the impression qf colour, which strikes all Asiatic travellers, being the result of the distance they can see, is most striking, and his estimate of the difference is much within the truth. He has allowed for the air but not for the increased intensity of the light, and the actual difference of visual power is within a trifle of four to one. Whether the colours them- selves are not positively brighter than in England, where every- thing tends to drab, is a question we leave to the scientific.

Blackwood has little of interest this month, the best paper, "Visit to an Insurgent Camp," being injured by its close re-

semblance to letters which have already appeared in the daily

papers. Sir Bulwer Lytton continues the essays with which readers of Blackwood have so long been wearied, and which are

full of sentences like these :—" But the world of our day is not the world of Juvenal—no, nor the world of Tacitus nor Petro- nitts ; no, nor is the world of our day the world orSt. Simon, of Rochefoucauld, of Horace Walpole." In a similar style of pompous truism, we may remark that Sir Bulwer Lytton is not Montaigne. An article on the Church of England, which pretends to be impartial, and might have been written by Mr. Henley, is, however, remarkable for a single sentence. The writer believes that tests were ordered by the Apostles :-

" But it by no means follows that, in the Apostolic age, laymen about to be admitted into the order of the priesthood were net constrained by some form of obligation as stringent as any now in use. What other- wise could St. Paul mean in his addresses to Timothy and to Titus ?—to the former, whom he charges, that good thing which was committed unto thee, keep, by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us :' to the latter, when, in reference to the responsibility of a bishop, he says that a bishop shall hold fast the faithful word as he had been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.'"

Five assumptions of vital importance in less than nine lines ! If this is the style of reasoning Dr. Stanley's adversaries adopt his labour is truly useless, for the Gods themselves fight in vain against stupidity.

"The Small House at Allington " continues in Cordial, Mr. Trollope still improving the portrait of his hero with a skill as malicious as if he personally hated him, and readers must still wait for the promised successor to " Romola." But the paper of this month is a notice of " Heinrich Heine," by Mr. Mathew Arnold, one of those exquisite morsels of criticism, expressed in the clearest of words, which only he can write. His theory of Heine's place in literature is, perhaps, best gathered from this paragraph :— "Modern times find themselves with an immense system of institu- tions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules, which have conic to them from times not modern. In this system their life has to be carried forward, yet they haves sense that this system is not of their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational. The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit. The modern spirit is now awake almost everywhere; the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit, be- tween the new wine of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and theold bottles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seventeenth, almost every one now perceives; it is no longer dangerous to affirm that this want of correspondence exists; people are even beginning to be shy of denying it. To remove this want of correspondence is beginning to be the settled endeavour of most persons of good sense. Dissolvents of the old European system of dominant ideas and facts we must all be, all of us who have any power of working ; what we have to study is, that we may not be acrid dissolvents of it."

Heine was such adissolvent, and an acrid one, a man who could say things like this :—" Pouvez-vous sillier?" his doctor asked him one day, when be was almost at his last gasp ; "suffer," as every one knows, has the double meaning of to whistle and to hiss :—"Helas ! non," was his whispered answer ; "pas memo une comedie de M. Scribe ! " He waged incessant war with a thing for which in England we have no word, because in England it is omnipresent—Philistinism. Mr. Arnold wishes us all to

adopt the word Philistine, with this pungently accurate explana- tion of its meaning

Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light. The party of change, the would-be remodellers of the old traditional European order, the invokers of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers, as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to the light ; stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong."

We cannot, in a cursory notice like this, enter into an estimate of a poet like Heinrich Heine. In the main, we agree with Mr. Arnold, though we doubt whether his own genius, essentially and radically classical, quite comprehends the Hebrew element in that of Heinrich Heine. He recognizes it, no doubt, in words, but with, we suspect, some want of sympathy with a force so widely different from his own. Heinrich Heine struck at the worshipped idols of the world often in the sprrit as well as in the language with which Elijah taunted the priests of Baal. "Perchance he is on a journey" is the very tone of the singer who, with every limb diseased, lay eight years iu bed singing strains of which the music is only equalled by the melancholy sarcasm— "Love, lay thy hand on my bosom here ; List what a knocking and noise is there. There dwells a carpenter strange to see ; He hammers a coffin that's meant for me.

"He knocks and hammers both night and day ;

He's driven already my sleep away. Oh ! master carpenter, hasten fast, That I may slumber and rest at last."

We must notice the "feature" of Macmillan in another place, and have only to add that " the paper of the Victoria is Mr. Maurice's really noble protest against "Sisterhoods,' based on the belief that for the sake of effective work, as well as in prin- ciple, "the man is not without the woman, nor the woman with- out the man, in the Lord." The Victoria commences a second story by Mrs. Oliphant, which promises well.