THE MAGAZINES.

Ann the magazines about to abandon politics altogether? Of the five which are usually read in London, only one has a paper which

bears in any degree on the domestic affairs of Great Britain, or the questions likely to come in a practical shape before the people. Mr. Bonamy Price sings in Fraser his everlasting song in praise of Austrian statesmen, whom he, in defiance of Europe, considers ill-

treated men ; and the same journal gives us a paper on the Re- vised Code, which just now has some connexion with Parliamentary action. But on domestic politics, strictly so called, the magazines are as silent as if they were published under the eyes and within

the grasp of M. de Persi,gny. They have little to say on America, and not a word upon France, and as to Parliamentary ques- tions, they despise them as much as Parliament does itself. The omission may be, of course, accidental, but it indicates a tendency in all our periodicals, a wish to reserve space for one of the worst products of the age, information chopped up fine, and sweetened with easy writing. We suppose it sells, but to palates trained to discriminate a paper such as Professor Thomson's on the heat of the sun, tastes very like the sweet froth young housekeepers call a "trifle." The whole paper might be resolved into a couple of lines. Professor Thomson thinks the sun is a liquid incandescent mass cooling, and calculates that the sun has not illuminated the earth for more than one hundred million years, and will not illuminate it for many millions of years longer, a fact which perhaps does not strike men who only ask for sunshine during a century with the awe it deserves. The magazines want connexion with every-day life, with the things men talk about after dinner, which the press can never exhaust, and of which society is never weary.

Fraser continues " Thalatta," which comprises this month a most striking and most unfair sketch of George Canning and his famous speech about calling a new world into existence to redress the ba- lance of the old by a process the results of which Europe has just resolved to upset. A. K. H. B., too, is excellent, discoursing with most unusual vehemence on the woes of childhood, and the oppres- sion the children of the middle classes often suffer. Writers have of late revived the old cry of the happiness of childhood with such vigour, that men who look back on that period of their lives with a vin- dictive horror are almost deafened, and feel a positive relief when they finds man who gives them the other side, and avers bluntly that there are hundreds of men who never felt happiness till they were out of boyhood. Mr. Boyd seems to confine the class a little too much to those who are personally oppressed by bullies, bad school- masters, and silly fathers, who tell them that everything pleasant is wrong ; but it is much more extensive. It includes, we believe, all children physically weak, or over-sensitive, or ambitious, besides one whole stratum of society—the children of the educated poor. Very large numbers, too, of the class of "slow" lads feel boyhood very acutely: They are wearied to pain with the perpetual struggle between their ambition and a sense of failure, which is not the result of weakness but of want of development. Indeed, the whole subject of slowness, as distinguished from dulness, is one which Mr. Boyd might treat to advantage. How is it, that certain men of very great mental power think so slowly, have so .much difficulty in shaping their thoughts into opinions, and carrying their opinions into acts ? Is it possible that one man's brain can really act quicker than another man's ? or is the evident tardiness produced by its wider grasp upon facts—by an appetite, in fact, so great that the mind reqtures more time for digestion? Mr. Boyd is terribly severe on the misery " strict" parents — who are invariably selfish pa- rents — inflict upon their children; but we can scarcely credit the following story: "I have heard of a parent, an important member of a very strait sect of the Pharisees, whose child, when dying, begged to be buried, not in a certain font old hideous churchyard, but in a certain cheerful cemetery. This request the poor little creature made with all the energy of terror and

despair. But the strait Pharisee refused the dying request ; and pointed out with polemical bitterness to the child that he must be very wicked indeed to care at such a time where he was to be buried, or what might be done with his body after death. How I should enjoy the spectacle of that unnatural, heartless, stupid wretch, tarred and feathered! The dying child was caring for a thing about which Shakspeare cared; and it was not in mere human weakness, but by faith,' that Joseph, when he was a dying, gave commandment concerning his bones.' "

There is no limit to the degradation pharisaism can produce, and we have known a Catholic tell his Protestant wife, at the close of his five years' sickness, durin which she had nursed him as only loving women can, that his only regzet in dying was to think of the hell that awaited her; but like cruelty to a dying child seems precluded by the universal sympathy of men with the horror the child expressed. The paper on " Popol Vuh," though somewhat slight, is full of interest. The "Popol Vuh" is the great book of the natives of Guatemala, and purports to be a col-

lection of the traditions current among the people before the Spanish conquest, compiled three centuries since by an anonymous author in order to preserve the national knowledge. The book reveals sue cessive creations of men, which were all, for one reason or another, failures, and which ended in inundations sweeping away the race. At last, the gods created four men, who, with their wives, were the progenitors of all tribes, both black and white. These tribes all as- sembled together at a town called Tulau, and there found that they had lost their community of language, and wailed over the loss. The Abbe de Bourbourr, of Guatemala, has it published the work with an original FrenStrauslation, and as t contains an account of the migrations of the Quiches before they settled in Guatemala, will doubtless excite much discussion.

Blackwood this month would be exceedingly stupid but for the "Chronicles of Carlingford," stories worthy of the Blackwood's very best days. In the present number, the Dissenting minister is still struggling between his sense of duty and the disgust produced by over-refinement, and a sort of physical sensitiveness which makes the attentions of vulgar people insupportable to him. He has fallen violently in love with a great lady, who introduces him into society, "a society which was not cruel, or repulsive, or severely exclusive, but simply did not know him, could not make out who he was, and was busy talking the conversation of a limited sphere, full of personal allusions, into which no stranger could enter." Sir L. Bulwer, in this number of "Caxtouiana," has got upon a subject which suits his genius—the power possessed by the imagination of seeing without eyes—and is consequently full of interest. We fail to perceive, how- ever, the connexion between clairvoyance, technically so-called, and the gift possessed by genius of realizing what it has never seen, or the instinctive prevision some men seem to possess of the effect of political movements. It is almost incredible that a man who had never seen the festival of Juggernaut, should have described it as Southey has done in the "Curse of Kehema," where the very melody is in passages made to repeat the precise and most unique noise made in an Indian crowd—utterly unlike the noise of any other crowd in the world—but what has this faculty to do with clairvoyance ? The poet, by force of genius, realizes the living aspect of the dead facts he has read, but the clairvoyant professes to see things of which he has no previous knowledge. As well might it be said that because a man could construct a house he could therefore create one. It is quite true that there are men, and sometimes •ignorant men, who have a sort of prevision in politics, but it is not analogous to clair- voyance. It springs from sympathy, from the feeling which enables a man to "predict" what his wife will do, as well as if he were watching her. There are minds which are sounding-boards to opinion, which can catch its faintest manifestation, and consequently appear to predict when they are merely repeating. The friends of an autocrat can often foretel his action weeks before his own mind is made up, and so can those who, from mental constitution, are sensi- tive to the internal workings of that great autocrat, public opinion. Blackwood publishes some songs from a working miner, who, in a letter of pleasant manliness, invites hostile criticism. He is scarcely, we fear, a Burns, and his song on the accident in the .Dykehead Pit is an exceedingly poor ballad, but the lines to his wife show genuine power. This verse, at all events, is above the magazine run: "My little wife weekly to the church came,

Sweet little, dear little, mellow-voic'd Jane, Where I, fill'd with equal devotional flame, Would glance at her fair face again and again..

Sometimes an emotion, Not wholly devotion, A dim nameless thrill, o'er may senses would flee, And then, growing bolder, I dar'd to behold her,

And wish that such sweetness would once think of me."

Macmillan, too, has a poem by Mr. Richard Garnett, which, though not poetry, is exceedingly good rhetoric, as witness the following description of the Cam pagna :

"Go to that master-labour of the priest Which was the rich Campagna ; look around; Scan glutted Desolation's amplest feast— Scarce ruins even, nothing but the ground, Iinhoused, untilled, untenanted, uncrowned By any growth save Nature's ; view the thirst Of fever preying on that ague-bound, Squalid, and meagre serf—then go, his worst Of lots prolong; but hear his malediction first !"

But what on earth is a "pale consternated look?" or who made "stern" of the first conjugation?—or what may this mean?—

"No portent brand the nnterrifying home Of either and pure stars, of which may one Soon with new beams illume the eternal dome" .. .

How does a portent brand a homg which does not terrify ? " Ra- venshoe," in the 'same magazine, advances well. The priest has had a stroke of paralysis, and the reader goes on with a keener interest, strengthened by a placid hope that the next stroke will kill him, and rid Mr. Henry Kingsley of a character he cannot describe, and his readers of machinery no genius can now-a-days render anything but tiresome. He might as well resort to secret staircases, murderous bravoes, and heroic shepherds changed at nurse. The remainder of the number is a little stupid, though we note a fresh and pithy article on the American struggle, full of feeling and sense.

The noticeable point in Gorski(' this month is the excellence of Mr. Doyle's sketch. He has not done himself justice lately, his features being confused, and his faces reminiscences from his own older designs. This week, however, we have a specimen of his genuine power. Every figure in "After Dinner" tells its own story, from a young lady, who though we can only see the back of her head, is palpably longing for a flirtation with the shy young simpleton at the glass, to the gentleman, who with a jovial reminiscence of that last bottle of port, is airing his waistcoat on the sofa. The articles gene- rally of the number—"Philip" excepted—are of a very ordinary kind, though there is an excellent defence of lower class Englishmen from Mr. Roebuck's charges. The writer seems even half disposed to defend their manners, though he does not exactly do it. "If our labourers and mechanics in general were as well behaved as steady policemen, sober non-commissioned officers, or respectable railway porters, they would behave as well as there is any reason to suppose men who work with their hands all day long, and are sup- ported by the wages of their labour, ever will behave. It would be a very bad exchange if they took to behaving like Frenchmen or Spaniards, or to giving to their language that detestabe affectation of literary style Which turns a good house into an eligible residence, and makes a man contemplate the erection of such a residence in- stead of intending to build it." The writer might have gone a great deal further. We write as familiar with many lands when we say that there is not a working man on earth, except the Italian artisan, who has a more genuine or a better manner than the English, so long as he is soles. It is not a cringing manner, which is what those who revile him secretly want, nor has it the cold reserve which English gentlemen who train themselves to that manner appreciate in the Spaniard. But it is a. thoroughly hearty manner, honest and self- respecting, and by no means rougher than that of the continentals. The reasons why it annoys the cultivated class are, we believe, just these: An Englishmen drunk is the greatest brute alive, worse than the Spaniard who stabs you quietly, or the Frenchman who becomes maudlin, or the German who bores you to death, or the Asiatic who sits and laughs to himself like the idiot drink always makes him, and our working men, once in the streets, are a great deal too apt to drink hard. Secondly, all Englishmen, from the highest to the lowest, are fall of humour, and chaff which the Englishman takes contentedly from his equals irritates him from those he con- siders inferior. The working men either don't know this or don't care about it, and their remarks on a man above them in station always leave on his mind a feeling of irritation. The very few men who know that they can hit back without loss of dignity invariably pronounce the English manner an excellent one, and the few fo- reigners who understand colloquial English, speak in the highest. terms of the civility, air, and independence of English prokaires. We have not read London Society, and do not intend; but it con- tains an illustration worth its price five times over. We have seen nothing recently anywhere so good as Mr. Watson's picture of Peni- tence; a young man kneeling by a high wooden chair, the hands clasped, and the head bowed by an agony which we feel, without knowing why, is that of a noble nature. It is a most masculine pro- duction. Mr. Watson has called it by the absurd title "Ash Wed- nesday," we suppose in order to reduce his noble thought to the level of the magazine in which it appears.