CURRENT LITERATURE.
By far the most noteworthy paper in the July number of the Universal Review—a number distinguished otherwise by an almost emphatic sobriety of tone, both in letterpress and in illustrations— is a curiously characteristic and almost laughably ingenuous article by Mr. Freeman on " Political Differences and Moral Crimes." It would hardly be going too far to say, that the gist of the article is that the Bulgarian atrocities was a subject which was really worth getting into a rage, hating, and " vituperating " some one about; whereas Home-rule is not, although Professor Freeman "must allow that Mr. Goldwin Smith is sometimes very trying." It is positively delightful to find Mr. Freeman, Home-ruler though he be, blurting out such things as :—"I had rather not drag in the ugly and rather unmeaning word coercion.' It is like the other catch-word confiscation' All government is' coercion it hinders certain people from doing what they want to do The ' Dissentient' Liberal has much to say for himself when he claims that he represents the undivided Liberal party in point of opinion." Mr. Quilter is, in his " French and English Idyllic Art," seen at his very best as an art-critic. It is, to a large extent, a carefully thought-out contrast between the idyllism of Millet and the idyllism of "Old William Hunt." Mr. Quilter gives it as his deliberate opinion that, for absolute unpretentious truth, Hunt's finest works stand alone in English art; and certainly the reproductions that are given of some of Hunt's best sketches go far to justify this opinion. This paper also contains a sympathetic criticism—which is not quite the same thing as an elope—of David Cox. The other contents of the July number of the Universal Review are hardly up to the level of these two articles. In a rather thin and fragmentary paper on " The Next Extension of the Suffrage," Lady Dilko calls on " all women to husband their strength, and by preparing themselves and those within their influence for serious political work, to pave the way for a greater reform, which shall give the
vote to every grown-up person without distinction of sex." Mr. J. R. Ingram sends a readable and unaffected study of Marlowe, but it scarcely deserves to be entitled "anew view." Mr. Courtney and Mr. Ellis give some pretty and also informing prattle about palmistry, which seems a queer compound of eeriness, art, and
chariatanerie. Mr. Edward Garnett's "Light and Shadow" is as
repulsively painful a story as we have ever read. In the July instalment, a husband is seen witnessing the virtual seduction, not of his wife by his friend, but of his friend by his wife, and then settling down among unfortunates, and contemplating suicide !
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