THE MAGAZINES.

Sr. Paula is readable,—not very good, but readable. That habit of publishing novels as books just before they have been concluded

as serials makes reading the later numbers something of a bore,

but St. Pauls has fair padding besides. The review of " Gheel " is poor, sketchy, and Blight, if it is meant to be original, and not very fair, if it is a review of the book Gheel, the City of' the Simple, lately issued ; unless, indeed, it is by the author himself, as is quite possible. It will do a service if it makes

people read the book we have mentioned,* but otherwise not.

An avowed review, however, of the life of Napoleon I. by M. Lanfrey, strikes us, who have not read the book, as very well

calculated to effect its object, which is to induce men to read a work that in its singular truthfulness will offend readers even out of France, the cults Napoldonienne being by no means confined to the country the great Emperor ruled. Cmsarism is a creed now in all lands, and Napoleon, bad as he may have been, never offended,

as this reviewer clearly sees, against the main tenet of Cmsarism,— that an individual can be a better representative of a nation than

any parliament. That idea is the strength of Cmsarism, and so far as Parliament is an executive power that idea is true, the error being in the postulate that Parliament is only an executive power, whereas it has two functions higher than that, or than the legislative authority,—the function of educating the people in politics, and that of discovering the persons competent to govern. M. Lanfrey appears, therefore, to deserve all the more credit for his effort to throw pure white light on the character, the life, and the aims of the typical modern Cmsar, of the man who, as he himself said, missed his destiny when he devastated Europe instead of Asia. He would have been a vivifying power there. Here he only swept away obstacles, and did not do that cleanly, for it has cost us fifty years more merely to be rid of the Bourbons. There is a sketch, too, of O'Connell in this number of the St. Paul's which strikes us, in spite of occasional inflations of style, as very good, though we are unable to agree with its writer's main thesis. The writer maintains that O'Connell, devoted to Ireland, was also devoted to the Empire, wanted as his ultimate end a British Federation under a single Sovereign. Vell, but did he ? for that, after all, is the grand question about O'Connell. The essayist says he hated infidel and revolutionary France, which is, we believe, true ; but did he hate France? Did he not at heart, as all Englishmen believed, think that France, with its Celtic people and Catholic creed, was the natural ruler of Ireland? He was educated in France, and men educated in France rarely lose altogether their sympathy with French ideas, and O'Connell never expressed any belief in the present Irish Revolutionary thesis, that Ireland divided into four Cantons, with a Federal Government in Dublin, would make a happier and more vigorous Switzerland. That he repudiated any wish for "independence," is true ; but he knew perfectly well that with a Parliament on College Green Ireland would have been just so independent as to be forced to seek an ally against England, and the United States were not then full of Irishmen. The writer brings vividly before his readers O'Connell's supreme ability as an agitator, the hold he maintained for years, not only over the affections, but over the imagination of the Irish people, a hold to which that of his successors is feeble disaffection. One glance of his eye would for years have thrown Ireland into insurrection, and to us it is still a moot point why that glance was not given. The essayist believes that the great agitator abhorred the thought of war, his horror being deepened by what he had known of Revolutionary France, and this may be the true explanation. We doubt it, however, doubt if any man as able as O'Connell could have failed to see that his end was unattainable without war, could have been unaware that Scotland owed her unique position in the Empire to battle, or could at that time have deemed the contest hopeless. The popular explanation, that O'Connell was physically timid, seems to us opposed to the facts of his whole life ; but do we do him an injustice in suggesting another fear which has influenced greater men than he,—the fear that if war once began power in Ireland would pass, as it had

passed under his eyes in France, from the popular leader to the popular general, a post he could never hope to fill I

The Corn/lilt is full of pleasant, slight papers, very good to read, though they can be read in a hurry without very much low. The best to our thinking is the very fresh account of Dr. Salviati's glass works at Venice, where he has revived an art long supposed to be entirely lost, so entirely lost that even in 1866 it was believed that the sapphire glass could not now be made. It was made, however, and Dr. Salviati now presides over an establishment almost unique in the world, a factory in which every workman is more or less an artist, working under the superintendence of "masters," or foremen, as we should call them, who have been thoroughly educated to the trade :— "Zannotti, a sort of superintendent, now that the heat of the furnace is too much for his eyes, is most fertile in producing now designs. The immense lampadaro—one of five ordered by Prince Giovanelli, to adorn the ball-room of his palace—is a sort of co-operative design. It is of white glass; the candlesticks, ruby-tinted, seemingly hung by frail transparent links of purest glass ; pinks and tulips, with their spiked upright leaves, blossom between the tiers ; while—and this is the innovation—garlands of leaves and flowers, such as are now blossoming in the early spring, are hung beneath the bosses, which are generally ugly and forlorn. The hanging lampadaro is by far the largest ever blown, and is composed of innumerable different pieces : so that if any get broken, they can be at once replaced. Salviati imagined the garlands, Zannetti designed the chandelier, Barovier grew the field-flowers, and Seguso wrought the parts. Such is the perfection to which this master has attained, that he will turn out any given number of pieces of precisely the same size, form, and weight. This perfect obedience of the hand to the eye is the ne plus ultra of the artist in glass. In the same room with their fathers are two young lads, who work together, one week as master, the next as assistant. I watched them as they stood at the furnace mouth ; one sedate, stern intent as his father ; the other, the master of the week, bright-eyed, restless, but the deftest little imp imaginable. Beakers of nebulous opal, ewers, vases, and urns span from his fairy rod ; but, as his father pointed out, he could make no two things alike, neither could he yet manage to ma;ry the colours.

This would seem to be a perfect factory, but it had one drawback. It would not pay sufficiently. The price demanded for work so exquisite and so entirely dependent upon individual skill is of course high, and the demand, though it is growing, is still small ; but English capital has been introduced into the undertaking, and with it the brutal English sense. Art is good, say the new shareholders, but so also are dividends. Suppose we sell bottles, and make the profit of them supply capital for the pretty things ? This is to be done from 1870, as it has already been done by the Marquis Ginori.

"When the present Marquis Ginori, owner of the magnificent porcelain manufactory of the Doccia, a few miles from Florence, came of age, he found that from the time that his great-grandfather, the Marquis Carlo, founded the factory, in 1744, until the present time, immense sums of money had been sunk in the venture, and he was compelled to choose between three courses ;—either to close the manufactory; to restrict his men to producing useful articles ; or to make the pots and pans pay for the vases, urns, and other artistic ware, the completion of one of which will sometimes occupy an artist an entire month. He chose the last of the three, and while the produce and sale of his choicest porcelain are increased, ho has brought the manufacture of common earthenware up, or rather down, to the wants of the poorest peasant who needs a pot in which to boil his beans."

Every one who has seen the exquisite specimens of glass now selling in St. James's Street, glass which looks as if it had been produced from anything rather than silica, will rejoice to hear that the commercial prosperity of the concern will be assured even by means so vulgar as the making of bottles, which, strange to say, are in Italy always imported. The paper quaintly styled "Out of School in the Middle Ages" is an amusing account of the college life of those days on the Continent, with its privileges and its privations, its licence and its seventies; but surely, there is credulity in the following paragraph?—.

"Through the whole of the five or six centuries known as the Middle Ages, every high-road in Europe was alive with youths hastening to the schools. They crossed and recrossed mountain, forest, and narrow sea by tens of thousands; and they crowded the several seats of learning— Oxford, Paris, Salamanca, Bologna, and Prague—as thick as bees. Indeed, it is said that they generally outnumbered all the other residents of these cities,-30,000 being actually set down as attending the schools of Oxford ; 50,000, 70,000, and even 100,000, those of Paris ; while s notion of the numbers who selected Prague as alma mazer may be formed from the tale told of the multitude that accompanied the celebrated professor, John Hoffman, when expelled from that university by the influence of Huss,—a host which several writers estimate as high as 40,000."

The estimates formed of numbers during the Middle Ages were often as wild as those current in Oriental countries, and these must certainly be gross exaggerations. The class which studied was, after all, a limited one, and we hear nothing of an equal number of professors. The students were not counted head by head, and the inaccuracy of any rough estimate may be guessed from this example. The human race has been looking at the stars for 5,000 years, at all events, and has universally come to the conclusion

that they are countless. Yet no more than a thousand stars ever re visible to the naked eye in one place at one time.

Fraser, besides a clever rhapsody about criminals called "The Greatest Wonder," in which the writer advises us to sell all dangerous criminals into slavery to African Kings, a long and, to us, tedious essay on "Depreciation," by that prose Tupper A. K. H. B., a good paper on "Scottish Characteristics," in which the writer claims for his countrymen as their one special quality "go," or as he calls it vitalizing force, and repudiates effectively the absurd charge of want of humour, publishes a most elaborate paper on the relative demand for labour in the agricultural and manufacturing counties, with maps, diagrams, and columns of statistics. It is almost too solid a paper for a magazine, and is well worth the study of every man interested in politics. The writer points out that not only has the agricultural population decreased between 1851 and 1861 in thirty counties and ridings, but the quality of the labour has deteriorated, the employment of lads and old men increasing, while that of the ablebodied has diminished :—

lie attributes this decline in the demand for labour mainly to the practice of laying down arable land in pasture, and he strongly

recommends agricultural improvements, long leases, or easy modes of transfer of land, in order that clay lands may be broken up for the plough, and the population may be tempted back to the land. We fear his remedy will not be sufficient, and that if land continues to be held as at present, the emigration will continue and increase. Labourers may be paid, as he says they are, as well as unskilled artizans, and may have all the advantages squires claim for them ; but they have not the advantage which tempts Englishmen—the chance of getting on. Their fate in old age is the workhouse, and that fate the population, once educated, will not risk. Nothing but a return to small properties. will, we fear, make labour on the soil attrative again ; and we do not know that that will, for there are still in England great sections of land, including all Wales, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Stafford, Chester, Lancashire, Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, and the West Riding, in which the average of farms is under a hundred acres; and in some of these the number of men employed to the hundred acres is very small, as, for example, 4 in North Durham, and 4-5 in South Durham against 7-2 in North Essex, where the average of holdings is nearly double.

Macmillan, besides a review of Wallace's Malayan Archipelago, by Sir John Lubbock, which is almost as interesting as an original paper, publishes two more papers on the subject now getting threadbare, "The Girls of the Period." The peg is the Saurin case, and men are well rated for their imbecility in thinking that case will greatly diminish the temptation to enter nunneries :— " Men argue as though they would have no objection to convents if the nuns' bedrooms were well warmed and furnished, their dinners varied and well cooked, and their occupations light and easy. If they would take the trouble to study the history of the Monastic Orders, they would find that luxury has always demoralized them, stud that, whenever they have offered any such comforts and pleasures, they have produced a thousand times more evil than has been proved against the sisters at Hull. They would also see how these small annoyances and trivial penances may appear hallowed in Roman Catholic eyes by centuries of use by those whom they regard as saints. And after arriving at this point of sympathy with their opponents they might be able to

argue more fairly, and with more hope of carrying conviction into their hearts."

The writer does not, however, approve the convent life, holding that the body is God's work as well as the soul, that our faculties were given us to use, not to suppress, and that :—

" The worst part of the Convent system is that it sifts society, and leaves only the frivolous in the world. Many people argue as if only the weak and the silly were tempted to become nuns ; but this is not the truth. Surely a very weak woman would hardly wish to undertake so unattractive a life; there must be some force in a character which n.an willingly surrender every species of earthly enjoyment, in order to lire what she considers as a higher life. Nor do they do it ignorantly. The general public were surprised by what they seem to have considered 'startling disclosures,' but we do not believe that one woman in a thousand enters a convent or a sisterhood without being fully prepared for every one of these petty annoyances. Instead of being the weak and frivolous, it is often the noble and the strong who, disgusted with the ll'orrying littleneeses of society (sometimes as hard to bear as the petty tRatuay of a Lady Superior), turn to the convent in hopes of relief, and

thus deprive the world of qualities which might otherwise prove a bulwark against evil."

The second essayist distinctly defends convents, declaring that family life is as full of littlenesses, and urging the instinctive crave of the soul for "rest." She argues that the " let " of the conventual system is its excess, and would have it deprived of its permanence, its formality, and its distinctiveness, converted, in fact, from a conventual life into a method of retreat for a season :—

" Why should not the entrance into the convent be noiseless and unfettered, the continuance there unfettered too, the departure free and easy likewise? And why should not the dress, even if uniform, be uneccentric, quiet, and becoming, the brides of Heaven' not robing themselves as if for attendance at a funeral ?"

Why not, indeed, only in that case would not entering a convent be very like taking quiet lodgings ?

Blackwood is the only one among the older magazines which publishes this month a political article. It gives us two, one an analysis of Mr. Gladstone's Bill, the tone and capacity of which may be estimated from the following sentence :—" It is not the intelligent English people, nor the Scotch, nor even the Irish, who clamour for this great change. It is sought fur by the designing few whose object is to sink Great Britain to the level of America. It is shouted for by the ignorant many who know only that they are not so well off as they desire to be, and are persuaded to believe that any change must benefit them. And into the arms of the designing few and the ignorant many Mr. Gladstone has thrown himself." There is not a man of first-class eminence in the Commons except Mr. Disraeli, who is notoriously obeying his party, Lord Stanley, who will express no opinion on the subject, Sir R. Palmer, who only resists disendowment, and Mr. Hardy, who has not voted for this Bill. The "designing few" are the elite, the very flower of the political wisdom of the entire nation. The second paper is called the "Triumvirate," and is an elaborate attempt to prove that Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Lowe cannot long work together ; that Mr. Bright, a "political bigot," with "little intellectual culture," "at once fanatical and intolerant" longs for the fresh air below the gangway ; that Mr. Lowe, who is Mr. Gladstone's "superior in soundness of judgment and tenacity of conviction," and Mr. Bright's "superior in breadth of insight and richness of culture," is, on the practical side of his mind, a thorough Tory ; and that Mr. Gladstone, though a good arithmetician, is a matt "of such grotesque and fantastic mental eccentricities as are now seldom met with out of an asylum for the insane," and consequently the Ministry must speedily break up. In spite of all this fantastic fury, there is sense and spirit in the article, and the writer makes telling points by reprinting old speeches made by the Triumvirs against each other. Only he forgets that a common enmity, though it can be no bond of friendship, can be a bond of alliance, and that it is possible to feel such common enmity against political oppression. The padding in Blackwood is scarcely as good as usual, but there is a life of Sir John Lawrence by a writer who evidently knows very thoroughly the history of his career.