MAGAZINES FOR THE MONTH.

WE must commence our notice of the Coruhell this month by a re- monstrance with its editor. Why will be so misuse the opportunity the "Roundabout Papers" afford ? The design was an admirable one, and at first all readers enjoyed the desultory chat with the gifted man whose insight seems never so keen as when he is carelessly "making talk." Of late, however, these papers have fallen off. One or two have simply been answers to libels, which Mr. Thackeray ought to feel as much as an elephant feels a mosquito. One or two more are deficient in purpose, to a degree which destroys their artistic force. Talk may wander enjoyably, but a man must finish his sentences. And this last one is absolutely poor, mere print and paper, which but for its author's name nobody would read, an old attack on society for tolerating evil men. Of course it tolerates them, just as a man who wants his horse shod aiks the blacksmith to shoe it, though the blacksmith's wife has a bad black eye. Society may be a jury, but it is not to give in its verdict till the chant has been made, the evi- dence heard, and the corpus delicti shown to exist. We want to see humbug struck, not stripped, and who could strike so hard as the • laughing giant who now uses his strength to tear off the rags which cover loathsomeness. For the rest, the number is above the average, and incomparably the best shilling's-worth yet offered to the public. Philip has met his heroine, who is described as if Mr. Thackeray could, after all, realize something beyond Amelia, that sweet little blubbering fool. Mr. Trollope (?), too, appears with a new story in which he seems to have tapped a new mine, the teller of the story being an advertizing linendraper, who has become insolvent. We ought not to meet Mrs. Proudie in that society at all events, and the necessity of inventing original characters will relieve Mr. Trollope from the charge of sameness which begins to be urged against him. The gem of the number, however, is an article styled, somewhat affectedly, "At Westminster," and illustrated by a really marvel- lous series of sketches. Hogarth never drew anything better than the fine half-lengths which represent Judge, Counsel, and Solicitors. They are all shrewd, all legal, and all educated faces, but are dif- ferent, not merely in character, but in social grade, an impression most difficult to convey. The plaintiff is equally good, and the jury, though in the latter there is, perhaps, a faint but perceptible exagge- ration. The defendant is the nearest approach to a failure, the artist making the character visible enough, but not the grade of life to which it belongs. Taken altogether, however, these sketches form a new and most excellent feature in the magazine.

Macmillan this month would be dull but for Henry Kingsley, whose story, "Ravenshoe," improves as it advances. The priest's mine has been sprung, and Charles proved only a changeling in a scene, which, if a trifle melodramatic, is still highly effective, and with the explosion we hope we are rid of the Mrs. Radcliffe kind of machinery, which only hampers the author. It is not in describing the mental workings of a Jesuit priest that Mr. H. Kingsley shines, and Mackworth, with his mixture of villany and manliness, frank speech and secret designs, is almost an impossible character. Nor, we must be per- nutted to remark, do brothers, at least in England, express affec- tion in the exaggerated style described in the scene which follows Charles's departure. Cuthbert kneeling to Charles, to beg him not to go, is nearly as unnatural as Charles forgiving the priest just as the blow has fallen. It is a pity to see the man who wrote " Geoffry Hamlyn" falling in with the magazine crave for exciting situations. "The Indian Civil Service " is a sketch not very new, but accurate and readable, of the prospects opened to the lads so diligently asked to compete. They are said to be over-coloured, and the writer proves that, up to the twenty-second year of service, the civilian is not much overpaid. He has, if he follows the line of the service, as most civi- lians must, 400/. a year to start with, 840/. after the third year, 1200/. after the thirteenth, 2000/. after the fifteenth, and after that his pro- gress is slow up to 5000/. a year, the highest Indian pay, which he obtains commonly about his thirtieth year of service, when he ought to be forty-one. He seldom enjoys this long, and the writer estimates his entire pay at 30,000/. throughout his official twenty- two years, but this is an unfair statement. Most civilians remain till they are fifty, and the average annual income of every civilian, students included, is just 2000/. a year, giving 58,000/. for the twenty-nine years of service. The writer forgets, moreover, to add that the service is the only one in the world in which average incom- petence is not shut out from the prizes. Excessive incompetence is ; though two great civilians are well known to have been in lunatic asylums'; but the average stupid man, who in England would .earn three hundred a year at the bar, rises inevitably in India to the highest grades of the service. Ile also forgets that while Tom Brown gets these allowances, his brother the doctor, in the same climate, and with nearly as much work to do—if he only did it—is contented with just one-fourth. If a medical appointment on five

hundred a year is so sought, why not a civil one on double that sun as an average allowance ? Mr. Ludlow's paper on "Elsie Veinier and Silas Marner" is a thoughtful analysis of the difference of power shown in two widely different books, and the following paragraph, though it explains nothing, describes well a peculiarity of Amencan novel literature:

" But we cannot forget that this search after and study of the singular an exceptional pervades too much the ablest American fictions of the day. Elsie Venner,' the serpentoid, inevitably reeals the fame of Mr. Elawthome's Trans- formation,' and that peculiar vein of thought and feeling, fluctuating between the odd and the morbid, which runs through all his novels and tales. It seems as if the ablest American writers were now unable to look ordinary life steadily in the face, to see its beauty and its nobleness, and to depict it with the loving care of the true artist. How to account for this I know not. It is not for want of acuteness in seeing that ordinary life, nor yet of skill in rendering it ; but they do not seem to appreciate it as in itself a sufficient subject of study; they treat it only as a frAmmg or as a background for the abnormal, the improbable, the fantastic."

Or is it that American life, as it is, is so utterly ungenial to men of creative thought, that they ty to a dream-world for mere relief from vulgarity? A poet condemned to live always among Marylebone electors would be very likely to people his world with beings differ- ing widely 'from men. Mr. Ludlow objects, though not very gravely, to a slight sensuousness in Elsie Venner, which may spring from the same source. The natural impulse of strongmen, placed among over- starched proprieties, is to drag physical facts back to their true place among the moving forces of the world, and write just such a descrip- tion as Mr. Holmes gives of the girls' school in America, and Char- lotte Brent ë wrote of the pension riot in Belgium. There is a curious subtlety of criticism in this paragraph on Silas Muller : "For instance: in the Dinah of 'Adam Bode' she has shown us the working and influence of female religious enthusiasm; in Dolly Winthrop, she now shows us the very opposite picture, that of the power of a faith inarticulate, inco- herent, wholly unimpassioned. That the two portraitures should have come from the same hand, should have been worked out with the same tenderness, with the same success, is of itself a marvel of art. But one cannot help asking whether we are really to take both forms of religious faith as equivalent, the fervent strugglings of the young Methodist with sin, and the gentle evasions to- conformity of the old church-woman. And, if the writer's purpose be merely that of fine resthetic studies of religious faith under its varied aspects, and the inculcation of a calm philosophic indifferentism to the objects of that faith, all one can hope is, that her art will prove stronger than her purpose, and by its very fidelity to nature will serve to call forth yearnings which it will not satisfy, for truths beyond, below, and above itself."

"In Praise of Grandmothers" is quaint, but not, we confess, to our taste, and not equal to Mrs. Beecher Stowe's paragraph on the beauty of old ladies. The address to "Mr. Cobden and other Public Men in search of Work," is an earnest appeal to politicians to "take up" the civil war now raging in England between masters and men, and discover that just method of settlement, without which peace will never be found. It is the politician who must discover it at last ; and politicians are almost universally infected with a prejudice against time unions. If they speak without inquiry, "they will be aid probably first of all that their unions are wrong in principle. They see and know that these unions have supported them and theirs in sickness and sorrow, have enabled them to maintain their indepen- dence against the pressure of masters and foremen. They will be told that the unions must ruin every trade in which they are strong. They see and know that in every trade where there are no unions, or where the unions have been broken down and are feeble (e.g. agricul- tural labour, the slop-tailors in the East of London, the Northampton shoemakers, &c., &c.), there wages are the lowest, and the work- people in time greatest misery. Very probably masters may have a different tale to tell in these same trades. Moses and Son may make large fortunes in them, but the men somehow obstinately refuse to be thankful on this account." And Mr. Hughes might add, that the strongest of operative associations, that of the printers is also the most prosperous, and one of the most efficient of trades. The poetry in this number is very poor. Indeed, it is a curious fact how little of the *good poetry which was frequently found in the older magazines reaches those of the present day.

Temple Bar is as usual. The "Seven Sons of Mammon" drags heavily this month, though the account of a model lodging-house and its inmates is full of sketches as hard and as real as photographs; but the number scarcely advances the story. There is a sort of lunatic dream,-a story called "Time Death Wish," and another styled "Ru- mens in Stones," against which we enter a decided protest. If there is one form of effeminacy to be held in more contempt than another, it is in the prurient mawkishness which finds impropriety in every passing allusion to vice, or necessary statement of fact. That is no reason why Englishmen should tolerate the introduction into litera- ture of the very worst form of sensation novel. The whole interest of "Sermons in Stones" turns on an idea banished from our literature since Messinger died, and which it is a wickedness to revive. Better any nastiness Feydeau ever wrote, than a story which familiarizes the mind with this conception. Blackwood this month scarcely touches on any of the topics of the day, the number being almost wholly made up of padding of not very first-rate merit. "Norman Sinclair" is wound up with an episode which we would advise the author to excise from the story when pub- lished in its completed form. The villain of the piece is a Jew, and he is sentenced to die by poison by his own mother, sitting in London in a conference of her own people, presided over by an English rabbi :

" Peace!" said the deep voice of the Jewess Miriam, who now rose among them, casting back her veil, and displaying strong masculine features and grizzled hair, no longer, since this great sorrow had come upon her, arranged with a woman's neatness—" Peace! and add not to the affliction of the hour by the idle railing of a Shimei! Peace l—and bear the mother who bore this shame of Israel in her womb, and who suckled him at her breast, pronounce the sentence of his doom! 0 Joseph—my son, my son! Would to God thouhadst died in thy in- fancy, so that I could have laid thee to thy rest in the cradle of the earth, and strewn flowers upon thy grave, and mourned for thee with no worse a pang than the sacred sorrow of bereavement! Woe is me that I should have to say the word, and to speak the ban ; and yet both must be said and spoken! Thou haat forsworn thy faith as a child of Israel—thou hest disgraced thy people—thou bast broken into the sanctuary of life, as the thief in the night breaks into the house of the sleeper—thou haat stained thy hands with murder,—therefore must thou die the death ! I, thy mother, say it!—! who can condemn, but cannot abjure thee; for wicked as thou art, it is the will of the Lord that I should bear thee; and though the earth should open its mouth and swallow thee alive, as it did the company of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, still art thou not less my son!"

And so she made him take an oath to swallow the poison under penalty of her curse ; and he, a man who had lived by murdering people for the sake of insurances, took it. We can only lay if London Jewesses do talk that extraordinary rant as an excuse for family murders, they have retrogaded in morals since they quitted Pales- tine. The article on "Mad Dogs" is a very valuable and excessively disagreeable paper ; and there is an excellent but far too favourable sketch of "Joseph Wolff." The writer extols his feat in selling and chanting psalms at the gates of Mecca, which is supposed, of course, to have risked his life. The Mussulmans, however, never touch a madman, and as they had not the least idea what Wolff's Arabic meant, they took him for one. The rest of the number is, we think, somewhat beneath the average. Mr. Froude, in Fraser, returns to his charge against Queen Eliza- beth publishing the documents upon which he relies. They certainly prove that the Bishop of Aquila, the Spanish envoy in London, re- ported to his master that the Queen was in love, or worse,with Lord Robert Dudley, that she had promised to marry him, that she ex- pected the death of Amy Robsart, and that the Protestant party were inclined to compel her to name a Protestant heir to the throne. They may also prove, though not so completely, that the bishop was not deliberately lying. But they do not prove by any means that the queen ever intended to marry the Earl of Leicester, that she was privy to the murder of Amy Robsart, or that Cecil was ever disloyal to his mistress, except in contemplating a certain course in a eon. tingeney which never occurred. Against the first charges we have, ' fit tl ti t f tl on M F r. roud e s own snowing, rs , di s ne statement o le queen when she supposed herself on her deathbed; secondly, the bishop's own belief repeatedly stated by himself, that she would PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

cheat Lord Robert after all; and thirdly, the unquestionable, Recent Recollections of the Anglo-American Church in the United and to our minds unanswerable, fact that she, a Tudor, never carried States. By an English Layman, five years resident in that Republic. out the purpose for which she had waded through crime. She In two volumes. London: Rivingtons.—This book forms an interest- never did marry the peer for whom she had connived at a murder. sag supplement to the Bishop of Oxford's "History of the Anglo-Ame- We cannot in this summary go piece by piece through the letters rican Church." We here have a sketch of the actual condition of this

but they certainly seem to us to bear out the explanation placed branch of the Church at the present day; the character of her services,

on the queen's conduct by the popular instinct. She had a silly, It does not come within the scope of our author's work to touch on perhaps an extreme, fondness for Leicester, and like all queens the theology or the learning of the American clergy; but we gather —who are obliged by the necessity of their position to make the first from his general statements that the Church in America knows nothing advances—she was very indecorous in her display of attachment, an as yet of any but the two old-fashioned parties viz, the High Church indecorum, however, which did not extend, as she said, to "aught and the Low, and that what in England we understand by "Broad" unseemly." Leicester was the head of the Catholic party, and Eliza- Church has not yet made its appearance there. A great portion of beth, conscious that her throne depended on her own legitimacy, the book is taken up with describing the progress of what the Layman struggled to conquer a passion which she felt to be inconsistent with calls "the Church movement" in America, the meaning of which all the triumph of the Protestant cause. During the struggle, Cecil, a persons conversant with ecclesiastical phraseolog,y in England will un- fervent Protestant, talked treason in the Protestant interest, and derstand at once. The improvement of church architecture, the in-

when it was over, served her as queen never yet was served. troduction of choral services, and of all which constituted in Land's Leicester, meanwhile, incessantly kept up in the queen's mind hopeful signs for the future of the American Church. Coupled with the idea that his wife was in failing health and must shortly

die, and this idea she was always repeating in order to excuse this greger_potmp of worship we find of course the more distinct asser-

herself to her own conscience for her love to a married man. mn_of the Ca holie doctrines, as apart from the Protestant attitude, We cannot perceive a phrase in the letters inconsistent with that explanation which leaves the queen a weak but not consciously erring woman. A. K. H. B. contributes an essay of the kind to which readers of Fraser are now so well accustomed. This time his subject is immaturity, and everything is accordingly "veal." The hopes, the fancies, and even the work of youth are all "veal." The paper contains some sentences full of subtle thought on the power of youth to assume an imitative maturity, and on the strange want of maturity which seems to accompany some men through life, but, as a whole, it is not equal to many of Mr. Boyd's essays. He has not, we think, worked himself out, but he has arrived at the ponit where it is necessary to strike a new lode or give up working the mine. Surely, that power of subtle analysis into individual character cannot be wholly divorced from dramatic force, and, if not, Mr. Boyd could give us a novel few men could rival. The paper on "Italian States and Rulers in last Half of Fifteenth Century," is, like its title, spoiled by a compression too great for the subject to bear. The history of five dynasties, the polities, literature, and manners of one of the most busy half-centuries, cannot be described in nineteen pages, and the only result of the attempt is a confusion of clever sentences. We must pause for a moment to acknowledge some good magazine verses, a luxury to which magazine readers have been too long unused. The following, from a song on "Frederick Barbarossa," good in itself, is still better in its connexion :

" THE GATE OF GLORY.

" This is the way the Cesar pass'd,'

With burst of dram and trumpet blast ; With clash of arms and joyous song The mighty conqueror pass'd along, Glowing with victorious toil, Laden with Lombardic spoil, Onwards up the exulting Rhine To Colognes expectant shrine; All the grateful German race Sees itself in Frederick's face, Claims with pride the glorious day When the Ctesar pass'd that way."

"Ida Conway" is ended, to the satisfaction readers included, who have been dragged by a novelist who can do better things, through a cloud-land where English ladies are loved bv improbable counts, and German ladies murdered by impossible barons. The last paper in the number, on the "Causes of the Disruption of the American Union," is perhaps the most interesting, for it is written from a new point of view. The author detests the Ame- ricans with a heartiness he takes no pains to conceal, argues that civil war is the logical consequence of an absurd constitution, and denies that the North are fighting for anything nobler than material interests. We are not concerned to animadvert on theories which the editor refuses to endorse, and which deserve to be read for their clever logic and brilliant contempt for facts. The smaller magazines call this month for little remark, except Bentley's, which contains a really curious paper on "America under Arms," evidently prepared by an eye-witness. He declares, in op- position to all received opinions, that the American militia is a gigantic delusion, that anybody is exempted who chooses to pay seventy-five cents a year; that the men are badly armed, and worse drilled, and that their officers are capable of such droll absurdities as these :

"Of a different description was the tour of the Chicago Zouaves. A number of honest grocers and tailors came together in that city in 1859, donned the uniform of the French Zouaves. and invented a new manceuvre, which they, thought proper to christen the Zonave mode of fighting.' First came a little sharpshooting, and then the formation of a pyramid, one rank kneeling, a second standing, a couple of other men on the shoulders of the latter, and a single man forming the apex. With this piece of folly, which was intended to bring all the muskets into tire simultaneously, they gave performances in several towns. We should not have objected to it from a part of acrobats, but it was unworthy of soldiers, and the worst was, everybody believed in it. In New York, where the whole press talked for a week about no other subject than the Chicago Zouaves, a militia colonel even set to work establishing a similar corps. We wonder the worthy gentleman did not reflect that the entire pyramid would hare been over- thrown by the wind of a gunshot, just like a child's house of cards."

The writer adds that America, in 1859, possessed 42 ships ready for sea, many of them frigates of a very high class, 2400 steamers • of different sizes, but all available for transport, and 100,000 sailors, "of whom more than one-half sailed foreign."