SOME OF THE MAGAZINES.

THE Contemporary is full of papers of a certain interest, the most readable, perhaps, being two on Lord Beaconsfield—one shy " Shirley," from the admiring point of view ; and another by the Rev. M. MacColl, which is hostile. In both, the main effort is to discern what manner of man ho was who attained such a position, to analyse his individual character ; ,and in both, as in almost all contemporary writing about Lord Beaconsfield, there is a comparative indifference to the task swhich must one day be seriously undertaken, that of gauging .accurately his intellect and his powers. Shirley believes Mr. .Disraeli to have been a born leader of men, imaginative, magnanimous, with an inexhaustible fund of "gaiety," which of itself gave him strength. He asserts his literary power, though he admits that he had not the oratory which .charms a multitude ; and allowing that " he was hardly a

child of our prosaic England," he brings into strong relief his permanent faith " in the people of England, their genius, and their destiny,"—a faith, by the way, curiously contrasted with

his remark, "I see no reason why you, too, should not fade like the Tyrian dye, and moulder like the Venetian

palaces." Shirley maintains that, as regards the suffrage, Mr. Disraeli was indifferent, because he believed in the nation, and not in its arrangements ; that, as regarded Ireland, he thought the true policy was to create, not to destroy ; and that, in menacing Russia, he was defending civilisation by the only argument perceptible to Russians. Mr. MacColl, on the other hand, though temperate in his criti- cism, evidently does not believe in his subject. He asserts that Disraeli, so far from being magnanimous, was often outrageous in his language—a certain fact, up to a particular period in his career—and suggests that be was ulcerated by contemptuous treatment at school, a view for which there is some evidence, in the curious and quite separate hatred and horror his novels display for the class of ushers. This ulceration increased that pride of race which he afterwards displayed, and which there is every reason to believe was the most genuine of his feeling. A Jew, full of p ide and !of great ability, brought first of all into social contact with men of intellect without principle, like Count D'Orsay, Mr. Disraeli pinned his political faith on Boling- broke, one of the most unprincipled of mankind, and remained through life a sceptic, both iu politics and theology. He, indeed, told the electors of Taunton that statesmen must be governed by opportunity, and must even affect ideas they do not entertain, for the people must have leaders. He had, however, some strong sympathies, one being with the Mahommedan world, with which all Jews at heart sympathise ; and another with the Throne, which he desired to restore to power. He even believed that Sir Robert Peel should have availed himself of the strong feeling created by the accession of the Queen, to restore the Preroga- tive. Mr. MacColl supports each argument in his thesis by a chain of facts and quotations, which make his entire paper a valuable contribution to the Beaconsfield literature. At page 1013, for example, some very curious evidence is produced, showing that Lord Beaconsfield, who has always been sup- posed to be on the side of the North, and who had few sym- pathies with rebellion, wished the Emperor Napoleon to recog- nise the South, in which case, he believed, Earl Russell would have followed him, rather than quit power. The Duke of Argyll concludes his papers on the " Origin of Religion," which are intended to show the immense probability that man originally had a revealed religion, which he lost in some great degeneracy ; and Mr. Bence Jones once more gives his opinion on Irish affairs. It is, in brief, that Ireland should be governed like England, but without juries. Mr. Bence Jones writes with great moderation and good-temper, but his absolute belief in himself reaches the sublime. Only wicked persons could dis- like his way of governing his estate, which is avowedly to manage it as he would a shop, treating all on it as persons in his employ. The idea that a nation can think an estate some- thing else than a property, or could object to a landlord farm- ing a large acreage directly, clearly never entered his mind.

Yet he would not deny that if every landlord did it, Irish society would be reduced to landlords and labourers; or that this is not the Irish, or, for that matter, the English idea of a civilised community. In a paper " On Some National Char- acteristics of European Society," Dr. Hillebrand seems to us to confuse "society" with intelligent conversation in a most confusing fashion, and to make of such conversation almost the object of civilisation,—not, surely, a sound view. It is pro- bable, however, that he has unconsciously exaggerated the prominence of this division of his thought, and regards con- versation only es the easiest test of the harmonious relation of the cultured towards each other. Mr. Kuighton adds some- thing to the " Reminiscences of Carlyle," from his own experi- ence—and it is not a pleasant something. It will deepen the impression that there was a good deal of the wind-bag in the worshipper of reality, and also the impression of his bad- temper. This is characteristic :—

" It was amusing to see how impatient he was of correction from MI wife, and yet he would take correction from mine like a lamb. He was talking on one occasion with a distinguished nobleman about Herat. He pronounced in wrongly, Herat. My wifo was an atten- tive listener. I was conversing with Mrs. Carlyle about a paper of mine that bad recently appeared in Household Words, on 'The Buried City of Ceylon,' when I heard Carlyle say to my wife, You scorn interested in our conversation.'—' cannot quite make out what city you are talking about,' said she.—' Why, do you not know Mira, on the western confines of Afghanistan and the eastern of Persia, that diplomatists are so much interested in just now ?'—' Oh, you mean Herat,' said she, that's quite a different thing. Nobody calls is Herat.' He accepted the correction without a murmur, and for the rest of the evening spoke of the city as Herat. On another occasion ho quoted wrongly from the Bible Is thy servant a dead dog, to do this thing P'—' It is not a dead dog, Carlyle,' said his wife —she spoke with a burr on the r, Earlyle ; ' it is not a dead dog, Carlyle, but a dog,—" Is thy servant a dog, to do this thing ?"' Car- lyle .heard her patiently to the end, and a little after took occasion to repeat his misquotation gait() gravely ' Is thy servant a dead clog, to -do this thing ?' His wife, like a prudent woman, did not hear it. So much easier do we find it to be corrected by other people's wives than by our own !"

And this :-

"K. The magazines and reviews have been very busy with you lately, sir.'—C. Ay, have they ? I never read them. I have the most utter contempt and abhorrence for the literary canaille of the day, with their Reviews, and Magazines, and Times newspaper. They should try and understand me—that would be more sensible. And what have they been saying?'"

Sir Henry Taylor contributes to the Nineteenth Century the first kindly paper on Carlyle's "Reminiscences," in which he finds traces of " enduring love and sympathies and admira- tions," " clouded by misanthropic moods," having their origin partly in ill-health, and partly in a long-continued sense of despair, which, says Sir Henry, was not entirely unreasonable :—

" At a time when he was slowly emerging from obscurity, and sadly struggling for the moans of subsistence, I was in communica- tion on tho subject of literary pensions with the one of our statesmen now gone to their rest, who was the most distinguished for his love of literature, whilst his feelings of benevolence certainly exceeded what most of our public men have time for. I ventured to propose that a pension.should be offered to Carlyle, and the answer was that a man who wrote such a style as that ought to starve. Carlyle did not know of the proposal at the time, nor did it ever come to his knowledge, nor would it perhaps have met with his approval. But the reception given to it is significant of what was thought of him by most men of high cultivation in the orthodox and classical school of literature."

Sir Henry Taylor ventures to say, in a passage of unusually profound criticism, that although Carlyle was absolutely sincere, many of his opinions were not, and that this was, in part, the secret of his popularity :—

" His relations with the people are without a precedent, as far as I am aware, in these times, or in any ; the human paradox of the period. He is their chartered libertine,' assailing them and their rights, insisting that they should be everywhere ruled with a rod of iron, and yet more honoured and admired by them than any dema- gogue who pays them knee-worship. In courting the people, it is easy, no doubt, to err on the side of obsequiousness, and to lose their respect. But it is far from easy to defy them, and yet to conquer. How the conquest has been achieved by Carlyle is a perplexing pro- blem. Is it that the man, being beyond all question a genuine man, there is nevertheless something unreal about his opinions ; so that the splendid apparitions of them are admired and applauded by the people, as they would admire a groat actor in the character of Coriolanus, and another in the character of Menenius Agrippa, and still more an actor who could play both parts in turn ?

That is very just, though at the same time, as Miss Bronte once pointed out, the average Englishman likes to be mentally belaboured, and even respects Matthew Arnold for telling him that he is an " ill-bred bourgeois." It is only when his " rights " are interfered with, or he is told that he cannot ride, that he gots seriously angry. Mr. Vance Smith contributes a criticism of some value to the many which have appeared upon the New Revision of the Testament. He says it will be found that the changes of text are not many, the Textus Receptus being singularly accurate, and many suspicious points being, in fact, instances of the awkward use of Greek tenses natural to men who thought in Hebrew, and used Greek as an acquired tongue. He makes many criticisms of the revision, especially objecting to the substitution of "the Evil One" for "evil" in the Lord's Prayer, which, he thinks, scarcely warranted by analogy, but he only convicts the Revisers of one serious mistake. They have, he says, i•etainecl the title " Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews," without indicating that there is no manuscript authority for it whatever. They had, however, decided in the beginning to leave the titles untouched. Mr. Myers offers, in " Ernest Ronan," a charming biography of the philosopher, who is, he says, a pure Breton, of a family which emigrated from Cardiganshire about 480, and settled at Ledano, on the Trieux, where Renan'was born in 1821, in a house filled with an atmosphere of religion and legend. He had intended to become

• a priest, but study in the seminaries made him sceptical, and he developed by degrees into the rationalising Hebrew Professor known to all Europe, and a Conservative from a somewhat .separate stand-point, a distaste for the tendency to individualism,

which operates, he thinks, like a dry-rot to break up every old society. France, he considered, after the German war, " seemed to have before her then the choice of two paths, the one loading through national self-denial to national strength, the other through democratic laxity to a mass of private well-being, likely to place its own continuance above all other aims." France chose the latter, and with it weakness ; and her only revenge on Prussia will, he thinks, be " the spectacle of ease and luxury which will sap the robust self-denial of Germany." That theory assumes that democracy will never be unselfish, a point upon which history, as yet, gives little light. True democracies are hardly born yet, those which we call such having been based on slavery. That M. Henan has revealed the gravest of all democratic dangers we cannot, however, doubt. We have noticed elsewhere Mr. Romance' paper on ants, and can only name here Mr. Arnold-Forster's answer to Sir Garnet Wolseley, and the closoly-reasoned argument of Mr. Shaw Lefevre in favour of the Irish Land Bill, which is in brief a statement that nothing is forced on the landlords to which good. landlords do not already agree, and ends with this serious warning :-

"It is greatly to be hoped the Peers will deal with the Land Bill in the same wise and politic manner. Looking broadly at the Irish Land Question, it must be clear that we are passing through an agrarian movement not dissimilar in its tendencies and objects from those of which most countries in Europe have had experience during the present century ; one closely connected with the advance of democracy, and aiming at greater independence for the cultivating class. The first act of this movement was in IVO, we are now in the second act. Whether there is to be a third and more extreme move- ment must depend upon whether, in the main, the present measure will remedy the grievances and wrongs of which immediate com- plaint is made, and whether it will satisfy the yearnings for greater independence and security on the part of existing tenants, and provide machinery for the rapid extension of full ownerships in the future."

The Fortnightly has nothing of first-rate interest, unless it be the conclusion of Sir F. Doyle's two papers on horses, which to us, who know nothing whatever of racing or stud-books, or anything connected with the horse, seem simply admirable. Sir Francis's theory is that the modern system of racing does not improve horses, producing only swift, non-staying brutes ; and that if horses are to be improved once more, the wealthy must breed fine beasts, without thinking of their earning- powers as three-year-olds. It is a curious accidental proof of the soundness of Sir Francis Doyle's opinions, that he pub- lished his high estimate of American horses—which are bred to stay (p. 714)—before the American Iroquois had

won the Derby. Mr. Galton's paper on " The Visions of Sane Persons" is curious, but gives us an impression of readiness to receive imperfect evidence. Napoleon's seize ing General Rapp by the .arm to point out to him the brilliancy of a star which none but himself saw, does not convince us that he did see it. He may have done so, and Mr. Galton's remark on the loneliness of very great persons—one

reason of the extraordinary liaisons they are apt to form—and their consequent liability to madness, is most subtle ; but it is at least as probable that Napoleon saw nothing. He was a great actor, did not know what truth was, and was always trying to differentiate himself from other people. This is in- teresting, if only the evidence is certain :—

" A common form of vision is a phantasmagoria, or the appearance of a crowd of phantoms, perhaps hurrying past like men in a street. It is occasionally seen in broad daylight, much more often in the dark ; it may be at the instant of putting out the candle, but it generally comes on when the person is in bed, preparing to sleep, but is by no means yet asleep. I know no less than three men, eminent in the scientific world, who have these phantasmagoria in one form or another. A near relative of my own had them in a marked degree. She was eminently sane, and of such good constitution that her faculties were hardly impaired until near her death at ninety. She frequently described them to me. It gave her amusement during an idle hour to watch these faces, for their expression was always pleasing, though never strikingly so. No two faces wore ever alike, and they never resembled that of any acquaintance. When she was not well the faces usually came nearer to her, sometimes almost suffocatingly close. She never mistook them for reality, although they were very distinct. This is quite a typical case, similar in most respects to many others that I have."

That the mind can project such images is, of course, true, because it does it in sleep, and we know too little of sleep to predicate that it can confer on the mind any new power. Mr. A. Traill's judgment on the Laud Bill, from the Conservative side, is that it will do good, if the Land Court is a strong one, and does not plunder landlords too much, and that it ought to be accepted ; and there is an account of "Hindu Households," by Mr. W. Knighton, not at all new, and wanting in detail, but remarkable for a certain sympathy, the absence of which is so perceptible in most English accounts. Mr. Knighton does not describe the Hindoos as if they were ants, but as if they were people ho had visited. By the way, has he authority for saying that natives think pork will induce disease P That the Eastern abhorrence of pork may have sprung from some early outburst of trichinosis, enshrined in the popular traditions, is extremely pro- bable, but the Indian peoples do not give that reason. They hold the eating of pork not so much unhealthy as shameful, and this in a sense not, that we could ever discover, attaching to any other of the forbidden foods.