SOME MAGAZINES.

THE number of the Nineteenth Century for January is an exceedingly readable one. We have noticed before at consider- able length the first paper, Sir Garnet Wolseley's account of the position of the French Army, and Mr. Gladstone's " Last Words on the County Franchise ;" and next to these in interest is the short " Life of Midhat Pasha." It is written by an admirer, Mr. J. W. Gambier, who on the whole despises Turks, but who is, consciously or unconsciously, a Carlylean, and sees in Midhat a man of that tremendous energy which sometimes saves States. We confess we cannot admire his portrait of the man, or see in what Midhat differs from the original blood-drinking tyrants who made Turkey. He can, according to Mr. Gambier, govern, but only with the state of siege. " He cannot brook interference, and has never submitted to dictation," and from first to last has governed like a Jacobin Terrorist or like Narvacz, who produced order, but could not forgive his enemies because he had killed them all. In Roumelia he cleaned the country of the Circassians, whom Mr. Gambier pronounces mere villains, while " the bodies of the underhand and sneaking agents of secret societies swing warningly from hundreds of gibbets." Midhat apparently executed every Christian opponent as a traitor. Bulgaria was infamously governed, as Mr. Gambier admits, and as the population was restive, Midhat was sent there, and though he pardoned 500 dupes, " the chiefs of these plotters and intriguers, however, did not fare so well, and were despatched to join the company of those whom we have seen gracing the gibbets of Roumelia in an earlier portion of this history, very much to the disgust of their patrons beyond the Danube." He was then sent to Nisch, where he governed very well, and to the vilayet of the Danube, where he built roads and bridges, and introduced justice of a kind, hanging people apparently on suspicion ; and was finally sent to Bagdad, where the people, backed by the muni- cipality, objected to the recruiting law. The law was probably hated, as elsewhere in the East, because it fell only on those who could not bribe themselves off, but Midhat was determined it should be obeyed. He called together the Pro- vincial Council, and said to them :—" Gentlemen,—I give you two hours to quell the disturbances, for which I hold you per- sonally responsible to myself. I am aware to what extent you have fostered them, and have taken my steps accordingly. If in two hours peace is not restored, I will hang every one of you, and retire to Constantinople, leaving directions that the entire city shall be burnt." Everybody knew he would do it without a -qualm, and the unhappy wretches yielded, as men always yield, to force applied with a sufficient contempt for humanity. Midhat then appeared in Constantinople, where, as was natural, his -character made him an idol of the more fanatic Turks, and where in alliance with Hussein Avni, a Turk of the same kind, he upset the Sultan Abdul Aziz, who, Mr. Gambier thinks, certainly did not commit suicide :—" Murdered or dead by his own hand, the treatment his body received was as disrespectful and dishonour- ing as his end had been abandoned and forlorn. A certain person who went to the palace where the body lay, found it propped up behind a door, almost nude, where it remained until the evening, when without any ceremony, and scarcely any attendants but the grave-diggers, it was buried in the grave of his father, Mahmoud the Reformer." His subsequent career is well known, but it is not ended, for Midhat may return to power, and would be the very person to defend the Ottoman Empire when reduced to Constantinople, and only surrender it when burnt to the very ground. That he is energetic and able, follows from every account given of his history, and indeed from his rise itself ; but our admiration is reserved, we confess, for rulers of a different stamp, the men who, like many Indian Pashas—notably, Meadows Taylor--stamp out brigandage and lawlessness by force of character and serene justice, and not by expenditure of life and rope. Dr. Doran's account of " Shakespeare in France," and the form in which his plays have been put upon the stage, is most amusing—in the French Hamlet, Hamlet ends triumphantly as legitimate King— and individually, we have a strong admiration for Mr. Ruskin's

eloquence in the Oxford lecture. The admiration is utterly un- justifiable by any canon, but perhaps it may be justified by a quotation :-

" Of all the shallow follies of this ago, that proclamation of the vanity of prayer for the sunshine and rain ; and the cowardly equivocation, to meat it, of clergy who never in their lives really prayed for anything, I think, excel. Do these modern scientific gentlemen fancy that no- body, before they were born, knew the laws of cloud and storm, or that the mighty human souls of former ages, who every one of them lived and died by prayer, and in it, did not know that in every petition framed on their lips they were asking for what was not only fore- ordained, but just as probably fore-done ? or that the mother pausing to pray before ebe opens the letter from Alma or Balaclava, does not know that already he is saved for whom she prays, or already lies fes- tering in his shroud The whole confidence and glory of prayer is in its appeal to a Father who knows our necessities before we ask, who knows our thoughts before they rise in oar hearts, and whose decrees, as unalterable in the eternal future as in the eternal past, yet in the close verity of visible fact, bend, like reeds, before the fore-ordained and faithful prayers of his children."

Mr. Mallock finishes the fine protest against the utilitarian view of happiness and life which it pleases him, for some un- known reason, to designate, " Is Life Worth Living?"—he

holds that it is not, if there be no future state,—and Mr. Alfred Wills fights strongly for a right of criminal appeal,

which he, curiously enough, thinks would not be often resorted to, an argument in favour of the system which seems to us rather forced. There ought to be a criminal appeal, but surely the mere doctrine of chances would induce most criminals to resort to it.

The new feature introduced into the Contemporary, the account of the life and thought of the day in France and Italy, written, as to France, by Gabriel Monod—is he the Huguenot Pasteur of that name ?—as to Italy, by Professor de Gubernatis, seems to us excellent, a real addition to the means of information procurable in London. Each paper is a complete history, political, literary, and social, of the country to which it refers for that month, and it is hardly possible for work to be better done, though the editor should caution his contributors that he desires " white light," and as fair a statement of the unpopular side of each argument as may be given. These papers are quite worth the price of the maga- zine, the body of which is this month a little dull. Mr. Free- man's paper is perhaps the most readable, for he fights for a solu-

tion of the suffrage question, which will yet have stout defenders, —namely, an extension of the household suffrage to counties,

with a thorough reconsideration of the distribution of electoral power, but without any attempt to frame equal electoral districts. He would, in fact, perfect the scheme of election as far as possible, without breaking with the continuity of his- tory. His plan for this end is to give a number of Members to a town or county in proportion to its size, without altering its boundaries,—a scheme which would, of course, allow either of single seats, or cumulative voting, or Mr. Hare's plan, or any other system of election which might be adopted. Miss Cobbe's paper on the "Little Health of Ladies" is both amusing and in- structive, but we see in it traces of a feeling from which Miss Cobbe, almost alone among the strong-minded, has hitherto been free,—a feeling that man and woman are opposed. There will be smiles in many households when this paragraph is read :— " It must be borne in mind also, in estimating a woman's chances of health, that if she neglect to think of herself, there is seldom anybody to do for her what she does for her husband. Nobody reminds her to change her boots when they are damp ; nobody jogs her memory as to the unwholesomeness of this or that beverage or comestible, or gives her the little cossetings which so often ward off colds and similar petty ills. Unless the woman live with a sister or friend, it must be scored one against her chances, as compared to a man, that she has no wife."

Brothers are certainly a little oppressive to sisters, whose weak- nesses they, bred in the same nursery, scarcely understand ; but we should say husbands were, as a rule, decidedly more fidgetty about their wives' health than wives about their husbands', more solicitous about colds, and certainly at least as

much disposed to cosseting,—if that pleasant process be really, as Miss Cobbe says, a health-giving one. For the rest, women settle their own dress, and to a great extent their own ways of life, and the only charge which can be brought justly against the men is that they do shut women out from careers which would be as beneficial to their health as to their happiness. That is true, but even that is passing away. The article, however, which will be most read is that by the Duke of Argyll, on Dis- establishment. It will, we fear, disappoint the English reader, being mainly a paper to prove that lay patronage is not essential to the idea of a State Establishment,—a pro- position which nobody competent to form an opinion or likely to read the Duke's article ever doubted. The true difficulty is whether it is worth while for the State to support a Church for which it cannot make laws, which is the present position of the Scotch Establishment, and to that the Duke does not address himself. The General Assembly is now a true Parliament for the Scotch Church, and why should the secular Parliament rest under the obligation of taxing the people, or if you will, seeming to tax the people, in support of it, any more than of any other ecclesias- , tical organisation? It is certain, for instance, that Parliament r..ankl not relax the obligation of every Scotch minister to sub- scribe the Westminster Confession without breaking up the Church, while the General Assembly could, as the secular Parlia-

. ment -would confirm its vote without demur. Why, then, should the secular Parliament concern itself with the Scotch Church ?

- We do not say it 'should not, we are not prejudging that ques- tion. But we want to know why in this instance alone obligation phou1d not be accompanied by rights.

The .Fortnightly Review is not quite up to its usual mark. .There is plenty to read in it, but no paper of either special or surpassing interest. The best, perhaps, in spite of the absence of a date, is the report of Mr. Nassau Senior's conversations with Guizot at Val Richer, which is full of curious matter, showing at once the Minister's great ability and his:want of prophetic insight. This, for example, seems to us full of acumen :- "Louis XVIII," he said, "has the reputation of Constitutionalism, but it was not because he liked or even approved Parliamentary govern- ment. He hated the charter, but he believed it to be necessary, and he submitted to it with a good grace. With better grace, indeed, than Louis Philippe, principally because he took less interest in public affairs. Louis Philippe's spirit was broken by the Revolution. He worshipped Republicanism as some Asiatic nations do the Devil, as a maleficent Principle to be flattered and propitiated, but not to be resisted. Among his ministers, those whom he caressed most, an& as Lafitte, and after- wards Thiers, were not those whom he trusted moat or liked most. He used to call them by their simple surnames ; he never did so to Casimir Perier, or to the Duo de Broglie, or even to me. He was not familiar with those whom he respected; or rather, he ceased to respect those who appeared to wish for his familiarity. He has been called false, but I never found him so. Though personally brave, he was politically timid ; he preferred address to force ; he always wished to turn an obstacle instead of attacking it in front. He has been called avaricious. That is another calumny. He did not like to waste his money, but he devoted it liberally to public purposes. Though never confident as to the future, he made no private purse."

. And the events of the present day only lend force to this, though France has been driven in an unexpected way out of the com- bination :- "' You expect,' I said, ' to see Tunis French. What is Constantinople to be ?'—' It cannot remain Turkish,' he answered. The attempt to preserve the integrity of the rotten Turkish Empire is an attempt to resist nature. Such an attempt, when made by two such nations as France and England, may be persevered in for years. The longer it lasts the greater will be the waste of men and money and diplomacy ; but it must eventually fall. The Turks must be driven across the Bosphorus. We cannot occupy Constantinople, nor can you ; we are both resolved not to let Russia have it. All Europe would refuse to put it under Austria, even if Austria were mad enough to wish for it. It cannot be independent ; it must, therefore, be Greek, the capital of a Greek empire, to which you will be wise enough to cede your trouble- some and useless protectorate of the Ionian Islands."

But the whole of the following judgment proved to be an entire misreading of the facts, or rather of the conditions upon which the facts would ultimately be based :—

" 'France is a standing danger, sometimes to the freedom, sometimes to the good government of Europe. And what bulwarks have you now against her? Not Prussia. Her army, out of all proportion to her population or her wealth, is a militia. Our military men treat it with contempt. Sardinia, or by whatever name the new kingdom of Italy is to be called, is, at least for the present, powerful only for mischief. The Netherlands and Belgium could bring into the field 200,000 men—a force not to be despised ; but they have no military reputation. Russia is hors de combat. Our troops have returned from Italy with a great respect for the Austrian soldiers. But they have enough to do to keep ,down Hungary and Venetia. Austria, while intact, supported by Bel- ginm and Holland, and in case of need, by Prussia, was a check to the Ambition of a French despot, or to the madness of a French republic, which, was useful, I might say indispensable, to you and to ourselves. d •you have ,clone and are doing all that you can without actual war her np:" 'ALCOGGhlwin.Bmith.pleads 'strongly in his paper on " University Extension" for the foundation of Colleges in the great cities, which he holds to be specially needed for the young men of

the new wealth, but he is opposed to local universities„and would affiliate Owens College and similar institutions to Oxford or Cambridge. We do not understand, however, that he would object if the means were forthcoming to the creation of a great Northern University, say, at York, with a character of its own, his first fear being the old one, that new Univer- sities will be under unendurable temptation to lower the standard. The opinion is an important one, thaugh, as we think, erroneous, because, though an Oxford man, Mr. -Gold- win Smith is also a Professor in an American University.

Mr. Herbert Spencer begins what promises to be a considerable series of papers on "Ceremonial Government,"—that is, the laws• which govern the genesis of ceremonial, the primordial form, as• he believes, of social restraint ; but as yet he is only on the threshold of his subject. Sir George Campbell gives us an .in- side view of Egypt which, in the main, is most unfavourable, Sir George holding that the Egyptian Government is more

than the Turkish, while the Khedive is a wholesale monopolist, prohibiting—to take but one example—all boats on the Nile but his own, and the Fellahs are more heavily taxedthan in any other country in the world. The land-tax now amounts-

to 25s. an acre, and since the last arrangement for the debt the officials have been left unpaid, and have, of course, still further to plunder the people. " I cannot conceive how European, officers can reconcile themselves so far to strain their position in the interests of the creditors, as to maintain the appearance ,of

paying their way by discharging the coupons in full, when' the obligations are neglected." No man possessing money dare show that he possesses it, .and the conscription is worked,arbi-

trarily—any man being seized who cannot afford to bribe ithe- village sheik to exempt him. This unfavourable judgment is the more noteworthy, because Sir G. Campbell thoroughly knows that larger Egypt—Bengal—and is quite aware of

the difference between apparent suffering and its reality. The paper on " The Dutch in Java " strikes us as superficial, though- well written ; but Mr. G. Saintsbury's estimate of Jules Sandeatr

is a fine bit of instructive criticism, needing only to,be greatly extended. He can do what is so rarely done,—give an account of a novel which is not tedious, and conveys to the reader's mind some notion of the aroma of the novelist's work. There is plenty

of good criticism of novels, but good narrative criticism is so. rare that we quite welcome Mr. Saintsbury's work.

The novels in the Cornhill continue and improve, but the most original paper is an account of Marivaux, the French dramatist, the predecessor of Beaumarchais, and three or four of whose- pieces still keep the stage. His very name is almost forgotten in England, but his Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hazard has always been a favourite with leading French actresses, including Mdlle. Mars and Mdme. Arnould-Plessy. Marivaux was among dramatist& what Watteau was among painters,—a writer of much grace, but little force, who by preference depicted, and depicted well, an idle- and useless, but gay and picturesque, though slightly corrupt, society." Though he began to succeed in 1720, Marivaux is singularly modern in style, and he had a special gift for creating girls who, though "actresses in that eternal comedy', of false love which was the amusement of Versailles under- the old regime, are still youthful, natural, and tender. He scarcely makes plots, but relies upon the difficulties his lovers- make for themselves, and which the audience see from the first

will end :—

" In Les &cares, one of the pleasantest of Marivaux's comedies to- read, after twenty-one scenes of self-imposed complications, the char- acters pair off as we foresaw they would do at the beginning, and the Marquis laughing says Ala! ah ! ah I none avow pris un plaisant ddtour pour arriver la!' So might we say of all his pieces, but the- charm of them lies just in these detours, and one admires all the more that genius which can entertain us and hold our attention while he door nothing but detail before us in brilliant or tender conversation all the imaginary obstacles and apparently inextricable complications which the scruples, the ignorance, the timidity, the amour propre, or the too. delicate sense of honour of his characters, raise before the satisfaction of the wishes of their hearts. Marivaux's art consists in keeping alive- the interests while postponing the end as much as possible, and creating at every instant, not by the accumulation of obstinate and obstructive- facts, but by force of mere jeux d'esprit, new and again new difficulties- which still retard it."

Thin reading for to-day ; but still comedies which have kept the stage in France for 150 years must have had merit, and great merit, of their own. Marivaux also wrote some novels, and one of them, Marianne, was pronounced by Jules Dania, a novel whose author trod.very close upon the heels of the. author Of:Gi/ Bias :--" In all his portraita we find the-same variety, the same

delicacy, the same mixture of irony, good-nature, and sarcasm. Like Diderot and Gresset, Marivaux must have a little fling at the nuns. The Payson Parvenu is almost as charming a book as Marianne. It is written in the same style, only with more sar- casm and irony, as the subject naturally permitted ; and for any one who wishes to get an idea of the society of the eighteenth century, perhaps there is no collection of portraits more complete than Marivaux's Payson Parvenu."

Fraser has too many papers, and they are too slight, the best being, to our minds, those on the " City of Kiyoto," the residence of the Mikado of Japan ; and on the " Great Fourfold Waterfall," the fall of Garsoppa, on the western side of India, near Vonore. This fall, little known as it is, is one of the wonders of the world :—

" Difficult it is to convoy in words any picture of the stupendous scene. There is the river, some three hundred yards in width, flowing through soft woodland, its waters split into many glassy currents, gliding round worn boulders and islets, when instantly bed and banks are gone, and in their place are savage, terrific walls of gaunt rock plunging to depths the eyes dare not look into, down which the shud- dering waters fall at four points nearly equidistant on the irregular curve of the rim of the abyss. From the lip of the precipice to the dark pools at its foot is an accurately measured distance of eight hundred and thirty feet, more than twice the height of the top of the cross that surmounts St. Paul's Cathedral, and down this prodigious descent pour the four cataracts, each arrayed in its own special robes of grandeur and beauty. First on the western side is the Great or Rajah Fall ; a branch of the river runs over a projecting ledge, and nowhere touching the Titanic wall, which hollows in, descends in a stately unbroken column, gradually widening its shining skirts, into a black, unfathomable pool eight hundred and thirty feet below. The precipice runs backward, curving in an irregular bay, on whose farther side the next Fall, named the Roarer, shoots slanting down a third of the height into a rocky basin that shoulders out, whence it boils out in a broad massive cataract, plunging five hundred feet into the same pool opposite its kingly neighbour. Leaving the bay, next on the general plane of the precipice comes the Rocket Fall, running im- petuously over the brim and down the face of the stupendous wall, to which it only just clings with a broad band of glistening foam-white water, speeding in quick gushes, incessantly darting out myriads of watery rockets and vaporous arrows, with which all its volume seems alive, and pouring clear at last in a dense shining curtain into its own pool. Last and loveliest, La Dame Blanche glides down the grim colossal rampart in lapse after lapse of delicate lace-like veils, now blowing out in bright misty spray and again quickly gathering up the white folds, and so stealing downward with a whispering murmur, till gently sinking in a sparkling shower into a pool whose ink-black surface is hardly ruffled."

The exact depth, scientifically measured, is 830 feet.

We see nothing either in Blackwood or Macmillan calling for special note, except the paper in the former, which we mentioned last week, on " Peace or War." That is a strangely moderate summary of the situation from the Tory side.