THE MAGAZINES.

" CORNELIUS O'Down," to whom we naturally look for entertainment in Blackwood, fails us this month. He writes about Ireland, prophecies confiscation of the land, "a bill that will sweep away

the proprietor like the parson, and tell him that his mission has proved a failure,'" and is generally full of foreboding and wrath. Something of this temper he carries into a neutral subject. "The

Tempter" is an apology for money-lenders, which is too bitter to be humorous. Some licence must be allowed to the advocatus Diaboli, whether he seeks to show that his own client is not so black as is commonly said, or find blemishes in the garments of

the opposite party ; nor should we object to any moderate amount

of " whitewash " that could be laid upon usurers, who are probably not invariably malicious, and certainly not invariably successful, but this must not be done at the cost of " blackwashing" all the youth of England. To say of us English that " raising the wind is a pastime we cultivate from the perambulator to the Bath chair " is a humorous exaggeration not too far removed from the truth ; but "Mr. O'Dowd " is offensive and unjust when he tells us, with an air that is apparently serious, that the ingenues peer, by which he means a lad who is not a profligate spendthrift, is not to be found at public schools, or universities, or indeed anywhere. The sketch of " Sir John Lawrence " is concluded in a third part, which contains an appreciative summary of that statesman's work in India. The writer deals at length with the Affghan question, but as he writes before the interview between Lord Mayo and the Amir, his views

are out of date. He takes so unfavourable a view of that ruler's character and prospects, that he must disapprove, we should think, even of the very cautious advances of friendship which the British Government have made to him. The account of David Hume, the sceptic," in the "Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II.," is written in a fine and liberal spirit, and is well worth reading. Here are the last few sentences, touching on the want of the spiritual element in Hume's nature, and its apparent completeness without it :—

" There seems nothing left to be made up to him, no injustice to set right, no disappointment to soothe, no loss to restore. He had his immortality, his consolations, his happiness, such as it was, within the limits of this world. The imagination declines to follow him into any other. Such a man with such a life may be permitted, so far as our judgment of him is concerned, in a certain solemn heathen calm and

still atmosphere, hushed but not discouraged by the thought, to end and die."

Fraser is equably good, with an unusual proportion of articles on special subjects. " Spanish Poetry before A.D. 1500," " On the Names of Places of Ireland," and " The Two Comets of the Year 1868" are three essays, each of which requires, for any effective criticism of it, a special learning. The last of the three, dealing with one of the most fascinating parts of the most fascinating of sciences, has specially interested us. We pick out from it the fact that one of last year's comet consisted " of the incandescent vapour of carbon—not of burning carbon, be it understood, but of volatilized carbon." This is a discovery made by the spectroscope. The marvel of it is that the observation was made when the comet was far distant from the sun, that carbon does not become volatile but at a very high temperature, and that all the notion which we have hitherto

formed of that of the interplanetary spaces in which the comet was then moving is that of excessive cold.

The most striking feature in the Cornhill is certainly Mr. Reade's tale. The writer is plunging, with his accustomed intrepidity, into the depths of a great social question, nothing less than that of the action of Trade Unions. He also introduces us to a subject on which there will probably be less difference of opinion, the life-destroying trades, such as dry-grinding and the like. He shows his usual power of mastering details and working them up into singularly powerful pictures. On the whole, we are glad that he has made such a choice of a subject. He may often, it is true, be rhetorical, passionate, and even unjust, but he has a way of letting light into a thing. He did so, beyond all doubt, in prison affairs, when he wrote "Never too Late to Mend." The article " Maisons de Santé " is a remarkable revelation of a side

of life in Paris of which but few persons have ever suspected the existence. It seems that these mad-houses, or retreats, or whatever we may call them, fulfil other than sanitary purposes. Among other facts we are told that :—

"Mdlle. de Narbonne Fritzlar, too, the lovely Duchess of Chevrense, some time maid of honour to the Empress Josephine, was, in 1808, cloistered in a maison de sante, on account of the political aversion she had evinced for Bonaparte ; and, again, it was from a private lunatic asylum, in which he had been many years arbitrarily confined, that General Mallet escaped on the night of October 23, 1812, whilst the Grand Army was in Russia, and attempted that coup d'itat which, ill-organized as it was, very nearly succeeded in overthrowing the Government. Under the Bourbons, up to 1830, it was the turn of the Bonapartists to fill the maisons de sante ; under Louis Philippe the Republicans and tha Legitimists were more or less shut up in them ; and since the establishment of the Second Empire it has been towards the persecution of political writers in country newspapers, or of too free-thinking students, that maisons de sauté have been directed."

So that it seems the new revolution, if there is to be such a revolution in Paris, will have its Bastilles to destroy. We take it for granted that the editor guarantees his contributor's veracity.

The article has certainly a very genuine look ; not the less so, perhaps, because its literary form is somewhat rough.

Macmillan begins with an article on " International Copyright,"

which puts the familiar arguments forcibly enough. American authors, we imagine, do not need conviction ; American publishers may be capable of admitting it ; but is there any hope of persuading the American public, a vast multitude in which every man reads, and knows that a copyright treaty would be a tax upon himself of any number of dollars from five up to a thousand ? The writer drops a hint that he should like to see copyrights made perpetual. We should like to see the theme worked out. What a splendid thing it would be for the publishers ! Authors would scarcely be benefited, except the few great men who can afford to keep their literary property. Nine teen out of twenty have to sell it, for the needs of the day cannot wait a year or so for " half-profits ;" and a perpetual copyright would not fetch much more than a limited one, exactly as an advowson is not much more valuable than a next presentation.

Professor Huxley on "Scientific Education" is able, of course, and to ourselves, we must own, slightly provoking. His proposals for the introduction of scientific teaching are modest and reasonable. He asks for what the Germans call " Erdkunde" (earth-knowledge) as a preliminary, and as a subsequent course, for botany and physics (representing the two kinds of physical science ; the one regarding form and the relation of forms to one another ; the other dealing with causes and effects). We heartily wish him success, though we probably differ very widely from his views. We have no sort of sympathy, for instance, with such a sentence as this :—

" If history be the subject of study, the facts are still taken upon the evidence of authority and tradition. You cannot make a boy see the battle of Thermopylae for himself, or know of his own knowledge that Cromwell has once ruled England. There is no getting into direct contact with natural fact by this road."

Whether what a boy may learn by reading about Thermopylm and Cromwell is a " natural " fact or no, we believe that it is fact, and a thing which he may " know of his own knowledge," just as much as he may know any physical truth. Professor Huxley doubtless lodges a hard hit on the humanitarians when he writes :—

" There is, perhaps, no sight in the whole world more saddening and revolting than is offered by men sunk in ignorance of everything but what other men have written, seemingly devoid of moral belief and guidance, but with the sense of beauty so keen, and the power of expression so cultivated, that their sensual caterwauling may be almost mistaken for the music of the spheres."

But what will be the end if our youth is taught that there is no direct contact with fact,—in plain words, that there is nothing to be believed, except through the evidence of sense, or of mathe

matical demonstration? We feel sure that it will scarcely be that which indeed, as we heartily acknowledge, Professor Huxley always heartily asserts, " the love of right and the hatred of wrong." We should mention that Miss Moloch begins in this number a new story, " A Brave Woman," which seems to promise well. Archdeacon Allen communicates a letter written more than twenty years ago, after a visit to Keble, which is worth reading. We believe that Mr. Allen is a good archdeacon ; we are sure that he would have made a good Boswell.

St. Paula is, as usual, readable from beginning to end. Perhaps the most readable of all is the sketch of " Madame de Pompadour," difficult ground, which the writer traverses with commendable skill. We give an extract from the account of her last hours : "On the very morning of her death, being warned of her approach' ing end, she read over her long will and codicils attentively, and dictated a fresh codicil, with a number of additional legacies to friends.. . Alter this she had herself dressed, had some rouge put on her cheeks, and prepared to receive death, as she would have received the king, The Chief Master of the Post Office, who daily made reports to her of secret correspondence, came, and was received as usual, pour travailler avec elle. On the departure of the gentleman from the Post Office, the curd of the Madeleine de la Ville l'EvOque, at Paris, was introduced. She accounted herself his parishioner, since her hotel was in his neighbourhood. She talked to him cheerfully for some moments, and, as he was about to go, detained him with a smile, saying, ' Un moment, Monsieur le Curd, nous nous en irons ensemble.' Sho died very shortly after this pretty speech, at the age of forty-two years and six months."

The poetical critic in Temple Bar is quite equal, or even more than equal, to himself this month. His style is distinguished by the same amenities as usual. "Lax nonsense" is the phrase which he is pleased to apply to some criticism of our own. But he displays more than usual audacity. Last month, to use academical metaphors, he gave Mr. Tennyson "a bad third" among poets ; this month he " gulfs " Mr. Browning, flatly denies, that is, that he is to be reckoned a poet at all. And this is said of the man who could enrich the world with such a conception as that of Pompilia We have nothing in common with a critic of this kind, and cannot, therefore, argue with him, but we may suggest to him that he may make himself better acquainted with the literature of his subject than he appears to be. Why, he asks, has Mr. Bailey persisted for years in silence ? and he quotes, as a possible explanation, a passage from Festua. But has he never heard of "The Mystic," and " The Angel-World " ? In the same magazine we have a very severe,—we believe a not too severe,—article on "Lord Byron's Married Life."

The Fortnightly has a very powerful and trenchant reply by Professor Huxley to Mr. Congreve on the philosophical value of M. Comte's speculations. Professor Huxley shows that his own epigrammatic phrase for Comtism, " Catholicism minus Christianity," is only a literal condensation of Comte's own account of his own aims. He is very successful in exhibiting Comte's often ignorant scientific dogmatism, especially in th e regio u of ph ysi elegy, —Co m te's scorn for microscopic investigation, for example, now sounding almost ludicrous ; and, in our opinion, he might have added that M. Comte's philosophy of mathematics is exceedingly poor and incompetent. The Professor's criticism of Comte's " law of the three states " is quite unanswerable, and his analysis of the speculative tendencies of children is full of acuteness, though it rests apparently on a somewhat narrow experience. The following is excellent, as describing one type, but it is only one type :— "Nothing is more curious than the absolute irreverence of a kindly-treated young child ; its tendency to believe in itself as the centre of the universe ; and its disposition to exercise despotic tyranny over those who could crush it with a finger." The whole paper is masterly and masterful, Professor Huxley exhibiting now and then in an intellectual region a good deal of the frank and despotic dogmatism of his own typical child. Mr. Edward Dicey has written in the same number a very thoughtful and sagacious criticism of the mutual feelings of England and America, and their causes,—in which we only find fault with one point, his assertion that if England and America had exchanged places, if Ireland had revolted instead of the South, and America had acknowledged its belligerent rights, we should have said and done just what the Americans have said and done. We might have been,—we fancy we should have been, —more practically unreasonable than the Americans. We might have declared war for the escape of an American Alabama ; but we should not have been so sensitive about their words. Oar self-esteem is bigger than the Americans', —our susceptibility to ridicule or indifference, less. Mr. Cracroft has a subtle criticism of some portraits in the Royal Academy, which contains some very happy remarks on the portrait of Mr. Gathorne Hardy by Sir Francis Grant, though he greatly overpraises, to our mind, Millais's portrait of Miss Nina Lehmann. But why did he not mention at all what seems to us the most striking portrait in the exhibition,—Mr. Lawrence's portrait of the poet Browning, with the original Book—of The Ring and the Book—in his hand? The portrait has all the weather-beaten shrewdness of that great imaginatiVe man-stalker in perfection. The portrait brings back to one's mind at once that happy phrase of a brother poet's,--•

"With eye like a skipper's cooked up at the weather, Sat the Vice-Chairman Browning, thinking in Greek."

The Gentleman's Magazine continues to give us instalments of Victor Hugo's romance, of which, by the way, there is an amusing criticism in Macmillan, pointing out, besides more serious faults, some extremely absurd fancies of M. Hugo—Tom-JimJack, for instance, as a sailor's nickname, and Lord Clancharlie as a peer's title. Sylvanus Urban seems to be cutting himself off from the traditions of his past. We notice, perhaps ought to have noticed before, that the obituary has been discontinued.

Broadway, besides the continuation of Henry Kingsley's spirited tale " Stretton," has what strikes us as a very remarkable literary parallel between " Vathek," Beckford, and Edgar Poe. Poe, as the writer justly remarks, was a penniless Beckford. There were in both men the same tastes for the splendid and the horrible in strange juxtaposition, only the different circumstances of the two men gave them a very different development. Beckford, able to gratify his passion for the gorgeous, naturally dwelt upon it ; Poe, denied the same gratification, found a solace in the most ghastly conceptions.

We notice with considerable interest The Month, which, all our readers may not be aware, is a Roman Catholic periodical. It certainly is not open to the reproach, made not without some reason against some of these publications, of a want of general literary interest. There is a very appreciative criticism of " Thackeray as a Humorist," and a temperate though necessarily a somewhat hostile review of Mr. Lecky's History of European Morals. We cannot help expressing some surprise at reading that the fall of the Bourbons is owing to their oppression of the Holy See, and especially to the conduct of the great Bourbon Louis XIV. Is not this ungrateful to the author of the " Dragonnades "? Surely it is from our side, and not from that of Rome, that the quotation should be made,— Kai xeh6; ionart sePrat 0ki0pw, 'St; cive6Xotro zai 'XXo;, Err; roloci;rc'e 76 ?