THE MAGAZINES.

THE best article, from the literary point of view, in the Reviews for June is Mr. Rowland Prot hero's account of life in provincial France (Nineteenth Century), and the most lustre°.

tive the account of Socotra by the late Mr. J. Theodore Bent in the same magazine; but the one which will be moat read is the essay on the Queen by Mrs. Emily Crawford in the Contemporary Review. It is really interesting because it is neither fulsome nor hostile, and if accurate, a point upon which we can give no opinion, is a valuable contribution to history. It brings out strongly the mistakes made in the Queen's early education, perhaps too strongly, for the mistakes have in no way injured the essentials of her character. The Duchess of Kent, according to Aire, Crawford, was always afraid that her daughter, if allowed any freedom, would get out of hand and spoil the project for) her uuirriage, and she kept the future Queen, therefore, in a studious seclusion which stunted her figure, and made hes self-conscious and melancholy. The husband chosen for her, wisely chosen, if it is true that so many ineligible suitors thought they had a chance, made up, however, for everything :

"The romance of the Queen's life went on for twenty-three years. August is counted a lucky month to her family. August 24, the Prince Consort's birthday, is the red letter date in her calendar. She can no longer give him birthday presents, but she gives them to others in remembrance of him, thinks over his good words and kind deeds, and has the joy of feeling that her love is now freed from the dross of selfishness. The good of loving the dead, the crippled, the helpless, is that it purifies love from that dross. The Prince was to the Queen all she says. He was the corrective of some of her defects of character. One wonders how a young country gentleman, for he was only that, with no knowledge of human nature other than what he picked up as a student at Bonn. could have so well adapted himself to his exceptional situation. That he sought above all things for wisdom there can be no doubt."

The following story is amusing, perhaps also characteristic of the actors in it :—

" One of the incidents that conduced to give the Queen tem- porary popularity in Ireland was this. She and the Prince, with the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred, were driving in their roomy carriage to Mr. Dargan's Exhibition. The streets and windows were thronged. There were only bright faces, and the air was filled with cheers. She bowed very affably ; the Prince held his hat a little before his forehead, and hardly bowed. The Prince of Wales took off a cap with a white band and held it rather gracefully, as if to show that he should have bowed were the Queen not present. Prince Alfred looked a little sulky, and kept his cap on his bead. The Queen did not appear to see him, but (he (lid. She whipped the cap off his head with one hand and with the other gave him such a slap in the face. It was done in an instant, and without any change of countenance. Thunder- ing cheers marked the approval of the multitude."

—The Contemporary Review has also a personal article by " Germanicus " upon William II. of Germany. It is far too bitter, bait embodies the judgment, so far as that judgment is

hostile, which Europe is beginning to pass upon his Majesty. He is far too anxious to be always in front, to dictate upon small questions as well as great ; he has become to a remarkable degree reactionary ; and he seriously believes that he will one day have to suppress an uprising of the people by main force :-

" The situation is getting more and more dangerous, the feeling of discontent increases in intensity every day ; even very moderate and loyal men are beginning to see in the new legislation against political associations many striking utterances, which enable them to infer how powerfully in the highest circles the idea is gaining ground, that one day it will be necessary to crush a Social Democratic rising of the whole people by force of arms. When that day cornea it will be an evil day for Germany and for the Emperor. The Germans have not yet had their 1688, nor their 17S9 ; and we cannot believe that they will be spared the experi- ence of England and of France. The literary Golden Age in Germany also arrived a century later than the similar epnchs in the two Western European countries. Notwithstanding Sadowa and Sedan, notwithstanding their superior chemical industry and their Rontgen rays, the Germans, as a political body, are a hundred years behind the English or the French nation. They boast of a Constitution, a Parliament, and all the other parapher- nalia of emdern government. But the Emperor nevertheless considers himself the master, just as James II. did."

That is correct enough as a statement of fact, though over vehement in expression, but we distrust the deduction drawn from it. In 1688 the English King had no physical force behind him of any kind, and in 1789 the mechanism of the French Monarchy was completely worn out. Louis XVI. never made an effort to save himself. In Germany, on the other hand, the Court is supported by at least half the people and an irresistible Army. One cannot even think how a re- volution is to commence, for there is no machine within the State as powerful as the Sovereign, and an insurrection would only rivet the fetters of the mass. The contingency hinted at in another page, that the Army might not act, is wholly unsupported by evidence, and the Hohenzollerns have

survived external defeat over and over again. If Germany attains freedom, as we hope and believe she will do some day, it will be through the conversion of a Monarch who has become intellectually convinced that fifty millions of freemen can make a greater State than any army, however powerful, or any bureaucracy, however full of

cleverness and integrity.—"Eaten with Honour," by Mr. Flinders Petrie, is an odd paper, the object of which is to

show that cannibalism, or a vivid tradition that cannibalism was sacred, survived into the civilised period of Egyptian history. Bodies have been found buried with all honour and yet with the flesh strangely separated from the bones, appa- rently by boiling. The evidence found in certain tombs is certainly consistent with Mr. Petrie's suggestion, and he is, of course, a great authority ; but is it not more probable that the appearances observed are the result of some early and imperfect method of embalming, which those who used it did not know how to apply to the entire corpse P—But for personal reasons we should bestow unstinted admiration on

the picture of Holland drawn by Mr. C. J. Cornish, which really enables one to see the countryside in Holland; but we may quote a fact not generally known, that Holland is the native land of trotting matches, Hardriverij, as they are

locally called. The practice has created a special breed of horses, and in the excitement of the contests, to which all are admitted, the distinctions of caste, which are nearly as strong in Holland as in Germany, are for the moment obliterated. Mr. Cornish should have added a sentence to tell us whether the excitement is or is not increased by much betting. Mr. Patrick Geddes's account of Cyprus is hopeful. He

believes that the poverty of the island, as indeed of most of Western Asia, is due to a deficient supply of water, which nevertheless exists, but is not distributed :- " For in those too calcareous countries the springs are con- stantly sealing themselves up with a crust, just like a kettle with its deposit, and so year by year they run less freely ; nay, in time one little outlet after another becomes closed altogether, and thus most, it may be even all, of the water supply disappears, with corresponding shrinkage of fertility, which peasant and ruler (Turk and Briton alike) seem to have accepted hitherto in the same ignorant fatalism. At one spring a few kicks and scratches set free enough water to prove this view to all concerned, and an hour of pickaxe and crowbar gives a permanent increase of twenty or more per cent.; at another, where the crust is thick and old, hard work is wanted; at another, skilled miners and perhaps a charge of dynamite would be required. But it is safe to say there is probably not one spring, along the northern chain at least, which has ever been properly developed, or which might not be vastly and permanently improved at an expense altogether in- significant in comparison with the agricultural return."

Mr. Geddes would like to use Cyprus as a grand farm where for the future benefit of Asia every kind of irrigation might be tried, a suggestion in which, when South Africa has ceased to inflame—and poison—all imaginations, some able syndi- cate may yet see the way to profits. The first difficulty in the way of applying irrigation on a great scale is that there must be laws for the collection of the accruing rent, and that the peasant is never satisfied with those laws. At heart he thinks that the water should be given him as it was by the Princes of old; but that is not and can not be the modern method.

There are a good many interesting papers in the June number of the Nineteenth Century. The one which interests us

most is the account of the island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea, by the late Mr. Bent, the arclue )logist, who visited it in the winter of 1896. The island is scarcely known, having no harbour, though it is a kind of marine paradise; but it is under British protection, though its thirteen thousand inhabitants obey a recognised Sultan, and are a quiet people, apparently friendly to strangers and innocent of violent crime. The people are " poor and pastoral. The Socotran has hardly any clothes to cover himself with, nothing to keep him warm when the weather is damp, save his home-spun sheet ; and he has not a soul above his flocks. The closest intimacy exists between the Bedouin and his goats and his cows; the animals understand and obey certain calls with absolute accuracy, and you generally see a Socotran shepherdess walking before her flock, and not after it ; and they stroke and caress their little cows until they are as tame as dogs." They are, Mr. Bent believed, descendants of some aboriginal Arab tribe, and speak a lan- guage peculiar to themselves. They were once Christian, the Ethiopic cross being found everywhere, but are now Mussul- man, having been converted during some Arab descent. They live by agriculture and the sale of frankincense, dragons' blood, and " superexcellent " aloes. Mr. Bent expected to find ruins of interest, but discovered none, except some tombs built of huge stones in the Ethiopic fashion, though there were unmistakable signs that the island was once inhabited by a closely packed population, which cultivated every inch of ground. He thought the island would make a great tobacco-farm, and evidently considered that in selecting Aden for a military station instead of Socotra the British Government made a mistake. It would, however, be necessary to construct a safe harbour, which even in the Arabian Sea is a very expensive operation.—There is a charming paper also on the villages of rural France by Mr. Rowland Prothero, who sympathises strongly with the rather dead-alive life prevailing there, where, in fact, the women, and not the men, manage every-

thing except agriculture. This is the view which he has formed of the average Frenchman of the rural town, who is not a peasant :- " The Frenchman never feels the personal sense of the ludicrous ; he has no perception of incongruities : he knows nothing of mauvaise honte ; he is a stranger to the self-consciousness of un- recognised dignity ; he cannot understand the meaning of the word prig,' because at no time, though often self-important, does he take the serious view of life, or of his part in it, the precocious conception of which distinguishes that. variety of the human race. It is as a child that he can take delight in simple, almost infantine pleasures, that he enjoys himself freely and often selfishly, expresses his emotions openly, whether of joy, pleasure, affection, or rage, and walks in processions as if he were part of a pageant, not as if he were a shame-faced criminal. He cannot sympathise with the Englishman's dread of attracting attention. He cannot comprehend why the only emotion which it is desirable to display in public ie ill-temper, or why crayfish d la Bardelaise should be eaten with the same air of stoical indifference with which we sit down to a cold mutton chop. If he is immoral, be is so frankly and without disguise ; he bangs the front door noisily as he goes or returns, while the Englishman, shoes in hand, lets himself out and in with a latchkey, and probably officiates the next morning at family prayers. It is, again, because he is never a boy, that the Frenchman remains a child in the zest with which he pursues his immediate end, the naturalness of his enjoyment, the per- petual freshness of his interests. He never mortgages the present for the future. It is this concentration on the passing moment which gives to French life its elan and abandon, its directness and rapidity, its sparkle, allurement, and caprice."

—Mr. Lilly sends a paper, well written as usual, but a little commonplace, on the advantages of Constitutional Monarchy, the most original sentence perhaps being that, though Legitimism is happily dead and gone, Kingship is shown by this vast Jubilee celebration to be very much alive. That is true ; but then one would like a definition of kingship.— Sir A. Lyall describes the advance of "India under Queen Victoria," but he also rather disappoints us. It is interesting to note how the Empire has expanded, and also how it now touches on the North a vast military Monarchy, and on the

South-East the maritime Power which approaches most nearly to our own ; but we should have liked to receive from Sir Alfred Lyall an opinion as to the changes in the native attitude towards us, and the changes visible in the native mind. He repudiates the idea, we perceive, that any foreign observer could give us this information, but he does tell us a little when he indicates his belief that the antagonism between Hindooism and Mahommedanism is growing sharper, an d his suspicion, only just hinted at, that this is due to a recrudescence of old Hindoo orthodoxy. It seems strange to govern a huge Empire, yet never understand

its thoughts ; yet if that is Sir Alfred Lyall's position, how much more must it be the position of the average Indian administrator.--Mr. W. Huggins declares that, owing mainly to the spectrum analysis, a " new astronomy " has within the last sixty years come into being. He gives a most interesting account of this new astronomy, which it is of course quite impossible to condense, though we are a little fascinated by the account of the evidence upon which the probable explosion of a star, or rather the cooling of a star, while under observation, actually rests. We must therefore content ourselves with observing that a first-class expert like Mr. Huggins believes that research will yet go much further aided by the new instruments which the wealthy of many lands seem willing to provide. "In America, many have done liberally, but Mr. Yerkes has excelled them all. This summer will be celebrated the opening of a palatial institu- tion on the shore of Lake Geneva, founded by Mr. Yerkes , and dedicated to our fair lady, the new astronomy. This

observatory, in respect of the great size of its telescope, of forty inches in aperture, the largest yet constructed, its

armoury of instruments for spectroscopic attack upon the heavens, and the completeness of its laboratories and its workshops, will represent the most advanced state of instru- ment making ; and at the same time render possible, under the most favourable conditions, the latest and the most per- fect methods of research of the new astronomy. Above all, the needful men will not be wanting." Mr. Yerkes's telescope, we may add, commenced its career this week with some observations upon the moon, which it brings, it is calculated, within a distance of two hundred miles. —We have noticed Mrs. Green's curious essay on women elsewhere, and we may note a paper by Lord

Monteagle, the central idea of which is that healing influences are strongly at work in Ireland. That is certain as regards the machinery of administration, the doubt remaining being whether the radical difference between the Celtic and the Saxon ideal of life is susceptible of healing. You can make things touch, however distant their starting- points, if only they are travelling in the same direction ; but suppose they are travelling in opposite directions, or even directions which are not opposite, but tend to an ever- increasing divergence? The most hopeful example, to our mind, is the Breton, who neither likes nor respects the Frenchman, but, coerced by irresistible circumstance, works with him efficiently.

The place of honour in the Fortnightly Review is assigned to " Vindex," whose thesis is that there is "a plot against British interests in the Levant." The German Emperor, "Vindex " thinks, is plotting to secure ascendency in Greece through a financial and military control, and mil: use it to deprive Great Britain of its trade in the Balksr, States and the Levant. We dare say the Emperor is anxious to rule in Greece and everywhere else in the world, and we do not doubt his hostility to Great Britain ; but " Vindex " has to prove that this particular plot is within his compass. How is Great Britain to be shut out, especially from the Levant, without Russia, Austria, France, and Italy being shut out too ? If they are allowed to trade Germany will have no monopoly, and if they are not allowed Germany will have the whole world against her. We distrust the power of diplomacy either to create or to prevent trade. Napoleon tried to boy- cott British goods, with the result that they were sold everywhere as goods belonging to the nations he was pro- tecting. " Vindex " says John Bull is slow-witted, which is, we dare say, true ; but is he slow-witted when the expansion of his trade is concerned ? The figures of his commercial transactions during the Queen's reign seem to prove the con- trary.—We are tired of Jubilee articles, and will only quote,

from the four which appear in this number, Mr. Traill's judgment upon the literary character of the Queen's reign_ He thinks the average production of the period has been high as well as vast, so high that only genius of the loftiest order stands out above the rack, and we seem to have no great men when we have plenty. That is, we think, true; while with every line of the following sentence we cordially agree :- "From the exaggerated eulogy, the shameless rielante which attends even the most moderate of contemporary successes in literature sober criticism revolts. The artistic extravagances and violences into which every new writer, whether with ability or without, is tempted by the drum-beating showman of the Press to endeavour to catch the popular taste, unceasingly multiply ; and it needs a determined fair-mindedness on the part of the critic to refrain from judging the whole literary movement of the time by these repellent incidents. One has resolutely to think away all the brass bands and banners, as of a Salvation Army procession, which confuse and vulgarise the advance of English literature, before we can discern the truth which fortunately is at bottom indisputable, that during the sixty years of the Queen's reign that advance has been real and greet."

—Mr. H. W. Wilson's paper on the "Naval and Colonial Policy of Germany" is well worth! reading. He believes that its key is an effort to create and keep at home a navy equal to that section of the British Navy which the Government keeps at home. This navy is well manned, well officered, and kept in readiness for instant mobilisation. We could hardly threaten the coast of Germany, whose great trading ports lie

up estuaries, though we might destroy her carrying trade,— a process, however, during which her fast armed steamers would inflict grave injury upon our commerce. Mr. Wilson, we think, unconsciously exaggerates the strength of the German Navy, but his paper is worth attentive study.— The remaining paper of interest is Mr. Charles Williams's account of the Thessalian campaign, which strikes us as impartial. Mr. Williams describes the Greek army as one which in fact had never been formed, commanded by a, man who had never handled troops, officered by

men who did not know how to drill, and filled with men who used their cartridges to express emotion, firing

them off, for instance, in honour of the Day of the Resurrec- tion. The Turks, on the contrary, were absurdly slow ; their

artillery was contemptible, worse than the Greek, but the men were excellent, excessively numerous—probably eighty thousand were engaged in the manceavres against Domoko-m.

and both directed and 'led by German officers, a fact not to be passed over without notice. Pharsala was lost by the Greeks after a distant artillery cannonade, and Domoko in much the same way, though there was some fighting at the centre. The total impression left by Mr. Williams is that the merit of the Turkish army has been exaggerated, and that all they did in Thessaly was to roll back a half-organised crowd of Greeks, who were half armed, badly fed, and commanded by men who did their best, but had never learned even super- ficially the trade of war.

The National Review now endeavours to keep its readers fully instructed as to the course of European, American, and Colonial affairs in three separate articles. They are all very well done, and of great use to those who forget, as we all do, the sequence of events, or who fail to form opinions as to their mesn- ing. The best perhaps of the three is the American one, which deals with American feeling about Great Britain, and is dis- cussed at length elsewhere.—We do not see anything else of great interest except an admirably written comparison of " Newman and Renan" by Dr. William Barry. It would be difficult to pack Renan's creed into fewer or more aocurate words than these :-

" With Renan there is no key to existence but the ancient Eastern one of universal delusion, if that can be termed delusion which has come about by accident ; for design• consciousness, fore- sight, are words without souse when we would talk of the Eternal Process. God is in the making. Our infinite Cosmos puts forth innumerable feelers into the void : and, by experiments repeated through millenniums, it has come at last to be the unfinished yet promising enterprise which we behold. Some day, if luck attends it, the world will develop a triumphant ethical law ; instead of brute matter blindly striving, and often annihilating what is most precious, it will have eyes and conscience; it will be just as well as almighty. But now ' the real is a vast outrage on the ideal,' and • the noblest of all religions was itself due to prophecies misinter- preted, legends framed by dreaming enthusiasts, miracles expanded from simple occurrences seen through a mist of emotion, and hallucinations possessing the one human spirit which, without sacrilege or more than a pious metaphor, was worthy to be called Divine. All the gods are mortal, indeed ; and the fairest of them will pass away ; tout ici-bas n'est que rive et symbole.''' Blackwood has a paper of interest to novel-readers,—an account by Sir Herbert Maxwell of the heroic profligate, D'Artagnan, who was the model from which Dumas drew his

Gascon hero. He was in reality a well-born but poor Bearnais, who took service in the Mousquetaires, lived mainly by plundering his endless mistresses, and was in fact, not to

put too fine a point on it, according to modern ideas, a scoun- drel. He was, however, unusually brave, he refused to plunder his men as many officers did, ho rose to the com-

mand of the Mousquetaires, and would have been made a Marshal of France, but that on June 24th, 1673, he was killed before Maestricht while gallantly resisting a sortie of the Dutch, in which ninety-five of his men died fighting

round him.—Blackwood has also a valuable paper rather absurdly called "An Indian Romance," but in reality a well- told account of Sir Arthur Cotton's success in planning and constructing great works of irrigation. Sir Arthur Cotton, as all Anglo-Indiana know, was the Indian Engineer officer

who maintained that the security of India against famine must be sought not in railways but in canals, and it is difficult to read this account of his feats in the Godavery country without believing that he was right. The work was of the heaviest kind, the anicut across the Godavery, there as big as the Mississippi, being one of the greatest artificial structures in existence, but it redeemed eight hundred thousand sterile acres, and was acknowledged by Government to have proved " amply remunerative to the public Exchequer." Indeed, that is faint praise :—

" Whereas in the twenty years preceding the construction of the works the yearly revenue of the Godavery district had dwindled from 21 to 17 lakhs, in the twenty succeeding years it rose by steady yearly increments to 88 lakhs of rupees. During the same period it is officially recorded that the imports were increased tenfold, the exports twentyfold."

The bad side of the account is that population in the district has increased from five hundred and sixty thousand to two millions. Sir Arthur Cotton is now ninety-four, but his admirers believe that he could still draw out a complete and workable scheme of irrigation for all India,—a project which would make every engineer in Europe draw his breath.