THE MAGAZINES.

THE" Chronicles of Carlingford" have recommenced in Blackwood, the hero this time being a High-Church curate, hampered by Low-Church relatives. It is scarcely probable that the new series will be quite as good as the first, it being given to few to write two stories like" Salem Chapel," and the present story is

only just superior, in its first number, to the average of magazine tales. There is good promise, however, of more, of a picture of one of those mental struggles to resist a slowly changing creed, of the mental state of a man who suspects that most of his special orthodoxies are valueless, that true religious life is broader than this or that formula, in which Mrs. Oliphant excels.

She must, however, beware lest Mr. Wentworth be simply Mr.

Vincent in High-Church robes—a tendency very perceptible at present. The rest of the number is filled with papers which, with one exception, are rather thin. "The Rough Notes of a Ride to Babylon" are particularly so, the clear writing only making the hackneyed thoughts and well-worn descriptions more pain- fully visible. A" glance at the Italy of Cavour" is an able though hostile sketch of the statesman, whose greatness the writer acknowledges, though he deems him in political morals almost a Machiavelli. His theory of Cavour's later acts seems to us based on an erroneous principle. He assumes that Cavour ought to have dealt with the princes of Italy according to international law, which was not Cavour's notion at all.

He held that Italy, by its history, its geographical position, and the will of its people, was one, and intrigued against Bourbons and Dukes as one minister will against another, not as against a State. The depreciatory opinion passed on Ricasoli must be the result of ignorance. • He is no imitator of

Cavour, but a man with a higher morale, and brain equal in all but subtlety. We are tired to death of " Savonarola," whom George Eliot is sketching in " Romola " better than any historian will ever do, and must pass on to the letter from Poland, a most thoughtful and exhaustive account of the causes and conduct of the present insurrection, preceded by the very clumsiest " tag " we ever remember to have read. Either the writer has forgotten that he was writing a letter, and sat down

to write an article on the Tory side, or the editor, afraid of his correspondent's obvious liking for Poles, has adapted the letter to his readers' palate by two pages of audacious cynicism, written in the first person plural, while the singular is employed in all

the rest of the letter. The additions to our knowledge are not many, the daily papers having been, as was pointed out in the Spectator, unusually well informed on the Polish struggle ; but there is a very remarkable paragraph upon Russia. The writer seems to believe that the mighty empire which, under Nicholas, was such a bugbear to Europe is radically and not temporarily weak. "The march of civilization in the West has sickened her,

as it has Turkey. Her institutions were unfitted for enlightened Europe, and her system has become strained by frantic efforts to keep pace with the times." Civilization may, therefore, shatter instead of remodelling the institutions of Russia, and the world be delivered from the dread of another reign of brute force.

The first merit of the Corn/tilt is in its editing, by whomsoever

conducted. There is always something worth reading—a paper which every reader thinks would be worth the shilling, even were George Eliot and Mr. Trollope not sufficient justification for the pleasant extravagance. The fact only increases our surprise at the admission of the silly nonsense, called "a letter to correspondents." Only imagine three octavo pages of this sort of thing !—

" But now what have we said? This is a most vexatious business ! To swell the number of our foes, to fortify the hearts of those who are the terrors of our lot ; that, most undoubtedly, was not what this dis- cursion was begun for ; but now we have done it, and are done for. Yes, we foreknow how it will be. Metaphysicians twenty-three ?, Metaphysicians by the gross ! Sermons and satires by the toss! Bal- lads in faggots of a hundred! Heavens! how ingenuously we've blundered! The murder's out, the secret's said ; and those reports so widely spread abroad by people whom we fee to charge us with ferocity, they all go for nothing. Very well, we cast away horn, hoof, and tail, and unreservedly confess ourselves a Sin of Tenderness. Our table groans, say: well, we own, that hearing it, we also groan. That's natural; but, we declare, we only groan—we never swear."

Jokes of that kind between editor and reader are only endurable when each thoroughly understands the other, and then they ought to be short. " Spiritualism " is a very clever dialogue on the value of the evidence offered for that new draft on human credulity, the writer deciding that the evidence is very slight, in. which we cordially agree, and that no evidence can prove molt assertions, which we takEi leave to question. The following paragraph puts the argument by illustration :— " Q. But what would you say to the Christian miracles ? Does not the whole future of Christianity rest on the veracity of certain wit- nesses to isolated and transient facts 2—A. I should be very sorry to think so ; for if it did I am quite sure it would come to the ground. How it may have been with the first believers is another question, hut in the present day the religion carries the miracles, and not the miracles. the religion. People are Christians because the Christian account of life in general, and of the relations between God and man, appears to them, on the whole, the one which best suits the facts of life, and is thus, on the whole, the most probable.

To say that the Christian account of life and of the relations of God to man suits the facts of life, and, therefore, Christianity is true, is to beg the whole question. They do not suit it at all,. unless Christ be God, or sent of God, and that is a point only tobe proved by evidence, and which is proved by it, and not by the Christian approval of Christian ethics. A Greek would have smiled at those ethics, and if we reject the evidence as to Christ, who knows but the Greek was right. An Athenian certainly led a much happier life than we do, with our incessant self-conscious- ness and postponement of this life to the next, and if there be no evidence for Christ the morals He taught become some of them burdensome forrnulte. The facts about spiritualism being pi imci facie improbable, require an immense amount of evidence ; but if that evidence be supplied they must be accepted like any other facts. One would not believe a man who said he heard a dead body talk, but suppose ten hostile and sarcastic physicians. admit they heard it too, how then ? We must either admit the fact, whether we can explain it or not, or, rejecting it, reject also the whole scheme of scientific demonstration. No other testimony than repeated human observation proves that electricity will travel along a copper wire. Perhaps the first paper read in this. number will be one on the future " extinction of blue eyes." It seems that Dr. Bergholz, of Venezuela, has been examining into the question of inherited influence, and he comes to the conclusion that the swarthy complexions have a slight predominance ad force over the fair. In eighty-five children produced from parents of contrasted colours fifty had dark eyes, a ratio of 100 to 70. which in the end must extinguish light eyes. We must not quit the Cornhill without calling the attention of all who like deep thought expressed in exquisite style to a most subtly ap- preciative account of Eugenie de Guerin by Mr. Mathew Arnold.

The most interesting paper in Macmillan at this moment, per- haps, is one on Neapolitan prisons, almost official in its minute- ness and temperance of tone. Had it been authenticated by a signature it would have furnished a final answer to the charges. of Lord H. Lennox. One prison, St. Aniello, tenanted by "masterless rogues, pickpockets, and garzone di malavita," is. in an infamous condition ; but the remainder are about as good as English prisons. There is a curiously good paper, too, on furniture—an effort to apply the great principles of taste to the wants of the modern upholsterer. Some of the sugges- tions are most able ; but are spoiled by too great a con- tempt for expense. Here is a design for a drawing-room, which no upholsterer would execute unless previously well assured of his customer's solvency :—" The Artist : The walls should be panelled with frames of ebony filled with velvet of a rich violet colour. There ought to be magnificent mirrors, let in here and there in place of the velvet ; and round the mirrors the ebony should be enriched with the most delicate carving. Thechimney- piece should be of pure white marble sculptured by some great sculptor. Against your violet velvet beautiful statues should relieve themselves, and between each pair of statues a noble picture should hang. All round the room, silver candlesticks of exquisite design should spring from the ebony frames of the panels, each a separate invention:' " Mr. Plumpton: Very good. And the furniture ?" "The Artist : It might be either ebony with orange damask, or gilded with violet velvet. In the one case you would carry the woodwork of the walls into the furniture ; in the other, the hanging. The carpet might consist of a chequer of alternate lozenges of needlework, in one of which, an orange pattern was presented on a violet ground, and in the other the same pattern heraldically counterchanged to violet upon orange." The artist, too, defends the use of bluo upona

green with a wealth of argument which we wish we could quote, but which will convince any one not absolutely blinded by the conventionalisms of upholstery. The only defect we see in Ids designs is that lie has forgotten the dinginess which the London atmosphere gives to all rooms, and which can be remedied only by the use of sunny colours, yellow being at once the most perfect and the one least used. By the way, the absence of a milk-white among woods is a great loss to furniture. Is there no such thing as a true white among the woods of the tropical forests?

Fraser contains no very striking paper, but it is full of articles of more than average interest, the best, perhaps, being the first on "Bolingbroke as a Statesman." The writer seems to us, however, to overestimate Bolingbroke's power. He 'believed in the Tudor system, a government really controlled by the King, who again was compelled, on all great questions, to consult his people's will. That such a scheme of government is possible is evident from the fact that Cmsarism does work, but to believe, as Bolingbroke did, that it was consistent with liberty, shows defective knowledge of men. It is idle to argue that he only mistook the phenomena of his age; the difference between a statesman and a speculator on politics is that the one does not mistake those phenomena and the other does. Bolingbroke, like Mr. Disraeli, was a political dreamer, tied to earth by personal ambition, who enjoyed nothing so much as transcendental reflec- tions on politics viewed from outside, but who when work had to be done confounded statesmanship with intrigue. Miss Cobbe's account of the "City of Peace," is as well written as her productions invariably are, but somehow one wearies of these sketches of Jerusalem, all so like each other in form, and longs either for a new subject or a new point of view. There is something strained and stilted in the very best accounts of the Holy Land, arising, we suspect, from an unconscious effort to keep the mind on a level with the associations of Palestine, just while it is debased by the present circumstances of the country ; to think of Calvary, as Cavalry ought to be thought of, while fretting under a dinner rancid with bad oil. A 'fortnight in Paris in May, 1803," is chiefly re- markable for a vivid sketch of 'the hotels, and a scathing but most just denunciation of those great caravanserais, the Hotel du Louvre and Hotel de Paix—places where one purchases the negligent attendance universal in grand hotels at higher prices than those which small ones are accustomed to charge. You Are plundered as much as in smaller concerns, without the civility and easy life which are the compensations for plunder. The writer alleges that the agents de change, stockjobbers, and shareholders, of whom the salles of these houses are always so full, are also shareholders, obtain their dinners at a lower rate, and are, therefore, ex-officio defenders of the establishment. Criticism or complaint is, therefore, always repelled by apparently disinterested bystanders. Both are, however, useless, for the attendants, governed as strictly as if they were tailors in a sweating room, are always anxious to change, and care nothing either for the establishment, or for guests from whom they can obtain no fees.

The second number of the Victoria is decidedly better than the first, wanting only the first-class novel which is the necessity of a new magazine, and. for which Mr. T. Trollope's " Lindisfarn

-Chase" is but an insufficient substitute. M. paper on 4' English Social Life" is, perhaps, the most interesting, Conti- nental accounts of England being usually written either by Frenchmen, who either satirize or compliment, in order to draw a contrast unfavourable to the Empire ; or by Germans, whose object is to give their countrymen information. M. Villari is most cordial in his admiration, but believes we have much to learn, and puts his finger on a spot the rawness of which is beginning to be felt at home—the roughness of English man- ners arising from the want of hereditary civilization. It takes more than two hundred years for manners to penetrate from the upper to the lower grades of society, and two hundred years ago the English Squire Western was in manner a breeched savage. Mr. Senior's paper on Egypt is as interesting as ever, and the view .given of Mehemet Ali as a Turk, who, even when attacking the Sultan, could not bear to hear it said that Turks had been de- feated by Egyptians, is novel, and, we suspect, just. So also is -the remark that the Mussulmins qua Mussulmans are all unitedin support of the Sultan, and that, therefore an hereditary Pashalic does not necessarily weaken Turkey. The statement that Mehemet All was as regards antiquities a mere Turk, and destroyed them wholesale, till warned ' that Europe would be displeased, is also novel. He actually wanted to, pull down the Great Pyramid to

fill the barrage, and would have done it but that his em. reported against the expense. Sir John Lawrence saved Del. much the same way, proving that its destruction would cost son_ extravagant sum in wages and powder.