THE MAGAZINES.

Tux Magazines are of interest this month. The Contemporary, for example, gives us an eloquent and able history of the deal- ings of the House of Hapsburg with the Slays of the Balkan peninsula, by Mr. E. A. Freeman. It is tinged with the deep bitterness which marks Mr. Freeman's comments on Austrian policy, and shows a certain disinclination to acknowledge the immense difficulties with which the Austrian Emperor has to contend ; but it is full of knowledge and of insight. Mr. Free- man brings into full light the cardinal fact of the situation in South-Eastern Europe, that the "Austrian policy" is nothing but the old family policy of the House of Hapsburg, and that this policy is to acquire all the territories attainable, using German and Magyar, the two dominant castes, as instruments. The South Slays dread and dislike the prospect of absorption into the empire of many nations, and are always, Mr. Free- man believes, ready for resistance. What he does not explain and should explain is why he thinks this resistance may succeed, and to what he looks as the ad interim alternative to Hapsburg rule. Ultimately, we all know, he hopes for a Federation of the Balkans ; but intermediately, how does he expect to rescue Bosnia-Herzegovina, without setting the world on fire by a war between A ustria and Russia ? His ex- position of the facts as be judges them should be carefully studied, as should Mr. R. S. Gundry's account of the new British possession of North Borneo. He asserts, and to some extent proves, that the inhabitants of the new territory, a wonderfully rich and fertile province, as yet only " a little larger than Ceylon, but not quite so large as Ireland," are entirely favourable to the North Borneo Company, which has appointed Mr. Treacher governor, and has already introduced external order. Piracy, slave-catch- ing, and open violence have entirely ceased, and there is already a beginning of trade. The natives, both on the coast and in the forest, are distinctly friendly, and submit cheerfully to the new regime; but the Company looks for its future success to the immigration of a million Chinese cultivators, who always follow the British Flag, and who are ready, in return for protection in their industry, to bear a somewhat high rate of taxation. The Company rules over at least t00 miles of coast-line, with several good harbours, at least one river, the Kinabatangan, navigable for river steamers to a point 200 miles in the interior, and a mountain range 13,000 feet high, on the slopes of which tea, coffee, and cinchona will flourish in perfection. The Company levies, as yet, a royalty of 10 per cent. on all exported jungle produce, such as gutta-percha, edible nests, and the like; but it intends to rely mainly, as the land fills up, upon a moderate land tax. Much will depend upon Mr. Treacher, who was Consul-General for Borneo; but the Company appears fairly convinced that its prosperity must spring from the civilised order it is able to maintain. " Vernon Lee " sends a singu- larly eloquent and thoughtful paper on the well-worn subject of Vivisection, the more noteworthy because the writer does not ques- tion that advantage may be derived from vivisection, and does not believe in the Christian faith, or, indeed, in the supernatural at all. His argument is that vivisection is fatal to the evolution of true morality, that it is "dishonourable" to take from animals their share of happiness in existence, which cannot belong to man. The advantage to mankind is bought at the expense of other creatures, that is, is stolen. We are, in practising vivisec- tion, diminishing our most precious quality, the power of sub- mitting to suffering for the sake of justice. " It seems to me, that to every man imbued with the noble religion of choice and improvement, it should appear that the patient foregoing of knowledge thus to be bought, the manly endurance of suffering at such a price to be diminished, must be a great step in the great journey of human bettering ; must be, both in the large act of preference of justice to injustice, and in the minor attend.

ant acts of cherished forbearance from the coveted, of fortitude in pain, of thoughtful weighing of good and evil, of candid listening to our conscience, one of those choices of the higher rather than the lower which have made us what we are, which shall make us what we should be." We have no agreement with the point of view, but from the point of view, the whole paper is a singularly noble argument, one of the best illustrations we have ever seen of self-derived, self-supported morality. Only one is driven to ask,—If man is to pass away like an ephemeris, what is the good of rising to that lonely height of self-suppression ? Miss C. F. Gordon Cumming sends a pleasant but superficial account of a journey through Tahiti, and Mr. Stuart-Glennie a most interesting, though high-flown, account of Samothrace, the island mountain, 6,000 feet high, with its awe-inspiring scenery, and Pelasgic rains, with their Cyclopean walls. Mr. Stuart-Glennie, who has explored these structures, believes them to have been built by an early race, the first workers in metal, who were afterwards deified by Greek imagination, the Pelasgic archi- tecture being subsequently covered by the Ptolemies with the buildings which still exist, to which all Greeks made pilgrimages, and amidst which were celebrated the Samothracian mysteries. A few more facts and descriptions, and rather fewer reveries of the dreamy kind, would have greatly improved the paper. Two sketches are given of the late Professor Green,—one of his philosophy, by Mr. Nettleship ; and one of his character, by Mr. Bryce. The latter will be the more interesting to the ordinary reader, as the sketch of a rare and original nature, rugged, self-contained, and strong, which grew more genial as age approached, but always left on all with whom it was brought in contact an impression of quite special force and religiousness. Professor Green was a man who be- lieved of himself that his true function would have been that of a preacher untrammelled by any sect, but of whom his friends believed that he would have made a great figure in political life. The inevitable Irish articles follow, both being pleas that the crisis can only be met by repression. Mr. R. W. A. Holmes believes that order must be restored, and the land- lords allowed to retire, with compensation ; and Mr. Goldwin Smith argues that, by forcibly suppressing the separatist "conspiracy," we shall liberate the greater part of the Irish nation from a tyranny.

The Nineteenth Century is a little lighter than the Con- temporary Review, though it commences with four more papers on the Channel Tunnel, none of which, that we see, add much to previous arguments, unless it be Major- General Hamley's. That bright-witted officer suggests that if France desired to seize the Tunnel, she would load her trains with English hostages, leaving us to blow up or drown our own countrymen, if we would. That is, of course, only an extreme way of putting the obvious truth, that the first diffi- culty in the way of destroying the Tunnel suddenly would be the number of murders involved, the slaughter of innocent and unsuspecting persons, killed from a "political necessity," which might be imagined on erroneous information. Mons. J. Reinach's argument on behalf of the Tunnel, that to suspect the French of misusing it is " defamatory to France," strikes us as a little absurd. Why is it more defamatory than the exist- ence of the Channel Fleet, or of the fortifications of Portsmouth? We do not go to all that expense because France is friendly. Mons. Reinach might as well argue that, in improving the fortifications of Paris, France is " defaming " Germany. Mr. Matthew Arnold gives us in polished English an article on which we are almost unwilling to say a word, he will be so heartily abused for it in America. Its purport is that, although individuals full of sweetness and light may exist in the Ameri- can cities, groups do not ; that there, as here, the body of the people are Philistines. He maintains that that which in Eng- land we call the middle-class is in America virtually " the nation," and be holds the middle-class to "present us with a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and know- ledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners." He quotes Mr. Lowell as saying that the Americans are " the most common-schooled and the least cultivated people in the world." He quotes all manner of American evidence in proof of his thesis, and concludes with his usual advice,—that there be set up many excellent lyceums. It is most amusing reading, but we hardly see the use of it all. The majority of men will be half-cultivated to the end of time, if only because they can have no leisure ; and to the end of time the half-cultivated, if

they speak the same language as the cultivated, will seem to the latter Philistines. They will seek for themselves the intellectual and moral defences which they find in narrowness, reverence for routine, and belief in that worship of the usual which is called respectability. Mr. Arnold's polished sarcasms will not improve them, but only make them a little more self-conscious and shy. The Rev. J. Guinness Rogers gives us a careful calcu- lation as to the amount of strength Mr. Gladstone has lost in. the country, deciding that he has lost none ; and Mr. Lilly once more declares Pessimism to be the goal of modern thought, and a most detestable creed ; but the readable paper of the number is Dr. Jessopp's, " The Arcady of Our Grandfathers."

He has collected all the evidence he can from very old inhabit- ants of a Norfolk parish, and draws from it the deduction that the world is greatly improving in morals and in manners. That is nothing new ; but Dr. Jessopp argues his case with a grave and gentle humour which is most charming, draws wonderful little sketches of the old labourers as they are, and ever and anon gives us stories like this. One old body told him :-

" I've heard my mother say many a time that she blessed the Lord there was cock-fighting, or she didn't know how she could have got on at all' She kept the cocks in separate pens. Sometimes they would get out, and would fight anything. One day one of them escaped, and forthwith went for the old gander. I was only a little girl, and I was right frightened ; and I halloahed to mother, but the old gander he got the master of him with his pinions, and he knocked him over into our dyke by the common, and mother she had hard work to save him from being drownded, and when the old gander saw him in mother's arms, he came a hissing and a creaking at him like a Christian !' "

Is not that worth the price of the magazine ? Yet it is hardly better than this. Dr. Jessopp had helped, by the timely exhibi- tion of some ram, to save the life of an old reprobate :—" We have had many a long talk since then. God A'mighty has put up wi' a deal from me, he has, and I don't think he'll be hard upon me, somehow,' he broke in one day. Some on 'em talks o' being conwarted, but I don't mean to say as I've ever been conwarted. I wasn't never given over to drink enough for that''' The refrain " For his mercy endureth for ever " was never more quaintly expressed. Dr. Jessopp believes the old man held " conwar- sion," as he had seen it among Ranters, to be a kind of possession, following on or akin to delirium tremens. His old parishioners are never, he finds, laudatores temporis acti, they universally de- claring that the old times were hard. They tell him outrageous stories of the old discipline when farmers would correct their farm lads with a cart-whip, and their wives flogged the servant- girls. Old Biddy Wiffin, an old woman of eighty-five or eighty- six, cannot abide modern girls and their fal-lals. " Worked up to virtuous indignation, she becomes voluble, and then is your time. Gals ! there ain't no gals—they're ladies. You've got to call 'em Miss, or they'll sauce you! When I was young I was a gal ! I was one of the lucky ones, though, I was ! You mayn't credit it, but it's as true as you're sitting there : I never had a mistress as ever give me a flogging—not one !' " They had a dour reverence for the law, and a horror of being im- prisoned, expressed by an old labourer in a way which suggests that some at least of American raciness was imported from Great Britain. " 'Yon can always starve, but don't you get into gaol. Don't you believe it !' I've heard him say scores o' times, Abednego didn't get out o' that there furnace without blisterin? I was a grown man afore I rightly understood what he meant, but he war a scholar, he war!" Dr. Jessopp proposes to tell ns of the superstitions he finds among his people, and we hope he will also tell us something of their beliefs on political and social subjects. They are very often entirely and singularly different from anything their superiors imagine.

Almost every one who takes up the Fortnightly Review will turn first to the account by Prince Krapotkine of the Russian Revolu- tionary party, noticed elsewhere, but Mr. Gallenga sends an in- teresting account of the administration of Finland, which is still

governed by a senate of natives only, and a Diet of four orders,—

nobles, clergy, burghers, and peasants. The Government alone, however, can initiate Bills, the Diet is rarely called, and the differ- ences between the " Finns " and the " Swedes," that is in

practice, between the peasantry and the clergy, on the one side, and the cultivated classes on the other, prevents the formation of a truly popular party. The Finns oppose the emancipation of the Jews and the establishment of a free Press, the former

from prejudice, the latter from an idea that it would increase the power of the cultivated classes. There is a fine, thoughtful paper on Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor, who in an age of vice taught the sovereignty of the conscience, and was, even by Romans, declared to be the best of men. Mr. Myers gives a clear account of his philosophy, which, after all, is best summed up in this sentence by Marcus Aurelius himself :—

" Let the god within thee be the guardian of a living being, mascu- line, adult, political, and a Roman, and a ruler ; who has taken up his . post in life as one that awaits with readiness the signal that shall

summon him away And such a man, who delays no

longer to strive to be in the number of the best, is as a priest and servant of the Gods, obeying that god who is in himself enshrined, who renders him nnsoiled of pleasure, unharmed by any pain, untouched by insult, feeling no wrong, a wrestler in the noblest struggle, which is, that by no passion he may be overthrown ; dyed to the depth in justice, and with his whole heart welcoming whatso- ever cometh to him and is ordained."

We note a curious suggestion in the essay that the pagan heresies which occasionally appeared in Rome, the cults of Bacchus and Cybele, and, we may add, of Isis, are all de- scribed by men of the bigoted temper which represented the Christians as men devoted to a vicious creed. There may have been something more in those wildly emotional forms of dissent than the strict State Churchmen who wrote all Roman records either saw, or chose to acknowledge. The only other paper of first-class interest is Mr. Leadam's plea for juries in Ireland, a most remarkable array of evidence to prove that Acts for suspending juries always fail, the people believing that they are sentenced by mere violence, and holding the special tribunals much worse than courts-martial. They regard sentences under the latter as acts of war, to be expected in war. The writer maintains that the forms of law should be observed in any case, and that trial by special commission should be with a jury, made, we may presume, special too. In 1831, when Clare was very much disturbed, Mr. Barrington, Crown Solici- tor for Munster, suggested a special commission :—

" It was issued, and we went down to Clare and commenced the commission, and the jury convicted very nearly one hundred persons

and this had a most extraordinary effect, without bringing forward any capital offence by which the challenging of jurors with- out cause would be allowed to the prisoner, confining the indictment to transportable offences. The result was, the county became per- fectly tranquil."

The jury, however, was really packed by the Crown.

The Cornhill, besides its stories, has an entertaining little sketch, far too short, indeed spoiled by brevity, of the " Poor White Trash " of Kentucky, the little freeholders crushed by the competition of slaves; an entertaining account of " Cheap Places to Live In," the decision being in favour of the "smaller German

cities, like Cassel and Weimar, and the less known towns of Belgium, like Ypres; and a most interesting paper, called " The Foreigner at Home," describing the impression which England first makes upon a Scotchman. A pleasant land of sluttish plenty, with a dull, common people, who cannot converse, that seems to be the sum of it, though there are curious details of difference, such as the thinness of English houses and their warm colour, the presence of many windmills—now, alas ! pass- ing away—and the general softness of the prospect, in which bare rocks form an infrequent feature. That is a pleasant paper, of a kind of which we wish there were more, to bring home to us the general features of our own land, where alone, say Americans, the hedges are everywhere.

Blackwood, besides " The Ladies Lindores," slightly cynical

in this number, the ladies and their father getting sud- denly rich, has an extraordinary outburst of frank rage, called " Mr. Gladstone's Last," the tone of which may be judged from

these words:—" One would think it impossible to come across such a state of mind as prompted Mr. Gladstone's atrocious

boast that Mr. Forster had not shed a single drop of Irish blood." It is natural that such a writer should call the Irish "a peculiarly worthless race," and ask if the old tenure would have " driven out their entire agricultural population from the three Southern provinces, what great harm would that be ?"

It is in articles couched in this spirit that Irishmen find aliment for their belief that the utmost they have to expect from Eng- lishmen is unwilling toleration of their existence. Mr. Haw- thorne's " Fortune's Fool " continues in Macmillan, and gets wilder and cleverer than ever ; but there is little else of interest, except, indeed, " A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen," upon which we shall hereafter have a word to say. We see little of interest in Fraser, but " A Visit to the Queen of Burmah " is new, and Alfred Aylward pleads very ably the cause of irregular troops.

He evidently thinks that, cceteris paribus, they might beat regu- lar troops, and, granted exceedingly small numbers, he is pro- bably right. The individuality of the irregulars would do more

execution than the strict order of the regulars. But that is not true of large numbers, unless the irregulars are in a position to keep np an endless retreat without losing heart. A hundred Kentucky sharpshooters would kill a hundred Pomeranian infantry before they had time to do anything ; but could all Kentucky defend itself against a Prussian army of 100,000 men ? Certainly not, except by surrendering the State to occu- pation during a campaign of years, throughout which civilised life, municipal life, (to., must be suspended.