SOME OF THE MAGAZINES.

THE Magazines are not very good this month. There are plenty . of excellent papers in them, with much well-written argument and many facts ; but their subjects are rather dull, and there is no essay of first-class or exciting interest. The most original contribution in them all is, we think, a kind of prose poem iu

Macmillan, in which the author tries to describe what a woman might feel in the spirit-world, if she could revisit earth and find

herself forgotten. It is an old subject, and we do not know that there is anything very novel in the treatment ; but the writer has power to touch the springs of pathos, and leave in the reader a strange sense of unusually lasting pain. Let us hope that if a spiritual being can ever pass through such an experience, it will have compensation from a higher knowledge of the purpose with which man's memory has been made at once so lasting and so evanescent, at present a mystery hardly more soluble than the mystery of pain. Can love, or virtue, or sin- fulness be only a state P And yet if it is not, where is the ex- planation of the obvious tendency of the mind to forget and renew itself until the past is hardly the past, but rather another condition, as if there had been an imperceptible metem- psychosis P Of all the metaphysical problems, the nature of continuance in discontinuance has perhaps been the least care- fully studied out, or, at all events, the least carefully described. Tho author of " Lost," of course, contributes nothing to the problem, but in contrasting the continuance of feeling in the dead with its discontinuance in the living, he or she suggests it with

unusual power. Another paper in Macmillan, called "The English Community in Iowa "is of curious interest, as describing a now form of landlordism which is growing up, or may grow up, iu the Western States. It is a rude but natural, and therefore work-

able, variation on the metayer system. Mr. Close bought a quantity of land, 5,000 acres at first, in Iowa :-

"' Our system,' says Mr. Close, is, not to hold virgin ]and on the chance of a rise in value, but, by building houses and ploughing tho sod, to improve the property we buy and make it productive of in- come, wherein we conceive lies the distinction between legitimato business and speculation in land. Each 160 acres is let, as a rule, to one tenant, who provides labour and machinery, paying

us rent for wheat lands in kind, on the half-share system, and for Indian corn lands at about 8s. per acre. The tenant's own labour, with one assistant, usually a son, is enough, except at harvest- time, to cultivate 160 acres, if divided between wheat and Indian corn, Thus our labourers are directly interested in the yield, and we think we combine the economy of largo holdings with the efficiency and productiveness of small. In 1880, and for 1881, we could have let our farms twice over. Every 4.0 farms, or thereabouts, are placed under the superintendence of a steward, who is controlled directly by ourselves.' "

This is landlordism ou business principles, landlordism active, enterprising, and trotting about ; and the profit in the year 1878 was 55 per cent., and in 1870, 57 per cent. It would be more or less, in very good or very bad years, but things must go to the bad entirely before it can be less than 15 per cent. English squires should read this paper, and then bully Mr. Macmillan till he obtains permission to republish Mr. Close's privately circulated pamphlet detailing his experience.

The Fortnightly Review still opens with the Land Bill, the editor publishing two sets of observations upon it, one by Professor Richey, Q.C., and the other by Sir G. Campbell. Both strike us as curiously good. Mr. Richey, we think, under- rates the care with which the framers of the Bill have provided for the future revival of absolute ownership, a care acknow- ledged by the Duke of Argyll ; but he describes the central idea .of the Bill, the definition of the partnership in the land which it assigns to the tenant, with most unusual clearness and precision. The Bill, in fact, in his judgment, is a Bill tem- porarily regulating partnership in the usufruct and profit of land, and, as such, very carefully drawn, and perfectly intelli- gible. His grand objection to it is that future tenancy, when the landlord has bought out the present tenants' equities, is not provided for with sufficient clearness. Sir G. Camp- bell also approves the Bill, but would include leaseholders under its proviSions ; doubts if rent should not be fixed with more reference to the produce of the year, and be resettled every five years ; suggests that a " right of occupancy " would be simpler than the present arrangements for fixity ; questions whether the purchase clauses will work at all, the yearly demand being too great ; and obviously does not believe in regulated emi- gration at all. He would consent to give a free passage, but would leave the emigrant to choose his future destiny for himself, and indeed, is evidently inclined to leave the emigration clauses out. Mr. Church's short paper on " Statius," the first of the Imperial writers of Rome, i.e., the litterateurs not born under the Repub- lican system, or, like Tacitus, full of its thoughts, is full of know- ledge, of which this paragraph, on the method of publication under the Empire, may serve as a specimen

But there was a large class, just as there is in the London of to-day, which had leisure and means, and at least a superficial cultivation. In this class there was a very considerable literary activity, increased by the almost complete extinction of political life. The writers, perhaps, bore an undue proportion to the readers, though there were readers enough to make the cheap multiplication of books an im- portant and remunerative trade. And there was an institution which in a way supplied the place which the publisher now fills as a middle-man between the author and the public. The recitation or public reading gave the historian, dramatist, or poet an opportunity of canvassing the opinions of the cultivated class. It was often, no doubt, a vexation and a weariness, though in this, as in other things, we must make a largo deduction from the vigorous invec- tives of the satirists ; but it supplied an actual want, and did something to satisfy a taste to which the cumbrous and awkWard writing of the day—only to be appreciated by comparing an uncial manuscript with a printed book—can have been but an imperfect gratification. On the whole, it is certainly true that literature in Rome was, for a period which wo may calculate at about a century and a half, beginning with the accession of Augustus and ending with the death of Trajan, in a state of activity which can only be paralleled in the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries, and in the Europe of to-day."

Mr. Church's judgment on Statius is that of most scholars who have road him,—he was a miniature-painter who was set to do a grand historical piece, and failed. His merit is in a certain splendour and breadth of style. The best we can say of Mr. G. Meredith's " The Lark Ascending" is that ho has trodden on Shelley's own ground, and will not be pronounced a presumptuous intruder. This is poetry, and fine poetry, too, eetu if the inner thought be not wholly original :—

" Was never voice of ours could say

Our inmost in the sweetest way, Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our passion is too full in flood, We want the key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat, The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving -their one spirit voice."

Mr. G. Woodberry's essay on American literature is a paper of much thoughtfulness and grace, but it does not, to our

minds, explain fully the feebleness of American literature. It may be true that the cultivated class in America has little in- fluence, that critics are incompetent, or, rather, non-existent, and that the body of the people seeks for facts and knowledge rather than ideas, but all that was true of Englishmen in the Eliza- bethan period. Poets have risen without cultivated classes or

critics, and in countries, too, which seek their literature in a foreign laud. That America should have no Pope is intelligible, but why no Burns ? Is not the true explanation this,--that as yet, the American by himself, and separate, has hardly. been ? He is growing fast, though, and we think we see in

Henry James, Howell, and Hawthorne the forerunners of a separate and very admirable American literature, wholly of the soil, not English in any way, except in forms of expression. We recommend to all political students the editor's fine paper on " Cobden's First Pamplilets," not because we agree with all of it, for he is far too favourable to Cobdeu's views of foreign policy, but because it places some of the finest and most sug- gestive passages in Cobden's writings in a very attractive setting.

The Contemporary is very dull. Miss Wedgwood continues the discussion on the Carlyle " Reminiscences," and adds a mighty stone to the shower now falling on poor Mr. Froude's head. The letter published iu Thursday's Times by Mrs. Alex- ander Carlyle seems undoubtedly to convict him of disregarding Carlyle's instructions in publishing the book at all, but if it was to be published, we do not see that it would have gained by the excision of all ill-natured sentences. We should have lost a revelation of Carlyle, and not have gained much. We repeat that the true excuse for his bitter sayings has not been suffi- ciently understood. The man was a peasant of genius, accus-

tomed to rough speech, unaccustomed to think that speech could break houes, and not fully aware, for all Miss Wedgwood says of his egotism, that his bitter speech, unlike most men's, had vitality in it,—that he could use lightning as a whip. The families struck are not half so much injured as they think, and Carlyle himself, though he suffers, does not suffer unfairly. There was a fund of bitterness in him which often looked like love of detraction. Mr. T. Hodgkin's vigorous and picturesque sketch of the Prasfectus Pretorio, or as our fore- fathers would have called him, "the Lord Keeper" under Jus- tinian, is most entertaining, though it lacks completeness ; and there is subtle thought in Mr. Vernon Lee's " Dialogue on Poetic Morality," more especially in its suggested explanation of the tendency to extreme indecency manifested by many modern poets, and of the cause of the great mischief of such indecency ; but the remaining papers are very heavy reading, the most instructive, perhaps, being Professor W. Stanley Jevons's on "Bimetallism." He condemns that scheme, of course, as impossible, and evidently thinks that the fall in silver, which has led to the cry for its remonetisation, will go on. He believes, indeed, in a distinct appreciation of gold against all articles, as well as silver, caused by extra demand for currency ; and thinks that England, though it can consume little more silver, could increase the supply of gold abroad to an extent of about £20,000,000 sterling by an issue of one-pound notes. It isnot° worthy that no one who writes on bimetallism ever discusses the possibility of an artificial restriction on the pro- duction of silver. That could be effected, if the silver of the world were made a monopoly of States, an operation which, if it were worth while, would be by uo means outside possibility.

A very small proportion of the total supply is within the control of uncivilised Governments.

In the Nineteenth Century, besides the Duke of Argyll's argument against the Irish Laud Bill, which we noticed last week, Admiral Lord Dunsany writes an alarmist article on the possibility of invasion. He says that France, if joined by Italy, possesses a stronger fleet than we could put into the Channel, which might defeat our own, and so enable 200,000 men to land, probably near Pevensey, and march to London. His argument does not convince us, for wo do not see why the fight should end without the destruction of the greater part of the French Fleet, or why the immense host of transports should not be run down by steamers commanded by men ready to sacrifice themselves ;

but his paper will do good, by diminishing a dangerous over-confidence, which science will some day finally dissi- pate, and by disposing Parliament to assent to any really needful increase of the Fleet. The most ambitious paper in the number, that on George Eliot, by Edith Simeox, is by a writer far too completely fascinated by her subject to be even reasonably critical, and seems to us pitched on somewhat too high a note. We need a real study of George Eliot from one who knew her, rather than more of this rather tiresome kind of thing :- " In lingering over these memories, one can only feel the power- lessness of words to characterise the sweetness and the power of all she was. Nothing has been said of her fellowship with that side of the artist nature, its largo demands and passionate vehemence, of which Padalma's dance and Armgart's song are images; nothing of such traits as her delight in all fragrance, from that of syringes or sandalwood, to that most spiritual of incense which comes from the tong in which MO is spoken to ;' nothing of the scrupulous tender- ness which made her—if for a moment in conversational eagerness she had let some caressing word or gesture pass without response— come back upon it as an omission to be repaired ; nothing of her de- light in beauty, almost Hellenic in its reverence for a good gift of the gods which should be matched with worthy- living ; nothing of that refinement of sensibility which made her shrink from direct praise ; and note, as one of the paradoxes of emotion, that she was less touched by any tribute to herself than by reading of a great tribute to some one else whom she admired ; by the account of a similar incident that occurred to Dickens in the streets at York, than by the address of an unknown lady, ' Will you let me kiss your hand P' as she was leaving the concert-room at St. James's lull on Saturday afternoon."

We feel more interest in Mr. Dowdeu's transcriptions from Carlyle's unpublished lectures, many of which, like the following, are of great intellectual interest :—

" Having discussed the origin of Polytheism, Carlyle speaks of divination. It is really, in my opinion, a blasphemy against human nature to attribute the whole of the system [of Polytheism] to quackery and falsehood, Divination, for instance, was the great nucleus round which Polytheism formed itself—the constituted core of the whole matter, All people, private men as well as States, used to consult the Oracle of Dodona or Delphi (which eventually became the most celebrated of all) on all the concerns of life. Modern travellers have discovered in those places pipes and other secret con- trivances, from which they have concluded that these Oracles were constituted on a principle of falsehood and delasion. Cicero, too, said that he was certain two Augurs could not meet without laugh- ing ; and he was likely to know, for he had once been an Augur him- self. But I confess that on reading llerodotus there appears to me to have been very little quackery about it. I can quite readily fancy that there was a great deal of reason in the Oracle. The seat of that at Dodona, was a deep, dark chasm, into which the diviner entered when lie sought the Deity. If he was a man of devout frame of mind, ho must surely have then been in the best state of feeling for foreseeing tho future, and giving advice to others. No matter how this was carried on—by divination or otherwise—so long as the in- dividual suffered himself to be wrapt in union with a higher being. I like to believe better of Greece than that she was completely at the mercy of fraud and falsehood in these matters,'"

And this brief estimate of the Etruscans, from whom and the Pelasgi, Carlyle believed the Romans to have sprung :—

" The old Etruscans, besides possessing a certain genius for Art, wore an agricultural people, endowed with a sort of sullen energy, and with a spirit of intensely industrious thrift, a kind of vigorous thrift. Thus with respect to the ploughing of the earth, they declare it to be a kind of blasphemy against Nature to leave a clod unbroken.

Now, this feeling was the fundatueutal characteristic of the Roman people before they were distinguished as conquerors. Thrift is a quality held in no esteem, and is generally regarded as mean ; it is certainly mean enough, and objectionable from its inter- fering with all manner of intercourse between man and man. Bet 1 can say that thrift well understood includes in itself the host virtues that a man can have inn the world ; it teaches him self- denial, to postpone the present to the future, to calculate his means, and regulate his actions accordingly ; thus understood, it includes all that man can do in his vocation, Even in its worst state, it indicates a groat people.' "

This paper is the best contribution we have had yet to the Carlyle literature.

There is little of special interest in the remaining magazines, except an article on the " Sword " in Blackwood, peculiar from the half-ecstatic, half-comic mood in which it is written, but full of thought and literary "go," and, to our taste, about as good as such a production can be. We would especially call attention to the remarks (pages 562.503), unfortunately too long for extract, upon the difference between ancient and modern courage,—between the courage required for combat, and the courage required for standing placid and quiet, to bo shot down by weakens of precision. We would, however, venture to ask the writer whether ho seriously believes the swordsman, although called upon for individual effort, is really braver than the soldier who only acts in mass P He puts his case most charmingly, but we suspect he would rather lead a hundred Prussians in a tourney in which discipline disappeared than a hundred picked Sikh swordsmen. By the way, why does he misdescribe the exquisitely cynical and humorous observation engraved on a Hungarian sword, " He that thinks not as I do, thinks falsely," as a " critical observation P" Surely the author of that motto meant that the sword makes opinion. Mrs. Barnett's account iu the Corn/Lill of parties given to the poor of Whitechapel is very striking. It is an old subject, but we do not remember a sentence more pathetic than that of the child who said, as she saw a cornfield for the first time, "Look I here's straw a-growiu' ;" or one more full of painful suggestion than this, " Look, mother ! here's a Led with a room all to User'