THE MAGAZINES.

THE very best sentence in any magazine published this month is the following, from the Cornhill :—" She was oddly defiant and mistrustful for her age, for she was very young,—only eighteen, and young for eighteen. She looked upon herself as an experi- ment. We most of us have a vague idea of some character that we enact almost unconsciously : some of us look upon ourselves in the light of conclusions (this was the Archdeacon), others of tragedies, others of precepts. There are no end to the disguises and emblems of human nature. I have a friend who is a baro- meter, another a pair of slippers, another a sonata. I know a teapot (fem.), velocipedes of both genders, a harlequin, and a complete set of fire-irons. Mrs. Rowland might be looked upon as a soft hearth-rug comfortably spread out in the warmth of the blaze." Who does not know a precept, or a hearth-rug, or a velocipede ? The barometer is scarcer, though we know two; but hapless the man who has not among his friends a pair of slip- pers, a man or woman whose nature has in it that ineffable charm lent to some natures, and not always to the highest, of instantly conferring mental ease. We hardly need say that exquisite idea, with its delicate, downy malice, is from a story by Miss Thackeray, "Two Ladies—Two Hours ;" or that the story, with its pleasant acidity and keenness of insight, is worth half the three-volume novels ever issued, and would redeem any magazine, even a

poorer one than this. There is nothing else in it that we see, except Mr. Merivale's verses, and some acrid sense from "A Cynic" on "The Uses of Fools ;" but we do not know why there should be, for one perfect story, and one imperfect but striking poem, and one morsel of literary caviare, needing bread to make it eat- able, but greatly improving the bread, is surely enough for the reader, however chary of his shillings. Mr. Merivale's verses ex- press well the thought of the English visitor to Rome, who, with some sense of the great end which Rome, with all her vices, never forgets, sees how :—

"The Eternal City swarms with eager strangers

From every quarter of the busy earth ; Who fill the temples, like the money-changers, And say some prayers—for what they may be worth.

"In never-ending tide of restless motion, They come to burn, in fashion rather odd, The incense of their polyglot devotion, Before the altars of the Latin God.

"From holy place to holy place they flit, To 'do' as many churches as they can ; And humbly kneeling, for the fun of it, They climb the staircase of the Lateran.

. . ..... .

"There a slim youth, while all but he are kneeling, Through levelled opera-glass looks down on them, When round the Sistine's pictured roof is pealing Our buried Lord's majestic Requiem.

"For him each storied wonder of the globe is 'The sort of thing a fellow ought to see And so he patronized Ora pro noble, And wanted to encore the lenebrce."

He gets weaker when trying to express the disgust of the Englishman, inherently incapable of delighting in symbols, for sacerdotal splendour, but breaks again into poetry as he recalls what to him is Rome's true charm,—her storied memories

Where Raphael and all his great compeers Art's form divine in giant-mould have cast, The very air is heavy with the years, Tho very stones are vocal of the past.

"Above, beneath, around, she weaves her spells, And priest and poet vulgarize in vain : Who once within her fascination dwells, Leaves her with but one thought,—to come again."

Fraser is full of moderately good but rather didactic papers, such as "The Cost of a Napoleon," which the writer fixes at a

million of lives and five hundred millions of money, giving statistics to prove his estimate. We dare say they are all right, but we cannot say we are greatly interested in that method of reckoning up the results of Ctesarism. How many lives has Christianity cost, or how many perished in the barbarian conquest of Rome which regenerated Europe, or in the Crusades which crushed feudalism, or in the American civil war, which finally killed slavery as a working organization of society ? The proof afforded by the Crimean war that civilization is stronger than Russia, and the independence of Italy, are well worth the million of lives, which if they did not go in battle would still go from disease.

Compilers of statistics always seem to forget that human beings live perpetually under a deferred sentence of capital punishment, and that life is not taken, but only cut short, by war. "W. R. G."

entirely admits that in this instance the things acquired were worth their price, and holds Napoleon, on the whole, to have been "a fertilizing influence,"—which may be true, so is manure,—but fails to count up the cost of suppressing the genius of France, which, unsuppressed, might have yielded treasure indefinitely more valuable even than Napoleon's additions to exports and im- ports.—Rather didactic, too, is the paper of Mr. Thorold Rogers on "Capital, Labour, and Profit," which we do not otherwise criticize, because, after a careful perusal, we are obliged to make the humiliating confession that we do not understand it. At least, the only idea we can get out of it is that labour is one form of property, and we cannot imagine that anyone at this time of day would write a long paper to tell the world that, as a novel and most important fact. How that idea is made clearer by saying

that money is invested in the labourer, that somebody not defined invests 1150 in bringing him up, we are wholly unable to perceive. Mr. Rogers says :— "The labourer then, the man who employs the agency of an employes for the production and exchange of those objects in which hie industry is embodied, is as much a capitalist as that other person is to whom the loose language of ordinary political economy assigns this name. Ho may be in the aggregate even a greater capitalist than his employer. Let us conceive a firm engaged in the production of costly articles, as, for example, that of a manufacturer of machines on a large scale. I recollect one which is employing 5,000 adult hands. The capital in- vested in these 5,000 workmen cannot be less than £150 a head. Here, then, is a sum of £750,000 presented by the industrial capacity of the workmen employed. To this must be added the week's wages in advance, which the labourer either possesses in himself or by loan from the tradesmen with whom he deals, and who give him credit. This SUM at 25s. a head is more than £6,000 additional. Now it is a very large business indeed which requires for its continuous maintenance more than three quarters of a million sterling."

Very good. Money is invested in a diamond. There is the interest on the price of the mine, and the working outlay, and the royalty to the State, and the coat of transmission, total about i18

per carat. Consequently, a diamond is a capitalist ! What is the use of confusing labour, which is a representative of capital just as the diamond is, with capital itself? Anybody who has anything -to sell is, pro tanto, a capitalist, but it is more scientific to confine the word to the man who has bought it. Mr. Rogers says the labourer is a buyer too, for be buys wages with labour ; but surely that is only to introduce linguistic confusion into a science which, of all sciences, needs the aid of the clearness which can only be obtained by giving words a limited application. When we talk of capital as contra-distinguished from labour, we mean

that form of capital which everywhere will buy everything, labour included, namely, money, and we shall gain nothing by altering the definition.—Didactic also and dogmatic to boot is the clever paper on "Irish Priests," in which the writer wants to make out that a section of the priesthood governs Ireland, and that its object is Repeal ; and that of Mr. Vickers', the "Future of Turkey," in

which he sets out a great truth, that Western Europe will one -day colonize Turkey, in this rather impractical way :—" Turkey can never be colonized, like America, by a rude scrambling democracy ; but if the educated Frank adventurers of four nations will only drop their native prejudices, send their children to a common school, and organize themselves for their common advan- tage, they will find in the wide emigration-field beyond the Danube an oriental and aristocratic America, far more congenial to their minds than any of the mongrel republics beyond the Atlantic, founded on Jack-Cade and Jacobin notions of reviving primitive human equality." Would it not be easier to conquer Turkey, give it a regular Western government of some sort, say, to begin with, an Indian one, and then let the people scramble in as they do into Ohio ? They will take care of themselves very

effectually, if we only give them some security to begin with. Didactic and technical besides is the essay on "National Armies," a criticism of Mr. Cardwell's effort to introduce the system of 'cadres; and indeed the only papers which are not are "The Fort-

night in Kerry," a light and excellent sketch, and Professor Max .Mfiller's first lecture on "The Science of Religion," an effort to assert a place for "a third philosophical discipline that has to examine

into the conditions of that third faculty of a man, co-ordinate with sense and reason, the faculty of perceiving the Infinite, which is at the root of all religions. In German we can distinguish that

third faculty by the name of Vernunft, as opposed to Verstand, reason, and Sinn, sense. In English I know no better name for

it, than the faculty of faith, though it will have to be guarded by -careful definition, and to be restricted to those objects only which cannot be supplied either by the evidence of the senses, or by the -evidence of reason. No simply historical fact can ever fall under the cognizance of faith." Dr. Max Miiller's proposition in this number is that we ought, in studying theology, to apply the his- toric method, to collate "first of all, all the evidence that can be gained from a comparative study of the religions of the world fully

-collected, classified, and analyzed." Hem ! That depends upon the object of the search. Taking Christ for the moment from the A I scientific" point of view to be only an abnormal human being, how -many religions did he know, or St. Paul either, his great exponent? 'The study of the growth of religions is a most important branch of 'historic study, but it is not so that men can obtain religious wis- dom, least of all if they bring to the study the preconceived thought which is so clearly apparent in this passage "We have in the history of Buddhism an excellent opportunity for watching the process by which a canon of sacred books is called into -existence. We see here, as elsewhere, that during the lifetime of the teacher, no record of events, no sacred code containing the sayings of Alm master was wanted. His presence was enough, and thoughts of the future, and more particularly, of future greatness, seldom entered the minds of those who followed him. It was only after Buddha had left the world to enter into Nirvana, that his disciples attempted to recall the sayings and doings of their departed friend and master. At that time -everything that seemed to redound to the glory of Buddha, however extraordinary and incredible, was eagerly welcomed, while witnesses who would have ventured to criticize or reject unsupported statements, or to detract in any way from the holy character of Buddha, had no chance of even being listened to. .And when, in spite of all this, dif- ferences of opinion arose, they were not brought to the test by a careful weighing of evidence, but the names of 'unbeliever' and heretic' (nastika„ pashanda) were quickly invented in India, as elsewhere, and

bandied backwards and forwards between contending parties, till at last, when the doctors disagreed, the help of the secular power had to be invoked, and kings and emperors convoke councils for the suppression of schism, for the settlement of an orthodox creed, and for the comple- tion of a sacred canon. We know of King Aaoka, the contemporary of Seleacus, sending his royal missive to the assembled elders, and telling them what to do, and what to avoid, warning them also in his own name of the apocryphal or heretical character of certain books which, as he thinks, ought not to be admitted into the sacred canon."

The great paper of Macmillan is, again, Mr. Freeman's lecture on the origin of the English nation. Having shown, as he believes, that we are Low Dutchmen, a branch of the great Teu- tonic race, he now proceeds to develop the history of the great settlement, which differed from all other settlements made by the barbarians in other sections of the Roman Empire in two essen- tial points. Elsewhere, though they destroyed Rome, the barbarians admired and copied the Roman civilization, maintained its forms, adopted its language, and tried hard to keep the theory of empire unbroken :— " Everywhere, in Europe at least, the conquerors were brought, in a greater or less degree, under the charm of Roman influences. A seizure of lands, greater or smaller, but carried on commonly according to a fixed and regular proportion, accompanied the first settlement ; but, after this, the Roman inhabitants were not disturbed. They retained their own laws, while the Teutons, or, as they thought it no scorn to call them- selves, the Barbarians, retained theirs. Two separate societies, Roman and Teutonic, sat for a while side by side in the same land ; gradually the two intermingled, each of course influencing the other in many ways, but with the balance of real and abiding influence decidedly in favour of the Roman."

The Teutons who settled England embraced neither the civiliza- tion nor the religion of Rome.

"Our forefathers, coming straight by sea from their old land, bad none of these feelings. They had no respect for a civilization of which they knew nothing. They set no store by titles which, so far as they under- stood their meaning, would seem to them badges of slavery. They knew nothing of the religion of the Empire ; no Christian missionary had reached the Elbe or the Weser; no Christian captive had carried the tidings of salvation to the house of his bondage. In short, while our kinsfolk who occupied the Continental provinces were half Romanized before they settled within the borders of the Empire, our own forefathers entered Britain in all the untamed and unsoftened barbarism of the old Thetonic life. They came as simple destroyers."

From the middle of the fifth century wave after wave of these destroyers poured into the island, winning it bit by bit by hard fighting, in a war which was of necessity a war of extermination. A few women might be spared, a few Britons might be made slaves, but the population was in its essence Teuton. "We were a new people in a new land, a land which men had begun to look upon as another world, a world whose conversion was the noblest spiritual conquest of which the spiritual centre of the elder world could boast."—The Dean of Westminster's "Hymn on the Transfiguration" is a fine piece of cadenced rhetoric, rising in a few lines to genuine poetry, and falling in one or two others into somewhat feeble verse. The word " decease " for death in the following verse is surely supereermonical :— "'Master, it is good to be

In life's worst anguish close to Theo.' Within the overshadowing cloud Which wraps us in its awful shroud, We wist not what to think or say, Our spirits sink in sore dismay ; They tell us of the dread Decease '- But yet to linger here is peace."

"Earl's Dene" in Blackwood goes on well, and the number contains an admirable sketch of the Princesse des Ursine, the vigorous, witty old Frenchwoman who, known to posterity mainly as camerara mayor, or head lady in waiting to the Queen of Philip V. of Spain, really lived half-a-dozen lives. The writer's estimate of her character is highly favourable, and the paper is full of that instructive chit-chat in which memoir-readers so much delight.