an adroit man. He was asked to consent to the con- version of the Egyptian Debt in order that the money so saved might be applied to the total abolition of the corvee. He did...

T HE Provisional Government of Brazil is clearly not firmly seated. Ordinary telegrams are still edited or suppressed; but according to some cipher telegrams received in Lisbon,...

and Great Britain ; but it is said that a long answer to the latest despatch has been received by telegraph from the Portuguese Foreign Minister, and is couched in conciliatory...

case.

patristic learning, it might have been much easier to supply his place. He was very much more,—a man of singular simplicity and modesty, of singular disinterestedness and...

last, we have lost much the most impressive figure on the English Bench of Bishops. He had been greatly weakened by the alarming and, as it was then thought, almost necessarily...

Mr. Parnell's informants, must be a great master of fiction. In Monday's Times, Mr. T. W. Russell replied to Mr. Parnell's assertions as to the new tenants on the Coolgreaney...

workers of London, Mr. Weir, a compositor, is reported to have said of Mr. Livesey, who has really defeated the strike, that " he ought not to live twenty-four hours," that "he...

physicians have reported on it. Dr. G. See says that it very seldom attacks patients who are suffering from tubercular disease of the lungs, but is most serious with those whose...

Paris is not much less alarmed. In the former place it is said that 10 per cent. of the population is down with it ; and at Munich and Bremen it is raging badly. At Paris, among...

Times of Monday. As our readers know, he had asserted that while the Corporation of Belfast could only float their Municipal Debt at 34 per cent., the Corporation of Dublin had...

the men employed by the Gas Light and Coke Company, who supply an immense district in West London, indignant at the defeat of the South London gasmen, intended to strike, and...

up again. The French have a right, under the treaty which ceded the island, to fish on part of the coast, and use it to catch herring for bait in their deep-sea cod-fishing....

also at another time of New Zealand, called attention in Monday's Times to a passage in Mr. Spencer Walpole's " Life of Lord John Russell " (Vol. II., p. 176), in which Mr....

a " butchery " said to have occurred at Yakoutsk, in Siberia, some time in April last. Thirty political prisoners were waiting there, and an ad interim Governor, Ostashine, in...

of M. Jules Verne, the clever novelist, whose method it is to exaggerate the powers of scientific appliances till they become almost supernatural agencies. On December 22nd, a...

the proposal of the London County Council to im- pose on the owner of any house benefited by a neighbouring public improvement, a rent-charge equal to the improvement in his...

New Consols (4) were on Friday 97. to 974.

an evening contemporary calls a " new departure," but what Mr. Willing, who provides room for the advertisers of London, would call a very old departure, inasmuch as it seems to...

fierce attack on bimetallism, which he declares to be, as regards monometallic countries, attended with this tremendous initial difficulty. Gold is actually worth about...

BISHOP LIGHTFOOT. T HE Church of England has had a great loss, a loss which it will feel even more severely than the Church of Rome would feel the loss of a man and a scholar of...

I NVESTORS regard the postponement of the meeting of the Brazilian Representatives as the worst news yet received from Brazil, and they are right. The decree fixing the end of...

ideal in their minds of the Premier they would like to have, or they would not invest each successive popular favourite with such a halo of legend. Mr. Gladstone is no more like...

MAGEE has written an interesting paper, in the Fortnighily Review for January, on the incom- patibility between the function of the State and the function of the Christian...

does much more than " create a vacancy in the Episcopal Bench." It takes away one of the few occupants of that bench who came naturally into the mind when the leaders of the...

S INCE the publication of our article of October 26th on the relations of the white and coloured races in the United States, we have received quite a shoal of letters from...

is one of the first gifts which the New Year is going to bestow upon London. Whether the rumours that the epidemic has already broken out at Birmingham and Nottingham prove...

M R. PHELPS, lately United States Minister here, in the paper on Divorce which he publishes in this month's number of the Forum, suggests many serious questions, and one which,...

W ITH two great poets publishing characteristic poems, the one in his seventy-seventh and the other in his eighty-first year, and the elder of the two publishing at least one...

A COMMENTARY FROM AN EASY-CHAIR : CHRISTMAS-CHRISTMAS CARDS AND PRESENTS-THE INFLUENCE OF DICKENS-THE END OF THE YEAR. IT is surprising to see how the veins of London seem to...

[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR. "] Sts,—In the article in the Spectator of December 21st, on " Browning and Tennyson," the writer says of the former poet : " To use his own...

THE DEPOPULATION OF IRELAND. [To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIL—Every one admits the existence of " congested" districts in the Western half of Ireland. Mr. Parnell's...

A" SPANISH fleet affront our English shores ! It must not be ; it shall not ! Sink or swim Our cause, our lamp of hope burn bright or dim, Long as o'er English cliff the osprey...

THE BURIAL OF ROBERT BROWNING. UPON St. Michael's Isle They laid him for awhile That he might feel the Ocean's full embrace, And wedded be To that wide sea— The subject and...

THE LIFE OF MARY SHELLEY.* TILEEE years ago, Professor Dowden, at the request of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, published what may be called an official Life of the poet. He had...

authorship answers, though we suppose it must answer for the same reason for which, remarkably laborious men live to a great age,—namely, thaw they must be picked men, men...

THE most obvious, though not the most important, remark to be made about Mr. Fraser Rae's new novel, Maygrove, relates to the author's curious, and, indeed, inexplicable choice...

ONE thing strikes us at once in reading these, and, indeed, any folk-tales, a confusion of beliefs and ideas so diverse that we cannot assign to the story any certain origin or...

GOWER'S English poem has received but cold and stinted praises from our own critics, and has been handled by Chaucer's most enthusiastic American eulogist with merciless...

upon the text of the Old Testament, has in his last two works bent his scholarship in another direction, and given us edifying biographies of two of the prophets,—Elijah in The...

(Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)—Mr. R. Andre has given some pretty illustrations to a story which is fanciful indeed, but not in the way that commends it to us as suitable for...

S. Hewlett. (Nisbet and Co.)—The author writes in her preface : "This is a tale of Indian life. It is a tale, not a missionary report." It is somewhat inartistically...

GIFT-BOOKS. "i We have received the third annual volume of the Monthly Chronicle of North - Country Lore and Legends. (W. Scott, Newcastle- on-Tyne and London.)—It must be...

irrepressible boy ; Joplin, a benevolent and semi-comic police- man ; Kitty, a flower-girl; Roby's mother, and his aunt Dorothea, a short-tempered but kind-hearted person, are...

Co.)—This " tale of the Norman Conquest" is somewhat slighter in texture than some of those which Miss Holt has given to the public. Sir William Percy has granted to him by the...

H. Allen and Co.)—We cannot say that the story is commended to us by its title or by the nom de plume assumed by the author. As a matter of fact, however, politics have not much...

brought together in this volume, with laudable industry, many hundred proverbs, giving them in the various languages in which they are found. We doubt, indeed, whether all the...

(Ward, Lock, and Co.)—We wish that all writers of these tales would follow the precept given lately by one of their number, and plunge —we quote the exact phrase used—in mediis...

Edward Duncan (Blackie and Son), are two volumes in the series of " Vere Foster's Advanced Water-Colour Series." Each volume contains eight fat-similes of the original paintings...

a friend of a lad, whose acquaintance he had made under not very favourable circumstances, by some very honourable conduct in the matter of a purchase. The story tells us how...

story, the scene of which, for some reason that we do not understand, the author has chosen to lay in Elf-land. There is something hollow and false in all elfish things,...