THE MAGAZINES.

St. Pauls, if not the best, is, we think, this month the most readable of the Magazines. Besides " Septimius " which lags a little,. though it is full of Hawthorne's most characteristic thoughts— thoughts as of a man who, himself exempt from living, was specu- lating on the phenomena of life—it contains a striking story in verse by the author of "St. Abe and his Seven Wives," said to be Mr. Lowell, who, the Negro freed, is trying to release the Red, Indian from his burden of calumny. The ballad is not humorous, and scarcely pathetic, only a spirited tale of adventure in Texas ; yet somehow it leaves a deeper impression than any mere narrative would, and there is a touch of genius in the end, where the wild bad " Imp of Sin from Maine," whose life has been saved by an Indian whom he was striving to kill, walks away without thanks, and only suspends his habit of duelling for " many a week," but never again listens in silence to the calumny of the frontier which declares, and in many cases honestly declares, that an Indian is a wild animal. Mr. Buchanan has a fine apology for Charles Dickens as the modern maker not of humorous novels, but of the most perfect Fairy Tales,. with characters which do but embody qualities, and yet interest all mankind,—though we are unable to agree in his estimate of Dickens' sentiment, conceiving it, as we do, to be treacly rather than sweet ; and "Henry Holbeach " has a study of the Duke of Argyll as a writer, in which he decides accurately enough that- the Duke's function as metaphysician is to " put the skid on,' to compel his opponents to prove instead of begging their case. The " dominie " element in the Duke's writings—am element common to him with almost all Scotch thinkers—has,. however, been sufficiently recognized even by men who would not venture to say, as Henry Holbeach does, that " the elements of the question are so ludicrously simple " when the question is Necessity: He quotes, by the way, an instance of a perfect " bull" which is rather comic, as coming from a man who has quizzed the meta- physicians for their bulls. "Few birds," says the Duke of Argyll,. in the Reign of Law, "few birds are so invisible as the wood- pecker." St. Pauls has also a very clever paper on the " Art of Beauty," a lively treatise on furniture, decoration, and dress, nearly- every word of which will carry conviction to the reader, especially if he knows anything at all about colour. The essayist might have tempered his utter condemnation of the glossy-white papers, so common in drawing-rooms by the remark that they light up with artificial light as few other papers do, but we entirely agree in his decision in favour of the papers in imitation of Spanish leather, and record this little hint with enthusiasm tempered by the certainty that no such decoration would in London last a week. " A room painted with murrey colour, a kind of dull light, lilac, warmed up with amber hangings, may also have a very deli- cate and beautiful effect."

The Fortnightly is full of instructive but rather grave papers„, the best, perhaps, being the first, an account by Mr. A. C. Lyall of the genesis of the local Gods of Berar, called " The Religion of an Indian Province." His description of Hindooism as " fissi- parous," as a creed with a tendency to split into infinite subdivi- siona is a stroke of genius in nomenclature, and we have read with admiration, though we do not absolutely accept this thoughtful paragraph on the origin of the worship of " Stocks and Stones," as practised by all the ruder races of the peninsula. Mr. Lyall denies that this worship has its origin in symbolism, and thinks it due rather to the abnormal development of wonder which marks all these wild tribes :—

" The feeling which actuates the uninitiated Indian worshipper of stocks and stones, or of what are called freaks of nature, is in its essence that simple awe of the unusual which belongs to no particular religion. It survives in England to this day in the habit of ascribing grotesque and striking landmarks or puzzling antiquities to the Devil, who is, or has been, the residuary legatee of all obsolete Pagan superstitions in Christian countries. In any district of India such objects or local con- figurations as the Devil's Quoits (near Stanton), the Devil's Jumps (in Surrey), or the Devil's Punch-bowl(in Sussex), would be worshipped ; similar things are actually worshipped all over Berar, and in every case some signification, either mythical or symbolical, is contrived by some expert Brahman to justify and authorize the custom. Yet I feel certain that among the vulgar there is at first no arriere penste, or second mean- ing, in their adoration. The worshipper requires no such motive, he asks for no sign, offers no prayer, expects no reward. He pays reverent attentions to the Unaccountable Thing, the startling expression of an unknown power, and goes his way. It is not difficult to perceive how this original downright adoration of queer-looking objects is modified by passing into the higher order of imaginative superstition. First, the stone is the abode of some spirit, its curious shape or situation betraying possession. Next, this strange form or aspect argues some oiesign or handiwork of supernatural beings, or is the vestige of their presence on earth ; and one step further lands us in the world-wide regions of mythology and heroic legend, when the natural remarkable features of a hill, a cleft rock, a cave, or a fossil commemorate the miracles and feats of some saint, demi-god, or full-blown deity. Boras is abundantly furnished with such fables, and beyond them we get, as I think, to the regarding of stones as emblems of mysterious attributes, to the phallic rites, to the Saligram or fossil in which Vishnu is mani- fest, and to all that class of notions which entirely separate the outward image from the power really worshipped. So that at last we emerge into pure symbolism, as when anything appears to be selected arbi- trarily to serve as a visible point for spiritual adoration. I know a Hindoo officer of great shrewdness and very fair education who devotes several hours daily to the elaborate worship of five round pebbles, which he has appointed to be his symbol of Omnipotence. He believes in one all-pervading Divinity, but he must have something to handle and address."

The next step is tree worship,— " Tree-worship has a wide range. A tree is first reverenced as a thing to be feared, having sentient existence and mysterious potency, as proved by waving branches and weird sounds. Next, fruitful trees are honoured for yielding good fruits, which are bestowed yearly in more or less quantity according to some hidden caprice that may be possibly be propitiated; then a particular species becomes sacred to a well-known god ; or a great solitary trunk becomes the abode of a nameless impal- pable spirit ; or a dark grove or thicket may be his habitation."

And then we rise-to the worship of heroes, who are gradually sur- rounded with myths, and of anchorites,—much worshipped in Berar, where the Brahmins, in their competition for devotees, gradually exalt them to the rank of gods, by incessantly piling up stories about them, and even in some cases by declaring them to be by successive incarnations still present upon earth :-

"They still occasionally refuse even to admit that the dissolution of the first mortal body was a sign that the god had departed from among them ; and they employ that astonishing device, so notorious in India, of a perpetual succession of incarnations. At least two persons are now living in Central India who are asserted to be the tenements or vessels which the deity, who originally manifested himself in some wonderful personage, has now chosen for his abode on earth."

The best thing that can happen to one of these hero-gods is to have a great poem written about him, in which case he may live, as Rama has done, for ages on ages, until the mere utterance of the name of a Hindoo warrior is now a passport to immortality, and parrots are taught to repeat it exclusively, that the merit of the bird's adoration may pass to the credit side of its owner's account with Heaven. We have left ourselves little space to notice the rest of the Fortnightly, but we must note a fine criticism by Mr. G. H. Lewes on Dickens, the writer " who had all the resources of the bourgeois epic within his grasp ;" and Lord Hobart's bold defence of non-intervention as the policy of the future, which England does right in upholding under any amount of sneers, because, as liberty advances and the oligarchical class dies out, nationalism will rapidly perish, and the gospel of peace and good-will will rule the world. We need not say we believe nothing of the kind, seeing clearly that brothers will fight on provocation just as strangers will, and holding nationalism to be essential to prevent the dominance of a single race,—the Teuton, but Lord Hobart puts strongly what we all forget too much, the frightful consequences which may follow an era of war, especially in the dislike it may

produce among the masses for a system of society which allows them to be used up like cattle.

The best paper in Fraser, to our minds at least, is "Religion as a Fine Art," a powerful attack on that form of scepticism so common in our day which, allowing that religion is false, still cherishes It for its aesthetic value, and answers Dr. Colenso by the jibe that the same method of reasoning would disprove Gulliver's Travels or the Paradise Lost. "To talk about heaven and hell and redemption is merely a picturesque way of expressing abhor- rence for gross and disgusting habits. Worship is merely an agreeable mode of stimulating certain emotions, without implying any particular theory as to the objects of worship ; and one method of treatment may be as effective as another." The object of the writer, we need scarcely say, is to compel such people to admit that "faith has to do with fiction and reason with fact," and therefore to renounce faith as an instrument of thought; but his arguments cut two ways, and by compelling men to see that they cannot have faith in fiction, may compel them to probe down till they reach that substratum of fact which reason also will accept. Faith will then be stronger than ever. Meanwhile we concur in the writer's denunciation of the present practice of separating life and the operations of the mind into watertight compartments, so that the one may be submerged while the other remains buoyant, though his illustration that there are men who hold that faith in Christ can co-exist with disbelief in historical Christianity is, we believe, unfounded. If he had said that the histories of Christ may seem human to men who yet believe in Him as divine, he would have been nearer fact. Fraser has two Indian papers,—one an account of the Mohammedan revival, by Mr. Gifford Palgrave, full of his special knowledge and of information which would seem to prove the reality of the movement, which affects even the daily life of Mussulmans :—" It is worthy of note that " teetotalism has " in all ages been the thermometrical test of Mohammedan fervour," that at present the wine-shops everywhere are dis- appearing; that the Mussulman sailor leaves the grog-shop to the Christian, and the Mussulman soldier is as abstemious as the Janissary was drunken. Religious foundations are increas- ing rapidly, year by year the number of pilgrims swells, while the conversions are unceasing, even the Circassian exiles having now adopted Islam. Mr. Palgrave traces the revival to two causes : Wahabeeism, which is attracting even the Caliph, and the spirit of resistance to European pressure, and holds that in India we must acknowledge it, and compromise with it by restoring to the Mussulman his religious autonomy, his right to be judged in all cases of marriage, inheritance, or divorce by his own Knees. That is the opinion at which almost all sensible Anglo-Indians have arrived, but it is. opposed to the course of modern " scientific " legislation in Calcutta, which is just now about to place Mussulman converts from Christianity under distinct disabilities by forbidding them to marry again ; a just thing, it may be, in itself, the Christian wife having her rights, but still not in accordance with the immense favour shown in the new laws of inheritance to the convert from Hindooism to Chris- tianity. His family had their contract rights too.

Blackwood publishes an interesting sketch of a Trade School just opened at Keighley, in Yorkshire, out of moneys subscribed on the spot and an old endowment, and intended to supply a high practical education, not a classical education, to boys who can pay but £4 a year, but it is one we are unable to condense ; and the paper which attracts us in Blackwood is still the " French Home Life." This month the subject is food, and the economy in its use in which the French excel all other nations. The spirit of economy reaches down to the very servants, and many an anxious housekeeper will sigh as she hears that in France a house- hold of nine may be maintained with three meals a day, a daily dinner of soup, entrée, and roast, and a dinner party once a month, for £5 10s. a week, exclusive of wine. That is about one-half the cost of the same comfort in London, and considering prices in Paris and its neighbourhood seems incredible, but in the next page it is explained. Here is a glimpse of a housewife's paradise :— " To these causes must be added the immense saving which is real- ized in comparison with ourselves in the feeding of the servants. In France servants eat immediately after their masters have finished, and content themselves with what is left. If the relics are really insufficient for their appetites, a special dish of some common kind is added,—lentils and bacon, or cheap veal or mutton and white haricots, or sausages and pease-pudding. Never do the servants touch the more expensive sorts of meat ; poultry, or game, or sweet things are utterly forbidden to them ; all that may remain of that kind is kept for next day's breakfast. And yet they eat as much as they like, without stint or limit. By the association of these various conditions, a family of ten people is enabled to live admirably well in Paris,—infinitely better than its equals do in England—for ls. 7d. per head per day, or in the country for about Is. Bd."

English servants in the class described would not live under such a regime, a fact which of itself adds 30 per cent. to the household expenditure. It is in the difference of the servants, too, that the difference of the cooking, which Blackwood describes at great length and with some bias towards French cooking, really lies. A French cook learns her trade thoroughly and takes a pride in

novelties ; an English cook of the middle-class kind rarely does so, and always seeks to give herself as little thought—we do not mean work, but thought—as is consistent with the retention of her place. An exacting master sometimes makes a good cook, but Englishwomen unfortunately do not interest themselves in eating except when strangers are expected or the bills become too heavy.

The Cornhill contains little that interests us, the paper on rural poetry being only a criticism on the poets who have described ruralities ; but then Miss Thackeray continues and finishes Riquet of the Tuft, and what can critic or reader want more than that, unless he is one who delights in substantial padding or instructive papers such as Macmillan publishes on the Licensing Question in Sweden, a history of the Gothenburg experiment in restraining the liquor trade. This experiment is an absolutely original one, a Company having been formed which sells all the liquor in the town, having bought out the old dealers and being protected against new licences. This company does not attempt to restrict the sale of spirits, its principles being as follows :— " 1. Spirits to be retailed without any profit whatever to the retailer, who can thus have no temptation to stimulate their consumption,

"2. The sale of spirits on credit or on the security of pledges to be stringently prohibited. "3. All houses in which the liquor trade is carried on to be well lighted, roomy, airy, and clean. "4. Good victuals, at moderate prices, to be always procurable in drinking-houses by anybody demanding them."

The expenses of good and vigilant management are paid out of the profits, and then the balance is given to the municipal treasury, which is greatly profited thereby. In fact, though a company is interposed in order to facilitate the conduct of business, the municipality is the real owner of all liquor-houses, and in the interest of the community maintains order, turns drinking-shops into eating shops, where liquor is taken with food instead of without it, and after earning more than the old licences yielded produces the following effects upon intemperance: "The police-office statistics, for instance, show that the number of persons fined for drunkenness, which in 1864 was 2,161, has since that year gone steadily down, till in 1870 it stood at 1,416. The statistics of delirium tremens are still more significant. The number of cases was, in 1865 (the year of the formation of the Company), 118 ; in 1866, 107 ; in 1867, 82 ; in 1868, 54 ; and in 1870 (there is no return for 1869 forthcoming), 14 only."

There is another very suggestive paper in Macmillan on John Bright, in which the Member for Birmingham is extolled as the one man who has foreseen the immediate future of politics, and describes the reforms which he has suggested and which are not yet carried out :— " The abolition of capital punishment, the encouragement of emi- gration, the extension of the probate duty to all property which passes by death from one owner to another, the cultivation of waste lands, disconnecting ourselves from the policy and interests of Turkey, the extravagance of our taxation, Indian finance, and the dealing with pauperism, are a few more of the questions on which Mr. Bright has expressed opinions in most decided and unmistakable terms, and on which legislation must take place."