THE MAGAZINES.

THE best article in the Contemporary, and indeed, we may say in the Magazines for this month, is, to our minds, Mr. Goldwin Smith's, on "The Greatness of the Romans." It is a new proof of the prodigality, the positive waste of thought and industry and knowledge, with which men are now-a-days pouring themselves out in these ephemerals. Time was when a paper like this, diluted to perhaps double its number of pages, and called a monograph on the early history of Rome, would have made a reputation. In sixteen pages, Mr. Smith gives us a new and intelligible, and as far as we can test, an accurate account of the reason for the rise of the Roman Power, which mastered the world around the Mediterranean. The secret of that power was intellect applied lo the formation of armies—in other words, discipline—and the reason why the Romans so applied their intellect was their per- manent and serious danger of being plundered by the tribes around them. Rome, originally, in Mr. Smith's view, was a great commercial city, an antitype of Carthage or Venice :— "It is evident that in the period designated as that of the Kings, when Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and -country, a great and wealthy city. This is proved by the works of the Sings, the Capitoline Temple, the _excavation for the Circus Maximus. the Servian Wall, and above all, the Cloaca Maxims. Historians have indeed undertaken to give us a very disparaging picture of the ancient Rome, which they confidently describe as nothing more than a groat village of shingle-roofed cottages, thinly scattered over a large area. We ask in vain what are the materials for this description. It is most -probable that the private buildings of Rome under the Kings were roofed with nothing better than shingle, and it is very likely that they were mean and dirty, as the private buildings of Athens appear to have -been, and as those of most of the groat cities of the middle-ages un- questionably were. But the Cloaca Maxima is in itself conclusive evidence of a large population, of wealth, and of a not inconsiderable -degree of civilisation. Taking our stand upon this monument, and clearing our vision entirely of Romulus and his asylum, we seem dimly to perceive the existence of a deep prehistoric background, richer than is commonly supposed in the germs of civilisation,—a remark which may in all likelihood be extended to the background of history in -general. Nothing surely can be more grotesque than the idea of a set -of wolves, like the Norse pirates before their conversion to Christianity, -constructing in their den the Cloaca Maxima. That Rome was corn- paratively great and wealthy is certain. We can hardly doubt that she was a seat of industry and commerce, and that the theory which -represents her industry and commerce as having been developed sub- sequently to her conquests is the reverse of the fact. Whence, but from industry and commerce, could the population and the wealth have come ?"

The Roman Patricians from the first were financiers and money- lenders, their politics were those of an ancient and quick-witted -commercial community, and wealth was with them always a political force. It is not among a rude people that commu- nistic ideas have to be restricted by elaborate organisation. This city, rich and civilised, was an object of desire to the fierce hill tribes around, Sabines, 2Equians, Volacians, -and others, to the Samnites and those barbarous sybarites the Etruscans ; and it was necessary against these to be perpetually on the watch, and organised for a struggle in which the few must beat the many, and beat them without the protec- tion of the city walls :—" The Roman Legions were formed, in the first instance, of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength. When, to keep up the siege of Veii, military pay was introduced, a step was taken in the transition from a -citizen soldiery to a regular army, such as the Legions ultimately became, with its standing discipline of the camp ; and that the measure should have been possible is another proof that Rome was a great city, with a well-supplied treasury, not a collection of -mud huts." This theory, true or false, is worked out with much eloquence and force, and followed by an explanation of the special mark of Rome, her rare generosity to the conquered races, whom, instead of destroying—as, for instance, the Ottoman has -destroyed all he conquered—she preserved, and ultimately ad- mitted to full citizenship. We cannot, of course, go over the I ,frAola arkicle,,bat every paragraph in it suggests thought, and

compels the reader to think out the meaning of problems of which he has always known. Of remaining difficulties, the greatest is one to be explained only by experts. Why was discipline so important when armies actually touched in fighting, and individual physical prowess did so much? The Romans beat their physical superiors. Would policemen rather under- sized, but carefully trained, defeat with cutlasses, say, merchant sailors with cutlasses, but without training ?—The drawback to the series of short papers on "Future Punishment,' of which some are excellent, is a certain preachiness and unctuousness, a habit of using words, as in sermons, to rouse a certain condition of feeling, rather than to create a certain conviction. This is, we think, more marked on the Uni- versalist side than on the Evangelical, but it is marked on both. So also is a certain weakness. None of the Universaliats, for example, to use a broad and unfair but intelligible party term, seem to us to face the mystery of pain, or explain why, as God tolerates useless pain for a time—as, for instance, ear-ache or colic in a baby, who forgets it all—He may not tolerate pain for ever, as a mere consequence of a certain condition of things ; while most of the Evangelicals have—as Mr. Allen, for instance, has— a sneaking kindness for extinction, as a sequel to retribution,—an idea which seems to us impossible, as implying torture inflicted by God for no end whatever, except vindictiveness. If they mean that evil must merely, in the nature of things, have painful results, let them say so ; but then let them also distinguish their view from that of the ordinary Necessitarians, and show why it may not be true that ill-luck as well as evil must have painful results. It is so now, and if a" must be" is the only explanation, why not always P Professor Max Miiller's Hibbert Lectures "On the Origin and Growth of Religion" are published in the Contemporary ; there is a valuable answer to Renan by Canon Lightfoot, based on the recent discoveries in Cyprus ; and M. Taine contributes a won- derful picture of the anarchy prevailing in Paris just before the Revolution, when obedience seemed to have ceased everywhere, and every mob, however casually formed, did what was right in its own eyes. There is exaggeration in the account, as in all M. Taine writes, but it is impossible to read it and not long, even in 1787, for that whiff of grape-shot which came at last. M. Taine, though a strong Liberal, writes with a hatred of the Mob, which he calls "the blind brute" that brings on him the angry censure of many of his Liberal confreres.

The Fortnightly is choked with good papers. We say choked advisedly, for it is possible for a magazine to be a little too good, to contain so many papers which must be read and thought over as to create a faint impression of weariness in the mind. We heard an ordinary reader the other day inveighing against the quantity contained in the Contemporary, and are half inclined ourselves to wish for less of the best kind of work in the Fortnightly. There is one of Mr. Goldwin Smith's eloquent diatribes against the coming war, his grand point this time being that beating Russia is of no permanent use, as is shown by her advance since the Crimean War ; an account of the French Workmen's Annual Congress, at Lyons, by Mr. Harrison ; the end of "The Political Adventures of Lord Beaconsfield "; "Liberals and Whigs," by Mr. G. Brod- rick ; and "Diderot at St. Petersburg," by the Editor, all papers of the first order of magazine excellence. Mr. Harrison tells us that the Lyons Congress of January 28th, 1878, was attended by 140 delegates, nine of whom were women, three peasants, and one a Count, and sat for twelve days, and thinks its deliberations may be held to reveal the true mind of the French working-man. This mind, it would seem, is full of desire for the amelioration of his condition, but through mea- sures greatly resembling the English Factory Acts. The work- men repudiate all parties alike, dread State interference, pro- pound no theory of Socialism, but demand the restriction and regulation of women's labour, an immense extension of co-opera- tion, secular education, an Eight Hours' Labour Act, and other improvements which Englishmen do not consider revolutionary, and which are more necessary in France than in England, because the power of the capitalist is more sternly exercised. In the Lyons district, for instance, there are 200,000 female operatives, who are worked from eleven to thirteen hours a day, for an average wage of Is. 8d. Great complaints are also made of the oppression, particularly on young girls, fostered by apprentice- ship, but nothing is advocated "subversive of society," unless it be a demand for security of tenure in their houses. The workman, however, M. Finance, who appears to suggest this, relies for the im- provement of society on moral suasion, and severe self -control, and distinctly "accepts the personal appropriation of property, though he denies its absolute claim." That is, he maintains that property

has duties as well as rights. He, moreover, maintains that the ideal for women is the home-life, and would provide for in- dustrial crises by a great extension of the principle of insurance, and rises into eloquence as he denounces the tyranny of the majority over the minority. None of these ideas are un- wholesome, and we only wish we could believe that Mr.

Harrison's friends fairly represent the intelligence of the working-classes of France.—The unknown author of the sketch of Lord Beaconsfield has written the most effective attack on the Premier yet penned, holding him up to the country as a man who utterly despises English society, but is impelled towards it by his

Own scorn, "the satirist being also- the adventurer." He has one passion, hatred of the Whigs, one ambition, to live in high

society, and probably one fixed political opinion, that the power of the Crown should be increased, so that the influence of the aristocratic order may decay. It is necessary, however, to read this paper to comprehend fully its solvent force, or the extent to which it deprives the reader of the power of reverencing Lord Beaconsfield.—Mr. Brodrick, himself a Radical, one who holds that democracy is an auspicious stage in the civilisation of mankind, still demurs to the idea of Mr. Goldwin Smith that the Whig aris- tocracy should be ruled out of the Liberal party, and maintains that in a country like this, which is not democratic at heart and

does not dislike an aristocratic governing class, Liberals of lineage are most useful, as the class to which all varieties of opinion are most willing to submit :— " No doubt a most culpable neglect of the political succession has produced its natur .1 result in an extraordinary dearth of rising states- men, and such political ability as there is among the younger members of the Liberal party—except in the House of Lords—is to be found mainly on the extreme Left of the House of Commons. But the more we analyse the composition of this Radical section, the more clearly shall we discover it to be a heap of sand '—an incoherent mass of individuals, each one possessed with his own mission or crotchet, many still under the spell of hereditary rank,' if not amenable to 'Court influence,' and few indeed capable of that disciplined, far-sighted, and statesmanlike action contemplated by Mr. Goldwin Smith. Dashing skirmishers and men prepared to go on forlorn hopes may generally be found in the tanks of the Radicals, but it is the Whigs and their followers who have always brought up the reserves and consolidated the conquests achieved."

The plea for Whig leadership is most forcibly put, but Mr. Brodrick has omitted to notice one curious fact not quite in con- sonance with his theories. A Whig leader very seldom leads. Lord John Russell is a great exception, but as a rule, the Whigs, like the Tories, have had to submit either to a leader without lineage, or to a man imported from the opposite side. The account of "Diderot at St. Petersburg" is really a sketch of Catharine of Russia, who comes out of it a living figure, a coarse, debauched woman, without a taste except for building and for roses, but with the passion for reign- ing and the passion for fame, the latter inducing her to seek the protection of men of letters, who, she thought, would defend her reputation. Her true ideal was Louis XIV., and she resented criticism on him as an attack upon herself. Her special intel- lectual foible was pride, but she listened very readily to the freest expressions of opinion, and then took her own way. She writes to Diderot :—" You forget, in all your plans of reform, the difference in our positions ; you only work on paper, which endures all things ; it opposes no obstacle either to your imagination or to your pen ; but I, poor Empress as I am, work on the human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a very different degree." She was, in fact, very able, but utterly unprincipled, and deter- mined before all things to be absolute mistress of her empire and of all around her.

The number of the Nineteenth Century is not one of the best.

The " Symposium " on the comparative value of the popular and the aristocratic judgment in politics is continued, and will be concluded in the next number. The grand difficulty of that method of discussion, want of spontaneity, comes out as strongly as usual. The debaters are not sufficiently moved by each other's arguments, and the result is a series of essays, often good, often ordinary, in which the subject is very thoroughly threshed, but in which there is not the rousing vigour of true debate. In the present instance, we think all alike have forgotten

one immense factor in the queation,—the power which the millions have of enlisting the service of genius, of communi- cating to it, and therefore receiving from it, an electric mental current. The upper classes, as Lord Arthur Russell calls them, instead of the select classes, which, as Mr. Harrison points out, is what he really means, or ought to mean, rarely secure the leader- ship of any but average-men. It takes a mass movement to call onta leader fit for nations.—General Hamley states fairly enough, apparently, all the conditions which give strength or weakness to

the Russian or Austrian armies, but forgets, in his calculations of battalions, and rifles, and artillery, to give any estimate of the com- parative qualities of the men, who, after all, are more important than material. The Austrian Army is, no doubt, one of the best in Europe, but so it always has been ; but nevertheless, though its defeats have never been fatal, it has always been defeated. Why? —The sketch of Meryon, the sketcher of Paris—the strange, bitter,.

implacable man of genius, who so studied the city which did not recognise him, and which he therefore hated—seems to us better than almost anything Mr. Wedmore has done, full of knowledge and appreciation, and a sympathy which gives insight, all put on paper with a fine light touch, which can tell us that an artist was mad, probably more or less mad always, without making him in the least contemptible. Mr. Wedmore holds Meryon, who only sketched Paris, who was the son of a London physician and a French dancing-girl, and who died mad, refusing food because there was not enough in the world, and he was getting more than his share, to have been the greatest etcher since Rembrandt. Be that judgment true or no, he has produced one of the most charming papers, one fullest of new information, at least to us, and of pleasant, kindly, and yet truthful criticism, which we have lately seen in a magazine. Mr. Goldwin Smith recurs to his argument that Jews cannot be patriots with new force, telling them, truly enough, that men who deny to other races the privilege of intermarriage with them must at least be separate in their own views of them- selves ; and strongly advocating, in the interests of the world, the restoration of Palestine to its own people. The paper is a striking one, but does Mr. Goldwin Smith really hold that Christianity is an "industrial creed," very favourable to the creation of wealth ? It certainly is as practised, and one or two texts of the sternest kind can be quoted, particularly II. Thessalonians iii., 10, but the question whether Christ did not intend to teach an altruism incon- sistent with individual accumulation is hardly to be disposed of in that hurried way.—We cannot summarise Professor Mivart's "Force, Energy, and Will," but we must recommend the reader- to it by this one quotation, all the more remarkable as coming from a Catholic Professor :—

" Every one knows how much better men often are than their creeds, and there is no more reason to doubt the goodness of life than the honest sincerity of unbelievers. Fully maintaining that atheists generally are not only in error, but culpable (though not, of course, necessarily more culpable than are many theists whose culpability may have consequences in the sphere of morals only), yet passed culpability need not prevent a man from holding his opinions con- scientiously now. Again, however bad atheism may be, there is one thing yet worso,—nautely, a belief in a bad God. Now, surely it is- quite conceivable, and there is, to my mind, evidence of the fact, that some men have been driven into atheism by moral revulsion from the systems in which they have been reared. Amongst my non-theistic friends is one who has ever led a life of the most exceptional purity, the greater part of whose time has for years been passed in active charity,—philanthropy being tho one aim and object of his life ; yet this man is the son of most religious parents, and was carefully trained in early piety, though the Calvinism he was taught ultimately revolted him."

By the way, Mr. Mivart, if Leo XIII. read that, would he call it quite orthodox Mr. Dale's third division of his "Impressions of America" is on popular education, and is unmistakably bad, the oddest contrast conceivable to his first paper. Nobody wants any more accounts of the American Common Schools, still less any more statistics about them. Everybody knows that in Connec- ticut everybody can read and write. The point now is, what kind of effect has all this reading and writing? What sort of a human being comes out of the Connecticut Common School? This statement is simply exasperating

When I was in Now York, I visited a primary school in which one the assistant-superintendents had made an experiment in order to dis- cover whether it was not possible to secure far greater promptness aril accuracy in the intellectual activity of the children than is common in schools of the same kind. The principal teacher, a lady who gave me- the impression that she possessed unusual ability and vigour, entered heartily into his scheme ; her assistants wore equally zealous. The results, whatever their merit, were certainly astonishing. The intel- lectual drill of the children was absolutely perfect. There was some- thing almost preternatural in the readiness with which they answered every question that was put to them: They exploded as 8001) as they wore touched, and the answers were always as definite and exact as if they had been revised by a committee of lawyers or mathe- maticians. I watched several classes at work in different subjeets-,- reading, spelling, arithmetic, and geography—and what struck me as- most extraordinary was the fact that every child in every class was equally keen, equally clear, equally exact, equally alert."

Will it be believed that Mr. Dale adds, "I spent an hour or an hour and a half in this school, but was so astonished luta confounded by what I saw, that I was unable to form any con- ception of the peculiarities of method by which these very remarkable results were produced " ? Then, as reporter. .of impressions, what is the use of Dir. Dale? His buainess'in

that capacity was not to tell us that he had discovered a successful method of teaching or cramming applicable to primary schools, but to ascertain what it was, why it succeeded, and what sort of children it produced. M. Raoul Pictet describes in this number, through Mr. Robert Harvey, of Geneva, his successful attempts to reduce hydrogen and oxygen

to liquid and solid states, experiments which have greatly in- terested men of science, but at which, M. Pictet says, with a certain tolerant asperity, the world laughs. Possibly when men find their force for difficult labours doubled by their ability to

carry oxygen about in their pockets, and they see alcohol super- seded, they will not laugh. Or if they laugh,—what matters? It is a compensation for stupidity, that the ignorant can enjoy ridi- cule of the wise. The stupid just now, in an age of examinations, have not too many pleasures. Why grudge them their " titter " at M. Raoul Pictet?

Fraser has some very pleasant papers,—one in particular, on "Basque Customs," strikes us as quite charming, full of minute yet accurate observation of manners, though we cannot quite accept the writer's explanation of the courade, the custom observed among Basques, as among other of the really ancient races, of the husband lying-in on the birth of a child. Is not the root of it a notion that strength has gone out of the father and into the child, that the father has suffered a loss which he must regain, in rest and ease ? The ancient races observed that the qualities of the father were reproduced in the child, and thought that they had gone out of the one and into the other. This superstition of the transfer of strengths exists in many savage races, and is the reason which cannibals usually assign for adherence to their custom, though they may be, and indeed are, if we may trust Jackson's narrative of his experience in Feejee, merely stating an old tradition. There is a very complete answer to the assertion on which statists anxious for war now insist, that the cost of war would hardly be felt in this country, an answer in which the in- flation of values produced by our system of mortgaging every- thing, and so using at once property and the credit of property, is carefully stated ; and an article on the Azores, which ought to have been in Blackwood, where they have a sort of hereditary monopoly of interesting geography. We note, en passant, that the rental of land in the Azores runs higher than in almost any

portion of the world, from £3 to Li an acre being paid, while,—

" The rich Azereans (and some of them are very rich) seek to display their taste and luxury, not in galleries or works of art, but in the laying- out and embellishment of ornamental gardens. Most of these gardens are freely thrown open to strangers. The climate, of which the especial characteristic is warmth without aridity, permits a combination of English grass lawns with semi-tropical and tropical trees and flowers unattainable in Southern Europe, or even in Madeira. Wandering over well-kept sward, the visitor is surrounded by many of the greenhouse and hothouse plants of Kew and the Crystal Palace, flourishing in un- restricted space, and amplified often a hundredfold in size and vigour."

St. Michael's is strongly recommended as a place where an English- man willing to rough it a little, yet unwilling to face colonial life, might live in happiness and even luxury on very little money, everything being cheap which is not imported, servants of a kind plentiful, and the climate usually delightful. The island wants a clever young doctor more than anything else, a hint we recommend to any man in the profession with a few hundreds and a weak chest. The best paper, however—though that on German and English parties is original—is the account of Borne, the little known German publicist and philosopher whom Gentz admired so greatly, yet who was so bitter and complete a Radical, the friend, the disciple, and the German translator of Lamennais. He was a born journalist, wrote French so well that Raspail said, "This is a new French, a French without rhetoric," and laboured all his life for what he deemed the good of mankind, which yet he never expected to see realised. His fault was the sardonic distrust which centuries of persecution have developed in his race—he was a Jew—his merit, entire devotion to truth and to humanity. He left no permanent memorial, but he greatly affected opinion among democrats in Germany, though his bitter dislike of Germans excited strong resentment. He said of them, "Every man has a right to be a blockhead, nothing can be said against it, but even a right should be exercised with modesty ; the Germans abuse it."

The Cornhill has an amusing account of Athenmus's " Deipnosophistm," that wonderful repertory of ancient anecdote, jest, and quotation ; and an article on "The Ethics and lEsthetics of Modern Poetry," in which sound sense and some insight are disfigured by an ambitiousness of style rarely found in the Cornh ill. The sense of this remark on Shakespeare is clear

enough, but what a turgid form to put it in !—" By reason of his measureless receptivity, he took the good and evil up under that massive frontal arch of his, and held them there without dis- turbance or displacement until the hour came for using the material in his art, when, without any conscious theory about either art or morals, he instinctively used the darker tints of humanity in such a way as brought its higher and fairer aspects into full relief.'

We must demur en passant to the statement that Hamlet is "the noblest creature" of Shakespeare. The poet certainly did not intend to present his meditative, vacillating, infirm hero as his

ideal of a man. The most readable paper in the number is, however, an account of the" Origin of Flowers," which the writer believes to be comparatively recent :—

" In the forests which then bordered the great deltas of forgotten Amazons and Niles, it seems probable that no gleam of scarlet, blue, or purple ever broke the interminable sea of waving green. Uncanny trees, with sculptured or tessellated bark, raised their verdant heads high above the damp soil into which they thrust their armour-plated roots ; huge horse-tails swayed their jointed stems before the fiercer tempests.raised by a younger and lustier sun ; tree-ferns, scrow-pines, and araucarias diversified the landscape with their quaint and sym- metrical shapes ; while beneath, the rich decaying mould was carpeted with mosses, lichens, and a thousand creeping plants, all of them bearing the archaic stamp peculiar to these earliest developments of vegetable life ; but nowhere could the eye of an imaginary visitor have lighted on a bright flower, a crimson fruit, or a solitary gaudily-painted butterfly. Green, and green, and green again, on every side; the gaze would have rested, wherever it fell, upon one unbroken field of glittering verdure."

He holds that the flower is a development from the feeblest leaves, which, as they rotted, displayed colours, the result of decay, not of vigour, which attracted the pollen-carrying insects, and thus in ages gave the plant with this tendency most strongly developed the superiority in the struggle for survival.

Blackwood has one of its pleasant and characteristic accounts of Vienna, none the less characteristic of the magazine because it is boiled down from M. Tissot's book ; "A Ride Across the Peloponnesus," wanting, we think, in panoramic insight, the power

which makes the reader recognise the general impression of a place ; and more of Mr. Theodore Martin's admirable "Translations from IIeine." There is also, of course, the inevitable political article, defending—though this time with noteworthy moderation—the policy of the Government in insisting that there shall be no Congress unless the whole Treaty of San Stefano is submitted to it.