CURRENT LITERATURE.
Macmillan's Magazine for this month will, of course, be chiefly read for George Eliot's "Breakfast Party," which we have already criticised at length ; but it contains also a lecture by Professor Max Muller on "Fetishism," a biting criticism of the literature provided for village children, an excellent account of M. Taffies new volume on the Revolution, and a most eloquent lecture by Professor Shairp on -criticism and creation, in which he justifies the latter, as against the former, in its claim to benefit the world. We quote a suggestive remark about life in Oxford, as it is lived, not by undergraduates, but by those who teach them :—
" It is otherwise with older residents. For them, the golden ex- halations of the dawn are soon turned into the gray light of common day. For those on this side of graduation, whose manhood is harnessed into the duties of the place, what between the routine of work and the necessity of taking a side in public questions, and above all, the atmo- sphere of omnipresent criticism in which life is lived here, original production becomes almost an impossibility. Any one who may feel within him the stirring of creative impulse, if be does not wish to have it frozen at its source, must, before he can create, leave the air of academic circles and the distracting talk of literary sets, and retire, with his own impulses and thoughts, into some solitude where the din of these will not reach him."
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