CURRENT LITERATURE.
The British Quarterly Review. April. (Hodder and Stoughton.) —The feature of the number is naturally Dr. Freeman's article on "The Normans at Palermo." The subject suits him exactly, and he treats it in his best style, and not the less agreeably to his readers because he does not find it necessary to hold up any one to the exe- cration of mankind for such villainies as spelling Harald with an o, or the like. A writer on " Urban Leaseholds" is, we suppose, very much in earnest, but he produces the effect of one who jests. Lease- hold tenure he holds to be, after Original Sin (though, indeed, he does not mention the exception), the great cause of the evils of humanity, so far as humanity is collected in cities. If he only means to say, in an emphatic manner, that freehold tenure is preferable, we sympathise with his sentiments, but doubt the prudence of his method. " Where," he cries, "can be seen a show more dismal than the range of faces at a feast of some great City company ? They are all evidently men of business, and besides, are leaseholders." A well regulated mind will find other employment at a City feast than watching the faces of neighbours, and would scarcely, we should say, carry away from such glimpses as it may have leisure to take the essayist's impression. The present writer has been at some few of such feasts, but would not have used the epithet " dismal " in describing his convives. There is an excellent article on "Christian Theology and the Modern Spirit." It is a very good answer to Professor Huxley's dictum,—" Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules," that "instead of extinguishing theologians as Hercules strangled snakes, science has always, like Chronos, devoured her own children." "Wycliffe, and his Relation to the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century," is another good article. The essay on "The Zulu War" is fairly and temperately written, with a leaning towards Sir Bartle Frere. The author is Mr. J. E. Carlyle, whose able book on "South- African Mission Fields" we noticed some little time ago. The other articles are " Free-trade and Protection," and " The Novels of George Meredith," a criticism 'which misses the great drawback to that writer's popularity, that no novels so full of ability were ever so difficult to read.
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