THE MAGAZINES.

THERE is nothing in the Nineteenth Century of any special mark. We are tired of Mr. Keay's lugubrious and exaggerated pictures of the taxation of India, where after all, on the extremest view of the subject, two hundred millions of people pay, in taxes and quit-rent together, less than fifty millions a year, though we admit that, as regards the payment for land and water, the system in particular provinces is unscientific and oppressive. The most important paper is Colonel C. B. Norman's on the French Colonies, but it is overloaded with statistics and dull. He maintains that the French foreign possessions—France has no colony, except Algeria—are failures, the whole of them, including Algeria, containing 5,547,800 people, requiring 121,494 men for garrisons and police, yielding 22,565,000, though heavily taxed, and costing the French Treasury 24,107,000, or 15s. a head a year. They, however, support 16,562 French officials— exclusive of those in Algeria—and this number, which seems to Colonel Norman so extraordinary, is probably to M. Ferry the very reason for which the Colonies are valuable. They maintain "good citizens' sons," as he said Tonquin would. None of the Colonies pay their own expenses, none of the older ones are expanding, and none attract Frenchmen,—though, we believe, fortunes are still occasionally made by planters and the mer- chants who lend money to them. The State Banks of the Colonies, too, are flourishing institutions; and Colonel Norman observes that, while peculation by officials is not uncommon, the State Treasuries are rigidly guarded, and misuse of State funds is exceedingly rare. Mr. Stern's paper on 'The Mahdi " is solid, but of little interest; and we can find nothing whatever, not a single paragraph, in the account of Sir T. Brassey's trip to the

West Indies in the ' Sunbeam ' to justify its publication. There is readable matter for those who are interested in the literature of apparitions in the paper by Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers, who certainly continue to create the impression that they are seeking facts, and not manufacturing or circulating ghost-stories ; but we can only make one extract. It is a little long for these brief notices, but, though it has nothing to do with apparitions, it is, we think, the best authenticated case of the mysterious sym- pathy sometimes existing between twins which has ever come before us :—

" The following case was sent to Professor Sidgwick by the Rev. J. M. Wilson, head-master of Clifton College, a senior wrangler and well-known mathematician :—` Clifton College, January 5, 1884.— The facts were these, as clearly as I can remember. I was at Cambridge at the end of my second term, in fall health, boating, football-playing, and the like, and by no means subject to hallucina- tions or morbid fancies. One evening I felt extremely ill, trembling, with no apparent canoe whatever ; nor did it seem to me at the time to be a physical illness, a chill of any kind. I was frightened. I was totally unable to overcome it. I remember a sort of straggle with myself, resolving that I would go on with my mathematics, but it was in vain : I became convinced that I was dying. I went down to the rooms of a friend, who was on the same staircase, and I remember that he exclaimed at me before I spoke. He put away his books ; pulled out a whisky bottle and a backgammon board, but I could not face it. We sat over the fire for a bit, and then he fetched someone else to have a look at me. I was in a strange discomfort, but with no symptoms I can recall, except mental discomfort, and the conviction that I should die that night. Towards eleven, after some three hours of this I got better, and went upstairs and got to bed, and after a time to deep, and next morning was quite well. In the afternoon came a letter to say that my twin brother had died the even- ing before in Lincolnshire. I am quite clear of the fact that I never thought once of him, nor was his presence with me even dimly imagined. He had been long ill of consumption; but Iliad not heard of him for some days, and there was nothing to make me think that his death was near. It took me altogether by surprise.—JAMES M.

WILSON.'" What possible explanation of that story is there, except that the Rev. J. M. Wilson is deliberately lying, or that his own impression as to his ,own health was directly affected either by his brother's health, or by his brother's feeling as to his health—that the Head Master at Clifton was, in fact, moved by the decease of his brother in Leicestershire, which he did not know ? Mr. Swinburne concludes his criticism on Wordsworth, often just and sometimes most acute, by placing him below both Shelley and Coleridge. We shall not contend for Wordsworth here, because we want to note a passing criticism on Southey. After stating that the "Isles of Greece" is rrearly perfect rhetoric, a string of "strong oratorical effects, arranged in vigorous and telling succession," Mr. Swinburne says :--" That is the very utmost that Byron could achieve ; as the very utmost to which Southey could attain was the noble and pathetic epitome of history, with its rapid and vivid glimpses of tragic action and passion, cast into brief elegiac form, in his monody on the Princess Charlotte." That is a singular judgment. It is nearly impossible to criticise such a mass of unequal writings as Southey's poetry, except in an elaborate essay, but we should have said that the little song, "They sin who tell us Love can die," in " Kehama," was far above the elegy on the Princess Charlotte, and that Southey reached his highest level, not a lofty one, in single passages in " Thalaba," which would strike an Arab, if well translated, as the most vigorous expression of his own highest thoughts. Horsey men of cultivation will read with pleasure Mr. Blunt's experiences of the Arab horse, the more so as he admits facts, which most writers en the subject refuse to do. Thus he allows that the Arab wants size ; and, though he clings to the notion of his speed, for which the scientific evidence is small, though the traditionary evidence is great, his main belief seems to be that the Arab transmits the qualities which belong to "blood." That ought to be true, and makes of the Arab an invaluable horse to cross with, though strength, and that speed which is inseparable from size, must be sought in other races. By the way, has Mr. Blunt, amidst the' many facts he has collected, ever obtained the history of that curious experiment in the Mutiny of] 857, the mounting of an English Hussar regiment on the Arab horses of Lord Canning's Bodyguard They went through a campaign so mounted; and curious stories were told the writer, who is not horsey, of the endurance and freedom from fatigue of the over-weighted Arabs.

In the Fortnightly, Mr. MacColl's " Rus3ia Revisited" will excite interest, all the more because he was supposed to be a kind of devotee of Russia. We see little sign of that feeling in this paper. He maintains, like all who have studied the subject, that the strength of Nihilism consists in the "educated proletariat" of Russia, the small proprietors ruined by the Decree of Emancipation, the priests' sons shut out from the professions by an invincible prejudice, the more cruel because priests must marry, the dis- missed officials, the passed-over officers, and the educated section of the Jews. The Nihilsts are now trying to enlist the peasantry,—at present with little success, the masses having a fixed idea that the Czar is about to give them some more land ; but Mr. MacColl fears that the inevitable disappointment may largely increase the revolutionary party, who can, he maintains, be disarmed only by granting some kind of representative institutions. He would also remodel thoroughly the barbaric taxation of Russia, set education free, and support trial by jury —the latter a questionable policy. As regards foreign policy, he defends Russia's advance in Asia, which he believes to be for the good of mankind, but avers that the three Empires desire to deal with European Turkey as they list, and are even now proposing that England may take Egypt if they are allowed a free course in the Balkan Peninsula. We do not exactly see how England could stop the three Empires if they are really agreed, but Mr. MacColl writes as one having authority for his statement. Mr. Myers's picture of the Duke of Albany is a pleasant one, but it was written originally for the Duchess, and is published at the Queen's request. It is, therefore, exclusively eulogistic to a degree which we confess we fiud nearly in- tolerable. The Prince was a good specimen of princes, and succeeded in attracting friends ; but he was not all Plato's "royal soul" realised. By the way, Mr. Myers brings in a curious story of presentiment :—

" ' The last time I saw him to speak to,' writes a friend from Cannes, March 30th, 'being two days before he died, he would talk to me about death, and said he would like a military funeral, and, in fact, I had great difficulty in getting off this melancholy subject. Finally, I asked, "Why, sir' .do you talk in this morose manner I)" As he was about to answer he was called away, and said, "I'll tell you later." I never saw him to speak to again, but he finished his answer to me to another lady, and said : "For two nights now Princess Alice has appeared to me in my dreams, and says she is quite happy, and that she wants me to come and join her. That's what makes me so thoughtful." ' "

That is curious, but no story of the kind is worth a straw with- out the name of the witness. Mr. R. Campbell sends a very in- structive, and, as far as we can see, quite impartial account of the Bengal Tenancy Bill, which excites such rage among the educated natives who supported the Ebert Bill, and decides that the spirit of the new legislation is almost identical with that which guided the framers of the Irish Land Law. It is so, with this additional justification for Indian reformers—that the idea of ejection dates only from our conquest. Almost anything could be done to a defaulting ryot by the rent-taker, but the peasant could never lose his land. If the abuses which have crept into the tenure are not corrected, we shall some day have a strike against rent which will bring the fabric of Bengalee society to the ground. A "Manchester Con- servative" is anxious that the Lords should pass the Reform Bill, on the ground that it is essential to the formation of the Democratic Tory Party, which he believes will yet triumph, and he quotes the instance of Preston as a great borough where all householders vote, but steadily return Tory Members. He declares that he is no crypto-Radical, but the Lords will probably reply that if Radical measures are to be passed, they had rather Radicals passed them. Mr. H. Ganem "Syrian Deputy in the Ottoman Parliament," adds his testimony to the belief that all Mahomedans will accept the Mahdi if he is only victorious ; but draws thence the deduction that England ought to fight him in the Soudan, with which we by no means coincide. The Rev. D. Greig, in an essay on "The Speculative Basis of Modern Unbelief," maintains that the process of outer nature is not an evolu- tion, but a "free history," and that its incidents must therefore be either accidental or ordered, and if ordered, , there must be a being outside us of surpassing greatness. That is true ; but the evolutionist will answer that the word "free" assumes the whole case, and is unprovable, while he would not shrink from the word "accidental," as Mr. Greig does. Colonel Burnaby's paper on ballooning contains nothing new ; but we note with a certain interest that he despairs of balloons, though the balloon may be used as a watch-tower, and would have men search rather for a machine which, like a bird, should strike a blow on the air sufficient to acquire momentum. To use sack a machine man must first devise or discover some means of levitation,—that is, of diminishing the weight of his materials.

In a small degree, that is not absolutely impossible; but the method of so utilising, say, hydrogen gas, that it would lift its enclosing substance, yet not demand vast space, is still to seek. We very much doubt whether it is worth seeking,—not feeling certain that man would be the better for such a destruc- tion of distance and water, the two great instruments of separation.

The Contemporary is full of papers by known men, the most important, perhaps, being one by Mr. James F. Stephens. The former Fenian Head Centre declares that it was the policy of

obstruction which revived the dying Irish interest in Parlia- mentary life ; that the interest will deepen when the represen- tatives of the new constituency come into the arena, and that they will be far more revolutionary than the present Parnellites.

He doubts even if Mr. Parnell can lead them, unless he swims with the tide, and questions if local feeling will permit him to pose as Elector-General. He believes that many Members will refuse to sit ; that those who do sit will be so violent that they will be expelled or imprisoned ; and that Britain will in the end be compelled to disfranchise Ireland, and rule her as a conquered province in a state of siege. It is curious that the Fenian should agree so nearly with the extreme Tory ; but we will not lose hope so completely yet. There is an element of calculation in Irishmen, or they would have been in insurrection long ago. M. Elis6e Reclus on "Anarchy" we have noticed else- where ; and Mr. Herbert Spencer's paper, "The Sins of Legis-

lators," is, as compared with that of last month, poor. The question of State agency in social affairs is not much advanced

by evidence that the State in interfering has frequently blundered, and repealed its own laws. The biggest bit of inter- ference, the Poor-law, has stood through a good many storms. Archdeacon Farrar translates the "Teaching of the Apostles,"

the very early compendium of Christian ideas, written probably

in the beginning of the second century, which the Bishop of Nicomedia, Philotheos Bryennios, has discovered in the " Jera- salem Manuscript" at Constantinople. It is of interest mainly as showing how accurately the ancient and modern conception of Christ's teaching agree. There are, however, some new things in it. The writer may have talked with Apostles, and

he denounces the man who receives alms when he does not need them as a sinner :— " To every one who asketh thee give, and ask not back, for the Father wills that from our own blessings gifts should be bestowed on all. Blessed is he who giveth according to the commandment, for be is innocent. Woe to him who receiveth ; for if a man hath need and receiveth, he shall be innocent ; but if a man bath not need, he shall give account why he received and for what purpose, and being in distress he shall be examined concerning his deeds ; and he shall not come out thence till he have paid the uttermost farthing. But re- specting this also it bath been said, 'Let thine almsgiving drop (iit. sweat) into thy hands so long as thou knowest to whom thou givest."

'The dislike of lying which arises from Christianity is, too, much more definitely expressed. The unfulfilled idea that the meek shall inherit the earth is repeated in that form ; but resignation and the duty of submission are very plainly taught,—" Thou shalt accept as good the workings (of Providence) that befall thee, knowing that nothing happens apart from God." There are strong hints that prophets who ask money are no prophets, and there is this strange caution, which neither the Bishop nor

Archdeacon Farrar can interpret,—" Every approved genuine prophet who makes assemblies for a worldly mystery (p) Droti; m it; pwriptop xocttcpcom boanatad but does not teach

others to de what he does, shall not be judged by you."

May not the interpretation be that some early teachers tried to arrange Christian meetings like the Greek and Roman "Mysteries," with secret rites. That would be a natural effort in a time of persecution. The whole paper is most interesting, and "The Teaching of the Apostles" will be quoted in all the churches. Dr. J. Milner Fothergill points out clearly the direct benefit pain sometimes confers on man, by pointing out the seat and cause of disease, but admits that the utility of cancerous pain cannot be proved—nor, he might have added, that of tooth- ache. Nor does he explain the utility of pain to the wild animals, who sometimes suffer severely,—wild horses more especially. The Rev. Compton Reade sends an appreciative and pleasant but over-

slight sketch of Charles Reade, who, he says, was, though a gentleman, essentially Bohemian. Mr. Reade takes, we note, the same condemnatory view as we do of "A Terrible Temptation." He regards the story as the aberration of a tired mind,—and, indeed, it is curiously unlike any other of its author's works.

Mr. Shaw Lefevre writes against the representation of minori- ties, on the ground that the alleged dangers do not exist, and that proportional representation "would result in weakening the position of the Executive, and in making it more difficult., if not impossible, to the nation to carry out its will ; it would in practice, even in its more complete methods, give undue weight and prominence to groups and cliques of opinkon not yet ripe for dealing with in Parliament ; it would result in the return of Members specially representing in greater proportions than now crotchets and immature opinions, and the interests of classes without reference to national questions ; it would there- fore inculcate among electors the moral that the interests of classes are to be preferred to those of the nation." May we

remonstrate with the managers of the Contemporary about

their trick of printing the valuable articles on "Contemporary Life and Politics" so closely that it is an effort to read

them? There is nothing in the Review so instructive as Pro- fessor C. K. Adams's sketch of the American, law regarding dynamiters, and of the recent Civil Service reform ; but it is packed, though in fairly large type, like the report of a speech in Parliament, and will be avoided for that reason.

There is little in the National Review, but we note that Mr. W. St. John Brodrick advocates Reform of the House of Lords—a very small reform only, the selection of one Peer in two and the addition of great officials ; that Miss Zim- mern sends a pleasant sketch of Scheffel, the German popular poet ; and that Lord Carnarvon, in the pleasant guise of

Mr. Mannering, the old-fashioned squire, condemns battnes. T. Tantivy has discovered that the policy of the future must be " the Federation of the Empire," and advises Conservatives to give nights and days to the study of the American Constitu- tion. If that is to be the policy, and England is to be lost in

Canada and Australia, would not the simplest road be to declare

ourselves States of the American Union, and so rebind the English-speaking people into one vast political whole, with the general guidance of the world in its hands? Federation is a dream.

Macmillan, publishes the first chapters of a new story, " Mitchelhurst Place," by Miss Veley, which begins well, with

more suggestion of story in it than Miss Veley always indulges

us with, and Mr. Matthew Arnold's lecture on Emerson. There is a most amusing paper, too, on the ways' and manners of hospital patients, which incidentally confirms a story we have

constantly heard in villages, that the very poor regard ventila- tion not only with dislike, bat dread. Ages of huddling together for warmth seem to have convinced them that a draught

is deadly. The same dislike is, however, sometimes seen among the rich, and we should like to know if there can be for it any constitutional cause. Are there men, that is, with special liability to effects from free air ? The Editor's "Review of the Month" is more impartial than it has been lately, but what does he mean by making of Morocco a bugaboo ? Suppose France, risking the permanent hostility of Spain, does add Morocco to Algeria and upset the peculiarly evil native government, what is it to us ? Fortresses cannot bar ironclads from steaming past them, and except as regards free entrance to the Mediterranean, Morocco may, as far as England is concerned, as well be French as Spanish. We take it, too, that if Germany wants Spain as an ally, Morocco is the consideration asked for at Madrid. Mr. Talbot, the Warden of Keble College, contributes a most thoughtful, interesting, and, on the whole, just estimate of Frederick Maurice, written from the High-Church point of view, and in a spirit of most kindly but not altogether sympathetic criticism.

Temple Bar has two papers besides its stories, both of them amusing. One is a gossipy sketch of the three last French Presidenta, which brings out their external peculiarities in a very clear way ; and another an account of that strange being, the "Mad Czar" Paul. The writer believes that he was purposely neglected and humiliated by his mother, who detested him, it is hinted, on account of the circumstances of his birth, but more probably because she saw that he was unfit to reign. He promised at first to be an endurable Emperor; but his madness, which was in part only the freakishness of an unrestrained will, soon showed itself, and he became intolerable, and was murdered—that is, secretly executed—by order of his successor. The paper is too rapidly written, and overrules the doubts of historians too brusquely, but it is readable.

lathe Oornleill, Mr. Baring-Gould ends his story of "Mar- gery of Quether." It is a most ghastly conception,, so far as we know absolutely original, the leading idea being that of a

human being who does not die, but renews her own vitality from generation to generation by absorbing vitality from some one else. We hardly know in what the power of the little tale con- sists, unless it is in the realistic simplicity with which the horrible " facts " are related ; but there is something about it positively uncanny. There is nothing to revolt at, but one would much rather not havt read it. As a conception of horror, Margery beats the vampire of the Middle Ages into nothingness.