THE MAGAZINES.

THE Fortnightly Review will, we fancy, be pronounced dull bf most people, and it is certainly heavy ; but it contains some very valuable papers. We have noticed Professor Clifford's else- where, and there is a somewhat thin sketch of Alexander Dyce, which will introduce to many a little-known but interesting per- sonality—interesting as, perhaps, the last of the old scholiasts; an able statement of the case against State Telegraphs, by Mr. Stanley Jevons—which leaves us entirely unconvinced, but will place his readers in possession of most of the facts required for an opinion, Mr. Jevons's own being that the English purchase of the Telegraphs has been a blunder, which has cost us a quarter of a million a year, and may cost us four times that sum—and at least two other papers of unusual merit. Mr. Freeman, in " The True Eastern Question," tells the whole truth about the Turks and their claim to remain in Europe, and it is not his fault, but his misfortune, if the intellectual contempt of all opponents which so penetrates his writing makes half his readers doubt if he is anything but a partisan. He has, however, exaggerated nothing in his descrip- tion of the piratical horde which oppresses South-Eastern Europe, and has refrained from descriptions of suffering which would have made his readers receptive of his invective :— " To so-called Turkish Government is then, I say, no government at all. It has no claim on the allegiance of those whom it calls its sub- jects. Founded on wrong in the beginning, it has kept on the first wrong to this day. It has never, even after five hundred years, become a national government. It has never, in all those ages, had any feeling or interest in common with those of the nations over whom it has borne sway. It has never done for them oven those common duties of government which the worst of civilised governments does for its subjects. The Turk is still as much an alien in European Turkey as he was when tho land first began to take his name. The Sultan may be our dear and cherished ally, he may be Knight of the Garter and guest of the Lord Mayor, but ho is none the less the chief of an intruding horde, dwelling by force in the lands and houses of other men. What kind of treatment it is that Turkish role carries with it Englishmen may learn from the letters from Ragusa in the Tines. In Herzegovina, as elsewhere, the causes of revolutions and their imme- diate occasions are not always the same. The cause is doubtless the abiding determination of the people to shake off the hateful yoke. The immediate occasion of the outbreak was of that kind which has been the immediate occasion of so many outbreaks, the old tale of the Sicilian Vespers and of the daughters of Skedasos of Lenktra. One necessary accompaniment of Turkish rule is what the Greek poet sang of in Byron's day- , naibedv, g.apOirwr, yvreuxia", Ar4KSOTO; fOopu'ec.'

'Every pretty girl,' so I heard at Ragusa, ' is carried off as a matter of course.' It was a specially foul outrage of this kind which immediately led to the revolt."

And Mr. Gifford Palgrave commences in -" Dutch Guiana" an account of the least known of all European colonies, which, as it seems to us, in its picturesque realism could hardly be improved. We may be more ignorant than our neighbours, but to us the account of Paramaribo—the one tropical capital in which drainage is perfect, with its Dutch public buildings, and churches, and synagogues, its carefully-kept canals, its endless avenues, and its contented, well-grown Netherlandish negro population—is entirely novel, and has an interest far beyond any account of Batavia we ever read. Mr. Palgrave's writing rarely admits of extract, for he infiltrates you, so to speak, with his knowledge and his views, and no single drop tells you much, but we may quote one of his more general observations :— " It is a matter of more surprise, an agreeable surprise, when we find much that recalls to mind the Dutch peasantry and labouring-classes, distinctly traceable among the corresponding classes of Creole negroes throughout the delta of Surinam. By what influence is it—attraction, sympathy, or mastership—that some nations so eminently succeed in transforming the acquired subjects of whatever race into copies, and occasionally caricatures, of themselves, while other nations not less signally fail in doing so ? That Frenchmen, however much they may annoy those they annex by their incurable habit of administrative over- meddling, yet make, not always indeed obedient subjects of France, but anyhow Frenchmen and Frenchwomen out of those they role, is a fact attested everywhere, and one that will long remain to grieve German hearts in Alsace and Lorraine. How long ago is it since the tri- colour has been hauled down to make place for the Union-Jack at St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Trinidad ? Yet in each of those and their kindred isles the French impress still survives, unefFaced as yet by change and time. Much in the same way to run through the list of other national annexations or conquests: Brazil is not merely ruled by a Portuguese Emperor, but is Portuguese itself ; and even the revolted Spanish colonies are Spanish in almost everything but official allegiance to this day. On the contrary, who ever heard of a land Germanised by the Germans, however influential their settlers, and absolute their rule ? And is there the remotest prospect that the Hindoo, though reconciled by sheer self-interest to toleration of the most equitable rule that ever race exercised overrace,will ever become not merely an English subject, but an Englishman in ways and heart ? Still more complete has been the failure of Danish attempts at extra-national assimilation, in whatever land or age, from the days of /Ethelred to our own. But, indeed, where there is diversity of blood, mistrust and antipathy aro more easily accounted for than sympathy and unison. To return to our Dutch friends. How it may be with *them elsewhere, in Java, for instance, I know not ; here, on the Guinea coast, they have almost outdone the French in assimilative results ; a problem of which the solution must be sought, partly in history, partly in actual observation."

He might have added, that at this moment one of the greatest difficulties in the government of Southern Africa arises from the deep trace of Dutch feeling and sentiment which the original con- querors have left behind, and which, unless some deep wave of emigration should strike there, it will take another century to eradicate.

In the Contemporary, Cardinal Manning on " The Pope and Magna Charta" does not greatly interest us. That the Pope claimed a power of deposing Christian princes in the thirteenth century is quite certain, as it is also certain that his right was acknowledged by some princes when convenient ; but to say that even then "the supreme civil power of Christendom was founded on the supreme spiritual- authority" is as vague and as inaccurate as to say now that the liberties of English- men are founded on the sacredness of the right of insur- rection. Nobody denies that in certain cases the right of in- surrection exists; but nobody, therefore, asserts that a law of treason is immoral. That the Pope might, in certain contin- gencies depose was admitted by men who, all the same, held that for a King to acknowledge vassalage to the Pope was a derogation of his rights justifying insurrection. Cardinal Man- ning holds the act to have been only disgraceful because it was in- sincere. Mr. Peter Bayne on "Walt Whitman" seems to us to miss the only object which could make such an article interesting. That Walt Whitman has written much blatant rubbish, many obscenities, and much that is no more poetical than an auctioneer's catalogue is, is true enough, and is admitted, we fancy, by most of his admirers, among whom we certainly do not reckon our- selves. But the point to be explained is, why this man, who wrote this dirty rubbish, is considered by so many the true poet of democracy? Swinburne, Rossetti, Dowden, Buchanan, and the rest may all be mistaken, but their fault as critics has not usually been the deification of weakness and intellectual sterility. They must see something in Whitman beyond blatancy and obscenity—Mr. Rossetti, for instance, who has published a clean edition—and the need now is to find out what it is, a question towards the solution of which Mr. Bayne gives us no light. There is more instruction in Mr. Arthur Clive's wild rhapsody over Whitman in the Goal( man's Magazine, little as we agree with it, than in Mr. Bayne's strong censure. Mr. Llewelyn Davies begins what will be a most interesting sketch of Wesley and his system of church discipline, but leaves on us, like every other writer on Wesley, an unpleasant sense of his ingrained despotism of nature and want of tenderness for humanity. At present the most original feature in the sketch is the strength with which Mr. Davies brings out the survival of High-Chtu-chmanship, and its frequent concomitant, strong sacerdotal feeling in Wesley, and the con- sistency with which he taught a doctrine not to be easily dis- tinguished from that of Baptismal Regeneration. He retained, in fact, to the end of his life a certain continuity of ecclesiastical impressions derived from his Oxford training :— " An incidental observation, made by him at the age of seventy-four, is curiously significant of his habitual estimation of the Dissent of his time. He is speaking of the people of the Isle of Man A more loving, simple-hearted people than this I never saw ; and no wonder, for they have bat six Papists, and no Dissenters, in the island.' Once more, a letter to his brother Charles, written in his seventieth year, contains an expression of general feeling upon which it would no doubt be a mistake to insist as if it were a deliberate judgment, but which is a conclusive proof of the continuity of Wesley's religions life:—' I often cry out, Vita: me redde priori ! Let me be again an Oxford Methodist I am often in doubt whether it would not be best for me to resume all my Oxford rules great and small. I did then walk closely with God, and redeem the time. Bat what have I been doing these thirty years?'" Mr. Galton's new paper on Heredity is too strictly scientific and technical for popular reading, and the general reader will turn with more enjoyment, if not more instruction, to Lady Verney on the "Songs and Legends of Modern Greece," and Mr. Willis Clark on " Sea-Lions," the seals which yield to European and American women their favourite fur. Lady Verney tells us that the modern Greek ',songs, made to be sung, not read, still retain much of the savour of the early time, with its total want of self-consciousness and abandonment to the feeling of the moment. The songs are many of them very ancient, but altered to suit new requirements, and breathe still sometimes the old spirit, the belief in the old mythology, though under new names, and the sense of a struggle between man and supernatural opponents. lEschylus would have recognised this dirge. Digenes is the Roland or Rustum of modern Greece :— " On Tuesday Digenes was born, on Tuesday he must die ;

And he sent to fetch his friends ; and all of them were giants : He sent for Menas, Mauvailis, and also for the son of the Dragon.

They come, and they find him smitten down on the field ; He groans, and the mountains tremble ; he groans, and the fields shake.

' What has come to you, Digenes ; and what have you to do with death ?'

' Eighty years long have I lived on this upper earth, No one have I ever feared among all the giants •

But now have I seen a barefooted one, with shining garments;

His hair shone in the sun ; his oyes were like the stars;

He called me out to fight with him on the marble threshing-floor,

Whichever of us two should conquer, the soul of the other would belong to him.'

They went, they fought on the marble threshing-floor ; Where Digenes struck, the blood trickled in streams, as from a furrow ;

But where Charon struck, the blood flowed forth in rivers as from a

trench."

Many of the songs, too, are strangely characteristic of the ancient people, as seen without the haze cast over them by their genius. A dying soldier of pure Athenian blood, if he could have expressed his thought about himself, would have sung his own dirge and told his passion of self-pity very much in the words of "the song of the dying Klepht":-

'

say to you that I cannot ; while you say to me, ' Arise ;

Hold me up, that I may sit awhile ; and place me sitting, And bring me sweet water, that I may drink and die ;

And bring me the tambour, that I may sing aloud, That I may compose my song, the death-lamentation.

Oh, my jet-black moustachio, and my pencilled eyebrows.

My sparkling eyes, my mouth as sweet as sugar, And my illustrious uncut lacks, that flow long over my shoulders ! The black mother earth will eat you all, the desert place, the land.

Take me, and carry me out to a high ridge of rock ; Take with you your yataghans, and reach me my cup; Take your knives with you, that you may dig me my grave; Make it big, wide enough for one, for two, for three persons, That I might stand up straight to fight, and lie on my side to load ;

And on my right side open a window, That the birds may come and go, and tell me of the good summer-

time."

The interest of Mr. Clark's essay is in his description of the poor beasts hunted so relentlessly, and in the Arctic regions so cruelly, but its drift may be shortly summarised. The seals must be pro- tected in the Antarctic regions, as they now are in Alaska, or they will cease to exist. We have murdered them down too fast. In Alaska, however, the regulations are strict, and the number of the beasts is so great on the Prybilov Islands, that the enormous price of their fur can be explained only by supposing a secret combination among the dealers:— "The vast numbers that congregate upon these islands will give some idea of the multitude to be met with at one of their favourite haunts.

I adopt the results of Mr. Elliott's very careful calculations. He shows that on St. Paul's there are upwards of eight miles of shore-line, with an average depth of 129 feet, occupied by breeding seals ; and estimates the numbers there, on the basis of two square feet to each seal and her cub, at over three millions. St. George's is smaller, supporting only 163,420 animals. The yearlings, and males under six years of age, he sets down at two millions; so that we arrive at a total of from five to six millions for the two islands, or nearly twice the population of London! Wild animals, in considerable numbers, have become so scarce in the world that it is difficult to realize the aspect of a shore so swarming with life. No wonder that the noise should be described as like the booming of a cataract—so loud, as to warn vessels at sea of the proximity of land ; or the smell as something almost insupportable."

Fraser is as dull externally as the Fortnightly, but it con- tains two or three papers of some interest. The savage review of Mr. Green's " History of the English People " is amusing, as savage reviews are apt to be, and will help Mr. Green to revise his work for the new form in which, we trust, it is about to appear; and the authoress of " German Home Life " concludes her bitter sketches by an account of German men, whom she loves apparently for their manliness, and hates for the suspicious irri- tability with which they insist that Germany ought to be persist- ently admired :—" The modern German is likely to become a thorn in the flesh of humanity at large, not because he is victorious, but because he is for ever blowing the blast of his victories on the trumpet of fame. The braying of that brazen instrument is, of necessity, not so sweet in his neighbours' ears as in his own ; yet should you venture to remonstrate, he will fix a quarrel upon you, and you will have abjectly to ask him to continue his melodious strain." That is a rough expression of the new quality in Germans which threatens to make them as offensive to the rest of mankind as Frenchmen when gasconading, or Americans when complain- ing, or Englishmen when stolidly ignoring all views except their own. The two best papers, however, to our minds, are the slight sketch of "Land and. Labour in Russia," which to the ordinary reader will need amplification to become intelligible ; and the very curious " study " or monograph on the Bukowina, that strange coiner of Eastern Austria between the Dniester and the Pruth where fugitives from all the races which have dominated, con- quered, or settled in Eastern Europe seem to have found a home, and to have been successively extirpated or reduced to villenage, until in 1775 the Emperor Joseph commenced the colonisation of the district with Germans, Russian Old Believers, Ruthenians, Roumanians, hracians, and Czechs. This composite population now numbers 530,000 souls, of whom 45,000 are Germans, 9,000 Poles, 210,000 Roumanians, 240,000 Ruthenians (Little Russians or Old Poles), and a large number Jews. The creeds are as numerous as the races, the peoples live apart from one another, and the only nexus binding the population together is an almost fanatic devotion to the Hapsburgs, who at different times have saved them all from oppression. The account of them all here given by "E. Kilian," who dates from Vienna, is almost unread- able from its profusion of knowledge, but the reader who has patience for the consumption of so much literary pemmican will find his comprehension of this corner of the world greatly in- creased thereby. We extract a paragraph giving an account of a class unknown, we suspect, to most Englishmen, the Jewish " Saints," who, in Eastern Austria, rule the Chassidim,—the sect of Jews most commonly found there :- "These ' Saints' and 'Just Ones' are sly impostors, who take advan- tage of the fanaticism, superstition, and blind ignorance of the Chassidim in the most bare-faced manner. They heal the sick by pronouncing magic words, drive out devils, gain law-suits, and their curse is supposed to kill whole families, or at least reduce them to beggary. Between the Saint' and God ' there is no mediator, for he holds personal intercourse with the Father of all, and his words are oracles. Woe to those who should venture to dispute these miracles in the presence of these un- reasonable fanatics ! They are ready to die for their superstitions, and to kill those who dispute them. One of the most distinguished of these Saints,' to whom the faithful make pilgrimages from the interior of Russia and from Western Austria, is the Rabbi of Sadragora, near Czernowitz. This aged man has been performing miracles for many years past, and his fortune is said to be enormous. He lives like a prince, possesses several palaces and carriages, and is waited upon by men-servants in livery. His daughters are laden with precious stones, like Oriental princesses, and his sons marry the fairest and richest maidens among their co-religionists."

The Cornhill has little this month for notice except its stories. for we can neither admire nor clearly understand the paper on "The Arabian Nights," which reads to us like a medley of all the notes which a clever man, reading Galland's version, Lane's trans- lations, and Torrens's unfinished volume, had left upon their margins. We suppose the writer had some drift in his mind, but after two serious attempts to gather it, set ourselves down as too hopelessly stupid to find either the clue or the place to which it leads.

Macmillan is more readable, giving us at least three good papers :—" Kisawlee ; or, Life in a Canadian Country Town," a paper of the breezy, humourous, descriptive kind usually found only in Blackwood,—which, by the way, is asleep this month ; "The Literature of Holland during the Nineteenth Century ;" and a bit of curious, out-of-the-way, clever fun, called the " Diversions of a Pedagogue." Mr. J. H. Raven protests that schoolboys are far more diverse than most people suspect, and illustrates his statement by illustrations of schoolboy blunders, blunders which he says indicate the shade of mental idiosyncrasy. We have not had such a laugh for months. The blunders by "the careless" are irresistibly comic, but perhaps the answer of the con- ceited lad who defined democracy as " government by dukes and deacons" was the most perfect, and may in England come nearest to the truth. We find it, however, a little difficult to believe that all the blunders of the Eccentrics are unconscious. These read like the efforts of a premature punster :— " Sometimes they are good as catechumens, e.g. :—Q, ' What is a dependent sentence ?' A. Ono that hangs on by its clause.'—Q. 'De- rive Pontifer.' A. ' From Pons, a bridge, as we say Arch bishop.'—The following character of Gideon ' will repay examination. It is curiously ingenious, though very absurd. ' Gideon was a true unbelieving Jew. Still he was a good man, though rather idolatrous.' "

And we should doubt a little the simplicity of the " Simple " boys who sent up these " variations in their dictation :"—

" In writing out 'Lord Ullin's Daughter' from dictation, one of the Simple has a very curious reading:-

' Come back, come back!' he cried in Greek

Across the stormy water.'

Here is a new version of Scott:

He is gone on the mountain, He is lost to the forest, Like a summer-dried fountain When our need was the saw-dust,'

Here a variation on Macaulay:— , And the rod glare on Skiddaw roused the burglars of Carlisle.'

Another,—

Hertninius on black Auater, Grave chaplain on grave steed.'

From a description of a waterfall

From rock to rock the giant elephant Lens with delirious bound,'

—where, of coarse, 'elephant' is a varia lectio for ' element.'"