THE MAGAZINES.

WE have discussed elsewhere Mr. Gladstone's essay on "Daniel O'Connell," which will be, we suppose, the most read paper in the Nineteenth Century for January ; but there are others which will attract. Mr. E. Beckett, in "Australian Side-Lights on English Politics," really does give us some light, though it is not much. For example, he incidentally mentions that in Australasia, "of persons arrested in 1886, the proportion to the thousand of Victorian birth was 1625; while the proportion for those hailing from the other Australasian Colonies waii 3976; England and Wales, 4649; Scotland, 55.00 ; while Ireland heads the list with 86.16." One great cause of crime is, as usual, drunkenness; and in all the Colonies a measure of restriction has been adopted which is said to work well, and which is singularly moderate. A Com- mission appointed by the Colony visits every town with more than a certain number of people, and fixes the number of public-houses absolutely required. The voters are then asked if the existing number shall be reduced to that figure. If they vote " Yes," as they generally do, the least respectable and valuable houses are at once suppressed, the Commission fixes the compensation to be paid, and the town pays it. That is, of course, Local Option, with two riders added,—that the neces- sary houses shall be left open, and that publicans abolished for the public good shall receive compensation. Mr. Beckett points out that the same democracy has adopted Protection in Victoria and Free-trade in New South Wales. The result has been an aggrandisement of Melbourne, but a decay of trade in the Pro- - tectionist Colony as compared with its Free-trading rival. All manufactures under Protection concentrate themselves, and therefore population, in the great city, where labour and transport are easily procured; and Melbourne grows so rapidly as to alarm the Government, while the interior towns decay. Mr. Beckett reports, as the prevailing opinion of Australia, that too much is done for education, which has not developed the new race as was hoped, and quotes curious testimony to the distrust and dislike of the local Legislatures which is growing up in Australia as in the United States. In New South Wales, the Press is exceptionally bitter against them, on the ground that legislators drink hard, and the charge does not appear to be denied. hfr.Beckett's opinion obviously is that ultimately the people will separate the Legislature from the Executive, which is quite worn out by Parliamentary neglect of real business ; but he has still a vague hope that the constituencies will interfere, and return only reasonable men, a hope which, we confess, seems to us all over the world too sanguine.—The Earl of Meath's essay on the social ques- tion, called "A Thousand More Mouths Every Day," is not, we fear, sufficiently practical. He finds remedies in State-regulated colonisation, in restrictions on foreign immigration, in technical education, and in penal regi- ments of lazy industrials. Those might all be good suggestions if the popular mind were in a more decided mood; but only one of them—technical education—is likely to be adopted, and will, we fear, produce but little result. Its benefits, such as they are—and Lord Armstrong, who has tried the experiment, says they are but slight—will fall to the in- dustrious children of industrious fathers. As to emigration, it looks the wisest of schemes ; is, in truth, unanswerable on paper; but could a State try emigration on a larger scale than Ireland has voluntarily tried it ? Doubtless she has relieved herself ; but the social question remains as unsolved as ever. —By far the most striking article in the number is, however, the short history of Scotland which the Duke of Argyll calls "Isolation." It is quite impossible to condense it, but its drift is that Scotland throughout her history has gained, not lost, by the infusion of the blood and the customs of the more civilised South. The Duke has an idea, to us at least new, that the Celts, after their entrance into Scotland, never quite mastered the novel conditions of agriculture demanded by their new climate :— " It does almost look as if the Celtic and other tribes who moved westwards had never been sufficiently settled to master the new conditions under which they came to live. Explain them as we may, the facts are certain, as regards Scotland generally, and especially as regards the highlands and islands, in proportion as these were most remote from the new centres of peaceful industry. In a country where there is a heavy rainfall, its inhabitants never thought of artificial drainage. In a country where the one great natural product was grass of exceptional richness and of compara- tively long endurance, they never thought of saving a morsel of it in the form of hay. In a country where even the poorest cereal could only grow by most careful attention to early sowing, they never sowed till a season which postponed the harvest to a wet and stormy autumn. In a country where such crops required every bit of nourishment which the soil could afford to sustain them, they were allowed to be choked with weeds, so that the weed-crop was greatly heavier than the corn. In a country where such straw as could be grown would have been invaluable for winter fodder or for many other purposes, the whole of it was destroyed by deliberate burning, because they did not know how otherwise to separate the grain. In a country where, consequently, the main subsistence of the people was in cattle, they had no winter provender for them, so that they died in hundreds every winter, and those that survived became more and more degenerate. In a country where by far the largest area of the whole was mountain and moor, this immense extent of fine natural pasture was used only in bits and patches during six weeks or two months of the year, and for the rest of it was abandoned to the wolf, the eagle, and the fox. Such is a literal abstract, and an abstract only, of the almost incredible barbarisms of the native agriculture."

That is most striking; but is it not at least as probable that the Celts disliked the excessive and monotonous labour essential to successful agriculture? To this hour the true Celt of Scotland, splendidly as he sometimes works, holds manual labour to be in some sense degrading, and in theory is an idle gentleman.—We must leave each reader to judge for himself of the merit of Mr. Oscar Wilde's essay on "The Decay of Lying." He pleads for "lying," i.e., Art, as against truth, that is, Nature, and pronounces the latter dull and abhorrent. To us, the paper seems admirable, when it is once understood that its author is using his talent for humorous exaggeration to plead for idealism in all things as against realism. We do not agree with one word in ten, not even with the demon- stration that "there is no Japan," the country as we think of it being merely an idea created by an accidental development of Art; but the humour of the whole is often delightful, and will make the stoutest realist think.

The January number of the Contemperrary is not very good. The light article, "Zola," by Mrs. Emily Crawford, is read- able enough ; but her theory that Zola's brutal realism is due to his Italian blood, and that the prurience of France is due to the lingering influence of the Italian Renaissance and the foulness of Napoleon M.'s Court, will not hold water. Tillon preceded the Renaissance, and is as corrupt as any successor; Rabelais was purely a Frenchman ; and as to Napoleon's r4gime, France has become more prurient since that was burned up at Sedan. The licentiousness of France has existed always, though it has waxed and waned, and

is due to something deeply seated in the very nature of her people, most probably to one of her worst and one of her best qualities, a salaciousness which the Romans noticed, and a dislike of all that is hypocritical, even when the " hypocrisy " is beneficial to morals. Why literature in France should be at its worst at this moment, is a far knottier question ; but the tendency of immense crises to unsettle morals has long ago been remarked. The long struggle of Louis XIV.'s

reign, ending like the Empire in defeat, was followed by the r4ime of Louis XV., which was not wholly due to the character of that monarch.—Mr. Joseph Thomson, the explorer, is perfectly savage in his attack on the British

for allying themselves with the Germans in East Africa. He suspects the latter of wishing to seize Zanzibar, declares their settlement an unmitigated evil, and believes that the hostility now displayed towards them by the Negroes will soon be extended to all whites. He utterly denies that any blockade can affect the slave-trade, and charges the Germans with habitual dissoluteness and barbarity. He fails, however, entirely to show that we could have prevented anything that has occurred except by war, or that we shall lose our influence in restrain- ing Germany by acting as her ally.—Mr. H. Dunckley (" Verax "), in "Two Political Centenaries," thinks both France and England have won democratic liberty in the last hundred years, and that the practical result is favour- able to ourselves. That is true ; but it is not much to say, and we fancy Mr. Dunckley himself doubts whether the English movement has quite ended. At least, he ends his article with what is really a strong word of warning :— "For the present we are content, as we probably long shall be, with the essentials of a Republic, persisting in our in- difference to forms so long as they do not cramp the spirit of freedom. We no longer have any quarrel with the Crown.

The sternest of theoretical Republicans might well hesitate to meddle with an institution which sums up the history of the nation for a thousand years, which is an object of interest to millions who never read a Parliamentary debate, which saves us from what would be the fiercest struggles of party strife, aggravated by the risks of personal ambition, while all those powers and prerogatives which were once used for the aggrandisement of the Royal authority, are now vested in a committee nominated by the House of Commons, and re- newable in all its members whenever the people see fit."

—Miss Wedgwood's "The Cambridge Apostles of 1830 "— Maurice, Tennyson, Trench, Hallam, Sterling, and the rest— will be read with keen interest, not only by the "apostles" friends, but by all who have watched the decline of a great liberating theological movement into the arid form of scien- tific agnosticism which is now in so many quarters the creed of "progress." We do not know that we can endorse all Miss Wedgwood's judgments, which in one or two passages are perhaps too eulogistic ; but we must reproduce, if only for its literary beauty, the one upon John Sterling :—

" For our own part, at all events, we turn from the richly hung oil portrait [Carlyle's Life of Sterling], secure in its position in the gallery of literary favourites, to the timid, hesitating water- colour sketch left us in Sterling's earlier biography by a hand not more loving, perhaps, but far more suited, it seems to us, to record a life in which the chief lesson for the world is the subordination of literary achievement, as an actual influence on the hearts of men, to that immediate influence of soul on soul which emanated from John Sterling. Many a reader of these pages, probably, will recall some one whose presence had exactly that influence which Wordsworth described as the mission of the Poet, to add sunshine to daylight,' in whose neighbourhood thought seemed clearer, feeling stronger, the whole being stimulated and vivified, yet who has left nothing to justify this impression for those who never felt it. Tell us what he said,' they ask ; and they are answered by memoranda as like the recollections they chronicle as dried flowers to an Alpine meadow."

Mr. Oscar Wilde appears also, in" Pen, Pencil, and Poison,'. in the Fortnightly Review, his paper being a fine piece of restrained satire directed against the theory that Art, or a

love of Nature, or even a worship of Wordsworth, will make a man moral, or even an endurable citizen. Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, Charles Lamb's friend, was an artist of no slight merit, a virtuoso of the first order, a writer of the florid kind of some critical capacity, a devotee of Nature, and an admirer of Wordsworth, and one of the most cruel poisoners who ever existed. He actually poisoned one friend in order that an Insurance Office with which he had quarrelled should lose £3,000 by his friend's death. The money did not go to him, but it was lost to the insurers, the crime being, in fact, intended to fine them for exposing his own habit of poisoning to gain insurance money. He was at last transported for life, but tried poisoning .even at the antipodes. The satire is fine, but we fancy that to improve it, Mr. Wilde has read into his hero rather more than was in him. Wain- wright was essentially a voluptuary, caring little for art and less for literature, except so far as they ministered directly to pleasure and to his inordinate vanity. The paper, how- ever, is an able protest against a very prevalent doctrine. —" The Ethics of Cannibalism," by Mr. H. H. John- ston, has too much grim joking in it for our taste—at least, we suppose page 24 to be jocular—though it contains in- cidentally much information. We had not heard before of the belief among some African tribes that in eating an enemy you absorb, and therefore destroy, his soul, which is thus rendered incapable of a future life. This is considered the supreme vengeance, and reveals, if the story is true, a curiously vigorous belief not only in the existence of a soul, but in its material substance. It is this idea, Mr. Johnston believes, which swayed some Negro Christians who, after a victory recently, joined in a feast upon their foes. The subject can never be made a pleasant one, but he would have added just as much to our knowledge if he had adopted a less cynical tone. It is all nonsense about im- partiality. A cannibal is a bad sort of murderer, of whom, if he will not give up cannibalism, earth is well rid.—There are some fine criticisms scattered through Mr. J. A. Symonds's

"Comparison of Elizabethan with Victorian Poetry ;" but we prefer to quote one which is an addition to the material resources of criticism on the literature of to-day. Mr. Symonds thinks it a remarkable peculiarity of Victorian lyrics that they do not set well to Musk, and gives in confirmation of his opinion that of Jenny Lind :— "I once asked an eminent musician, the late Madame Gold- schmidt, why Shelley's lyrics were ill-adapted to music. She made me read aloud to her the Song of Pan' and those lovely lines To the Night,' 'Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of Night !' Then she pointed out how the verbal melody seemed intended to be self-sufficing in these lyrics, how full of complicited thoughts and changeful images the verse is, how packed with consonants the words are, how the tone of emotion alters, and how no one melodic phrase could be found to fit the thedal woof of the poetic emotion.

"Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Star-inwronght ! Blind with thine hair the eyes of day, Kiss her until she be wearied out—"

'How different that is,' said Madame Goldschmidt, from the largo of your Milton,— " Let the bright Seraphim in burning row, Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow !"

How different it is from Heine's simplicity,—

" A& FICigeln des Gesanges

Herz liebchen trag' ich dich fort."

can sing them,' and she did sing them then and there, much to my delight ; and I can sing Dryden, but I could not sing your Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats; no, and not much of your Tennyson either. Tennyson has sought out all the solid, sharp words, and put them together; music cannot come between.' " Madame Goldschmidt was a great judge ; but was not her judg- ment a little impaired by the fact that she was criticising poems in a language which all great singers detest P We have no opinion to give on any musical matter; but we could, we think, pick out bits of Tennyson which would enchant the most fas- tidious of composers. Mr. Symonds, whose opinion is the more valuable because, residing always among the eternal snows, he has something of the detachment of posterity, ventures on this remarkable prophecy as to the future of English poetry :— " In the course of the nineteenth century it might seem as though this passion for nature—the passion of Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth—had declined. To assume this would, how- ever, be a great mistake. What has steadily declined is the Eliza- bethan strain, the way of looking upon nature from outside. The modern strain, the way of looking upon nature as congenial to man, has strengthened, but with fear and rending of the heart, and doubt. The time is not yet ripe for poetry to resume the results of science with imaginative grasp. What has been called the cosmic enthusiasm is too undefined as yet, too unmanageable, too pregnant with anxious and agitating surmise, to find free utterance in emotional literature. In our days science is more vitally poetical than art ; it opens wider horizons and excites the spirit more than verse can do. Where are the fictions of the fancy compared with the vistas revealed by astronomers, biologists, physicists, geologists ? Yet signs are not wanting—I see them in

some of the shorter poems of Lord Tennyson, I see them in the great neglected work of Roden Noel, I see them in the fugitive attempts of many lesser men than these—which justify a sober critic in predicting that our century's enthusiasm for nature is but the prelude to a more majestic poetry, combining truth with faith and fact with imagination, than the world has ever known."

—Mr. Harrison's paper on "The Future of Agnosticism" is pleasant to read, like all he writes ; but it really comes to this,

that man will never be content with negation, and must therefore accept Comtism,—which is negation plus a par- ticularly contemptible fetish, universal Humanity, which in-

cludes cannibals and the Bradford murderer.—Mr. Mallock's answerto him—for "The Scientific Bases of Optimism" is really only an answer to Mr. Harrison—is well reasoned ; but we do not quite recognise the word "scientific." Comtism is not scientific, but extremely given to improvable hypothesis, and scientific men are by no means all optimists. Some of them believe rather strongly in the degeneracy of the race.

Mr. Boulger's account of the value of the Chinese alliance

to this country, in this month's National Review, is sound in principle, but reads too much as if it had been talked over with a Chinese Ambassador. It defends Chinese interests rather

than English. Our interest in Corea is surely a remote one, hardly one for which it would be worth while to wage a war. We might lend China officers and artillery to defend it, but hardly fight a campaign for Corea.