THE MAGAZINES.
Tins is by no means a first-rate number of the Fortnightly, but it contains some interesting papers, particularly one on "A Lost Art," the art of copying pictures in oil by "mechanical means," which is by many supposed to have been a kind of camera. Specimens of pictures not explicable by any ordinary theory, and ,certainly produced by some process not yet known, are still in Sir -Francis Smith's rooms at the Patent Museum of South Kensing- ton. The article on class legislation too, though too furious, is worth study, and we must extract from it one exquisitely charac- teristic story :-
"Alfred Hunt, a lad, and a hired servant to Mr. Godfrey Gerring, of Colesbill, was charged with misconduct in service. Part of his duty was to milk the cows, and on the 21st May Mr. Gerring's son ob- served that one of them had not been properly milked. He accordingly • directed defendant to fetch it in from the field and milk it properly. 'This he neglected to do, and on the cow being milked by another man he found seven and a half pints of milk left. Defendant had been -cautioned as to the same thing before. He now admitted his fault, and the chairman said he had no doubt been tampered with by those who are always ready to set class against class. Fined 10s. and costs 10s., and in default of payment he was committed to Reading Gaol for four- teen days without hard labour."
Union advocates are evidently the causes of all evil, in the minds of Messrs. Goodlake and Dundas, just as the First Napoleon was the cause of bluebottles in the butchers' shops. There were in 1872, 10,359 persons convicted before magistrates like these tinder the Act which they thus render. It is quite possible Hunt intended to steal some milk, but that is not the motive of his punishment.
Fraser has wonderfully little of interest except Professor Max Atiiller's lectures on Mr. Darwin, which we hope to notice sepa- Irately ; and a wonderfully conservative paper on "The Peasantry of the South of England," which admits, however, that a man with two acres and a family to help him can make a pound a week out of them, and be at the same time absolutely independent, an ad- ditional gain which the essayist forgets or does not value. His opinion, however, can hardly be of much importance, for he says, " The improvement of the worst class of cottages will follow with the roll-on of civilisation. We are always seeking greater com- forts. The houses of Bedford Square and Russell Square are ex- changed for the superb mansions of Belgravia ; and may we not hope that those who seek greater comforts for themselves will endeavour to provide the same for their dependants?" The effect of extreme luxury is not to increase, but to extinguish sympathy, as has been shown in the history of every slave-owning country in the world. The writer, moreover, considers the fear of change natural to an old labourer who was afraid of emigration a natural reason for keeping his wages down. Anyone who wants to know why agricul- tural unionists will not trust even good masters has only to read this article. Its writer is evidently benevolent, and as evidently holds a discontented labourer to be a sort of deserter, whose failure to run away should be punished by reduced wages all his life.
The best things in the Contemporary are, this month, not its moral and social philosophy. Mr. Herbert Spencer is for once both brief and dry. Miss Simcox, who estimates the influence of Mr. John Stuart Mill's writings, is acute, but unsatis- factory from the necessity of the case. You can hardly write satisfactorily on a philosopher's influence without justifying or criticising him,—at least when his views are so widely ques- tioned and so largely rejected as Mr. Mill's,—and for either argumentative support or argumentative assault, Miss Simcox, though, of course, she sympathizes in the main with Mr. Mill, has not room. It would have been better to have thoroughly examined the influence of any one of his chief doctrines, supporting or criticising it as she thought right. Mr. Dowden's paper on Victor Hugo is written with a good deal of brilliance, but seems to us to fail in recognising the element which renders the poetry of this extraordinary genius so frequently actively repulsive even to true lovers of poetry. Victor Hugo's personal antinomianism, his disposition almost to revel in losing control of himself, and in expending his gigantic force in shrieks of the wildest and most unmeaning passion, strike many lovers of poetry, who see in poetry the necessary " measure " and "law " of the old Greek theory of beauty, almost as a sin against the very nature of poetry. The spirit of rhythm—a kind of law—which is of the essence of the poetic form, should enter also into the very morale of the poet. Mr. Peter Bayne gives us an exceedingly interesting and instructive study of the first Marquis of Montrose.
A new serial story, " Young Brown," opens in the Cornhill with great promise. Just at first one is naturally alarmed at being suddenly introduced to a dull duke, and we are accustomed to consider that Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Trollope share the literary copyright in dull dukes, and "Young Brown" is
evidently not written by either of those gentlemen. But the dull duke dies in the first chapter, leaving a wicked heir and an indicated lawsuit, and our minds are relieved. The book is going to be a charming one. There is a good deal about Jane Austen in " Some Literary Ramblings about Bath;" and if the author be right in his conjecture (it is no more) that Northanger Abbey was written during her residence in Bath (1801-5), her nephew and biographer is wrong in one of the most singular and in- teresting points which he has made respecting her, and which was, we remember, brought out in an essay on her life and works in the Dublin Review. This point was the painstaking accuracy with which she had studied the topography of Bath, for the purposes of Northanger Abbey, before she had ever visited that city, and the pleasure with which she afterwards verified her own descrip- tion of the cross-purposed excursions of Catharine Morland, the Tilneys, and John Thorpe. Mr. Austin Leigh is not likely to have been mistaken on this point, especially as he relates an interesting anecdote with respect to the neglect of that particular book by a publisher, which afterwards enabled Miss Austen to get it back into her own hands, and make a decent bargain for it. Miss Burney, Beckford, and Landor figure in this pleasant chapter of reminiscences. A very clever essay on "The Bronths " carries us with it a good deal of the way, but not all. The author declares that he can scarcely understand what is meant by Mrs. Gaskell's admission that there are coarse passages in the writings of Currer Bell. We perfectly understand what is meant, and why Mrs. Gaskell was forced to make the admission, and we refer the writer to his own admirable, indeed perfect, analysis of that extraordinary production of Emily Bronto, Wuthering Heights—of which he justly says that its power is "absolutely Titanic, that from the first to the last page it reads like the intellectual throes of a giant "—for a negative illustration of what the admis- sion meant. That book is full, as he says, of savagery and ferocity, and in Heathcliff we agree with him that Emily Brontë has drawn the greatest villain extant, after Iago. " He has no match out of Shakespeare, and the Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust is a per- son of gentlemanly proclivities compared with Heathcliff." But there is no coaiseness ' in the book, with its abounding brutality ; there is nothing like the taint that lingers about the relation
between Rochester and Jane Eyre, when the man talks to the girl about his French mistress and afterwards about his mad wife. Almost every charm and quality of genius may be truly claimed for the author of Jane Eyre, except that of perfect purity. The woman who said to her, "We have both written naughty books," was rude and silly ; but no amount of admiration can obscure the fact that Currer Bell makes Jane Eyre love a man whose un- disguised immorality, whose mere speech must have shocked a per- fectly pure nature, and that therein lies essential coarseness.' A fascinating paper on the impossible conditions of existence in the planet Mars contrasts amusingly with a plain, useful, and satis- factory account of the Civil Service Supply Association, which every one ought to read who lives on this portion of the planet Earth ; and no less worthy of attention is an interesting article on "Volunteer Life Brigades, and Rocket and Mortar Apparatus for Saving Life from Shipwreck."
Macmillan contains a:very clever paper on "Daniel O'Connell," which, while it advances only one absolutely novel statement, is inter- esting as a summary of the life and character of one whom the writer declares to have been, "take him for all in all, the most remarkable man that Ireland has produced ; " and important, as a deliberate exposition of the present attitude of all sincere and educated political opinion in Ireland towards England. The writer takes an elevated, but not an extravagant, view of O'Connell's character, and analyses with much ability and strong sympathy the sources of his wonderful influence, which he im- putes in chief to the resemblance between himself and the people whom he led. "Whatever qualities or defects you find in the genuine Irish peasant," says Mr. Ball, "these you find heightened and intensified in the great Agitator, with the addition of one all- important element, scarcely ever to be found in the same type of character,—restless, persevering, indomitable energy." He con- cludes a very vivid description of the sway which O'Connell exercised over the mass of his countrymen by the following sentence, embodying a truth which we have found expressed elsewhere, but which cannot be too deeply impressed upon all critics of Irish political affairs : — "Heedless of the pre- sent, but gladly dwelling on the prospect of a brighter future, and still more attached to dim traditions of an illustrious past, loving more to be dazzled than to be convinced, so prone to exaggeration that his ordinary speech is all compacted of superlatives, passionately attached to a creed that unites for him the strongest feelings of religion and patriotism, possessing all the virtues that grace youth, but wanting those that build up manhood, the Irish peasant has hearkened in succession to many political leaders, but in no voice save that of O'Connell has he found the echo to all his own unspoken feelings and aspirations." Mr. Ball dwells with a wholesome insistence on the lesson which Englishmen should draw from the history of the long struggle for Catholic Emancipation,—a lesson to which Mr. Lecky has not given sufficient prominence in his handling of the subject,—" deep distrust of their own prejudices." The one entirely novel contri- bution to the history of O'Connell's life which Mr. Ball makes is of a surprising nature. It has hitherto been believed that no political office was ever placed within O'Connell's reach, but Mr. Ball, released by the death of all the persons concerned from the obligation of secrecy imposed at the time, informs us that he heard from the lips of O'Connell himself in 1837 that Lord Melbourne had just appointed him Attorney-General for Ireland. An hour or two later, O'Connell stated that the arrangement was at an end, because the King had absolutely refused his con- sent. Mr. Ball adds, "It is right to say that one of the few per- sons now alive who was in a position to be fully aware of every important step taken by Lord Melbourne is persuaded that no such offer was made, and that O'Connell must either have deceived himself, or from some inexplicable motive have made a false state- ment." The point is curious, and well worth investigating. A very able, sympathetic, and instructive paper on " Mauzoni," which has only the uncommon defect of being too brief, contains a charming critical sketch of the literary career of the novelist and poet, and a remarkably fine translation of the second of the two famous "cori" in the " Adelchi " which filled Goethe with admi- ration. It is the second, upon the death of Ermingarda, the un- justly repudiated wife of Charlemagne. The translator conveys with very rare skill the deep and tender pathos of the original. "A Run to Vienna and Pesth " gives an amusing description of that gigantic failure, the opening day at the Vienna Exhibition. The author of "Traditions of Sterne and Bunyan " claims another original than Ensign Roger for Uncle Toby, one Captain Hinde. He argues his point ingeniously. Mr. Black makes it increasingly plain that the Princess of Thule has married the wrong man. We.
never liked Frank Lavender, and his developing meanness and egotism are soothing to our prejudices. "Medical Reform" is practical and sound, but necessarily dry reading.
Temple Bar contains less fiction than usual. It is impossible for the most conscientious reader to keep the progressive phases of three novels in mind at one time, so that the reduction to two- in this number is welcome. A pleasant short story by Mrs. Ross- Church and a mock Horatian epistle, seemingly the first of a projected series, are the best of its lighter contents. There is also in this number a spirited account of the life of Marie Amelie, the- late Queen of the French, written, however, by a writer whose- exact conception as to the rights of Kings it is not very easy to get at. Sometimes he writes like a pure Legitimist, regarding all violent interruptions in the proper line of dynastic descent as moral evil of the most absolute kind ; but then he puzzles us by speaking as if the late Emperor and Empress of the Frenth had just the same kind of claim to the loyalty of the- people as Charles X. Clearly if Louis Bonaparte had a divine right to his manufactured empire, Louis Philippe had a divine- right to his manufactured kingdom ; nor was the intrigue in the- latter case so underhanded, or followed by nearly such bloody results, as the intrigue in the former case. However, though we- cannot follow the author in his somewhat exalte views of " usurpa- tion " and royalist right, we can heartily recommend this spirited and admiring sketch of the late Queen of the French, by one who- evidently detests Louis Phillippe as one of the worst of modern, "usurpers."
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