THE MAGAZINES.

Fraser is full of good things. Miss Cobbe's " Paper on Ireland and her Exhibition in 1865 " is of course desultory in the extreme, and equally of course contains many striking reflec- tions. She doubts, for example, the aesthetic qualities always attributed to the Irish. If they have them, she asks, why are their dresses so mean, their houses so squalid, their streets so banales? Poverty? They are not so poor as the Eastern beggars, who swing their raga round them with a grace which makes them picturesque, or the Swiss, who build pretty chalets of logs, or the lower popula- tion of Bristol, whose Pithay is a sight for the artist. Why have they done nothing of the first class in poetry, or painting, or archi- tecture, or sculpture? Why do they not even grow flowers? She doubts whether the aesthetic faculty has not still to be developed in Irishmen, forgetting, we think, that mere love and admiration of nature are the best proofs of its existence, and that the Irishman possesses these. Miss Cobbe disbelieves in Irish truthfulness, declares his sense of honesty disturbed by some " delicate nuances" of feeling, which induce him, for example, to think stealing from an enclosure wrong, but stealing from the open venial, and credits him rather with the passive than the active virtues. Oa the other hand, he possesses patience, resignation, charity, imagination, wit, and an appreciativeness very much greater than that of English- men.

"We once narrated to some Irish children the story of the nuns guillotined in the French Revolution, and chanting the Te Deno: to the last. Our little audience was full of enthusiasm for the victims ; and some one remarked, 'It was a grand death they died.' We told the same story to a class of big English boys in a city school, and strove to make them feel the heroism of the martyrs, narrating the scene as drama- tically as we wore able. The boys were curious enough about the details, but next day told our fellow-teacher they had heard such a nice story, all about chopping off women's heads!' The spirit had evaporated, the ugly physical fact was alone retained."

Sydney Smith says that when he uttered his famous joke, " It's so hot I have been obliged to take off my flesh and sit in my bones," a visitor rejoined, " Oh, Mr. Smith, how could you do that ?" An Irish school on the other hand " took " the joke instantly, enjoying it as keenly as another one did this :—

" The master put the rather small class in attendance through a very fair lesson in Biblical knowledge, and their proceeded to display some of the practical instructions received by his pupils.—' Now, boys, you know Donnybrook Fair ?'—' Yes, sir, we do.' (Every hand up.)—'Is it right to go to Donnybrook Fair?'—No, air, it is not.'—' What is it ?'—'It's a sin, Sir.'—' Very well, boys,' replied the master. Turning to his English visitor, You see we do not neglect to inculcate practical precepts as well as religions opinions.'—' Quite true,' said the visitor; but may I be allowed to put a question to the boys myself?'—' Oh, certainly, sir, whatever you please.'—' Well, then, boys—tell me honestly—every boy who has been to Donnybrook this year, hold up his hand !' Up went every hand in the class ! Of course the boys, being Irish, saw the intensity of the joke, and laughed accordingly, and the master being of the same nation was not more backward, in spite of his defeat ; and visitor, teacher, and scholars joined in a good hearty roar, which had hardly calmed down when one little gamin of the class stepped forward and put up his hand. 'Please, sir, I went to Donnybrook to distribute,thracts r —As the idea of any urchin going to Donnybrook to sell tracts, or coming alive out of it if he did, was utterly incredible, the laugh broke out again with renewed violence, till the visitor took his departure."

Miss Cobbe evidently believes in the slow improvement of Ireland through natural causes, and is of course an advocate for the abolition of the Irish Establishment, as due to " that greatest expediency—justice." She does not, however, like the form of Catholicism prevailing in Ireland, believing that both that creel and its rival are presented to the people in a coarser and rougher way than in England, the Catholics learning astronomy after Dr. Cullen's method, the Protestants being carefully instructed that " men know the mind of God through texts." A paper on "Psi Madre," the new religion of the Maories, gives some curious information as to the causes which have spread the new creed so rapidly. The writer believes that the Maories adopted Chris- tianity from an idea that it would make them a powerful people, like the Pakehas, and finding it has not done so have abandoned it, and adopted the new one, which promises them victory and the expulsion of the English interlopers. The new creed is a series of promises of a speedy future, in which the Maories and the Jews alone shall inhabit a regenerated New Zealand freed of all other white men, and its root is hatred of the foreign rulers. Their slaughter seems to be one of its tenets, and another is poly- gamy, which the.founder, Te Ua, a madman who pretended to miraculous power, believed would greatly increase the numbers of his countrymen. The writer believes that the missionaries are now hated throughout. the island, and that the new creed is spreading among the friendly tribes near Auckland, but that with the political defeat of the natives the revived heathenism will be

laid aside once more, never to re-appear. The Maories, like the ancient, but unlike most of the modern heathen races, think pros- perity a proof that they are in the right path, and victory sufficient evidence that the God of the victors ought to be obeyed. They wor- ship, like the Record, irresistible power without reference to its goodness, and logically enough think they have a right to transfer their obedience to a worse deity, if only it is visibly a stronger one. The remaining articles in the number worth notice, are a sketch of the works of Charles de Bernard, sensational French novelist, who is credited with some of Balzac's power ; of Boling- broke, who is declared to have been a man who hated mystery and cant, and who founded modern political journalism ; and of Austrian politics, from which latter we take a statistical fact worth remembering. The population of the Austrian Empire has been, since the loss of Lombardy, 31,714,326, of whom are :- Germans ...

Northern Sclavonians — Bohemians, Mora- 7,889,925 or 22 per cont.

vians, Poles, Slovenes, Ruthenes ... 11,044,872 „ 35

It

Southern Sclavonians—Raitzon, Croats, Dal- matians, Wends, &c. 3,982,774 „ 11

Western Roumaines—Italians 2,989,136 „ 8

Eastern Roumaines—Wallachians ... 2,642,953 „

7

11

Magyars—Hungarians and Szeklers... ... 4,947,134 „ 14

ft

Other races—Jews, Bulgarians, Armenians, Gypsies ... 1,217,532 „ 3 „

Colonel Heros von Borcke continues in Blackwood his spirited account of the Confederate War, but the number is unusually deficient in papers of general interest. The best is perhaps the account of Giacomo Leopardi, the Italian poet of melancholy, whose nature expressed itself perhaps most completely in these melancholy stanzas, written just after he had lost his belief in immortality :— " To MYSELF.

"Now stand thou still for ever, My weary heart; the extreme delusion dead. Eternal I supposed me. Be it known That this has perished ; of these dear deceits, Not only hope, but even desire is flown. Be still for ever ; thou bast throbbed enough, Thy impulses are nothing worth ; Nor does earth merit even a sigh.

Life is but bitterness and pain, And other hope is none ; the world is dust. At length compose thee ; be despair revealed For the last time. Fate to our mortal race Has given only to die. Henceforth despise Nature, thyself, and the vile powers that bring To common misery all, themselves concealed ;— And vanity of every living thing."

Macmillan, besides the tales, has an article by Profesor Bain on " Grote's Plato," rather analytical than controversial, and a quaint little paper on the "neglected art" of household government, pleasantly written, but very useless. Its writer's remedy for the growing evil of the day, the difficulty of maintaining a pleasant home on a moderate income, is for wives once more to superintend the labours of the kitchen, to do some portion of the cooking, and employ about two hours a day below stairs. That remedy she thinks will establish economy in the kitchen, reduce the servants to order, and enable the husband to swim successfully against the social stream. It might do all that, though we doubt it extremely, but is it not rather giving up the game? The object to be sought at this moment is a mode of living on 5001. a year which shall neither exclude those who try it from society nor compel the wife to be cookmaid, and the problem is solved everyday, even in cases where there are children, without any extraordinary difficulty. The key to success lies in two rules, —to forswear pretence in any shape, - and never to part with cash when by a little extra exertion expense can be avoided. Of all classes in this country those who have least need of show are the clergy, and they of all others live the most social lives upon the smallest means. Nothing is expected of them, and if other professions would be equally frank and equally indifferent to appearances, as little would be expected of them either. They have but one advantage in the race—free houses, and if the professional class had anything like the habit of com- bination growing up among workmen they might have it too. For the wife to cook is impossible when there are children to manage, and when there are not saves a po and a week at the cost of all that refinement which the professional man of to-day seeks in his companion. Mr. Henry Kingsley begins an admirable account of " Eyre, the Australian Explorer," a man who traversed a thousand miles of waterless sands on foot rather than, as he thought, fail in his duty, and Professor Taylor a sketch of the " Literary Life of

Isaac Taylor," rather too favourable, and abounding in sentences like this :—" With this literary enterprise his characteristic feelings

and fancies, as well as his deep and peculiar insight of hutuauity, are so obtrusively blended, that when we want to rescue any of the subjects on which he touches from the pale colours reflected by the surrounding atmosphere of ordinary opinion, there are few more effectual resources than to watch its transmutations as it here passes through the alembic of his richly imaginative sentiment." Are the conductors of magazines really driven by a public demand to insert verses like those on the "Matterhorn Sacrifice ?" They must know quite as well as the critics that this kind of thing is not poetry, or anything else :—

" To do what none Before had done They braved the ice-field's trackless way ; They courted fame, They sought a name ; The bubble burst—and where are they ?"

There are nearly two pages of that.

A " mad doctor" has been allowed in the Cornhill to publish his view of the proper mode of trying criminals on whose behalf the plea of lunacy has been set up. He believes of course, as all of his profession believe, that nobody except one of his own branch of his own profession can possibly decide whether a criminal is lunatic or not, and would have a certain number of experts paid by the Crown to give evidence in every case, which evidence he wishes to me taken as final. In other words, he wishes to transfer the right of trying for murder from juries to mad doctors. His wish will not be gratified, for the public neither has accepted, nor will accept, his main proposition. It is quite true that only experi- enced men can in some instances detect the symptoms of latent insanity, but then latent insanity is no defence for crime. The insanity must have shown itself, like any other disease, and when it has, a jury is just as competent to form an opinion as any number of mad doctors. The question for them is not one of pathological niceties, but broad and plain—is the man's mind in a state which rendem him irresponsible for his acts? If it is, let him be confined ; if it is not, let him be hanged. A man of course may be the victim of transitory or hysterical mania, during which he is before God irresponsible, but society must protect itself by broad, or, so to speak, brutal rules, and can no more take such a defence into account than it could take a purely intellectual de- lusion. A sane criminal may believe it his duty to kill another so sincerely as to render it impossible for any but the Almighty to decide on his moral guilt, but society can only hang him. So also he may be the victim of what is called moral lunacy—really incapable upon points of distinguishing right from wrong, but society cannot receive evidence to that effect. It must assume that he knows the difference, as it must assume that he knows the law, and for just the same brutal reason—that it could not get on if it did not. The only precaution it can take against error it does take, namely, to ask plain men whether, after listening to what experts have to say, they think the prisoner responsible or not, and act accordingly. To allow the experts to decide finally, is simply to raise the endless question whether all crime is not ultimately lunacy, the greatest question which can be propounded to the moralist or theologian, but one with which society has nothing whatever to do. The rest of the padding in the Cornhill is a little dull, particularly an article on " Venice," which seems to us a nearly perfect example of the " thin " writing fostered by magazines. The words are pleasant words, but there is nothing in them.

The rest of the magazines call for no comment, except the Fortnightly Review. That production seems to have taken a very considerable place in the public mind, and if the editor will set his face as resolutely against scrappiness as the Revue des Deux Moudes does, may yet take a higher one. It may be made a vehicle through which considerable men can communicate with the public without loss of caste, the function which the quarterlies used to perform, and perhaps could still perform, were not the march of events too quick for them. We have noticed the political paper elsewhere, and the best of the remainder is perhaps Sir Charles Taylor's, on " Fishing in Norway," a bit of easy meaty writing which it is pleasant to read. Sir Charles has been fishing, he says, for thirty years, and propounds these three humourous puzzles :— " Where does the salmon go when he is in the sea ? You may catch him in salt water as he is going up to the rivers. But where does he spend the rest of his time during the six months or so he passes in the ocean ? Was one ever caught out in the far ocean ? What does he take a fly for ? A trout fly is an imitation ; but a salmon fly is like nothing in heaven or earth. Moreover, as far as I know, salmon do not eat real flies. In fact, it is hard to say what salmon do eat in fresh water. When you catch them their stomachs are always empty. Surely a large Namsen fly, all silver twist and golden pheasant feathers, is like nothing a sal- mon can ever have seen. Besides, a salmon will take a boiled prawn ; surely he never can have seen that before. And thirdly, I want to

know why the more a river has been fished the shier the fish are. You will find this to be the case not only towards the end of the season, but will also experience the same thing the next year when first you begin. Do the few fish who are hooked and get off tell their friends and neigh- bours that a salmon fly is not the most desirable thing to put into their mouths ?"

As to the first, is it not possible that the fly annoys the salmon, instead of attracting him, as a red flag does a bull,—that he bites in wrath, instead of hunger?