public of immorality because it delights in stories of vice. This, however, is not the question at all. Nobody denies that there exist in France the purest lives, the most admirable characters. Nobody now who knows anything about the matter believes, as once an ignorant generation believed, that because the French have not the word "home" the thing does not exist among them—a ridiculous misconception, which only ignorance could ever justify. At the same time, we know that our own novels are more or less truthful representations of the life of our time--many of them admirable, few of them seriously misleading. There are some, indeed, which represent life only as it exists among the frivolous classes, and these have naturally no breadth of truth, but yet are sufficiently faithful to the path of life which they portray. This being the case, we are not only justified in believing that French novels must be in their way a true expression of life, but driven to that conviction. In every other country they are accepted as such. The drama must deal with stronger effects than are necessary for a portrayal of life, being compelled to epitomise in the space of a few hours the entire growth and dénouement of a tragedy, or, what is even more difficult, of the genteel comedy, which approaches more closely to a novel. That we should distrust the existence of pure women in France because their novels are odious, or imagine that every French woman who reads 'Madame Bovary' must necessarily share her inclinations or emulate her life, is absurdity; though at the same time not to have read 'Madame Bovary'-a book the name of which must be forced upon her in a hundred

critical discussions, which are the things French writers are most cunning and remarkable in — must be almost impossible for a cultivated Frenchwoman who is not a jeune fille. And this is put forth, recognised, applauded as a revelation-and no voice of authority, as far as we are aware, has ever said that it was not so. Some disclaimers, we are aware, have arisen recently from the bosom of French society on this subject. The author of 'Marie Fougère,' who has written under various noms de plume, sometimes as a woman, but who is no less a personage than the present Procureur de la Republique, has made a a most energetic and animated protest, describing how in the country "toutes les honnêtes femmes sont effrayées, pour leur enfants comme pour elles-mêmes, des tendances que manifeste de plus en plus l'école moderne.

Paris nous a lancé comme dernier défi la Terre et l'Immortel: ceci est la réponse de la bourgeoisie lettrée de province." Alas! the réponse is but poorly qualified to maintain its place against the modern school thus objected to. It is like all French fiction, which resembles the immortal little girl of the distich :

"When she was good she was very, very good,

And when she was bad she was horrid."

same time this universal burden of story, this consent of living testimony, how is it possible to accept it is as worth nothing? If by common agreement Realism is understood to mean Vice in a certain language and country, what can spectators say or believe? Nothing that Mr Hamerton says is worth considering as an answer to this question. It is doubtful, indeed, as he announces on various occasions that he does not read French novels, how far he is a judge.

:

There are some very curious statements about life in England in this book, which lead us to the conclusion that Mr Hamerton must have forgotten his native country in many ways. He tells us that the modern Englishman, for instance, is "taught and governed in boyhood by clergymen: their feminine allies compel him to go to church, and to observe the English Sunday if he intends to marry in England." The last is a most curious and entirely French suggestion and it is rather a pity that it is not true. "Even a strong-minded Englishman is a little afraid of a clergyman," Mr Hamerton adds. Another very curious statement is about our language. "It is only the most cultivated English people who dare to employ in conversation the full powers of their noble tongue: the others shrink from the best use of it, and accustom themselves to forms of speech that constitute in reality a far inferior language, in which it is so difficult to express thought and sentiment that they are commonly left unexpressed." Mr Hamerton adds, in a footnote, "An English friend of mine, himself a man of the very highest culture, says that the cultivated

English keep their talk down to a low level, from a dread of the watchful jealousy of their intellectual inferiors. They only dare venture to talk in their own way between themselves in privacy.”

This is a very appalling statement indeed. Is it possible that the intellectual classes in England, after expressing or not expressing "in a far inferior language" such sentiments as it may be possible to trust to their intellectual inferiors, talk Johnsonese among themselves? How glad must everybody be in that case that he or she does not belong to these painfully "cultivated" people!

But probably the reader has had enough of Mr Hamerton. It is a pity he did not keep to his literary landscape-painting, and to those sketches of his French neighbours which were so. pleasant. He has clearly forgotten his native land, which is not wonderful; for few people perhaps are capable of being of two nationalities at ice. Nobody, however, is compelled to be absurd unless he likes. And the above statement is almost more ludicrous than the funny but nasty French belief which he quotes, of the common bath taken daily by every English family. The latter, indeed, is the more excusable of the two.

We had meant to take up two other varieties of the fragmentary fare brought to us at the end of the publishing season-two books amusingly unlike, and both in their way significant of the period The

but that space fails us. first is a long poem, in which is treated the origin of man, and his progress upon strict Darwinian principles, from the ooze and slime up to the highest honours of civilisation. Miss Mathilde Blind

has the good sense to occupy a very short space with the first steps of this process. Though they would naturally be the most interesting had she any light to throw on the subject, it is wiser to refrain when she has so evidently none. Here is the beginning of her genesis :

"Struck out of dim fluctuant forces and shock of electrical vapour,

"dawned upon the seething waste." But we confess that we are much startled by his appearance-a something apparently not dependent upon the auroral pulsations or the atoms flashing in union primeval. How did he get there? We think Mr Darwin furnishes no reply. At the end of the poem, after Man has ascended into the inexpressible miseries of London life, a Voice,

ed mingling in union primeval;

And over the face of the waters, far

heaving in limitless twilight, Auroral pulsations thrilled faintly, and

striking the black heaving surface The measureless speed of their motion

now leaped into light on the waters. And lo, from the womb of the waters,

upheaved in volcanic convulsion, Ribbed and ravaged and rent, there

rose bald peaks and the rocky Heights of confederate mountains, compelling the fugitive vapours To take a form as they passed them, and float as clouds on the azure.'

This goes on, but very briefly, until

"Lo, moving o'er chaotic waters Love dawned upon the seething waste,"

which pulls us up sharply, for we were not aware that Love had any hand in it, and who is Love? Whoever he may be, it appears that, after all, he acted as a first cause in the original slime. And it requires us only five widely printed pages to arrive at Man, whose after-career, when he comes the length of Egypt, Rome, &c., we are already acquainted with. Love encounters Miss Blind several times after in the course of her despairing rambles through the miseries of the world and of London, and evidently in the opinion of both he would have done much better had he not

something outside, and which addresses Miss Blind as its "young

est child," the culmination of its efforts, after it has "yearned and panted through a myriad forms," bids her, as the "heir and hope of my to-morrow," rouse up and stand fast. "Bear, oh bear, the . horrible compulsion," sayз this Venerable Originator, for-and the reason is at least somewhat presumptuous, if we must not say profane

"From Man's martyrdom in slow con-
vulsion

Will be born the infinite goodness-
God."

We may therefore expect, after Miss Blind has suffered a little more, chiefly it would appear from the sight of other people's misery, that she will accomplish this last invention, and disclose it to a wondering world. It is well to be thus told what the instrument and the process shall be.

The burden of the other book1 before us is singularly different, and yet we scarcely know whether there may not be a subtle something of harmony between them. It is a book of revelations, chiefly made in dreams to a lady, Dr Anna Kingsford, who appeared for some time in England as a professor of medicine, and lectured on hygienic and other subjects,

with what success we do not know. It appears, however, that she was "recognised by many as a Seer, an Interpreter, and a Prophet of the rarest lucidity and inspiration, and a foremost herald of the dawning better ago;"--and that this is the posthumous collection of her prophecies or "illuminations," chiefly conveyed in dreams. One of these illuminations is entitled a "Prophecy of the Kingdom of the Soul, mystically called the Day of the Woman," in which the new doctrine is given forth as follows:"1. And now I show you a mystery and a new thing, which is part of the mystery of the fourth day of creation. 2. The word which shall come to save the world shall be uttered by a

salvation.

"4. For the reign of Adam is at its last hour and God shall crown all things by the creation of Eve.

"B. Hitherto the man hath been

alone, and hath had dominion over the earth;

"6. But when the woman shall be created, God shall give unto her the kingdom and she shall be first in rule and highest in dignity.

"22. But the creation of woman is not yet complete: but it shall be complete in the time. which is at hand.

"23. All things are thine, O mother of God! all things are thine, O thou that risest, from the sea! and thou shalt have dominion over all the worlds."

Mrs Kingsford's revelations are long, and we are unable here to treat them fully. The reader will perceive by the above that she finds indications of the woman who is to be revealed in the 'ancient Venus who rose from the sea, as well as in the Blessed Virgin; and we may add that there is a tone of real poetry in some of

her hymns to the ancient godз, as well as in certain of her illuminations-which is by no means characteristic usually of these fantastic revelations of a new faith. It is very curious, however, to note how many of the prophets of the present time (and they are very numerous) have taken hold of Swedenborg's idea of what is called the dual nature of God. The Motherhood as well as Fatherhood of the Deity is the central point in their wild dreams of a new force which shall renovate

It

the future. It has been lately set forth with mystic completeness, yet vagueness, in the strange book called 'Sympneumata.' is the inspiration of the book now before us. Another still more mystical production, having the same name, and attached to some obscure organism for propagating the faith, has also passed through our hands. One wonders whether

it has anything to do with the

revolution in feminine affairs which has occurred within the last twenty years, or what it will come to. We are a long way from the Johanna Southcote period, who was to be a second mother of

God, in the old and well-recognised mode, as bringing forth another

Messiah.

Nowadays it is the

woman in her own right who is to take that place. This is the last development, and one which we should have imagined the most unlikely of the Ewige Weiblichkeit. Miss Blind, who expects to be able to produce "the infinite goodness

God," as the result of her musings, is naturally a little more profane; but, altogether, it is a very curious turn of that fantastic current of feeling which in religion, as in everything, continually tends to and aspires after something

new.

MR BRYCE's book on the American commonwealth is far too massive a work to be adequately reviewed in a single article. We shall not therefore attempt the task: At the same time, we cannot allow so valuable a contribution to political literature to pass without comment. It raises two questions of immense practical importance, which, however, it does not attempt to deal with, since they come within the domain of party politics. The author does not claborate or cven disclose his opinions on those questions inside his book, though they may be conjectured from his position in politics. Those questions are, How does England compare with America in respect of its security against the tyranny of a majority, or what is called democratic haste and instability and, What light does American experience throw upon any project of substituting in the United Kingdom a system of local Home Rule with a federal union, for the existing time-honoured system of parliamentary government, one and indivisible?

▲ consideration of Mr Bryce's Look leads us to the conclusion that the American guarantees against cócial and political disorder resulting from the abuse of democratic power are immeasurably greater than the corresponding guarantees in England. Also, that a federal system at all resembling that of the United States cannot be established in these islands without such a dislocation of our political system and constitution

We

as would involve its entire rebuilding from its base upwards. gladly take advantage of the book to say something upon those two points, for both are of urgent practical importance.

It is difficult to resist the belief that inacquaintance with the system of the American commonwealth, cven in its broad outlines, is more general than it ought to be. Even if that is not so, it is worth while to remind our readers of them, and to give a summary sketch of institutions which Mr Bryce has explained with great clearness but in wide detail. The governing circumstance to be attended to is, that that commonwealth is founded on a declaration of independence. It emerged from a successful revolt. The principle, or condition, of absolute power, so familiar to us and to the Old World, is unknown in America. Thirteen colonies, all possessed of local Governments limited and prescribed by the mother country, threw off their allegiance, but retained their forms of government, which were all based on limited and delegated authority. Political necessity obliged them to combine to form a Federal Union for purposes of defence and security. They did not drift into democracy as the result of struggles with feudalism and classes, but the best and wisest of the statesmen whom the great events of last century produced, met together and established their democracy, all of them anxious to provido all the securities against its abuse of power which their

1889.