--Lady artists play a distinguished part in this year's Exhibition of the Ontario Society of Artists. Two pictures, by the Princess Louise, head the catalogue and fairly challenge attention. Her Royal Highness makes her first public appearance in Toronto, as an artist in the rooms of the Society, and can afford to be judged by her work, independent of any claims to indulgence as a lady, or as the daughtor of our sovereign. She exhibits two pictures, 'A Study of a Female Head,' and 'A Study of Peaches.' We commend these pictures, or rather sketches in oil, for they have the appearance of having been blocked in' at one sitting,-to the attention of our amateurs to artists they commend themselves. They have just these qualities which in amateur work are generally wanting, decision, force and expression. In the female head there is no attempt at finish, but the character is given; you feel that there is an individual soul looking out from the face, this is the first and highest characteristic of true portraiture, and it is the rarest.

The study of peaches' is evidently a sketch from nature, rapid and masterly. The drawing is free, bold and again expressive. Notice the poise of the leaves, their foreshortening and force of light and shade. There are no pretty meaningless flourishes or blotches (called suggestive, because they suggest nothing), but in every line and tint there is intention, purpose-see that peach, the rich dark side showing in full light and the light yellow side in shadow; note how by presentation of true colour the dark side of fruit expresses sunlight, and the light side expresses shade. We see some admirable and highlyfinished fruit-pieces on the walls, but nothing so graphic and true as this sketch-an opinion in which ninetenths of the public, who look first for finish will not concur, but which the few, who really see nature and care for truth, will recognise as being correct.

Close to the peaches' is a picture of a fair girl with a kitten in her arms; beside her is a table on which is a saucer of steaming bread and milk, which the struggling kitten devours with greedy eyes; the whole picture says, without looking at the title in the catalogue, Patience Puss, too hot.' Here again is expression, with admirable drawing, delicate colour and high finish. We do not need to look at the name of the artist to know that it is Mrs. Schreiber's, and to recognise those qualities which give such value to her teaching in the school of art. Another of her pictures, further on, and entitled A box on the Ear,' is better still, but as the artists have secured it for the Ontario collection, there will be opportunities enough to enjoy it by the sight of the eye, which is better than the hearing of the ear.

ART.

-It is curious to notice with what tenacity we cling to shreds and patches of superstition long after we have learned to boast of our deliverance from such a degrading thraldom. A not inapt illustration of this occurred the other day, when one of our best Judges felt bound to reject evidence which was tendered in a case of some literary interest, on the ground that the witness did not possess the amount of religious belief required by law to warrant its acceptance. I am not at all impugning the correctness of the law thus laid down, but I should like to expose its fallacy. Blindness itself cannot refuse to see that the number of intelligent, educated men of good morals and well conducted lives, who refuse to believe in a future state of existence or a superintending Providence, is on the increase. I am not discussing the religious aspect of this vital question, nor giving any opinion whether it is a thing to be glad or sorry at; but, I ask, is this growing and already important class to be kept under a stigma and a ban, and to be denied

the privileges of citizenship even in the smallest particular? Such conduct, disguise it as we may, is but persecution after all, and, like all persecution, is apt to recoil upon those who inflict it. Who knows but your dearest interests, my fellow-guestyou who feel inclined to uphold the present law in all its bare absurdity— may not depend some day on the testimony of such a man as I have described? You may be accused of the foulest crime, charged with the grossest fraud, attacked by the vilest extortioner, and the only man who could expose the conspiracy against you may perchance be your moral, respectable neighbour, who lives much like other men, except that he does not attend church or chapel. The basest hypocrite may kiss the book' against you -a priest-ridden slave, who believes his next absolution will wipe away his premeditated perjury, may appear in the box to condemn you-even the degraded being who holds belief in transmigration of souls will pass the test, and his word be thrown into the opposing balance. But the most intelligent, straightforward atheist who, while denying Our Saviour, does his best to carry out His moral precepts and imitate His blameless life-he may not be heard!

By all means keep the temporal punishments for perjury; even relax, if you will, those restrictions by which a conviction for that crime is rendered almost unattainable, but if a witness refuses to pledge his faith in a future state of rewards and punishments, let him be asked no more than this-' Do you believe it wrong to tell an untruth, will you, do you now, promise to tell the truth between these parties?'

A kindred subject suggests itself to me. I mean the decision of our Court of Queen's Bench in Pringle v. Town of Napanee, in which it was held that Christianity was part of the law of the land, and consequently that a town council that had let their hall to a lecturer, could refuse him the right he had bar

gained and paid for, on discovering that he intended to deliver a freethinking discourse. This appears to me a contradiction in terms. Can that be law which cannot be enforced in its entirety The dicta and statutes, to the contrary, were framed in the spirit of the good old times' when the Church could enforce its claims with the Statute de hæretico comburendo and a net-work of Courts of Conscience; when its hierarchy were barons of the realm, and heresy was practically unknown. Thanks to the long struggle of our fathers against an infallible Church, Church Catholic or Church Anglican, those days are past. We are content to live in one empire, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mussulmen, Buddhists and even the despised Atheist all abiding under the same laws. Parsee youths study at English Universities. Jews have sat, since 1858, in the House of Commons, and have adorned the English judicial bench. Surely it is time that all this childishness were swept away and town councils left to protect themselves in their bargains without calling in the aid of a foreign, obsolete and barbarous law to excuse them from an intentional breach of a deliberate contract. F. R.

-That the clash of moods known as good-humour and peevishness, merriment and 'the blues,' lies at the root of much of society's wretchedness will be readily conceded to the writer of the note on Moods' in last month's 'Round the Table.' It may be true that family harmony and fireside happiness are not dollars and cents; but the abundance or scarcity of the latter has a vast deal to do with the presence or absence of the former, so far as these are influenced by the mood of paterfamilias. A good day's business, or a series of 'bad debts,' will often make in his case all the difference between a cheery home circle or an atmosphere for the evening of sullenness and gloom.

'To make a happy fireside clime

For weans and wife,

That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.'

Such homely felicity is often unconsciously reached when the rosy light of unembarrassed success tinges all a man's surroundings with brightness. But wife and weans are generally the first to suffer when business difficulties obscure his sky, and when mental worry has unstrung his nerves of finer fibres.'

That the recent, and indeed the present, condition of the financial and commercial world has occasioned sombre moods in many fathers of families whose merchandise, like Antonio's, ordinarily made them not sad, needs not occasion surprise. Reverses of fortune have been many and startling amongst us in the past five years. And who shall tell the aggregate of the household miseries brought about by these? Not alone the change of home and station, stepping down from affluence to almost indigence, which is one of the hardest trials for human nature to bear. But the lesser worries, not the less truly miseries, of growing impecuniosity, the frettings over expenses, the repinings for accustomed luxuries which the ruin that impends must surely deny, these may, to a philosophic mind, appear unworthy causes of distress, nevertheless, they are very common ones.

It may be interesting to see how far such reverses are the fruit of wrong methods and false economy, and also to ask whether the last estate, humbler though it be, of many who suffer these vicissitudes, is not better than the first, so far as rational and sober enjoyment is concerned.

Let no one take offence when we say that we are an extravagant people; vainly expensive, wasteful, profuse,' such is the definition of the word. It is a prevailing fault of this continent, and we are no worse in that respect than our American neighbours, if we are as bad as they. In our domestic economy we waste at a rate that would

drive a Frenchman crazed; in business matters we dissipate profits in expenses that would bankrupt a German ; in our charities, in our civic matters, in our very amusements, we are prodigal of money to a degree that frightens the Scotch and even the English.

This extravagance is at the bottom of much of the dejection under which commercial men and matters are labouring the world over. Overproduction, to fill wants created by an artificial and wasteful mode of life, has been succeeded by glut and stagnation. Then the mercantile host and the mercantile machinery are, in this country at any rate, too great for the trade to be done. As an American humorist said of us, referring to Dundreary's conundrum: 'It is a case of the tail wagging the dog, and the dog is getting fatigued.'

If the dictum of Swift be accurate, that economy is the parent of liberty and ease, then the freedom and comfort of the present generation must be the offspring of the economy of our forefathers, for assuredly economy such as ours of the present day is barren. 'Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with its necessaries' had become the cry of the age. True it may be that in some quiet farm houses, and in not a few frugal families, prudence, and the sense of fitness, have been able to preserve the even tenor of their lives and of their expenditures, unvexed by a desire for dainties beyond their means. But the idea is wide-spread upon this continent of the inalienable right of every body to eat, drink, wear the like articles, and to engage in the pursuit of happiness by the like expensive modes with any one else, no matter what that one's station or his income. If Fitz Herbert, who inherits ancestral blocks and marries money, takes his bride to Quebec and Cape May for a wedding trip, returning via New York (Brevoort House or Fifth Avenue understood), Smifkins must take his Susan a similar round, doing the swell'

places with equal expense if less elegance, and regardless of the bills he owes his livery man or his washerwoman, whom he avows his inability to pay because of this very marriage jaunt.

It is no uncommon experience, we are told, of those unpleasant and unpopular functionaries whose business it is to take possession of one's effects when one is no longer solvent, to find that the sum of the debts due by small tradesmen or retail shopkeepers to picture dealers, booksellers, jewellers, and wine merchants, form a rather surprising proportion of the total of their obligations. Even the farmer, that bone and sinewy personage, whose interest has been studied, whose prosperity promised, and whose vote cajoled by Grit and Tory alike, has succumbed to the prevailing rage for finery. The story is told of one, who, when his land was being sold under mortgage, and his creditor wonderingly asked how he came to have spent $600 for a Chickering upright piano, instead of paying his debt, answered: 'Well, my gurl went to the 'Cademy a hull year, an' she can whip the Squire's daughter all round the stump singin' and playin', an' I jest thought she was entitled to a first-rate pianny a durned sight more'n that high flyer of a girl that hadn't no voice at all." The question whether he could afford the instrument seemed never to have entered his mind.

We cannot go back to the simplicity of the good old days, as some would have us; the conditions of modern life are too much changed by recent discovery and invention. Nor, is it in every sense desirable that we

should, for there are many ways in which life has been made easier' of late years, and that not in the sense with which Mr. Craggs found faultthe reaper, the thresher, the sewing machine, the street car, the locomotive, are real blessings. As for the genuinely rich amongst us, save for the force of their example, it does not matter how freely they spend their money or their time. Or rather, indeed, as Geo. Wm. Curtis lately said, Mockery as it may seem, we doubt if, in such a straightened period, the rich can spend too much, can burn their candle at both ends too fast, for when the rich cease spending great enterprises languish and die, and with them those whom these influences keep at work.'

Still, a little more consistency and wholesome self-denial in the use of our modern privileges, would tend in a marked degree to the financial comfort, and the rational happiness as well, of our middle class. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there,' says the 'Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,' whose contented man's sentiment was:

I only ask that fortune send,
A little more than I shall spend,

There was political and social economy, as well as deep morality, in the advice of that man of experience in difficulties, Mr. Micawber, when he stated that if your expenditure exceed your income by even over one-eighth of one per cent.-to translate from his florid language into the phrase of 'the street'-the result is misery, 'and in short you are floored.'

ALEX.

Ocean Wonders, a Companion for the Seaside. By WILLIAM E. DAMON. New York: D. Appleton & Company; Toronto Hart & Rawlinson.

Tremely interesting subject. Putinto

This is a very readable book on an ex

the hands of the holiday school-boy, who is about to inhale his first sniff of sea air at some of the Gulf watering places, it may be the means of exciting him to habits of enquiry and research that would otherwise have remained latent, and may even prove the slight but effectual cause of development of some future Gosse.

Mr. Damon has found, in a rather extended experience, that kindred works written by English naturalists are hardly adapted for use in the different climate and amidst the varying forms of life that obtain on the east coast of the United States.

The present work may be said to be open, in some measure, to a similar objection here, for the marine animals, fishes and plants which he describes so graphically are chiefly those of the New York coast, varied by the addition of the group which is found on the rocky shores of the Bermudas. Yet even with this draw-back Mr. Damon gives us much material of considerable assistance to the amateur, and notably the very practical and sensible chapter on the constructing, stocking, and management, of fresh and salt water aquaria. We must also have a good word for the freedom of conceit which appears in this book. If Mr. Damon does not know the scientific name of such or such a plant or crustacean, he simply says so, describes it and passes on. Readers of books of popularised information will agree with us that this is a feature as pleasant as it is rarely met with.

The book is profusely illustrated, but the cuts are by no means of equal merit. They vary from that of the Sea-Anemones on page 8, which is about as bad as it well can be, to some of the drawings of fishes and shells, which are clear

and effective and occasionally very forcible in their execution. The plate showing the curious "lasso cells of some of the Actinia, with their wonderful arrangement of noose and coiled filament, is delicately executed. It is, we suppose, to save work for the engraver that this and similar plates appear in the form of white lines on a black ground, but this is to be regretted both on account of the heavy and unsightly ap pearance it gives to the page, and also because of the smaller amount of detail of which it is susceptible.

While referring to this page (12) we would draw attention to the fact that the name of the sub-kingdom to which these anemones belong is spelt Cælenterata, not Colenterata.

The Fairy Land of Science, illustrated ; By ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY. New York, D. Appleton & Co.; Toronto, Hart & Rawlinson. 1879.

When we mention that Miss Buckley occupied for some time the enviable post of secretary to the late Sir Charles Lyell, our readers will be prepared to hear that this little work shows a very intimate acquaintance with modern science. But while the author, no doubt, owes her knowledge in no small degree to her scientific surroundings, her power of easy and graphic explanation is altogether her own. It would perhaps be almost as difficult for some of the great scientists whose discoveries Miss Buckley lays under contribution, to adapt their teaching to a child's understanding, as it would be for the lady to make such researches for herself into the mysteries of nature. There is however a very noticeable and marked improvement in the style of writing employed by scientific men now-adays over the stilted and elaborately ill-constructed sentences which were too often the literary garb that clothed the thoughts of great philosophers in the last century; and if our Huxleys and Tyndalls continue to improve at the same