mon which he is prepared to launch, whenever he may have the chance, against a reprobate squire.

It

It has always been noted that in courts of justice you obtain some of the most vivid glimpses of local manners. I have noted several amusing instances in a remote country district with which I used to cultivate an acquaintance. frequently happens that judge, legal gentlemen, plaintiffs and defendants, are all on some terms of intimacy, and permit themselves a familiarity and license of language which would indeed astonish more regular courts. For instance, I have known of a magistrate who, being annoyed at the tone of a defending lawyer with whom he was on terms of chronic animosity, interrupted the legal proceedings by brandishing his stick and threatening to crack the learned gentleman's skull. One or two instances I refrain from quoting, but the following must be told. On a far-away county-court circuit a learned gentleman used to preside who was more noted for his goodness of heart and head than for an extensive technical acquaintance with the law. His justice was irrefragable, but his law was of the shakiest description. There was a clever young solicitor who used to plead before him; but Lawyer Jack, though a favourite with juries and much in legal request, was possessed by a fatal fondness for spirituous liquors. One day a rather important case was called on, in which Lawyer Jack had to appear. But, alas! he had made a beefsteak breakfast, washed down by ale, with his client, and had made a point of honour of liquoring up with all the witnesses. When Jack began his speech it became painfully evident that he was hardly in a condition to do full justice to his case or his client. The kindhearted judge, seeing how matters lay, adjourned the court for a quarter of an hour. Obviously the lawyer ought to have spent the time in holding his head under a pump, and have told a waiter to keep on uncorking soda-water until further notice. Injudiciously, however, he

went to the bar of the adjacent 'public,' and manufactured a mighty tumbler hot and strong. On resuming his speech, he smiled very inanely, and made a variety of very foolish observations. The judge then told him to sit down. Does your honour mean to say,' asked Lawyer Jack, with an expression of virtuous indignation, that I'm intossicated?' I mean to say,' mildly returned the judge, 'that, looking to all the circumstances of the case, and speaking to the best of my judgment, I hardly believe that you are in a fit condition to be permitted to address the court.' For a moment the lawyer maintained an attitude and look of wounded feeling and drunken wisdom. He then said calmly, 'I really believe that, for this once, your Honour is correct in an opinion.'

An extremely thoughtful and well-written essay was published last year on 'Country Towns,** the author of which strongly advocated that mitigated form of provincialism. There was an excellent saying by an excellent man: When I am in the country I believe in God, and when I am in London I believe in the devil.' This essayist endorses Mr. John Stuart Mill's complaint that society is crushing out individuality. He thinkswhich we altogether doubt-that residence in a country-town would obviate this. He says, acutely enough, that though people in London do not gossip like people in a small town, yet a London set gossip just as much as a country set. It might be added that in either one might so live as to defy gossip. He says that in the country we might have a simple natural life, and tells a town story: 'I know a man, suddenly raised by successful speculation above the life of an operative, who took a house and furnished a splendid drawing-room, which his wife used to exhibit to his friends, and then return with them to sit in a little parlour down-stairs.' We

*Country Towns, and the Place they fill in Modern Civilization,' Bell and Daldy.

believe this anecdote might be capped again and again in country towns, and the standard objection to perpetual provincialism is untouched-of its dreariness and stagnation.

Another instance may be taken as illustrating the narrowness and limitation of small provincial towns. Every market of metropolitan talent is regularly fed by provincial feeders. The vast majority of the men who, so to speak, come up to the surface of London life and achieve some kind of distinction, are men who have been drawn from the provinces by the irresistible London magnet. Such men achieve a distinction in London which it would be impossible for them to attain in their own provincial town. The local artist or the local poet are men who are misunderstood and derided. If by any chance the town should earnestly believe in its poet or its artist, that poet or artist is infallibly a humbug. The born genius is scouted by his townsmen. When all the world has recognized that genius, the native will continue blind and deaf to it, or perhaps affirm that it is altogether founded upon misapprehension and mistake. A prophet is without honour among his own kindred and in his own country. The prophet will therefore do wisely if he ignores his town, which will most certainly ignore him, and appeal to a larger audience and to wider sympathies. It hardly appears to us that our towns have progressed in this respect, or done anything towards wiping away this reproach. Lichfield is a provincial town which, in its literary aspect, is very favourably known to us during a portion of the last century. There appear to have been persons in Lichfield who were capable of recognizing the nascent genius of Garrick and the ponderous sense and erudition of Johnson. Kindly gentry in the cathedral close asked the young fellows to dinner, and did what they could to promote their views in life. We suspect that anything of this sort is now extremely rare. Still, those whose lot is cast in a provincial

VOL. XV.-NO. XC.

town may find many very excellent arguments to prove that their lot is the very best in the world; and, if they have the true savoir vivre, they may really make it so. Theoretically we admit the charms of provincialism, but practically we would desire to combine some slight modification. Let a man have the run of London in the season, the run of the seaside in summer and autumn, the run of the Continent when he wants a change, and for the rest of the fleeting year provincialism becomes a very endurable and praiseworthy institution.

THE WORLD OF LETTERS.

That voluminous literature that belongs to Abyssinian subjects has, we hope, received its culmination in the two volumes which Mr. Hormuzd Rassam has published, thinking it right that he, too, should have his say on a subject in which he was so greatly concerned. The volumes have caused some of the critics to study Mr. Rassam as a psychological subject, and to question, from internal evidence, whether he was the best sort of man to make the majesty of Britain intelligible to the barbaric mind. He has something more to say on the subject of Theodore's present of cows to Lord Napier: the Abyssinian cow threatens to be as renowned a beast as the Trojan horse. Also we are glad to hear that Mr. Rassam received a solatium of five thousand pounds for the hard lines he had undergone, and Dr. Blanc and Lieutenant Prideaux two thousand each. The last gentleman, on whom the honours of martyrdom were so nearly forced, will have peculiar reason to congratulate himself. When the war commenced, we were all gleaning stray facts discoverable about Abyssinia, but now there has been such a blaze of information about it, that an additional work becomes as burdensome as that additional penny in the income tax.

A great deal of deserved attention has justly been drawn to Mr. Wallace's new work on the Malay Archi

2 P

pelago.* It is in every respect one of the most genuine and thorough works of travel we have ever perused. Mr. Wallace returned home six years ago, but he has had many thousand specimens to examine and classify, and in these days of rapid writing it is gratifying to know that for so many years a work has been simmering in an author's mind. Travels, in these days, must be sensational, and Mr. Wallace's sensations are the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise, which appear in every variety of artistic illustration. The work has many elements of popularity, but Mr. Wallace's enthusiastic devotion to his favourite science, entomology, and the positive results at which he has arrived, will be peculiarly interesting to the esoteric circle of scientific readers. That devotion is indeed great. He dilates with joy over a superb 'bug,' and has given us a close description of his sensations of intense excitement when he discovered the Croesus butterfly. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I have felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.'

Those

who love ferns-and in these days who does not love them?-will read with envy and delight of fern-trees that raise their fronds thirty feet in the air. Mr. Wallace gives a very pleasing picture of many of the tribes, though a picture the reverse of pleasing is to be given of many other tribes, and thinks that some energetic missionaries might do much good, but then they must not be trading missionaries but men of a genuine stamp, like the Jesuit missionaries of Singapore. Mr. Wallace does not positively state what, nevertheless, his words imply, that accredited missionaries from Eng

*The Malay Archipelago; the Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise," etc. By Alfred Russell Wallace. Macmillan.

land are also traders. Mr. Wallace's great object was Natural History, but his remarks on the ethnology and physical geography of a remote region so rarely visited by travellers are exceedingly valuable. The archipelago, as a whole, is comparable with any division of the globe it is, indeed, a broken-up and dismembered continent, and it has islands larger than France or the Austrian empire. There are many interesting evidences to prove that the great islands of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, at a recent geological epoch formed part of the Asian continent, and the other islands form a distant division approximating to Australia and New Guinea. Mr. Wallace divides the inhabitants into Malay or yellow, and Papuan or black; but we are somewhat surprised at his identifying the Papuans with the Polynesians, as the prevalent ethnological opinion identifies them with the Malayans. He has a striking description of the wonders of a coral sea; but he maintains that the animals and plants of the tropics are not more brilliantly coloured than those of the temperate regions. He draws a contrast between savages and civilized beings which is by no means flattering to civilized beings. We think that Mr. Wallace shows to least advantage when he deserts his proper path as a scientific observer. During his residence in the archipelago, Mr. Wallace independently worked out that idea of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, which is known almost exclusively as Darwinism.

The Earl of Carnarvon is so justly celebrated in society and in politics, that any publication of his, however slight, is sure to excite a large measure of personal interest. He has edited the diary of his late fathera nobleman as distinguished for his accomplishments as for his retiring disposition-in a most complete and meritorious 'manner, most ingeniously dovetailing his own observations on his father's narrative. As a picture of the land at the epoch of the Liberation, the diary is faithful and picturesque, and the

Earl of Carnarvon's own statesmanlike remarks on the present state of Greece have a real political importance. The community of Greek merchants in London, possess a high degree of social repute and commercial prosperity, but when they come to apply their abilities to the politics of their own country, the uniform result is failure and scandal. We trust that Lord Carnarvon will redeem the literary promise of this useful and pleasant little book by some work of independent authorship. He has a hereditary reputation to vindicate, besides his own collegiate, parliamentary, and social fame. The days of Philhellenism are over; and it is perhaps very doubtful whether the modern Greeks are, in any real sense, the descendants of the ancient Greeks; but at any rate the same scenery is theirs, and they are zealously trying to revert to the old language, and to keep in mind the historic traditions. In spite of the misbehaviour of the youngest, and spoilt, member of European families, those who take an interest in ancient Greece will feel an interest also for modern Greece. An article in the current 'Quarterly'-the author of which is aut Stanley aut Diabolas- Mr. Tozer's Researches in the Highland of Turkey,' is coupled with Lord Carnarvon's publication, and the reviewer praises Mr. Tozer's volumes as having 'the thorough taste of that rare quality, a genuine traveller:' a hint for collectors of books of travel.

receptivity, and must have time to assimilate and arrange its stores. Mr. Taylor is a most wonderful traveller; he has penetrated to the Arctic Zone, and Central Africa, has ransacked Europe, and is largely acquainted with India, Japan, and China. Although he speaks so modestly and unaffectedly of himself, he is, in truth, a charming writer of travels, thoughtful and observant, and possessed of a grace and force peculiarly his own. His present work on the 'Byeways of Europe ** will only cost his readers one regret, which will be found in its announcement that this is to be his last book of travels. He here brings before us his reminiscences of districts which, as a matter of fact, are not at all difficult of investigation to ordinary travellers but which ordinary travellers generally neglect on account of more frequented and fashionable localities. Thus he penetrated to Andorra, the little republic in the Pyrenees, with which the public is much less acquainted than with San Marino. He wished to visit Caprera, but Garibaldi, with a capriciousness which seems to belong to his character, refused to honour the strong letters of introduction with which he was furnished. He took a cruise on the largest European inland water, Lake Ladoga, so rarely visited, although it is easily accessible from St. Petersburg. So, too, few of the many persons who sail Lake Constance, or reach St. Gall, penetrate to the Little Land of Appenzell. Yet this isolated mountain republic, islanded in the territory of St. Gall, presents many points of interest, and struck the first blow for Swiss liberty. With a natural affinity, Mr. Taylor seeks out the simplest and most primitive forms of democracy. We think that he exaggerates-we are sure unconsciously-the unfrequentedness of the Balearic Islands. We have friends who go out there for the winter; and a few years ago there was a regular colony of English on one of the islands, owing to the construction of a railway. Again,

It can hardly, however, be questioned that in any classification of travellers, very few would have a higher place than Bayard Taylor. He, indeed, refutes a saying that has been ill-naturedly imputed to Humboldt respecting him-He has travelled more and seen less than any man living'-by the simple remark, that he has a letter of Humboldt to himself which would silence such an invention; but at the same time he ingenuously admits that he has seen more than he has been able to digest, and means to lay aside the mantle of the traveller and apply himself to culture. He says that the mind flags under a constant

* 'Byeways of Europe.' By Bayard Taylor. Sampson Low, Son, & Co.

not many of the tourists who visit Moscow so time and adapt their visits as to take the railway to NijniNovgorod, and become acquainted with that great fair, which there, by a thousand links, mingles Europe and Asia. Here he took some of the famous caravan tea-and only the best and costliest is brought overland-but he thought he had had better in New York. He noticed that some persons took about thirtythree teas in the course of the railway journey. Winter-life in St. Petersburg' hardly comes within the title and scope of his work, but we should indeed be sorry to lose these vivid pescriptions of court life in Russia. It is a pleasant change to turn from Mr. Taylor's northern to his southern experiences, and we hardly know which we like best. He is a true cosmopolitan, and has infinite powers of adaptation. When, at breakfast, red mullet came upon the table, and oranges fresh from the tree, I straightway took off my northern nature as a garment, folded it, and packed it neatly away in my knapsack, and took out in its stead the light, beribboned, and bespangled southern nature, which I had not worn for some eight or nine years. It was like a dressing-gown after a dress-coat, and I went about with a delightfully free play of the mental and moral joints.' Mr. Bayard Taylor is rather a disillusionating writer. He describes a beautiful girl with her indolent happiness, her fine, regular, almost Roman profile, her dark masses of hair, her graceful attitude, her impressible eyes, 'a phantom of delight but for the ungraceful fact that she inveterately scratched herself whenever and wherever a flea happened to bite.' Mr. Taylor is the most remarkable traveller of the day, Lady Franklin perhaps excepted.

Several biographical works of importance have appeared, or are promised, or are threatened. We confess that we are disappointed with Mr. Black's translation of the Life of Leopold the First,' so far as it has appeared. King Leopold, we observe, was fond of repeating a sensible saying of Lord Palmerston's -that, to be in perfect health, a man

ought to be in the open air for four hours a day, and he appears to have acted on the conviction. Sir James Clark was a fashionable physician, with more solid merits than generally belong to his class; he did very much, also, towards the construction of a science of climatology. His life of such a broad-minded reformer in the treatment of lunacy as Dr. Conolly will be read with much interest, especially in scientific circles. Mr. Forster's 'Life of Walter Savage Landor' is so important that we must seek to return. to it separately.

But the critics are all just now sharpening their wits and their pens on Mr.Lecky's new work; and people who pride themselves on intellectual conversation have certainly derived from it both a stimulus and a subject. Mr. Lecky's first work—on an Irish subject-attracted no attention, but his 'History of Rationalism,' published a few years since, was a great success, and after Mr. Gladstone had quoted it, was regarded as almost classical. We may observe, by the way, that Mr. Trench's 'Realities of Irish Life has several times received the meed of parliamentary praise and quotation: a work not of much substance, but valuable for its vivid and trustworthy narratives. Mr. Lecky's new work on the History of Morals* will, we think, be hardly so successful as its predecessor, although it is equally original in its design and brilliant in its execution. There is a voluminous literature of ethics, which has been chiefly occupied by the discussion of the conflicting theories of the two great schools of opinion on this subject. But we are not acquainted with any formal work that has examined the subject historically and tested the theory by facts of progressive history. This is what Mr. Lecky has tried to do, and he deserves infinite credit for the force and boldness of his attempt. Mr. Lecky shows the more courage, as he is opposing what is certainly the predominant school of thought on this subject at the present moment.

History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne.' By W. E. H.. Lecky, M.A. Longmans.