to get more out of her life by getting this man into its circle, nor, consequently, the smaller temptation to dress herself well for his eyes, and take little rides with him, and "subject herself to be spoken about, through an uncontrollable desire to hear smooth words in soft tones, and win much consideration from " her momentary idol. There was a touch of vanity in Kate Lethbridge, even, one perceives, of the lower vanity, that which is born not of self

depress rivals as well as to exalt oneself. And then comes Clarence Lyster, eldest son and Royal equerry, "happy Prince with joyful eyes," and curly golden hair, and with him also she incontinently falls in" love," that is, into a habit of admiring sympathy.

power of reserving judgment; but she did find him infinitely more engrossing than the parochial-minded yeomen, and other middle-class men, who never migrated, of the neighbourhood. It was the quality of managing his words with a due regard to both metre and meaning together, with a certain half-expressed carelessness as to whether people were pleased with him or not, which first attracted the girl's attention to Roy Fleming. There was a latent love of all that was intellectual in Miss Leth-appreciation, but of envy for others, the wish to bridge, a love that she was unconscious of herself as yet, for nothing had come before her to call it forth. From the bottom of her soul she adored brilliancy. She adored brilliancy; and anything approaching to verbal brilliancy was such a new thing to her, that what wonder if she accepted much of Roy Fleming's society talk, much of his happy, tricky, ear catching phraseology, as pearls of great price? . . . At times there was a vague unrest in the girl's soul a sense of desiring God knows whata moody, hopeless longing for a something, which she could not even grasp, to name and seek-and that something' was more satis-ognized the superiority and preferred the comfying mental sustenance than had fallen to her share. But as thought grew with her growth, the feeling that there was more to be got out of life than she was getting, or even likely to get, grew too, and she hungered for unknown realms of thought before she had ever heard of them. She craved, with a strong craving that would have frightened her father and mother, who had never suffered from it themselves, for companionship with those who had interests and ideas above the daily ones, which remained precisely where they were when she first began to be cognizant of them. The books she got were so very few-and so common-place-that they failed to please her. What wonder that she was disposed to take Roy Fleming's well regulated lamp for a regular sun, and to put him on a pedestal, from which it would surely give one of them pain to displace him?"

This handsome, sparkling, flattering young fellow, with a habit of lounging devotionally, and of speaking in a subdued tone, and of letting his lashes droop as he spoke, was a new type to Kate, and Kate had such a marvellous capacity for the pleasure of novelty. For every-day life, and for a permanence, she recpanionship of Roydon Fleming. Maurice Byıne interested her more deeply with his strange mixture of quiet and power. But the holiday portion of her nature the lighter, mere pleasure-loving part of her, sympathized with this bright favorite of fortune, who was the most perfect type of a curled darling whom she had ever seen. He embodied that description of the happy Prince with joyful eyes, and lighterfooted than the fox,' which she had often revelled in, acknowledging to herself that it would be no bad fate to be wakened from a dreamless sleep by just such a one, and to have the option given her of following him through all the world.''

Kate Lethbridge means no harm with any of these men, does not want to entrap them, still less to marry them, but their admiration excites her as music does, she is as sympathetic to them as to genius in poetry, luxuriates in their Kate really loves this man with her whole pleasant ways, and soft looks, and sweet words, heart, but he unfortunately being poor, leaves as she would in a wood fire, or a pretty room, her a little too free, so that when a really great or a striking scene, hums pleasure to each like literary light comes in her way she feels at a contented cat, and of course comes to grief at liberty to admire that also. This is Maurice last. Your genuine flirt, even of the highest Byrne, one of those persons whom authoresses kind, always does. There is a grain of selfishweaker than Miss Thomas are so fond of draw-ness in all true affection, a trace of distrust in ing, a splendid atheist, who believes nothing all love else why is it so near jealousy?. and does everything, witches women and never talks of his conquests, breaks-in horses and speaks with feminine softness, has no scruples in pursuit of his prey, yet keeps rigidly within certain self-made laws, a being, in fact, who may exist, but who seems much more like a cross between a real person and one of Guy Livingstone's imaginary heroes. He grows better as the story goes on, more natural and less wondrous, but this is how he first appears to Kate Lethbridge; and she cannot help worshipping him, cannot keep down her pride in his attention, cannot resist the great temptation

and a shade of forwardness in every flirt, and the jealousy and the forwardness react upon each other. Every worshipper is in some sort a lover to the born flirt, and she cannot stand on the minute proprieties, or respect the network of social bienséances, invisible as spider's threads, strong as the threads Maimuna wove, as the indifferent can. Kate cannot resist the temptation to bid Maurice Byrne farewell at the railway station, steps into the carriage for a short final chat, and, the train starting, is carried away to London; terribly compromised by the forgetfulness of a moment. Maurice Byrne

offers to marry her on arrival, but she will not | fruits of her marvellous good fortune, and to be married out of pity; her father dies of her imaginary shame, dies ruined; Roydon cannot reknit his broken trustfulness, though he tries hard; and Kate Lethbridge, as a governess in a vulgar London family, feels and confesses that she is "played out.' Hard measure, male readers will affirm, but Miss Thomas, womanlike, amidst her clever pleading for her heroine betrays some faint dislike of her, gives the impression that if she met Kate Lethbridge in the flesh she would analyze, and coax, and fool her to the top of her bent, and then rap her smartly, not without a little viciousness in the pat. Perhaps she is right. There is something of treachery in a flirt, even of this kind, something of cold-heartedness, something even of immodesty, and it is good she should suffer; but still this particular specimen is so pleasant, has been so pleasantly described, is so full of kindliness, and niceness, and capacity for loving, that the reader half regrets her sentence, half wishes the author had led her through the fire into a pleasanter land.

The rest of the story is the biography of Mrs. Petherton, née Nellie Collins, a sketch of country life bitten in with aquafortis. It is a powerful but unpleasant account of a vulgar woman, vain, bitter, talkative, and aspiring, who marries the rich son of a gin distiller, and tries in vain to fight her way into the society of her county. The penalties she endures, and the lies she tells, and the miseries she inflicts in pursuit of her mean object are admirably recounted, so admirably that somebody must be smarting by this time under a sense of being found out; but other authors could have drawn her. We are not sure that others could have drawn Kate Lethbridge, could have limned every turn of her head and emotion of her heart with the patient, loving, acid accuracy displayed in the three volumes of Played Out. Mrs. Petherton, with her contempt for her husband and reverence for rank, and indifference to truth, and contemptuous love for her sisters, and snaky viragoism, would alone make a good story; and she is very inferior, both in conception and execution, to the affectionate, truthful, daring little high-caste flirt, Kate Lethbridge.

From the London Review, Nov. 24. BARON RICASOLI AND THE TEMPORAL POWER.

As the day for the evacuation of Rome by the French troops draws near, the lightest words proceeding from Paris or Florence possess an interest which is hardly lessened by the fact that they may only repeat what we have heard before. The settlement of the Roman question is now the only act requisite to give to Italy the repose necessary to enable her to reap the

convince the world that its sympathies have not been lavished upon a nation unworthy of them, by exhibiting in the prosaic avocations of peace the same fortitude which has distinguished her in war. And though there is not in this question a great military power to be driven from Italian soil, it has difficulties of its own which require the highest judgment and tact in dealing with them. It is part of the programme of the Italian kingdom that, while it is opposed to the temporal power, it recognizes in the Pope the chief of the Roman Catholic religion, and it cannot be a matter of indifference to the Italian Government that, when the time comes for the temporal power to disappear, it shall do so in a manner which shall not leave Italy open to the reproach of having falsified its professions. But apart from this consideration, the September Convention binds it to resist any danger to the temporal sovereignty of the Pope which may threaten it from without. And from the circular which Baron Ricasoli has addressed to the Italian prefects on the development of order in the interior of the kingdom, he has not failed to warn them that "all agitation having for pretext the Roman question must be discour aged, prevented, and repressed."

Still it is equally clear from the language of the circular, that this position of neutrality is all the more willingly assumed, because the Italian Government doubts not that the Pope will have soon to reckon with his subjects; and it contains words which read almost as an incitement to the latter to take the reins in their own hands, or at least as an intimation that what remains to be done in order to perfect the fabric of Italian unity must be done by them. "The Sovereignty of the Pope," it says, "is placed by the September Convention in the position of all other Sovereigntics. Italy has promised France and Europe to remain neutral between the Pope and the Romans, and to allow this last experiment to be tried of the vitality of an ecclesiastical principality without parallel in the civilized world. Italy must keep her promise, and await the certain triumph of her rights through the efficacy of the principle of nationality." It is impossible to misunderstand such language as this, and there can be as little doubt that both by the French and the Italian Governments it was the very object of the September Convention to raise this issue. The Moniteur du Soir cites this circular as a reproduction of "the ideas so often expressed by the Government of the Emperor, whose efforts have always tended towards reconciling the national aspirations of the Italian Peninsula with its religious sentiments." These words will dissipate whatever apprehensions the friends of Italy may have had that the Emperor would at the last moment find an excuse or a pretext for prolonging the occupation of Rome. Indeed, the same pen might have traced them which wrote in the Florence circular, that though "the double capacity of the Sovereign Pontiff furnishes some persons with a motive

for confounding the political with the religious | against them in Hunan, and they are to be question, and disturbing with doubts the con- swept from the face of the Flowery Land. sciences of the timid," still that "the Italian Their country is fifty thousand li from China, Government does not desire to lessen the inde- beyond a triple ocean; from that distance their pendence of the spiritual chief of Catholicism." lives cannot be avenged, so the village elders are The stage is thus cleared for the performance invited to collect the populations to exterminate of a new act in the drama of Italian unification, them. This is the purport of an address, of and whatever is to be its issue it certainly be- which we to-day give a translation, that has gins with pacific demonstrations. The clergy been extensively circulated through Hunan and of Venetia, the higher dignitaries especially, the adjacent provinces; whether emanating have rejoiced with the people over the liberation from a too-enthusiastic patriot or from a tea of that province, and their participation in the man who has made a bad bargain, it is difficult national joy has had no slight effect in soften- to determine. In either case it has obtained ing asperities in other parts of Italy between wide notoriety, having been observed by a forthe laity and clergy. Baron Ricasoli's circular eigner on the walls of a city in Kiang-si; and permitting the return of the exiled bishops to the fact that it has not been suppressed would their sees, and bearing testimony to the defer- appear to indicate at least the absence of offience shown to the Administrative authorities cial disapprobation. Feeling, of course, quite by those who had already returned, is again a careless as to its origin or effect, foreigners will proof that the gulf is being narrowed, and raises still peruse the proclamation itself with interest, the hope that it may eventually be closed. It as indicating the degree of obliquity with which is, again, to be observed that we do not now it is possible that their character may be reperceive signs of that feverish desire to hasten garded, and the source whence a large portion events by violence, which has been so conspic- of the odium attaching to them arises. Their uous throughout the history of Italian liberation. presence in Foh-kien and Chekeang, in KiangThe National Committee will, probably, be soo and Shantung, and above all their invasion content to bide their time, and wait until the of the metropolis is galling certainly; but their current serves; and, certainly, nothing could subversion of the morals of the people by inculbe more fatal to their prospects than the repeti- cating a new religion, is insisted on as the great tion of such a tragedy as that which, in 1848, grievance. "Those who have come to propaprecipitated the Pope's flight from Rome. Nor gate religion, enticing and deluding the ignorant must we, in enumerating the tokens of a grow- masses, are the prominent objects of attack. ing good-will between interests so long es- They "set loose the established bonds of sotranged, forget that though the Pope still bitter- ciety, deliberately practise their perversions in ly reproaches the enemies of the temporal pow- open day," and trouble and disturb the feelings er, he has not withheld his blessing from Italy. of the people in all quarters. Against missionIn the beginning of his pontificate he showed aries, and the iconoclastic religion they teach, how well he could share its aspirations, and are the thunders of the proclamation principally how thoroughly Italian he was at heart. If directed, two points being especially selected for Italy has achieved its unity without him, it attack, the endeavours to subvert established certainly owed to his liberal policy twenty years custom, and the incongruities and absurdities ago one of the strongest impulses it ever re- of the new doctrine. Most of the arguments ceived. Nor is it by any means certain that directed to expose the latter, may be passed by the events which have occurred since that epoch as starting from wrong premises, and therefore have entirely silenced the patriotism which easily refuted. But in the fifth clause of the made him and Charles Albert so personally category, a joint utterly unprotected by harness popular. There is therefore, we would hope, a is disclosed. reasonable prospect that the last of Italian questions, and in some respects the most delicate, already begins to present a facility of solution as the time approaches for the departure of the French troops. Nothing will then remain when this difficulty has finally been disposed of, to prevent Italy from reaping that plenteous harvest which must spring from the blood of her patriots, if those who have been left to complete the national work will only labour in the same spirit of self-denial and selfdevotion as those who went before them.

From the North China Herald. FOREIGN RESIDENTS IN CHINA.

THE doom of foreign residents in China is evidently sealed. A jehad has been proclaimed

"Although the adherents of the religion only worship Jesus, yet being divided into the two sections of Roman Catholics and Protestants, they are continually railing at each other, so that we have no means of determining which is right and which is wrong."

It is only necessary to conceive an attempt by two Buddhist priests-each differing from the other on every point of doctrine to convert England to the prevailing religion of the world, in order to appreciate the incongruity in the eyes of an intelligent Chinaman of two missionarics preaching different forms of Christianity. Literally, in the eyes of a heathen, the doctrines preached by Protestant and Catholic must appear two different religions, concentring only in one Divinity; and in this grave error, of attempted conversion to a sect instead of a principle, lies one secret of the comparative