through one of her ladies, he says, 'The remembrance of that audience, and the thoughts that spring out of it, are often present with me in the House of God, and still more are they with me when I bend my knees in private, and ask Him to bless our Sovereign.' It is to the same occasion that the following little anecdote refers. On returning to Cambridge, Sedgwick was accosted by a lady: You have been to Court, Professor, since I saw you last.' 'No, madam,' he replied, 'I have not been to Court: I have been to see a Christian woman in her affliction.'

We have left to the last a special notice of the most fascinating part of the volumes before us-the large collection of letters addressed by Sedgwick to his nieces and other young ladies with whom he had formed intimate and delightful friendships. For the mixture of lively narrative, wise counsel, and overflowing playfulness, we do not know any bundle of letters to surpass these. He did himself an injustice when he once wrote to one of his fair correspondents, 'Ever since I was fifteen (for more than half a century) all young ladies have been to me a most amazing puzzle;' for he certainly knew the way to their hearts. Of what is best in woman, the conception which he loved to impress upon them may in these days of advanced ideas wear an old-fashioned look, but perhaps may be none the worse for that. 'Simplicity, humility, and charity,' he used to say, 'are a woman's best graces.' But 'dragonesses of blues' were little to his taste. I think I have heard it said,' he remarks on one occasion, that a good woman might have her stockings as blue as you like, only she ought to have petticoats long enough to cover them.' He voted in the

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minority against the extension to girls of the local University examinations, thinking that the plan will be a mere steppingway to the puffing of second-rate forward chits and Bloomers;' and it is on record that in Hall, after the grace had been carried in their favour, when a brother Fellow remarked, 'I never could have believed that the University would have sunk so low as this,' he replied, 'No, indeed! nasty forward minxes, I call them!' A well-informed woman was the object of his admiration, and to his dearest Isabella' and his darling Fankin' he gave many instructions in the art of mental cultivation; but, between what he wished them to become, and the woman that tries to ape the man, he drew a strong line of demarcation. When pouring out to Lyell his denunciations of his special bête-noire, the anonymous Vestiges of Creation,' which for a time he thought must be a woman's work, because of the gracefulness of the externals' which covered its inner de

formity

formity and foulness,' he gives full expression to his view of woman's rightful sphere :—

'She longed for the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and she must pluck it right or wrong. In all that belongs to tact and feeling I would trust her before a thousand breeches-wearing monkeys: but petticoats are not fitted for the steps of a ladder. And 'tis only by ladder-steps we are allowed to climb to the high platforms of natural truth. Hence most women have by nature a distaste for the dull realities of physical truth, and above all for the labour-pains by which they are produced. When they step beyond their own glorious province, where high sentiment, kind feeling, moral judgments most pure and true, and all the graces of imagination, flash from them like heaven's light, they mar their nature (of course there are some exceptions), and work mischief, or at best manufacture compounds of inconsistency. The mesmeric dreamer and economist in petticoats is, I think, no exception to this remark.'

At the same time he welcomed the 'petticoated bipeds' to his lectures, and the account he gives of them to one of his fair favourites is delicious :

'Do you know that the Cambridge daughters of Eve are like their mother, and love to pluck fruit from the tree of knowledge? They believe in their hearts that geologists have dealings with the spirits of the lower world; yet in spite of this they came, and resolved to learn from me a little of my black art. And, do you know, it is now no easy matter to find room for ladies, so monstrously do they puff themselves, out of all nature, in the mounting of their lower garments, so that they put my poor lecture-room quite in a bustle. Lest they should dazzle my young men, I placed them, with their backs to the light, on one side of my room. And what do you think was the consequence? All my regular academic class learnt to squint, long before my course was over. If you can't understand this, come and see for yourself; and I will promise you that when you set your foot in my lecture-room, and sit down with your back to the light, you will make them all squint ten times worse than ever.'

The little gallant turn at the close of this extract was very characteristic of Sedgwick. To another of his correspondents he writes,' Had I not been born forty years too soon, I would have made love to you in such an ardent manner that you would surely have been melted, and I should have carried you in my arms to the altar-rails.' But if not so ardent, the following specimen of excellent fooling in this strain is the prettier, and with it we must bring our extracts to a conclusion:

I have found your lost glove and now return it. Call therefore all your lady friends together, and tell them to rejoice with you. But it was cruel of you to ask for it, as it was the only glove of the

kind in my old College den; and indeed I had watched it and fostered it, with as much care as if it had been the big Punjaub diamond. Now that you have it, pray take care of it. Gloves have done much mischief-sometimes they have been symbols of love— sometimes of deadly hate and furious fight-sometimes they may have symbolized both love and hate-for purring and scratching are often close together. But these are mysteries I have long outlived. All I have to say is--take care of your glove, and keep it safe till the day a priest orders you to pull off your glove, and give your bare hand to the happiest man in England. . . . Had I been forty years younger, I should have cried out with Romeo, "Oh that I were a glove!" or perhaps I might have come with your glove pinned to the left side of my waistcoat, and asked you to wear the man that bore it so near his heart.'

Being such as this biography truly exhibits him, it is no wonder that Adam Sedgwick was the pride of his College, and the idol of his large circle of friends, down to the end of his prolonged life. If it was not given him to lay posterity under a lasting obligation, by bequeathing to it some epoch-making work which should be a possession for ever, the least that can be said is that in his own generation he filled his place nobly, and left many to mourn him whose lives had been brightened by his affectionate and playful solicitude, and their hearts strengthened in goodness by his wise lessons and fair example. Well would it be for the world if there were many more of whom it could be as truly recorded, as it is of him in the Cathedral which knew him so well, that in him met together an imperial love of truth, an illustrious simplicity of character, and an unshaken constancy in the faith.

ART.

ART. V.-1. L'Empire des Tsars et les Russes. Par Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. Paris, 1881 and 1886,

2. Pères et Enfans. Terres Vierges. Par Ivan Tourgéneff. 3. Journal de Marie Baskkirtsheff. Paris, 1890.

4. Open Letter to the Head of the Russian Synod, Privy Councillor Constantine Pobiedonosieff. By Hermann Dalton. Leipzig, 1890.

HERE is no subject, outside our own country and its belongings, which can be said to occupy, puzzle, and distress the English public more than what is heard of Russia at the present day. We hear of ever-recurring tales of injustice, dishonesty, and inhumanity; of the worst scandals, so far as we can learn, unrectified; of the worst corruptions regularly organized and recognized; of a nation with no backbone in the shape of a middle class; with an enormous army of soldiers, and an only lesser army of spies; with an automaton officialism which goes like clock-work, but marks only fraud and wrong; with a vicious and depraved noblesse, and an Imperial family guarded by double relays of police; and lastly, with an unrelenting body of conspirators-respecting nothing and fearing nothing-two stepping into the place where one has fallen. Russia, according to all this testimony, has reached a stage where it is impossible to foresee what she will do next. Nor is there any ancient spirit of gentleness and nobleness to appeal to, or hope to revive. Russia has no youthful Past. She has known no Crusades, no reign of Chivalry; and grand and generous traditions are as much wanting to her history as the Gulf Stream to her climate.

Curious is the present contrast between the two largest States in the world. A stranger will not be three days in the United States before he is asked on all sides what he thinks of America; he may live in Russia twenty years before he is asked the same question about her. Were he to start the subject at a dinner table, he would silence all present. And this from no invariable or distinct fear of consequences, but from ignorance, and habitual banishment of a topic which only the thinking few think about at all. Between these two facts of American inquisitiveness and Russian indifference, will be found that cause which all will immediately guess, and which consists simply in the far from unmixed good of freedom on the American part, and in the entirely unmixed evil of the reverse on the Russian.

No one has entered more profoundly into the causes and effects which are operating in Russia than M. Leroy-Beaulieu, Vol. 172.-No. 343.

I

well

well known as a distinguished journalist in the world of political enquiry. We announce nothing new in saying that Russia is cold, flat, and immense-three causes to begin with, from which the author deduces effects historical and national, alike novel and logical. Yet, enormous as is the territory, ninetenths of which are still so slenderly inhabited that it cannot be called peopled, the inhabitants presenting an amalgam of races unexampled in any other European country-there is a unity of climate, soil, aspect, and language, which no European State one-tenth the size can show, and which marks her emphatically for the home of one people. Nor is there any natural frontier or line of demarcation to limit her boundaries. Two great divisions of soil, and two great contrasts of climate, are the features which break the dead monotony of Russia. The northern half is almost unbroken forest, the southern half almost unbroken steppe; each strengthening the unity of the whole by being indispensable to the other; the north supplying the fuel, and the south the corn; both being alike, an unbroken flat. The forest zone commences from above Archangel, and extends in ever-widening breadth below Moscow to the neighbourhood of Kief; the tree-the larch-that can easiest bear the high latitude leading the way; followed in an increasing scale of variety by other members of the fir tribeespecially by the spruce; by the birch, the logs of which supply the chief firewood in St. Petersburg; by the aspen, the alder, and so gradually by the elm, the lime, and finally by the oak and beech of our latitude. Some portions of this forest region to the north and east hardly know the foot of man; for when the long terra firma of winter breaks up, summer converts it into a dismal swamp, through which the rivers find no current, and stagnate into myriads of boggy islands and myriads of shallow lakes. In the government of Archangel alone there are above eleven hundred of such lakes.

The steppe zone lends itself more to the use of man, though from its immensity just as little to his control. The great character of the steppe is that it is dry and treeless-the dryness unfavourable to the growth of wood, and the absence of wood increasing the dryness. Still, the fertility of the soil is such as in great measure to compensate for the want of water. If ever there was a paradise on earth for an indolent race, the region of black earth-the Tchernoziom—in latitude 53° to 46°, is that for the Russian peasant. No manure has yet been wanted to make it produce corn enough for the relatively large population which its conditions have attracted; with the increase of the one implement needed, Man, and he with fitting tools, this region