out by a co-operative workshop, he objected that this would make reconciliation impossible; when they thought of petitioning Parliament to prohibit lock-outs as a logical corollary of legalising strikes, he observed that Parliament was more likely to renew the restraints upon the men than to impose them upon the masters; his only positive suggestion was that gave way. thought was the doctrine that creeds deliver from systems, to which he was led by the peremptory exclusiveness which had seized upon the Unitarian congregations since the days of Priestley and Belsham. It has curious analogies with the doctrine of the famous Bampton lectures on the Limits of Religious Thought (which oddly enough were first denounced to Mr. Maurice by the present Archbishop of York), that an historical revela"an unconditional surrender might be the right way of showing the brute force there was in tion does not admit of dialectical criticism or capital, and of bringing the case of the work-logical development. He is sorry to read of ing-men fairly before the public, as a struggle one "Mr. Mansel's Carlton Club and Oxford of human beings against mere money power." Common-room yawn, ''Pon my soul, I can't see why evil should not last for ever if This was worthy of a man who ten years it exists now.'" But Mr. Mansel was the later seriously thought of resigning his living only one of his contemporaries to whom Mr. by way of attesting his belief in the Pen- Maurice was really unjust, though he judged tateuch. A wiser resolve, which, upon the Dr. Pusey too exclusively by the "Novatian" whole, he kept, was not to be Gamaliel any tract upon baptism, which led Mr. Maurice to more, as the little boy said when the pyramid separate himself from the Oxford writers of stools on which his brother (who wanted whom he had just approached with his to play Saul at his feet) had perched him up pamphlet "Subscription no Bondage." As a rule, he judged more reasonably than most men of his contemporaries; he overrated them all as compared with himself; he did not overrate one man as compared with another; few more penetrating things have been said of Mill than this, à propos of his article on Bentham: "The circumference of his thoughts is enlarging continually, I wish they had a centre; " or of Carlyle than this: "He believes in a God who lived till the death of Oliver Cromwell." Another remarkable trait is the affirmation that Marriott and Manning, whom he thought the completest man he knew, had managed Sterling better than he did. He never ceased to reproach himself for parting from Sterling when Sterling parted from orthodoxy. He parted in another way from other friends. When they were promoted he feared to compromise them, as he feared to compromise the Church if he were promoted himself. In 1856 we find him congratulating Dr. Trench heartily on his appointment to the Deanery of Westminster; in 1860 he no longer knows what he thinks. The Christian Socialist movement had other results than abortive newspapers and industrial associations, of which the most conspicuous was a tailors' work-room that turned out bad coats; it cemented some almirable friendships between working-men and members of the educated classes; it contributed to Mr. Slaney's Act for industrial partnerships, and it turned Mr. Maurice out of King's College, to the great regret of Sir Benjamin Brodie. It is obvious that, in spite of his "cholera of resignations," Mr. Maurice might have kept his ground under even such a Principal as Dr. Jelf, even after publishing the Theological Essays, if he had not alarmed the Council by standing sponsor for Parson Lot. The curious point in the controversy was that Mr. Maurice early recanted, and never re-asserted, the Unitarian dogma of Universal Salvation, and sacrificed his position to a suggestive gloss on the word aiovios, which would hardly have been generally condemned if it had been generally understood, and which, when understood, yields but cold comfort to those who find the traditional doctrine too distressing. Mr. Maurice did not care very much for comfort; he always thought his own feelings very cold; he almost thought it an open question how far eternal life involved happiness; and he was content to leave a door ajar. He was aware of this himself, and he could not agree with Mr. J. M. Ludlow, who said "a Christian ought to build, and not to be always looking for foundations." He half fancied that it was Kingsley's mission to be a builder, not a digger; but, even in his case, he was jealous lest he should waste upon Biblical criticism powers that might be devoted to the question how, if God be the Father of men, they can be made His children in baptism. Though Mr. Maurice always remained obstinately aloof both from natural science and historical criticism, the two factors which have done most to transform contemporary beliefs, it is clear from his letters that he made the fullest allowance for both; they did not touch his own faith, which rested on assertions which met his needs, and could be most easily explained by thinking them true. Perhaps his most characteristic and lasting contribution to Cheyne tells his readers that his aim has been "Jehovah, who shall be a guest in thy pavilion! "God is our refuge and stronghold, fully proved as a help in troubles, Therefore will we not fear, though the earth should change, and the mountains sink into the heart of the sea." Again (civ. 1, 2): "O Jehovah my God, thou art very great, Thou hast robed thee in glory and grandeur. He wraps himself in light as in a mantle, he stretches out the heavens like a tentcurtain." Ps. iv. 8: "In Only here and there does a phrase strike us as less felicitous-e.g., to quiet for ever It is no easier now than ten years ago to (ci. 5, 8). But, as a whole, the version is forecast Mr. Maurice's place in ecclesiastical admirable, and betokens in every line the history. The Cambridge revival of orthodoxy anxious pains that have been bestowed upon owes more, and more directly, to him than the it. We had collected several illustrations Oxford revival owed to Coleridge. Perhaps of Mr. Cheyne's keen and delicate percep he may be remembered longest in something tion of Hebrew idioms, but it must suffice the same way as Herder-not so much for any to quote two or three. work he did, as for the ideas and tendencies peace will I at once lay me down and sleep. which he was the first to bring to a head. If for thou, Jehovah, makest me dwell alone in these, too, are forgotten at last, he would safety; " xi. 3: "When the foundations are deserve to be remembered for the radiant being cast down, what can the righteous do?" victory that he won over the despondency eiv. 25: "Yonder sea, so great and stretching that he inherited from his clear eyed mother, on either hand therein are things moving and the inconsequent disputatiousness that he innumerable, living creatures both small and inherited from his generous father-by the great." The reader conversant with Hebrew happy home life of one who could say "the may refer further to xxvii. 2; xxviii. 8; beginning of months is not the honey-month, xxxi. 5; xxxvii. 20c (rhythm); 1. 3, 6; those which follow are much brighter and lxxv. 3; lxxvii. 6; lxxxix. 21; xci. 10; sweeter, and that even when the clouds exxxix. 8, 9; here, and often besides, he will gather" for the fragrance of the courtesies find Mr. Cheyne's crisp and vigorous English which shrank from thanks, for the picty which reproducing with surprising fidelity the exact hid itself so cunningly from sight. nuance of the original. G. A. SIMCOX. Mr. Cheyne's volume, however, is more than a mere translation of the received Hebrew text. Internal evidence combines with the testimony of the ancient versions to show that the text of the Old Testament has not in all parts descended to us in its original purity; and, though it is often casier to point to the corruption than to suggest the cure, the evil may undoubtedly be to some extent relieved by the help of the ancient versions and a temperate use of conjecture. The attention of critics has latterly been much directed towards the text of the Psalms. The suggestions of Hitzig and Lagarde have been before the world for many years; recently, however, emendations have been proposed on a more comprehensive and systematic scale. The brilliant Professor at Breslau, Dr. H. Grätz, author of the principal modern History of the Jews, completed only last year his Critical Commentary on the Psalms, which gave proof that proposals for the correction of the text flowed with only too great readiness and originality from his pen. And a learned Roman Catholic scholar, Dr. Gustav Bickell, in his researches on the metrical form of the ancient Hebrew poetry (which he conceives to have been analogous to that used afterwards in the early Syrian Church), has been led to study minutely the text of the Psalms; and his Carmina V. T. metrice (1882) abounds with textual changes, mostly, to be sure, suggested by presumed necessities of the metre. Dr. Bickell's volume has not received in England the notice that it deserves, and we hope that Mr. Cheyne's translation will have the effect of calling attention to it. It is not our purpose to pass judgment in detail on the conjectures adopted by the translator. To the present writer they do not all appear to be necessary; but it may be said safely that out of the abundant materials provided for his disposal Mr. Cheyne has made a judicious selection. He has been principally influenced by the authority of Dr. Bickell; but the emendation adopted has in many cases had the approval of preceding commentators, and not unfrequently is supported by one or more of the ancient versions -.g., xxxi. 6, xxxiv. 5, xlix. 11a, lxxiii. 7. The boldest emendation (following Bickell) is the one in Ps. xlv. 6; in this and other cases where words supposed to be missing are supplied, the restoration depends in great measure for its probability on the prior question of the validity of Dr. Bickell's metrical theory. Mr. Cheyne has not told us whether he accepts this. One of the neatest and most convincing conjectures is the one due to the late Duncan Weir, in Ps. lxxxviii. 1, where, by the supposition that a single small letter has been accidentally repeated, a verse scarcely translateable becomes at once coherent and clear. The attention bestowed upon the text forms such a distinctive and important feature in Mr. Cheyne's work that it is a pity space has not been found in the notes to indicate the authorities for the textual changes adopted. Indeed, even the changes themselves are not indicated more closely than by a minute sign at the beginning of the psalm in which they occur, so that the unlearned reader has no means of discovering whether he is reading an improved version of the existing text or the translation of an emended text. Sometimes, moreover, the sign itself does not appear where it should-e.g., at Ps. xxv. (see ver. 17), Ps. lii. (see ver. 9), Ps. lxv. (see ver. 5). We venture to express a hope that in a second edition these inconveniences will be remedied. A few words only remain to be said on the Introduction and notes. In the Introduction the religious significance of Hebrew psalmody, as well as the chief literary features distinguishing it, are briefly, but justly, sketched. A few pages tell the reader all that he need know regarding the steps by which the Psalter arrived at its present form, and provide him with a reasonable answer to enquiries respecting authorship and date. The notes are carefully framed with a view of indicating the scope of the several psalms, and of explaining such expressions as really call for illustration. The theory that many of the psalms are written in the name of the personified nation (p. xii.) seems to us to be resorted to more often than is necessary (e.g., in Ps. xvii.); still, there are no doubt instances in which it is eminently truthful and probable, and where its application solves more than one difficulty adhering to the common interpretation. Doubtless in such cases Mr. Cheyne would admit (though he has not said so distinctly) that the thought and feeling were at the same time truly the Psalmist's own, and that the salient features in the delineation were supplied by his own experience. May we presume to suggest that a future volume of "The Parchment Library" should be devoted to the Book of Job? This does not occupy nearly as much space as the Psalter in the Hebrew Bible; so that notes and illustrations might be added with a less sparing hand. There is no book of the Old Testament in which Mr. Cheyne's guidance would be more valuable; and a volume dealing with it in the spirit in which he has dealt with the Book of Psalms would deserve, we are sure, the same warm and grateful commendation. S. R. DRIVER. Cowdray: the History of a Great English House. By Mrs. C. Roundell. (Bickers.) MRS. ROUNDELL could scarcely have chosen a more charming subject, for the park which surrounds the ivy-clad ruins of Cowdray, with its sunny glades and stately avenues of limes and Spanish chestnuts, is the very type of English sylvan beauty, while the heirs of this fair scene have been dogged by a fate so melancholy and mysterious that the story of their lives is as interesting as a romance. Cowdray was the name given to the crenellated mansion built by the lords of Midhurst for their residence in the thirteenth century, when the Norman keep on St. Anne's Hill which their ancestors were contented to inhabit was found incommodious. It is quite likely that the old castle was ruined in the Civil Wars between Henry III. and his barons, for, although the date of the fabric is commonly attributed to the reign of Edward III., it is certain that Cowdray was the family residence when John de Bohun, who died in 1281, mortgaged his estates to the Bishop of Durham. This, however, is one of the points on which Mrs. Roundell was misled by the historian of Western Sussex, for the true history of the Bohuns of Midhurst has still to be written. The story of Midhurst and its owners prior to the reign of Henry VIII. is dismissed with a single page of scanty notice, and this brief account is disfigured by several errors. For example, Savaric, to whom Henry I. granted in 1102 the castle and manor of Midhurst on the forfeiture of Robert de Belesme, was not Savaric de Bohun, but Savaric fitz Cana, a cadet of the Beaumonts, Vicomtes of le Mans, who married the heiress of the Norman barony of Bohun. Again, Camden was wrong in saying that the Bohuns of Midhurst were "hereditary sealers of the King's briefs and sergeants of the Chapel Royal," because these offices were the irheritance of Joan de Capella, wife of John a Bohun, and her husband lost no time in resigning them into the hands of Edward I. Again, there is ample proof that Sir David Owen, who married Mary Bohun the heiress of Cowdray, was a natural son of Owen Tudor, the grandfather of Henry VII.; but it is equally certain that he was not his son by Queen Catherine, because she died in 1437, and we have Sir David's sworn statement that he was born in Pembrokeshire in 1459. His wife Anne, the sister of Lord Ferrers of Chartley, who survived him, was his third wife, and not his second wife, as Mrs. Roundell has it. It is an error of more importance to say that Sir David had no children by Mary Bohun, because if she had not borne issue her husband's interest in her lands of inheritance would have determined on her death, and neither he nor his after-born son could have made a good title to a purchaser. The fact is that it was Mary Bohun's son and heir, Sir Henry Owen, who sold Cowdray, subject to his father's life estate, to Sir Wm. Fitzwilliam. The mansion, which is the subject of this volume, was built by the Earl of Southampton, and completed by his half-brother and heir, Sir Anthony Browne, the standard-bearer of England. It was a bad omen that one of the first inmates of the new house was the stouthearted Countess of Salisbury, who was Lord Southampton's prisoner there until the relics found in her chamber at Cowdray were made the pretext for her cruel execution. The next owner, Sir Anthony Browne, married Anne of Cleves as proxy for Henry VIII.; and his portrait in the dress which he wore at the marriage was one of the glories of the picture gallery, which perished in the great fire of 1793. He was enriched out of the spoils of the Church; and among the suppressed houses of religion, which the King lavished on his favourite was Battle Abbey, in Sussex, which Sir Anthony made his chief residence. He was solemnly warned that "a curse of fire and water" would pursue from generation to generation the plunderers of the Church. But the knight, who had no scruples in demolishing the great_cathedral church_at Battle to make a pleasure-garden and a bowling-alley, would take little heed of such predictions. Time, however, has proved the truth of the old saying that the Church is never robbed with impunity, and that the day of retribution for sacrilege comes sooner or later; so that when the mansion of the Brownes was burnt down, and two generations of the heirs of Cowdray were drowned, it was believed by more than the vulgar that the old curse of fire and water was at last being fulfilled. It may well be believed that its fulfilment had been retarded for several generations by the piety of Sir Anthony Browne's immediate descendants. His son and heir, who was created Viscount Montacute by Queen Mary, was one of the two peers who had the courage to oppose in Parliament the Act to separate England from the communion of Catholic Christendom. He was as loyal to his Sovereign as to his religion, and in his old age was conspicuous among the host assembled at Tilbury Fort to repel the Spanish invasion. He retained Queen Elizabeth's favour, notwithstanding his refusal to acknowledge her as head of the Church, and the Queen stayed with him at Cowdray on a visit of six days in 1591. She was feasted right royally, and at breakfast each day three oxen and 140 geese were consumed. His grandson, the second Viscount, was wise and discreet beyond his years, for he was only twenty-three years old when he compiled his famous book of regulations for the government of his family and household, which enables us to realise the splendid housekeeping and wellordered magnificence of the greater nobility in the olden time. Lord Montacute was accused of being privy to the Gunpowder Plot, for Guy Fawkes had been at one time in his service, and it was a suspicious circumstance that by his own admission he had intended not to be present at the opening of Parliament. He had, however, a powerful intercessor at Court in his father-in-law, Lord Dorset, and escaped with a fine after forty weeks' imprisonment in the Tower. The younger brother of this great noble was a lay brother in the Jesuits' house at Liége, where he set an edifying example of holiness and humility. When the plague broke out in that city in 1637, he nursed the sick poor until he caught the infection and died a martyr of charity. The third Viscount suffered doubly in the Civil War, as being both a Catholic and a Cavalier; and it was a sorry recompense to the family that his son, the fourth Viscount, was appointed by James II. Lord Lieutenant of Sussex during the brief period of Catholic ascendency. He died childless in 1708, and his brother who succeeded him was a fugitive from justice. The fifth Viscount was at once profligate and superstitious, and, when the Sacraments were withheld from him until he reformed his life, in his fury he shot dead the priest who refused him absolution. It was an aggravation of his guilt that his victim was slain at the foot of the altar; and, although there was no prosecution, the murderer never ventured to show himself in the light of day. It was given out that he had gone abroad, and was among the Catholics at St-Germains; but, according to local tradition, he really spent the last years of his life in the priest's hiding-hole in the keeper's lodge at Cowdray. He never went out except at night, and the mysterious stranger who was seen walking in the avenue at midnight was taken for a ghost. The first act of his son and successor in 1719 was to sell Battle Abbey when the family removed to Cowdray. It was during the life of the sixth Viscount that Horace Walpole made his pilgrimage to Cowdray, and recorded his admiration of the pictures there. The seventh Viscount modernised the mansion with execrable taste, but in spite of this restoration Dr. Johnson was impressed by its old-fashioned splendour. "I should like," he said, "to stay here twenty-four hours. We see here how our ancestors lived." This Viscount married the Protestant widow of a Scotch peer, and was induced to abjure the Catholic religion, which enabled him to take his seat in the House of Lords; but on his death-bed he sent for a Catholic priest to reconcile him to the Church, solemnly declaring that he had conformed to the Establishment not from conviction of its truth, but from worldly motives of ambition and interest. He died penitent; but his children had been educated as Protestants, and were lost to the Catholic faith. His only son, the eighth Viscount, threw away his life at the age of twenty-four in a mad attempt to shoot the falls of the Rhine at Laufenburg. He was warned and remonstrated with in vain; but it seemed as if he were being hurried to his doom by an irresistible fate, for he literally wrenched himself away from the grasp of his old servant, who tried to hold him back. He had scarcely disappeared in the whirlpool when a messenger arrived from England with the news that Cowdray and all its treasures had been burned to the ground, so that by a strange fatality the mansion and its lord perished in the same week. But the avenging curse was still unappeased. The Viscount's only sister, who now succeeded to his estate, married Mr. Poyntz, and had two sons. Her mother was firmly convinced that her son had been the victim of the curse, and that her grandsons were pursued by the same inexorable fate. It was constantly on her lips, "I know it will come to them as it came to my boy." She died in 1814; and before twelve months had passed her forebodings came true, for in July 1815 both boys were drowned on a fine summer afternoon in the sight of their parents. The title had passed on the death of the eighth Viscount to a remote kinsman, who was a friar at Fontainebleau. He was presumed to be the last of his race; and, in order to save the family from extinction, he was dispensed by the Pope from his vows of celibacy. But it was in vain, for, although he married in 1797, he died in the following November without issue. The title has never been claimed; but, if we may believe a strange story, which was published in the Reliquary of April 1865, and which is not without some evidence to support it, the peerage has for more than two hundred years belonged of right to a family of masons and small farmers living at North Wingfield, in Derbyshire. They claim descent from the eldest son of the third Viscount, who died in his father's lifetime, and (as it was supposed) without issue. He was taken prisoner at Marston Moor, but contrived to make his escape into Derbyshire, where he supported himself by the labour of his hands, and founded a family. His son was not in a position to contend with his father's brother, who had succeeded to the title and estates in ignorance of his nephew's existence. He was contented, therefore, to register his pedigree and to wait for his uncle's death. He died, however, before him, and his descendants have from time to time asserted their pretensions so far as their poverty and obscurity allowed. If this story be true, all the Viscounts since the third have been usurpers. But this might easily happen in the case of a Catholic peer who was excluded from Parliament, when we know that the Barony of Willoughby of Parham was enjoyed in error by the descendants of a third son from 1679 to 1765, although the second son had left issue, who were eventually admitted to the succession. Cowdray was sold in 1843 by Mrs. Poyntz's daughters to the sixth Earl of Egmont, and it has since descended with the earldom; but no son has ever succeeded his father, and it has notoriously not proved a lucky inheritance to its new owners. Mrs. Roundell is too discreet to tell tales of her neighbours, and therefore makes no allusion to the succession of the Earls since the purchase, or to the lawsuit by which the estate was rescued from the clutch s of an Irish money-lender. But there is no scandal in quoting from peerages and law reports; and she tantalises her readers, after working up their interest to the highest point, by breaking off her narrative in 1843. This charming book is so valuable a contribution to the history of Sussex that it sounds almost ungracious to suggest that it deserves a better Index, and that the first chapter might be rewritten with advantage in the next edition. EDMOND CHESTER WATERS. Japan. By J. J. Rein. (Hodder & Stoughton.) THIS book is the result of travels and researches undertaken at the cost of the Prussian Government in the years 1874 and 1873. Prof. Rein deserves to be congratulated upon the satisfactory conclusion of so large a portion of his gigantic task, which was nothing less than to gather together, arrange, and digest all obtainable information on all subjects connected with Japan. The present closely packed volume of 534 pages is of the nature of an encyclopaedia. Although we are informed in the Preface that each single chapter is, with the exception of the historical portion, the result of the author's own observations and of researches based upon them, Prof. Rein has evidently not neglected any written sources of information or the labours of previous travellers and men of science. So intent is the author to produce his conclusions in the tersest manner that, but for a paragraph here and there, it would be possible to read the book without realising that it was a record of personal travel. The aim of the Professor has been to present a complete scientifi picture of the country, and in this he has succeeded to a far greater extent than any other writer with whom I am acquainted. To review, in the ordinary sense, such an enormous and compact mass of information is hopeless. It would tax more than all the space at my disposal to give any but the barest outline of the contents of the book. It is divided into two portions, one of which deals with the physiography of Japan, the other with the Japanese people. The former section comprises the geology, the orography and hydrography, the climate, the fauna and flora, of the country; the latter, a complete summary of the history of the people, their ethnography and topography; and under ethnography are included chapters on the language, the habits and customs, and the religions of the Japanesc. A later volume is to be devoted to such mineral productions as coal and kaolin, and the branches of art and industry which are based upon them. The present volume is confined to what may in the largest sense be called the natural history of the country and its inhabitants; the second will be occupied with art and manufactures. Such a comprehensive task as that of Prof. Rein would have ended in failure in the hands of an author who to a sound scientific training did not add remarkable powers of arrange ment and a clear, terse style. As a mere that tiger-hunting is a profession. But Westminster School, Past and Present. By literary effort the book deserves very honour- from wherever the Japanese derive their Frederick H. Forshall. (Wymans.) able notice. Everything is in its right knowledge, the artistic insight with which OLD Westminsters will be grateful to Mr. place, and the large army of facts are so they have divined its character is one of the Forshall for supplying a want they have long drilled and mobilised that they proceed most remarkable phenomena of Japanese felt of a complete work on the school, comcontinuously without hitch or hindrance. imagination. In other words, the work, though preserving account of its bining its history and an the exactness and dignity of a scientific present state with the personal experience of treatise, flows slowly but pleasantly from an old Queen's scholar. The Alumni Westbeginning to end, and is far more easy to monasterienses, carried down by Mr. Charles read than the nature of the matter would lead all the King's and Queen's scholars up to that B. Phillimore to 1852, gives a full account of one to expect. The author has full command of his subject, and also, apparently, of the date. Several writers, such as Lord William English language. The translation is, indeed, Lennox, Lord Albemarle, and Sir George by another hand, but all the proofs have Dasent, have given us graphic descriptions of passed under his own; and the English their own school-days; but these, however edition, we are informed by himself, is not amusing, are fragmentary. The two volumes only a new but a revised one. of the Lusus Alteri Westmonasterienses, compiled and edited by those most accomplished scholars the late Mr. James Mure, Mr. Henry How careful Prof. Rein has been that the English reader may study his work with the same ease as that enjoyed by his own countrymen is shown in many ways-in none more than the pains which have been taken to find the popular English equivalents for those of the animals, trees, and flowers whose scientific or Japanese names are capable of such translation. It is all the more pleasant, because little to be expected, to find in such a work how many of our familiar wild flowers may be met with in the blooming upland prairies of Japan. In these mountain meadows (called The Hara) the reader, with Prof. Rein for his guide, may walk surrounded by violets and pimpernel, bluebells and scabious, milkwort and bugle. Nor is it less easy to picture the feathered inhabitants of the Japanese woodland. While apparently bent on little more than a catalogue of facts, the author gives plentiful aids to any imagination which desires to construct a semblance of a world that is unknown. Of the scientific portion of the volume, it is in the chapter on geology that the author most deplores the imperfection of his material, and it is here that we come upon an almost solitary instance of ambiguity in statement. The description of the mountain chains (p. 29) does not seem to be perfectly clear. Yet this part is, on the whole, well done and interesting. Even readers of no profound scientific knowledge will be interested to learn that, notwithstanding the abundance of Japanese work in metals of all kinds, the mineral wealth of the kingdom (save in coal and iron) is not great, and that there are no traces of an Ice age discoverable throughout the islands. tigers. Nor is the book without many other facts which will appear worth gathering by those and they are the large majority) whose interest in Japan and knowledge of it are mainly based upon its art-products. It will seem to such remarkable that the bamboo, which enters so largely into all its decorative work, is not found in Japan in an uncultivated state. Still more surprising is the absence of Although the Japanese artist has never mastered the anatomy and foreshortening of this animal, he yet draws it more accurately and with a thousand times more spirit than the artists of Hindostan and China. Indeed, the rarity of the animal in Chinese art makes me doubt the opinion of Prof. Rein that the Japanese derive their notions of the savage beast from China. Is it not probable that Corea was their master in this as in pottery? There, it is said, tigers so abound The summary of Japanese history which forms the second part of the volume is founded upon the same sources as many other summaries of the same kind which have been published of recent years, and is necessarily very similar to them; but, so far as I have been able to compare it with others, it seems certainly one of the most able and readable. It is only when it comes to very recent times that there is reason for slight dissatisfaction. The great social and political changes which have taken place since the abolition of the Shogunate are indeed described with clearness, but in a somewhat summary manner. They are, however, so mixed up with the strange problems of the present and the future that Prof. Rein may reasonably have thought that enlargement on such topics was not quite in character with the main object of his book. The section on ethnography is full of interest and knowledge carefully gathered and arranged. It is to be regretted that so careful an observer as Prof. Rein should not have visited Yezo. His account of that province, and consequently of the Ainos, would have been more valuable and probably more full if written in the light of personal experience. It seems uncertain whether the author has read Miss Bird's delightful account of her sojourn in this strange land. If he had done so, could scarcely be doubtful as to the continuance of the curious bear-worship. In one page of his volume he speaks of it as though it were obsolete; in another he recounts he it as existing. Following Doenitz, Hilgen- Bull, and Dr. Scott (the late head-master), the fight between John Erskine, afterwards The late Mr. James Mure once told the present writer that he remembered this fight perfectly, and the Princess looking on, holding on to the railings, and even how she was dressed in a tight pelisse, with red collar and cuffs. One of the most valuable parts of Mr. Forshall's book is his full account of the challenges"-that peculiar form of examination conducted by the boys themselves on This chapter has now, alas! an antiquarian each other, which decided who should gain the foundation scholarships, and in what order. the present generation, are now abolished, and interest; the challenges, which survived till the present generation, are now abolished, and with them a very potent means of forming good and accurate scholars and ready thinkers tinctive mark of Westminster teaching, the and speakers has disappeared. Another dis Too great thanks could scarcely be bestowed upon the care, the learning, and the patience which have gone to the production of this book, which will probably remain for a long time the fullest and most trustworthy of works also due to its illustrations. They are not very of reference upon Japan. A word of praise is many nor very beautiful, but they are useful. The frontispiece is a group of Japanese types, every one of which is well distinguished. By the view of "Subashiri, at the Foot of Fuji-no-Yama " we are enabled to form a good notion of the appearance of a quiet Japanese village; the next illustration is a photograph of one of the celebrated cryto-study of Hebrew, has been also abolished. meria avenues near Nikko; a photograph of It does, indeed, seem perverse that at a time the tomb of Iyemidsu follows. After this when the number of subjects taught in the we have an engraving which enables us to school is increased, so important a one should be withdrawn. Does a love of change lie at appreciate the enormous strength of the walls of one of the old castles; and not the the bottom of this? least interesting of the set is a photograph of one of the curious, highly artificial temple gardens which makes us think that the artist of the willow-pattern plate must have been a realist of the most extreme type. COSMO MONKHOUSE. The life of a Queen's scholar during his junior year forty years ago was hard, but it was a wholesome hardness. Mr. Forshall makes effects of this discipline, and remarks that some interesting observations on the healthy "youths of the present day are in marke degree more conceited, more brusque, more hero of the novel is a plain man, cast in no heroic mould, but who can slowly perceive what the right thing to do is, and can bring himself to do it, though not ungrudgingly. He has been disappointed in early life both in ambition and in love, but at the age of fifty there seems a prospect of his ward bringing sunshine into the steady evening of his days. Her heart, however, has already been given Perhaps the author has overloaded his book with his voluminous list of distinguished old away, and Mr. Whittlestaff painfully, but manfully, recognises the one course left open Westminsters, which is not free from repe- to him. There are stronger and more elaborate titions, yet he has forgotten Charles Abbot, pictures drawn by the same hand, but the Speaker of the House of Commons. The suc- Rev. Montague Blake is an addition to the cession of eminent men in every walk of life author's long portrait-gallery of country and which the foundation of Westminster, limited cathedral clergy; and, though we have known to forty boys, has, from the age of Elizabeth, old housekeepers like her before, we are glad continued to produce is a matter for admira- to meet Mrs. Baggett and listen to her lectures. tion. We attribute this to four causes- While written with vigour and directness, (1) that Westminster was always a working, the almost total absence in the two volumes never an ornamental, school; (2) the ad- of those shrewd and half-humorous disquimirable system of teaching; (3) the dis-sitions about men and things which the author cipline of college and its pre-eminence over loved shows that the stream was getting dry. the town boy part of the school; (4) the But there are one or two good things, neverhappiness of the school in her head-masters. theless, as the rector's sermon meditated under The names of Camden, Busby, Nichol, Mark- the beech-trees, and his friend who wonders ham, Vincent, and Carey must always be held whether "the sermon could be made to have in reverence. Westminster has produced four men of the very first order-Locke, Gibbon better in that case it would be." And Mr. some flavour of the beech-trees, and how much (he was not in college), Lord Mansfield, and Trollope has made good use as ever of the Warren Hastings. She is especially rich in knowledge of cities and men which he acquired poets; Ben Jonson, Cowley, George Herbert, in his official wanderings. The description of Dryden, Prior, Cowper, Churchill, and Southey society at the Kimberley diamond-fields is make a goodly list, to which may be added effective, and serves its place in the story the two Colmans. After this, it is only fair admirably. to confess that Westminster is responsible for Elkanah Settle. Westminster has furnished five Archbishops of York. As late as the year 1818 the Prime Minister and seven other members of his Government were West minster men. Had space permitted, we would gladly have touched on many other points of interest treated of by Mr. Forshall which we must now leave the reader to find out for himself. We must, however, call attention to the author's translations from the Latin of inscriptions, epigrams, and prologues to the play, which seem to us well and often elegantly done. WILLIAM WICKHAM. NEW NOVELS. An Old Man's Love. By Anthony Trollope. In 3 Poisoned Arrows. By Jean Middlemass. In THE last completed novel that Mr. Anthony select for their art. Bethesda is a clever book-perhaps too clever. It belongs both in manner and treatment to what is popularly called the new school of American fiction, and has been written under the immediate influence of such work as Mr. Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. It has all the defects of the school to which it belongs, and perhaps more than the usual lack of robustness. The conversation is certainly made brilliant here and there, but at the expense of ease and gracefulness; and the brilliancy is always hard and artificial. While the craving for a quasi-scientific precision of language has resulted in the plentiful use of such barbarisms as "ultimation." But the material which the writer has chosen is less commonplace than that which her countrymen often of the "elective affinities" in a milder and The theme is a repetition less passionate atmosphere. Bethesda, of course, is the travelled New England girl, conscious of high but vague aspirations, and touched with that fatalism which a sojourn in Eastern lands so often communicates. Her fate comes to her in the shape of a chivalrous French gentleman, living apart from a wife who had never been a wife to him, with whom she forms a literary friendship. They each think to assist the other unselfishly, and of course they resolve to create an ideal marriage of true minds for themselves, and not be "like other people." But the hero is in reality, though neither heroine nor author will recognise it, grossly selfish, only his selfishness is veneered over with refinement and delicacy. He is the first to fall, but is not long left alone. "Amor che a null' amato amar perdona." The story of Bethesda's trial, sufferings, and insight and sympathy; but the writer's oversubtlety sometimes betrays her into being obscure. The conclusion is not satisfactory, and, so far as René d'Isten is concerned, not probable; but the author has seriously attempted to realise her characters, and has largely succeeded. Besides the errors of style peculiar to its class, there are one or two other mistakes in the book. Could Bethesda possibly have lodged in the house at Florence where Beatrice lived? and would Folco Portinari's house have looked out over the Arno? slender thread on which a good many pearls The plot of Poisoned Arrows is a very of style and description are strung, to the evident satisfaction of the author. As for the characters, they belong to a good old-fashioned type-a beautiful heroine, a handsome and accomplished villain, and a blameless hero somewhat less handsome than the villain. There is a shadow resting on the villain's birth, which makes a kind of weak Edgar out of him. His machinations are abetted by the random gossip of an old maid, 64 Mrs. Smith's novel has a distinct, if not a very pleasant or probable, plot-an advantage which she does her best to conceal from the reader in the first volume and a-half by a great deal of irrelevant matter. Her style unfortu nately contributes to the same result. It is redundant and unchastened, full of exaggera tion, and abounding in strange and curious epithets. The small Berkshire farm where the heroine retires is described as a "luscious thirty acres;" and one of the fields is actually "white with mushrooms." There are very frequent apostrophes on subjects which perbaps deserve them, such as love and beauty. A young lady, who is constant as well as charming, is apostrophised thus: "Oh fair but thorny rose, the giant birth of a measureless fraction of time, the immortal bloom of eternity." It seems rather hard on a young lady who is all this to be subjected to the addresses of a young man who, by way |