speak of benevolence in such cases is simply to misuse the word. Where the social affections have been excited, where there is real interest in another's welfare, it is surely nonsense to say that the showing of kindness is not in itself a pleasure, although it may be conceded that a truly benevolent person will feel with exceptional keenness the suffering inflicted by ingratitude.

Another instance of what I feel tempted to call Dr. Bain's perversity is his manner of refuting the statement of "sensational writers" that everything is mysterious and wonderful. A mystery, he tells us, is simply a fact that requires explanation; and the explanation of a fact consists in showing that it is a particular case of a more general fact previously known. When we have pushed this process to its farthest limit, we must of necessity come to certain ultimate facts which are incapable of reduction to any more general principle. In relation to these facts, the word "explanation" is unmeaning, and the emotion of wonder with regard to them is an absurdity. It seems probable that, in spite of the author's veto, human nature will still continue to feel awe and wonder at the thought of the existence of the universe, or of the "mystery" of the union of body and mind.

Dr. Bain appears to greater advantage in the five essays which are more or less concerned with the subject of education. In the essay

on

in other deliberative bodies in which time is
often wasted on the discussion of crotchets
peculiar to one or two members.
HENRY BRADLEY.

History of the Irish People. By W. A.
O'Conor. In 2 vols. (Simpkin, Marshall,
& Co.)

EUGÈNE SUE once wrote the Histoire d'une
Famille Prolétaire. He showed how a Gaulish
household lived and worked under each suc-
cessive tyranny, from that of the Roman
legionaries to that of the farmers-general,
and how that life was a continual witness for
the right and a pledge of its ultimate triumph.
Mr. O'Conor does something of the same kind
for Ireland. The difference is that Sue's
book was a romance, this is a history. It is
conceivable that a family should last on
through all that the French novelist described;
it is the fact that a people has lasted on
through trials which give it a far better claim
than ever the Jewish people had to apply to
itself the language of Isaiah liii.

their lingering over more or less mythical glories which have nothing to do with progress, he is, above all, severely impartial. Whosoever they are-whether "Milesians" or Danes, adventurers of Elizabeth or of Cromwell, Orangemen or recreant Catholic lords, or absentee rent-drawers, who have made the religious, social, political, they have cloaked people their prey; under whatever pretext, their oppression-them does his soul abhor.

Mr. O'Conor starts by sharply distinguishing between the Hiberionaces (of St. Patrick), to whom he attributes not only the handicrafts but also the arts which made Ireland so famous in the world's art history, and the Scoti or "Milesians," as, with that unhappy distortion of classical names which defaces early Irish history as it defaces the pages of Gildas and Nennius, the native chroniclers have chosen to call them. Sociologically he is right in insisting on this distinction. Whether ethnology will bear him out in attributing a Norse origin to these milidh (for milites, not Milesians, should of course have been the name), and in assigning an Iberian (Basque) origin to the bulk of those whom they partly subdued, I cannot tell. One thing is cer tain: in the legends the dominant caste is light-haired and blue-eyed, while the dark race is described in terms nearly as opprobrious as those in which the Aryas on the Ganges stigmatised the Dasyus.

Mr. O'Conor's is a remarkable book with a remarkable title. We have Histories of Ireland enough and to spare, but none of the Irish people. Not that his book covers the whole ground; at the economic history of his country he only glances. I often wonder when some trained Irish writer will bring to This milidh was the type of all dominant "The Classical Controversy," and inci- the merchant-rolls of Kinsale and Waterford, castes since. Despising handicrafts and the dentally in that on "The Civil Service Ex- and to whatever other trade records are still older race that excelled in them, it set its aminations," he replies with considerable extant, the skill, and patience, and insight bards to sing of nothing but war and rapine, success to the arguments used by some of the which Mr. J. P. Prendergast brought to the and to involve even the popular saints in the defenders of Latin and Greek. He appar- confused mass of documents which he scorn with which it overwhelmed the people ently proposes to substitute for what is marshalled into life in his Cromwellian from whom they were sprung. Given up to called classical instruction the systematic Settlement. We want to know where and tribal quarrels as ceaseless as those which set teaching of history and of the world's best by what men was made that saia d'Irlanda Wessex against Mercia and both against literature through the medium of translations. which was such a prized article of com- Northumbria, it substituted the clan for the Whether this can be called a practical sug- merce before Norman freebooter and native nation, and by-and-by too readily adopted gestion is fairly open to doubt. The essay chieftain had fought one another back to from Mr. Froude's Norman "civilisers" the on "The Art of Study" is entirely excellent. primal savagery. Popes had mantles of it; worst features of what we call feudalism. I A brief notice is due to the two papers Florentines bequeathed garments of it as linger long on this point because it is allwhich conclude the volume. In the first of heirlooms; Plantagenet kings relaxed their important. It is thus that Mr. O'Conor these Dr. Bain advocates the entire disuse of edicts in its favour; and Ireland to-day clears away the nonsense about Celt and clerical subscription to creeds and articles. feeling that she must now again be a manu-Saxon and sets forth as his subject-matter the His reasonings will not be needed for the facturing nation, asks who among her sons people of whatever breed, and the fighters conviction of those readers who regard the gained this early glory in the world's markets. only so far as they have made common cause continuance of traditional beliefs with aver- Mr. O'Conor (like most thinking Irishmen) with that people. His sketch of early Anglosion or indifference. To those whose sym- feels that in the so-called Danish cities the Irish history is clear and forcible. Sir H. S. pathies are in the opposite direction, he mass of the population was native; and that Maine has shown how sad a thing for Ireland offers the argument based on the inutility of there it wrought and traded, heedless of the was this invasion which stopped her natural subscription for securing its professed object. strife of rival clans. He goes no farther; development just at the critical moment when The persons to whom this argument is but this hint is worth following up. Of one native family was becoming paramount. addressed are not likely to consider it his present work the main features are: Mr. Lecky has aptly compared the chronic strengthened by Dr. Bain's account of the dog-first, freshness of thought. Every idol of den aggression that followed the first inroad to a matic tendencies of those churches in which or market-place, to which English writers spear-head which keeps a wound rankling. subscription has been abolished. The last and their Irish imitators have bowed down, Mr. O'Conor probes this wound, and shows essay, on "The Procedure of Deliberative he overthrows. Every opinion which John what festering sores have grown out of Bodies," is occupied with suggestions for the Bullism has exalted into an axiom he it. Within his brief limits he tells all better despatch of business in the House of traverses. Next, thorough sympathy with the that need be told, brushing away as he goes Commons and in other administrative assem- English people. He is writing the history on the misrepresentations which we have blies. Many of Dr. Bain's recommendations of those who are still their brothers, often been used to accept as history. His account deserve careful consideration. Much waste of though they have been used as blind instru- of 1641, for instance, and his brief remarks legislative time would be avoided if it were ments in oppressing them. His quarrel is not about '98 I fearlessly commend to all fairfound possible to substitute printed questions with England but with Normanism, whereby minded readers. Yet he does not hide faults; and answers for the present system of oral inter- he means caste-spirit, which set up in the man who has the courage to confess: pellation-a change which has been advo- England, as in Ireland, a few as lords over cated by high parliamentary authorities. The the many, and prompted them to drown in "the readiness of Irishmen to be bought, not proposal to require several assenting members, the roar of foreign victory the cry of those but professional men, secretaries, and comthe untainted and unpurchaseable peasantry, instead of only a single seconder, before any whom they oppressed. Free from the be-mittee-men, has not been so much an agency motion can be debated, might with advantage setting faults of most native historians, from for the malice as a temptation to the virtue of be adopted, if not in Parliament, at any rate their easily explicable want of perspective, England,”

proves by such a confession that it is quite worth Englishmen's while to consider whether, in regard to other things, he is not right and their ordinary guides wrong. They will find in him a Christianity which ignores the narrow limits of separate churches, and a political faith which links him with those who are fighting everywhere the battle of progress. He is never backward in exposing servility even when those who gave way to it were Catholic lords and bishops; he makes it clear that true Irishmen will never allow their national movement to be degraded in the future, as it has been in the past, into a religious feud. He keeps well in view the cardinal truth, shuffled out of sight by those who confute our land reformers in an epigram, that "land was meant by Providence for the production of food, and not for the mere production of rent." He is strongly in favour of a Union, but it must not be a Mezentian one.

"The present so-called Union seizes on the advantages of a material junction for England, and imposes the disadvantages of a foreign conquest on Ireland. Clare and Castlereagh would never have ventured to say that the intention was to make Ireland England's grazing farm. . . . It was a union of Englishmen with Irishmen, and not with Irish cattle, that was proposed.'

As to taxation, he points out the gross unfairness of taxing Ireland to provide the bribes wherewith Pitt gained his end. A word about his style; it is everywhere adequate, incisive, marked with suppressed power, a model to his young countrymen, who sometimes forget the difference between writing and orating. The tenacity which over and over again fixes Mr. Froude in a dilemma is well matched with the remorseless logic which lays bare the radical weakness of Irish official Protestantism. On occasion he

with one who deserves to rank with Lecky
and Godkin, with Prendergast and Duffy,
with A. M. Sullivan and Barry O'Brien, and
with the rest of that band of scholarly his-
torians who have done their full share towards
their country's regeneration.
H. S. FAGAN.

The Unity of Nature.

By

indeed ultimately become convinced that species have been all born just as individuals are now all born, and that such has been the universal method of creation, this conviction will not only be found to be soluble, so to speak, in the old beliefs respecting a creative mind, but it will be unintelligible and inconceivable without them. So that men, in describing the history, and aim, and direction of evolution, will be compelled to use substantially the same lanthe Duke of guage in which they have hitherto spoken of the history of creation."

Argyle. (Strahan.)
THIS thoughtful work will be found of special
interest at the present time, for it mainly
consists of a re-statement with new facts and
illustrations, and by a writer well acquainted
with modern science, of that old teleological
argument for the existence of an intelligent
creator of the universe which is often repre-
sented as finally set aside by the result of
recent enquiries. Socrates argued that a statue
inferred the existence of a sculptor; Cicero
that the Iliad could not have come into being
without a poet; Paley that a watch must
have had a maker; the great principle of the
Unity of Nature is here made to show that
the origin of creation is due to a creating
mind.

The term "Unity of Nature" is explained

to mean

"that intricate dependence of all things on
each other which makes them appear to be parts
of one system. . . . That kind of unity which
the mind recognises as the result of operations
similar to its own, not a unity which consists
of mere sameness of material, or in mere identity
of composition, or in mere uniformity of struc-
ture, but a unity which consists in the subordina-
tion of all these to similar aims and to similar
principles of action, that is to say, in like
methods of yoking a few elementary forces to
the discharge of special functions, and to the
production by adjustment of one harmonious
whole."

Hence we are shown by many examples how
man, by both the extent and the limitations
of his own powers, can discern everywhere
within him and without him indications of
the presence of a mind at once infinitely
greater than his own, and yet kindred to it.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is that which deals with the instincts of animals and the manner in which we see in them those indications of adaptation and adjustment to a purpose which it is the object of the whole treatise to unfold. The following is a good example of the graphic manner in which this subject is illustrated. By the side of a river

"I came suddenly upon a common wild duck whose young were just out. She fluttered into the stream with loud cries and with all the struggles to escape of a helplessly wounded bird. The laboured and half-convulsive flapping of the wings, the wriggling of the body, the straining of the neck, and the whole expression of painful and abortive effort were really admirable. When her struggles had carried her a considerable distance, and she saw that they produced no effect in tempting us to follow, she made resounding flaps upon the surface of the water, to secure that attention to herself which it was the great object of the manoeuvre to attract, then rising suddenly in the air she made a great circle round us, and returning to the spot renewed her efforts as before. It was not, however, necessary, for the separate instincts of the young in successful hiding effectually baffled all my attempts to discover them."

This and similar examples of instinct naturally give rise to the question how does man's mind differ from the intelligence of the brutes. The Duke places the difference in the sense of obligation in the "two voices" of conscience, in the animals, while it "is never wholly wantof which he says that there is "no indication" ing in the most degraded of human beings."

can rise to chastened eloquence. Not even
Montalembert himself pays a nobler tribute to
the Irish missionary saints; not even Davis's
exquisite poem brings more pathos to the sad
story of Owen Roe O'Neil. I must quote a
few lines of what he says about O'Connell :-
"A constitutionalist by nature, and shocked
To that numerous class of persons who are
by the sight of the revolutionary excesses rendered vaguely uncomfortable by the
in France, he chose moral agitation as the doctrines of Darwin and the nomen horrendum
means of his country's deliverance. But his of evolution may be commended the study exactly as a child does in the same predica-
A dog, when caught in a fault, looks
peaceful struggle was conducted with the of chap. viii., in which the Duke proves from
shout and the onset of the warrior. He their own words that the men of science who ment; he can be "tempted" from his post,
roused, united, and informed his country; either directly or by implication deny the and we can imagine him saying in some dog-

men. He inspired one soul into Ireland, and
made it potentially a nation. His gait, as
evidence of design in nature are forced by
he trod the streets, was a challenge to men the necessities of human speech to use lan-
who claimed a servile demeanour as their due. guage which involves an admission of it.
We can scarcely now estimate his towering This is plainly shown from Darwin's own
character as he stood alone in the valley white words, on which the Duke remarks—
with the skeletons of centuries, and prophesied
upon them, and covered them with flesh, and
"Whether that theory [of evolution] be true or
sinew, and skin, and called the breath of free- not, it is a theory saturated throughout with
dom from the four winds to breathe upon them the ideas of utility and fitness, and of adaptation,
as the governing principles and causes of the
till they stood on their feet an exceeding great harmony of nature. Its central conception is,

army."

This apoσdóknтov use of Scripture is perilous; but Mr. O'Conor succeeds as well with it in

prose as Mr. Swinburne does in versc.

I close a most inadequate notice of a most timely and valuable book, beseeching the men of thought in England and elsewhere to stand aside from the bustle of party politics, and to study it. It will help them to gauge the feelings and aspirations of their Irish brothers, and it will bring them face to face

that in the history of organic life changes have
somehow always come about exactly in pro-
portion as the need of them arose; but how is
it that the laws of growth are so correlated with
utility that they should in this manner work
together? Why should varied and increasing
utility operate in the requisite direction of varied
and increasing developments?"

While this part of the argument is thus
summed up :-

"Of this we may be sure, that if men should

Here some readers will differ from the author, and think that we can detect in the animals as distinct traces of conscience as we can of

reason.

gish way, "Budge, says the fiend; budge not,
"though "the fiend" is
says my conscience;
a piece of meat, and " my conscience" the
certainty of his master's anger. Between
Gobbo's way of expressing his conscience's
qualms and Macbeth's profound reflections
when he is hesitating over his intended crime
there is a wide interval, and that between the
dog's uncertainties and Gobbo's may hardly
be much greater; while the difference in both
cases seems more in degree than in kind, and
to arise not so much from the want of a
faculty in the lower creature as from a superi-
ority of organisation and cultivation in the
higher one.

The closing chapters of the work treat of man, his moral nature, its degradation, and the origin of civilisation and of religion. The Duke is no believer in our savage origin, and holds that the savage as we see him is an example of "development in the wrong

DR. VILLIERS STANFORD'S settings of Mr. Browning's "Cavalier Tunes are to be given, with a chorus of fifty voices, at Mr. Edwin Bending's concert at the Princes' Hall on May 21,

THE Report of the Council of the Camden Society to the general meeting held on May 2 announced that the publications for the coming year would be-(1) Papers relating to the issue of the Second Prayer-Book of Edward VI., edited by the Rev. N. Pocock; (2) Political memoranda of the fifth Duke of Leeds, 1774, &c., edited by Mr. Oscar Browning; and (3) Selections from the Lauderdale Papers, vol. ii., edited by Mr. Osmund Airy. Of these, the first two are already in the press. The council have added to the list of works in preparation an account of the war in Ireland after the rebellion of 1642, from the pen of Col. Plunket, a Catholic officer serving under the Marquis of Ormond, to be edited by Miss Mary Hickson, which will add to our knowledge of Irish history during the period which has recently been illustrated by the works edited by Mr. J. T. Gilbert.

THE modified form of Prof. Sayce's Herodotos,
which we have before announced, will be en-
titled simply The Ancient Empires of the East:
a Series of Essays. It will be published like-
wise in America.

MR. WILLIAM SIME, author of King Capital,
has sent to press, with Messrs. W. Swan
Sonnenschein & Co., a new novel entitled The
Red Route.

MR. T. FISHER UNWIN will issue next week
Henry Irving in England and America, 1838-84,
with a portrait specially etched by M. Ad.
Lalauze. The same publisher also announces a
popular edition (being the fourth within a few
months) of Prof. Vambéry's Autobiography.
MESSRS. GRIFFITH & FARRAN are about to
publish a pamphlet containing three essays by
Mr. R. M. Eyton, entitled "Laodiceans,"
"Aesthetic Perceptions," and "Rubens and
Goethe."

THE Contemporary Review for June will contain a poem by Mrs. Pfeiffer, suggested by the parliamentary debate, March 27, on Prof. Bryce's Infants Bill.

on

THE Marquis of Lorne has written a paper
number of the Girl's Own Paper.
"Miss Rye's Girls' Homes" for the June

THE article in the current Westminster against
Mr. George, "Co-operation and Spoliation," is,
we hear, by Mr. Newcomen Groves, formerly
of Oriel College.

of Libraries, &c., contributes an article on
MR. EDWARD EDWARDS, author of Memoirs
The Quest for MSS. in the Levant" to the
May number of the Library Chronicle.

AMERICAN JOTTINGS.

WE are glad to hear that the death of Mr. Leypoldt will not interfere with the early publication of the Supplement to The American Catalogue, which has been for some time in preparation. It will comprise all books that have appeared in the eight years ending July 1, 1884; and it is estimated that the number of entries will exceed twenty thousand. The number of copies will be limited to 1,250, and "no plates will be made." The price to subscribers will be ten dollars (£2). It will form a single volume, but it is possible that it may appear in two parts, the one giving the entries according to author and title, the other according to subject. The date fixed for publication is October.

THE Harvard Herald, following the example of the Critic, has taken a vote among the students at Cambridge for members of a hypothetical" American Academy," and these are the leading fifteen names :-George William Curtis, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, George Bancroft, Bret Harte, Oliver Wendell Holmes, J. R. Lowell, Charles Dudley Warner, G. W. Cable, Prof. Child, Henry James, J. G. Whittier, James Freeman Clarke, Edward Everett Hale, W. D. Howells, Edmund Clarence Stedman.

IN recording the grant of a pension to Dr. Murray, the editor of the New English Diction ary, the Critic asks-" Cannot some of our rich American institutions assist pecuniarily in this great and costly enterprise, and win immortality for themselves thereby?

limited edition of Jane Eyre, in two volumes, A PHILADELPHIA publisher announces a illustrated with a portrait and eight etchings of scenery, all by American artists.

and "

MESSRS. TRÜBNER & Co. have in the press a MR. MONCURE CONWAY will take the chair collection of popular Indian stories made by at the Browning Society's meeting on May 23. Mrs. H. W. Steel and Capt. R. C. Temple. THE Nation culls from auctioneers' catalogues The title of the work is Wide-Awake Stories: a MR. FLUEGEL is at R and S of the thoroughly the two following entries:-"Abbotsford's Collection of Tales told by Little Children, revised edition of his German-English and Waverley Novels Xenophon's Cyclobetween Sunset and Sunrise, in the Panjab and English-German Dictionary. He is incorpor-paedia.' Kashmir. The volume will contain, among ating into it all the colloquial English words many others, the following stories:-" Sir and phrases which our novels and society papers dents' Editions" of the Songs of Tennyson and MESSRS. OSGOOD, of Boston, announce "StuBumble,' ""The Rat's Wedding,' "The Faith-contain. Dickens's "I felt so all round my of The Princess, edited by Mr. W. J. Rolfe, ful Prince, ," "The Bear's Bad Bargain," "Prince hat," Melville's "easy " and "row all," and the Shaksperian scholar; a handsome illustrated Lionheart,' ," "The Lambkin," and "Bopoluchi.' the like will find their place in the new edition of The Lady of the Lake; and a volume Care has been taken to give the stories a Dictionary, as well as Shakspere's puzzling of sketches by Mr. W. D. Howells, entitled literary form, so as to render them attractive expressions. to all classes of readers, while the originals Three Villages. have been faithfully followed. The work will include, besides notes and an index, an introduction explaining, inter alia, the method of collection pursued by the authors. The price will be 7s. 6d.

CAPT. R. F. BURTON is now printing, and Mr. Quaritch will publish, the fifth volume of his Camoens series, containing the first lyricssonnets (360), canzons, odes, and sestines. Vol. v. will soon appear, with the octaves, the elegies, and the eclogues or idylls.

WE also hear that Mr. J. J. Aubertin is preparing a second edition of his Lusiads, to be followed by a second edition of his Sonnets. MESSRS. MACMILLAN announce an edition of the works of Thomas Gray, in four volumes, by Mr. Edmund W. Gosse.

MR. F. ANSTEY'S novel, "The Giant's Robe," which is now running through the Cornhill, will be issued at the end of the present month in a single volume, and at a low price.

MR. JUSTIN H. M'CARTHY-the son, not the father-will publish shortly a little volume entitled England under Gladstone.

East by West: a Journey in the Recess, will be the title of Mr. Henry Lucy's forthcoming book describing a visit to the United States, Japan, and India. A portion of the work has appeared in the Daily News, but more than half will be new.

THE Académie française has awarded one half of the prix Bordin to M. James Darmesteter for his Essais sur la Littérature anglaise and his Essais orientaux.

IT is proposed to commemorate the seventieth birthday of Prof. Ernst Curtius, on September 2, by presenting him with his own bust in marble.

The

THE posthumous works of Berthold Auerbach
are to be published in three volumes.
first will be entitled Briefe an Jacob; the others
will consist of critical essays and fragmentary
sketches.

THE veteran Servian poet, Matia Ban, now
residing at Belgrade, has just published a
tragedy on the subject of Hus, which he dedi-
cates to his Bohemian brethren.

French translation of The Subaltern, an early
M. CHARLES GUIARD will shortly publish a
work of the late Chaplain-General of the Forces,
with notes and appendices.

fact that a writer in the current number of the
A CORRESPONDENT calls our attention to the
Westminster Review (p. 422), when quoting the

familiar lines,

OBITUARY.

FRIEDRICH NOTTER.

THE veteran Dante translator and commentator, Friedrich Notter, who died at Stuttgart, in his eighty-fourth year, on February 15, ought not to be passed over without a brief record. His first work on Dante, which aptitle, Sechs Vorträge über Dante and Dante, ein peared twenty-three years ago (bearing the Romanzen-Kranz, two distinct works, but issued in one volume), consists of a prose commentary, and of a cycle of ninety-one romances, forming, so to say, a poetical commentary on the Diving Commedia, and vividly representing the poet's

life and times. This work was followed, ten years with a detailed introduction and numerous notes later, by a complete German version of Dante's great poem (two volumes, 1871-72), supplemented on its theological and philosophical problems. It should be mentioned as a peculiarity of the less monotonous interchange of female (or Notter's poetical version that it first introduced dissyllabic) and male (or monosyllabic) rhymes, crossing each other in the first and third, the second and fourth lines; whereas the original, as a rule, uses only the female rhyme, as demanded by the euphony of the Italian language.

H. KREBS.

ON Easter Monday the "Barabbas" of the