THE MRS. STANTON CELEBRATION. the State. We must remember that the demand for Home Rule in this city comes largely from that class which, if permitted to have their way, will ruin homes by the repeal of just laws, and by A REUNION of the "pioneers in the movement for woman's the enactment of other laws in the interests of a personal liberty, which with them is a synonym for unbridled license. "Let Christian citizens in this municipality, by speech and by vote so act in the interests of the enforcement of law, for the protection of the American Sunday, and for the perpetuation of liberties created by a Christian civilization, that they will secure the approval of their own moral natures and the favor of God. Concealment, compromise, and cowardice never win any permanent victories for truth and righteousness."-James M. King, D.D., Pastor of Union Methodist Episcopal Church, New York. Neither Puritan nor Lawless, but Liberal.-"The Puritanical observance of Sunday, in the Judaistic ceremonial spirit, is with us a thing of the past. The whole question, therefore, must be viewed from a larger standpoint. "The generic principle of Sunday, however, must remain, wherever there is reverence for the Word of God and concern for the welfare of society. This is, that Sunday is to be set apart as a day of rest and worship. (6 Whatever is inconsistent with either of these should be forbidden; whatever conduces to them should be permitted. Ordinary business should certainly be suspended. Unnecessary work should not be allowed. The taskmaster should not dare to ply his goad on the day of peace. Rest should be guaranteed to the toiler. What also is necessary to afford opportunity for innocent recreation should be permitted. "As to the Sunday opening of saloons that is another matter.Had we public gardens, such as those in Berlin, with music and light refreshment, attended by families and pastors, where all is quiet and decorous, and not a taint of evil influence in the atmosphere, the case would be altogether different. But the American saloon, as at present conducted, seems so clearly not an innocent, harmless resort, and so conducive to that noise, revelry and lawlessness, destructive of the quiet, reverent spirit of the day, that the call for opening it looks altogether unjustifiable. "We do not believe that Sunday opening of saloons is a logical outcome of a larger view of that 'Sabbath which was made for man'-a view, which while it reverently guards the sanctity of the day, makes it also conduce to the welfare of the masses as a season of innocent, restful, and joyous relaxation. As to the plea for the 'Poor Man's Club,' if he must have one on Sunday, it would be better that he finds it amid the cultivating influences of the library, or Museum of Art, than amid the demoralizing in'fluences of the saloon."-J. B. Remensnyder, D.D., Pastor St. James Lutheran Church, New York. Decrease in Immigration. -The report of the CommissionerGeneral of Immigration for the year ending June 30, 1895, shows that there has been a considerable decrease in the number of immigrants entering the United States. The total number of newcomers is 258,536-the smallest number since 1879. 2,719 immigrants were debarred under our laws, and this is regarded as a small proportion. The Philadelphia Telegraph says: "It is simply unthinkable that all the rest of these quarter of a million and more people were persons of an acceptable kind. It may be assumed that they were qualified to enter the country as the law at present defines those qualifications; but the point is still, as it always has been, that the standards established by the law are altogether too low. The matter has been debated in every possible aspect, and it seems to be agreed on all sides that we need fewer immigrants, at any rate of the kind which we are now getting. It is contended, of course, that every American is a foreigner, and that those who came early have no rights over and above those who are coming late. This is an argument which does not appeal very strongly to many people. It is a mere instinct of self-preservation, impelling those who are already established on the Continent to exclude the dangerous elements which undertake to settle here from other continents. It is the right of those who arrived first and who have built up the American civilization to maintain it, and they are going to do so. They have a full right to shut out others if they wish when there are just grounds for it, and there is no question that such grounds are at hand when persons who land here are not self-supporting, when they have vicious habits, or when they in any way promise to be an encumbrance or a peril to the country. It is true that these facts are difficult to establish in all cases, but something can be done if the task is approached in the right spirit." emancipation," in honor of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's eightieth birthday, was held on November 12 in the New York Metropolitan Opera House. The occasion was deemed specially fitting for a celebra tion of fifty years of woman's progress in politics, religion, science, literature, art, industry, and the professions generally. Fifty years ago Mrs. Stanton began her work in be.. half of woman, and to celebrate her own individual achievements as well as the progress of the period, the National Council of Women and other clubs and societies arranged this festival and reunion. About three thousand people were in attendance, ELILABETH CADY STANTON.. and addresses were made by a number of leading women. Miss Anthony spoke on the progress of women in politics, Drs. Emily Blackwell and Elizabeth Cushier on women in medicine, Rev. Anna H. Shaw on women in the pulpit, and others dealt with women's advance in other lines. Messages of sympathy and congratulation were received from women's societies in England and other European countries. Mrs. Stanton's own address described the growth of the emancipation movement from small beginnings and went on as follows: "We who made our first demands for the ballot have nearly finished the battle. With full suffrage in three States, municipal suffrage in one, and school suffrage in half the Union; with municipal suffrage in Great Britain and her colonies, with some sort of suffrage either in person or by proxy in several countries in Europe, the principle is conceded and we are about ready to lead our women into the promise-lands of political equality.. "We must now make the same demands of the church that we made of the state during the last fifty years, for the same rights, privileges, and immunities that man enjoys. We must see that the canon laws, Mosaic code, Scriptures, prayer-books, and liturgies are purged of all invidious distinctions of sex; of all false We teachings as to woman's origin, character, and destiny. must demand an equal place in the offices of the church as pastors, elders, deacons; an equal voice in the creeds, discipline, in all business matters, and in the synods, conferences, and general assemblies. "We must insist that all unworthy reflections on the sacred character of the mother races, such as the allegory of her creation and fall, and Paul's assumption as to the social status, be expunged from our church literatures. We must demand that the pulpit be no longer desecrated with men who preach from texts that teach the subordination of one half of the human race to the other. The laws and customs in church and state alike are behind the public sentiment of our day and generation." The New York Home Journal commented on the celebration in an editorial from which we quote a portion: "Mrs. Stanton, handsome, womanly, refined, with a dignity of manner and appearance befitting her intellectual power, stands before the public as a representative woman, a type of the American woman at her best, a type of that union of physical, mental, and moral beauty which may make a woman as attractive at eighty as at eighteen. Applying to Mrs. Stanton what has been said of Emerson, the serenity of her life and thought has been a great gift to her countrywomen. So it is peculiarly fitting that the many, from far and near, should come to her at this time, bearing gifts and words of greeting. "Around Mrs. Stanton at this celebration clustered women pioneers in every line of work; and not only distinguished workers themselves, but others who brilliantly and pointedly told how the earnest work for the uplifting of woman has been done, and who succeeded in vividly picturing to the audience the truth that he lives most 'Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.' "The educational value of such a meeting is too apparent to be overlooked. To delegates from schools, colleges, and societies; to the woman of society as well as to the working-woman-it is of no small advantage to have had a bird's-eye view of what has been accomplished in fifty years. No drama could be more instructive than the history thus unfolded by the actors, not of a moment, but of a lifetime." Many papers have paid high tributes to Mrs. Stanton's ability and earnestness. Thus the Baltimore American said: "She is in many respects one of the most remarkable women of her time. Educated in the best schools of her day, she began her work for the elevation of her sex over half a century ago, and has lived to enjoy many of the fruits of the reforms of which she was almost the first advocate. It is to her efforts that women owe many of the measures that give them rights before the law that they never possessed before her time. She was never a wild reformer of imaginary wrongs, but a sensible, practical woman of superior mind and of unquestioned ability, a born leader among her own sex, seeking no notoriety, but always devoted to the cause in which she enlisted. The tributes paid to her by the National Council of Women were well deserved, and it is a notable fact that none of the greetings that reached her last night were more cordial than those that came across the water. One that was sent her by thirty members of the family of John Bright spoke of her as 'the friend of the enslaved African, the doughty champion of peace, of temperance, of moral reform, and for sixty years the eloquent advocate of the claims of motherhood and women. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who is an opponent of woman-suffrage, objects to the identification of the suffrage movement with the general cause of woman's emancipation, and criticizes the program of the celebration as fundamentally misleading. The Eagle says: on their sex. "This paper believes that the advocates of women's-suffrage have retarded, and not assisted, the advance of that sex in law, in medicine, in theology, in art, in trade, in shops, in stores, in factories, in clerkships, in secretaryships, in cashierships, in journalism, in library work, and in every department of paid labor in which women are gaining and holding a place. The men who have favored equal work, equal education, equal wages, and equal opportunity for women have, by a great preponderance of numbers, not favored the ballot for them. The women who have urged and those who have received these rights and benefits have also by a large majority been opposed to the shunting of suffrage There are just enough exceptions to this case to emphasize the substantial truth of the proposition. "By reciting a great many things which have occurred in the last sixty or eighty years and by 'claiming' them with the ferocious assurance with which a party in power 'claims' good times, or a party out of power promises 'good times,' the advocates of suffrage for women make quite a list of achievements to wear as beads around their necks. Journalism might as well claim the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the evolution of the germicide theory in medical practise, the discovery of anesthesia, photography, the improvements in surgery, in dentistry, and in mowing-machines, and all the other benign results with which journalism is contemporaneous. To coincide with results is not to cause them, and to coexist with their production is not to create them." Ambassador Bayard on Protection.—The recall of Thomas F. Bayard, the American Minister to England, is demanded by some politicians and newspapers on account of his denunciation of protection in a recent address on individual liberty before the Edinburg Philosophical Society. His utterances are characterized as disgaceful and humiliating to the American people by a number of Republican newspapers, while many of those journals which sympathize with Mr. Bayard's views doubt the wisdom of his choice of place and occasion for the presentation of his views. The passage deemed specially objectionable is as follows: "In my own country I have witnessed the insatiable growth of a form of socialism styled protection which has done more to corrupt public life, to banish men of independent mind from public councils, and to lower the tone of national representation than any other single cause. Protection now controlling the sovereign power of taxation has been perverted from its proper function of creating revenue to support the Government into an engine of selfish profit, allied with combinations called trusts." The New York Herald, independent and low-tariff journal, says about this remark: "Without saying a word in favor of protection, it is still desirable to ask whether this denunciation of it comes fitly from an American Ambassador in England. He is there as the Ambassador, not of free-traders, not of the Democratic Party, not even of a Democratic Administration, but of the United States. Protection, mistaken policy tho it be, is the policy of a great party which represents half of the people of the United States. Is it, then, for the American Ambassador to announce in England that half the American people are wedded to a policy which is corrupt and corrupting? To say it at home is one thing; to say it abroad is another, and for an Ambassador to say it is to use his great office to disparage in the view of England the country he represents." The Republican papers say that the recent election proves that protection is popular with the American people, and that Mr. Bayard's expressions are an affront to them. Those who defend Mr. Bayard take subtantially the view thus expressed by the Philadelphia Record (Dem.): "Mr. Bayard believes that protection is founded upon a theory that is false, a theory that may in practise give to the industries of a country, temporarily, the hue of health, while, in fact, planting the seeds of permanent disaster; and so believing, he has, both at home and abroad, vigorously expressed his thought. . . . Holding these opinions upon a question of vital importance, both to the United States and the world, why should he not express them? They have no relation to the domain of diplomacy, but they concern the domain of political economy, in which all nations have a deep interest." TOPICS IN ... BRIEF. WHEN Wat Hardin recovers consciousness great care should be exercised by the nurses. The sight of a platform might throw him into a relapse.The Post, Washington. PINGREE'S Presidential bee is only a potato-bug.-The Press, New York. ELIZABETH CADY STANTON is eighty years old, and owns it. She always was an intrepid woman.-The Telegram, New York. ORDINARY talk doesn't seem to affect the Sultan. After a while some of the war-ships may come along and give him a blowing up. - Times, Philadelphia. THE Democrats save Mississippi, which is to say that they lost the mother and child, but pulled the old man through. The GlobeDemocrat, St. Louis. SPIRIT OF THE AGE: "Do you desire the peace of Europe?" Chorus of Great Powers: "That depends on which of us gets the The biggest piece." Tribune, New York. THERE are friendly suggestions to the effect that Mr. Bavard is not as diplomatic in his relations with this country as he might be.The Star, Washington, "THEY talk of a new in creation of peers England." For the export trade?" - Life, Brooklyn. LETTERS AND ART. T LYRICS OF THE DAY. HERE is something decidedly Tennysonian in those poems of Mr. Madison Cawein which are descriptive of nature. The objects caught by his alert and discriminative eye are frequently pictured for the reader with realistic simplicity, yet with a rare delicacy of fancy. The following lyric, from the November Cosmopolitan, illustrates this faculty in the writer. It was this gift which first attracted Mr. Howells to Mr. Cawein's verse, when the former had charge of the "Editor's Study" of Harper's, which department was sometimes almost exclusively devoted to the young Kentucky poet's work : MADISON CAWEIN. And now Mr. Howells himself gives us a new volume of poetry -"Stops of Various Quills" (Harper & Bros.)-concerning which Mr. Richard H. Stoddard, his long-time friend and admirer, says, in The Mail and Express: "This is a remarkable book, concerning which there will probably be considerable difference of opinion among readers of current verse, tho there ought to be none, and will be none, among those who are capable of looking beyond and below mere poetic technique into the thing which is poetry itself the thought which is in the poet's mind, the feeling which is in his heart, and which, whether he has captured it in his verse, or whether it has evaded him, is individual, vital, inevitable. There is something here which, if not new in American poetry, has never before made itself so manifest there, never before declared itself with such veracity and force, the process by which it emerged from emotion and clothed itself in speech being so undiscoverable by critical analysis that it seems, as Matthew Arnold said of some of Wordsworth's poetry, as if Nature took the pen from his hand and wrote in his stead." We quote one of the poems chosen by Mr. Stoddard: THE BEWILDERED GUEST. I was not asked if I would like to come; I have not seen my host since here I came, A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys Dumb in our breasts, and then, some one is gone. They say we meet him. None knows where or when. We know we shall not meet him here again. England's political safety lies in the fact that however widely and bitterly Englishmen may differ in times of peace, when national trouble threatens they fly together. At the shadow of a war-cloud they cohere. There is more than poetic impulse in the following poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, which appears in The Nineteenth Century (November) : TRAFALGAR DAY. Sea, that art ours as we are thine, whose name Never since day broke flowerlike forth of night A man' more godlike than the lord of light. SUBJECTION OF AUTHORS TO THE TIME 'ALMIGHTY DOLLAR." IME was when one who sat down to write a book felt as if he were approaching a devout task; he felt as if the pen were a sacred instrument, the book a gospel. With this reflection Mr. Edward W. Bok opens an essay on "The Modern Literary King," in the November Forum, and goes on to say that when such an author wrote he did so because he felt a mental or spiritual impulse which drove him to the pen, and when his work appeared in print people realized that the man had written because he had something to say; he had a message; he wrote from inspiration; there was in his work a glow and a magnetic vigor which took hold of the reader as it had possessed the writer; he believed in inspiration, and waited for it before he wrote; he was actuated by no other motive than the impulse which drove him to transform a mental message--something which he felt and believed-into a printed page. Mr. Bok continues: A "Nowadays we have changed all this. Inspiration is given no chance one is almost led to say that it has become an unknown quality in our literature. The one thought of the author of today is to make matter out of mind. The successful writer of the present, once he has secured the eye of the public, feels that he must keep himself and his work before the eye of that public. He must produce and go on producing whether impulse or inspiration comes to him or not. He must, he feels, produce just so much work. He is sincere and conscientious in the hope that what he does will be good work. But if it happens to be otherwise, which is more than likely, he feels that he is not altogether to blame. The work must be produced. It is not a case of can: it is simply and purely one of must. He is in a feverish race: he needs keep in the procession and as near the head of it as he can. He is driven by a force he neither understands nor stops to analyze. He must eke out his living by his pen, and there lies the root of the evil. Not only does his present belong to another, but his future is mortgaged. He contracts to write books for delivery within the next two, three, or five years, quite unmindful of the question whether there will be a book in him to write, or a story in him to tell, or not. "There is now an author before the public whose writings have a wide audience, but who has been recently told by the critics that his work is deteriorating. This is true, and it is not strange that it should be so. He is a man who as a writer shows the highest art in his work, and his earlier books demonstrate this fact beyond a doubt. But he has come under the influence of the dollar, and now writes what is called 'to order.' Not long ago a magazine editor approached this author for his next work, and found him just starting upon it. "I would like it,' said the editor. "What will you pay for it?' was the author's first question. 664 'How long will it probably be?' inquired the editor. "Oh, I can make it just as long or as short as you want it,' said the obliging author. Then he added: 'It depends upon the price. I can make a 40,000-word story of it if you like, and then it will cost you $6,000. Or, I can spin it out to 60,000 words-and that is really what I ought to have to let the story tell itself; but then I will want $7,500 for it. Of course, if you can't pay more than $6,000, I can trim it accordingly.' The real question of the story itself did not enter into the question. It was simply a matter of price. You paid so much and you got so much. If you paid a little more you received a little more. IN CAN LITERATURE BE TAUGHT? N a congratulatory item, written on learning that Mr. George Saintsbury had been selected for Professor of English Literature in the Town's College of Edinburgh, Mr. Andrew Lang queries (in Longman's) whether literature can be taught, saying that it is a question which may be argued either way. We quote briefly : "In my poor opinion, it can not be taught; for manuals and lectures are no substitutes for original reading, and for original reading the student, in his college years, has very little time. But something of the art of English composition may probably be both taught and learned, just as Greek and Latin composition may be improved by practise and tuition. The reef on which the Caledonian student used to strike when I wore the scarlet gown A copious, verbose, rather aimless rhetoric, as ornate, in proportion to its substance, as Jean Jamieson's bonnet, was regarded as admirable. The minstrel sings was the reef of Dr. Chalmers. He is simply 'under contract:' his time, his brain, his mind is mortgaged. For each novel he is offered a larger sum than he received for his last, and proud is that author who, when a publisher comes to him in these days, can say: 'My dear fellow, I can't undertake another scrap of work. Everything I do for the next five years is sold. My 1897 novel goes to So-and-so, my 1898 stories are sold to ——'s Magazine, while all I do in 1900 I have contracted to give to the --S. You see how I am fixed.' And if you ask him what his 1897 novel will consist of, he has no more idea of its plot or context than has his valet or his cook. Nor is this in any sense an exaggerated picture of the condition of the modern American author. With one or two rare exceptions-so rare that they can be counted upon the fingers of a single hand, with fingers to spare-the successful authors of the day are under the thraldom of the modern literary king-the almighty dollar." For this condition of affairs Mr. Bok blames equally both the contracting parties, author and publisher. He says: The "The monetary basis of literary wares is unquestionably wrong, and the public suffers because of it. The literature given to the people is born of the mart and not of the study. Everything about it has the flavor of money, money, money. And instead of the conditions growing any better, they are getting worse. true reason for much of the weakness of our American national literature is to be found in the conditions which surround the author of to-day, and which he has allowed to surround him and enter into his work. To his credit, it should be said that he does not desire it, nor does he relish it. It has been forced upon him. And there is where our literary purveyors are to blame. The commercial element is too dominant with them. But the author has fallen under the pressure, and there is where he is to blame. The course for each is plain. The remedy is in the hands of both. The dollar is the curse of our literature of to-day." By way of illustration, and in proof of his assertion, Mr. Bok relates the following: Did ye ever hear tell O' Jean Jamieson's bonnet? But the ornaments on it! "The ornaments on the ambitious Scot's essay were, so to say, comical. Suns, stars, clouds, oceans, tears, and 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' were deeply interfused with remarks on Consciousness or the Syllogism. . . "People who are born to write will finally, after a period of imitation, write in their own way. With all respect for Mr. Saintsbury's genial and distinguished predecessor the biographer of Milton, I do not suppose that Professor Masson taught Mr. Barrie how to write 'A Window in Thrums.' Like the minstrel of Odysseus, great writers are self-taught, in a discipline aided by life and literature. Still, a professor can, at least, point out a man's more glaring faults. 'Don't write like Carlyle,' said the Master of Balliol to a student, who could only murmur that 'it was very catching.' Catching, too, is the manner of Macaulay; and I also wonder that the manner of Thackeray seems, on the whole, to prove so little infectious among young writers. He himself had certainly caught a good deal of his manner from Fielding, perhaps the greatest master of all. To imitate, indeed, is not to be original, as Mr. Stevenson justly remarks, ‘nor is there any way but to be born so.' A professor gets, and deserves, but little credit from his pupils who are 'born so'; his real business is with the ordinary crowd of middling intellects, to make them understand and appropriate the pleasures of literature." IN a brief notice of Mr. Goldwin Smith's "Essays on Questions of the Day," The Atlantic says: "Mr. Goldwin Smith has long been known as a close observer of current events, and a caustic commentator on events of the day. A brilliant and not over-scrupulous advocate, he is carried away by a prophet's vanity, until truth, in his eyes, wears the color of his own prognostications. But if one does not demand trustworthy information nor impartial criticism, one may enjov some gracefully turned sentences in these essays on Utopian Visions, The Empire, Woman-Suffrage, The Irish Question, and like themes.' Μ' MARIA EDGEWORTH REDIVIVUS. UCH is being written nowadays about Maria Edgeworth, both in England and America. Her "Life and Letters" has just been published; her novels, after a long neglect, aré being republished and read; and the reviews are again devoting their pages to an analysis of her qualities as a writer and to a consideration of the "moral novel" and its relations to literary art. Perhaps the contrast between Maria Edgeworth and the writers of the "art for art's sake" school is responsible for this revival of interest in "Belinda" and her other works. In our issue of August 10 we gave Mr. George Saintsbury's opinion of her work. We now find an article in The Quarterly Review, from which we make some interesting extracts. Many persons associate with the name of Maria Edgeworth the buckram dignity of a schoolmistress, the matter-of-fact primness of a woman who, without appealing to higher motives or deeper feelings, inculcated a selfish prudence and illustrated the utility of virtue. Speaking of the "Life and Letters" of Miss Edgeworth. (edited by Augustus J. C. Hare), The Quarterly writer says that those who have formed any such conception as the above of Miss Edgeworth will be unprepared for the treat which these letters afford; that as a correspondent it might be expressed that she would be shrewd, observant, sensible, practical, and the surprise exists in the almost rollicking sense of fun, the power of light and humorous description, the wit, generosity, and warmth of her literary appreciations, the artlessness of her enthusiasms, the variety and multiplicity of the topics in which she was keenly interested. In view of the fact that Miss Edgeworth's novels are being republished and read after such long neglect, we quote from this critic's opinion of her literary character and force. In concluding his lengthy essay, he says: "Moral teaching was Miss Edgeworth's first object; literature, To this cardinal or the interest of her tale, came only second. defect she is indebted for most of her faults as a novelist. Her plots are improbable, and her characters become dummies. If she does not avow her didactic purpose so clearly as Hannah More or Mrs. Sherwood, she is not satisfied, like Miss Austen, to leave her characters to convey their own lesson. She seems more intent upon erecting moral sign-posts for the convenience of future travelers than of accomplishing her own journey with rapidity and success. Nor is her teaching of an elevated kind. Its polestar is enlightened selfishness. As her pattern children are always rewarded, so her heroes and heroines are sure to prosper, to discover themselves the inheritors of great fortunes, and to marry into the peerage. Small spaces allowed in her system for imagination, passion, or religious enthusiasm: the internal struggle which their strength creates would only have disturbed her simPrevious novelists had ple balance between right and wrong. based morality on feeling: she ascribes it to the understanding. She allows no amiable weaknesses, no sudden impulses, no uncontrollable emotions. Even Cupid, king of men, is elbowed from his throne, and, in exchange for his kingdom, is offered a sinecure as the keeper of Nonconformist consciences. A large tract of life is, in fact, to Miss Edgeworth a terra incognita, of which she knows nothing, because she feels nothing. "Two great defects are the result of this distorted conception of the novelist's art and this partial insight into human life. In the first place, her principal actors, tho they are not sent into the world as matured saints or full-blown criminals, are labeled with some particular vices or virtues which they are expected always to illustrate. She offers us pictures of one prominent characteristic, brought into the strongest relief by the suppression of the nice gradations which give play and variety to character. If her heroes or heroines are good, they are so prudent, so well-intentioned, and so unromantic that they fail to excite interest: if there is one flaw in their composition, we know, from the outset, that this defect will lead to their ruin, or, if corrected, will insure their happiness. She refuses to allow her actors to be overmastered by impulse or passion: they only act upon the nicely calculated motives of a well-balanced reason. To give interest to her stories Miss Edgeworth is, therefore, driven to violate nature a second time, and to make her plots unnatural. Her events are not, as in real life, connected one with the other, neither do they lead consecutively by a simple chain of cause and effect to the final catastrophe. On the contrary, the framework of her stories is distorted to heighten the moral lesson. The incidents, like the characters, are forced to serve the cause of morality at the expense of probability." Yet, says the critic, in spite of such grave defects, Miss Edgeworth's novels live, and deserve their prolonged vitality by their real merits. He cites "Belinda" as a "curious picture of English society at the close of the last century, ‘a dramatic presentation of character," and, in spite of many defects, "a powerful work of fiction." He ends by saying: "As a founder of national fiction, and as the pioneer of Sir Walter Scott, she has laid all lovers of novels and romances under the deepest obligation. Nor must it be forgotten that no writer of her own time exercised a wider influence for good than Maria Edgeworth, and that, whatever opinion may be held as to her talents, no figure in our literature is more deserving of respect. If she sacrificed, as we think she did, her natural gifts as a novelist to the object of moral teaching, she conferred by so doing a boon on her own generation, which her contemporaries appreciated with generous warmth, and the results of which have doubtless descended to ourselves." AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF BLACKIE, THE FAMOUS SCOT. O Scots in all parts of the world" Miss Anna Stoddart dedicaters her biography of Prof. John Stuart Blackie; and, says a writer in The Saturday Review, it is to "that perfervid race" to which this biography will chiefly appeal. This writer can not understand why Blackie was the object of such "hysterical admiration" among Scotchmen, and proceeds to give his impressions of the renowned professor, as follows: "From a sober English standpoint, it is very difficult fairly to appraise him. For twenty years past we have occasionally seen him in his meteoric flights. We have heard him talk a world of nonsense and a little sense. We have seen him go down on his ter. knees on the platforms of institutes to kiss the hands of ladyvocalists; he has pinched our knee in friendly punctuation of a loud discourse, as in far-off days he pinched the auguster leg of Thirlwall; we have witnessed the vainglorious swagger, the flourish of the plaid, the quavering burst of song, the thumping and smacking and jogging of dignified persons unaccustomed to such liberties. We have been refreshed, and then dreadfully fatigued by his loose enthusiasm, the clatter of his mind, the innocent libertinism of his intellectual vagaries. . . . His positive contributions to literature are of the most ephemeral characNot even in Edinburgh can they believe him to be a poet; as a translator he was careless and inelegant; his essays in narrative and philosophy no longer exist. As a creator he has left no mark whatever. Nor as a critic of literature is his work of any permanent value. He was, however, a critic, if we may so put it, of intellectual action. He threw his warm, unabashed personality into the scale whenever an abstract question was to be discussed, and its presence startled, exhilarated, and electrified his auditors. The first interesting incident of his life was his absurd but not unworthy behavior when he was called, in 1839, to the chair of Humanity at Aberdeen. He signed the Confession of Faith, and then handed in a paper of mental reservations, and wrote a violent letter to the editor of a newspaper, neglecting to say that it was not to be printed, and behaved generally like a blue-bottle fly in a tumbler. But the result was beneficial; it prepared the way for the abolition of tests in 1853, and such was Blackie's personal force and tenacity of purpose that he lost nothing, but gained immensely by all this fuss.' " The writer refers to the fact that Professor Blackie had singular success in rousing imperfectly cultivated minds to a curiosity in culture, and asks: "Is it unkind to suggest that this was partly The article because he himself was imperfectly cultivated?" continues: “We have referred to the want of positive value in all his criti |