clubs. Lecture-giving and lecture-hearing are characteristic of Boston. I heard an elderly lady say, the other day, "I do not like two or three days to pass wîthout a lecture of some kind." That's the animus of Boston. They laugh at it in Boston, but they do not change. They may all be as polished and refined as the members of "The Emery Bag," a club of elderly women before whom I lectured, but that does not entitle Boston to be called the northern Athens.

THE

CITY MISSIONS AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS. THE REVEREND FRANK MASON NORTH, M. A. Condensed for THE LITErary Digest from Papers in Methodist Review, New York, March-April. THE Christian worker in foreign fields has made notable contributions to government, language, commerce, art; to the circle of sciences geography, ethnology, geology, botany, zoölogy, comparative religion; to the higher pursuits of philosophy and philanthropy. But the missionary in the cities is supposed to be but slightly concerned with what the world of literature and science and statesmanship regards as important and dignifies for its own thought as the problems of the age. It has only just begun to dawn upon the world's consciousness that he has a relation to human progress in its broader sweep.

Underlying the thought of this age are two postulates. The first declares the supreme importance of the questions of society. The problems of government, of social and economic relations as bearing upon the welfare of the race, are given the right of way in every avenue of thought. The chief concern of humanity is not discovery or science or art, but-humanity. The second postulate asserts that the city is the playground, or better, the battlefield, of these tremendous social forces. Here they centre and combine and contend. Where are the problems of society, and specially, of the city not held to be paramount? In England the semi-socialistic reforms of the London County Council are watched as closely as are the Home-Rule proposals. Germany busies herself with plans for workingmen's insurance, and State Socialism receives the careful attention of her entertaining and versatile Emperor. The most striking feature of our own last census is the transfer from the rural to the civic life. Congress appoints a commission to investigate the slums of great cities. The age has turned its search-light upon the people, and its rays are focused upon the centres where they live and toil and sin and play and weep and die.

Into the city comes the man whom God has sent to preach His Gospel to the people. He finds himself at once in actual contact with the problems which other folks are discussing. With them facts melt into theories; with him theories congeal into facts. Observe the discoveries of his practical life, the realities which confront him in a single day's experience: I. Here is the rum-traffic. It thwarts him at every turn. He is familiar with the drunkard's home. The children he gathers into his Sunday-school are the heirs of vice. In New York, a block or two from one of our mission churches, is a public school. Within four hundred feet of that school are seventyseven legalized saloons. Next door to that church is a saloon in the back yard of which the empty beer-kegs, on Monday morning, are heaped in great piles, and in summer the preaching is accentuated by the strike of the mallet in tapping the barrels. When the city missionary reads in the laconic phrase of the Bishops' address concerning the liquor-traffic, “It can never be legalized without sin," he knows as few others can the terrible truth of that statement. The serpent draws its slimy length across the thresholds of the homes this man seeks to brighten, and poisons with its venom the very cup of cold water he would give to the thirsty. Who better than he can study the problem of rum?

2. He confronts poverty everywhere. The hiss of the ser

pent is not more familiar to him than the growl of the wolf. There is a poverty which is a spur to ambition and impels to better deeds.. There is a poverty which means privation, hunger, filth, moral inertia, vice, death. Few understand its horrible import. Over seventy-six per cent. of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Saxony are living on incomes of less than $200 per annum. A recent authority estimates that in Great Britain 3/3 of the population possess in actual property, on the average, $30 per head, and have an average income of $85.

30

In some cities, and in some parts of all large cities on these shores, the poverty varies little from that beyond the sea. In New York, for years, of all who have died one out of every ten has been buried in Potter's field. It is said that one hundred deaths from starvation were recorded last year. But no record is made of the thousands to whose death hunger was a contributory cause, nor of the scores of thousands who are physically dwarfed and morally debased by the horrible experience of continual semi-starvation. And the reality of poverty is central in the work of the missionary to the city. He knows the facts which statisticians tabulate; faces the foe which political economists describe; shares the burden which philanthropists are striving to weigh and to lift.

3. The child scorched with scarlet fever or choked with diphtheria, at whose bedside he kneels, dies and is buried; but the foul abuse of the laws of health declares the necessity of the gospel of sanitation. The scientist finds no truer ally than the man whose commission drives him into the very centres of contagion.

4. He is the companion, and sometimes the confidant, of the workman. He feels the throb of the great and burdened heart of labor. The hall where anarchy is preached adjoins the chapel where he preaches Christ. It is impossible for a man to walk Mulberry Bend or to fraternize with the denizens of the Fourth Ward without coming to conclusions touching laissez faire and the new political economy.

The work of city missions being thus inextricably intermingled with the problems which are throbbing in the heart and brain of humanity, it becomes evident that application of the new forces and methods developed by the very emergency of the case is to be made in the same field and in a large degree by the same hands. How close to the questions involved Providence has placed the solutions! No man has yet seen them all, but some of them are already within reach. The kindergarten, university extension, the college settlement, are all instruments suited to pressing needs. But the first need of this decade is that men and women of culture and godliness, disciplined equally in mind and heart, who can be indifferent to nothing that concerns human welfare, shall with profound devotion to Christ consecrate themselves to the life of contact with the multitudes in our cities over whom the Master weeps.

WH

THE MASSACHUSETTS PRISON-SYSTEM. THE REVEREND SAMUEL J. Barrows. Condensed for THE LITerary DigesT from a Paper in New England Magazine, Boston, March. ́HEN prison-reform received its great impetus from John Howard, the physical condition of prisons demanded most attention. The condition of most prisons, the world over, was shocking. In Massachusetts, little or no complaint can be made on this score. Indeed, the criticisms which have been more lately made, are that there is a tendency to make prisons more comfortable than they ought to be.

There are in Massachusetts a State Prison, a Reformatory for Men, a Reformatory Prison for Women, and twenty-one county prisons, comprising five separate houses of correction, and fourteen institutions combining a jail and a house of correction under one management. In addition to these are the Boston city institutions at Deer Island. Some of these prisons are rather primitive in structure and ill adapted to the deten

then they turn round to their audience and say: "See how like these inen-supposed two—are to one another! See how they share the same thoughts! Certainly they are one and not two, and that one is Bacon."

And if the audience are shallow, unreflecting animals, they take in this awful nonsense as gospel truth. But if it be asked: “How about the determining the decisive elements in this discussion-the qualities that each writer had which the other had not?"-they have no answer but a fudged one; and as a sample I take Mr. Reed's proof-Heaven save the mark!that "Bacon's sense of humor, as has already been shown, was phenomenal." The reference is to the letter of Sir Toby Matthew, in which we find that Bacon's "wit "-a very different quality is called "most prodigious";* and the statement that "the world's most famous jest-book we owe to Francis Bacon, dictated by him entirely from memory in one day."

Now, passing by the absurdity of calling Bacon's 'Apothegms" "the world's most famous jest-book," just see what it is: a mere recollection of good sayings by other folk! So that on Mr. Reed's principle, if you can recite a string of Shakespeare's, Marlowe's, and Ben Jonson's best bits, you are at once a phenomenal dramatic genius.

Bacon's lack of dramatic power is shown in his delineation of a "Soldier," in a device for Essex before the Queen (Spedding, viii., 380). Read Bacon's "Henry VII.," and recognize the same deficiency. There are excellent analyses and explanations of the causes of the man's actions; but he doesn't live -he is accounted for. The explanation of the omission of a play of "Henry VII." in Shakespeare's series, which, Mr. Reed says, is "inexplicable on any but the Baconian theory of authorship," is simply that the reign of Henry VII. was not suited for a play; it was too quiet; it was not a fighting or a stirring time; it was fit for a historian or a philosopher, but not for a dramatist. Mr. Reed answers himself when he says that the reign contained "the richest and most instructive experiences of political life." The statesman Bacon rightly treated it; the playwright Shakespeare wisely left it alone.

As to poetic power, Mr. Reed, in an honest moment, confesses that Bacon had none. How does he treat David? Take a sample, Psalm xc.: 6, 7:

Yes, "brittle pins," or " rusty tins," or fishes' fins," or any other bathos you like. And this Bacon write Shakespeare! Bah!

Is there any need for me to go on? Take Bacon's coolness about women and love. See the calm way in which he talks about the widow he first thought of making up to, and the absence of any enthusiasm about his own or any other man's marriage. Contrast this with Shakespeare's getting into trouble at nineteen with his older Anne, and having a child six months after his marriage. Note how passion for women is carried through all his plays; mark his Othello bit:

O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
That the senses ache at thee.-IV., ii. 69.

Remember the "kissing with inside lip" in his last play, "Winter's Tale." Anyone of like nature knows what these things mean; and if he knows Bacon, too, he knows that no trace of them is in the author of "The New Atlantis." Shake* THE LITERARY DIGEST, Vol. V., No. 15, p. 402.

speare loved his girls as the apple of his eye; and Bacon hardly deigned to think of them except as mere products of nature.

A last word to Americans. The best work now being done on Shakespeare is done by an American, Horace Howard Furness, and throughout the States men and women, girls and boys, are learning to know, to love, and honor Shakespeare. The tribute of their praise, the strains of their ochestra, which Furness so grandly leads, come gratefully to English ears over the wide water that separates the mother and daughter lands. Why are these sweet sounds to be longer marred by the senseless and discordant jangle of the marrow-bones and cleavers of Mr. Reed & Co. ? Shakespeare belongs to America as well as to England; his works, his fame, should be dear to you of the States as well as to us. Work at him, then, you who are fooling around with the stupidity and imposture of this Bacon mania; get to know him; then, when you realize him, rejoice greatly, and see how he is himself, not another, not Bacon, however great,—but William Shakespeare, the pride of, the bond between, all English-speaking people.

A NOVEL THEORY AS TO THE ORIGIN OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.*

LOUIS COURAJOD.

Translated and Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper in

THE

Le Moyen Age, Paris, February.

HERE have been many theories about the origin of Gothic architecture. It has been derived from various sources, as an offshoot of Byzantine art, as Neo-Greek, and the like. Undoubtedly, whatever impulses of ancient art reached the Merovingians and the Carlovingians, came by the way of Byzantium. In the history of art, beyond question, the period of time which extends from the sixth to the tenth century, is properly called the Byzantine or Barbaro-Byzantine period. The traditions transmitted from the Eastern Empire were leavened by the industrial and decorative art of the Barbarians, for such the Barbarians may be said to have had.

If you

The art which the Barbarians had in the matter of architecture was the art of construction in wood, with special principles, tendencies, processes, and characteristics. examine art-constructions which have come down to us from the seventh and the beginning of the eighth century, such as the Ciborium of Saint George in the Museum of Verona (712), the Baptistry of Cividele in Frioul (737), and a number of others of the same period, you will find, if you eliminate everything which belongs to the Latin or Byzantine element, something which belongs distinctly and unmistakably to the Barbarian invaders of Europe. These Barbarians were people who were accustomed to wooden structures. All their recollections were of structures in wood, and all their ideas of ornament, all their principles of construction, belonged to such buildings as might be built of wood.

The two principal generators of Gothic architecture are the vaulting and the prop. The history of vaulting, the study of the influences which this method of construction have had over the development of Roman, and afterwards of Gothic, edifices has been deeply cultivated. But the history of the prop has not been studied with anything like so much care as the history of the vault. Students of architecture gave close attention to the vault before troubling themselves about the prop, although the latter preceded the former virtually in the conception, and effectively in the execution.

The characteristic trait of Roman architecture is the use of the column. There are, however, columns and columns. Antiquity was acquainted with the column, but only as it made part of an order. The column never appeared without an entablature. Among the Romans, for the most part, the colunin was a simple ornament, and not an essential principle * Lecture delivered on December 14, 1892, in the Course of History and Sculpture at the Ecole du Louvre, Paris.

and indispensable member of the construction. Most writers on architecture have not distinguished between the column used as an ornament and the column used as a prop.

In Gothic architecture the column is not an ornament; it is an essential and indispensable part of the building; it is the prop without which the structure would tumble to pieces. Gothic architecture is the triumph, the exaltation of the principle of prop. It is the conception of carpenters who keep firm and solid in the air vaults of stone by the artifice of a system of incombustible props. These latter, far from concealing the form they had borrowed from the wooden structure, emphasize and openly display that form. The builders repeated in stone what had formerly been done in wood, and put together several columns in a bundle-one of the most notable inventions of the eleventh century, and which has become one of the principal elements of the ogival style.

Once you admit the elements of construction in wood in Gothic architecture, everything in that architecture is easily explained. Its development in the form it has taken was quite natural. Its ruling motive was the religious one of aspiring to that heaven to which it was intended to turn the thoughts of those who worshipped in churches and cathedrals, in cloisters and abbeys. That aspiration was revealed by lofty vaulting which required to be adequately supported, and that support was derived by them from the Barbarians, all of whose traditions and recollections were of edifices constructed in wood. They used stone, when it could be cut with ease, in the same way in which they had used wood before. Stone employed in the columns of Gothic architecture is the direct result of architecture in wood, and is the forerunner of architecture in iron. The future is for the carpenters just as the past belongs to them.

GLASS-PAINTING AND GOTHIC CATHEDRALS. JUL. LANGE.

Translated and Condensed for THE LIterary DigesT from a Paper in Nordisk Tidskrift fór Vetenskap, Konst, och Industri, Stockholm, Första Häftet.

LASS-PAINTING and the mediæval churches may be said A Gothic cathedral is full of powerful effects, yet its painted-glass windows are the strongest of them all. They may be said to belong to it by necessity. They are certainly out of place in a factory or in a room for ordinary uses.

G to be inseparably connected.

The inner space of a Gothic cathedral is free and lofty, and is a world in itself. When one enters he leaves the outside, prosaic, and natural world behind him. He does not even see the clear blue sky. Though the sky is not exactly "earthly," it is yet "natural," and the natural world belongs to the heathen, not to the Christian. That is the idea of the mediaval church building. Painted-glass windows keep out the light and set a barrier to the eye. The painted glass corresponds to the colored curtains used for the same purpose in the older Romanic styles.

Yet these windows are not curtains. They bar the sight, they prevent the eye from looking out, but they give full admission to light from outside, and are the only source of light for the interior. While they exclude the external world they offer new sights to the eye. They are full of pictures. They, so to say, open the vision to another heaven. While the light-rays fall through the glass they are largely absorbed by the color of the glass. The color would not obtain its brilliancy in any other way. This symbolizes to the believer that the "heavenly sun must be absorbed and must transfigure the Human, which else does not partake of the heavenly. The ideas of transfiguration and glorification owe their origin to glass-painting.

Medieval art groped its way towards this through several generations. No one artist originated it. The ingenuity is in this; that the medieval man found a natural means for the

expression of the over-natural. And the fundamental idea is correct, for the over-natural is to be seen and felt, and cannot be discovered in any other way. In the whole visible world there is, perhaps, no other place that gives rise to such elevated ideas as the interior of a Gothic cathedral. Towards evening the light disappears almost wholly from the lower part of the church, but remains reflected in the upper part through the windows. The impression made upon the visitor by the brilliant colors and the exalted personages is one from "another world." Medieval Christianity was preached by means of color, and was of the nature of feeling,.perception, and sensuous impressions.

The Gothic style and glass-painting are preeminently French art. The cathedrals of Poitiers, Tours, Le Mans, Chartres, Laon, Troyes, St. Remy in Reims, and Bourges make, in my opinion, the grandest impressions by their glass-paintings. But, to this day, no Gothic cathedral is complete. Either the towers have not been finished or some windows remain without glass-paintings, destroying the illusion. In some churches modern imitations have replaced the plain glass in windows left unfinished. In Notre-Dame du Paris, Saint-Chapelle, and the cathedral of Cologne a complete restoration of glasspainted windows has taken place; but the moderns do not seem to have understood the delicate art and the sensitive ideas which are the true spirit of the art of glass-painting. In Notre-Dame du Paris, for instance, they have placed ventilators in the beautiful windows of the choir, that place towards which all eyes are raised. Ventilators are, of course, extremely useful, but when left open they destroy the illusions created by the painted glass. Of what use are painted-glass windows when the illusion is destroyed?

BEAUMARCHAIS.

EUGENE LINTILHAC.

Translated and Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST from a Paper in Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, March.

THE

HE name of Beaumarchais is held in grateful remembrance on both sides of the Atlantic. By his writings he contributed greatly to hurry on the events that led to the French Revolution. It was he who, by unmeasured exertions, succeeded in inducing the French Government to give ample, though private, assistance in money and arms to the insurgent North American colonies. He sympathized with the colonies with all his heart, and no one rejoiced more than he at the success of the American Revolution. Yet if he had never played a part in political events, he would still be a benefactor to mankind by his two masterpieces, "The Barber of Seville" and "The Marriage of Figaro," so overflowing with wit and cheerfulness, and which, married to the melodious strains of Rossini and Mozart, are familiar everywhere in the civilized world.

In my book, "Beaumarchais et ses œuvres," I utilized some of the great mass of unpublished papers which still exist and are in possession of Beaumarchais's descendants—an enormous correspondence relating to all the epochs of his life; a collection of thoughts and maxims; interesting little compositions; precious variations of all his known works; a considerable quantity of documents and memoirs relating to dramatic authors, with letters from most of the men connected with the theatre of his time, papers connected with the War in America and the French Revolution.

Since the publication of my book I have been again permitted to inspect these papers of Beaumarchais, and found many things unobserved in my former examination of them. I discovered a voluminous bundle of papers relating to an interoceanic canal by the way of Nicaragua, and to a certain alliance of the American insurgents with Ayder Haly Khan, which a fiery native of Marseilles in the service of that Rajah was very anxious to bring about.

From a literary point of view, however, I came across nothing

more interesting than three detached sheets of "The Marriage of Figaro." In order to appreciate these they must be put in the frame where they belong. It is well known, from the Memoirs of Madame Campan, that three or four years before permission could be obtained to produce "The Marriage of Figaro," the play was read by her privately to Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. In the play as it is printed, and has always been performed, there is a monologue by Figaro, in which, with that mingled wit, shrewdness, gaiety, and philosophic reflection which characterize all he says, he tells the story of his attempts to get the productions of his pen before the public. In order to induce the authorities to grant leave to put his drama on the stage, Beaumarchais had to make alterations, and the three detached sheets are a portion of what he had to leave out. Very amusing are these enforced expurgations, which also explain something which has hitherto been hard to understand in the narrative of Madame Campan.

She says that in the monologue of Figaro, where he speaks of the State prisons, the King instantly stood up and made with vivacity" certain remarks. What Figaro says in the printed play runs thus: "Not possessing an inch of ground, I wrote about the value of money and its product, and immediately I saw lowered for me the bridge of a strong castle, at the entrance of which I left hope and liberty." There does not appear any reason for these words exciting Louis XVI. What Beaumarchais wrote, it now appears, was this: "My book did not sell, its publication was stopped, and, while they shut against me the door of my publisher, they opened for me the door of the Bastille." With this we comprehend the exclamation of Louis, as recorded by Madame Campan; "That is detestable, it shall never be played; the only way to prevent dangerous consequences from representation of such a piece would be to destroy the Bastille." The poor King was a true prophet. In August, 1789, Beaumarchais was appointed by the Mayor of Paris to superintend the demolition of that Bastille, the assault on which Figaro had sounded a premonitory note of, ten years before in the private cabinet of the King.

What follows in the three discovered sheets is full of delicious humor.

At the Bastille I was very well received. I was lodged and fed for six months without having to pay a penny for either food or lodging, being able also to make a great saving in the cost of my clothes. This economical retreat is the most valuable return which literature has brought me. But as good fortune does not last for ever in this world, I had to go away when a new minister came into power, who, requiring a list of the prisoners and the cause of their imprisonment, decided that there was not sufficient cause for detaining me.

"Another time I wrote a tragedy. The scene was laid in a harem. As a good Christian it is clear that I could not restrain myself from saying a few hard things about the religion of the Turks. Instantly the Envoy of Tripoli lodged a complaint with the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, declaring that in my writings I had taken liberties which offended the Sublime Porte, Persia, a portion of the peninsula of India, Egypt, the kingdoms of Barca, Tripoli, Algiers, and Morocco, as well as the whole coast of Africa, and my tragedy was stopped by the police of Paris out of respect for the Mahomedan princes, who make slaves of us and call us dogs of Christians. So my piece was not played.

In order to console myself and also to get wherewith to keep body and soul together I composed another drama, in which I depicted, as well as I could, the destruction of the religion of the Bards and Druids and their vain ceremonies. There is no envoy in France of these nations, which are no longer in existence, I said to myself, and the comedians will play it, and I shall get some money, for the ninth part of the receipts will belong to me. I had not, however, perceived the venom hidden in my work, and the allusions which could be made, in pointing out the errors of a false religion, to the

revealed truths of a true religion. An officer of the Church, wearing a high lawn collar, unfortunately for me discovered this hidden venom, denounced me as impious, and my piece was stopped at its third representation, by the bishop of the diocese; the comedians, in rendering me an account, made out that, over and above my ninth of profit, I owed the troupe twelve pounds, which was to be deducted from the first piece of mine which should be presented, and which the bishop should allow to be played."

"The officer of the Church with a high lawn collar" was very pretty, but this was regarded as a veiled and disrespectful allusion to the Archbishop of Paris, and out it had to

come.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.

RECENT SCIENCE.

AERONAUTICS.

International Conference on Aerial Navigation.-Prof. A. F. Zahn, of Indiana, intimates in a circular forwarded for publication to the editor of Der Stein der Weisen, Vienna, that in connection with the various Congresses which will be held under the auspices of the World's Congress Auxiliary, it is proposed to hold in Chicago, in 1893, an International Congress on Aerial Navigation, somewhat similar to that which took place in Paris during the French Exposition of 1889. The time assigned for this Conference is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Aug. 1, 2, and 3, 1893. The principal objects of the Conference will be to bring about the discussion of some of the scientific principles involved; to collate the results of recent researches, procure an interchange of ideas, and promote concert of action among the students of this inchoate science. It is proposed to invite delegates from the various aeronautical societies of the world. The topics selected for discussion fall under the following three heads: I. Scientific Principles. II. Aviation. III. Ballooning.

ANTHROPOLOGY.

Terra del Fuegan Skeletons.-The University of Zurich possesses the rare treasure of five skeletons of members of the Alakuluf tribe in Terra del Fuego. It seems these wretched islanders were taken to Europe to show in museums, and by some strange fatality all died at Zurich of pneumonia. Dr. Rudolph Martin has worked up their osteology and published his results in the Vierteljahrsschrift der Natur. Gesell. in Zurich. He finds the skulls well shaped, mesocephalic, with relatively large cubical capacity, 1,590 cubic centimetres, and the horizontal circumference greater than that of the modern Parisians, as reported by Broca. The torsion of the humerus was less than in Europeans, and two of the humeri showed perforation of the fossa of the olecranon. The study is an exact and an interesting one.—Science, March 10.

ARCHEOLOGY.

Was There an Age of Copper ?-M. Berthelot, the wellknown French technicist, in a recent communication to the Académie des Sciences, states his belief in the sometime existence of an age of copper in addition to the three recognized archæological eons of stone, bronze (copper and tin), and iron. He bases his opinion chiefly upon an analysis of a piece of copper which had been found by M. de Sarzec in the course of antiquarian investigations in Mesopotamia, or Al Jezira, as the Arabs designate the famous stretch of country between the Euphrates and the Tigris. The fragment thus chemically determined proves to have neither tin nor zinc entering into its composition, there being simply traces of lead and arsenic. Water and the atmosphere had made ravages into the specimen, which was practically a sub-oxid or a compound of protoxid and metallic copper. As the ruins from which the piece of metal was taken are authoritatively considered to be