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mendation of being readable, though it is very easy to have a surfeit of them. There is no faltering in the lady's firm touch; and in great matters as in small, she always writes with the serene self-assurance which is one of the secrets of her popularity. Whether she is describing life in a penal settlement at the antipodes, or writing the sanguinary history of the coup d'état in 66 Ishmael,' or sending sportsmen out with rifles in September to shoot partridges in the pheasant coverts, we are much inclined to accept all she writes as gospel. If it is not true it ought to be, so great is the air of vraisemblance.

Sensational stories, in moderately priced single volumes, are the fashion now, and without satirical intention, we say the shortness is in their favor. Some are as good as Mr. Stevenson's "Treasure Island" or Kidnapped;" others are comic and gory burlesques of the better kind of criminal extravaganzas. Considering the diffi

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culty of hitting upon any fancies that are decently fresh, we are bound to say that not a few of them show creditable dexterity and ingenuity. But surely this sensational business must soon come to an end, or be suspended for half a generation or so. The public is getting familiarized with all manner of mysteries, in cabs, in black boxes, in garrets, and in cellars the detectives have been told off for such intolerably hard duty, that it is clear they must soon strike in disgust, and refuse to lend themselves to those stale combinations; and the pirates, highwaymen, and bushrangers who have been indiscriminately resuscitated will find temporary rest again in their dishonored graves. The novelreading public revels in excitements, and is not over-critical; but of sensation, when it has degenerated into melodrama and burlesque, there must surely come satiety at the last.-Blackwood's Magazine.

A WORD FOR THE ANTIQUARIANS.

We do not quite understand why Dr. Schliemann's career is considered so remarkable. Our wonder is rather that there are so few Dr. Schliemanns. It is true that he was at fifteen a grocer's boy, and at twenty-two a half-starved clerk, and at thirty-six, when he renounced commerce, a prosperous man of business; but business is not incompatible with a love of learning, which in Schliemann was never even held in suspense, for it was while he was running about as a clerk on £32 a year that he acquired his mastery of European tongues. The ultimate form which his love of learning took, was in part also dictated by his history, for up to fourteen he was educated by classical scholars, and his father, a well to-do pastor who gave his mind its first bent, was full of the love of the old "tale of Troy divine." The lad vowed as a mere child that he would find Troy, and it seems to us simply natural that, finding himself rich for his wants, the mature man, unmarried and practically without a country, should set out upon the quest which had so fired his childish imagination. Thenceforward his destiny was fixed, for he succeeded. Whether he found Troy or not is a question on which experts differ, and will differ

until some new wave of barbarism, probably an upheaval from below, has drowned all such speculators and speculations together; but he hit, by that kind of intuition which is the gift of some students, upon a mound at Hissarlik as the certain site, and found under it a great city of antiquity, which he at least recognized as meeting all Homer's descriptions, and treasures of ancient art which he believed to the end of his life to have belonged to Priam. It was the merest consequence that he should thenceforward be an explorer, and should again and again unearth antiquities which, to whomever they originally belonged, shed a flood of light on the condition of the Greeks at a time before Homer lived, and modified forever the ideas of scholars as to the suddenness or slowness of Greek development in all the fictile arts.

The world has agreed, being beguiled or persuaded by a newborn hope, to admire, or indeed care about research, only when it is applied to what are called the secrets of Nature; to the discovery, that is, of forces which may increase the domi. nance of man, or render his life a happier It hungers for new motors, new sources of light, new medicines, new

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methods of rapid inter-communication. It may be right for what we know, though it will not discover the secret of happiness either by preventing fevers or enabling it self to tell lies in twenty kingdoms at once; but there is an older kind of research which still retains for the few some value the research into what men have thought, and been, and done, and of this Dr. Schliemann's seems to us, perhaps, the most fascinating branch. Antiquarianism in its broadest and truest sense, is research into those facts upon which we must in the last resort base our conception of the history of man. It is the pursuit or the science, call it which you will, which enables us to verify the only facts we have, or are likely to have, that are beyond dispute; proving that man at a certain period in his existence had discovered certain things, had learned to work in associations large or small, had taught himself or been taught something of what we call the arts; that is, methods of applying thought and experience to concrete substances so as to produce something which he could either use or admire. We know, or think we know-for we would willingly leave a gap open for conceivable, though most improbable, discoveries in China-that beyond a certain point in history we shall get no records, nothing which will lighten the labor of investigation or tell us the 'traditions or the thoughts which the men, say, of four thousand years since, probably in many countries and certainly in one, must have inherited. We must deduce every thing for ourselves, extract our knowledge bit by bit from material remains, from the ruin and the tumulus and the tomb, from shaped stones and worked morsels of metal, and broken potsherds, such as those which suggested to Lyell the special antiquity of man in Egypt. If the history of man is worth studying, the discovery of such things, and above all their careful verification, is great work, and work which we are surprised does not far more keenly attract the idle rich, who might find in it, even if they did it by deputy, a new excitement. There are plenty of places to search, for the work, even in Egypt, is only begun

it is probable that there are ruins of cities buried under existing ruins, just as at Hissarlik-it has never been commenced in China; and in America, though much seems to have been accomplished, nothing has been done thoroughly, not even that

inquiry into languages which seems to have revealed, if not a common origin for all American native tongues, at least this strange fact, that from end to end of the two Continents, the countless tribes which inhabit them built up their tongues on the same system, which is not one known in Asia, Africa, or Europe. Or if the rich say that search is too vague, for all its great results, let them come lower down the stream of time, and search, as Schliemann did in the borderland, the unknown time which men who could record their thoughts, whether by writing, or, as is more probable, by transmitting rhapsodies, professed either to remember or to have heard of. Greece, Asia Minor, the land between the two great rivers of Mesopotamia, must be full of such places, needing only the explorer with gold to soothe officials and pay for protection, and hire diggers to obey orders they cannot comprehend. Such explorers must, we admit, study a little first, and select the right men to aid them, men with imaginations; but they may gain vast results without an overwhelming expenditure of time. The sites to be tried once settled, six months of steady digging would either prove them guilty of error, or reward them fully,for one thing, if they wish for that, spreading their names over earth wherever men know enough to know what they have done. Nineveh revealed Layard, as much as ever the phonograph revealed Edison, to the world. We can conceive no external interest added to life greater than would accrue to the rich man who set himself steadily to discover what could be discovered concerning the origines Americanæ, who accumulated information enough to form theories-not a difficult task nowand who then sent or led expeditions to test them by discovery precisely as Dr. Schliemann did. No doubt they will lack the grand assistance the German derived from the wonderful ballad which, from the days of Alexander, the world has agreed to consider its greatest poem, an assistance which might create imagination where it was lacking; but he could only at best discover what had been described, and they may discover what has remained for ages unsuspected.

Let some millionaire try Delphi to begin with, first conciliating and not irritating the national and justifiable pride of Greece, and see if he is not amply rewarded, better rewarded than if he car

ried out our old suggestion to speculators, and ascertained the ultimate source from which Pactolus had derived its reputation, lasting through so many centuries of neglect, of being the golden river. Or let him ally himself with the French to continue their intermittent hunt in the jungles of Cambodia, where a great race, now wholly extinct, had discovered the secret of the arch, and carved human forms in stone so well that we can see as we look at them that they possessed a special and dominant character, a look that could only belong to men ruling, and ruling cruelly, over subjugated populations. Or, finally, let them try to settle once for all the source of the civilization of Peru, admitted by native Peruvians to have been external, and now believed to be Chinese. That could be settled, we believe, by a thorough search among the ancient monuments of Peruincluding some singular ruins known to exist in the practically unexplored back country-to be followed by a long visit of the same explorers to China, where the mis sionaties, and perhaps some learned Chinese, would greatly help to verify or disprove this exceedingly attractive or plausible hypothesis.

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Antiquarians are accused of being excessively credulous, but we do not know that they are more credulous than any other men of research. They are doubt a little more hampered than the majority by mere amateurs who will not take pains, and who sometimes jump in sheer ignorance at extravagant conclusions. It is rather, we should say, that their blunders have for some reason struck the literary class as exceptionally comic, and, moreover, capable of comic description, and that their blunders therefore have been paraded before the world. A blunder in A blunder in physiology, or in chemical research, or astronomy, never seems comic; but a blunder in the reading of an inscription, or the interpretation of a building does, and is therefore remembered like the Abbé Domenech's famous book, to the discredit of antiquarianism. Even, however, if there was credulity in the past, there is lit tle danger of it now, a flood of hostile

criticism pouring over every discovery, and almost every suggestion, until antiquarians are growing timid and inclined to believe nothing that has not been tested, and submitted, through photographs, to the judgment of the whole world. This has been the process as regards the mysterious ruins in Mashonaland. Those ruins may prove of the first historic importance, and greatly excite all antiquarians of the broader school, for they may throw a flood of light upon the earliest history of civilized man, and in particular modify greatly our conception of his readiness to engage in maritime enterprise, -a readiness certainly displayed by peoples like the Hindoos, who have now lost it. Nevertheless, all antiquarians wait for the reports of Mr. Bent, who is going out, or has gone out, under the auspices of the South African Company specially for the investigation, and who, if he lives, will doubtless, by his observations, measureinents, and photographs, enable the experts at home to come to definite conclusions. to definite conclusions. No; credulity is not the modern foible of antiquarians so much as a certain want of vigor, accompanied by a decided unreadiness to part with cash. They ought to be engaged in a dozen explorations where they carry on one, and keep their societies as alive and as well provided as if they were prospecting for gold. As it is, they tend to starve everything, even the Palestine Exploration Fund never having half the money it wants, though in that case the appeal is not only to antiquarian feeling, but to a deep religious sentiment common to the entire Christian world, and especially manifest in America, where for some purposes money is a drug. We suppose that the root of this difficulty is the fact that all antiquarians, loving, as they do, the past, are by temperament conservative and cautious and unwilling to give money, except for ecclesiastical restorations; but it ought not to be an insuperable one. Suppose Mr. Jacob Astor or Mr Brunner justifies his existence by a thoroughly organized search at Delphi, or the final completion of the search into the rock upon which Solomon's Temple stood.--Spectator.

ON A PROPOSAL TO RESTORE THE ELGIN MARBLES TO ATHENS.

BY MICHAEL FIELD.

GREAT Master of the Parthenon, men wreak
Resentment on us for our raid among

Thy ruining marbles-deem we did thee wrong;
Thine are the stones: but, Pheidias, thou wilt seɩk,

Save 'mid the English, vainly for the Greek.

Do not the heroes of thy land belong
To us, whose loftiest lyric poet's song
Honors divine Erechtheus? Or, to speak
Of our twain hoary prophets, who as these
Have sung Tiresias and l'heidippides?
Who tells the tale of Jason's wondrous crew?
Who, if not Landor, guards Aspasia's grace
Perfect from soil? Is it too much for you
To trust your darkening torsos to our race?

-Academy.

AN AGE OF DISCONTENT.*

BY JAMES BRYCE, M.P.

WHOEVER, reaching middle life, sees twenty or thirty years of manhood lie behind him, is apt, if he be of a thoughtful temper, to ask himself in what respects the world as he sees it now differs from the world as he knew it at twenty years of age. He perceives that he is not thinking the same thoughts as he did then, nor are others round him. He feels that his ideals and his hopes, his fears and his aversions, have undergone a change. He notes a difference in the moral and intellectual atmosphere he breathes. He pauses often to muse on the question what the difference is and how it has come about. I propose to night to inquire what is in the main the bent and outcome of the reflections of those who in England look back over the last twenty or thirty years, and what they take to be the distinctive note of the present temper of Europe. To address ourselves to this inquiry is to undertake a study in contemporary history, and in that difficult kind of contemporary history which deals, not with patent facts, but with underlying principles and tenden

cies.

Observers in Europe are struck by the prevalence of the spirit of discontent. I

* An address delivered before the members of the Brooklyn Library, U. S. A., on November 3, 1890.

do not mean despondency, still less despair, but merely discontent, that is to say, disquiet, restlessness, dissatisfaction with the world as this generation finds it. Some one may think that such discontent is the natural and normal habit of mind of middle age as compared with youth; and others will add that in all the centuries there has been discontent, chiefly manifesting itself among those who have passed their first youth. You will hardly suppose, however, that I have overlooked such a trite remark, or failed to allow for so obvious a cause. It would be absurd to compare the men who were twenty in 1860 with the men who are fifty in 1890. We must compare the men who were fifty in 1860 with those who are fifty now, the men who were twenty then with those who are twenty now. And the discontent I discover is in the more anxious and less buoyant tone of society and literature as a whole, of political speakers, of private conversation, of books, of newspapers, sermons. In the years from 1850 to 1860 men in Western Europe were far enough from being satisfied with things as they were. England, indeed, was prosperous and peaceful; but France was darkened by the degrading tyranny of Louis Napoleon and the sordid group that surrounded him. All the best spirits of Italy were silenced

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or in exile'; Germany was vainly, as it seemed, struggling for unity and liberty; Hungary lay bleeding and prostrate; Russia was in the iron grasp of the Czar Nicholas. And when Englishmen looked across the Atlantic they marked how the problem of slavery had risen and spread till it covered the whole sky like some black thundercloud, from which at any moment the lightning flash of war might break forth. Yet, with all this, there was, I repeat, and not in England only, but in Western Europe generally, a greater confidence in the speedy improvement of the world, a fuller faith, not merely in progress, but in rapid progress, a more pervading cheerfulness of temper than we now discern. Men acknowledged the presence of great evils, but expected them to be soon removed. They saw forces at work in whose power they had full confidence the forces of liberty, of reason, of sympathy; and they looked forward to, and were prepared to greet, the speedy triumph of the good.

To-day we in Europe have by no means ceased to believe in and to value these same forces. They are at work, and their work is visible. But it is slower than the men of 1850 expected; and because it is slower, we are less disposed to wait patiently for the results. We are less sanguine and more unquiet; less resolute and more querulous. We do not see our way so clearly, and are more pressed by the sense of surrounding difficulties. We are like a party of travellers who have started to climb some lofty mountain. At first the vivid flush of dawn and the keen morning air fill them with delight and make even the difficulties of the path enjoyable-the morasses to be crossed and the rocks to clamber over and the narrow ledges that it needs a steady head to traverse. But when after a time the air has grown sultry and the limbs have lost their spring, then the roughness of the way begins to tell upon their spirits, and the peak that looked so near looks no nearer, and one doubts if they have not missed the way, and another is sullenly silent, and a third regrets that he ever started, since what was meant to be a pleasure has turned out a toil.

I will not for the moment stop to inquire how far the temper I have sought to describe exists to-day in the United States, though it will be fitting to say something presently upon this point. What I now

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wish to convey is an impression of the prevalent-I do not say the universal, but only the prevalent-temper of Europe, that is, of the thinking minds in the four great nations of Western and Central Europe, as it appears to us in England. It is not a melancholy or gloomy or- to use an expressive American term- <-a disgruntled" temper, but one which is restless and uncertain, eager, and even carnest, yet doubtful, resolved to move in some direction, because displeased with what lies around it, but doubtful in what direction to move or which of many summoning voices to follow.

If I have not made my meaning quite plain, I must hope that the illustrations that are to be given will make it plainer. And I go on to ask-Assuming the fact to be as stated, what cause can be assigned for it, and are the phenomenon and its cause such as ought to depress and overshadow our view of the future?

The cause, you may think, needs no long search. What more obvious explanation of disappointinent than that the things which men expected have not happened. Thirty or forty years ago men were elate with hope, confident of attaining the objects that lay before them. These objects remain unattained; and from disappointment there springs discontent, and a despondent view of the future. You may remind me that it was always so throughout history. Sometimes we are high on the crest of the wave. Sometimes we are low in the trough. Hope springs eternal, but it springs more fresh and buoyant at some times than at others, and the coldness of disheartenment is proportioned to the warmth of the hope that went before. The question, therefore, comes to be, In what have we been disappointed? What were the particular hopes that then raised us to the crest of the wave? What have been the failures that have brought us down into the trough?

His

I admit the force of this remark. tory does no doubt tell us of such an alternation of cheerfulness and despondency in the minds of nations. But what is significant in the record of the last thirty years is the fact that our generation has been depressed not so much by failure to attain the objects it strove for, as by the failure of these objects, when attainedand some of them have been attained-to produce their expected results. The trees

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