chapter in the Bible, in another raving at Olivia as a vile strumpet, an ungrateful creature, the vilest stain upon their family, who should never darken its "harmless doors" again. Her husband more practically starts out in search of the fugitive, and, after a variety of adventures in which we need not follow him, finds her deserted, and listens to her confession. "It was Mr. Thornhill who seduced me,' says Olivia. This announcement causes the most intense astonishment to the addlepated vicar, who up to that moment seems to have been under the firm conviction that the real villain was Mr. Burchell! The next incidents follow each other rapidly. Olivia accompanies her father homeward, but remains at an inn for one night in order that the family may be prepared for her reception; the vicar reaches his house at midnight, and finds it in flames; the wife and children are rescued, but all their effects are lost; and then the news is broken of Olivia's return. Mrs. Prin rose receives her with a series of ungenerous taunts, but is soon silenced by the vicar, and in a few days we find them all under shelter again, thanks to the assistance of their neighbors, prominent among whom is that Farmer Williams they had used and abused so shamefully. Then comes the report that Thornhill is paying his addresses to Miss Wilmot, the young lady he had previously called a fright; while, to make things pleasanter for Olivia, her mother actually insists upon her singing, for their entertainment, a song descriptive of her own disgrace!

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom, is to die. Conceive a person just sentenced to be hanged being forced to recite an Ode to the Halter for the amusement of his friends! Could refinement of cruelty in its grotesquest form go farther than in the case of this miserable girl, seduced, abandoned, and put to eternal shame, being thus compelled, by her own mother, to quaver this musical comment on her own infamy?

Just then the seducer drives up, and is very properly denounced by the father of

his victim as a poor pitiful wretch, a liar, a vile thing, and so forth. Thornhill replies with an outrageous insult, and is thereupon stigmatized as a reptile; he, in rejoinder, calmly threatens to evict the parson for rent and to proceed against him for a forfeited bond, concluding with an invitation to the parson and Olivia to assist at his marriage with Miss Wilmot. Upon this he is desired to make himself scarce, and departs abruptly, vowing to be revenged.

Now occurs another of those little incidents which show the utter lack of anything like self-respect that characterizes Mrs. Primrose and her daughters. The Squire's threat is put into execution the very next morning, and the women, in their agitation, positively implore the parson to "" comply with the seducer" upon any terms," even begging him "to admit his visits once more"! Is this an intentional travesty? Is Oliver Goldsmith a bitterer satirist of human nature than the author of "The Houhynyms"? parson, however, has not fallen quite so low, and is marched off to jail in due course. We pass over his experiences in this place, and approach the climax of the story, which, for extravagance and monstrosity of conception, transcends anything we ever met with in the domain of serious literature.

The

Dr. Primrose is visited in prison by the despised and flouted Burchell, who now reveals himself in his true character as Sir William Thornhill. All previous misunderstandings having been cleared up, and the baronet placed in full possession of his nephew's villainy, the nephew himself arrives; and now mark what follows. Sir William receives him with a torrent of scathing invective; the young man prevaricates and lies; exposure promptly follows, whereupon he sinks into a condition of abject surrender, fawns, cringes, grovels on his knees, and, in a voice of piercing misery," implores compassion. The uncle, meanwhile, treats him with withering scorn, calls him a viper, a stain to humanity, a wretch whose pleasures are as base as himself, and so on, over several pages. Certainly, no human being was ever reduced to so pitiable and contemptible a plight, or made to appear so thoroughly and hopelessly ridiculous, as the fascinating vanquisher of Olivia. Surely we may fancy them all congratulating them

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selves that the mock marriage she had undergone with so poor a cur was a mock marriage, and that while her own innocence of intent preserved, her honor intact she would be henceforward safe from the misery of having such a husband! But no; Ephraim Jenkinson, the sharper, had been employed by the Squire to procure a sham license and a sham priest. He turns out not to have done so, but, playing his master false, took care to get him the real articles; so that Olivia is now tied for life to one of the basest and most pitiful scoundrels in creation. Let us see how the discovery of this terrible calamity is received.

A burst of pleasure now seemed to fill the whole apartment; our joy even reached the common room, where the prisoners themselves sympathized, and shook their chains in transport and rude harmony. Happiness was expanded upon every face, and even Olivia's cheeks seemed flushed with pleasure. To be thus restored to reputation, to friends,

and fortune at once, was a rapture sufficient to stop the progress of decay, and restore former health and vivacity. But perhaps, after all, there was not one who felt sincerer pleasure than I. Still holding the dear-loved child in my arms, I asked my heart if these transports were not delusion,

So ecstatic, indeed, is everybody's joy, that Sir William Thornhill immediately insists upon Sophia marrying Jenkinson; a man who has been a common swindler, a sort of superior thimble-rig frequenter of fairs and inns, who has twice robbed

the family of valuable property, and has never evinced the smallest wish himself to marry Sophia. The young lady very naturally and indignantly refuses, and Jenkinson has the satisfaction of being rejected, to his face, by a person he has never proposed to or probably even thought of. Then Sir William offers himself, and is accepted; the vicar recovers the fortune he lost at the beginning of the book, and the story closes with a double wedding.

Such, then, are the main incidents in a work of fiction which has probably gained for its author more praise than any other production of its size in the English language. Goethe says that its effect upon him was indescribable. "That lofty and benevolent irony, that fair and indulgent view of all infirmities and faults, that meekness under all calamities, that equanimity under all chances and changes, and the whole train of kindred virtues," proved, he says, his best education at a critical moment of his mental development. We need not travel farther afield than this. Did Goldsmith "write like an angel"? Was he, in sober truth, a man of transcendent genius? He must have been, and that of the highest order. inferior intellect could have achieved so wonderful a triumph as to win, for a work instinct with such ignoble import, grotesque improbability, and inverted morals, the enthusiastic admiration of Goethe, and the suffrages of the entire reading world. National Review.

No

MEN who dislike female education-and they exist, though the class is rapidly diminishing when they grow spiteful, always assert that it is only the ugly women who learn hard, and that the most successful among them would exchange all their triumphs in the schools for the gift of beauty. Novelists, on the other hand. who are supposed to be observers, and especially female novelists, are apt to inake intelligence and good looks, especially in men, supplements, and even in many cases causes, of each other. Miss Brontë created a passing admiration for intelligent ugliness; but her successors have reverted, and their heroes, military or clerical, are as remarkable for their clear-cut features

as for the incisive and original thoughts of which we hear. There is absolutely, so far as we know, no sufficient ground for either assumption, and certainly neither can be justified by a priori reasoning. Boys and girls alike study, for the most part, either because they wish to succeed in life, that is, to earn independent incomes, or because they have the instinct of students, and never think of their own looks in connection with the matter. Some women may, a little later on,-the inborn desire to attract acting as a spur, and urging them to remedy inferiority of one kind by superiority of another, as it also urged that unusually ugly person, John Wilkes; but they begin their course

before personal vanity has any decided power. As a matter of fact, in both sexes, successful students have been occasionally noted for unusual physical beauty (take Crichton and Lady Mary Montagu), and for exceptional absence of form (take Socrates, and the philosopher who was said-unjustly, as we think-to be his own missing link). The truth we take to be that the modern world almost unconsciously confounds expression with beauty, and fancies that because intelligence in most cases produces expressiveness-there are marked exceptions-therefore there must be some intimate relation between beauty and intelligence, or even, a much more remarkable error, the possession of knowledge. There is, however, no such law, and no reason why there should be, the power of the brain, and the shape of the bones and flesh, being almost entirely disconnected. Beauty is a result of race, of circumstances, such as personal freedom and mode of life, and of continuous diet, not of intelligence, and still less of the acquisition of knowledge, which latter can only benefit the individual, whose features are fixed past serious change before study is even commenced. A man or a woman inherits his or her face, and mental habitude, though it may greatly affect its meaning, can no more alter its shape than assiduous training can turn a smooth fox-terrior into the wiry kind from Airedale.

It may even be doubted, strange as many will deem the assertion, whether continuous education will produce beauty, whether the growth of intelligence will even in ages yield the physical result which we notice the authors of Utopias always assume, as if it were a scientifically demonstrable consequence of the new society. The most beautiful black race in Africa, a tribe in Nyassaland, on whose looks even missionaries grow eloquent, and who are really as perfect as bronze statues, are as ignorant as fishes, and though they have discovered the use of fire, have never risen to the conception of clothes of any kind. The Otaheitan, when discovered, was as uncultured as the Papuan now is; yet the former approached as nearly to positive beauty as the latter does to positive deformity. The keenest race in Asia, and, as all who know them assert, the strongest in character, the Chinese, is decidedly the ugliest of semi-civilized man

kind; while the Hindoo, if sufficiently fed, is, even when as ignorant as an animal, almost invariably handsome. The Circassians, who know nothing, and are rather stupid than exceptionally intelligent, are physically a faultless race, far more so than the Germans, who, though the best trained people in the world, display a marked commonness of feature, as if the great sculptor Nature had used good clay, but taken no trouble about the modelling. Some of the very ablest among them belong to the flat-nosed, puffycheeked, loose-lipped variety. The keenest race in the world, and probably the one most susceptible of culture, the Jew, presents few types of beauty, being usually at once hook-nosed and flabbycheeked, though in physique, as in thought, that race occasionally throws out transcendent examples. The tamed Arabs of Egypt, who seem to possess poor brains, and, of course, have no education, are often extraordinarily handsome; while in 1860 the grandest head in Asia, a head which every artist copied as his ideal of Jove, belonged to an Arab horsedealer who, outside his trade, knew nothing. No modern men of culture would pretend, in mere perfectness of form, to rival the old Greek athletes, who intellectually were probably animals, or the Berserkars, who were for the most part only hard-drinking soldiers. The Royal caste, which has been cultivated for a thousand years, seldom produces beautiful men, and still seldomer beautiful women; most Princesses, though sometimes dignified, having been marked, as to features, by a certain ordinariness often wanting in the poor, and especially the poor of certain districts, like Devon in England, and Arles and Marseilles in France. Devon is no better taught than Suffolk, but mark the difference in peasant forms. In the last century, the ablest men in Europe were remarkable for a certain superfluity of flesh, of which Gibbon's face is the best known and most absurd example; and in our own time, intellect, even he reditary intellect, is constantly found dissociated from good looks, and even from distinction, some of the ablest men being externally heavy and gross, and some of the ablest women marked by an indefiniteness of check and chin as if they had been carved by the fingers in putty. stranger ever saw Tennyson without turn

No

ing round, but Browning would have passed unnoticed in any English or Austrian crowd. The air of physical refinement, which is what continuous culture should give, is precisely the air which is often lacking anong the cultivated, as it is also in many aristocratic families. Indeed, though caste must mean more or less hereditary culture, it is doubtful if it secures beauty. It does not in the Royal houses, and in any regiment, though an officer or two will probably stand first, the proportion of splendid men will be found greater among the non-commissioned than the commissioned officers. Why not? Just as no man can by taking thought add a cubit to his stature, so no extent of culture, even if continued for generations, can make straight hair wave, or reduce high checkbones, or cut away a hanging lower lip, or refine that most frequent of drawbacks, a cheek without conWe might as well say that it would alter color, which, as far as evidence can prove, is independent of everything, whether mental or physical in influence, except possibly and that as yet is only a guess-of ages of hereditary starvation.

tour.

It is not perhaps, to the injury of the world that the effects of culture should be thus limited. We rather dread the spirit of caste as an operating force, believing that it tends to a segregating exclusiveness, and already we see that the world is dividing itself into two classes, those who speak with the trained voice and those

If

who do not, the members of which instantly recognize each other, even in the dark, and have very little in common. the cultured were likewise the beautiful, and the uncultivated the ugly, the Queen would indeed be ruling two nations more widely apart than were ever the rich and the poor in Mr. Besant's novels. Already mésalliances are growing fewer, and it is considered as monstrous for the educated to marry the ignorant as ever it was for nobles to marry plebeians. The separating influences from which the world is never free are strongly at work again, and new Brahmins are looking down on new Pariahs with a contempt which is only externally gentle. That spirit needs no intensification, and it is not a bad thing to remember occasionally that science can no more make a Circassian than a one-legged race, and that the physical attributes, like the grace of God, are independent of thinking. If they were not, we should some day have a race of heroes indeed, stalking among lesser men as Kingsley depiets his Goths stalking among the far more quick-witted and better cultivated Alexandrians. An entire race like Alexander the Great, the man in whom, of all mankind, brain-power and physique were united in their highest perfectness, would soon be more intolerable than the "Venetian" aristocracy whom Mr. Disraeli derided, denounced, and worshipped.Spectator.

"Is civilization a failure?" asks Truthful James, beset by a horrible misgiving; "and is the Caucasian played out?" Without yielding an unqualified assent to the latter half of this double-barrelled query, we may-while emphatically negativing the first still admit the possibility of the fact suggested by it. History repeats itself and that not once or twice only; and if we compare our own era with others which have preceded it, it may seem more than likely that, in one sense at least, "the Caucasian is played out." Nations and races have their rise, their period of dominance-overlordship or hegemony, whichever we like to call it

and their decline. But civilization-which I take to mean that progress of the race which, halting, blundering, frequently recoiling and returning on itself, has yet been, on the whole, an onward and upward one--still goes on. One race reaches its height, sinks, and falls, and, in its fall, hands on the torch to another, whose day is only just beginning. Such -as a survey of history shows-has been the general course of social evolution, by which we mean the Divine education, through mistake and failure, of that complex, enigmatic, helpless, and yet allachieving being we call Man.

Attention has often been drawn, some

times in bitter cynicism, sometimes in deepest sadness and despair, to the unmistakable analogies to be perceived between our own country during the latter half of the present century, and the Roman Empire from the days of Tiberius onward. It is foreign to our present purpose to follow out in detail the various points of resemblance the unwieldy extent of dominion abroad, the social discontent at home-the crumbling of old faiths and old ideals, the spread of intellectual knowledge, and the weakening-real or seeming-of moral obligations-all these have been dwelt upon again and again. I would only remark, in passing, that while no doubt a great deal of what has been said on the subject is true, it seems to me the outlook is by no means so hopeless as it has appeared to some among our noblest and best. George MacDonald, I think it is, who has pointed out that the progress of the world, apparently a circle, as it were, is really a spiral; so that, when we seem to have come round again to the same point we reached a thousand years ago, we are really above it. Our epoch corresponds, alas! only too well to the age of Tiberius. Yet in some points it is better, if only in that we are ashamed of doing things which then no one felt to be wrong; and it is these points which represent the advance, the higher plane to which the spiral ascent has brought us. So that, even granting which we are by no means prepared to do -that the present age has exhausted all the possibilities of Europe, we see that the world has not been left where it was at the beginning of the Christian era; it has advanced, and though the advance may seem trifling, God's Providence, which has all Eternity to work in, can afford to wait.

Again, the decadence of the Roman Empire, hopeless as the outlook may well have seemed to a St. Augustine or a Sidonius, was not the decadence of the world. Out of that seething Medea's caldron as Charles Kingsley puts it-of the wrecks of kingdoms and the dross of nations, new states were even then springing into being, and the Empire, already dead, lived again in their life. Rome gave them their law and their civil institutions; she handed on to them the religion which she had received, but in her decrepitude could not worthily assimilate; she supplied them, in some cases, with a

language to be moulded into fresh shapes by their own young and living thought.

The question suggests itself: Who is to carry out the parallel? Where is the raw material to be found, out of which, moulded by our stored up experience, the civilization of the future is to be shaped? Who is to work out in nobler, truer practice, the theories we have so imperfectly acted up to? The great Oriental Empires have had their day, so have the Latin races; the Teutons have seemingly passed the zenith of their glory. Whether the Slavs are to come on the European stage, to play out the last act of the drama which began with Alfred and Charlemagne, remains to be seen. Personally, I think it very probable, though it is hard to say what they will make of it. America is, so far as regards its white population, merely a replica of old-world civilizations, more vigorous in its Teutonic, less so in its Latin elements. Whether the aboriginal stock dying out in the Northern Continent, is equally so in the central and southern, scems at present an unsettled question.

Whether Japan and China-now, after centuries of seclusion, modifying their national characteristics by intercourse with the western world-are destined to see any vigorous life of their own, it is difficult to decide. It may be that the activity shown at present is but a reflex from the stirring life of the West, and may turn out to be the last spasmodic struggle which precedes dissolution. Both contain, socially and morally, elements of decay which have been fatal to societies in all ages. These evils are not, so to speak, crudities incident to the raw-material stage of society, which will disappear with growth and culture-they are deeply-seated diseases, exceedingly difficult to eradicate, and, unless eradicated, fatal. But this is a point on which I would speak with extreme diffidence; and it is, after all, foreign to my main purpose, which is, to inquire whether there exist, at present, any races which can properly be termed raw material, and which stand in the same relation to Europe of the present, as the Alemanni and the Gauls, the Goths, Saxons, Jutes, and Vandals did to Rome of the past.

It seems to me that we must look for an answer to this question to the muchdiscussed and hotly-debated Dark Conti