All his periodical writings, all his plays, and all his poems are necessary, however, to a complete edition of his works; for our Own part, we should be satisfied with "Elia," "Rosamund Grey," "John Woodvil," the Farewell to Tobacco," and the "Letters." We must have the last, not as Talfourd has given them to us, but as Lamb wrote them ipsissimis verbis. Talfourd has helped us to bits of them-those bits which he thought nicest and prettiest; but, if we could have the true text, we should be better pleased on the whole. Upon a moderate calculation, the collection found by Talfourd does not represent a moiety of the total. Where, let us ask, is the correspondence with Hone, with the Holcrofts, with Cottle, with Hunt, with Collier, and with Novello? A contemporary of Lamb's was lately, and may be yet, living, who possesses a series of letters, not one of which has seen the light. mour at all, after the first publication in | Pilate, and even of Judas Iscariot. With1823. He never did anything which ap- out going to such lengths as this, it is only proached in merit the contents of that ad- fair to call attention to the very ambiguous mirable volume during the eleven years and unsatisfactory position of a man whose from 1823 to 1834. name really does not seem to deserve to have become a byword of reproach. It is a little strange, in this age of civil and religious liberty, that nobody should have a good word for Gallio. His hard lot has been to be taken as a type of carelessness and of scepticism, and to be thundered at from all the pulpits of the Christian world. If we inquire carefully into what is recorded about him, it turns out that he is a strangely underrated man. His whole crime appears to consist in his having refused to listen to the accusations against the Apostle Paul, and having looked on with profound indifference at a bastinado inflicted upon the chief ruler of the synagogue. It is possible that a modern magistrate would have felt it his duty to interfere to prevent any and every breach of the peace; but a beating is not a serious matter among Oriental communities, and when inflicted upon a Jew it would be deemed a bagatelle; and at all events, as far as the Apostle was concerned, Gallio can claim the posthumous credit of having released him from his captors without even waiting to call on him for his defence. The sole political principle which we hear of his enunciating on the occasion was, according to modern political ideas, a sound one. It was nothing more or less than the non-interference of the State in matters of purely A GOOD deal of ingenuity has been spent religious discipline and controversy upon the whitewashing of various historical era chiesa in stato libero. "If it were a matcharacters who are thought to have been ter of wrong or wicked lewdness," said Galtreated by posterity with unnecessary injus- lio to St. Paul's accusers, reason would tice. Some of them, by means of the per- that I should bear with you; but if it be a tinacious efforts of their apologists, have al- question of words and names and of your most been set upon their legs again; while law, look ye to it, for I will be no judge of others, like Mary Queen of Scots and Henry such." And so saying, Gallio drave them VIIL, still furnish an inexhaustible subject from the judgment seat; or, in other words, of literary controversy. There is, however, dismissed the prosecution, and ordered the a considerable opening for any diligent the Court to be cleared. Such being his decisologian who will make it his duty to repair ion, it became wholly unnecessary for him and varnish some of those whom we may to hear the prisoner at all. We do not even perhaps, without irreverence, be permitted know that the Apostle wished to be heard, to call the black sheep of Scripture. We but in any case Gallio did nothing beyond do not for a moment allude to anybody of what the strictest and most orthodox Bow whose wickedness we are authoritatively Street magistrate of the nineteenth century assured by sacred writers. But outside the would have done. The text usually flung category of these there are a number of per- at the head of the much-abused deputy of sons on whose moral or religious merits the Achaia has no reference at all to his treatBible does not pronounce, but who, from ment of the religious ideas of Paul. The some cause or another, have nevertheless "thing" for which he is said not to have come to be regarded as good for nothing and cared was the beating of Sosthenes. The sinful creatures. Every educated person is Church has not since attached to it much aware of the arguments that have been more importance than Gallio did; and so urged in favour of the sincerity of Pontius long as the whole circumstances of the chas From the Saturday Review. Lib As its acknowledged aim was the extirpation of all other creeds, it was not strange that it should be thought a standing menace to them or to State tranquillity. The tone adopted towards it by the Emperor Julian shows what was thought by a rational adherent to old systems of belief. As time went on, a battle à outrance began between the old and the new. It was war to the knife between them, and, if we are to believe history, some acute observers had seen this from the first. But the distinction drawn by Gallio between matters of opinion and matters of State cognizance was not a visionary one. tisement of Sosthenes are not before us, jus- | Christian Church became a State danger. The charge of indifference to religious truth, so far as Gallio is concerned, must accordingly be considered as not proven. Apart from this, it is a charge which is singularly inconsistent in the mouths of those who prefer it against him. It is illogical in ecclesiastical commentators to upbraid the Executive of the Roman Empire at one time for interfering, and at another for not interfering, in the early controversy between Christianity and its assailants. One of two things is obvious - either that the Imperial Government was lax or not lax upon subjects of Pagan orthodoxy; but it is idle to accuse its agents simultaneously of scepticism and of tyranny. The truth is that the line drawn by Gallio between what was and what was not a matter for State inquiry was conformable to the principles of Imperial Rome. One of the accidental merits of educated Paganism was that it generally was tolerant, just as Alexander the Great was tolerant, and as all who attempt to establish a world-wide empire must be tolerant. Rome could not afford, with her enormous frontier and her system of outlying provinces, to be anything else. The subsequent persecutions of Jews and Christians were political rather than religious in their inception. Polytheism is usually anything but an exclusive system. The worship of the gods of the hills is not essentially incompatible with a toleration of the worship of the gods of the valleys. But, unfortunately for the lives and liberties of its early followers, Christianity could not co-exist with any other form of religious creed. Neither Jew nor Christian could consent to admit the statue of the Emperor to stand on the altar of the one true God; and both Judaism and Christianity were thus driven into direct conflict with the political requirements of the Roman Empire. Still later on, when it had grown to more substantial proportions, the Such was the view of Rome. The departure from it in the case of Christian persecutions was a matter not of sectarian bitterness so much as of State policy. Indeed Gallio's theory, good or bad in the abstract as it may be, was one which, at that particular moment, the early Christians had every reason to approve. If Gallio had chosen to investigate Paul's orthodoxy, he would have had to investigate it not merely from a Jewish point of view. It would have been his business to examine whether the Apostle's opinions were consistent or inconsistent with allegiance to the Roman Emperor. His abstinence from unnecessary inquisitiveness was therefore rather a politi cal virtue than a theological vice. That it was conformable to the maxims of the Empire is evident from the subsequent history of St. Paul. It was the spontaneous appeal of the Apostle to "Cæsar" which led him into captivity at Rome, not any interference by Imperial agents with private liberties and rights. After hearing his exposition of Christian doctrine, Agrippa and Festus agreed between them that "this man might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed unto Cæsar." The same inconsistency which is observable in the reproaches freely poured upon Gallio is also to be seen in the censures lavished on those in our day who are supposed to be like him, and who are usually dubbed by his name. In the proper sense of the appellation, a modern Gallio is, as we have said, a gentleman who disbelieves in a State Inquisition. If so, most people are Gallios. No section of the Church at the present day is anxious to have matters of theology subjected unnecessarily to the careful cognizance of State authority- least of all those sections of the Church which might be expected to inveigh most earnestly against Gallios. Again. if it be suggested that Gallio was indifferent to the welfare of his soul, there is not the vestige of proof that he T T 1 was anything of the kind. We come, lastly, on the whole to abstain from controversial to the real derivative sense attached by pul- discussion. Their answer to such abuse is a pit orators to the term. Gallio is put for- simple and a conclusive one. They do not ward as the type of people who, on the whole, profess to deal with those topics any more are sceptical about the advantage of enter than Gallio the Roman lawyer did. They ing upon the discussion of religious contro- are secular, not religious, critics, just as he versy. It is somewhat significant that this was a secular, and not a religious, judge. should form part of the burden of the indict- The line they draw is precisely his line. ment against Pilate, who is thought to have When it comes to be a matter of wrong or displayed an improper incredulity as to the of wicked lewdness they interfere, but not possibility of arriving at abstract "truth." till then. It is their duty in the interest of Gallio and Pilate, as far as one can judge, the public to expose ignorance, charlatanwere both of them sceptics in the metaphysi- ism, or immorality, but from subjects of thecal sense of the word, though the former ology pure and simple they keep aloof. seems to have been exempt from the crimi- Nobody in his senses can maintain that such nal weakness which has rendered the latter a view is wicked. It is simply common an object of infamy to all time. Before con- sense. And Gallio-haters may perhaps feel demning, in Gallio's person at all events, the the cogency of the argument when they spirit of philosophical scepticism, preachers reflect on the nature of the other alternawill do well to consider what philosophical tive that must be accepted if abstention scepticism is, and how far it interferes with from theological controversy is to be conor seems contrary to the principles of orthodox religion. demned. The alternative is that every newspaper in England shall be a religious partisan, free to adopt its own theories about religion, and to enter on a religious propaganda for the sake of persuading the public of their truth. Probably a régime of literary Gallios would be far more acceptable, even to theologians. It is worth remarking that the one nation in Europe which is most conservative in matters of theology is the most sceptical about metaphysics. The nation in question is ourselves. Nor is this a pure coincidence. The two things stand to each other very much in the relation of cause and effect. The position of Gallios in private life is The reason that Englishmen believe in re- not a bit less tenable than that of Gallios in ligious truth so firmly is that they do not journalism. It is not a crime, as some peobelieve in the attainment of philosophical ple think, to feel no interest in theological truth at all. The ordinary theologian of the controversy. There is a point, indeed, at day makes metaphysical uncertainty, or the which such controversy usually becomes inimpossibility of discovering truth by think- teresting. If problems are mooted affecting ing about it, the basis of his system. It is the future destinies of the Church, and the true that the edifice is not a logical result of character of the future religious teaching of the foundation on which it is built, and that the country, people seldom fail to form a a man may doubt everything besides reli- view of their own about them. In this region without ceasing to doubt about reli- spect few of us are Gallios, and least of all gion itself. But practically, and among a those who are oftenest suspected of the large mass of English men and women, dis- crime. But apart from such cases a Gallio belief in the powers of the human mind, and point of view is not only very natural, but belief in the doctrines taught to them, do go certainly by no means the reverse of praisetogether. There are, however, more ration-worthy. What would become of the world al methods of reconciling Gallios and religion than this. And, in the first place, it is clear that, in declining to discuss theology, Gallios have the sanction of a large number of authorities of the Christian Church. Every modern Gallio has a right to say that theology is not his vocation. There are those whose business it is to study it and to investigate its subtleties; but a layman is no more bound to be a theologian, unless he likes, than he is bound to be acquainted with the mysteries of contingent remainders. Newspapers, for example, are continually set down as Gallios, or Sadducees, or both, simply because they feel it best up if every professional man and every educated layman were to strip for the controversial arena, and to desend into the pit in the costume of a theological gladiator, armed with net and dagger for the fray? Such a state of things would be the death of most easy-going country parsons. There was a Turkish Pasha in the Crimean war who expired out of sheer dismay at the fuss made at Balaclava by the Consuls of the Western Powers. A like melancholy end would befall a good many English clergymen if all the laymen in the parish insisted on sifting and controverting all the doctrines laid down, or taken for granted, in the Sun day sermon. Does the parson who preaches against Gallios wish for a congregation of Gallios or not? If he does, he is a very rash man. He desires to pass from a calm atmosphere of quiet into a troubled atmosphere of thesis and antithesis, of disputation, mutiny, and rebellion. If he appreciates the utility of Gallios in particular, he ought not in common fairness to preach against Gallios in general. This is especially true in times like the present, when religious tenets are held by most educated people rather as a matter of moral conviction and practical use than of mathematical certainty. If Gallios are to be put down, their place will be filled by far more inconvenient and uncomfortable disputants. Theologians ought to be satisfied with the latitude conceded to the theologians of Corinth. They have full liberty to inflict any spiritual penalties they like on a rival Sosthenes, but it is a fatal mistake on their part to object to the orthodox neutrality of Gallio. From the Spectator. MR. DARWIN AT THE ANTIPODES. "THE native [Maori] saying is, 'As the white man's rat has driven away the native rat, as the European fly drives away our own, as the clover kills our fern, so will the Maoris disappear before the white man himself."" Thus quotes Dr. Hooker, the eminent naturalist of our Kew Gardens, in a remarkable article in the new number of the Popular Science Review on "The Struggle for Existence amongst Plants." "The European house-fly," says Dr. Hooker, "seems to drive out before it the native blue-bottle of New Zealand, so that settlers, knowing its value, carry it in boxes and bottles to their inland stations." So, too, in the vegetable world the vegetable emigration from Europe seems to drive before it the native products of the New Zealand soil. "The noisy train of English migration is not more surely doing its work than the stealthy tide of English weeds, which are creeping over the waste, cultivated, and virgin soil, in annually increasing numbers of genera, species, and individuals." Dr. Hooker quotes a New Zealand correspondent to the same effect: "You would be surprised at the rapid spread of European and other foreign plants in this The country. All along the sides of the main lines of road through the plains, a Polygonum (avicu lare), called 'cow-grass,' grows most luxuriantly, the roots sometimes two feet in depth, and the plants spreading over an area from four to five feet in diameter. The dock (Rumex obtusifolius or R. crispus) is to be found in every river-bed, extending into the valleys of the mountain riv ers, until these become mere torrents. sow thistle is spread all over the country, growing luxuriantly nearly up to 6,000 feet. The watercress increases in our still rivers to such an extent as to threaten to choke them altogether; in fact, in the Avon, a still deep stream, running through Christ Church, the annual cost of keeping the river free for boat naviga tion and for purposes of drainage exceeds 300l. I have measured stems twelve feet long and three quarters of an inch in diameter. In some of the mountain districts, where the soil is loose, the white clover is completely displacing the native grasses, forming a close sward." - and later in his article he tells us the most remarkable fact of all, that, "The little white clover, and other herbs, are actually strangling and killing outright the New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax), a plant of the coarsest, hardest, and toughest descrip tion, that forms huge matted patches of woody rhizomes, which send up tufts of sword-like leaves, six to ten feet high, and inconceivably strong in texture and fibre. I know of no English plant to which the New Zealand flax can be likened, so as to give any idea of its robust constitution and habit, to those who do not know it; in some respects the great matted tussocks of Carex paniculata approach it. It is difficult enough to imagine the possibility of white clover invading our bogs, and smothering the tussocks of this Carex, but this would be child's play in comparison with the resistance the Phormium would seem to offer." It is an illustration of the same process that the European horse so increases in South America as to gain rapidly upon the native animals of these plains, and that in New Zealand the English pig runs wild and multiplies at a rate which is a serious danger to the sheep farmers, whose flocks of lambs the wild hog decimates. That a little and apparently feeble plant like clover should be able to win a complete victory over the formidable sworded flax of New Zealand, and that the English fly should drive out the blue-bottle which is such a nuisance to the settlers, are striking illus trations of the apparent power which human civilization seems to lend to even the animals and plants that have thoroughly adapted themselves to its conditions,illustrations which inevitably suggest the superstitious view of the subject conveyed Those in the Maori presage with which we com- weaker plants all the more languid and menced this article. It seems as if the feeble elements of its physiology, while the mere local connection with civilized beings New Zealand perennial, living undisturbed which is implied in buzzing in civilized in a milder climate and much richer soil, windows and growing on ploughed fields, has been left comparatively without any were a physical tonic to the constitution of process of competitive selection, till, like animals and plants which enables them, the luxurious man who has had all his com when put in competition with the native forts and necessaries at his elbow, when insects, animals, or plants of barbarous competing for existence against the trained countries, to win as easy a victory as civili- hunter who has lived by his knife and gun, zation wins over barbarism. Does not the it is worsted at every turn by the hardier English fly contract a cunning from its resi- rival. It would be easy, of course, to sugdence in English larders, which makes it gest a similar account of the success of the more than the match of the big Maori blue- European fly and European rat in combottle? Have not the clover and water-peting against the native blue-bottle and cress imbibed, by the process of selection, the native rat. In neither case, probably, structural habits of economizing the juices is it due to greater strength or ferocity, of the comparatively poor English soil, greater aptitude for war, but to instincts which gives them an advantage over the trained through successive generations unplants that have grown up for ages in a soil der more difficult circumstances. to rich to need any such provisions for European flies and rats which have not assimilating all the most nutritious elements been able to adapt themselves to their conof growth? It is quite conceivable that in dition in a country where the most nouran old and much tilled country only the ishing food is usually jealously guarded, and more hardy species, those which have the where all wild animals have less and less most powerful attraction for the juices in chance every year, have died out, and only the soil on which they live, will succeed in those remained which by hardier constituyielding good crops, while in a very rich tion, greater caution, less offensive habits, country, especially when combined with and more subtle instincts, have been able, a milder climate, this process of contest while supporting themselves, sufficiently to between the more and less vigorous species avoid the enmity of man to prevent any will go on much more tranquilly and slowly, war of extermination being waged against so that the race between one plant and them. And these trained instincts of course another for nutrition may not have elabo- tell greatly in their favour when they come rated anything like such special powers of to be pitted against races which have not competition for sap. Dr. Hooker tells us hitherto needed them for their protection. that seedlings of the cedar and the maple Such is the apparently most natural infercome up even with us in the early spring ence from Dr. Hooker's strange array of by thousands in the grass-ground where they facts to prove that while the plants and are planted, but then, as soon as the grass animals of the antipodes show no increased begins to grow again, the grass draws away fertility when transplanted to Europe, no all their supplies of nourishment, and they tendency to run our native plants hard in die away. This seems to show that peren- the struggle for existence, our plants and nial grasses have a much stronger relative animals show as much colonizing capacity attraction for the nutritious elements of as man himself when they emigrate with the earth than seedling trees; but in New him to New Zealand. We take the case of Zealand it would seem, from Dr. Hooker's New Zealand rather than that of any other account that even annuals from Europe virgin soil, like South America, because often beat New Zealand perennials in the though many of the same phenomena are race. That is, it may be, the seeds of the true of South America also, the conditions European plants obtain in a few months as of climate are there generally so different strong a hold of the ground as the native that the experiment is disturbed by many perennials have gained in many years, and other considerations. In New Zealand, on then by virtue of their "naturally selected the contrary, though the climate is rather species, assimilate with more rapidity and milder, owing to the greater extent of sea, effect than their perennial neighbours the climatic conditions are exceedingly like the juices of the soil, and so starve the those of England. plants in their vicinity. The vegetable which in England has gone through centuries of competition for existence with other vegetables, has lost by the death of the We have striven purposely to suggest an interpretation of these very curious and as yet unexplained facts which is entirely in the spirit of Mr. Darwin's great work, |