We have been taught to neglect it by the
tendency of general thought and political
change, by the temptation of a cheap stim-
ulus to attention, and lastly, by the teach-
ing of a great genius. The narratives
which have combined the interest of dra-
matic creation and eloquent preaching,
the works which have been cited from the
pulpit and hailed as a new Bible by those
who wished to discard the old, have been
modelled more and more on the new rev-
erence for physical science. The change
is strikingly apparent when we compare
George Eliot with George Sand; and one
character which we cannot help fancy-
ing that the great Englishwoman took
from the great Frenchwoman, and in
which, therefore, we can compare the two
methods of treatment- brings it out very
strikingly. Tito Melema, as the incar-
nate principle of the Renaissance, is the
creation of George Eliot; but as the faith.
less, frivolous, luxury-loving admirer of
Romola, he reminds us of Angiolo, the
Venetian singer, who has a similar rela-
tion towards Consuelo. But we know
Tito as a patient in a hospital; Angiolo
as a personage in a drama. We follow
the downfall of the perfidious Greek with
the interest with which we study a re-
markable case in pathology; while the
perfidious Venetian is known to us as a
passing acquaintance is, and leaves us
without any feeling that we have before
us the complete analysis of his condition.
We know him, that is, from a literary, not |
a scientific, point of view.

atmosphere impregnated with the prob lems which that fiction presented in a solid form; they were prepared to recognize them by innumerable hints and allusions; they could not take up a magazine, and hardly a newspaper, without being reminded that these were the issues disputed between thinkers; and when they found these problems, which to a certain extent were familiar, apparently settled in an interesting fiction, the fiction, without losing its own peculiar interest, gained that of philosophy. All this is true only for a generation. We cannot point to any romance of the past as prefiguring what "Daniel Deronda" and "Middlemarch" may be for the readers of the twentieth century, because the ideal on which they are moulded is entirely new. But we may safely predict that when George Eliot's productions come to be read by our grandchildren, her readers will turn most eagerly to those which enter on ground where expression is con. fessedly incomplete always, rather than to those which change of time can rob of a completeness apparently attempted by their author. Nothing exhaustive, we firmly believe, can ever be perennial.

It may be objected that when we have settled how much detail a writer of fiction had better invent, that does not help to decide how much fact a biographer had better reveal. The objection, however plausible it sound, is a part of the very heresy against which our whole polemic is directed. The aim of biography is to Well," it may be objected, "that, so reveal a character. The character is not far as it goes, is all on the side of the to be invented. But the biographer should scientific ideal of fiction, for George Eli- feel his task just as much one of selection ot's creation is a more powerful one than as the writer of fiction does. Only very George Sand's." To the countrymen of rarely will he reveal the character he seeks George Eliot, and at the very time of to reveal by telling everything he knows. publication it certainly is. Beyond this The most popular biography in the lanlimit of time and space we doubt. We guage is an example of just such fortuhave a profound faith in the conser-nate chance as this. Boswell could not vative influence of pure literature, and some distrust of instantaneous impressiveness. The contrast seems to us forcibly exhibited in the earlier and later style of George Eliot herself. "Adam Bede" was a study of moral aspects, not an analysis of moral conditions; and it had not so large an audience as its successors had; perhaps it was not read with the same keen interest as they were, for the author's power of description and creation remained undimmed, and to these attractions was afterwards added that of a kind of mental stimulus peculiarly flat tering to the ordinary intellect. The readers of "Daniel Deronda" breathed an

seems to us to have

have painted a character that needed se-
lective treatment; Johnson could not have
been so vividly known to us by any one
who bad aimed at selective treatment.
Another popular biography - Stanley's
"Life of Arnold”.
carried the principle of selection too far,
and to lose interest with its lack of shad-
ow. But the most erroneous specimens
of the kind of biography which embody
the aim of revealing a character as a dif-
ferent endeavor from that of describing a
thing, seem to us to do more ultimately
to further true views of mankind than the
most elaborate attempts which ignore this
difference, and suppose that what the bi-

ographer has to do is to empty his wallet, longs to the literary spirit, that even here

of information. The biographer who for gets his kindred to the poet, and enters into partnership with the student of physiology, starts from an assumption more false than any that could be put into a narrative form. Only he who creates can fully reveal, and he who remembers that truth will reveal least inadequately.

it seems to us the muse of history descends from her pedestal when she would approach closely to science; nor should we desire a better illustration of this truth than the two historic works of the great man from whose biography we took our start. The history written in his youth is an original and vivid picture of human life; the history written in his age is an exhaustive account of the greatness of a military nation, which that nation finds itself obliged to study as the best source of accurate information, and we feel no more doubt as to which of these works will be best known to posterity, than we do as to its verdict on the contrast between the purport of his teaching and the

The case in which the scientific ideal is least hurtful to literature is one in which the exception proves the rule, for as memory is a bridge between the regions of sense and imagination, so is history be tween those of science and literature. Here, no doubt, the two ideals must blend. And yet so intimate, so indissoluble is the connection between the truth of human life, and that selective feeling which be-disclosures of his biography.

THE ORIGIN OF SILK. — If we put any trust India, and was at last brought to Europe. The in tradition, says an English journal, there is a soldiers of Crassus, B.C. 56, saw silken standlegend that Tchin, the eldest son of Japhet, ards among the Parthians, and a few years father of the Asiatic race, taught his children later an immense velarium of silk protected the art of preparing silk, as well as the arts of the spectators in the Roman circus from the painting and sculpture. Be this as it may, it rays of the sun. From this time the Romans is certain that about three thousand years were always provided with the beautiful textbefore the Christian era a Chinese book, ures which were the admiration of their the Chou-King, described silken cords, which legions. Yet silk was still the privileged poswere stretched upon a musical instrument in- session of the rich, and in the time of Aurevented by the emperor Fo-Hi. One of his lian, who flourished in the third century, was successors, Chin Nong, reputed inventor of worth about forty times its present value. the plough, explained to his contemporaries This enormous price, when considered with what beautiful stuffs could be obtained by cul- the fact that there was at that time no comtivation of the mulberry tree, and about the merce between Rome and the Orient, goes far year B.C. 2600 an empress, to whom a grateful towards explaining the great hoarding of treas. posterity assigned a place in a celestial con- ure and jewellery which has since that time stellation, perfected the art of unravelling the gone on in India. There is a dispute between Cocoon and weaving. From that time silk tradition and history as to the period when the culture had its principal seat near the northern genuine cocoon was brought from China to portion of the Yellow River, in the province Europe. How was the vigilance of the Ceof Chan-Tong. There was produced silk for lestials thwarted, since exportation of the silkthe royal household. Yellow was the chosen worm from the flowery kingdom was forbidden color for the emperor, empress, and prince under the severest penalties? One account imperial; violets for the other wives of the states that in A.D. 552 two monks sent to Ko. emperor, blue for distinguished officers, red than by Justinian succeeded in bearing away for those less conspicuous, and black for every their booty concealed in a stalk of bamboo. one else. In the book of rites, Li-Ki, the cer- The legend says that once upon a time, when emonies performed at the harvest are carefully Kothan did not yet possess the precious bom. described. Even the empress did not disdain byx, the king of one of the provinces sought to gather the leaves of the mulberry with her and obtained a daughter of the Chinese emown dainty fingers, and watched over the rear-peror in marriage. Before quitting her native ing of the busy toilers of the cocoon. For a long time this invaluable industry remained the exclusive property of the Chinese Empire, but about the third century before the Christian era a military expedition from China bore the results of its civilization to the startled Occident. Silk became known in Persia and

land she hid seeds of the mulberry and silkworms' eggs in her hair, where it would escape the vigilance of the customs officers on the frontier. When she reached her new home she planted the seeds of the mulberry in order that suitable nourishment might be provided in the leaf for the worms.

3

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EMPIRE.*

By a decree published in the Journal Officiel of the French Republic on September 7, 1870, the minister of the interior appointed a commission charged with the collection, classification, and publication of the papers and correspondence of the imperial family which had been seized at the Tuileries on the overthrow of the empire, three days before. The president of this commission was M. André Laver tujon, who, on October 12, addressed a report to M. Jules Favre, then interim minister of the interior, indicating the progress made up to that date by the commission, and suggesting the appointment of M. Taxile Delord, Laurent-Pichat, and Ludovic Lalaune, to replace MM. de Kératry, Estancelin, and André Cochut,

who had been called to the exercise of

submitted to the control of the government of the national defence. After publication the original documents, carefully catalogued, were deposited in the national archives.

Such is the account, given with all the dry precision of an official report, of a publication of a more startling nature than often comes within the purview of the historian. Amid the portentous echoes of the time, when the ears of men were stunned by such tidings as those of the capitulation of Sedan, the collapse of the empire, the siege of Paris, and the deathstruggle of France, it might well be the case that items of what might almost be called personal gossip, which in less tempestuous times would have rung through Europe, would appear dwarfed to undue proportions by the terrible news of each day. We are not prepared to say that any effort was made by those who were other functions, the first-named of the most compromised by the papers in questhree being made prefect of police. This tion to collect and to destroy the published report, approved and countersigned by copies. But the rarity of the volumeM. Jules Favre, states that on September only one other copy than the one before 24, the first fasciculus of the papers in us having met our eyes, and that on the question had been published; that fascic- table of an ambassador - certainly tends uli, composed each of two octavo leaves, to confirm that not unnatural supposition. had succeeded nearly every other day; At all events it will be, as the commission and that the contents of a volume of five has said, "in the interest of truth" to adhundred pages had been already passed duce a few of the proofs thus unexpect through the press. Copies of each num-edly furnished of what the second empire ber, as they appeared, had been sent to cost France. the public prints; and not only had most of the documents been republished by them in entirety, but counterfeits had been circulated among the public, with which the commission had not regarded it as any part of their duty to interfere. The commission insist, in a brief preface, that the publication of these papers has an absolutely official and impersonal character, the work having been undertaken in the sole interest of the truth. The commission, according to the preface, did not judge-it simply drew up an inventory; it attempted no polemical work, but impartially prepared the materials of history. The documents, copied under the respon-lique dans les carrosses du Roi.* sibility of the secretaries to the commission, were examined by the president, and

Papiers et Correspondance de la Famille Impériale. Paris: 1870.

It is difficult to approach an enquiry of the kind without a strong sense of the grim humor of the event. The ink will hardly run from the pen without leaving traces of a certain amount of malice, using the word in its French, and not in its English, sense. That those very documents which, by reason of their intimately private nature, should be entrusted to no minister, secretary, or archivist, but kept in the personal custody of the sovereign himself, should be thus collected, kept, and at last made public for the special service and delectation of King Mob, is a new incident of the drama of la Répub

The

A similar incident had, however, twice before occurred in the course of the French Revolution, when the mob broke into the Tuileries, and pillaged the private papers of the sovereign. The documents found