sirable.

videt meliora probatque. He remains at Indeed it is by contrast with American bottom the man who said, Le livre serait | life that nirvâna appears to Amiel so demon ambition. He adds, to be sure, that it would be son ambition, “if ambition were not vanity, and vanity of vanities." Yet this disenchanted brooder, "full of a tranquil disgust at the futility of our ambitions, the void of our existence," bedaz zled with the infinite, can observe the world and society with consummate keen-ual being, and the expansion of self with hapness and shrewdness, and at the same time with a delicacy which to the man of the world is in general wanting. Is it possible to analyze le grand monde, high society, as the Old World knows it and America knows it not, more acutely than Amiel does in what follows?

For the Americans, life means devouring, incessant activity. They must win gold, predominance, power; they must crush rivals, subdue nature. They have their heart set on the means, and never for an instant think of the end. They confound being with individpiness. This means that they do not live by the soul, that they ignore the immutable and eternal, bustle at the circumference of their existence because they cannot penetrate to its centre. They are restless, eager, positive, because they are superficial. To what end all this stir, noise, greed, struggle? It is all a mere being stunned and deafened!

Each function to the most worthy: this maxim is the professed rule of all constitutions, and serves to test them. Democracy is not forbidden to apply it; but Democracy rarely does apply it, because she holds, for example, that the most worthy man is the man who pleases her, whereas he who pleases her is not always the most worthy; and because she supposes that reason guides the masses, whereas in reality they are most commonly led by passion. And in the end every falsehood has to be expiated, for truth always takes its revenge.

In society people are expected to behave as Space is failing me, but I must yet find if they lived on ambrosia and concerned them-room for a less indirect criticism of deselves with no interests but such as are noble. mocracy than the foregoing remarks on Care, need, passion, do not exist. All real American life. ism is suppressed as brutal. In a word, what is called le grand monde gives itself for the moment the flattering illusion that it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. For this reason all vehemence, any cry of nature, all real suffering, all heedless familiarity, any genuine sign of passion, are startling and distasteful in this delicate milieu, and at once destroy the collective work, the cloud-palace, the imposing architectural creation raised by common consent. It is like the shrill cock-crow which breaks the spell of all enchantments, and puts the fairies to flight. These select gatherings produce without intending it a sort of concert for eye and ear, an improvised work of art. By the instinctive collaboration of everybody concerned, wit and taste hold festival, and the associations of reality are exchanged for the associations of imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry; the cultivated classes deliberately recompose the idyll of the past, and the buried world of Astræá. Paradox or not, I believe that these fugitive attempts to reconstruct a dream, whose only end is beauty, represent confused reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart; or rather, aspirations towards a harmony of things which every-day reality denies to us, and of which art alone gives us a glimpse. I remember reading in an American newspaper a solemn letter by an excellent republican, asking what were a shopman's or a laborer's feelings when he walked through Eaton or Chatsworth. Amiel will tell him: they are "reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart, aspirations towards a harmony of things which every-day reality denies to us."I appeal to my friend the author of "Triumphant Democracy" himself, to say whether these are to be had in walking through Pittsburg.

learn is, that "the ultimate ground upon What publicists and politicians have to which every civilization rests is the average morality of the masses and a sufficient amount of practical righteousness." But where does duty find its inspiration and sanctions? In religion. And what does Amiel think of the traditional religion of Christendom, the Christianity of the Churches? He tells us repeatedly; but a month or two before his death, with death in full view, he tells us with peculiar impressiveness.

The whole Semitic dramaturgy has come to seem to me a work of the imagination. The apostolic documents have changed in value tween belief and truth has grown clearer and and meaning to my eyes. The distinction beclearer to me. Religious psychology has be come a simple phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and absolute value. The apologetics of Pascal, Leibnitz, Secrétan, appear to me no more convincing than those of the Middle Age, for they assume that which is in question-a revealed doctrine, a definite and unchangeable Christianity.

Is it possible, he asks, to receive at this day the common doctrine of a divine Prov

idence directing all the circumstances of our life, and consequently inflicting upon us our miseries as means of education?

This is water to our mill, as the Germans say, indeed. But I have come even thus late in the day to speak of Amiel, not Is this heroic faith compatible with our because I found him supplying water for actual knowledge of the laws of nature? any particular mill, either mine or any Hardly. But what this faith makes objective other, but because it seemed to me that by we may take subjectively. The moral being a whole important side he was eminently may moralize his suffering in turning the nat-worth knowing, and that to this side of ural fact to account for the education of his him the public, here in England at any inner man. What he cannot change he calls rate, had not had its attention sufficiently the will of God, and to will what God wills drawn. If in the seventeen thousand brings him peace. pages of the journal there are many pages still unpublished in which Amiel exercises his true vocation of critic, of literary critic more especially, let his friends give them to us, let M. Scherer introduce them to us, let Mrs. Humphry Ward translate them for us. But sat patriæ Priamoque datum: Maïa has had her full share of space already; I will not ask for a word more about the infinite illusion, or the double zero, or the great wheel. MATTHEW ARNOLD.

But can a religion, Amiel asks again, without miracles, without unverifiable mystery, be efficacious, have influence with the many? And again he answers:

Pious fiction is still fiction. Truth has superior rights. The world must adapt itself to truth, not truth to the world. Copernicus upset the astronomy of the Middle Age; so much the worse for the astronomy. The Everlasting Gospel is revolutionizing the Churches; what does it matter?

A | the shoulder; but it seemed to have no effect, and on he charged straight at us, making a terrific shindy. I gave him the left barrel in the middle of his body, and the shock of the bullet rolled him over; but he contrived to get into his cave, to which he was close, be fore I could give him another bullet. Knowing he was mortally wounded, we waited half an hour before reconnoitring. We then went to the cave, but it was so deep and dark that we could do nothing. Getting a lot of wood, we tried to smoke him out, but he did not show. We then sat down, and, after a council of war, concluded we could do nothing without light and help. I therefore remained with the shikari while the tracker went back to Doonga for a lantern, which in due time arrived. We then entered the cave, the shikari first with lantern and a knife, and I next with the rifle. The cave was very narrow and went far into the rock. We had got about twenty yards, when suddenly the bear, which was hidden behind a turn in the cave, gave a roar, seized the shikari's hand and the lantern, tore his arm and leg, and left us in perfect darkness. How we got out of that cave I know not; but we did so with very fair average speed. Luckily, the bear was injured so that he could not rise on his hind legs; as we afterwards found, the bottom of his spine was smashed, and the bullet in his intestines, but he had just been able to strike at the shikari. To make a long story short, the bear died next day, and a man with a long torch went into the cave, and the carcass was pulled out. It measured six feet from nose to tail, and five feet nine inches round the chest."

A BEAR HUNT IN THE HIMALAYAS. correspondent writes to the Field: "We had news of a large black bear; so I sent on my shikari and rifle to the Dâk Bungalow at Doonga Gully, where I was to sleep. I arrived at the bungalow toward the small hours of the morning. The shikari was waiting to say that he had got a tracker, and we were to start for the bear at 5 A.M. After a walk of six miles of the steepest climbing I ever had, and hanging on to fearful precipices - those of the Himalayas must be seen to be understood -we came on the bear's fresh tracks. He was evidently a large one, from his pugs (foot-mark). We tracked him for some distance to the edge of a terrible incline. We were at a height of over ten thousand feet, and there was snow in all the ravines. The tracker went on in front, and presently came back with a face of delight to say that the bear was lying on a rock just outside his cave, taking the air. It was now so steep that I had to take off my shooting-boots and walk with bare feet, as a slip would have been fatal. Luckily there was a strong breeze blowing from the bear up to us, so there was no danger of his scenting us, which is most to be feared in bear-stalking. Down we went towards him, creeping nearer and nearer, till at last we got within forty yards. My shikari had now become so excited that he was shaking all over, and kept telling me to fire. I wanted, however, to make sure, so crept on till within twenty paces. The shikari's excitement now became intense, and he nearly spoiled the whole thing. In trying to restrain himself he coughed loudly, and up sprang the bear.

At once I gave him the right barrel in

Fifth Series,

Volume LX.

} No. 2259.-October 15, 1887.

From Beginning,

Vol. CLXXV.

CONTENTS.

I. A GREAT LESSON. By the Duke of Argyll, Nineteenth Century,

II. MAJOR AND MINOR.

Part X.,

III. MASANIELLO,

IV. A SECRET INHERITANCE.. By B. L. Far-

jeon. Conclusion,

By W. E. Norris.

Good Words,

Temple Bar,

V. DONATELLO, AND THE Unveiling of THE

FACADE OF THE DUOMO AT FLORENCE,

VI. REALISM AND IDEALISM,

VII. THE LAST Day of WINDSOR FOREST,

VIII. SOME CLERICAL REMINISCENCES,

IX. A CARTHUSIAN MONASTERY NEAR MERAN,

X. THE UBIQUITY OF THE JEWISH RACE,

Temple Bar,

Spectator,

Jewish World,

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From The Nineteenth Century.
A GREAT LESSON.

he was the grandson of Dr. Erasmus Darwin —a man very famous in his day, who THE most delightful of all Mr. Darwin's was the earliest popular exponent of evoworks is the first he ever wrote. It is lution as explaining the creative work, and his journal as the naturalist of H.M.S. who, both in prose and verse, had made it Beagle in her exploring voyage round familiar as at least a dream and a poetic the world from the beginning of 1832 to speculation. Charles Darwin in his journearly the end of 1836. It was published nal seems as unconscious of that specuin 1842, and a later edition appeared in lation as if he had never heard of it, or 1845. Celebrated as this book once was, was as desirous to forget it as if he confew probably read it now. Yet in many curred in the ridicule of it which had respects it exhibits Darwin at his best, and amused the readers of the " Anti-Jacobin." if we are ever inclined to rest our opinions Only once in the journal is there any alluupon authority, and to accept without sion to such speculations, and then only doubt what a remarkable man has taught, to the form in which they had been more I do not know any work better calculated scientifically clothed by the French natuto inspire confidence than Darwin's jour-ralist Lamarck. This is all the more curinal. It records the observations of a mind ous and interesting, since here and there singularly candid and unprejudiced-fix- Charles Darwin records some facts, and ing upon nature a gaze keen, penetrating, enters upon some reasoning, in which we and curious, but yet cautious, reflective, can now see the undeveloped germs of the and almost reverent. The thought of how theory which ultimately took entire poslittle we know of how much there is to session of his mind. But that theory was, be known, and of how hardly we can learn beyond all question, the later growth of it is the thought which inspires the nar-independent observation and of indepen. rative as with an abiding presence. There is, too, an intense love of nature and an intense admiration of it, the expression of which is carefully restrained and measured, but which seems often to overflow the limits which are self-imposed. And when man, the highest work of nature, but not always its happiest or its best, comes across his path, Darwin's observations are always noble. "A kindly man moving among his kind" seems to express his spirit. He appreciates every high calling, every good work, however far removed it may be from that to which he was himself devoted. His language about the missiona- And yet there was one remarkable exries of Christianity is a signal example, in ception. Like every other voyager who striking contrast with the too common lan- has traversed the vast southern ocean, he guage of lesser men. His indignant denun- was struck, impressed, and puzzled by its ciation of slavery presents the same high | wonderful coral reefs, its thousands of characteristics of a mind eminently gentle | coral islands, and its still more curious and humane. In following him we feel that not merely the intellectual but the moral atmosphere in which we move is high and pure. And then, besides these great recommendations, there is another which must not be overlooked. We have Darwin here before he was a Darwinian. He embarked on that famous voyage with no preconceived theories to maintain. Yet

dent thought. He started free-free at least, so far as his own consciousness was concerned. The attitude of his mind was at that time receptive, not constructive. It was gathering material, but it had not begun to build. It was watching, arrang. ing, and classifying facts. But it was not selecting from among them such as would fit a plan. Still less was it setting aside any that did not appear to suit. He might have said with truth that which was said by a greater man before him: "Hypotheses non fingo." This is one of the many great charms of the book.

coral "atolls." Why is it that so many of the continents and of the great continental islands whose coasts front or are surrounded by the waters of the Pacific, are fringed and protected by barrier reefs of coral? The curious question that arises is not why the coral should grow at all, or how it grows. All this, no doubt, is full of wonder-wonder all the greater the