their origin from the Babylonian captivity for, according to a tradition still possessed amongst them, their ancestors settled in Persia in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and did not respond to the appeal of Ezra to return to Palestine. Their mode of life resembles that of the Persians in general. They hold the beard in high esteem, and wear long flowing robes. They have sevlaw from Bagdad. The celebrated African traveller, Mungo Park, found a colony of Jewish families in the heart of Africa, about eight hundred miles from the coast. It is no doubt this peculiarity of the Jewish race which induced a French writer on medical geography to express the opinion that "it is questionable whether the crossing of human varieties confers on the issue constant advantages in relation to the species; for the Jewish race seems in a wonderful manner capable of adapting itself to every change of climate, while others are scarcely able to bear the least change. The Jew is found in every part of the world; in Europe, from Norway to Gibraltar; in Africa, from Algiers to the Cape of Good Hope; in Asia, from Cochin to the Caucasus; from Jaffa to Pekin. He has peopled Australia, and has given proofs of his powers of acclimatization under the tropics, where people of European origin have constantly failed to perpetuate themselves."

China. According to a tradition preserved among them, they were descended from a tribe of Jews who had quitted Palestine on the destruction of the second temple. From their long residence in Cochin they had become completely bronzed. These are not the same as the Malabar Jews. The Jewish traveller Benjamin, sometimes called Benjamin the Second, discovered a colony of Jews, evi-eral synagognes, and obtain scrolls of the dently of Persian origin, in Hindostan. They were known as Babylonian Jews, on account of their having migrated from Babylonia. They observed the essential rites of Judaism, and strictly avoided intermarriage with other sects. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Jewish colony settled in Cayenne, in the West Indies, one of the most inhospitable climates in South America. Cayenne was subsequently conquered by the French, who made it a penal settlement, and the Jewish colony was forced to retire to Surinam. Notwithstanding frequent persecutions, Jews are still found in Persia, more especially to the south of the Caspian Sea, where the soil is very fertile, but the climate very unhealthy. The principal city is Balprosh, where about one hundred and fifty Jewish families reside in almost complete isolation. They trade with their brethren in Great Tartary, and are engaged in the wool and silk trade or in the sale of citrons. They, too, trace

FASHION V. SCIENCE AND HUMANITY. From a very remote, we may even say a prehistoric, period, it has been the custom of human beings to provide themselves with garments at the expense of the lower creation. From a time almost if not quite as early, animals have been slain to furnish food for man. In our own day, also, both practices exist in operation side by side. While, however, the necessity for flesh as an article of diet is generally admitted, provided that it be used in moderation and combined with vegetable food, the need for taking the life of animals in order to clothe the body, it must be allowed, has been to a great extent obviated by the progress of textile industry, which gives us as woollen fabrics most of what we require for daily wear without depriving a living creature of one drop of blood. Fancy, taste, luxury, utility-one or all of these it is true, still order the destruction of countless fur-bearing and feathered beings of a lower grade than ourselves; and we are not prepared to say that in obeying the mandate, at all events of the last-named authority, man exceeds the

privilege of his lordly position. When, however, we find him, at the bidding of a mere fashion, persecuting the life of some harmless and to him otherwise useless race of animals, and this even to the extent of extermination, we blush for the cruel heart of our so-called civilization. When, for instance, little birds, whose only fault is their beauty, are sacrificed by thousands in a year, in order that their feathers or their bodies should adorn the "softer sex" of our species in hours of enjoyment, we are bound in creature kindness to those helpless members of the world's great family, to condemn the barbaric fancy which is so heedless in its self-esteem. Artificial substitutes can be found for ornaments of this kind, and the counterfeit is not by any means a despicable imitation. The desire for their more general adoption is not, we are sure, limited to ourselves, nor is the hope that other governments will copy the recent practice of our own by restricting the indiscriminate slaughter which has already lost to the world not a few interesting and beautiful forms of animal life.

Lanost.

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From Blackwood's Magazine.

THE COUNTRY PARSON AS HE WAS, AND
AS HE IS.

so strongly marked as it is in the characters of the clergy and the better class of tenant farmers. The squire has changed, In his notes to "Waverley," Sir Walter but not so much. What he may become Scott remarks of certain changes which in a few years' time, it is hazardous to had taken place in Scotland between 1745 conjecture; but at the present moment and the end of the eighteenth century, the average English country gentleman of that they had made the Scotland of his four or five thousand a year is in all essenown day as unlike what it was sixty years tial respects pretty nearly what he has before as the England of sixty years be- been any time since the death of George fore was to the England of Elizabeth. I IV. Of the peasantry and smaller farmhave not sufficient knowledge of the coun-ers the habits and ways of thought are try to say whether the further changes comparatively little altered. If they have which have taken place since Sir Walter picked up some wild political crotchets wrote have created as wide a gap between from men like Arch and Collings, they are the Scotland of 1886 and of 1806 as ex- only skin-deep. The spark would go out isted between the Scotland of Sir Arthur directly if it were not constantly fanned. Wardour and the Scotland of Baron Brad- The beginnings of a great change are wardine. But of this I am sure, that were undoubtedly perceptible, which in the any one to write a story of English rural course of another generation, when board life, entitled ""Tis Sixty Years since," he schools and agrarian agitation shall have would have to depict a state of manners done their work, may complete that transalmost as unfamiliar to the present genera- formation in the character of the peasantry tion as the manners drawn by Fielding which has taken place in the classes just and Richardson. George Eliot's earlier above them. But at present we see only novels, "Adam Bede," "Silas Marner," the germs, and there are still nooks and and "Scenes of Clerical Life," have to corners to be found where we do not even some extent done this. But they belong see these. But in the clergy the change to a still earlier period, the last ten years is very marked; and it is in the country of the eighteenth and the first ten years of villages that it is most conspicuous and the nineteenth century, when not a ripple most significant, and most closely conyet moved over the surface of rural society nected with other great changes — moral, to tell of a coming change of weather. political, and theological. The influence of the French Revolution was visible in the large towns long before it penetrated to the secluded agricultural villages buried among their woods and lanes; and when rumors of it did reach them, the only effect was to intensify their natural conservatism and make them cling more closely than ever to the old order of things. But my own reminiscences refer rather to a time when the old and the new order of ideas were just beginning to meet each other; when it was yet doubtful whether railways would supersede or only supplement stage-coaches; and when the seniors, though they found themselves jostled here and there by strange theories of life and dress and government, did not suspect a revolution, and were rather irritated than alarmed.

The change in our rural society which has taken place since that time is nowhere

The distinctive peculiarity of the country parson of the ancient régime was that he was part of a system. The village was a miniature of the State. The three estates of the realm were represented by the parson, the farmers, and the laborers, and over all was the squire. The little community was, under the old parochial system, self-contained and self-sufficing, with a life of its own, and with its own traditions and idiosyncrasy. What the Church was to the nation the parson was to the parish, and this embodiment of Church and State in every village in the kingdom represented with perfect fidelity for nearly a century and a half the preponderant public opinion of England. It embodied the Revolution compromise, according with the national repugnance to both Popery and Puritanism, which alone made the Revolution a success. On the barrier

against both presented by the Established | tions of the Methodists. Nor did they Church of England, the nation leaned as themselves wish to touch them. The on a rock. The private lives of the Dissenters, for many generations, shared clergy; the zeal or the indolence displayed in the popular conviction that the exist by them in their special duties; the awak- ence of the Church of England as then ening or non-awakening character of their constituted was, upon the whole, for the Sunday discourses, were trifles not public good. As Englishmen they saw worth a moment's consideration alongside what their fellow-countrymen saw in the of the great truth to which the Church was Church of England. They desired greater a standing witness, and the safety of the liberties for themselves, but years went great fortress of which she was a corner- by before they were hostile to the Estabstone. The shafts of Dissent, few and far lishment. between as they were, glanced harmlessly off the solid wall which the Church then presented to their attacks. In fact, the position in which the clergy lay intrenched was scarcely touched by them. Bolts aimed at doctrine or discipline flew wide of the mark, when doctrine and discipline had ceased to interest society, and when the Church's strength lay in her national character, and the double front which she presented against the two extremes of bigotry and hypocrisy, represented to the popular intelligence by Popery and Dissent. It was an era in which her spiritual functions were, owing to the force of circumstances, subordinated to her political and social

ones.

Two hundred years of revolution, during which the nation had been tossed to and fro between the conflicting extremes of religious intolerance, had made it heartily weary of both. A decline of what is called spiritual activity, not of real sober-minded piety, was the inevitable consequence as soon as the combatants were exhausted. The nation sank back, as it were, into a kind of religious armchair, in which it slumbered peacefully till the beginning of the present century. The Church of England, therefore, not only represented the dominant political opinion of the Georgian era, but also the spirit of the age by which it was naturally accompanied the comfortable, easy way of taking things into which the English people settled down after the tumult of the Reformation and the Revolution had subsided. Wesley and Whitefield produced a great commotion; but the mere fact that the Church weathered it so easily, proves the truth of what we say namely, that the foundations upon which she then rested were not touched by the declama

It is easy to see that the clergy who were brought up under this dispensation must have possessed a quiet, undoubting confidence in themselves and their own position, which would give free play to all individual peculiarities, and relieve them almost entirely from any undue solicitude about public opinion. Such a position in every walk of life has its advantages and disadvantages. Virtual irresponsibility may lead to neglect of duty, to abuse of power, to selfishness and self-indulgence. On the other hand, freedom from restraint, and from the perpetual haunting fear of what the world will say, tends to make men more natural, more spontaneous, and therefore more likely to be listened to, than when they are less at their ease. In short, as a general rule, it makes the good better and the bad worse; and so it was in the Church of England. There were in those old days, it is but too true, many very bad clergymen, to whom what they called " 'parsoning" was a simple bore, and who excused, though they could not justify, the well-known saying of Sydney Smith. But of the large majority I believe that at least two-thirds were benefi cial members of society, doing a great deal of good in their own way, and attaching the people to the Church by stronger ties than any which exist now. other third were probably as active and zealous parish priests as any to be found even in these days of ecclesiastical revivals.

The

Of the country parson, who was indigenous to the kind of soil I have described, there were, of course, numerous varieties. Some, I think, are quite extinct. Some linger still "in sheltered situations." But thirty years ago there