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THE ARCHEOLOGICAL AND COUNTY MAGAZINES.

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NEW illustrated quarterly county magazine has just made its appearance in England as the Essex Review, to be devoted mainly to the study of the literature, antiquities, folk-lore, etc., of Essex, and to the recording of everything of permanent interest to the county. In the first number we get descriptions of the Church of St. Augustine at Birdbrook and Waltham Abbey, while Dr. Thresh reprints his paper on the "Housing of the Agricultural Laborer in Essex." There are also notes on Essex sports and pastimes, obituary notices, and other items relating to Essex County in particular.

The numerous magazines of county history and antiquities published throughout Great Britain do not make much noise in the world, and few of them seem to be known outside their own counties. London and Middlesex are represented by the London and Middlesex Note Book (quarterly); Kent has the Kentish Note Book (half- yearly); Berkshire Notes and Queries (quarterly) and Lincolnshire Notes and Queries (quarterly) represent the two counties referred to in the titles; the East Anglian (monthly) and Fenland Notes and Queries (quarterly) give notes and queries on subjects connected with Suffolk, Cambridge, Essex, and Norfolk, and with the Fenland counties of Huntingdon, Cambridge, etc. Cornwall and Devon have Notes and Gleanings, the Western Antiquary, and the West of England Magazine-all monthlies. There are also the Western Magazine and Portfolio (monthly) for the West of England and Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset (quarterly). Carmarthenshire has the Carmarthenshire Miscellany (monthly), Yorkshire Poets Past and Present (monthly), and the Yorkshire County Magazine, with which several other Yorkshire magazines have been incorporated, deal with the folk-lore and antiquities of the large county; while the Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore and Legend may be said to make Northumbria its special field. The North is further represented by the Illustrated Scottish Borders (monthly), the Scottish Antiquary (quarterly), and Scottish Notes and Queries (monthly), the Scots' Magazine and the Highland Monthly. The Journal of Proceedings of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and the Western Review and Sligo Monthly hail from Ireland. The Reliquary (quarterly) does not confine itself to any particular county or district.

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THE IDLER.

HE Strand has got a formidable rival in the Idler, a new sixpenny English magazine, brought out by Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Bard, with Mark Twain as its chief attraction. Mark Twain supplies the frontispiece, the serial, and there is an illustrated conglomerate interview with him. Another feature of the magazine is the excellent series of composite photographs which show the photographs of four Liberals and four Conservatives thrown into one focus, and then, finally, the whole eight are combined together. It is curious to see how Lord Salisbury's face dominates the whole of the Conservatives, while in the Liberals the result of the blending is to bring out a sanctified Harcourt-a very curious result from four such different faces as Mr. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Mr. Morley, and Sir William Harcourt. The combination of the eight faces is a kind of cross between Harcourt and Hartington. The only thing about Gladstone which persists is the high collar. The Conservative nose is dominated by the Liberal in the combination portrait, for the Conservative nose is somewhat

snub, while the Liberal nose is long, which befits the members of a party which puts its nose into abuses. Mark Twain's new story, "The American Claimant," opens well. The American claimant is Mr. Mulberry Sellers, who claims to be, and, what is more, veritably is, Lord Rosmore. It is not generally known that Mark Twain has a far-away claim to be considered as the rightful Earl of Durham; at least it is a tradition that he is a descendant of the Lampton who ought to have had the estates and the title, and this fact has probably, as the editor suggests, supplied the motive for the new tale.

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NEW MAGAZINES.

N addition to the Idler and the Essex Review, the year 1892 has brought several other new magazines. Among the latest born are School and College (Boston) and Longman's School Magazine. School and College is edited by Mr. Ray Greene Huling, and will, as its name implies, devote its pages to subjects connected with secondary and higher education. Longman's School Magazine is rather for the children than for the teacher, being an illustrated paper for school and home reading, edited by David Salmon. In the first number (February) there is an instalment of Dr. A. Conan Doyle's "Micah Clarke" in condensed form, together with some reprinted papers, such as "The Last Fight of the Revenge," by Mr. Froude; "The Golden Goose," from the "Red Fairy Book;" a natural history paper by the Rev. J. G. Wood, etc. There will also be competitions, particulars of six of which are already given.

One of the most ambitious of the new magazines of the month is the Eastern and Western Review (London), which is published at shilling, and contains articles the bulk of which are in English, but some at the close in Arabic. The Review is a gallant, although a somewhat forlorn, attempt to interest English readers in Eastern affairs. The articles deal with Egypt, Persia, Turkey, and with what may be called the Arabic world. It is illustrated, its contents are varied, and if it can succeed in establishing a circulation in the Arab lands, it will have achieved an unparalleled feat.

UNIVERSITY EXTENSION.

O far has progressed the interest in the new movement for popular higher education that there is now printed in Philadelphia a monthly journal, University Extension, exclusively devoted to that subject. This modest but neat and tasteful magazine is published under the auspices of "The American Society for the Extension of University Teaching."

The February number contains, among other useful papers, one by Halford J. Maekinder, of Oxford, England, on "The Education of Citizens." Mr. Maekinder considers that the present work of university extension being done in England is to be criticized for neglecting the liberal arts, literature and history, for the technical ones, physics, chemistry, geology, etc. But he thinks that the exponents of the "liberal” arts have themselves to thank, largely, for the want of popular enthusiasm for their departments as contrasted with the physical sciences. "The truth of the matter is that it is not wholly bread and butter which draws the artisan to scientific hobbies, but the practical atmosphere of the laboratory."

Professor E. J. James, himself such a force in American University Extension, writes on "The University Extension Lecturer." In laying down the duties and personal requirements of the lecturer he shows plainly that the office is no sinecure, nor one to be unthinkingly usurped.

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THE FRENCH MAGAZINES.

"BIBLIOTHEQUE UNIVERSELLE" AND ITS

FOUNDER.

MONG the magazines which have attained a heroic age the Bibliothèque Universelle et Revue Suisse deserves honorable mention. It is now in its ninetyseventh year, having been founded in 1796 by Charles Pictet de Rochemont, a biography of whom has just been brought out by his grandson, Edmund Pictet. The review made its début, however, as the Revue Britannique. Its founder, Charles Pictet, was born at Geneva in 1755. At the age of twenty he entered a Swiss regiment in the service of France, where he remained ten years. Afterward he held some public offices, then studied literature and agriculture, and finally, with his brother, Marc Auguste, and a friend, Frédéric Guillaume Maurice, founded the well-known review. For twenty-nine years the three conducted their national publication, and found so much support in Europe that Talleyrand told Pictet in 1815 that Napoleon dare not suppress it. The part edited by Marc Auguste was devoted to science, and it still appears at Geneva as the Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles; but at that time it was published alternately with the edition devoted to literature and agriculture conducted by Charles. Many eminent names were included among the early contributors, and on one occasion when Charles was ill Mme. de Staël offered to relieve him of his editorial duties, promising to discharge them "with infinite zeal."

Charles Pictet also played an important part in the restoration of the independence of Geneva in 1813. It was then that his diplomatic career began, first as secretary to Baron von Stein, and later as the representative of Geneva at Vienna and of Switzerland at Paris. He took infinite trouble about the settlement of the FrancoSwiss frontiers. "We have to congratulate ourselves that we did not need to have recourse to such repugnant means as diplomacy often permits. We have worked not as intriguers, but as men of honor. It was in making Geneva interesting that we made friends for her."

The Bibliothèque Universelle has just published an index to its contents from 1886 to 1891 which should be most valuable.

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THE REVUE DES DEUX MONDES.

`HE Revue for January consists of two solid numbers. The more important articles are noticed elsewhere. M. Edmond Plauchut opens a series of articles on "The Ancient Provinces of France" with a very readable paper on Berry, which he describes as "one of the last ramparts of ancient Gaul, the most ancient and the most central of French provinces," where people still believe in fairies dancing on the fern by moonlight; in were-wolves; in the cattle talking in the stables on Christmas night; in headless men appearing at midnight on cross-roads. There are wild and lonely moors, grown with furze and bog-asphodel, and Druidic menhirs and dolmens scattered over the hills, and weird legends of l'homme à feu and other goblins enough to satisfy the most eager folk-lorist. M. Gaston Deschamps gives a delightful description-with a liveliness and verve peculiarly French-of six weeks spent searching for antiquities in the islands of Amorgos, in the Cyclades. In the mid-January number the Duc de Broglie begins a series of "Diplomatic Studies," the first instalment of which deals with the Peace of Aix-la

Chapelle in 1746. Vice-Admiral Jurien de la Gravière continues his series of articles on "The Sea Gueux." Readers of Motley will remember that the National party in Holland, during the struggle with Spain, adopted the name of Gueux, after being contemptuously called "beggars" by their opponents; and certain bold spirits among them, who took to privateering, were known as "Gueux de Mer," or "Meergeuzen." At one time they seem to have contemplated an alliance with the Sultan of Constantinople, and wore a badge in the shape of a crescent, with the device "Liever Turx dans Paus"- -"Rather the Turk than the Pope." The Vicomte de Vogüé writes on recent studies of Lamartine, and M. Eugène Delard furnishes the quota of fiction, being the conclusion of his "provincial study," "The Dupourques."

THE NOUVELLE REVUE.

PIERRE LOTI continues his "Fantôme d'Orient"

M. through the two numbers of the Revue for Janu

ary. M. Hector Depasse writes on "Strikes and Syndicates," and M. Marius Vachon has a very readable article on "Patronesses of Art in France," containing much outof-the-way information concerning Philippine of Luxemburg, Mahaut d'Artois, Jeanne de Laval, Anne of Brittany and other ladies of old times. An anonymous "Letter to M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire" attacks that statesman with refreshing vigor, and is, prehaps, the most important item in a not very remarkable number. The head and front of M. Saint-Hilaire's offending seems to be expressed in the unguarded 'admission made by him to an interviewer, "Je suis un peu Anglais." Only, thinks the anonymous reviewer, he should not have said "un peu.”

"For you are English, sir, both in your ideas of which you make no secret-and in your policy, as I shall presently prove. One thing can be conceded-you are not English by birth, which is a pity. It is true that had you been so we should not, in all probability, have escaped the misfortune of seeing you as our Minister for Foreign Affairs, since M. Waddington, at present Ambassador from the Republic to the country of his origin, was born an Englishman."

The article continues in the strain of which the above is a slight specimen, charging M. Saint-Hilaire with doing his utmost to injure French and exalt English interests in Egypt. Among other instances of this is mentioned the recall of the Baron de Ring, at the instigation of Sir Evelyn Baring and Riaz Pasha, which, says our author, was the death-blow to French prestige in Egypt. Then follows a paragraph containing what will be news to most people:

"It was all over with public order, for no European from thenceforward had moral influence enough over the native army to maintain discipline and protect them against their own excesses. From that day forward the French agents, Baron Ring's successors, appeared to the eyes of the Egyptians as mere hangers-on to their English colleagues-which, in fact, was all that you wished them to be, M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire-and Egypt hastened on toward the inevitable catastrophe on which the British Government reckoned, and which, moreover, was most skilfully contrived on their part. In fact, it is no secret to any of our compatriots in Egypt that the massacre of Alexandria was a 'put-up job,' arranged by Maltese agents provocateurs in the pay of Mr. Scott, the English consul."

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POETRY AND ART.

POETRY IN THE MAGAZINES.

LICE E. EATON contributes a poem to the February Cosmopolitan on "Destiny:"

With patient toil I spun myself a web,
And when its meshes sparkled in the sun

And caught each fleeting vision as it passed,

I looked upon it with delight and cried:

"Ah! this is love and life!"

One day the master hand of Destiny

Swept down my web, and left me crouching there,
A helpless spider that had spun its life
Away. Then, in despair. I understood

That this was love and life!

The following lines by Charles Converse Tyler appear in Lippincott's for February:

If thou canst reach her heart, my rose,
And teach it to forget,

Then hast thou done far more than could

Thy sister violet.

Tell her from me that wintry skies,

And days of storm and rain,

The violet and the rose forgive

When Summer comes again.

The Poet Laureate has written seventeen lines of consolation to the mourners round the bier of the Duke of Clarence which appear in the Nineteenth Century for February. After eulogizing the Prince as tender, truthful, reverent, and pure, it consoles the mourners by telling them that

The toll of funeral in an angel's ear

Sounds happier than the merry marriage bell.
The face of Death is towards the Sun of Life.

If so, the angels must be singularly lacking in sympathy for those who are left. Lord Tennsyon suggests that the angel of death should be renamed Onward, which he says is his truer name. But as Lowell said, "Not all the consoling since Adam has made death other than death," so not all the rechristening of Azrael softens the pang of bereavement to the survivors.

Sir Theodore Martin writes the longest threnody in Blackwood. Grief seems to have stifled his poetry. Here is the last verse:

The rite is ended. Not all is grief;

Many hearts are stricken, one young life blighted; But the thought abides, of all thoughts the chief,A nation more close by this grief united.

In the New England Magazine for February Mr. James Buckham takes for his theme "The Tribute of Silence."

A poet read his verses, and of two

Who listened, one spake naught but open praise; The other held his peace, but all his face Was brightened by the inner joy he knew. Two friends, long absent, met; and one had borne The awful stroke and scathe of blinding loss. Hand fell in hand; so knit they, like a cross: With no word uttered, heart to heart was sworn. A mother looked into her baby's eyes,

As blue as heav'n and deep as nether sea. By what dim prescience, spirit-wise, knew she Such soul's exchanges never more would rise? Oh, deep is silence-deep as human souls,

Ay, deep as life, beyond all lead and line; And words are but the broken shells that shine Along the shore by which the ocean rolls.

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as typical, passed between the great painter and a young artist: "I have frequently been told by friends of yours, sir," said Mr. Allston, "that they were afraid you were running after the old masters. Now, if that frightens them, I would make every hair on their heads stand on end! For you may depend upon it that you cannot go to better instructors for your art. From them you will learn the language of your art, and will learn to see nature as they saw it. You will understand, of course, that I am not recommending you to imitate, but to study them. By studying their works you will imbibe their spirit insensibly; otherwise you will as insensibly fall into the manner of your contemporaries. The old masters are our masters, and there is hardly an excellence in our art which they have not individually developed. With regard to preparatory studies I should warmly recommend your devoting a portion of every day to drawing; for this reason, that if any artist does not acquire a correct design while young, he never will."

This number of Scribner's contains, also, William A. Coffin's second paper on "American Illustration of To-day," a charming feature of which is the frontispiece, an indescribably graceful, piquant portrait of a little girl courtesying. It was copied from a pastel by William M. Chase.

The old master selected for illustration in the Century for February is Titian, of whose pictures three beautiful engraved specimens are given— "La Belle" as frontispiece, "The Gentleman with Gloves," and "The Entombment."

One of the best articles in the February Belford's, and a paper of value to all interested in art subjects, is "Modern Pictures and the New York Market," by Champion Bissell. Whether one be an idealist or realist in art, he will certainly wish, from this treatise on picture "dealing," that more idealism might be introduced in the buying and selling of canvases. Says this writer:

"In no business on the planet is there more jockeying than in picturedealing; in very few businesses is there so much. Horse-dealing is child's play in comparison; and a man who rigs the sale of city lots in some uninhabited quarter-section of a Western territory might well sit at the feet of one of these Gamaliels of the law of unreal and hypothetical valuations. To get a picure at an infinitely small price and sell it at an infinitely large one is the aim of the dealer. The result is of course unattainable, but by aiming at it the dealer accomplishes more than if his aim were less ambitious.

"The typical dealer is not insensible to the attractions and the beauties of art, but he has schooled himself to repress his emotion and put a padlock on his lips when he poses as a buyer. The natural tendency of the artist when he has finished any piece of work is to estimate it as the best effort of his life; it is the business of the dealer to disabuse hin of this idea. A contemptuous silence as the canvas is exposed to view is a good method of bringing the artist down from his position; and when the dealer says, 'Well, it certainly is a falling off, but I suppose I mustn't offer you less than for the last piece,' the effect is complete."

Incidentally there is a good deal in this paper about the Barbizon school, and the writer takes occasion to call the much-admired " Angelus " a rough, gloomy, poor specimen, by one of the least of that school; and boldly proclaims that the great price of the picture was entirely due to the cunning of the dealer.

On February 23-a century ago-Sir Joshua Reynolds passed, full of honors, to his rest, in his sixty-ninth year. He was accorded a great public funeral, and his body was laid in the crypt of St. Paul's, London, to which waiting-chamber in after-days have been borne England's great war-kings of sea and land. The centenary of Reynolds' death is commemorated by the Magazine of Art for February in a brief sketch of his career, with illustrations of his birthplace, Plympton, a quiet little spot some four miles from Plymouth.

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THE NEW BOOKS.

MR. HARDY'S "TESS OF THE D'URBEVILLES."

HE two novels of the season are undoubtedly Mr. Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbevilles: A Pure Woman," and Mrs. Humphry Ward's "David Grieve." Mrs. Ward's great novel was reviewed last month. If any falling off from Mr. Hardy's best was discernible in "A Group of Noble Dames," he has made ample amends in "Tess of the D'Urbevilles," which can hardly fail to take rank as its author's greatest work up to the present time. The conception of a girl who, placed in circumstances of extraordinary and overwhelming difficulty, was led, almost irresistibly, to forsake the path of conventional morality, yet retained unimpaired her central virginity of soul, was attended with some dangers, both ethical and artistic, and we do not pretend to think that Mr. Hardy has altogether overcome them. The influence of so-called "realism," as understood in France in the latter part of the nineteenth century, is strong both for good and ill in Mr. Hardy's latest work, which in some respects is Zolaesque to a degree likely to alienate not a few well-meaning persons; and in more than one instance we doubt if he has not sacrificed the higher truth of imagination for a narrower and lower kind of fidelity to the ignoble facts of life. This, however, is partly a question of view-point and partly of mere detail; and these matters being allowed for, simple critical justice demands the admission that "Tess" is truly a great work, in virtue both of the profoundly serious purpose which animates it and of the high level of execution maintained almost from first to last in its pages. The tragic story which forms its groundwork is, to some extent, relieved by sketches of simple rustic life in Mr. Hardy's finest vein; and even he has done nothing more charming and winning than the picture of the three dairy-maids-by no means immaculate or ideal conceptions of English girlhood, but entirely sweet and lovable in their wholesome reality and credibility-whose calamity it was to give away their too combustible hearts where no return was possible. Tess herself is one of those imperfect, faultily. beautiful figures which take into hopeless captivity the reader's affection. But Mr. Hardy has not seen fit to make her lover in any way singularly attractive; and we doubt if Angel Clare's power to draw upon himself the devotion of all the women within his sphere of personal influence is quite intelligible on any less general ground

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RECENT AMERICAN AND ENGLISH PUBLICATIONS.

HISTORY.

Church and State in New England. By Paul E. Lauer, A. M. 8vo, pp. 106. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. 50 cents.

The latest monograph in the Johns Hopkins series of Studies in Historical and Political Science is by Mr. Paul E. Lauer, who holds a fellowship in history at the University, and who reviews the facts concerning the "Church and State in New England" from the time of the settlement of the colonists down to the disappearance of the last vestiges of ecclesiasticism from the laws and constitutions. Congregationalism was an established form of worship in New England, the towns sup

porting the Church, as they did the schools, by taxation. Complete separation was not brought about until the first decades of this century. Mr. Lauer's convenient review of the facts is timely, in view of current discussions at home and abroad of other phases of the question of separation of Church and State. The Architectural Antiquities of the Isle of Wight from the XIth to the XVIIth Centuries. By Percy Goddard Stone. Folio, pp. 66. London: Stone, 16 Great Marlborough St. W. £3 3s. for four parts.

The third part of a valuable work. The numerous illus trations and sketches are executed in a particularly beautiful

manner.

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