Theodore Parker has no work to do for God, now?" she said. Another of Mrs. Stowe's stories is that of a boy, who, after being told that anger was very sinful, asked his mother how it was that the Bible said God was so often angry. She told him he would find that out when he got older. The boy thought for a while, and then said, "Mother, I have found it out: God is angry because He is not a Christian."

In the course of this old woman's gossip, as she herself calls it, she tells how Mrs. Somerville was not buried in Westminster Abbey, because the Astronomer Royal, with whom she had had a controversy on a scientific subject, refused to make the request to Dean Stanley, which he would have been only too glad to grant. Of Rosa Bonheur she says, "Her face was charming; such fine, clear eyes, looking straight into one's, and frank bearing; an Englishwoman's honesty with a Frenchwoman's courtesy."

IN PRAISE OF JOURNALISM.

Miss Cobbe delights and exults in the memory of her journalistic work. Journalism, as she says quite truly, is a delightful profession, full of interest and promise of increasing usefulness. So convinced of this was she, that when she was a professional journalist she never could go into a bank or lawyer's office without pitying the clerks for their dull, monotonous, ugly work. The calling, she thinks, is pre-eminently healthy, being so full of variety and calling for so many different qualities. As a journalist for seven years, she never once missed an engagement, and was delighted to think that she proved, once for all, that a woman may be relied on as a journalist no less than a man. Although she wrote more than a thousand leading articles, and an immense number of notes during her seven years on the Echo, she never wrote a line not in fullest accordance with her own opinions and convictions on any subject, small or great. This was the more remarkable as she was a Tory, and Arthur Arnold was a Liberal. Diligent worker as she was, she could not be said to have made much money by her writing. Altogether, she says, she thinks she made about £5000-a little more than her whole patrimony. At the same time she carried out of the editorial sanctum a complaisant sense of having done a useful work in a kindly fashion. It is well when any one can look back upon so vivid and active a life and write as follows:

I have done very little in any other way than to try to put forward, either at large in a book or in a magazine article, or, lastly, in a newspaper leader, which was always a miniature essay, an appeal for some object, an argument for some truth, a vindication of some principle, an exposure of what I-conceived to be an absurdity, a wrong, a falsehood, or a cruelty. I have not been the cause of other's tears; so, I hope, I may say, I have given no brother or sister of the pen the wound, and often the ruinous loss, of a damaging critique of his or her books. If my writings have given pain to any persons, it can only have been to men whose dead consciences it would be an act of mercy to awaken, and towards whom I feel not the slightest compunction.

VI.-LITERARY REMINISCENCES.

Among her scrappy souvenirs there is ample gossip about most of the distinguished people whose names were perhaps more familiar ten years ago than they are to-day. Here, for instance, is a story of Sir Charles Lyell:

Another time we had been discussing Evolution, and some of us had betrayed the impression that the doctrine (which he had then recently adopted) involved always the survival of the best, as well as of the "fittest." Sir Charles

left the room and went down stairs, but suddenly rushed back to the drawing-room, and said to me all in a breath, standing on the rug: "I'll explain it to you in one minute! Suppose you had been living in Spain three hundred years ago, and had had a sister who was a perfectly common-place person, and believed everything she was told. Well, your sister would have been happily married and had a numerous progeny, and that would have been the survival of the fittest; but you would have been burnt at an auto-da-fe, and there would have been an end of you. You would have been unsuited to your environment. There! that's Evolution! Good-bye!

Charles Kingsley was another of her friends, and they had a common feeling in their intense love of dogs. Another notable man with whom she had keen sympathy was John Stuart Mill, whom she loved, among other things, because he would allow his cat to lie on his table, and sometimes on his neck, while he was writing his books. Here is an account of her visit to him in 1869:

We talked of many grave things, and in everything his love of right and his immense underlying faith impressed me more than I can describe. He thought the loss of reverence unspeakably deplorable, but an inevitable feature of an age of such rapid transition that the son does actually outrun the father. He added that he thought even the most sceptical of men generally had an inner altar to the Unseen Perfection while waiting for the true one to be revealed to them.

She met John Bright, with whom she sympathised more on canine than on political subjects, and she chronicles a touching story which Bright told her at dinner of a poor crippled woman in Llandudno whose handsome collie was drowned by her husband in order to spare the expense of keeping it. Bright's voice broke, she says, when he came to the end of the story, and they said little more to each other during that dinner.

TWO THOUSAND DINNERS.

She was a great diner-out, and she calculates that in the twenty years she was living in South Kensington she went to two thousand dinners, great and small, and apparently enjoyed them all, nor suffered anything from gout and indigestion, which is a great tribute to the English cook. Dinner parties now, she says, are no longer so tedious or so drunken as they used to be. Dinners in the sixties used to last two hours and. sometimes three, and every one took wine, but the ripple of gentle laughter in good company has decidedly fallen some in the last thirty years. She gossips pleasantly on about Matthew Arnold, another celebrated man who shared her cult of the dog.

LORD AND LADY BYRON.

She met Lady Byron, Lord Byron's widow, who was short of stature, deadly pale, but of royal dignity. She quotes from a letter of Mrs. Hemans, written in Byron which was sent to Mrs. Hemans by her sister:1819, a very vivid but unpleasant description of Lord

A more wretched, depraved-looking countenance it is impossible to imagine! His hair streaming almost down to his shoulders, and his whole appearance slovenly and dirty. Still, there is a something which impels you to look at his face, although it inspires you with aversion-a something entirely different from any expression on any countenance I ever beheld before. His character, I hear, is worse than ever; dreadful, it must be since every one says he is the most

dissipated person in Italy, exceeding even the Italians themselves.

Among other items of gossip she mentions that Lord Byron always slept with pistols under his pillow, and on one occasion threatened to shoot his wife in the middle of the night. A pleasant bedfellow, indeed!

DARWIN AND DOGS.

She quotes from correspondence with Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Henry Mayne, and other men. Darwin's" Descent of Man," with its theory of the nature and origin of Sense, seems to her of absolutely fateful import, but she did not quarrel with him until he became a chief priest of the vivisectors. She quotes an interesting passage from a letter written by Darwin to her in 1872, referring to an article of hers in the Quarterly, which begins:

It seems to me the best analysis of the mind of an animal which I have ever read, and I agree with you on most points. I have been particularly glad to read what you say about the reasoning powers of dogs, and about that rather vague matter, their self-consciousness.

Since publishing the "Descent of Man" I have got to believe rather more than I did in dogs having what may be called a conscience. When an honourable dog has committed an undiscovered offence, he certainly seems ashamed (and this is the term naturally and often used) rather than afraid to meet his master. My dog, the beloved and beautiful Polly, is at such times extremely affectionate towards me; and this leads me to mention a little anecdote. When I was a very little boy, I had committed some offence, so that my conscience troubled me, and when I met my father I lavished so much affection on him that he at once asked me what I had done, and told me to confess. I was so utterly confounded at his suspecting anything, that I remember the scene clearly to the present day; and it seems to me that Polly's frame of mind on such occasions is much the same as was mine, for I was not then at all afraid of my father.

SOME OF HER CORRESPONDENTS.

She was delighted with Keshub Chunder Sen, who seemed to her worthy to rank with St. Augustine and St. Patrick. In outward appearance he was the ideal of a great teacher, and he was, she thinks, the most devout man with whose mind she came in contact. And so the good lady goes on, page after page, gossiping away concerning Louise Michel and Thomas Lake Harris, whose disciple Alice she knew very well; of Longfellow and Dr. Martineau, under whom she used to sit, and of whose ermons she gives a considerable account. Mr. Greg was another correspondent of hers, whom she converted to her own views on a very vital matter; and she quotes several letters from Dean Stanley, chiefly notable because of the bitter feeling which they express in relation to Cardinal Newman.

She met

Renan when he was in England, and mentions that his face was exactly like a hog, stupendously broad across the ears and jowl. Renan told a charming story about himself, to the effect that when he was last in Italy, numbers of the poor came to him and asked him the lucky numbers of the lotteries, because they thought he was so near the devil he must know. Of Lord Houghton she says he was extraordinarily rough and blunt.

refused to attend the deputation to the Home Secretary because Cardinal Manning was to be present, and Carlyle declared he would not appear in public with the Cardinal, who was "the chief emissary of Beelzebub in England."

CARDINAL MANNING.

Very different, indeed, was Miss Cobbe's own estimate of the Cardinal. She quotes several of his letters, the last of which, written in 1889, was as follows:

My last days have been so full that I have not been able to write. I thank you for your letter, and for the contents of it. The highest counsel is always the safest and best, cost us what it may. We may take the cost as the test of its rectitude. I hope you will go on writing against this inflation of vainglory calling itself science.

She was all the more grateful for Cardinal Manning's support, because the Pope, Pius IX., had refused to allow his Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to be founded in Rome, because man owed duties to his fellow men, but he did not owe duties to the lower animals. This abominable pontifical utterance in no way disheartened the benevolent Cardinal, and he got round the difficulty with his accustomed adroitness. He accomplished the feat at an Anti-vivisectionist meeting, held in Westminster Palace Hotel, June 10th, 1886:-

On that occasion, when it came to the Cardinal's turn to speak, he began at once to say that much misapprehension existed as to the attitude of his Church on the subject of duty to animals. As he said this, with his usual clear, calm, deliberate enunciation, he looked me straight in the face, and 1 looked at him! He proceeded to say: "It was true that man owed no duty directly to the brutes, but he owed it to God, whose creatures they are, to treat them mercifully."

Manning did his very best to induce the General of the Franciscans to support the anti-vivisection movement for the love of St. Francis. But the Franciscan general was dull and ignorant, and never helped in the least. Miss Cobbe, with all her sympathies, has a considerable capacity of vehement disgust, and she expresses herself pretty freely as to the lack of humanity on the part of Jews and Catholic priests in these present pages. the last day on which the Cardinal attended a committee meeting, she has recorded the following anecdote :

:

On

"Shall I tell your Eminence," I asked, "what Mrs. F. (now Lady B.) told me Lord Shaftesbury said to her shortly before he died, about our committees here? He said that if our society had done nothing else but bring you and him together, and make you sit and work at the same table for the same object, it would have been well worth while to have founded it!'" "Did Lord Shaftesbury say that?" said the Cardinal, with a moisture in his eyes. "Did he say that? I loved Lord Shaftesbury!"

TENNYSON.

He came

Lord Tennyson was not less sympathetic. to her house in Cheyne Walk and sat for a long time over the fire and talked of poetry and the share melodious words ought to have in it, and discoursed much on the hatefulness of scientific cruelty. She met him frequently afterwards and explained to him that his ideal of a vivisector with red face and coarse hands was quite wrong. As Lady Macbeth must have been small, thin, and concentrated, not big, bony, and conscientious, so some vivisectors are polished and handsome gentlemen, with peculiarly delicate fingers for drawing out nerves, etc. Tennyson's devotion to anti-vivisection continued to the last. The last meeting of the poet with Miss Cobbe is thus described :

The last time I saw Lord Tennyson was one day in London, after I had taken luncheon at his house. When I rose to

leave the table he shook hands with me at the door as we were parting, as we supposed, for that season: he said to me, "Good-bye, Miss Cobbe. Fight the good fight! Go on, fight the good fight!" I saw him no more; but I shall do his bidding, please God, to the end. Those who regard themselves as his heirs are equally sound on Miss Cobbe's side. She says:

Mr. Lewis Morris has also written some beautiful and striking poems touching on the subject of scientific cruelty, and I have reason to hope that a younger man, whom many of us look upon as the poet of the future in England, Mr. William Watson, is entirely on the same side. In short, if the Priests of Science are against us, the Prophets of Humanity, the Poets, are with us in this controversy, almost to a man.

LORD SHAFTESBURY.

Miss Cobbe was rather afraid of Lord Shaftesbury, owing to his reputation for narrow evangelicalism. But the moment she met him she found him with a large beautiful collie lying under his writing-table, and full of devotion to his daughter's Siamese cat. A firm friendship was established between them on a basis of love to animals, and she labours to remove the prejudice which exists against him in many quarters. She declares he was no bigot as to Sabbatarianism, even venturing to assert that if a lawyer has a brief for a case on Monday, and has no time to study it on Saturday, he would be justified in reading it up after church on Sunday. Neither did he share the bigotry of teetotalism; on this subject he made a wise remark, saying, "The teetotalers have added an eleventh Commandment, and think more of it than all the rest." He nominated seven bishops under Lord Palmerston, and Miss Cobbe says that when appointing Arthur Stanley to the Deanery of Westminster, Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord Shaftesbury saying that he would not make the appointment if he, Lord Shaftesbury, disapproved. Lord Shaftesbury wrote back cordially concurring in Lord Palmerston's selection, for, notwithstanding Dr. Stanley's theological views, he was an admirable man, and a gentleman with special suitability for this post. The following is her account of the last she saw of the great Earl :-

The most touching interview I ever had with him was one of the last, in his study in Grosvenor Square, not long before his death. Our conversation had fallen on the woes and wrongs of seduced girls and ruined women; and he told me many facts which he had learned by personal investigation and visits to dreadful haunts in London. He described all he saw and heard with a compassion for the victims, and yet a horror of vice and impurity, which somehow made me think of Christ and the woman taken in adultery. After a few moments' silence, during which we were both rather overcome, he said, "When I feel age creeping on me, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong to say it, but I cannot bear to leave the world with all the misery in it."

THE SHAFTESBURY LETTERS.

From the 280 letters and notes she had received from Lord Shaftesbury between 1875 and 1885, I quote the following passages:—

May God prosper us! These ill-used and tortured animals are as much His creatures as we are, and to say the truth, I had, in some instances, rather be the animal tortured than the man who tortured it. I should believe myself to have higher hopes and a happier future.

It is frightful to see that the open champions of vivisection are not Bradlaugh and Mrs. B., but bishops, fathers in God, and pastors of the people. We shall soon have Bradlaugh and

his company claiming the Apostolical Succession; and if that succession be founded on truth, mercy and love, with as good a right as Dr. G., Dr. M., or D.D. anything else.

It arose while I was a boy at Harrow School, about, I should think, fourteen years of age-an event occurred (the details of which I may give you some other day) which brought painfully before me the scorn and neglect manifested towards the poor and helpless. I was deeply affected, but for many years afterwards I acted only on feeling and sentiment. As I advanced in life, all this grew up to a sense of duty, and I was convinced that God had called me to devote whatever advantages He might have bestowed upon me to the cause of the weak, the helpless, both man and beast, and those who had' none to help them.

Do not think for a moment that I claim any merit. If there be any doctrine that I dislike and fear more than another, it is the "doctrine of works." Whatever I have done has been given to me; what I have done I was enabled to do; and all happy results (if any there be) must be credited, not to the servant, but to the great Master Who led and sustained him.

Why do you give "truth" to the men, and deny it to the women? If you mean by "truth" abstinence from fibs, I think that the females are as good as the males. But if you mean steadiness of friendship, adherence to principles, conscientiously not superficially entertained, and sincerity in a good cause, why the women are far superior.

In thirty years we took off the streets of London, and sent to service, or provided with means of honest livelihood more than two hundred and twenty thousand "waifs and strays."

I have ever believed in a happy future for animals; I cannot say or conjecture how or where, but sure I am that the love, so manifested, by dogs especially, is an emanation from the divine essence, and, as such, it can, or rather it will never be extinguished.

Miss Cobbe never met George Eliot or Harriet Martineau; with that exception she seems to have known pretty well every one who was worth knowing.

CONCLUSION.

The foregoing extracts from these two fascinating volumes will give the reader some idea of the character and career of one of the most distinguished women of our time. Miss Cobbe is still with us, and if she is not quite so boisterous as in the olden days, she is still full of the Divine compassion which has made her the knight-errant of the wrongs of our inarticulate brethren; and as long as life lasts, while a vivisector is to be found ready" to carve the living hound," there will Frances Power Cobbe be quick to launch the major excommunication. Nor is it to be believed that this vehement spirit will evaporate into mist and nothingness when her cumbrous physical frame is laid to rest. Rather will the dissolution of her body give fresh range to her ardent spirit, and her avenging ghost will haunt the masters of the Nine Circles of the modern Inferno.

That, however, belongs to the future. For a long time to come we hope we may still have with us this stout Irish Tory, who has been such a fighter for all Radical reforms and such a scourge to the torturer of the inquisition of to-day.

I have praised the book from which these extracts are taken. But Miss Cobbe has not deserved well of mankind in sending forth such a heterogeneous conglomeration of good things without even an attempt at or an apology for an index. Indexes are needed in all books, but in such a collection as this an index is so indispensable that copyright should be refused until an index is supplied.

We will not go so far as to say that the men now in power in Paris are bent on war with England, but the step from offensive public utterances and resolute action, regardless of the interests of others, to actual conflict is often far from long, and no war would be so popular in France as one with England, especially as there are good reasons for entertaining a hope of victory.

ENGLAND WITHOUT AN ALLY.

Then follows a vivid description of England's position in the event of an enemy succeeding in intercepting her food imports, and it is for this very end that the swift cruisers of both France and Russia are intended! In the case of a war with France" Germanicus" further decides that England will have no ally, for, he continues:

When I was in London recently I was repeatedly asked, with some anxiety, what attitude the Triple Alliance would be likely to take up in such a case. of absolute neutrality. Germany undoubtedly would not lif I answered, "Probably ne her little finger to defend the interests of England."

My questioners then invariably expressed regret at the shortsightedness of such a policy, since the Triple Alliance would be defenceless against a victorious France allied with Russia. I replied that this prospect had no terrors for us, as we believed that we should be perfectly able to defend ourselves against both our neighbours. It is, on the other hand, by no means certain that France would stand alone in a war with England. Russia may rest assured that neither Germany nor Austria-Hungary would draw the sword against her, provided she did not offer violence to Roumania or Bulgaria, or stretched out her hand to seize Constantinople. reason she will do neither the one nor the other. For this

RUSSIA UNREADY.

Referring to Russia, "Germanicus" considers there is no immediate danger there, for the following reasons. Only one-third of her army is as yet equipped with the small-bore rifle, and the other two-thirds will not have the weapon till 1896. The Russian soldier is extremely brave, but the officers are poor and the administration corrupt. The finances, too, are in a bad way, and therefore the Tzar desires peace for a twofold reasonhis natural aversion to war, and the true state of the revenue. At the same time "Germanicus" treats the Tzar as a nonentity in the present situation, only telling him that his Bulgarian policy was a failure.

ENGLAND'S CHANCES OF SUCCESS.

But Russia might join France against England, and threaten England in Asia. Italy, however, would be

prevented from allying herself to England by the Triple Alliance. "Germanicus" thus sums up his reflections:

A great war of the Continental Powers amongst themselves appears very improbable, and possible only as a result of incidents that cannot now be foreseen. But a war between France and Russia on the one hand and England on the other seems to us, not indeed imminent, or, at present, even probable, but, nevertheless, possible, since a conflict of interests really exists between them, and France and Russia would have the greater chances of victory. Disraeli, it is true, declared, in November, 1875, before the Russo-Turkish war, that England's resources, should she be forced into war, were practically inexhaustible; but the real question is whether she would have time to make use of them.

The economic prosperity of France since 1871 has shown what resources she has at her disposal, and yet, after six months of war, Thiers had to admit to the National Assembly at Bordeaux that "la France reconnait qu'elle n'a plus d'Armée." At sea the conditions will be the same. will be fought by the great fleets in European waters. Two The decisive battles defeats in the Mediterranean would break the power of England in that quarter, and even if they were all, would overthrow her dominion in Egypt, and annihilate her trade with the Mediterranean ports and through the Suez Canal.

It is impossible to foresee whether the present war between Japan and China will lead to consequences so far-reaching. The war is certain to be protracted, and it is likely that the European Powers will intervene when the antagonists are exhausted. Then, however, the interests of England, which once, for the sake of peace, gave up Port Hamilton, but which Korea, will be called in question. can hardly tolerate the acquisition by Russia of a footing in

ENGLISH CARICATURES OF NAPOLEON. CONTEMPORARY caricatures cast a most instructive sidelight on the course of history, and Mr. J. Howe Adams' paper in the August Cosmopolitan, on "the English Napoleon," with its numerous illustrations, is as valuab'e

BEELZEBUB GOING TO SUPPER.

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LIBERAL PARTY. BY MR. T. H. ESCOTT.

MR. ESCOTT, writing in the Contemporary Review upon "Cabinet Counsels and Candid Friends," discusses the question as to whether or not the Unionists can re-unite. He thinks that they can, but, in view of Mr. Chamberlain's non possumus, it is doubtful whether the members of the Whig families will, as Mr. Escott anticipates, after their sojourn in the Tory camp, return in the fulness of time to their ancestral alliance. Mr. Escott's idea, which is not very clearly expressed, is to be found in the following passage:

Ere Lord Rosebery or any of his colleagues can expect to win the consent of the "predominant partner" to an extension of Irish liberties, they are well aware that it is imperative for them to show how something in the nature of Home Rule can be granted without imperilling unity, and even how it can be made to strengthen the central executive for imperial purposes. The crux of the whole question, the sum and essence of the entire difficulty, are the necessity to be faced of defining, on the lines of the American constitution, what are imperial and what local concerns. That difficulty, however, is surmounted successfully by the French, by the Belgian, and by the Dutch constitution, laws; why should a similar feat be impossible here with all the wisdom, the experience, and the shrewdness of the "mother of parliaments" to help us in its performance? The supreme and most complex obstacle, of course, is land; but even this might be dealt with by the institution of an imperial civil law-that is, by a civil code with chapters on real and personal property, to be applicable, of course, as the essential provisions of an Imperial Federal Home Rule scheme must be, to every part of the United Kingdom. The task indeed is difficult, bnt problems exist to test the skill of statesmen in their solution. Nor would the enterprise be unworthy of that rare intellectual power in virtue of which Mr. Courtney, after having been the first mathematician of his day at Cambridge, became one of the most powerful journalists who ever wrote a leading article in Printing House Square, and which more recently has won for him the reputation of the clearest-visioned and most impartial Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons. Here, too, there would be a congenial field open for the display of their special aptitudes and knowledge, by Mr. James Bryce as well as by Sir G. O. Trevelyan, and even by the new Lord Chief Justice himself; nor, one may believe, would the legislation now sketched in outline be wholly abhorrent to the present leader of the Opposition of the House of Commons, and some at least of his more moderate followers. The great danger to be avoided and one that now besets all legislation is lest the scheme thus indicated should degenerate into a series of fragmentary and patchwork efforts, without accuracy, esprit de corps, or system. In safeguarding against these perils, the peculiar qualifications of the politicians just named would be invaluable, and might also be successful. Although the time may be approaching when it will not be premature for responsible Liberal statesmen to acquaint the public with the outlines of a policy of Imperial Home Rule, not perhaps dissimilar in some respects to that which we have ventured to adumbrate, it is not to be supposed that even for this the Unionist and the non-Unionist Liberals should co-operate successfully without much and long preliminary training in concerted action about other matters. The relation of the colonies to the mother country, the position of the Established Church in Wales, and possibly elsewhere; the struggle between secular and ecclesiastical parties, daily becoming more accentuated in the department of education; the relations of the House of Lords to the majority of the House of Commons on the one hand, to the voting strength of the constituencies on the other; all these, and the innumerable other instances of the chronic struggle between the champions and opponents of privilege, will sufficiently furnish forth the harmonising and unifying discipline that may be expected by slow and often imperceptible degrees to unite the Liberals under Mr. Courtney with their brethren under Sir William Harcourt and Lord

Rosebery. An absolute reunion of all professing the name of Liberalism could not, at this time of the political day, be accomplished even by Mr. Gladstone himself; and as yet we probably do not realise sufficiently the full consequences to our party system of his retirement; but it is scarcely premature to venture the opinion that where he failed, none of those who follow him are likely to succeed. While due attention to the facts and arguments now advanced does seem to warrant the conclusion that a partial and very gradual reconstitution of the Liberal party in the fashion here suggested may be among the eventualities to be counted with in the political future, the prospect of the Liberal party, as a whole, being restored to the condition in which it was before 1886 is as distant as ever from coming within the purview of practical politics.

AN IRISH VETO.

All such discussions as to the reconstitution of the Liberal party on new lines are based upon the assumption that the English, Scotch, and Welsh Liberals can reckon without the Irish. This is a mistake. The Irish are an integral factor in any combination which places the Liberals in office, and we need not go further than the periodicals of the present month, to see that the Irish are already becoming restive. Mr. Justin Macarthy's plaintive lament in the New Review is noticed elsewhere, and in the New Ireland Review, an Irish parliamentarian, who is an enthusiastic admirer of the Home Rule Alliance, emits a menacing growl as to the way in which the conditions of the truce of God, between the Liberals and Home Rulers, have been fulfilled. The following is an interesting balance-sheet from the Irish point of view:

THE "BOY'S OWN" AND "GIRL'S OWN" ANNUALS.Readers of this REVIEW hardly need the merits of these "Annuals" pointed out to them. It should be enough to say that where a publisher asks six shillings for a boys' or girls' story no longer than the serials of which there are four or five in each of these handsome volumes, the Religious Tract Society charge only eight shillings apiece for these large books. Among the writers who contribute serials to the Boy's Own are Mr. Paul Blake, M. Jules Verne, and Mr. David Ker; in the Girl's Own long stories will be found by Miss Sarah Doudney, Miss Sarah Tytler, and Miss Anne Beale. And each volume, it is needless to say, has many other excellent features, and illustrations almost to every page.