children ashore to Crusoe it on an uninhabited but luxuriant island. In all these books the ingenious writer, with a keen eye to stage business, makes the castaways as comfortable as the case will admit. The ship goes to pieces, and, by the care of a kindly Providence, the surge floats ashore the chests with clothes and the casks of salt junk. Even metals have a strange buoyancy in the Southern Pacific, and the refugees are amply supplied with tools, guns, and ammunition. In fact, with a light-hearted child like Leila, trusting fondly in her father, and with a nurse to see to her ablutions and toilette, the misfortune becomes an enchanting picnic. She has turtle eggs at breakfast for those of the domestic fowl; the bread-fruit takes the place of loaves and French rolls; and, instead of being stinted to an orange at dessert, she revels in everything—from grapes to bananas. When she has overcome her tremors, she is happy in a tropical paradise that combines the palm-houses of Kew with the inexhaustible excitements of a Zoological garden. Above are the cerulean skies, around is the azure sea, with limitless aquaria of limpid water within the coral reefs; and when the ship comes which is to bear her back to civilization, the child and the childish readers are more inclined to cry than to congratulate themselves.

'Leila or the Island' naturally suggests Masterman Ready, which was written, as Marryat assures us in the original preface, chiefly from conscientious motives. No doubt that very ready writer was eager to turn his hand to anything professionally, but he resented the inaccuracies of the Swiss Family Robinson.' He had intended to write a sequel to what he admits is an amusing book; but he was scandalised not only by nautical blunders, but by the ignorance of local botany and zoology. We know not whether the young folk care greatly to differentiate the rig of a schooner from that of a brig, or to discriminate between the mango and the mangrove. Yet from the artistic point of view Marryat was right, and we are reminded of Scott making notes at Rokeby of the wild flowers enamelling the banks of the Greta. When Morritt suggested that the conventional violets and primroses would serve the purposes of poetry quite as well, he received an answer which satisfied and silenced him. Description may be monotonous, but Nature never is. Marryat was nothing if not singularly accurate, and that goes far to explain the prolonged popularity of his innumerable books. We are amused by the boisterous fun, but there is solid painting in the background. A remarkable example of Marryat's strict fidelity to truth appears from Mr. Knight's ' Cruise of the Alerte,' which describes an expedition to the Southern Trinidad in

search

search of buried treasure. That barren jumble of volcanic rock, now a subject of international dispute between England and Brazil, had seldom been visited, for the barricades of surf are often impracticable. But Knight was startled to find that in Frank Mildmay' the crumbling precipices, the waterless gorges, and even the slippery mosses beneath the spasmodic cascades, were described by a man who had gone over the ground and carefully marked each spot in his memory. So 'Masterman Ready' is no piece of fancy scene-painting. It may rank with 'Tom Cringle's Log' for its inimitably faithful pictures of tropical scenery, of animated nature from the ground-sharks to the fire-flies, and of the wildly picturesque atmospheric phenomena which seem to shadow forth the terrors and splendours of the judgment-day.

We ought not to overlook Miss Martineau, with her Feats on the Fiords,' 'The Crofton Boys,' &c. That gifted lady did not obtrude, in her exciting juvenile books, the unhappy religious creed which she felt bound to profess elsewhere. Nor can we omit Miss Catherine Sinclair, who, in Holiday House,' broke away from the old traditions and treated human frailties generously. We have but faint recollections of a story we have not read for some fifty years, but we do remember that the healthy and high-spirited children played the parts of small social demons in a well-regulated household. Indeed, malevolent critics might have plausibly said that Miss Sinclair suggested to children all manner of mischief.

But as we must draw an arbitrary line somewhere between the old and the new, the line may as well be drawn at 'Masterman Ready.' The naval veteran who succeeded and surpassed Captain Chamier-who rivalled and, in nautical science, surpassed Cooper-was among the last of those fortunate writers who had a fair field and few efficient competitors. Of a sudden we find publishers and purchasers submerged in the ever-growing spring-tides of literature for school-room or nursery. Now the season sets in, year after year, with the punctuality and profuse downpour of the Indian monsoon. Or, to change the metaphor, about a couple of months before Christmas the illustrated gift books, in every conceivable style and vein, descend like snowflakes on the floors of the publishing houses. They come like the snowflakes, and like the snowflakes they disappear. There are few indeed which have left affectionate impressions, or which survive in a fair succession of 'new and cheap' editions. With scarcely an exception, the most fascinating have been written by ladies, and we are glad to think that, when not avowedly religious, their moral tendencies are unimpeachable. And

further,

further, they have invariably obtained the greatest popularity when the style has been simple and the subject domestic. The innocence of childhood is easily pleased; and although we may subscribe to the doctrine of original sin, we nevertheless know that it is the children who are nearest to heaven.

We

We cannot enter at the end of an article on an aggressive discussion of the merits and defects of recent writers. We may single out a few who personally have pleased us most. recall Miss Charlesworth, with her Ministering Children' and England's Yeomen,' written in the blissful tranquillity of days before the agricultural depression, when the hospitable farmer was happy on a modest competence, and while the squire and the worthy parson were still his trusted friends. Then there is Miss Montgomery's 'Misunderstood,' awakening all our sympathies in favour of the delightful little scapegrace who came to shipwreck for want of a motherly Mrs. Fairchild or of a Mr. Barlow brought down to date. There are Mrs. Clifford and Mrs. Molesworth, and, above all, the late Mrs. Ewing, who as we happen to know, with one of her pregnant apothegms as to the punching of heads and the pleading in Law Courts, threw a busy Queen's Counsel into oblivious abstraction when he ought to have been attending to innumerable briefs. Above all, there is Mrs. Hodgson Burnett's 'Little Lord Fauntleroy,' which in its way should be such an epoch-making book as Jane Eyre' or Mrs. Gaskell's 'Ruth.' As matter of fact, we must hazard the sinister prediction that Lord Fauntleroy will never live with the Fairchild Family.' So, we fear, it will fare with Sweetheart and I,' which, with its frolicsome humour and its gentle pathos, converted us to a faith in Mr. Crockett's genius, when we had hesitated over 'The Men of the Moss-Hags' and his locally coloured Covenanting tales of 'Guy Mannering's Country.'

If we ask why that should be, we find it hard to answer. But some contributory solutions of the problem are sufficiently obvious. As books are multiplied, professionally and almost mechanically, the pace of production is inordinately accelerated, and the machinery turns out the products to a monotonous pattern. A single striking success produces endless and most wearisome imitation and reiteration. But the chances are that the happy hit has a succès d'estime, so far as the children to whom it is addressed are concerned, and that the brilliantly imaginative writer wins the approval of older folks. It seems to us that the fairy fancies of 'Lewis Carroll' are cases in point. They have passed through endless editions; they were translated into several foreign languages. And yet the author

.

in the Hunting of the Snark' introduces bankers and billbrokers among the members of the adventurous expedition. We thank Heaven that many a year must pass before any of our darlings in brief petticoats know anything of pecuniary worries, and we hope it may be long ere our boys of the preparatory school are tempted by usurers and versed in accommodation bills. But in the realms of mythological romance, and as to the manners and habits of the unseen sprite world which surrounds us, the children are positively blasé and absolutely unsusceptible of surprise. They know all about the fairies and the gnomes, the brownies and the brute-elves which the first Lord Lytton touched so delicately in the Pilgrims of the Rhine.' We are sure they would still read the travels of the pilgrims in the subterranean Rhineland and his version of Reynard the Fox with breathless interest and throbbing pulses; but they are so thoroughly well-informed as to resent the intrusion of book-making ignoramuses among those sacred mysteries. The heavy, blundering tread scares away the sprites who will only make friends with sympathetic genius. When the children long for cake at Christmas-time, they are generally given a stone, or bread that is dry, flavourless, and indigestible. Consequently we fancy that they will welcome with effusion the republication of the old classics for children, and we are optimists enough to believe that the experiment will be a

success.

ART.

6

ART. V.-1. La Crise actuelle: Le Canada République ou Colonie. Par Joseph Royal, ex-Lieut.-Gouverneur des Territoires du Nord-Ouest. Montreal, 1894.

2. L'Avenir du Canada: Réponse à M. Royal. March 17, 24, 31, and April 14, 1894.

'La Vérité,'

3. Code of Public Instruction of the Province of Quebec. Montreal, 1889.

4. Pastoral Letter of their Lordships the Archbishops and Bishops of the Ecclesiastical Provinces of Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa, 'On Education.' March 1894.

THE

HE 'splendid isolation' of Great Britain has, apparently, quickened colonial loyalty to the Empire to a very remarkable extent. Even Canada,

the very province which had seemed readiest to make light of her Imperial obligations, the province which must be first to suffer if war actually came, rivalled, and perhaps surpassed, all others in her declaration of devotion to the Crown, and of her purpose to stand or fall with the Empire itself."

6

This assertion of the New York Herald' is strongly confirmed by the fact that, when Mr. McNeill gave notice in the Dominion House of Commons of a resolution professing Canada's unalterable loyalty to the Empire, the resolution was carried unanimously, and supported by stirring speeches from both sides of the House. The Canadian press, whether it represented the Government like the Gazette,' or the French-Canadians of the Dominion like La Presse,' or was an independent organ like 'The Witness,' spoke one thought with one voice.

'If war' (said the Gazette') 'was forced upon the Empire, from any quarter whatever, Canadians would, as a matter of duty, freely accept all the responsibilities that such an occurrence would imply. This is not jingoism. It is the simple expression of the country's feeling, sent at an opportune time to the statesmen who have the Empire's interests in their care, so that they may know what British people outside of the central United Kingdom think, and what they are prepared to do, if need be, in defence of the general interests of the Empire.'

'La Presse' writes thus of Mr. McNeill's resolution :

'Inutile d'ajouter que cette résolution a été votée d'emblée nemine contradicente.

'Cette manifestation de haute loyauté envers l'Angleterre a certainement sa raison d'être, actuellement. En tous cas, le patriotisme de nos députés a été mis au grand jour avec une profusion de discours marqués au plus haut degré d'attachement à la mère-patrie.'

Vol. 183.-No. 366.

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