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she were a real college girl, that she would help to chair Miss Wriothesley round the college, and shout herself hoarse in her applause. And certainly, the pathos of her looks would not keep her awake on the night after the Tripos lists had placed her among the coveted First Classes.

The author of A Newnham Friendship has succeeded better in rendering something of the spirit. of the place, but she has unfortunately fallen into the snare of over-description. She knows her subject and loves it-loves it so well indeed that she cannot bear to part with any of it, and loses herself in an endless multiplicity of detail. No little incident, no girlish conversation is too trivial to be recorded. for ever putting her favorites through their paces for our benefit, and gushing over them until we grow weary of their surpassing beauty and their evidently indescribable charm.

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And one and all these writers are convinced that a strong admixture of love interest is essential to the success of their tale. So that some young men who are clearly intended to be very manly, athletes and brilliant scholars, cela va sans dire, are generally introduced to complete the picture. And this adds the last touch of incongruity to the description. For whatever our heroines may be, whether potential mothers of families or high-school mistresses in the making, they are at any rate quite unromantically occupied during these three years of college life. Books and games, not love and marriage, are the order of the day. And books and games are quite wholesome ingredients for the daily life of youth, but very poor material for fiction. There are, of course, always possibilities among coaches, and we have it on trustworthy evidence that even undergraduates may be possessed of irresistible charm. But these are side issues; from the point of view of romance the

ground is not fertile, and the ploughing, whether undertaken in malice or good faith yields but a sorry crop.

The writer who takes the after-career of the graduate for his theme has a wider and more fruitful field. The college story ought to provide healthy and interesting reading for the jeune fille, the other offers possibilities for the treatment of problems of a wider and deeper interest. We should expect to find among modern novels the tragedy of some woman who had preferred books to love, and found books barren in the end. We should be prepared to sympathize with the woman whose intellectual interests were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the dictates of her heart. Something of this problem, indeed, we meet in A Girton Girl, by Mrs. Edwardes, one of the earliest novels that claimed to deal with the subject. But the "girl" does not live up to her title, for she never reaches Girton at all. She had counted without the fatal charm of the hero, whose first kiss solves the problem for her, and reveals her "a very woman after all.”

One of the earliest products of the Higher Education to be met in fiction is Angela Messenger, the charming heroine of All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Angela is introduced to us strolling by the river with her friend, to whom she is confiding her views on life in general and her own future in particular. The friend is no doubt intended to represent the typical student. For her the world has no interest. Mathematics and the welfare of the Higher Education of women jointly hold exclusive possession of her soul. She yearns to wrest not only academic honors, but the very buildings of the men's most ancient foundations from the rival sex. For the rest, she is pale, spectacled and unbending, and admirably adapted to serve as a foil to the charming heroine. There is no

denying that Angela is a very nice young woman, but we have an uncomfortable suspicion that it is against great odds and in spite of her college training that her maker allows her to keep her charm. She herself sums up Newnham and its limitations with scant courtesy, and pours contempt on the studies with which her college career had been chiefly occupied. Indeed, we suspect that her maker's sole object in sending her to Newnham was to enable her to pursue the study of Political Economy, in order that she might denounce it afterwards with full effect. For Angela is his chosen instrument for the annihilation of the "dismal science," and it was necessary, therefore, that she should have had special training in its specious fallacies. Such training, in the days when the London School of Economics and the provincial Universities were still unborn, could only be obtained in Cambridge. So Angela, we conclude with regret, cannot be claimed as anything more than an accidental product of the Higher Education.

Miss Cayley, a later product, is, we venture to believe, no longer purely accidental. Her author does not treat her with anything like the seriousness which Sir Walter Besant devotes to his heroine; but then Lois Cayley was created not to point a moral, but merely to adorn a tale. She is a surprisingly efficient young woman, whose briskness, courage and resource almost take our breath away. As she adds to these qualities good looks, honesty and every sort of virtue, the college which produced her has every reason to be grateful to Mr. Grant Allen. Still we fear that even Lois Cayley was not intended to represent a type, or at best only an exceptional one. Like Angela Messenger she has a friend, a pale spectacled friend, devoted to the teaching of the higher mathematics, who is presumably intended to typify the Gir

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ton student. Lois, we may suppose, represents the product of college training working on very favorable, original material. True, she has all the vigor and independence of spirit of the college girl. But she looks with some contempt on the avocations of her colleagues, and nothing could be further from her thoughts than any wish to put her education to the traditional use. We have no reason, therefore, to suppose that the writer intended to give more than a modicum of credit to Girton for Miss Cayley's successful

career.

The boldest and at the same time, the most sympathetic sketch of a college graduate is Mr. Bernard Shaw's Vivie Warren. "She is an attractive specimen of the sensible, able, highly educated young middle-class Englishwoman." As she was Third Wrangler in her year, we feel that the Mathematical Tripos is avenged, and the reputation of Newnham redeemed. Vivie Warren sums up in her own personality the entire spirit of the higher education on its material side. She represents much more besides, and there are tendencies in her for which her parentage is obviously responsible. She is keen, clever and capable, straightforward and direct to bluntness, endowed with a quantity of good sense and a quality of penetration which are truly alarming. She is plucky, alert and honest, absolutely selfish and a materialist to the finger tips. In this last respect she typifies not the higher education so much as the modern spirit. She hates holidays, this candid young person; she cares nothing for beauty and romance; art and music she has tried and would not go through the experience again for anything that could be offered to her. What she likes is working and getting paid for it. "I must work," she tells us, "and I must make more money than I spend," the "must" re

ferring purely to a necessity of her mind. This characteristic she inherits from her mother, but she is an honest woman while the mother is a blackguard, she deals in nothing more harmful than figures and calculations while her mother trafficked in human lives. Very characteristic is the young

But in fair

woman's determination to choose her own way of life at any cost. For love she naturally finds no time in her busy scheme of existence, and the question of work versus marriage does not present for her even the rudiments of a problem. She expresses herself unambiguously on this point "Now once for all mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife. I don't want a mother and I don't want a husband." ness to Vivie it must be remembered that she was prepared to stand by her mother staunchly enough while she thought that it was only on account of a regrettable and perhaps regretted past that Pharisees pointed the finger of scorn. It was only when she discovered that the past had its continution in the present, that the wealth which she was invited to share was being produced by the foulest methods conceivable, that she decided to rupture relations and launched the unfilial ultimatum which we have quoted. Vivie's fortitude throughout the very nasty experiences which she undergoes commands our admiration, and we hope that in her independence and the coveted office in Chancery Lane, she may find something to compensate for the bitter taste which the revelations of those summer days must have left

The National Review.

with her. She has made good her claim to the title of Vierge forte, and she stands almost alone in English fiction in that character.

It is curious that with all the material at our disposal we have not as yet treated the problem on a large scale and in a serious manner. It is even more curious that this should have been done in a country where the material hardly existed and the problem was barely foreshadowed. In Frédérique, and Léa, Les Vierges Fortes, the author had to imagine a set of circumstances foreign to his national experience, and was obliged even to invent a college in which his heroines might graduate. To be trained in public spirit, to learn the meaning of freedom and the uses of economic independence he sent them to England. With Monsieur Prévost's treatment of the problem, and with his conclusions we are not here concerned, but there is no doubt that he depicted the character of his heroines-their weakness as well as their strength, their defects as well as their qualities, the spirit which animated and the ideals which inspired them, with extraordinary penetration and remarkable sympathy. And yet in this country, where all the conditions are favorable, where freedom requires no apology and the serious treatment of any question can always command a hearing-in this country where women's colleges have existed for more than forty years, the vierge forte who is the natural development of the strongest type of girl graduate, is still waiting for her exponent.

H. Reinherz.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF CHESS.

Lost in the dim distances of the long-forgotten past, the history of the origin of chess-the most ancient of all games, beloved alike by king and peasant-has formed the theme of many learned writers.

Historical research on this subject has been carried out by savants of all ages and nationalities, both Western and Eastern; but in spite of the most strenuons endeavor, up to the present moment, the exact manner in which this game came into existence is buried in complete oblivion. Nor is it likely that successive ages will be any more successful in elucidating this problem than present or past generations. This is all the more remarkable considering the world-wide ubiquity of the game. Chess, with the very slightest alteration in its form, is known throughout the length and breadth of the world-civilized or uncivilized.

The balance of evidence tends to show that chess is Indian in origin. The ordinary Hindustani word in use for chess is "shatrang," which in reality is a Persian word but which is in colloquial use throughout India. The word "chess" is a mere corruption of “shatrang.” But "shatrang" itself is derived from a still more ancient Sanscrit word "chatauranga."

We are thus led to the belief that, although the chess of mediæval and modern Europe was undoubtedly derived from Arabic or Persian sources, yet India was the real cradle in which the game was nurtured. The words "check" and "mate," mere phonetic equivalents of the Persian words "Shah" a king, and "mat"= he is dead-the king is dead-are conclusive proof of the Persian origin of the game so far as its introduction into Western countries is concerned.

Interesting, however, as the philology of chess may be, the history of the game itself, and of the different pieces of which it is composed, is of still greater interest, for its own intrinsic value as well as for the study of contemporary constitutional and military history which is thus afforded.

Up to about the ninth century of the Christian era by far the largest part of the population of India adhered to the Buddhist religion. The recent event of the finding of the crystal casket, containing certain bones of Gautama the Buddha, in the Peshawur district, incidentally emphasizes this fact; an event of considerable historical importance, which may have been passed unnoticed, except by those in close touch with the most recent archæological discoveries in India.

The ancient Buddhist faith positively forbade the shedding of blood; and, indeed, predicted a far severer punishment in the world to come to the soldier than to the murderer. The ancient Pundits reasoned that a murderer, generally, would only slay under the impulse of the moment or under some sudden provocation; but that the soldier went out to battle with the fixed intention of slaying: he killed in cold blood-and was guilty of the greater crime in consequence.

But at the same time, the cravings of human nature for strife-that bump of pugnacity which is marked to a greater or less extent on the cranium of every member of the human race was not overlooked; and of all the theories which have been advanced as to the origin of chess, for it must be remembered that the exact origin is quite unknown, the most plausible appears to be that the ancient Buddhist priests invented the game of chess, so that the natural fighting instinct of

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mankind might find an outlet without transgressing the Buddhistic commandment, which prohibited fighting.

In the light of the early history of India, which, in the main, is one long procession of invasion, rapine and murder, this theory may seem fantastic; but it must be remembered that the Buddhist priests were wont to shut themselves off completely from the world in some secluded spot in their endeavors to follow the rigid teachings of their founder; and it is by no means impossible that, finding the fundamental fighting instinct of humanity was an almost insuperable barrier to their inner strivings, these priests attempted a solution of the problem by the invention of the game of chess.

In attempting to unravel the history of chess it is a most unfortunate fact that the climate of India is an unfavorable one for the preservation of ancient manuscripts. Old manuscripts seldom lasted more than four hundred years. For this reason copies had to be made in order that the ancient writings might be preserved.

Two grave sources of error are thus opened out inaccurate copying in the various transcriptions, and interpolation by the scribe; the latter personage was often no doubt himself a young Pundit, who would be naturally wishful to put forward his own views. These reasons, in themselves, are sufficient to account for the obscurity of the origin of the game; and for these same reasons it is highly probable that this origin always will remain hidden, even from the most learned and energetic worker of any subsequent generation.

It might be mentioned in passing that the Hindustani and Sanscrit word "chatauranga" is used to mean "chess" in the most ancient MSS. extant. This is an additional fact going to show the probable Indian origin of the game.

So far as it is possible to rely on

ancient MSS. the game has always been played with sixteen pieces; and although the movements and even the names of the different pieces have varied considerably in the course of the last ten centuries-particularly about the fifteenth century-yet in its main essentials the game as now played is the same as it was in the days of long ago.

It is very doubtful whether the original chess was a four-handed game, played with dice, as some have supposed. The essence of the game clearly points to a military origin, where chance would be eliminated and where the natural sequence of events, the result of worldly experience, would produce two rather than four battling hosts. Apart from this, the confusion which would result from four independent sets of chessmen playing on the same chess-board would be almost inextricable, while the evidence furnished by the names of the pieces points to the same conclusion. The fact that the movements of the pieces in the earliest days of chess were not the same as they are now would not alter this conclusion. Throughout all time these moves have not greatly varied.

The chess-board is most certainly the same, though it was not until the sixteenth century or thereabouts that the surface was chequered black and white.

The king, the most important piece on the board, round whom the whole game centres, was said to be subject to capture; but under these conditions the method of conducting the game is not quite clear, because in modern chess the capture of the king terminates the game. Possibly all pieces and pawns had to be captured before the game was finally won. At this early period the king could make three moves at a time in any direction, and in addition could make a knight's move in order to

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