men out into better and worse golfers, without leaving them a single ground of deprecatory appeal to fortune. The golfer stands up at a small plat of ground and chooses any spot which seems to him the best on which to place his ball. To obviate cause of complaint for conceivable inequalities in the growth of grass, he may even make a little mound of sand on which to prop it, which may vary in size with his fancy from a worm-cast to mole-hill. He then selects the club most suitable (or which he thinks most suitable-for there is a subtle humor in that too) for his style, age, weight, and height, and with everything thus disposed in his favor, all he is asked to do is to strike that ball as far as possible in a certain direction. He may, in doing this, stand as he pleases, swing his club as he pleases, make what antics he pleases, play in a shirt or a shootingcoat; he is absolute monarch of the conditions under which he shall strike (or attempt to strike) that ball. Was there ever before such ridiculous organized liberty of procedure in anything to be called a game? Is it wonderful that its appeal is irresistible to human beings who never get anything in life without distasteful conditions? Is any imaginable man proof against such provocation? Can any one fuse such a challenge? But as he hastens to take it up he does not see, vain man, the dire nature of the humiliation that follows if he fail in the trial. In the clation natural at having everything thus arranged in his favor, it does not occur to him that failure must inevitably be the failure of himhim alone. And when failure does happen (which it does more often than is explicable except upon a low estimate of average human capacity), how the natural man leaps forth to palliate it! A fly, a tree, moving clouds, the glitter of a button on an opponent's coat, will be called upon to serve as reasons, although every one knows no truth lies that way, and that the player himself knows it. No: it was he who missedhe alone. And equally, if the opponent succeeds, it is he who succeeds: this is wherein lies the application of the

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parable of the chandler and the Chancellor. We see thus two direct assaults upon the pride and convictions of the natural man: the success of the opponent whose possibilities are no better than his if so good; and the constant mocking challenge of the conditions of the stroke. To the first no man will willingly submit, while few can resist the latter; and therefore the adage, Once a golfer, always a golfer. The actual experience, which in due time. shows that this game so apparently easy is really difficult, does not seriously affect this attitude of the player. He is never disillusioned; the one thing he will not credit is the necessity for failure to happen. The guileless simplicity of the game, when once he is persuaded to attempt it, works upon the weakest side of his nature, for no mental effort is required to grasp its conditions; and he can see nothing in these that should prevent him rivalling the best feats accomplished at it. So nicely nicely calculated these things to delude the average human mind that they survive the bitterest teachings of experience, and draw it on ever deeper into the plausibilities of a recreative confidence-trick.

are

It is not for nothing that the game of golf comes from Scotland. One would like to think that the fine conception it embodies sprang from the brain of one man, and that his name may yet be recovered in order that due honor may be paid him. We can imagine him some humorous moralist who thus enshrined one of the subtlest and most searching criticisms of humanity, not in a poem, play, or book of dogma, but in a game: one who, perceiving how attractive is the element of chance in games, how large a share has been allotted to it even in those in which skill is called for, how salutary are its operations to the loser and how enjoyable to the winner-yet conceived the possibility and framed the conditions of the game of golf, wherein the element of chance should be almost completely eliminated, and a man, seduced by that pleasing consideration, be made his own censor in a ruder and blunter fashion than by almost any

other pursuit, serious or recreative. The golfer stands up at the first tee in the exhilarating conviction that he is author and master of all that will happen to his ball; what is to be done will be done by him. He holes-out on the eighteenth green in most cases with a sense of defeat, yet conscious that he has had no real opponent but himself. One would dearly like to believe that one man, one namable man if possible, imagined and created this game; but the probabilities are against it. Far more likely it is that not one mind but many minds have made it what it is, have elaborated it in course of time from grass-tees to sand-tees, from rude natural putting-greens to smooth. shaven swards each improvement of ground, club, and ball only increasing the grim jest of the game.

If it be objected that there is, after all, a good deal of luck in the fall and lie of the ball through the "fair-green,"

We know on the highest authority that "for ways that are dark and for tricks that are vain" the heathen Chinee is peculiar. But still stranger and more peculiar are the ways of children. It is all very well for amiable and painstaking scientific gentlemen to take down their sayings in notebooks, and to collect instances of their ways of brushing their doll's hair or pulling the cat's tail. You may get thousands of such anecdotes, and stuff your interleaved copy of "Alice in Wonderland" with first-hand comments by Jack and Mary, but the mystery of child-life remains a mystery still, and will do "till the last goodnight." Solomon said that the heart of the King is inscrutable, but it is nothing to the heart of the child. What are the thoughts that lurk in the intricate and sensitive brain of the child, none can tell. We can only say of the child as Vanessa said to Swift, "Never any man living thought like you." The real child, that is, a person of either sex between the ages of two and seven,

lives in a world that is not ours, and which no student of psychology will ever fathom by observation, be it never so laborious and minute. Perhaps the most glorious thing about the childish mind is its superb inconsequence. No child thinks it the least odd, or as demanding apology or excuse, to start a new subject with each new breath. The fresh and eager mind of the child will fly at any and every game. Think of

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the mental sweep of the little boy who in the course of a short walk, and one on the top of the other, asked his father the following questions: Where do Tom-cats go to church?" What do policemen have for dinner?" "If God made the flowers, why doesn't he pick them?" You cannot produce any result by tabulating questions of that kind. They do not show that the child is an animal or a savage, or an undeveloped man or woman, but simply that he is a child, and that a child is something quite apart.

But though we do not think that children can ever be entirely under

stood by grown-up people, it must not be supposed that we think children incapable of thought. As a matter of fact, their power of thought is one of the most remarkable things about them. There is nothing so remorseless as childish logic. Children may not be very particular about premises, but they detect a false conclusion in an instant. There is no escaping from the nursery syllogism. It comes down like the knife in the guillotine. This is why childish theology often takes such strange forms, and why we so often. hear of such questions as "Why don't God kill the Devil, and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?" Mr. Sully, in his book, " Children's Ways," just published by Messrs. Longmans, though his method of treating the mind of the child seems to us far too pedantic, or let us say scientific, gives some delightful stories which illustrate our contention that children are splendid logicians. The Greek philosophical riddler thought he had made a great hit in the region of philosophic puzzles when he asked "which came first, the owl or the egg?" A little boy known to Mr. Sully, by the use of his logical faculty arrived at this. difficulty at the age of five: "When there is no egg, where does the hen come from? When there was no egg, I mean, where did the hen come from?"

The

ordinary man or woman would not have put the problem with half the same point. The correction is most remarkable, and shows how perfectly and logically the small brain was working. Not so good, but very clever, granted the premises supplied her by the grownups, was the question of a little girl of four. "When everybody was a babythen who could be their nurse-if they were all babies?" No doubt some one had said to the child, "We were all babies once," or "Everybody was once a baby." The child accepted the premise, saw also that babies require to be nursed, and at once pierced the inaccuracy of the original statement by her question. Had she been told all grown-up people were babies once, but not all at the same time, she would not have wanted to ask her question. It

is very interesting to note in connection with the keenness of the logical faculty in children, the way in which they perpetually stumble upon the problems with which the schoolmen used to puzzle their brains. Think of this from a boy of three: "If I'd gone upstairs, could God make it that I hadn't?" Here his logical faculty had hurled the child headlong against one of the greatest mysteries of existence. Children, however, are not always logical in matters theological. Sometimes we get a taste of the natural man coming out, as witness the question, "If God wanted me to be good and I wouldn't be good, who would win?" The child apparently had a very strong belief in his own innate power of naughtiness. He could not feel sure that he would be beaten by anything if he once set his mind to not being good. Very logical in its way is the notion that children sometimes get in regard to the existence of a backward tendency running parallel to that of growth. people turn back into babies when they get quite old?" asked one of the children quoted by Mr. Sully. Said another, à propos of an old person of her acquaintance: "When will she begin to get small?" But perhaps the closest and most successful reasoner of all was the child who remarked that if he could say what he liked to God, it would be: "Love me when I'm naughty." The quick flash of childish reason had shown him the great need of humanity.

"Do

We have said that we do not think much does, or can, come of the sort of philosophizing about children and their ways adopted by Mr. Sully and observers of his school. The child moves too much in worlds unrealized by us. He may be a quick reasoner when we supply him with premises, but when he is not exposing the bad conclusions, faulty premises, and fallacious syllogisms of his elders, he is moving far from us in a world of his own-a world still bright with the reflections from "that Imperial Palace whence he came." Some happy people, a few mothers and here and there a nurse with the mother's heart, may occasion

ally be led to the door by little guides knee-high, but the glimpse, if allowed, is only for a moment, and those who have seen can as a rule communicate little or nothing of what they beheld. They may taste the ecstasy through sympathy, but it cannot be imparted, for we have no language in which it can be conveyed. Were it otherwise the children themselves would tell us how they think and what are the motives of their actions and desires. But though we must write this about Mr. Sully's investigations, we should be behaving most ungratefully if we did not acknowledge that he had written a most delightful book. He evidently has a great fondness for, and a great knowledge of, children, for he tells his stories most charmingly. His book, too, is quite full of good things, and all who love children may spend a most delightful hour in turning over its pages. One of his stories illustrates very pleasantly the sententiousness of children: "A little boy had been quarreling with his sister named Muriel just before going to bed. On kneeling down to say his prayers and noticing that Muriel was sitting near and listening, he prayed aloud in this wise: 'Please, God, make Muriel a good girl,' then looked up and said in an angry voice, Do you hear that, Muriel?' and after this digression resumed his petition." Delightful, too, is the anecdote of a sententious boy who interrupted a lecture from his mother with the remark, "Mamma, when you talk you don't move your upper jaw!"-very polite in form and far more difficult to deal with than the little "Turk" who greets a lecture with " Hold your jaw!"

Perhaps, however, the best story of all is the following. It is charming as “a score," and it is also a most excellent lesson to parents: "A mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, 'I'm afraid you can't understand it, dear,' for which she got rather roughly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you would not explain.' The explaining' is resented because it interrupts the child's own secret art of 'making something' out of our words." One sympathizes so thoroughly with the child who, like Wordsworth, was

"Contented if he might enjoy

The things that others understand." The world, in truth, would be far less. dark than it is if people could only be got to realize that explanations often make things far more unintelligible than they were before. "I know when you do not ask me," replied one of the Fathers when they asked him what time was. "I understood till you began to explain it," is the protest of many a child, and also of many a grown-up person. For ourselves, we firmly believe that there was a great deal of meaning in "Sordello," and in many other of Mr. Browning's more obscure poems, until the various Browning Societies began to explain them. We cannot, however, find space for any more of Mr. Sully's delightful stories. We can only end by saying what we have said before-namely, that his book is full of good things, and that it will be a source of great pleasure and amusement to all who love children.Spectator.

THAT some people are never contented will inevitably be the thought suggested to many readers by the title of this paper. For a space of more than ten years opera has been once again the rage in London society; it has returned to the place of supremacy NEW SERIES, VOL, LXVIII., No. 3.

among fashionable amusements which it held from the time of Handel until early in the present century; and it has proved its claims to popularity by a wise catholicity in the matter of the music represented, so that what used to be called the Royal Italian Opera has

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now dropped the middle word from this famous name, as all the principal languages in which operatic librettos exist have in turn been heard upon the Covent Garden stage, sometimes two or three of them at once. Under the late Sir Augustus Harris a tradition grew up that operas must be presented with due regard to the general effect, and he taught Londoners to expect the same care in the preparation of an opera and in its presentment as they were accustomed to demand in the non-operatic theatres. The old practice of pitchforking the works of the great masters upon the stage, on the strength of one prima donna, whose fee for a single appearance swallowed up nearly the whole sum taken in payment for seats, has now disappeared, happily for music and the public, and there is little chance of any return being made to the old system, for the successors to Sir Augustus Harris, the members of the energetic triumvirate known as the Grand Opera Syndicate, are fully aware of what is wanted by the public for which opera exists in London.

And two large sections of the public are perfectly contented with things as they are. One is composed of the wealthy few who are not too particular about the selection of the operas given. as long as they can be assured that the music they hear is really fashionable; the other class contains the multitude of unmusical people, who do not wish to go to the opera at all, and who have and profess no interest whatever in music. There is a considerable space between these two, and it is filled by a large and ever-growing class of people who take a more or less intelligent interest in music, who habitually go to concerts, and in whose lives music of one sort or another plays a prominent part. These belong to a very great variety of sects in the musical world; for it is one of the peculiarities of London that its musical inhabitants do not form one great body, as they do in the majority of the continental cities, but are subdivided into many small classes or cliques, so that the musical aristocrats of the Richter concerts are hardly ever to be seen at concerts conducted

by Lamoureux, Mottl, or Wood, each of whom has his own enthusiastic following, while the patrons of the Popular Concerts remain for the most part contented with chamber music, and rarely hear orchestral works at all. Lower down the scale we get to the numerous less cultivated amateurs who patronize the concerts of one favorite. performer, or those alone in which he takes part. But all, or almost all, of these, divided though they may be in the objects of their admiration, unite in viewing the opera as a thing lying entirely outside their ordinary experience. Even those who throng any concert hall where a "Wagner selection is announced as a special attraction, do not display any particular anxiety to be present at operatic performances of the music dramas as a whole; and although in the present season an extraordinary effort has been made, and with an altogether astounding amount of success, to convert the Wagnerian public into habitual opera-goers, by introducing the conditions in which they delight at Bayreuth into the ordinary course of London life at the height of the season, the performances of the Nibelungen. trilogy will stand, as it were, by themselves, and as an exceptional thing, not as a part of the regular course of an operatic season. Putting aside this special feature of the present series of productions, the great majority of concert-goers are pretty sure to return one or two answers to any friend who refers in their presence to matters operatic. Either they will allege that the operas they care for are never given, or they will confess, what is likely to be the truth in any case, that they cannot afford the cost of the entertainment.

Here we encounter the central difficulty of the situation. The very large class of well-to-do people who at present support numberless concerts are, or consider themselves, excluded from regular attendance at the opera by the cost of comfortable seats. Even if the price of a guinea stall were never exceeded, it is only natural that a great many among even musical people should prefer going to the play twice to a single visit to the opera. And we