noticing the topics which were discussed in council by Thorndale, Clarence, and Seckendorf. Seckendorf thought there is a general movement in England towards the Roman Catholic Church; and that it is not unlikely that the ragged urchin who is chalking up 'No Popery' on the walls of London, may live to see High Mass performed in St. Paul's Cathedral. He maintained that fear is the root of all religion; the unseen root, even in the happiest Christians: that 'the pillars of heaven are sunk in hell.' We differ from him. We think that love and hope, rather than fear, are the guiding influences in the Christian life. We believe that though a great fear may be the thing that wakens a man up from total unconcern about religion, yet that the race once entered on, he treads 'the way to Zion with his face thitherward;'-looking towards the home he seeks; and drawn by the hope before, rather than driven by the fear behind him.

Thorndale's Fifth Book is called Clarence; or, the Utopian. As the invalid was wearing down from day to day, one morning he was sitting in the gardens of the Villa Reale. There a group drew his attention—a father, and, as it seemed, his little daughter. The father was evidently an Englishman; the little girl, with fair complexion and light hair, had the dark eye of the Italian. Thorndale recognised his old friend Clarence; but with characteristic reserve, he shrunk from making himself known. But he looked with kind feeling upon the little child; and mused, as Dr. Arnold had done before him, on a child's power to reawaken a parent's flagging interest.

in life. The beaten track is no longer monotonous; the circle of the year looks new. Thorndale thus

mused:

What beautiful things there are in life! joys that have come down to us pure and unstained from the times of the patriarchs. It is to me an eternal miracle to see the same roses year after year bloom as freshly as they did in Paradise. Plant this wedded happiness, plant these roses, in every rood of ground, ye who would improve the aspect of this world! but do not think you can change a single leaf of the plant itself.

Thorndale's idea had been anticipated. James Hedderwick, a pleasing but overlooked poet, thus excuses a new poem on the old theme of Love :

The theme is old-even as the flowers are old,
That sweetly showed

Their silver bosses and bright-budding gold

Through Eden's sod ;

And still peep forth through grass and garden mould,
As fresh from God!

Happily Thorndale and Clarence met at last. The little girl, compassionating the wan look of the consumptive, offered him another day some flowers. Clarence followed her; and suddenly recognising his old companion, 'burst into tears like a woman.' He and his little Julia were afterwards constant visitors at the Villa Scarpa; and all the beauty of the scene, which had been paling to the dying man's languid eye, suddenly revived. Morning after morning Clarence spent, painting the view, from Thorndale's terrace. Julia was not his daughter; she was his adopted child.

She was the daughter of an exiled Italian patriot who had come to England, married an English woman, settled down quietly in a little cottage on the borders of the New Forest, and supported himself as a sculptor. In a chapter called Julia Montini, the story of the exile, his wife and child, is related with exquisite grace and pathos. Very beautifully did the simple and untaught English girl tell Clarence how, as there gradually grew upon her the sense of the genius and refinement of the man she had married, she feared that he would cease to love her, so much above her as he She read and studied, hoping to make herself more worthy of him: but her fear proved idle; he never loved her less. It is indeed something of a disappointment for a husband to feel there are realms of thought to which he has access, but into which a gentle and loving wife cannot enter with him: but solitude is the penalty which attaches of necessity to elevated thought. The man who climbs too high, leaves common sympathy behind him. Our readers may remember how beautifully the author of In Memoriam has anticipated the poor young wife's thoughts and fears:

was.

He thrids the labyrinth of the mind,
He reads the secret of the star :
He seems so near and yet so far :

He looks so cold: she thinks him kind.
For him she plays, to him she sings,
Of early faith and plighted vows;
She knows but matters of the house,
And he, he knows a thousand things.

Her faith is fixt and cannot move,
She darkly feels him dark and wise:
She dwells on him with faithful eyes,
'I cannot understand: I love.'

Suddenly the sculptor and his wife died of fever; and Clarence found the little child all alone in the deserted cottage. The quiet home, that had looked so happy, was obliterated at a stroke. Is it a morbid thing, if we find it for ourselves impossible to look at any happy home, without picturing to our mind a day sure to come? We look at the cottage in the sunshine, amid its clustering roses, and with children's voices by. Ah, some day there will be an unwonted bustle-straw flying about the neat walks--empty, echoing rooms-the children gone-and the peaceful home broken up for ever. It is well for those who can feel themselves secure, even if they be not safe.

And now Clarence and Julia soothe the dying man's solitude. Thorndale lies on his sofa under the acaciatree; Clarence stands near, painting; Julia is busy gardening. And as Thorndale's hand turns too feeble to hold the pen, Clarence takes up his abandoned manuscript volume, and fills the remaining leaves with his own confession of faith. To notice that at all adequately, would demand an article of itself; and we shall not attempt to do so. But we see our last of Thorndale as we have just described him. We leave him, now with very little to come of life, under the acacia-tree. There is now only the stillness of expectation, upon that terrace that looks down upon the bay.

We should have been happier, we confess, had we

left him with something better to support him at the last than philosophy, whether cynical or Utopian. Surely he had within himself, too sacred for common talk, a hope and a belief not to be paraded for Seckendorf's sarcasm! Surely, when, in the last hours, the pictures of childhood came back, the perplexed and tempest-driven man was again the child that prayed by the little white bedside. We do not care if our readers should complain that the sermon peeps through the article that the disguise of the reviewer does not quite conceal the gown and band. Let it be so: but in treating of such grave matters as those which this book suggest, we could not have forgiven ourselves had we failed to notice the book's essential defect. Holding the belief which we hold, we could not have written of the mystery of life, without reference to that which alone can read it.