gical lights of our own day. We hailed it, for our own part, with exceeding joy, as a symptom of returning health in our fiction. We do not want the silly old poetical justice or 'affected purism' back again, but, duce Mr. Thackeray, the cynical or basely natural' style of handling life has been so much overdone of late that it was an immense relief to see a revival of the fine old English art of telling a simple story of things as they are without disgusting the poor reader. Messrs. Black wood have just published a new story by the same author, in three volumes, called Adam Bede;' in which the characteristics of the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' are retained, and the general effect is still beautiful, though the work is spun out, and the composition occasionally weak. It is a story of the sad fortunes of a village beauty of the Dolly Varden stamp, and of a working carpenter in the country, at the beginning of the present century. We especially commend it to the readers of the Christian Spectator,' because in Dinah Morris, the Wesleyan womanpreacher in this book, Mr. Eliot has again shown that he can do what no other 'outsider' who writes fiction has shown the smallest capacity for-understand and describe evangelical piety. 'Adam Bede' is healthy and Christian from beginning to end, and, though it includes a most painful incident, may be to quote again from the style choisi —'read aloud in the family circle' without the omission of a line. We quote a single passage, easily isolated, from the account of the funeral of Adam's father at Hayslope Church :—

'Adam's thoughts of Hetty did not deafen him to the service; they rather blended with all the other deep feelings for which the church service was a channel to him this afternoon, as a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility. And to Adam the church service was the best channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearning, and resignation; its interchange of beseeching cries for help, with outbursts of faith and praise-its recurrent responses, and the familiar rhythm of its couplets, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have done; as to those early Christians who had worshipped from their childhood upward in catacombs, the torchlight and shadows must have seemed nearer the Divine presence than the heathenish daylight of the streets. The secret of our emotion never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past; no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathizing observer, who might as well put on his spectacles to discern odours.

ance.

'But there was one reason why even a chance comer would have found the service in Hayslope Church more impressive than in most other village nooks in the kingdom-a reason of which I am sure you have not the slightest suspicion. It was the reading of our friend Joshua Rann. Where that good shoemaker got his notion of reading from, remained a mystery even to his most intimate acquaintI believe, after all, he got it chiefly from Nature, who had poured some of her music into this honest conceited soul, as she had been known to do into other narrow souls before his. She had given him, at least, a fine bass voice and a musical ear, but I cannot positively say whether these alone had sufficed to inspire him with the rich chant in which he delivered the responses. The way he rolled from a rich deep forte into a melancholy cadence, subsiding, at the end of the last word, into a sort of faint resonance, like the lingering vibrations of a fine violoncello, I can compare to nothing for its strong calm melancholy but the rush and cadence of the wind among the autumn boughs. This may seem a strange mode of speaking about the reading of a parish clerk-a man in rustic spectacles, with stubbly hair, a large occiput, and a prominent crown. But that is Nature's way; she will allow a gentleman of splendid physiognomy and poetic aspiration to sing

wofully out of tune, and not give him the slightest hint of it; and takes care that some narrow-browed fellow, trolling a ballad in the corner of a pothouse, shall be as true to his intervals as a bird.'

We will only add this that we know no recent storyteller who has successfully blended the homily and the tale as Mr. Eliot, and that if we were confined to two new books of fiction for our family shelves, we should, heartily and without hesitation, select Adam Bede,' and 6 Scenes of Clerical Life.'

Mr. Owen Meredith's new volume of poems, The Wanderer' (Chapman and Hall), is as unsatisfactory as second works generally are, and one of the most unwholesome books we ever read. It is no secret that Mr. Meredith is the son of Sir Bulwer Lytton, and as the moral indecency of the present volume leaves us in no mood to be nice, we shall say that he is decidedly a chip of the old block; with all that nauseating half-sincerity of tone which made Hawthorne call the father 'the very pimple of the age's humbug,' and made Carlyle call him 'a scent-bottle of treble-distilled cant.' 'The Wanderer' avows himself the author, and in a great number of miscellaneous poems, takes you with him through painful adventures with women, and some scenes which belong to the Dame aux Camelias school, in France, Italy, Holland, and other countries. The last book' is called 'Palingenesis,' and what it does in the new-creating way is a scheme of Christianized Pantheism, in which there is, at bottom, a good deal more Browning than Meredith, and plenty of very vile versification. The author then tells us that he suffered more than he recorded;' which we are sorry for; having told so much, it is a pity he did not make the thing square. And he dismisses this tale of 'one man's life' as 'all men's lesson.' We hope 'all men' will read it carefully -backwards!

After this, those who are unskilled in the waywardness of critics, will, perhaps, be surprised to find us saying that Mr. Owen Meredith has unquestionable faculty, and often writes with extraordinary power and beauty. By this token

THE PORTRAIT.

• 'Midnight past! Not a sound of aught

Thro' the silent house, but the wind at his prayers.

I sat by the dying fire, and thought

Of the dear dead woman upstairs.

A night of tears! for the gusty rain

Had ceased, but the eaves were dripping yet;

And the moon look'd forth, as tho' in pain,

With her face all white and wet:

Nobody with me, my watch to keep,

But the friend of my bosom, the man I love:

And grief had sent him fast asleep

In the chamber up above.

Nobody else, in the country place

All round, that knew of my loss beside,
But the good young Priest with the Raphael-face,
Who confess'd her when she died.

That good young Priest is of gentle nerve,
And my grief had moved him beyond control;
For his lip grew white, as I could observe,
When he speeded her parting soul.

I sat by the dreary hearth alone:

I thought of the pleasant days of yore:
I said, "The staff of my life is gone:
The woman I loved is no more.

"On her cold, dead bosom my portrait lies,
Which next to her heart she used to wear-
Haunting it o'er with her tender eyes

When my own face was not there.

"It is set all round with rubies red,

And pearls which a Peri might have kept.
For each ruby there, my heart hath bled:
For each pearl, my eyes have wept."

And I said, "The thing is precious to me:
They will bury her soon in the churchyard clay;
It lies on her heart, and lost must be,

If I do not take it away."

I lighted my lamp at the dying flame,

And crept up the stairs that creak'd for fright, Till into the chamber of death I came,

Where she lay all in white.

The moon shone over her winding sheet,
There, stark she lay on her carven bed:
Seven burning tapers about her feet,
And seven about her head.

As I stretch'd my hand, I held my breath;
I turn'd as I drew the curtains apart:
I dared not look on the face of death:
I knew where to find her heart.

I thought, at first, as my touch fell there,

It had warm'd that heart to life, with love; For the thing I touched was warm, I swear, And I could feel it move.

'Twas the hand of a man, that was moving slow

O'er the heart of the dead-from the other side: And at once the sweat broke over my brow, "Who is robbing the corpse ?" I cried.

Opposite me, by the tapers' light,

The friend of my bosom, the man I loved,
Stood over the corpse, and all as white,
And neither of us moved.

"This woman, she loved me well," said I.
"A month ago," said my friend to me:
"And in your throat," I groan'd, “you lie !"
He answer'd . . . "Let us see."

"Enough!" I return'd, "let the dead decide:
"And whose soever the portrait prove,
His shall it be, when the cause is tried,
Where Death is arraign'd by Love."

We found the portrait there, in its place:
We open'd it by the tapers' shine:
The gems were all unchanged: the face
Was-neither his nor mine.

"One nail drives out another, at least!

The face of the portrait there," I cried,
"Is our friend's, the Raphael-faced young Priest,
Who confess'd her when she died."

The setting is all of rubies red,

And pearls which a Peri might have kept.
For each ruby there my heart hath bled:
For each pearl my eyes have wept.'

Far more important and significant, as a sign of the times, and as to its influence on public opinion, is Mr. John Stuart Mill's Essay 'On Liberty' (Parker). Here we have, from the extreme opposition' side, from a hater of 'hero-worship,' from a very great thinker of the school in which Mr. Herbert Spencer may to some of our readers be a more familiar example, the very cry which Mr. Carlyle has so long been raising. More manhood, less machinery! More energy, even at the price of less correctness of conduct! More character, even if we must for a time have more irregularity in consequence! Life, free, bold, questioning, open-faced, vigorous life, at all costs, if England is to hold her own, and the world keep rolling! We recommend all who can grapple with the book to read it; but not because it is Christian in tone, for it is very much otherwise, as a single extract will show :

'I much fear that by attempting to form the mind and feelings on an exclusively religious type, and discarding those secular standards (as for want of a better name they may be called) which heretofore co-existed with and supplemented the Christian ethics, receiving some of its spirit, and infusing into it some of theirs, there will result, and is even now resulting, a low, abject, servile type of character, which, submit itself as it may to what it deems the Supreme Will, is incapable of rising to or sympathizing in the conception of Supreme Goodness. I believe that other ethics than any which can be evolved from exclusively Christian sources must exist side by side with Christian ethics to produce the moral regeneration of mankind, and that the Christian system is no exception to the rule; that in an imperfect state of the human mind, the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions. It is not necessary that in ceasing to ignore the moral truths not contained in Christianity, men should ignore any of those which it does contain. Such prejudice or oversight, when it occurs, is altogether an evil; but it is one from which we cannot hope to be always exempt, and must be regarded as the price paid for an inestimable good. The exclusive pretension made by a part of the truth to be the whole, must and ought to he protested against; and if a reactionary impulse should make the protesters unjust in their turn, this one-sidedness,

like the other, may be lamented, but must be tolerated. If Christians would teach infidels to be just to Christianity, they should themselves be just to infidelity. It can do truth no service to blink the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.'

6

'To our instructors in the art of war!' said some beaten general, proposing a toast to his own soldiers. Whose fault will it be if the Christian advocate does not learn a lesson from such enemies as Mr. Mill? Mr. Mill, however, manifests the usual theological nonintelligence of your great philosophic analysts: he knows as much about Calvinism' as does the magnum bonum we write with. The 'Saturday Review,' however, in saying a similar thing, allows the real issue to be huddled up under cover of a misconception. The fact is, Mr. Mill, like all his school, is opposed to any theocratic conception of life, and to try to fight this battle on the ground of mere 'Calvinism,' were like trying to marshal the hosts of Armageddon in Trafalgar-square.

Through two hundred pages of magnificently sulky writing Mr. Mill discusses the question of the limits of social and individual freedom. The domain of absolute liberty, he thinks,

Comprises first, the inward domain of consciousness, demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty within the same limits of combination among individuals, freedom to unite for any purpose not involving harm to others, the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.'

Law and custom have so encroached on this domain in our own country, that he considers

ness.

'Already energetic characters on any large scale are becoming merely traditional. There is now scarcely any outlet for energy in this country except busiThe energy expended in that may still be regarded as considerable. What little is left from that employment is expended on some hobby which may be a useful, even a philanthropic hobby, but is always some one thing, and generally a thing of small dimensions. The greatness of England is now all collective; individually small, we only appear capable of anything great by our habit of combining, and with this our moral and religious philanthropists are perfectly contented. But it was men of another stamp than this that made England what it has been, and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline.'

In the Applications' of his principles, Mr. Mill discusses the question of National Education among others; and his idea is, that the Government should, by examinational enactments, demand that every