all colour and gilding, she further delights in confusing outlines and exchanging forms, so that we ask ourselves in vain which is youth and which is age? where is beauty, and where ugliness?

We cannot guess at the answer to those riddles as long as everything is veiled in a uniform black domino. But the counter - enchanter Day is at hand, and with the first wave of his golden wand he dispels all illusion, tears off the black domino, and the masquerade is at an end. Everything resumes its primitive colour and shape; beauty and ugliness, age and youth, are once more as distinct from each other as goat from sheep.

When, therefore, as usual, the sun rose next morning at Rudniki, changing black weird ghosts back into gnarled oak-trees, bands of spectre warriors into peaceful haycocks, crouching dragons into rotten tree-stumps, the inhabitants of the village became likewise aware that their eyes had deceived them singularly the night before, in showing them a black cow, and an old woman with a bundle.

The cow was not black-it was speckled; and the woman was not old-she was young and beautiful, and in place of a bundle she carried a baby in her arms. In other words, it was Magda herself who, with her baby and her speckled cow, had returned to her husband's house, henceforward to leave it no more.

The neighbours wondered and stared for a day or two; but wondering and staring are never of long duration, and people soon forget the little episode of Magda's visit to her brother's house and her sensational return.

Most people said that Filip had done a wise thing in taking back his wife, and others added that it would have been wiser yet if he

he

had never sent her away; would have spared himself a useless journey and a burnt roof.

What had passed between husband and wife was never exactly known, nor what had been the reason which had determined Filip to take back Magda and agree to forgive and forget the past. Perhaps the burnt roof and Kuba's misdemeanours had something to do with the matter; or perhaps the speckled cow, which had once weighed so heavily in the matrimonial balance, had still further displayed her matchmaking propensities in bringing the couple once more together. Or was it not perhaps a better and nobler motive than all these?-the godlike spirit of charity, which teaches us to forgive the wrongs of others, as we hope ourselves to be forgiven?

Probably the motives were so complex, that not even Filip himself could have analysed them.

Some weeks after Magda's return, she found her husband standing in the shed gazing intently at a small piece of charred wood which he held in his hand. This was all that remained of those luckless gates, which once had been so near completion, but which now would never adorn the village church.

"Seventy florins!" he said, mournfully. "It would have brought me in seventy florins. And now it is too late; I cannot begin again, and the Curé will order the gates elsewhere. I shall never have such a chance again. Seventy florins gone!"

"Let them go!" cried Magda, impetuously; "there are other things, better things, than money. Those gates have led to nothing but misery; let them remain closed for ever!"

Filip gazed intently at his wife; then he extended his hand to her and echoed her words, "Let them

go!" and he stifled the sigh with which he threw away the last remnant of St Peter and his key.

As years passed on, there was peace in the little cottage, and Filip never regretted his generosity towards Magda. Seeing her thus, with the light of happiness in her eye and a smile on her lips, no one would have thought that she had ever been otherwise than a happy and contented wife. Even the little fair-haired baby who had brought such revolution into the household, ceased by degrees to be a source of irritation: time, which harmonises so many things, darkened his hair and browned his face, so that he grew more like the other children, and was less of an eyesore; and it was scarcely felt to be a relief when one summer, when he was about four years old, the spectre cholera, in paying another flying visit to the place, thought fit to pluck this useless little weed.

Magda has now a new string of corals round her neck, and two other children of her own by her side, black-eyed urchins who bid fair to rival their step-brother Kuba in pranks and mischief. Kuba's famous achievement, however, with the duck's egg, they will not be able to imitate, for the storks never built again upon that roof.

Danelo has removed to a distant village, where he has married a wealthy widow some years older than himself. He beats his wife when he comes home drunk on Saturday nights, and at such times she cries, and vows that she is the most miserable woman on earth; but on the whole, they do not get on much worse than their neighbours, and for the sake of his blue eyes and radiant smile she would

doubtless forgive yet greater offences.

Madame Wolska, now Princess Rascalinska, rarely comes to Rudniki. She is usually to be heard of at Paris, or at some of the fashionable watering - places. Some people say that her second marriage has not been more successful than the first, for Prince Rascalinski gambles away a large proportion of her income, and cares far more for the society of notorious actresses than for that of his handsome wife; and such people wonder that Sophie Rascalinska does not seek for a divorce.

Better-informed folk, however, who know more of the world, are probably right in asserting that the penniless and obscure Sophie Bienkowska has been perfectly successful in both her matrimonial ventures. By the first she got wealth; by the second, position. Prince Rascalinski married her for her money, and she took him for his name, which gives her the entrée to fastidious aristocratic circles where plain Madame Wolska would not have been received.

Thus it comes about, all over the world, that couples are kept together by some sort of link-but that rarely, very rarely, that link is the golden rivet of pure love.

It is usually gold of another sort, or interest, or only a cow, or still less-a name.

Many people start in life with a stock of high principles, but have to lay them aside as unpractical and expensive luxuries. Poor people cannot afford them, and rich people do not seem able to afford them either.

High principles are therefore only made for storks, who are free to act according to their lights with an undeviating sense of justice.

WE do not pretend that the above title completely covers the ground occupied by Dr Tulloch's recently published volume, named below, to which we propose to call the attention of our readers. The nine essays collected in it, two only of which are new, the rest having already appeared in the periodical literature of the day, are reviews of as many different philosophical utterances of one kind or another, ranging from Dr Tyndall's dithyrambic apotheosis of Matter before the British Association, to the ponderous transcendentalism of Kant, and the deification of abstract humanity by Comte. They deal, accordingly, with many problems of thought which are too abstruse for these lighter pages, and which, if we were to attempt to discuss in a popular manner, we should run the risk of only puzzling our readers, if not ourselves into the bargain. To serious students, indeed, of human thought, who wish to dig down to the foundations on which science and morals have been built up, and to ascertain how far sensation can be the basis of knowledge, and instinct of ethical judgment, the abstruser parts of these essays will furnish valuable hints to guide them in their arduous investigations, warn them off the pitfalls which gape for the unwary, and clear up for them some of the countless perplexities with which the field of metaphysics is thickly strewn. But we confess that we have not

sufficient confidence in the prevalence of an appetite for such strong meat, to embolden us to offer even so much as a scanty meal of it here. Nor shall we do more than make a passing allusion to the lighter and more generally attractive portions of the essays, which are of a biographical character. Those and we hope they are many

who have made acquaintance with Dr Tulloch's delightful little treatise on Pascal, in the series of "Foreign Classics for English Readers," will not be surprised to find him, in the present volume, sketching with perspicuity and graceful sympathy the story and character of more than one of the wellknown writers, whose works come under his hands for judgment. With a few masterly touches he places before us the eccentric apostle of Positivism, and expounds the strange metamorphosis produced in his gospel by his short acquaintance with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, under whose stimulating influence an arid classification of human knowledge budded apace into an enthusiastic religion, with its temples and priesthood, its sacraments and festal commemorations. At the opposite end of the philosophical scale, as well as of the volume, will be found a charming sketch of the oracular critic of reason and conscience, to whom the dreary old town of Königsberg owes its fame-the immortal Kant, who may be said to have divided himself rather unfairly between his so

Edinburgh and London: 1884.

that "

cial habits and his published works, bestowing all his simplicity on the one, and all his complexity on the other; and who, if the "sweet girl graduates" will allow us to say it, may, for the sake of his "categorical imperative," be pardoned his ungallant "synthetic judgment," a woman whose head is full of Greek, may as well have a beard on her chin." Between these biographical sketches come notices of Ferrier, the subtle and combative metaphysician of St Andrews; of William Smith, the author of 'Thorndale' and 'Gravenhurst,' one of the most frequent contributors to this Magazine a generation ago, and remarkable for the fastidious beauty and delicacy of his thought; and lastly, of the atrabilious triad of Kill-joys, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann, in whose sombre pages the music of the spheres degenerates into a concert of groans, and the universe is depicted as a discord in black.

While, however, we pass lightly over so much that enters into Dr Tulloch's volume, and concentrate our attention on the single topic of "Sceptical Theories," we are by no means so eclectic or arbitrary in our treatment as it might at first appear. His nine essays are all bound together by a common purpose, and proceed upon a common principle. What he aims throughout them all at doing is, by his own confession, to state plainly the points at issue between the old Christian faith and the naturalism which modern scepticism proposes to substitute for it, and to show how defective and unsatisfactory is every basis of life and thought from which the supernatural has been excluded. In fact it is but a single central problem which, in these essays, he is ap

proaching on different sides, and contemplating under various aspects- a problem in which the essential character and dignity of human nature are involved, and with the solution of which its destinies are bound up. What is man? is the grand question, over which he perceives the several hosts of science, philosophy, and religion to be hotly contending; and like a red-cross knight he rushes into the fray, to strike a blow in defence of the anthropology which the Bible has enshrined and the Churches have taught.

Why this conflict should have so many sides and phases will readily appear, if we recollect into how many discordant factions the sceptical army is broken up. "Quot homines, tot sententiæ," is applicable here. The Babel of voices by which answers are given to the question, "What is man?" has its amusing as well as its melancholy side. Man, cries one faction, is a peculiarly lucky member of the great zoological family, who by some happy fate or chance has been pitched up to the top of the animal scale, from whence, in the fleeting day of his pride, he can look down on the poor cousins he has left behind him, whether they grow in the soil, cleave the waters or the air, or roam through the prairie or the forest. Man, cries another faction, is a mere automaton, a flesh-and-bone machine worked by the pull of cosmic forces on the particles of his brain, yet ludicrously imagining all the while that he is regulating his own movements. Man, cries a third faction, is an ephemeral fragment of an eternal abstraction, a perishable atom of an imperishable ideal, a transient member of an immortal organism. Man, cries a fourth faction, is a finely

soon as

balanced chemical compound, which effervesces thought, imagination, affection, and emotion, by the action and reaction of its particles, and is destined presently to be resolved into carbonic acid, ammonia, and water. Man, cries a fifth faction, is a blunder, an accident, a morbid offspring of some unaccountable cosmic caprice, who cannot better employ his illgotten and disastrous consciousness than in the effort to hurl himself back again as possible into nothingness. Many voices, many theories, indeed; but with all their divergences they agree in this, that the heaven over our heads is empty; the spiritual world, to which we have fondly believed ourselves akin, but an illusion of fancy; the hope of personal immortality a mere dream; and that we ourselves are nothing but fleeting products of the physical forces of nature, minute fractions of a universe which can be defined in the terms of matter and motion.

It is with these degrading conceptions of human nature, then, that Dr Tulloch, throughout his Essays, is, in various ways, joining issue; and his contention, through all its forms, follows two lines. On one hand, he argues that by none of the theories propounded as substitutes for the old faith are the phenomena of human existence adequately explained; on the other, that our search for the divine, as the supreme factor in the universe, if it is to be satisfactorily pursued, must not start from the phenomena of the physical world, nor even from the consciousness of our own intelligence, but from our still higher consciousness of a spiritual element in us, which is the peculiar crown and glory of our

VOL. CXXXVI.-NO. DCCCXXV.

being. Of each of these lines we are able to give an illustration in Dr Tulloch's own words, although his volume does not easily lend itself to quotation. His sense of the failure of the modern sceptical theories, which endeavour to shoulder aside the Christian view of the universe, is expressed in the following passage:—

"We have no doubt whatever that when the Modern spirit has exhausted its searches in all directions, and seen how hollow are the successive theories which it would place in the room of the Divine Idea which has been the strength and consolation of man in all generations, it will return to this belief, not in mere cynicism or apology,' but as the only true light of the world-the faith which is

at once most rational in itself, and which throws the brightest illumination of reason around the mysteries of existence."-(P. 221.)

The other point of his contention,-the necessity of setting out from a belief in the spiritual element which enters into the constitution of man, if we would reach a belief in an eternal, allcreating Spirit, is forcibly exhibited in these sentences:

"If there is no spirit in man, he can never find a Spirit above him. The reality of a spiritual Reason in man, with the fundamental principles which it implies of Cause, Substance, Personality, is the only rational foundation of belief in a supreme spiritual Existence or Divine Being."-(P. 73.) "Unless we start with the Divine in man, we can never reach it in Nature."

(P. 120.) "If man is not primarily a conscious Spirit, and thought the peculiar property of this Spirit, there can be no rational vindication to him of an Eternal Spirit or Mind. If he sciousness, transcend Nature, he can does not himself, in his essence of connever find anything above Nature, whether Eternal Idea or Supreme In

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