others who understand the peculiarities of tobacco, sugar, raisins, currants, figs, oranges, and such like productions of warm countries, would be very unlikely to get employment in Victoria in their own particular line of life. The population is too thin to make any speculation profitable that, like silk or vines, requires a swarm of cheap labourers like the hop-picking in England, just at a critical period of the year. Many of the resources of Australia are hence lying undeveloped, waiting for population. Victoria, by keeping out foreign competition gives the English artisan, the French and Italian silk grower, the German and Portuguese vintagers, and all other manufacturers and skilled workers, a chance of making a fair start in a new land. Nothing said by English statesmen, papers, or magazines will affect the course of the colonists. From experience they have grown to adopt the pardonable creed that England knows much too little of Australia to make its advice worth asking or receiving. The Australians will work out their schemes to their practical results, and act upon their own deductions, and upon nothing else. Sudden changes of law have no terrors for them. If they once clearly see that protection is a mistake, the whole system will be abolished as rapidly as it was adopted. In the meantime let it be understood that free-trade and protection are not on the same footing in Australia as in England. England with all its machinery erected, and its business in working order, thinks only of how she can make the most out of the present, how she can reap the largest commercial harvests. Victoria knows what she loses by protection, and deliberately accepts the loss, that she may in her youth lay the foundations of certain industries, which she believes could not be laid without this temporary sacrifice.

Loyalty. The visit of the Duke of Edinburgh to Australia gives the opportunity of fairly testing the feelings of the colonies towards England.

No one can have been more astonished than the Prince at the unaccountable sensation produced by his visit. Governments, parliaments, corporations, citizens, towns, and villages, from one end of the continent to the other, gave up work, and took to wholesale spending of money, merry-making, cheering, ringing of bells, firing of cannons, and to the invention of things to delight and honour him. Young as he is, and, to all appearance, excessively modest and retiring, a continued ovation of four months, a progress through triumphal arches erected round half of Australia, must have been exceedingly trying to his constitution and temper. The work that the Australians have made him perform, that they may see and glorify him, is perhaps the hardest bit of labour that any royal prince of modern days has successfully gone through. Before he left South Australia, his first place of call, all tender-hearted people felt that three or four public ceremonies a day in the presence of crowds of delighted and shouting men and women, visits to notable places, balls, and the reception of addresses- that these attentions continuing day by day for a month, even though they were manifestations of love and loyalty, were yet slightly bordering on cruelty to the Duke himself. No mercy, however, was shown by the other colonies; it was the first opportunity they had had of letting the old people at home know that they were still Britons, and six times in succession had the Prince to go through his programme in the capitals and provinces of six enthusiastic colonies. Any one who will take the trouble to glance over a score or two of the addresses to him, of the speeches made by public men, of the Prince's replies to addresses,

which they have agreed to shirk' the great question as to the true meaning of adelphen gynaika,' which Mr. Dixon and the early fathers' are alone competent to meet. In pity however, it must be presumed, for their ignorance, he bestows a page of his work to an enumeration of the various ways in which these mysterious words have been translated in each of the European versions of the Bible. As a philosopher, again, he must occupy a high place, since he knows, and many times repeats, the fact that Kant lived at Königsberg; while he has read the Symposium with such care as to discover that Plato writes with a dry sense of fun which, in its own grave style, has never been excelled except, perhaps, in the writings of his rival Francis Bacon.' Nor is his reading confined to theology and philosophy. He is well versed in the writings of authors such as Goethe, whose works are not generally read. That his knowledge may not be wasted, he gives a sketch of a romance which he denominates the 'Burden of Werther, and recapitulates the main facts of the 'Wahlnerwandschaft.'

But while compelled by the numerous proofs of learning given in Mr. Dixon's book to admit his erudition, we are bound to state that, in our judgment, he has no other qualification for the performance of the very difficult work he has undertaken.

He delights in the vaguest and most indefinite statement of the facts which he has to tell. Any one who tries to collect from Mr. Dixon's work a history of the Ebelian movement will see that this charge is not made without reason. The facts which are to be told, or at any rate the facts that Mr. Dixon knows, are few. They are, with rare exceptions, drawn from a strange kind of affidavit, made by one Sachs during the course of

the legal proceedings against Ebel. This affidavit itself is as wandering and unsatisfactory a production as has ever been penned by a German professor, who thought it necessary to write a psychological investiga tion instead of a plain narrative. The affidavit, moreover, is probably made more obscure by the fact that Sachs was as anxious to conceal as to tell the truth, and would not have written clearly if he could, though he perhaps could not have been otherwise than obscure had he wished to be clear. But, neverthe less, this affidavit, such as it is, and whatever its worth, is the basis of Mr. Dixon's 217 pages of diffuse nar rative. How these 200 pages are filled up may be conjectured by the fact that the history of Ebel, and of his movement, does not really begin till the hundredth page. The merest loose talk about 'pious shoutings,' 'the prophet of Doom,' 'Königsberg and its inhabitants,' ' Seraphim kisses,' 'philosophers and magis trates,' the preparation for the coming of Christ, Friedrich Wil helm the Fourth,' and in short about all things, important or unimportant, which may or may not bear on the Ebelian movement, fills up the first nine chapters of Mr. Dixon's work. The reader who wades through these chapters will, we admit, find in those which follow a certain very limited amount of curious informatien.

But even when at last something like a consecutive narrative of Ebel's career is given, it is everything that a narrative ought not to be. To understand such a history dates are wanted, and scarcely a date is given. It is, again, of primary importance to know what are the main incidents of the long suit or prosecution in which Ebel was involved. Here again nothing is to be found but vague hints and general confusion. Perhaps Ebel was rightly condemned, perhaps he was the victim of calumny. But Mr.

Dixon gives no means of forming any sound estimate of Ebel's real character. From Mr. Dixon's narrative we should ourselves suppose that Ebel belonged to the very worst type of religious mystics; and it is certain that, if Sachs' evidence is not a tissue of falsehood, Ebel was one of the vilest of men, not to say the worst of hypocrites. But it must in fairness be added, that the character of Ebel and his disciples cannot be ascertained with certainty by any one who has not studied carefully the evidence produced against him. Sachs may, of course, have been a perjured blackguard, and his own statement is sufficient to prove him by no means an unimpeachable witness. Mr. Dixon writes as if Sachs were a man utterly lost to honour. Yet at the same time Mr. Dixon's account is grounded on Sachs' narrative. Are we to believe Sachs, or not? To this question Mr. Dixon gives no answer. He does not even perceive that an answer is required. Sentence, again, was given against Ebel, and the sentence was reversed. Mr. Dixon darkly insinuates that the reversal was the result of court influence; but he neither states this clearly, nor even seems to have thought it necessary to form any accurate conception as to the course of the legal proceedings against Ebel. It may be urged that it is difficult to obtain information as to foreign trials. is true. But then no one is bound to give an account of a foreign cause célèbre; and any one who does so is bound to make his account as accurate and precise as possible. Accuracy, however, and precision are not the most striking qualities of Mr. Dixon's mind. Nor, indeed, would it have been possible for a writer distinguished by accuracy to produce Spiritual Wives, for the book is throughout, if not a sensational novel, at any rate a sensational history.

This

It has already been pointed out, that a desire to avoid sensational writing is one of the most necessary qualifications of the historian of a religious movement. A mere glance at the headings of Mr. Dixon's chapters will show that, if he fails constantly to produce a sensation, the failure must arise rather from want of power than want of will. It is, indeed, at once provoking and amusing to observe the perversity with which the most simple facts are stated in the most grandiloquent and inflated language. Take, as one example out of a hundred, the following passage. The simple fact which needs to be told is that, in 1832, America was the scene of a religious revival. This statement is expanded into a chapter of seven pages, appropriately headed 'A Great Revival.' The first sentence exhibits the process by which a statement which might be made in two lines is expanded so as to fill seven pages: 'In the year 1832 a loud and angry tempest rolled through a great part of the Teutonic heaven, especially through that part of the Teutonic heaven which spans the American continent. A thing new and weird, which had not yet had much attention paid to it by public writers, certainly not so much as, from what is seen of its effect on our religious thought and social life, it would seem to crave,' &c. &c.

Mr. Dixon's habit of writing in a rhetorical and sensational, or, to use the expression of his admirers, a graphic' manner, would of itself scarcely deserve notice, were it not closely connected with mental defects which absolutely incapacitate him from dealing properly with his subject. The defects are, first, a total absence of any sound judgment as to the proportion or nature of the facts which he narrates; and, secondly, either a want of power or a want of will to state these facts in clear, simple