have been such changes since then-it looks like years."

"Yes," said Mr. Ashburton, in his steady way. "There is nothing that really makes time look so long; but we must all bow to these dispensations, my dear Miss Marjori banks. I would not speak of the election, but that I thought it might amuse you. The writs are out now, you know, and it takes place on Monday week."

Upon which Miss Marjoribanks smiled upon Mr. Ashburton, and held out her hands to him with a gesture and look which said more than words. "You know you will have all my best wishes," she said; and the candidate was much moved. more moved than at such a moment he had thought it possible to be.

burton as if he was in a very bad way. And feeling began to rise rather high in Carlingford. If anything could have deepened the intensity of Miss Marjoribanks's grief, it would have been to know that all this was going on, and that affairs might go badly with her candidate, while she was shut up, and could give no aid. It was hard upon her, and it was hard upon the candidates themselves - one of whom had thus become generally disapproved of, without, so far as he knew, doing anything to deserve it; while the other occupied the still more painful character of being on his promotion a repentant man, with a character to keep up. It was no wonder that Mrs. Centum grew pale at the very idea of such a creature as Barbara Lake throwing herself in poor Mr. Cavendish's way. A "If I succeed, I know whom I shall wrong step one way or other a relapse in- thank the most," said he fervently; and to the ways of wickedness-might undo in then, as this was a climax, and it would a moment all that it had cost so much trou- have been a kind of bathos to plunge into ble to do. And the advantage of the Rec-ordinary details after it, Mr. Ashburton tor's support was thus grievously counter- got up, still holding Lucilla's hand, and balanced by what might be called the clasped it almost tenderly as he said gooduncertainty of it - especially as Mr. Cav- bye. She looked very well in her mournendish was not, as his committee lamented secretly among themselves, a man of strong will or business habits, in whom implicit confidence could be placed. He might get restive, and throw the Rector over just at the critical moment; or he might relapse into his lazy Continental habits, and give up church-going and other good practices. But still, up to this moment, he had shown very tolerable perseverance; and Mr. Bury's influence thrown into his scale had equalised matters very much, and made the contest very exciting. All this Lucilla heard, not from Mr. Cavendish, but from her own candidate, who had taken to calling in a steady sort of way. He never went into any effusions of sympathy, for he was not that kind of man; but he would shake hands with her, and say that people must submit to the decrees of Providence; and then he would speak of the election and of his chances. Sometimes Mr. Ashburton was despondent, and then Lucilla cheered him up; and sometimes he had very good hopes.

"I am very glad you are to be here," he said on one of these occasions. "It would have been a great loss to me if you had gone away. I shall never forget our talk about it here that day, and how you were the first person that found me out." "It was not any cleverness of mine," said Lucilla. "It came into my mind all in a moment, like spirit-rapping, you know. It seems so strange to talk of that now; there

ing, though she had not expected to do so; for black was not Lucilla's style. And the fact was, that instead of having gone off, as she herself said, Miss Marjoribanks looked better than ever she did, and was even embellished by the natural tears which still shone by times in her eyes. Mr. Ashburton went out in a kind of bewilderment after this interview, and forgot his overcoat in the hall, and had to come back for it, which was a confusing circumstance; and then he went on his way with a gentle excitement which was not unpleasant. "Would she, I wonder?" he said to himself, as he went up Grange Lane. Perhaps he was only asking himself whether Lucilla would or could be present along with Lady Richmond and her family at the window of the Blue Boar on the great day; but if that was it, the idea had a certain brightening and quickening influence upon his face and his movements. The doubt he had on the subject, whatever it was, was not a discouraging, but a piquant, stimulating, exciting doubt. He had all but proposed the question to his committee when he went in among them, which would have filled these gentlemen with wonder and dismay. But though he did not do that, he carried it home with him, as he trotted back to the Firs to dinner. Mr. Ashburton took a walk through his own house that evening, and examined all its capabilities—with no particular motive, as he was at pains to explain to his housekeeper; and again he said to himself, "Would

84

she, I wonder?" before he retired for the | Richmond, if that was what Mr. Ashburton night; which was no doubt an unusual sort was curious about, he might have saved of iteration for so sensible a man, and one himself the trouble of any speculations on so fully occupied with the most important the subject. For though Miss Marjoribanks would be very anxious about the election, affairs, to make. As for Lucilla, she was not in the way of she would indeed have been ashamed of asking herself any questions at that mo- herself could her feelings have permitted ment. She was letting things take their her to appear anywhere in public so soon. course, and not interfering; and conse- Thus, while Mr. Ashburton occupied himquently, nothing that happened could be self much with the question which had said to be her fault. She carried this prin- taken possession of his mind, Lucilla took a ciple so far, that even when aunt Jemima good book, which seemed the best reading was herself led to open the subject, in a for her in her circumstances, and when she hesitating way, Miss Marjoribanks never had looked after all her straitened affairs even asked a single question about Tom's in the morning, sat down sweetly in the last letter. She was in mourning, and that afternoon quiet of her retirement and sewas enough for her. As for appearing at clusion, and let things take their way. the window of the Blue Boar with Lady

- Whatever lamen- receive from wandering through a picture galTHE LOVE OF MUSIC. A good deal of fine confused pleasure tations may be pronounced over the decline of lery? the fine arts, there is one art which is at the perhaps, of a kind which allows them to make present day a passion with every nation of remarks upon about two hundred paintings per Europe. Sculpture may have little real and hour. But to obtain any intense delight from vital connection with our modern life; our painting, such delight as does not suffer one to architecture may be grey, and grim, and death- make a remark, not a little special culture, exful, or a sterile reproduction of forms which cept in rare instances, must have gone before. critics instruct us to admire, or for truly mod- Music, if we set aside poetry, is the only art ern work, a railway station and a Crystal which can at present give delight of great inPalace; our painting may have fallen sadly tensity to persons who have received but slight away from "the grand style" and the glories of artistic education, or that preparation for art"high art:" but the hearts of men are vi- istic enjoyment which comes from the study of And nature and literature. The mere recollection brating everywhere to perfect music. this, as M. Taine remarks, is the genuine of it is a delicious torture; it is not the rememlanguage of reverie, and vague emotion, and brance of an object perceived by the senses, but was thrown; and undefined aspirations, and infinite regret. The the attempt to revive a state into which our last hundred years have not given us a second whole emotional nature Phidias, or Raphael, or Shakespeare; but we though this state, while actually experienced have had Handel, and Mozart, and Beethoven. seems more entirely passive and trance-like We look back to the Middle Ages; and be- than that produced by any of the other arts, cause we find a wonderful palace here, and a music, more powerfully than all the rest, bell-tower or a cathedral there, we say they awakens the dormant artistic activities in every were great days of art. And so they were. man, and, by some mysterious dealings with the But what will future centuries think of soul, makes him involuntarily a reproducer. It the period of art in which "Don Giovanni," may be a gain, or it may be a misfortune, that "Fidelio," Elijah," were created? Will the the master art of the present day should be one painters of the Renaissance who stood below so purely sensitive and emotional-one into But of the fact there can be Raphael and Michael Angelo, or the dramatists which, for the listener, so slight an intellectual of the Elizabethan age who stood below Shake-element enters. speare, appear a more illustrious group of little question. What may come of this in the artists than Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Ver- future it is not easy to conjecture; but this di, Weber, Auber, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Gounod? we know, that the source of a noble developAs unquestionably as sculpture was the supreme ment of art is a noble national nature, and that art of Greece, architecture of the Middle Ages, if ever a period comes when clear thought, and painting of the Renaissance (poetry being earnest faith in great things, and vigorous wills, common to all), is music the supreme art of the are united in men with a delicate susceptibility, a finer power of sympathy, and a higher culpresent day. It is that with which we are most in sympathy: it is also the most truly ture, our country cannot fail to obtain a freer democratic. How much do nine persons out and more healthful development of art than has of ten really care for a tinted Venus or a sleep- yet appeared.-Contemporary Review. ing faun? What amount of pleasure do they

From the Saturday Review. NOVELS FOR FAMILY READING.*

Rasselas, and Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare- these constituted the bulk of the books for the young, with which we were perforce contented. Now all is changed. Not only is every bookseller's shop deluged with stories for boys and stories for girls, but periodicals for the young are supplied, with every sort of illustration and at every variety of price. Besides this, the whole national notion as to novel-reading is modified. Unless there is something flagrantly offensive to propriety, and the plot turns upon the infraction of one particular commandment, the real novel, with all its fullblown love-making, is regarded as wholeunlimited quantities. It is probably not an some reading for girls and boys in almost fiction, of some sort or other, that was read exaggeration to say that, for one book of by each girl or boy at the beginning of the century, fifty are now read by each one of

our children.

DOCTORS tell us that the prevalent type of disease from which the present generation suffers is quite different from that which afflicted our fathers and grandfathers. Punch and port wine have done their work, and we bear the penalty of past ancestral joviality in the shape of an exaggeration of nervous sensibility and all its attendant miseries. Gout and fevers have gone out, and headaches and dyspepsia have come in. In fact, had not volunteering been invented, and cricketing come to be regarded as a branch of the litera humaniores, there is no saying to what a degree of morbid sensitiveness and incurable indigestion the whole nation might have been by this time reduced. But this is not all the change that is going on. As we are uplike our progenitors in bodily constitution, so must we expect our A still more striking and suggestive posterity to be unlike ourselves in the thing is the position that novels have type of their minds. The next genera- established for themselves in the various tion of Englishmen and Englishwomen periodicals of what we must call the religious will exhibit to the world the unprecedented world. The publication of magazines for phenomenon of a a people brought up the propagation of some theological school mainly upon novels. Half a century has by the aid of stories and tales is, when one wrought a development of the theory of comes to think of it, a phenomenon almost fiction-making for the young at which our startling, from the rapidity with which it has own worthy fathers and mothers would have stood amazed, if not absolutely aghast. Let gown to its present maturity. The inany man of fifty or sixty recall the amount into the paths of virtue on the high-pressure genuous youth of to-day are to be seduced of story-reading and bonâ fide novel-reading system which now pervades all English life. which was permitted to himself when he The single or two-volume stories of the was a boy, and the change will strike him at established religious tale-writer do not once as wonderful. In those days it was come fast enough for the children of a genuniversally held that much fiction was a eration that has the Times of the day on most unwholesome thing for the young its breakfast-tables at Brighton, and telemind, and according to the national belief graphs a Queen's Speech to Paris with such such was the national practice. Very few haste that it arrives about ten minutes after stories for children were in existence, and the last words have been spoken in the those were usually of the most carefully House of Lords. A union between piety devised and highly proper description. and periodicalism has become a recognised Think only of the names of the books and means of grace," even among the lowest the writers who were supposed to satisfy all our young aspirations after "the good, the beautiful, and the true." Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Trimmer, Mrs. Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, Mr. Day (the author of Sandford and Mer ton), were Our novelists. Exquisitely exciting periodicals like the Mirror or the Bee, with an occasional Keepsake or Gem, and, in more indulgent families, a Gulliver (unexpurgated), the Arabian Nights (unexpurgated), and Don Quixote (also unexpurgated), with, of course, Robinson Crusoe, and (perhaps) the Tales of the Genii, and

Alfred Hagart's Household. By Alexander Smith, London: Alexander Strahan,

of Low Churchmen, and the most sabbatarian of Sabbatarians. Non-conformity itself relaxes into a grim smile, the Religious Tract Society provides its Sunday

stories, and in the same sheet which offers

words in season," "hints to the unconverted," and " daily texts," the youthful Congregationalist and Baptist learns how to combine flirting and chapel-going on the soundest possible of Scriptural principles. Good Words, the periodical from which this story of Alfred Hagart's Household has been republished though the fact is nowhere stated in the republication itself—is in itself a phenomenon. It is the first

distinct attempt of the Broad Church school to make its voice heard in the parsonages and quiet homes of universal Great Britain. Its Broad Churchism, is, of course, of the mildest description. Edited by a shrewd and accomplished Presbyterian minister, it was not to be expected that it would too heedlessly shock the prejudices of the orthodox, whether north or south of the Tweed. Dr. Macleod's chief assistants belong, indeed, to the English Establishment, and this fact alone is sufficient to suggest the tone and principles of the publication. And, in reality, it is by the combination of writers differing widely from one another as to their tastes, habits of thought, and actual dogmatic beliefs, that this singular periodical propagates religious liberalism. The editor and his staff have just attained to that early and half-developed form of Broad Church thought which aims at the creation of charitable views towards an

world. Not a suspicion of bigamy, or of the doings of French actresses, or of runaway marriages, must be detected either in the verse or prose which he stamps with his imprimatur. But, short of this, every taste shall be gratified. During the past year he has given to the world two novels as utterly unlike in style, tone, and substance, as it is possible to conceive. If the rational and non-theological novel-reader finds neither ofthem to his liking, this is not because they are both of them of the kind one would look for in such a quarter. To those who think Mr. Kingsley a master of the craft of story-telling, and are ready to sit at his feet when he teaches history, Hereward, the Last of the English, may appear as something less extravagant, noisy, and tedious than we have found it, so far as we have been able to surmount its difficulties. As an historical picture, it appears to be about as accurate as its author's remark that “all true men " love women" with an overwhelming adoration" is profoundly true. Alfred Hagart's Household is altogether in a different line. If Mr. Kingsley is truculent, and the talk of his characters fiery and fierce, Mr Alexander Smith's personages are all of the "goody" kind. His tale is just the description of story that the simple-minded

tagonists in general. As for the distinct liberalism of Stanley, Jowett, and Colenso, they know it not; and in truth, if they did know it, their periodical could never have seen the light. Nevertheless, it is difficult to conclude that Good Words is not playing the part of a pioneer. A household that habitually reads a magazine wherein one clerical writer records the unrivalled reader would have looked for in a magazine influences of Assisi and the Evangelical piety of the founder of the Franciscans, while another tells how he coquetted with Greek priests and Archimandrites in Montenegro, and a third (a Dean) wanders among French churches, combining admiration for their architecture with zeal against Mariolatry — such a household must surely become habituated to the idea that Christianity is something different from a belief in patristic creeds or medieval hymns or Thirty-nine Articles of British origin. Nobody who is accustomed to see Mr. Charles Kingsley's name associated with those of a host of more orthodox divines can continue to cherish the dear delightful old theory that "the Gospel is the good news of eternal damnation to everybody except one's self," even though Mr. Kingsley himself is more bitter than ever against the fellow-religionists of Dr. Newman, and a Dr. Brown (a Scotch gentleman) denounces Babists, Puseyites, and Rationalists as the legitimate successors of the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Sadducees of ancient times.

bearing the ominous title of Good Words. The plot is imperceptibly small; the reflections are highly appropriate and generally untrue. Mr. Hagart, and Mrs. Hagart, and the young Hagarts, and an old relation, "Miss Kate," and all their friends, acquaintances, and relations in general, whether laudable or the reverse in their conduct, talk that small and smartish talk which is in favour with the imitators of Mr. Dickens. Then, by way of giving life to the tale, the author is perpetually introducing himself, after the way of Thackeray and Mr. Anthony Trollope-a practice disagreeable enough in the hands of a master of the craft, but in Mr. Smith utterly intolerable. It is, however, by his more eloquent outbreaks that Mr. Smith would probably have us judge him. Let us hear him, then, in the person of a gifted youth whose love-making is introduced towards the end of the story, as he strides up and down an "apartment" in his own house, "his mind filled with austere music" in consequence of reading Samson Agonistes. "The reading of Milton always humikates me," he silently observes to himself —

And on just such universalist principles the editor of Good Words administers his fiction to his believing eaders. Of course What immeasurable altitude and solitariness he can usher nothing "improper" into the of soul! What cruel purity and coldness as