In strange contrast to this manly civil policy is the sordid squabbling and petty interference with which Bismarck is treating the Catholic Church. The expulsion of the Jesuits, as much for their misdeeds of two hundred and fifty years ago as from any present fear of their influence, is an act without justification. So is the closing of those churches in Posen, that united in a specia! service to put that province under the protection of "the sacred heart." With all his strength the chancellor has his weakness, the weakness of a High Lutheran from Pomerania.

ENGLAND has on her hands now the problem that Stein solved half a century ago-what shall be done with the bauer. Her farm laborers are up in arms against the oppressions of the tenant farmers, and are making a very manly struggle for better wages. The trouble is confined to the purely Saxon parts of England, where there are little or no manufactures. Many of the discontented workmen in going northward, have found abundance of work and fair wages, in the shires with the pluck and thrift and push of the Norse race have given shape to society and distributed wealth among all classes.

The trouble lies deeper than any remedy proposed. The whole status of English agriculture is wrong and unnatural. The country imports at least one-fourth of all the breadstuffs she uses, while the soil is capable of producing perhaps ten times as much as is now grown upon it. If some of the pains taken to develop her manufactures had been expended in training the farmers in scientific methods, all classes would be better off to-day. There is no reason why the country should not be autarkes as regards the production of food.

THE English High Church party have made an almost grotesque struggle to prevent Dean Stanley from becoming one of the select preachers at Oxford. They gave notice of their purpose through the papers and rallied the non-resident members of their party to vote in the Convocation. The Liberals, however, were equally alert and secured a majority of sixty-two in support of the Vice-Chancellor's nomination. The demonstration has its meaning; it tells Liberal premiers what a swarm of hornets they will have about their ears if they nominate Stanley to a bishopric.

It is curious how large a number of the English Broad Church leaders belonged to a single family connection. A recent book about the Hare family brings out the fact that Stanley, the Hares, F. D. Maurice and John Sterling were all related by kinship or marriage; and Sir Wm. Jones was another relation.

MR. FROUDE and Father Burke have closed their historical duel, the former having gone back to Europe. Mr. Froude's lectures were not the careful and thorough pieces of work that the public had a right to expect of him, but he made out all all his points pretty thoroughly as against the Father. 1. That there was no nationality in Ireland and no immediate likelihood of any when the Normans-Father Burke's ancestors among them-invaded the island, but only a sort of universal Donnybrook Fair, where every one was fighting with and slaughtering everybody else, like so many Kilkenny cats. 2. The invasion was undertaken with the authority of the Pope, an authority then regarded by all Europe, and still by the Irish people, as sufficient to decide the right or wrong of the act. 3. The general tenor of the English treatment of Ireland has been well-meaning, the worst part of their conduct being gross and disastrous blunders and mistakes, and the biggest mistake of all being their failure to bring the country at once under a vigorous police. 4. The Scotch and English colony established during the reign of James was planted with no infliction of wrong or outrage upon the Irish people, was an immense benefit to the country at large, and had no interests not in common with those of the whole people. For a long period both parties acted in unison, but suddenly and with no just provocation, the Catholics rose in 1641 and deluged the colony with blood and massacre, thus laying the foundation of all Irish party-work and sectarian bitterness. Whatever wrongs the Celtic Irish may have suffered at the hands of the Irish Protestants, history must pronounce to have been provoked by previous outrage. 5. The assumption that Ireland has especial claim upon America's sympathy, because of aid and comfort in her day of small things and of struggle for life and independence, is without foundation. The Celtic Irish had not begun to emigrate to this country, and the Irish in the ranks of the Revolutionary armies were Protestants-the English and the Scotch of Ireland. The Catholic Irish, through their recognized heads and

representatives, pledged their unwavering loyalty to the House of Hanover, and violently condemned the disloyal colonists.

These are Mr. Froude's points. We fail to see where Father Burke has successfully assailed any of them. The third of them. furnishes the most tempting field for hostile criticism; it covers most ground, and admits of most muddling. But even here the

Father failed to effect any dislodgment of his adversary.

Mr. Melline's controversy with Mr. Froude about Mary, Queen of Scots, has nothing to do with the latter's visit to America, and is in suspense until he has access to his papers at home.

BOOK NOTICES.

HISTORY OF English Literature: by H. A. Taine, abridged from the translation of H. Van Laun, and edited with chronological table, notes and index, by John Fiske, assistant librarian and late lecturer on Philosophy in Harvard University. Pp: 502. New York: Holt & Williams.

The Class Room Taine is a very careful adaptation of the first great history of English literature to purposes of instruction. It is no honor to English and American authorship that that work is from the pen of a Frenchman, but we must bow to the facts. We have no book to set beside M. Taine's, nor are we likely soon to have one. The genius of the Anglo-Saxon is not for system; he lays out his strength to best advantage on monograms, and has not the German fondness for thoroughness, and the French for completeness.

M. Taine's philosophy of the subject may be called a positiveist one. To him the literature of a period has nothing arbitrary or accidental in it; the book is the outgrowth of the times and their men, not chiefly of the man. It could not be otherwise than it is, and any criticism that supposes it could, is impertinent. In a word he is at the other pole from Prof. Kingsley and Mr. Carlyle, to whom the will of the individual great genius or hero is everything. Either view, we think, is one-sided, but Taine's is the happier of the two to start from in treating English literature. It forces its author away from mere literary details, such as fill Wharton's book, and compels him to study the great books of England in connection with her great periods of political and religious history.

M. Taine's style is brilliant in the extreme, and his mastery of facts is remarkable. His book has run the gauntlet of the keenest English criticism, substantially without impairment of its

authority. To most English readers it is a new world that the lively Frenchman introduces them to, a world of their own at the same time. They had no idea that so much could be said of the old writers, and said so well. It is a substantial English dish dressed up with careful French cuisine and the piquant sauce of wit and epigram.

Mr. Fiske's abridgment omits the chapters that relate to cotemporary authors and prunes away the Frenchman's exuberance in the earlier chapters; so as to bring the two large volumes into a moderate sized one of 468 pages. To this he has added thirty pages of chronological tables from Mr. Henry Morley, and careful index. He is careful always to let M. Taine tell the stor in his own words. If his book has any fault it is that it is still too little abridged for a text-book. The time that can be devoted to any one topic in a four years' college curriculum does not admit of recitation upon 468 pages of this size, and the teacher that purposes to use it will have to abridge it over again.

MYTHS AND MYTH MAKERS: Old Tales and Superstitions interpreted by Comparative Mythology. By John Fiske, Assistant Librarian, etc., at Howard College. Pp. 251. Boston: Jas. R. Osgood & Co. For sale by Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfin

ger.

The reader of Middlemarch will remember the clerical pedant whom Dorothea marries in the belief that he is a great and wise man, and who is busied with a Key to all the Mythologies. A book of the saine plane as Bishop Warburton's dissertations in his vastly witty and often scurrilous Divine Legation of Moses, and as Jacob Bryant's Mythology. The science of Mythology had already passed from its mechanical and uncertain to its dynamical and scientific stage, under the hands of Creuzer, Mone and their compeers, but Mr. Casaubon was still working hard in the old fields, impatient of every sort of criticism. Dasent and Baring Gould have done much to convey into English literature the results of those German explorations, and to enlarge the field by their own studies, and now Mr. Fiske we believe is the first American to give us a book on the same subject.

His book does not weary the reader with long dessertations. It plunges in medias res with Homeric promptness, giving explanations and theory as they are needed. Every one, old and young, will find it full of curious interest. The rarest old wives tales and nursery rhymes, to say nothing of the currently accepted fictions of history and literature, are here shown to have an unexpected meaning and significance, and are traced away over land and sea to the huts and tents of strange people. The unity of mankind has here strong proofs in the uniformity of these child

like traditions, that carry us back to the days when men found all nature instinct with life.

THE UNITY OF LAW as exhibited in the relations of Physical, Social, Mental and Moral Science. By Henry C. Carey. Pp. 433 8vo. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, Industrial Publisher, (406 Walnut st.) Price $3.50.

Mr. Carey's views on social science have one mark of truth: their unceasing growth into larger and fuller completeness. He has had to give the public "line upon line," to reiterate and repeat himself, but every successive book has been an advance in point of clearness and consistency, since his essay on Wages in 1837. This growth has not always been of his own doing either; he confesses that his friend and disciple, Mr. E. Pershine Smith has been the one to suggest missing links and to help the edifice to completeness.

The present book, which is possibly its author's last systematic statement of the whole matter, is a thorough carrying out of the great idea which occurs everywhere in his earlier works; all sciences are the same in their ultimate principles; all laws converge toward the hand that holds the reins of the universe. Trace them upward and at last you reach Bacon's conclusion, "the end of philosophy is the intuition of unity."

Nothing is more characteristic of Mr. Carey's school than this refusal to abstract questions of national economy from those of general science, and to ignore the analogies furnished by co-ordinate branches. It is this that gives a living, immediate interest to what they write, and widely distinguishes their books from those of the English school. The latter are a sort of economicalgeometries, starting from a few abstract axioms and maxims and worksing on to conclusions hardly less abstracted from human interests, ave where they outrage all human feelings.

We regard the present book as the best piece of literary work that Mr. Carey has done, and rejoice that various associations of manufacturers have done so much to secure its wide circulation.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

The Two Ysondes, and other Verses; by Edward Ellis. London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 196 Piccadilly. 1872.

Life Lessons from the Book of Proverbs; by W. S. Perry, D.D. New York: T. Whittaker.

Getting On in the World, or Hints on Success in Life; by William Mathews, LL.D. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. 1873. For sale by Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.

Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education for Novem