that it is meant to charge the present rulers of the Vatican, and least of all the Holy Father himself, with anything of the nature of grasping avidity or the lust of wealth. Leo XIII. has introduced the strictest economy into every branch of the administration of his household, save the very heavy item of charitable assistance to hardly pressed individuals and churches. The other day his eldest nephew, the son of his brother, was to be married, and the young man applied to his uncle, asking him what he could do for him under the circumstances. The Pope borrowed £1000, which he gave him, telling him that it was absolutely out of his power to do more. Shortly subsequently he made over to his family property to the amount of about £3000, being the entire share of the patrimony which he had inherited from his father, telling them at the same time that they must look for nothing further at his death, for that he possessed nothing! To those who live in a city every part of which is decorated with the magnificence of Borghese, Barberini, Ludovisi, Altieri, Rospigliosi, Corsini, and many other enormous palaces, all built from the spoils of Papal nepotism, the change of times must be striking.-British Quarterly Review.

Preserving AutUMN LEAVES.-One of the great fancies of this season has been for autumn leaves, which are used in various methods, the most popular being, perhaps, to dry them flatly and carefully, and take great care to preserve their stalks. When thoroughly dry, they are varnished with "Canada balsam varnish,' which gives them a pretty gloss, and also acts as a preservative to them from all insects and moths. After this, they are carefully laid aside for the decoration of the winter dinner-table, and may be most safely preserved in a tin box, with a well-fitting cover. Grasses added to them are very effective, and when dry they may be dyed at home with Judson's dyes. They may be also frosted when dry, by dipping each stalk into a solution of alum, and leaving them to dry upright. With the grasses and leaves may be used the dried everlasting flowers and the prepared moss, but I must warn my readers that no little taste is needed in their arrangement to avoid the least heaviness of effect. I have found that glass vases and stands are the most effective for their arrangement, as the transparency of these increases the wished for lightness and grace. Another way of using the dried leaves is for the ornamentation of tables, blotting-books, or boxes. Old cigar boxes, when painted black, are very favorite articles for decoration ; but now we know the value of varnished un

If,

painted wood, I fancy that many people will prefer the effect of the cigar boxes unpainted, with the unvarnished leaves gummed on, and the box and leaves varnished afterward. however, a black ground be especially desired, use 'Brunswick black" to stain the wood, or Brunswick black and turpentine mixed, to make a rich-looking brown grounding. Then gum on the leaves in a central group, being careful to cut away, with a sharp pair of scis. sors, all the under parts of the leaves, which will be hidden by others above, as too many thicknesses of leaf will make an uneven surface, and give an ugly appearance to the work when finished.-Ladies' Gazette of Fashion.

"THE ART OF LIFE."-We quite agree with a contemporary that "the art of life is very backward." The truth of this remark is illustrated in the, at first sight, curious fact that the great world spends summer in London and winter in the country, that "society" forsakes the Park in the evening at the precise moment when it is becoming delightful, and betakes itself, in quest of enjoyment, to crowded and heated rooms and assemblies, where heat and light and food and close quarters combine to make the most distressing inferno known to the civilized world. There is no room to doubt the accuracy of this reasoning. We fly in the face of Nature in too many of our customs, and, speaking generally, lead lives of flagrant offence against common sense. We all know and feel in our inner consciences that the majority of the maxims and principles" which govern the usages of life in society are either unreal or fallacious, but we cling to them and affect to obey or act upon them, Nothing short of a politico-social revolution would induce the Legislature to assemble in the dark winter months, or to sit by day instead of night. It would be easier to change the calendar than to put a stop to the giving of dinners and balls and indoor entertainments in the evening. It goes for nothing that men would live longer and lead healthier and happier lives if the entire code of conventional proprieties was revised, and its unwritten but inexorable statutes recast on a rational and natural basis. The physician has the errors and incongruities of social life daily forced on his attention. He does his best to reason his patients out of their most urgently mischievous follies; but for the most part, the words of wisdom falling from his lips light on stony hearts and barren brains. Society has plenty of courage in the main, but its members lack the most virtuous form of valor, the courage to be sensible. Lancet.

AT Saratoga Springs, on the 11th of September, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, there died WALTER HILLIARD BIDWELL, whose name has so long been associated with this magazine. Such incidents of his life as the public is likely to feel interested in may be briefly outlined. He was born at Farmington, Conn., on the 21st of June, 1798. Of sturdy North of England and Scotch stock, his paternal ancestor emigrated to the Hartford colony many years before the American Revolution; and about the same time his maternal ancestor, Ithamer Pelton, a native of France, came over and settled at Saybrook. His father, William Bidwell, was a farmer. After the usual preparatory studies, the subject of this sketch entered Yale College in 1824, graduating in 1827; but having determined to become a minister, he afterward took a course in theology at the Yale Theological Seminary. In the spring of 1833 he received his license to preach, and in the autumn of the same year was ordained and installed as pastor of the Congregational church in Medfield, Mass. After a pastorate of four years, the failure of his voice compelled him to abandon the ministry, and for the sake of a milder climate he removed to Philadelphia.

In 1841 he began his long and varied career as an editor with the American National Preacher, a monthly publication, which he conducted for about nineteen years in all, and into which he gathered an immense number of sermons by nearly five hundred ministers of all evangelical denominations. In 1843 he became the proprietor and editor of the New York Evangelist, a weekly religious journal, which has served and is still serving its generation with ability and zeal, and which he conducted for twelve years. In 1846 he became the proprietor of the ECLECTIC MAGAZINE, and also about the same time proprietor and conductor of the American Biblical Repository, one of the oldest and most celebrated of our religious quarterlies. In 1860 he became publisher and proprietor of the American Theological Review, the editorial department being in charge of the late Prof. Henry B. Smith. Two years afterward this work was incorporated with the Presbyterian Quarterly Review, and passed into the hands of the Rev. J. M. Sherwood. Finally, between 1848 and 1854, he published a series of seven valuable missionary maps, of which his brother, the Rev. O. B. Bidwell, was the author.

Next to his labors as editor and publisher,

his visits to foreign lands must necessarily fill the largest space in any record of Mr. Bidwell's life. His first visit was made about 1830, when, on account of the feeble health of his wife, he spent a year in England and France. His next visit was not made until 1849, when he spent four months in travelling through England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Two years later, in the summer of 1851, the year of the first great International Exhibition, he again went abroad, visiting London, Holland, various cities of Germany, and Vienna; returning through Bohemia and Saxon Switzerland, and home by way of Paris and London. In 1853 he made a still more extended tour, including Southern France, many of the historic cities of Spain, Portugal, and a brief excursion to Tangiers. During the next ten years he was completely absorbed in his various literary and business schemes; but in the winter of 1863-64 overwork caused a violent inflammation of the brain which nearly cost him his life, and by the orders of his physicians he again sought relaxation in foreign travel. This time he travelled through England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, returning to New York in restored health to resume his labors, which were now confined to the ECLECTIC MAGAZINE. In 1867 he was appointed by Secretary Seward as Special Commissioner of the United States to visit various points in Western Asia, and spent eight months of continuous travel in Greece, Egypt and Palestine, Syria and Turkey, returning from Constantinople by way of the Black Sea and the Danube.

Toward the close of 1868 Mr. Bidwell withdrew from active editorial work and business responsibility, spending most of his time in alternate travel and repose. Several additional visits were made to England and other parts of Europe, but these were not important enough to require separate or special mention. The closing years of his life were mostly spent with relatives and friends in Ohio, his visits to New York being very brief and infrequent. His death was sudden and unexpected, for, in spite of his patriarchal age, he maintained his remarkable physical vigor almost to the last.

time or another, shall they be so subdivided as to give us a specific insight into human nature in each of its several moods and passions-melancholy or merry, angry or amorous, self-seeking or patriotic ?

If we inquire into human nature as differing in different ages, we find that custom, born of circumstance, can bring into combination elements which, with out the evidence of history, and indeed without that kind of evidence which extant letters afford, might have seemed altogether incompatible; and having seen what blind contradictions mankind in servitude to custom has been capable of in the past, we may be led to open our eyes on the present, and strain our sight to discern what there may be in ourselves that future ages will read of with wonder in the letters we leave for their instruction.

What was buccaneering in the sixteenth century ? Ferocious, merciless slaughter of men, women, and children, some of them called savages, by Englishmen more savage than they-more savage, if we were to judge according to the sentiments of our own time,* and

* Since the above was written I have read in the Pall Mall Gazette of January 26 what follows:

"A former member of the 9th Surrey Volunteers, whose name out of consideration for his friends we suppress, has been describing the fighting in Basutoland in letters, to which he is not ashamed to attach his name, in the Richmond and Twickenham Times. When he left this country he was no doubt a humane product of nineteen centuries of Christian civilization. But for some time past he has been fighting the Basutos in South Africa; and, to judge from his letters, the demoralizing influence of a campaign against a semi-savage tribe has been too much, not merely for his human ity, Christianity, and civilization, but for the elementary ideas of soldierly duty. What other conclusion can be drawn from the following extracts from a letter dated Dipherring, Basutoland, November 21 ?—

"The niggers have massed an immense army. There are about 30,000 or 40,000 of them, but I hope we shall yet be able to give it them hot, and pay them well for all their cruelties to us. The colonel has given orders for no man to take a prisoner, but to kill at once, and that we are all glad to hear. The other day a nigger came to our camp and pretended to be friendly, but one of our men took up his gun and blew his brains out. He was only five yards from him, and the bullet went clean through his head. The man was brought up for court-martial, but all of us-2500 in num

yet possibly on some other side of their nature as tender and conscientious as a Nelson or a Collingwood.

The buccaneer Cavendish might be taken to be a fiend by those who read of the horrors he perpetrated in South America; but before we send him back to the region which might be supposed to have given him birth, let us read a few words in a letter he wrote from his death-bed on board ship as he was returning from his last enterprise :

And now to tell you of my greatest griefe, which was the sicknesse of my deare kinsman John Locke, who by this time was growne in great weaknesse, by reason hee desired rather quietnesse and contentednesse in our course than such continual disquietnesse which never ceased us. And now by this, what with griefe for him and the continual trouble I endured among such hel-hounds, my spirits were cleane spent; wishing myself upon any desart place in this world, there to die. return to our private matters. I have made my will, wherein I have given speciall charge that all goods whatsoever belong unto me be For God's sake delivered unto your hands.

And now to

refuse not to do this last request for mee; I owe little that I know of; therefore it will be the less trouble; but if there be any debt that (of truth) is owing by me, for God's sake see it paid. To use complements of love now at my last breath were frivolous; but know that I left none in England whom I loved halfe so well as yourselfe; which you in such sort deserved at my hands as I can by no measure requite. I pray you give this copie of my unhappie proceedings in this action to Sir George Carey, and tell him that if I had thought the letter of a dead man acceptable, I would have written unto him.

I have

now no more to say; but take this last farewell-that you have lost the lovingest friend that was lost by any. . . I pray forget not Master Carey of Cockington; gratify him with something, for hee used me kindly at my departure.

Was there ever a man steeped in blood and greedy of plunder on the one

ber-said we would lay down our arms if he got punished, so Colonel Clarke told him he was exonerated from all blame, and the announcement was received with great cheers all around the camp.'

When an officer and a gentleman' can take part in threatening a mutiny to prevent the punishment of the perpetrator of a coldblooded murder, and can write home to his parents announcing the delight with which he hailed the order that no quarter was to be given, no further evidence is required as to the brutalizing effect of these native wars.'

I had vainly hoped that even wars with savage tribes could not carry us back to the darkness and gnashing of teeth we read of three hundred years ago.

side of the globe, who was more loving and considerate to his friends on the other, as well as careful and just in taking order for the payment of his debts? How are we to account for such a combination? It was the work of custom; and custom was the work of

Circumstance, that unspiritual God And mis-Creator.

Custom was the amalgam which could thus fuse two souls into one and find a place for them in the same body. Nobody in the sixteenth century had learned to regard savages as fellow creatures, or to care how much they suffered or how many of them had their throats

cut.

Such was the state of feeling three hundred years ago. Now it is a bold adventure in speculation to forecast what may be the changes in custom and customary sentiment which shall have taken place three hundred years hence, and what things regarded with indifference or approval now may be condemned by our descendants in the twentysecond century-not so severely, perhaps, nor so confidently, yet in some sort and measure as we condemn what was blindly tolerated by our progenitors in the sixteenth ;-bold but not unlawful; and let us get what glimmerings we can from the light of experience, looking back first and then feeling our way forward.

Burning heretics, to which Sir Thomas More, the best and most benevolent of men in his time, saw no objection, had already come to an end with the sixteenth century. Torturing to extort confession, countenanced by one who was before his age in almost all things else, came to an end in the seventeenth. In the eighteenth men who had committed suicide ceased to be buried where four roads meet with a stake driven through them. Early in the nineteenth the pillory and cropping of ears fell into disuse; and, moreover, we were no longer to be drawn and quartered as well as hung. Next the slave trade was abolished, and then slavery. Bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, prizefighting, duelling-all came to a not untimely end.

Such is the story of the past. And now for the conjectural outlook.

Vivisection lingers still, but will it linger long? It is maintained by some high authorities and denied by others, that while the animals operated upon cannot always be exempted from torture, the benefit to mankind is such as to make the pain to them of no account. Are moral questions, then, to lose themselves in hypothetical computations of results? It may be for the ultimate benefit of mankind that savage tribes should be exterminated, after the manner of Cavendish the buccaneer, so to make way for races of a higher order of moral and intellectual attributes. may be that there has been, on a balance of results, a saving of pain to mankind from the murders committed by Burke in Edinburgh some sixty years ago in order to supply bodies, not otherwise to be obtained, for dissection. But murders and massacres have a character of their own independently of ultimate results. Again, it does not seem to be questioned by either party that human pain is infinitely more worthy of consideration than any that can be suffered by animals. Is this altogether beyond a

doubt ?

Pain in man

It

Bears the high mission of the flail and fan; In brutes 'tis purely piteous.

And not only is the discipline of pain often salutary in a spiritual sense to the sufferer; it is still oftener the correlative of moral and spiritual qualities in others-pity, charity, self-sacrifice, devout dependence and prudential forethought-virtues which could not very well get on without it.

;

But it is argued we might just as well object to field sports as to vivisection if we indulge in the one, why renounce the other? There is another question to be asked-Why not renounce both? Field sports are said to be Will our progeny of the twenty-second manly." century call them so? Or will they respond to the very few voices of this century one of them, however, that of its most illustrious monitor, Wordsworth,* another that of a prose writer who is also likely to instruct more centuries