ness. Every system tends to produce men Having referred again to the fact that the in its own image, who will defend it to the social degradation of woman is traceable to last; and the living ideas or needs, however her physical weakness in ages of war, we urgent, must long be ruled by sceptres held in the hands of skeletons. We may yet study with profit, as we did in 1832, the history of the proud city of Old Sarum. On that hill stood the grand old cathedral and the castle from which Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman had successively ruled south-western England. An age of incessant warfare, made by the struggles of races, had decided that the city should be built on that hill. But when the first days of comparative peace came, the people of Old Sarum looked upon the green and smiling valley of the Avon near them, and said, "Why should we be perched upon this hill?" The yearning for the valley increased, until about six centuries ago the whole city went down into the valley, and a single generation saw the first stone of Salisbury laid and the last inhabitant leave Old Sarum. For several centuries now not even the outlines of the ancient city could be traced in the dust. And yet up to 1832, Old Sarum continued to send two members to parliament, as in the reign of Edward III. The two members were elected under an old tree, where in the presence of the sheep and grass the bailiff read the Bribery Act, proclaimed the elections, and so on. Thus did Old Sarum continue to make laws for England centuries after it had utterly disappeared from the earth, with the military exigencies which had built it. Something has been done toward abolishing the stigmatizes it. Man may not be conscious rotten boroughs of politics; but how many moral and intellectual Old Sarums are there which have crumbled with the conditions that produced them, but still manage to wield power and make laws for the living? Are not our universities really the rotten boroughs of monkish ages? An English journal, in a late article on the enfranchisement of woman, claimed that her inability to be a soldier was the seal of Nature to her present inferiority of position. The able editor was perhaps unconscious of the extreme antiquity of his opinion, which was the echo of that of the first savage who ever knocked his child on the head because it was a female, and therefore unfit for the one object of life - warfare. An age in which war was the one interest produced that editor's idea as it built Sarum on a hill; but what meaning has it for an age that has abandoned the fortified crags for the green valleys of peaceful life? Government is not now a War Council. It concerns the every-day relations and the homes of men, women, and children; of education, art and religion. 1 take this place to affirm that she can be justly excluded from any other sphere of life only by a degree of natural incompetence similar to that which incapacitated her for war. A stone that is fit for the wall is not left in the way, says the proverb; and Nature is too cunning a builder to put into the wall the stone that is unfit. If women are unable to help men in the court, the college, the government, there need be no restrictive laws to keep keep them out of these. But these things cannot be decided by prejudice. Women must be permitted to unfold their faculties freely, and their level must be determined by their real abilities and disabilities - not those arbitrarily assigned them by man. And thus far, we claim, the only occupations for which she has been shown unfit are those which are doomed to pass away, and which intelligent and good men everywhere are seeking to abolish. Woman, it is granted, is unfit for war; but who does not hope that war is passing away for ever? We are anxious to keep women out of the region of the mobviolence, partizan rancours, and intrigues, attendant upon elections; but what good citizen does not wish to purge politics of these base accompaniments? A French writer, Madame Sirault, has said, "Every career from which woman is steadily repulsed by man is, by this fact alone, marked with the seal of death. The very repulse of what he does; but the career which is too vile for a woman to enter has already outlived all chance of reform, and must perish with its abuses." Her statement is true. And our trade, laws, politics, will then alone be sufficiently ennobled in the eyes of just and wise men, when a pure woman may mingle with them without danger or shame. It is significant that reformers are glad to accept the aid of woman in their organizations; she is not out of place in their ideal societies. Her equality refers to happier and purer eras, as her oppressions refer to ages of bloodshed, tainted trade, and corrupt politics. God said, "It is not good that man should be alone: I will make him an help meet for him. Then made he a woman, and brought her unto the man." So spoke the human instinct in ancient times. But presently man concluded that he knew better; and said, in the market, in the college, in public affairs, man shall be alone. And even in the home he determined that woman should enter at first only as a slave, I and to the last only as an inferior. Never 1 theless, through her own ability and his he would very soon find a propriety in feneeds, woman gradually obtained in fact, male physicians. And the most respectable though never in law, a preponderant power merchant would be found citing Portia, if in the homes of civilized society. Now with a law-case involving 10,0001. he fully compare this one sphere in which her equal- believed that a certain female barrister ity is practically recognized, and her influ- could infallibly gain his cause. Therefore, ence most felt, with any of those in which the thorough ngh education of women, man has resolved that it is good for him to be alone. Compare a refined English home with English politics, diplomacy, litigation, colleges, international relations; and who does not feel that the latter are some centuries behind the former in civility and beauty? There is a taint of grossness or barbarism upon every department of the world from which woman is excluded; and every home in England writes upon our public affairs, "It is not good for man to be alone." For ourselves we are not, in this matter, so much concerned for "woman's rights" as for the rights of mankind. We believe that the enfranchisement of woman would be the greatest contribution toward carrying the civilization of the home into the rank wilderness of Statecraft; that the laws would be more just, wars more rare, and the relations of nation with nation less snarling and selfish, if they were not so unmitigatedly male. We believe that those - their admission to every advantage for training possessed by man, seems to us the parent of all other reforms. Let there be the river, it will not fail to find its channel, and the right path to the sea. Let women be known to have faculties available for definite work, and the sentimental will have to sigh over her deserted "sphere" in vain. It was long before female physicians were heard of about 1745 that a woman in good society in New York, a Mrs. Lester, was known to have great surgical skill and medical knowledge, and in the course of thirty-four years she was called to attend 1300 important cases. A woman became chief calculator of lunar tables at Washington, because when Congress made an appropriation for a Nautical Almanac she offered the most accurate work. Neither of these women failed to receive due applause from society. Mrs. Dall's excellent work is a cyclopædia of facts which show that woman's sphere will always be widened enough who come after us will regard us as having to include anything she can actually contribeen very stupid in going on from age to age bute to society. But her credentials must with our repulsive social routine, our hard be verified, to use Margaret Fuller's phrase, selfish politics, with their venality and gen- by good work. We believe, therefore, that eral ugliness, while all around us lay unuti- the first thing of all to claim for her is the lized the vast resources of moral feeling right of education, the right, that is, to and refining power in the heart and brain be put in possession of the implements for of woman. We believe that man is only her work. And experience has shown that woman has become in the noon of the nine-pulse, tenderness, and moral promptings, half living in so much of this world as woman is excluded from; that he is only half seeing truth, only half discovering the laws and the beauty surrounding him, because one of his eyes with a subtle light of its own is closed in the ignorance of woman. But whether this creed be true or not, it will never be recognized in the organization of society until women have shown their ability to help the world materially in all these directions. As it is the rule of the British Constitution to admit classes to power only when there is more danger in keeping them out than in admitting them, so it will for a long time be the rule with our commercial Anglo-Saxon man to make changes only when they improve the column of profits and diminish that of loss. We have not the least faith that our solid men will suffer a sentiment to come between them and a solid advantage. If the most conservative man in England had consumption or epilepsy, and really believed that certain woman could completely cure him, a this will not be fairly done until women are admitted to the same studies, in the same universities, with men. In every female college in the world studies are expurgated, qualified, selected, accommodated, to suit some preconceived nonsensical theory about woman's mind or woman's sphere. Thus she is shackled to begin with, and then held up to illustrate her inability to keep step with man. If a thing be true, a woman has, in her ability to learn it, the right to learn it; and in depriving her of a particular study, man may be withholding the particular ray of heat or light under which her special ability would unfold. It is a deep wrong that ages which held that women had no souls, or made them slaves, - or fashionable toys, or consecrated them to nunneries, - should still be represented in our laws, institutions, and colleges; and it is adding insult to the injury, when the machinery into which we place her turns out "the girl of the period," to hold her up to the scorn of the world as the best thing that teenth century. It comes to this: having by force taken possession of the means of education, men turn to cast shame on women that they are left outside! The fact is, the Egyptians believe that woman has no soul; the English believe she has no reason; - the wretched Ailmchs on the Nile are produced by one theory, and female frivolity in some and ruin in other classes are the fatal leaf and blossom of the other. These Roman and Salic laws upon which our modern society is based are really decrees of divorce between man and woman, grow into tawdry sentimentalism when shut out from their fit arena, when untrained to emulate a brother's active life. Coolness, forethought, and strength, grow into cunning, rapacity, and tyranny, when uninfluenced by that gentler element of your nature which God has placed by your side." In the home we have succeeded, in civilized communities, in overruling to some extent this horrible divorce. The next step is to overrule it in the larger home where human minds are nurtured and trained for life the school. And from these the sa between their mutually supplementary pow-cred reuniting influence shall surely extend As Mrs. Dall has well said: "Im-through all the departments of human life. ers. CROMWELL AND THE CAVALIERS. - It was in the Abbey the Cavaliers believed Cromwell's body to lie; but this is not our legend, for we think we know where he really is. The author of "The History of England during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart" says that a gen- | tlewoman who attended the Protector during his last illness told him that the day after his death his friends, fearing the malice and insults of the Cavaliers if they ever regained power, wrapped in lead the body so sacred to all good Puritans; two of his nearest relations and a guard of soldiers then put it on board a barge and carried it below bridge, and at night sank it under the quiet waters in the deepest part of the Thames. But neither is this our legend. The author of "The Compleat History of England," again, relates a still more reliable tradition, which he derived from the son of Barkstead the regicide, a gentleman then still living, and to be met with at Richards' Coffee House, within Temple Bar. The story was this: - His father was Lieutenant of the Tower, and one of Cromwell's special confidants. During Cromwell's last illness, Barkstead one day desired to know where his friend wished to be buried; the Protector answered, where he had obtained the greatest victory and glory, on the field of Naseby, and as near as possible to the spot where the heat of the action had been. One midnight, soon after his death, the body was embalmed and placed in a leaden coffin, and was put into a hearse. This hearse, Barkstead the narrator - then a boy of fifteen says he helped to escort down to Northamptonshire. On arriving at Naseby, they found a grave nine feet deep already dug, the mould carefully heaped on one side, and the green sods on the other. The coffin was then lowered, the mould replaced, the residue carted away, and the turf laid down again with care and precision. Soon after, the field was ploughed up and sown for three or four years successively with corn. But our own legend, which we have hitherto kept so carefully secret, is asserted with equal firmness, and rests on still more reliable testimony. It is reported, and is still believed by many, that either soon after his death, or on 458 LIVING AGE. VOL. XI. the night his coffin was dug up at Westminster, and carted off to the Red Lion Inn at Holborn, to be hung the next day on the Tyburn gibbet, the body was secretly removed, another substituted in its place, and the real corpse of the Protector buried in what is now the centre of Red Lion-square- exactly where the obelisk used to be, and as nearly as possible on the site of the little black, dismal summer-house that now stands there. The legend, true or untrue, has hallowed the spot for ever. The Cavaliers wasted their cruelty. On June the 14th, immediately after the Restoration, the waxen effigy of Cromwell-the one we have described as lying in state-was hung by a rope to the bars of a window of the Jewel Office at Whitehall, amid the derision of the fickle mob. On December the 8th, the Lords concurred with the Commons in ordering the bodies (carcases they called them) of Cromwell, Ireton, Bradshaw, and Pride to be dug up, carried on hurdles to Tyburn, there to be hung in their coffins, and afterwards to be buried under the gibbet. The rough disinterment took place on January the 26th. That was Saturday night; on Monday night the bodies were carted to the Red Lion Inn in Holborn, and the next day drawn on sledges to Tyburn, amid the curses and acclamations of the same people who had so often greeted the victorious Protector. The bodies were pulled out of their coffins in the Tyburn fields, and hung upon the triple tree. At sunset they were taken down, the heads cut off, and the trunks buried in a deep hole under the gallows. The next day the common hangman (Jack Ketch himself, we believe) stuck the heads on poles, and set them on the top of Westminster Hall, Bradshaw in the middle, Ireton on one side, and Cromwell on the other. An embalmed head, said to be that of Cromwell, is still preserved by a London antiquarian. Let us hope that our legend is true, and that there still, under the sooty summerhouse, rest the honored bones of the great Pro-' tector. The very possibility of the truth of such a legend will surely consecrate that slip of dingy garden-ground as long as London remains the centre of the world's civilization. Cassell's Magazine, From The Spectator. RUN TO EARTH.* "RUN TO EARTH" is an extraordinary specimen of sensational fiction. The author has, if possible, excelled herself, she has beaten all her rivals, she has forever obscured the fame of those wonderful fiction-writers, beloved of errand-boys and shop-girls, who deal in revenge and murder, jealousy and hatred, who treat the wildest and most diabolical actions as ordinary occurrences, who convert men into ghouls and women into harpies, who can transform with a stroke of the pen a beggar into a princess, and an English gentleman into a Thug. If the first object of the novelist be to excite a morbid curiosity, if blood and poisoning and intrigue, the most hateful passions, the vilest actions, form the best ingredients of fiction, then it must be owned that no one has mixed them together more skilfully than Miss Braddon. Her admirers, and they are many, will assuredly not be disappointed with this fiction. We can promise them a murder, a seduction, a suicide, and the conversion of a streetsinger into a fashionable young lady before they have read a hundred pages of the story. A little further on they will be introduced to a surgeon known as Victor Carrington, but who is in reality an exiled French nobleman, "a creature without a conscience, without a heart," who wears a mask of metal with glass eyes, accomplishes an outrageous plot and an incredible murder in the first volume, a plot still more outrageous and a murder only possible in fiction in the second volume, and very nearly commits another murder in the third. Then the readers of this marvellous novel will be taken to a mysterious gambling house at Fulham, with a secret room in which rouge-et-noir is played. The house is kept by Madame Durski, a lonely and beautiful woman, who lures fools to their destruction, is herself a slave to opium, and yet, strange to say, is one of the most respectable people in the narrative. This lady's affianced lover accuses her of endeavouring to poison him, whereupon Madame Durski, "luckless, hopeless, heartbroken," takes an overdose of her favourite "compound," and disappears from the scene. This is but one sensational incident among many. We have a sailor accusing his honest father-in-law of murder, a husband accusing his wife of adultery, the disappearance of a baby heiress who lives in a castle and who is protected by a great iron door, the achievements of a London detective, and the ignominious failures of a husband hunter. Marvellous, too, are the adventures of the heroine, who sings in low public houses at Wapping, is said to be the child of a wretch whom she (whose vulgarity, by the way, as described in the novel, is wholly out of accordance with the position they occupy), marries the baronet, is made a widow in a few weeks through Carrington's devices, devotes herself to purposes of revenge, and discovers at last that she is the stolen child of a lady of title and distantly connected with her husband's family. We have but glanced at some of the more prominent incidents of the novel, which the author is no doubt justified in calling “a sensational story, pure and simple." She quotes also an observation made by "one of the most accomplished reviewers of the day" (Mr. Lewes, we believe), to the effect that in criticizing stories there should be some discrimination of the kind of interest attempted, and that the critic should not demand from the writer qualities incompatible with or utterly disregarded by his method. The interest aimed at in Run to Earth is simply sensational, and we are ready to grant that in that aim the author has been successful. She has made up a tale utterly without probability, without characterization, without thought, without humour, pathos, or poetry, without one of the charms, in short, which delight us in the great masters of fiction, a tale which has no use in the world beyond that of stimulating an unwholesome curiosity, and supplying fitting aliment to a vulgar sort of mental dissipation. This is the kind of success achieved by the writers of sensational fiction, and the same kind of distinetion may be justly awarded to the novel before us. It fulfils its purpose, but the critic may be permitted to ask whether such a purpose is worth fulfilling? THE COMPOSITION OF LAVA. - The lava thrown out by Mount Vesuvius during the present eruption has been subjected to analysis by an Italian chemist, and found to contain the following ingredients: Silica, 39 parts; lime, 18; alumina, 14; magnesia, 3; protoxide of iron, 13; potash, 1; soda, 10; water, 2. The specimen, therefore, closely resembled the common glass seen in wine bottles. Lava, though varying considerably in colour and solidity or friability, and occasionally containing little groups of crystalline minerals, would seem to be a sort of rough natural glass or earthenware mainly produced from sand, chalk, clay, and similar common earthy substances. A PRESS ASSOCIATION is being formed, to sup knows to be a murderer, is picked out of the gutter by a baronet worth £40,000 a year, is transferred to "a thoroughly aristocratic seminary, presided over by two maiden sisters " * Run to Earth. A Novel. By the author of Lady Audley's Secret. 3 vols. London: Ward, Locke, and Tyler. 1868. ments. ply the provincial newspapers with news under the forthcoming Government telegraph arrangeIt is thought the change will revolutionize the present mode of collecting and supplying news to the provincial dailies. Under the new system a leader-writer will be able to telegraph a late article for about 5s. Athenæum. CHAPTER VII. AN ILLUMINATING FLASH. AFTER the crisis of a storm has passed, a company of persons become very lively, and have an additional feeling of home. They had withdrawn into the inner music saloon, whose vaulted ceiling, brilliantly lighted up, had even a festive appearance. Half way up the walls of the room four balconies projected, and in the centre was the grand pi ano. Then she gave it to be understood that the old established families could not be too strict in receiving foreign intruders. In a somewhat forced humor, Bella joked about the long nails of Frau Ceres; but her lips trembled when Clodwig said very sharply, "Among the Indians long nails take the place of family descent, and the one perhaps is as good as the other." All were amazed when Clodwig spoke so disparagingly of the nobility. He seemed On one side was a circular seat, upon displeased at the detracting remarks upon an elevated platform, where Bella was sit- the Sonnencamp family; he was above all ting with the happy justice's wife on the right, and the forester's wife on the left. The young girls were promenading arm in arm through the saloon, and Pranken, full of his jokes, accompanied them; he carried in his hand a rose out of Lina's wreath; when Clodwig and Eric joined the circle, with the mayor, the young people came up to them. Bella asked the major whether the work upon the castle, which Herr Sonnencamp had begun to rebuild, was still continued. The mayor nodded; he always nodded several times before he spoke, as if carefully arranging beforehand what he should say. meanness, and everything small and invidi- He paused, and as no one spoke, he continued, - "Riches have a certain title to respect; riches, especially one's own acquisition, are an evidence of activity and service. Far easier does it appear to me to He asserted very confidently that they be a prince, than to be a man of such exwould find a spring in the castle court-yard. cessive wealth. Such an accumulation of Clodwig begged him to preserve carefully power is apt to make men arbitrary; a very every relic of the middle ages and the Ro- wealthy man lives in an atmosphere saturatman period, and promised soon to go him-ed, as it were, with the consciousness of self, and superintend the excavations. The supreme power, and ceases to be an indihead-forester jestingly observed, "Herr Sonnencamp," -everybody called him Herr, but with a peculiar accent, as if they wished no further acquaintance with him, "Herr Sonnencamp will probably now give his name to the restored castle." When Herr Sonnencamp's name was mentioned, it seemed as if a dam had been carried away, and the conversation rushed in headlong from all quarters. "Herr Sonnencamp has a deal of under vidual personality, and the whole world assumes to him the aspect of a price-current list. Have you ever met such a man?" Before Eric could reply, Pranken roughly broke in, "Captain Dournay wishes to become the tutor of the young Sonnencamp." All eyes were directed towards Eric; he was regarded as if he had been suddenly transformed, and clad in a beggar's garment. The men nodded to each other and shrugged their shoulders; a man engaging standing," said the school-director, "but in a private employment, and such an em Molière maliciously observes, that the rich man's understanding is in his pocket." The apothecary added, "Herr Sonnencamp loves to represent himself as an incorrigible sinner, in the hope that nobody will believe him; but people do believe him." Eric caught the names Herr Sonnencamp, Frau Ceres, Manna, Roland, Frau Perini; it was like the chirping of birds in the woods, all sounds mingled together, and no one melody distinctly heard. The wife of the justice, with a significant glance towards Pranken, said, "Men like the major and Herr von Pranken can take up at once such mysterious, interloping people from abroad, but ladies must be more reserved." ployment too, had lost all title to consideration. The ladies looked at him compassionately. Eric saw nothing of all this. He did not know what Pranken meant by this surprising revelation; he felt that he must make some reply, but knew not what to say. A painful pause followed Pranken's communication. Clodwig had placed his hands upon his lips, that had become very pale. At last he said, aid. " Such an appointment will contribute to your honor, and to the honor and good fortune of Herr Sonnencamp." Eric felt a broad hand laid upon his shoulder, and on looking round he gazed into the smiling countenance of the major, Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Mass. |