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ity and accuracy of workmanship and cu- tonishing perception of its moral meaning rious elaborateness of decoration, such as and results. They take so lofty a view we habitually associate with the handi- of the new bonds between them and Engwork of the Chinese and the Japanese. land, that they unconsciously present a We heard of national songs amongst them, model of government such as old nations leading people who cared about such mat- are striving after with various fortune; ters to hope that a sequence of traditions they realize the unseen, they seize upon might be made out, which should estab- the abstract ideas of sovereignty, of the lish another great difference between them complicated bonds of a great political and and all the savages of the Southern world, social community, and they pour out their by supplying a proximate history of their feelings to the men who are to them the past. We heard of the upspringing of a embodiment of these ideas, in language wild, passionate, religious enthusiasm, full of grave, dignified pathos. Long years under the direction of a martial leader, of homage in innumerable varieties of which had a distant, dwarfed resemblance idiom have not brought to the Queen of to the origin of Mohammedanism. But, on England any words more simply beautithe whole, they were “black fellows," and ful than those in which she is referred to they had had no charming books written in a letter written 23rd July, 1872, by one about them, except Dr. Hochstetter's, of "her Maori children" to Dr. Featherwhich was originally published at Arkan-ston, Agent-General for New Zealand, to the German language, and after- whose personal influence with the tribes, wards, in the English version, at Stuttgart, during his residence in the island for so that the delightful accounts it gave of the thirty years, much of the present peace, Bubline beauty of the interior of the island prosperity, and extraordinary progress of and of the sunny salubrity of its climate, the Maori is due. He had, during eighprobably extended to few beyond those teen years' continuous tenure of office as who resorted to its pages with a purpose. Superintendent, constant official commuThere were plenty of books and pam-nication with the tribes of the Wellington phlets about the settlers and the sheep; but province, and from 1861 to 1865 mainthe writers generally confined themselves tained peace in this portion of the colony. to assurances that the Maori never came It has a strange effect to come in a dry in sight in their respective districts, or to official record on such a passage as this, cheerful anticipations of their speedy re- addressed by one of the former principal duction to "harmlessness," a readily in- promoters of the Maori-King movement terpreted phrase in the mouths of a cer- to his "father and friend," now, as his tain class of colonists. There has been no loving son" has it, "appointed by our gradual preparation of the public mind Queen to bear the burdens of this island for such a revelation of the Maori charac-into her presence": ter as that made by the lately published "O Sire, salutations! I send greeting to the official documents, and for the present at greatest of our benefactors, to one whose love has titude of the Maori race, which is quite as been felt by those who are dead and gone, as well surprising as the great social revolution as by the living! O Sire, salutations! Your letter of Japan, and, except from the strictly has been received, and both I and my tribe have commercial-exporting point of view, much seen it. Great is my satisfaction that you more important to us, the elder brethren should still remember us, residing, as you now of these extraordinary people, towards are, in the midst of the great world, and near whom they yearn with a most affecting the fountain of life!"

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eagerness. They fought us bravely, for The celebrated chief Wi Tako contribas long as they could, and they are not utes a letter to this remarkable correashamed of it, nor of their defeat. They spondence, which puts the native character dumbly, like the Delawares, in an unexpected light. Wi Tako within stubborn endurance of extinction; but drew himself in 1862 from all communicalike men to whom a revelation has been tion with Europeans, fortified his pah, made, which they have hearkened to with raised the rebel flag, moved from place to strong will and lofty intelligence, they piace attended by a bodyguard of 100 have sprung "full statured in an hour men, and on being invited to meet Sir towards the civilization which the conquer- George Grey at Otako, refused to receive or now holds out in the hand that has the Governor except in his own pah, and sheathed the sword. We have destroyed under the "King's" flag. But he ultithe old things, and they demand of us the mately yielded to Dr. Featherston's pernew. They ask for guidance, instruction, sonal influence, met the Governor on neuall the material of civilization, with an as-tral ground, took the oath of allegiance,

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and became a valuable ally. His letter, lofty, eloquent, full of poetry, and without which may be taken as widely if not com- the slightest touch of the grotesque. Of pletely representative, shows perfect be- what other "savage death ceremony lief in the wisdom, and reliance on some- could that be said? Few more romantic or thing more than the good faith, on the wonderful spectacles have been witnessed kind, just, brotherly feeling of the English than the korero, or conference, at Tokano, Government. This man and his fellows the native settlement at the south end of have entered upon their new allegiance the lake, which was held by the Governwith a chivalrous loyalty that finds highly or and the great chiefs. The lake, poetic utterance, and has an underlying as large as that of Geneva, glittered note of steadfast patience, entirely acqui- in the sunshine, surrounded with a escent in the honest working of an un- noble chain of mountains, with the snowknown, uncomprehended machinery, which clad ridge of Ruapehu (9,200 feet high) is perhaps the inost utter contradiction of towering above them, and the great volall to our notions of even the noblest sav-cano Tongariro (6,200 feet high) sending age. The eager whole-souledness of their its clouds of steam and smoke up into the aspiration to the civilization of their con- deep blue sky. queror is combined with an entire reason- With countless flags flying-there was ableness quite as curious as an attribute great competition for Union Jacks — and of the state of childhood, whether national soft-swelling songs of welcome, came the or individual. "The fidelity of your na-tribes and their chiefs to greet the Govtive tribes to their absent chief has not jernor, to tell him how eagerly they longed diminished. We are greatly rejoiced be- for "English education," for the English cause your plans are clear and compre- tongue," for the faces and voices of their hensive. I have told you that the island white brethren, for the roads, and the is at peace. This is the result of the good laws, and the knowledge of other lands policy of the Government. They are se- and other people which he could send curing the confidence of the people." them. Among the number of striking Then follows a clear abstract of certain phrases, these may be taken at random tribal conferences, and reference to the from many speakers: matters to be brought before the English Parliament by "the loving father," who is "yonder, seeking out the advantage of this country."

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All the followers of the King will hear what you say to-day. Welcome, my father. There is no knowledge in Hauraki; come and see it. Come hither from the place where you have been laying down life-giving principles of action. Come and see the death of Taraia, and the people who last saw him.

"Come, O Governor! and see us. You are the father of the people. We have been swimming in the ocean, and know not where to go. We feel that we are now touching the shore, and There is quite an Ossianic loftiness you about many of the speeches made by the We have long been searching for a proper course have come to help and guide us to land. Maori chiefs to Sir George Bowen, Govto take. We are now beginning to think we ernor of New Zealand, during his "pro- have found the right way. We will listen to gress "last April, when he travelled over-you, in hope that our troubles may now end. land through the central, once hostile, districts, lately inaccessible to Europeans, from Wellington to Auckland, and visited both shores of the great Lake Taupo, the geographical and strategical course of the island, from whence to the chief towns of all the provinces the mail-coach roads are being rapidly completed. A universal chorus of welcome greeted the Governor, welcome in which there is not a touch of servility; couched in language which must have had a strange effect upon the Master of Blantyre, who was of the Governor's party. It All this is blended with keen practical sug. is such as might have been spoken by the gestions, shrewd comments on the GovHighland chieftains, children of the Mist, ernor's admirable speeches, and explicit when the clans were gathered to declare declarations that they expect the land for the unseen, unknown object of their question to be speedily dealt with (hapimaginative romantic loyalty, full of the pily the Maori know nothing of the hispoetic fervour of one feeling common to torical precedent furnished by Ireland, all, yet strangely distinct, and true to the if they did, their confidence might be spirit of clanship. The "tangi or la- shaken); also very plain intimations that ment for an aged chief, at which they as- the collective loyalty of the tribes is not sisted, is just like a Highland "coronach," to lessen their respective independence.

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His soul has gone, taken hence by the strong hand of death. Himself selected the day of his departure. Had he been bound him. Though his spirit has fled, his voice still with chains, it had not been possible to detain lives, and he bids you all welcome."

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"Let chiefs of other tribes," says Poihipi Board is 567, of whom 327 are males and Horomatangi, "be responsible for the 240 females. The Board declares that the good conduct of their own people; they number of deaths reported (the total must not interfere with us.' Paora Rau-number of aborigines in Victoria is 1,638) hihi observes tersely:-"We have long does not support the conclusion that the been wishing to see you. I never saw a aborigines are decreasing at the rate that Governor before. Welcome." And one fine several estimates would seem to show. It old chief, Tahira, made a little speech, is plain that their task is a hard and a which for sense and a lingering pathetic dispiriting one, and the encouragement of regret is matchless : freely-expressed public approbation ought to be given to the Board, whose object is, to use the words of their own Report, "to rescue the people from misery and degradation, and if they cannot make them useful citizens, to prevent them at least from remaining a burden on the State."

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"All I can do is to

Welcome," said he. greet you. I cannot make myself one with you so thoroughly as my friends around you have, because our thoughts are not yet the same; but when I find that I can dwell quietly and without being disturbed in my own place, then perhaps I shall see my way clear to do as others have done. It were better that the position of the land were made clear. My hands are quite clean. I do not know your thoughts. Unite yourselves with us to-day, because it has been through you that this place is what it is." Every line of the Report is worth reading and full of suggestion. So these are the Maori, the brown men of the fairest of islands, with the finest climate in the world, who offer an absolute contradiction to the conviction usually produced by making acquaintance with savage lands, that the natives are blots on the beauty and grandeur of the scene. To read the official reports concerning the Maori of the present, and Dr. Hochstetter's description of their country, is to have a wide field opened up for speculation upon the future of the race, under its double aspect of romance and reality.

From The Spectator. ANIMAL GROTESQUES.

It is curious to see modern science, under the guidance of Mr. Darwin's great intellectual impulse, so far returning upon its tracks as to find a new store of humour in those grotesque recasts and reconstructions of animal forms which amused the old Greeks and Egyptians with the conceptious of centaurs, chimæras, bird-headed men, and so forth. Here are two humorous books, both of which have evidently been suggested by Mr. Darwin's conception that the divergence of different directions of animal development depends upon mere incidents of climate, food, the characteristics of competing races of animals, and so A sad and striking contrast presents it- forth, all of which incidents differ in every self at the other side of that wide strip different locality, and that, therefore, the of silver sea which divides the Maori from real combinations of animal forms might the Aborigines of the Australian conti- have been very different from what they nent. The Eighth Report of the Board are. The drawings of "Grotesque Anifor the Protection of the Aborigines in the mals," by W. E. D. Cooke, R.A., F.Z.S., &c. colony of Victoria is a record of well sus- (Longmans), are efforts of fancy in exhausttained, praiseworthy efforts on the parting the permutations and combinations of of the gentlemen who have undertaken so animal forms supposed to be most incomhumane a task, with satisfactory results as patible with each other, and are full of the regards the number and condition of the humorous extravagance of startling and protected persons. But every characteris- monstrous amalgamations. The other tic which the official records bring out into book, by Mr. Charles Bennett and Mr. view in the Maori is wanting in the Vic- Brough (Ward, Lock, and Tyler), is a very torian aborigines. These people seem to clever attempt to show by what insensible be hopelessly vagrant by nature, and la-gradations you can make almost any kind mentably unable to resist drink. These of animal shade off into man, - so that are the great obstacles, the deadly ene- you can hardly catch the graduations by mies the Board have to contend with, and which you pass from the prize ox in the considering their strength, and the diffi- stall to the ox-headed grazier who is lookculty of making the recipients of such ing at him, or by which you pass from the beneficence appreciate its motive or its dull and greedy vulture to the dull and advantage, it is satisfactory to record that greedy man of prey who fattens on the the number of aborigines now settled on garbage of human society. Mr. Cooke's the stations under the control of the book is really a work of art as well as a

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work of humour, so gracefully as well as human qualities, produced exactly that so oddly are the animal forms combined impression of twisted and dislocated forms into the most night-marish of new species. which is implied in the word " grotesque.' It is impossible to describe grotesque Hazlitt has put this very powerfully in comeffects which appeal solely to the eye; but menting in Esop's humour, saying of him: nothing can exceed the oddity of the con- Ape and slave, he looked askance at ception in the very first plate in the book, human nature, and beheld its weaknesses for instance, where the head of a cockatoo and errors transferred to another species. with gay ruffled feathers is issuing from ... He saw in man a talking, absurd, oba spiral (Ammonite) shell, and the com- stinate, proud, angry animal, and clothed pound creature is supported by a single these abstractions with wings, a beak, or stout human leg and foot, while a lamb- a tail, or claws, or long ears as they apheaded servant, with a conical (Turitella) peared embodied in these hieroglyphics in shell for a fool's cap, also a monoped, fol- the brute creation. His moral philosophy lows the haughty cockatoo-headed fop at is natural history. He makes an ass bray a respectful distance. These oddities of wisdom and a frog croak humanity." If conception must be seen to be enjoyed. Esop had lived in our day, he would have But the grotesque humour of both books probably felt the moral grotesqueness of is evidently due to the new impulse which his fables to be far more instead of less Mr. Darwin has given to the conviction of striking. The odd distortion which his a physical relationship between all forms fancy invented for the sake of effect, might of animal life, human and otherwise, and have a certain tone of semi-reality now. the impression he has given us that com- Our cunuing may really be related by binations of organs which are arbitrary something like immemorial descent to that and impossible under existing conditions of the fox,- - our rapacity to that of the might have been possible under conditions wolf, our industry to that of the beaver not very widely varied. What were exer- or the bee. Animal passions are not so cises of the merest arbitrary fancy to the much the distorted forms of human pasnations of the ancient world, have gained sions, as human passions are the partially for us a sort of remote significance from straitened forms of animal passions, the knowledge how very slight a change straitened by conscience and reason and of conditions might have changed the direc- the possession of a divine soul. But this tion of development, so that what was gro- does not make the grotesqueness in the tesque by virtue of its arbitrariness to the likeness less, but rather greater. What ancient world, is still more grotesque to us we see in the animal world, still bears to because part of that arbitrariness has dis- what we find in ourselves something of appeare. As cousins are apt to feel the the same relation that a gurgoyle repregrotesqueness of the moral contrasts be-senting a human head bears to the real tween them far more than strangers, for image of a man; and we feel the thrill and the very reason that they are not so far pathos which is involved in all the higher off as they might seem, so the new sense forms of the "grotesque" only the more of affinity between the various animal in gazing at the animal world, so far as we types and forms and organs adds a certain | really believe that there is a common ankeenness of flavour to the grotesqueness of the contrasts they present.

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For the word "grotesque," taken primarily, we suppose, from the twisted and distorted character of forms seen in the dim light of a grotto, applies especially to the twisted and distorted parodies on human functions and passions which we seem to see winding away from us into the deep gloom of the lower animal types. It was this feeling which gave its rare grotesqueness to the wisdom of Esop. The voluntary distortion of his moral wisdom when it was made to issue from the mouth of the frog, or the ass, or the fox, the sense of the relation and also the disproportion between the thought and cunning and passions of men, and the various undignified animals whose forms he peopled with these'

cestry for those strange instincts which we dimly trace winding away into the subterranean life of brute existence. Unquestionably one reason why the grotesqueness of animal life is taking gradually so much more important a place in the modern world of literature than it had in the ancient, is that in the ancient world it was connected simply with the sharp contrasts and analogies traced by keen intellectual wit, while in the modern world a feeling of sympathy between the lower and the higher form of life is growing up to shade off the intellectual contrasts. The grotesque suggestions of Esop's fables have no pathos in them. But the grotesque suggestions of the greatest of modern Esops a much greater than 30p,- Hans Christian Andersen, are full of pathos, and

solely on this account, that his speaking animal have a real relationship to man, and feel as men feel, only with a more embarrassed and limited and less articulate voice. The kinship between the lower animals and man is the greatest of all sources of the higher grotesque effects, those effects in which the sense of ludicrous difference and distortion is modified by an undercurrent of feeling of real affinity. Andersen's "Ugly Duckling," his toads and storks, and a hundred other of his creations, have all the wisdom and wit of Esop, and combine with it a tender feeling of animal infirmity as akin to human infirinity, as well.

same type, where the secret of the pathos lies in the deep sympathy of the writer with the dumb, unconscious, creaturely phases of animal or human feeling. Indeed, every writer we have named, from Scott to Turguenieff, hhs proved that his sympathy with the lower animals was as living as his sympathy with the dumb inarticulate feelings of men hardly yet set free from the dumbness of the lower animals. Mr. Darwin's doctrine has not come before the way had been prepared for it by a quite new current of sympathy between our race and the grotesque germs of human feeling in the races beneath our

own.

From The Spectator.

BRIDES AND BRIDALS.*

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And it is probably for some reason of the same general kind that modern literature has devoted so much more attention to the pathetic side of what is most grotesque in man himself. Sir Walter Scott's grotesques, his Dominie Sampson, Davie Gellatly, Laird of Dumbiedikes, and so THE subject of Mr. Jeaffreson's new forth, almost all have a touch of the kind work will make it popular with a larger of pathos in them which comes from a sym- class of people than could have been inpathy with animal inarticulateness, with terested in his studies of doctors, lawyers, that helplessness of nature that has never and clergymen, while the novel attractions fully gained the faculty of speech or self- of many of the materials he has collected knowledge, and that takes us back to the will be recognized by most readers. Marlower races of creatures for illustrations riage, and the customs connected with it, of it. It was, perhaps, Sir Walter's great afford a wide field for anecdote. We are sympathy with animals that gave him this taken back to early times in such a chapter wonderful power of sketching the interme- as that on Marriage by Capture;" but diate world between consciousness and un- almost every age presents some notable consciousness in man. Even Shakespeare features. The Fleet marriages of one shows little sign of this kind of command century, the Gretna Green marriages of of the grotesque. His fools and madmen, another, the espousals and pre-contracts touching as they are, are not touching which once were of undisputed validity, from their creatureliness, but from eclipsed the lay marriages and publication of banns or disfigured human qualities. And his conceptions of Caliban and Ariel have none of that sort of pathos in them. They are marvellous feats of creative fancy, but do not excite our pity. Even on the stage you see how much the taste for the higher kind of grotesque feeling has grown. Robson's greatest efforts used to be produced by delineating the struggle of dumb affections to express themselves dimly without words, in actions so grotesque that you knew not whether to laugh or to cry, but the pathos of which was at least as profound as their humour. And the grotesque humour of America is in a great degree of the same kind, especially in such poems as "Little Breeches" and "The Prairie Bell," and such tales as Bret Harte's, studies of rude natures helplessly struggling for a half-utterance. It would seem, too, that the great Russian author Turguenieff has produced studies of the grotesque of a pathos even higher, and precisely of the son.

in the market-place that came in under the Commonwealth, are treated in turn by Mr. Jeaffreson, and furnish him with much curious matter. Then we have chapters on wedding-dresses, wedding-rings, wedding-cake, and last, not least, weddingpresents. Besides these matters, which are intimately, some might say painfully, associated with the marriage ceremony, Mr. Jeaffreson deals with the legal consequences of matrimony, even going on to discuss a subject which is hardly mentioned at weddings, and which he delicately calls dissolution of partnership. In one of Mr. Charles Reade's novels, indeed, we hear of an allusion to divorce while the Maire is proclaiming the indissolubility of the civil marriage which he has just performed, but the circumstances there are altogether exceptional. Moreover, with regard to

Brides and Bridals. By John Cordy Jeaffre
London: Hurst and Blackett. 1872.

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