free"; but in the same breath he adds "male nor female, Jew nor Greek." We are, therefore, constrained to accept his words metaphorically. That the Apostle perceived the evil effects of slavery upon character we cannot doubt. He not only congratulates himself upon being born free, but his advice to slaves shows an effort to initiate them into some sort of inward freedom, so that they may give to religion "the offering of a free heart." They are to forget as far as possible that they serve men, and by avoiding "eye service" are to assume an honorable bondage to their own consciousness, and thus become "the slaves of Christ," and not "men pleasers." He warns them also not to despise their masters, because they are brethren; while all free Christians are bidden to "remember those that are in bonds as bound with them." That certain Christian Churches were apt to look down on slave members is suggested by St. James, who condemns those who keep their courtesy for the wearers of "gay clothing," and "have men's persons in admiration for the sake of advantage." That St. Paul regarded "graces and qualities of breeding" as things which "adorn the faith of Christ" is evident from his letters and his life. It is he who remembered and wrote down for us our Lord's saying, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," and it is characteristic of him that the sentence stuck in his mind. To receive was painful to him always, and independence the first necessity of happiness. He urges all men to work rather than be beholden to any, and he urges those who give, not to wound by their manner of giving the pride of him who is obliged to take. Not only must they give without grudging, they must "give with simplicity." To give with simple generosity is not a very easy task. Many men never grudge, and yet fall into the subtler temptations which sur

round the giver to take the grace from his gift. Those who give for the sake of their own souls without knowing if they do good or harm cannot be said to give out of simple generosity, neither can those opposite characters who give their money in order to buy power. This latter error is, to our mind, by far the more excusable of the two. Indeed, if a man believes in his own judgment, likes power, and is determined to use it for the good of his neighbors, the temptation is almost unavoidable. It is often a duty to rule, and to "rule diligently," and who can rule a fool for his good without the means of coercion? Nevertheless, whoever gives with this end in view gives without grace, though he may often give to his neighbor's advantage. Το "show mercy with cheerfulness" is a yet more difficult injunction to follow. If the man who shows mercy is too cheerful— makes too light of his own magnanimity -the culprit is likely "to do it again." On the other hand, he may be more touched by the grace of the forgiveness than he could be by the most grievous reprimand. The better the man the more likely he is to be impressed by kindness, and perhaps wisdom should prompt us to give the best man the first chance.

The self-possession, courage, and detachment which enabled men working at an almost impossible task, and "standing in jeopardy daily," to give their minds to the refinements of courtesy and honor are not easy to account for. Something was given to the early Church which has been denied to later generations, the power to "rejoice in hope." Nothing was too hard for them to do, nothing too great to expect. That they looked for the triumph of Christianity in their own generation no candid reader can doubt. A spiritual mirage brought near to them a goal now out of sight. But a mirage is a reflection of the truth, not a deception

of the imagination, and the Church waits now as she waited then, if no longer rejoicing in hope, at least "patient in tribulation," "till we all come The Spectator.

unto a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,"— that is, till Christianity is not only the standard but the stamp of humanity.

It is said that this is the season when the compilers of almanacks set about to prepare their productions for the following year. I know not if this is so; but if it is, and they happen to be afflicted with a sense of humor, they must laugh like Cicero's augurs when they consider the ineptness of our calendar. With a name derived, it is said, from the Roman Calends-by which we no longer reckon-it seems to have been carefully arranged to correspond to nothing either in nature, history, or convenience. As its last reformation took place in the Christian Era, the year might be supposed to begin with the Birth of the Founder of Christianity. But, while this took place-or at least is celebrated-on the 25th of December, the first day of the year is postponed to seven days later. The most natural day for the beginning of the year would, of course, be the spring equinox when the days first prevail over the nights, and Nature, as they used to say, awakens. Yet this date is entirely unmarked in our calendars, and it is only with some difficulty that we discover it to be the 21st of March. Nor is the end of the year determined in a more rational manner than the beginning. The earth completes its revolution round the sun in three hun. dred and sixty-five days, five hours and a fraction. But we have arranged the civil year so that it consists of three hundred and sixty-five days only, and we have therefore to intercalate an ex

tra day every fourth year to make up the difference. If we look at the names of the divisions of our year, we find ourselves confronted with a system so confusing to our modern ideas that it seems as if it must have been invented by mandarins. The days of the week are dedicated to the sun and moon, to the Saturn of the Roman mythology, to the Woden, Thor, and Freya of the Scandinavian, and to a seventh god so obscure that it is extremely difficult to discover any reference to him in any document of antiquity. The months are in like manner named after two Christian saints, Januarius and Februarius, the Roman Mars, a word which is said to refer to the annual opening of the earth, the nymph Maia, the goddess Juno, the first two Cæsars, andworst absurdity of all-the numbers seven, eight, nine, and ten, which we carefully apply to the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months respectively. A large part of Christendom, although it accepts these heathen ap pellations, still enjoys a different arrangement of the year from the rest of it, so that the Russians and other nations belonging to the Orthodox Church celebrate Mars and the other heathen deities at a different time from ourselves. But the greatest inconvenience of all is the clumsy arrangement by which the days of the week and the days of the month fail to correspond from year to year, so that it requires much calculation before we can ascer

tain whether the 25th of December or any other day will fall on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday.

The greater part of this confusion comes, of course, from the objection which Europeans-unlike our new allies, the Japanese-have always felt to breaking entirely with the past. Before the beginning of the Julian Era, there does not seem to have been any system in Europe at all, while the Easterns calculated their calendars from events distinguished from the point of view of their different religions. When Julius Cæsar, stirred up thereto, it is said, by the representations of those Alexandrian astronomers who were the pioneers of Western science, decreed that the year should thenceforth consist of three hundred and sixty-five days with an extra day inserted every fourth year, he did much to bring order out of chaos. Unfortunately, he was not aware that the solar year, instead of consisting of six hours more than three hundred and sixty-five days, really enjoys a superiority of only five hours, forty-eight minutes, forty-five seconds and a half, with the result that the Julian year gained upon the solar at the rate of about three days in four hundred years. Thus the spring equinox instead of arriving every year on the 21st of March, gradually receded to the 10th, and would have gone on receding until it corresponded with the beginning of the civil year on the 1st of January, had not Pope Gregory XIII., under the inspiration of the astronomer Louis Lelio, decided upon suppressing the inconvenient ten days, and decreed that the day after the 4th of October 1582 should be called the 15th. By doing so, he annulled a number of saints' days, including the festivals of Bishop Remigius, Pope Callixtus, and St. Ursula and her virgins, which had to be transferred to other dates, but he restored the Chris

tian calendar to something like correspondence with Nature, and the new system was instantly adopted by France and other Catholic countries. Our own country, as became a Protestant land always indifferent to logic, held out against the proposed reform until 1752, since when the only attempt to reform the calendar has been that of the French Revolutionists during the Reign of Terror. Their system of Germinal, Florial, Prairial and the rest, had the advantage of possessing poetical names which really corresponded to the phenomena of the meteorological or agricultural year, but it had also the great drawback of being inapplicable save to the climate of France; while its division of the year into weeks of ten days instead of seven involved a greater change of habits than the most determined revolutionaries cared to put up with.

Can anything now be done to remedy the anomalies of the existing state of things? M. Camille Flammarion, to whose articles in astronomical journals I am much indebted for my facts, thinks so. The inconvenience caused by the falling of New Year's Day upon different days of the week in successive years, he would at once do away with by making the year to consist of three hundred and sixty-four days divided into fifty-two equal weeks of seven days each. The remaining day he would put into no month, but would have observed-as it now is in most Continental countries-as a public holiday. In bissextile, or leap year, this complementary day would be doubled, although he rather inclines to the reserving of these intercalary days until seven are in hand, when a whole week's holiday would be given to the greater and, as we think, the most important, part of the human race. He would further make the civil to correspond with the solar year by transferring his New Year's Day to what is

at present the 21st of March, while he would alter the present ridiculous names of the twelve months into those which he says are alone worthy of "the qualities or at least the intellectual tendencies of humanity" such as Truth, Science, Wisdom, Justice, Honor, Kindness, Love, Beauty, Humanity, Happiness, Progress, and Immortality. The year would thus be divided as at present into quarters, the first month of each quarter containing thirty-one, while the remaining two months would contain only thirty days. Thenceforward every New Year would commence on a Monday and would end on Sunday, and the days of the week would correspond in every year.

Is there any chance of such a reform being adopted? Personally, I should say not the slightest. Rational and sensible as M. Flammarion's new calendar is, the names of his months smack too much of what our grandfathers called Sansculottism to be acceptable to autocrats like the Czar and the German Emperor. His proposal, tentative as it is, for a whole week's holiday would involve too great a dislocation of trade to recommend itself to nations of shop-keepers like ourselves and our American cousins, and the The Academy.

same objection would probably apply, though with less force, to the addition of one more dies non in every year to the number that already exist even in Protestant countries. Nor does it overcome the objection, which most of us having correspondents in distant colonies have felt, that the calendar cannot be made to correspond with the seasons all over the world, which could indeed only be affected by a re-arrangement on astronomical grounds that would commend itself to nobody. This is the more serious, because all new inventions-etheric telegraphy, aerial navigation, and improvements in locomotion by land and sea-seem to be tending to an annihilation of time and space which will bring the nations of the earth nearer to each other than they have ever been before. But even if these objections could be overcome, the reform of the calendar is an undertaking so serious that it is not likely to take place except after some great change in our political or religious institutions such as would be produced by the Social Revolution that certain dreamers talk about. Failing this, it will probably be postponed till the Greek Kalends.

F. Legge.

The Scribners have in preparation a novel by the late Frank R. Stockton which was found in manuscript after his death.

Mr. Owen Seaman's "Borrowed Plumes" which Henry Holt & Co. have in press is a series of present-day parodies of Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, John Oliver Hobbes, Maurice

Hewlett, Maeterlinck, Henry James and others. If it is half as clever as Mr. Seaman's contributions in verse to "Punch" it will have many delighted readers.

It is announced that Charles Reade's long-time friend, Mr. John Coleman, is writing a memoir which he intends to call "The Romance of Charles Reade."

Mr. Augustine Birrell should be in his element in the volume on "Sydney Smith" which he is writing for the Macmillans' English Men of Letters series.

When a man has reached the age of seventy-six without publishing verse, it may be questioned whether he has any moral right to begin; but Mr. Alfred de Kantzaw,who makes his maiden appearance as a poet in a volume just published in London by Fisher Unwin has reached that age.

There are a number of American hotels of the better class which have found it profitable to minister to the needs of their guests by adding a good library to their equipment. One of the popular London hotels has made a further advance by putting a library of twenty books in each of its bedrooms.

Mr. James Bryce's "Biographical Sketches" which the Macmillans will publish this autumn includes the following subjects:

Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, J. R. Green, E. A. Freeman, T. H. Green, W. Robertson Smith, Lord Iddesleigh, Robert Lowe, C. S. Parnell, Lord Cairns, Sir George Jessel, Cardinal Manning, Archbishop Tait, Bishop Fraser, Dean Stanley, Lord Acton, Henry Sidgwick, Anthony Trollope.

The "Poems and Verses" of Edward Sandford Martin (Harper & Brothers) present in a delightful aspect a writer hitherto chiefly known by his keen, humorous and somewhat whimsical comments upon public affairs and the goings-on in "this busy world." There is an ease of versification, a flow of spirits and an ingenuity of rhyme in some of these verses which suggest now Dr. Holmes and now Owen Seaman: yet they are not imitations but have a quality of their own. Among the lighter verses perhaps "Blandina"

and "Uncertainty" are most pleasing; while among the serious poems there is nothing finer or more imaginative than the opening poem "The Sea is His."

That the conventional estimates of character and conduct are as often false as true is of course the point that Richard Bagot sets out to make in "The Just and the Unjust," and it is of course by a study of feminine types that he makes it. A "society novel" of the most pronounced order-its scene laid among the "smart set" of London -the book is clever and readable, but it leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. John Lane.

Of the gradual passing away of a bit of London which is rich in personal associations the London Times remarks:

Whitehall-gardens or Privy-garden, as the still secluded row of houses at the back of Whitehall was formerly called-has lost many of its charms since Pepys, on May 21, 1662, saw there "the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine's, laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw; and did me good to look at them." The lawns and the statues and the quaint dials have all disappeared, and now two of the houses are in the builder's hands, making the contrast greater than ever. No. 3, the old Office of Parliamentary Counsel, has been demolished, leaving a great gap between No. 2-which Disraeli took after the death of his wife about 30 years ago-and No. 4, once the home of Sir Robert Peel. It was at No. 4 that Peel formed the fine collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings which are now included in the National Collection, and it was in the dining room on the ground floor facing the riverwhich flowed past the bottom of the garden in those days-that he died on July 2, 1850. The house was built in 1824, and, till the construction of the Thames Embankment, there were steps leading to the river.