which they are daily losing under ultramontane influences; and there is a more saintly Aurora Raby ':

'Who gazed upon a world she scarcely knew

As seeking not to know it: stately, lone,
As grows a flower, thus quietly she grew,

And kept her heart serene within its zone;'—

all in their respective spheres working for the salvation of Lothair.

The last, or all but the last, complete poem of Heinrich Heine is a Dream in which he sees his own agonised and world-worn frame reposing in a sarcophagus surrounded with sculptures alternately picturing the traditionary figures and stories of the two ancient worlds :

'the primal paths our race has trod— Hellas, the nurse of Man, distinct as Man, Judæa pregnant with the Living God.'

But even that rest is broken by the

'War of creeds:

The bas-reliefs dispose themselves for battle,
Pan's dying wail the Pagan ardour feeds,

And Moses blasts his foes like Pharaoh's cattle.'

Thus here for the rescue of Lothair from the domination of the mystical Hierarchy rises a Grecian Goddess-a Venus-Minerva, a creation of Art and Liberty..

'It was the face of a matron, apparently of not many summers, for her shapely figure was still slender, though her mien was stately. But it was the countenance that had commanded the attention of Lothair: pale, but perfectly Attic in outline, with the short upper lip, and the round chin, and a profusion of dark chestnut hair bound by a Grecian fillet, and on her brow a star.

"Yes; I am struck by that face. Who is it?"

"If your Lordship could only get a five-franc piece of the last French Republic, 1850, you would know. I dare say the moneychangers could get you one. All the artists of Paris-painters, and sculptors, and medallists-were competing to produce a face worthy of representing La République Française; nobody was satisfied, when Oudine caught a girl of not seventeen, and, with a literal reproduction of nature, gained the prize with unanimity.'

Under the fascinations of this Bride of Corinth,' Lothair forgets alike the beauteous English girl whom he had desired to make the mistress of his serene and luxurious existence, and the lovely daughter of the ancient faith, with whom he had shared the awful delights of the Roman ceremonial and the pleasant diversions of croquet under abbatial walls, and in whose heart he had only one rival-the Church. Theodora, the

goddess, has a confederate, an odd combination of a Virginian slaveholder and an Italian patriot, towards whom Lothair is almost equally attracted, and on whose staff we soon find him engaged on a somewhat incongruous enterprise for a more than incipient convert to the Roman faith-an invasion of the domains of the Pope. She is killed at Mentana, and Lothair, transported to Rome as a wounded prisoner, falls once more under the care of his English Catholic friends, by whom he is brought into a state of mind in which he becomes doubtful whether he was not all the time in the army of the Zouaves instead of that of Garibaldi. He is made the unconscious hero of a religious festival, when a miracle takes place in his honour, not unlike that of La Salette; and when he reads, with indignation, the account of it in the Osservatore Romano,' he is assured by the Cardinal' that nothing appears in that official journal that is not 6 drawn up and well considered by truly pious men.' Thus spell-bound and almost physically constrained, he wanders for the first time down into the Coliseum, where the ghost of Theodora appears to him, lets him know that he is going on in a bad way, and he is picked up senseless.

So to fill up this extravagant outline as to make it not only readable but amusing is the work of no ordinary artist. We once asked an American how he accounted for the great prevalence of the humour of exaggeration in his countrymen's witticisms: Sir, it is the enormous dimensions of our country.' We can only account for Mr. Disraeli's faculty of this nature by the wide range of his fancy and his fun; and it is really wonderful that he retains the mirth, and the power to exercise it, after more than a quarter of a century's habitual life in a public assembly so impervious to humour, though apprehensive enough of wit. Here once more the old spirit of Ixion' and 'Captain Popanilla' reappears; once more the hurried Hudson 'rushes into the chambers of the Vatican,' and now the confused reviewer, as of old the perplexed country-gentleman, takes the irony for bombast and the good nonsense for grave indiscretion. But a novel by Mr. Disraeli would not be complete without an excursion into Palestine. We remember the close of Tancred,' how the Duke and Duchess of Bellamont arrived 'at Jerusalem,' and we are sure to find Lothair there some time or other. We know the large capital that Ernest Renan has made out of Josephus's highly-coloured description of the garden of Galilee,' for the purpose of elevating the social status and intellectual culture of the Christian Apostles, and the determination of Mr. Disraeli to keep alive the glory of his sacred people decks with everlasting freshness the

crumbling walls and arid suburbs of Jerusalem. This scene, too, as many of our readers know by experience, is altogether described in visionary shapes and imaginative colours; but the passage is eloquent, and the reflection which closes it characteristic.

There are few finer things than the morning view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. The fresh and golden light falls on a walled city with turrets and towers and frequent gates: the houses of freestone with terraced or oval roofs sparkle in the sun while the cupolaed (?) pile of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the broad steep of Sion crowned with the Tower of David, vary the monotony of the general masses of building. But the glory of the scene is the Mosque of Omar as it rises on its broad platform of marble from the deep ravine of Kedron, with its magnificent dome high in the air, its arches and gardened courts, and its crescents glittering amid the cedar, the cypress, and the palm. "The view of Jerusalem," said the Syrian, never becomes familiar, for its associations are so transcendent, so "various, and so inexhaustible, that the mind can never anticipate its "course of thought and feeling, when one sits, as we do now, on this "immortal mount."

Here the spiritual pilgrimage of Lothair virtually ends. Disgusted with narrow Protestantism, seduced by the specious fallacies of Rome,-revived by the sensuous idealisms of Paganism, he is at length raised to a practical and intelligent Christianity by the traditionary influences and divine associations of the Holy Land. Such is the theory of these volumes, and it is the same that, in one form or other, Mr. Disraeli has preached in his books and in his life. This is not the place to criticise its merits or its defects-its proportions of truth and error; but there is assuredly something honourable and reasonable in its consistent maintenance during the vicissitudes of a long political career, which it could not successfully advance, but which it may, in many points, interpret and explain.

If we cannot accept as real beings Mr. Disraeli's sketches of society, and we are not sure how far the paradoxes he utters through their lips are in accordance with his own opinions, we readily admit that there are passages in these volumes in which his philosophy is not captious or even his theology insincere. We give Mr. Disraeli credit for the wish to record a protest against the stupid and aggressive materialism of the present age; and we think the following conversation (which is not the only one of its kind) deserves to be quoted:

"But there is something to me more interesting than the splendour of tropical scenery," said Lothair, "even if Galilee could offer it. I wish to visit the cradle of my faith."

"And you would do wisely," said the Syrian, " for there is no doubt the spiritual nature of man is developed in this land."

And yet there are persons at the present day who doubt-even deny the spiritual nature of man," said Lothair. "I do not, I could not there are reasons why I could not."

"There are some things I know, and some things I believe," said the Syrian. "I know that I have a soul, and I believe that it is immortal."

"It is science that by demonstrating the insignificance of this globe in the vast scale of creation has led to this infidelity," said Lothair.

"Science may prove the insignificance of this globe in the scale of creation," said the stranger, "but it cannot prove the insignificance of man. What is the earth compared with the sun? a molehill by a mountain; yet the inhabitants of this earth can discover the elements of which the great orb consists and will probably ere long ascertain all the conditions of its being. Nay, the human mind can penetrate far beyond the sun. There is no relation therefore between the faculties of man and the scale in creation of the planet which he inhabits."

' "I was glad to hear you assert the other night the spiritual nature of man in opposition to Mr. Phœbus."

He

"Ah! Mr. Phoebus!" said the stranger with a smile. "He is an old acquaintance of mine. And I must say he is very consistentexcept in paying a visit to Jerusalem. That does surprise me. said to me the other night the same things as he said to me at Rome many years ago. He would revive the worship of nature. The deities whom he so eloquently describes and so exquisitely delineates are the ideal personifications of the most eminent human qualities and chiefly the physical. Physical beauty is his standard of excellence, and he has a fanciful theory that moral order would be the consequence of the worship of physical beauty, for without moral order he holds physical beauty cannot be maintained. But the answer to Mr. Phoebus, is that his system has been tried and has failed, and under conditions more favourable than are likely to exist again; the worship of nature ended in the degradation of the human race."

"But Mr. Phœbus cannot really believe in Apollo and Venus," said Lothair. "These are phrases. He is, I suppose, what is called a Pantheist."

"No doubt the Olympus of Mr. Phoebus is the creation of his easel," replied the Syrian. "I should not, however, describe him as a Pantheist, whose creed requires more abstraction than Mr. Phœbus the worshipper of nature would tolerate. His school never care to pursue any investigation which cannot be followed by the eye-and the worship of the beautiful always ends in an orgy. As for Pantheism, it is Atheism in domino. The belief in a Creator who is unconscious of creating is more monstrous than any dogma of any of the Churches in this city, and we have them all here."

"But there are people now who tell you that there never was any Creation, and therefore there never could have been a Creator," said Lothair.

"" And which is now advanced with the confidence of novelty," said

the Syrian, "though all of it has been urged and vainly urged thousands of years ago. There must be design, or all we see would be without sense, and I do not believe in the unmeaning. As for the natural forces to which all creation is now attributed, we know they are unconscious, while consciousness is as inevitable a portion of our existence as the eye or the hand. The conscious cannot be derived from the unconscious. Man is divine."

"I wish I could assure myself of the personality of the Creator," said Lothair. "I cling to that, but they say it is unphilosophical."

"In what sense?" asked the Syrian. Is it more unphilosophical to believe in a personal God, omnipotent and omniscient, than in natural forces unconscious and irresistible? Is it unphilosophical to combine power with intelligence? Goethe, a Spinozist who did not believe in. Spinoza, said that he could bring his mind to the conception that in the centre of space we might meet with a monad of pure intelligence. What may be the centre of space I leave to the dædal imagination of the author of 'Faust;' but a monad of pure intelligence is that more philosophical than the truth, first revealed to man amid these everlasting hills," said the Syrian, "that God made man in His own image?

"I have often found in that assurance a source of sublime consolation," said Lothair.

"It is the charter of the nobility of man," said the Syrian, "one of the divine dogmas revealed in this land; not the invention of Councils, not one of which was held on this sacred soil, confused assemblies first got together by the Greeks, and then by barbarous nations in barbarous times."

"Yet the divine land no longer tells us divine things," said Lothair.

"It may, or it may not, have fulfilled its destiny," said the Syrian. "In My Father's house are many mansions,' and by the various. families of nations the designs of the Creator are accomplished. God works by races, and one was appointed in due season and after many developments to reveal and expound in this land the spiritual nature of man. The Aryan and the Semite are of the same blood and origin, but when they quitted their central land they were ordained to follow opposite courses. Each division of the great race has developed one portion of the double nature of humanity, till after all their wanderings they met again, and, represented by their two choicest families, the Hellenes and the Hebrews, brought together the treasures of their accumulated wisdom and secured the civilisation of man.”’

The hostile animus towards the Papal system, which is so prominent in these volumes, will surprise many who remember the conciliatory tone towards the Roman Catholics generally adopted by Mr. Disraeli in Parliament, his own theocratic turn of mind, and his frequently avowed belief that nothing but the accidents of Irish history dissevered that body from Conservative opinions, to which they would be otherwise naturally attracted by their love of public order, and their sense of the