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moreover is one which no brokendown literary adventurer is fit to undertake. The original creators in the world of letters and of art occupy, no doubt, a supreme position, and deserve the homage of mankind; but the well-equipped critic, the man of wide reading, of cultivated taste, of wellbalanced mind and complete intellectual disinterestedness is a man whom society may well honour. The balance of faculties which we require in the critic is something in which the greatest geniuses⚫ are sometimes sadly lacking. In fact the business of a genius would seem to be simply to be a genius, and give the world his one special gift; and, that done, we find him even as other men. On one side there is preponderant development, on another there is possibly deficiency. It is ungracious perhaps to look such noble gift-horses in the mouth; but their surpassing merits should not lead us to disparage men who, if less brilliantly endowed, possess, nevertheless, special faculties of no common order. The accomplished critic, with his calm penetrative glance and infinite tact, is a man whom those who know and love literature best know how to value.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that the critic finds all the materials for his criticism in the work before him. Far from it he has materials in his own mind, derived from his wide experience of human thought; he knows the ways of men, and has grasped so many relations that nothing can touch his mind that does not waken countless associations and vibrate along a thousand lives. So that in interpreting an author he takes of his own and weaves it in with his presentation of the author's thoughts. To know what critics have done and can do for the illustration of great texts, and the cultiva

tion of the minds of the educated classes, let any one run through a number of volumes of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and try to do justice to a few of the numberless essays that I will there be found under such names as De Rémusat, Schérer, Janet, St. Réné-Taillandier, Renan, Réville, to mention only a few of the more prominent ones. The work of these men

is immense, and executed with a faithfulness that is an honour to them and to French letters. Our own Review literature will show the same thing, but in a less striking form. It is not the work of broken-down literary men that we see in such periodicals, but work, in many cases, vastly better than any that the brilliant phrasemaker to whom the sneer to which we allude is due ever put off his hands.

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Criticism should be the voice of impartial and enlightened reason. often what passes for criticism is the voice of hireling adulation or hireling enmity. Illustrations of this will occur to everyone, but there is no use in blaming criticism, which, as has been said, is an intellectual necessity of the age. The foregoing remarks have been made in the hope that they may help to clear away some prevalent misconceptions by showing the organic connection, so to speak, that exists between criticism as a function, or as a mode of intellectual activity, and the very simplest intellectual pro cesses. Such a mode of regarding it should do away with the odium that in so many minds attaches to the idea of criticism Let us all try to be critics according to the measure of our abilities and opportunities. aim at seeing all we can, at gaining as many points of view as possible. Let us compare carefully and judge impartially; and we may depend upon it we shall be the better for the very effort.

Let us

ROUND THE TABLE.

CHARLES LEVER IN CANADA.

HE lovers of Charles Lever's writ

ings have doubtless experienced a shock of disappointment at the bald and disjointed biography lately issued from the pen of W. J. Fitzpatrick, 'LL.D., M.R.I.A., Professor of History; J.P., &c., &c.' With a subject replete with biographical interest, and a history full of variety and adventure, 'The life of Charles Lever,' in Mr. Fitspatrick's hands, has dwindled down into a series of trivial ancedotes, carelessly strung together, and feebly told. The genial characteristics of the great novelist, his bright humour and bonhommie, are lost in a maze of insignificant traits and stories that are too dull and pointless to bear repetition. Better that the author of Charles O'Malley,' 'Tony Butler' and 'Sir Brooke Fosbrooke' should have been known by his writings alone, than have suffered at the hands of such an historian.

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It is, however, with reference to Lever's Canadian experiences that I write. He is said to have visited Canada in 1829, as the medical officer of an emigrant ship bound for Quebec. He is stated to have spent the summer of 1829 in Canada and the States; visited some of the Indian settlements and Lake Erie, and went as far as Inscarara.' Where that may be, we are not told,and a search through gazetteers and maps of the period has failed to enlighten us. He is stated to have passed from civilized districts to the prairie, with the determination to seek the experiences of forest life, with an Indian tribe.' Forest life upon the prairie! He there got so thoroughly in accord with the

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red man's habits and manner of life, that the Indian Sachem formally admitted him into tribal privileges, and initiated him into membership.' Growing tired of his savage companions, and being told that an attempt to escape would cost his life, he finally absconds with an Indian called 'Tahata' or 'the Post,' and arrives at Quebec in December,attired in 'mocassins and head feathers!' There he sees 'men slipping along in rackets;' (snow shoes?) and 'women wrapped in furs sitting snugly in chairs, pushed along the ice some ten or twelve miles an hour.' To illustrate the combina. tion of vulgar egotism with impertinent curiosity which marked the emigrant population of Canada, we are told a story about a person Lever is suppos ed to have met in travelling from 'Utica to the Springs' (Saratoga ?). From such barbarous surroundings, Lever flung himself into the ranks of the less repulsive red man.'

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It will be remembered that in 1829 the population of Lower Canada was about three quarters of a million, and of Upper Canada a quarter of million; that the St. Lawrence, Rideau, and Welland canals were building or built, and steamboats plying upon all the lakes. Where then did Lever obtain his experience of savage life? We are told by his historian, that in 'Roland Cashel' he details his history when a prisoner with the Comanches, a savage American tribe! Comanches in Canada! Surely the Professor of History in the Royal Hibernian Academy should study the geography and history of Canada.

Considerations of time and plan lead me to think Lever's experience of savage life in Canada apocryphal.

Certainly the adventures detailed in 'Con Cregan,'-with which his historian credits him,-could never have happened to him. Moreover, he is stated to have been in Germany during the same year as that allotted for his Canadian experiences. No doubt

Lever crossed the Atlantic, and spent a short time in Canada and the United States, but about the Indian adventures-Credat Indians.

CANADA'S DESTINIES.

-If it were not for John Bull's strong aversion to the consideration of all troublesome questions one moment before they are forced upon him, and for the conventional type of 'loyalty' imposed by a partisan press on the people of Canada, the question of Canada's political future would be one of the burning issues of the day. There is nothing lacking to make the present connection between Canada and the Mother Country one of the absurdest, and yet one of the most embarrassing of political survivals.' It is no longer an organic tie, but simply an antiquated constitutional form, out of which all virtue has long since vanished. Everyone sees this, except those who are too indolent or too obstinate to see it. But such is the terrorism exerted by the party press that people dare not speak what they think. In this case, as in a thousand others, each party is watching the other in the hope of being able to turn against it whatever odium may attach to the striking out of a new line of policy. If the Liberals showed the faintest disposition to make Canada's relation to the Mother Country a matter for free discussion, in the interest of Canada, the Tories would instantly rouse against them all the forces of prejudice and hyprocrisy throughout the country, and no doubt would succeed in making a powerful stir. And precisely the same would happen if the Conservatives made the first move. Our brave Liberals would raise a frantic cry about

'loyalty,' as if the loyalty of a Canadian were not due in the first place to Canada. And we call ourselves a free people, while we have to go into nooks and corners, in order to confide to our friends what we think respecting the paramount interests of our country. Surely it is time this folly ceased. Party government may be a fine thing, 'distinctly precious, blessed, subtle, significant and supreme,' as the artcritic said lately in Punch; but if the Grit party and the Tory party are to be the upper and nether mill-stones which, between them, are to crush out free speech and free thought in all matters of fundamental importance, then are we paying too dearly for the party system.

What every one knows is that Canada's position is at present most unsatisfactory; that it is embarrassing to the Mother Country, and that, under it, Canadian interests are every where at a disadvantage. We have no national feeling, no national sense of responsibility. We are interesting neither to ourselves nor to others. Englishmen care next to nothing for us, and the other nations of Europe care absolutely nothing; whereas 'American' civilisation is a matter of constant interest and study. We are growing visibly on the shady side of the wall, while our neighbours, owing to the simple fact that they are solving great political and social problems for themselves, and are independently maintaining their own prestige in the world, are enjoying no end of sunshine. If they had only our population, the eyes of Europe would still be turned to them and not to us. Who wants to know anything of a colony? Our British fellow countrymen, when they cross the Atlantic, think the only thing worth stepping upon Canadian territory for is to see our side of Niagara Falls. Dickens, Thackeray, Huxley, Tyndall, Proctor, Froude what did we see of any of these men in Canada. The attraction is all to the south of us; we are nothing. Would this be

the case if we were an independent people, holding our own as best we could in the great family of nations? No one will suppose so for a moment. The only question seems to be whether after our long tutelage, we are really fit for the burdens of an independent national life. We might be at a loss at first, but surely the spirit of our people would rise to the occasion, and we should find within ourselves a strength we have never realized. Every year

passed under the present system, is a heavy loss to the country. We all feel it, young and old. We know we are not doing justice to ourselves, and yet in deference to the Grit and Tory Grundies, we hold our peace. But let some able politician, shaking himself aloof from party, declare boldly that the hour of Canada's majority has arrived, and he will perhaps be surprised at the amount of support he will receive. VOX CLAM.

BOOK REVIEWS.

A History of Our Own Times, from the Accession of Queen Victoria to the Berlin Congress, by JUSTIN MCCARTHY. Vols. I. and II. New York: Harper Brothers; Toronto: Willing & Williamson.

It is with much pleasure that we hail this recent contribution to contemporary history, and our pleasure is the greater when we see that the subject has sufficient charms to attract the attention of a liberal Member of Parliament. It has been well said that the history of the day before yesterday is less known than that of any other period of our national life. We know of to-day's doings in a more or less fragmentary, confused way from the newspapers. But there are few among us who could sit down and write a tolerably connected account of the way the world wagged in 1878. The historian of recent periods suffers most from lack of material. There are, it is true, newspaper files by the car-load,-but in one way or another experience soon teaches the student how little their columns are to be relied on. Read from day to day, their contents bear the impress of truth, but we too often find that their gravest announcements of facts are only the condensation of idle rumour, their most serious personal charges only the outcome of malignant political hatred and backstairs gossip. Such a historian finds the living actors who grace the scenes he paints all interested, perhaps unconsciously, in warping or

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colouring facts,-and it is not till years have elapsed and struggling ambitions lie quieted in their graves, that the information stored away in correspondence, diaries, and memoirs, begins to see the light. The difficulties that beset the man who essays to picture what passed beneath his own eyes are well exemplified in Mr. Kinglake's History of the Crimea,' as are also the peculiar advantages that attend such a position. No historian writing fifty years after the event could have amassed the wealth of illustrative detail as to the currents of the heady fights' of Balaclava or Inkerman that Kinglake gathered from the lips of the survivors; but at the same time, we may add, no such historian would have cared to use this material. It is well perhaps that there should be on record such a full account of individual deeds of prowess, and the book will always be of interest to the military student; but, as a whole, one may parody the famous saying uttered à propos of a charge recorded in its voluminous pages, C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'histoire.'

In one way newspapers afford invalu

able assistance to the writer of modern history. We refer to the infallible test they afford to the varying pulse of public opinion. They may, and often do, mislead as to facts, but there is one thing they never seek to conceal from us, and that is the public feeling as to these facts. Of course we refer at present to the general English press, and.

not to those merely partisan organs, of which we have too many specimens amongst us, which find relief after every political reverse in an ostrich-like hiding of the head. Such a paper as the Times, varying with the shifting current of upper middle-class opinion, and disclosing especially in its correspondence columns the unbiassed views of the ordinary citizen, supplies an unerring index to the health of the body politic. And in the modern view of history, the spirit in which a rumour was received by a nation (although that rumour afterwards proved unfounded), may be a fact of sufficient importance to be chronicled although the occasion that gave rise to it may sink into utter insignificance.

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For example, few things now seem to us more trifling than the so-called "Acts of Aggression on the part of Cardinal Wiseman, dealt with by Mr. McCarthy in his chapter on "The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill." Slight as they now appear to us, the historian would but ill perform his part if he did not give us a full account of the outburst of indignation that promptly responded to the appeal contained in Lord John Russell's famous Durham letter. We see in that great but aimless movement the evidence of a disturbed and unsettled state of the national mind as to the national religion; the premonitory symptoms of that struggle against Tractarianism which has survived all the original leaders of that school and is now being waged with unabated fury between Ritualists Evangelicals. In a more benighted age the public wrath that found harmless vent in platform speeches, letters to the Times, and endless cartoons and squibs in Punch, would have expended itself in more active persecutions, and when the reaction came, it would not have been able to remove all trace of the contest as was done in '871 by the simple repeal of the effete and foolish Ecclesiastical l'itles Bill.

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It is not too much to say that modern history is largely indebted to our caricaturists. The main incident of the week, or the chief topic of discussion, is presented in a striking way, and the attitude of the national mind towards it pretty clearly indicated. Looked at in this light, how strange an instance of the irony of fate was it, when the sudden outburst of Jingoism called forth a reproduction of all Punch's cartoons upon Lord Beaconsfield ! With what a bitter smile must he have looked over

its pages and recognised the fact that the main current of opinion had steadily considered him as a man of broken pledges, and one in whom the strategist outweighed the statesman.

Of the contemporary criticism afforded by such means, Mr. McCarthy has made careful use. His sketches of leading politicians strike us as true as well as life-like, and he has not let his national predilections warp his judgment in estimating Irish orators and statesmen.

It is an interesting and curious fact that it is only men of the Liberal shade of politics who care to undertake the task of bringing our history books down to date. Such a writer was Washington Wilkes, who wrote the useful book called "The Half-Century," which covers the first half of the nineteenth century, in fact he was a little more of a partisan and less of a man of the world than Mr. Justin McCarthy. His work is adapted to fill the place of an introduction to the history now under review, and the two together form the most enconraging study for progressive minds, and the facts they relate explain sufficiently why Conservative historians prefer to draw their inspiration from more remote ages and to depict very different manners and contests in which their defeats have been less marked and conspicuous.

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There are a few blots to be noticed in this work. It is hardly correct to describe Lower Canada as "Western Canada," and the epithet " steepy as applied to the hilly streets of Quebec is picturesque, but we see no reason why it should displace its old and recognised relation "steep." Occasionally Mr. McCarthy indulges in fine writing. "Making the currents of the air man's faithful Ariel," is a description of electricity worthy of a penny-a-liner, and is objectionable as containing the worst faults of cheap journalistic composition. In the first place electricity is not an air current, and secondly the jingle of "air" and "Áriel" has a most unpleasant sound. We also notice the inevitable bull. Speaking of the attempt by Francis on Her Majesty's life, Mr. McCarthy tells us that he fired a pistol at her, and in the same breath he says it was not certain whether the weapon was loaded or not! Of course what he means is 'loaded with ball.'

We shall look forward with much interest to the remaining volumes of this work.

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