long, pompous, pedantic, illegible; and that, in some instances, as on the shocking epitaph of Gay—

"Life is a jest, and all things show it:

I thought so once, and now I know it "

On the

they strike a radically false note. But here and there-not to speak of mere felicities of language-they inculcate a noble lesson. tomb of brave young Francis Holles we read that—

"Man's life is measured by his works, not days;

Not aged sloth but active youth hath praise."

Solon had the Athenian Hermæ inscribed with moral gnomes for the instruction of the multitude. Many a brief expression on an Abbey tomb serves the same purpose. Is there nothing striking in the line,

“He feared man so little because he feared God so much," on the tomb of Lord Lawrence? Have none been stirred to generosity by the prayer that God would enable him to bless his fellow-men, recorded on the place where lay the remains of George Peabody? Who is not touched by the energetic reprobation of the slave trade-" that open sore of the world "-the last words ever written by Livingstone in his solitude, and here engraved upon his tomb? The two monosyllables, “Love-Serve,” on the pedestal of the statue of Lord Shaftesbury, will epitomize for thousands the main moral teaching of the Gospels. Many more instances might be given, but I will only add that they may often be found in unnoticed corners. Few slabs are less noticed than that humble piece of marble which records Jeremiah Horrox, the young curate of Hoole, and the inventor of the micrometer, who died at twenty-two, after detecting the long inequality in the mean motion of Jupiter and Saturn, and determining the motion of the Lunar Apse. He was the first to observe the transit of Venus, on Sunday, Nov. 24, 1639 (O.S.), in the brief interval between three full Sunday services. Important and intensely interesting as he knew the observation to be, he yet would not sacrifice to it one moment of his sacred duties, but nobly says of them, "Ad majora avocatus quæ ob hæc parerga negligi non decuit."

I have said nothing here of the inestimable value of the Abbey and its monuments as preserving for us in a striking and concrete form the marvellously changing phases of Art as represented by sculpture, and the manner in which those phases represent the influence of age after age on the minds of the people, and on their mode of contemplating death. This and much more must be left untouched.

Obviously in this paper-spatiis inclusus iniquis-I have only been. able to touch, as it were, on the outermost fringe of the subject; but even what I have written here may suffice to show the reason why I ask the question, and I would fain ask it of the whole English and American people- What is to be the future of Westminster Abbey ? I say of the American people as well of the English, for America,

too, has a share, and a large one, in our national mausoleum. One great purpose that the building and its history may serve, is to bind the two nations—which are yet one nation-in closer union. Such burning questions as "fishery disputes" ought very rapidly to burn themselves out when Englishmen and Americans worship side by side in the Abbey, and remember that all its glories and memories up till the days of the Pilgrim Fathers, nay, up to the War of Independence, belong equally to both. "In signing away his own empire George III. did not sign away the empire of English law, of English literature, of English blood, of English religion, or of the English tongue." Elsewhere I have shown more fully the share of Americans in Westminster Abbey.* It contains the bust of their most beloved poet. It is enriched by their gifts. It is the first object of their pilgrimage. They feel rightly and proudly that it is theirs as well as ours. Therefore, I ask Americans and Englishmen what shall be the future of a building which has been equally "a seat of royalty and a cradle of freedom?"

For hitherto there have always been one or two interments in it every year of men whose fame England would not willingly let die, and in the course of the next very few years those burials must finally cease. The dust of the mighty shall mingle under its pavement no longer; and, what is even more to be regretted, a few more memorials -and very few-will exhaust the possibility of continuing the long unbroken line of its famous records. The stream of English history which has flowed through it since the days of the sainted Confessor will cease to flow. It will become a record of a proud past, but of a past which it will no longer link into any continuity with the living present. If the student or the patriot wishes to find some contemporary trace of any past age of English story-of the struggles of Saxon and Norman, of the Plantagenets, of the Crusaders, of the Barons' War, of medieval thought, and worship, and legend, of the Tudors, of the Stuarts, of the House of Hanover, of the Renaissance, of the Reformation, of the eighteenth century, of the dawn of literature, of the dawn of science, of the dawn of philanthropy, of the dawn of art, of the drama, of the pursuits of peace, of glorous wars by sea and land, of education, of men's thoughts about life and death at any particular epoch-he has only to walk into the Abbey and he will find them. He may look at the sculptured shields of the Confessor, of Louis IX., of Frederic Barbarossa, of Simon de Montfort;-he may see Aylmer de Valence, riding to Bannockburn with the mantelets streaming from his helmet; -he may see the bas relief of the first pupil teacher instructing his class of junior boys;-he may look on the tomb of Chaucer;-he may read the epitaphs of Pope. The antiquarian may study the armour of Prince John of Eltham, or the jewelled bodice of Blanche de la Tour, * In a paper in Harper's Magazine.

or the peaked shoes of Edward the First, or the horned head-dress of Queen Philippa, or the exquisite Limoges enamel on the tomb of William de Valence, or the fine hammered ironwork which protects the tomb of good Queen Eleanor. The herald may find a hundred quaint devices which are but little known, and the historian may find proofs of facts and feelings which have found their way into no ordinary record. Are these memorials to cease for ever? Shall our descendants, centuries hence, look in vain in the Abbey for any traces of the thoughts, emotions, discoveries, arts, religion of the generations which succeeded Queen Victoria?

It need not be so. Mr. Shaw Lefevre, in the last number of the Nineteenth Century, has mentioned a plan for building a cloister or chapel-in immediate connection with the Abbey, and forming part of its buildings-which many years ago, in a slightly different form, excited the warm interest of the late Prince Consort. He has suggested that part of a certain derelict fund of public money be applied to assist in the large expense which will be required for carrying out this design. If this sum be granted by the House of Commons, the rest can and will be raised by public subscriptions. It does not follow that the exact design suggested will be ultimately carried Other plans, and perhaps better ones, may be devised; but the great main question is whether there be in the English nation-aided as we doubtless shall be by the splendid generosity of Americaenough of magnanimity, of public spirit, of pride in and gratitude for England's unequalled past, to consider the advantage of the generations yet unborn, and to see that Westminster Abbey should continue to be in the future what it has been in the past. When the Athenians bade Pheidias to make his statue of Athena in the Parthenon of ivory and gold, because those were the costliest materials, they showed the spirit of a great nation which says, Nil parvo aut humili modo.

out.

Is it too much to hope that, both in Parliament and elsewhere, all the meaner self-interest and niggardly economies of the present may be laid aside, and that the question how best to preserve and continue the rich historic associations of the Abbey for ages yet to come, may be approached in the large and generous spirit which shall prove us to be worthy inheritors of the memories which the great Abbey sets before us in so visible a form?

F. W. FARRAR.

IMPRESSIONS OF AUSTRALIA.

IT

II. SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE.

T is estimated by Mr. Hayter, the Statist to the Victorian Government, that in 1891, when the next simultaneous census of the colonies will be taken, the population of the Australian continent will be at least 3,200,000, and that the population of Tasmania and New Zealand will be about 800,000. If this estimate is correct, and there is no reason to regard it as excessive, the Australasian group will contain within the next three years four millions of people.*

* "Victorian Year Book for 1885-6." By Henry Heylyn Hayter. I take this oppor tunity to express—if it is not impertinent-my admiration of the manner in which the statistics of Victoria and the comparative statistics of the whole of the Australasian Colonies are presented in this volume. Mr. Hayter does not merely present elaborate tables relating to (1) Population, (2) Finance, (3) Vital Statistics, (4) Interchange, (5) Production, (6) Law, Crime, &c., (7) Accumulation, (8) Defences, (9) Religious, Moral, and Intellectual Progress: he discusses his figures with the skill of a scientific statistician and with a clearness and directness of style that make his book as attractive as it is instructive. The statistics are very minute, and throw a most interesting light on a very large number of curious aspects of colonial life. Last year Mr. Coghlan, the Statistician to the Government of New South Wales, published a volume, entitled "The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, 1886–87." This, too, is admirably done. It contains an historical sketch, beginning with the early discoverers, and bringing down the story of the colony to our own times. It also contains a most excellent account of the physical configuration of New South Wales, its climate, geology, mines and minerals, vegetation, and fauna; and discussions and tables similar to those contained in Mr. Hayter's "Year Book," illustrating the present statistics of the colony. It derives a special value from the fact that under each heading there is an historical survey of the subject to which it relates-a sketch, for example, of the beginnings and the progress of pastoral enterprise. Both these volumes are issued by the Governments of the respective colonies. Each of the colonies I visited publishes an annual volume, exhibiting the whole of its statistics for the preceding year, and comparative tables for the other colonies; and the statistics especially those of New South Wales ("Statistical Register" and "Hand-book of New South Wales Statistics")-are of great interest and value. But the only official "Year Book," containing an appreciation and discussion of the figures, which I happen to have seen, is that prepared by Mr. Hayter for Victoria. The closing paragraph, however, of the preface to Mr. Coghlan's volume creates the hope that he, too, intends to issue an annual "Year Book." Would it be possible for the Imperial Government to let us have (1) a similar "Year Book" for Great Britain and Ireland, and (2) another, constructed on different lines, for the Empire!

Mr. Hayter, with that delight in the speculative treatment of figures, which characterises a statistician who has a real genius for his subject, has also worked out a table showing what the population of the group would be at each of the ten next decennial periods, supposing the same increase to take place between census and census, that was found to have taken place between 1871 and 1881. It appears that in 1981 the population of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, would, on this hypothesis, be just under ninety-four millions; and in 1991-a hundred years from the next simultaneous census-more than one hundred and thirty-three millions. He closes this discussion by

the wise words: "It must be admitted that, at the present time, such speculations are more curious than practically useful.”

But the imagination of the Australian people delights to dwell on the probability on the certainty-of the immense expansion of their numbers during the next hundred years. They are now celebrating the centenary of the founding of the earliest of the colonies; they confidently predict that the Australian continent alone, which now contains about three millions of inhabitants, will contain, when the second century comes round, a hundred millions. As the patriotism of young Englishmen feeds its fires on the past glories of our race, the patriotism of young Australians derives equal fervour from the vision of the future development of their country.. With a population of a hundred millions, having in their veins the best and most vigorous blood of these islands, blending in themselves all the best qualities of the English, Scotch, and Irish people, inheriting the material, intellectual, and moral triumphs of European civilization, living in a country the resources of which are boundless, and under skies such as poets in their dreams have seen bending over the isles of the blessed, Australia, a hundred years hence, will be one of the greatest, most powerful, and most splendid of nations. These are the prophecies and hopes on which the more ardent and generous of the young Australians delight to dwell. Their buoyant faith in the future of their people is an animating contrast to the weariness, the despondency, the hopelessness, the perplexity with which many of the most thoughtful and most cultivated of our young men at home discuss the condition and prospects of our own country. And the exulting hopefulness is a great element of strength.

A hundred millions of people on the Australian continent within the next hundred years-this is what the Australians expect. And there seems to be more than room for them all. England, Scotland, and Wales have an area of 88,000 square miles, with a population estimated at rather more than 32,500,000. The area of the Australian. continent is 2,944,000 square miles, or just about thirty-three times as large.

Some very considerable deductions, however, would have to be