my card at the hotel he insisted on my coming up to his room; he inquired after relatives who had been dead for twenty years as if he had met them at dinner the day before yesterday. Several years later at the same hotel my respects were paid to the late Emperor of Brazil. That potentate had been travelling in the Midlands, and had just paid a surprise-visit to Chatsworth in the absence of its owner, the late Duke of Devonshire. The Brazilian monarch, always an inconveniently early riser, had reached the place shortly after daybreak, and only a sleepy housekeeper, after some waiting, responded to the knock. The attempt at conversation that followed was necessarily unintelligible to the pair. Presently a groom of the chambers, as the Emperor supposed, in plain clothes, appeared. To the imperial relief, he addressed the visitor in French; the sovereign continued the talk in Italian, and the supposed major-domo showed himself a master of the tongue; the Emperor changed his speech to the Neapolitan dialect. and then conversed in a variety of that dialect used only in a particular quarter of Naples, but the ducal lackey seemed more at home than ever. Before the imperial caller signed his name in the Chatsworth visiting-book he asked the housekeeper whether all the duke's servants passed a preliminary examination in modern languages. The pangloss, whom the Brazilian potentate took for a menial, turned out to be Sir James Lacaita, of the British Museum, the most accomplished linguist of his day, who had obliged his old friend the duke by coming down to Chatsworth to examine some manuscripts of which the united science of European academies could make noth. ing.

During my acquaintance with himnever at Claridge's, but in the same quarter at Brown's in Dover Street

used to put up the most amusing, perhaps the cleverest, Oriental that ever wasted his time and money in a fashionable quarter on a hopeless cause. Than the entourage of Ismail Pasha, ex-Khedive of Egypt, modern history records no body of followers more prompt to plunder their chief. Ismail was the most easily deceived and by no means the least kindly of Eastern intriguers; he carried about such wealth as he had saved from the wreck of his deposition, in the shape of plate, jewels, and precious stones. So long as there remained an available pennyworth of these possessions, he was attended by a motley and evergrowing suite, who bade him "be of good cheer," for was not each one of them making interest with the Courts and Cabinets of the world to secure that his patron should soon come by his own again? In this way and on these pretences endless were the sums spent on entertainments at Brown's Hotel, on presents of jewelry, on cash payments, or what were euphemistically called retainers, that poor Ismail was induced to pay.

On the old coach-road from London, leading by Bath and Wells to the west of England, still stands, wearing its old name, Piper's Inn. A long. low, half-thatched, half-tiled building, it is to-day merely a pot-house; but the place still keeps the fine mahogany and oak furniture which in pre-railway days made it the admiration of the whole countryside. If its name does not occur in his novels, Fielding often mentioned it in his letters; here Squire Western always put up when taking his daughter Sophia to Bath; and in one of the upstair sitting-rooms may still be seen the table at which Mr. Western shocked the refined ears of his sister, Mrs. Blifil, by launching in his broadest "Zomerzetzhire" and in his coarsest patois his invectives against Hanover rats and everything

The traditional sayings of Christsayings, we mean, outside the Canon of the New Testament to whose authenticity some credence is given by the learned-are very few. The late Bishop of Durham, Dr. Westcott, at the end of his "Introduction to the Study of the Gospels" published a list of as many as appeared to him to contain "true and original traits of the Lord's teaching, and as such to be invested with the greatest interest." Several other striking sentences were found some years ago on a single sheet of papyrus on the site of what was once the town of Oxyrrhynchus, in Egypt. These also, our readers may remember, attracted the attention of many scholars. Both sets of phrases are disjointed, some only partly decipherable, others, to our mind, incomprehensible. Others again seem to us to bear in a striking manner upon one of the great religious questions of to-day, -i.e., the attitude of Christ towards the individual conscience, and by inference, His attitude towards those who find themselves unable to come to a conclusion as to the things which pertain to religious peace. The doubt of the twentieth century and the unbelief of the first are such very different things that to compare them is nearly impossible. There are not more than two or three instances in the Gospel of religious men who were apparently by their own honest minds, apart from any indifference, any sense of scorn, or any preference for the darkness which covers evil deeds, compelled to admit that they did not believe. St. Thomas was one; the man who gave a voice to all religious-minded doubters from then till now, who "cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief," was another. Probably St. James may have been a

third. He is generally considered to have counted among the "brethren" who did not believe, and to have been converted after the Resurrection by our Lord Himself. It is a significant fact that in his Epistle-supposing, as many scholars suppose, that he wrote the letter which bears his name-he puts faith in a less important light than any other writer of the New Testament. Towards all these men Christ's attitude is benignant. To James He grants a revelation. The "unbelief" of the father who prayed for his son is "helped" by his son's restoration to health. Thomas receives a proof, and, as we read the narrative, no rebuke whatever for his mistaken opinion. "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed" is a statement of a self-evident fact which must surely be acquiesced in by sceptic and Christian alike. It only comes to this: "How happy are those people who without asking for evidence are able to believe in the resurrection of the dead." If any other suggestion is contained in the words, it seems to us to be a suggestion of sympathy for a man who has been unable to accept the consolation of faith.

But to turn from the Gospels to the traditional sayings. The first upon Dr. Westcott's list unreservedly states that conscience, and not doctrine, is the final test by which every man must stand or fall. The saying as it is presented to us is set in a fragment of narrative:-"On the same day having seen one working on the Sabbath, He said to him, 'O man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not thou art cursed, and art a transgressor of the law.' The man at work was refusing to conform to the authority of what was considered in his day re

vealed religion. The Disciples who saw him were probably shocked at what seemed to them his act of profanation; but whether he was blameworthy or innocent was, according to our Lord, a matter which depended entirely upon his convictions. Regard for the Sabbath involved faith. It is no part of instinctive morality to stop work on a particular day of the week. The question was one of revelation, not of intuition. This saying of Christ's, if it is His-we must refer our readers to Dr. Westcott's book for the evidenceis somewhat more comprehensive than any sentence of the kind which has come down to us in the New Testament, but it is not out of keeping with the words recorded by St. Luke: "He that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes." Again, the true intent of this verse has, perhaps, some light thrown upon it by Romans xiv. 5-6, where a similar thought is apparently meant to be conveyed. "One man esteemeth one day above another: other esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it." In fact, what makes the man a sinner in such cases as that under consideration is not the act but the violation of the conscience.

an

Christ's blessings pronounced upon spiritual hunger and thirst, His exhortations to ask and to knock, His words to the lawyer who desired to be assured of eternal life and was told to continue in his present course of welldoing and he should live,-all point towards sympathy with the spiritually dissatisfied; and once more tradition confirms the attitude of our Lord in the Gospels. "Jesus saith, I stood in the midst of the world, and in the flesh was I seen of them. I found all men drunken, and no man found I athirst

among them.

My soul grieveth over

the sons of men because they are blind in their hearts." These possible words of Christ would seem to declare a state of uncertainty to be more hopeful than one of thoughtlessness. The orthodox faith of the Pharisees of His day had been turned by ceremonial and indifference into a dead self-satisfaction, out of which the scourge of doubt had no longer power to revive them. Perhaps the same suggestion is contained in another of these sayings-one which has a haunting fascination, but of whose meaning we feel by no means sure "They that wonder shall reign, and they that reign shall rest." Other words but partially decipherablefound in the Egyptian papyrus-seem to assert that the spirit of Christ is often near to those who imagine themselves to be alone, and is poured out through many channels, not necessarily religious. "Jesus saith where there are . . . and there is one alone . . . I am with him. Raise the stone, and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood, and there am I."

...

It must be remembered that though the Apostle's died in faith, they by no means lived their whole lives in it. The friends whom Christ chose and whom He called the salt of the earth withstood Him, misunderstood Him, denied, doubted, and deserted Him. But it may be asked,-Why, from the point of view you have been setting forth, is it then better to believe than to doubt? That question, which looks at first sight so reasonable, is in reality absurd. As well ask why is it better to feel safe than to feel apprehensive, to feel of some importance than to feel of unutterable insignificance, to belleve ourselves part of a divine order of things than to believe we are grains of dust in a whirlwind of chance, to expect to go through death to a fuller life than through our last agony to "the shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss, the

utter nothingness from which we came." Religious assurance is a tremendous strength, which those who go without, if indeed they are to blame, surely expiate their fault by their loss here. Perhaps it was to them that the last traditional words we shall quote were addressed. "They who wish to see me and to lay hold on my Kingdom must receive me by affliction and suffering." The doubters of whom we are speaking are not, of course, those who desire to convict their neighbors of an ill-considered faith. Theological argument is not an ignoble pastime, in that The Spectator.

it exercises two minds upon the most important of all questions, but it has not much to do with religion. We speak of the men who desire not intellectual victory but intellectual defeat; who want to find spiritual truth, not to chop polemical logic; whose greatest dread is that they should hear in their hearts at the last the terrible sentence, "Thou hast judged rightly"; and whose greatest hope is to be put in the end to intellectual confusion by the stern words which brought new life to the doubters upon the Emmaus road:-"O fools, and slow of heart to believe."

They are a relief from literature these fresh draughts from the sources of feeling and sentiment; as we read in an age of polish and criticism the first lines of written verse of a nation. -Emerson.

For centuries a wealth of national epic and song has been accumulating and circulating orally amongst the Russian peasantry. With the develop ment of railway communication, the increased centralization of town life, and the spread of the reading and writing routine of school instruction, this national poetry will perhaps share the fate of that of other countries and cease to be. At present there is, fortunately, little sign of its decay. In the remote agricultural governments which compose the bulk of the spacious Russian Empire the truth of the national proverb, "Wherever there is a Slav there is also a song," finds ample confirmation. So excellent, too, are the performances of these untutored singers that they themselves are no mean critics. They listen to the musical liturgy in their churches much as

the better classes follow their opera; and they have been known to absent themselves in a body from a village church where the singing was bad, observing that "they do not like goat chanting."

The Russian national songs may be conveniently classed under three headings: 1st, the metrical romances and epic ballads, known as the builìnï, literally songs of "what has been," i.e., the story of something which has actually happened; 2nd, the horovodî, or choral songs to be heard all over Russia, and of a type not met with elsewhere in Europe; 3rd, the solo lyrics or piessni, which, unlike the builinï, have no historical basis, but emanate simply from the daily round of poverty and necessity, of hopes and fears closely connected with the domestic life of the singers.

Few nations are found to be wholly devoid of national epics. They have usually taken a written form very early in their country's history. Western Europe the transcription was already accomplished during the mid

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