and Mr Bright, and Mr Beales and Mr Potter, are to go in for a fresh redistribution of seats, and for the abolition of those clauses which require that the exercise of the franchise shall be dependent on the payment of rates. This is extremely probable; indeed, any other line of conduct would be at variance with the principle by which the Liberal party has heretofore been guided. The chiefs of that party have never used the people except as instruments for their own aggrandisement. It is very little likely that they will now change their tactics. We doubt, however, whether such tactics will succeed. The Liberal party is not what it once was. If the democracy gain something in one direction by the changes which are impending, it will lose much more in another; for whatever dissatisfied Whig lawyers may say to the contrary, the people of England look up with respect to the aristocracy and the crown, and are from habit as well as conviction attached to the Constitution under which they live. The Prætorian Guard, as Mr Disraeli calls them -the petted, pampered leaders of the trades-unions-hate everybody and everything which they cannot bend to their own purposes. They are quite prepared to take up the cry for manhood suffrage and electoral districts, because they imagine that, with such a lever, to be wielded by themselves, it will be easy to Americanise the institutions of the country, and in due time to set up a republic. But their ability to bring all this about we entirely discredit, especially since those frightful revelations have been made, which show to what extent they abuse power of any kind as soon as they acquire it. Such leaders the people will not follow indeed, we anticipate from recent occurrences a speedy break-up of the system which has thus far done so much damage to trade, and would, if it could be applied to political

objects, more than justify the worst fears to which Lord Cranborne and Mr Lowe appear to have given themselves up. Besides, the tradesunions are at this moment in a decided minority, so far as English workmen are concerned; and nonunionist men are very little likely hereafter to submit to a tyranny which has ceased to be secret, and therefore lost half its terrors. Nor is this all. The old Whigs, the representatives and adherents of the Revolution houses, have no tastes in common with the men who now stand forward as leaders of the Liberal party. Mr Bright and Mr Beales are as little in favour with them as they are with the Tories; and even Mr Gladstone has contrived, by his intemperance, to shake whatever confidence they might have heretofore reposed in him. They disapproved of his attack upon Lord Grosvenor and Lord Stanley last year at Liverpool, and they are more than disappointed in finding that, so far from winning back the ground which was lost on that occasion, he has never fought one battle since except to lose it. To use the words of a Liberal writer in the 'Saturday Review,' "Mr Gladstone has helped to pass the Bill by alienating his followers, losing his command over his party, and showing that he had no alternative plan worthy of consideration." That the great Whig houses will put themselves under his guidance again, and be hurried by him or by anybody else into a crusade against their own most cherished traditions, we entirely disbelieve. Agitation will doubtless come, just as it would have come had Lord Russell carried his Bill in 1866, or Mr Disraeli his in 1859; but it must be met, and will, we are confident, be met and overcome by the good sense of the country. We are no believers either in Mr Lowe or Lord Cranborne, when they appear before us in the character of prophets of evil, uttering words which, if they have

any effect at all, can only tend to promote the evil which they dread; still less can we assent to the charges which they bring against the statesmen from whom they have separated in anger. Lord Cranborne we can understand. He is at all events consistent with himself. He blundered in assenting at all to a Tory Reform Bill. He cannot excuse this blunder to himself, except by misstating, because he misunderstands, the proceedings of his late colleagues. But Mr Lowe is without excuse on the score either of honesty or prudence. We leave him in the hands of Mr Disraeli, with the peroration of whose speech on the third reading we entirely agree. Here it is:

"The right hon. gentleman has concluded his attack upon us, accusing us of treachery, by informing us that he is going to act in favour of all the measures which he has hitherto opposed in this House, though I believe he supported them in another place, and will recur to those Australian politics that rendered him first so famous. (A laugh.) The right honourable gentleman told me that in the conduct we were pursuing there was infamy. The expression was strong (laughter), but I never quarrel with this sort of thing. (Laughter.) I never disturb on that ground a gentleman, especially when he is approaching his peroration. (Laughter and cheers.) But according to the right hon. gentleman our conduct is infamous-that is his own statementbecause in office we are supporting measures of Parliamentary Reform of which we disapproved, and which we

have hitherto opposed. Well, if we disapproved of the measure which we and sanction to-night, our conduct, inare recommending the House to accept deed, would be objectionable. If we did not from the bottom of our hearts believe that the measure which we are now requesting you to sanction is upon the whole the wisest and most necessary measure that can be passed under the circumstances, I would even say that our conduct is infamous. But I want to know what the right hon. gentleman thinks of his own conduct, when, having assisted in turning out Lord Derby in 1859, because the then Government would not reduce the borough franchise-I have reason to believe that he was one of the most active managers of the intrigue (cheers)—when, having done that, the right hon. gentleman accepts office in the year 1860, and Lord Palmerston brings forward a measure of Parliamentary Reform which the right hon. gentleman utterly disapproved of; which he more than disaproved of, because he asked his political opponents to defeat it. This is the gentleman, the right hon. gentleman, who talks to us of infamy. (Loud cheers.) The prognostications of evil of the noble lord I can respect, because I know that they are sincere; but the warnings and prophecies of the right hon. gentleman I treat in another spirit. I do not think myself that the country is in danger. I think England is safe in the race of men who inhabit her; that she is safe in something much more precious than her accumulated capital-her accumulated experience. (Cheers.) She is safe in her national character, in her fame, in the traditions of a thousand years, and in that glorious future which I believe awaits her.

(The right hon. gentleman sat down amidst loud cheering.)

ENGLISH novels have for a long time-from the days of Sir Walter Scott at least-held a very high reputation in the world, not so much perhaps for what critics would call the highest development of art, as for a certain sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanness unknown to other literature of the same class. This peculiarity has had its effect, no doubt, upon those very qualities of the national mind which produced it. It has increased that perfect liberty of reading which is the rule in most cultivated English houses; it has abolished the domestic Index Expurgatorius as well as all public censorship; it has made us secure and unsuspicious in our reception of everything, or almost everything, that comes to us in the form of print. This noble confidence has been good for everybody concerned. It has put writers on their honour, and saved readers from that wounding consciousness of restraint or of danger which destroys all delicate appreciation. There are other kinds of literature in which the darker problems of the time can be fitly discussed, and, with a tolerably unanimous consent, Eng

VOL. CII.-NO. DCXXIII.

lish writers have agreed to leave those subjects in their fit place. The novel, which is the favourite reading of the young-which is one of the chief amusements of all secluded and most suffering people

which is precious to women and unoccupied persons-has been kept by this understanding, or by a natural impulse better than any understanding, to a great degree pure from all noxious topics. That corruption which has so fatally injured the French school of fiction has, it has been our boast, scrupulously kept away from ours. It was something to boast of. We might not produce the same startling effects; we might not reach the same perfection in art, which a craftsman utterly freed of all restraints, and treating vice and virtue with equal impartiality, may aspire to; but we had this supreme advantage, that we were free to all classes and feared by none. Men did not snatch the guilty volume out of sight when any innocent creature drew nigh, or mature women lock up the book with which they condescended to amuse themselves, as they do in France. Our novels

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were family reading; and the result has been a sense of freedom, an absence of all suggestion of evil, in the superficial studies of ordinary society, which it is impossible to overestimate. Nous sommes tous d'un age mûr," said an irreproachable French matron to the English acquaintance whose eyes expressed a certain amazement at the frank-. ness of some drawing-room narrative; "j'espère que vous ne pensez pas que je parlerais comme ça devant des jeunes gens." This idea, which is the very heart of French ideas on the subject, is quite foreign to our insular habits. We are accustomed both to read and to speak everything that comes in our way in the presence of jeunes gens. The habit has so grown upon us that to change it would involve a revolution in all our domestic arrangements. It would involve us in an amount of trouble which very few could face. We should require three or four packets from the library instead of one. We should have the nuisance of separating our children and dependants from our own amusements. We should no longer be able to discuss, as we do now continually, the books that we are reading and the thoughts we are thinking. This is a necessity from which we have been altogether free in the tranquil past; but it is an indulgence which only habit and the long use and wont of public security preserve to us now.

For there can be no doubt that a singular change has passed upon our light literature. It is not that its power has failed or its popularity diminished - much the reverse; it is because a new impulse has been given and a new current set in the flood of contemporary story-telling. We will not ask whence or from whom the influence is derived. It has been brought into being by society, and it naturally reacts upon society. The change perhaps began at the time when Jane Eyre made what advanced critics call her "protest"

against the conventionalities in which the world clothes itself. We have had many protests" since that time, but it is to be doubted how far they have been to our advantage. The point to which we have now arrived is certainly very far from satisfactory. The English mind is still so far borné that we do not discuss the seventh commandment with all that effusion and fulness of detail which is common on the other side of the Channel, though even in that respect progress is daily being made; but there are points in which we altogether outdo our French neighbours. To a French girl fresh from her convent the novels of her own language are rigorously tabooed; whereas we are all aware that they are the favourite reading of her contemporary in this country, and are not unfrequently even the production, with all their unseemly references and exhibitions of forbidden knowledge, of young women, moved either by the wild foolhardiness of inexperience, or by ignorance of everything that is natural and becoming to their condition. It is painful to inquire where it is that all those stories of bigamy and seduction, those soidisant revelations of things that lie below the surface of life, come from. Such tales might flow here and there from one morbid imagination, and present themselves to us as moral phenomena, without casting any stigma upon society in general; but this is not how they appear. They have taken, as it would seem, permanent possession of all the lower strata of light literature. Above there still remains, it is true, a purer atmosphere, for which we may be thankful; but all our minor novelists, almost without exception, are of the school called sensational. Writers who have no genius and little talent, make up for it by displaying their acquaintance with the accessories and surroundings of vice, with the means of seduction, and

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with what they set forth as the secret tendencies of the heart tendencies which, according to this interpretation, all point one way. When the curate's daughter in 'Shirley' burst forth into passionate lamentation over her own position and the absence of any man whom she could marry, it was a new sensation to the world in general. That men and women should marry we had all of us acknowledged as one of the laws of humanity; but up to the present generation most young women had been brought up in the belief that their own feelings on this subject should be religiously kept to themselves. No doubt this was a conventionalism; and if a girl in a secluded parsonage is very much in earnest about a husband, there is no effectual reason we know of why she should not lift up her " test" against circumstances. But things have gone very much further since the days of 'Shirley.' We have grown accustomed to the reproduction, not only of wails over female loneliness and the impossibility of finding anybody to marry, but to the narrative of many thrills of feeling much more practical and conclusive. What is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshly and unlovely record. Women driven wild with love for the man who leads them on to desperation before he accords that word of encouragement which carries them into the seventh heaven; women who marry their grooms in fits of sensual passion; women who pray their lovers to carry them off from husbands and homes they hate; women, at the very least of it, who give and receive burning kisses and frantic embraces, and live in a voluptuous dream, either waiting for or brooding over the inevitable lover,-such are the heroines who have been imported into modern fiction. "All for love and the world well lost,"

was once the motto of a simple but perennial story, with which every human creature had a certain sympathy-the romance that ended pleasantly in a wholesome wedding, or pathetically in a violet-covered grave. But the meaning has changed nowadays. Now it is no knight of romance riding down the forest glades, ready for the defence and succour of all the oppressed, for whom the dreaming maiden waits. She waits now for flesh and muscles, for strong arms that seize her, and warm breath that thrills her through, and a host of other physical attractions, which she indicates to the world with a charming frankness. On the other side of the picture it is, of course, the amber hair and undulating form, the warm flesh and glowing colour, for which the youth sighs in his turn; but were the sketch made from the man's point of view, its openness would at least be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it in England is, that it is oftenest made from the woman's side-that it is women who describe those sensuous raptures

that this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls, and is offered to them not only as the portrait of their own state of mind, but as their amusement and mental food. Such a wonderful phenomenon might exist, and yet society might be innocent of it. It might be the fault of one, or of a limited school, and the mere fact that such ravings are found in print might be no great argument against the purity of the age. But when it is added that the

class thus represented does not disown the picture-that, on the contrary, it hangs it up in boudoir and drawing-room-that the books which contain it circulate everywhere, and are read everywhere, and are not contradictedthen the case becomes much more serious. For our own part we do not believe, as some people do, that