tarian spirit from the institution; all interference in religious matters, on the part of the nurses, is strictly forbidden; they are required, while living at the Home, to attend public worship, - according to the rites of the Church of England, I suppose. The religious nature of their work, and the necessity for the strongest religious motives to enable them to perform it faithfully, are constantly held before them; and, judging even from bare statistical evidence, the lady superintendent of the Home must set them a noble example.

Miss Stephen has shown discretion in avoiding the subject of English sisterhoods, though it is not quite fair to say that she does so because "there is no one sufficiently widespread or long established," there being more than one of older date and more extensive operation than the Liverpool TrainingSchool for Nurses.

So ends Part I. Part II. treats the question whether charitable purposes are best served by religious or secular institutions. Difficult as it has been to bring Miss Stephen's very full accounts of the various sisterhoods within the limits of a review, it would be impossible and most unjust to her to attempt to crowd the reasoning of one hundred and fifty-five closely printed pages into such a compass. The whole Second Part is most interesting and searching; and although the professed object of the book is to examine the merits of sisterhoods "for charitable purposes," that vexed and momentous question is really discussed in all its bearings. The successive chapters of Part I. are only so many premises on which she bases her arguments and forms her conclusions. She deduces from her observation of the two systems (secular and religious) the effects on their members, on the poor, and on society at large, and considers the abstract questions on which both rest.* Utility in its highest, deepest, to speak properly, in its sacred sense, is Miss Stephen's touchstone. Her opinion blessed with this world's goods has been no less beneficial. "The nurse who, after the first week's visiting, came back crying, saying she could not bear the scenes she had to witness -soon found the good she could do so clear and satisfactory, that she is happy and contented, and has quite given up her wish to return to her former work of nursing the rich."

* The titles of the chapters of Part II. may give an idea of the ground which is gone over in the process: The Wants of the Poor; The Interests of Charitable Women; The Public Good; and The Theological Questions at Issue.

is, that certain evils are inseparable from sisterhoods, and that the good done by them could be done as effectually by secular institutions. The personal question involved is discussed comprehensively and powerfully under "The Interests of Charitable Women," and almost exhausts that branch of the subject. Almost, not quite. Miss Stephen ignores "vocation," a cant term for an undeniably real thing; she overlooks the desire- which in some natures is a necessity for seclusion, meditation, recueillement, offering as our only alternative the old self-centred idea, of the "religious life" where everything is done for one's own soul's salvation, or a busy existence of charitable activity in the outer world however uncongenial, taking no note of the possibility of a middle course like that offered by an establishment on the principle of the Béguinage. Perhaps Miss Stephen, in dealing exclusively with things as they are, and putting forward no scheme of her own, found no place for these considerations; but she proclaims utility as the primary and final article of her code, and the Liverpool Training-School as its exemplar. In the chapter on the "Public Good," she observes with rare good sense: "It seems to be taken for granted that the poor are exposed to every want which is felt by their richer neighbors, with the addition of those arising from poverty. Now a very little observation will show that, if money satisfies some wants, it originates at least as many others, especially when it has been applied to its best purpose, that of education. It would be truer to say that the rich experience every want which is felt by their poorer neighbors, with the addition of those arising from wealth and leisure." She goes on to say: "If the fact of suffering be that which constitutes a claim upon the ministrations of good women, the rich are entitled to such ministrations at least as much as the poor." Some people might demur to this, and esteem those ministrations as part of the great system of compensation, to counterbalance the lack of other alleviations which the rich can always command, but which the poor must ever want. But Miss Stephen further assumes, or rather has previously assumed, that the majority of women who wish to enter religious or charitable fraternities are not those of recognized social standing or inNO. 241.

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dependent if limited means. How true this ma England, we cannot judge; but it is certainly not true country. Therefore, in this view of the equal claims and poor to our sympathy and aid, she overlooks the difficulties which present themselves to many women i as hired or even volunteer nurses among the former, ties common to the nurse and her patients and their Taking two women equally devoted to their calling a dient to the rules of their association, every one must the difference in the moral attitude of her who goes nurse into a rich house and her who goes to a poor the latter, whether paid or not, she is a minister; in mer a servant, and only the badge of a professedly life which has pledged its members to become the se servants can relieve such a relation of much mutual rassment. Miss Stephen also seems to me to lay t stress on the value of such intercourse to female min remarks may apply to those who shut themselves off at eighteen, but hardly to women who have known t and life; women can get from books the greater part they learn from men, though the converse is not true least at their present status they are less likely to mere partisans by reading what is written upon all si subject than by hearing it talked of by a father or a who takes only one view of it. She also gives too littl to the hold of a vow, whether perpetual or limited, minds. It may be that this hold is a relic of supersti that it would be better if vows and oaths could be d with on all occasions, civil and religious; but while t more power over the human mind than mere force science, can we do without them? The abuse of su proves nothing, their disuse will not dispel superstit the gradual evaporation of superstition will lead to use of the forms.

In fine, with all our admiration for Miss Stephen's cannot consider it "the last word" about sisterho there is no doubt that it is the weightiest that has spoken, and no one who is interested in the subjec better than go to it for information and food for reflec SARAH B. V

ART. VII.-CRITICAL NOTICES.

1.- Meta Holdenis. Par VICTOR CHERBULIEZ. Paris: Hachette. 1873.

WE hardly know to what extent M. Cherbuliez is known and admired by English readers in general; to ourselves, we confess, he is an old friend, and a new novel from his hand has all the dignity of a literary event. Our friendship for him was formed more than ten years ago, over his Comte Kostia, the work by which he made his mark among the French romancers of the day. We doubt if this charming romance has ever become popular, but we are safe to say that it has had no indifferent or ungrateful readers. To our sense it seemed full of brilliant promise; it was impossible that so genuine an artist should not do more and better. M. Cherbuliez has done more, and has given his early masterpiece half a dozen successors; but we have often vainly wondered whether, on the whole, he has done better. We inclined to think not, and this Meta Holdenis, clever as it is, has put an end to our doubts. The author's talent has become more and more flexible and polished, and, in the way of mere manner, the volume before us is still a masterpiece; but it has parted parted fatally, we think, in the present case- with a certain essential charm, - a turn of fancy in which spontaneity and culture went hand in hand with singular grace. M. Cherbuliez's career, through his several novels, would be a study for a penetrating analyst, and demands more space than we can bestow. His talent is peculiarly delicate, and its development very much a matter of fine shades; but to trace these shades would be suggestive of many things, possibly of some reflections not altogether cheerful. A certain melancholy element there is in the history of all marked talents: the fact, we mean, that the growth of skill is always attended with the loss of simplicity. The genius ripens, but unlike peaches and plums it hardens. An author's first really strong work (especially when it is a work of imagination) is always more or less classic, as compared with works produced after he has caused something to be expected of him; it has a more virile compactness, it is more simply and contentedly itself. Vanity Fair is classic as compared with the Newcomes; Oliver Twist is classic as compared with David Copperfield; and Adam Bede, to our mind, is signally classic as compared with Middlemarch. So, to proceed from greater things to lesser, the Comte Kostia is classic as compared with Meta Holdenis. The charm of the former tale is difficult to describe, and we recommend our readers to taste it at first

hand. The story is perfectly a romance, and yet it is profoundly real. It is a piece of the finest artistic polish, and yet it bristles with "sensations"; it is the work at once of a master of style and of a consummate story-teller. But its great merit in this age of dingy realism is that it is simply beautiful, and that the author has ventured to remember that it is not precisely amiss that a work of art should be lighted with a ray of idealism. The book is an excellent example of the discreet use of this ingredient; it leaves the story, mechanically, as perfect as possible; it only furnishes an atmosphere for the mechanism to work in. M. Cherbuliez is a Swiss, his native city of Geneva playing a part in most of his tales; and although we may be sure, in the light of his last performance, that he will not thank us for doing so, we may nevertheless express a sense of the characteristically Genevese complexion of his talent in its earlier form, — a mental complexion lighted, indirectly perhaps, but none the less visibly, from Germany as well as from France. The Genevese mind, in so far as a stranger may guess at it, is less vivacious than the French, and says things incomparably less agreeably; but it feels them strongly enough, and, whatever they are, it has a way of taking them more seriously. This serious way of taking things we have always regarded as a result of its having a side-light open to German influences. How many Parisians of average culture can read Goethe in the original? This is a very common accomplishment in Geneva. M. Cherbuliez had read Goethe to good purpose, and his first two novels were the work of a man who took things seriously. Meta Holdenis is written to prove that German seriousness is very likely to be a humbug; it may be or may not; what remains true is, that the discerning reader of the Comte Kostia and Paule Méré felt himself in contact with an imagination whose poetically blue horizon, in one direction at least, lay well beyond the Rhine. The second of these tales is an attempted exposure, rather youthful in its unsparing ardor, of the narrowness and intolerance of Genevese society. How true the picture is, we are unable to say; but the story is admirably touching, and it has an aroma much less of the Parisian asphalt than of the cropped and drying grass on the mountain slopes that descend into the Lake of Geneva. The heroine is a delightfully tender conception, and though perhaps she is not absolutely natural, we prefer her, taking one piece of false drawing with another, to Meta Holdenis. In spite of the relative naïveté of imagination that we have touched upon, the author's first two tales were clever enough to leave us no surprise at the cleverness of the Roman d'une Honnête Femme; and what we felt, beside the pleasure of reading a very interesting story, was a certain suspicious