the same Review contains an article from the pen of Madame Adam on the degeneracy of French girls, which, as their decadence is directly traced to the corrupting influence of their English and American sisters, may be regarded as a supplementary count in Lady Jeune's indictment. Some of the enormities committed by these fair mutineers sound not a little strange to an English ear: They carry "their noses in the air; they go out with a maid or a governess, and without their mothers" they take walks with their brothers; they attend learned lectures; and, worst of all, they are beginning to entertain original and independent views upon the choice of a husband. What a change," says Madame Adam, pathetically, since the days when ornithology was the only accepted science," and that only" because nests and little birds gave a poetic turn to confidential talks between mother and daughter, which some day might become useful or necessary.”

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Now surely in all these attempts to glorify the "girl of the past" at the ex

pense of the modern young lady," there

is much that is neither very new nor very true. Almost the same thing has been said for the last fifty years, and laments over the degeneracy of the age are as old as the days of Horace :

"Etas parentum, pejor avis, tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem."

And yet heretical as it may sound-I venture to maintain that the "English Miss," so dear to the French caricaturist of a bygone age, was both mentally and physically the inferior of her much maligned modern descendant. Indeed, I suspect that the demure and fragile beings depicted in the first numbers of Punch, with whom it was de rigueur to faint at a spider and scream at a frog, would appear somewhat puny and insipid by the side of the supple well-grown damsels who may be seen any day in the Park managing their steeds with a grace and dexterity which Murat himself might have envied. And surely a game of lawn tennis, a row on the river, or a good gallop in Rotten Row, even with a cavalier and without the protection of a groom, whatever that may be worth, are better for mind and body than "backboards" and regulation walks in Kensington Gardens, from which the male element was rigor.

ously excluded. The devotion of a whole life to the pursuit of pleasure cannot, of course, be too strongly condemned. Happily, however, this is a vice which sooner or later brings with it its own punishment, and may perhaps be safely left to work its own cure. But it is well to remember that this propensity—even if it be as universal as Lady Jeune believes-is in itself a reaction against the intolerable ennui in which the girls of a former generation passed what ought to have been the hap piest years of their youth. And if their pursuits were of the dreariest, their education was of the flimsiest kind. I have heard more than one lady of my own age confess that the time she spent in the schoolroom with a finishing governess was not only the dullest but the least profitable in her whole existence. If "the girl of the period" is more given to pleasure, she is not only more "attractive and original," but infinitely better educated in the best sense of the word. Nor ought we to forget that the change which Lady Jeune deplores is in itself only part of a social revolution which is making itself felt far beyond the narrow circle of what is called "London Society." The country-house girl of thirty or forty years ago seldom left the paternal roof. Her horizon was the parish, her centre of interest was the village clothing club or the National School. The modern maiden is to be met with on the fiords of Norway, on the steps of the Capitol or the Parthenon, on the top of the Great Pyramid, and even on the summit of Mont Blanc. Her studies and pursuits are as varied as her peregrinations. She goes up to Girton or Somerville, takes the part of Antigone or Electra in a Greek play, pits herself against her brothers or her cousins in the Tripos or the Class List, and comes out "above the Senior Wrangler." And it must be confessed that, if she works hard, she works to some purpose. The days when Disraeli could with some truth make Sidonia say that marriage was a woman's only career are long since past. The num. ber of ladies who make an income by art, literature, or journalism is daily increasing, and their exclusion from the learned professions, and even from political life, is by many persons regarded only as a question of time. But if women are to be educated like men, if they are to work like men, if-pace my friend Mr. Frederic

men.

Harrison-they are to earn their bread in this rough-and tumble world like men, they must of necessity grow more like Of course there is an objectionable side to all this, the more so because unfortunately the women who aspire to rise superior to the prejudices of their sex have an unfortunate knack of imitating the least refined and the least mannerly of what they would call the "conflicting sex. It would be satisfactory to think that if women are to become more like men, they would at least try to be like gentlemen, for it is surely a poor compliment to our sex to suppose that its distinguishing characteristic is a contempt for the courtesies of life. When Anthony Trollope put the finishing touch to his inimitable Lady Glen," he took care to say that if she occasionally forgot that she was a lady, she was always "a thorough gentleman."

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But the keen edge of Lady Jeune's satire cuts much deeper than this. In her eyes a young woman who " reads the newspapers and what books she chooses" is well advanced on the broad way which leadeth to destruction. Now here we are unfortunately face to face with a choice of evils. "Our grandmothers" never opened a newspaper and-except, perhaps, upon the sly-never ventured upon any reading more exciting than Miss Porter's novels or Miss Edgeworth's "Tales of Fashionable Life." The result was that they were about as much in touch with contemporary life and thought as a native of Madagascar or Fiji. The young lady whom you take in to dinner to-day reads the Parliamentary debates, has met Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, and has intelligent if somewhat pronounced views on the Salvation Army, the Shop Hours Bill, and the enfranchisement of wonen. That this enlargement of her mental horizon should be purchased by a closer acquaintance with the fruits of the tree of knowledge is, no doubt, unfortunate. But we cannot, like the police on the Russian frontier, blacken out certain columns of our newspapers, and the "young person" must take her chance with the rest of the world. Curiously enough, too, that portion of the press which professes the deepest solicitude for the morals of the rising generation is by no means the most careful to exclude from its reports the most objectionable revelations of our Divorce or

But the modern maiden is not Lady Jeune's only bête noire. She has a word of reproof for the young married woman and for the jeunesse dorée, who have to be beguiled to a ball by the most recherché supper and the most expensive champagne who won't dance, and, what is worse, won't marry. There is something positively tragic in her picture of "patient rows of sleepy chaperons and anxious girls long before midnight awaiting the approach of the young Adonis, who, after surveying the serried ranks scornfully through his eyeglass from the end of the ball-room, retires below to partake of the hospitality provided by his thoughtful host, and having thus done his duty, goes back to his club." All this is very sad, and alas! is a matter of common experience. I remember an old lady, who was an acknowledged authority on social matters, telling me the other day, that in the days of her girlhood young men at the beginning of a dance approached their partners with a profound bow, and asked for the honor of a waltz. "Now," she said, "they come up with their hands in their pockets and say: Round or square?'"

But have not women themselves to thank for most of this treatment? And is it quite certain that the decline in the fashionable marriage rate is wholly due to the selfishness of one sex and the exaggerated demands of the other? In an age when the struggle for existence grows fiercer every day, when

the race, and it requires but a short experience of any office which is supposed to carry with it the disposal of some kind of patronage, to familiarize a Minister or a member of Parliament with the bitter cry of those who have married in haste and repented at leisure. But in Lady Jeune's eyes an improvident marriage may bring in its wake evils infinitely graver than these. She does not scruple to affirm that there are men who, marrying on small means, suddenly find their whole entourage changed by the addition of horses and carriages, French cooks, and all the modern luxuries of a fashionable ménage, and who shut their eyes and accept the gifts of the fairy godfather who has wrought all these miracles."

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Translated into plain English, this, if it means anything, means that there are husbands among us who are willing to play the part attributed to Gautripan in "L'Infâme," and to sell the honor of their wives for a good dinner and a well-appointed equipage. That such creatures as the mari complaisant have been found, and perhaps may still be found, in certain strata of society may be true; but to assert that they occupy a recognized "position" in the smartest" set in London is to imply the existence of a state of things for a parallel to which we must go back to the Court of Louis XV. or the sixth satire of Juvenal.

It is a pity that the writer's virtuous indignation should carry her to such lengths, for underlying much of her article there is an undoubted substratum of truth. With her contempt of the prevailing craze for notoriety every sensible person will sympathize. The only wonder is that people can be found to read as well as to write the personalities with which some of our newspapers are padded. To know

that an eminent statesman breakfasts on devilled kidneys, and that a deceased nobleman never dressed for dinner, may be a source of harmless gratification to those who can take an interest in such trivialities. But what are we to say to the following announcement, which I have copied nearly verbatim from a Society journal: "Lady looked charming in sunset pink, and her two pretty daughters in white chiffon. No wonder the dance was well attended when the hostess had succeeded in attracting such eligible partis as Sir and the young

heir of"? That such impertinences should be tolerated, nay, if report be true, prized and paid for "in the best set in London," is surely not a very healthy sign of the times.

But the main feature of the article consists of an unsparing and, upon the whole, justifiable onslaught upon the Mammon worship of the age. "Wealth is the keystone of success in the smartest London society.' It supplies the place of morality, of culture, of good birth, of good looks, and of good manners. The love of luxury is the determining motive of all social action, and it finds its natural outlet, according to the sex which it attacks, in dressing and dining. Of the temptation to spend a fortune at Hancock's or Worth's it is not for one of the uninitiated to speak. But the enormous sums spent upon modern entertainments are certainly a tempting subject for a satirist. At one time it seemed as if a reaction in favor of greater simplicity had set in, but that fashion has again changed, and Homeric feasts, where the flagging appetites of the guests ate alternately stimulated by the variety and blunted by the profusion of the viands, are once more the order of the day. But here again we are on well-trodden ground, as old as the banquets of Lucullus-nay, as the feast of Belshazzar himself. No doubt it is true that the enormous accumulation of wealth, especially in the commercial and manufacturing world to which Mr. Giffen bas drawn attention, has called into existence a class which has not only a much larger income to spend, but has much more leisure to enjoy it. A desire to excel is common to human nature, and where people have no other standard of excellence they will naturally seek to compete with their neighbors on ground of which they have a monopoly. But there is compensation in all things. If the young men of the present generation are more luxurious, they are certainly less coarse, and probably less vicious. If the moral law is more lightly esteemed and more frequently broken, its infraction when discovered is (as recent cases have shown) much more severely punished. If more time and money are expended on the pursuit of pleasure, a far greater proportion of both is devoted to works of philanthropy and public utility. Surely, too, there are in the very front rank of society, even in Lon

don, many men who prefer plain living and high thinking to dinners at Greenwich and suppers at the Savoy, and some women, at least, whose idea of heaven is not, like that of Miss McFlimsy of Madison Square, associated with the possession and display of toilettes and jewels which no ingenuity will enable them to carry to 66 those upper regions of air.”

Lady Jeune maintains that "with the disruption of the Liberal party and the desertion of its great Whig supporters all society in that party has in one sense

ceased, the task of gathering together the fragments having been taken up in a very perfunctory manner by the aspiring wives of future politicians. "The assertion may or may not be true. If it is, all that can be said on the subject is that, among the many services rendered by Mr. Gladstone to his party, not the least valuable is their exclusion from the dressy, showy, noisy, and unspeakably vulgar clique of men and women who presume to call themselves "London Society."-Contemporary Review.

THERE was a time when the Muse of History moved in the halls of monarchs with regal pomp and splendor, with retinue of cardinals and princes, with blare of heralds' trumpets and clank of knightly steel; when she watched the champions break their lances in the lists, or the pilgrim wending home his painful way, or the fair damsels plying their needles in turret of medieval castle, or the gay lady riding to the chase with falcon on her wrist, or the fat monk gloating over the refectory table. There was an earlier time when she wrote on waxen tablet the repulse of the Eastern by the waking Western world, when she applauded the tragedies of Eschylus or the harangues of Pericles, when she explored the mysteries of the land of old Nile, when she traced with potent finger the achievements of mighty kings upon the surface of the living rock. And there was a later time when amid roar of cannon and thunder of rushing hoofs, amid cheer of victory and cry of despair, amid all the horror and glory of war, the Muse, with high and lofty look, beheld the death grapple of mighty nations, traced the devastating career of superb ambition, and placed the laurel on the victor's brow, or sat with diplomatists in council and signed success away. But now she has laid aside her royal robes; she has dismissed her splendid train; she has become clear, cold, prosaic, and precise; she does nothing now but sit before a table strewn with Acts of Parliament to study the British Constitution. Warriors and adventurers, kings and courtiers, poets and philosophers were erst her companions. Now she cares for no one who is not a lawyer

or a member of Parliament. She is wasted to a skeleton. She has grown bleareyed, and has lost her beauty. What is worse, she has grown short-sighted too, and no longer sees or marks much that she was wont to see and mark in the days of her prime.

Now the history of the British Constitution is good. To trace the successive steps by which the sovereignty has passed from the king to the nobles, from the nobles to the people, from the people to the mob is interesting, valuable, and instructive. To investigate the mode in which the vast and complex fabric of Parliamentary institutions has developed is a legitimate task for a historian. But he must not call his work the History of England. It is because the standard modern work which bears this proud title on its cover is nothing more or less than the history of the development of the Constitution, accompanied by the thinnest possible narrative of facts, that this protest is penned. We are fully sensible of the author's many merits. It is to his school of thought, not to himself, that we take exception. We believe that history is on a wrong tack; and if our views of legitimate history be correct, then is Mrs. Markham more of a genuine historian than Dr. Bright.

A First Class man in the Final History Schools will tell you that "Macaulay and Carlyle are very good in their way. One should read them, of course. not history." not history." What then is history?

But it is

History has been defined as the biog raphy of great men. The definition is absurdly inadequate; but, like many such

epigrammatic phrases, it has a germ of truth. At certain epochs in the experience of mankind it has been tolerably correct. The biography of Caesar for the last three or four years of his life is the history for the time of the Roman Empire. The record of the lives of Henry the Eighth and Cardinal Wolsey is the history of the reign of Henry the Eighth. The biography of Napoleon, from the time he became First Consul to his abdication, is the history of the French people. So long as history was regarded as a succession of wars, the great figure of a conqueror filled the whole stage, and there was nothing more to know. But wars are not the whole of history any more than Acts of Parliament are. What then should the History of England be? By your leave, beardless Bachelors of Arts, and newly elected Fellows of All Souls, let Macaulay speak.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the history of a constant movement of the public mind, of a constant change in the institutions of a great so

ciety. We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded

nations of the East now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slav.

ery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds, We see the multitude sunk in brutal igno. rance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge In the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most civilized people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics tion had ever reached Ptolemyr Strabo, have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre. Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genos together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical, have produced a litera ture which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, have speculated with exquisite subtlety on the operations of the human mind, have be n the

over vast continents of which no dim intima

acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political improvement. The history of England is the history of this great

change in the moral, intellectual and physical state of the inhabitants of our own island.

Truly, to record the "history of this great change in the moral, intellectual and physical state" of the English race were a task for the noblest brain that even England herself should ever produce, a task to be undertaken with humility and pride, humility on account of inadequacy for the work, pride to be thought worthy to attempt it. Why then do modern historians refuse to trace the moral change, the physical change, or the intellectual change, and virtually confine themselves. to constitutional change? It is as though a man should walk through the midst of the loveliest scenery with looks bent only on the straight high road, and eyes that only mark the mile-stones by the way. The historic landscape is full of beauty; vista after vista opens into the picturesque past; yet these plodding intellectual pedestrians pursue their laborious way along the arid and dusty track of constitutional development, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left.

It may be doubted whether it be right, in any sense, to make so prominent a feature of constitutional change. Acts of Parliament have the smallest possible influence upon the real life of the nation. That an Act of Parliament can turn a man out of a public-house but cannot make him sober, has become a truism. Quid leges sine moribus vana proficiunt? The reason is sufficiently clear. The Act of Parliament is itself an effect and not a cause. It is a conclusion, not a beginning. It initiates nothing. It defines in words and reduces to writing the formless principle that has gradually grown to maturity in the mind of the community. Constitutional change is but the outcome of the "change in the moral, intellectual, and physical state of the inhabitants of our own island." It is simply the manifestation of that mysterious, heterogeneous, complex, irresisti ble force known as public opinion. The senatorial decree, it is true, is formulated and promulgated at Westminster; but it has been debated, voted, and passed long since in the heart of the whole country.

There is, of course, a narrative in these Constitutional Histories. It is a clear but vapid stream, running with an even and steady current, broken by no roguish ripples, enlivened by no brilliant sparkles, toying with no flowers, checkered by no