bottom of which, darkly and fitfully, appear the sinister features of Karl Marx, a wandering Jew, whose personal aims appear to be enveloped in mystery, but who no doubt expected by troubling the waters of society to take some kind of fish. This worthy we are told spent his days in studying politics and economy at the British Museum, and his nights in studying the working-men at their places of social resort. Armand Levi, another Jew, in the secret service of the French Empire, attempted to give the movement an Imperialist direction, but was cut short in his machinations by his master's fall. A predominating influence seems to have been at last excited by Bakounine, a gigantic Russian savage, and a type of the extravagant socialism and atheism to which the ill-balanced mind of the semi-barbarous Slave rebounds from the extreme of paternal despotism and superstition. Cluseret, politically if any thing a Fenian, but who was above all things a military adventurer, opening the world oyster with his sword, also gained an influence which of course increased when, from organizing and speech-making, affairs began to tend towards fighting. Ultimately Tolain, the French chief of the industrial movement, was thrust aside, and the secret history of the International merged in the secret history of the Commune, at which point Mr. Onslow Yorke's work terminates.

In spite of the uneasiness felt, and not very wisely

betrayed, by the European governments, we are disposed to think that the mine has been pretty well emptied of its explosive contents in the Parisian insurrection. The military circumstances of Paris after the siege, and the antagonism between the Parisians and the Assembly which represented the power of the despised and detested "rurals," furnished the Communistic leaders with forces such as they are not likely again to command. Whether the International plays any important part in the industrial conflicts which still rage in Europe, and are unhappily extending themselves to this country, we are unable to say; but these conflicts present no feature at present which they did not equally present before the International came into existence.

FAIR TO SEE.-A novel. By Lawrence W. M. Lockhart. New York: Harper Brothers.

A good novel, with well drawn characters, and an interesting plot fairly woven out of character and situation, without assistance from the stores of the sensation scene-painter. The subject of the story is a shooting party in the Highlands, out of which grows a love affair between Bertrand Cameron and Eila McKillop who is 'fair to see." The weak part of the novel is that Eila can hardly be said to be fair even to see. Her false and hateful character is visible from the beginning. The ultimate marriage of Eila with old Sir Roland Cameron is rather a repulsive incident, and there is a flatness in the way in which Bertrand, after his misadventure with Eila, falls back on Morna Grant. Mr. McKillop's end, perhaps, should have been excepted in saying that the tale was free from sensationalism; but it was necessary for the happy winding up of the piece to get rid of him. The author is a military man, and, like most of his profession, a strong Tory; and he cannot help mingling his politics with his fiction. When will

literary artists learn that art and controversy are incompatible with each other? It is true that the author, being a Tory of the good old type, is tolerably impartial between parties as they are, and abuses them pretty handsomely all round. Indeed, in his indignation at Conservative backslidings he is forced to confess that the Radicals are the best of the lot, which "is enough to break a gentleman s, not to say a patriot's, heart." Of the leaders of the two great parties he says, perhaps with more point than clearness, that one (Mr. Gladstone) has a spasmodic conscience and a twisted brain, and the other (Mr. Disraeli) has a spasmodic brain and no conscience at all.” Mr. Gladstone's army reforms are however unwittingly justified in the most forcible manner by the character of Coppinger, one of the best things in the book, and the true portrait of a large number of the wealthy triflers to whom the lives of British soldiers and the honour of the empire were entrusted under the old system.

After Sadowa and Sedan it

was high time to replace these men by soldiers professionally trained and devoted to their calling, who need not on that account be any the less gentlemen. The "Kicker" is no more a gentleman than he is a soldier.

DEAD MEN'S SHOES.-A Romance by Jeannette R. Hadermann, author of Forgiven at Last." Philadelphia; J. B. Lippincott & Co.

This is decidedly a lively novel. The scene is laid in Louisiana. The plot runs through two generations of two families, but the interest centres in the attempt of Dr. John Reynard to dispose of his step-son and step-daughter, the first by a course of dissipation and absinthe, the second by marriage to a tool of his own in the person of his rascal brother. Like the evil spirit in a novel generally, Dr. Reynard makes all the fun, and we are really very sorry when his schemes are foiled by the virtuous and heroic Miss Bertha Lombard, and when he is ultimately drowned in a flood of the Mississippi. The bad characters, Dr. Reynard himself, his brother James and his wife, are well drawn ; the good characters are rather flat, as is too apt to be the case. Miss Bertha Lombard, who is the angel of the piece, gets beyond the range of our sympathies from the moment when, being stabbed in the arm with a knife by her beloved, but demented cousin, she does not feel the stab, but only the word of reproach by which it was accompanied. There is something of the rawness of Louisiana in the scenery, moral and domestic as well as physical; and the ladies and gentlemen have a decided tinge both of the plantation and of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. "Deuced fine girls; star of the first magnitude; diamond of the first water; pearl without price; pretty as a pink; dances like a fay; face piquant; worth going in for; charming little witch; first class prize; sharp as a needle; manners of a little princess;" the world in which such phrases as these are current may safely be said not to be highly refined. Slavery is in the background, but has little to do with the tale. We must protest against many of the constructions and expressions, if they are tendered as English and not as the language of Louisiana. "From this out," "given up to be beyond comparison," "kissed him good-night," "hush talking nonsense, "would rank middling fair," "would have gone a

ANTIDOTE TO THE

"THE GATES AJAR,' by J. S. W. Sixth thousand. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

"The Gates Ajar" was nonsense, though nonsense of a most marketable kind, as its success and the sum realized by it proved. We can understand its having an enormous run in the States, among the people who erect sentimental monuments in the Rose Walk of the Jeffersonville Cemetery, and bury their dead friend in a glass case, dressed in a blue surtout with a flower in his button-hole. Probably people did not really believe that Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps had any special information about the occupation of the blessed in the other world; but they bought her book with the sort of half curiosity, half credulity, with which the simpler sort of mortals buy an astrological almanac or an infallible cure for all diseases. The best antidote to nonsense is our own sense. But it seems that in the present case there is a large demand for another "Antidote," which has run through six thousands-probably by this time still more. We have read it, and can sincerely declare ourselves convinced that Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps has no special information about the occupations of the blessed in the other world. It is something, in this age of doubt and perplexity, to have distinctly arrived even at a negative conclusion.

LIFE AND LABOURS OF THE REV. WM. MCCLURE, for more than forty years a minister of the Methodist New Connexion. Chiefly an Autobiography. Edited by the Rev. David Savage. Toronto: James Campbell & Son, 1872.

This tribute to the memory of a good and earnest minister of the Gospel is very creditable both to the Editor and to the Conference of which he was a member. There are many in Toronto, not belong ing to the New Connexion Church, who will remember, with deep respect, the subject of this memoir. A tall figure, slightly bowed, though it scarcely appeared to be by age--the neck enveloped in one of those extraordinary white neckerchiefs, admirably drawn in the portrait prefixed to this volume, to get into or out of which seems a mystery to us of this generation-the face always beaming with meekness and good-nature, which were distinguishing marks of his character. Few of those who saw him in those latter peaceful days knew of the struggles through which he had passed, and the severer sufferings of his father before him. Much of the volume under review is made up of the religious experiences of Mr. McClure, into which it is not our province to enter; there is also much of permanent interest in anecdotes of the Repeal movement under Daniel O'Connell, and of the state of Ireland in the early part of this century, which we can only collect from the journals of acute observers like Mr. McClure. A true Irishman, the rev. gentleman possessed a full measure of the humour of his race, and although it was chastened by the essentially spiritual tone of his

nature, it usually asserted itself in a quiet way on every social occasion. Yet, withal, he was a man thoroughly in earnest about the work he believed to be set before him in the Gospel; an active apostle of total abstinence; an energetic friend of the University of Toronto, on the Senate of which he sat as a member. Without great brilliancy or superior talent, his earnestness, his unaffected meekness, his genial and kindly disposition, endeared him to those with whom he came in contact, and, therefore, we think with Mr. Savage that it is well that some memorial of his laborious life should be placed on record.

NOTES ON ENGLAND. By H. Taine, D.C.L., Oxon. &c. Translated with an Introductory Chapter by W. F. Rae. London: Strahan & Co. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson & Co.

The popularity of M. Taine's Notes on England is already established, and that the work should be made accessible to all Englishmen in a translation was a matter of course. The translator, it appears to us, has done his work remarkably well, preserving to an unusual extent the vivacity and piquancy of the original, with little sacrifice of English idiom. In this respect, indeed, Mr. Rae's work equals, perhaps, any translation from the French which we know, and is singularly happy in giving, to those who do not read French, an idea of the French mind as reflected in the forms of expression. Here and there, perhaps, one feels a little inclined to smile at the skittishness to which our staid language is stimulated, and to wonder what old Johnson would have thought of this or that phase or construction. But as a whole the work could hardly have been better done.

Mr. Rae's introductory chapter is also judicious, and most people will agree with its criticisms on the method of observation which M. Taine prides himHappily, when travelling in England, he observed self on having invented and professes to follow. with his eyes and not with his method.

It is superfluous to repeat the praises which have been bestowed on M. Taine's Notes by the British journals and reviews. The best part of the work, in our judgment, is that which relates to national character, especially in its social aspect. It is true that M. Taine's point of view is rather that of the French salon, and that the worst of all social phenomena in his estimation appears to be a lady ill-dressed and with prominent teeth. But with this qualification the remarks are acute, subtle, sometimes profound. They are always candid, discriminating, and if not free from national bias, perfectly free from national antipathy. John Bull, seeing himself in the glass held up by M. Taine, will sometimes wince a little, but generally he will not be displeased, and he will admit that in intention at all events the critic is always just. The general descriptions of the country are also graphic, and in the main correct, though M. Taine is a little under the influence of conventional comedy on the subject of the British climate, the perpetual humidity of which must be broken by an occasional gleam of sun, or it could not ripen an immense crop of cereals every year. The weak portion of the Notes, as might have been expected, is the political part, which consists mainly of hasty and not very consistent generalizations, and is, moreover, written under the fatal influence of a manifest bias derived from the recent course of events in France.