Through the long history of Glastonbury I cannot lead you to-day. My special subject has been those early fortunes of the place which have given it a character wholly unique among the minsters of England. I would fain say somewhat of the stern rule of Thurstan, when the monks were shot down before the altar, because they chose still to sing their psalms after the ancient use of Glastonbury and not after a new use of Fécamp. I would fain say somewhat of the lights thrown upon the state of Glastonbury and all Somerset by the Glastonbury entries in Domesday. I would fain say somewhat of the long struggle with the Bishops which makes up so great a part of the local history both of Glastonbury and of Wells. I would fain say somewhat of the last scene of all, of the heroic end which winds up the tale, which at Glastonbury as in other monastic houses, had for some centuries become undoubtedly unheroic. The martyrdom of Richard Whiting, following on the ordinary story of an English abbey after abbeys had lost their first love, reads like the fall of the last Constantine winding up the weary annals of the house of Palaiologos. But of one group of names, of one name pre-eminently among them, I must speak. We cannot meet at Glastonbury without in some shape doing our homage to the greatest ruler of the church of Glastonbury, the greatest man born and reared on Glastonbury soil. Earliest among the undoubted worthies of Somerset, surpassed by none who have come after him in his fame and in his deeds we see, on this spot, rising above the mists of error and of slander, the great churchman, the great statesman, of the tenth century, the mighty form of Dunstan. Not a few famous men in our history have been deeply wronged by coming to be known only as the subjects of silly legends, or worse still, of perverted and calumnious history. So have Leofric and Godgifu suffered; so has Elfred himself suffered; but Dunstan has suffered more than all. Justice was once done to him years agone by a great scholar among ourselves; fuller justice still has since been done to him by the greatest of all our scholars.† Yet I doubt not that to many minds his name still calls up no thoughts but that of one of the silliest of silly legends; or, worse still, it calls up the picture, most unlike the original, of a groveling and merciless fanatic. Think, I would ask you, under the guidance of true history, more worthily of the greatest son, the greatest ruler, that Glastonbury ever saw. Think more worthily of one who was indeed the strict churchman, the monastic reformer, who called up again the religious life at Glastonbury after a season of decay-but who stands charged in no authentic record as guilty of any act of cruelty or persecution, but who does stand forth in authentic records as the great minister of successive West-Saxon kings, of successive lords of * * See the paper by Mr. J. R. Green on "Dunstan at Glastonbury' in the Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archæological Society for 1862, p. 122. See Dr. Stubbs's Preface to his Memorials of St. Dunstan, throughout. all Britain, in days when Wessex was the hearth and center of English rule, and when Glastonbury stood first among English sanctuaries, the chosen burial-place of kings. Let us think of him as the friend of Eadmund, the counselor of Eadred, the victim of Eadwig, the friend and guide of Eadgar the Giver-of-Peace. So mightily under him grew the fame of Glastonbury that a greater name than all was drawn within its spell, and men at the other end of England deemed that it was at Glastonbury, and not at Athelney, that Ælfred himself held his last shelter, when the bounds of Wessex, the bounds of England, reached not beyond the coasts of a single island of the Sumorsætan.* But in that century of West-Saxon greatness, the local history of this spot ean dispense with any single word or touch that the strictest criticism would reject. The home of Dunstan, the burial-place of Eadgar and the Eadmunds, gathers around it the greatest memories of the great age which made the English kingdom. Yet these memories are all of a kind which are shared by other famous spots within the English realm. What Glastonbury has to itself, alone and without rival, is its historical position as the tie, at once national and religious, which binds the history and memories of our own race to the history and memories of the race which we supplanted.-EDWARD A. FREEMAN, in Macmillan's Magazine. SUICIDAL MANIA. SUICIDES are annually becoming more common, not in England only, but all over the civilized world. During the last two years there have been special causes at work-failures in trade, agricultural depression, and commercial losses, which have tended to drive men to suicide in ever-increasing numbers. But I do not refer to the last two years only in making the statement that the number of suicides is annually increasing in all civilized countries. Professor Bertillon, of Paris, in his “Annales de Démographie Internationale," gives some curious details on this subject, and Professor Morselli, the eminent Italian economist, indorses them as correct. Thrown into a tabular form the results of their inquiries are, that in every million of inhabitants the increase in the number of suicides has been the following: * See the Historia de S. Cuthberto, X Scriptt. 71,vol. i. p. 144 of the Surtees edition of Symeon. Alfred tribus annis in Glestingiensi palude latuit, in magna penuria." See Old-English History, p. 127. In Italy... .1864 to 1878, from 30 to 37 annually In Belgium. In Great Britain and Ireland. 1860 to 1878, from In Austria.. In France. In Prussia. In Denmark. In the United States of North And in the minor German .1820 to 1877, from 70 to 122 annually 52 to 149 annually 71 to 133 annually .1836 to 1876, from 213 to 258 annually .1845 to 1878, from 107 to 163 annually .1835 to 1878, from 117 to 289 annually The increase of population in these countries will only account for a very small part of the increase of suicides, except in the case of the United States. Men are everywhere becoming more weary of the burden of life. Authorities on sanitation and vital statistics tell us that of late years, life, the average human life, has been considerably prolonged by greater attention to the means of preserving health; yet, concurrent with this improvement, there are a greater impatience of life itself and a greater desire to escape its burden. Women are less prone to commit suicide in Europe than men, and extensive investigation on the subject has convinced Signor Morselli that the tendency to suicide increases with age, more strongly amongst the unmarried and widowed than amongst the married of both sexes. The following table curiously illustrates this fact: Amongst a million of persons of each class in Europe generally, in so far as the returns enabled him to compare them, the following numbers committed suicide: Women cling to life much more strongly than men, and that under the most wretched conditions. A childless widow would appear to be far more desolate in the world than a widower similarly situated; yet she bears her loneliness better-doubtless from religious restraints, or from possessing a larger measure of that hope which springs eternal in the human breast. It is a melancholy proof of the sadness of woman's lot in the East that the proportions of suicides are there reversed. In India more than double the number of women put an end to themselves compared with men, and I have no doubt the same fact holds true of all countries in which polygamy prevails. So familiar do women become with the suicidal mania in India that they put an end to themselves there on the smallest provocation. Two instances that came within my own experience in Oudh will illustrate this fact. Rugber was a shopkeeper in the bazaar. He had married Nazi in the days of his poverty. They had labored together, and success had crowned their efforts. They were comfortable in circumstances; the labor of nine or ten years had not been without recompense. They had two children, a boy and a girl. Everything was happy and prosperous with them, till Rugber determined upon taking another wife. There was nothing contrary to the habits of his caste in doing this, he was merely exercising a common right; but Nazi resented it and refused to live with him. He appealed to the courts. She had taken their children and gone off to live with a sister in a village at some distance. The court decided that she must give up the children, and return to her husband. Every caste has its own laws and regulations, and Rugber had taken care to conform strictly to the customs of his caste in all that he had done. Nazi gave up the children in obedience to the command of the court, and appointed a day on which she was to return to Rugber's house. He was to come to meet her. He did come. She had left her sister's house two days before, and had not since been heard of. The usual method of committing suicide in India, particularly amongst the women, is to throw themselves into a deep well; I have no doubt Nazi did so. Search was made for her body, but without success; she doubtless went to a distance to make way with herself. Every magistrate in India has had experience of cases of attempted suicide. Some poor miserable woman, half dead, to whom life, with its daily privations and ill-usage had become intolerable, is taken up from the bottom of a well-a well, perhaps, with only a few feet of water in it—and brought by the police before the nearest magistrate. They are among the most painful cases upon which the magistrate has to pass sentence. He But, as I have said, some of these women attempt to put an end to their existence on the smallest provocation. One case came before me in which the woman's son was playing at a little distance from her door when she had prepared dinner. She called her son_to come and partake of the meal-he was about ten years of age. paid no attention to her call; she called again, and got angry, but still he came not. Instead of taking a switch to chastise the boy for his disobedience, she sat down at the door and said solemnly to him: "My son, your dinner is ready, and I have called you twice; I now call you for the third time, and if you do not come I will throw myself into that well, and my death shall be on your head." But still he came not. She rose, and threw herself into the well. Then there was wild hurry and commotion in the village. She was got out alive, indeed, but bruised and cut. The police arrested her, and brought her up for judgment under a section of the penal code, which provides due punishment for attempted suicide-probably the only offense in any code, an attempt to commit which is penal, whilst the completed crime passes without legal punishment! Almost all women, all over the East, put an end to themselves, when they desire to do so, by drowning; most frequently in a well, sometimes in a river. This practice extends from Arabia to Japan. In her "Unbeaten Tracks in Japan," Miss Bird writes: "Suicide appears very common. When a young man and woman wish to marry, and the consent of the parents is refused, they often bind themselves together and drown themselves. This is such a frequent offense that the new code imposes penal servitude for ten years on people arrested in the commission of it. Women never hang themselves, but, as may be expected, suicide is more common amongst them than amongst men. An acute sense of shame, lovers' quarrels, cruelties practiced upon "geishas" (professional singers and dancers) by their taskmasters, the loss of personal charins through age or illness, and even the dread of such loss, are the most usual causes. In these cases they usually go at night, and, after having filled their capacious hanging sleeves with stones, jump into a river or a well. I have recently passed two wells which are at present disused in consequence of recent suicides." 66 How truly Bacon says that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak but it mates and masters the fear of death." People have been known to put an end to themselves to escape the pain of toothache, and it was but the other day that a mining engineer, sent out from England to report on the gold-bearing districts of Southern India, committed suicide in Calicut, in order to free himself from a pain in the stomach! The following advertisement appeared in Le Petit Parisien last month: "Suicidal. A young man, to whom life is a burden, has resolved to put an end to himself, but wishes to accomplish his death in the most advantageous manner possible. He places, therefore, the sacrifice of his life at the disposal of any person who, for a suitable sum, would wish to intrust him with an enterprise the issue of which would be necessarily fatal. This offer is very serious. Write to the initials K. R. V., Poste Restante, Anvers. There is no punishment in the French code for attempt at suicide. It is not many months since the French papers reported the case of a bonne, in Marseilles, who wanted, during the severe frost, to go skating one day, as she had done on former occasions, with her master's daughter. But her master refused, and said that they should both remain at home that afternoon, Next morning the |