with barbarous tribes. If Russian conquest has really recruited its strength and begun to move again, the immediate aim probably is Persia, from which the Russians may hope to operate westward on the Ottoman Empire without having to ask Austria for the key. But the ultimate mark is Constantinople, the standing aim of the Russian bureaucrat, the constant vision of the Russian fanatic. Any demonstration against British India is probably intended, for the present at least, only to cover the more serious operation.

The danger to British India from Russian aggression is, in all probability, more remote than the danger from the circumstances of the Empire itself—the incurable estrangement and want of sympathy between the ruling and the subject race--the dark fanaticisms which are always working in the mysterious depths of Indian sentiment, and which may one day be impersonated in a great religious leader, the usual organ of Oriental revolution-the unification, by our railroads and other unifying measures, in themselves beneficial, of the populations whose divided state has hitherto been one of our chief talismans of command.

Whether Russia will fulfil the will of Peter the Great depends partly on her military strength, partly on her political and social tendencies. Her military strength has been immensely increased by railroads, the want of which was the great source of her weakness and of her frightful losses in the Crimean war. Her political and social tendencies are one of the difficult problems of European politics. We see a dark mass of ignorant fanaticism and servile Imperialism headed by an ambitious and unscrupulous bureaucracy. But from the mass occasionally flame forth jets of wild materialism and communism which seem to indicate that some volcanic forces are at work below. A revolution in Russia would liberate civilization from a great danger.

The question whether England should alone, or with only the help of the half

foundering Austrian empire, attempt to bar the path of Russia to Constantinople, would be one of the most tremendous ever submitted to the judgment of English statesmen. We must not blind ourselves to the fact that the power of England, though positively it has not declined but increased, has relatively declined, especially in comparison with the power of those great inland giants, whose once unwieldy limbs have of late been knit together by railroads. Her children must not feel themselves dishonoured because one little island can no longer give the law in all parts of the world. Her standing army and her navy are her sole effective force. Brave and hardy populations, whether of landsmen or sailors, untrained, unarmed, unenlisted, would no more avail to guard her against a mortal blow in case of sudden hostilities with a great power than the unworked coal in the mine would heat the furnaces of her men of war.

The force of political sympathy among all the nations of Europe is now sufficiently great for the revolution in Spain, if it ends in the permanent establishment of a Republic, to lend some strength to the Liberal party in England.

King Amadeus was too young for statecraft, but he seems to have shown sense and courage as well as a steady regard for constitutional principles, and therefore it may be presumed that the attempt in which he has failed was hopeless. Of dynasties it may be said with more truth than of constitutions, that they are not made, but grow. In proportion to the religious attachment felt by the Spanish people to their ancient line is the difficulty of planting any new Royal Family in their affections. Probably the strongest basis now left for conservative institutions is the old provincial feeling, the strength of which points in the direction of a Federative Republic. A Federative Republic in Spain would no doubt for some time to come be far from an edifying spectacle to the political

world; but it might keep its legs, which, to all appearances, nothing else could. What calls itself Carlism is to a great extent mere brigandage, a pest which may be said to have prevailed in certain districts of Europe, and to have broken out whenever political disorder gave it an opportunity, almost since the time of the great robber armies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The parentage of the Prince of Asturias is doubtful, and the Duke of Montpensier never had the slightest hold on the affections of the people. There is talk, apparently, of reviving the Hohenzollern candidature, but the Hohenzollerns are foreigners, and the Spaniards are, above all things, national From the effete and decrepit aristocracy there is nothing to be hoped or feared. The peasantry are physically a very fine race, and their vigour seems to some extent to keep at bay the influence of their ignorant and fanatical priesthood, to which, however, they are a good deal subject. They are totally careless about politics, and indifferent as to the form of Government which may be set up at Madrid. In this sense they are reactionary, and the hope which the conservative party in England and elsewhere reposes on them at this crisis is well founded. But it does not follow that they may not be trained as well as the Swiss peasantry to selfgovernment by good local institutions, at once the schools and the anchors of liberty. In the cities, especially in Madrid, Barcelona, and Cordova, there is a large Liberal party, though one, probably, with less stamina than enthusiasm, rather visionary, and full of faction, which, whatever some of our contemporaries may think, is not invariably the parent of patriotism and concord. The great danger is the rise of some military adventurer; for the army, unless it has recently undergone some great change, is totally unprincipled and ready to support any pretender or usurper who will pay the Prætorians well. Probably the alleged difference of political opinion between the cavalry and

the infantry is little more than a question of blackmail.

Senor Castelar, the Republican leader of the Cortes, who is carried to the top by this turn of the wheel, is somewhat rhetorical, and somewhat enthusiastic, but his course has been pure and dignified, and he has shown himself not incapable of selfcontrol. It is more than doubtful, however, whether his hand is strong enough to curb the steed.

We must not allow the disorders incident to the break-up of the old political system of Spain to mislead us as to her real strength and her probable future. Disorders at least as great attended the break-up of the feudal system in England, which was followed by a splendid rejuvenescence of the nation. Spain has thrown off her great incubus, the theocratic monarchy, with its political fetichism, its persecuting laws, its inquisition, its index expurgatorius, its swarms of mendicant monks, and its industry-crushing load of ecclesiastical wealth. In spite of financial difficulty and national bankruptcy, commerce has increased. Other signs of national energy have re-appeared. Spanish literature has emerged from the tomb of Cervantes and de Vega, and the voice of free thought, which had been silent since the last victim perished in the fires of the Inquisition, rings again through the speeches of Castelar. We look with hope as well as sympathy to the future of the Spanish people, and not without hope to the future of their colonies in the new world, to the political disturbances in which the same remarks are in some measure applicable, and which we believe now to have passed through the worst crisis of their history.

It is reported that the revolution in Spain. was partly brought about by the influence of France. For France we should read, the extreme Left. But it is probable enough that the direction taken by French ambition for the present will be that of Republican propagandism, and that France will endeav

our to unite what are styled the Latin nations by bonds of political sympathy under her own leadership. Even with the army the glories of the empire have faded, and those of the first republic have recovered their brightness. At all events, the revolution in Spain cannot fail to strengthen the hands of republicanism in France. The two together will act on Italy, where the vices of the Court are unhappily little less flagrant than those which hurled Isabella from the Spanish throne. It is also far from improbable that the Liberal party in Belgium, now almost suffocated by the lasso of the Clericals, may stretch their hands to their French sympathizers for aid, and that the French Republicans may grasp the opportunity of at once extending their principles and indemnifying France territorially for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. In every period of transition there will be oscillations and relapses; but if we look at the space which has been traversed by political and social progress since the time of the Holy Alliance, we can hardly doubt that a new era is opening in Europe. The intellectual revolution, which is at the bottom of all, advances with rapid and unceasing tide. Massachusetts hails the accession of Spain to the sisterhood of Republics, and at the same time expresses, of course in terms of the highest morality, a hope that the new sister

will not object to being despoiled of Cuba. The virtue of New England is unquestionable, but it sometimes clothes itself in forms which lend a certain amiability to vice. As we have said before, the policy, or rather the inclination, of General Grant, is aggrandizement, and since he has suppressed the rebellion against his despotism and that of his clique, which took the name of Liberal Republicanism, he is more likely to indulge his bent. He is quietly increasing his navy; and the despatch of Mr. Fish to the American Ambassador at Madrid, of which it is impossible to doubt the authenticity, though a quibble may be raised as to its formal character, is evidently the summons of a wolf to a lamb marked for the devouring maw. The Washington boa-constrictor has at all events not learnt the art of lubricating his prey. Cuba has been little better than a running sore to Spain, and its purchase might possibly have been effected had the American Government spared the honour of the Spanish people. But the mingled insolence and hypocrisy of Mr. Fish's despatch are enough to make every drop of blood boil in Castilian veins. If Spain proposes to the American Government to submit the difference to arbitration, it will be seen whether the Congress of Geneva has opened a new era of international morality for mankind.

TH

'HE wives of poets, according to Hazlitt, are, for the most part, mere pieces of furniture in the room. "If you speak to them of their husbands' talents or reputation in the world, it is as if you made mention of some office that they held." In another of his books he refers to a certain poet's wife, on canvas, as handsomer than falls to the lot of most poets, who are generally, he says, more intent upon the idea in their own minds than on the image before them, and are glad to take up with Dulcineas of their own creating. We men are so exacting, Parson Dale tells Riccabocca; we expect to find ideal nymphs and goddesses when we condescend to marry a mortal; and if we did, our chickens would be boiled to rags, and our mutton come up as cold as a stone. It is quite another sort of Country Parson who muses on the extent to which men of an imaginative turn have to "come down" when they get married not that he supposes anything about the clever man's wife but what is very good; but surely she is not always the sympathetic, admiring companion of his early visions! For instance, we are put in mind of the poet who, walking in the summer fields, said to his wife, as together they gazed on the frisking lambs, that he wondered not at the lamb being taken, in all ages, as the emblem of happiness and innocence; and of the revulsion in his mind produced by the thoughtful lady's answer, after a little reflection, "Yes, lamb is very nice, at any rate with mint sauce." Some poets, or poetasters, however, have urgent need of such wives, and are a sore trial to their patience after all. The Harold Skimpole type is, in Yankee style, a caution. There is a story of one of the tribe whose wife had laid by fourpence (their whole remaining stock) to pay for the baking of a shoulder of mutton and potatoes, which they had in the house, and on her return home from some

errand she found he had expended it in purchasing a new string for a guitar. The purchase suggested the Miltonian aspiration, "And ever against eating cares, Wrap me in soft Lydian airs." The exasperated Mammoth, in one of Jerrold's forgotten comedies, declares that the wives of geniuses live only in the kitchen of imagination.

Jean Paul Richter has typified in Lenette the unappreciative wife of an exacting, or at least expectant, man of genius; and blessed is he that expecteth nothing, in such cases, for only he shall not be disappointed. Lenette is the wife of Siebenkas, Advocate of the Poor, in that story among the Blumen-Frucht-und| Dornenstucke collection which is recognized as not only one of the most remarkable, but most personal of all Jean Paul's writings. Lenette, an alleged portrait of his mother, in her salient characteristics, is representative of a nature essentially of sterling worth and even nobility, but hampered by the limitations of her state of life; cabined, cribbed, confined by circumstances; uncultivated, and correspondingly unsympathetic. Nothing, it has been said, can be more true and of more universal application than Richter's view in Siebenkas of the unhappiness of an ill-assorted union, when there is neither vice nor crime, only an unequal standard of mind and a deficiency of culture in one of the pair. Lenette is "incapable of understanding her gifted husband,” who, full of tenderness and fine qualities, has married her for her innocence and simplicity, but is at length worn out by her narrowness, obtuseness, and want of sympathy.

To have a common past is well said to be the first secret of happy association ; a past common in ideas, sentiments, and growth, if not common in external incidents. One reason why a cultivated man is wretched with a vapid woman is that she "has not travelled over a