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Was there ever a more modest, more touching suggestion of a want? What! one room only, one poor room! to make a home for a great philosophy, a universal religion? We do not know how the reader may feel, but we confess that our first impulse was to reply promptlyYes, certainly, you amiable soul! you shall have a room, and that at once. Poor though we are, (and where is the critic who is not poor?) we can yet manage to make this little sacrifice, nay, even to buy a plaster bust or two to adorn the same and make you happy. We put on record the instinctive response of our heart, in which we have no doubt the reader will sympathize, for our own satisfaction, and because perhaps it may But please Mr. Congreve to hear of it. we have great pleasure in informing the public that the sacrifice which we were so genially disposed to make has not been necessary, but that the Positivist body itself has proved equal to the task imposed upon it, and that the Room has been attained. Here is our mild Apostle's own account of so gratifying a fact: In England, during the past year, we have

When, on the last made a great advance. anniversary of this festival, I mentioned certain objects as desirable, I had little expectation that we should, by the next anniversary, We have got so far towards their attainment. have been now for nine months in possession of this room, and the gain to our cause has been, and will be, undoubtedly great. It gives us a centre of action, a place to which those who wish to hear more of our teaching may come, as well as a rallying-point for ourselves; and it gives us, moreover, what is on all grounds so valuable to us, a sense of permanence. It gives us the unity of place in exchange for the unpleasant but necessary changes to which we were previously driven. It enables our associations to fix themselves, and to gain the strength which fixity gives. It is in the highest degree calculated to proThere is good reason, I think, to hope that it will give a very strong impulse to our progress. Nor is it the mere room we have, but in the collection of the busts of the calendar which ornament our walls, together with the pictures which, as the room becomes drier, may be see not added in increasing numbers, we merely with gratitude the liberality of our members, but the evidence of that worship of the dead which is characteristic of Positivism, and the beginnings of that artistic develop

mote our sense of order.

ment which it sets before it as one of its great ends. None can enter the room and give the most passing attention to that series of busts without being struck with the historical charshould be, and will be, a valuable impression acter which attaches to our religion. They for all, and the Positivist cause is much indebted to those who have placed them there.

We cannot conclude more fitly than
with this gratifying announcement. The
Room (it is surely worth a capital) is sit-
uated in Chapel Street, Bedford Row,
No. 19. There Mr. Congreve preaches
on Sunday mornings, taking "the practi-
cal and religious side of the subjects,"
There all men
and Mr. Beesly on Sunday evenings tak-
ing "the historical side.'
who will may be informed by the collec-
tion of busts and the pictures, which no
doubt has been added to by this time;
there we may learn how to say a litany to
Humanity, and pray to that great Be-
ing, and contemplate, in and through
Humanity, the august figure of M. Comte.
There, too, we may be taught how to
love Space, and to understand the re-
sponsive passion of that highly compre-
hensible entity. Furthermore, if you
wish it, dear reader, you may there be

initiated into the dates and names of the
new religion, and date your letter Moses
19th, instead of January 19th, Aristotle
instead of March, Dante instead of July,
Gutemberg instead of September; and
so forth. The first day of Moses in the
86th year of the blessed French Revolu-
tion, for instance, would be the date in
the Calendar at No. 19 Chapel Street,
Bedford Row, for what we called the 1st of
January 1874 in profane parlance. Think
of that, all who aspire to superiority and
To be sure, in the present
singularity !
rudimentary state of the community, this
system of dates is troublesome, since the
old-world, effete Christian date must still
be added to insure comprehension; but
in the natural course of events the old
must displace the new, and this unsatis-
factory state of affairs will no doubt come

to an end.

We feel too much attached to Mr. Congreve to criticise his grammar or his mode of expressing himhow a series of busts can be "a valuable impression." self; but it troubles our limited intelligence to know We admit, however, that after our effort to comprehend the love of Space and the worship of Humanity, we may have got a little confused as to what words mean.

the domestic history of the period which preceded the great Revolution should turn to this article. M. Soury has consulted the chief works recently published and a number of inedited documents, and he has invested with wonderful life and reality the biography of these last daughters of the House of France.

Academy.

He

IT is stated that in 1849 a brother of King Coffee, named Aquasi Boachi, and then of about twenty years of age, lived at Vienna for several months. He was taken from Coomassie by some Dutchmen at the age of nine, brought up at Amsterdam, and afterwards sent to the School of Mines at Freiberg. spoke three or four European languages, and showed much intelligence and love of study. Not wishing to return to his country, he entered the service of the Dutch colony at Batavia, where he was found by the Novara expedition, holding the office of director of mines, and enjoying the respect of all with whom he was brought in contact. Academy.

A GOOD deal of attention has lately been survive her, and died in great obscurity on paid to the daughters of Louis XV. Attempts February 18, 1800. All who are interested in have been made by some to prove that one of the six was a saint, by others to prove that three at least were stained with abominable crimes. Both are alike unsuccessful. Mdme. Louise appears, from an article by M. Jules Soury in the Revue des Deux Mondes, to have been diseased in mind and body, a mixture of wounded vanity, ambition, casuistry, and intrigue. The others had, in greater or less degree, the merits and defects of the house of Bourbon. Voluptuous and full-blooded, devoted to the pleasures of the table and the chase, with constitutions prone to hereditary disease, and good natural abilities debased by the wretched education of the convent and the Court, and soured by the disappointments of a useless life, they were but ill-fitted to bolster up a falling dynasty, to foster the feeling of loyalty in an exasperated people, to recommend the precepts of Ultramontanism to a nation of sceptics and Encyclopedists. Their influence over their unhappy niece, Marie Antoinette, was for evil, as she herself at last recognized. Their language was too free for the by no means fastidious courtiers of the eighteenth century. The affection which they bore their father, one of the redeeming traits in their character, deep and self-sacrificing as it was, was too effusive to escape scandal. The little traits which distinguished the sisters, except the scheming devotee Louise, and perhaps the timid Sophie, are well brought out WITH the object of improving the means of by M. Soury, who is a careful student and communication between Russia and Turkey, an able exponent of character. Their disposi- agreement was entered into last year between tions were mainly Bourbon, intermingled with the two governments to grant to a Dane of the some Polish traits inherited from their mother, name of Tityen a concession to lay down and Maria Leczinkska, whose joyless destiny irre-work a submarine cable between Odessa and sistibly reminds us of Catharine of Braganza, as the records of the Louis Quinze period so often recall the vivid pages of Pepys and the England of his day. The record of their lives is in itself no great contribution to history. The eldest, Elizabeth, became the wife of the third son of Philip V. of Spain, afterwards Duke of Parma, a dissolute, weak-minded prince, who was always out at elbows. She was known as the poor Duchess, and was saved from utter misery by her love for her children, a feature which she shared in common with her father, Louis XV. The others were never married. Mdme. Louise, the youngest, retired in 1770 to the Carmelite monastery of St. Denis, her "angel" being Julienne de MacMahon, and became the mainspring of Jesuit intrigues and Ultramontane intolerance, and a passionate collector of all sorts of relics, especially the entire bodies of saints. Only two, Adelaide and Victoire, were living when the Revolution which their father had but too surely foreseen, and had done his best to render inevitable - burst upon France. They fled to Rome, and, on the approach of the revolutionary armies, to Trieste, where Victoire died in May, 1799. Her sister, the impetuous and masculine Adelaide, did not long

Constantinople. By virtue of this concession, Tityen formed a company, and on May 11 last the task of laying the cable was successfully accomplished. The line has since been thoroughly tried, and is now in working order, the charge being fixed at 14 francs for an ordinary message from any inland town of Russia to one in Turkey, and 12 francs from Odessa to Constantinople. Academy.

ACCORDING to the most recent and careful calculations, the population of Japan amounts to 33,000,000. The country is divided into 717 districts, 12,000 towns, and 76,000 villages, containing an aggregate of about 7,000,ooo houses, and no less than 98,000 Buddhist temples. Among the population are included 29 princes and princesses, 1,300 nobles, 1,000,000 peasants (about half of whom are hired labourers), and about 800,000 merchants and shopkeepers. The number of cripples is estimated at about 100,000, and there are 6,464 prisoners in confinement throughout the country. |

Academy.

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A MESSAGE-AN ANSWER.

I.

I HEARD that life was failing thee; and sent
A rose, the Chalice of Love's Sacrament,
Thinking that the sweet heart of her should
show

How one remembers thee, that long ago Had steeped the rose in tears, long dried, long spent.

Not that my messenger should stir thy breast,
Or passion move thee, that for only guest
Should have the Lord of Life, thy soul to
guide

Through the Death-valley to the other
side-

Thy only love be now the First and Best

But that before the awful shadows creep
Across thee, and thou fall indeed asleep,

Thy whitening fingers once might wander in
The petal's depths; and thou, remembering,
Mightst send some token to a friend to keep.

A friend, O sacred word of depth divine!
Passion may fade as fadeth pale moonshine,
And glories fail from off the earth and sea,
But what shall hinder us, if unto me
Thou say,

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"But that which thou didst know of old on earth

Is born again; and from the second birth "I am thy friend, and thou art Stands measureless of stature, grown divine! mine?" If on the earth and in my dying hour Words none had I, nor yet could find a

Love halteth trembling at the Gates of Life,
Afraid to enter, since her heat is strife,

And she transfusèd is with earth's unrest;
But for us, friend, it hath long since been
best,
Love past a long while since, when Love was
rife.

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From The Quarterly Review.
ENGLISH VERS DE SOCIETE.*

the volume that heads our list, has expanded a similar view with copious illusTHE writer of vers de société (for which tration. He is careful to remark that we have no corresponding term in the while in this species of verse "a bouEnglish language) stands in the same doir decorum is or ought always to be relation to the audience of the salon and preserved, where sentiment never surges the club as the ballad-writer to that of into passion, and where humour never the alehouse and the street. The one overflows into boisterous merriment," it circle is more cultivated than the other," need by no means be confined to topics but the poet must equally reflect its tone, of artificial life, but subjects of the most exthink its thoughts, and speak its language. alted and of the most trivial character may Not a few of the brightest specimens of be treated with equal success," provided this poetry are of anonymous authorship. the conditions of the art be duly observed. Many of its best writers whose names What those conditions are he proceeds have been recorded were not professed to show. His definition of them is poets, but courtiers, statesmen, divines, straiter than Isaac D'Israeli's, and somesoldiers, wits, or "men about town," who what too exacting, for it would be easy to combined with their intimate knowledge prove that many of the poems admitted and quick observation of the world a suf- into his collection do not unreservedly ficient facility in the production of easy comply with them. A certain "conversparkling verse to win the ear of their sational" tone, as he notes, generally percircle. Whenever, as has often been the tains to the best vers de société. The case in our literary history, a poet of high qualities essential to the successful congenius or graceful accomplishment has duct of conversation will accordingly be cultivated this branch of the art, he has observed in them, - savoir-faire, sprightnot failed to enrich it with his own pecu-liness, brevity, or neatness of expression. liar charm. But, as Isaac D'Israeli has Humour, the salt of well-bred conversapointed out in his essay on the subject, tion, is one of their commonest characterthe possession of genius is "not always istics; and egotism, a soupçon of which sufficient to impart that grace of amen- is never grudged to an agreeable talker, ity" which is essentially characteristic frequently lends them flavour and piof verse "consecrated to the amusement quancy. But these are not indispensable of society. Compositions of this kind, ingredients. Such verse is as often effusions of the heart and pictures of the purely sentimental, and may at times be imagination, produced in the convivial, tinged, although not too strongly, with the amatory, and the pensive hour," de- the emotion of which sentiment is but the mand, as he goes on to show, rather the mental simulacrum. No precise definiskill of a man of the world than a man of tion, indeed, is possible of a poetry so letters. "The poet must be alike pol- volatile, a wind-sown seed of fancy, for ished by an intercourse with the world as which circumstance serves as soil and with the studies of taste, one to whom opportunity as sun, and that varies with labour is negligence, refinement a science, the nature of its subject, the disposition and art a nature." † of its writer, and still more the temper of its age.

Mr. Locker, in his admirable preface to

1. Lyra Elegantiarum; a Collection of some of the best Specimens of Vers de Société, &c. Edited by Frederick Locker. London, 1867.

This brings us to what we deem the special feature that distinguishes it from other branches of the art, its representa

2. Ballads. By W. M. Thackeray. London, 1856. tive value as a reflection of history. To 3. London Lyrics. By Frederick Locker. this aspect of the subject, upon which we

Edition. London, 1873.

Sixth

4. Verses and Translations. By C. S. C. Second doubt if sufficient stress has yet been

Edition. Cambridge, 1862.

5. Fly-leaves. By C. S. C. Cambridge, 1872.

6. Vignettes in Rhyme and Vers de Société.

Austin Dobson. London, 1873.

By

↑ "Literary Miscellanies" (Edition of 1863), p. 308.

laid, the following observations must made respecting the living interest of the mainly be devoted. The remark already poetry of society applies with equal force

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