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throne of the Keyanians, the sublime and absolute Emperor of all Persia." It will be observed, that whereas the compliments paid to himself by the Sultan are mainly moral and territorial, the forms of self-adoration adopted by the Shah are astronomical and historical. It would be curious to follow up this difference to its roots, and to seek out the peculiarities of national character which lead a Turk to talk of his dominions and his virtues, and a Persian to quote his ancestors and the solar system.

The Chinese forms are very simple: as, however, the treaties with the Celestial Empire have all been drafted by Europeans, and have been simply signed by the Chinese, we possess no specimen of their diplomatic formulas, and can only judge their phrasings by such edicts as have come into our possession. They are all tolerably alike, are very practical, and the only peculiar point about them is that they invariably finish by the words, "respect this."

The Barbary States present differences of style which are somewhat difficult to explain amongst close neighbours of analogous origin. The Bey of Tunis is alternately flowery and pious; to France he says, in his treaty of 1830: "In the name of the clement and merciful God. This treaty, which fulfils all wishes, and which conciliates, with God's aid, so many diverse interests, has been concluded between the wonder of the princes of the house of the Messiah; the glory of the peoples who adore Jesus; the august offshoot of the blood of kings; the crown of monarchs; the resplendent object of admiration to his armies and his ministers; Charles X., Emperor of France; by the intermediary of his ConsulGeneral and Chargé d'Affaires at Turin, Matthieu de Lesseps; and

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the prince of peoples; the chosen of the great; issued from royal blood; brilliant with the most flashing signs and the sublimest virtues; Husseim Pacha Bey, Master of the Kingdom of Africa." England the Bey has spoken in less vivid but more religious words, as suits a nation of our supposed respectability. His declaration of April 1826 is the grandest document which he has addressed to us; and yet it does not get beyond these hymnlike phrases, "Praise be to God, to whom all things belong. By the servant of God Almighty, whose pardon and grace he implores, and in whom he trusts, Hassan Bashaw Bey, Lord of the Regency of Tunis and its dependencies in Africa, protected by God and imploring His pity." But when he turns back to the vain and frivolous French, the Bey diminishes the pious talk which he thought was so particularly fitted to Great Britain, and resumes personal glorifications. In the telegraph convention of 1859 he said: "Praises to God alone. The present blessed convention, if it pleases God in the highest, shall insure advantages to the subjects of the two high contracting parties. It has been established between the very High, the very Eminent, the offshoot of glorious sovereigns; the sustainer of great princes; who is obeyed by swords and pens; His High Majesty, Napoleon III., Emperor of the French, represented by, &c., and His Highness, the descendant of generous princes; the Elect of the Emirs; the very High Mouchir Mohammed-el-Sadoc, Bashaw Bey, possessor of the Kingdom of Tunis.' The allusion to the obedience of swords and pens, to the entire subservience of steel in its most ancient and its most modern form, in its two most distant and distinct aspects of destruction and creation, is worthy of all our admiration. In

Morocco, forms are still more religious and still less pompous; they have a certain character of calm, which distinguishes them from all others. The English treaty of 1791 is a fair example of them; it says: "Praise be to God alone. This is a copy of the writing of the treaties of peace between the Lord of the Faithful; who is crowned Defender of the Law, by the grace of God of the universal world, that his pros perity may never be at an end; Mahomed-el-Mehidi-el-Yazid, whom God has crowned at the head of his troops, that his fame may be continued to be named in his dominions; and George the Third, King of England, in forty-three articles," and this is marked with a round seal bearing the words, "God of truth, crown the truth. There is only one God, and the Prophet Mahomet sent of God." The Dey of Algiers was the most laconic of the potentates of the Mediterranean shore. When he confirmed, in 1805, the treaties which his predecessors had made with France, he did it in these simple words: "The object of the present writing is what follows. Mustapha Pasha having been put to death, and his soul having passed to eternity, and His Highness Ahmed Pasha (whose desires may God fulfil) having replaced him in the dignity of Dey, the friendship, peace, and good intelligence between us, the French nation and its Emperor, have been maintained and confirmed conformably to the ancient treaties." And in 1814 an analogous declaration was sent to France in the following terms: "In the present year the chief of the French Government, Bonaparte, having abdicated, Louis XVIII., of the ancient race of kings (may his end be happy) has been elected Padishah in his stead. May you, Prince, by the aid of Jesus, Son of Mary, occupy the

throne of power with glory and felicity." Then follows a confirmation of existing treaties.

The same constant public invocation of religion comes out again in the firman of the Imaun of Sana, confirming, in 1824, the privileges of the French in his dominions. He says: "In the name of the clement and merciful God. By our generous and noble writings we insure and confirm to the French the privileges which were granted to them by our illustrious ancestors, and which they have enjoyed for long years in our flourishing town of Moka, the protected of God;' and it ends,-" God suffices to us; we accept His will."

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But when we turn to the English treaties with the Arab tribes round Aden, we get into a totally new class of diplomatic literature; we discover forms which are essentially proper to the district, and which possess a local perfume of the distinctest character. The treaty of 2d February 1839, with the chief of the Abdalecs, is a good specimen of those singularly straightspoken documents :-"From this day, and the future, Syed Mahomed Houssain bin West bin Hamed Suffran gives this promise to Commander Haines, gentleman, on his own head, in the presence of God, that there shall be friendship, lasting friendship, and peace, and everything good, between the English and the Abdalees. I promise no wrong or insult shall be done, but it shall be peace; and the British Government agrees to the same. Sultan Mahomed Houssain and all interior sultans agree to this, and I am responsible. All those even on the roads to the interior shall be kept from molesting any one by me, as they were when Sultan M. Houssain possessed Aden. This is agreed upon between me and Commander Haines on the part of Government;

and I promise to do even more than I have hitherto done, please God. I require respect from Commander Haines in return, and more than before, if possible." The French, however, obtained a far simpler bargain than even this when they made peace with the King of Guoy (Senegal) in 1858. That beaten potentate contented himself with saying: "The King of Guoy, recognising that without an alliance with the French there can be nothing but ruin and misery for himself and his family, demands peace, and gives up to France all the territory between Bakel and the Falémé."

One more specimen from the other side of the world is worth mentioning, before we close the list of exotic forms. When the Grand-Judge of Tahiti, Paofai, accepted the French protectorate of his country, he wrote the following letter to Admiral Dupetit - Thouars: "Mr Admiral, I salute and felicitate you on your arrival at Tahiti. This is what I want to say to you. I approve very much that the King of France takes Tahiti under his protection. I am satisfied because the demand has been made. I wish you to consider me as having written my name at the bottom of that demand. If you do not admit this, I shall be annoyed."

All these examples, both European and African or Asiatic, present characters which justify us in including diplomatic forms amongst the signs of the pride of nations. But as we could not get on at all without these forms; as the selfglorifying aspect which they so frequently assume is not in any way essential to themselves, but is a consequence of the uses which they are made to serve by kings, ministers, and diplomatists,-we ought perhaps

to regard them rather as a necessary article which is spoiled by the way it is handled, than as one of the inherent follies of the world. This view, indeed, is supported by the fact that vanity damages a good many other things as well as forms; all kinds of talents, small and great

from billiards, rope-dancing, and swallowing knives, to oratory, "salting mines," cookery, and statesmanship-lead straight to vanity; the ownership of such purely accidental qualities of beauty, rank, or money, the possession of a good tailor, of a particular umbrella, of an unpublished chignon, are still more productive of the same result. All that we can say of forms, then, is, that they constitute no exception to the universal rule; that the vanity which we put so abundantly into everything around us springs up in them as in all else. The fault is in ourselves, not in the gifts which we possess, or in the tools which we employ. Bossuet and M. J. Chénier have told us this everlasting truth in words which are worth remembering: they said, the first, that "though God and nature have made men equal in forming them of the same mud, human vanity cannot suffer this equality;" the second, that "all is vanity, including majesty, and even love, which is a pity." We cannot, then, expect to exclude forms from its miscellaneous action. Vanity will live on; forms will continue to be employed; we can but indulge the hope that the two may be kept more apart as time goes on, and that the men whose trade it is to utilise the international elements of forms will endeavour to remember, in their application of them, that "everything on earth is vanity, except the good we do there."

JOHN STUART MILL: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

THE rivals and contemporaries of the late Lord Campbell, when informed that it was the intention of that learned lord to write their lives, complained, with as much of bitterness as humour, that he had added a new pang to the terrors of death. The Lives of Lyndhurst and Brougham contained a faithful record of all that a jealous rival would be most likely to note with avidity; and shortly after its appearance, the uses of autobiography were amusingly illustrated, when Lord Brougham, by the aid of his executors, was enabled from the tomb to reply upon his noble friend, give his own version of his career, and impeach the evidence of the witness against him by arraigning his motives. Literature, however, can hardly be said to have gained in dignity or usefulness in that singular exhibition.

Autobiographies worthily undertaken, especially of men whose fame rests upon abstract speculation, are really valuable contributions to literature. They disclose to us, with many intrinsic guarantees of truthfulness which ordinary biographies do not possess, the formation of character and mind, and the degree in which capacities so obtained were adapted to, or controlled by, the opportunities of life. There are several public men of the present day, whose lives, written by themselves, would be of intense and absorbing interest to those who survive them. And where the motive of autobiography is so evidently in the interests of the public, as is this of the late Mr Mill, it is due to the memory of a great and distinguished man to judge it with

Autobiography. By John Stuart Mill. Dyer. 1873.

impartiality, treating it in the spirit of the bequest, regarding the interest of the "experiment in life" as superior to the record of its merely personal vicissitudes. No one could have given this narrative if Mr Mill had not done so; and both the motive for doing so, and the manner in which it has been accomplished, are proofs of the truthful character and purposes of its author, and are entitled to a grateful recognition of their fidelity and public spirit. Mr Mill's account of his life is simple and truthful, and free from all conscious egoism or self-assertion he narrates his education and his career,. and leaves posterity to take warning or encouragement according toits conscience and its judgment.

It is a marvellous story: the history of a life which from the first was isolated from mankind and human influences-of a mind which was artificially isolated from the very nature in which it was embedded-of a training which was forced, unnatural, and severe, and which crushed or stunted as much as it developed. Apparently from thecradle the object which the elder Mill set before him was to produce. an intellect in its hardest, nudest form, free from all alloy of human feelings, whether of an animal or spiritual nature; which should be developed so as to be a quarter of a century in advance of its age; which should stand apart from society and its influences, from human nature and its contamination, the destined invader of the whole existing principles and organisation of society; and which should correct, as with a rod of iron, the strange

London: Longmans, Green, Reader, &

misconceptions, the false ideas, and the pernicious institutions which society had unconsciously formed and carelessly cherished.

own.

The childhood of Mr Mill strikes us as inexpressibly sad. The central figure of the family group is a stern, austere, uncompromising Scotchman, whose inward repression of faith, and outward struggles with pecuniary difficulty, had hardened a nature which joined a vigorous understanding to a very contracted sympathy. We hear nothing of the mother; as for the numerous brothers and sisters, they are dismissed with slight observation upon their childhood, and are never again referred to. Nor were any of them known or heard of in society. Their teaching was confided to the child who was their elder brother, and he was responsible to his father for the manner in which they repeated their lessons, as well as for the way in which he learned his Such teaching was, as Mr Mill himself says, 66 very inefficient as teaching; and I well know that the relation between teacher and taught is not a good moral discipline to either." The probability is that they grew up in the ordinary and healthy way, with more of maternal care and less exaction from the father, and that between them and young Mill there was little love lost. The father evidently reserved to himself the eldest son, whose abilities and mind attracted his favour, in order, by dint of the most resolute and pertinacious effort, to form and endow intellect in its highest and most isolated form. In the attempt to do so, he made, in our opinion, as unflinching and unjustifiable an experiment as one human being ever yet made upon the life of another. That experiment was begun before the child was fairly out of the cradle; and we have preserved to us an exact

record of the successive steps by which it was effected.

Mr Mill had no remembrance of the time when he began to learn Greek, but was told that it was at the age of three years. From three to seven a list of Greek authors is given which he was bound to read and digest; his father demanding in all things "not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done." His infantine recreations were to walk with his father, narrating to him the substance of his last day's reading. A number of English histories were a substitute for childish play, and the story of the American war inspired his infantine fancy with the feeling of national partisanship, until he was set right by his father, and the instinctive sympathy with his countrymen was crushed by the domineering convictions of his hard-headed parent. The heavier studies of this unfortunate child included theories of English government, the vicissitudes of ecclesiastical history, and accounts of great men exhibiting energy and resource in struggling against unusual difficulties: "Of children's books any more than of playthings I had scarcely any, except an occasional gift from a relation or acquaintance." From eight to twelve a long list of Latin books taxed his energies and employed his time. Greek poets, Aristotle, geometry and algebra, the differential calculus, and other portions of the higher mathematics, were thrown in so that no time should be lost. In reference to mathematics he was under this additional difficulty that his father had forgotten them, and was unable to give him the necessary aid. True, however, to his principle of demanding "that which could by no possibility be done,” the father continually visited his displeasure upon the son's inability

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