readers' "Friend," are in themselves sufficient promise of what might be; but these are far from being all the signs of possible strength. We heartily wish for the day when the welcome of all Catholics for this persevering first effort will have caused it to develop into one of the largest, best, and widest circulating of Irish and English periodicals; for we feel certain that such an ever-fresh recreative influence would be an immense power for good among the whole number of our Catholic children. If it does not hold that position now, and if it cannot rival nonCatholic magazines, the simple reason is because Catholics are as yet slow to assist in the work. In such a case as this obviously it is not the excellence of the matter that will ensure circulation, when its place is already occupied by un-Catholic literature; it is, on the contrary, the circulation that, under the same management, would change small beginnings into excellence.

As to this question of excellence, if we examine in what consists the attractiveness of non-Catholic periodicals for the young, we shall easily distinguish three great qualities, beside the merits of illustration, which is merely a matter of capital and cost, in these days of high art in black and white. The three qualities we would note are: the elements of amusement, of information, of truth to Nature. In every recreative book that is meant for young readers the presence of what they call "fun" is positively necessary. If man is a laughing animal, much more so is the boy; but there is the great distinction that they do not laugh at the same things. For the man and for the boy, wit and humour are represented by very different ideas; and there will be no success in amusing the young unless the child's standard of humour is well known, and yet the man's standard of humour indicated. Even in causing a laugh there may be an improvement of taste, an unsuspiciously received germ of instruction; but unless somehow the laugh be caused, the free hours will be given elsewhere, and the book will be voted dry. Our Protestant contemporaries have long ago perceived this necessity, and the brightness of childhood's ready smile is provoked in every corner of their pages, and constantly watched for in their fiction. As to the second quality-information-we do not for a moment mean to advocate that periodicals should turn into lesson books; in that case, the periodicals would turn before long into waste paper. But there are certain topics on which boys and girls thirst for information, topics for the most part peculiarly associated with their own life, or with the life of imagination which mingles with it. They want to know about boat-building and chess, bicycling and bowling, crewel work and singing, travelling and mountaineering, how famous men and women were actually boys and girls once, and how life goes on all the

world over. All they want to know makes a medley far worse than this, because it is a thousandfold more various; and the whole is the outcome of that curiosity which is one of the strongest traits of the character of most children. Kept within bounds, a child's curiosity often is the energizing power in education. Without some evidence of this quality, children are what is commonly called dull; their mental life is like the life of a polyp contentedly fastened to a rock, and accepting all that comes within his circle of tentacles, but not troubled by feeling that there must be a good deal of the world farther away. The faculty of curiosity is as closely mingled as that of ambition with the desire to learn. If curiosity is ill directed and if it becomes a ruling power, we may expect the same evil that results from the abuse of any other faculty; but there is no reason why it should not be used for good within due limits. During the hours of recreative reading, or, as we have called them, the hours of self-education, the child's curiosity is generally most active. That it be turned to good, and satisfied usefully without being allowed in simple hunger to seek the satisfaction of pernicious reading-all this depends greatly upon the attractiveness and the value of well-chosen information in the periodicals that belong to the young. In those periodicals they take a peculiar interest, becoming not only readers of the magazine, but having an individual connection with it, by correspondence with the editor. This again is a great power for good. For instance, the editor of Sunshine is a hard-working clergyman well known in London as a friend of the working classes, simply seeking to brighten their lives, and using such expedients as his magazine and his floral services in a chapel full of flowers; Sunshine itself is but a very small, well-intentioned ray; but he boasts of a correspondence with some thousands of young readers all the world over. Is not such a correspondence as this in Catholic hands a thing to be expected and hoped for? Lastly, we have noted a necessary element of success-truth to life; and this chiefly applies to fiction. We do not alone mean that fiction should be a description of persons and incidents given in such a natural manner as to be in effect like a reflection of some lives that have been lived somewhere-a reflection true in all characters and events, not with the truth of what actually has been, but of what actually may be. This truth the fiction ought to possess, but we would indicate another kind of truth also. The stories of young lives ought to answer truly to the real conscious life of the child's heart. It ought to be vigorous, for vigour is in the nature of everything young; and fiction without strength will no more captivate the boy or girl, than weak fiction of a more mature sort will entertain an older mind. It ought to be elevating in tonc

but not necessarily religious. Unless it be fiction grafted on to Church history, or introducing the characters of canonized saints, there is no reason why religion should ever fill the greater part of the pages. And stories containing but little mention of religion are often of the very highest benefit to young readers. We add this remark, because there is forced upon us from long examination of this subject, the truth that Catholic writers for the young are apt through very zeal to make their own work less effectual. They are individually anxious to give religious instruction and direct moral teaching; whereas, what is wanted most is, not direct teaching, but that unceasing undercurrent of true Catholic spirit, which cannot fail to be present in even the most purely secular work of a Catholic mind. Books for the young need not be spiritual books; for the most part they ought not to be spiritual books, unless we want to drive our boys and girls to seek all their recreative reading in the works of Protestants. Those boys and girls, be it always remembered, are growing up to give to God an active service, which will not by any means consist entirely of prayers and devotions. To a great extent their prayer, the prayer that is commanded to be offered always, will be their life-life with its contact with the world on every side: its meeting and journeying on with crowds of other faces in different relationships: its hard trials, sometimes apparently of the most unsanctifying kind and the most unromantic aspect: its daily round of duties little and great: its recurring, tormenting uncertainty as to what is duty at all and what is not. Out of such commonplace stuff as this is made, in the lives of most men and women, the precious life offering that the touch of God turns to the pure gold of His service. And for such lives the child-like fictions of childhood, the brave tales of boyhood, ought to be made part of the preparation. If they be true to their end, they will have much more to do with secular matters than with religious, just as the child will have in after-life more labour and ordinary talk than devotional converse in every day. Faith, prayer, and devotion are taught elsewhere; the reading of the recreation hour ought not always teach them directly-and fiction seldom. Its real work is to show the outer side of lives as faith ought to mould them to implant in the generous nature of the young the thought of duty, the patient resolve to suffer, the hope of having, if need be, the glorious strength of great self-sacrifice. To teach these things indirectly is to teach the life-prayer that speaks to God in actions, not words. But what is indirect teaching, and how is it to be conveyed? We answer, it is to be conveyed by example. True fiction will give in unlimited aspects the story of noble examples; and, in proportion as it is true, it will appeal to the reader's faculty of imitation. Fénélon

:

says of this faculty of imitation, that it has been implanted in the young in order that they may be easily bent towards what is shown to them of good. What is any worthy fiction, but an exposition of the good that has been done and that may be done in ordinary life? To show it is enough; we need not in words bid the generous and ardent to copy. They love to imitate; and imitation is easy for their plastic minds and their lives of unformed habit. Very often to teach spirituality is to spoil a story; to make it simply a picture of good, drawn by a Catholic hand and heart, is to leave in it the fascination of an abiding good example. We have been prompted to add these words by our sense that in juvenile fiction the spirituality is often introduced to the detriment of the vigour and power of the story itself. And we have purposely wandered away from our distinct province-periodical literature-because we wish these remarks to apply, not to Catholic periodicals, but to Catholic juvenile fiction, wherever it appears. We shall never rally all children together, never win the playful little ones, never, above all, arrest the attention of growing boys, until it is well understood that Catholic literature is to be a united power, not a succession of individual efforts. When our writers are content to work simply for the exclusion of evil; when they are content to teach by good hardy stories, without aiming at spirituality in every chapter; when they are content not to teach directly, or not to teach at all, but to amuse; when they find their different work, some treading the higher paths of direct religious teaching, others humbly luring the little ones near or keeping them anyhow from following false pathswhen, as we say, Catholic writers appreciate this great work and accomplish it with the esprit de corps of a body who are ready to choose individual sacrifice for the sake of gaining united success→→ then, and then only, we shall be in a fair way to possessing a Catholic juvenile literature worthy of our numbers, and worthy of the love of the Church for the souls of the young.

ART. IV. MINOR POETS OF MODERN FRANCE.

N approaching the subject of the Modern Poets of France, our feelings are not unlike those of a person who, on entering a vast aviary, is called upon to give an account of his garrulous surroundings and their varied song. A countless number of small birds warble, each on his separate twig, while here and there only, mounting above the croak of the raven, the screech of parrots,

and the cooing of doves (for pigeons are plentiful), the clear, strong notes of some sweet songster charm the bewildered ear and dominate the general din. In each case, whether of the winged or wingless warblers, two general characteristics which present themselves are multitude and, with regard to the larger number, mediocrity. Volumes of verses-poems, odes, and even sonnets, for the most part excellently written-pour in rapid succession from the press and yet nothing can be much more profitless and disappointing than the examination of these productions usually proves to be.

Never, perhaps, since the time of the Welsh Druids was the science of rhythm more carefully studied than it is at the present day. Is a strophe wanted? A hundred versifiers are ready with it at once, admirably finished, delicately turned, charmingly coloured, and having only one defect-it lacks substance-it wants an idea.

The chief principle of the new poets seems to be to avoid hav. ing any principle in particular; and that they must have no credo, is their one belief. According to them, poetry must admire everything alike, have no enemies, make no war against evil, admit no distinctions between vice and virtue. In fact, the only forms of enmity, more or less veiled or violent, that we have found among the new poetic generation have been invariably against one or another of three objects-the Catholic Church, Chastity, and the Prussians otherwise their dogma is that Poetry ought to be as plastic as Sculpture itself, or rather that it is merely a jewelled robe in which noble forms or vile may alike be draped. Its true and ancient purpose, that of leading the mind upward to the Source of all Beauty by the charm of beautiful language clothing lofty thoughts, if not forgotten, is discarded and despised, and, instead, its sole ambition is the Picturesque. One result of this worship of the picturesque has been to lead certain of its devotees into sheer paganism-in the same way that with us Mr. Edwin Arnold has apparently been landed in Buddhism by his cultus of Siddartha. And where these poets do not worship Jupiter, Pan, and, above all, Venus, they usually worship nothing: they have no enthusiasm for what is great, no aspiration for

*We should be sorry to misjudge the talented author of "The Light of Asia;" but our impression is received from the concluding lines of his work-addressed to BUDDH :

Ah! Blessed Lord! O high Deliverer!

Forgive this feeble script which doth thee wrong,

Measuring with little wit thy lofty love.

Ah! lover! brother! guide! lamp of the law!

I take my refuge in thy name and thee!

I take my refuge in thy law of good!

I take my refuge in thy order!