not disagree with the opinion suggested; only, from an artistic point of view, the opinion had better not have been there. We want no personal colouring in our perfect illustrations of human life; the artist must be out of sight, and the picture should not be painted on toned paper.

It is in this that Jane Austen so much excels Charlotte Brontë. She has found enough to write about without the intrusion of any prejudices or disappointments of her own. When we look at the world through her eyes the atmosphere is wholly clear. The picture is so perfect that we forget to praise the artist; it is simply quite natural, quite true, and so, perhaps, for some persons, wholly without interest. For there is a large class of readers to whom nature does not speak plainly enough, for whom real life is not intense enough. They fail to find in the one the beauty the poets describe, and in the other the passions they depict. Life and nature must be translated for them into plainer expressions by some other mind, and the more theatrical light the other mind throws into these expressions the more satisfactory they are considered. Day by day we all walk through the same scenes without observing half the details of them; and if we are compelled to grope for the first time in the dark along often-trod pathways, we come unexpectedly on hitherto undiscovered objects innumerable. It is only when some new light is thrown upon a well-known scene-the sudden flashes in a thunderstorm, or the red glow of a great fire-that our attention is roused to things habitually passed over unseen.

Some persons walk as blindly through life itself. They require a cleverer mind than their own to throw a background of fantastic colour behind the objects among which they move. Only so can they perceive their true signifi

cance.

Such persons cannot be expected to appreciate Jane Austen's delicately-tinted pictures of human life. Perhaps

they must not even be required to realise what we mean when we are foolish enough to praise Shakespeare. A very intelligent young man of to-day, who reads novels with interest and attends theatres with pleasure, is so convinced of the absence of any surpassing merit in the mighty dramatist that he allows himself to believe that the enthusiasts for the poet are all pretending!

Another man, an elderly clergyman (also of to-day), an M.A. of Oxford, in early years a botanist and a dabbler in the natural sciences-a man who thinks he appreciates Virgil, and has got everything out of the poets that can be got by an intelligent mind-has been heard to express, in a kind of confidential disgust at the stupidity of the world, the following astonishing sentiment: "Shakespeare ? Shakespeare is a very much overrated man. I can't understand what people profess to see in him. But it's no use saying anything." So he leaves us all to our blindness.

It is not to such men that we must recommend the study of Jane Austen's works, with their quiet humour, their quaint reality, their trenchant but good-natured criticism, their sober and unexaggerated tone, and that manner which, Macaulay has told us, approaches somewhat near to Shakespeare's own. There is such an absence of exciting scenes in Miss Austen's books that, with the exception of those passages in "Sense and Sensibility" designed to illustrate the weakness of the heroine's sister, we can hardly remember any occasion of actual weeping; agony and wild passion are altogether excluded. We may complain a little of want of the pathetic, which can less easily be spared than the exciting element; but even here we may be wrong to demur. In the present age, when most of the powerful writers employ their power in harrowing our feelings painfully, in weaving miseries out of circumstances which seem improbable, by means of actions which strike us as unnatural; in a time when the chief end of talent seems to be to pile up

the agony sufficiently high, without caring about the reasonableness of the foundation on which it rests, we may well hesitate before expressing a regret that, in a series of half-adozen delightful novels, there is not one distressing death, not one terrible domestic tragedy, not one horrible crime, not even one irresistible temptation. All can be good if they choose, and nearly all may be happy if they will.

We may say of these books that they are simply and entirely delightful. The cheerful reality of interest and the genial spirit of laughter which pervade them carry us on through pleasant and instructive pages to a pleasant and satisfactory end. We know none, except Jane Austen, who, by a few delicate touches, can so completely satisfy us concerning the disposal of a heroine at the close of a novel. After passionate quarrels the reconciliation generally seems tame; but we are wholly content with the fate of Emma in the novel which bears her name, of her favourite Lizzy in "Pride and Prejudice," and of the gentle heroine in "Persuasion."

There is no respect of persons in the works of this writer. A charming impartiality and candour are to be found in all her portraits of friend or foe. Jane Austen delights us as much in depicting the peculiarities of a pleasant old woman as in relating the fortunes of a blooming young one.

And the most extraordinary thing is that at a time when every other writer thought it necessary to write in another way, and to depend upon incident and plot for his interest, Jane Austen ventured to write in this way, and has so commended herself to this generation beyond her more brilliant contemporaries.

Even the king of novelists, Sir Walter Scott, whose wonderful masterpieces of fiction we have all read with absorbing delight and interest, must, in some points, as he has himself so generously acknowledged, bend his head before this quiet and unobtrusive young woman, who never made,

and never seemed to wish to make, a sensation of any

sort.

The fact that so little of the interest of Jane Austen's works depends on her incidents is in favour of a repeated perusal of these delicate etchings of human life. The characters she depicts are less romantic than is, or was, usual in fiction; but then they are much more real-with the reality not of stupid commonplace, but of pleasant familiarity, intelligently and suggestively unveiled to us.

Her style seemed prosaic to Charlotte Brontë, and her characters uninteresting. Life was full of meaning to the younger authoress, and even the minor incidents in her novels are stamped with the impress of some strong feeling, or carry a reflection of some intense personal experiences. But Jane Austen's belief in the seriousness of life went beyond Charlotte Brontë's; and the author of "Pride and Prejudice" found the drama of human existence so full of meaning that she dared to leave it to explain itself.

A. ARMITT.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

DARWINIANISM AND RELIGION.-A NOTE ON MR. GRAHAM'S 'CREED OF SCIENCE.'

I

S the doctrine of Evolution, as stated by Darwin, essentially and fundamentally in antagonism with the first principles of religion? is a question raised in the reader's mind by Mr. Graham's Creed of Science.'* In the absence of any single and universally acknowledged authority on all problems of faith and doctrine, Mr. Graham takes "the consensus of scientific opinion" amongst the highest authorities on each particular article, and treats this "as the orthodox teaching of science,”as what would have been the decision had all such authorities met together in council to fix the faith. His book is not the shriek of frightened ignorance: it bears no trace of ecclesiastical resistance to the removal of old landmarks. It is marked by careful study of the scientific thinkers who are criticised, by great willingness to accept facts, and by the dignity of devout conviction.

I do not propose to examine its general course of argument, but to ask for a reconsideration of the description given of the Darwinian hypothesis when looked at from a religious point of view.

What strikes Mr. Graham most in reading Darwin's marvellous story "of the origin and process of manufacture of Nature's living forms," is the seemingly chance affair it all was.

We are not permitted, on Darwinian principles, to suppose that there was any prevision or forecast of what was to come resident in Nature's blind bosom. There was no conception, not even the vaguest dream, on

*The Creed of Science, Religious, Moral, and Social. By WILLIAM GRAHAM, M.A., author of Idealism: an Essay, Metaphysical and Critical.' London: Kegan Paul and Co. 1881.