polite. But true refinement certainly shows itself in never mentioning such things without necessity, and, if we may trust our author, such reticence is not to be found among the ladies with whom she associated. Indeed, as a rule there is all over the Continent much more simplicity and directness of speech than we are accustomed to think of as delicate. But coarse

ness does not lie so much in calling things by their right names as in mentioning them gratuitously. In the matter of interjections neither German nor Catholic French women have what we call any regard for the Third Commandment. In the case of the latter we can only suppose that their confessors and catechisms cannot consider such exclamations sinful. any rate, the mere law of refinement would surely condemn exaggerated and inappropriate exclamations, and to English ears the calls upon sacred Names on all trivial occasions are simply dreadful.

At

According to our authoress, scandal reigns pre-eminent in the coffee-drinkings of the high-born matrons. We will not take the statement as universal. There are, no doubt, circles where there is more of intellectual conversation; but when we consider the pains that are spent on the education of these ladies, surely the general tone of conversation ought to be on something beyond the household, its servants, its births, deaths, and marriages. A lady who translates a poem, or carries on the work of self-improvement, should not be put down as not in good taste in model cultivated society.

And as to sense of beauty, the reception room is bare of all ornament save a cluster of family photographs on the walls, a glass cabinet with a few bits of china and such curiosities in it, and the wool-work on chairs and sofas, arranged without an eye for colour. Upstairs, refinement takes the, to us, curious form of thinking a bath an improper article of furniture, and reducing the size of the washhandbasin. The room is as bare as a servant's bedroom, and the German matron replies to the Englishwoman who has been used to make her nest graceful and pretty, 'You are unpractical. Who would there be to see it? No one but my husband, who would scold me well and never cease grumbling at my extravagance. Dark window-blinds, well-covered cotton curtains, a strip of bedside carpet, and a few chairs are enough for anyone's wants.' Art is all very well for a picture gallery or a theatre, but in German opinion it is merely unpractical at home. There is no attempt to bring beauty and grace into the home side of life. Perhaps we are, especially at this moment, inclined to indulge too much in the quest of

the beautiful, and the average Englishwoman may overload her table and crowd her rooms with what is not strictly in good taste. If German bareness sprang from the desire to be strictly neat and clean with little expense, we should not complain; but, alas! cleanliness is not a virtue in vogue. The terrible scourge of typhoid fever testifies to the general indifference to such matters as one would have thought it the first duty of physical science to inculcate.

No baby's head is ever washed for six months, and the English fashion of using cold water is credited with the blindness of the King of Hanover. The ordinary morning déshabillé in which the family stand, snatching their morning meal round the bare table, is the dressing-gown and loose cap. Our authoress, appearing in the usual trim quiet morning dress of an English gentlewoman, was laughed at, and asked whether she expected the Grand Duke. The afternoon visiting dress and the evening garb are splendid in comparison with an English lady's, but-if we may take the verdict of France, England, and America-alike conspicuous for servile and tasteless adhesion to French fashions and ill-assorted colours. Trifles, perhaps, but symptoms certainly, and symptoms are estimated by what they show, not by their size.

At the beginning of German Home Life there is a letter from a German, owning that its chapters (which had appeared in Fraser's Magazine) thoroughly photograph German society, but excusing much on the ground of the national poverty. We allow that the bareness of the rooms and much besides are thus accounted for, but we cannot allow the plea for coarseness of manners and want of delicacy. Plain living and high thinking' should go together, and we have only to turn to American literature to see how compatible they are. For if there are colossal fortunes and boundless luxury across the Atlantic, there are also thousands of families where the ladies are the only housewives and the means are small, yet where the treatment of woman is chivalrously, almost spoilingly, tender and considerate, language is chastened into purity (we do not mean of accent), and taste and refinement are cultivated. No, we cannot accept the German's plea for the national boorishness.

Nay, there are other matters on which we hardly dare touch, above all on the authority of a book that paints so much en noir, but we fear that it is a patent fact that the 'holy estate of matrimony' has lost much of its holiness in the eyes of this people. The toleration of lax morals in servants, to which we have alluded, is the token of a strange

indifference to purity. Marriages are reckoned at 39 per cent. in England, but at only 19 per cent. in Germany. The restrictions and difficulties in all ranks are as numerous 'as though it were a state of vice instead of a state of virtue,' and the long delay too often leads to the man, at least, living in 'a state of vice.' And even marriage itself is but a feeble tie. Mutual dislike, family quarrels, and various trivial pretexts are sufficient for a divorce. Astonished English may hear a gentleman at the table d'hôte say, speaking of the portly countess opposite to him, 'When I had the honour of being the husband of madame;' nay, the writer of German Home Life declares as a fact that in her own family there was an old general, a Waterloo man, who played whist every evening with three divorced wives. Again, she tells of two brothers marrying two sisters, quarrelling, divorcing, exchanging partners, and finally, on the death of one husband and one wife, the two survivors being remarried. The famous Double Arrangement' in the Anti-Facobin is here surpassed.

All this is not the growth of one generation. Immorality has been the bane of Germany throughout its history. The little courts of the last century were hotbeds of vice, and the memoirs of German princesses such as Elizabeth Charlotte of the Rhine and Frederica of Prussia are too plain-spoken to be readable in the present day. These things may not be new; but what is the mission of culture, if not to change them?

There used to be a belief among English parents that the Sorrows of Werther were all that was to be read in German, except what were freely classed as infidel books, therefore that it was as well not to let their daughters read that language. Then came a revulsion. There were Schiller, and Schlegel, and Fouqué, to say nothing of the great Goethe. The world smiles at its past weakness; and every young lady in the land puzzles at her Lesebuch; everyone who can string a rhyme attempts a translation of the Erlkönig. Not very unfortunately, a good many still remain floundering in the compound sentences when they are released from the schoolroom, and never do acquire German enough to read for

amusement.

For though of course there is much that is innocent and excellent reading, yet, besides those works of Hegel, Strauss, &c., which, as everyone knows, well deserve the old stigma, the nation has reflected its corruption in much of its lighter literature. Take, for instance, Friedrich Spielhagen's Breaking of the Storm, translated, we are sorry to say, by two English

ladies. It is a picture of terrible hollowness and corruption of society, both among nobles and burghers, and of hatred of classes one against the other, while the plot is founded on a fraudulent speculation conducted with more than common treachery. The two most honest men in the book are-sad omen-of the elder generation, an old general and a master builder; but the sons of both are alike worthless men, whose vices are treated almost as matters of course. The builder, Ernst Schmidt, regards the nobility with so bitter and unrelenting a hatred that even when General von Werben, on the discovery of how far matters have gone between Lieutenant Ottomar von Werben and Ferdinanda Schmidt, would have waived all objections and consented to the marriage, he refuses all consent. The real heroine, Elsa von Werben, and old Schmidt's nephew, an able and upright merchant captain, do indeed conduct themselves fairly well, and marry prosperously; but the story of poor Ferdinanda's love and death is that of a heathen woman, and throughout love is so entirely the lord of most, if not all, the women of the story, that Christianity seems to be never looked on as a restraining power. Even the good old general feels no shame or doubt in sending his innocent daughter Elsa to associate with his sister, who had disgraced her marriage and was still living in the power of her former lover, an Italian adventurer, whom she could not marry on pain of forfeiture of her estates. He is the prime villain of the book, or rather the demon moving all the minor villains, of whom Ottomar is the chief victim. Having been drawn into the web of fraud, so as to taint his honour as an officer, the miserable young man is tried by court martial and dismissed the service. This is viewed as tantamount to being condemned to die by his own hand. His father himself loads the pistol with which he is to end his life, and sends it to him; but Ottomar's escape, and with Ferdinanda, is managed by a certain easy-going and disreputable Bertalda, only, however, to be overtaken by a maniac lover of the girl's. She perishes in saving Ottomar from his dagger, and Ottomar is soon after killed in the great tempest which gives name to the book and does a great deal of execution in the third volume. The tissue of wickedness and horror connected with this madman, and the unprincipled conduct of almost every person concerned in the story, can hardly be described. Even the almost angelic blind girl, Cilli, promotes and counsels the flight of Ferdinanda after this fashion :

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And may God be with you,' said Cilli, laying her hands on

Ferdinanda's head, who had thrown herself on her knees before her' with you both. He only asks for love, and yet again for love, the love that beareth all things. You can now, you can both now prove that your love is true love.'

This is to an unmarried girl fleeing with a dishonoured, disgraced, and guilty soldier. It was to save his life indeed; but is not this the dangerous confusion of right and pseudo-generosity that is most to be deprecated, the blasphemous application of what is said of heavenly love to that which is‘earthly, sensual, devilish,' the very fault of the worst French novels?

And we fear that this is not an exceptional book, and that it does to a certain degree represent the tone of feeling and morality where the Christian faith has become little more than a vague sentiment, and der liebe Gott is little more than the God of nature, and is chiefly known in expletives. Alas! we fear that Prussia was but too truly, though unconsciously, portrayed in the romance of Sintram, the offspring of her best days, when fresh from the patriotic struggle with the First Napoleon.

Is not the Fatherland only too like the youth, a Christian in name indeed, but with his gentle mother, the Church, driven away to pray for him in her cloisters while he is delivered up to the might of his strong hereditary passions for ambition, violence, and dominion, while the demons of lust and gain haunt his dreams? May the better hope, the truer spirit of faith and love, return! May he take hold at last of better things, not as the demon prompts, but in patience and penitence !

For if Sintram had followed the bidding of the Little Master and had snatched at Gabrielle, she must either have perished or have lost all that rendered her truly lovely and precious. Is it not even thus with things fair and good, and all that culture gives? If it do not come through, and for the sake of, God, it is nothing worth, and fails in the using.

For verily we have not written these things in censoriousness of our neighbour nations, but in fear and trembling for ourselves. The experiment of culture alone is urged on us, and it would be tried all over the country were it not that we have a strong tenacity of purpose and habit of acting and managing for ourselves, and of paying dearly in order to do so, such as cannot easily be forced into a centralisation.

Before submitting, then, it is well to look forth and see the effects on our neighbours. Culture has been tried to the utmost on both sexes in Germany, and on the men in France. What has been the effect? In France, apparently, the strength of