... PLA YGOING, PAST AND PRESEAN7P THERsaE are few subjects in which it is more difficult to get at the real facts of the case than in the question as to the deterioration of the English stage. Everybody says that plays and actors are worse than they vere when George IV. was king; and everybody knowvs that to see a good new play or a good old play thoroughly well acted in all its characters is ...

... IDm O C Y.' Tim authors of this book have been for some years engaged in the endeavour to raise to the highest possible pitch the individual and social condition of the idiot, and they give us here the results of their experience. Too much gratitude could hardly be felt for the boon they have thus conferred upon a class than whom none more heartily deserve our pity and our aid. They have had ...

... THE PARIS EXHIBITION OF THE WORKS OF| I ' L 'LIVING ARTISTS. [FIRST ARTICLE.] Two incidents which gave rise to some comment marked the opening of the French Salon this year-one, the suicide of a young painter because his works had been rejected by the jury appointed to examine the pictures sent in for exhibition the other, a controversy in the newspapers originated by that enemy of all that is ...

... ESSA YS ON THE IRISH CHURCH.* WE can scarcely conceive a more painful position for a conscientious statesman to be placed in than when he is called upon to decide between what seems to be truth in the abstract and what seems to be truth in the concrete. He has no time, be it remembered, to reconcile the apparent contradiction between them-for apparent only in most cases it will be. This ...

... [SECOND ARTICLE.] No picture in the present Salon has been more talked about than M. (&ronle's Cleopatra and Caesar, not so much on account of its mnerits, as because the lady who commissioned it refused to take it at the price demanded by the artist, and because some wealthy Englishman stepped in andl secured it by paying the 40,000 francs: which fact naturally whetted public Curiosity. M. ...

... FIVE novels with a purpose, the purpose of each being very nearly the same as that of its predecessor, must surely be exhausting even to the most fertile writer. And so we are prepared to find the Abbe ' : I now and then repeating himself in the argumentative chapters which, after his manner, he brings in by way of chorus between the different acts of his plot. His grand principle that, as a ...

... IT is a proof alike of the deep and permanent importance of the subject and of the Matron's ability in dealing with it that this continuation of her prison sketches, of which two series have already appeared, should show no diminution in interest. Those who have read her former book will no doubt find some degree of sameness in the present volumes; but there is nevertheless much freshness ...

... Tur, clerical mind shares with the feminine one of those peculiarities in which women are specially unlike men. Both women and clergymen take particular delight in dwelling upon and describing their own per- sonal emotions and sensibilities. Woomen, indeed, unless they are given to boolk-making are usually too discreet to call upon their male companions to listen to their sweet and amiable ...

... MIRK ABBEY.. IN those novels, and they are the most amusing, if not the most artistic class, where the interest depends chiefly upon the plot, the author has two tasks to perform-he has to tie the knot, and he has afterwards to untie it. The first of these tasks is by far the easiest: the skein of human existence is constantly getting into tangles, which the novelist can copy from the life, ...

... L'ELISIR D'AMORE. WHILE the art of acting seems rapidly dying out in that form of the drama where good acting is an essential, it is developing, with singular felicity, in that form of the drama where it is an accessory. The musical drama becomes attractive by its actor-singers at the very time when the spoken drama is becoming intolerable. Is there on the European stage at the present ...

... THE GENTLE PHILOSOPHER. * THE twaddling essayists may at least congratulate themselves that they give much more trouble to critics than writers of brilliant parts and literature do. There is an inspiration about a clever man's book which puts the reviewer on his mettle, and makes his task a pleasant one. If you dislike his views, there is excitement in controverting them. If you sympathize ...

... CLEMENCY FRANKL YN. * IT would be hardly fair to expect from lady novelists strikingly lifelike portraits of the opposite sex, for, as no introspection will serve them here, they are forced to form their notions of the invisible machinery of the male character from induction (which is not a lady's forte), and induction too of a very imperfect kind, as even the external indices upon which it ...