benefit of certain masses, and other acts of piety and charity." Well, but what was the burlesque ? We must give the whole passage at length. We beg Mr. Blackburn's pardon for stealing his plums, but And all and manly bearing," walk in, " quiet in demeanour, and very neatly dressed in tightfitting suits of black, with embroidered hussar jackets and Spanish sombreros,' their hair cut closely, except the one little plaited pigtail, which hangs down at the we can't help it. There are plenty left. back." Well, then there is the crowd of "Parts of the performance," be it premised, young Madrileños, the sporting fraternity "were disgusting, and quite unfit to be of Madrid, who follow these heroes, with a witnessed by an English lady." So Mr. running accompaniment of loud discussion, Blackburn has left them out. while the performers sit and sip their "for the benefit of certain masses," &c., 66 agua " with the greatest composure. &c., &c.! But now for the burlesque. "Before we left the café we noticed the "The great attraction of the day was group in deep consultation with one Count the first appearance of an întrepid'señowho, it appeared, had obtained per- rita' tauromaniac,' we should be dismission to act as amateur espada. He was posed to call her who was to face the no novice, having a private bull-ring of his bull single-handed. This drew crowds of own." We like the amateur espada and spectators; and when the ring was cleared, the private bull-ring. This little touch is and the young lady entered, in a kind of a whole chapter in itself. We smoked over bloomer' costume, with a cap and redit for half an hour, and made a tour of in- spangled tunic, the audience rose to welspection upon it round all our ideas of come her. She bowed to the president, and Spanish society, comparing it with our own was conducted at once into the centre of Derby, and Ascot, and other things. Now, the arena, when lo! a great tub, with one on the whole, which is more magnificent of end open, was brought and placed upright, the two, to have a bull-ring of one's own, and the intrepid' señorita lifted into it. a private bull-ring, or to be the owner of It reached to her armpits, and there she Hermit? to fight a bull publicly as an stood, waving her banderillas' or darts, amateur before enthusiastic Madrid, or to when at a given signal the bull was let in. lose two hundred thousand pounds and It was a young bull, with horns cut short mortage twenty thousand a year in the face and padded at the ends; and as the animal of amazed and gossiping England? We could only toss or do mischief by lowering give it up. On the whole, for practical its head to the ground, the risk did not purposes we should like to be able to fight seem great or the performance promising. à bull. It must add to our legitimate self- For some time the bull would have nothing respect, and perhaps result in that statu- to do with the tub, evidently not consider esque bearing and noble calm which seems ing it fair game, but after walking two or to be the natural attributes of the true three times round the arena he turned espada. But we fear it is too late to study round suddenly, and without the slightest butchery considered as one of the fine arts. warning rushed headlong at it. Away Our amateur had a bull allotted to him. went the tub, rolling half across the arena, He was greatly cheered, showed plenty of with our fair señorita, who had evidently courage and self-possession, but he mangled rehearsed her part, coiled up inside. This the bull by false thrusts, and the poor crea- was all very well, and the lady might enjoy ture had to be killed by the hand of a pro- a sport usually confined to the hedgehog fessional executioner, without the consola- and other lower animals; but when the tion in his last moments of having fought bull, who soon began to get angry, at last an artistic fight. Mr. Blackburn is very caught up the barrel on his horns, and straightforward about it all. "Perhaps," rushed bellowing round the ring, it looked he says, he never wished to see a bull-fight serious for the tenant. ['Tenant!' A again. But he admits there were one or pretty tenement, just the sort of tenement, two really fine moments. by the by, to exercise Mr. Disraeli's cosmopolitan wit in devising a Reform Bill for Spain. They are sure ask him to do it some day.] Then a general rush of ‘banderillos' and 'chulos' to the rescue, but some minutes elapsed before they could surround the bull and rescue the performer from her perilous position. When extricated she was smuggled ignominiously out of the arena, and we saw the brave seño A large part of the chapter on Seville is heavy, but the inevitable bull reappears towards the end, and this time with an absolutely new sensation. Let playgoers imagine a genuine Spanish burlesque. Very good, but a burlesque of what? Why, of a bull-fight. What, without the bulls? No, bulls and all, and for whom does Lady Herbert think? why, "for the rita no more; the bull was not killed, but | scarcely distinguishable in the twilight, but 'bundled' out of the ring." twinkling with the light of thousands of cigaritos,' and covered with a complete canopy of smoke floating in the still air. Beyond, the city towers, just tinged with the sun's departing rays, and La Giralda' yet broad day. The finale was a wonderful sight. Two or three young bulls were let into the ring, and then ALL THE PEOPLE. We left them there, rolling and tumbling over one another in the darkness, shouting, screaming, fighting, and cursing, sending up sounds that might indeed make angels "The next act was Skittles.' 'Nine negroes dressed grotesquely stand up like ninepins, within a few feet of each other, and a frisky novillado, or young bull, was let in to knock them over. They under-high above them all, glowing as if it were stood their duty, and went down flat at the first charge. The bull struck out right and left, and soon overturned them all." [With all respect, what we fail to perceive here is, how the bull soon overturned them all,' if they had already gone down flat.' If he turned them over,' we understand it but turning over is not the same as over-weep." On the whole, that seems to us turning.] However, they then sat in rows in chairs, and were again bowled over, to the delight of the assembly. "This was great fun," says Mr. Blackburn, simply, and it was repeated several times; the bull liked it, the ninepins' seemed to like it, the people gloried in it." the sort of blind man's buff which the Spanish damned might be allowed on holidays to enjoy in hell, especially on those days on which Sevillian burlesques are enacted for the benefit of certain masses, and other acts of piety and charity. Now, seriously, on Mr. Blackburn's word of honour, and he is, we assume, a man of honour; he was Mr. Horsman's secretary, he says so himself, on his very word of honour, "Is all this true?" Because, if it is not, it is a very impudent hoax; and if it is, it is, well, it is simply portentous. What are all these Spaniards made of? But really science would like to know what such people are made of. We should like to know. Mr. Blackburn takes it all stolidly for granted, and asks no questions. "The third act was a burlesque of the 'picadores,' a grotesque, but a sadder sight. [Mr. Blackburn is going to moralize.] Five poor men in rags, who, for the sake of two or three reales, allowed themselves to be mounted on donkeys, and receive the charge of the bull. We could not help thinking that it was not alone Cervantes who had laughed Spain's chivalry away,' if the stately Sevillians could enjoy such sights as these. But we must not stay to • moralize, the sight is too ridiculous. There But whatever his notes may be, they are they come in close phalanx, cheered by at not dull. We leave them comparatively least 5,000 people; the five donkeys with untouched, and will only add Mr. Blacktheir ears well forward, their tails set close-burn's advice to travellers anxious to see ly between their legs, the ragged picad- Spain. The Pyrenees, even the Spanish ores,' without saddle or bridle, riding with Pyrenees, are not Spain. The true Spain, a jaunty air, and a grim smile on their he says, is rapidly passing away. If you dirty faces, that was comical in the extreme. wish to see it as it has been, haste, and Would that Gustave Doré could have seen tarry not. the group! There comes the bull. The gates are opened again, and the bull goes to work. He charges them at once, but they are so closely packed that they resist the shock, and the bull retires. He has broken one of the animal's legs, but they tie it up with a handkerchief, and continue marching slowly round, keeping well together as their only chance. A few more charges, and down they all go. The men run for their lives, and leap the barriers, and the donkeys are thrown up in the air." And now for a rare vista. "As evening approached, the whole scene made one of those pictures that delight an artist. The 'Plaza di Toros,' at Seville, is half in ruins; one side of the wall being destroyed, and through this gap we saw the city. The foreground was an irregular mass of people, | Hodder. From the Spectator. THE TAYLORS OF ONGAR.* THESE volumes are worth looking at carefully. We use the words "looking at " deliberately. A few may find reading them through both pleasant and profitable, a far larger class will gladly make themselves acquainted with the first volume, and there are others, perhaps, who, with ourselves, will The Taylors of Ongar. Edited by the Rev. Isaac Taylor, M.A. London: Jackson, Walford and our "Liberal applications lie In Art as Nature, dearest friend ; Should hook it to some useful end." be led carefully to study both (not without theless believed in duty as à grand princia consciousness that the task is somewhat ple, leading along a straight road to a desiirksome), from a desire fully to follow out rable though unknown goal. And the the trains of thought they suggest. Here, school was not a despicable one. The woin these pages, the author of the Physical men at least learned much a later generaTheory of Another Life, and the inventor of tion seems in some danger of forgetting, the more than one skilful mechanical device, children nursed in it have some of them with his sister, the well known Jane Tay- outlived it, but we should like to be sure the lor, live before us. Seldom long separated present age will produce equally fine specifrom each other, all their earlier lives spent mens of character, men who, when their in the most intimate interchange of thought, English is rusty, will have their honour one has scarcely passed from amongst us, bright, women who, when their hair is whilst the voice of the other has been silent white, will still find men the better for their for more than forty years; and as we look presence. We have learned to despise a from the one to the other, and read these story with a moral, to believe that, fragments from a pen that from one generation to another in this family seems to have been never idle, we see that in the interval of that short forty years a silent revolution, mightier than the one which marked their earlier years, has taken place among us. The Essays in Rhyme may rest on shelves beside Cowper or Young, Display beside Decision, but we look at them as at some quaint Dutch pictures, which have a certain realism of their own, and yet touch no chord to which our own lives respond. Was it a healthy life, this religious life of seventy years ago? A strange, silent beauty rests on it now, like the calm on a dead man's face. The quiet home in Lavenham, where "a handsome dwelling, with spacious garden well stocked with fruit," were to be had for 61. a year; where the mother read aloud at meals, and no moment in the day was suffered to be lost; where the winter months pass in unbroken quiet; yet the days in their well filled order did not seem monotonous; where the mornings were spent by the girls in what would now be called household drudgery, but which with them seems only to have left them fresher for the evening's work, the writing of those verses which have been the delight of more than one generation of children since, and are likely to last when the essays of maturer years have been long forgotten. That Jane Taylor's stories and essays found so wide and eager a reception proved she was the exponent of the thoughts of many at that time. There had already begun the reaction from the fierce infidelity and careless libertinism of the eighteenth century, a strong desire, not after a higher life exactly that was to follow but after a sense of completeness, satisfaction, roundness, as it were, in the daily routine, and men, but more especially women, who never dreamed of eternal life as a thing already begun, who had not the faintest perception that Christ revealed more than divines taught, never We have done with "Mirrors" and Looking-Glasses," are tired, in short, of looking at our own small selves, begin to think we are, after all, but atoms in a universe, the resources of which are daily opening more widely to our view. It is a higher, at least, a wider life, but we return to look again at the pioneers who cut the way to it for us, through many a huge impediment. These Taylors were amongst them, not in the van, but steadily doing the work. One of the earliest amongst them who took the family pen " into his hand. Charles Taylor, the well read editor of Calmet, uncle to Isaac Taylor, of Stanford Rivers, is well sketched in these volumes. The "artistscholar," to whom work was play, and rest work, " teeming with repressed energy," so repressed, he seems to have turned some key upon his deeper intellectual nature when he left his study, and never at the family table discoursed of the matters wherewith his brain was teeming. His table talk, says his biographer, "was an instance in illustration of Talleyrand's reply to an impertinent physician, who had tried to lead him into State affairs, Sir, I never talk of things that I understand.'" To the last he loved his work, but shrank from the fame which attended it. We gather from this sketch that Mr. C. Taylor, engraver, was to be found at home, but the editor of Calmet nowhere. 6 The chief interest of the book, however, centres around Jane Taylor, and it is almost as the antiquarian looks at some ancientseeming coin, whose modern date he more than half suspects, that we look at these letters of not yet fifty years ago. The names are the familiar names of places and people yet Certainly, no "One pearl that I wear Is more brilliant and rare Than the loveliest gem in a princess's hair. And "My stature is tall, Invisibly hurled, I traverse the world, o'er every land is my standard unfurled. "I silently roll among us, but the style, which had lasted many a long year, has passed away for ever ; a wider life, quicker travelling, and cheap postage have rendered impossible the long sententious letters which were the delight of the last century. Jane Taylor's are not below the average, but they are full of men- Or shrink myself almost to nothing at all. tal provincialisms, such as one ever prayed who was not a Christian," or (when compelled by circumstances to attend the services of the Established Church), "Dr. Watts's hymns are always sung, which make the prayers go down a little better." Even her brother and biographer, writing later, when a long course of mental exertion should have cured this intellectual cramp, says, "Perhaps the instances are rare, if indeed such instances are But often am made the accomplice of crime. at all to be found, in which laborious zeal in works of mercy exists in union with a vivid relish of the pleasures of the imagination." It certainly must co-exist with the vivid power to imagine pain, and the capacity for receiving either impression is probably of one width. Coleridge has more truly said: And And long the wild region endures my control. Round the icy-bound pole; "From earliest time I was grave and sublime; My intellect teems With visions and dreams, wild tales of terror, my favourite themes. "Yet sorrow and pain Oft welcome my reign, And eagerly watch for my coming again : Then I must away, with my story half told.. In one of Jane Taylor's letters she gives an amusing clue to the success which attended! her Hymns for Infants. "My method was to shut my eyes and imagine the presence of some pretty little mortal, and then endeavour to catch, as it were, the very lan-guage it would use on the subject before. me, and I have failed so frequently, because so frequently I was compelled to say, "Now. you may go, my dear, I shall finish the hymn myself." And so, quietly working,. a life touched with many lines of sadness slipped away, not without leaving its mark.. The "family pen," which has never been suffered to drop, is now in the hands of one,. who, though the editor, never introduces himself in these volumes. But there is poetry. in the sternest lines of his most simple prose, and in the hour when "life is all retouched again," there will be many a bright thread woven in with a blessing on the pen that told the story of the children. of Bethnal Green. From the Spectator. A WEEK IN A FRENCH COUNTRY HOUSE.* he continued. "The feeling of decency-le THE great charm of this inimitable little sketch of French country life seems to be in the graceful childlikeness of the manners of the whole social group it describes. In England, grown-up persons of the most pleasant kind are seldom or never childlike. The charm of simplicity may last into maturity, though even that is not very common, but the charm of perfect spontaneity, of childlike self-will, or childlike self-devotion, childlike guilelessness and equally childlike guile, of childlike helplessness and equally childlike dexterity under difficulties, especially of childlike frankness and equally childlike stratagem for purposes of courtesy, is almost unknown in the best English society. The sketches of character in this little book are the merest outlines, sometimes so slight as only just to give individuality of expression, sometimes vivid enough to impress the memory very powerfully, but never studied in anything like detail. But the effect of the whole upon the reader's imagination is far more vivid than the effect of the parts. There is a wholeness and beauty of expression about the picture of the little society kept together for a single week only within the cognizance of the reader of this story, which is never to be found in any English story. Even such a picture as Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, perfect in its way, and executed with far more laborious detail, —gives no such impression of differences of character blended into a single social whole, simply because there is no such thing to be found even in the most perfectly amalgamated of English societies. Englishmen and Englishwomen have by their very nature less capacity to blend with each other. Their lives are too much regulated by recognized social customs and etiquettes, too little by the momentary result of spontaneous social feeling. M. Berthier, a French artist, who is one of the best figures in the admirable little group at Marny, gives us a perfect illustration of the element in the English character which prevents the spontaneousness necessary to the charm of all true society. He is describing the different way in which the English and other nations deal with the great evil of sea-sickness : "Mademoiselle does not look as if she had ill?" crossed the sea yesterday: were you asked Monsieur Berthier, in his slow gentle way. * A Week in a French Country House. By Adelaide Sartoris. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. "I think the English character never comes out more strongly than on board a steamboat," convenable-is what English people never lose sight of- English women more especially : even the tortures of sea-sickness they manage to control, and retire to some secluded corner with their basin, hoping to shroud from observation an attitude which no amount of will can render graceful or dignified. I saw a vulgar Spaniard once, when I was crossing over to England; he had been making game of a poor Meess, who, with English forethought, had provided herself with a basin before the vessel started. He straddled about on deck with a great chain and a gaudy cane, and said in a swaggering way, Look at all these poor wretches who are determined to be ill! their precautions are exactly what makes them so; they are afraid, and give in, and of course are sick immediately; but if one walks up and down as I do, and smokes as I do and sings as I do, one is never ill.' He began executing some roulades as the boat steamed out of har bour; the sea was terrible, and before ten minutes were over, my Spaniard, who had suddenly lapsed into ominous silence and gradually become of a hue the like of which I never beheld before or since on any human countenance, uttered a discordant shriek, and made a violent him; the ship lurched and the basin rolled off, plunge at a basin he saw upon a bench near and he rolled after it, and lay wallowing there on the ground where he fell, an utterly demoralized and disgusting object; but so miserable, and so regardless of all appearances, that I assure you he became almost grand through excess of suffering, and the entire absence of selfconsciousness. Meess, with her basin in her corner, and all her British dignity, was little by the side of that Spaniard in the agony of his utter self-abandonment." - We all laughed, but Madame Olympe took the English side of the question, and stood up for it very vigorously. Monsieur Berthier turned to me. "Confess that you went downstairs and tried to hide yourself from everyone; you would not be English if you had not done thus. I remember at one time of my life having to pass every day the English pastrycook's at the corner of the I used to see the English Rue de Rivoli. Misses there eating cakes, and when I looked in at them (for they were almost always pretty) they took a crumb at the time, but when I passed on, and they thought they were not seen any more, they put enormous picces into their mouths, and ate with as much voracity as other people. I used to amuse myself with pretending to go by, and then coming back stealthily to watch them from the corner of the window, and they always did the same." There are characters in this fascinating little sketch, or tale, or whatever it may be called, of all kinds, self-willed and yielding, selfish and unselfish, timorous and bold, helpless and helpful, but all (except the English |