The anecdotes conclude with a most particularly." affecting recital of "a blind: " 204.

From the Athenæum.

SARAH TAYLOR AUSTIN.

Not long after the first of these was published, Mr. and Mrs. Austin took up their residence in Germany. During this, which lasted for some years, she had more oppor

THE last survivor of one of those re-tunities, probably, of becoming acquainted markable English families of the middle class, whose intelligence, probity and culture have done so much for literature, art and morals in this country, and most especially during the time of unsettlement and change of the last century, Mrs. Austin, died a few days ago, aged seventy-four, after a long period of decaying health.

She was one of the Taylors of Norwich, a family of Dissenters honourably engaged in commerce. Her mother was a superior woman, whose society was sought by the best and most intellectual men who visited the town, and who gave her children that substantial education to which as basis any amount of accomplishment may be afterwards added. The youngest, perhaps, fared the best, and Sarah Taylor, besides being the youngest, was perhaps the most genially gifted, with great aptitude for languages, considerable power if not quickness of observation, a love of literature and a taste for Art. In her youth, and till a late period of life, she was a beautiful, stately woman. She conversed well, rather than brilliantly. It is no wonder, then, that from her youth upwards she was admired, and that, on her marriage in 1820 with Mr. John Austin, a barrister, who afterwards became eminent by his labours in the question of jurisprudence, her house was resorted to by some of the deepest thinkers and most refined men of letters of the time. Hers was a salon, after its kind, as peculiar as that of Madame de Staël.

with phases of society and forms of manners" gentle and simple " than have fallen to the lot of most Englishwomen. This journey was followed by a residence in Paris, which terminated in 1848, the year of trouble, when they returned to England. Mrs. Austin survived her husband for some

years.

A contemporary is somewhat in error when speaking of Mrs. Austin as only a translator. That she was a shrewd critic many volumes of this Journal could prove, not to speak of more extended contributions to the Reviews. During her residence abroad, too, and after her return to England, Mrs. Austin was a frequent contributor to the Athenæum, and her travelling letters (" Sketches" is too slight a name for them), and her obituary notices, are among the best things of the kind which have adorned our periodical literature. After Mr. Austin's death, she bent herself to the difficult and grave task of arranging for publication the Lectures on the Principles of Jurisprudence, which his great delicacy of health had prevented him from putting in order. In brief, she was a complete, select and distinguished literary artist, and we can name no woman who can precisely fill the void left by her departure.

From the London Review 17 Aug.

MR. DISRAELI'S VICTORY.
Now that the battle has been fought, and

When Mrs. Austin first began to turn her literary talents to account, we are unable to say; but shortly after her marriage she began to be known as a translator of the first class. Hers, indeed, were not so the cloud of words has somewhat cleared much translations as reproductions in away, we may, perhaps, be better able to another language of her French and Ger- see who are the victors. The Tory papers man originals. Few have ever written claim the victory for Mr. Disraeli. The English more nervously, correctly, and ele- The Ultra-Liberals are silent. More cynigantly; few have ever taken such consci-cal politicians are inclined to pronounce entious pains exactly to represent every the latter half of Sir Richard Bulstrode's idiom, every turn of phrase; in short, saying upon the Royalists and Parliamenteverything included in the word style. Her arians at Edgehill, uterque victus." And versions of the travels of the ridiculous the battle has not been unlike that of EdgePrince Packler-Muska, of Dr. Carove's hill. The Tories have enjoyed the advandelicious litle fairy tale, The Story with- tage of ground and dicipline. The Liberals out an En l'her compilation, Goethe have been divided and dispirited. Yet it and his Contemporaries,' and her trans- is only Edgehill in appearance, and in the lation of Rinke's History of the Popes,' fact that it is the first of the Parliamentary succeeded each other at brief intervals. battles between the Liberals and Tories.

war, or still later bringing forward his so-
called "Secret Treaty," whether we view
him as regards the Paper-duty or India,
whether we look at his small party intrigues,
or his would-be alliance with the Pope,
we find his policy ever dictated by the same
uniform feelings of vanity and selfishness.
To do him justice, he has never pretended
to any political conscience. With Pertinax
Marsycophant he would say, "Conscience!
why you are mad! Did you ever hear of
conscience in political matters! I have
been in Parliament these three-and-thirty
years, and never heard the term made use of
before. Sir, it is unparliamentary." The
annals of Mr. Disraeli's life are very simple.

In all else it is the Worcester or the Naseby of the Liberal cause. In every way have Liberals defeated their traditional opponents. A year ago, such a victory was despaired by the most earnest Reformers. There is no need to print side by side the Tory Reform Bill, with all its limitations and safeguards as originally proposed by Mr. Disraeli, and the Liberal Reform Bill which has now passed. It is enough to show that, on nearly every single point for which the Liberals contended, Mr. Disraeli has met with overwhelming defeat. Every thing that he did the Liberals undid. He made plural votes, and the Liberals unmade them. He manufactured voting-papers, and the Liberals destroyed them. He joined Genius," he somewhere cries, is his motto. Durham and London Universities, and the Percat fortiter it should be. He has lately Liberals separated them. When he re- succeeding in uniting in his own person two trograded, the Liberals shoved him him for- functions which are generally separated. ward. For every step he went back, they He has played the part both of gambler and shoved him on two. Every time he stum- "bonnet." He has gambled with the Libbled, they put him firmer on his legs. They eral party, whilst he played the "bonnet" not only led him to the waters of Liberal- to the Tory. And his admirers now shout ism, but made him drink. When he pack-- Isn't he a clever fellow? he has deceived ed the boundary Commission, they made both. This has been Mr. Disraeli's victory. him unpack it. When he disqualified the Cunning is now designated policy, and a compound-householders, they made him retreat is called a triumph. qualify them. When he disfranchised the large boroughs, they made him enfranchise them. Is this Mr. Disraeli's victory? because, if so, we gladly admit the defeat of the Liberals. But do men call capitulation victory? because this was Mr. Disraeli's victory. One by one he gave up his fancyfranchises. One by one he handed up his safeguards. Another such Tory victory, and the Liberal cause is for ever safe. Whatever tunes the Liberals chose to pipe, they made Mr. Disraeli dance to. And the Tory papers, in their exultation, now cry out Didn't he dance well? We cannot even give him this faint praise. He didn't dance, but simply capered on red-hot bricks. Such is the history of the present Reform Bill. Its owes its existence to Mr. Disraeli's inordinate vanity. He did not mind dancing on red-hot bricks, as long as he could be seen to dance. As Voltaire said of somebody he would not mind being hung, as long as his name was in the writ. And this is precisely Mr. Disraeli's case. He does not mind what he does as long as his own vanity is gratified. The whole history of his life is summed up in the single word vanity. He is the same man that he ever has been. Qualis ab incepto. Whether we look at him in his early days on the hustings at High Wycombe, or in his maturer age criticising the conduct of the Crimean

To the credit of such a feat Mr. Disraeli is indeed welcome. Whatever triumph he has gained let him enjoy. He has risen with the occasion. As far as present appearances go, he is the winner. His triumph, if not acknowle iged, has been proclaimed. But we venture to say that his triumph is the ruin of the Tory party:

"A maiden forsaken a new love may get,
But the neck that's once broken, can never be

set."

Mr. Disraeli has broken the neck of the Tory party. Its intellect has gone one way and its heart another. But the intellect was shallow, whilst the love of the heart was deep. The Tory party can never again be what it was. The Peels, the Herberts. the Cecils, the Thynnes, have spoken the thoughts of the country squires. They hate the man who has led them to their so-called triumph. They have won the victory, but they have lost their honor. Their field of victory they find is a ditch. Instead of defeating the Whigs, they discover that they have helped the demagogues. Instead of strengthening the Crown, they perceive that they have aided democracy. In vain the Tory papers cry out, "Toryism and Household Suffrage for Ever!" As for the Tory papers, —

"Ils chantent fort, quand ils gagnent la victoire, Plus fort encore quand ils sont bien battus, Chanter tojours est leur grande vertue;"

so that we are not surprised at their singing as loud a pæan just now over Mr. Disraeli's victory.

But the question of victory must be looked at from another point of view. As Cromwell and Hampden said after the battle of Edgehill-"We must weed our ranks; we must replace the serving-men and tapsters with true soldiers." And this is still more emphatically true when applied to the Liberals of the House of Commons than to the Parliamentarians at Edgehill. We Liberals must weed out of our ranks the Lowes, Doultons, Elchos, Neates, and Adullamites. They have been the men who have rendered the Liberal victory incomplete. The present battle, as we have said before, is, like Edgehill, only the beginning of the fight. We have still a long and weary campaign before us. There are the great battle-grounds of redistribution of seats, Church-rates, education, and the land question, upon all of which we shall have to fight. And no army, however brave, can hope to win whilst there are traitors in the ranks. So far we have indeed gained the

ours.

In the House of Commons he has sneered at
those Reformers who have borne the heat
and burden of the day, whilst at the Man-
sion House he became his own trumpeter.
Few men have the effrontery to proclaim
their own disgrace, and to laud a want of
principle as virtue. But Mr. Disraeli's
"L'audace,
maxim is the same as Danton's-
l'audace, et encore l'audace." By continual
reiteration he hopes to produce an effect.
But it is in vain. The public are deaf to
either boasts or blandishments. Before now
the Tories have gained similar victories for
the people; but the people do not thank
the Tories for them. Nor will they thank
Mr. Disraeli for the present victory. They
know to whom it is due to Gladstone,
Bright, Mill, and the Liberal party at large.
In the long run, the public are the best
judges of a man's career. They know, too,
how to apportion their gratitude, and the
persecutor of Peel is not likely to be regard-
ed, were he to carry twenty Reform Bills,
as a public benefactor.

From the Saturday Review.

AND MISCELLANIES.*

WHEN SO much tall talk comes over from

One almost wonders whether,

day, and so far we ought to be thankful. WASHINGTON IRVING'S SPANISH-PAPERS Our victory is as great as it is unexpected. We have fought the Reform battle with our ranks disorganized. It will be our own fault if we do so again. Above all, let us beware of resting content. Cæsar's maxim must be We have gained nothing until we have gained all. Personal representation must be next won. The small boroughs the Dartmouths, Wallingfords, Lymingtons must either be disfranchised, or, what will be still better, grouped with others. It is intolerable, too, that a single nobleman should, as in the cases of Malton, Stamford, or Malborough, be able to return his own members. Anomalies such as these must be swept away next session. Then, and not till then, will the Liberal Reform ‣ victory be complete. Then we shall have representation established upon an intelligible basis. Then we shall have men entering Parliament as representatives of the people, and not as the nominees of some Whig or Tory nobleman. But this cannot be accomplished without much labor and selfdenial. A good beginning has, however, this session been made. What is so well begun is certainly more than half won.

To return, however, to Mr. Disraeli and his victory. He has not himself been above the vulgarity of blowing his own praises.

America, it is always the more pleasant to
come across any American writer, old or
ward and unaffected English. Washington
new, who condescends to write straightfor-
Irving, unless he is already forgotten, is an
old friend of most English readers, and we
are well pleased to meet him again in any
if he now appeared for the first time, he
shape.
would win any popularity. The chief at-
traction of Irving must always have been
the grace and ease of his style, and that
grace and ease is as widely removed as may
be from the style of either the comic or the
sensational writers who are now most in
Vogue. The highest class of subjects and
the highest style of composition were doubt-
less beyond him, but all that he writes
shows the impress of good sense, good taste,
and good feeling. The second volume of
this collection contains some youthful writ-
ings of Irving's letters written at the age
of nineteen to a New York paper edited b

y

*Spanish Papers and other Miscellanies, hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected. By Washington Irving. Arranged and Edited by Pierre M. Irving. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston. 1866.

66

his elder brother, and dealing with the most passing and trivial subjects, the theatre, the style of dress, the general manners, of New York at that time. Their intrinsic interest has passed away, but they are valuable as showing how a young man of natural liter ary talent instinctively wrote at that time. Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent." clearly had the Spectator before his eyes; no such model would be likely to occur to a young gentleman nowadays, when young ladies have been known to decline all acquaintance with Sir Roger de Coverley on the ground that History is so dry." Of course a young man writing in the character of an old man is not perfectly successful; but the real value of the thing is that a young man writing at New York sixty-five years ago, and bound by the nature of his subject to write something striking and funny, chose or rather instinctively fell into, a style of fun of so quiet a kind. There is not the faintest approaching shadow either of sensation or of the grand style; on the other hand there is nothing of stilted or over-acted sententiousness. The whole thing is the merest trifle, but it is the sort of straw which shows which way the wind blows, and, as such, it is worth preserving.

er careless whether they are matter of fact
or not. But a reader who has the faintest
glimmering of criticism in him must instinc-
tively ask, Is this true or false? Is this
certain or uncertain? Am I, in short,
reading history or romance ? And the an-
swer is a rather unpleasant one. He is
reading something which is neither legiti-
mate history nor legitimate romance, but
which, to speak the plain truth, is romance
unfairly putting on the garb of history.
Historical romance is another matter; we
have always held that historical romance,
written according to certain very obvious
canons, is not only a perfectly legitimate
kind of writing, but may be made a really
useful handmaid to history.
And even
when an historical romance is utterly inac-
curate and misleading, still, if people are
misled by it, it is very much their own fault.
We do not defend the absurdities and con-
tradictions of Ivanhoe; still many of them
are so outrageous that any one who has a
child's or even a passman's knowledge of
chronology and history could set them
right for himself. No one who can count
ought to be led away into thinking that the
son of a man who was present at Stanford-
bridge could have been living in the time
of Richard the First. Few people, we
trust, are so ignorant as to believe that
anybody especially Richard the First, was
grandson either of William Rufus or of
Edward the Confessor. When, however,
Irving makes one of his heroes come to a
Dominican convent in the ninth century,
the mistake is quite as gross, but the gen-
eral reader is not so likely to be able to set
it right. The sum is just as easy to do,
but the reader is less likely to have the
figures ready to begin the sum. A reader,
even an intelligent reader, who is unprac-
tised in historical criticism might easily be
led to accept these fascinating stories as
the true record of things which actually
happened. Such a very slight warning as
that with which Irving ended his preface
could do no good whatever:

The title of "Spanish Papers," applied to the larger part of the contents of the first volume, is somewhat deceptive. We at once began to think of researches like those of Mr. Prescott and Mr. Motley; our thoughts at once flew off to Simancas and Mr. Bergenroth. Was Washington Irving, too, doomed to become a posthumous prey to Dr. Doran and the Duke of Manchester? But we have nothing in the world but the so-called "Chronicles of the conquest of Spain by the Mahometans, and of its reconquest by the Christians. Some portions are reprints, others are selections from what seems to be a vast mass of manuscript of the kind which Irving left behind him. The editor asks his readers to bear in mind that these papers or Chronicles never received the final revision of the author. We are certainly not going to quarrel with them on that score; they are very pleasant reading as they are, and the objections which we have to make to them were not likely to be removed by any further revisions of the author. Irving knew thoroughly well how to tell a story, but he did not care so much as he ought to have cared whether the story which he had to tell was true or false. Now Irving's Spanish Chronicles are tales so pleasantly told that crowds of readers no doubt read them, either ac- not historical foundation. All the facts herein cepting them as matter of fact, or altogeth-contained, however extravagant some of them

In the following pages, therefore, the author has ventured to dip more deeply into the enchanted fountains of old Spanish chronicle, than has usually been done by those who, in modern times, have treated of the eventful period of the Conquest; but in so doing, he trusts he will illustrate more fully the character of the people and the times. He has thought proper to throw these records into the form of legends, not claiming for them the authenticity of sober history, yet giving nothing that has