be therefore confidently expected that the new German lines will attract a fair part of the Eastern commerce.

Another very important feature in the domain of public roads for commerce is the establishment of three great canals, the first connecting the Baltic with the North Sea, the second the Spree with the Oder, and the third the Ems with the Rhine. The first, being principally military, as it allows our ironclads to cross directly from Kiel to the Atlantic, is undertaken by the empire, Prussia paying a special contribution of £2,500,000; the two others, which are to be supplemented by canals from the Rhine to the Elbe and from the Oder to the Silesian mountains, are principally important for bringing German coal to the northern seaports. The respective Bills were strongly opposed by the Agrarian interest, which feared from these canals an increased competition of foreign corn, but were carried by the resolute attitude taken by the Government. In regard to other business, the only question which has been brought to a satisfactory settlement is the law regulating the pensions of the officers and the Civil Service, the Government having at last yielded to the request of the Reichstag, that the private fortunes of officers should be subjected to communal taxation. The discussions on Sunday's rest, on the factory work of women and children, on the increase of inspectors, and on industrial arbitration, led to no practical result. Nor can we ascribe much value to the project of a Customs union with AustriaHungary; the mere difference between the German gold standard and the Austrian paper currency, together with the Austrian monopolies for tobacco and salt, would prove an insuperable difficulty, which would be still further increased by the fact that Hungary and Austria themselves are only united by a temporary Customs union, just now severely jeopardized by divergences of the two on the petroleum duty; and if a complete union cannot be effected, Germany as well as Austria would by several treaties be bound to accord to all most-favoured nations the concessions made to each other. Therefore, all we can hope for is, that if the present treaty of May 23, 1881, expires on Dec. 31, 1887, a more liberal one will replace it.

In the Prussian Diet the principal questions, besides the ecclesiastical law, were several Bills directed against the Poles of the eastern provinces. The Government complained that the German element in those parts was pressed back by the Polish, and therefore introduced several Bills, of which the principal authorized a loan of one hundred millions in order to buy up Polish estates, and to sell them in allotments to German settlers. This policy is not new; it was followed with success under Frederic William III., when, besides, large estates of the nobility had been forfeited by their participation in the insurrection of 1831; but Frederic William IV. was weak enough to give back those estates to their former proprietors in a condition much improved by the administration of the State. If the Government now complains of the expansion of the Poles, it has itself considerably contributed to this result. First, the Culturkampf forced the German Catholics in those provinces to coalesce with their Polish co-religionists in a defensive league, and the Poles being more numerous, their nationality became the dominating element. Secondly, the landed property in the east, being mostly entailed and belonging to the nobility, the German agricultural labourers, unable to become small proprietors, largely emigrated, and

the proprietors had to fetch hands from Russian Poland. This will go on as long as they have no other supply of labourers. Whether the Government succeeds in its plan-which is just the reverse of Mr. Gladstone's plan of buying out English proprietors in Ireland-will depend on its finding good German colonists.

In the obituary of the last six months stands foremost the name of Leopold von Ranke, who died on May 23, after having completed his ninetieth year on December 21, 1885. In him Germany has lost one of the most illustrious of that great group of students who have contributed as much as her generals and statesmen to raise her to her present eminence. This is true, although Ranke was never what is called a national writer in the same sense as Treitschke and his school may be called so, as turning everything in majorem gloriam Germaniæ. On the contrary, the serene impartiality with which he always treated his subjects was often pushed so far as to create a chilling impression. The foul deeds of a Cæsar Borgia, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the devastation of the Palatinate, were unable to rouse his indignation; he pre-eminently realized the truth of the old saying, that we are neither to weep nor to laugh at human things, but to try to understand them. His standard of judgment of historic personages was not our ideas on right and wrong, wisdom and folly, but the ideas of the times in which they lived and acted, and how their actions were reflected in the conscience of their contemporaries. Starting from this point of view, he, the Protestant, had no difficulty in understanding the motives of a Loyola, Sixtus V., Alba, or Wallenstein, and to render justice to men who strained every nerve to crush what was dearest to him. Following in the wake of Niebuhr, he was, together with that great man, the founder of the modern school of historiography. In opposition to the brilliant but superficial writers of the eighteenth century, such as Voltaire, who at best produced historical novels, these two men built up their works on unwearying historical investigation combined with acute criticism. Thus Niebuhr, by his criticism, destroyed the legend of the first centuries of Roman history, and founded the method which became the rule of modern historiography. Thus Ranke wrote the history of the Roman Popes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the despatches of the Venetian ambassadors.* All his works reposed on the most painstaking drudgery with which he ransacked all the documents of the period he studied; nothing was too small, nothing too insignificant, for being examined whether it could throw a new light on his subject. It was only when this sifting and collating process was exhausted that he formed his definite judgment and began to condense his materials into manageable form, to make plain the relations of all parts to each other, to show why events must have taken this or that turn, and to lay bare the connecting threads. This process went on when the work was already in the press; he once told me, laughing, that he was the

* In their reports to the Signoria, unveiling the secret springs of politics, and exercising "an anatomy of states and princes," he found an inexhaustible treasure of information for his studies. In the preface to this standard work, which at once raised him to eminence and earned Macaulay's highest praise, he says: "Some have attributed to history the task of judging the past and teaching contemporaries for the sake of future years: this essay will only state how it really has been." And to the proud simplicity of this most difficult programme he always remained faithful.

despair of his publishers and printers, treating the proof-sheets entirely as if they were manuscript, and constantly changing, constantly going on refining, till at last he felt sure that it would do. And then it would do; for rarely has a historian combined such width of learning with such a psychological gift of penetrating into the most secret motives of the acting personages, and with such capacity of giving artistical form to the results of his investigation. Conscious of these powers, he once, when I was walking with him in 1855 in the Champs-Elysées, observed with proud modesty, "Macaulay is now considered to be the most brilliant historical writer; perhaps posterity will acknowledge that, as historian, I have some merits." His penetration also enabled him to write on contemporaneous subjects as well as on the past; a specimen of that sort is "The Servian Revolution," which Niebuhr declared to be "the best book on a contemporaneous event which we have, of which Germany may be proud." He also entered the arena of politics. After the revolution of July, Berlin society was split into two camps-the Legitimists and the Constitutionalists. Ranke, not being able to side with either, founded the Historical-Political Journal, by which he tried to exercise a mediating influence, and particularly opposed Hegel's political doctrines, stating that for the philosopher's artificial commonwealth nothing less was wanted than artificial men. He also in conversation often made lucky hits: when Thiers, meeting him at Vienna after the fall of the Empire, in September 1870, asked him, "A qui donc faitesvous la guerre maintenant? Ranke replied, "A Louis XIV."

That Ranke had his limits shall not be contested; he is preeminently a diplomatic historian; the times of the Renaissance, the political struggles of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries remain his favourite field; the elementary revolutions, religious as well as political, the parliamentary history, the philosophical development, are less in his line; his pictures of Luther, or, in his last work, of Mahomet, do not, as I think, unveil fully the sources of the sway which these men exercised; and I doubt whether Ranke could have written a history of the English Constitution or of the French Revolution of the same excellence as belongs to his other works. With all that, he remains the greatest historian of his time, and he not only wrote history, but taught how it ought to be written. In 1834 he founded the Historical Society, in which nearly all our modern historians of merit, such as Hatzusser, Waitz, Sybel, Giesebrecht, Schaefer, &c., have been formed. Gifted with extraordinary vitality, he has outlived not only his contemporaries, such as Schlosser, Dahlmann, Droysen, Gervinus, but also many of his pupils, and was able to commence in his eighty-fifth year a great work on universal history, of which a volume came out annually. The fifth volume was completed in December last, and he hoped to complete his task; he even spoke of writing a history of the nineteenth century, which, as he said, he had ready in his head. These hopes were not destined to be fulfilled. On his ninetieth birthday (December 21) he felt still perfectly fresh. A few months later "the fate of all human beings overtook him," as he has often said in his writings. On May 6 he was taken ill, and soon fell into a lethargy from which he was not to rise.

He had scarcely closed his eyes when one of his best pupils, Georg Waitz, followed him-a historian who had not the great grasp of his

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master, nor enjoyed a similar fame, but continued worthily his traditions by thoroughly investigating every subject he treated and by teaching his pupils to do so. His lectures and the "historical exercises which he presided over at Göttingen attracted an ever-growing number of students, many of whom, raising themselves to eminence, have always remained thankful for what they received from him. Waitz's standard work was his "German Constitutional History," which in eight volumes embraces the time from the beginning to the middle of the twelfth century; and after the death of Pertz he was selected for continuing the great collection of the "Monumenta Germaniæ Historica."

In the domain of lighter literature Germany has to mourn the death of Victor von Scheffel, the author of one of the few real historical novels in the best style of Walter Scott and Willibald Alexis. His "Ekkehard" is a picture from life of olden times, presenting a striking contrast with the sensational novels of Dahn and Ebers. They use history as a canvas for representing modern ideas and tendencies in the disguise of old Egyptians and Goths, whilst Scheffel's monks and princesses, shepherds and Huns, are real, living creatures of their time. "Ekkebard," as well as his charming song "The Trumpeter of Saeckingen," has gone through a hundred editions, and some of his lyrical poems, which show a rich vein of humour, are among the most popular in modern Germany.

In the fine arts we have to mention the jubilee international exhibition of pictures at Berlin, in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the first exhibition in 1786. According to all reports it is a great success; but I must reserve a fuller account of it for my next article.

H. GEFFCKEN.

CONTEMPORARY RECORDS.

I.-FICTION.

F the moral colouring of fiction be a faithful reflection of that which pervades the life of its time, we should say that this must be overshadowed in our day by some influence that brings into sharp relief whatever is perplexing, disappointing, and bitter. Perhaps the fact that the novels before us present for the most part a dark view of life might to some minds suggest the opposite view: it is the young who love tragedy, it is those who know nothing of actual, who delight to dwell on the description of imaginary, woe. Still the tone of fiction does on the whole form an index to what we may call the spirits, as distinct from the spirit, of a particular time, and so far as it goes we must allow that it bears witness to some influence depressing to ours. It is the chill, and not only the storm of life which we feel here; love is disappointing, not only disappointed; life is difficult, arduous, sordid, full of anxiety; poverty is crushing, wealth is corrupting. And while the shadows of earth are more visible than they were, the light of heaven is less visible; this world, while it is more naked than it was, is not more beautiful, and the other world is faint and dim.

The three first novels on our list reflect the problems of the newspaper; and the most powerful of the three has had its popularity somewhat impaired, we fancy, by its painfulness. "Hurrish "* recalls, perhaps too much for the kind of enjoyment we crave in fiction, the perplexities that sadden the heart and the alternatives that strain friendship and bewilder judgment, in the political question of the day. It sets before us the bitter memories, the wild hopes, the partisan fever, the angry controversy, and profound disappointment that we gather up in the word Ireland. It has not all the relief an equally faithful picture might have. There is no happy love, no dare-devil Irish fun. It has humour, but it has no humorous side; the story moves steadily on towards its tragic conclusion, and though it has not a dull line, and no reader can lay it down unfinished, yet the impression it leaves on the mind is one of almost unrelieved gloom. And nevertheless something in it recalls two of the most cheerful writers that ever touched a pen; it has some resemblance (though it lacks their bright and varied surface) to those novels of Miss Edgeworth which Scott names as suggesting the first bent of his own genius; and sometimes it even recalls Scott himself in his pictures of peasant life and the breath of a fresh wild nature that seems to pervade it. In making the comparison we are vividly reminded of the influence of the change that has come over thought since the time of both the earlier writers. It has "Hurrish. A Study." By the Hon. Emily Lawless. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Sons.