ground, and we confess that-possibly for lack of microscopic science-we fail to discern the narrow line dividing virtue from vice. Certainly we have very little sympathy left for the heroine by the time that her husband's convenient death leaves her free to reward Giovanni for his long fidelity. Perhaps it is Mantegazza's theory that extremes meet, and that a good woman may behave in all purity precisely like a bad one in all calculation. The story ends with the reunion of the two friends, no longer alone, but with their respective wives. Their ten years' quest for the Dio Ignoto is at an end, and in fact each has found his ideal in the quiet haven of domestic happiness.

From the artistic point of view Mantegazza's novels would be greatly improved if he could forget, while writing them, that he was a physician and a physiologist. In the Day at Madeira the nature of the plot allowed, even demanded, a certain amount of pathological detail; but the Dio Ignoto is sometimes disfigured by remarks and expressions more suitable to a medical journal than to the pages of a romance. Nerves and muscles are brought into unpleasant prominence in portraitures of mental emotions; we are too seldom allowed to forget the fleshly covering of the soul. Even when he has led us to the mountains and is treating us to a very eloquent and poetic dissertation on the characteristics of trees, the author's metaphors still smack of the hospital, and he spoils our enjoyment by telling us that, "in uncongenial soil, the beech resigns itself to the life of a scrofulous tumour." Thus, notwithstanding its many merits, notwithstanding its author's brilliant style and analytical force, the solid success of Il Dio Ignoto is but an additional proof of the existing dearth in Italy of sound novel writers and discerning novel readers.

In fact amid the mass of romances produced during the last ten years the only one that stands out as a type and promise of what Italian novels might

be is the Confessioni d' un Ottuagenario of Signor Ippolito Nievo. As a work of art it is by no means faultless; it is much too long, the style is unequal, both action and dialogue frequently drag, and the eighty years over which it extends compels the introduction of fresh groups of actors who do not enlist the reader's sympathies as strongly as the first. But notwithstanding all these defects, which, had the author lived to revise his work, might probably have been corrected, the first volume of the Confessioni is profoundly interesting, and gives us a vivid picture of life in the Venetian provinces before the fall of the Republic. It is both a domestic and an historical novel, and in the form of the autobiography of a Venetian noble relates his life's vicissitudes and the turmoil of political and social change in the days when Napoleon's armies were sweeping over the Peninsula. The scene is at first laid in Friuli in the family castle, not far from Portogruaro, and we find ourselves in the strange old world of "hairpowder and feudal jurisdiction."

There is the old Conte di Fratta, who passes his life in doing nothing with great dignity, and who, though he never mounts a horse, continues to wear boots and spurs in token of his sympathy for Frederic the Great. At his heels for the greater part of the day, rising when he rises, siting when he sits, is his living shadow the chancellor of the castle, who carefully picks up the handkerchief his master is always dropping, and never fails to wish him good luck when he sneezes. Then there is the captain-at-arms, a cowardly bully, who tells Munchausen tales of his exploits against the Turks, and who drills the ragged peasant retainers once a month on the day he receives his pay of twenty ducats. There is a fine-lady countess sighing for the gaieties of Venice, her brotherin-law, Monsignor Orlando, honorary canon of Portogruaro, her two daughters, the gentle Contessina Clara, and the merry, spoilt little flirt Pisana. And on the skirt of this

family group is the poor little orphan nephew, Carlo Altoviti, the teller of the tale, who is more or less snubbed, neglected, and ill-treated by all, and whose only friend is a superannuated old servant, whose chief occupation is that of grating cheese in a corner of the vast castle kitchen. The description of this kitchen is a fine Dutch picture, with Rembrandt lights and shadows, and there is much humour in the account of the proportions it assumed in the child Carlo's eyes.

Having no space for any adequate sketch of the rambling plot of the Confessioni we must content ourselves with indicating a few of its merits. Amid the large number of characters crowding the scene there are five or six that are drawn with a master's touch and stand out from the canvas distinct and living beings. Dr. Lucilio, the ardent patriot and untiring conspirator is one of the grandest figures of Italian fiction, and there is both power and originality in the way in which Nievo unrolls his character before our eyes. Pisana, the principal heroine, is another minute study and, given the time and place, there is nothing unnatural in the complexities of her nature, her curious inconsistencies, her impulses and her calculations, her virtues and her faults. The hero himself is most interesting during his childhood; afterward he dwindles into insignificance beside Lucilio. The descriptive portions of the book are all excellent, and the author is as successful in pastoral scenes and poetic bits of natural scenery as in his picture of the last sitting of the Grand Council and of various episodes of Napoleon's Italian campaigns.

Nievo began his literary career by the publication in his twentieth

year (1852) of a volume of promising verses, which, while showing the influence of Ginoti's manner, are not without originality, and are full of genuine patriotism, fun, and feeling. His next productions were two short novels, one of which, the Angelo di Bontà, contains a fine group of Venetian characters, including a cleverly-drawn notary who believes in the transmigration of souls, and announces to his friends, on his death-bed, that he shall presently be reincarnated as an emperor. "Chirichillo died on the 15th November, 1768. I cannot swear to anything, but all the world knows that on the 15th of the following August Napoleon Buonaparte was born at Ajaccio."

The author has also left two unpublished tragedies. lished tragedies. His principal work,

the Confessioni d'un Ottuagenario, was written at the age of twenty-five, and barely finished when the author threw down his pen to share the glories and dangers of Garibaldi's Sicilian expedition. He went through it with distinction, accompanied the General on his triumphal entry into Naples, was sent again to Sicily, on a special mission, towards the end of 1860, and perished with all on board, in the wreck of the steamer that was bringing him back to the mainland. If, to what we have already said of this young writer's works, we add that in all he shows a keen sense of humour and brings out the comic side of things with an easy touch, we think that the reader will agree with us in thinking, that Ippolito Nievo's premature death, at the age of twenty-eight, has deprived Italy of an author who might have founded a school of original and thoroughly Italian fiction.

FLORENCE, Feb. 1878.

LINDA VILLARI.

IF men wished to lay before their fellow-beings a treatise upon the best mode of arriving at excellence in the production of grain, or if their object were to discover the most certain method of attaining perfection in the cultivation of forest trees, they would surely seek first of all to lay the foundation of their theories in the earlier stages of seed-time and of selection. They would not rest content with elaborating methods of milling, or of expatiating upon strength and durability, they would endeavour rather to trace the successful result of the autumn harvest to the primary principles of the spring seed-time, or to the conditions of air and space in which the young tree had first taken its root. And yet, though this most ordinary course would force itself upon the attention of all whose object was the dissemination of knowledge on these simple subjects, it is curious to observe how readily people forget to apply such evident first principles to the great questions of our national defence, how prone they are to develop theories having reference to our military strength, which are based upon the acceptance of the private soldier as an unalterable quantity, a thing thrown to our service by the chance hazard of his social condition, that social condition being poverty or disgrace; instead of diligently seeking out the lines of life of the classes from which our soldiers have been drawn in the past, and are now being drawn, and seeking also to discover what are the present conditions, not only of the market in which these soldiers are bought, but, far more important, what is the seed from whence that soldier is produced.

We have recently had, both in the pages of magazine and newspaper

literature, many articles and letters upon the strength, military and monetary, of England. On the one hand, we have had a formidable array of figures to show that our material prosperity is greater than it ever has been. On the other, equally formidable statistics have been produced to demonstrate that the offensive and defensive force of the nation is to-day in a far higher state of preparation than at any previous period in our history. In these pages we propose briefly to set down the anomaly in the manner in which the military portion at least of this subject has been hitherto treated, an anomaly which we can best make apparent to the reader by the comparison we have above used; secondly, to show the ultimate union existing between the land, the peasant, and the soldier in all modern countries; and thirdly, to endeavour to look upon the question of the military strength of Great Britain and Ireland, not as a separate piece of mechanism totally unconnected with anything outside the questions of organization, drill and discipline, but as an integral portion of that great fact in the lives of all peoples-the land on which they dwell.

So long as the military armaments of Europe were confined within the limits reached during the eighteenth century, the difficulty of filling up the losses caused by war was not practically brought home to any nation on the Continent, still less was it made apparent to England, who, from her connection with Hanover had always available the mercenaries of the small German States. Nor did the early wars of the French Revolution call forth a necessity for seeking in the ranks of the nation itself that strength which had been looked for among the

idle or the ill-fed classes of the community. The wild burst of enthusiasm called forth among the people of France at the close of the century filled the ranks of the republican army with voluntary soldiers. Half-trained, illarmed and undisciplined though they were, there burned within these volunteers that fierce fire of enthusiasm which through all time has so often made the recruit and the old soldier enemies worthy of each other.

But the blue-coated youths whose hymn of the Marseillaise filled the fog of the November morning at Jemappes, were in reality the first offering of peasant France to the cause which had given them liberty. The astounding victories of the Napoleonic wars, the successive occupation of every European capital, have eclipsed in the eyes of history these early campaigns of Republican France. To the military genius of Napoleon has been attributed all that long catalogue of victories, and men have been too prone to forget that all Europe had been signally defeated during four years' campaigning, Belgium and Holland had been overrun, French dominion extended to the Rhine, ere Napoleon had appeared upon the scene to really take in hand the conduct of this new resistless power-the peasant soldiers of France.

It was long before there dawned upon Confederated Europe a real insight into the causes which underlay the failures of their own armies, and gave such formidable power to the new system. Four successive coalitions had been defeated; every European capital, save Moscow and Constantinople, had been occupied by the French troops ere it occurred to the mind of a foreign minister that there was something in all this marvellous career of conquest besides fate and generalship.

"A battle lost is sometimes progress gained," has said a famous French writer. Jena fulfils the apparent anomaly, for it is in the complete overthrow of the Prussian Kingdom in 1806 that we must look not only for the

final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, but also for the preponderance of North Germany to-day among the nations of Europe.

It has been the habit of many writers to speak of Scharnhorst as the author of the reforms in the Prussian army which began after the Peace of Tilsit. Scharnhorst was the amplifier, not the author or originator. It was the genius of Stein that first realised the great fact that it was necessary to imitate the work of the French Revolution before that Revolution could itself be vanquished. The Prussian peasant planted on the Prussian soil might yet defeat the French peasant whom the Revolution had called to life. The work of Stein deserves more than a passing notice. Called to that hard task, the reconstruction of a fabric ruined by the incapacity of others, Stein began in 1807 the work of giving his country a fresh existence. Two facts were of transcendent help to him. First, the defeat suffered by his country had been sufficiently overwhelming, the disaster had been vast enough to still into almost complete silence the voice of privilege, to stifle even the utterance of faction. Second, his early training had given him a keen insight into the working of the land, the mineral resources, the revenue, and the whole social system of his country. He had passed the prime of life, but his years had run, not in the groove of a profession, not under the influence of the traditions of a department, or the teachings of a social caste, but along the broader lines of thought and amidst conditions of life from which alone those

principles touching all classes and centering in the welfare of the State, can be evolved.

Four days after his hand had grasped the helm of the shattered vessel, his ordinances were proclaimed. Serfdom in every shape ceased, peasants and burghers were given the right to become owners of land, the rights of municipalities were secured to them, and large portions of the vast

estates of the nobles were divided amongst the peasants.

Stein, soon after driven into exile, left to other hands the completion of this great work. It was completed. The foundations of the present military system in Germany were laid deep by Scharnhorst in the land policy of Stein, and, quickly catching root, there arose from that fruitful soil a tree destined to overshadow the whole Continent of Europe. No nation felt so bitterly as Prussia the power of Napoleon; in no country was defeat brought so thoroughly home to prince, peer, and serf, and in no country did the policy following upon defeat, result so completely in brilliant triumph.

Truly was Jena lost, Prussian progress gained. But many years had to pass ere another nation learned the great secret that the cradle of an army is the cottage of the peasant. Again the lesson was learned in the dark hours of defeat. With Sebastopol fell the serfdom of Russia, and to-day, ere half a generation has passed, Europe beholds in mingled admiration and terror, the free peasants of the North moving with a power which no obstacle of man or mountain could oppose upon the long-coveted prize of Constantinople.

"We have 30,000 army-soldiers," said an American to an English traveller in the United States, about twenty years ago, "and we have two million five hundred thousand fight ing men." The Englishman laughed, thinking the answer only a Yankee boast, but it was literally the soberest truth. Ere ten years were gone the two million five hundred thousand men were arrayed in war against each other; but not until the farmers of the North-Western States, the men of Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota, had poured from their 160 acre freehold farms was the great civil war brought to a termination.

France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and America, all have long since recognized the fact that the only army which can

be relied on in the hour of peril is that army which springs from the people, the people planted upon the soil.

In England the same fact would long since have been acknowledged if war had ever been brought home to the British nation as it has been brought home to the countries we have named. Thanks to the "silver streak," we have been enabled during two centuries to play with war almost as we liked; the real bitterness of defeat, the terrible indignities of invasion, have died out from the very imaginations of the people. All our perceptions of war are summed up in increased taxation; so many pence on the income-tax, and "something in the papers." Of the real principles on which modern Europe is organised for war, of the great fact permeating all continental countries-namely, the intimate union between conscription and land tenure we know nothing. We speak about conscription being antagonistic to the spirit of freedom in every British heart, of the impossibility of making Englishmen see it in any other light save as a violation of the liberty of the subject-and certainly it is this so long as it is levied only upon the dregs of the population. But conscription, as it is practised in Europe, is nothing more than a tax laid equally upon all classes, falling chiefly, by reason of their numbers, upon the peasant proprietors of the soil, who in paying it feel that they are the persons most interested in its continuance.

In fact, it may be laid down as a rule that conscription can only become a permanent success in a country where the chief part of the population is settled permanently upon the soil. The artisan, the labourer, the men of the trade or of the loom, will all quickly realise the fact that their labour or trade can easily be removed to a place of security out of reach of the conscription. The weaver, the carpenter, the miner, can carry their respective avocations to New York, to Montreal,