the least error and inaccuracy in your manners, air, address. No woman in Europe can do it so well; none will do it more willingly, or in a more proper and obliging manner. She will not put you out of countenance by telling you of it in company, but either intimate it by some sign, or wait for an opportunity when you are alone together. She is also in the best French company, where she will not only introduce but puff you, if I may use so low a word.* What a scolding Lady Hervey would have given his lordship for using it! During her Paris sojourn she apologizes to Mr. Morris for writing but seldom. The "fashionables" keep late hours at night, and have short mornings, as they dine at two o'clock. But if she could do him "any real, essential service by writing," she would borrow time not only from her pleasures, "but from my business, my rest, and my sleep." There can be no doubt she was a faithful ally; she says she never lost a friend but by death - and that those who remain shall never lose her while she lives, if they care to keep her. Fontenelle is one of her Parisian compan ions: He has no mark of age but wrinkles, and a degree of deafness; but when by sitting near him you make him hear you, he answers with that liveliness and prettiness peculiar to himself. He often repeats and applies his own and other people's poetry very agreeably, but only as it is proper to the subject. He is ninety-two, and has the cheerfulness, liveliness, and even the taste and appetite of twenty-two! While in France Lady Hervey had an illness which made her so weak that she says she could "as easily have managed a cannon as a pen."' But it was almost a pleasure to be ill among so many sympathizers. Her friends and acquaintances besieged her door all day long, and waited for hours in the afternoon to waylay the doctor or nurse and have the latest bulletin. Light quilts, couches, easy-chairs, all the things she could possibly require, were sent to her; and when she began to rally, "little chickens out of the country, new-laid eggs warm from the hen," the best varieties of wine, poured in upon her. "If you could guess all the kindness I meet with," she says, "you would neither blame nor wonder at my reluctance to quit these agreeable people." She does return to England in 1752, however; but Lord Bristol's death having lessened her ties to home, in subsequent years she is often found writing from her Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, 12th edit., 1806, vol. iii., pp. 55-6. friends' seats. She frequently goes backwards and forwards to her beloved France, and in 1756 she visits Scotland, apparently for the first time. "This country is far from being so bad an one as English prejudice and English ignorance represent it," she says, writing from the neighborhood of Roxburgh. And she praises the corn. fields, the noble wooded hills, the beautifor herrings and crabs, I do not believe I ful rivers, and above all, the fish: "As shall ever be able again to taste what is called so in England, they are not like the tasted; the trout, the smelts, the perch are same fish. The salmon is the best I ever incomparable." Such beef and mutton she never ate before. But the fruit that, indeed, is "little and indifferent." Her descriptions of the Duke of Roxburghe's, Lord Haddington's, and Lord Hopetoun's seats are very minute and eulogistic. I have seen many more fine places [she continues]; the worst thing in Scotland is its capital, which is a frightful dirty town, though paved as well as St. James's Square. I like the people in general. They are sensible and learned, and have a very cheerful heartiness and good humor about them. Her admiration for the great Frederick would have satisfied Carlyle. "There is no one but the king of Prussia worth thinking of," she says in 1757:What a persevering spirit, what courage, what sagacity, how able a legislator at home, how formidable and humane an enemy abroad! A pattern and a model of arts and sciences! In short, something in the great scale of beings between a man and a deity; and whatever the weak admiration for antiquity may be in general, I prefer him to Cæsar, and consequently very much before Alexander. He has the virtues of both without their vices. As years pass on, her letters become sadder and more grave in tone. Her health was broken. Her children were scattered; the diplomatic service and the army had drawn her sons out of England, and often into danger which racked her nerves and oppressed her spirits. Her old friends were falling by her side, and almost every letter records a loss. says], and which in old age cannot be repaired. These are the misfortunes of long life [she One can hardly then make acquaintance, certainly not friends. Indeed, with all the improvements you talk of, that of friendship is not one. You hardly now ever hear it named; connections is the word, and the thing; these last for one, two, or perhaps even three sessions of Parliament, for on them depend all those connections. Nevertheless, the accession of George | to Sir Horace Mann a few weeks after III. gave her pleasure. "I have the best her death: "Lady Hervey, one of my imaginable opinion of him," she says, "not great friends, died in my absence. She from anything he does or says just now, is a great loss to several persons; her but because I have a moral certainty that house was one of the most agreeable in he was in his nursery the honestest, truest London; and her own friendliness, good good-natured child that ever lived; and breeding, and amiable temper had attached you know my old maxim, that qualities all that knew her. Her sufferings, with never change. What the child was, the the gout and rheumatism, were terrible, man most certainly is, in spite of tempo- and yet never could affect her patience, rary appearances.' or divert her attention to her friends."* visit her. She still exerted herself occasionally to see and entertain those who wished to To Mr. Morris's children she was thoughtfully kind; and some cheerful and accomplished sisters named Stanley were much with her; but she was rather shy of the new generation: The little understanding I have is worn very thin indeed [she says in 1764]. I am a mere rag, and I dare say the Miss Stanleys have no notion that I ever had any liveliness about me. They have a great deal. I like them extremely, and should be happy in their acquaintance, if my vanity did not throw cold water on that pleasure. In short, I confess I am mortified when new acquaintance see me as I now am. I don't mean as to my figure, but as to my understanding, which is full as old and as grey as the other. Don't laugh at me for my vanity. We all have our share of it in some shape or degree, and, take the species as it is, ready made, I question whether vanity is not the most general and powerful motive of the best and most agreeable things we do. La vertu n'iroit pas loin si la vanité ne lui tenoit pas compagnie. All rational creatures are either ashamed or proud of what they say or do. The vanity is equal in each case. In June, 1768, in the course of a more than usually cheerful letter in which Lady Hervey spoke of her intention of going to Old Windsor, to Ickworth, and thence to drink her " Sunning Hill waters," she told her old friend she did not fear death, "but the way to it; " the last sufferings - sometimes protracted; but "when once they are over, I do not question but to rise to a new and better life." It was her last letter to Mr. Morris. On the 2nd of September she died at her town house; and she was spared the final agony she had dreaded. Her son Augustus was with her, and told Mr. Grenville that the day before her death "she squeezed my hand, and said, 'Poor dear Augustus,' and never spoke afterwards. She felt, thank God! no pain whatever."* Horace Walpole, some of whose pleas. antest letters were addressed to her, wrote • The Grenville Papers and Correspondence, vol. iv., P. 357. Lady Hervey often moralized gently on "the vanity of human wishes," the cruel way in which time will sometimes mock one's little plans, and hopes, and achievements. She did not foresee that her own case was destined to be very much in point. In 1774 Walpole wrote to the Rev. William Cole: Lord Bristol got his mother's house from his brother [Augustus] by persuading her he was in love with it. He let it in a month after she was dead - and all her favorite pictures and ornaments, which she had ordered not to be removed, are mouldering in a garret ! t Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Peter Cunningham, vol. v., p. 129. † Ibid., vol. vi., p. 82. From The Contemporary Review. WURZBURG AND VIENNA: SCRAPS FROM A DIARY. GOING to Vienna to collect books and documents, with the intention of studying the results of Bosnia's occupation by Austro-Hungary, I take the Rhine route, and stop two days at Würzburg to see Ludwig Noiré, and have a talk on Schopenhauer. The Vater Rhein is now changed beyond recognition: quantum mutatus ab illo. How different all is to when I visited it for the first time, years ago on foot, stopping at the stages men66 Rhin," which tioned in Victor Hugo's had just appeared. All those grand peeps of nature to be got on the old river, as it forced its majestic way through barriers of riven rocks and volcanic upheavals, have now almost wholly disappeared. The wine-grower has planted his vineyards even in the most secluded nooks, and built stone terraces where the rocks were too steep for cultivation. All along the banks, these giant staircases climb to the summits of peaks and ravines. The vines have stormed the position, and their aspect is uniform. The Burgs, built on heaps of lava, the Maus and the Katze, those sombre retreats of the burgraves of old, now covered with the green leaves of Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn. his horror of nature in its savage state, 66 brute nature, as he calls it. At the present day, our impression is precisely the reverse of this. We seek on almost inaccessible summits, in the region of eternal snow, and in the very heart of hitherto unexplored continents, a spot where man has not yet penetrated, and where we may behold nature in her inviolate virginity. We are stifled by civilization, wearied out with books, newspapers, reviews, and periodicals, letters to write and to read; railway travelling, the post, Below, engineering skill has dammed in the telegraph, and the telephone, devour the waters of the river, and the basaltic time and completely mince up one's life; blocks form a black wall with white lines any solitude for fruitful reflection is quite between the stones. Black and white! out of the question. Shall I find it, at Even the old god of the Rhine has least, among the fir-trees of the Carpa adopted the Prussian colors. Embank- thians, or beneath the shade of the old ments have been constructed at the wide oaks of the Balkans? Industry is spoil points of the river, for the purpose of in- ing and soiling our planet. Chemical creasing its depth, and of reconquering produce poisons the water, the dross from meadows, by the slow but natural process different works and factories covers the of raising the level by mud deposits. Be- country, quarries split up the picturesque tween Mannheim and Cologne, the cur- slopes of valleys, black coal smoke dulls rent has gained ten hours, and the dangers the verdant foliage and the azure of the of navigation of legendary celebrity have sky, the drainage of large cities turns our disappeared. All along the embankments, rivers into sewers, whence emerge the immense white figures inform navigators germs of typhus. The useful destroys at what distance from them it is safe to the beautiful; and this is so general as at pass. On each bank, too, runs a railway, times to bring tears to the eyes. Have and on the river itself pass steamers of not the Italians, on the lovely Isle of Sta. every shape, form, and description Heléna, near to the public gardens in Vensteamers with three decks, for tourists, ice, erected works for the building of enas in the United States, little pleasure- gines, and replaced the ruins of a fourthboats, iron barges from Rotterdam, steam-century church by chimneys, whose tugs worked by paddle or screw, and opaque smoke, produced by the detestable dredgers of various proportions; all these hundreds of chimneys vomit a continuance of black smoke, which darkens the whole atmosphere. The carriage roads are in admirable order; not a rut is visible, and they are lined with fruit-trees, and with the same black and white basaltic blocks as the river. The Prussian colors again; but the aim is to point out the road for carriages on dark nights. When the way turns either to the right or the left, the trees on each side of it are painted white, so as to be distinctly visible. I have never anywhere seen a great river so thoroughly tamed, subdued, and utilized, so complete ly bent to man's necessities. The free Rhine of Arminius and of the burgraves is as well disciplined as any grenadier of Brandenburg. The economist and the engineer admire, but painters and poets bewail. Buffon, in a page published in every Cours de Littérature, sings a hosanna to cultivated nature, and appears unable to find words strong enough to express bituminous coal of the Saar, would soon leave a sooty trace on the pink marble of the doges' palace and on the mosaics of St. Mark, just as we see them on St. Paul's Cathedral in London, so ugly cov ered with sticky streaks. It is true that the produce of this industrial activity be comes condensed in revenue, which enriches many families, and adds consider. ably to the list of the bourgeois population inhabiting the capital. Here, on the banks of the Rhine, these revenues are represented by villas and castles, whose pseu do-Greek or Gothic architecture peeps out from among masses of exotic trees and plants in the most sought-after positions, near to Bonn, Godesberg, St. Goar, or Bingen. Look! there is an immense feudal castle, beside which Stolzenfels, the empress Augusta's favorite residence, would be a mere shooting-box. immense assemblage of turrets, galleries, roofs, and terraces must have cost at least £80,000. Has it sprung from coal or from Bessemer steel? It is situated just This below the noble ruin of Drachenfels. Will not the dragon watching over the Niebelungen treasure in Nifelheim's den, avenge this impertinent challenge of modern plutocracy? I intended going to see at Stuttgart a former member of the Austrian Cabinet, Albert Schäffle, who now devotes all his time to the study of social questions, and has published some very well-known All that I see on my way up the Rhine works - among others," Capitalismus leads me to reflect on the special charac- und Socialismus," and "Bau und Leben teristics of Prussian administration. The des Socialen Körpers" (" Construction and works which have so marvellously "do- Life of the Social Body "), books which mesticated" the river as to make it a type place him at the extreme left of professoof what Pascal calls un chemin qui rial Socialism. Unfortunately, he is at marche, have taken between thirty and the baths in the Black Forest. But I forty years, and have been carried out continuously, systematically, and scientifically. In her public works, as in her military preparations, Prussia has succeeded in uniting two qualities which are only too often lacking—a spirit of consistency, and the love of progress. The desire to be as near as possible to perfection is apparent in the most minute details. Not unfrequently consistency, and a too close following of traditions, leads to routine, which rejects innovations. Great strength is attained, and the chances of success are considerably increased if, while one aim is always kept in view, the best means to attain it are selected and applied without delay. I have remarked, when speaking of parliamentary administration, that a lack of consistency was one reason of the fee. bleness of democracies. This should be guarded against as soon as it becomes apparent, or inferiority will ensue. A few trifling facts will show that the Prussians are as great lovers of useful novelties and of practical improvements as the Americans. On the Rhine, at the ferries, the old ferry-boats have been replaced by little steamers, which are constantly crossing the river from one side to the other. At the railway stations, I notice that the trucks for luggage are made of steel, and are lighter and stronger than any I have seen elsewhere. The system for warming the railway compartments is also more perfected. Heated pipes run under the seats of the carriages, and the passengers can regulate the temperature by turning a needle on a disc from Kali (cold) to Warm or vice versa. At the summit of the tower of the town hall of Berlin the different flagstaffs for the flags hoisted on the fête days are ranged in order. Outside the highest gallery iron rings have been fitted all round in which to fix the staffs, each of which has a number correspond. ing to the same number on the ring it is to fit into. In this manner both rapidity and regularity are insured. Order and foresight are safe means to an end. stop at Würzburg to meet Ludwig Noiré, a philosopher and philologist, who has deigned to study political economy. The sight of the socialistic pass to which democratic tendencies are leading modern society, induces many philosophers to turn their attention to social questions. This is the case in France with Jules Simon, Paul Janet, Taine, Renouvier; in England with Herbert Spencer, William Graham, and even with that æstheticist of pre-Raphaelite art, Ruskin. I hold that political economy should go hand in hand with philosophy, religion, and especially with morality; but as I cannot myself rise to these elevated spheres of thought, I am only too happy when a philosopher throws me out a bit of cord by which I may pull myself a lit tle higher, above our workaday world. Ludwig Noiré has written a book, which is exactly what I needed in this respect, and which I hope to be able to speak of at greater length a little later. It is entitled "Das Werkzeug" ("The Tool "). It shows the truth of Franklin's saying: Man is a tool-making creature. Noiré says that the origin of tools dates from the origin of reason and language. At the commencement, as far back as one can conceive, man was forced to act on matter to obtain food. This action on nature for the purpose of satisfying wants is labor. As men were living together in families and in tribes, labor was carried on in common. A person making a muscular effort very naturally pronounces certain sounds in connection with the effort he is making. These sounds, repeated and heard by the entire group,. were after a time understood to signify the action of which they were the spon taneous accompaniment. Thus was language born from natural activity in view of supplying imperious needs, and the verb representing the action preceded all their words. The effort to procure the necessary and useful develops the reasoning powers, and tools soon became necessary. Wherever traces of pre-historic men are found, there is also to be found the flint implement. Thus reason, language, labor, and implements, all manifestations of an intelligence capable of progress, appeared almost simultaneously. Noiré has developed this theory fully in another book, entitled, Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin of Speech"). When it was published Max Müller stated in the Contemporary Review, that although he considered this system too exclusive, yet it was far superior to either the onomatopoia or the interjection theory, and that it was certainly the best and the most probable one brought forward at present. I can but bow before this appreciation. personality and liberty? Nobody, neither Christian nor naturalist, has yet been able satisfactorily to answer this. Hence has sprung, on the one hand, the predestination of the Calvinists and Luther's de servo arbitrio, and, on the other, determinism and materialism. Kant is the first mortal who fearlessly studied this problem and studied it satisfactorily. He plunged into the abyss, like the diver of Schiller, and returned, having vanquished the monsters he found there, and holding in his hand the golden cup from which henceforward humanity may drink the divine beverage of truth. As nothing can be of greater interest to us than the solution of this problem, so our gratitude, be Noiré is a fanatical Kantian, and an en- it ever so considerable, can never possibly thusiastic admirer of Schopenhauer. He equal the service rendered by this really has succeeded in forming a committee for prodigious effort of the human mind. the purpose of erecting a statue in honor Kant has provided us with the only arm of the modern Heraclitus. The commit- which can combat materialism. It is full tee, he says, must be international, for if time we should make use of it, for this as a writer Schopenhauer be German, as detestable doctrine is everywhere undera philosopher he belongs to the entire mining the foundations of human society. world, and he asked me to join it. "I am I venerate the memory of Schopenhauer, exceedingly flattered by the proposal," because he has inspired the truths resaid I; but I offer two objections. In vealed by Kant with more real life and the first place, a humble economist has penetrating vigor. Schopenhauer is not not the right to place his name side by well known in either France or England. side with such as are already on the list. Some of his works have been translated, Secondly, being an incurable disciple of but no one has really understood him Platonism, I fear that Schopenhauer did thoroughly, because to understand a philnot remain in the Cartesian line of spirit-osopher it is necessary not only to admire ualism. I feel persuaded that two notions, but to be passionately attached to him. which, it appears, are at the present day The folly of the Cross' is an admirable very old-fashioned-I speak of a belief expression. in God and in the soul's immortalityshould form the basis of all social science. He who believes in nothing but matter cannot rise to a notion of what ought to be'i.e., to an ideal of right and justice. This ideal can only be conceived as a divine order of things imposing itself morally on mankind. The Revue Philosophique of October, 1882, says, 'Positive science, as understood at the present day, considers not what should be, but only what is. It searches merely the formula of facts. All idea of obligation, or of imperative prohibition, is completely foreign to its code.' Such a creed is a death-stroke to all notion of duty. I believe that faith in a future life is indispen-pity.' sable for the accomplishment of good works. Materialism weakens the moral sense, and naturally leads to general decay.” "Yes," replied Noiré, "this is just the problem. How, side by side with the dire necessities of nature, or with divine omnipotence, can there be place for human 66 Schopenhauer maintains that the will is the great source of all; it means both personality and liberty. We are here at once planted at the antipodes of naturalistic determinism. Free intelligence creates matter. Spiritus in nobis qui viget, ille facit. God is the great ideal. He does not make us move, but moves himself in us. The more we appropriate to ourselves this ideal, the freer we become; we are the reasonable and conscious authors of our actions, and liberty consists in this. Schopenhauer's moral law is precisely that of Christianity-a law of abnega. tion, of resignation and asceticism. What Christians call charity, he designates as He exhorts his followers to struggle against self-will; not to let their eyes dwell on the passing delusions of the outside world, but to seek their soul's peace by sacrificing all pursuits and interests which should fix their attentions solely on the changing scenes of this life. Are not these also the Gospel principles ? Must they be rejected because Buddha |