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at his disposal day and night; but he has invite relatives or friends to examine and now a favour to ask which no violence admire both the materials and workmancould secure, and pleads thus that his ship, as if it were some beautiful picture mother's body may be carried gently, or statue of which they had just cause to without jar or concussion of any kind. be proud. Upon the coffin is carved an He will have her laid by the side of inscription with the name and titles of his father, in a coffin which costs per- its occupant; if a woman, the name of haps two hundred taels, and repair her husband. At the foot of the coffin thither periodically to appease her de-are buried two stone tablets face to parted spirit with votive offerings of face; one bears the name and titles of fruit, vegetables, and pork. the deceased, and the other a short acImmediately after the decease of a count of his life, what year he was born parent, the children and other near rela-in, what were his achievements as a tives communicate the news to friends scholar, and how many children were living farther off by what is called an born to him. Periods of mourning are announcement of death," which merely regulated by the degrees of relationship states that the father or mother as the to the dead. A son wears his white case may be, has died, and that they, the clothes for three years actually for survivors, are entirely to blame. With twenty-eight months; and a wife mourns this is sent a "sad report," or in other her husband for the same period. The words a detailed account of deceased's death of a wife, however, calls for only a last illness, how it originated, what med- single year of grief; for, as the sacred icine was prescribed, and taken, and sun-edict points out, if your wife dies you can dry other interesting particulars. These friends reply by sending a present of money to help defray funeral expenses, a present of food or joss-stick, or even a detachment of priests to read the prescribed liturgies over the dead. Sometimes a large scroll is written and forwarded, inscribed with a few such appropriate words as — “ A hero has gone!" When all these have been received, the members of the bereaved family issue a printed form of thanks, one copy being left at the house of each contributor and worded thus: "This is to express the thanks of the orphan son who weeps tears of blood and bows his head of the mourning brother who weeps and bows his head of , the mourning nephew who wipes away his tears and bows his head."

It is well known that all old and even middle-aged people in China like having their coffins prepared ready for use. A dutiful son will see that his parents are thus provided, sometimes many years before their death, and the old people will

marry another. The same time suffices for brother, sister, or child. Marriages contracted during these days of mourn ing are not only invalid, but the offending parties are punished with a greater or less number of blows according to the gravity of the offence. Innumerable other petty restrictions are imposed by national or local custom, which are ob served with a certain amount of fidelity, though instances are not wanting where the whole thing is shirked as inconvenient and a bore.

Cremation, once the prevailing fashion in China, is now reserved for the priest of Buddha alone that self-made outcast from society, whose parting soul relies on no fond breast, who has no kith or kin to shed "some pious drops the closing eye requires;" but who, seated in an iron chair beneath the miniature pagoda erected in most large temples for that purpose, passes away in fire and smoke from this vale of tears and sin, to be absorbed in the blissful nothingness of an eternal Nirvana.

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That God and man both serve in blood and I shall be left with grief and memory;

From The Quarterly Review.
LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT.*

579

no less than by the wise reticence of sound taste, and by an austere judgment that holds in check the writer's enthu

or the book will want that underglow of life, without which the reader's sympathy is not to be arrested or retained.

"To me," says Mr. Theodore Martin, in his admirable dedication of this vol-siasm. For enthusiasm he must have; ume to the queen, "biography, while one of the most fascinating, has always appeared one of the most difficult branches of literature. How difficult, the few mas- These considerations, and they are ter-pieces in that kind, of either ancient only a few of those which enter into the or modern time, are enough to show." question, have had little weight with the In view of much that has of late years mass of recent biographers. A quantity been given to the world, the remark is of crude materials, some good, some bad, peculiarly appropriate. A good biogra- some utterly worthless, are thrown tophy demands very special qualities in the gether without method and without selecwriter. As a primary requisite, he must tion. All sorts of petty details, in thementer thoroughly into the mind and char-selves of the most insignificant kind and acter to be portrayed. He must also have so lived into the circumstances, and become imbued, as it were, with the atmosphere of the life of the man whom he has undertaken to describe, as to be able to look upon its incidents with the same eyes, as nearly as may be, as his. At the same time he must have the power of holding himself so far aloof as to scrutinize all its details with a judgment at once calm and penetrating, to discriminate the relative importance and significance of every detail with which he has to deal, and to assign to each its due place and relief in working out the picture which is to reproduce in the minds of his readers the conception to which conscientious research and long meditation have given a definite shape within his own.

"We

Nor does the difficulty end here.
are a mystery," as Mr. Martin truly says,
"to ourselves; how much more, then,
must we be a mystery to each other;
and he illustrates his proposition by
Keble's beautiful lines, which remind us,
that

valueless as illustrative of character, are gone into, often at intolerable length. Things are not unfrequently divulged, which might make the miserable subject of the narrative turn in his grave with horror. His weaknesses, the mere accidents, it may be, of broken health, are recklessly laid bare, and the dearest secrets of his heart turned into a theme for vulgar gossip. from their dread abode," would seem to "To drag his frailties be the main object in view; and they who should protect the man, whose life they have set themselves to manufacture into a book, do him as much mischief by their inconsiderate babble, or clumsy does to the man and woman he has hapvindications, as the malevolent cynic pened to know, who leaves behind him, as a legacy to mankind, a journal of the vilest gossip of his fellow-cynics, which he dared not publish in his own lifetime, terials for history." to be published after his death as "ma

Happily a swift oblivion inevitably overtakes biographies into which so lit

Not even the tenderest heart, and next our tle conscientious study and artistic skill

own,

Knows half the reason why we smile or sigh.

have gone. Charles Lamb, fortunately for himself, had sunk into his grave beAn almost womanly sympathy and ten-fore some of the chief offenders 'in this derness of touch are, indeed, required for line had thrust their chaotic octavos upon the subtle half-tints that make up much the world, otherwise these would, to a of the charm of a good biography. But no biography will be good which is not also distinguished by a manly sincerity, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Con

certainty, have been included with court circulars, statistical reports, Beattie's and Soame Jenyns's works, and the like, in that famous catalogue of his "books, By Theodore Martin. With Portraits and which are no books." It is with a very different order of book that we are now

sort.
Views. Volume the First. London, 1875.

called upon to deal. In the "Life of the at his disposal an unreserve which Prince Consort" by Mr. Theodore Mar- this volume enables us to estimate in all tin, we have a book which is a book -aits extent, while it shows at the same book fitted to be as welcome in the time, by the prevailing discretion and drawing-room as in the library,- and good taste with which Mr. Martin has which Charles Lamb would certainly not used his materials, how fully the confihave included in his catalogue of biblia dence has been repaid. One thing at a-biblia, for he would have been sure to least is evident, from what Mr. Martin have been delighted, not less with the has written, that the relation which has delicate insight into character which it subsisted between himself and his soveraffords, than with the thoroughly artistic eign, with reference to this work, has skill which has gone to its production. been one of entire frankness on one side, Mr. Martin's task was one of supreme and of unconstrained independence on difficulty. The events in which the the other. Mr. Martin has obviously not prince played an important, though often been asked to withhold the frankest exunnoticed part, were still recent; the pression of the convictions at which he passions of old party strife had not as has arrived from the facts and documents yet wholly cooled down; men were still before him; and he has not hesitated to alive of whom it was difficult not to speak out with the fearless loyalty of a speak, but who could not fail to be deep-man who felt sure of a generous estimate ly sensitive about whatever was said in from a sovereign whose truthfulness and any work which appeared with her Maj-directness of character are no secret to esty's sanction. Much had to be set her people. right, as to which the public were either inaccurately informed or wholly in the dark. To write a life of the prince, which did not deal fully with public affairs both at home and abroad, which did not grapple with the motum civicum, gravesque principum amicitias, which are at all times a theme of peril, would have been to write a life from which what constituted its main elements of interest was omitted. Yet how might a writer hope to hold the scales so evenly as not to give offence, or, what in such a work was to be still more deprecated, provoke con-in which the prince's lot was cast, and to troversy in which possibly the sovereign might be involved?

With such materials as have obviously been placed in Mr. Martin's hands he was well qualified to deal. The pages of this review have, on more occasions than one, contained evidences of his power to place eminent men of a past day before us "in their habits as they lived." And his admirable monograph on Horace had satisfied the most fastidious that his knowledge of men and things, and his quick spirit of imaginative sympathy, were likely to bring vividly before us the salient points of the history of the days

show the prince himself moving and working among them with all the animaThen Mr. Martin, as he tells us, "had tion of a living picture. Nor have the not the happiness or the good fortune to expectations of those who were familiar know the prince personally," and he had with Mr. Martin's powers as a writer therefore to enter upon his task in total been disappointed. Even from this first uncertainty whether he should be enabled volume the world will be enabled to by the information to be placed at his know the prince as he has not been disposal to overcome this disadvantage, known before. When the work is comor to satisfy his instinct as a writer of ex-plete, and the prince, who in these pages perience, that nothing was withheld, is seen rather growing into the great which "an honest chronicler" ought to

know.

man, than developed into the noble proportions which his character afterwards From the latter difficulty Mr. Martin assumed, we may hope to possess a recassures us he was at once relieved by the ord not unworthy of one to whom, as Mr. generous unreserve with which her Maj- Martin well says, England has assigned esty placed every species of information | a foremost place "among those whom