country whose teaching has been entirely in the hands of the Catholic Church ever since Cortez first conquered it.

In BRAZIL also the Church question assumed important proportions this year, and was brought into connexion with the broader principles of the European strife. A complaint was brought against the Bishop of Pernambuco for refusing religious rites to members of the Freemasons' Society. Ever since the promulgation of the Infallibility dogma at Rome, the Brazilian Bishops had chosen to ignore the bene placitum of Government. The Emperor referred the Freemasons' complaint to the State Council, which decided against the Bishop. But the Bishop declined to obey the orders of Government; and State and Church found themselves committed to a strife similar to that which Bismarck was waging against the Ultramontanes in Germany.

An insurrection in Entre Rios, led by Lopez Jordan, was occupying attention at Buenos Ayres in the month of October.

In BOLIVIA, Señor Adolfo Ballivian was elected President early in the year. His character was much relied upon as affording hopes for the future of the country; but serious difficulties accumulated round his path, owing to the corrupt state of public morality.

The Congress of PERU was closed by President Pardo on the 14th of May, under circumstances of unusual harmony. The elections for a new Parliament took place in October.

ASIATIC AND AFRICAN STATES.

The western peregrinations of the Shah of PERSIA this year brought the affairs of his country into more than usual notice. Speculations on Persian progress occupied various paragraphs of our newspapers, and some interest was felt in the Ministerial crisis which, on the Sovereign's return to his dominions, removed his Grand Vizier, Mirza Hussein Khan, from his councils. The Minister's unpopularity was connected with the great "Reuter Concession," by which the Shah had taken a bold step towards launching Persia on the road of European national civilization. To the brief notice we have given of this concession in our chapter on Germany it may now be added that the Shah was pleased simply to farm out his whole country to Baron de Reuter, who was to form a series of companies in London, with the object of changing the entire state of things in Persia, and giving it railways, canals, mines in working, and a flourishing commerce. Baron de Reuter and those claiming under him are to make any railways in Persia they please, and for seventy years no one else is to be allowed to make any. With the exception of mines of gold, silver, and precious stones, this great contractor is to be allowed to work all Government mines on paying 15 per cent. of the profit to the State. He may require the owners of private mines to hand them over to him unless they have worked those mines within five years. If he discovers a mine, he is to pay nothing

for it but the mere price of the surface. Forests and canals are handed over to him on very similar terms. The Government guarantees him six millions sterling to help him in his various enterprises, and for twenty-five years he is to receive all the Customs dues of the kingdom, giving the Shah a progressive bonus on his present revenue. No one else is to be allowed to execute any works for the material improvement of the country, or to set up any bank or credit establishment, until Baron de Reuter has had the opportunity of considering whether he would like to oust the projector and take up the scheme for himself. And, lastly, the Shah undertakes to provide the necessary labour at current prices.

CHINA.

A fact worth recording in the affairs of CHINA this year is the defeat and subjugation of the Panthays, a Mohammedan people inhabiting the Chinese province of Yunan, after an independent career of seventeen years' duration, and a gallant struggle against overwhelming numbers. Talifu, the capital of the Panthay Sultan Soleiman, was captured in February by a Chinese army of 200,000 men, and in the latter end of May Momien, the second great city of the Panthays, fell also into the power of the victors. A horrible massacre took place at Talifu. According to the report of the Panthays, the Chinese slew every man, woman, and child, numbering from forty to fifty thousand, within the walls. The Sultan attempted, with something of antique grandeur, to obtain mercy for his people by surrendering himself to the Chinese General. Having poisoned his wives and children with the rooted Oriental notion of saving them from possible dishonour, he entered his palanquin and ordered his bearers to carry him to the Chinese camp. When the palanquin arrived at the camp of the Chinese General, Soleiman was found dead inside; but his submission and self-sacrifice did not save Talifu.

The Chinese Emperor's reception of the foreign ambassadors on the 29th of June, the first ever accorded by the jealous rulers at Pekin, is also a noteworthy event in the annals of the Celestial Kingdom. The proceedings at this reception were mainly formal, and may be stated in the words of the telegram from Pekin :"The Ministers of England, Russia, America, France, and the Netherlands were received in audience for the first time by the Emperor of China on the 29th of June. The Japanese Ambassador was received first and separately. M. de Vlangati, the Minister of Russia, read an address in French, which was translated into Chinese by Herr Bismarck, the interpreter of the German Legation. Each Minister then deposited his credentials on a table in front of the Emperor, who replied in the Manchu language to the address

read by M. de Vlangati, Prince Kung on his knees interpreting his Majesty's answer into Chinese. Eight hundred Mandarins, including the Princes, were present at the audience. The members of the Tsung Li Yamen (Foreign Board) escorted the Ministers to their chairs. The streets were crowded.

JAPAN continued in its path of improvement. The financial report presented this year was extremely flourishing. Railway making was in progress, and extensive coal-fields were discovered in the province of Musashi.

The Emperor of MOROCCO, Sidi Muley Mohammed, died in the month of September, and war broke out between his brother, Muley Abbas, and his son, who both claimed to reign in his stead.

S

RETROSPECT

OF

LITERATURE, ART, AND SCIENCE, IN 1873.

LITERATURE.

THE total number of books, pamphlets, &c., published during 1873, in the United Kingdom, amounted to 4991, nearly two hundred more than the publications of the preceding year. Deducting new editions, and a comparatively small proportion of books imported from America by English publishers, the number of new English books stood at 3463, a figure hitherto unprecedented. Works of fiction formed the most numerous class this year; taking the lead of theology which has usually stood before it, but which in 1873 formed only the second rank. Scientific works showed a rapid and continuous advance. History and biography were also on the increase. December, and then November, were the great publishing months.

We shall here, according to custom, note some of the prominent books which have appeared, giving a fair sample of current opinion on their merits. And we begin our notice with that which may be said to have caused on the whole the most sensation by its intrinsic originality, by the circumstances of its authorship, and by the interest attaching to the recent death of him who was at once its subject and its producer. We refer to the "Autobiography of John Stuart Mill," which was given to the world by Miss Helen Taylor, Mr. Mill's step-daughter, late in the autumn, about six months after the philosopher's death at Avignon. The first edition, consisting of 3000 copies, was sold within six days of publication, and a second impression, about as large, was disposed of with scarcely less rapidity.

The greater part of this remarkable personal portraiture was written in or before 1861, and the "Remainder of My Life," as Mr. Mill pathetically designates the period which followed the death of his wife, in 1870. The book is composed with the thoughtful care and finish of style which have made the writer's works popular notwithstanding the dryness and abstruseness of many of the subjects of which he treated. Probably no scholar or philosopher has left an equally full and faithful history of his education and his intellectual life. The unconscious revelations of character which are often the most valuable parts of an autobiography bear an unusually small proportion to the deliberate narrative, because Mr. Mill's purpose of writing a candid account of his life was made effective by his long practice of psychological observation. Having fully attained the objects for which he was trained in youth, and which he afterwards proposed to himself as the business and duty of his life, Mr. Mill thought, with a self-confidence unmixed with vanity, that his own progress must convey useful instruction to others.

His education, under the superintendence of his father, James Mill, the historian of India, was a gigantic experiment on the formation of mind. He began Greek at three. In his eighth year he had read a number of "Greek authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's 'Cyropædia' and 'Memorials of Socrates; ' some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates' 'Ad Dæmonicum' and 'Ad Nicoclem.' I also read in 1813 the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron' to the "Theætetus' inclusive; which last dialogue," he adds with characteristic caution, "I venture to think would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it." In his eighth year he began Latin, and between that and his twelfth year he read an immense quantity both of Latin and Greek. At or soon after twelve he began upon logic and history, and in particular he read his father's "History of India," and shortly afterwards went through a course of political economy. At fourteen he went abroad for a year, and learned French, besides acquiring a great love for various French ways of thinking and feeling. At fifteen he read Roman law with Mr. John Austin, and studied Bentham. He also read a certain quantity of metaphysics, Locke, Helvetius, Hartley, and Condillac. In his seventeenth year (1822-3) he formed a little society called the Utilitarian Society, one of the members of which was Mr. Roebuck. In the same year he received an appointment in the India House which made him independent for life. At about nineteen (1824-5) he edited Bentham's "Rationale of Judicial Evidence," and at the same time, or rather earlier, he contributed to various newspapers and reviews. At about twenty he and about a dozen of his friends and contemporaries, of whom Mr. Grote was perhaps the best known, formed a sort of club, which met for the purpose of systematic study at Mr. Grote's house twice a week, for an hour and a half in the mornings. They studied successively in minute detail treatises by Mr. James Mill, Ricardo, Hartley, and certain writers on logic. After that he took a great part for several years in public speaking at debating societies. He was also for a great length of time a contributor to a series of reviews which were intended to be the organs of philosophical Radicalism. From about the year 1830 the events of his life have little interest, and indeed consist mainly of the production and publication of his different books. He retired from the India House when the Company was put an end to in 1858. He sat in Parliament from 1865 to 1868, and he died in 1873 at the age of sixty-seven.

66

"

or

In talking of his early precocity, Mr. Mill modestly says that it was all labour, for that he was singularly devoid of genius, or what is called quickness of parts. At a very early age he was reported to be a "made' manufactured" man, and strangers came expecting to be astonished, but without a thought that a warmer or kinder regard was possible. It was only when nature did at last break through the biggest and tightest swaddling clothes ever strapped round human soul that Mr. Mill was discovered to be a lovable and interesting person. Mr. Mill had never been allowed to be a child or a boy: but the proper elements of these stages are irrepressible, and in course of time, ever through life, he showed that he had it all in him, though with an irregular development. His father had that estimation of the wisdom of youth as to hold that men under forty might be as justly ex cluded from the franchise as women, on the common ground that both are