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HE answers to SELF CULTURE questions for June will be found in Vol. XXIII., of the new Encyclopædia Britannica on the page indicated by the number which follows the question.

June 1. What is known regarding the authorship of "The Thousand and One Nights," a work more commonly known in English as "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments"? 316

June 2. When and by whom were the first serviceable telescopes made, and were they "reflectors" or "refractors"?

135, 139, 146. See also 1481 Supplement. June 3. What economic considerations practically restrict the cultivation of the tea-plant to the countries whence it first became known to Europeans? 97

June 4. Where did Oriental carpet-weaving reach its greatest perfection of form and finish?

June 18. Where did tennis, the oldest of the ball-games, originate, and what regulations govern it? 179

June 19. What was the farthest northward point reached by the tide of Turkish conquest in Europe near the close of the sixteenth century, and what intervened to save Turkey three hundred years later, when a Russian army before Constantinople exacted the treaty of San Stefano? 640, 647

June 20. What had been done toward constructing a working telephone when Bell began the experiments which solved completely the problem of telephonic communication?

127. See also 1481 Supplement June 21. What are the principal provisions of the Constitution of the United States? 745

June 22. Wherein did Solomon's celebrated temple differ from the structures which successively replaced it? 165

June 23. What appliances are used by taxidermists in mounting birds and animals so as to preserve a life-like appearance? 89

June 24. What confirmation is given to the legend of Troy by the excavations conducted by Schliemann and others? 577, 582

June 25. What is the origin of the more familiar titles of honor in distinguishing rank? 417

June 26. What were the associations which influenced, if they did not inspire, Tasso's beautiful epic poem, "Jerusalem Delivered"?

W

INTRODUCTION*

HEN Sydney Smith, towards the close of his life, considered the changes which had passed over the country within his recollection, he said that he wondered how the young men of his time had managed to preserve even a decent appearance of cheerfulness. Sydney Smith died in 1845, just at the beginning of those deeper and wider changes of which he suspected nothing, for, though he was a clear-headed man in many ways, he was no prophet-he saw the actual and the present, but was unable to feel the action of the invisible and

* The following chapters of this retrospect of the Social Changes that have occurred in England during the Victorian reign, are taken from a work specially written by the distinguished novelist and littérateur, Sir Walter Besant, for THE WERNER COMPANY, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York, and to be presently published by them under the title of "The Enchanted Island, or the Victorian Transformation." The work has been called forth by the interest manifested in the year of the Queen's "Diamond Jubilee," and affords many and striking illustrations of the social transformation that has come about in Britain since Her Majesty's accession, together with a number of instructive facts regarding the expansion of the Empire and the political, industrial and social amelioration of the people. The present instalment deals interestingly with the Transformation of the Professions and the Transformation of Woman in the past Sixty Years.-ED. S. C.

potent forces which were creating a future to him terrible and almost impossible. Had he possessed the prophetic spirit he would have been another Jeremiah, for the destruction of the old forms of society, the levelling up and the levelling down destined to take place, would have been pain and grief intolerable to him.

I have always maintained that the eighteenth century lingered on in its ways, customs, and modes of thought until the commencement of Queen Victoria's reign, and I regard myself with a certain complacency as having been born on the fringe of that interesting period. I might also take pleasure in remembering that one who has lived through this reign has been an eye witness, a bystander, perhaps in some minute degree an assistant, during a revolution which has transformed this country completely, from every point of view; not only in manners and customs, but also in thought, in ideas, in standards, in the way of regarding this world, and in the way of considering the world to come. I do not, however, take much pleasure in this retrospect because the transition has taken place silently, without my knowledge; it escaped my notice while it went on; the world has changed before my eyes and I have not regarded the phenomenon, being COMPANY. All rights reserved.

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busily occupied over my own little individual interests. I have been, indeed, like one who sits in a garden thinking and weaving stories, nor heeding while the shadows shift slowly across the lawns, while the hand of the dial moves on from morning to afternoon. I have been like such a one; and, like him, I have awakened to find that the air, the light, the sky, the sunshine have all changed, and that the day is well-nigh done.

I desire in this place, above all things, to interest an American audience. I have to depict for them a revolution of which they have probably heard little. It is nothing less than a transformation of the British Empire. There are, I understand, certain prejudices in the States as to the average Englishman. I desire to do something towards removing these prejudices without asking what they are. To be sure, other prejudices may perhaps take their place: I have no hope that we shall ever come to be regarded as angels. One might perhaps remark that as regards our national faults they may be observed as in a looking-glass, across the

Putting aside this contention, I would plead that men at all times are liable to the defects of their qualities: given the latter, we may assume the former. However, I am not here retained for the defense. I shall only state the facts. Again, though I may be considered after all as a mere special pleader, I confess that my one object in writing these pages is to present my American readers with a new, an independent, and, if possible, an unprejudiced, consideration of England as it is, and not of England as it was in the eighteenth century: i. e., down to the year 1837. I am convinced that a man can place before himself no nobler object than the removal of prejudice, if it exists, and the reconciliationthe word must be allowed-of the mighty Republic of the West with the British Islands and the four great nations of the future, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It may be that the leadership of the race may pass from London to Washington. It seems to me more likely that there will be no leadership at all, but that six independent peoples, all speaking the same language, all governed by the same institutions, all owning the same literature, will be united on terms of equality in an alliance offensive and defensive against the whole

world. In either case the alliance should be acccompanied by no lingering prejudice, rancor, or animosity. We must endeavor to extinguish the smouldering ashes of revengeful memory once and for all.

Do not expect in these pages a Life of Queen Victoria. You have her public life in the events of her reign; of her private life I will speak in another chapter. But I can offer you no special, otherwise unattainable, information; there will be here no scandal of the Court. Indeed, in Her Majesty's Court, there is little or none of that to relate. I have climbed no back stairs; I have peeped through no keyhole; I have perused no secret correspondence; I have on this subject nothing to tell you but what you know already.

Again, do not look in these pages for a résumé of public events. You may find them in any Annual or Encyclopedia. What I propose to show you is the transformation of the people by the continual pressure and influence of legislation and of events of which no one suspected the far-reaching action. The greatest importance of public events is often seen, after the lapse of years, in their effect upon the character of the people. This view of the case, this transforming force of any new measure, seldom considered by statesman or by philosopher, because neither one nor the other has the prophetic gift, if it could be adequately considered while that measure is under discussion, would be stronger than any possible persuasion or any arguments of expediency, logic, or abstract justice.

I propose, therefore, to present a picture of the various social strata in 1837, and to show how the remarkable acts of British legislation, such as free trade, cheap newspapers, improved communications, together with such accidents as the discovery of gold in Australia, and of diamonds at the Cape, have altogether, one with the other, so completely changed the mind and the habits of the ordinary Englishman that he would not, could he see him, recognize his own grandfather. And I hope that this first sketch, devoted to the transformation of the professions and of women, may prove not only useful in the manner already indicated, but also interesting and fresh to the general reader. W. B.

LONDON, Easter Sunday; 1897.

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IXTY years ago there were three professions and two services. The two services were the Army and the Navy; the three professions were the Church, Law, and Medicine.

The Church was the natural home of the scholars; a few scholars drifted off into the Law; there were also a few in the House of Commons, where they made apt quotations from Horace, and delighted the members by giving a Virgilian turn to a debate. Now-a-daysalas! — were a scholar to venture on a Latin quotation, the House would not understand.

It is pleasant to look back upon the quiet, uneventful, peaceful life of the early Victorian scholar. He began at a public school where he needed no stimulus in the way of stripes; he devoured books; he acquired scholarship by a kind of intuition; he wrote Latin verses in which every hexameter had a Virgilian phrase and every pentameter reminded one of Ovid; he wrote Greek iambics more easily than the most rapid English poet ever composed blank verse; he thought in Latin; he made jokes in Greek. This boy gained, of course, a school scholarship and entered one of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge. Here he obtained one of the college scholarships, perhaps, too, one of the University scholarships, and all the prizes that there were for Latin and Greek compositions, and at last took the highest degree possible in classical honors. This

done, a fellowship was the next step. This place was worth about £300 sterling a year, with rooms, commons and dinner free. There were no duties attached; if he chose to take Orders and to remain unmarried, he might keep his fellowship for life. He did take Orders; he was appointed college lecturer in classics; he remained lecturer for ten years, when the tutor took a college living; he then succeeded to the tutorship, which was worth three or four thousand a year.

He then had two courses open to him. He might remain tutor long enough to amass a considerable fortune, and then take a college living and retire into the country, or he might wait on, presently retire, and either finish his days as a

Copyright, 1897, by THE WERNER COMPANY.

fellow, or be perhaps elected to the mastership, a post both dignified and wellendowed. By this time he had passed the period when most men desire to marry; he was settled in most excellent rooms; he had a free library; his habits were fixed; the college wine cellar was renowned; he was too comfortable to run the risk of change. Therefore he stayed where he was, within the walls of the old college, and younger men took the college livings. He never wrote anything to prove his own learning or to advance the learning of others; he produced nothing except a few Greek epigrams. And when at last he died, there was for a brief period a memory of one who had been among them, a great scholar; and then oblivion closed over him and he was gone. Such was the life of the Don. Sometimes he retired from the college and took the head mastership of a school; but not often.

All the clergy were not college Dons and great scholars. Yet there was always, at that period, a flavor of scholarship about them. The beneficed clergy of the country were generally younger sons of the country gentry, because almost every family had a church living in its gift, and these livings were too valuable to be bestowed out of the family. A young man who took a curacy in the country without family influence probably found himself, if he had no extraordinary gifts, stranded for life on eighty pounds a year. Those of the benefices which did not belong to private patrons were either in the gift of the lord chancellor, with whom interest was required, or belonged to the bishop, who had his own relations to provide for, or to some college at Oxford or Cambridge, which wanted them for its fellows. Of the sons, nephews and cousins, for instance, of Dr. Sparke, sometime bishop of Norwich, it was said of the nepotism which characterized that prelate, that preferment came to his relatives "as the Sparkes fly upwards."

The only chance for a young man was to attract attention as a preacher in some town. But this chance came to few; therefore for half the clergy, at least, their profession was a starveling. Yet those who had no interest entered it with hope, and under the pressure of a " call,"

which they believed to be real and not to be disobeyed under penalties too awful to be contemplated. Meantime, it is now nearly fifty years since Charles Kingsley, who could never shake off the prejudices of small middle-class gentility, uttered the sneer that the modern way of making your son a gentleman was to send him to Oxford first and to put him in Holy Orders next. He here expressed, however, a common feeling about the clergy, which was that they should be scholars first, gentlemen next, and divines last. And there is no doubt that the social position of the Church, and, therefore, the adhesion of all the better classes to the Church, has proved of the greatest value, in times of religious decay, towards maintaining the Anglican ecclesiastical system in its position of ascendancy.

The administration of the parish was still that of the eighteenth century. That is to say, the Church was there, before all people, with open doors, offering its services, its sermons, its offices, freely to all who chose to accept them. It was not considered the business of the clergy to run after those who refused their offices. As for the piety and the reputation of the clergy, their lives were pure; there was commonly no scandal; they were supposed, however, to be addicted to wine; and in the city there were some who were known as "three bottle men.' In opinions, the majority were of the Evangelical type, with Calvinistic leanings; they preached sermons wholly on points of doctrine; the general belief was that mere membership in the Church was of no importance at all; and that the salvation of the soul was an independent and separate transaction carried on between the individual and his Creator. This kind of preaching has not yet wholly ceased, but it is rare. Such preachers are no longer heeded.

Let us compare the Church of the present day. It is no longer a church of scholars; there are still some learned members in it; but the old presumption that a clergyman must be a scholar is quite lost and forgotten; rather the presumption is the other way, that a clergyman is not a scholar. The young scholars of the day do not, as a rule, take upon them Holy Orders; there are too many openings for their intellectual activities. Moreover, the prizes are not what they were. Agricultural depres

sion has ruined the fellowships, cut down by one-half the country livings, destroyed the value of deaneries and canonries. The bishoprics still, however, keep their value, and a profession cannot be thought very poor which numbers so many prizes as the Church of England, with her archbishops and her bishops. Preaching, which was formerly so important a part of Church work, has decayed deplorably. The reason is the development of the parish work, which now occupies the whole time of the clergy, leaving them no time for meditation and study. For, since the people will not come to the clergy, the clergy condescend to stoop to the people.

At the present moment the Church is the centre of numberless institutions and associations which aim at civilizing the people rather than making them religious. The clergy preside over clubs for the lads, clubs for the girls, temperance associations, mothers' meetings, sales of clothing, lectures, concerts, care of the poor and of the sick, benefit societies, visiting organizations, Sunday Schools, country holiday funds, convalescent homes, and a thousand other things. Now the working people, and especially the very lowest class, regard this activity with a kind of admiring wonder; they see these young fellows-many of whom are not clergy, but live among them— working morning, noon and night for no reward; they are touched by this devotion; their lads would follow them to the death. I do not say that this example makes them religious, but it fills them with that new feeling towards religion which has been already considered. The doctrines held by the present clergy are in most cases High Church, with which, personally, I have no kind of sympathy. At the same time one must admit that the modern views have destroyed the dreadful terrors about Election and Predestination: in the Anglican, as in the Roman Church, once more the fold protects.

In Law and Medicine, fewer changes have been made. In the former a barrister was not allowed to make a friend of an attorney, or to take his hand, or to visit at his house. The low class attorney-at-law, of whom there were a great many, practised with impunity all kinds of iniquities and conspiracies; he was, indeed, an enemy to the human race; he