--

inhabit the islands of the Satyridæ, | sickness. The gulon seems to be a which are three in number, standing curious and far from attractive animal right over against India (there is a which was unknown to the ancients, Shakespearean vagueness about his but with which Mr. Topsel and his geography). They keep their meat contemporaries had some slight acunder their chins, and from thence take quaintance. It was supposed to be a it forth to eat. They are seldom taken cross between a lion and a hyena, and alive, but one was caught in the woods was called the gulo on account of its of Saxony rather a long way from gluttonous habits, since it was accushome which was tamed and taught tomed to stuff until its body stood out to talk. There are several different like a bell. "It may be," says our kinds of satyrs, including pans, fauns, author, "that God hath ordained such and sileni. The sphinx is a dangerous a creature in those countries to express species of ape, with a woman's face the abominable habits of the noblemen and breasts. If a man first perceive who sit from noon till midnight, eating the sphinx, he shall be safe, but other- and drinking, particularly in Muscovy wise it is mortal to man. The pigmies, and Lithuania. I would to God that our author decides, belong to the sim- this gluttony had been confined to ian, and not, as some have thought, to those unchristian or heretical apostatthe human species, "because they have ical countries, and had not spread itself no reason, modesty, honesty, nor jus- over our most civil and Christian parts tice, speak imperfectly, and, above all, of the world." The gorgon, of which have no religion, which (as Plato says) no portrait is given, is proper to Africa, is common to all men." Mr. Topsel and is a terrible beast, with fiery eyes has no great admiration for the ape in which look neither forwards nor upany of its varieties, for he holds it to wards, but always on the earth. It be "a subtill, ironical, ridiculous, and lives entirely on poisonous herbs, and unprofitable beast, good only for laugh- when it sees an enemy it opens its ter." There is one use, however, to mouth and sends forth a horrible breath which he may be put; for when a lion which poisons the air over its head, is old or sick he recovers himself by so that all creatures breathing the air eating an ape. The various organs of fall into convulsions. It is a vexed the animal, moreover, contain valuable question, however, whether the poison medicinal properties when properly proceeds from the creature's throat or prepared, though they are neglected by eyes, and Mr. Topsel inclines towards our latter-day doctors. Still, it is well the latter supposition, because some to know that the heart of an ape, dried, of Marius's soldiers, when invading and a groat's weight thereof drunk in Africa, tried to kill a gorgon which a draught of stale honey, strengthens was feeding, but as soon as it raised the heart, sharpens the understanding, its head and looked at them they fell and is sovereign against the falling down dead.

THE ENGLISH PHEASANT A JAPANESE museum specimen; but fifty years ago, a BIRD. We owe many things to Japan; but it is not generally known that the pheasant of our preserves can trace its pedigree on one side to the more brilliant bird of the Land of the Rising Sun. Such is, however, the case. The Japanese pheasant, the Phasianus versicolor, is a bird of splendid plumage with a breast of dark grass-green color, a blue neck, and with scarlet feathers on the head. Up to 1840 it was unknown in Europe except as a

few pheasants were brought to Amsterdam from Japan in the living state. The Earl of Derby, grandfather of the present earl, and a distinguished zoologist, became possessed of a single male bird, and by crossing it with the pheasant of this country (the Phasianus colchicus) and repeated breeding back, a new race of birds was introduced, and the beautiful pheasant of our preserves, with its iridescent plumage, was produced and naturalized as an English bird.

For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO.

Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

The white sails come and the white sails go. A cloud of gold, a cleft of blue profound,

ears

From The Contemporary Review.
MR. GLADSTONE.

cause he then disapproved of the Maynooth grant, but because his earliest IF at the close of the first fifty years book had committed him to principles of Mr. Gladstone's life that is, at the which would have required him to disend of 1859-any one had prophesied approve of that grant to a Roman Caththat his career would prove far the olic training college, and because he most potent stimulus to the democratic was too scrupulous to change his policy movement in England which this cen- without giving up the immediate adtury has witnessed much more so, vantages which that change of policy for instance, than Mr. Bright's, whose might otherwise have brought him. eloquent denunciations of the bishops, All these symptoms of his political the aristocracy, and the privileged views were of the Conservative type, classes, had just been ringing in men's and promised anything rather than a the prophecy would have been great democratic career. And though received with general ridicule. At that his earlier Conservatism had been date Mr. Gladstone was, if not still a shaded off, under Sir Robert Peel's inConservative, at least a Peelite, and one fluence, into a sober disposition to meet of the most Conservative members of the Progressive party half-way, he was, the newly formed Liberal government. in 1859, the trusted member for Oxford' And he was Conservative in view, not University, and quite as likely to be only from religious and ecclesiastical remembered for that dislike of the feeling, but from historical feeling, Turkish Alliance which had rendered and not only from historical feeling, his course so erratic during the Cribut from that sympathy which profes- mean War, as for his exposure of the sional economists are apt to display tyrannical cruelty of the Neapolitan with all those conditions that give sta-government, and his strong sympathy bility to commerce -a sympathy that with the patriotic movement in Italy. had been one of the most striking char- Then, too, he had within a few months acteristics of Sir Robert Peel's policy recommended the cession of the Ionian before it showed itself in Mr. Glad- Islands to Greece, a step which was stone. Besides, when administrative never very popular in this country, so statesmen reach the age of fifty, they that, on the whole, it would have been are usually beginning to appreciate the the very last suspicion likely to have dangers of great and rapid change far entered the public mind, that Mr. more keenly than they appreciate its Gladstone would one day far surpass fascinations. In 1859, Mr. Gladstone and completely eclipse Mr. Bright in was just beginning to appreciate its the impulse he would give to the demofascinations more than its dangers. cratic, or soi-disant democratic, moveHe had given his support to the Con- ment in English thought. It was servative Reform Bill of the previous generally supposed, and with some jusyear. Two years before he had offered tice, that Mr. Gladstone would somea strenuous and eloquent resistance to how manage to find himself midway Lord Palmerston's extension of the law between two opposite policies, with a of divorce. And earlier, again, his op- reason for each, and a mind that disposition to the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, covered the subtlest excuses for now and his condemnation of the ludicrous leaning to one, and now again to the panic as to what was called " Papal other. To have predicted that when Aggression," had gained him the repu- nearer sixty than fifty he would sudtation of great courage in stemming denly find his sails filling with enthusithe waves of popular fury. Nor had asm for the popular cause, and that for he shrunk from change only when the nearly thirty years he would be the change was proposed by way of curb- great democratic leader of the age, ing the pretensions of Rome. Earlier would then have seemed one of the in his career he had separated himself most irrational conjectures that had from Sir Robert Peel, not indeed be-ever entered the mind of man.

And for those who are familiar with | That is a clear and good passage, charthe characteristic tenor of Mr. Glad-acteristic, not of Mr. Gladstone's most stone's discussions and arguments the involved and subtly qualified, but of Improbability of such a transformation his most lucid, style; yet it is the style would have seemed still greater than of a student, not of a great leader of even the hesitations and involutions of men. It has not the cycles and epicyhis external career in the past would cles of many statements elicited from have made it. No style of writing and him by challenges of his political conthinking less like the style of a great duct; but still it has the characteristic leader of democracy can be imagined hypothesis to begin with, the parenthan that scholastic style which Mr. thetic qualification, the gradual and Gladstone stil: wrote, not merely in his almost spiral method of approximation early days, but even when more than to his drift, anything indeed but the thirty-six years of public life and effec- sledge-hammer mode of beating sparks tive House of Commons oratory had out of the apathetic minds of a dense popularized his speech and given mass of human beings, which the great weight to his elocution. Take, for in- democratic orator best loves. Indeed, stance, the following passage in Mr. in 1868, Mr. Gladstone was still, though Gladstone's" Chapter of Autobiog- a great Parliamentary orator, the orator raphy," written in November, 1868, of a highly educated House of Coma passage of considerable interest as mons, an official orator, to whom the illustrating the relation between public platform was as yet almost unknown, and private opinion as Mr. Gladstone and those modern drill-halls or circonceived it, and indeed one much cuses in which great mass meetings are more clear and unqualified in its state- now addressed, quite unknown. Nor ments than Mr. Gladstone's statements would any one, even in 1868, casily often are; and compare it with the sort have believed that Mr. Gladstone could of style which we naturally expect from ever become the idol of such meetings one who is to lead passionate multitudes as those which he has since addressed to great democratic victories: on Blackheath and in Hengler's Circus. His own natural style was almost scholastic, the style of a thinker who engrafts one distinction on another till the reader is somewhat bewildered in trying to grasp the full effect of the complex qualifications thus composed; and we venture to say that even in 1868, though the great and telling apophthegm that the new voters under the recent Reform Act were "our own flesh and blood," had then been two years in vogue, no one could have anticipated that Mr. Gladstone was destined to eclipse Mr. Bright, not indeed as an orator, but as an effective democratic force. Yet that is assuredly what Mr. Gladstone has become, and become, moreover, since he had passed by many years the age of seventy, and

If it is the office of law and of institutions to reflect the wants and wishes of the country (and its wishes must ever be a considerable element in its wants), then as the nation passes from a stationary into a progressive period, it will justly require that the changes in its own condition and views should be represented in the professions and actions of its leading men, for they exist for its sake, not it for theirs. It remains, indeed, their business now and

ever to take honor and duty for their guide, and not the mere demand or purpose of the passing hour; but honor and duty themselves require their loyal servant to take account of the state of facts in which he is to work, and, while ever laboring to elevate the standard of opinion and action around him, to remember that his business is not to construct with self-chosen materials, an Utopia or a Republic of Plato, but to conduct the affairs of a living and work-long after he had fully realized, to use his own phrase, that a country's ing community of men who have self"wishes must ever be a considerable government recognized as in the last resort the moving spring of their political life and element in its wants." of the institutions which are its outward vesture.

Truly such a career as Mr. Gladstone's is amongst the most remarkable