adopted throughout, both by Ruth herself and by her friends when alluding to her fault, is at war with this impression and with the true tenor of the facts recorded. Mrs. Gaskell scarcely seems at one with herself in this matter. Anxious above all things to arouse a kinder feeling in the uncharitable and bitter world towards offenders of Ruth's sort, to show how thoughtless and almost unconscious such offences sometimes are, and how slightly, after all, they may affect real purity of nature and piety of spirit, and how truly they may be redeemed when treated with wisdom and with gentleness, she has first imagined a character as pure, pious, and unselfish as poet ever fancied, and described a lapse from chastity as faultless as such a fault can be; and then, with damaging and unfaithful inconsistency, has given in to the world's estimate in such matters, by assuming that the sin committed was of so deep a dye that only a life of atoning and enduring penitence could wipe it out. If she designed to awaken the world's compassion for the ordinary class of betrayed and deserted Magdalenes, the circumstances of Ruth's error should not have been made so innocent, nor should Ruth herself have been painted as so perfect. If she intended to describe a saint (as she has done), she should not have held conventional and mysterious language about her as a grievous sinner.

We have more to say upon this subject, for it is a wide and a very grave one; but our space is exhausted, and we have probably drawn as largely as is wise upon our reader's attention. But the faulty religion, which disfigures modern novels nearly as much as false morality, may perhaps tempt us to take up the subject once more on some other occasion.

KINGSLEY AND CARLYLE.

HERE are two living English writers who, wide as the poles asunder in many points, have yet several marked characteristics in common, and whom we confess to regarding with very similar sentiments, Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Kingsley. Both are eminent; both are popular; both have exercised, and are still exercising, a very unquestionable influence over their contemporaries: unquestionable, that is, as to degree; questionable enough, unhappily, as to kind. Of both we have frequently had occasion to speak with respect and admiration. We read them much, and recur to them often; but seldom without mixed feelings, provocation, disappointment, and regret. We constantly lay them down outraged beyond endurance by their faults, and mentally forswearing them in future; we as constantly take them up again in spite of vow and protest, drawn back into the turbid vortex by the force of their resistless fascinations. In short, we feel and act towards them as men may do towards women whom they at once delight in, admire, and condemn; who perpetually offend their purer taste and grate against their fiuer sensibilities, but whose noble qualities and whose meretricious charms are so strangely vivid and so marvellously blended, that they can shake themselves free from neither. For Mr. Kingsley we have long ago. expressed our hearty appreciation; but there is a time to appreciate, and a time to criticize. Standing as he now does at the zenith of his popularity, it is the fit time to

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speak of his shortcomings with that frankness which is the truest respect.

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The historian of Frederick the Great and the author of Hypatia have many points of resemblance, but always with a variation. They are cast in the same mould, but fashioned of different clays and animated by different spirits. Both are terribly in carnest; but Kingsley's is the earnestness of youthful vigor and a sanguine temper, Carlyle's is the profound cynicismn of a bitter and a gloomy spirit. He is, if not the saddest, assuredly the most saddening of writers, the very Apostle of Despair. Both seem penetrated to the very core of their nature with the sharpest senso of the wrongs and sufferings of humanity; but the one is thereby driven to preach a crusade of vengeanco on their authors, the other a crusade of reseno and deliverance for their victims. Mr. Kingsley's earnout. ness as a social philosopher and reformer dovolops itself mainly in the direction of action and of sympathy; Mr. Carlylo's exhales itself, for the most part, in a' fioreo contempt against folly and weakness, which is always unmeasured and sometimes unchristian. The earnestness of Carlyle, though savagely sincere, never condescenda enough to detail or to knowledge to make him a practical reformer; that of Kingsley is so restless as to allow him no repose, and sends him rushing, tête baissée, at every visible evil or abuse. The one has stirred thousands to bitterest discontent with existing evils and social wrongs, but scarcely erected a finger-post or supplied a motive; the other has roused numbers to buckle on their armor in a holy cause, but has often directed them astray, and has not always been careful either as to banner or to watchword.

Both are fearfully pugnacious; indeed, they are beyond comparison the two most combative writers of their age. Nature sent them into the world full of aggressive propensities; and strong principles, warm hearts, and expansive sympathies have enlisted these propensities on the side of benevolence and virtue. Happier than mary, they have been able to indulge their passions in the cause

of right. But their success or good fortune in doing this has led them into the delusion common in such cases. They fancy that the cause consecrates the passion. They feel

"We have come forth upon the field of life

To war with Evil";

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and once satisfied that it is evil against which they are contending, they let themselves go, and give full swing to all the vehemence of their unregenerate natures. We comprehend the full charms of such a tilt. It must be delightful to array all the energies of the old Adam against the foes of the now. What unspeakabla roliof and joy for a Christian like Mr. Kingsley, whom God has made boiling over with animal eagerness and florco aggressivo instincts, to feel that ho is not called upon to control those instincts, but only to diroot thom and that onea having, or fanoying that he has, in viow a man or an institution that is God's onomy as well as his, ho may hata it with a porfiet Introd, and go at it en schreur? Accordingly he reminds us of nothing so much us of a war-horso panting for the battle; his usual style is marvellously like a nigh, "ha ha! among tho trumpets!" the dust of the combat is to him the breath of life; and when once, in the plenitude of grace and faith, fairly let loose upon his prey-human, moral, or material all the Red Indian within hin comes to the surface, and he wields his tomahawk with an unbaptized heartiness, slightly heathenish, no doubt, but withal unspeakably refreshing. It is amazing how hard one who is a gladiator by nature strikes when convinced that he is doing God service. Mr. Kingsley is a strange mixture of the spirit of the two covenants. He draws his sympathy with human wrongs mainly from the New Testament; but his mode of dealing with human wrong-doers altogether from the Old. Mr. Carlyle borrows little from either division of the Bible; his onslaughts are like those of one of the Northern gods; he wields Thor's hammer righteously in the main, but with a grim and terrible ferocity, and often mangles his victims as though absolutely intoxicated by the taste of blood.

Both writers and this is one of their most serious offences are contemptuous and abusive towards their adversaries far beyond the limits of taste, decency, or X gentlemanly usage. Both indulge in terms of scorn and vituperation such as no cause can justify and no correct or Christian feeling could inspire. Their pages often read like the paragraphs in the Commination Service. Their holy wrath is poured out, as from teeming and exhaustless fountains, on everything they disapprove, and on every one who ventures to differ from them or to argue with them. Since the days of Dean Swift and Johnson there have been no such offenders among the literary men of England. Still, even here, there is a difference; Mr. Carlyle slangs like a blaspheming pagan; Mr. Kingsley like a denouncing prophet.

Mingled, too, with this unseemly fury, and piercing through all their unmeasured and lacerating language, there is discernible in both men a rich vein of beautiful and pathetic tenderness. This is most marked in Mr. Carlyle, as might be expected from his far deeper nature; and if considered in connection with the irritations of an uncomfortable and nervous organization, goes far to explain, if not to excuse, his outrageous ferocity of utterance. It is as though, like the prophet of old, "he was mad for the sight of his eyes which he saw." Gloomy and phrenetic by temperament; full of enthusiasm for what is noble; keen in his perceptions of what ought to be and might be; bitterly conscious of the contrast with what is; sympathizing with almost painful vividness in the sufferings of the unhappy and the wronged, but perversely showing that sympathy rather by contemptuous anger than by relieving gentleness; richly endowed with warm human affections, which yet he is half ashamed of, and would fain conceal; little accustomed to control himself, and never taught to respect others, his spirit is in a perpetual state both of internecine and of foreign. war; and his tenderness, instead of being like oil upon the troubled waters, seems to be only one more incongruous and fermenting element cast into the seething

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