mind you, cheerfully, what you will come to. THIS is an admirably executed repro duction by photography, from the best original proof prints, of the engravings of one of Turner's most beautiful series, the twenty pictures of Richmondshire, engraved for Whittaker's history of that lovely little bit of Yorkshire, between 1819 and 1823. The Misses Bertolacci have done their work with great skill, and these photographic copies seem to us to But in spite of all artificial forms there is have all the charm of original engravings. the genuine gusher still among men. One The first of the series, the engrav knows the type. He rushes up in the ing of Richmond itself, is almost equal street, and, although we saw him only yes- in beauty to the engraving of one of Turnterday, yet he shakes our hand as if he had er's finest pictures, "Heidelberg Castle," just come back after a perilous voyage from to which in character and treatment it New Zealand. Breathlessly he tells us bears no slight resemblance. There is everything about himself; and the smallest no bridge, indeed, over the river, and detail is invested with the very highest im- no rainbow arch in the sky, and less alportance. He slaps his friends on the back, causing the most exquisite pain; he pokes them in their ribs, redoubling their anguish; he laughs irrepressibly at the faintest joke that arises, and, in short, a little of him goes a very long way. And he labours under a still further disadvantage. If for an hour he is quiet or silent he is immediately thought to be out of temper, or at any rate to have something the matter with him—so that the mere physical exhaustion which must sometimes attend upon gushing, will most likely be interpreted as a fit of the sulks. Compare with this unkindly estimate by which he is tried the blessings which hover round the reserved and selfcontained man. His wishes are tacitly consulted for fear he should make himself disagreeable, which he can do very satisfactorily in his quiet way. And supposing on any occasion that he thaws for a while and behaves like an ordinary mortal, there is quite a buzz of excitement, about, and one whispers to another the joyful news, "How wonderfully agreeable Diogenes was tonight; I saw him talking to Jones for nearly half an hour." Think of the honour which this unworthy member of society receives in contrast to the contemptuous treatment to which the gushing man is condemned, however good and virtuous he may be. And if there is any truth in the pictures which have been drawn, they ought to convey most broadly that celebrated "Advice to those about to be gushing "— don't. together of the romantic and imaginative character which so well suits the grand his toric traditions of the Heidelberg ruin. But there is an unseen summer-evening sun catching the crest of the hill on which Richmond stands, so that its church and castle towers, and even the houses themselves, are steeped in a white light that seems to rob them of half their solidity, while the trees and sloping banks of the Swale are all in shadow, and the whitish stream itself, reflecting the light sky above it, glasses the deeply shadowed bank in a pale soft mirror. In the distance is a landscape flooded with soft evening light, and in the foreground a little girl, kneeling beside her little terrier, touching her dog with one hand and plucking flowers with the other, on the edge of the high bank above the stream. In the half-distance, at a bend in the Swale, is the weir, white against the shadowed banks, and on the opposite bank of the river winds away a tiny footpath, along which a figure with a market basket is walking home from Richmond. It is just one of those scenes in which the light and shade seem to conspire to make nature appear more real than human habitations. The pale river reflect * Richmondshire. By J. M. W. Turner, R. A. The twenty subjects photographically reproduced by CC. and M. E. Bertolacci, in one complete volume, with a concise historical preface. London: Published for C. C. and M. E. Bertolacci, by Messrs. Willis and Sotheran, 136 Strand; and also for them by Messrs. Colnaghi, Pall Mall East, and Messrs. A. Marion, Son, and Co., Soho Square, - al The Sabbath silence of the hills; And all the quiet God has given Without the golden gates of heaven." The silver river winds between hills covered with the richest wood, of which the darkest throws its purple shadow towards the little church, and then sparkles on into the bright foreground, passing Brignall Church almost within earshot of the bubble of its waves. There is not the variety of the two pictures of which we have spoken before, but quite as much beauty as in either. The privacy and soft beauty of the valley in which the church lies, is expressed as few engravings ever expressed it before; Turner might have drawn it with Wordsworth's lines in his head: : ing back the sky, and the pale town in the evening sun, seem equally unsubstantial beside the steep heavy-shadowed banks of the swale and the dark foliage upon them. Still more beautiful is the photographed engraving of the fall of the Tees called High Force. Round a great round crag, most like the face of one of the Nuremberg round towers, the Tees sweeps down in two waterfalls, one on each side; one of them, after springing forward from the rock just far enough to catch a gleam of light, falls almost perpendicularly in the shadow; the other shelves down in a mist of dazzling sunlight, and only reaches the shadow near its base. On the landward side of both falls stand, half facing each other, two great cliffs, the opposite extremities of the wall of rock through which the Tees bursts, neither of them caught by the sunlight and one "Beneath the clear blue sky, he saw densely black in its own shade; but the A little field of meadow ground; head of the round crag which divides the But field or meadow name it not; Call it of earth a small green plot, falls, and which is isolated by them, is lighted up by the sun, and its lower slope is so With woods encompassed round." thrown forward as just to catch the light It would be easy to go on dilating on the again in a sweeping curve that bridges the exceeding beauty of almost all of these fine separating rock, and unites the sunlit with reproductions of some of Turner's best the shadowed waterfall. The effect of works. What a picture is that of "Harthese three sweeps of wave, of water draw Falls," the solid wall of bare rock without sun, of sun without water, and of fringed with wood on either side, over both sun and water together, is inex- which the thin stream of the swift river pressibly grand; they form an incomplete leaps in silver spray, cooling the summer triangle, of which the uniting arc of sun-air for those happy cattle that are gently light is the slanting base. By the deep black pool beneath, where the two cataracts join, fishermen are standing with rod and net, and with just a glimpse of the brilliant upper day from which the river is rushing down into their twilight. A more poetical picture it is not easy to imagine. The waterfall in shadow (though just touched with light at the top) is almost solemn, and looks like the flowing dress of some gigantic figure turning away from the darkness of the glen towards the sunlight; the other is a sparkling shower of light feeding the gloom; while the belt of fainter sunlight which slants up from one to the other seems to soften the contrast, and shade off the into the other. one The engraving" Brignall Church" is one of the softest and most delicious of these landscapes. The little church itself lies in one of those sequestered glens which recalls what has been said of Vala Crucis: "Vale of the Cross, the shepherds tell "Tis sweet within thy woods to dwell; grazing on the sunny slope in the foreground. But it is idle describing in words what the eye can take in at a glance; and we have only attempted it thus far to persuade our readers of the excellence of these photographic echoes of the original engravings. From The Spectator. BUDDHISM*. MR HARDY would have done better to write a book upon Buddhism specially adapted for English readers. He has a deep practical knowledge of the creed as obeyed in Ceylon, from reading its books and controversy with its priests, and has collected information which in another form would be of the highest interest to Europe. Nothing is more wanted than an account of Buddhism as it appears to an intelligent English theologian if an Arminian, so * Legends and Theories of the Buddhists. By the Rev. R. S. Hardy. London: Williams and Norgate. Its originality consists in this, that while Buddhism is a religion, i. e., a system of thought having reference to things not material, inculcating self-restraints and moral obligations, it denies the useful basis of all religions. In India, and indeed most places, it is so mixed with Brahminism that it is hard to discern the truth, but wherever it is pure it recognizes no God, no Supreme Intelligence, much the better—who has really fought it | human race, and thence spread till it subout with the yellow-robed priests in their jugated India, China, and the countries own tongue, has understood not only what between, and Ceylon say a clear half of their sacred books say, which is one thing, the human race. India fell back from it, but what the expositors think they say, or rather superadded to it a system of anwhich is quite another. Instead of such a other kind, at once nobler and more earthly, work, Mr. Hardy, either out of laziness or but in Siam, China, Cochin China, and humility we will assume the second, for Ceylon the people, so far as they recognize the man is evidently both good and temper- any system of religious philosophy, recogatehas republished a controversial work nize this, the most original of all which the intended to fortify the Singhalese Christians sons of men have devised. among whom he laboured, mingled with explanations intended for a more Western latitude. The result is a jumble of knowledge which, as far as the writer, who can follow most of the quotations, can judge, is very accurate; of reflections which, if not always deep, are usually to the point; of legends which would be most interesting, but for the higgledy-piggledy in which they are presented, and of deductions which are sometimes of necessity imperfect. For instance, Mr. Hardy wants evidently to point out the actual working of the Buddhist sexual law, apparently so very pure a system. That is a practical point of high interest to the speculative Europeans who alone will read his book, but he stops short, and will not even quote the Buddhist Scripture, lest a certain laxity in its doctrine should injure his converts' minds. Nevertheless, in spite of its form, his little book is one for which we are indebted, and we will try to condense from it an account of Buddhism, the least known and in some ways the most interesting of creeds, as it appears to a man who has studied the Buddhist books with the aid of Singhalese, i. e., as we understand it, of "Catholic" Buddhists, theologians. We take it- but we give the opinion as the result of much reading, and not, except as to the Indian Buddhists, of knowledge like Mr. Hardy's that the Indian Buddhist of the higher class is the Neologian, the Burmese the Orthodox Protestant, the Singhalese the High Church, and the Siamese and Chinese the Secularist of the Buddhist system. We may pass over disquisitions as to Gautama or Gotama. Whether Sakya Muni ever existed, whether he was a Prince, whether he ran away from his wife to hide himself in the jungle, whether he turned the world topsy-turvy, or whether he underwent St. Anthony's temptations in an intensified form, does not matter much. What is certain is, that about 580 B. C., say a century after Lycurgus, a system of thought, probably originating with an individual, did arise on the Indian frontier of Nepal, or did get there from the old cradle of the the primary idea of Gautama being that to predicate any Self, any Ego, is an absurdity, no soul, no future life, except as one among a myriad stages of terminable existence. It is not revealed, but discovered by man, any human being who can so far conquer his natural self, his affections, desires, fears, and wants, as to attain to perfect calm, being capable of "intuitions" which are absolute truth; wherefore Gautama, though he argued against other creeds, never proved his own by argument, simply asserting "I know." Its sole motors are upadan, the "attachment to sensuous objects," as Mr. Hardy calls it, or as we should describe it, nature, and karmma, literally, work, the aggregate action which everything in existence must by virtue of its existence produce, and which ex rerum naturâ cannot die. For example, fruit comes because there is a tree, not because the tree wills it, but because its karmma, its inherent aggregate of qualities, necessitates fruit, and its fruit another tree in infinite continuity. There is a final cause, but it is not sentient: :-" All existences are the result of some cause, but in no instance is this formative cause the working of a power inherent in any being that can be exercised at will. All beings are produced from the upádána, attachment to existence, of some previous being; the manner of its exercise, the character of its consequences, being controlled, directed, or apportioned by karmma; and all sentient existences are produced from the same causes, or from some cause dependent on the results of these causes; so that upádána and karmma, mediately or immediately, are the cause of all causes, and the source whence all beings have originated in their present form." It will be readily perceived | Gautama we have no concern. Suffice it to that this theory, expressed by Buddha in say that his theory of what we call revelathis form because he wanted to use illustra- tion is that the intuition of a man who has tions from the germination and self-repro- conquered upádána is absolutely true, and duction of trees and fruit, is really nothing that this idea applied to physics by a totally but the old argument of necessity, the ignorant person produces an explanation of "must be" of the universe; but he drew the phenomena of the world which is simply from it a strange deduction. Instead of extravagant nonsense, dreamy stuff about arguing, as English secularists and many central rocks, and the swallowing up of the Hindoos do, that as there is obviously a law sun by a demon. We pass on to the ethical which is unalterable, and of which we can system of Buddhism. Strictly speaking, know nothing, and which therefore we the creed, by reducing everything to the should ignore, and try to be happy as in- natural law of cause and effect, should kill telligent animals, Gautama set himself to morals, but it does not. "Of sin, in the kill the law. Penetrated with the idea that sense in which the Scriptures speak of it, existence, though a natural consequence of he knows nothing. There is no authoritaa natural law, is mere misery that the tive lawgiver, according to the Dharmma, natural man is wretched as well as evil, he nor can there possibly be one; so that the declared that if a man, by subduing all the transgression of the precepts is not an natural affections, could, as it were, break iniquity, and brings no guilt. It is right the chain, kill the upádána, or attachment that we should try to get free from its conto sensuous things, he would as a reward sequences, in the same way in which it is pass out of existence, would either cease to right for us to appease hunger or overcome be, or for this is doubtful- -cease to be disease; but no repentance is required; conscious of being. The popular notion and if we are taught the necessity of being that nirwan is absorption, is incorrect, for tranquil, subdued, and humble, it is that there is nothing to be absorbed into, no su- our minds may go out with the less eager preme spirit, no supreme universe, nothing, ness after those things that unsettle their and into this nothing the man who has at- tranquillity. If we injure no one by our tained nirwan necessarily passes. To attain acts, no wrong has been done; and if they it he may have to pass through a myriad are an inconvenience to ourselves only, no states or forms, each less attached to sense one else has any right to regard us as transthan the last, hence transmigration; but gressors. The Dharmma has some resemwhen it is reached the perfect result is blance to the modern utilitarianism; it is simply annihilation, or rather the loss of not, however, the production of the greatest being, for the components of being, if we possible happiness at which it aims, but the understand Buddha, could not die. A removal of all possible evil and inconvenidrearier system of thought was never de ence-from ourselves. Nevertheless selfvised, and we can account for its rapid denial is the sum of practical ethics, and spread only by assuming what we believe Gautama having set up the killing of atto be the fact, that the Asiatic who was tachment to sense as the object, and selfbelow philosophy understood by nirwan denial as the means, has produced a very not annihilation in our sense, but that state noble theoretic system of ethics. True, the of suspended being in which one exists, but ultimate reward is only annihilation, but neither hopes, fears, thinks, nor feels, in there are intermediate stages, and so powwhich he delights, and which we despair erful is the crave of man to be higher than of making comprehensible to the Northern he is, so terrible his fear of being lower, that mind. Our only chance is to recall to our even for this he will, theoretically at least, readers' recollection a fact they may have surrender much. No act is in the Buddrecognized, but which, if they can sympa- hist system sin, the very idea is unknown thize with the Spectator, they have probably never realized to themselves, namely, the intense delight some men feel in sleep, not as a relief from fatigue, not as a renovator, but as a condition. Sleep is temporary death, non-existence and if they can realize the delight in that temporary death, they may understand why, amid a people with whom it is universal, the doctrine of nirwan found favour. With the cosmical system of Buddha or but then a bad act produces a bad consequence, just as a rotten substance will produce stench, and bad acts are therefore to be avoided. As to what is good everything is good, because in se everything is indifferent, but nevertheless that is bad relatively to its consequence which produces injury to another. If it produces injury to oneself no matter, because each existence is its own irresponsible lord, but if to another then nirwan is by that injurious act postponed, and he who commits it is zon which the Emperor watches with illlower than he who does not. There is no concealed anxiety. The debates this year sin, but there is unkindness, and unkind- on the Address, though not wanting either ness produces fruit just as a tamarind pro- in spirit or eloquence, and though addressed duces fruit. The result of that principle, to subjects so interesting as Rome, Algeria, one latent in a dozen creeds besides Budd- Germany, and the Extradition Treaty, have hism, and secretly believed by thousands attracted comparatively little attention, for even in Western Europe, is a system which, they are all overshadowed by one not yet worked honestly out, would produce univer- begun. In a few days an amendment is to sal passive benevolence-active benevo- be proposed, praying the Emperor to lence being of no use whatever - and the most bizarre muddle of morals in some departments of life. For example, it would be a crime to hurt any living thing, and strict Buddhists still refuse to swallow animalculæ; but it would not be a crime to commit adultery if the husband consented, a deduction formally drawn and acted on in Ceylon, because no one is injured. In practice the idea works in two ways, the really devout pass lives of the monastic kind, absorbed in themselves, and apart from the world; and the worldly follow their own inclinations, thinking the reward of virtue a great deal too distant and too shadowy a hunt after nothing. So keenly indeed is this felt that in most Buddhist countries there is a sub-creed, not supposed to be at variance with the Established Church, but to work in a less refined but quicker way. When a Singhalese, for example, feels the need of supernatural help, he worships a devil to get it, not as disbelieving Buddhism, but as supposing that devils may exist as well as anything else, and may if kindly treated be as useful as any other allies. Of course the race which holds such a system has, as a race, rather a better chance of being decent than a really pagan one, for it only half understands its own creed, and the stock texts being all very benevolent and philosophical, it takes them for a theoretic rule of life, and though it does not fully obey the rule, it is decidedly better than if the rule were a bad one. The Burmese, for example, are on the whole distinctly a better people than the Hindoos, more especially because as human affairs must go on, they make rules for holding society together - as we also do- which are quite independent of any divine rule at all, and which happen in Burmah to be decently wise. From the Spectator. THE FRENCH CHAMBER. THERE is a little cloud, no bigger as yet than a man's hand, in the Napoleonic hori "crown the edifice" by conceding a large measure of liberty to France. That would under ordinary circumstances be merely a menace of a poignant speech, very disagreeable no doubt to Ministers and very amusing to Parisians, but of no material importance to the Imperial régime, but this particular amendment has been signed already by forty-six members, of whom thirty at least are strict supporters both of the dynasty and its system. Every day adds to their number, every addition diminishes the reluctance of the remainder- for Frenchmen, with all their individual courage, are politically gregarious-and it is expected by men not hostile to the Empire that on the day of division at least one hundred votes will be recorded in favour of an amendment fatal to the existing régime. Only forty signed the amendment on Tuesday requiring the Emperor to confer all the rights of French citizens on the French colonists in Réunion, Guadaloupe, and Martinique, yet though Government resisted strenuously, it was beaten by 141 to 91. No such event as a great vote in favour of liberty has occurred since the coup d'état, and its importance will be considerably increased by the peculiar relation which the Deputies consider themselves to bear towards the Government. Almost all of them not belonging to the avowed Opposition are official candidates formally supported by the Prefects, and as Frenchmen are always logical, consider that in accepting such aid they are bound by the "logic of the position" to support the Imperial view. Nothing but a strong sense either of danger to the country, or to the Empire, or to their own seats, would compel them to take a part in a "mutiny ;" and if they do take part, the omen is one full of menace for Bonapartism. We believe that it is such an omen, that the Forty-six are expressing a feeling which is spreading rapidly through France, that there is at last a chance of the only constitutional danger the Empire can encounter an irreconcilable difference between the Legislature and the Executive power. One of the keenest and oldest politicians in France, a man with a singular |
