rated, was met by certain legal fictions respecting what is called reshuth,' for which the nearest equivalent is the term domicile.

In the Seder Moed, or second order of the Talmud, which treats of Festivals, the first treatise regards the due observance of the Sabbath-day. But this is followed by the tract Erubin, or the combination of places and limits, by means of which the extreme rigour of the rabbinical ordinances may be considerably lightened. This legislation is so entirely conventional as to show that its growth and development must have been tardy. Thus, according to the Mishna, no man is allowed to go beyond 2,000 paces from the bounds of his domicile on the day of rest-the Sabbath-day's journeys of the Gospels. But if he has deposited food for two meals in any particular place, before the Sabbath, he has established a legal domicile there, beyond which he may go for 2,000 paces. Again, the houses in a court or street may be combined into one reshuth,' so as to allow things to be conveyed from one house to another on the Sabbath. Perhaps the most striking proof of the extremely artificial and conventional nature of this elaborate legislation is to be found in the decision, that a man is guilty who plucks a flower, leaf, or fruit from a plant growing in a perforated flower-pot, but guiltless if the pot be not perforated.*

6

It is impossible to contemplate the history of the Jewish nation as controlled by the iron rule of tradition, and fettered by the subtleties of the Halaca, without a certain feeling of melancholy. There is so much in the heroic endurance of this ancient race; in the sublime contempt of their paternal faith for chance and change in human affairs; in their unshaken expectation, with that which is the evidence of things unseen, of the King Messiah; in the noble confession, and though He retard his coming, yet will I wait for Him till He appears; to command sympathy and respect, that we may at first feel at a loss to account for the strict exclusion of the Jews from the comity of nations. The folk lore of the world is instinct with anticipation of good to come. Rex quondam, Rexque futurus, was the epitaph of a legendary king, of our own blood, that attested this common expectation. Don Sebastian is even yet expected in Portugal to return from his protracted exile. The sleep of Ragner Lodbrok is to be broken when the old Norse king's time has come. The advent of the twelfth Imaum is expected by the disciples of the Arabian Prophet. No less local, personal, and certain is the reign of Christ which some

* Sabboth, x. 6.

Christians hold to be foretold on earth, and designate as the Millennium. So closely do these expectations, notably the last, join with the one great conservative element of the Jewish creed, that we might be tempted to suppose that the differences which separate that nation from Islam or from Christendom are little other than those idle dogmatic subtleties, which have but little philosophical weight, although they often raise polemical controversy to its whitest glow.

But when we sound the sombre, exclusive, pitiless depths of the inner doctrine of the Talmud, we see that a reason exists for that marked and secular demarcation between the Jew and the Gentile, for which we were about to blame our own intolerance. Purposely and rigidly, in exile no less than in the splendour of the theocratic polity, has the hand of the Jew been directed by the depositaries of his traditions against every man. It is the law of self-defence that has raised the hand of every man against him. Our ancestors were not, after all, so blindly cruel as some writers are too ready to admit. Offers of friendship and of brotherhood are as powerless as are the fires of the Inquisition to break down that moral wall, substantial as the very fortress wall of the Temple, that resisted the voice of Christ, and that has been strengthened by the constant efforts of the doctors of the Talmud for five centuries after the fall of Jerusalem. The power of resistance is the same at this moment that it was two thousand years ago. The point of attack is still the same as in the days of Herod. To the question, Who is my neighbour?' the Talmud returns one reply, and the parable of the Good Samaritan another. The mercy to be shown, as Moses taught, to the stranger, is qualified by the Halaca by the assumption that he must also be a proselyte. All questions as to which accord would be otherwise possible, whether in the historic past, or the dimly predicted future, are insoluble, while the justice, mercy, and truth-the weightier matters of the Law-are, by the guardians of the Law of Moses, confined to those of their own faith and blood. The vitality of Judaism was contained in the doctrine, that the Jews had one father, even God. The hope of the future of humanity lies in the good tidings that God is the common Father of mankind.

ART. III.—1. Promenade autour du Monde, 1871. Par M. le Baron de HÜBNER, Ancien Ambassadeur. 2 Tomes. Paris: 1873.

2. Voyage autour du Monde. Par le Marquis de BEAUVOIR. 3 Tomes. Paris: 1870.

SINCE

INCE the tour of the globe has become a trip or excursion for the instruction of youth or the recreation of manhood, no one has described this diorama of mankind with more grace, vivacity, and intelligence than the two writers whose works we have placed at the head of this article. The young Marquis de Beauvoir starts just after his twentieth birthday, completes a voyage of 16,900 leagues, and having visited the British Australian Colonies, encountered the Amazons of the King of Siam, and breakfasted with the First Minister of the Court of Pekin, returns to Paris before he is two and twenty to publish a narrative which would do credit to a much more experienced author. It is impossible to write with more freshness and truth, or in a more enlarged and liberal spirit, than M. de Beauvoir; and if we do not propose to dwell upon his travels on the present occasion, it is because they have already received the honours of translation, and have obtained a very wide circulation in this country.

The publication of Baron Hübner is more recent and, as yet, in England less known; but we must say he is a formidable rival to the young French Marquis. The Baron will be remembered in the diplomatic history of our time as the representative of Austria in Paris, to whom the late Emperor Napoleon III. addressed, on January 1, 1859, the ominous. words which announced, to the consternation of Europe, the campaign of that year and the loss of Lombardy to Austria: a speech as memorable in its consequences as the first Napoleon's celebrated sally to Lord Whitworth. He is not less favourably known in the literary world as the author of the Life of 'Pope Sixtus V.,' which was first introduced to the English public in this Journal, and which has since been translated by Mr. Jerningham, being in fact a contribution of singular merit to the monographs of papal history. He brings therefore to the observation of new countries and old civilisations a mind trained by a long experience of public affairs and a careful study of past history. To these qualities he adds a facility and elegance in writing by preference in the French language, extremely uncommon in anyone not bred within the banlieue of Paris. We can hardly recall an instance of French written

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by a German, so playful, idiomatic, and free from effort. Good French prose has this incalculable advantage over all other languages, that it addresses itself alike to the cultivated classes of society in every part of Europe, and for the purposes of a light and discursive narrative like the present it is simply inimitable. But Baron Hübner had other and even higher qualifications for a tourist. Although he travelled in no official capacity, and without pretension, his well-known services and rank in the diplomatic world obtained for him marks of respect both in America and Asia, which are seldom conceded to any private traveller; and his reflections on the social and political condition of these countries are singularly candid, instructive, and acute.

A man who journeys round the globe, starting from an Irish port to the shores of the United States, visiting New York and Washington-the chief seats of American trade and powerwhirled in one of Mr. Pullman's cars across the Western continent and the Rocky Mountains, until he reaches at the Salt Lake the strange theocracy of Brigham Young, and at San Francisco the rising confluence of yellow men from the Far East with the rough emigrants of the Far West-who then crosses the Pacific Ocean, and on arriving in Japan, embraces at a grasp the antiquity and the novelty of that extraordinary people and who winds up by a few weeks at Pekin— does in fact travel through ages and strata of humanity more numerous than the degrees of longitude which he crosses. He passes from the excess of modern luxury and modern appliances for travel to scenes of barbarous rudeness among the wild miners of California; he may happen, if he has bad luck, to be scalped by Red Indians at an outlying railway station; and in Japan he will occasionally be reminded that a very thin layer of civilisation and comity separates him from the twosworded samurai who would infallibly, but a few years ago, have run one of his deadly blades through an intruding stranger. Certainly in no other age of the world could a man pass through scenes so various in so short a space of time; and accustomed as we are to the marvellous celerity. of modern locomotion, the dates of this journey of the Baron's fill us with fresh surprise. He leaves Queenstown on May 14, 1871; in a fortnight he is at Chicago; he spends the beginning of June at the Salt Lake, and reaches San Francisco on the 10th; he explores the valley of Jesomiti and the great Pines of California, and embarks on July 1 to cross the Pacific Ocean. Twenty-four days are needed to land him at Yokohama, and he remains two months in Japan.

October is past at Shanghai, Pekin, and Canton, and on January 13, 1872, precisely eight months from the day of departure, he lands at Marseilles. All this is done without hurry or excessive fatigue, and with ample time to gather on the route a large store of observations and reflections.

One remark, though it may savour of national complacency, we will take upon ourselves to make. It adds very much to the value of both these works that they are not written by Englishmen, though they bear a willing and kindly testimony to the vast presence-we had almost said omnipresence-over the globe of the genius and enterprise of England. The Marquis de Beauvoir's account of the Australian colonies is the most lively picture we possess of that last-born offset of Great Britain, which has sprung up into a nation within the lifetime of man; and Baron Hübner followed the broad tracks of the Anglo-Saxon family and language across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, and to the very heart of the oldest communities of the world. Both these intelligent gentlemen are independent witnesses; both attest that the prodigious influence of this country over the destinies of a great part of the human race is never so perceptible as when perceptible as when you have crossed the seas to the furthest limits of the globe. Here in Europe we have ceased to put forth any great pretensions, and the stranger who visits this dusky island may perhaps be disappointed by the absence of grandeur, magnificence, and the conspicuous signs of power. But survey the race which has founded in America the most colossal group of States known in history; watch the growth of the same people in the Southern hemisphere; measure the effects of British commerce, capital, and mechanical inventions upon the once impenetrable arcana of China and Japan; observe ere you return to the West the Indian Empire held in fee by less than 100,000 Englishmen ; and it must be acknowledged that the language, the laws, and the genius of a race of men sprung from this island are rapidly tending to encompass and command the earth. The fact is recorded in almost every page of these volumes, with the utmost good will, by these French and Austrian travellers. They found that the English take with them at least one of their virtuesthat of hospitality-wherever they go; and, in fact, the voyage they accomplished with so much ease would have been impossible if England and her American descendants had not laid down the rails and organised the lines of steam communication.

We do not propose to loiter any more than Baron Hübner did, in the United States. That is trodden ground. His first impression, indeed, was that everything on the Western Con