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which differ but little from that of our times, were also assigned. other provisions were also made in these statutes of 1431 which would be tedious to state in all their extension in these short letters.

D. João I. died on the 14th August, 1433, and he was succeeded on the throne by his son D. Duarte. a most enlightened prince like all his brothers, and moreover gifted with the necessary qualities for governing, but unhappily he was favoured neither by time nor fortune. His reign was short, for he died in 1438, and was succeeded by his brother the Infante D. Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, as regent during the minority of D. Affonso V.

Our University continued under the protectorate of the Infante D. Henrique, and notwithstanding the agitated state of the country, and the civil war raging during this epoch, all things appertaining to the University were progressing, and the independence of the school maintained. The intervention of Government in the University was reduced within small limits. The monarchs simply preserved to the institution their ancient privileges, or conceded new ones, favouring the increase of its rents, and nominating the conservators, who at first had only the charge given them of watching that these privileges should be preserved, and of informing the King of all occurrences which influenced the good government of the University, but later on became its private and secular judges. The whole internal government of the University, the formation of statutes, the nomination of professors, the election of rectors or other functionaries, all belonged to the scholastic body.

At this epoch appears, for the first time, the foundation of a college for the maintenance of ten poor scholars who were to follow the university course. This was an institution of private benevolence, due to the philanthropy of Dr. Diogo Affonso Manga-ancha, who in his will left the regulations to be followed for its administration. The college, however, lasted but a short time; indeed, in Portugal, never did the colleges annexed to the University attain any importance, nor did they become consolidated as they did in other universities, particularly in English ones. In Coimbra they did exist later on, as we shall see when I come to speak of the second period, and they even formed part of the organism of the University.

It was also during the protectorate of the Infante D. Henrique, that the religious of Saint Francis obtained a Bull from Pope Nicholas V., granting them the privilege of having their studies incorporated with the University, and that the masters, students, and readers of their monastery in Lisbon should be admitted to degrees.

CURRENT LITERATURE.

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In these two volumes Mr. Julian Hawthorne has been pleased to lead his readers into strange pastures. In "The Laughing Mill" he avowedly takes them for an excursion mystery-ward." And all the four stories which make up the volume contain something very mysterious indeed, and in the case of two of them something not very agreeable. In fact, Mr. Hawthorne has taken a dip into the horrible, and then looks back-laughing, as it were in his preface,-to see if his readers follow him. Whether

they do or no he seems scarcely to care, having hit upon a somewhat new idea of the duty of a writer in this respect, which he thus explains

to us:

"What is called the human interest in fiction is doubtless more absorbing than any other, but other legitimate sources of interest exist. The marvellous always possesses a fascination, and justly; for, while it is neither human nature nor fact, it ministers to an æsthetic appetite of the mind, which neither fact nor human nature can gratify. Superstition has been well abused; but that were a sad day which should behold the destruction in us of the quality which keeps superstition alive.

Such works as The Tempest,' 'Faust,' and 'Consuelo,' show their authors at their best,

because, being obliged by the subject to soar above the level of vulgar possibility, the writers catch a gleam of transcendent sunlight on their wings. And he who would mirror in his works the whole of man, must needs include the impossible along with the rest. Whoever has lived thoughtfully feels that there has been something in his experience beyond what appears in 'Tom Jones,' 'Adam Bede,' and 'Vanity Fair.' They are earth without sky. . . . A reader with a healthy sense of justice feels that an occasional excursion mysteryward is no more than he has a right to demand. And such excursions are wholesome for literature, no less than for him. For the storyteller, sensible of the risk he runs of making his supernatural element appear crude and ridiculous, exerts himself to the utmost, and his style and method purify and wax artistic under the strain."

Thus excused, Mr. Hawthorne offers a strange collection of mysteries, which, though unearthly, are yet not supernatural. They are imaginative, and as Mr. Hawthorne is gifted with imagination beyond most writers of the day, they are, of course, interesting. "The Laughing Mill," itself is perhaps the one of the stories most fully bearing out the promise of the preface. Mr. Hawthorne has seized upon that feeling which many of us must have experienced at one time or another, a feeling that inanimate or natural subjects seem

sometimes to become possessed of a certain amount of spirit, when they have been intimately associated with any intense human state; and out of this he has evolved a strange fantastic story. The description of the old water wheel, which is the centre of the picture, has an element of the weirdly supernatural, which is very fine and vivid. Mrs. Radcliffe was a mistress of the art of thrilling the reader by her weird unearthly descriptions; and that, too, though she never indulged, except by quotation, in the actually supernatural; but as Leigh Hunt remarks, she understood to perfection the use of old castles, haunted houses, mysterious music, &c., &c.

She used recognised stage scenery. "Ludovico, meanwhile, in his remote chamber, heard now and then the faint echo of a closing door as the family retired to rest; and then the hall clock, at a great distance, struck twelve. 'It is midnight,' said he, and he looked suspiciously round the spacious chamber." We know now that we are going to be frightened; the stage is ready for the ghost. Mr. Hawthorne coolly dispenses with all these accessories of fear, and takes his reader for a walk by the seashore beneath a blue sky. Yet he succeeds in imparting the unearthly character to the beautiful gorge, "full of sunlight and verdure," in the midst of which hangs the old water-wheel, and this by a few simple but masterly touches.

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weather that one might have fancied it charred by fire. The rain and snow of unrecorded seasons had spread the rust in streaks and blotches over the swarthy rottenness of the woodwork until I could almost have believed it dabbled with unsightly stains of blood. . . . Solitary as I stood there, I yet could not rid myself of the notion that I was not (in the ordinary sense of the word) alone. That wheel-there was something about it more than belongs to mere negative brute matter. It seemed not devoid of a low and evil form of consciousness, almost of personality."

Georges Sand gives a horror of this kind to a certain wooded hill : but, like Mrs. Radcliffe, she explains everything: there are under ground chambers here, and lights are seen sometimes, and beings appear suddenly. Mr. Hawthorne goes far deeper in allowing that this horror of a certain spot may exist without any explicable reason. Calbot's Rival," which comes next in the book, is a clever ghost story, but without this deeper element of suggestiveness which make one dwell upon "The Laughing Mill."

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66 Mrs. Gainsborough's monds" is even more clever still: though it is not a ghost story at all, but only a very ingeniously constructed and cunningly worked out deception, recalling some of the eldrich mockeries of T. B. Aldrich. There is one feature in the story which is perplexing: why, when Tom Gainsborough had been so atrociously taken in and swindled by one brunette with weird eyes beneath black eyebrows, should he marry another lady of the same type? Mr. Hawthorne does not stay to inform us of the reason for this extraordinary likeness between Tom's two sweethearts, whose dispositions are so different. One is

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Archibald Malmaison also takes us "mystery ward." Mr. Hawthorne evidently thinks that literature is getting too commonplace, and that we need a little improbability to freshen the atmosphere.

Archibald Malmaison" is a story of psychological experiences of a very extraordinary kind, helped out by something more of the Mrs. Radcliffe order a dark room entered by a secret door. Yet it is a clever, original, curious book. It is an ingenious idea to put the secret of the house in the hands of this unaccountable Malmaison, and the narrative is worked out like a problem. There is only one place in which the working out appears imperfect; Archibald is subject to phases of what would be called idiotcy, but which are evidently periods in which a different and inferior spirit dwells in his body, instead of his own intelligent soul. He relapses into this stupid state, which comes at seven years intervals, when in possession of the silver rod which admits him to the secret chamber. This rod has to be hidden away, therefore the boy visits the secret chamber when in a somnambulistic state, and then restores the rod to its hiding-place. Thus the secret remains in his own hands, both when in possession of his mind and during his relapses. But when later on, he runs away with his old sweetheart and hides

her in this dark room, and then suddenly relapses into the state in which he is practically idiotic, why does he not then visit the chamber in a state of somnambulism? Something would have happened then-Kate, driven to despair, would have escaped, or have

aroused him would not have died unheard. But, though the puzzle just here does not seem exactly to fit, it is a very clever one. The author's inventions have at least the merit of being new. But, well written and ingenious as they are, Mr. Hawthorne's admirers may regret that he should give the rein to ingenuity while his powers of really sugges tive writing (apart from abnormalities and puzzles) are almost put out of court, and his capacity for observation and description of natural scenery are also very much laid aside. "The Laughing Mill" has something of both these rare and exquisite qualities; but otherwise these volumes are mostly devoid of them. Mr. Hawthorne's descriptions are especially charming, because he has that rare eyesight which sees not only the surface of things, but also a little below them. But though he has limited himself to strange situations in these two last books they are very pleasant reading, simply because, take what subject he will, Mr. Hawthorne always throws around it that most ensnaring glamour of a charming literary style, while he always exhibits, even in his lightest writing, the colour of a thoughtful and brilliant mind.

The Comédie Humaine and its Author, with Translations from the French of Balzac. By H. H. Walker. London: Chatto and Windus. 1879.

The Drama of Life! A fit title for the subject of Balzac's almost hundred volumes, taken as a whole;

giving, by the name, a completeness to them as fragments, and a purpose. It is, at all events, his own name for his own work, and his conception of it. The great general scope this conveys is perfectly consistent with the widely distinctive character of the novels themselves, and the widely varied scenes of which each novel is composed. Mr. Walker has given three of the tales in English, and he has introduced his translation by a rapid sketch of the principal of Balzac's writings, so that the English reader may form something like a just notion of what they really are, and of their merits; also of their defects, and in what they are wanting. Many are, in truth, philosophical studies. "La Recherche de l'Absolu, " e.g., is profound in its metaphysical research; "Le Peau de Chagrin" is a fantastic essay of imagination and speculation of philosophy and science. The whole are more or less studies of manners. The " Physiologie du Mariage," the " Petites Misères de la vie Conjugale," treat their subject, as Mr. Walker justly says, from "a decidedly un-English point of view which it would be useless to dwell upon" (p. 73), but which, let us add, has been sometimes confounded with a point of view more objectionable than the being unEnglish; with that, however, it is in reality less fairly chargeable.

The "Correspondence of Balzac" has lately not only aroused interest in him and in his writings, but must have corrected for many a false and unjust estimate of both; it ought, at least, to have had that effect. As a man, it shows him endowed with excellent qualities and dispositions; as a writer, it shows that he has been much misunderstood, both in the tendencies of his novels, and as to his own aim in writing them. It is, we think, the one thing wanting in

Mr. Walker's excellent introduction that he has made no use whatever of that Correspondence, nor once referred to it. We can only conjecture he wrote before it was known. For a second edition, it is yet possible that Balzac's letters to his sister may explain something in this volume left in doubt, and add something to it. However this may be, English readers will be very glad of the aperçu Mr. Walker gives of the author and his works; the life of Balzac he was not writing. The whole eighty pages of the Introduction are well filled with an appreciative study of the series of the Novels and Tales, and an almost analytical examination of them, and of their purpose, with discriminating criticism upon both. We think, if it should be the means of introducing Balzac to English readers, they will see that his ideal of life was tinctured with true philosophy, and we say it advisedly that the moral to be drawn from them, and which he himself one way or another leaves as the moral, is that the most precious of all possessions are friendship, love, and home. Of course, this judginent of them is without adopting the form in which these lessons are sometimes conveyed, and without forgetting that the meridian of France and England are not the same, and the conventional standard of the fit and the becoming is different; our own, of course, patriotically speaking, being very prefer

able.

The specimen tales Mr. Walker has chosen are three in number, "The Purse," "Albert Savarus," and "Gaudissart II.," all excellent as translations, and examples of Balzac's varying manner; we rather wonder, indeed, the Introduction says nothing of the charming style, which gives a worth to what as incidents are very nothings. These three have been chosen, we are told

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