MACMILLANS AND THE ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9022, 7 April 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

MACMILLANS AND THE ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES.

The first article in Macmillan's ia entitled "Early Days of Darwinism," by Professor Newton. The Professor explains how he was engaged in investigating, in Iceland, some problems in ornithology, when the papers of Darwin and Wallace appeared. Here is a description of how the issue affected Professor Newton :—

I think I had been away from home the day this publication arrived, and I found it when I came back in the evening. At all events I know that I sat up late that night to read it; and never shall I forget the impression it made upon me. Herein was contained a perfectly simple solution of all the difficulties which had been troubling me for months past. I hardly know whether I at first felt more vexed at the solution not having occurred to me, than pleased that it had been found at all. However, after reading these papers more than once, I went to bed satisfied that a solution had been found. All personal feeling apart, it came to me like the direct revelation of a higher power; and I awoke next morning with the consciousness that there was an end of all the mystery in the simple phrase, "Natural Selection." I am free to confess that in my jov I did not then perceive, and I cannot say when I did begin to perceive, that though my especial puzzles were thus explained, dozens, scores, nay hundreds of other difficulties lay in the path, which would require an amount of knowledge, to be derived from experiment, observation, and close reasoning, of which I could form no notion, before this key to the " mystery of mysteries " could be said to be perfected; but I was convinced a vera causa had been found, and that by its aid one of the greatest secrets of creation was going to be unlocked.

" Mr. Kinglako'e Invasion of the Crimea" is a review of the seventh and eighth volumes, which conclude this laborious work. Wβ doubt whether Kinglake's history will live. The Crimean war was loss a tribute to the martial power of England than a revelation of how marvellously we can mismanage a war, how we sacrificed thousands of lives from mere etupidity. It showed us also how difficult it is to carry on a war while hampered with embarrassing alliances, which cripple even every operation in the field. However, Mr. Kinglake has done the work which he undertook with elaborate care. The book will always be a record of important events, but it is not probable that posterity will care much to read about Lord Raglan, and Canrobert, and Pelissier.

Mr. Henry James publishes the firab part of a story called " The Reverberator," but so far it is rather stupid and meaningless. "Virgil in English Verse" is by Mr. J. W. Mackail, and is founded on Sir Charles Bowen's recent translation. We quote the conclusion of the article on Virgil as a poet:— But Virgil is the perfect artist, dealing considerately with » difficult matter, melting a reluctant language in the sevenfold furnace of an intenee imagination, forging and tempering, retempering and reforging, till the last trace of imperfection disappears. The iinished work carries the result of all the labour, but it is transformed into beauty. In Milton alone is there another instance of such superb continuity of workmanship, such ardour of genius fusing immense masses of intractable material and sustaining itself, by sheer force of style, at a height which is above danger, secure in its own strength. But the tenderness and sweetness of Virgil, come, colui che piangc e dice, is all his own. And to us it has come charged with the added sweetness of a thousand memories : the wreck of the ancient world, the slow reconstruction of the Middle Ages, the vast movement of later times. The fanatical selfreproaches of Saint Augustine hardly conceal the stirring of heart with which he looks back to the clinging enchantment of the iEneid ; and we may fancy that as he lay dying in Hippo, the clamour of the siege and the cries of uenseric and his Vanuals mingled in his mind with the old unforgotten romance of his boyhood, the siege and sack of Troy, tquus liflieus ptenm armatis, tt Trojce incendium, atque ipniwi umbra Creueot. The earliest dawn of new light upon England found Bede, in his northern monastery, making timid attempts to copy the music of the Kcloguoa. Throughout the Middle Ages Virgil was a beneficent wizard, a romancewriter and a sorcerer, his name recurring strangely among all the greatest names of history or fable. To the scholarship of the Renaissance he became a poet again, out still Prince of Poets, still with something of divine attributes. For us. who inherit from all these ages, he is the gathered sum of what to all these ages he has been. But it is a? a voice of Nature that he now appeals to us most; as a voice of one who in nis strength and sweetness is not too steadfastly felicitous to have sympathy with human weakness and pain. Through the imperial roll of his rhythm there rises a note of all but intolerable pathos; and in the most golden flow of his verse he still brings us near him by a faint accent of trouble. This is why he beyond all other poets is the Comforter; and in tire darkest times, when the tifrmoil within or around us, confusai sonv* urbie et iUmtabile murmur, seems too great to sustain, we may still hear him saying, as Dante heard him in the solemn splendour of dawn on the Mountain of Purgatory : " My son, here may be agony, but not death; remember, remember !"

" A Night in the Jungle " is a tiger hunting story, in which the tiger succeeds in getting away. " Robespierre's Love'' tells now "the sea-green incorruptible" was loved by the daughter of the man with whom that strange compound of humanity lodged, and gives two letters (imaginary) in which the hapless girl sets forth what attracted her to one who by many was accounted a monster in human form. The English Illustrated Magazine (Macmillan and Co.) puts forth its strength in its engravings, the articles being for the most part such as require illustrations to give them full effect. In "The Weasel and his Family " we have a discourse upon that tribe which we are importing into New Zealand to deal with the rabbits, and Of whose power and action in the future we have only a dim idea. Mr. Harrison Weir, the well-known artist, writes on " Fowls," and gives spirited and accurate cuts of Dorkings, game fowls, Langshans, etc. "Coaching Days and Coaching Ways" continues its course, the Portsmouth Road being the one now dealt with. The remainder of the contents are of the usual character.