doubt. It was natural enough that the princess should share the Russophobia of 1877, and we find no fault with her judg. ment or sagacity for being swept away by away with her. But it was hardly so nat ural that an English princess, who knew what mischief the persecution of the Roman Catholics had done in England, and how fruitless of good, and how fruitful of vain passion, had been the outburst of panic against the Roman hierarchy in 1850, should sympathize with the attack on Rome which Prince Bismarck initiated, and which all the German States were disposed to approve, in the years which followed the Vatican council and the Franco-Prussian war. Evidently the princess did sympathize with that attack, and thereby showed that she was the simple, amiable woman, yielding at once to the natural influences of the society in which she moved, which in all things alike she shows herself to be. For there is certainly no proof of independence of mind and large sagacity in falling a victim to one of the greatest blunders in policy ever committed by shrewd statesmen. Now, the princess Alice had had special facilities for avoiding that mistake. But her gentle, feminine nature was too yielding to make head against the strong current of feeling in which she found herself. And we are far, indeed, from reproaching her for being what she was. Only we would rather take credit for her for feeling acutely all those responsibilities to which German opinion was disposed to attach the highest importance, than for her ability to criticise and resist the prev alent opinion of the time and place in which her lot was cast, whenever it happened to go astray. princess Alice to the queen, which the queen must have communicated herself, —it will, we think, completely answer her purpose. For we find in it the memoir of a woman by no means strong in constituit when many a strong man was swept tion, whose heart overflowed with the simplest and warmest domestic feelings, but whose sense of anxious responsibility for the duties of her position as the wife first of the heir to the grand duke, and during the last year and a half, of the grand duke himself, spurred her on to work to which she was physically unequal, and which appears to have done much towards wearing out a naturally feeble constitution. The princess says, in 1869, that she always looks back to her childhood and girlhood as "the happiest time of her life." "The responsibilities," she adds, “and the want of many a thing in married life can never give unalloyed happiness." And no doubt it was the responsibilities mainly which weighed on the princess; for to every responsibility she was most sensitive, the succession to the sovereignty at the end of her life having evidently cost her a vast deal more than it gave. She had not been grand duchess many months when she finds her appetite and sleep failing under the pres sure. "Too much is demanded of me; and I have to do with so many things." The feeling of weariness and incapacity rapidly increases on her, and when the fatal outbreak of diphtheria came, carried off one of her children, and after she had nursed her husband and all the others through the dreadful disease, seized upon herself, her stamina was gone, and she had no vital force left to resist the attack. No one who reads this life and these letters can doubt that the princess was heavily weighted by her official responsibilities, and that she felt them precisely as the most conscientious and hard-working woman among the queen's subjects would have felt hers. If the queen wishes to make us realize how laborious and responsible are the duties of sovereigns, and how keenly, when they are conscientious at all, they feel those responsibilities, she has been quite right to sanction the publication both of the prince consort's memoir and of that of his daughter, the grand duchess of Hesse. The princess Christian, in her pleasant and very modest preface, claims for the grand duchess of Hesse political opinions on the state of Europe "remarkable for breadth and sagacity of view." But no attempt is made to illustrate this political sagacity, of the existence of which, indeed, we should be disposed to feel some What we have said is not at all incon. sistent with recognizing a great courage, as well as a great gentleness and tenderness, in the princess Alice. During both the wars which disturbed her short career, it would have been impossible for any woman in her position, who suffered so keenly from the anxieties of the situation, to show greater intrepidity in meeting them than the princess displayed. During 1866 especially, when her country was engaged on the losing side, her letters, though they are full of a woman's terrors, are full also of a woman's resolve not to fail in her duty. She works as hard at the hospitals as though she were not fearing every day to lose her young husband in the war; and the leading part she took in the organization of a nursing system for the German army, which proved in valuable in 1870, began from the war of ling. After Lenchen's [Princess Christian's] 1866, and was never remitted. boys were gone, and he had seen Eddy and It is clear that the princess had a very Georgy [sons of the Prince of Wales], his own impressionable intellect in relation to mat-loss came fresh upon him, and he cried for his little brother! It is the remaining behind the loss, the missing of the dear ones, that is the cruel thing to bear. Only time can teach one that, and resignation to a Higher Will. ters of the higher speculative thought, and to matters of faith. The impression made on her by Strauss, temporary as it was, was for the time deep; and it seems On the whole, this memoir is sure to to have yielded finally only to the reli- excite to the full the kind of public intergious feeling which grief and maternal est and sympathy which the princess yearning excited in her after the death of Christian in her preface evidently expects her little son. In the mean time, she was for it. It will not, we think, bear out the not afraid to let the world know how deep inference that the grand duchess of an impression Strauss had made, -prob- Hesse had any great political originality ably feeling that it would be cowardly to though other letters not given might, shrink from bearing the public imputation of opinions to which privately she had lent her sanction. Christianity in its more rationalistic types has no standingground which it can hold against pure rationalism. But the whole of the princess's dealings with Strauss, though they show how difficult she found it to defend a tender and pious kind of rationalism against the thoroughgoing rationalism of a strong man, are morally most honorable to her, and prove that she was determined not to get public credit for believing what at the moment she knew that she did not believe. The tenderness and thoughtfulness of the princess are best seen, perhaps, in the letters which follow the loss of her little boy by a fall from a window in 1873. It would be hard, for instance, to find a more simple and beautiful illustration of the maternal spirit than is given in the following letter to the queen, written a year and a half later: — I always think, that in the end children educate the parents. For their sakes there is so much one must do : one must forget oneself, if everything is as it ought to be. It is doubly so if one has the misfortune to lose a precious child. Rückert's lovely lines are so true (after the loss of two of his children): — Nun hat euch Gott verlieh'n, was wir auch wollten thun, Now unto you the Lord has done what we had wished to do; We would have train'd you up, and now 'tis we are train'd by you. train, With grief and tears, O children, do you your parents And lure us on and up to you, to meet in heaven again. perhaps, establish this - but it will bear out the conclusion that the princess was as tender, as courageous, as simple, and as refined, as true a wife, and as true a mother, as it was possible for a woman to be, and that as a member of the royal caste she was as genuine a working bee as even the most industrious of women, though born to earn her own livelihood, could have proved herself. From The Spectator. THE ORIGINAL AMERICANS. PROFESSOR REVILLE, who delivered the Hibbert Lectures this year, has an exceptional power of condensing, and, so to speak, clarifying masses of information; and his discourses, considered as sketches of the ancient American civilizations, were exceedingly instructive. There are pas sages in them, especially the references to the hieratic systems and ancient creeds absorbed and superseded by the priesthoods of Mexico and Peru, whom the Spaniards found in possession of power, which, if not novel to experts in the subject, are new to more general students, and of this we would gladly hear much more. But the main intellectual interest of his argument, which was a little choked and concealed by his wealth of illustration, rests upon the immense assumption contained in his first lecture, which, he will perhaps pardon us for saying, requires a great deal of proof before it is finally accepted. M. Reville says, very truly, that as nothing would interest students of physics like intimate acquaintance with another planet, with its obviously original physical conditions, so nothing should more interest the student of the laws of mind. If he found among sentient beings in Mars that ideas had sprung up akin to those which have arisen among men on earth-identical supersti sessed and, therefore, never lost the power tions, similar religions, cognate views of the supernatural - he would be forced to the conclusion that such ideas were not self-derived fancies, but were results, natural or even inevitable products, of certain given conditions. Creeds would be shown to be growths, not inventions,-growths so natural and inevitable that the ob server, knowing the conditions and the people, would almost be able to predict the leading characteristics of their faiths. If we were about to discuss that matter, we should not accept that statement as fully true; for it leaves out of sight the possibility that in both planets a few ideas may have been revealed and not have grown, and may have, by their overmas tering force, produced a similarity which otherwise would not exist. If in Terra and Mars both, the idea of forgiving your enemies has been revealed and has mas-is scarcely possible to look at the ruins tered the more natural notion of vengeance, there will be in Mars as well as Terra an identity of religious conception as to duty in that matter, and consequently of observances intended to teach that duty, which otherwise could not exist. The idea is, however, sufficiently true and complete to serve as a basis for argument; and M. Reville proceeds to say that in America we have this separate planet, and that therefore the self-derived American creeds, the ancient creeds of the continent, can teach us even more of the laws in obedience to which creeds grow, than the better-known faiths of Europe and Asia. They are not borrowed results, but results which have come independently of any teaching from outside, and which must therefore be in some sense inevitable results. The human mind grows them wherever it is, and does not purchase, or steal, or borrow them. Granting the assumption that America is so separate as to be, for purposes of intellectual investigation, in the position of a new planet, that is a most interesting argument, and would justify severe and protracted investigation into the ancient American mind. But then, is that assumption true? Have we enough evidence to justify us in using so startling a theory, even provisionally, as a basis upon which we are to expend time and labor in pursuing an inquiry which after all may lead us nowhere? It is possible, of course, in the absence of knowledge, that the native Americans are autochthones, that is, that wherever they came from, they were at one time in America so savage, so idealess, so nearly animals, that all their subsequent gains must be held to have been self-derived. It is also possible that they never pos scattered over Yucatan without believing them to be of Asiatic workmanship, or, at all events, influenced by recollections of Asiatic workmanship, even if the celebrated "elephant's trunk," which some observers see carved on a ruin in Uxmal should be an accident, or an idea derived from the discovery by Indians of a buried mastodon, or possibly from tradition of the mastodon, as the latest traveller, Mr. F. A. Ober, who is disposed to assign extreme antiquity to these remains, recently suggested. Above all, there is the certainty that the civilized Indians, aware in some unaccountable way of their own escape from savagery, which so many nations have forgotten, with one consent ascribe their civilization to more or less miraculous strangers, who visited them, taught them, gave them order and ideas, and then went up to heaven. That tradi tion, which is universal, and so undisputed that it facilitated Spanish conquests, is surely a very strange one to spring up among unvisited autochthones, - who, moreover, we know as absolute matter of fact, were visited from the external world. It is as certain that vikings from Iceland reached the shores of America, as that they reached the shores of Scotland; or, to take a better illustration, as certain as that Brahmins once conquered, taught, and built in the island of Java. M. Reville will not question that Hindoos sailed to, conquered, and civilized Java, or that Hindoos now believe that feat impossible, or that all knowledge of navigation, foreign geography, and shipbuilding has perished among Hindoos. When we landed in India, they could as easily have conquered the moon as Java, and would have said so, nothing doubting; yet they did conquer Java, and built there temples so vast that even earthquakes, as we saw the other day, only half destroy them. Why should not an incident like that, the marvellous strangeness of which so impresses all students of Javanese antiquities, have happened twice in the history of the world? Is it not a little over-courageous, in the face of such facts, to assume an indigenous American civilization as so fully proved, that it is of itself a grand contribution to the study of the natural religious development of the unaided human mind? That such development is a matter of the highest intellectual interest, we not only concede, but maintain; but it is not made clearer by assuming as data facts so uncertain as the separateness of early American civilization. bodia, dead, but undestroyed. Because it is the Americans' work? If it is, the Americans perform it very badly. They have settled nothing yet - not even the ages of the ruins they have examined, and are disputing at this moment, whether Mitla, with its monolithic halls, the photographs of which look as old as Stonehenge, is really three thousand years old, or only about three hundred. They do not use the right men as explorers, either. Braver, more patient, or more devoted men do not exist; but they one and all suffer from the American intellectual complaint, the absorption of the brain in America, and the consequent want of the power of comparison. The study needs to be commenced by men saturated with the old culture, and the old experience younger Fergussons, in fact — to whom a sight of Mitla and Uxmal will not be merely an experience, but an experience recalling facts long known. The next man who sees the great temple at Mitla, which almost dazes the spectator with its inexplicable vastness and solidity, there is a lintel in one chamber, which is a solid block of porphyry, nineteen feet long, which no native power now existing in America could raise to its place, and which no European architect would touch without hydraulic machinery, — ought to have seen both Egypt and India, and to have learned how other early peoples moved other blocks of stone. He ought, too, to know, what we believe no American ex And this brings us to the smaller and more concrete object of this paper. Why do Europeans, and especially we English, who spend so much time in ransacking the history of the past, do so little towards the investigation of the early history of America? That work has hardly begun; it is, as M. Reville has pointed out, of extreme interest, not only to the historian and antiquarian, but to the thinker; and yet we do nothing to advance it. We explore Palestine foot by foot, chiefly to discover perfectly useless evidence that the historical portions of the Bible are substantially true, as if anybody would have invented the cave of Machpelah; we are deeply and wisely interested in M. Mareotti's researches in Egypt; we explorer has ever known, all that the splen plore, after some kind of fashion, the did Spanish collections can teach, and all antiquities of India, forgetting in every the few and scattered accounts the early new decade what we learned in the previ- Conquistadores have left. And, above all, ous one; and we have measured the clam- he ought to live among the Indians, to mounds in Australia, to see how long fish- hear what their traditions are, and to exeating aborigines have lived on her coast. cite their confidence in a way never yet But we do nothing in America. Why? attempted. We have a great respect for Because the Spaniards have done so the last visitor to Mitla, Mr. Ober; but much? They have done much more than he, finding a mighty monolith in the temis popularly believed in the way of collec-ple, which, as Indians believe, gives death tion, but they have done little compared to all who embrace it, records with pleaswith what remains to be done. They are not by nature good explorers, being persuaded that the early observers told the truth, which they probably did not; and they have a special difficulty in explora tion — the profound distrust with which Indians regard them and their race. It is not they who will discover the Indian city with its still unbroken native civilization of which so many legends tell, and which may yet be found, not indeed alive, - that seems impossible, though the exploration of many Spanish-American states has been most imperfect; but, like Gour, or Mitla, or the old capital of Cam ure that "each of our party took particu lar pains to embrace that pillar most affectionately," to the horror of the Indians. That is not the spirit of true explorers.. Why should not some English society or English millionaire do for Yucatan what has been done for Palestine, and if the secret cannot be torn from the ruins, at least collect the material on which alone investigation can be based? It would be worthy work to waste wealth on, even if we discovered that the American mind had received impacts from outside, which would be so fatal to M. Reville's charmingly interesting theory. 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