Tue Spectator notes the eagerness with which the people leaped at the suggestion of fires on the hill tops on Jubilee and it asks, could notice be sent, say of asian, from Hurst Castle to John O'Groats, by answering beacons, within one summer's night. 'There is along article on the Bonfires, with quotations from Macaulay's Ballad' of the Armada, and notwithstanding that there has been so much said about the Jubilee we think the following description of the lighting up of England will be interesting If can never be too much regretted that Macaulay did not complete his poem. He had just reached the Lakes, and his description of how the fires shone out on Red Screes, the Langdale Pikes, Helvellyn, Scawfell, and Black Combe and High Street, would have taught us how to understand clearly the accounts from Cumberland and Westmoreland, which without it area little difficult to dis entangle. How vividly would Macaulay have realised for us the extraordinary romance of the beacon lighted on High Street, the hill along whose back goes the paved way of the Romans? Certainly the rhetorician who knew so well how to interweave the lore and the association of place and of history, would have had his opportunity there. "Probably the scene at the Lakes was the most. striking;
and Westmoreland stand so near together in Bugland. The mountains of Cumberland that it is possible to see almost the whole of them at once. It seems that by 11 o'clock, from the Old Man no less than 106 fires could be soon blazing at once. "At the night grew darker, the glare of the fires was more intense," and from all sides ' magnificent fire-arks were everywhere being discharged." The spectacle, indeed, must have been one of extraordinary splendour though, unfortunately, not one that is likely to be repeated for many years. It was once the good fortune Cortina; in the Dolomites, illuminated by a of the present writer to see the Valley of ring of bonfires on the hills immediately surrounding the valley. Magnificent as was the sight, it cannot have been anything to what was to be seen from the Old Man. At Cortina, the bonfires could only be built upon the lower hills, for the ridge of mountains that form the ultimate gate of the valley are limestone pyramids of ten and eleven thousand feet high, capped with eternal snow, and thus the tires did not flare against the sky-line, but were overpowered by the imminent masses of the hills that towered above them. At the Lakes, the beacons were on the highest summits of the whole range, and so stood out in the vault of the summer night, with nothing above them. Perhaps next in Splendour of effect to the spectacle seen from the Old Man was either that seen from Malvern or from Newbury. The scene from the Bea-on fil at Newbury was of the most. impres-character. The hill, an ancient British stronghold,, commands 60 wide a view that no less than seventy fires were visible. To quote the words of the Times' correspondent,—On every side the horizon was alive with the flames of the bonfires and the constant rise of signal rockets." It would be impossi-Dle to find space to tell of all the picturesque effects produced by the beacons; of how Exmoor and Dartmoor and the hills of Cornwall Scotland joined inthe celebration. flayed their part, and of how Ireland and
When the next Jubilee comes, the Specta-{or opines that me may 200 a change, and behold the coast lighted on every headland by colossal electric flames, maintained by a power developed by the utilization of the tides. A very suggestive article is the one on the Religions Retrospect of the Queen's Reign which commences Nothing is stranger than to look back to the state of opinion and belief which prevailed in England at the time of the Queen's coronation. "That was a time when in the Church the strife was at its height between the school of hard, logical, latitudinarian theology, with Whately at its head, and high, primitive, traditional theology, with Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman at its head; when Arnold was still at the summit of his influence as a teacher and historian; when Hampden lad just been censured by the University of Oxford for Hampton lectures which would now hardly he deemed heterodox; when in Scotland "the Presbyterian Church had not yet reached the isi rupture; and when Carlyle had not yet conceived those lectures on hero-worship which did so much to colour the religion and theology of the age. Now we look back upon a per Rod when agnosticisin,—a word not then so much as coined,—even though preached in the pulpit of the' Estabished Church, and in the heart of the University which still insists more on its theology than any other in Great Britain, is severely let alone; when a Canon who had been examining chaplain to an Archbishop expounds a theology to which Positivists might almost give in their adhesion; when one of the greatest of our poets defines God as 'a stream, Of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousne: and when the ecclesiastical Gignitary whose death has excited more universal mourning than perhaps that of any English Churchman of the Queen's reign, has been lamented even more for his large-hearted sympathy with sceptics than for that "pictur rescue sensibility" which enabled him to make the history of the Jewish and Christian Churches so profoundly interesting, and the geography of Palestine so vivid to the readers of the Bible. Has the change been, on the whole, for evil or for good?
This paper has a fashion of taking up points in public matters and questions that: are umoticed by its contemporaries, and if its treatment of these is not always satisfying, there is generally something new in it. Discussing the People and the Jubilee," it says that nothing has more forcibly struck the writer than the great change in the disposition of the people towards great public functions. They like them more than ever, but they reverence them a great deal less. Probably, we should say, the increased liking is owing to the increased strain which the business of life puts upon peuple generally, making them glad to join in anything which will give a decent excuse for a holiday or outing.
The Saturday has an article on "Girton and Newnham," apropos of the "extraordinary success of Miss Ramsay in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge; the more natural, but still remarkable, fact of Miss Harvey in the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos; and the less brilliant, if even more solid, achievement of two ladies from Newnham "-'one was distinguished in philosophy and the other in history. From what the Saturday says of Miss Ramsay we are almost entitled to conclude that she has an hereditary venins for classical languages Miss Ramsay did not learn Greek before she was sixteen, though she comes of a classical race. Her father took a double first at Oxford. Her uncle is Professor of Latin at Glasgow. Her great-uncle, the famous commentator on Plautus, had a genius for scholarship. The magnitude of Miss Ramsay's performance has been exaggerated by some good-natured panegyrists, who were pardonably misled by the obscure complexity of the new system of examinations at Cambridge. She cannot be put on the same level, as the Times sought to put her, with the Senior Classics of old days. Strictly speaking, there is no longer any such thing asa Senior Classic-at all." The Classical Tripos is divided into two parts, each part is divided into three classes, and each class in the first part consists of two or more divisions. But the names in each class, or division of a class, are arranged in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.