Whey this century was younger than it is, Longfellow counselled us, through the mouth of one of the characters in Evangeline, "'therefore trust in thy heart and in the world calls illusions." There is much to attract in the childlike simplicity which could put this advice into practice, but the older the century grows, the more difficult does compliance become. The tree of Simple Faith was wont to strike its roots in the nursery, wax mightily in our school days and flourish, splendid of leaf and flower, far on into manhood. It was once no doubt possible to be a centenarian with still a decent show of leafage on one's tree. But no its leaves have turned decide breeze of incredulity, which used only to flutter, has become a sirocco which scorches when it does not. strip. Our boys will live in a Vallombrosa, where searce a green leaf remains dancing by the time they go to college.
Tt is hard that the gods and herves should have to fly in the wake of Comus and his merry, if disreputable, rout, but it was scarcely to be expected dliey could live forever, It's harder to be taught that Tell of the Crossbow had no existence and that his sou never stood with an apple on his head in the market-place at Altorf; that Nero was an amiable musical amateur Crookback Richard, a loving uncle of straight and. comely person; and Henry the Eighth, a lady-killer, but only in the gentler sense of the word. The very success achieved by Horace Walpole and his fellow historic-doubters is of evil augury, for where will their machinations end? If it is shown, out of the Iron Duke's own lips, that he never adjured the Guards to be "up and at em"; if it can be satisfactorily proved that instead of "La garde meurt tered only one word, of which the most outspoken of French historians cannot venture to set down more than the initial letter, what faith shall we continue to place in that inspiriting legacy, Nelson's signal at Trafalgar? And can we be quite certain that future centuries will not whitewash Jack the Ripper! and demonstrate beyond cavil that Mr. Gladstone was a solar myth of Scandiavian origin? Playful Dons have} amused themselves with such tours de force as proving the non-existence of Napoleon the Great, or the identity of Max Miller with Thor the Thunderer and therefore with the sun; but this is playing with edged tools, and the Q. E. D. they write with so much complacent si at the tail-end of their ce disquisitions, is ominous and disquieting and provocative of further outrages in the same and other directions.
For History is not the only field of these iconoclasts. Indeed it is difficult to say what region they do not invade the very foundations of our domestic circles are not sacred to these crusading sappers. They attack even the food and drink of our breakfast-tables and threaten us with the fate of Sancho Panza. Tea used to share with balmy sleep the credit of being tired nature's sweet restorer. Away with it! cry) the doctors, it is a slow poison; coffee impairs the brain-power; milk swarms with microbes; sugar—if we must sweeten our food, our only chance of surviving lies in saccharine. From time to time some scientific benefactor of mankind aumounces to suffering hu-inanity the discovery of a new drug which is to work wonders as an anodyne or a specific. As surely as Nemesis follows crime, a second scientist ari to disprove the conclusions of the first. Occasionally the wheel takes another turn and the original announcement is triumphantly justified, as has happened only the other day in the case chloroform, which for many years has been under the cloud of undeserved suspicion, But the hypodermic injection of morphia has yet to have its character cleared; cocaine lis under the baleful imputation of producing madness in the patient; and even antipyrine, that godsend to the neuralgic, is apt to develop unexpectedly fearsome properties, if the "faculty" is to be believed.
The see-saw of assertion and contradiction is bewildering; whichever way we turn, it starts up to meet us. The universe is only now recovering from convulsions at the suggestion that the plays of Shakespeare could be proved by internal evidence to be the work of Bacon; and, magnis componere area, the authorship of the utterances and writings of General Tcheng Ki Tong, so astonishingly clever considering the nationality of the author, has just been claimed by his French secretary. Whom are we to believe? Dis-bevelled Oscar or Whistler of the quaint paraph? Mrs. Hodgson Burnett or} her self-styled victim? Nor are the Arts exempt, It is not so very long since a celebrated gallery of paintings in Germany was fouud to contain not, as had been imagined, a peerless array of Old Masters, but a collection of distressingly well-executed forgeries. "Schubert's Addie" is a misnomer. The composer of " Der Erlkénig" had no hand in it. The " Dream of St. Jerome" was the work of a music-seller's hack and owes nothing to the genius of Beethoven. The very "I'welfth fas" of Mozart is apocryphal. So they disappear, all the old beliefs and illusions. Faith's dove can find no est for the sole of her foot; Faith's tree will soon have not a leaf remaining. And we owe no thanks to the undeceivers; it was pleasanter on the whole when our coffer was filled with the fairy gold of beliefs, than now when we have to gaze on the withered leaves of bygone illusions, THE TELEGRAPH CONVEN'TION, Tne Viceroy Li Hung-chang, having gone to Peking to attend the Emperor during his visit to the Eastern Man-solea, is moving heaven and earth during his stay at the capital to get the Chefoo Telegraph Convention ratified. The majority of the Foreign Ministers are doing their best to prevent the ratification, and those members of the 'I'sung-li Yanién who understand the question are also opposed to the Convention but many of the members of the yamen do not know anything themselves about the question, and are willing to take anything Li Hung-chang tells them for granted. ''he Emperor starts on Friday, and the matter has to be settled one way or the other befure that date, that there is no time for any fresh representations from the Chambers of Commerce to reach Peking. Herr you Brandt and Colonel Denby are, however, fully informed on the merits of the question, and take great interest in it, and they are doing all that can possibly be done to frustrate this renewed effort on the part of the Cable Companies.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.