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    The current number of the North British Review is scarcely so interesting as usual ,, but there is . never-a number without matter worthy of attention . Protestantism in Italy will be read with eagerness by a large class . The paper ¦ onAmerican Novels contains a passage we quote elsewhere , and applies a rather startling canon to fiction : starting from the fact that now-a-days the novelist and poet rival the preacher in influence , the corollary is that their responsibility is equal to that of the preacher , and therefore that their teaching must be as narrowly watched . " If a minister of the gospel deviates a hair ' s-breadth from the well-defined convictions of his congregation , his audience falls away , and he will never hear the last of it ; and , as for ah error of practical morals , it would be regarded with such horror if it came from the pulpit , that the occurrence of such defalcations is absolutely unknown among us . But , as many of us keep our best suit of clothes and conduct for the Sabbath , so we have our Sunday and week-day doctrines ;

    and to be orthodox one day is regarded as salt sufficient for the seven . In our Sunday sermon we demand a bright and spotless reflection of revelation , and on Monday we fall to recreating ourselves ( mark the etymology !) with some novel or poem , which , if we had character and courage to set its secret sins in the light of God ' s countenance , would horrify us with its profound infidelity and insane perversion of moral truth . " A startling canon this , yet who shall deny its rigorous justice P For our parts we think that the discordance between clerical and lay teaching , points to the radical discordance between doctrine and belief . There was no such discordance in the ages of faith . An elaborate article follows on Dr . Vatjghan ' s Wycliffe—a work we have not seen—but the article of the number we should select is the one on Domestic Service , a subject of great importance treated in a thoroughly Christian spirit . How well the writer characterizes the bugbear of " familiarity " : —

    "But we cannot expect class-prejudices , the growth of more than a century , to yield to the kindness of a day . The fact is , that it would be a much easier thing than it now is to do good , if the desire to do good were more common . We can hardly be surprised that the poor should look with some suspicion on the rich , — that they should be slow to believe in the genuine kindness of the latter , when the rule is one of exclusiveness and indifference , and the exceptions are so very rare . We are afraid it cannot truthfully be denied that if the general feeling of the lower orders is one of distrust , it is because their superiors have done little or nothing to gain their confidence and affection . The distrust is generally mutual . Even in grave didactic books , published by religious tract societies , young people are warned against being ' familiar' with their servants ; and the warning is generally fortified by some stories illustrative of the evil habits of domestics , —of their trickery , their duplicity , their dishonesty , their use of bad Language , &c . &c . Now , what are we to expect , if they who conceive it to be their mission to teach , thus wilfully and systematically endeavour to widen the breach between the

    employers and the employed , —to make each regard the other with distrust , —to array them , indeed , one against the other , openly , undisguisedly , as enemies , instead of bringing the master and the servant side by side as friends ? Now , ' familiarity between the employer and the employed , rightly understood , so far from being a bad state of things , is that which , above all others , it is most desirable to bring about . If ' familiarity , ' in the writings of which we speak , means levity of conduct and looseness of speech , doubtless it is to be eschewed , whether it belong to the behaviour of a nursery-maid or a duchess . That is not a matter which we are now called upon to consider . If such writers , however , mean to instruct young gentlemen and ladies to keep themselves aloof as much as possible from domestic servants , becauso the daily life of such peop le is ordinarily marked by levity of conduct and looseness of speech , all we can say is , that it had been better for them if they had never learnt to w lite . There m no surer mode of making our servants unworthy of our confidence and the companionship of our children , than by thus holding thorn up , even in our lesson-books , as reprobates and outcasts . " Then again as to " followers " : —¦

    " If wo admit , an every rational person must admit , that our domestic servants , like other people , must have friends and desire to associate with them , in it not far hotter that it should be an understood thing between the employer and tho employed , that the latter should bo visited at seasonable hours , by respectable relatives and friends , and that even if thoro bo something more than mere comnflui acquaintiuice , it should not bo a thing denied ? Why m not Ruth , or Kate , ^ 5 r ¦ Fanny to have her ' followei-H , ' aa well a « Miss Amelia Maria , after whom Captain Sabrotasch i « always dangling ; or Mrs . Plumb , the wealthy widow , who is pcr-Hoveringly ' followed' by tho Reverend Isaac Pew ? Amelia Maria expresses her horror of followers , even to tho Captain himself ; and tho widow lives in a otatoof uxoitcinent regarding them , which noonis likely to shor ten her days . If ono of their pretty serving girln ban been Heon Blinking her cherry-coloured ribands , at tho

    baok gate , ; ib tho carpenter ' h hou goes by after bin day ' s work , or him actually had tho audacity to invite tho grocer ' h : iHHiHtant to sit down and tako a dish of tea in ' h o kitchen , thoro in no cud to their lamentations and revilingH . Tho unfortunate ) tf'i'l ib denounced in tho harshest ; language ; oho in impertinent and immodest , bold < 'i"d artful—purhapu hU « Iohch Ivor place . How much better , under Huoh ciroumutancoH , would it be for the miHtruHH of a household to endeavour to win the confidence of her'dorncHticH , and to be tho depositary of their niont choriHhfld Hoorotn ? Wliy a comely parlour-maid , or housemaid , or oven a buxom cook , tthouhl not roeeivo tho honest addreHHOH of a worthy young man , and , in due course , have tho baniiH put up in the parish church , we cannot by any means conjecture . They do not vow tbeuiHelvoH to perpetual celibacy when they advertise for a place . Hut

    Wo know very well that the concealments forced upon them by thoharnh , grudging Npirit in which too ofton tho gratification of their natural intitinctH if ) regarded , are liwlon with a world of evil . It w a melancholy fact , that n very largo proportion ° ' the unhappy young women who are tried every year in our criminal courts , for 'he murder of their illegitimate children , aro domestic Hervantn . This in not to be aUrihutod to the peculiar depravity of the claHH , but tho peculiarly disadvantageous character of thoir Hoeial environmontH . How much of it comoH out of those three well-known wordfl , ' No followers allowed , ' it in diflioult to say . if young Wo nien are afraid of their admirem being hooh within tho shadow of thoir own n Pflitful homos , they will meet thorn abroad , where no reutrainta and impedimenta ox , and tho tempter , Opportunity , io at their elbow . "

    Our own experience is decidedly in favour of the utmost liberty to followers as a practical good , quite apart from its abstract justice . If your servants are respectable their followers will be so ; if they are not , you get rid of them . The British Quarterly is excellent . In spite of some queer philosophizing about man beginning in the highest state of civilization , and subsequently degenerating into barbarism ( all with a view of " reconciling *' Scripture with history , ) the opening paper onCAwawill . be read with interest ; so also that on JJud ^ wig TiecJc . In the paper on English Fens ;

    their origin and improvements , there is amassed much piquant detail ; in that on Matvrice's Essays the reader will find a lucid analysis of a book now exciting so much attention from its furnishing the pretext for the professor ' s expulsion ; he will also find there some of those brave , wise words which Robeet Vafghan is strong enough and wise enough to utter in defence of true religion against religious cant . Speaking of the treatment MTattbice has received at the hands of certain " religious newspapers , " such as our dearly-beloved JRecord , Dr . Vaughan ( we assume the authorship ) says : —

    ' ' When religious truth is not embraced to % ts proper end , it is not unnatural that the moral state in which it leaves men , should sometimes be a worse state than that in which it found them . Mr . Maurice may feel assured , that he has hardly a worse opinion than we have of irreligious spirits often to be found in what is called the religious world . It is anything but agreeable to be obliged to observe the subtleties , the frauds , the slanders , the cruelties , to which such spirits will often commit themselves . They are good haters , —and the strength of that feeling is too often , in their estimation , the best evidence of their spirituality and enlightenment . This hatred has reference to something accounted the contrary of religion , and it

    is therefore regarded as religious ; and the zeal allied with it has reference to something accounted religious , and therefore the feeling is regarded as religion . Notions , dogmas , commonly supply their watchwords to such people . Echo these , and your praise will be upon their tongues ; fail to pronoun ce their shibboleth , and you have to lay your account with all the possible forms of persecution . On these grounds , we look with a , degree of sympathy on any man who diverges fron » the beaten path , however much we may think him mistaken . For we are obliged to remember , that in the case of not a few who pour their censures upon him , the great recommendation of orthodoxy , as of a thousand things beside , has been , that it does not expose a man to any sort of cost or inconvenience . "

    We have said the same things , but not with the same authority . From us the accusation has been treated as if springing from doctrinal differences , whereas it sprang from moral differences . No one can deny that in this journal every religious conviction , from that of the Catholic to that of the missionary , has met with the respect due to sincerity ; but irreligion masking itself under religion we have exposed and ever will expose . In the same Review there is a suggestive paper on Portrait Painting in History , in defence of the anecdotical and personally picturesque , which sin so gravely against the "dignity of history . " Incidentally touching on craniological indications , the writer says : —

    " If any part of a man's body is more emphatically symbolical of the whole man than another , it must be the nervous mass of his brain ; and , while a man is alive , his brain can be studied only from the outside . True , from the outside examination of the Hkull all that we can know ( and this only approximately , for the skull may he thick or thin , and its surface not at all points equidistant from the surface of the brain ) is the absolute size of the brain , and the relative dimensions of its parts . As this leaves out entirely the considerations of density , and of what may be called quality , regarding which craniologists vaguely try to be a little

    more certain by calling in temperament to their aid , and as , moreover , there aro two kinda of matter in all brains , a grey and a white , whose respective functions are not nettled , and whose proportions cannot bo externally ascertained , the most eminent anatomists and physiologists of tho present day , with all their respect for tho tentative generalizations of Gall , Broussais , and others , aro agreed that the claims of external eraniology as a practical science of cerebral manifestation , want the necessary basis . More unanimous and more vehement is tho rejection which tho learned give to tho actual science of the thirty-five ' bumps' into which eraniology itself liaa degenerated in too hasty hands . "

    Io this we may add , that even could tho absolute size of the brain bo ascertained , tho test would bo fallacious , for size ( and tho phrenologists recognise this , though not distinctly awaro of tho reasons , ) is only an index , " other things being equal . " Temperaments—in the vag-uo use of that term—will not solve tho problem . Nervous tissue diJIbrs from nervous tisauo in its chemical composition , ( as , indeed , all organic substances do , their composition being non-dejinite , thereby distinguished from tho definitely composed inorganic ; substances , ) and although theao variations may be voiy slight , yot they bailie appreciation , and only loavo the simple fact in our hands , that one man ' s nervous tissue is more active than another ' s . Further , it has been ascertained by ] 3 Air , r . AKO-ion to bo far from true , as commonly taught , that tho inlolled ; of animals bears any direct proportion to tho extent of cerebral surface ( tho groy matter of tfca

    bmin . ) Ho dissected out all tho white substance , and unfolding tho convoluted grey matter , took casts of it ; on comparison , he found that tho human brain lias less superficial ox . tont in proportion to its volume than that of many mammalia . Hence thoro in less difficulty in tho fact , which has puzzled many , of tlio grampus possessing a brain with deeper convolutions aiul more extensive surfaoo than man , without , however , manifesting any signs of superior intellect !; . Wo should require to know first , whether tho extent of cerebral surface itt the index of intellectual power ; second , whether the nervous tissue of the grampus is of precisely tho same structural composition ns that of man ; a trifle moro or letm fiay of phosphorus will produce indefinite variations . Having briefly indicated these physiological points , lot us return to our author , for a curious pasnago on heads , largo and small ;—>

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    Critics are not the legislators , but tie . judges and police of literature . They do not mats laws—they interpret and . try to enforce them- —Edinburgh Ileview .

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    November 12 , 1853 . ] THE LE ADER , 1095

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 12, 1853, page 1095, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2012/page/15/