books, with their positive teaching, could everywhere be introduced alongside of the negative morality of the Chinese sages and philosophers." Since this was written, the country has been opened up, as the writer anticipated, and we receive with satisfaction his assurance, that "Christendom might control the schools of the empire." It was there we failed in India, though we were its rulers. We did not allow Christendom, or rather Christianity, to control its schools, and the result we have seen. Let us not make the same unpardonable mistake in China, if we wish its future to be holiness to the Lord.

We cannot withhold the expression of our deep conviction, that the future of China rests with England. Is the Chinese empire destined, like that of the Great Mogul, to come beneath the sceptre of a British sovereign? Is all Asia about to become a dependency of Britain? We are startled to see the words we have written; and yet, remembering history, and knowing the extraordinary influence of the Anglo-Saxon mind over the Asiatic, we cannot withdraw these words. How got we possession of India? It is a long story, but two words will answer, by commerce and war: commerce necessitating treaty; war punishing the breach of treaty, and the gradual cession of districts and kingdoms, to atone for breach of faith, and to be a material guarantee for the future; and now the Indian empire is ours. But, as we began and went on in India, so have we begun, and so far gone on, in China. Commerce and war: commerce necessitating treaty; war punishing the breach of treaty, and the cession of districts to atone for breach of faith, and to be a material guarantee for the future. Now the question naturally arises,-Have we seen the limit of this in China? In other words,-Will the Chinese observe the stipulations of the Elgin treaty? We unhesitatingly answer, They will not. What Epimenides-quoted by St. Paulsaid of his countrymen, may, with equal truth, be said of Asiatics in general, "The Cretans are always liars." The morality of heathenism knows nothing of the sacredness of truth. It is only at the cannon's mouth that allegiance to international treaty can be enforced in the East; and, on the present occasion, but for the unbending firmness of the Earl of Elgin, he would have been outwitted by the cunning and falsehood of the pompous mandarins, sent by their master to negotiate terms of peace with the representative of England. The long-headed Scottish earl knew the slippery character of the gentlemen he had to deal with, and, while his country owes him a debt of gratitude for the complete success of his

mission, Christians will not fail to thank him for inserting, and insisting on compliance with, that clause in the treaty which demands for Christianity complete toleration throughout the Chinese empire. That the treaty will be respected by China for a time, is clear enough; but the constitutional indolence and the habitual falsehood characteristic of rulers and ruled, will lead her to evade its stipulations on the first favourable opportunity, and then war again, to be followed, as before, with more concessions, and larger slices of the empire being handed over to the terrible British! We see no way of preventing this, but the appointment of a resident ambassador at the court of Pekin, whose wisdom and firmness shall see that full faith be kept with us, in every particular.

But suppose the Elgin treaty faithfully observed, and recurrence to fresh wars and fresh demands thus obviated; and suppose that, therefore, there shall not be witnessed in China the counterpart of our conquests in India, still, for trading purposes, great numbers of our countrymen will visit that land; many will make it their occasional, or permanent, place of residence; and thus English ideas and habits, and English intelligence and force of character will conquer the people, while the land still belongs to the emperor. If we are just and generous in our feelings with the people, and loyal to our faith and our God, in the midst of a nation of idolaters, or, more correctly, atheists, our advent on the shores of China will be a better thing for it than all the advents of its boodhs through all the ages of its fabulously long history. It is this consideration that makes us anxious about the future of China. Waiving the possibility that China is destined to come under Anglo-Saxon sway, we are perfectly certain that she must come under Anglo-Saxon INFLUENCE the legitimate influence exercised over a feeble mind by a strong one; and for the well-being of China, and the honour of Great Britain, we desire that influence to be in accordance with the revelation of truth which God has graciously placed in our hands. this be so, a splendid future awaits the flowery land. If the English merchant is known to be the friend of the English missionary,—not frowning upon him as did the Company's magnates in India, and, as his friend, facilitating his work in every legitimate way, it is impossible to foresee the rapidity with which the doctrines of Christianity may be diffused through the land. The English, with their capital and skill, will inevitably be the employers, and the natives the employed. If the former remember the honourable responsibility of such a position, in relation to a people who are, compared

If

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with themselves, only grown-up children, and as children imitative and teachable, the work of the Christian schoolmaster and missionary will encounter few of the difficulties it has to overcome in other foreign lands. One thing is clear, if we may reason from history, and from what the Anglo-Saxon race are doing, at this moment, all over the globe, we must make way in China; our ideas, our enterprise, our commerce, and our civilization will make way. It cannot be otherwise. God has given to this race his own truth, with a charge to make it known to all nations; and he has likewise given to this race indomitable perseverance, wonderful decision of character, and an extraordinary love of travel, which prompts us to visit every country, continent, and island on the globe. It appears, then, that we are constitutionally prepared for the work of discharging our Christian mission of being God's lightbearers to the nations of the earth. It wants, therefore, only an ardent love in our hearts for that light and its holy source, to qualify us for the discharge of our sublime mission to the family of man under the whole heaven. Only the other day, for the first time in history, China became one of the family of nations, took her place on the common platform of humanity, and opened her gates to amicable intercourse with other states; but in opening those gates she said, in effect, "I am sick at heart and wearied of my gods; let Christians come, and tell me about their God." Thus one-third of the population of the globe suddenly appeared before the Christian Church, to excite her sympathy and awaken her zeal. What a field for the exercise of these graces! And now, under God, the future -embraced in prophecy and included in promise—rests instrumentally with those that fear and love his name; let them be faithful, and that future will yet show it an orient gem of great splendour and magnitude in the diadem of Immanuel, God with us.

ART. II.-Histoire de l'Académie Française. Par PELLISSON et d'OLIVET, avec une Introduction, des Eclaircissements et Notes, par M. CH.-L. LIVET; 2 vols. 8vo. Paris: Didier. AMONGST the institutions which, at the present time, are engaging the public notice, we may name, in the very first place, the Académie Française under the Napoleonic régime. Anything like freedom of speech is so completely at a discount, so roughly set aside as dangerous, immoral, contrary to all laws,

both human and Divine, that a society which professes to speak out plainly on every subject coming home to the heart of man, a literary circle practising free discussion, and encouraging it, is a perfect anomaly, and claims the attention of critics on the same ground, at all events, as any lusus naturæ would that of physiologists or scientific observers.

There was a period, not very far from us, when the Académie Française had become a kind of butt for the jokes of literary hacks, and of young men whose first tragedy had met with an untimely end amidst the groans and hisses of the gods of the gallery; Piron's epigram was the motto of effete poetasters; and if a would-be politician saw his maiden essay going at once from the printer to the greengrocer, he comforted himself by the conclusion that the Académie Française was an antiquated, useless institution; it had lived its day, and was dying, at last, a natural death.

The Académie Française could well afford to allow such stupid and pointless pleasantries; it visited those who were most bitter in their remarks with the excellent punishment of electing them to the vacant seats; and it is a matter of general observation that the new academicians have been far more preoccupied with the dignity of the docte compagnie than those amongst whom they were called to sit. The time then came when the power of the sword laid low all the liberties of France; statesmen, magistrates, journalists, succumbed, either struck with fear, or gained over to the fait accompli by those promises, against which so few men can stand proof; two or three exceptions occurred, and amongst them the Académie Française, Richelieu's pet institution, the society patronised by Louis XIV., honoured, therefore, with the direct encouragement of tyranny itself, that society resisted, and would not bend the knee before Baal. It has, consequently, become the time for another set of critics to carp at the "forty immortals," to run them down, and to denounce them, but this time, on the ground of their political opposition; when academicians meddle with state craft, they are, it is asserted, wandering from their proper sphere; and MM. Rouland and Granier de Cassagnac would fain establish as an undoubted fact, as a literary axiom, that the only province of writers is to concoct panegyrics on Cæsar, to quibble about the spelling of a word, or to sing the praises of the Immaculate Conception. At any rate, the Académie Française is just now the talk of the day; recent circumstances have invested it with more than usual éclat, and the occasion seems a very proper one for sketching, in a short, though complete manner, the history of an institution

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which has done much towards the progress and development of elegant literature.

The materials ready at hand for any writer anxious to discuss this subject fairly, are not very plentiful. First of all, we have the work of Pellisson. This writer, now almost exclusively known by his conversion to Catholicism, and by the zeal, without knowledge, which he displayed in helping to the persecution of his former co-religionists, was courted under the reign of Louis XIV. as one of the chief among the beaux esprits. His style was elegant, and polished; his taste formed on the model of classical antiquity; and, in short, he had risen to be an excellent authority on all points connected with learning. His relation, unfortunately too short, is composed of five parts. The author begins by detailing the origin of the Academy; he then reviews its statutes, its labours, the events, more or less interesting, which occurred in connection with it; then he supplies biographical notices of all the academicians who had died when he undertook his task; and he concludes with a list of the members, such as it existed in 1652. D'Olivet's continuation of Pellisson has to recommend it neither beauty of style nor even the merit of accuracy; it is a slovenly production, incomplete, unsatisfactory; and yet so much are we at a loss for other sources of information, that it is quoted as a standard work on the subject which is now occupying our attention. From these remarks, it is beyond a doubt that the Académie Française, up to the present day, had not yet found a proper historian; and we are very glad that a writer so learned, so au courant of all the minutiae of French literature, as M. Livet evidently is, should have supplied the deficiency. He has, we believe, adopted the only safe course in taking as his ground-work the monographies of Pellisson and D'Olivet; but then, he has completed the labours of his predecessors by introducing a mass of interesting documents derived from various sources, and chiefly, hitherto, unpublished. Thus Chapelain's MS. letters have furnished a long series of extracts; and Conrart's portfolios, that inexhaustible repertoire of documents on the literary history of the seventeenth century, are also brought under contribution. M. Livet, indeed, does not profess to take us beyond the contemporaries of D'Olivet, and thus the Histoire de l'Académie Française leaves still untouched the events of the age immediately preceding our own; but we must hope that this gap will soon disappear, and we do not know any historian better qualified than M. Livet himself for the task we are now pointing out. In reviewing here this new and very much improved edition