This, then, was the state of matters in the best times of the Republic, but this state was changed by the violent civil wars that preceded the establishment of the Empire. Then the great families of the commonwealth were decimated and family ties broken up. A feeling of the utter uncertainty of life and an indifference to its continuance pervaded all classes. Moreover, luxurious habits had become prevalent. Formerly sons with their wives lived in the house of their father, and constituted, in fact as in law, one family. Instances of this conjoint family life are recorded so late as the second century B.C. But now the expense of bringing up a family had come to be felt by many as a burden, and the trouble of family cares was regarded as an encroachment on the enjoyments of life. And hence arose an unwillingness to marry. People saw no good and felt no pride in having families. Their children might be a curse to them, or they might be exposed to lives of poverty, accusation, harassment, and proscription-lives in fact which were miseries, and not blessings. But Augustus held that the prevalence of such sentiments and practices was fatal to the welfare of a State, and the special circumstances of the time made them peculiarly dangerous to Rome. For the State had suffered enormous loss by its civil wars. Appian asserts that at the census of Julius Cæsar it was said that the population was only half of what it had been before these wars. Dio Cassius describes the scarcity of the population as terrible, and the number of women had decreased. Friedländer estimates the free population of Rome in 5 B. C., omitting senators, knights, and soldiers, as consisting of 320,000 males and 265,600 females. A remedy for this state of matters was urgently required, and Augustus believed that a remedy could be found only in legislation. Accordingly legis lation was the remedy which he adopt

The accounts of this legislation are very confused. Mention is made of three Bills-one, Julia de adulteriis coercendis; a second, Julia de maritandis ordinibus; and a third, Lex Papia Poppaa. He commenced his legislation in the very beginning of his reign in 28 B. C., but as, on assuming

the supreme power, he abrogated the decrees of the triumvirate, and claimed to be restoring the Republic, his Bills had to go through the ordinary processes of discussion in the Senate and proposal to the Assembly. This afforded scope for every form of obstruction, and, besides difficulties in passing the Bills, the laws met with fierce private resistance. Before passing his final law, the Lex Papia Poppæa, in 9 A.D., Dio Cassius states that Augustus, knowing that the equites were eager for the abrogation of his previous laws, summoned the whole of them to a meeting. divided them into two classes, those who had married and those who had not. He deplored the fact that the latter class was more numerous, and addressed to them strong words of reproof, and at the same time expounded the reasons why marriage should be praised and rewarded, and bachelors condemned and fined.

He

The Lex Papia Poppaa probably embodied all the regulations which Augustus had made in regard to marriage, with such additions and amendments as experience had proved to be necessary. Its great object was to encourage and reward marriage, and punish and prevent celibacy.

Julius Cæsar, painfully alive to the effects of the civil wars on the destiny of the Empire, had already offered rewards for a numerous offspring, and we find that in his agrarian law for the distribution of lands in Campania, he gave the lots to fathers of three or more children, of whom at the time there were twenty thousand. Augustus resolved to carry out this idea systematically. Any married woman who had three children received special privileges, and the justrium liberorum became an honor, which was also conferred at first by the Senate, and subsequently by the Emperors, on distinguished women on whom nature had not bestowed the requisite number of children. Four children released a freedwoman from the guardianship of her patron, and three children put a free patroness on an equality with a patron.

Similar privileges were conferred on men. The consul who had the greater number of children had precedence over him who had fewer, and the married consul took precedence of the unmar

ried. The candidate for office who had children was permitted to assume certain offices of state at an earlier age than the unmarried, and other privileges were bestowed on the married. Fines and disabilities were imposed on bachelors. The ages fixed for males were twenty and sixty, and for women twenty and fifty, and whoever was unmarried within these ages was subjected to a tax, and could not become heir except to near relatives, and could not receive legacies.

Such were some of the provisions of this Lex Papia Poppea for the encouragement of marriage. Our information in regard to it is in many respects defective and unsatisfactory. The law was much discussed by subsequent jurists, and it is likely that some of the clauses, which are represented as the work of Augustus, were inserted by later legislators.

Augustus did in regard to adultery what he did in regard to marriage. He translated ordinary private practice into public law, and on the whole made the conduct of the Romans milder than it had been, though he was strongly tempted by the licentiousness of his daughter to prescribe stern punishment for the crime. His law required that the divorce should take place in regular form. The freedman of the man who wished to divorce must hand over the repudium, or bill of divorce, in the presence of seven Romans of full age, and the wife who wished a divorce must do the same. The law ordained that a woman who was found guilty of adultery should be banished to an island, and lose half of her dowry and a third of her property, and similar punishments were inflicted on a faithless husband. In the case of the wife, it still lay with the husband to carry out the penalty, and he himself was liable to be punished if he did not carry out the sentence. The husband could still kill his wife if he found her in the act; but he could execute vengeance only if he put to death both the guilty parties.

The Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which was no doubt embodied in the Lex Papia Poppæa, brings to light a new phase of Roman life. Distinctions had arisen among the Roman citizens, and more anxiety was felt to maintain

the honor and purity of the highest of these classes than to preserve the ordinary Roman citizen from the outside world. Senators were forbidden to marry freedwomen, but all other citizens were allowed to marry them, owing to the scarcity of free women, but prohibited from marrying prostitutes, procuresses, condemned criminals, and ac

tresses.

The legislation of Augustus in regard to marriage has generally been regarded as a failure. Horace celebrated the success of the Lex Julia de adulterio cohibendo in Ode iv. 5

"Nullis polluitur casta domus stupris, Mos et lex maculosum edomuit nefas”words which seem to me to prove that the accounts of the degeneracy of the women were grossly exaggerated-for no legislation could produce effects in any way approaching to those described by Horace, if the evil were deeply seated. From Horace's words we may gather that the law had some good effect; and the prominence of the Lex Papia Poppea in the discussions of jurists, renders it likely that it continued to act for some time with considerable force. The general effect of legislation based on it, and of the course of events, was to alter the basis of the Roman State, and to make the individual, and not the family, the unit. Husband and wife became more closely connected together, the wife becoming to some extent the heir of the husband, and her children being entitled to inherit her property. But causes were working, in combination with the aversion to marriage, which rendered the Lex Papia Poppea nugatory. In the Christian Church arose an inordinate estimate of the virtue of celibacy. A large family came to be regarded almost as a disgrace, as a proof of lasciviousness. And thus, when Constantine, a Christian Emperor, ascended the throne, he abolished most of the pains and penalties of celibacy and childlessness, and Justinian abolished all the clauses that dealt with inheritance. But to understand the motives of Christian legislation, we must discuss-in another paper-the position of women among the early Christians.-Contemporary Review.

WITHOUT a doubt, mental sedatives are craved for by a very large and increasing number of men and women. There are moments in life when the one thing we want is a literary anodyne, and nothing else will do. The mind requires rest, and yet it cannot rest, like the body, in mere inaction. It must be patted into quietness like a restless child, and won to calm by employing it upon something which shall just occupy and yet never force it into activity. Some men find their literary anodynes in easy mathematical problems, others in records of travel or in the discoveries of science. Such people, however, are the exceptions. To mankind in general, the novel is the only potent anodyne.

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It is of such literary anodynes that Mr. Andrew Lang writes a very pleasant article in the September number of the New Princeton Review. "A man,' says Mr. Lang, "wants his novel to be an anodyne;" and from this standpoint he proceeds to declaim against those who wish to make fiction the last word of humanity." Modern fiction is either "the novel of the new religion, the novel of the new society that declines to have any religion, the novel of dismal commonplace, or the novel of the Divorce Court. Are not," he continues, some fourteen hours of the day enough wherein to fight with problems and worry about faiths and rend one's heart with futile pities and powerless indignations? Leave me an hour in the day not to work in, or ponder in, or sorrow in; but to dream in, or to wander in the dreams of others. . . . To get into fairyland, that is the aspiration of all of us whom the world oppresses. Scott, Dumas, Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Rider Haggard, Gaboriau, and plenty of others, old and new, will do this for us; and therefore they and their kind are the only true writers of fiction. Such is the line of Mr. Lang's thought. But does he not make a very notable confusion? No doubt the tellers of tales of adventure and of romance, whether they write of to-day or of long-forgotten times, are the best compounders of that sovereign nepenthe for which so many

That,

jaded brains are always craving. however, does not show that the novel of manners, of character, of politics, of sentiment, of reflection, of still life, and of life as men live it not on the High Veldt or in ships that go searching for treasure, but in the dull routine of the real world, has no raison d'être. Because "Treasure Island" or the "New Arabian Nights" are better to read after a hard day of brain-work than "Silas Marner," that does not make the miracle-working of the golden-haired child any the less a noble story. In his apology for anodynes, Mr. Lang has, in fact, gone much too far, and has written as if such a thing as ordinary mental meat and drink did not exist.

The apologist for the novel which aims at something more than mere storytelling has plenty of ground upon which to make his defence. The literature of a nation may no doubt reflect its manners and its life, but it also helps to mould them. The novel, as the strongest and most popular form of literature, can and does affect the national life. It can be, and often is, a great instructor, a school of conduct and of manners. A novel with a too apparent purpose is no doubt unbearable; but for all that, those novels of Dickens and of Charles Reade which were written with an avowed social aim, not only helped to produce great and visible effects, but were in every sense good novels, not mere sermons in monthly parts. Thackeray, too, because he was burned up with the desire to make English people ashamed of admiring the peerage, and because his novels are often nothing but a series of reflective essays and character-studies slowly revolving round the thinnest of stories, was not therefore any the less a writer of fiction. The novels that appeal to us by the same means as the Greek drama, and are, in fact, prose tragedies or comedies, are also not to be condemned merely because, instead of thinking only of getting on with more adventures or thickening the plot, they strive to resolve by raising and appeasing the sense of pity and terror in their readers. No; the novel in its highest sense is as much a

nor

part of the larger life as the plays of Shakespeare, the sculpture of the Greeks, or the pictures of Raphael; and to abandon the nobler forms of the narrative art for mere story-telling, would be as great a sign of literary decadence as it is possible to imagine. But if we decide not to look at the matter in the large, and accept for the moment the modern definition that the end of Art is only to please, we shall still find that Mr. Lang's exclusion of everything which does not make a good literary anodyne from the ranks of novels, cannot be sustained. What does the world at large want in its novels? Mr. Lang says it does not want realistic photographs of the life we know too well, realistic studies of the development of characters like our own petty characters, thwarted passions, unfulfilled ambitions, tarnished victories over self, over temptations, melancholy compromises, misery more or less diguised, dull dinner-parties, degraded politics," yet a new religion in three volumes, nor novels where the hunt for adjectives and epigrams wearies us as we read. Now, we can quite understand Mr. Lang not wanting to hear about "the world we know so well "-i.e., the big London world, made up of fashion and eminence, political, literary, and socialnor about character development, nor about dinner-parties, nor politics, nor new religions, nor the hunt for epigrams; for this is the world in which he himself lives, and these are the subjects which he and other London men of letters are perpetually hearing discussed. In the same way, a sailor does not care about sea-novels, nor a farmer about tales of country life. In novels, we like to fly to something unfamiliar. But to the greater number of readers, the subjects Mr. Lang enumerates are quite unfamiliar. They do not know how people talk at London dinner-parties, any more than they do how people talk in the forecastle of a pirate schooner. They are not in the habit of hearing their neighbors analyzing each his friend's character; and when these things are done in the novel, it amuses them extremely. Even the new religion in three volumes, which seems so intolerable to Mr. Lang, is an intense source of interest to thousands who, though they may be steeped

to the lips in the old-fashioned forms of theological discussion, are quite unused to see religion apparently reappearing in the garb of modern humanitarianism. In truth, men want in their novels to escape from themselves, their own life, and their own indigenous ideas, into a new world. Men of letters who, through seeing life for themselves, or by an infinity of reading about life, have exhausted the actual world and its topics, like to escape into fairyland. For the ordinary reader, however, the world is still for the most part an unknown country. and so far more interesting than even fairyland. He asks, therefore, for exactly the novel which Mr. Lang most abhors. In a word, one man's irritant is another man's anodyne,

the man of letters likes to get his brain on to new ground when he is resting; so does the country doctor or solicitor; but the ground which is new to one is deadly stale to the other. The difference between the two is natural enough, and suggests the reason why the critics often praise a novel which no one will read, and damn one which sells a dozen editions. A man praises a novel according as he finds it readable or not; but the critics and the greater public have a perfectly different standard of interest, and accordingly their verdicts often differ totally over works of fiction.

Such seems to us the fallacy of Mr. Lang's paper. He thinks what is a change to him is a change to the rest of the world, and he fails to admit that there is something in novel-writing beyond story-telling, and a something which places the great novels on a level with the very highest works of literature. For this latter mistake he may, however, well be pardoned, for he has evidently in his mind the latest products of the naturalistic school. It is hardly to be wondered at if a man fresh from "L'Immortel" should cry,-" Let us have an end of all this analysis of filth, brutality, and realism, and confine the novelist's art to the mere telling of a tale which may while away an hour of mental lassitude, and give without loathing the mental recreation we demand. Thank heaven, however, the choice is not necessarily between natu

ralism and tales of adventure! Romance we must have, for life would indeed be poor without it; but we may have, too, the graver, deeper work of the novelist, which sets before us the larger life, and

helps to allay those sorrows and miseries which cannot always be met by merely taking the hand of some bold adventurer and wandering with him into the land of dreams.-Spectator.

WITHIN the last few months I have had occasion, by a longer sojourn in France and Switzerland, to study political matters on the spot. At Paris especially I was able to compare notes with friends of various nationalities-French, English, American, and German. The subjects uppermost in men's minds were the Boulanger scare and the question of Peace or War. On the latter I will quote at once the remarks made to me by a German diplomatist. He said :

War is out of the question. The French are not able, single-handed, to risk it. Their army is not sufficiently organized, and the people in general do not desire it. The unforeseen, it is true, plays a great part in French politics. As to the German Government, it certainly does not wish for war, though it is not afraid of it. The measures recently taken in Alsace-Lorraine are only temporary ones. They are not meant to continue for a very long time; in fact, the labor entailed thereby upon the German Embassy is too great for that. Strange as it may seem, however, such measures positively make for the maintenance of peace. Frenchmen, when startled by such a decree, say to themselves, with that somewhat childish tremor which often overtakes them, that "a trap is being laid for them." Then they exclaim:-"No; we won't fall into that trap!" And so the result is, that they become virtually all the more peaceful, albeit some of them may storm and rave.

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Though diplomatic language is not always to be understood literally, I hold that this was not said in Talleyrand's vein. Neither the German nation, nor the official circles which reflect the ideas of Prince Bismarck, wish for war. The Iron Chancellor" unquestionably likes to appear before Europe as the "weaponed man," who, at a moment's notice, could make his country's hosts and those of its allies swoop down upon any would-be disturber of the peace. He also prefers remaining the dictator of the home politics of Germany by always holding the spectre of a possible warlike contingency before the eyes of

the public. Truth to say, every Frenchman I have spoken to declared himself eager for the maintenance of peace. On the other hand, it may well be doubted whether many of them might not be suddenly thrown off their balance, if they could hope to have Russia on their side. So far Prince Bismarck may be right; but it is allowable to question the wisdom of his occasionally provoking tactics-as in the recent affair of the passport regulations. There is good reason to believe that these regulations have not even the approval, at heart, of those at Paris and Strassburg who are to carry out the vexatious decree. As a

race and as individuals, the French are not only a most amiable and most pleasant people to deal with, but also a very sensible one-sensible (sage) even to such a degree that their carefulness and caution often verges upon the Philistine. If this were not so, their frequent revolutions, during which the noblest maxims are proclaimed, would not have left so many crying abuses in the country's administration unremedied. Nor would all kinds of progressive innovations, which elsewhere make their way easily, be so difficult of adoption in France, where routine has a wonderful vitality; men otherwise revolutionary being strangely fond of the old bureaucratic ruts. Hence the population in France, at large, is also curiously shy of visiting foreign lands and enlarging the scope of its knowledge. Yet, while there is such extremely slow-going circumspection in many things, there arises, now and then, an instantaneous excitement and a hurly-burly action among leading groups in the capital, to which the masses for a time yield absolute obedience, in spite of previously declared contrary views. Of these characteristics the neighbors of France have unfortunately to take note.