a handful of books or mulcted for a visé after a tedious detention at the Neapolitan frontier, you could not help brightening up at the sight of the dismal hovels and deathstricken faces you passed in the Pontine Marshes. We should by no means care ourselves to live all the year round in a cottage ornée in the Campagna. Even the Doria Pamphili, loveliest of Roman villas, high as it stands, is deadly in the summer months. But what can be more delightful than the gallop through its savage desolation? here a red-thatched hut and there a solitary farm, just life enough to relieve the brooding oppression of an absolute desert. What a change from Durhams, or even the white Tuscany oxen, to the Campagna buffaloes, standing in green-mantled water up to their great horns and savage little eyes! Evidently the cattle breeders have never passed their frontier. They may not be profitable, and would fetch but a moderate price as beef at Leadenhall; yet in point of effect the one is to the other as the wild figure in uncouth sheepskins and unkempt hair to the sleek English clown in blouse and hobnails. That herdsman of the wilds is the veritable child of Catholicism and nature, reared immediately under the eyes of the Pope, within easy sound of the bells of St. Peter's, if not quite under the windows of the Vatican. He represents the perfection of education according to unerring wisdom-in other words, none at all. That his highest interests are safe, we trust we may take for granted. His spiritual father answers for him, and sundry sins may be lightly atoned by penal fines when you can plead bestial ignorance in extenuation. Therefore, if the Campagna peasant does not mind racking rheumatism, alternate fever fits of chilling cold and parching heat, and a premature return to the fetid earth whence he shot up fungus-like, perhaps his lot is an enviable one. There can be no doubt he makes a pleasant object in the eyes of a party of English visitors, and comes in tellingly like the stone pines and weed-grown aqueducts in the sketches of an English picnic party. neutral tint, except here and there some muzzled Liberal has symbolized his revolutionary leanings by smearing over the sad tones of his premises with whitewash. Then the population is artistically distributed, as if the chief end of their being were the furnishing subjects to the photorapher. Here you have a quarter like the Ghetto-and there are many Christian Ghettos-swarming with life like a mouldy cheese. You have to pick your way along the gutter banks among sprawling infants, while those of somewhat riper age entangle themselves in your legs, as in the religious light you grope out and in among the odoriferous traffic in the centre of the street. When you lift your eyes to the thread of sky high overhead you find the persevering rays that struggle downwards refracted at each of the numerous floors by countless protruded heads. It is the effects of an Oriental bazaar without the blaze and the sparkle - the picturesque, in its austerely solemn aspect, as befits the City of Churches and the stagnant fountain of the Catholic faith. But a little of it goes a very long way, as you feel when you expand your lungs in the comparatively salubrious air of some piazzetta, with a ruined temple in front, a stupendous refuse heap on one side, and a fragrant sewer on the other. Here, however, the sacred authorities kill two birds with one stone. In flattering the tastes of the visitor by preserving dirt and distress unimpaired in distant quarters they do what lies in their power for the health of the inhabitants. Admitting the fair Campagna must remain a piosonous swamp, and the genius of malaria must be suffered to flap his wings over the devoted city, next to votive offerings and dear-bought priestly intercession, excessive crowding is found to be the best way of keeping him in respect. You leave this picturesque crowding for the sublime desolation of adjacent quarters. You mope along interminable streets, which except that the vast buildings have their roofs on and glass in their windows, while the climate admits of grass growing among the paving-stones, might remind Go within the walls and it is the same you of Tadmor in the Wilderness, or the thing. All over the place you are conscious Giant Cities of Bashan. Here and there a of what one may call the cathedral odour stray figure glides past a portal as if to compounded of vault and earth and decay-indicate the proportions of the architecture. ing wood. The houses in the streets take after the pagan ruins; the dilapidation is contagious, and they begin to crumble. The immemorial rubbish mounds swell steadily, burying deeper every day the wrecks of the Kings, the Republic, the Empire, and the early Church. Everything lies in solemn Now and then a venerable porter opens a shutter in the vast blank face of a huge palace to peer out upon the waste. Then as you saunter by desolate side lanes the sound of chastened revelry breaks in on the solemn stillness, and you come upon a group of brawny pensioners and parasites The From The Saturday Review. VILLAGE POLITICS IN FRANCE. clustered over their soup tins round the hospitable portals of a convent. monks have a natural sympathy with able- WHILE every gamin in Paris is shouting bodied idleness, and regard with com- "Vive la République!" graver heads are placency those strapping paupers fattening anxiously asking themselves "How long is upon the crumbs that fall from their the Republic likely to live?" And this, vicariously spread tables. The great it must be remembered, is no longer a charm of Papal Rome used to be, that, question that depends simply on the mobilturn whither you would, there was noth-ity of the gamin of Paris or the humour of ing to reproach you with the aimless life the Faubourg St. Antoine. If the later you led there. The tone of society was Napoleonism has done nothing else, it has inspired you knew, and that tone was dis- freed France from the despotism of its captinctly drowsy. If you could not rival in ital and greater towns. Prefect and priest faith the college of cardinals and its have for the last twenty years been busy priestly satellites, you could in the absence teaching the peasant proprietors of the of work. Even the legitimate desire of country that the safety of the nation lies gain could not tempt the tradesmen of the in their hands, and the peasant has learnt Corso and Babuino to bustle about among a lesson so flattering to his pride with very their scarves and cameos. Even the sense natural avidity. He is quite conscious that he lived from hand to mouth would that it was he who, in the teeth of "those not rouse the beggar on the flags of the gentlemen of Paris," placed the Emperor piazzas to loll into a sitting posture when on the throne, and that it was his emphatic he volubly cursed your want of charity. "Yes" in plébiscite after plébiscite which If you paid your coachman by the course, retained him there. With what sort of his horses jogged as if you hired him by favour he is likely to regard, when once the hour. If you dropped into your Ital-war has ceased to absorb his whole attenian banker's his clerks were having their tion, a revolution which springs out of a siesta, or exhibiting premonitory symptoms street row, and a government which conof drowsiness, or rubbing their eyes after sists simply of the deputies of Paris, it is waking from their slumbers. The sharp not very difficult to guess. But it is far paving-stones opposed themselves to your harder to say in what way the peasant will walking, and made it absolutely necessary regard the question of the Republic itself. to send your horse to the city gates if you The truth is, we know next to nothing of meant to ride. There were no journals in the condition or the sympathies of rural the cafés and no light to read them by, France. The peasant is nowhere an easy had the mist of rancid tobacco been less person to become really acquainted with, dense. The English Club and the smok- and the French peasant is the least easy ing-rooms in the English hotels were the of all. He is far pleasanter to talk to than only places where you woke up. There his English namesake, but he is just as disyou found restless birds of passage ac-trustful. He has a sort of animal secrecy tually taxing themselves to play billiards, and wariness, and in the presence of men or warming up into political arguments. of better station and education than himAnd they were rather a warning than an example. You knew you were rightthat in supine indolence lay the culmination of human perfectibility; for did not the infallible Pontiff himself set the example, and all his acolytes scrupulously practise what they preached? If we are to have all this sort of thing upset with the Papal throne, whatever are we to do, or whither in the wide world are we to go? If the Italians come to theorize upon activity there, we do not suspect them of practising it. Where are we to seek another Rome? There was but one city in the world where you could go to sleep among antiquities and art treasures with an easy conscience, and point proudly to your classical surroundings as the reason of your blameless life. self, although he is quite ready to display a democratic consciousness of equality which would be odd on this side of the Channel, he has all the caution and reticence of instinctive fear. Books help us very little indeed; nine out of ten French novels never stir beyond the Parisian boulevards, and the few that do, with one illustrious exception, either confine themselves, like Balzac, to country towns, or invent imaginary scenes of country innocence and repose. Perhaps the one person who knows the French people best is the Englishman who wanders from village to village with a knapsack on his back. What strikes such a stranger most in the village population is its terrible ignorance. With Germany and Switzerland on one side of it, with England on the other, the educational standard of France is almost as low as that of Spain or Southern Italy. chatting with a Norman priest beneath the Among the facts that have most startled shadow of one of the grandest minsters in the Germans in the present war is the in- France on the subject of English religion. ability of half the prisoners they have He was proud of his knowledge of the taken to read or write. Many even of the subject, and it amounted to this, that officers cannot sign their own names. the "église nationale was "Protestante But any one who has penetrated much into Methodistique." From this position it was the rural life of France knows that this is impossible to move him; he had once been only a fair indication of the educational to Paris, and at the Exposition he had state of the country. No doubt efforts seen a Methodist chapel, and his mind was have been made of late, especially under made up. That there are learned men the administration of M. Duruy, to cope among the French clergy we do not deny; with this mass of ignorance; and M. Jules that there are men of the highest holiness Simon has done more than justice to the is plain from an such an instance as that energy shown by the Imperial Govern- of the Curé d'Ars; and the political power ment. Schools have been built and the they exercise over their flocks is unquesnumber of teachers greatly increased, but tionable. But, as a rule, the tone of the the quality of the instruction given re- peasant towards his curé is that of goodmains as wretched as ever. The wretched humoured contempt. "What is that buildpittance given to the school-master would ing?" we remember asking a country counteract the good intentions of a thou- hostess in Picardy, as we pointed to a huge sand Ministers of Public Instruction. Sim- edifice by the side of the Church of St. ply to procure bread, the wretched dom- Riquier. "It is nothing but une pépinière inie has to eke out his living by acting as de prêtres," she replied, with a smile. A clerk to the sous-préfet, if he is settled in class so regarded is necessarily incapable a country town; or if in a village, by serv- of exercising any great influence for the ing as bell-ringer, acolyte, church-sweeper improvement of the country, but it does to the priest. The value of the instruc- not follow that it is destitute of power tion given can easily be conjectured. That when it plays on the prejudice and ignoit has failed to produce any real effect on rance around it. And just now the temptthe prejudices or the superstitions of the ation to play on them is very strong inpeasant may be judged from the com- deed. The ordinary curé has but two inplaints of the priests themselves. In a terests in the world - Rome and his stiparish of the South it is the usage to pre- pend. Rome is his religion; his stipend is sent to the curé certain wooden images, his bread. For these he is quite prepared bearing the names of saints, but whose form to fight to the death; and the announceshows them to be figures of the older ment of a Republic is a threat to both. If gods of heathenism, which become by his he has let the Emperor fall so quietly, it is benediction sovereign charms against cer- in great measure because, in withdrawing tain bodily ailments. One parish priest of the bulk of his troops from Rome, he belate years threw them boldly into the fire, lieves the Emperor to have betrayed the but an epidemic which broke out among the Pope. But a Republican Government is cattle brought him to his senses and the certain to be indifferent to the fate of the custom was restored. His successor was Pope and the Papacy. What comes still more resolute. He burned the images, and more home to the priest is the danger to nearly paid for the act with his life. The his actual livelihood. The absolute sepparish rose against him, and he had to take aration of Church from State, so long adrefuge in a compromise. He procured vocated by M. Louis Blanc, is now the acfigures of the saints themselves, a little cepted creed of the Republican party. If more artistically carved, but the peasants they remain in power, they are pledged to declared they were good for nothing, and annul the work of the First Napoleon in refused him all supplies for the reparation ecclesiastical as in civil matters. But of his church. As a rule, however, the there is not a priest in France that will not curé contents himself with a silent protest make a fight for his 60l. a year. In such a against the grosser ignorance around him. contest all will depend on the view he can He is himself a peasant, the son of a peas- induce the peasant to take of his own risk ant; and his slender stipend of some 401. from the Republic. or 601. a year makes him dependent on the Active political preferences the peasant offerings of his flock. He shares their has none. To his monotonous life of laprejudices, and his exclusively ecclesiasti-bour the substitution of one ruler for ancal training has raised him little above other makes very little difference indeed. their own level of culture. We remember Here and there, as in Champagne, the Napoleonic legend" still flourishes, just seen on the ground with immense satisfacas Orleanism survives in the commercial tion. He can hardly help being irritated, towns; but the peasant will not expend a and, slight as his direct influence is, he can sou for the Imperial dynasty any more manage in some degree to communicate than the merchant will raise a hand for the his irritation to the peasant. The old jealCount of Paris. What, however, Napo- ousy of the aristocracy which caused the leonism has done for his political educa- rejection of De Tocqueville in 1848 by the tion is to arouse in his mind an intense farmers of his village, on the ground that aversion to being governed by the towns. he was "a noble," has pretty well died Power has for twenty years rested on the away, and if the balance of opinion in the votes of the peasantry, and the peasant can country districts once really wavers, the hardly like to see his work overthrown by bitterness of the Legitimist party may tell an émeute in the streets. A Republic means fatally against the Republic. But, if it the rule of the shopkeeper, and he hates wavers at all, it will hardly waver for poand envies the shopkeeper. Above all, it litical reasons. The life of the peasant is is 66 a government of lawyers," and meshed, chained to his bit of land; he is a proprias he very commonly is, in lawsuits and etor, not a politician. Proclamations about mortgages, he regards the lawyer as his a federation of the Latin peoples, declamanatural foe. And here he finds himself at tions against the penalty of death, the one with the sympathies of a class which rhetoric of Victor Hugo, the logic of Jules has still a perceptible influence on rural Favre, are all without the slightest meanopinion the Legitimists. The shabbying or interest to him. So long as those young marquis who lounges along the gentlemen of Paris like to amuse themshore of some little Breton watering-place selves with these, he is not likely to stir. is utterly powerless to obtain what he So long as his bit of land is safe, Republic likes; but it by no means follows that he or Empire is alike to him. But for twenty is powerless to destroy, or at least to in-years he has been assiduously taught that duce others to destroy, what he does not a Republic means peril to property. To like. The Empire was partly of his own him the red flag means pillage, and, making. In his eyes it was a mere usur- though Gambetta has managed for the pation, of course; a mere continuance of moment to put it aside, it waits its turn to the régime of iniquity and fraud which had supersede the tricolour. Louis Blanc is a robbed him and his ancestors of their polished and gentlemanly man to those rents since '89. But still he never re- who have had the pleasure of his acquaintpented having helped to make it. In the ance in London, but the peasant of France first place, it made Paris brighter and has not had that pleasure, and to him the pleasanter, and his month's fling in Paris reappearance of Louis Blanc means the is the holiday for which the young marquis reappearance of Communism. The elecscrapes and starves during the rest of the tions for the Constituent Assembly will year. And, in the second place, its hand soon let us see in what temper the French lay very heavily on the classes who robbed villager regards the new institutions of him and his, the bourgeoisie and the ouvrier, his country. But it would be a great misthe Dantons and Marats and Robespierres take to suppose, as has lately been supof whom he believes the Republican party posed, that the similarity of the last Revto be composed. He could pardon very olution to its predecessors means that much of the man who had to a certain ex- Paris is still France, and that her political tent avenged his wrongs, and who had convictions will impose themselves on the been clever enough to trample under foot country. Paris, fighting the enemy, is the democracy that had ridden over the simply allowed to fight him in her own necks of his ancestors. This was what the way; but, fighting once over, the natural marquis meant when he took his cigarette relations of things can hardly fail to be refrom his lips and assured you that the Em-stored, and the French statesman will have peror was "très-intelligent." To a Legit- to look for the solution of its administraimist of this sort the proclamation of a Re- tive problems, as during the Empire, in its public is simply the getting up again of a village politics. foe whom he had for the last twenty years 8. THE GERMAN VIEW OF ALSACE AND LORRAINE, Saturday Review, POETRY. 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