no account. This worship of mere wealth has, it is true, this advantage over the old adoration of birth, that something may be possibly got out of it; to cringe and fawn upon the people that have blue blood is manifestly futile, since the peculiarity is not communicable, but it is hoped that, by being shaken up in the same social bag with millionnaires, something may be attained by what is technically called the 'sweating' process. So far as I have observed, however, the results are small, while the operation is to the last degree disagreeable.

6

What is very significant of this new sort of golden age is that a literature of its own has arisen, though of an anomalous kind. It is presided over by a sort of male Miss Kilmansegge, who is also a model of propriety. It is as though the dragon that guarded the apples of Hesperides should be a dragon of virtue. Under the pretence of extolling prudence and perseverance, he paints money-making as the highest good, and calls it thrift; and the popularity of this class of book is enormous. The heroes are all self-made' men who come to town with that proverbial half-crown which has the faculty of accumulation that used to be confined to snowballs. Like the daughters of the horse-leech, their cry is Give, give,' only instead of blood they want money; and I need hardly say they get it from other people's pockets. Love and friendship are names that have lost their meaning, if they ever had any, with these gentry. They remind one of the miser of old who could not hear a large sum of money mentioned without an acceleration of the action of the heart; and perhaps that is the use of their hearts, which, otherwise, like that of the spleen in other people, must be only a subject of vague conjecture. They live abhorred and die respected; leaving all their heaped-up wealth to some charitable institution, the secretary of which levants with it eventually to the United States.

This last catastrophe, however, is not mentioned in these biographies, the subjects of which are held up as patterns of wisdom and prudence for the rising generation. I shall have left the Midway Inn, thank Heaven, for a residence of smaller dimensions, before it has grown up. Conceive an England inhabited by self-made men!

Has it ever struck you how gloomy is the poetry of the present day? This is not perhaps of very much consequence, since everybody has a great deal too much to do to permit them to read it; but how full of sighs, and groans, and passionate bewailings it is! And also how deuced difficult! It is almost as inarticulate as an Æolian harp, and quite as melancholy. There are one or two exceptions, of course, as in the case of Mr. Calverley and Mr. Locker; but even the latter is careful to insist upon the fact that, like those who have gone before us, we must all quit Piccadilly. At present,' as dear Charles Lamb writes, 6 we have the advantage of them;' but there is no one to remind us of that now, nor is it, as I have said, the general opinion that it is an advantage.

It is this prevailing gloom, I think, which accounts for the enormous and increasing popularity of fiction. Observe how story-telling creeps into the very newspapers (along with their professional fibbing); and, even in the magazines, how it lies down side by side with burning questions' (such as 'Is future punishment eternal?') like the weaned child putting its hand into the cockatrice's den. For your sake, my good fellow, who write stories [here he glowered at me compassionately], I am glad of it; but the fact is of melancholy significance. It means that people are glad to find themselves 'anywhere, anywhere, out of the world,' and (I must be allowed to add) they are generally gratified, for anything less like real life than what some novelists portray it is difficult to imagine.

[Here he stared at me so exceedingly hard, that any one with a less heavenly temper, or who had no material reasons for putting up with it, would have taken his remark as personal, and gone away.]

Another cause of the absence of good fellowship amongst us (he went on) is the growth of education. It sticks like a fungus to everybody, and though, it is fair to say, mostly outside, does a great deal of mischief. The scholastic interest has become so powerful that nobody dares speak a word against it; but the fact is, men are educated far beyond their wits. You can't fill any cup beyond what it will hold, and the little cups are exceedingly numerous. Boys are now crammed (with information) like turkeys (but unfortunately not killed at Christmas), and when they grow up there is absolutely no room in them for a joke. The prigs that frequent my Midway Inn are as the sands in its hour-glass, only with no chance, alas! of their running out. The wisdom of our ancestors limited education, and very wisely, to the three R's; that is all that is necessary for the great. mass of mankind: while the pick of them, with those clamping irons well stuck to their heels, will win their way to the topmost peaks of knowledge.

At the very best—that is to say when it produces anything-what does the most costly education in this country produce in ordinary minds but the deplorable habit of classical quotation? If it could teach them to think—but that is a subject, my dear friend, into which you will scarcely follow me.

[I could have knocked his head off if he had not been so exceptionally stout and strong, and as it was I took up my hat to go, when a thought struck me.]

Among your valuable remarks upon society as at present constituted you have said nothing, my dear sir, about the ladies.'

'I never speak of anything,' he replied with dignity, which I do not thoroughly understand. Man I do know-down to his boots; but woman'-here he sighed and hesitated—'no; I don't know nearly so much of her.'

JAMES PAYN.

EAST ROUMELIA.

Ir is unnecessary and useless now to waste words upon the exploded scheme of what was called a joint or mixed occupation of East Roumelia, for every thinking mind perceived from the first that the execution of such a plan could scarcely be but a mischievous muddle, into which no English government would have been unwary enough to plunge. The artistic skill of Russia was wasted in laying that snare for the country she hates so fixedly, and, however prettily she sketched out the theory, she knew well enough we should never have accepted a scheme every detail of which, as she planned it, was patently impossible in practice. It was indeed manufactured solely for her own profit. Her idea was simply to gain time. That all Russian officials have said in set phrase from the beginning 'après notre départ, le déluge,' we know; and we know too—at least, those of us who have seen the acts and deeds of the Russians in Roumelia know only too well-how energetically and skilfully they have laboured to insure that sequence; the mixed occupation' was invented to enable them to stop and see the fun. Glorious fun it would have been to Prince Dondoukoff et hoc genus, to see the Briton, who with: true Christian charity screamed for joy over the expulsion of the 'hated Turk,' engaged in cutting down the new Bulgarian troops; glorious fun to watch the brethren of those who shouted the welcome of the returning diplomatists now supplanting peace' with the sword, and honour' with broken faith. If our enemies tear up our treaties, we know where we are; but what will become of good faith and honour if every country tears up its own? It is not pleasant to hear what is said of us on the Continent on that score, and it would have been a great misfortune had we been induced to make ourselves more ridiculous by acceding to the joint occupation scheme. That Russian scheme, however, having failed, let us see what remains for us to do in healing the sores of the East.

The unchanged and unchangeable principle of Russia is Might— whether right or not. Brute force, taking advantage of a country bankrupt alike, for the time being, in good government as in money, and encouraged by the rabid exaggeration of party men in England, seized on a fortunate moment for bearing all before her; but the force of

strength had to give way to that of reason; she was compelled to retire. She had, however, accomplished much. For twenty, nay, for twice twenty years, she had been secretly labouring with unwearied skill to mislead the ignorant Bulgarian; like the locust she disdained not the humblest spot in which to lay her poisonous eggs; now, with a fine army, she came to hatch them. The harvest was apparently hers.

Is it any wonder that an astute, shrewd, unprincipled nation such as Russia should desire to obtain the Balkan country for her own, and, like the locust, to devour the Bulgarian people? The religion of their new slaves would, they think, give them very little trouble (in which they are largely mistaken); their language and their habits and customs are cognate, though far from identical. The Russian regards the Bulgarian with an unconcealed but wholly undeserved contempt. Of the two, the Bulgarian has a very superior nature. Uneducated as he is, he is now savage, brutal, and dirty; and he is profoundly ignorant. So is the Russian. But take a fair specimen of each: wash and educate them, and the Bulgarian will be worth two of the other. The Bulgarian is untruthful from the habit of fear, but, relieved of that, he is stolidly upright, full of shrewdness and excellent good sense; he is naturally very industrious, awfully parsimonious, and has an impulse of moral and physical advancement in him which is intensely interesting and admirable. He is, in my opinion, the best of the Slav nations; yet he is the least loveable. He is singularly unaffectionate. I do not hesitate to say there is no European nation with so little natural affection as the Bulgarian. The curious fact is that even a little education seems at once to develope the tender fibre; they become kindly and amiable. They are a dull, sulky-tempered people now; but two or three generations of education will certainly improve that into an animated good temper. Their stingy frugality will become reasonable thrift; their unloving selfishness will melt into kindly goodfellowship. At present they are, one and all, rich and poor, without exception, offensively self-satisfied, supremely self-confident, and full of the most absurd vanity, while they have little of which to be vain. And of course the notice they have lately attracted has greatly increased their self-estimation. Left to the teaching of Russia, this cognate nature will grow into a perfect resemblance to the Russian, whose inflated self-esteem is so unbearably odious; whose ignorance, even when educated, is so astounding; and whose untruthfulness is so boundless. Assisted by Europe, encouraged by the West, the Bulgarians would develope into a solid, valuable people, alike able to govern themselves and to command the respect of that European family of nations of which they will, I thoroughly believe, if kept from Russia, ultimately form a worthy member.

It is our duty to help them to accomplish this. It was our duty

to have helped them long ago as Christians and fellow-citizens of the world; but our countrymen knew nothing of them, thought nothing about them, and did nothing for them; only a few individuals laboured with cordial heartiness to show them the path of progress. Had this continued, and steady wise measures been taken at Constan tinople, the Bulgarians would have developed and gradually liberated themselves in due time, and in an abiding, satisfactory form, very different from the misfortunes that have now come upon them. As to the four hundred years of bloody oppression and murderous tyranny' of which we have heard so much, I utterly and wholly deny it. The Bulgarians were repressed, that is true: they were at so low and brutal a level that they naturally hewed wood and drew water for the race that had conquered them; slowly they began to rise in level, and rise they did, until, unfortunately for them, the dominant race noticed them, and seized on the tool at hand to play it off against another race that was rising also, and a little faster than they were. The encouragement of the Porte undid them, for it drew upon them the attention of the great Czar, and, alas! attracted also his greedy covetousness, besides pointing, as he thought, an easy road to Constantinople. Be it observed it was not Russia that first helped them up, but the Porte, though truly for her own benefit, not theirs. In this, Russia closely resembles her. And then the Bulgarians throve-yes, throve as no mortal beings could thrive had they been as brutally oppressed as it has suited some people to represent them. Just the same were the Irish for nearly three hundred years oppressed by the English; just the same were they subject to an occasional outburst of fanaticism, and just the same did that ill-used people make horrid reprisals. Given the differing status of civilisation, the calamities of 1876 in the one country scarcely equalled those of 1798 in the other. I once read-I think in the Daily News-a list of acts of violence that had happened in European Turkey in the last three hundred years. It was appalling; but a little trouble would have matched a similar list in nearly every country in Europe, the British islands certainly not excepted. Horrible details of this kind are of course very impressive in a speech, and the listeners are seldom quick enough to reflect at the moment that these things are the milestones that mark the progress of civilisation.

Well, the Bulgarians throve, laying field to field and vineyard to vineyard, impossible to a cruelly oppressed people; they became, as they are now, wealthy and comfortable, and constantly able to buy off the depredations of bad governors and rapacious officials. It was terrible to lose the laboriously earned wealth in the shape of bribes; nor was this the worst of the sorrows the Bulgarian had occasionally to bear-I must add only occasionally till quite of late years. No doubt, as in many another case, the trifling annoyances were the most galling; yet the being compelled to wear a fez instead of a