The minor tone which runs through all the Scotch ballads and songs has a similar effect. We discover it continually in Burns, and it runs through all the ballads, ancient and modern, in the collections of Scott and Motherwell. This minor is very perceptible in the following sweet and simple song of Sanibert's=

'Afore the Lammas tide

Had dun'd the birken tree,
In a' our water side

Nae wife was blest like me:

A kind gudeman, and twa

Sweet bairns were round me here;

But they're a' ta'en awa'

Sin' the fa' of the year.

I ettle whiles to spin,

But wee wee patterin' feet

Come rinnin' out and in,

And these I first maun greet:

I ken its fancy a',

And faster rows the tear,
That my a' duined awa'

In the fa' o' the year.'

Charles Kingsley, with much power and great earnestness, has written some of the most foolish and falsest things of contemporary literature. We must, however, accord him the credit of having surpassed all the moderns in the successful imitation of the naive pathos of the old ballad. We can remember with vivid distinctness what a gush of tears and choking swelling of the heart it gave us when, long years ago, in reading that tu-, multuous parody of Thomas Carlyle and Ebenezer Elliot'Alton Locke'-we came to the exquisite ballad-' the Sandsof Dee.' The pathos of one verse is ever fresh in our minds:

'O is it weed, or fish, or floating hair,

A tress o' golden hair,

O' drowned maiden's hair,

Above the nets at sea?

Was never salmon yet that shone so fair,

Among the stakes on Dee.'

The pathos of circumstance is beautifully illustrated in Keats" 'Ode to a Nightingale', in which the poet, weak and dying, wanders off from his present state on the wings of raptured

dreams, charmed by the music, blissful, unconscious until, suddenly, he wakes himself, like a dreamer indeed, with uttering the word 'forlorn', and presto! the vision flutters off and he is himself again—his own unhappy self--

'Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self.'

The involved, harsh style of the Brownings, painful with excess of thought, seldom gives proper scope to the pathetic. On some simple subjects, however, the wife has written touchingly, as for instance, in Only a Curl':

'Oh children!-I never lost one,

Yet my arm's round my own little son,
And Love knows the secret of Grief.

'And I feel what it must be and is,
When God draws a new angel so

Through the house of a man up to His,
With a murmur of music you miss,

And a rapture of light you forego.'

Robert Browning, a great poet-one of the masters indeedhas never done himself entire justice, because he has let his sense of beauty lie in continual subjection to his sense of power. If he could make his language as pliant to his genius as his thought is, he would be the rightful successor of Shakspeare. In the Blot on the Scutcheon, a drama strangely vigorous, full of elevated fancy, and poignant pathos, a poem indeed worthy of a better day and a more poetic age, in that scene of agony where Tresham has discovered Mertoun, and they fight, and the latter falls, there occurs one of the most masterly touches of dramatic pathos ever written. We know nothing superior to it, except Macduff's terrible parenthesis: 'He hath no children!' But that is sublime in its terror, while this is pathos of the purest and most wonderful sort:

'Tresham. You are not hurt?
Mertoun. You'll hear me now!

Tresh.

Mer.

But rise!

Ah, Tresham, say I not "you'll hear me now!"
And what procures a man the right to speak
In his defence before his fellow-man,

But I suppose-the thought that presently

One can half fancy he sees Tresham's shudder of remorse.

In Mr. Tennyson's 'Enoch Arden,'-to worthily conclude a long article,-occurs a passage of exceedingly pure and simple pathos, which nevertheless affords us an opportunity to point out exactly the distinctive difference between the ancient and the modern treatment of the pathetic in poetry. Enoch, dying, has sworn the garrulous old hostess to secrecy until his death. Then Enoch, rolling his grey eyes upon her, "Did you know Enoch Arden of this town?" "Know him?" she said, "I knew him far away. Ay, ay, I mind him coming down the street; Held his head high, and cared for no man, hie." Slowly and sadly Enoch answer'd her : "His head is low, and no man cares for him.

I think I have not three days more to live:
I am the man !”

It is difficult to find fault with verse so perfect and so sweet as this; but, had Homer or Chaucer been telling the tale, they would not have introduced the words 'Slowly and sadly', for the simple reason that they would have trusted to the reader's apprehension to understand that Enoch could not have spoken in any other wise., It is the excess of self-consciousness which marks the difference between the ancient and the modern poet, and in spite of the deepest feeling and the most consummate taste, is able to mar more or less the best efforts the latter can put forth.

ART. III-1. Voyage a Madagascar et aux Iles Comares. par B. F. Leguéval de Lacombe. Paris. 1840.

2. The Martyr Church: a narration of the Introduction, Progress, and Triumph of Christianity in Madagascar. By the Rev. William Ellis. London. 1870.

3. Madagascar and its People. Notes of a few years' residence. With a Sketch of the History, Position, and Prospects of Mission Work amongst the Malagasy. By James Sibree, Jr. Religious Tract Society. 1870.

4. Relation d'un voyage à Tananarivo, à l'époque du couronnement de Redama II. par Le T. R. P. Jouen. Préfet Apostolique de Madagascar. Paris. 1864.

93

To find any parallel to the rapid progress of Christianity in Madagascar we must go back to the, earliest ages of the Church, and the labors of the Apostles in Jerusalem and Judea, when three thousand converts were made in one day,' and 'the Lord added daily to the Church such as should be saved', and 'believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of men and women.' A vast island, 950 miles long by an average of 300 broad, not unaptly called the Great Britain of Africa, containing a population of more than ten millions of inhabitants, has been, within the short period of eight years, converted into a Christian kingdom, its previous condition having been one of bigoted idolatry. And all this apparently the result of the labors of a few zealous European missionaries! There surely must have been other causes at work to bring about so sudden and complete a social and religious revolution. Let us endeavor to trace them.

In order to do this it will be necessary to notice briefly some of the salient points in the history of the island, having reference to the early attempts of Europeans to introduce Christianity.

1 Acts II.: 41.

2

Ibid. 47.

3

Ibid. V.: 14.

What the island was before the Portuguese first visited it (in 1506), matters little. They claimed the honor of having 'discovered' it, although it had been well known to the Moors and Arabs for centuries previously, and a considerable commerce was carried on by them with the ports on the North-west coast. It was known to the celebrated Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, who calls it Magaster and Madeigascar. Subsequent researches have, indeed, proved that Madagascar was originally peopled by Africans, especially by tribes resembling the Gallas; but these aborigines were at a remote period subdued by the Malays of Eastern India. The superposing of this conquering race upon the inferior African one, is a fact that must be borne in mind constantly in treating of the Malagasy. Distinct populations, more or less numerous, are spread over the island, but though they differ from each other in several respects, they can be classified under one or the other of these types, Malayan or African, even though much intermixed. In some, the unmistakable flat nose, thick lips, and woolly hair of the negro predominate and they use words of African origin. In others, the olive complexion, long and straight black hair, and language and manners, indicate plainly a Malayan origin. According to Lacombe, the fact of a Malayan population being found in Madagascar, though extraordinary, is easily accounted for by popular tradition.

5

He says that it was not because they were driven into the island by a tempest that they made their appearance there, but it was because, having experienced mariners, they sailed thither purposely. His exact words are: Ce ne fut pas la tempête qui porta dans la grande ile les enfants de l'Archipel Indien. Peuple navigateur et hardi, les Malais arrivérent á Madagascar sur une flotte nombreuse et dépossédèrent ou enterminérent la race indigène connue sans le nom de Vazimbas, dont les usages et les grossières superstitions, tels que la tradition nous les rapporte, ont une si grande ressemblance avec ceux des sauvages Zimbas (peuples de l'Afrique que l'on croit être les mêmes que les Gallas) que l'on ne doit pas hésiter les à considérer comme Voyages de Mirc› P›»l», Vol. I. of the Memoires de la Sit Geographic, p. 232. 5 Vol. I., p. 11.