with the exception of 32 lakhs, or about £300,000. "The balances,' remarks Sir George Couper, "represent the amount suspended." The Lieut.-Governor is obliged to admit "that much of the money paid into the State treasury by landlords was borrowed from money-lenders and probably the difficulty of tiding over the hard times in the cold weather of 1877-78 was aggravated." Yet the Board of Revenue had prohibited the collection of the land-tax from those who were compelled to borrow in order to satisfy the demand. And Mr. Auckland Colvin, late Collector of Bijnour, and now in the service of the Khedive of Egypt, says that in spite of the relief afforded by the suspension of half the demand in his district "money had to be borrowed on a large scale at a high rate of interest, and much jewellery was sold or pawned. Registered deeds show a very heavy increase, and so do transfers of property. A calamity such as that of 1877-78, partial though it was, guts a district; embarrassments have been renewed or created, which, in too many cases, will never be cleared off. Add to this the mortality and the emigration, and we shall find, as the famine clears away, a population reduced, greatly impoverished, disheartened, and dislocated; a proprietary loaded with fresh debt; and eventually an increase in the transfer of land from the agricultural to the non-agricultural class. This is our present aspect and prospect, suspension of Land Revenue lessens the distress, but can only mitigate it." It would be impossible to express in more forcible language the mischief caused by "the rigorous exaction of the Land Revenue" in 1877-78. One fact still remains to be recorded in order to complete the picture. While wringing out of its miserable subjects the gigantic sum of nearly £2,000,000, the amount expended by the Government of India on famine relief was £57,000; and of this, hardly any until Mr. Knight's letters to the Statesman compelled them to depart from the policy of inhuman apathy which, till that time, they had resolutely followed. Mr. Elliott, in concluding his letter, says: "I think I may now venture to say that I have disproved every charge brought by Colonel Osborn against the Government of India in respect to the drought of 1877 in the North-West Provinces. It would be as easy for me to dispose of every statement he has made in regard to the Afghan War, the Famine Insurance Fund, and the Cotton Duties." In reply, I think I may venture to say that if Mr. Elliott's method of disposing of these latter statements at all resembles that which he has employed with reference to the North-West Famine, their accuracy may be regarded as unquestionable. I have now done my part. It remains for the Parliament of the Empire to do theirs. It will be idle to take credit. to ourselves for the equity and benevolence with which we govern India, if men responsible for what I have described escape without censure or punishment of any kind. R. D. OSBORN. THE NEW FICTION. IT The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. By Georg› Meredith. David Copperfield. By Charles Dickens. Villette. By Currer Bell. Sylvia's Lovers. By Mrs. Gaskell. Three Brothers. By Mrs. Oliphant. Madcap Violet. By William Black. Far from the Madding Crow 1. By Thomas Hardy, Cripps the Carrier. By R. D. Blackmore. Daniel Deronda. By George Eliot. The Heir of Redclyffe. By Miss Yonge. Alec Forbes of Howglen. By George MacDonal 1. T has been more than once remarked that when history came to be properly written it would eclipse in attractiveness all the fiction that could be invented and put into books; and, indeed, there is some such saying to be found either in the writings or the reported words of Macaulay. That distinguished man and delightful historian had his own reasons for knowing that the biography of nations might be found interesting even by readers outside the class of students proper. But the day is yet far off when the historian shall jostle the novelist out of his place. Within the last twenty years the novel proper has undergone a development which may still be pronounced astonishing even by those who have been accustomed to consider it, and has taken rank side by side-at no humiliating distance, though, of course, not close with poetry and philosophy, formally so entitled. It is far otherwise than sarcastically true that "Romola" and "Daniel Deronda" cannot be called light reading; and, passing away from fiction of that graver sort, it is abundantly clear that not even yet has criticism done all the work which the New Fiction has cut out for it in the way of widening its scope and improving the instruments by which it endeavours to trace the more subtle affiliations of literature. It may almost be said that there is now a branch of criticism specially, if not exclusively, applying to novels; and, perhaps, it may be added that the critics who cultivate this branch of work do not yet feel themselves quite up to their work. In fact, the New Fiction is a product for which the canons were not ready, and some of the best things said about it and what it foretells are little better than self-conscious talk to fill up time. Of course the notion that the historian could ever supersede the novelist is absurd. However little short of chaotic our present criticism may be in such matters, there can be no risk in laying it down that the historic faculty and the poetic faculty are two very different things. So much to begin with; and it carries us a long way. Macaulay had poetic faculty, though it was very narrow; but it is certain he would have made a grotesque failure of a novel, if he had attempted one. Lord Brougham did write a novel, but it was rather aborted than produced; and those who have never seen it may be thankful for a mercy not small-there are things one would much rather never have known. What sort of novel would Mr. Grote have written? But novelists have written history, and Mr. Thackeray, who contemplated writing it, would · possibly have succeeded. We say possibly; because his Lectures on the Four Georges, and on the Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, do not encourage one to dispense with phrases of conjecture in this matter. That George Eliot could write history is certain, and it would surprise no one if she were to leave some really monumental work of that order behind her. Bulwer-Lytton did write history, and not unsuccessfully. So did the author of "Caleb Williams" and "St. Leon." If Defoe could not have succeeded as an historian, it would only have been because he was such "a matter-of-lie man" (to quote Charles Lamb's phrase), that he could never copy straight on. "Is that all ?" asked the Scotch advocate, when his client had apparently completed his statement of his case-"Is that all ?" And the client replied, "Ou ay, man; that's a' the truth; ye maun put the lees till't yoursel." It is to be feared that Defoe, while he was telling his true historical story, would, by the necessity of his nature, have added "lees till't" in abundance. And as this brings us up to a point, we may as well stop in an enumeration which might easily be carried on to an indefinite length. It Let a man tell what story he will, he is sure to add "lees till't," though unconsciously. Lord Macaulay did it in his historical and biographical writings, and no man has done it more than Mr. Carlyle. The involuntary false touches come out of a writer's idiosyncrasy. But it is not here that we arrive at the essential difference between the genius of the novelist and that of the historian. Even when the writer is fond of taking an historical basis for his work-like Sir Walter Scott, for example-his manner is obviously different. Nor does mere excess of detail or picturesqueness make all the difference. lies largely in the filling up and in the pervading air of personal intimacy which belongs to the novel, as distinguished from the history. You are supposed to know how the historian came by his knowledge, and when he makes a fancy picture he tells you so, directly or indirectly. Not so the novelist. The novelist tells you with impossible minuteness the most secret soliloquy of a man's mind; has unrestrained access to a lady's boudoir, and will tell you all she did there at a given time, though the door was locked, and the curtains drawn. From end to end of his story he does not give you his authority, and you are not expected to ask for it. On the contrary, that would destroy the illusion. The whole of his work consists of digested and transformed experience presented to you under arrangements new to himself. It is all true, except as to "the way it is put," and you feel that it is true— that is, if the work be good of the kind; but you cannot "condescend upon particulars" as to when and where it all happened. Of course, we are now taking only a general view of the matter-there are plenty of books coming under the category of the novel which are more or less historical; but it is admitted that the task of writing a work of fiction avowedly founded on fact is one of extreme delicacy. It is upon the point of filling up that we easily arrive at perhaps the most obvious difference between novel and history. It is quite certain that Napoleon dined; and that he had many interestingly painful discussions with Josephine before putting her away. In point of fact, our interest in Napoleon was so great that the driest and least expressive of historians gave us a good deal of personal gossip about him, and in proportion, as we come to feel intimate with a personage, we excuse such writing. But to introduce it into history, if the scale of the writing be large, is a difficult task, and we are sure to be sensible of a sort of jolt or jerk in passing from one passage to another, unless the artist be one of consummate skill. If a novelist had conceived a Napoleon, and had introduced the repudiation of Josephine and the marriage to Marie Louise, he would have told the story by fixing on occasions and scenes unimportant in themselves, and filling up till he interested us; at the same time telling the story in the most complete manner conceivable. You would have been introduced, perhaps, to the lady and the Little Corporal taking coffee together, the most insignificant and domestic scene in the world,—and then you would have been told all the conversation: how Napoleon knit his brow at a particular moment; how Josephine panted with suppressed anger and suppressed affection, but put her hand to her left side and kept the tears down; how the coffee got cold; how the bread-and-butter was left untasted; or how one little slice was eaten as a feint. You would have had as much of the humour and the pathos as the novelist's imagination of what passed (all in the most minute detail) could help you to; and by the time you got to the end of the chapter you would find you had passed a crisis of the story. Anybody who has never done such a thing before, but will upon this hint examine the structure of a modern novel, will be struck, above all things, with the manner in which the main story is left to be gathered from details in themselves commonplace. "Jane was giddy and Alfred was irritable; they had a quarrel and parted last June." That would be in the manner of the historian, and it would be sufficient for his purpose; but, of course, the novelist would fill up that outline, while the historian was off and away to something else with which the quarrel between Jane and Alfred stood, we will suppose, in some large relation. It is a pleasant exercise to analyze a good novel in this way to take the chapters one by one, and note what they are made of; how little "incident" and how much story. We undertake to affirm that the result of such an analysis will invariably be a surprise to the reader-it should, of course, be made after he has read the novel, and if it is a familiar one, so much the better. But let us listen to a few sentences from the prelude to Mr. George Meredith's last novel "The Egoist." "The world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the book needs a powerful compression. The realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. . . . . We have the malady, whatever may be the cure, or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science introduced us to our o'er-hoary ancestry them in the Oriental posture; whereupon we set up a primæval chattering to rival the Amazon forest nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease was hanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail. We had it fore and aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we got from Science. "Art is the specific. . . . . In Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing out of disdain under the stroke of honourable laughter; and Ariel released by Prospero's wand from the fetters of the damned with Sycorax. And this laughter of reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty spring deciding for summer. liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society: a low as of the udderful cow past milking hour! O for a titled ecclesiastic to curse, to excommunication, that unholy thing! So far an enthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing. You hear it giving the delicate spirit his "Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos, and we are not totally deficient of pathos." Mr. George Meredith is an original writer of fiction, who has never quite fallen into the ranks of the order; indeed, he is perhaps more of a poet, specifically, than of a novelist, and above all things capable of being a humourist of the Shandean school. If that novel of his with which, for convenience, we have headed our list, had been written as a series of sketches or "magic lantern slides," to use Coleridge's phrase concerning Goethe's "Faust," it would have been more successful; but he was bound down to the forms of the novel proper, and the need of continuity of narration has strained the genius of the author of "The Shaving of Shagpat"--that very delightful book. But it would not be easy to find a modern writer of fiction better entitled than he is to express opinions like those we have quoted. At all events, that curious passage concerning the Book of Earth, which is "full of the world's wisdom," and the dictum that "the realistic method. . . . is mainly accountable for our present branfulness" and |