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Loch-Na-Diomhair-The Lake of the Secret. By GEORGE CUPPLES.

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Poet's Corner: or an English Writer's Tomb. By C. A. COLLINS.

Question of The Age-Is it Peace? By T. E. CLIFFE ĻESLIE ..I . .I
Ramsgate Life Boat; A Rescue

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Sonnets. By the REV. C. (TENNYSON) TURNER.↓

Spiritualistic Materialism.-Michelet. By J. M. LUDLOW..

Sport and Natural History, New Books of By HENRY Kingsley

Suffrage, The. The Working Class and the Professional Class. By the REV. F. D.
MAURICE

Swiss-French Literature-Gasparin. By J. M. LUDLOW,

Three Vices of Current Literature.. By The EDITOR,

Tom Brown at Oxford. By the Author of "ToM BROWN'S SCHOOL-Days "-

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Contributors to this Volume.

AUTHOR OF "JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN.”

AUTHOR OF "TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL-DAYS."

AUTHOR OF FIVE YEARS AT AN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY."

COLERIDGE, HERBERT.

COLLINS, CHARLES ALLSTON.

CUPPLES, GEORGE.

DOBELL, SYDNEY.

DOYLE, SIR F. H.

FAWCETT, HENRY.

GARNETT, RICHARD.

GOODWIN, DR., DEAN OF ELY.'

GREG, PERCY.

KINGSLEY, HENRY.

LESLIE, T. E. CLIFFE.

LUDLOW, J. M.

MARTINEAU, JOHN.

MAURICE, REV. F. D.

MASSON, PROFESSOR.

POLE, PROFESSOR, F.R.A.S.

PORTER, W. A.

ROBINSON, REV. H. G.

SAFFI, AURELIO.

SIMEON, CORNWALL.

SMITH, ALEXANDER.

TEMPLER, J. C.

TREVELYAN, G. O.

TURNER, REV. C. (TENNYSON.)

WILSON, PROFESSOR GEORGE.

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DOVE, P. E.

FORSTER, W.

GARNETT, RICHARD.

GREG, PERCY.

HUXLEY, PROFESSOR, F.R.S.

LUDLOW, J. M.

LUSHINGTON, FRANKLIN.

LUSHINGTON, THE LATE HENRY.

MASSON, PROFESSOR.

MAURICE, REV. F. D.

MILNES, R. MONCKTON.

NEALE, E. VANSITTART.

PALGRAVE, F. T.

PATON, CAPTAIN ROBERT.

SMITH, ALEXANDER.

SPENCER, HERBERT.

STEPHENS, F. G.

TENNYSON, ALFRED.'

VENABLES, G. S.J

WILSON, PROFESSOR GEORGE.

[The Editor of MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE cannot undertake to return Manuscripts sent to him.]

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

MAY, 1860.

THREE VICES OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

BY THE EDITOR.

NATURAL and becoming as it is to think modestly of the literary achievements of our own time, in comparison with certain periods of our past literary history, it may yet be asserted with some confidence that in no age has there been so large an amount of real ability engaged in the conduct of British literature as at present. Whether our topmost men are equal in stature to the giants of some former generations, and whether the passing age is depositing on the shelf of our rare national classics masterpieces of matter and of form worthy to rank with those already there, are questions which need not be discussed in connexion with our statement. enough to remember that, for the three hundred publications or so which annually issued from the British press about the middle of the seventeenth century, we now produce every year some five thousand publications of all sorts, and, probing this fleeting mass of contemporary authorship as far round us and in as many directions as we can, in order to appraise its contents, to see, as I believe we should see, that the prodigious increase of quantity has been accompanied by no deterioration of average quality. Lamentations are indeed common over the increase of books in the

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world. This, it is said, is the Mudiaval era. Do not these lamentations proceed, however, on a false view of literature, as if its due limits at any time were to be

No. 7.-VOL. II.

measured by such a petty standard as the faculty of any one man to keep up with it as a reader, or even to survey it as a critic? There is surely a larger view of literature than this-according to which the expression of passing thought in preservable forms is one of the growing functions of the race; so that, as the world goes on, more and ever more of what is remembered, reasoned, imagined, or desired on its surface, must necessarily be booked or otherwise registered for momentary needs and uses, and for farther action, over long arcs of time, upon the spirit of the future. According to this view, the notion of the perseverance of our earth on its voyage ages hereafter with a freight of books increased, by successive additions, incalculably beyond that which already seems an overweight, loses much of its discomfort; nay, in this very vision of our earth as it shall be, carrying at length so huge a registration of all that has transpired upon it, have we not a kind of pledge that the registration shall not have been in vain, and that, whatever catastrophe may await our orb in the farther chances of being, the lore it has accumulated shall not perish, but shall survive or detach itself, a heritage beyond the shipwreck? In plainer argument; although in the immense diffusion of literary capability in these days, there may be causes tending to lower the

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highest individual efforts, is not the diffusion itself a gain, and is it after all consistent with fact that the supposed causes are producing the alleged effect? That there is a law of vicissitude in the intellectual power of a nation; that, as there are years of good crop and years of bad crop in the vegetable world, so there are ages in a nation's life of superexcellent nerve and faculty, and again ages intellectually feeble, seems as satisfactory a generalization as any of the rough historical generalizations we yet have in stock; but that this law of vicissitude implies diminished capacity in the highest individuals according as the crowd increases, does not appear. The present era of British literature, counting from the year 1789, is as rich, as brilliant with lustrous names, as any since the Elizabethan era and its continuation, from 1580 to 1660; nay, if we strike out from the Elizabethan firmament its majestic twin-luminaries, Shakespeare and Bacon, our firmament is the more brilliantly studded -studded with the larger stars. Nothing but a morose spirit of disregard for what is round us, or an excess of the commendable spirit of affection for the past, or, lastly, an utter ignorance of the actual books of the past which we do praise, prevents us from seeing that many of the poets and other authors even of the great Elizabethan age, who retain their places in our collections, or that, still more decidedly, many of the celebrities of that later age which is spanned by Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," were but poetasters and poor creatures, compared with relative authors of the last seventy years. Test the matter roughly in what is called our current literature. What an everlasting fuss we do make about Junius and his letters! And yet there is no competent person but will admit that these letters will not stand a comparison, in any respect of real in tellectual merit, with many of the leading articles which are written overnight at present by contributors to our daily newspapers, and skimmed by us at breakfast next morning.

It is, therefore, in no spirit of depre

ciation towards our current literature,

that we venture to point out certain of its wide-spread vices. its wide-spread vices. The vices which

we select are not those which might turn out to be the deepest and most radical; they are simply those that cannot fail to catch the eye from the extent of surface which they cover.

1. There is the vice of the Slip-shod or Slovenly. In popular language it may be described as the vice of bad workmanship. Its forms are various. The lowest is that of bad syntax, of lax concatenation of clauses and sentences. It would be easy to point out faults of this kind which reappear in shoals in each day's supply of printed matterfrom the verbs misnominatived, and the clumsy "whiches" looking back ruefully for submerged antecedents, so common in the columns of our hasty writers, up to the unnecessarily repeated "that" after a conditional clause which some writers insert with an infatuated punctuality, and even the best insert occasionally. Should the notice of a matter so merely mechanical seem too trivial, there is, next, that form of the slip-shod which consists in stuffing out sentences with certain tags and shreds of phraseology lying vague about society, as bits of undistributed type may lie about a printing-room. "We are free to confess," "we candidly acknowledge," "will well repay perusal," "we should heartily rejoice," "did space permit,"

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causes beyond our control," "if we may be allowed the expression,' "commence hostilities"-what are these and a hundred other such phrases but undistributed bits of old speech, like the "electric fluid" and the "launched into eternity" of the penny-a-liners, which all of us are glad to clutch, to fill a gap, or to save the trouble of composing equivalents from the letters? To change the figure (see, I am at it myself!), what are such phrases but a kind of rhetorical putty with which cracks in the sense are stopped, and prolongations formed where the sense has broken short? Of this kind of slipshod in writing no writers are more guilty than those who have formed their

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