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CHINA.

The young Emperor of China was married on the 16th of October. The name of his Empress is Aluté; she is a Mongol by descent. The ceremonies and superstitions attendant on the marriage were largely chronicled in the current literature of the day. The chief significance of the marriage, as concerns the foreign politics of China, is that the Emperor will have to assume the reins of power henceforth, and that one of the first questions he will have to decide on his own responsibility is the admittance of foreign ambassadors to audience.

One important political transaction had been accomplished this year by China in the treaty and trade regulations concluded with Japan, which, though showing progress in some ideas of civilization, still exhibited much of the jealously restrictive policy usual among these Eastern nations.

JAPAN.

In Japan, meanwhile, a very remarkable spirit of reform and progression in Western ideas has been manifesting itself. The Embassy which was sent by the Mikado, or Emperor of Japan, to visit the seats of Government in Europe and America, had it in charge, it is said, among other things, to collect materials for the elaboration of a new religion, to be prepared, with the sovereign's supervision and sanction, for the acceptance of his people!

On the 12th of June a railway, the first constructed in Japan, was opened between Yokohama and Shinagawa. Among other things, the Mikado has devoted much of his attention to education. It is said that he has established in Yedo alone five colleges, each containing from 1500 to 3000 pupils, and a new military academy. Among the subjects taught at these institutions are all the branches of science and several foreign languages. Twenty-three French professors have been engaged for the military academy, and ten English professors for the naval school; and twenty Bavarian shoemakers and ten brewers are to be employed as teachers in the industrial establishments.

RETROSPECT

OF

LITERATURE, ART, AND SCIENCE IN 1872.

LITERATURE.

THE whole number of books published in the United Kingdom this year, according to the "Publishers' Circular," amounted to 4814, of which 3424 were new books, 1100 new editions, and 290 American importations. Of new works in theology there were 590; of novels, tales, and works of fiction, 468; of poetry and the drama, 272; of voyages, travels, and geographical research, 172. We shall proceed to mention some of the works which attracted most attention from the public, or which seem otherwise to have special claims to notice-basing our report in great measure on the current criticism of the journals. And first for biography.

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The literary gossip of the London drawing-rooms during the early weeks of this year found a pleasant topic in the Recollections of a Past Life," published, after it had been three years in private circulation, by the octogenarian physician, Sir Henry Holland, whose title to notoriety has long rested not more upon his professional ministrations among the upper ten thousand, than upon his active interest in science and literature, and his indefatigable energy as a traveller over almost every visitable portion of the earth's surface. His life commenced before the first French Revolution, and, directly or indirectly, he became mixed up with the historical events of his era, and with almost all the personages who made it famous. In the course of his long professional life he made it a rule to spend two months of every year in foreign travel. One of his early tours on the Continent was made in the capacity of physician to the Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Caroline. In the course of time he visited every capital of Europe, most of them repeatedly, made eight voyages to the United States, travelling over more than 26,000 miles of the American Continent, one voyage to Jamaica and other West Indian islands, was four times in the East, twice in Iceland, twice in Russia, repeatedly in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, besides making voyages to the Canary Isles, Madeira, &c., "and other excursions which it would be tedious to enumerate." So far from injuring him professionally, Sir Henry Holland says he found these yearly excursions beneficial in every way, and he notes how of late years, by the aid of the telegraph, he had been able to make engagements for the very hour of his return :

"On the day, or even hour, of reaching home from long and distant journeys I have generally resumed my wonted professional work. . . . I recollect having found a patient waiting in my room when I came back from those mountain heights-not more than 200 miles from the frontiers of Persia where the 10,000 Greeks uttered their joyous cry on the sudden sight of the Euxine. The same thing once happened to me in returning from Egypt and Syria, when I found a carriage waiting my arrival at London-bridge, to take me to a consultation in Sussex-square, the communication in each case being made from points on my homeward journey. More than once, in returning from America, I have begun a round of visits from the Euston Station."

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As may be supposed, he was often brought into connexion with incidents more or less curious in an historical point of view. He was in the Peninsula when the Duke of Wellington "was preparing the campaign which won the battle of Salamanca and carried the English army to Madrid;" and while in Portugal he had the advantage of being ranked and provided for as a major on the commissariat list. When in Turkey he was summoned almost daily to the palace by Ali Pasha, who on one occasion asked him whether he knew of any poison which, put on the mouthpiece of a pipe or given in coffee, might slowly and silently kill, leaving no note behind. The instant and short answer I gave," says Sir Henry, "that as a physician I had studied how to save life, not to destroy it,' was probably, as I judged from his face, faithfully translated to him. He quitted the subject abruptly, and never afterwards reverted to it." Sir Henry was at Madrid when the news arrived of the great victory of Vittoria, and a fortnight later he visited the battle-field. Once at Naples he was at a great ball given by Count Mosburg to the Neapolitan Court, the Princess of Wales, and many foreigners, when intelligence came of the escape of Napoleon from Elba. He was at Genoa when Pope Pius VII. landed under English protection and passed to the palace prepared for him guarded by files of English soldiers. He was at Prague when the first news reached him of the battle of Waterloo, and was afterwards present at the church thanksgivings for the victory held in the Prussian capital; and he saw Paris for the first time when it was garrisoned by the English and Prussian armies. In later life the writer's interest in the events of the day and in foreign travel continued unabated. He relates how he was twice in Algeria during the French war of conquest there, "on one occasion joining at Blidah the march of a corps under Marshal Bugeaud against certain Arab tribes near Medeah;" how at the age of seventy-five he was an active spectator of the great civil war in America; how, when on the verge of his eighty-second year, he again visited the States, and travelled in five weeks more than 3500 miles; and how, in 1871, he visited Iceland for the second time, and was able to ride for nearly twenty miles. Nor when at home has Sir Henry's life touched at fewer points of interest. He attended professionally six English Prime Ministers. Of Canning he says:—

"On my return to London I hastened to Lord Liverpool, to report to him on what he himself strongly expressed to me as a matter vital to his Government. Having satisfied his inquiries as to Mr. Canning, he begged me to feel his own pulse-the first time I had ever done so. Without giving details, I may say that I found it such as to lead me to suggest an immediate

appeal to his medical advisers for careful watch over him. The very next morning Lord Liverpool underwent the paralytic stroke which closed his political life."

Six months afterwards Canning himself was no more:

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'Succeeding to Lord Liverpool's place as Premier, when exhausted by recent illness, and harassed by unceasing toil and turmoil, personal as well as political, from the moment of his taking the office, an attack of internal inflammation came on, under which he rapidly sank. I scarcely quitted him during the last two days of his life."

In a note Sir Henry records that Mr. Canning said to him, while sitting by his bedside in this his dying illness, "I have struggled against this long, but it has conquered me at last."

Sir Henry draws between Lord Palmerston and Lord Aberdeen the following comparison:

"Without infringing on my rule of abstinence from professional anecdote, I may briefly notice the singular contrast of natural temperament between Lord Palmerston and Lord Aberdeen. The inborn vivacity and optimism of the former pervaded his life, both public and private, preserving him in great degree from many of those anxieties which press, more or less, upon every step of a Minister's career. He had a singular power of clear and prompt decision, as I had often occasion to know, and was spared that painful recurrence to foregone doubt which torments feebler minds. Lord Aberdeen looked at objects and events through a more gloomy atmosphere. He was wanting in that elasticity of body and spirit so influential in a public career. I recollect on one occasion to have seen them as patients in immediate succession for several days together, when this contrast was presented under strongly-marked colours, which illness more especially discloses."

Lady Clementina Davies's "Recollections of Society in France and England" run on a parallel line with those of Sir Henry Holland's earlier life. Belonging to a well-defined and limited section of society, with traditions and associations special and romantic, Lady Clementina might, we fancy, have made her "Recollections" more interesting than they are, had she known how to throw a little colour, not of invention, but of imagination, over the bare record of facts. Her father was titularly Lord Maurice Drummond; her grandfather was Earl of Perth and Duke of Melfort, the latter title having been given in the first instance by James II., as well as that of Duke of Perth, to one of his most faithful adherents in exile. After the English Revolution of 1688 the Earl of Melfort was allotted a suite of apartments at St. Germain immediately beneath those occupied by the King, and these rooms were tenanted by his descendants up to the date of the French Revolution of 1789, when their connexion with the French Court compelled them to leave France. At St. Germain Lady Clementina Davies was born, and there the earlier years of her childhood were passed, her family having returned upon the advice of Talleyrand, an old friend of her father's.

While wishing, however, that Lady Clementina had from tradition made us a little more at home with Jacobites as Jacobites, in a Jacobite home, it is fair to say that her personal recollections refer mostly to times and scenes in which anything like positive Jacobite colour would be out of place. She

arrived in England in the first year of the present century. Afterwards her father went to reside in Edinburgh. There she fell in with all the notabilities who combined to make the Scottish capital so brilliant a rendezvous for many years. The Comte d'Artois, then residing at Holyrood, Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble, Mrs. Jordan, Walter Scott, figure in her pages. We understand that her want of reticence in some of the anecdotes of private life told about this period have given no small offence in the northern capital. From Edinburgh Lady Clementina repaired to London with her father in 1814, when the fall of Napoleon had been succeeded by the return of the Bourbons. Louis XVIII. was accompanied from Hartwell by his niece-hisAntigone as he called her the Duchess d'Angoulême, daughter of Louis XVI., and generally spoken of in Europe as "The Orphan of the Temple." It is amusing to read that, as "the elder of the two surviving brothers of 'Louis the Martyr' was not a hero in appearance, the Legitimists in France, where tradition still clung to the warlike deeds of the Bourbons in bygone times, felt it expedient to prepare the minds of the people for the sight of a king whose infirm legs were cased in red velvet gaiters, whose body, no longer slender, was buttoned up in a blue surtout, and who wore on his head a round English hat." She was present at most of the festivities which were held in Paris to celebrate the Restoration. At nearly all the best frequented soirées roulette was the favourite, if not the principal, event of the evening; and the Marquis d'Ivry, who was appointed by Government to preside at the ceremony, went from house to house with his "little wheel," much in the same way as less respectable caterers for the amusement of our own sporting public travel from one race-meeting to another. She was in Paris on the 20th of March, when Louis XVIII. fled before the advancing armies of Napoleon, and was residing at Versailles with her father when the news of Waterloo reached them in the shape of some wild Cossacks galloping down the avenues of the Grand Monarque. She was in Paris also at the time of the Duc de Berri's assassination, and describes graphically the scene around his death-bed in the Opera House-a scene, by-the-bye, which had been still more powerfully described by an English lady of older date, Horace Walpole's friend, Miss Berry. Lady Clementina arranges her anecdotes with some disregard of chronology. Her second volume opens with a description of the first representation of Voltaire's "Irene " at the Théâtre Français.

A busy diplomatist's experiences are before us in the "Diaries and Letters of Sir George Jackson, K.C.H., from the Peace of Amiens to the Battle of Talavera." Mr. Jackson began life as an attaché to the suite of his brother Francis, employed as British Envoy in the negotiations which led first to the conclusion and then to the rupture of the Peace of Amiens. In 1806 he was himself sent on a confidential mission to the Court of Berlin. Afterwards he acted diplomatically under his brother again, during the expedition against Copenhagen: then under Mr. Frere in Spain. He remained in the public service till 1859, and died in 1861, at the age of seventy-six. His sketches of Paris during the Consulate are marked by great shrewdness and vivacity, and form perhaps the most generally amusing part of these volumes. He thus describes the hero of the hour :

:

"I was much struck by the personal appearance of Bonaparte; for the caricatures, and the descriptions which the English newspapers delight to

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