From The Spectator. MR. KINGSLEY'S WATER-BABIES.* MR. KINGSLEY'S genius is so remarkable for its sympathy with the irrational forms of animal life, and the rational element in it is so often merged in a sort of noble but furious bark at what he dislikes, that we seldom read his tales without a feeling that the ideas with which he begins, often subtle and fine enough, are sure to tail off into something half animal before the conclusion. In this fairy story, begun with a clear purpose enough, the waterdog in Mr. Kingsley has prevailed more than usually early in the book, and before the end of it we have almost literally nothing left but the swishing of his wet tail, his floundering in the water, and the deep bay of his liberal conservatism. He has prefixed a kind of warning to the critics which would appear to deprecate any remarks we may have to offer on this eccentric gambol of his genius :"Hence, unbelieving Sadducees, And less believing Pharisees, With dull conventionalities; And leave a country Muse at ease To play at leap-frog, if she please, With children and realities." Well, we have no objection to Mr. Kingsley's freaks either with children or realities; but we rather wish that when he is playing at leap-frog with children he would suit the dimensions of his realities to his small play-fellows, and not insist on their taking such tremendously high metaphysical backs, at times, which are certainly quite beyond the little arms of his infantine friends. He dedicates the book to his youngest son, Grenville Arthur, with the motto tale a good fairy tale for children,—for we do not deny that it had an idea; but if not, as we feel tolerably confident, why, then we arraign Mr. Kingsley of that half-animal impatience which cannot be satisfied with working out patiently a single distinct idea,—but must interpolate arrogant inarticulate barks at a hundred things which have no business at all in his tale, and tumble head over heels in scores of unfit places just because there and then his intellect feels inclined for a somerset of which neither men nor children will appreciate the fun. The purpose of the tale, and it was a fine one,-seems to have been to adapt Mr. Darwin's theory of the natural selection of species to the understanding of children, by giving it an individual, moral, and religious, as well as a mere specific and scientific application. He took the watery world, principally because he knows it so well, and because the number of transformations which go on in it are so large, and so easily capable of a semi-moral significance, that it served best to illustrate his purpose. For example, the specific difference between salmon and trout, Mr. Kingsley interprets as a difference between enterprise and industry on the one hand, and stupid greediness on the other, as shown in this conversation between his water-baby and the salmon : 666 "Why do you dislike the trout so?' asked Tom. tion them, if we can help it; for I am sorry 'My dear, we do not ever mento say they are relations of ours who do us no credit. A great many years ago they were just like us: but they were so lazy, and cowardly, and greedy, that instead of going down to the sea every year to see the world and grow strong and fat, they chose to stay and poke about in the little streams and eat worms and grubs; and they are very properly punished for it; for they have grown ugly and brown and spotted and small; and are actually so degraded in their tastes, that they will eat our children.' “Come, read me my riddle, my good little man; If you cannot read it, no grown-up folk can,' and we are quite content to abide by Grenville Arthur's judgment. If he understands the joke about the Gairfowl's objecting to marry his deceased wife's sister, about the whales " butting at each other with their ugly noses day and night from year's end to The same general drift is intended to peryear's end," like "our American cousins,' vade the book, which contains numberless about the "abolition of the Have-his-carcase hints that wherever moral qualities, or the Act," and the "Indignation Meetings,"- -or germs of moral qualities, begin, there, at the Back-stairs way out of Hell, or the Hip- least, is a turning point of natural developpopotamus major in the brain,—or a hundred ment or degradation in the individual, and others, we will pronounce Mr. Kingsley's thence also in the species. Thus Mr. Kingsley hints that the specific difference between Baby. By the Rev. Charles Kingsley. With two the Irish and Saxons may be originally rooted illustrations by J. Noel Paton, R.S.A. Macmillan. in moral, more than in physical distinctions, *The Water-Babies. A Fairy Tale for a Land and might be ultimately traced to the love of scriptive efforts. We have room but for a giving "a pleasant answer," if we take into short passage:— account the long accumulations of generations "But out of the water he dared not put of dispositions of the same sort. Again the his head; for the rain came down by bucketsGairfowls are meant to be the types of races ful, and the hail hammered like shot on the who die out through mere traditional pride, stream, and churned it into foam; and soon from refusing to avail themselves of the alli- the stream rose, and rushed down, higher and ance of fresh blood, and determining to stand higher, and fouler and fouler, full of beetles, all alone on the precedents and etiquettes of and sticks and straws, and worms, and addle eggs and wood-lice, and leeches, and odds and ancestral usage. The same moral Darwiniends, and omnium-gatherums, and this, that, anism is the idea of the story of the idle and the other, enough to fill nine museums. Doasyoulikes, and also, of course, of the Tom could hardly stand against the stream, water-baby's own history. Indeed, all the and hid behind a rock. But the trout did various physiological transformations in the not; for out they rushed from among the story are intended to illustrate some such stones, and began gobbling the beetles and notion as this. And the fairy whose watch- leeches in the most greedy and quarrelsome work-nature obliges her to punish everybody's hanging out of their mouths, tugging and way, and swimming about with great worms mistakes by treating them exactly as they kicking to get them away from each other. have treated others, "Mrs. Bedonebyasyou- And now, by the flashes of the lightning, did," is meant, we suppose, to represent the Tom saw a new sight-all the bottom of the invariable and unalterable principle of God's stream alive with great eels, turning and universal providence. She is, as we are twisting along, all down stream and away. taught at the close, after all but another form They had been hiding for weeks past in the of divine love, which is the motive, if not mud; and Tom had hardly ever seen them, cracks of the rocks, and in burrows in the the principal agency in effecting these trans- except now and then at night; but now they formations. Yet surely it is not quite true were all out, and went hurrying past him so to represent men's actions as generally re- fiercely and wildly that he was quite frightturned upon them in kind,—the bleeding ened. And as they hurried past he could doctors and over-cramming schoolmasters be- hear them say to each other, 'We must run, ing by no means uniformly bled and overWhat a jolly thunderstorm! crammed in their turn. However, the fairy then the otter came by with all her brood, Down to the sea, down to the sea!' And is commissioned, we suppose, to show gener-twining and sweeping along as fast as the ally that individuals, and therefore races, eels themselves; and she spied Tom as she suffer degradation in consequence of the ac- came by, and said :— Now is your time, eft, cumulations of their errors and sins ;-in con- if you want to see the world. Come along, sequence of not keeping their eyes open to children, never mind those nasty eels; we God's laws, and still more of not obeying to the sea, down to the sea!' them when they do know them. we must run. shall breakfast on salmon to-morrow. Down Well, this conviction of Mr. Kingsley's, But no sooner does Mr. Kingsley get out and its many lively (if often fanciful) illus- of the salmon stream, than his pen begins trations, was worth a fairy story, and none to flag, his power to spend itself in the most could be more spirited or vigorous than this eccentric capers, and his proper theme to up to the point when he gets his transformed fade away at intervals from his imagination. chimney-sweep (who, coarse and ignorant, He begins chaffing the scientific men,—and but wishing to be clean, was by the law of his chaff is neither subtle to men nor intellifairy consequences transformed into a water-gible to children. He barks right and left at baby) to the mouth of the salmon river. Even this portion has been improved considerably since its first publication, and made a more coherent fairy story by the earlier introduction of the fairy. The description of the storm, which fills the stream and enables all the living things in it if desiring to reach the sea, to sweep down upon its swollen waters, is one of Mr. Kingsley's finest de everything he does not like, whether it has anything to do with his leading idea or not. Professor Owen is chaffed for insisting on the hippocampus minor as the specific distinction of man; the cram-systems of education and examination are chaffed; the nescience of medical men is chaffed; universal progress and Mr. Lincoln are chaffed; the orthodox fanatics who believe in hearsay, and don't want to be set right, are chaffed; the positive philosophy, collecting multifold experiences, but refusing to learn their meaning, is chaffed, and all in a way very few men will be able to laugh at, and no children at all (unless it be Grenville Arthur) to understand. What is the use of four whole pages of this sort of thing? "Now the doctors had it all their own way; and to work they went in earnest, and they gave the poor professor divers and sundry medicines, as prescribed by the ancients and moderns, from Hippocrates to Feuchtersleben, as below, viz.: Hellebore, to wit-hellebore of Æta; hellebore of Galata; hellebore of Sicily; and all other hellebores, after the method of the helleborizing helleborists of the helleboric era. But that would not do. Bumpterhausen's blue follicles would not stir an inch out of his encephalo-digital region." "And if he had but been a convict lunatic, and had shot at the queen, killed all his creditors to avoid paying them, or indulged in any other little amiable eccentricity of that kind, they would have given him in addition the healthiest situation in England, on Easthampstead Plain, free run of Windsor Forest, the Times every morning, a double-barrelled gun and pointers, and leave to shoot three Wellington College boys a week (not more) in case black game were scarce. that ecstatic apostrophe to the Back-stairs, and when the man might, perhaps, enjoy the idea the caricature is far too broad and its tone too screaming for his taste. For example, the following is said by the fairy to him know the back way out of the place of a water-baby to explain why she cannot let punishment, i.e., the way which saves you from the effect of evil without saving you from the cause. People would importune him as follows, she says, to divulge the secret :— "For thousands of years we have been paying, and petting, and obeying, and worshipping quacks who told us they had the key of the back-stairs, and could smuggle us up them; and in spite of all our disappointments, we will honor, and glorify, and adore, and beatify, and translate, and apotheotize you likewise, on the chance of your knowing something about the back-stairs, that we may all go on pilgrimage to it: and, even if we cannot get up it, lie at the bottom of it, and cry Oh! back-stairs, precious back-stairs, invaluable back-stairs, requisite back-stairs, necessary back-stairs, good-natured backstairs, cosmopolitan back-stairs, comprehensive back-stairs, accommodating back-stairs, well-bred back-stairs, comfortable back-stairs, humane back-stairs, reasonable back-stairs, long-sought back-stairs, coveted back-stairs, aristocratic back-stairs, respectable backstairs, gentlemanlike back-stairs, ladylike back-stairs, commercial back-stairs, economiWe may smile a grim smile at first, but it back-stairs, deductive back-stairs, orthodox cal back-stairs, practical back-stairs, logical is impossible to smile when that sort of non- back-stairs, probable back-stairs, credible sense is prolonged beyond a certain point. back-stairs, demonstrable back-stairs, irreAnd this kind of thing strays at large through fragable back-stairs, potent back-stairs, allthe book, and is seldom very amusing. We but-omnipotent back-stairs, etc. Save us may smile when we are first told that Pro- from the consequences of our own actions, fessor Ptthmllnsprts, Professor of Necrobi- and from the cruel fairy, Mrs. Bedonebyasonoepalaeohydrochthonanthropopithekology youdid! would have called a water-baby by two long names, "of which the first would have said a little about Tom, and the second all about Upon the whole, in spite of some passages himself, for, of course, he would have called of great beauty, a fine idea, and much knowlhim Hydrotecnon Ptthmllnsprtsianum," but edge to work with, Mr. Kingsley has, as he when the same species of fun goes on for a too often does, spoiled a good story by his ungreat many pages together, we feel as if we disciplined and ill-concentrated imagination, were hearing one of those insane extrava- which induces him to interrupt one train of ganzas at the minor theatres, which are meant thought just to vent his disgust at a dozen apparently to cast a gloom over the very is at work. He is like a dog which constantly name of fun, and induce early idiocy in the loses the scent by turning aside to worry cats, actors. And this fault is repeated so system- bark at ill-looking beggars, or simply to play atically during the latter part of the tale, that with a bone with his four legs in the air. it quite sickens the reader, even though he However noble the bay, or however graceful may have what Miss Muloch painfully denom- the frolics of such a creature, the fairy Mrs. inates "the child-heart." Indeed the worst Bedonebyasyoudid will be obliged to reward of it is, that when the child might possibly him with a very mutilated and unsatisfactory enjoy the caricature, the idea caricatured is fame,-unworthy both of Mr. Kingsley's quite beyond his grasp,-as, for example, in real genius and of his noble aims. 1 This sort of thing might clearly be expanded by the Binomial Theorem to any number of terms you pleased. follies or crimes which occur to him while he oble as a bright example, "where scarcely any converts had cost so much as a hundred francs, and the greater part not nearly so much as that amount." From The Saturday Review. MEMOIR OF A FRENCH NEW TESTAMENT.* THIS curious tract is a piece of literary dissection. With temper and scholarly patience, but with no unflinching hand, it demonstrates the anatomy of a fraus pia. About the middle of the seventeenth century, it appears that an intense uneasiness with regard to the prospects of the Church had crept over the clergy and higher classes of France. One of the most noticeable symptoms was the fanatical, and far from unsuccessful, attempt of Louis XIV. to bribe Protestants back to their old spiritual allegiance. From a letter of the Sieur Pelisson, one of the king's chief agents in this business, we learn that, for about two thousand crowns, seven or eight hundred persons had on one occasion" tered the Church." Bishops wrote word that plenty of conversions were to be had, provided that funds were forthcoming. Regular lists of these converts were laid before the king; and instructions for the regulation of the market were duly transmitted back to the bishops. They were to look out for families of distinction, but by no means to neglect the common people, who might frequently be snapped up at from two to five pistoles the family. Under peculiar circumstances, left to the discretion of the principal dealers, the high figure of a hundred francs was sanctioned. But this was a famine price; low:and Pelisson points out the diocese of Gren en Another symptom of uneasiness was a morbid anxiety to discover definite authority for the introduction of the Mass. Peiresk, a learned French antiquary and lover of coins, believed that he had discovered it on a medal of Constantine. On the reverse of one of that emperor's medals there is a sort of altar, on which is a globe, standing on a low base. Probably, as Archdeacon Cotton remarks, the impression which Peiresk saw was much worn, and the figures on the globe were effaced, leaving only the circular outline visible. To the devout eye of the antiquary, the legend “Beata Tranquillitas suggested the Sacrament of the Altar," and the circle could be nothing but the holy wafer. But, valuable as the testimony of so early a coin would have been, it would clearly sink into nothing by the side of a text from the Sacred Writings themselves. And successfully to introduce such a text into current versions of the Bible seems to have been the object—in some cases the whole lifetime's study of certain energetic French divines of the period. The passage which was seized upon as most eminently suited for this purpose is Acts xiii. 2, the important words of which run as fol VULGATE. UNIFORM GREEK. λειτουργούντων δὲ αὐτῶν τῷ Ministrantibus autem illis Κυρίῳ. Domino. During a search into the origin of certain corrupt renderings of this passage, which will be described below, Archdeacon Cotton met with a pamphlet published in London in 1674, and taken from a French tract about thirty years older, entitled La Messe trouvée dans l'Escriture. The title of the English tract runs thus-A famous Conference between Pope Clement X. and Cardinal de Monte Alto, concerning the late Discovery of the Masse in Holy Scripture, made by the worthy Father Patrick, an excellent Engineer of the Church *Memoir of a French New Testament, in which the Mass and Purgatory are found in the Sacred Text. Together with Bishop Kidder's "Reflections" on the Same. By Henry Cotton, D.C.L., Archdeacon of Cashel. Second Edition, enlarged. London: Bell and Daldy. 1863. RECEIVED ENGLISH. As they ministered to the of Rome in England. The cardinal asks the ignominious penance. The tract La Messe whether personal or indirect, is distinctly trouvée, etc., is now known to have been the traceable in several similar undertakings exwork of a pastor named Lucas Jansse. It ecuted during the seventeenth century. The was printed at Rouen in 1647, and the ver- Testament of 1686 was first exposed in Engsion which gave rise to its remarks was not a land by Dr. Kidder, who afterwards became genuine Louvain translation, but the work Bishop of Bath and Wells. His Reflections, of the far-seeing Jesuit, François Veron. etc., were published in 1690, and were supVeron was born at Paris in 1575, and was plemented about half a century later by the curé of Charenton during the greater part of Rev. James Serces, Vicar of Appleby. Both his active life. Quickly perceiving how much these tracts have been reprinted by Dr. Cotsacerdotal capital might be made out of a 40n, who gives a clear and able bibliograph"nouvelle traduction, très-élégante," issued ical account of the seven French versions of by one Jacques Corbin in 1641, he shortly the seventeenth century, beginning with Corproduced a version of the Vulgate by himself, bin's (1641), and ending with the Bordeaux which was followed in 1647 by a still more (1686). One very valuable and interesting advanced rendering. portion of his task consists of a synoptical table of the renderings of forty passages in the New Testament, all selected from texts examined in Bishop Kidder's Reflections. Though by no means the first or the last of Romanist translators who have tampered with the text of the Bible, Veron was decidedly the ablest and most thorough-going of his peers. It was from his versions, chiefly, that the excrescences of the Bordeaux Testament of 1686-the subject of Dr. Cotton's Memoir-were derived; and his influence, A few specimens from this table will not be read without interest. The first is the much disputed passage in Acts xiii. 2, the original of which was quoted above :— It is, perhaps, putting no undue strain on | authority for the Mass had been thus cheaply the fancy, to read in the concise and forcible secured, it seemed hard to do less for other rendering of Veron the unscrupulous and and minor points of Catholic belief :— thorough-going qualities of the man. When It cannot be too distinctly stated that these | ceived the deliberate sanction of the Roman efforts at exegetical rendering have never re- Catholic Church. As soon as the real char |