reminds us of 'Pelham,' but it is only by way of contrast to his earliest novel. 'Pelham' has been called the impersonation of success; Kenelm Chillingly' is the impersonation of failure. The key to his character may be found in the name which Lady Glenalvon-the Lady Roseville of Pelham-gives him, 'my old young friend Kenelm.' He is le Hamlet de nos jours. Before his beard has grown he finds how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable' are the uses of the world. 'Man delights him not, nor woman neither.' The motives for Hamlet's satiety lie on the surface. He looks on himself as a microcosm, and from his own misfortunes concludes that the time is out of joint. His mother has been false, and he exclaims that woman's name is frailty. Kenelm's ennui is wholly unmotived, or rather its motive is to be looked for solely in the age in which he lives.

The story we will not attempt to tell. In its simplicity and the absence of any elaborate construction, it is unique among Lord Lytton's novels; but it overflows with humour, it is lit up with flashes of wit as brilliant and as innocent as summer lightning, it has something even of that boisterous joviality which distinguishes Fielding, but at bottom it is the saddest of all Lord Lytton's stories.

Kenelm is at once the product of his age and a standing protest against the age; and Lord Lytton in his person is never tired of railing at the age. Much of his satire is well merited, on politics as usual he is especially happy, to some of his criticisms on art and poetry we should demur, and above all we cannot help wishing that he had not revived his ancient feud with the critics.

Let us, in conclusion, illustrate one or two points by a few quotations. Of the age:

'But there is a more conceited fool than either of us, and that is the Age in which we have the misfortune to be bornProgress, Mr. Saunderson, junior-an Age of Prigs!'

-an Age of 'When I hear a gentleman" say that he has no option but to think one thing and say another, at whatever risk to his country, I feel as if in the progress of the age the class of gentlemen was about to be superseded by some finer development of species.'

On politics :

"He said to me the other day, with a sang-froid worthy of the iciest Chillingly, 'I mean to be Prime Minister of England-it is only a question of time.' Now, if Chillingly Gordon is to be Prime Minister, it will be because the increasing cold of our moral and social atmosphere will exactly suit the development of his talents.

"He is the man above all others to argue down the declaimers of old-fashioned scntimentalities, love of country, care for its position Vol. 134.-No. 268. 2 L

among

among nations, zeal for its honour, pride in its renown (oh, if you could hear him philosophically and logically sneer away the word 'prestige'). Such notions are fast being classified as 'bosh.' And when that classification is complete when England has no colonies to defend, no navy to pay for, no interest in the affairs of other nations, and has attained to the happy condition of Holland,-then Chillingly Gordon will be her Prime Minister.""

Again, of a Prime Minister:

"He was born before the new ideas came into practical force; but in proportion as they have done so, his beliefs have necessarily disappeared. I don't suppose that he believes in much now, except the two propositions: firstly, that if he accept the new ideas, he will have power and keep it, and if he does not accept them, power is out of the question; and secondly, that if the new ideas are to prevail, he is the best man to direct them safely-beliefs quite enough for a Minister. No wise Minister should have more.'

6

The next is a conversation between Lord Thetford, a Liberal M.P., who is convinced that his party are going too far and too fast, but with that party he goes on light-heartedly, and would continue to do so if they went to Erebus.' He is persuading Kenelm to enter Parliament. Kenelm answers :

"I might if I were an ultra-Radical, a Republican, a Communist, a Socialist, and wished to upset everything existing, for then the strife would at least be a very earnest one!"

"But could not you be equally in earnest against those revolutionary gentlemen?"

"Are you and your leaders in earnest against them? They don't appear to me so."

Thetford was silent for a minute. "Well, if you doubt the principles of my side, go with the other side. For my part, I and many of our party would be glad to see the Conservatives stronger."

"I have no doubt they would. No sensible man likes to be carried off his legs by the rush of the crowd behind him; and a crowd is less headlong when it sees a strong force arrayed against it in front. But it seems to me that, at present, Conservatism can but be what it now is a party that may combine for resistance, and will not combine for inventive construction. We are living in an age in which the process of unsettlement is going blindly at work, as if impelled by a Nemesis as blind as itself. New ideas come beating in surf and surge against those which former reasoners had considered as fixed banks and breakwaters; and the new ideas are so mutable, so fickle, that those which were considered novel ten years ago are deemed obsolete to-day, and the new ones of to-day will in their turn be obsolete to-morrow. And, in a sort of fatalism, you see statesmen yielding way to these successive mockeries of experiment-for they are experiments against experience and saying to each other with a shrug of the shoulders, 'Bismillah, it must be so; the country will

have it, even though it sends the country to the dogs.' I don't feel sure that the country will not go there the sooner, if you can only strengthen the Conservative element enough to set it up in office, with the certainty of knocking it down again."

Kenelm is asked whether he is intended for any of the learned professions.

"The learned professions," replied Kenelm, " is an invidious form of speech that we are doing our best to eradicate from the language. All professions nowadays are to have much about the same amount of learning. The learning of the military profession is to be levelled upwards-the learning of the scholastic to be levelled downwards. Cabinet Ministers sneer at the uses of Greek and Latin."

As specimens of criticism take the following palpable but not ill-natured hit at Mr. Darwin :—

"I cannot conceive that even that unrivalled romance-writer can so bewitch our understandings as to make us believe, that, when some lofty orator, a Pitt or a Gladstone, rebuts with a polished smile which reveals his canine teeth, the rude assault of an opponent, he betrays his descent from a 'semi-human progenitor' who was accustomed to snap at his enemy. . . . . Surely-surely some early chroniclers must depose that they saw, saw with their own eyes, the great gorillas who scratched off their hairy coverings to please the eyes of the young ladies of their species, and that they noted the gradual metamorphosis of one animal into another. For, if you tell me that this illustrious romance-writer is but a cautious man of science, and that we must accept his inventions according to the sober laws of evidence and fact, there is not the most incredible ghost story which does not better satisfy the common sense of a sceptic.'

'Kenelm Chillingly' is the work of a man who has suffered much, and who lays bare all his store of sad experience. But it has the same genial humanity, the same sympathy with infinite varieties of men, the same glow for all that is noble in thought and heroic in character, which distinguishes all Lord Lytton wrote, and which we have endeavoured to point out in one portion of his manifold works. Of his poems, his plays, his essays, his translations, it is not within our limits now to speak. But we have no hesitation in affirming that, in the last years of his life, Lord Lytton was not only the foremost novelist, but the most eminent living writer in English literature.

ART. VIII.-1. History of Bokhara, from the Earliest Period down to the Present. By Arminius Vámbéry. London, 1873. 2. A Journey to the Source of the River Oxus. By Captain John Wood, Indian Navy. New Edition, edited by his Son. With an Essay on the Geography of the Valley of the Oxus. By Colonel Henry Yule, C.B. 1872.

3. Correspondence with Russia respecting Central Asia. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. 1873. Nos. 1 and 2. (Quoted below as A and B.)

4. Die Russen in Centralasien. Von F. v. Hellwald. Wien, 1869. 5. A General Report on the Yusufzais. By H. W. Bellew, Assistant Surgeon, Corps of Guides. Lahore, 1864.

6. Report on Peshawar District. By Major H. James, C.B. Lahore, 1871.

7. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Vol. XXVIII.: Notes on Kafiristan; and Vol. XXXI.: Account of Suwat, &c. By Captain H. G. Raverty.

HE first two works on our list were issued before the late revival of excitement about Central Asian questions. The publication must, in each case, have been inspired by a happy prescience, or guided by singular good fortune.

Of Professor Vámbéry's book, we cannot speak at such length as it might justly claim. It is the only history of Bokhara in existence; the narrative is maintained with surprising spirit; and the proportions assigned to each period are adjusted with great judgment, and free from prolixity. The author uses a variety of new Oriental sources, and introduces us to dynasties now named in an European book for the first time. These, indeed, as might be expected, are not the dynasties whose history affords the most attractive episodes. The attention must flag over the barren wars and bigotries of the later Uzbeg rule, till that rule reaches a climax of degradation in Nasrullah Khan, best identified to English readers as the unpunished murderer of Conolly and Stoddart, father of the present Amír Mozaffar, on whose unhappy head, as Professor Vámbéry remarks, the ancient Hebrew proverb, that 'the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge,' has found a rare and rapid completeness of verification. In the base reign of Nasrullah a new and vast power rises luridly on the horizon of Bokhara.

Bokhara seems not to have been of much antiquity at the Mahommedan conquest. Moslem writers, cited by Vámbéry as asserting that the city's name meant in the language of the

idolaters

idolaters 'a place of study,' indicate its true origin. The site is said to have been a hollow covered with marshy jungle. Here, then, amid the reeds and wild-fowl, some pious Buddhist ascetics established their Vihára, just as the early monks of our own lands sat down amidst the fens of Ely or Glastonbury. It is interesting thus to trace in the name of Holy Bokhara a flood-mark, in the extreme north-west, of that strange influence of Hindu religion which has spread in an opposite quarter to far Japan and the Moluccas.

We had selected for extract passages treating of the accession of the Amír Maasum (1784), and his invasion of Merv, because they touch characteristics of Central Asia; the Pharisaic Islamism of Bokhara; the slaving raids, which are the scourge of the whole Khorasan frontier; the processes by which tracts of Asia, once fertile and populous, become the irretrievable prey of barrenness. But space affords but one extract, which we take from a letter addressed to the Amír, by Aga Mahommed Shah in 1797, and which contains a remarkable recognition of the national unity of the Turkish races:

'Dost thou perchance wish to renew the old wars between Iran and Turan? For such a task thou art verily not sufficient. To play with the tail of the lion, to tickle the tiger in the ear, is not the part of a prudent man. Yet all men are descended from Adam and Eve, and if thou art proud of thy relationship to Turanian princes, know that my descent is also from the same. . . . We all of us owe thanks to God, the Almighty, that he hath given the dominion over Turan and Iran, over Rúm, Rús, China, and India, to the exalted family of Turk. Let each be content. I also will dwell in peace within the ancient boundaries of Iran, and none of us will pass over the Oxus.'-P. 355.

It is indeed a notable fact that for more than eight centuries at least, unless the anarchy that followed the death of Nadir Shah show a kind of exception, no dynasty of other than Turanian blood has reigned in Iran; nor, during that time, has any dynasty of Iranian blood held high power anywhere in Asia.

The English of Vámbéry's work is far above the ordinary run of anonymous translations. There are some odd mistakes in it, but they evidently spring from the translator's want of familiarity with Oriental subjects, and not from defective knowledge of either German or English. Dr. Vámbéry gives us incidentally many curious etymologies. We are glad to believe him when he tells us that Mankbarni, the cognomen of Jalaluddín, the gallant king of Chorasmia, meaning 'the Sniveller,' is an error for Mangbardi, the Heaven-sent.'

Still the