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region mighty changes have been wrought during the eighty years, and native Mohammedan converts have sealed with their blood the testimony they bore to the Cross. As in most Oriental countries, the Bible Society's agents require Bibles in a variety of languages to satisfy the varying demands of purchasers, and no less than ten languages appear on the version list of Persia.

'It is curious that the language which shows the highest circulation in 1893 is not Persian, but Hebrew. In the old land of their captivity the Jews are found in vast numbers. They haunt the scenes where their fathers toiled as slaves, and hanging their harps on the willows wept when they remembered Zion.' (Bible Society's Report for 1894, p. 194.)

Bitter hostility, culminating periodically in open outrage, withstand all Christian effort in Persia, and occasional outbreaks of war or pestilence present further hindrances: but, despite all, the work progresses both in fixed missionary centres and through the agency of colporteurs, who penetrate through almost every district of the kingdom.

The pages of modern missionary biography afford full insight into the daily life of the most recent translators. We may take them almost at random. Bishop Steere, whose labours in the Swahili materially helped to make that language the lingua franca across the entire continent of Africa, first occurs to us. He sits at work in his library, a whitewashed room with a sloping floor, which has a hole at the lower end through which the water sluiced over it can drain away; its furniture, a table and chair, a few cupboards, and a bed with mosquito curtains. A thousand distractions, all of which he endures with gentle equanimity, divert him from his work. Visits to the schools or the printing-presses, superintendence of packing and unpacking parcels, plaiting grass for thatch, digging, planting; trimming lamps, prescribing medicines, directing cookery, attending services-such multifarious occupations alternate with correspondence on the deepest problems of religious faith and life, at once so penetrating and so practical as to be of lasting value. And amidst all these demands upon his time the Bishop plods steadily onwards— his work as architect, clerk of the works, and builder of the noble church he erected in the Slave Market at Zanzibar, being only another legacy to us in addition to that of his dictionaries and grammars in African languages, besides himself translating into the chief of them all the Prayer Book and New Testament, with half the Old, as well as 180 hymns, with tracts and elementary books in almost endless variety.

Vol. 180.-No. 360.

Y

Bishop

Bishop Horden, the son of an Exeter printer, accepts the chaplaincy at Moose Fort under the Hudson's Bay Company, to which a single vessel is despatched with stores once in a twelvemonth. Here he passes a life of apostolic simplicity and untiring labours, his earliest effort being to master the difficult Indian language. Greek and Latin he declared to be tame in comparison with Sakehao and Ketemakalemão, with their animate and inanimate forms, their direct and inverse, their absolute and relative, their want of an infinitive mood, and their two first persons plural. We spare our readers any specimens of the sesquipedalia verba which serve in Cree for personal pronouns. Suffice it to say that through indefatigable perseverance after eight months he no longer required an interpreter in preaching, and presently he commenced a translation of the Prayer and Hymn-book and the Four Gospels. The work is combined with the pastoral charge of a diocese that extends to the North Pole, involving long and tedious journeys to distant settlements abroad, and the duties of schoolmaster, surgeon, and universal referee at home. To these are presently added the labours of a printing-press sent out for his Cree Gospels, and the acquisition of Norwegian and Ojibewa and Eskimo, that he may minister to some of his flock in those tongues. Twice only during forty-two years does he return for a brief visit home from the great lone land of his adoption. He has no time for repining, or, as his Indians express it, thinking long'; and after forty-one years have expired, the last word of the Cree Bible is written. A few months later he dictates a letter from his sick-room :

Picture me in my work. I am lying on my back in my bed; Mr. Richards is sitting at a table by my side; I have my English Bible, the Revised Version, in my hand. Mr. Richards has my translation before him, which he is reading to me slowly and distinctly. Every sentence is very carefully weighed, and all errors are corrected. This is a glorious occupation, and I cannot feel too thankful that I am able to follow it in these days of my weakness.' (Forty-two Years amongst the Indians and Eskimo,' p. 221.)

A few hours more and the toiler is at rest. Such examples might be largely multiplied. No intellectual gifts have been deemed too high, no acquired knowledge too various, to Le devoted to the service of Bible translation. What contrast could be more striking than that presented by two fellow-labourers on the Persian version,-the stately and scholarly Henry Martyn, breathing the rarefied air of spiritual and mystic saintliness; and the breezy nonchalance of Professor Palmer, with all the poetry of the East at his finger-ends. In this work every gift

is sanctified, and no pains is superfluous. Witness the method adopted by Bishop Callaway, perhaps the foremost of them all, at one time reading and discussing the Greek text, and using all the books of criticism within reach; at another mastering the Zulu folk-lore and their religious system so thoroughly, that Mr. Tylor said hardly anything so good had ever been published on the intellectual state of the lower tribes, in order that, being saturated with the spirit of both, he might present a worthy rendering of God's message to a despised heathen people.

Such labours with such an object need no human commendation. Yet we may fitly conclude this brief review in the words of a great Indian statesman, the late LieutenantGeneral of the Panjab, as quoted by one to whom the cause of Bible translation and diffusion owes no ordinary meed of gratitude":

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To my mind,' said Sir Charles Aitchison, there is no department in which the results of missionary labour during the last century are more manifest than in the translation and circulation of the Scriptures. At the beginning of the century, Bibles were scarce and dear. Carey's first Bangáli Bible cost about 4l. A Bangáli Bible can now be had for a few pence. At the beginning of the century, the Bible existed only in some thirty languages; it has now been translated in whole or in part into something like three hundred and fifty. If there were no other result of missionary labours than that, they have conferred an inestimable boon upon the whole human race, and all the lives that have been spent in the mission cause from the beginning till now would even for that result not have been thrown away. Apart altogether from the spiritual aspect of the case, and looking merely to the secular side of it, the philological value of a work like that is simply incalculable.' (Normal Addresses on Bible Diffusion,' p. 33.)

ART. II.-1. The New Arabian Nights. By Robert Louis Stevenson. London, 1882.

2. And other Works. By the Same. London, 1882-1894. 3. The Works of R. L. Stevenson. Vols. I.-V. Edinburgh, 1894-1895.

THAT

HAT ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the poets, of which Plato in his Republic' draws so striking a picture, was never more charmingly brought out than in the life and achievements of Robert Louis Stevenson. A life suddenly broken, to our lasting loss; for his immense and kindly audience were but expectant of a nobler strain, when the player was struck senseless before them and his instrument dashed to the ground. It is the fate of Euphorion once more; of Keats, Byron, Shelley, the sons of the gods that die in their golden prime, having sounded a prelude of such promise, that they leave the world murmuring at spendthrift Nature and the envy of Fortune. Vain laments, inevitable alike and unavailing! The delicate Ariel-spirit who has quitted us recently, with his subtle fancies, quaint and flowing imagination, and tender rhymes, who made all his readers in love with him, and was an adept in the magic of the heart no less than acquainted with every charm of literature, will have found a task elsewhere, if there is truth in the visions of the Beautiful that haunted him from early days. That these shadows tell of no hidden sun from which they were cast, never let us believe. Rather let us write upon that tomb at Vailima the Virgilian words wherein are best summed up the poet's aims and enthusiasms, are they not true of Robert Louis Stevenson to the letter?

'Tantus amor florum, et generandi gloria mellis.'

But the blossoms, and the wings, and the honey,-to say nothing yet of the glorying in them, how little do they remind us of Puritan Scotland! Here is the divine irony, ludens in orbe terrarum, which by cunningly devised oppositions and by the tragedy of contrast renews the controversy that sour-visaged systems had thought to end with anathema. In Plato's ideal city, no literature might find admission save simple heroic narratives, and hymns for the service of the temple. Where John Knox took to himself his great power and reigned, there, over and above what was in the Bible (to which the Greek stories of the gods, as Socrates would have purged them, may bear some resemblance), all the wisdom and the craft of poetry were to be expended on metrical versions of the Psalms. Literature became, in the

words

words of the devout Presbyterian, grave sweet melody' chanted in various keys to the listening angels, with now and then a suspicion of 'Hieland skirling' to dash the notes, as by a sudden invasion of the bagpipe. Fiction? what was fiction but a lie, dishonourable to the Supreme, disgraceful in a professing Christian? This world and the next, as they appeared in the severe light of Calvinism, allowed no more scope for imaginative writing, for artistic make-believe, or Milesian Tales, than the earthquake of Lisbon would have allowed for dancing a ballet. Men were always on their deathbed, if they would only think of it; they had to struggle with Apollyon, and to walk long in the Valley of the Shadow. The arts of amusement came to be set down as Pagan; all was to be deadly earnest, from which poetry, the vinum dæmonum, with its hall of banqueting-the stage-and its decorative handmaid-painting-were banished into the outer darkness. Plato turned Puritan must have felt on a Scottish Sabbath the despair which too perfect an attainment brings. He would have dealt gently with that divine, and sweet, and charming creature' the poet, nor sent him away from the city without incense, and a crown upon his brow. Very unlike was the reward which Calvin's followers had predestined for the unhappy minstrel who loved madrigals better than the Five Points, and built castles in the air when he should have been laying to heart the Shorter Catechism. He was breaking the first and the greatest commandment, 'Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image,' and his worship of fantastic fooleries would cost him dear. A stern winter for the Attic bee, and the snow lying deep on Hymettus where once the thyme grew sweet and abundant! Religion had slain art, banished joy, made an end of lovely childish musings, and burnt a red-hot iron into the poet's brow. Too grim and cruel this would surely have seemed even to the Spartan mood of our Plato, dreading what a corrupt literature might inflict upon mankind! Could so Arctic a season last for ever?

No, it was to break up in shouts of scornful laughter, in warm tears, in passion and revolt welling forth from the lips of Robert Burns. Over its wide skirts of desolation, the Wizard of Melrose and Loch Katrine, the hundred-tongued story-teller, the magician who could touch Homer's dead lyre and awaken its chords to battle harmonies, Sir Walter Scott, was to fling his embroidered garment, woven with old and new romance, with the heroic doings of gods and giants, with tales of adventure, and figures the more lifelike that they never had breathed outside his enchanted kingdom. For in his hands

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