and by begging for intervention, which would have been followed by war between America and Europe. Moved by this impulse, perfectly justifiable in the imperative necessity of saving himself, he left Pinar del Rio, where he seemed like an imprisoned lion vainly beating against the bars of his cage, and planned to enter the capital, sack and destroy it by fire, thus creating a general panic, and then take possession of the much coveted island. Therefore, he left his men in Pinar del Rio and crossed the trocha, almost on all fours, according to the account given by his doctor and adjutant—some say, however, that he went to seaaccompanied by a few resolute followers. He gathered together and trained the negroes of the middle part of the island in order to work out his bold plan and strike a most daring blow, but he did not count upon the strength of his opponents, nor, perhaps, upon the disorganization of his own people. The insurgents in the centre of the island differed utterly from those in the east. When Maceo left behind the trocha those rebels who had accompanied him from Santiago, he left a body without a head, and when he went forward with merely a handful of men, he took with him a head without a body, a head which was able to think for a few minutes, but which was of no value in actual warfare. Nevertheless, he intended to make a body, an easier thing to do in the segmentation of those crude and incipient organisms than in the true, wise and harmonic combinations of perfect organisms. Maceo collected a rough army in whose ranks there was more impetuosity than resistance. Nearly four thousand volunteers arose at the sound of his voice and trumpet, all of them unaccus tomed to regular warfare. When they saw our column, they disbanded and the greater part fled, utterly panic stricken. Only the most valiant and resolute remained with their leader. Even with the few who remained he would have been able to plan a military movement, which if well carried out, would have put our heroic men to confusion. Courage is one of the most distinctive traits of our character and never deserts the Spanish soldier. Cirujeda's column, composed of four hundred welltrained men, did not count the number of its enemies, but threw itself, blinded by the inspiration of battle, into the thick of the fight with the boldness of heroes and the abnegation of martyrs. Such a combination of impulsive strength, added to great resisting force, constitutes one of the greatest qualities and virtues of Spanish valor. No people show more plainly or with more loftiness of spirit, their own free will, than our soldiers, and no nation resigns itself with such conformity to the decrees of Providence and the yoke of fatality which it cannot, by any possibility resist, than the Spanish. Therefore, it is characteristic of the national legion to attempt the impossible, and if the impossible cannot be obtained at the first trial then our men redouble their efforts and are not unduly elated over victory nor cast down by defeat, The men of San Quintin, with Cirujeda as leader, had the boldness to oppose their scanty number against the almost overwhelming force of the enemy. This boldness was followed by triumph, notwithstanding the great efforts of Maceo, of whose presence our men were ignorant. If the negroes, whom the general commanded, had been his daring comrades of long ago he would have been able to direct them from the rear guard, as they were easily managed, but, as his force consisted of indisciplined men, collected by chance, he had to place himself at the vanguard, in order to stimulate and encourage them. Thus, compelled by the imperative necessity of fighting hand to hand, he could not maintain the guard about his person which is indispensable for a safe command. The military plans, conceived with such cleverness, could not be carried out, owing to the blunders of his men. A valiant handful of heroes terrified the rabble which might have overwhelmed our men, owing to their supe riority of numbers. Maceo died, not as his friends in their wrath have said, of poison, but in a fair fight, like a great hero, conquered by greater heroes. After a year of warfare, the insurgents must understand that there is not sufficient strength in the rebellion against Spain. Some agreement must be made, for Cuba will always be Spanish at heart. The Divine and the national will so decree. adopted nearly twenty years ago at Berlin, was far too sanguine and be lated. The view of those who deprecated the attempt to bolster up the Turkish Empire has been justified, though no one can say with confidence that, though that enterprise has failed, there might not have been considerable danger in directly stimulating the impatience and flushing the hopes of the Slavonic race. However, we are not Translated for the LIVING AGE, by Jean Raymond going to dwell on the political aspects Bidwell. From The Spectator. WAITING. the for There is one aspect of the queen's great reign to which we think sufficient attention has not been given. At all events the greater portion of it, all that has elapsed since she lost prince consort in 1861, has been her Majesty a long period of patient waiting; and in other senses for the people over whom she has reigned, it has been during that period one sometimes of patient, sometimes of impatient, waiting, partly for political, partly and increasingly for social, and still more perhaps for personal convictions, which have been slow in coming, and are not even now coming very fast. The earlier part of her reign was marked by one or two precipitate strokes of policy. The Crimean War, if we judge it only from our own point of view, was precipitate and mistaken; though possibly from the point of view of Russia and the Slavs, it may have been necessary to convince them that the time had passed for overrunning the Continent of Europe after the fashion in which the invasions of the Huns, and those whom the Huns drove before them, had been carried out. But from the point of view of those who hoped to renovate the Turkish Empire, it is certain that the policy of the Treaty of Paris, and to a certain extent even that later and much modified and improved policy which was of the precipitation of which our nation has found reason to repent, but rather on the sharp checks frequently administered to the precipitate temper in itself. In relation again to very farreaching social and constitutional reforms, it seems to us that the great lessons taught to the English people under this reign have been of the same kind, namely, "Don't let us be in a hurry; there are a great many reasons for not acting precipitately, even where we are most sure that we should act, and act firmly, too." The great social reform of the new poor-law had been hardly completed before the queen ascended the throne. It was a great and unquestionable step in advance, and yet perhaps one of the Lost remarkable results of her reign is that before its close we are learning that it probably went too far, and that we should reconsider and materially modify some of its most conspicuous features. Again, what is more evident than that the steady and almost tumultuous advance of democracy, in spite of its many and incontestable advantages, has brought with it great and incontestable set-offs that diminished the effectiveness, and to some extent attenuated the moral influence, of England in the world. We have gained much popular sympathy; we have found for ourselves mighty allies at the ends of the earth, partly because we have become so democratic; but there is far more doubt than formerly as to what it is prudent for us to do in Europe, and as to the probable effect even of what we have actually done. Our statesmen of this generation hesitate where our have statesmen of the last generation but should be easy to perform with promptly intervened; and we find genuine satisfaction. The duty of ourselves hampered and controlled waiting is a duty against which youth in all that seems to us to be almost imperatively needed in the West, for every great step which we take in Asia and Africa. The huge classes which we have admitted to influence our policy do not understand these foreign questions, and yet for that very reason their influence ccnstrains the action of those who do more or less understand them. Our new masters fix their minds on very different issues, and so are unable to give that stimulus to any English foreign policy which was given to it in former generations, even perhaps when our statesmanship was shortsighted, rash. and premature. But what strikes us as even more characteristic of the waiting attitude of England, in the queen's reign is the uncertainty, the often patient, as well as now and then impatient, uncertainty, of its moral and spiritual convictions. The sensationalism of our modern literature, the feverish lesire to try new theories, is more than half due to the popular discovery that there is a good deal more to be said on every side of every great question than our fathers seem to have understood, and to the impatience felt that we cannot simultaneously enjoy the strength of great convictions and also throw off the incumbrance of great constraints. Look at the literature which concerns "the new woman." It is little more than an attempt to state the disadvantages, which are not to be denied,— of the inability to be both woman and man at the same time. The fretfulness of much of our literature is mere revolt against the placid satisfaction that used to prevail at the narrow limitations of woman's life, and against the complacent moralities of those who say that the duty of waiting, and waiting patiently, to see where the limitations of the old view of women's lot were mischievous and extravagant, and where they were wise and inevitable, ought not to be an irksome duty, at least, revolts, but it is one which, in almost every sphere of thought, the latter part of this reign has enforced upon us. Clough's great lesson has been, to our mind, one of the most emphatic lessons of the last thirty years: "Old things need not be therefore true;" The souls of now two thousand years And in spite of the frequent impatience of the day, the patience, we think, predominates over the impatience, and insists on "considering it again." Take the region of Christian faith. Who has been the characteristic representative of the duty of waiting and "considering it again," except the late poet laureate who after stating in the strongest form the excuses for doubt, proceeded to say of himself: I falter where I firmly trod, I stretch lame hands of faith and grope Whatever else Tennyson has taught us, he has certainly taught us that doubt may be much too confident, toat doubt should doubt itself as well as that which "the souls of now two thousand years" have laid upon us as "the earnings of their pain," and may well hesitate to cast recklessly away. Milton said that "they also serve who only stand and wait." Might he not have dispensed with the "only"? Is it not one of the most difficult of attitudes of mind to stand and wait to see the issue? For Englishmen at six. "The vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak and not lie. Though it tarry wait for it, because it will surely come; it will not tarry." least we believe it to be so, and yet it is often the highest of duties, though of course we are not for a moment denying that it may often be a mere excuse for failure to take prompt action where prompt action is a duty, and one of the first of duties. Still, this reign has taught us, alike in matters of political, social, and spiritual moment, that prompt action may be rash action, and that "Ah, yet consider it again" may be the wisest of all counsels. Waiting is not an easy matter, at all events to the young and eager. Men are so driven into action by the urgency of outward circumstance, that they often mistake the crave for action for its necessity. It is quite true that a man who acts promptly, though he acts wrongly, may often do better in life than a man who considers it again, and considers it again, till the time for wise action is altogether past. "Waiting" is so difficult just because it often overstays the emergency. Still, on the whole we think that Englishmen oftener err on the impatient than on the dilatory side. If we look to our statesmen, we hold that the most conspicuous of the last half-century, Palmerston and Gladstone, both erred in over-promptitude, -Palmerston in foreign policy, Gladstone in his latest Irish policy. And if we look to matters of even deeper moment, we should not scruple to say that most of those thinkers who have, for instance, taken up the sceptical philosophy, who have hastily treated Darwin's great evolution doctrine as destructive of theism, or, like Matthew Arnold or Mr. Goldwin Smith, have regarded "the Higher Criticism" as fatal to the Christian revelation, have lost their heads through their impatience of considering it again. No doubt “waiting” may become a disease. But it is a disease to which Englishmen do not very often incline until they get beyond the age for mature judgment, and even then it is not unlikely that they may hurry into an error, as Mr. Gladstone did when he was seventy From The National Review. "THE OTHER GRACE." "Add but the other grace-be goodWhy want what the angels vaunt." BROWNING. Fashions in clothes; fashions in manners; fashions in speech, and fashions in heroines; the law finds no exception. The general idea of how a book comes to be written is, that the author is possessed by certain characters and inciIdents and has no rest until he has described them; it would be better for literature if it were so. But only to the past masters in the craft belongs this glory of creation; the great mass of writers do not create-have, that is to say, no independent conception of their characters; they merely wait until the masters have clearly created a new type, then they take possession of that type whatever it may be, dress it up anew, place it in fresh surroundings, and try to pass it off as a novel creation of their own. The masters have indeed, in this way, a good deal to answer for; just as the High Priest of Fashion is answerable for a good deal when he thoughtlessly sends every woman in Europe into crinoline or large sleeves, as the case may be. A Zola, for instance, or a Hardy, astonishes the world with a splendid, if brutal, bit of work. The public fancy is fascinated by the type. "We must paint life as we see it, nothing like life! passion! virility!" cries every literary dabbler; and forthwith rushes in where even angels might well fear to tread. "We can all do it, nothing easier!" they say-and fearful and wonderful are the monsters they make. It is astonishing, too, how long they take to tire of them. Long after the reading public has become completely sated with the type they are hammering on at it, seized apparently with a curious blindness which keeps tuem from seeing that they are doing the thing that has been done perhaps a hundred times already. At last, how ever, there comes a breathing space. What will they be at next? asks the anxious reader, scanning the literary horizon for a sail, so to speak. Perhaps it is a Stevenson this time who comes like Hopeful to give a hand out of the Slough of Despond. His style is lucid, his types are clearly defined again "nothing easier," is the cry, and in a trice they are tricked out in doublet and hose to follow their leader. And the historical romance runs merrily on its way. Then, just as something new is wanted, comes-let us say, a Barrie. Ah, what fresh fields, what pastures new! But they are not long uninvaded. "Whence came their feet into my field and why?" he might rather appropriately enquire, for the green fields are getting all trodden and tashed nowadays. It is so easy to write about old mothers, and dominies, and ingleneuks and the shorter Catechism! One might multiply examples indefinitely. I have merely chosen these at random to illustrate what every intelligent reader must have noticed-that there is fashion in books, as in so many other things. The master-minds are responsible for the type of hero or heroine which is for the nonce to reign in public favor; and it is a curious fact that since first novels began to be written, heroines have been divided into far more marked types than men. I do not pretend to account for this fact; but I think that it is one. The earlier novelists bestowed all their powers of characterization upon their male characters; there was plenty of individuality in them; but they seemed to be contented with one fixed type of heroine the then ideal of woman-and added her as a sort of stage property to every book. Fielding, in Sophia Western, describes the type which reigned triumphantly for many a day:I never heard anything of pertness, or Such was Sophia; and she may be recognized in almost every one of Scott's heroines, and survives even in Thackeray's Amelia Sedley-the "gentle creature" who "took her opinions from those who surrounded her, such fidelity being much too humble-minded to think for itself." But the Sophias and Amelias of the past are indeed dead and done with now, and a new type of heroine has arisen and now rules despotically over the whole world of fiction. The new type may be divided into two classes of favorites: the Outcast woman, and those whom, for want of a better name, I shall call the Sirens; and everywhere we read of "pure women," whose special claim to that title seems to be their lack of purity. The sad fact is that "good women," in the plain Saxon meaning of the words, are gone out of fashion—in books at least-and until the tide of public opinion turns, we must submit to the reign of her successor as best we may. This statement that good women have gone out of fashion will probably be received by many people with a shriek of protest; for it is quite one of the worst features of the Siren that she masquerades as an angel. The idea has got abroad that, provided the heart is pure, the intention harmless, nothing is wrong, and the Siren is continually acting in the most unprincipled way with the best inten |