one of rare originality. You are a minister and an academician; your duties in this matter are in harmony and aid each other in their accomplishment. Hugo's eloquence was thrown away. Rochefort was transported-by degrees. First, he was sent to Fort Boyard, off the coast of France, near La Rochelle, where his coming caused a fever of excitement amongst "the Jonahs swarming in the belly of the monumental whale." In about a year he was transferred to Oleron, not, however, until after two almost successful ventures for his liberty. In the subterranean dungeons of this citadel he experienced "durance vile" indeed. Fifty prisoners were thrust into a den too small for ten. The sea oozed through the filthy walls and dripped upon the hideous mattress that made up his stock of furniture. At night enormous water-rats, as large as cats, mistook his face and body for a racecourse, and sometimes drowned themselves in his drinkingwater. Smaller vermin swarmed upon him and almost devoured him; and, all the while, the Paris press was clamoring, in the interests of equal justice, against the "scandalous favors" that were being shown to him. But there were some alleviations. In a larger room in the barracks to which he was transferred he became acquainted with the Arab chiefs, for whom he had long and vainly demanded an amnesty, and with them he spent some pleasant hours. For the purpose of a novel he was writing he had procured some colored fashion-plates. SO My Arabs were stupefied at this avalanche of women in pretty colors. Mahomet forbade his followers to be painted, no one has ever known why. One of my native comrades took me discreetly aside, and inquired mysteriously if these ladies were my moukères. I told him they were my wives and that they had all sent their portraits. He spent much of his time loking at them, with tears in his eyes, thinking probably of the wives he had left on the other side of the Mediterranean. . . . I ended by presenting the plates to him, a gift which delighted him highly, and which he regarded as princely. He pasted them 730 VOL. XIV. LIVING AGE. on the wall over the head of his bed, and knelt before them every night when he said his prayers. In the autumn of 1873, after having been permitted to marry the dying mother of his children "to secure their legitimacy," Rochefort was transported in a cage, in the hold of an old and crazy frigate, to New Caledonia, where, after a martyrdom of sea-sickness, he arrived on the 10th of December, amid a demonstration from the convicts on the landing-stage, such as is not often witnessed or permitted in this world. His life was Noumea was exile rather than imprisonment. He took it gaily and enjoyed it much, in spite of the musquitos and the heat. The sunsets there reminded him of Turner's "incomparable painting," "Ulysses quitting Polyphemus," in our National Gallery. They were of liquefied gold, transfused with amethyst. The loveliest lunar rainbows spanned the humid evening sky. The stars on clear nights seemed as if about to fall upon their heads. The phosphorescent sea on those pale nights, in which the moon shone bright enough for them to see to read, formed a spectacle of poetic beauty not to be described. But exile, even in these delightful scenes, was exile still, and, "like a joke, the better for being short." "I am not sorry to have seen this," he used to say, "but it is almost time to go and see something else." The time was nearer than the thought. The captain of an Australian sailing vessel was easily persuaded to connive at a plan for rescuing the famous convict from a rock, to which, together with a few companions, he was to swim under cover of darkness. But the story must be told in Rochefort's words. Dumas has nothing better in the way of marvellous escapes. Our friend had gone on board, and, by a most encouraging coincidence, found the captain reading Bow Bells in his cabin, at the page containing my biography, with a portrait at the head. Grandthille had not much difficulty in making him understand his proposal. He was to receive ten thou sand francs for hiding me and my companions in the hold of his barque. He accepted the proposal without any discussion. "M. Henri Rochefort," said he, "is too much of a gentleman not to respect his word of honor. . . . Returning from my farewell walk I saw a large shark disporting itself between our peninsula and the island of Nou. I called Bauer's attention to it, saying to myself in an aside, "Perhaps that is the one that will eat us to-night." But when we plunged into the sea the clouds were thickening, and the dog-fish, frightened by the thunder, had sought refuge at the bottom of the sea. Though I had often swum out to the rock, it appeared this time to be unusually distant. The tide, which was generally very slack, had almost covered its surface, and I found it impossible to distinguish it through the leaden veil that hung around us. I began to ask myself whether we had taken the right direction, for I swam a little ahead of my two companions, when I suddenly struck my knee against a pointed piece of rock and found that we were within our depths. More active than myself, Olivier Pain and Paschal Grousset scrambled up the peak ahead of me. danced ... We the attendance in crevices, and talked of returning to our hut, thinking that Grandthille had not been able to seize his employer's boat. The five gas jets in front of the prison on the island of Nou were the only spots of light to be seen. Suddenly one of these lights disappeared and then reappeared, whilst the next one seemed to go out. Evidently an opaque body was passing between us and the lights. Soon afterwards the noise of rowing reached our ears. "Are you there?" came a voice. "Yes." "Well, you'll have to swim for it; the boat can't get alongside. She only needs to touch a reef and she'll sink." We slid down into the water, and, after swimming several fathoms, managed to clutch the gunwale of the boat, like Cynægirus, and were dragged into it one after another. We dressed as hurriedly as possible, Ballière took the rudder, the boat put about, and we made for the port, where the ladder of the P. C. E. was hanging over the side ready for us to mount on board. After numerous narrow escapes the ship got out to sea, and landed the pason the sengers safe, but penniless, shores of New South Wales. Money came from France, and they were enabled to discharge their obligations and secure a passage in a steamer, viâ Fiji and Hawaii, to San Francisco. The later chapters are as lively and diverting as the rest, but English readers, for whom this edition has been specially prepared, would not have been sorry to have been spared the pain of seeing SO much vitriolic language poured upon the author's enemies, both great and small. We pass it by, and linger for a moment on the pleasanter and more amusing portions of the narrative. When in Australia, a kangaroohunt was arranged for M. Rochefort and his friends. It was a delightful day, except for the poor kangaroos, three of which were shot, and a fourth missed, or, rather, I would have missed it if I had fired at it. . . . "Why didn't you fire at once? We gave you the best place." "I couldn't fire," I replied. "When I saw it stand up, and put its hand in its pocket, I took it for an omnibus conductor." In Honolulu they were favored with an audience by King Kalakaava, who protested that he was more revolutionary than themselves. After far too many bottles of champagne, his Majesty commanded them to sing the Mar seillaise. ... What struck me more than anything, was this cry, which, from Calais to the Gare du Nord, never ceased to ring in my ears: "Long live honest men!" I shall make this title the pride of my life. It gives the true note of popular sentiment, and shows the real significance of this demonstration. It was not the good or bad articles that I have penned during the last thirty years which were applauded by the hundreds mune. In spite of his pronounced triumphal entry into Paris, on his secHome Rule opinions, he was stoned ond amnesty in 1895, our hero wrote:in the streets of Cork, and, on a visit to Madame Tussaud's, in London, he was much amused to find that, since his previous visit, his effigy had been transferred from the society of kings and emperors in the Saloon of Honor to the company of criminals, in the Chamber of Horrors. His time in London, then and subsequently, was employed in picture-hunting, and in writing for the press. But, both in London and Geneva, where he sheltered Vera Zassoulitch, the Russian Nihilist who shot the chief of the St. Petersburg police, he was the centre to which revolutionaries of all shades and countries drew, as if by instinct and affinity. Some of them were sorry specimens, as he himself admits, and but imperfectly developed Socialists. One day, I was accosted by a longbearded man in Oxford Street, who confided his troubles to me. He had just reached London, he said, after escaping an Assize Court verdict condemning him as an Anarchist. "Ah!" I said, naively, "For a newspaper article or for a speech?" "Neither," he replied, in an off-hand tone, "it was for having brought Socialistic principles of redistribution to bear on a gold watch." But he kept the watch, and thus this piece of redistribution turned in no way to the advantage of society. my of thousands of Parisians massed by the route followed by my collaborators and myself; it was known disinterestedness, and the certainty that I am incapable of selling my conscience or my vote. The auto-eulogy is not entirely undeserved. Within the limits of his rather narrow code of honor, M. Rochefort has been honesty itself, and, in spite of all his intransigeance and bitterness in public life, in other spheres he has not seldom shown a kindly and a tender heart. Lofty and sour to those who love him not: Of most refined and cultured pagans, so From The London Times. THE POSITION OF NONCONFORMITY. The article on "The Outlook for the Established Church of England" which appeared in these columns last September excited an interest far wider than the limits of the Anglican Communion. In that article, however, the Non-conforming members of the English Church were only referred to in their capacity of opponents. It seems advisable that the readers of the Times should be placed in possession of a statement, as full as newspaper limits will allow, of the present situation of the Dissenting bodies-their position in regard to the Church of England and to each other, and the tendencies which are modifying the views and practice this century, there was a common feelof English Nonconformity. At the outset, it may be well to dispose of a common delusion as to the number of Christian sects in this country. According to a list in "Whitaker's Almanack" there are two hundred and ninety-three "denominations" certified to the registrar-general as having "places of meeting for religious worship" in England and Wales. These include various Jewish, Moslem, and Mormon societies; the Secularists, Spiritualists, and Positivists; a number of evangelistic organizations, such as the British and Foreign Sailors' Society, the Railway Mission, and the Young Men's Christian Association, which are no more correctly described as "denominations" than the British Association or the Commons Preservation Society would be; and a multitude of insignificant groups, from the "Believers in Joanna Southcott" to the "Worshippers of God," which not one Englishman in a thousand has ever heard of outside of the registrar-general's catalogue. As a matter of fact, there are three large denominations in England-the Congregationalists, Baptists, and Wesleyan Methodists; and eight others of considerable importance the Presbyterians, the Unitarians, the Society of Friends, the Salvation Army, and four Methodist bodies known as the Primitive Methodists, Methodist New Connection, United Methodist Free Churches, and Bible Christians. The one point on which all these are understood to be united is their opposition to, or at any rate their divergence from, the Church of England. This opposition and this divergence, however, have in the past varied greatly among the different denominations. Fifty years ago the Wesleyans were sharply divided from the rest of the Dissenters by their friendship for "the Church," and so lately as the seventies there was a very strong and influential party of Wesleyans who were always ready to fight the battles of the Church against their fellow Nonconformists. On the other hand, among the Congregationalists and Baptists of the first half of ing that the Church of England was an un-Christian if not an anti-Christian body. In neither case was the reason hard to find. The Wesleyan Connection was largely the creation of one man, who, under every provocation, retained a deep affection for his mother Church; and his followers long held by his opinions, as they have held by his name to this day. The two older bodies, born in a revolt against the English Church of the sixteenth century, grew up in a lifeand-death struggle with sacerdotalism; they were recreated and launched upon a career of opposition by the action of the sacerdotal party, in expelling the famous two thousand Puritan clergymen from the Church of England in 1662. But the alienation of the older Dissenters from the Church has appreciably diminished, while that of the younger bodies has distinctly increased. The Congregationalists have never been a strongly denominational body. With them, as their name implies, each congregation of Christians is a Church in itself, meeting other Churches of the same kind for purposes of discussion, and joining in voluntary associations to promote mission work, but owning no legislative authority except that of Christ as the head of the whole Catholic Church. Lacking the cohesion maintained by the iron band of an Anglican episcopate, a Methodist confer ence, or a Presbyterian assembly, they have bestowed less care and means than most other bodies upon the enterprises of their own denomination; and they have attached less weight than any of their fellow Dissenters to their own peculiarities of belief and practice. The old leaders, and perhaps the ministers as a whole, would argue with some warmth that Congregationalism was the primitive and Apostolic form of Church government; but a large and increasing number of Congregationalists, while agreeing with the assertion, decline to push the argument very far. "Our plan suits us," they say, "but another plan may suit other people." Congregationalists even adopt a modified form of episcopacy in parts of the foreign mission field. The Church of England form of service, too, is no longer an object of positive aversion, as it once was. As long as thirty years ago a stalwart Congregational minister used to take his children to the parish church on Christmas morning and to St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday afternoons, and no one called him weak-kneed or suspected him of secret leanings to the Scarlet Woman. Since then the waters of strife have been drying up apace, and no prejudice is so nearly evaporated as that against the Anglican liturgy. In the case of the Baptists, the denominational spirit is strengthened by the distinctive tenet which gives them their name. Nevertheless, even in their ranks a kindlier spirit towards the Church of England has grown up and continues to grow. This spirit, however, shows no signs of developing into indiscriminate admiration. The Nonconformists recognize the fact that the Anglican clergy, with comparatively few exceptions, are earnest workers for the Christianization of the world, and that many of the clergy are practically at one with Nonconformists in theological opinion. For these, the evangelical section of the Church, Nonconformists have an in creasing sympathy. The others, the High Churchmen, while they compel admiration by their energy and devotion, and often win personal friendship by their geniality, have provoked by many of their practices and much of their teaching a feeling of repugnance which every year intensifies. The growth of sacramentarian opinion among the Anglican clergy has been accompanied by an accentuation of intolerance towards other communions. This intolerance seems to be a logical result of that opinion; and the effect is one of the strongest arguments against the cause. In proportion as a man exaggerates the authority of his own organization and approaches the point at which an organization appears to its members to be infallible, so his annoyance increases at the existence of other con organizations presuming to do the same kind of work. Where the Dissenting minister is also a cultured gentleman the vicar's contempt for his position cannot but be modified by his respect for the man himself, and cases are not rare in which the High Church priest and the Nonconformist minister are personally on good and even familiar terms. But when the differences of origin and education are great, however the Dissenter's moral character may seem to command respect, there is little chance of that social intercourse which takes the edge off ecclesiastical tempt. All the Dissenting bodies have been accustomed to this; but the Methodists, having attached the least importance to education as a qualification for the ministry, and drawing their members most largely from the humblest social rank, have had the bitterest experience of ecclesiastical bigotry. The consequence is that Methodism has been alienated as Puritanism was; and lately the more conservative organ of the Wesleyan Church has expressed a sorrowful foreboding that the conference will be led to pass a disestablishment resolution. In the minor sections of Methodism the same movement is visible-a movement towards disestablishment, fostered, if not created, by the un-Protestant transformation that has come over the Church of England. Even the Presbyterians, who include a large percentage of Conservative politicians and are composed to a great extent of State Churchmen from Scotland, have had their friendship for the English Church seriously weakened. The old feeling of hatred to "black prelacy," burnt into the Scottish heart by the Stuart persecutions, has almost faded away; but something closely akin to it is being aroused by the arrogance of those Episcopalians who proclaim and insist that they, and they alone, are "the Church." Opposition to the State establishment of sacerdotalism and opposition to all State establishment of religion are, it may be argued, not the same thing. Indeed, an eminent man might occasionally be found in Congregationalism, |