heaven otherwise than by Him,' and human, well we recognise it, is the vehemence of that reiterated exclusion of all other paths to joy. Me liked,' she says, 'none other heaven.' Once again she touches the same octave, condensing in a single phrase which has seldom been transcended in its brief expression of the possession that leaves the infinity of love's desire still unsatiated: 'I saw Him and 'I sought Him, I had Him, and I wanted Him!' Fletcher's tenderness, Ford's passion, lose colour placed side by side with the utterances of this worn recluse whose hands are empty of every treasure.

And round all her 'even Christen,' God's lovers in heaven and on earth, not omitting those dear sinners whose sins by God's great courtesie-it is the word she uses almost oftener than any other in connexion with the Deity-are forgotten, her warm affections cling. For St. John of Beverley, who it seems was a 'kind neighbour and of her knowing; for our Lady St. Mary, a simple maiden, but little waxen above a child, as she stood to Juliana's beholding; for God Himself, the Lord who took no place in His own House,' who 'is a very noble Lord and will save His word in all 'things' (the language of chivalry echoes fantastically from the outward world of the Black Prince's day), 'and will make 'all well that is not well,' for these her love clothes itself as with the tender impetus of a child's caress. God, it is true, has His secrets; sin and hell trouble her betimes, as they have troubled many another before and since; but a certain gay optimism of faith and hope triumphant, surmounts that infirmity of fear. Sin is behovely, but all shall be ' well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall 'be well,' is the refrain of page after page—and little marvel it is, for she saw an high privity hid in God, which shall be known in heaven to us. In which knowing we shall ' verily see the cause why He suffered sin. In which sight we shall endlessly have joy, and all say with one voice, Lord, blessed mote Thou be. For because it is thus,

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thus it is well.'

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Strange too is it, in an epoch when the physical hell of fire and torture-such hells as that of Teresa's later vision, with long narrow lane, low and dark and close, with 'mire of reptiles and contracting walls,' had branded itself upon the orthodox-to read Juliana's quiet words: To me

was showed none harder hell than sin; hell was as sin to 'my sight;' and from sin, she gives sad assent to the inexorable law of human weakness, we may not in this life

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'keep us.' Yet, even as she makes her concession to the inevitable, the old jubilant faith reasserts its sure basis of final victory. In each soul that shall be safe is a goodly 'will, that never assenteth to sin ne never shall,' and in the end blame shall be turned into endless worship, though 'how and by what deed there is no creature beneath Christ that wot it.' Even those to whom her gospel conveys no certificate of truth may find something to learn in that doctrine of good cheer.

This is to give but some slight sketch of those conditions of mind and body and thought belonging to the mysticism of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. To track its influence in literature, to follow its developements in the copies fiction made from life, and in those other more recent plagiarisms life is accused of having made from fiction, is a task far beyond our scope. That it left the trace of its spiritual glamour is plain enough. The German school of chivalric romance, as represented by Fouqué in his legends (mis-estimated in England as children's stories), or by Novalis in his unfinished Heinrich von Oftendingen,' is permeated with it. Perhaps some kindred film crept over Hawthorne's pen when he wrote his tales, where, trembling on the brink of the unseen, the figures of his men and women rise in the moonlight of his creative fancy. George Sand, in her strange chronicle of spiritual inheritances Spiridion,' has caught something of its atmosphere. Its symbolism is echoed --we are tempted to say their pose approaches a parody -by many so-called 'mystics' of our own time, who are fain to assume the gift of the ascetic's vision while they withhold the guarantee of the ascetic's sacrifice. Spurious mysticism there has ever been, superficial imitations and artificial emotions. Men forget that to see a vision is not to have become a mystic. To be, if one may borrow the journalists' term, an anti-naturalist, is not to have attained the ethereal kingdom that flesh and blood cannot inherit. 'Chevalier Malheur' may pierce the hand of the dreamer; 'le rêve qui pleure' may visit the dead eyes of the living sinner; to the remorseful penitent les soirs mystiques,' with their vibrations of les angélus roses et noirs,' may come; the experiences of Huysmans's hero, the Parisian mystic' of to-day, whose studied emotions and self-absorbed egoism would be less revolting as features of his sins than of his repentances, may be true to life. But the fact remains

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* Sagesse,' Paul Verlaine.

The

that to adopt a symbolic phraseology is not to have assimilated a spiritual temperament, although be it allowed that in days when originals are lacking the copyists themselves may be unconscious of the fraud.

And towards them, as towards all who bear by right, or have taken in good faith, the title, the world may well exercise a judgement of forbearance. Sleeping dreams there are of the brain, the recital of which in a land, were there any such, where sleep is dreamless, would read as an impostor's fable. Waking dreams there may be of the soul, towards which our attitude is perforce of a like incredulity; yet, may be, even so and to us, they have their value. Is it not perhaps true, in a wider sense than the writer intended, that ohne die Träume würden wir gewiss früher alt'?

ART. III.-1. Woman under the English Law. By ARTHUR RACKHAM CLEVELAND. 1896.

2. The Law of the Domestic Relations. By W. P. EVERSLEY. Second edition. 1896.

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We live in times much given to murmurings and to the expression of dissatisfaction both with ourselves and our institutions. The good old days of self-complacency, so irritating to Mr. Matthew Arnold, are past. No need now for any of us to mutter under our breath, Wragg is in 'custody.' Our Navy is inadequate and unmanned, our Army costly and inefficient, our clergy are unloved, our public schools failures, our commercial morality rotten at the core. Betting on horses we have never seen, and on the rise or fall of stock we have never held, are our most prosperous industries, and the drink traffic is our only roaring trade; whilst, as for our manufactured articles, they are all (almost) made in Germany. In this querulous state of mind the Mother of Parliaments is not likely to escape domestic criticism. On all sides we hear complaints of both Houses. The Upper House has little to do, and the Lower House does nothing. Governments cannot pass their measures because of the garrulity of private members, those minor 'orators' of whom Mr. Chamberlain in his meridian splendour speaks so contemptuously; whilst private members themselves cannot pass their own little bills because the Government has taken all the time. It is a pitiable picture. Yet in important matters it is well to take large views, to forget the mishaps of the hour, to look back a bit and then forward; for so alone can we mark the progress of events and the course of law.

Every middle-aged Englishman, fat and pursy citizen. though he may have become, has lived through a revolution effected by law-a revolution, or rather a series of revolutionary events, some of them hailed by salvoes of leading articles and thunders of popular applause, whilst others have passed barely noticed; nor would it be paradoxical to assert that the new laws which most nearly concern us, which affect not only our conduct but our ideas, which cut most deeply into our social life, are those which attracted the least observation during their passage through Parliament.

The title of Mr. Cleveland's interesting book which stands at the head of this article has suggested to us a subject second to none in social importance, which has been revo

lutionised by Statute Law in our own day, and in order to judge in detail how complete that revolution has been it is only necessary to refer to Mr. Eversley's learned and scholarlike work on 'The Domestic Relations '-a book which, though technically belonging to the forbidding ranks of 'law books,' is yet full of human interest, and written, moreover, in the English language.

If it be the business of parliaments to make laws, to upset (if justice demands) established things, and to substitute in their place what is conceived to be equitable, and to do this fearlessly, nor always at the bidding of constituents or in consequence of mandates' from ill-attended public meetings, or minatory letters from underbred secretaries of declining associations, but in obedience to a true legislative instinct-why, then the history of our recent legislation with regard to married women is alike honourable in itself and a complete answer to those conceited babblers who would have the country believe that parliamentary institutions stand self-condemned to uselessness and public impotence.

Women may be roughly divided into two classes, married women and single women; for widows may, for legal purposes and without impropriety, be included, for the nonce, amongst the single. Apart from certain civic disqualifications and professional exclusiveness, our old Common Law never thought fit to bully single women, who, when of full age and of sound mind, have always been left free to manage their own property, whether real or personal, and to make and alter their wills and codicils as and when they in their good sense or caprice might think fit. No family council of males ventured to control them, nor was any limit placed either upon their acquisitiveness or their powers of inheritance. Single women amongst us have from time immemorial chaffered and sold, kept shop, and farm, and inn, driven to market, collected their rents, made their investments, sued their debtors, compounded with their creditors, and, in a word, lived their life exposed to nothing worse than a good deal of time-honoured and heavy jesting about single blessedness' and their supposed desire for, or alleged aversion to, that holy estate of matrimony, into which, for one reason or another, they never entered.

Very different, indeed, has been the history and plight of the married woman in England. Our laws are far more imaginative than our novels, being the creatures of the oddest preconceptions and the most original fancies

Our