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An English member of Parliament, who has little or nothing in the shape of such popular national literature of his own to speculate about, may ask, Do the Irish read no newspapers? No doubt they do ; and the proprietors of The Freeman's Journal, The Nation, United Ireland, and other popular newspapers, have very substantial reasons for knowing that the Irish reading public is a large and increasing one. But the humblest gentleman of the press' must feel some interest in seeing what the Catholic bishop calls the memory of the past' kept alive by a national literature more truly popular than any literature of the kind in Europe. The literary man may remember what Samuel Johnson said about Ireland having been the early home of religion and learning, and he may be interested in seeing how the Irish peasant knows this and is proud of it. In other respects, also, it may have an interest for the literary man. But has it any interest for the politician? That is a question for the politician to decide.

J. POPE HENNESSY.

THE CONTINENTAL SUNDAY.

THE Art Gallery in South London, part of the Free Library, is always open, and crowded, on Sunday afternoons and evenings. For this, whether it be bad or good, I am in part responsible; the rooms being opened simply because we find that on Sunday the attendance is very large. But this simple-minded fulfilment of our duties as trustees of works lent for public view, in a poor neighbourhood, has been a serious, well-nigh insurmountable, difficulty in the way of obtaining funds, and I have been driven to think whether I can justify the Sunday opening, whether I may not be wrong in setting up convenience as a standard of morals. The Continental Sunday in particular became a nightmare, and to get rid of dreaming, and to form a waking conception of what the Continental Sunday is, I determined to see it with my own eyes, so far as I could. I have therefore visited most of the large towns in Western Europe, and made inquiries beyond my personal observation. I had before formed the idea that Sunday labour was decreasing on the Continent, and that, so far from England adopting the Continental Sunday,' it was rather the Continent adopting, gradually, and far from slowly, our customs; but this was only a mere chance impression, derived from ordinary pleasure rambles.

Leaving London on a Saturday evening, I reached Paris by noon on Sunday, and hastened to the Louvre, open from 12 to 2, to find it crowded. A large number of soldiers, and children with their parents, gave variety to the crowd that wandered through the rooms in that vague way that people do wander through museums, and makes one wish that guides or lecturers would tell us something of the things and their meanings, or that we all had education enough to be guides to ourselves. The rest of the day was spent in walking about Paris. One man was washing down the front of a house, two were repairing a gas-pipe, twelve men were mending a road, and two men and three horses were taking a girder to a house in course of erection. This was all the work I saw. In the evening many shops that had been · closed were open, and the Boulevards were all alive with open shops and gas, but the trade done could not, accordin gto appearance, have

paid for a tenth part of the gas used. The number of people in the streets was enormous, the trams and omnibuses were crowded, the noise of voices, wheels, tram-horses, was very trying to any but very robust ears, but wanton noise or disorder was nowhere perceptible. The theatre doors were crowded, and there were several morning perform ances, one being at the Français.

I had hoped to be at Madrid by the following Sunday, but had not allowed for the devious routes of Spanish railways, and the slowness of Spanish trains. So Sunday morning found me at Burgos, where the Cathedral was crowded and the market-place busy; but in the afternoon the market was limited to a few vendors of fruit, all the shops being closed. The people loitered and crawled, rather than walked, about the streets. We wandered about the town and then

out of it, up to the citadel, where, under the eye of the single sentinel, we repeopled, in fancy, the heights with the forces of Wellington, and enacted again the siege of seventy years ago. No single townsman followed us, though the day was bright, and, to our thinking, not cold, though it was December. We returned to the town to find the people still listlessly loitering about, apparently without active life of any kind.

The following Sunday we were at Cadiz. We could not well stay at Madrid till Sunday, but we found traces of Sunday visiting at the Escurial. Noticing that the lower parts of the frescoes in the galleries were all covered with what appeared, at a distance, to be representations of grass, we went closer, and found them all disfigured by scribbling, such as we see at Carisbrooke Castle, and other places of popular resort (where every wall is regarded as a visitor's book). The guide explained this to be the work, or play, of the Sunday visitors from Madrid; and when we asked why it was allowed, he simply shrugged his shoulders as the only reply to so absurd a question. At Cadiz, we found Sundays as other days up to noon; in the afternoon the shops were shut, and the people walking about on the promenade, and round the bay. Walking about' is the one means of getting through a day of rest in any part of Europe. In the evening we went to a circus; of the two theatres one was shut up, and the other burnt down. A difference of opinion as to the repetition of a song by the clown provoked a riot, confined entirely to voices and legs, about a hundred shouting men leaping into the arena, and doing nothing when there. The appearance of a policeman in a huge sash, and more huge cocked hat, made an impression, and when he formally, and with much solemnity, drew forth a mighty sword, there was a general slinking back into the seats. As the structure was temporary and threatened to be more so than originally intended, we left as soon as we could, without appearing to be partisans in the dispute. The booth was very full, and there was much noise, but no real disturbance.

The next Sunday it was Granada, and a fête day. In the morning the markets were crowded with buyers; women sitting on the ground with heaps of copper coins piled on the ground, without guard (or need of any), other than the common honesty of the common people; veritable money-changers in the market-place. The publichouses were full of people, but for coffee, not spirits; the talking incessant, the noise considerable, but no disturbance, no quarrelling. In the afternoon the chief streets looked almost as quiet as Oxford Street. A row of stalls was being set up in the chief square, and in the same square we saw a huge heap of earthenware presided over by a woman, while a man (presumably her husband) was selling, or rather trying to sell, very small bits of paper, which proved to be tickets for a lottery, the earthenware being the prizes, to be awarded at night. In the market-place we had seen in the morning two very fat pigs, driven about by a man who was selling tickets for another lottery, of which the pigs were to be the prizes; in the afternoon the same two pigs were lying in the grand square completely exhausted, the man still trying to sell tickets. We walked in the evening to the Alhambra through streets as quiet as any in London; the few shops that were open being quite devoid of any appearance of business. We dined off cold bread, and meat, and oranges, on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, looking down upon the Alhambra, and even on the Generalife, and saw two men building a wall at the cemetery, and a man and two mules collecting stones for them to build with.

Another Sunday, and we are at Barcelona; again a fête day, when much extra trade in specialities might be expected. In the morning the same busy markets, the same crowded churches, the same noise, and the same freedom from disturbance of any kind. In the afternoon the same absence of business and crowded streets. Three o'clock performances at two theatres, a circus, two panoramas, and a small boat, thirty feet long, in which two men, one a Swede, the other an American (born at Bath, and brought up at Nottingham, in England), had crossed the Atlantic, then made up the public attractions in day-time. Here we came into collision with the authorities at the Post-office, who declared my passport, ten years old, to be out of date. The British Consul explained that, as nothing lasted ten years in Spain, an English passport ten years old must of necessity seem to be out of date. In the evening we crossed the frontier, having very few fellow-travellers, the journey being quiet to tediousness, which is not the usual characteristic of Spanish third-class railway journeys. In all my Continental journeying I travelled third

class.

In Rome, Naples, Venice, Milan, the same appearance of decreasing Sunday work and trading. At Naples I saved ten shillings by finding a bank open on Sunday; but there was no clerk and no appearance of business. A most obliging English lady was apparently the

only person on the premises, and we settled the value of a five-pound note by finding a newspaper, and from it the exchange of the day. We differed in our computation, but I had to accept hers, which was the higher of the two. The hotel-keeper would take the note only at its nominal value, desiring to profit by the very large exchange, on the plea that he was an hotel-keeper, not a banker.'

In Berlin I spent one of the busiest and the dreariest of my foreign Sundays; so dreary was it that I resolved the next Sunday should be under the shade of my own trees, whatever had to be given up. Coming after so many other Sundays in so many other towns, possibly Berlin had not a fair trial. In the morning I watched the shops opening one by one, the men going about with beer and paraffin on long drays; by mid-day the closing was as general as the early opening, and more prompt. In the afternoon the closing was complete. The streets, museums, and park full of people, occupied with the eternal 'walking about' which seems to be the one great means of getting rid of Sunday. The only opera amongst all the theatres was at the Wilhelm Theatre, on my way to which I passed two beer-gardens. The first, at four o'clock, was beginning to fill. A large open space, almost completely filled with square wooden tables, each having six chairs. At one end a large bar, at one side a large toy stall. At the other end a large room in which at intervals conjuring tricks, of a somewhat commonplace character, were exhibited. To this an entrance fee of about one penny was charged. Besides the few gas lamps there were rows of lanterns decorated by rough coloured engravings, all vigorous, some a little broad in character. Men, women, and endless groups of children gradually filled the place.

The Wilhelm Theatre is in one of the long, apparently endless, streets that branch out of Berlin, gradually changing from town to suburban character. It is built on part of a garden, the remainder of which has a broken-down character, suggesting the idea of what a well-kept small private garden, might become in a year or so if left utterly untended. The opera was 'Trovatore,' with a chorus of ten and an orchestra of eight. At the end of each act the audience went out into the garden until a bell rang to give notice of the next. The second act was compressed into twelve minutes, and the audience evidently expected more of it, for no one stirred. A notice, 'End of the Act,' rose out of the stage, and in two minutes the exodus was complete. Each time the entire audience went out in less than two minutes and refilled the house in less than three. The eating and drinking was more of the kind we see at the Crystal Palace-nət hasty drinking at a bar, but leisurely eating and drinking at a table. The waiter in a few seconds would cover a table with a cloth, knives and forks, plates, &c., and the audience had a series of little meals between the acts, while the others walked about until the bell rang.

Let us take a wider view still, beyond the limits of Western