snowflake is from the burning, unstainable brightness of the sun's seven-fold ray. It has often been shown by experience that purity, refinement, and culture in woman enhances the preciousness of her work, so that their real value is intrinsic, and not contingent on their rarity or fragility, as that of curious. old china.

I must quote one passage from a prose work of the most severely pure of our great poets on this subject. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered vertue, unexercised and unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

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edly, we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather that which purifies us is triall, and triall by what is contrary. That vertue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, is but a blank vertue not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness."

It is in the darkness that the moonlight and starlight are seen to be beautiful, and Portia tells us "so shines a good deed in a naughty world. And there are among men and women, who are told to let their light shine by a higher than earthly authority, the same whose prayer was, not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil." I trust that it will not be thought irreverent to appeal to such authority in so slight a matter. For are not these trivialities of life rooted in our moral principles?

The conventionalities relating to work are closely allied, indeed almost the same as those just referred to. The etiquettes and opinions concerning that work

which is held suitable for men, that suitable for women, that which befits the higher classes, and that which is left to the more struggling, have grown out of convictions not all ill-founded, and observation not all short-sighted.

They, too, are beginning to yield to the pressure of present exigencies. They are, to use a simile of Ruskin's, like the bark that enclosed the trunk of a tree in its youth, but which is cleft asunder, and gapes with the_increase of each succeeding year. In former times. the man was the bread-winner. Such women as were bereft of external aid, then as now, struggled to earn their own livelihood, but within miserably cramped limits. But it was the usual creed that it was more feminine and dignified to lean upon the family supporters, and to eke out a small round of occupations within the home enclosure. To venture forth and do battle with the outer world of work was infra dig. and masculine, and ladies were shy of earning their bread. These notions are now being supplanted by other views. The axiom that "if any will not work neither shall he eat" will perhaps soon be applied practically to woman as to man. A larger field of work is already opening before us, of which the limits have not yet been drawn. Actual Actual experiment alone will have to decide where the incoming wave shall stop, and say, "hitherto shalt thou come, and no further." Some work will be found too severe a strain on our physical powers; some, perhaps, too high for our mental stature to attain; some may prove too alien to the distinctive traits and virtues of woman. Meanwhile I believe that every one who lends a hand in removing the more artificial barriers set up by Conventionality, will be doing good service to the world at large.

Because strong-mindedness is

objectionable, it will not therefore be held that a love of honest independence is wrong, or that earning, for one's own living, and "to give to him that needeth," is less worthy, less attractive, than clinging in feeble indolence to the arms of those who are often heavily enough burdened as it is.

Customs which encourage the maintenance of such selfish and false views of life and its duties cannot too soon be got rid of.

"Social lies, that warp us from the living truth," have, like a fog, veiled the true aspect of things from our eyes, so that people walk "in a vain show," disquieted "in vain." But rifts are in the fog, where light can be seen. We can

exist, if we will, in a world of shadows, glamour, and delusion, with reality ever eluding our grasp, but at the expense of our truer selves. Of this unreal existence Ruskin says, "it is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass much of our time in the world; that life in which we do what we have not purposed, and speak what we do not mean, and assent to what we do not understand; that life which is overlaid by the weight of things external to it, and is moulded by them, instead of assimilating them; that which instead of growing and blossoming under any wholesome dew, is crystallized over with it, as with hoarfrost, and becomes to the true life what an arborescence is to a tree, a candied agglomeration of thoughts and habits foreign to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy, which can neither bend nor grow, but must be crushed and broken to bits, if it stand in our way. All men are liable to be in some degree frostbitten in this sort all are partly encumbered and crusted over with idle matter; only if they have real life in them, they are always breaking this bark away in noble rents, until it be

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comes like the black strips upon the birch tree, only a witness of their own inward strength. But with all the efforts that the best men make, much of their time passes in a kind of dream, in which they indeed move and play their parts sufficiently to the eyes of their fellow dreamers, but with no clear consciousness of what is around them or within them; blind to the one, insensible to the other."

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If this be true, by Ruskin's testimony of "the best of men,' how may we, weaker women, hope to free ourselves in any measure from the thraldom of our roundings? Are we to allow circumstances to petrify around the crevices of life which it is our lot to fill, and let them become a kind of mould to us, while we live like toads enclosed in stone? Or, weak as we are, are we endued with a vital expansive force, with which we can resist the pressure, nay, even react upon our circumstances?

A parable from Nature may answer us. "The waters wear the stones." Many a time-worn ruin of man's building, and many a massive cliff, the work of Nature herself, will testify to this fact. "Weak as water," "Hard as a rock." Often have we heard these expressions, and yet the caverns underneath and the weatherbeaten summits above confess that the rock has come off worsted in its conflict with a mightier power. And what are these lying there? Fragments of a stony crown which the cliff has torn from its brow and laid at the feet of the conquering

waves.

Not only the waves have left their mark upon the cliff. Drops of rain, one by one, falling on the rock in seemingly uninfluential showers, have penetrated with subtle way through invisible inlets into the solid mass, and have hidden themselves far within. Then

followed heat and cold, strong sunshine and alternate frosts, as auxiliaries to the hidden moisture; till at the last we find the strong

cliff rent into separate column-like fragments by the expansive strength of the waters within.

PERHAPS no country on the face of the earth has a stranger history than that of Montenegro. The earlier portion of this history is entirely legendary, and is based on the piesmas or ballad narratives, with which the country abounds; but even when legend gives place to fact the story of Montenegro is no less extraordinary.

Its very name is a puzzle which philology has as yet been unable satisfactorily to solve. Both the Venetian term, Montenegro, and the native name Tsernogora, when translated into English, mean "The Black Mountain; " yet the so-called Black Mountain is a series of lofty white chalk cliffs, well known as a conspicuous landmark by every sailor on the Italian seas. Some have supposed that these cliffs were once covered with black firs, and so account for the name. Others think that Montenegro means the Hill of the Outcasts or Black-guards. Perhaps the lucus a non lucendo principle of derivation is the best answer to the riddle.

The country is a stupendous mass of almost impenetrable rocks, lying straight north from the eastern point of Italy, but shut out from the Adriatic coast by a narrow inter

vening slip of territory now belonging to the Austrians. Its character is thus described in a national fable: "When God created the world he held in his hands a sack full of rocks, and the sack happened to burst just over the top of Montenegro, dropping its whole contents upon the land."

M. Reclus, to whose valuable information we have already been repeatedly indebted in these papers, gives the following graphic description of the country:-" If one were to take a bird's-eye view of Montenegro, it would appear like an enormous honeycomb, opening into thousands of cells, or like a network formed of innumerable meshes. The rains have cut up the plateau by forming thousands of streams, which have excavated for themselves deep beds in the rock. In some places these have hollowed out large valleys; in others they have only formed narrow roudinas, which are little else than deep wells. In very rainy seasons the water collects itself in temporary lakes, covering the low lands and destroying the crops; but in ordinary weather the streams flow in the first instance into deep cavities in the chalky rock, which in their turn feed the beautiful springs

of clear blue water that are to be seen at the base of the mountains, on the shores of the Gulf of Cattaro. The Zęta, the chief river of Montenegro, is itself formed by the union of streams which have bound themselves in reservoirs north of the Valley of Niksiki, and run thence in hidden channels under the hills of Planinitsa. The heights of Carniola, some parts of the Lower Alps in France, and many other mountainous countries have a similar construction so far as regards their river-beds; but in no other place are there found so large a number of small deep water-pits arranged side by side on a grand scale. The traveller is all the more struck with the abrupt inequalities of the surface, the height of the mountains, and the depth of the valleys, when he finds that the only roads are either mere footways running over the debris of the rocks, or ladders of stone cut out of the precipices."*

We may add, that when Napoleon ruled the Illyrian shores of the Adriatic, he offered to form, at his own expense, a road from the coasttown of Cattaro to Niksiki, which would have contributed greatly to open up the country; but his offer was refused. When we come to describe the character of the Montenegrins we shall find that their inaccessible rocks are the main source

Nouvelle Geographie Universelle, p. 294.

of their power. The country, once opened to invasion, would soon cease to exist as an independent state. Where carriages can pass cannon can follow. †

The only portion of Montenegro which approaches to a lowland character is the south-eastern district, in which the mountain ridges are separated from one another by immense valleys, sloping towards the Adriatic coast and the Albanian frontier, and drained by the affluents of Lake Scutari. In one of these valleys stands the capital, Cettinje, a petty village, consisting of somewhere about a hundred houses. Here the Senate or Scuptschina meets in a thatch-roofed house of one storey. Here also lives Prince Nikita, in a cottage scarcely distinguishable from those of his neighbours. ‡

The population of the country is officially estimated at 196,000, or thereabouts; but we greatly doubt whether it actually reaches that number. It is easy to understand that there are very good "official ” reasons for maintaining an appearance of strength with the view of misleading the Turks as to the available military force of Montenegro. The barren nature of the country, as well as its small extent, forbid us to suppose that its population can be SO numerous as

196,000. Its superficial area is only about 1,000 square miles. Its greatest breadth is thirty-five miles, and its greatest length is not more than sixty.

Prior to the battle of Kossovo, in 1389, the heights of Montenegro seem to have been either uninhabited, or inhabited only by a set of nomadic hunters and shepherds, living under no law and having no political organization. It then became a refuge from the Turks to one band of the defeated Servian army. Its mountain fastnesses overhang the field of battle-the sorrowful Amselfeldt.

A certain Ivan the Black is the early national hero towards whom all the legends of the Montenegrins converge, and who is regarded as the founder of their nationality. Probably enough he was of Slavonic extraction, and the country may have been in its first years peopled by a race of pure Slavonic blood. But this has long ceased to be the case, though the mixed population of unspeakable blackguards who still occupy the land, or rather rock, worship Ivan as their father and future saviour, who "Sleeps on the bosoms of the Vilas, that watch over him, and will wake him one day, when God shall have resolved to restore Cattaro and the Blue Sea to his dear, Montenegrins. Then the immortal hero will once more march at the head of his people to drive out the Schwabi (the dumb Germans) from the coasts usurped from the Slavs."+

If there is any sediment of truth in the piesmas or ballads regarding this Ivan, he must have been originally an outlawed robber, who rose to power by help of an alliance with Venice, at a time when that republic was anxious for many reasons to maintain her influence in the Adriatic, and to extend her territory

in Greece and the East. With her aid, and with the influx of refugees of every type, for whom the rest of the world had become too hot, he supported himself and his following of outcasts by pillage and piracy. Montenegro became, and continues to be, the Adullam of Europe. Every one that is in distress and every one that is in debt, and every one that is discontented gather themselves there.

The Montenegrin is ferocious rather than brave. His tradition ary" Christianity" makes him sojust as Islamism does with the Turk. When an infant is born in the country the first wish expressed over its cradle is, "May he never die in bed!" When such a misfortune as a peaceful death overtakes a man, his friends are ashamed to own the disgraceful fact, and rather than do so they say, "The Old Murderer has killed him!"

Much is said at present of Turkish atrocities. We shall describe one out of many Christian atrocities, which is the next step in Montenegrin history.

The last Montenegrin chief belonging to the dynasty of Ivan the Black, married a Venetian wife. Probably her influence over him had some civilizing effect at all events, he determined to leave his Montenegrin rule behind him, and to become a Venetian citizen. He carried this purpose into effect, and the Turks took advantage of the dissensions which ensued, and seized upon Montenegro. With varying fortune and unvarying bloodshed, they strove to maintain their occupation till, in 1703, no inconsiderable number of Turkish settlers, and other converts to Mahommedanism, were to be found in the mountain.

We quote the piesma which describes what happened on the Christ