fatal facility of finger so often the enemy of mechanical perfection, of that exquisite sense of time and intonation, which never deserts Italian natures. So that the Italian may travel in a month the road on which the tardigrade and patient German will be detained for a year. Then, as must be notorious to whoever has frequented Southern society, melodious perception is almost universally diffused over all ranks and conditions of men. Elsewhere professors and amateurs have the monopoly of this advantage. In Italy, even in unmusical Turin, you may safely consult statesmen and waiters as to the timbre and extension of a prima donna's voice, or the accuracy of a violinist's arpeggios and double notes. Of such matters the general public in Munich and Berlin are tolerably ignorant, though we may not rate their intuitions at the dead level of our own. Nor, apart from those choral performances which have nearly as much to do with goodfellowship as with art, is there to be heard in Germany much amateur execution of a superior kind. The Blue-blood does nothing at all in this walk, and the little skill which exists belongs to men rather than to women. This is the more strange, because in such opposite points of Europe as St. Petersburg and the Hague, especially in the last capital, ladies with sixteen quarterings attain to surprising degrees of executive power. A like remark applies to Pesth, where the local magnates lately gave a public concert from their own resources of throat and finger, and fairly beat the profession out of the field. Vienna is perhaps the Nadir of musical performances as far as the aristocracy of parchment is concerned. But the choral societies maintained by middle-class agency-by which We mean lawyers, doctors, employés, shopmen, and so forth-are models of correct and vigorous execution. In particular their voices produce that competent volume of tone which is so curiously absent when our own larynxes congregate in large numbers. The Viennese amateur philharmonic society goes far beyond any like institution amongst ourselves. But then it is recruited from a lower social stratum, and the comparative lightness of Austrian toil allows the native of the Imperial city opportunities for prolonged practice, which cannot be commanded in our busy land.

The Swabians do not love oratorio, and works of this class are not regularly given. Ecclesiastical music in churches is at the lowest ebb; classical concerts are not, according to our London standard, very plentiful. There are two philharmonic societies, of which that of "The Young Musicians" is to be preferred, partly, perhaps, because the older institution is under the direction of the Opera Kapellmeister above mentioned. There are usually two sets of performances of chamber music: one by Herr Hellmesberger's party; another conducted by that admirable violinist, Herr Laub. The ensemble of the Hellmesberger set cannot be too highly praised. Their delivery of Beethoven's posthumous quartettes has never been surpassed, if indeed equalled; it almost repays the trouble of a journey from London to Vienna to hear the "Danza Tedesca" and the Presto of the Quartette No. 13, played in the room of the Musikfreunde.

Herr Laub's party were hardly so well drilled as their rivals, but on the other hand, Laub himself is an artist of the first rank. Like Joachim, he belongs to the school of Spohr; but whereas Joachim is not without analogies, remote though they be, to the manner of Paganini on one hand, and Vieuxtemps on the other, Laub's playing may be described as suggesting certain reminiscences of Ernst. If Joachim excels in Doric breadth and senatorial dignity, Laub is perhaps more at home in the tender and impassioned strains of the Lydian measure. Vienna possesses one great resident pianist of what may be called the Swabian school. Herr Eppstein descends, as far as genealogy of style is concerned, through Kalkbrenner and Czerny, from Hummel, pertaining rather to the Döhler and Meyer species, and is altogether a very attractive artist. With perfect fluency of finger, a touch so limpid as almost to defy comparison, and great agility, he is full of feeling and refined taste. Grandeur is not his walk; so that, though he succeeds with Haydn, or even with Mozart, Beethoven lies outside his horizon. The soul of harmony has chains, which, in the case of part music, are hardly to be untwisted, except by the persevering and confidential repetition that belongs to domestic practice alone. The sisters Milanollo and Marchisio may be cited as witnesses to this truth, and when Herr Eppstein plays duets with his graceful wife, the rule receives a fresh illustration. In the presence of beauty criticism loses its edge, and praise becomes panegyric, but Madame Eppstein can stand on her artistic merits; she rivals her husband in delicacy, and goes beyond him in vigour, as well as in the subtleties of "linked sweetness long drawn out." A more extraordinary though less legitimate performer than Herr Eppstein, is Tausig, a Pole who often visits Vienna. His bravura powers are of the most surprising sort, and as a concerto player he has an aplomb and fire almost phenomenal. Tausig's reading of the march in Weber's Concert-Stück, and other pieces requiring an impetuous and broad delivery, is not without a dash of the mens dirinior of that incomparable Hungarian meteor, now wellnigh lost to music,-the Rev. Abbé Liszt. The roll of the pianists who belong more or less to Vienna would be incomplete without the mention of a highly gifted young lady from Prague, Mademoiselle Kolar, whose powers, however, are not yet equal to her charms.

The Law of Libel.

No part of the law of England is more closely connected with the common affairs of life, or more liable to be misunderstood on account of the difficulties inherent in the subject, and superinduced by the legislator, thar the law of libel. Most of us find it easy to keep clear of the other branches of criminal law, and even civil litigation may generally be avoided without much real difficulty, but the law of libel is peculiar. Any one who has to give the character of a servant, or who repeats a story which happens to have struck his fancy, and which is to the disadvantage of some other person, may find himself involved in its meshes without having had the slightest notion of committing a crime or inflicting an injury; and it is not too much to say that, of that innumerable multitude of men and women who are in one way or other concerned in writing for the papers, there is hardly one who has not frequent occasion to write what, if the law were rigorously construed, might be regarded as a libel. Wide, however, as is the definition of libel, it is no less true that the course of events has gradually introduced extensive changes into the law, all of which, at least of late years, have tended to discourage the strict notions upon the subject which formerly prevailed; and it is hardly too much to say of this gradual change, that of late the courts have been disposed to regard newspapers as being invested with a sort of quasi-judicial position, involving privileges not unlike those which are possessed by regular tribunals. This change, which would be enough to make the elder generation of lawyers turn in their graves, has been very gradual; but the length to which it has gone, may be collected from a case lately decided between a Dr. Hunter, the incidents of whose carcer attracted a good deal of public attention, and the Pall Mall Gazette. Dr. Hunter published in various newspapers a series of letters on consumption, and otherwise conducted his professional affairs in such a manner, that the Pall Mall Gazette considered itself justified in assailing him in terms about as vehement as could well be used. The article was headed "Impostors and Dupes," implying that Dr. Hunter belonged to the one class, and his patients to the other. Dr. Hunter was described as a quack, classed with scoundrels, and his right to call himself "Dr." was questioned in the most vehement and contemptuous manner. In short, the article prima facie was about as severe a libel as could be written. If the printer had been criminally prosecuted for its publication forty, or even thirty years ago, he would, in all probability, have had to undergo substantial punishment. Nevertheless, in the course of his summing up, the Lord Chief Justice of England made the following observations on the subject:

"Under his second head of defence, the defendant says-This was a matter of public concern. The plaintiff put forward in these advertisements his system, his theory, and communicated to a certain extent the remedies by which he proposed to cure this malady. He invited persons to come to him for the purpose of being treated and cured by him. I could see from his account of the theory on which his treatment was based, and from his account of the treatment that he proposed to use, that the whole was a mere idle delusion, and looking at the mode in which his work was published, looking at the secrecy in which his discovery was shrouded, looking to the mode which he adopted to bring himself into notoriety-a mode which was utterly at variance with the received habits of the profession to which he professed to belong-I was warranted in drawing the inference that he was a mere pretender, and not only a pretender, but a quack who intended to impose on mankind as quacks do. I was warranted in drawing this inference, and I denounced him accordingly. It may be that I was wrong, it may be that now the matter has been fully investigated, and that the plaintiff has had an opportunity of being heard and vindicating this theory which he has put forward, of showing that his practice has not been wholly unsuccessful, that a jury may think I have gone too far; but the question is not thereby concluded, if it should appear, under all the circumstances of the case, that, bringing to the discharge of my duty as a public writer caution and moderation in criticizing what I thought to be a mischievous and noxious pretence, I have exercised a reasonable and careful judgment, have not been over-hasty and precipitate, inferring sinister design and wicked motive against the person whom I have assailed. If I have brought to the discharge of my duty only an honest desire to do good and benefit in the department to which I belong, in that case, if a jury should be of that opinion, I am entitled to their verdict. And, gentlemen, I endorse that proposition."

We do not believe that the law has ever before been stated in a manner so favourable to journalists, and we think that it may possibly be interesting to our readers to be presented with a short sketch of the various phases through which the law passed before it reached this point.

The law of libel is singularly confused, and it is by no means an easy matter to give anything like a systematic account of it. It may, however, be traced back to the very infancy of English law, into which, together with a far larger proportion of our system than is generally supposed, it was introduced from the Roman law. It would be interesting to lawyers, but hardly to unprofessional readers, to exhibit at length the influence which the one system had upon the other. Those who wish to study the subject will find much learning about it, mixed up with a great deal of singularly prosy and commonplace speculation, in the preliminary discourse prefixed by Mr. Starkie to his work on the Law of Slander and Libel. A few observations on the leading points of the history of the system in England may be of interest to our readers as an introduction to what we have to say on the most recent development of the law.

The law of libel may be divided into two great branches, each of which again is subdivided into two other great branches. Libel may

be regarded either as a crime or as a civil wrong, and the crime may be committed or the wrong inflicted either by writings, pictures, or other permanent things, or by words spoken. Each of these has its own history. Libel, regarded as a crime, has passed through a great variety of changes at different periods in our history. In very early times, when there was no periodical literature, and when comparatively few people could read, the commonest way of committing the offence was by word of mouth by spreading rumours which either were or were considered as false, by writing the songs which were the first germs of the modern leading article or review, and by maintaining propositions which were regarded as dangerous to the established authorities in church and state. The gravity of these offences varied from the very highest degree of criminality to the most petty breach of police regulations. Many instances occur in our early history, and especially in the more excited periods of it, when, for a certain time and under special provocation, the severest of all penalties were attached to words spoken. In Henry VIII.'s reign, for instance, it was made high treason to deny the royal supremacy, and in the fierce legislation of that period many similar instances may be found of the severity with which the expressions of any sort of censure upon the Government, or on the doctrines which for the time being happened to be established, were repressed. If we go to the other end of the scale, we find a homely provision made for the punishment of mere bad language in the bridle or trebuchet and ducking-stool. The bridle was a sort of gag made of iron which surrounded the head and confined the tongue, and the ducking-stool was a contrivance by which a person could be ducked under water in a pond. These were the remedies which our ancestors considered it necessary in old times to provide for scolds. They were at the disposal of the petty criminal jurisdictions which at that time existed in manors under the name of courts-leet, and which to a certain extent filled the place of our modern magistrates. There was besides this another jurisdiction, once most formidable and efficient, but now almost forgotten, which it may be well to mention, and which existed till our own times. This was the jurisdiction of the spiritual courts, which before the Reformation was by no means confined to the discipline of the clergy and to questions of doctrine and the like, but extended to the laity quite as rigorously, and applied to almost all cases. of moral delinquency, and especially to matters connected with the relations of the sexes and the sins of the tongue. The well-known saying, that the duty of archdeacons is to discharge archidiaconal functions, had once a very different meaning from that which it has at present. The archidiaconal functions were no joke at all, nor were they confined to questions about the repair of the fabric of churches and the like. The archdeacon was a sort of inquisitor in a mild way. He took cognizance of all charges of unchastity, all matters of defamation, and various other things, and