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In order to redeem himself man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natural and healthy impulse, and turn his back on joy and beauty. Puritanism celebrated its reign of terror in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, destroying and crushing every manifestation of art and culture.

The Dancing Mania, arising from the tarantula bite, continued with all those additions of self-deception and of the dissimulation which is such a constant attendant on nervous disorders of this kind, through the whole course of the seventeenth century.

Then follows the Moretum, attributed to Virgil, and afterwards the Phoenix of Claudian. The latter piece is in the character of the seventeenth century, while the rest of the MS. is in that of the fifteenth."

These most curious documents, put together very maladroitly it must be confessed, by Father Labat, formed the subject, a few years ago, of a very interesting work by M. Berlioux. To the south-east of Africa, during the first half of the seventeenth century, the French founded some commercial settlements in Madagascar, an island long known under the name of St. Lawrence.

THE TRANSITION POETS. When one attempts to classify the literature of the first half of the seventeenth century, from the death of Elizabeth to the Restoration , he realizes the impossibility of grouping poets by any accurate standard. The classifications attempted here have small dependence upon dates or sovereigns, and are suggestive rather than accurate.

After the seventeenth century the habit of writing in the vernacular tended more and more to oust Latinity, and culture in each country began to assume more of a distinctively national character.

The British navy had discovered in its conflicts with the Dutch during the seventeenth century that the object of naval warfare was the command of the sea, which must be won by breaking the enemy's force in battle. This was also perfectly understood by the Dutch admirals, and in those wars was begun the development of the art of fighting battles with sailing vessels.

The seventeenth century is only woman see the tapestries, the delightful goddesses who have discarded their hoops and heels to appear in still more delightful nakedness, the noble woods, the tall castles, with the hunters looking round; no servile archaeology chills the fancy, it is but a delightful whim; and this treatment of antiquity is the highest proof of the genius of the seventeenth century.

The charm of the work, which makes it the joy of old and young, learned and ignorant, and of readers of all possible schools of thought and theology, lies in the interest of a story in which the intense imagination of the writer makes characters, incidents, and scenes alike live in that of his readers as things actually known and remembered by themselves, in its touches of tenderness and quaint humour, its bursts of heart-moving eloquence, and its pure, nervous, idiomatic English, Macaulay has said, "Every reader knows the straight and narrow path as well as he knows a road on which he has been backwards and forwards a hundred times," and he adds that "In England during the latter half of the seventeenth century there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree.

THE LITERATURE. INFLUENCE OF WOMEN. Previous to the fourteenth century learning in Japan was confined to the court circle. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries are the dark ages when military domination put a stop to all learning except with, a few priests. With the seventeenth century begins the modern period of general culture.