CONVERSIONS IN SCANDINAVIA.-The Church of Rome continues to make great strides in Scandinavia. Many Lutherans have been converted at Stockholm, and there is so much good-will toward Catholics that at a recent fancy fair held for a Catholic hospital the sum of 38,000 francs was obtained, mostly from non-Catholics. The new Prefect-Apostolic of the North, Mgr. Fallize, has been on a visit to Christiania, where he was received by the Government authorities. Though Catholic emancipation in Denmark dates from only 1848, there are now 4000 Catholics in the country, served by some thirty priests, with schools taught by Sisters of religious communities. The Jesuit Fathers have a college in Copenhagen, with over forty students. In Norway, before 1845, Catholic priests were forbidden the country under pain of death. Twenty years ago there were only 130 Catholics; now there are over eight hundred, with twenty priests; while Sisters of Charity have the management of two hospitals and eight schools. The sparseness of the population and the great distances which separate one town from another are, of course, unfavorable conditions for the propagation of religion in Ultima Thule. -Weekly Register.

THE THUNDER STORM: IN THE LION HOUSE. -A correspondent sends the following account of his experiences in the Zoological Gardens during the storm of August 17th to the Pall Mall Gazette: Chance took me to the grounds of the Zoological Society yesterday evening, and after a stroll around I had just time to slip into the building known as the Lion House, where also are the tigers, jaguars, and leopards, when the storm burst in all its fury. In the waning light the situation was anything but agreeable for the little band of belated visitors, most of them without umbrellas. The rain poured down with such violence that the floor of the place was soon covered, owing to the presence of various overflow pipes which discharged themselves inside the building. The flashing of the lightning was incessant and the roar of the thunder simply deafening. As each flash lit up the dim recesses of the cages, the eye lighted upon the savage forms behind the bars. Here was a lion standing up with his ears pricked, as though the clamor of the elements brought back to his mind dim memories of a time when he prowled the forest and shrunk from the savagery, greater even than his own, of a tropical storm. Two leopards who had been snarling at one another appeared

to bury the hatchet in presence of the mysteri ous flashes which ever and anon blinded their fierce eyes; and their demeanor evinced a certain mutual conciliatoriness. For the most part, the animals lay perfectly motionless about the dens. A tigress from Turkestan was, however, an exception, as she seemed to revel in the storm, and bounded from corner to corner with a bold defiance of the lightning which, with almost the brilliancy of limelight, played upon her. In the next cage a tiger and tigress, whose course of true love did not appear to run smoothly, to judge from the nasty snaps of the lady when her mate attempted to rub his nose on her shoulder, were completely subdued by the crashing and flashing which was going on around them, and they crouched down in opposite corners, with every appearance of terror. When a slight cessation in the rainstorm emboldened the keepers to drive us forth into the horrors of the night, it was with some feeling of relief that I left this particular refuge, for the thought would intrude itself that if by chance a bolt were to strike down a wall there, my four-footed friends would be very disagreeable companions in the dark."

THE NEW LANGUAGE.-Volapuk, the new universal language, is making steady headway. The Volapukists held their grand international congress a few days ago at Munich, and most of the countries of Europe sent representatives. The good repute of America for enlightened curiosity was saved by one gentleman from Cincinnati. Pasteur Schleyer, the inventor of the language, took the chair, in the name of the Associations of France. He explained that Volapuk was not meant to suppress other tongues, but only to supply a new one for the common purposes of all mankind, and, in particular, for the promotion of universal brotherhood. The inventor hopes to induce the German Government to admit Volapuk to the list of languages transmissible by telegraph within the Empire. In Denmark it has been officially recommended to telegraph clerks as a subject of study. The best augury for its spread in France lies in the fact that Berlin seems to take no interest in it, inasmuch as that city was not represented at the Congress. Englishmen ought to look upon Volapuk with a kindly eye, as most of its borrowings from the Germanic languages are taken from their own tongue. The characteristically English phrase, "How much money have you?" must, we regret to say, be rendered in Volapuk by " Moni limödik labols."-Daily News.

to be branded at the time as either "a joke or a job," and to be made the occasion, months and years after, of an abiding charge of "fraud" against the electors. Some while after the election, the immediate venue was changed from Oxford to Cambridge. The demerits, real or alleged, of a certain professor there were made the handle for a fierce attack, not only upon him but upon both Universities, in which the story of the election to the Oxford professorship was of course not forgotten. A little later, the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford proposed a statute to Congregation, a very common event, and one which, as a rule, does not greatly stir the public mind. But the heading of this statute contained the word "lapguages; some of its clauses contained the word literature." The words seemed harmless words; they were certainly used with very harmless meanings; but the words "language" and "literature" seem to be to some minds what the red rag is in one proverbial saying and the trailed coat in another. The hubbub began again; in truth it had never stopped. The statute was strongly opposed in Oxford and fiercely denounced out of it, and the favorite formula of "fraud " did not fail to be brought in.

Now I suppose there are some to whom all this seems right and natural, and to whom these charges of "fraud and the like must at least have a meaning. But there are also some to whom the whole thing seems very wonderful. Their difficulty is to understand how "language" and "literature" came to be looked at as distinct and even hostile subjects. They had lived all their lives in the belief that "language" and "literature" were, perhaps not exactly the same thing, but that they were at least things which could not be kept asunder or studied asunder, things which, if not the same thing, were different sides of the same thing. How, they would have asked, if the question had come into their heads, can language stand without literature or literature without language? Each, they would have said, implied the other. The study of literature might be supposed to be the study of books, and to study books implied a knowledge of the language in which they are written.

And, in such study of any language as might be looked for in an University, knowledge of the language would be held to imply, not the mere power of reading and talking it, but a knowledge of the language itself, its history and character and relations to other languages. Such knowledge might not get beyond the level of elegant scholarship or it might rise to that of the higher philology; in either case it would be what the time and place concerned accepted as thorough knowledge of the language. A mere empirical command of a language, the mere power of speaking it, was not the kind of knowledge with which an University would be satisfied. The academical knowledge of a language surely implied both some knowledge of the language itself, of the facts about it, and also some knowledge of the books written in that language. Neither could be conceived apart. One man might give more attention to one side and another to the other; but no man could afford altogether to neglect either. For some ages Greek and Latin were the only languages which formed part of any academic course. In the way in which they were studied there were some manifest faults; but there was certainly no divorce between "literature' and "language," as those words were understood then.

The weak side of the old study of Greek and Latin lay in this, that they were studied apart from other languages. They were supposed to have some mysterious character about them, some supreme virtue peculiar to themselves, which made it needful to look at them all by themselves, and made it in a manner disrespectful to class any other languages with them. This belief, or rather feeling, grew naturally out of the circumstances of what is called the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The learning then revived was an exclusively Greek and Latin learning, and it could hardly have been otherwise. And besides this, the error, like other errors, contains a certain measure of truth it is a half-truth thrust out of its proper place. For purposes purely educational the Greek and Latin tongues have something which is peculiar to themselves, something which does set them apart from all

others. That is, they are better suited than any other languages to be the groundwork of study. On this head there is no need to insist for the position is not only admitted, it is even clamorously asserted, by some at least of those who most eagerly set up "literature" as a foe to "language.' Perhaps indeed the fault of the old way of studying Greek and Latin may have been that it made too much of "literature" and too little of "language." It certainly led, and still leads, to a fashion of confining the study of those languages to certain periods of them. The choice of those periods might, either from a historical view of the languages themselves or from a political view of the history of those who spoke them, seem purely arbitrary, but it is defended on the ground that the periods chosen are those which produced the best literary models in the two languages. Within the range of the old classical studies it is certainly not "literature" which suffers; the complaint might rather be that both political history and the historical study of language are sacrificed to "literature." But this applies only to the choice of periods. Within the periods chosen there is no divorce between "language" and "literature; the divorce, if any, is rather between "language" and "literature" combined and the study of the matter of the books that are chosen. This last is the distinction between the examination popularly known at Oxford as Moderations" and the final examination in Literæ Humaniores. The severance between those two may be fairly objected to on other grounds, and I myself deeply regret it; but it hardly touches any question between "language" and literature." As far as Greek and Latin are concerned, those two flourish together. The caviller may object to the isolation of the two languages from other languages; he may object to the neglect of all except certain periods of those languages. But so far as the Greek and Latin languages and the literature contained in those languages are studied at all, language and literature are certainly studied together. Those who had gone through and profited by the old system of classical study at Oxford, without much

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speculation as to the nature of that system or of any other systems that might be put in its place, might have been surprised to hear of literature" and language" as distinct and possibly hostile subjects. As far as concerned the two languages to which they had given most thought, they had assuredly done whatever they had done of grammatical and philological study in the closest connexion with the study of the master-pieces of literature, and they had reached those master-pieces of literature only through a careful study, according to some standard of careful study, of the languages in which they were writ

ten.

Now to those at least who hold that the study of language, no less than the study of history, is a whole, who hold that no language can be profitably studied wholly apart from all other languages, that there is no special mystery about the Greek and Latin languages, that a really sound study of them and a really sound study of other languages must be carried on according to exactly the same methods-to them it would seem to follow as a natural consequence that in the sound study of any other language the same close connexion between language and literature should be kept up. I am speaking of sound study, thorough study, such study as it is worthy of an University to encourage. What form of study deserves those names is a question which may be differently answered at different times. But whatever its shape at any time, it stands distinguished from another kind of treatment of language, from other ways, not perhaps of studying, but certainly of mastering, languages which for certain other purposes are highly useful. A man may have a mastery of French, for instance, which may serve him for a crowd of practical purposes, a mastery which may even make him shine in a diplomatic congress, and yet he may have hardly any notion of the history of the French language, hardly any notion of its relations to Latin and to the other Romance tongues. On the other hand a man may have the most thorough knowledge of the origin of the French language and of all the stages of its history, he may have read a crowd of French books, old and new-that is, he

may have studied, and profitably studied, both language and literature-and yet he may be quite unable to make a French speech. No doubt the most perfect state of mastery of any language is when a man combines both these forms of knowledge of it; but it is a matter of fact that they may be, and often are, found apart. But it is surely the second, the scholarly knowledge of the language, which it is the business of an University to encourage; the practical mastery each man must gain for himself in a crowd of ways which lie outside the authority of professors and examiners. Each kind of knowledge is good in its own way and for its own purpose. Best of all it is when both are found together. But the two may exist apart; and asto assume a doctrine on which I may have to insist further on-every kind of knowledge is not a fit subject for University training, we may fairly lay down that it is the business of an University to teach men the scholarly knowledge of languages, that it is not its business to teach men their practical mastery.

But here we are met by another difficulty. The proposition that there is such a thing as a scholarly knowledge of French or of any other spoken European language, and that it is the business of an University to encourage such knowledge, is likely to meet with enemies, and with enemies on different sides. More than one kind of classical scholar is likely to object. I need not speak of the kind of scholar whose whole scholarship consists in making imitative verses and quoting scraps of Horace and Virgil. There is danger from a higher kind of scholar than that, from the scholar who really knows something of the Greek and Latin languages, and of the literature of each, during certain periods, but who declines to go beyond those periods. There is danger from the man who begins but refuses to finish, from the man who grounds his support of Greek and Latin on the strange argument that they are "dead languages.' It is singular, but it is true, that there is no form of ignorance more thoroughly complete than that in which the ordinary classical scholar is contented to abide, in which he is rather proud to abide, of all the later forms of the two languages to which he professes to de

vote himself. He seems positively to shrink from any contact with their later history and their later literature. Such an one cannot be a friend to the scholarly study of the forms of Greek and Latin now spoken in Europe, because that study calls for exactly the kind of knowledge from which he turns away. A Teutonic or Slavonic scholar he might just possibly be, though even in these branches of study he would be under great disadvantages; a Romance scholar he cannot be; so to call him involves a physical contradiction. As for any special scholarship applied to the later ages of the Greek tongue, that one hardly ventures to speak of. How deep is the ignorance, how deep is the dislike, with which the ordinary classical scholar approaches any wider knowledge of the history and literature of the tongues which he thinks specially his own, was shown in the rejection last year by the Oxford Congregation of the statute which proposed to do something to fill up the wretched gap between so called ancient and "modern," which is the bane of all Oxford studies.

If the rejection of one Oxford statute showed the kind of dislike which a scholarly study of so called "modern" languages is likely to meet with on one side, the opposition to another statute shows the kind of dislike which it is likely to meet with on another side. That a statute designed to encourage such studies has been denounced as a "fraud on literature" is a fact well worthy to be borne in mind. It reveals the nature of the new "literary" opposition; in so doing it takes us very deep into several aspects of one stage, the latest, of the English language and its literature. The word fraud " is a hard one; but it is perhaps not to be taken in its obvious sense; the charge may mean no more than that "literature, in the sense in which that word is used by those who bring it, is not made so much of as it ought to be. The truth is that the objection made to the statute, and the strong language used about it, have brought to the front the fact that "literature'' is an ambiguous and sometimes a misleading term. The statute, in its heading, says nothing about literature;" it is a statute for establishing a "School of Modern Lan

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