EUROPEAN NOTES.

Evening Star, Issue 3513, 27 May 1874, Page 3

EUROPEAN NOTES.

Mr John Lemoinne, the best political writer in France, is a man of whom we may be well proud, smoe he is more than half an fcjngHshman. Jie has a keen eye, and can so well judge, that to us he is a kind of posterity. He it was who. at the very first, condemned Mr Gladstone’s coup and pointed out that the minister would abolish himself. Continuing bis current notes upon us, he criticises the battles before Coomassie, the capture of that town, the firmness and pluck of the handful of ttrglish troops.and the ability or the officers. “We must confess,” he of old, and ho pays our men the due meed of praise. Rut he does nob fail to blame a Ministry that could send a handful of men against a powerful and warlike nation iu an atmosphere where no .European could live. “ 'f alk about the light heart of the Ollivier Ministry,’' he says, “in the German war: this expedition, though on a small scale, by far exceeds that in. blameworthy self-con-fidence. ” Ihe election of women to school directorships is a movement which will be soon made in . Pennsylvania, the new Constitution permitting such action. A German educationist has produced a text book of intuitive instruction, by the aid of which children shall be educated during the first school year without either reading or writing. It has recently been officially introduced both in Bavaria and in Alsace-Lorraine. following aLvertisement appears in the London papers Wanted, in a priest’s large family, in the West of England, a strong, hard-working, intelligent woman, over thirty, to cook and manage a dairy, single-handed. Must be a good churchwoman, an early riser, and not object to Australian meat.” Db Forbes Wiuslow died lately at Brighton, aged 64. Ho has long been known as a high authority on mental disease. M. Emille Gllivier’s reception in the French Academy has been adjourned sine die, inconsequence ofybis refusal to modify certain passages eulogistic of the late Emperor Napoleon that occur in M. Ollivier’s inaugural address. The world of the dead is "wide,” says a hero of Lord Lytton’s; “ why should the ghosts jostle us ?” They don't do so, unless people continue to credit those disreputable creations. The latest practical use of them that we have heard of has been in the Ashantee war. We took out Snider rifles and the electric telegraph. The Ashantee chiefs brought out th-ir choicest bogueys : hung daggers (all fetish), pointing to our paths, from bough and spray; tied chequered strings across our roads; and put dead babies-(poor little souls ! well rid of their black world) —-on fetish trees, with ghastly fingers stretched as if to curse us. We need not say that Jack Tar and the British soldier —commonly known as “Tommy Atkins Wi re not jostled out of the way by the “ Bullwig ” Lytton spectres. Ghosts and bogueys are not effectual agents in modern warfare. Quite is getting quite an ill-used word in fashionable slang. Here is one sentence from the ‘Drawing-room Gazette’: “ But then people are getting quite more than very rich uowa-days.” Yes; and some of them entirely mule more than very poor, too 1 Another, from a novel: “Ethel is nearly quite grown up now. Yes, the darling ! she is quite almost quite —a woman.” Do not our superfine friends forget quite what the Word means ? Ten years’ penal servitude was the sentence passed by Mr Justice Lush on Thomas Grouch Davies, a country postmaster, for emoezzling money deposited in the savings bank under his superintendence. Lord Chancellor Cairns and Lords Justices James and Hellish have had before them an appeal in bankruptcy iu which the question was whether, under the Married Women’s Property Act, a married woman who had property settled to her separate use could be adjudicated a bankrupt. Their lordships were unanimously of opinion that she could not be adjudicated a bankrupt..