Recent Literature

A DISTINCT and peculiar school of writers in New England, akin to the Lake School in England, was the group of Concord authors, of whom the two youngest, Thoreau and Ellery Channing, are represented in the book lately published by the latter. We say was, because though but two of the five friends who composed the group have passed away, — Thoreau and Hawthorne, — the school itself is a thing of the past. Mr. Emerson ranks as its founder, though he has been rather the centre about which the others have clustered, than the root from which they sprang. There was an independent and original genius in Alcott, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Ellery Channing, which, though related to the genius of Emerson, made each of the four a separate individuality, sure to manifest itself sooner or later in its own peculiar fashion. Hawthorne touched his associates at fewest points, and earliest withdrew from close companionship with them,— though none of his few intimates was perhaps more truly intimate with him than Ellery Channing. 13ut even Hawthorne could not escape the charm of Concord ; he left it twice and twice returned thither after an interval of years; his third departure was for the brief journey that preceded his death, and his third return was to the grave where he lies buried on a Concord hill-side. Of the five, Thoreau was the only one born in the town, for Emerson and Channing were natives of Boston, Hawthorne of Salem, and Alcott of Wolcott, in Connecticut. Perhaps it was for this reason that Thoreau was also the most sedulous in his abode there, and the most diligent in celebration of his birthplace. He has been accused, indeed, of treating Nature herself “ as if she had been born and brought up in Concord,” — and perhaps there was something narrowing in the persistence with which he clung to the flat plains, swampy meadows, and low hills of the Muskctaquid valley. But if Coueord contracted his genius somewhat, the very process gave it point and pungency ; and his memory is best preserved thereby, — for, as a friend said, after his death, “ This village is his monument, covered with suitable inscriptions, by himself.”

Thoreau died in May, 1862, and in August of that year Mr. Emerson printed in this magazine the eulogy and biographical sketch read by him at his friend’s funeral. This seeming incomplete, Mr. Channing began in 1863 the memoir now published, and printed some portious of it in 1864, in the Boston Commonwealth. Less than a third part of the present volume, however, lias been seen in print before; and a great deal of it is drawn either from Thoreau’s unpublished journals, or from note-books of walks and talks which the two friends took together across the fields and by the brooksides they were never tired of perambulating. No man ever walked so many miles with Thoreau, or sailed so far with him in his boat, as Mr. Channing did; none was more familiarly his friend, or knew better the character and genius of the man whom he so aptly calls “ the poet-naturalist.” There is then a peculiar fitness in a biography of Thoreau by Channing, enriched as this book is by numberless quotations, not only from Thoreau’s own writings, but from his favorite authors, and from the manuscripts of his companions. We seem to detect along the pages verses of Emetson’s hitherto unprinted, as well as passages from Mr. Channing’s unpublished poetry, and other poems of his, collected from the oblivions corners of newspapers. Were there only a little more method in arranging the work, and a great deal more clearness of style, the merit of the volume would be thrice what it now is, aed more than that of any recent literary biography. Even in its present crude condition, it is a mine of rich matter, and, in parts, of exquisite beauty and inimitable native force.

Thoreau was born in 1817; began to write and publish when he was twenty years old ; was a contributor to the Dial in 1840-44, and to other magazines for a few years after ; went to live at Walden in 1847, and left his hut there when he had published his first volume in 1849, returning to the village of Concord and to his father’s house. Here he wrote his next book, “ Walden,” which came out in 1854, and has been more extensively read than any other of his volumes. He published no other books during his life-time, but contributed to the magazines from 1852 to 1862. After his death these papers and others, including a few of his letters and poems, were edited by Miss Thoreau, Mr. Channing, and Mr. Emerson, in five volumes, which appeared successively from 1863 to 1866. Since then nothing has been published of Thoreau’s, until now these passages, making perhaps half of Mr. Channing’s memorial volume.

There is much similarity between his style and Mr. Channing’s. Both are humorists, and carry their humor into verbal excesses, — puns, quips, and obscurities, which often puzzle the plain-minded reader. Of the two, Thoreau is the less obscure, so that there is force in a complaint we have heard that this book translates Thoreau into an abstruser dialect than his own, which was needless. It is by no means smooth and easy reading, either in its prose or verse. Like Montaigne and Burton, it requires to be read sparingly, and with much thought and meditation. But its peculiarities give it piquancy, and from its very unlikeness to other books, a position of distinction is at once conferred upon it. Its absolute value as a biography is considerable, though it fails to give in a connected way the chief events in Thoreau’s life. It abounds in anecdotes and in good sayings of his, which sound like quotations from Plutarch sometimes, sometimes like the inconsequent utterances of Jean Paul. It is overloaded with verses, some of them very hard to read and of no pertinence to the place where they occur. Its rhetoric and syntax are eccentric, and it occasionally becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, it sets forth, as has never been done before, the true nature and paradoxical composition of Thoreau, who has been much misunderstood by admirers as well as by those averse to him. Mr. Channing dwells wifh warm affection, and yet with discrimination, on one of his noblest traits, his constancy in friendship. “ Those who loved him never had the least reason to regret it. He meant friendship, and meant nothing else, and stood by it without the slightest abatement; not veering as a weather-cock with each shift of a friend’s fortune, nor like those who bury their early friendships in order to make room for fresh corpses.” To the same effect are those lines with which he closes his dedication, and which were the close, with slight variations, of an earlier volume of Mr. Channing’s, printed during Tboreau’s life-time. We quote them as they then stood (the earlier form is better, to our thinking), because they furnish a portrait of Thoreau quite different from that which has generally been given of him.

— Mr. Robert Dale Owen’s good wine should certainly need no bush in this place where it was first broached; and yet we would fain flourish over it a wreath of the vine interwoven with laurel; not so much to draw custom to it as in sign of our own pleasure in its goodness. As the papers which have gone to make up Threading my Way appeared one after another in these pages last year, there were few readers or none, we imagine, who did not enjoy their geniality of spirit, their entertaining material, their lightness and ease of manner. They were of a kind of writing that, when all is said, remains to our thinking the most delightful kind of writing there is. Autobiography is the soul of history, the most precious contribution to men’s knowledge of each other. It gives the delight that story-telling imparts in fiction, and if it is faithfully done, it out-romances all invention by the records of those facts in man’s consciousness or experience, which it is the highest ambition of the inventive writer to make his creations resemble. It is not disheartening like biography, at the end of which always stands that sad Hic jacet, — your autobiographer goes on living forever; and it is as intimate in its appeal as the finest poetry. Best of all, it utterly forbids the mockmodesty which pretends to shrink from the mention of one’s self. For once, the worthy first person is accorded the first place, and egotism becomes the sole virtue; the autobiographer who proposed not to talk about himself would be a ludicrous hypocrite and pretender. And being put upon his honor, as it were, by these conditions, the antobiographer is commonly very modest. He does not spare his faults, he owns manfully to his mistakes, he recognizes his failures; and even when he does not judge his actions he leaves them frankly to your judgment.

Mr, Owen seems to have realized the ideal of autobiography in these papers, which, written so as to be each complete in itself, and to serve the humor of the reader who cared for but one of them, had yet a continual purpose of developing the history of the author’s first twenty-seven years. Later in life he became part of our political, social, and religious history, and in a second volume he promises that we shall have his estimate and record of himself in that character. “ But here,”he says, referring with a wise frankness which we find very charming, to his efforts to set the world right in points where he believed it wrong, “but here ends the first portion of my life, during which my home was in the Old “World and in my native land. These were the tentative years, the years throughout which I was proving all things and seeking for that which is good. Up to that time I seem to myself to have been but threading my way; and I thought I had found it. I had energy, moral courage, eagerness to render service in the cause of truth, and a most over-weening opinion of the good which I imagined that I could do, in the way of enlightening my fellow-creatures. It needed quarter of a century more to teach me how much that intimately regards man’s welfare and advancement, moral and spiritual, had till then been to me a sealed book; to bring home the conviction that I stood but on the very threshold of the most important knowledge that underlies the civilization of our race.”

We cannot leave this delightful book without asking the reader’s attention to the extent and variety of the experiences and observations it records, and which strike us more in the collected chapters than when they appeared from month to month. Mr. Owen’s notices of his ancestors, and especially his study of his grandfather David Dale’s character and work at New Lanark ; the pictures of his own early life at Braxfield, those fascinating Scotch interiors, which we should hardly know where to match elsewhere ; the excellent characterization of his father, and the account of his efforts in behalf of labor-reform ; his own youthful experience at London ; his education at Hofwyl; his chapter on English Reformers; the pretty and touching idyl of his first love ; the recollections of the community life at New Harmony; the chapters sketching famous people whom he met afterwards in France and England — leave scarcely any representative man or leading interest of the first quarter of our century untouched ; while they abound in entertaining anecdote and harmless gossip. Through all runs the sweetest and gentlest spirit; a lenient judgment, a generous sympathy, a high morality, a shrewd and humorous self-perception. It is as Christian a book as ever was written, and is to be praised as much for its blameless conscience, as for its blameless manner.

— Mr. Butterfield’s history of Crawford’s expedition against the Indian towns at Sandusky, in 1782, is the latest of that excellent series of local narratives, biographies, and sketches of pioneer life in the Ohio valley which Messrs. Clarke & Co. have been issuing for the past five or six years, and which have been successively noticed here, and commended as an enterprise worthy of all encouragement. For the pioneer history of the Ohio valley is by no means merely of local interest. It was in that region, and more particularly in that part of it west of the Ohio, that the Indian tribes trade their last considerable stand against the United States, defeating St. Clair, and finally succumbing to Wayne. They were aided and abetted, first secretly and afterwards openly, in their raids upon the Virginia and Pennsylvania settlements, by the British from their post at Detroit; and if the English name were not already rather too thickly iucrusted with barbarities of all sorts, it would form a conspicuous stain on it that for seven years the British arms protected these pitiless savages in the slaughter of men, women, and children along the frontier, and in the murder, with atrocious tortures, of their prisoners. It was when these forays had become unendurable, that the Virginian and Pennsylvanian borderers, acting with the coöperation of General Irvine, commandant at Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh), volunteered for the expedition against Sandusky, whither they marched some hundred and seventy-five miles through the unbroken forest. They were led by Col. William Crawford, a personal friend of Washington, and a tried soldier and expert Indian fighter, who had done good service against the French at Braddock’s defeat, and afterwards in the reduction of Fort Du Quesne (Pittsburgh). Congress appointed him in 1788 to the command of the Western Department, and he proved himself an efficient and trusty officer; his popularity on the frontier was unbounded, and fully merited.

The Indian towns at Sandusky were under the protection of the British at Fort Detroit, but it was expected that Crawford’s command, all mounted men, could reach them and destroy them before help arrived. A battle was actually fought with the Indians, who had deserted their towns, stud who were beaten by Crawford’s men; but the Indian spies had been swifter than the whites ; they had carried news of the invasion to Detroit, and the day after the first battle, a troop of British cavalry came up and joined the Indians, who already vastly outnumbered the Americans. Then it was only a question how to keep the retreat from becoming a rout and slaughter. The officers succeeded in this, and the main body of Crawford’s command returned home in safety, though many were cut off, and perished. Crawford himself became separated from his men, the first night of the retreat, and was captured by the Indians, who burned him to death. The story of his torments, prolonged for many hours, is one unsurpassed for horror even in the annals of our border wars, and it is of course the darkest chapter in the disastrous history which Mr. Butterfield narrates.

This history has a general value as a study of pioneer life and warfare, which we should be sorry to leave unmentioned, and the sketches of adventure in which it abounds add greatly to the interest of the main narrative. We can commend to the historical novelist looking about for a hero, the story of Major John Rose, permitted by General Irvine to join the expedition: a most gallant and cheerful gentleman throughout the terrible affair, who proved afterwards to be Baron Gustavus de Rosenthal, a young Russian noble obliged to fly his own country for having killed another in a duel. He served to the end of our Revolution, and then by the Emperor’s permission returned home, where he married, and died on his Livonian estates, at a good old age, cherishing with enthusiasm the memory of his exile in America, and especially the scenes and friendships of his life on the border.

Mr. Butterfield endeavors, and it seems to us endeavors with perfect success, to redeem the memory of Crawford’s command from the wrong done it by the Moravian writers, and those that follow them, in declaring that the expedition against Sandusky was intended to complete the work of massacre at Gnadenhütten, where, in the previous year, the Americans had murdered ninety-six men, women, and children, of the Christian Delawares. The rest of the Moravian converts had been removed by the British Indians to Sandusky; but Mr. Butterfield shows that there is no reason to believe Crawford’s expedition directed against them. It would have been better, we think, if Mr. Butterfield had treated the massacre at Gnadenhütten more fully — perhaps a little more frankly—as an important circumstance of the contemporaneous history; but whatever his short-coming in this respect, he seems clearly to have established the fact that Crawford’s expedition was a measure dictated by the necessity of the borderers, who had suffered the cruelties and horrors of savage warfare from the Indians living there, till it had become simply a question whether Sandusky should be destroyed, or the settlements west of the mountains abandoned.

— The Prostrate State is the euphemistic style under which Mr. Pike speaks of the present condition of South Carolina, which might better be called the dismembered and devoured State, so entirely has it ceased to exist in any true political sense, so utterly has it fallen a prey to the black and white thieves who “ govern ” it. It is not exactly news that Mr. Pike tells us, for it has for years been notorious that the ignorant negro rulers of that ex-Commonwealth had carried into their legislation and administration the spirit of the servile raid on the plantation hen-roost and smoke-house ; but his book is nevertheless freshly impressive, and one cannot read it without shame that such things should be. It is well enough, once in a way, and for an impressive spectacle, that the slaves should sit in the place of their old masters ; but the fact remains that they are totally unfit to make laws, and that as yet they have shown not much political ability to do anything save to steal the public money. In this they improve even upon the example of the carpet-baggers, whom by an early dispensation of Providence, they are already beginning to push from their places in the government. The administration of South Carolina is now in the hands of the blacks, who outnumber the whites only by twenty thousand votes, but who understand their own affairs so well that they effectively oppose all schemes of white immigration tending to reduce their majority. Mr. Pike shows very conclusively that farming is more profitable in South Carolina than in the West; but with the sable despotism now established, the white immigrant may be at any moment taxed out of the State, as the native whites have already been largely taxed out of house and home. The statements and charges of Mr. Pike’s book are supported by figures and instances, which do not permit us to doubt their truth, and which would present a prospect too alarming and shocking, if it were not relieved by the amusing fact that the present legislators of South Carolina cannot for the most part read or write the laws they make. Though, upon reflection, we do not see why this fact should be amusing to any one.

— It is rather a pensive pleasure that the soft-hearted critic of this day, with his modern teste and tastes, finds in looking over a volume of old-fashioned verse like that of Charles Penno Hoffman ; so much of it is so very obsolete in matter and in manner, and it all enforces again so poignantly the question how much of what we admire in the poetry of our own time is not mere fashion and perishable. It is not so long ago since he was a conspicuous figure on our thinlypeopled Parnassus; wrote Greyslaer, a much-accepted romance, printed several books of poetry and was reviewed to his disadvantage (as was the common fate of American poets thirty years since, and even later) in the English quarterlies, founded the Knickerbocker Magazine, edited the American Monthly Magazine, and helped to edit the New York Mirror. “ It is as a lyrical poet that Mr. Hoffman is best known to the world,” says Mr. Allibone, from whose amiable dictionary we have learned these facts, “ and in this department he unquestionably occupies a very high rank. Among the principal favorites of the songs which have carried his name so extensively through the social circles of the land are Rosalie Clare, ’Tis Hard to Share her Smiles with Many, Sparkling and Bright, and the Myrtle and Steel.”

Which of these principal favorites are the young ladies now slenderly piping and tinklingtheir pianos to ? Is it Rosalie Clare ?

Or is it the Myrtle and Steel ?

It does not greatly matter which of these is the principal favorite in the social circles of the land at this moment; perhaps neither is so, and that would not greatly matter either. They might very well be immortal for all that; and the opening lines of Sparkling and Bright, at least, have still a pulse and living color in them :—

This is all the poetry there is in the song, which is nevertheless good enough, as songs go, throughout; and we will not say that it is the only poetry which we have been able to make sure of in the book. There is a poem called Waller to Sacharissa, in which there is the heat and sorrow of true passion ; but it is hastily oversaid, so to speak; and it is true that very, very many of the pieces here are apparently what used to be called copies of verses. A faiut, pathetic odor, as of old-fashioned perfumes embalming the poet’s manuscripts in the drawers where they were laid away by the young ladies to whom he gave them, steals from the first lines of these pieces, and rehabilitates a whole forgotten literary world.

And so forth, and so forth. It makes one very melancholy, and insecure of the fashion of this world, and old, to run over such things, but once they were brilliant and fresh, and filled people who read them with youth and youth’s joyful sadness; for they are mostly mournful, though there are here and there some vers de société, which have not yet lost their lightness and sparkle. Mr. Hoffman was a lover and an intimate of nature, and he wrote of her wilder aspects with sympathy and effect; he also wrote Indian legends and Indian songs, which our poets do not much affect nowadays, and which the reader instinctively shuns ; and one may quite honestly say of him with Mr. Bryant, who encouraged his nephew to make the present collection, his “ thoughts are expressed in musical versification with the embellishments of a ready fancy.” Even greater praise than this might be true.

— The good intention with which the author of Sounds from Secret Chambers begins the principal poem of her book, Sweet Bells Jangled, seems to fail her before she is far advanced in it, and a rather common tragicalness prevails over the true and simple note that she first struck. The brave, undirected ambitiousness of the young girl who thinks love an overrated affair; who will have a friendship with the young man who loves her, but perceives with a sudden terror that some other woman will someday get her friend for a lover, if she does not, and so is, as it were, dismayed into love, — is as prettily imagined as need be, and it was a great pity to force such an amiable little idyl to be a tragedy. We wish Miss Redden would try her fortune again with some such conceit as this, and have it end pleasantly. She has a light and graceful touch when she will, and she should set herself to rebuke those faults of over-intensity and rhetorical passion. It is odd how the ladies, nowadays, when they write, will insist upon seeking to make us unhappy. They want to be storming away on the bass, with the pedal pressed down hard, and the whole piano trembling before them, instead of taking the company with those gentle airs which they might so much more successfully play and sing. But Miss Redden shows in this little book of hers that she has too much faculty to be of any mere fashion: there is enough good in it to make it her obligation to do better.

— Among the books for the holidays which we hope people will not forbear to buy because the holidays are past, we wish to mention Mr, Winslow Homer’s silhouette pictures to Mr. Lowell’s Yankee poem of The Courtin’. They are the simple black figures on white ground, with which Konewka charmed us in his illustrations for the Midsummer Night’s Dream and Faust, and they depend like these for their effect upon a sculpturesque purity and strictness of out line, and for the grace with which a wander ing tendril of hair, or a flying ribbon, or a curling length of apple-peel may be shadowed forth. They are not imaginative; they are literal versions of the text; but the best ot them interpret the spirit of the poem exceedingly well. There are seven of them; the first where

and the third where she has lifted her head, and, looking at Zekle with the half-pared apple in her grasp, perpetrates the bold hypocrisy,

Zekle appears at full length in the fourth, at the moment of saying, “ I’d better call again; ” and in the fifth he has “ up and kissed her,”— a very prettily managed scene as to Huldah, in whose face and attitude the proper degree of not altogether unexpected surprise is humorously expressed. But the best picture of all is that which follows : Huldah sitting with her head bent down again over the apples, and rubbing her eyes with the back of the hand which holds the blade of the knife thrust forward. This is where she is

It is the only one of the seven in which the artist has suffered the delicately managed character of Huldah to degenerate into caricature. Elsewhere he has expressed her country brightness and quickness, in which there is no vulgarity, most satisfactorily, and has made such a charming figure of her that most readers will be glad to accept it as that which was in their own minds. Zekle’s face and action are always good, and it is therefore the greater pity that his dress should he that of the stage Yankee. It was doubtless difficult to costume him aright; but his dress is too cheaply contrived by Mr. Homer.

— Mr. Barrett’s little book, The Golden City, has a double purpose: first to commend Swedenborg’s interpretation of the Apocalypse to persons interested in sacred prophecy; and incidentally to stigmatize the Swedenborgians themselves for the injustice which in his opinion they do to Swedenborg in giving his writings an ecclesiastical bias. Mr. Barrett’s readers will agree very probably that his effort is more telling in the incidental direction than in the primary. He may on general principles fully justify an appeal to Swedenborg from the chaos of interpretations which have been put upon the Apocalypse; but when the appeal is answered, the answer itself requires to be interpreted in a very much broader sense than Mr. Barrett gives it. Mr. Barrett has none of the spirit of sect, and his readers cannot complain of him in this direction. But he persistently fails to secularize Swedenborg’s treatment of the Christian symbols — that is, bring out their strictly universal import and interest in application to the alleged union of the divine and human natures. And consequently his exposition of the New Jerusalem, as symbolizing a spiritual divine work accomplished exclusively in human nature, reads rather as if it were a work accomplished among the persons of that nature ; as if in other words it were a work of judgment, and not of mercy, a work not of larger comprehension but rather of larger exclusion. And this is a New Jerusalem that continues to savor far too much of the Old, to interest a truly Christian imagination. Nothing can be better of course than that the evil and the false shall find themselves excluded from the New Jerusalem; but if you exclude the evil and the false from human nature only by finiting that nature, only by destroying its individuality of freedom, the New Jerusalem will turn out more of a loss to the world than a gain.

But Mr. Barrett’s book is still valuable as a vindication of his author from the ecclesiastical abuses to which he has been put, and will no doubt attract many well-pleased readers. It is indeed worthy to be commended to every one interested in the matters of which it treats.

— In the opening chapter of his CommonSense in Religion, or essays on the doctrines of the New Testament, Mr. Clarke, as it seems to us, falls into some confusion of definition and statement, which seems rather surprising in a writer usually so clear and forcible. “In this volume,” he says, “I propose to look at questions of religious truth and religious culture from the point of view of common-sense. I do not undervalue other tests in applying this. What does Scripture say? What does he church say? What does abstract reason say? — These questions are all legitimate. But it may also be well to supplement these with another method of investigation, taken from the common analogies of earthly life.” What Scripture says, what the church says, what abstract reason says of religious truth, are then tests — are legitimate questions, which he does not undervalue, but which he would supplement by appeal to the standard of common-sense. Does the author mean that the Bible, the church, and abstract reason have an authority and weight apart from that of common-sense ? His language seems to convey this idea — and yet his subsequent course of thought, immediately following, and continued through his whole book, is entirely opposed to the idea that Scripture, church, and the private reason have any weight except as they are tested by common-sense.

“Common-sense,” he says, “is not a special power of the human mind, but a method of judgment derived from experience. It consists of those habits of thinking which have resulted from life, and have been verified by life.

“Nor by common-sense do I mean the uneducated or miseducated heathen judgment, but the educated Christian judgment. We did not bring into the world our common-sense ; we have acquired it here. Common-sense differs in different countries, times, nations, religions, civilizations.” The common-sense of the Feejee Islander justifies cannibalism, that of the Middle Ages the burning of heretics and witches, that of America self-government, that of Europe, a few hundred years ago, the divine right of kings. “ When, therefore, I speak of common-sense in theology, I mean that part of Christian truth which has been taken up into the average mind of Christendom. I mean those ideas of right and wrong, of God’s character and man s duty, into which, by Blow and various processes, the Christian world has at last been educated. I mean those great underlying principles of truth which pervade the New Testament, giving it its vital power.”

But what is the average mind of Christendom ? Christendom is the great population of so-called Christians scattered over the world, of whom an overwhelming majority belong to the Roman Catholic, Greek, and Evangelical Protestant churches. And does the author assert that even the most advanced of this majority are prepared as a mass to accept the broad and free theological views which he teaches as Scriptural truth ?

It is to be regretted that the author, in the introduction to his book, wherein he endeavors to state his premises clearly, should have written rather plausibly than consistently. We say this in no invidious sense, for these essays for sermons, tor such they apparently are in their structure and tone) are full of broad, deep, and lofty statements of truth, clearly and forcibly expressed, and at the same time with such a tender and hearty sense of the essential humanity of man, and with such a reverent faith in the Divine Fatherhood, that they will appeal strongly to the heart and reason of a large class of seekers and believers. The essays are twenty in number, and embrace a wide range of thought. After discriminating well between revelation and mystery, he discourses with profound earnestness on the Common-sense View of Human Nature; on the doctrine concerning God, on the Bible and Inspiration, on the True Meaning of Evangelical Christianity, on Sin, Hell, Heaven, the Future Life, on the Church, on Piety, on Jesus as a Teacher and “ Mediator,” on Salvation by Faith, on Fear, Hope, Love, and the Brotherhood of Man. He writes not for the learned but for the simple ; and there is hardly a child but might follow his course of thought, and take delight in his fresh and striking illustrations.

— Nowadays when Buddhism is made use of as a convenient stalking-horse for attacks on Christianity, when we are bidden to admire the greater charity of the heathen who is taught to carry his obedience to the commandment “ Thou shalt not kill,” so far as never to take even the life of brutes, and when the cruelties which have so often stained the religions of the West are compared with the absence of the persecutions in the cause of Buddhism, it is well that over-enthusiastic persons who are very anxious for a new religion, should be able to lay their hands on a succinct and accurate account of the faith which is held with more or less orthodoxy by a very large proportion of the inhabitants of the world. Only scholars have time to consult Bennouf’s large volumes on Buddhism. Köppen’s book is perhaps the best for general use ; it is certainly a very painstaking compendium, but it is written in German. In English there is no lack of writers, but they are not all of equal authority. Dr. Eitel’s little volume is perhaps the best we have. Besides a very thorough knowledge of the copious native literature on the subject, he has the immense advantage of having seen the practical working of the religion. Many of his remarks are of great interest, and all are extremely fair-minded. He says : —

“ The strong point of Buddhism lies in its morality, and this morality is equal to the non-Christian morality of our civilized world. It is not civilization, therefore, but Christianity alone, that has a chance against Buddhism, because Christianity alouc teaches a morality loftier, stronger, holier than that of Buddhism, because Christianity alone can touch, can convert the heart, for there — in the heart of the natural man —it is where the roots of Buddhism lie.” .... “ Buddhist morality is a morality without a God and without a conscience. There appears in Buddhism an utter want of an active principle of goodness. Buddhist morality does not endeavor to produce in man a conviction of sin, it does not appeal to his own inner sense of moral goodness. Buddhism does not attempt to purify the affections, to govern desire, to control passion, to renovate the heart, to regenerate, to sanctify the whole being. Its virtue is essentially negative. It enjoins men to cease from doing evil, it demands the total extinction of all desire, of all passion, but stops short of urging men to do good, and has no assistance to offer by way of strengthening humanity in its struggle with the power of evil.”

Buddhism is indeed, as Dr. Eitel says, the religion of despair.

The doctrine of Nirvâna, which has been the subject of so much hot discussion, is treated intelligently by the author. He says it is now impossible to determine what was the opinion of the founder of the religion about it, but that since then while the tendency of the philosophical schools has been towards a definition of Nirvâna as a state of annihilation, the most ancient Sutras describe it as a happy immortality. His own belief, like that of the best students of the subject, is “ that a consistent development of the principles of Buddhism must always lead to the same negative result, that existence is but a curse and that therefore the aim of human effort should be the total annihilation of the personality and existence of each individual soul.”

— Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology, one of the admirable International Scientific Series, is a book as suggestive, as thoughtful, and as entertaining as one could wish to read ; and when we consider that this is merely a preparation to a larger and more thorough work in three volumes which is to form part of Mr. Spencer’s philosophical system, we have good reason to admire the activity of mind and the intelligence of a thinker who is able to take so wide a view of the universe, while noticing and recording even petty details. Some years ago the Principles of Sociology was announced, and a very good idea of the value of that work may be formed by those who are familiar with what he has already done. This book shows us the spirit in which the subject of Sociology is to be studied, the need of such study, and the difficulties it has to encounter.

The study of Sociology he represents “ as the study of Evolution in its most complex form,” without having recourse to the theory of special providences, or to what he calls the great-man-theory. The difficulties in the way of accurate study are numerous; the untrustworthiness of witnesses, and the necessity of avoiding too hasty generalizations, — these are the objective, while the subjective difficulties are our lack of sympathy for others ; our subjection to various hopes and fears, to anger at one time and undue admiration at another. Then we are biased by faulty methods of education, by social training, by patriotism ; “ the class-bias .... no less inevitably causes one-sidedness in the conceptions of social affairs.” “ The theological bias .... disturbs in various ways our judgment on social questions.”

As the result of such studies, he says, “the only reasonable hope is, that here and there one may be led in calmer moments to remember how largely his beliefs about public matters have been made for him by circumstances, and how probable it is that they are either untrue or but partially true. When he reflects on the doubtfulness of the evidence which he generalizes, collected haphazard from a narrow area — when he counts up the perverting sentiment fostered in him by education, country, class, party, creed, — when, observing those around, he sees that from other evidence selected to gratify sentiments partially unlike his own, there result unlike views ; he may occasionally recollect how largely mere accidents have determined his convictions. Recollecting this, he may be induced to hold these convictions not quite so strongly ; may see the need for criticism of them with a view to revision; and, above all, may be somewhat less eager to act in pursuance of them.”

We might quote still further to show the reader that Mr. Spencer teaches caution as well as boldness, that he urges wise moderation as warmly as he denounces sluggishness with regard to what is to be learned in the way of improving the faults of society, but it needs no proof that a man who sees so far into the laws that govern the world will be the one most likely not to content himself merely with detecting errors.

The number of ingenious remarks the book contains is marvelous. Mr. Matthew Arnold is attacked for his undue depreciation of the English character, for his undeserved praise of French institutions, and again it is pointed out how defective are the usual tongs by our fire-places, — there is no one who will not find the lesson made clear to him by Mr. Spencer’s singularly clear style and copious illustrations. There is hardly a writer of English who makes himself more intelligible; indeed, this is a peculiarity of the school to which he belongs ; another instance is Mr. Walter Bagehot. Both of these gentlemen write as the best talkers talk, without inversions or pomposity, and with abundant illustrations to make obscure points clear. With both it is a minor merit, but one which must be of great service to them.

— There is no need of going into a discussion about the relative merits of classical and scientific education in order to praise the excellent design of the series of Ancient Classics for English Readers, the last volume of which, containing an account of Lucian, lies before us to-day. Homer, Herodotus, Cæsar, Virgil, Horace, Æschylus, Xenophon, Cicero, Sophocles, Pliny, Euripides, Juvenal, Aristophanes, Hesiod, Hesiod and Theognis, Plautus and Terence, Tacitus, have already appeared, and all have been well treated, The intention of the editor has been to bring into the compass of a brief volume a life of the author discussed, and an account of his works, together with such an analysis of them as may serve to jog the memory of those students who have more or less forgotten what they have already read, and to give an accurate idea, to those who have not read the originals, of their most striking qualities. The work has been very well done ; the best translations have been used, and all the latest lights of scholarship have been brought to bear on the preparation of the different volumes. It was hardly to be expected that all the authors could be treated with equal success. It is difficult to dispose of the Iliad, for instance, or of Æsehylus, in any satisfactory way within the slender limits of a single volume. But there is hardly any writer who is so capable of this treatment, who is, indeed, so much improved by it, as Lucian. In the first place, he is much more nearly in sympathy with modern tastes, vastly more so than many later writers, as, for example, Rabelais; all that he wrote is in a very brief form, with no lofty poetical flights which defy translation, and his humor is as modern, for the most part, as if it had been written yesterday. Lucian’s admirable, sensible wit in his dialogues derisive of the old Greek mythology will always be entertaining reading, and to those who do not care to spell out the original Greek, we can recommend this interesting volume by Mr. Collins.

— It will seem rather strange to an American reader of domestic habits, to find himself stepping over to Africa as easily as it may be done by falling in with Mr. Blackburn’s Artists and Arabs. Nevertheless, he may entertain himself for a half hour, perhaps, without too great a shock of strangeness, under this gentleman’s guidance ; lounging about in Moorish cafés, scrutinizing life upon the house-tops from a painter’s studio, and finally making a short run to the lesser Atlas Mountains and back. The motive of the book, as set forth in the argument, is simple and good: “ The advantage of winter-studios in the South, and the value of sketching in the open air, especially in Algeria.” We sometimes wish that Mr. Blackburn should not so completely succeed as he does in rubbing off the varnish of mystery in which we are disposed to keep all countries unknown to us. But he is looking for the picturesque, and has rather a business-like eye for it. There is this advantage, however, that he will teach a great many people who might not have known, what they had better try to enjoy in foreign countries. There is a spirited passage on the growth and appearance of palmtrees and aloes (which last are described as in bloom at all ages, apparently in defiance of the tradition of their hundred year flowering], and a description of one of the fierce characteristic storms of the region. Inland among the mountains, there are green and pastoral glades full of trees and sparkling water in sight of the arid and rainless plains, and bordering other rocky, mountainous wastes, hard by, where there are sudden storms similar to those of the plain. Then we have a touch or two about French colonization and the Kabyle war, and presently we come to the end. The book is made up of brief jottings that suggest more than they tell. There is less material in it for the amateur than in the same author’s Normandy Picturesque, but more that will catch the eye of the artist, perhaps.

— Literary and Social Judgments is a volume which contains some earlier essays by the author of The Enigmas of Life. The greater number discuss literary subjects, as the titles will show: Madame de Staël, Kingsley and Carlyle. French Fiction, Chateaubriand, and M. de Tocqueville. These are all far from dull, they every one stand as good representatives of review-writing, and yet without forming an extraordinarily valuable collection of monographs. Perhaps the best of all is the article on Chateaubriand, who both as a writer and as a man is far from winning sympathy or admiration from the essayist. The Frenchman’s inexhaustible vanity, his colossal conceit, are set before us with severity, but with perfect justice. From his birth, nay, even before his birth, if his own account is to be believed, Chateaubriand had an aversion to life. This trait, and those qualities mentioned above, combined with deep satisfaction at his literary and political success, make him, in Mr. Greg’s opinion, “ a typical man of his class, time, and country.” And, indeed, few writers of his time sounded a note which won so universal admiration among his fellow-countrymen as did Chateaubriand in his Génie du Christianisme and his Atala. For none of our time and country can these works have the interest they had for those for whom they were intended, and the admiration which has been expressed about them so unreservedly will always sound to us as affected. Mr. Greg does not denounce them, but he hints what his readers will be very ready to confirm.

The article on Madame de Staël is entertaining, but its especial merit lies in what it tells us about Talleyrand. Some of the mots of this wit we have never seen before, and with their courteous outside but biting point they bear the ear-mark of truth. The following is one of the best: “ When ‘ Delphine ’ appeared, Madame de Staël was currently reported to have drawn both herself and M. de Talleyrand therein, — herself as Delphine, him as Madame de Vernon. Talleyrand met her shortly afterwards and paid her the usual compliments on the performance, adding, in his gentlest and sweetest voice the keen sarcasm, ‘ On m’assure que nous y sommes tous les deux, vous et moi, déyuisés en femmes.’ ”

The essay on M. de Tocqueville is one which will be of interest to all Americans; it has the advantage of having been written by a personal friend as well as by one who warmly sympathized with the eminent political philosopher.

The article on Kingsley and Carlyle is far from exhaustive, especially with regard to its treatment of the latter. Kingsley’s superficiality of reasoning and frequent coarseness of expression are alluded to in terms that must have sounded stranger at the time they were written than they do now, when the author has sunk from the exaggerated position in which his indiscreet admirers placed him some ten or fifteen years ago.

Of very much the same sort of literary criticism are the two articles on the false morality of lady novelists, and on French fiction. In the first named, he attacks some novels, most of which are now deservedly forgotten, for their crooked morality and the false notions of sacrifice which they contain. The subject he treats with much good sense, not with remarkable brilliancy, but with gratifying, frankness and intelligence. The immorality of French novels he attacks in no measured terms. That the author might alter somewhat the leniency of his remarks about Dumas fils, in view of some of his subsequent work, seems to us more than likely. But, it must be said, he shows no desire to soften the expression of the disgust which fills his mind when he regards the too common tendency of French novels. That he has exhausted this subject cannot be affirmed. French fiction is not merely a collection of impurities ; and while we rejoice to see such grossly offensive works attacked as are some which he mentions, we feel that it is but fair that some word should be said in behalf of the great cleverness of some French novels (some of George Sand’s, ror instance), which attracts readers more than does the inclination of man to interest himself in reading chronicles of sin. What Mr. Greg says is true, but there is more to be said before the solution of the whole matter is found.

In his Why are Women redundant? he strikes a note with which the readers of his Enigmas of Life are tolerably familiar. His plan for remedying the evil of the redundancy is to arrange for the emigration of one third, another third is to be employed in domestic service, the other third, with so many rivals removed, will find the struggle for life less difficult, marriage will be more common, and the evil will thus gradually disappear. With such a plan there is one objection to be found, and that is, that it reads much better on paper than it is likely to work in real life. It is an easy solution which it is justly customary to laugh at when it is a fanatical reformer, such as Mr. Greg is always laughing at, who proposes it. The author’s gentle optimism seems to mislead him here; there is a vagueness about it not unlike that for which he criticises Mr. Matthew Arnold in the essay called Truth versus Edification.

Messrs. J. R. Osgood & Co., Boston, publish The Proud Miss MacBride, by John G. Saxe, with illustrations by Augustus Hoppin, the greater part of which are produced in heliotype with a clearness equal to that of the best wood-engraving, and with almost as great brilliancy. The result is indeed more satisfactory than any yet attained by similar photographic processes in America; the heliotype lends itself with peculiarly happy effect to the delicate lines and suggested shadows of our best and most imaginative illustrator of books. We should say that he had very fairly interpreted Mr. Saxe’s poem in these pictures, and that is perhaps why Mr. Hoppin is not seen at his best in them. Yet they are full of that charm of style in woman, which no one knows so well as he how to catch, and to look upon them is as good as to stroll down Broadway or Fifth Avenue at the hours when the ladies are most abundantly abroad. The same house sends us Cameos selected from the works of Walter Savage Landor, by E. C. Stedinan and T. B. Aldrich, with an Introduction by Mr. Stedman; a book which we reserve for future notice.

From J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, we have the first volume of Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, being the fourth volume of their new and revised edition of that author’s works. In a note to the preface, Mr. Kirk, the editor, tells us that “ the author’s emendations of this history include many additional notes .... chiefly derived from the copious annotations of Don José F. Ramirez and Don Lúcas Alaman to the two Spanish translations published in Mexico. There could be no stronger guarantee of the value and general accuracy of the work than the minute labor bestowed upon it by these distinguished scholars.” If any one cares to know how this accuracy was once impugned and how defended, we refer him to the Atlantic Monthly for April and for May, 1859, in which Mr. Kirk reviews Mr. Robert A. Wilson’s New History of the Conquest of Mexico. These two notices, published in the hot youth of the magazine, before age had tempered its judgments with mercy, showed Mr. Wilson the smallest conceivable compassion, and seem apparently to have obliterated his book. Lippincott & Co. also send us a new edition, enlarged and thoroughly revised by Dr. Richard Dunglison, of Dunglison’s Dictionary of Medical Science.

Scribner, Armstrong & Co., New York, publish From the Earth to the Moon direct, in Ninety-seven Hours and Twenty Minutes, and a Trip round it, by Jules Verne, between whom and the public it must soon become a question whether the power to produce is greater than the capacity to consume ingenious and enormous fables. Nothing is yet decided, but we venture to predict that M. Verne will triumph in such a contest. Another work, almost as idle and a good deal harder to read, is Mr, Fitzedward Hall’s Modem English, from the same publishers. Mr. Hall is one of those enemies of man who desire man to speak and write good English, or rather who desire to convict man of speaking and writing bad English. It is needless to say that he succeeds in this last, and that it does not matter to any one but Mr. Hall, who has nothing important to say when he has perfected his language. The worst of these efforts to purify the English tongue is that they imperil the souls of its champions ; and against Mr. Hall can be alleged some sins of dishonesty, especially in a former book, for which we hope (against hope) he may not find it embarrassing to answer at the last day. However, much is to be forgiven to a purist.

From D. Appleton & Co., New York, we have Nancy, a novel,by Miss Rhoda Broughton ; Religion and Science, a series of Sunday Lectures on the Relation between Natural and Revealed Religion, or the Truths revealed in Nature and Scripture, by Joseph Le Conte, Professor of Geology and Natural History in the University of California; and The Water-Witch, and The Two Admirals, by Cooper.

Lee and Shepard, Boston, publish Home Nook, or the Crown of Duty, a novel, by Amanda M. Douglas; Ten Minute Talks on all Sorts of Topics, by Elihu Burritt, with an Autobiography of the Author; Mrs. Armington’s Ward, or, The Inferior Sex, a novel, by D. Thew Wright.

We have also received the following publications : From the State Journal Company, Lincoln, Nebraska, Midland Poems, by Orsamus Charles Dake. From De Witt C. Lent, New York, Poems of Twenty Years, by Laura Winrhrop Johnson. From Robert Clarke & Co., Cincinnati, Rosemary Leaves, poems by Mrs. D. M. Jordan. From Macmillan & Co., New York, Comparative Politics, being six Lectures read before the Royal Institution, with The Unity of History, the Rede Lecture read before the University of Cambridge, by Edward A. Freeman. From Henry Holt & Co., New York, Primitive Culture ; Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, by Edward B.Tylor; in two volumes. From Noyes, Holmes & Co., Boston, The Life of John Warren, M. D., by Edward Warren, M. D. From the Naturalists’ Agency, Salem, Our Common Insects : A popular Account of the Insects of our Fields, Forests, Gardens, and Houses, illustrated with four plates and two hundred and sixty-eight wood-cuts; by A. S. Packard, Jr.

Those who are accustomed to regard French society as a seething mass of wickedness, which is faithfully portrayed in such novels as are to he found in much greater abundance than is desirable, would do well to read Madame Récamier, les Amis de sa Jeunesse et sa Correspondance intime, which admirably supplements the very readable, or more than that, the very delightful Souvenirs et Correspondance tirés des papiers de Mme. Récamier, by the same author, Madame Lenormant, the niece of Mme. Récamier. In the whole history of French society of this century there is no such pleasing picture as that which is presented by these volumes. We see an agreeable society of scholars like Ampère, scientific men like Ballanche, statesmen like Chateaubriand, who for years are devoted to the queen of it all, who rules by her beauty, her amiability, and her gentle sympathy. What was the secret of the charm every one will wonder who sees by the light of these volumes how great her influence was. There are very few letters of hers published, and those we have seen are nothing but commonplace. They are kind, and those to her niece especially are affectionate, but they read like the letters of a person who is averse to writing. In the Souvenirs et Correspondance we have a large number of letters from her friends, and notably from Chateaubriand, whose colossal egotism stands out in every line with the effect of showing us how much Mme. Récamier must have liked him to he able to prefer him to all of her admirers. In the new volume we have before us to-day there is hardly any mention made of Chateaubriand, for which the reader should be grateful, but considerable space is given to J. J. Ampere, whose outburst of devotion to Mme. Re'cnmier, then over forty years old, when he was but twenty, has been described by Sainte-Beuve. It will be remembered that she feared lest he should fall in love with her niece, and was giving him a few words of warning when he fell on his knees and said, “Ah! ce n’est pas pour elle,” and all the rest of his life he was a constant admirer of his first love. A collection is to be made of the works of Ballanche, which will include his correspondence, and, we presume, more of the letters of Mme. Récamier.

We have said these volumes give us a charming picture of society, but it is of society as distinguished from domestic life. With all these men who were such devoted admirers, family affection held a secondary place. Ampère never married; Chateaubriand’s wife, whom he had not married out of love, was always, and naturally enough, jealous of him ; Camille Jordan’s letter to Mme. Rècamier about his marriage is not one that would have given much pleasure to his bride; he says : —

“ Chère Juliette, quel va être votre étonnement! Cet irrésolu se fixe, cet inconstant s’enchaîne! Je me marie, j’e'pouse line Lyonnaise, je fais un de ces mariages conseillés par les grands parents, mais sanctionné par le cœur, à la fois raisonnable et doux. Il y a, malheureusement pour la perfection du roman, de la fortune et des convenances. Mais d’ailleurs on est jeune, on a du sens, de la vertu, de la grâce : on parait m’aimer beauconp, et tout dur que je suis, je m’en laisse attendrir.”

Mme. Récamier, however, knew how much more valuable were the joys of domesticity than the greatest social successes, as she continually repeated to her niece. “ I want you,” she used to say, “ to have everything I have missed and to be happier than I.” In her letters, too, we see that she was not a happy woman. We hope this new volume will find many readers.

— Les Moralistes Français au dix-huitième Siècle is the title of an interesting little volume by M. Jules Barni. The author’s aim in writing it was to show that if bad doctrines had many followers in that century there were yet some who opposed them, and that even those whose doctrines were pernicious were not without a generous desire to diminish some of the mischief they might cause. Those whom he has chosen to treat of are Vauvenargues, Duclos, Helvetius, Saint-Lambert, and Volney. Of these the most important by all odds is Vauvenargues. He was horn in 1715, and from the age of seventeen until he was twenty-nine was in active service. Although he detested army-life with all its petty cares, his ambition, and a strong feeling that it was the best because the most honorable career for a young gentleman, kept him in it until his health, enfeebled by his campaigns, compelled him to resign. He then betook himself to Paris where he died, May 28, 1747, aged thirty-one. Voltaire, who for a few years had been a friend of his, wrote that he had always seen him the most unfortunate and the calmest of men. His life, though short and ill-adapted for intellectual work, was very productive. His maxims are but little known,especially to us English readers, but they well deserve to be read and when read to be remembered.

We take this opportunity to quote a few ; we forbear translating them, lest the flavor of the original should be lost.

“ On suppose que ceux qui servent la vertu par réflexion la trahiraient pour le vice utile : oui, si le vice pouvait être tel aux yeux d’un esprit raisonnable.”

Here is one which is more especially directed at the moralists of the preceding centary, La Rochefoucauld and Pascal.

“ Nous sommes susceptildes d’amitié, de justice, d’humanité, de compassion, et de raison, O mes amis, qu’est-ce done que la vertu ? ”

In general, he may be said to belong to the reaction against Pascal, who painted the heart of man in such black colors. Though this at times leads him to exaggeration, we never fail to detect the noble heart which inspired Vauvenargues, so that besides being a philosopher by reflection he was a brave man, a nobleman by nature; as when he says:—

“ Le courage a plus de ressources contre les disgrâces que la raison.” Or again : “ Il y a pen de situations désespérées pour an esprit ferme, qui combat à force inégale, mais avec courage, la nécessité.”

Very many of his thoughts urge the virtue of humanity. He says that in considering the extreme weakness of men, the variance between their means and their wishes, their misfortunes always greater than their faults, their virtues always less than their duties, he concludes that there is nothing just except indulgence and humanity.

Again he says about our ordinary severity and lack of patience with our kind, that we keep our indulgence for the perfect.

Here are a few words directed at La Rochefoucauld, but which may be quoted nowadays without doing harm.

“ Plusieurs philosophes rapportent géneralement à l’amour-propre toutes sortes d’attachements. Ils pre'tendent qu’on s’approprie tout ce que l’on aime, qu’on n’y attache que son plaisir et sa satisfaction, qu’on se met soi-même avant tout, jusque-là qu’ils nient que celui qui donne sa vie pour un autre le préfère à soi. Ils passent le but eu ce point; car, si l’objet de notre amour nous est plus cher sans l’être que l’être sans l’objet de notre amour, it paraît que e’est notre amour qui est notre passion dominante, et non notre individu propre, puisque tout nous échappe avee la vie, le bien que nous nous étions approprié par notre amour, comme notre être véritable. Ils répondent que la passion nous fait confondre dans ce sacrifice notre vie et celle de l’objet aimé ; que nous croyons n'abandonner qu’une partie de nous-mêmes pour conserver l’autre; au moins ils ne peuvent nier que celle que nous conservons nous parait plus considérable que celle que nous abandonnons. Or, dès que nous nous regardons comme la moindre partie dans le tout, e’est une preférence manifeste de l’objet aimé.”

The remainder of this volume is by no means devoid of interest, although the other men who are described are of much less importance. Volney we would be far from recommending to any English reader ; Helvetiusis by no means fascinating ; such men as these represent fashions, while Vauvenargues is one of the few who speak for all time. He had a wonderfully acute mind and the ability to make all manner of wise remarks without yielding to the temptation of saying witty things. And when we consider the occupations of his life, so averse to thought, and the early age at which he died, in view of the merit of what he left behind him, it is impossible not to regret that he could not have lived longer. As it is, he was one of many forerunners of the revolution, a half-century ahead of his time, saying the wise thing which is not yet old in practice. He said it too with a flavor of old-fashioned courtliness only to be found in a time when the army and diplomatic life were all that stood open for young men of family. While we are all ready enough to quote the apothegms of those philosophers who detect the selfish impulses in the human heart, it would be well not to forget the sayings of a man who was gener ous as well as sharp-sighted.