Recent Literature

MR. LUNDY'S title¹ is somewhat misleading. It is not really the art of the early Christians with which he concerns himself, for his book does not take even so much as a glance at the æsthetic aspects of the contents of the Catacombs ; it is only the symbolism of this art that he is interested in. A work which should present, within moderate compass and with criticisms both philosophic and appreciative, the curious arthistory that may he traced in the subterranes of Rome would be extremely useful, for the publications of Bosio, De Rossi, Didron, F. Piper (of Berlin), and others of that class are too archæological in their direction to be of use to the art-student without long research. However, when the reader has checked his disappointment at Mr. Lundy’s failure to fill this gap, he will still find much that is very interesting in the present volume. But another abatement must be made, more serious than the first. That Mr. Lundy’s ideas are not so clear as might be desired, even as to the nature of symbols, which form a chief part of his subject, this passage at once reveals : “Properly speaking, then, the symbol is used to express pure and sublime ideas of God, as clearly and concisely as possible. It is the root, trunk, and flower of all figurative representation of idea and thought. It is obvious and plain. It differs from allegory in this respect, which represents one thing and means another. The symbol means only what it represents. . . . The symbol requires but a glance to comprehend its meaning. The allegory is complicated; the symbol is unique. The allegory is a luxurious plant with many branches; the symbol is a half-opened rosebud containing the beautiful flower.” To say nothing of the confusion of metaphor which makes “ the root, trunk, and flower ” synonymous with “the half-opened rosebud,” or of the mistaken use of “ unique,” we may confine ourselves to the singular cloudiness of the author’s definition of a symbol. In the phrase which we have italicized he entirely loses the distinction between representative and vicarious symbols ; this is especially strange, because the majority of the symbols with which he has to deal mean things wholly other than those which they represent. That a symbol, too, “ is obvious and plain” is so far from being true that Mr. Lundy elsewhere admits that “symbolism is a veiled expression ; ” and his own book would have been reduced to one half its actual bulk, if he had not found in the symbols before him a great deal which had to be explained. Neither would these have been used at all by the early Christians, if they had been “ obvious and plain.” For, according to the view of all writers on this subject, and of Mr. Lundy himself, the Roman professors of the new faith adopted the plan of painting their underground chapels and tombs with designs to understand which required special initiation. This was one measure of protection against heathen investigation, and formed a part of the Disciplina Arcani (or Arcana, as others phrase it), the “secret discipline” of the church, to which the author devotes a chapter. This discipline he connects with the pagan “ mysteries ” which had prevailed before Christ’s advent, showing how the Christian mysteries observed, like the pagan, different degrees of initiation, but eliminated the debasing elements of the latter, and made it possible for the catechumens or novices to pass into the higher classes of competentes, or those who had undergone their preparation for baptism, and the illuminati or mystce, who composed the highest order. These mysteries culminated in the celebration of the Eucharist at night, shortly before daybreak ; and Mr. Lundy reminds us of the mystic import of this system carried on in secrecy and darkness, by tracing it back to Christ’s custom of retiring into the country to talk with his disciples and prepare them for their mission. He adds, “ The very advent of the Son of God to earth was at night. The Holy Supper was instituted at night. The resurrection itself took place at night.” But his reference to allusions in the New Testament, with the aim of showing that mysteries in this sense of the Catacomb practice were a matter of immediate institution among the Apostles, does not seem to prove anything. Most of these allusions are in the writings of Saint Paul, and there is no doubt that his use of the word mystery does not imply something concealed (the usual sense), but on the contrary something hitherto hidden and now made known. Furthermore, Mr. Lundy makes bold to instance a place in I Corinthians, where the “testimony of God ” is spoken of, and to use this as synonymous with “ mystery of God.” In the Greek, the words employed are entirely distinct from each other. In general, Mr. Lundy’s exposition of the Disciplina Arcana lays itself open to a charge of haziness and uncertainty. The view of Monseigneur Gerbet, as cited by the author, is the more probable one, namely, that the use of symbolic paintings and the privacy of worship were due to a fear of pagan interference. The catechumens were probably put into separate chapels because these sepulchral chambers were too small to admit both classes into one apartment. What Mr. Lundy recalls as to the grounds of government opposition to Christianity is worth remembering. He rehearses the well-known facts that Tiberius was disposed to recognize the new religion of Christ, notwithstanding the opposition of the Roman Senate, that Alexander Severus had an image of Christ among his household gods, and that the worship of Isis and Osiris was tolerated by the Romans; and explains that Christians incurred animosity by their refusal to tolerate any part of the heathen religion, as also by their custom of nocturnal worship. All secret meerings were viewed with great severity as being dangerous to the state; the Bacchic festivals had been suppressed on account of the shameful practices of participants in them ; and the Christian agapœ or love-feasts were dreaded as tending in the same direction. The improprieties of which unworthy Christians were guilty at these meetings furnished a ground for proceeding against the entire body. The main part of Mr. Lundy’s work is devoted to searching among the symbolic paintings for evidences of the early presence of doctrines in the church, in the form which they now retain among Protestant Episcopalians. He remarks on the early reverence for God which allowed the Creator to be represented only by the symbol of a hand (this being interestingly allied with the mystic Hebrew Yod, said to mean a hand, which is the first letter of Jehovah’s name, and the tenth or perfect number of the Hebrew alphabet); and brings in as evidence of Romish corruption the growing audacity which first introduced God as a wearer of the human form, and finally portrayed him as Pope, in full canonicals. Another chapter is devoted to Jesus Christ as Divine, another to the favorite symbolic representation of the Good Shepherd, and one treats of Jesus Christ as Human. In the latter, the author discusses the growth of the Madonna-cult. This is one of the most striking of his themes, but it can be found in much more concise and scholarly form in Marriott’s Church in the Catacombs, which Mr. Lundy does not mention in his appended list of “ books in the author’s library,” — a heading which savors of obtrusive pride. Jesus Christ as Sufferer, Hades, The Tree of Life, The Holy Ghost, The Communion of Saints, The Forgiveness of Sins, and Resurrection, make up the rest of the volume. This whole subject of the belief and practice of the primitive Christians of Rome is of the deepest interest; it excites one’s keenest sympathies, it is full of pathetic suggestion, it arouses even a dormant sense of reverence. But it seems to us a serious mistake on Mr. Lundy’s part to assume that the condition of the Roman Christians ought to determine absolutely the shape of Christian faith to-day, or that it settles beyond question the exact form in which the faith was left by Jesus to his disciples. The earliest records of the Catacombs that have any doctrinal value still leave a wide interval between their time and that of Christ’s ministry. Fifty or even a hundred years give ample room for marked developments or modifications to take place in a religious system, even when so near its source. Mr. Lundy makes up the deficiencies of proof, in some cases, by quotations from Celsus and Minutins Felix as opponents of Christianity, and from the patristic writings in its defense. All this is valuable in defining the limits of debate, but the fathers sometimes committed themselves to points which a modern mind cannot accept; and even at that period officers of the church were becoming widely diverse in their opinions, and heresy was abundant. Mr. Lundy cumbers his volume by his extensive and repetitious quotations from the church fathers. But he invites our confidence in his evidence by the most robust example : finding from the monuments that the early Christians prayed to their dead as intercessors, he is himself quite ready to accept this doctrine as supplying the true communion of saints.

He places himself in the main on the generally accepted basis of Episcopalian belief, but having set out to prove the “one catholic faith and practice,” his tone is controversial throughout. He attacks Renan, “the infamous Houston” (author of Ecee Homo), and Dr. Draper; he assails the Romish church, in the old abusive fashion, as “ the mother of harlots and of all abominations in religion and politics” (page 295), and at the same time quotes with great satisfaction from John Henry Newman (page 230). He of course has his fling or two at the Puritans, but what is more puzzling is that he attacks the Ritualists at one time, and at another waxes wroth with the American General Convention. He takes, in fact, whatever suits his taste, from whatever source; but this seems to be not so much because he is generously catholic, as that he is various in his capacity for prejudice. Opposing a good many people on all sides, he is obliged to recoil upon a centre of some kind of consistent belief which he regards as the single true one; but it is not wholly easy to define even this, beyond its general Episcopalian tendency.

This curious faculty of Mr. Lundy’s mind makes him an uncertain guide even in his interpretation of symbols. He shows too easy a fertility of fancy in discussing them, and goes the great length of insisting that the horrible graffito of the Palatine — obviously a caricature if compared with other caricatures of antiquity — is a Christian adaptation of the Egyptian assheaded god, Anubis, as a type of the crucified Saviour, He also, we think, makes too much of the Cypriote images from the New York Metropolitan Museum, in attributing to them a distinctly cruciform character. What he adduces as to pagan prefigurations of Christ, — for example, Plato’s ideal man in The Republic, whose final act of devotion to his kind would be to suffer crucifixion; the crucifixion of the Persian mediator, Mithra; the Hindu story of Krishna; with the singular Asiatic crucifix from Tuam, in Ireland, and the tradition of the Mexican god, Quetzalcoatl, — all this is most suggestive, though not new. It is interesting, also, to speculate in what way the legend of Orpheus may be connected with the life of Jesus ; and that the famous Christian monogram of the St. Andrew’s cross with the Greek letter P should have been in use on the coins of the Ptolemies, and again on those of Herod the Great, struck forty years before our era, is a fact singularly impressive in itself. But, if we understand Mr. Lundy aright, he deduces from these data the conclusion that there had been many incarnations of the deity before the advent of Jesus; that is, he accepts in a general way the Hindu theory of the Avataras. It would be impossible here to discuss this at length, but Mr. Lundy’s conclusion is, to say the least, much more credulously mythological and far less ideal than the Swedenborgian insight into the nature of these precursive conceptions and images that so strongly remind us of Jesus.

Mr. Lundy has missed an opportunity of Writing a book which, as presenting a convenient compend of his subject, would have met a real need. As it is, the recent smaller work of the Rev. W. H. Withrow, The Test of the Catacombs, presents a much better executed and more intelligent survey of the field. Mr. Lundy has the advantage in the sumptuous style in which his book is issued, and in the fullness of the illustrations accompanying it, but these illustrations, on the other hand, are many of them poorly executed, and very inferior to those of Marriott. The text of the present publication is full of bad writing. Many errors of grammar appear in it as glaring as this: “ The suspicions of the Roman mob that the Jews had set fire to the city, and who, when officially examined, implicated the Christians” (page 51), or the following : “ This single remark or two . . . which seems ” {page 382). Two things are spoken of as being “ on the same equality ” with each other. Here and there occur, also, passages of very questionable taste indeed, a mild example of which is the author’s statement that churches, at first made circular, were afterward shaped as parallelograms, coupled with the facetious comment that the church should always be “on the square ” with God. The concluding sentence of the book, too, seems ill-chosen: “Go forth, little book, and the favor of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost go with thee, child of my love and care and anxious thought through all these years of toil and study,” etc.

Yet, notwithstanding his inaccuracies, his dubious conclusions, his dogmatism, and other drawbacks, Mr. Lundy is manifestly a well-intending writer, and deserves credit for an elaborate attempt to collect into one volume what has been scattered through many different works. Received with caution, his book will be a useful one.

— In 1770 the Messrs. Langhorne, D. D. and M. A. both, in the preface to their edition of Plutarch’s Lives, referred to the first English translation, from which, they scornfully observed, some persons supposed that Shakespeare might have taken suggestions for his Roman plays. This supposition they parried by asking how Shakespeare, unless learned in Greek, got at his soliloquy of “To be or not to be,” which they claimed was an almost literal translation from Plato, whose works were not known to have been translated in Shakespeare’s time. But Shakespearian criticism is not conducted on this plan now ; and the Rev. Walter Skeat has even thought it worth while to reprint seven of the Lives as rendered from the French of Bishop Amyot, by Sir Thomas North, in 1612.1 (North’s first edition, published in 1579, is not now to be found.) A special cause for his choice of the (third) edition of 1612 is the following curious fact. In 1870 a copy of that edition was presented to the Greenock Library, which is supposed to be “ the very copy once in Shakespeare’s own possession.” On the probable genuineness of this copy as a part of the great dramatist’s library we are not prepared to form a decisive opinion, though Mr. Skeat is evidently satisfied by the presence of the initials W. S. on the title-page, and various other marks of identity, the strongest being certain few marginal notes in the same handwriting, a handwriting which “may very well have been Shakespeare’s.” The most striking of these annotations is the remark “ Brute — Brutus,” in brackets, opposite that part of the description of Julius Cæsar’s death where Brutus is mentioned. This note is remarkable, because the phrase does not appear in Plutarch, and does appear in the play of Julius Cæsar. But, however it may be with regard to the Greenock copy, the main interest of this modern reprint lies in the fact that North’s Plutarch was the book from which Shakespeare must have drawn supplies for several of his plays. Any one who reads the lives of Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, and Antony, must always be struck with Shakespeare’s independent method of conceiving the subjects, and at the same time must wonder at the close following of Plutarch which appears here and there. The most noticeable instance of the latter, which Mr. Skeat points out, is the correspondence between the opening sentence of the Life of Coriolanus and the speech of Junius Brutus in act ii.,scene iii. “ Ancus Martius was one, King Numa’s daughter’s son, who was King of Rome after Tullus Hostilius,” is North’s phrase, paralleled by —

The passages where specially distinct connection exists are not very numerous, but there are many others worth noticing. As we have hinted, the dissimilarities are quite as interesting as the resemblances; and in the whole study which Mr. Skeat’s volume opens up lies one of the most fruitful regions of artistic inquiry. The book itself is edited with admirable care, completeness, and intelligence ; and to our thinking it is more charming than any other English version of the author. Not, of course, to be placed on the same level with Clough’s clear, chaste, and scholarly translation (that late-perfected result of the faulty old Dryden edition), it still has the spice of Elizabethan naïveté which nothing else can have, and is more subtly suggestive, though often less definite, than a more modern rendering is permitted to be.

— There is a satisfaction to the readers of Dr. Dexter’s carefully studied pages2 in the thought that a painstaking rummaging of all the original sources respecting the banishment of Roger Williams has disclosed no new facts or new readings which would reverse the judgment already pronounced by impartial and thorough scholars like Dr. Palfrey and Dr. Ellis. One approaches a new monograph on such a subject with a certain stiffening of the mind. Here we are to have, one says, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and it is hardly likely that we shall get off from the reading without suffering some violent strain upon our prejudice, or rather — if we are talking aloud — upon our settled conviction. Dr. Dexter’s attitude toward Roger Williams might have been foreseen ; he and we would probably both have voted for Williams’s banishment if we had been so fortunate as to get all Our learning on the subject by talking with Winthrop and Endicott; but though the volume before us is colored by the author’s intimacy with the persons who did the banishing, it is so crowded with reference to authorities that any champion of Roger Williams could not do better than consult it for sources from which to draw his weapons.

The main line of argument pursued by Dr. Dexter is the familiar one that the banishment of Roger Williams from Massachusetts was in self-defense against a man whose public words and acts contravened the authority of the colony at a time when that authority was in a critical condition; that freedom of conscience was not the point upon which the banishment turned; and that the course of the colony in excluding intruders and turbulent characters did not spring from religious bigotry, but from a prudent consideration for the harmony and self-preservation of the colony.

In maintaining these propositions Dr. Dexter goes over ground which has already been clearly laid out, but he undertakes to strengthen the position and en passant to settle certain minor questions, as Williams’s age and the date of his banishment. His anxiety to make out a clear case for the magistrates outstrips his judgment, we think, when he labors to show that Williams was not banished at all, because only a state can banish, and not a trading-colony. As a mere question of words he might have been content to use a word which Cotton used, and if he were to tell Williams that the magistrates of Massachusetts could not banish him, Williams might answer, as in the story, “ But they did banish me.”

The fame of Roger Williams’s plea for liberty of conscience has very naturally spread over his whole career, and affected popular judgment as to his exclusion from Massachusetts, but history has a way of citing records and presenting dates which slowly sets public opinion right. Dr. Dexter’s book will do something toward confirming a judgment already becoming well known, and its array of authorities will frighten some into assent. But after all, the question of Roger Williams’s banishment in itself is of little importance beside the larger matter of the historic truth concerning the spirit and aims of the founders of New England. The opposing eulogy and calumny under which their real selves have been buried are slowLy giving way before a historic criticism which has no partisan ends to subserve.

— Mr. Tarbox hardly treats his readers fairly when he invites them to read the Life of General Putnam,² and engages their attention for nearly two thirds of the volume with a discussion concerning the battle of Bunker Hill. The book is not a Life of General Putnam, but a controversial tract upon the question of Putnam’s position on the 17th of June, preceded by an account of Putnam’s ancestry and his early life, and followed by a record of what seem to the biographer the unimportant years succeeding the battle of Bunker HILL. We like things to be called by their right names, and it does not help this book, and its plea, to give it a name likely to mislead the unwary.

With more violence than the subject seems to demand, the author brings a great many facts and arguments to prove what we believe was never seriously called in question, that Prescott commanded in the redoubt and that Putnam exercised an erratic command over the rest of the field. The main facts, according to his showing, are that the expedition to Bunker Hill was planned in a council of which Putnam was one ; that Prescott was in sympathy with Putnam and was placed in command of the expedition; that his orders were to intrench himself on Bunker or Breed’s Hill (as the officers themselves were in doubt, we shall not attempt to decide the question) ; that he marched his men there, and with Gridley’s aid raised the earthworks that constituted the intrenchments; that he remained at his post until the final defeat, and that General Putnam, sometimes on the field, sometimes in Cambridge, was an inspiring and efficient officer, exercising control over the miscellaneous assemblage of troops more by the force of his personal popularity and enthusiasm than by virtue of his rank as a general officer. The error which underlies much of Mr. Tarbox’s argument is in the attempt to apply a strict interpretation of military rank and etiquette, and to give the entire enterprise an order and precision which it never had. The occupation of Charlestown was a piece of daring which impetuous men achieved in the teeth of military prudence ; the battle which followed had not been planned for, and the confusion of the day resulted principally from the lack of military foresight and the timid half-measures of General Ward. Prescott’s bravery in the redoubt and Putnam’s energy in the field were the heroic elements in the contest which shine forth most brilliantly, but the entire operations partook more of a volunteer character than of a military movement guided and shaped by a single mind. Moreover, no one there seems to have regarded himself as commander-in-chief or to look upon any one else as such. Putnam puts himself under Warren’s orders, which Warren refuses to give. Prescott tenders the command in the redoubt in the same way, with the same result. Putnam and Prescott dispute about the intrenching on Bunker Hill, and Putnam, in his lively fashion, gallops off the field after reënforcements.

Mr. Tarbox is bound to make out a case for General Putnam, and seems to regard his hero as lying crushed under a weight of calumny; but the Dearborn slanders were instantly met and answered fifty years ago, and the recent revival of interest in Prescott has no such malignant aspect toward Putnam as Mr. Tarbox seems to imagine. He has worked himself into such a heat about it that he loses his grammar as well as his temper, and in his eagerness to exalt Putnam seems to think it necessary to disparage Prescott, closing his main argument with the uncivil fling, “If Putnam had had the same business to do over again a fortnight after, he would not probably have chosen Prescott as his assistant.”

It may be that the material does not exist for a full life of Putnam, but it would be a capital subject for a writer with an eye to the picturesque in character and adventure. He would find in the contemporary accounts and anecdotes of Putnam material for graphic narrative, and the surroundings of Putnam’s life render him an admirable representative of the rough-andready volunteer of the Revolution. A biographer with such a subject, if thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Putnam, would hardly make the question of his command at Bunker Hill a solemn call for justice, nor think it necessary to be less civil to Prescott than Putnam himself was.

— In his latest volume ³ Dr. Holland returns to the field of his early fame, won by such books as Letters to Young People, and Gold-Foil. On the whole, he is at his best and strongest in that field, and there is much good sense in this collection of short editorials — good sense advanced with the emphasis of a quality by no means common in writers for the periodic press, namely, moral earnestness. This is of service in the author’s discussion of Personal Dangers, Preachers and Preaching, The Church of the Future, Woman, The Rich and Poor. Still, we ourselves doubt the ultimate efficacy of his urgent remarks freely addressed to young men tempted by sensuality; the prominence given to this subject is quite as likely to do harm in Some quarters as to do good in others. Besides, as Dr. Holland himself says, “ One tires of talking to fools, and falls back in sorrow that hell and destruction are never full.” And many good people, we may add, are tired of hearing the fools talked to. There are better ways of working. The temperance question, or rather the question of total abstinence, comes in, of course, for a great deal of attention, and it is in the paragraphs devoted to this that Dr. Holland fully shows how prejudiced he is capable of being. Culture, however, excites in him an animosity nearly equal to that which even the most moderate use of wine seems to arouse. He professes to attack only the faults of culture, but he contrives to include among these “ faults ” the entire system of culture representative of one portion of the country, a system than which none has been more generous, more humane, more broadly and gently Christian, in this century. Of this he says, “ Christianity must kill it or Christianity must die. It must kill Christianity, or it must die.” But Dr. Holland must not be taken too seriously when dealing with delicate literary questions. He derides criticism, at one point, as being merely an amusing branch of literature, consisting of the selfillustration of various men, gifted or otherwise, who imagine that they are illustrating and judging other men; and we fancy that his calibre in literary subjects is not misrepresented by the following remark, which appears in a short address on the self-evident maxim that “ all writers who are good for anything have a style of their own.” It is this : “ As a fair illustration of the absolute impossibility of one man writing in the style of another, take the two great poets of England, and let Browning and Tennyson undertake to acquire each the style of the other. It would absolutely ruin both.” Dr. Holland’s own style is

neither very distinctive nor polished. Is it possible that he is blind to the infelicity of this simile? — “Wine and strong drink always have done more harm than good in the world, and always will, until that millennium comes whose feet are constantly tripped from under it by the drunkards that he in its path.” Such passages, frequently recurring, impress one with the author’s neglect of due discrimination. His language, though often forcible, is sometimes so redundant and feeble that not even the violent words which are somewhat lavishly used can inject strength into it. We might suggest to the author that he is in danger of falling into coarse statements of his cases, and that his severity sometimes becomes mere scolding. This is exemplified, by the way, in The Tortures of the Dinner-Table. “It is almost as hard to listen as to talk,” he complains, “ when the stomach is full of the heavy food of a feast; ” and he sums up the topic of dinner-speeches thus : “ Let us have done with this foolishness.” A better way would be to moderate one’s appetite. And is “foolishness” necessarily so to every intelligent person? We like Dr. Holland better in his retort upon Mr. Tyndall, which is ingenious and witty. Given his premises, he proceeds with great keenness to his conclusions. But the latter are often valueless because of his entire omission of important elements in the problem. With many practical suggestions, his ideas are often crude and commonplace. He appears to think, but not to reflect. Yet he gives withal the impression of an honest, energetic man, eager for the right, and having much power for good. The more on this account is it a pity that he neglects the development of thought in certain fine but essential particulars. To our thinking, he has qualities better than taste alone, but they are warped and injured by the absence of taste. And his mistakes, though serious, might be passed over but for his influence with the thousands of readers who, he reminds us, are familiar with his editorials.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.<FNREF>1</FNREF>

It is as hard to define exactly the charm of the two volumes of M. Doudan’s correspondence ⁴ as it is to give to one friend an accurate description of another which he shall find to be a just one when he comes to meet the third person face to face. Experience teaches that the most dexterously arranged adjectives convey no definite notion of what is to be expressed ; and even wellchosen quotations are hardly more satisfactory in throwing light upon the tone of a writer’s mind, his refinement and humor, or whatever his virtues may be, than are the little pieces of quartz with specks of gold in them, which early miners used to send home from California, in giving one an adequate comprehension of the mineral wealth of that State. Whoever cares for literature pure and simple, for reading sound and thoughtful opinions on men and things, well expressed and made wise and agreeable by a delightful humor, will find in these letters what makes some few books the most invaluable companions. The writer’s name had already been mentioned by SainteBeuve in the eleventh volume of his Causeries, and now, thanks to the Vicomte d’Haussonville, we have an opportunity to judge how well deserved were the critic’s few words of praise.

Doudan led a singularly retired life. He was born, as we learn from the introductory notices, in the year 1800, at Douai. He came to Paris to finish his studies, and soon afterwards he became a sort of under-teacher at one of the large schools for boys. While holding this post he was invited to take charge of the education of the son born to Madame de Staël after her marriage to M. de Rocca. This brought him into the household of the Duc de Broglie, and there he remained until his death, in 1872. He was not only a tutor, for when the Duc de Broglie held office under government he made Doudan his secretary, and at all times he was regarded as a trusty and intimate friend. His society was sought by all the distinguished visitors of the house ; all his friends showed the utmost confidence in his taste, consulting him about their work and submitting to him the proof-sheets of their books, and some few coming in for a share of his correspondence. His influence made itself felt through his conversation and his letters. He wrote but little for publication, but he was an indefatigable reader of new books and of old ones. He was uncommonly reserved, we are told, and his modesty was no less noteworthy. He was a sort of power behind the throne in literature, only the throne was very nearly unoccupied; and he preferred intercourse with intelligent friends, and indirect influence over their taste, to the struggle for more general approbation. It has been suggested that he was too fine a critic to have been successful if he had written for the public; but this statement is at least open to doubt, for the higher a man’s taste is, the greater his cultivation without pedantry, the more agreeable his humor, the more surely he is marked out for a leader. During his life Doudan influenced only a small circle, but now there is no doubt that he will show many the value of literary art and of wide education.

The difference between most books and these letters is this, that here we find no formal literary manner, but rather that charm to be had only in the conversation of some rare friend. The flavor, that is to say, is not bookish, but personal, at the same time that it is literary. The impression we get of this reserved man, cultivating his taste by frequent study of the best models, praising discreetly but avoiding any excess of enthusiasm, — from sincerity, not from affectation,— and blaming without harshness, is a fascinating one. It need hardly be pointed out how thoroughly French are the qualities of M. Doudan, how his taste and elegance are the qualities which mark the best of French literature, to the despair of those who deal with ruder tongues and are ready to give up writing and to turn to digging ditches for a livelihood.

Of the specimens given of his published writing we shall speak later ; it is better to begin with his letters. His criticism of those of La Mennais will show how he felt about them, and how he demanded sincerity above all things, he says of that writer, “He reserves his talents for his books, and I have often noticed that this economy was a bad sign, and the proof that one makes a trade of literature and that one does not really have the impressions one assumes to have in one’s books. One’s genuine self ought to appear everywhere, in conversation, in letters, as in one’s published writings. There is nothing gloomier than those parlors in country-houses where fire is lit only when company comes.” Nothing of this sort is to be detected here, as further extracts will show. Here is part of a letter written in 1835 to a friend of his, named Raulin : “ You would do well to think of buying and reading some law-books. One can get interested in everything by merely dipping beneath the surface. I have given you, I hope, fine discourses on erudition. As for me, I have a yearning for study which increases every day. That is the secret of my pretended idleness. There is no real originality except beneath the lowest layers of erudition. He who knows nothing is too apt to take up new ideas. It would be a wise resolution to think nothing by one’s self until one knew what all ages had thought about it. One would, perhaps, find it hard to think anything for one’s self after all this study, but read M. Hugo’s two volumes and you will see if it is worth while to think for one’s self. By the way, it is said that M. de la Mennais has thought out by himself a new volume. What does he say over again here ? And whom does he want to eat ? Is it a treatise on the Imperious Necessity of Slaying one’s Enemies by the Light of the Gospel ? What a pretty little lamb that rhetorician is ! His books are like processions in the auto-da-fé: pleasant songs, fine flowers, fine torches, magnificent chasubles glittering like butterflies’ wings, fine verses from the Scriptures repeated by fine voices, beneath a clear sky, and at the end of it all, in the distance, a fine pile of blazing wood to burn up one’s master or servant, according to the genius of the centuries.”

This is from a letter written the next year, 1836, to the son of the Duc de Broglie, then a student: “You know it is agreed, decided, and decreed that you are not to answer my letters during the examinations. I see that this idea has begun to enter your head, and it is a new pleasure for me every day not to receive any letter from you. When I get up I say to myself, ‘ I shall not have any letter from Albert to-day,’and i feel happy; and I pull up my window-curtain and the sun pours into my room, and I sit down to read some witty letter of Voltaire or of Madame de Sévigné. So, my dear friend, do not hurry.”

Here is a bit of criticism about Victor Hugo which does not sound like much of the adulation poured out on that eminent writer in England, when many of the writers there had but recently discovered France or at least French literature : “I certainly intend to write in the Revue francaise. I wanted to speak of Victor Hugo’s Voix intérieures. The title reads as if it were the work of a ventriloquist, but that did not stop me. I find in him so much talent that I am unable to give him all the illtreatment he deserves. Read the ode to his young brother who died mad. You will find in it many stanzas of much beauty; the movement, the ideas, the images are all poetic. There are many charming verses scattered here and there amid the wildest nonsense. You will come across a beautiful wild rose, all wet with dew, by the side of an old slipper and broken pots. I think that he jumbles everything in this way without premeditation. He does not distinguish what is beautiful from what is ugly. He is a powerful nature producing with energy palm-trees, serpents, toads, humming-birds, and spiders indifferently ; he puts them all in a bag together and calls it a volume. I think too ill of him to say any good of him, and vice versa.” Some English critics compare Hugo with Michael Angelo ; this is what Doudan says : “ Victor Hugo is a Michael Angelo in terra-cotta, while the other Michael Angelo, the real one, works in the pure, solid white marble of a grand imagination.”

There are not only many passages which concern themselves with the criticism of modern books, there are also frequent remarks about politics and the spirit of the age, which are worthy of attention. For instance, “ It is very possible that for some time the devil has been haunting the world in the form of utility. He has thought in his malice that this was the worst trick one could play the beautiful.” Again, “You will see that in the next fifty years there will not be a single literary work produced ; I mean by that a book that will be read when it is a year old. Men are going to live like rabbits listening from their burrows to all sorts of hunters, who come with sticks and guns and dogs. In spite of La Fontaine, no rabbit has been able to think about any abstract subject. . . . Whoever is without a feeling of security for the morrow can neither meditate nor accomplish a lasting work. Great catastrophes behind one and great repose before one are the conditions in which the human mind exerts itself with that depth and calmness which constitute beauty. The memory of the civil wars, of the battle of Philippi, of the past proscription, a pretty house on the bank of the Tiber, the water-falls of the Anio, with Soracte on one side and Rome in a golden dust on the other, for the present; and for the future, the empire of Augustus keeping all things in repose by means of great, strong armies, with fine fleets on the sea at Misenum and Ravenna; with these conditions, which are not to be seen from the heights of Montmartre, one writes odes which are like beautiful clouds floating slowly over a vast expanse of tranquil sky. I doubt whether Camoens, whom I have not read, could have written a magnificent poem with the continual prospect of perishing in one way or another every day. . . . Seneca is hurried, like a man who expects to be called at any moment to leave his beautiful gardens, and marble and golden cabinets, to open his veins in a hot or lukewarm bath as he might choose. Virgil, on the edge of such a hot bath, would never have dreamed of the wild tranquillity of the Aventine woods, of the kingdom of Evander, or of the miseries of Dido beneath the sun of Carthage. Racine would not linger in the forests with Phædra, listening to the call to arms, or to the roar of cannon, or to the tocsin, or to the talk in a hut which should give him legitimate fear that his little family would not be kindly treated by the friends of a new system of property and new relations between men.”

Of making extracts there could be no end. Probably enough have been given to show some of the more attractive of this writer’s qualities, his taste, his humor, and his thoughtfulness. Of the published articles reprinted here, one of the most interesting is that on the new school of poetry in France, which treats of the difficulty of the people of one nation understanding fully the literature of another race, and to this subject the writer frequently returns in his letters. He expresses what may seem to some his limitations, for his sympathy is bounded, and he does not fully comprehend all modern foreign literatures, —this is not surprising, for how many of us derive any real enjoyment from the classics of French literature ? — and it is with Greek and Latin and French books that he feels most at home. But it is the aroma, so to speak, of his appreciation of them that makes the present book such agreeable reading. One does not find here a complete solution of all questions, not even of all literary questions, but rather much light as to the way in which the last-named have to be solved. It is with great pleasure that we hear of the promised publication of yet more of his letters. No one will regret reading all that can be had.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

J. B. Bachelder, Boston : Popular Resorts and How to Reach Them. Illustrated. Tourists' Edition.

Edward Bosqui & Co., San Francisco : California Notes. By Charles B. Turrill.

Callahan & Co., Chicago: The Constitutional and Political History of the United States. By H. von Halst, Professor at the University of Freiburg. Translated from the German by John J. Lalor and Alfred B. Mason.

Curtis and Childs, Utica: The Fallen, and other Poems. By lames B. Kenyon. — Eighteen Presidents and Contemporaneous Rulers. By W. A. Taylor. Fourth Edition.

Estes and Lauriat, Boston : A Family Tree. By Albany de Fonblanque. — Woven of Many Threads. By Mrs. C. V. Hamilton. - Half-Hour Recreations in Natural History. Part 10. Insects as Architects. By A. S. Packard, Jr.

Henry Holt & Co., New York : Practical Botany, Structural and Systematic. By August Koehler, M. D. — Ida Craven. By H. M. Cadill.

W. J. Johnston, New York : Oakum Pickings. A Collection of Stories, Sketches, and Paragraphs contributed from Time to Time to the Telegraphic and General Press. By John Oakum.

S. T. Jones & Co., St. Louis : Political and Constitutional Law of the United States of America. By William 0. Bateman.

Henry S. King & Co., London: St. Thomas of Canterbury. A Dramatic Poem. By Aubrey De Vere.

Macmillan & Co., New York: History of the Norman Conquest in England. By Edward A. Free-man

Nelsonand Phillips, New York : The Lord’s Land. By Henry B. Ridgeway.

Oration by R. C. Winthrop before Boston City Council.

James R. Osgood & Co., Boston : Peter and Polly; or, Home-Life in New England a Hundred Years ago. By Marion Douglas. — The Echo Club, and other Literary Diversions. By Bayard Taylor.

Porter and Coates, Philadelphia: A Brief Treatise on United States Patents, for Inventors and Patentees. By Henry Howson, Civil and Mechanical Engineer and Solicitor of Patents, and Charles Howson, Attorney at Law and Counsel in Patent Cases.

G. P. Putnam’s Sous, New York : Goethe’s Prose. Edited, with Notes, by James Morgan Hart.

J. W. Schermerhorn & Co., New York : Elements of Latin Grammar in Connection with a Systematic and Progressive Latin Reader. By Gustavus Fischer, LL. D. —Elements of English Grammar. By S. W. Whitney, A. M. — Manual of School Material. — The Mask of Comus, By John Walton.

Richard Schomburgh, Philadelphia: Botanical Reminiscences in India.

Simpkins, Marshall, & Co., London : Lord Byron vindicated ; or, Rome and her Pilgrim. By Maufred.

Charles P. Somerby, New York : The Ultimate Generalization. An Effort in the Philosophy of Science.

William Tegg & Co., London: The Poetry of Creation. In Eight Parts. By Nicholas Michell.

— Famous Women and Heroes. In Seven Parts. By Nicholas Michell. — Pleasure. By Nicholas Michell.— The Immortals; or, Glimpses of Paradise. By Nicholas Michell. —London in Light and Darkness. By Nicholas Michell.

The Declaration of Independence; a Poem commemorating the One Hundredth Anniversary of the National Birthday of the United States of America. By Joseph H. Martin.

Transactions of the Department of Agriculture of the State of Illinois. By A. M. Garland.

D. Van Nostrand, New York : The Ethics of Benedict de Spinoza. From the Latin. With an Introductory Sketch of his Life and Writings.

Weed, Parsons, & Co., Albany : George Washington Brown. A Non-Partisan Satire. By Vox.

Sumner Whitney & Co., San Francisco: Wrongs and Rights of a Traveller. By B. Vashon Rogers,

A. Williams &Co., Boston : The Merchant’s Wife. By a Looker-on here in Vienna.