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Motley's Dutch Republic-German Poets.

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writers; and some of the most illustrious among the dead she leaves for the most part to authors who have written so ably of them and of their works. But 'Lives of the Poets' for Germany, on the plan of Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets' for England, can hardly fail to be interesting and instructive to the English reader. The style of Madame Pontès is simple and unpretending; her criticisms are never brilliant nor profound, but they are in general sensible and just; and she writes upon a subject which she understands, and which is to her an object of affection. Her notices commence with the earliest stages of German poetry, and her narrative touches on many things connected with German literature and German life, from the middle age downwards.

Memoirs and Adventures of Felice Orsini, written by Himself; containing Unpublished State Papers of the Roman Court. Translated from the Original Manuscripts by George Carbonel. Constable.Orso Orsini was born in 1819. His father was a Liberal, and shared in the feeling of the patriot party in Italy. But his uncle, who was of the other side, exerted another kind of influence upon him. From his schoolboy days he was filled with the idea of seeing Italy emancipated nearly all generous Italians shared in that feeling at that time. In 1843 he became a member of the Young Italy' fraternity. But father and son were speedily arrested and thrown into prison. He was liberated by the amnesty of the present Pope, and the defence of his subsequent course rests on the plea that the promises of Pius IX. had not been followed by performance. The change in the Pope's policy, and the French intervention, of course changed everything. Then followed a series of conspiracies, directed equally against the Pope and Napoleon. It is a sad story-this life of Orsini. Who can fail to admire the spirit of self-sacrifice in such men, especially when compared with that low spirit of self-seeking so manifest in not a few who become their censors. But, unhappily, men who would not lie or deceive to save themselves, often learn to do both to save their country. It is in the nature of tyranny that it should teach men, in this manner, to allow the end to sanctify the means. Right in its struggle against might learns to clutch at all weapons, and accounts it well so to do. You who denounce the vices of conspiracy so fluently and loudly, have you no word of rebuke for those bad governments which often goad even wise men into such forms of madness? France and Austria are Catholic countries, and they retain their hold on Italy because the papacy is there, and because of the uses which they wish to make of that power in relation to their own subjects. If Italy were left to the Italians, the case would soon be settled; but it is not so left, it will not be so left.

Fishes and Fishing. By W. WRIGHT, Esq. Newby.-This book treats of the Artificial Breeding of Fish, Anatomy of their Senses, their Loves, Passions, and Intellects.' The author must be a gentleman of a truly venerable age, for he was surgeon-aurist to Queen Charlotte, and can remember how the world and the church went on as far back as the times of Lord North and the terrible Junius. But the author's faculties are in good condi

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tion, and his vivacity is such as it is generally pleasant to witness in old age. There was inducement in the scenes of his boyhood to the use of the rod and line, and his fondness for this amusement became a passion. The book not only relates the author's experiences as an angler, but includes a good deal of tattle' about the history of fishing; and the reminiscences of life in general, as the author has known it, which are interspersed, go so far back as to be to us of the nature of history, and history for the most part of a very pleasant and gossiping description.

Intellectual Education and its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women. By EMILY SHIRREFF. Parker and Son.-Miss Shirreff is a bold lady to expect to find a female auditory for a discourse about women which does not make marriage the one end of their existence; which treats that event as very natural and becoming, when it comes as it ought to do, but as by no means indispensable to the happiness or usefulness of women. Of course, if women are not to depend on marriage for happiness they must depend on something else; that something else must be in themselves; and that this something else may be equal to their wants there must be education of a larger kind, adapted to call forth wider sympathies than is commonly provided for the fair sex. This is a sensible view of things. book, indeed, is a book very much to our mind. It does not deal in wordy platitudes; what is said is said simply, naturally, and well. The worst of it is that men, for the most part, are so indifferently educated, that women as Miss Shirreff would make them would be more than a match for them, and the great majority of ill-educated men are terribly afraid of well-educated women.

The

Recollections of the Last Four Popes, and of Rome in their Times. By H. E. CARDINAL WISEMAN. 8vo. Hurst and Blackett.-The author of this volume is a sagacious person-wise in his generation. But, like all very clever people, he is capable at times of grave mistakes. On the whole, he has done good service to the church to which he belongs. We doubt, however, if Romanism has made much way with the English people by means of his arts, or of any other, of late years; though the ostentatious bearing of the Cardinal has, no doubt, given much greater boldness to its priesthood. The power of the system which the Cardinal represents is, at present, as nothing in this country, or even in Ireland, in comparison with what it was in the better days of O'Connell. In England, the plea of persecution is gone, and with it much of the strength that may always be derived from that source. The reminiscences which make up this volume are, in many respects, interesting. The author foresees that his pictures will be regarded by many persons as sketches giving only the favourable side of things, and as designed to serve the reputation of his communion. In this respect the thing is greatly overdone. Rome, and the ecclesiastical people who govern it, are made to be so good, that the writer is not likely to be widely believed in this country. Everywhere we are greeted with the odour of sanctity. We move among the learned, the wise, the amiable, and the good. The Cardinal tells us that, in early

he was not thrown in the way of bad men; that, in later life, he

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has not sought such companionships; and this is his excuse for leaving the darker shades of Italian and ecclesiastical history to be laid in by other hands. Men of sense will smile at talk of this sort from such a quarter. Popes, however, have a great deal of the Grand Lama about them. We rarely know much concerning them until they are dead. In this respect they are distinguished from secular princes. Ignorance is, no doubt, the mother of devotion in relation to popes as well as to popery. Politicians of Cardinal Wiseman's school need no teaching concerning maxims of that nature.

Essays by the late George Brimley, M.A., Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. Edited by WILLIAM GEORGE CLARK, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. 8vo. Macmillan and Co.-The author of these papers was a native of Cambridge. When little more than twenty years of age, the 'cruel malady,' of which he died before he was forty, betrayed itself, and compelled him to restrict his literary efforts to such writing as was possible to an invalid. Periodical literature is the natural refuge of such men. The first paper in this series is on Tennyson, and appeared in the Cambridge Essays of 1855. The second is on Wordsworth, and is republished from Fraser's Magazine. These two papers make up nearly twothirds of the volume. The remaining pieces, selected chiefly from the literary department of the Spectator newspaper, are much more brief. But everywhere we trace the presence of a mind of deep principle and of admirable culture. The following passage from the review of Carlyle's Life of Stirling is in keeping with much that we have ourselves said on the same subject:-

'Every one not personally acquainted with Stirling will feel that the great interest of the book is the light thrown by it on Mr. Carlyle's own belief. For good or evil, Mr. Carlyle is a power in the country; and those who watch eagerly the signs of the times have their eyes fixed upon him. What he would have us leave is plain enough, and that too with all haste, as a sinking ship that will else carry us, state, church, property-down along with it. But whither would he have us fly or is the wild waste of waters, seething, warring round, as far as eye can reach, our only hope?-the pilot-stars, shining fitfully through the parting of the storm-clouds, our only guidance? There are hearts in this land almost broken, whose old traditional beliefs, serving them at least as moral supports, Mr. Carlyle, and teachers like him, have undermined. Some betake themselves to literature, as Stirling did, some fill up the void with the excitement of politics; others feebly moan their irreparable loss, and wear an outward seeming of universal irony and sarcasm. Mr. Carlyle has no right, no man has any right, to weaken or destroy a faith which he cannot or will not replace with a loftier. We have no hesitation in saying that the language which Mr. Carlyle is in the habit of employing towards the religion of England and of Europe is unjustifiable. He ought to have said nothing, or he ought to have said more. Scraps of verse from Goethe, and declamations, however brilliantly they may be phrased, are but a poor compensation for the slightest obscuring of the hope of immortality brought to light by the Gospel.''-Pp. 252-254.

The intelligence, right-heartedness, and courage indicated in this extract pervade the general criticisms of this interesting volume.

A Month in the Forests of France. By the Hon. GRANTLEY F. BERKELEY. Longmans.-In this volume Mr. Berkeley gives us an account of the chace of the wolf and the boar in the beautiful forests of France-of the chace of those somewhat formidable quadrupeds, as he

himself found it. The author assures us that he has not put fiction anywhere in the place of fact, nor published anything concerning the homes of his entertainers which he has any reason to suppose they could themselves object to see in print; and he earnestly exhorts his fellow-sportsmen to follow his good example in these particulars in like circumstances. We scarcely need say that, to the lovers of the chace, the book will be amusing and instructive; and hardly less acceptable will it be to those who wish to see Frenchmen out of Paris-when located in their châteaux far away from that great centre of the artificial and conventional.

In and About Stamboul. By MRS. EDMUND HORNBY.-These letters commence with August, 1855, and terminate in September in the following year. They embrace a period accordingly when the great struggle which ended in the fall of Sebastopol was in progress. But Mrs. Hornby's descriptions nearly all relate to the social life she witnessed during that period, either in or near Constantinople. What society is thereabouts may be learnt, to a large extent, from her pages, at least, so far as the surface of character and manners is concerned. The descriptions are light, clever, and apparently truthful, and belong to the better class of ladies letters, in what they omit as much as in what they contain. Happily, the thoughts of the public are much less drawn towards the shores of the Bosphorus at present than two years since.

Historical Revelations. Inscribed to Lord Normanby. By LOUIS BLANC. Chapman and Hall.-The design of this volume is twofoldto correct some errors in the journal recently published by Lord Normanby, and to place the case of Louis Blanc and his coadjutors in the Revolution of 1848 in a favourable light before Englishmen. Certainly the author has a right to complain of the want of care and accuracy on the part of his Lordship in many particulars, and his own political views seem much less extravagant in these pages than in the current representations concerning them. But Lord Normanby has erred, less from intention than from a limited range of thought, and that indisposition to adequate effort which is too common with lords when they attempt to become authors; nor was the course of Louis Blanc, generous and well-intended as it was, a course so near the path of true wisdom as he would have us believe. In fact, the scheme of a republic for France-to say nothing of Socialism-was a blunder from the beginning. It was the error of our own Vanes and Ludlows over again-an attempt to force a republic upon a people who were not one-tenth of them republicans.

History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke. By THOMAS MACKNIGHT. 2 vols. Chapman and Hall.-We must confess to something like pity for the man who now-a-days attempts a 'life and times' of Edmund Burke. His reading needs be so great, his power of digesting his material so admirable, and all with the prospect of finding it next to impossible to throw any shade of novelty over his subject, that one may well feel compassionate towards any honest labourer working in such a field. Genius of the highest order, indeed,

Hornby-Louis Blanc-Macknight-Bell, dc. 233

might impart freshness even to this theme, and cause it to speak as with a new utterance; but we cannot speak of Mr. Macknight as possessing such genius. The biographer of Burke should be a man of matured taste, and of large, unbiassed, and discriminating thought; but Mr. Macknight, on the contrary, is often magniloquent, always partial, and better skilled in bringing material together than in pronouncing a wise judgment upon it. Coming late, he has of course some sources of information open to him that were not accessible to his predecessors-such as Fox's Correspondence and the Grenville Papers. It is this circumstance which furnishes a reason for this publication, and gives it its value.

Wayside Pictures through France, Holland, Belgium, and up the Rhine. By ROBERT BELL. Routledge. The contents of these pages are well described as 'pictures.' They are such-sketchy, but thrown off with great ease and vigour. The thing is done as only a man of talent having much of this kind of practice could have done it. Sententious wisdom and gravity are not in Mr. Bell's way, but those who covet lightness of touch, vividness of presentation, and a fair measure of information, will not turn over his pages with any feeling of disappointment.

Historical and Biographical Essays. By JOHN FORSTER. 2 vols. Murray. The essays which make up these two substantial volumes are seven in number. The first two, one entitled 'The Debates on the Grand Remonstrance,' and the other on 'The Plantagenets and the Tudors,' have not been printed before, and both are weighty historical papers. The first extends to a hundred and fifty pages. We have had many reprints of review articles of late, and none better entitled to that honour than the remaining five in this series. These are on Cromwell, De Foe, Sir Richard Steele, Charles Churchill, and Samuel Foote.

Brazil and the Brazilians. By the Rev. D. P. KIDDER, D.D., and the Rev. G. C. FLETCHER. Trübner.-This volume extends to six hundred pages, and is illustrated with a hundred and fifty engravings. What is more, it is full of information on its subject-we know not where to point to another book on the Brazil territory and people which is, on the whole, so satisfactory. It is not merely the surface of Brazil life that is here given us, but much below it.

Naples and King Ferdinand. By ELIZABETH DAWBARN. Booth. -This is a volume of slight texture, a small page, large type, not much exceeding three hundred pages, and the first hundred and fifty of these pages are occupied with sketches of Neapolitan history before the accession of its present amiable sov reign in 1830. But what follows-the part which will deeply interest the modern reader-is sufficient to convey a pretty clear idea of King Bomba and his rule. The narrative is certainly not given by a pen favourable to his majesty, but it appears to be trustworthy. Ferdinand's beau-ideal of a State is, says Miss Dawbarn, a middle-age affair, somewhere about half-way between barbarism and modern civilization. Every spark of intelligence is watched with the utmost suspicion and dread by the Govern

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