he has undertaken, and in part performed so well. The first of these advantages consists in his not being by birth a Frenchman. This fact is indicated by his name and by the style of his book, which is not French, as a comparison of the work of M. Taine, which he translated so admirably, with this original production of his own will show. The inveterate tendency of Frenchmen to regard everything French as the best of its kind would have rendered impartiality like Van Laun's impossible. We presume that few Frenchmen would have so freely acknowledged certain points of inferiority in his own race that are exposed in the historical sketch of the Celts or Gauls, which Mr. Van Laun has prefixed to his "History of French Literature." This guaranty for a fair account of the merit and influence of the writings which he had to pass in review is certainly no mean vantage-ground.

Another peculiarity of the French people is their small success in the acquirement of foreign languages. Whether their inferiority as linguists arises from natural incapacity, or from contempt of other languages in comparison with their own, the fact is certain that in no other nation of Europe do we find so few, even among educated men, who can speak in any tongue but that of France. On the other hand, we find that the Teutonic and Sclavic races of the European continent have a facility in the acquisition of languages greater than that of the English and the Americans, and very much greater than that of Frenchmen. Now, in the absence of more reliable proof, Mr. Van Laun's remarkable proficiency, both in French and English, goes far to convince us that he is not of Celtic or Gallic extraction. But, however this may be, his familiarity with French and English is a second advantage, whose importance cannot well be overrated. Notwithstanding all pretences to the contrary, we agree in an opinion which has been ascribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, that an Englishman or an American gains a better knowledge of any foreign writer from a good translation - such, for example, as those of our author- than from his own perusal of the original. Accordingly, when we perceive that Mr. Van Laun's knowledge of French is as perfect as that of an educated Frenchman, we feel further assured that, other things being equal, he is able to give us a better history of French literature than if he was less at home in the language in which it is written. Moreover, his thorough knowledge of English enables him to think in English, and to furnish spirited and accurate translations of all the passages which he quotes in illustration. To most English readers this is a positive boon, as M. Taine's translation of English quotations into pure French must be even a greater boon to the people of France.

Mr. Van Laun's notion of literary history is that it forms an integral

part of the civil history of nations. "The history of a literature is the history of a people; if not this, it is worthless. To know merely what books have been written, and who wrote them, is to know a number of dry facts which may encumber the mind but cannot inform it. To know what our predecessors and our contemporaries have written and thought, to throw ourselves into the mood of an author, assimilate his work, comprehend and develop his meaning, to make a literary production our own, so as to have the power of reproducing it at our pleasure, without at the same time being familiar with the circumstances under which it was first conceived, and the annals of the age in which it saw the light, this is impossible." Following out this conception, he interweaves with the political and ecclesiastical history of France the history of the chief authors of each period and of their works, explaining the origin, estimating the merit, and valuing the influence of these works, —in a word, bringing into full view the literature of the nation as a necessary factor in the national existence.

The period embraced in the part now under consideration is, perhaps, the most important in French history. It includes what has been termed the Augustan age of French letters. It begins with the Jesuits and the League, and closes with the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, including the lives and writings of all the celebrated poets, dramatists, orators, moralists, and philosophers of the Grande Nation, Ronsard, Malherbe, Corneille, Brantôme, Sully, St. Francis of Sales, Pascal, Madame Sevigné, Mademoiselle de Scudery, Richelieu, Descartes, Molière, La Fontaine, Scarron, La Rochefoucauld, Boileau, Racine, Malebranche, and La Bruyère, and the pulpit orators Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fénélon, Massillon, and Saurin, together with a hundred others of less celebrity.

In conclusion, the fact that Van Laun is the translator from the French of Taine's " History of English Literature" almost forces on us a comparison of their respective works. To young men Taine must be the most fascinating, to men of mature years Van Laun must be the most satisfactory. Taine's style is characterized by splendor, yet it is the splendor of clouds, delighting while bewildering; Van Laun's is solid and perspicuous, affecting no gorgeous speculation, and venturing on no transcendental theories. His feet are continually on the ground, and we can follow him whithersoever he goes. There is no such hypothesis in his work as that Hamlet was a partial development of Shakespeare himself, or that Milton, the republican, the Puritan, and the regicide, borrowed the scenery of his celestial court from the palace of the Stuarts, the abode of "Bacchus and his revellers," - by whose persecution driven "old, poor, sightless, and disgraced, he re

tired to his hovel to die." Van Laun's book, as we have said, is not French, although it is an excellent and interesting history of French literature.

6. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. By LESLIE STEPHEN. In two Volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1877. 8vo. pp. 482, 481.

THIS elaborate work was suggested directly, as Hunt's "Religious Thought in England" was indirectly, by Dr. Pattison's remarkable paper in "Essays and Reviews" on the "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England between the Years 1688-1750." Mr. Stephen, known heretofore as a literary essayist and brilliant writer, has here boldly addressed himself to a great work, in which Mr. Hunt has met with indifferent success, and in which the Rector of Lincoln College has always displayed the hand of a master. His special qualifications for dealing with its religious and philosophical issues are great industry and an easy facility in mastering and condensing the many-sided statements of a controversy into a few intelligible propositions. To this may be added a good, clear, well-formed literary style, which makes his pages bright and readable amid the severest discussions. But the great drawback, and one which impairs this history of thought in the same way in which Gibbon's great work is permanently injured, is that the author is himself a believer neither in Christianity nor in an intelligent Deism, but a disciple in the school of Morley, Martineau, Buckle, and Harrison, who holds that "the mind becomes an accurate reflection of the external universe." He is an "agnostic" philosopher, who puts aside all faith in the supernatural, who discards the belief in a personal God, who does not even see that the world is directed by an Intelligent Will. If such a writer reduces the highest things in life to Matthew Arnold's principle of "conduct," it follows that the intellect, cut off on the spiritual side from contact with the unseen, and divorced on the human side from the sentiments which unite reason with emotion, becomes merely the cold and formal instrument of human progress, and that the many forces which blend in the shaping of thought, even when evolved chiefly out of present experience, are neglected or overlooked. Mr. Stephen's book is written upon this theory, and is thoroughly vitiated by it. It is common to speak of the eighteenth century as the lumber-room of dreary, theological speculation and impracticable philosophy, but Mr. Stephen's point of view makes it even worse, as concerned chiefly if not only with mere inanities of thought and belief; and yet out of this century came or through it was transmitted the seeds or germs which have made the

present century in some respects the bright consummate flower of civilization.

While his point of view and thoroughly pagan creed incapacitate him for understanding Butler's Analogy, and appreciating William Law's spiritual teachings, and duly estimating the religious reaction under Wesley, it does not affect his estimate of the other movements of thought during the century, the political theories taught by Locke, the French influence of Montesquieu and Rousseau, the superb instinct of Burke for the fundamental principles of government, the work of the political economists, and the social and literary reaction which set in at the close of the century. Here he is the clear and dispassionate historian of secondary sociological movements to which the unsoundness of his religious creed has no special relation, and in our judgment these are the best parts of his work. Even in other parts, if one bears in mind that the theory behind everything is that the intellect alone is the supreme factor in human progress, the history does not fail to be instructive and helpful. But Mr. Stephen, as has been ably pointed out by Dr. Pattison in the March "Fortnightly Review," where he aptly called the eighteenth century "the age of reason," has notably failed even to indicate, much less to trace, the relation of English to contemporary Continental thought during this period. Hume is the special prophet of the century, and one hears nothing of Kant and other thinkers, save slightly in France at the period of the Revolution, and yet England was never so insular but that the currents of thought on the Continent reacted upon British leaders, and influenced, if they did not direct, English thinking. It is a limitation which seriously impairs the usefulness of these volumes to the student by ignoring the parallel movement of the century in other centres of thought. If one knows precisely why a book is written, it is comparatively easy to use it intelligently and to forget its limitations in gratitude for its fresh presentation of old questions and brilliant pictures of the days that were. Mr. Stephen has not only written laboriously, but here and there his thoughts are incisive and often become epigrammatic, condensing into single sentences the suggestive results of the widest reading. One or two specimens will illustrate our meaning: "Thought moves in a spiral curve, not in a straight line"; and again, "It would not be extravagant to say that Mr. Darwin's observations upon the breeds of pigeons have had a reaction upon the structure of European society." And such sentences also show how much of the best thinking of which a man is capable has gone into his work. It is this conscientious industry and quick intelligence, which is manifest on every page, that makes these volumes indispensable to all who would understand the sources of thought in the present century; and for a

partial statement of the truth, for that which a man can see and understand who looks only to the earthly issues of human thought, there is "a deal of confused fine feeding" in this thoughtful and learned work.

7.- Nach dreissig Jahren. Neue Dorfgeschichten von BERTHOLD AUERBACH. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Cotta. 1876.

Ir is not every writer who would do what Auerbach has done in these his latest volumes, that is to say, who would go back after an interval of thirty years to take up anew the very form of composition which first brought him real fame. Very many authors would prefer to forget their early writings, and would go back to them only to exterminate and destroy; but Auerbach was fortunate enough to be successful in his first attempts, and, indeed, it may well be questioned whether he has ever reached a higher mark than in the village-stories on which his fame is tolerably sure to rest. Since writing them he has tried higher flights, but with varying success, for at times he has got into the clouds, and he is best where he has the firm ground, and firm German ground, beneath his feet. In these volumes he not only goes back to his old methods, he has even taken up the threads of some of his old stories, with the double aim of writing more village-stories, and of showing indirectly how great advances Germany has made in civilization during the last thirty years. Now it is hard to believe that a man of sixty can at will recall the spirit of thirty, and, indeed, it may be questioned whether it is to be hoped that he should. There was in his first stories a certain poetical flavor, consisting of a love of nature, and a sort of simplicity which sits better on youth than on maturity, and which, if not naturally present, can never be imitated. It is as hard to recall as is light-heartedness when one is miserable, so that if this poetical aroma is missing here there is no occasion for surprise. Moreover, the other incentive to writing these stories, the patriotism, is a quality, however excellent, which is by no means sure to produce good stories, any more than in our war it produced good war-songs, although the field for them was unoccupied. A story that is written to convey instruction in modern history is as likely to fail in interest as if it was intended to teach geography or any other branch of polite learning. Hence it is not surprising that these three volumes, each of which contains the continuation of one of the old stories, should be lacking in interest.

The first one, Des Lorle's Reinhard, is the sequel to Die Frau Professorin, one of the best of all he wrote in the old days. It will be remembered for its account of the young girl who marries the painter,