We are willing to believe that the bulk of the Democrats in both Houses of Congress, who had the virtue to defy the threats and cajolements of their party-leaders, when this great public crime was demanded at their hands, were sincere in the resistance they opposed to this subversion of all the principles in which they had been bred, and of which their party had always professed to be the special defence and guard. But the mantle of our charity is not wide enough to cover up the base treachery of those men who, acknowledging and demonstrating the right, devised or consented to the villany which was to crush or to cripple it. That the final shape which the Lecompton juggle took was an invention of the enemy, cunningly contrived to win by indirection what was too dangerous to be attempted by open violence, is a conclusion from which no candid mind can escape, after a full consideration of the case. The defection of so large a body of Northern Democrats from the side of the Slaveholding Directory was doubtless a significant and startling fact, suggestive of dangerous insubordination on the part of allies who had ever been found sure and steadfast in every jeopardy of Slavery. And it made a resort to guile necessary to carry the point which it was not prudent to press to the extremity of force. The Slaveholders are not fastidious as to the means by which they reach their end. Though they might have preferred to hew their way to their design with a high hand, and to put down all opposition by bought or bullied majorities, backed by the strong arm of the nation, yet they never refuse to compromise and palter when the path to success lies through stratagems or frauds. The skill in this instance, as in all others, by which they propose to win everything under the show of yielding somewhat, is worthy of Machiavel or of Lucifer, and is far above the capacity of the paltry Northern tool who is permitted to enjoy the infamy of the invention which he was employed to utter. The Slaveholders, like other despots, do their dirty work by proxy, and scorn the wretched instruments they use, and then fling from them in disgust.

The Lecompton cheat having been defeated in the House after it had received the indorsement of the Senate, the two coordinates were at issue, and it seemed for a brief time to have met with the fate it merited. But cunning and treachery combined to put it into the hands of a Committee of Conference to be manipulated afresh, and, if possible, moulded into a shape that might give Democratic recusants an excuse for treason to the North and submission to the Power that demanded it. And the invention was worthy of the diabolical sagacity and ingenuity which have always marked the politics of Slavery. The maxim, that every man has his price, was assumed to apply as well to men when collected into bodies corporate as to individuals; and the hook, with which the souls of the men of Kansas are to be fished for, was baited with a bribe the most tempting to their hungry needs. And to make their capture the more sure, an answering menace threatens them on the other hand, to force them to swallow the barbed treachery. They are offered no opportunity of expressing their assent or dissent as to the Constitution held over their heads. Their enemies know too well what its fate would be, if offered, pure and simple, to their acceptance or refusal. They are only to say whether or not they will accept five million acres of land that Congress munificently offers them for the construction of their railways. If they say, "Yes, thank you," to this simple question, the Chief Conjurer of the nation, the great Medicine Man of our tribe, the Head Magician of our Egypt, will only have to say, "Presto pass," and they will find themselves a Slave State in the glorious Union, under a solemn contract, struck by this same act, to endure Slavery for six years to come. If they say, "No, we won't," the door of the Union is shut in their faces, and they are told to wait without in all the bleakness of Territorial dependency, subject to the laws now afflicting them, with a satrap sent down from Washington to rule over them, and with Lecomptes and Catos to decree justice for them, until swindling tools of the Administration shall be instructed to allow the presence of a sufficient population to entitle a State to a Representative.

If they consent to be erected into a Slave State by accepting the bribe, they will come into the Union by a puff of Presidential breath, though having only forty thousand inhabitants, with two Senators and a Representative, and all the advantages incident to Federal connection and patronage. Should they reject it, they will be left, it may be, to years of Territorial annoyance, and the annoyance of a Slave Territory, too, till Government officials shall discover their numbers to amount to near a hundred thousand, and possibly to much more, after the next census has newly apportioned the House. With Slavery, they have proffered to them broad lands to help cover their wide expanse with an iron reticulation of railways, developing their resources and multiplying their material prosperity, at the slight cost of their consistency and their honor. Without it, they may have to stand shivering at the gate of the Union, blasted by the "cold shade" of our American aristocracy, and far removed from the genial sunshine of national favor and bounty. Truly did Senator Wilson say that Congress approached Kansas at once with a bribe and a threat. Never was the devilish cunning of Slaveholding politics more strikingly illustrated than by the insidious vileness of this proposition. It had been bad enough, surely, had we been called upon to rejoice, as over a great triumph of the right, at the concession to Kansas of the sovereignty of settling her own institutions in her own way, had such been granted. Nothing could be more simple and natural, in a case of conflicting assertions and opposite beliefs as to the state of opinion there, than to remit the decision of the doubt to a fresh vote. Had any other interest than that in human beings been involved, such a disposition of the whole matter would have excited neither remark nor opposition. Nothing, perhaps, could exemplify the control Slavery has obtained over the affairs of the country more strongly than the power it has had to hinder this simple remedy of an alleged wrong or error,—and this, by procuring the defection of sordid Northern Representatives from what they confessed to be the right, to this corrupt evasion,—an evasion designed to fit the people of Kansas for servitude by tempting them to sacrifice their self-respect and their honor. Let these miscreants make haste to seize the price of their perfidy before popular contempt and loathing shall sweep them forever out of sight into the abyss of infamy and forgetfulness which is appointed for the traitors to Liberty. If the question of the real will of the people of Kansas had been referred back to them for settlement, it would have been humiliating enough to have had to exult over it as a victory of Freedom. With what depth of shame, then, should we contemplate the compassing of their end by the Slavocrats, through the venal surrender of the rights so long and so manfully asserted, for so paltry a temptation!

But we do not apprehend a consummation so devoutly to be deprecated. We believe that the people of Kansas will spurn the bribe and refuse to eat the dirt that is set before them for a banquet. They will reject the insulting proffer with contempt, and fall back upon their reserved right of resistance, passive or active, as their circumstances may advise. They will not be so base as to desert the post of honor they have sought in the great fight for freedom and maintained so long and so well, disappointing and throwing into confusion the distant allies who have stood behind them in their most evil hours, for all the lands that President and Congress have to give. It is, indeed, a momentous crisis for them, and we have faith to believe that they will not be wanting to its demands. The eyes of the lovers of liberty everywhere are earnestly watching to see how they will come out from the ordeal by fire and by gold to which they are subjected. What Boston was in 1775, and Paris in 1789, is Kansas now,—the field on which a great battle for the right is to be fought. Honor or infamy attends the issue of her action in the dilemma in which the crafty malice of her enemies has placed her. If she agree to take the dirty acres which are proffered to her as the price of her integrity, she consents to take the yoke of Slavery upon her neck and not even to attempt to shake herself free from it for six years to come. We know that shuffling Democrats, and even temporizing Republicans, represent that the people, after accepting the Lecompton Constitution, can forthwith summon a Convention and substitute another scheme of government in its stead. But this could be initiated only by a breach of the promise they would have just pledged, and could be carried through only by a revolution. Such a course would be a direct violation of the philosophy of Constitutional Government, which assumes as its fundamental axiom, that Constitutions can be altered only in the way and according to the conditions prescribed in themselves. Such a proceeding would be a coup d'tat, not as flagitious certainly as that of Bonaparte, but to the full as revolutionary and illegal. And we may be sure that the arm of the United States Government would not be shortened so that it should not interpose and hinder such a defiance of itself and the Power whose instrument it is. With servile and corrupt judges at its beck and a majority in Congress within its purchase, the occasion and means of such an interference would be readily devised and supplied.

We believe that this line of policy would lead to an armed collision with the General Government. It is for the oppressed inhabitants of any country to say when their wrongs have reached the height which justifies the drawing of the civil sword. We have neither the right nor the disposition to advise the people of Kansas in a matter so emphatically their own. But there is another way of coming to this arbitrament,—inevitable, if they deviate a hair's-breadth from the strict line of law,—should they deem there is no other remedy for their wrongs. The admirable Constitution just framed at Leavenworth, one well worthy of a free people that has been tried as with fire, will be adopted before these lines are before the public eye. Let them reject the Buchanan-English swindle, put their heel on the Lecompton fraud, set up the Leavenworth Constitution, and erect a State government under it in defiance of the Territorial Usurpation, and they will soon find themselves face to face with the tyranny at Washington. But is there not reason to hope that firmness and patience may yet win the battle for freedom without resorting to so serious an alternative? Is it indeed inevitable that Kansas must remain out of the pale of the Union, under the oppression of the Territorial laws, until the hirelings of the Government shall have determined that slaves enough have been poured in to decide the complexion of the new State, and shall authorize her to ask for admission? We are told that the joy at Washington and elsewhere over this "settlement" of the Kansas difficulty was because it was taken out of Congress, and "Agitation" at an end. But what is to hinder its being brought into Congress again?—and whose fault will it be, if Agitation do not survive and grow mightier unto the victory? If the present Congress can shut its doors against this intruder, its power dies with itself, and it greatly lies with the people of Kansas to make the next Congress one that shall rehabilitate them in their rights. Their conduct at this pregnant moment may settle the proximate destiny of the Republic, and decide whether the Slave Power is to rule us by its underlings for four years more, or whether its pride is to have a fall and its insolence a rebuke in 1860.

We all remember how often the Agitation of the Slavery question has been done to death in Congress, and how sure it was to appear again to startle its murderers from their propriety. Like "the blood-boltered Banquo," it would confront again the eyes that had hoped to look upon it no more. It would come back:

"With twenty mortal murders on its head To push them from their stools!"

And this dreaded spectre, though a beneficent angel with healing on his wings in truth, will push yet many traitorous or cowardly sycophants from the stools they disgrace, and substitute in their stead men who will quiet Agitation by Justice. Let the men of Kansas remember that a yet greater trust than that of providing for their own interests and rights is in their hands. The battle they are to fight in this quarrel is for the whole North, for the whole country, for the world. Let them address themselves unto it with calmness, with prudence, with watchfulness, with courage. They are beset on every side by crafty and desperate enemies. Greedy land-jobbers, in haste to be rich, will try to persuade them that not to be innocent is to be wise. Timid timeservers will urge a submission which promises peace, though it be but a solitude that is called so. Rampant Pro-slavery will exalt its horn against Righteousness and try again the virtue of ruffianism to prevail against civilization. The barbarians will hang anew upon the borders, ready to complete the conquest they began so well. And above all, a majority of the men who are to pass upon the votes are the creatures of the Administration, who know, by the example of their predecessors, that the suspicion of honesty will be fatal to all their hopes of preferment, and that they can purchase reward only by procuring, quocunque modo, the acceptance of the proposition of Congress. But still the power is in the hands of the Free-State men, if they choose to put it forth. Let them organize such a scrutiny everywhere, that fraud and violence cannot escape detection and exposure. Let them observe most rigidly all the technical rules imposed upon the electors, that no vote may be lost. Let them come to the polls by thousands, and trample under their feet the shabby bribe for which they are asked to trade away their independence and their virtue. Let them be thus faithful, and never be weary of maintaining the Agitation, which is proved, by the very dread their enemies have of it, to be the way to their victory. Thus they will be sure to triumph, conquering their right to create their own government, and erect a free commonwealth on the ruins of the tyranny they have overthrown. And Kansas, at no distant period, will be welcomed by her Free Sisters to her place among them, with no stain of bribes in her hands, and with no soil of meanness upon her garments. And then the "peace" and "prosperity," which President Buchanan saw in vision on the eve of May-day, will indeed prevail and be established, while the blackness of infamy will brood forever over the memory of the magistrate who used the highest office of the Republic to perpetuate the wrongs of the Slave by the sacrifice of the rights of the Citizen.



LITERARY NOTICES.

Library of Old Authors.—Works of John Webster. London: John Russell Smith. 1856-57.

We turn now to Mr. Hazlitt's edition of Webster. We wish he had chosen Chapman; for Mr. Dyce's Webster is hardly out of print, and, we believe, has just gone through a second and revised edition. Webster was a far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakspeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has produced; but his mind had no balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of diction, and now and then dilates our imaginations with suggestions of profound poetic depth. Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent workman, whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen of that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready sense of the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any man. Only Shakspeare wrote comedy and tragedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakspeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the elements of a character, (as in Falstaff,) that any question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the apprehension of its thorough humanity. Rabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge; but, in our opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree with Shakspeare, except Cervantes; no man has since shown anything like an approach to it, (for Moliere's quality was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, Fielding, and Richter. Only Shakspeare was endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was midway between the imagination and the understanding,— that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impartiality,—that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dominating all zones of human thought and action,—that power of verisimilar conception which could take away Richard III from History, and Ulysses from Homer,—and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as "great dramatists,"—as if Shakspeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but though imagination and the power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon gifts, and even in combination not without secular examples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena, to find them joined with those faculties of perception, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the loving union which alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect that Shakspeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call "a humor" till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakspeare's stand-point as poet and artist.

Webster's most famous works are "The Duchess of Malfy" and "Vittoria Corombona," but we are strongly inclined to call "The Devil's Law-Case" his best play. The two former are in a great measure answerable for the "spasmodic" school of poets, since the extravagances of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and Aristotle's admirable distinction between the Horrible and the Terrible in tragedy was never better illustrated and confirmed than in the "Duchess" and "Vittoria." His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We do not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan drama was an El Dorado, whose micacious sand, even, was treasured as auriferous,—and no wonder, in a generation which admired the "Botanic Garden." Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of his day, and himself calls his "Vittoria Corombona" a "night-piece." Though he had no conception of Nature in its large sense, as something pervading a whole character and making it consistent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an entire tragedy and makes all the characters foils to each other and tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are flashes of Nature in his plays, struck out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic intensities of phrase for which it would be hard to find the match. The "prithee, undo this button" of Lear, by which Shakspeare makes us feel the swelling of the old king's heart, and that the bodily results of mental anguish have gone so far as to deaden for the moment all intellectual consciousness and forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of Ferdinand when he sees the body of his sister, murdered by his own procurement,—

"Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young."

He has not the condensing power of Shakspeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concellisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples:—

"Oh, if there be another world i' th' moon, As some fantastics dream, I could wish all men, The whole race of them, for their inconstancy, Sent thither to people that!"

(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech was the first faithless lover, he adds,—

"And he invented tents, unless men lie,"—

implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.)

"Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds: In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study, For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea, For men of our profession [merchants]; all of which Arise and spring up honor."

("Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.)

"Poor Jolenta! should she hear of this, She would not after the report keep fresh So long as flowers on graves."

"For sin and shame are ever tied together With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun, They cannot without violence be undone." "One whose mind Appears more like a ceremonious chapel Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence." "Gentry? 'tis nought else But a superstitious relic of time past; And, sifted to the true worth, it is nothing But ancient riches." "What is death? The safest trench i' th' world to keep man free From Fortune's gunshot."

"It has ever been my opinion That there are none love perfectly indeed, But those that hang or drown themselves for love,"

says Julio, anticipating Butler's

"But he that drowns, or blows out's brains, The Devil's in him, if he feigns."

He also anticipated La Rochefoucauld and Byron in their apophthegm concerning woman's last love. In "The Devil's Law-Case," Leonora says:

"For, as we love our youngest children best, So the last fruit of our affection, Wherever we bestow it, is most strong, Most violent, most unresistible; Since 'tis, indeed, our latest harvest-home, Last merriment 'fore winter."

In editing Webster, Mr. Hazlitt had the advantage (except in a single doubtful play) of a predecessor in the Rev. Alexander Dyce, beyond all question the best living scholar of the literature of the times of Elizabeth and James I. If he give no proof of remarkable fitness for his task, he seems, at least, to have been diligent and painstaking. His notes are short and to the point, and—which we consider a great merit—at the foot of the page. If he had added a glossarial index, we should have been still better pleased. Mr. Hazlitt seems to have read over the text with some care, and he has had the good sense to modernize the orthography, or, as he says, has "observed the existing standard of spelling throughout." Yet—for what reason we cannot imagine—he prints "I" for "ay," taking the pains to explain it every time in a note, and retains "banquerout" and "coram" apparently for the sake of telling us that they mean "bankrupt" and "quorum." He does not seem to have a quick ear for scansion, which would sometimes have assisted him to the true reading. We give an example or two:

"The obligation wherein we all stood bound Cannot be concealed [cancelled] without great reproach."

"The realm, not they, Must be regarded. Be [we] strong and bold, We are the people's factors."

"Shall not be o'erburdened [overburdened] in our reign."

"A merry heart And a good stomach to [a] feast are all."

"Have her meat serv'd up by bawds and ruffians." [dele "up."]

"Brother or father In [a] dishonest suit, shall be to me."

"What's she in Rome your greatness cannot awe, Or your rich purse purchase Promises and threats." [dele the second "your."]

"Through clouds of envy and disast [rous] change."

"The Devil drives; 'tis [it is] full time to go."

He has overlooked some strange blunders. What is the meaning of

"Laugh at your misery, as foredeeming you An idle meteor, which drawn forth, the earth Would soon be lost i' the air"?

We hardly need say that it should be

"An idle meteor, which, drawn forth the earth, would," &c.

"Forwardness" for "frowardness," (Vol. II. p. 87,) "tennis-balls struck and banded" for "bandied," (Ib. p. 275,) may be errors of the press; but:

"Come, I'll love you wisely: That's jealousy,"

has crept in by editorial oversight for "wisely, that's jealously." So have:

"Ay, the great emperor of [or] the mighty Cham";

and:

"This wit [with] taking long journeys";

and:

"Virginius, thou dost but supply my place, I thine: Fortune hath lift me [thee] to my chair, And thrown me headlong to thy pleading bar";

and:

"I'll pour my soul into my daughter's belly, [body,] And with my soldier's tears embalm her wounds."

We suggest that the change of an a to an r would make sense of the following:—

"Come, my little punk, with thy two compositors, to this unlawful painting-house,"

[printing-house,] which Mr. Hazlitt awkwardly endeavors to explain by this note on the word compositors:—"i.e. (conjecturally), making up the composition of the picture"! Our readers can decide for themselves;—the passage occurs Vol. I. p. 214.

We think Mr. Hazlitt's notes are, in the main, good; but we should like to know his authority for saying that pench means "the hole in a bench by which it was taken up,"—that "descant" means "look askant on,"—and that "I wis" is equivalent to "I surmise, imagine," which it surely is not in the passage to which his note is appended. On page 9, Vol. I., we read in the text,

"To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe,"

and in the note, "i.e. submission." The original has aue, which, if it mean ave, is unmeaning here. Did Mr. Hazlitt never see a picture of the Annunciation with ave written on the scroll proceeding from the bending angel's mouth? We find the same word in Vol. III. p. 217,—

"Whose station's built on avees and applause."

Vol. III. pp. 47-48:—

"And then rest, gentle bones; yet pray That when by the precise you are view'd, A supersedeas be not sued To remove you to a place more airy, That in your stead they may keep chary Stockfish or seacoal, for the abuses Of sacrilege have turned graves to viler uses."

To the last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note, "Than that of burning men's bones for fuel." There is no allusion here to burning men's bones, but simply to the desecration of graveyards by building warehouses upon them, in digging the foundations for which the bones would be thrown out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the "Churchyard of the Holy Trinity";—see Stow's Survey, ed. 1603, p. 126. Elsewhere in the same play, Webster alludes bitterly to "begging church-land."

Vol. I. p. 73, "And if he walk through the street, he ducks at the penthouses, like an ancient that dares not flourish at the oathtaking of the praetor for fear of the signposts." Mr. Hazlitt's note is, "Ancient was a standard or flag; also an ensign, of which Skinner says it is a corruption. What the meaning of the simile is the present editor cannot suggest." We confess we find no difficulty. The meaning plainly is, that he ducks for fear of hitting the penthouses, as an ensign on the Lord Mayor's day dares not flourish his standard for fear of hitting the signposts. We suggest the query, whether ancient, in this sense, be not a corruption of the Italian word anziano.

Want of space compels us to leave many other passages, which we had marked for comment, unnoticed. We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt, (see his Introduction to "Vittoria Coromboma,") in undertaking to give us some information concerning the Dukedom and Castle of Bracciano, should uniformly spell it Brachiano. Shakspeare's Petruchio might have put him on his guard. We should be glad also to know in what part of Italy he places Malfi.

Mr. Hazlitt's General Introduction supplies us with no new information, but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We wish that he had been able to give us better means of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John Websters one from the other, for we think the internal evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed to the author of the "Duchess" and "Vittoria" could not have been written by the same author. On the whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet.

In leaving the subject, we cannot but express our satisfaction in comparing with these examples of English editorship the four volumes of Ballads recently published by Mr. Child. They are an honor to American scholarship and fidelity. Taste, learning, and modesty, the three graces of editorship, seem to have presided over the whole work. We hope soon, also, to be able to chronicle another creditable achievement in Mr. White's Shakspeare, which we look for with great interest.



History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time. By WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Third Edition, with Additions. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1858. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 566, 648.

We are heartily glad to welcome this reprint of the "History of the Inductive Sciences," from an improved edition. From an intimate acquaintance with the first edition, we should cordially recommend these volumes to those who wish to take a general survey of this department of human learning. The various subjects are, for the most part, treated in a manner intelligible and agreeable to the unlearned reader. As an authority, Whewell is generally trustworthy, and as a critic usually fair. But in a work going over so much ground it would be unreasonable to expect perfect accuracy, and uniformly just estimates of the labors of all scientific men. Dr. Whewell's scientific philosophy naturally affects his ability as an historian and critic. In his Bridgewater Treatise, he indulged in a fling at mathematics, for which we have never wholly forgiven him; and in the present volume we see repeated evidence of his underestimate of the value of the sciences of Space and Time. He says, Vol. I. p. 600, that it was an "erroneous assumption" in Plato to hold mathematical truths as "Realities more real than the Phenomena." But to us it seems impossible to understand any work of Nature aright, except by taking this view of Plato. The study of natural science is deserving of the contempt which Samuel Johnson bestowed upon it, if it be not a study of the thoughts of the Divine Mind. And as phenomena are subject to laws of space and time as their essential condition, they are primarily a revelation of the mathematical thoughts of the Creator. Those mathematical ideas are, in Erigena's phrase, the created creators of all that can appear.

This false view of the mathematics lies at the foundation of Whewell's view of a type in organized nature. He conceives a genus to consist of those species which resemble the typical species of the genus more than they resemble the typical species of any other genus. It follows from this view that a species might be created that would not belong to any genus, but resemble equally the types of two or three genera. Thus, our little rue-leaved anemone might belong to the meadow rues or to the wind-flowers, at the pleasure of the botanist. We believe that classification is vastly more real than this, real as geometry itself. Another instance of a similar want of idealism in Dr. Whewell may be found in Vol. II. p. 643:—"Nothing is added to the evidence of design by the perception of a unity of plan which in no way tends to promote the design." Now to one who believes, with us, that a thought is as real as the execution of the thought, the perception of a unity of plan is the highest evidence of design. No more convincing evidence of the existence of an Intelligent Designer is to be found than in the unity of plan,—and his design, thus proved, is the completion of the plan. For what purpose he would complete it, is a secondary question.

In this third edition many valuable additions have been made; and no tales of Oriental fancy could be more wonderful than some of these records of the discoveries in exact science made by our contemporaries. What more magical than the miracles performed every day in our telegraphic offices?—unless it be the transmission of human speech in that manner under the waves of the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. What more like the dreams of alchemy than taking metallic casts, in cold metal, with infinitely more delicacy and accuracy than by melted metals,—taking them, too, from the most fragile and perishable moulds? What sounds more purely fanciful than to assert a connection between variations in the direction of the compass-needle and spots on the surface of the sun! or what is more improbable than that the period of solar spots should be ten years? What would seem to be more completely beyond the reach of human measurement than the relative velocities of light in air and in water, since the velocity in each is probably not less than a hundred thousand miles a second? Yet two different experimenters arrived, according to Whewell, in the same year, 1850, at the same result,— that the motion is slower in water; thus supplying the last link of experimental proof to establish the undulatory theory of light. While the records of science are strewn on every page with accounts of such triumphs of human skill and intellect, we see no need of resorting to fiction or to necromancy for the gratification of a natural taste for the marvellous.

It is true, Dr. Whewell does not give these discoveries, in the spirit of an alchemist, as marvels,—but in the spirit of a philosopher, as intellectual triumphs. Few men of our times have shown a more active and powerful mind, a more earnest love of truth for truth's sake, than the author of this History,—and few men have had a wider or more thorough knowledge of the achievements of other scientific men. Yet we are surprised, in reading this improved edition, written scarce a twelvemonth ago, to find how ignorant Dr. Whewell appears to have been of the existence or value of the contributions to knowledge made on this side the Atlantic. The chapter on Electro-Magnetism does not allude to the discoveries of Joseph Henry, in regard to induced currents, and the adaptation of varying batteries to varying circuits,—discoveries second in importance only to those of Faraday,—and which were among the direct means of leading Morse to the invention of the telegraph. The chapters on Geology do not mention Professor Hall, and only allude in a patronizing way to the labors of American geologists, and to the ease of "reducing their classification to its synonymes and equivalents in the Old World," as though the historian were not aware that Hall's nomenclature is adopted on the continent of Europe by the most eminent men in that department of science. In Geological Dynamics Dr. Whewell speaks slightingly of glacial action, and approves of Forbes's semifluid theory, in utter ignorance, it would seem, of the labors of the Swiss geologists who now honor America with their presence. The chapters on Zoology, and on Classifications of Animals, make no allusion to Agassiz's introduction of Embryology as an element in classification, which was published several years before the "close of 1856." The history of Neptune gives no hint of the fact, that its orbit was first determined through the labors of American astronomers, with all the accuracy that fifty years of observation might otherwise have been required to secure. Nor does Dr. Whewell allude to the fact, that Peirce alone has demonstrated the accuracy of Le Verrier's and Adams's computations, and shown that a planet in the place which they erroneously assigned to Neptune would produce the same perturbations of Uranus as those which Neptune produced. Much less does he allude to that wonderful demonstration by Peirce of the younger Bond's hypothesis, that the rings of Saturn are fluid; or to Peirce's remark, that the belt of the asteroids lies in the region in which the sun could most nearly sustain a ring. Yet all these points are more important than many of those which he introduces, and more to the purpose of his chapters.

Notwithstanding these deficiencies in Whewell's scholarship and in his philosophy, his History is a valuable addition to our modern literature, and gives a better sketch of the whole ground than can be found in any other single work. It is particularly valuable to those whose ordinary pursuits lead them into other fields than those of science, and we have known such to acknowledge their great obligations to these clearly written and most suggestive volumes.



The Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer. By SAMUEL SMILES. From the Fourth London Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

There is something sublime about railway engineers. But what shall we say of the pioneer of this almost superhuman profession? The world would give much to know what Vulcan, Hercules, Theseus, and other celebrities of that sort, really did in their mortal lives to win the places they now occupy in our classical dictionaries, and what sort of people they really were. But whatever they did, manifestly somebody, within a generation or two, has done something quite as memorable. Whether the world is quite awake to the fact or not, it has lately entered on a new order of ages. Formerly it hovered about shores, and built its Tyres, Venices, Amsterdams, and London only near navigable waters, because it was easier to traverse a thousand miles of fluid than a hundred miles of solid surface. Now the case is nearly reversed. The iron rail is making the continent all coast, anywhere near neighbor to everywhere, and central cities as populous as seaports. Not only is all the fertility of the earth made available, but fertility itself can be made by our new power of transportation.

Who more than other man or men has done this? Is there any chance for a new mythology? Can we make a Saturn of Solomon de Caus, who caught a prophetic glimpse of the locomotive two hundred years ago, and went to a mad-house, without going mad, because a cardinal had the instinct to see that the hierarchy would get into hot water by allowing the French monarch to encourage steam? Can we make a Jupiter of Mr. Hudson, one bull having been plainly sacrificed to him? and shall Robert Schuyler serve us for Pluto? Shall we find Neptune, with his sleeves rolled up, on the North River, commanding the first practical steamboat, under the name of Robert Fulton? However this may be, we think Mr. Smiles has made out a quite available demigod in his well-sketched Railway Engineer. George Stephenson did not invent the railway or the locomotive, but he did first put the breath of its life into the latter. He built the first locomotive that could work more economically than a horse, and by so doing became the actual father of the railroad system. In 1814, he found out and applied the steam-blast, whereby the waste steam from the cylinders is used to increase the combustion, so that the harder the machine works, the greater is its power to work. From that moment he foresaw what has since happened, and fought like a Titan against the world—the men of land, the men of science, and the men of law—to bring it about.

But before we go farther, who was this George Stephenson? A collier-boy,—his father fireman to an old pumping-engine which drained a Northumbrian coal-mine,—his highest ambition of boyhood to be "taken on" to have something to do about the mine. And he was taken on to pick over the coal, and finally to groom the engine, which he did with the utmost care and veneration, learning how to keep it well and doctor it when ill. He took wonderfully to steam-engines, and finally, for their sake, to his letters, at the age of seventeen! He became steam-engineer to large mines. Of his own genius and humanity, he studied the nature of fire-damp explosions, and, what is not more wonderful than well proven, invented a miner's safety-lamp, on the same principle as Sir Humphrey Davy's, and tested it at the risk of his life, a month or two before Sir Humphrey invented his, or published a syllable about it to the world! He engineered the Stockton and Darlington Railway. He was thereupon appointed engineer of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Though the means of transportation between those cities, some thirty miles, were so inadequate that it took longer to get cotton conveyed from Liverpool to Manchester than from New York to Liverpool, yet it was with the utmost difficulty that a grant of the right to build a railway could be obtained from Parliament. There was little faith in such roads, and still less in steam-traction. The land-owners were opposed to its passage through their domains, and obliged Mr. Stephenson to survey by stealth or at the risk of a broken head. So great was this opposition, that the projectors were fain to lay out their road for four miles across a remarkable Slough of Despond, called Chat Moss, where a scientific civil-engineer testified before Parliament that he did not think it practicable to make a railway, or, if practicable, at not less cost than 270,000 for cutting and embankment. George Stephenson, after being almost hooted out of the witness-box for testifying that it could be done, and that locomotives could draw trains over it and elsewhere at the rate of twelve miles an hour,—for which last extravagance his own friends rebuked him,—carried the road over Chat Moss for 28,000, and his friends over that at the rate of thirty miles an hour. Thus he broke the back of the war, and lived to fill England with railroads as the fruits of his victory; all which, and a great deal more of the same sort, the reader will find admirably told by Mr. Smiles,—albeit we cannot but smile too, that, when addressing the universal English people, he expects them to understand such provincialisms as wage for wages, leading coals for carrying coal, and the like. But, nevertheless, his freedom from literary pretence is really refreshing, and his thoroughness in matters of fact is worthy of almost unlimited commendation. On the important question, Who invented the locomotive steam-blast? had Mr. Smiles made in his book as good use of his materials as he has since elsewhere, he would have saved some engineers and one or two mechanical editors from putting their feet into unpleasant places. Our Railroad Manuals, that have adopted the error of attributing this great invention to "Timothy Hackworth, in 1827," should be made to read, "George Stephenson, in 1814." Their authors, and all others, should read Samuel Smiles, the uppermost, by a whole sky, of all railway biographers.



A Volume of Vocabularies, illustrating the Condition and Manners of our Forefathers, as well as the History of the Forms of Elementary Education and of the Languages spoken in this Island, from the Tenth Century to the Fifteenth. Edited, from MSS. in Public and Private Collections, by THOMAS WRIGHT, ESQ., etc. Privately printed. [London.] 1857. 8vo. pp. 291.

Mr. Wright, in editing this handsome volume, has done another service to the lovers and students of English glossology. Their thanks are also due to Mr. Joseph Mayer, who generously bore the expense of printing the book.

A great deal that is interesting to the student of general history lies imbedded in language, and Mr. Wright, in a very agreeable Introduction, has summarized the chief matters of value in the collection before us, which comprises the printed copies of sixteen ancient MSS. of various dates. As far as we have had time to examine it, the book seems to have been edited with care and discretion, and Mr. Wright has added much to its value by timely and judicious notes.

Most of the vocabularies here printed (many of them for the first time) were intended for the use of schoolmasters, and throw great light on the means and methods of teaching during the periods at which they were compiled. Mr. Wright tells us that there exist very few MSS. of educational treatises of the fourteenth century, (during which teaching would accordingly seem to have been neglected,) in comparison with the thirteenth and fifteenth, when such works were abundant. To all who would trace the history of education in England and follow up our common-school system to its source, the editor's Introduction will afford valuable hints.

The following extracts from Mr. Wright's Introduction will give some notion of the archaeological and philological value of the volume.

"It is this circumstance of grouping the words under different heads which gives these vocabularies their value as illustrations of the conditions and manners of society. It is evident that the compiler gave, in each case, the names of all such things as habitually presented themselves to his view, or, in other words, that he presents us with an exact list and description of all the objects which were in use at the time he wrote, and no more. We have, therefore, in each a sort of measure of the fashions and comforts and utilities of contemporary life, as well as, in some cases, of its sentiments. Thus, to begin with a man's habitation, his house,—the words which describe the parts of the Anglo-Saxon house are few in number, a heal or hall, a bur or bedroom, and in some cases a cicen or kitchen, and the materials are chiefly beams of wood, laths, and plaster. But when we come to the vocabularies of the Anglo-Norman period, we soon find traces of that ostentation in domestic buildings which William of Malmsbury assures us that the Normans introduced into this island; the house becomes more massive, and the rooms more numerous, and more diversified in their purposes. When we look at the furniture of the house, the difference is still more apparent. The description given by Alexander Neckam of the hall, the chambers, the kitchen, and the other departments of the ordinary domestic establishment, in the twelfth century, and the furniture of each, almost brings them before our eyes, and nothing could be more curious than the account which the same writer gives us of the process of building and storing a castle." p. xv.

"The philologist will appreciate the tracts printed in the following pages as a continuous series of very valuable monuments of the languages spoken in our island during the Middle Ages. It is these vocabularies alone which have preserved from oblivion a very considerable and interesting portion of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and without their assistance our Anglo-Saxon dictionaries would be far more imperfect than they are. I have endeavored to collect together in the present volume all the Anglo-Saxon vocabularies that are known to exist, not only on account of their diversity, but because I believe that their individual utility will be increased by thus presenting them in a collective form. They represent the Anglo-Saxon language as it existed in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and, as written no doubt in different places, they may possibly present some traces of the local dialects of that period. The curious semi-Saxon vocabulary is chiefly interesting as representing the Anglo-Saxon in its period of transition, when it was in a state of rapid decadence. The interlinear gloss to Alexander Neckam, and the commentary on John de Garlande, are most important monuments of the language which for a while usurped among our forefathers the place of the Anglo-Saxon, and which we know by the name of the Anglo-Norman. In the partial vocabulary of the names of plants, which follows them, we have the two languages in juxtaposition, the Anglo-Saxon having then emerged from that state which has been termed semi-Saxon, and become early English. We are again introduced to the English language more generally by Walter de Biblesworth, the interlinear gloss to whose treatise represents, no doubt, the English of the beginning of the fourteenth century. All the subsequent vocabularies given here belong, as far as the language is concerned, to the fifteenth century. As written in different parts of the country, they bear evident marks of dialect; one of them—the vocabulary in Latin verse—is a very curious relic of the dialect of the West of England at a period of which such remains are extremely rare."—p. xix.



Sermons, preached at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. By the late REV. FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON, M. A., the Incumbent. Second Series. From the Fourth London Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.

The biography of Robertson, prefixed to this volume, will gratify the curiosity which every sympathetic reader of the first series of his sermons must have felt regarding the incidents of his career. It was evident to a close observer that the peculiar charm and power of the preacher came from peculiarities of character and individual experience, as well as from peculiarities of mind. There was something so close and searching in his pathos, so natural in his statements of doctrine, so winning in his appeals,—his simplest words of consolation or rebuke touched with such subtile certainty the feelings they addressed,—and his faith in heavenly things was so clear, deep, intense, and calm,—that the reader could hardly fail to feel that the earnestness of the preacher had its source in the experience of the man, and that his belief in the facts of the spiritual world came from insight, and not from hearsay. His biography confirms this impression. We now learn that he was tried in many ways, and built up a noble character through intense inward struggle with suffering and calamity,—a character sensitive, tender, magnanimous, brave, and self-sacrificing, though not thoroughly cheerful. The heroism evinced in his life and in his sermons is a sad heroism, a heroism that has on it the trace of tears. Always at work, and dying in harness, the spur of duty made him insensible to the decay of strength and the need of repose. He had no time to be happy.

The most striking mental characteristic of his sermons is the originality of his perceptions of religious truth. He takes up the themes and doctrines of the Church, the discussion of which has filled libraries with books of divinity which stand as an almost impregnable wall around the simple facts and teachings of the Scriptures, protecting them from attack by shutting them from sight, and in a few brief and direct statements cuts into the substance and heart of the subjects. This felicity comes partly from his being a man gifted with spiritual discernment as well as spiritual feeling, and partly from the instinct of his nature to look at doctrines in their connection with life. He excels equally in interpreting the truth which may be hidden in a dogma, and in overturning dogmas in which no truth is to be found. In a single sermon, he often tells us more of the essentials of a subject, and exhibits more clearly the religious significance of a doctrine, than other writers have done in labored volumes of exposition and controversy. This power of simplifying spiritual truth without parting with any of its depth accounts for the interest with which his sermons are read by persons of all degrees of age and culture. His method of arrangement is also admirable; his thoughts are not only separately excellent, but are all in their right places, so that each is an efficient agent in deepening the general impression left by the whole. The singular refinement and beauty of his mind lend a peculiar charm to its boldness; we have the soul of courage without the rough outside which so often accompanies it; and his diction, being on a level with his themes, never offends that fine detecting spiritual taste which instinctively takes offence when spiritual things are viewed through unspiritual moods and clothed in words which smack of the senses. Combine all his characteristics, his intrepidity of disposition and intellect, his deep experience of religious truth, the sad earnestness of his faith, his penetration of thought, his direct, executive expression, and the beauty which pervades and harmonizes all,—and it is hazarding little to say, that his volumes will take the rank of classics in the department of theology to which they belong.



The Church and the Congregation. A Plea for their Unity. By C. A. BARTOL. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 16mo.

As church-membership is in some respects the aristocracy of Congregationalism, and as it is considered by many minds to be as necessary for the safety of theology as the old distinction of esoteric and exoteric was for the safety of philosophy, the publication by a clergyman of such a volume as this, with its purpose clearly indicated by its title, will excite some surprise, and certainly should excite discussion. Mr. Bartol contends for open communion, as most consonant with Scripture, with the spirit of Christianity, with the practice of the early Church, with the meaning and purpose of the rite. He denies that the ordinance of the Lord's Supper has any sacredness above prayer, or any of the other ordinances of religion; and while he appreciates and perhaps exaggerates its importance, he thinks that its most beneficent effects will be seen when it is the symbol of unity, and not of division. The usual distinction between Church and Congregation he considers invidious and mischievous, as not indicating a corresponding distinction in religious character, and as separating the body of Christian worshippers into two parts by a mechanical rather than spiritual process. Though he meets objections with abundant controversial ability, the strength of his position is due not so much to his negative arguments as to his affirmative statements; for his statements have in them the peculiar vitality of that mood of meditation in which spiritual things are directly beheld rather than logically inferred, and, being thus the expression of spiritual perceptions, they feel their way at once to the spiritual perceptions of the reader, to be judged by the common sense of the soul instead of the common sense of the understanding. This is the highest quality of the book, and indicates not only that the author has religion, but religious genius; but there is also much homely sagacity evinced in viewing what may be called the practical aspects of the subject, and answering from experience the objections which experience may raise. The writer is so deeply in earnest, has meditated so intensely on the subject, and is so free from the repellent qualities which are apt to embitter theological controversies, that even when his ideas come into conflict with the most obstinate prejudices and rooted convictions, there is nothing in his mode of stating or enforcing them to give offence. The book will win its way by the natural force of what truth there is in it, and the most that an opponent can say is, that the author is in error; it cannot be said that he is arrogant, contemptuous, self-asserting, or that he needlessly shocks the opinions he aims to change.

Mr. Bartol's style is bold, fervid, and figurative, exhibiting a wide command of language and illustration, and at times rising into passages of singular beauty and eloquence. The fertility of his mind in analogies enables him to strengthen his leading conception with a large number of related thoughts, and the whole subject of vital Christianity is thus continually in view, and connected with the special theme he discusses. This characteristic will make his volume interesting and attractive to many readers who are either opposed to his views of the Lord's Supper, or are unable to agree with him in regard to the importance of the change he proposes.

THE END