SHORT ARTICLES.-Thomas Hood and Little Nell; Pompeii, 396.- Shakspeare Almanac, 417-How to get on, 422.-Biblical Cyclopedia; Record of the Black Prince; Commercial Crisis of 1847-8; Art of Illumination and Missal Painting; Second English Reader, 431. POETRY. - An Eagle's Quill, 419.- Serenade; Mementos, 420.- Home, 421.- Love's Treason, 422.

PROSPECTUS.-This work is conducted in the spirit of | now becomes every intelligent American to be info me Littell's Museum of Foreign Literature, (which was favorably received by the public for twenty years,) but as it is twice as large, and appears so often, we not only give spirit and freshness to it by many things which were excluded by a month's delay, but while thus extending our scope and gathering a greater and more attractive variety, are able so to increase the solid and substantial part of our literary, historical, and political harvest, as fully to satisfy the wants of the American reader.

of the condition and changes of foreign countries. And this not only because of their nearer connection with our selves, but because the nations seem to be hastening, through a rapid process of change, to some new state of things, which the merely political prophet cannot compute or foresee.

Geographical Discoveries, the progress of Colonization, (which is extending over the whole world,) and Voyages and Travels, will be favorite matter for our selections; and, in general, we shall systematically and very ully acquaint our readers with the great department of Foreign affairs, without entirely neglecting our own.

The elaborate and stately Essays of the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and other Reviews; and Blackwood's noble criticisms on Poetry, his keen political Commentaries, highly wrought Tales, and vivid descriptions of rural and While we aspire to make the Living Age desirable to mountain Scenery; and the contributions to Literature, all who wish to keep themselves informed of the rapid History, and Common Life, by the sagacious Spectator, progress of the movement-to Statesmen, Divines, Lawthe sparkling Examiner, the judicious Athenæum, the yers, and Physicians-to men of business and men of busy and industrious Literary Gazette, the sensible and leisure-it is still a stronger object to make it attractive comprehensive Britannia, the sober and respectable Chris- and useful to their Wives and Children. We believe that lian Observer; these are intermixed with the Military we can thus do some good in our day and generation; and and Naval reminiscences of the United Service, and with hope to make the work indispensable in every well-in the best articles of the Dublin University, New Monthly, formed family. We say indispensable, because in this Fraser's, Tail's, Ainsworth's, Hood's, and Sporting Mag-day of cheap literature it is not possible to guard against azines, and of Chambers' admirable Journal. We do not the influx of what is bad in taste and vicious in morals, consider it beneath our dignity to borrow wit and wisdom in any other way than by furnishing a suflicient supply from Punch; and, when we think it good enough, make of a healthy character. The mental and moral appetite use of the thunder of The Times. We shall increase our must be gratified. variety by importations from the continent of Europe, and from the new growth of the British colonies.

The steamship has brought Europe, Asia, and Africa, into our neighborhood; and will greatly multiply our connections, as Merchants, Travellers, and Politicians, with all parts of the world; so that much more than ever it

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Or all the Periodical Journals devoted to literature and science which abound in Europe and in this country, this has appeared to me to be the most useful. It contains indeed the exposition only of the current literature of the English language, but this by its immense extent and comprehension includes a portraiture of the human mind in the utmost expansion of the present age. J. Q. ADAMS.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 251.-MARCH 10, 1849.

precipitate change and lawless anarchy-and then at length Philosophical, to prove that as there are no depths of sin or misery to which the healing of the gospel cannot reach, so there are no heights of speculation to which the wisdom of the gospel

MIDDLETON and Gibbon rendered a real, how-cannot ascend. ever undesigned, a service to Christianity by attempting to prove that the rapid extension of the primitive church was merely the natural result of natural causes. For what better proof could be given of the divine origin of any religion than by showing that it had at once overspread the civilized world, by the expansive power of an inherent aptitude to the nature and to the wants of mankind? By entering on a still wider range of inquiry, those great but disingenuous writers might have added much to the evidence of the fact they alleged, although at a still greater prejudice to the conclusion at which they aimed.

It is not predicted in the Old Testament that the progress of the gospel should, to any great extent, be the result of any agency preternatural and opposed to ordinary experience; nor is any such fact alleged in any of the apostolical writings as having actually occurred. There is, indeed, no good reason to suppose that such miraculous though transient disturbances of the laws of the material or the moral world, would have long or powerfully controlled either the belief or the affections of mankind. The heavenly husbandman selected the kindliest soil and the most propitious season for sowing the grain of mustard seed; and so, as time rolled on, the adaptation of our faith to the character and the exigencies of our race was continually made manifest, though under new and ever varying forms.

Believing thus in the perpetuity as well as on the catholicity of the church, and judging that she is still the same in spirit throughout all ages, although, in her external developments, flexible to the varying necessities of all, we have ventured on some former occasions, and are again about, to assert, for "the pure and reformed branches" of it in England and in Scotland, an alliance with the heroes of the faith in remote times, and in less enlightened countries; esteeming that to be the best Protestantism, which, while it frankly condemns the errors of other Christian societies, yet claims fellowship with the piety, the wisdom, and the love, which, in the midst of those errors, have at tested the divine original of them all.

If, according to the advice which on some of those occasions we have presumed to offer to those who are studious of such subjects, there be among us any scholar meditating a Protestant history of the monastic orders, he will find materials for a curious chapter in this correspondence of the French Benedictines of the reign of Louis the XIV. In that fraternity light and darkness succeeded each other by a law the reverse of that which obtained in Europe at large. From the promulgation of their rule in the sixth century, their monasteries were comparatively illuminated amidst the general gloom of the dark ages. But when the sun arose on the outer world, its beams scarcely penetrated their cloisters; nor did they hail the returning Thus the church was at first Congregational, dawn of literature and science until the day was that by the agitation of the lowest strata of society glowing all around them in meridian splendor. the superincumbent mass of corruption, idolatry, Then, however, passing at one vault from the and mental servitude might be broken up-then haze of twilight to the radiance of noon, they Synodal or Presbyterian, that the tendency of sep-won the wreath of superior learning, even in the arate societies to heresy and schism might be counteracted then Episcopal, that, in ages of extreme difficulty and peril, the whole body might act in concert and with decision-then Papal, that it might oppose a visible unity to the armies of the Crescent and the barbarians of the North-then Monastic, that learning, art, and piety might be preserved in impregnable retreats amidst the deluge of ignorance and of feudal oppression-then Scholastic, that the human mind might be educated for a return to a sounder knowledge, and to primitive doctrine-then Protestant, that the soul might be emancipated from error, superstition, and spiritual despotism-then partially Reformed, in the very bosom of the papacy, lest that emancipation should hurry the whole of Christendom into

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times of Tillemont and Du Cange-though resigning the palm of genius to Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Pascal. Thus the three great epochs of their annals are denoted by the growth, the obscuration, and the revival of their intellectual eminence. M. Valery's volumes illustrate the third and last stage of this progress, which cannot, however, be understood without a rapid glance at each of the two preceding stages.

"But why," it may be asked, “direct the eye at all to the mouldering records of monastic superstition, self-indulgence, and hypocrisy?" Why indeed? From contemplating the mere debasement of any of the great families of man, no images can be gathered to delight the fancy, nor any examples to move or to invigorate the heart. And

doubtless he who seeks for such knowledge, may | by other fugitives from the world, who acknowlfind in the chronicles of the convent a fearful dis-edged him as the superior of this monastic village. closure of the depths of sin and folly into which | But their misconduct compelled him again to seek multitudes of our brethren have plunged, under a new retirement; which he found at Monte Cathe pretence of more than human sanctity. But sino, on the frontiers of the Abbruzzi. There, the same legends will supply some better lessons, attended by some of his pupils and former associto him who reads books that he may learn to love, ates, he passed the remainder of his life-comand to benefit his fellow-men. They will teach posing his rule, and establishing the order which, him that, as in Judea, the temple, so, in Chris- at the distance of thirteen centuries, still retains tendom, the monastery, was the ark, freighted his name and acknowledges his authority. He during the deluge, with the destinies of the church died in the year 543, in the sixty-fourth year of and of the world-that there our own spiritual his age. and intellectual ancestry found shelter amidst the tempest that there were matured those powers of mind which gradually infused harmony and order into the warring elements of the European commonwealth-and that there many of the noblest ornaments of our common Christianity were trained, to instruct, to govern, and to bless the nations of the West.

To the intercourse of Benedict with the refractory monks of Subiaco, may perhaps be traced the basis of his system. It probably revealed to him the fact that Indolence, Self-will, and Selfishness are the three archdemons of the cloister; and suggested the inference that Industry, Obedience, and Community of goods are the antagonist powers which ought to govern there. But the comGuided by the maxim "that whatever any one prehensiveness of thought with which he so exsaint records of any other saint must be true," we hausted the science of monastic polity, that all glide easily over the enchanted land along which subsequent rules have been nothing more than Domnus Johannes Mabillon conducts the readers modifications of his own-the prescience with of the earlier parts of his wonderous compilations; which he reconciled conventual franchises with receiving submissively the assurance that St. Ben- abbatial dominion—the skill with which he at edict sang eucharistic hymns in his mother's womb once concentrated and diffused power among the -raised a dead child to life-caused his pupil different members of his order, according as the Maurus to tread the water dry-shod-untied by a objects in view were general or local-and the word the knotted cords with which an Arian Goth deep insight into the human heart by which he (Zalla by name) had bound an honest rustic-cast rendered myriads of men and women, during more out of one monk a demon, who had assumed the than thirty successive generations, the spontaneous disguise of a farrier-rendered visible to another instruments of his purposes-these all unite to a concealed dragon, who was secretly tempting prove that profound genius, extensive knowledge, him to desertion-and by laying a consecrated and earnest ineditation, had raised him to the very wafer on the bosom of a third, enabled him to re- first rank of uninspired legislators. His disciples, pose in a grave which till then had continually indeed, find in his legislative wisdom a conclusive cast him out ;-for all these facts the great annal-proof that he wrote and acted under a divine imist relates of his patriarch St. Benedict, on the au- pulse. Even to those who reject this solution it thority of the pontiff (first of that name) St. Greg-is still a phenomenon affording ample exercise for ory. If, however, the record had contained no a liberal curiosity. better things than these, the memorial of Benedict would long since have perished with him.

That the Benedictine statutes remain to this day a living code, written in the hearts of multiHis authentic biography is comprised in a very tudes in every province of the Christian world, is few words. He was born towards the end of the chiefly perhaps to be ascribed to the inflexible fifth century, at Nursia, in the duchy of Spoleto. rigor with which they annihilated the cares and His mother died in giving him birth. He was responsibilities of freedom. To the baser sort no sent to Rome for his education by his father, a yoke is so galling as that of self-control; no demember of the Anician family, which Claudian liverance so welcome as that of being handsomely has celebrated; but was driven from the city by rid of free agency. With such men mental slavery the invasions of Odoacer and Theodoric to the readily becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. Mons Subiacus, where, while yet a beardless To the abject many, the abdication of self-governyouth, he took up his abode as a hermit. Like ment is a willing sacrifice. It is reserved for the Jerome, he was haunted in his solitude by the too nobler few to rise to the arduous virtues of using vivid remembrance of a Roman lady; and subdued wisely the gifts which God bestows, and walking his voluptuous imagination by rolling his naked courageously, though responsibly, in the light body among the thorns. The fame of such pre- which God vouchsafes. mature sanctity recommended him to the monks And by the abject many, though often under of the neighboring monastery as their abbot; but the guidance of the nobler few, were peopled the scarcely had he assumed the office when, disgust-cells of Monte Casino and her affiliated convents. ed by the rigors of his discipline, the electors at Their gates were thrown open to men of every tempted to get rid of him by poison. Returning rank, in whom the abbot or prior of the house to his hermitage, he soon found himself in the could discover the marks of a genuine vocation. centre of several rude huts, erected in his vicinity To exclude any such candidate, though a pauper

or a slave, would have been condemned by Benedict, in the words and spirit of Augustine, as grave delictum. In those sacred enclosures, therefore, many poor and illiterate brethren found a refuge. But they were distinguished from the rest as conversi—that is, as persons destined neither for the priesthood nor the tonsure, but bound to labor for the society as husbandmen, shepherds, artisans, or domestic servants.

during forms, might be combined and grouped together into one glorious whole. With a ritual addressed to the eye rather than to the ear—a sacred pantomime, of which the sacrifice of the mass was the action, the priests the actors, and the high altar the stage-nothing more was requisite to the solemn exhibition but the cathedral as its appropriate theatre. It arose, therefore, not the servile representation of any one natural object, but the majestic combination of the forms of many; and full of mystic significance, in the cruciform plan, the lofty arch, the oriel windows, the lateral chapels, and the central elevation. Not a groining, a mullion, or a tracery, was there, in which the initiated eye did not read some masonic enigma, some ghostly counsel, or some inarticulate summons to confession, to penitence or to prayer.

In the whirl and uproar of the handicrafts of our own day, it is difficult to imagine the noiseless spectacle which in those ages so often caught the eye, as it gazed on the secluded abbey and the adjacent grange. In black tunics, the mementos of death, and in leathern girdles, the emblems of chastity, might then be seen carters silently yoking their bullocks to the team, and driving them in silence to the field—or shepherds interchanging Every niche without, and every shrine within some inevitable whispers while they watched their these sanctuaries, was adorned with images of flocks or vine-dressers pruning the fruit of which their tutelary saints; and especially of Her who they might neither taste nor speak-or wheel- is supreme among the demigods of this celestial wrights, carpenters, and masons plying their trades hierarchy. But, instead of rising to the imperlike the inmates of some deaf and dumb asylum-sonation of holiness, beauty, or power in these and all pausing from their labors as the convent human forms, the monkish sculptors were content bell, sounding the hours of primes or nones or to copy the indifferent models of humanity within vespers, summoned them to join in spirit, even when they could not repair in person, to those sacred offices. Around the monastic workshop might be observed the belt of cultivated land continually encroaching on the adjacent forest; and the passer by might trace to the toils of these mute workmen the opening of roads, the draining of marshes, the herds grazing, and the harvests waving in security, under the shelter of ecclesiastical privileges which even the Vandal and the Ostrogoth regarded with respect. Our own annual agricultural meetings, with their implements and their prizes, their short horns and their long speeches, must carry back their economic genealogy, to those husbandmen who, with dismal aspect, brawny arms, and compressed lips, first taught the conquerors of Rome the science in which Columella and Virgil had instructed the ancient Romans.

their reach; and the statues, busts, and reliefs, which, in subsequent times, fell beneath the blows of Protestant Iconoclasts had little if any value but that which belonged to their peculiar locality and their accidental associations. In painting also, whether encaustic, in fresco, or on wood, the performances of the early Benedictine artists were equally humble. In order to give out their visible poetry, the chisel and the pencil must be guided by minds conversant with the cares and the enjoyments of life; for it is by such minds only that the living soul which animates mute nature can ever be perceived; or can be expressed in the delineation of realities, whether animated or inanimate. In ecclesiastical and conventual architecture, and in that art alone, the monks exhausted their creative imagination; covering Europe with monuments of their science in statics and dynamics, and with monuments of that plastic genius, which from an infinity of elaborate, incongruous, and often worthless, details, knew how to evoke one sublime and harmonious whole. In those august shrines, if anywhere on earth, the spirit of criticism is silenced by the belief that the adorations of men are mingling in blessed accord with the hallelujahs of heaven.

A similar pedigree must be assigned to our academies of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. The fine arts are merely imitative in their infancy; though, as they become mature, they also become symbolical. And this maturity is first attained by the architect, because he ministers to a want more urgent than the rest-because, in the order of time, the edifice must pre- To animate that belief, the Benedictine musicede the works designed for its embellishment-cians produced those chants which, long afterwards and because, finding in nature no models, except combined by Palestrina into the Mass of Pope for the details of his performance, he must, from Marcellus, were hailed with rapture by the Roman the first, be inventive in the composition of it. Conclave and the Fathers of Trent, as the golden Thus the children of Benedict, when contemplating links which bind together in an indissoluble union their lofty avenues sacred to meditation-and the the supplications of the Militant Church and the mellowed lights streaming through the foliage—thanksgivings of the Church Triumphant. and the flowers clustering in the conventual gar- "Lusts of the imagination!” exclaimed, and den-and the pendulous stalactites of the neigh- may yet exclaim, the indignant pulpits of Scotland boring grottoes-conceived of a Christian Temple in which objects resembling these, though hewn out of imperishable stone, and carved into en

and Geneva-" lusts as hostile to the purity of the Christian Faith as the grosser lusts of the flesh or the emptiest vanities of life." Hard words these

for our restorers of church architecture in media- in the government of mankind-for profound learnval splendor! Let the Camden Society, the Lord ing-and for that contemplative spirit, which disof Wilton, and the benchers of the Temple look covers within the soul itself things beyond the to it; while we, all innocent of any such sump-limits of the perceptible creation. Such, indeed, tuous designs-her majesty's church-building com- is the number of these worthies, that, if every missioners themselves not more so-refer to these page at our disposal were a volume, and every Benedictine prodigies only as illustrating a mem-such volume as ponderous as our old acquaintance, orable passage in Benedictine history. Scapula, space would fail us to render justice to the achievements of the half of them. We cannot, however, pass by this goodly fellowship without a transient glance at one normal type, at the least, of each of these various forms of Benedictine heroism. For that purpose we need scarcely wander from the annals of our own land.

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But art was regarded by the fathers of that order rather as the delight than as the serious occupation of their brotherhood. With a self-reliance as just as that of the great philosopher, if not as sublime, they took to themselves all knowledge as their proper province. Their rule assigned an eminent rank among monastic virtues to the guar- In the Benedictine abbey of Nutsall, near Windianship and multiplication of valuable manuscripts. chester, Poetry, History, Rhetoric, and the Holy It taught the copyist of a holy book to think of Scriptures were taught, in the beginning of the himself as at once a pupil and a teacher-as a eighth century, by a monk whom his fellow-counmissionary while seated at his desk-using each trymen called Winfred, but whom the church honfinger as a tongue-inflicting on the Spirit of Evil ors under the name of Boniface. He was born at a deadly wound at each successive line-and as Crediton, in Devonshire, of noble and wealthy baffling, with the pen, the dread enemy, who parents, who had reluctantly yielded to his wish smiles at the impotent hostility of every other to embrace the monastic state. Hardly, however, weapon grasped by the hand of mortal man. In had he reached middle life, when his associates at each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set Nutsall discovered that he was dissatisfied with apart for the discharge of this sacred office. In the pursuits by which their own thoughts were this Scriptorium, some of the monks plied their engrossed. As, in his evening meditations, he pens assiduously, and in profound silence, to pro- paced the long conventual avenue of lime trees, duce faultless transcripts of the best originals. To or as, in the night watches, he knelt before the cruothers was committed the care of revising the text cifix suspended in his cell, he was still conscious of such works as were then held in the highest es- of a voice, audible though inarticulate, which reteem. Charlemagne himself assigned to the Bene-peated to him the Divine injunction, to go and dictine Alcuin the high office of preparing, from preach the gospel to all nations." Then, in menthe various sources within his reach, a perfect co- tal vision, was seen stretching out before him the dex of the Holy Scriptures. For what remains land of his German ancestry; where, beneath the to us of Pliny, Sallust, and Macrobius, and for the veil of the customs described by Tacitus, was conorations against Verres, we are indebted to their cealed an idolatry of which the historian had neiliterary zeal. A tribute of writing materials at ther depicted, nor probably conjectured the abomithe commencement of each novitiate, and another nations. To encounter Satan in this stronghold, of books at its close, with an annual import of became successively the day dream, the passion, manuscripts from the inferior houses, were continu- and the fixed resolve of Boniface; until at length, ally augmenting the libraries of their greater con- abandoning, for this holy war, the studious repose vents. How extensive and how valuable such for which he had already abandoned the world, he collections became, may be inferred from the di- appeared, in his thirty-sixth year, a solitary and rections given by the Benedictine Cassiodorus for unbefriended missionary, traversing the marshy the guidance of his brethren in their studies. He sands and the primeval forests of Friesland. But had collected, and he enjoins them to read, the Charles Martel was already there the leader in Greek and Latin fathers, the church historians, a far different contest; nor, while the Christian the geographers and grammarians whose works mayor of the palace was striking down the Pagans were then extant and in repute, with various med- with his battle-axe, could the pathetic entreaties ical books, for the assistance of those monks to of the Benedictine monk induce them to bow down whom the care of the infirmary was confided. to the banner of the cross. He therefore returned Whoever will consult the "Historia Rei Litera- to Nutsall, not with diminished zeal, but with riæ Ordinis Sancti Benedicti," by their historiog- increased knowledge. He had now learnt that his rapher Magnoaldus Zeigelbauer, may rapidly ac- success must depend on the conduct of the secular cumulate the most conclusive proofs, that by their and spiritual rulers of mankind, and on his own order were either laid or preserved the founda- connection with them. tions of all the eminent schools of learning of modern Europe.

The greatness of the Benedictines did not, however, consist either in their agricultural skill, their prodigies of architecture, or their priceless libraries; but in their parentage of countless men and women, illustrious for active piety-for wisdom

The chapter of his monastery chose him as their abbot; but, at his own request, the Bishop of Winchester annulled the election. Then, quitting forever his native England, Boniface pursued his way to Rome, to solicit the aid of Pope Gregory the Second, in his efforts for the conversion of the German people.