Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

6

clearly what was clear before, that the only ends he aimed at were his country's, his God's and truth's. Those who look to national interests will hold that the first intellectual virtue of a ruler is an insight into the spirit of his time, and the first moral virtue, a sympathy with his people's hopes and fears. As men may be too good fathers if they use patronage as a vehicle of nepotism, so kings may be too good husbands, when they give or withhold their consent to the nation's wishes according to the tempers or caprices of their wives, and too good churchmen, when they put one-half their subjects without the pale of toleration. This is not the sense in which with kings as with others, England expects every man to do his duty.'" Of Cromwell they say, "Strange that England should have been so long deluded into believing that the noblest of her sons could have been the great, wicked man' that blind and bitter partisans depicted; he, a mere revolutionary demagogue, who was the restorer of order at home; he, a hard and selfish usurper, whose stout nerves quailed at last, not at the attempts of assassins, but at the agony of a daughter's suffering; he, a prince of hypocrites, whose last half-conscious murmurings were of the goodness of God and of His presence with His people!" We may note here that the fact most frequently alleged to prove that Cromwell was not religiously sincere, his question addressed on his deathbed to one of his chaplains in regard to the possibility of falling from grace, first makes its appearance in Neal's History of the Puritans in 1813, and that it is utterly out of keeping with the very detailed account of his dying hours, recorded by "a gentleman of his bed-chamber." Where Neal got it is a mystery.

Our authors have spent most pains on the constitutional side of the history as that which best discloses the great and permanent services rendered by the Puritans. At every step they explain very briefly, but clearly, the relation of what is done to the Constitutional past and future of the nation. But the other sides of the history, especially its military aspects, have not been neglected. Very excellent plans illustrate the principal battles, and the most untechnical reader will be at no loss to follow the thread of military narrative.

On some points there is room for correction. A grain of the old leaven sticks to them in their representation of the Puritan attitude towards amusements. But it is to be remembered that the Long Parliament decreed that Wednesday should be a half-holiday; that one of the London theatres was open almost from the conclusion of the war; and that even mixed dancing was allowed. Thus at the wedding of one of Cromwell's daughters, they danced till five in the morning. The sonnet of Milton to Vane is given, but the circumstances under which it was written are not referred to. Vane himself is characterized as the English stoic; he was far more of a mystic than that. In the note to page 258, it might have been added that the Queen was first Jermyn's mistress, and then after her husband's death, his wife.

EASTON TO BUSHKILL. THE CENTENARIAN OF MONROE COUNTY. Reminiscences of George LaBar. A. B. Burrell. Pp. 111; price, $1.00. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.

This gem in the way of typography, paper and portrait-we would we could say more in praise of the book-attracts our attention with unwelcome force. It does not merely afford us an example of modern literary faults; it is a grotesque caricature of them, and not unworthy of study for that reason. A smattering of colonial history, a few traditions, some reminiscences of the Centenarian, a little general genealogy which has no apparent raison d'être, and a ludicrous amount of trite, stilted moralizations upon the physiologically wonderful age of the hero-all these have sought their accidental places, without so much as the semblance of method in the eighteen tiny chapters of this multitudinously betitled book.

From the Introductory, as he poetically terms the first chapter, we quote the characteristic paragraph with which it concludes: "Can we still talk with one who heard the booming cannon of the Revolution, and who participated in the rejoicings after that trying war was over? Can we shake hands with one who saw the stately Washington? Yes, he lives! A marvelous volume, a living record of one hundred and six years! Eighteen such lives would reach back to the time of Christ. Only eighteen times for the tale to be handed down from father to son, to reach through the dim distance ! Eighteen generations instead of an average of fifty-seven !"

To make this audacious supposition tenable, the reveler in exclamation-marks should have added another, to wit, that each of these centenarian sires should have had a son towards the close of his life, an unusually precocious boy, who, at the age of one or two years, should have heard and remembered the tradition. And this double physiological marvel, regularly recurring at intervals of 106 years, might have warranted double exclamation-points.

Our author is very fond of this breath-taking strain, of these thrilling hypotheses; but his periods are not always so well balanced, nor his grammar so good. Inelegant motions are magnified when we get on stilts, as, for instance, in the opening sentence of the book: "This little volume has been drawn together by frequent conversations with the aged pilgrim with whom these talks were had." The reviewer doubts whether a volume or any other thing could be "drawn together" by all the powers beneath the sun-certainly not by the curious tautology of the rest of the sentence, which rivals the famous critic's parody on Pope :

Let Observation with extensive observation
Observe mankind from China to Peru!

An amusing instance of how figures when stretched upon the rack may be tortured by the cunning inquisitor into a splendid mendacity, occurs in the 17th chapter, wherein, by dint of much "assuming"

and "deducting" and "multiplying," our author calculates that Mr. LaBar's grandfather and his two brothers "now show a living progeny of about 7,200 !" Henceforth, who dares deny imagination to mathematics?

Nothing but the name LaBar, for which in former years we learned to cherish a profound respect, coupled with the aristocratic appearance of the volume, and the reputation of its publishers, could have tempted us to its perusal. But amusement and instruction are not the prerogatives of good books alone.

THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. With numerous Illustrations. Centennial Edition. Great 8vo. Pp. 297. Price, One Dollar. Boston: Jas. R. Osgood & Co. 1876.

A Centennial edition of the poet who has written our best Centennial poem, has fitness in it. Our Friendly poet is one of the great number of the faithful and the true, whose labors and utterances helped to make the past century honorable to the nation. And he has come to the opening of another, full of years and of good works, and here gathers up all his songs earlier and later, and places them within the reach of the poorest, but in a form that commends . them to the most fastidious.

He

There are single poems in this collection, which have turned lives into new and nobler channels; and the amount of influence for good exerted by the whole collection upon the national life, only God can measure. More than any other American poet Whittier renders his country the service that Wordsworth rendered England, and for which even John Stuart Mill had reason to be thankful. takes, that is, common life of the humblest class and excites our sympathy for those who live it by showing them to be men of like passions with us full of the same hopes and fears, helps and trials. He does his share to lift our national life out of its sordidness, by casting over it the poetic glamour of his verse-nay, by taking away the veil from our eyes and our hearts, and showing us the poetic truth bound up in what had seemed mere sordid reality.

The illustrations of the work are those which have already appeared in various editions of the author's lesser volumes, and are of course of unequal merit. Some of the landscapes are very fine and effective, and the New England conventionalism in depicting the human face and form is not so inappropriate as when sometimes employed on foreign themes.

LIBRARY NOTES. By A. P. Russell. Pp. 401., 8vo. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

A very pleasant and chatty book, good for this hot weather. The

title well describes it; it is the talk of a man fresh from his books, and with a pigeon-hole memory that enables him to recall a host of their best things in the right place. Sometimes he reminds us of Emerson, sometimes of Jacox, but he never succumbs to the citirenwuth of the latter. Without the affluence of thought and the miraculous apercus of the man of Concord, Mr. Russell has his fine felicity of quotation.

FETICH IN THEOLOGY; or, Doctrinalism Twin to Ritualism. By John Miller, Princeton, N. J. Second Edition, with letters introductory. Pp. xiii., 261. New York: Dodd & Mead.

Mr. Miller is a very brave man, and at the same time it is a sign of the times that his book has excited very little of the odium thelogicum, with which it would once have been treated. He is a clergyman of the Presbyterian church, settled at the very headquarters of its orthodoxy, under the shadow cast by that Seminary which prides itself on its rigid adherence to the letter of the Calvinistic creed as formulated over two hundred years ago. And yet this book is for the most part a slashing review of Prof. Hodge's Systematic Theology, the opus magnum which Princeton believes has put back the shadow on the dial some two hundred years, and made adherence to seventeenth century theology possible to men of the nineteenth. It is said that Prof. Park, of Andover, and Dr. Hodge have each been waiting for years till the other should show his hand by publishing his system; and now, it is said, we may look for a big book in which the milder Calvinism of New England will be held up in contrast with the sterner creed of Princeton. But we are sure that Prof. Park will have nothing to say of Dr. Hodge half so severe as what is here said by a clergyman of Dr. Hodge's own church and neighborhood. If Mr. Miller be right, then Dr. Hodge may be a good Christian, but he has lamentably failed to translate into intelligible terms the contents of his Christian consciousness. He has robbed faith of its true force and sense by his definition; he has helped to consecrate as a holy garment, the cere cloths of superstition which enwrap and entangle the limbs of the Church.

We shall not endeavor to explain to our readers the specific points made by Mr. Miller; it is enough to have indicated to those who are interested in such topics, the drift and value of the book. But we must say that on more than one point Mr. Miller seems to be fighting for half-truths, and not doing full justice to the half-truths he criticizes. For instance he assails Dr. Hodge for making the will of God the ground of moral obligation, asserting that there is in the nature of things an essential difference between right and wrong, to which the will of God must be conformable to be a holy will. Now while the deistic conception of God is adhered to, too much stress cannot be laid on this principle. If God be conceived, that is, as purely personal spirit, transcending the universe and related to it

only as its personal first cause and its providential supervisor; then the very foundations of ethics would be undermined by the position that God could make anything that is now wrong into right, by an act of His will. But if this conception of God be supplemented by the truth of Pantheism, without its error-if God be contemplated as the personal sum of all reality, and the universe as a moment in the divine life,-if, that is, the nature of things, to which Mr. Miller appeals, be regarded as not supplementary to the conception of God but as included therein-then the contradiction between the two positions at once disappears; and we think that the theism of the New Testament fairly requires such an extension of the conceptions now current among Christian theologians.

MRS. LIMBER'S RAFFLE; or, A Church Fair and its Victims. A Short Story. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

This is a clever rebuke of the devious ways to which the most honest-minded men and women resort when the faithful are not dis

posed to sow plenteously. That which the direct appeal cannot effect must be managed by the indirect, and to the "Open, Sesame !" of the raffle and grab-bag the purses of young and old yield up their treasure; while of the many who share in this pious gambling probably few realize that they are committing a punishable breach of the law.

Mr. Limber, a worthy churchman of the town of Spindle, after in vain exhausting upon his wife good and reasonable argument on the side of morality, takes advantage of this popular ignorance, permits the raffle to be held at his house, and then calls in the law of the State of New York to his assistance in convincing his family and townspeople of the immoralities of these charitable agencies. Each subscriber of one dollar to the "image or effigy of the female human form, composed, as to the head and neck thereof, of wax, and as to the rest, residue and remainder thereof, of muslin, stuffed with bran, saw-dust, or other minute particles," (which being translated into language understanded of the people is-wax doll,) is held in the sum of "three hundred dollars, being three times the value of the article as set up, together with the further sum of ten dollars" for costs. The claims of the law are satisfied by the host, who assumes the responsibilities of his guests, and the wax doll becomes the patron saint of a new hospital. The court scenes are full of life, and no one should regret an hour given to the unravelling of Mr. Limber's amusing stratagem to open the eyes of the wilfully blind by the vindication of the law. Had it been the object of the author to furnish an hour's pleasant reading, the book must have been considered a success; but as he had a higher aim than to amuse, we trust the moral of his fable may carry conviction to other than Spindle folk that "the devil's edge-tools are sure to cut, no matter how dexterously handled by saint or sinner,"

« AnteriorContinuar »