LITERATURE.

NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

Studies of Public Men. No. 1.-Peel-O'Connell-Brougham To which is added, an Essay on some and Social System of England and

-Cobden-D'Israeli. points in the Political France.

Ar no era of our national history have the principles of public men been more powerfully marked by their effects than in the present. It would be a proof of moral blindness to deny that society is in our day undergoing a vast revolution; that its changes are no longer the silent and gradual developments of times and seasons, but rather resemble some reorganization of the elements of our formation. Mind, instead of making slow advances, appears to have burst its bondage with a mighty effort, and to have asserted its right to rule rather than be ruled. The watchword of political liberty has sounded like a tocsin throughout Europe, and much that was once held sacred and venerable has been consigned to the charnel house of antiquity. Consistency has been supplanted by expediency, and though this last be a word of doubtful reputation, yet let it not be altogether repudiated with disgrace. Expediency has a twofold interpretation; one may suggest a debasing truckling to arbitrary power, the other conveys the impression of the powerful ability of adapting measures to contingencies as they arise, of seizing on adverse circumstances as they present themselves, of re-moulding and throwing their weight, into the right scale. In other words, expediency is the skill of the pilot changing his course so as to escape the dangers of those shifting sands which, pursuing the old track, he must infallibly suffer shipwreck in encountering.

That the steersman at the great helm of state has acted on this policy is undeniable. Doubtless he has held it wiser to submit to reform rather than revolution, and the great agitations of society like the rumblings of the earthquake, might seem to him as its inevitable precursors. The party spirit which has possessed us has not been one to be exorcised by a few muttered words. It has made men passionate, energetic, clamorous. It has made men seek right even through wrong. It has made men buckle on armour and take to their weapons, and it has enlisted and marshalled whole armies of politicians. There are causes of contention which have the faculty of inspiring the partizans on either

side with the firm conviction that they are battling for conscience sake, and in none more powerfully than in the field of politics. Hence we have the greatest power the most highly stimulated, and next we wonder that from a host thus energized we should have such men standing boldly forward as our author has here selected.

The value of this work is not to be estimated at a casual glance. In the warmth of energetic debate, in the heat of party spirit, and in the lash of conflicting sentiments, it is difficult to arrive at a clear and decisive judgment. When men who have once been so embroiled look back on their own past opinions, they blush for the prejudices on which those opinions have been formed. How important at the existing moment is a calm, dispassionate, philosophic estimate of the actions which are being performed around us, and on which we may safely found our confidence in the actors. Just such shall we find in these "Studies of Public Men." Here we have mind measuring mind. Not seeking to realize utopian visions of patriotic perfection, but giving just weight to those interests and influences by which the statesman is necessarily surrounded and assailed. It is not the now but the hereafter by which a ruler must be judged, and he who can but carry on his thoughts from the present to the future is the wisest Solomon of his age. Consequences are more to be weighed than causes. Political results mark the really great statesman rather than oratorical triumphs. Posterity reads the one in indelible records, while the speech of the other dies on the listening ear. Such men live in their public actions rather than in their private doings, and such are the selected subjects of these "Studies." Undoubtedly these men are leaders, we will not say of parties, for the very term has grown obsolete, factions having fallen into fragments, but they are those whose prowess has impelled them into the front ranks of political championship. The features of mental and moral character have been carefully pourtrayed, motives fairly weighed, influences candidly admitted. The pressure of circumstances without, and the power of impulses within, have been treated with just allowance. Nothing has been extenuated, nothing set down in malice. Here are no traces of the serpent-like slime of detraction, seeking to throw odium on a cause by calumniating its advocates. These "Studies present us with an able, comprehensive, uncompromising, and honest chronicle of five of the great men of our own great day; and ours is a great day, let people murmur or declaim as best pleases their own fancy. It matters not whether great men make great events or great events make great men, for in either case ours is a marked era. In the chronology of intellect the nineteenth century must stand high, even though succeeding ages should advance still higher; and these are the men who have had, and are having, the most pow

erful influences upon the destiny of their country. Let then the estimate which our author has supplied be duly valued, and let us be thankful for the light which his calm, lucid, and dispassionate mind has thrown upon these political biographies.

The Astrologer. A Legend of the Black Forest. By A Lady. INDEPENDENTLY of all subordinate divisions, imaginative writing may be divided into two classes: the one is of the life we live; the other is the life of which we dream, but in which we live not. These are the real and the ideal. The first possesses all that allotment of human interests, human actions, human worldliness, human passions, everything, in short, which abounds in the vast varieties of daily life; the other has the sesame of a world in which all is fanciful, figurative, replete with wonders. The one author paints things as he sees them; the other as he feels them. In short, the one is our every-day, and the other our holiday,

world.

For our own part, an excursion into these fairy lands of fancy in which so many beautiful castles are built in the air, is a delightful transition from the dusty and fatiguing highroads of life, and we are always willing to surrender our matter-of-fact incredulity and enjoy a ramble in those realms of pure, unmitigated romance, where an author does not take the trouble to demonstrate an impossibility, but is content to cast himself upon an amicable understanding, established beforehand between himself and his reader. We are sufficiently well pleased, we say, to escape from the logics of life, and to exchange them for the company of an author whose imagination has given him a license and dispensation to will and do according to his own good pleasure.

The "Astrologer" belongs to the class of the ideal. We have here a romance in its genuine character, in which the art of magic and the science of astrology are assumed as truths, and the fullest liberty given to the most lively imagination. Reading is something like travelling. It may be that we journey through a delicious scenery, or it may be that we drag our way through regions of sterile tediousness; yet when we have finished our journey, we pause and look back over the way we have traversed. Just so have we done with this romance. Having read to the end, we take a retrospective view of the path through which we have been led, and though it may have been covered with poetical flowers, yet we discern features of a marked character. Our authoress has the power of arranging her plot and keeping its bearings constantly in view. Romantic as are the incidents, there is under them a strict coherence of design. Although eminently imaginative, she possesses a clear judgment, evidenced by a distinct purpose being July, 1846.-VOL. XLVI.-NO. CLXXXIII.

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distinctly carried through every part of a work which possesses novelty as well as consecutiveness, and is full of powerful dramatic effects.

Here we have a fond and doting father living in unwavering belief in astrology with a son whose life is menaced by malignant aspects throughout his youth, and threatened with a death of violence; and based upon this belief we find the parent surrounding his beloved son with so many and such varied restrictions and coercions, as to render existence itself almost a curse. Such a position as this possesses a dramatic interest of great originality; while in the development of the tale we trace results of previous events traced out with extraordinary skill. In our critical capacity we usually find that the execution of a work is better than its conception; but here we are bound to say that the conception surpasses the execution, which is a far higher degree of merit.

The Confessions of an Etonian. By J. E. M.

PLACES, like people, have character; not, indeed, every place nor every person, for it may be said of numbers as Pope said of women, that they have no character at all. Insipidity has few lineaments, either of beauty or deformity. We visit many localities, and we converse with many individuals, and when they have passed away from our vision their memory has also departed. The record of our acquaintanceship is written on sand or in water, and the next wind of Heaven or wave of ocean obliterates them for ever. Not so, however, with the place or the individual whose character is positive and not negative. The slightest acquaintanceship engraves such on mind and memory, and that too indelibly.

Eton is one of those haunts around which linger a host of undying recollections. The youth of numbers, whose ripened years have signalized them to the world, have been spent within its shades. Now, indeed, the refinements of the age may be smoothing down its obsolete customs, but how tardy has been the reformation. How quaint, how marked with all the rugged lines of gone-by times, are all its peculiar customs. Even now the relics of barbarism may be said still to exist time-honoured. The master of a parochial charity school would be dismissed with clamour from his office for a hundredth part of the severity of discipline practised upon pauper children which the scions of our proud nobility have been trained up in receiving, and the peasant mother would rain tumults of indignation for the tithe of that chastisement which many a duchess mother has heard of with nonchalance. Undoubtedly the intellectuality of the nineteenth century must soon soften down more of the Gothic barbarisms, chartered in

these institutions of olden times, and therefore it is that such a work as the present one is stamped with additional value.

These Confessions" of a boy at Eton give us a most faithful picture of the daily routine of life in that great seminary of learning, as it is yet fresh in the memory of many amongst us. Those who have occupied any, or all, of its half-dozen forms will know the accuracy of its details; those who have not will be amused by their freshness. It is well that the system of fagging should be exposed, slavery being the best preparation for tyranny, and the one as much requiring abolition as the other. The volume is cheerful, being full of the fun, the frolic, the tricks, the daring, the shuffling of a community in which these qualities are considered as proofs of rare spirit; but it is also marked by an occasional dash of sentiment, the emotion of genuine feeling, more touching from contrast with its general tone. Altogether these "Confessions" will be read with an interest not to be divided from their subject matter, and greatly enhanced by the mode in which it is conveyed.

Locrine, and other Poems. By THOMAS HOLMES.

WHEN we open a volume of rhyme and find it to be poetry, true, real, and heaven-born poetry, our pleasure, like all sunshiny things, is always accompanied with the shadow of real regret that it should be so difficult to convince the world of its merit. We are sorry that that world should be deprived of a real gratification through its own incredulity, and that the feelings of the most susceptible class of our race should be wounded by disregard and neglect. Nevertheless the true poet is not without his compensation in the deep and unutterable joy and rejoicing of his spirit. He knows that he has a heritage greater than principalities, for all that is sublime and beautiful in the whole creation is his, and he knows that every throb of his own heart is one of sympathy with the best feelings of his entire race.

Our poet will have this enjoyment which the world can neither give nor take away, yet for their own sakes, as many as are susceptible of so much pure pleasure, we would have to share it. Let not railroads and corn-laws entirely supersede the refined and the poetical. It is the spirit which breathes in such volumes as this which raises, purifies, and ennobles. A man's daily occupations will have a certain influence upon the character of his mind and the tone of his manners, and we think that such things as commerce, statistics, and mechanics may well be relieved by the perfume of such poetry as we have found in Mr. Holmes' pages.