no race less energetic and resolute could be competent (p. 16); and in the special interposition of Providence to defeat the great final effort of Spain to crush the heretic nation in 1588. He gives abundant details of the Catholic conspiracies against the life of Elizabeth; shows that Mary Stuart was fully implicated in them, or at least privy to them, so that she could not be safely spared; yet argues that the whole tragical tissue of crime and vengeance came from the original wrong of detaining Mary as a prisoner. How the brutal penalties of the English treason law were inflicted on men innocent of any plot, victims of friendship for the victims of Jesuit arts, and how the web of treachery was unravelled by Walsingham's more subtile skill, we find told here with all the interest and freshness of a new tale.

The drift of the book, as touching the Puritans, covers two points, their agency as champions of political liberty and reform, pioneers of the freedom of Parliamentary debate, and the unjust, malignant, and mean persecution of them by the prelates, especially the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. Whitgift is shown to have been guilty of the blood of men whom he himself describes as "servants of God, but dangerous to the state." Why dangerous? The Puritans professed the heartiest loyalty to the Queen, and had done their full share to uphold the severest laws against the Catholics, designed to protect the royal life. Their vehement hostility, not to the English Church, of which they earnestly claimed to be members, not to Episcopacy as such, but to the relics of Romanism involved in it, may seem to us extravagant and superstitious. Their strong Sabbatical convictions, which succeeded in drawing so broad a line between English and Continental Protestantism, put them at sharp odds with the doctrine of the clergy and the practice of the court. Yet these are light grounds for so vindictive a persecution as is recounted here. To the shame of English justice, and the dishonor of the English Church, the argument seems abundantly established, that personal spite, and bitterness at personal affronts, were at the bottom of the unrelenting war the prelates waged against the purest form of Christian piety then known. "Martin Mar-prelate " was bitter, coarse, and offensive in his attacks upon the priesthood; but his real name was never known, while pious missionaries and humble pastors and gentle women were dragged to the gallows, or poisoned with jail-fever, to expiate the hatred his sharp words had roused. The painful story has never, we suppose, been so vividly and fully told as here. The narrative of John Penry (John ap Henry, a young Welsh Puritan convert from Romanism) makes a considerable episode in this volume, idyllic, pathetic, tragic, as its successive scenes are drawn in the brisk dramatic style of the author. And the most shocking thing of all is, that the horrible cruelties here detailed were inflicted under cover of an old statute made to meet a wholly different set of cases; that they were hastened or urged in private pique at being foiled in Parliament, or attacked by some nameless pamphleteer; and that Elizabeth was systematically kept from knowledge of what was going on, lest her high spirit and quick intelligence should interfere. But once sharply cross-questioning her minis

ters, she received from Whitgift the remarkable answer we have quoted before. "Alas!" she replied, "shall we put the servants of God to death?" "Henceforth," we are told, "her mind was changed; so that during her reign care was taken that no more Protestants should be put to death for their religion." (p. 542.)

A work of this sort we judge more from the value of the matter which is brought freshly and vigorously before the reader's mind, than from the specialities of form and style. As to this latter, one gets a little suspicious of the long details of dialogue, given as if authentic, and a little weary of the incessant affecting of the Tudor style in them. We think also that the Parliamentary proceedings are reported in far too great length and detail. Possibly objection might be taken to the jail scenes and scaffold scenes, as feeding a morbid and coarse taste for horrors; but these also are features of the Elizabethan period, and were tragical and too familiar facts to the pioneers of our religious liberties. Mr. Hopkins has done much to commend his work to the great majority of readers, by his attempt to portray the living speech of those whose sufferings he tells, and to draw the landscape they lived in, and the picture of their homes. And his handsome, lively, and well-attested pages are a most serviceable contribution to our knowledge of that age so fertile in remarkable events and heroic men.

*

THE work which Dr. Tulloch has just published is in some sense a sequel to his work on the "Leaders of the Reformation," which was received with great favor. It is in many respects superior to that work, written in a more intense sympathy, and with larger means of information. It is in five chapters. The first gives the introductory history of Puritanism, from its faint indications in the reigns of Henry and Mary, its bolder manifestations in the reign of Elizabeth, its open contests in the reign of James and against the prelates of Canterbury, and its triumph in the reign of the first Charles and the wars of the Commonwealth. This chapter, which is an admirable résumé, brings the history down to the appearance of Cromwell in public life. It contains the results of thought rather than any discussion of acts, and is not open to the charge of "special pleading," which lies against so much that has been written about the early Puritans.

Cromwell is the subject of the second chapter, the longest in the volume. With no redundance of detail, the writer succeeds in condensing in his sketch all the important facts and movements in the life of this leader, and in furnishing a picture which in sharpness of outline, if not in richness of coloring, has not been surpassed by any of the portraits of the Lord Protector. Cromwell is to him the impersonation of Puritanism in its highest force, in its power over the wills, the actions, and the passions of men; the best product of the Puritan spirit in its

* English Puritanism and its Leaders, Cromwell, Milton, Baxter, Bunyan. By JOHN TULLOCH, D. D., Principal and Professor of Theology, St. Mary's College, in the University of St. Andrew's, and one of her Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary in Scotland. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. 1861. 12mo. pp. 502.

conflict, its energy, its daring, and its trust. Dr. Tulloch does not gloss over Cromwell's defects of temper, and his mistakes of action are fairly admitted; he was violent, headstrong, often cruel, and at times brutal; his course was not always open, not always just; but, with all his failings, he was an honest man, a true patriot, and a sincere believer. His mistakes were rather errors of judgment, than the efforts of a base ambition. His usurpation was for the safety of the state and from the call of God, and not for any selfish end. His piety was the moving spring of his action, and his work in the world was the natural issue of his conversion.

Milton is the subject of the third chapter. Dr. Tulloch follows the history of the Puritan scholar and poet with a genuine enthusiasm. His estimate of the prose of Milton, and its influence upon the mind of England, is more moderate than we might expect from so devoted an admirer. He admits that, with the exception of the "Areopagitica," the political and controversial works of Milton are not works on which the fame of a great writer can rest. Milton's liberalism in theology, according to Dr. Tulloch, was "the natural development of that spirit of freethinking, which, in him as in some others, struggled all along with the dogmatism of the time." Dr. Tulloch denies that the Paradise Lost represents in its theology the real creed of its author; maintaining rather, that, for the purposes of art, the poet used forms of expression and the features of a creed which the thinker had outgrown.

The Presbyterian Baxter is the subject of the fourth chapter; and we have never seen in English a sketch of that sickly, conscientious, and industrious theologian which will compare with this for discriminating fulness and justice. The weakness and the strength, the generosity and the narrowness, of the obstinate, yet kind-hearted minister, are brought into bold relief. Baxter's rigid Calvinist creed is not made amiable, as Dr. Tulloch presents it, and it appears as a hindrance to mental freedom and a source of confusion. Dr. Tulloch has evidently no sympathy with the system in its practical workings and its moral influence, and his picture of its wrong to human conduct and the private conscience is so sharply drawn as to make us believe that he has no love for the scheme of dogma itself. The spirit of his sketch is contained in the remark concerning Baxter's opinions, that "they touched distinctions, many of which have lost all vitality of meaning, and would be scarcely intelligible at present. To try to revive them would interest none but the theological reader, and would not in his case serve any good end."

The closing chapter, on Bunyan, though well written and just in its conclusions, is the least interesting of any in the volume. Bunyan's life is so comparatively insignificant, and is marked by such an obstinate and self-willed fanaticism, that its details become tiresome. It is evidently an effort for Dr. Tulloch to make a hero out of a zealot whose piety was largely compounded with absurdity, and not altogether lacking in vanity. He is compelled to present the visionary and spiritual side of Puritanism in the character of the tinker of Bedford; but the raptures, perplexities, and mental conflicts of this pietist have no

fascination for the Scotch common sense of his critic, who sees in the "Pilgrim's Progress" no half-inspired work, to be received as authority either for literary finish or for theological soundness, but a very human composition, with very human faults.

WE have registered the titles of several works of value in the department of Biblical exposition.

Professor Noyes's Translation of Job is too well known, and has been too long an admitted classic in this department, to need more than the mention of its third edition. Its accurate scholarship, its clear, excellent English, and its neat style of getting-up, will continue to secure it the favor it has so amply earned. The present edition has been carefully revised, and its renderings and criticisms brought into fair comparison with the works of recent Continental critics. The Preface announces a revision of "The Hebrew Prophets," whose publication, we fear, must wait for less evil times.

The erudite and the curious will find also the titles of a translation of the Psalms from the Syriac, from which we hope to gather something of interest for our readers; and of the Psalms in parallel columns, Hebrew and English, for the help of students.

Mr. Ellicott's "Hulsean Lectures" on the Life of Christ are reverential, rather diffuse, and almost homiletic in style, accompanied by notes of considerable erudition, the lecturer's theological position being sufficiently indicated in the title-page.

We have been somewhat disappointed in Mr. Trench's Commentary on the "Epistles to the Seven Churches," which is rather an expansion of the text, by way of edification, than a help to the exposition of the marvellous composition in which the epistles are found.

It may be worth while to mention in this connection a recent paper in the Westminster Review, containing a remarkably vivid and clear exposition of the general outline and drift of the Apocalypse, with the very confident assignment of its date to the year A. D. 69,- a reckoning and an estimate very similar to what Mr. Maurice has given in his Lectures on the First Two Centuries.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.

THE second volume of Curtius's Greek History* has a completeness and unity in the ground it covers and its method of treatment, which almost entitle it to be called a history of the Athenian hegemony, beginning as it does with the battle of Marathon, where the Athenians first proved their fitness to rule, and ending with the overthrow of their power at Egospotami. No period of equal length has stamped itself more ineffaceably than this upon the history of the world, or has won more love and gratitude from the heart of humanity; and nowhere,

*Griechische Geschichte von ERNST CURTIUS. Zweiter Band. Bis zum Ende des Peloponnesischen Krieges. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. 1861. 12mo. pp. 704.

is this brilliant epoch more

perhaps, at least in the same space, worthily treated than in the volume before us. Professor Curtius has indeed a rare combination of qualifications as an historian. We should hardly expect that the most thorough scholarship of the German type should have allied with it a minute knowledge of the localities gained by four years' residence and travel in Greece, an elegant, picturesque, and easy style as a writer, a hearty enthusiasm for the subject, and a delicate appreciation of the art and literature that gave it its peculiar greatness, full sympathy with the Athenian democracy in its prime, with a just discrimination as to the faults and merits of its leaders. He is less eulogistic than Grote, who seems to us sometimes to praise the Athenians more than they deserve; and yet not even Grote has defended the statesmanship of Pericles more zealously than Curtius. Where Grote excels all his rivals in his analysis of political movewe can hardly expect the citizen of a country which has no political life to succeed. We do not find, however, that the political movements of the fifth century are less effectively handled here than in Grote. A surer test of power will be applied when our author arrives at the stormy career of Demosthenes, and the intrigues of that sad period which Grote has discussed in so masterly a way.

ments

Perhaps the finest passages in this volume are the personal descriptions, among which we would especially notice those of Cimon and Alcibiades. The account of the intercourse between Socrates and

Alcibiades is uncommonly fine. Curtius does not, like Grote, represent Alcibiades as drawn to this strange and searching teacher as Critias was, merely from a selfish desire to catch his peculiar knack at entrapping an opponent, for the purpose of using it himself in political life; but, like Niebuhr, he recognizes noble traits in this wayward and dæmonic being, which drew Socrates to him with the purpose of rescuing him from the dominion of his lower nature, and making of him a second Pericles.

"Where the great Pericles failed, another succeeded, - an insignificant man, who used at that time to wander through the streets of Athens, barefooted and meanly clad, an artisan by trade, who had left his workshop because an inner voice drove him to go about through the multitude, to hold conversation with men of all conditions, to learn from them, or to excite in them, questionings which became the germ of earnest self-inquiry and moral growth. This was Socrates, son of the sculptor Sophroniscus, who was forty years old at the time of the death of Pericles. Among the varied population, in which, after the fearful trials through pestilence and war, immorality, frivolity, and a conceited shallowness were making ever more rapid progress, he sought unweariedly for men to whom to offer his services; his eye then fell upon the son of Clinias, who was at that time about nineteen years old, and the thought seized him that it might be given him to rescue the richly endowed youth from the intoxications of sensuality, and redeem his better self; he felt that he could do Athens no better service.

"When Socrates first approached Alcibiades, the latter supposed, like most Athenians, that he had to do only with a sophist of an un