IN a four months' horseback excursion, during the lull in the perpetual revolutions of Mexico in 1856, Mr. Tylor has added materially to our knowledge of the antiquities of that ill-fated land, has furnished instructive drawings of obsidian knives and weapons, and discussed the connection of pure Mexican art with that of Central America. The chief interest of “Anahuac”* is antiquarian, and whatever novelty it possesses lies in the direction of the past, while the closing pages do not hesitate to assert the destiny of the country as that of inevitable absorption in the United States of America. A curious explanation of the fact that the most productive portion of the country is the least occupied, that the banana region indeed is a mere wilderness, is, that the children were raised so entirely upon vegetable food that their constitutions were predisposed to scrofulous diseases; epidemics like the smallpox found them ready as dry wood for the flame, so that whole villages have frequently been depopulated in a few days. But this is to overlook their excessive use of intoxicating drinks, their prevailing want of cleanliness, and the pernicious influence upon health of general immorality. While the country remains at the mercy of military adventurers, while the highways are unsafe, and the very capital subject to pillage, — it cannot be expected that population should increase, even with the finest climate, the richest soil, and an inexhaustible store of mineral wealth of every kind. It may be hoped that the end of this desolating anarchy is at hand; that some form of permanent government is about to be set up on this most afflicted soil; and that some kind of Mexican Protectorate can be established by the European powers which will save our government from the necessity of undertaking this troublesome charge.

"PICTURES of Old England," † a duodecimo volume in twelve chapters, has just appeared in English dress, comprising part of the materials gathered by Reinhold Pauli in the composition of his five-volumed "Geschichte von England." The subjects of the entirely independent chapters indicate the character of the book better than the attractive title. They are, Canterbury and the Worship of Becket; Monks and Mendicant Friars; Parliament in the Fourteenth Century; England's Earliest Relations to Austria and Prussia; Emperor Louis Fourth and King Edward Third; Hanseatic Steelyard in London; Gower and Chaucer; Wiclif; King Henry Fifth and Sigismund; Maid of Orleans; Duke Humphrey of Gloucester; London in the Middle Ages. Being limited to the days of the Plantagenets, they are strictly a series of antiquarian essays, and as such are exceedingly interesting,-even that upon the Hanseatic Steelyard being full of instructive matter, new to common readers of history, upon the remarkable dependence of early England upon German commerce and German manufactures. The most agreeable portion for general reading is that which treats of he

* Anahuac: or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. By EDWARD B. TYLOR. London: Longman & Co. 1861.

† Pictures of Old England. By DR. REINHOLD PAULI. Translated by E. C. OTTÉ. London and Cambridge: Macmillan.

VOL. LXXII. - - 5TH S. VOL. X. NO. I.

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roic Joan of Arc, a picture of self-sacrifice which we hope to see in general circulation through the American periodical press, because the vindications of this martyr to patriotism have been so few and so imperfect. The chapter devoted to Wiclif will be the most attractive to theological readers, characterized as it is by impartiality, felicity of expression, and power of narration. Dr. Pauli writes with remarkable clearness, draws from original sources, gives distinct impressions of a remote period, and has been excellently translated, under his own supervision, by E. C. Otté.

L

NOVELS AND TALES.

THE literary merit of "Cecil Dreeme," "* and the fine intellectual and moral quality which is its conspicuous excellence, would secure a good repute and command attention to it, quite apart from the striking facts which now come out concerning the writer's life, and that nobility of his death which begets a sort of regretful affection for a person so highminded and brave. It needs no showing up in our esteem from the circumstances, at once grievous and glorious, which have heralded it to our notice. But of the many who have read it, there will be few who have not read with a quick personal interest, as one reads an autobiography or a collection of letters, and with an unwonted identification of the writer with his work; few that have not shut the book with tenderness toward him, and regret, and withal a feeling of pride in him, that so costly a sacrifice should be offered so simply and so cheerfully. Our interest in the book and the charm of it have been much enhanced by this identification, by this search and pursuit along its pages of the bright and vigorous mind and thoroughly manly heart of which it is the fruit.

The story is interesting and well carried out; somewhat meagre in incident, and at the end savoring a little of the melodramatic and commonplace. Abduction, private madhouse, and murder with a stray and handy dagger, are the familiar and convenient devices for a catastrophe, which excite no feeling more ardent, perhaps, than the warm welcome to old and tried friends. The book will attract by its dramatic movement, and they who read it for that alone will find it to their account of pleasure and excitement. Its originality and freshness are not marked, however, in its succession of events, and not in the action and fate of its personages, but in the drawing and fashioning of them. The style of the people in it is the part of the work which shows special knowledge and skill, and displays the peculiar ability of the writer. It is in the character of the characters that his quality and power are indicated, more than in their action and their final disposal at the closing up of the story. He belongs in that class of novelists who love to deal with the secrets of thought and feeling, and to unveil, for delight or horror, hidden places lying at the springs of moral good and evil in the nature. While they tell the story which runs by the passage of events, they

* Cecil Dreeme. By THEODORE WINTHROP. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1861.

make the deeper drama move before us, which proceeds by the orderly march of high and composed thoughts, or by the agony of struggling passions. Mr. Hawthorne stands, perhaps, at the head of this class, and "Cecil Dreeme" has more than once reminded us of the peculiar power and weird effect of his stories. Their interest, after all, notwithstanding the effective external drama, with its impressive situations and stirring events, lies in the play within the play, in the movement, to the bitter or blissful end, of moral fatalities, unholy or holy passions in the blood and temper. If their realistic and artistic power were any less, they would be phantasmal, setting cloudy images before our eyes and making us hear only hollow voices. As it is, we get from them ever the sense of something unsubstantial, so surely does the spiritualism or the diabolism carry it over the incidental, physical, and eventful. A taste of this quality we find in this book of Winthrop's, and for the earnest it gives of moral and intellectual power, and of literary effectiveness, we look with some eagerness to those novels which we understand are to follow the favorable reception given to this.

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a

MR. READE has written an excellent novel,* of interest enough to suit all readers, and not without profit to those who think while they read. Such is his vivacity of style, and literary effectiveness, and skilled use of all the arts of his craft, that he is always sure of his readers, and always sure to hold and please them. But since "Peg Woffington" none of his novels have, to our mind, pleased with better reason than his last. He calls Iatter-of-fact romance," but he might reasonably claim for it the more dignified name of "historical novel." It belongs to that class by better title than many do which assume to be historical, because of the introduction of a few lay-figures from mediæval history, and by the glib use of "by my halidome," and "i' faith, sirs," to show how they talked in the old time, of "fortalice" and "donjon keep," "venison pasty" and "flagon of Rhenish," to tell how they lived then, and of "jerkin,” "basnet," "scapulary," to teach us how they dressed. The novel is not made historical by these cheap devices and external make-shifts, but, as “The Cloister and the Hearth does, by putting us into real relation with the past time in its thought, its ideas, its social movements, and its domestic character.

We commend the opening and the close. One augurs well of such a beginning, and at such an ending shuts the book, glad to find the pleasing excitement of a story companied with high thoughts, and fitly finishing with profitable meditation. The book begins with this:

"There is a musty chronicle written in tolerable Latin, and in it a chapter where every sentence holds a fact. Here is told, with harsh brevity, the story of a pair who lived untrumpeted, and died unsung, four hundred years ago, and lie now as unpitied in that stern page as fossils in a rock. Thus, living or dead, Fate is still unjust to them. For if I can but show you what lies below that dry chronicler's words, methinks you will correct the indifference of centuries, and give those two sore tried souls a place in your heart — for a day."

--

* The Cloister and the Hearth; or, Maid, Wife, and Widow. A Matter-of-Fact Romance. By CHARLES READE. New York: Rudd and Carleton.

And it ends with this:

·

"The yellow-haired laddie, Gerard Gerardson, belongs not to Fiction, but to History. She has recorded his birth in other terms than mine. Over the tailor's house in the Brede Kirk Street she has inscribed, Hæc est parva domus natus qua Magnus Erasmus'; and she has written half a dozen lines of him. But there is something left for her yet to do. She has no more comprehended Magnum Erasmum than any other pygmy comprehends a giant, or partisan a judge. First scholar and divine of his epoch, he was also the heaven-born dramatist of his century. Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his mediæval pen, and illumine the pages where they come, for the words of a genius so high as his are not born to die; their immediate work upon mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but, at each fresh shower of intelligence Time pours upon their students, they prove their immortal race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries; they bud, they flower, they fruit, they seed, from generation to generation, and from age to age."

"JEPHTHAH'S Daughters' " is the somewhat fanciful title which

M. Achard has chosen for his latest issue of studies in human character. The three tales of this volume have for their heroines selfsacrificing virgins, who are ready, in obeying duty and parental will, to give up their own affections, and devote themselves to a life of wretchedness. The stories are told with all that grace of style and fineness of delineation in which Achard has few superiors among living French novelists. Bertha, in the first tale, whose familiar name is "L'Eau qui Dort," is a singular union of impulsive and capricious will with deep feeling and lofty disinterestedness. To gratify the imagined wish of her indulgent father, she conceals her own passion, drives away her lover, marries an uncongenial husband, and suffers the additional pain of seeing the misery of her lover married to a foolish and unworthy wife. Salomé, in the second tale, is the daughter of an old Huguenot, of the straitest sort, a woodman in the Black Forest. She loves a young Catholic gentleman, every way worthy of her, but will not marry him on account of her father's antipathy to the Catholic faith, and his vow never to live on the soil with a son-in-law of that hated Church. The parties are wedded at last, when the lives of both his children, saved by Catholic help, have softened the stern Calvinist into consent, but only then by his emigration to America, that his vow may not be broken. Martha, in the third tale, called familiarly "Miss Tempète," gives up her affection for the sake of her gentle and sensitive elder sister, who would die if her love should be disappointed. The chance, very common in real life as well as in romances, of two sisters in love with the same man, is here very skilfully used. All the stories, in fact, are good, and free from any of the immoral situations and allusions which we expect in French novels. The characters stand out in relief, and are few enough for picturesque effect, while they are numerous enough for the impression of real life. The only instance of carelessness which we have noticed in the book is the statement that

* Les Filles de Jephté. Par AмÉDÉE ACHARD. Paris: Hachette. 1861. 12mo. pp. 361.

Rodolph, the hero of the second story, had in his wanderings gone to Baalbec to study "Inscriptions." It is architecture which one studies in that ruined city, but not "Inscriptions." The volume, as a whole, we can heartily commend, as interesting and excellent in its tone.

"The Allen:

MISCELLANEOUS.

A NATION that on a sudden emergency raises its military force in six months from some ten thousand to more than half a million, and its naval force from twenty-five guns to more than a hundred times that number, may be on the way to be a great military power; but it is likely to be embarrassed for a while by the very numbers it has equipped, and a good deal at the mercy of many who know very little of the science and art of war. For a while, during the past season, the conspicuous books on shop-counters, or placarded at booksellers' doors, were almost all military; and thousands of unskilled but intelligent volunteers were put on the royal road to that branch of learning. We trust it is an omen for good, that at the head of the force so hastily mustered is a man who has shown himself as keeneyed an observer and critic in military things as he has been diligent in study, faithful in business, and brave in the field. Except for mere garrison and frontier service, our military force was all to create; and an organism so fearful and wonderful as a modern army should be trusted in the making to no every-day hand. The circumstances under which General McClellan's Report on "The Armies of Europe' " was made to our government are known to everybody; and we have only to notice the great fulness of information, clear brevity of statement, abundant illustration, and the handsome, compact, convenient style of getting-up, as we read it in the edition recently published by authority, by J. B. Lippincott & Co.

THE late librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the literary seclusion caused by permanent illness, contributed to Fraser's Magazine and the Spectator a series of critical papers, part of which have been collected into a handsome volume,† and issued with marked favor in England and America. Mr. Brimley had evidently a high idea of the office of a critic, spared no pains to qualify himself for the work, writes excellent English, and speaks on all topics with perfect independence, and yet with exceeding kindness. Readers will differ as to the severe judgments he sometimes passes upon popular writers, but they cannot differ as to the breadth of thought, purity of purpose, vigor of expression, and freshness of feeling which have entitled these remark

The Armies of Europe; comprising Descriptions in Detail of the Military Systems of England, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sardinia, adapting their Advantages to all Arms of the United States Service; and embodying the Report of Observations in Europe during the Crimean War, as Military Commissioner from the United States Government, in 1855-56. By GEO. B. MCCLELLAN. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 8vo. pp. 499. Illustrated.

† Essays. By GEORGE BRIMLEY, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. New York: Rudd and Carleton. 12mo. pp. 409.