NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

I. Art, Scenery and Philosophy in Europe. Being Fragments from the Port-folio of the late Horace Binney Wallace, Esq., of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Herman Hooker. 1855. pp. 346.

Daniel Webster said of Mr. Wallace, "He is a young man of as much ability and power as any I know. If I had the power I would most cheerfully bring him into public service." Chief Justice Gibson, a man whose capacious intellect, at least, no one will dispute, said: "Tell him I am proud of his praise. He is one of the few in this our day and generation, who can appreciate the solution of a black-letter question." Professor Dod of Princeton, a man remarkable for the union of scientific and imaginative power, said, "He was the most extraordinary young man I have ever known. He seemed to read and know everything. His superiority and modesty alike attracted my notice." Auguste Comte says of him: "Free from all affectation, his culture, both æsthetical and scientific, was in perfect harmony with his fine organization. I do not exaggerate his merits in ranking him as the equal of the greatest American statesman."

This is high praise, but we are disposed to think Mr. Wallace deserved much of it. His is a name of which Pennsylvania should be proud. The encouragement to devote oneself to literature of the finer and deeper kinds is so scanty, that those who, in these times and in this land, are filled with the thoughts which filled all minds in Greece, are indeed of the "finer clay." Literature, we think, has a much feebler hold upon America than is generally imagined. If it were not for religion, it would soon die out. We owe our very existence as a people, capable of everything great and good, to the Church and the ministry, in a sense more emphatic, perhaps, than is true of any nation that ever existed. Without the patronage of the Government, or the force of the Christian ministry, it is almost impossible to sustain a College, a Review, or anything learned that has not an immediate reference to money-making. When we find, therefore, a man devoted to learning for its own sake, like Horace Binney Wallace, we would accord to him, if not a triumph at great things accomplished, at least an ovation.

He descended from one of that circle of Wallace families in Mid-Lothian and Tweed-dale, which produced Sir William Wallace, and claim rightfully among their ancestry, Robert Bruce. The most authentic account seems to trace them to the De Walays of Normandy. It is remarkable, that of fourteen families whose blazon is given in Burke, in all parts of the United Kingdom, though mostly in Scotland, nearly every one bears the same arms, indicating strength and speed, while the motto without an exception is sperandum est, in one case translated esperance,,

showing their descent from a common stock. John Wallace, who arrived at Newport, R. I., in 1742, was the American progenitor of the branch of the family from which H. B. Wallace descended. He was a nephew of Horace Binney, Esq.

These things had a great deal of influence on Mr. Wallace's mind. He felt it constantly, like an impulse, that he ought not to allow the honor of his family to degenerate in his keeping. In ridiculing a feeling like this, in America, we are treading down one of the safeguards implanted by the God of nature, few enough certainly, around nobleness of character.

We regard it as a great advantage to Mr. Wallace, that he spent a considerable portion of his youth in, what we call in Philadelphia, the country. We do not know who wrote the short Memoir* prefixed to this work, but whoever he is, he does not understand the interior of Pennsylvania, and especially mistakes the character of Meadville, where the family lived for some years. The talk about "Indians" and "primeval forests," and the cockneyisms about "region and scene, quite unlike anything which they had ever known before," and "little kindred to his tastes and character," is quite the worst thing in the book, and the only thing-except the intense Puseyism-which chills our admiration and kind feeling. Meadville has always been, from the time the first road was blazed to it, remarkable among Pennsylvania villages for its cultivation. There have always been families there who were quite fit associates for any one; gentlemen, especially, who like Mr. Wallace, Sr. himself, were led there and to Erie, by their connection with large landed interests, or with the army. Mr. H. B. Wallace there learned nature and reality. His intercourse with the peculiar phase of society around him gave breadth and simplicity to his mind, and many prejudices and dillitanteisms which grow up in the hot-house atmosphere of great cities, never took root in him. We can see the pure healthfulness of the Pennsylvania forests breathing through his entire writings.

Mr. Wallace studied law, but did not practice it. Besides Articles in several periodicals, and a novel in two volumes, written before he was twenty, all anonymous, he published "notes, or more properly, commentaries upon Mr. Smith's Selection of leading Cases in various Branches of the Law; upon White and Tudor's Selection of leading Cases in Equity, and upon decisions in American courts in several departments of the law." An eminent lawyer, in an obituary privately printed, says: "It is, indeed, an injustice to him, to speak of these works in relation to age or years. There is no professional mind, here or elsewhere, that would not have left as many, perhaps more traces of youth, or immature thought, or defective research, among the clear, precise, beautifully written, and, in several instances, bright and radiant criticisms, which have proceeded from his pen in each of these works. The best judges in the country have received them, and spoken of them with the highest respect; and the profession have accredited them, in all our States, by calling for edition after edition of them, in quick succession, as *Not the same as the author of the Obituary, privately printed.

the demand has frequently exhausted the bookseller's supply. It is almost marvellous that a man of thirty, who had had no time or chance to file his opinions and thoughts by the thoughts of other men in bar discussions, should have attained to so true, and uniform, and firm an edge, and to so short and penetrating a point, in all of them. There is not a note or remark in the whole body, that does not show the mind of the lawyer, imbued with the spirit of the science, instinctively perceiving and observing all its limitations, its harmonies, its modulations, its discords, as a cultivated musical ear perceives, without an effort, what is congruous or incongruous with the harmonies of sound. There is a beautiful concord between his thoughts and his language. And all this was effected with inconceivable facility. The American world has lost in him the inappreciable advantage of possessing a great leading critic and writer, in the midst of those surges of judicial opinion which sometimes make the sway of the Law among us shake like a thing unfirm."

We quote an admirable analysis of his manners:

"It has been said that, in appearance, he was reserved. The world so regarded him; and, in the same way, it misregards all men of the same type. He had no reserve whatever. He was frank, cordial, affable, full of conversation, affluent in topics, playfully imaginative in the treatment of them, and prolific in illustrating them by the treasures great or small, that he would appropriately bring from his own memory into the common stock of conversation. He was a converser, not a talker. He was an exchanger of resources and products, not a monopolist. He was dumb to the heart's content of any man who wanted to have all the talk to himself. But in our free intercourse [in America] in which all conditions and characteristics are fused together, it does and will happen that men who have any shyness or sensitiveness on the surface, will be so misregarded. It happens often, as it happened with Mr. Wallace, that the mere temperament of the surface rules in this matter, to a degree of which the party is himself unconscious, as is immediately perceived by all who take any pains to know the person whom they call reserved; for the personal knowledge, after it goes a line beneath the surface, finds an interior all open, free and unconfined. His heart was as warm, and as kindly as a child's, and as true as steel. No difference of opinion or sentiment turned its edge. Instead of being selfish, or self-esteeming, his truer characteristic was that, to speak after the manner of men, it was a defect-that he did not sufficiently value himself upon the productions of his mind and pen, to connect his name with them, nor upon his powers of conversation, to give general society more frequent benefit from them."

It is very characteristic of the man, and—in this, not even age of "bronze," but of mere pinchbeck and veneering-we record it with a satisfaction that we cannot express, that Mr. Wallace refused to allow Dr. Rufus Wilmot Griswold "to give publicity and reputation to his name, by introducing it with portions of his writings, in 'The Prose Writers of America.'" Dr. Griswold had printed a flaming dedication, which he intended to prefix to the book, and which the author of the Memoir gives

us as originally printed." "The types were set up, and the form ready to be worked off," but Mr. Wallace, we can imagine with what joy, was in time to beg that the types might be "distributed," without being used.

If, now, we should give our own opinion of Mr. Wallace, it would be, that he possessed very fine analytical and critical powers, a remarkably pure taste, an exquisite refinement, a comprehensive intellect, a fine fancy bordering very closely upon the region of imagination, if not passing into it. He needed a closer connection, we think, with practical life. He was obviously restless under a confined sphere of action, and we think would have made an admirable judge, or, so far as such a position is possible in America, a senator, dignified in manner, broad and statesmanlike in view. It is the curse of our time, that politicians seem to have no basis for their views, no science of government, but everything floats on the waves of expediency or corruption.

Mr. Wallace was a very thorough-going and somewhat prejudiced highchurch Episcopalian; we say, and are sorry to say it, "prejudiced." His notions about popery are very dangerous, not in a theological but in an æsthetic way. He had a passion, which would have subsided had he lived ten or fifteen years longer, for "Christian Art," and laying out of view, practical, vulgar, every day popery, as it debases the nations and feeds rapacity and licentiousness, he became fascinated with chimes and cathedrals. If he had had a little more of the Presbyterianism of his Scottish ancestors, we should have had less sentiment and more common sense in his letters from Europe.

His writings on artistic matters are very beautiful. In the essays "Art, an Emanation of religious Affection;" "Art, symbolical, not imitative;" "The Principle of Beauty in Works of Art," he goes down to the foundation. His principles are, for the most part, true and noble, and the only ones upon which art can be successfully reared. They are very like Ruskin's, as to their philosophic basis, but without his extravagance. We wish we had room for his analysis of Comte, and of the truth and error which he supposed to lie in the "Positive Philosophy." It shows fine discrimination and much philosophic power.

But we are exceeding our space. We will, however, give the reader one specimen of Mr. Wallace's beautiful writing. It is a description of Milan Cathedral:

"The Cathedral of Milan stands alone in the fields of Art. It is like nothing else in the world, before or since. It seems as if upon the confines of the Teutonic and Ausonian territory, the pure and fervid spirits of German Gothic and of the half classical Italian Gothic had coalesced, and their several excellences had become identified in the strange and almost supernatural loveliness of an offspring, which, though absolutely special and individual, and not one of a race of such, is yet consistent in its novel organization, and irresistible in its fascinating effect. The exterior of the building has not the outlines of a cathedral, but rather the massive and spreading repose of a Greek temple; yet the dress of decorations in which it is arrayed is Transalpine and still not inappropriate. It is a monster, perhaps, according to the botany of architecture, but it is like the peerless and perfect rose, which passes out of the family of order, only to become

the queen over all orders: and we may grant pardon to a deviation which works out an affluence of charms that bewilders the mind in admiration and makes faint the sense with delight.

"There is a wild grace in the delicate and luxurious elegances of Milan, which inflames the admiration into an ecstasy of pleasure. I shall not speedily forget the revelation of joy born of beauty, that opened in an instant upon me, as on the morning after my arrival in Milan, I walked forth from the Inn of Gran' Bretagna along one of the streets, without plan or purpose, and presently found myself upon the piazza of the gorgeous duomo. The façade is bad, on account of the Roman doors and windows which have been let into it. But stand off towards the south side, and view it diagonally, so as to bring the side and roof well into combination, and you will confess that a more singular and more enchanting vision never rose beneath your eye. It was a clear morning in the early November, the air was bracingly cool, with something of Alpine purity, the turquoise-blue of the unclouded vault of heaven was then, to my unaccustomed eye, a ravishment of unreality. Beneath this glowing canopy, and from out the violet atmosphere that filled the whole space between earth and sky, rose the snowy masses of the cathedral, whose crowd of pinnacles seemed to tremble and tingle with diamond-like light. Thought and feeling seemed to melt together in the thrill of the senses' enjoyment, and for an instant I knew not whether to regard that blue heaven as a pictured dream of passioning Art, or that silvery pile as a crystalization of the glorious crown of Nature, who lavishing her grace on Italy, as she had her grandeur upon Switzerland, might seem here to have formed a glacier of loveliness-a Mont-Blanc of beauty. A white-robed, glittering band of seraphs seemed to have just lighted upon the summit of each turret and buttress and finial, and to stand there with pearl-pale spears pointed up to Heaven.

pro

"A striking peculiarity of the duomo of Milan, is that it is built entirely of statuary-marble. Some portions of the stone, especially above the roof, have a roseate or reddish hue which, wrought into statuettes and bas-reliefs, form a delightful effect. The darkening of this stone by age has duced an appropriate and agreeable effect: for the tower part seems to have shared the stains of earth to which it is rooted, while the higher portions bloom in the arum-like whiteness of their virgin quarry. The roof is nearly flat, and very neatly paved with marble; and numerous turrets and pinnacles, set with statues or statuettes, rise around and upon it. The number of the figures now peopling the exterior is said to be above 3,000; and the design when completed will include 6,000. Many of these figures are by sculptors of the first reputation; three or four by Canova. They bear and, indeed, require examination by a glass. That higher, open temple which is thus built and populated upon the top of the duomo, vaulted by the heavens, and lighted by the sun and stars, is a world of curious and delightful intricacy. The religious finish of every façette, and figure, and bas-relief, even in places where the eye cannot approach them except by extraordinary aids; the inscriptive dedications beneath the little shrines, so removed that human gaze cannot decipher them, produces a singular and profound feeling. It seems as if they might be shrines which were wrought for the glory of heaven and the solace of God's nightly angels. The view which the summit commands, with the whole line of the russet-tinted snow-peaks of the Alps along the north, and the ocean-plain of Lombardy in the south, with the great roads that radiate from the city so foreshortened that they seem as if rising directly upward, is one of rare and memorable interest. Walk at twilight or even