fended from without by the same power. With him this power was infinitely stronger than brute force; it possessed the might of immortal spirit. Moved by its impulses and confiding in its strength, he encountered all perils, braved all dangers, fearing God alone. Regard his heroic, his magnanimous life, and no longer say that the spirit of peace is the spirit of abject, of tame submission. ARTICLE IV. CRITICAL NOTICES. 1.-Fragment from Bacchylides. Bacchylides was contemporary with Pindar, and shared with him the favour of king Hiero. A few fragments of his poems are found in Athenæus and Stobæus. Among these, is part of a Hymn to Peace; of which a Latin translation, by Grotius, and a more lit. eral English paraphrase are subjoined. The original is remarka ble for the dignity of its language and may serve, in part, to res cue classical literature from the charge of being, throughout, imbued with a martial spirit. Pax alma res fert maximas mortalibus; Illa ministrat opes, Blandosque lusus carminum. Tunc lætus ignis in Deorum altaribus Cæsasque consumet boves. Gratus palæstræ tunc juventutem labor Sertaque juncta mero Et tibiæ exercet sonus. Tunc inter ipsa fibularum vincula, In clypeique sinu Araneæ texunt opus. Hic hasta, et illic ensium mucro jacet ; Nullo fugatur classico; Sed alta hæret et sui juris sopor! Carminibus resonat Vicinia, et festa dape. The following English version of the above, is from the Greek. Vast are the blessings Peace bestows!— From burning hearth, to heaven flows, The ringing flute and merry dance :- And rust corrodes the sword and lance, Sweet sleep that cherishes the heart, Unbroken, to the eyelid clings: And childhood's songs delight impart. 2.-Sartor Resartus; in three Books. Boston, James Munroe and Company, 1836. pp. 299, 12 mo. This work is composed of a collection of articles from Fraser's (London) Magazine, in which periodical they appeared in the years 1833-4. These articles professed to consist of the Life and Opinions of Diogenes Teufelsdrock, professor of things in general, in a German University, interspersed with remarks of the editor upon the "Clothes Philosophy," a work of this professor. Such is the form in which the work appears. In fact, however, it is in the words of the American Editors, "a Criticism upon the Spirit of the Age, we had almost said, of the hour, in which we live; exhibiting, in the most just and novel light, the present aspects of Religion, Politics, Literature, Arts, and Social Life." The Editors continue, "Under all his gaiety, the writer has an earnest meaning, and discovers an insight into the manifold wants and tenden. cies of human nature, which is very rare among our popular authors. The philanthropy and the purity of moral sentiment which inspire the work, will find their way to the heart of every lover of virtue." The name of the author is not prefixed to the work, but it is gen. erally understood, among the knowing, who is entitled to the honour of having produced it. The author's mode of thinking and style of writing are very peculiar. His distinguishing trait consists in the power of discerning truth in its essence, through all the clothes or outer environments which in this mechanical, clothes-making world of ours, so thickly envelop it. The following extracts from the work in question, will serve to verify this assertion: "No less satisfactory is his sudden appearance, not in battle, yet on some battle field; which, we soon gather, must be that of Wa gram, so that here, for once, is a certain approximation to distinct. ness of date. Omitting much, let us impart what follows: 'Horrible enough! A whole Marchfeld strewed with shell-splin. ters, cannon-shot, ruined tumbrils, and dead men and horses; strag. glers still remaining not so much as buried. And those red mould heaps: aye, there lie the shells of men, out of which all the life and virtue has been blown; and now are they swept together, and crammed down out of sight, like blown eggshells!—Did nature, when she bade the Donau bring down his mould-cargoes from the Carinthian and Carpathian heights, and spread them out here into the softest, richest level, intend thee, O Marchfeld, for a corn. bearing nursery, whereon her children might be nursed; or for a cockpit, wherein they might the more commodiously be throttled and tattered? Were thy three broad highways, meeting here from the ends of Europe, made for ammunition-wagons, then? Were thy Wagrams and Stillfrieds but so many ready-built casemates, wherein the house of Hapsburg might batter with artillery, and with artillery be battered? König Ottokar, amid yonder hillocks, dies under Rodolf's truncheon; here Kaiser Franz falls a-swoon under Napoleon's; within which five centuries, to omit the others, how has thy breast, fair plain, been defaced and defiled! The greensward is torn up and trampled down; man's fond care of it, his fruit-trees, hedge rows, and pleasant dwellings, blown away with gunpowder; and the kind seedfield lies as a desolate, hideous Place-of Sculls."" 'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain natural enemies' of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now, to that same spot in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxta-position; and thirty stands fronting thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word Fire!' is given; and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their governors had fallen out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor block heads shoot.-Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still, as of old, what devilry soever kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper !'-In that fiction of the English Smollett, it is true, the final cessation of war is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two natural enemies, in person, take each a tobacco-pipe, filled with brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces, till the weaker gives in. But from such predicted peace-era, what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!"" 3.-Postscript to a poem entitled Captain Sword and Captain Pen. The London Herald of Peace, (No. 55,) contains extracts from a postscript to a poem, with the above title, written by Leigh Hunt. The object of the poem is to portray the horrors of war. The author is favourably known to American readers from several mi. nor poems. Hazlitt, in his critical list of authors prefixed to his compilation of select British poets, says, "Leigh Hunt has shown great wit in his Feast of the Poets, elegance in his occasional verses, and power of description and pathos in his story of Rimini. The whole of the third canto of that poem is as chaste as it is classical." In this postscript, Hunt professes to feel due admiration for that courage and energy, the misdirection of which he deplores; and while he acknowledges that heretofore war may have been neces sary, he expresses his belief that by encouraging the disposition to question this necessity, it may soon cease to be so. For ourselves, we imagine that if such a disposition had heretofore been sufficiently encouraged, the necessity would never have existed at all. Such views of the absurdity of war as are contained in the following passages of the postscript, had they been universally prevalent, would certanly have gone far towards preventing any such neces sity: "I firmly believe that war, or the sending thousands of our fel. low creatures to cut one another to bits, often for what they have no concern in, nor understand, will one day be reckoned far more absurd than if people were to settle an argument over the dinner. table with their knives—a logic indeed, which was once fashiona. ble in some places during the "good old times." The world has seen the absurdity of that practice: why should it not come to years of discretion, with respect to violence on a larger scale? The other day, our own country and the United States agreed to refer a point in dispute to the arbitration of the king of Holland; a com. pliment (if we are to believe the newspapers) of which his Majesty was justly proud. He struck a medal on the strength of it. Why should not every national dispute be referred, in like manner, to a third party? There is reason to suppose, that the judgment would stand a good chance of being impartial; and it would benefit the character of the judge, and dispose him to receive judgments of the same kind; till at length the custom would prevail, like any other custom; and men be astonished at the customs that prece. ded it. In private life, none but school-boys and the vulgar settle disputes by blows; even duelling is losing its dignity. Two nations, or most likely, two governments, have a dispute; they reason the point backwards and forwards; they cannot de termine it; perhaps they do not wish to determine; so, like two carmen in the street, they fight it out; first, however, dressing themselves up to look fine, and pluming themselves on their ab. surdity, just as if the two carmen were to go and put on their Sunday clothes, and stick a feather in their hat besides, in order to be as dignified and fantastic as possible. They then " go at it," and cover themselves with mud, blood, and glory. Can any thing be more ridiculous? Yet, apart from the habit of thinking otherwise, and being drummed into the notion by the very toys of infancy, the similitude is not one atom too ludicrous; no nor a thousandth part enough so. I am aware that a sarcasm is but a sarcasm, and need not imply any argument; never includes all; but it acquires |