Frank, still masked, addresses her. "Il sèche ses larmes au rayonnement de l'or et la rend infidèle sur son cercueil."

Here, then, are the two poets whom M. Taine contrasts as representative writers in the last, and what perhaps is the most. remarkable chapter in his History. There can be no question There is a depth of tender

with which one are his sympathies. ness in every line of this tribute to De Musset which we have not found anywhere in his description of any English writer. He goes further. He describes the wretched place where his impassioned poems were written under the influence of brandy: and where, as one of his biographers has said, "souvent, il se faisait amener, comme les peintres, un modèle vivant, dont les poses plastiques venaient en aide à ses inspirations." He describes the room, where, as we are told, "he burned out his brain" with absinthe, and the gloomy street, in that part of Paris, where, at night, "the restless shadows march past the doors and trail along their dresses of draggled silk to meet the passers by;" and he tells us in so many words that "it was these vilenesses and vulgarities of the stews which caused his divine eloquence to flow !"-"It was these which gathered in his bruised heart all the splendors of nature and history, to make them spring up in sparkling jets and shine under the most glowing poetic sun that ever rose. Then he turns to that" other poet," as he half contemptuously calls him, "away there in the Isle of Wight, who amuses himself by dressing up lost epics; and exclaims: "How happy he is amongst his fine books, his friends, his honeysuckles, and roses!" "But," he continues, "No matter! De Musset, in this very spot, in this filth and misery, rose higher. From the heights of his doubt and despair, he saw the infinite, as we see the sea from a storm-beaten promontory. Religions, their glory and their decay, the human race, its pangs and its destiny, all that is sublime in the world, appeared there to him in a flash of lightning. He felt, at least this once in his life, the inner tempest of deep sensations, giant dreams, and intense voluptuousness, whose desire enabled him to live, and whose lack forced him to die. He was no mere dilettante; he was not content to taste and enjoy; he left his mark on human thought; he told the world what was man, love, truth, happiness. He

suffered, but he invented; he fainted, but he produced. He tore from his entrails with despair the idea which he had conceived, and showed it to the eyes of all, bloody but alive. That is harder and lovelier than to go fondling and gazing upon the ideas of others." The people who have listened to Tennyson are better than our aristocracy of towns-folk and bohemians; but I prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson." With this frank confession the History of English Literature is closed.

And now we have endeavored, according to the methods of M. Taine himself, "to annihilate as far as possible whatever prevents us from seeing him with the eyes of our head." In his own words, we have imagined to ourselves an accomplished French gentleman "in a black coat and gloves," whose lodgings in Paris are" on the second floor;" who "is welcomed by the ladies; who makes every evening his fifty bows, and his score of bon-mots in society; who reads the papers in the morning; who is not over gay, because he has nerves, and especially because the refinement of his feelings disposes him somewhat to believe himself a deity." This modern literary Crichton has mastered all knowledge, has travelled everywhere, knows everybody, has seen everything. Yet he is not blasé. He feels no ennui; for he has the inestimable advantage of being carried away with a theory, and he has made it the business of his life to apply this wonderful theory to the whole round of activities of which the human mind is capable. He has at last taken up English literature, as the work which is to crown all that he has yet attempted. He has said some things that are valuable; many things which we cannot but admire. He is always brilliant. He is never dull. Sometimes, it is true, we cannot understand exactly what he means. And, certainly, when he declaims about Alfred de Musset, "tearing from his entrails with despair the idea which he had conceived, and showing it to the eyes of all, bloody, but alive," we confess that we are a little inclined to doubt his sanity! At all events, we are sure that if an Englishman should talk in this style the boys in the street would laugh at him. But of one thing we are quite confident, that his critical tastes are such that it is impossible for him to feel any sympathy with or love for English literature, and that, in

the preparation of this book, it has held in his eyes only a very subordinate position. He reminds us of some enthusiastic savan of the École de Médicine, who imagines that he has been successful in making some grand discovery with regard to the principle of life, and stands over the dissecting table, in the full tide of eloquence, while he uses the inanimate mass before him only for the purpose of illustrating his physiological specu lations. So M. Taine seems to us to make use of the treasures of English literature. He shows prodigious learning, and wonderful powers of description and analysis, yet it is manifest all the time that it is the theory which is the most important thing. in his eyes, and that he regards the literature only as the corpus vile which can be made to serve to illustrate it.

ARTICLE VII.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.*-We did not think it would come in our day, but here it is. Puritanism in the Church of England, persecuted under Elizabeth and her successors, victorious for a season under the Long Parliament, betrayed by the folly of its Presbyterian leaders into complicity with the restoration of the Stuarts, ignominiously expelled from the establishment by the reactionary government of Charles II, and seemingly annihilated under the reign of William and Mary by the Act of Toleration which converted Puritans into Dissenters, emerges into life again in these latter years of Victoria. The Rev. G. A. Jacob, D.D., late Head Master of Christ's Hospital, writing not as a Dissenter from the ecclesiastical establishment of England, but as a member of that establishment, has ventured to do what Thomas Cartwright did three centuries ago; he has carefully and learnedly investigated the Ecclesiastical Polity of the New Testament, has compared it with the system of the Church of England, and now, like Cartwright and the Puritans of old, he asks for a new reformation. The times are changed indeed since the reign of Elizabeth; it is not probable that Dr. Jacob will suffer for his theoretical Puritanism, so long as his conscience. will permit him to wear the vestments and read the liturgy with strict observance of the rubrics; he has, as the old Puritans had not, full liberty to withdraw from the Established Church, and as a Dissenter to preach and pray, and to unite with others in worship, according to his own convictions; he need not fear that his afflictions will be like Cartwright's; the England of Victoria is in many things exceedingly unlike the England of Elizabeth; but the Church of England, in its government and discipline, and in its formularies both of doctrine and of worship, remains unchanged. Dr. Jacob thinks it is high time to reform that singularly composite institution which for three hundred years has been, of all things in the English speaking world, most unreformable.

*The Ecclesiastical Polity of the New Testament. A Study for the Present Crisis in the Church of England. By Rev. G. A. JACOB, D.D., Late Head-Master of Christ's Hospital. New York: T. Whittaker.

Dr. Jacob's work is in the form of lectures (for some reason never delivered) on the following topics: "The Apostles and the Christian Church,"-" The First Organization of the Church,”"A further consideration of the Christian Ministry "-proving that it is not a priesthood,-"The Laity, or Christian Body at Large," "Public Worship"-including the question of prescribed liturgies," Christian Baptism,"-"The Lord's Supper,"-with a concluding lecture in which the facts and principles of the New Testament polity are applied to the impending crisis in the Church of England. Learning, carefulness, candor, and moderation characterize the entire work. We commend it to our friends—clerical and laical-in the American Episcopal Church. Be they ever so High, or ever so narrow, if they will read it in the spirit in which it is written, they will find themselves brought out in a large place. We do not say that they will cease to be Episcopalians; but they will be conscious of a new freedom.

Perhaps there is no better treatise on the scriptural warrant for the Congregational theory of Church government than this book from an Evangelical Broad-Church Episcopalian.

NAEGELSBACH ON JEREMIAH AND LAMENTATIONS.* The present volume of Lange's Bibelwerk, though far enough below the mark of the best German commentaries, is somewhat better than any we have hitherto had in English on this part of the Old Testament. Naegelsbach has a little more Hebrew scholarship and a little less disregard for the principles of historical criticism than are current among us. Of the poetical portions of the book of Jeremiah Mr. Asbury has given a new translation, "founded on a comparison of the German and English versions with the Hebrew." We assume that he has adhered substantially to Naegelsbach's interpretation, and is to be held responsible only for the language in which the ideas are clothed. In this he is not always happy. Such renderings as these will hardly strike any one as improvements on King James's Version: ii, 5, "followed vacuity and became vacuous;" v, 4, "stultified;" vi, 24 (and elsewhere frequently, both as a noun and adjective), "parturient;" xx, 10,

* A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures. By JOHN PETER LANGE, D.D. Vol. XIII. of the Old Testament, containing Jeremiah and Lamentations, theologically and homiletically expounded, by Dr. C. W. EDWARD NAEGELSBACH. Jeremiah translated, enlarged, and edited by SAMUEL RALPH ASBURY; Lamentations translated, enlarged, and edited by WM. H. HORNBLOWER, D.D. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1871. 8vo, pp. 446, 196.