who get entangled in its toils are apparently interested in nothing so much as the figure they are making under its influences. And the persons of the tale. if such they may be called, are, for the most part, intensely introversive and selfexplicative; spending much the better portion of their time in listening to catch what their own hearts are saying; evermore counting the pulse of their minds, to ascertain whether they are in a state of spiritual health, and what spiritual medicines they need. So that the staple of the book is little else than a tissue of wire-drawn soul-dissections, and moral diagnostics; people watching their springs of action with microscopic eye, and analyzing their motives, to find out where they come from and what they are made of; till the reader gets bewildered, and sees no path to light but in the conclusion that there really are no motives in the case, nor anything to be moved.

Characters, in the proper sense of the term, there are none in the book; or, if there be, our optics are not keen enough to discern them: the things purporting to be such, have no substantive being, nothing to individualize them in our thoughts; but are mere reflexes from the author's mind, as looked at now on this side, now on that; metaphysic abstractions and generalities dressed in persons' clothing, and moving before us like a procession of puppet phantoms, and opening their make-believe mouths by wire-work, while the operator ventriloquizes to their motions. "The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them." The nearest approach to a character is in the case of old Admiral Clare, in whose freight of sad and tender memories, the mingled beams of sagacity and benevolence that light up his aged face, and the gouty tempers flashing out from a ground-work of steady affections, we catch something like a relish of individual life. This figure excepted, all seems cold, stark, and unreal: the frank exuberances of healthful thought, the free, negligent, unstudied transpirations of nature and natural feeling are wanting; there are no refreshings, no surprises of wit or humour or genial nonsense, to kindle and keep alive a sense of personal converse: instead of these, we have frigid reflection, premeditated sermonizing, clock-work animation, and elaborate self-anatomy. There are indeed many essays at the pathetic, which would thaw into the heart and steal out at the eyes, if they were but accompanied with any inspirations or exhilarations of life to lift the soul out of itself; but in most cases the marks of trap-setting are so plain that the foxy instincts of human sympathy refuse to be caught. Of course, as in all attempts to make us" laugh by precept only, and shed tears by rule," these transports of pathos aforethought seldom produce any thing better than an oppressive feeling that we ought to be moved. As for such delineations of character, it is very much as if one should carve figures in ice, expecting them to survive the process of liquefaction.

Having said thus much, it would be hardly fair to dismiss the book without in licating briefly some of the details. Sir Henry Clare, for some years a parliamentary cipher, has a second wife, booked as Lady Augusta, and also a daughter by his first wife, named Helen. Lady Augusta, having cast the foliage of youth, and dried its sap all out of her structure, and having become

tremendously wise and dignified and self-sacrificing, had accepted the widower's hand under an awful sense of duty, as thinking herself the only woman extant, who could be a suitable stepmother for Helen, to form her mind and manners, and put her safe through the preliminaries of life, marriage of course included, as preliminary in chief. In spite of her maternal schooling and Argus-eyed discipline, Helen turns out a rather wilful, perverse, and impracticable beauty; presuming that it must be a divine thing to have her own way, from the care taken to train her in ways not her own; while the graces of gentleness wrapped up in her nature are kept from germinating, because the proper felicities of girlhood are withheld in order to make her good in the conventional sense of her loving stepmother. The neighbourhood rejoices in a grave, precocious, self-balanced, unyouthful young man named Claude Egerton; one of those rather unpromising promises and sterile expectations, that naturally prompt us to exclaim, " O, wise and upright judge! how much more elder art thou than thy looks." Lady Augusta's large discourse forecasts, even in his boyish days, the man of mark that he is destined to be so she begins, while the dews of their morning are yet undried, to manage and manoeuver out a match between Claude and Helen; and, as her administrative powers are large, she finds means of fructifying them into a fitness for each other, herself being judge. Admiral Clare, the most potential of the Clares, an antiquated bachelor, undertakes to home his old age at Ivors, the country seat of Sir Henry; but the illumination of her Ladyship soon proves too much for him; he is dazzled into a retreat, and concludes to dwell apart from his mighty kinswoman; though not till he has sounded her redundancy of conscience, and made up his mind about her wise doings and designs. As Claude is in some sort a protegé of his, he undertakes to counterwork the match-brewing process. He has his keen but quiet old eye on a far sweeter, though much less showy blossom of womanhood, named Susan Graham, who proves to be the angel of the story. Susan's mother, now a widow, and Helen's mother were sisters, so that the two families have some natural threads of intercourse. Mrs. Graham and her daughters (she has two besides Susan) dwell in a paradise of their own kind affections and cheerful tempers; and from their eyes and lips and hands the old Admiral has enough to warm and gladden his declining years.

It may seem strange that one with so old a head as Claude's, should have youth enough in his heart to fall very deeply in love. Nevertheless, as becomes a dutiful limb of the story, he does at the proper time get smit with Helen he discloses the sweet wound, and has it salved with a soft "yes." Moreover, he gets himself elected to Parliament, and soon moves conspicuous among the tallest in the high walks of legislation. As the day of his happiness draws nigh, Helen discovers that her love is all smoke, and, as she is too much his friend to marry him without the fire, she sees no way but to jilt him off. This is a terrible blow to Lady Augusta: to see all the labour of years thus spilt, almost breaks the place where her heart would be, if she had one. However, she soon rallies enough to set another match in brew

with one Captain Mordaunt, a conceited, leaky, coxcombical sprout of nobility, who is on the eve of blossoming out into an Earl, unless Death should perversely shirk his duty. Helen now flows into an intimacy with Madame Reinhard, a wise, strong-minded woman from Germany, who talks meteors, and aspires to a life so far above life, and waxes so fap with the splendours of celestial truth and beauty, as to snatch freedom of thought from the littlenesses of mundane virtue. With her, Helen gets deeply engaged in a course of German metaphysics and aesthetics and ecstatics; rather parlous food indeed, but that her better angel comes to her rescue. Madam Reinhard has, it is true, a nominal husband, but it turns out that she is one of those spiritualistic saints who either marry without love, or else love without delicacy and respect. She abuses Helen's confidence, and hatches a close correspondence with the Captain; the result of which is, that this aristocratic addlehead falls to vapouring dishonourably touching his matrimonial prospects. Through the officious kindness of Claude and Susan, Helen is informed of these things; whereupon she snaps the link of engagement with her unloved and unloving lover. This throws Lady Augusta into a violent brain-fever, from which she never recovers. The shocking catastrophe brings Helen to herself; her character, sorrow-swept, takes a sudden turn; and she soon comes out shining with the lack of what she had, and with the having of what she lacked.

From the outset, Susan Graham had taxed all the powers of her sweet womanly discretion to help on the match of Claude and Helen, though she had secret cause for wishing it might come to nothing. When it was broken off, the thoughts which, before, she could neither cherish nor repress, began to gather strength. She saw much of Claude, knew him thoroughly, and cared far more for his happiness than for her own. His friendship for her was so deep and confiding as to have the effect of precluding the tender sentiment which she felt for him; and when she, all alive with trembling hope, supposes that she is going to "suck the honey of his music vows," he declares to her his unabated love for Helen, and asks her whether he has any chance of a return. Notwithstanding the silent shattering of expectations deep as life, and of "hopes subdued and cherished long," she sets herself to furthering a reëngagement of Claude and Helen, and lives, though broken-hearted, to see them happy in each other and in divers little Egertons. Susan settles down into a serene, gentle-hearted, seraph-souled old maid, taking it as her ideal of the safest happiness in this world, to live in shade and look upon sunshine.

Lady Augusta's character, if she could properly be said to have any, would be exquisitely disagreeable; so overlaid and encrusted with the starch of respectableness, that none can inwardly respect her. Susan's virtues are too emphatic, and are constantly rendered more so by her efforts to keep them otherwise. Somehow there does not seem to be room enough in her for them; she cannot pull them in on one side without pulling them out on the other; so that the effect is as if she were trying to hide them, in order to let it be seen that they could not be hid. She is indeed framed of angelic goodness, but there is an air of elaborateness and studied finish about her goodness, that

chills the sympathies; and she oppresses us with a sense of our inability to appreciate her we feel that she would be better, if she were not so good; in a word, she is one of those "faultless monsters whom the world ne'er saw."

An Apology for the Common English Bible. Baltimore: Joseph Robinson. New York: Dana & Co. 1857.

Of all the pamphlets of the current season, this is by several degrees the most important that has come to our knowledge. It is from the pen of the Rev. A. C. Coxe, of Baltimore, and presents a searching and masterly review of some recent doings of the American Bible Society. As might be expected from the authorship, it is abundantly able, eloquent, and fearless: it also strikes a blow which was richly deserved, and which now bids fair to accomplish its purpose. The blow was timely, it was well aimed; and proofs are daily thickening that it is not going to be inoperative.

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The American Bible Society was formed for a single, specific purpose. At the time of its formation, in 1816, it avowed that "its SOLE OBJECT was to promote a wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures without note or comment;" and gave an express pledge, that the only copies in the English language to be circulated by the Society shall be the version now in common use." It now appears that a spirit of innovation has lately crept into the management of the Society; it has enlarged its platform of duty; instead of remaining "cribbed and cabined in" to its original "sole object," it has volunteered other items of service, and taken in hand to improve and perfect the translation of the Scriptures. To expose the results of this restless, meddlesome tampering, is the object of the pamphlet in question.

There are many reasons, which cannot here be detailed, why the text of the English Bible as set forth in 1611 should be guarded from innovation with all possible care. The translation was made by an authority from which there was at the time no practical dissent; it was made while Anglo-Saxon Protes tantism was still at unity with itself; and among the sad rents and divisions that have since occurred, it has served as one rallying centre, one thread of common sympathy and interest, and, therewithal, one strong foothold of hope that, in God's good time, the lost unity might be restored. Of course a new version, openly avowing itself to be such, would stand no chance against the old: those sweet, precious words of Elizabethan health and life, upon which so many generations of thoughtful Christians have fed, have rooted themselves too fast in the minds and tongues of Anglo-Saxondom, to be displaced by any thing that the present age can work out, provided it be known as the work of the present age. And, besides the exceeding injudiciousness of setting on foot a course of innovation, we may well question whether it be exactly honest, to circulate, under the sanctions of the ancient standard, the discoveries and novelties and alleged improvements of to-day. Let not the flag of the old ship float over any secret items of contraband. Let the cargo be in all

respects precisely what it claims and purports to be. Let the very first beginnings of change, the slightest initiatory steps of innovation be firmly shut off. Now, we are far from supposing that the old English version is at all points perfect, or that it could not possibly be bettered. Many and great advances have since been made in Biblical and Classical criticism. But modern scholarship has ways enough of rendering its services available, without meddling with the Scripture text. Besides, even if changes were ever so desirable, it is nowise the business of the American Bible Society to make them. The work of improvement is totally beside their commission, and beyond their province. Moreover, it is patent to any fair and candid judgment, that some of their changes are far from being improvements. It may be urged most reasonably that they have in divers cases departed from the old merely because it was old and taken to the new merely because it was new. Change for the sake of change is but too legible in their workmanship, as if they had not strength enough to sit still, nor wisdom enough to keep silent even when they have nothing to say. If the spirit of reform in this matter be suffered to inaugurate itself, there is no telling where it will stop; and the Society in question has already demonstrated a mischievous impatience of rest, and a disposition to run on merely for the delight of seeing itself run.

But we are extending our remarks beyond what we purposed at our setting out. The point last in hand is fully made good in Mr. Coxe's excellent pamphlet, as one or two quotations will show conclusively. Besides various changes, some of them deeply significant, and equally unwarrantable, the Society has carried a sweeping hand through the old headings of the chapters. On this point Mr. Coxe has the following:

Nothing is more valuable to the ordinary reader, as giving him a clue to the fact that the Old and New Testaments are one Gospel, than the great system which runs through the old headings. In them, CHRIST is everywhere, from the Psalter to the Apocalypse. In the Society's headings, CHRIST is nowhere. Even in the New Testament, the old familiar phrases, Christ's passion, Christ's resurrection, and the like, running along the top of the page, and clustering over the heads of chapters, are generally stricken out. We have, instead, Jesus is crucified, The resurrection of Jesus. I know that to a believer this is all the same, for sense; and to him the name of JESUS is the adorable name at which he bows his knee. But it is not the same, by any means, to all for whose evangelizing the Gospel is sent. The Jews are willing to allow that Jesus was crucified; but CHRIST Crucified is what Paul preached unto them as their stumbling block. The Jews always speak of our SAVIOUR as "JESUS of Nazareth," but it was an old law of theirs, that "if any man did confess that He was CHRIST, he should be put out of the synagogue." I am sorry to see this law so profoundly reverenced in the Society's Gospel. Let any one compare the old and the new headings, and see how thoroughly the latter are Judaized. "That worthy name by which we are called," the name of CHRIST, which makes us Christians, seems to have been peculiarly obnoxious to the Society's critics. A similar taste is fashionable among Socinians. They name the name of JESUS, as they speak of Confucius or Plato. May God save our children from being taught, in their very Bibles, the irreverence, which led a Socinian minister, not long ago, to publish a work entitled "JESUS and His biographers," meaning thereby our LORD and His Holy Evangelists!

It is useless to say that Messiah and CHRIST are all the same thing. So they are to a believer, and so they are critically. But practically they are very different. CHRIST and Christian are words which cannot be separated. CHRIST