THE CHURCHMAN'S MONTHLY REVIEW AND CHRONICLE. JANUARY, 1844. ROME AS IT WAS UNDER PAGANISM, AND AS IT BECAME UNDER THE POPES. Two vols. 8vo. London: Madden. 1843. "I STAND continually upon my watch-tower in the day-time: I am set on my watch whole nights: " the words of the burden of the desert of the sea might well be our motto, if we did our duty now. As in the changing fashion of our garments, few persons consider how the changes come about; why a certain colour haunts our vision one year, and the next year disappears; a certain form pleases us to-day, that presently will seem awkward and ill-fashioned; and little more account is asked, or can commonly be given of the matter, but that the dealer makes them because they are worn so;' and the wearer purchases them because they are made so'-thus to a great extent it is with what is called the literature of the day. The mass of readers have frequently no other reason for their choice of books but that they are the fashionable reading of the time; the writer and the publisher no reason for their choice of subjects but to meet the demands of a prevailing taste while deep in the bosoms of the reflecting, the observingit may be the designing-the secret lies hidden, whence the impetus comes, which gives the direction to the yielding mass. "The fashion of this world passeth away," says the Holy Scripture: and if that were all, we might conform ourselves to its fantasies, and let it pass. But in this case it is not so. The prevailing character of our ephemeral publications, expresses as well as influences the tone of public thought-indicates the appetite as well as affects the health of our whole moral, intellectual, and spiritual being. When it pleased Almighty God to commit the knowledge of himself, his mind, and will, to the keeping of "a book," he knew the fitness and potency of such an instrument to affect the minds of men. And be sure, when the evil one marked this act and deed of the Most Holy, he took a lesson from Eternal Wisdom, and learned his lesson well. Next to those unseen internal influences on the minds of men, with which he imitates the Holy Spirit's gracious actings, we doubt not that " reading" is Satan's chief instrument of mischief, now that all those sensible communications are forbidden him, by oracles, possessions, and whatever else had served his purpose in the olden time. The power of this instrument for good and evil, increases every day; and every day its significancy becomes of more vital moment. The light which heretofore shone out from the high places of literary fame, from the convent, the study, and the school, to guide or to entrap, to lead or mislead, as it might be, the inquiring multitude, is now the way-lamp in every separate hand, by which each individual runs to and fro to find his own way or to lose it. And has not the same prophetic scripture, which marks this as the character of the last days, added thereto, "But the wise shall understand?" The changes in our popular reading are never without a cause or without a consequence, of importance increasing in equal ratio with its extent; and therefore never so important as now. "Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain, that are ready to die," saith the Spirit to the declining church of Sardis. It surely becomes the Lord's watchmen, for other ends than criticism, to be very mindful of the phases of public reading now. We had occasion, heretofore, to remark the stealthy inroad surreptitiously making in our nursery lore: the altered lists of our Sunday-school and village libraries, our children's story-books and servants' tracts. More recently we noticed the certainly not stealthy inroads of anti-protestant opinions, through the Tractarian novels. We have had occasion to review poems of portentous length, to which, at the best, the muse was but the step-mother: and travels to which neither art nor nature's wonders were the hand-book. These are but separate symptoms of the one disease, that is working at the very heart's core of true religion in our land. Among the many changes the Tractarian leaven has already wrought beyond its marked boundary, and beyond, we fear, its even suspected limits, nothing is more painfully manifest than the influence it has had on the ordinary writing and reading of the day. Each separate indication of this change seems trifling in itself, and might escape detection: but the aggregate is momentous. In public, we mark the reprinting of a certain class of books, familiar as the Sunday-reading of our young days, but almost obsolete since the multiplication of tales, dialogues, formularies, argued all on the one side, but read too carelessly and curiously on both sides the discovery that religious tracts are a dangerous species of novel-reading for the poor; while a new species of novel-reading inundates the tables of the rich. In private, we hear the plain declaration from parents who were not used to think so, that young people had better read any thing than religious books, which set them to thinking and judging for themselves: and mark the actual fact, that in families where through ten, fifteen, twenty years of careful religious instruction, the young people never saw so much as the cover of a novel or play-book, every inquiry about their reading now is answered with Scott's novels, Fletcher's plays, Richardson or Burney, Evelinas and Cecilias, which truly seem to share with graver names the sudden revival of patristic lore; following as aptly upon Gresley and Paget, as Ken and the Breviary on the Oxford Tracts. We are credibly informed that in a certain palatinate in the north of England, where all the clergy of the neighbourhood are professedly opposed to Puseyism, Paget and Gresley's stories are the common gift-books and loan-books to the poor. It is written that "none of the wicked shall understand," and we do apprehend that a headlong plunge into dangers unperceived, and mischiefs undesigned, both is, and is to be, characteristic of the days that are at hand. But those who are esteemed wise who should be wise-might surely understand what is likely to be the next reading of those to whom they thus administer the first laugh at sacred things-how easy a step from the Warden of Birkenholt to Jack Shephard and Joe Miller. A step just so easy will be taken by the readers of Rutilius and Lucius to the work before us, as unconsciously, as fearlessly. The author is of course a papist: though publishing without a name, we do not charge him with obliquity or disguise; beyond the cautious silence of the title-page and preface, we do not perceive that any is intended: and, in truth, our Tractarian fiction-writers might take a lesson of prudence from their Romish fellowlabourer, in the avoiding of all those resounding strokes which they have rashly given to the building they seek to undermine. The book before us is an assault on nobody-on nothing. You would not know by it that there was an error or à schism in Christendom. Even the small manner of deception that may seem to be implied in the historical title, and octavo shape, and verily authentic map, with which it is sought to pass a wholly fictitious narrative, is dissipated in the preface, by the somewhat artless confession of the writer, that it has been composed "under the auspices of imagination;" with certain candid intimations that of whatever is historical and authentic in the events and characters, nothing is related exactly as it happened; by reason of "some slight imaginative embellishment," and a "reverse" of all historical perspective in the "style of the grouping: " all intended, and certainly calculated, to afford the reader "the no small, and not-by-any-meansto-be-despised advantage," of drawing fictitious conclusions from authentic statements. We do not think we can do our author better justice, without betraying our public trust, than by giving his programme in his own words. Of course it does not escape our notice that the preface-writer purports to be only the editor of an anonymous manuscript. This allowed artifice of fictitious. writing is peculiarly inartificial in the present case; since it would be quite impossible for any two persons to have achieved exactly such a rendering of the English tongue. We might almost stake our critical reputation on the fact that no one ENGLISHMAN could have done it; unless it should be that from his very cradle he had merged in latinity, or something else, his mother-tongue. After a description of the present site of Rome-compassed with walls, "that are obviously done with sieges," "garrisoned now only by recollections," and "garlanded with wild flowers, with grass, parasitical herbs, and precarious shrubs," (a new genus in botany, we apprehend), where "the very ruins of palace, amphitheatre, and triumphal arch, seem to exalt themselves higher in sullen haughtiness, and to regard with unutterable indignation those vile intruders" (a monastery or hermit's cell inclusive) "upon the cemetery of heroism and empire which they guard" the author thus proposes himself: "The writer of the following pages (whoever he may have been) seems to have aimed at giving a vivid idea of the revolution, by which the Rome of the Cæsars was reduced to this prostrate state, and in which the Rome of the popes had its beginning. With this view he labours not only to fill up, as 'twere anew, the gaps of centuries,' but completely to rebuild the imperial city; to restore the palatine, the trophies and temples of the forum, the capitol, and the Campus Martius; to re-open the Thermæ, the amphitheatre, and the circus; to repair the aqueducts, replenish a thousand glorious fountains with their limpid treasures; not only to replace the furniture and priceless embellishments of the palaces, and rebuild the altars of the 'immortal gods,' but to throng the Appian and Flaminian way with the concourse of the nations, and awake, from the sleep of centuries, the Roman people and the senate, with "The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule |