New Books.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND ESTHETIC LETTERS AND ESSAYS OF SCHILLER. Translated, with an Introduction, by J. WEISS. Post 8vo. J. Chapman.

THERE is still such a fundamental difference in the modes of thought between German and English writers, of even high repute and philosophical tendencies, that the one requires most careful interpretation to introduce it to the other. There are still influential and accomplished English critics who refuse to acknowledge the excellence of German philosophy, and who indeed are still so impregnated with John Bullism as to refuse to give it a fair examination. Educated carefully and laboriously in the finite and logical school of Locke, they refuse to enlarge their literary horizon, declaring that they have approached the absolute, as near as is possible, through the medium of English philosophy, and that all beyond is a cloudy dream-land-a foggy region, fit only for crazed idiots or frenzied madmen. The doctrine of German philosophers, of which they know scarcely anything, and, if anything, only through the medium of scraps of criticism on foreign literature, they declare to be "rubbish," "nonsense," that only confounds common-sense, and which ought to be dismissed at once as folly. Such impediments have always existed to the introduction of new thoughts or new modes of examination of abstruse subjects, and no set of persons have shown themselves more unphilosophical than philosophers when their theories have been attacked. It would seem that there is in human nature an overpowering impulse to retain anything it has once conquered, and that to give up what has cost some considerable pains to acquire is a sacrifice that few are inclined to make. The opinions of men, however, will not be stayed by the pertinacity of any set of thinkers or reasoners, and the consequence is that new doctrines, however virulently opposed, will make their value, whatever it may be, felt. It is sad, however, to think that the progress of human advancement is thus retarded, not by the ignorant vulgar, but by the ignorant learned. We are not prepared to say (for we pretend not to the competent knowledge) that the German philosophy is perfect, or even sound, but this we will assert, that some of the subtlest thinkers and most profoundly informed men have appeared in Germany during the last eighty years, and that to dismiss their works as unworthy of consideration, because they are abstruse, is as disgraceful as to assert that a man must be an atheist who does not subscribe to the thirty-nine articles.

These letters (which the very able translator says) stand unequalled

in the department of Esthetics, and are so esteemed even in Germany, which is so fruitful upon that topic, have been upwards of fifty years in reaching us. The same may be said of Schelling's admirable essay on Art, and numerous other works; and during this period what a number of crude essays and works have been foisted on the English reading public. How many works of inferior artists and authors have been thrust into notoriety (though not into fame), and how many dreary years of outrage have many noble minds endured, from the application of false principles in æsthetical matters.

It is a common thing, in English society, to be asked if "all this refinement of argument and remote reasoning is necessary, or of any avail ?" and the real opinion of such questioners is that it is all nonsense. Common-sense, they say, is surely quite sufficient for the elucidation of matters of taste; though in matters of science, which are only the essence of common-sense, they are willing to be led into the most complicated trains of reasoning. Against metaphysics universal prejudice prevails in England, though to that region every question must necessarily retreat. The sooner, therefore, we remove to that elementary ground, the sooner are we likely to elicit absolute truths. This the Germans have long acknowledged. The French philosophy carried mere logic and discussion to its highest point, and established a sceptical theory thereby; and thus the other great thinkers of the world were driven to examine, not only the truths that could be elicited in this mode, but the very foundation of that logic itself. Fichte and Kant led on a host of explorers in this region of mind, and it was pursued with an ardour, power, and learning, that has greatly enlarged human knowledge on the subject of itself.

During this important controversy, in 1795, Schiller published the present Letters, and with the large and profound estimation of things, that peculiarly marked his age and country, perceived and maintained that aesthetics were a portion of morals, and that their foundation was coexistent with nature and the human soul. With his truly poetic spirit and grand moral feeling, poetry and the fine arts were a part of politics, not in the petty sense of the term, as a mere exposition of any peculiar dogmas, but as a part of the directing influence of men's passions and conduct. In this view are the arts treated of in the "Letters on the Esthetic Culture of Man," and in these hitherto, to us, unknown essays will be found the true arguments of many questions now agitating our political world. The mode of really civilising large masses of men; the regulation of the "play-impulse," and the stimulation of the "workimpulse," and many other matters which will employ the last half of the nineteenth century.

A slight quotation will give a glimpse into this wonderful and manifold series of truths.

"Must theoretical culture precede the practical, and yet the latter be the condition of the former? All political improvements should result from nobility of character; but how can the character ennoble itself under the influe n eo

a barbarous civil polity? We must find then an instrument for this design, which the state does not afford, and lay open sources, which preserve themselves pure and undefiled in every political depravation.

"I have now reached the point to which all my previous meditations have tended. This instrument is the fine arts. Those sources are displayed in their undying models. Art, like knowledge, is independent of everything that is positive or established by human conventions, and both enjoy an absolute immunity from the caprice of men. The political lawgiver can encroach upon its province, but he cannot govern there. He can outlaw the friend of truth, but truth remains; he can humble the artist, but cannot debase the arts. It is true, nothing is more common than that both science and art should do homage to the spirit of the age, whose judgments give the tone to the prevailing taste. Where the character is tense and hardened, we see science watching narrowly its limits, and art moving in galling letters of rule; where the character is relaxed and dissolute, science strives to satisfy, and art to delight. Whole centuries have shown philosophers as well as artists busied in immersing truth and beauty in the depths of a vulgar humanity; the former sink, but the latter struggles up victoriously in her own indestructible energy."

It is not possible in a brief notice like the present to do more than intimate the kind of excellence of a work of this nature. It is a profound and beautiful dissertation, and must be diligently studied to be comprehended. After all the innumerable efforts that the present age has been sometime making to cut a royal road to everything, it is beginning to find that what sometimes seems the longest way round is the shortest way home; and if there be a desire to have truth, the only way is to work at the windlass one's-self, and bring up the buckets by the labour of one's own good arm. Whoever works at the present well will find ample reward for the labour he may bestow on it: the truths he will draw up are universal, and from that pure elementary fountain "that maketh wise he that drinketh thereat."

THE STORY OF A ROYAL FAVOURITE. By MRS. GORE. In 3 volumes, p. 8vo. H. Colburn.

MRS. GORE, reversing the distich of Pope, draws "low characters from high life," pourtraying with something of malice the extreme selfishness, folly and inanity of that portion of society which she all through the present novel designates by way of joke (in which it is impossible to see the fun) "the hairy stockorasy." It is said that Mrs. Gore's position in society enables her to give just pictures of fashionable life; and if so we can only say that tory, as she represents herself to be, nothing can have a greater republican tendency than her novels. It is not the first time, by many, that we have found men and classes writing themselves down; and after all the persecution the Chartists have received it is to be doubted if their fiercest writers have ever produced anything so effective against idle rank and superfluous wealth, as what

is termed a fashionable novel. If the great question of worth versus wealth is to be tried (and assuredly it will be) before a presiding world, the most efficient witnesses against hereditary privileges would be the writers of their own faction. Whom heaven would destroy it first renders mad, and certainly the madness pourtrayed by these aristocratic writers, in thus revealing the weakness of their cause, seems to shadow forth the destruction of their class. The Anti-Corn Law League, or the Chartist association, would find it more effective than circulating the prosy speeches of some of their long-winded orators, to buy up the copyright of half a dozen fashionable novels, and circulate them in sixpenny tracts, and at the same time, to prove the extravagance and gullibility of the members of the aristocratical world, telling them the original price was a guinea and a half. Had Cobbett or Tom Paine drawn the characters of an English duchess or a member of parliament as Mrs. Gore has those of the Duchess of Wigmore or Mr. Roper, they would have had an ex-officio filed against them, and been decried as low envious slanderers. There is now, however, in the literature, a mass of evidence from the pens of lords and ladies of fashion, that will at any time justify the importation from France of the law abolishing primogenitureship.

As a novel the work possesses some talent and is readable; and to those anxious, from admiration or detestation of the aristocracy, to know their sayings and doings, very interesting. Mrs. Gore has certainly an almost fatal facility with her pen, and verges toward the hackwriter. The difficulty of maintaining the interest of three volumes begins to be perceptible, and is especially so here, in the second volume. Authorship becomes a trick with her, and she is an adept in all the artifices of novel concoction. For brilliancy there is a perpetual audacity and vivacity (the word should be flippancy). Legislators, systems, poets, prejudices, "all that the world holds dear," are finished off with a sarcasm so feeble and so perpetual that it seems more like petulance than satire, impertinence than sense. She, doubtless, knows her readers, who, strange to say, are to be found amongst the very set she abuses. Common-place characters and incidents do, however, receive from her lively handling a fresh lacker; and although she gives us nothing but pompous dukes, cringing members of parliament, idiot duchesses, roué young lords, amiable kept-mistresses, vapid wives, vulgar ladies'-maids, poisoning foreign valets, brigand couriers, with one ideal hero and heroine, yet she contrives by her so potent art not to render them tedious, though she cannot render them novel. In all the arts of manufacture Mrs. Gore is an adept of the greatest experience: she declares open war with the critics, thus disarming, as she would seem to suppose, their condemnation, on the plea of its being mere offended malice. She garnishes her pages with all the modern and two of the dead languages, though the learned quotations seem to be mere twigs from the tree of learning, or bouquets presented by some scholastic admirer. The furniture of the last

pattern, the fashions of the last date, all that is popular or has any notoriety is alluded to with a familiarity that will make her adored by many readers, more especially country ladies, who own no sway but that of the great world, and who pass their lives in a blaze of enthusiasm towards those who rule in the realms of fashion. Her book too is a very directory of fashionable tradesmen; and advertising is so indulged in that some readers may consider her novel as being a series of disguised advertisements, and that it comes within a class now publishing in Paris, wherein puffs are introduced after this fashion: "Albert flew to meet Helene with an elastic bound, that nothing but the braces of Mons. would have allowed."

The "Royal Favourite" is a little monster of King Charles's breed, whose position enables him to witness many transactions that a biped could not, and his autobiography forms the story, of which, as is usual in novels of character and satire, there is little; and it must be confessed that Mrs. Gore is quite free from the tediousness of long descriptions of persons or things. We have not eight pages on a dress of the middle ages, nor a piece of the Pictorial England stuck into the middle of a volume. What she writes is from her own observation, and therefore, being given without much effort, is readable. If she is not profound, she is never obscure; and if she is never tender, she is never maudlin. Whatever may be her deficiencies as compared with the highest standard, she has still enough of merit to interest her readers, and whoever takes up her novel will read it through, and when he has done so will not altogether have thrown away his time; and to those who want to know all about high life and great folks it will be delightful. No doubt it will be in great request at the circulating libraries, where it will have many inferior competitors, and few, of the present day, superior.

THE BALLAD POETRY OF IRELAND. Edited by CHas. G. Duffy. 24mo. Dublin: J. Duffy.

THIS is a portion of a series issued in Dublin, as wonderful for cheapness and excellence as Mr. Knight's shilling volumes in London. The selection is exceedingly well made, and preceded by a remarkably well-written introduction on Irish Ballads, discriminating with great nicety of taste and judgment the claims they have on the general reader; and fully accounting for the curious fact that the national songs of so impulsive, passionate, and imaginative a people as the Irish, should not have become as popular as those of Scotland and England. It is a volume which, from its price, size, and contents, every Irishman, and all Englishmen who admire lyrical poetry, should possess. Many of the ballads are beautiful, tender, and impassioned poems, and are often indicative of the noble qualities natural to the ill-governed and misled Milesian race; with whom it only requires that Englishmen should come to a right appreciation, to remove the impediments that