tory of Christianity in the Roman world was the victory of Christ, who was lifted up that he might draw all men with him.'

The passages of the book that we would point out for the attention of scholars are those portions of the first part that treat of the influence of the Roman Empire upon Christianity, the yearnings for more light and better motive among the poets and philosophers of Greece, and the rise of a sense of justice and of universal humanity among the Romans, in spite of the hideous vices that prevailed; with the full and careful consideration of the systems of the Platonists and the Stoics. In the second part, Chapter X., on "The WaterMarks of Age in the New Testament Histories," cannot but interest and impress students who have been attracted by the sweeping denials of Baur and Strauss, or by Renan's easy method of doing away with the authority of these documents; while the closing chapter, on "The Characteristics of Christianity in the First Century," may stir the desire for a further handling of the subject by the same candid and accomplished pen.

Some nicer and more critical treatment of the relations of Jewish and Greek thought to Christian faith might be desired by philosophic scholars; and, perhaps, men of affairs and also followers of the dynamic school of science and of society would like a more adequate interpretation of the vital forces, the will and the muscle, perhaps the passion and the policy, that went into the new religion, and gave it the upper hand. But the book does excellently what it undertakes, and it is a substantial contribution to our literature. Is it not in the wholesome direction of what may be called our rising American Renaissance-the movement, not to supplant faith and devotion by mere taste and culture, but rather to nurture within religious sanctions the generous humanity and the enlightened philosophy, that shall remove the offense of the hard old theocracy, and make our art and science and letters a part of our heritage from the source of all good? Certainly Yale College, that began with a stern defense of the Puritan theocracy against the Harvard latitude then, has an ecclesiastical professor who is not behind Harvard in the humanities.

3.-Prose and Verse. Humorous, Satirical, and Sentimental. By THOMAS MOORE, with Suppressed Passages from the "Memoirs of Lord Byron," chiefly from the Author's Manuscript, with notes edited by Richard Herne Shepherd, and a Preface by Richard

Henry Stoddard. New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co. 1878. Pp. xx.-444.

THE contents of this volume consist chiefly of a damned play, which Moore himself confessed was good for nothing, and a number of articles reprinted with no great expenditure of time or labor from the Edinburgh Review, in the pages of which they might have been left to slumber without much loss to the world. The "suppressed passages" from Byron's life seem to be chiefly made up of notes jotted down by the author when he had the book in view (e. g., 'Lord B.'s modesty "_"his looking up to all the men he lived with," -"mentioned this in talking of his praises of me"), which he used in writing it, so far as he needed them, and which are now generally of no particular value. The play, "M. P.; or, The Blue-Stocking," even a dead failure when produced on the stage, and the pretty little songs it contains, have been mostly printed in the author's "Poetical Works." Most of the other verses in the book are derived from a scrap-book formerly in Moore's possession, containing newspaper cuttings of his political squibs, with his own manuscript corrections, as prepared for the collected edition of his works, from which they were omitted, it seems, "either by accident, or for some temporary reasons, which no longer exist." Some of these are well worth preserving, though we confess to a slight feeling of resentment at being forced to take with them such a very large dose of well-forgotten prose. Many of them show Moore at his best-as the composer of those light verses in which he excelled, sometimes vers de société, sometimes political squibs, in which we have all the pleasure to be got from a graceful wit in the hands of a master of versification. For graceful banter and raillery in verse, for badinage and pretty sentiment, for every one of the less weighty literary faculties, Moore is undoubtedly unequaled, and a hundred years hence the idea of criticising him seriously from any other point of view will probably be no more thought of than a classical scholar would now think of complaining of Anacreon because he did not write an epic. The efforts of his most moral and praised contemporaries to lift him up to what would now be called a "higher plane," will probably then seem only amusing. On a higher plane Moore was out of his element, and not at his best. When Leigh Hunt adjures "dear Tom" not to—

"Pollute the bright Eden Jove gives to his care,

But love the fair Virtue for whom it is given,

And keep the spot pure for the visits of Heaven,"

one involuntarily turns to "dear Tom's" first prophetic effusions in

verse (p. 3), in which in 1793 he gave the world warning of what was in store for it:

""Tis true my Muse to love inclines,

And wreaths of Cyprias' myrtle twines;
Quits all aspiring lofty views,

And chants what Nature's gifts infuse."

Nothing could be better than this as an indication of what he felt inspired to do, and we can no more find heart to regret it than we can that Theodore Hook did not take to preaching sermons, or that Sheridan did not devote his life to African missions. Some of the verses which Mr. Shepherd has rescued from oblivion are well worth preserving; as, for instance, the "Songs of the Church, No. II.," an excellent poetical parody of Shenstone's

"I have found out a gift for my fair."

In the notes for Byron's life, too (p. 423), there is a valuable hint (we do not recollect whether it is given in the life itself or not) that should be read and pondered by any one who proposes to examine the evidence in Mrs. Stowe's attack on the poet's private life. Moore says:

...

"The pride of personating every description of character, evil as well as good, influenced, as we have seen, but too much of his conduct. . . . To such a perverse length, indeed, did he sometimes carry this fancy for self-defamation, that if, as he himself in moments of depression supposed, there was any tendency to derangement in his mental faculties, on this point alone could it be pronounced to have showed itself. . . . I have known him, when a little under the influence of wine, as we have sat together after dinner, to fall seriously into one of these dark and self-accusing moods, and throw out hints of his past life and its deeds, with an air of mystery, designed evidently to evoke curiosity and interest. I have little doubt that, to produce effect at the moment, there is hardly any crime so dark of which, in the excitement of this acting upon the imagination of others, he would not hint that he had been guilty; and it has sometimes occurred to me that the real secret cause of his lady's separation from him, round which herself and her legal advisers have thrown such a formidable mystery, may after all have been nothing more than some dramatic trial of his own fancy and of her credulity, some invention in the dramatic guise of confession of undefined horrors meant merely to mystify, his temptation to such tricks being increased by the precise character of his hearer, but which the lady, unluckily for both, so little understood him as to take seriously."

4.-Reminiscences and Anecdotes of Daniel Webster. By PETER HARVEY. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1877. 8vo, pp. x.–480. MR. HARVEY's book is one of those which is sure to have what the French call a succès d'estime. It is written about a distin

guished man by an intimate friend, contains what purports to be interesting or amusing anecdotes relating to him and his friends, and important hitherto unpublished reminiscences. Yet we have searched the book in vain for any indication that Mr. Webster was a great or even interesting person. We know that he was; but Mr. Harvey almost makes us doubt it. We cannot help asking ourselves, as we read Mr. Harvey's prosing pages, whether this is indeed the great Webster who argued the Dartmouth College case, who made the Ashburton treaty, and whose dispatches and speeches on matters of public law are not less authorities than the treatises of Grotius and Wheaton, or whether it is not rather some local political hack unknown beyond the bounds of his petty borough, whose fast-waning fame is fanned again into a temporary blaze as an excuse for the publication of this volume. Mr. Harvey takes us through the statesman's early years, exhibits him to us as a law-student, at the bar, in public life, in his intercourse with his contemporaries, and at home; gives us his traits of character, his religious thoughts and feelings, and even takes us into the confidence of his last moments and death-bed; and yet after all is done we know little more of Mr. Webster than before, and what is worse we know a great deal more of a person toward whom at the outset we entertained no unkind feelings, but for whom our regard diminishes in warmth with the growth of our acquaintance -we mean the author. The book might be called "Webster's Reminiscences of Harvey," so certainly and so minutely does it make us acquainted with the peculiarities of the latter. Not that it is an egotistic book; far from it. Mr. Harvey's abasement of himself in the presence of his idol is profound; but there are certain qualities of his which shine through his modesty, and will not let us have any peace. As his tale goes on, we feel that there is being photographed upon our mind's eye an image not of Webster, but of Harvey himself, the devout biographer worshiping his great friend, but worshiping him without knowledge, and wholly misunderstanding and misrepresenting him. Many of his reminiscences would have been better not remembered, some of his anecdotes not told.

There are, of course, stories worth telling. Often Mr. Harvey catches a gleam of Mr. Webster's humor, and reproduces it faithfully; as (in a small way) in the case of the nicknames he was in the habit of giving his favorite fowling-pieces, the "Learned Selden" and the "Wilmot Proviso;" and here and there we find something with regard to public matters, or the practice of his profession, which deserved a memorandum. For instance, we may mention the curious

ly-verified prophecy made after he had failed to receive the nomination at Baltimore (in 1852), looking forward to the ruin of the Whig party, declaring that its downfall had begun when it began to take "available" instead of well-qualified men as candidates; that General Scott would not receive the electoral vote of six States; that Pierce would be elected, and that after the 4th of November the Whig party would cease to exist.

Again, Mr. Harvey unwittingly now and then reveals Mr. Webster's failings in a curious way; the following extract from a letter we should hardly have expected to find carefully preserved by a sincere admirer of Mr. Webster:

"For my part, though I like the investigation of particular questions, I give up what is called the science of political economy. There is no such science. There are no rules on these subjects so fixed and invariable that their aggregate constitutes a science. I believe I have recently run over twenty volumes from Adam Smith to Prof. Dew; and, from the whole, if I were to pick out with one hand all mere truisms, and with the other all the doubtful propositions, little would be left."

The passages which describe Webster's advice to Mr. Harvey to vote for Pierce would have had light cast upon them by mention of the fact that his son Fletcher Webster retained his lucrative Federal office at the port of Boston under the incoming Administration. But Mr. Harvey's services in detaching the Webster Whigs may be held to have deserved that recognition; they were assiduous and successful. It is only just to this duller Boswell, who possessed at least the greatest of those qualities which aroused the enthusiasm of Carlyle in the self-effacing and admiring biographer of Dr. Johnson, to say that his reserve is complete where he might have told so much, in respect to the chronic pecuniary straits which would have disclosed the weakness of his idol.

The volume ends with a full report of the unveiling of Ball's colossal statue of Webster in the Central Park of New York, an occasion remarkable by the orations of Mr. Evarts and Mr. Winthrop, and the absence of Webster's most intimate friend now living, his only surviving literary executor and his biographer, the accomplished lawyer and publicist, Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, who divides with Rufus Choate and Edward Everett the honor, which Peter Harvey has so sadly missed, of being the faithful custodian of an exceeding and just fame.