ment, by which our author would justify our confidence in the character and destinies of this continent, as the soil of harvests noble as they are altogether new. "The eyes of the people," he says, "though they may be easily dazzled for a moment, see clear on a cloudy day"; and we believe that their vision will yet be purified. "The consolation of art and science is no compensation for the proud conviction that one belongs to a great, proud, honored, and dreaded people," said Goethe, keenly feeling the divisions and weakness of his own. And while we admire and half envy that powerful and stanch nationality which gives deeper breath and fuller pulse to the breast of every Briton, -we remember that it has been wrought by the strifes, griefs, and glories of ten centuries; and confide afresh in the slow, sure development of our own.

What we have said has been, not in echo to that vainglorious and deceitful boasting that has already done this people so deep harm, but in devout recognition of what we consider to be the providential facts of our position, and the better qualities of our common nature; as a protest, moreover, against that tone of disparagement and complaint, in which Christian moralists, and especially American moralists, too often indulge. Surely there cannot be a true public morality, healthy and sincere, that does not gratefully recognize, and is not in harmony with, the better characteristic traits of one's own time and people. These, we insist, every man who is free-born, especially if he seeks to guide or instruct his fellow-men, should heartily apprehend. pining, captious, discontented, cynic criticism is but a poor substitute for that generous and manly sympathy, which, while it condemns the wrong, yet more heartily cherishes and rejoices in the good.

A

Into the channel, and towards the end now hinted, as we firmly trust, will set the main current of our destiny. That destiny is not yet, it may be, "manifest"; but lies still within the dominion of our free will. We have already noble institutions, and land, and hope; these are our inheritance. But we are not a noble people, — strong, magnanimous, or wise enough to throw off the burden of our wrong, and VOL. LXIII. 5TH S. VOL. I. NO. II.

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freely to choose the simply right. Still we shrink from the path of honorable danger and self-sacrifice — only to plunge into deeper danger, and incur heavier sacrifice. Still we have the keen humiliation to feel, that, when a young man of generous impulse and pride of talent comes forward with honorable ambition to claim his place in public life, the question he must meet is not, Are you resolved to be true and steadfast in that faith of liberty and right, those purposes, aims, and hopes, from which grew up the glorious fabric of our freedom? but, Will you be subservient to a system of barbarism and oppression that deliberately violates them all? While such is the test imposed on the young man entering into life, while, with the popular consent, liberty and peace are still menaced by fierce border feud, and our government, valiant to hunt a wretched outcast through the ominous silence of bayonet-lined streets, is helpless or else irresolute to defend the free settler on his claim, or to confront a vile and licentious tyranny among its mountain ranges, — so long, in sorrow and abasement, we can but labor to heal our country's wounds and veil her shame. For, as civilization without Christianity is Mephistophelean, a hollow garnish of splendor covering the wreck of faith and nobleness; so Democracy without Christianity is Satanic, — sacrificing both liberty and justice to the insatiate demon of men's ambition, and, in the name of "law and order," consecrating every crime: Goethe's fiend, which is incarnate Mockery, allied with Milton's fiend, which is rebellious and insolent Self-will.

But we believe that a holier alliance will prevail; that the Christian conscience of our country will come more and more to play intelligently in the courses of popular impulse and sympathy, and providential destiny. We believe that the invincible force of modern Democracy will be discerned at length as an agent of Almighty God; and that the new dispensation of Religion which He reserves to our age will be to enlighten, purify, guide, and harmonize these leagued energies of the modern world, so terrible in their unchastened violence, so glorious when turned to wise and humane and holy ends.

ART. VII.-LIFE AND WORKS OF JOHN KITTO.

Memoir of JOHN KITTO, D.D., F.S.A., Editor of the Pictorial Bible, the Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature, &c. By J. E. RYLAND, M.A. With a Critical Estimate of Dr. Kitto's Life and Writings, by PROFESSOR EADIE. Second Edition. Edinburgh: Wm. Oliphant and Sons. 1856. 8vo. pp. 488.

EVERY struggle with adverse fortune has its interest, especially when the consecrated will is felt to be triumphing over unpropitious circumstances. Every human brother, obliged to make his way forward with but a part of his senses, moves our compassion; but when a high purpose changes his personal privation into a public blessing, it is a pleasure to applaud the heroic champion. In that life-arena, where small difficulties are often permitted to deter from effort, and trifling misfortunes are suffered to overcome, it is noble to see a quickened spirit surmounting every kind of opposition, rising again and again from entire prostration, vindicating himself against oppression, and opening a path to usefulness, honor, peace, and blessedness, which will encourage others in the "pursuit of knowledge under difficulties."

Dr. Ryland's biography is no great affair: not so wretched as some notices had pronounced it, we find it confused, ill-proportioned, and overburdened with letters of exceeding length. Kitto's youth, which produced little of a literary kind that is worthy of preservation, is spread out over hundreds of pages; while the twenty years of enormous and successful effort in London are crowded into a corner. Juvenile epistles, written frequently as mere trials of skill at composition, block up the book at the beginning, as if to turn all but the resolute traveller off the track. Had his doting grandmother survived to erect this monument to one whose character she was the principal instrument to determine, it would be easy to account for this preservation of every scrap on which his pen had traced its early impressions, and the contraction, within one fifth of the crowded volume, of those later years, when his character was seen in full efflores

cence. The middle portion of the biography is too exclusively taken up by the account of his Oriental journey, which exhibits no remarkable gift at narration, though stamped all over with minute fidelity, an experience already familiar in its results to the readers of his works, and partly superseded by later and more favored travellers. With all kindness towards a work intended to aid a destitute family, the editor seems to have done his part so poorly, that the simple course of events is confused, the death of the eldest daughter being repeated through some inadvertency, and Kitto's rejection, with the accompanying correspondence, recurring after his actual reinstatement in the service of the Missionary Society.

The habit of hasty sermonizing or rapid journalizing has given Mr. Ryland a style easier to himself than to his reader; -one chiefly successful in spreading a small thought over a vast surface. In thus noticing a book whose size will deprive it of a fair share of popularity, we may be permitted to express our hearty disgust at the recent fashion of making every biography as bulky as possible, without regard to the public station a man has occupied, the individuality of mind he has exhibited, the claims he possesses to the reverence of posterity, or the variety of incidents which can throw fascination over the narrative. Conscientious readers, who buy a book with the intention of seeing it through, get discouraged, not to say vexed, with the life of the Sheffield Bard, for instance, in seven volumes, and that of Kitto in a type which might fill four octavos. Southey's Memoirs have some excuse for their bulk, in the matchless prose which mingles with the biographer's own handiwork; while the eight volumes of Moore are relieved by the wit, poetry, incident, and company of distinguished persons, scattered through those fascinating pages. But Kitto's experience was necessarily limited, monotonous, and uneventful; his books, though the best we have on several topics, may be supplanted by something better, by and by, because they required no peculiar genius, no rare endowments for their preparation; they come from a mine which it is easy to work, in which discoveries are making still, and better machinery brought from time to time to bear. It is his character which has the greatest instruction and most

abiding interest; and that will become extensively popular when it has found a worthy biographer, — will in some fit shape, like Southey's Nelson, encourage other unfortunates to brave endeavor, will soothe us all under disappointment, inspire a filial trust, and insure a spiritual, if not always a visible victory.

But we wish to sketch a life well expressed by its motto, "Per ardua"; we desire to make the readers of these pages familiar with the contest of humanity against what seemed an inexorable fate, against obstacles that for some time heaped themselves higher and higher in the only path, and would have doomed a less energetic spirit, if not to a forgotten corner in the parish poor-house, to the obscurity, repining, and moroseness of a mere bookworm in some charity establishment of charitable England. Certainly, John Kitto was born under the worst conditions in which religious character and intellectual pursuits could unfold themselves. His father was a drunken journeyman mason, anxious to eke out an uncertain pittance by using his boy's slender strength as a hod-carrier; his mother, educated to better hopes, seems to have yielded herself hopelessly to her miserable lot, and left her eldest child to the care of a weak but devout grandmother, on whom all his filial affection centred, from whom he received the best influences which her poverty and ignorance permitted her to give. She nursed her favorite in her own religious views, encouraged him in picking up knowledge for himself, and, had her means permitted, might have saved his life from its sorest trial, and his history from its tragic interest. No straits which children encounter among us, in their way to knowledge, can compare with his. Books he could not buy, and could only occasionally hire by doing small jobs for a penny; his first effort at authorship, when he was only twelve years old, was to write a story about King Pippin for a penny, with pictures to match, for a cousin younger than himself. A year before this he had made copious indexes for his own use of such favorites as Young and Spenser, Baxter and Watts. He indeed "bore the yoke in his youth." At the age of thirteen, as he was mounting with a load of slates from the highest round of a ladder to