appropriately typified as wild beasts than as seeds; and echoes and wild beasts agree better with a mountain than does a pair of stairs with the sowing of seeds, even admitting that these seeds be seeds of fire, and be sown broadcast" among the hills" by a steep generation while in the act of tumbling down the stairs; that is to say, of coming down the stairs in too great a hurry to be capable of sowing the seeds accurately, as all seeds should be sown; nor is the matter rendered any better for Mrs. Browning, even if the construction of her sentence be understood as implying that the fiery seeds were sown, not immediately by the steep generations that tumbled down the stairs, but mediately, through the intervention of the "supernatural thunders" that were occasioned by the steep generations that were so unlucky as to tumble down the stairs.

T

Joel T. Headley

HE Reverend Mr. Headley (why will he not put his full title in his title-pages ?) has in his Sacred Mountains been reversing the facts of the old fable about the mountains that brought forth the mouse, parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus for in this instance it appears to be the mouse-the little ridiculus mus-that has been bringing forth the "mountains," and a great litter of them, too. The epithet "funny," however, is perhaps the only one which can be considered as thoroughly applicable to the book. We say that a book is a funny book, and nothing else, when it spreads over two hundred pages an amount of matter which could be conveniently presented in twenty of a magazine; that a book is a "funny" book, "only this and nothing more," when it is written in that kind of phraseology, in which John Philpot Curran, when drunk, would

99

The Sacred Mountains. By J. T. Headley, author of Napoleon and his Marshals. Washington and his Generals, etc.

have made a speech in at a public dinner; and, moreover, we do say, emphatically, that a book is a "funny" book, and nothing but a funny book, whenever it happens to be penned by Mr. Headley.

We should like to give some account of The Sacred Mountains, if the thing were only possible; but we cannot conceive that it is. Mr. Headley belongs to that numerous class of authors who must be read to be understood, and who, for that reason, very seldom are as thoroughly comprehended as they should be. Let us endeavor, however, to give some general idea of the work. "The design," says the author, in his preface, "is to render more familiar and life-like some of the scenes of the Bible." Here, in the very first sentence of his preface, we suspect the Reverend Mr. Headley of fibbing; for his design, as it appears to ordinary apprehension, is merely that of making a little money by selling a little book.

The mountains described are Ararat, Moriah, Sinai, Hor, Pisgah, Horeb, Carmel, Lebanon, Zion, Tabor, Olivet, and Calvary. Taking up these, one by one, the author proceeds, in his own very peculiar way, to "elocutionize" about them; we really do not know how else to express what it is that Mr. Headley does with these eminences. Perhaps if we were to say that he stood up before the reader and "made a speech" about them, one after the other, we should come still nearer the truth. By way of carrying out his design as an

nounced in the preface, that of rendering "more familiar and life-like some of the scenes," and so forth, he tells not only how each mountain is, and was, but how it might have been and ought to be, in his own opinion. To hear him talk, anybody would suppose that he had been at the laying of the corner-stone of Solomon's Temple, to say nothing of being born and brought up in the ark with Noah, and hail-fellow-wellmet with every one of the beasts that went into it. If any person really desires to know how and why it was that the Deluge took place, but especially how, if any person wishes to get minute and accurate information on the topic, let him read The Sacred Mountains, let him only listen to the Reverend Mr. Headley. He explains to us precisely how it all took place,-what Noah said and thought while the ark was building, and what the people, who saw him building the ark, said and thought about his undertaking such a work; and how the beasts, birds, and fishes looked as they came in arm-in-arm; and what the dove did, and what the raven did not-in short, all the rest of it; nothing could be more beautifully posted up. What can Mr. Headley mean, at page 17, by the remark that " there is no one who does not lament that there is not a fuller antediluvian history"? We are quite sure that nothing that ever happened before the flood has been omitted in the scrupulous researches of the author of The Sacred Mountains.

He might, perhaps, wrap up the fruits of these researches in rather better English than that which he employs:

"Yet still the waters rose around them till all through the valleys nothing but little black islands of human beings were seen on the surface. The more

fixed the irrevocable decree, the heavier he leaned on the Omnipotent arm. And lo! a solitary

cloud comes drifting along the morning sky and catches against the top of the mountain. . At length

from rock to rock the sobbing of the multitude that followed after tore his heart-strings.

Friends

were following after whose sick Christ had healed.

The steady mountain threatened to lift from its

base and be carried away.

Sometimes God's hatred of sin, sometimes His care for His children, sometimes the discipline of His church, were the motives. Surely it was the mighty hand that laid on that trembling tottering mountain," etc.,

These things are not exactly as we could wish them, perhaps; but that a gentleman should know so much about Noah's ark and know anything about anything