were disappointed that he refused the invitation, for "they had never tasted human flesh." We ought, however, to mention, that in an ethnological point of view this volume is not without its value, for the captain is an accurate observer, and is capable of thoroughly understanding, and recording to the best purpose, all

he saw.

The "Art Student in Munich," "* is the work of a lady, describing Munich as it appears to the tourist, as it is to the resident, and as it exists for the artist. Miss Howitt is labouring as an artist. She writes this book to help her on in her career. We know something of her name, but nothing of her pencil. All hope and success, however, to her in her profession. She must have observation and much cleverness, or she could not have written this pleasant book.

Mr. J. Ross Brown, an American, with all the reckless, pushing, go-a-head energy which is attributed to his nation, has been scampering about in the East, and brings us back a series of careful descriptions of common-place incidents in travel. Mr. Brown started from Washington to make the tour of the East with fifteen dollars in his pocket. Before he reached the land which was the point of his wanderings, he made a voyage in a South-Sea whaler as a common seaman-went to California as a third lieutenant in the Revenue service-thence to Oregonwas made post-office agent in California-reported the debates on the formation of the State Constitution and for this last job obtained money enough to start for the East. To our minds the most interesting part of Mr. Brown's book is the manner in which he surmounted the obstacles to his setting out upon his journey. The track taken by this writer is not quite untravelled: there are fifty books on the same subject, whereof five-and-twenty are much better; and there is a constant striving after grotesqueness in all his descriptions, which frequently becomes as wearisome as it would be to sit out a performance of grimaces, kept up for several hours.

The Indian controversy goes merrily on. The three articles in the "NEW QUARTERLY REVIEW" still form the raw material of all the pamphlets on this subject. Some of the pamphleteers even appropriate our words and sentences wholesale; not a very safe thing to do, seeing that there is not a member of the legislature, who pretends to take part in the discussions, who has not conned these papers with full conviction that it is the only existing epitome of the unmasterable mass of blue books upon Indian mis-government. Some of the more scrupulous of the India reformers have

* "An Art Student in Munich," by Anna Mary Howitt. 2 vols. Longman. 1853.

been a little scandalized by these dishonest pilferings, and have remonstrated. We beg them, however, to feel no delicacy upon our account. It is in the interest of humanity that we have taken up this question. If others will take the trouble to beat our metal out into gold leaf, we are quite content that the gilding should shine to others' honour, so that the good work advances, and that the poor Hindu is at last raised from his misery, his slavery, and his degradation. We can only here refer to the subsequent article on the Indian question, and promise not to quit the subject while a hope remains that a particle of good can be effected.

The other political pamphlets of the Quarter are innumerable. From the heap we have picked out one by Mr. Rigby Wason, which bears the title of "Short and sure way of preventing Bribery at Elections." Mr. Wason, having contested five elections for the Borough of Ipswich, is not without some experience in such matters. He proposes that every candidate shall, within one month after the close of the poll, return to the House of Commons a full account of every sum of money paid by him on account of the election, accompanied by a declaration that he has not, and will not, pay any other charges; and further, that no claim in respect of any election expenses shall be recoverable, unless process be commenced within fourteen days after the close of the poll. The proposed measure contains also heavy penalties against any person, whether candidate or other, who shall pay any moneys not included in the return to the House of Commons. If any intention of putting down bribery were seriously entertained, this would appear to be a tolerably effectual means of doing so. The chief objection we see to his plan is, that we doubt the possibility of carrying out in practice his prohibition of the employment of agents. This, no doubt, would strike hard at the root of the evil, butis it practicable?

We prophecied that Mr. Richards' furious tirade against Cobden would find a great many readers. A fourth edition has just beer sent us. It has expanded into a volume, has a long historical preface, wherein the author has expended much really commendable industry in bringing together the opinions of the founders of the American nation, as to the justice of our war with the French; and has also an onslaught upon the critics which is very terrible to look upon. We beg to be allowed to step aside out of the line of fire.

The novels are not numerous, and none of them are very remarkable. Mrs. Jones, of Pantglas, has put forth a pretty volume of stories, gathered together, with the title of "Scattered Leaves, or, Twilight Trifles," and taking as the motto of her work the true womanly

sentiment

What I most prize in woman

Is her affections, not her intellect :
Her intellect is finite; but the affections
Are infinite-

The author of " Alton Locke" has written a good novel; and Mr. James has produced another of his strong family likenesses. Mrs. Trollope, also, has presented us with three volumes about a young heiress. We miss, however, the pungency of her caricatures; and when Mrs. Trollope ceases to be bitter she almost always becomes a bore.

"The Preacher and the King; or, Bourdaloue in the Court of Louis the Fourteenth," is an American translation of a work by Louis Bungener, which has attained great popularity in France, and will, as we think, be read with some interest here. It is a fiction. Bossuet and other prelates of the church are scandalized by the course of life of the great monarch, and it is resolved that he shall be openly admonished of his sins and of his duties; the connexion with Madame de Montespan being at that moment the notorious sin. The task devolves on Bourdaloue, and the preparation and delivery of the sermon form the subject of the tale. The object is, to inform the public, through the medium of a fiction, as to the sphere, influence, and responsibilities of the preacher's office.

English men and women are not very curious as to what foreigners may think, say, or print of them, unless, indeed, they should, like the "German prince" or Mr. N. P. Willis, tickle the taste for scandal which our "genteel" people unfortunately possess, by telling them quizzical stories of their betters. The quarter has not been deficient in descriptions of England by American tourists; but we apprehend that no one of our readers has ever heard of Mr. Benjamin Moran's "Wanderings of an American in Great Britain," or of Mr. Andrew Dickenson's "First Visit to Europe;" and very few will feel much curiosity to see what Mr. Moran or Mr. Dickenson thinks of us and our island, even now that we have assured them of the existence of such censors. Mr. M. F. Ward, as a fool of the Bobadil class, might perhaps be found amusing for a few minutes. He avows the gentle object of his visit to have been to "seize the British Lion by the throat, and strangle him into involuntary silence;" and he thinks he has quite accomplished his purpose when he has declared that an Englishman is "outré in dress, repulsive in manners, and selfish in nature;" and that he wears "pants very full about the seat and waist, but very tight about the legs." We are not unaccustomed to a laughing rivalry of repartee with our American friends. We have been told by one that he never sleeps in peace in this little pins' point of an island for fear the wind should rock his bed and tumble him out into the sea; and another has assured us gravely, that there was

enough waste metal in the smallest of the United States to run an island as big as this in a short night! But these lively, rollicking, open-handed Yankees are very different guess sort of men to the vulgar Bombastes whose "English Items" would appear to designate him as some small clerk, whose habits and manners made quiet English people to shun him. Quite sure we are, that no American, who was worth knowing, ever had cause to complain of any want either of hospitality or cordiality on this side of the Atlantic. Our American friends, so sensitive as to what Mrs. Trollope, or Mr. Dickens, or the Duchess of Sutherland may say of them, cannot comprehend or believe, what every Englishman knows to be the undoubted truth, that our public is so impregnable in its somewhat scornful complacency, that if we were to extract all the evil things Mr. Ward says, not a reader would get beyond the first six lines of it before he threw down the review with a yawn. We should commit the most unpardonable of all literary crimes— become dull and uninteresting. "How can this editor imagine that any one can possibly want to know what people of this sort think or say?" would be the immediate complaint. When will our American friends become sufficiently sure of their own dignity to be equally unmoved? When will they be great enough to feel that it is not in the power of an individual to insult a nation? If they really knew their own position in the great society of mankind, they would not fret themselves with resentment because the coarse hypocrisy of Glasgow groans dismally at slavery, while the unco'gude hypocrites are enriching themselves by spinning slave-grown cotton into calicos; nor would they be making ridiculous efforts to destroy the import trade of Liverpool, because a languid coterie of London ladies enjoy a little sickly excitement in reading the highly-wrought fictions of an American novelist. Still less should they be deterred from doing what they themselves think right in purging their institutions from evil, by the fear of being thought to be influenced by the voices of the old women of both sexes who gathered round Mrs. Stowe in England. We had some intention of entering into a full review of the "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," and of shewing to the English people what are the real sentiments of eminent American statesmen upon the subject of Slavery. But the nine-days' wonder is now gone by: the searchers after new topics have

We cannot refrain from quoting the following Letter addressed by Henry Clay to several political friends of his, who wrote to him in 1844 on the subject of emancipating his slaves. They expressed their high admiration of his character, their pleasure on learning that he had he would extend the same boon to those who still remained given freedom to his man Charles, and their desire that on his hands. To which Mr. Clay replied as follows:

volume, and we hope to see it reach a second edition. Should this happen, we strongly recommend Mr. Wenckstern to print the original German as well as the English, and to add the references. This will not only increase the value of the book, but it will also extend its sale, for the volume will then form capital German exercises for schools.

Among the miscellaneous books there are very few worth noticing, and these are nearly all noticed separately.

A nice scholarlike volume by Mr. R. Chenevix Trench, containing five lectures on the Lessons in Proverbs, deserves a more special notice than we can afford. Those who enjoy such books will, however, judge this as well by a little specimen, as they could if we extracted pages.

Of how many, for example, we may note the manner in which they clothe themselves in an outward form and shape, borrowed from, or suggested by, the peculiar scenery, or circumstances, or history of their own land; so that they could scarcely have come into existence, not at least in the shape which they now wear, anywhere besides. Thus our own Make hay while the sun shines, is truly English, and could have had its birth only under such variable skies as ours,-not certainly in those southern lands where, during the summer-time at least, the sun always shines. In the same way there is a fine Cornish proverb in regard of obstinate wrongheads, who will take no counsel except from calamities; who dash themselves to pieces against obstacles, which with a little prudence and foresight they might have avoided. It is this: He who will not be ruled by the rudder, must be ruled by the rock. It sets us at once upon some rocky and wreck-strewn coast: we feel that it could never have been the proverb of an inland people. Do not talk Arabic in the house of a Moor,-that is, because there thy imperfect knowledge will be detected at once: this we should confidently affirm to be Spanish, wherever we met it. Big and empty, like the Heidelberg tun, could have its home only in Germany, that enormous vessel, known as the Heidelberg tun, constructed to contain nearly 300,000 flasks, having now stood empty for hundreds of years, As regards, too, the following, Not every parish priest can wear Dr. Luther's shoes, we could be in no doubt to what people it appertains. Neither could there be any mistake about this solemn Turkish proverb: Death is a black camel which kneels at every man's gate, in so far at least as that it would be at once ascribed to the East.

"White Slavery in the Barbary States "* we strongly suspect to be an American reprint. It certainly is directed against the "peculiar institution" of our Translantic brethren. The author thinks that it may not be without profit to dwell on the origin, the history, and the character of a custom, which "after being for a long time a by-word and a hissing among the nations, has at last been driven from the world" (?) The work is an historical essay, neither very new nor very profound, compiled from very common books, but containing in small compass all the information that the general reader would care to acquire. The

subject is brought down to its natural conclusion, when the Bey of Tunis "for the glory of God, and to distinguish man from the brute creation, decreed the total abolition of human slavery throughout his dominions." We are, of course, properly rejoiced at this consummation, but do not quite see how the" distinction" in question is helped by it. If monkeys were in the habit of enslaving each other, and bartering among themselves healthy labourers for heaps of cocoa-nuts, the Bey might be as logical as he is humane. But as matters really are, instead of creating, he has abolished one very strong distinction between man and brute. On which side, however, the advantages lay, we shall scarcely think it consistent with due selfrespect to intimate.

Of Mr. Frank Newman's translation of the "Odes of Horace" into unrhymed metres we shall best please ourselves by saying nothing, except to beg of our readers, in mercy to the author, not to look at it. Mr. Newman is a man of too much learning and too much talent to make it other than a disagreeable task even to mention so very sad, so utterly unaccountable a failure as this.

Mr. Pidgeon has written a foolish book upon a very mysterious and a very interesting subject-those giant mounds which have been discovered in the new world, and which tell of a civilized race of men anterior to the tribes which the white man found there, and which have nearly disappeared under the influence of gunpowder, rum, and small-pox. As Mr. Pidgeon finds in North America the evidence of a Roman and Grecian population—believes that America was known to the Egyptians-and amuses his readers with a history of the Elk nation, derived from the last of the Elks, and going back to the time of the mound-builders ;as such is the quality of Mr. Pidgeon's book, we had better, we think, withhold what we have to say upon these American antiquities, until we find a more rational author with whom to discuss the subject.

There is also a sketch of the lives and Nelson and Sons, and some other minor works, careers of the present Cabinet, published by which we ought to notice: but we hope to return upon some future occasion to Lord Aberdeen and his colleagues, and our readers will scarcely regret the other omissions.

WHEN Hume propounded his famous argument that it is contrary to experience that miracles should be true, but consistent with experience that testimony should be false, he simply fell into that vulgar trap that catches the shallowest of disputants-he deceived himself by trifling with an undefined term. If by the word "experience" he meant to convey the convictions produced upon the mind by the testimony of the senses of the individual, as opposed to the proof offered to the mind by the testimony of other men, his "decisive argument," which was "to be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusions," would involve consequences inconvenient to so sceptical a philosopher. If a man should reasonably be bound to believe what he saw and heard, rather than what others tell him, he will be strictly held to the constant belief that he met a ghost in a churchyard, provided he be frightened into a conviction of the fact at the time, even although a man should afterwards testify that the appearance was a trick which he had played off to scare him he would be compelled to live on in entire credence that the juggler who, every night, with his eyes bandaged and his back turned to the audience, reads minute inscriptions upon the rings and buttons of individuals in the crowd, is an actual worker of miracles, although the juggler testifies to all around that he is doing nothing more than deceive their senses: he would be constrained to the life-long conviction, that on a particular night he saw the tables, candles, bottles, and decanters, all whirling round the room, although his friends might testify to him the next morning that the phenomena had been occasioned by his exceeding tipsiness. He must believe, moreover, that the ventriloquist was up the chimney, that the hat really contained the half dozen guinea-pigs, batter pudding, and twenty dozen nosegays, he saw drawn from it, and that the half-crown he felt in his hand, when the conjurer placed it there, was really conveyed away again by a miracle. All this he must believe; for sight, hearing, and touch testified distinctly to the reality, and he has nothing but the testimony of other men to place against the testimony of his senses.

If, on the other hand, this word "experience" means the testimony of credible men, combined

with the testimony of the senses of the individual, there would be no lack of proof in modern times that it is not contrary to experience that miracles should be true. We confess that to us it is a most inexplicable fact that the lad we before mentioned, standing upon a stage, with his back towards us, with his eyes bandaged, and at a distance of twenty paces, should read the inscription upon a mourning ring. Had the lad proclaimed himself a prophet, there can scarce be a doubt that a dozen honest dupes would have testified to their belief in him. They were certainly as convinced of the fact as we were, and would have testified to their conviction. But as the boy very honestly confessed that the performance was but a delusion of the senses, all the concurrent testimony and experience of some hundreds of people produced no other effect on the mind than a little amused astonishment.

If, again," experience" should mean the ordinary course of events as known to the individual, an ignorant man should disbelieve in an eclipse, although he sees the darkness; and, as indeed Hume expressly admits, a native of hot countries should disbelieve in frost and snow, even when he sees the snow-flakes and the ice.

Hume's touchstone, therefore, is so radically defective, that, in the first two cases put, it would be powerless even against false miracles; and, in the third, would impose a disbelief in the ordinary phenomena of nature.

The true test of miraculous agency has been much better enunciated by Paley, by Bishop Douglas, and by those who have followed them upon the same side of the argument. These men have shewn that a miracle, in order to compel a rational belief, should not be tentative, for fallibility betrays at once a human origin, but certain and unequivocal, as an emanation from omnipotence must be. They have shewn, moreover, that it should not depend entirely for its evidence either upon the senses or the testimony of mankind. It should have an object commensurate with the importance of the temporary suspension of an eternal law, and a result so striking, so notorious, and so enduring, that the presence of that result may be to all generations a proof more certain than any testimony of the senses, and more incorruptible than the oaths of witnesses.