British heart. And here is the mistake which the author has made. He loses his patience. He lacks the skill of the preacher. He denounces the people he would reform. His own pure longings for a generous and gentle life among the greatest number of men and women can not wait for the delay and weakness of human nature. But while this may blur the effect of his teaching in England, though we are hardly more appreciative, we look for an excellent influence from this little volume among ourselves. The beauty and sincerity of its thoughts will command attention; and it can not but be widely read, and to every reader it will bring a blessing. It will give him higher notions, making him purer and wiser and happier.

The chief defect in this volume is the fault of all Mr. Ruskin's writings. He is impatient of a logical evolution of his thoughts. It is difficult to sum up his teachings into any settled plan. And again, he shows how people ought to be improved, without laying down patiently any plan. He theorizes, but is not practical. It is perhaps the nature of such minds that they can never trace out their intuitions or build the ladders by which mankind may reach up to their level.

But why is it that an author who commands such a circle of readers can not be published in a style comporting with his excellence? Here is a writer upon the beauty of art, on whom have been lavished none of the arts of printing and binding which have given such an added grace and dignity to the writings of Thackeray and Dickens and Tennyson, and yet his books are far more deserving of them. We sincerely believe that the publishers would find an ample return in issuing an edition of Ruskin hardly inferior to the English, and copying in some way the plates which go so far toward illustrating the letter-press. The day has.gone by when scholars are satisfied with cheap and imperfectly printed copies of favorite authors. An edition of modern Painters and of the Stones of Venice from Riverside would find a welcome in many hundred homes.

5. History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M. A., late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Vols. III., IV. New York: Charles Scribuer & Co.

WE have spoken, in a previous number, of the first and second volumes of this very able and interesting historical work: the exceeding beauty of the letter-press, the fascination of the style, the patient research, the great (apparent) candor and ingenuousness—almost timidity-displayed in the investigation of matters of profoundest moment in the republic of letters and the Christian church; and the

wide departure from conclusions universally regarded as sound hitherto. These two volumes exhibit the same peculiar features, and embrace a period of eleven years, from Henry's second divorce with the bloody tragedy ensuing, and his new and hasty marriage, in 1536, to his own death in 1547. Poor Catherine of Arragon has reached the end of her troubled life, (Jan. 7, 1536). The fearful tragedy of the beheading of Anne Boleyn on the green by the Tower has been announced to the citizens of London by the booming of that single cannon on the battlements; the Lambeth sentence, which has consigned her name to infamy, has made Elizabeth illegitimate; and the way is thus open for Henry to seek a new matrimonial alliance, and, through that, a prince to inherit his crown. This he has already done, while the body of the murdered Anne is hardly cold, persuaded to the step, almost reluctantly, as our author would have us believe! by the earnest entreaties of the Privy Council and the peers, by making the beautiful and virtuous Jane Seymour his third wife and Queen.

On the 12th of October, 1537, an event happened which filled all England with joy, and all Catholic Europe with dismay; an event which Latimer compared to the birth of John the Baptist. A royal prince was born. But the joy was speedily abated by a great sorrow. In just twelve days the young mother closed her eyes in death. Happy Jane Seymour! Not beheaded; not sent to the Tower; not even suspected of wrong by the jealous Henry: Queen of his palace, his bed, his heart, for considerably more than a whole twelvemonth, she gave birth to a prince and heir to the crown, and was gently divorced by death. "Among all Henry's wives," says Mr. Froude, "she stands out distinguished by a stainless name, untarnished by the breath of reproach."

It was not the fault of Henry, assuredly, that two years passed away before the crown which the virtuous Jane had so suddenly laid aside was placed upon a fourth head. For, on the very day of her death, the Privy Council urged the disconsolate King to make still further provision for the succession by marrying again without delay; to which argument the King disconsolate was induced, in the calm resignation of his grief, to listen; professing himself “in his tender zeal for his subjects," ready for "the election of any person from any part." But negociations failed, Francis I. declining to accede to Henry's entreaties to send the most beautiful ladies of his kingdom to Calais to enable the royal widower to make his own election; and it was not until December, 1539, that Anne of Cleves arrived in England; and then to make it apparent to Henry and to all the world that "any person from any part" should not have been con

strued so as to strain too much "his tender zeal for his subjects." Anne did not please him; he called her "a great Flanders mare”; nevertheless, "reluctant," he was married to her on Tuesday, the 6th of January, 1540, and on Saturday, July 10th, of the same year he was released, not reluctant, from the bonds; a convocation of two archbishops, seventeen bishops, and a hundred and thirty nine clergy declaring the marriage "null and void."

Urged again by the Privy Council, for reasons of state, again the patriotic and magnanimous Henry consented to wed, and in this instance Catherine Howard was the elect lady. It is a special relief to know that when, after a year of uninterrupted and unsuspecting domestic peace to the King, Catherine Howard was accused of the foulest dishonor, both before and after her marriage, and tried, and pronounced guilty, and executed, it was impossible to doubt that there was some truth in the charges. That indiscretion before her marriage was proved against her, both Catholic and Protestant believed. It is also probable Henry believed all that was alleged as to her misconduct after she became his wife, and it is quite certain that the parties who so vehemently accused her had the strongest possible personal motives for their conduct, to wit, a very earnest desire to keep their own heads on their shoulders. Henry was growing old, already past fifty; evidently there was no longer any room for reasons of state; the Privy Council afflicted his long-suffering soul with no more importunities; he might now indulge in solitude to the end of his days the grief which his matrimonial mishaps had occasioned. Nevertheless he married, making Catherine, widow of Lord Latimer, his sixth and last wife. She outlived Henry, although she very narrowly escaped the block, for once venturing to express an opinion in a religious conversation with her husband. Of this Mr. Froude makes no note. It would not be convenient for him to note that, and sundry other little incidents, as he would have his readers believe that Henry was not only one of the most chaste of princes, but justified in all his treatment of his wives.

How many things of grandest import happened during the eleven years of which these two volumes treat; events which have largely shaped the history of the civilized world through the following centuries to the present time, and whose results are only partially seen as yet. Amid cloud and tempest, fierce animosities and struggles, religious and political and social, plots and counterplots, persecutions, banishments, gibbets, and fires of martyrdom, the star of the Reformation was steadily rising, and Henry was made the instrument, in the hand of God, of blessings to England and mankind which he never honestly intended. He broke the power of Rome;

he gave the Bible to the people; he exalted men of humble birth to a high place in his kingdom, thus impairing the ancient prescriptive rights of the nobility, and initiating a reform which was to reach no finality until the House of Commons should become the controlling power in the British government, and the rising tide of democracy should threaten to plough the parks of the nobles as a field, and to overturn the throne itself. Some of the greatest, best, most heroic men that the world ever saw, lived and acted their illustrious part, and died during that dreadful, stormy, bloody period, sealing their testimony, as patriots and citizens, with their blood. What magnificent pictures does Mr. Froude give us of Hugh Latimer, the dauntless Christian preacher; of William Tyndale, to whose incomparable genius and great learning and apostolic piety, faith and love and courage, we are mainly indebted for our version of the English Bible; and even of Reginald Pole, of whom he would fain have his readers think only as a vain, ungrateful man, returning evil for good to the most generous of friends and most forbearing of monarchs, which he declares Henry to have been. We must ask Mr. Froude's pardon, nevertheless, for professing a sentiment very like admiration in listening to the faithful Reginald while he addresses to the haughty King such words as the following: "Was it indeed your conscience which moved you? Not so. You lusted after a woman who was not your wife. You would make the word of God bear false witness for you; and God's providence has permitted you to overwhelm yourself with infamy."

That Henry was a prince of magnificent powers has never been questioned. His contest, single-handed, with Rome in the height of her supremacy, was such a feat of daring as the world has not often witnessed; and its momentous issues impart to it great moral sublimity. That the world is still reaping immeasurable benefit from the measures he carried, is equally true. That his age was barbarous; that he offended both Catholics and Protestants, the two great contending parties for the empire of the world; that all men were warped by prejudice; that every European court was full of intrigue and lies; and that Henry was maligned: all this must be admitted. It is also true that the wrongs he did to women have brought upon him fiercer execrations than all the wrongs to man that have ever been laid to his charge. That Mr. Froude's labors have set some things in a new light and will secure a truer appreciation of Henry, we are glad to believe. This history is a masterly work, and deserves to be not only read, but studied; and it will be studied. We deliberately affirm, nevertheless, that, with only these pages from which to glean evidence for a verdict, we are pressed directly to the conclusion that,

with whatever great and noble and statesman-like qualities, the stalworth Tudor was the incarnation of cold, cruel, remorseless selfishness, with whom a fancied personal wrong was as the greatest of state crimes, and who shed the purest and best blood in his kingdom as lightly as that of the "great, goodly and fat hart," sent by the hand of his servant to Cardinal Wolsey on his way to France to discuss, in a convention of cardinals, the affairs of the church.

6. The Life of John Brainerd, the brother of David Brainerd, and his successor as Missionary to the Indians of New Jersey. By Rev. THOMAS BRAINERD, D. D. 12mo. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee. 1865.

"ALTHOUGH not so great a man, John Brainerd was as holy as his brother David." This was the judgment of their contemporaries, and it was doubtless just. John lacked his brother's genius—that ineffable spirit, part mental and part, we had almost said, divine, which, aside from his pious single-heartedness, gave him power like a living magnet. David Brainerd had a large suffusion of this etherial aura. John had none of it. But he had all the rest. He was a most faithful missionary, toiling on, for a generation of years, with great sagacity, earnestness, self-sacrifice, and good success in the work which his brother had begun. David's rapid course had been like a three years' flight of an angel. John followed on foot, like any apostolical mortal. The transition of this history of evangelization from the one to the other of these brothers, forms one of the strong attractions of the volume.

The editor has fairly exhausted his subject; and the picture he draws of primitive missionary toil and hardship is very instructive. Valuable information is given concerning our early relations to the aborigines of this country, and some reproofs are administered on the selfishness of our public policy toward this race, which are righteous. It is a lamentable and shameful record. The author deals rather too much in exhortation to his readers, to improve the general run and tenor of the story for personal stimulation to duty; tells us oftener than is needful, where to stop and admire his hero's excellences. He forgets, perhaps, sometimes that he is not writing a

sermon.

There is some carelessness, moreover, in the authorship. We do not know the authority for writing President Samuel Davies' name, Davis, as it is here uniformly given. Nor is there any adverb, "repetitiously." The adjective form of this word, which seems to be a favorite with the biographer, is awkward enough. We protest against its being turned into the still worse adverbial state.