of greater genius, more abundant talents, and more extensive and.

profound acquirements.

The true man is not free from errors. We have seen, we think, that More was not. But his faults were those of the generous spirit and pure conscience, not those of the self-seeking and the time-server.

It is with difficulties such as no one can appreciate who has not tried to pursue independent historic research, when many most needed and original documents are not to be had, that even such a sketch as this is, can be written. But let us trust that however imperfect or superficial it may be, American Churchmen will receive more cordially to their hearts the remembrance of one whose life was given to their own Holy Mother, and, with Her, to the one Redeemer of us all. In our catalogue of the great and good, let us reserve one chief place for this true and gentle man, this zealous and pure-minded Churchman, this Christian hero, Sir Thomas More.

BOOK NOTICES.

GRAFFITI D'ITALIA. By W. W. STORY. Charles Scribner & Co., New York, and Wm. Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.

1868.

You see
When

Mr. Story is known as the son of a distinguished jurist, as an artist, and as the author of "Roba di Roma." We have had no opportunity of measuring his merit in the fascinating domain of sculpture. The work last named is a minute and admirable sketch of the "Eternal City" in its modern aspects sprightly, graphic, and, in many respects, unequaled. Every description is a picture. You see the ceremonies of Rome. You see the beggars of Rome. You see the gamblers of Rome. You see the pageants of Rome. Rome as she is in all her poverty, her superstition, and her splendor. Mr. Story would pencil a scene from antiquity, the crowded Coliseum stands before you in its majestic proportions. Beasts paw, and glare, and roar. The people yell. Vestals appear in their glittering white. Knights sit in their chairs. Senators advance with dignity. The Emperor ascends his throne in his purple. The vast edifice resounds with the cries of animals, the clash of combatants, the applause of spectators. Where the scene is not described it is suggested, and fancy makes a picture more vivid than the pen. The characteristics of Mr. Story's prose are perceived in his poetry. He is essentially dramatic. He evinces the eye of an artist. He exhibits a passion for the beautiful. If his style is sometimes prosaic, his thoughts are never trivial. While seldom soaring to the loftiest regions of poetic excellence, he rarely sinks into a mere mediocrity. His verse is usually musical, although occasionally careless, and even imperfect. We should expect a man of his age, evidently conversant with the world, to excel most in wit, and least in passion. It is just the

18

reverse. His wit is often tame, and his passion is always intense. He reserves his fire for scenes of love, which burn with flames rather of an Italian than an American sun. While this book exhibits very high merit, and may, perhaps, take permanent rank in our literature, it yet frequently is seen to be rather the production of the artist laboring in his studio than the poet talking with the universe. It is also painful to observe that there is, we think, not even an allusion to the author's own country. We can understand that the home of the artist may be amid the works of the immortal European masters. We can understand that the "Eternal City" is to genius an inspiration. We can understand how crude, and bare, and youthful must seem art in our own Republic, to one familiar with the gardens, the galleries, the edifices of the old world; but we cannot understand how Mr. Story, historically connected with his country, should be so wholly occupied with classic subjects and Italian scenes, as to have no incidental allusion to the bright promise of his native land. We should have expected some ray from this Western glory to have kindled in his song. He resembles a beautiful flower transplanted to a foreign soil, where new juices and another sun increase the brilliance of its hues, and yet make us sigh for its native colors. This book of Mr. Story has indeed no nationality. He has lost one country, and not found another. He is not American, and he is not Italian. On a trunk too vigorous to be changed by transplantation, we have a bright exotic bloom.

We will conclude with an extract expressing a familiar thought in an original manner, and more strikingly than we have ever seen it in any other author:

"So does the complement, the hint, the germ

Of every art within the other lie,
And in their inner essence all unite.

For what is melody but fluid form,
Or form but fixed and stationed melody?
Colors are but the silent chords of light,
Touched by the painter into tone, and key,
And harmonized in every changeful hue.

So colors live in sound - the trumpet blows
Its scarlet, and the flute its tender blue;

The perfect statue in its pale repose

Has for the soul a melody divine,

That lingers dreaming round each subtle tone."

The strength of Mr. Story is in what pertains to the theories and representations of art. His heart is more in his marble than his verse.

CHINA AND THE CHINESE: a General Description of the Country and its
Inhabitants, its Civilization and Form of Government, its Religious and
Social Institutions, its Intercourse with other Nations, and its Present
Condition and Prospects. By the Rev. JOHN L. NEVIUS, Ten Years a
Missionary in China, with a Map and Illustrations. New York: Harper
& Brothers, Publishers, Franklin Square. 1869.

The Celestial Empire has an equal interest for the statesman, the scholar, and the Christian. The former beholds a vast territory, equal in extent to the organized States of our own Republic, and with its eighteen provinces added, having an area twice as large as all our united possessions exclusive of Alaska crowded with nearly half the population of the globe, cultivated

by an industrious people, possessing exhaustless agricultural and mineral resources, boasting men of admirable learning, making education an indispensable condition of office, exhibiting a venerable form of government, whose period contrasts with that of our own as the duration of an Egyptian pyramid with the age of an American villa; and whose twenty-five hundred years of life are not yet entombed by the earthquake of a gigantic revolution. Let the locomotive thunder along the streams and over the plains of China, from Pekin as a centre to the distant provinces, and link the antiquated civilization of Asia to the progressive civilization of Europe! Let the telegraph girdle this mighty empire! Let all its resources of soil and brain be opened to our world! The revolution of thought and habit which will succeed appears stupendous and unrivaled. Asia will eventually pour a stream of wealth on our Pacific coast, large and ceaseless, as that discharged from Europe on our Atlantic coast, and San Francisco will be the magnificent rival of New York. The celestial, now ridiculed for his pigtail and his idol, will yet be a merchant prince in America. Omitting the attraction for the scholar in the ancient, the complex, the marvelous language of China, how the heart of the Christian pulsates as he views it in connection with the Cross! Perhaps never has the development of the religious instinct been more clearly traced than in this singular empire. The system of Confucius was a pure humanitarianism, with no trace of a God. Its centre was veneration for the parent, not worship of the Deity. It had no eternal sanctions. It was the Mosaic Law mutilated, teaching duty to man, but not to his Creator. It secured for Confucius a tomb, a temple, veneration, immortality. Yet, while embraced and admired by the universal empire, we find the instincts of the nation unsatisfied by a mere moral system reaching out after God as a dungeon-plant towards the sun, and enthroning for worship the monstrous idols of Buddhism, and the multiplied deities of Tauism. How glorious, how satisfying, how divine in the comparison appears our own holy religion embracing both tables of the Law, offering pardon through the Cross of our Saviour, an example in his Life, and immortality in his Resurrection! The soul of every Christian must glow in anticipation of its future triumph over the dark and terrible superstitions of the Chinese Empire.

The work of Mr. Nevius is the result of a long residence in the interesting country he describes. He has been a careful and minute observer, and seems faithful in his record of facts. He seizes strongly on whatever is characteristic in the past and present of China, and in a simple, unpretending, graphic way presents his readers with a vast amount of practical information which can scarcely be found in any other volume. In a book of such modest merit, we will not take time to notice minor blemishes.

New York:

HER MAJESTY'S TOWER. BY WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON. Harper & Brothers, Publishers, Franklin Square. 1869. Scarcely an edifice in Europe concentrates in itself so much history as the great Tower of London. Every turret has a voice! Every wall has a lesson! Every apartment has a life! Almost every stone has a national interest! The venerable pile towers like a rock amid the surges of an ocean, looking down in silent majesty as generation after generation sweeps noisily about its base. Gundulf the keeper, and Henry the builder a secluded Norman monk and a mighty English monarch were its first designers. It

united the quiet meditation of the cell and the treasured wealth of a throne.
Here Ralph of Durham, the devouring lion, lavished his forced contributions.
Here Richard the Second yielded his crown. Here Henry the Sixth died, most
probably by violence.
Here the Hunchback murdered his youthful nephews.
Here Margaret of Salisbury met her tragic fate. Here Richmond moved in
royal state. Here Oldcastle died a martyr. Here Fisher awoke on the
morning which saw his blood stain the scaffold. Here Lady Jane Grey was
imprisoned before she passed to a crown whose title will never be questioned.
Here Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley knelt, in prayerful preparation for the martyr's
fire. Here the majestic Raleigh heated his crucibles, and wrote his books, and
conversed with his friends, and elaborated his theories, before the axe severed
from its trunk that head enshrining the brightest intellect of England. But
we must pause in our record. What future histories lie in Her Majesty's
Tower! How long will its walls protect a crown which is to encircle the
brows of British monarchs? Shall it stand a witness of coming revolutions,
which are to shake the throne of England, separate the Church from the state,
and convert the kingdom into a republic? These questions we cannot answer.
But we can say that Mr. Dixon has used the old Tower to good advantage
in making a new book. It is full of interesting facts, but shows everywhere
unmistakable traces of a volume manufactured for the market. Many familiar
historic truths are introduced to swell its size and increase the price.

TRAVEL AND
ADVENTURE IN THE TERRITORY OF ALASKA, formerly
Russian America, now ceded to the United States, and in various other
Parts of the North Pacific. By FREDERICK WHYMPER. With Map and
Illustrations. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, Franklin Square.

1869.

This book is written by an Englishman, and, without the common conceit of vulgar travellers from Albion, is full of good nature, sense, observation, and information.

Alaska is, of course, a name which has found its way in one fashion or another out of the Senate Chamber, where the treaty with our Russian friends was ratified. We are among those who wonder what the country is, and whether there are whale oil, or seal, or fur, or coal, or timber enough in our new and not everywhere prized dominions, to help us pay our taxes and to raise the national debt from America. Mr. Whymper is evidently a young man, and hopeful, and speaks of Alaska kindly; but it still appears in the honesty of his book, though this region may have coal for our Pacific steamships, and timber too, and perhaps gold in some of those gullies which reach back among its ice-mountains, and fish are plenty, it is yet a land of long winters and short summers, where it rains oftener than it shines, with great rugged chains of mountains extending perhaps to the Frozen Sea, and vast shaggy forests, not overstocked with game, and with a population of mean and low Indians, and where neither trade nor agriculture can ever very much prosper.

Mr. Whymper is what we may call a promiscuous traveller. Wherever there is a new place to explore, accessible to man, he goes, not so much for money, or the chase, as to discover something new, in that enterprising spirit which has belted the world about with Englishmen on their travels. He therefore explored in his own rollicking, wayward fashion, British Columbia and the Russian possessions on the Asiatic coast of the northernmost waters. Part of

the time he seems to have been officially connected with a telegraph company which undertook to connect Europe and America, by way of Northern Asia, and whose attempt the success of the Atlantic Cable has brought to naught. He wintered in a trading fort; lived among the natives; watched Alaska and Russian manners with a careful eye; sketched down the quaint things he saw with a dash of humor and English self-complacency to give them a pronounced coloring, and ended by writing a very clever book. It has not the eloquence of Kinglake's "Eothen," nor the elegance of the "Cross and Crescent " not eloquent or elegant at all; yet it is a sensible, humorous, plainly pictured, lively, charming book, and scattered about in it are many bits of rare information.

- is

SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. By H. P. LIDDON, M. A., etc. Third Edition Revised. Rivingtons, London, Oxford, and Cambridge. 1869. Published in the United States through Scribner, Welford, & Co., 654 Broadway, N. Y.

We often think when writing these curt reviews of voluminous or valuable books, that they should be called " Book Glimpses " instead of " Book Notices." Here, for instance, are thirteen elaborate and profound sermons, on the vast themes of God in His relations to humanity, by an apt and matured scholar, with time to meditate, and scholastic libraries all around him to invigorate and broaden his thought, and we give him perhaps ten lines in notice. Yet whoever does himself the favor to buy these sermons, will find in them the truly pious and patristic spirit of our ancient faith, and a bold defense of the Christian Mysteries against the new moods and skepticism of this age, which too often believes only what it sees, as if the very idea of Faith did not for ever deny the supremacy of the universality of sight. We shall merely remark one thing in this brief reference to a very creditable and valuable contribution to Anglican sermons, for which all persons who believe that scholarship is the friend of Churchmanship, will thank their author. When we ordinarily turn

from American theological works of this date to English, we find a certain patience, calmness, rest, and thoroughness in the latter which are wanting in the former. These sermons have about them that air of venerable ancientness, whose daughter is not Fire or Fever, but Rest. They seem to belong to a Church whose stones are draped with venerable mosses and many rooted ivies, and under whose aisles are the crypts of long lines of revered prelates, who ministered before those unwasting altars upon which the Holy Eucharist is daily laid by the hands of new priests, and whose life and genius are toned to a great calmness by the silent tides of the ages flowing down, without hindrance, from the beginning. They are sermons to be written within the silent retreat of an English college, by an English priest, who taught by the old, undertakes to control the new, and not always friendly, thought of English university men, to the childlike obedience of the faith of Jesus Christ.

CAST UP BY THE SEA. BY SIR SAMUEL W. BAKER, M. A., F. R. G. S., etc., with Ten Illustrations by Huard. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, Franklin Square. 1869.

Those of us who have followed with delight Sir Samuel, an unknighted traveller, as he told us in his charming African narratives of as stubborn a struggle as man ever made against savages, sickness, and the very hostility of