niversary of that event has called forth with the prodigality of both an individual and a national enthusiasm.

It is remarkable that this ovation of the Italian people to their great poet, should have taken place in the midst of another reviving of their country as profound as was the awakening of it from former slumbers, which welcomed his birth. The Dante jubilee is one of the proofs of this new arousing. Young Italy came forth to say to the age, through this celebration, that again she is alive and on her feet, as when her illustrious son wrote his name for immortality, not as a poet only, but as a patriot statesman, on her then heroic annals. It was an act of love, almost of religious devotion. There was a more than poetic justice in the assignment of these ceremonies to his own beloved Florence, where he had lived and sung, and administered the government of the state with equal wisdom and purity; and from which, at thirty-six years of age, he had been sent forth by a hostile faction, to an exile of twenty years of noblest fortitude amidst keenest sorrows, from which death only released him.

Dante was one of the few men who not only represent all that is best in their own age, but also herald the coming fortunes of their race, as if by a kind of prophetic ordination. Without falling into a vein of blind hero-worship, one may concede his uncommon learning in literature, philosophy, science, statesmanship; his great sagacity, and remarkable powers of persuasion; his magnificent poetic genius; his devoutly religious spirit and life. All this he dedicated to his country's service with the heartiest zeal. Just at the era of his nation's newly begun existence, he threw himself into her history with a moulding and impelling force which has had very few parallels. No one man has ever more directly and energetically influenced his own countrymen than he. He did more to form the language of Italy to its present beauty and purity than Pascal did for the French-nearly if not quite as much as Homer did for the language of the Greeks. He opposed, with all his influence, the political designs of the Papacy, as reorganized by Gregory VII. and Innocent III.; and though he died in the Roman communion, he was really one of the reformers inside that church before the Reformation. He had the loftiest sense of honor, an utter freedom from unworthy self-regard. What can be nobler than his response to the magnates of Florence, when they wished him to return, under the safe conduct of a general amnesty, as if a pardoned enemy of the State. "Can I not everywhere behold the mirror of the sun and the stars? speculate on sweetest truths under any sky, without giving myself up ingloriously, nay, ignominiously, to the populace and city of Florence? Nor shall I want for bread."

All this personal greathess and goodness of his illustrious countryman is worthily commemorated by the author of the present work. In addition to this, he gives us a lucid analysis of Dante's writings, particularly of the Divina Commedia, with copious illustrative quotations. The volume is an excellent introduction to the study of that master-piece of imaginative composition. We close it with a new impression of the truth which Mendelssohn so well expresses in one of his letters from Rome: "It is a thought fraught with exultation, that a man is capable of producing creations, which after the lapse of a thousand years, still renovate and animate others." That is the true immortality.

4.

Sesame and Lilies. From Lectures delivered at Manchester, 1864. By JOHN RUSKIN, M. A. 1. Of Kings' Treasuries. 2. Of Queens' Gardens. New York: John Wiley & Son.

THE day has come when whatever John Ruskin may write on any subject is sure of being read. The angry dissent may be spoken; he may be sneered at; the critic may pick flaws, but the honesty, the simplicity, the fine thoughtfulness, the right intention of his writings is patent to every one; and such is the longing in these days of surface writing for books which are made because these authors had something to say, that a book from him, now and for so long the acknowledged master of the art of making an English sentence, is a notable event in the literary world. No educated man can ignore the fact. And though the author shows in this brochure something of that all-talking egotism which is so often the attendant of riper years, he has won so high a position that it is not unpleasant, but rather the means by which we gain the every day opinion of a thoughtful man on literature and art and life; he talks familiarly with his readers; his words have the sweet flavor of personality; and, indeed, it is one excellence of all Mr. Ruskin's books that he confides his loves and hates to his reader.

Sesame and Lilies is one of the series of works in which he has been trying to teach the English nation, from his absolute point of view, how to think and act. It is made up of two lectures delivered in Manchester in 1864, one of which is entitled, "Of Kings' Treasuries," the other, "Of Queens' Gardens." These are the fantastic titles by which he introduces first a Discourse upon the Kingly Power of a noble Education, and secondly a Discourse upon "What special portion or kind of this Royal Authority, arising out of noble Education, may rightly be possessed by Women; and how far they also

are called to a true Queenly Power." One answers the question, Why to read; the other, What is woman's place, and how shall she be educated and you see at once that he has chosen a practical and attractive theme; and when we add that he writes with the deep intensity of personal conviction and the careful.compactness of a conscientious scholar, you need no further incentive to read and study the book. But this outline is only the frame upon which he hangs his brilliant tapestry of thoughtful word-painting. The value of good books, the difficulty of reading them so as to carry away the true meaning of the author, the majesty of the great authors whom we look at daily upon our book-shelves, the kingly power that they confer upon us when we allow them to teach us the difference between a sensitive nobility of feeling and mere vulgarity, and England's terrible deficiency as a nation in a true sensitiveness to power in literature, or excellence in art and science, or beauty in nature, and her sordid pursuit of gain-those are the topics which Mr. Ruskin treats upon with all his well known tact and mastery. And in the second lecture, pursuing the subject in its application to woman, he defines her place and power, her suitable education, and "her queenly office with respect to the State" with a justness and correctness and delicacy which make it perhaps the finest prose tribute ever paid to woman. It honors the author's heart; it shows his nobility and greatness of heart. Much as has been said since Tennyson wrote the Princess, about the sphere and work of woman, nothing has been published since his famous lines which so pointedly and truly and naturally speak the intuitions of cultivated common sense upon this subject. The coarse platitudes of literary blue-stockings or the insane doings. of masculine women are as mere heavy thunderings compared with Mr. Ruskin's keen flashing conceptions of womanly grace and beauty and power. This lecture has the delicate aroma of poetry. Its penpictures, its felicities of phrase, its melodious sentences, its exquisitely choice and gentle culture cause you to linger upon every page. And its truths are so evidently the final thought of one whose instincts have been unusually pure, and opportunities of experience large, that no teacher of youth can rightfully neglect its study. It gives the ideal result of a true womanly culture, just lifted above the common-place of our ordinary lives. There is just enough of imagination to lend the "precious seeing to the eye." We wish it might be scattered broadcast throughout the land.

The storm of abuse which in England has met the passionate protest of the first lecture against persistent money-making, shows how keenly and directly Mr. Ruskin's honest words have cut into the

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 thisvolume 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 Scribner & 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 aunounced 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