very productive and inviting continent is about to be added to the world of commerce, civilization and Christianity, in place of our theoretic Africa of sand and jungle and pestilent solitude.

This territory, specially, opened up to us on the Zambesi and its affluents, is populous and fertile, and needs but the forces of a Christian home to make it healthy. Some of the staples of trade. are native to these regions, and have so long been kept from the marts of the world only by that scourge of the nations, the slave trade. On this the author makes some shocking and shameful revelations, while his work is one of the severest blows that the inhuman system has ever received.

The exposure in regard to the Portugese, in their relations to the eastern coast of Africa, is very discreditable to them.

They have had such control of about seventeen hundred miles of coast as to shut off trade with it from the rest of the world, and confine it mostly to slaves. This narrative will hasten the breaking up of this monopoly in iniquities, and start new and stimulating, elevating kinds of trade with the native tribes.

This book is a valuable contribution to geography, and will aid in solving some of the long studied problems of Africa. It has, moreover, all the thrilling incident of fiction, with all the comfort and profit of real fact, and for this reason is worthy a place in every intelligent family, and specially where there are young children. It is worth a whole alcove of novels and fictitious travels. The enterprising house of the Harpers is doing good service in multiplying such books. Can no better form be given to its map than this expauding and contracting one of ten foldings? The use of this one is a very annoying process, and we suspect, from our own experience, that it is but little used for this reason.

7.-Battle Echoes, or, Lessons from the War. By GEORGE B. IDE, D. D. Boston: Gould & Lincoln 1866.

WE have here eleven Sermons called out by the Rebellion. Direct, positive and earnest, they may serve as a sample of the Northern pulpit during our national struggle. They partake of the popular, newspaper discussions of the times, when they were preached, and as such will serve as a good condensed record for future reference. The sermon-literature of the war must be very voluminous in MSS. Some of it will work into print among personal friends, and by and by another Thornton will give to the libraries a choice and permanent volume, with rich annotations: The Pulpit on the Great Rebellion.

8.-Short Sermons to News Boys. New York: Charles Scribner.

By CHARLES LORING BRACE.

1866.

NEWS BOYS have bodies, and so the good people of New York have built lodging-houses for them. They have souls, and so Mr. Brace has made them some short, simple, practical, interesting serSabbath school talkers, who retail stories without point or moral, may here learn how to be wide-awake without being sensational or theatrical.

mons.

9.-The Toilers of the Sea. A Novel. By VICTOR HUGO. New York: Harpers. 1866.

THE interest which this book awakens does not arise from its story or plot. There is but little of this, and what there is is not especially pleasing. The persons involved are not of a kind to excite much sympathy or admiration. There is but little complication to the machinery. Artistically there are grave defects, as the very long and minute account of the single-handed rescue of the engine of the Durande from her wreck among the Channel rocks. So the lovers of Caudray and Deruchette are narrated with a meagreness quite disproportioned to the space given to much inferior subjects of interest. M. Hugo does not seem to have an eye for symmetry and proportion as was glaringly manifest in his Les Miserables. His novels are as out of balance as some old trees which have taken the wind, for generations, on only one side. But this, as his other books of imagination, is full of the power which genius alone can command. It is a study in anatomy, the anatomy of man's character and life; of nature in the most variant moods; the anatomy of every thing which the author touches. He will not leave his subject, be it what it may, until he has taken it in pieces with painful minuteness. He analyzes almost to death, whether it be a human feeling, a plant, a sea phenomenon, or what else, which has arrested his notice. His microscopic studies are like a statist's exhibit; but then he throws around them the purple lights of his idealizing spirit, and you hardly know whether you are reading philosophy or poetry. He makes everything live. He puts a personal will into the sea, the air, the engine of a steamboat; it is all invested with a sort of human intelligence and purpose, and you feel that a great battle is going on around you, of which you can hardly call yourself a mere spectator. You care but little for the individual fortunes or misfortunes of the

dramatis persona: but you feel that you have been conversant with a curious medly of out of the way specimens, from which possibly some useful knowledge may result.

10.-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. V., VI. pp. 474, 495.

Ir is beginning to be painful to remember that we are coming so near to the last of Mr. Froude's volumes. We could wish that so original an explorer among the records of England's past would continue his researches and his masterly and delightful embodiment of the results, not to the death of Elizabeth merely, but to the life and reign of Victoria, if such a thing were possible in a single life. The fall of Wolsey was in September 1529; and Elizabeth died early in 1603. Out of a period of seventy four years Mr. Froude has made his eight goodly volumes. At this rate it would take twenty eight additional volumes to reach the present time.

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The two volumes under notice, commence with Henry's last directions before his death, in January, 1547, delivered verbally to Lord Hertford and Sir William Paget, making provision for the conducting of the government until his son and heir, Edward, should attain to his majority, to the death of the "Bloody Mary," in November, 1558. Very memorable were these eleven years in the annals of England and of Europe. For conspiracies, and intrigues, and deep animosities, and fierce encounter of great and mighty religious parties, and rise and fall of illustrious men and women, and the shedding of blood, both of low and high degree; very few riods of equal length in the annals of the world can bear comparison with it. These volumes are marked by the same peculiar excellences which we have noticed in those that preceded. It has been supposed that the world in general, or at least the republic of letters, knew all that was ever likely to be known of Somerset's ambition and Northumberland's great conspiracy, with its tragic termination, and Gardiner and Bonner and Cranmer, and the persecutions under Mary. But Mr. Froude draws out the main facts, with which we have long been familiar, and illustrates those facts by so many incidents which are like the delicate lights and shadows of a great picture, that many old things seem strangely new. To one journeying in this leafy month of June amid the soft beauties and peaceful homes of England's landscape, it is difficult to believe that a land so beautiful and quiet and happy can ever have been the scene of such agonies and horrors, and (should we not add) such heroic and Christian magnanimities as these volumes exhibit. These mag

nanimities are the mighty lights which break in upon the awful darkness of human history. Man is no where else so great as in sorrow and suffering. Nothing else in the life of Cranmer was so great as

that sublime prayer and abjuration of the Pope at his death, when Cole had preached his funeral sermon in St. Mary's church, Oxford. The extract which Mr. Froude gives, v. 437, from a tract in circulation among the Protestants when suffering under Mary's persecutions, exhibits a spirit which was not surpassed in the apostolic age. For example, speaking of the cross: "O profitable instrument! O excellent exercise, that can not be spared in a Christian life! with what alacrity of mind, with what desirous affection, with what earnest zeal, ought we to embrace this incomparable jewel, this sovereign medicine, this comfortable cup of tribulation." In reading the frightful record of this dark and bloody period, we are amazed again for the thousandth time, that such a heart could have dwelt in the breast of a woman. We would gladly believe, with our author, that Mary's deep personal sorrows made her insane, and so prepared her to be the dupe and tool of her spiritual advisers, and especially of Reginald Pole, or, in other words, as we should paraphrase it, the embodiment in them of the spirit of the papacy, always one and

the same.

Such volumes as these of Mr. Froude should be much read and studied in our day. They make us feel that, with all our high sounding self-laudation, the piety of the present day is comparatively a soft and silken thing, knowing little of the cross, save as it surmounts the spires of our churches, or is embellished with flowers, or adorns the neck of beauty.

We must profess our admiration of the uncut condition of these exceedingly elegant volumes. There is a peculiar pleasure in cutting the leaves. It makes us feel that the first reading is ours. It is like standing under the tree and eating peaches gathered by our own hand.

11.-Prophecy Viewed in Respect to its Distinctive Nature, Special Functions and Proper Interpretation. By PATRICK FAIRBAIRN, D. D., Principal of the Free Church College, Glasgow; Author of "Typology of Scripture," "Ezekiel and the Book of His Prophecy," etc. pp. 524. New York: Carlton & Porter. 1866.

THIS is a new and revised edition of a work first published several years ago. It exhibits sound learning, skill in exegesis, and clear, well poised judgment. The treatise consists of two parts, the first upon the "Investigation of Principles," and the second upon the "Application of Principles to Past and Prospective Fulfillment of Prophecy." This, it will be observed, is very comprehensive, covering the whole ground. The writer does not hold with those who "have demonstrated with mathematical certainty" as they claim, "that the present Louis Napoleon is the last, the culminating embod

iment of Anti-Christ," and that the return of the Jews to Palestine, the building of their new temple, and the second advent of Christ are events just at hand. Dr. Fairbairn employs the failure of such visionary predictions with great effect against those who have adventured them. It is a fact to be greatly deplored that the writing of such dreamers, good and true men, nevertheless, has done so much to envelope the whole subject of prophecy in a painful cloudiness, tending even to weaken the popular faith in the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. This work is of great value in contributing to restore the subject to its proper place.

12.-A History of New England. From the Discovery by Europeans to the Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. Being an abridgement of his History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty. By JOHN GORHAM PALFREY. In two volumes. pp. xx. 408, xii.

426. New York: Hurd & Houghton. 1866.

THE Riverside Press is doing most excellent service to the republic of letters in the series of standard historical works it is sending forth. It gave us quite recently Punchard's two volumes on Congregationalism, of the value of which we can hardly speak too highly. Froude's incomparable volumes are nearly completed; and here we have two volumes exhibiting all the unique Riverside beauties, and comprising a history of profound interest and value, of which we can only say now, that it is marked by all the peculiar excellences of the larger work of which it is an abridgement, much research, elegant scholarship, and a happy faculty of clear and concise delineation. Perhaps we will refer to it again.

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13. Only a Woman's Heart. By ADA CLARE. New York: M. Doolady. 1866.

A RATHER clever combination of improbabilities and impossibilities; how a brilliant, dreamy, warm hearted girl, and a fighting girl withal, literally a fighting girl among her school mates, was a reformer in the seminary, banishing, by her influence, duplicity and sundry other ignoble qualities; how she fell in love with an actor, and met with mortification, and despaired and hoped, and was married to him at last, and both were wrecked, and both died in the boat in which they had escaped from the ship; with the moral tone good on the whole.

14.-Roebuck. A Novel. New York: M. Doolady. 1866.

PERHAPS this is as good as most of the works of the same kind at the present day. Perhaps it is better than most of them. And per