A FEW HISTORIES.-"There she is," said Webster, of Massachusetts," behold her, and judge for yourself. The world knows her history by heart." But if it does, that is no reason why her history should not be written. Accordingly, Mr. BARRY has given us a most elaborate and agreeable record of it, in his History of Massachusetts. It is a work, which in more respects than its mere form resembles Bancroft's "United States," without being an imitation. It evinces the same research, the same animation, and the same liberal American spirit. Beginning with the earliest discoveries of the State, it describes the landing of the Pilgrims, their troubles with the Indians, their persecutions of the Quakers, and the successive administrations, down to a quite modern period. The author, who cherishes both an admiring love of the heroic qualities of the New England settlers, and a noble disdain of their occasional bigotry and meanness, writes with ease and eloquence, in the temper of a judge, and not of a partisan. His work will take its place, we confidently predict, among the standard books of history; for it is clear, succinct, conscientious, and attractive. - A History of Western Massachusetts, by JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND, is confined to the several counties of Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire, and is more of a local than a general narrative. In the first part, we have an outline of general history, but the second part relates to the geology, and the third part to the towns of those particular counties. It has been prepared with much industry and skill, and is a valuable contribution to our local knowledge. Many of the anecdotes which Mr. Holland has collected out of the archives of the old towns, have a quaint and characteristic significance. - No writer has a more charming simplicity of style than ZSCHOKKE, whose History of Switzerland, a household treasure among the Alps, has just been faithfully rendered into English, by FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW. It is the great merit of Zschokke, that while his narrative possesses that clear and limpid beauty, which adapts it to the capacity of children and the people, it has all the accuracy, conciseness and thought which the maturest mind may require. It is the text-book, we believe, of the confederate Cantons. We confess to a strong liking for LAMARTINE'S Histories. It is true, they are not always accurate, but, it is also true, that they are always profoundly interesting; his sentiments are often sentimentalities, but then his descriptions are pictures. Who can read any one of his books, and forget it? How vividly, and with what poetic elevation, he brings his scenes and characters before the mind! How graceful and flowing his narrative-how liberal, and, for the most part just, his judgments? Take up the first volume of his History of Turkey, just published by the Appletons, and read his account of the rise of Mahomet and his religion, and see if you ever before read a more graphic, impressive, and fascinating story? The East, where Lamartine has spent nine years of his life-with its sunny climate, its wild deserts, its legendary mysteries, its strong passions and lofty enthusiasm is just the sphere for his fine poetic faculties, and, we cannot doubt, that this Ottoman history will be one of his most characteristic and beautiful books. In the lectures on Louis the Fourteenth and the Writers of his Age, translated from the French of J. F. Astié by the Rev. E. W. KIRK, we have an able and instructive, though somewhat incomplete view of the literary and religious aspects of the age of the Grand Monarque. They were delivered in French, to a private audience in this city, and have since been translated by Mr. Kirk, who is a friend of the author. The prose part of the translation is good, but the poetry quite indifferent. An ambitious introduction by the translator, is not so skillfully executed as it might have been, although it supplies a rapid review of preliminary French History, which will be found useful in studying the treatise. -The Life of Sam Ilouston is evidently written with a view to advance his interests as a candidate for the Presidency, but is full of fine material notwithstanding. His experiences of this world have been so varied, that the incidents fall, of themselves, into picturesque and striking forms. Even the turgid style of his biographer cannot divest them of a certain dramatic and robust force. As the boy emigrant, the Indian chief, the successful General, and the influential statesman, his career exhibits the most romantic contrasts, and novel adventures; and, had they been de scribed with a simple reliance upon the facts, without the attempt at elaborate eulogy, which runs through this book, the natural impression produced would have been stronger than the artificial one, aimed at by the writer, is likely to be. -A History of the War, by GEORGE FOWLER, is a succinct but authentic account of all the proceedings of the hostile parties in the East. It is compiled from public and private documents of the highest authority, and gives a clear, though compendious, narrative of the progress of negotiations and hostilities, from the mission of Mentchikoff, up to the siege of Sevastopol. Two excellent maps, one of the Crimea, and the other of the besieged city, add materially to the value of this little vol ume. -The Church History of Dr. CHARLES HASE, lately rendered into English, is one of the best manuals on that subject that we have found. It is succinct but clear, and unites to an astonishing power of condensed expression, the most impartial and comprehensive judgment. The arrangement has all the scientific precision of the Germans. with a liveliness of narrative which is not German. In its sketches of both characters and events, it exhibits a rare insight on the part of the author, whose learning, also, as he is a German, is of course prodigious. -The Lives of the Chief Justices of the United States, of which, we have read the advanced sheets. kindly forwarded to us by Lippincott. Grambo, & Co., promises to be a standard work of history. It is compiled from original and authentic documents, some of them now used. for the first time, and is written in a forcible and attractive style. SOME MISCELLANIES.-We shall speak of Maginn's Miscellanies, as an American book, for, though the substance of it has been printed in foreign Magazines, as a book it is new. Mr. Mackenzie, the editor, is already known by his elaborate edition of Wilson's Noctes Ambrosiana, and has acted judiciously in putting forth Maginn as a kind of continuation of that work. ginn was of the Wilson set; inferior to Wilson in many respects, but exhibiting many of the same qualities. He does not appear to have had the pathos and energy of Wilson, although he shares in his learn Ma ing, his fun, and his convivial sympathies. They, and their companions, were a rollicking, jovial crew (at least in print), as savage as meat-axes the next morning, and as full of loyalty as they were, or pretended to be, of liquor. Their truculent jokes told well in their day, but, we confess, that to us, now, many of them have the smell of an old drink-shop,-or of whisky-fumes and stale tobacco. A great deal of their wit is repulsively coarse, or a great deal of it, as an Irishman would say, no wit at all. It is mere broad whim, or a kind intellectual tours de force,-amusing for the time-but not genuine. The polyglott translations, for instance, are curious evidences of dexterity, but nothing more: the drinking and eating boasts, too, are mere vulgar exaggerations, pleas ing alone to swill-tubs; while the arrogant ridicule of contemporary authors, has less humor, and all the low malice of Billingsgate fishwives. Yet, over and above this gin-room slang and maudlin loyalty, there is often in Maginn real humor, touching sentiment, and sound learning. He has a free, hearty, careless way about him that carries you along, by the mere force of animal excitement. You like the fellow, even while he repels you, he is such a gentlemanly and scholarly rowdy. His insolence you ascribe to the bad rum in him; but his talent, his vivacity, his wonderful variety, his originality and independence you ascribe to the man himself. How atrocious the criticisms on Shelley, Keats, Hunt, etc.; yet how capital the burlesques of Wordsworth, Crabbe, Byron, Coleridge and others! What ingenuity in his parodies; what a true bacchanalian swing in his drinking songs; what audacity in his egotisms; what bluster in his critiques, what endless wealth of conceit in his literary disguises! We do not wonder that Blackwood, in his day, was universally disapproved and read-that the booksellers refused to sell it, and yet that every body bought it; or that every body pretended to be disgusted, while every body laughed. It was enough to drive Edinburgh mad, with mingled wrath and mirth-this stormy club of writers and bruisers, who seem to alternate with equal gusto from the rectory to the ring, from pugilism to philosophy, from license to literature, from rum to religion. Mr. Mackenzie has edited the book with vast industry, but not equal judgment. Many of his notes are de trop, and he ought to assume that the class of persons likely to read him will know something of such men as Jeffreys, Hogg, Belzoni, Shelley, Henry Mackenzie, etc., etc., without the assistance of a long biographical account. Sometimes, too, he ludicrously mistakes his author. Maginn, for instance, in one of his maxims, (p. 110,) says the best thing to be drank after cheese is strong ale; and adds ironically, by way of confirmation, "who ever heard of a drayman, who lives almost entirely on bread and cheese, washing it down with water or champagne?" Whereupon Mr. Editor asks, in a note, with all solemnity, "How could a drayman obtain champagne?" Sure enough, Mr. Mackenzie! how could be? But, generally, the notes of the Editor are a real assistance, and we thank him for the pains he has taken both in collecting and elucidating the text. -A work upon making and fencing Clearings, from Paris: a work upon Landscape Gardening, from the banks of the Ohio! Who would not as soon look for the one as for the other? But, in Mr. Kern's Landscape Gardening, published at Cincinnati, we have the latter, showing how rapidly the subtler arts follow in the peaceful train of empire. Mr. Kern has well judged his circumstances, and has produced the right book at the right moment. There are, probably, as each spring opens, a thousand homes where the opportunity and the wish coexist for the first time, for some external sign of ease, and of the love of natural beauty. The want of these, the guidance towards a tasteful expression, this book supplies. The more elaborate works of the class Mr. Kern has read with evident care and discrimination. He is certainly to be commended for making a book of reasonable size, and for writing with straightforwardness upon Landscape Gardening; a treatment which, before Downing's time, was hardly known. The principal English writers-Price, Ripton, Brown, Loudonare two-volume-octavo men. Loudon spun from his laborious head laborious books, full of valuable material, but useful only to the student or man of solid leisure. Most of us here are basty men, who do not expect at the utmost to reach seventy, who have a great deal to do, and may be called upon as F. Pierce was, at short notice, to be President of this Republic. Art, therefore, for us, whether in words or works, must be condensed. His publishers have put Mr. Kern before the public in great luxury of typography. The genius and expense devoted to the wood engravings might have been concentrated to advantage upon a smaller number; and Mr. K.'s elaborate "rockwork" could have been successfully omitted. -Dr. HAYWARD, President of the Massa chusett Medical Society, has just given to the world the more prominent points of his medical experience, with reflections. These "Papers and Reports" indicate a man of the profoundest professional good sense, the preeminent characteristic of our noble old physicians. They are complacently deficient, compared with the French school, in the technical minuteness of detail now obtainable; but have a far outbalancing tact and breadth of intelligent views. If every competent physician should leave such material as this for the deductions of future investigators, science might safely hope to make a vast step forward. -The death of MRS. CHARLOTTE BRONTE NICHOL, the author of "Jane Eyre," of "Shirley," and of "Villette " is too important an event in the literary world for us to allow it to pass without comment. In the accounts which have reached us of her actual personal life and experience, there is little to relieve the sense of sadness which is derived from her books: a feeling of loneliness and untold tragedy which give them an earnestness beyond those of any other contemporary woman. It is scarcely ten years since "Jane Eyre" was published, but the position of its author in English literature is assured. It was not only its vivid characterization, its startling and brilliant description, its glow and passionate pathos, which compelled the homage that followed it; but its profound humanity, its quiet scorn of the conventional accessories of success in fiction, its bold faith in human nature, its perfect freedom from dandyism and dilletantism, and its tone of religious earnestness, without cant or meanness, that made fame salute its author as eminent among women. By these characteristics all the works of Miss Bronte have achieved a permanent place among the best books of the best age of fiction; nor do we hesitate to say that, on the whole, "Jane Eyre" is the most remarkable novel ever written by a woman. Miss Bronte belonged entirely to the modern school; the school of which George Sand is a veiled Prophet, and of which Dickens and Thackeray are the high Priests. But, among her fellow workers, among contemporary novelists of either sex, she had few superiors. The amiable ladies who monthly supply the circulating libraries with the high-bred woes of the highborn Arethusa; or the sentimental gentlemen who paint the dainty miniature of the incomparable and impossible Harley L'Estrange, were incontinently put aside by this Yorkshire intruder, who hailed Thackeray as the chief among them all, and went into the field, showing his colors. The eye and the heart of the world followed her; and she has done what, perhaps, no other of the score of contemporary female novelists has done; she has enriched literature, and, consequently, human experience, with a new image. She has done what all genius has tested its greatness by doing, created a character that lives as a representative and type, in the human mind. The story of her life is sad and short. She was born, and mostly lived, and died, among the hills of Yorkshire. Her father was a poor clergyman; her sisters were of the same sensitive, if not morbid, temperament as herself; and they both died young and before her. Her brother was a youth of similar promise, and he died also. She went early to a school, of which the school in "Jane Eyre" is a picture, and there physical privation and suffering confirmed the grave and melancholy bent of her nature. She went, afterward, as a governess, to Brussels, and the fruit of that episode in her life we have in "Villette." Returning to Yorkshire she found her two sisters, Emily and Ann, and there the three novels were written by the three sisters, "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall." They retained their initials in the names they assumed, and were severally known to the public as Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell. Our readers will all remember the appearance of these remarkable books. There was a startling reality in them which quite staggered criticism. They seized the public almost sternly by the arm, and said, "Quit your smirking over the amiable imbecilities of Lady Belinda Doriana, and see another, and more real, and more terrific, aspect of human and English life." The books of the two younger sisters were appalling. The reader preferred to disbelieve. They were such revelations as had never been made, and of a state of society that was hardly suspected. They were imperfect in structure, and the protest that breathed through them was so fierce that it seemed almost insane or exaggerated. But "Jane Eyre" was so calm, so intense, and so real, that there was no escape. As a work of literary art it is most admirable. It is so sharply cut, so pointed, and defined: it leaves the moral so wisely where life and nature leave it, that the public mind instantly acknowledged a new power, and the little, brown-haired, sad-eyed, and wasted daughter of the Yorkshire curate, was a famous woman. But she meant to live neither for fame nor fortune. In her estimation, the writing of a book was a work to be done seriously and because it must be done, not because it could be done. She was neither dazzled nor deluded by her success, and wrote her next novel, "Shirley," in the midst of great domestic distress. It is less excellent than "Jane Eyre," but has the same qualities. Then, and last, came "Villette," a book written upon the edge of the churchyard, in which her sisters and brother were buried; and, at the window, whence she looked upon their graves. It is about two years since it was published. She married, then, and died on the last day of March in this year. So, among the wild Yorkshire hills, ended a life that seems bleak enough. It is not possible that she, who could so delicately describe great happiness, as she does in portions of all her works, did not feel, with an aching sorrow, the absence of it in her own life. Yet she wrought that tragedy into forms of pathetic beauty. If the thorn against her heart made her song sad, the world listened and wept. She was not forty years old when she died; but how much has she done, who has made her name dear in many lands, and to all kinds of persons, by the heroic tenderness with which she probed the most private wounds, and the earnest composure with which she poured the balm. The quality of the grief that lingers about her grave is the finest homage to her power. It is not a romantic sorrow over the death of youth and the blight of beautiful promise; nor the regret that follows the departure of a brilliant wit and scholar: it is not the grief at the decease of an entertaining and familiar author; but, it is the feeling of want and loss in the death of a noble woman, who did not wear her genius as a diamond to dazzle, but as a star, to inspire, and chasten, and console. LETTER FROM MAJOR WHERREY. To the Editor of Putnam's Monthly. SIR-I am grieved to see that a fair correspondent objects to the inconsistency of certain strictures of mine on an exhibition described to me as the German cotillion, which were reported in the March number of your periodical. The difficulty seems to lie in the fact, that I chose to offer vinous refreshment to my guests upon the occasion under consideration. Poor Barnard was dreadfully hurt at being called an "old masculine prude;" and when I came to that passage, he interrupted me and said, "Well, Major! you can make the same reply that Mrs. did when asked why she did not invite her sister (who married the music-master) to her last ball-My dear sir,' she said, you know we must draw the line somewhere! So pray tell this gentle critic that, to a certain extent, you choose to conform to the usages of society; but that you must draw the line somewhere! Your guests shall be welcome to your wines-but not to your wife." I confess I thought of saying something of this kind, until, upon reading the concluding paragraph of the remonstrance, I learnt that "punch and cigars are behind the age," and, moreover, that they are "medieval follies." When I asked Barnard how this was, he began to laugh, and exclaimed, "The lady has you there, Major! You have been growing cranberries down here in Bearbrook so long, that you know nothing of the advance the world has made elsewhere. The fact is, that associating the German in any way with such a medieval folly as an indulgence in stimulating fluids, is simply preposterous. It is well known that, at the great houses in the city, where this is the fashionable dance, no wine, punch, or any kind kind of spirituous liquor is provided, and that no person was ever known to be present at, or assist in, the German, except in a state of the severest sobriety. As for cigars-except as interesting relics illustrative of medieval folly-they are utterly unknown out of Bearbrook; and for introducing an indulgence so completely extinct, you may well be held responsible." I was so shocked to hear that a past frailty had been revived at my little October party, that I didn't exactly understand an allusion to some marines with which Barnard concluded his statement. It was, probably, of no consequence. Dear me! Sir, I fear this letter will be rather a composite affair, for my nephew Tom has just come into the room, and insists upon writing a paragraph, to give his ideas of what should have been the editorial comment upon the critical correspondence you have published. He thinks there is a very “sufficient answer" to the lady's complaint-and thus he writes it as in your person: "It is certainly a new doctrine, that a writer of fiction can introduce no characters but such as exhibit a spotless propriety or perfect con sistency. We had always supposed it not only perfectly lawful, but decidedly meritorious, to represent people no better than they really are. Our correspondent will scarcely deny that there are many gentlemen of the old school who so far retain former habits as to take wine or punch themselves, and to offer it to their guests, who are, nevertheless, honestly and decidedly shocked at follies to which custom has not hardened them. The notion that a writer is personally responsible for every opinion expressed by the characters he uses, or for all that is done in the scenes he describes, is too plainly absurd to require refutation." I really forget what I was writing about when Tom interrupted me, so I will conclude by saying that I could never seriously counsel or advise the use of any stimulant. But so long as it is the custom, among any circle of acquaintances, to give wine or punch when friends are received in the evening, I shall probably conform to it. A trifling difference in latitude may make a considerable difference in the habits and necessities of man. I can assure my graceful censor that the custom of providing spirituous refreshment upon social occasions, which it seems is extinct and mediæval in New York, is, UNFORTUNATELY (and I heartily underscore the word), so prevalent in Bearbrook, that one of the parties-either upon paper or in reality-would be incomplete without its introduction. I am sorry to have troubled you with so long a letter, and should not have done so had not Tom assured me the public would expect it. If you would now and then give us some agricultural articles, I think I could promise an increased circulation to your Magazine. It may seem presumptuous in me to suggest in this matter, but I am convinced that an occasional paper on the Cranberry could not fail to be popular. Pray assure your correspondent that I am not at all angry at what she called me, and shall endeavor to pacify Barnard as soon as possible. And so, Sir, believe me, with the highest consideration, Your very obedient servant, PAUL RETRIBUTION WHERREY. In justice to Major Wherrey, it should bo stated that, upon the first intimation of a charge upon his social morals, he was in the field, fully armed; and his present note of explanation was unavoidably deferred from the May number of the Monthly, for which it was designed.-ED. |