By Allan Cunningham.
6 vols., with Portraits of Thirty-two of the most distinguished British Artists, &c.
The author has collected in six small volumes the History of Art in England, and the Lives, Characters, and Works of its Professors,—the materials for which were previously scattered through many volumes. On this account, these biographies have been considered a valuable acquisition to literature; and although the critical observations will render them valuable to the student, yet, being free from the dry technicalities of virtù, and abounding with personal anecdote, they are not less alluring to the ordinary reader.
The annals of Art, and the lives of its followers, though deficient in the spirit-stirring incidents of the warrior and the politician, possess an interest not less attractive. The labours and struggles of genius, the success of perseverance, and the inutility of natural talent separated from prudence, as exemplified in these biographies, will afford a useful moral lesson, at the same time that the perusal of the stories of such lives is a source of pleasure and entertainment.
THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS.
By Rev. H. H. Milman. Complete in 3 vols.
With Original Maps and Woodcuts.
With the exception of Josephus, we have no historian of the Jews, and he lived at a period too remote and too limited to enable him to do justice to his subject. It is true, many events have been narrated by Rollin, and the authors of the Universal History, and noticed by commentators,—but a narrative at once Christian and liberal in its tone, spirited and elegant in its language, and depicting with something like kindred enthusiasm and eloquence, the manners, wars, religion, and policy of the most extraordinary of nations, was still wanting.
The object of the present work is strictly historical,—yet it affords elucidation of many obscure passages in the Old Testament; avails itself of the casual evidence of heathen writers; and throws new light on the manners and customs of the “Unchanging East,” by references to the ablest modern travellers.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF INSECTS.