The Victory of the Vanquished. A Tale of the First Century. By the Author of the Schönberg-Cotta Family. T. Nelson and Co.
In her new story, Mrs. Charles has ventured to tread the oft-trodden paths of the age of the Incarnation, and with a delicacy, grace, and devout tenderness that perhaps none of her predecessors have attained. The story opens in Rome in the year a.d. 17. Its personages are a captive German family, brought to Rome by Germanicus—slaves in his household, first becoming acquainted with the pagan life at Rome, then with the heaving Jewish life, which He who was Immanuel was stirring to its depths. Jew and Roman, Greek and Christian represent the various classes of contemporary life. Mrs. Charles is too refined and reverent an artist to bring us into the actual presence of him who taught in Capernaum; but we vividly feel and realize his life; and Siguna and her children, Seivord and Hilda, and Laon, the old Greek, and Clœlia Diodora, the Roman maiden, find its salvation. A more beautiful, pellucid, and tender story has rarely been written.
Chips from a German Workshop. By F. Max Muller, M.A., Foreign Member of the French Institute, &c. Vol. III., Essays on Literature, Biography, and Antiquities. Longmans, Green, and Co.
The first and second volumes of Mr. Max Müller's occasional essays on the subject of comparative mythology, and on the so-called science of religious development, received the modest and quaint title of 'Chips from a German Workshop.' Our author has given the stress of his energy and the prime of his life to great undertakings. His edition of the 'Rig-Veda,' and now his elaborate translation and interpretation of its hymns, have not prevented his delivering important courses of lectures on the Science of Language. The great assistance he rendered to Baron Bunsen in his Oriental and philological speculations has been abundantly recognised by all students of the greater works of Bunsen. But scientific scholarship on this high scale has brought our author into contact with other and allied themes of literary research; and we find in the present volume a reprint of sixteen additional essays, of varied interest and merit, which greatly enhance our idea of the wide extent of Mr. Max Müller's scholarship, and are, moreover, of a class which may be safely commended to the general reader. Comparative grammar is clearly the key which this accomplished student of ancient and modern languages is tempted to use on all occasions, and for the solution of all puzzles, historical, theological, political, and even scientific. His keen and penetrating eye sees analogies, histories, reaches of civilization, bonds and bars of fellowship, in non-extant words, where one less trained to the business would utterly fail to discover them; and his linguistic omniscience makes us, in our ignorance, not seldom feel that he is too clever by half, and that his conclusions come almost too 'pat' upon his speculative theses. Be this as it may, we thank him very heartily for the exceeding refreshment and peculiar charm of this volume. The three articles on 'Cornish Antiquities,' on the question 'Are there Jews in Cornwall?' and on 'the Insulation of St. Michael's Mount,' which were written in 1867, form a trilogy of extreme interest. We have seldom read anything more perfect or complete in its way than his demolition of Mr. Pengelly's plausible theory, that the Cornish language was spoken before the insulation of St. Michael's Mount, in Cornwall, could have taken place; even though, geologically speaking, that event must be thrown back from 16,000 to 20,000 years. His learned refutation of the idea that Jews worked in the mines of Cornwall, in part effected by the discovery of the true etymology of the name of the town Marazion, on which so much had been built, and his instructive exposition of the nature and value of the Cornish antiquities and language, will well repay perusal.
The gem of the volume is the eloquent and affectionate tribute to the memory of Bunsen, in the form of a review of his memoirs. To these Max Müller has now added a valuable postscript, in a selection of some hundred letters addressed to himself by the great scholar and diplomatist. They are charged with kindly and generous feeling, and with noble enthusiasm; and they give fresh insight into Bunsen's astounding activity, far-reaching glance, and prodigious range of literary endeavour. They would many of them be more intelligible if they were read in their proper place in his biography; but the perusal of them recalls the zest with which three years ago the memoirs of this great man were devoured rather than read. We are not surprised that M. Müller should say, 'It has been my good fortune in life to have known many men whom the world calls great philosophers, statesmen, scholars, artists, and poets; but take it all in all, take the full humanity of the man, I have never seen, and I shall never see his like again.'
One of the essays to which we would direct special attention is that on the language and poetry of Schleswig-Holstein. The biographical articles on Schiller, and Wilhelm Müller, and some of the shorter 'chips' on 'Ye Schyppe of Fools,' 'Old German Love-songs,' and on 'A German Traveller in England, A.D. 1598,' are racy, and highly entertaining.
The World of Moral and Religious Anecdote; Illustrations and Incidents gathered from the Words, Thoughts, and Deeds in the Lives of Men, Women, and Books. By Edwin Paxton Hood. Hodder and Stoughton.
Mr. Hood is a man who reads everything, and who, making allowance for such slight inaccuracies as are characteristic of voracious readers, forgets nothing that he has read. It would be difficult to name a man better qualified to compile a volume of anecdotes. We wish, however, he would not call Samuel Bailey, the thoughtful author of the 'Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions,' Baillie. Eccentricities of this kind are frequent in Mr. Hood's writings, and not easy to be accounted for.
The volume published by Mr. Hood, under the more general title 'The World of Anecdote,' has met with a reception so favourable, that he has published this companion volume, 'The World of Religious Anecdote,' filled with anecdotes of religious men or things, gathered from a very wide circle of religious biography and history, and from all imaginable miscellaneous sources—from a quarterly review to a newspaper. Mr. Hood does not exaggerate the importance and significance of anecdote, either in history or biography; if exactly told, such incidents as constitute anecdote, indicate the movement or the man, more truthfully than formal disquisition. We do not pretend to have read through Mr. Hood's volume—this would be a task, less arduous only than to read through a dictionary—but we have read enough of it cordially to commend it as a repertory of many things that are both new and good, and of some that are neither.
The Essays of an Optimist. By John William Kaye. Smith, Elder, and Co.