While the forethought of Mr. Brunel—which added fifty per cent. to the accommodation afforded by his lines of railway for the future traffic of the country—doubled the speed of his own trains, it further compelled the narrow-gauge lines, by the use of the long six-wheeled engines, materially to increase theirs. The sagacious genius of the engineer was evinced yet more splendidly in the services he rendered to navigation. Of oceanic steam traffic Mr. Brunel may justly be called the father. In July, 1837, the Great Western steamship was launched at Bristol, and in April of the following year she arrived at New York, after a journey of nine days, with a fourth of her coal unconsumed. The Sirius was built by the St. George's Steam Packet Company expressly to anticipate the Great Western, so that by sea as well as by land Mr. Brunel effected almost as much by the emulation he awoke as by his own energy and toil. The Sirius arrived at New York a few hours only before the Great Western, having consumed every combustible on board, down to a child's doll! The measured tonnage of the Great Western was 1,340 tons; that of the Great Britain, launched at Bristol in July, 1843, was 3,443 tons; that of the Great Eastern, launched in the Thames on 31st January, 1858, was 13,343 tons. It was thus that the cautious shipwright felt his way before developing the full magnitude of his conceptions.
For the account of his further works—his docks and harbours, his bridges and viaducts, his investigation of projectiles and of screw propulsion, his admirable military hospital for the Crimean expedition, his general professional practice—we must refer our readers to the volume now before us. All those who regard the civil engineer as a sort of typical or central workman, and who therefore are prepared to measure our future progress in applied science and industrial art by the scale afforded by the condition of this profession in England, will do well to read with care this very interesting book.
Memoir of George Edward Lynch Cotton, D.D., Bishop of Calcutta; with Selections from his Journals and Correspondence. Edited by Mrs. Cotton. Longmans, Green, and Co. 1871.
In this volume Mrs. Cotton has given to the world a memorial of the late Bishop of Calcutta, which by those who personally knew him, and also knew English life in India, will be read with peculiar interest. The scattered nature of their dioceses, the varieties of claims which they have to meet, the consecration of churches, and the confirmation of candidates, compel the dignitaries of the English Church in India to travel frequently and far; and, as metropolitans over the entire empire, the Bishops of Calcutta journey more frequently and to greater distances than their colleagues. A large portion of this memoir is devoted to the details of such journeys; and the descriptions of places, persons, and incidents, coming fresh from the ripe, scholarly, and cheerful mind of one who saw Indian scenes and manners for the first time, give to it a peculiar charm. The extracts from the Bishop's journals and letters are numerous, perhaps too numerous and extended; and the connecting links, now detailing important facts, and at another time discussing the bearings of some great question, are written with clearness and power.
The vein of humour which ran through Bishop Cotton's mind enabled him to discern the lively and especially the burlesque aspect of the scenes through which he passed, whether in school and college days, or amid the serious labours which closed his life. At Rugby he named the fat denizen of his sty Vitellius; at Cambridge he would class his personal friends in an imaginary tripos, and award them medals and honours which expressed his estimate of their worth; and his letters to his children and old friends are full of the amusing side of native life.
With many things to interest him, the reader cannot but be disappointed at the book. It is almost entirely confined to the few years of Bishop Cotton's episcopate. At page 68 he has already left England for his Eastern diocese at the age of forty-nine; and the story of the next eight years occupies five hundred pages. All we can learn of the mental and moral growth of his English life, of his distinguished career as an educator, and of the remarkable position which he early attained among the foremost clergy of the English Church, is contained in the first three chapters of the memoir by Dean Stanley, with the beautiful notices of his work and influence by Professor Shairp and the late Professor Conington. Yet his early career deserves to be described as fully as that of Dr. Arnold, who loved him so well, whom he so greatly resembled, and to whose position as an educator he practically succeeded. These early years made him what he was—a careful scholar, a man of active, earnest piety, an intense lover of truth, a man of large mind and broad sympathies.
We took occasion, soon after the bishop's death in October, 1866, to express in these pages our high estimate of his worth and usefulness, and his views on the important questions with which in his brief episcopate he had to deal are fully set forth in Mrs. Cotton's narrative. His long but most interesting travels; his concern for the isolated English communities in India; his care for the spiritual interests of the English soldiery; his opening the consecrated Episcopal Churches to the use of the Presbyterian regiments; his charges to the clergy; his deep interest in the Episcopal missions, in the raising up of a native ministry, and in measures for the relief of native converts, such as their Re-marriage Act; his efforts to establish schools for East Indian children, are fully and carefully discussed. But while illustrating in many ways Bishop Cotton's large-hearted sympathies and the broad views which he took of men and things, the memoir fails to show how in religious matters he looked with deep interest on other Christian communities than his own, was prepared to do them full justice, and held the most kindly and unpatronizing intercourse with prominent members among them. A man of deep, sterling piety, an evangelical preacher, a faithful minister and bishop of his Church, a lover of good men, he well deserves the high position now accorded to his name by the members of the Church of England; and long will he be remembered with esteem and regard by men of many communions who outside her own pale are striving to evangelize India.
Some Memorials of Renn Dickson Hampden, Bishop of Hereford. Edited by his daughter, Henrietta Hampden. Longmans, Green, and Co.
Time brings its revenges, but not always repentance or wisdom. The Dissenters are to be admitted to the University, and the intelligence and good sense of the country—the dogmatic intolerance of such men as made Dr. Hampden a martyr alone excepted—heartily approve. He is justified as a man more foresighted and just than many of his contemporaries, and his persecutors are relegated to that limbo of conscientious intolerance into which all claimants of arrogant prerogative and all obstinate conservatives are cast. Dante should have devised a retribution for non-jurors, or Vathek should have represented them as melancholy ghosts with their hands upon their hearts and ceasing not to sigh out their non possumus. Opponents of every liberal advance in Church and State rudely swept into eddies by the stream of time, their characters are most heterogeneous and their labour very great. The forty bullet-headed Protectionists of the Free-trade reform, the Bourbons who 'forgot nothing and learned nothing,' the bereaved patrons of rotten boroughs—to say nothing of Laud and his school of divine right, of the good old times of the Star Chamber, of the Five-mile Act, of the Test and Corporation Acts, of Roman Catholic disabilities, of Church-rates, and the Irish establishment—must surely bemoan themselves very bitterly either because they maintained right in vain, or because they opposed it in vain. And yet inherent Toryism will not learn wisdom. The opponents of the Test Repeal Act are, in the present Parliament, repeating as blindly and as fatuously the follies of their predecessors. Miss Hampden tells the story of her father's noble testimony, for really while his actual life was much more than this, there is little more about it to tell. Learned, pious, candid, orthodox, conservative, reverently, and, as we should now say, almost timidly jealous for revealed truth, anything but a man of advanced opinions generally, Bishop Hampden was the object of a virulent and most unscrupulous persecution, such as must ever be the dark reproach of any Church or party whose polemical passions can make them capable of it. His sin was that he was strongly opposed to the Tractarian movement. He was too honest and honourable to be moved by this hostility from his position, although his scholarly and benevolent and sensitive life was embittered by it. He lived to see himself vindicated, and now the public opinion of England is about to endorse the clear-sightedness, candour, and justice of his advocacy. Of his great theological learning and catholic heartedness, there is no need to speak. The memoir, although not very skilfully put together, is an interesting and touching memoir of a very noble man.
The Life and Times of Lord Brougham. (Written by himself.) Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons.