This volume contains seven interesting papers, originally contributed by the author to periodicals. They are all striking specimens of Mr. Headley’s peculiar powers of narration and description—a little less flushed in style, perhaps, than his Napoleon, but indicating the same vigorous abandonment to the subject. The best article is that on Alison’s History of Europe. The Biographies of Alfieri, Cromwell and Luther, are executed in a style which will stamp their leading traits indelibly on the popular imagination. The article on Griswold’s Prose Writers, which closes the volume, is unworthy of Mr. Headley, and should have been omitted from the collection.
From the preface we learn that the present volume has been issued to operate against an unauthorized edition of the author’s magazine articles, published by some bookseller in New York, on his own account. Every respectable bookseller and every respectable book-buyer should avoid the pirated edition, on the principle of common decency and justice.
Historical Studies, By George Washington Greene, late United States Consul at Rome. New York: George P. Putnam. 1 vol. 12mo.
Professor Greene is one of our ablest historical scholars, especially in the department of Italian literature and history, and the present work, embodying the thoughts and observations of many years, is a valuable contribution to thoughtful and elegant literature. The author combines the narrator and the thinker in just proportions, and connects with admirable tact, thoughts that quicken with biographical details which interest the mind. The subjects of the papers relating to Italy are Petrarch, Machiavelli, Manzoni, Verrazzano, The Hopes of Italy, Historical Romance in Italy, Reformation in Italy, Italian Literature in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, and Contributions for the Pope. The article on Libraries is one of the best ever written on that subject. Perhaps the most generally agreeable paper in the volume is that on Charles Edward. In this we have a flowing and animated biography, replete with novel facts, and as interesting as a romance. The author’s style, in all the papers, is sweet, flexible, graceful and condensed, indicating high culture, but a culture which has developed instead of deadening all that is peculiar in his mind and heart.
The Early Conflicts of Christianity. By the Rev. Wm. Ingraham Kip, D. D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.
This elegantly printed volume is published for the benefit of those Christians who have no clear idea of the difficulties to which the faith “was subjected in the earliest stages of its existence, or the severity of the conflict through which it was obliged to pass.” If it reaches all of those to whom it is addressed, it will have more readers than Macaulay’s history or Dickens’s novels, for the subject is one on which the strangest ignorance prevails even among pious and intelligent Christians. Dr. Kip divides the obstacles to the eventual victory of Christianity into five classes—Judaism, Grecian Philosophy, the Licentious Spirit of the Age, Barbarism and the Pagan Mythology, each of which is represented with much vigor and beauty of style, distinctness of thought, and wealth of information. It is a book which deserves to be in every family which professes a regard for the Christian faith, as it meets a universal want; and it will save the general reader a great deal of labor and time, embodying as it does, in a lucid and animated style, the results of a student’s researches in the whole field of early ecclesiastical history.
James Montjoy; or I’ve been Thinking. By A. S. Roe. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.