Bishop McIlvaine's Charge on the subject of Spiritual Regeneration has been issued in a neat pamphlet by Harper and Brothers. It forms an able and appropriate contribution to doctrinal theology, at a time when the topic discussed has gained a peculiar interest from the present position of Catholicism both in England and America. The theme is handled by Bishop McIlvaine with his accustomed vigor and earnestness, and is illustrated by the fruits of extensive research.
Speaking of the decease of our illustrious countryman, Fenimore Cooper, the London Athenæum has the following discriminating remarks: "Mr. Cooper was at home on the sea or in his own backwoods. His happiest tales are those of 'painted chiefs with pointed spears'—to use a happy description of Mr. Longfellow; and so felicitous has he been in setting them bodily, as it were, before the reader, that hereafter he will be referred to by ethnological and antiquarian writers as historical authority on the character and condition of the Lost Tribes of America. In his later works Mr. Cooper wandered too often and too much from the field of Romance into that of Polemics—and into the latter he imported a querulous spirit, and an extraordinarily loose logical method. All his more recent fictions have the taint of this temper, and the drawback of this controversial weakness. His political creed it would be very difficult to extract entire from the body of his writings; and he has been so singularly infelicitous in its partial expositions, that even of the discordant features which make up the whole, we generally find ourselves disagreeing in some measure with all. But throughout the whole course of his writing, whenever he turned back into his own domain of narrative fiction, the Genius of his youth continued to do him service, and something of his old power over the minds of readers continued to the last. His faults as a writer are far outbalanced by his great qualities—and altogether, he is the most original writer that America has yet produced—and one of whom she may well be proud."
"Hawthorne," says a London critic, "has few equals among the writers of fiction in the English language. There is a freshness, an originality of thought, a quiet humor, a power of description, a quaintness of expression in his tales, which recommend them to readers wearied of the dull commonplaces of all but a select few of the English novelists of our own time. He is beyond measure the best writer of fiction yet produced by America, somewhat resembling Dickens in many of his excellencies, yet without imitating him. His style is his own entirely."
In a notice of Hitchcock's "Religion of Geology," the London Literary Gazette remarks: "Dr. Hitchcock is a veteran American clergyman, of high reputation and unaffected piety. Officially, he is President of Amherst College, and Professor of Natural Theology and Geology in that institution. As a geologist, he holds a very distinguished position, and is universally reputed an original observer and philosophical inquirer. His fame is European as well as American. No author has ever entered upon his subject better fitted for his task. The work consists of a series of lectures, which may be characterized as so many scientific sermons. They are clear in style, logical in argument, always earnest, and often eloquent. The author of the valuable and most interesting work before us combines in an eminent degree the qualifications of theologian and geologist."
The London News briefly hits off an American work which has attracted little attention in this country: "A fast-sailing American clipper has appeared in the seas of philosophy. The author of 'Vestiges of Civilization; or the Etiology of History, Religious, Æsthetical, Political, and Philosophical,' advertised as written within two months, has puzzled the scientific public as much as did the original MS. of 'Pepys' Diary.' The reader, however, may be comforted in his bewilderment by finding that the author himself is but little better off. In a note there is a confession which should certainly have been extended to the whole production: "I freely own that, touching these extreme terms of the complication in Life and Mind, or rather the precise combinations of polarities that should produce them, my meaning is at present very far from clear, even to myself. And yet I know that I have a meaning; that it is logically involved in my statement; and is such as (perhaps within half a century) will set the name of some distinct enunciator side by side with, if not superior to that of Newton."