Revolutions in English History. By ROBERT VAUGHAN, D.D. Vol. I. Revolutions of Race. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1860. pp. xvi., 663.
We do not think that Dr. Vaughan has been happy in his choice of a title for his book. It is more properly an introduction to the study of English history, than the limitation of the title would seem to import. The Saxon occupation of England is, perhaps, the only event which may fitly be called a revolution of race. The volume, however, is a solid and sensible one. Dr. Vaughan is not a brilliant writer; but brilliancy is not always the best quality in an historian, for it as often leaves readers dazzled as taught. A decidedly matter-of-fact turn of mind prevents his being a theorist, so that he does not formulate characters and events in accordance with some fixed preconception. His learning seems sometimes limited by what was accessible to him at the least expense of study,—as, for example, in his account of the religion of the Teutonic races, where he depends almost altogether on Mallet. His style is generally clear and unpretending, never remarkable for any rhetorical merit, sometimes disfigured by inaccuracies, which, had they occurred in an American book, would have been attributed by English critics to the low grade of our culture and civilization. In one instance he is guilty of the barbarous cockneyism of using the word party as an equivalent for person. He speaks of the Roman Wall as having been kept perpetually guarded when he means constantly, of border land as "separating between" two races, and of ornaments made "from jet."
Though we do not find in Dr. Vaughan the fascinating qualities which we have been spoiled into expecting by some recent English and French examples of historical composition, we can give him the praise of being fair-minded, sensible, and clear. If he anywhere shows prejudice, it is in his somewhat depreciatory estimate of the Normans, whom he rather gratuitously supposes to have acquired civilization and the love of art from the Saxons,—a supposition at war with probability as well as fact. If anything distinguished the Norman from the Saxon, it was his aptitude for appreciating beauty as distinguished from use,—an aptitude on which French influence could not have been lost before the Conquest of England. The Normans in Sicily certainly had not had the advantage of Saxon training in aesthetics, and the poetry and architecture of the Normans in England were no reproduction of Saxon models.
But whatever deductions are to be made on the score of want of picturesqueness in style, of generalizing power, and of that imagination which sets before us dramatically the mutual interaction of men and events, Dr. Vaughan's history will be found a useful and enlightened compendium of the facts with which it deals.
Fresh Hearts that failed Three Thousand Years Ago; with Other Things. By the Author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. pp. 121.
In noticing the "New Priest," in a former number of the "ATLANTIC," we had occasion to speak of the author's remarkable beauty and vigor of style, his keen sense of the picturesque and imaginative aspects of outward Nature, his comic power, and his original conception of character. At the same time we could not but feel that a certain tendency to multiplicity of detail, and a neglect of form or insensibility to it, hindered the book of that direct and vigorous effect which its power and variety of resource would otherwise have produced. Something of the same impression is made by the present volume. There are glimpses in it of real genius, but it shows itself generally here and there only, as the natural outcrop, seldom in the bars and ingots which give proof of patient mining and smelting at furnace-heat, still more seldom in the beautiful shapes of artistic elaboration. Here, again, we find the same unborrowed feeling for outward Nature and familiarity with her moods, the same poetic beauty of expression, and in many of the pieces the same overcrowdedness, as if the author would fain say all he could, instead of saying only what he could not help.
There are some of the poems that do more justice to the abilities of the author. In "The Year is Gone" there is great tenderness of sentiment and grace of expression; "Love Disposed of" is a pretty fancy embodied with true lyric feeling; but the poem which over crests all the others like a decuman wave is "The Brave Old Ship, the Orient." It is a truly masculine poem, full of vigor and imagination, and giving evidence of true original power in the author. There is scarce a weak verse in it, and the measure has a swing, at once easy and stately, like that of the sea itself. We know not if we are right in conjecturing some hint of deeper meaning in the name "Orient," but, taking it merely as a descriptive poem, it is one of the finest of its kind. The writer's heart seems more in the work here than in the devotional verses. We quote a single passage from it, which seems to us particularly fine:—
"We scanned her well, as we drifted by:
A strange old ship, with her poop built high,
And with quarter-galleries wide,
And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now,
And carvings all strange, beside:
A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark
Long years and generations ago;
Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard
With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow.
* * * * *
"Down her old black side poured the water in a tide,
As they toiled to get the better of a leak.
We had got a signal set in the shrouds,
And our men through the storm looked on in crowds:
But for wind, we were near enough to speak.
It seemed her sea and sky were in times long, long gone by,
That we read in winter-evens about;
As if to other stars
She had reared her old-world spars,
And her hull had kept an old-time ocean out."
Hester, the Bride of the Islands. A Poem. By SYLVESTER B. BECKETT. Portland: Bailey & Noyes.
Mr. Beckett is evidently an admirer of Walter Scott; and it is not the least remarkable fact in connection with "Hester," that an author with the good sense to propose to himself such a model, disregarding the more elaborate poets of a later date, should have proved himself so utterly unable to follow that model, except in a few phrases, which were quite appropriate as Scott used them, but are ludicrously out of place in his own verse. In adopting the brief lines and irregularly recurring rhymes of Scott, he has taken a hazardous step. The curt lines are excellent with Sir Walter's liveliness and dash; but when dull commonplaces are to be written, their feebleness would be more decorously concealed by a longer and more conventional dress. The cutty sark, so appropriate when displaying the free, vigorous stops of Maggie Lauder, is not to be worn by every lackadaisical lady's-maid of a muse. In the moral reflections, with which "Hester" abounds, there is a most comical imitation of Scott,—as if the poem were written as a parody of "The Lady of the Lake," by Mrs. Southworth, or Sylvanus Cobb, Junior.