MISCELLANY.
The Colosseum and St. Peter's—Now when I recall my impressions of Rome, I find only two that efface or at least predominate over the others: the Colosseum, the work of the Roman people, and St. Peter's, the master-peace of Catholicism. The Colosseum is the gigantic work of an almost superhuman people, who, in a ferocity of pride and pleasure, erected only such buildings as contained an entire nation, rivaling nature, if possible, in massiveness and duration. The Tiber would have drained the mud of its banks, that the Colosseum might command it forever. But St. Peter's is the work of a thought, of a religion, of an entire humanity, at an epoch of the world. Not an edifice simply to contain an ignoble people, but a temple admitting all of philosophy, of prayer, of grandeur—every aspiration of man. The walls themselves seem to rise and grow, not in proportion of a people, but a God.
Michael Angelo alone has understood Catholicism, and in St. Peter's has given it its most sublime and complete expression—an apotheosis in stones, the monumental transfiguration of the religion of Christ. The architects of gothic cathedrals were sublime barbarians—Michael Angelo a philosopher in conception. Saint Peter's is itself philosophical Christianity from which the divine architect chases darkness and superstition, and bids enter the imperishable stream of beauty, symmetry, and light. In its incomparable beauty—a temple that might serve any worship, a temple deistical, if I may use the word applied to stones—God himself reclothed in his splendor. Christianity itself might perish, but St. Peter's would still remain the eternal, universal, and rational temple of whatever religion succeeded Christ's, provided that religion was worthy of God and humanity. The most abstract Temple that ever human genius, inspired by divine ideas, has constructed here below. [{282}] When one enters, one knows not if it is ancient or modern. No detail offends the eye, no symbol distracts the thought. Men of all religions enter with the same respect; sufficient to know the idea of God alone pervades it, and none other could occupy the place.
Change the priest, take away the altar, detach the pictures, carry off the statues—nothing is changed, it is always the house of God, or rather, St. Peter's is to him alone the great symbol of that eternal Christianity, which in influence and sanctity is but the germ of successive developments of the religious thought of all men and every age; and in proportion as God has illuminated it, so it opens to reason, communicates with him in this light, enlarges and elevates itself in proportion to the human mind, growing endlessly, gathering all people in a unity of adoration more and more rational, and making of each form of divinity an only God, of each age a single religion, and of all people a single humanity. Michael Angelo is the Moses of monumental Catholicism, and as such will one day be understood. He has constructed the imperishable arch for the future—the pantheon of divine reason.
LAMARTINE.
Oriental Translation Committee.—An attempt is being made to resuscitate the operations of the Oriental Translation Committee. The Oriental Translation Fund was established in 1828 by several Oriental scholars and others interested in Eastern literature, "for the translation and publication of such works on Eastern history, science, and belles lettres as our inaccessible to the European public in MS. form and indigenous language." This scheme received at first very considerable support, and the reigning sovereign has from its commencement always been the patron of the undertaking. During a period of thirty-two years the committee have published, or aided in the publication of more than seventy translations. Of these many are highly valuable, all are curious and interesting, and several of them are of such a nature, that without the aid afforded by the Society they could scarcely have been undertaken. The Sanskrit translations include those of the Sankhya Karika, Rig Veda, and Vishnu Purana. Among those from the Arabic, are found the travels of Ibn-Batuta, and of the Patriarch Macarius, Al-Makkari's history of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, and the extensive Lexicon of Hajji Khalfa. There are also on the list translations from the Persian, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Chinese, and Japanese languages. For the last two or three years no work has been issued from the press of the society, nor is any one preparing for publication; but as there are signs in the literary world of a renewed interest in Oriental learning, the committee invite the special co-operation of all those who are anxious to bring the East and West into a still closer communion with each other—London Reader.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
ELEMENTS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW.
By Henry Wheaton, LL.D., Minister of the United States at the Court of Prussia, corresponding member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in the Institute of France, honorary member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, etc. Eighth Edition, edited, with notes, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., LL.D. 1 vol. 8vo., pp. 749. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. 1866.
Whoever will examine Fulbecke's Pandects of the Law of Nations, published at London in 1602, which the author styles the first, to his knowledge, that hath been written on this subject, and compare it with the first addition of Wheaton's International Law, published in 1836, must be astonished at the great progress which has been made in this most interesting science in a period of two centuries and a third. But a glance at Dana's Wheaton will satisfy the most superficial Inquirer that the last thirty years have still more fully develop the principles of that code of law which professes to find the nations of the civilized world.