The translator has already given us two volumes of the great Dominican's Conferences, and promises more in the same readable form. Persons as yet unacquainted with Lacordaire will find his papers kindle their enthusiasm beyond, perhaps, those of any other author—that [pg 431] is, if they can at all appreciate the originality of his argument, together with his giant grasp of thought and diction. And especially do we commend these conferences to earnest thinkers outside the church, with whom the supernatural is the question of questions.
Indebted as we are to the translator, he must not think us hypercritical if we complain of bad punctuation, a comma being sometimes found where a colon or even a full stop ought to be; or if we take leave to remind him that, to render French idiomatically, it will not do to preserve the sudden changes of tense which are forcible in that language, as in Latin, but sound very strangely in English.
The Hymnary, With Tunes: A Collection of Music for Sunday-Schools. By S. Lasar. New York and Chicago: Biglow & Main.
We could recommend this hymn-book to Catholic schools, and, on account of its intrinsic worth, would have been glad to do so, if the compiler had excluded the few hymns, of no special merit in themselves or in the tunes adapted to them, which are anti-Catholic in doctrine. Poison is dangerous, and we cannot offer it even in the smallest quantities to our children.
The Issues of American Politics. By Orrin Skinner, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1873.
Attracted by the title of this book, the fact of its dedication to a distinguished citizen of New York, and by its comprehensive table of contents, we took it up and read it from cover to cover. In all candor, we must say a more confused, ungrammatical, and shallower book it has seldom fallen to our lot to peruse; and why any respectable publishing house should have been induced to bring it out in such good style, or in any form at all, passes our comprehension. To grapple with the great issues of our American politics, to state each leading question clearly and fairly, and to draw deductions therefrom that will stand the test of justice and reason is a task requiring infinitely more experience, judicial ability, and knowledge of our language than the author displays or evidently ever will possess. Judging from this production, Mr. Skinner has not the faintest conception of the principles upon which rests the framework of our government. Though a lawyer, he is sadly ignorant of law as a science; and, though ambitious of authorship, he seems unable to write a paragraph intelligibly. For instance, take the following, snatched at random:
“The deduction from this criticism constitutes, of course, an advocacy of intelligent suffrage. The plea is here urged that an unrestricted suffrage is its own incentive to the education of those who exercise it. The assertion betrays an unpardonable ignorance of one of the most prominent characteristics of human nature. Frail humanity is so constituted that, when it has presented to it two ways of effecting its purposes, one with effort and the other without, it invariably chooses the latter. Equality as a fundamental element of republican institutions is also urged, Let such a sciolist read his conviction in the quotations from Burke already cited.”
It were, however, useless to further attempt to criticise this most pretentious and least readable of books, and the best wish we can afford the author, and one that we have no doubt will be gratified, is that it will be read by few and soon forgotten.
A Manual of American Literature: A Text-Book for Schools and Colleges. By John S. Hart, LL.D. Philadelphia: Eldridge & Bro. 1873.
Mr. Hart has gathered considerable fresh material on American literature in this volume. There is still much which he has omitted. With the same industry and care which he has already bestowed on this manual, he may render it complete. There is a personality in some of his remarks which is uncalled for. In spite of these defects, this is the best work of the kind with which we are acquainted.