LITERARY NOTICES
The Patience of Hope. By the Author of A Present Heaven. With an Introduction by John G. Whittier, 'Et teneo et teneor.' Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
A work less remarkable for talent than for tender, pious feeling—less marked by genius than goodness, yet of a kind which the impartial critic will still sincerely commend, simply because its defects are negative while its merits are positive and apparent to all who will read only a few pages in it. The author seems to us as one who has gleaned the best from mystical Christianity or Quietism, without having taken up its defects—one who has found in Tauler or Guyon, or perhaps still more in Fénélon, something to love, and has loved it without effort. We are certain that the work is one which will enjoy a very extensive popularity among all liberal-minded yet truly devout Christians.
History of Friedrich the Second, called Frederick the Great. By Thomas Carlyle. In four volumes. Vol. III. New York: Harper & Brothers. Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.
To judge Carlyle well, one should have outgrown a love for him. Then, and not till then, will the reader ace him as he is—a genius obscured and belittled by eccentricity in judgment and grotesqueness in literary art; a man who must be seen, out of whom much may be taken, but not with profit unless we leave much behind; a writer who was ahead of his age in 1830, but who is wellnigh thirty years behind it now; one still worshipping heroes, and quite ignorant that great ideas are taking for the world the place of great men. It is curious to consider that Carlyle, without understanding the first principles of the French Revolution, should have written most readably on it, and that, still more blind to the manifest path of free labor and of utility, he should still have assumed a pseudo-radical position. Yet, after all, nothing is strange when a man is wrong in his premises. Carp at them as he may, Carlyle is of the destructives rather than the builders, and, like all literary destructives, continually flies for shelter to the conservatives, even as Rabelais fled for safety to the Pope.
In this third volume of Friedrich the Second, he who neither overrates nor underrates Carlyle may read with great profit. In it one sees, as in a brilliant series of highly-colored views—overcolored very often—shifting with strange rapidity and in wild lights, how from June, 1740, to August, 1744, King Frederick lived his own life, and incidentally that of Prussia and a good part of the civilized world with it, as all active and earnest monarchs are wont to do. That it is piquant and interesting—to the well-educated taste more so than any novel—is true enough; and if the author acts despotically and talks arbitrarily, we may smile, and leave him to settle it with his dead men. He must be dumb indeed who can read it and not feel his thinking powers greatly stimulated, and with it, if he be a writer, his faculty of creating.
Jenkins's Vest-Pocket Lexicon. BY Jabez Jenkins. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.
A dictionary is generally referred to for unfamiliar—not for well-known words; but it is in large and copious ones only that such words are given, and every one has not always at hand his Webster and Worcester 'unabridged.' In view of this want, Jabez Jenkins has compiled an admirable little two-and-a-half-inch square English 'Lexicon of all except familiar words, including the principal scientific and technical terms, and foreign moneys, weights, and measures.' The common Latin and French phrases of two and three words, and the principal names of classical mythology, are also given; 'omitting,' says J.J., 'what everybody knows, and containing what everybody wants to know, and cannot readily find.' It would be difficult to exaggerate the great practical utility of this admirable little book, in which, we have, so to speak, the very quintessence of a dictionary given in poco. We should not have looked for a joke, however, in an abridged dictionary—but there is one. 'This Lexicon,' says its author, 'will be found a convenient, and, it is hoped, a valuable vade mecum; and, though not inspiring the same degree of veneration as some of its leviathan contemporaries, may possibly occupy a place much nearer the heart, viz., in the heart-pocket.' Let us not forget, by the way, to mention that S. Austin Allibone has indorsed this little work as one of the most important and useful publications of the day.
Inside Out. A Curious Book by a Singular Man. New York: Miller, Mathews & Clasback, 767 Broadway. Boston; A.K. Loring.