Two other striking contributions to the history of this stormy epoch have been made by Bruno Bauer, the well known rationalist. Bauer treats the political and religious parties of modern Germany with the same scornful satire and destructive analysis which appear in his theological writings. He delights in pitting one side against the other and making them consume each other. His first book is called the Bürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland, (the Burghers' Revolution in Germany); it was published above a year ago, and attracted a great deal of attention from the fact that it took neither side, but with a sort of Mephistophelian superiority, showed that every party had been alike weak, timid, hesitating, short-sighted, and useless. The New-Catholics of Ronge's school were especially treated with unsparing severity. Bauer has now just brought out his second book, which is particularly devoted to the Frankfort Parliament. In this also the Hegelian Logic is applied with the same result. The author proves that all that was done in that body was worth nothing and produced nothing. There is not a particle of sympathetic feeling in the whole book; but only cold and contemptuous analysis. It has not made very much of an impression in Germany. Both these works, and, indeed, the whole school of ultra-Hegelian skeptics generally, are a singular reaction upon the usual warmth and sentimentality of German character and literature. They are the very opposite extreme, and so a very natural product of the times. For our part we like them quite as well as the other side of the contrast.
Germany is the richest of all countries in historical literature. Nowhere have all the events of human experience been so variously, profoundly, or industriously investigated. Ancient history especially has been most exhaustively treated by the Germans. One of the best and most comprehensive works in this category is that of Dr. Zimmer, the seventh edition of which, revised and enlarged, has just been published at Leipzic. Dr. Zimmer does not proceed upon the hypotheses of Niebuhr and others, but conceives that the writing of history and romance ought to be essentially different. The whole work is in one volume of some 450 pages, and of course greatly condensed. It discusses the history of India, China, and Japan; the western Asiatic States, Assyria, Babylonia, Syria, Phœnicia, India, down to the fall of Jerusalem; the other parts of Asia; Egypt to the battle of Actium, with a dissertation on Egyptian culture; Carthage; Greece to the fall of Corinth; Rome under the emperors down to the year 476; and concludes with an account of the literature of classical antiquity.
As we have no manual of this sort in English, that is written up to the latest results of scholarship, we hope to see some American undertaking a version of Dr. Zimmer's book. There is considerable learning and talent in the two octavos on the same subject by Dr. Hebbe, and published last year by Dewitt & Davenport; but we strongly dislike some of the doctrines of the work, which are not derived from a thorough study.
The seventh volume of Professor Schlosser's History of the Eighteenth Century, and of the Nineteenth till the overthrow of the French Empire, appeared, in translation, in London, on the first of November. Volume eighth, completing the work, with a copious index, is preparing for early publication.
The Discovery of a lost MS. of Jean Le Bel is mentioned in the Paris papers, as having been made by M. Polain, keeper of the Archives at Liège, among the MSS. in the Bibliothèque de Bourgogne, at Brussels. It is on the eve of publication, and will be comprised in an octavo volume, in black letter. This work was supposed to be irretrievably lost. It was found by M. Polain, transcribed and incorporated into a prose Chronicle de Liège, by Jean des Pres, dit d'Ontremeuse. It comprises a period between 1325 and 1340, which are embraced in one hundred and forty-six chapters of the first book of Froissart. It therefore contains only the first part of Le Bel's Chronicle: nevertheless it is a fragment of much importance. Froissart cannot be considered as a contemporary historian of the events recorded in his first book, but Le Bel was connected with the greater portion of them, and was acquainted with them either from personal knowledge or through those who had authentic sources of information.