Dr. Laing, one of those restless English travelers who have printed books about the United States, is now a prominent personage in Australia, where he has been elected a member of the newly instituted Legislature, for the city of Sidney. Upon the conclusion of the canvass he made a speech, after which he was dragged home in his carriage by some of the more energetic of his partisans, the horses having been removed by them for that purpose. He is opposed to the Government.
The History of Liberty, by Mr. Samuel Elliot, of Boston, is examined at considerable length and in a very genial spirit, in the last number of the Revue des Deux Mondes—a review, by the way, in which much more attention appears to be paid to our literature than it receives in the North American. The writer observes, in the beginning, that the two initial volumes of Mr. Elliot's great work, now published, in which the Liberty of Rome is treated, would be a superhuman performance, if Niebuhr, Muller, Heeren, Grote, and Thirlwall, had not written, and compares the work of our countryman with the poem on the same subject by Thomson, the author of "The Seasons." He says:
"Mr. Elliot's work breathes a lofty morality; a grave and masculine reserve; a deep and constant fear of not having done the best. He may be subject,—like other Americans more or less ideologists and system-mongers,—to illusions; but he has the true remedy: his ideal is well placed; he can sympathize fervently with all the pursuits and employments of human activity; he cherishes a profound respect for prudence, and moderation; for an enlarging survey and indulgence of human necessities; for that generosity and virtue which is tender above all of what has life, and seeks to conciliate a complete transformation in the ideas of men. Until now, it would have been difficult to find a thinker who, in judging the Romans, would not have celebrated their inordinate patriotism, as their chief glory. Their heroes were admired precisely for the ardor with which they sacrificed everything—even their children or their conscience—to the interests of country or party. Mr. Elliot, on the contrary, discovers in this heroism only a lamentable deficiency of true virtue and honor; of a sound moral sense and equitable liberality. To our apprehension, a great reform—an historical event—is to be recognized in this new moral repugnance—this new tendency to deem the spirit of party an evil and a danger. Formerly, nothing was conceived to be nobler than to serve your party, without stint or reservation;—nothing more disgraceful than to abandon it even when you could not entertain the same opinions. The condemnation and reversal of this doctrine would be a moral advancement more important for human futurity, than many of the occurrences or the revolutions of the last sixty years, that have made the most noise."
We believe Mr. Elliot's leisure is not to be seriously interrupted by public employments, and trust, therefore, that he will proceed, with as much rapidity as possible, with his grand survey of the advance of Liberty, down even to our own day—which it is not unlikely will conclude a very important era of his subject.
Dr. Bowring, who is now, we believe, British Consul at Canton, was the editor of the last and only complete edition of Jeremy Bentham's works; he has been one of the most voluminous contributors to the Westminster Review, and he is eminent as a linguist, though if we may judge by some of his performances, not very justly so. He translated and edited specimens of the poetry of several northern nations, and it has often been charged as an illustration of his dishonesty, that he omitted a stanza of the sublime hymn of Derzhaven, a Russian, to the Deity, because it recognized the divinity of Christ, as it is held by Trinitarians—the Doctor being a Unitarian. He is sharply satirized, and treated frequently with extreme and probably quite undeserved contempt, in the Diaries and Correspondence of the late Hugh Swinton Legaré.