Mr. Hallam, on the 13th of February, sent a letter to the Society of Antiquaries, in London, announcing in consequence of his recent bereavement, he wished at the next anniversary to relinquish the office of Vice-President, which he had filled for the last thirty years; having been a member of the Society for more than half a century, and having during that period contributed many papers to its transactions. A resolution was proposed by Mr. Payne Collier, seconded by Mr. Bruce, expressive of respect for Mr. Hallam, sincere sympathy with his afflictions, and sorrow at his retirement. In a subsequent letter, Mr. Hallam stated that he should continue to be a member of the Society.
General Sir William Napier has published a new edition of his History of the War in the Peninsula—the best military history in the English language—and in his new preface he states that he is indebted to Lady Napier, his wife, not only for the arrangement and translation of an enormous pile of official correspondence, written in three languages, but for that which is far more extraordinary, the elucidation of the secret ciphers of Jerome Bonaparte and others.
In a recent number of The International we printed a poem by Charles Mackay, entitled Why this Longing? without observing that it was a plagiarism from a much finer poem by Harriet Winslow List, of Portland, which may be found in The Female Poets of America, page 354.
A descriptive catalogue of the books and pamphlets educed by the reinstitution of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy in England, would be a very entertaining work. It is astonishing how active the English become in pamphleteering when any such engrossing subject comes before the people or the parliament. The Duke of Sussex carefully preserved every thing in this shape that was printed during the discussion of Catholic Emancipation, and after his death we purchased his collection, which amounted to about seventy thick volumes, and includes autograph certificates of presentation from "Peter Plimley," and perhaps a hundred other combatants. The present discussions will be not less voluminous, and it promises to be vastly more entertaining. The matter of the holy chair of St. Peter, with the Mohammedan inscription, upon which the verd antique Lady Morgan has published two or three letters as witty and pungent as ever came from the pen of an Irishwoman, will afford pleasant material for the last chapter of her ladyship's memoirs. Warren, the author of Ten Thousand a Year, Dr. Twiss, the biographer of Eldon, Dr. George Croly, the poet, Walter Savage Landor, and Sheridan Knowles, the dramatist, are among the more famous of the disputants on the Protestant side. The author of "Virginius" professes to review Archbishop Wiseman's lectures on Transubstantiation, and the Literary Gazette says he thoroughly demolishes that dogma, which, however, "no one supposes that any Romanist of education and common sense believes. It is understood on all hands that whatever defence or explanation is offered, is only for the sake of affording plausible apology to the vulgar for a dogma which the infallibility of the church requires to be unchangeably retained. The reply of the philosophical churchman, populus vult decipi et decipiatur, is that which many a priest would give if privately pressed on the subject." The Literary Gazette makes a very common but very absurd mistake, for which no Roman Catholic would thank him. The church does maintain the doctrine, and the most "philosophical" churchman would be dealt with in a very summary manner if he should publicly deny it. The Literary Gazette adds that Knowles "displays complete mastery of the principles and familiarity with the details of the controversy," which we can scarcely believe upon the Gazette's testimony until it evinces for itself a little more knowledge of the matter.
The only one of these works that has been reprinted in this country is Landor's, which we receive from Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston.
R. H. Horne, the dramatist, and author of Orion,—upon which his best reputation is likely to rest—has just published in London The Dreamer and the Worker, in two volumes.