We perceive that the work of which the first volume is here noticed, is to be followed immediately by Examples of the Architecture of Venice, selected and drawn to measurement from the edifices, by Mr. Ruskin: to be completed in twelve parts, of folio imperial size, price one guinea each. These will not be reproduced in this country, and as the author probably has little advantage from the American editions of his works, we trust that for his benefit as well as for the interests of art, the Examples will be largely imported.
The new play written by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, as his contribution towards the fund raising for the new Literary Institute, is in the hands of the literary and artistic amateurs by whom it is to be enacted, and rehearsals are in progress. The first performance will take place probably in June.
It was a custom when the world was younger than it is now, for disappointed lovers, and outlaws, and portionless youths too proud to labor and afraid to steal, to go into the wars; nobility, that would not suffer them to become journeymen mechanics, led them to hire out as journeymen butchers. But at length the field of military adventure is almost every where closed. There is no region, ever so remote, where a spirited and adventurous youth could hope ever to learn the art martial. A few skirmishes on the Parana and the Plata, on the Fish River, or the Keiskamma, form all the fighting that is going on upon the globe; and that fighting offers no premium to the adventurer. There is no native prince of great wealth and numerous followers, no mogul, or sultan, or sikh, with whom the turbulent European might make a good bargain for his courage. The last field for such enterprise was the country of the Mahrattas, where French and English mercenaries—with a sprinkling of Americans—created a colony which enabled the ignorant, bigoted and jealous savages to keep in check the best European armies. A Frenchman named Person was a pioneer in the business. He was succeeded by the Savoyard, De Boigne, whose statue now adorns the principal square of Chamberry. James Skinner, whose Memoirs have just been published in London by the novelist and traveler Mr. Bailie Fraser, began a similar career under De Boigne. Some idea may be formed of the Mahratta army, when the Peishwa at times brought 100,000 horse into the field. A trusted officer, as Skinner afterwards became, might thus command a division of twenty, thirty, or forty thousand men, equal in fact to the largest European armies in the last century. When men played with such tools as these, it may be easily imagined how they themselves rose and fell; how empires crumbled, or were reared anew. When Wellesley and Loke overthrew the Mahrattas, Skinner entered the British service, and it appears from the book before us that he died in 1836 a knight of the Bath.
"Hitherto," says M. de Sainte Beuve, "the real learning of women has been found to be pretty much the property of their lovers;" and he ridicules the notion that even Mrs. Somerville has any scholarship that would win the least distinction for a man. It may be so. We see, however, that a Miss Fanny Corbaux has lately communicated to the Syro-Egyptian Society in London a very long and ambitious paper On the Raphaïm and their connexion with Egyptian History, in which she quotes Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, &c., with astonishing liberality.
Carlyle's translation of the Apprenticeship and Travels of Wilhelm Meister, has been issued in a very handsome edition, by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston.