A pension of 200l. a year on the civil list has been conferred on Mr. Silk Buckingham. A pension of 200l. a year has also been given to Colonel Torrens, the author of several works on political economy. Mr. Buckingham had just obtained 400l. a year, as we have before mentioned, from the East India Company. It seems to us that these pensions can have but little to do with the "encouragement of literature."
The venerable poet James Montgomery will be eighty years of age on the fifth of November, and the people of Sheffield are preparing suitable honors for the occasion. A statue, to be set up in a conspicuous place, is talked of, and a general desire is felt that the festival which is proposed, and the honors which are to be given, shall be worthy of the man and the city.
A curious Diary of Edmund Bohen, a voluminous writer of the seventeenth century, has been discovered in Suffolk, England, his native county, and is about to be published under the editorship of S. W. Rix, of Beccles, author of the Fauconberge Memorial.
John Stuart Mill, we are advised by letters from England, is hereafter to be editor of the Westminster Review, which is now the grand organ of the socialists and disorganizers of society.
We have from Mr. Hart, of Philadelphia, in two beautiful volumes, Memoirs of the Life of Mary Queen of Scots, by Miss Benger. They are written with neatness, and could not fail of a dramatic interest. Indeed, we know of no memoir of Mary Stuart, in the two or three dozen we have read with more or less attention, that is in all respects as attractive as Miss Benger's. But it seemed an unfortunate time to publish this, when the History of Mary Queen of Scots by M. Mignet, Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, was advertised, and it was known that its character would be such as necessarily to give it precedence of all other works on the subject. We noticed the design of M. Mignet two or three months ago, and we have now before us a translation, published by Bentley, of London, of his first volume. It fully realizes our expectations, in evident candor, research, and ability. It owes its existence to Prince Labanoff's collection of the queen's letters, and is the substance of a series of papers on that extraordinary work in the Journal des Savants. But M. Mignet had obtained access to original documents (chiefly the dispatches of the Spanish embassies in England, France, and Rome) which even Prince Labanoff had not explored, and has thus been able to give an original character to his narrative. It is an excellent specimen of condensed yet clear historical writing. Leading incidents stand out boldly, and no essential facts are omitted, yet there is not an excess of details. Motives are discriminated, and doubtful questions cleared, while we are spared the fatigue of elaborate disquisition. The book is little more than a sketch—but it is a most valuable one. With more materials before him than any previous biographer, the author has had to contend with fewer prejudices of his own. He is neither the apologist, nor the traducer of his heroine. Neither as Catholic nor as Protestant, as Scotchman nor as Englishman, does he sit in judgment on her history; he views the scenes of her career with an impartiality as far removed from harshness as from indulgence and may perhaps be pronounced her first unbiassed biographer. It is right at the same time to add that his historic coldness of temperament does not always enable him to judge quite fairly the difficulties under which both parties (but especially the Protestant party) labored at particular times; and perhaps it stops short, now and then, of the compassionate considerations which would best explain some points of Mary's conduct.