suffered, but he invented; he fainted, but he produced. He tore from his entrails with despair the idea which he had conceived, and showed it to the eyes of all, bloody but alive. That is harder and lovelier than to go fondling and gazing upon the ideas of others." The people who have listened to Tennyson are better than our aristocracy of towns-folk and bohemians; but I prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson." With this frank confession the History of English Literature is closed.

And now we have endeavored, according to the methods of M. Taine himself, "to annihilate as far as possible whatever prevents us from seeing him with the eyes of our head." In his own words, we have imagined to ourselves an accomplished French gentleman "in a black coat and gloves," whose lodgings in Paris are "on the second floor;" who "is welcomed by the ladies; who makes every evening his fifty bows, and his score of bon-mots in society; who reads the papers in the morning; who is not over gay, because he has nerves, and especially because the refinement of his feelings disposes him somewhat to believe himself a deity." This modern literary Crichton has mastered all knowledge, has travelled everywhere, knows everybody, has seen everything. Yet he is not blasé. He feels no ennui; for he has the inestimable advantage of being carried away with a theory, and he has made it the business of his life to apply this wonderful theory to the whole round of activities of which the human mind is capable. He has at last taken up English literature, as the work which is to crown all that he has yet attempted. He has said some things that are valuable; many things which we cannot but admire. He is always brilliant. He is never dull. Sometimes, it is true, we cannot understand exactly what he means. And, certainly, when he declaims about Alfred de Musset, "tearing from his entrails with despair the idea which he had conceived, and showing it to the eyes of all, bloody, but alive," we confess that we are a little inclined to doubt his sanity! At all events, we are sure that if an Englishman should talk in this style the boys in the street would laugh at him. But of one thing we are quite confident, that his critical tastes are such that it is impossible for him to feel any sympathy with or love for English literature, and that, in

the preparation of this book, it has held in his eyes only a very subordinate position. He reminds us of some enthusiastic savan of the École de Médicine, who imagines that he has been successful in making some grand discovery with regard to the principle of life, and stands over the dissecting table, in the full tide of eloquence, while he uses the inanimate mass before him only for the purpose of illustrating his physiological specu lations. So M. Taine seems to us to make use of the treasures of English literature. He shows prodigious learning, and won. derful powers of description and analysis, yet it is manifest all the time that it is the theory which is the most important thing in his eyes, and that he regards the literature only as the corpus vile which can be made to serve to illustrate it.

ARTICLE VII.—NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.*-We did not think it would come in our day, but here it is. Puritanism in the Church of England, persecuted under Elizabeth and her successors, victorious for a season under the Long Parliament, betrayed by the folly of its Presbyterian leaders into complicity with the restoration of the Stuarts, ignominiously expelled from the establishment by the reactionary government of Charles II, and seemingly annihilated under the reign of William and Mary by the Act of Toleration which converted Puritans into Dissenters, emerges into life again in these latter years of Victoria. The Rev. G. A. Jacob, D.D., late Head Master of Christ's Hospital, writing not as a Dissenter from the ecclesiastical establishment of England, but as a member of that establishment, has ventured to do what Thomas Cartwright did three centuries ago; he has carefully and learnedly investigated the Ecclesiastical Polity of the New Testament, has compared it with the system of the Church of England, and now, like Cartwright and the Puritans of old, he asks for a new reformation. The times are changed indeed since the reign of Elizabeth; it is not probable that Dr. Jacob will suffer for his theoretical Puritanism, so long as his conscience will permit him to wear the vestments and read the liturgy with strict observance of the rubrics; he has, as the old Puritans had not, full liberty to withdraw from the Established Church, and as a Dissenter to preach and pray, and to unite with others in worship, according to his own convictions; he need not fear that his afflictions will be like Cartwright's; the England of Victoria is in many things exceedingly unlike the England of Elizabeth; but the Church of England, in its government and discipline, and in its formularies both of doctrine and of worship, remains unchanged. Dr. Jacob thinks it is high time to reform that singularly composite institution which for three hundred years has been, of all things in the English speaking world, most unreformable.

*The Ecclesiastical Polity of the New Testament. A Study for the Present Crisis in the Church of England. By Rev. G. A. JACOB, D.D., Late Head-Master of Christ's Hospital. New York: T. Whittaker.

Dr. Jacob's work is in the form of lectures (for some reason never delivered) on the following topics: "The Apostles and the Christian Church," "The First Organization of the Church,”— "A further consideration of the Christian Ministry "-proving that it is not a priesthood,-"The Laity, or Christian Body at Large," "Public Worship"-including the question of prescribed liturgies,—“ Christian Baptism,"—"The Lord's Supper,”—with a concluding lecture in which the facts and principles of the New Testament polity are applied to the impending crisis in the Church of England. Learning, carefulness, candor, and moderation characterize the entire work. We commend it to our friends-clerical and laical-in the American Episcopal Church. Be they ever so High, or ever so narrow, if they will read it in the spirit in which it is written, they will find themselves brought out in a large place. We do not say that they will cease to be Episcopalians; but they will be conscious of a new freedom.

Perhaps there is no better treatise on the scriptural warrant for the Congregational theory of Church government than this book from an Evangelical Broad-Church Episcopalian.

NAEGELSBACH ON JEREMIAH AND LAMENTATIONS.*-The present volume of Lange's Bibelwerk, though far enough below the mark of the best German commentaries, is somewhat better than any we have hitherto had in English on this part of the Old Tes tament. Naegelsbach has a little more Hebrew scholarship and a little less disregard for the principles of historical criticism than are current among us. Of the poetical portions of the book of Jeremiah Mr. Asbury has given a new translation, "founded on a comparison of the German and English versions with the Hebrew." We assume that he has adhered substantially to Naegelsbach's interpretation, and is to be held responsible only for the language in which the ideas are clothed. In this he is not always happy. Such renderings as these will hardly strike any one as improvements on King James's Version: ii, 5, "followed vacuity and became vacuous; " v, 4, "stultified;" vi, 24 (and elsewhere frequently, both as a noun and adjective), "parturient;" xx, 10,

* A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures. By JOHN PETER LANGE, D.D. Vol. XIII. of the Old Testament, containing Jeremiah and Lamentations, theologically and homiletically expounded, by Dr. C. W. EDWARD NAEGELSBACH. Jeremiah translated, enlarged, and edited by SAMUEL RALPH ASBURY; Lamentations translated, enlarged, and edited by WM. H. HORNBLOWER, D.D. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1871. 8vo, pp. 446, 196.

"obligated to be at peace; " 1, 11, "for thou rejoicedst, for thou exultedst, robber of my heritage, for thou skippedst like a thrashing calf, and neighedst like the strong steeds;" 1, 13, "the ell of thy section;" the frequent use of will for shall, e. g., xiv, 13, "ye will not see the sword, and famine will not come to you." The phrase, "ground property" (xii, 10), we are afraid, was not compared either with the Hebrew, or with the English version; it is too unmistakably German. As an editor Mr. Asbury has contented himself, we are happy to say, with few additions to the work of Naegelsbach, an act of self-denial which we appreciate the more highly from the fact that the Commentary on Lamentations has been swollen by Dr. Hornblower's additions to double the size of the original. Especially Naegelsbach's opinion that Jeremiah was not the author of Lamentations, Dr. Hornblower has combated with great warmth and at great length. Naegelsbach's arguments are drawn from the differences in the style of the two books, differences partly of a general nature, especially the very artificial alphabetic structure of Lamentations, partly specific differences in the usus loquendi. Of the latter he gives a list founded on a comparison, word for word, of Lamentations with Jeremiah. The question cannot be regarded as settled, indeed it hardly admits of more than a probable solution, but toward such a solution Naegelsbach has- made a contribution of some value. Dr. Hornblower meets the arguments of Naegelsbach by such as these. Admitting that "the modern acrostic is justly regarded as a species of literary trifling, pleasing only to a fanciful, finical, or puerile taste," he thinks it "not impossible that the Hebrew alphabetical acrostic may have belonged to the highest art of ancient Hebrew poetry." To show that the difference in language is not inconsistent with unity of authorship, he has taken the trouble to compare the poems and plays of Shakespeare, and finds, for example, in the first stanza of Venus and Adonis, the following expressions which do not occur in the plays; purple-colored face, weeping morn, hied, sick-thoughted, and two that occur only once in the plays; rose-cheeked, bold-faced. The parallel will satisfy one of the conditions of the mathematical definition; the things compared will certainly never come together, no matter how far the comparison is pushed. The relation which the vocabulary of poetry bears to that of prose is by no means the same in Hebrew as in English. One difference only, the facts that compounds are hardly to be found in Hebrew (except in proper names), will strike off perhaps the major part of Dr. Hornblower's