aged to exclude everything but her emotional piety and personal feelings. This excellent lady was doubtless one of the sixty or eighty principal women who, at first, attended the weekly preaching exercises of Mistress Anne Hutchinson, and she must have taken sides in the wordy and memorable Antinomian controversy of 1636. A woman's account of this woman's quarrel, in prose, rhyme, or blank verse, would have been precious; but, alas! there is no allusion to the subject in her writings. In the place of it we are treated with a rhythmical "Epitome of the three first Monarchies, viz. the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and the Roman Commonwealth." A hundred other topics founded on the events, the customs, the virtues, and the follies of that period might be suggested, of which her Muse, if it had anticipated the demands of this practical and degenerate age, would doubtless have sung. But hers was not the Muse of Colonial history, and we must be content with substitutes in the form of rhymes on "The Four Elements, the Four Constitutions, the Four Ages of Man, and the Four Seasons of the Year," which have as much relation to Massachusetts affairs of two centuries ago as they have with the Darwinian theory of to-day.

Besides her longer poems, already enumerated, the volume contains several minor pieces, one of which is " A Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning their Present Troubles, Anno 1642," commencing thus:

"NEW ENGLAND.

"Alas dear Mother, fairest Queen and best,

With honour, wealth, and peace, happy and blest;
What ails thee hang thy head, and cross thine arms?
And sit i' th' dust, to sigh these sad alarms?

What deluge of new woes thus over-whelme?
What means this wailing tone, this mournful guise?
Ah, tell thy daughter, she may sympathize.

"OLD ENGLAND.

"Art ignorant indeed of these my woes?

Or must my forced tongue these griefs disclose ?
And must myself dissect my tatter'd state,
Which 'mazed Christendome stands wondering at?
And thou a Child, a Limbe, and dost not feel
My fainting weakened body now to reel ?
This Physick purging potion, I have taken,

Will bring consumption, or an Ague quaking,

Unless some cordial, thou fetch from high,
Which present help may ease my malady."

"In reference to her children," Mrs. Bradstreet writes:

"I had eight birds hatcht in one nest,

Four Cocks there were, and Hens the rest,

I nurst them up with pain and care,
Nor cost, nor labour did I spare,
Till at the fast they felt their wing,
Mounted the Trees, and learn'd to sing;
Chief of the Brood then took his flight,

To regions far, and left me quite."

She here alludes to her son Samuel, who sailed for England in November, 1657, and returned in July, 1661, when she again sings:"All Praise to him who hath now turn'd

My feares to joyes, and sighes to song,
My teares to smiles, my sad to glad :
He's come for whom I waited long."

"To her husband absent upon Publick employment," she writes::"My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay more,

My joy, my magazine of earthly store,

If two be one, as surely thou and I,

How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lye?",

It would, of course, be very unhandsome treatment to test the literary merits of Mistress Bradstreet's verses by the modern standard of criticism. The sole interest attached to them is that they were written and printed at that early period. With an antiquary the intrinsic merits of a book have nothing to do with its pecuniary value, which is the measure of a strange madness among collectors to possess it. The two early New England books which now command the highest price,somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand dollars each,- the Bay Psalm Book, 1640, and Eliot's Indian Bible, 1663,- are intrinsically as worthless volumes as can be named. The latter no person living can read (unless we except one linguistic scholar), and the former no person would desire to read. Still, a few of Anne Bradstreet's poems can be read without doing penance, and in the elegant form in which they are here presented are positively attractive, especially when we compare them with the rhythmical jargon of their contemporary, the Bay Psalm Book.

Mr. Ellis has included in this edition the contents of a manuscript volume of Mrs. Bradstreet's miscellaneous writings, which is now for the first time printed entire, under the titles of "Religious Experiences and Occasional Pieces," and "Meditations." A page of this manuscript he has caused to be reproduced in fac-simile. Her "Religious Experiences" and "Meditations" are chiefly in prose, and their literary merit surpasses that of her poetry.

From the freedom with which Mrs. Bradstreet makes use of classical allusions and the names of ancient writers, it has been inferred that she was acquainted with the Latin and perhaps the Greek language. Mr.

Ellis has identified the books she had read, and makes it highly probable that she knew the classic writers only through English translations. The scraps of Latin she used do not imply that she understood the language.

A woodcut of the Bradstreet House in North Andover, engraved in a most artistic manner by Mr. Henry Marsh of Cambridge, faces the titlepage.

The editor, in his elaborate historical Introduction, has made a thorough examination and judicious use of all the material extant for the illustration of his subject, and in it he has embodied much historical and literary information of value.

12.- Manual of the Constitution of the United States of America. By TIMOTHY FARRAR. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1867.

THE author of this work remarks in his Preface that it was composed during the late war, and that "its position in this respect is dif ferent from any prior exposition of the Constitution."

There is need now of a fresh examination of the Constitution by some competent authority, made in the light of the great events to which Judge Farrar refers. These events have, in great measure, silenced a narrow brood of literalists who had striven during many years to belittle the great charter and to make its commandments of none effect by their tradition; and to others they have given courage and breadth of view in interpreting it. It has lately been made to appear with uncommon distinctness that the nation must sometimes look through the letter of the Constitution and search for the spirit of it and for the ends to which it exists; and that in great emergencies this instrument may furnish but little guidance except in the large concessions of power that are implied in it when it establishes a nation.

We are compelled, however, to say that this volume is not the sort of work which is needed, and that, while it utters much paradox, it adds but little, if anything, of value to what had already been said. It undertakes to show that the Constitution confers upon the national government power to do "everything that a good government ought to be called upon to do for the benefit of any people." It insists that "the division of the British empire rendered the people of the American Union just as much a sovereign and independent nation as it left the people of the European portion"; that "the States, as Colonies, were organized under the Union"; and that the Confederation of 1781, by which it was declared that the United States had no "power, jurisdiction, or

right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated," was “a sort of Holy Alliance, in which neither the people of the United States nor the people of the individual States were named as parties, or ever became such by any formal act. . . . . The thing framed said to him that framed it, he had no understanding. It is manifest that no such procedure as this could have any tendency to change the legal relation between the people of the United States or their government and the local governments they had invited and allowed to be organized within and under their jurisdiction. . . . . Such a combination could neither increase their own powers nor diminish those of the United States." And the author finds that the States now, under the Constitution, are substantially in the same situation as the Colonies were "under the Union," as above indicated.

Judge Farrar regards what is generally known as the preamble to the Constitution as being a grant of the fullest legislative powers, and as the most important clause in the instrument. And, among many other things, he finds Congress to be authorized to prescribe the qualifications of electors, not only of the national House of Representatives, but also of the House of Representatives in each State. It is not quite clear, perhaps, whether he does not intend to say that the Constitution itself absolutely fixes those qualifications; but he is positive in stating that whatever power the States have over the matter is, by the express terms of the Constitution, subject to the supervision of Congress.

As to the course of reasoning and the historical propositions by which these and other equally extraordinary positions are supported, we can only say that they seem like the argument of an ingenious lawyer in a bad case. And in answer to Judge Farrar's strange constructions of this much-twisted instrument, one can hardly do better than simply to quote his own motto, Litera scripta manet, and to turn back to the text.

13. Y Legende of St. Gwendoline. With eight Photographs by ADDIS from Drawings by JOHN W. EHNINGER. New York: G. P. Putnam and Son. 1867. Folio. pp. 55.

So much pains has been bestowed on this volume, it has plainly been an object of such solicitous and tender regard, that it makes almost a naïve appeal to sympathy, and calls upon our good feeling for commendation. And if we take the common standard by which such a work is likely to be judged by the good-natured and genial critic of the newspaper, we should find it easy to praise this book as one of the most elab

orate gift-books of the season, and eminently fit to adorn a showy drawing-room table. But if it be judged by the standard of genuine criticism, the standard by which the author of the Legend would, we doubt not, desire it to be judged, it must be said that, throughout, the intent of the work is better than its execution; that the story, both in conception and diction, betrays a young and inexperienced hand, and that the illustrations and typography of the volume are more ambitious than excellent.

14.- Italian Journeys. By W. D. HOWELLS, Author of "Venetian Life." New York: Hurd and Houghton. 1867.

UNDER favor of his work on "Venetian Life," Mr. Howells took his place as one of the most charming of American writers and most satisfactory of American travellers. He is assuredly not one of those who journey from Dan to Beersheba only to cry out that all is barren. Thanks to the keenness of his observation and the vivacity of his sympathies, he treads afresh the most frequently trodden routes, without on the one hand growing cynical over his little or his great disappointments, or taking refuge on the other in the well-known alternative of the Baron Munchausen. Mr. Howells has an eye for the small things of nature, of art, and of human life, which enables him to extract sweetness and profit from adventures the most prosaic, and which prove him a very worthy successor of the author of the "Sentimental Journey."

Mr. Howells is in fact a sentimental traveller. He takes things as he finds them and as history has made them; he presses them into the service of no theory, nor scourges them into the following of his prejudices; he takes them as a man of the world, who is not a little a moralist, - a gentle moralist, a good deal a humorist, and most of all a poet; and he leaves them, he leaves them as the man of real literary power and the delicate artist alone know how to leave them, with new memories mingling, for our common delight, with the old memories that are the accumulation of ages, and with a fresh touch of color modestly gleaming amid the masses of local and historical coloring. It is for this solid literary merit that Mr. Howells's writing is valuable, and the more valuable that it is so rarely found in books of travel in our own tongue. Nothing is more slipshod and slovenly than the style in which publications of this kind are habitually composed. Letters and diaries are simply strung into succession and transferred to print. If the writer is a clever person, an observer, an explorer, an intelligent devotee of the picturesque, his