progressive changes which they undergo. The first volume from the necessity of the case was mainly a constitutional history, without the interest which belongs to a continuous narrative and to personal characters and fortunes. But with the Punic wars we come to a period for which the sources of authentic history, though for times nearer to our own they would seem lamentably defective, are for the ancient world tolerably abundant. The events, too, unlike the petty wars of the early republic, are on a scale of imperial magnitude, and draw after them consequences of enduring and incalculable importance. The hundred years included in this volume are, on the whole, the best century of Roman history,-distinguished by the greatest vigor, the most heroic efforts, the severest sacrifices, and the most dazzling successes. The republic is now at the acme of its strength and glory. The seeds of its decay and dissolution are, indeed, already sown, especially by the devastations of the Hannibalian war, destroying that class of peasant proprietors, of small land-owners, which constituted the real strength of the state. But the symptoms of decline did not becorne manifest and alarming until some time after the battle of Pydna.

Of all the historic personages who appear in this volume, the grandest figure by far is that of the great Carthaginian, Hannibal. We quote the passage in which Mommsen introduces him to the reader:

"The voice of his comrades now summoned him—the tried, although youthful general to the chief command, and he could now execute the designs for which his father and brother-in-law had lived and died. He took possession of the inheritance, and he was worthy of it. His contemporaries tried to cast stains of various sorts on his character; the Romans charged him with cruelty, the Carthaginians with covetousness; and it is true that he hated as only Oriental natures know how to hate, and that a general who never fell short of money and stores can hardly have been other than covetous. But though anger, and envy, and meanness have written his history, they have not availed to mar the pure and noble image which it presents. Laying aside wretched inventions which furnish their own refutation, and some things which his lieutenants were guilty of doing in his name, nothing occurs in the accounts regarding him which may not be justified in the circumstances and according to the international law, of the times; and all agree in this, that he combined in rare perfection discretion and enthusi asm, caution and energy. He was peculiarly marked by that inventive craftiness, which forms one of the leading traits of the Phoenician character; he was fond of taking singular and unexpected routes; ambushes and stratagems of all sorts were familiar to him; and he studied the character of his antagonists with unprecedented care. By an unrivalled system of espionage he had spies even

in Rome he kept himself informed of the projects of the enemy; he himself was frequently seen wearing disguises and false hair, in order to procure information on some point or other. Every page of the history of the period attests his genius as a general; and his gifts as a statesman were, after the peace with Rome, no less conspicuously displayed in his reform of the Carthaginian constitution, and in the unparalleled influence which, as a foreign exile, he exercised in the cabinets of the Eastern powers. The power which he wielded over men is shown by his incomparable control over an army of various nations and many tongues-an army which never in the worst times mutinied against him. He was a great man; wherever he went, he riveted the eyes of all."

The current belief that the policy of Rome towards the republics of Greece was from the outset an aggressive one, designed to encroach upon their rights and crush their independence, is warmly combated by Mommsen. After describing the proclamation of freedom for the Greek states by Flamininus in 196, he

says:

"It is only contemptible disingenuousness or weakly sentimentality, which can fail to perceive that the Romans were entirely in earnest in the liberation of Greece; and the reason why the plan so nobly projected resulted in so wretched a structure, is to be sought only in the complete moral and political disorganization of the Hellenic people. It was no small matter, that a mighty nation should have suddenly, with its powerful arm, brought the land, which it had been accustomed to regard as its primitive home and the shrine of its intellectual and higher interests, into the possession of full freedom, and should have conferred on every community in it deliverance from foreign taxation and foreign garrisons, and the unlimited right of self-government; it is mere paltriness that sees in this nothing save political calculation. Political calculation suggested to the Romans the possibility of liberating Greece; it was converted into a reality by the Hellenic sympathies that were at that time indescribably powerful in Rome, and above all in Flamininus himself. If the Romans are liable to any reproach, it is that all of them, and in particular Flamininus, who overcame the well-founded scruples of the senate, allowed the magic charm of the Hellenic name to prevent them from perceiving in all its extent the wretched character of the Greek states of that period, and from putting a stop at once to the proceedings of com munities who, owing to the antipathies that prevailed alike in their internal and their mutual relations,, neither knew how to act nor how to keep quiet. What was really necessary, as things stood, was at once to put an end to such a freedom, equally pitiful and pernicious, by means of a superior power permanently present on the spot; the feeble policy of sentiment, with all its apparent humanity, was far more cruel than the sternest occupation would have been."

The volume closes with a series of chapters on "the government and the governed," on "the management of land and of capital," on "faith and manners," on "literature and art,”— which represent with masterly skill and power the social and intellectual conditions of the Romans during this period. From the last of these chapters we quote an impressive passage on the later

Attic comedy, which, as adapted to the Roman stage by Plautus, Terence, and others, forms the staple of the Roman comic drama:

*

"The national-Hellenic poetry has preserved, even in this its last creation, its indestructible plastic vigor; but the delineation of character is here copied from without rather than reproduced from inward experience, and the more so, the more the task approaches the really poetical. * * Yet the blame of this want of depth in the portraying of character, and generally of the whole poetical and moral hollowness of this new comedy, lay less with the comic writers than with the nation as a whole. Every thing distinctively Greek was expiring; fatherland, national faith, domestic life, all nobleness of action and sentiment were gone; poetry, history, and philosophy were inwardly exhausted; and nothing remained to the Athenian save the school, the fish-market, and the brothel. It is no matter of wonder, and hardly a matter of blame, that poetry, whose office it is to shed a glory over human existence, could make nothing more out of such a life than the Menandrian comedy presents to us. It is not a reComedy was not the

*

proach to the poet that he occupies the level of his epoch. cause, but the effect of the corruption that prevailed in the national life. But it is necessary, more especially with a view to estimate correctly the influence of these comedies on the life of the Roman people, to point out the abyss that yawned be neath all that polish and elegance. The coarseness and obscenities, which Menander, indeed, in some measure avoided, but of which there is no lack in the other poets, are the least part of the evil. Features far worse are, the dreadful aspect of life as a desert in which the only oases are love-making and intoxication; the fearfully prosaic monotony, in which any thing resembling enthusiasm is to be found only among sharpers whose heads have been turned by their own swindling, and who prosecute the trade of cheating with some sort of zeal; and above all, that immoral morality with which the pieces of Menander in particular are garnished. Vice is chastised, virtue is rewarded, and any peccadilloes are covered by conversion at or after marriage. There are pieces, such as the Trinummus of Plautus and several of Terence, in which all the characters down to the slaves possess some admixture of virtue; all swarm with honest men who allow deception on their behalf, with maidenly virtue whenever possible, with lovers equally favored and making love in company; moral cominonplaces and well-turned ethical maxims abound. A finale of reconciliation, such as that of the Bacchides, where the swindling sons and the swindled fathers, by way of a good conclusion, all go to carouse together in the brothel, presents a corruption of morals thoroughly worthy of Kotzebue."

THE LIFE OF MISS MITFORD,* as told by herself in these volumes of letters to her friends, was a very sad life, darkened by constant shadows, which were as constantly lighted up by the perpetual sunshine of a buoyant and kindly nature. On the Thursday before her death, which was in distinct and near prospect, she thus wrote to a friend. "It has pleased Providence to preserve to

* The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, told by herself in letters to her friends. Edited by the Rev. A. G. K. L'ESTRANGE. In two volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1870.

me my calmness of mind, clearness of intellect, and also my power of reading by day and by night; and, which is still more, my love of poetry and literature, my cheerfulness, and my enjoyment of little things. This very day, not only my common pensioners, the dear robins, but a saucy troop of sparrows, and a little shining bird of passage whose name I forget, have all been pecking at once at their tray of bread-crumbs outside the window. Poor pretty things! how much delight there is in those common objects, if people but learn to enjoy them and I really think that the feeling for these simple pleasures is increasing with the increase of education."

This letter, written at the age of sixty-seven, gives expression to certain prominent traits of character, such as were conspicuous in many of her writings. But they do scant justice to the more serious and noble traits of filial devotion and self-sacrifice, of constant and painful labor and sorrow-of sustained patience and sweetness under constant mortification, and of an honest religious peace and faith, long-delayed, but given at last when it was most needed. Few of the many who will read this life will fail to be the wiser for the reading, though all may well be the sadder. The multitudes who were delighted at the first and cheerful pictures which this merry writer gave them of nature and society in rural England, did not dream that these sketches were written under a constant pressure of sorrow, but those who learn the painful secret, will not admire the writer or her works any the less for this discovery, though they will wonder at both the more. The moral value of this collection of letters is of the highest, and it is still more highly to be praised in our country than in England, inasmuch as not a few of our gifted writers are somewhat morbidly disposed to cherish discontent and envy, under what they call their ill-requited services. In other respects than as they give us so ample a revelation of a very noble character and so beautiful and truthful a picture of a truly noble life, they will be variously estimated by different persons, according to the point of view from which they study them. Some will regard them as overloaded with petty personal and domestic details, as super-abounding in the small gossip concerning men and events that are now deservedly forgotten-a representation of a state of society which was in many respects more frivolous and petty than that which has happily taken its place in similar circles. Others will not agree with many of the personal preferences of the writer, as her de

voted admiration for Napoleon, O'Connel, and Cobbett, and her equally unreasonable dislike of all descriptions of Conservatives and Tories. Her critical estimates of authors and their works, both living and dead, will be positively and sorely offensive to not a few. Their occasional capriciousness and superficiality will be more scandalous in the eyes of many men. She says hard things and pungent things of the works of Thackeray, Dickens, of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and is not always complimentary to Walter Scott or Wordsworth, to both of whom she became more than reconciled at a subsequent period. But none of her caprices and prejudices and dislikes are malicious or inveterate, and all bear the marks of an honest, if it be a hasty mind, of an impulsive but true-hearted temper. One of the most interesting of her loves was that which she cherished for Miss Barrett, aferwards Mrs. Browning. The letters which she addressed to her, and the terms in which she spoke of her in her letters to others, are altogether delightful. To one class of readers these volumes may be of special service, as they will be likely to be of special interest to them--to the not few female writers of every grade in which this country abounds, and the very much more numerous class of female littérateurs, with which perhaps we super-abound. The lessons of wisdom, of patience, and hope which they inculcate for all such, will suggest themselves to every reader. Many blessings must follow the memory of so bright an example of brilliant and varied talents, consecrated to filial duty.

LIFE OF JAMES HAMILTON, D.D.-The author of the "Royal Preacher" was himself a man of rich and royal mind, to whom nothing was too great and nothing too small in God's works for him to love. He was like the "Preacher" of old, conversant with every tree and plant, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that runneth on the wall. While yet a young man ministering to his rural flock at Abernyte, he was in the habit of carrying the wild flowers he had gathered on the way into the pulpit, and of expatiating upon them, much to the wonderment of his stern, old fashioned Scotch hearers; and on one occasion, having obtained possession of the big branch of a fig tree he used it to illustrate a scriptural lesson. A plain woman from a neighboring parish, full of fervid zeal for spiritual things, seeing the young preacher

* Life of James Hamilton, D.D., F.L.S. By WILLIAM ARNOT, Edinburgh. Second Edition. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers. 1870.