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The "Annals and Legends of Calais”* have pleased and interested us much by their perusal. We like the good old town, with its reminiscences of English streets and English houses; its traditions of Edward, of Eustache St. Pierre, of Anne Boleyn and the Field of Cloth of Gold; its "Cour de Guise," its gate immortalised by Hogarth, and chamber by Sterne; its "Courgain," "the municipal wart of Calais," its pier-fit emblem of France-with ever-varying records-and, finally, its emigré notabilities, from the "honourable" friends of the fair Edith Jaquemont to Brummell, Berkeley Craven and Mytton, and even the unfortunate Lady Hamilton. Of all these strange transitions, traditions, and personages, the reader will hear much in these excellently told local annals and legends. There may be some few faults of commission and omission-as Mathilde for Maude, wife of Stephen, and Elinor Cobham as a wife of the Duke of Gloucester, uncle to Richard the Second; there may also be a want of historical consecutiveness in placing the chapter on the early seigneurs of Calais-the Comtes de Guîsnes and Boulogne-after the capture and occupation of Calais by the English; but, as a whole, the work is well done, and is nicely got up, and it will be welcomed by the many who are interested in the good old town, formerly the landingplace in France.

A branch of history seldom treated of in an efficient manner in this country-that of the great empire of the Tsar-has been made the subject of a first charming volume by George Fowler, Esq., under the title of the "Lives of the Sovereigns of Russia."+ This is only one of a series, which we perceive is to extend to four in number; and to judge by the execution of the first, the general reader will at length be possessed, at the conclusion of the work, of a complete and classic history of a great country, to ignore whose antecedents is, in the present day, an act of great national superciliousness, and a sad manifestation of intellectual and literary poverty.

We regret not having hitherto noticed, at adequate length, Mr. Thomas Wright's "Celt, Roman, and Saxon." Not being able to do so at the present moment, we still should not feel ourselves justified in further delaying to call our readers' attention to a work which, though modest and unpretending, is, in reality, of deep purport, and of the highest possible interest. Never has the history of the Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, as a denizen in this country, derived mainly from the monuments of their power and civilisation that they have left behind them, been placed in so complete and so perfect a light before the reader as by Mr. Wright.

We have the ethnology of the British race discussed in as complete a

* Annals and Legends of Calais; with Sketches of Emigré Notabilities, and Memoir of Lady Hamilton. By Robert Bell Calton, author of "Rambles in Sweden and Gottland." John Russell Smith.

† Lives of the Sovereigns of Russia, from Rurik to Nicholas; including a History of that Empire, from its Foundation to the Present Time. By George Fowler, Esq. Vol. I. William Shoberl.

The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon: a History of the Early Inhabitants of Britain, down to the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Illustrated by the ancient remains brought to light by recent research. By Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.S.A., M.R.S.L., Corresponding Member of the Institute of France. Arthur Hall, Virtue, and Co.

manner as the present state of the question will admit of; but that is far from satisfactory. From the point, however, at which Mr. Wright takes .it up, all is archæologically correct, and historically admissible. It is illustrated in its first ages by British antiquities; in its second, by Roman art and literature. The reader will be somewhat surprised, in perusing Mr. Wright's detailed account of the Roman occupation of Britain-accurate descriptions of their towns, walls, towers, and gates-of their houses-public buildings-sanitary arrangements-roads-villas-villages-pottery-coal and iron works-arts and trades-to find that Britain was parcelled out by the Romans among colonies of almost every people who had been subdued by the Roman arms, and that it presented a strangest possible assemblage of races. Mr. Wright actually traces to the very sites of their residence, Spaniards, Sarmatians, Tungrians, Belgians, Germans, Dalmatians, Pannonians, Cilicians, Portuguese, Gauls, Thracians, and even Moors!

The mass of matter brought together, indeed, in this compact little tome, to illustrate the times of the British, the Romans, and the Saxons, is in itself quite a curiosity. When once generally known, it will be the common manual of British antiquities; and had Mr. Wright never penned another book, it would have entitled him at once to take his place as the very best general antiquarian that this country possesses.

Mr. John Chapman has published a concluding volume to his "Catholic Series," being "A Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion," by Theodore Parker, an American minister,* and of which it is scarcely necessary to say more than that it is a work of established repute among Unitarians in America. It is, however, a bold work, which professes to recal men from the transient shows of time to the permanent substance of religion; from a worship of creeds and empty belief to a worship in spirit and life; but it does a great deal more-more than we can venture to intimate.

The same publisher's "Library for the People" contains a third edition of Francis William Newman's metaphysico-theological essay, “The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations." The lovers of ingenious and bold speculation on matters of philosophy and religion cannot but admire the work, and will be pleased to see its popularity. This is, however, probably owing more to the earnestness of the author's style than to the soundness of his matter.

Mr. S. W. Fullom has added one more to a class of works which have been very numerous of late years works which, without pretending to enlarge the boundaries of science, labour to place its great truths in at once a simple and elementary, and, at the same time, a graceful and phi

*A Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion. By Theodore Parker, Minister of the Second Church in Roxbury, Mass. John Chapman.

+ Chapman's Library for the People. The Soul; its Sorrows and its Aspirations: an Essay towards the Natural History of the Soul as the true basis of Theology. By Francis William Newman, formerly Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and author of "A History of the Hebrew Monarchy," "The Phases of Faith," and "Lectures on Political Economy," &c. Third edition. John Chapman.

The Marvels of Science, and their Testimony to Holy Writ. By S. W. Fullom. Colburn and Co.

losophical form before the general reader. Such works cannot but be of the greatest use in seducing the desultory reader into studies of a really beneficial character, and which, while they improve and enlarge his understanding, will, at the same time, humble his self-exaggeration and chasten his heart. Mr. Fullom has accomplished his task with credit to himself and no discredit to the sciences of which he has proclaimed himself the expounder and the prophet. The "Marvels of Science" are duly introduced by the discussion of the relations of science and religion, and open themselves properly enough with the "Empire of the Sun" and the "Regions of Space;" these are followed by "The Ruins of Creation," and "The Two Revelations," in which geology is made to be the handmaiden of Scripture, instead of, as is too usual, the antagonist. Lastly, these are followed by equally interesting chapters on "Natural Forces and Phenomena," "Light," "The Celestial Fire," "The Mysteries of the Deep," "The Atmosphere,' ," "The World of Plants," "The Animal Kingdom," "The Race of Man," and "The Human Frame." themes to write upon in the present day, when science is marching at almost railroad speed across the heavens and into the earth's and ocean's depths, and is marshalling the physical agencies of the imponderables in a way little dreamt of by our forefathers; and Mr. Fullom appears to have felt, and to have been somewhat imbued, with the gravity and the responsibility of his self-imposed task.

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In the same field of science we have to notice, of infinitely less pretensions but of quite different import, the second course of Dr. Lardner's "Hand-Book of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy,"* containing Heat, Common Electricity, Magnetism, and Voltaic Electricity. Dr. Lardner is one of the small phalanx of earnest, conscientious labourers in true science, and one of the best practical systematisers of its progress that we possess. This, in respect to the subjects of the present volume, heat, magnetism, and electricity, happened to be particularly wanted, and the modest students of science-those who want facts and not marvels-or to whom, rather, every fact of science is a true marvel, will welcome Dr. Lardner's volume with warm gratitude.

* Hand-Book of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy. By Dionysius Lardner, D.C.L. Formerly Professor of Natural Philosophy in University College, London. Second Course. Heat, Common Electricity, Magnetism, Voltaic Electricity; with upwards of 200 Illustrations. Taylor, Walton, and Maberly.

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

ULTRAMONTANISM IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND.

THERE have not been wanting those who have attributed the political successes of Louis Napoleon to the partisanship of the Roman Catholic Church, and more especially of the Jesuits. A variety of concurring circumstances would tend to corroborate the fact of an alliance, boding no good to the liberties of mankind, or to the peace of the world. We have seen that in recent Napoleonic publications, the religious character of the prince is much dwelt upon: he is stated to be a believer in every sense of the word. In all the great political events accomplished during the past three years, he has never failed to invoke the assistance of Religion. The name of the Supreme Being is to be met with in all his addresses. In all his different journeys his first care has always been on entering a city to ask the blessings of Heaven in the metropolitan church. He has salaried the bishops, and won over the clergy by giving to them a prominence and importance long since unknown in France. The Bird of Rapine is blessed by a whole army of mitred and robed ecclesiastics, and a climax is attained by the emperor-elect declaring himself to be the protector of the sanctuaries or holy places, thereby assuming to himself by a stroke of the pen a power which the crusading princes of old failed to preserve by the sword; and inevitably renewing those old undying enmities between the eastern and western churches, which have never been totally extinguished since the first usurpation of supreme authority by the bishops of Rome.

Placed in such a position, and with such prospects before them, it is not surprising to find an able pen declaring in a communication made to the daily papers that

The

The Jesuits and Ultramontanes are drunk with exultation. The sacerdotal heel is on the neck of France-the garotte prepared for Europe. The Holy Roman Apostolic Church dreams once more of universal empire. Before or behind its ecstatic obscurantism six centuries vanish, and the nineteenth, which we falsely believed this to be, is only really the thirteenth. Univers laments that Luther was not burnt, and sanctifies the Inquisition; Donoso Cortez denounces reason as a damnable impertinence; abbés and bishops aroynt the classics, anathematise Cicero and Virgil, and prescribe for the education of youth the study of the "Fathers," the breviary and paternoster; Frère Léotade and the Curé Gothland are on the road to canonization, and the land teems with miracles. Winking Madonnas, sweating saints, bleeding altar-pieces, and inspired cow-boys; the gendarme who deposes to the pious lie, and the sub-prefect who endorses it; episcopal charges, archiepiscopal pastorals, and papal rescripts, all testify alike that the favour of Heaven has fallen on the Jesuits, that Louis Napoleon is the "chosen of the Lord," and that "society is saved."

M. V. Schoelcher, the author of the "Histoire du Deux Décembre," a Dec.-VOL. XCVI. NO. CCCLXXXIV. 2 c

stern republican, but not the less to be credited on this particular point— for personally hostile to Louis Napoleon, it is not his interest to lighten the burden of responsibility from off the prince's shoulders-declares that the Jesuits played a prominent part in the late coup d'état; and the writer before quoted, adds further:

Jesuitism plays the desperate game of double or quits with reason. After the revolution of February Catholic priests blessed the trees of liberty. After the coup d'état they chanted a Te Deum on its massacre. They sanctified legitimacy until it fell; they consecrate perjury when it has triumphed. Ministers of Christ, they burlesque Christianity; teachers of morality, they deify crime. They have learnt and forgotten nothing. For them Hildebrand may still thunder in the Vatican; the Inquisition is an incomplete experiment; the Reformation is a heresy, and not a lesson, and the war on civilisation must be recommenced. Their black conspiracy against intelligence envelopes Europe, its staff in Rome, its file everywhere. In Italy its banner is the Pope!" in France, "Society!" in Ireland, "Religious Equality!" The equality which triumphant Jesuitism would dispense is that of persecution and damnation.

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Wishing to examine more thoroughly into the state of this question, we have taken as text books two works recently published,* which profess to grapple with Romanism as it exists in France; the one by M. Capefigue, begins with the "Church" as it existed in the Middle Ages, as contrasted with the Church in our own times; the other, by M. le Comte de Montalembert, takes up at once what the author terms "the interests of the Catholics in the nineteenth century."

The "Middle Ages," in that which concerns the " Church," commences in the seventh century and ends with the fourteenth, and it was during this interval that the Church organised itself into its particular institutions. They open with the local administration of the bishops— those old citizens of Gaul, of Italy, and of Germany, who stood at the head of the Roman municipalities as protectors of the city, and ultimately won the power from the conquerors themselves. The episcopacy, and after it the order of Saint Benoît, were the two leading forces of the Church up to the eighth century. From the summit of Mount Cassin, the last-mentioned solitary dictated a code which gave to mankind the spirit of association and of labour united with science and prayer. This epoch was succeeded by the political supremacy of the popes-a dictatorship which, founded by Gregory VII., kept strengthening its dominion to the times of Innocent III. and Gregory IX.

Nothing, according to M. Capefigue, in the history of governments, can be compared to the wonderful activity of the medieval Church in repressing the tyrannical spirit of feudalism, which at that time had established its sway in fortified castles, the crown upon the head, and the sword in hand. The Church fought at that time the battle of the individual against serfdom; of moral authority as opposed to brutal force. The means which popedom employed to obtain such great results were excommunication, or placing the feudal lords under the ban of the Church, nay, even deposing them from power; these, as M. Capefigue remarks, were possibly legitimate means at the confused epoch of these old ages. In the progress of time the papal supremacy established a moral and

* L'Eglise au Moyen Age du viie. au xiie. Siècle. Par M. Capefigue. Des Intérêts Catholiques au xixe. Siècle. Par le Comte de Montalembert, l'un des Quarante de l'Académie Française.

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