scientific; and it is as if he sought to mark the moral quality of it by a form of speech as far at variance as possible from the dogmatic and scientific handling which we generally give to our political ideas. These lectures are meant to be, in the strictest sense, practical. They are written in the interest of the "Workingmen's College," to which the copyright of them is presented. They deal with the precise points of representation and suffrage which have made and unmade Administrations within the year, and which now and then threaten to bring England to the very verge of a social revolution. Yet the mind of Mr. Maurice steadily refuses to see them in the light that illuminates them to other eyes. He does not deny the theories of reformers and propagandists. He only pleads with them to show how vain and insufficient those theories, or any thing that is rigid theory, must be. He will shed on them the wide, quiet light of history, which steadily rebukes all dogmatism; the pure sky-light of religion and morality, which dulls the passionate and artificial glare. So the reader is vexed to find no solution offered or attempted to the questions as they are apt to be practically put. Instead of it, he finds ethical meditation, historic example, and Christian exhortation.

And yet we doubt whether he will not carry away, at the end, as strong an impression, and as valuable instruction, as if he had found the answer to the thought that lay nearer the surface. That human society is not a mass or multitude of men, but an organization of them by their sentiments and their interests; that the PEOPLE is the community of freemen, giving each man a direct interest in the welfare of the whole; that a political community, like the Roman aristocracy, jealous of admitting to its privileges those standing outside, must perish of inanition and sure decay; that citizenship means, not so much right or privilege, as it does obligation and trust; that civil freedom is "the contrast rather than the counterpart" of a savage and unsocial independence, these are truths, not precisely new, but very desirable to be stated with the force of conviction, and freshness of illustration, we find here; while the great lessons of history -traced from the germs of the Roman Republic to the time when the citizen's privilege was no longer jealously withheld, because it had lost all its glory and its worth; from the germs of English liberty to the dissensions and ambitions of to-day — are traced with that curious felicity of insight and intelligent sympathy so characteristic of the writer's mind. Of special illustrations, also, we have been greatly struck with the words said of our late republican President to the working

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men of England; with the exhibition of the first Christian communities as centres of living organism in a dissolving society, germs of the grander structures of the future; and with the review of the period of the Holy Alliance," when a style of serious, noble, devout thought, respecting a true statesmanship and a Christian order of society, came into being, with Wordsworth for its chief apostle, relieved against the hard despotisms of the compulsory quiet of that era of peace and restoration. And we see and find in this volume, vague and defective as it may appear, one of the timeliest and finest expositions of the higher morality of a nation's life.

J. H. A.

AMONG the biographies or historical studies that have come to our knowledge, aiming to make the last days of the Roman Republic better known to us, we incline to rate highest the series of sketches included in Boissier's "Cicero and his Friends."* An admirable book, it seems to us, for translation, or perhaps for a recast. It is not a detailed biography; but presents the life of Cicero in a succession of views, each in a sense complete, and making together perhaps the most finished portrait yet attainable. The correspondence of Cicero is, of course, the main authority relied on; but this is supplemented, with curious skill, by the speeches and contemporary documents. One or two of the sketches stand out with peculiar vividness for example, that of "Coelius, or the Roman Youth; in which the career of that fast young man, that prodigal son of the aristocracy, is traced through the dissipations and intrigues, the scandals and rivalries, of the life at Baiæ; through the wayward and petulant ambitions of politics, down to the disgraceful close in the miserable conspiracy against Cæsar's too firm and conservative rule. The temper of the sullen aristocracy that murdered Cæsar, the capricious and uncomfortable relations which Cicero maintained with the Dictator, the motives that stirred the men and parties of that evil time, are traced with very great skill and absolute seeming impartiality. In its mastery of facts, its clear historic sense, its wide sympathy, and its freedom from personal or party bias, this volume appears to us a fine example of that new French school of criticism, of which Taine is perhaps the foremost representative.

* Ciceron et ses Amis. Par Gaston Boissier. Paris.

ANTIQUITIES.

A WORK upon Grecian mythology, which departs from the prevailing custom of allegorizing, and treats of the religion of the Greeks, not merely of their mythology, is a welcome addition to philological literature. Whether this is the correct point of view or not, it deserves more attention than it has received. From Forchhammer, whose key to all myths is water, and who makes out the Iliad to have been an Ueberschwemmung, a truly Neptunian philosopher, -to Max Müller, who resolves them all into the dawn, it has seemed impossible for anybody to touch these creations of remote antiquity without unconsciously forcing them to take on the stamp of his own mind, or, at any rate, that of the century in which he lives. We believe that they have all begun at the wrong end. They treat religion, as Hartung says, "as a result of idle speculation and figurative philosophizing," rather than as something which has its origin in the nature and necessities of man. "Can any one believe," he asks, p. 131, "that the Romans would have consecrated altars and chapels to a Fides, Victoria, Concordia, or Honos, and offered them prayers and sacrifices, if they had held them for mere allegories?""It is moreover no symbolical representation by which the motion of the sun is called a course (Fahren), and chariot and horses, and, as a matter of course, a four-in-hand, attributed to it. The symbol is designed to bring something spiritual nearer to the senses; but here they had already before them something visible and corporeal, and one would suppose that every one could see that the sun has neither chariot nor horses. If, nevertheless, the religious man does not see this, it is clear that he holds the sun as a living god, not as a rolling ball. If, now, this god, like a madman, burns up every thing, he must either himself have become a cruel tyrant, like the Thracian Diomedes, or his horses must have become frantic and run away with him, as with Phaethon." (p. 132).

The author of the work before us begins, as we conceive, in the right way, by investigating, first of all, those modes of religious thought and forms of worship which belong to the Greeks as a people

Die Religion und Mythologie der Griechen, von J. A. HARTUNG. Erster Theil. Naturgeschichte der heidnischen Religionen, besonders der Griechischen. Zweiter Theil. Die Urwesen oder das Reich des Kronos. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1865. 8vo. pp. 218 and 250.

of primeval antiquity; when they were not the Greeks of history and literature, whom we know, but a rude race, just emerging from barbarism. His aim is, therefore, to trace out primitive ideas and ceremonies, not suffering himself to be drawn aside by the poets, who "were obliged to alter the myths for their own ends, without regard to their mystic meaning." For this reason, he adds, "Pausanias is of more importance, in my eyes, than Homer and Hesiod." (p. vii.).

He is thus led to give special prominence to the heroes and demigods, as being, originally, gods whose power is now passed away (verkommen) and obscured: "The interpretation of their myths gives a key to the interpretation of the traditions of the gods themselves; while these, on their part, are of service in the interpretation of those" (p. vii.). The characteristic of the fully developed mythology of the Greeks, as contrasted with the oriental nations especially, was anthropomorphism; but traces of the primitive worship of nature in the fetich, and animal or semi-human forms, still exist side by side with the fully humanized Olympus of the poets. "We find, contrasted with almost every one of the Olympic gods, one who represents the elements of nature (Elementen-Geist); the latter receiving little or no attention in the worship, because he belongs to an old, deposed régime, so to speak. Thus we have Okeanus by the side of Poseidon, Gê by the side of Demêter, Uranos by the side of Zeus, Rhea by the side of Hera, Helios by the side of Phobos, Selene by the side of Hecate, Priapos by the side of Dionysos, Pan by the side of Hermes, and many more" (p. 188). The transition from the older to the newer system, the transformation of "the gods living in nature from shadows and phantoms to persons, with determinate human qualities of an ideal order," he attributes to the poets, and heads one section with the title, "How Homer and Hesiod created their gods for Greeks."

The two parts of the work already published are devoted to the primitive religion of nature which the Greeks held," the realm of Kronos" he calls it, - in which we meet with monsters, spirits of fire

"Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire,"

dæmons, giants, nymphs, centaurs, and satyrs. All this, the natural outgrowth of the uncultivated Greek mind, is as it were the foundation upon which the poets and philosophers built the wonderful structure

of mythology, by which they "overcame the horrors of Asiatic and Egyptian superstition [which had begun to invade Hellas], and developed a human, rational religion, whose greatest defect was that it was a national, and not a world-religion for all mankind, and must therefore necessarily die out with the other heathen religions when its time was past" (p. 67). We find less of" Comparative Mythology” in this volume than we anticipated; but what there is is very judicious, and generally by way of illustration rather than as part of the system.

ANOTHER instalment the first half of the fifth volume * - has appeared of the great treatise on Roman Antiquities, begun by Becker, and continued, since his death, by Marquardt. The present volume is devoted to the family life of the Romans, a topic already exhaustively handled by Professor Becker, in his well-known work, "Gallus." A comparison of the two books, however, gives us no reason to regret that the completion of his task has fallen into Professor Marquardt's hands, whose treatment of the subject is clearer, more concise, and more judicious than his predecessor's, while the plan of the work is much better adapted to conveying instruction. To be sure, a man of genial imagination can convey a good deal of information in the guise of a simple fiction, as Böttiger did in his "Sabina," which is as superior (in its limited scope) to "Gallus" as a work of imagination is to one of dry detail. But after all, erudition is not to be smuggled into the mind by any appeal to the fancy, especially so dull and unskilful a one as "Gallus," which is a ponderous attempt to construct a romance out of antiquarian scraps, taken from Propertius, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal.

The volume before us contains an exceedingly clear, concise, and well-digested statement of what is known upon the subjects discussed, illustrated by very copious references and citations. We cannot better illustrate its superiority to Becker's narrow and pedantic way of looking at a subject than by their respective treatment of, perhaps, the most important of the disputed points that come up in this volume, the identity of the atrium and the cavum ædium. Pliny the younger, in the description of his Laurentine villa, speaks of both as atrium and

*Handbuch der Römischen Alterthümer. Fünfter Theil. Römische Privatalterthümer von J. Marquardt. Erste Abtheilung. Leipsig: Vorlag von S. Hirzel. 1864. 8vo. pp. 384.