possess a simple dignity and devoutness, never, probably, excelled in that class of poetry. But from the Latin works of Luther few readers, I believe, will rise without disappointment. Their intemperance, their coarseness, their inelegance, their scurrility, their wild paradoxes, that menace the foundations of religious morality, are not compensated, so far at least as my slight acquaintance with them extends, by much strength or acuteness, and still less by any impressive eloquence. "The total want of self-restraint [in Luther], with the intoxicating effects of presumptuousness, is sufficient to account for aberrations, which men of regular minds construe into actual madness."

وو

These extraordinary statements of Hallam are in keeping with remarks in his previous works. In his anxiety to avoid the partisanship, as he describes it, of such men as Isaac Milner, he falls, as it seems to us, into the opposite extreme. Luther comes out from his hands shorn of nearly all his honors, an ignorant, furious, exacerbated monk, who, if he could have had his way, would have involved the world in a Protestant midnight. But Hallam's statements seem to be a little inconsistent with themselves. Luther wrote and spoke German with great perfection. He composed numerous excellent hymns, which is certainly a rare gift. He made a most excellent translation, as all acknowledge, of the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into German-a translation which is to German literature what our authorized translation is to English-a standard of the tongue. Surely Luther must have had some philology, some common sense, some judgment, to have made a translation, with the slight helps which he had, which created a language, and whose merit is fully acknowledged by such writers as the Roman Catholic Frederick Schlegel. That Luther was an opponent of the study of the Greek and Latin profane writers is news to us. Hallam appears to receive all the splenetic remarks of Erasmus as indubitable proof. Erasmus, with all his learning and wit, had more sympathy, we fear, with Horace than with Paul, and, in his latter days, is one of the last sources to which we should apply for correct information in regard to Luther. In another passage, Hallam speaks of Luther as one whose "soul was penetrated with a fervent piety, and whose integrity as well as purity of life are unquestioned." Again, he writes of the total absence in him of self-restraint, which it would be difficult to reconcile with fervent piety. We have been accustomed to regard self-government as one of the most important parts of eminent piety. Hallam gives a wholesale opinion of Luther's Latin works, while he confesses that he has but a slight acquaintance with them. Hundreds of passages in those works have impressive eloquence if they have nothing else. "The best authorities," says Hallam," for the early history of the Reformation are Seckendorf's Hist. Lutheranismi, and Sleidan's Hist. de la Réformation, in Courayer's French translation." Hallam makes no allusion to the great work of J. G. Planck, incomparably the best work on the Protestant side, and very candid and impartial also. "From Luther's German translation, and from the Latin Vulgate, the English one of Tyndale and Coverdale published in 1535 or 1536, is avowedly taken." On the contrary there is satisfactory proof that Tyndale translated from the original Greek and

Hebrew. How far Coverdale was acquainted with Hebrew does not

appear.

The fifth chapter of the work before us treats of the history of ancient literature in Europe from 1520 to 1550. The labors of Sadolet, Bembo, Erasmus, Budaeus, Camerarius, Gesner and others are passed briefly in review. The sixth chapter is occupied with the theological literature which we have partly anticipated in our notice of Luther. Of the Colloquies of Erasmus, which had an important bearing on the Reformation, 24,000 copies were sold in a single year. Reference is here had to the Institutes of Calvin, to the Loci Communes of Melancthon, the sermons of Latimer, etc. "It may not," says the author, "be invidious to surmise, that Luther and Melancthon serve little other purpose, at least in England, than to give an occasional air of erudition to a theological paragraph, or to supply its margin with a reference that few readers will verify." We know not but that such is the case in England. We should infer it from the ignorance of our author himself on the subject, but the remark does not hold good on the continent nor in the United States. The whole works of Luther are frequently imported into this country. Large editions of his Commentary on the Galatians have been published. A new and complete edition of Melancthon is now coming out in Germany under the charge of Bretschneider. Three editions of Calvin's Commentaries on the New Testament have been sold in Germany and this country within six or eight years. Even in England, within two years past, an edition of Calvin on Romans, and of Luther on Galatians has been printed.

The seventh chapter contains the history of speculative, moral and political philosophy, and of jurisprudence, in Europe, from 1520 to 1550. In speculative philosophy, we have Paracelsus, Agrippa and Jerome Cardan; in political and moral philosophy, Calvin, Melancthon, Erasmus, Thomas Elyot, Cortegiano and especially Nicolas Machiavel. Hallam's estimate of Machiavel is very able and discriminating. Machiavel's Discourses may now be read with great advantage, especially as the course of civil society tends further towards democracy. His works must, however, be read with large deductions. His History of Florence is enough to immortalize his name.

The eighth chapter contains the history of the literature of taste; and the ninth, of scientific and miscellaneous literature in Europe from 1520 to 1550. Though these chapters contain, like other parts of the volume, many interesting facts, and not a few profound observations, yet our limits preclude any further quotation or reference.

From the British and Foreign Review, January, 1841.

Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By HENRY HALLAM, F.R.A.S. Vols. 2, 3, 4.

London: 1839.

THE expectations we had formed from the first volume of Mr. Hallam's History of Literature are now gratified by the completion of the work.

It is, perhaps, unnecessary to add, that to the larger and more arduous portion of his task the author has brought the same discriminating spirit and comprehensive knowledge, that made the introductory volume so welcome an accession to critical literature. In a field difficult to divide from the connection, and to arrange from the variety of its departments, he treads with equal security the dark places of ethics and metaphysics, the steep and far-stretching range of the Baconian philosophy, or the pleasant mazes of fiction and poetic creation. Mr. Hallam is cautious, but he is also catholic in his tastes. He is ready to acknowledge, in its proper sequence and degree, every form of excellence from the "Pilgrim's Progress" to "Paradise Lost ;" and the moderation of his censure and his praise is to our feelings more impressive than the eager eulogies, or the acrid zeal, with which Bouterwek and Schlegel are wont to approve or condemn. Neither has he fallen into a common mistake of literary historians, an exclusive preference for certain schools and eras of literature. The predilections, which are excusable and even natural in an editor or the revivers of old books, are inconvenient in the wider sphere of the historian, who has to adjust rather than advance claims of literary precedence, and who must, with rare exceptions, subordinate the station of an author to the general character of his age. Mr. Hallam makes honorable mention of many whom he still would not exalt into the high places of literature. His allegiance to Shakspeare does not diminish his admiration of Molière and Racine. He is devout without bigotry, and is equally vigilant against his exotic and against his national prejudices. To some passionate admirers of particular fashions in literature, and to theological and political zealots generally, Mr. Hallam's pages will often appear cold and lifeless, especially in an age seemingly well inclined to fight over again some old quarrels; but Mr. Hallam's work is not meant for readers of this description. They will best profit by it who, willing to form a dispassionate judgment of modern cultivation, so far as it is derived from literature, will take for their guide, or if they have already explored the way, for their companion, a writer whose patience in research and candor in disquisition are exemplary, whose taste is generally manly and pure, and whose habits of mind and composition unite discretion with earnestness, and eloquence with simplicity of language.

If we found it difficult to present our readers with such a survey of Mr. Hallam's former volume as might compress without injuring, or display without anticipating its contents, our task is now infinitely less easy, not merely from having to deal with three to one, but from the greater importance and variety of the literary history of Europe subsequent to the Reformation. A critical historian, who, among the libraries of Attalus and the Ptolemies, should have undertaken to write a synoptical and æsthetical account of Greek literature, could scarcely have failed to impart something of an artistic unity to his work. However numerous the volumes he would have had to unroll, in the master-works of that language he would have traced the gradual evolution of certain intellectual laws; in the secondary works a series of reflected images more or less faithful to their common type. But the history of modern European literature

affords fewer facilities for arrangement. Within the period of Mr. Hallam's labors, it is divided by theology into two principal segments, which are again broken up by the original differences of language and of race Beyond any of these causes, however, the objects to which the historia must direct his researches are multiplied and perplexed by the incomparably wider range of intellectual activity in modern times. If the ancients discussed nearly every problem in moral and metaphysical philosophy the sophistic or scholastic mind can invent, they had, at least in their purer ages, no theology. Their books of ritual, the almanac and rubric of Pagandom, awakened no religious emotions; and their treatises on the "Divine Nature," on "Fate" or "Divination," agitated only the lecture-rooms of the philosopher. On the other hand, the development of their poetic forms was so regular, that a work was at once referred to the epic, the dramatic, or the lyrical class. Those born out of due time, like the Argonauts of Apollonius, were easily distinguishable as a parasitical species, indebted for whatever strength and succulence they exhibited to their adherence to the forms of a more genial age. But how wide are the individual distinctions even within the numerous sections of modern literature! Butler and Milton are poets; Böhmen and Barrow, theologians; yet with what compasses can we trace orbits so apart from one another as those of "Hudibras" and "Comus," the "Aurora" and the "Sermons on the Government of the Tongue." Of the various races that make up the political aggregate of modern Europe, there is scarcely one which has not in some degree had a national, at least a local literature of its own. Of these some, like the Sicilian, have been too short-lived; some, like the low-Dutch, too provincial; or some, as the Swedish, too remote from the centres of politics and commerce, to influence the general progress of society; while from other causes, an entire family, the Sclavonic, has remained without the pale of European cultivation. Yet with all these deductions, the subdivisions of literature, since the revival of learning, present an almost inextricable variety to the historian. Mr. Hallam has managed his synchronisms with great skill; his transitions are easily remembered, and his necessary brevity in many departments of his work is attended with few sacrifices of what is really interesting or instructive. In our notice of the first volume we have, however, entered more fully upon his merits in these respects. We must now hasten to lay before our readers such an analysis of the larger portion of the work before us as our limits will allow, omitting, as before, what may be called the statistics of literature, and such sections as we cannot abridge without injury. We must, therefore, content ourselves with a general recommendation of Mr. Hallam's account of Bodinus and Bacon, of Hobbes and Descartes, not merely as among the more valuable portions of the present volumes, but as accessions of no common worth to the exegetical part of moral and political science. Our extracts, as well as our remarks, will rather be confined to such chapters as relate to the initiative or progressive periods of intellectual cultivation, and to the more striking phenomena in the character of literature and learning.

The first chapter is devoted to the progress of classical learning and

philology from the middle to the close of the sixteenth century. This period eminently deserves the title of an age of scholars, and has filled our public libraries with immense fruits of literary labor. The immediate effects of the revival of ancient literature were, it is well known, to repress invention and independence of thought, and to induce a mistaken but generous despair of emulating, in the ruder dialects of modern Europe, the exact harmony of classical models. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, however, this intellectual servility was on the decline, especially on this side the Alps; and the Italians, who still submitted to it, already began to be less conspicuous as critics and philologists. The greater vigor and earnestness of the Teutonic mind displayed itself even in scholarship, and the fame of Manutius, Panvinius and Sigonius was equalled or eclipsed by that of Ruhnken, Casaubon and Scaliger. In speaking of Manutius, Mr. Hallam says, that "his letters, though addressed to the great classical scholars of his age, and exclusively on literary subjects, deal chiefly in generalities; and the affectation of copying Cicero in every phrase gives a coldness and almost an air of insincerity to the sentiments." In point of mere style, there can be no comparison between the letters of Sadolet or Manutius on the one hand, and those of Scaliger, Lipsius, or Casaubon on the other. The former, however, have "but one note-the praise of learning-yet they rarely impart to us much information about its history and progress." The others are "full of animation and pregnant with knowledge." In the middle of the sixteenth century, some far from uncommon writers had not yet been given to the press, but most of the rest had gone through several editions; and the means of acquiring an extensive, though not in all respects very exact erudition, might perhaps be nearly as copious as at present. The character of learning, as Mr. Hallam observes, in consequence, probably, among other reasons, of these augmented stores, underwent a change. "It became less polished and elegant, but more laborious and profound. The German or Cisalpine type, if I may use the word, prevailed over the Italian, the school of Budæus over that of Bembo." One advantage, however, that Italy derived from its enthusiasm for antiquity, Mr. Hallam has omitted to notice. Its learned men gained the most distinct and lively view of the character of ancient Rome; and although many sources of more accurate information have subsequently been opened, we have but recently surpassed the clearness and completeness of the old Italian philologers in this department of study. The air they breathed, the ground they trod on, the ruins with which that land is strewn, and the affinities of their native language, impregnated their whole being with the spirit of ancient Rome, and inspired them in their antiquarian labors with something like the faculty of divination. Mr. Hallam has carefully, and we think justly, characterized the merits of the French and German scholars of this half century, 1550 -1600. His admiration chiefly rests, as that of every scholar will always do who can estimate what he has inherited from great minds and what he owes to their memory, upon the younger Scaliger. His arrogance and intolerance were those of his age; yet are they less offensive, not merely than the ruffianism of Scioppius, but than the irritable vanity of