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This article is a long one for so short a book. It is far too short to convey our impression of the value of the book. A concio ad populum by an accomplished scholar free from the slightest exaggeration, the slightest appeal to vulgar feelings, deserves all the honor that can be given it. Those of us who have sometimes spoken harshly of the writer for what have seemed his harsh judgments of other men, must be eager to make him amends by confessing what this essay has

taught them, what impulses to good they have received from it. Those of us who have longed for some clear statement of their own profoundest and most earnest convictions respecting slavery, unmixed with any Northern partialities, and for a vindication of the Bible, such as no mere controversialist has made, or is ever likely to make, will thank the Professor of Modern History of Oxford for giving us both at once. F. D. M.

tian papyrus, suggests that the method of preTHE Paper Trade Review, speaking of Egypstem of the plant into its concentric layers, as paring the paper was by separating the succulent many as twenty being got from a single stem. When separated, these were probably spread out flat, and subjected to some pressure, then exposed to the action of the sun's rays, and, last of all,

THE PRINCE OF WALES having expressed a wish | could tolerate, even in comic license, a rhyme to be present at the Eton Speeches, and the 4th like stanza and plans are. In Eton, if anyof June having fallen this year on the Ascot Cup where in England, the sacredness of the sound R day, the delivery of the speeches was postponed should be respected. to the next day. Accordingly, yesterday week was held as the gala day of Henry the Sixth's College. The Prince and Princess of Wales reached the Quadrangle at 12 o'clock, which, long before that hour, was completely filled with distinguished visitors, just as the dense, heavy rain was pouring down in torrents. Again and again the old walls rang with the cheers of the young Etonians-some of them, perhaps, the prince's future ministers, statesmen, and warriors. The opening speech, a poetical address in the heroic couplet, composed by Lord Francis brought to a hard and even surface, by rubbing Hervey, son of the Marquis of Bristol, in honor with a smooth shell, or piece of ivory. The of the visit of their royal highnesses, was deliv-single sheets, so to speak, of paper obtained in ered in admirable style by the young author. this way, were sure to be limited in size. On an Other recitations followed, according to custom; six inches in breadth; but they could be gummed average they might be eighteen inches long, and and, at the close of the programme, the prince together piece by piece when required, until and princess visited the College Chapel; after which they and the other guests were entertained large sheets were formed, on which important by the provost, Dr. Goodford, at his residence. and voluminous records could be engrossed. The We observe, by the by, that Lord Francis Her- largest sheet of this kind in this country is in the British Museum, measuring some eight or nine vey's address, from which the newspapers gave feet long, and one foot wide. The quantity of extracts, has been published entire in the first these sheets produced must have been very connumber of a new Eton-School Magazine just pub-siderable. The trade became a lucrative one; lished under the name of Etonensia. The num- and at Rome the consumption of papyrus was ber contains, besides, a few short prize essays and poetical pieces by the young hopes of Eton- very great, with a supply seldom equal to the the most interesting article, perhaps, being a brief essay on Arthur Hallam, dear to Eton as an old Etonian, and as a contributor, in his Eton days, to a former school magazine called The Eton Miscellany. Most of the pieces show at least a very nice feeling; but we should not have expected from a young Etonian, even in fun, such a cockney rhyme as the following, which appears in one of the poetical pieces :

"Oh, aid us, kind muse, to a stanza,

Since without thee 'tis vain to aspire;
To the public we'll state what our plans are,
And request them to buy and admire."

We hope Dr. Goodford will ruthlessly root out,
in Eton, that style of pronouncing English which

demand.

POSTAGE-STAMPS were, according to the Moniteur, in use as early as two hundred years ago. This paper quotes a postal regulation of 1653, according to which letters bearing the inscription Post paye shall be carried free of expense from one end of the town to the other, and announcing that franking stamps are to be had at certain places, at a sou a piece, etc.

THE death of Edward Vogel, the African traveller, has been, we hear, confirmed by evidence which places it beyond a doubt.

From The Spectator. on the Eastern shores, or as hardy pioneers THE GERMAN PRESS IN AMERICA. in the primeval forests of the far West. THE German element has of late played a The unlucky insurrections of the year 1848 rather conspicuous part in North American brought men of higher aspirations and of a politics, and its influence greatly contributed more intellectual stamp among them; and to the success of the Republican party in the these radicals proved a powerful leaven in the election which raised Lincoln to the Presi- hitherto sluggard population. They started dency. The Germans themselves reckon their newspapers containing matters somewhat number in the United States at five millions more momentous than idle local gossip, and at least, whilst native Americans want to re- continued on the other side of the Atlantic duce it to two or three millions. The differ- the great discussions of philosophical and ence might be easily accounted for, since the economical principles which had brought former claim as their own all children born them to grief under the petty despotisms of of Teutonic parents, whilst the latter regard the Old World. They wanted, above all, to only those as true "Dutchmen " who were form a German party, which, by throwing its actually born in Germany, and have immi- numbers and influence either on the right or grated at a later period in life. However the left, might turn the scales in the political that may be, it cannot be denied that their strife for supremacy. They did not succeed weight in the political scale begins to be at first, the German colonists remaining calduly felt, and they hardily fight for the Union | lous to their passionate appeals, and preferboth in public meetings and on the field of ring to walk in the wake of some recognized battle, both with the pen and the sword. It American faction. But the blind and veheis asserted that over one hundred thousand ment opposition of the Know-nothings, their men of that nationality have enlisted in the violent vindication of the exalted and excluRepublican armies, and if just now the re- sive rights of nativism, estranged the Gerported flight of the corps of Schurz and mans from the Democrats, and threw them, Steinwehr at Chancellorsville has brought often against their will, into the arms of the them into unreasonable disrepute, it ought Republican party. It may now be safely as not to be forgotten that on several occasions serted that these three millions of immigrants they have borne the brunt of the day under are all Unionists, however fairly their symtheir favorite leader, General Sigel, who, un-pathies may still be divided among the old happily for himself and his countrymen, was induced to resign his command several weeks ago. We are, in consequence, entitled to expect that the Germans, who are generally endowed with many military qualities, as is sufficiently testified by the eagerness of potentates to enlist them in their service, will soon redeem their character. At all events, it appears preposterous and cruel to treat as mercenary hirelings thousands of men who zeal-known, free editors, crammed with the logiously rushed to arms in the defence of their adopted country and the loftiest principles of freedom.

In former times, the German settlers in America, chiefly drawn from the sober, industrious peasantry which dwell on the slopes of the Black Forest, and on the pleasant borders of the Rhine and the Maine, had no other anxiety but to pursue their tillage in peace, free from the Government shackles which weighed so heavily on their shoulders in their native land. Ease, and even affluence, were the price of untiring labor and strict economy, and they often became rich, either as saving tradesmen in the large cities

Democrats and their successful antagonists.

The German press in America has espoused the cause of the Union and of freedom with an ardor and a vehemence to which even natural-born Americans are strangers. Bred in a far-off country, which was never convulsed by the bloody strife between slaveholders and abolitionists, and in which the fancied necessities of forced labor have forever been un

cal principles of Kant and Hegel, devoted to the faith of "Humanism," feel no difficulty in declaring war to the knife against the Southern "institution." Their influence is not to be despised, for if daily, weekly, and periodical publications are all taken into account, the number of German newspapers reaches close to two hundred. Every party, every shade, every school is represented here, from the Roman Catholic lucubrations of Father Oertel to the materialist declamations of Carl Heinzen.

The most wide-spread, and, therefore, most influential journal is the Staats Zeitung of New York, the property of the "widow'

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Uhle. This "old Democratic gossip," as numerous adversaries condescend to call it, has often changed editors, and, as usual in successful papers, follows rather than directs public opinion. Still, it has strongly declared in favor of the Union, and as it has found great favor with thriving shopkeepers and sturdy farmers, we may take it as a symptom that the large middle class among the German settlers are unfavorable to the dissevering pretensions of the South. Two other daily periodicals published in the Empire City deserve to be mentioned-the Abend Zeitung and the Criminal Zeitung. The former hoists the Republican flag and pronounces in favor of speedy abolition; the second had for many years a communistic tint, and, though socialist to an extreme, never discovered in slavery anything higher than an "economical question. It may be startling, but it is by no means strange, to discover that the men who, in Europe, affected to give to the right to labor the precedence over political liberty, concerned themselves in the American negroes only so far as their presence might influence the position of free workmen.

The West of the United States possessed, until very lately, an influential and well written paper, the Anzieger des Westens, published by M. (now Colonel) Börnstein, a political refugee, and M. Charles Bernays, once American Consul in Switzerland. This journal was so successful, and had enlisted among its staff so many correspondents of the highest standing (among others, Dr. Ruge, from Brighton), that the editors once offered a high price for the best German novel written in America. The competition was exciting and lively, and the prize was awarded by competent judges to M. Douai, the former editor of the San-Antonia Zeitung, whom the slaveholders had driven from Texas, and who is at present a contributor to one of the New York papers. The Americans were secretly somewhat startled to hear that the Anzeiger had ceased to appear, in spite of its financial prosperity; having formerly been a Democrat, and converted by the war to the Repub lican creed, it seems that M. Börnstein found insuperable difficulties in maintaining his moral ground, and preferred to interrupt his journalistic labor. Another paper, the Westliche Post, started at St. Louis several years ago, as an opposition publication, has now entirely replaced its antagonist; it is of the true abolition hue, and carries the numerous Germans who inhabit the State of Missouri into the ultra Republican camp,

Among the widely-circulated papers, we have to notice the Chicago Staats Zeitung, a Unionist journal, founded by Brentano, the former dictator of Baden. Most of the other

periodicals owe their influence merely to the private character and talent of the chief editor, and are altogether to be looked upon as private enterprises. Every political scheme, every philosophical opinion, be it the wildest fancy or the most absurd day-dream, finds its enthusiastic exponents in that numerous class; but the great, unfailing characteristic is the combativeness of the writers. True to their European habit, the Germans in America prefer making war against one another to a combined assault against the common enemy, and in this ungrateful struggle they evince a bitterness and a power of coarse invective worthy of a better or a worse cause. Foremost, and almost alone on his unenviable pinnacle, stands M. Heinzein, of the Boston Pioneer, the most radical, unsparing, indiscreet, and violent, but also the most deeply convinced of all German editors. He is wanting neither in cleverness nor conceitedness, and has, indeed, often brought his unwilling countrymen over to his ideas. In one of its recent issues, an English paper, the Missouri Republican, thus speaks of him :

"When, a year or more ago, we took occasion to point out to the leaders of the radical to lashing them to the chariot wheel of the German press that their course inevitably led great Bugaboo, Carl Heinzen, at Boston, the olution in spe, there was quite an effort made self-proclaimed Danton of the prospected revdid us the justice to copy our article verbato make us appear ridiculous. Carl Heinzen tim in his Pioneer, and broadly hinted that we were about right in our estimate of the modern lansquenets of revolutionary young Germany; for, by some such name, he chose them worthy of a better title, though of some to stigmatize his compatriots, not deeming infinitely more degrading.

"And what do we behold? Day after day, step by step, ever uncompromisingly and relentlessly did Heinzen proceed; now fulmiand his countrymen in America in particular, nating, then hectoring the world generally, but never failing to treat with unspeakable contempt his fellow-countrymen of the young of candor, of logic, tact, and foresight. He German press for their servility, their want was treated as a madman at times; again he was drawn into ridicule and contempt. Sometimes even a green specimen of late importaof inexorable logic," to be crushed; but tion entered the lists with him in the field

all in vain."

In fact, there has been erected in America a new stage for German literature but we feel bound to confess that the products are neither of the highest nor the purest kind, and that the performers are in nowise remarkable for the Atticism of their wit or the amiability of their temper.

From The Saturday Review.
STAHR'S LIFE OF LESSING. *

are as wearisome to the reader as the author
appears to think them incumbent upon him-
self. The reader should be now and then
permitted to draw his own lessons, without
having it flung in his teeth that he is a child
of the degraded and materialistic nineteenth
century. Moreover, a subject like the life of
Lessing claims an almost historic dignity of
treatment, and that "pitch of style" which
the late Dr. Arnold judged requisite in the
composition of history. Not that M. Stahr
was without the best of intentions to impart
such a dignity to his book. The second edi-
tion is ushered in by a most sonorous blast of
trumpets, consisting in the eulogies of certain
critics, quoted with modest pride by the not
unconscious author. The book is described
as "a lamp to lighten the darkness around;
as "the free confession of a free man amongst
hindering and even threatening circumstan-
ces; a breath of air and a ray of light amidst
the smoke of a gloomy mysticism, a Byzan-
tine hierarchy, a blasé romanticism, which
had intruded themselves into the ancient
home of the healthiest, clearest, and manliest
of German minds; " and a prophecy is added
that "it will last, this book, it will work, and
in numberless unseen pipes pour forth its pure
contents through the world." Being trans-
lated, these very brave words signify that, in
praising Lessing, M. Stahr meant to tread on
the corns of those who yet survive as the rel-
ics of the systems which Lessing overthrew.

GERMAN authors seem gradually awakening to the fact of the brevity of life, and to the corresponding necessity of brevity in their monographs. They begin to perceive that, in order to find readers, a writer must be tolerably short and moderately readable; and that the public is more frequently propitious to the successful digester than to the patient accumulator of materials. There is scarcely a fact in Mr. Lewes' Life of Goethe which had not been previously mentioned in Viehoff's laborous work on the same subject; but even to German readers Mr. Lewes has made himself Goethe's biographer par excellence. A similar fate might have befallen the Life of Lessing, had a foreign author of reputation, till very recently, chosen to avail himself of the copious materials extant in the learned work of Guhrauer; but M. Adolf Stahr determined that a popular life of a writer who was the very incarnation of the German mind should at all events be attempted by one of his grateful compatriots. M. Stahr is one of the most prolific, and also one of the most entertaining, of living German writers. He is deeply enough read to satisfy the claims of his own nationality, but he has at the same time the vivacity of a Frenchman and the independent feelings of an Englishman. He appears to be one of those happily-constituted mortals who are at home everywhere. He has worshipped in If, however, the reader will consent to overthe museums of Rome and Florence, and conlook, or to estimate at its proper value, the versed at his ease in Paris salons; he has occasionally almost oppressive grandeur of Aristotle under his pillow and Longinus at M. Stahr's commentative oratory, he will his fingers' ends; he is au fait with the secret find in this biography a very faithful picture, springs of Goethe's amours and the secret drawn by a most skilful hand, of an intelmeaning of the Music of the Future; he comlectual life matchless for its vigor and truthmands the political situation in Germany and fulness. Lessing was restless, in the sense in the rest of Europe, and has encompassed in which the pilgrim, ever pressing onward and traversed the entire field of ethics, ancient to a goal it will never be given him to attain, and modern. He is a greater polyhistor than is restless. Those who complain of a want was Lessing himself; and his criticisms attempt as free and bold a range as those of the subject of this biography. That such a writer should but rarely be dull, is no matter for wonder; and it is perhaps equally natural that we should often miss in him the sobriety and moderation which becomes, a critic of the arch-critic. Constant allusions to the present

*G. E. Lessing. Sein Leben und seine Werke. Von Adolf Stahr. 2 Bande. 2te Ausgabe. Berlin: 1862.

of unity in his manifold expeditions on various fields but ill understand the unity of the true critic's life. Lessing was anything but a mere negative and destructive critic. Every literary advance which he made formed a link in that synthesis which, in a short life, he was able with unusual completeness to establish. In judging of works in the field of any art,

it was his constant aim to establish the rules

and the limits of that art. From a purification of the literary stables of Germany, he

rose to distinct theories by which to deter- A peculiar bitterness characterizes Lesmine the adherence to, or aberration from, sing's unceasing attacks on Voltaire. It must fixed rules in the case of the French and Eng-be admitted that Voltaire suffered but little lish schools. In his Litteraturbriefe, he showed from them during his lifetime, and that his how Shakspeare and the English dramatists reputation as an originator bids fair to last differ from the Greeks as species differ from as long in France as his fame as a destroyer; species, but how the French are as far from for in that country, even more than elsethem as the perversion is from the original, where, success and vanity form almost imand the false from the true. To the Eng-pregnable entrenchments. To this, probalish poets of Pope's time, and their host of bly, much of the bitterness of Lessing's aniimitators in the German didactic poets, he mosity may be ascribed; but M. Stahr suphad already assigned their true limits, exclud-plies another key, which may be taken for ing them from the Poetic Art. In his Ham- what it is worth. Lessing, it appears, had burger Dramaturgie, he more fully and spe- a personal opportunity of becoming acquainted cially exposed the radical vices of the French with the meanness and injustice of " Voltaire, tragedians, and defeated Voltaire, and his Chambellan du Roi," through certain more gods and worshippers, with their own weapon than questionable money transactions of the -the appliance of the rule of Aristotle. Yet latter, which involved him in a disgraceful he was not slow to perceive the likelihood of lawsuit, out of which he only escaped by an an aberration in a contrary direction, and to equally disgraceful compromise. His royal warn young Germany against that defiance patron and disciple founded on these transacof all rules and laws which became the motto tions a comedy, entitled Tantale en Procès, and of their Sturm and Drang period, and of a mercilessly satirizing the avaricious philosomore recent French school. But to the Po-pher. Moreover, Lessing indiscreetly proetic Art itself, in contradiction to the Plastic, cured the MS. of Voltaire's Siècle de Louis he fixed limits, in his Laocoon, which Winck- XIV., before publication, from the author's elmann himself, the greatest of German arch- secretary, and by accident took it away with æologists, had failed or refused to recognize. him from Berlin. The wrath of the philosFrom Esthetics his genius took a loftier flight opher, who declared himself robbed, was treto Ethics, and after a long series of polemi-mendous. The secretary was dismissed, and cal encounters (some negative in their origin, but all constructive in their aim), arrived at its consummation in those speculations on the development of mankind, and the place belonging in it to revealed religion, which opened to him, in his own words, "an infinite view into a distance neither wholly hidden from his eyes nor wholly discovered to them by the soft gleam of sunset. His various polemical encounters were conducted, if not always with moderation (as in the case of Klotz), yet with a steady view to the goal which would be approached by the removal of the obstructions against which he revolted. Thus Lessing well deserves the name of a second Luther, not only for his fearlessness in overthrowing abuses, but because he did it for the sake of the truth whose countenance they hid from the sight of man. In either case, the vehemence of such struggles is to us rather melancholy than delightful, when we reflect on the hard fate of those who fight, not for fighting's sake, but to be enabled to pursue the path for whose end they are yearn-pacity for a literary activity of the sort."

ing.

an interchange of disagreeable letters in French and Latin passed between Voltaire and Lessing. Lessing's letter has been lost, but he said "it was not one Voltaire was likely to stick in his window. The Frenchman's letter certainly repeats the accusation of theft against the secretary, but is otherwise flattering to Lessing. M. Stahr seems to us to attach too much importance to the affair, which only proves what every one knew before-that the temper of Voltaire was vinegar itself.

The biographer-who, on a previous occasion, has started the theory that Goethe was a democrat at heart, and saw through the hollowness of courts and princes-is very anxious to prove Lessing a member, by anticipation, of the democratic party in Germany. He is candid enough to admit that his hero, except by occasional remarks, never mixed in the politics of the day, but consoles himself by observing that the reason of this was certainly not " that he lacked inclination or ca

The capacity all will admit, but of the in

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