No. 1150. Fourth Series, No. 11. 16 June, 1866. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay a commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second " The Complete work Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. Dr. S. Austin Allibone's great DICTION- introduce here, having materially aided in her ARY OF AUTHORS, in the press of George husband's great work, may W. Childs, Philadelphia, is now completed, so far as the author's work is concerned. We heartily congratulate both the Author and Publisher of this great work, which will necessarily form part of every good library in America and Great Britain. An editorial article in the Philadelphia Press contains some particulars which will interest our readers: S. AUSTIN ALLIBONE D. C. L. "Share the triumph and partake the gale." That our readers may be able to judge wha labor and research have been here concentrated, we shall add a few facts which are within our knowledge. There were 1,873 manuscript H; 1,796 of M; 2,251 of S, and 2,008 of W. pages of subjects under the letter B; 1,555 of It took Dr. ALLIBONE about twenty-two months to write up the articles in the letter S, and about as many more for those of the letter W. SMITH cannot be a very unusual patronymic, for Dr. ALLIBONE chronicles the literary productions of seven hundred of that name among whom there are ninety JOHN SMITHS. It gives us great gratification to announce GIBBON, who fully knew the importance and that Dr. ALLIBONE has completed the second value of his great work, has recorded the very and concluding volume of his "Critical Dic- day on which, as he sat musing amidst the ruins tionary of English Literature, and British and of the Capitol, the idea of writing the history American authors, living and deceased, from the of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire earliest accounts to the Middle of the Nine- first started to his mind, and told, with still teenth Century; containing Thirty Thousand more particularity the exact place, time, and Biographical and Literary Notices with Forty hour when he wrote the last lines of the last Indexes of Subjects." This work was projected page. Future historians of literature may in 1850, and the author commenced preparing thank us for here setting down the fact that Dr. it for the press in August, 1853, and in Decem- ALLIBONE "wrote the lines of the last page" ber, 1858, was published the first volume (A. to of his work (the most extensive ever produced J) of over 1,000 pages imperial octavo. The by one mind), precisely at 8.27 P. M. on TuesMagnum Opus, a loving labour of more than six-day, May 29th. He will rest his mind, we hope, teen years, is now completed, and will be placed for sufficient time, when the additional and before the public as soon as (consistent with that overruling accuracy for which its author is so anxiously watchful) it can pass into type and thence into the iron grasp of the printing-machine and the more delicate handling of the book-binders. The mass of manuscript of ALLIBONE's Dictionary, fairly copied for the press, occupies 19,044 large foolscap pages and a few pages in large The "Loneliness of Self" is very touchquarto. The copyist, was Mrs. ALLIBONE, who ing. And we can see that it must be so. thus proved herself a helpmeet for her accom- "The wretch concentred all in self" can plished and persevering husband. In like manner, enjoy little communion with his kind. And when the late Dr. BUCKLAND wrote his celebra- the man who wanders away from his heavted Bridgewater Treatise on Geology and Mineralogy, his wife copied parts of it nineteen times enly Father loses the most comforting and (so frequent and extensive were the alterations) most elevating of all that is outside of himand, as she told the writer of this, made fair self. copies of the entire work four times over. Like Dan the Cripple will remind the reader of her, the lady whose name we have ventured to The Clouded Intellect. wearying labor of seeing the new volume through the press is ended. We can easily imagine what a reception he would have among the lit erati of England, France, and Germany, who highly appreciate the value and the conscientious reliability of the cyclopedic work which he has accomplished. From The Spectator. MR. CARLYLE'S RELIGION. - a glimpse of far horizons peeping through the foreground of fact, the same strong reverence for the past and disposition to fret under the stiff yoke of the present, the same dread of being fettered by the oppressive customs around him, and the same contempt for the opinion of the world, which showed themselves in the first of his characteristic works. No man of our age has learned so little and unlearnt so little from mere experience as Mr. Carlyle. He has kept all the freshness and humidity of the young man's first beliefs; he has never submitted to wear that harness of submission to other men's wills and views, .which teaches so much and yet at the same time misteaches so much also, which is essential to the knowledge of life partly because it is essential to imbue us adequately with popular errors, and to give us the varnish of the accepted and acceptable insincerities of the world. If Mr. Carlyle has lost something by sturdily clinging to the dreamy and sanguine temperament of youth, he has also gained not a little by his obstinate refusal to engraft upon his mind any form either of thought or action which is not characteristically his own. No other man of this day at all events none of equal power — has ever grown from youth to age on so simple and uniform a type of life. The old forest tree is not less different from the young, than Mr. Carlyle's latest confession of faith from his earliest. MR. CARLYLE, though now, as he tells the students of Edinburgh, in his seventieth year, shows us all the radical boyishness of his great genius as completely unimpaired by what is commonly called the sober schooling of experience, as when he first put forth his brilliant paradoxes, lighted up for us the distant vistas of ethics and politics with the broken lights of his rich imagination, or filled our ears with those tones of mingled awe and laughter which have always expressed his profoundly religious doubts, or, if that is nearer the mark, his profoundly doubting faith. His address on Monday went over nearly all the heads of his well known and very simple creed, and from it might easily be compiled a 'shorter catechism' of the Carlylian faith. What strikes one most about it is the very slight degree in which the actual stir and press of human existence have modified either the centres of Mr. Carlyle's interests or the character of his thoughts. He isstill the imaginative youth of eighteen or twenty, enriched with a few score years of additional study; there is nothing of the dryness of the sedentary bookworm about him; nothing of the cold and fading light of the shrewd and busy understanding; nothing of the close and minute detail of the worldly intellect which has lost all faith in gene- There is one striking passage in Mr. Carralities, and can no longer give its atten- lyle's speech at Edinburgh which brings tion to anything less circumscribed than him into close contrast with the form of scraps of particular fact; nothing of the faith most widely separated from his own, and hard and petrified dogma into which the yet, characteristically enough, presents him warm sympathies of early life are apt grad- as half bewailing its break-up and coming ually to settle down; nothing of the con- extinction, simply and solely because that tempt for sanguine dreams and enterprize faith was at least an orderly power, giving with which experience snubs the wayward a certain sanction to authority, and exerself-confidence of youth; nothing even of cising through the clergy a certain degree the overweening value for special knowl- of real mastery over the "dim, common edge and definite acquirement which those populations." "Curious to say," interjects who, like Mr. Carlyle, have devoted all Mr. Carlyle, "now in Oxford, and other their life to filling in diligently the details places that used to seem to lie at anchor in of a few great historic pictures, usually ex- the stream of time, regardless of all changes, hibit in so emphatic a form. All that Mr. they are getting into the highest humour Carlyle shows himself in his earliest and of mutation, and all sorts of new ideas are most original essays, those which were most getting afloat. It is evident that whatever adapted to fascinate men in their college is not made of asbestos will have to be burndays, he shows himself still. He is still full ed in this world. It will not stand the of the vague religion of wondering, awaken- heat it is getting exposed to. And in saying intellect. There is the same animation ing that, it is but saying in other words that and freshness of feeling, the same graphic we are in an epoch of anarchy." And all vagueness of conception, the same youthful through this, his latest confession of faith, love of intensity and grand Rembrandt-like and all through his chain of writings, there effects, the same hatred of vapid formalism, runs, in spite of his sceptical turn, and his the same attraction towards subjects with hatred of mere routine, the deepest desire for some sort of self-asserting authority to arrange men, and things, and thoughts too, in their right places in the universe, and tell them, with a certain passion of eloquence and power of conviction, where they are to go and what they are to do. And yet there also runs through him an unconquerable aversion to submit to any system of rules or formulas, to anything which is not a visible living Will with a powerful magnetism of its own for human hearts and a conspicuous aptitude for availing itself of human opportunities, and bidding its servants come and go, and do this or that at the right moment. Both moods of feeling are as widely contrasted as possible with the High-Church tone of mind towards Authority and prescribed rules, the breaking up of which at Oxford Mr. Carlyle half deplores, and the most popular expression of which we take to be the poetry of that most refined and delicate of modern religious poets whom we have just lost, the late Mr. Keble. To hear Mr. Carlyle lamenting the waning influence of such ideas as Mr. Keble's, and that is really what his wail over the drifting of Oxford from its last intellectual anchorage means, has something in it at once pathetic and instructive; pathetic because it shows how genuine is Mr. Carlyle's respect for any influence, however widely severed from what he himself acknowledges, which takes up a strong disciplinarian attitude towards human life, and is ready to guide ignorance and rebuke license without any grain of self-distrust, and instructive because it is impossible even to think of the High-Church school of feeling towards Authority, the sources of its self-confidence and of its genuinely happy reliance on its own resources, without getting by the very contrast a new light upon the nature of Mr. Carlyle's own faith. - Run over the articles of Mr. Carlyle's creed as he tells it in his Edinburgh address, his hatred of all speech that does not converge directly on action, his curious admiration for Goethe's doctrine of symbolic education by mute gestures (not, we suspect, because they are necessarily more sincere, witness Oriental gestures, which are full of flattery, and even diffuse insincerity, but because they express thought and feeling on large subjects much more vaguely, and harmonize better therefore with Mr. Carlyle's own vague thought on infinite subjects), his belief in courage the Roman virtus, as almost the sum and substance of all human goodness, his - reverence for all instinctive and hereditary qualities, hereditary descent being a mode of transmission in some sense at once supernatural and natural, — his value for physical health and the tranquillity of spirit which it gives, and his half poetical gratitude towards that renovating sleep which soothes down the nervous excitability of genius, his preference for the Roman type of character, with its religion of imperial duty, and his remarkable selection for special panegyric of Phocion amongst the Greeks, who represents the nearest to the Roman type among eminent Greek politicians, finally, as the central point of all his creed, his devotion to all historic characters which bring organizing power to a bright personal focus, and present us with a picture of a single Will holding and pulling the threads by which crowds of poorer and feebler natures are controlled, and in all these well known articles of the Carlylian faith, you see the same stamp, a vehement repulsion for all closely regulated and neatly channelled rules and conventions of thought and action which carve out duty for all time, a strong passion of belief in vague mysterious streams of divine' agency flowing into the soul and demanding ever new expression, and a perfect idolatry for all natures capable of serving as foci for such vague, half wasted streams of influence, and of so concentrating them as to create a new order. Mr. Carlyle can scarcely suppress his contempt for natures content with the monotony of an antique régime. All men, he secretly thinks, are bound either to be the dictators of a new crisis or to serve such dictators when found. Hence the curious blending of his admiration for so much of chaos and anarchic force as serves to blur, as it were, the dull boundary lines of regulated formalism, and give the full impression of the difficulty of new organization, with his admiration for the rough volition which can bridle these forces and press them into the service of a new order. Ordered force drawing its supplies from errant and vagrant force, Dantonesque audacity, Mirabeauesque intellect, Cromwellian enthusiasm and faith, all these satisfy the conditions of his admiration, because you see, in more or less prominence, in all of them, the "ragged rims of thunder brooding low," as well as the gleams of that intelligence which can turn the brute mischief' to purposes of good. We doubt if Mr. Carlyle ever made a hero yet of a character without strong traces in it of jarring forces and half-tamed passions. It is the stormy ebullition of Goethe's youth that helps him to admire the placid tranquillity of his age. Mr. On the whole, Mr. Carlyle's religion, Carlyle does not worship even God as the free, masculine, noble in its type, scarcely creator, so much as the subduer of the succeeds in being a faith. He bows to "the world, as Him who can tame the wild eternal verities" with what Professor Huxforces of the Nature and the Man He has ley calls "a worship chiefly of the silent first created. Hence a certain lurking sort, at the altar of the Unknown and Unsympathy in him with the ferocities and knowable," but he scarcely trusts those passions to be subdued, which turns into vague disembodied springs of new vitality dislike only so soon as they get the final and order which he is always groping mastery over the will and reason that after, and the impulses of which he is only should be their masters. too eager to obey. His is an inchoate faith, a vague faith of the young kept fresh until old age. But Mr. Carlyle has almost no sympathy with that feeling for holiness as holiness, that horror of sin as sin, which feels a certain infinite and mysterious anguish for the voluntary breaking of divine law. And hence the surprise which is involuntarily felt at his lament over the waning power of Oxford orthodoxies. We doubt if any two men, each in their way profound reverers of Authority, were ever less able to understand one another than Mr. Carlyle and the poet of the Christian Year, who may stand as well as any one for the ancient ways' of Oxford thought. Keble loved authority as a woman loves the firm will on which she can lean, and in which she is ever glad to discern new beauties. He found a real joy, for instance, in believing that the Church had pointed out to him a particular line of sentiment in which it was especially proper to indulge on the twentythird Sunday after Trinity, and adapted all his musings on nature, as a wife might adapt her musings on the birthday of an absent husband, to the particular line of thought suggested by the anniversary. The HighChurch school, so far as it is poetical at all, is full of this poetry of deep, limited, dependent sentiment, and so far as it is not poetical, is full of mere rigid, punctual obedi ence to written law. Its sense of sin even is apt to be cast more in the mould of the child's awe of disobedience, than in that of the old evangelical passion of horror at iniquity. It is not easy to imagine anything more widely severed from Mr. Carlyle's religion than this. And yet it was eminently characteristic in him to regret its decay. He does so evidently out of his deep hatred for undisciplined egotisms such as are apt to spring up in ordinary persons if there are no shepherds of the people, even of a thin High-Church type of eagerness, to lead them by the right way. Anarchy on a grand scale, anarchy like that of the French Revolution, anarchy just going to be subdued, he admires, and loves even to revel in. But an anarchy of petty individualities, with "only the constable" to keep them in order, he despises and abhors. THE sixteenth century has been called the age of learned women. Its title to be so designated in the annals of England dates from a period very near its commencement. The revival of letters was long in reaching this country, but the quickening impulse, once received, inspired many minds with a generous zeal for the improvement of education. The temper of these reformers was audacious. They exalted the classics to the skies, and trampled the schoolmen under foot. They despised all who adhered to the old studies, while they insisted that none should be refused the blessings of the new. Liberal culture for the minds of girls as well as boys was first recommended by the example and authority of Sir Thomas More.* *As to the general condition of female literature in England at the close of the fifteenth century, we' have few means of judging. In describing the accomplishments of Jane Shore, Sir Thomas More mentions that she could "read well and write," as if that were an extraordinary circumstance. We gain a more favourable Impression from the Paston respectable, though not noble, family in the reigns Letters, which consist of the correspondence of a of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Henry VII. If these letters are genuine, which we are forbidden to doubt, it is plain, as Mr. Hallam remarks, "that several members of the family, male and female, wrote not only grammatically, but with a fluency the habitual use of the pen." The Plumpton Corand facility, an epistolary expertness. which implies respondence, published by the Camden Society, also contains numerous letters written by women of moderate station in the reign of Henry VII., chiefly, however, during the latter half of it. |