key to them and when they publicly and | arrest a movement which has almost the ceremoniously thank a subject for restoring force of a convulsion of nature, the movethe good relations between Austria and ment of the Germanic people towards unity. France, as they have thanked Prince Met- Already enough of that unity has been acternich, they intend that public acknowledg- complished to render resistance dangerous, ment to be not only a supreme honour and it may at any moment become almost and they think it an honour beyond com- hopeless. Hesse, it is perfectly understood, pare but to be also a political manifesto. must obey any summons from Berlin. The The allusion to the East, the quarter in people of Wurtemburg have announced, which French, Austrian, and English inter- within the last fortnight, in an informal ests are so nearly identical, is, if an inven- Parliament of notables, that they intend to tion, an admirable one, and the Treaty of join the North, to concede to her, in their Prague is no doubt a natural basis for own words, an undivided military control. French, if not for Austrian policy. The The Bavarian Ministry have prevented their Emperor has made a mistake but an endur- King from visiting Salzburg by an expression able one, if Prussia is only to be extended of opinion which amounts to an exercise of to the Main, to be only as great as France, moral coercion. In a few months the South, and not quite so well situated. If, however, which is fretting under its isolation, will be Prussia is to be Germany, if the greatest enthusiastic for union, and then Count von nation of Central Europe, perhaps the great- Bismarck must either risk a great war, or est nation in the world, is to be organized give up the dream of his and his master's like a regiment, under the Hohenzollerns, life. Is he likely to fear the risk? He then it would cease to be endurable. France stated in Parliament, immediately after would be stifled, and France dislikes thick Sadowa, that he expected it, that Prussia neckcloths. On the other hand, so long as was prepared for it, and that he hoped to South Germany remains independent, so keep the annexations Prussia had acquired long as a great Catholic German population with the sword. He either has secured St. outside Austria remains isolated, the Haps- Petersburg, as Continental statesmen beburgs have a chance of retaining their po- lieve, or he can secure St. Petersburg by sition as a civilized ruling House. Aided offering aid to the south-east, and with that by events, they may draw Wurtemburg, alliance an attack even from France and Hesse, Baden, and Bavaria into a Con- Austria need not look too formidable to be federation of which Austria would be the risked. At any rate, unless he risks it, he head, and if not so aided, may at least keep may give up all hope of uniting Germany, their own dominions intact, at least retain and there is no reason to suppose that with the solid base which enables them to deal a stake so enormous he will hesitate to take with the Hungarian kingdom as equals. up good cards. His real opponent will be The Catholic Germans of Austria will hard- France, and to France under an Empire. ly consent to merge themselves in the Pro- with a Sovereign who cannot select the best testant Germans of Prussia unless secure General lest he thereby promote a rival, of their due influence, unless they are a with an army doubtful if it be well led, and mass sufficient to be worth conciliation. a people demoralized by eighteen years of But if the Southern States join Prussia, servitude, he opposes an army equally great, and find the junction not only endurable fully confident in its leaders, commanded by but pleasant, as Catholic Cologne, for exam- men whose victories help to cement the ple, has found, then indeed it will be hard monarchy, and supported by a people young to keep the Austrian States from their in spirit, drilled to perfection, and filled with natural position as members of the united, the hope of reaching a visibly attainable prosperous, and externally powerful German goal. We see no clear reason why Count Empire. Austria, too, really needs help to von Bismarck should falter, and yet if he preserve the independence of the States of does not falter he comes straight_athwart the Danube, which is becoming problemati- the Napoleonic basis of peace, a Germany cal, and she can hope to obtain it only from cleft in two by a contemptible river. He the West. may of course delay, may occupy these months in conciliating Hanover and those in reorganizing the South, may even think it better to wait a possible revolution in Paris which might spare him all anxiety, but sooner or later, if Napoleon remains upon the throne, and the Papacy does not regain its hold on Munich, the conflicting On the whole, we incline to the belief that the telegrams are in the main true; and if true, they bode no good to the permanent peace of the world. Two very considerable Empires, one admittedly strong, one perhaps stronger than it is for the moment believed to be, are united in the resolve to ideas must clash with a clang that will reverberate throughout the world. And, looking to the disturbance the armed peace creates, the necessities of Napoleon, and the difficulty of restraining national enthusiasm both in Germany and in France, we can by no means believe that the interval, the moment of hushed breath, will be protracted. It is not the interest of Napoleon to protract it beyond the spring, and he can at any moment inquire why Prussia, bound by the Treaty of Prague, is fortifying Mayence with iron plates. From the Athenæum. Taylor. (Low & Co.) MR. BAYAD TAYLOR, known as a poet and journalist of high rank, is perhaps still better known as an adventurous_traveller. In his salad days he traversed Europe on foot, and made the presence of his staff and knapsack familiar to thousands of readers. Since those early times he has described for us Egypt and Sicily, China and Palestine, Japan and Bulgaria. He has spent a couple of years among the wonders of California. He has tramped through Spain and a part of Africa. Blessed with good health and a powerful frame, he has dared the chills of Mont Blanc and the heats of the Dead Sea. Holding his pen with a light though a strong hand, he has made many places into pictures for those easy mortals who like to do their travelling in an arm-chair. But England? We do not like the part assigned to England in this drama at all. There is not, indeed, the slightest probability that Queen Victoria will visit Paris as a sort of Empress of Britain, with Mr. Disraeli for Vizier, prepared to sign alliances, and take part in arrangements for Colorado: a Summer Trip. By Bayard remodelling Europe. That is not her Majesty's role in life, and 'the telegram which assumes that position for her throws some discredit over the remainder. But it must not be forgotten that the existing Ministry is by long prepossession Austrian, that Mr. Disraeli believes it the duty of Great Britain to be servile to Napoleon, that both the aristocratic parties have expressed their resolution time and again not to consent to an united Germany, and that the interest of Great Britain in the East is, on the whole, identical with that of Austria. She wants to keep Russia out, and so do the Hapsburgs. It is more than possible that England, if not asked for too much, might join such an alliance, might accept the Treaty of Prague as a new basis for the public life of Europe, might consider the independence and greatness of Austria indispensable to the independence and security of the East. That such a view would be fatal to our true interests, which command us to welcome Germany as a counterpoise to France, to hold our Eastern position by our own strength and not by alliances, and to see in the possession of Egypt full compensation for the expulsion of the. Turks, is as little to the purpose as that it is our moral duty to support the nationalities. The Ministry are just as capable of miscalculating the chances of German consolidation as of American unity, quite as likely to believe Austria indispensable to Europe as to hold with Mr. Disraeli that the safety of England demands the independence of the Pope. It is hard to believe that the nation will, for the second time in six years, make the blunder of striving to prevent the growth of a nationality, but the Ministry may, and in foreign affairs a resolute Last year this accomplished traveller left his prim and Quaker-like village in Pennsylvania for a trip to the Rocky Mountains. The journey was meant, we believe, for the Salt Lake; but was, unhappily, cut short, by failure of health and strength, at the eastern slope of the Black Hills. Mr. Taylor crossed the Missouri two months earlier than the author of New America.' The land was then quiet; for the Cheyennes had not been roused into fury by what they considered as the breach of public faith. Fear of the redskins was not absent from the adventurous party; but the trouble seemed afar off, and the caution which the neighbourhood of an Indian camp occasioned was rather a poetical and picturesque excitement than a daily and nightly terror. No stimulant, perhaps, in the world is more exhilarating than a scalping-knife; and it need not be always moving close to the hair in order to produce a quickening effect on the brain. Mr. Taylor saw the redskins, as every traveller in the prairies must. He was not very pleasantly struck by them: "We met a number of Indians and squaws on horseback- one of the latter in a pink dress and wearing a round hat with upright feather, and her hair in a net. A little further, we came upon a mounted band of twenty or thirty, all drunk. My driver showed a little uneasiness, but they drew aside to let us pass, and a few hoots and howls were all the salutation we received." He felt the presence of Cheyennes, Arappahoes, and Kiowas around him, as he bumped and banged along in the prairie wagon, not unpleasantly, we think, since a little spice of adventure is absolutely necessary to good health and good spirits under the monotony of such a trip. Those who have travelled with Mr. Bayard Taylor already know with what care he reproduces the landscape over which he drives. In these pages the prairies are made to live. We see the long swell of the rising upland over which the buffaloes roam, the dry sandy ravines in which the rattlesnakes glide, the bunches of wild sage under which the wolf lurks and the prairie-hens cluck, the countless flecks of golden flowers, and the tender green of the sweet bunchgrass. We see in his pages the strong bullock-train, the emigrant's corral, the sunburned miner coming home from the mountains, the vicious party of road-agents. Here we meet the Jew pedler, the swarthy ranchman, the daring trapper, each in his big boots and his slouch hat, and with his revolver and bowie-knife handy in his strong leathern belt. Under his hearty description we come to love this virgin country and these rough squatters and teamsters. Just after leaving the Missouri River, Mr. Taylor notes a fact which has in it a grain of comfort: "Here I first witnessed a phenomenon of which I had often heard, the spontaneous production of forests from prairie land. Hundreds of acres, which the cultivated fields beyond had protected against the annual inundation of fire, were completely covered with young oak and hickory trees, from four to six feet in height. In twenty years more these thickets will be forests." We are not sure that the theory of these prairies having been universally stript of their forests by fire has been proved. Fires are frequent on the great plain, and anything like timber which stood in the way of a running prairie flame would certainly perish in its fierce embrace. But the absence of wood is too general to be satisfactorily explained on this hypothesis. High bluffs, broad rivers, stretches of sand would offer their resistance to a body of rolling flame. Fire could hardly cross the Kansas and the Arkansas rivers, even with the help of different winds. In many parts of the prairies, the land has not been ravaged by fire for many years. The low brushwood is often very old - the wild sage probably forty or fifty years in certain places; yet for hundreds of square leagues not a high tree dots the landscape, which is not the less covered with this wild brush. Still there are places in which the land has seemingly been stript by fire of its natural forests- a misfortune of the most tragic kind since, next to water, wood is the most necessary to man of all natural gifts; and we agree with Mr. Taylor in thinking that human care and culture will oppose very strong barriers to the further depredations of this terrible element. Further inland we have this prairie picture : "Our route, for some distance, lay over an elevated plateau, around which, for an hour or two, dark thunder-clouds collected. Out of one of these dropped a curtain of rain, gray in the edges. It slowly passed us on the north, split, centre, but of an intense indigo hue at the from one minute to another, by streaks of vivid rose-coloured lightning, followed by deafening detonating peals; when, just as we seemed to have escaped, it suddenly wheeled and burst upon us. It was like a white squall on a tropic sea. We had not lowered the canvas curtains of the coach before a dam gave way over our heads, and a torrent of mingled wind, rain, hail, and thunder overwhelmed us. The driver turned his mules as far as possible away from the wind, and stopped; the coach rocked and reeled as if about to overturn; the hail smote like volleys of musketry; and in less than fifteen minutes the whole plain lay four inches under water. I have never witnessed anything even approaching the violence of this storm; it was a marvel that the mules escaped with their lives. The bullets of hail were nearly as large around us like a succession of Bengal fires. We as pigeons' eggs, and the lightning played laid the rifles in the bottom of the coach, and for half an hour sat in silence, holding down the curtain, and expecting every moment to be overturned. Then the tornado suddenly took breath, commenced again twice or thrice, and ceased as unexpectedly as it came. For a short time the road was a swift stream, and the tufts of buffalo-grass rose out of an inundated plain; journey was not delayed, as we had cause to but the water soon found its level, and our fear. Presently Mr. Scott descries a huge rattlesnake, and we stop the coach and jump out. The rattles were too wet to give any sound, and 1 the snake endeavoured to escape. A German" out of fashion." His project was good, frontiers-man who was with us fired a revolver, but his manner of dealing with it was ponwhich stunned rather than wounded the reptile. derous. Even a German gelehrter would Then, poising a knife, he threw it with such a secure aim, that the snake's head was pinned to the earth. Cutting off the rattles, which I appropriated, we did him no further injury." Mr. Taylor made Denver, "City of the Plains," his head-quarters, from which he visited Central City, Golden City, and other mining villages. "I only wish," says Mr. Taylor, that the vulgar, snobbish custom of attaching 'city' to every place of more than three houses could be stopped. From Illinois to California it has become a general nuisance, telling only of swagger and want of taste, not of growth." Most readers will think of Bob Wilson in connexion with Denver. Mr. Taylor refers to an incident in Golden City:"The age of law and order has not yet arrived. The people pointed out to me a tree, to which some of them had hung a Mexican last week, on account of an attempted assault upon two ladies of the place. The criminal was taken from the sheriff's hands and lynched: and the few remaining Mexican residents, who appear to have had no fellowship with him, are ordered to leave the place. Affairs of this kind make an unpleasant impression." One would think so; at least until the stranger gets accustomed to it. The main interest of Mr. Taylor's volume lies in the practical character of the information which it contains. The traveller looks with a farmer's eye upon every landscape, and his thoughts are always running upon the pasture question. His production might be called a settler's handbook. From The Saturday Review. HALF-HOURS WITH THE BEST LETTERWRITERS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHERS.* SOME quarter of a century ago William Roberts, then or formerly editor of "My Grandmother's Review," and celebrated in Don Juan, printed a History of Letter Writing. Published it can hardly be said to have been, since his book expired almost at its birth. "There was some care and valour in this Welshman," but it was quite Half-Hours with the best Letter Writers and Autobiographers: forming a Collection of Memoirs and Anecdotes of Eminent Persons. By Charles Knight, Editor of "Half-Hours with the best Authors." London and New York: Routledge & Song. 1867. have sunk under the, toil of reading seven hundred pages no one of which was enlivened by any grace of language, or by any gift of insight into the characters of the Roberts, various writers of the letters. however, had the merit of broaching a very interesting subject. That he so utterly failed in rendering it attractive was perhaps owing to his grinding at the mill of the British Review, or to the extremely depressing nature of his theological opinions. With far better judgment, and far higher qualifications, Mr. Charles Knight has given us a very instructive account of the best Letter-writer and Autobiographers of Ponderous Roberts opens Great Britain. his work with the creation of letter-writing, and brings us down no nearer to present times than the fifth century of the Christian So utterly innocent is he of criticism as to treat of the correspondence in Homer's time! Mr. Charles Knight, with proper compassion for the shortness of buman life, starts eleven centuries later with Familiar Letthe Epistola Ho-Eliana, or ters of James Howell." quite satisfied with the principle on which him to give in his own words the description he has made his selection, it is only fair to of his purpose in making it: As we are not : The present work [he says] is not proposed by its compiler as a mere Sequel to the Half-hours with the best Authors, although it completes the plan of that popular series, as formed by its editor many years ago. Half-hours with the best Letter-Writers and Autobiographers aspires to be more than a selection of interesting and brief extracts, with introductory notices. Wherever it may be possible, Letters of one person, or of several correspondents, will be grouped together, so as to develop some connected story, or exhibit some leading sentiment or habitual thought. For the same reason, two Autobiographers or Letter-Writers will occasionally be treated as parallels. A large collection of Épistles, or a voluminous Autobiography or Diary, cannot be dealt with upon this principle. But separate portions may be held together by occasional illustrations, historical or critical, so as view, which will be comprised in a distinct to assume, in some measure, the form of a ReChapter. Following such Chapter will be frequently given an Interchapter of Detached Letters, having some connexion with the subjects which have immediately preceded them. We are ready to endorse the conclusion at which Gibbon arrived when tired of consulting friends about the manuscript of the first volumes of his Decline and Fall. "The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; no one has so deeply meditated on the subject, no one is so sincerely interested in the event." Similar latitude is due to a "compiler," as Mr. Knight modestly styles himself. His preface shows that he has well considered the form and contents of his present volume. Yet we admit feeling some surprise as to the space and rank assigned to several of the letterwriters, and occasionally at the letters he has preferred. Why is so subordinate a station assigned to one whom Southey, with the almost pardonable enthusiasm of a biographer, describes as one of the best of English letter-writers? Why is William Cowper relegated to Chapter XV.-"Autobiographic Sketches of Schools and School Days - and there treated in so cursory a manner as to imply distaste for him on the part of the collector? The religious opinions of the recluse of Olney may probably, and justly also, be distasteful to Mr. Charles Knight; they are so to many readers of Cowper's verse and prose. But in the large collection we have of Cowper's correspondence were there no samples worth select ing of his pure diction, of his good sense when unclouded by disease or theological gloom of his humour and, his descriptive powers? If ever there was a writer of letters who also was unintentionally and unconsciously his own biographer, it was Cowper. The "Lives" of him that have been written, beginning with Hayley's and ending with Southey's, are, two-thirds of them at least, compilations from his letters. Again, why is Gibbon "shunted" on to the autobiographical line? His " Memoirs are well known. It was scarcely necessary to mention them. Cui non dictus Hylas puer? But not so his letters. These, besides their value in containing much news of the day, are distinguished frequently by a sly humour and by a spontaneous ease that are not so apparent in his "Memoirs or in his History." Of Richard and Mary Steele we have too many letters in this collection. They, in our opinion, would have come with more propriety into a Half-hour with the best Note-Writers. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bas indeed, by just epistolary right, a chapter to herself; but who will suppose her to have been a sprightly or witty lady, if known only by Mr. Knight's samples of her letters? Of David Hume's correspondence with his friends or acquaintance there is only one sample given a parsimony the less easy to put up with because, although his account of Blacklocke, |