Lectures to Young Men. By William G. Eliot, jr., Pastor of the Church of the Messiah, St. Lewis. Crosby, Nichols & Co., Boston.- Self-Education; Leisure Time; Transgression; The Ways of Wis dom; Religion.

Why I am a Temperance Man; with Tales and Sketches from Real Life. By Thurlow W. Brown. Derby & Miller, Auburn, N. Y. With a number of Engravings.

Light on the Dark River; or, Memorials of Mrs. Henrietta A. L. Hamlin, Missionary in Turkey. By Margarette Woods Lawrence. Ticknor, Reed & Fields, Boston. With a Portrait.

THE ENGLISH CLIMATE.--The English climate, | Eliot, jr., Pastor of the Church of the Messiah, and especially the London fogs, have a powerful St. Lewis. Crosby, Nichols & Co., Boston. influence on the moral faculties of the natives, Home; Duties; Education; Follies; Woman's and even strangers cannot escape that influence. Mission. Nothing can better explain the two leading features of the English character-their silent sadness and energy. Under their skies you feel that by degrees you lose the two faculties that are dearest to man— -the faculty of thinking and the faculty of enjoying. All the springs of intelligence are relaxed: you are serious without reflection; you are gradually drawn into and tossed about in an ocean of horror and slow despair; the mind becomes unmindful of itself, and you feel it vanish and dissolve into thin air; you are thoughtful without thinking; you dream yourself into a void; from the depths of your mind ascend vapors which have no shape-desires void of Polyhymnia; a Collection of Original Hymn coloring murmurs which have no meaning, Tunes, Anthems, Chants, &c. Also, a New Methlike the silent voices of night the voices of still-od in the Art of Singing. Composed by Charles ness, caused by the absence of movement and F. Heuberer. B. B. Mussey & Co., Boston. light; in fine, you welter in nothing. At this juncture, you are saved by a manly and energetic reaction the mind becomes alive to the dangers of its situation, and protests against them; it goes, so to say, out of itself, and sallies forth in search of the outer world, which it handles and analyzes to make quite sure of its existence. After which, it takes greedily hold of that outer world, and from the profoundest repose and the most hopeless apathy, the mind leaps at once into the crudest reality. An almost frenzied activity is alone capable of reacting against the sullen torpor which is created by this climate. Hence the practical, matter-of-fact turn of the English. Under their sky, a man must either work, or die, or emigrate, if poor; or travel, if rich. - Paris Moniteur.

NEW BOOKS.

A Church Dictionary. By Walter Farquhar Hook, D. D., Vicar of Leeds. Sixth Edition. Revised and adapted to the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. By a Presbyter of said Church. E. H. Butler & Co., Philadelphia. [This handsome octavo will be found very useful, as a book of reference, by persons whose opinions differ ever so much from those of Dr. Hook. The subjects are alphabetically arranged, as in an Encyclopedia.]

Discussions on Philosophy and Literature. Chiefly from the Edinburgh Review. By Sir William Hamilton, Bart. Harper & Brothers, N. York. Here are sixteen elaborate articles from the Reviews with appendices Philosophical, Logical, Educational. The author is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh.

On Civil Liberty and Self-Government. By Francis Lieber, LL. D. Lippincott, Grambo & Co., Philadelphia. Two handsome duodecimo volumes, containing discussions of important political and philosophical subjects.

The Conflict of Ages; or, The Great Debate on the Moral Relations of God and Man. By Edward Beecher, D. D. Phillips, Sampson & Co., Boston. [This work is likely to attract much attention. We see notices of it occasionally, but hope to find some which we can reprint for the information of our readers.]

A Memoir of the Life and Labors of the Rev. Adoniram Judson, D. D. By Francis Wayland, President of Brown University. Phillips, Sampson & Co., Boston. In two Volumes. [Dr. Judson's Life and Labors have so long been familiar to the Christian Church, that no doubt many thousands of this memoir will be established in our libraries.]

Hearts and Faces; or, Home Life Unveiled. Phillips, Sampson & Co., Boston.

Minnie Brown, or the Gentle Girl. By Frank Forrester. Geo. C. Rand, Boston. Another volume of Uncle Toby's Library.

God with Men; or, Footprints of Providential Leaders. By Samuel Osgood. Crosby, Nichols & Co., Boston.-1. Abraham and the Ellen Montgomery's Bookcase. This is the Empire of Faith. 2. Moses and the Law. 3. general title, under which it seems that "the Aaron and the Priesthood. 4. Saul and the Authors of The Wide, Wide World; Queechy; Throne. 5. David and the Psalms. 6. Solomon Dollars and Cents, &c., &c.". -are about to issue and the Hebrew Wisdom. 7. Isaiah and the Proph- a series of small volumes. This, the first, is enets. 8. John the Baptist and the Precursors titled Mr. Rutherford's Children, and is pubof the Messiah. 9. The Messiah in his Prepara- lished by G. P. Putnam & Co., New York. tion and Plan. 10. In his Ministry. 11. Peter and the Keys. 12. Paul and Gospel Liberty. 13. John and the Word. 14. The Disciples and the Unseen Witness. 15. Theologians and the World to Come.

Lectures to Young Women. By William G.

Western Characters; or, Types of Border Life in the Western States. By J. L. M'Connell. With Illustrations by Darley. Redfield, New York. - The Indian; Voyageur; Pioneer; Ranger; Regulator; Justice of the Peace; Pedler; Schoolmaster; Schoolmistress; Politician.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 497.-26 NOVEMBER, 1853.

POETRY: Hosmer's Poems, 513; Starlight in the Garden On a Village Church, 514; The Voice of Autumn, 573; Old Man Eloquent, 576.

SHORT ARTICLES: Talleyrand, 534; Marie Antoinette - The Isle of Islay - The Selby Estate, 539; The Bible in Separate Volumes, 544; Forget-me-not, 573.

NEW BOOKS: Old House by the River, 558; Praed's Poems, 566.

Well art thou named-for did not he
Derive his force and fire from thee,

Whose legions tamed the world?
Flamed in his glance thy levin red,
Timed by thy thunder was his tread
With Rome's old flag unfurled.

From Household Words.

STARLIGHT IN THE GARDEN.

THE Garden (by its ivied walls inclosed)
Beneath the witching of the night remains
All tranced and breathless; and, in dreams

reposed,

In love towards your distant orbs; and we Have quivered at your touch, and sighed to burn

Our lives away in a long dream of ye.
O, let us die into your light.
-as hues
Of sunset lapse, and faint, and interfuse !

"Out of the mystery of the formless night

We woke, and trembled into life's strange
dawn,

And felt the air, and laughed against the light;
And soon our fragile souls will be withdrawn
Like sighs into the wide air's emptiness:

The white-walled house, with blinded window-Yet sometimes of new life we dream and guess.

panes,

Glimmers from far like one vast pearl between
The clustering of its dark and shadowy green.
A night in June; and yet 't is scarcely night,
But rather a faint dusk. -a languid day,
Sleeping in heaven- the interfluent light

Of Even and Morning, met upon one way;
And, all about the watchful sky, a bloom
Of silver star-flowers fills the soft blue gloom.

Silence and odorous dimness, like a ghost,
Possess this ancient garden utterly:
The grass-plots smile beneath the starry host;
The trees look conscious of the conscious sky;
The flowers, insphered in sleep, and dew, and
balm,

Seem holding at their hearts an infinite calm.

The path-ways winding underneath the trees,
The moon-white fountains that aye stir and talk,
The ivy's dark and murmuring mysteries,
And all the pale and quiet statues, seem
Half shrouded in some bright and filmy dream.

There is a soul to-night in everything

Within this garden, old, and green, and still;
The Spirit of the Stars, with noiseless wing,

Glides round about it—and his ardors fill
All things with life; but most of all the flowers,
Close shut, like maidens in enchanted towers.
The sweet breath of the flowers ascends the air,
And perfumes all the starry palace-gates,
Climbing the vaulted heavens like a prayer;

The quickly answering star-light penetrates
Between the close lids of the flowers, and parts
Its way, and thrills against their golden hearts.
"O, bright sky-people!" say the flowers, "we

know

That we must pass and vanish like a breath Whenever the sharp winds shall bid us go;

And that your being hath no shade of death, But floats upon the azure stream of years, Lucid and smooth, where never end appears.

Is but a shade that briefly fluttereth,

God-thrown upon the luminous universe, To dusk the too great splendor. Therefore, flowers,

Your souls shall incense all the endless hours.

"Within the light of our unsetting day

Your withered blooms shall waken, and expand
More fair than now when set in earthly clay,

Fast ripening to the grave in which ye stand.
The tender ghosts of hues and odors dead
Are as the ground on which our nations tread.”
At this, the flowers, as if in pleasure, stirred,

And a new joy was born within the night:
The wind breathed low its one primeval word,
And Heaven, and Earth, and all things, seemed
Like some most ancient secret on its flight;

to kiss,

Love-lost in many mingling sympathies.

ON A VILLAGE CHURCH IN ENGLAND.
THE air is sweet with violets, and the West
Robes in its evening splendor earth and sky.
Whoe'er thou art, here find repose. This spot,
In rustic beauty clad, woos thee to rest.
The tongue of Time calls from the gray old tower,
And every leaf is whispering Calm and Peace.

Dear, welcome shrine! haunt of the good, fare-
well!

Oft in my distant home, at twilight hour,
Alone and still, shall I recall this scene-
The ivied porch, the steeple touched with light,
The hedgerows green, oaks that the centuries
crown,

The kindly voices Friendship newly gave,
The chime of waters musical and low,
And songs of birds careering up to heaven.
J. T. FIELDS.

}

From the Quarterly Review. Vita S. Thoma Cantuariensis. Ed. Giles. London.

The labor of Dr. Giles has collected no less

course of events for generations to come, and exercised an influence which is not exhausted yet, it would still deserve to be minutely EVERY one is familiar with the reversal of described from its connection with the statepopular judgments respecting individuals or liest of English cathedrals, and with the first events of our own time. It would be an easy great poem of the English language. though perhaps an invidious task, to point than nineteen biographies, or fragments of out the changes from obloquy to applause, and from applause to obloquy, which the present biographies, all of which appear to have been generation has witnessed; and it would be written within fifty years of the murder, and Instructive to examine in each case, how far some of which are confined to that single these changes have been justified by the facts. subject. To these we must add the accounts What thoughtful observers may thus notice in of the contemporary or nearly contemporary the passing opinions of the day, it is the chroniclers-Gervase, Diceto, Hoveden, and privilege of history to track through the although somewhat later, Brompton; and, course of centuries. Of such vicissitudes in what is the most important, because the the judgment of successive ages, one of the earliest the French biography in verse by most striking is to be found in the conflicting Guernes, or Garnier, of Pont S. Maxence, feelings with which different epochs have rewhich was composed only five years after the rarded the contest of Becket with Henry II. event. Dr. Giles has promised a supplement During its continuance, the public opinion of to his valuable work, containing this curious England and of Europe was, if not unfavor- relic- the more interesting from being the able to the Archbishop, at least strongly in the language in which they spoke. We wish sole record which gives the words of the actors divided. After its tragical close, the change Dr. Giles good speed in his undertaking, and from indifference or hostility to unbounded veneration was instantaneous and universal. meanwhile avail ourselves of the concluding This veneration, after a duration of more than fragment of the poem which has been pubthree centuries, was superseded, at least in lished by the great scholar Immanuel Bekker in the Berlin Transactions. England, by a contempt as general and profound as had been the previous admiration. And now, after three centuries more, the revolution of the wheel of fortune has again brought up, both at home and abroad, worshippers of the memory of St. Thomas of nesses. Three others- William of CanterCanterbury, who rival the most undoubting devotee that ever knelt at his shrine in the bury, Benedict, afterward abbot of Petercredulous reigns of the Plantagenet kings. It borough, and Gervase of Canterbury — were is not our intention to attempt the adjustment monks of the convent, and, though not present of these various verdicts, and indeed there at the massacre, were probably somewhere in appears less need of an arbitrator than there the precincts. Herbert of Bosham, Roger of might have been some years since. Indica- Pontigny, and Garnier, were not even in Engtions are not wanting, that the pendulum land, but they had been on terms of interwhich has been so violently swung to and fro, course more or less intimate with Becket, and is at last about to settle into its proper place; and we may trust that on this, as on many other controverted historical points, a judgment will be pronounced in our own times, which, if not irreversible, is less likely to be reversed than those which have gone before. But it may contribute to the decision upon the merits and defects of Becket if we endeavor to present a more complete picture than has hitherto been drawn of that passage of his career which has left by far the most indelible impression—its terrible close. Even though the famous catastrophe had not turned the

One author, the Rev. J. C. Robertson, of Bokesbourne, may be especially selected as having already taken, in two articles in the English Review of 1846, an impartial survey of the whole struggle, in which he will no doubt be imitated by Dr. Pauli, already known as the learned biographer of Alfred, in his continuation of Lappenberg's History of England.

Of these twenty-four narrators, four-Edward Grim, William Fitzstephen, John of Salisbury (who unfortunately supplies but little), and the anonymous author of the Lambeth MS.- claim to have been eye-wit

the utmost pains to ascertain the truth of the the two latter, especially, seem to have taken facts they relate. From these several accounts we can recover the particulars of the death of Archbishop Becket to the minutest details. It is true that, being written by

monastic or clerical historians after the national feeling had been roused to enthusiasm in his behalf, allowance must be made for exaggeration, suppression, and every kind of false coloring which could set off their hero to advantage. It is true, also, that on some few points the various authorities are hopelessly irreconcilable. But still a careful comparison of the narrators with each other, and with the localities, leads to a conviction that on the whole the facts have been substantially preserved, and that, as often happens, the truth can be ascertained in spite, and even in consequence, of attempts to distort and suppress it. If this be so, few occurrences in the

middle ages have been so graphically and copiously described, and few give such an insight into the manners and customs, the thoughts and feelings, not only of the man himself, but of the entire age, as the eventful tragedy, known successively as the "martyrdom, "the"accidental death," the "righteous execution," and the "murder" of Thomas à Becket.

the

The

auxiliary, in the person of Randulf de Broc, a
knight to whom the king had granted posses-
sion of the archiepiscopal castle of Saltwood,
and who was for this, if for no other reason, a
sworn enemy to Becket and his return.
first object of the archbishop was to conciliate
the young king, who was then at Woodstock,
and his mode of courting him was character-
istic. Three magnificent chargers, of which
his previous experience of horses enabled him
to know the merits, were the gift by which
he hoped to win over the mind of his former
pupil; and he himself, after a week's stay at
Canterbury, followed the messenger who was
to announce his present to the prince. He
passed through Rochester in state, entered
London in a vast procession that advanced
three miles out of the city to meet him, and
took up his quarters at Southwark, in the
palace of the aged Bishop of Winchester,
Henry of Blois, brother of King Stephen.
Here he received orders from the young king
to proceed no further, but return instantly to
Canterbury. In obedience to the command
he relinquished his design, and turned for
the last time from the city of his birth to the
city of his death.

The year 1170 witnessed the termination of the struggle of ten years between the King and the Archbishop; in July, the first reconciliation had been effected with Henry in France; in the beginning of December Becket had landed at Sandwich the port of the monks of Canterbury-and thence entered the metropolitan city, after an absence of six years, amidst the acclamations of the people. The cathedral was hung with silken drapery; magnificent banquets were prepared; the churches resounded with organs and hymns; the palace-hall with trumpets; and the archbishop preached in the chapter-house on the text, Here we have no abiding city, but we seek one to come." b Great difficulties, how ever, still remained. In addition to the general question of the immunities of the clergy from secular jurisdiction, which was The first open manifestations of hostility original point in dispute between the king proceeded from the family of the Brocs of and the archbishop, another had arisen with- Saltwood. Before he had left the neighborin this very year, of much less importance in hood of London, tidings had reached him that itself, but which eventually brought about the Randulf de Broc had seized a vessel laden final catastrophe. In the preceding June with wine from Henry II., and had killed Henry, with the view of consolidating his or imprisoned the crew. This injury was power in England, had caused his eldest son promptly repaired at the bidding of the young to be crowned king, not merely as his succes- king, to whom the archbishop complained of sor, but as his colleague; insomuch that by the outrage through the abbot of St. Alban's contemporary chroniclers he is always called and the prior of Dover. But the enmity of "the young king," sometimes even "Henry the Brocs was not so easily allayed. No III." In the absence of the Archbishop of sooner had the primate reached Canterbury Canterbury the ceremony of coronation was than he was met by a series of fresh insults. performed by the Archbishop of York, assisted Randulf, he was told, was hunting down his by the Bishops of London and Salisbury. The archiepiscopal deer, with his own dogs in his moment the intelligence was communicated to own woods; and Robert, another of the same Becket, who was then in France, a new blow family, who had been a monk in the novitiate, seemed to be struck at his rights; but this but had since taken to a secular life, sent out time it was not the privileges of his order, his nephew John to waylay and cut off the but of his office, that were attacked. The in- tails of a sumpter male and a horse of the alienable right of crowning the sovereigns of archbishop. This jest, or outrage (according England, inherent in the see of Canterbury as we regard it), which occurred on Christmasfrom the time of Augustine downwards, had eve, took deep possession of Becket's mind. been infringed, and with his usual ardor he On Christmas-day, after the solemn celebraprocured from the Pope, Alexander III., let- tion of the usual midnight mass, he entered the ters of excommunication against the three cathedral for the services of a festival which prelates who had taken part in the daring act. eminently precludes the intrusion of passionate These letters he had with him, unknown to and revengeful thoughts. Before the perthe king at the time of the reconciliation, and formance of high mass he mounted the pulpit, his earliest thought on landing in England and preached on the text (according to the was to get them conveyed to the offending Vulgate version) "On earth, peace to men of bishops, who were then at Dover. They good will." He began by speaking of the started for France from that port as he landed sainted fathers of the church of Canterbury, at Sandwich, leaving however a powerful

Fitzstephen, Ed. Giles, vol. i., p. 283.

• Fitzstephen, 284, 285
• Ibid., 287.

d Ibid., 286.