No. 773.-19 March, 1859.-Third Series, No. 51. POETRY.-Nancy Downing, 738. Lass of Watertown, 738. The River, 738. Autumn Reveries, 738. Cradle Song, 739. Twilight, 739. SHORT ARTICLES.-Death of Professor Bond, 737. Robert Walsh, 749. Change in Prayer-Book, 754. Paget vs. Macaulay, 756. Extraordinary Exhibition, 756. Photography, 768. BOOKS RECEIVED. THE MASSACHUSETTS REGISTER for the year 1859 containing a record of the Government and Institutions of the State, and a variety of useful information. Adams, Sampson, & Co., Boston. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & Co., Bofton; and DELISSER & PROCTER, 508 Broadway, New York. For Six Dollars a year, remitted directly to either of the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded free of postage. Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, hardsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 12 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. HENRY HALLAM. among the most important of literary undertakings. In the "Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries," we again have a work which is more than national, on whose stage nations are but dramatis personæ, which treats of the forms and the movements of thought in one of the grand divisions of the world. This, we think, may be taken as one great mental characteristic of Hallam. His mind ranges over the history of the world, marking its leading epochs, its prominent WE are told by those who have turned their attention to the subject, that the grand difference between the Scotch and the English intellect is, that the former is intense and fervid, the latter equable, harmonious, and calm. All our greatest Scotchmen, from Wallace to Chalmers, have been perfervid; the grandest intellects of England, taking their rank with the highest in human history, Shakspeare, Bacon, and Newton, have been surrounded with a majestic calm, like that which encircles Mont Blanc and his giant phenomena; and tracing their causes and concompeers. We shall neither affirm nor ques- nections; the field which his mental vision tion the general fact, but we can scarce avoid embraces is vast, and, from his serene height, remarking the prominent exhibition thereof, he notes not the flowers or the smiling little whether accidental or ethnological, which is cottages, but the ridges and valleys of the presented by our present historical literature. mountains, or the main currents of the ocean. This century has produced four historians His calmness is allied to this width of vision; who rise in manifest pre-eminence over all he rises out of the region of excitement, he others: two of them are Scotch, and two can view his own generation in relation to English; the former are Alison and Carlyle, other generations, and accord it simply its due the latter, Macaulay and Hallam. Alison, if place; speaking with the mighty of all ages, not distinctively intense, is eminently ani- he is not deafened by the clamorous and mated; he always glows with a warm, undis- vacant noises of the men around him. And guised fervor. Carlyle is the embodiment of so he walks majestically through the Hall of fiery intensity; his eye cannot look upon a the Past, never turning to laugh or jest, and subject without setting it on fire; he scorns smiling, if at all, only with a grave and shaded all logical apparatus, and cleaves his way right smile. The small graces of style he does not to the heart of his subject. Macaulay is in- court. He has none of that luxuriant though variably calm; with wide sympathies and vast rare adornment which spreads such a charm knowledge, he gazes over nature and history, over Macaulay's rhetorical pages: he is still and brings from all quarters the choicest farther removed from the poetic prose, whose flowers to deck his mildly-beautiful page. every sentence seems intended to have a Hallam is distinguished by a calmness, which point, and where one is reminded painfully of is his characteristic quality, and which amazes, a rose-bush where every green leaf has been from the vastness of the stores of learning taken away, and there is left only a blaze of over which it presides, and the colossal mag- flowers; his style is massive, stately, and clear, nitude of the tasks in which it leads him to with an occasional metaphor, to give edge to delight. There is something immense about a sentence, but in no sense ornate. each of his works-something, so to speak, continental. His first was the "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages;" it is one of which the various departments comprise severally the general history of a nation—which treats of vast classes of events in their influence upon the destinies of humanity, which it is an effort to present clearly and at one view to the mind. His "Constitutional History of England" is certainly not of such gigantic dimensions as that which embraced all Europe, yet, from the difficulty of the subject, the endless lore required for its treatment, and the collateral questions it involves, it does also take its rank We do not read Hallam, as we read Macaulay, for the fascination of the style; but, when we come to Hallam as to a sage, for instruction which cannot be had elsewhere, we are not deterred by any frigid baldness in the form of its delivery. There are certainly few, if any, of the writers of the day from whose works more benefit is to be obtained; the grasp of mind demanded in order fully to comprehend his vast subjects in all their bearings, the philosophic truth and depths of many of his observations, his stately impartiality and fearless avowal of what he deems truth, and the pure and dignified style in which he composes, all unite to render the works of |