THE AMERICAN QUARTERLY 203 CHURCH REVIEW REV. PROF. JOHN M. LEAVITT, A. M. EDITOR AND PROPRIETOR. VOL. XX. NEW YORK: No. 37 Bible House, Astor Place. LONDON: RIVINGTONS, WATERLOO PLACE. 1869. PUBLIC LIDM........ The Huguenots; The Hermitage, and other Poems; The Guardian Angel; Visions of Paradise; Joseph II. and his Court; Nathan the Wise; Queens of American So- Norwood; The Great Exhibition; Autobiography of Elder Jacob Knapp; A French Country Family; The Massacre of St. Bartholomew; A Commentary on the Holy Israel, K rummacher; The Catholic World; Comedy of Convocation; Legend of St. A June Idyl, James Russell Lowell; Siena, Algernon Charles Swinburne; Lucretius, The Earthly Paradise, William Morris; The Spanish Gypsy, George Eliot: Notes on the Book of Psalms, Albert Barnes; First Principles of Education, S. S. Randall; The Scientific Basis of Education, John Hecker; Manual of Mythology, George A. Cox; Prose Works, Bulwer; Cape Cod, Charles Nordhoff; The Opium Habit; The Christian Doctrine of Sin, Julius Müller; Biblical Commentary, Keil and Delitzsch; The Invasion of the Crimea, A. W. Kinglake; Lake George, B. F. Da Costa; Life Below; Mental Science, Alexander Bain; History of the American Civil War, J. W. Draper; Hebrew Grammer, S. Deutsch; Smith's New Testament History; Smith's Biblical Dictionary; Harper's Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion; Life in the Argentine Republic, Sarmiento; Revision of the Prayer Book; A Psyche of To-day; The Periodic Law; Comedy of Canonization; Ecclesiastical Law in New York, Murray Hoffman; The Annunciation; Frank Stirling's Choice; Interleaved Family Prayers, W. H. Lewis; Catholic Reform Movement in Italy; Is the Pope of Rome the Great Antichrist, Bishop Hopkins; Silliman's Journal of Science and Arts; Reviews; Law- fulness of Marriage with the Sister of a deceased Wife; Common Prayer, with Ritual Song: Morgan's Discourses; Practical Wisdom in Planting a Church, Bishop Coxe; THERE is one race that we admire,-a race that sprang up in the midst of barbarism-themselves barbarians but for one power and gift, and that put them at the head of the whole world; and their one gift was organizing and administrative genius. We mean the ancient Romans. For mere intellectual qualities, they were nothing. Their poetry is imitation. Virgil, who did his best, is but a master of smooth writing; his Epie is no Epic; it has no movement, or living energy of action; it has no living characters. It was written, because Homer was the great post of the Greeks, and wrote an Epic. Therefore Virgil, having all the literary facilities of Rome, the capital of the world, and being what we should call the Poet-Laureate, wrote an Epic too, against the grain, invitâ Minervâ. Take again the Roman Drama, and here we have the stilted sentimentality of Seneca, his Latin Tragedies-which no mortal reads except he is writing a Latin dictionary-against the three Tragedians of Athens, unmatched and unmatchable, since the world began and until it ends, in all that the Tragic Muse requires of terror and pity,- and shining, glowing and glittering, each one of them, in the polished splendor of a most glorious and harmonious diction; each of them like a marble palace, |
