with it, he always pronounced it partridges. A friend of the writer observed to her, that it could hardly be considered as a mere piece of negligence, for it appeared to him that the boy, in calling them partridges, was making game of the patriarchs. Now, here are two distinct meanings contained in the same phrase: for to make game of the patriarchs is to laugh at them; or to make game of them is, by a very extravagant and laughable sort of ignorance of words, to rank them among pheasants, partridges, and other such delicacies, which the law takes under its protection and calls game; and the whole pleasure derived from this pun consists in the discovery that two such meanings are referable to one form of expression." Mr. Cunningham tells several amusing anec dotes in his "Handbook of Modern London." One is of Dr. South, whose habit of punning in the pulpit is well known. When appointed chaplain to the Merchant Tailors' Company, he took for the text of his inauguration sermon the words, "A remnant of all shall be saved." In a Bible printed at Stationer's Hall, in the year 1632, and still shown there, the important omission of the word not in the seventh commandment, which is printed, "Thou shalt commit adultery," brought down Laud's anger on the Company, and the infliction of a heavy fine for the immorality of the precept. A less serious mistake is thus narrated: "The City was commonly called Cockaigne. The name Cockney-a spoilt or effeminate boy-one cockered and spoilt-is generally applied to people born within the sound of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow. When a female Cockney was informed that barley did not grow, but that it was spun by housewives in the country, 'I knew as much,' said the Cockney, 'for one may see the threads hanging out of the ends thereof.'"' - Fenelon's Telemachus, which has long since been translated into all the European languages, but which had never been rendered into any Eastern tongue, is just being published in Hebrew, in Posen, (Prussian Poland.) This edition is especially intended for the Jews of Russia, and the publisher, M. Samniter, has obtained permission from Nicholas to import into his dominions as many copies as he can sell, free of all duty. - The Library of the Paris Observatory has just received a valuable addition to its scientific catalogue. When Lalande, the French astronomer, died in 1807, he left a vast number of manuscripts to be divided among his numerous heirs. One of his descendants, an officer in the army, has been for a long time engaged in attempting to get these manuscripts together again. In this attempt he has at last succeeded, and has made a present of the whole, forming thirty-six volumes, to M. Arago. The latter, fearing that they might again become separated, has, in his turn, caused them to be deposited at the Observatory. Miss Martineau's opinion of Dr. Paley is thus expressed in her new history::-"One of the Cambridge men who opposed Horne Tooke's having his degree in 1771, was Paley, then a tutor in the University. Paley died first, in 1805, having distinguished himself in a very different line. He was too clear and strong an advocate of the principles of liberty and the rights of conscience to have any chance, in those days of high preferment; and he rose no higher in the Church than the sub deanery of Lincoln. He was a clear headed man, who could say at will exactly what he thought; and that talent, at a time when the solemn pomposity of Johnson's imitators began to be wearisome, obtained for Paley a reputation as a thinker, which the lapse of half a century has shown to be very far beyond his deserts. He was clear, but not deep; strong, but not comprehensive; orderly, but not elevated. The subjects he attempted-as in his Moral and Political Philosophy, his Evidences of Christianity, and his Natural Theology. -were too deep and too high for his order of intellect; and though the charms of his manner and the clearness of his method secured a long term of popularity for these works, the higher and larger thought of men since born has made us wonder at the acceptance so long given to Paley's inadequate definitions, loose reasonings, and low moral propositions. Utility and expediency are his universal solvent; and the method of their application in the philosophy and practice of morals, politics, society, and ecclesiastical matters, seems as uncertain as the principle is loose and questionable. They accord but too well with his own celebrated saying, in regard to the profession of religious belief -that he "could not afford to keep a conscience." Dr. Paley died, as has been said, very early in the century; but his works exercised till lately so strong an influence over the minds of statesmen, divines, and educators, that he may be considered as belonging to our own time, as well as to the preceding half century." TANCRED. The engraving accompanying this number is from a subject contained in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered-one of the heroes of which epic Tancred was a Sicilian, and embarked with his is Tancred, the companion of Godfrey of Bouillon. friend, Bohemond, on the great crusade in 1096, ing. He joined Godfrey on the plains of Chalcedon, and soon became conspicuous for his valor and darwhere was formed the celebrated compact of which Tasso speaks. At the great siege of Nice, Tancred was the soul of the engagement; and in a subsequent battle at Dorylæum, his intrepidity saved the army of the crusaders when surrounded by 200,000 Seljooks. Tancred also led the way in the long and perilous march to Jerusalem, more than a thousand miles. On reaching the Holy City, he captured an advanced work, which still bears the name of Tancred's Tower. His career in Palestine was one of splendid and incessant triumph. He was created Prince of Galilee, and exhibited both in his administrative career and his military enterprise, the gal lant, disinterested, noble conduct which has made his character the favorite of poet and painter alike, and his name the highest ideal of chivalry. Tasso's glowing verse has immortalized him, as the peculiar glory of the crusades, and the model Christian hero. WE propose in this article to enter on no | proper discussion of American literature, but merely to present such an array of carefully ascertained and interesting facts, with brief and hastily written but deliberately formed opinions, as will guide the intelligent reader to a just estimate of the general intellectual activity in the United States; reserving for a separate article an account of the books that have recently issued from the American press. We have been over the field with some care, having in the last few months examined with more or less attention a larger number of American books, in the various 1 "The Prose Writers of America. With a Survey of the Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the Country." By Rufus Willmot Griswold. vol. 8vo, pp. 552. Fourth edition. London: Richard Bentley, 1849. "The Poets and Poetry of America, to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century.' By Rufus Willmot Griswold. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 550. Eleventh edition. Philadelphia: A. Platt, 1851. "The Female Poets of America." By Rufus Willmot Griswold. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. 400. Second edition. Philadelphia: H. C. Baird, 1850. "De la Littérature et des Hommes de Lettres des Etats-Unis d'Amerique." Par Eugène A. Vail, auteur de la Notice sur les Indiens de l'Amerique du Nord. Svo, pp. 617. Paris, 1841. VOL. XXV. NO. III. departments of literature, than a majority of our readers will be apt to believe were ever written. The library of the British Museum contains an immense number of American Histories, Biographies, Reviews, &c., and is by no means deficient in what with more propriety may be called American Literature, though the privilege that we enjoy, while occupied with these pages, of consulting a library in which there are thirteen thousand works composed in the United States, leaves on our mind an impression that Mr. Panizzi might, with some advantage to British students, suggest the bestowal of a few hundred guineas more on the speculation, the poetry, romance, and aesthetical dissertation of the cultivators of their language across the At lantic. We cannot but think, despite the contrary judgment of some wise persons who have debated this point, that the distinct history of the American mind should be commenced, far back, in the times of the first Puritans in New England. There is a national character in America; it is seen, very decided and strongly marked, in the free northern States; and making every proper allowance for the Dutch element and its influence in New York, 19 ence altogether more powerful than it has had in England; and soon after was commenced the propagation of the Franco-German phitions, and the composition of original works, which, in number and character, now constitute a philosophical literature, many-sided indeed, but abounding in able and ingenious dissertations on the chief points which have interest in the modern schools. that national character was born in England, cast out from thence because it was not agreeable to a majority of the people, and has remained until now, unchanged in its essen-losophy, in translations of its leading expositials, where it first found a home, in the area of civilization ever widening from the British settlements on this continent. The history of American literature begins in the good old days of the Dudleys, the Cottons, Nortons, and Mathers, or earlier still, in those of JOHN MILTON, who has been claimed as the "most American author that ever lived." And with justice. For what had that stern and sublime intelligence in common with kingly domination, or hierarchical despotism, against both of which he made "all Europe ring from side to side"? And are not his immortal books on State and Church polities the very fixed and undecaying expression of the American ideas on these subjects? Philosophers. Before the commencement of this century, America had but one great man in philosophy; but that one was illustrious. From the days of Plato there has been no life of more simple and imposing grandeur than that of Jonathan Edwards, who, while living as a missionary at Northampton, then on the confines of civilization, set up his propositions, which have remained as if they were mountains of solid crystal in the centre of the world. We need not repeat the praises of Edwards, by Robert Hall, Mackintosh, Stewart, Chalmers, and the other great thinkers of Britain and of the Continent, who have admitted the amazing subtlety and force of his understanding. In America, his doctrines were constantly discussed among theologians, but until the present generation he had scarcely a disciple or an antagonist deserving of much consideration. Of writers now living who have treated with most ability and earnestness his Doctrine of the Will, we may mention Dr. Day, late President of Yale College, Professor Tappan of New York, Professor Upham of Maine, and Professor Bledsoe of Louisiana; but there are many others who have written with acuteness against the great necessitarian, or in his defence. The text-books of the old country-the works of the Scotch metaphysicians, or those of Locke, were used commonly in the schools, and for fifty years there was scarcely a pretence of originality or independence; but in 1829, the late James Marsh, then President of the University of Vermont, republished, with a masterly Preliminary Essay, the Aids to Reflection, by Coleridge, which was destined in the United States to have an influ We have space only for a sort of catalogue raisonne of a few of the most conspicuous living writers in this department. Professor Upham, of Bowdoin College, is known to the religious world by "Memoirs of Madame Guyon," and other works illustrating a belief in Christian perfection, and as the translator of "Jahn's Biblical Antiquities." His metaphysical productions consist of a "Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will;" "Elements of Mental Philosophy, embracing the two Departments of the Intellect and the Sensibilities;" the same work abridged; and "Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action." These works have passed through many editions, and are very largely used as text-books. They are, in the main, eclectic and Anglo-Scottish, but have some original and striking views, particularly in regard to the sensibilities, in his chapters concerning which he discusses very amply and clearly the distinctions between the intellectual and sensitive parts of our nature. Professor C. S. Henry, D.D., of the University of New York, an accomplished scholar, whose first considerable work was a "Compendium of Christian Antiquities," is best known by an "Epitome of the History of Philosophy, from the French, with additions, and a translation, with commentaries, of "Cousin's Elements of Psychology." In all his writings he agrees with Cousin. Henry P. Tappan, D.D., is the author of an admirable" System of Logic," to which is prefixed an "Introductory View of Philosophy in General, and a Preliminary View of the Reason;" the most able and satisfactory reply that has ever appeared to the doctrines of "Edwards on the Will;" a volume on "University Education," and many important papers in the reviews. S. S. Schmucker, D.D., Professor of Theology at Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, is a voluminous writer in metaphysics and theology, and is noticed here chiefly for his "Psychology, or Elements of a new System of Mental Philosophy on the Basis of Consciousness and Common Sense." What is "new" in this I work is rather in classification and terminol |