might suffice for the empire State of New York. The salaries were once very liberal; but now that the Province has the honor of appointing the incumbents of office, and the burden of supporting them, they have been reduced to the lowest point which is compatible with a faithful and intelligent performance of the duties. Thus the field which is open for ambitious talent is very limited, and the highest honors which are attainable seem hardly worthy of an effort. Really able men feel their circumscribed position, and peevishly foster the spirit of discontent and complaint, though there is actually no grievance to be redressed. How can they be quiet? If they were in England, parliamentary honors would be attainable; if in this country, the post of president of the republic would be a prize to dream about, if not an object within their grasp. Even those whose abilities could not raise them out of the common herd under any circumstances are at liberty to fancy that the sole obstacle to their gaining distinction is their provincialism. Thus the discontent which is created is great, out of all proportion to the cause in which it originates.

Along the Miramichi River, Mr. Johnston found large tracts of country whose bleak and desolate appearance is a memorial of the terrible conflagration of the woods which happened there a quarter of a century ago. He met with one person in whose mind the horrors of the scene were still fresh, and who gave him a vivid account of this disaster.

"It was an excessively hot summer, and fires were burning in numerous places upon the Miramichi and St. John Rivers and their tributaries; and the air was everywhere hot, and obscured with smoke. But on the 7th of October, it began to blow from the southwest, and the fire to spread over the country in the same direction. The wind increased gradually to a hurricane, and the fire advanced with proportionate rapidity. At one o'clock in the afternoon, it was still seventy miles up the river; and in the evening, it was at Douglastown. It travelled eighty-five miles in nine hours, so that scarcely on a fleet horse could a man have escaped from it. Lumberers already in the woods were caught, and solitary settlers with their families; and while all their property was destroyed, some saved their lives by rolling themselves in the rivers, till the scorching blast had passed over them. Instances of miraculous escape he told us - of parental devotion, and of selfish desertion; but the most striking things he mentioned were, that the flame, as it advanced, was twenty-five miles

in breadth; that, coming from the west, it rushed past the towns of Newcastle and Douglastown, leaving a green margin of some miles in breadth between its southern edge and the river; and that when, in its easterly course, it reached Burnt-church River, the wind lulled, turned round, and drove the fire up the river again. It then came back along the green fringe it had left as it descended, and by the way licked up the towns of Douglastown and Newcastle - of their 254 houses leaving only 14. It was doubtless the rushing of the sea-wind from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, into the huge fiery vortex, that drove back the flame when it had reached the open mouth of the Miramichi River.

"At these towns, men and cattle rushed into the river; and though a hurricane was rang on its surface, people hurried into vessels and boats and soows, anti eagerly thrust off from the land. The lesser dread was forgotten in the presence of the greater. But although so huge a flame was raging, there was no light. Showers of ashes and burned twigs, and still burning brands, and thick smoke, filled the air; and for two days afterwards, amid a perfect calm, the darkness on the river was such that a bell was kept tolling on each bank to indicate the site of the ferry, that people might know where to steer to.

"The town of Chatham, on the opposite side of the river, in a great measure escaped; but the Nassau Settlement, six miles behind it, was burned to the ground the settlers only saving their lives by rolling themselves in the river till the flame had passed away. In many streams, where the native woods still overhung them, the water proved insufficient to preserve human life; and the thousands of salmon and other fish found floating on their surfaces showed how intense and penetrating the heat must have been.

"Over many other parts of the Province, great fires raged on the same day; and the loss to the Province, not only in private property, but in the public forests consumed, was immense. The loss of private property at Miramichi alone was estimated at £228,000. Nor, in such burnings, is the public injury confined. to the old forest trees consumed, which it will take many years to replace, but the soil itself is permanently injured by every such visitation. The clouds of ashes borne away by the wind are an actual robbery by nature, and an exhaustion of the land. It is in this way, no doubt, among others, that land is destroyed, as the provincials term it, by frequent burnings.

"On this occasion, cinders and smoke were observed at Quebec, on the banks of Newfoundland, and even as far off as the Bermudas." Vol. ii. pp. 35-36.

We must here take leave of Mr. Johnston's book, and

with no unfriendly feeling. It is because we attach so much value to the preservation of amity and good-will between the people of England and of this country that we feel called upon to rebuke even with sternness those who would cast the seeds of dissension and jealousy between them. The extension of commerce is daily multiplying and strengthening the ties which bind them to each other; and certainly literature and science ought to do nothing to rupture these grateful bonds.

M. Stuart.

ART. XI. - Bards of the Bible. By GEORGE Gilfillan. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1851. 12mo. pp. 325.

THERE is something, after all, in names. The Bards of the Bible, forsooth! It sounds somewhat oddly to our ears, on this side of the Atlantic. We were aware that now and then an instance might be found, in poetry, where bard is used as synonymous with poet; such as Rapt into future times, the bard began." But this we have always supposed to be mere poetic license. The true reason of its use, in this case, lies in the measure of the verse; bard was commodious here, where poet would have marred the metre. But as to general or correct use in prose, there is no doubt of the oddity and incongruousness of the title. We have supposed that the word belonged to the ancient Gauls, who named those persons bards that composed war-songs or battle-songs ; while the song itself was called bardiét. And so we have heard of Runic bards and Celtic bards; the first, among the Goths and Scandinavians, and the second among the Celts of Northwestern Europe. Songs of battle and of victory are generally among the oldest poetry of any nation. The deep interest taken by uncivilized men in the events of contest and conquest seems first to have inspired the human mind with the enthusiasm appropriate to poetry. The religious element, very soon, if not from the first, intermingled itself with this.

It is indeed true, that within this limited sense of the word bard we might include some of the writers of poetry

in the Bible. We find triumphal odes in Exodus xv., in Judges v., Psalms xviii., lxviii., Isaiah xiv., Habakkuk iii.; not to mention a number of brief fragments (to all appearance) of other compositions of the like nature. But to think of characterizing, in sober prose, all the Hebrew poets by such a name, is beyond our cis-Atlantic measure of daring.

The title is certainly in good keeping with the book. If the sound of it is somewhat strange to our unpractised ears, and incongruous with that sober reverence with which we are accustomed to hear the writers of the Bible spoken of, it is not more so than the "critical poem " which follows. It is from this that we first come to know that the Pentateuch, (besides its few poetic fragments and fewer lyric songs,) is en masse a piece of poetry; that the historical books in general are poetry; that the Gospels are poetry; and that the writings of Paul and James are poetry. If this piece of information were of any value, we should be bound to thank the writer for having made such a discovery, and having communicated the knowledge of his achievement to the world. How much the writer values his efforts and his success in writing a poetical critique, is plain from what he says on page 14. Many elaborate and learned criticisms," he remarks, "have been made on the poetry of the Bible; but the fragmentary essay of Herder alone seems to approach to the idea of a prose poem on the subject." He thinks that "a new and fuller effort is demanded." He says of preceding writers, "They seem in search of mistakes, or in search of mysteries, to have forgotten that the Bible is a poem at all." But to speak of forgetting what was never before known or taught is hardly proper. Surely Mr. Gilfillan is the first man that ever discovered the whole Bible to be a poem; and this discovery has been first developed, in this prose-poetic critique. To him exclusively belongs the honor attached to the discovery; and he should not speak disparagingly of others, who do not possess his gift of second-sight.

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We have been in the habit of supposing that the genealogical catalogues in the Pentateuch; and the architectural details in respect to the formation of the tabernacle, which occupy somewhat of a large space in Exodus; and, also, the whole of the Mosaic ritual directions, and of the laws civil and social, were something quite distinct from poetry.

We have, hitherto, come far short of finding out the poetry of the first nine chapters of the first book of Chronicles; or of the corresponding lists of names in Ezra, Nehemiah, and elsewhere. But no matter. It was said, some time ago in England, that "the Muses had never been able to get a passage across the Atlantic." If so, and if even steamboat accommodations are not sufficient to tempt those ladies to cross the great waters, then it cannot be any matter of wonder that we of the New World should be quite incompetent to write a "poetical critique" on the poetry of genealogies, of architectural details, of ritual precepts, and of civil ordinances. Not even in historical narratives, as such, have we been able to discover it. How much the work before us may enlighten us, and contribute to change our views, remains to be seen.

He

We have read, in days that are past, of the Orations of Edward Irving, meaning (in vulgar parlance) his Sermons. Perhaps Mr. Gilfillan, who has exalted that gentleman to a place near the apex of the human pyramid, and who speaks of him as having a "neck clothed with thunder," learned from his great exemplar the art of exciting popular wonder or curiosity by strange fantastic appellations and criticisms. We took up this work with the expectation of finding some sallies of imagination. We had been taught, by the perusal of some of this writer's former works, to expect them. is, beyond all doubt, one of those second-sighted men, “who see a sight we cannot see, and hear a voice we cannot hear." He tells us in his introduction, that "the Bible is a mass of beautiful figures. . . It has arrayed itself in the charms of fiction. . . It has gathered new warmth and new power from the very passions of clay. [?] . The light is God's shadow. . . The quick spirit of the book has ransacked creation, to lay its treasures on Jehovah's altar." He also says, that "poetry is the only speech which has the power of making a permanent impression, . . since it gives two ideas in the space of one.' We have hesitated here; for we are not sure that we understand what is meant by the space of an idea. We had supposed that ideas, in themselves, were hardly the tenants of space; perhaps they may be, in the land of Second-sight.

What all the critics before and since Herder have failed to do, and what Herder himself only began to do, is completed,