engaging, with features "handsome and strongly-marked Italian, and form, though tending to breadth, and rather under the usual stature, yet eminently dignified." The character of the troublous times to which this fiction belongs, supplies the author with ample opportunities for getting his hero into strange passes. But the interest is mightily abated when we know how sure he is to get out of them, and the very variety of Salathiel's difficulties becomes at last monotonous and wearisome. He is perpetually being taken prisoner, and perpetually setting himself, or being set, at liberty. The way to catch him, is, to Roman and Jew, easy enough; but the way to keep him is undreamed of in their penal philosophy. Nero despatches him to execution, and a masked figure hurries him instead to liberty. Near the Lake of Tiberias he is captured by a body of Roman troopers, and gives them the slip by a ruse of Arab horsemanship. After a two years' durance in an unlighted dungeon, he gropes his subterranean way into a brilliantly illuminated cavern of Cypriote pirates. Onias imprisons him in the upper ward of a stupendous tower, and a boy lets him out of the window in an empty wine-basket. Titus has him fast under trusty lock and key, and a young girl, Naomi, guides him to freedom. Again Onias consigns him to captivity in the Tower of Antonia, in a dungeon undermined and fired by the enemy; and the very means used for his inevitable destruction are those which saved his charmed life, for though the walls collapse, and he is plunged down a chasm, and continues rolling for some moments in a whirl of stones, dust, earth, and smoke, yet, when it subsides, he finds himself lying on the greensward, in noonday, at the bottom of a valley, with the Tower of Antonia covered with the legionaries, five hundred feet above him,-and, as might be expected, he is up and doing again in no time at all. The management of historical fiction is at all times a matter of nicety and difficulty. We do not think "Salathiel" a triumph of art in this respect. There is either too much or too little history in it. It is neither one thing nor the other. There is something paradoxical in its very starting-point. Why is Salathiel so infinitely affected by the words "Tarry thou till I come," proceeding as they do from the mouth of One in whose divine mission he is not a believer? And then in the evolution of the great drama of Jerusalem's destruction, we have just sufficient adherence to history to make us expect the narration of notorious episodes, inseparably related to the catastrophe, and the introduction of notorious characters, almost essential to the working of the tragedy-in which expectation, however, we find ourselves in error. As a writer of fiction, Dr. Croly was at liberty to use as much and as little of fact as he pleased, always with a due deference to the exigencies of art; and as readers of fiction, we too are at liberty to express our opinion as to the success of his electicism in this respect. And now, having growled ad libitum, let us own, in conclusion, that "Salathiel" is not lacking in features of power and grandeur, in qualities of lofty conception and elaborate fulfilment, such as would do honour to any writer of the age. The mere fact of its publication in the pages of Blackwood ensured to Dr. Croly's other novel, "Marston," the advantage of a large, if not an eager, public. It failed to excite the interest which some of its "forbears" and successors, as serial fictions in Old Ebony, have so sig nally aroused-such as the sea-stories of Michael Scott, the exaggerated but often forcible inventions of Dr. Samuel Warren, and the crowning triumphs of Sir Bulwer Lytton. But "Marston" has high merits of its kind and to those who relish the introduction of political and historical portraits, mingling on the stage of the action,-after the manner of Scott in "Peveril," or of the last-named maestro in "Devereux ❞—these "Memoirs of a Statesman," walking and talking with statesmen French and English, during the agitating years of the French Revolution, are replete with attraction. The principles in politics, the elucidation of which had occupied Dr. Croly's mind while engaged on the biographies of Burke and Pitt, he had now an opportunity of illustrating in the form, and with the vivid aids, and the appliances and means to boot, of fictitious narrative-philosophy teaching by example-and this opportunity he turned to account with skill, and with fair success. It involved the peril of indulgence in disquisition, and of postponing story to argumentative discourse (which the subscribers to Hookham's, Ebers', Mudie's, &c., profanely style "prosing"), and of making plot and passion yield the pas to dissertation and description; but the writer was too experienced in his craft, and too lively in his ideas, ever to become absolutely dry; too animated in his perceptions, and too graphic in the expression of them, ever to be voted unconditionally "slow,"-unless, peradventure, by some of those very "fast" fellows, who are themselves superlatively slow in their upper-works-in the mechanics (it were absurd, in their case, to say the dynamics) of vous. Of Dr. Croly's minor tales, one of the most remarkable is that entitled "Colonna the Painter," a tale of Italy and the Arts, with la Vendetta for its stirring, thrilling, all-absorbing theme. The conduct of the narrative is admirable; and the diction, like that of its imaginary manuscript, lofty and impassioned-occasionally rising into a sustained harmony, a rhythmical beauty and balance, consonant with the locale and the accessories of the story. There is masterly art in the narrator's prefiguration of the catastrophe by the picture in Colonna's Saloon, and his gradual development of the events of which it was the dark culmination. The whole is highly wrought, but without any of the strain and startling distortion of the French school. The "Tales of the Great St. Bernard," some of which made a sensation when they appeared, we can do no more than name. And to the same nominative case, in the plural number, must be referred the diligent author's edition of Pope, his Reign of George the Fourth, and other miscellaneous works. Theology falls not within our province; yet, omitting mention of the Rector of St. Stephen's (Walbrook) general performances in this department, we are tempted to bestow a parting word on that particular book of his, which, from the nature of its subject, of all others, it might seem our chiefest duty to leave undisturbed-his Commentary, namely, on the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This exposition it is almost difficult to reconcile with our previous impressions of the writer, as a man of highly cultivated intellectual power, and gifted with much practical sagacity-indeed, one of his critics defines his intellectual distinction to be strong, nervous, and manly sense. But he is also of an imaginative and ardent temperament, and to this he seems to have yielded the direction of his exegetical pen, when transporting himself in spirit to the isle called Patmos, and interpreting the mysteries of the seven-sealed scrolls. His ebullient Protestantism and his rampant anti-Gallicism got the better of him, and fired him to explain the vastest, sublimest, most inscrutable of apocalyptic symbols, by their "things of the day." He could descry in the spelling of Apollyon a dreadful identity with that of Napoleon. His eager snatches at allusions and analogies may remind us of Wordsworth's smile At gravest heads, by enmity to France Forced from the street-disturbing newsman's horn, Of utter ruin. Coleridge, whose liaison with Edward Irving must have imparted to him a special extrinsic interest in the theme of this Commentary, was even vehement in the tone of his strictures upon it. We find him writing as follows, in a letter to Dante Cary :-"I have been just looking, rectius staring, at the Theologian Croly's Revelations of the Revelations of St. John the Theologian-both poets, both seers-the one saw visions, and the other dreams dreams; but John was no Tory, and Croly is no conjuror. Therefore, though his views extend to the last conflagration, he is not, in my humble judgment, likely to bear a part in it by setting the Thames on fire. The divine, Croly, sets John the Divine's trumpets and vials side by side. Methinks trumpets and viols would make the better accompaniment the more so as there is a particular kind of fiddle, though not strung with cat-gut, for which Mr. Croly's book would make an appropriate bow. Verily, verily, my dear friend! I feel it impossible to think of this shallow, fiddle-faddle trumpery, and how it has been trumpeted and patronised by our bishops and dignitaries, and not enact either Heraclitus or Democritus. I laugh that I may not weep. know me too well to suppose me capable of treating even an error of faith with levity. But these are not errors of faith; but blunders from the utter want of faith, a vertigo from spiritual inanition, from the lack of all internal strength; even as a man giddy-drunk throws his arms about, and clasps hold of a barber's block for support, and mistakes seeing double for additional evidences.' The most sage and sensible of men appear, somehow, liable to monomaniac tendencies on the one subject of prophecy : even Newton was crotchety here; and Dr. Croly but adds another name to the list of those celebrated by his satirical fellow-countryman, such as Whiston, who learnedly took Prince Eugene For the man who must bring the Millennium about; And Faber, whose pious productions have been All belied, ere his book's first edition was out. * Memoirs of the Rev. H. F. Cary. You A GERMAN VIEW OF THE EASTERN QUESTION.* IF contradictions, conflicts, and national wars may be regarded as misfortunes, in that case the peninsula of the Hamus is most assuredly the Pandora's box for European futurity, for its condition presupposes protracted and sanguinary contests. The fact that the Osmanli dominion is gradually drawing to its close-that the suppressed races are incapable, without foreign assistance, of political regeneration, but that the European powers are as little inclined to give up the whole booty to one among their number, as they are able to settle about its division-such is the nucleus of the Eastern question and the torment of diplomatists. No one can furnish any advice in the difficulties raised by the solution of this question; every one feels that the old continental traditions of diplomacy are not capable of arranging this solution, that a re-construction of Europe must be united with it, the plan of which is not yet clearly defined. Hence the universal desire to defer the decision and to maintain the status quo. Austria feels this desire most heartily, and has entire cause to do so. When the Osmanli forced their way into Europe, the period of ideal policy was not yet past. People still talked of the unity of Christianity: the Hapsburg emperors were still regarded as the temporal governors of this Christianity; and this was not an utterly empty title, as long as the national policy was silent, in opposition to the Turkish "hereditary foe," and combatants collected from nearly all the Christian countries beneath the banners of the Hapsburgs, in order to support Austria in her defensive opposition to the Osmanli. For the traditions and maxims of the House of Hapsburg, that type of the most corrupt form of Romanism, which was sunk in the slough of apathy and Spanish ceremonial,-could never lead them beyond the system of defence. The positive, the aggressive, the initiative, were utterly ignored by these traditions. They caused Austria to be so dependent on the status quo, that is, on the preservation of the Turkish empire; for she felt, that when this empire collapses, Austria must either become positive—that is, give up her nature and traditions— or else perish. She became, as soon as her territories were liberated from the Turkish sway-in just distrust of the expansive abilities of a state which strenuously strove to weaken and suppress her own elements of nationality—the truest and most disinterested friend of the Turks, and remained so, until she was driven from her orbit by the revolution of 1848; and now helplessly oscillates between the past and the futurepowerfully drawn backwards by her traditions, and the interests recently aroused by the present reaction, which represents them; driven forwards by her destiny and the progress of the world. There is in the life of a nation a certain period, which, in the East, occupies the whole existence of the people, when religion is all in all, and religion and state, unless they wish to perish utterly, are indissolubly connected. A nation which is capable of development breaks through this connexion, and strives to render religion a matter affecting the indi * Russland, Deutschland, und die östliche Frage. Von Gustav Diezel. Williams and Norgate, vidual, and to separate it from the state. In such a case it is possible to fuse different religions and nationalities into an harmonious whole; the only condition is, that men, spite of the difference of religion and nationality, regard each other as possessing equal privileges, and that the government protects the life and property of all alike. At this stage of its development the state is capable of unbounded extension, as it everywhere recognises the existing. But so long as it remains in this stage, fusion, assimilation, both national and religious, are connected with this expansion, and when this appears impossible, the expansion ceases. Austria found, from her inability to raise herself from this lower stage of political development to a higher one, the bounds of her expansion in the Greek-Byzantine empire-although it was of the highest importance for Austria, composed as she is of so many various nationalities, which can never be fused into a whole, to emancipate the state from everything connected with dogmatism. She felt that she neither possessed the power to catholicise these countries by force, nor was she able to join them to herself by the propagation of a system of cultivation in a perfect state of independence on religious relations. Hence she fell into a state of stagnation, wasted away, and pretended to believe in the eternal duration of the status quo. Hence, too, she was lauded for her deep political wisdom-for the maintenance of the status quo in Turkey was a subject of intense interest to all; but while England and Russia were growing stronger, and so became more able to assert their claims in the settlement of the Turkish inheritance whenever the catastrophe could no longer be deferredAustria became, by this status-quo policy, by this purposed suppression of the national energies, by this systematic exclusion of progress, each day more powerless, more incapable for action when the catastrophe arrived. She sedulously played into the hands of her future rivals, who were gradually growing more prepared to accept the inheritance, while she was continually becoming weaker. This is the necessary consequence of that unhappy Spanish policy, which in the 16th century opposed the Reformation-not recognising it as a necessary expression of the national vitality-and suppressed it by bloodshed in the Austrian family lands. The sins of this policy-which only fools can call conservative, for it is not conservative to engraft Spanish corruption on a healthy nationality-have not yet borne all their fruit; but the time is at hand when the ulcer will burst and the atonement will ensue. Russia has displayed less reluctance to attack the status quo generally, and in Turkey more especially. This is very natural. Russia has managed to fasten to its interests all that fancied itself menaced by the revolution in the widest extent of the term, but is itself thoroughly revolutionary in its being. If we comprehend by revolution the compulsory alteration of all existing relations, Russia is, in fact, the revolutionist among European states. Its mere appearance in the European state family was an act of revolution: the balance of power was disturbed by this very fact. The creator of modern Russia was the most terrible revolutionist whom the world ever saw, although he was seated on a throne: nothing existing was sacred to him; all that was ancient and venerable he overthrew, and he refrained from no measures, however |