cerns the welfare of Christendom at large." This is the theory; how wildly it disregarded realities is shown by the fact that more than half of Christendom was shut out from the organization, recognizing neither the Pope of Rome as the head of the Church, nor the Western Emperor as the head of the Empire. Nay, how completely the sovereignty of Rome was forgotten in the East is illustrated by the claim of Solyman the Magnificent, that he, in virtue of his possession of Constantinople, was the legitimate successor of Augustus and Constantine, not Maximilian or Charles.

We have not space to follow Mr. Bryce's admirable sketch of the manner in which the Holy Roman Empire was, in fact, if not in name, transformed into a German Empire, a discussion perhaps even more striking than that already spoken of. The decisive moment of this transformation he places at the reign of Maximilian I., when the house of Hapsburg acquired that permanent leadership in the narrowed empire, which Germany had obtained five hundred years earlier in the Roman Empire. The change was naturally a gradual and unrecognized one. There was no time indeed when the universal character of the Empire was more distinctly recognized in theory than at this very time, in the contested election at the death of Maximilian, when the candidates were the kings of France, Spain, and England. The tendencies which at last made of the universal Empire a mere Austrian monarchy appear so uncontrollable in Mr. Bryce's analysis of them, that one cannot help wishing that he had considered the question: What would have become of the Empire if Francis I. of France, or still more Henry VIII. of England, had been elected instead of Charles I. of Spain? It was easy for Charles to combine the Spanish with the German monarchy, because a large part of his dominions were in Germany; how would it have been with the insular Henry? Perhaps we may conclude that the result would have been good. The Holy Roman Empire was already an anachronism and an obstacle; perhaps under an English or French emperor its unnaturalness and uselessness would have been sooner seen, and it would have been superseded in Germany by some genuine German constitution.

Another point which Mr. Bryce has failed to discuss, and which would seem to have come directly in his way, is the influence of Roman imperialism, especially as remoulded by Constantine upon the ideas of sovereign power in modern Europe, transforming the free barbarian kingship into an absolute monarchy by divine right, and infecting the Teutonic aristocracy with the haughty and contemptuous spirit that was the true source of the class distinctions and class struggles of modern times.

We wish also to call attention to one or two expressions less accurate than one should expect from so careful a writer: "Town-life there was none [in Germany] till Henry the Fowler forced his forest-loving people to dwell in fortresses that might repel the Hungarian invaders " (p. 132). Now, to say nothing of old Roman towns like Cologne, Mentz, Worms, and Augsburg, there was no small number of German towns-Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfort, &c.- long, before Henry the Fowler; the towns that he founded, too, Quedlinburg, Merseburg,

p.

&c., were in his own Duchy of Saxony, in North Germany, and therefore on the Slavonian, not the Hungarian, frontier. On 223 we find the statement that Frederic III. never entered the Empire for twenty-three years. We do not understand what is meant by this. It is true that Frederic III. let the Empire go, and kept within his own hereditary dominions; but these all belonged to the Empire in the narrowest sense of the term, for Hungary was not yet a part of the Austrian possessions. The Emperor Sigismund, who, as he says, "was virtually a Hungarian king," was the only emperor of the whole long line who can be said to have lived mostly "without the Empire's bounds"; and even he spent much of his reign in Bohemia, an integral part of Germany. Again, we think it is hardly correct to say (p. 309) that the inducement with "those who chose Maximilian emperor was that "he was the strongest of the German princes," and so best able to sustain the dignity. This was, it is true, the actual result, but it was almost by accident that the Empire fell to the house of Hapsburg, and the great growth of power in that house was after the imperial dignity had become practically hereditary, and indeed largely as a result of the imperial dignity (as Mr. Bryce himself says in a note to p. 184). Albert II., of Austria, was chosen to succeed Sigismund because he was his son-in-law; at his early death his cousin, Frederic III. of Styria, succeeded, as being the head of his family; not by virtue of his power, for he possessed only Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, being at the same time regent of Austria for the infant Ladislaus Posthumus. Maximilian succeeded him as being his son. The whole series of transactions illustrates the constant tendency of the Empire to become hereditary, even in collateral lines.

A note to this third edition (p. 365) explains that a chapter would have been added, treating of the consequences of the war of 1866, but that the sudden outbreak of the war of 1870 made it preferable to defer this discussion until the further changes that will inevitably be made. Meantime we may notice how remarkably the events of the past year illustrate the theories of the book. The temporal power of the Popes was established by the Carolingian kings a little earlier than

the Empire itself. As it came a little earlier than the Empire, so it lasted a little longer. For the period of a thousand years the theory of Church and Empire kept the two institutions in existence long after they had lost all real vitality. The nineteenth century first sees an end put to this medieval anachronism. Immediately upon the overthrow of the temporal power of the Pope follows the creation of a new Empire, no inheritance of the dead past, like the Austrian Empire, claiming no connection with Augustus or Charlemagne, like the upstart French Empire, but the expression of the new life of a powerful and at last united nation.

8. The Book of God; A Commentary on the Apocalypse. Trübner & Co. pp. 853.

London:

OUR types are not cabalistic enough to give in full even the title of this most perfect volume of truth, as its author styles it. Truth only, says Bacon, doth judge itself; and certainly few men have knowledge enough of Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Runic, Welsh, Tasmanian, and other tongues, to criticise properly a work in which they are all so freely used. It is a pity that such precious matter should be so hard for a common person to understand. If we had not this distinct statement as a guide, we should make a different estimate of the value of this commentary; but it must be allowed that its truth and its perfection seem to us about on a level. It is rather startling to learn that the Apocalypse was written by Adam, and is now first restored to the correct readings; that Satan is identical with Napoleon I., and the Beast with the United States; that the faith of the Jews is diabolical, that of the Romanists a structure of villany and superstition, and that of the Protestants wicked and blasphemous; and that no doctrine except that set forth by the author is much better. As much bad language is poured on all nations as on all religions; and it is some salve to our national pride to be told that the British power is ravenous, murderous, and avaricious. It seems that the only true believers are "pure Gnostics," and the only sound writer since Adam is Mr. Scott of Ramsgate. Much of the learning of this book is so ingeniously profane as to be unquotable; and most of the rest needs a "pure" Gnostic to interpret it. Those who know anything of the history of that sect can judge how justly the epithet is applied to it, in ancient or modern times; but it was reserved for the prophet now under consideration to develop the most curious abominations from the most innocent and even sacred writings, and to illustrate them from the antiquities of the East.

Two former volumes, doubtless as true, as pure, as perfect, and as big

as the present, have been published, forming with this one work; and the author wishes to publish eleven books more, beginning with the Book of Enoch, and to this end invites communications; but as he describes himself only as 2 and the Twelfth Messenger of God, it is to be feared that few will reach his address. His labors have not as yet been received to his satisfaction; nor can we predict for them much future usefulness, except so far as they must greatly increase the linguistic knowledge of any enthusiastic disciples who try to read them through.

9.

Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several Hands. Corrected and revised by WILLIAM W. GOODWIN, Ph. D., Professor of Greek Literature in Harvard University. With an Introduction by RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 8vo. 5 volumes. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1870.

PLUTARCH is perhaps the most eminent example how strong a hold simple good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days in the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born middle aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, love to lose himself in an O, altitudo! yet the sky-piercing peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled predilection to the "sym

But it is within his

pathies that are nestled at the feet like flowers." villa that we love to be admitted to him and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis. If we are in the atrium (where we like him best) he has an anecdote to tell of all the great Greeks and Romans whose busts or statues are ranged about us, and who for the first time soften from their marble alienation and become human. It is this that makes him so amiable a moralist and brings his lessons home to us. He does not preach up any remote and inaccessible virtue, but makes all his lessons of magnanimity, self-devotion, patriotism, seem neighborly and practicable to us by an example which associates them with our common humanity. His higher teaching is theosophy with no taint of theology. He is a pagan Tillotson disencumbered of the archiepiscopal robes, a practical Christian unbewildered with doctrinal punctilios. This is evidently what commended him as a philosopher to Montaigne, as may be inferred from some hints which follow immediately upon the comparison between Seneca and Plutarch in the essay on Physiognomy. After speaking of some escripts encores plus révérez, he asks, in his idiomatic way, à quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science? More than this, however, Montaigne liked him because he was good talk, as it is called, a better companion than writer. Yet he is not without passages which are noble in point of mere style. Landor remarks this in the conversation between Johnson and Tooke, where he makes Tooke say: "Although his style is not valued by the critics, I could inform them that there are in Plutarch many passages of exquisite beauty, in regard to style, derived perhaps from authors much more ancient." But if they are borrowed, they have none of the discordant effect of the purpureus pannus, for the warm sympathy of his nature assimilates them thoroughly and makes them his own. Oddly enough, it is through his memory that Plutarch is truly original. Who ever remembered so much and yet so well? It is this selectness (without being over-fastidious) that gauges the natural elevation of his mind. He is a gossip, but he has supped with Plato or sat with Alexander in his tent to bring away only memorable things. We are speaking of him, of course, at his best. Many of his essays are trivial, but there is hardly one whose sands do not glitter here and there with the proof that the stream of his thought and experience has flowed down through auriferous soil. "We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation," says Mr. Emerson admirably in his Introduction. No