Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/414

404 themselves always in an amphitheatre, with the assembled world as spectators, whereas all the while they are playing to empty benches; the evils, too, of habitual mistrust, of morbid craving for sympathy, and of unemployed intellect and affections. Another essay greatly to our mind, is that on Party-spirit—an evil against which the wisest require to be constantly on their guard, lest, as is well expressed, its insidious prejudices, like dirt and insects on the glasses of a telescope, blur the view, and make them see strange monsters where there are none; most salutary is the censure of the unfounded, but common notion, that party-dealings are different from anything else in the world, and are to be governed by looser laws,—for it is a very dangerous thing, we are here reminded, to acknowledge two sorts of truth, two kinds of charity. Of the whole of this small volume, we may safely and advisedly say, that it were difficult to name anything in contemporary prose of a more healthy and intelligent nature. The sale it enjoys tends, in some measure, to ratify this Opinion.

In a later work, our author characterises "Friends in Council" as a book which the average reader will find a somewhat sober, not to say dull affair, embracing such questions as Slavery, Government, Management of the Poor, and such like; but in which the reader, who is not the average reader, may, perhaps, find something worth agreeing with or differing from. The "friends" are happily discriminated: Ellesmere, who views everything in a droll sarcastic way, a shrewd man of the world, who speaks out fearlessly; Dunsford, an amiable country rector, who pretends to be a simple, unworldly, retired man, content to receive his impression of men and things from his pupils, and to learn politics by watching his bees, but a man of practical acumen when he chooses to be so, and one who, as his pupils tell him, ought to conduct great law-cases and write essays, instead of leaving such things to Ellesmere and Milverton;—the latter, Milverton, an eloquent, thoughtful, gentle essayist, whose themes form the subject of the conciliar debates Alike in these sententious though fluently written essays, and in the discussions to which they give rise between the members of the triumvirate, we find healthy sentiment, deliberate reflection, and refined taste. The topics reviewed are often trite enough. Ellesmere charges Milverton with his musty selections:

"There is no end to your audacity in the choice of hackneyed subjects. I think you take a pride in it."

"No, indeed," is the reply; "but they do not appear hackneyed to me."

Nor do they to the reader thanks to the fresh, genial treatment-of the writer. Among them we meet with History, Truth, Fiction, Education, Greatness, Slavery, Reading, Criticism, the Art of Living, the Condition of the Rural Poor. The Essay on History teems with evidences of conscientious and repeated study. It pronounces the main object of the historian to be, the securing an insight into the things which he tells: us of, and then to tell them with the modesty of a man who is in the presence of great events, and must speak about them carefully, simply, and with but little of himself or his affections thrown into the narration. A canon, this, sadly calculated to damage many a popular historian—particularly those of the Lamartine school! The disquisition on Greatness is another very able section, explaining greatness, if it can be shut up in qualities,