The Press. — London, England, 1858-03-06 00:00:00

236 THt PEE PERIODICAL LITERATURE. THE North British Review for February contains some good writing. The paper ou Stanhope's His tory of England, composed of two sketches of the great antagonists, Walpole and Pulteney, is inte resting, though in our opinion not always to be trusted. But the best article in the number is a review of " Tom Brown." It contains a candid and discriminating estimate of Dr. Arnold, which was ne cessary as a corrective to the somewhat misdirected adulation he has recently received : But the point in which we regard Arnold as decidedly defective as a schoolmaster was one which closely touches his greatness as a msn. Arnold's majestic singleness was his chief characteristic. Like Wordsworth's cloud, his mind Moved altogether if it movel at all. Moreover, it ne Ter moved except by genuine impulses from his own nature. Wordsworth himself was not more intensely individual. Now, while the elements of which Arnold's character was composed included perhaps all the noblest and finest which the range of human nature offers, and these in unusual strength and perfection, they were comparatively limited in number, and he bat( little or no thing of that sort of imagination which enables some men to live a large margin of life beyond that of their own idio• syncrasy. There are two kinds of men who succeeit in making a great impression on the world. The one is he whose wide and deep insight into human nature places men as it were at his coraniand, and, if he cannot remove the obstacles to his will, enables him at least to avoid theta. He, like Homer's steersman — Mt e. . . Km , 90;7v :9,m,. The other, wanting this insight, making 'his way rather like the iceberg than the ship, mole roil sad ; he bars . down impediments, but it is at the expense of collision. It was to the latter class that Arnold belonged, and the in capacity of understanding other natures differently consti tuted from his own was his great defect as a schoolmaster. A school of any size is a microcosm which will contain all the elements of human character that are subsequently to diversify the larger scene. It is essential that the man who is to train these young minds should not only be able to enter into these diversities, but should reconcile him self fairly to that wisdom which has ordained that such diversities should be permanent. Arnold fulfilled neither requisition—the former because lie could not, the latter because he did not think of it. As far as his own consti tution coincided with that of the boy, he sympathised with him, but no further. This alone secured that Arnold should be in more or less sympathetic relation with the best and highest natnres with which he came into contact, but equally it left him outside a great part of the life which he desired to rule—not that he did not see the phenomena. for his observation was quick, but that he could not rightly interpret them. And again, as a natural result of this limitation, he had but one ideal for all boys, and that his own conception of the perfect man. The difference be tween boys, to which he submitted as a necessity, was only a difference of more or less; the boy approached nearer or remained further from that standard by which he mea sured all. He did not conceive that grand doctrine of equivalents which is the foundation of all true education. This was quite natnral and unavoidable in him—himself a man of so few, and those such engrossing, sympathies— tended to diminish his efficiency . whether in any situation of active been that of a military commander, for great capacity—Arnold's practical in aye suffered from this imperfect Byrn t in that political sphere for which, in as undoubtedly highly qualified. In better or worse, was Arnold " a man e have indicated, he could not cor himself to those differences of nature and he man of the world begins by recog thia, that capacity of suiting himself to ch the latter, whether in the right or the eminently possess, was almost an im- Arnold. The Spasmodists " is sound and observable articles in Blackwood Our Convicts," and " Food and is careful, thoughtful, and argu , writer's idea is the popular one of transportation must be abandoned. error, as in our opinion it is, article. But assuming that to be admirable. We deny the impossi new settlement ; nor do we think w get "a colonial population willing -aomit to the mixture of convicts." We cannot snw go into this question, but our own views were arguel at some length in TILE PRESS rather more than a twelvemonth since. The writer of " Food and Drink," though very clever and readable, ap pears to us both to misrepresent his opponents and to misstate his facts. English physiologists do not deny that " the fats, oils, and salts" are essential to the formation of tissues. Besides which he has aiveral blunders and bits of carelessness; as, for in. stance, at page 334, he says : Examination of the structure of the blood shows that, so far from tieing composed exclusively of nitrogenous substances, it is composed of a variety of substances, • which the nitrogenous albumen and Urine to not more than 72 in 1,000 parts; and if a be added for the globuline and btetnatine of but so far as it acted it `‘ as a schoolmaster. It may be doubted u life—nitless it had been 4. Ouch be showed grea fl t.:ielici would not have psi ouvo and not least in h 4u. , respects, he was o • . j . 'use of the term, In of Ille world." As we ' i •ly reconcile himself 4. ranter which the m • ing, but beyond this, 1c 1- umstances which th " * .Jong spirit, must etni I .4 .;ssibility with Arnold. 'he article on "TE useful. .lie two most of ..s month are " 01 1 , Drink." The first it mentative. The wri the day that trans] This fundamental i / vitiates the whole art sound the rest is adi bility of making a ns at it impracticable to go " to rubmit to the pi' among a amount t trille mot SS, MARCH p, 1858. the blood-discs, that is all the nitrogen in the blood said to be solely composed of nitrogenous substances. The trifle is only about 120, or, according to some calculations, 150, which make the albumen and fibnne much less ; so that of the 1,000 parts the 200 parts which are composed of solid matter are nearly all nitrogenous. As to the rice of the Hindoo, he only eats it when he can get nothing else ; and a national diet is not always the best. Maize, for in stance, gives the Italians skin diseases, but they eat a great deal of it; and the rice-eating Hindoos are the worst of the race. Amongst ourselves it is supposed that consumption would be much less fre quent if more fatty matter were consumed. Many of his quotations from Lawes and Gibert relate to the fattening of animals, which require the formation of fat, not of muscles. "Sullivan on Cumberland "is an entertaining paper, and the instalment of " What will be do with it " as interesting as usual. Fraser has a very good Indian article. We quote one extract, which from a Liberal periodical is suffi ciently damning : But one thing is most clear—either that the Indian Government, with the whole Indian navy at its command, with the whole Peninsular and Oriental fleet, with the whole mercantile marine of the Eastern seas at its dis posal, did not appreciate the necessity of sending trans ports to Suez, did not advise the Home Government of having done so, did not Implore the Home Government to use that fleet to the uttermost, fur that hours were as men's lives, and days as kingdoms—and if this be indeed the case, then Lord Canning's condemnation is signed and sealed ; or the Home Government did know that the ships were at Suez, but did not care to depart from the usual course, and so had recourse to that extraordinary assurance—the most audacious, perhaps, that ever ema nated from Downing•sireet—that the Cape route was very nearly as quick as the overland, and sailing-vessels would make the voyage as fast as steamers. Bitter indeed has been the satire passed by silent facts on this idle boasting. We will not speak now of what might have been, though no sare man will deny that, owing to the non-transmission of troops overland, India was brought to the very extremest brink of jeopardy. e trust and believe that that jeopardy is past; but what are the facts even now? We have been obliged to evacuate Gude, and have yet to see the effect on the people of India of that terrible necessity. The Punjaub is still cut off completely from all India below Delhi. The Dooab and Rohilcund are still in name only British possessions. Cawnpore is again threatened, and all this because we have no reinforcements ; because of the army sent from England not a single company has yet reached Allahabad, because the famous clippers that were to have made the voyage in seventy days do not arrive in a hundred, because, in one word, troops were not sent over land in July. We have no wish to exaggerate, but there is no dis guising the fact that Christmas has arrived and finds us still standing on the defensive ; that it must be six weeks before we can hope to be in a position to strike an offensive blow, and that in six weeks the hot weather down country will have already commenced. Nor can we be blind to the moral effects of this most unhappy delay. In the Punjauh it iv not the energetic ruler only, nor the I.nging Europeans only, who ask when will the troops come? The anxious people ask the same question. It is a sober fact that every day which passes and finds forty thousand Punjaubi soldiers in arms, and the Punjaub denuded of European troops, is a day of danger. Nor is it a little evil that the natives should have learnt to measure the exact interval of time which, as they will suppose, necessarily separates the Indian settlers from their English resources. Four thousand men arriving overland in August would have done more to teach the natives that there was always help for us at hand, than forty thousand arriving round the Cape in November. Readers of THE PRESS will be familiar with these arguments. Another good paper is on " Recruiting'; and the naturalist contributor is as pleasant as usual with his feathered familiars. We have not seen a better numb'r of the Dublin for many months than the present one. In " Gerald Fitzgerald " Mr. Lever is displaying an earhest power for which the world scarcely gave him credit. " Lord Macaulay " is a capital paper, almost equal in its way to Mr. Bagehot's. the following rap on the knuckles is as sharp as well merited : Of course, Lord Macaulay may gaily assert " that a man of sense syllogises in celarent and cesare all day long, without suspecting it; and though he may not know what an ignoratio elenchi is, has no difficulty in exposing it, henever he falls in with it, which is likely to be as often as he falls in with a reverend Master of Arts nourished in iuode and figure in the cloisters of Oxford." But two sneers are not half an argument : and " Oxford logic " may be a sore subject to one who has felt the home-thrusts of Mr. Stanley pierce the gorgeous mail of his rhetoric, and whose reasoning faculties, strong as they are, must yield in debate to the subtle dialectics of Gladstone. And, perhaps, Lord Macaulay's Master of Arts might have told him that to charge on a science the errors of its professors is the common fallacy of "Non caeca pro causci." There is, after all, a very simple solution of all this nonsense of his lordship's which our Dublin friends cannot he expected to be quite up to. Lord Ma caulay has never learned logic. At Cambridge, where classical reading on;y means classical " scholarship," he went in for classics and highly distinguished himself. This gave him his taste. his style, and his command of allusion so grateful to the cultivated Englishman. But the Chancellors Medallist, Craver : Scholar, or first classinan of Cam. bridge, knows necessarily no more of logic than a young lady who is an adept in French. All Lori Macaulay's writings betray this deficien cy , and none more so than the History of England. Of his lord- ship's diction the writer says well : We have said that Lord Macaulay' s di ct i on, though it shows the greatest rhetorical skill, and is rich with various oeauties, is not of that highest kind of language, which is the simple expression of great thoughts, and is noble is virtue of their greatness. The concluding paragraph iv, however, a silly at tempt to throw in a sugar-plum at the end, end, strange to say, is in direct cortradiction to th e b ulk of the paper. " Pope and His Biographers "is an article of which the object is to) piste before the reader, As briefly as possible, a sketch of Pope's various biogyE pliers ; the successive stages through which Polon' criticism has passed ; the state in which it now rests; and the points which, in our opinion, still demand elucidation. They will then be in a position both to appreciate the labours of Mr. Carruthers, and to look forward, with hi. terest, to fresh disclosures. Five passages in Pope's career are selected for cm. ment—i.e., the quarrel with Addison—the surrepti tious publication of the letters—the poet's intimacy with the Blounts—his alleged acceptance of money from the Duchess of Marlborough —and his conduct towards Bolingbroke in the matter of the Patriot King. On all these' points except the last the writer's conclusions are in favour of the poet. The essay on " Matthew Arnold?' is exceedingly good, and the whole number quite equal both to its Soto and its English competitors. Bentley and the New Monthly are each about the usual thing. We observe that the author of " Ashley " and " The Red•court Farm " is beginning to write him or herself out. " Heiresses "is a promising story ; but " Queen Stork" finishes abor tively. The article on Lord John Russell is of withering severity. We have observed nothing in Tait that requires particular notice. The first number of a new female magazine, called The Englishwoman's Journal, is promising. The article on the House of Mercy is good, but rather prejudiced. The Gordian Knot is gradually being palled tighter. The Train has a capital story, called "A Strange Night," which compensates for the vulgar rubbish entitled "Sham Pamphlets." •••ImMn PUBLTCATIONS RECEIVED.—Msnat 5. BOOKS. Essays on Church Penitentiaries. J. H. and J. Parker. The History and Design of the Foundling Hospital. John Brownlow. R. and H. S. Wsrb. Wild Oats. Captain Lascelles Wrazall. J. and C. Brown. A Dictionary of Trade Products. P. L. Simmonds, F.R.G.S., F.S.S. Routledge. Life Doubled by the Economy of Time. Houlston and Cu. The Funeral Oration of ilyperides. Churchill Babington, 8.D., F.L.S. Deighton, Bell, sod Co. Mortality of the British Army. Harrison and Sons. The Moors and the Fens. F. G. Trafford. Three Vols. Smith and Elder. T. Hodgion. Helms of Houghton. The ()'Donoghue of the Lakes. Nicholas J. Gannon. Bosworth and Harrison. .4 Personal Journal of Mc Siege of Lucknow. Captain R.l'. Anderton. Thacker. The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford. Vol. B. Bentley. A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849-50. Major- General Sir W. H. Sleeman, K.C.B. Two Vols. Ditto. The Student's Blackstone. Sir Wm. Blackstone, F-nt. J. Murray. Statistical Society. J. W. Parker—Cassell** Arl•Trea sures Exhibition. Kent and Co.—The Ladies' Treasury. Ward and Co.—lioulledge's Shakspeare. Routledge- - Mervyn Clithero. Routledge—Le l'ollet. Simpkiu and Marshall—Tait's Magazine. Partridge and Co.—The Art Journal. Hall and Virtue—Davenport Dunn. Chapman and Hall—Paved with Gold. Chapman and Hall—lroh Metropc.7itan Magazine. Simpkin and Marshall —The National Magazine. ------- A Narrative of the Campaign of the Delhi Army. V. H. Delta—The Dictionary of Daily Wants. Parts ' l and 3. Hordston and Co. MR. MABSETT'S ENTERTAINMENT.-At the Hanover square Rooms, on Monday enening, Mr. Stephen Massett announces his first entertainment in London. The opinions of the press in India, Australia, and America are of the most favourable character in reference to Mr. 11Iassett's powers as a vocalist, reader, and imitator, and if he possesses but a tithe of the talent ascribed to him, he cannot fail to be come a universal favourite with the English public. L r. a a. e. u. r. 1. r. r- J. - id in 4h SIC 3.