The Press.
London, England, 1854-01-14 00:00:00

SATURDAY,

pretensions. But it was reserved for our own
age to discover, what had hitherto been StlB-
- by a few persons rather than certainly
known even to them, that half a century of
peace, so far from effacing, had scarcely
dimmed to the eyes of the French peasantry
the dearly-bought glories of the Napoleonic
reign.
We are surprised to find in Sir Archibald
Alison a zealous defender of that which to us
seems not only a crime but a blunder—the
crowning error of the Restoration—the French
invasion of Spain in 1823. Non-intervention,
as at the present moment, may be pushed too
far ; but, as a general principle, it is at least
better than the opposite extreme. And what
was the defence put forth for the Angouleine
expedition? Not any violation of treaty—not
danger to France—not the necessity of main-
taining pledged faith with an ally—but simply
the desire of political propagandisin in a neigh-
bouring state; an excuse which may just as well
be urged on one side as the other—an excuse
which might have been pleaded had the
French Government of 1848 chosen to send a
force to assist the projected Irish rebellion—a
policy of which, if generally adopted, the re-
sult must be to render peace unattainable
until the whole world shall be either republi-
can or despotically ruled. Wars of opinion,
the bloodiest and the longest of all, have
this additional demerit, that they originate
in the false assumption that all nations can
be, and should be, governed alike. Our author
sees this clearly enough where the revolt of
the South American colonies is concerned : he
thinks our interference in that struggle a mis-
take, if not an injustice. But does not the
French aggression on Spain rest on a footing
precisely similar? France, indeed, aiming at
the domination of the Continent, errs more
readily ou the side of needless interference
than we do ; but the tendency—a very danger
ous one—is common to all popularly-consti-
tuted countries. America is probably destined
to exemplify it to a greater extent and in a
more signal manner than any European
power.

Ephemeris ; or, Leaves from r Journall of
Marian Drayton. London : Seeley e.
IMITATIONS, even in the literature of antiquity,
were devoted to ridicule, and in an age like
our own, when novelty is so much demanded,
we wonder how any writer can be found to
submit to the public such an evident copy of
another's style as " Ephemeris." Its proto-
type is " Lady Willoughby's Diary ;" and we
are again treated to the typographical arta,
which in the first instance produced some
effect. But secondhand artifices, like Harle-
quin's tricks in a revived pantomime, soon
weary. As " curiosities of literature " such
works as this may have some artificial interest,
if when executed by persons of great literary
knowledge. A poem or an essay iu the old
English of a particular reign, written by a pro-
foundly accomplished linguist like the late
Mr. Hookham Frere, would be prized by scho-
lars. But, where the knowledge of the changes
in our mother tongue is evidently superficial,
the recurrence to old spelling annoys instead
of amusing. All the novelists have agreed
that, when dialogues in remote antiquity are
to be recorded, the " artist in words" must
adhere to modern spelling, removing the con-
versation from mere conventional forms by a
certain homely, old-fashioned quaintness, as
Sir Walter Scott has done in " Ivanhoe," and
Sir Edward Lytton in " The Last of the
Barons." We need not go beyond the title-
page of this work to see how moderate is the
knowledge of Elizabethan bibliographi pf
sessed by this writer of " Ephemeris. the
book is supposed to be published iu 1592, and
we are told at the foot of the title that it is
Imprinted in London for ROBERT & GEORGE Samara,
dwellinge in the Fkte Steele, near Saint Dunstan's Church&
This is a very bad imitation of the spelling of
the age ; the word " dwellinge " would not
take the final e ; and in the present participle,
where we now use the letter i, our forefathers
in that day as often employed the vowel y, as
in " thinkyng," louyng" (for loving), " drown-
yng," &c. The word " near " should have
been spelt with a final e ; but even the word-
ing of the passage is scarcely right, as well-