The Press.
London, England, 1856-07-26 00:00:00

S, S.

away beneath me towards an unknown and awful abyss ; a
band from an invisible person grasped mine ; I stepped
across, and had passed the ridge of the Wetterhorn

The author attempts to describe his sensa-
tions in a style which is not equal to the occa-
sion:—
The instant before I had been face to face with a blank
wall of ice. One step, and the eye took in a boundless
expanse of crag and glacier, peak and precipice, mountain
and valley, lake and plain. The whole world seemed to lie
at my feet. The next moment I was almost appalled by
the awfulness of our position. The side we had come up
was steep, but It .aris a gentle slope compared with that
which now fill omit from where I stood. A few yards of
glittering ice at our feet, end then nothing between us and
the green slopes of Grindelwald, nine thousand feet be-
neath. lam not ashamed to own that I experienced, as
this sublime and wonderful prospect burst upon my view,
a profound and almost irrepressible emotion—an emotion
which, if I may judge by the low ejaculations of surprise,
followed by a long pause of breathless silence, as each in
turn stepped into the opening, was felt by others as well as
myself. Fialmat told me repeatedly afterwards that it was
the most awful and startling moment he had known
in the course of his long mountain experience. We felt as
in the more immediate presence of ;Him who had reared
this tremendous pinnacle, and hap:math the " majestic
roof " of whose deep blue Heaven we 6;1 poised, as it
seemed, half way beneath the earth and
This volume is carefully got up. The ii its
1 /A
collected on the Alps lave been named by
Mr. James Atkins, of Painswick, and some
is irited sketFhes
.from , the ikellil ; of, Mrs.
Wills illuatratrp iil pacres. '
1

0.,,
CXCVII. London::

The Quarteetr Be+Hem Hari;
• marrajr.. I:, •.7 l'ft t•I
Tft 'ektrrent" nikitiber of the 41ittrteriy has several
artieleS of !timer* excellence, a' quality which the
accomplished editor seems to prize above originality
of subject or view. The paper on Savonarola is an
elaborate summary of his career. The nine works
under review furnish material for criticism on his
character; of the works themselves little is said.
As in all essays of this class, it is duly noted:—" The
" family of Savonarola came from Padua. . . Giro-
" lamo was l;r4September 21st., 1452." In two
classes of 1;1' bical essejrs this minuteness is
allowablq; tis when the personage has long been
lost sight' of,":an 1 the facts of his life can only be
gained froln!'lobscnre and not generally accessible
records ; or *hen the subject is recently deceased,
and it is desirable to set forth contemporary know-
ledge. In a Review of the high class of the Quarterly
it appears almost impertinent to state particulars
which are to be found in any biographical dictionary.
In the essay on "The Civil War," in this number,
we read :—" Oli‘er [Cromwell] was born April 25th,
" 1599." As this eminent critical review does
give the dates, it might have been as well to state
- whether New or Old Style was intended. The birth
of Savonarola is generally assigned to 12th October,
14.52. The public would have been glad of a search-
ing and critical estimate of the value of M. Guizot'a
publications on Charles 1., Cromwell, and the Pro-
tectorate; but the reviewer gives little more than
a bare narrative of well-known facts, to the period of
she raising the royal standard at Nottinahati." ",The
"'rise of that extraordinary man" (Croin4ien), we
are told, " must form the subject of another article."
One of the mo,t amusing papers in the number is
that on the" Police and Thieves," chiefly intended to
show the acuteness and services of the "Detectives."
The keen scent of the old Bow-street officers
has not been lost. The spirit of Townshend—
a memoir of him would be worth reading—lives in the
Inspectors Bucket of our day. The review of Mr.
IGrote's - "is highly laudatory. The •

" Greece, - reviewer
•esteems Mr. Grote as the advocate of the ballot in the
(House of Commons, and a great banker of London,
peculiarly fit to criticise Thncydides, and to correct
Ao, ideas of Athenisn society . tr,ansraitted to us by
1'1'44 i and Aristotle, ferrace will think it 6
r
me
greatly exaggerated staten tha it would " be'.as
"reasonable to judge of Atheniliu institiVois and so-
" cial arrangements from the writings of these philo-
" sophers, as of the social condition of England or
"France from the theories of Robert Gwen or Fou-
" tier." The reviewer particularises faults of Bossuet,
Hume, Gibbon, and Macaulay, only to intimate that
Mr. Grote is free frum their defects. Some very ques-
tionable peculiarities of Mr. Grote are extolled as me•
rite of the highest order. In reference to the defeat
and death of Philistus, the faithful servant of the
Dionysian dynasty at Syracuse, we are requested to
admire the patchwork sentence, "He had been an
"actor in its first day of usurpation, its 18th Bru-
" make : his timely, though miserable, death saved
" him from kbating in its last day of exile its St.
" Helena.""flie taste is little to be commended
which suggests so forced a parallel. As an example
of the historian's sagacity, tho passage is qUoted in
which he supposes that there was more freedom of
individual life in Athens thsn in modern societies.
Lsnyposes that in this country= and in almost all
irk GOT •("t 111, 'lt •
r" et;i?lttittil'44iescl •odi xibobweb