The Press.
London, England, 1854-08-19 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

This bottle's the sun of our table,
His beams are rosy wine ;
We, planets, that are not able
Without his help to shine.
Let mirth and glee abound!
You'll soon grow bright
With borrowed light,
And shine as he goes round!
A companion volume of " Opera Songs " will
be required to make this little work perfect.
In the meanwhile the rarity of the earlier
songs and the interesting criticisms of Mr.
Bell will commend this volume to a wide
popularity.

Germany from 1760 to 1814. By Mrs. Austin.
London : Longmans.
THERE is no half century of social history
which, well narrated, might not be made both
interesting and suggestive to all intelligent
minds. But it is no ordinary half century
that Mrs. Austin here attempts to place under
our remembrance ; it is one of those compa-
ratively short eras of transition to which whole
ages owe their after character and the diree•
Lion or course of their successive catastrophes.
Sometimes the history of a nation, under
the swing and impulse of one of these epochs
of movement, rolls with the imparted bias so
long that the very memory of the momentous
but transient day when it began is almost
lost. In such cases the few years which cere
parents of so many centuries are, of course,
more worthy than those centuries themselves
of being made the subject of careful study ; and
we may add that to a mind of sufficient intelli-
gence the study will also be more attractive
and more charming. Such, then, it may well
be said, were the memorable years between
1760 and 1814. The weight, and the mark,
and the consequences of them, will not be re-
moved from the s'ciety of the European con-
tinent for many an age. Of those fifty-four
years the history is like an epic in the regu-
larity of its import—in the unity of its in-
terest (prevailing over and outliving the most
exciting episode)—and in the magnitude of
its general result. In Germany a new and
important territorial and political settlement,
violently introduced and violently maintained,
was defending itself with desperate spirit at the
point of the sword. Prussia, which had
asserted suddenly and recently the same level
as the greater monarchies had long possessed,
stood all armed among them, showing none of
the diffidence of youth, and none of the con-
ciliatory mien of weakness, but fierce, preda-
tory, and, if mangled and bleeding, yet reso-
lute not to surrender a particle of the spoils
which had been seized with so daring a hand.
The seven years' war was mare than half over,
and the end of it would finally confirm the
pretensions of this new power.
The encyclopiedists, not then so called, were
commencing their crusade against all estab-
lished creeds ; and, . while their work was to
exhibit itself, the German mind, so long torpid
and passive, was about to flower forth into
that wild, rank, and teeming literature in
which Frederick had neither faith nor in-
terest, and which is, perhaps, the necessary
precursor of a more orderly development. These
great movements, with the French Revolution,
the whole career of Napoleon, and the foun-
dation and rise of the United States of Ame-
rica, render the era treated by Mrs. Austin in
the present work one of the most pregnant
in the entire annals of mankind. These essays
and sketches do not, however, constitute a his-
tory or a connected narrative; nor do they amount
to any exposition of the philosophy derivable
from those great vicissitudes to which they
refer. Desultory descriptions of manners and
of individuals, anecdotes, remarks, occasional
passages of argument enforcing the writer's
political and moral views, and illustrated by
the incidents under discussion,—these are the
chief ingredients of the book. The style is
generally natural, sometimes strong; and the
whole production, thus planned and thus
executed, is very entertaining. Moreover, the
reader feels that the time bestowed by him is
not lost—that the work is not frivolous, though
it is composed in as lively and discursive a
manner as the gravity of the matter could
with any propriety admit.
The first part of these miscellaneous views
of a great drama acted upon a vast stage is