The Express.
London, England, 1867-11-19 00:00:00

Ititeratture.

NEW BOOKS.

Mr. O'Dell Travers Hill, F.R.G.S., has col-
lected from the Ihihlie trairersity Magazicce certain
papers which he wrote there some time back, on
English Monasticism; its Else- and hyltrente (Jack-
son, Walfurd, and Hodder). He takes for the
groundwork of his discourse an account of Glaston-
bury Abbey (the oldest monastery in England),
from its foundation in one of the early Christian
centuries, to its dissolution in the sixteenth cen-
tury. His object he describes as the examination
of km:fish monasticism in its two great phases, the
Benedictine and Franciscan ; and ho has selected
the recur& of the famous Somersetshire Abbey as
enabling him to do this within something like
moderate dimensions. Mr. Hill is certainly not a
11. man catholic, but he is manifestly a great
admirer of the monastic system. He seems only
to admit with reluctance that that system, towards
the close of its existence in this country, had
become extremely corrupt ; but he dilates with
effusion and rapture on its many virtues, on the good
it effected in rude and barbarous epochs, on the en-
couragement it gave to literature and the arts, on
the charity which it extended to the poor, and on
the piety which it excited among its devotees. We
should infer from all this, and from a certain tone
of sentimentality which pervades his style, that
Mr. Hill is a member of the ritualistic section of
the church of England • and yet his work is
issued by one of the best known of our evan-
gelical and nonconformist publishers. Be this as
it may, Mr. Hill is determined that the monastic
system of the middle ages shall not want such
adornments as his pen can give it, nor its opponents
any hard knocks and depreciatory epithets which
it is within his power to furnish. He is very severe
on all thaw who deny the system any virtues or
redeeming features whatever ; but it seems to us
that on this head he expends a great deal of indig-
nation in vain. None but extreme fanatical,
whose power at the present day is of the
smallest, ever think of questioning the im-
portant part which the church of Rome per-
formed during the dark ages as a spiritual
counterpoise to the savage brutality of the mili-
tary order. Lord Macaulay, who was certainly
not inclined to a papistiml view of things, and
who regarded such matters in a singularly calm and
unemotional manner, fully acknowledged the fact,
and did ample justice to the genuine claims of the
Latin church. All other philosophical historians
have written in the same fair and reasonable
spirit ; but this does not seem enough for Mr. Hill.
He becomes quite poetic and lyrical in celebrating
the loveliness of the old conventual life ; and,
in speaking of the men of the Reformation and
their work, uses such phrases as " fierce fanati-
cism," " ruthless Vandalism," "blind ignorance,"
" the devastation of the iconoclast," " the wan-
tonness of the ignorant," " those over-zealous
men," " barbarity without bravery," Sze. In
making so large a claim upon protestant writers
for the exercise of a liberal canelour in judging
of the monastic system, Mr. Hill would have better
vindicated his own impartiality had he made some
allowance for the circumstances under which the
reformers worked. To us, sitting in the security
of the nineteenth century, under the light and
liberty which they to a great extent secured to us,
it is easy to condemn their excesses, which no
doubt were often very regrettable, and not to be
vindicated ; but when we recollect that the system
which they shattered in a sudden outburst of
wrath had become a scandal to Christendom, and a
peril to the social life of England which can scarcely
be exaggerated—a system that even Mr. Hill says
hid degenerated into "a lie," against which human
nature rose—we may well forbear from passing any
bitter judgment on that excess of zeal which ap-
pears to be inseparable from all great revolutionary
movements arising out of ages of corruption and
wrong-doing. Mr. Hill seeks to be pathetic, in
one place, over the loneliness of the monkish life ;
but in that case why does he seek to array
it in such gorgeous coloursl It was not
simply that the monastic order had be-
come, by the commencement of the sixteenth
century, a cloak for a terrible amount of pride,
covetousness, tyranny, and vice. It is not only
on that ground that really protestant writers object
to this leading feature of Romanism ; they protest
against it because, even at its best, and in spite of
certain virtues specially suited to the circumstances
under which it arose, it was an unnatural repres-
sion of the individual by a sacerdotal despotism
designed to check the progress of liberty and the
de%elopment of secular civilisation. Tlus does not
seem to be the view adopted by Mr. Hill, and the
presence of a contrary idea will act to the prejudice
of the work in the eyes of all but the lovers of
ritualistic formalism. As a laboriously compiled
history of a remarkable institution, his book is a
work of interest; although we cannot praise his
style.
To the numerous works that have already been
written about Algeria and the other northern States'
of Africa, the Hon. Lewis Wingfield has just added 1
two very entertaining volumes with the title of 1
Under the Palms in Algeria and Tunis (Hurst and
Blackett). The book appears to have been pub-
lished against the advice of the writer's friends, who
forewarned him of the consequences, and, above
all, bade him take heed of the critics. Mr. Wing-
field, however, considered that a simple account of
his travels would not be unacceptable to the general
reader, especially as Algeria, according to our
author, is but little known at present to English-
men, notwithstanding that many of our country-
men and countrywomen annually visit its shores
to escape the inclemency of our wtnters. Doubtless
Mr. Wingfield is right in saying that the greater
number of these visitors return to England without
knowing anything of Algeria, either as to its
present condition or future prospects ; but
we cannot expect to find laborious inquirers
in mere pleasure-seekers. The two volumes
tinder n0...66 contain a somewhat elaborate
description of the writer's rambles, in the first four
months of the present year, through the States of
Algeria and Tunis. He was accompanied in his
journey by two friends and several native guides,
and he appears to have gone over nearly the whole
extent of both these countries, having wandered as
far as the borders of the great sandy desert of
Sahara. Most of the principal cities and villages
of Algeria were visited by him, and, during his
brief stay in the capital, he experienced a rather
severe shock of earthquake. The volumes include
a compendious geographical and statistical descrip-
tion of the country traversed by the author,
together with ample details of the present govern-
ment, laws manners, and amusements of the
natives, interspersed with occasional Arab tales and
legends. From Algeria Mr. Wingfield journeyed
to Tunis, where he saw the ruins of ancient Car-
thage, of which he gives a short, but graphic and
picturesque, description. Tunis, the capital of the
kingdom of the same name, is supposed to number
among its inhabitants at the pfesent day about
20,000 Jews, which is a larger number than is to
be found in any other town of the Barbary
States. The population, both of Turns
and Algeria, however, seems to be of a very hete-
rogeneous kind. Mr. Wingfield's work contains •
good deal of information concerning the present
state, political and social, of the people of Algeria,
both native and colonial, and is very agreeably
written, the style being easy, animated, and genial.
The author gives it as his opinion that the govern-
ment of Algeria, as at present administered, is
extremely vicious and corrupt, altogether false in
principle and bad in practice. Ever since the con-
quest of the country by the French the govern-
ment has been placed in the hands of a general or
marshal of France, who has also had the chief
command of the army of Algeria. This military
rule has been productive of many evil consequences
to the French settlers. Of course the soldiers desire
the system to continue • but the colonists, on the
other hand, ardently Wish for a civil form of go-
vernment, similar to that of the mother country.
They desire to be no longer in leading-strings, and I
ask of the home government nothing more than
that they will give them opportunities to buy land.
Mr. Wingfield avers that, until the existing state
of things is entirelyaltered, the government com-
pletely assimilated to that of -France, and the