The Sun.
London, England, 1864-03-11 00:00:00

LITERATURE,

Bavarian dominions.
On the 24 of March the King, worried out, re
signed his crown in favour of his son, adoptipg the
title of King Ludwig (Majesty). He issued an
address to his people, declaring his belief that a
" new state of feeling had commenced—a state
which differed essentially from that embodied in
the international code agreeably to which he had
governed for nearly 23 years." Ho had " adminis-
tered the publie property and the public money as
if he had been a Republican officer"—a remark
which, considering our recent experience of Repub.
lican administrative honesty, would hardly at this
time of day seem matter of boasting. King Maxie
milieu, in his address to the people on his accession,
said he " deeply felt his responsibility, ascending,
as he did, the throne at an epoch which was mightily
convulsed with infinite requirements at home and
abroad." Great excitement prevailed at Munich
when the abdication of King Louis was known; it
was said to ba the " result of intrigue," and the
burghers had some intention of protesting, and
taking the part of King Louis, who had transacted
business and given audience to several deputations
on the morning of the day at the close of which he
announced that ho no longer reigned.
The new King professed great liberalism—an
amnesty for political offences was to be granted—
Ministers were to be responsible—the press were to
be free, and so forth. In 1849 his liberalism col--
lapsed under the pressure of a disturbance in the
Palatinate of the Rhine, which resulted in the dis-
solution of the Diet, and the expulsion of certain
obnoxious deputies,by his Majesty. Still, the King
was not, on the whole, a bigot or a despot. He op-
posed the Ultramontanes, and endeavoured (1855),
in vain, to carry a Jewish relief bill.
Ile advocated the independence of his country
against the menaces of Prussia, but afterwards
wanted to make one (a little one) in a triumvirate
whereof his two big brothers of Prussia and Austria
were to form the other two-thirds. One memorable
saying is recorded of him—" I wish to be at peace
with my people." Happy the people that are in
such a case! The King has unluckily taken the
greatest interest in the outrageous proceedings of
the Frankfort Diet in regard to Denmark. It is said
that his Majesty's anxiety on behalf of the Father-
land which covets the Naboth's vineyard of the
Duchies has prevented him from Bleeping for many
weeks. Persons who have an abnormal taste tor
diving into the secrets which are not within the
province of mortals might find in the deceased King
the first victim of the retributive Nemesis which
always waits on high-handed aggression.
It is more pleasant to turn from the King's
politics to his literary end social habits, which
were such as do "befit a king." Plain and simple
in his life, unostentatious, affable, and kindly, he
and all his family were universally popular in
Munich. He walked and drove about freely and
without any show of dignity ; rose early, dined
early, and went to bed early. Beer (Bavarian) is
the popular liquor ; Prince Charles once boasted,
"I, too, am a brewer" (nos etiam in Arcadia),
which was a fact.
In religion the King was a Roman Catholic,
though, we believe, his wife was of the Reformed
religion. He never recognised the kingdom of
Italy, though he apologised to the Emperor of the
French for allowing the Austrian troops to pass
through Munich; not apologising, however, for the
notorious fraternisation of the Munichers with the
Austrians, and for the enthusiastic toasts in honour
of the latter.
The King was a traveller. it has been said that
he visited, in early life, Italy and Greece. In 1853
he visited Naples and Sicily, and in 1857 Paris.
But the chief honour which ought to be paid to
the deceased Sovereign is ono which can be paid to
very few European Sovereigns indeed. Like his
father, King Maximilian was a patron of science
and art, and yet not a patron in that sense of the
term which in England implies ignorance and
wealth on one side, and poverty and cringing on
the other. It was this King who attracted to Munich
the greatest and noblest intellects of Germany.
Liebig was made professor of chemistry ; Siebold
professor of physiology, anatomy, and zoology at
the Munich Institute; and among other great men
whom the late King patronised may be named
Pfeiffer, Carrlere, and Giebet. The illustrious
Ranke was appointed by the King to preside over a
commission ordered to make researches into the
history of the country, a commission which has been
of immense benefit to historical students.
The King was " Proprietaire" of the 2tl Regiment
of Austrian Cuirassiers and of a regiment of Rus-
sian Lancers ; also chief of the let Regiment of
Prussian Hussars of Westphalia (No. 8).
The King of Bavaria married, by proxy, at Berlin,
October 5, and personally at Munich, October 12,
1842, her Royal Highness Frederica Frances
Augusta Mario Hedwige, daughter of the late
Prince Frederic William Charles, uncle of the pre-
sent King of Prussia. By her he leaves issue two
sons—Louis Otho Frederic William, born August
25, 1845, now King of Bavaria, and Ohio William
Leopold Adalbert Waldemar, born Apiil 27, 1848.
The new King is Colonel and " Proprietaire" of the
`.lcl Regiment of Infantry, and his brother is a sub-
lieute• ant in the (Bavarian) Guards.
The brothers and sisters of the late King are
numerous. His nextbrother was Otho, born in 1815,
elected King of Greece 1832, married to a Princess
of Oldenburg, a strong-minded Queen, who was
unable, unfortunately, to keep the troublesome
crown on her husband's vacillating and very weak
shoulders : as all the world knows, King Otho was
expelled from his kingdom by a bloodless revo-
lution, and the Bavarian dynasty was excluded from
the throne. Prince AdalbertWilliam George Louis,
another brother, was the heir to the throne of Greece,
,•

The Nodes Ambrosiance. By Professor Wilson.
Vol. 111. of the New and Popular Edition. Wm.
Blackwood and Sons.
Another instalment of the glorious Noctes brings
the work down to the thirty-second symposium
Ambrosiar re, that 32d being the one published
in 1832 in the November number of Blackwood's
Illagcnine. Every fresh dip into the torrent of
the Great Professor's Elcquenee here poured
forth by him, "at his very best," in these
wonderful Nights of Ambrose, only enhancing
our wonder no less than our admiration at
the abounding vivacity, vigour, and vitality of
the masculine genius therein displayed. It is not
simply that, in the Nodes, John Wilson, under
the alternating characters of the supposed interlo-
cutors, discourses according to the whim of the
moment, " from grave to gay, from lively to severe"
—it is rather that he roves at will as Christopher
North, as Timothy Tickler, and still more mar-
vellously as The Shepherd, from the wildest extra-
vagances of fun and frolic to the profoundest intro-
spections of philosophy, from an indulgence in
the most pitiless and excruciating satire to a
manifestation, again and again, of the tenderest
sensibility. And what diversities of theme, he here
plays a perpetual game of intellectual shuttlecock
with, among those Ambrosian interlocutors, but
more particularly among that same wondrous
triumvirate of talkers, North, Tickler, and the
Shepherd. Literally, " from pitch and toss to
manslaughter" is nothing to it ! Turning over the
382 pages of the third volume of this new four-
volumed popular edition of the Great Work, what
do we instantly 'light upn as among his themes,
every one of them chance-chosen ? Why, almost
cheek-by-jowl, a relishing discussion of " Welsh
Rabbits" and wild cries of " Murder ! murder !" be-
because of a swarm of bees in and under Tickler's
bonnet ! Here, in rapid sequence, culled from the
Quarterly, a " Boozing Buffoon," a " Brainless
Bigwig," and a " Jackass Braying !" Now "Will
and Intellect"—now "Ales and Oysters !" It is, in
effect, a marvellous repertory of erudition and comi-
cality, fitfully or genial sardonic an astound-
ing jamble-up-together of horseplay and meta-
physics, conviviality and scholarship, the like of
which there is not anywhere discoverable, we
believe, in the whole range of ancient or modern
literature. As the illustrative frontispiece to
Vol. 111., we have an engraving by Lockyer from
Sir John Watson Gordon's life-like portrait of
James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd : the original
of which portraiture is among the glories of that
Maga Gallery of Portraits adorning the walls of
the great publishing house at 45, George street,
Edinburgh.

Sketches of the English Constitution. Edited
by S. S. Laurie. Thomas Murby.
Sketches of Political Economy, Edited by S. S.
Laurie. Thomas Murby.

Two capital little handbooks have here, in these
tiny volumes, been excellently well put together
under the supervision of one of her Majesty's In-
spectors of Schools, one no less skilled both as an
Inspector and a Compiler than Mr. Laurie, the able
Editor of the Graduated, and also, of the Standard
Series of Reading Books. The Graduated Series of
Reading Books as published volume after volume
by the Messrs. Longman and Company, we have
repeatedly had occasion in these columns to corn-,
mend, as a work admirably adapted to fulfil its
express design, that, namely, of insinuating know-
ledge. Quite in us cordial terms can we speak
now of the companion guides and handbooks here
provided for the respective use of Teacher and
Learner by Mr. Laurie—these rapid, but sufficient
sketches of " Political Economy" and the English
Constitution." We regard them—perhaps from the
simple fact of their being so wholly unpretending

in their character—as important additions to the
store of thoroughly good school books now provided
in such extraordinary abundance for the Boys of
England, books admirably well calculated to

facilitate the intellectual development of those boys
into intelligent Englishmen.

A Basket of Fragments. By a Quondam Author,

Richard Bentley.

Although these ninety small pages of Fragments
are apparently the last sweepings from a tolerably
well-sifted jumble of notions, jotted down from time
to time in the anonymous writer's common-place
book, they are not by any means what one would
call common-place. Mere intellectual crumbs though
they are, they are still wholesome food for thought.
Take a few of them, culled haphazard—". God's
religion is love—man's is censoriousness." Or again,
" The great man is known as much by what he does
not do as by what he does." Or, "Is it not neces-
sary that ministers should frequently hear sermons
as well as make them ?" Or—wonderfully apposite
at this moment—" It seems as if nations were still
in their childhood; they quarrel and fight about
trifles." The little book is so far doubly worth
publishing—that it is deserving of being read, and
while read (this, by the way, not being by any
means the case in regard to every book) is deserv-
ing of being thought over. Most of the reflections
in it are decidedly original, some of them very
felicitous.

The Elements of Mechanical Physics. By J. C
'Buckmaster. Chapman and Hall.
The author of this wonderfully lucid little
treatise, recently a student in the Government
School of Mines, is now a Certificated Teacher of
Science by the Department of Science and Art.
He is, besides this, Examiner in Chemistry and
Physics at the Royal College of Preceptors. Mr.
Buckmaster has already, moreover, been lecturer
in his time both in Chemistry and in Physics to the
Evening Classes at the Royal Polytechnic Insti-
tution. He is therefore thoroughly competent to
undertake a compilation precisely of this character.
He carries his credentials appended to his name
upon his Neil title-page. But the work itself in
its 183 pages of systematised explanation is his
complete justification in having compiled it. He
begins with the beginning and works his
way, and therefore his student•reader's way,
through all the mazes of Mechanical Phy-
sics. Starting with an epigrammatic defi-
nition of Statics and Dynamics, he afterwards
defines almost es tersely Form, Gravitation,
Weight, Mass, Density, and Volume; and so,
having cleared the path before him descants in brief
but sufficient chapters upon the Centre of Gravity,
lupon Levers, Wheels and Axles, Momentum, and so
forth : until after the Elements of Mechanical
Physics have thoroughly been explained, Mr.
Buckmaster throws in, by way of supplement, a
companion treatise on the Elements of Hydro-
statics. The letterpress is rather thinly sprinkled
with woodcut diagrams that might (it is the only
obje3tion we have to make to the work) have been
multiplied with considerable advantage alike to the
author and his readers.

INCREASE IN TIIE EIZPORT TRADE Or LIVERPOOL.
—From an official entry which will appear this day
in the Liverpool customs bill of entry, it appears that the
exports of British and Irish goods frprn Liverpool in the
month of February last amounted in value to £5,271,736,
being an increase of £466,106 over the same month 011°63.
The goods were exported in 365 against 322 ships engaged
in February of the previous year. The exports to the
United States show a filling off of nearly £200,000.
The flock of alpacas presented by the Government
of the Equador to the Emperor of the French, are
now at the Zoological Gardens, is the Bois de Boulogne,
and having recovered their appetite enjoy excellent health.
The director has been informed by a telegram from Mar-
seilles of the arrival of a second flock from the Equador,
brought by the corvette Cornelie, of the imperial navy.
Twelve of the 17 embarked at the Equador have arrived
safe, after a passage of seven months. M. Drouyn de Lhuys,
president of the Zoological Society, has received a promise
from the Peruvian Government that the Governor of the
province of Ptmo, which produces the finest alpacas, shall
select 50 of the choicest and present them to the Emperor
Fromeh.