The Sun.
London, England, 1856-01-28 00:00:00

THE QUARTERLIES.

The quarterly Review. No. CXOI7.
A pleasant gossipping paper upon "Table Talk
—leading off the eight new articles in the old
Qitarterly--introduces us' in .imagination to the
homes of John Selden, of William Haziitt, and of
Samuel Coleridge. Nay, more, -it carries our
fancy to the dwelling-place of Martin Luther,
where we listen to him babbling, iii his slippered
ease, about the wearing of love-locks by wo nen—
aucl suddenly breaking off in his discourse with a;
" Let us ttilk of sonAlling else," as though the
theme were, too much for him to speak of with any
degree of sustained equanimity. The contribution
referred to comes to hand appropriately enough,
midway, a 3 it were, between the anecdotal bio.
graphy of Bidney Smith and the promised record
of the Son Toots heard by the initiated at Samuel
Rogers' breakfasts, hard by the Green Park. An
earnest essay upon the noble subject of"" Reforma-
tory Schogs " next appears among the present con-
tents of the Quarterly, and evidences throughout the
fact of its having emanated directly from the heart
and the conscience of an active, genuine, practical
philanthropist. A wag, too, in his way—as we
glean from his casual record of the subjoined scale
of the value of Boy Labour, as jotted down by a
Farmer of the West of England :-
1 Boy is a boy ;
2 Boys are half a boy ;
3 Boys are no boy at all.
The critical, biographical, literary, antiquarian
palaver about " Menander," given immediately
afterwards by another reviewer well "up in the
eld Greek comedian's life and writings, as well as
admirably versed in the recent -disquisitions upon
the same, given to the world, of letters in 1854 by
Charles Be.uoit, and in 1855 by Guillaume Guizot,
will be seized upon as a welcome tidbit by the stu-
dents of classic literature. Strange is it to find
the sold Christian sentiment—

" Ile dies the earliest whom the gods love best—'

articulated in so many words, centuries and cen-
turies ago, by the old pagan dramatist—
" op 7ap Bern chiXopo-tr, an-Avoca:7u vtor•."
Stranger still, almost, to find how accurately Aim.
nander has expressed in Greek the grand truth
that—

" The voice of Conscience is the voice of God—"
" Bporotc arcurry OlVitj,llll.o efOC "
It is agreeable to turn over the pages coming to
hand immediately afterwards, affording us, as they
do, so genial a notice of Mr. Frederick Lawrence's
recent biography of Henry Fielding, and giving
us, while doing so, the memoir of our glorious no-
velist all over again, in a- form very ingeniously
epitomised. Articles upon " The Neology of the
Cloister," upon "Landscape Gardening," and upon
"The Zoological Gardens," succeed, and these in
turn are crowned by the political chapter of the
Quarterly, for this once—relating, as a matter of
course to the present (shall we say to the recent 7)
War—its "Results and Prospects." It is amusing
to find in the last-mentioned contribution, not the
faintest inkling of an anticipation of the sudden
collapse of all our warlike preparations, consequent
upon the sinister auguries of a precipitate compro-
wise with the Russian Government.

The New Quarterly Review.

Those who are desirous to keep themselves ail
courant with the literature Qf the day, and have
not time for wading through many periodicals,
will find the New Quarterly of service. In addi-
tion to a digest of current literature, most of the
principal productions of the quarter, French,
German, and Italian, as well as English, will be
found in the present number, as was the case with
its predecessors.