The Sun. — 1845-02-04 (London, England)

BRITISH MAGAZINE. This Number contains a spirited article on " Modern Hagiology, or the Lives of the Saints," and exposes the ambition of the extreme Oxford party in very just terms. The followers of Mr. Newman, or, as our friend Sidney Smith would call them, the NewManiacs, seem determined, by the publication of the Lives of the Saints, such as St. Walstan, St. German, and St. Hellier, to achieve their own destruction as a party—" Quod Deus vult perdere, priusquam dementat." Take the following out of many instances, equally ridiculous :—" St. Walstan was not above confessing that a savoury roast goose, which was preparing for his dinner, had once so taken up his thoughts that he could not attend to the service he was performing, and that he had punished himself for it, and given up the use of meat in consequence." We can scarcely recommend any one to incur the trouble or expense of reading the original work, though most enticingly got up as to its exterior; yet if any one is anxious to know the error and follies which naturally flow from the Newman system, the able summary in the British Magazine will repay perusal.  "Nobody but a chess-player can appreciate the strong tie of brotherhocd which links its amateurs. When men spend much time together, they become accustomed to each other, like horses used to run in the same coach. For a fellow chess-player, a man will do that which he would refuse his father and mother. The habit of breathing the same air and looking at the same chessboard creates a friendship to which that of Damon and Pythias was mere How d'ye do?' This it was upon which I reckoned. Schmidt and I had played thousands of chess games together, and barely exchanged three words. He no more suspected me of being a banker's clerk than of being the King of the Sandwich Islands. We had mostly singled out each other as antagonists, because pretty nearly matched; and Schmidt loved me the more, as I knew, because it was not every man who would play with him. " Schmidt was the slowest chess-player I have ever seen. He has been known to sit three-quarters of an hour over a move, his head covered by his hands, and then to be discovered fast asleep! In everything he was the same. Correct as the sun; but a slow sort of person, for all that. Schmidt was the kind of man ivho, meeting you in a pouring rain, says, What a wet day this is!: A wholesale dealer in prosy truisms, an 4 nothing brighter; and yet covered all over with a portly assumption of consequence, which famously dusted the eyes of the vulgar. I had ever been a judge of physiognomy, and knew my man. How many Schmidts there are in the world! Excuse my thus moralising at the dinnertable, if only for its novelty." We have read the review of "Anti-Coningsby, or the New Generation Grown Old," and fully agree with the writer in reprobating the custom of making personal attacks on living public characters. However clever these sallies may be, if the habit be encouraged, it may lead to a taste for scandal and personalties in fictitious writing highly to be deprecated. It would have been better if the writer of this review had confined himself strictly to his subject, instead of wandering into other matters, and digressing upon things not immediately connected with it. But upon the whole it exhibits a careful consideration of the matter in hand, and is written in a dispassionate and careful manner. We subjoin the following extract, rs expressing an opinion of the author of " AntiConingsby," in which we heartily concur : " The writer of ' Anti-Coningsby' has only had two objects in view : first and foremost, to glorify herself (we are satisfied the book is the production of a woman); and, secondly, to heap abuse and ridicule upon everybody against whom she has conceived a dislike. In carrying out the latter object, she displays a boldness and recklessness quite as great as that which prevails throughout Coningsby.' She occasionally, too, shows great cleverness and power in depicting the ludicrous. But there is a superabundance of coarseness and vulgarity ; an utter insensibility to all gentle and proper feeling ; and a magnitude and intensity of spitefulness that makes the book, upon the whole, loathsome. No doubt, in compering Coningsby,' Mr. D'lsraeli was actuated by some motive beyond the mere desire of giving vent to his personal spleen ; but the author of ' Anti-Coningsby' wrote for no other motive except this, combined, as we have observed, with the desire to puff herself ; and this has been done in a very coarse and clumsy marner, and is far more likely to produce disgust than admiration in the mind of a stranger. A clever shrew, a witty virago, is, in our opinion, the most odious thing in nature. We heartily wish Sir Peter Laurie would take these Furies under his care, and put them clown,' together with suicide, Puseyism, and againstwoodthe which nuisances all the powers of ~, his vigorous mind are at present directed. As a nappropriate punishment for these viragos, wewould suggest to the worthy Alderman that they should be put paverner under the same ban with the real, old, original Furies whoran :thttramendous burst after the slayer of Clytemnestra