this Monsieur Charpentier does not touch; and proceeds to a triumphant close by dwelling again on the lost pronunciation of the Roman tongue. He actually goes so far as to say that, to modern appreciation, the dignity and music of Latin are produced by the fact that it is spoken by each people with its national accent. This looks paradoxical at first; but there is the root of truth in it. For if you will listen, on the next opportunity, to a foreigner speaking our language, -or even to a foreigner, say a Dutchman, speaking his own-you will find that something ludicrous mingles with that unaccustomed accent; and in the same way very probably the addresses of Caius Juljus Kaisar to his army, or of Marcus Tulljus Kikero to the senate, would not have had so grand an effect in French or English ears, if pronounced with the true inflection of the forum, as when we hear them spouted with the sound of familiar tones.

We have perhaps dwelt long enough on this one article to give a view of one of the phases of periodical literature a hundred and seventyfive years ago; but before we go in search of another specimen, we will conclude the subject of Latin pronunciation with an anecdote quoted elsewhere by the editor from Eras mus, which we commend to our public orators at Oxford and Cambridge, and also to the sages in the German universities, who still lecture in the tongue that Maro loved. "The Emperor Maximilian being harangued by several ambassadors in Latin, everybody thought they had spoken each in his native tongue. Erasmus, who was present, assures us, particularly with regard to the French envoy's speech, that though it was very tolerable Latin, the Italians considered that he was speaking French. The reply, however, was not a bit liker the original, for it began in frightfully guttural pronunciationCaesarea Maghestas pene caudet fidere fos et horationem festram lipenter autifid "-His Imperial Majesty well rejoices to see you, and has heard your oration with pleasure. If Erasmus had introduced this in a play, Master Caius's of Windsor would

not have been the first specimen of broken language as an element of comedy on the stage.

What did the great discussion come to after all? Charpentier was declared the victor, the Jesuit was put to silence, and the champion of the French tongue was commissioned, while the arch was building, to prepare an inscription in French, for the series of pictures by Le Brun, commemorative of Louis the Fourteenth's victories. When his compositions were produced, they were found so dull, so magniloquent, so diffuse and unintelligible, that the partiality of the Academy could defend him no more, and the task was committed to Boileau and Racine. The arch of triumph at the Porte St Martin, the subject of the discussion, still attests the scholarship of the city of Paris, and the taste of the sculptor; for there is a Latin inscription, recording the exploits of the Grand Monarque over nations so disguised in Roman names, that it is impossible to recognise them as existing peoples; and the hero himself is represented in the character of Hercules leaning on a club, while his head is decorated with a wig of the most imposing size.

It may perhaps be objected to the News, that its notices are all rather of a scholarly and philosophical turn; for, on searching through the volumes for several years, we do not find a review of a single novel. We see nothing but abstracts of deep and perhaps stupid performances, on such subjects as "The difference between attrition and contrition, as entitling to absolution;" the advantages of "a library arranged according to the matters treated of," as in the Bibliotheca of Mr Martin Lipenius; but we are to remember that the reading public at that time did not consist altogether of young ladies of romantic dispositions, who reclined on sofas and shed tears over the fate of insane baronets or broken-hearted lords. Nor was theology a science which could be taught in a three-volume romance, where a High-Church clergyman convicts a Dissenter of the unpardonable sin of refusing his ministrations as father confessor. But men were men in those days, and theo

logy was a subject on which different sides were taken, with life or death, poverty or wealth, depending on the decision. No amount of interest displayed on the result of a parliamentary debate, when peace or war, contentment or revolution, hung on the final vote, was ever more deep or entrancing than the breathless eagerness with which the discussion of religious systems was listened to in the days of the Republic of Letters. The refugees in Holland and Geneva, the still tolerated Protestants in England during the reign of the second James, and the threatened Lutherans in Germany, caught the first whisper of a controversy, not as a mere matter of taste or historical inquiry, but as a guide to show them how their opinions were likely to be received. Will Louis the Fourteenth send and demand the expulsion of the opponents of Bossuet from the territories of the United Provinces? Will the civil courts accept the subordinate office vouchsafed to them by the Pope in the Bohemian States, and condemn the recalcitrant Calvinists to death at the dictation of Jesuits and bishops? The Palatinate fires were not yet extinguished, with which Turenne and his master had done God good service in destroying house and home, granary and farm, church and manse, belonging to the Reformed throughout that fairest of the territories on the Rhine; and therefore, if there was a pamphlet against the great king, an argument against papal authority, a denial of the doctrines of the Church, all men who could read, or hate, or hope, or fear, or lose their position, or gain a better, were on the look-out; and, sitting quietly in his mud fortress of Rotterdam, the sedate and calmtongued Bayle watched the four quarters of the wind, and reported what they brought by every post. A disquisition on grace or predestination, which to us appears not quite fitted for the pages of a review, however soberly treated by the reviewer, stirred the inflamed heart of civilised Europe like a trumpet of reinforcement or defiance. Jansenist and Jesuit, Romanist and Protestant, were not like Whig and Tory; they were like Cavalier and Roundhead on the eve of Edgehill. Each man

yearned for his adversary's blood; and with Louis and Maintenon in the Tuileries guided by Tellier or Père la Chaise, and Austria threatening in the south, and England ruled over by the truculent and priest-ridden James, we cannot help wondering at the moderation of the notices we meet with in these volumes, of treatises breathing death and destruction on the opponents of those immaculate powers. A certain Father Heliodore published a book in 1686, with the modest title of "The Duty of returning to Union with the Church, and a Refutation of the Foundations of the pretended Religion.” Malice and Vanity have seldom been so visibly displayed, and we may imagine the feelings with which the thousand exiles from France, who had been driven the year before from their native land, and hurried across the boundaries with sword and pistol at their heads, must have listened to the complacent boasts of this hardhearted Capuchin, when he says: "The infinite goodness of God has never acted with such power and sweetness, in order to deliver the Protestants from those impostors, their ministers, as when the king was inspired by the Holy Spirit to demolish the temples of the devil, where the guilty servants of that bad master had enchanted them with their charms." He even assures them that the ardent charity of the king, who saved them from their spiritual danger, "though they perhaps suffered a little when he dragged them from it as it were by force, and almost in spite of themselves, deserves their utmost gratitude." And all that the reviewer says on the subject is, that the reverend author must have been somewhat puzzled when he had to insert these last phrases about force and spite. Had he forgotten the beginning of his statement about the infinite goodness of God, which acted with so much power and sweetness ? In another place the Capuchin gives five infallible marks of heresy, and maintains that any Protestant who reads those marks, and does not instantly get reconciled to the Church, will be infallibly punished, both in this world and the next. The marks are these: "Novelty, variation, non

acceptance of Scripture (denial of the canonicity of the Apocrypha), the habit of calumniating the Church, and, lastly, separation from it." To this formidable catalogue of iniquities the placid critic merely makes a reply, that these are rather superficial distinctions, and that the Roman ists have surely forgotten to give notice of them to the Jews, who might raise a criminal process upon these five marks against the Christian religion itself.

But the placidity and the calmness were limited to the writer. The reader was foaming at the mouth; the Romanist to carry conviction to the dullest minds, by farther pains and penalties; the Protestant to get vengeance for the past, and security for the future. We need not, therefore, condole with the literary world on the tastelessness or ill selection of its food; and if we can enter into the feelings of the time, we will venture to say that the table of contents of any month or any year will vie in interest and attraction with that of any of our modern Reviews.

Yet one very remarkable omission occurs. In the whole of these volumes, extending from March 1684 to December 1688, written, printed, and published in Rotterdam, there is not one word about the Prince of Orange or the prospects of the Protestant party of which he was the head. With the exception that, in one short paragraph, it is stated that the French king would not have ventured to revoke the Edict of Nantes if it had not been for the death of Charles the Second, there is not a syllable or suggestion which can be twisted in any way to the part likely to be played by the Dutch Stadtholder; nor even after his landing in England on the 5th of November, is there the slightest allusion to the expedition of which all Holland must have seen the departure and heard the result before the publication of the December number. The fact is, the editor was only a Dutchman inasmuch as he was a successful competitor with the fish for a residence in Rotterdam. In heart, and language, and quickness of apprehension, he was as much a Frenchman as if he had never left his native

county of Foix. The deliverance of England was a threat to the supremacy, or, as many thought, to the existence of France. Was the student of Marseilles, the professor of Sedan, to see the elevation of the cold-mannered, Calvinistic-minded, unliterary William, on the ruin of France and the discomfiture of the tyrant who, though he was a tyrant, professed himself the friend of letters, and surrounded his throne as thickly with poets, painters, and scholars, as with generals and lords? Besides, Bayle seems to have been one of that class of men who must always be in opposition. His parents were so strict in their religious faith according to the Reformed model, that he turned a Roman Catholic, and joined the society of the Jesuits. When storms came, and the church he had joined was triumphant, he retook his old creed with all its losses and disadvantages. When England, and, through her, the Reformation, in the same way, was threatened by the combined infamy of her own kings and the power of the Grand Monarque, he sided against the schemes of his native sovereign, and wrote with spirit and effect in support of liberty and toleration. There is no saying what part he might have taken if he had lived to see the final close of Marlborough's great campaigns of the humiliation of the miserable old Louis, and prostration of France. Somewhat of the spirit of opposition to success had already shown itself before the series of English victories was begun. While William was making his preparations, and summoning round him all the free hearts in Europe, all the caution of the cautious Bayle could not conceal that he did not enter warmly into the hopes and revenges of his fellow-exiles. Jurieu accused him of being secretly an emissary of France

evil whisperers got to the ear of the Protestant hero at Whitehall; and if it had not been for the protection of Lord Shaftesbury, the editor of the News for the Republic of Letters would have been expelled from the republic of Holland. What, therefore, with fights and changes,triumphs and persecutions, we cannot help thinking that the life of a liter

Ir is, we think, a belief very generally entertained even by men who are ready to acknowledge the working of God's providence upon earth, that war is a calamity which can be prevented or averted by the exercise of human will and prudence. Famine and pestilence are allowed to be direct visitations of the Almighty. When some fearful blight falls upon the fields of Europe, making no distinction between north and south, smiting alike the hill and the valley, the continent and the islands, drying up the springs, withering the corn in the blade, rendering the fruit-trees barren, and nipping the buds of the vine or when the cholera or other grievous plague sweeps over sea and land, resistless as the breath of the simoon, filling the ships with dead, and the cities with the cry of lamentation such as was heard in Egypt when the angel of the Lord passed over with the destroying sword-we acknowledge the visitation from on high, and humble ourselves in penitence and in prayer. Hardened in deed must be the heart of the man who at such a time could assert that these were no other than phenomena, manifested through some occult but unerring law of nature, and as certain to occur periodically in the revolution of ages, as the night is to succeed the day, or the winter follow after the autumn. Such doctrines have indeed been broached by men who have acquired a philosophic reputation mainly from the extent and stubbornness of their scepticism; but in times of terror, distress, and prostration of spirit, these receive no acceptance among the people-nay, are regarded as impious, if not blasphemous suggestions; whilst almost every page of Holy Writ contains an express declaration that such are the visitations of the Almighty, the supreme Ruler of the nations. But although we unequivocally repudiate as monstrous and atheistical such doctrines when applied to events which are obviously beyond human prevention and cure, we are slow to admit that the other calamities of

which men are visibly the authors and agents are to be attributed to the will and purpose of a higher power. We have, all of us, become too much accustomed to rely upon human wisdom, prescience, and dexterity. We think it possible by treaty, by negotiation, by the extension of commerce, by the unrestricted freedom of trade, by the formation of railways, by international communication, to make war impossible. For that end our diplomatists rack their brains, our parliaments debate, our merchants speculate, our capitalists project, and our legions of workmen labour. We worship Mammon as a god, but under the guise of a peacemaker. And when, after all our efforts, and all our confident predictions that war will never trouble us more, we are startled by the clash of steel, or stunned by the roar of the cannon, we look round with astonishment and wrath to detect the mere human offender, but forget that the issues of peace and war, as well as those of life and death, are alone in the hands of the Almighty.

Viewed simply as the consequence of man's folly or ambition, war presents itself to us in an aspect so hideous and abhorrent that we can hardly bear to contemplate it in detail. It is of all crimes the greatest; of all enterprises the most worthless and unprofitable. In that brief monosyllable are included all the disasters, woes, griefs, wrongs, scourges that can afflict humanity. Wholesale destruction of human life, annihilation of property, rapine, oppression, cruelty, murder, and lust-these are the concomitants of war. Wherever it is carried, it leaves misery and desolation behind. It is worse than famine or pestilence, for it does the work of both, and is more ruthless and unsparing than either. It afflicts not only the existing generation, but entails misery on those which are yet to come. It is an abandonment of God's fair earth to the tyranny of a malignant demon. In vain do we try, under cover of idle names borrowed from the Pagan records, to