OUR LIBRARY TABLE. EDWIN OF DEIRA.* of the Christianizing of England. Edwin ceases to be hero and becomes only an instrument to the new purpose. The prophecy of the Shape does not sufficiently connect the first part with the last. No one who had not read of this Shape in the original legend, would pay much attention to its appearance in the first book of the poem. Edwin's heroic history ends with his reconquest of his kingdom and his marriage to Bertha. He grows morally after that time (and glimpses given us of this growth are well done) and at length turns from the false heathen gods to the true. Taking Edwin still for the hero of the poem we want to see how he is. affected by this change of religion-how it upheld him in the reverses and sorrows which old legends tell us he afterwards sustained. But the Christianizing of him and his kingdom being performed, there is an end. We are told in effect that he lived happy everafter. For Edwin's sake the poem should either have terminated with his marriage, or have carried him on through an afterlife set to music very much more high and solemn than any here. That Mr. Smith has abstained from closely following the legend of Edwin of Deira as generally related, is a matter of little consequence. These early personages are not historical but mythical, and the poet has full right to deal with the vague stories regarding them as seemeth good to himself. But not the less for this will he have to run the gauntlet at the hands of critical readers, as to the propriety and expedience of the changes he has introduced. This poem is grounded, doubtless, on the legend told by Bede. We happen to have no Bede at present by us; and so cannot consider in detail the changes made by the poet. But there are changes here which must strike anyone at all conversant with the legend. Why is the Christianizing of the king taken wholly out of the hands of his Christian wife? Why is the coincidence in time of the birth of a child to him with the attempt upon his life, never mentioned? The slow influence of a wife, constantly strengthened by the presence of her ghostly comforter, was surely a more natural means to effect the softening of the king's heart, than the sudden entrance upon the scene of the theatrical chorus of priests. Again, the greatest stress is laid in the old story on the impression produced upon Edwin by the synchronizing of the birth of his child and of the murderous blow. This impression was natural enough, and one can conceive how wife and priest would turn it to their own good purposes. However, Alexander Smith has, doubtless, better reasons then we can divine for these and other alterations. The conversion becomes more miraculous; the Christianizing of Northumbria is made to represent in some sort the Christian-speak the words of inspiration which they must izing of all England, by the judicious mingling of the two accounts of the conversions by Augustine and Paulinus. The story of the punning pontiff, dear to our childhood, comes in close proximity to the grand story of Coifi. We get the effective landing of the priests together with the terrific demolition of the heathen temple. Perhaps this crowding of tableaux is better art than the quiet painting of a woman's influence, and the shadowing forth of the impression produced by a strange coincidence upon the mind of a sick man. Having begun with carping, we may as well finish our fault-finding before we turn to the beauties of this poem. In the first place, then, it is incomplete. It begins as a heroic biography (so to speak) of Edwin. It takes up, half-way through, the idea * By Alexander Smith. (Macmillan & Co.) If on the other hand we take the Christianizing of England as the chief theme of the book, we find that through the first half there is no mention of it, no allusion even save in the dim prophecy of the Shape. We find the heathen knights practising all the Christian virtues, perfectly satisfied with their gods and having no remotest craving for a belief purer and higher. Moreover, it requires a better preacher than Alexander Smith to show forth the excellence of the Christian idea. White robes and swinging censers and psalmody are but poor persuasions to the grasping of a new faith. Mr. Smith has attempted to make his priests have spoken to transform men's souls and convince their intellects; but Mr. Smith had, on the whole, better have remained silent. The entire scene of the Christianizing is to us revolting-not more here, however, than in the original legend, for the speeches of the priests are closely copied. The selfishness of Coifi, the doubt and darkness of Ella, are surely incentives to conversion not of the most orthodox kind. The savage destruction of the ancient temples, to the infinite fear and horror and distress of the blind multitude, seems to us a sad first-fruit of the new religion. Looking at the poem in either light we find it incomplete. Taking it as it is, we see in it a blending of two poems into one. Mr. Smith is unfortunate in the choice of his subject. The appearance of "Edwin of Deira" so soon after that of the "Idylls of the King," provokes comparison. Very nearly Tennyson's equal in some lighter matters, Alexander Smith is infinitely beneath him in that deep, solemn, | found clearly stamped upon " Edwin of Deira." moral insight which sanctifies the true poet, and Take a passage or two, chosen somewhat at ransets him apart from all other men. This dom. For instance, of the impossibility of esti"Edwin " seems the more ambitious, remem- mating the full happiness of lovebering the "Idylls." How poorly trivial appear the wonder-working words of Paulinus to the sorrowing words of Arthur in "Guenevere," embodying the very essence of Christianity! Let us turn to the pleasanter part of our task. Comparing this with the previous poems of our author, we find a progress greater than is commonly made by a poet in so short a time. Tennyson's advance from "Claribel" to "Guenevere" has been the work of many years. Alexander Smith has advanced faster than Tennyson. His "Life-Drama," with its "spum. ing stars" and general spasmodics, was not written so very long ago. The language of "Edwin of Deira" is noble and simple-not showing, it is true, anything like the exquisite simplicity of the "Idylls", but still a sure progress in the same direction, from glittering words and conceits to deeper thoughts and feelings. We get, now and then, good terse lines here, such as would not shame some of our older giants. Of similes Mr. Smith is still profuse. We cannot imgine what injury the sun has done him that he should put it through so many unimaginable tortures. The cliff, too, that fronts the light or the wind, or anything and everything, is made to do unconscionable duty. But in his wildest moments our poet does not now give us absurdities. He does give us some of the most exquisite similes that have ever been written. Tennyson could not write some of the bad similes that Smith has written; but (dare we pronounce the blasphemy?) Tennyson could not write some of the best that Smith has writ ten. Again, he has a great power of description, of word-painting. And this is not only by laborious detail, but often by a single touch of colour, like the "antique root" of Shakespeare's oak. Ruskin expatiates somewhere, rhapsodizing about some picture of Turner's, on three hair-breadth strokes of vermillion laid on the light side of a distant building. Four strokes would have spoiled the picture; any other kind save hair-breadth strokes would have spoiled the picture. The three hair-breadth strokes prove the genius-and we have the three hair-breadth strokes more than once in this poem. But of a higher order than this power of outward description, whether by subtle selection or accumulation of details, is the power of uttering simple heart-truths, of touching the string which, girdling the whole earth, vibrates throughout its length to the magical touch, stirring all nature. Of this power Alexander Smith is not destitute. Tennyson has it, perhaps, in greater measure than any other poet save Shakespeare; and we are not to look for the depth of Tennyson's sympathetic insight here. But still this seal of the true poet is to be I know that I am happy; I know not Whose wide unskirted boundaries and shores Of liberality I keep an open door for thoughts and men Mr. Morley has proved to have been simply a laborious scholar, anxious to acquaint himself with the secrets of Nature, and studying, as a That wear strange clothes and speak with foreign means to this end, magic, cabalism, and astro Such passages as the above rank higher than any simile however exquisite-than any piece of word-painting however subtle. In the drawing of character our poet has no great skill. Edwin himself has no personality; Bertha might be any other good and fair girl and wife and mother. Regner is distinguishable from the rest of his brothers only by name. The treacherous instability of Redwald is coarsely delineated. The best portion of the poem is that which paints the married life of Edwin and Bertha. The description of the child and of the parents' delight in it is really exquisite. To sum up: it is not a great poem, but there is some very beautiful poetry in it. In plan and in the drawing of character it is utterly deficient; nor does Mr. Smith show a power of rising with his theme to a due solemnity and majesty. It is a poem from which one will be inclined to cull pretty passages: it is not a poem one will be inclined to read again. J. A. BIOGRAPHIC PORTRAITURES; OR, SKETCHES OF THE LIVES AND CHARACTERS OF A FEW ILLUSTRIOUS PERSONS, By John Leaf. (London: James Blackwood. Paternoster-row.) -The stories of good and great men's lives never pall. We cannot have too many of such histories; nor, for those whose means will not afford the high price of the original memoirs, too many sketches of them, concentrating (like these before us, the governing circumstances and principal events, detailed and amplified in their proper volumes. To compile and condense is by no means the easy task that the inexperienced imagine. Judgment and careful analysis are necessary in the mere preparation of materials, in order to select the most characteristic and interesting of them; and, subsequently, there is the assimilating them in the writer's mind, so as to impart to them a distinct arrangement, and to infuse them with his individual style. In the volume before us Mr, Leaf has taken care to render the portraitures as varied as possible: Heyne, Fichte, Daniel De Foe, the Dauphin (Louis XVII.), the Duke of Kent, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Kitto, and Thomas Campbell are the illustrations chosen. And though we may take exception to one or two of them, as scarcely coming within the meaning of the first phrase of our notice, the variety and interest of the work are all the greater for their presence. Amongst the most entertaining of these memoirs are those of Cornelius Agrippa and Dr. Kitto, the first of whom figured so long as a magician in mediæval history, but whom the painstaking research of logy. He was an earnest lover and seeker after truth, opposing his intellect and learning to the teaching and fables of the clergy. "Their bigoted and perverse representations of sacred personages are not to be credited," he says. "All the recent Martyrologies and professed legends of the saints are full of such prodigious lies, that they make Christianity a laughing stock in the eyes of Jews, Turks, and Infidels." Of course a man who previous to the Reformation ventured upon such declarations as these could hope but little toleration from the Churchmen; and accordingly, though the son of a noble house, we see him driven out from place to place, misrepresented, subject to losses; his whole life, indeed, full of "shifts, perils, and disappointments." "A diligent student," he made himself familiar with almost everything that was then called learning. He had mastered the scholastic philosophy, and, in the way of novel speculations had made himself acquainted with cabalism-a method of mystically interpreting the Scriptures to say nothing of the various works in Greek and Latin literature, which were then beginning to obtain attention among scholars. Armed with this knowledge, Agrippa goes forth to gain a footing as a man of letters, and make the world wiser by his expositions. He is ambitious of becoming the protégé of Margaret of Austria, Maximilian's daughter, who is Mistress of Dôle and Burgundy, and celebrated for her love of letters, and her bounty towards learned men. Received as an orator, with admiration, the University of Dôle bestowed on him, at twenty-three, the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and Agrippa fancied himself already assured of the favour of Margaret, and on the high-road to fortune and preferment. He marries, settles down to authorship, and produces a certain work on magic. Our author gives us some curious quotations from it—very curious, but harmless. Taken altogether [says Mr. Leaf] it may be said to embody, in a sort of crude system, the natural science, metaphysics, and mystical theology that were current among the learned at the time when it was written. Indeed, magic is defined by the author as the whole knowledge of nature-the perfection of all true philosophy. In his character of magician, therefore, Cornelius Agrippa was simply an inquirer into the natural and divine significance of things, and an expounder of their occult or hidden virtues. understood and meant by magic. This, and not any art of conjuration, was what he it was wont to be called, till its capture and spoliation by a French army, in 1479, changed its name to that of Dôle la Dolente, became so in earnest to Cornelius Agrippa, who had to retire from the face of his clerical enemies, and seek employment at the Court of Maximilian. In 1510 we find him attaché to an embassy from the Court of Germany to that of Henry VIII., and resident as the guest of Dean Colet (the friend of Erasmus, and founder of St. Paul's School), at Stepney, then a pleasant suburban village, famous for its pretty scenery and the scented penny-royal that overspread the adjacent common. We have not space to follow the fortunes, or rather misfortunes, of Agrippa; now on the field of battle, now amongst his books, but ever pursued by the enmity of his co-religionists the priests, whose tenets and conduct he condemned openly, but whose creed he had not the courage to abjure. He had been knighted on the field of battle, made Doctor of Medicine and Law at Paris, twice married and twice a widower, threatened by the Inquisition, excommunicated, bereaved of his second wife by the plague, just as her virtues were softening the Princess Margaret to seek her, and his own pecuniary and worldly difficulties appeared to be surmounted. The Princess Margaret, whose patronage he had so much desired, bestows her friendship on him, and shortly after dies. His salary from the Court of Charles V. is in arrears, and, on various pretexts, withheld from him; his children literally hunger whilst he follows the Emperor with his vain suit. At length the affair is adjusted through the intercession of the Archbishop of Palermo his debts in course of liquidation, a humble salary ensured him, and reinvigorated in hope and circumstances, the poor man tempts his fate a third time, and marries a woman who turns out faithless and infamous, and from whom, after three years of misery, he succeeds in getting a divorce. Once more attacked for his heresies (to which the Monks added the crime of dealing with familiar spirits), the Emperor (who sides with the Monks) leaves him no choice between recanting his writings, or the loss of salary and his imperial protection. Agrippa will not recant, and, without money, overwhelmed with debt, we find him driven from kingdom to kingdom, till, finding a refuge in a friendly gentleman's house at Grenoble, he dies there, worn out, at forty-nine years of age, with disappointment, sorrow, and disgust. -- daylight on all that was mysterious in the life of the so-called magician, and his seven demons turn out to be faithful dogs; his wonder-working implements, his books.-The life of Kitto presents us with a very different phase of social history, and marks the progress of literature, and its influence on the times and men, very remarkably. More than three hundred years had intervened between the birth of Cornelius Agrippa Von Nettesheim, at Cologne, and that of John Kitto, the journeyman-mason's son, at Plymouth; yet, in the face of low birth-of poverty-of the difficulties which the utter and complete loss of hearing placed in the way of communication and sympathy in spite, too, of the mistakes of friends as to the best means of settling him in life; the natural tendencies of his mind, the conscious power within him, leads him to his true vocation, and establishes him, at thirty, as a scholar and a man of letters. His passage to this preferment has been by no means an easy one. An accident at thirteen years of age shut out from the poor boy for ever that fifth sense, by the loss of which the powers of his mind were to be so strengthened and concentrated. Never more did John Kitto hear the living voice of man or woman. Henceforth the world lay round him in dull monotonous SILENCE! Nevermore when the spring advanced, with its choral band of joyous birds, did he hear tidings of its coming. The murmuring brooks ran noiselessly, and the delicious cadences of waving trees fell all inaudible upon his stricken sense. waterfalls and ocean-tides, the anthem of the leaves on summer nights, the march of storms over mighty winds in winter, the silvery tinkling of plains and forests-all these had lost their power to The solemn chant of move him with a thrill of awe or pleasure. But the poor boy, who had hungered and thirsted for books as soon as he had learned to spell through them, fell back upon them with an interest painfully intensified. At home; in the workhouse; as a shoemaker's apprentice, he never lost sight of the great hope and aim of his existence-the accomplishment of learning. All the stray halfpence, all his crude efforts at art (for we find him painting halfpenny pictures for this purpose), are hoarded and exerted for no other end but to buy books; and when at length the hard usage to which he was subjected, as apprentice, induced him to complain of it to the master of the workhouse (who had Agrippa [observes Mr. Leaf] was no pretender of statements to the magistrates, by their correctalways been a friend to the lad), his written any kind, but a true man, faithful to his insightness of diction, astonished the bench, and led and convictions, and, in so far as he taught error, teaching it only as a scholar imperfectly informed. He was a wiser and more purely religious man than any of his enemies-a truth-seeking, candid-minded, earnestly aspiring man, such as few were in his age and country. Henceforth the occult science has lost one of its grandest names. Mr. Morley has let in the to his release from his indentures and " ulterior measures for his advancement." We cannot follow the lad throughout the various changes of circumstances and occupation which intervene till we find him engaged with Mr. Charles Knight, the publisher, and recognized as a man of great and various information, master of many languages, and, having travelled in the East, familiar with oriental customs-a circum- | stance that decided Mr. Knight to ask his assistance in preparing a pictorial Bible; but the specimen commentary which he produced had the effect of transferring the whole work to his hands-" a work which has made him celebrated, and upon which the distinction he has gained in literature may be said principally to rest." The whole details of the Doctor's life are so full of interest, and are so agreeably described and arranged, that this memoir alone is worth the purchase of the book. It offers another example for a future edition of "Self Help," and proves how valuable in time becomes the habit of accumulating facts and observation. Little by little seems to have been the principle on which John Kitto acted-a principle that cannot be too much impressed on young people, and which proves in almost every instance, but especially where knowledge or wealth are the objects of attainment, infallible. We congratulate Mr. Leaf on the very useful and pleasant work he has performed, and repeat that such books cannot be too well known and studied. The good sense and intelligent admiration of what is really worth admiration and preservation, in individual character, and the selection of the characters themselves, are proofs of the author's fitness for his task, and make us desirous of meeting him in other similar undertakings. PERIODICALS. THE ENGLISHWOMAN'S JOURNAL. (19 Langham Place, Regent Street; Kent and Co., Paternoster-row). - The October number of our contemporary contains the usual quantity of articles, upon the usual subjects. "Margaret Beaufort," a pleasantly-written paper of historical biography, is completed. The Report of the Society for promoting the Employment of Women contains a paragraph which we reprint for the use of our lady-readers. A well-known London tradesman, on an application to him to take a woman as an assistant, replied, "Ladies have this matter in their own hands. If every lady, as she came into my shop, were to ask to be waited on by a woman, we should be obliged to supply one." Surely, if, instead of signing addresses, the upwards of two hundred ladies of influence who did so were simply to act upon the tradesman's suggestion above-quoted, it would save time, and be far the most direct way of bringing about the desired substitution of women for men-assistants, in drapers' and other shops where ornamental and other light articles are sold. We are happy to learn that the success of the Victoria Printing Press is established, and also that active measures are being taken to organize a system of "Emigration for Educated Women." The "Black Country" is, we fear, too true a picture of the social condition and moral wants of the district it treats of. "Helps to the Doctor" suggests co-operative societies of women to take upon themselves the care of the sick. Our readers must read the article for themselves, and form their own judgment of the feasibility of the plan. Such associations, to be of any practical value in their several localities, must first submit to be trained to the proper performance of their self-imposed duties; otherwise, we fear, instead of being "Helps to the Doctor," they would very likely be found hindrances. THE ODDFELLOW'S JOURNAL. (Manchester.) A very pleasant contribution to this number is Mr. Hardwick's sketchy paper, "Our Jerry." The familiar Y. S. N., in an article entitled "A Voice from a Sisterhood," touchingly recals the claims of superannuant governesses. Mr. Edwin Goadby's "Advice Gratis" is an amusing essay, on a subject of universal prescription, and which our sometimes own contributor has very cleverly handled. The remainder of the papers, however interesting to members of the fraternity, are not so in a literary sense. Smith, Soho Square. Derby: Beeton and Sons, THE RELIQUARY. (London: John Russell Irongate.) Let no one run away with the idea (which the editor, Mr. Llewellynn Jewett, tells us is rife in some circles) that this Quarterly is either "a Popish, or at least a Puseyite," publication. It is simply a literary depository for relics legendary, biographical, and historical; which relics, for the present, are all collected in one county-Derbyshire; to the history of which the learned éditor and his coadjutors are formation. In spite of the excellent illustrations, adding, from time to time, much interesting inin themselves exceedingly valuable, as preserving would be lost to the future, we regret that the the forms of many antiquities which otherwise high price of the work must immensely limit its circulation, and, in fact, confine it almost to the number contains some interesting papers, on anlocality from which it emanates. The present tiquarian and other matters. JOURNAL OF THE WORKHOUSE VISITING SOCIETY. (London: Longman, Green, and Co.) The value of this society appears to increase from month to month, and, indeed, can scarcely be over-rated. Forming a link of communication between the public and that great body of alms-men and women, the inmates of our workhouses, all that concerns the aged, the sick, or insane, and the children in them, are constantly made the subjects of discussion. Upon the theme of workhouse education we have a paper by Miss Louisa Twining, whose active interest in the subject is well known. It points out the different systems of education provided by the Poor Law, and states the main objections to them. This lady advocates, and on very just grounds, the education and training of the children apart from the contaminating |