space as results of His own existence in any other way we cannot know." The note expresses the philosophy of Kant; the text that of Newton and Clarke. We shall have to return to this subject in a future article on Magic.

Holy Water vindicated is No. 2 of the "Halifax (Nova Scotia) Tracts for the Times." A scriptural, patristic, and ritual illustration of the Catholic doctrine on holy water, well drawn up, complete and satisfactory; so solid and argumentative indeed, that we regret the presence of the few pages of "smart" writing which the writer has prefixed to the substance of his tract. No doubt the vagaries of vulgar Protestantism are silly and offensive enough, and it is (sometimes) entertaining to Catholics to read about them; though the subject soon grows tiresome. But it is the worst policy to place this kind of hit at the beginning of a publication which is meant to be read by those very people whom you are turning to ridicule. You might as well expect to conciliate a man's deference to your conversation by giving him a slap in the face.

Three Lectures on the Correlation of Psychology and Physiology, by Daniel Noble, M.D. (London, Richards). "Dr. Noble is a gentleman whose acquirements are well known to our readers at Manchester. His three lectures, here republished, give many very remarkable instances of the action of the will and the imagination on the brain, and thus on the whole action of the functions of the body. We rejoice to see these kind of subjects taken up by men who, like Dr. Noble, unite professional acuteness and liberality of mind to that faith which will preserve them from falling into the materialist delusions too common both in this country and abroad.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE.

Hard Times: for these Times: by Charles Dickens. This is a reprint, in one volume, of a tale which has already appeared in "Household Words." Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed magnate of Coketown (in the manufacturing districts), with the aid and advice of his friend Josiah Bounderby, a banker, hard-headed, hard-hearted, and purseproud, educates his two eldest children, Louisa and Tom, on facts and figures, to the entire exclusion of tastes and affections. The system bears fruit. Louisa, in callous misery, sacrifices herself in marriage to Bounderby, thirty years her senior, and is only saved from the snares of a seducer by a timely flight to her father's roof. Tom turns thief, and robs the safe in the Bounderby bank, where he is a clerk, but escapes to die abroad in wretchedness, having succeeded in throwing suspicion on an innocent man, Stephen Blackpool, a weaver, who, in hot haste to clear himself, pitches headlong down an old mine-shaft, and is so mangled that, as soon as rescued, he expires. This dreary framework is filled in by the loves of Stephen, who, in his youth, married a drunkard, from whom, to his and Mr. Dickens' disgust, neither death nor the laws will divorce him; and Rachel, a fellow "hand" of pattern goodness, who is his guiding star. A star of the same kind is supplied to poor Louisa, in her trouble, by Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a clown in Sleary's horseriding troupe, the latter dividing the comic business of the tale with Mrs. Sparsit, a sort of brown-holland edition of Volumnia in our author's "Bleak House," who acts as housekeeper to Mr. Bounderby. Here and there we meet with touches not

unworthy of the inventor of " Pickwick;" but, on the whole, the story is stale, flat, and unprofitable; a mere dull melodrama, in which character is caricature, sentiment tinsel, and moral (if any) unsound. It is a thousand pities that Mr. Dickens does not confine himself to amusing his readers, instead of wandering out of his depth in trying to instruct them. The one, no man can do better; the other, few men can do worse. With all his quickness of perception, his power of seizing salient points and surface-shadows, he has never shown any ability to pierce the depths of social life, to fathom the wells of social action. He can only paint what he sees, and should plan out his canvas accordingly. No doubt great evils exist in manufacturing towns, and elsewhere; but, nevertheless, steam-engines and power-looms are not the evil principle in material shape, as the folly of a conventional humanitarian slang insists on making them. The disease of Coketown will hardly be stayed by an abstinence from facts and figures; nor a healthy reaction insured by a course of cheap divorce and the poetry of nature. In short, whenever Mr. Dickens and his school assume the office of instructors, it is, as Stephen Blackpool says, 66 aw a muddle! Fro first to last, a muddle!"

The Poetry of Christian Art. Translated from the French of A. F. Rio (Bosworth). Many translators murder the books they pretend to translate; but the lady who has translated this charming volume has preferred to murder its author. In a note at page 215, she says that "had Rio been alive at the present day," he would have done so and so. As we happen to have the pleasure of M. Rio's acquaintance, we can assure his translator that he is not a man of a past age, but a gentleman still alive, not advanced in years, and in the full enjoyment of all his faculties. He will, moreover, when he sees the volume before us, regret that when its translator undertook the work, she did not endeavour to ascertain his wishes on the subject; for we happen to know that he did not wish it to be translated without revision by himself, and that he purposed making certain important additions to the work in the event of a translation being undertaken. As it is, we can only trust that a second edition may enable the translator to remedy her error. another page she speaks of Quatremère de Quincy's life of Raffaelle, as if it was not easily to be procured; not knowing that a translation of it, by Hazlitt, was published in Bogue's European Library in 1846. Apart from her extinguishment of our friend M. Rio, we cordially thank the translator for presenting the English reader with perhaps the most delightful book on early and mediæval Christian art which exists. M. Rio is an enthusiast for the earlier as opposed to the later schools of Italian art; and if he now and then pushes his views to what may be a slight exaggeration, his remarks are ever those of an accomplished scholar and an enlightened critic. His style is lively, agreeable, and earnest, and it translates well. It is also a pleasant feature in his book that it shows more knowledge and appreciation of English literature than is usual with French writers.

In

The Parlour Library is the oldest and one of the best of the now innumerable shilling affairs which load the railway bookstalls. It has lately passed into the hands of a very respectable publisher, who, we believe, is anxious to steer clear of all those objectionable books which deform too many of these cheap series. Its newest volumes are a republication of "Mark's Reef" and "The Sea-Lions," by Fenimore Cooper, always most at home in his sea-stories.

Grantley Manor, a Tale; by Lady Georgiana Fullerton. A new

edition (Burns and Lambert). This is a new, cheap, and at the same time handsome edition of Lady Georgiana Fullerton's delightful novel, well known to the general novel-reading public, but not sufficiently so to the Catholic reader. We recommend it to every one who likes a story full of grace and refinement, and showing Catholics in their every-day life, without controversy or any of that obtrusiveness which characterises the "religious novel." It is a book to buy, keep, and lend, and not merely to be hired from the circulating library. We are glad to see that our publishers are prepared to send it by post, without any charge for postage, on receiving the price (Four shillings) in postage-stamps.

Chambers' Journal is a periodical to which we always turn with interest, as the best of all such publications, and to our tastes far superior to Household Words. It rarely contains any thing to which any Catholic will object, and we should be sincerely glad to know that it never would contain any thing to unfit it for general circulation among our poor. Such, we believe, is Messrs. Chambers' wish, though now and then articles have found their way into some numbers of their Edinburgh Journal (to which this is the successor), which have been far from unobjectionable. Its enterprising conductors will understand us, when we say that, rejoiced as we are to see their Journal widely circulated among the Catholic poor, we cannot but watch jealously against the propagation of any thing derogatory to the truth of our faith. The September Part, now before us, is as sensible, agreeable, and instructive as usual. The paper on "The Daily Newspaper" is worth reading by every one. Another, on Lucifer and the Poets," if really appreciated by the mass of its readers, indicates a high degree of intelligence in them. We could have wished that the paragraph on Bailey's Lucifer had more clearly pointed out its objectionable features. The extract on "The Externals of a Gentleman," too, would tend to make gents and snobs, rather than to refine the rude to the standard of the true gentle

man.

Katharine Ashton, by the Author of "Amy Herbert," &c, (London, Longmans). This is another novel by the Anglo-Catholic" lady to whose literary labours the Rev. William Sewell has hitherto so well and naturally acted the part of sage-femme, and who has deservedly obtained a reputation extending far beyond the limits of the coterie to which she belongs by the real talent which she manifested in "Amy Herbert." We are sure that the present novel will not increase her reputation. The general public will not take much interest in the development of that scrupulous and fidgety religiosity that constitutes the only possible material out of which to compose a Pusey in petticoats, however interesting the story with which it is interwoven. But here the story is not over-interesting; it turns too much on those minute characteristics of feeling and temper which true Puseyites are so fond of observing and analysing, and on which, instead of on acts of the will, they generally make true religion to turn. This school is as much bitten with the organisation" or "temper" theory as Dickens and his followers, only the latter do manage to turn out of their workshops real buoni diavoli, or jolly fellows, while the former do not seem capable of appreciating any thing but scrupulous persons, whose consciences delight in spiritual self-tormenting. When we are out of the realms of grace, we certainly have a weakness for good nature and geniality, as the Germans call it.

66

The Dramatic Works of Mary Russell Mitford (2 vols. London,

Hurst and Blackett). Miss Mitford is one of the few female authors who have been successful on the stage; and she now, in her declining years, re-edits these productions of her maturity, prefacing them with an introduction that is quite a model of a pure English style; it overflows with kindly feeling, a modest appreciation of her own abilities, and that sort of pathos which is inseparable from a narrative of youthful feelings and incidents when related from the point of view of a person almost sinking beneath her increasing infirmities. There is something about it quite touching.

The Royal Phraseological English-French, French-English Dictionary, by J. C. Tarver, French Master, Eton (2 vols. large 8vo, London, Dulau; Eton, E. Williams). This is an excellent, but very voluminous Dictionary. The characteristic of it is, that all the meanings of the words which have more than one are illustrated by specimens of the phrases in which they occur. It has already reached a second edition.

The Russians in Bulgaria and Rumelia in 1828 and 1829, from the German of Baron von Moltke (London, Murray). This is a standard work on the campaigns of the Danube, the sieges of Brailow, Varna, Silistria, and Shumla, and the passage of the Balkan by Marshal Diebitsch. A very interesting appendix gives an account of the horrible diseases which destroyed the greater part of the Russian armies in these campaigns.

Gymnastics an essential Branch of National Education, by Captain Chiosso (Walton and Maberly). With the natural exaggeration of a "Professor" of the art, Captain Chiosso writes a good deal of sound sense on the advantage of muscular excrcise, in order to counteract the mischiefs of a sedentary life.

FOREIGN LITERATURE.

Besides M. Huc's book, which we review in another place, several works of interest have reached us this month, to which we shall only allude here, as we intend to notice them at length. The most important of these is Father Ravignon's "Clément XIII et Clément XIV;” in connection with which we may mention a work on the system of education as pursued by the Jesuits at the time of the dissolution of their order, by M. Maynard. M. Bareille has translated Balmez' Miscellaneous Works on Religion, Philosophy, Politics, and Literature; they are most of them articles contributed by him to an ecclesiastical review. Another volume of the translations of the works of St. Teresa, by Father Bouix, S.J., is now published: it appears to be, so far, the best French edition of her works.

THE

RAMBLER.

VOL. II. New Series. NOVEMBER 1854.

PART XI.

THE "CIVILISATION" ARGUMENT.

CATHOLICS Who mix much with the world are often attacked with some such questions as these: "If Catholicism is from God, and is the only true Gospel, how is it that the political and social condition of Catholic countries is often so degraded? How is it that, while freedom, commerce, and national power have attained so glorious a height in Protestant England, Catholic Spain is a prey to factions, revolutions, tyranny, and general decay? How is it that Naples is an effete despotism, and that Sardinia is torn with conflicts between the government and the Church? More than all, how is it that the Romans themselves, where the Pope and Cardinals have it all their own way, are a feeble, dirty, frivolous race, submitting unwillingly to the rule of ecclesiastics, or rather hating it so cordially, that the Pope is only maintained on his throne by the bayonets of France? To put the whole question in a sentence,-If England is wrong, and Rome is right, why is the civilisation of the Papal States inferior to that of England?"

How repeatedly the facts thus assumed, thus embodied, are thrust in our faces by our fellow-countrymen, we need not linger to show. From the senate to the mechanic's institute, from the bench of bishops to the spouting shoemaker on his tub, from the Times newspaper to the placards and handbills of every country town, the same taunt is flung in our eyes, the same (as it is thought) irresistible weapon is flourished over our heads. The polished gentleman with his well-bred sneer, and the low-lived talker with the coarse insolence of his vulgar abuse, agree in casting the same reproach in our teeth, and in asking us how that creed which degrades man can come from God.

Like every other apparently forcible argument against Catholicism, this reproach, thus conveyed, is based, to a very great extent, on a gross perversion and mis-statement of facts.

VOL. II.-NEW SERIES.

CC