We part from Mr. Fox Bourne with thanks for a well written book on a subject worth writing about. If we cannot always. share his admiration for his hero, we can always appreciate the results of it in careful statement and patient investigation. And his American publishers have done their part admirably in presenting his book to the public, though we notice a few misprints, especially in dates. R. E. T.

STUDY OF HAWTHORNE,

NEW BOOKS.

By George Parsons Lathrop. 18mo. Boston: Jas. R. Osgood & Co.

This is a pains-taking account of Hawthorne's life and works, by a genuine admirer. All the great American writers deserve far more study and analysis at the hands of their countrymen than they have yet got, and the volume moves in the right direction. If there be such a thing as a national style, it is high time we had a glimmering of what ours is. But we lay this book down, notwithstanding much interesting, and to us new information, and a great deal of suggestive comparison, without the distinct and orderly impression we had hoped to receive from it. We do not know whether it is because Mr. Lathrop has undertaken too much in attempting to combine the functions of biographer and critic, or whether the obscurity arises from his failure to separate the offices sufficiently. On the same page, and frequently in the same sentence, he will relate a fact in Hawthorne's life and argue from it some effect in his works. There is an effort to reconstruct the Genius from his ancestors, from his birthplace, his early reading; to trace Milton and Bunyan into him, and to parallel him with Balzac, George Sand, Irving and Poe. He is held up as an American genius in contradistinction to the types of other nations. Now we consider this, with all respect be it spoken, a very defective critical method. It is true, that every thoughtful man does make just such investigations and theories, and that they are to him very interesting, great aids to memory, and good frames to hang his ideas in; but then, on the other hand, they are apt to be fanciful, and at the best, they lie in the region of dense uncertainty. We once knew a man who thought all Frenchmen resembled monkeys, and his reasonings on the subject were profoundly satisfactory to himself, and greatly conducive to sprightly conversation. Such literary judgments-we are not referring to the monkey theoryrest on a few out of an immense number of unknown or forgotten facts, each one of which alone and in relation to others has some,

but some uncertain weight in the problem. Perhaps the most trivial incidents have had the deepest influence. Certainly no one of us could pretend to a satisfactory explanation of his own character and temper at this moment. Whoever undertakes to account for a literature, a school, or an author, or having done so to compare them with other literatures, schools, and authors, and explain the difference, treats his reader to an amount of conjectures that makes the dryest certainty absolutely delicious. It is fair to say that much of this is suggested by, rather than said of, the particular book in hand.

In his honest admiration of Hawthorne, we fear Mr. Lathrop occasionally bears too hard on other American writers compared with him. Notably Poe, whose horrors have often brought him into contrast with Hawthorne's mysterious vein, suffers at his hands. His estimate of him is certainly too low and unnecessarily severe. His prose was as original, crisp and well formed as possible. And we fail to find in his tales, which appear to us to have been put together with the study and deliberation of a puzzle, the subjective tendency which Mr. Lathrop deplores. In this connection it is of interest to revert to the criticism of Poe himself upon Hawthorne: "Allegory is at war with the whole tone of his nature, which disports itself never so well as when escaping from the mysticism of his Goodman Browns and White Old Maids into the hearty, genial, but still Indian-summer sunshine of his Wakefields and Little Annie's Rambles. Indeed, his spirit of metaphor run mad is clearly imbibed from the phalanx and phalanstery atmosphere in which he has been so long struggling for truth. He has not half the material for the exclusiveness of authorship that he possesses for its universality. He has the purest style, the finest taste, the most available scholarship, the most delicate humor, the most touching pathos, the most radiant imagination, the most consummate ingenuity; and with these varied good qualities he has done well as a mystic. But is there any one of these qualities which should prevent his doing doubly well in a career of honest, upright, sensible, prehensible, and comprehensible things? Let him mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of The Dial, and throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of the North America Review.”

THE CENTENNIAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE NATURAL LAWS OF MARRIAGE, LEGITIMACY, AND LIFE IN GENERAL. By Geo. J. Ziegler, M. D. Philadelphia: Geo. J. Ziegler.

"Love goeth where it listeth"-that we know, but we may not know the laws of its genesis and of its distribution. Indeed, we fear that if laws there be of human amativeness and of marrying

and giving in marriage, they are shut out by a merciful Providence from the ken of mortals that are exceedingly given to marrying, if not to loving. Can any one imagine the consequence of a careful study and observance of the so-called physiological laws of matrimony-how hampered all spontaneous feeling would be-how anxiously would the individual exercise his, or her judgment upon the physiological merits of fatness or leanness, of temperament, of dark or light hair, and of other transient personal traits that we have to-day and have not to-morrow, according as the world uses us well or ill?

is

It is not the fault surely of a large class of writers that society ignorant upon the physiological relations of marriage. The bibliography of this kind of literature is immense, designed ap-. parently to suit all sorts of tastes. In such a field, of course, there are good books and bad books, the usual consequence of moral and literary excellence being reversed,-the bad receiving more attention than they deserve, while those that are written for the purpose of instruction are left unread.

But upon the subject of matrimony, even in its physiological aspects, society unwittingly does very well. There is every reason to believe that the majority of married people are happy, and that the majority of their children are healthy, the very results that writers claim are gained by observing these so-called laws. Instinctively people seek those matrimonial relations that are good for them; and that the unions generally end well is ample proof that this instinct may be trusted. Theology is a better teacher than science in matters matrimonial; and its teachings may be summed up something in this form: Take no heed (physiologically speaking) as to whom you should marry, but live virtuously and cleanly, and marry just as soon as there is the wherewithal to fill more mouths than one; fear God, love one another, and honor -since we cannot say the king-an honest politician, for he is more precious than gold. Know and believe in this one and simple law of marriage, which is physiological, theological and wholly divine; that we marry in obedience to a Power that numbers the hairs of our head in His infinite solicitude, that looks after the fitness and beauty and perpetuation of man and flowers alike. Here there is scope for a sexual selection spontaneous, unfettered, that insures happiness and health as a natural sequence of its unconscious freedom.

In Dr. Ziegler's book there is much to be commended and much to be found fault with. All that he has to say upon sexual disorders, is well said, and deserves attention, with just a suspicion of radicalism about it; but we can forgive a man's being a radical when he writes with the motives of a reformer upon the subject of alcohol, tobacco, and venereal diseases. Upon the main theme of the book, that of marriage, the author, with the best intentions in the world, we presume, advances views that are not conducive to

either the happiness or safety of society. We cannot coincide with his theory of "natural marriage." In the majority of states there are laws to punish the relations of the sexes to which the author applies this term. As a large part of the book is not suited to a popular review, it would be an injustice to the author to condemn without giving the reader a chance to judge for himself. To those who are interested in literature of this character, and are specialists enough to sift the good from the bad, we may perhaps commend the book; but it would certainly be a mistake to give it a general circulation.

A WOMAN'S WORK. Letters and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel. Edited by Mrs. J. F. Herschel. New York: Harpers. 1876.

Caroline Herschel was, in her day, a very notable person. The sister of a famous astronomer, Sir William Herschel, she took more pride in his fame than in any of her own achievements, and yet her distinction as an astronomer was such as to secure for her many awards of scientific societies. The filial devotion of the wife of another Herschel of our own time, has put upon record the charming memoir and correspondence of Caroline Herschel, in a volume published by Harpers, which, more than her own scientific publications, will make her name familiar and perpetuate a devotion to science and a self-abnegation that will always be instructive. Living to ninety-eight, Caroline Herschel spent the last twenty years of her life in almost absolute retirement, still doing a fair share of scientific work for her nephew, Sir John Herschel, and thus enabling him to carry on and extend the observations and researches of his father. But it was only to do honor to his memory that she made a record of her own work, and with his death she felt that her life was in the past, dedicated to the task of completing his labors and of encouraging his son in following the father's pursuit of science for its own sake. Her long life extended from the Seven Years' War, which was not without its influence upon her childish experiences, through the American War, the old French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and all the varied events of almost a century; yet she scarcely in writing her memoirs mentions public events, or speaks of other occupations than that of "minding the heavens," which engrossed all her own and her brother's thoughts Indeed, even of her own important contributions to science she thought little, and counted it her great good fortune and distinction to be able to claim that she was of some use in helping that brother on in his great work. When in her old age, an old age that was full of interest and anxiety for those who were carrying on the astronomical researches that had for ever connected the name of Herschel with astronomy, she laughingly accepted the honors thrust upon her by scientific societies, but she took them only as

tributes to the service she had rendered her brother. With the small preparation that a narrow home life could give, she started out to help her brother in his original career as a musician and followed him to England to be his helpmeet and housekeeper; but her force of character, her indefatigable industry, and her indomitable ambition to keep abreast of all his interests, enabled her to join in the pursuit which gave him fame, that of astronomical research. Undaunted by poverty and the necessity almost of inventing as well as manufacturing his apparatus, he persisted in his work, and it was only a poor help that he found in the royal patronage which promised so much and performed so little; but through it all Caroline Herschel was his untiring scribe and co-worker. Forty years of unceasing scientific work, and for a long time with the care of all housekeeping and other domestic provision, might well have made her impatient of other men and women, who with greater advantages made little or no use of them, but Caroline Herschel seems, all through her life, to have had wonderful sweetness of temper and a self-abnegation that of itself ought to make her memory precious. Her discoveries of eight comets, her immense labor in the reduction and record of vast series of observations, her readiness in assisting her brother in perfecting machinery for his work, her catalogues and index of stars for the use of astronomers, all these constitute her claim to be recognized as an independent authority in science; but although she worked until she was seventy-five, it was never from any other motive than to assist her brother in his life or to complete the record of his work after his death, After fifty years of such companionship, she returned to Hanover, and, naturally enough, found life there dull and common-place, wanting the great impulse of her brother's scientific pursuits. Still her love of science encouraged and drew encouragement from the work of the son of that brother; and thus the long years of her exile from her old post, the observatory, were softened by the knowledge that the name and fame of the family were still prominent in her all-absorbing science. She lived, however, altogether in the past, and found the present not only strange but annoying. Her life is thus still another lesson not to pray for length of days, except in so far as it gives time for diligent labor in

real work.