Karl Hildebrand makes a stirring appeal in the January Contemporary on behalf of England in the eighteenth century. It was lately the fashion to decry the political life of that period as corrupt, its religious life as death under another name, and its literary development as contemptible. On the contrary, as the result of " minute analysis, Hildebrand shews that under all three aspects English thought and action were never more fruitful than then, It was an age of religious revival, witness Wesley and Whitfield, of literary wealth, witness Swift, and of political energy, witness the improvements introduced into the constitttion, and the foreign wars in defence of European independence against schemes of universal mouatehy.—Mr. Robert Buchanan tells in smoothly running verse a tale of a philosopher who brought up his only son in the Lueretian creed, and found that body of negative belief all insufficient to sustain him when death snatched away the object of his idolatry. Apart from its poetic merits, which are distinctly high, the tale is most artistically constructed to suggest a moral which is nowhere thrust under the reader's eyes, Humour and pathos are skilfully blended into a whole which will, we think, agreeably astonish those who stand outside the very select circle of Mr, Buchanan's admirers.—We pass by a rambling paper by Professor Blackie on Landlords and Land Laws, and a criticism by Professor Calderwood of Herbert Spencer's last book, The latter is unintelligible to anyone who has not The Data of Lithics at hand for consultation. Mr, Matthew Browne writes pleasantly on Charles Dickens's lately published Letters, in which the great humourist displays all the strength and weakness of which his novels give proof. Alongside of his genuine love for the young and his passionate desire to see them well treated, we find his hard practical common sense; alongside of his elaborate and studied pathos, we find his generally pervading commonplace against his amiability, which ever seeks to reconcile us to human nature, there is to be placed his failure to depict any single character of grandeur; while his generosity and occasional unselfishness are alloyed with a self-consciousness and self-esteem which in a lesser man would be ludicrous, but in Charles Dickens suggests an admiring and half-doubting pity. It must be said, however, that when Dickens displays his weakness he is mostly writing to members of his own family, and "a man is not an egotist when he tells the story of his adventures to his wife or sister.""—Canon Rawlinson adds another name to the list of royal authors by placing Cyrus the Great among them. We are all familiar with the decrees preserved in the book of Ezra, and some of us have heard of the Loftus brick brought some thirty years ago from lower Babylonia, and since somewhat squabbled over by cuneiform scholars, which contained a fragment of a proclamation by the "great king." A fourth work from his stylus consists of but a few words, and is still to be seen in its original position on the jambs of a gateway near the "Tomb of Cyrus" at Muigab. Quite recently (summer of 1879), yet another proclamation was brought to light from one of the Baby-ionian ruins, and the contents of this are translated at length by the writer, and form the subject of his article. This proclamation is the longest of those extant, but is mainly remarkable for the light it throws on Cyrus's inner being. Hitherto we have been accustomed to regard Cyrus as in character, just and simple, gentle and kind in religion a monotheist; in disposition devout. But in the newly-discovered proclamation he announces himself as, if not renegade from the faith of his fathers, at least a perfect indifferentist, ready to see in Jehovah or Jove the equivalent of Ahura-Mazda, Merodach, Asshur, Mel-earth or Ritamon, This view, though under the circumstances surprising, is after all the most probable one. The leader of great conquering race, unless he be like Mahomet, a converter by profession as well as a warrior, must necessarily be a syncretist, else general discontent and continual rebellion would ever harass the rear of his advancing armies, The Jewish prophets seem to have been somewhat too enthusiastic in their celebrations
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.