MR. FROTHINGHAM'S "TRANSCENDENTALISM IN NEW ENGLAND "* is an interesting and valuable history, if a work so sketchy and uncritical deserves to be called a history. It is interesting for the manner in which the author has collected and arranged his materials and the pleasant way in which he has recited his tale of men and books and systems. It is valuable because it will preserve the memory of not a few incidents, the memory of which was fast dying out in the present generation. The phases of speculative thought in this generation are becoming very unlike those which astonished conservative Boston and traditional New England some thirty-five years ago, when Rev. George Ripley dared to defend Christianity on the ground of its inner spirit, in default and without the aid of miracles, and his doctrine was assailed by Prof. Andrews Norton as the latest form of infidelity; when Ralph Waldo Emerson vexed and grieved his father's friends and his own by his astonishing address to the senior class in Divinity College in 1838, and Theodore Parker sprung a mine among his brethren a few years later in his memorable ordination sermon.

Mr. Frothingham's sketch of the Kantean Philosophy cannot be said to be incorrect so far as it goes. Perhaps it goes far enough to satisfy its author and his readers. It is surprising that he omits altogether to record the application which Kant made of his own principles to the questions of supernaturalism and revelation, in which he anticipated, with a much more vigorous logic than that of many of his followers, the vague and florid unbelief of so many of the New England transcendentalists. We observe that the great movements for reform are referred by him more exclusively to the Unitarian and Rationalistic Transcendentalists as their originators than the truth would warrant. The orthodox faith and the orthodox conscience of many who were in no sense Transcendentalists contributed very largely to the growth and strength of the movement against temperance and slavery, and brought no little practical wisdom and self-sacrifice to the cause of right in the hour of trial. There were not a few philosophical Transcendentalists in New England who held fast to a supernatural Christianity as their predecessors had done in the days of Herbert and Collins. We ought not to be surprised that such a thinker and writer as Mr. Frothingham should not do justice to

* Transcendentalism in New England. A History by OCTAVIUS BROOKS FROTHINGHAM, author of "Life of Theodore Parker," "Religion of Humanity," etc., etc. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1876.

these aspects of Transcendentalism. He has done the best which he could; as a literary artist he deserves our heartiest commendation, as a critic and a theologian he has done the best which so negative and mystical a thinker as he could possibly achieve.

PRESIDENT BASCOM'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION* is a vigorous and independent discussion of the grounds of religious belief. The topics are Matter and Mind, God, Nature, Man, Immortality, Revelation, Miracles, Inspiration, Interpretation, Sin and Divine Law, Trinity, Christ, his Divinity and Work, Holy Spirit, Sanctification, the Church, Future Life, Lines and Conditions of Progress. These topics are all treated with the greatest freedom from conventional language and traditions, with a spirit fully alive to the destructive tendencies of modern thought, and yet with a moral earnestness which now and then rises to eloquent fervor. The candid and thoughtful reader may fail to be convinced by some of the utterances the author puts forth as arguments, he may now and then weary of the needless length of his discussions, but he can not fail to find much in the volume which is pertinent to the difficulties and objections which are current in these times, and now and then an important contribution to the defence and vindication of the Christian Faith.

The discussions in this volume naturally invite extended criticisms, but these we must leave to each reader to furnish for himself.

PROF. HENRY N. DAY'S ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOLOGY* is a small volume of 248 pages, but it gives us the results of faithful and earnest and independent thinking and contains some novelties in the science of the human soul. The classification adopted by the author is peculiar to himself, in that he classes under the sensibility, the imagination and the memory in all their functions, so far as it would appear to the casual reader. Only the reader who is well acquainted with Psychological Science would correct this natural construction of the author's meaning and interpret him as referring only the passive and unconscious affections and activ

* A Philosophy of Religion, or, the Rational Grounds of Religious Belief. By JOHN BASCOM, author of "Principles of Psychology," 'Philosophy of English Literature," "Esthetics," etc. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1876.

* Elements of Psychology. By HENRY N. DAY, author of "Logic," "Moral Science," "Esthetics," "Art of Discourse," etc. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1876.

ities of the mind in imagination and memory to the sensibility, and this on the ground of their passivity. We have no doubt that this treatise may be made an interesting and useful text book, if it is used by an able and thoughtful teacher, and would recommend it to instructors and students as an able and ingenious and independent work, which does great credit to its much respected and most laborious author.

ROUND MY HOUSE.*—This book has a real value for its descriptions of country life in France, by a thoughtful and unprejudiced observer, who had his home for years in one of its remote provinces. Nothing can be more unlike what the foreigner usually sees in Paris than the people and the scenes which he describes. The results of his observations are the more deserving of attention just now, as the rural population of France are acquiring more and more political importance. In no country of Western Europe also is the "peasant-world," as he calls it, so large in proportion to the whole population. Mr. Hamerton tells us that among this vast number of people "few can read easily enough to do it for their pleasure," and that practically "the book and the newspaper have no direct influence upon peasant life." One of the results of the "incredible ignorance" of the French country people, he says, is that they do not even know what the word "France" means; and it was this entire absence of all geographical knowledge which made the peasantry, in a measure, insensible to any patriotic appeals during the Franco-German war. "Tell them that the war has ended in the loss of Alsatia and Loraine. This conveys no direct idea to their minds. Why should they make sacrifices for the people of Alsatia who were always as foreigners to them.” This absence of national feeling, incredible as it seems to us, is illustrated at length. We have no space in which to follow the author in his interesting description of this subject, or even to enumerate the titles of the other subjects which he takes up. It must suffice to say that he describes all the phases of country life in France as he became acquainted with it in the familiar intercourse of years with all classes and conditions of people in a provincial town. We ought not to close without some reference to the charm of Mr. Hamerton's style, which throws an additional interest around every subject which he

treats.

* Round my House; Notes of rural life in France in peace and war. By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1876. 12mo. pp. 415.

BARNUM'S ENGLISH RHYMES.*-We fear that Mr. Barnum, by the preparation of this very convenient book, has rendered himself accountable for an immediate increase in the number of rhymsters which it is appaling to contemplatc. He has made in fact a great labor-saving machine by which an indefinite number of rhymes may be turned out at a moment's notice. A hundred years ago, Walker published a "Rhyming Dictionary," which was so clumsily arranged, and put together in so defective a manner, that it is doubtful whether any one was ever actually enticed by it into perpetrating doggerel, who was not already strongly predisposed. For a hundred years his book has remained the only book of the kind, and it is practically so worthless that in all probability not one in a thousand of the poetasters of the day ever heard of it. But Mr. Barnum has constructed a new book on what is undoubtedly the correct principle. It is so simple that the wonder is no one has ever attempted it before! "Words are arranged according to their rhyming adaptations and sounds." That is all! But we foresee in this remarkably innocent, and, we may say, to the ordinary mind, uninteresting book, a new danger to the literature of the day. It is but fair to say, however, that Mr. Barnum takes a more hopeful view of the situation. He expresses the hope in his preface, that "it will aid poets and versifiers to do their work better and more easily; and thus it will assist in the cultivation of good taste and feeling, the improvement of literature, the promotion of human welfare, and the glory of Him who is Lord of all."

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