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have ever had, - which did not and could not believe in the practicability of the French theory that a form of government may be improvised, and that the future may be shaped by anything less powerful and omnipresent than the past. They held it a cardinal truth in statesmanship, that a great part of the power of political ideas lay in their continuity (a truth we could wish to see more steadily kept in view by our members of Congress, who seem to like measures in proportion as they have not been tested by experience); and their mistake was in looking too exclusively to England for precedent, overlooking the fact that America had already developed certain irresistible tendencies more potent than even precedent itself. If we may call it a proof of political sagacity that John Adams and his son, at important crises, both subordinated party to what they considered higher claims, there is also something in human nature which sympathizes even more strongly with Pickering, who clung to a defeated and hopeless party all the more devotedly that it was defeated and hopeless.

This volume brings Colonel Pickering to the end of the Revolutionary War and to his fortieth year. It gives us glimpses of his college life; shows him to us before the war as a good citizen, always eager to be useful and always in earnest; and gives us a minute record of his services during the struggle for independence, as an officer of the line, leading member of the Board of War, and Adjutant-General of the Continental Army. The gentle and kindly side of his uncompromising character is brought out in his relations to home and family. Mr. Octavius Pickering has performed his task modestly, and with a judicious selection from his materials. The volume already published contributes much fresh and valuable material to our Revolutionary history. We get some new and unexpected light, for example, on the famous Newburg letters, the story of which, as here told, is a singular proof how little even the memory of the actors themselves may be trusted in establishing the facts of history. In this case, every survivor of those present, when the event about which a question had arisen took place, recollected differently, and was wrong in some essential particular. Colonel Pickering himself, with no temptation to be mistaken, nevertheless was mistaken, as his own letters of the time would have shown him, had he referred to them.

We shall look for the succeeding volumes of this work with much interest. They cannot fail to illustrate many obscure points in our political history, and to help us in forming a fairer judgment of the motives and conduct of the Federal party, - a party more often maligned than understood. When Mr. Pickering shall have finished his labors, we shall hope to do that justice to his subject, and his mode of treating it, which our limits forbid us now.

18. The Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts. By his Son, EDMUND QUINCY. Boston Ticknor and Fields. 1867. pp. xii., 560.

THE verdict of the public as to the interest of this volume has been so unanimous that we need do no more than say that, for once, the public is altogether right in its judgment. It is as interesting a biography of an American as was ever written; and, while the subject of it was in all ways a remarkable man, the taste and judgment of the biographer have enabled him not to obscure that, fact in the reader's mind, as has been done before now, in other cases, by unwieldy pens. If Mr. Edmund Quincy may well be proud of such a father, he may also feel a just satisfaction in having so admirably discharged all that was possible of the debt he owed to his example and memory.

19. The First Canticle (Inferno) of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Translated by THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra, & Co. 1867. pp. 216.

THE name of Dr. Parsons is familiar and dear as a poet to that limited number of his countrymen who have refined perceptions and a cultivated taste. His audience has not been so large as he deserved, not so large, perhaps, as those who appreciate him would have expected; but the quality of applause more than makes up for any lack of vociferation. Competent judges know him as a master of that classical English which culminated in Dryden, of that polished finish which had its last great example in Gray. Perhaps it will be luckier for him hereafter than it is now, that he has not been led astray from style into mannerism by any fashion of the day. His best poems have naturalness of thought, a grace of sentiment, and purity of diction truly Horatian, qualities sure of general acknowledgment sooner or later. We could name a dozen of them not surpassed in their kind by those of any contemporary. His poetry has the distinguished merit of not seeking for originality by overstepping simplicity, outside of whose limits it is never to be found in the marvellous perfection of its unexpectedness.

It is now twenty-five years since Dr. Parsons published ten Cantos of the Inferno, as a herald and specimen of his translation. He has in the mean while labored at the correction and revision of it with all the diligence of affection. He has chosen for his measure the pentameter quatrain of alternate rhymes, familiarized to all English ears by the famous Elegy of Gray. Davies and Davenant had already shown that

it might be successfully employed at greater length, the one in didactic, the other in epic poetry. Dr. Parsons, by an adroit interlacing of stanzas one with the other, and by an artistic distribution of the pauses elsewhere than at the end of the quatrain, has given to the measure all that it needed for his purpose both of continuity and variety. Davenant sometimes runs one stanza over into the next, but seldom, and apparently from necessity rather than with design. Commonly each stanza is a separate whole, and Gray's poem is a succession of epigrams (in the old sense) each perfect in itself and only connected by the general sentiment. In many cases the order might be changed without detriment either to the continuity of the thought or to the general effect. By Dr. Parsons's device, he cunningly contrives to give something of the effect of terza rima, while escaping its difficulty. We shall not enter upon the vexed question of rhyme and blank verse. The kind of fidelity attainable by each is different from that of the other, though it is not always safe to define this difference absolutely, as if it were inherent by the nature of the case, for surely blank verse is as capable of wings, as rhyme liable to jog wearily afoot. The latter, however, in artistic hands, seems to shoe the feet of verse with talaria, and surely is worth trying in the translation of a rhymed poem a part of whose peculiar quality lies in the form of its verse. The attempt has been several times made in English to translate Dante in this way, sometimes in terza rima, sometimes, as Dr. Parsons has done, with the semblance of it. But it has never before been made by a poet, and therefore never before with anything like the success of the translation before us. The great snare of rhyme for the translator is that it obliges him (what Dante boasted that no word had ever made him do) to say rather what he must than what he would. Some of Dr. Parsons's verses have suffered a little by being caught in this trap, though he has generally avoided it with consummate skill, and where he is best rises easily to the level of his theme. Where Dante is at his height, his translator kindles with a fire and attains a force that give his lines all the charm of original production, and we read real poetry, such as speaks the same meaning in all tongues. The most ungrateful part of his task is now done, and we look forward with an interest as keen as it was a quarter of a century ago, and with a confidence based on sure ground, to see him shake out his sails on the miglior acqua of the Purgatorio and Paradiso. His translation should be welcomed by all who are interested in native genius and scholarship, not as the rival of Longfellow's, but as a succedaneum to it.

NOTE.

THE ARMY LABORATORY AT PHILADELPHIA.

In a notice of "The Military Sanitary History of the United States during the last War, by Dr. Von Hawronitz," published in this journal in July last (North American Review, Vol. CV. p. 287), is the following passage:

“Dr. Hawronitz was undoubtedly led to believe that the Army Laboratory was an important auxiliary to the army medical service, when in point of fact it was a mere apothecary shop, where the preparations procured for the army from our own chemical laboratories, and in lavish and most injudicious proportions from foreign manufacturers, were 'put up' in the absurd and extravagant manner prescribed by Army Regulations.""

From information which has recently been supplied to us, we are convinced that the preceding statement is incorrect as regards the character and usefulness of the Army Laboratory, and conveys an unfair impression of the manner in which its work was conducted and its functions discharged. Not only were its operations on a scale of great magnitude, but they were directed with judgment, vigor, and ability, and much important work was done in the Laboratory which the private pharmaceutical and chemical establishments in the country could not have been looked to to discharge in an equally satisfactory man

ner.

We regret that the sentence we have quoted found place in our pages. [EDS.]

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