many regards, have been unnecessarily encumbered with the details of learning, covering up and keeping out of sight the results, which are of vastly more concern. Commentaries are often profuse where all is plain sailing, and most provokingly scanty and unsatisfactory where a real difficulty is in the way. This may not be urged as an objection against this Bible-work. It is not in the habit of German scholarship to slur over any difficulty. Though even here it would be a decided advantage did the German mind study a little more the condensation so essential in these days. This volume comprises Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. It is well that these four books are considered together. There is a unity here deeper than the mere matter of being bound together in the same volume. In date they belong to the same general period of Jewish history, the depression of the post-exile period and the hope of something better struggling into birth and being. This post-exile literature has mainly to do with the fresh, though faint and feeble, revival of the nation's life centring in the grand undertaking, allowed by Cyrus (Ezra i. 2-4), of rebuilding the Temple, and so giving an impulse and nucleus to the return of this "peeled" and scattered people to their own land. These Commentaries are an immense help to a right understanding of this national movement, — reaching wider than the nation itself; taking on, in fact, a world-embracing character in the Messianic hope it imbosomed and carried on to full accomplishment. All historic activity gathers itself about prominent persons. It was so in ancient, as it is even so in modern, times. Ezra and Nehemiah were leaders in the regenerated life of the nation. Old tradition as well as modern criticism accredit these men as the authors mainly of this post-exile literature. Certain it is that they were in the best position for the performance of such work. But withal there is clearly the presence throughout of a retouching hand, the hand of a later editor, and, in some cases, supplementer. Taking its annalistic character into consideration, the question may be asked, and it is a serious one, Why "Chronicles" at all, — why, in the ordinary economy of Holy Scripture, this seeming duplication of the sacred history? The Rev. Dr. Zöckler, the German author of the Commentary, meets the question in his "Introduction" in a full and able way. He defends it against the charge of being a mere repetition of the other historical books, maintaining for it a supplemental character. "The last book of the Old Testament canon forms a comprehensive history, which recapitulates the progress of the people of God from Paradise to the close of the Babylonish captivity in a peculiar point of view, partly extracting, partly repeating, and partly supplementing the con tents of the earlier canonical books of history, with the exception of the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, which are later in point of contents." So far from being a repetition of Samuel and Kings, "Chronicles" furnished just such a compendious and continuous history as, under circumstances of great national depression, was needed, in its fresh vitality, to inspire encouragement and hope; "bridging over,” as another says, "the gulf which separated the nation after, from the nation before, the captivity." It connects the hopeful present with the historic past, and that in order to carry the whole history of this marvellous people forward, in a legitimate way, towards its own gracious end in the Divine "fulness of time." Thus it is, "Chronicles" comes to be something more than what many Bible-readers regard it, of dry genealogical tables. Nothing could well be further from the truth. History is life. It is a movement steadily reaching onward to its purpose and end. This nation had a divine mission, and in its continuous, though compendious record, "Chronicles" joined together the sundered threads of its own national distinctness, looking backward to its Divine starting and forward, through Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Malachi, to its Divine end, the fulfilment in Christ of Israel's wondrous history and hope. a series It is the highest commendation of this volume that it proceeds upon this inlying burden of all Jewish history. And thus, what would have been nothing other than dry detail, or the mere registry of names, in direct connection with the Divine mission of this people, is lifted up into real historic significance and gracious importance. The translators have done their work well. They have made the volume worthy to take its place along with its fellows. Only three volumes yet remain to complete the whole series. This Commentary of twenty-four volumes, crowded with critical information and Biblical learning, is an invaluable acquisition to the library of every thoughtful student of God's Word. 16. An Introduction to Political Economy. By ARTHUR LATHAM PER- PROFESSOR PERRY has an established reputation as an ardent advocate of free-trade. The goddess of Professor Wilson's worship is Labor, that of Professor Perry's is Exchange. The axioms of the free-traders that every man has a right to pursue his own interest, that if all are left free to do so the best result will be obtained, and that, as government does everything badly, it had better do as little as possible—are well known. But nothing is more certain than that society is a mass of artificial restrictions which habit alone prevents from becoming intolerable. Nobody is left free to follow his own ideas of interest. Professor Perry says, "He is an enemy to the human race who, for ends of his own, undertakes, by means of the action of government, to prevent exchanges which would otherwise take place." But then he is obliged to add that government may restrain exchanges in the interest, 1. of public health; 2. of public morals, and 3. of public revenue. But who is to define the limits of these elastic exceptions. Professor Perry might undertake to give a definition very clear and exact, but we doubt whether it would be satisfactory to Mr. Henry C. Carey. A great many instances are given of the absurdity of our tariff, which, and a great deal more, may be all true, but that only shows that our financial administration is bad, an evil to be met with very different weapons from such general propositions as the above. The maxim which affords the free-traders such delight, that protection does not protect, does not prove the badness of the end, but only of the means. In fact, a tariff seems to be a question of expedients and not of principles. It is from the former point that even Great Britain has in practice always approached it, and we believe that some of her soundest writers, as J. S. Mill and W. Bagehot, have been forced to admit that in certain countries and states of society protection may be advisable, if not necessary. The subject of Money, as far as it goes, and indeed all others in the book, are treated with great clearness, vivacity, and fertility of illustration; but there runs throughout a tone of hostility to government interference, - a sign of the times which, though general, we cannot regard as healthy. Probably the worst government that ever existed was better than no government at all, and political economy would do much better to study how government may be improved than how to get rid of it. Professor Perry states the fact, but not the principle, of the separation of currency from banking in England. Thus, when he says that a depositor can draw either notes or gold from the bank, though this is in one sense true, in another it ignores the whole theory on which the Act of 1844 was based. We regret this the more, believing that in that principle is our hope of escape, that it points the road to specie payments with the minimum of necessary disaster, and, most important of all, a guaranty for a stable basis of currency in the future. In taxation Professor Perry has a theorist's preference for direct impost, overlooking, we think, a cardinal principle of human nature. We know few men who would not rather pay fifty per cent more through their expenditure than face an assessor with a return of property and income. We concur most heartily, however, in denouncing the spirit which, for the sake of private interest, refused to tax tea, sugar, and coffee. 17. Viking Tales of the North. Translated by RASMUS B. ANDERSON and JÓN BJARNASON. With TEGNER'S Fridthjof's Saga, translated by GEORGE STEPHENS. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. 1877. 12mo. pp. 370. Fridthjof's Saga. By ESAIAS TEGNÉR. Translated from the Swedish by THOMAS A. E. HOLCOMв and MARTHA A. LYON HOLCOMB. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. 1877. 12mo. pp. 213. THE substance of Tegnér's poem appears, in these volumes, in three independent forms: first, as a prose translation, by Messrs. Anderson and Bjarnason, of the chief originals upon which the poem was based, the Icelandic Sagas, namely, of Thorstein, son of Viking, and of Fridthjof the Bold; second, in Professor George Stephens's translation of the poem itself into English verse, made in 1839, and forming more than half of the volume in which it is here reproduced; and third, in a new version in the original metres, "the first complete American translation," as its joint authors tell us, of the Swedish bishop's masterpiece, but the nineteenth which has been made into English since the appearance of the original in 1825. Just forty years ago Professor Longfellow contributed to this Review* a full analysis of that famous poem, now familiar to all students of Northern literature; and we need not return to the story of it here. For Tegnér's "Frithiof's Saga," as in days of a less minatory and exacting orthography than the present we were permitted to write the name, has been translated into all the leading European languages, and has won a secure place among the Swedish classics; and with reason. In substance a story of love and of magical prowess, delineating persons and actions that were judiciously selected from the Sagas, and that in the treatment were not idealized beyond recognition, — in manner full of fancy and of color, overflowing with a certain blithe sweetness like that of the Northern springtime, the Frithiof's Saga deserved both its vogue and its permanent success. As a poem, its fame appears secure ; but Messrs. Anderson and Bjarnason have done a service to its better understanding and to the illustration of its origins, by translating the Sagas of Thorstein and of Fridthjof, from which its story mainly comes. These Sagas, ascribed respectively to the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, give us the means of marking the difference between the true Norse medievalism and the modernizing versions of that mediavalism, as seen in Mr. Morris's poetry; and they enable us, too, to *North American Review, XLV. 149. |