the precepts of Epicurus. The StoThe Stoics made men virtuous, by teaching them the precepts of Zeno;-their systems were educative; their means, the development of philosophers. Bacon was content to state his end as the good of man, without troubling himself to discuss the supreme good. He evidently had in mind the legal goods of a thriving citizen in a well ordered state, the virtuous enjoyment of life, liberty, and property; but he objected to no kind of good, except that abstract good, which is good for nothing. His means of attaining this end, was the increase of useful knowledge and useful inventions. He considered these as a sort of hoarded happiness. If they did not render the inventors happy, they would sometime add to the mass of human happiness. They were happiness solid ified, subjected to weight and measure, buying and selling. If Zeno were to look around one of our factories, with its miracles of machinery, and its miserable mannikins of men, he would cry aloud to them with groans, "get more soul!" Bacon would gaze exultingly upon the scene"toil on! toil on! every new fabric will be so much good for some one, no matter whom; so many yards of happiness."

The first advances the individual, but keeps the race stationary. What need of additions to the general stock? That which educated Aristotle, will certainly educate me.

The second neglects the individual, in the race; "and the individ. ual withers, and the world is more and more." The Greek left the school of Socrates intent upon molding himself into such a character as his teacher; our ambition is to discover a planet or a new and useful bug, or to invent a lightning rod, or a safety lamp, or at least, a new or ganization of society. The Stoic would be something; the Baconian must do something. Here also Bacon shows the lawyer. Theologi

ans have always held the Grecian end and means; they insist upon one supreme good; a spiritual state, in comparison with which, all other good is evil, all other attainment so idle, that he who has reached it may be totally depraved. They are educators also, and look for God's blessing upon the direct application of truth to the soul. Bacon transferred the ends of law to other sciences. How completely these ends engrossed his mind, is no where more distinctly seen than in his constant and bitter charges of barrenness against the old philosophy; for surely he overlooked its aims, when he said that it bore no fruit. Fruit! what fruit should it produce? The groves of Academus were not planted with steam-engines, or lightning rods. Men grew there. Its fruit is to be sought in the men who have matured under its influences-and what a harvest! Was there nothing ripe, and mellow, and juicy in the soul of Plato, on whose infant blossom the honey-bees alighted, and no seed thoughts in the core of his spirit? Was Aristotle nothing, but a choke-pear of disputation? a metaphysical burr, with no meat in the center?

Was not Marcus Aurelius a sound and wholesome product? an imperial growth worthy of propagation? Such as these have been the fruits of the Grecian philosophy wherever it has been planted; by the stately palaces of the Medici; by the monasteries of Ger. many; by the academic halls of England; or, beyond the currents of Oceanus, in the lone wilds of America. Fruit glorious and im perishable! aid and comfort also, through all time, to universal humanity! The method of Bacon, the inductive method, though it had already been pointed out by Aris totle, has been generally considered by philosophers the chief merit of his system. But the legal and po litical commentators seem disposed to pass it over very slightly. Mac

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auley, for example, in his showy and sophistical review, says that scarcely any person, who proposed to himself the same end with Bacon, could fail to hit upon the same means." However incorrect this opinion may be, it shows how nearly akin the inductive method is to those pursued in the law.

But Bacon added the lawyer's test of truth; its working well. He wanted no truths which could not produce or prophesy, and he judged them by their fruits. Knowledge was truth to him, if he could make nature act, or foretell her courses by it; otherwise, not, a test always sure to give the clearest ideas of causes; but excluding all other relations, an unerring guide to truth in physics, where only truth will act; but in civil business, where, as Bacon himself says, "falsehood, like an alloy in coin of gold and silver, may make the metal work the bet ter," it is but a slow guide to purity or truth. It consecrates means for the sake of the end.

We have spoken of the spirit of the Baconian philosophy, compre hension, and progress; of its end, the good of man; of its means, useful knowledge, and useful inventions; of its method, the inductive process; of its test of truth, the consequences of it: and claimed to find, in all these, traces of the study of jurisprudence, not in such a sense, that any good lawyer might have written the Novum Organum, or that a better lawyer would have made a better philosophy. Sir Edward Coke would, doubtless, have made a worse one, but it would have been more like Bacon's, than one by Luther or Erasmus. It is in tracing the history of jurisprudence, and the useful arts alone, that Baconianism seems to grow up naturally; to be the "birth of time;" and it is in these, and the sciences to which they have given rise in the hands of Grotius and Montesquieu, and in political economy and legislation, that the

glory of the Baconian philosophy consists. It has no direct, legitimate claim, to those sublime, but, in Bacon's sense, barren studies, astronomy and geology; for, in conclusion, it savors of the faults, as well as the excellences, of the legal profession.

They may be summed in a sentence. Bacon did not love truth for its own sake, and he denied its relations to God. He was devout, too, in his way; but he held his creed by will, and not by reason; he delighted in absurdities, to use, with Sir Thomas Brown, that odd resolution, learned out of Tertullian"Credo, quia impossibile." He denied final causes, and so left an unspanned abyss between man and his God.

In the infancy of science, men believed all things made for them; to give them food, the earth was peopled; to give them light, the sun, and moon, and stars, were created; God works for them alone. Then a science of utility is natural; but when the telescope has opened the heavens, depth beyond depth, and the microscope has revealed its wondrous and countless races, and the history of the world has been traced back, ages upon ages, before man was; he sees, with humility, his true relations to the universe, and science, expanding with his thought, embraces beauty, right, and religion, as well as utility.

Lord Bacon clung to this earth, and the old theory of the solar system; but if he be not one of those sublimer souls, who delight to be present in spirit with God, when of old he laid the foundations of the earth, and to raise the voice of praise, with the morning stars, which sang together, or, far through the infinite realms of space, to go sounding on, sphere beyond sphere, forever and forever; as the genius of his philosophy, he is seen moving among the crowds of men, in their marts of business, or legislative

halls; with trumpet-voice proclaiming the worth, and the high destiny of man; or, nobler and diviner still, in the low and lone hut, by the flickering light of poverty's cold fire, by the restless bed of sickness; wherever shivering want can be warmed, or the fevered brow be

soothed, he is seen moving with a look like His, "who pitied men;" touching sad hearts to tears of joy, and wielding the elements to perform the miracles of love.

"Shall not his name lead all the rest, Who wisely loved his fellow-men ?"

THE Soft Gallic title, "Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie," led every one who looked at the book through the medium of "Excelsior," and those spirited translations, so industriously elaborated from the other modern languages of Europe, into our own, to cut the leaves with hasty fingers. The very word, Acadie, falling upon the ear with a dreamy cadence, suggestive to the imagination of flowery meadows, sylvan retreats and bowers, where primeval nature might recline and hold familiar discourse with modern provincial life, remote from the hum of the city, operated as a kind of charm. Every reader, who opened the book, was predetermined to be pleased. He said involuntarily to himself, now I will, for one little hour, forget the corn laws, the tariff, the Oregon question, the Mexican war, the extension of the area of freedom, and the prospects of different men for the next presidential canvass. I will go back to the days that Horace and Akenside loved to figure to themselves. I will spirit myself away from the steam-whistle, and the railway station, to haunts where Sidney would have laid aside his sword in sweet abandonment to the tones of his favorite lute. I will take Shenstone along with me, and Burns, and Bloomfield. In short, I will have a holiday. It is also safe

Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. W. D. Ticknor & Co.,

Boston.

to presume that, in spite of the unusual meter in which the writer chose to present his subject, almost every reader would have been pleased with that fanciful little prelude, uniting the murmurs of the forest-foliage and moss, with the wild, though not more varied, responses of the "deep-voiced neigh boring ocean." Nor is the descrip. tion of Grand Prè, where the scene of the poem is laid, in any way cal culated to destroy this favorable impression. It is at once lively and minute. You have a picture of a sweet agricultural village, reposing in a fruitful valley, with orchards and corn-fields, stretching away to the south and west; on the north, a mountain, crowned with venerable forests, and the broad ocean, with promontory, bay, and cavern, lying like a vast map upon the eastern horizon. Sea-mists, like armies in battle array, skirt the mountains in the distance. The distaff, the shuttle, the wheels of the laborer's wain returning homeward, the song of maidens and the frolicksome, unrestrained glee of children, mingle their various notes with the soothing influences of evening. The accus tomed bell breathes its tremulous tones musical, and full of moral meaning, over this little world of happy homes. It is true, the language is rude and unpolished; but this blemish is lost sight of in the happy grouping, and easy drapery, of the poet's images.

From this general sketching and landscape painting, the writer proceeds to a particular description of the principal personages, who are to figure in the poem. It was one of the favorite maxims of Horace, that a passage of true poetry has a certain vigor of sentiment, and harmonic richness of tone, which can not be entirely destroyed by transposing the words, or even by translating them into plain prose. Let us apply this touchstone to the following lines :

"Somewhat apart from the village, and nearer

the basin of Minas,

Benedict Bellefontaine, the wealthiest farmer of Grand Prè,

Dwelt on his goodly acres; and with him,

directing his household, Gentle Evangeline lived, his child, and the pride of the village.

? Stalworth and stately in form was the man of seventy winters;

Hearty and hale was he, an oak that was
covered with snow-flakes;
White as the snow were his locks, and his
cheeks as brown as the oak leaves;
Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seven-
teen summers.

Black were her eyes, as the berry that grows
on the thorn by the way side;
Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath
the brown shade of her tresses;
Sweet was her breath, as the breath of kine
that feed in the meadows,
When, in the harvest heat, she bore to the
reapers at noontide

Flagons of home-brewed ale: oh! fair in sooth
was the maiden!"

Now, under the application of Horace's rule, if we render these thirteen lines into prose, we shall have a result similar to the following. Benedict Bellefontaine, the wealthiest farmer of Grand Prè, lived on his goodly acres, and the gentle Evangeline, his child, and the pride of the village, lived with him, directing his household. This man of seventy winters was stalworth and stately in form; he was hearty and hale; an oak that is covered with snow-flakes; his locks were as white as snow, and his cheeks as brown as oak leaves. That maiden of seventeen summers was fair to behold; her eyes were black as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside; black, yet how softly they

gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses. Her breath was sweet as the breath of kine that feed in the meadows. Now, it is almost impossible to transpose this passage in any way that will render it more prosaic and common-place, than it appears in the book. In the first place, you have the picture of Benedict Bellefontaine, a farmer, who (strange to say) lived on his own farm; who had turned the management of his household affairs over to his daughter. In the very poetical and classical words of the author, he was a "hearty, hale" old man, about seventy years old-an oak, covered with snow-flakes, says the poet-a metaphor, which certainly has the merit of originality to recommend it. But fearing, lest his readers should be in doubt as to the proportions and proper disposition of its parts, he tells them that the snow is meant to represent the locks of the old man, and that the foliage of the oak is meant to shadow forth the color of his cheeks. This guarded explanation puts one in mind of the amusing dialogue between Snug and Bottom, in "Midsummer Night's-Dream."

Snug. "You can never bring in a wall-what say you, Bottom?”

Bottom. "Some man or other must present wall, and let him have some plaster, or some lome, or some rough cast about him, to signify wall. Or let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper."

But poor Evangeline, her worst enemy, could not have treated her with more unnatural severity than the poet, who called her into being. She is just seventeen years old(such darlings of the imagination are always just seventeen)-with a pair of eyes, that look for all the world like a couple of blackberries, that grow on a thorn (probably the author thought the word blackberry bush unpoetical) by the way-side. Lest there should be some misunder

standing, and you should infer that she had a small piercing black eye, too black to express subdued sentiment, and languishing love-an eye, which poets, of all ages, have abhorred-he informs you, in the next verse, that their too piercing ray is softened, in some degree, beneath the brown shade of her tresses. As respects that other qualification of his heroine, had Mr. Longfellow been any thing more than a theoretical Acadian farmer, he must have known that, let his kine feed in meadows, or where they may, he was, by this comparison, not only offering an insult of the grossest kind to Evangeline, but offending the taste of every reader, who knows any thing of the peculiarities of those horned animals of whom the poet seems so caressingly fond.

Passing by the bee-hives and "the old moss-covered bucket," with its bewitching adjunct of "a watering-trough for horses," we come to the barns and barn-yard, where let us linger with the poet awhile, in rapt and hallowed musings. Behold the farming utensils of all sorts, from the wain, the plow and harrow, newly purchased, down to the wasted relics of many a predecessor in all the stages of dissolution. And there, walking in aristocratic pride, the swollen turkey and the cock, whom, "surrounded by his seraglio," in spite of poor morbid Beattie's appellation of "fell chanticleer," our enamored bard could almost embrace. Those barns must have been a sight to be sure, to feast a poet's eye, a village of them, says the chronicler, with dove-cotes and corn-lofts, (with stair-cases leading to them,) and every barn, so filled with hay as to be bursting, like a ripe canteleup, in the sun. Surely, the Earl of Northumberland's stables and outbuildings, nay, Paris itself, must have been insignificant in the comparison; and, to finish the picture, while they delight the ear, behold and listen to a multitude of

weathercocks, which are said to be without number, "rattling and singing incessantly of mutation." The music of the spheres must have been quite old-fashioned and monotonous, if heard in contrast with this sublime and soul-stirring anthem. The next character appearing, in the order of the story, is Gabriel, the hero, the son of a blacksmith, (for they had a stithy in Acadie,) a very respect able young man in his way, though possessed of some personal pecu liarities as a lover, which we shall have occasion to note by-and-bye. Our young lovers had been schoolmates in childhood it seems, and were in the habit of spending a good deal of time in the blacksmith's shop, "where they stood," says the poet, (with great enthusiasm,) with "wondering eyes, to behold Basil, the father of Gabriel, take in his leathern lap the hoof of the horse, as a play-thing." While they were not occupied in this way, they were hunting for swallows' nests in the barns. By this time, we are to suppose Evangeline grown up to womanhood, and so popular among farmers as to receive the euphoni ous title of "Sunshine of Eulalie," because it was supposed that that sort of sunshine had some myste rious sympathy with the apple orchards.

the

The second canto of the poem opens with a beautiful description of a northern autumn, which has more of the picturesque in it than is to be found in any other part of the poem. The description of his heroine's heifer, however, with her "snow white hide," and lofty gait, savors rather more of the shambles than of Acadie. If Mr. Longfellow has any nervous readers, he might have spared them the smell of the saltmarsh hay as too aromatic and pungent for an invalid. The gigantic wooden saddles, of flaming color and crimson tassels "nodding in bright array," like so many holly. hocks in blossom, must have been