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have already given our opinion in the notice of Niccolò de' Lapi, in our July number for 1848, and we could only repeat what we have there stated, and to which we refer our readers. At that time we had no intention of giving more than a rapid sketch of the romance before us, but we have since thought that it deserves to be known to the English reader, no less than its more dignified and elaborate successor. Though its merits are of a different character, they are of the highest order. To many minds the interest excited is deeper, and it is more gentle. There is more of human feeling. The puritanical element, which, in spite of its moral grandeur, gives a harshness to Niccolò, is in Ettore exchanged for the chivalrous. And we feel ourselves among the highly born, the noble, and the illustrious. Even the imperfection of the principal personages adds in some degree to their charm. We have not the stern and superhuman excellence which we admire, but with which we do not cordially sympathize. And yet there is deep and true principle at the bottom. The eye never loses sight of the cross. And this, we repeat, is the master key to D'Azeglio's influence over the wise and good. His works are eminently Christian. He does not merely make us conversant with high thoughts and noble aspirations, which all earnest writers in the present day almost without exception aim at, and in which they not unfrequently succeed, but he makes us feel that 'no foundation can any one lay but that which is laid.' And it is here that so many of his fellow-novelists so lamentably fail. It requires but a slight acquaintance with the imaginative literature of the day to perceive that, in spite of a professed and even real desire for truth, and goodness, and self-sacrifice, it utterly ignores the law and the testimony.' We except, of course, what are called 'religious novels,' in which there is a superabundance of the religious element, but so mixed up with the writer's peculiar 'views,' as to be acceptable only to the party for whom they are intended. We speak of works, not only of acknowledged talent, but of professedly universal principles. Such works either pass over the Bible and the Church altogether; or if they affect philosophy, treat them as bygone things, successive developments of the human mind in its progress towards perfection, not authoritative emanations of the Divine Will, upon which opinions are to be formed, and by which conduct is to be regulated. There is, perhaps, no one point in which the tendencies of the age are more fully shewn, than in the sense of man's responsibility. While there is scorn of selfishness, and trickery, and false seeming, and a base truckling to the rich and great; while there is an honest and enlarged desire to promote human virtue and happiness, man's physical and mental well

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being in short; and, while there are occasional glimpses of the Infinite and the Eternal, which make our hearts burn within us; there is no feeling of man's responsibility to God as a creature and a sinner. Our modern literature, like our modern monuments, is the blazonry of man's achievements, instead of the record of his fall and restoration. It is the statesman dying in the arms of his country, or the warrior on the field of his glory, or the actor standing forth in the lofty character which he embodied, not the penitent sinner, who, with closed eyes, hands crossed on his breast, or raised in the attitude of prayer, lays his virtues and his sins together at the foot of the cross. Now we think these antichristian tendencies of no small moment. Their effect upon the popular mind is great, and it is most hurtful. We doubt if even the worldly and sensual literature of a bygone age, sapped so completely the very foundations of truth. Things were called then by their right names. Virtue was virtue, and vice was vice. Men feared God, or they did not. A well-defined boundary was set, which they understood, even if they overleaped it. But now we are so confused by the mixture of truth and error, low conceptions of duty, and bursts of highly-wrought feeling, that we can scarcely recognise the ancient landmarks. We hail, therefore, any

return to better things. And we find them both at home and abroad. We have some writers among ourselves who know and appreciate their high vocation, but we think that, in the works now for the first time submitted to the English reader, there is a depth and earnestness, which, united as they are with Christian submission, we do not find elsewhere. In D'Azeglio, as in his father-in-law Manzoni, there is what the old puritans were wont to call 'the root of the matter.' Bating a few Roman peculiarities, the religion which these works pourtray, is that of the Bible and of the universal Church, and we cannot form a better wish than that all readers, both here and elsewhere, may drink deeply of its spirit, and be fully prepared for its selfsacrifice.

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ART. IV.-Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People in 1848 and 1849. By SAMUEL LAING, ESQ. London: Longman & Co. 1850.

MR. LAING is ambitious to raise the profession of a traveller above the more common level of recording the personal history of an individual with the adventures of his pilgrimage. This may be accomplished by great powers of description, or by reflection on what is seen or heard, that is, by observations on the social and political state of foreign countries. In these days of pictorial representation and advancement in every branch of that art, the province of scenery is taken away from the traveller unless he handles the pencil or brush, or otherwise is enabled to make the fine arts subservient to his purpose. This however is not Mr. Laing's object, nor his turn of mind, as we shall presently discover; therefore he has chosen the legitimate object of making all his talents aid the science of political economy. For fifty years he has been a traveller in Europe, and knew Hamburgh when its senators wore powdered wigs, velvet coats, silk breeches, gold shoe-buckles, and drove about in gilt coaches of antique shape. Peruques and the pomp of ancient days have been laid aside, and Europe presents another state of things, linked to her social life for better or for worse. The whole condition of modern Europe, as compared with England, comes in review in the course of this work, and many questions of great interest at the present time are most powerfully discussed. The conclusions which Mr. Laing arrives at are attained by a very different process in many respects from what would be followed up by a member of the English Church, but their innate truth is often a confirmation of views held by persons from whom Mr. Laing would much differ. His conclusions are radically opposed to modern government schemes, on much the same ground that the Church party would adopt; and the very fact that he is himself a presbyterian, proves that this opposition not only arises from the imaginations and dreams of a particular school, as a bold adherence to church principles still makes its defenders liable to be called; but from some fundamental error in the social philosophy of modern governments. The great questions that attract his attention are some of them remediable and still matters of choice, while others are certain visible consequences from certain past events already

too fixed to be at all matters of controversy, and the discussion of which is chiefly of use as pointing out the evils which result, in order that some of their tendencies may be checked.

Of the latter kind, is the great land question, from which Mr. Laing traces the distinctive marks of modern politics throughout the continent. During the last half century the whole land of France has passed from its original possessors, and become divided into small portions belonging to peasant proprietors. This state of things viewed in the abstract has some advantages, but many evils. Both sides of the question are fully stated in this work, but no opinion definitely expressed, as to which on the whole answers best; nor indeed is it a practical question as long as rights of property are respected; and if such rights are violated, we can hardly expect that any system will have a fair trial. England still maintains her large landed proprietors, while the continent has swept them away. It is therefore a question of great interest to trace the various results of such opposite conditions. On abstract grounds there is much to be said in favour of small holdings, but in connexion with other subjects of political interest it is found the parent of great disorder. The middle class is thereby destroyed, and there is no intervening influence between the governing power and the mass of the people; nothing to represent moral and social order as of spontaneous growth, and as the natural condition of man. The bare nakedness of physical force is clearly seen in imperial edicts, which work directly on the private habits of a people, and the foundations of tyranny are most effectually laid if a system of this kind is established. In England the whole people in their various positions and ranks of life appear to go on naturally and easily as if by themselves, only appealing to authority to correct certain crimes, and amend errors of social politics as they are discovered. Government, according to the spirit of our constitution, is a visitorial rather than a direct power; it presupposes inherent laws of moral and social life, and it is only concerned to see those laws carried out. Its power is really the greater for this unseen character of acting through a medium, and not by direct instruments. An English subject does not trace every action of daily life to an act of parliament; he has no government official always at his elbow, backed by the whole force of an imperial army; but he rests securely on abstract principles of justice, and considers it his birthright to have just cause of complaint if such principles are violated with regard to himself, by Kings, Lords, or Commons. This state of things necessarily implies a large and influential class between the governing and the governed, and the recognition of independent interests as the

immediate source of all the actions that make up our daily existence. Each individual is thus left free, and only interfered with in case he injures his neighbour. A third class is indeed necessary, under all circumstances, between the supreme power and the people; the question then is really this: shall this third, this middle body, be direct functionaries of government, or shall they be independent agents? On this depends true liberty. If every change of government affects with galvanic shock the whole fabric of a nation, it cannot be said that the people are free; we require, as it were, springs and buffers, to break the shock which would otherwise go so rudely throughout the whole train of interests. Even the representative power is nothing to the freedom from caprice which independent rights insure to the people themselves. The House of Commons indeed is chiefly of use to preserve this liberty to others, and it is not its province to assume an executive power inconsistent with such rights; yet the whole system of modern Europe, since the almost completed annihilation of the aristocracy and landed interests, is such, that this middle class is composed of paid government officers, whose daily bread depends on the smile of government. It is the Prussian system of functionarism that is the modern bugbear of Europe; it is this we have to resist, and it is this which forms the great point of attack in the book before us. Again and again does Mr. Laing come round to the same point. His honest indignation against this system, which eats away the vitality of human independence, is amusing from its very pertinacity. He abhors and detests a functionary as an evil genius of mankind. He rejects their best offers of assistance, and cares neither for protection from enemies, nor for the education of the poor, nor the stability of government, if supported and encouraged by such means, because he has no confidence in the reality of their discipline, and had rather trust to blind confusion than a hungry and servile array of placemen, servile, that is, to those above them in office, but arrogant enough to the helpless sheep driven about by these civic pastors.

In contrast to such a condition of the public service Mr. Laing appeals to England with almost too free an admiration, picturing in too high colours the prosperity and luxury of our humbler classes. He knows Prussia and France better than England; still, in the main, he is right, though partial in his home knowledge. He also excludes some other considerations that should come into the science of political economy. He is an honest presbyterian, and according to his light gives open expression to a natural shrewdness of observation and a great power of tracing social effects to their causes. His fair and

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