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it may be, are waiting in the street, waiting by the hour, in sunshine or storm, though the distance from home be but a furlong or two. Now look at that coachman or footman, and see peeping out in his dress the unchristian attempt to introduce into this land the cast-off trumpery of an old aristocracy; to mark and degrade the man as a menial, a serving man, by putting upon him a livery! It is true that only a few brainless asses or selfish egoists are thus sowing the wind for their children to reap the whirlwind, but those few are in a position, in some of our cities, to make weak people wish to imitate even their follies and sins.

Take, in the other extreme, the keeper of a small house, it may be a boarding house, for instance. Look at the lot of her woman of all work; see her toil and sweat, early and late, week in and week out; poorly fed; hardly lodged; miserably paid; as poor in purse at the end of the ten years of toil which have broken down her once vigorous frame as she was at the beginning of them ;-remember that there are thousands and thousands of such, and say, were we wrong in asserting that domestic servitude exists among us in a dreadful form?

ART. VI. SHORT REVIEWS AND NOTICES.

1.- A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, &c. By WM. THOMAS THORNTON. London: J. Murray. 1848.

THIS is a good book, so far as it goes, upon a great question, written by a man of clear sight and right purpose, but of faint heart.

sermon.

The subject is, the distribution of the face of the earth among the children of men, to whom God gave it to possess; and the tim id and winding way in which the author approaches it, shows his lack of courage to grapple with the great wrong which prevails in all civilized countries. The very title contains matter for a "A PLEA!". that is, a pleading, an apology; — and for what?for the right of the sons of God to possess, during their lives, enough of the surface of the earth to till and live upon; and for their right to their share in "the dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." A PLEA! and for whom?-for the PEASANTS, the laborers, that is; not men wholly and entirely, but only a plebes rustica, whose business it is to hew the wood and draw the water of society; men set apart and appointed to do those things which the true homo, the gentle man, does not deign to do.

Looked upon from the highest stand point of humanity, regarded as a question of pure right and wrong, the subject matter of this book is not worth a moment's notice. There should be no plea for peasant proprietors, but a stern demand for the rights of man wherever, as in Ireland, for instance, they have been manifestly and grossly violated, and where men lie down and starve to death upon the bosom of that earth which is full of nourishment for them, if other men, full to fatness, would only let them draw that nourishment freely. We should not, in such extremities, stand hesitating about disturbing "vested rights," but maintain the prior right of humanity, vested in man at the creation; we should not bow reverently before a criminal institution because it is old, but denounce it as more wicked in proportion to the length of day that it has cumbered the earth and oppressed the race.

But this may not do, some will say ; and Mr. Thornton is perhaps right after all. Nothing is done in nature by starts; there is a vis inertia which must be respected, even in a criminal institution. We must hit it gently at first, not break our heads against it; we must push steadily, until we get it fairly into motion, when we may knock and kick it down to perdition with all our might and main.

The author begins his PLEA by striving to show that small farms may be made more productive in proportion to their size than large ones; and this he does, we think even to the satisfaction of those matter-of-fact souls who will not esteem any thing as valuable products of agriculture except material and tangible corn and potatoes; who look into the barn and the cellar to count the gain of the peasant laborer; and who consider that by bread alone a man liveth. To such persons the attempt to show that men of any knowledge, working for themselves and their children upon their own little garden will make the aggregate material products of those gardens greater than they would if working as hirelings upon the grounds of a taskmaster, is very well; though to others it may seem like proving that three and two are more than two and two.

His chapter upon the effects of peasant proprietorship in France is very interesting; and his comparison of the condition of the agricultural class in the Channel Islands with that of the same class in England, Ireland, and Scotland, is most striking. Indeed, it would be conclusive of the whole argument if one could draw any certain conclusions upon these subjects from facts now or heretofore existing. The truth is, in the solution of a question of this kind, we must go back to first principles, because in no country are the people in such a condition as to show fairly what would be the result of giving to every head of a family his own vine and his own fig-tree. Most of the facts and circumstances which have been brought forward as arguments against the policy 33

NO. IV.

of having a country divided into small farms, grow out of the ignorance of small farmers. When you remove this ignorance you remove the whole evil; and until you do remove it you will have the world bearing, as it does now, more of tares than wheat, more of hate than love, more of strife than mutual help. But surely the way to remove it is not to disfranchise men socially; to make of them tenants at will. hired laborers hewers of wood and drawers of water.

That condition of life is best for man (for the whole nature of man,) which calls into action the greatest variety of faculties, affections, and sentiments that may be consistent with obtaining sufficiency of food and raiment; and that condition is worst for men which narrows down the exercise of their nature to a single point, and keeps them grinding needles, or sticking handles on to teacups, or hoeing corn, all their lives. He who takes from grown men all care and forethought, all cause of anxiety and responsibility, who feeds them, clothes them, houses them, and provides them with every thing they wish, requiring only in return that they work on thoughtlessly under his sole guidance, robs them of their birthright, dwarfs their natures, and makes of them slaves.

What said Jesus about him who went and buried his talent in a napkin? How much more indignantly would he condemn to outer darkness those who strive to wrap in napkins, to bury in the earth, to stifle and destroy, all the talent, all the energy, all the ambition, and all the emulation of whole classes of men?

In our view those European statesmen who, looking with single eye to the material productiveness of the earth, strive to centralize farming, to create great proprietors, and to keep the workmen in the condition of thoughtless, careless, and irresponsible hired laborers, differ only in degree, not in kind, from those who strive to perpetuate the doomed institution of negro slavery in our own land.

Where was the spiritual adviser of the Duchess of Sutherland when her legal adviser told her she might drive away thousands of small farmers from her broad lands, and cover them with flocks and herds whom a few stupid shepherds, their talents buried in napkins, could watch? Why did he not open to her Grace the laws of God, written everlastingly in man's nature, while the lawyer opened the laws of the land, written on paper that perisheth? Why did he not oppose to Blackstone, Christ; and to Political Economy, Christian Charity?

But the thought of the absolute necessity which man has for the whips and spurs of care, forethought, anxiety, and even necessity, in order to develop his nature and his capacities, and the peculiar fitness of agriculture, of the ownership of a little land, to furnish all these, and likewise the noble spiritual harvest which follows them, the thought of these things, we say, would

lead us into an essay longer than the book we were to notice. We close, therefore, abruptly, by introducing Mr. Thornton to our readers, as a most interesting and intelligent writer, and recommending his book to their notice. We take the liberty, also, to counsel him to write another book and follow up the same subject; not, however, to take his stand upon the loose sands of artificial society and tottering institutions, but to plant his feet upon the rock of truth, and thence proclaim Christ's doctrine of human brotherhood.

2.

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Essays and Tales by John Sterling: with a Memoir of his Life. By JULIUS CHARLES HARE. London. 1848.

JOHN STERLING, during his short life, was a valued ornament of the best literary circle, and the friend of Coleridge, Arnold, Carlyle, Mill, Hare, Tennyson, French, Maurice, and other noted scholars. He was the son of Edward Sterling, well known to politicians as "the thunderer of the Times," on account of certain powerful contributions to that newspaper. He was educated at Cambridge. To a fine literary talent he added extraordinary powers of conversation, a scholar devoted to the best books, a reader of Plato, of Eschylus, of Simonides; of Dante, Calderon, Montaigne, Leibnitz; and of Goethe, Schiller, and the criticism of modern Germany. He had also, what is rare in the brilliant society in which he lived, a military love of action, which carried him over that bound which a scholar can rarely pass without ridicule or ruin, and drew him into various resolutions of charity and patriotism; mixed him up with anti-slavery in St. Vincent's in the West Indies; made him the strenuous friend of public education; put him forward in a disastrous Spanish insurrection in 1830, which ended in the death of his friend, General Torrijos. The same conscience and desire to serve men led him to take orders in the church, though the progress of his mind, more than the state of his health, withdrew him from it afterwards. His hospitable mind was continually exploring books most distasteful to his countrymen, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Strauss, and the neology of Germany and the socialism of France. He had a great range of friends and correspondents. Whatever belonged to thought or religion was sure of his sympathy, and he loudly complained of the torpor of the English mind, whilst the real strength of the nation seemed to him to be all of the brute mechanic sort. "Think," he says, "if we had a dozen men to stand up for ideas, as Cobden and his friends do for machinery!" The Essays indicate the ardor and activity of his mind; they embrace a range of interesting topics, and furnish often the best insight into the spiritual condition of England. Ill health made

him a traveller, and he learned, at least, from his journeys in other countries, to look at his own with some advantage. Of the Tales, "The Onyx Ring," from Blackwood, long since well known in this country, is the best.

In his last illness, Sterling appointed Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Hare his literary executors. Mr. Hare, in writing his biography, has wisely drawn it in great part from his letters. From Mr. Hare's commentary, it is easy to see how distasteful was the task, and how much praise he deserves for printing what he did. We must not be ungrateful for good meaning; but the heroic Sterling shows so ill in these faint and deprecating paragraphs, that every one will wonder at the silence of Mr. Hare's colleague, and regret that the greatest portraying hand of this age did not draw the picture.

"For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew

Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

-How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enough of such as for their bellies' sake

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold."

3. The Artist's Married Life, being that of Albert Dürer. Translated from the German of Leopold Schefer. By Mrs. J. R. STODDART. London. John Chapman. 1848. 16mo.

pp. xx. and 226.

ALBERT DÜRER is one of the most interesting artists that lived in an age full of vigorous life. The moral purity delineated in his numerous works attracts the student towards the man, while the wealth of ideas and exuberance of his fancy compel one to acknowledge in him a man of extraordinary powers. But he had not the most favorable opportunity for their development; Nuremburg was not Florence. The little that is known of his private life only excites a desire to know more. Frederick Campe published a little volume of Relics of Albert Dürer,* a few years ago, at a time when long deserved honors were paid him in his native city; several books have been printed treating of him or his works.†

It appears that at the age of twenty-four he was made the victim of a marriage got up between his own parents and those of a young woman of Nuremburg. Agnes, for that was the name

*Reliquien von Dürer. † Heller, Leben und die III. have been announced.

Nürnb. 1828.

Werke Dürers. Vol. II. Leipzig, 1831: Vol. I. and
Roth, Dürers Leben. Leipzig. 1791.

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