those which this story displays as it sinks into the reader's heart. It is a summary of life and a catalogue of its passions, as the rose is a summary of the beauty of summer, and the forests are a catalogue of the years that are gone. It does not address us in the manner of most fictions, with sly inuendo and flippant argument, but rather discourses with itself, as the wind discourses with itself in the echoing defiles of mountains. It is a prose poem, of which goodness and beauty are the metre and the rhythm. It is a rhapsody on the joyfulness of a pure life. As Johanna Baillie illustrated the human passions by writing a tragedy and a comedy on each, so has Miss Mulock illustrated, in “John Halifax," each of the great phases of human life by two pictures, not opposed to each other, nor even contrasting, but taken from different points of view, and thus, by a kind of mental stereoscope, enabling us to form a solid and real conception of what, under any other treatment, could at the best have been merely picturesque.

The very plan of the book involves in itself a great truth; a truth of which there are wild glimpses in Don Quixote, and coarse illustrations in Paul de Kock's L'Homme de Police et l'Homme de la Nature. It proposes, and nobly works out the idea, to show that whatever of good or great is taught to man by the stern, sad lessons of life, exists originally in his own nature in far greater vigour and brilliancy, and would never cease to bless him, would he only keep himself pure. This is the text to which "John Halifax" is the sermon, as summer is the music to which its flowers are the words.

The story of "John Halifax" is placed fifty years since; a time which is memory to the old and tradition to the young; a time than which there has been none more momentous to England, none more widely interesting to the world. The choice of such a period by our authoress was evidently no careless one, and the energy of the public life and spirit at that time is well matched with the striking individual character of her story. Of the wisdom of the introduction of characters which the lapse of time is rendering historical, amongst the creations of fiction, there must be greater doubt. Lady Hamil

ton, for instance, is introduced to us by name, and made to take part in the story, and vigorously attacked. She, whom the tasteful Romney thought all worthy to be the model for the purest creations of an artist's fancy for Miranda and St. Cecilia; whom the delicate minded Hayley loved to describe as a noble, simple, truthful actress; and whom the proud queen of the Sicilies rejoiced to call her friend, is described in the novel before us in the flippant, mock-polite manner of a police report. It is a cruel blow-and it comes from a woman's hand.

The main thread of the story consists of the rise of a poor boy from the utmost poverty and destitution to affluence and distinction. This is a subject dear to all Englishmen, because all Englishmen are acquainted with living illustrations of it; there are, in fact, so many wealthy men who have begun the world with less than five shillings, that eager aspirants after fortune must be almost tempted to commence their career by the distribution of any cash they may possess above that moderate sum. But the hero does not obtain his social elevation simply by means of his great business talents and steady adherence to the principles of morality. Our authoress is well aware that sentiment has as much influence on the practical affairs of life as the weather on the corn market in autumn; and friendship, as well as fortune, holds out her hand to aid John Halifax in the busy strife.

The story, as we have before said, bears throughout a twofold aspect, and the scenery is always nicely chosen to suit each. The vast tanyard and the huge water-mill, bright with light and strong with shadow, which are the great instruments of fortune to the favored family of the story, are so associated in its pages with kindliness of heart, that we are almost led to believe that friendship shares with industry the honor of being the philosopher's stone.

We commend this novel to our readers; and to those who object to novelreading we can recommend its perusal as a portion of their serious studies. Better novels may have been written, but none with a finer purpose, or capable of leaving a more excellent impression.

CAN Sardinia afford a war with Austria? is the stern question of those who see, in the unequal resources of the two countries, little to hope for the emancipation of Italy. Can a nation which numbers not one-sixth of the population carry an aggressive war into the territories of its now powerful neighbour, and, with an army of, at the very utmost, eighty thousand men, assail a force of triple or quadruple amount, in a country abounding in fortresses, and every resource of which is already at their command? There are no words which could exaggerate the inequality of such a contest, nor is there one single element which the struggle could evoke that would diminish that disparity. The line of attack is limited to a comparatively small extent. It must be through the space between the Alps and the Duchies; or, in other words, it must be by an open country, where there are few natural defences, and only adapted for the operations of large masses of

men.

Widely extended flanks, unsupported by any advantages of position, require great resources in cavalry, in which Austria is eminently superior; and in artillery, where her strength is equally conspicuous; and lastly, the devotion to the cause of Italian independence, which many well-minded but ill-informed persons attribute to the inhabitants of Lombardy, has no existence whatever in fact. Between the Piedmontese and the Lombards there is no feeling of friendship; the VOL. XLVIII-NO. CCLXXXYII.

only sentiment is that of jealousy and dislike; and were the peasant of the Milanais to choose to-morrow, he would infinitely prefer the rule of the German, such as in all its stern severity he has known it, than to form part of a "united Italy" of which Piedmont should be the head.

In fact, if there be anything more than another to damp the ardor and diminish the sanguine hopes of those who dream of Italian independence, it is this very rivalry, this mean and narrow jealousy, which sets every state of the Peninsula against its neighbour. The old grudges of longpast centuries are treasured as traditions of hate, and the cruelties of ages gone by are almost the only chronicles which are valued in their history. Nor has Austria been slow to profit by this unworthy feeling; with all her native craft she has ministered to it in a hundred ways. For years has it been the congenial labor of her press to exaggerate and widen the difference between the Lombard and the rest of Italy; to contrast, occasionally with truth, the prosperity he enjoys with the poverty under which his neighbour is struggling; and to ascribe to the sway of a paternal government the benefits which are most justly attributable to habits of industry and economy so essentially inherent in the Lombard character. Well knowing, besides, that the spirit of the nobles can never be with her, that every instinct of their order must be to hate those from whom they have met nothing but insult and outrage,

I I

she has wreaked upon them the full measure of her vengeance, burthening them with the heaviest taxation, sequestrating their estates, driving them, by tyrannical enactments, to forced sales of their properties, and by a series of laws, conceived with an almost diabolical ingenuity, establishing a system by which utter ruin and beggary must be the portion of all who will not cast their lot with the dominion of the German.

While they have done all this, outraging every feeling and insulting every sentiment of a great aristocracy, they have practised every possible indulgence towards the peasant. The taxation imposed upon the proprietor has been so much of relief to him; the increased imposts which war has necessitated fall only to the share of the owner of the soil; in the same proportion that one is injured is the other benefitted; and while the Government sets at defiance the enmity of the noble, it draws more close its alliance with the people.

It is not, perhaps, generally known that this great empire, with all its high instincts of aristocracy, practises a game of democratic guise, which, if it were not Macchiavellian in spirit, might enlighten the freest notions of the Model Republic itself. In Austria, as in Russia, it is the noble that is feared, and the steady aim of the Government is to maintain the rights and lighten the burden of the peasant. The Kreishauptmann in the German provinces, the Delegate in Italy, ostensibly a mere magistrate, is in reality the retained and salaried defender of the peasant against the proprietor-an agent invested with considerable power, and placed in a position to turn the scale ever in the favor of the humble man, and by this organized protection to attach him to the state.

This policy Austria has practised most successfully in Italy; failing to attach the nobles to her cause, she has resolved to crush and destroy them. By a gross and almost incredible exercise of tyranny, she has forbidden them to educate their sons in foreign universities; she has foreseen the consequences of lives begun in indolence and continued in inglorious leisure and dissipation; and craftily speculated on the time when the race

of men thus trained should be no longer formidable. There is not a

flaw or a feature of national character that she has not studied and turned to advantage; their very vices have been ministered to as means of their subjugation! Thus, year by year, day by day, widening the interval between the proprietor and the peasant, she has given a different air and object to each, till the very idea of a common country has ceased to exist between them. How conspicuously was this seen in the disastrous retreat of Charles Albert in '48. The Piedmontese troops died of starvation on the roads, while the peasantry flocked in thousands with all the resources of their fields to the camp of the Austrians. This was the reward of Italian patriotism-this was the recompense of those gallant fellows who shed their blood for Lombard independence that on the very soil they fought to emancipate, they sank famished and exhausted, while their enemies revelled in every enjoyment.

This digression, longer than we had intended it, will serve to shew that little is to be hoped from either the sympathy or the aid of the Lombard peasant; his interest points in another direction; nor was his heart ever in the cause. It is different with the inhabitant of the towns; but even his patriotism the events of '48 have served sadly to disparage. It was in that very city of Milan, to whose cry for aid the brave Piedmontese rushed in arms in '47, that the life of Charles Albert was perilled in the retreat from Mantua; and but for the personal gallantry of his staff there is every reason to believe that he would have been assassinated by the populace.

Amid all the demoralizing consequences that ensue from mal-government, there is not one so fatal as the propensity a long enslaved people contract to impute treachery to every one of every side. Years of tyranny teach habits of craft and subtlety; severity suggests evasion and falsehood; and where the natural faculties are acute, and the sense of injury strong, a temperament is formed that places its strength far more in distrust than confidence, and relies more on its own powers of detection than on the guidance and good