gress of the Sunday-school movement in our Church, and of the operations of the Sunday-School Union. We have no space left for reflections or inferences. A great work has been begun among us. The Church has done much, especially during the last five years, to diffuse evangelical ideas through the press. But she must do more in future. The moral wants of the American population are increasing daily: the position of our Church is growing in importance and prominence; the eye of the nation is upon her. To maintain her numerical ascendency, and make that numerical greatness a true index of her strength, she must be indefatigable in the use and patronage of the press. Her army of preachers must both cultivate their own minds, and excite a desire for mental culture in the people. Our Sabbath-school teachers must be suitably taught, by libraries, lectures, and Bible-classes, that they may be workmen who need not to be ashamed.

Our youth, too, must be especially cared for and taught. Catechumen classes must be organized. A deep, principled desire must be begotten in the Church for their conversion. As they grow up to manhood, their places must be filled through aggressive labours among the surrounding population. The poor, the outcast, the stranger, must be visited, invited to church and to Sunday-school, educated, loved, saved, and elevated. By such means Methodism will continue to advance in true greatness; God will smile upon her; the nation will bless her institutions; and it shall be said of her, as of ancient Salem, "Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King. God is known in her palaces for a refuge."

ART. VIII.-TICKNOR'S SPANISH LITERATURE.

History of Spanish Literature. By GEORGE TICKNOR. 3 vols., pp. 589, 566, 563. New-York: Harper & Brothers. 1849.

THE history and character of Spain are surrounded with peculiar associations of romantic and poetical interest. The Spanish peninsula is by its physical position somewhat isolated from the rest of Europe, and yet closely connected with institutions, events, and discoveries which have changed the current of history, and the aspect of the modern world. To this day, it is marked by traces of the primeval populations which, ages before the earliest date of authentic history, swept in mighty waves from the parent sources in pro

lific Asia, guided by the great natural pathways across the continent, to the uttermost shores of Europe. Changes of religion, foreign conquests, successive languages, have passed over the whole or parts of the territory: Celtiberian barbarism yielded to Carthaginian conquest and Roman culture; Roman culture to Gothic rudeness, and Heathenism to the Christian faith; the crescent drove back the cross, and for centuries shone "full high advanced" over the fairest realms of Southern Spain; then the swarthy misbelievers were uprooted from the soil they had conquered, and repelled by force of arms in deadly struggles, fighting inch by inch, from the land they were deemed to pollute by their hated presence.

Again, what an illustrious part was played by Spain in the great age of discoveries, which added another continent to the world! What promise of future and increasing greatness lighted up the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella! What inexhaustible fountains of wealth seemed to pour their golden streams upon this land-the blest of Heaven! What lavish genius in another age gave an earnest to the world that a literature, original as that of Greece, but enriched with the warmer sentiments of Christian chivalry, and varied by the broader compass of modern thought, should in the course of time reflect, in transfigured beauty, the glories of a nation whose past was filled with deeds of more than mortal prowess, sung in strains that almost rivalled the rhapsodies of Homer; and whose present was crowded with marvellous adventure, and glowing with the deepest enthusiasm of the fiery national heart!

What has brought Spain down from the height to which she once ascended? What arrested her course in mid career, and forbade her attaining those further heights to which her destiny seemed to point? With an early poetry superior, perhaps, to the corresponding poetical development of any other modern nation; with a language compounded of the richest elements of human speech, endowed with a stately march scarcely inferior to the imperial tread of the parent Latin, fitted alike for the varied rhythms of every species of verse, and the noblest movements of eloquence in prose; with a multitude of poetical forms unborrowed from foreign literature, and expressing, with unaffected fidelity, and a grace beyond the reach of art, every emotion of the national spirit; with an early drama as racy and original as the natural growths of the soil itself, sparkling with the brightest gems of fancy, wit, imagination, and plastic power,-a drama, whose mines have furnished, without exhaustion, the costly materials out of which no small portion of the great dramatic works of the foremost nations of cultivated Europe have been wrought,— with a past running back into an unfathomable antiquity to draw

upon, and a future gilded with the light of promise and hope; Spain has not availed herself of these innumerable and priceless blessings to perpetuate, enlarge, exalt, and immortalize her national glory. She has not pushed forward in the march of progress, in which the other nations, with less or greater speed, have been and are advancing. She neglected to lay solid and deep foundations for outward national prosperity, in the generous cultivation of science, and the establishment of free political institutions: she crippled her moral force, by yielding to a harsh and gloomy bigotry, which took the place of the benign religion of Christ, fruitful of every moral and intellectual good to man: in the madness of her folly she submitted her mental freedom to the terrors of that accursed institution-the Inquisition-which slowly but surely wound its coils round the national mind, and killed in its fatal embrace the living energies of genius as inevitably as the bodies of its victims perished amidst the penal fires of the Acts of Faith. And so, with all her great achievements, Spain has given us but a magnificent presentiment of what she might have been. She has produced a few artists, whose works are the ornaments of foreign galleries, and the admiration of men of taste; but most of her treasures are scarcely known beyond the Peninsula, and Spanish art, if not dead, is in a death-like trance. She has shown the world an affluence of poetical invention, and a daring felicity and rapidity of poetical execution, whose history sounds almost. fabulous: but Spanish poetry now belongs to the past; its many voices have died away amidst the scenes of national decay and degradation, or, at least, are heard only in faint and dirge-like echoes, mourning the frustration of hopes whose moment of accomplishment vanished with the retreating horizon of time.

Yet the productions of Spanish genius have always attracted the attention of scholars. The political relations, both in war and peace, between England and the Peninsula, have kept the attention of some at least among the English men of letters constantly alive to the literature of Spain. Of late years several works on Spain have appeared in England, of high merit. The poet Southey, Mr. Hookham Frere, alike at home in the delicate refinements of classical literature, and in the varied productions of modern poetry,—translating with equal felicity the brilliant and witty lines of Aristophanes, the grave and didactic Theognis, and the fine old ballad poetry of the Cid; that illustrious scholar and statesman, the late Lord Holland, whose house was the resort of all that was most cultivated in English society, the author of a life of Lope de Vega; more recently, Mr. Ford, to whom the world is indebted for a valu

able Hand-book of Spain, and Lord Mahon, the distinguished historian of the War of the Succession, together with numerous contributors to the periodical journals of the times, have made many parts of the Literature of Spain and Portugal familiar to the reading public. American writers have also contributed their share to the illustration of this subject. Mr. Slidell Mackenzie's Year in Spain enjoyed, and still enjoys, an extensive popularity, for its vivid delineations of Spanish life and scenery. The works of Mr. Irving, written after his appointment as minister to Spain, furnished many agreeable pictures, wrought with his inimitable grace, besides his beautiful Life of Columbus. The name of Mr. Prescott is already classical, and will be forever connected with the glory of Spain. Mr. Longfellow has touched upon the subject here and there, and, wherever he has touched, adorned it. Spanish poetry is indebted to his accomplished pen for some of the most exquisite translations which have ever been made, as well as for the scholar-like discussions which he has contributed to American periodicals, or embodied in his work entitled, The Poets and Poetry of Europe. Other writers, too numerous to be further specified here, have done much in the same field.

The study of Spanish literature in the United States has probably been somewhat promoted by our intercourse with Mexico and the South American republics. We may boast of several excellent editions of Spanish classics, published and extensively circulated in the United States; as, for instance, Don Quixote, a selection of the most celebrated pieces of the Spanish drama, some of the works of Iriarte and others, ably edited by that venerable teacher, Mr. Francis Sales, to whom so many generations of scholars in Harvard College are indebted for their knowledge of the Spanish language.

Of the professed histories of Spanish literature, there are two which deserve especial mention, as well for the ability with which they are written, as for the influence they have had in diffusing a taste for that literature among the scholars of the continent of Europe. We refer of course to those of Bouterwek, the well-known professor in the University of Göttingen, and of Sismondi, the great historian of France and of the Italian Republics. The work of the former constituted a portion of a comprehensive history of modern culture, by a combination of some of the most eminent scholars in Europe; that of the latter was a series of brilliant and eloquent discourses on the literature of the South. Both of these works have been well translated into English, the one by Miss Thomasina Ross, and the other by a son of the late William Roscoe, who has well sustained the hereditary reputation of his family. Sismondi's work

was largely indebted to that of Bouterwek; but neither of these able scholars had within his command the materials necessary to the complete development of the subject, neither had the means of collecting the documents for himself, and neither, we believe, had ever personally visited Spain. It will be readily understood, that in a country labouring under influences so fatal to the free unfolding of the rich literary germs that were springing up within its bosom, comparatively little was done towards placing before the world the writings of its great authors, in such forms of completeness, and with such illustrations, as the progress of intellect in other countries demanded for their respective literatures. The great libraries of the European universities, therefore, were inadequate to furnish the books necessary for writing a full and critical history of the literature of Spain. Of many important Spanish authors no accessible editions existed; of the works of others, parts only had been published, and these were not to be obtained through the ordinary channels of the book-trade; while others still were to be found only in manuscript, existing in the public libraries, or in the collections of the curious in Spain. The industry of Bouterwek, and the lively genius of Sismondi, were insufficient to cope with difficulties of this description; and though their works will always hold an honoured place in literary history, the one for its careful use of all accessible materials, and, with few exceptions, for its conscientious sobriety of judgment; and the other for the warmth of its eloquence, sympathizing with every form of poetical beauty, and for the elegance of its style; yet, an examination of the two leads us to the conclusion, that the history of Spanish literature still remained to be written.

It is with no ordinary pride, both as patriots and scholars, that we now take it upon ourselves to say that this hiatus in the literary history of modern times has been filled by an American scholar, Mr. George Ticknor. His great work, the title of which is placed at the head of the present paper, is undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the literature of the present age. It is-as Thucydides, in the lofty consciousness of an immortal achievement, called his History of the Peloponnesian War-a ктua èç deí, a possession forever. Mr. Ticknor has long been known to the literary public as one of the most learned men of our times. His occasional writings commanded attention by the finished elegance of their style, and the unassuming but obvious mastery of a comprehensive scholarship by which they were characterized. In the year 1816, a liberal bequest was received from the late Abiel Smith by the corporation of Harvard College, for the foundation of a professorship of the French and Spanish languages and literature; and by a vote