bloom, the artlessness, the timidity, the every thing most characteristic of girlhood-all has fled, and is no longer there. There are plenty of good-looking young ladies, whose toilette is not the most carefully adjusted in the world, and whose hair is arranged in a fashion suggestive of the very probable idea that they were called away just before achieving the desirable ceremony of washing their faces. They are influential members of society; they are presiding influences of sundry Committees and Female Associations for the Alteration of This, the Abolition of That, or the Advancement of the Other. They write pamphlets, and issue manifestoes; they speak at crowded meetings, and take an ardent part in important controversies. They are not really young women-they are Public Persons. Any of my sons, I am quite sure, would as soon think of making love to Lord Brougham or the statue of Mr. Canning, as of uttering a word of any thing sentimental to these ladies. Moreover outward appearances can by no means be assumed to be a reliable criterion. At one of the first evening parties which I attended this season, I was greatly attracted by a group of pretty, fair-looking damsels, who seemed to herd together in one corner of the room, chirping like sparrows among themselves-their flower-decked heads nodding and tossing with charming impetuosity, and their little gloved hands gesticulating with fans, bouquets, and handkerchiefs. They appeared to me almost children in years; and something in their aspect quite warmed my disappointed heart with a sense of freshness and sweetness. I assumed the privilege of my age and gray hairs, and approached them, with some conciliatory remark, at once suave, be nignant, admiring, and jocose-in fact, couched after the usual manner of old gentlemen to young ladies. "And what breeze is stirring the flowers ?" say I-" what momentous subject is rippling over those rosy lips? Will you admit an old man to your conference ?" At this they all look at me, and then at each other, with sudden seriousness. They are evidently astonished; and presently the rosy lips assume curves not of the pleasantest; and I am conscious, before any reply is vouchsafed me, that these innocent white-robed maidens know what sarcasm means. "We are talking about our dolls, of course," replies one. "That subject and dress, are all that ever occupy our minds," says another. "Now what did you suppose we were discussing ?" a third asks me, laughingly, and with an air of candor that would be very delightful if on such a smooth brow, there were not a suspicion of boldness about it. "Oh!" I rejoin, determined not to fix the theme too low, "I might have thought you were canvassing the merits of the last new song, or picture, or novel. Young ladies nowadays, are great critics such matters.' on "But we don't talk shop' when we come out to parties," flippantly observes Nymph No. 1. At which I am mystified, not understanding slang: and no doubt I' look so, for they all exchange glances again, and laugh, and the candid one oblig. ingly explains. "You see we all of us either write, or compose, or paint. We are professional artists." But here she broke off suddenly, as another lady came quickly towards us, and said with great earnestness and energy: Mr. -'s in the other room. Go and speak to him about the Bill. I'll get hold of- and attack him." Off they all fluttered, and I was left stranded in a very blank solitude. Yes, though in the midst of a brilliant crowd, and with the hum and buzz of conversation, and music, and laughter thrilling around me, I confess I felt a strange sense of loneliness creep over me; I seemed to have lived too long: I had ceased to be a part of the things of this present world. I was like a harpsichord tuned to the concert-pitch of a quarter of a century ago, which could take no part in the orchestra of to-day, being utterly discordant with every instrument therein; and while depressingly conscious of my own "flatness," I could not but feel some anxiety as to the issue of this fiercely strung-up, highly-tensioned state of things. What would it all end in? I experienced a yearning after the little girls of my friend Brown, at Slowington, nice little things in short frocks and pinafores, and I marveled if they would grow up into women, simply (ah! could they do better?) or if they would graft on to that fair heaven's work alien growths resulting in something strange and nondescript, like many of I declare to you (and hence the source of my dismay) that if I were a young man thrown into the society of the present day, I should find myself perfectly incapable of falling in love with any of the young la dies that as yet have come under my notice. I couldn't do it. These followers of the arts, whose life is in the pictures they paint, or the books they write, these scientific damsels who would strike me dumb with a sense of my helpless ignorance if I began to converse with themthese political ladies, above all, who influence the affairs of Europe by their pens, and talk leading articles at you by the hour together, if you give them a chance those I saw about me then? I don't deny | culiar feelings love is born; and I want that a profound, and perhaps an unreas- to know what is to be done when the last onable melancholy overcame me as I blow is struck at them, and they cease looked round that well-filled room, and to be? took note, individually and collectively, of the fairer half of its occupants. For not the least perplexing element in this new system of perplexities, is to see external characteristics remaining as they were, and musical proportion, grace of form, and delicacy of coloring still marking the broad distinction between the physical nature at least, of woman and man. But how long will this lingering remnant of the original idea remain? I thought to myself. Will politicians, like that one in pink silk there, who, I am told, understands the state of foreign affairs as well as any man living, continue to boast the fresh, shell-like complexion, the lustrous eyes, the winning dimples on the cheek, could I ever feel a tender sentiment for that I see now? As the mind hardens with its abstruse studies and its bitter experience of practicalities, will not the skin grow coarse and rough, the lines deepen into furrows, and the whole aspect alter, till the outward aspect of a woman becomes feebly masculine, answering to what, as I take it, she is now trying to make her mind? And if so-if this should come to pass-I want to know what is to become of my sons, and other men's sons? Where are they to look, when they go seeking among the daughters of the land that they may take unto themselves wives? How is it to be expected that they will feel towards these public characters, who have been working side by side with them in the great arena of business, politics, or science; blackening their faces and roughening their hands in the same hard labor, only with the difference that they have to stand on their tip-toes to reach their fingers to the tool-board, and to run very fast to keep pace with the bigger laborer's slow walk? Can it be supposed that my sons and their compeers will continue to regard these anomalous beings with the chivalric deference that conscious strength always feels to conscious helplessness? Are they to be supposed capable of entertaining for them the proper manly feeling of protecting tenderness to the physical weakness, of self-reproaching, half-wondering admiration of the gentleness, purity, and moral strength that in former times used to make women, women? Yet of these pe any of these? Does a man fall in love with artist, novelist, mathematician, or politician? No, he doesn't; and the end of all these speculations is, that I turn with a feeling of profound relief and thankfulness to my beloved Alicia, who is, as she always was, neither more nor less than a loving woman, strong enough in mind and body for all a woman's work and duties, but for no more; who would as soon think of picking pockets as of writing books-knows no more of algebra than a flower, or of politics than a skylark. Oh! if I could find six such women for my boys! But I despair of it: I don't believe they exist. Education, cultivation, intellectual elevation, and so forth, have absolutely annihilated the species. Alas! the day! Doubtless I shall be deemed illiberal in these lamentations. Doubtless the cry of my heart, "Oh! for a little ignorance among women! oh! that their minds were not so expanded and their intelligence so developed!" sounds narrow, selfish, and shallow. Probably I shall find few to echo my wish that the sex was rather what it used to be, with all its weaknesses and follies and shortcomings, than what I dismally fear it is about to become. it so. Of course, if the world is satisfied with itself as it goes on, it is all very well for the world, and I must even keep my doubts and discontents buried in my own old-fashioned breast. Be This once, however, I may surely be allowed to speak out and unburden my mind of this Fear for the Future. From the London Review. CECIL AND MARY; OR, PHASES OF LIFE AND LOVE.* | Withers the flower of love, or other chance Which goes, but to no purpose; and beware, Kind words and kinder deeds THERE are many beauties, both moral and poetical, in this little volume; and also, we are bound to say, many artistic blemishes. We will not now insist upon the latter, as it would lead us unto a repetition of much that we have said before, when characterizing the effusions of Mr. Alexander Smith. As a poet, Mr. Jack-Whose tongue is like a clock that has no dial, son belongs to the same school. He has evidently made the Balder of Mr. Dobell a particular study. His illustrations are out of all proportion to the amount of truth and incident, and their profusion is far more evident than their felicity or force. Considering this ornate style, nothing could be more ill-chosen than the dramatic form. Of course, all the interlocutors use the same lavishly embroidered language. Every epithet is a metaphor, and every sentiment shrined in Oriental phrase; and though this might be allowed. as a peculiarity of the polished and fastidious Cecil, it is hardly right that his good mother should be made to drop so many tropes, and that too under circumstances of severe maternal trial. We do not object to the following excellent advice, except that it is not very happily addressed to one whose choice was made; but the terms are not such as even noble mothers use upon like occasions. Cecil is about to go to India as a missionary, leaving home and his betrothed behind him : "Hearken now, my son: We who have sailed far down the stream of life Know better than those nearer to its source Where lie its perilous rapids, shoals, and falls. You can not take her with you whom you have Most wisely chosen, and absence, like long drought, * Cecil and Mary: or, Phases of Life and Love. By JOSEPH EDWARD JACKSON. Parker & Son. 1858. Are gentle rain to the sweet flower of love. words Strip off the flowers from an unyielding bond This is a fair specimen of the author's style, and every page is of the same elaborate pattern. The whole poem breathes a pure, religious, and missionary spirit; and it is for this reason we the more regret its excess of sentiment and imagery. A manly, simple, and direct style would surely have better seconded the author's moral purpose; for how shall we believe in the devotion of a hero whose tones are of the daintiest, and who can not plainly tell you what a thing is, but must needs tell you handsomely what it is like? From Colburn's New Monthly. PRESCOTT'S HISTORY OF PHILIP THE SECOND.* IN the present volume of Mr. Prescott's attractive history, Philip himself is not often seen upon the stage. It is only in the two concluding chapters that we catch more than a glimpse of his majesty, the previous eleven being occupied by the narrative of the Rebellion of the Moriscoes, and war with the Turks. With his usual completeness of arrangement, the historian makes his reader conversant with the checkered past of the Moors in Spain, before he details the exciting story of their fatal present. He takes us back to the beginning of the eighth century, when the Arabs, on warlike thoughts intent, as inspired thereto by the prophet of their aggressive faith, having traversed the southern shores of the Mediterranean, now reached the borders of those straits which separate Africa from Europe. Here we see them pausing for a moment, before carrying their banners into a strange and unknown quarter of the globe, and then descending, with accumulated strength, on the sunny fields of Andalusia, there to meet the whole Gothic array on the banks of the Gaudalete, and, after that fatal battle in which King Roderick fell with the flower of his nobility, spreading themselves, like an army of locusts, over every part of the Peninsula. "Three years sufficed for the conquest of the countryexcept that small corner in the north, where a remnant of the Goths contrived to maintain a savage independence, and where the rudeness of the soil held out to the Saracens no temptation to follow them. "It was much the same story that was repeated, more than three centuries later, by the Norman conqueror in England. The battle of Hastings was to that kingdom what the battle of the Guadalete was to Spain; though the Norman barons, as * History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain. By WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. Vol. III. London: Routledge & Co. 1859. they rode over the prostrate land, dictated terms to the vanquished of a sterner character than those granted by the Saracens." We may here remark, in passing, that Mr. Prescott has a pleasant habit of thus illustrating his recital by allusions to historical parallels, or, as the case may happen, historical contrasts. A little further on, for example, he describes the intercourse between these Moslem conquerors and the subject-natives in Spain, as having been "certainly far greater than that between our New-England ancestors and the Indian race which they found in possession of the soil-that ill-fated race," as he too truly calls it, which seem to have shrunk from the touch of civilization, and to have passed away before it, like the leaves of the forest before the breath of winter. On the other hand, he supposes the union in question to have been not so intimate as that which existed between the old Spaniards and the semi-civilized tribes that occupied the plateau of Mexico, whose descendants, he adds, are at this day to be seen there, filling the highest places, both social and political, and whose especial boast it is to have sprung from the countrymen of Montezuma. similar way he speaks of the war carried on by Ferdinand and Isabella against the Moors of Granada, as one which rivaled that of Troy in its duration, and surpassed it in the romantic character of its incidents ;" and of the chronic war, so to speak, maintained age after age by Christian against infidel-generation after generation passing their lives in one long, uninterrupted crusade-as having something of the same effect on the character of the nation that the wars for the recovery of Palestine had on the Crusaders of the Middle Ages"-namely, that every man learned to regard himself as in an especial manner the soldier of Heaven - forever fighting the great battle of the faith. So again the fall of the favorite, Cardinal 66 In a Espinosa, is called "an event as signal | choose ye. The Moors chose the former and unexpected by the world, and as alternative-that horn of the dilemna aptragical to the subject of it, as the fall of pearing to them the less of two evils, for Wolsey." And the massacre in the pri- there are such things as conversions not son of the Chancery of Granada "no where even skin-deep, the Ethiopian being, in finds a more fitting parallel than in the fact, incapable of changing his skin, and murders perpetrated on a still larger scale, the leopard his spots-on compulsion. during the French Revolution, in the Charles the Fifth had not been ten years famous massacres of September "-with upon the throne, when the entire Moorish this difference, that whereas the Parisian population were "brought within the pale miscreants were the tools of a sanguinary of Christianity," and were henceforth to faction, that was regarded with horror by be called Moriscoes, old things (it was every friend of humanity in the country was hoped) having passed away, and all -in Granada, on the contrary, it was the things become new. But all things are government itself, or at least those of not apt to become new, and remain so, highest authority in it, who were respon- even in cases the most miraculous of sible for the deed.* wholesale conversions. Morisco is but Moor corrupt. Call him what you will, after baptism, it is still the article of his faith that there is but one God, and Mohammed is his prophet; and he thinks it best, as a ward of the Inquisition, and mere step-son of Christendom, to put his trust in that one God, and keep his powder dry. He will want it soon, and plenty of it. Of course the historian's sympathies are with the Moriscoes in the systematic oppression that crushed them in the latter days. Upon the impolicy as well as the injustice of that oppression he descants with glowing emphasis. He traces the degrees by which the Spaniards became more and more arrogant, in proportion as the Arabs, shorn of their ancient opulence and power, descended in the scale; and shows how the latent fire of intolerance was fanned into a blaze by the breath of the fanatical clergy, who naturally possessed unbounded influence in a country where religious considerations entered so largely into the motives of action-while, to crown the whole, the date of the fall of Granada (1492) coïncided with that of the establishment of the Inquisition, "as if the hideous monster had waited the time when an inexhaustible supply of victims might be afforded for its insatiable maw." Ximenes set most Christian Spain an example in the art of conversion. Proselytism made easy was the apparent fruit of his endeavors. Turn Christian, or turn out-of house, home, country: * Possibly Mr. Prescott's wholesome appetite for allusion leads him occasionally to become far-fetching in his fare. For example, in his description of the allied fleet making for the gulf of Lepanto, and, as it swept down the Ionian Sea, passing many a spot famous in ancient story, none of these, he suggests, would be so likely to excite an interest at this time as Actium, "on whose waters was fought the greatest naval battle of antiquity. But the mariner, probably," it is added-and the probably is a most safe conjecture-"gave little thought to the past, as he dwelt on the conflict that awaited him at Lepanto." The mariner, honest man, had, in vulgar parlance, other fish to fry, that foggy morning, than any that were kept in (Ionian) hot water by the Roman tragedy of All for Love, or the World Well Lost, some fifteen hundred years before. VOL. XLVI.-NO. IV. When Philip succeeded to the throne, the larger part of the Moorish population was spread over the mountain range of the Alpujarras, where, in scattered hamlets, they kept alive as best they could the traditions of their fathers, and that spirit of independence without some remnant of which, life was not worth the living. For a year or two the King had too engrossing a call from foreign affairs to allow of his devoting much attention to Morisco rats and mice, and such small deer of the sierras in the south. By and by, however, ordinances were published which tended to discourage and irritate the alien race. These "impolitic edicts" were but precursors of a revolutionary measure-a grand inquisitor's masterpiece -which forbade the use of Arabic, the continuance of family names, of Oriental costume, of feminine vails in public, of private religious ceremonies, of national songs and dances at home festivities, and of the warm baths which every cleanly Morisco accounted a necessary, not mere luxury, of every-day life. Stern penalties were attached to the non-observance of this index prohibitorum. Imprisonment and exile were to overtake the transgressor of a law which, says Mr. Prescott, "for cruelty and absurdity, has scarcely a parallel in history." For it would be difficult, as he observes, to imagine any 36 |