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NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (aated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To cubscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY
LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

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FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money.

Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars.

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Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers.

PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS.

For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HoRNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10.

MIGHT AND RIGHT: A DIALOGUE.

Πάντως ἐμέ γ' οὐ θανατώσει.

KING WILLIAM.

I WIELD the strength of the chosen race,
My breath makes kingdoms to fall and stand;
I have moved my landmarks a goodly space,
And won fair realms from the stranger's
hand.

I have driven the "Welsh" with spear and
sword

In the cause of God and my people's gain, That German tongues may sing to the Lord In the fields of Alsace and fair Lorraine.

On my right stands Bismarck to do my will, With steel in his words and blood on his pen; On my left sits Moltke calm and still,

Weaving his nets with meshes of men. Am I not lord in the day of wrath,

To smite my foes with a holy rod ? Who shall blaspheme or bar my path? Is not my sword as the sword of God? FREEDOM.

O king of the proud and patient folk,

When you rose in power to guard your Rhine, And smote the tyrant with stroke on stroke, The sword was yours, but the edge was mine.

Can I sell my children to serve your will? Shall they bow their necks to a yoke again? Of plunder your nets may take their fill,

But the meshes are wide for the souls of men.

Though you burn with fire and sow with salt All fenced cities from Rhine to Seine,

Is France the soil where your armies halt?

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Nay, France is mine, and your thought is All rude winds were hush'd to rest

vain.

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Only the enamoured south, Wantoning round her swan-like breast, The silken folds of her azure vest Kiss'd with its fragrant mouth.

L. L. D.

THE LOUER SENDETH SIGHES TO MONE
HIS SUTE.

Go burning sighes vnto the frosen hart,
Go breake the yse which pities painfull dart
Myght neuer perce and yf that mortall prayer
In heauen be herd, at lest yet I desire
That death or mercy end my wofull smart.
Take with thee payn, whereof I haue my part,
And eke the flame from which I cannot start,
And leaue me then in rest, I you require:
Go burning sighes fulfil that I desire.
I must go worke I see by craft and art
For truth and faith in her is laid apart :
Alas, I can not therfore assaile her
With pitefull complaint and scalding fier
That from my brest disceiuably doth start.
Translated from Petrarch, by Sir Thos. Wyatt.

From The Quarterly Review.
LORD PALMERSTON.*

Reform Bill of 1832, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, with the attendant and Ir sounds strange to say of a man who analogous changes-we might rest, be died in his eighty-second year that he died thankful, and take breath, before hazardopportunely, neither too soon nor too late, ing any fresh attempt to improve or confor his fame. Yet this is strictly true of firm our political, social, or material adLord Palmerston. If he had died at vantages by legislation. In other words, seventy, before his first Premiership, the moderate Conservatism was in the ascendplace permanently assigned to him by his-ant; Lord Palmerston was pre-eminently tory would be amongst British statesmen a moderate Conservative; and the wideof an inferior order: he would have no spread conviction that he was so, that he pretension to rank with Somers, Walpole, was equally opposed to undue caution and Chatham, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Peel, or Can- rash enterprise, was what gained him ning; he would, at best, be remembered as the confidence and insured him the supone who, by conducting the foreign policy port of the most influential portion of of the country on liberal and enlightened the so-called Opposition in addition to principles, had caused England to be re- the largest, steadiest, and (we think) wisest garded, with alternating fear and gratitude, as the eager, not invariably judicious, promoter of free institutions throughout the world. On the other hand, if he had lived a year or two longer, he would probably have survived much of his utility and his popularity: although he would certainly not have fallen back on the reactionary party, he would hardly have moved fast enough to satisfy the party of progress, who were already beginning to murmur; he was imperfectly qualified for a home minister at the best of times; he would have upheld unwillingly and with a bad grace the banner of Retrenchment and Reform; and neither the disestablishment of the Irish Church nor the Irish Land Bill would have been carried (if carried at all) in the sweeping, dashing, and uncompromising style in which Mr. Gladstone has carried them.

It was owing to the peculiar exigencies of a transition period that Lord Palmerston's reputation culminated. It was during a lull, between the ebb and flow of the tide, when the State vessel was pausing in her course, that the national voice kept him at the helm. The rational majority of the people thought that, after the abolition of almost all prominent and admitted evils or inequalities - after such measures as Catholic Emancipation, the

* Life of Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston, with Extracts from his Journals and Correspondence. By the Right Hon. Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, G.C.B., M.P. Vols. I. and II. London,

1870.

section of the Liberal party. During the closing years of his career he attained and held power by being the representative man, or (more correctly speaking) representative politician, of the period; and this must not be understood in a depreciating sense, for it was not he who changed and accommodated himself to the times, but the times had come over to his way of thinking and acting. He remained substantially what he always had been; tout vient àpropos à qui sait attendre; and the good fortune which attended him through life had so ordered it that, as contemporary after contemporary died out, he should be recognized as the statesman of all others best qualified to satisfy the expectations of his countrymen.

If any persons connected or intimately acquainted with Lord Palmerston and anxious for his fame should be inclined to question Sir Henry Bulwer's eminent qualifications for his task, their doubts and misgivings will be materially lightened, if not altogether dissipated, by the opening paragraphs, in which he clearly developes his estimate of the life and character which he proposes to describe and illustrate, and his plan :

"I have undertaken to write the biography of a great statesman under whom I long served, and for whom I had a sincere and respectful attachment. I shall endeavour to perform this not ungrateful task with simplicity and impartiality, feeling certain that the more simply and impartially I can make known the character of a singularly able and honourable man, the more

likely I am to secure for his memory the admi- and felicitous in expression. It is fully ration and affection of his countrymen. The borne out by the ensuing biography, for most distinguishing advantage possessed by the which abundant materials of the rarest eminent person whom I am about to describe and most valuable description were fortuwas a nature that opened itself happily to the nately at hand; including an autobiotastes, feelings, and habits of various classes and graphical sketch down to 1830, journals kinds of men. Hence a comprehensive sympa- for several years, and numerous letters to thy, which not only put his actions in spontane-near relatives and trusted friends to whom ous harmony with the sense and feeling of the the writer communicates his thoughts and public, but by presenting life before his mind in many aspects, widened its views and moderated speculations on both private and public The letters to its impressions, and led it away from those sub-matters without reserve. tleties and eccentricities which solitude or living constantly in any limited society is apt to gen

erate.

his brother, Sir William Temple, the diplomatist, who became Minister at Naples, would alone constitute a highly interesting publication.

"In the march of his epoch he was behind the eager, but before the slow. Accustomed to There is a conventional understanding a wide range of observation over contemporane- that no notes are to be taken of what ous events, he had been led by history to the passes in Cabinets, and when notes have conclusion that all eras have their exaggerations, been taken that they should be carefully which a calm judgment and an enlightened suppressed or sealed up till the generation statesmanship should distinctly recognize, but interested in and affected by them shall not prematurely or extravagantly indulge. He

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have passed away. Lord Palmerston does did not believe in the absolute wisdom which not appear to have considered himself some see in the past, which others expect from bound by any understanding of this sort. the future; but he preferred the hopes of the generation that was coming on to the despair of Some of his journals contain full and cuthe generation that was passing away. Thus rious notes of what took place in the there was nothing violent or abrupt, nothing earlier Cabinets of which he was a memthat had the appearance of going backwards and ber, and these have been placed at the forwards, or forwards and backwards, in his unrestricted disposal of Sir Henry Bulwer, long career. It moved on in one direction in the full confidence (amply justified by gradually but continuously from its commence- the result) that he would exercise a sound ment to its close, under the influence of a motive discretion in quoting from them. He has power formed from the collection of various in- used them in a manner to throw new and fluences the one modifying the other valuable light on public characters and not representing in the aggregate the decided events, without (that we can see) withopinion of any particular party or class, but drawing the veil from anything which approximating to the opinion of the English nation in general. Into the peculiar and individ-policy or delicacy required to be conual position, which in this manner he by degrees acquired, he carried an earnest patriotism, a strong manly understanding, many accomplishments derived from industry and a sound early education, and a remarkable talent for comprehending and commanding details. This, indeed, was his peculiar merit as a man of business, and wherein he showed the powers of a masterly capacity. No official situation, therefore, found him unequal to it; whilst it is still more remarkable that he never aspired to any prematurely. Ambitious, he was devoid of vanity; and with a singular absence of effort or pretension, he found his foot at last placed on the topmost round of the ladder he had been long unostentatiously mounting."

cealed.

The distinctive merit of his book is the

manner in which, step by step, by aid of these documents, the individual Palmerston is developed and placed in broad relief, until it is made clear how and why a man without commanding eloquence, without personal or parliamentary following, without grandeur of conception or originality of view, rose gradually and steadily to the highest point of power and popularity to which it is well possible for the subject of a constitutional State to rise. The trains are laid from the beginning, and even in the few and faint traces of Lord Palmerston's boyhood that have remained unThis strikes us to be just in conception | erased by time, Sir Henry Bulwer discov

ers proofs that the boy was father to the
man. It is curious, therefore, that he
should have omitted to mark the probable
influence of blood and race to which Mr.
Kinglake drew attention in a sketch of
"The Minister who held his own Way: "
"His partly Celtic blood, and perhaps, too,
in early life, his boyish consciousness of
power, had given him a certain elation of
manner and bearing which kept him for
a long time out of the good graces of
the more fastidious part of the English
world."* When this passage was read to
Lady Palmerston at Broadlands, on the first
appearance of the book, she denied the
Celtic blood almost as indignantly as Lady
Teazle denied the pillion and the coach-
horse, but on immediate reference to the
“Peerage” she admitted that Mr. King-
lake was right.

which he always took an interest." It was there also that he acquired an accomplishment which he subsequently turned to good account. He spoke Italian fluently and idiomatically. His residence abroad also inspired him with a wholesome distaste for sundry habits and customs of the English, which did not fall into deserved discredit till long after he had grown to man's estate, without at the same time in the least impairing his boldness of spirit or manliness of tone. Writing to his friend Francis Hare in Italy, from Harrow, January 5th, 1798, after expressing his admiration of Andromeda's leavetaking scene with Hector in the 5th Book of the "Iliad," he says:

Homer, Greek Testament, and a collection of "I am now doing Caesar, Terence, Ovid, Greek epigrams, and after the Easter holidays, According to Sir Henry Bulwer, the which are now drawing near, I shall begin VirTemples were gentlemen in the reign of gil, Horace, and some more. I am perfectly of Henry VIII., and Lord Palmerston's im- your opinion concerning drinking and swearing, mediate ancestor was the younger brother which, though fashionable at present, I think of Sir William Temple, the trusted coun- extremely ungentlemanlike; as for getting sellor of William III. and the honoured drunk, I can find no pleasure in it. I am glad patron of Swift. Henry, the son of this to see that though educated in Italy you have younger brother, was the first Viscount not forgot old England. Your letter brings to Palmerston, created March 12th, 1772, and my mind the pleasant time I spent in Italy, and was succeeded by his grandson, described makes me wish to revisit the country I am now as an accomplished and fashionable gen- reading so much about; and when I am sucking tleman, a lover and appreciator of art, a sour orange, purchased by perhaps eight biwhich he studied in Italy. He was also occhi, I think with regret upon those which I an admirer of beauty, of which he gave a used to get in such plenty in Italy; and when eating nasty things nicknamed sausages, envy proof in his second marriage to Miss Mee, who is "said to have been the daughter off some nice ones. I have begun to learn Spanyou at Bologna, who perhaps now are feasting of a respectable Dublin tradesman, into ish, have also begun to read Don Quixote' in whose house, in consequence of a fall from the original, which I can assure you gave me his horse, the peer was carried. Our late much pleasure. Mr. Gaetano, if you remember Prime Minister (born 20th October, 1784) him, desires to be remembered to you. I can was son of the second Viscount, of whom I assure you I have by no means left off my Italhave just been speaking, and of Miss Mee, ian, but keep it up every holiday with Mr. who, though not of aristocratic birth, from Gaetano, who has published a new Italian gramall accounts appears to have been not only mar, which has been very much approved of handsome, but accomplished and agreeable, here in England. I cannot agree with you and to have taken in a becoming manner about marriage, though I should be by no the place in Dublin and London society means precipitate about my choice. Willy is which her marriage opened to her. Her

husband's artistic tastes led him at various times into Italy; and it was thus that a portion of the future minister's boyhood was passed in that country in the fate of

"The Invasion of the Crimea," vol. 1. p. 452.

come to Harrow, and sends his love to you. I send you no news, as I know none. Adieu!"

Francis Hare was the eldest of four highly-gifted and accomplished brothers. He is the only friend or acquaintance of Lord Palmerston's boyhood mentioned or commemorated by him, and it is somewhat

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