preached his sermon, taking what was called conservative ground." He gives Dr. Gannett also the credit of opposing harsh dealings with Theodore Parker among the Boston Unitarian clergy, and of standing up manfully for Christian liberty on the old liberal platform. The author deals gently with Theodore Parker's extravagances, and calls him "Our Boston Socrates-our gift of God—our Theodore." Yet he does not let him off without serious strictures, and he thinks bis Christology and his Anthropology defective in exaggerating the power of the will, and taking little account of transmitted evil, and the need of forgiveness and redemption. He regards Parker as cruel and severe in his invective; and he cannot approve of his severity. "I consider it false because extravagant; unjust, because indiscriminate; unchristian, because relentless and unsympathizing." Yet he does not forget that Parker was himself harshly denounced, and that zealots prayed in public for his death. Charles Sumner is treated more mildly by the author, and, while he allows that the famous Senator was quite fond of praise, he maintains that this fact entitles him to more honor for his independence and for his devotion to an unpopular cause.

Dr. Clarke's book has value from his Western experience and his traits of Western life and persons. Four of the sketches are from his Western residence in Louisville (1833-'40), and they are of much interest, and the friends of George Keats will be especially grateful for the hearty and discriminating tribute to the author's parishioner, the brother of the writer of "Endymion ;" while journalists will be glad to have this strong and truthful portrait of George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal. Here as elsewhere pastoral tenderness is combined with plain speaking, and the whole volume should be welcomed as a fine example of the new breadth and manhood of the pastoral office, and its ability to deal with civic and literary as well as ethical and theological subjects. Thus, the full treatment of Governor John A. Andrew, in a paper of sixty-five pages, and the shorter sketch of Dr. Walter Channing, the physician, are both pastoral remembrances, and they show how much of the old Puritan parish relation may remain in the new times and under the new conditions. The author seems to have had that new character, a medical woman, in his parish, and his tribute to the worth of Dr. Susan Dimock has the air of a pastoral memorial. The sketches of James Freeman and William Hull have a still closer interest in having for their author a near kinsman of those distinguished men.

Dr. Clarke's intellectual position may perhaps be most decidedly inferred from his paper on Washington, in which he selects Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, as the four greatest Americans, and from his opinion that "William Shakespeare stands at the summit of human intelligence; that of all mankind, since creation, his is the supreme intellect." The range of the author's liberality may be judged from his defense of Rousseau against the charge of being an infidel, and his pronouncing him to be a Christian who had doubts about the miracles. Perhaps careful students of Rousseau who might not object to this statement of his belief would be less satisfied with the author's view of Rousseau's genius and career. "He was a man of genius-that is, a man of ideas; but the ideas which possessed him were not those of the eighteenth century, but of the nineteenth." For Rousseau would have suffered from his weakness in our century so long as he kept his essential characteristic as a man who was run away with by his feelings, and whose most positive ideas were all electric and tremulous with sensibility, the slave of his emotions and perhaps of his passions to the last. In his treatment of Rousseau, as of Shakespeare, the author looks mainly at the intellectual aspects of genius, and little comparatively to its practical force and artistic ability. Therefore he throws little light on the Genevan's marvelous style and the Englishman's marvelous constructive art. How to think the subject out is one thing, and how to put the thought or fancy into shape and life, this is another thing, and one which is not much discussed in this instructive and interesting but somewhat fragmentary volume.

2.- Villari's Machiavelli. PASQUALE VILLARI. Niccolò Machiavelli e i suoi tempi illustrati con nuovi documenti. Vol. I. Firenze Successori Le Monnier. 1877. 8vo, pp. xx.-647. Or the many problematical characters of the Renaissance, none has been judged more severely or more differently than Machiavelli. For some he is the patriotic statesman who first realized the idea of the modern state; for others he is the sycophant and apologist of a despot who wished to enslave his country; while those who judge him from the standpoint of literary history frown on him as an immoral playwright. In common with other great countrymen, Machiavelli has followed the vicissitudes of Italy. ing is more interesting than to trace the posthumous Dante and Petrarch, for example, and see through what

phases they have passed, from mere poets to exponents of modern political systems. Machiavelli, from the nature of the case, has always taken a prominent place among the public men of Italy, but the changes of his posthumous fame have not been less clearly marked. The phase on which Italy has just entered bids fair to produce a revolution in her past history; it must be rewritten or reread in the reflected light of the present. Not merely that the increase of intellectual activity has brought out from dusty archives (now made accessible for the first time to scholars) masses of hitherto unused material, but the national consciousness sees a new and deep significance in a past whose sporadic and ineffectual efforts after national unity are all precious to a generation that has achieved the great boon. Doubtless we shall hear much about rehabilitation, but there can be no question that we shall obtain a truer idea of many things that puzzle us in that most puzzling of all epochs-the Renaissance. It is, as we have just hinted, Machiavelli's political ideas which, viewed in the light of the present, assume such interesting proportions, that have brought him just now into prominence, and tempted one of Italy's greatest scholars to undertake the task of giving the world for the first time a correct picture of the man who, with all his great genius, was simply the war secretary of the Florentine Commonwealth.

The author, so favorably known by his admirable "Life of Savonarola,"* appreciating the fact that it is only by an acquaintance with the period that one can understand Machiavelli's life, has prefixed to his biography proper an elaborate introduction of three hundred pages, divided into four parts. The first gives a general and vivid sketch of the Renaissance; the second treats briefly the history and condition of the principal Italian states-Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples; the third describes the literary movement of the period from Petrarch and the beginning of the Renaissance down to the revival of Italian literature in the fifteenth century; and, finally, the fourth discusses the political state of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, the election of Pope Alexander VI., the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII., the Borgias, and Savonarola and the Florentine Republic. This elaborate introduction will, doubtless, be compared with two recent works covering much the same ground: we allude to the fourth book of Von Reumont's "Lorenzo de' Medici" (Leipsic, 1874, 2 vols.), in which he gives a splendid account of the Medici in their relations to literature and

Translated by Leonard Horner. London: Longmans. 1863. 2 vols.

art, and Symonds's "Renaissance in Italy" (London, 1875-1877), the first two volumes of which describe the social, political, and literary conditions of this period. While Villari's introduction is more condensed, its outlines are necessarily sharper, no feature of importance is omitted, and it would be difficult to find elsewhere a more admirable résumé of the history of the Italian Renaissance.

The introduction is followed by a portion of the first book, which is to contain the biography of Machiavelli from his birth in 1469 to his removal from office by the Medici in 1512. The first volume contains the biography only to the year 1507. An appendix of over a hundred pages contains a large number of inedited documents, among them many autograph letters and reports.

The period of Machiavelli's life here narrated is, like almost all of it, a record of his services to the state, the most interesting consisting of an interminable series of embassies, in which he had all the labor and none of the honor of an embassador. In this period fall his first legation to France, and the beginning of his connection with Cæsar Borgia, which was to bring such infamy on him. The end of the volume coincides with the institution of the Florentine militia, 1505–1507. We must await the appearance of the second volume (which the author, unfortunately, does not promise very soon) before we can form a clear opinion of the new Machiavelli. Whatever may be the judgment of the author, the reader and the future world will have for the first time all the materials for the formation of an independent opinion, and the means of testing the views of others.

We must not omit, in conclusion, to add that to the author's painstaking researches we owe the valuable and interesting dispatches of Giustinian, the Venetian embassador at Rome from 1502 to 1505,* which Villari found in the Venetian archives while collecting the materials for the present work.

3.-A Statistical Account of Bengal. By W. W. HUNTER, LL. D., Director-General of Statistics to the Government of India, etc., London: Trübner & Co. 1875-77. 8vo, 20 vols.

etc.

THIS great and important work is only the first installment of one still greater and more important. The British Government has undertaken to assemble and publish, upon a uniform plan, a body

*Dispacci di Antonio Giustinian, Ambasciatore veneto in Roma dal 1502 al 1505. Per la prima volta pubblicati da Pasquale Villari. Firenze: Successori Le Monnier. 1876. 3 vols., 12mo.

VOL. CXXVII.-NO. 264.

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of statistical information respecting its whole immense Asiatic empire, with the further intention that the results won shall be condensed and digested into an Imperial Gazetteer of India. Twenty volumes of such material may seem at first sight a great deal; but that is only because we realize so little the vast scale of Indian circumstances and interests. Each volume of the present series deals with a region having a population of about three million souls. The series concerns a people both more numerous and more varied in character (as the preface points out) than that of England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Holland, Sweden, and Italy, taken together. And Bengal is but one of twelve administrative equals, though the greatest among them. English and feudatory India has been found by a recent census to contain near 250,000,000 inhabitants—a greater number than are to be found in all Europe, if Russia only be excluded. To finish the work on the same scale will, it is evident, require toward a hundred volumes.

Its plan was formed about ten years ago, under an urgency always felt and acknowledged, and in the light of experience derived from more than one costly failure. The extreme importance of detailed and accurate knowledge of the country and its people to the success of administration, especially in the hands of a centralized government, of foreign origin, is too obvious to need pointing out. Where, as in the case of India, the rulers are more intelligent and energetic than the ruled, and wholly well-wishing toward the latter, failure to secure happiness must have its foundation mainly in ignorance of actual conditions and needs. Such ignorance the English have always been fighting against. Great stores of information have been gathered and piled away in the archives, or sent home to England; but, for want of unity of plan, continuity of management, and promptness of reduction to published form, they have been in no small measure gathered in vain. Now, however, a single bureau of statistics for the whole empire has been constituted, and has been placed under the management of a man whose appointment is equivalent to an assurance of success for the scheme. Dr. Hunter has long been employed in this kind of work in India, and has shown that he possesses a genius for it. His "Annals of Rural Bengal," first put forth in 1868, made a very marked sensation, attracting to Indian affairs a wider and keener interest than any other work of its class ever inspired; it was republished and found numerous readers and admirers in this country, and it has reached in England its fifth edition. His "Orissa," also