wholly unprepared for it, either in their habits or
education: they saw nothing but death, and only
thought of flight, without making the slightest effort
to face or endeavour to avoid it by proper diet and
ventilation. The epidemic did not confine itself to
Grand Canary, but followed the fugitives into the
country, and made dreadful havoc in the small towns
of Felde and Aruncas.

NARRATIVE OF LITERATURE AND ART

THE literary services and memory of Dr. Lingard seem particularly to claim respectful mention at a time
when the intellectual claims of other distinguished Roman Catholic divines have been clouded by arrogant
worldly pretensions in which the deceased historian neither shared nor sympathised. He refused, on more
than one occasion, the highest distinction which his church could have conferred upon him, in order that
he might uninterruptedly and peaceably conclude a work which will endear his name to future generations
of English Catholics far more than the red hat or purple stockings would have irradiated his memory.
Having on a former occasion stated in these pages what we conceive to be the defects of his history, this may
be the fitting time to record briefly what we hold to be its merits. It is no small triumph, in our judgment,
to have not only produced a work which his fellow Catholics are content to accept as an authority and guide,
but at the same time to have produced an examination into the original sources and authorities of English
historical narrative, so ingenious, learned, and laborious, that no similar investigation has since been made
without continual reference to his pages. Dr. Lingard has rendered his volumes indispensable to every candid
or honest enquirer. We could often desire a warmer, a more interested, a more sympathising companion in
historic study; we must confess that we always wish for a more candid describer of religious differences,
notwithstanding the very impressive and singular show of candour he assumes; but a more pains-taking collector
of facts, a more careful examiner of authorities, and a fairer mediator in political animosities, we may never
hope to meet with. There can be no danger in predicting, that, for these qualities, Lingard's History of England
will keep an enduring place in English libraries; though, for vivid pictures of English historic life, or animating
views of the struggle for English freedom, the student will have to turn to a less cold and unimpassioned page.

There has rarely been a month at this period of the
season in which fewer books of mark or pretension have
appeared than during the month just passed. Publications
of a miscellaneous kind, and not without interest,
have nevertheless been numerous enough.

Mr. Finlay's History of Mediæval Greece, though in
itself an independent work, connects itself with his
former volume on the history of Greece under the
Romans, as the sequel of that picture of Greek decline
and fall. The present volume comprises something
more than two centuries, from the opening of the
thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth, beginning with
the conquest by the Crusaders, and ending with that by
the Turks, tracing the decline down through the empire
of Trebizond, and working out with great care the much
disputed question of races. Mr. Finlay decides against
the claim of the modern Greek to rank as of pure
Hellenic blood. An English translation of the first
volume of Lamartine's History of the Restoration and
Monarchy in France has appeared simultaneously with
the original. It carries the subject down to the abdication
at Fontainebleau, and closes with an elaborate
disquisition on the manners and character of Napoleon.
The former it ranks higher, the latter perhaps lower,
than any previous historian. The book will chiefly
excite attention, indeed, by the severity of moral
analysis, which it applies to the deeds and aims of the
great soldier and emperor. Professor Creasy's Fifteen
Decisive Battles of the World is a book successfully
executed on a very ingenious plan. It is a series of the
battles of which, in the author's judgment, any other
result than that which attended them would have
altered the whole course of subsequent history, plainly
and forcibly described, and with such explanations and
dates interposed as may serve to bring within one connected
view the succession and inter-dependence of events
between Marathon and Waterloo. The only other book
of history which remains to be mentioned, The English
in America, by the author of Sam Slick, belongs rather
to the opposite extreme of outrageous fiction. The
author's prejudices are too violent and avowed to permit
him to do any kind of justice to one of the noblest
incidents in modern history—the settlement and colonisation
of America by the pilgrim fathers of England.

Books of a more miscellaneous kind have been numerous,
but not very important. Dr. Latham has
published a small volume on the Ethnology of British
Colonies and Dependencies, and Mr. Prinsep has given
us a still smaller book on the social and political condition
of Tibet, Tartary, and Mongolia, and on the
character of the Boodh religion as existing there, in
which he points out many striking resemblances to the
Christian system. To the ingenious author of How to
make Home Unhealthy, we owe a not less clever and
instructive Defence of Ignorance; and a benevolent
lady has collected in a volume all the accessible
evidence on Reformatory Schools for the Children of the
Perishing and Dangerous Classes and for Juvenile
Offenders, of which the object is to demonstrate the
inefficacy of the existing institutions, and to recommend
the establishment of a national system of special
reformatory schools. Dr. Bushnan has undertaken to
rebuke some recent religious heresies, in a small book
entitled Miss Martineau and her Master; Mr. Scully,
a distinguished Irish lawyer and landowner, has contributed
some new and valuable lights to the illustration
of the much vexed Irish Land Question; Mr. Drummond
Wolff has made an agreeable volume out of a few
lightly-written but well-observed sketches of Spanish
life in Madrid and its suburbs, to which he gives the
title of Madrilenia; and Archbishop Whately has re-
edited the valuable little Selection of English Synonyms,
which was published some years ago with his authority.
To this list may be added a new volume of Notes and
Queries, and the first completed volume of Mr.
Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor,
which is dedicated to Mr. Jerrold.

The month's summary of publications, however,
would be very incomplete without mention of a
pamphlet, small in size, but weighty in contents,
containing Two Letters to Lord Aberdeen, written by Mr.
Gladstone. The object of these letters is to describe
the horrible and disgusting administration of the
present government of Naples. Mr. Gladstone relates
what he saw; and the narration would hardly be
credible from a person of less distinguished character
and known veracity. The King of Naples has more
than thirty thousand of the people confined in loathsome
prisons on political charges, and, among them,
subjected to cruelty and ignominy from which the
imagination recoils, an absolute majority of the Deputies
who swore to the Constitution at the same time
with himself, and whose only crime is the having kept
that oath which he has since so deliberately violated.
All law is suspended, with all personal liberty; and
the most revolting doctrines are taught by the public
authorities, under direct sanction of the state, releasing
all the moral sanctions, justifying perjury, and calling in
the aid of religion for dissemination of doctrines the
most wicked and abominable. These letters cannot
fail to produce a deep impression, and they may
possibly contribute to results which the writer has not
chosen to contemplate.