From The Examiner.

THE QUARTERLIES.

dundant word. This ensures good English. But no man can write as he feels when he considers it dignified to reject the little word that lies next to his thought for a word of more syllables that has a bigger or more judicial sound. If a man be in judicial mood his form of speech will take from his mood the right judicial flavoring; but if he be not in a judicial mood, why should he weave himself a wig out of the queen's English? And let us guard this comment against standing for more than it means. Our quarterly essayists are seldom pretentious writers; each brings to his work usually a great wealth of substantial knowledge, gained by compilation or direct experience, upon the subject he discusses, and sets forth clearly what he has to tell. The mistaken notion that there is a dignity of syllables and sentences apart from that of the true thought in its own word leads to no stilted writing. Our quarterly essayists walk firmly on their feet; but they should vary their pace more with their humor, and be less monotonously particular as to the way of rising on their toes.

SINCE their first days a change has come over the nature of our quarterlies. They make no more attempt to sustain a character for vigorous originality, and as for a witty article on any subject, its inevitable eccentricity might even be thought to sacrifice the dignity of the review. There is so much rough-and-ready journalism panting to be witty, and only contriving to be smart, that the reviewer in a reputable quarterly disdains to be anything more or less than_judicial, grammatical, and well-informed. Every reviewer casts, or endeavors to cast his periods in the same mould of decorous gravity. Avoiding Scylla he strikes on Charybdis. Rightly disdaining to be smart, he quells his just and natural vivacity. But why should a good writer delude himself into the belief that he must make the expression of his thought less lively than the thought itself if he would be respectable? There is the same faulty notion of respectability in public speak ing. An able man who can convince a friend in ten minutes by the use of his natural voice, From The Examiner. addresses a room full of strangers, not by givPOLAND BEFORE THE INSURRECTION. ing all the more intensity to his own true expression of himself, but by falling into a AT Warsaw, the three crowned heads held drawl of monotonous cadences that only irri- a meeting which seemed to personify all the tate the ear. It is not undignified to be nat-disasters of the land. It must be said that, ural in saying what is worthy to be said as clearly as good English, and as forcibly as the most genuine, direct expression will permit. It is undignified to be formal where, as in good literature, the object is to be immediately and completely true. We set a very high value upon the present influence of quarterly reviewing, -never was its power to maintain the true standard of literature more important than it is in our own day, but we believe its service to the public would be even greater than it is if it anticipated the impending doom of all false dignity. To the elastic movement of thought, language must adapt One religious service followed the other, itself with infinite variety of form. With of in memory of the patriot-poets, Mickiewicz, course occasional exceptions when, through Krasinski, and Slovaçki; and on November some man of bolder genius who will write as 29th, 1860, that song was heard, for the first he feels, the angel descends to stir the waters time, which for a year has been the impasof the pool, the pool of English writing in sioned watchword of the multitude, which our quarterlies is rather stagnant. If it be has echoed in cathedrals, and which has gone asked, what it is that we want when we at-up from the humblest country churches-that tack constantly the over-familiar smartness, "Boze cos Polske "-" Give us our country! and the vernacular slipslop of the great mass O Lord! give us our liberty! In a short of popular writing of the day, if we discover time, the whole face of affairs had changed, also a false dignity of style in works of such sub- and an electric thrill ran through the country. stantial mark and value as our foremost quar- Perhaps it ought to be called a revolution; terlies. We want fearless directness; given it certainly was a moral revolution, and it resomething to say that is worth saying, a la- vealed that which had hardly as yet been susbor only to express that clearly, just as it is pected--the existence of a nation, unimpaired felt. There is no perfect clearness of ex- by suffering and by trial. To be a revolupression without faultless grammar, and the tion, it had a strange beginning. There was extinction from each sentence of every re- no violence, no bloody intentions, no insur

to choose Warsaw as a place of meeting between these three masters of Poland-the Emperor of Russia, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of Prussia-and to choose it, too, just when all Europe was ringing with the enfranchisement of Italy, was to throw a challenge to our unhappy nation; nor was it long before popular feeling took up a challenge which was the second it had received from Alexander-his first having been that address to the nobility of Warsaw which he had made after the Congress of Paris. After this, demonstrations increased.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Suicide by Guillotine, 550. Romance of War, 550. A Very Old Man, 553. Latin Elegy by Praed, 553. University of Gottingen, 553. Girard College, 555. Yards and Miles, 572.

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From The National Review.

PASSAGES FROM THE LIFE OF ERASMUS. 1. Unpublished Papers in the Public Record Office.

2. Erasmi Epistolæ.

not the product of the same necessity, at the least the most potent aid to that same need, the Latin Church found in the Vulgate an instrument for reaching all hearts and guiding all tongues. For those new races, the THE present Dean of St. Paul's has famil- founders of the nations of Western Christeniarized his readers with the expression, dom, all their carliest religious impressions "Latin Christianity." The phrase is new, were connected with the Vulgate. From the and is apt to suggest a distinction that never Vulgate all forms of thought took their first existed. Had the patriarch of Constantino- direction. What popes and schoolmen never ple succeeded in his opposition to the rival could have done-for securing uniformity of patriarch of the West, had an imperial court belief and worship; for rooting in the hearts overawed by its splendor and authority the of men the grand idea of one Church, one humble palace of the Vatican, Greek Chris head, one language, binding the old to the tianity (if that be meant as a correlative to new races in unbroken succession, and to him Latin) might have found a centre, in which above all who had the keys of death and hell the thousand varying lights of Greek intel- -was done by the silent and irresistible inlect might have converged. But in fact fluence of the Vulgate. No wonder, then, Greek Christianity, as represented by the that any attack on its authority should have Greek fathers, is little more than a feeble been resisted as a deadly thrust against the reflection of the Latin. Christianity, strange very foundation of that system which had to say, awakened no responsive chord of the grown up with the growth of centuries and old Greek mind; the poetical and philosoph-entwined itself with every fibre of the heart ical elements of earlier days sprung up to no and imagination of mankind. second life. Even that logical subtlety which struck such vigorous root in the Latin Church found no place in the Greek. The intellect, language, and leisure of the Greeks would have seemed to point them out as the most suitable guardians and interpreters of the New Testament. And yet, as if to falsify all human anticipations in these matters, the Greek Church produced no expositors comparable to the Latin, Athanasius excepted. The social forms and economy of Christian life are of Latin growth. Our ecclesiastical ceremonies and dresses are Latin; our prayers and liturgies are Latin: our disputes upon cardinal points of doctrine are founded upon Latin words, and guided entirely by our conceptions of their Latin meaning.

Placed in the van of that battle which Christianity had to wage with the new barbarian nationalities of the North, the Latin mind gained new life and vigor from the struggle. If it be true that there are men whose genius, like aromatic herbs, never gives out its fullest sweetness until they are bruised and trampled on, it is equally true that but for these collisions we might have known the old Latin literature in its strength and majesty, but never in "its hearse-like strains; " never in its more spiritual forms, and that ascetic beauty which haunts and lingers round the memory like a spell. If

It is, then, as the opponent of that authority which till his time had been held infallible, and for this alone, that Erasmus can be regarded as the precursor of the Reformation. In his jests against the clergy, or rather against the religious orders, the clergy laughed as heartily as himself, secure and heart-sound. It was only when he proceeded to examine the evidence on which the Vulgate rested that they looked grave; when he claimed to apply to the authorized translation of the Scriptures the same rules of criticism as the scholars of his days were applying to Cicero or to Virgil. In this respect his influence on the Reformation was greater than Luther's; as the application of the principles of interpretation introduced by Erasmus must, under more favorable circumstances and in more vigorous hands, lead to consequences more important. At this time, when so much excitement has sprung up on the subject of biblical interpretation, we have thought that an account of this first effort at theological criticism might not be without interest to our readers.

In the year 1509, Erasmus was in Italy, when he received a letter from William Lord Mountjoy, urging his instant return. With more than a significant hint at the parsimony of Henry VII., Mountjoy informed him that the reign of avarice was at an end.

"Our