Prom Kling to King : the Tragedy of the Puritan
Revolution. By G. Lewes Dickinson. (George Allen.)—Here are thirteen scenes, sometimes in verso, sometimes in prose, which occupy the period between 1632 and 1662. In the first, Hampden and Eliot con- verse in the Tower ; in the last, Vane speaks to the crowd from the scaffold. The idea is good. The author has the opportunity of putting the great questions of the time, religious and political, from many points of view. Laud, Strafford, Chillingworth, Lord Falkland, Hyde, King Charles, Cromwell, and Vane, with others, explain themselves. And, to a certain degree, the carrying out of the conception is good. Mr. Dickinson has wide sympathies. He can spoak with a certain force in various characters. But the literary form is not always as good as we could wish. Perhaps the finest is the third, when Strafford is visited on the eve of his execution by his old tutor, Greenwood. Here is the argument by which the latter defends the seemingly harsh utterance whereby he has declared that his old pupil, whom yet he loves, " deserves to die
" You wrought as if immortal ; promises,
Laws, precedents were nothing ; crash you went Through every slow-built barrier raised to stem The swift returning tide of despotism.
You know the course, you meant to keep the channel By your own free intelligent discernment
Of public good and evil—say you did,
What of your next successor'? What should check Him but the law P and law you swept aside, Hurling the young creation back to chaos, That you might recreate. You poured contempt On the wise pationoos of living time, Crying, 'One man, one work.' And now you wait Death with your work. The greatest man alive . . Is hardly matched, my lord, against the world. And yet there's more, You treated men as children, Whom a kind father governs for their good ; But children grow, my lord, to take possession Of their bright heritage, lemon, which to sway, For good or ill, by force, betrays not love,
But most tyrannical folly."
In the second volume of the "Select Library of Nicene and Post- Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church," edited by Henry Waco, D.D., and Philip Schaff, D.D. (Parker, Oxford), we have The Church Histories of Socrates and Sozomenus. The translation of Socrates (305-439) has been revised by Professor A. C. Zena, that of Sozomen (323-425) by Mr. Chester D. Hartranft. Indexes to each follow.—We have also to acknowledge a fifth volume of Cassell's New Popular Educator. (Cassell and Co.)—If the students who but a short time ago were teaching themselves the inflexions of nouns and verbs can translate into idiomatic Latin the not very easy piece beginning, "The supreme command was unanimously assigned to Cortes," they have not been working in vain. Probably self-education does not show to the best advantage in language ; but of the general utility of this series we have no doubt. There are some striking testimonies to it drawn from personal experiences.
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