was attached, was a used-up, extravagant lord, who wasted immense estates in selfindulgence, and compelled his daughter, not fifteen years of age, to marry Count D'Orsay, whom she had not seen till within a few weeks of the ceremony, and from whom she shortly separated. On the death of the Earl she lived in magnificent style in London, with her son-in-law, the Count, as a companion, harassed by debts, though her income for most of the time could not have been less than twenty thousand dollars a year, until the entire establishment was sold under execution, and she and the Count were obliged to take refuge in Paris. She died in comparative poverty--though not deserted--and the Count soon followed her, the victim of disappointment and Louis Napoleon's ingratitude. Now, that is not a fine life! That is not a great success! The Countess, however, appears. to have ben a person of noble and generous disposition, passionately beloved by all who knew her (as the fine tribute in Landor's recent letter shows).

Her Memoirs, by Dr. MADDEN, recently re-published by the Harpers, is a book of absorbing interest, though perfectly unpardonable in its free use of private letters. It tells the story of the Countess's literary life with fidelity, and in a sympathizing tone. The letters in it, from eminent men, are mostly on personal topics, full of compliments and mutual admiration, but are entertaining-especially those of Landor, Dickens, Mathews, and Sir William Gell. But the most amusing are several by Viscount D'Arlingcourt, a French nobleman and writer, who combines as much aristocratic hauteur with authorial conceit as can easily be imagined. The supreme disdain with which he speaks of the bookseller, (whom he wishes to print a translation of one of his works,) and his avaricious anxiety to drive a good bargain, at the same time, are ludicrously contrasted. A sentence in one of the letters written to Lady Blessington in Paris, after the auction sale of Gore House, by one of the domestics left behind, will suggest a thought or two:-"Le Doctor Quin est venu plusieur fois, etc. M. Thackeray est venu aussi, et avait les larmes aux yeux, en partant. C'est peutêtre la seule personne que j'ai vu réelement affecté en votre depart." Think of the picture. The cold, stern satirist, as he is called, the big,

burly, true-hearted man, as he is, amid the ruins of that splendid mansion, the only one of all its former joyous crowds, with tears in his eyes! We are sure we shall read the next number of the "Newcomes" with additional zest.

-In St. Domingo, its Revolutions and its Hero, by C. W. ELLIOTT, we have a brief but spirited and deeply interesting account of the career of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the liberator of St. Domingo. After an allusion to the history and condition of the island up to 1789, when the first insurrection of the slaves took place, the author passes to the personal character and conduct of Toussaint Breda, who afterwards took so important a political part. Mr. Elliott describes the incidents of his career with bold and startling effect; and, by a remarkable power of condensation, presents a complete picture of varied and protracted action, in a few touches. His style, however, is wanting in simplicity at times, particularly in passages which appear to have been suggested by the spasmodic Carlyle.

-Professor JOHN DARBY, of Auburn, Alabama, has prepared a Botany of the Southern States, which is presented to Colleges and High-schools as a text-book. In the first part, the leading principles of ve getable anatomy and physiology are presented in a concise form, with a variety of wood-cut illustrations; and in the second, a descriptive classification of all the plants of the Southern States is given. As far as we are able to judge, the book is wellexecuted and complete.

REPRINTS.-Mr. Calvin Blanchard has reproduced in this country the English translation, by MARIAN EVANS, of FEUERBACH'S celebrated work called "The Essence of Christianity." It ought to have been called the "Essence of Infidelity, or Naturalism the true Religion," for it is one of the most audacious attacks on all religion that we have read-audacious and yet puerile. Feuerbach occupies, in common with Strauss, (not he of the fine waltzes, as an English periodical laughably asserted,) and Bruno-Bauer, the extreme left of Hegelianism in Germany. Strauss, in his "Life of Jesus," endeavors to explode the historical verity of Christianity, Bruno-Bauer its biblical evidences, while Feuerbach completes the circle, by an assault upon Christianity in general. The peculiar stand-point of the latter, given

out with much apparent philosophical precision, is this, that all religion is the mere projection into objective existence of the inward thoughts and emotions of the human being. Man is distinguished from the brutes by the simple fact of self-consciousness,-by his ability to make his species, his essential nature, an object of thought. He possesses, consequently, a two-fold life, an inner and outer life, the first having relation to his species, or to his general nature, and the second to his individual nature. But this inner life seems to him always infinite, and outer life only is finite or limited. His self-consciousness, consequently, is essentially infinite. The power of will, the power of thought, and the power of affection, which constitute this self-consciousness, are infinite powers and are the ground and substance of all religion; considered as objective existences, these three-fold powers are Godthe Trinity. The consciousness of the object and self-consciousness, coincide and are one. Religion is the relation of man to himself, to his own subjective nature; but a relation to it viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being, so called, is nothing else but the human being freed from the limits of the individual man, or made objective, and contemplated and revered as another or distinct being.

It will be seen that this is naturalism run to seed, or rather naturalism carried out to its extreme and legitimate expression. Starting from the doctrine-too generally accepted, we fear, both in the Church and the world-that man is the source of his own life,

"Himself, his world, and his own God,"

it ends with the denial of the Infinite Goodness and Wisdom as the living and substantial source of all life.

There is some truth in Feuerbach's statement that men make their own God,-that in the heroic times, he is the God of Battles, to the Jew a narrow and avenging Deity, to the martyr a sympathetic sufferer, to the devout monk a larger Pope, and to the speculative thinker, like Hegel, as Menzel says, a pedant on the throne of the Universe; but these errors of former, and even of the present time. need not obscure our conceptions of Him, as he is declared to be in Revelation, or as he is loved and revered by the regenerate heart.

Human opinions are all subject to progress and change, but the absolute and the eternal, in which alone our thoughts and affections can rest, ceases to be the absolute and eternal, when we conceive of it, not as self-subsistent, but as the mere projection of our own nature.

-The Banking-House, by SAMUEL PHILLIPS, is a short story, singularly and rather roughly constructed. Its situations and events spring from the efforts of Michael Allcraft, the Banker, to preserve the business reputation and pay the debts of his father, Abraham Allcraft, who, though reputed enormously rich, died insolvent. In these efforts, Michael is thwarted by the villainy of one of his partners, and the follies of the two others; and the various excitements prepared for the reader, which are all painful, are founded upon the narrative of the terrible efforts of the unhappy and overmatched man, the successively deeper miseries into which he falls, and his death, when broken in health and reputation, and penniless. His sorrow is aggravated by remorse for having borrowed all his wife's large fortune, to repair his successive losses, and by her prospective poverty. She at last finds refuge in a country parsonage, and in doing good. The remaining characters are left to hang themselves; at least, they are entirely unaccounted for. The book is well written, but must, apparently, either have been very hastily composed, or have been much cut down and compressed for insertion in the periodical where it first appeared; insomuch that it does not adequately show its author's power. The use of significant names, too openly significant, as in many other novels, destroys all the illusion of the story. When we read of a cunning miser named Allcraft, of a projector named Planner, we cannot read, in the truthful and pleasant, appropriate delusion, that there were such men. Names of this kind should only be used in professed allegory.

-Fabiola; or, the Church of the Catacombs, by His Eminence CARDINAL WISEMAN, is a Roman Catholic religious novel, which treats of events supposed to have happened at Rome, in the first half of the fourth century, during the persecutions under Dioclesian and Maximian. For Protestant readers it has little interest, except as a literary curiosity. It is a book of the same class with Amy Herbert, and

the other novels of the GRESLEY and SEWELL School, and intended to propagate a ritual and hierarchic churchism; but with this difference, that whereas these latter are only at the verge, Fabiola is wholly inside the pale of the Roman Catholic Church. It is somewhat overcharged, too, with the sentimentality proper to Young Rome; narrating the ecstasies, and even the miracles of its three saintly characters, St. Agnes, St. Sebastian and St. Pancras, with sickening detail. The Lives of the Saints, and the Acts of the Martyrs are quoted, throughout, as quite reliable authority, and the ordinary ceremonies and forms of the Church, along with other antique observances, are a staple material in the progress of events. The story is not remarkable, being the frequently repeated experience of early Christians of high and low rank, converted, and betrayed and martyred, or escaping and living happily. The quiet postulate that Christianity is and always has been Romanism, of course, underlies the whole book. The style is precisely what one would expect from a dignified prelate; rather stiff, and more or less disfigured with classicisms and foreign idioms, such as one might acquire by long habituation to the use of Latin and Greek, and of the continental idioms of Europe; not to speak of technical terms from the ecclesiology of the writer. On the whole, therefore, it is greatly inferior to the controversial works and occasional discourses of the Cardinal, which exhibit not only prodigious variety and accuracy of learning, but rare eloquence.

-Pride and Prejudice, by JANE AUSTEN. With this respectably printed volume, Messrs. Bunce & Brother commence the republication of Miss Austen's standard novels. To the readers of forty years ago any account of her works would be superfluous; but they are known to comparatively few of the younger patrons of circulating libraries and book-stores. Pride and Prejudice is, in respect of style, a conversational novel; in respect of subject, a social novel. It seems to have been intended by the writer to be taken as an exposition of the evils resulting from the faults after which it is named; for the unhappinesses of the story are the consequences of the pride of Darcy and the prejudice of Elizabeth Bennet. But it might, without absurdity,

be maintained that Miss Austen had another purpose at least equal in importance, in her own mind, in its composition; for the book displays the disgusting folly and miserable result of miseducated and misdirected female life very much more fully and forcibly than the nature or operations of either Pride or Prejudice. Mrs. Bennet is a silly old woman, with four daughters; and her whole foolish energies are devoted to the one purpose of marrying them to husbands; who must, at any rate, be wealthy next respectable, then handsome, and good or bad, as luck may have it. Very much the same is the intention of all the other mothers in the book. Such is the expectation of the daughters, who are represented as wise or foolish virgins, more in proportion to the modesty or immodesty of their conduct in their husband-hunting enterprises, than for any other remarkable qualities. The action of the book is principally carried on by means of conversations, throughout which the individualities of the interlocutors are distinguished and preserved with very considerable skill; and which are quite artistically contrived to hold to each other, throughout the work, the relations usually sustained by adventures or schemes. A very meagre and unskillfully written biographical notice of Miss Austen is prefixed, apparently from some biographical dictionary.

THE FINE ARTS.

HORACE VERNET'S Brethren of Joseph, at Goupil & Co.'s Gallery.

Ary Scheffer's "Temptation of Christ,” was removed from the Gallery of the Messrs. Goupil, only to make room for a picture of less size but certainly equal merit, by Horace Vernet. "The Brethren of Joseph" has also left us, to adorn the walls of its English purchaser, but a large and important picture by Maclise speedily supplied its place, and renewed, for the third time during the past season, the obligation the public is under to the enterprising gentlemen who compose the firm of Goupil & Co., for the opportunity to study, at leisure, first class works of Art.

There are several things waiting to be said about these Exhibitions of single pictures, and the aid they bring to the formation of a correct public taste, but we leave them until another occasion. At present,

and texture of every object, but he does not know how to harmonize and tone the whole into an agreeable result. Hence his pictures have a spotty, crude appearancethe eye is not soothed and pleased as in looking at a Rubens or a Titian, but it is shocked and dazzled. Afterward, when the mind busies itself with the story and the characterization of the actors, delight begins. But it must never be forgotten, that a picture wanting in color is deficient in an important and noble attribute.

Vernet works with marvelous rapidity. He rarely uses the model, and then only for an instant; he spends little time in studying dresses, arms or accoutrements-so retentive is his memory that once having seen he remembers with distinctness, and then, free from all impediment, he impresses himself upon the canvas with such rapidity that he may almost literally be said to think with his brush.

The picture of "The Brethren of Joseph," which our citizens have had so good an opportunity to study, was a fine specimen of Vernet's work. It was painted in Africa in 1853. The story was remarkably told, and the execution could not be surpassed. Like all his pictures, it was unpleasant in color, but it displayed the utmost perfection in drawing. The botany, the anatomy, the rendering of texture in the materials, were all masterly. It was a work we greatly desired to have made a public possession. Not until our people can see such works freely and at will, shall we be able to congratulate ourselves on a public appreciation of Art; and until we have that appreciation we shall be wanting in a great element of civilized society. To provide such works of Art for the contemplation of the people is as clearly a duty of Government as anything can be, and we can but be ashamed that a city like New York, the third city in the world, has to depend for her opportunities of seeing works of Art, on the courtesy of picture dealers, and in the advantages which she offers for the study of pictures and statues, is not only behind Boston and Philadelphia, but also far behind some of the smallest cities of Europe.

Perfect as was "The Brethren of Joseph," in its drawing, and wonderful as it was in the truth of its rendering, and the clearness of its narrative, it wanted the charm of sentiment and purpose. Each of those men

was a wonder-each had a distinct individuality, but it was not only the fact of their being Arabs, and not Hebrews, that made them appear unrelated to the scene. They seemed as if arranged in a tableau vivant, and yet not so, but rather as if some accidental juxtaposition of men in real life had caught the eye of the artist and impressed him with its strange resemblance to the scene acted centuries ago in Palestine by those twelve hard-hearted brethren, and as if he had copied what he saw with literal exactness, making no allowance for the difference between the motives of the two scenes. This want of sentiment-the highest quality in a work of Art, prevented "The Brethren of Joseph" from taking that lofty rank to which, had it been all that we have a right to demand in this respectits admirable execution, the power of its characterization, and the profound knowledge in many departments it displayedwould have unquestionably entitled it.

-The Sacrifice of Noah, by DANIEL MACLISE, R. A., at Goupil & Co.'s Gallery.

This large work by an Irish painter, long resident in England, is undoubtedly a fine specimen of his ability. With great good sense, the Messrs. Goupil have thus far selected their pictures for engraving from the works of those men who are not remarkable for excellence in color. Scheffer, Delaroche, Vernet, and Maclise, are none of them colorists, and their works are well represented by engravings. Of the peculiar excellence of such men as Titian, Paul Veronese, Giorgione, Rubens, and Allston, no idea can be formed by prints: through such a medium we only see the beauty of their forms, the excellence of their arrangements, or the naturalness of their expres sion.

Mr. Maclise has treated his subject with great simplicity and directness. In color, the picture, like all his works, is wholly unsatisfactory. It is cold, gray and inharmonious. It is very much worse in this particular than either the "Temptation" or "The Brethren of Joseph." But in drawing, it is excellent, and the story is told with a clearness wholly admirable. The salient points of the narrative are seized with decision, and the canvas, without being crowded, is full of incident.

In the centre stands Noah-an erect, vigorous figure, wanting, perhaps, in hight; his face is lifted earnestly to heaven—his