grounds alone, or on any exclusive grounds, but from a broadly comprehensive point of view. Every human institution has a private history which is very different from its public one. In some respects the former is the more, in others the less, admirable of the two. In the present case, the element in the picture which appeals to our admiration is the heroic patience and perseverance, the fortitude, the tact, and the courage with which the Church applied herself to the healing of her internal wounds when they were curable, and to the enduring of them when they were not, in order that, at any cost, she might produce upon the world the impression of unity, sanity, and strength.
The title of this book leaves its reviewer little to say in explanation of its purposes. It is a lively enough book, and a book well enough written, with a good deal of dash and piquancy in the style; and yet, like the blameless dinner to which Doctor Johnson objected that it was not a dinner to ask a man to, it is not a book to advise one to read. It does not appear to us, after reading it, that we are wiser concerning Brazil than before; even the facts in it we greeted, in many cases, with the warmth due to old statistical acquaintances. The philosophy of the author seems to be that the Brazilians are a bad set, and that they have become so mainly by mingling their blood with that of their negroes, a race never so useful and happy as when in the discipline of slavery. Mr. Codman contrasts their hopeless state on the lands of a good-hearted Scotchman in Brazil, who intends to let them earn their freedom by working for him, with their condition on the neighboring estate of a sharp, slave-driving Yankee, who acquiesces unmurmuringly in the purposes of Providence; "his theory being, that, as labor is their condition, the greatest amount of work compatible with their health and fair endurance is to be got from them. With this end in view, there is a judicious distribution of rewards and punishments." Mr. Codman finds the charm of novelty in these just and simple ideas, but we think we have in past years met with the same ingenious reasoning in Southern speeches and newspapers; and we suspect the system was one commonly adopted in our slave States, where the occasional omission of punishments was economically made to represent the judicious distribution of rewards.
In fact, Mr. Codman seems to have travelled and written too late to benefit his generation. Six or seven happy years ago, an enlightened public sentiment would have received his views of slavery with acclaim; but we doubt if they would now sell a copy of his book even in Charleston.
People who remember things written as long ago as five years have a certain stiffness in their tastes which disqualifies them for the enjoyment of much contemporaneous achievement; and it is fortunate for the poets that it is the young who make reputations. Miss Ingelow's first volume, indeed, had something in it that could please not only the inexperience of youth, for which nothing like it existed, but even the knowledge of those arrived at the interrogation-point in life, who felt that here there was a movement toward originality in much familiar mannerism and uncertain purpose. If there was not a vast deal for enjoyment, there was a reason for hope. It was plain that the author's gift was not a great one, but it was also clear that she had a gift. She was a little tedious and diffuse; she was often too long in reaching a point, and sometimes she never reached it at all. But then she wrote "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire," and the "Songs of Seven," and "Divided,"—none of them perfect poems, yet all very good and fresh,—and showed a true feeling for nature, and some knowledge of humanity as women see it. In this second volume, however, she abandons her maturer admirers to their fate, and seeks the favor of the young ladies and gentlemen who have begun to like verses since Mr. Tennyson's latest poems were written, and the old balladists and modern poetical archaists ceased to be read. In fact, it is amazing to see how this author, who had a talent of her own, has contentedly buried it, and gone to counterfeiting the talents of others. The "Story of Doom" here given is an unusually dreary copy of the unrealism of Mr. Tennyson's "Idyls
