has therefore fallen through. He is, however, to be again put on his trial, for the publication of other articles. On the continent matters remain without any great change. In France, the people, forgetting their recent mission of European liberation, are all mad with delight at the balls and parties of Louis Napoleon, and are without eyes or ears for anything but the smallest gossip of his sayings and doings. That the farce will shortly be ended by his being elected emperor, either unequivocally or disguisedly as president for life, seems to be the general opinion. From Austria sickening accounts of the reign of terror established by the emperor and his army still come thick upon us, while with respect to Hungary, where excesses of the most frightful character continue to take place, nothing more is known of a decisive kind than had reached us a fortnight back. France, by whom all the movements were originated that have led to these severities, has now no word of succor or protest on behalf of the sufferers. In Italy revolutionary changes are yet going on with some rapidity. The Duke of Modena has fled from his dominions, and the Duke of Tuscany, a really liberal man, who was one of the first supporters of Pius the ninth in his popular movement, has followed the fatal example, from the dread, it is believed, which was inspired in his mind of yielding any further to the democratic tendencies of the time, and thus incurring the excommunication recently promulgated by the pope from Gaeta. In Rome the temporal power of the pope has been declared at an end, and here as in Tuscany a provisional government has been established. Both in Rome and Tuscany these movements were preceded by a determination to promote the convocation of a Constituent Assembly, to decide the basis of an Italian union, but in Sardinia, although the liberal ministry still hold power, a wiser or more practicable course has been pursued and this step has met with no encouragement. Meanwhile the despotic powers, Naples, Austria, and Russia, are burning to pour in troops and to subjugate these disturbers. In the Sicilian question there is no new feature. From the Times of Feb. 23d. AMERICAN HONOR. THE most interesting question connected with the present prosperity of the United States is, what effect will it have in causing a return to honor on the part of the defaulting communities of Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, and Michigan. It is now more than ten years since the creditors of these states found themselves embarrassed or ruined by their misplaced confidence. In the crash which occasioned the default, five other states also suspended. Three of these have since resumed, and, for the most part, in a manner to leave them free from stain; the fourth has made a compromise, which, although not very creditable in itself, will now be faithfully adhered to; and the fifth (Illinois) gives ground for forbearance and hope by paying a portion of what is due from her, and by not denying her liability for the remainder. The indication afforded by this gradual progress is unmistakable. It was the sound feeling of the majority of the American people comprised in the non-defaulting states, which irresistibly impelled the defaulters to make these efforts to regain their standing in the Union, and with every instance of a return to good faith, the force of public opinion must have become still more severe in its operation on those that remain. When nine states, with an aggregate debt of $114,000,000, were banded together, they formed a phalanx sufficiently powerful to comfort one another, and to resist for a time the example of the majority of the confederation. Now that the number is reduced to four, with a debt of not more than $30,000,000, they occupy a very different position. The number of states in the Union is twenty-eight, with a total population of 22,000,000. Of this population, the proportion of the four repudiating states reaches only 800,000. It is not difficult to see that, surrounded by such a majority who are compromised by partnership with them, they must speedily become honest in self-defence. But it is not on this ground that the best hopes of the creditors depend. There are abundant signs that, in the ten years which have elapsed, a very decided change has occurred amongst the people even in the defaulting states. It is scarcely too much to believe that if the question of repudiation were now put for the first time, not a dozen individuals would be found to assent to it, or beyond this, that if each man by quietly contributing his quota henceforth could place the matter as if nothing had ever happened, there would be no further trouble of any kind. The difficulty is to get anv one to agitate afresh so disagreeable a subject. Claims that have been dishonored for one third of a generation may well be left for another week, month, or year, and so the affair goes on. A single bold politician in each instance might not only carry the point, but gain an enduring fame. Under these circumstances, it is plainly the policy of the creditors to commence an active movement, and to ascertain distinctly from the executive of the several defaulting states the ground they are disposed to take. If the result of these applications should prove unfavorable, they should then lose no time in drawing forth by petitions, and by every other available method, the advocacy of the most upright and energetic amongst those in each community who are capable of giving a direction to popular feeling. All the South American republics are now seeking to make arrangements with their creditors, and it would be disagreeable to find that if Spain does not soon stand alone in degradation, it will be because she can point to examples amongst some of the most flourishing governments of the AngloSaxon race. [We have prepared and postponed many pages upon Ireland; but make room for the summing up by the Times, in order to call the attention of our readers to the fact, that the question which no British ministry has been able to solve the question of Ireland-is about to be transferred to us.] THE EMIGRATION FROM IRELAND.—It is a growing expectation in Ireland that we are now about to witness one of the most momentous operations of society-the removal of a people en masse to a distant shore. The half million who have got off with no very great stir, in the course of two years, are but an advance guard to the main body that follows. It must, indeed, be the most furious impulse or the direst necessity that can urge men at this season of the year to cast themselves on the deep, to brave the wide Atlantic, to be thrown on they know not what headland or shoal, in the storms and the fogs which beset the wished-for shore, and, at the best, to land in a country still ribbed with ice and buried in snow. Yet we were told the other day of ten emigrant vessels taking refuge in the Cove of Cork, of crowds waiting at other ports for the chance of a passage, and of multitudes ejected from their holdings, and now lodging in towns, with no other hope upon earth than once to put their feet on the shore of the new world. We believe it to be even as it is described. The failure of the staple crop, the burden of maintaining the victims of famine, the impossibility of paying rates upon small holdings, and the invincible objection to pay them upon holdings of any size, constitute an expellent force of which the like was never seen. Pauperism, in all its bearings, is depopulating the island. They who are paupers, they who expect to be paupers, and they who loathe the thought of contributing their hard earnings to be squandered upon paupers, are equally out of heart, and resolved to go elsewhere. When the mind is resolved, the means only are wanting. But among the many redeeming virtues of this intractable and unfortunate race, is a strength of family affection, which no distance, no time, no pressure, no prosperity can destroy; and every one of the half million who have safely effected their retreat consecrates his first earnings to the pious work of rescuing a parent, a brother or a sister from Ireland. 'Tis a fearful thing in winter For the stoutest held his breath, Each one busy in his prayers, Just the same as on the land?" And we spoke in better cheer, Lytton. Franklin Illustrated. Part 5. The Midnight Sun: a Pilgrimage. By FredTranslated from the unpublished rika Bremer. original by Mary Howitt. History of Queen Elizabeth. By Jacob Abbott. With Engravings. Elementary Treatise on Mechanics. By Prof. A. W. Smith. This is an important work on the science of mechanics, founded on the analytic method of investigation; a mode which affords scope for the exercise of the judgment and the inventive powers more equably by far than the geometrical methods. The mature experience of the learned author has led and we think it probable that this work will prohim to adopt this mode in his professional teaching, mote its very general adoption.-N. Y. Com. Adv. A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, perpetrated in the evening of the fifth day of March, 1770, by soldiers of the 29th Regiment, which with the 14th Regiment were then quartered there; with some observations on the state of things prior to that catastrophe. Printed by order of the Town of Boston, 1770: and now republished by John Doggett, Jr., New York, and Redding & Co., Boston, with notes and illustrations. Price 50 cents. NEW BOOKS AND REPRINTS. Poems by James T. Fields. An elegant volume of a hundred pages with this title has been published by William D. Ticknor & Co. The poem recently delivered by Mr. Fields before the Mercantile Library Association of this city is here included entire, and there are many pieces of a high order into all lands in 79 years! of merit now for the first time published. The book deserves a closer examination than we can give it to-day; but we cannot forbear quoting the following exquisite ballad, as a fair specimen of its quality : of Boston and a frontispiece showing the citizens Here is a handsome bound volume, with a map with their cocked hats, falling under the fire of the soldiery. How the sound of those guns has gone We were crowded in the cabin, Not a soul would dare to sleep, It was midnight on the waters, And a storm was on the deep. Many are now living who were then upon the earth. The vastness of the changes during the life of a man, overpowers thought! Will those of the All movement is now next 79 years be greater? accelerated with tenfold velocity, but we can hardly conceive, unless the SECOND COMING be near, of se great a change as has converted a few discontented colonies into an empire which now acknowledges no superior, and which needs but a few more years to be the greatest in the world! POETRY.-Sonnet on Mrs Butler's Readings; Another, by Prof. Longfellow, 18.-Ballad from Poems by James T. Fields, 47. SHORT ARTICLES.-Songs, Madrigals and Sonnets; Count D'Orsay's Picture of our Saviour, 17.—History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, 43.-New Books and Reprints, 47. PROSPECTUS. This work is conducted in the spirit of Littell's Museum of Foreign Literature, (which was favor ably received by the public for twenty years,) but as it is twice as large, and appears so often, we not only give spirit and freshness to it by many things which were excluded by a month's delay, but while thus extending our scope and gathering a greater and more attractive variety, are able so to increase the solid and substantial part of our literary, historical, and political harvest, as fully to satisfy the wants of the American reader. The elaborate and stately Essays of the Edinburgh, Quarterly, and other Reviews; and Blackwood's noble criticisms on Poetry, his keen political Commentaries, highly wrought Tales, and vivid descriptions of rural and mountain Scenery; and the contributions to Literature, History, and Common Life, by the sagacious Spectator, the sparkling Examiner, the judicious Athenæum, the busy and industrious Literary Gazette, the sensible and comprehensive Britannia, the sober and respectable Christian Observer; these are intermixed with the Military and Naval reminiscences of the United Service, and with the best articles of the Dublin University, New Monthly, Fraser's, Tail's, Ainsworth's, Hood's, and Sporting Magazines, and of Chambers' admirable Journal. We do not consider it beneath our dignity to borrow wit and wisdom from Punch; and, when we think it good enough, make use of the thunder of The Times. We shall increase our variety by importations from the continent of Europe, and from the new growth of the British colonies. The steamship has brought Europe, Asia, and Africa, into our neighborhood; and will greatly multiply our connections, as Merchants, Travellers, and Politicians, with all parts of the world; so that much more than ever it now becomes every intelligent American to be informed of the condition and changes of foreign countries. And this not only because of their nearer connection with our selves, but because the nations seem to be hastening. through a rapid process of change, to some new state of things, which the merely political prophet cannot compute or foresee. Geographical Discoveries, the progress of Colonization, (which is extending over the whole world,) and Voyages and Travels, will be favorite matter for our selections; and, in general, we shal systematically and very ully acquaint our readers with the great department of Foreiga affairs, without entirely neglecting our own. While we aspire to make the Living Age desirable t all who wish to keep themselves informed of the rapia progress of the movement-to Statesmen, Divines, Lawyers, and Physicians-to men of business and men of leisure-it is still a stronger object to make it attractive and useful to their Wives and Children. We believe tha we can thus do some good in our day and generation; and hope to make the work indispensable in every well-informed family. We say indispensable, because in this day of cheap literature it is not possible to guard against the influx of what is bad in taste and vicious in morals, in any other way than by furnishing a sufficient supply of a healthy character. The mental and moral appeine must be gratified. We hope that, by "winnowing the wheat from the chaff" by providing abundantly for the imagination, and by a large collection of Biography, Voyages and Travels, History, and more solid matter, we may produce a work which shall be popular, while at the same time it wil aspire to raise the standard of public taste. LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 256.-14 APRIL, 1849. From the North British Review. tendom-irritated at the progress of Protestant The History of England, from the Accession of WE have never perused a work of literature or science, or even one of fiction, with such an intense interest as that with which we have devoured the two remarkable volumes now before us. We have cheated our mind of its usual food, and our body of its usual rest, in order to grasp, by one mental effort, the great truths which they teach, and imbibe the noble lessons which they convey. Were we among the personal friends of Mr. Macaulay, or did we adopt the latitudinarian views of religious truth which he has presented to us in all the fascination of language and of sentiment, we might have suspected that our judgment was partial, and our admiration extravagant; but, though our Presbyterian feelings have been often offended, and our most venerated martyrs but slightly honored, and our national creed not unfrequently reviled, yet these penumbral spots disappear, while we study in his bright and eloquent pages the vindication of our country's liberties-the character and the fate of the sages who asserted them-and the righteous but terrible doom of the princes from whom they were wrung. for A despicable king, in carrying off its crown, got his duty to the land which gave him birth, striving to overturn its blood-cemented church, and launching against its priesthood and its people the formidable power of his double sovereignty. Her humble temple fell beneath the sword of the tyrant, but only to rise again with a nobler pediment and a loftier peristyle. The same godless princes who had desecrated our altars and slain our martyrs lifted their blood-stained hand against the sister church; but they lifted it in vain, for their dynasty perished in the wreck of the superstition which they upheld. Under a Protestant race of kings, and a Protestant constitution, the sceptres of England and Scotland have been welded into one. Their churches have flourished and grown together There is no period of the history of England in which the events are so closely related to those of the present day as the few years of oppression and judicial murder which constitute the reign of James II. In watching at present the revival of Popery, and in resisting its insidious approach, we must study its spirit and its power previous to the Revolution; and in contemplating our domestic disturbances, and the political convulsions which are now shaking the civilized world, we may discover their cause and their cure by a careful study of Mr. Macaulay's volumes. In the arbitrary rule of the house of Stuart-in the perfidy and immorality of its princes-in the bigotry and licentiousness of its priests-in the venality of its statesmen-and in the blood-thirstiness of its captains-we see the germ of that revolutionary tempest which swept into one irresistible tide the otherwise conflicting elements of society. The giant of Reäction, in his most grim and savage form, summoned a patient and oppressed people to revolt, and with its scorpion lashing to fear from perfidious and criminal sovereigns, hurried one sovereign to the scaffold, and another from unprincipled statesmen, from venal judges, or into exile. from sanguinary chiefs. We have nothing to fear But while we shudder over the recitals in which from political turbulence. The progressive reform these crimes are emblazoned, and through which of our institutions, and their gradual accommodation our liberties were secured, the mind searches for to the ever-varying necessities of man, and the eversome powerful principle of action to which they can changing phases of social life, can always be secured be referred. Why was the prince perfidious, the by the moral energy of an educated and religious judge sanguinary, and the priest corrupt? It was people. We have still less to fear from foreign inbecause an idolatrous superstition reigned in Chris-vasion. The diffusion of knowledge, and the local the one rich and powerful-the other humble and contented. Their literature and science—their trade and their commerce— e-their arts and their armshave achieved throughout the civilized world a gloWe have now nothrious and imperishable name. With the faith approximation and mutual interests of nations, have | ery event but one tongue, and every mystery but exorcised the spirit of war; and should it reäppear, one interpretation. We here learn that with civil with its iron vizor and its bloody drapery, we have liberty popery cannot coëxist. With Scripture bulwarks of steel and of oak that may defy the hos- truth it is utterly irreconcilable. tile levies of the world. But we have much to fear of science it is at variance. To the spread of from that gigantic superstition which has so often education and knowledge it is bitterly opposed. erected the stake and the scaffold in our land, and From the sage equally as from the novice it dewhich is again girding itself for the recovery of its mands the secrets of the life and the heart; and power. Crowds of its devotees have been long sta- over the domestic sanctuary, the seat of the purest tioning themselves in our towns and villages. Idol- and holiest of our affections, it has exercised, and atrous altars are rising thick around us. The Upas insists upon exercising, the control of a parent, and seeds of papal error, long concealed in the rubrics it has wielded, and insists upon wielding, the scepand liturgies of a neighboring church, have already tre of a god. begun to germinate-now hiding their blanched vegetation from the eye of day-now rising up in rank luxuriance-now budding under the surplice -now bearing fruit under the mitre. The breath of a bigoted minister, or the fiat of an unprincipled monarch, is alone wanting to plant the poison-tree in our land, and renew the battle of faith which was waged and won by our fathers. Gathering these truths from the work before us, and entertaining the opinion which we do of its transcendent merits, we cannot but record our satisfaction at the rapid and extensive circulation which it has already obtained, and express the wish that it may adorn every library and enlighten every family in the kingdom. And notwithstanding the imperfections which in our eyes it bears, and the errors of opinion which to us it occasionally exhibits, and the hard judgments which it sometimes pronounces against truths which we accept and revere, we would yet wish to see it in an abridged form, diffusing through middle life its great truths and lessons, and we should not object to have it read in our schools, and studied in our universities, as the best history of our revolution, and the safest expositor of our civil and religious liberties. As Mr. Macaulay's History of England is to be brought "down to a time which is within the memory of men still living," it will no doubt include the chronicle of the great revolution, which, at the close of the last century, subverted European dynasties, and which, after being itself subverted, has reäppeared with redoubled energy, threatening the extinction, or heralding the improvement, of every political institution. The path of the his It is not probable that such a direct agency will be employed, but there are crooked lines of policy by which treason finds an easier and a quicker path to its crimes. There may be a minister, and there may be a parliament, so blind to religious truth, so ignorant of the lessons which history has read to them, and so reckless of the temporal and spiritual interests which they control, as to supply with the munitions of war the enemies of our faith, and thus arm a Catholic priesthood against a Protestant shrine, and marshal a wild population against the peace and liberties of the empire. Had we at the helm of state some modern Orpheus, who could charm with his lyre of gold the denizens of the moral wilderness, or some Indian sage who could cajole the poison-tooth from the snake in the grass, we might expect by a stipendiary bribe to loose the Jesuit from his vows, or the priest from his allegiance; but history proclaims to us, by a hand-torian will therefore lie among thorns and quickwriting on the wall, what the experience of the nation confirms, that every concession which truth makes to error is but a new buttress to support it, and that every shackle which toleration strikes from fanaticism, adds but to its virulence and power. To our Roman Catholic brethren we would cheerfully extend every right and privilege which we ourselves enjoy to every civil and military office we would admit them-with every honorable distinction we would adorn them. Whatever, indeed, be his creed, we would welcome the wise man to our board, and we would clasp the good man to our bosom—some modern Augustine if he exists—It is difficult for a statesman embroiled in the polsome living Pascal if he is to be found; but we would never consent, even under the torture-boot of James II., to pay out of the hard earnings of Protestant toil the stipend of a Catholic priest, or build his superstitious altar, or purchase the relics of his idolatry. We have no desire to support these views by any arguments of our own. We are content to refer our readers to the truth-speaking and heartstirring pages of Mr. Macaulay. In his history of James II., every fact has but one meaning, ev sands, exposing him to the assaults of vindictive factions-of men rushing headlong to change, or checking the march of that great civilization which the highest oracles have taught us to anticipate. The manner in which Mr. Macaulay has traced his course through the intricacies of our own revolutionary period is the best earnest of his future success; and though we sometimes start at what is perhaps only the shadow of secular leanings, when he refers to conflicting creeds, and treats of ecclesiastical strife, we yet look forward with confidence, and even with delight, to his future labors. itics of his own day, and committed often to party opinions which he does not himself hold, to descant freely and consistently on the events of other times, and to protect those stern decisions which he pronounces for posterity, from the taint of passing interests and contemporary feeling. Mr. Macaulay has, in our judgment, stood clear of this Scylla and Charybdis of history, and we feel assured that even his political adversaries will not venture to assert that he has chronicled the reign of James II. with the temper of a partisan, or sought to |