truth, of course, if one only knew enough of law, there is nowhere any anomaly. There is a law to tracing the streets of Boston, as much as to those of Philadelphia. Only very few people know the one, while almost everybody can guess at the other.

There follow three Lectures on Rhyme and subjects connected, as Rhythm, Assonance, and Alliteration. Here is an acknowledgment of the serious weight placed on poetry by the necessities of rhyme, in a language so little fitted for it as English. Many a poetaster has come as far as the recognition of this difficulty, echoing the wail of a young literary friend of ours, who, in his sixth year, sobbed out, "It is hard to make it in poetry;" and many more have recognized it, without daring to say so. Mr. Marsh goes a good deal further, and lets us into some of the secrets by which our best "makers" of to-day relieve the cadences growing every year more familiar to us, of "fountain and mountain," "length and strength," and the rest of the handful of English rhymes. Handful the proportion of rhyming words must be called, in proportion to the number of words which one would be glad to use in poetry. It seems that alliteration is, to the general ear, as favorite a figure as it was in those Norse tongues which required it of their bards. John Norris, near two hundred years ago, wrote,

"Like angels' visits, short and bright;"

but nobody remembered his line, excepting Robert Blair, who stole it fifty years after, and dressed it thus:

" Visits

Like those of angels, short and far between.”

The line still did not answer any other purpose than any of the rest of "The Grave" in which he buried it, till Campbell evoked it, destroyed its sense by making it read,

"Like angel visits, few and far between,”

-

but in so doing gave it the alliterative quality which has made of it a proverb in the lips of everybody. We say "destroyed its sense," because visits which are few must be

far between, and for Campbell's own purpose the idea of short, which he threw out, was essential. There is something rather gratifying to our sense of the original resources of our language, when we learn from Mr. Marsh that we are coming. back, unconsciously, to the forms of versification which gave their character to the sagas and ballads of our ancestry. He suggests some further advances in this way. There is no rhyme in the following stanzas. Can the reader make out the law of their harmony?

In this connection, Mr. Marsh glories that it was not an American who set Homer to the tune of Yankee Doodle, but Professor Newman of an English University.

"Maiden Athene thereupon
Courage bestowed and enterprise,
Might in pre-eminence be seen
About his helmet and his shield
In fashion of autumnal star,
Blazeth abroad irradiant,

Such fire around his head she threw,
And urged him to the midmost ranks,

on Diomed Tydides

that he 'mid all the Argives
and earn excelling glory.
unweary fire she kindled,
which, when in ocean washed,
beyond the host of heaven:
and down his shoulders kindled,
where'er the rout was thickest."

*

The Lectures on Synonymes, Translation, and Idioms, lead naturally to a chapter of very great importance on the English Bible. Mr. Marsh demonstrates the proposition that the language of the Bible resembles that of popular use now as much as it ever did, perhaps even more. The popular language has described an ellipse around the standard of the English of the Bible, and is indeed nearer now to the vital focus than it was in King James's day. From this central proposition Mr. Marsh proceeds to argue, in face of the immersion people, the "assiduously-cultivate-peace" people, and the "change-yourmind" people,† first, that no general revision of King James's Version is desirable at the present day; second, that none is possible. It is very curious to see a competent student show how slight are the changes in the English vocabulary since the current version was introduced; and to us it is charming to find, that, of the handful of obsolete words counted by the English scholars in that version, thirty are still used by us here, and that thus, in the most important exigency of our literature, America shows herself a conservative power in the English language, as she has, indeed, in some of the fundamentals of Saxon social institutions.

The closing chapter of the book, which discusses the influences of America upon the English language, is scholarly and manly. We have, on the whole, it seems, less ground for selfreproach than for self-gratulation in the influence which our nation has had on that tongue which, God be praised, is the mother-tongue of most of us. Nor is this one evidence more of our easy performance of the great office of self-gratulation. The wider the waters flow from the pure "well-head," the deeper the magnificent reservoir in which Providence permits them to clarify, the purer are they and the more vitalizing. The English language of to-day is truer English and stronger than it would have been had it been left to stagnate in the little corner of the world where it first bubbled into existence; if Carver and his men had become Spaniards on the shores.

"Follow

* "Assiduously cultivate peace." Mr. Dickinson's improvement on after peace." t 66 Change your minds, and be baptized." Rev. Warren Sawyer's interpretation of John Baptist.

of the Orinoco, as some of them wanted to do; if the colony of Jamestown had been absorbed by the savages, like the colony of Roanoke, and this continent had thus been left to draw its literature and its language from the island of New Manhattan, its religion and its politics from the Dutch trading company which had settled there. True, we speak English in latitudes far south of Cornwall. We have contracted, therefore, something of the distinct articulation of a southern climate. Again, we read more than any nation except the Japanese, ten times more than our cousins in England. A nation of readers pronounces more deliberately and clearly than a people like the English, of whom a large proportion cannot read at all. So we are said to drawl our words, and protract our vowels. But still, with due loyalty to the sources of our speech, we shall do our full share to keeping the English language in that fixed orbit in which it steadily revolves around its foci. The existence of the North American republic will prove no evil, but one safeguard more, to the preservation of the English tongue.

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Favored, then, by the mighty elective affinities, the powerful harmonic attractions, which subsist between the Americans and the Englishmen as brothers of one blood, one speech, one faith, we may reasonably hope that the Anglican tongue on both sides of the Atlantic, as it grows in flexibility, comprehensiveness, expression, wealth, will also more and more clearly manifest the organic unity of its branches, and that national jealousies, material rivalries, narrow interests, will not disjoin and shatter that great instrument of social advancement, which God made one, as he made one the spirit of the nations that use it."

ART. II. ANALOGUES OF SATAN.

1. Comparative Mythology. By MAX MÜLLER, M. A. (Oxford Essays, 1856.) London: John W. Parker and Son.

2. The Natural History of Man.

By JAMES COWLES PRICHARD, 1855.

M. D. London: H. Ballière. 3. The History of HERODOTUS. BY GEORGE RAWLINSON, M. A. Vols. I. II. III. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1859-1860.

To deny the existence of the Devil was, in times past of the Christian Church, almost as serious a matter as Atheism. During all the period of the Middle Age, it was deemed as necessary to a good Catholic to believe in Satan as to believe in God, and after the Reformation, in the amended system, this article of faith still retained its old prominence. The adherents of the new order, like those of the old, waged war against the Devil with argument, ridicule, and prayer, and, when these did not avail, with carnal weapons. In the fif teenth and sixteenth centuries, when Europe went eastward and westward, sowing in many lands the seeds of future nations, side by side with every germinating state she planted her familiar beliefs. The Portuguese colonist in Hindostan, clinging to his old faith, was haunted in his exile by the dark shadow of the Adversary. It went with Spanish adventurers to the Andes and to the unbroken Mississippi wilderness. In imagination, the fathers of New England saw the spectral shape hovering over their scattered settlements; a host of demons were his retinue, and every town and hamlet furnished its quota of witches and wizards, recruits from the human race to his dreaded legions. To this day, faith in the Devil is a cardinal point in the creed of a vast majority of Christians. There is an intelligent class, however, with whom he has lost his ancient importance, and in some cases has been given up as a mere phantom of superstition, without any real existence. Science has robbed the Devil of many of the circumstances which once conspired to make him terrible. Sulphur and phosphorus were once articles of purely diabolical furniture, but chemistry applies them now to a thousand harmless uses. Geology has stolen his material hell, and dissipated the throng