his fellows; but his ample leisure bas spoiled him, or rather, he has suffered it to run to waste; while the latter, by a wise economy of fragments of time, has done and is doing much that will render his name illustrious. And if you will pardon the repeated egotism, I may state that I acquired more solid knowledge before and after my daily duties in an accountant's office, where I passed two years, than I did in any other two years of my life; and this although I was occupied for eleven hours every day.

But I must not extend these cautionary remarks, though my list is not yet exhausted. Some of the things which I had noted will be treated of when I come to the section on habits. This section, with sundry "hints" about success, reading, health, time, and a few other matters, must be given next month, by editorial permission. Some of my unknown but friendly readers will, perhaps, do me the favour to learn from these plain and desultory remarks. Others, like silly moths, will flutter about, and at length will burn their wings, preferring to earn wisdom by painful experience. For one and all, I wish many happy years, in the highest and best sense of the phrase; and they will, I am sure, unite with me in wishing that this may be a prosperous year to the British Controversialist.

The Reviewer.

Essays; Critical, Biographical, and Miscellaneous.

WILLIAMS. London: Wm. Freeman.

By S. F.

THIS work appears unprefaced. This is scarcely fair either to author or reader. It has become so much the fashion of late to republish contributions to periodicals and newspapers under the title of Essays, that one has got almost into the habit of looking upon books bearing that designation as a set of republications. Our library shelves are full of such productions, or rather reproductions, -some excellent, few bad, many good or respectable; and we like to turn them over of an evening, because they are generally short and readable, somewhat wordy often, and much the same as to their essential matter, but still interesting and stirring. We like, too, to observe how the light of thought falls variously upon the several subjects in which there is much sameness, according to the point of vision taken, and the capacities of the eye that looks upon it. It is a sort of practical lesson in metaphysics-useful, entertaining, and instructive—so to read the works of our modern essayists, at once so different, so numerous, and so discursive, when compared with the elder fathers of that school of writing.

The word "essay" has lost its original signification. It was of old indicative of an attempt, an experiment, a sort of first fruit of thought. It made no pretension to finish, elaboration, or methodic form. It involved the idea of popular interest and general accept

ability, and was ordinarily confined to topics relating to manners, morals, criticism, taste, and learning. Now they are often elaborate, careful, erudite, thought-weighted, and finished off. Their production has become a task for the highest minds, and the ripe original thoughts of the greatest intellects of the age come to the parlour and the study in the bran-new cover of some able serial. It is a venturous risk now to publish essays, the legionary throng is so varied and well recruited. The humbleness of the old meaning is now lost and gone, and the terrible reality suggested by the names of Bacon, Addison, Goldsmith, Johnson, Jeffrey, Macaulay, Hannay, Hayward, Forster, Bayne, Brimley, Brougham, Whately, &c., remains. On which horn of the dilemma must one be pinned? Shall a lowly estimate be taken, and a judgment be sought from the idea of effort and aspiration included in the etymology of the word? or shall we swell the breeze of ambition up to its full and bellied greatness, to gain a place alongside of the noted barks who bear the freights of thought adown life's stream with an acknowledged standardness? A preface might have set this to rights; but there is none, and so our say must be said on the book itself, and our view of it.

Taken in the old-fashioned meaning of the term-although there is nothing really antique about them except that name-as essays, attempts, endeavours, not as achievements, the volume is far more than respectable. The author, we presume, is a young man smitten with the charms of several high-minded and noble writers-Emerson, Carlyle, Kingsley, Thackeray, &c., and somewhat inoculated with the platitudes of Edwin Paxton Hood, the bravura style of George Gilfillan, and the invocative rhetoric of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who has published too early for his own true reputation. There is the stuff of a thinker in him, but his thoughts have, we think, been ripened by the fire of his neighbour's grapehouse rather than by their own natural heat and strength.

There are a great number of echoes in the book, and there is an unsuitable combination of mannerisms in the composition, which detracts from the pleasure of reading it, and from its real worth and artistic value. There is not, perhaps, a more painful quality in a book than a suggestiveness regarding the reading out of which it has grown, or of striking the thoughts off in quest of a Peter Schlemihl, whose shadow has been lost, and which we think we have found. In this book the sentences have the turn, and the ideas are thrown into moulds, which are so familiar in certain authors, as almost to bewilder the judgment, and cause a sort of hesitancy now and then in our course. This is not the result, however, of plagiarism, but of the worshipfulness of the author's mind. He has set himself high models in some respects, and in others has allowed hin self to be influenced by the lords of clap-trap. He has been far less himself than we could have wished him to be. There is pith in the core of the man, and we would have liked to see his nature growing naturally, "from within outward."

Had the book been less essentially able we should certainly not

long have dwelt upon its demerits, but would have laid it aside with brief notice. We write with a painfully conscientious necessity for our fault-finding, and now that it is done and over we shall all the more gladly express our sense of its merits.

The following enumeration of the sixteen essays which the work contains will show that the subjects are more unhackneyed than is common in works of this sort :-Genius, Thackeray (in comparison with Dickens). Longfellow, Gerald Massey, Cowley, Alexander Murray (the Scottish Orientalist), George Crabbe, and Count Cavour, in the First Part, of 200 pages; and in the Second, of 112 pages, The Intellect. The Influence of the Thinker. An Address (on Debating Societies), The Spirit of Nature, Love, War and Christianity, On the "Trent" Affair, Gloria Deo. This ample field of thought the author traverses with a quick vision and a sure step. and forms an admirable conversationist by the way. Indeed, the work is better adapted for reading aloud than perusing, as if most of the papers had been composed for delivery to the ear, not for exposure to the eye. We have read several of them aloud, and have been much pleased with their oratorical verve and roundedness. We may mention as especially speechlike the Essays on "Cavour,' "The Influence of the Thinker." "War and Christianity," and many of the paragraphs on "Gerald Massey." These have the rhetorical fulness and the elocutional brilliancy of orations, and would have taken well in the literary association or from the platform of an institute.

We welcome Mr. Williams as a man possessed of the intrinsic worth out of which great fames are made, and counsel him to an unegotistic self-reliance-the due exercise of the innate manliness of his faculties. Should our advice be taken, we augur favourably of his career-that he will be known among the men who make their marks on other men's minds, and whose thoughts become part and parcel of their being. This will require patience, self-denial, and the heroism which endures as well as thinks, acts, plans, and flashes its purposes athwart society.

A Glance at the Universe. By NICHOLAS ODGERS, Schoolmaster, Stithians, Cornwall. Second Thousand. London: H. J. Tresidder. THIS is a small book on a large subject. It is evidently the production of a shrewd and intelligent thinker; and although it may contain nothing very original, it will be found to be valuable in assisting young persons to form a comprehensive idea of the universe as a whole.

The Book of Bible Geography of the Old and New Testaments, alphabetically arranged. By CHABLES BAKER. London: Houlston and Wright.

WE have examined this book with some care, and do not hesitate to pronounce it to be the best Bible Geography we have seen, for popular educational purposes. It contains eight small but wellexecuted maps, and is sold for eighteenpence.

The Topic.

OUGHT GIBRALTAR TO BE CEDED TO SPAIN?

a better policy than the usurions exaction of every item of humiliation we can enforce. Let us be holily bold, and give neither with doubt nor wavering. -J. J. H.

To protect ourselves against the despot of the bourgeoisie, we must have Spain in close and trustworthy alliance. That alone can give us a point of debarkation which shall enable us to carry on any war that may arise on the Continent, and to avert it from our own shores, which has been the war-olicy of our country for ages. To restore it to Spain, would be to secure the gratitude of that nation, and to gain the admiration of the world. This act of self-denudation of a long-possessed territory would be the fittest evidence of our perfect easiness about our position in the world, and would be as efficacious as a whole army in assuring foreign countries that we felt quite able to maintain our own position among them. The cession, while advantageous to Spain, would not injure us, and we would have the proud consciousness of being both just and generous. The cession of Gibraltar would be an act of grace, of power. of selfassertion, and wise policy. It would, above all, be right.-N. O. P.

forming that close alliance with us which would secure us from the fear of France, we maintain that the toocostly gratification, especially in the present state of our finances, should incline us to give up the spendthrift property.-THOMAS WEALE.

Of what real utility is Gibraltar to us? Naturally it is a part of Spain. If a promontory on the coast of Sussex were under the dominion of Spain, it would be a case only parallel with our pos-ession of Gibraltar. Like many other of our distant possessions, it is retained by us at a great annual cost, for which we have no adequate return. To cede it to Spain would be ridding ourselves of an encumbrance. In no way was Britain the worse for the non possession of this rock, when she was not its proprietor. There is a vast difference between the cession of Gibraltar, and the cession of such a province as Canada. To cede the former, is simply such an act as that of the man who gives to a friend an animal which is of no real service to him, and which costs him much for its keeping, while at the same time he has several others of a sim lar kind. In ceding Gibraltar to Spain, we should not be surrendering a colony or settlement to be plundered or oppressed by another power. We should not, in such an act, be deserting human beings, and delivering them over to starvation and suffering, or to a condition akin thereto, but simply causing them tochange hands,

in lieu of ourselves. The cession, therefore, would be no injury to Britain, it would do no wrong to Gibraltar, it would be no injustice to Spain, nor to any other people. What valid reason, then, can be alleged why the cession should not take place?-S. S.

Bravado is not heroism, neither is braggadocio boldness. Bullyism and rowdyism has been, we hope, swept away out of the cabinet policy of Great Britain. We do not need Gibraltar; it is a burden and difficulty. It an eye--delivering them up to another protector sore to the Spaniards that the British flag should flap upon the extremity of their territory; it is a continual jeopardizer of the tranquillity of the world that we should twit France and Spain with our boastful and braggart spitefulness in keeping up, for the mere love of military glory, an outpost of our empire, which out-costs its own keep by nearly a quarter of a million. It is a standing evidence of our foolish pride and proud folly. Not to mention the fact of its untenableness in the present state of warfare of the certainty of its standing as a constant dissuadent to Spain from

NEGATIVE.

Gibraltar is the key of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Fortified and impregnable as it has been rendered by nature and art, it will ever be superior to any fortificatious that can be erected on the other side of the strait, as a counterbalance to its bare and al