CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Dublin Review for October. (Burns and Oates.)—This is the best number of the Dublin we have read for some time. We have already drawn attention to the article which shows that Roman Catholics, as such, have no interest in the cause of Legitimacy in France, a paper of much literary ability, as well as great political interest. The article second in interest is an exceedingly lucid and vigorous assault on Mr. Froude's ac- count of the Babington conspiracy, which it reviews together with the work of Mr. Hosack on Mary Stuart, and Father Morris's book on the papers of Sir Amyas Poulet. The paper undoubtedly shows that Mr. Freud° has dealt very unscrupulously with the evidence, and ap- pears to us to prove all but conclusively that the passages in Mary's letter to Babington approving the assassination of Elizabeth, were forged by the decipherer Phliippes, and were not in the original letter. Mr. Aubrey De Vere's "Alexander the Great" receives very high and discriminating praise, and a paper on the new Catholic University, with the practical conclusions of which, of course, we cannot sympathise, contains, nevertheless, many thoughtful remarks on the Atheism of the day, with which we do. The examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Psychology is written evidently by an able physiologist, and has great value on that side, but its various and somewhat minute criticisms need more fusing together for the purposes of the general reader. As a coherent and very able expression of the literary mind of Roman Catholics at the present moment, this number of the Dublin has the highest interest for the external world. The Month is the only other Roman Catholic Review which seems to us to rival it in any way in literary grasp.
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