The Papers of the Manchester Literary Club. Vol. XIII. 1891.
(Heywood, Manchester and London.) —We have had,
on various occasions, the pleasure of welcoming this interesting series of volumes, also calling itself, whether for the first time we know not, the " Manchester Quarterly." The number now before us is not unequal in value to its predecessors. Perhaps the most remarkable item in the volume is the adverse criticism passed by Mr. J. G. Maudley on Prescott's " Conquest of Mexico." To put the matter briefly, he maintains that it is not a history, but a romance. The elaborate civilisation of the Aztecs. as described by the Spanish writers on whom Prescott, and, following him, Sir Arthur Helps, relied, was, we are told, a fiction. So far, Mr. Maudley's argument does not go far beyond inherent improbabilities. There are some readable papers on Gilbert White. A paper on the " Literary Work of Mazzini," by Mr Thomas Newbiggin, deserves special attention, because it calls attention to a quality of the great Italian which is not so much appreciated as it should be. There are other essays of con- siderable value on a great variety of subjects. We do not quite see what Mr. Thomas Kay means in his " Carthage and its Queen" when he says that he "shall boldly assume Eliza's (Hide's) mother was of the house of David, a daughter of Solomon." Sychaeus— Zaccheus, he suggests, and the "Eli" of Eliseo, suggests the El in Elijah, &c. Of course the tongue of Carthage was Semitic, and such resemblances are natural enough (so Berea. Barak), but how about the chronology? The date of the foundation of Carthage is pretty well known as somewhere in the eighth century B.C. But how would this snit a grand- daughter of David ? Rehoboam, a grandson, died in 958.
Previous page
