CURRENT LITE RAT URE.
The British Quarterly Review. July. (Jackson, Walford, and Hodder.)—The title of the article which opens this number is at first a little disappointing. By "the Roman question" we naturally under- stand the question of the day, the Pope and Louis Napoleon, the Pope and Cardinal Antonelli, the Pope and the Congress. Bat by the time that we have discovered that the British Quarterly deals with an earlier question, and that the actors on the stage are Pius VII. and the First Napoleon, we feel relieved at remembering that after all we have heard enough about the present discussion. The article in the British Quarterly makes a great many interesting quotations from the vast storehouse of the Napoleon correspondence (which every now and then fills a Paris letter in the leading journal), and from the memoirs of Cardinal Conealvi. Of the second article, on "The Imagination, its Functions and its Culture," it is difficult either to give or gain a clear idea. A summary of Professor Rogers' exhaustive work on "The History of Agriculture and Prices ;" an analysis of the Book of Job ; a comparison of Kehl° and George Herbert ; and a sketch of the life of Dr. Abraham Simpson, a late Congregationalist minister of some note and of more characteristic notability, form, with an article on " Reform " and some notices of "Contemporary Literature," the rest of the contents of the number. The article on " Reform " deals chiefly with the two recent vanmes of essays, which it looks upon in the light of joint-stock answers to Mr. Lowe. There is much in the article that is suggestive, and Much that is able. Yet it is not as effective as it would be, and as the thought it contains would naturally make it, but for the eccentric phrases and turns of style in which, when we look back over its para- graphs, it seems to abound. It is true that an article must be good to
tempt us to look back over its pages, and this we are ready to admit, while we regret that our second glance should disclose aught in the way of blemishes.
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