deserted by God, because they do not see | daries on a map, become deeper and gloshim, is to be more truly atheists than any physicist. There is a scepticism which is of God's making, in order that we may see how many of the highest springs of human life are founded in trust, how everything else fails, even in the highest minds, to produce order, peace, and calm. The physicists of to-day are suffering for us, as well as for themselves. It is their failure to find light, which will show where the light is not, and also where it is. As Mr. Mallock well says, in the best paper he has yet written - that in the Nineteenth Century, on "Faith and Verification,”. the pitiful cries of modern physicists, as they raise their hands to what they deem a spiritual vacuum, are about the best auguries we could have that it is not in physical science that man can ever find his salvation. From The Sunday Magazine. LICHENS run through the whole chromatic scale, and show what striking effects nature can produce by an harmonious combination of a few simple lines and hues. Most of them are of a quiet grey tint, but some display the most vivid colors. One species covers trees and rocks with bright yellow, powdery patches; another sprinkles them with a kind of green rust, especially in the neighborhood of large towns. Almost every old wall, castle, and rocky seashore is emblazoned with the brilliant deep yellow rosettes of the common wall parmelia. Olive-green and pale primroseyellow lichens diversify the surface of moorland boulders and dykes. And what is very remarkable, the higher we ascend the mountain-side, the farther north we penetrate, the brighter becomes the coloring and the more graceful and luxuriant the form of lichens; presenting in this respect a parallel to many flowering plants, such as the birch, whose stem is whiter, and whose leaves are more shining and fragrant in Norway than in this country. One of the loveliest species is the "geographical lichen (Lecidea geographica), which is the most arctic, antarctic, and alpine plant in the world, occupying the extreme outpost of vegetation in altitude and latitude; and its yellow-green crust becomes brighter, smoother, and more continuous, and its characteristic black dots and lines, like towns, and rivers, and boun sier the nearer we approach the limit of perpetual snow. It is a fit companion of those exquisite alpine flowers that bloom their fairest in the same desolate circumstances, and exhibit a grace and beauty far surpassing those of their favored sisters of the plain. The little cup lichen that holds up its tiny goblets in myriads to catch the dewdrops upon the turfy top of every old wall and bank, assumes in one of its kindred forms that grows at a great height upon the mountains, a larger size, a more elegant shape, and a more tender color. Nothing of the kind can be lovelier than this mountain species, with its soft sulphur-colored cups decked round the edge with waxen heads of the most brilliant scarlet, creeping over the bleak alpine turf, and forming, with the gay flowers of the purple saxifrage and the moss campion, a tiny garden in the wilderness. On the wildest islands of the Antarctic Ocean, where nothing else but lichens grow, some of the finest species abound, whose large polished black shields contrast beautifully with their yellow shrubby stems; and on the tundras, or vast plains that border the polar ocean, the eye is delighted beyond measure with the delicate and intricate branching and the snowy purity of the larger lichens, which form almost the only vegetation. One lichen in New Zealand imitates the finest lace-work; another found on our grey northern moors resembles miniature coral; and on the highest and most exposed ridges of the Scottish mountains one leafy species occurs whose under side is of the most splendid orange color, while its upper surface, constantly wetted by the clouds and mists, is of the most vivid green, varied by the chocolate color of its large, flat, shield-like fructifica tion. Thus, where we should expect the vegetation to partake of the sombre nature of the locality, and to be dwarfed, illshapen, and discolored by the unfavorable circumstances, we find the most perfect and luxuriant forms; and just as the lichens in our sheltered woods and valleys flourish best in wild wintry weather, so do their congeners in the exposed altitudes and latitudes of the world, where there is a perpetual winter and storms continually prevail, exhibit their brightest coloring and their most graceful shapes; reading to us thus the most needful lesson of one of the sweet uses of adversity, viz., to perfect that which concerneth us - to complete the ideal which a too easy and pleasant life often fails to realize. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY 579 602 619 623 626 628 633 1 635 636 578 640 TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. From The Quarterly Review. apparently attained by any of those with whom he lived in daily and familiar intercourse. THE life of Dryden has yet to be written; but we are at last in the posses- And here begins our quarrel with the sion of ample materials for the task. biographers. We are compelled to conThe editors of his works have labored fess that though they have been eminently with patient research and honest enthusi- successful in bringing fresh material to asm, under no ordinary difficulties; but light, they have failed in the biographer's these difficulties have been crowned with principal duty. They have not fused their no ordinary success, and Mr. Christie materials into a consistent whole; they closes a long line of able and industrious have neither arranged nor interpreted; students who have cheerfully submitted they have contented themselves with heapto much drudgery, and who consequently ing up masses of facts which are simply deserve well of the republic of letters. not chaotic because they are chronologiNinety-eight years ago Johnson pro- cal. We shall not, we trust, be guilty of nounced that the life of Dryden was any disrespect to the memory of Malone, likely to remain a blank, that nothing could whose memoir has always been the great be known beyond what casual mention storehouse for the facts of the poet's life, and uncertain tradition have supplied. or of any insensibility to the merits of We are now enabled to pronounce with Messrs. Mitford, Bell, Hooper and others, confidence that we know as much of Dry-whose discoveries Mr. Christie has at den, of his domestic life, of his personal once summed up and supplemented, if we habits, of his peculiarities, of his character, say that the biography of Dryden has been of his relations with his contemporaries, very imperfectly executed, that hitherto as we know of any of those accomplished we have been furnished rather with the men who lounged away their evenings at materials of a good biography than with Button's, or listened to Swift reading the biography itself. Sir Walter Scott's "Gulliver's Travels" on Pope's lawn at memoir prefixed to the collected edition of Twickenham. Indeed we shrewdly sus- the works is still the best we have, but, pect that were it possible for Congreve like all Scott's miscellaneous writings for and Addison to converse with a well-in- the booksellers, its graphic vigor is marred formed student of Dryden in the present too evidently by haste and off-hand judgday, he could communicate many interest-ments, always sensible, but not always ing details about their patron which would accurate. With so many students of Drybe altogether new to them; he could ex- den in the field it ought long ago to have plain many inconsistencies in the great been superseded, but we are bound to say poet's character and conduct, which proba- that Mr. Christie's introduction, which bly excited a good deal of unsatisfactory represents the last contribution to the biogspeculation at Wills' and at the Grecian, raphy of Dryden, cannot be pronounced in and he could show with excusable com- anyway to have superseded it. As a reposiplacency how careful study will some-tory of facts lucidly arranged in chronotimes enable mankind to have a truer insight not into the works only, but into the personal character of a great man nearly two centuries after his death, than was logical order it deserves praise. He has availed himself to the full of the labors of his predecessors; he has added some fresh discoveries of his own, and he has evidently spared no trouble to inform himself from collateral sources of the minutest particulars of the poet's life. His text of the poems is the best we have. For the rest, his work sinks to the level of a school-book. The literary execution is of a decidedly third-rate order; * the style is * By dint of neglecting pronouns, Mr. Christie has cramped and jejune, the reflections vapid | and pollute style with the vices of Marini and commonplace, and when he attempts and Gongora. He had brought home to to comment on the more perplexed pas- us the masterpieces of the Roman classics, sages of his author's not very consistent and he had taught us how to understand career, his want of insight and his ina- them. He had given us the true canons bility to interpret evidence become lamen- of classical translation. He had shown us tably apparent. We should in truth be how our language could adapt itself with very sorry to think that it is destined to precision to the various needs of didactic remain the standard biography of one who prose, of lyric poetry, of argumentative was himself a model of facile, various, and exposition, of easy narrative, of sonorous masculine composition, the best prose- declamation. He had exhibited for the writer beyond all question among our first time in all their fulness the power, poets, the best poet beyond all question ductility, and compass of the heroic coupamong our prose-writers. let; and he had demonstrated the possibility of reasoning closely and vigorously in verse, without the elliptical obscurity of Fulke Greville on the one hand, or the He had rescued English satire To Dryden himself we are bound by triple ties of traditional association, of personal interest, and of national gratitude. No other name in the annals of literary painful condensation of Davies on the biography has represented so completely other. the English character and the English from the semi-barbarous diction which had intellect in the fulness of their strength deformed it while passing successively and in the extremity of their weakness. through the hands of Gascoign, Donne, Sophocles was not more essentially an Hall, Marston, Wither, Cleveland, Marvel; Athenian, Juvenal and Lucan were not and he had raised it to the level of that more essentially Romans, than Dryden is superb satirical literature which Quinctilian essentially an Englishman. Nearly two claimed as the peculiar and exclusive centuries have passed since his coffin was growth of Roman genius. He had reconreverently laid by the hands of his contem-structed and popularized the poetry of poraries in the grave of the father of our romance. He taught us to think naturally poetry and through all the shifting vicis- and express forcibly. Perhaps," obsitudes of opinion and criticism which serves Johnson, "no nation ever produced have perplexed two hundred years of rest- a writer that enriched his language with less literary energy, no one has ever yet such a variety of models." What was said grudged his ashes the proud distinction of Rome adorned by Augustus may be apthus claimed for them. His services had plied by an easy metaphor to English poindeed been manifold and splendid. He etry embellished by Dryden, “Lateritiam had determined the bent of a great litera-invenit, marmoream reliquit, he found it ture at a great crisis. He had banished brick and he left it marble.” His influence forever the unpruned luxuriance, the essentially uncritical spirit which had marked the literature of Elizabeth and James, and he had vindicated the substitution of a style, which should proceed on critical principles, which should aim at terseness, sententiousness, and epigram, should learn to restrain itself, should master the mysteries of selection and suppression. He had rescued our poetry from the thraldom of a school which was laboring, with all the resources of immense learning, prac tised skill, and fine genius, to corrupt taste managed, within the short compass of seventy-seven pages, to repeat the name of Dryden upwards of six hundred and thirty times !! on our literature in almost all its branches has indeed been prodigious. He is one of those figures which are constantly before us; and, if his writings in their entirety are not as familiar to us as they were to our forefathers, they are to be traced in ever-recurring allusion and quotation: they have insensibly leavened much of our verse, more of our prose, and almost all our earlier criticism. With the exception of Shakespeare's, there is probably no name so familiar to the student of our literature. His genius has been consecrated by the praises of men who now share his own literary immortality; his writings have been discussed in works |