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A Memoir of John Bromfield, by Josiah Quincy, (Cambridge, Metcalf & Co., 8vo, pp. 34,) does something towards removing a general impression in this community, an impression shared in a measure, too, by some of the friends of the late Mr. Bromfield, that he was a man of a morose and miserly nature. Known, as he was, as a man without family, living in the most economical manner, and seen upon the exchange, where the vicissitudes of the money-market offer opportunities to the rich financier, he was supposed by many to be sordidly penurious, and no great lover of his kind. Mr. Quincy gives a brief sketch of his life and character, principally in very interesting letters from a few of the intimate acquaintances of the deceased, and presents him to us, not in an exalted, but in a dignified manner, as struggling on from an adverse youth and early manhood, till, by industry and probity and prudence, which taught him economy and thrift, and in spite of some marked peculiarities, he achieved independence. He is found to have been faithful, in his own way, to the duties of humanity while he lived, besides endowing the Boston Athenæum with $25,000 in his lifetime, and leaving public legacies to the amount of $110,000.

The Oration delivered by Edward Everett, on the Celebration of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, has been published, together with an account of the celebration in the great ship-house, and at the dinner-table (Boston, Redding & Co., 8vo, pp. 80). The occasion was a marked one. The orator thus completes his work of associating his splendid periods and his eloquent voice with the three great battle-scenes of Massachusetts. His orations at Concord and Lexington are more descriptive, but this is the most philosophical, and its paragraphs are burdened with the wisdom of a rich experience, pervaded by thought and study.

Two more of the "Latter-Day Pamphlets, edited by Thomas Carlyle," No. VII., Hudson's Statue, and No. VIII., Jesuitism, (16mo, pp. 48, 58,) have been published by Phillips, Sampson, & Co., Boston.

Mr. Elizur Wright of this city has taken Mr. Carlyle in hand, and after much the same fashion in the use or abuse of the English language, and by the aid of incongruous epithets and images, seeks to riddle the Latter-Day Pamphlets. We suppose that Mr. Wright intends to do his work upon each one of Mr. Carlyle's series. "Perforations in the Latter-Day Pamphlets" is the title under which Messrs. Phillips, Sampson, & Co. have issued the first number of Mr. Wright's essays, in uniform appearance with their reprints of Carlyle. (pp. 48.)

Messrs. Phillips, Sampson, & Co. have published the twentythird semi-monthly number of their rich and valuable edition of Shakspeare. Without any falling off in the mechanical excellence of the paper, the type, or the engravings, each successive number sustains the reputation of the work, and finds, we believe, an increasing circulation. We again commend it to all who are without a proper copy of the great poet.

Lester's "Gallery of Illustrious Americans," an enterprise of great merit, presents for its seventh and eighth numbers, fine engravings of Colonel Fremont and of William H. Prescott, with accompanying biographical sketches. The more the editor is patronized, the better will he labor to make his enterprise most successful.

The Messrs. Harper have published, in a neat form, an American edition of Sydney Smith's Moral Philosophy, a work which is noticed in our pages.

Messrs. Gould, Kendall, & Lincoln have published a second and revised edition of Professor Felton's translation of Professor Guyot's Lectures on "The Earth and Man." This valuable work, whose merits we have already discussed, has appeared in two editions in London, and in one at Paris.

Messrs. Ticknor, Reed, & Fields have published a new volume of poems by Whittier, entitled "Songs of Labor." We have not had time to examine it, but the author, as a poet or prose-writer, needs no introduction to our readers.

The history of the American Revolution is put into a most attractive form for the young, and indeed for their parents, in the serial work by Lossing, entitled "The Pictorial Field-Book of the American Revolution," five numbers of which, beautifully printed and richly illustrated, have been published by the Harpers.

INTELLIGENCE.

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE.

Death of Neander. A recent arrival from Europe has brought to us the intelligence of the decease of one of the most honored and worthy of the great Christian scholars of Germany, Dr. Augustus Nean

der. He died of a form of cholera, on Sunday, July 14, at Berlin, where, for a period longer than that of a human generation, he has been an instructor of successive bands of Christian teachers, and has helped to train religiously the mind of his whole nation. He was, in many respects, a remarkable and a very interesting man. He was born of Jewish parentage, in the year 1787, at Göttingen. At the early age of seventeen he was converted to Christianity. Of course, at that stage of his intellectual and spiritual development his conversion can scarcely be claimed as involving the highest exercise of judgment, and must have been, more or less, influenced by circumstances independent of his own mental action. But his whole subsequent career continually kept open before him the grounds and reasons on which he retained a residuum of his former faith in Judaism, and the whole of his after faith in the Gospel, as the blossom and the fruit of a revelation from God. Over and over again, with all the thoroughness and erudition of the highest class of German scholars, with a most penetrating sagacity, and a most patient candor, did he study the whole written lore of the ancient world, and especially the records of Christian antiquity. The collisions of an incessant scholastic warfare, the acute and ingenious, though often fanciful and shadowy, theories of a race of Biblical critics, and the destructive systems of unbelief and so-called philosophy which continually arose around him, forbade his mind to rust, or his faith to continue alive without daily renewal. Neander lived and wrote and taught through one of the most critical periods of the discussions which involve the authority and the substance of the revelation made by God through Jesus Christ. No weapon which sophistry, logic, ridicule, or real scholarship and the most exhausting skill of sharp intellects, could find to employ against the Gospel, was left untried by some of those who lived contemporaneously with him, and even taught directly at his side. If with some degree of satisfaction we may claim his adherence to an old-fashioned Christian belief as a proof of the undamaged foundations of the Gospel, we may with even higher satisfaction call to mind his acknowledged candor, his perfect freedom from all rancor, his generous confidence, his fearless tolerance in dealing with those who labored to destroy what he sought to build up. A poor bigot, or even a timid and sincere believer, would probably have used the power, which Neander had offered to him, of forbidding the publication in Prussia of Strauss's "Life of Jesus.' But Neander discouraged such weak opposition to the entire liberty of the mind and the press, and advised that the work should be allowed to circulate with perfect freedom, while it should be subjected to the fair trial of a perusal, an examination, and a reply. He was faithful in the exercise of his abilities to these latter ends, and so could well dispense with the help of his fears.

Of all the works of Neander, his History of the Christian Religion, and of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church, is the most thorough, elaborate, and valuable. That the History is a perfect work, probably only a portion even of the admirers of the author would care to assert. Its style and rhetoric are not wholly to our taste; from its conclusions, as well as from its philosophy, we are often led to differ. There is at times a vagueness in its statements, and a dimness cast over its discussions, which perplex us. We see the same defects in his Life of Christ, in which we are often left in doubt as to the theory which the author adopts, or the bearing of his opinions upon matters where a de

cisive assertion would be very much to our satisfaction. Probably the constant influence of familiarity with a thousand conflicting fancies and theories had an insensible effect upon him, which he was not careful either to allow for or to resist in his own writings. And yet there is a vividness, an earnestness, a power in his pages, which equally please and instruct a reader. How such a man, and the author of such sentences and paragaphs as might be quoted from him, retained the repute and the savor of Orthodoxy among English and American admirers surpasses our comprehension. The merest shadow of that system is all that can be made to appear in his works, and we can scarcely be said to find even that there, unless we look aside to the right hand or to the left. Indeed, we have seen many significant hints in Orthodox pages this side of the water, that Neander was one of the friends from whose pleading and advocacy they wished themselves to be delivered.

Many anecdotes are related by the pupils and acquaintances of Neander illustrative of his eccentricities, his absence of mind, his ungainly and untidy ways, and his nervous manner in his public lectures. We hope that these stories are exaggerated. We take no pleasure in being informed that his sister found it necessary to watch by the lecture-room daily, that she might show him the way home, or that he neglected to dress himself decently, or that he delivered his lessons with his legs swung over a chair. We cannot avoid the misgiving, that there is more or less of affectation in such extreme absence of mind and slovenliness. At any rate, they do not enter into the essential or the ornamental parts of the Christian scholar and gentleman. Doubtless his oddities have been overstated.

The correspondence of such a man with such men as those with whom he exchanged epistles must have a high interest and value. One or more volumes of these materials, with whatever papers of autobiographical or personal contents he may have left behind him, would be highly prized by us, and we shall look forward with the hope that we may be thus gratified.

Literary Addresses. During the season of the year which is just closing upon us, the columns of the weekly and the daily papers throughout New England, and some of the adjoining States, and the fresh pamphlets in our bookshops, bear witness to the number of occasions for the delivery of literary addresses. Indeed, pamphlets of this general character are evidently multiplying around us, to a degree which indicates that they are to form a large department of what we call American literature. A few words upon what may be and what ought to be the character and material of such addresses will not be out of place.

Not only our colleges, but our larger and more ambitious academies and seminaries for pupils of either sex, have now a day or an evening set apart for an annual festival consecrated to letters. The services of our men of genius and distinction are enlisted for the delivery of orations and poems. The number of such occasions will surprise any one who may not have kept pace with the yearly addition which is made to them.

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Within our memory, and that not a long one,- the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge was the only literary society known to us by the observance of such an anniversary. But now, even the existence of some of our literary institutions, in town and country, has been first

revealed to us by the sight of newspaper paragraphs announcing the orators and poets for their summer anniversaries. The same news items have also made known to us how many gentlemen there are who are available for such occasions, and who stand ready to produce what shall fill up, however it may meet and satisfy the expectations of, the hour. Literary Societies, Academic Brotherhoods, Adelphic Unions, Associations of Alumni, and fraternities designated by two or more letters of the Greek alphabet, are formed for the sole purpose of paying this tribute to letters, or of exacting this service from them.

When, however, we examine, even without a purpose of criticism, the contents and character of such of these performances as we read or hear, we are led to infer, either that the number of them is too large, or that some who deliver them are incompetent to their work, or that the proper demands of the occasions are not understood. Doubtless the occasions are actually too numerous to assure success for each, and the yearly draft at so many open fountains is more than our best mental springs will supply. But the most frequent cause of failure is a disregard, on the part of the orator, and sometimes on the part of the poet, of the specific design of these occasions, and a want of harmony with their spirit as literary festivals.

Themes of an exclusively literary and intellectual character are most appropriate to such occasions, and these themes are certainly abundantly fruitful. The pleasures, tasks, and responsibilities of the literary life; the laws, and labors, and growth of the intellect; the interests of good letters, as embracing language, ethnology, criticism, and biography, with the whole range of illustration from the wealth of libraries, from fields whose diligent gleaning will draw even from their surface the riches as of deep mines, more precious than all their previous harvestings; the cause of education, from its summit-peaks of high science and scholarship, down to its most popular levels; the claims of our literary institutions upon the patronage of wealth, and the intelligent favor of the representatives of the people, here are abundant themes suited to demonstrative eloquence in the academic hall, before literary brotherhoods on their summer anniversaries. One would think that, when an elected orator was seeking for a subject, he could not avoid such as these, which must press upon his mind and invite and allure him. But how is it in fact? These subjects are avoided, and the substitutes which are chosen for them are sometimes utterly out of harmony with the occasion. Not infrequently the so-called oration is a farrago of commonplaces, a threadless, incongruous, and impertinent succession of sentences, whose prosy wearisomeness gives vexation to an audience, broken only by occasional clapping for a poor pun or a hard witticism. We wish that it might be understood that political, controversial, reformatory, and antireformatory harangues, and all commonplaces of all sorts, are out of time and out of place on our literary festivals.

Nor need there be any fear that other subjects. subjects, too, of confessedly higher importance than any literary themes-should fail of their dues if excluded from these occasions. For other occasions in full abundance, even to the making of an Indian bead-string of the days of our year, give time and place for every topic of serious or pleasant interest to us. There are occasions without number for political addresses, on elections to office and retirements from it, in letters and speeches before the nation and before its states, districts, counties, towns, and villages.

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