THE LAST MANDEVILLE; THE HEART'S SACRIFICE; THE MONK; MATILDA OF DENMARK. Tragedies, by LAUGHTON OSBORN. American News Company, New York. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. CORRESPONDENCE. FROM a friend who knows all about St. Domingo, and whose failing sight, alas! disables him at present from writing about it, we have received the following lines: "It has not been wisely done to repel the advances of St. Domingo. The acquisition of tropical territory is the next great logical event to the destruction of slavery. It is the only means by which our coloured people can have their choice, as we, in the temperate latitudes have ours." But the Saturday Review, though sometimes bitter and cynical, is pretty good authority on literary matters, and we desire to lay its opinion before a part, a very large part, of our correspondents. We know a clergyman, who just after his ordination as deacon, took occasion to say that he was sure that no hunger for lucre tempted him into the ministry for he could make much more money by writing poetry. We hope that this sacrifice has not been unccmpensated. If our poetical correspondents would in like manner employ their learning, taste, fancy and fire in other departments of labor, how great would be the world's gain! How much is suggested here! The greater consideration at home of the laboring people thus tempted abroad; — the inducements to remain which would be offered to them in the We do not need original poetry; — and if we ready sale of land; as well as more ungrudging ever should we need not go from home; we have acknowledgment of equality under the law; bet- but to break down the dam of diffidence, and our ter pay for labor and better treatment of all most earnest admirers would have enough. We kinds, would be a great good to all of us. And cannot say, as ancther poet has said, that we for we did not lisp in then for the island, or islands, to be added to "lisped in numbers" this nation, how great will be the gain, even any way, but the memory of man runneth not if delayed for one or two years, of an accession to the time when the numbers did not come. of earnest and educated men who would give But it is more than half a century since we light and life to the dull and degraded native ceased from competition, and began to build our population. We say "educated advisedly, pyramid with other people's brick. Perhaps it for we do not believe that any means of learning has been no loss to mankind! which money can supply, will be grudged by the people already rising up in their own schools like the grass after the rain. And when their feet have been securely planted on the isles and on this continent-their next and early movement will be to de-barbarize Africa. A GREAT EVENT. - The whirligig of Time has never brought about its revenges with more picturesque effect than by bringing a coloured member for Mississippi, Mr. Revels, to that same place in the Senate which was last occupied by Mr. Jefferson Davis. Mr. Revels took his seat this day week (26th February), being admitted by "a strict party vote" of 48 to 8. He is the first negro who ever sat in Congress, and has reached the Senate at a single step. Ten years ago, when Mr. Buchanan was still President of the United States, and the South hardly yet prepared even for Secession, Mr. Revels was one of those "weak things of the world, and things which are not," which God has called to confound the mighty things of the world, and to bring to naught the things which are. Surely the deliverance of Israel from Egypt itself was not more conspicuously a work of Divine power, ,—or more conspicuously disregarded as a sign by the generation which witnessed it. Spectator, March 5th. THE Telegraph mentions a story for which we have seen no other authority, that the Italian Government have engaged the services of Baron Haussmann to build a completely new capital for Italy, to be called Nuova Roma. The idea is a bold one; but where is the money to come from? and what is to become of Florence? and where is the new site to be? and since when has Italy surrendered the idea of Rome for its capital? and why such a pathetic name as New Rome, worthy only of Illinois ? &c., &c., of endless interrogatories. We suppose M. Haussmann has been consulted as to some Florentine improvements, and only trust he will not plant a Rue Rivoli on the Arno. Spectator. A curious fact in A NEW BREED OF CATS. zoology is reported in the Hamburg News. Some months ago, a Lithuanian lynx escaped from a travelling menagerie, at Altona, and $20 reward was offered for its capture, but in vain. Not long ago, a sentinel at Kiel observed a strange-looking cat-like animal coming out of the mouth of a large cannon on the ramparts, and after a short while returning with a duck in its jaws. The man got assistance; a net was spread over the muzzle of the gun, and the missing lynx was recaptured, together with a domestic cat and a litter of three young ones. The offspring of this curious and hitherto quite unprecedented cross of breeds have been transferred to the botanical garden of Hamburg, where they have been visited by many naturalists. The directors of the Zoological Garden in Paris have already offered 5000 francs ($1000) for one single specimen. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH NATION. THREE LECTURES. corner of his broad lands to be held as alms at the royal hand, or as a vassal of the stranger who dwells in the halls of his fathBY EDWARD A. FREEMAN, ESQ. ers. Ask him of what nation he is, of what THESE three lectures were read before nation is the stranger who has supplanted him. He will tell you nothing about Northe Literary and Philosophical Institution mans and Saxons; he will answer: "I am at Kingston-on-Hull, on January 3d, 5th, and 7th, 1870, and they are printed, with a whom the lands of my fathers have passed an Englishman, and it is a Frenchman to few verbal corrections, as they were then away." Ask him for his title-deeds, for the read. It will be at once seen that they writ of the foreign King to which he owes forestall several questions which have been that, though he has sunk many degrees in raised in Professor Huxley's Lecture before rank and wealth, he is at least not driven the Sunday League, and in the controversy to beg his bread, perhaps not even to guide which has followed upon it. For that very the plough with his own hands. He will reason it has been thought better not to re-show you a small scrap of parchment writcast them in any way, but to leave them in their original shape as lectures addressed to a popular audience before that controversy began. LECTURE I. we 66 ten over in characters which look uncouth to our eyes, and which, if read, will sound lect of our own tongue. Show those words like some half-strange, half-intelligible, diato an ordinary scholar; ask him what tongue it is, and he will say, "Of course that is If we could, by an effort of will, carry Saxon." Ask the man himself in what tongue ourselves back eight hundred years into the it is written, and he will at once say that is, past, we should not see our land of England on Englisc." Bid him read the writ out, if inhabited, as it is now, by men who, what- his scholarship goes so far, and you will find ever may be their differences in other re- in it no mention of Normans and Saxons, but spects, at least speak one common tongue how "William King greets all his Bishops and look on one another as children of one and his Thegns, and all his men, French common country. The England of eight and English, friendly." Go back yet anhundred years back was a land in which the other two hundred years; go to the lands struggle of race against race, of language south of Thames and Avon; go to the islandagainst language such a struggle as shelter of Athelney and to the field of vichave seen in our own day going on in some tory at Ethandun; ask of the great King other lands- was raging with all the bitter- struggling against his enemies, ask of Elness of a recent conquest. Who, I would fred himself, of what nation he is, and over ask, were the races the conquerors and what people he bears rule. If he speak in the conquered-between whom the land the Latin tongue, he will perhaps say that was then disputed? By what names were he is Rex Saxonum;" for he comes of the they known to themselves and to one an- blood of the old Saxon lands beyond the other? Ask the novelist, ask the popular sea, and of the same Saxon blood come the compiler of history, and he will answer with more part of the men who follow him. But all the glibness that may be, Oh, of course if he speak in his own tongue, he will not they were the Normans and the Saxons." use the Saxon name without a qualifying And they would make that answer with adjective. Not of the Saxons, but of the equal glibness whether the question were West-Saxons, does that Saxon prince call put to them here by the banks of the Hum- himself the King. And seek him in his ber or in my own home by the banks of the hours of peace, with his pen and his parchAxe. But if we could ask the men them- ment before him; ask him into what tongue selves, they would give us another answer. he is translating the history of Bæda or the Ask that man, once lord of many lordships, Consolation" of Boëthius; and Saxon sprung, it may be, from ancient Earls, or though he be, it will not come into his head even from ancient Kings, to whom the clem-to make any other answer than that he is ency of the stranger King has granted some writing his book "on Englisc," that the --- 66 66 English folk may understand. Go back yet | of calling our forefathers by one name, while again two hundred and fifty or three hun- they themselves called themselves by andred years; place yourselves in the metrop- other. It has become an inveterate usage olis of this northern province or in the older so inveterate that people who know betsouthern metropolis in the old Kentish land.ter often slip into it by mere chance - to You will see in either city a heathen King call all Englishmen who lived before a cerwith a Christian Queen, hearkening to the tain time-commonly before the year 1066 words of eternal life at the mouths of Roman not Englishmen, but Saxons. Yet it is missionaries. The scene is one alike for the quite certain that there never was a time, historian, for the divine, for the poet, or for from the day when Englishmen began to the painter. Ask your poet or painter what have a common name, when that common this scene is, and he will call it the conversion name was anything but English. Our Celof the Saxons. Ask again of the men them- tie neighbours - the Welsh, the Irish, the selves, and you will find that no man by Picts and Scots - have indeed always called either Ouse or Stour has ever dreamed of us Saxons, and they call us so to this day. calling himself by the Saxon name. Look But we never called ourselves so. Into the too at the scroll which the missionary has whole minutiae of this matter, into the cases brought from the capital of the world, bear- where the word Saxon was used and where it ing the greeting of the Patriarch of the West- was not used, I have gone at great detail in ern Church. Gregory the Bishop, Boni- a work which some of you may have seen or face the Bishop, writes in either case to a heard of, and in which those who care to do King in the far island which men looked on so may follow up the subject for themselves. as another world. But the superscription I will here only say that the way in which speaks not of Saxons or of a Saxon King; an Englishman now speaks of a Welshman, the epistle is inscribed, as it might have the way in which a Welshman now speaks been six hundred years later, Glorioso of an Englishman, and the way in which an Regi Anglorum." Once more go back Englishman speaks of himself, have none of again a century and a half, to the very be- them changed for at least a thousand ginnings of the history of our race; the years. White Horse banner is planted for the first time on the white cliffs of Kent; the worshippers of Woden and Thunder are harrying, burning, and slaying through what had been a Christian and once a Roman land. Ask again your poet, your painter, your popular historian, to name the scene. It is the landing of Hengest and Horsa - the landing of the Saxons. But turn to the ear-likely to have right ideas. Indeed, a great liest chronicles where that wild warfare is part of the historian's work just now is to recorded in the speech of the conquerors, get rid of the false names which have hinand again we find no mention of the Saxon dered people from forming true ideas. This But we do read how "Hengest and is eminently the case in the matter which Esc fought with the Welsh, and how they we have immediately at hand. If you call took booty of war that could not be reck- the people of a certain country up to a ceroned, and how the Welsh fled from the Eng-tain year " Saxons," and after that year call lish like fire." name. 66 Let no one here think that I am merely going to set before you a series of pretty pictures, like the shades of a magic lantern. In all the scenes which I have thus made to pass swiftly before you, I have had one object, to bring home clearly to your minds that, for at least six hundred years of our national history, we have got into the way But I may be asked, What is there in a name? If we know the facts of our history rightly, what does it matter by what name we call the actors in them? I answer that you cannot know the facts of history rightly, unless you learn to call things and persons by their right names. Names express ideas, and he who uses wrong names is not them " Englishmen," that can only be because you think that the people who lived before that year and the people who lived after it were not the same people. When I put it into words in this way, you will most likely say that this is not what you mean. If the same parents had two children, one born in 1065 and another in 1067, I do not think you would say that the ceived, and, though I do not think that we can be certain about the exact year, I have no doubt that it was somewhere about the middle of the fifth century that the English first began to settle in Britain. Till then, we may possibly talk about Englishmen in some other part of the world, but we cannot talk about them in this island. Now in all these matters I would call on you to beware of confounding the land with the people who live in it. This island in which we live is the Isle of Britain; that is a purely geographical name, which may be rightly given to that island at any stage of its history. But England is simply the Land of the English, the land in which Englishmen are at any time dwelling. We give, and rightly give, that name to part of the Isle of Britain, to that part of the island in which Englishmen dwell. That part of the Isle of Britain became England, because Englishmen gradually conquered and dwelt in it between the fifth century and the eighth. But we all know that there is another England, an England beyond the western sea, that New England in which Englishmen began to dwell eight hundred years later. And you may not all know that there is yet another England still. As there is beyond the western sea an England newer than this England in the Isle of Britain, so there is also, beyond the eastern sea, another England which is older. There is an England which was England before elder was a Saxon while the younger was something else. It is exactly the same if you choose any other year, and not 1066. But because you see the absurdity when I put it in this way, it does not at all follow that the use of an inaccurate expression is not misleading. If you call the same people by one name up to 1066, and by another name after 1066, you cannot get rid of the idea, acting perhaps almost unconsciously, that something happened in the year 1066 which altogether cut off the times and the people before that year from the times and the people after it. Now a very important event did happen in the year 1066, an event whose importance, if we only look at it in the right way, it is not easy to rate too highly. But that event did not have the sort of result which people sometimes seem to fancy. It did not so cut off the times and the people before it from the times and the people after it as to make it right to call those who lived before it by one name, and those who lived after it by another. There were Englishmen before that year as there were Englishmen after it, and they called themselves Englishmen before that year just as they call themselves Englishmen to this day. Do not therefore allow yourself to call the same people at two different stages by two different names, when they themselves called themselves all along by the same name. Do not allow yourselves to talk of a "Saxon period," meaning a period ending in 1066. Do not allow yourselves Englishmen settled in the Isle of Britain, to talk of a "Saxon" word, a "Saxon" book, a " Saxon" building, meaning thereby merely a word, a book, a building, older than 1066. The word 66 Saxon," and the word " Anglo-Saxon" too, is a perfectly good word in its right place; but this is not the way in which any accurate person will use it. And now that I have given you a warning in one direction, let me give you another warning in another direction.. I want you to teach yourselves to use the word "English" soon enough, but I do not want you to use it too soon. I want you to learn to apply it to the people who lived in this land before the year 1066; I want you to learn not to apply it to the people who lived in this land before the year 449. I say the year 449, for that is the year commonly re namely the land from which Englishmen came to the Isle of Britain, and part of that land keeps the English name to this day. It is therefore most important never to apply the names England or English to the land or people of Britain in the days before the land became England by the English people settling in it. If we do so, we get into endless confusion. We take people for our forefathers who are not our forefathers, and we forget that people were our forefathers who really were 80. When Haydon the painter killed himself, he was engaged in painting a picture of "Alfred and the first British Jury." Now as juries, like so many other things, were not made but grew, it is quite certain that neither Elfred, nor anybody before or after him, can be truly said to have summoned the |