imagination to weave a modern romance around a central figure in whose being the elements of the wild joyous Faun nature were blended from a hereditary source. "The being here represented is endowed with no principle of virtue, and would be incapable of comprehending such, but he would be true and honest by dint of his simplicity." Donatello, the hero, is the heir of a line of Etruscan ancestors whose origin is traced back by the legends of the region in which their hereditary castle stands to the vanished race of the Faun which once peopled and made living the darkling depths of Tuscan forests. A sudden deed of blood, in defence of one he loves, first wakens sorrow and remorse and finally human aspirations and hope in the joyous, animal being of the nineteenth century Faun. By a dim mystical method brightened indeed by some flashes of beauty and gleams of genuine feeling is this moral wrought out. The theme is repulsive in itself, and Mr. Hawthorne has not endeavoured to soften or relieve, except in rare instances, its repelling features. The other creatures of the story are unfortunately but too familiar to Mr. Hawthorne's readers. The highly-gifted, beautiful, proud woman, hunted down by some vague and terrible destiny, and eternally haunted by a mysterious and abhorred persecutor; the fragile, spiritualized girl; the earnest, aspiring artistthese are forms we have met in all our author's previous works. But their colours have begun to fade. Artistically, as well as in a higher sense, this book seems to us a failure. The moral it professes to teach is surely open to the gravest exception. Never before, at least in the literature of our day, has crime been made the purifying furnace from which the soul comes out refined and glorified. Artistically the story is complicated and confused, its characters feeble, and only its incidents and reflections striking, while its conclusion is scarcely intelligible. Why should a man of genuine and natural power convert himself into a kind of literary Cagliostro? Might not the words Mr. Hawthorne has applied to our English sculptor be, with far greater strictness, now applied to himself? "Gifted with more delicate power than any other man alive, he has foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted himself into a Pagan idealist, whose business or efficacy in our present world it would be exceedingly difficult to define." It would, indeed, be unjust not to declare that there are many scenes of great power, vivid descriptions of town and forest sights, quaint scraps of suggestive thought, and gleams of irresistible pathos scattered over these volumes. Some of the sketches of Italian scenery remind the reader of Mr. Brett's marvellous Vale of Aosta, with its sun and shadow, its thunderclouds, its vines, its rocks, and its radiant colours; and here and there a stray passage of a quieter and homelier kind reminds us that we are communing with the author of the "Twice-Told Tales." Here, for instance, are a few genial sentences in which Mr. Hawthorne meditates over his heroine, as she sits and mends a glove: "There is something extremely pleasant and even touching -at least, of very sweet, soft, and winning effect-in this peculiarity of needlework, distinguishing women from men. Our own sex is incapable of any such by-play, aside from the main business of life; but womenbe they of what earthly rank they may, however gifted with intellect or genius, or endowed with awful beauty -have always some little handiwork ready to fill up the tiny gap of every vacant moment. A needle is familiar to the feelings of them all. A queen no doubt plies it on occasions; the woman-poet can use it as adroitly as her pen; the woman's eye that has discovered a new star turns from its glory to send the polished little instrument gleaming along the hem of her kerchief, or to darn a casual fray in her dress. And they have greatly the advantage of us in this respect. The slender thread of silk or cotton keeps them united with the small, familiar, gentle interests of life, the continually operating influences of which do so much for the health of the character, and carry off what would otherwise be a dangerous accumulation of morbid sensibility. A vast deal of human sympathy runs along this electric line, stretching from the throne to the wicker-chair of the humblest seamstress, and keeping high and low in a species of communion with their kindred beings. Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew, especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied." THE ECLECTIC. JUNE, 1860. I. THOUGHTS ON THE REVISION OF THE AUTHORIZED VERSION. EVERY few years the press teems with discussions of this subject; with pamphlets, speeches and letters about it; the controversy then dies away, and in a year or two revives again. The reasons of the periodic resuscitation of the topic are very obvious. Every thinking person must, we suppose, admit, (however paradoxical it may appear), the two statements on which the disputants on both sides chiefly rest; one of which leads to the perpetual renewal of the strife, and the other to doubts of any practicable method of settling it. The first is, that it must be, and ought to be, the wish of every Christian to remove every speck and flaw from the mirror which reflects Divine truth to us; and that therefore, if there be any such in the common version, it can never be our duty to perpetuate them. The second is, that though this is undeniable, our common version is so near an approximation to fidelity, and is so masterly in point of expression, that it may be feared that any extensive tampering with it would deteriorate instead of improving it; and that any gleam of stronger light that might be thrown on an insulated point here and there, on some small angle of truth, might be more than counterbalanced by a frequent, though it might be slight, impoverishing of the expression. To this it is added, that the fabric of popular association, which has gathered, in love and reverence, for more than two centuries about the Bible as it is, ought not to be lightly touched; that the very words and phrases, over which our fathers lingered, which consoled them in sorrow and sustained them in death, and which are diffused through the vast extent of our religious literature, are consecrated to the popular ear, and that no substitutes can have an equal charm. We confess that much is to be said on both sides of this controversy. VOL. III. T T Whenever the controversy is renewed, we are sure to find the customary exaggerations. Men speak as if there were the most urgent reasons for an instant decision of it; extravagant statements are indulged in as to the magnitude of the errors to i corrected in the old version, and the wonderful advantages to be secured by a new one. One would imagine, to hear some god folks talk when under the polemic orgasm, that there was some danger of a plain man's missing his way to Heaven, unless he had a more accurate chart of the voyage than that laid down in the old Bible, which nevertheless has brought so many millions in peace to their "desired haven.” At present, as we have sai men's minds seem to be more calm, and to feel that it is a controversy which need not be decided in a hurry; that whatever increase of accuracy might be attained by a new version-even though it were absolutely perfect-is but infinitesimal as compared with the approximate accuracy of the version already in every body's hands; that it can but give circumstantial exactness to what already has substantial fidelity; that the little gold-dust of truth which a new translation would give us, when summed eve so scrupulously, must be but a very minute fraction compared with the entire mass of shining bullion which the common version faithfully secures to us. Freed from all exaggerations, however, the subject is of su cient importance to deserve and demand repeated discussion; and we are not sorry to take an opportunity of recording our ow views of it, when, as we have said, there is a temporary pause the gusts of controversy, a lull in public feeling. In such a moment, we shall best keep our own mind, and the mind of the reader, free from the exaggerations incident to a controversy in full flame, as well as from all impatient solutions of the prob lem submitted to consideration? We shall endeavour, without prejudice, and with the utmost sobriety, to state the reasons for and against alterations in the current version; the limits within which any such alterations are either desirable or necessary; and the modes in which, as we conceive, they may be most unobjectionably attempted; attempted not only without any injury to the Authorized Version, but, with is most desirable), so as not even to involve any solution of en tinuity in the associations of love and veneration with which the people regard it, or any abrupt transition of feeling in passing from the old to the new. To avoid this evil, even if for no other reason, we should deprecate, in the strongest terms, any proposa to commit to any body of men (be they who they may), the tak of giving us an entirely new translation of the whole Bile as a "common version." We shall endeavour to show, before we have done, that, in all probability, though they were more learned, as they might very well be, than King James's translators, they would give us a translation, on the whole, much inferior,-certainly inferior in popular power and idiomatic energy,—to that we already possess. The utmost that any reasonable man would ask is, that unquestionable blemishes should be removed and proved errors corrected, leaving the substance of the sacred volume untouched. Certainly in our judgment nothing but unnecessary risks could ensue from attempting a new translation altogether, if, for the reasons we are about to state, the probability is that a new translation, even though it might successfully achieve the rectification of some trivial errors, or the recovery of some stray particles of circumstantial truth, would be less idiomatic in its general expression, and, consequently, less forcible. The little gained here and there, in a particular passage, would be too dearly paid for by a generally-diffused deterioration of form. But even were a new translation abstractedly equal in point of expression, it would be mere folly needlessly to disturb the charm of association with which, in millions of minds, the very words of the present version are regarded, and which wanton innovation, even though the diction were not deteriorated, must, according to a universal law of our nature, impair. In fact, however strong reasons justify a doubt whether, in the present condition of the language, even the best taste and the most severe self-control on the part of modern scholars could give us, as a whole, so magnificent a specimen of English as our present version. Every cultivated language has its historic development, and there are epochs when, and when alone, relatively to given purposes, it is in perfection. Perhaps the period in which the translation of the Scriptures was made was the one in which not only the sinewy strength of the vernacular was unimpaired, but also in a condition of receiving, in relation to popular expression, the maximum aid from the foreign and classical elements. A generation afterwards, we may see, in the diction of Jeremy Taylor, Donne, Thomas Brown, and a host of similar writers, how a pedantic (or unconscious) imitation of classical terms and idiom had impaired their use of the vernacular; and how, if they had been among the translators of the Bible, it might have coloured and tinctured their diction. In our own day, though the ancient pedantry be gone, yet the infusion of the foreign element, owing to the demands of increasing knowledge and science which, in the altered structure of our language, could not be supplied from the vernacular sources, is so enormous, and literary taste is so familiar with that element, that it is very pro |