from which that nation derived the greatness and the liberties it enjoys to-day, has never yet been written, and can be written only by an American republican, a glorious task in

reserve for some scholar and patriot yet to appear.

We have been led to these thoughts by contemplating the volumes already printed of Prescott's Philip the Second. Our intention was only to discharge- what our readers would blame us for neglecting our duty as literary journalists, by uniting our commendations with those with which they have everywhere been received, without waiting, as was our original purpose, for the publication of the remaining volumes.

Of the merits of this particular work, we have only to say, that they equal those of its predecessors. The style is, if anything, more easy and fluent, and all the parts show the same thorough preparation, and uniform polish and finish. Besides the great characters of Charles V. and Philip II., there are many others presented in an attractiveness of portraiture not easily paralleled. The Duke of Alva and Don Carlos are drawn to the life. The terrible effects of the Roman Catholic fanaticism upon the men and condition of the times are exhibited in private cruelties and public despotisms that shock the sensibilities of every humane heart; and the awful lesson of ecclesiastical power controlling the course of governments is impressed upon the mind in the deepest characters. The forms of life in elevated circles, the intrigues of courts, the whole system of feudal ceremony, pride, and pageantry, and the military force to which society was subjected in that age, are described with great clearness and felicity of expression. The chapters on the Knight's Hospitallers of St. John and the Siege of Malta are particularly interesting, and, like many other portions of these volumes, will undoubtedly always be ranked among the finest passages of modern history.

ART. VII.1. M. T. Cicero De Amicitia. Ex Editionibus Oliveti et Ernesti. Accedunt Note Anglica. Cura C. K. DILLAWAY, A. M. Editio Quinta. Philadelphia: Henry

Perkins. 1850.

2. The Essays: or Counsels, Civil and Moral: and the Wisdom of the Ancients. By FRANCIS BACON. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 1856.

3. In Memoriam. By ALFRED TENNYSON. Sixth edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1856.

ONCE, in old Rome, so great and fond was the intimacy between Tiberius Cæsar and Ælius Sejanus, that they were reckoned a pair of friends. The emperor raised the knight to an equality with himself, had every bosom-secret in common with him, and was inseparable from him. In recognition of their excelling attachment, the Senate, by a unanimous decree, dedicated an altar to Friendship personified as a goddess. And while that altar remained, amidst the multitudinous array of shrines that decked and hallowed the floor of the Pantheon, we may believe that sincerer prayers were nowhere else breathed, purer libations nowhere else poured, choicer garlands nowhere else hung. Two thousand years have passed, and that guarded altar, revered and loved by many a heart that perished long ago, the witness of ingenuous vows, so often lighted with the smiles of happy votaries, so often wet with the tears of bereaved and betrayed sufferers, has mouldered down, ages since, and left not a vestige where it stood.

Pausing on these pages in a respite from mere earthly interests, wooing a season of thought and emotion over better themes, let us too rear, amidst the alluring shrines of ambition, labor, and vanity that throng the crowded avenues of secular life and absorb the worship of mankind, an altar to Friendship, and gather around it, hand in hand, our pulses striking as one. What subject is better fitted than this to fill a quiet hour? It is holy. It belongs to every man in what should interest him most. Let us neither soil it by unclean handling, nor desecrate it, while we dishonor ourselves, by turning cold and incredulous ears to its appealing speech.

Above the clang of machinery, the din of traffic, and the clamor of low passions, that fill the common air of the time and land, its benign messages should sound and come to us with that complex association, sudden beauty, and romantic thrill, which accompany a strain of martial music unexpectedly rising over the jolt and tramp of a city's rattling street, making the surprised and fascinated auditor pause to listen, and leaving sacred echoes to linger with him when he walks on.

The instances in which friendship between men rises to the height of a controlling passion seem to be few, as we look around us. There have been times when such an experience was both more frequent and more prominent than now. There are still lands where it is far more common than with us. The prosaic sternness and literalness, the unsentimental spirit and frigid manners, of the Puritan type of character, are still influential in New England. We are an undemonstrative people. The understanding is exhibited, the heart concealed. Brazen sense lords it over modest sentiment. Iron-handed morality thrusts the graces aside. The glowing coals on the hearthstone of the breast are hidden under the ashes of a chill and formal exterior. Business and gossip are garrulous; friendship and poetry are silent. The endearing phrases, the meeting and parting kiss, the close embrace, the numerous spontaneous signs and endearments of manly affection, so natural and copious with the Italians, Germans, French, Persians, Arabs, Hindoos, are not cherished, are scarcely tolerated, here.

Then, too, the commonplace routine of modern life, its cowardly pursuits, its mean rivalries, its vulgar ploddings, its artificial customs, perverting and suppressing nature, must be less favorable to the formation of heroic friendships than the exposed, adventurous, and dramatic cast of ancient and mediæval life. What enchanted friendships float before us, in the golden mist of the past, when we open the annals of chivalry! Beautiful in a dark and bloody age was the rite called the Brotherhood of Arms. Its rudiment appears in the book of Samuel, where the son of Saul puts his own raiment on the son of Jesse; and in the Iliad, where two combatants, in the midst of the conflict, interchange spears and troth, and part in kindness; but its perfection is seen in the knightly orders of the Middle Age. Two knights, plighting their mutual faith,

exchanged armor and watchwords, and thenceforth were each to the other as his own soul. They were stimulated by each other's presence to superhuman strength and valor. In each other's service, or rescue, the face of danger grew lovely; impossibilities were sports. They stormed up bristling parapets, they broke through forests of lances, their swords mowed swaths of men, and after the fray they were found side by side in the van of victory, or clasped in each other's arms where the dead lay thickest;

"For Lancelot loved Arthur more than fame,

And Arthur more than life loved Lancelot."

The ancients appear to have paid more regard to friendship, and to have thought more loftily of its privileges, than the moderns. The sentiment which Crito expresses to Socrates, after offering the use of his fortune to him, "What character can be more disgraceful than this, to seem to value one's riches more than one's friends?"-is pitched on so high a key, that it would scarcely be possible to tune the active conviction of Paris and London, New York and Boston, into unison with it. Among the most precious treasures of their legendary and historic lore, nearly all the old nations have sent down to us charming stories of illustrious pairs of friends, whose magnanimous ardor of affection and feats of mythic renown captivate the fancy of mankind; glorious couples of starry shapes, shining immortal in the memory of the world, like the constellation Gemini in the abyss of night. The Japanese tell to this day of Techouya and Sibata. The former, condemned to death for having been engaged in a conspiracy, was led to execution. A man broke through the encircling crowd, and came to the executioner, saying, "I am Sibata, the friend of Techouya. Living far remote, I have but lately heard of his arrest and sentence; and I have come to embrace him, and to die with him." The two friends conversed, drank together, and, weeping, bade each other farewell. Techouya earnestly thanked Sibata for coming to see him once more. Sibata said, "Our body in this world is like the magnificent flower, Asagarva, which, blossoming at dawn of day, fades and dies as soon as the sun has risen. But after death we shall be in a better world, where we shall always enjoy each other's society."

"And it

The Hebrews had their David and Jonathan. came to pass, when he made an end of speaking, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and he made a covenant with him, because he loved him as his own soul." And when the puissant prince fell on the mountains of Gilboa, immortal in its peerless pathos was the sweetly mournful elegy the Psalmist sang. "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places. O Jonathan, my brother, I am distressed for thee; very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women."

The Greeks have fondly celebrated the astonishing friendship of Theseus and Pirithous, who passed fearful perils and performed incomparable exploits in company, and were separated only after the failure of their last desperate enterprise to pluck the Queen of Hell from her throne, and bear her to the light. There were also Orestes and Pylades, who, playmates in childhood, sworn comrades in youth, ever held each other dearer than life. Summoned together before a tyrant who, without knowing how to distinguish the two, had doomed Orestes to die, Pylades declared that he was Orestes. The son of Agamemnon claimed his own identity. This contest for death in each other's stead gave the tyrant such a proof of the power of friendship, that, filled with admiration, he dismissed them both. But the most famous pair of friends in all antiquity was Achilles and Patroclus. They were educated together in boyhood, in the house of Peleus. They ran together in the chase, and fought side by side in many a battle. When Patroclus was slain before Troy, the grief of Achilles was boundless, and he avenged him terribly at the Scæan gate. After his own death their ashes were mingled, and two monuments erected, touching each other, over them. And when Ulysses, passing the limits of the earth, enters the realm of the dead, he still sees the shades of Achilles and Patroclus, arm in arm, a friendly pair, rambling over the asphodel meadows of Elysium. Alexander and Hephaestion also were a renowned pair of friends. In the course of the great Macedonian's conquests they came to two dilapidated monuments claiming to designate the burial-place of the Phthian hero and his friend. Alexander repaired the sepulchre