When Juan talks at his ease, he strikes the note of poetry much more surely than when he lifts his voice in song:

"Yet if your graciousness will not disdain

A poor plucked songster, shall he sing to you?
Some lay of afternoons, some ballad strain
Of those who ached once, but are sleeping now
Under the sun-warmed flowers?"

Juan's link of connection with the story is, in the first place, that he is in love with Fedalma, and, in the second, as a piece of local color. His attitude with regard to Fedalma is indicated with beautiful delicacy:

"O lady, constancy has kind and rank.

One man's is lordly, plump, and bravely clad,
Holds its head high, and tells the world its name:
Another man's is beggared, must go bare,
And shiver through the world, the jest of all,
But that it puts the motley on, and plays
Itself the jester."

Nor are his merits lost upon her, as she declares, with no small force,

"No! on the close-thronged spaces of the earth

A battle rages; Fate has carried me
'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand, -
Nor shrink, and let the shaft pass by my breast
To pierce another. O, 't is written large,
The thing I have to do. But you, dear Juan,
Renounce, endure, are brave, unurged by aught
Save the sweet overflow of your good-will."

In every human imbroglio, be it of a comic or a tragic nature, it is good to think of an observer standing aloof, the critic, the idle commentator of it all, taking notes, as we may say, in the interest of truth. The exercise of this function is the chief ground of our interest in Juan. Yet as a man of action, too, he once appeals most irresistibly to our sympathies: I mean in the admirable scene with Hinda, in which he wins back his stolen finery by his lute-playing. This scene, which is written in prose, has a simple realistic power which renders it a truly remarkable composition.

Of the different parts of "The Spanish Gypsy" I have spoken with such fulness as my space allows: it remains to NO. 221.

VOL. CVII.

41

add a few remarks upon the work as a whole. Its great fault is simply that it is not a genuine poem. It lacks the hurrying quickness, the palpitating warmth, the bursting melody of such a creation. A genuine poem is a tree that breaks into blossom and shakes in the wind. George Eliot's elaborate composition is like a vast mural 'design in mosaicwork, where great slabs and delicate morsels of stone are laid together with wonderful art, where there are plenty of noble lines and generous hues, but where everything is rigid, measured, and cold,—nothing dazzling, magical, and vocal. The poem contains a number of faulty lines, - lines of twelve, of eleven, and of eight syllables, of which it is easy to suppose that a more sacredly commissioned versifier would not have been guilty. Occasionally, in the search for poetic effect, the author decidedly misses her way :

"All her being paused

In resolution, as some leonine wave,” etc.

A "leonine" wave is rather too much of a lion and too little of a wave. The work possesses imagination, I think, in no small measure. The description of Silva's feelings during his sojourn in the Gypsy camp is strongly pervaded by it; or if perchance the author achieved these passages without rising on the wings of fancy, her glory is all the greater. But the poem is wanting in passion. The reader is annoyed by a perpetual sense of effort and of intellectual tension. It is a characteristic of George Eliot, I imagine, to allow her impressions to linger a long time in her mind, so that by the time they are ready for use they have lost much of their original freshness and vigor. They have acquired, of course, a number of artificial charms, but they have parted with their primal natural simplicity. In this poem we see the landscape, the people, the manners of Spain as through a glass smoked by the flame of meditative vigils, just as we saw the outward aspect of Florence in "Romola." The brightness of coloring is there, the artful chiaroscuro, and all the consecrated properties of the scene; but they gleam in an artificial light. The background of the action is admirable in spots, but is cold and mechanical as a whole. The immense rhetorical ingenuity and elegance of the work, which constitute its main distinction, interfere

with the faithful, uncompromising reflection of the primary elements of the subject.

The great merit of the characters is that they are marvellously well understood, far better understood than in the ordinary picturesque romance of action, adventure, and mystery. And yet they are not understood to the bottom; they retain an indefinably factitious air, which is not sufficiently justified by their position as ideal figures. The reader who has attentively read the closing scene of the poem will know what I mean. The scene shows remarkable talent; it is eloquent, it is beautiful; but it is arbitrary and fanciful, more than unreal,untrue. The reader silently chafes and protests, and finally breaks forth and cries, "O for a blast from the outer world!" Silva and Fedalma have developed themselves so daintily and elaborately within the close-sealed precincts of the author's mind, that they strike us at last as acting not as simple human creatures, but as downright amateurs of the morally graceful and picturesque. To say that this is the ultimate impression of the poem is to say that it is not a great work. It is in fact not a great drama. It is, in the first place, an admirable study of character, an essay, as they say, toward the solution of a given problem in conduct. In the second, it is a noble literary performance. It can be read neither without interest in the former respect, nor without profit for its signal merits of style, and this in spite of the fact that the versification is, as the French say, as little réussi as was to be expected in a writer beginning at a bound with a kind of verse which is very much more difficult than even the best prose, the author's own prose. I shall indicate most of its merits and defects, great and small, if I say it is a romance, a romance written by one who is emphatically a thinker. HENRY JAMES, JR.

ART. X.-CRITICAL NOTICES.

1.- The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America. By DANIEL G. BRINTON, A. M., M. D. New York: Leypoldt and Holt. 1868. 8vo. pp. 307.

THOUGH we are not of the number of those who think that Americans a people wholly of European ancestry and European civilization are under a subtile sort of obligation to study the antiquities and primitive history of the continent they inhabit, rather than of the continent from which all their culture is originally derived, we are nevertheless glad to see American archæology treated by an American scholar in a scholarlike way. We know of no reason, except the slight esteem in which all subjects not fraught with so-called "practical” implications have been habitually held by our people, why these studies should be left, as for the most part they have been left, to the curiosity and industry of scholarly Frenchmen and Germans. The talk which is currently made about " American literature," "American traditions,” "indigenous science," is indeed much of it affectation, much of it folly. Though our future may be as closely wrapped up with that of Asiatic China, and virtually Asiatic Russia, as Mr. Banks in his amusing speech would have us believe, yet our past is in Europe, and the less we try to cut loose from it, the better. It is Athenian speculation, Roman imperialism, mediæval Catholicism, feudalism, chivalry, the Protestant Reformation, English constitutionalism, which have made us what we are; and we are no more indebted to the red Indians than the modern French are to the yellow Turanians, who once in all probability inhabited their vine-clad country. Nevertheless, geographical position must be allowed to influence our sympathies, to some extent; and we are right in thinking that we have at least as much interest in knowing the pre-historic antiquities of our country as any German philologist can possibly have. Our situation, too, is all in our favor; we are as conveniently placed for studying the American Indians as we are inconveniently placed for studying ancient Iberians or mediaval Normans. Throughout large portions of our country, relics of the race which formerly dwelt in it are continually showing themselves. The ancient mound covered with wild vines, and the rude arrow-head turned up by the farmer's ploughshare, have their history. And though the annals of the race which we have supplanted - chaotic and meaningless, revealing no progress from century to century would perhaps hardly repay the trouble of recovery, were it possible to recover them, yet

their customs and beliefs, their social organization, and the myths in which they perpetuated their crude interpretations of the phenomena of Nature, will be found extremely valuable as throwing light upon the primitive history of the human mind.

Dr. Brinton is probably the first American who has specially treated the subject of Indian mythology in a thorough and scholarly way. We say nothing of Mr. Parkman, whose admirable chapters on Indian manners and customs deal only incidentally with mythology. Mr. Schoolcraft's superficiality and extravagance are now, we believe, quite generally admitted. And Mr. Squier's learned book on the "Serpent Symbol" is justly objected to by our author, as written entirely in the interest of one school of mythology, and that a rather shallow, or at least a very incomplete one. Sun-worship, combined with the phallic adoration of the generative power in Nature, will by no means explain everything; and it is one of Dr. Brinton's most noticeable merits, that he refrains from striving to reduce all the phenomena of mythology within the compass of any single favorite formula.

But if Mr. Squier's treatise falls short of the mark, that of the Abbé de Bourbourg goes wholly astray. Of all the hypotheses which have been employed in the study of mythology, that of Euhemeros is certainly the most stupid and the most unprofitable. It cuts away all the supernatural, or, to speak more accurately, the extraordinary, features of the myth, wherein alone dwells its peculiar significance, and to the dull and useless residuum accords the dignity of primeval history. In this way we lose our myth without compensation. We ask for bread, and get stones. Considered merely as a pretty story, the legend of the golden fruit watched by the dragon in the garden of the Hesperides is not without its value. But what merit can there be in the statement that Herakles broke a close with force and arms, and carried off a crop of oranges which had been guarded by mastiffs? May we not legitimately feel indignant at the childish ingenuity which can be satisfied only by the degradation of the grand Doric hero to a level with any vulgar fruit-stealer?

It is perhaps unnecessary, however, to rail at a theory, of which, were it not for M. de Bourbourg, we might say that it has long since been utterly abandoned by all philologists and scholars. In the Euhemeristic hypothesis there has long been generally recognized that aspect of rawness which belongs to most of the doctrines originated or eagerly patronized in the eighteenth century. We now know far better than it was then known what constitutes genuine. historic tradition, and we no longer regard the vast body of mythologic lore as a remnant of primitive history. Gradually it has become apparent to us