loves, and which it will then be his honour we humbly suggest to him. A more grateto have maintained. But let him mark ful task could not occur to us than that of well, that upon no other condition than this, welcoming back the NEWSPAPER PREss of is either the one or the other permanently FRANCE, in circumstances such as these, to fixed. And notwithstanding the grave cen- a position they never would have forfeited, if sure which we have been obliged to pass the possession of most remarkable talents, upon the Paris Journals, we think sufficient- and the recollection of services for which ly well of them to believe, that they would in times past they made the whole civilized yet support the monarch in the wise, just, world their debtor, could of themselves liberal, and yet most prudent course, which have retained them there.

SHORT REVIEWS OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

Gedichte. (Poems.) Von HEINRICH RITTER
VON LEVITSCHNIGG. Vienna: Pfautsch and
Co. 1842.

told in a serious poem, that hope kept a mint in the heart, where he struck bright coins out of promises, and that when his false gold would not pass, he wrote bills of exchange payable at WE must say that on opening this book our im- the bier, with the good firm Heaven' written pression was a favourable one. A portrait of thereon. We are not hoaxing you, gentle readthe author greeted us, and certainly, if the er: turn to page 57, and then, if you can read limner be faithful, he is an uncommonly fine- German, you will find that we have not misled looking fellow. There is an agreeable ferocity you. A little further on we found the sun comin his thick moustache, a proud animation in his pared to a golden swan floating through a blue large eyes. Here, we thought, we shall have flood. A golden swan!' It is this sort of something crude perhaps, but energetic and poetical genius to which we are indebted for spirit-stirring. Alas for our hopes! Patiently those figures that adorn our public houses, and did we turn over poems in all sorts of metres, regale our eyes from the broad surface of our including ghazels and sonnets, but our feelings twelfth-cakes. Night (p. 82) is a black beauty, were untouched, our imagination was unele-and-what are the stars? Why they are euvated, our fancy was guided to no pleasing sport.

The author, we suspect, has taken Nicolaus Lenau for his model: a noble poet, but one very likely to lead his imitators into straits. Those excessively bold personations which delight us in Lenau, that perpetual recurrence of the most startling imagery, can only succeed when a powerful mind displays in such combinations the vigour of its grasp. Ritter von Levitschniggs on a perpetual quest to find out something, which shall be like something else; the chase after the image is a most painful one; and the worst of the matter is, that when it is caught, it is generally singularly infelicitous. If he starts from something beautiful, it is a hundred to one that he illustrates it by something remarkably ugly.

Our mind misgave us at p. 57, when we were

nuchs that guard the harem with bright Damascene swords. A strange taste this of Ritter von Levitschnigg! He finds himself in a beautiful real world, enlivened by hope, and adorned with celestial luminaries, and out of this he hammers an ideal world peopled by masters of the mint, eunuchs, and golden swans! If this be poetry who would not prefer plain prose!

But the stunning poem was one on Schiller (175). The poet Levitschnigg is indignant at the depreciation of Schiller which is prevalent among certain German literati. He predicts that the time will arrive when Europe will be a desert, and when tourists will come from Botany Bay to Germany, and that when they reach Weimar they will look into the geographical dictionaries (!) and find that it was the spot where the last German_nightingale sung. We

'Botany-Bai,' and the geographisch Wörter-ness expressed a decided wish, that whatever buch,' were too much; and exclaiming, This bay will be the death of us,' we took leave of Ritter von Levitschnigg.

Every history not written till a century and a half after the events to be related had occurred, is at once classed by Daunou among traditions. Thus the whole of the Roman History down to the war against Pyrrhus, is mere tradition; and in reading it, the student is warned to make allowance for the credulity, ignorance, and imaginations of the people among whom those traditions were current. In Greek history, according to our author's view, all is tradition that precedes the time of Herodotus; and the annals of After the revolution of 1820, Daunou had the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Medes, and several marks of favour from the men in power. the Persians, are all similarly classed. The traIn August of the same year he received the su-ditional period again is preceded by what Dauperintendence of the archives of the kingdom, nou calls the mythologieal period, in which it is and several honourable distinctions, including impossible for the historian, unless by the aid of that of the peerage, were conferred upon him.

Von

Chantrey, Wilkie, Albertolli, Antolini, Wiebeking: but perhaps no one had wrought so great and sudden, if not altogether complete, a change in the department of it which he pursued, as did Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

and he receives as extremely improbable all | which Daunou is to hold in the estimation of historical narratives relative to the same period, posterity; and it is but the natural partiality and accompanied by an unusual concourse of of his editor, Mr. Taillandier, to believe with marvellous occurrences; but where there is him, that the composition will one day take a nothing improbable about a fact handed down place among the highest productions of French by tradition, or where that which is natural and literature. probable may easily be separated from that which is marvellous or fabulous, a traditional Karl Friedrich Schinkel: eine Characteristik event may often acquire an all but unquestion- seiner Künstlerischen Wirksamkeit. able authority. Lycurgus, for instance, is FRANZ KUGLER. Berlin. 1842. known to us only by tradition, and gross fictions THE name of Schinkel, one not wholly unfamiliar have been interwoven into his history, by his to our readers, has now become historical, and credulous and imaginative countrymen; yet no will mark an epoch in art, as that of the great historian thinks of questioning the fact that there master in architecture among his German condid exist such a man as Lycurgus, and that he temporaries. Within the course of the last two did give laws to the Spartans. The existence of years, art has lost several of its more distinHomer and Hesiod again is mere matter of tra-guished followers: Dannecker, Geefs, Freund, dition, and we have only traditional authority for the fact that the works attributed to them were really written by them; yet those who have declared their doubts as to the existence of Homer, and have gone so far as to question the paternity of the Iliad and Odyssey, have become, in our author's opinion, just objects of derision to every sane scholar. Many other occurrences, resting only on tradition, are, nevertheless, reasonably placed in history, as unquestioned, if not as unquestionable, facts. Among these may, for instance, be mentioned, the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, and the establishment of the consulate; the two first Messenian wars; the philosophical labours of Thales and Pythagoras; the laws of Solon; the usurpation of Pisistratus; the conquests of Cyrus and Cambyses; and the commencement of the war between the Persians and the Greeks. For all these facts we have no authority but popular tradition, and each of them is handed down to us with a multitude of fabulous details, which the judicious critic is bound to reject: still the main facts cannot be called into question without overstepping the bounds of a reasonable scepticism.

We need not here repeat the biographical notice already given of him in our fourteenth volume, neither have we much to add to it: scarcely any further facts or particulars being supplied by Kugler, beyond the melancholy ones connected with his last illness and death; and those may be briefly told. Shortly after returning with his family from a wateringplace which he had visited for the benefit of his health, he was seized on the 9th of September, 1840, with a sudden attack or paralysis of the brain, which reduced him all at once to a most deplorable condition; to a state of constant stupor, with only a few brief intervals of returning consciousness. In this sort of living death he continued till the 9th of October, 1841, when he breathed his last. Three days afterwards his funeral took place, attended by a long cortège of mourners, accompanied by crowds of speciators, all anxious to express, by their last sad homage to his remains, their admiration for the artist, and their esteem for the man.

Our author next examines the value of historical monuments, among which he includes the productions of the painter, the statuary, the It is of Schinkel in the first mentioned chaarchitect, and the mechanician. He then pass-racter that Dr. Kugler has given us a memoir ad es on to the subject of medals and inscriptions, the historical value of which he seems, strangely enough, not disposed to estimate very highly.

The whole of the first volume is occupied by the subject of Historical Criticism. The second volume contains the second book, on the Utility of History, to which Daunou gives, naturally enough, an extensive signification. The second great division, the Classification of Facts, commences about the middle of the second volume, and will, we presume, be continued in the third. In the classification of facts are included the sciences of geography and chronology.

The third great division, the Exposition of Facts, is of so comprehensive a nature, that it is difficult for any one not in the secret to guess the extent to which the work may eventually be carried. The two volumes now before us, therefore, may be looked upon as a portion only of the introductory matter, and it would be hazardous to pronounce an opinion on the probable ultimate value of the whole work. There cannot, however, be a doubt, that it will be the work on which will mainly depend the rank

interim-for we hope it will be followed up by some more complete and detailed account, upon the same plan. Even this, however, we think a valuable contribution to architectural biography, which is generally exceedingly vague and meagre, without any attempt at either description or criticism, although in the case of the works of a man of real eminence there is ample field for both. Dr. Kugler's little brochure is in these respects an excellent model, for it forms an almost indispensable companion to Schinkel's published designs, and should be in the hands of all who possess those Entwürfe.' Neither is it in his capacity of architect alone, that the biographer takes a view of his studies and their results, but adopts the same course in regard to the several other accessory branches of art to which he also devoted himself. For Schinkel was an artist in the comprehensive meaning of the word: a master who, like some of the great ones of former days, had a catholic love for art in all its shapes. Yet laudable as was this feeling, it is perhaps to be regretted than in practice he did not confine himself more

However opinion may differ as to the partic ular merits of his buildings individually, most undeniable it is that the capital of Prussia is indebted to Schinkel for a new era in its architecture. Henceforth his name will be as much identified with Berlin, as that of Palladio with Vicenza; and but for his sudden death, when not much advanced beyond the meridian of life, it must have been still more so, as almost a new career would now have been opened to him by the important and extensive architectural undertakings to be commenced under the auspices of the present sovereign. One of these is to be a cathedral; report says, at the cost of upwards of a million sterling; and another, an additional edifice for the purpose of a museum.

Topographie von Athen. (Topography of Athens.) By P. W. FORCHHAMMER. Kiel. 1841

strictly to one particular province, instead of, lead some to do what Schinkel neglected: nameturning his mind into so many different chan- ly, to start afresh from that point up to which nels; more especially after he had opened a he himself had advanced, and then suddenly fresh vein in the mine of architecture, the work- stopped short. ing of which would assuredly have sufficed, and would also have been attended with fame: certainly with more than he has now acquired. Hardly need we say that we here allude to that re-adaptation and extension of Grecian architecture, of which he has left us many successful essays in some of his earlier architectural works, more especially the Berlin Museum. Yet, instead of perseveringly continuing in that route, and it is one where so very much more than as yet has been ever attempted, remains to be accomplished, he seems to have allowed himself to be diverted from it, just at the point where every fresh step would have been a sevenleague stride. That he had left himself much to do, is evident from his having so frequently repeated some of his first ideas, without attempting to vary them. Particular features he almost stereotyped on every occasion,-such as doors and windows,-notwithstanding that they afford so much scope for invention, and for diversity both as to detail and to general character-THIS treatise appeared originally as part of a a circumstance all the more inexplicable because ornamental design, and composition of detail for other purposes, was in a manner his forte. If so far it is to be regretted that he did not attempt more, it would, on the other hand, have been better for his fame had he not aimed at so much, since what he has done or designed in the Gothic style rather detracts from than adds any thing to it. He seems to have had very little feeling for it, either as regards its general character and elements, or the expression depending upon subordinate parts and details. Hence his designs of this class are all more or less tame and cold, feeble and spiritless; although some of the individual forms are not unsatisfactory. Instead, therefore, of adding to, or at all setting off his reputation, his attempts in the Gothic manner are little better than so many rust spots upon it: they are his weak points, in which he is open to criticism, and defenceless. Besides this, it must be admitted that if he opened a new track, and broke through the dull and frigid mannerism of a former period, he fell, in turn, into a sort of mannerism of his own, easily caught, and therefore adopted by others: among the rest by Romberg, whose 'Stadtbaukunst' is almost entirely made up of ideas in the manner of Schinkel. If only on this account, his later designs betray a falling off at all events they do not realize the anticipations to which some of his earlier ones gave rise, and which were at the time expressed in this publication. Nevertheless, he was a great artist, and it behooves us to be grateful for what he has done for architecture. It is true that his designs are unequal in merit and in taste, yet

even this circumstance may be turned to account in studying them, as a warning to put others on their guard. Perhaps they may now

In the design of the law courts now in course of erection at Liverpool, the architect seems to have brought, to a careful and successful study of Schinkel, considerable taste and originality of feeling.

collection of philological studies, to which sev eral of the professors of Kiel had contributed. Professor Forchhammer's essay, however, was deemed, either by himself or his friends, of too much importance to be allowed to slumber among the learned lucubrations of his colleagues, and here it is in a separate publication. The object of the pamphlet, for it can scarcely be called more, is to overthrow at least two-thirds of all that has hitherto been taken for fact with respect to the topography of ancient Athens. Names like those of Leake and Müller affright not the professor of Kiel, and he has a right, un questionably, to speak his opinion freely, with out allowing his judgment to be warped by the authority of his predecessors. Should Forchhammer make good his position, he becomes an authority in his turn. It is difficult, without the assistance of the map appended to his work, to make his views clear; but an extract or two, to those who have made themselves acquainted with the subject, will at all events show the boldness of the professor's assumptions; and the map of Athens, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, will to a great extent supply the absence of the more detailed plan.

extend from Museium over the Pnyx, and several
"The foundations of a wall," he says, "which
intervening heights, to the vicinity of the Dipylum,
belong not to the ancient city-wall, but are of a more
recent date, probably of the tire of the Emperor
Valerian, in the third century of our era. The an-
cient city-wall lay much farther west and south, and
enclosed the western declivity of the Pnyx and the
Museium, which belonged to the most peopled quar-

ters of the ancient city. From the Museium, more
the bed of the Ilissus, ran along its left bank, and
over, the wall bent away towards the south, crossed
did not cross over again to the right bank till after
whereas the Lykeium lay without it.
passing the Stadium, which was within the wall,
Pausanias
entered the city through the Porta Peiraica, which
lay within the mouth of the two long walls, on the
low ground between the Museium and the Pnyx.
Here at the entrance to the city was situated the