quote this treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly
his; though we believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by
some transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes
substitutes his own language for that of the original.]

[Footnote 10: Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an
inspired thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless
sweep a grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others.]


* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_A History of Philip the Second, King of Spain_. By WILLIAM H.
PRESCOTT. Vol. III. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1858.

A cordial welcome from many quarters will greet this third instalment
of a work which promises, when completed, to be the most valuable
contribution to European history ever made by an American scholar. This
will in part be owing to the importance of the subject, which, though
professing to be the history of a single country and a single reign, is
in fact the great program of the politics of Christendom, and of more
than Christendom, during a period when the struggles of rival powers
and of hostile principles and creeds kept the world in agitation and
prolonged suspense,--when Romanism and Reform, the Crescent and the
Cross, despotic power and constitutional freedom, were contending for
mastery, and no government or nation could stand wholly aloof from a
contest in which the fate, not of empires alone, but of civilization,
was involved. Spain, during that period, was the bulwark of the Church