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X—NOTICES OF BOOKS.
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, The Thomas History Carl of yle Frederi...
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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¦( 56 )
¦( 56 )
X—Notices Of Books.
X—NOTICES OF BOOKS . - _&* .
, The Thomas History Carl Of Yle Frederi...
_, The Thomas History Carl of yle Frederick . Four Yols II . of Prussia Chapman , called and Hall Frederick . the Great * By
The first lialf of Mr . Carlyle s great work lias now been for some six months before the publicand almost every organ of the press
lias had its say upon the subject , ; so that by dint of much reading of the book itself , and of the opinions of others upon it , it would
appear to the intellect of a candid reviewer to be next to impossible to say anything oriinal of Frederick the Great . _? ' : _-
Yet this is b g far the most remarkable book of the autumn seasonnayof y the whole year ; ( forfend us Mr . Buckle !)
inasmuch ; as whole , hoards of buried facts are herein dug up and _, exposed to view ; and it shares , in common with every other pre- *
sentment of fact , many sided relations to different classes of mind . None of the disquisitions alluded to have so much impressed
us as that to be found in our contemporary " Fraser , " for the month of Decemberin which the witty and ingenious reviewer ,
excuses himself from , really perpetrating a review of the Life of Frederick the Greaton the wholesome plea thatexcept from the
, , two new volumes actually on his table before him , he really knew next to nothing about him ! Thereupon he summons up the
convenient presence of two or three imaginary friends , and proceeds to chat about the work in question in a highly suggestive and pleasant
manner , without any pretence of being more thoroughly up in Prussian history than Mr . Carlyle himself .
But if " Fraser " professes prior ignorance on the dusty details now for the first time inspired with life and meaning , to what
amount of knowledge or of critical judgment shall the " English "Woman ' s Journal" lay claim ? Potsdam and Sans Souci are not to
us _xmknown , nor are the wide streets of Berlin , wherein this story _, shaped itselfa mere vision of our imagination ; yet of nearly all that
, Mr . Carlyle has so delightfully told us , we were before as ignorant ( Heaven help us ) as the babe which has never learnt its letters .
. Let us therefore imitate the reviewer in " Fraser , " and summon our council of friends ; and this time they shall be ladies , if you
please , who read " Frederick the Great" with avidity for the wonderful amount of hearty human gossip which the book contains , a
• very good and veritable element in any history , and likely to be remembered when diplomacy has vanished from the face of the earth .
Do we not all cherish the tit bits of history , —Fair Rosamond , Queen Catherine , and the boxing" of Lady Essex , —to the exclusion of
much weightier matter ? Did not King Charles , of unblessed memory , scramble into an oak tree after a battle whose name . we have
forgotten , the result of a series of quarrels of which " ship money "
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), March 1, 1859, page 56, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01031859/page/56/
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