ly novels we can at least extract a laugh; but those of the
modern-antique school have a ponderous, a leaden kind of fatuity, under
which we groan. What can be more demonstrative of the inability of
literary women to measure their own powers than their frequent assumption
of a task which can only be justified by the rarest concurrence of
acquirement with genius? The finest effort to reanimate the past is of
course only approximative--is always more or less an infusion of the
modern spirit into the ancient form--

Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist,
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.

Admitting that genius which has familiarized itself with all the relics
of an ancient period can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic
divination, restore the missing notes in the "music of humanity," and
reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote
past nearer to us, and interpret it to our duller apprehension--this form
of imaginative power must always be among the very rarest, because it
demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigor. Yet we
find ladies constantly choosing to make their mental mediocrity more
conspicuous by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting
their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian
princesses, and attributing their rhetorical arguments to Jewish
high-priests and Greek philosophers. A recent example of this heavy
imbecility is "Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Dispersion," which forms
part of a series, "uniting," we are told, "taste, humor, and sound
principles." "Adonijah," we presume, exemplifies the tale of "sound
principles;" the taste and humor are to be found in other members of the
series. We are told on the cover that the incidents of this tale are
"fraught with unusual interest," and the preface winds up thus: "To those
who feel interested in the dispersed of Israel and Judea, these pages may
afford, perhaps, information on an important subject, as well as
amusement." Since the "important subject" on which this book is to
afford information is not specified, it may possibly lie in some esoteric
meaning to which we have no key; but if it has relation to the dispersed
of Israel and Judea at any period of their history, we believe a
tolerably well-informed school-girl already knows much more of it than
she will find in this "Tale of the Jewish Dispersio