by radical or conservative.
Hence the confusion, hence the many strange phrases to be met with in
the periodical press. The author of the present work has sought to throw
some light on this important point. Leaving aside his prophetic fears of
future shocks with American or Asiatic powers as visionary, we can say
for the work that it presents in a clear light the question of races
as referring to European politics. The notes are good, and no research
seems to have been spared by the writer to establish the position he
maintains.

1. _Ancient Danish Ballads._ Translated from the Originals, by R.C.
ALEXANDER PRIOR, M.D. London: Williams & Norgate. Leipzig: R. Hartmann.
1860, 3 vols. pp. lx., 400, 468, 500.

2. _Edinburgh Papers._ By ROBERT CHAMBERS, F.R.S.E., etc., etc. _The
Romantic Scottish Ballads, their Epoch and Authorship._ W. & R.
Chambers: London and Edinburgh. 1859. pp. 40.

3. _The Romantic Scottish Ballads, and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy._ By
NORVAL CLYNE. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. 1859. pp. 49.

The expectations raised by the title of Dr. Prior's volumes are in a
great measure disappointed by their contents. The book is of value only
because it gives for the first time, in English, the substance of a
large number of Danish ballads, and points out the relations between
them and similar productions in other languages. Of the spirit and life
of these remarkable poems a person hitherto unfamiliar with them would
find but scanty indication in Dr. Prior's versions. He has merely done
them into English in a somewhat mechanical way, and one scarcely gets
a better notion of the more imaginative ones in his bald reproductions
than of the "Iliad" from the analysis of that poem in the "Epistolae
Obscurorum Virorum." It seems to require almost as peculiar powers to
translate an old ballad as to write a new one.

Dr. Prior complains of Jamieson, that his versions from the Danish are
done in a broad Scotch dialect, almost as unintelligible to ordinary
readers as the language of which they profess to give the meaning. But
if any one compare Jamieson's rendering of "The Buried Mother" with Dr.
Prior's, (Prior, vol. i. p. 368,) he will, we think, see cause to regret
that Jamieson did not do what Dr. Prior has attempted, and that he has
not left us a greater number of translations equally good. Jamieson's
fault was not so much his broad Scotch as his over-fondness for
archaisms, sometimes of mere spelling, which give rise to