REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers._ By SAMUEL SMILES,
Author of "Self-Help," "Brief Biographies," and "Life of George
Stephenson." Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

The history of iron is the history of civilization. The rough, shapeless
ore that lies hidden in the earth folds in its unlovely bosom such fate
and fortune as the haughtier sheen of silver, gleam of gold, and sparkle
of diamond may illustrate, but are wholly impotent to create. Rising
from his undisturbed repose of ages, the giant, unwieldy, swart, and
huge of limb, bends slowly his brawny neck to the yoke of man, and at
his bidding becomes a nimble servitor to do his will. Subtile as
thought, rejoicing in power, no touch is too delicate for his
perception, no service too mighty for his strength. Tales of faerie,
feats of magic, pale before the simple story of his every-day labor, or
find in his deeds the facts which they but faintly shadowed forth. And
waiting upon his transformation, a tribe becomes a nation, a race of
savages rises up philosophers, artists, gentlemen.

Commerce, science, warfare have their progress and their vicissitudes;
but underneath them all, unnoted, it may be, or treated to a superficial
and perhaps supercilious glance, yet mainspring and regulator of all,
runs an iron thread, true thread of Fate, coiling around the limbs of
man, and impeding all progress, till he shall have untwisted its Gordian
knot, but bidding him forward from strength to strength with each
successive release. No romance of court or camp surpasses the romance of
the forge. A blacksmith at his anvil seems to us a respectable, but not
an eminently heroic person; yet, walking backward along the past by the
light which he strikes from the glowing metal beneath his hand, we shall
fancy ourselves to be walking in the true heroic age. Kings and warriors
have brandished their swords right royally, and such splendor has
flashed from Excalibur and Morglay that our dazzled eyes have scarcely
discerned the brawny smith who not only stood in the twilight of the
background and fashioned with skilful hand the blade which radiates such
light, but passed through all the land, changing huts into houses,
houses into homes, and transforming into a garden by his skill the
wilderness which had been rescued by the sword. Vigorous brains, clear
eyes, sturdy arms have wrought out, not without blood, victories more
potent, more permanent