aid before, more firmly believe that the Protestant cause
is the good cause; none are more reverentially inclined toward all
honest critical investigations, more anxious to see all truth, the
Bible itself, sifted and tested in every possible method; but we must
protest against what certainly seems too contemptuous a rejection of
a mass of historic evidence hitherto undoubted, except by the school
of Voltaire; and of the hasty denial of the meaning of Christian and
martyrologic symbols, as well known to antiquaries as Stonehenge or
Magna Charta.

At the same time, Dr. Maitland's book seems the work of a righteous
and earnest man, and it is not its object, but its method, of which
we complain. The whole question of martyrology, a far more important
one than historians generally fancy, requires a thorough
investigation, critical and historical; it has to be done, and
especially just now. The Germans, the civil engineers of the
intellectual world, ought to do it for us, and no doubt will. But
those who undertake it must bring to the work, not only impartiality,
but enthusiasm; it is the spirit only, after all, which can quicken
the eye, which can free the understanding from the idols of laziness,
prejudice, and hasty induction. To talk philosophically of such
matters a man must love them; he must set to work with a Christian
sympathy, and a manly admiration for those old spiritual heroes to
whose virtue and endurance Europe owes it that she is not now a den
of heathen savages. He must be ready to assume everything about them
to be true which is neither absurd, immoral, nor unsupported by the
same amount of evidence which he would require for any other historic
fact. And, just because this very tone of mind--enthusiastic but not
idolatrous, discriminating but not captious--runs through Mrs.
Jameson's work, we hail it with especial pleasure, as a fresh move in
a truly philosophic and Christian direction. Indeed, for that branch
of the subject which she has taken in hand, not the history, but the
poetry of legends and of the art which they awakened, she derives a
peculiar fitness, not merely from her own literary talents and
acquaintance with continental art, but also from the very fact of her
being an English wife and mother. Women ought, perhaps, always to
make the best critics--at once more quicksighted, more tasteful, more
sympathetic than ourselves, whose proper business is creation.
Perhaps in Utopia they will t