ng five
hundred pages, but he will hardly satisfy one reader; and we are
convinced by Mr. Towle's work that, whatever other species of literature
may demand the exercise of a childish imagination,--a weak fancy easily
caught with the prettiness as well as the pomp of words,--a slender
philosophy incapable of grasping the true significance of events,--a
logic continually tripped upon its own rapier,--and a powerful feeling
for anti-climax, with no small sentiment for solecism,--History, at
least, has little to gain from them.

_War of the Rebellion; or, Scylla and Charybdis. Consisting of
Observations upon the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Late Civil
War in the United States._ By H. S. FOOTE. New York: Harper and
Brothers. 1866.

The slight value which this volume possesses is of a nature altogether
different from that which the author doubtless ascribes to it, though we
imagine most of his readers will agree with us in esteeming it chiefly
for its personal reminiscences of great events and people. As for Mr.
Foote's philosophization of the history he recounts, it is so generally
based upon erroneous views of conditions and occurrences, that we would
willingly have spared it all, if we could have had in its place a full
and simple narrative of his official career from the time he took part
in secession up to the moment of his departure from the Rebel territory.
We find nothing new in what he has to say concerning the character of
our colonial civilization and the unity of our colonial origin; and, as
we get farther from the creation of the world and approach our own era,
we must confess that the light shed upon the slavery question by Mr.
Foote seems but vague and unsatisfactory. A few disastrous years have
separated us so widely from all the fallacies once current here, that
Mr. Foote's voice comes like an utterance from Antediluvia, when he
tells us how compromises continually restored us to complete
tranquillity, which the machinations of wicked people, North and South,
instantly disturbed again. There was once a race of feeble-minded
politicians who thought that, if the Northern Abolitionists and Southern
fire-eaters were destroyed, there could be no possible disagreement
between the sections concerning slavery; and Mr. Foote, surviving his
contemporaries, still clings to their delusions, and believes that the
late war resulted from the conflict of ambitious and unscrupulous men,
and not from the confli