n evil transient in its cause and its
consequences, compared with those which would result from unsettling the
faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of
men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_The Armies of Europe: Comprising Descriptions in Detail of the Military
Systems of England, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sardinia,
adapting their Advantages to all Arms of the United States Service; and
embodying the Report of Observations in Europe during the Crimean War,
as Military Commissioner from the United Stales Government in 1855-56_.
By GEORGE B. McCLELLAN, Major-General U.S. Army. Originally published
under the Direction of the War Department, by Order of Congress.
Illustrated with a Fine Steel Portrait and Several Hundred Engravings.
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. 8vo.

It is an interesting study to examine into the causes or motives which
have produced military books of the higher order; for we are thus
vouchsafed an insight into the writer's genius, and an intelligence of
the circumstances amidst which he wrote, and of which he was often an
important controller. The Archduke Charles wrote his "Grundsaetze der
Strategie," etc., as a vindication of his splendid movements in 1796,
against the French armies of the Rhine and the Sambre-et-Meuse; and
it has remained at once a monument to his achievements and a standard
text-book in military science. Marmont, the Marshal Duke of Ragusa,
collecting the principles of the art of war from "long and frequent
conversations with Napoleon, twenty campaigns, and more than half a
century of experience," has given us, in his "Esprit des Institutions
Militaires," a condensed view of his own military life, as complete, if
not as pleasantly diffuse, as his large volumes of "Memoires." Jomini,
from an extended experience, and a study of the genius of Napoleon,
which his Russian position could never induce him to undervalue,
has produced those standard works which must always remain the
treasure-houses of military knowledge. We admire veracity, but let no
soldier confess that he has not read the "Vie Politique et Militaire,"
and the "Precis de l'Art de la Guerre." But, in all these cases, the
_litera scripta_ has been but the closing act,--the signing of the name
to History's bead-roll of passing greatness,--the _testamentum_ of the
old soldier whose _personalty_ is worth bequeathing to th