"
Though we do not find in Dr. Vaughan the fascinating qualities which we
have been spoiled into expecting by some recent English and French examples
of historical composition, we can give him the praise of being fair-minded,
sensible, and clear. If he anywhere shows prejudice, it is in his somewhat
depreciatory estimate of the Normans, whom he rather gratuitously supposes
to have acquired civilization and the love of art from the Saxons,--a
supposition at war with probability as well as fact. If anything
distinguished the Norman from the Saxon, it was his aptitude for
appreciating beauty as distinguished from use,--an aptitude on which French
influence could not have been lost before the Conquest of England. The
Normans in Sicily certainly had not had the advantage of Saxon training in
aesthetics, and the poetry and architecture of the Normans in England were
no reproduction of Saxon models.
But whatever deductions are to be made on the score of want of
picturesqueness in style, of generalizing power, and of that imagination
which sets before us dramatically the mutual interaction of men and events,
Dr. Vaughan's history will be found a useful and enlightened compendium of
the facts with which it deals.
_Fresh Hearts that failed Three Thousand Years Ago; with Other Things_. By
the Author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay." Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
1860. pp. 121.
In noticing the "New Priest," in a former number of the "ATLANTIC," we had
occasion to speak of the author's remarkable beauty and vigor of style, his
keen sense of the picturesque and imaginative aspects of outward Nature,
his comic power, and his original conception of character.
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