We had marked for quotation an admirable passage, in which our author passes judgment on the policy of the Spanish government, its cruelty and its mistakes.  But want of space compels us here to take leave of a book which we have not pretended to analyze, but to which we have rendered sincere, though inadequate, praise.

[Footnote 1:  “Sempre apparisce d’un volto e d’una temperatura medesima; la qual cosa a chi, considerato gli accidenti che gli sono occorsi delle morti dei figliuoli e delle mogli, ha fatto credere che fusse crudele.” Relaz.  Anon. (1588.)]

[Footnote 2:  None of the anecdotes in which Philip is represented as giving way to violent bursts of anger will bear examination.  Take, for example, the story of his pent-up wrath having exploded against the Prince of Orange, when he was quitting the Netherlands in 1559.  The Prince, it is said, who had accompanied him to the ship, endeavored to convince him that the opposition to his measures, of which he complained, had sprung from the Estates; on which the king, seizing William’s sleeve, and shaking it vehemently, exclaimed, “No, not the Estates, but you,—­you,—­you!”—­No los Estados, ma vos,—­vos, —­vos!—­using, say the original relator and the repeaters of the story, a form of address, the second person plural, which in the Spanish language is expressive of contempt.  Now it is true that vos, applied to an equal, would have been a solecism; but it is also true that it was the invariable form employed by the sovereign, even when addressing a grandee or a prince of the Church. (See the Papiers d’Etat de Granvelle, passim.) Moreover, the correspondence of the time shows clearly that neither Philip nor Granvelle had as yet conceived any deep suspicion of the Prince of Orange, much less had any of the parties been so imprudent as to throw off the usual mask.  The story is first told by Auberi, a writer of the seventeenth century, who had it from his father, to whom it had been told by an anonymous eye-witness!]

[Footnote 3:  Relazione di Pigafetta.]

[Footnote 4:  Walpole to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774.]

* * * * *

The Courtship of Miles Standish.  By HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 1858.

The introduction and acclimatization of the hexameter upon English soil has been an affair of more than two centuries.  The attempt was first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass.  Gabriel Harvey,—­a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,—­whose chief claim to remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred.  In his “Foure Letters,” (1592,) he says, “If I never deserve anye better remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill,