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 take the reviewer’s business entirely off our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by-the-bye, in one leading periodical.  But of all critics an English matron ought to be the best—­open as she should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and admiring sympathies, accustomed by her Protestant education to unsullied purity of thought, and inheriting from her race, not only freedom of mind and reverence for antiquity, but the far higher birthright of English honesty.

And such a genial and honest spirit, we think, runs through this book.

Another difficult task, perhaps the most difficult of all, the authoress has well performed.  We mean the handling of stories whose facts she partly or wholly disbelieves, while she admires and loves their spirit and moral; or doctrines, to pronounce on whose truth or falsehood is beyond her subject.  This difficulty Mr. Newman, in the “Lives of the English Saints,” edited and partly written by him, turned with wonderful astuteness to the advantage of Romanism; but others, more honest, have not been so victorious.  Witness the painfully uncertain impression left by some parts of one or two of those masterly articles on Romish heroes which appeared in the “Quarterly Review;” an uncertainty which we have the fullest reason to believe was most foreign to the reviewer’s mind and conscience.  Even Mr. Macaulay’s brilliant history here and there falls into the same snare.  No one but those who have tried it can be aware of the extreme difficulty of preventing the dramatic historian from degenerating into an apologist or heating into a sneerer; or understand the ease with which an earnest author, in a case like the present, becomes frantically reckless, under the certainty that, say what he will, he will be called a Jesuit by the Protestants, an Infidel by the Papists, a Pantheist by the Ultra-High-Church, and a Rogue by all three.