Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of cowardice.  It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and avenge themselves.  Every human government is bound to make its laws so far resemble His, that they shall be uniform, certain, and unquestionable in their operation; and this it can do only by a timely show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the single attribute of the Infinite Reason that we can clearly apprehend and of which we have hourly example.

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REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Personal History of Lord Bacon, From Unpublished Papers.  By WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON, of the Inner Temple.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 12mo. pp. 424.

The life of Bacon, as it has been ordinarily written, presents contrasts so strange, that thoughtful readers have been compelled either to doubt the accuracy of the narrative, or to admit that in his case Nature departed from her usual processes, and embodied antithesis in a man.  The character suggested by the events of his life has long been in direct opposition to the character impressed on his writings; and Macaulay, who gave to the popular opinion its most emphatic and sparkling expression, increased this difference by exaggerating the opposite elements of the human epigram, and ended in manufacturing the most brilliant monstrosity that ever bore the name of a person.  Lord Campbell followed with a biography having all the appearance of conscientious research and judicial impartiality, but which was really nothing more than a weak translation of Macaulay’s vivid sentences into such English “as it had pleased God to endow him withal.”  Bacon, to all inquiring men, still remained outside of the statements of both; and after the lapse of nearly two centuries, the slight biographical sketch by his chaplain, Dr. Rawleigh, conveyed a juster idea of the man than all the biographies by which it had been succeeded, but not superseded.

Mr. Dixon’s “Personal History of Lord Bacon” is the first attempt to vindicate his fame by original research into unpublished documents.  It is a mortifying reflection to all who speak the English tongue, that this task should have been deferred so long.  There has been no lack of such research in regard to insignificant individuals who have been accidentally connected with events which come within the cognizance of English historians; but the greatest Englishman among all English politicians and statesmen since the Norman Conquest has heretofore been honored with no biographer who considered him worthy the labor which has been lavished on inferior men.  The readers of Macaulay’s four volumes of English