“It has seemed to us proved, that the names, Volces, Volsks, Bolgs, Belgs, Belgians, Welsh, Welchs, Waels, Wuelchs or Walchs, Walls, Walloons, Valais, Valois, Vlaks, Wallachians, Galatians, Galtachs, Galls, Gaels or Caels, Gaelic, Galot, Gallegos, Gaul, and even Ola, Olatz, and Vallus, were but one and the same word under different forms.”

The point to be established at all hazards is, that the French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Belgians, and even the English and Greeks, form but one great family, of one hundred and fifteen million individuals,—­the Gallo-Roman.  This Neo-Latin world the author would wish combined in one grand confederation, like the States of America.  Hence his use of the term Panlatinism, in opposition to the so much debated one of Panslavism.  The merit of the work under consideration is, that, though decidedly French in all its views, it condenses in a few paragraphs the present mooted question of race.  The idea of Panslavism, or the uniting of eighty millions of Sclavonians under one banner, was, in its origin, republican and federal, whatever it may have become since.  Few words have acquired more diametrically opposite meanings, according as they were uttered by radical or conservative.  Hence the confusion, hence the many strange phrases to be met with in the periodical press.  The author of the present work has sought to throw some light on this important point.  Leaving aside his prophetic fears of future shocks with American or Asiatic powers as visionary, we can say for the work that it presents in a clear light the question of races as referring to European politics.  The notes are good, and no research seems to have been spared by the writer to establish the position he maintains.

1. Ancient Danish Ballads. Translated from the Originals, by R.C.  ALEXANDER PRIOR, M.D.  London:  Williams & Norgate.  Leipzig:  R. Hartmann. 1860, 3 vols. pp. lx., 400, 468, 500.

2. Edinburgh Papers. By ROBERT CHAMBERS, F.R.S.E., etc., etc. The Romantic Scottish Ballads, their Epoch and Authorship. W. & R. Chambers:  London and Edinburgh. 1859. pp. 40.

3. The Romantic Scottish Ballads, and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy. By NORVAL CLYNE.  Aberdeen:  A. Brown & Co. 1859. pp. 49.

The expectations raised by the title of Dr. Prior’s volumes are in a great measure disappointed by their contents.  The book is of value only because it gives for the first time, in English, the substance of a large number of Danish ballads, and points out the relations between them and similar productions in other languages.  Of the spirit and life of these remarkable poems a person hitherto unfamiliar with them would find but scanty indication in Dr. Prior’s versions.  He has merely done them into English in a somewhat mechanical way, and one scarcely gets a better notion of the more imaginative ones in his bald reproductions than of the “Iliad” from the analysis of that poem in the “Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum.”  It seems to require almost as peculiar powers to translate an old ballad as to write a new one.