It adds to the color of Mr. Kingsley’s pages, while detracting from his authority, that he is always and inevitably a partisan.  He must have somebody to cry up and somebody to cry down.  In “Sir Amyas Leigh,” his hatred of the Spanish and admiration of the English were like those of a man who had suffered intolerable wrongs from the one and received invaluable rescue from the other.  The same element appears powerfully in the volume above named.  The Teuton stands for all that is best, and the Roman for all that is worst in humanity.  He makes no secret, indeed, of his deliberate belief that the whole future of the human race depends upon the Teutonic family.  Deliberate, we say; but in truth Mr. Kingsley is little capable of believing anything deliberately.  He is always precipitate.  His opinions have the force which can be given them by warm espousal, vivid expression, a certain desire to be fair, and a constant appeal to the moral nature of man; but the impression of hasty and heated partisanship goes with them always, and two words from a broad and balanced judgment might overturn many a chapter of this red-hot advocacy.

The present volume derives an interest for Americans from its relation to our great contest.  Mr. Kingsley has been represented as intensely hostile to the North, and as using all his endeavor to infect his pupils with his opinions.  These lectures, however, hardly sustain such representations.  He is, indeed, anti-democratic in a high degree.  He is so as a disciple of Carlyle, as a prosperous Englishman, not destitute of flunkyism, and also as a man whose very best power is that of passionately admiring individual greatness.  He is a believer in natural aristocracy, in the British nobility, and in Carlyle; and democracy could, of course, find small place in his creed.  Hence he has a sentimental sympathy with the South, and once in a foot-note speaks of “the Southern gentleman” in a maudlin way.  There is also another passage in which he makes the South stand for the Teuton, whom he worships, and the North for the Roman, whom he abhors.  Yet this very passage occurs in connection with a denunciation of deserved doom upon the Southern Confederacy.  He had been describing the last great battle of the Eastern Goths, after which they literally disappeared from history.  And the reason of their defeat and destruction, he avers, was simply this, that they were a slaveholding aristocracy.  As such they must perish; the earth, he declares, will not and cannot afford them a dwelling-place.  Indeed, he repeatedly lays it down as a law of history that slaveholding aristocracies must go down before the progress of the world, and must go down in blood.

The Small House at Allington.  By ANTHONY TROLLOPE.  New York:  Harper & Brothers.