and wing his sarcasm.  Theodore Parker virtually told the Christian minister that he must reprove profitable and popular sins, or else stand at great disadvantage in the trial between Rationalism and Supernaturalism which is vexing the age.  In rich and prosperous communities Christianity has been too prone to degenerate into a mere credence of dogma; it must reassert itself as the type of ethics.  It is also good that the clergy, intrusted with the defence of the faith delivered to saints, be compelled to place themselves on a level with the ripest scholarship of the day.  For ends such as these the life of this critic and protester has abundantly wrought.  If he has pulled down a meeting-house here and there, we are confident that he has been instrumental in building up many more to an effective Christianity.

Peculiar.  A Tale of the Great Transition.  By EPES SARGENT.  New York:  G.W.  Carleton. 12mo.

There seems to be an element of luck in the production of highly successful plays and novels.  To succeed in this department of imaginative writing, it is not enough that the author has literary power and skill.  Else why do the failures of every great novelist and playwright almost always outnumber the successes?  Even Shakspeare offers no exception to the fact.  What a descent from “Hamlet” to “Titus Andronicus,” from “Othello” to “Cymbeline”!  Miss Bronte writes “Jane Eyre,” and fails ever afterwards to come up to her own standard.  Bulwer delights us with “The Caxtons,” and then sinks to the dulness of “The Strange Story.”  Dickens gives us “Oliver Twist,” and then tries the patience of confiding readers in “Martin Chuzzlewit.”  We will not undertake to analyze all the reasons for these startling discrepancies; but one obvious reason is infelicity in the choice of a subject.  A subject teeming with the right capabilities will often enable an ordinary playwright to produce a drama that will rouse an audience to wild enthusiasm; whereas, if the subject is un-pregnant with dramatic issues, not even genius can invest it with the charm that commands the sympathy and attention of the many.  Watch a large, miscellaneous audience, as it listens, rapt, intent, and weeping, to Kotzebue’s “Stranger,” and see the same audience as it tries to attend to Talfourd’s “Ion.”  Yet here it is the hack writer who succeeds and the true poet who fails.  Why?  Because the former has hit upon a subject which gives him at once the advantage of nearness to the popular heart, while the latter has selected a theme remote and unsympathetic.

In “Peculiar” Mr. Sargent has had the luck, if we may so call it, of finding the materials for his plot in incidents which carry in themselves so much of dramatic power that a story is evolved from them with the facility and inevitableness of a fate.  When the United States forces under General Butler occupied New Orleans, certain developments connected with the workings of “the peculiar institution” were made, which showed a state of social degradation of which we had not supposed even Slavery capable.  It appeared that women, so white as to be undistinguishable from the fairest Anglo-Saxons, were held as slaves, lashed as slaves, subjected to all the indignities which irresponsible mastership involves.