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LITERATURE.

D. APPLETON & Co. have published in two large volumes The History of the Navy during the Rebellion, by C. B. BOYNTON, Chaplain of the House of Representatives, and Professor in the Naval School at Annapolis.

The history of naval operations during the five years of the war possesses a double interest, and is valuable both as forming an important part of the whole history of the struggle, and as showing the fertility of American inventive power under the incentive of a powerful stimulus.

The movements of the army during the war have been fully chronicled; we have his. tories from soldiers, editors, correspondents, politicians, and others, more or less impartial and trustworthy, but the part borne by the navy has been by no means so well understood by the public, and we doubt whether the effect of the naval operations on the duration and issue of the contest has ever been fully appreciated.

The history opens with a picture of the condition of the navy at the commencement of Mr. Lincoln's administration. Its strength seemed inadequate enough to the task assigned to it. With about a dozen vessels at home, ready for service, and about as many more that could be equipped within a few months, a blockade was to be established and preserved along a coast line of more than three thousand miles; the seaports and shipping of the Northern States were to be protected from whatever force the Confederacy might be able to establish, and active assistance was to be rendered to the army in regaining possession of the forts and harbors along the coast.

With an energy and enterprise for which our venerable Secretary of the Navy and his coadjutors have perhaps never received due credit, a temporary force was organized by the arming of merchant vessels, ferry-boats, and coast-steamers, and government yards, and private docks and foundries, were pushed to their utmost activity in the production of a fleet of a more permanent value, so that, although the work to be accomplished far exceeded the original estimate, the navy thus created was found equal to the task.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is that describing the building of the first monitor. The difficulties to be overcome in uniting in one structure so many ideas that

were as yet but experimental, the opposition met with from many of the most experienced and influential naval authorities, the doubts and discouragements of the best friends of the enterprise, the completion of the monitor, er speedy trial, glorious struggle, and final success, are all vividly and dramatically told, and an almost personal interest is awakened in the mind of the reader for the little vessel that for a brief hour fought single-handed as the champion of a nation.

Our naval battles were important not merely for their immediate effects upon the fortunes of the Union or Confederacy, but also for the revolutions they brought about in the principles of naval architecture and gunnery. When the Merrimac destroyed the Cumberland, it proved conclusively that the days of wooden frigates were over, and that the wooden fleets of the greatest naval powers in the world would be at the mercy of a few ironclads. In twenty-four hours, however, another step was taken, another principle established; the Merrimac was damaged and repulsed by the Monitor, and the greatest power for both attack and defence was shown to be possessed by an insignificant-looking craft, whose appearance fully justified the rebel description of "a Yankee cheese-box on a raft."

As Mr. Boynton justly remarks, the victory of the Monitor was the triumph of American ideas; for, while the Merrimac was armored after the model of the French and English ironclads, the Monitor, as to its hull, turret, and guns, was entirely the product of American thought. The history of the world hardly gives an instance where so much was decided by a four hours' combat between two vessels, fought by a couple of hundred men. It is difficult to place a limit to the destruction that the rebel ironclad would have been able to accomplish but for this timely check. Steaming up the Potomac, it could have held the Capital at its mercy; a few hours' sail would have enabled it to destroy the shipping of New York, and place the city itself under contribution; or, going down the coast, it could have raised the blockade, and opened the Confederacy to Europe. It is hardly too much to suppose that recognition by England and France would have followed, and the life of the Rebellion have been indefinitely prolonged.

No wonder there was rejoicing in Norfolk

and anxiety in Washington on the night following the exploits of the Merrimac, and the debt due to the inventor and the fighting man, Ericsson and Worden, who at this hour of need stepped in between their country and its peril, can hardly be overestimated.-The first volume of Mr. Boynton's book contains a val, uable chapter on ordnance. We find here a review of the progress of English gunnery from 1646 (the date of the building of the first frigate), and a short sketch of the development of our own system of artillery, with tables showing the comparative strength of the American and English navies. In 1861, the largest guns used in English vessels, threw 8-inch shot, weighing 68 lbs. ; the experience of our war brought into service the Parrot, Dahlgren, and Rodman guns, throwing shot of 11, 13, and 15-inches, weighing 150 to 200 lbs., and the introduction of turret-armaments in the place of broadsides, enabled these to be used with terrible efficiency. The difference in the destructive power of the two classes of armaments can be readily estimated..

The principal naval actions on the coast, commencing with the capture of the forts at Hatteras inlet, and ending with Farragut's entry into the Bay of Mobile, are described with spirit, and apparently with careful fidelity to facts. The history of the river fleet or inland navy, and of its varied fortunes, from the storming of Fort Henry, its first success of importance, to the close of the Red River campaign, is interesting, not only on account of its bearing upon the progress of the war, but also from the fresh proofs given of the fruitfulness of the American inventive power. Experiment succeeded experiment, and rams, mortar-schooners, iron monitors, and "turtles," were all brought into use under the ever-varying circumstances of the campaign, while the close of the naval war in the west was marked by one of the most brilliant engineering feats on record, the building of, the Red River dam.

Ingenuity of invention and persevering energy were not confined to one side; the rebel government, during the first two years, made manful efforts to establish a navy, and the Merrimac, Louisiana, Atlanta, and other ironclads, showed a constructive power, and ability to make the most from small materials, worthy of respect; but the failure of their first few enterprises, and the great difficulties to be overcome in ship-building, early discouraged the Navy Department, and during the last years of the war its efforts were con

fined to the obstruction of harbors, and manu. facture of torpedoes.

Mr. Boynton's descriptive style is good, but somewhat marred, we think, by his continual references to the interference of Divine Providence. We believe thoroughly that all the actions of individuals and of nations are under the supervision of such Providence, and we also gladly admit that the power that controls the whole must also control the parts; still, we feel that there is a certain irreverence of expression, if not of thought, in speaking of a divine blessing as following each missile of destruction, and we cannot forget that such blessing was invoked with equal faith by rebel and unionist.

The blemishes of Mr. Boynton's work are, however, few, as compared with its merits, and The History of the Navy will take rank among the best of the memorials of the war of the Rebellion.

"Two Thousand Miles on Horseback"Sante Fe and Back. By JAMES F. MELINE. (Hurd & Houghton.) Two Thousand Miles on Horseback! How tired Colonel Meline must have been! is the involuntary exclamation. The next is-What a capital title! Is the book as good as the title?

Tired, the colonel certainly does not seem to have been; for his story is as bright and wide-awake as any book of travels we have read this many a day. The trouble, if it be a trouble, is that he travels through a region of country which our people neither know much about nor care. And yet we ought to know and care. As one of General Pope's party of examination he had an opportunity--and the best-of seeing and studying the country and the people of that vast region extending from the Missouri River through Colorado, the mountains of Pike's Peak, through New Mexico to Sante Fé, and back along Northern Texas to St. Louis. We say he had the best opportunity for seeing the country and the people of any man who as yet has been over this route. And more, he has the keen eye, the quick perception, and the sharp pen, which mark the dexterous traveller and practised writer; and he has given us, in a most readable style, an account of life on the Plains, in and around the gold country of Colorado, through the whole region of which Sante Fé is the centre. He tells us strange and laughable peculiarities of this people, and with great research has collected a great deal never presented before of this the oldest portion of civilized America. He saw, chased, and ate the buffalo; saw and

learned to despise "ye gentle savage;❞ saw and talked with Kit Carson. He tells us that after all-and he has seen both-the stretch of mountains at Pike's Peak "impress me as incomparably finer" than the Bernese Alps, and he "solemnly abandons the last of my European illusions on the subject of European scenery." In the words of our old vestryman, Hoffman, we are compelled to say, "I don't care, I won't assent." We yet stand by the Alps. It is with a feeling of regret that we are compelled to close this notice without giving choice extracts, such as Description of Sante Fé, p. 151-2; The Church of Abuquer que, p. 126; A Most Amusing Theatre, p. 1812; The Pubelos Indians, p. 133; Kit Carson, p. 264-8, &c., &c. All this the reader is commended to read, and enjoy as we did.

DR. J. C. HEPBURN has finished his "Dictionary of Japanese and English, with an English and Japanese Index," on which he has been engaged for the last eight years, and has sent a few copies to this country, to the care of Mr. A. D. F. Randolph, corner of Broadway and Ninth street. The book is a large octavo of nearly 700 pages, and is extremely well printed, the Japanese and Chinese characters being remarkably neat and clear. The volume was printed at Shanghae, at the American Presbyterian Mission Press, and bears the date 1867. A friend who has lived in Japan for the last seven or eight years, tells us, that the well-known American firm of Walsh, Hall & Co, established at Yokohama, learning that Dr. Hepburn had finished his book, but that the expense of publishing it was too great for his means, said to him: "It seems to us, that if you can afford to spend eight years in making this Dictionary, we can afford to pay for the printing of it." And so the book was printed at their expense. The Japanese Government immediately ordered a thousand copies at ten dollars a copy; but this was in a fit of enthusiasm that did not last, and they repented, and made the order less. On Dr. Hepburn's part, this has been a pure labor of love, and without a thought of pay, or even of reimbursement. His reputation for accuracy, judgment, and painstaking, stands as high, both with those who have known him in Japan, and those who have known him much longer here at home, as his character for devotion to the truth, and for a self-forgetting modesty that leaves the results of his labor no voice but their own to speak for them. His Dictionary will, however, make his name more widely

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known, and will add another to the listsmall but worthy-of American scholars. He says in the short preface, that in compiling the work, he labored under the very great difficulty of having had little to assist him in the works of predecessors in the same field. The only works of the kind within is reach were the small vocabulary of Dr. Medhurst, published in Batavia in 1830, and the Japan. ese and Portuguese Dictionary published by the Jesuit missionaries in 1603. His principal dependence has been upon the living teacher, and he declares himself alone responsible for every thing in the work. The Dictionary contains definitions of over 20,000 Japanese words, and we have found it, as the apocryphal old woman did Dr. Johnson's"very entertaining reading." We are constantly surprised by the delicacy with which the language expresses shades of meaning, and conveys complex ideas by single words or compounds. In reading over the definitions we get a world of information about Japanese ways of living and thinking, conveyed, as may be imagined, in rather a desultory manner, but none the less agreeable for that; and the good Doctor has interspersed through the book so many pretty Japanese proverbs, and bits of verse, and quaint sayings, and charming little inconsequential sentimentalizing, that our conventional notions as to the dryness and dulness that belong to a dictionary are entirely upset, and we have passed a whole afternoon in poring over these pages with a good deal of pleasure, and we dare say, no less profit.

DR. BRINTON'S Myths of the New World, (Leypoldt & Holt,) is a comprehensive, dense, well arranged, and well discussed exhibition of the religious observances, thoughts, and ideas of the native races of North and South America. The author considers his subject in its connections with the nature of the human soul, and along with the parallel facts of language and of symbolism; and thus develops a theory which is consistent, instructive, and, we think, substantially correct, of natural religion, its origin, progress, and significance. As the author himself remarks, he has written "more for the thoughtful, general reader than the antiquary." only has he succeeded in this design, but his array of curious and interesting superstitions, practices, traditions, and comparisons, and deductions of verbal meaning, will be found singularly entertaining, even to the reader for

mere amusement.

Not

Behind the Scenes, by ELIZABETH KECKLEY, formerly a Slave, but more recently Modiste and Friend to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. New York, G. W. Carleton. The latest, and decidedly the weakest production of the sensational press. It is-to use a Virginianism--"powerfully" weak. "There is a kind of physiognomy in the titles of books no less than in the faces of men, by which a skilful observer will know as well what to expect from the one as the other." Exceedingly well put, Mr. Publisher; and, applying the rule to the present case, we find that it works admirably. What but weakness could be expected from such a title? The book is illustrated, we cannot say adorned, by a woodcut portrait of the authoress, which is very "wooden." The contents are as flat as a Dutch landscape, the first sixty odd pages being made up from Mrs. Keckley's own lifeexperiences as a slave, inclusive of the usual manumittory documents (blank forms of which might be found, we apprehend, in any old book of Missouri practice), the direst trivialities of Mr. Lincoln's family life, and the humiliating details of Mrs. Lincoln's conduct subsequent to leaving the White House. The book ought never to have been written or published; but now that it is in the market, we cannot conceive of any sensible person's reading it with pleasure or profit-even conceding that all its statements are facts.

Lilliput Levee is the title of a little English book of children's poetry, republished here by Wynkoop & Sherwood. The Children having turned the world upside down, and taken the reins of government into their own hands, not only set up a king and queen, but a poetlaureate, and the poems in this clever little volume are supposed to be those of a candidate for the latter position. The book contains not only some very good sense, but some admirable nonsense, calculated to delight all sensible people (witness especially the delicious fragment called "Topsy-turvy World), as well as some fascinating childportraits. We are sorry to say, however, that the Bogey of the nursery who has made night hideous for so many poor babes, re-appears in this Lilliputian Paradise in a horrible tale called the "Storm-Cradle," which is a story of the very worst rawhead-and-bloodybones description. There are traces of this monster, our quondam friend Bogey, in one or two other ballads, but none are so bad as this. On the contrary, Lilliput Levee (the opening poem), Prince Philibert, Polly, Top

sy-turvy World, Stalky Jack, and the Wonder ful Toy, are all admirable. There are many verses in the book good for nothing but padding, but as long as no Bogey is concealed therein, we will return thanks for the gems of the collection which will be a real Godsend to the little ones, and to all mammas of wearied and overtaxed invention, an inestimable boon.

King Sham, and Other Articles in Verse, By LAWRENCE N. GREENLEAF, (Hurd & Houghton,) is another of those collections of newspaper jeux d'esprit with which the market is flooded. Their authors do not seem to appreciate the fact that the very reasons which produce newspaper popularity are often precisely the ones which prohibit a longer life, and that their verses cannot be successful in a book, because they have had a certain vogue in the daily journals. And can we conceive a more melancholy spectacle than a book full of stale poems? They are flatter than champagne a week uncorked, sadder than the crumpled relics of last night's ball, more depressing than the recollection of all one's unanswered letters and unpaid bills, gloomier than a hearse in a November fog. Puns, as well as venison, must be eaten hot. It is only the flash of high spirits which can make them tolerable, unless indeed, they are of that infrequent and precious kind in which the pun is the vehicle for the thought, inleaf's) a mere peg upon which to hang a stead of the thought being (as in Mr. Greenchildish play on words.

Vathek, (James Miller, publisher,) is a new edition of the famous Oriental tale, by WILLIAM BECKFORD, originally written in French, and published in 1786. Had it been a work of much less merit it would still have possessed great interest from the fact that it was written by a youth of nineteen, in a foreign language, and at a single sitting of three days and two nights. A severe illness was the consequence, as might have been apprehended. The story is not only exceedingly interesting, but is unsurpassed in the oriental magnificence of its descriptions, and the exquisite irony which underlies and tempers that magnificence. The conclusion is written in a strain of grand and solemn poetry, and the account of the Halls of Eblis, with the wretched multitude who wander therein, is unsurpassed by any thing of the kind in our language. We owe many thanks to Mr. Miller, for giving us such a charming little edition of this fine story.

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Ragged Dick," by HORATIO ALGER, Jr., published by A. K. Loring, Boston, is a welltold story of street-life in New York, that will, we should judge, be well received by the boy-readers, for whom it is intended.

The hero is a boot-black, who, by sharpness, industry, and honesty, makes his way in the world, and is, perhaps, somewhat more immaculate in character and manners than could naturally have been expected from his origin and training.

We find in this, as in many books for boys, a certain monotony in the inculcation of the principle that honesty is the best policy, a proposition that, as far as mere temporal success is concerned, we believe to be only partially true. However, the book is very readable, and we should consider it a much more valuable addition to the Sunday-school library than the tales of inebriates, and treatises on the nature of sin, that so often find place there.

Mr. Secretary Pepys, with extracts from his Diary, by ALLAN GRANT. (Wynkoop & Sherwood.) To any one who has read the charming pages from which this book has been compiled, it will be a matter of rejoicing that these samples of old Pepys' quality are thus placed within the reach of all. Like a good loaf of cake, cut him anywhere, and he is toothsome. But if we are not much mistaken, men who mean what they say when they pray, "Lead us not into temptation," ought not to buy this book, for it will be very sure to lead them into a temptation that they will make the slightest possible endeavor to resist, viz., the temptation to go at once and purchase the four large volumes from which this little volume is made up, that he may reap the benefit of every word of this deliciously garrulous old fellow's journal. Here is the material out of which history must be made. Here are "pen-photographs" of a man's inner life, and the inner life of an eventful time. Mr. Allan Grant has made his selections with commendable taste, but has strung them on a somewhat obtrusive thread of his own twisting. Of the external appearance of the book we can say no good. It is a pity that so pure a gem should have so mean a setting.

W. V. SPENCER, of Boston, has republished a pamphlet lately issued in London, entitled The Social and Political Dependence of Women, which contains some trenchant and pithy arguments on a question daily growing

in importance--the relative rights and privileges of the sexes. The author, whose name is not given, takes strong ground in form of the "enfranchisement" of women, and supports his position with a clearness of reasoning worthy of John Stuart Mill, and a caustic analysis of the arguments of the opponents of the enfranchisement, that reminds one forcibly of his wife. The following quotation from Mrs. Mills's famous essay, is given as an excellent expression of a truth that will sooner or later be accepted as an axiom :-" We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or any individual for another individual, what is, and what is not their proper sphere. The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest to which they are able to attain. What this is cannot be ascertained without complete liberty of choice."

International Copyright.-The proceedings of the Meeting of Authors and Publishers to organize an International Copyright Association, have been published in a neat pamphlet, and may be found at the office of the chairman, No. 661 Broadway. Every candid and conscientious reader of this Record will find therein arguments and illustrations drawn from a sense of justice on the one hand and intelligent self-interest on the other, which cannot fail to convince him that a great legislative duty to the intellectual benefactors of the age, demands instant recognition and liberal performance from our country, whose government is avowedly based on equal rights. When such an American author as William Cullen Bryant leads off in the protest and the plea, when such patriotic and accomplished citizens of foreign birth as Dr. Lieber and Dr. Schaff echo and respond to the argument, and a publisher of the large experience and liberal integrity of James T. Fields joins in the demonstration,-there must be substantial reason and adequate cause for the important movement which this interesting and seasonable brochure signalizes. It contains the circular of the committee that called the meeting in March, 1868, a list of the officers of the Association, letters from Dr. Gross, Professor Agassiz, Dr. Palfrey, Dr. Holland, Simms, and others; the speeches of Bryant, Prime, Osgood and Schaff; Dr. Prime's Essay on the Right of Copyright, Lord Mansfield's opinion, R. G. White's statement of the question, and the constitution and list of members of the International Copyright Association.

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