ounce all idea of an Italian mission in the
world.

JOSEPH MAZZINI.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: This sacred word, which sums up the dogma of the future,
has been uttered by every school, but misunderstood by the majority.
Materialists have usurped the use of it, to express man's
ever-increasing power over the productive forces of the earth; and men
of science, to indicate that accumulation of _facts_ discovered and
submitted to analysis which has led us to a better knowledge of
secondary causes. Few understand it as the expression of a providential
conception or design, inseparable from our human life and foundation of
our moral law.]

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty._ By J. W. DE
FORREST. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The light, strong way in which our author goes forward in this story
from the first, and does not leave difficulty to his readers, is
pleasing to those accustomed to find an American novel a good deal like
the now extinct American stage-coach whose passengers not only walked
over bad pieces of road, but carried fence-rails on their shoulders to
pry the vehicle out of the sloughs and miry places. It was partly the
fault of the imperfect roads, no doubt, and it may be that our social
ways have only just now settled into such a state as makes smooth going
for the novelist; nevertheless, the old stage-coach was hard to travel
in, and what with drafts upon one's good nature for assistance, it must
be confessed that our novelists have been rather trying to their
readers. It is well enough with us all while the road is good,--a study
of individual character, a bit of landscape, a stretch of well-worn
plot, gentle slopes of incident; but somewhere on the way the passengers
are pretty sure to be asked to step out,--the ladies to walk on ahead,
and the gentlemen to fetch fence-rails.

Our author imagines a Southern loyalist and his daughter sojourning in
New Boston, Barataria, during the first months of the war. Dr. Ravenel
has escaped from New Orleans just before the Rebellion began, and has
brought away with him the most sarcastic and humorous contempt and
abhorrence of his late fellow-citizens, while his daughter, an ardent
and charming little blonde Rebel, remembers Louisiana with longing and
blind admiration. The Doctor, born in South Carolina, and living all his
days among slaveholders and slavery, has not learned to lo