could thus be fired with nearly the same precision at midnight and noonday. This would render nightwork in the trenches nearly as hopeless as daywork has now become under the action of modern arms and shells. Fleets would thus be shorn of every inducement to run by forts during darkness.

We cannot more appropriately conclude this Article, than by briefly presenting some items of military progress during the short interval since the first week in August." The question of Whitworth's gun has been decided by the Select Commission on Ordnance, adversely to its claims, because of its unfitness for service and its inferior accuracy. Armstrong's gun is being very actively manufactured and introduced into the British service, and his one hundred pounder has been tested with such reputed success as to have been adopted. The trial of Captain Rodman's fifteen inch gun, weighing forty-nine thousand and ninety-nine pounds, and mounted on a wrought-iron carriage, constructed by Captain Dyer, is now progressing at Fort Monroe, Old Point Comfort, Va. A very coarse grained powder is being used to save the gun from the usual severe strain while the ball is starting from its bed.

The movement for the defense of Great Britain, has gone forward with rapid strides. The recommendations of the Special Commission were ably advocated before the Commons by Lord Palmerston, in his speech of July 24th, and a bill appropriating for the current year, the sum of $10,000,000, "for the defense of the royal dock-yards and arsenals, and for the forts of Dover and Portland," proceeded rapidly and with overwhelming majorities through all its parliamentary stages. The Premier cited as precedents for this expenditure, the appropriation by France in 1841, of £13,000,000 for fortifications; £5,000,000 expended for the defenses of Paris; £8,000,000 on works at Cherbourg; £4,000,000 at Toulon; £3,000,000 at Coblentz and Rastadt, and 7,000,000 francs at Alessandria. This act of appropriation is a substantial adoption of the policy of sea-coast defense, as defined by the Commission for the dock-yards, and leaves but little doubt that after completing the works thus inaugurated, England will attend to the special defense of London and of the various re

maining harbors along her coast, useful to an enemy for landing men and materiel. The Commission refers to both of these cases as being excluded from their special consideration, and they are thus merely kept in waiting till the more urgent demands of the dock-yards and arsenals can be met. We ought to see in this fresh history a new and strong stimulus to hasten on this same defensive policy along our own immense and exposed ocean frontier. It is a powerful substantiation of the soundness of the principles on which our defensive system rests. It is, too, an admonition that our exposures to attack are genuine, and that the results would be most formidable should we be assailed while our panoply is incomplete.

ARTICLE V.-DR. ALEXANDER'S LETTERS.*

Forty Years Familiar Letters of James W. Alexander, D. D. Constituting, with the Notes, a Memoir of his Life. Edited

by the surviving correspondent, JOHN HALL, D. D. volumes. New York: Charles Scribner. 1860.

In two

IN one of the earlier letters of this correspondence, Dr. Alexander says:

"A letter, as the thought just now strikes me, should be as nearly as possible the transcript of one's common talk; or perhaps a better description of a good, that is an acceptable letter, would be, that it is a soliloquy in black and white, penned with the freedom of a private meditation, yet written for the eye of another, with whom the disclosures it contains are just as safe as in their native bosom."

This passage furnishes a key to the seemingly hasty and varied style of these letters, their abrupt transitions from one subject to another, and the freedom of their criticisms upon men and things. But it also contains a reproof to the friend who would lay before the public thoughts and feelings which were poured into the bosom of friendship with unreserved confidence. To whom can we give our confidence, if not to our friends?—and to what friend can we give it unreserv edly, if, the moment the grave hides us from view, it is to be blazoned forth to the world? No amount of public interest felt even in the smallest sayings of a good or great man, should justify his friends in revealing what, from close association with him, it was their privilege to know of his inner man. The sanctuaries of friendship must either be religiously guarded from the scrutiny of those who do not stand within the portals, or they must be torn down at once and be forever demolished.

* In the last number of the New Englander we briefly expressed our views of Dr. Alexander's Letters: but the present Article, not written from a theological point of view, but coming from the pen of a lady who was a parishioner and friend of this honored divine, will serve as a complement of our criticism.— ED. NEW ENGLANDER.

Yet the character of Dr. Alexander shines forth from these letters as a Christian divine, a laborious and faithful pastor, a man of generous and discriminating mind, and an enlightened scholar. To the people of his charge they are full of interest, as they behold the pastor whom they loved, in every line. To those who were not privileged to come within the direct sphere of his influence, they are interesting, as, since his death, his fame has been in all the churches.

That ardent and intense love of souls, which was manifest in his preaching, seems to have thoroughly possessed him at an early age. He entered upon the work of his life with a joy and whole-heartedness which were not disturbed by the periods of profound melancholy to which he was always more or less subject. He describes these moments in an early letter:

"Forebodings of future pain or misery are not often the subject of my thoughts, but there comes over my soul, I can no otherwise describe it, a cloud, a blackness, a horror, which tinges every object without or within, with a certain indefinable, vague, and terrific darkness; which absorbs the powers of the soul, and seems to concentrate all the faculties upon some hideous something, or nothing, and waste the mental energy in empty musing." Vol. I, p. 44.

Elsewhere he says:

"I find religion and religious thoughts, not the causes or the concomitants of melancholy, but its surest remedy."

God undoubtedly suffered him to walk in these gloomy paths that he might be able to lead away others whose feet were in danger of going astray there.

His humility was great. No man was ever more conscious of his own imperfections, or consequently more charitable towards the imperfections of others. Even when he was the idol of a large congregation in the Fifth Avenue, the love and reliance which his people felt towards him seemed only to make him more conscious of his awful responsibility towards them. He says:

"Some of the things which, I dare say, people think tend to elate me, have a quite contrary effect; especially the worldly increase of my cure. Seldom, if ever, have I had any private exercise more solemn, than in the whole progress of this matter."

He was eminently a Bible student in order to be a Bible teacher. His favorite method of studying the Bible he gives in these letters:

"I have just been reading over, at one sitting, the Epistle to the Colossians. I have done so many times within a month, both in Greek and in all the translations I have, which are more than ten. This way of frequent re-perusal, continuously, I learned of my father, many years ago. It is well to intermix it with critical study of the same portion. I like to confine myself to one book at a time, and, as it were, live in it, till I feel very familiar. I usually find great satisfaction during such a period, in preaching from such a book thus studied."

He was strongly in favor of much Bible study among the young. To his correspondent, then editor of the Sabbath School Journal, he writes, in 1834:

"Let me beg you to take it as a prominent, perpetual object of selections, &c., for your Journal, to hold up the great truth, that the Bible is the book to educate the age. Why not have it the chief thing in the family, in the school, in the academy, in the university? The day is coming; and if you and I can introduce the minutest corner of this wedge, we shall be benefactors of the race. I can amuse a child about the Bible; I can teach logic, rhetoric, ethics, and salvation, from the Bible. May we not have a Bible School?" Again-"I am filled with enthusiasm about having the Bible more taught. Instead of a mere reading book in schools, it must be taught after the Sabbath School fashion; geography, archæology, and all. All our girls must read the Greek Testament. I mean to teach a few on the plan of Locke. By an interlinear version any merchant's clerk may learn Hebrew." Again-" I am a little wild on the subject of making the Bible the grand organ of mental and spiritual development. Suppose one knows the Bible, and from it as a center radiates into the thousand subsidiary knowledges, will he not know all he needs?"

He was also much interested in the work of Missions, and, indeed, his fertile mind was continually employed in seeking different ways to advance Christ's kingdom among all classes and ages of men. All the channels through which religious literature flowed in upon the public, were swollen by his

pen:

"I endeavor to have as many plans as I can, thereby I find work for all moods of mind."

He wrote much for children, impelled to that work by an extraordinary fondness for them, which was one of the most