Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 79, No. 485, March, 1856 by Various
"Blackwood''s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 79, No. 485, March, 1856" by Various is a literary periodical written in the mid-19th century. It gathers wide-ranging essays that review new books, probe classical and modern history, discuss church and state questions, and comment on current affairs. The tone blends scholarship with opinion, moving from rigorous criticism to vivid biographical and social sketches. The opening of the issue devotes a substantial essay to Dr. Liddell’s History
of Rome, contrasting the blood-soaked boasts of ancient conquerors with Rome’s distinctive role in shaping European civilisation. It surveys the shift in Roman studies from heroic narratives to critical debates over myth, tradition, and constitutional reconstruction, weighing Niebuhr’s bold hypotheses against Sir George Cornewall Lewis’s scepticism, and illustrating the value and limits of legend through stories like Coriolanus, Decius, and the Gallic sack. The reviewer praises Liddell’s book as a useful, clear compendium for general readers, then sketches Rome’s republican machinery—short annual magistracies, citizen legions, and above all the Senate’s enduring power—before charting emerging moral decay, the harsh provincial tax-farming of the Publicani, Cato the Censor’s stern crusades, and the corrosive effects of slavery. A second piece turns to Amans Alexis Monteil, recounting his obscure provincial roots, his family’s ordeals in the Revolution, the saintly influence of his mother, the checkered fates of his brothers, and his own dogged archival hunts that fed a pioneering social history of ordinary French lives. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Richard Tonsing, Jonathan Ingram, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
