It seems to us that this rapid survey of the immense subject treated by Mr. Lea is calculated to confirm rather than to enfeeble an unprejudiced reader's sense of the marvellous achievements of the Church. The enumeration, made in the volume before us, of its enactments with regard to celibacy and chastity, constitutes a chapter in its internal history. This is, to our perception, the worst that can be said of them and of the state of things which they reveal. If the Catholic Church is to be pronounced an institution of the past, a mockery, a delusion, and a snare, it is not on these grounds alone, or on any exclusive grounds, but from a broadly comprehensive point of view. Every human institution has a private history which is very different from its public one. In some respects the former is the more, in others the less, admirable of the two. In the present case, the element in the picture which appeals to our admiration is the heroic patience and perseverance, the fortitude, the tact, and the courage with which the Church applied herself to the healing of her internal wounds when they were curable, and to the enduring of them when they were not, in order that, at any cost, she might produce upon the world the impression of unity, sanity, and strength. _Ten Months in Brazil; with Incidents of Voyages and Travels, Descriptions of Scenery and Character, Notices of Commerce and Productions, etc._ By JOHN CODMAN. Boston: Lee and Shepard. The title of this book leaves its reviewer little to say in explanation of its purposes. It is a lively enough book, and a book well enough written, with a good deal of dash and piquancy in the style; and yet, like the blameless dinner to which Doctor Johnson objected that it was not a dinner to ask a man to, it is not a book to advise one to read. It does not appear to us, after reading it, that we are wiser concerning Brazil than before; even the facts in it we greeted, in many cases, with the warmth due to old statistical acquaintances. The philosophy of the author seems to be that the Brazilians are a bad set, and that they have become so mainly by mingling their blood with that of their negroes,--a race never so useful and happy as when in the discipline of slavery. Mr. Codman contrasts their hopeless state on the lands of a good-hearted Scotchman in Brazil, who intends to let them earn their freedom by working for him, with their condition on the neighboring estate of a sharp, slave-driving Yankee, who acquiesces unmurmuringly in the purposes of Providence; "his theory being, that, as labor is their condition, the greatest amount of work compatible with their health and fair endurance is to be got from them. With this end in view, there is a judicious distribution of rewards and punishments." Mr. Codman finds the charm of novelty in these just and simple ideas, but we think we have in past years met with the same ingenious reasoning in Southern speeches