One of the most amusing passages in Meshach's autobiography is that in which he relates his military experience as captain of a company of militia. The company appear to have gone into action only once, and that was on occasion of a muster when they undertook to _lick_ their commander, with whom, for some reason or other, they were discontented. As well as we can make out, the result seems to have been, that the captain licked _them_; though our Caesar's Commentaries are naturally so confused on this topic, that we almost feel, after reading them, as if we had been through the fight ourselves.
The book should have been shorter by at least two-thirds,--for one bear-story is just like another, and Meshach's style of narrative is one that cannot bear the prosperity of print. However, we find much that is interesting in the volume, as in all records of real experience.
Mr. Milburn's account of himself we have also found very entertaining. In some respects it belongs on the same shelf with Meshach Browning's; for we think the best chapters in it are those which bring us into contact with Cartwright and other Methodist ministers, the frontiersmen and bushfighters of the Church, who do not bandy subtilties with Mephistopheles, nor consider that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, but go in for a rough-and-tumble fight with Satan and his imps, as with so many red _Injuns_ undeserving of the rights and incapable of the amenities of civilized warfare. We confess a thorough liking for these Leatherstockings of the clergy, true apostolic successors of the heavy-handed fisherman, Peter. Their rough-and-ready gospel is just the thing for men who feel as if they could not get religion, unless from a preacher who can "whip" them as well as thunder doctrine at their ears.
We prefer those parts of Mr. Milburn's book in which he tells us what he saw (if we may say it of a blind man) to those in which he undertakes to tell us what he was. The history of the growth of his mind is not of vital importance to us, and we should be quite willing to have "returned unexperienced to our graves," like Grumio's fellow-servants. We think there is getting to be altogether too much unreserve in the world. We doubt if any man have the right to take mankind by the button and tell all about himself, unless, like Dante, he can symbolize his experience. Even Goethe we only half thank, especially when he kisses and tells, and prefer Shakspeare's indifference to the intimacy of the German. Silence about one's self is the most golden of all, as men commonly discover after babbling. Mr. Milburn, in one of his chapters, gives an account of his passage through what he is pleased to call _neology_ and _rationalism_. He represents himself as having sounded the depths of German metaphysics, criticism, and aesthetics. But a man who is able to write a sentence in which Lessing's Works are spoken of as if the reading of them tended to make men "transcendentalists of the supra-nebulous order" no more deserves a scourging by angels for his devotion to German literature than Saint Jerome did for being a Ciceronian. No truly thorough course of study ever weakened or unsteadied any man's mind, for it is the surest way to make him think less of himself,--and we cannot help believing that the disease Mr. Milburn went through was nothing more nor less than _sentimentalism_, a complaint as common to a certain period of life as measles. But while we think him mistaken in his diagnosis, we cannot but commend the good sense and manliness of his course of treatment.