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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 120,
+October, 1867., by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 120, October, 1867.
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2011 [EBook #38270]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, OCTOBER 1867 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jana Srna, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._
+
+VOL. XX.--OCTOBER, 1867.--NO. CXX.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by TICKNOR AND
+FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+
+
+
+THE GUARDIAN ANGEL.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+MINE AND COUNTERMINE.
+
+What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect on
+the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody especially
+interested knew but himself. We may conjecture that it announced some fact,
+which had leaked out a little prematurely, relating to the issue of the
+great land-case in which the firm was interested. However that might be,
+Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard that Myrtle had suddenly left the city for
+Oxbow Village,--for what reason he puzzled himself to guess,--than he
+determined to follow her at once, and take up the conversation he had begun
+at the party where it left off. And as the young poet had received his
+quietus for the present at the publisher's, and as Master Gridley had
+nothing specially to detain him, they too returned at about the same time,
+and our old acquaintances were once more together within the familiar
+precincts where we have been accustomed to see them.
+
+Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
+remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of the
+detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the habit of
+keeping an eye on mischievous students. If any underhand contrivance was at
+work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he was interested, he was a
+dangerous person for the plotters, for he had plenty of time to attend to
+them, and would be apt to take a kind of pleasure in matching his wits
+against another crafty person's,--such a one, for instance, as Mr.
+Macchiavelli Bradshaw.
+
+Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the party;
+at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner. When he found that
+the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he suspected
+something more than a coincidence. When he learned that he was assiduously
+visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close communication with Miss
+Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was pressing the siege of Myrtle's
+heart. But that there was some difficulty in the way was equally clear to
+him, for he ascertained, through channels which the attentive reader will
+soon have means of conjecturing, that Myrtle had seen him but once in the
+week following his return, and that in the presence of her dragons. She had
+various excuses when he called,--headaches, perhaps, among the rest, as
+these are staple articles on such occasions. But Master Gridley knew his
+man too well to think that slight obstacles would prevent his going forward
+to effect his purpose.
+
+"I think he will get her, if he holds on," the old man said to himself,
+"and he won't let go in a hurry. If there were any real love about it--but
+surely he is incapable of such a human weakness as the tender passion. What
+does all this sudden concentration upon the girl mean? He knows something
+about her that we don't know,--that must be it. What did he hide that paper
+for a year ago and more? Could that have anything to do with his pursuit of
+Myrtle Hazard to-day?"
+
+Master Gridley paused as he asked this question of himself, for a luminous
+idea had struck him. Consulting daily with Cynthia Badlam, was he? Could
+there be a conspiracy between these two persons to conceal some important
+fact, or to keep something back until it would be for their common interest
+to have it made known?
+
+Now Mistress Kitty Fagan was devoted, heart and soul, to Myrtle Hazard, and
+ever since she had received the young girl from Mr. Gridley's hands, when
+he brought her back safe and sound after her memorable adventure, had
+considered him as Myrtle's best friend and natural protector. These simple
+creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated people,
+with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the
+live facts which are going on about them. Mr. Gridley had met her, more or
+less accidentally, several times of late, and inquired very particularly
+about Myrtle, and how she got along at the house since her return, and
+whether she was getting over her headaches, and how they treated her in the
+family.
+
+"Bliss your heart, Mr. Gridley," Kitty said to him, on one of these
+occasions, "it 's ahltogither changed intirely. Sure Miss Myrtle does jist
+iverythin' she likes, an' Miss Withers niver middles with her at ahl,
+excip' jist to roll up her eyes an' look as if she was the hid-moorner at a
+funeril whiniver Miss Myrtle says she wants to do this or that, or to go
+here or there. It's Miss Badlam that 's ahlwiz after her, an' a-watchin'
+her,--she thinks she 's cunnin'er than a cat, but there 's other folks that
+'s got eyes an' ears as good as hers. It's that Mr. Bridshaw that's a
+puttin' his head together with Miss Badlam for somethin' or other, an' I
+don't believe there 's no good in it,--for what does the fox an' the cat be
+a whisperin' about, as if they was thaves an' incind'ries, if there ain't
+no mischief hatchin'?"
+
+"Why, Kitty," he said, "what mischief do you think is going on, and who is
+to be harmed?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley," she answered, "if there ain't somebody to be chated
+somehow, then I don' know an honest man and woman from two rogues. An' have
+n't I heard Miss Myrtle's name whispered as if there was somethin' goin' on
+agin' her, an' they was afraid the tahk would go out through the doors, an'
+up through the chimbley? I don't want to tell no tales, Mr. Gridley, nor to
+hurt no honest body, for I 'm a poor woman, Mr. Gridley; but I comes of
+dacent folks, an' I vallies my repitation an' character as much as if I was
+dressed in silks and satins instead of this mane old gown, savin' your
+presence, which is the best I 've got, an' niver a dollar to buy another.
+But if iver I hears a word, Mr. Gridley, that manes any kind of a mischief
+to Miss Myrtle,--the Lard bliss her soul an' keep ahl the divils away from
+her!--I 'll be runnin' straight down here to tell ye ahl about it,--be
+right sure o' that, Mr. Gridley."
+
+"Nothing must happen to Myrtle," he said, "that we can help. If you see
+anything more that looks wrong, you had better come down here at once, and
+let me know, as you say you will. _At once_, you understand. And, Kitty, I
+am a little particular about the dress of people who come to see me, so
+that if you would just take the trouble to get you a tidy pattern of
+gingham or calico, or whatever you like of that sort for a gown, you would
+please me; and perhaps this little trifle will be a convenience to you when
+you come to pay for it."
+
+Kitty thanked him with all the national accompaniments, and trotted off to
+the store, where Mr. Gifted Hopkins displayed the native amiability of his
+temper by tumbling down everything in the shape of ginghams and calicos
+they had on the shelves, without a murmur at the taste of his customer, who
+found it hard to get a pattern sufficiently emphatic for her taste. She
+succeeded at last, and laid down a five-dollar bill as if she were as used
+to the pleasing figure on its face as to the sight of her own five digits.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had struck a spade deeper than he knew into his first
+countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples about the means
+of obtaining information which might have embarrassed a diplomatist of
+higher degree.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM.
+
+"Is Miss Hazard in, Kitty?"
+
+"Indade she 's in, Mr. Bridshaw, but she won't see nobody."
+
+"What 's the meaning of that, Kitty? Here is the third time within three
+days you 've told me I could n't see her. She saw Mr. Gridley yesterday, I
+know; why won't she see me to-day?"
+
+"Y' must ask Miss Myrtle what the rason is,--it 's none o' my business, Mr.
+Bridshaw. That 's the order she give me."
+
+"Is Miss Badlam in?"
+
+"Indade she 's in, Mr. Bridshaw, an' I 'll go cahl her."
+
+"Bedad," said Kitty Fagan to herself, "the cat an' the fox is goin' to
+have another o' thim big tahks togither, an' sure the old hole for the
+stove-pipe has niver been stopped up yet."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Cynthia went into the parlor together, and Mistress
+Kitty retired to her kitchen. There was a deep closet belonging to this
+apartment, separated by a partition from the parlor. There was a round hole
+high up in this partition through which a stove-pipe had once passed.
+Mistress Kitty placed a stool just under this opening, upon which, as on a
+pedestal, she posed herself with great precaution in the attitude of the
+goddess of other people's secrets, that is to say, with her head a little
+on one side, so as to bring her liveliest ear close to the opening. The
+conversation which took place in the hearing of the invisible third party
+began in a singularly free-and-easy manner on Mr. Bradshaw's part.
+
+"What the d is the reason I can't see Myrtle, Cynthia?"
+
+"That's more than I can tell you, Mr. Bradshaw. I can watch her goings on,
+but I can't account for her tantrums."
+
+"You say she has had some of her old nervous whims,--has the doctor been to
+see her?"
+
+"No indeed. She has kept to herself a good deal, but I don't think there's
+anything in particular the matter with her. She looks well enough, only she
+seems a little queer,--as girls do that have taken a fancy into their heads
+that they 're in love, you know,--absent-minded,--does n't seem to be
+interested in things as you would expect after being away so long."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked as if this did not please him particularly. If he was
+the object of her thoughts she would not avoid him, surely.
+
+"Have you kept your eye on her steadily?"
+
+"I don't believe there is an hour we can't account for,--Kitty and I
+between us."
+
+"Are you sure you can depend on Kitty?"
+
+["Depind on Kitty, is it? O, an' to be sure ye can depind on Kitty to kape
+watch at the stove-pipe hole, an' to tell all y'r plottin's an' contrivin's
+to them that 'll get the cheese out o' y'r mousetrap for ye before ye catch
+any poor cratur in it." This was the inaudible comment of the unseen third
+party.]
+
+"Of course I can depend on her as far as I trust her. All she knows is that
+she must look out for the girl to see that she does not run away or do
+herself a mischief. The Biddies don't know much, but they know enough to
+keep a watch on the--"
+
+"Chickens." Mr. Bradshaw playfully finished the sentence for Miss Cynthia.
+
+["An' on the foxes, an' the cats, an' the wazels, and the hen-hahks, an'
+ahl the other bastes," added the invisible witness, in unheard soliloquy.]
+
+"I ain't sure whether she's quite as stupid as she looks," said the
+suspicious young lawyer. "There's a little cunning twinkle in her eye
+sometimes that makes me think she might be up to a trick on occasion. Does
+she ever listen about to hear what people are saying?"
+
+"Don't trouble yourself about Kitty Fagan, for pity's sake, Mr. Bradshaw.
+The Biddies are all alike, and they 're all as stupid as owls, except when
+you tell 'em just what to do, and how to do it. A pack of priest-ridden
+fools!"
+
+The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap. The stout muscles
+gave an involuntary jerk. The substantial frame felt the thrill all
+through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing creaked sharply
+under its burden.
+
+Murray Bradshaw started. He got up and opened softly all the doors leading
+from the room, one after another, and looked out.
+
+"I thought I heard a noise as if somebody was moving, Cynthia. It's just as
+well to keep our own matters to ourselves."
+
+"If you wait till this old house keeps still, Mr. Bradshaw, you might as
+well wait till the river has run by. It's as full of rats and mice as an
+old cheese is of mites. There's a hundred old rats in this house, and
+that's what you hear."
+
+["An' one old cat; that's what _I_ hear." Third party.]
+
+"I told you, Cynthia, I must be off on this business to-morrow. I want to
+know that everything is safe before I go. And, besides, I have got
+something to say to you that's important,--very important, mind you."
+
+He got up once more and opened every door softly and looked out. He fixed
+his eye suspiciously on a large sofa at the other side of the room, and
+went, looking half ashamed of his extreme precaution, and peeped under it,
+to see if there was any one hidden there to listen. Then he came back and
+drew his chair close up to the table at which Miss Badlam had seated
+herself. The conversation which followed was in a low tone, and a portion
+of it must be given in another place in the words of the third party. The
+beginning of it we are able to supply in this connection.
+
+"Look here, Cynthia; you know what I am going for. It's all right, I feel
+sure, for I have had private means of finding out. It's a sure thing; but I
+must go once more to see that the other fellows don't try any trick on us.
+You understand what is for my advantage is for yours, and, if I go wrong,
+you go overboard with me. Now I must leave the--you know--behind me. I
+can't leave it in the house or the office: they might burn up. I won't have
+it about me when I am travelling. Draw your chair a little more this way.
+Now listen."
+
+["Indade I will," said the third party to herself. The reader will find out
+in due time whether she listened to any purpose or not.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the mean time Myrtle, who for some reason was rather nervous and
+restless, had found a pair of half-finished slippers which she had left
+behind her. The color came into her cheeks when she remembered the state of
+mind she was in when she was working on them for the Rev. Mr. Stoker. She
+recollected Master Gridley's mistake about their destination, and
+determined to follow the hint he had given. It would please him better if
+she sent them to good Father Pemberton, she felt sure, than if he should
+get them himself. So she enlarged them somewhat, (for the old man did not
+pinch his feet, as the younger clergyman was in the habit of doing, and
+was, besides, of portly dimensions, as the old orthodox three-deckers were
+apt to be,) and worked E. P. very handsomely into the pattern, and sent
+them to him with her love and respect, to his great delight; for old
+ministers do not have quite so many tokens of affection from fair hands as
+younger ones.
+
+What made Myrtle nervous and restless? Why had she quitted the city so
+abruptly, and fled to her old home, leaving all the gayeties behind her
+which had so attracted and dazzled her?
+
+She had not betrayed herself at the third meeting with the young man who
+stood in such an extraordinary relation to her,--who had actually given her
+life from his own breath,--as when she met him for the second time. Whether
+his introduction to her at the party, just at the instant when Murray
+Bradshaw was about to make a declaration, saved her from being in another
+moment the promised bride of that young gentleman, or not, we will not be
+so rash as to say. It looked, certainly, as if he was in a fair way to
+carry his point; but perhaps she would have hesitated, or shrunk back, when
+the great question came to stare her in the face.
+
+She was excited, at any rate, by the conversation, so that, when Clement
+was presented to her, her thoughts could not at once be all called away
+from her other admirer, and she was saved from all danger of that sudden
+disturbance which had followed their second meeting. Whatever impression he
+made upon her developed itself gradually,--still, she felt strangely drawn
+towards him. It was not simply in his good looks, in his good manners, in
+his conversation, that she found this attraction, but there was a singular
+fascination which she felt might be dangerous to her peace, without
+explaining it to herself in words. She could hardly be in love with this
+young artist; she knew that his affections were plighted to another,--a
+fact which keeps most young women from indulging unruly fancies; yet her
+mind was possessed by his image to such an extent that it left little room
+for that of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had been just ready to enter on a career of worldly vanity
+and ambition. It is hard to blame her, for we know how she came by the
+tendency. She had every quality, too, which fitted her to shine in the gay
+world; and the general law is, that those who have the power have the
+instinct to use it. We do not suppose that the bracelet on her arm was an
+amulet, but it was a symbol. It reminded her of her descent; it kept alive
+the desire to live over the joys and excitements of a bygone generation. If
+she had accepted Murray Bradshaw, she would have pledged herself to a
+worldly life. If she had refused him, it would perhaps have given her a
+taste of power that might have turned her into a coquette. This new
+impression saved her for the time. She had come back to her nest in the
+village like a frightened bird; her heart was throbbing, her nerves were
+thrilling, her dreams were agitated; she wanted to be quiet, and could not
+listen to the flatteries or entreaties of her old lover.
+
+It was a strong will and a subtle intellect that had arrayed their force
+and skill against the ill-defended citadel of Myrtle's heart. Murray
+Bradshaw was perfectly determined, and not to be kept back by any trivial
+hindrances, such as her present unwillingness to accept him, or even her
+repugnance to him, if a freak of the moment had carried her so far. It was
+a settled thing: Myrtle Hazard must become Mrs. Bradshaw; and nobody could
+deny that, if he gave her his name, they had a chance, at least, for a
+brilliant future.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY.
+
+"I'd like to go down to the store this marnin', Miss Withers, plase. Sure I
+'ve niver a shoe to my fut, only jist these two that I 've got on, an' one
+other pair, and thim is so full of holes that whin I 'm standin' in 'em I
+'m outside of 'em intirely."
+
+"You can go, Kitty," Miss Silence answered, funereally.
+
+Thereupon Kitty Fagan proceeded to array herself in her most tidy apparel,
+including a pair of shoes not exactly answering to her description, and set
+out straight for the house of the Widow Hopkins. Arrived at that
+respectable mansion, she inquired for Mr. Gridley, and was informed that he
+was at home. Had a message for him,--could she see him in his study? She
+could if she would wait a little while. Mr. Gridley was busy just at this
+minute. Sit down, Kitty, and warm yourself at the cooking-stove.
+
+Mistress Kitty accepted Mrs. Hopkins's hospitable offer, and presently
+began orienting herself, and getting ready to make herself agreeable. The
+kind-hearted Mrs. Hopkins had gathered about her several other pensioners
+besides the twins. These two little people, it may be here mentioned, were
+just taking a morning airing in charge of Susan Posey, who strolled along
+in company with Gifted Hopkins on his way to "the store."
+
+Mistress Kitty soon began the conversational blandishments so natural to
+her good-humored race. "It's a little blarney that 'll jist suit th' old
+lady," she said to herself, as she made her first conciliatory advance.
+
+"An' sure an' its a beautiful kitten you 've got there, Mrs. Hopkins. An'
+it's a splindid mouser she is, I 'll be bound. Does n't she look as if she
+'d clane the house out o' them little bastes,--bad luck to 'em!"
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked benignantly upon the more than middle-aged tabby,
+slumbering as if she had never known an enemy, and turned smiling to
+Mistress Kitty. "Why, bless your heart, Kitty, our old puss would n't know
+a mouse by sight, if you showed her one. If I was a mouse, I 'd as lieves
+have a nest in one of that old cat's ears as anywhere else. You could n't
+find a safer place for one."
+
+"Indade, an' to be sure she 's too big an' too handsome a pussy to be after
+wastin' her time on them little bastes. It 's that little tarrier dog of
+yours, Mrs. Hopkins, that will be after worryin' the mice an' the rats, an'
+the thaves too, I 'll warrant. Is n't he a fust-rate-lookin' watch-dog, an'
+a rig'lar rat-hound?"
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked at the little short-legged and short-winded animal of
+miscellaneous extraction with an expression of contempt and affection,
+mingled about half and half. "_Worry_ 'em! If they wanted to _sleep_, I
+rather guess he would worry 'em! If barkin' would do their job for 'em,
+nary a mouse nor rat would board free gratis in my house as they do now.
+Noisy little good-for-nothing tike,--ain't you, Fret?"
+
+Mistress Kitty was put back a little by two such signal failures. There was
+another chance, however, to make her point, which she presently availed
+herself of,--feeling pretty sure this time that she should effect a
+lodgement. Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing Kitty, first with one
+eye and then with the other, evidently preparing to make a remark, but
+awkward with a stranger. "That's a beautiful par't y've got there," Kitty
+said, buoyant with the certainty that she was on safe ground this time;
+"and tahks like a book, I 'll be bound. Poll! Poll! Poor Poll!"
+
+She put forth her hand to caress the intelligent and affable bird, which,
+instead of responding as expected, "squawked," as our phonetic language has
+it, and, opening a beak imitated from a tooth-drawing instrument of the
+good old days, made a shrewd nip at Kitty's forefinger. She drew it back
+with a jerk.
+
+"An' is that the way your par't tahks, Mrs. Hopkins?"
+
+"Talks, bless you, Kitty! why, that parrot has n't said a word this ten
+year. He used to say Poor Poll! when we first had him, but he found it was
+easier to squawk, and that 's all he ever does now-a-days,--except bite
+once in a while."
+
+"Well, an' to be sure," Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her
+defeats, "if you 'll kape a cat that does n't know a mouse when she sees
+it, an' a dog that only barks for his livin', and a par't that only squawks
+an' bites an' niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-hearted woman that
+'s alive, an' bliss ye, if ye was only a good Catholic, the Holy Father 'd
+make a saint of ye in less than no time."
+
+So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite of her
+three successive discomfitures.
+
+"You may come up now, Kitty," said Mr. Gridley, over the stairs. He had
+just finished and sealed a letter.
+
+"Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars? And how does our
+young lady seem to be of late?"
+
+"Whisht! whisht! your honor."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw's lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive listener.
+She opened every door in the room, "by your lave," as she said. She looked
+all over the walls to see if there was any old stove-pipe hole or other
+avenue to eye or ear. Then she went, in her excess of caution, to the
+window. She saw nothing noteworthy except Mr. Gifted Hopkins and the charge
+he convoyed, large and small, in the distance. The whole living fleet was
+stationary for the moment, he leaning on the fence with his cheek on his
+hand, in one of the attitudes of the late Lord Byron; she, very near him,
+listening, apparently, in the pose of _Mignon aspirant au ciel_, as
+rendered by Carlo Dolce Scheffer.
+
+Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr. Gridley, who
+told her to sit down, which she did, first making a catch at her apron to
+dust the chair with, and then remembering that she had left that part of
+her costume at home.--Automatic movements, curious.
+
+Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between Mr.
+Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for herself as
+the reporter of the occasion. She then repeated to him, in her own way,
+that part of the conversation which has been already laid before the
+reader. There is no need of going over the whole of this again in Kitty's
+version, but we may fit what followed into the joints of what has been
+already told.
+
+"He cahled her Cynthy, d' ye see, Mr. Gridley, an' tahked to her jist as
+asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he did. An' so,
+says he, I 'm goin' away, says he, an' I 'm goin to be gahn siveral days,
+or perhaps longer, says he, an' you 'd better kape it, says he."
+
+"Keep _what_, Kitty? What was it he wanted her to keep?" said Mr. Gridley,
+who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot, and meant to
+follow it. He was getting impatient with the "says he's" with which Kitty
+double-leaded her discourse.
+
+"An' to be sure ain't I tellin' you, Mr. Gridley, jist as fast as my breath
+will let me? An' so, says he, you 'd better kape it, says he, mixed up with
+your other paaepers, says he," (Mr. Gridley started,) "an' thin we can find
+it in the garret, says he, whinever we want it, says he. An' if it ahl goes
+right out there, says he, it won't be lahng before we shall want to find
+it, says he. And I can dipind on you, says he, for we 're both in the same
+boat, says he, an' you knows what I knows, says he, an' I knows what you
+knows, says he. And thin he taks a stack o' papers out of his pocket, an'
+he pulls out one of 'em, an' he says to her, says he, that 's the paper,
+says he, an' if you die, says he, niver lose sight of that day or night,
+says he, for its life an' dith to both of us, says he. An' then he asks her
+if she has n't got one o' them paaepers--what is 't they cahls
+'em?--divilops, or some sich kind of a name--that they wraps up their
+letters in; an' she says no, she has n't got none that 's big enough to
+hold it. So he says, give me a shate o' paaeper says he. An' thin he takes
+the paaeper that she give him, an' he folds it up like one o'
+them--divilops, if that 's the name of 'em; and then he pulls a stick o'
+salin'-wax out of his pocket, an' a stamp, an' he takes the paaeper an' puts
+it into th' other paaeper, along with the rest of the paaepers, an' thin he
+folds th' other paaeper over the paaepers, and thin he lights a candle, an'
+he milts the salin'-wax, and he sales up the paaeper that was outside th'
+other paaepers, an' he writes on the back of the paaeper, and thin he hands
+it to Miss Badlam."
+
+"Did you see the paper that he showed her before he fastened it up with the
+others, Kitty?"
+
+"I did see it, indade, Mr. Gridley, and it's the truth I 'm tellin' ye."
+
+"Did you happen to notice anything about it, Kitty."
+
+"I did, indade, Mr. Gridley. It was a longish kind of a paaeper, and there
+was some blotches of ink on the back of it,--an' they looked like a face
+without any mouth, for, says I, there 's two spots for the eyes, says I,
+and there 's a spot for the nose, says I, and there 's niver a spot for the
+mouth, says I."
+
+This was the substance of what Master Byles Gridley got out of Kitty Fagan.
+It was enough,--yes, it was too much. There was some deep-laid plot between
+Murray Bradshaw and Cynthia Badlam, involving the interests of some of the
+persons connected with the late Malachi Withers; for that the paper
+described by Kitty was the same that he had seen the young man conceal in
+the _Corpus Juris Civilis_, it was impossible to doubt. If it had been a
+single spot on the back of it, or two, he might have doubted. But three
+large spots--"blotches" she had called them, disposed thus
+...--would not have happened to be on two different papers,
+in all human probability.
+
+After grave consultation of all his mental faculties in committee of the
+whole, he arrived at the following conclusion,--that Miss Cynthia Badlam
+was the depositary of a secret involving interests which he felt it his
+business to defend, and of a document which was fraudulently withheld and
+meant to be used for some unfair purpose. And most assuredly, Master
+Gridley said to himself, he held a master-key, which, just so certainly as
+he could make up his mind to use it, would open any secret in the keeping
+of Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+
+He proceeded, therefore, without delay, to get ready for a visit to that
+lady, at The Poplars. He meant to go thoroughly armed, for he was a very
+provident old gentleman. His weapons were not exactly of the kind which a
+house-breaker would provide himself with, but of a somewhat peculiar
+nature.
+
+Weapon number one was a slip of paper with a date and a few words written
+upon it. "I think this will fetch the document," he said to himself, "if it
+comes to the worst.--Not if I can help it,--not if I can help it. But if I
+cannot get at the heart of this thing otherwise, why, I must come to this.
+Poor woman!--Poor woman!"
+
+Weapon number two was a small phial containing spirits of hartshorn, _sal
+volatile_, very strong, that would stab through the nostrils, like a
+stiletto, deep into the gray kernels that lie in the core of the brain.
+Excellent in cases of sudden syncope or fainting, such as sometimes require
+the opening of windows, the dashing on of cold water, the cutting of stays,
+perhaps, with a scene of more or less tumultuous perturbation and afflux of
+clamorous womanhood.
+
+So armed, Byles Gridley, A. M., champion of unprotected innocence, grasped
+his ivory-handled cane and sallied forth on his way to The Poplars.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM.
+
+Miss Cynthia Badlam was seated in a small parlor which she was accustomed
+to consider her own during her long residences at The Poplars. The entry
+stove warmed it but imperfectly, and she looked pinched and cold, for the
+evenings were still pretty sharp, and the old house let in the chill
+blasts, as old houses are in the habit of doing. She was sitting at her
+table with a little trunk open before her. She had taken some papers from
+it, which she was looking over, when a knock at her door announced a
+visitor, and Master Byles Gridley entered the parlor.
+
+As he came into the room, she gathered the papers together and replaced
+them in the trunk, which she locked, throwing an unfinished piece of
+needlework over it, putting the key in her pocket, and gathering herself up
+for company. Something of all this Master Gridley saw through his round
+spectacles, but seemed not to see, and took his seat like a visitor making
+a call of politeness.
+
+A visitor at such an hour, of the male sex, without special provocation,
+without social pretext, was an event in the life of the desolate spinster.
+Could it be--No, it could not--and yet--and yet! Miss Cynthia threw back
+the rather common-looking but comfortable shawl which covered her
+shoulders, and showed her quite presentable figure, arrayed with a still
+lingering thought of that remote contingency which might yet offer itself
+at some unexpected moment; she adjusted the carefully plaited cap, which
+was not yet of the _lasciate ogni speranza_ pattern, and as she obeyed
+these instincts of her sex, she smiled a welcome to the respectable,
+learned, and independent bachelor. Mr. Gridley had a frosty but kindly age
+before him, with a score or so of years to run, which it was after all not
+strange to fancy might be rendered more cheerful by the companionship of a
+well-conserved and amiably disposed woman,--if any such should happen to
+fall in his way.
+
+That smile came very near disconcerting the plot of Master Byles Gridley.
+He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as he thought,
+against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down all resistance.
+He had come armed with an instrument of torture worse than the thumb-screw,
+worse than the pulleys which attempt the miracle of adding a cubit to the
+stature, worse than the brazier of live coals brought close to the naked
+soles of the feet,--an instrument which, instead of trifling with the
+nerves, would clutch all the nerve-_centres_ and the heart itself in its
+gripe, and hold them until it got its answer, if the white lips had life
+enough left to shape one. And here was this unfortunate maiden lady smiling
+at him, setting her limited attractions in their best light, pleading with
+him in that natural language which makes any contumacious bachelor feel as
+guilty as Cain before any single woman. If Mr. Gridley had been alone, he
+would have taken a good sniff at his own bottle of _sal volatile_; for his
+kind heart sunk within him as he thought of the errand upon which he had
+come. It would not do to leave the subject of his vivisection under any
+illusion as to the nature of his designs.
+
+"Good evening, Miss Badlam," he said, "I have come to visit you on a matter
+of business."
+
+What was the internal panorama which had unrolled itself at the instant of
+his entrance, and which rolled up as suddenly at the sound of his serious
+voice and the look of his grave features? It cannot be reproduced, though
+pages were given to it; for some of the pictures were near, and some were
+distant; some were clearly seen, and some were only hinted; some were not
+recognized in the intellect at all, and yet they were implied, as it were,
+behind the others. Many times we have all found ourselves glad or sorry,
+and yet we could not tell what thought it was that reflected the sunbeam or
+cast the shadow. Look into Cynthia's suddenly exalted consciousness and see
+the picture, actual and potential, unroll itself in all its details of the
+natural, the ridiculous, the selfish, the pitiful, the human. Glimpses,
+hints, echoes, suggestions, involving tender sentiments hitherto unknown,
+we may suppose, to that unclaimed sister's breast,--pleasant excitement of
+receiving congratulations from suddenly cordial friends; the fussy delights
+of buying furniture and shopping for new dresses,--(it seemed as if she
+could hear herself saying, "_Heavy_ silks,--_best_ goods, if you
+please,")--with delectable thumping down of flat-sided pieces of calico,
+cambric, "rep," and other stuffs, and rhythmic evolution of measured yards,
+followed by sharp snip of scissors, and that cry of rending tissues dearer
+to woman's ear than any earthly sound until she hears the voice of her own
+first-born,--(much of this potentially, remember,)--thoughts of a
+comfortable settlement, an imposing social condition, a cheerful household,
+and by and by an Indian summer of serene widowhood,--all these, and
+infinite other involved possibilities had mapped themselves in one long
+swift flash before Cynthia's inward eye, and all vanished as the old man
+spoke those few words. The look on his face, and the tone of his cold
+speech, had instantly swept them all away, like a tea-set sliding in a
+single crash from a slippery tray.
+
+What could be the "business" on which he had come to her with that solemn
+face? she asked herself, as she returned his greeting and offered him a
+chair. She was conscious of a slight tremor as she put this question to her
+own intelligence.
+
+"Are we like to be alone and undisturbed?" Mr. Gridley asked. It was a
+strange question,--men do act strangely sometimes. She hardly knew whether
+to turn red or white.
+
+"Yes, there is nobody like to come in at present," she answered. She did
+not know what to make of it. What was coming next,--a declaration, or an
+accusation of murder?
+
+"My business," Mr. Gridley said, very gravely, "relates to this. I wish to
+inspect papers which I have reason to believe exist, and which have
+reference to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers. Can you help me to
+get sight of any of these papers not to be found at the Registry of Deeds
+or the Probate Office?"
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Gridley, but may I ask you what particular concern you have
+with the affairs of my relative, Cousin Malachi Withers, that's been dead
+and buried these half-dozen years?"
+
+"Perhaps it would take some time to answer that question fully, Miss
+Badlam. Some of these affairs do concern those I am interested in, if not
+myself directly."
+
+"May I ask who the person or persons may be on whose account you wish to
+look at papers belonging to my late relative, Malachi Withers?"
+
+"You can ask me almost anything, Miss Badlam, but I should really be very
+much obliged if you would answer my question first. Can you help me to get
+a sight of any papers relating to the estate of Malachi Withers, not to be
+found at the Registry of Deeds or the Probate Office,--any of which you may
+happen to have any private and particular knowledge?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gridley; but I don't understand why you come to me
+with such questions. Lawyer Penhallow is the proper person, I should think,
+to go to. He and his partner that was--Mr. Wibird, you know--settled the
+estate, and he has got the papers, I suppose, if there are any, that ain't
+to be found at the offices you mention."
+
+Mr. Gridley moved his chair a little, so as to bring Miss Badlam's face a
+little more squarely in view.
+
+"Does Mr. William Murray Bradshaw know anything about any papers, such as I
+am referring to, that may have been sent to the office?"
+
+The lady felt a little moisture stealing through all her pores, and at the
+same time a certain dryness of the vocal organs, so that her answer came in
+a slightly altered tone which neither of them could help noticing.
+
+"You had better ask Mr. William Murray Bradshaw yourself about that," she
+answered. She felt the hook now, and her spines were rising, partly with
+apprehension, partly with irritation.
+
+"Has that young gentleman ever delivered into your hands any papers
+relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your safe
+keeping?"
+
+"What do you mean by asking me these questions, Mr. Gridley? I don't choose
+to be catechised about Murray Bradshaw's business. Go to him, if you
+please, if you want to find out about it."
+
+"Excuse my persistence, Miss Badlam, but I must prevail upon you to answer
+my question. Has Mr. William Murray Bradshaw ever delivered into your hands
+any papers relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your
+safe keeping?"
+
+"Do you suppose I am going to answer such questions as you are putting me
+because you repeat them over, Mr. Gridley? Indeed I sha' n't. Ask him, if
+you please, whatever you wish to know about his doings."
+
+She drew herself up and looked savagely at him. She had talked herself into
+her courage. There was a color in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eye; she
+looked dangerous as a cobra.
+
+"Miss Cynthia Badlam," Master Gridley said, very deliberately, "I am afraid
+we do not entirely understand each other. You must answer my question
+precisely, categorically, point-blank, and on the instant. Will you do this
+at once, or will you compel me to show you the absolute necessity of your
+doing it, at the expense of pain to both of us? Six words from me will make
+you answer all my questions."
+
+"You can't say six words, nor sixty, Mr. Gridley, that will make me answer
+one question I do not choose to. I defy you!"
+
+"I will not _say_ one, Miss Cynthia Badlam. There are some things one does
+not like to speak in words. But I will show you a scrap of paper,
+containing just six words and a date,--not one more nor one less. You shall
+read them. Then I will burn the paper in the flame of your lamp. As soon
+after that as you feel ready, I will ask the same question again."
+
+Master Gridley took out from his pocket-book a scrap of paper, and handed
+it to Cynthia Badlam. Her hand shook as she received it, for she was
+frightened as well as enraged, and she saw that Mr. Gridley was in earnest
+and knew what he was doing.
+
+She read the six words, he looking at her steadily all the time, and
+watching her as if he had just given her a drop of prussic acid.
+
+No cry. No sound from her lips. She stared as if half stunned for one
+moment, then turned her head and glared at Mr. Gridley as if she would have
+murdered him if she dared. In another instant her face whitened, the scrap
+of paper fluttered to the floor, and she would have followed it but for the
+support of both Mr. Gridley's arms. He disengaged one of them presently,
+and felt in his pocket for the _sal volatile_. It served him excellently
+well, and stung her back again to her senses very quickly. All her defiant
+aspect had gone.
+
+"Look!" he said, as he lighted the scrap of paper in the flame. "You
+understand me, and you see that I must be answered the next time I ask my
+question."
+
+She opened her lips as if to speak. It was as when a bell is rung in a
+vacuum,--no words came from them,--only a faint gasping sound, an effort at
+speech. She was caught tight in the heart-screw.
+
+"Don't hurry yourself, Miss Cynthia," he said, with a certain relenting
+tenderness of manner. "Here, take another sniff of the smelling-salts. Be
+calm, be quiet,--I am well disposed towards you,--I don't like to give you
+trouble. There, now, I must have the answer to that question; but take your
+time,--take your time."
+
+"Give me some water,--some water!" she said, in a strange hoarse whisper.
+There was a pitcher of water and a tumbler on an old marble sideboard near
+by. He filled the tumbler, and Cynthia emptied it as if she had just been
+taken from the rack, and could have swallowed a bucketful.
+
+"What do you want to know?" she asked.
+
+"I wish to know all that you can tell me about a certain paper, or certain
+papers, which I have reason to believe Mr. William Murray Bradshaw
+committed to your keeping."
+
+"There is only one paper of any consequence. Do you want to make him kill
+me? or do you want to make me kill myself?"
+
+"Neither, Miss Cynthia, neither. I wish to see that paper, but not for any
+bad purpose. Don't you think, on the whole, you have pretty good reason to
+trust me? I am a very quiet man, Miss Cynthia. Don't be afraid of me; only
+do what I ask,--it will be a great deal better for you in the end."
+
+She thrust her trembling hand into her pocket, and took out the key of the
+little trunk. She drew the trunk towards her, put the key in the lock, and
+opened it. It seemed like pressing a knife into her own bosom and turning
+the blade. That little trunk held all the records of her life the forlorn
+spinster most cherished;--a few letters that came nearer to love-letters
+than any others she had ever received; an album, with flowers of the
+summers of 1840 and 1841 fading between its leaves; two papers containing
+locks of hair, half of a broken ring, and other insignificant mementos
+which had their meaning, doubtless, to her,--such a collection as is often
+priceless to one human heart, and passed by as worthless in the
+auctioneer's inventory. She took the papers out mechanically, and laid them
+on the table. Among them was an oblong packet, sealed with what appeared to
+be the office-seal of Messrs. Penhallow and Bradshaw.
+
+"Will you allow me to take that envelope containing papers, Miss Badlam?"
+Mr. Gridley asked, with a suavity and courtesy in his tone and manner that
+showed how he felt for her sex and her helpless position.
+
+She seemed to obey his will as if she had none of her own left. She passed
+the envelope to him, and stared at him vacantly while he examined it. He
+read on the back of the package: "_Withers Estate_--old papers--of no
+account apparently. Examine hereafter."
+
+"May I ask when, where, and of whom you obtained these papers, Miss
+Badlam?"
+
+"Have pity on me, Mr. Gridley,--have pity on me. I am a lost woman if you
+do not. Spare me! for God's sake, spare me! There will no wrong come of all
+this, if you will but wait a little while. The paper will come to light
+when it is wanted, and all will be right. But do not make me answer any
+more questions, and let me keep this paper. O Mr. Gridley! I am in the
+power of a dreadful man--"
+
+"You mean Mr. William Murray Bradshaw?"
+
+"I mean him."
+
+"Has there not been some understanding between you that he should become
+the approved suitor of Miss Myrtle Hazard?"
+
+Cynthia wrung her hands and rocked herself backward and forward in her
+misery, but answered not a word. What _could_ she answer, if she had
+plotted with this "dreadful man" against a young and innocent girl, to
+deliver her over into his hands, at the risk of all her earthly hopes and
+happiness?
+
+Master Gridley waited long and patiently for any answer she might have the
+force to make. As she made none, he took upon himself to settle the whole
+matter without further torture of his helpless victim.
+
+"This package must go into the hands of the parties who had the settlement
+of the estate of the late Malachi Withers. Mr. Penhallow is the survivor of
+the two gentlemen to whom that business was intrusted.--How long is Mr.
+William Murray Bradshaw like to be away?"
+
+"Perhaps a few days,--perhaps weeks,--and then he will come back and kill
+me,--or--or--worse! Don't take that paper, Mr. Gridley,--he isn't like you;
+you wouldn't--but he would--he would send me to everlasting misery to gain
+his own end, or to save himself. And yet he is n't every way bad, and if he
+did marry Myrtle she 'd think there never was such a man,--for he can talk
+her heart out of her, and the wicked in him lies very deep and won't ever
+come out, perhaps, if the world goes right with him." The last part of this
+sentence showed how Cynthia talked with her own conscience; all her mental
+and moral machinery lay open before the calm eyes of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+His thoughts wandered a moment from the business before him; he had just
+got a new study of human nature, which in spite of himself would be shaping
+itself into an axiom for an imagined new edition of "Thoughts on the
+Universe,"--something like this,--_The greatest saint may be a sinner that
+never got down to "hard pan."_--It was not the time to be framing axioms.
+
+"Poh! poh!" he said to himself; "what are you about, making phrases, when
+you have got a piece of work like this in hand?" Then to Cynthia, with
+great gentleness and kindness of manner: "Have no fear about any
+consequences to yourself. Mr. Penhallow must see that paper,--I mean those
+papers. You shall not be a loser nor a sufferer if you do your duty now in
+these premises."
+
+Master Gridley, treating her, as far as circumstances permitted, like a
+gentleman, had shown no intention of taking the papers either stealthily or
+violently. It must be with her consent. He had laid the package down upon
+the table, waiting for her to give him leave to take it. But just as he
+spoke these last words, Cynthia, whose eye had been glancing furtively at
+it while he was thinking out his axiom, and taking her bearings to it
+pretty carefully, stretched her hand out, and, seizing the package, thrust
+it into the sanctuary of her bosom.
+
+"Mr. Penhallow must see those papers, Miss Cynthia Badlam," Mr. Gridley
+repeated calmly. "If he says they or any of them can be returned to your
+keeping, well and good. But see them he must, for they have his office seal
+and belong in his custody, and, as you see by the writing on the back, they
+have not been examined. Now there may be something among them which is of
+immediate importance to the relatives of the late deceased Malachi Withers,
+and therefore they must be forthwith submitted to the inspection of the
+surviving partner of the firm of Wibird and Penhallow. This I propose to
+do, with your consent, this evening. It is now twenty-five minutes past
+eight by the true time, as my watch has it. At half past eight exactly I
+shall have the honor of bidding you good evening, Miss Cynthia Badlam,
+whether you give me those papers or not. I shall go to the office of Jacob
+Penhallow, Esquire, and there make one of two communications to him; to
+wit, these papers and the facts connected therewith, or another statement,
+the nature of which you may perhaps conjecture."
+
+There is no need of our speculating as to what Mr. Byles Gridley, an
+honorable and humane man, would have done, or what would have been the
+nature of that communication which he offered as an alternative to the
+perplexed woman. He had not at any rate miscalculated the strength of his
+appeal, which Cynthia interpreted as he expected. She bore the heart-screw
+about two minutes. Then she took the package from her bosom, and gave it
+with averted face to Master Byles Gridley, who, on receiving it, made her a
+formal but not unkindly bow, and bade her good evening.
+
+"One would think it had been lying out in the dew," he said, as he left the
+house and walked towards Mr. Penhallow's residence.
+
+
+
+
+THEMISTOCLES.
+
+
+    So! Ye drag me, men of Athens,
+      Hither to your council-hall,
+    Armed with judges and informers,
+      That your doom on me may fall,--
+    Doom that Athens oft hath levelled
+      On her noblest sons of yore,--
+    Doom that made her foes triumphant,
+      And each heart that loved her sore.
+    Oft, as I have seen her heroes
+      Brought to this ignoble end,
+    Have I pondered,--when should Fortune
+      To my lips the cup commend?
+
+
+    Read the foul indictment, falsehood
+      After falsehood rolling on;
+    Far away my thoughts shall wander,
+      Thinking of the moments gone,
+    When with tears and prayers ye dragged me
+      Hither to your council-hall,
+    Young and old, and wives and children,
+      Echoing one despairing call,--
+    "Speak some word of comfort, Archon,
+      Ere the Persian dig our grave!
+    Speak, Themistocles, and save us,--
+      Thou alone hast power to save!"
+
+
+    Is it over? Let me hear it,--
+      Let me hear once more the end,--
+    "For Themistocles betrays us,
+      And is sworn the Persian's friend--"
+    No, not that! Take back the falsehood!
+      Curse the hand that wrote the lie;
+    Charge what deadly crime it lists you,
+      'Tis no dreadful thing to die.
+    But shall all my free devotion,
+      All my care for Athens' weal,
+    Turn to treason and corruption,
+      Stamped with such a lying seal?
+    Was 't for Persia then I led you
+      Up to proud Athena's height,--
+    Bade you view this barren country,
+      And the sea to left and right,--
+    Bade you leave your plain and mountain,--
+      Save to dig their shining ore,--
+    Bade you grasp the ocean's sceptre,
+      Spoil the wealth of every shore,
+    Spread your white sails to the breezes,
+      Unrestrained like them and free,
+    Lords of no contracted city,
+      But the monarchs of the sea!
+
+    Persia's friend! Have ye forgotten
+      How the lord of Persia came,
+    Bridging seas, and cleaving mountains,
+      With the terrors of his name,--
+    How he burst through Tempe's portal,
+      Trod the dauntless Spartan down,
+    Dragged the vile Boeotian captive,
+      Dared e'en Delphi's sacred crown?
+    And the craven wail of terror
+      Rang through Athens' every street;
+    Then ye came and begged for counsel,
+      Kneeling, clinging to my feet.
+    Then I bade you leave your city,
+      Leave your temples and your halls,
+    Trusting, as the god gave answer,
+      To your country's wooden walls.
+    And the Persian, entering proudly,
+      Found a city of the dead;
+    Athens' corpse his only victim,
+      Her immortal soul had fled!
+
+    Was 't for Persia in the council
+      With your false allies I toiled,
+    Bade the Spartan, "Strike, but hear me,"
+      Ere my country should be spoiled?
+    Or that all that night their galleys
+      In the narrow strait I kept?
+    For we felt the Persian closing,
+      And no son of Athens slept.
+    But when broke the golden dawning
+      O'er Pentelicus afar,
+    Rose the glad Hellenic paean,
+      Bursting with the morning star.
+    For we saw the Persian squadrons
+      Ship on ship in thousands pour,
+    And we knew the pass was narrow
+      'Twixt the island and the shore.
+    Calmly, as no foe were near us,
+      All our morning tasks we wrought,
+    Lying there in silent order,
+      As though fight we never fought.
+    But we grasped our oars all eager
+      Till the tough pine burned each hand,
+    Watching till the steersman's signal
+      For the onset gave command.
+    Then we smote the sea together,
+      And our galleys onward flew,
+    While from all the Hellenic navy,
+      As we dashed along the blue,
+    Pealed one loud, triumphant war-cry,--
+      "Now, ye sons of Hellas, come,
+    Conquer freedom for your country,
+      Freedom each one for his home,
+    Freedom for your wives and children,
+      For the altars where ye bow,
+    For your fathers' honored ashes,
+      For them all ye 're fighting now!"[1]
+
+    On the mountain height the tyrant
+      Bade them set his golden throne,
+    And in pitch of pride surveyed them,--
+      All the fleet he called his own,--
+    Heard the war-cry far resounding,
+      Heard the oars' responsive dash,
+    And the shock of squadrons smiting
+      Beak to beak with sudden clash,--
+    Saw them locked in wild confusion,
+      Prow on prow and keel on keel,--
+    Heard the thundering crash of timbers,
+      And the ring of clanging steel,--
+    Saw his ponderous ships entangled
+      In the close and narrow strait,
+    And our light-winged galleys darting
+      Boldly in the jaws of fate,--
+    Saw the mad disorder seize them,
+      As we grappled fast each prow,
+    Leaped like tigers on the bulwarks,
+      Hurled them to the depths below,--
+    Saw his bravest on the island
+      Slaughtered down in deadly fight,
+    Whom he fondly placed to crush us,
+      If perchance we turned to flight,--
+    Saw one last despairing struggle,--
+      Then the shout that all was lost,
+    And his matchless navy turning,
+      Fleeing from the hated coast,--
+    Saw them stranded on the island,
+      Rent and shattered on the main,--
+    Heard the shrieks of myriads wounded,
+      Saw the heaps of thousands slain,
+    While the sea was red with carnage,
+      And the air with shouts was wild,
+    "Woe to Persia's slaves and tyrant!
+      Hail to Athens, ocean's child!"
+
+    No, ye have not all forgotten,
+      All your hearts have not grown cold,
+    When of Athens' countless triumphs,
+      This, the noblest tale, is told.
+
+    Oft perchance my acts have wronged you,
+      But ye dare not charge me this,
+    That the Persian is my master,
+      When ye think of Salamis.
+    More I might; but it sufficeth,--
+      Here I wait the word of doom;
+    Strike! But think that I, the culprit,
+      Raised your city from the tomb.
+
+    *....*....*....*
+
+    Guilty! Well! The fate of others
+      Now at length descends on me;
+    Envy strikes the loftiest ever,
+      As the lightning on the tree.
+    Banished! Athens aye hath willed it
+      For her truest souls of yore;
+    Now I know thee, Aristides,
+      As I never knew before.
+    O forgive me, gallant rival,
+      If I e'er have wrought thee ill;
+    Think but of the glorious morning
+      When we stood on yonder hill,
+    When Miltiades arrayed us
+      In the central ranks to stand,
+    When we charged adown the mountain
+      On the motley Persian band,
+    When the shouting wings swept forward,
+      And we stood, like sea-cliffs fast,
+    Smiling to behold the nations
+      Break in foam upon us cast;
+    When we chased them to the galleys,
+      Slaughtered thousands by the wave,
+    Sent them back in rout to Susa,
+      Heaped the mound above our brave,
+    And forever through the ages
+      Sounds our glory, rolling on,
+    For Miltiades and Athens,
+      For ourselves and Marathon.
+
+    Men of Athens! By your sentence
+      I am banished from your state;
+    Humbly to that doom I bow me,
+      And I leave you to your fate.
+    Not to me thine awful ending,
+      Athens, shall the years unfold;
+    Long shall night have closed these eyelids
+      Ere that ruin men behold.
+    Still, when I am long forgotten,
+      Shall thy haughty sway extend,
+    Isles and cities, lords and kingdoms,
+      Forced to court, to sue, to bend,
+    As, from year to year increasing,
+      Still thy marts new wealth enclose,
+    And thy far-resplendent treasures
+      Dazzle e'en thy fiercest foes.
+    Wider ports and swifter navies,
+      Broader fields and richer mines,
+    Deadlier fights and braver armies,
+      Statelier halls and fairer shrines,
+    Loftier accents poured in council,
+      Nobler thoughts in sweeter song,
+    Loud proclaim the crown of Hellas
+      Doth of right to thee belong;
+    Till thy heart be drunk with glory,
+      And thy brain be crazed with power,
+    And the gods o'erhear thy boasting
+      In some mad, triumphant hour.
+
+    Then, when one by one thy subjects
+      Turn and beard thee in despair,
+    Calling Sparta to the rescue,
+      In thy death and spoil to share,--
+    When thy vines and groves lie desert,
+      And within thy crowded wall
+    Pest and famine slay thy chosen,
+      Slay the foremost chief of all,--
+    When thy armies throng the dungeons,
+      And thy shipwrecks heap the strand,--
+    When thine ancient strain of heroes
+      Gives no more the proud command,
+    But thy wisest heads turn faithless,
+      And thy truest hearts grow dull,
+    Making all thy counsel folly,
+      All thy desperate valor null,--
+    When each fond and mad endeavor,
+      Clutching at thy fallen crown,
+    Deeper in the roaring whirlpool
+      Of perdition sucks thee down,
+    When at last thy foes surround thee,
+      Dig the trench, and hem thee in,--
+    When the dreadful word is spoken,
+      Which to whisper were a sin,--
+    When at length, in vile subjection,
+      Unto Sparta thou shalt sue,
+    Swearing thou wilt humbly serve her,
+      Will she but thy life renew,--
+    In that hour of keenest torture,
+      When thy star is sunk in night,
+    Think!--but not of me, whose valor
+      Thou so foully didst requite;--
+    Think not of thine outraged heroes,
+      But of her who banished these,
+    Think of Athens, false and fickle,
+      Think not of Themistocles.
+
+    But if e'er, in after ages,
+      Once again thy star _should_ rise,--
+    If some noble son _should_ save thee,
+      Like a god that left the skies,
+    If thy shackles should be broken,
+      And thou leap to new renown,
+    Then remember me, my darling,
+      City of the violet crown!
+    Then shall endless shouts of triumph
+      Sound the glories of thy name,
+    And the songs of generations
+      All thy matchless gifts proclaim;
+    Then be every wrong forgotten,
+      Then be every debt repaid,
+    And the wreath of every hero
+      On Athena's altar laid.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The foregoing description is nearly a translation from the _Persae_ of
+AEschylus.
+
+
+
+
+BEN JONSON.
+
+
+Authors are apt to be popularly considered as physically a feeble folk,--as
+timid, nervous, dyspeptic rhymers or prosers, unfitted to grapple with the
+rough realities of life. We shall endeavor, in the following pages, to
+present our readers with the image of one calculated to reverse this
+impression,--the image of a stalwart man of letters, who lived two
+centuries and a half ago, in the greatest age of English literature,--who
+undeniably had brawny fists as well as forgetive faculties,--one who could
+handle a club as readily as a pen, hit his mark with a bullet as surely as
+with a word, and, a sort of cross between the bully and the bard, could
+shoulder his way through a crowd of prize-fighters to take his seat among
+the tuneful company of immortal poets. This man, Ben Jonson, commonly
+stands next to Shakespeare in a consideration of the dramatic literature of
+the age of Elizabeth; and certainly, if the "thousand-souled" Shakespeare
+may be said to represent mankind, Ben as unmistakably stands for
+English-kind. He is "Saxon" England in epitome,--John Bull passing from a
+name into a man,--a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineering individual,
+whose intellect and personality cannot be severed, even in thought, from
+his body and personal appearance. Ben's mind, indeed, was rooted in Ben's
+character; and his character took symbolic form in his physical frame. He
+seemed built up, mentally as well as bodily, out of beef and sack, mutton
+and Canary; or, to say the least, was a joint product of the English mind
+and the English larder, of the fat as well as the thought of the land, of
+the soil as well as the soul of England. The moment we attempt to estimate
+his eminence as a dramatist, he disturbs the equanimity of our judgment by
+tumbling head-foremost into the imagination as a big, bluff, burly, and
+quarrelsome man, with "a mountain belly and a rocky face." He is a very
+pleasant boon companion as long as we make our idea of his importance agree
+with his own; but the instant we attempt to dissect his intellectual
+pretensions, the living animal becomes a dangerous subject,--his
+countenance flames, his great hands double up, his thick lips begin to
+twitch with impending invective; and while the critic's impression of him
+is thus all the more vivid, he is checked in its expression by a very
+natural fear of the consequences. There is no safety but in taking this
+rowdy leviathan of letters at his own valuation; and the relation of
+critics towards him is as perilous as that of the juries towards the Irish
+advocate, who had an unpleasant habit of challenging them to personal
+combat whenever they brought in a verdict against any of his clients. There
+is, in fact, such a vast animal force in old Ben's self-assertion, that he
+bullies posterity as he bullied his contemporaries; and while we admit his
+claims to rank next to Shakespeare among the dramatists of his age, we beg
+our readers to understand that we do it under intimidation.
+
+The qualities of this bold, racy, and brawny egotist can be best conveyed
+in a biographical form. He was born in 1574, the grandson of a gentleman
+who, for his religion, lost his estate, and for a time his liberty, in
+Queen Mary's time, and the son of a clergyman in humble circumstances, who
+died about a month before his "rare" offspring was born. His mother,
+shortly after the death of her husband, married a master-bricklayer. Ben,
+who as a boy doubtless exhibited brightness of intellect and audacity of
+spirit, seems to have attracted the attention of Camden, who placed him in
+Westminster School, of which he was master. Ben there displayed so warm a
+love of learning, and so much capacity in rapidly acquiring it, that, at
+the age of sixteen, he is said to have been removed to the University of
+Cambridge, though he stated to Drummond, long afterwards, that he was
+"master of arts in both the Universities, by their favor, not his studie."
+His ambition at this time, if we may believe some of his biographers, was
+to be a clergyman; and had it been gratified, he would probably have
+blustered his way to a bishopric, and proved himself one of the most
+arrogant, learned, and pugnacious disputants of the English Church
+Militant,--perhaps have furnished the type of that peculiar religionist
+compounded of bully, pedant, and bigot which Warburton was afterwards, from
+the lack of models, compelled to originate. But after residing a few months
+at the University, Ben, deserted by his friends and destitute of money,
+found it impossible to carry out his design; and he returned disappointed
+to his mother's house. As she could not support him in idleness, the
+stout-hearted student adopted the most obvious means of earning his daily
+bread, and for a short time followed the occupation of his father-in-law,
+going to the work of bricklaying, according to the tradition, with a trowel
+in one hand, but with a Horace in the other. His enemies among the
+dramatists did not forget this when he became famous, but meanly sneered at
+him as "the lime-and-mortar poet." When we reflect that in the aristocratic
+age of good Queen Bess, play-writing, even the writing of Hamlets and
+Alchymists, was, if we may trust Dr. Farmer, hardly considered "a
+creditable employ," we may form some judgment of the position of the
+working classes, when a mechanic was thus deemed to have no rights which a
+playwright "was bound to respect."
+
+We have no means of deciding whether or not Ben was foolish enough to look
+upon his trade as degrading; that it was distasteful we know from the fact
+that he soon exchanged the trowel for the sword; and we hear no more of his
+dealing with bricks, if we may except his questionable habit of sometimes
+carrying too many of them in his hat. At the age of eighteen he ran away to
+the Continent, and enlisted as a volunteer in the English army in Flanders,
+fully intending, doubtless, that, as fate seemed against his being a Homer
+or an Aristotle, to try if fortune would not make him an Alexander or a
+Hannibal. As ill-luck would have it, however, his abundant vitality had
+little scope in martial exercise. He does not appear to have been in any
+general engagement, though he signalized his personal prowess in a manner
+which he was determined should not be forgotten through any diffidence of
+his own. Boastful as he was brave, he was never weary of bragging how he
+had encountered one of the enemy, fought with him in presence of both
+armies, killed him, and triumphantly "taken _opima spolia_ from him."
+
+After serving one campaign, our Ajax-Thersites returned, at the age of
+nineteen, to England, bringing with him, according to Gifford, "the
+reputation of a brave man, a smattering of Dutch, and an empty purse." To
+these accomplishments he probably added that of drinking; for, as "our army
+in Flanders" ever drank terribly as well as "swore terribly," it may be
+supposed that Ben there laid, deep and wide, the foundation of his
+bacchanalian habits. Arrived in London, and thrown on his own resources for
+support, he turned naturally to the stage, and became an actor in a minor
+play-house, called the Green Curtain. Though he was through life a good
+reader, and though at this time he was not afflicted with the scurvy, which
+eventually so punched his face as to make one of his satirists compare it,
+with witty malice, to the cover of a warming-pan, he still never rose to
+any eminence as an actor. He had not been long at the Green Curtain when a
+quarrel with one of his fellow performers led to a duel, in which Jonson
+killed his antagonist, was arrested on a charge of murder, and, in his own
+phrase, was brought "almost at the gallowes,"--an unpleasant proximity
+which he hastened to increase by relieving the weariness of imprisonment in
+discussions on religion with a Popish priest, also a prisoner, and by being
+converted to Romanism. As the zealous professors of the old faith had
+passed, in Elizabeth's time, from persecutors into martyrs, Ben, the
+descendant of one of Queen Mary's victims, evinced more than his usual
+worldly prudence in seizing this occasion to join their company, as he
+could reasonably hope that, if he escaped hanging on the charge of
+homicide, he still might contrive to be beheaded on a charge of treason.
+In regard, however, to the original cause of his imprisonment, it would
+seem that, on investigation, it was found the duel had been forced upon
+him, that his antagonist had taken the precaution of bringing into the
+field a sword ten inches longer than his own, and thus, far from intending
+to be the victim of murder, had not unsagaciously counted on committing it.
+Jonson was released; but, apparently vexed at this propitious turn to his
+fortunes, instead of casting about for some means of subsistence, he almost
+immediately married a woman as poor as himself,--a wife whom he afterwards
+curtly described as "a shrew, yet honest." A shrew, indeed! As if Mrs.
+Jonson must not often have had just occasion to use her tongue tartly!--as
+if her redoubtable Ben did not often need its acrid admonitions! They seem
+to have lived together until 1613, when they separated.
+
+Absolute necessity now drove Jonson again to the stage, probably both as
+actor and writer. He began his dramatic career, as Shakespeare began his,
+by doing job-work for the managers; that is, by altering, recasting, and
+making additions to old plays. At last, in 1596, in his twenty-second year,
+he placed himself at a bound among the famous dramatists of the time, by
+the production, at the Rose Theatre, of his comedy of "Every Man in his
+Humor." Two years afterwards, having in the mean time been altered and
+improved, it was, through the influence of Shakespeare, accepted by the
+players of the Blackfriars' Theatre, Shakespeare himself acting the
+characterless part of the Elder Knowell.
+
+Among the writers of the Elizabethan age, an age in which, for a wonder,
+there seemed to be a glut of genius, Ben is prominent more for racy
+originality of personal character, weight or understanding, and quickness
+of fancy, than for creativeness of imagination. His first play, "Every Man
+in his Humor," indicates to a great extent the quality and the kind of
+power with which he was endowed. His prominent characteristic was
+will,--will carried to self-will, and sometimes to self-exaggeration almost
+furious. His understanding was solid, strong, penetrating, even broad, and
+it was well furnished with matter derived both from experience and books;
+but, dominated by a personality so fretful and fierce, it was impelled to
+look at men and things, not in their relations to each other, but in their
+relations to Ben. He had reached that ideal of stormy conceit in which,
+according to Emerson, the egotist declares, "Difference from me is the
+measure of absurdity." Even the imaginary characters he delineated as a
+dramatist were all bound, as by tough cords, to the will that gave them
+being, lacked that joyous freedom and careless grace of movement which
+rightfully belonged to them as denizens of an ideal world, and had to obey
+their master Ben, as puppets obey the show-man. His power of external
+observation was pitilessly keen and searching, and it was accompanied by a
+rich, though somewhat coarse and insolent vein of humor; but his egotism
+commonly directed his observation to what was below, rather than above
+himself, and gave to his humor a scornful, rather than a genial tone. He
+huffs even in his hilarity; his fun is never infectious; and his very
+laughter is an assertion of superior wisdom. He has none of that humanizing
+humor which, in Shakespeare, makes us like the vagabonds we laugh at, and
+which insures for Dogberry and Nick Bottom, Autolychus and Falstaff, warmer
+friends among readers than many great historic dignities of the state and
+the camp can command.
+
+In regard to the materials of the dramatist, Jonson, in his vagrant career,
+had seen human nature under many aspects; but he had surveyed it neither
+with the eye of reason, nor the eye of imagination. His mind fastened on
+the hard actualities of observation, without passing to what they implied
+or suggested. Deficient thus in philosophic insight and poetic insight, his
+shrewd, contemptuous glance rarely penetrated beneath the manners and
+eccentricities of men. His attention was arrested, not by character, but by
+prominent peculiarities of character,--peculiarities which almost
+transformed character into caricature. To use his own phrase, he delineated
+humors rather than persons, that is, individuals under the influence of
+some dominant affectation, or whim, or conceit, or passion, that drew into
+itself, colored, and mastered the whole nature,--"an acorn," as Sir Thomas
+Browne phrases it, "in their young brows, which grew to an oak in their old
+heads." He thus inverts the true process of characterization. Instead of
+seeing the trait as an offshoot of the individual, he individualizes the
+trait. Every man is _in_ his humor, instead of every humor being in its
+man. In order that there should be no misconception of his purpose, he
+named his chief characters after their predominant qualities, as Morose,
+Surly, Sir Amorous La Fool, Sir Politic Would Be, Sir Epicure Mammon, and
+the like; and, apprehensive even then that his whole precious meaning would
+not be taken in, he appended to his _dramatis personae_ further explanations
+of their respective natures.
+
+This distrust of the power of language to lodge a notion in another brain
+is especially English; but Ben, of all writers, seems to have been most
+impressed with the necessity of pounding an idea into the perceptions of
+his countrymen. His mode resembles the attempt of that honest Briton, who
+thus delivered his judgment on the French nation: "I hate a Frenchman, sir.
+Every Frenchman is either a puppy or a rascal, sir." And then, fearful that
+he had not been sufficiently explicit, he added, "Do you take my idea?"
+
+With all abatements, however, the comedy of "Every Man in his Humor" is a
+remarkable effort, considered as the production of a young man of
+twenty-three. The two most striking characters are Kitely and Captain
+Bobadil. Give Jonson, indeed, a peculiarity to start with, and he worked it
+out with logical exactness. So intense was his conception of it, that he
+clothed it in flesh and blood, gave it a substantial existence, and
+sometimes succeeded in forcing it into literature as a permanent character.
+
+Bobadil, especially, is one of Ben's masterpieces. He is the most colossal
+coward and braggart of the comic stage. He can swear by nothing less
+terrible than "by the body of Caesar," or "by the foot of Pharaoh," when his
+oath is not something more terrific still, namely, "by my valor"! Every
+schoolboy knows the celebrated passage in which the boasting Captain offers
+to settle the affairs of Europe by associating with himself twenty other
+Bobadils, as cunning i' the fence as himself, and challenging an army of
+forty thousand men, twenty at a time, and killing the whole in a certain
+number of days. Leaving out the cowardice, we may say there was something
+of Bobadil in Jonson himself; and it may be shrewdly suspected that his
+conceit of destroying an army in this fashion came into his head in the
+exultation of feeling which followed his own successful exploit, in the
+presence of both armies, when he was a soldier in Flanders. Old John Dennis
+described genius "as a furious joy and pride of school at the conception of
+an extraordinary hint." Ben had this "furious joy and pride," not only in
+the conception of extraordinary hints, but in the doing of extraordinary
+things.
+
+Jonson followed up his success by producing the plays of "Every Man out of
+his Humor," and "Cynthia's Revels," dramatic satires on the manners,
+follies, affectations, and vices of the city and the court. One good result
+of Jonson's egotism was, that it made him afraid of nothing. He openly
+appeared among the dramatists of his day as a reformer, and, poor as he
+was, refused to pander to popular tastes, whether those tastes took the
+direction of ribaldry, or blasphemy, or bombast. He had courage, morality,
+earnestness; but then his courage was so blustering, his morality so
+irascible, and his devotion to his own ideas of art so exclusive, that he
+was constantly defying and insulting the persons he proposed to teach.
+Other dramatists said to the audience, "Please to applaud this"; but Ben
+said, "Now, you fools, we shall see if you have sense enough to applaud
+this!" The stage, to be sure, was to be exalted and improved, but it was to
+be done by his own works, and the glory of literature was to be associated
+with the glory of Master Benjamin. This conceit, by making him insensible
+to Shakespeare's influence, made him next to Shakespeare perhaps the most
+original dramatist of the time. He differed from his brother dramatists not
+in degree, but in kind. He felt it was not for him to imitate, but to
+produce models for imitation; not for him to catch the spirit of the age,
+but to originate a better. In short, he felt and taught belief in Ben; and,
+high as posterity rates the literature of the age of Elizabeth, it would be
+supposed from his prologues and epilogues that he conceived his fat person
+to have fallen on evil days.
+
+In "Every Man out of his Humor" and "Cynthia's Revels," he is in a raging
+passion throughout. His verse groans with the weight of his wrath. "My
+soul," he exclaims,
+
+    "Was never ground into such oily colors
+    To flatter vice and daub iniquity.
+    But with an armed and resolved hand
+    I 'll strip the ragged follies of the time
+    Naked as at their birth,
+                  ... and with a whip of steel
+    Print wounding lashes on their iron ribs."
+
+But though he exhausts the whole rhetoric of railing, invective, contempt,
+and scorn, we yet find it difficult to feel any of the indignation he
+labors to excite. Admiration, however, cannot be refused to Jonson's prose
+style in these as in his other plays. It is terse, sharp, swift,
+biting,--every word a die that stamps its object in a second. Occasionally
+the author's veins, to use his own apt expression, seem to "run
+quicksilver," and "every phrase comes forth steeped in the very brine of
+conceit, and sparkles like salt in fire." Yet, though we have whole scenes
+in which there is brightness in every sentence, the result of the whole is
+something like dulness, as the object of the whole is to exalt himself and
+depress others. But in these plays, in strange contrast with their general
+character, we have a few specimens of that sweetness of sentiment,
+refinement of fancy, and indefinite beauty of imagination, which, occupying
+some secluded corner of his large brain, seemed to exist apart from his
+ordinary powers and passions. Among these, the most exquisite is this Hymn
+to Diana, which partakes of the serenity of the moonlight, whose goddess it
+invokes.
+
+    "Queen and huntress chaste and fair,
+      Now the sun is laid to sleep,
+    Seated in thy silver chair,
+      State in wonted manner keep.
+        Hesperus entreats thy light,
+        Goddess excellently bright!
+
+    "Earth, let not thy envious shade
+      Dare itself to interpose;
+    Cynthia's shining orb was made
+      Heaven to clear when day did close.
+        Bless us, then, with wished sight,
+        Goddess excellently bright.
+
+    "Lay thy bow of pearl apart,
+      And thy crystal-gleaming quiver;
+    Give unto the flying hart
+      Space to breathe how short soever,--
+        Thou that mak'st a day of night,
+        Goddess excellently bright."
+
+If, as Jonson's adversaries maliciously asserted, "every line of his poetry
+cost him a cup of sack," we must, even in our more temperate days, pardon
+him the eighteen cups which, in this melodious lyric, went into his mouth
+as sack, but, by some precious chemistry, came out through his pen as
+pearls.
+
+It was inevitable that the imperious attitude Jonson had assumed, and the
+insolent pungency of his satire, should rouse the wrath of the classes he
+lampooned, and the enmity of the poets he ridiculed and decried. Among
+those who conceived themselves assailed, or who felt insulted by his
+arrogant tone, were two dramatists, Thomas Dekkar and John Marston. They
+soon recriminated; and as Ben was better fitted by nature to dispense than
+to endure scorn and derision, he in 1601 produced "The Poetaster," the
+object of which was to silence forever, not only Dekkar and Marston, but
+all other impudent doubters of his infallibility. The humor of the thing
+is, that, in this elaborate attempt to convict his adversaries of calumny
+in taxing him with self-love and arrogance, he ostentatiously exhibits the
+very qualities he disclaims. He keeps no terms with those who profess
+disbelief in Ben. They are "play-dressers and plagiaries," "fools or
+jerking pedants," "buffoon barking wits," tickling "base vulgar ears with
+beggarly and barren trash," while his are
+
+            "The high raptures of a happy Muse,
+    Borne on the wings of her immortal thought,
+    That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,
+    And beats at heaven's gate with her bright hoofs."
+
+Dekkar retorted in a play called "Satiromastrix; or, the Untrussing of the
+Humorous Poet"; but, though the scurrility is brilliantly bitter, it is
+less efficient and hearted than Jonson's. This literary controversy,
+conducted in acted plays, had to the public of that day a zest similar to
+that we should enjoy if the editors of two opposing political newspapers
+should meet in a hall filled with their subscribers, and fling their
+thundering editorials in person at each other's heads. The theatre-goers
+seem to have declared for Dekkar and Marston; and Ben, disgusted with such
+a proof of their incapacity of judgment, sulked and growled in his den, and
+for two years gave nothing to the stage. He had, however, found a patron,
+who enabled him to do this without undergoing the famine of insufficient
+meat, and the still more dreadful drought of insufficient drink; for, in a
+gossiping diary of the period, covering these two years, we are informed,
+"B. J. now lives with one Townsend, and scorns the world." While, however,
+pleasantly engaged in this characteristic occupation, for which he had a
+natural genius, he was meditating a play which he thought would demonstrate
+to all judging spirits his possession equally of the acquirements of the
+scholar and the talents of the dramatist. In the conclusion of the
+Apologetic Dialogue which accompanies "The Poetaster," he had hinted his
+purpose in these energetic lines:--
+
+                          "Once I 'll say,--
+    To strike the ears of Time in these fresh strains,
+    As shall, beside the cunning of their ground,
+    Give cause to some of wonder, some despite,
+    And more despair to imitate their sound.
+    I that spend half my nights and all my days
+    Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face,
+    To come forth with the ivy and the bays,
+    And in this age can hope no better grace,--
+    Leave me! There 's something come into my thought,
+    That must and shall be sung high and aloof,
+    Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof!"
+
+Accordingly, in 1603, he produced his weighty tragedy of "Sejanus," at
+Shakespeare's theatre, The Globe,--Shakespeare himself acting one of the
+inferior parts. Think of Shakespeare laboriously committing to memory the
+blank verse of Jonson!
+
+Though "Sejanus" failed of theatrical success, its wealth of classic
+knowledge and solid thought made it the best of all answers to his
+opponents. It was as if they had questioned his capacity to build a ship,
+and he had confuted them with a man-of-war. To be sure, they might
+reiterate their old charge of "filching by translation," for the text of
+"Sejanus" is a mosaic; but it was one of Jonson's maxims that he deserved
+as much honor for what he made his own by _Jonsonizing_ the classics as for
+what he originated. Indeed, in his dealings with the great poets and
+historians of Rome, whose language and whose spirit he had patiently
+mastered, he acted the part, not of the pickpocket, but of the conqueror.
+He did not meanly crib and pilfer in the territories of the ancients: he
+rather pillaged, or, in our American phrase, "annexed" them. "He has done
+his robberies so openly," says Dryden, "that one sees he fears not to be
+taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be
+theft in any other poet is only victory in him."
+
+One incident connected with the bringing out of "Sejanus" should not be
+omitted. Jonson told Drummond that the Earl of Northampton had a mortal
+enmity to him "for beating, on a St. George's day, one of his attenders";
+and he adds, that Northampton had him "called before the Councell for his
+Sejanus," and accused him there both of "Poperie and treason."
+
+Jonson's relations with Shakespeare seem always to have been friendly; and
+about this time we hear of them as associate members of the greatest of
+literary and the greatest of convivial clubs,--the club instituted by Sir
+Walter Raleigh, and known to all times as the "Mermaid," so called from the
+tavern in which the meetings were held. Various, however, as were the
+genius and accomplishments it included, it lacked one phase of ability
+which has deprived us of all participation in its wit and wisdom. It could
+boast of Shakespeare, and Jonson, and Raleigh, and Camden, and Beaumont,
+and Selden, but, alas! it had no Boswell to record its words,
+
+    "So nimble, and so full of subtile flame."
+
+There are traditions of "wit-combats" between Shakespeare and Jonson; and
+doubtless there was many a discussion between them touching the different
+principles on which their dramas were composed; and then Ben, astride his
+high horse of the classics, probably blustered and harangued, and
+graciously informed the world's greatest poet that he sometimes wanted art
+and sometimes sense, and candidly advised him to check the fatal rapidity
+and perilous combinations of his imagination,--while Shakespeare smilingly
+listened, and occasionally put in an ironic word, deprecating such austere
+criticism of a playwright like himself, who accommodated his art to the
+humors of the mob that crowded the "round O" of The Globe. There can be no
+question that Shakespeare saw Ben through and through, but he was not a man
+to be intolerant of foibles, and probably enjoyed the hectoring egotism of
+his friend as much as he appreciated his real merits. As for Ben, the
+transcendent genius of his brother dramatist pierced through even the thick
+hide of his self-sufficiency. "I did honor him," he finely says, "this side
+of idolatry, as much as any other man."
+
+On the accession of James of Scotland to the English throne, Jonson was
+employed by the court and city to design a splendid pageant for the
+monarch's reception; and, with that absence of vindictiveness which
+somewhat atoned for his arrogance, he gave his recent enemy, Dekkar, three
+fifths of the job. About the same time he was reconciled to Marston; and in
+1605 assisted him and Chapman in a comedy called "Eastward Hoe!" One
+passage in this, reflecting on the Scotch, gave mortal offence to James's
+greedy countrymen, who invaded England in his train, and were ravenous and
+clamorous for the spoils of office. Captain Seagul, in the play, praises
+what was then the new settlement of Virginia, as "a place without
+sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers, only a few
+industrious Scots perhaps, who indeed are dispersed over the whole earth.
+But as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England,
+when they are out on 't, in the world, than they are; and, for my own part,
+I would a hundred thousand of them were there, for we are all one
+countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort of them
+there than we do here." This bitter taunt, which probably made the theatre
+roar with applause, was so represented to the king, that Marston and
+Chapman were arrested and imprisoned. Jonson nobly insisted on sharing
+their fate; and as he had powerful friends at court, and was esteemed by
+James himself, his course may have saved his friends from disgraceful
+mutilations. A report was circulated that the noses and ears of all three
+were to be slit and Jonson tells us, that, in an entertainment he gave to
+Camden, Selden, and other friends after his liberation, his old mother
+exhibited a paper full of "lustie strong poison," which she said she
+intended to have mixed _in his drink_, in case the threat of such a
+shameful punishment had been officially announced. The phrase "his drink"
+is very characteristic; and, whatever liquid was meant, we may be sure that
+it was not water, and that the good lady would have daily had numerous
+opportunities to mix the poison with it.
+
+The five years which succeeded his imprisonment carried Jonson to the
+height of his prosperity and glory. During this period he produced the
+three great comedies on which his fame as a dramatist rests,--"The Fox,"
+"The Silent Woman," and "The Alchymist,"--and also many of the most
+beautiful of those Masques, performed at court, in which the ingenuity,
+delicacy, richness, and elevation of his fancy found fittest expression.
+His social position was probably superior to Shakespeare's. He was really
+the Court Poet long before 1616, when he received the office, with a
+pension of a hundred marks. We have Clarendon's testimony to the fact that
+"his conversation was very good, and with men of the best note." Among his
+friends occurs the great name of Bacon.
+
+In 1618, when "Ben Jonson" had come to be familiar words on the lips of all
+educated men in the island, he made his celebrated journey on foot to
+Scotland, and was hospitably entertained by the nobility and gentry around
+Edinburgh. Taylor, the water poet, in his "Pennylesse Pilgrimage" to
+Scotland, has this amiable reference to him. "At Leith," he says, "I found
+my long approved and assured good friend, Master Benjamin Jonson, at one
+Master John Stuart's house. I thank him for his great kindness; for, at my
+taking leave of him, he gave me a piece of gold of two-and-twenty
+shillings' value, to drink his health in England." One object of Jonson's
+journey was to visit Drummond of Hawthornden. He passed three or four weeks
+with Drummond at Hawthornden, and poured out his mind to him without
+reserve or stint. The finical and fastidious poet was somewhat startled at
+this irruption of his burly guest into his dainty solitude; took notes of
+his free conversation, especially when he decried his contemporaries; and
+further carried out the rites of hospitality by adding a caustic, though
+keen, summary of his qualities of character. Thus, according to his dear
+friend's charitable analysis, Ben "was a great lover and praiser of
+himself; a contemner and scorner of others; given rather to losse a friend
+than a jest; jealous of every word and action of those about him
+(especiallie after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth);
+a dissembler of ill parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that
+he wanteth; thinketh nothing well bot what either he himself or some of his
+friends and countrymen have said or done; he is passionately kynde and
+angry; careless either to gaine or keep; vindictive, but, if he be well
+answered, at himself." It is not much to the credit of Jonson's insight,
+that, after flooding his pensively taciturn host with his boisterous and
+dogmatic talk, he parted with him under the impression that he was leaving
+an assured friend. Ah! your demure listeners to your unguarded
+conversation,--they are the ones that give the fatal stabs!
+
+A literal transcript of Drummond's original notes of Jonson's
+conversations, made by Sir Robert Sibbald about the year 1710, has been
+published in the collections of the Shakespeare Society. This is a more
+extended report than that included in Drummond's works, though still not so
+full as the reader might desire. The stoutness of Ben's character is felt
+in every utterance. Thus he tells Drummond that "he never esteemed of a man
+for the name of a lord,"--a sentiment which he had expressed more
+impressively in his published epigram on Burleigh:--
+
+    "Cecil, the grave, the wise, the great, the good,
+    What is there more that can ennoble blood?"
+
+He had, it seems, "a minde to be a churchman, and, so he might have favour
+to make one sermon to the King, he careth not what thereafter sould befall
+him; for he would not flatter though he saw Death." Queen Elizabeth is the
+mark of a most scandalous imputation, and the mildest of Ben's remarks
+respecting her is that she "never saw herself, after she became old, in a
+true glass; they painted her, _and sometymes would vermilion_ her nose."
+"Of all styles," he said, "he most loved to be named Honest, and hath of
+that one hundreth letters so naming him." His judgments on other poets were
+insolently magisterial. "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his
+matter"; Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, but no poet; Donne, though
+"the first poet in the world in some things," for "not keeping of accent,
+deserved hanging"; Abram Fraunce, "in his English hexameters, was a foole";
+Sharpham, Day, and Dekkar were all rogues; Francis Beaumont "loved too much
+himself and his own verses." Some biographical items in the record of these
+conversations are of interest. It seems that the first day of every new
+year the Earl of Pembroke sent him twenty pounds "to buy bookes." By all
+his plays he never gained two hundred pounds. "Sundry tymes he hath
+devoured his bookes," that is, sold them to supply himself with
+necessaries. When he was imprisoned for killing his brother actor in a
+duel, in the Queen's time, "his judges could get nothing of him to all
+their demands but I and No. They placed two damn'd villains, to catch
+advantage of him, with him, but he was advertised by his keeper"; and he
+added, as if the revenge was as terrible as the offence, "of the spies he
+hath ane epigrame." He told a few personal stories to Drummond, calculated
+to moderate our wonder that Mrs. Jonson was a shrew; and, as they were
+boastingly told, we must suppose that his manners were not so austere as
+his verse. But perhaps the most characteristic image he has left of
+himself, through these conversations, is this: "He hath consumed a whole
+night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars
+and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, feight in his imagination."
+
+Jonson's fortunes seem to have suffered little abatement until the death of
+King James, in 1625. Then declining popularity and declining health
+combined their malice to break the veteran down; and the remaining twelve
+years of his life were passed in doing battle with those relentless enemies
+of poets,--want and disease. The orange--or rather the lemon--was squeezed,
+and both court and public seemed disposed to throw away the peel. In the
+epilogue to his play of "The New Inn," brought out in 1630, the old tone of
+defiance is gone. He touchingly appeals to the audience as one who is "sick
+and sad"; but, with a noble humility, he begs they will refer none of the
+defects of the work to mental decay.
+
+    "All that his weak and faltering tongue doth crave
+    Is that you not refer it to his brain;
+    That 's yet unhurt, although set round with pain."
+
+The audience were insensible to this appeal. They found the play dull, and
+hooted it from the stage. Perhaps, after having been bullied so long, they
+took delight in having Ben "on the hip." Charles the First, however, who up
+to this time seems to have neglected his father's favorite, now generously
+sent him a hundred pounds to cheer him in his misfortunes; and shortly
+after he raised his salary, as Court Poet, from a hundred marks to a
+hundred pounds, adding, in compliment to Jonson's known tastes, a tierce of
+Canary,--a wine of which he was so fond as to be nicknamed, in ironical
+reference to a corpulence which rather assimilated him to the ox, "a Canary
+bird." It is to this period, we suppose, we must refer his testimony to his
+own obesity in his "Epistle to my Lady Coventry."
+
+    "So you have gained a Servant and a Muse:
+    The first of which I fear you will refuse,
+    And you may justly; being a tardy, cold,
+    Unprofitable chattel, fat and old,
+    Laden with belly, and doth hardly approach
+    His friends, but to break chairs or crack a coach.
+    His weight is twenty stone, within two pound;
+    And that 's made up, as doth the purse abound."
+
+As his life declined, it does not appear that his disposition was
+essentially modified. There are two characteristic references to him in his
+old age, which prove that Ben, attacked by palsy and dropsy, with a
+reputation perceptibly waning, was Ben still. One is from Sir John
+Suckling's pleasantly malicious "Session of the Poets":--
+
+    "The first that broke silence was good old Ben,
+    Prepared before with Canary wine,
+    And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,
+    For his were called works where others were but plays.
+
+    *....*....*....*
+
+    Apollo stopped him there, and bade him not go on;
+    'T was merit, he said, and not presumption,
+    Must carry 't; at which Ben turned about,
+    And in great choler offered to go out."
+
+That is a saucy touch,--that of Ben's rage when he is told that presumption
+is not, before Apollo, to take the place of merit, or even to back it!
+
+The other notice is taken from a letter from Howel to Sir Thomas Hawk,
+written the year before Jonson's death:--
+
+"I was invited yesternight to a solemn supper by B. J., where you were
+deeply remembered. There was good company, excellent cheer, choice wines,
+and jovial welcome. One thing intervened which almost spoiled the relish of
+the rest,--that B. began to engross all the discourse, to vapor extremely
+by himself, and, by vilifying others, to magnify his own Muse. For my part,
+I am content to dispense with the Roman infirmity of Ben, now that time has
+snowed upon his pericranium."
+
+But this snow of time, however it may have begun to cover up the solider
+qualities of his mind, seems to have left untouched his strictly poetic
+faculty. That shone out in his last hours, with more than usual splendor,
+in the beautiful pastoral drama of "The Sad Shepherd"; and it may be
+doubted if, in his whole works, any other passage can be found so exquisite
+in sentiment, fancy, and expression as the opening lines of this charming
+product of his old age:--
+
+    "Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
+    Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:
+    The world may find the Spring by following her;
+    For other print her airy steps ne'er left:
+    Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
+    Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
+    But like the soft west-wind she shot along,
+    And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
+    As she had sowed them with her odorous foot!"
+
+Before he completed "The Sad Shepherd," he was struck with mortal illness;
+and the brave old man prepared to meet his last enemy, and, if possible,
+convert him into a friend. As early as 1606 he had returned to the English
+Church, after having been for twelve years a Romanist; and his penitent
+death-bed was attended by the Bishop of Winchester. He died in August,
+1637, in his sixty-fourth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The
+inscription on the common pavement stone which was laid over his grave
+still expresses, after a lapse of two hundred years, the feelings of all
+readers of the English race,--
+
+    "O RARE BEN JONSON!"
+
+It must be admitted, however, that this epithet is sufficiently indefinite
+to admit widely differing estimates of the value of his works. In a
+critical view, the most obvious characteristic of his mind is its bulk; but
+its creativeness bears no proportion to its massiveness. His faculties,
+ranged according to their relative strength, would fall into this
+rank:--first, BEN; next, understanding; next, memory; next, humor; next,
+fancy; and last and least, imagination. Thus, in the strictly poetic action
+of his mind, his fancy and imagination being subordinated to his other
+faculties, and not co-ordinated with them, his whole nature is not kindled,
+and his best masques and sweetest lyrics give no idea of the general
+largeness of the man. In them the burly giant becomes gracefully _petite_;
+it is Fletcher's Omphale "smiling the club" out of the hand of Hercules,
+and making him, for the time, "spin her smocks." Now the greatest poetical
+creations of Shakespeare are those in which he is greatest in reason, and
+greatest in passion, and greatest in knowledge, as well as greatest in
+imagination,--his poetic power being
+
+    "Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,
+    Binding all things with beauty."
+
+His mind is "one entire and perfect chrysolite," while Jonson's rather
+suggests the pudding-stone. The poet _in_ Ben, being thus but a
+comparatively small portion _of_ Ben, works by effort, rather than
+efficiency, and leaves the impression of ingenuity rather than
+inventiveness. But in his tragedies of "Sejanus" and "Catiline," and
+especially in his three great comedies of "The Fox," "The Alchymist," and
+"The Silent Woman," the whole man is thrust forward, with his towering
+individuality, his massive understanding, his wide knowledge of the baser
+side of life, his relentless scorn of weakness and wickedness, his vivid
+memory of facts and ideas derived from books. They seem written with his
+fist. But, though they convey a powerful impression of his collective
+ability, they do not convey a poetic impression, and hardly an agreeable
+one. His greatest characters, as might be expected, are not heroes or
+martyrs, but cheats or dupes. His most magnificent cheat is Volpone, in
+"The Fox"; his most magnificent dupe is Sir Epicure Mammon, in "The
+Alchymist"; but in their most gorgeous mental rioting in imaginary objects
+or sense, the effect is produced by a dogged accumulation of successive
+images, which are linked by no train of strictly imaginative association,
+and are not fused into unity of purpose by the fire of passion-penetrated
+imagination.
+
+Indeed, it is a curious psychological study to watch the laborious process
+by which Jonson drags his thoughts and fancies from the reluctant and
+resisting soil of his mind, and then lays them, one after the other, with a
+deep-drawn breath, on his page. Each is forced into form by main strength,
+as we sometimes see a pillar of granite wearily drawn through the street by
+a score of straining oxen. Take, for example, Sir Epicure Mammon's detail
+of the luxuries he will revel in when his possession of the philosopher's
+stone shall have given him boundless wealth. The first cup of Canary and
+the first tug of invention bring up this enormous piece of humor:--
+
+                      "My flatterers
+    Shall be the pure and gravest of divines
+    That I can get for money."
+
+Then another wrench of the mind, and, it is to be feared, another inlet of
+the liquid, and we have this:--
+
+    "My meat shall all come in in Indian shells,
+    Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded
+    With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies."
+
+Glue that on, and now for another tug:--
+
+                              "My shirts
+    I 'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light
+    As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment,
+    It shall be such as might provoke the Persian,
+    Were he to teach the world riot anew."
+
+And then, a little heated, his imagination is stung into action, and this
+refinement of sensation flashes out:--
+
+    "My gloves of fishes' and birds' skins perfumed
+    _With gums of Paradise and Eastern air_."
+
+And now we have an extravagance jerked violently out from his logical
+fancy:--
+
+    "I will have all my beds blown up, not stuffed;
+    Down is too hard."
+
+But all this patient accumulation of particulars, each costing a mighty
+effort of memory or analogy, produces no cumulative effect. Certainly, the
+word "strains," as employed to designate the effusions of poetry, has a
+peculiar significance as applied to Jonson's verse. No hewer of wood or
+drawer of water ever earned his daily wages by a more conscientious putting
+forth of daily labor. Critics--and among the critics Ben is the most
+clamorous--call upon us to admire and praise the construction of his
+plays. But his plots, admirable of their kind, are still but elaborate
+contrivances of the understanding, all distinctly thought out beforehand by
+the method of logic, not the method of imagination; regular in external
+form, but animated by no living internal principle; artful, but not
+artistic; ingenious schemes, not organic growths; and conveying the same
+kind of pleasure we experience in inspecting other mechanical contrivances.
+His method is neither the method of nature nor the method of art, but the
+method of artifice. A drama of Shakespeare may be compared to an oak; a
+drama by Jonson, to a cunningly fashioned box, made of oak-wood, with some
+living plants growing in it. Jonson is big; Shakespeare is great.
+
+Still we say, "O rare Ben Jonson!" A large, rude, clumsy, English force,
+irritable, egotistic, dogmatic, and quarrelsome, but brave, generous, and
+placable; with no taint of a malignant vice in his boisterous foibles; with
+a good deal of the bulldog in him, but nothing of the spaniel, and one
+whose growl was ever worse than his bite;--he, the bricklayer's apprentice,
+fighting his way to eminence through the roughest obstacles, capable of
+wrath, but incapable of falsehood, willing to boast, but scorning to creep,
+still sturdily keeps his hard-won position among the Elizabethan worthies
+as poet, playwright, scholar, man of letters, man of muscle and brawn; as
+friend of Beaumont and Fletcher and Chapman and Bacon and Shakespeare; and
+as ever ready, in all places and at all times, to assert the manhood of Ben
+by tongue and pen and sword.
+
+
+
+
+UNCHARITABLENESS.
+
+
+I hold society responsible for a great deal.
+
+I wondered once where all the disconsolate came from,--where all the human
+wrecks tossed up by the waves of misfortune received their injuries, and
+what became of those who sailed from port in early youth and were never
+heard of more. I marvelled, too, that there were so many unhappy bachelors,
+so many forlorn maids, so many neither wife nor maid; but at all these
+things I wonder no longer. I have solved the problem I set myself. Society
+makes them all.
+
+I am not going to analyze society to please any one. I make mine own.
+Hyacinth, I dare swear, makes his. Why shall I paint it? It is you, it is
+I, it is both of us, and many more. Can I sketch the figures in a
+kaleidoscope ere they change? If I could, I might say what society is or
+was. To-day members of circles marry, or are given in marriage. Disease
+comes and war decimates; foul tongues asperse, and the unity that was
+perfect is so no longer. The whole world is society, and I believe there
+was not so much confusion at the Tower of Babel after all. Men speak in
+different tongues, but their motives are the same in all climes.
+
+I love or I hate my Celtic friend. The sea rolls between us, but from afar
+the same sun warms us. If he does a good deed, I shall applaud it; or, if
+he is mean, shall I not smite him? The world looks on, and puts us all to
+the test alike. We love or we hate.
+
+Are there no Procrustean couches in these days? If my neighbor is too
+short, what shall I do but stretch him? if he is too long, I am the one who
+shall hack off his superfluous inches.
+
+Ah! believe me, sceptic, there is a mote in thine eye, but in mine there is
+no beam. It is I who am immaculate. "The king can do no wrong." I am a
+king unto myself; but, whether king or commoner, how lenient I am to my own
+faults,--how intensely alive to my neighbor's!
+
+If Kubla Khan decide to build his pleasure dome,--nay, if he but hint at
+it,--I set myself to wonder where he can possibly have obtained the funds.
+Not in commerce surely. Not in that vulgar little furnishing-store in which
+he has toiled early and late for twenty years. He is doubtless a spy of the
+government,--a detective of some kind; and, now that I recall it, he
+certainly was away some time during the Rebellion. In short, there are many
+ways by which he may have procured this money dishonestly. Rather than
+believe my neighbor quite honest and beyond reproach, I discuss the topic
+of his supposed fall from virtue with our mutual neighbors, until at last I
+bring them to the conclusion I have long ago arrived at, which is, if the
+truth were known, that Kubla Khan is no better than the law compels him to
+be.
+
+I do this, of course, solely from a regard for virtue, from a sense of
+duty. The times, I say in my discussions, are such that one must know his
+associates thoroughly; and so I believe, or profess to believe, K. K. to be
+a rogue rather than an honest, upright man.
+
+I have a right to my opinion, have I not? Most unquestionably. While this
+tongue and beard can wag, I will assert the privilege of free speech. But
+have I a right to traduce my neighbor? What business is it of mine if he
+has money, and sees fit to build a house with it? Am I his banker, that I
+give heed to his concerns? Why cannot I look on with delight, and even help
+select the site of the future edifice? All of his previous life has been
+blameless and without reproach; but now I suddenly discover that my
+neighbor is not trustworthy. Is this charity?
+
+Perhaps I do not touch upon Kubla Khan and his prospective chateau at all.
+My neighbors in the house adjoining engross my attention. Come! let us
+watch for the butcher and the baker, that we may see what our neighbors'
+fare is. I will engage that I can fix to a shilling the amount of their
+weekly bills. Such meanness are some people guilty of, that they live upon
+a sum that would not keep my boy in tarts. I am certain that our neighbors
+take ice but every other day in the summer, and if the milk they buy is not
+swill-fed, then I am no judge. The steaks are not porter-house, but
+rump-steaks. Last Saturday night I saw Pater-familias bring home a smoked
+shoulder,--not a _ham_, because that is much dearer; and--will it be
+believed?--the bonnets the girls wear are revamped from those of last year.
+Young Threadpaper dances attendance upon them, and I am sure of all low
+things a man milliner is the lowest. Two weeks ago Pater-familias rode down
+town with me, and I saw upon his shoe an immense patch, while his hat was
+so shiny, with frequent caressings from a silk handkerchief, that it seemed
+to be varnished and polished.
+
+His clothes are very unfashionable, too. He is invariably a year behind the
+style; and how can one respect a person who does not wear garments of the
+prevalent cut?
+
+There must be something mysterious about this man. If there is, I am the
+one to ferret it out. Let me see. His manner is reticent. From this I
+deduce the fact that he has at some time been a convict. All men who have
+been incarcerated are just so quiet. I was once in a jail in Massachusetts,
+with other persons, and one poor fellow, taking advantage of our presence,
+whispered to his neighbor, whereat the jailer swore awfully, and punished
+him; but the rest were very quiet, just like my neighbor. It is certainly
+suspicious.
+
+He is economical, too. Ah! that follows quite naturally. Remorse has seized
+him, and he is now endeavoring to pay off his indebtedness, or do something
+else which I cannot fathom just now; thus making his family suffer doubly
+for his misdeed.
+
+O, I cry in the pride of my heart, truly "the sins of the fathers are
+visited upon the children," and I not only fix the nature of my neighbor's
+transgression, but the very jail in which he was incarcerated.
+
+Fool and blind that I am! If I had but a tithe of that intuition I boast, I
+might have discerned that my neighbor was one of those rare individuals we
+sometimes read of in tracts, but seldom meet in the flesh,--one of those
+heroes who fight daily battles with trial, temptation, suffering, and
+privation in many shapes, that he may live honorably before men, and leave
+a heritage of honor to his children when he goeth to his long home. I might
+have seen that this man worked early and late without complaint, that he
+might pay debts his dead father incurred for his education, and that the
+poor decrepit old lady whom no physician can cure is his mother. She costs
+him a pretty penny for her support, I warrant me, and accuses him in her
+dotage with harboring a desire to get rid of her. What wonder if he is
+reticent to the world? Look in his eye. It is the eye of an honest man.
+Take his hand. 'T is a true palm, and many a beggar shall be refused at
+Dives's door, but not at his.
+
+But he is poor; he looks downcast. Come, let us beslime him with the breath
+of suspicion. Let us gossip about him. Let us look askance at him, and
+direct our children to avoid his,--when they play their little hour, to run
+swiftly past that wretched abode of silence.
+
+Silence! said I. Ah! that is a queer silence which reigns in my neighbor's
+dwelling. When he comes to his family there are shouts and laughter, and
+rosy-mouthed roisterers stand ready to pillage the plethoric pockets laden
+to the flaps with bananas and oranges he has starved himself to procure. I
+do not hear that he discusses his neighbor's affairs, or that he distils
+into his oolong one drop of bitter scandal by way of flavor. Nay, I am
+certain that I might lose five hundred dollars per diem, and the world
+would be none the wiser through him.
+
+So much for externals.
+
+How sharply we see things which have no existence! How quickly we discern
+faults in our neighbors, but how slow we are to find out our own!
+
+Now I look at it, there is a grievous rent in my neighbor's doublet; but
+look at mine own. How it fits! Is it not immaculate? I have a suit of
+character in which I am triply armed,--a coat of mail of reputation which I
+defy slander to pierce. The man who wrote
+
+    "He that is down need fear no fall,
+    He that is up no pride,
+    He that is humble ever shall
+    Have God to be his guide,"
+
+knew nothing about human nature. I fancy I could teach that genius a thing
+or two. The springs of human action are not concealed to me. Ah, no! I see
+them all, in my own conceit, and no mean motive of other people escapes me.
+
+But how shall my neighbor fare at my hands in argument? Well, I trust, if
+he agree with me. That is, provided he sees things as I do. If he sees the
+shield to be gold, and I see it so also, what sagacity he has! what
+judgment! "A man of fine talents," I say to my son. "See that you emulate
+him. Mark how quickly he grasps the same points that I did,--with what nice
+discrimination he avoids irrelevant matters, and treats only the main
+idea." Next to myself, I say in my heart, there is no one but my neighbor
+who could have solved this riddle so quickly.
+
+But let him dare to disagree with me,--let him say the shield is gold when
+I say it is silver, or brass if I like,--and what depth of stultification
+is too deep for him,--what pit of error too dark for him to stumble in? He
+is a sophisticator, a casuist; he chases every paltry side-issue until his
+brains are so muddled that he cannot tell what he does think; he is a mole,
+an owl, a bat; he is a blockhead, to boot.
+
+What! differ from _me_?--the idiot! I say the shield _is_ silver; how can
+it be gold? Is it not white? doth it not glisten? hath it not lustre? what
+else can it be?
+
+My neighbor suggests sportively that it is tin; whereupon I impugn my
+neighbor's good-sense; and that is a logical conclusion of the controversy.
+It does not occur to me that a man may differ in opinion from his fellows,
+and yet not be a convicted felon or a disturber of the peace. His views are
+his; foolish, perhaps, from my standpoint; yet, because he is not so wise
+as I, is he any the less entitled to courtesy, to consideration and
+charity,--is he the less a fond father, a patriot, or an honorable man? Why
+insist that of all the world I am sagest and always right?
+
+Why shall I break the images men set up? Iconoclast that I am, reflection
+would show me what long years ago my copy-book told me, _Humanum est
+errare_,--and that violence, intolerance, and discourtesy are poor weapons
+to fight prejudice and bigotry with. Come! let us throw them aside
+hereafter; let none be persecuted or derided in social circles for their
+opinions' sake. There are more forcible arguments than vituperation and
+personality, and if we cannot convince, let us be content.
+
+The world is made for all. When my Uncle Toby took the fly and let him out,
+he did as men should to others who differ in opinion. Go! I say to the
+sceptic, the world is wide enough for thee and me.
+
+At the commencement of this paper, I said it was no mystery where the
+disconsolate came from,--society made them; and I reassert it as my
+conviction that the supply is far ahead of the demand. I say too many in
+society are hollow and false, and not true to themselves, nor to the
+instinct planted in every human breast.
+
+By word or deed I convey to my _vis-a-vis_ in the crowded _salon_ my
+opinion that our host's daughter is a failure; the money spent upon her
+education is thrown away. She has no air, no manner, no tone. My
+_vis-a-vis_ understands me, and, taking her cue, goes to the cherished of
+her heart, and straightway repeats the slander, and we smile and smile and
+are villains.
+
+"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the Preacher," and I say after
+him, Is there nothing but nettles in the world's garden,--nothing but
+noxious weeds? Have we no traits and sentiments which are lofty and
+ennobling? Why cannot we see these and talk about them? But whoever went to
+a party where the guests talked of virtue?
+
+Here is Straitlace. His wife is in the country; he will therefore bear
+watching. Come! let us invent and suppose, let us pry and peek. Ah, ha! I
+see a letter,--a _billet-doux_, a delicately scented one, and he is so
+close to me in the cars that, by the merest accident I assure you, I am
+able to read the beginning,--"Dearest of my soul."
+
+There, that is quite enough. Dearest of her soul, indeed! Do wives begin
+letters in that way? Not many. Shocking! Dreadful! And then my comrades and
+I roll the sweet morsel under our tongues, when, after all, the model
+husband was only reading his model wife's letter.
+
+Or look at this phase of uncharitableness. What a happy faculty my
+countrymen have for finding out each other's business. I move into some
+country village, where a small but select community meet and agitate
+various topics for the moral regeneration of all. I am from the city, and
+therefore have some ways easily noticed. I am unquestionably "stuck up,"
+and am hardly settled in my place before a tea-party is held, not to do me
+honor, but to sit in inquest upon me and my family.
+
+Are our virtues discussed at the inquest? Have we any good qualities? Are
+we not almost outcasts? How we drawl our words, for example. We wear white
+skirts, when balmorals are good enough for most folks. We starve our
+children, too, because they get only bread and milk for tea, and no pies
+or cakes. In short, how very far below our neighbors we are in social
+standing!
+
+Go to, ye shallow dissemblers, retailers of scandal, disturbers of the
+peace! Leave _us_ in peace, and possess your souls in patience. We are
+human, and frail even as you are. We have faults and virtues. Why not
+extend the hand of friendship to us? Why not be courteous, instead of
+making us detest your presence,--instead of souring our tempers, and making
+us feel as though every one's hand was against us?
+
+There is that Abigail, whom I have often seen lounging at the next door
+below. She snuffeth scandal from afar. She heareth the whisperings and
+innuendoes of them that traffic in reputations, and she loseth little time
+ere she adorns the secret meetings of the conspirators with her presence.
+Away with her to the scaffold! she is chiefest among the malefactors. Offer
+her up a sacrifice to charity, and let none say nay!
+
+Suppose I stand by when the tale-bearer begins his monotonous song, what am
+I to lose by keeping silent, as he tears my neighbor to pieces?
+
+There were two maidens, saith the fable, one of whom was lovely to look
+upon, while the other was plain; but when the former spake, toads and
+serpents fell from her lips, while from the unlovely lips came diamonds and
+pearls. I know which I should have wooed, and I hope won, for I value more
+a quiet life than false lips and a tongue that speaketh lies.
+
+"Speech is silvern, but silence is golden." I shall be silent when the
+detractor begins his tale.
+
+    "Teach me to hide the faults I see,
+    And feel for others' woe,"
+
+saith the poet, and, though he may be accused of uttering a platitude, I
+subscribe to it. I am willing to forgive and forget, instead of enlarging
+upon all the flaws, all the weaknesses, of human nature. I shall not
+thunder on the roof of some hapless wretch who has stumbled, fallen by the
+wayside, and cry, "Come out! come out! thou villain, and do penance for
+thy sin." I will rather give him my hand and help him arise. I will set him
+up again, and I will back him against all takers that he never slips again.
+
+"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin," saith another poet; but he
+meant good, not bad nature, for he knew full well how to set communities by
+the ears with his sharp sayings.
+
+To-day it is the sister against her brother, the son against his father,
+and the world is so full of evil, if we might believe the scandal-mongers,
+that no good will ever exist again in it.
+
+"Let those who dance pay the piper," says Worldly-mindedness, and he
+chuckles as he says it for a sharp thing. But there are some who like
+dancing that have not the wherewithal, and to those I offer my purse. If a
+man fall down, I am not going to jump upon his back and jeer him. He has
+danced, and cannot pay now; but what of that? Some day he will.
+
+Here is one hand and one heart that shall never betray. Come to me, ye
+scandal-torn and society-ridden. Come to me, ye whom venomous tongues have
+harried, and ye whose characters hang in shreds about you, come also. Ye
+have faults, and so have I. Somewhere ye have good traits, and these are
+what I respect.
+
+Let us defy the "they-says," and as for those whose shibboleth is, "I have
+it upon good authority," we will give them the go-by.
+
+We will laugh to see the tribulation of them that sit in council, and hold
+foul revelry over their neighbors' shortcomings; they shall read of our
+resolutions, and there shall be no comfort in the cup of tea any more which
+Tabbies sip delectably, while they tear Miss Bright-eyes to pieces. There
+shall lurk a maggot in the shreds of dried beef which these modern ghouls
+rend, as they rend my fair name; and may the biscuits be as heavy upon
+their stomachs as tale-bearing shall one day be upon their consciences.
+
+_Thou shalt not bear false witness._
+
+If I am unlike you, gentle reader, guiltless of this crying sin, I know you
+will not condemn me, will not decry me, make little of me, or seek to
+poison men's minds against me. You will have that charity for me which is
+not puffed up; and where I err, or you are ignorant of my motive, hold your
+peace.
+
+To-day there are dear ones in exile, or in the bonds of sin, for this very
+practice. There are lives hopelessly lost to virtue, and others imbittered
+forever. Families are separated, and high hopes and aspirations crushed,
+while the fountains of affection which should be filled to the brim afford
+only a trickling stream, or, worse still, foul lees which never will
+subside. There are shadows in many homes, and empty chairs that never will
+be filled. The child on the floor misses its playfellow, the wife her
+husband, the mother her son, the betrothed her lover, and still the
+tale-bearers go upon their rounds, and their feet never, never rest.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROSE ROLLINS.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+There lived a few years ago in one of the small seaport towns of New
+England a solitary, friendless man, of the name of John Chidlaw,--a
+gray-headed, stoop-shouldered, hollow-chested person of about fifty years
+of age at the time our story begins. He was sober, steady, and industrious,
+and always had been so since his first appearance in the place, but somehow
+he never got ahead. He was thriftless, people used to say, and they got in
+the habit of calling him "Johnny," and then "Old Johnny," until nobody
+called him anything else, unless it were here and there some poor child or
+sympathetic woman, who said "Uncle Johnny," with that sort of gentle
+kindness that is never bestowed on the prosperous.
+
+He did not resent anything, even pity, but took his hard fortune as a
+matter of course, and the heavier the burden, why, the more he bent his
+shoulders, but he did not complain. Nobody had ever asked his history,--the
+history of a man who has patches at his knees, and whose elbows are out, is
+not, by those more fortunate persons who have no patches at their knees,
+and whose elbows are not out, generally supposed to be of an interesting
+character. John Chidlaw was, therefore, never bothered with questions.
+
+Could he lift a heavy log? Could he tend a saw-mill? Could he drive a team,
+or carry a hod of bricks? These, and the like, were the questions that were
+asked him mostly; and as he could say yes to any and all of these, and as
+people did not require him to say more, he seldom did say more, but lifted
+the log, or drove the team, as the case might be, in silence.
+
+He looked a good deal older than he was,--not that his head was so gray,
+and not that his shoulders bent so much, but the rather that there was an
+utter absence of buoyancy, an indurated and inflexible style and expression
+about the whole man, as if, in fact, he had been born old. You could not
+think of him as having ever been a boy, with cherry cheeks, and laughing
+eyes, and steps that were careless and fleet as the wind, but he had had
+his boyhood and his boyhood's dream, as will appear by and by.
+
+It had happened to him at one time that a saw had gone into his hand, and
+left a jagged and ugly scar across the back; another time it had happened
+that his horse had run away, upsetting his cart, and breaking one of his
+legs, so that he limped thereafter, and was disabled from some of the
+harder kinds of work he had been used to do. He had been dismissed by one
+and another, in consequence of his inability to make a full day's work, and
+was sitting one day on a pile of bricks in the outer edge of the town where
+he lived, quite down-hearted, and chewing, not the cud of sweet and bitter
+fancies, but, instead thereof, a bit of pine stick, which he held partly in
+and partly out of his mouth.
+
+His eyes looked solemnly out from under his gray eyebrows as now and then a
+whistling teamster drove by, throwing a whole cloud of hot, suffocating
+dust over him. Sometimes a pedler, or some stroller with a monkey on his
+shoulder and an organ on his back, would nod to him as he passed; but the
+pedler did not think of exhibiting his wares, nor the organman of grinding
+out a tune, or of setting his monkey to playing tricks, for the like of old
+Johnny. The sun was growing large toward the setting, and nothing had
+turned up, when all at once there was a wild whirl of wheels, and a crying
+and shouting and holding up of hands by all the men and boys along the
+road. A horse was running away. On he came, galloping furiously, while the
+old heavy-topped buggy to which he was attached rattled and creaked and
+swayed from side to side frightfully,--frightfully, because it was in
+imminent danger of being crushed all to pieces; and sitting still and
+solemnly upright, swaying with the buggy, and in imminent danger of being
+crushed to pieces too, was a child,--a beautiful little girl, with a cloud
+of yellow curls rippling down her bare shoulders. Her white dress fluttered
+in the wind, and her hat was swimming on the pond half a mile in the rear;
+but still she sat, sober and quiet as though she had been on her mother's
+knees, and not so much as puckering her pretty lip for all the tumult and
+fright.
+
+A dozen men were in the road, some with rails in their arms, with which
+they no doubt intended to intercept the mad creature; but the best
+intentions fail sometimes, and the men with rails in their arms threw them
+down, and got themselves out of the way, as soon as the danger came near
+them.
+
+John Chidlaw went into the road among the rest, but without a rail in his
+arms. He did not, however, get himself out of the way,--not he. He threw
+himself with might and main upon the neck of the frightened beast, and
+there he held, and was dragged along,--half the time, as it seemed, under
+his very feet.
+
+"That's you, Johnny!" "Go it!" "Good for you!" were the cheers and calls of
+encouragement that followed him. The horse was valuable, and he was in
+danger of breaking his neck; and what matter about John Chidlaw! He had no
+friends!
+
+He required not to be thus stimulated, if they had but known it: he had
+been stimulated sufficiently already, by the tossing hair and fair face of
+the little girl, to peril his life, and he was not the man to look back
+when he had his hand to the plough.
+
+The blood besmeared his face, and streamed down his neck, and wet his
+shirt-bosom and sleeves, and still the voices cried, "Hold on, Johnny!"
+They thought he was being battered to death, though the blood was from the
+mouth of the horse, for the entire weight of the man was being dragged by
+the bit.
+
+At the toll-gate an old woman ran out with a broom,--she could have shut
+the gate, but did not,--and when Johnny had stopped the horse, which he did
+a little farther on, she told him that but for his being in the way she
+could have stopped the beast at once, and that, if he was as badly battered
+as he seemed, she would be at the pains of getting the poor-house cart, and
+seeing that he was carted away! The old carriage was surrounded in a few
+minutes, and the child lifted out, and kissed and coaxed, and petted and
+praised, and fed with candies and cakes, and handed from the arms of one to
+another; and the feet and legs of the horse were carefully examined, and he
+was dashed with cool water, and combed and rubbed, and petted and patted,
+and given a variety of either grand or endearing names; but nobody looked
+after Johnny, and the only kindness shown him was that of the old woman
+with the broom.
+
+But even Fortune tires of frowning at last, and the time of her relenting
+toward John Chidlaw was at hand.
+
+He was washing the blood from his face in a wayside puddle, when the man
+who owned the horse and buggy came breathlessly up. "My good friend," he
+said, slapping him on the shoulder, "you have saved my child's life!" And
+then his hand slipped from shoulder to waist, and he positively hugged the
+astonished Johnny, who was almost awe-struck at first, for the hugger was
+well to do, and he that was hugged was exceeding poor, as the reader knows.
+
+"My name," he said, introducing himself, "is Hilton, David Hilton, and I
+keep the ferry at the lower end of the town; should n't wonder if I could
+put business in your way! You can turn your hand to a'most anything, I
+reckon,--a man of your build mostly can."
+
+A fortnight later, and John Chidlaw was the master of a little black
+sailboat not much bigger than a canoe, and his business was to carry
+butchers' meat, bread, poultry, and vegetables from the market-town in
+which he lived to the great hotels situated on the hills above the opposite
+shore. His boat had, therefore, in his eyes, somewhat the dignity of a
+merchantman; and as he was entitled to a part of the profits of the trade
+he carried on, he was at once a proud and a happy man. He had christened
+his boat "The Rose Rollins," and kept her as neat and trim as she could be.
+He wore a sailor's jacket, from professional pride, and used all the
+nautical phrases he could muster. His shoulders got the better of their
+stoop, and his chest of its hollowness, in a wonderfully short time; and
+one day, when he was asked about the scar on his hand, he answered that he
+had been bitten by a whale when he was a young man at sea. It will be
+perceived that he was gaining confidence, and growing in worldly wisdom.
+The questioner was a very timid person, but she said she guessed she could
+trust herself with an old sailor like that, and at once went aboard. She
+was a milliner, laden with boxes for the ladies in the opposite hotels, and
+was the first female passenger the master of the Rose had had;--for his
+legitimate trade was merchandise, and not the transportation of men and
+women; but occasionally, as his confidence grew, he had taken a passenger
+or two across the ferry, on his own hook, as he phrased it.
+
+"I took such a wiolent fancy to the name o' your wessel," says the
+milliner, "and that is how I come to take passage with you. Ain't she a
+nice little thing, though?"
+
+"Trim as a gal o' sixteen!" says John. "But had n't you better unlade
+yourself o' your merchandise, and fix to enjoy the sail some?"--and he
+began taking the boxes from her lap.
+
+"O sir, you 're wery good!" says the milliner, quite blushing. And then she
+adjusted her skirts, and flirted them about as she adjusted them, and then
+she untied her bonnet-strings and knotted them up again, for nothing in the
+world but the pleasure of tying knots in ribbon apparently; but John
+Chidlaw thought he had never in his life seen such a graceful and
+enchanting performance. He brought his jacket directly, and offered to
+spread it over the board on which she was sitting.
+
+"Oh, you 're wery good, wery good, I am sure, sir,--but I 'm a-givin' you
+too much trouble!"--and, saying so, she partly rose and allowed the seat to
+be cushioned as proposed. The wind caught the bright ribbons, and fluttered
+them in the man's face as he was thus employed.
+
+"Oh!" says the milliner, with a little start; and then she says, "The nasty
+winds have such a wulgar way of catchin' up a body's things"; and she pulls
+back the innocent strings and holds them against her bosom by main force.
+
+"Pray, miss, don't haul 'em round that way on my account; they did n't hurt
+me none! Why, I thought 't was a butterfly at fust, and then I thought 't
+was a hummin'-bird, and them was allers pleasin' things to me, both on
+'em."
+
+The woman was flattered. In the first place she was not young,--not much
+younger than he, in fact,--and he had addressed her as "miss"; and in the
+next place his comparing her ribbons to butterflies and humming-birds
+seemed the same as a personal compliment.
+
+"O Captain!" she says, coloring up, "did you think so, werily?"--and then
+she changes the subject, and talks about the appearance of the clouds, and
+the prospect of rain. "I suppose you old sailors can tell, purty much," she
+says, "whether it 's a-goin' to rain, or whether the clouds will ewaporate
+into mist; and I should really walue your judgment, for if my things
+should git wet, you see, it would cost me a wery considerable sum!"
+
+"I'll just take an obserwation!" says John; and he set his foot on a
+bread-basket, and cocked up one eye. He had never given the sound of _w_ to
+his _v_ before, but he had noticed that his fair passenger did so, and he
+adopted the pronunciation, partly in gallantry, partly because it struck
+him as elegant. While he was taking the observation, a bright thought came
+to him. "I guess we shall have foul weather afore long," says he. "When the
+clouds hev sich disjinted shapes as they hev this mornin', it 's generally
+portentous; but I can knock up a canvas kiver in a minute, and if it still
+looks like fur rain when we go into port, why, I would adwise you just to
+stay aboard,--it sha'n't cost you a cent more, not if you make a dozen
+trips!"
+
+"I 'm sure I 'm wery much obliged, Captain, and I 'll take your adwice when
+we come to port, and if the weather still looks wacillating, I won't wenter
+ashore. It would n't be worth while to risk my goods,--some of 'em welwets,
+too, of great walue!"
+
+"The keepin' on 'em aboard sha'n't cost you nothin'," says John, "if that
+'ll be any object to you."
+
+He wished to convey the idea, that, to a person of her fabulous wealth,
+dealing in velvets and the like, a fare more or less could not possibly be
+an object, and at the same time to show a magnanimous disposition on his
+own part.
+
+"Money is money," says the milliner, "there is no denying of that; and it
+has its adwantages, on account o' which I set a certain walue upon it; but
+just for its own sake I can't say that I do walue it,--not over and above!"
+
+"I hev n't hed no great on 't," says John, "but I 've hed enough, sense I
+'ve come into business, to know that if I hed to keep it a-chinkin' into my
+pocket I should n't value it much."
+
+Then he corrected himself, and said _walue_.
+
+"I 'll tell you how money is waluable to me," says the milliner, "if I may
+wenter so far?"
+
+"Most certainly!" exclaimed John. "You could n't venter nothin' that would
+n't be to your credit,--I 'll vouch a fippenny bit on that!"
+
+Then he repeated himself, substituting _wenter_, and _wouch_, in the places
+of the words previously used.
+
+"Dear me! I should become wain o' myself if I thought your compliment was
+walid," says the milliner, dropping her eyes; but the next moment she gives
+her bonnet-strings a little flirt, and goes on in the sprightliest way
+about a hundred trifles,--one of which had no connection with another.
+
+"You 've forgot what you sot out on!" says John, interrupting her at last;
+"and you kerried me away so, I was a-forgittin' on 't too. Howsever, it 's
+no odds, as I know on,--you make whatever you touch so interestin'!"
+
+"O Captain! how you do warnish me up! I shall certainly wacate the premises
+when we come to port, if you don't stop sich things!--that is, if there's a
+single westige o' clear sky. But we were talking of the walue of money, was
+n't we?" She cast down her eyes again, and spoke with a sweet seriousness.
+"I walue money," she says, "when I see I can make another happy with it."
+And then she says her lot in life has been a wery lonely and sad
+one,--wersatile, but on the whole lonely, sometimes to the wery werge of
+despair!
+
+"You don't say?" says John. "I certainly should n't 'a' thought it
+possible! Why, you don't mean to say you 've allers been alone in the
+world?"
+
+Then she tells him how she thought she fell in love, at seventeen, with a
+green-grocer that turned out to be a miserable wagabond, inwesting all her
+earnings in whiskey and rum, and drinking them himself.
+
+"The villain!" cried John;--and then, finding that he had not done justice
+to his feelings, he repeated, with great stress of indignation, "The
+willain! the black-hearted willain! But he never dared to lay
+violent--wiolent, I mean--hands onto you!"
+
+"Dear me, how my heart wibrates!" says the woman,--"not so much with the
+memory of what I have suffered as that--that anybody should manifest such
+a--such a wery kind feeling toward me now!"
+
+"How anybody that seen you should 'a' helpt from doin' on 't," says the
+boatman, "is awful curus to me!"
+
+"Law mercy, how selfish I am, never offering you a seat all this while!"
+says the artful woman. And she hitched along, and smoothed out the jacket.
+
+"Well, whatever your trouble 's been," says John, "I hope your red on 't!"
+
+It was an ingenious method of saying he hoped the vagabond was out of the
+way.
+
+He turned toward her as he spoke, and the wind once more fluttered the gay
+ribbons in his face. She lifted her hand to draw them back. "Don't you be
+a-mindin' on 'em," says John; "they're just as sweet as rose-leaves, and I
+like to hev em a-blowin' over me so."
+
+You may smile, reader, if you will, but you would not smile if you had seen
+the soul yearning in the eyes of the man, if you had heard the pleading in
+the sad sincerity of his tone. He was fifty years old now, and I dare say a
+woman's ribbon had never touched him till then. He was wrinkled and gray,
+and old to look upon, but his heart in its tender sentiment was as fresh
+and young as a boy's.
+
+So, with the ribbons fluttering on his cheek, and his boat drifting as it
+would, John Chidlaw listened to the story of the woman's life, and as
+Desdemona loved the Moor for the dangers he had passed, so he loved her for
+the sorrows she had borne.
+
+"Yes, Captain," she says, "my troubles is over now, pretty much. I've been
+a widder this ten year,"--(he hitched a little closer,)--"I 've been a
+widder, and I 've had peace o' mind, and I 've laid up money; but, law me
+when a body has nobody to lay up for, what 's the use?"
+
+"Sure enough, what is the use on 't?" says John.
+
+"Why, it's no use," she answers; "it's wanity and wexation! that's what it
+is!"
+
+"Wanity and wexation!" he repeats.
+
+And then she says, if anybody had ever showed a warm heart toward her, she
+'d 'a' been a different woman to what she is.
+
+"A different woman!" says John. "How different to what you be?" He could
+not conceive of the possibility of a difference for the better.
+
+"Why, I would 'a' been ten year younger and ten year smarter," says the
+widow, "and then may be somebody might 'a' took a notion to me! Who knows?
+We women never cease to hope, you know!"
+
+"And hev n't they, as 't is?" says John, eagerly bending toward her.
+
+"What a saucy Captain you are, to ask me such questions!"--and she put him
+gently back with her white hand. "But here we are almost ashore!"--and she
+began gathering up her band-boxes and paper parcels with great energy.
+
+"I thought you said you was a-goin' to take my advice?" says John, with a
+soft reproach in his voice.
+
+"Did I? O, then I will!" she answers, with the most innocent air possible,
+and leaning quite across his knee to replace one of her boxes. "What is
+your adwice, now? But you must bear in mind the walue of the welwets. I 've
+one bonnet in the lot, of a wermilion color, that's worth a wast deal; and
+you know welwet, when it 's once wet, looks just like a drownded cat. No
+dressing can make anything of it. Some ladies wears it, but _my_ ladies
+does n't."
+
+"I never knew clouds look like them," says John, "when it did n't pour;
+and, if you take my adwice, you 'll stay just where you be."
+
+"I 'll take your adwice," says the widow, touching his hand lightly with
+her soft fingers, and smiling upon him with that unpremeditated coquetry
+that always makes a woman charming. It was especially charming to this
+man, for no woman had ever smiled upon him like that; and then to think
+she had asked and accepted his advice, withal! It was enough to turn his
+head, and it did.
+
+"I'll take your adwice, Captain," she says, "and keep the welwets dry, for
+it would cost a pretty penny to replace that wermilion, to be sure! I shall
+lose some time by it; and time is money. But what 's money but wanity and
+wexation, when nobody has a warm heart toward us?"
+
+John Chidlaw sighed a long, long sigh, and then he turned his boat about
+and they sailed back again. By and by, as if to push him toward his fate,
+there flashed down a few big drops of rain. The sun was shining all the
+while, but he bestirred himself, and worked with a will, and the widow lent
+her little hindering help, and directly the canvas was spread and securely
+drawn down, and they were sitting beneath it, side by side, cosey as could
+be. She became more communicative now, and told him in what street she was
+born and who her father was.
+
+"What! not ---- Street, of our town here? And your father's name Peter
+Rollins, too?"
+
+"Yes, Peter Rollins, coffin-maker, satin-lined and silver-screwed! The wery
+tiptop. None but quality come to him. When I was a little girl, I used to
+get into 'em, when we played hide and seek. Why, if you believe me, I 've
+been into many a hundred-dollar one, and had my head into the satin piller
+of it! That's the way I happened to cultiwate a taste for satins and
+welwets and the like, I guess."
+
+She did not heed the intimation of her companion that he had known her
+father, but went on for half an hour without once stopping to take breath.
+
+"Ah, Captain," she says, "I 've been dethroned in the world! I was born to
+riches and a proud position, but I married beneath me, a poor green-grocer
+that turned out a wagabond; and in my trials with him, I lost all my good
+looks; for I may say, without wanity, that I was good-looking in my
+girlish days, and lost all my wiwacity, and come to be the sober, staid
+old woman you see me."
+
+"Old woman, to be sure!" says John. "Why, nobody would think o' callin' you
+old. You look a'most like a girl o' sixteen to me!"
+
+"O Captain!" says the widow; and then she says his sight must be failing,
+though his eyes do look so uncommon bright; and then she says, with a
+little sigh, that she is upwards of forty.
+
+She had observed John's wrinkled face, and her confession was not without
+method, though she might have added five to the forty years, if she had
+chosen to be very accurate.
+
+"Up'ards o' forty!" says John, charmed alike with her sincerity and her
+well-preserved beauty. "Why, I snum, you might marry a man o' twenty-five
+any day, if you had a mind."
+
+"Ah, Captain, but I have n't the mind. I want a man--that is, if I ever
+wenter to marry agin--who is older than myself,--say from ten to fifteen
+year older. I would n't be so wery particular." And then she says to
+John,--for a possibility crosses her mind,--"Does your family live
+hereabouts?"
+
+John blushed up to his eyes. "Family!" says he. "I never was so fortinate
+as to hev one."
+
+"Not even a wife, to be sure?"
+
+"No, miss." And then he says he never expects to hev one.
+
+"Law, Captain, why? if I may wenter."
+
+"Cause nobody 'd hev me, miss; and to say truth, I never thought on 't much
+till sense we 've been a-takin' this voyage"; and he glanced at her slyly,
+and touched the ends of her ribbon.
+
+"And what could 'a' put it into your head now, Captain Chidlaw?"
+
+"Can you ask me that in airnest?" says John, still holding the ribbons as
+for dear life. "Then I must tell you to just look into the glass, and you
+'ll see what."
+
+"O Captain, you ought to be ashamed to plague a poor lone woman like me
+that way; it 's wery bad of you, wery, and I 've a great mind to box your
+ears!" and she put out her little hand to him in a sweetly menacing manner.
+
+John seized the hand and kissed it, and then, frightened at himself, ran to
+the other end of the boat and looked hard at the clouds.
+
+"O, come back! come back!" screamed the widow; "the boat 'll upset, with me
+at one end and you at the other!"
+
+"Sure enough!" says John, and he went sheepishly back, and again seated
+himself by her side.
+
+She gave him a little tap on the ear, and asked him if he would promise
+never to run away and frighten her so again.
+
+John said he would promise her anything in the world that was in his power
+to grant; and he looked at her with such adoration that the woman overcame
+the coquette, or the coquette the woman,--which shall I say?--and she went
+as far from the "dangerous edge of things" as possible, and told him
+demurely that the only promise she exacted was, that he should listen to
+the long and techin' story of her life. It all came back upon her, and she
+felt as if she must tell it to somebody. "May be, though, you don't want to
+hear it?" says she.
+
+"May be I don't want to hear it! How can you?" says John, edging up. And
+she began:--
+
+"I told you, Captain, that I had been dethroned, and I have,--wilely
+dethroned, and brought low, by my own woluntary act."
+
+"Dear heart!" says John, "so much the worse, if it was woluntary, so few
+pities you."
+
+"Ah, that 's it," says the widow; "nobody pities me,--nobody in the wide
+world has got a warm heart toward me." She broke quite down, and the tears
+came to her eyes.
+
+"What may your name be?" says John, seizing both her hands and gazing
+tenderly in her face.
+
+"Why do you ask? I 'm but a transient wisitor to your boat; you can't have
+no interest in me; and, besides, my name is hateful to me."
+
+"But I must call you somethin'!"
+
+"Well, then, inwent a name. My maiden name reminds me of the royal hours
+when my father's position gave me rank, and before the wicissitudes of
+fortune brought me low; I cannot therefore consent to be called by that;
+and my married name is the name of a wagabond, and I despise it. O sir,
+inwent a name, for mercy's sake!"
+
+"I 'll inwent it for love's sake," says John, slipping his arm round her
+waist, and drawing her close to him; "and I 'll call you my dove, coz you
+see you 've got all the timidity and gentleness o' that lovely bird, and
+your voice is sweeter than the turtle's, I 'm sure."
+
+"O Captain, my woice is n't a nice woice now-a-days,--my woice went with
+the rest of my attractions when I was dethroned. I had a nice woice once.
+If we could have met then!"
+
+"My dove!" says John, "whatever your woice hes ben, I would n't hev it no
+sweeter than what it is now; it kerries me back to the years that hed hope
+in 'em,--the years when I was a boy, and in love."
+
+"Say no more," says the widow; "my heart already tells me that you love
+another,"--and she began to pout.
+
+"Lord bless us!" says John; "our boat is aground. I was so took up with
+you, Rose, that I did n't see she was driftin' down stream, and here we be,
+high and dry, and a storm a-comin' on; but you can't blame me so ha'shly,
+my dear Rose, as what I blame myself. Can you forgive me?"
+
+"Forgive you?" cries the widow, reproachfully. "Can you forget that I am an
+undertaker's daughter?"
+
+This speech did not convey any very clear meaning to the mind of John
+Chidlaw; but he attributed that to his own dulness, and as this struck him
+as being very great, somehow or other, though he could not tell how, he
+bowed his head in shamefaced silence.
+
+In spite of what he had said about being in love in his youth, the widow
+took great courage. He had said "our boat" instead of "my boat," and he
+had called her Rose,--her real name,--how should he know that? She could
+not tell, but somehow she augured favorably from it; besides, they were
+aground, and must wait for the rising of the tide, and in the intervening
+time who knew what might be done? She would tell all her story; and its
+pathos, she fancied, must subjugate the most obdurate heart.
+
+"Yes," she renewed, "I am, or rather was, an undertaker's daughter, with
+the most brilliant prospects before me that ever allured a wile wagabond of
+a fortune-hunter, for such he was who stole me from the satin pillers my
+young head had played among, and give me a piller of husks, and cold
+wittles, and wulgar lodgings."
+
+"The wretch!" cries John. "The wile wretch! if he yet lived, I would wow
+myself to wengeance!" And, like Jacob of old, he lifted up his voice and
+wept.
+
+"Don't take on so," says the widow. "I would not cause you a moment's
+sorrow for the world."
+
+"To think any man should have abused the like o' you!" says John. "But
+surely he never laid wiolent hands ont' you? I think I shall lose my senses
+if you say that."
+
+"Then I won't say it," says the widow, tenderly stroking his hand.
+
+"That touch is wivifying," says John; "so, dear Rose, you may go on and
+tell the wust on 't."
+
+Then the widow came to the worst; for after all the trials she had with the
+old wagabond, she said, she could have put up with him but for one nasty
+habit,--he walked into his sleep! "And now a man that walks into his
+sleep," says she, "is a trial and a torment to his wife which there is no
+tongue can tell it."
+
+"Ah, to be sure," says John, "you ought to hev been divorced, and to have
+recovered big damages into the bargain. To think that the willain dared to
+walk into his sleep, and frighten a poor timid dove like you! But the
+hearts o' some does seem manufactured o' flints, and his'n was one on 'em,
+I guess."
+
+"Yes, as you say wisely, some is flint," says the widow; "but then some is
+n't!" And she dropped her eyes, and gave his hand a confiding little
+squeeze. And then she says that, once married, diworce is n't got for the
+asking,--"you are tied for good and all." And then she says, that brings
+her to the p'int.
+
+"To be dethroned was bad enough," says she; "and then to see my royal
+dowery conwerted into whiskey, which it was dewoured by him, the same being
+took continual; but what was most intolerable of all was that he walked
+into his sleep! I tried every way to contrawene the wile habit that could
+be inwented. I coaxed and I scolded, and I got up late, and I give him hot
+winegar with a little whiskey into it,--he would swaller anything that had
+a drop of whiskey into it,--and I prewailed on him to sing psalms, and,
+that failing, I prewailed onto him to inwest into a wiolin and play onto
+that till late into the midnight, thinking by that means his witality would
+be exhausted, and he would lie into his bed like any other man; but lo and
+behold! he inwested into the wiolin a-Monday, and a-Monday night he played
+till along towards ten o'clock, and I got clean wore out, and, says I, 'Do
+leave off playing onto that wiolin,' says I, 'for my head aches like all
+possess'; and with that he up and went to bed, and after a while I hears
+something fingering the latch, and I riz onto my elbow, and says, in a
+whisper, 'Dan'l, there 's a man a-trying to break in, as sure as you 're
+alive!' He did n't answer, and thinks says I, the wiolin has done it, and
+he is a-sleeping with a wengeance, and then I feels along, and says I,
+'Dan'l, Dan'l!' but still no answer; then I felt for the piller, and there
+was no head onto it, and I scraped a match, and it went out, and I scraped
+another, and it went out, and I scraped another, and a leetle blue flame
+just started and flickered, and before I could see what it was a-fumbling
+at the door, _it_ went out. Thinks says I, I 'll make sure work now; and I
+took two of the nasty things into my hand and scraped so hard I crushed
+them all up together, and they flashed out and seared my finger-ends and
+burnt a hole into my nightgownd-sleeve, and, seeing I was like to burn up,
+I slapped my arm with all my might, and at last I slapped the flame down,
+and at last, by persewerance, I slapped it out; and yet I had n't seen a
+thing, but I could feel the hole into my nightgownd-sleeve, and my arm all
+burnt into a light blister. 'Dan'l!' says I again; but Dan'l did n't
+answer, and then I was full sure it was him, and I scraped with a steadier
+hand, and the match--it was one of them nasty lucifers, may be you know--"
+
+"Yes, I 've heerd tell on 'em," says John.
+
+And the wretched woman went on: "It was one of them nasty lucifers, and it
+choked me so I could not find the candle; and though I could just see a
+ghostly object at the door, I could not tell at all whether it was Dan'l or
+not, for he never looked like himself when he walked into his sleep; and
+the match--they are nothing but splinters, you know--was burning closer and
+closer to my fingers, and I just dabs it wiolently into the washbowl, and
+puts it out. And then says I, 'Dan'l! Dan'l!' again; and this time he
+answers, and says he, 'You wixen,' says he, 'shut up your mouth!'
+
+"There was no mistaking that, and all in the dark I wentered after him, and
+grabbed and ketched him by the end of his neck-tie, and hild with all my
+might; and at that he began to wociferate at the top of his woice, and,
+thinks says I, better than rouse all the neighbors and have them broke o'
+their rest, I 'll just let him go and walk into his sleep till he 's
+satisfied. I took the key out of the door, and then I tried to find my way
+back, for, thinks says I, I 'll retire and take my rest anyhow, and, if you
+believe it, I was so turned round I could n't find the piller! So I went
+feeling here and there, and every minute I come back to him, and every time
+I touched him he wociferated at the top of his woice; and then I 'd say,
+'Dan'l, it was n't woluntary!' and then I 'd feel and feel by the chairs
+and the wall, and by one thing and another, as a body will when they can't
+see, and the first thing I 'd know I 'd be right back to him agin. My
+blistered arm, meantime, was a-burning like fire, but, thinks says I, it 's
+no use, I can 't find the water-pitcher, I 'm so turned round; and I just
+sot down where I was, and there I sot till daylight, blowing all my breath
+away onto my arm, and the minute I could see I made for the pitcher; but,
+happening to take it by the snout instead of the handle, away it went, and
+spilt all the water, and broke the pitcher past all mending,--and a fine
+pitcher, too!--one that my own father give me in cholera times, when his
+business was at the best."
+
+"I declare," says John Chidlaw, "it 's enough to make a body's blood run
+cold!" And then he says he does n't wonder she 's agin matrimony!
+
+Now the widow had said nothing of the sort, and stoutly protested that she
+had not, but that, on the contrary, she thought it an adwantage to any
+woman to be married, prowided she could find an indiwidual that had a warm
+heart toward her; to which John replied that she had found such a one; and
+she answered, "How you do go on!" and resumed her story.
+
+"Well, a-Tuesday night he took to the wiolin again, and played and played
+and played and played all the old dancing tunes in creation, and I sot by
+and never said a word till 'leven o'clock come, and then till twelve
+o'clock come, and then till one o'clock come, and then till two o'clock
+come, and at last, thinks says I, my brain will go wild, and says I,
+'Dan'l, I ain't a bit sleepy, but I do feel some as if I could go to sleep
+if you 'd just keep on a-playing; I 've got kind o' used to it, and I don't
+believe I can go to sleep without it.' With this he flung the wiolin into
+the cradle,--my father had presented me with a cradle that he had made out
+of some boards that had been used once and rejected on account of knots,
+but just as good, you know,--and then he flounced into bed, and he never
+walked into his sleep that night!"
+
+"You cunnin' little thing!" cries John, overcome with her smartness, and
+hugging her close. "Who but you would ever 'a' thought on 't? Such a sleek
+deception!"
+
+"Well, a-Wednesday night he would n't touch his wiolin, and that night, or
+rather along towards morning, he walked into his sleep, and a-Thursday
+night he would n't play a stroke agin; in wain I put the wiolin into his
+sight; and that night he just dewoted himself to walking,--making himself
+wisible to the neighbors, even. So thinks says I, this won't do; and
+a-Friday night, says I, I says to him, says I, 'I hate the old wiolin,'
+says I; 'and I 've a good notion to burn it up!'
+
+"'You just wenter!' says he, and he takes it up and slants it agin his
+shoulder, and turns his head kind a sideways, all the time a-keeping his
+eye onto me, and he seesaws and seesaws till I falls asleep into my chair,
+and then he seesaws and seesaws till I wakes and rubs my eyes, and still
+his head is kind a sideways, and his wiolin agin his shoulder, aslant like,
+just as if he had n't moved; and then I pertends to sleep, and I pertends
+and pertends and pertends, and at last pertence is clear wore out, and I
+wakes up like, and I says, says I, 'Dan'l, it must be a'most ten o'clock,
+ain't it?'--I knew it was daylight. And all at once his wisage changed, and
+the wiolin fairly dropt from his shoulder, and he hild up his head that had
+been kind a sideways all that while, and went to bed peaceable as a lamb,
+he did, and for the rest of the night he did n't walk into his sleep at
+all!"
+
+"You angel!" says John,--"to get round him so."
+
+"Just wait," says the widow; "there's something a-coming that 'll make you
+open your eyes. A-Saturday night says I, 'I feel like dancing,' says I;
+'so, Dan'l, give us one of your liveliest tunes!' and with that I began to
+hop about like a lark. Of course he was took in, and the wiolin was n't
+touched; but O how he did walk into his sleep! Wisible to everybody! In
+wain I argued that walking into sleep was wulgar, in wain I coaxed, and in
+wain I cried,--though tears will sometimes prewail when nothing else will,
+that is, if they ain't too woluntary. Some women seems to shed 'em
+woluntary, and then they are not so prewailing, which it was never my case,
+Captain, never! I cried for sheer spite and for nothing else; it was always
+the way with me, especially after I was dethroned; and when tears did n't
+prewail, thinks says I, I must take adwice, which I took it,--adwice here
+and adwice there,--and one adwised one thing and one another; but the
+adwice I took was adwice that it liked to have landed me where I never
+should have seen the light of this blessed day, nor seen, nor seen, nor
+seen--you!"
+
+John put both arms round her instead of one, and held her fast, lest she
+might vanish like a phantom.
+
+"You seem so like a sweet wision of the night!" he said. And then he asked
+her what was the wicious adwice.
+
+"I do feel as if I 'd wanish, sure enough," says the widow, "if it was n't
+for your wine-like arms a-holding me up so nice, for I never can repeat
+this part of my sufferings without being quite wanquished,--just a leetle
+closer, if you please; now your shoulder, so that it will catch my head if
+it should happen to fall. You have wisely called the adwice which I was
+adwised to wicious," says she; "but what will you say when you hear the
+adwice which I was adwised? Nerve yourself up, Captain, but don't let go of
+me, not the least bit, I am so liable to be wanquished by my feelings.
+There, that 'll do,--the dear knows it 's all because of my fear. Well,
+the adwice I was adwised was, as you wisely said, wicious,--indeed it was
+wery wicious,--and yet the woman that she adwised the adwice was a woman of
+wast experience,--the wife of a wiolent drinker, and the mother of fourteen
+children. More than this, her father had been constable once, and she wore
+French thread-lace altogether! Would you suppose, Captain, considering her
+adwantages, especially as regards her father and her laces, that she could
+have adwised me with adwice that it was unadwisable?"
+
+"No, I should n't a-dreampt on 't," says the Captain; "but what was the
+adwice that she adwised you that warn't adwisable?"
+
+"I really can't get my consent to tell," says the widow, "now that I 've
+sot out, for I never expected to reweal it to anybody, unless it was
+to--well, to some one that either was, or was like to be, my husband. Dear
+me, I've undertook too much!"
+
+"There," says the enraptured lover; "now can't you go on?"
+
+"I don't know," says the widow, blushing, but not withdrawing her cheek.
+
+"Try, for my sake!" says the Captain, "it 's so interestin'. You 've
+undertook a good deal, but whatever consarns you consarns me."
+
+"Well, I won't wacillate no more,--not if it plagues you!" And the widow
+looked fondly in his face, and then, quite supporting herself upon his arm,
+she drooped her eyelids modestly and resumed.
+
+
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT.
+
+
+There is an American lady living at Hartford, in Connecticut, whom the
+United States has permitted to be robbed by foreigners of $200,000. Her
+name is Harriet Beecher Stowe. By no disloyal act has she or her family
+forfeited their right to the protection of the government of the United
+States. She pays her taxes, keeps the peace, and earns her livelihood by
+honest industry; she has reared children for the service of the
+Commonwealth; she was warm and active for her country when many around her
+were cold or hostile;--in a word, she is a good citizen.
+
+More than that: she is an illustrious citizen. The United States stands
+higher to-day in the regard of every civilized being in Christendom because
+she lives in the United States. She is the only woman yet produced on the
+continent of America to whom the world assigns equal rank in literature
+with the great authoresses of Europe. If, in addition to the admirable
+talents with which she is endowed, she had chanced to possess one more,
+namely, the excellent gift of plodding, she had been a consummate artist,
+and had produced immortal works. All else she has,--the seeing eye, the
+discriminating intelligence, the sympathetic mind, the fluent word, the
+sure and happy touch; and these gifts enabled her to render her country the
+precise service which it needed most. Others talked about slavery: she made
+us _see_ it. She showed it to us in its fairest and in its foulest aspect;
+she revealed its average and ordinary working. There never was a fairer nor
+a kinder book than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; for the entire odium of the
+revelation fell upon the Thing, not upon the unhappy mortals who were born
+and reared under its shadow. The reader felt that Legree was not less, but
+far more, the victim of slavery than Uncle Tom, and the effect of the book
+was to concentrate wrath upon the system which tortured the slave's body
+and damned the master's soul. Wonderful magic of genius! The hovels and
+cotton-fields which this authoress scarcely saw she made all the world see,
+and see more vividly and more truly than the busy world can ever see remote
+objects with its own unassisted eyes. We are very dull and stupid in what
+does not immediately concern us, until we are roused and enlightened by
+such as she. Those whom we call "the intelligent," or "the educated," are
+merely the one in ten of the human family who by some chance learned to
+read, and thus came under the influence of the class whom Mrs. Stowe
+represents.
+
+It is not possible to state the amount of good which this book has done, is
+doing, and is to do. Mr. Eugene Schuyler, in the preface to the Russian
+novel which he has recently done the public the service to translate,
+informs us that the publication of a little book in Russia contributed
+powerfully to the emancipation of the Russian serfs. The book was merely a
+collection of sketches, entitled "The Memoirs of a Sportsman"; but it
+revealed serfdom to the men who had lived in the midst of it all their
+lives without ever seeing it. Nothing is ever _seen_ in this world, till
+the searching eye of a sympathetic genius falls upon it. This Russian
+nobleman, Turgenef, noble in every sense, saw serfdom, and showed it to his
+countrymen. His volume was read by the present Emperor, and _he_ saw
+serfdom; and he has since declared that the reading of that little book was
+"one of the first incitements to the decree which gave freedom to thirty
+millions of serfs." All the reading public of Russia read it, and _they_
+saw serfdom; and thus a public opinion was created, without the support of
+which not even the absolute Czar of all the Russias would have dared to
+issue a decree so sweeping and radical.
+
+We cannot say as much for "Uncle Tom's Cabin," because the public opinion
+of the United States which permitted the emancipation of the slaves was of
+longer growth, and was the result of a thousand influences. But when we
+consider that the United States only just escaped dismemberment and
+dissolution in the late war, and that two great powers of Europe were only
+prevented from active interference on behalf of the Rebellion by that
+public opinion which "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had recently revived and
+intensified, we may at least believe, that, if the whole influence of that
+work could have been annihilated, the final triumph of the United States
+might have been deferred, and come only after a series of wars. That book,
+we may almost say, went into every household in the civilized world which
+contained one person capable of reading it. And it was not an essay; it was
+a vivid exhibition;--it was not read from a sense of duty, nor from a
+desire to get knowledge; it was read with passion; it was devoured; people
+sat up all night reading it; those who could read read it to those who
+could not; and hundreds of thousands who would never have read it saw it
+played upon the stage. Who shall presume to say how many soldiers that book
+added to the Union army? Who shall estimate its influence in hastening
+emancipation in Brazil, and in preparing the amiable Cubans for a similar
+measure? Both in Cuba and Brazil the work has been read with the most
+passionate interest.
+
+If it is impossible to measure the political effect of this work, we may at
+least assert that it gave a thrilling pleasure to ten millions of human
+beings,--an innocent pleasure, too, and one of many hours' duration. We may
+also say, that, while enjoying that long delight, each of those ten
+millions was made to see, with more or less clearness, the great truth that
+man is not fit to be trusted with arbitrary power over his fellow. The
+person who afforded this great pleasure, and who brought home this
+fundamental truth to so many minds, was Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Hartford,
+in the State of Connecticut, where she keeps house, educates her children,
+has a book at the grocery, and invites her friends to tea. To that American
+woman every person on earth who read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" incurred a
+personal obligation. Every individual who became possessed of a copy of the
+book, and every one who saw the story played in a theatre, was bound, in
+natural justice, to pay money to her for service rendered, unless she
+expressly and formally relinquished her right,--which she has never done.
+What can be clearer than this? Mrs. Stowe, in the exercise of her vocation,
+the vocation by which she lives, performs a professional service to ten
+millions of people. The service is great and lasting. The work done is
+satisfactory to the customer. What can annul the obligation resting upon
+each to render his portion of an equivalent, except the consent of the
+authoress "first had and obtained"? If Mrs. Stowe, instead of creating for
+our delight and instruction a glorious work of fiction, had contracted her
+fine powers to the point of inventing a nutcracker or a match-safe, a
+rolling-pin or a needle-threader, every individual purchaser could have
+been compelled to pay money for the use of her ingenuity, and everybody
+would have thought it the most natural and proper thing in the world so to
+do. There are fifty American inventions now in use in Europe from which the
+inventors derive revenue. _Revenue!_--not a sum of money which, once spent,
+is gone forever, but that most solid and respectable of material blessings,
+a sum per annum! Thus we reward those who light our matches. It is
+otherwise that we compensate those who kindle our souls.
+
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin," like every other novelty in literature, was the
+late-maturing fruit of generations. Two centuries of wrong had to pass,
+before the Subject was complete for the Artist's hand, and the Artist
+herself was a flower of an ancient and gifted family. The Autobiography of
+Lyman Beecher has made known this remarkable family to the public. We can
+all see for ourselves how slowly and painfully this beautiful genius was
+nourished,--what a narrow escape it had from being crushed and extinguished
+amid the horrors of theology and the poverty of a Connecticut
+parsonage,--how it was saved, and even nurtured, by that extraordinary old
+father, that most strange and interesting character of New England, who
+could come home, after preaching a sermon that appalled the galleries, and
+play the fiddle and riot with his children till bedtime. A piano found its
+way into the house, and the old man, whose geniality was of such abounding
+force that forty years of theology could not lessen it, let his children
+read Ivanhoe and the other novels of Sir Walter Scott. Partly by chance,
+partly by stealth, chiefly by the force of her own cravings, this daughter
+of the Puritans obtained the scanty nutriment which kept her genius from
+starving. By and by, on the banks of the Ohio, within sight of a slave
+State, the Subject and the Artist met, and there, from the lips of sore and
+panting fugitives, she gained, in the course of years, the knowledge which
+she revealed to mankind in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
+
+When she had done the work, the United States stood by and saw her deprived
+of three fourths of her just and legitimate wages, without stirring a
+finger for her protection. The book sold to the extent of two millions of
+copies, and the story was played in most of the theatres in which the
+English language is spoken, and in many French and German theatres. In one
+theatre in New York it was played eight times a week for twelve months.
+Considerable fortunes have been gained by its performance, and it is still
+a source of revenue to actors and managers. We believe that there are at
+least three persons in the United States, connected with theatres, who have
+gained more money from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" than Mrs. Stowe. Of all the
+immense sums which the exhibition of this story upon the stage has
+produced, the authoress has received nothing. When Dumas or Victor Hugo
+publishes a novel, the sale of the right to perform it as a play yields him
+from eighty thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand francs. These
+authors receive a share of the receipts of the theatre,--the only fair
+arrangement,--and this share, we believe, is usually one tenth; which is
+also the usual percentage paid to authors upon the sale of their books. If
+a French author had written "Uncle Tom's Cabin," he would have enjoyed,--1.
+A part of the price of every copy sold in France; 2. A share of the
+receipts of every theatre in France in which he permitted it to be played;
+3. A sum of money for the right of translation into English; 4. A sum of
+money for the right of translation into German. We believe we are far
+within the truth when we say, that a literary success achieved by a French
+author equal to that of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" would have yielded that author
+half a million dollars in gold; and that, too, in spite of the lamentable
+fact, that America would have stolen the product of his genius, instead of
+buying it.
+
+Mrs. Stowe received for "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the usual percentage upon the
+sale of the American edition; which may have consisted of some three
+hundred thousand copies. This percentage, with some other trifling sums,
+may have amounted to forty thousand dollars. From the theatre she has
+received nothing; from foreign countries nothing, or next to nothing. This
+poor forty thousand dollars--about enough to build a comfortable house in
+the country, and lay out an acre or two of grounds--was the product of the
+supreme literary success of all times! A _corresponding_ success in sugar,
+in stocks, in tobacco, in cotton, in invention, in real estate, would have
+yielded millions upon millions to the lucky operator. To say that Mrs.
+Stowe, through our cruel and shameful indifference with regard to the
+rights of authors, native and foreign, has been kept out of two hundred
+thousand dollars, honestly hers, is a most moderate and safe statement.
+This money was due to her as entirely as the sum named upon a bill of
+exchange is due to the rightful owner of the same. It was for "value
+received." A permanently attractive book, moreover, would naturally be more
+than a sum of money; it would be an estate; it would be an income. This
+wrong, therefore, continues to the present moment, and will go on longer
+than the life of the authoress. While we are writing this sentence,
+probably, some German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, or English
+bookseller is dropping into his "till" the price of a copy of "Uncle Tom's
+Cabin," the whole of which he will keep, instead of sending ten per cent of
+it to Hartford on the 1st of January next.
+
+We have had another literary success in these years,--Mr. Motley's
+Histories of the Dutch Republic and of the United Netherlands. As there are
+fifteen persons in the world who can enjoy fiction to one that will read
+much of any other kind of literary production, the writers of fiction
+usually receive some compensation for their labors. Not a fair nor an
+adequate compensation, but _some_. This compensation will never be fair nor
+adequate until every man or woman in the whole world who buys a copy of a
+novel, or sees it played, shall, in so doing, contribute a certain
+stipulated sum to the author. Nevertheless, the writers of fiction do get a
+little money, and a few of them are able to live almost as well as a
+retired grocer. Now and then we hear of an author who gets almost as much
+money for a novel that enthralls and enchants two or three nations for many
+months, as a beardless operator in stocks sometimes wins between one and
+two P. M. It is not so with the heroes of research, like Motley, Buckle,
+Bancroft, and Carlyle. Upon this point we are ready to make a sweeping
+assertion, and it is this. No well-executed work, involving original
+research, can pay expenses, unless the author is protected in his right to
+the market of the world. This is one of the points to which we particularly
+wish to call attention. Give us international copyright, and it immediately
+becomes possible in the United States for a man who is not rich to devote
+his existence to the production of works of permanent and universal value.
+Continue to withhold international copyright, and this privilege remains
+the almost exclusive portion of men of wealth. For, in the United States,
+there is scarcely any such thing as honest leisure in connection with
+business or a salaried office.
+
+Now, with regard to Mr. Motley, whose five massive volumes of Dutch History
+are addressed to the educated class of all nations,--before that author
+could write the first sentence of his work he must have been familiar with
+six languages, English, Latin, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish, besides
+possessing that general knowledge of history, literature, and science which
+constitutes what is called culture. He must also have spent five laborious
+years in gaining an intimate knowledge of his subject, in the course of
+which he must have travelled in more than one country, and expended large
+sums in the purchase of books and documents, and for copies of manuscripts.
+Living in the cheap capitals of Continental Europe, and managing his
+affairs with economy, he may have accomplished his preparatory studies at
+an expenditure of ten thousand dollars,--two thousand dollars a year. The
+volumes contain in all about three thousand five hundred large pages. At
+two pages a day, which would be very rapid work, and probably twice as fast
+as he did work, he could have executed the five volumes, and got them
+through the press (a year's hard labor in itself), in seven years. Here are
+twelve years' labor, and twenty-four thousand dollars' necessary
+expenditure. Mr. Motley probably expended more than twelve years, and twice
+twenty-four thousand dollars; but we choose to estimate the work at its
+necessary cost. Two other items must be also considered:--1. The talents
+of the author, which, employed in another profession, would have brought
+large returns in money and honor; 2. The intense and exhausting nature of
+the labor. The production of a work which demands strict fidelity to truth,
+as well as excellence in composition,--which obliges the author, first, to
+know all, and, after that, to impart the essence of his knowledge in an
+agreeable and striking manner,--is the hardest continuous work ever done by
+man. It is at times a fierce and passionate joy; it is at times a harrowing
+anxiety; it is at times a vast despair; but it is always very hard labor.
+The search after a fact is sometimes as arduous as the chase after a deer,
+and it may last six weeks, and, after all, there may be no such fact, or it
+may be valueless. And when all is done,--when the mountain of manuscript
+lies before the author ready for the press,--he cannot for the life of him
+tell whether his work is trash or treasure. As poor Charlotte Bronte said,
+when she had finished Jane Eyre, "I only know that the story has interested
+_me_." Finally comes the anguish of having the work judged by persons whose
+only knowledge of the subject is derived from the work itself.
+
+No matter for all that: we are speaking of money. This work, we repeat,
+cost the author twenty-four thousand dollars to produce. Messrs. Harper
+sell it at fifteen dollars a copy. The usual allowance to the author is ten
+per cent of the retail price, and, as a rule, it ought not to be more. Upon
+works of that magnitude, however, it often is more. Suppose, then, that Mr.
+Motley receives two dollars for every copy of his work sold by his American
+publishers. A meritorious work of general interest, i. e. a book not
+addressed to any class, sect, or profession, that costs fifteen dollars, is
+considered successful in the United States if it sells three thousand
+copies. Five thousand is decided success. Seven thousand is brilliant
+success. Ten thousand copies, sold in the lifetime of the author, is all
+the success that can be hoped for. Ten thousand copies would yield to the
+author twenty thousand dollars, which is four thousand dollars less than it
+cost him.
+
+But Mr. Motley's work is of universal interest. It does not concern the
+people of the United States any more than it does the people of England,
+France, and Germany, nor as much as it does the people of Spain and
+Holland. Wherever, in the whole world, there is an intelligent, educated
+human being, there is a person who would like to read and possess Motley's
+Histories, which relate events of undying interest to all the few in every
+land who are capable of comprehending their significance. Give this author
+the market of the world, and he is compensated for his labor. Deny him this
+right, and it is impossible he should be. England buys a greater number of
+fifteen-dollar books than the United States, because, in England, rich men
+are generally educated men, and in the United States the class who most
+want such books cannot buy them. Our clergy are poor; our students are
+generally poor; our lawyers and doctors are not rich, as a class; our
+professors and schoolmasters are generally very poor; our men of business,
+as a class, read little but the daily paper; and our men of leisure are too
+few to be of any account. Nor have we yet that universal system of town and
+village self-sustaining libraries, which will, by and by, abundantly atone
+for the ignorance and indifference of the rich, and make the best market
+for books the world has ever seen. England would readily "take" ten
+thousand copies of a three-guinea book of first-rate merit and universal
+interest. A French translation of the same would sell five thousand in
+France, and, probably three thousand more in other Continental countries. A
+German translation would place it within the reach of nations of readers,
+and a few hundreds in each of those nations would become possessors of the
+work. Or, in other words, an International Copyright would multiply the
+gains of an author like Mr. Motley by three, possibly by four. 20,000 x 3
+= 60,000.
+
+We are far from thinking that sixty thousand dollars would be a
+compensation for such work as Mr. Motley has done. We merely say, that the
+reasonable prospect of even such a partial recompense as that would make it
+possible for persons not rich to produce in the United States works of
+universal and permanent value. The question is, Are we prepared to say that
+such works shall be attempted here only by rich men, or by men like Noah
+Webster, who lived upon a Spelling-Book while he wrote his Dictionary?
+Generally, the acquisition of an independent income is the work of a
+lifetime, and it ought to be. But the production of a masterpiece,
+involving original research, is also the work of a lifetime. Not one man in
+a thousand millions can do both. Give us International Copyright, and there
+are already five publishers in the United States who are able and willing
+to give an author the equivalent of Gibbon's sixteen hundred pounds a year,
+or of Noah Webster's Spelling-Book, or Prescott's thousand dollars a month;
+i. e. maintenance while he is doing that part of his work which requires
+exclusive devotion to it. Besides, a man intent upon the execution of a
+great work can contrive, in many ways, to exist--just exist--for ten years,
+provided he has a reasonable prospect of moderate reward when his task is
+done. There are fifty men in New England alone who would deem it an honor
+and a privilege "to invest" in such an enterprise.
+
+Mr. Bancroft's is another case in point. Mr. Buckle remarks, that there is
+no knowledge until there is a class who have conquered leisure, and that,
+although most of this class will always employ their leisure in the pursuit
+of pleasure, yet a few will devote it to the acquisition of knowledge.
+These few are the flower of their species,--its ornaments and
+benefactors,--for the flower issues in most precious fruit, which finally
+nourishes and exalts the whole. We are such idle and pleasure-loving
+creatures, and civilization places so many alluring delights within the
+reach of a rich man, that it must ever be accounted a merit in one of this
+class if he devotes himself to generous toil for the public good. George
+Bancroft has spent thirty years in such toil. His History of the United
+States has stood to him in the place of a profession. His house is filled
+with the most costly material, the spoils of foreign archives and of
+domestic chests, the pick of auction sales, the hidden treasure of ancient
+bookstores, and the chance discoveries of dusty garrets. His work has been
+eminently "successful," and he has received for it about as much as his
+material cost, and perhaps half a dollar a day for his labor. When the
+third volume of the work was about to appear, a London publisher offered
+three hundred pounds for the advance sheets, which were furnished, and the
+money was paid. The same sum was offered and paid for the advance sheets of
+the fourth volume. Then the London publisher discovered that "the courtesy
+of the trade" would suffice for his purpose, and he forbore to pay for that
+which he could get for nothing. Six hundred pounds, therefore, is all that
+this American author has received from foreign countries for thirty years'
+labor. His work has been translated into two or three foreign languages,
+and it is found in all European libraries of any completeness, whether
+public or private; but this little sum is all that has come back to _him_.
+Surely, there cannot be one reader of this periodical so insensible to
+moral distinctions as not to feel that this is wrong. The happy accident of
+Mr. Bancroft's not needing the money has nothing to do with the right and
+wrong of the matter. No man is so rich that he does not like to receive
+money which he has honestly earned; for money honestly earned is honor as
+well as reward, and it is not for _us_, the benefited party, to withhold
+his right from a man because he has been generous to us. And the question
+again occurs, Shall we sit down content with an arrangement which obliges
+us to wait for works of permanent and universal interest until the accident
+occurs of a rich man willing and able to execute them? It is not an
+accident, but a most rare conjunction of accidents. First, the man must be
+competent; secondly, he must be willing; thirdly, he must be rich. This
+fortunate combination is so little likely to occur in a new country, that
+it must be accounted honorable to the United States that in the same
+generation we have had three such men,--Bancroft, Motley, and Prescott. Is
+it _such_ persons that should be singled out from the mass of their
+fellow-citizens to be deprived of their honest gains? Besides, riches take
+to themselves wings. A case has occurred among us of a rich man devoting
+the flower of his days to the production of excellent works, and then
+losing his property.
+
+It will be of no avail to adduce the instance of Dr. J. W. Draper. We have
+had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Draper relate the history of his average
+day. Up at six. Breakfast at seven. An hour's ride to the city. Busy at the
+New York University from nine to one. Home in cars to dinner at three. At
+four P. M. _begins_ his day's literary work, and keeps steadily on till
+eleven. Then, bed. Not one man in many millions could endure such a life,
+and no man, perhaps, ought to endure it. Dr. Draper happens to possess a
+most sound and easy-working constitution of body and mind, and he has
+acquired a knowledge of the laws which relate to its well-being. But, even
+in his case, it is questionable whether it is well, or even right, to
+devote so large a part of his existence to labor. It is probable, too, that
+an International Copyright would, ere this, have released him from the
+necessity of it, or the temptation to it.
+
+Few of us are aware of the extent to which American works are now reprinted
+in England. We noticed, the other day, in an English publication, a page of
+advertisements containing the titles of thirteen volumes announced to be
+sold at "1_s._" or "1_s._ 6_d._" Twelve of the thirteen were American.
+Among them, we remember, were Mrs. Stowe's "Little Foxes," Dr. Holmes's
+"Humorous Poems," and Mr. Lowell's "Biglow Papers." The cheap publication
+stores of Great Britain are heaped with such reprints, the sale of which
+yields nothing to the authors. We have even seen in England a series of
+school writing-books, the invention of a Philadelphia writing-master, the
+English copies of which betrayed no trace of their origin. Nor have we been
+able, after much inquiry, to hear of one instance in which an English
+publisher has paid an American author, resident in America, for anything
+except advance sheets. Mr. Longfellow, whose works are as popular in
+England as in America, and as salable, has derived, we believe,
+considerable sums for advance sheets of his works; but, unless we are
+grossly misinformed, even he receives no percentage upon the annual sale of
+his works in Great Britain.
+
+And the aggravating circumstance of all this spoliation of the men and
+women who are the country's ornament and boast is, that it is wholly our
+fault. We force the European publishers to steal. England is more than
+willing, France is more than willing, Germany is quite willing, Sweden,
+Denmark, and Russia are willing, to come at once into an international
+arrangement which shall render literary property as sacred and as safe in
+all civilized lands as tobacco and whiskey. All the countries we have named
+are now obliged to steal it, and do steal it. Who would have expected to
+find the Essays of Mr. Emerson a topic in the interior of Russia? We find
+them, however, familiarly alluded to in the Russian novel "Fathers and
+Sons," recently translated. If authors had their rights, a rill of Russian
+silver would come trickling into Concord, while a broad and brimming river
+of it would inundate a certain cottage in Hartford. How many modest and
+straitened American homes would have new parlor carpets this year, if
+henceforth, on the first days of January and July, drafts to their address
+were to be dropped in the mail in every capital of the world which the
+work done in those homes instructs or cheers! Nor would new carpets be all.
+Many authors would be instantly delivered from the fatal necessity of
+over-production,--the vice that threatens literature with annihilation.
+
+There is another aggravating circumstance,--most aggravating. The want of
+an International Copyright chiefly robs our best and brightest! A dull book
+protects itself; no foreigner wants it. An honest drudge, who compiles
+timely works of utility, or works which appease a transient curiosity, and
+which thousands of "agents" put under the nose of the whole population, can
+make a fortune by one or two lucky hits. There are respectable gentlemen
+not far off, who, with pen and scissors, in four months, manufactured
+pieces of merchandise, labelled "Life of Abraham Lincoln," of which a
+hundred thousand copies each were sold in half a year, and which yielded
+the manufacturer thirty thousand dollars. This sum is probably more than
+twice as great as the sum total of Mr. Emerson's receipts from his
+published works,--the fruit of forty years of study and meditation. It is
+chiefly our dear Immortals and our best Ephemerals who need this protection
+from their country's justice. It is our Emersons, our Hawthornes, our
+Longfellows, our Lowells, our Holmeses, our Bryants, our Curtises, our
+Beechers, our Mrs. Stowes, our Motleys, our Bancrofts, our Prescotts, whom
+we permit all the world to plunder. We harmless drudges and book-makers are
+protected by our own dulness. We are panoplied in our insignificance. The
+stupidest set of school-books we ever looked into has yielded, for many
+years, an annual profit of one hundred thousand dollars, and is now
+enriching its third set of proprietors. No one, therefore, need feel any
+concern for _us_. _We _can do pretty well if only we are stupid enough, and
+"study to please." But, O honorable members, spare the few who redeem and
+exalt the country's name, and who keep alive the all but extinguished
+celestial fire! If American property abroad must be robbed, let cotton and
+tobacco take a turn, and see how _they_ like it. Invite Manchester to come
+to the Liverpool Docks and help itself. Let there be free smoking in
+Europe. Summon the merchants of London to a scramble for American bills of
+exchange. Select for spoliation anything but the country's literature.
+
+The worst remains to be told. It is bad to have your pocket picked; but
+there is something infinitely worse,--it is to pick a pocket. Who would not
+rather be stolen from, than steal? Who would not rather be murdered, than
+be a murderer? Nevertheless, in depriving foreign authors of their rights,
+it is still ourselves whom we injure most. The great damage to America, and
+to American literature, from the want of an international copyright law, is
+not the thousands of dollars per annum which authors lose. This is, in
+fact, the smallest item that enters into the huge sum total of our loss.
+
+It maims or kills seven tenths of the contemporary literature that must be
+translated before it is available for publication here. Charles Reade, in
+that gallant and brilliant little book of his, "The Eighth Commandment,"
+quotes from a letter written in Cologne, in 1851, the following passage:--
+
+"About thirty years ago the first translations from English were brought to
+the German market. The Waverley Novels were extensively circulated, and
+read with avidity by all classes. Next came Bulwer, and after him Dickens
+and other writers. Rival editions of the same works sprang up by the
+half-dozen; the profits decreased, and the publishers were obliged to cut
+down the pay of the translators. I know that a translation-monger at Grimm
+pays about L6 for a three-volume novel.
+
+"These works, got up in a hurry, and printed with bad type on wretched
+paper, are completely flooding the market; and, as they are much cheaper
+than original works, they are a serious obstacle to our national
+literature. Thus much for our share in the miseries of free trade[2] in
+translations.
+
+"Now for yours. There are able men in Germany, who, were it made worth
+their while, could and would put the master works of your novelists and
+historians into a decent German garb. But under the present system these
+men are elbowed out of the field."
+
+Change a few names in this passage, and it describes, with considerable
+exactness, the state of the translation market in the United States. Works,
+which in France charm the _boudoir_ and amuse the whole of the educated
+class, sink, under the handling of hasty translators and enterprising
+publishers, into what we call "Yellow-Covered Literature," which is to be
+found chiefly upon the wharves. Respectable publishers have a well-founded
+terror of French and German translations; since, after incurring the
+expense of translation, they have no protection against the publication of
+another version except "the courtesy of the trade,"--a code of laws which
+has not much force in the regions from which the literature of the Yellow
+Cover emanates. We are not getting half the good we ought from the
+contemporary literature of France, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Holland, Italy,
+and we never shall, until American publishers can acquire property in it by
+fair purchase, which the law will protect. The business of furnishing the
+American public with good translations from the French would of itself
+maintain two or three great publishing houses. There is a mine of wealth
+there waiting for the removal of the squatters and the recognition of the
+rightful title-deeds. What would California have been worth to us, or to
+itself, or to anybody, if its treasures had been _left_ to the hurried
+scratchings over the surface of uncapitalled prospecters? Capital and skill
+wait until the title is clear. Then they go in, with their ponderous
+engines, and pound the rocks till the gold glitters all over the heap.
+
+Messrs. Appleton, of New York, have recently ventured to publish good
+translations and good editions of Madame Muehlbach's historical novels. The
+name of this lady being new to America, the enterprise was a risk,--a risk
+of many thousand dollars,--a risk which only a wealthy house would be
+justified in assuming. The _great_ expense of such an undertaking is
+incurred in making the new name known, in advertising it, in shouting it
+into the ears of a public deafened with a thousand outcries. An enormous
+sum of money may easily be spent in this way, when advertising costs from
+twenty cents to two dollars a line. Suppose the efforts of the publishers
+are successful, see how beautifully the present system works! The more
+successful they are, the more perilous their property becomes! It is safe
+only as long as it is worthless. Just as soon as they have, by the
+expenditure of unknown thousands, created for the works of this German lady
+a steady demand, which promises to recompense them, they are open to the
+inroads of the Knights of the Yellow Cover! See, too, the effects upon the
+Berlin authoress. Playing such a dangerous and costly game as this, the
+American publisher dare not, cannot treat with her in the only proper and
+honorable way,--open a fair bargain, so much for so much. Messrs. Appleton
+did themselves the honor, the other day, to send her a thousand dollars,
+gold, which was an act as wise as it was right. We enjoyed an exquisite
+pleasure in looking upon the lovely document, duly stamped and
+authenticated, which has ere this given her a claim upon a Berlin banker;
+and we have also a prodigious happiness in committing the impropriety of
+making the fact public. Nevertheless, it is not thus that authors should be
+paid for their own. All we can say of it is, that it is better than nothing
+to her, and the best a publisher can do under the circumstances.
+
+This business of publishing books is the most difficult one carried on in
+the world. It demands qualities so seldom found in the same individual,
+that there has scarcely ever been an eminent and stable publishing house
+which did not consist of several active and able men. Failure is the rule,
+success the rare exception. The shores of the business world are strewn
+thick with the wrecks of ventures in this line that gave every promise of
+bringing back a large return. It has been proved a task beyond the wisdom
+of mortals, to decide with any positive degree of certainty whether a heap
+of blotted manuscript is the most precious or the most worthless of all the
+productions of human industry. Young publishers think they can tell: old
+publishers know they cannot. This is so true, that for a publisher to have
+a knowledge of the commodity in which he deals is generally a point against
+his success as a publisher; and it will certainly ruin him, unless he has a
+remarkably sound judgment, or a good, solid, unlearned partner, whose
+intuitive sense of what the public wants is unbiased by tastes of his own.
+
+It is this terrible uncertainty as to the value of the commodity purchased,
+which renders publishing a business so difficult, precarious, and
+unprofitable; and the higher the character of the literature, the greater
+the difficulty becomes. Publishers who confine themselves chiefly to works
+of utility and necessity, or to works professional and sectarian, have an
+easy task to perform, compared with that of a publisher who aims to supply
+the public with pure science and high literature. If any business can claim
+favorable consideration from those who have in charge the distribution of
+the public burdens, surely it is this. If in any way its perils can be
+justly diminished by law, surely that protection ought not to be withheld.
+We believe it could be shown that the business of publishing what the trade
+calls "miscellaneous books," i. e. books which depend solely upon their
+intrinsic interest or merit, yields a smaller return for the capital and
+talent invested in it than any other. The Harpers have a grand
+establishment,--one of the wonders of America. Any one going over that
+assemblage of enormous edifices, and observing the multitude of men and
+women employed in them, the vast and far-reaching enterprises going
+forward,--some of which involve a large expenditure for years before any
+return is possible,--the great numbers of men of ability, learning, and
+experience who are superintending the various departments, and the amazing
+quantities of merchandise produced, the mere catalogue of which is a large
+volume,--any one, we say, observing these things, would naturally conclude,
+that the proprietors must be in the receipt of Vanderbiltian incomes. The
+same amount of capital, force, experience, and talent employed in any other
+branch of business could not fail to put the incomes of the proprietors
+high up among those which require six figures for their expression. Compare
+the returns of these monarchs of the "trade" with those of our dry-goods
+magnates, and our mighty men in cotton, tobacco, and railroads. A dealer in
+dry-goods in the city of New York has returned as the _income_ of a single
+year a sum half as large as the whole capital invested in the establishment
+of the Harpers. If the _signal_ successes of publishing--successes which
+are the result of the rarest conjunctions of talent, capital, experience,
+and opportunity--are represented by incomes of twenty and thirty thousand
+paper dollars a year, what must be the general condition of the trade? But
+it is the difficulty of conducting the business at all, not the slenderness
+of its profits, upon which we now desire the reader to reflect. That
+difficulty, we repeat, arises from the fact that a publisher buys his pig
+in a poke. He generally knows not, and cannot know, whether what he buys is
+worth much, little, or nothing.
+
+But there is one branch of his business which does not present this
+difficulty,--the reprinting of works previously published in a foreign
+country. He has the advantage of holding in his hand the precise article
+which he proposes to reproduce,--a printed volume, which he can read with
+ease and rapidity; and this is nearly as great an advantage as a manager
+has who sees a play performed before buying it. He has the still greater
+advantage of a public verdict upon the book. It has been tried upon a
+public; and it is a rule almost without exception, that a book which sells
+largely in one country will not fail in another. Dickens, Thackeray, Reade,
+Miss Mulock, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Dumas, Hugo, George Sand, have
+in all foreign countries a popularity which bears a certain proportion to
+that which they enjoy in their own; and even the Chinese novel published
+some years ago in England was a safe speculation, because it was
+universally popular in China. The Russian novel before alluded to was a
+prudent enterprise, because Russia had previously tasted and enjoyed it.
+Literature of high character is always pervaded with the essence of the
+nationality which produced it, but it is, for that very reason, the more
+interesting to other nations. Don Quixote has more Spain in it than all the
+histories of Spain; but in the library of the German collector of
+Cervantes, whose death has been recently announced, there were more than
+twice as many foreign editions as Spanish. According to the Pall Mall
+Gazette, there were 400 editions in Spanish, 168 in French, 200 in English,
+87 in Portuguese, 96 in Italian, 70 in German, 4 in Russian, 4 in Greek, 8
+in Polish, 6 in Danish, 13 in Swedish, and 5 in Latin. Poor Cervantes! How
+eloquently this list pleads for International Copyright!
+
+It is, then, in the republication of foreign works that our publishers
+ought to find an element of certainty, which cannot appertain to the
+publication of original and untried productions. But it is precisely here
+that chaos reigns. In the issue of native works, there is but a single
+uncertainty; in the republication of foreign, there are many. No man knows
+what his rights are; nor whether he has any rights; nor whether there
+_are_ any rights; nor, if he has rights, whether they will be respected.
+This chaos has taken to itself the pleasant and delusive name of "Courtesy
+of the Trade." Before the "reign of law" is established in any province of
+human affairs, we generally see men feeling their way to it, trying to find
+something else that will answer the purpose, endeavoring to reduce the
+chaos of conflicting claims to some kind of rule. The publishers of the
+United States have been doing this for many years, and the result is the
+unwritten code called the Courtesy of the Trade,--a code defective in
+itself, with neither judge to expound it, jury to decide upon it, nor
+sheriff to execute it. This code consisted at first of one rule,--If a
+publisher issues a foreign work, no other American publisher shall issue
+it. But it often happened that two or three publishers began or desired to
+begin the printing of the same book. To meet this and other cases, other
+laws were added, until at present the code, as laid down by the rigorists,
+consists of the following rules:--
+
+1. If a publisher issues an edition of a foreign work, he has acquired an
+exclusive right to it for a period undefined.
+
+2. If a publisher is the first to announce his intention to publish a
+foreign work, that announcement gives him an exclusive right to publish it.
+
+3. If a publisher has already issued a work of a foreign author, he has
+acquired thereby an exclusive right to the republication of all subsequent
+works by the same author.
+
+4. The purchase of advance sheets for publication in a periodical gives a
+publisher the exclusive right to publish the same in any other form.
+
+5. All and several of these rights may be bought and sold, like any other
+kind of property.
+
+There is a kind of justice in all these rules. If we could concede that a
+foreign author _has_ no ownership of the coinage of his brain,--if anything
+but that author's free gift or purchased consent _could_ convey that
+property to another,--if foreign literature _is_ the legitimate spoil of
+America,--then some such code as this would be the only method of
+preventing the business from degenerating into a game of unmitigated grab.
+In its present ill-defined and most imperfect state, this system of
+"courtesy" scarcely mitigates the game at all; and, accordingly, in "the
+trade," instead of the friendly feeling that would naturally exist among
+honorable men in the highest branch of business, we find feuds,
+heart-burnings, and a grievous sense of wrongs unredressed and
+unredressable. Some houses "announce" everything that is announced on the
+other side of the Atlantic, so as to have the first choice. Smaller firms,
+seeing these announcements, dare not undertake any foreign work, even
+though the great house never decides to publish the book upon which the
+smaller had fixed its attention. It is only under the reign of law that the
+rights of the weak have any security. In the most exquisitely organized
+system of piracy, no man can rely upon the enjoyment of a right which he is
+not strong enough personally to defend. It is not every house that can
+crush a rival edition by selling thousands of expensive books at half their
+cost. Between the giant houses that tower above him, and the yellow-covered
+gentry that prowl about his feet, an American publisher of only ordinary
+resources has a game to play which is really too difficult for the limited
+capacities of man. Who can wonder that most of them lose it?
+
+One effect of this courtesy system is, that many excellent works, which it
+would be a public benefit to have reprinted here are not reprinted. Another
+is, that corrected or improved editions cannot be given to the American
+reader without bringing down upon the publisher the enmity or the vengeance
+of a rival. It is not common in Europe for the first editions of important
+works to be stereotyped; but in America they always are. The European
+author frequently makes extensive additions and valuable emendations in
+each successive edition; until, in the course of years, his work is
+essentially different from, and far superior to, the first essay. _We_
+cannot have the advantage of the improved version. There is a set of old
+and worn stereotype plates in the way, the proprietor of which will not
+sacrifice them, nor permit another publisher to produce the corrected
+edition, which would as completely destroy their value as though they were
+melted into type metal. Who can blame him? No one likes to have a valuable
+property suddenly rendered valueless. "It is not human nature." Mr. Lewes
+is not justified in so bitterly reproaching Messrs. Appleton for their cold
+entertainment of his offer to them of the enlarged version of his "History
+of Philosophy."
+
+"I felt," says Mr. Lewes, "that Messrs. Appleton, of New York, had, in
+courtesy, a prior claim, on the ground of their having reprinted the
+previous edition in 1857. Accordingly I wrote to them, through their London
+agent, stating that I considered they had a claim to the first offer, and
+stating, further, that the new edition was substantially a new book. [As
+this is an important element in the present case, allow me to add, that the
+edition of 1857 was in one volume 8vo, published at sixteen shillings,
+whereas the new edition is in two volumes 8vo, published at thirty
+shillings; and the work is so considerably altered and enlarged that a new
+title has been affixed to it, for the purpose of marking it off from its
+predecessors.] Questions of courtesy are, however, but ill understood by
+some people, and by Messrs. Appleton so ill understood that they did not
+even answer my letter. After waiting more than three months for an answer,
+I asked a friend to see their London agent on the subject, and thus I
+learned that Messrs. Appleton--_risum teneatis, amici?_--'considered they
+had a right to publish all future editions of my work without payment,'
+because ten years ago they had given the magnificent sum of twenty-five
+pounds to secure themselves against rivals for the second edition."
+
+The omission to answer the author's letter, we may assume, was accidental.
+It is not correct to say that the publishers founded their claim to issue
+the new edition upon their payment of twenty-five pounds. The real
+difficulty was, that Messrs. Appleton possessed the plates of the first
+edition, and could not issue the enlarged edition without, first,
+destroying a property already existing, and, secondly, creating a new
+property at an expenditure about four times as great as the sum originally
+invested. The acceptance of Mr. Lewes's offer would have involved an
+expenditure of several thousand dollars, at a time when, for a variety of
+reasons, works of that character could hardly be expected to return the
+outlay upon them. The exclusive and certain ownership of the work might
+well justify its republication, even now, when it costs exactly three times
+as much to manufacture a book in the United States as it did seven years
+ago. But nothing short of this would warrant a publisher in undertaking it.
+The real sinners, against whom Mr. Lewes should have launched his sarcasm,
+are the people of the United States, who permit their instructors, both
+native and foreign, to be robbed of their property with impunity. Thus we
+see that a few hundred pounds of metal are likely to bar the entrance among
+us of a work which demonstrates, in the clearest and most attractive
+manner, the inutility of all that has hitherto gone by the name of
+"metaphysics," and which also indicates the method of investigation from
+which good results are to be rationally hoped for.
+
+It is the grossest injustice to hold American publishers responsible for
+the system of ill-regulated plunder which they have inherited, and which
+injures them more immediately and palpably than any other class, excepting
+alone the class producing the commodity in which they deal. There are no
+business men more honorable or more generous than the publishers of the
+United States, and especially honorable and considerate are they toward
+authors. The relation usually existing between author and publisher in the
+United States is that of a warm and lasting friendship,--such as that which
+subsisted for so many years between Irving and Putnam, and which now
+animates and dignifies the intercourse between the literary men of New
+England and Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, and which gathers in the well-known
+room of the Harpers a host of writers who are attached friends of the
+"House." The relation, too, is one of a singular mutual trustfulness. The
+author receives his semiannual account from the publisher with as absolute
+a faith in its correctness as though he had himself counted the volumes
+sold; and the publisher consigns the manuscript of the established author
+to the printer almost without opening it, confident that, whether it
+succeeds or fails, the author has done his best. We have heard of instances
+in which a publisher had serious cause of complaint against an author, but
+never have we known an author to be intentionally wronged by a publisher.
+We have known a publisher, in the midst of the ruin of his house, to make
+it one of the first objects of his care to save authors from loss, or make
+their inevitable losses less. How common, too, it is in the trade for a
+publisher to go beyond the letter of his bond, and after publishing five
+books without profit, to give the author of the successful sixth more than
+the stipulated price! Let every one speak of the market as he finds it. For
+our part, after fifteen years of almost daily intercourse with publishers,
+we have no recollections of them that are not agreeable, and can call to
+mind no transaction in which they did not show themselves to be men of
+honor as much as men of business. We have not the least doubt that Mr.
+Peterson honestly thought he had acquired a right, by fair purchase, to
+sell the property of Charles Dickens in the United States as long as he
+should continue in business, and then to dispose of that right to his
+successor. We are equally confident that Messrs. Harper felt themselves
+completely justified in endeavoring to crush the Diamond Edition of
+Thackeray. All this chaos and uncertainty, all these feuds and enmities,
+have one and the same cause,--the existence in the world of a kind of
+property which is at once the most precious, the easiest stolen, and the
+worst protected.
+
+Almost to a man, our publishers are in favor of an International Copyright.
+We have been able to hear of but one exception, and this is the publisher
+of but one book,--Webster's Dictionary,--the work of all others now in
+existence that would profit most from just protection in foreign countries.
+There is an impression in many circles that the Harpers are opposed to it.
+We are enabled to state, upon the authority of a member of that great
+house, that this is not now, and never has been, the case. Messrs. Harper
+comprehend, as well as we do, that they would gain more from the measure
+than any other house in the world; because it is the natural effect of law,
+while it protects the weak, to legitimate and establish the dominion of the
+strong. International Copyright would benefit every creature connected with
+publishing, but it would benefit most of all the great and wealthy houses.
+The Harpers have spent tens of thousands in enforcing the observance of the
+courtesy of the trade, but they cannot enforce it. It is a work never done
+and always beginning. It cost them four hundred of our ridiculous dollars
+for the advance sheets of each number of Mr. Dickens's last novel; and
+within forty-eight hours of the publication of the Magazine containing it,
+two other editions were for sale under their noses. The matter for
+"Harper's Magazine" often costs three or four thousand dollars a number;
+can any one suppose that the proprietors _like_ to see Blackwood and half a
+dozen other British magazines sold all over the country at a little more
+than the cost of paper and printing? They like it as little as the
+proprietors of Blackwood like it. This is a wrong which injures two
+nations and benefits one printer; and that printer would himself do better
+if he could obtain exclusive rights by fair purchase. No; Messrs. Harper,
+we are happy to state, are decidedly in favor of an International
+Copyright, and so is every other general publishing house in the country of
+which we have any knowledge.
+
+Consider the case of our venerable and beloved instructor, "The North
+American Review," conducted with so much diligence, energy, and tact by the
+present editors. Not a number of it has appeared under their management
+which has not been a national benefit; and no country more needs such a
+periodical than the United States, now standing on the threshold of a new
+career. The time has passed when a review could consist chiefly of the
+skilfully condensed contents of interesting books, which men could execute
+in the intervals of professional duty, and think themselves happy in
+receiving one dollar for a printed page, extracts deducted. At the present
+time, a review must initiate as well as criticise, and do something itself
+as well as comment upon the performances of others. We believe that no
+number of the North American Review now appears, the matter of which costs
+as little as a thousand dollars. But it has to compete, not only with the
+four British Reviews sold here at the price of paper and printing, but with
+several periodicals made up of selections from the reviews and magazines of
+Europe. Nor is this all. A public accustomed to buy books and periodicals
+at a price into which nothing enters but manual labor and visible material
+is apt to pause and recoil when it is solicited to pay the just value of
+those commodities. A man who buys a number of the Westminster Review for
+half a dollar is likely to regard a dollar and a half as an enormous price
+for a number of the North American, though he gets for his money what cost
+a thousand dollars before the printer saw it. For forty years or more we
+have all been buying our books and reviews at thieves' prices,--prices in
+which everybody was considered except the creators of the value; and the
+consequence is, that we turn away when a proper price is demanded for a
+book, and regard ourselves as injured beings. How monstrous for a volume of
+Emerson to be sold for a dollar! In England and France, when the price is
+to be fixed upon works of that nature, the mere cost of paper and printing
+is hardly considered at all. Such trifles are felt, and rightly felt, to
+have little to do with the question of price. The publisher knows very well
+that he has to dispose of one of those rare and beautiful products which
+only a very few thousands of his countrymen will care to possess, or could
+enjoy if it were thrust upon them. He fixes the price with reference to the
+facts of the case,--the important facts as well as the trivial, the rights
+of the author as well as the little bill of the printer,--and that price is
+half a guinea. The want of an International Copyright, besides lowering and
+degrading all literature, has demoralized the public by getting it into the
+habit of paying for books the price of stolen goods. And hence the North
+American Review, which would naturally be a most valuable property, has
+never yielded a profit corresponding to its real value. People stand aghast
+at the invitation to pay six dollars a year for an article, the mere
+unmanufactured ingredients of which cost a thousand times six dollars.
+
+Good contemporary books cannot be very cheap, unless there is stealing
+_somewhere_, for a good book is one of the most costly products of nature.
+Fortunately, they need not be cheap, for it is not necessary to own many of
+them. As soon as an International Copyright has given tone to the business
+of writing and publishing books, and has restored the prices of them to the
+just standard, we shall see a great increase of those facilities for
+purchasing the opportunity to read a book without buying it, which have
+placed the whole literature of the world at the command of an English
+farmer who can spare a guinea or two per annum. It is not necessary, we
+repeat, to possess many new books; it is only necessary to read them, get
+the good of them, and give a hearty support to the library from which we
+take them. The purchase of a book should be a serious and well-considered
+act, not the hasty cramming of a thin, double-columned pamphlet into a
+coat-pocket, to be read and cast aside at the bottom of a book-case. It is
+an abominable extravagance to buy a great and good novel in a perishable
+form for a few cents; it is good economy to pay a few dollars for one
+substantially bound, that will amuse and inform generations. A good novel,
+play, or poem can be reread every five years during a long life. When a
+book is to be selected out of the mass, to become thenceforth part and
+parcel of a home, let it be well printed and well bound, and, above all,
+let it be of an edition to which the author has set the seal of his consent
+and approbation. No one need fear that the addition of the author's ten per
+cent to the price of foreign books will make them less accessible to the
+masses of the people. It will make them more accessible, and it will tend
+to make them better worth keeping.
+
+When we consider the difficulties which now beset the publication of books
+in the United States, we cannot but wonder at the liberality of American
+publishers toward foreign authors,--a liberality which has met no return
+from publishers in Europe. The first money that Herbert Spencer ever
+received in his life from his _books_ was sent to him in 1861 by the
+Appletons as his share of the proceeds of his "Essays upon Education"; and
+every year since he has received upon all his works republished here the
+percentage usually paid to native authors. This is so interesting a case,
+and so forcibly illustrates many aspects of our subject, that we will dwell
+upon it for a moment.
+
+It will occasionally happen that an author is produced in a country who is
+charged with a special message for another country. There will be something
+in the cast of his mind, or in the nature of his subject, which renders his
+writings more immediately or more generally suitable to the people of a
+land other than his own. We might cite as an example Washington Irving,
+who, though a sound American patriot, was essentially an English author,
+and whose earlier works are so English that many English people read them
+to this day, we are told, who do not suspect that the author was not their
+countryman. Washington Irving owed his literary career to this fact! His
+seventeen years' residence abroad enabled him to enjoy part of the
+advantage which all great authors would derive from an International
+Copyright, that is to say, he derived revenue from _both_ countries. During
+the first half of his literary career, he drew the chief part of his income
+from England; during the second half, when his Sketch-Book vein was
+exhausted, and he was again an American resident, he derived his main
+support from America. If he had never resided abroad, we never should have
+had a Washington Irving; if he had not returned home, he would have been
+sadly pinched in his old age. Alone among the American authors of his day
+or of any day, he had the market of the world for his works; and he only,
+of excellent American authors, has received anything like a compensation
+for his labor. The entire proceeds of his works during his lifetime were
+$205,383, of which about one third came to him from England. His average
+income, during the fifty years of his authorship, was about four thousand
+dollars a year. Less than any other of our famous authors he injured his
+powers by over-production, and it was only the unsteadiness of his income,
+the occasional failure of his resources, or the dread of a failure, that
+ever induced him to take up his pen when exhausted nature cried, Forbear!
+Cooper, on the contrary, who was read and robbed in every country, wrote
+himself all out, and still wrote on, until his powers were destroyed and
+his name was a by-word.
+
+A case similar in principle to that of Irving was Audubon, the
+indefatigable and amiable Audubon. The exceeding costliness of his "Birds
+of America" protected that work as completely as an International Copyright
+could; and, but for this, we never could have had it. Audubon enjoyed the
+market of the world! The price of his wonderful work was a thousand
+dollars, and, at that period, neither Europe nor America could furnish
+purchasers enough to warrant him in giving it to the press. But Europe
+_and_ America could! Europe and America _did_,--each continent taking about
+eighty copies. The excellent Audubon, therefore, was not ruined by his
+brave endeavor to honor his country and instruct mankind. He ended his days
+in peace in that well-known villa on the banks of the Hudson, continuing
+his useful and beautiful labors to the last, and leaving to his sons the
+means of perfecting what he left incomplete.
+
+But to return to Herbert Spencer, the author of "Social Statics"; or, as we
+call it, Jeffersonian Democracy, illustrated and applied. Unconnected with
+the governing classes of his own country, escaping the universities, bred
+to none of the professions, and inheriting but a slender patrimony, he
+earned a modest and precarious livelihood by contributing to the
+periodicals, and wrung from his small leisure the books that England
+needed, but would not buy. An American citizen, Professor Youmans, felt all
+their merit, and perceived how adapted they were to the tastes and habits
+of the American mind, and how skilfully the ideas upon which America is
+founded were developed in them. He also felt, as we have heard him say,
+that, next to the production of excellent works, the most useful thing a
+man can do in his generation is to aid in giving them currency. Aided by
+other lovers of his favorite author, he was soon in a position to bear
+part of the heavy expense of stereotyping Mr. Spencer's works; and thus
+Messrs. Appleton were enabled, not only to publish them, but to afford the
+author as large a share of the proceeds as though he had been a resident of
+the United States. Thus Herbert Spencer, by a happy accident, enjoys part
+of the advantage which would accrue to all his brethren from an
+International Copyright; and we have the great satisfaction of knowing,
+when we buy one of his volumes, that we are not defrauding our benefactor.
+
+Charles Scribner habitually pays English authors a part of the profit
+derived from their republished works. Max Mueller, Mr. Trench, and others
+who figure upon his list, derive revenue from the sale of their works in
+America. Mr. Scribner considers it both his duty and his interest to
+acquire all the right to republish which a foreign author can bestow; and
+he desires to see the day when the law will recognize and secure the most
+obvious and unquestionable of all rights, the right of an author to the
+product of his mind.
+
+We trust Messrs. Ticknor and Fields will not regard it as an affront to
+their delicacy if we allude here to facts which recent events have in part
+disclosed to the public. This house, on principle, and as an essential part
+of their system, send to foreign authors a share of the proceeds of their
+works, and this they have habitually done for twenty-five years. The first
+American edition of the Poems of Mr. Tennyson, published by them in 1842,
+consisted of one thousand copies, and it was three years in selling; but
+upon this edition a fair acknowledgment in money was sent to the poet.
+Since that time, Mr. Tennyson has received from them a certain equitable
+portion of the proceeds of all the numerous editions of his works which
+they have issued. Mr. Fields, with great labor and some expense, collected
+from periodicals and libraries a complete set of the works of Mr. De
+Quincey, which the house published in twenty-two volumes, the sale of which
+was barely remunerative; but the author received, from time to time, a sum
+proportioned to the number of volumes sold. Mr. Fields has been recently
+gathering the "Early and Late Papers" of Mr. Thackeray, one volume of which
+has been published, to the great satisfaction of the public. Miss Thackeray
+has already received a considerable sum for the sale of the first edition.
+Mr. Browning, Mr. Hughes, Mr. Reade, the Country Parson, Mr. Kingsley, Mr.
+Matthew Arnold, Dr. John Brown, Mr. Mayne Reid, Mr. Dickens, have been
+dealt with in a similar manner; some of them receiving copyright, and
+others a sum of money proportioned to the sale or expected sale of their
+works. Nor has the appearance of rival editions been allowed to diminish
+the author's share of the profits realized upon the editions published with
+their consent. Mr. Tennyson counts upon the American part of his income
+with the same certainty as upon that which he derives from the sale of his
+works in England, although he cannot secure his Boston publishers the
+exclusive market of the United States. We dare not comment upon these
+facts, because, if we were to indulge our desire to do so, the passage
+would be certain "to turn up missing" upon the printed page, since Messrs.
+Ticknor and Fields live two hundred miles nearer the office of the Atlantic
+Monthly than we do. Happily, comment is needless. Every man who has either
+a conscience or a talent for business will recognize either the propriety
+or the wisdom of their conduct. Upon this rock of fair-dealing the eminent
+and long-sustained prosperity of this house is founded.
+
+The following note appeared recently in "The Athenaeum":--
+
+     "May I, without egotism, mention in your paper that
+     Messrs. Harper, of New York, have sent me, quite
+     unsolicited, a money acknowledgment for reprinting, in
+     their cheap series, two of my novels, 'Lizzie Lorton of
+     Greyrigg' and 'Sowing the Wind.' At a time when so many
+     complaints are being made of American publishers, it
+     is pleasant to be able to record this voluntary act of
+     grace and courtesy from so influential a house.
+
+                       "E. LYNN LINTON."
+
+
+
+Complaints, then, are made of American publishers! This is pleasant. We say
+again, that, after diligent inquiry, we cannot hear of one instance of an
+English publisher sending money to an American author for anything but
+advance sheets. Mr. Longfellow is as popular a poet in England as Mr.
+Tennyson is in America, and he has, consequently, as before remarked,
+received considerable sums for early sheets, but nothing, we believe, upon
+the annual sale of his works, nothing from the voluntary and spontaneous
+justice of his English publishers. We have no right, perhaps, to censure
+men for not going beyond the requirements of law; but still less can we
+withhold the tribute of our homage to those who are more just than the law
+compels, and this tribute is due to several publishers on this side of the
+Atlantic. But then there remains the great fact against us, that England is
+willing to-day, and we are not, to throw the protection of international
+law around this most sacred interest of civilization.
+
+Would that it were in our power to give adequate expression to the mighty
+debt we owe, as a people, to the living and recent authors of Europe! But
+who can weigh or estimate the invisible and widely diffused influence of a
+book? There are sentences in the earlier works of Carlyle which have
+regenerated American souls. There are chapters in Mill which are reforming
+the policy of American nations. There are passages in Buckle which give the
+key to the mysteries of American history. There are lines in Tennyson which
+have become incorporated into the fabric of our minds, and flash light and
+beauty upon our daily conversation. There are characters in Dickens which
+are extinguishing the foibles which they embody, and pages of Thackeray
+which kill the affectations they depict. What a colossal good to us is Mr.
+Grote's "History of Greece"! Miss Mulock, George Eliot, Charles Reade,
+Charlotte Bronte, Kinglake, Matthew Arnold, Charles Kingsley, Ruskin,
+Macaulay,--how could we spare the least of them? Take from our lives the
+happiness and the benefit which we have derived from the recent authors of
+Europe; take from the future the silent, ceaseless working of their
+spirits,--so antidotal to all that remains in us of colonial, provincial,
+and superstitious,--and what language could state, ever so inadequately,
+the loss we and posterity should experience? And let us not lay the mean
+unction to our souls that money cannot repay such services as these. It
+can! It can repay it as truly and as fully as sixpence pays for a loaf of
+bread that saves a shipwrecked hero's life. The baker gets his own; he is
+satisfied, and holy justice is satisfied. This common phrase, "making
+money," is a poor, mean way of expressing an august and sacred thing; for
+the money which fairly comes to us, in the way of our vocation, is, or
+ought to be, the measure of our worth to the community we serve. It is
+honor, safety, education, leisure, children's bread, wife's dignity and
+adornment, pleasant home, society, an independent old age, comfort in
+dying, and solace to those we leave behind us. Money is the representative
+of all the substantial good that man can bestow on man. And money justly
+earned is never withheld without damage to the withholder and to the
+interest he represents.
+
+We often think of the case of Dion Boucicault, the one man now writing the
+English language who has shown a very great natural aptitude for telling a
+story in the dramatic form. For thirty years we have been witnessing his
+plays in the United States. A fair share of the nightly receipts of the
+theatres in which they were played would have enriched him in the prime of
+his talent, or, in other words, have delivered him from that temptation to
+over-production which has wellnigh destroyed his powers. He never received
+any revenue from us until he came here and turned actor. He gets a little
+money now by associating with himself an American friend, who writes a few
+sentences of a play, then brings it to New York and disposes of it to
+managers as their joint production. But what an exquisite shame it is for
+us to compel an artist to whom we owe so many delightful hours to resort to
+an artifice in order to be able to sell the product of his talent! Our
+injustice, too, damages ourselves even more than it despoils him; for if we
+had paid him fairly for "London Assurance" and "Old Heads and Young
+Hearts," if he had found a career in the production of plays, he might not
+have been lured from his vocation, and might have written twenty good
+plays, instead of a hundred good, bad, indifferent, and atrocious. We cheat
+him of our part of the just results of his lifetime's labor, and he flings
+back at us his anathema in the form of a "Flying Scud." Think of Sheridan
+Knowles, too, deriving nothing from our theatres, in which his dramas have
+been worn threadbare by incessant playing! To say that they are trash is
+not an infinitesimal fraction of an excuse; for it is just as wrong to
+steal paste as it is to steal diamonds. We liked the trash well enough to
+appropriate it. Besides, he really had the knack of constructing a telling
+play, which, it seems, is one of the rarest gifts bestowed upon man, and
+the one which affords the most intense pleasure to the greatest number of
+people.
+
+Why, we may ask in passing, did the English stage languish for so many
+years? It was because the money that should have compensated dramatists
+enriched actors; because the dramatist that wrote "Black-eyed Susan" was
+paid five pounds a week, and the actor that played William received four
+thousand pounds during the first run of the play. In France, where the
+drama flourishes, it is the actor who gets five pounds a week, and the
+dramatist who gets the thousands of pounds for the first run; and this
+just distribution of profits is infinitely the best, in the long run, for
+_actors_.
+
+There is still an impression prevalent in the world, that there is no
+connection between good work and good wages in this kind of industry. There
+was never a greater mistake. A few great men, exceptional in character as
+in circumstances, blind like Milton, exiled like Dante, prisoners like
+Bunyan and Cervantes, may have written for solace, or for fame, or from
+benevolence; but, as a rule, _nothing gets the immortal work from
+first-rate men but money_. We need only mention Shakespeare, for every one
+knows that he wrote plays simply and solely as a matter of business, to
+draw money into the treasury of his theatre. He was author and publisher,
+actor as well, and thus derived a threefold benefit from his labors.
+Moliere, too, the greatest name in the literature of France, and the second
+in the dramatic literature of the world, was author, actor, and manager.
+Play-writing was the career of these great men. It was their business and
+vocation; and it is only in the way of his business and vocation that we
+can, as a rule, get from an artist the best and the utmost there is in him.
+Common honesty demands that a man shall do his best when he works for his
+own price. His honor and his safety are alike involved. All our courage and
+all our cowardice, all our pride and all our humility, all our generosity
+and all our selfishness, all that can incite and all that can scare us to
+exertion, may enter into the complex motive that is urging us on when we
+are doing the work by which we earn our right to exist. Nothing is of great
+and lasting account,--not religion, nor benevolence, nor law, nor
+science,--until it is so organized that honest and able men can live by it.
+Then it lures talent, character, ambition, wealth, and force to its support
+and illustration. The whole history of literature, so far as it is known,
+shows that literature flourishes when it is fairly rewarded, and declines
+when it is robbed of its just compensation. Mr. Reade has admirably
+demonstrated this in his "Eighth Commandment," a little book as full of
+wit, fact, argument, eloquence, and delicious audacity as any that has
+lately appeared.
+
+There has been but one country in which literature has ever succeeded in
+raising itself to the power and dignity of a profession, and it is the only
+country which has ever enjoyed a considerable part of the market of the
+world for its literary wares. This is France, which has a kind of
+International Copyright in its language. Educated Russia reads few books
+that are not French, and in every country of Christendom it is taken for
+granted that an educated person reads this language. Wherever in Europe or
+America or India or Australia many books are sold, some French books are
+sold. Here in New York, for example, we have had for many years an elegant
+and well-appointed French bookstore, in which the standard works of French
+literature are temptingly displayed, and the new works are for sale within
+three weeks after their publication in Paris. Many of our readers, too,
+must have noticed the huge masses of French books exhibited in some of the
+second-hand bookstores of Nassau Street. French books, in fact, form a very
+considerable part of the daily business of the bookstores in every capital
+of the world. Nearly one hundred subscribers were obtained in the United
+States for the _Nouvelle Biographie_ in forty-six volumes, the total cost
+of which, bound, was more than two hundred of our preposterous dollars.
+Besides this large and steady sale of their works in every city on earth,
+French authors enjoy a protection to their rights at home which is most
+complete, and they address a public accustomed to pay for new books a
+price, in determining which the author was considered. Mr. Reade informs us
+that a first-rate dramatic success in Paris is worth to the author six
+thousand pounds sterling, and that this six thousand pounds is very
+frequently drawn from the theatre after a larger sum has been obtained for
+the same work in the form of a novel.
+
+What is the effect? Literature in France, as we have said, is one of the
+liberal professions. Literary men are an important and honorable order in
+the state. The press teems with works of real value and great cost. The
+three hundred French dramatists supply the theatres of Christendom with
+plays so excellent, that not even the cheat of "adaptation" can wholly
+conceal their merit. Great novels, great histories, great essays and
+treatises, important contributions to science, illustrated works of the
+highest excellence, compilations of the first utility, marvellous
+dictionaries and statistical works, appear with a frequency which nothing
+but a universal market could sustain. In whatever direction public
+curiosity is aroused, prompt and intelligent efforts are made to gratify
+it. Nothing more surprises an American inquirer than the excellent manner
+in which this mere task-work, these "booksellers' jobs," as we term them,
+are executed in Paris. That _Nouvelle Biographie_ of which we have spoken
+is so faithfully done, and is so free from any perverseness or narrowness
+of nationality, that it would be a good enterprise in any of the reading
+countries to publish a translation of it just as it stands. French
+literature follows the general law, that, as the volume of business
+increases, the quality of the work done improves. The last French work
+which the pursuit of our vocation led us to read was one upon the
+Mistresses of Louis XV., by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. We need not say
+how such a subject as this would be treated by the cheated hirelings of the
+Yellow Cover. This work, on the contrary, is an intelligent historical
+study of a period when mistresses governed France; and the passages in the
+work which touch upon the adulterous tie which gave fair France over to
+these vampires are managed with a delicacy the most perfect. The present
+hope of France is in her literature. Her literary men are fast educating
+that interesting and virtuous people to the point when they will be able to
+regain their freedom and keep it safe from nocturnal conspirators. They
+would have done it ere now, but for the woful fact that only half of their
+countrymen can read, and are thus the helpless victims of a perjured
+Dutchman and his priests.
+
+What the general knowledge of the French language has done for French
+literature, all of that, and more than that, an International Copyright law
+would do for the literature of Great Britain and the United States. Here
+are four great and growing empires, Great Britain, the United States, the
+Dominion of Canada, and the states of Australia, in which the same language
+is spoken and similar tastes prevail. In all these nations there is a
+spirit abroad which will never rest content until the whole population are
+readers, and those readers will be counted by hundreds of millions. Already
+they are so numerous, that one first-rate literary success, one book
+excellent enough to be of universal interest, would give the author leisure
+for life, if his rights were completely protected by international law.
+What a field for honorable exertion is this! And how can these empires fail
+to grow into unity when the cultivated intelligence of them all shall be
+nourished from the same sources, and bow in homage to the same commanding
+minds? Wanting this protection, the literature of both countries
+languishes. The blight of over-production falls upon immature genius,
+masterpieces are followed by labored and spiritless repetitions, and men
+that have it in them to inform and move mankind grind out task-work for
+daily bread. One man, one masterpiece, that is the general law. Not one
+eminent literary artist of either country can be named who has not injured
+his powers and jeoparded his fame by over-production. We do not address a
+polite note to Elias Howe, and ask him how much he would charge for a
+"series" of inventions equal in importance to the sewing-machine. We
+merely enable him to demand a dollar every time that _one_ conception is
+used. Imagine Job applied to for a "series" of Books of Job. Not less
+absurd is it to compel an author to try and write two Sketch-Books, two
+David Copperfields, two Uncle Toms, two Jane Eyres, or two books like "The
+Newcomes." When once a great writer has given such complete expression of
+his experience as was given in each of those works, a long time must elapse
+before his mind fills again to a natural overflow. But, alas! only a very
+short time elapses before his purse empties.
+
+It was the intention of the founders of this Republic to give complete
+protection to intellectual property, and this intention is clearly
+expressed in the Constitution. Justified by the authority given in that
+instrument, Congress has passed patent laws which have called into exercise
+an amount of triumphant ingenuity that is one of the great wonders of the
+modern world; but under the copyright laws, enacted with the same good
+intentions, our infant literature pines and dwindles. The reason is plain.
+For a labor-saving invention, the United States, which abounds in
+everything but labor, is field enough, and the inventor is rewarded; while
+a great book cannot be remunerative unless it enjoys the market of the
+whole civilized world. The readers of excellent books are few in every
+country on earth. The readers of any one excellent book are usually very
+few indeed; and the purchasers are still fewer. In a world that is supposed
+to contain a thousand millions of people, it is spoken of as a marvel that
+two millions of them bought the most popular book ever published,--one
+purchaser to every five hundred inhabitants.
+
+We say, then, to those members of Congress who go to Washington to do
+something besides make Presidents, that time has developed a new necessity,
+not indeed contemplated by the framers of the Constitution, yet covered by
+the Constitution; and it now devolves upon them to carry out the evident
+intention of their just and wise predecessors, which was, to secure to
+genius, learning, and talent the certain ownership of their productions. We
+want an international system which shall protect a kind of property which
+cannot be brought to market without exposing it to plunder,--property in a
+book being simply the right to multiply copies of it. We want this property
+secured, for a sufficient period, to the creator of the value, so that no
+property in a book can be acquired anywhere on earth unless by the gift or
+consent of the author thereof. There are men in Congress who feel all the
+magnitude and sacredness of the debt which they owe, and which their
+country owes, to the authors and artists of the time. We believe such
+members are more numerous now than they ever were before,--much more
+numerous. It is they who must take the leading part in bringing about this
+great measure of justice and good policy; and, as usual in such cases, some
+one man must adopt it as his special vocation, and never rest till he has
+conferred on mankind this immeasurable boon.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Upon this expression Mr. Reade justly remarks: "This is a foolish and
+inapplicable phrase. Free trade is free buying and selling, not free
+stealing."
+
+
+
+
+THE FLIGHT OF THE GODDESS.
+
+
+    A man should live in a garret, I think,
+      And have few friends, and be poorly clad,
+    With an old hat stopping the wind in the chink,
+      To keep the Goddess constant and glad.
+
+    Of old, when I walked on a rugged way,
+      And gave much work for but little bread,
+    The Goddess dwelt with me night and day,
+      Sat at my table, haunted my bed.
+
+    The narrow, mean attic, I see it now!--
+      Its window o'erlooking the city's tiles,
+    The sunset's fires, and the clouds of snow,
+      And the river wandering miles and miles.
+
+    Just one picture hung in the room,
+      The saddest story that Art can tell,--
+    Dante and Virgil in lurid gloom
+      Watching the Lovers float through Hell.
+
+    Wretched enough was I sometimes,
+      Pinched, and harassed with vain desires;
+    But thicker than clover sprung the rhymes
+      As I dwelt like a sparrow among the spires.
+
+    Midnight filled my slumbers with song;
+      Music haunted my dreams by day:
+    Now I listen and wait and long,
+      But the Delphian airs have died away!
+
+    I wonder and wonder how it befell:
+      Suddenly I had friends in crowds;
+    I bade the house-tops a long farewell;
+      "Good by," I cried, "to the stars and clouds!
+
+    "But thou, rare soul, that hast dwelt with me,
+      Spirit of Poesy! thou divine
+    Breath of the morning, thou shalt be,
+      Goddess! for ever and ever mine."
+
+    And the woman I loved was now my bride,
+      And the house I wanted was my own;
+    I turned to the Goddess satisfied,--
+      But the Goddess had somehow flown!
+
+    Flown, and I fear she will never return!
+      I'm much too sleek and happy for her,
+    Whose lovers must hunger, and waste, and burn,
+      Ere the beautiful heathen heart will stir!
+
+    I call,--but she does not stoop to my cry;
+      I wait,--but she lingers, and ah! so long!
+    It was not so in the years gone by,
+      When she touched my lips with chrism of song.
+
+    I swear I will get me a garret again,
+      And let the wee wife see the sunset's fires,
+    And lure the Goddess, by vigil and pain,
+      Up with the sparrows among the spires!
+
+    For a man should live in a garret aloof,
+      And have few friends, and be poorly clad,
+    With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof,
+      To keep the Goddess constant and glad!
+
+
+
+
+THE THRONE OF THE GOLDEN FOOT.
+
+
+Early on the morning of the 13th of September, 1855, a most fantastic and
+picturesque procession--in which the formal and arrogant simplicities of a
+nice Western civilization, and the grotesque and insolent ostentations of a
+crude Oriental barbarism, with all the splendid riddles of its far-fetched
+type-and-symbolry, were blended in a rich bizarreness--formed in the main
+street of the western suburb of "the Immortal City" of Amarapoora, and
+moved toward the palace of "him who reigns over the kingdoms of
+Thunaparanta, Tampadepa, and all the great umbrella-bearing chiefs of the
+Eastern countries,"--the Lord of Earth and Water, King of the Rising Sun,
+Lord of the Sacred White Elephant and of all white elephants, Master of the
+Celestial Weapon, and Great Chief of Life and Righteousness,--called, "for
+short," Mendoon-men, King of Ava. An imposing deputation of Woons and other
+grandees, with their respective "tails," were escorting the newly arrived
+Envoy of the Governor-General of India, and his suite, from their Residency
+on the south shore of the lake Toung-ah-mah-Eing below the city, to the
+Hall of the Throne of the Golden Foot, there to have audience of that
+great, glorious, and most excellent Majesty, whose dominions are bounded
+only by the imagination--and here and there a British customhouse; and
+whose excursions of dreadful power are stayed only by the forbearing fiat
+of Boodh--and now and then some British bayonets.
+
+The escort was illustrious: there were the old Nan-ma-dau-Phra Woon, or
+Lord-Governor of the Queen's Palace; the Woondouk Mhoung Mhon, a minister
+of the second order in the High Court and Council; and the Tara-Thoogyi, or
+Chief Judge of Amarapoora; besides other magnificos of less note, but all
+very fine in their heavy, wide-sleeved court robes of crimson velvet, laced
+with a broad edging of Benares brocade. On their heads they wore high
+mitres, also of crimson velvet, curving backward in a volute, and encircled
+at the base with a coronet of tinsel spear-heads. It is the _ton_ at court
+to wear these mitres excessively tight, and to carry a little ivory blade,
+modelled like a shoe-horn, with which the cap of honor is drawn on, and all
+"vagrom" locks of hair "comprehended." The _tsalwe_ (a Burman badge of
+nobility, derived from the Brahminical triple cord, and having three, six,
+nine, or even twelve threads, according to the distinction conferred on the
+wearer), and a trumpet-shaped ear-tube of gold, complete the official
+costume.
+
+The royal presents from England, guarded by the British-Indian cavalry
+escort, had been sent forward over a long bridge which spanned the southern
+end of the Toung-ah-mah, to await on the other side the arrival of the
+Envoy. There was a superb carriage for the King, which, being too wide to
+pass the bridge, was towed across the lake on a raft.
+
+That was a brilliant scene, the passage of the lake; and the picturesque
+elements almost surpassed the fantastic;--the jolly-boats of the steamers,
+leading the way with the men of her Majesty's 84th, followed by the
+Zenobia's gig, bearing the Governor-General's letter, with the Honorable
+East India Company's jack saucily flaunting at the bow; then other gigs and
+cutters, with the Envoy's suite; and, lastly, a gorgeously gilded war-boat,
+carrying the Envoy and the Woons, with fifty Burman oarsmen rowing to a
+wild chant. The white spire and pinnacles of the Ananda temple, with its
+grove of noble cotton-trees and tall palms, sharply defined against the
+boldly diversified ranges of the Shan Mountains, formed the background of
+the picture, which derived rich color and grotesque action from the Burmese
+soldiers of the Envoy's guard lining the banks, and the hurly-burly of
+half-naked, splashing villagers, waist-deep in the lake,--_salvages
+coupes_.
+
+First in the procession went the cases of royal presents, borne by Burmese
+porters on bamboo litters, and followed by four Arab horses and an English
+carriage for the King; next came the cavalry and infantry of the Envoy's
+Anglo-Indian escort, preceded by a band; behind these, the Secretary of the
+mission on an elephant, with the Governor-General's letter under the
+Company's jack; the Envoy (Major Phayre) in a _tonjon_, attended by the
+Nan-ma-dau Woon and the Woondouk on elephants; the British superintending
+surgeon in Pegu, and the Tara-Thoogyi; a British special deputy
+commissioner for the frontier, and one of the Tsa-re-dau-gyis, or Royal
+Scribes; and all the rest of the British officials, each paired with a
+Burmese _thoo-gyi_ or "great man," in a Burmese howdah.[3]
+
+The route lay through the street called Ambassador's Row,--the very one by
+which the Chinese Envoys entered Amarapoora sixty years before,--toward the
+western central gate of the city. From lake to palace the way was fenced
+with troops; but such troops!--fishermen and convicts, old men and
+boys,--probably old women too, and girls,--the he and she Warts, Mouldys,
+Shadows, Feebles, and Bullcalfs of the Immortal City. At every cross street
+were officers on elephants, "men in gilt Mambrino helmets and mountebank
+costumes, decked out with triple buckram capes, and shoulder lappets, and
+paltry embroidery." But there were men in red jackets and _papier-mache_
+helmets accompanying the procession, who appeared to be more at home with
+their arms than these motley musketeers. Inside the city the streets were
+flooded with water from a heavy rain the night before, and here the
+soldiers were propped on little stools of bamboo, to keep them out of the
+mud, while the officers occupied higher perches, each with his spittoon and
+his box of betel. A great rabble of spectators, of whom many were
+women,--not all uncomely or shabbily attired,--peeped through the endless
+white lattice, or thronged the cross-streets,--all still and silent, with
+wonder or suspicion.
+
+Just as the escort, with fixed bayonets and martial music, turned up the
+street leading to the eastern gate of the palace, and, halting, faced
+inward for the party to pass, the procession of the Ein-she-men, or heir
+apparent, (Lord of the Eastern Palace,) came suddenly up from another road,
+and crossed before them to enter the enclosure,--a stale trick of Burmese
+jealousy and insolence to keep them waiting at the palace gate. Precedent,
+which is a god in Burmah, has bestowed a sort of respectability upon this
+exploit in bad manners, every British envoy having been treated so, from
+Fleetwood to Phayre. The prince himself was conspicuous in a massive gilded
+litter, borne by many sturdy fellows elaborately tattooed, while eight
+long-shafted gold umbrellas flashed over his head. When he had entered the
+gate, and it was closed behind him, his retinue, consisting of several
+hundred soldiers, performed some intricate and tedious evolutions,
+countermarching round an open circle, with the manifest purpose of
+magnifying the apparent strength of the force, as well as of prolonging the
+detention of the unwelcome strangers.
+
+When Colonel Burney, who was sent as Resident to Ava in 1830, was detained
+by the same manoeuvre at the stockade which encircles the palace wall,
+some of his party were sharp enough to discover that many of the retainers,
+as well as of the elephants and bands of music, after passing in the suite
+of one prince, made a sly circuit to the rear, and appeared as part of the
+tail of another prince.
+
+As the Envoy and his suite dismounted, noon was struck by alternate strokes
+on a great bell and a great drum, mounted on a square tower within the gate
+called "Ywe-dau-yoo-Taga," or the Royal Gate of the Chosen, because it is
+guarded by picked troops. By this gate they entered; but first the Envoy
+took the Governor-General's letter from the Secretary, and carried it
+himself. The Nan-ma-dau-Phra Woon and his august colleagues now threw off
+their shoes, and the Woondouk strove ineffectually to induce the
+representative of Great Britain to follow their loyal example. At four
+different points, as they advanced to the inner gate, they even dropped on
+their knees, and _shikhoed_, with their faces in the dust, toward the
+palace; and again Burmah pressed Bull to take part in the pious services,
+but the obstinate infidel _Kala_[4] would not; for you see the world has
+moved, and Anglo-Saxon backbones have stiffened, since Fleetwood wrote, in
+1695: "As the palace gates were opened we fell down upon our knees, and
+made three bows (_shikhos_), which done, we entered the garden, the
+presents following; and having gone about half-way from the gate to the
+place where the king was seated, we made three bows again as before. When
+we got within fifteen yards of the king, we made three bows again, and were
+ordered to sit down." Between Fleetwood and Phayre are two wars, several
+annexations, "a lot" of custom-houses, and "no end" of bomb-shells.
+
+The gilded colonnade, and the many-storied spire, conspicuous from all
+sides of the city; the great inner court, with its groups of tumblers,
+jugglers, and dancers, performing in the corners for the entertainment of
+privileged spectators; the dirty grand-staircase, where, to their lively
+disgust, the distinguished strangers, Envoy and all, had to leave their
+shoes; the long wings of the structure, curiously resembling the transepts
+of a cathedral; the choir-like centre; the altar-like throne; the tall,
+lacquered columns, picked out in red at the base, and all ablaze with
+gilding;--by these the great Hall of Audience was known; and here, on a
+carpet in the centre, facing the throne, the Envoy and his party seated
+themselves, doubling their legs behind them.
+
+On a broad dais blazed the high throne, in all its barbaric gorgeousness of
+carving and gilding,--competing in splendor with the awful seats of Guadma
+in the temples, and surpassing the glory of the pulpit from which the High
+Poonghyi[5] chants the beatitudes of the Boodh. On the top it was
+luxuriously mattressed with crimson velvet, and on the left was a tall
+elbow-cushion for the king. A carved portal, with gilded lattice doors,
+opened from behind to the top level of the throne, which was wrought in a
+sort of mosaic of gold, silver, and mirror-work. A few small figures,
+representing the progenitors of the human race, occupied niches in the
+central band, while on the edge of the dais stood five royal emblems, in
+the shape of gilded shafts, with small gilt labels or scrolls, like flags,
+attached to them.
+
+On each side of the dais were pew-like recesses, with railings; and rows of
+expanded white umbrellas, fringed with muslin valances, (the royal
+insignia,) were displayed along the walls behind the throne. The central
+hall or aisle, in which the gentlemen of the mission sat, was laid with
+velvet-pile carpet of Axminster or Lasswade; elsewhere there was matting
+merely, except where the more distinguished officers of the court had their
+separate carpets. A double row of young princes, in surcoats of gold and
+silver brocade, with gay silk _putsos_, occupied the centre aisle in front
+of the Envoy;--on the right, four sons of the King; on the left, four sons
+of the Crown Prince. Farther forward, near the steps of the dais, the
+Ein-she-men himself was installed, in a sort of couch or carved litter,
+scarcely raised above the floor. In his robes of Benares gold brocade, and
+his superb mitre set with precious stones, he sat still as an effigy, never
+turning round, but betraying his curiosity by the use he slyly made of a
+small looking-glass. Behind the pillars on each side, and a little in
+advance of the Englishmen, were the Woongyis, or principal minister of
+state, constituting the Hlwot-dau, the High Court and Council; and nearer
+to the steps of the dais were several elderly princes of the blood, "men of
+sensual aspect and heavy jowl, like the heads of some of the burlier
+Caesars,--or, with their stiff robes and jewelled tiaras, perhaps recalling
+certain of the old Popes."[6] Close to the Envoy's party were two of the
+_Atwen-woons_, or Ministers of the Interior (Household) Council, and some
+_Nekhan-daus_, "Royal Ears," besides other officers of the Palace and
+Hlwot-dau.
+
+The Envoy, on taking his seat, had deposited the salver with the
+Governor-General's letter on a gilt stool covered with muslin, which had
+been placed there to receive it. Little gilt stands, containing trays of
+tobacco, pawn, _hlapet_, or pickled tea, and other curious confections,
+neatly set out in golden cups and saucers, together with water-goglets and
+gold drinking-cups, were then laid before the Kala guests, the water being
+faintly perfumed with musk.
+
+At last, from some mysterious inner court of the palace came a burst of
+music. From the verandas behind the throne a party of musketeers filed in,
+and, taking position between the pillars on each side of the centre aisle,
+knelt down, with their double-barrelled pieces between their knees, and
+their hands clasped before them in an attitude of prayer.
+
+As the last man entered the golden lattice doors, the doors rolled back
+into the wall, and the King was seen, mounting a stair leading from a
+chamber behind to the summit of the throne. He ascended slowly, using his
+golden-sheathed _dhar_ as a staff to his laboring steps; and no wonder, for
+his jewelled robe alone weighed one hundred pounds. Having dusted the
+_gudhi_ with his own hand, by means of a small _chowree_, or fly-flapper,
+he had brought with him, he took his seat on the left side of the throne,
+resting his elbow on the velvet cushion, which had been covered with a
+napkin. Then the Queen, who had followed him closely, seated herself by his
+side,--on the right, and a little behind him,--where she received from the
+hands of female attendants, who showed themselves but for a moment, the
+golden spittoon and other ungraceful conveniences, which, on all occasions
+and in all places, must be at the elbow of every Burmese dignitary. Next,
+she fanned herself for a few moments, and then she fanned the King; and
+finally, having been served with a lighted cheroot by the shy fingers of
+some mysterious maid of honor, she smoked in silent expectation.
+
+The Lord of White Elephants and Righteousness is a portly man, with refined
+features, an agreeable and intelligent expression, and delicate hands. He
+wore a sort of long tunic, or surcoat, so thickly set with jewels that the
+material, a kind of light-colored silk, was overlaid and almost hidden.
+_Tha-ra-poo_, the crown, is a round tiara of similar material, in shape
+like an Indian morion, surmounted by a spire-like ornament several inches
+high, and expanding in flaps or wings over each ear.
+
+The Queen, who, like all her predecessors, is her husband's half-sister,
+wore a perfectly close cap, covering hair and ears, and forming, as it
+rose, a conical crest, with the point curved forward in a volute, like the
+horn of a rhinoceros, or the large nipper of a crab's claw; close lappets
+hung over the cheeks. The rest of her Majesty's dress was oddly
+Elizabethan; the sleeves and skirt in "successive overlapping scalloped
+lappets"; around the throat a high collar, also scalloped or vandyked, and
+continued in front to the waist, where blazed a stomacher, or breast-plate,
+of great gems. Both cap and robe were stiff with diamonds. The Queen's name
+is Tsoo-phragyi, and she is the eldest daughter of her husband's father,
+King Tharawadi.
+
+On a pedestal between their Majesties, in front of the throne, stood a
+great golden figure of the _Henza_, or Sacred Goose,--the national emblem.
+
+When the awful pair had fairly entered, the Englishmen for the first time
+took off their hats; but the entire audience of subjects bowed their faces
+to the earth, and clasped their hands before them. "The two rows of little
+princes, who lay in file, doubled over one another like fallen books on a
+shelf, and the two Atwen-woons, grovelled forward, in their frog-like
+attitude, to a point about half-way to the throne."
+
+Then some eight or ten Brahmins (two of whom are court astrologers), in
+white stoles, and white mitres encircled with gold leaves, entered the
+screened pew-like recesses near the throne, and struck up a choral chant in
+Sanscrit; which done, one of them immediately followed in a solo hymn in
+Burmese, which is thus translated by the Envoy, Major Phayre:--
+
+1. "May the dangers and enmity which arise from the Ten Points be calmed
+and subdued! May the affliction of disease never attach itself to thee; and
+in accordance with the blessings declared in the sacred Pali, mayest thou
+be continually victorious! May thy life be prolonged for more than a
+hundred years, and may thy glory continue till the end of the world! Mayest
+thou enjoy whatever is propitious, and may all evil be far from thee,--O
+KING!
+
+2. "Thy glorious reputation diffuses itself like the scent of the
+sandal-wood, and exceeds the refulgence of the moon! Lord of the Celestial
+Elephant,--of the Excellent White Elephant! Master of the Celestial Weapon!
+Lord of Life, and Great Chief of Righteousness! Lineal descendant of
+Mahatha-mada and Mahadha-mayadza! Like unto the Kings of the Universe, who
+governed the four great islands of the solar system, and were versed in
+charms and spells of fourteen descriptions, may thy glory be prolonged, and
+thy life be extended, to more than a hundred years! Mayest thou enjoy
+whatever is propitious, and may all evil be far from thee,--O KING!
+
+3. "Great Chief of Righteousness! whose fame spreads like the fragrance of
+sandal-wood, and exceeds the glorious light of the moon,--in whom is
+concentrated all glory and honor,--who, with her Majesty, the Queen, the
+lineal descendant of anointed kings, happily governest all,--may thy rule
+extend, not only to the great Southern Island (the earth), which is tens of
+thousands of miles in extent, but to all the four grand and five hundred
+smaller Islands! May it equal the stability of the mountains Yoo-gan-toh,
+Myen-mo, and Hai-ma-garee; and until the end of the world mayest thou and
+thy descendants continue in unbroken line, unto the royal son and royal
+great-grandson, that thy glory may endure for countless ages! And may thy
+royal life be prolonged for more than a hundred years,--O KING!
+
+4. "May our king be continually victorious! When the divine Buddha ascended
+the golden throne, all created beings inhabiting millions of worlds became
+his subjects, and he overcame all enemies. So may kings by hundreds and
+thousands, and tens of thousands, come with offerings of celestial weapons,
+white elephants, flying horses, virgins, and precious stones of divers
+sorts, and do homage to the Golden Feet, which resemble the germs of the
+lotos,--O KING!"
+
+Now, even for an exploit in poetical license, that is sublimely cool,
+considering that a mere yesterday of thirty years has sufficed to strip the
+Throne of the Golden Foot of dominions which were the gradual acquisition
+of more than two bloody centuries of drunken lust, and that the dread Lord
+of Life and Master of the Celestial Weapon well knew that day that he no
+longer had access to the sea save through many leagues of British
+territory,--considering that the chronicle of the Burmese kings is one of
+the bloodiest chapters in the book of Time, a record of hell-engendered
+monsters, conceived in incest, brought forth in insanity, trained to the
+very sport of slaughter, and doomed to quick assassination or the most
+summary deposition and disgrace,--considering that even this "just and
+humane" Mendoon-men himself had deposed his cock-fighting brother, the
+Pagan-men, and sacked and burned his capital, and that even now he held him
+a close prisoner, poor and despised, in a corner of the fortified
+city,--and finally, that even as that paean of infatuation ascends to the
+besotted ears of the King, given up of God to believe lies, his own
+brother, the Ein-she-men, possessed of a devil of precedent, crouches like
+a tiger below the dais, and plots assassination and usurpation in his
+cunning bit of looking-glass.
+
+The chants concluded, the Tara-Thoogyi read from a _parabeik_, or black
+note-book, an address to the King, stating that the offerings his Majesty
+purposed making to certain pagodas at the capital were ready. "Let them be
+dedicated!" said one of the officials solemnly; and the music was renewed.
+This dedication, the chant of the Brahmins, and the singular ceremony of
+_A-beit-theit_ (literally, a pouring out of water on a solemn occasion),
+together constitute the formal inauguration of a royal sitting. Then the
+Governor-General's letter was drawn from its cover, and read aloud by a
+Than-daugan, or Receiver of the Royal Voice, who also read the list of
+presents for the King and Queen. A railway model, contributed by Sir
+Macdonald Stephenson, was immediately produced and exhibited in the
+Hall,--the only one of the presents uncovered there,--and excited lively
+interest among the Burmese. All the readings were intoned in a high
+recitative, like the English Cathedral service; and the long-drawn
+"Phra-a-a-a!" (My Lord!) was delivered like the "Amen" of the Liturgy.
+
+After this, his Majesty, without moving his lips, but speaking by an
+Atwen-woon, who discharged for that occasion the function of Royal Tongue,
+condescended to address to the Envoy three formal questions, prescribed by
+custom and precedent, thus:--
+
+_Royal Tongue._ "Is the English ruler well?"
+
+_Envoy._ "The English ruler is well."
+
+_Receiver of the Royal Voice_ (in a loud tone). "By reason of your
+Majesty's great glory and excellence, the English ruler is well; and
+therefore, with obeisance, I represent the same to your Majesty."
+
+_Royal Tongue._ "How long is it since you left the English country?"
+
+_Envoy._ "It is now fifty-five days since we left Bengal, and have arrived,
+and lived happily, at the Royal City."
+
+_Receiver of the Royal Voice._ "By reason of your Majesty's great glory
+and excellence it is fifty-five days since the Envoy left the English
+country, and he has now happily arrived at the Golden Feet. Therefore, with
+obeisance," &c., &c.
+
+_Royal Tongue._ "Are the rain and air propitious, so that the people live
+in happiness and ease?"
+
+_Envoy._ "The seasons are favorable, and the people live in happiness."
+
+_Receiver of the Royal Voice._ "By reason of your Majesty's great glory and
+excellence, the rain and air are propitious, and the people live in
+happiness."
+
+And here the awful conversation came to a profound close. Gifts were
+presently bestowed on all the officers of the mission;--to the Envoy a gold
+cup embossed with the zodiacal signs, a fine ruby, a tsalwe of nine cords,
+and a handsome putso; to other officers, a plain gold cup, ring, and putso,
+or a ring and putso only.
+
+Then the King rose to depart, the Queen assisting him to rise, and
+afterward using the royal dhar to help herself up. "They passed through the
+gilded lattice, the music played again, the doors rolled out from the wall,
+and we were told that we might retire."
+
+On the twenty-first, Major Phayre had a private interview, by appointment,
+with the King. The reception was almost _en famille_. As the Envoy
+approached the palace, he found the assembled court under a circular
+temporary building, called a _Mandat_, where music and dancing were going
+on,--the King half reclined on a kind of sofa in a room raised several feet
+above the level of the mandat. The Envoy was led forward and shown to a
+place among the ministers, who, as well as all the rest of the company,
+were seated on the ground,--only the dancers standing. Outside squatted
+guards in red jackets, with red _papier-mache_ helmets, and muskets with
+the buts resting between their legs. Eight couples of men and women were
+dancing. The King did not speak to Major Phayre, but, on the contrary,
+retired as he entered, and sent him word that he would see him in another
+room; where again he found his Majesty reclining on a sofa, no longer in
+imperial costume, but the ordinary garb of the country,--a silk putso, or
+waist-cloth, of gay colors, a white cotton jacket, reaching a little below
+the hips, and a single fillet of book-muslin twisted round his head. On his
+left, at a little distance, were some half-dozen of his sons, "of all ages
+up to sixteen years," crouching on the ground, with their chins touching
+it. A band of girls in fantastic court-dresses were in an anteroom,
+discoursing soft music on stringed instruments. One of the Atwen-woons,
+with several other officers of the court, and a few pages, had followed the
+Envoy, and now sat together near the end of the room. The King held up his
+hand, and the music ceased. He then requested the Envoy to notice some
+large imitation lotos-flowers in a vase; and as he spoke, the buds, which
+had been closed, suddenly expanded, and out of one of them flew a solitary
+sparrow. The king smiled, and one of the company said, "Each bud had a bird
+imprisoned, but they managed to escape, all but this one."
+
+Then the King said to the Envoy, "Have you read the Mengala-thoot?"
+
+"I have, your Majesty."
+
+"Do you know the meaning of it?"
+
+"I do. I have read the Burmese interpretation."
+
+"How many precepts does it contain?"
+
+"Thirty-eight."
+
+"Do you remember them?"
+
+The Envoy did not; so the King repeated some of the precepts of this
+summary of beatitude,--a sermon of Guadma's, containing thirty rules of
+life, against pride, anger, evil associates, and the like.
+
+Then followed much talk about a treaty which the Envoy was anxious to
+procure; but the King, with diplomatic adroitness, put him off; for the
+Burmese hate treaties, and always break them. Said his Majesty, very dryly:
+"I have heard a great deal of you, and that you are wise and well
+disposed. I should not have taken the same pains to receive every one; I
+should have done according to custom. You have commenced well. But in a
+man's life, and in every transaction, there is a beginning, a middle, and
+an end,"--illustrating the remark by running his finger along the hilt of
+his dhar of state, which lay on a stand before him.
+
+"Did you receive the marble pagoda I sent you?"
+
+"I did, your Majesty, and have brought a singing-bird box, as a token of my
+thanks."
+
+"I am going to bestow on you a ring, which you will find very curious."
+
+Here a ring, half sapphire and half topaz, was brought in, and presented to
+the Envoy.
+
+The King expressed a wish to engage some one to take charge of his ruby
+mines, and especially his lively desire to procure a model of a human
+skeleton, made of wood, and so arranged that the action of the joints in
+sitting and rising should be shown. The Envoy promised to attend to this.
+Some trays of cakes and sweetmeats were then brought in, and the King,
+having particularly recommended one or two of the dishes to the Envoy,
+retired. During the interview his Majesty behaved with much courtesy and
+kindness. One of his children, about eighteen months old, ran in two or
+three times, naked as he was born, and climbed up on the couch; the young
+sons now and then lighted the King's cheroot, and gave him water to drink.
+
+On the 2d of October the Envoy is again with the King in the small
+pavilion; about a hundred persons are present, including two Atwen-woons,
+the Nan-ma-dau-Phra Woon, and several Shan Tsaub-was, but none of the
+Woongyis. The King asked the Envoy if he had been to the Pyee-Kyoung to see
+the Tshaya-dau, or Royal Teacher, Patriarch or Bishop of all the Monks.
+
+"I have, your Majesty."
+
+"Did he discourse to you, and did you approve of what he said?"
+
+"He discoursed on moral duties, and what he said was very proper."
+
+"You know what we call the Ten Virtues.[7] Do you approve of them?"
+
+"They are most excellent."
+
+"What length of time, according to your books, is a Kamba?" (A complete
+revolution of nature, a geological period, it might almost be called.)
+
+"Our books, your Majesty, do not contain that."
+
+"Well, we say that in a Kamba the life period of man gradually advances
+from the limit of ten years to an Athenkhya,[8] and then gradually
+diminishes from that down to ten years again. When that has been repeated
+sixty-four times it constitutes a period, which again is repeated
+sixty-four times; and when four such compound periods have been repeated,
+the whole era is called a Kamba, or a grand revolution of the universe. The
+world is then destroyed, and a new era commences."
+
+The King then entered into a long discourse on the history of the
+Mahan-Zat, or life of Guadma in one of his former births, the gist of which
+was that a king who had a wise minister could get anything he set his heart
+upon. After which he related the story of a king of Benares, who had three
+birds' eggs brought to him; one produced a parrot, one an owl, and the
+other a _mainah_; and to each of these, in course of time, a department of
+the state was intrusted, but the highest, politics, fell to the parrot.
+
+"I believe," to the Envoy, ironically, "your English kings have existed for
+two hundred years or more. Have they not?"
+
+"The English nation, your Majesty, have had kings to reign over them for
+fifteen hundred years."
+
+"_My_ ancestors have come in regular descent from King Mahatha-mada" (the
+first king who established government on the earth,--many millions of years
+ago, at the beginning of the present Kamba, in fact).
+
+_Envoy_ (to one of the Atwen-woons, to show that he knew that no such king
+had ever reigned in Burmah). "Which of the royal cities did Mahatha-mada
+build?"
+
+The Atwen-woon only stared.
+
+"O," said the quick-witted Woondouk, "that king reigned in
+Myit-tshe-ma-detha [_the Middle land_, India]."
+
+_King._ "Our race once reigned in all the countries you hold. Now the Kalas
+have come close up to us."
+
+_Envoy._ "It is very true, your Majesty."
+
+"Have you read any part of our Maha-Radza-Weng [_Chronicles of the
+Kings_]?"
+
+"I have read portions of them, your Majesty, and am very anxious to read
+more."
+
+"Well, I will present you with a complete copy, and also a copy of the 550
+Zats, and the Mahan-Zats; and when you come again I shall expect to find
+that you have studied them. I should like to have a copy of your Radza-Weng
+[_History of Kings_]."
+
+"That I will present to your Majesty."
+
+"It is only right, and the part of a wise man, to gather instruction from
+the records of the past and the works of sages. By the study of these books
+you will be enabled to divine people's thoughts from their appearance, and
+may aspire to the most difficult of all attainments,--the discerning of
+which is the greater principle, matter or spirit."
+
+The King then inquired if the Envoy had visited the Royal Tanks, at
+Oungben-le and other places, which had been recently constructed.
+
+"I have not, your Majesty; but I purpose going."
+
+"I have caused ninety-nine tanks and ancient reservoirs to be dug, or
+repaired, and sixty-six canals, whereby a great deal of rice land will be
+made available. In the reign of Naurabha-dzyai 9999 tanks and canals were
+constructed. I purpose renewing them."
+
+"Ninety-nine" in Burmese signifies a large number merely. Thus, Captain
+Hannay was told that there were ninety-nine _jheels_, or lakes, in the
+district of Tagoung. An ancient king of Aracan is said to have founded
+ninety-nine cities on each side of the Aracan River. The Burmese speak of
+the ninety-nine towns of the Shan country. Duttagamini, king of Ceylon, is
+said to have built ninety-nine great temples. The Buddhist physiology
+reckons ninety-nine joints and ninety-nine thousand pores of the human
+body.[9]
+
+At a later interview, the Envoy took particular note of the personal
+appearance of this royal barbarian. His skin was smooth and clear, and his
+bright black eyes twinkled, and displayed a true Chinese obliquity when he
+laughed, as he did every two or three minutes. His mustache was good, his
+throat and jaws were very massive, his chest and arms remarkably well
+developed, and his hands clean and small. The retreating forehead, which
+marked him as a descendant of Alompra, was especially conspicuous.
+
+He reclined, in a characteristic attitude, on a splendid sofa, wrought in
+mosaic of gilding and looking-glass, spread with a rich yellow velvet
+mattress, bordered with crimson; and a corresponding rug, of crimson
+bordered with yellow, was spread below for the regalia. These consisted of
+a fantastic gilded ornament, "in size and shape much like a pair of stag's
+antlers," festooned with a muslin scarf, and intended to receive the royal
+dhar; and of the large golden Henza, set with precious stones. Other royal
+paraphernalia, such as the golden spittoon and salver, and the stand for
+the water-goglet, with its conical golden cover set with gems, were brought
+in and deposited on the rug when his Majesty appeared. Dancing-women were
+performing in the central aisle before the throne, to the music of a group
+of female minstrels, gayly attired, and crowned with pagoda-shaped tiaras,
+like those worn by the princes in the plays.
+
+Speaking of the Maha-Radza-Weng, and other books which he had ordered to be
+brought for the Envoy, the King said: "The mass of earth, water, and air
+which composes the Great Island [the earth] and Mount Myen-mo is vast, but
+learning is more stupendous still, and great labor is necessary to acquire
+it. Do you [the Envoy] know how many elements there are in a man's body?"
+
+"I cannot inform your Majesty."
+
+"The body consists of a great number of particles, small as flour or dust.
+One hair of the head appears like a single fibre, yet it is made up of a
+great number of smaller fibres; just as one of the long ropes you sound the
+depth of water with is composed of many short fibres. Of the elements,
+earth enters into the bones, and water into the hair."
+
+In this connection, Captain Yule has an interesting note to the first
+chapter of his narrative:--"There seems to turn up now and then in the
+science of the Buddhists a very curious parody, as it were, or chance
+suggestion, of some of the great truths or speculations of modern science;
+just as there are circumstances of their religion which seem to run
+parallel with circumstances and forms of Christianity or Christian
+churches, and which made the old Jesuit fathers think that the Devil had,
+of malice aforethought, prepared these travesties of Christian rites and
+mysteries among the heathen, in order to cast ridicule on the Church, and
+bar her progress. An example of what I allude to is found here, as regards
+electricity, in their apparent knowledge of the non-conducting power of
+glass. In the Buddhist theory of the universe, we have an infinity of
+contemporary systems, each provided with its sun and planets, analogous to
+the commonly received opinion of the plurality of worlds. We have also
+their infinite succession of creations and destructions by fire or water,
+analogous to a formerly popular geological theory. They hold the
+circulation of the blood, after a fashion. The King's conversations at
+Amarapoora indicated his belief in the atomic constitution of the body, and
+of the existence of a microscopic world, though his illustrations were not
+accurate. And when Mr. Crawfurd published his account of fossil elephant
+bones from the Irrawaddi, Colonel Burney tells us that the Burmese
+philosophers expressed much satisfaction at the discovery, as establishing
+the doctrine of their books. These taught that in former times there were
+ten species of elephants, but that the smallest species alone survived."
+
+The King inquired who of the English gentlemen were then present.
+
+_Woondouk._ "There are Captain Yule, the Secretary to the Mission (_Letya
+Bogyee_, or right-hand chief); Dr. Forsyth (_Tshaya Woon_, or supreme over
+the teachers); Professor Oldham, the geologist (_Kyouk Tshaya_, or rock
+teacher); and Major Allan (_Meaday Woon_ and _Mhan Byoung Bo_, telescope
+officer)."
+
+_King._ "Major Allan is a good man. Does he speak Burmese?"
+
+"A little, your Majesty."
+
+"Not so much as the Envoy, I suppose. He should study. Parrots, by
+diligence, learn languages. Have you parrots that can speak English?"
+
+_Envoy._ "We have, your Majesty."
+
+"And we have parrots that even understand writing. What stones is the Rock
+Teacher acquainted with?"
+
+"He knows all kinds, your Majesty."
+
+"In my country there are mountains, along the side of which if horses,
+elephants, or men go, a green shadow is cast on their bodies. Your black
+coat would appear green there. How does he explain this?"
+
+Professor Oldham suggested that it might arise from copper on the surface.
+
+"No, it cannot be that, as the copper is not seen. I think it results from
+emeralds below."[10]
+
+_To Dr. Forsyth._ "How many elementary substances are there in the human
+body?"
+
+_Dr. F._ "Four substances."
+
+"That is correct. Could a man have one of them destroyed, and yet survive?"
+
+"It might be partially injured, and he yet survive."
+
+"But suppose the element on which the issues of the body depend were to be
+destroyed, could the man survive?"
+
+"In that case he must die, if the action could not be restored."
+
+"That is true. It is proper for every physician to be conversant with the
+elementary substances. There are a great number of books on the subject of
+medicine in the Burmese language,--books _so_ deep,"--raising his hand
+above his head.
+
+_Envoy._ "I have received from your Majesty a fossil alligator's head,
+which is very much prized by the Rock Teacher; and I have heard there are
+Biloos'[11] (monsters') bones in some parts of the country."
+
+_King._ "There are Biloos' bones in the Yau district, and you can have as
+many as you choose, or a whole Biloo even." (_To the Woondouk_,) "See that
+this is attended to." (_To the Atwen-woons_,) "These people cannot sit long
+thus without being cramped."
+
+His Majesty then flung himself brusquely off the sofa, turned his back, put
+on his shoes, and strode away without any leave-taking. His manner was easy
+and full of good-humor; but he chewed betel to almost disgusting excess;
+the golden pawn-box was never out of his hand, and he played with it as he
+talked.
+
+When he was gone, refreshments were brought in,--pancakes filled with
+spiced meats, jellies of rice-starch, in various colors, and other viands.
+But the most Oriental and by no means the least palatable dish consisted of
+fried locusts, stuffed with spiced meat. They were brought in
+"hot-and-hot," in relays of saucers, and tasted like fried shrimps.
+
+In the large audience-hall, adjoining the pavilion, ten or twelve richly
+dressed dancing-girls slowly circled to passionate music, brandishing in
+both hands bunches of peacock's feathers, throwing themselves into a
+variety of difficult and curious attitudes, and chanting all the while in a
+pleasing chorus, which singularly resembled the psalmody of a choir in an
+English parish church.
+
+A few days later the Envoy called, _pour prendre conge_, on the
+Ein-she-men, whose physiognomy he describes as that of a strong-willed,
+boisterous, passionate, and energetic man, with but little intellect or
+refinement, but not, perhaps, without kindly impulses. He was full of
+questions,--among others, "What nation first made gunpowder?"
+
+_Envoy._ "I am not quite sure, your Highness, whether it was first made in
+England or Germany. Our books say that it was known from an earlier period
+in China."
+
+"Ah!" interposed the sly old Woondouk. "You won't say where gunpowder was
+first made, because you want it to appear that it was in England."
+
+"Not at all; the point is a doubtful one. I tell you exactly what I know."
+
+"Then where were muskets first invented?"
+
+"I cannot tell you. The first use of cannon on record was by the English,
+some five hundred years ago."
+
+_Prince._ "What nation first made steamships?"
+
+"America, your Highness. The steam-engine was invented in England, and an
+American adapted it to ships."
+
+_Woondouk._ "Those are the people who went out from you, and you could not
+govern them, and they set up for themselves."
+
+_Envoy._ "Precisely. Just as the people of Aracan, of your own race and
+religion, settled in that country, and had a king of their own, and you
+lost dominion over them." (_Much good-humored laughter at this reply._)
+
+Speaking of the friendly relations between England and France, the Envoy
+explained that communication is kept up constantly between the two
+countries by means of the electric telegraph. (_To the Woondouk._) "You
+have seen the telegraph in Bengal, and will be able to inform his Highness
+about it."
+
+_Woondouk._ "They put a wire on posts above the ground, or bury it
+underneath, carrying it over mountains and through rivers; and at certain
+stations apart there are magnetic needles, which shake to denote the
+letters of the words of a message that is sent. Thus they converse
+together, though they are hundreds of miles apart."
+
+This Woondouk, Moung Mhon, was a very astute and ingenious man. When he
+accompanied the old Dalla-Woon on a mission to the Governor-General, he was
+taken on one occasion, by Major Phayre and Colonel Baker, to make a short
+excursion on the East India Railway. When his attention was called to the
+great speed at which they were travelling, he made no remark, except to
+ask the interval between two telegraph posts on the line; and then,
+counting the beats of his own pulse, and making a mental estimate of the
+rapidity with which he passed those intervals, he quietly said, "Yes, we
+_are_ going very fast."
+
+_Woondouk._ "Now where was the electric telegraph first discovered?"
+
+_Envoy._ "I believe the discovery was nearly contemporaneous in England and
+America."
+
+_Woondouk._ "But it must have been in one place or the other."
+
+_Envoy._ "In Europe, where men of science are engaged in a great variety of
+studies, and publish their views and opinions, similar discoveries are
+frequently made about the same time in different countries."
+
+The visits of ceremony to the four Woongyis, and to old Moung Pathee, the
+Nan-ma-dau Woon, were marked by circumstances of peculiar interest. At the
+house of the Magwe Menghi (Great Prince of Magwe), the most intellectual
+and influential of the Woongyis, the floor was laid with carpets, and
+chairs for the visitors were set at a long table. The large silk curtain
+which separated the reception-room from the women's apartment was partly
+raised at one corner; and there, on carpets, were seated all the ladies of
+the family. Breakfast was served, at first in English fashion, with bread
+and butter, muffins and tarts. But presently the hospitable Woongyi called
+out cheerily, "Come, come! they know an English breakfast well enough; let
+us have Burmese dishes now." Then came sweetmeats and dainties of various
+kinds, and in profusion,--in all, fifty-seven dishes. After the breakfast
+the usual Burmese dessert of betel-nut, pawn, pickled tea,[12] salted
+ginger in small strips, fried garlic, walnuts without the shells, roasted
+groundnuts, &c., on little gold and silver dishes; and, last of all,
+cheroots.
+
+The Woongyi led in his wife, and would have her attempt an English chair,
+next the Envoy; but the old lady, after several amiable efforts to
+reconcile herself to the foreign situation, bravely tucked in her scanty
+robes, and doubled her legs under her.
+
+From the Magwe Menghi's they passed to the houses of the Mein-loung, the
+Myo-doung, and the Pakhan Menghi, (all Woonghis,) and of the venerable
+Nan-ma-dau Woon,--breakfasting at each. At the residence of the Pakhan
+Menghi several ladies joined the party at table; these were the Woongyi's
+wife, who had been one of Tharawadi's queens, with her mother and two
+sisters,--all really lady-like and self-possessed, fairer than the
+generality of Burmese women, and of delicate and graceful figures, though
+not pretty. They wore the usual _tawein_, or narrow petticoat of gorgeously
+striped silk, polka jackets of thin white muslin, and ornaments of
+extraordinary brilliancy. Their ear-cylinders were gold; but instead of
+being open tubes, as commonly worn at the capital, they were closed in
+front, and set with one large cut diamond, ruby, or emerald, surrounded by
+smaller brilliants. The necklace consisted of a narrow chain of gold,
+plain, or set with pearls, and bearing table diamonds in two rows, one
+fixed and the other pendent. They also wore superb rings, in which were
+rubies of noble size.
+
+Among the ladies seated on the ground were two strongly resembling one
+another, and with the receding forehead which marks all the descendants of
+Alompra. These were daughters of the Mekhara-men, that uncle of King
+Tharawadi who used to translate articles from Rees's Cyclopaedia into
+Burmese, and who assisted Mr. Lane, a merchant of Ava, in the compilation
+of the English and Burmese Dictionary which bears the name of the latter.
+
+For a Kala at Amarapoora not to know the Lord White Elephant is to argue
+himself unknown. Consequently a presentation to that Buddhistic demi-god in
+bleached and animated India-rubber was a crowning ceremonial, essential, in
+a political as well as religious point of view, to the success of the
+embassy. He "receives" in his "palace," a little to the north of the Hall
+of Audience. On the south are sheds for the vulgar monsters of his retinue,
+and brick _godowns_, in which the state carriages, and the massive and
+gorgeous golden litters, are stowed.
+
+Captain Yule says the present white elephant is the very one mentioned by
+Padre Sangermano as having been caught in 1806,--to the great joy of the
+king, who had just lost the preceding incumbent, a female, which died after
+a year's captivity. "He is very large, almost ten feet high, with a noble
+head and pair of tusks. But he is long-bodied and lank, and not otherwise
+handsome for an elephant. He is sickly too, and out of condition, being
+distempered for five months in the year, from April to August. His eye, the
+iris of which is yellow, with a reddish outer annulus, and a small, clear,
+black pupil, has an uneasy glare, and his keepers evidently mistrust his
+temper. The annulus round the iris is pointed out as resembling a circle of
+the nine gems. His color is almost uniform,--about the ground-tint of the
+mottled or freckled part of the trunk and ears of common elephants, perhaps
+a little darker. He also has pale freckles on the same parts. On the whole,
+he is well entitled to his appellation."
+
+His royal paraphernalia are magnificent. The driving-hook is three feet
+long, the stem a mass of small pearls, girt at frequent intervals with
+bands of rubies, and the hook and handle of crystal, tipped with gold. The
+headstall is of fine red cloth, plentifully studded with choice rubies, and
+near the extremity are some precious diamonds. Fitting over the bumps of
+the forehead are circles of the nine gems, which are supposed to be charms
+against malign influences.
+
+When caparisoned, he also wears on the forehead, like other Burmese
+dignitaries, including the king himself, a golden plate inscribed with his
+titles, and a gold crescent set with circles of large gems between the
+eyes. Large silver tassels hang in front of his ears, and he is harnessed
+with bands of gold and crimson set with large bosses of pure gold. He is a
+regular estate of the realm, having a Woon, or minister, of his own, four
+gold umbrellas, the white umbrellas which are peculiar to royalty, and a
+suite of thirty attendants. The Burmese remove their shoes on entering his
+palace. He has an appanage, or territory, assigned to him to "eat," like
+other princes of the Empire. In Burney's time it was the rich cotton
+district of Taroup Myo.
+
+The present king never rides the white elephant; but his uncle used to do
+so frequently, acting as his own mahout, which was one of the royal
+accomplishments of the ancient Indian kings.
+
+"The importance attached to the possession of a white elephant," says
+Captain Yule, "is traceable to the Buddhist system. A white elephant of
+certain wonderful endowments is one of the seven precious things the
+possession of which marks the _Maha chakravartti Raja_, 'the great
+wheel-turning king,' the holy and universal sovereign, a character who
+appears once in a cycle, at the period when the waxing and waning term of
+human life has reached its maximum of an _asanhkya_ in duration. Hence the
+white elephant is the ensign of universal sovereignty."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] Narrative of a Mission to the Court of Ava, in 1855. By Captain Henry
+Yule, Secretary to the Envoy.
+
+[4] Western foreigner.
+
+[5] Priest; literally, "Great Glory."
+
+[6] Yule's Narrative.
+
+[7] 1. Charity; 2. Religious Observances; 3. Self-denial; 4. Learning; 5.
+Diligence; 6. Patience; 7. Truth; 8. Perseverance; 9. Friendship; 10.
+Impartiality.
+
+[8] _Athenkhya_ is a corruption, or Burmese pronunciation, of _asankhya_,
+Sanscrit, from the negative _a_ and _sankhya_, "number,"--literally,
+"innumerable"; but as a Buddhist period, it is expressed by a unit and _one
+hundred and forty ciphers_. Yule.
+
+[9] Yule's Narrative.
+
+[10] "Amid lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding
+waters, almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold.
+True, according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent; but
+Sir Walter [Raleigh], on afterward showing the stones to a Spaniard of the
+Caracas, was told by him that they were _madre del oro_, mother of gold,
+and that the mine itself was further in the ground."--_Hugh Miller._
+
+[11] A sort of demon-monkeys, grotesquely hideous and fearfully
+funny,--generally depicted as black Calibans, with tusks. Judson defines
+them as "monsters which devour human flesh, and possess certain superhuman
+powers." According to a Buddhist legend, Guadma, when he attempted to land
+at Martaban, was stoned by the Nats and Biloos, who then inhabited that
+country, as well as Tavoy and Mergui; and Captain Yule imagines there may
+be some dim tradition here of an alien and savage race of aborigines (akin,
+perhaps, to the quasi-negroes of the Andamans), who have become the Biloos,
+or Ogres, of Burman legend, "just as our Ogres took their name, probably,
+from the Ugrians of Northeastern Europe." The description of the Andaman
+negroes by the Mohammedan travellers of the ninth century, as quoted by
+Prichard, would answer well for the Biloos of Burmah: "The people eat human
+flesh quite raw; their complexion is black, their hair frizzled, their
+countenance and eyes frightful; their feet are almost a cubit in length,
+and they go quite naked." The comic element, however, always enters into
+the Burmese conception of a Biloo. On the pavement of a royal monastery at
+Amarapoora is a set of bas-reliefs representing Biloos in all sorts of
+impish attitudes and antics.
+
+[12] _Hlapet_, or pickled tea, made up with a little oil, salt, and garlic,
+or assafoetida, is eaten in small quantities by the Burmese, after dinner,
+as we eat cheese. They say it promotes digestion, and they cannot live in
+comfort without it. Hlapet is also passed around on many ceremonial
+occasions, and on the conclusion of lawsuits.
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A QUACK.
+
+IN TWO PARTS.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+At this present moment of time I am what the doctors call an interesting
+case, and am to be found in bed No. 10, Ward II. Massachusetts General
+Hospital. I am told that I have what is called Addison's Disease,--and that
+it is this pleasing malady which causes me to be covered with large
+blotches of a dark mulatto tint, such as I suppose would make me peculiarly
+acceptable to a Massachusetts constituency, if my legs were only strong
+enough to enable me to run for Congress. However, it is a rather grim
+subject to joke about, because, if I believe the doctor who comes around
+every day and thumps me, and listens to my chest with as much pleasure as
+if I was music all through,--I say, if I believed him, I should suppose I
+was going to die. The fact is, I don't believe him at all. Some of these
+days I shall take a turn and get about again, but meanwhile it is rather
+dull for a stirring, active person to have to lie still and watch myself
+getting big brown and yellow spots all over me, like a map that has taken
+to growing.
+
+The man on my right has consumption, smells of cod-liver oil, and coughs
+all night. The man on my left is a Down-Easter, with a liver which has
+struck work; looks like a human pumpkin; and how he contrives to whittle
+jack-straws all day, and eat as he does, I can't understand. I have tried
+reading and tried whittling, but they don't either of them satisfy me, so
+that yesterday I concluded to ask the doctor if he could n't suggest some
+other amusement.
+
+I waited until he had gone through the ward, and then I seized my chance,
+and asked him to stop a moment.
+
+"Well," said he, "what do you want?"
+
+"Something to do, Doctor."
+
+He thought a little, and then replied: "I'll tell you what to do; I think
+if you were to write out a plain account of your life, it would be pretty
+well worth reading, and perhaps would serve to occupy you for a few days at
+least. If half of what you told me last week be true, you must be about as
+clever a scamp as there is to be met with, and I suppose you would just as
+lief put it on paper as talk it."
+
+"Pretty nearly," said I; "I think I will try it, Doctor."
+
+After he left I lay awhile thinking over the matter. I knew well enough
+that I was what the world calls a scamp, and I knew also that I had got
+little good out of the fact. If a man is what people call virtuous, and
+fails in life, he gets credit at least for the virtue; but when a man is a
+rascal, and breaks down at the trade, somehow or other people don't credit
+him with the intelligence he has put into the business,--and this I call
+hard. I never had much experience of virtue being its own reward; but I do
+know that, when rascality is left with nothing but the contemplation of
+itself for comfort, it is by no means refreshing. Now this is just my
+present position; and if I did not recall with satisfaction the energy and
+skill with which I did my work, I should be nothing but disgusted at the
+melancholy spectacle of my failure. I suppose that I shall at least find
+occupation in reviewing all this, and I think, therefore, that I shall try
+to give a plain and straightforward account of the life I have led, and the
+various devices by which I have sought to get my share of the money of my
+countrymen.
+
+I want it to be clearly understood, at the beginning, that in what I may
+have to say, I shall stick severely to the truth, without any overstrained
+regard for my neighbors' feelings. In fact, I shall have some little
+satisfaction when I do come a little heavy on corn or bunyon, because for
+the past two years the whole world appears to have been engaged in
+trotting over mine with as much certainty as if there were no other
+standing-room left in creation.
+
+I shall be rather brief about my early life, which possesses little or no
+interest.
+
+I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and am therefore what those dreary
+Pennsylvanians call a Jersey Yankee, and sometimes a Spaniard, as pleases
+them best. My father was a respectable physician in large practice, too
+busy to look after me. My mother died too early for me to remember her at
+all. An old aunt who took her place as our housekeeper indulged me to the
+utmost, and I thus acquired a taste for having my own way and the best of
+everything, which has stuck to me through life. I do not remember when it
+was that I first began to pilfer, but it must have been rather early in
+life. Indeed, I believe I may say that, charitably speaking, which is the
+only way to speak of one's self, I was what the doctors call a
+kleptomaniac,--which means that, when I could not get a thing in any other
+way, I took it. As to education, I took very little of that, but I had,
+notwithstanding, a liking for reading, and especially for light literature.
+At the age of sixteen I was sent to Nassau Hall, best known as Princeton
+College; but, for reasons which I need not state very fully, I did not
+remain beyond the close of the Junior year. The causes which led to my
+removal were not the usual foolish scrapes in which college lads indulge.
+Indeed, I never have been guilty of any of those wanton pieces of
+wickedness which injure the feelings of others while they lead to no useful
+result. When I left to return home, I set myself seriously to reflect upon
+the necessity of greater caution in following out my inclinations, and from
+that time forward I have steadily avoided the vulgar vice of directly
+possessing myself of objects to which I could show no legal title. My
+father was justly indignant at the results of my college career; and,
+according to my aunt, his sorrow had some effect in shortening his life,
+which ended rather suddenly within the year.
+
+I was now about nineteen years old, and, as I remember, a middle-sized,
+well-built young fellow, with large, dark eyes, a slight mustache, and, I
+have been told, with very good manners, and a somewhat humorous turn.
+Besides these advantages, my guardian held in trust for me about three
+thousand dollars. After some consultation between us, it was resolved that
+I should study medicine.
+
+Accordingly I set out for Philadelphia, with many good counsels from my
+aunt and guardian. I look back upon this period as a turning-point in my
+life. I had seen enough of the world already to know that, if you can
+succeed honestly, it is by far the pleasantest way; and I really believe
+that, if I had not been endowed with such a fatal liking for all the good
+things of life, I might have lived along as reputably as most men. This,
+however, is, and always has been, my difficulty, and I suppose that I am
+not therefore altogether responsible for the incidents to which it gave
+rise. Most men also have some ties in life. I had only one, a little
+sister, now about ten years of age, for whom I have always had more or less
+affection, but who was of course too much my junior to exert over me that
+beneficial control which has saved so many men from evil courses. She cried
+a good deal when we parted, and this, I think, had a very good effect in
+strengthening my resolution to do nothing which could get me into trouble.
+
+The janitor of the College to which I went directed me to a boarding-house,
+where I engaged a small, third-story room, which I afterwards shared with
+Mr. Chaucer of Jawjaw, as he called the State which he had the honor to
+represent.
+
+In this very remarkable abode I spent the next two winters; and finally
+graduated, along with two hundred more, at the close of my two years of
+study. I should also have been one year in a physician's office as a
+student, but this regulation is very easily evaded. As to my studies, the
+less said the better. I attended the quizzes, as they call them, pretty
+closely, and, being of quick and retentive memory, was thus enabled to
+dispense, for the most part, with the six or seven lectures a day which
+duller men found it necessary to follow.
+
+Dissecting struck me as a rather nasty business for a gentleman, and on
+this account I did just as little as was absolutely essential. In fact, if
+a man takes his teckers, and pays the dissection fees, nobody troubles
+himself as to whether or not he does any more than this. A like evil exists
+as to graduation; whether you merely squeeze through, or pass with credit,
+is a thing which is not made public, so that I had absolutely nothing to
+stimulate my ambition.
+
+The astonishment with which I learned of my success was shared by the
+numerous Southern gentlemen who darkened the floors, and perfumed with
+tobacco the rooms of our boarding-house. In my companions, during the time
+of my studies so called, as in other matters in life, I was somewhat
+unfortunate. All of them were Southern gentlemen, with more money than I.
+They all carried great sticks, usually sword-canes, and most of them
+bowie-knives; also they delighted in dress-coats, long hair, felt hats, and
+very tight boots, swore hideously, and glared at every woman they met as
+they strolled along with their arms affectionately over the shoulders of
+their companion. They hated the "Nawth," and cursed the Yankees, and
+honestly believed that the leanest of them was a match for any half-dozen
+of the bulkiest of Northerners. I must also do them the justice to say that
+they were quite as ready to fight as to brag, which, by the way, is no
+meagre statement. With these gentry, for whom I retain a respect which has
+filled me with regret at the recent course of events, I spent a good deal
+of my large leisure. We were what the more respectable students of both
+sections called a hard crowd; but what we did, or how we did it, little
+concerns us here, except that, owing to my esteem for chivalric blood and
+breeding, I was led into many practices and excesses which cost my guardian
+much distress and myself a good deal of money.
+
+At the close of my career as a student, I found myself aged twenty-one
+years, and owner of twelve hundred dollars,--the rest of my small estate
+having disappeared variously within the last two years. After my friends
+had gone to their homes in the South, I began to look about me for an
+office, and finally settled upon a very good room in one of the down-town
+localities of the Quaker City. I am not specific as to number and street,
+for reasons which may hereafter appear. I liked the situation on various
+accounts. It had been occupied by a doctor; the terms were reasonable; and
+it lay on the skirts of a good neighborhood; while below it lived a motley
+population, amongst whom I expected to get my first patients and such fees
+as were to be had. Into this new home I moved my medical text-books, a few
+bones, and myself. Also I displayed in the window a fresh sign, upon which
+was distinctly to be read:--
+
+          "DR. ELIAS SANDCRAFT.
+    Office hours, 7 to 9 A. M., 3 to 6
+           P. M., 7 to 9 P. M."
+
+I felt now that I had done my fair share towards attaining a virtuous
+subsistence, and so I waited tranquilly, and without undue enthusiasm, to
+see the rest of the world do its part in the matter. Meanwhile I read up on
+all sorts of imaginable cases, stayed at home all through my office hours,
+and at intervals explored the strange section of the town which lay to the
+south of my office. I do not suppose there is anything like it elsewhere.
+It was then, and still is, a nest of endless grog-shops, brothels,
+slop-shops, and low lodging-houses. You may dine here for a penny off of
+soup made from the refuse meats of the rich, gathered at back gates by a
+horde of half-naked children, who all tell varieties of one woful tale.
+Here, too, you may be drunk at five cents, and lodge for three, with men,
+women, and children of all colors lying about you. It is this hideous
+mixture of black and white and yellow wretchedness which makes the place so
+peculiar. The blacks predominate, and have mostly that swollen, reddish,
+dark skin, the sign in this race of habitual drunkenness. Of course only
+the lowest whites are here,--rag-pickers, pawnbrokers, old-clothes-men,
+thieves, and the like. All of this, as it came before me, I viewed with
+mingled disgust and philosophy. I hated filth, but I understood that
+society has to stand on somebody, and I was only glad that I was not one of
+the undermost and worst-squeezed bricks.
+
+You will hardly believe me, but I had waited a month without having been
+called upon by a single patient. At last the policeman on the beat brought
+me a fancy man, with a dog bite. This patient recommended me to his
+brother, the keeper of a small pawnbroking shop, and by very slow degrees I
+began to get stray patients who were too poor to indulge in uptown doctors.
+I found the police very useful acquaintances; and, by a drink or a cigar
+now and then, I got most of the cases of cut heads and the like at the next
+station-house. These, however, were the aristocrats of my practice; the
+bulk of my patients were soap-fat-men, rag-pickers, oystermen, hose-house
+bummers, and worse, with other and nameless trades, men and women, white,
+black, or mulatto. How they got the levies and quarters with which I was
+reluctantly paid, I do not know; that indeed was none of my business. They
+expected to pay, and they came to me in preference to the dispensary doctor
+two or three squares away, who seemed to me to live in the lanes and alleys
+about us. Of course he received no pay except experience, since the
+dispensaries in the Quaker City, as a rule, do not give salaries to their
+doctors; and the vilest of the poor will prefer a pay doctor, if he can get
+one, to one of these disinterested gentlemen who are at everybody's call
+and beck. I am told that most young doctors do a large amount of poor
+practice, as it is called; but, for my own part, I think it better for both
+parties when the doctor insists upon some compensation being made to him.
+This has been usually my own custom, and I have not found reason to regret
+it.
+
+Notwithstanding my strict attention to my own interests, I have been rather
+sorely dealt with by fate, upon several occasions, where, so far as I could
+see, I was vigilantly doing everything in my power to keep myself out of
+trouble or danger. I may as well relate one of them, merely as an
+illustration of how little value a man's intellect may be, when fate and
+the prejudices of the mass of men are against him.
+
+One evening late, I myself answered a ring at the bell, and found a small
+black boy on the steps, a shoeless, hatless little wretch, with curled
+darkness for hair, and teeth like new tombstones. It was pretty cold, and
+he was relieving his feet by standing first on one and then on the other.
+He did not wait for me to speak.
+
+"Hi, sah, Missy Barker she say to come quick away, sah, to Numbah 709
+Bedford Street."
+
+The locality did not look like pay, but it was hard to say in this quarter,
+because sometimes you found a well-to-do "brandy-snifter,"--local for
+gin-shop,--or a hard-working "leather-jeweller,"--ditto for
+shoemaker,--with next door, in a house no better or worse, dozens of human
+rats for whom every police trap in the city was constantly set.
+
+With a doubt, then, in my mind as to whether I should find a good patient
+or some mean nigger, I sought out the place to which I had been directed. I
+did not like its looks; but I blundered up an alley, and into a back room,
+where I fell over somebody, and was cursed and told to lie down and keep
+easy, or somebody, meaning the man stumbled over, would make me. At last I
+lit on a staircase which led into the alley, and, after some inquiry, got
+as high as the garret. People hereabouts did not know one another, or did
+not want to know, so that it was of little avail to ask questions. At
+length I saw a light through the cracks in the attic door, and walked in.
+To my amazement, the first person I saw was a woman of about thirty-five,
+in pearl-gray Quaker dress,--one of your calm, good-looking people. She was
+seated on a stool beside a straw mattress, upon which lay a black woman.
+There were three others crowded close around a small stove, which was
+red-hot,--an unusual spectacle in this street. Altogether a most nasty den.
+
+As I came in, the little Quaker woman got up, and said, "I took the liberty
+of sending for thee to look at this poor woman. I am afraid she has the
+small-pox. Will thee be so kind as to look at her?" And with this she held
+down the candle towards the bed.
+
+"Good gracious!" said I hastily, seeing how the creature was speckled, "I
+did n't understand this, or I would not have come. Best let her alone,
+miss," I added, "there 's nothing to be done for these cases."
+
+Upon my word, I was astonished at the little woman's indignation. She said
+just those things which make you feel as if somebody had been calling you
+names or kicking you. Was I a doctor? Was I a man? and so on. However, I
+never did fancy the small-pox, and what could a fellow get by doctoring
+wretches like these? So I held my tongue and went away. About a week
+afterwards, I met Evans, the Dispensary man.
+
+"Halloa!" says he. "Doctor, you made a nice mistake about that darky at No.
+709 Bedford Street the other night. She had nothing but measles after all."
+
+"Of course I knew," said I, laughing; "but you don't think I was going into
+dispensary trash, do you?"
+
+"I should think not," says Evans.
+
+I learned afterwards that this Miss Barker had taken an absurd fancy to
+the man because he had doctored the darky, and would not let the Quakeress
+pay him. The end was, that when I wanted to get a vacancy in the Southwark
+Dispensary, where they do pay the doctors, Miss Barker was malignant enough
+to take advantage of my oversight by telling the whole story to the board;
+so that Evans got in, and I was beaten.
+
+You may be pretty sure that I found rather slow the kind of practice I have
+described, and began to look about for chances of bettering myself. In this
+sort of location these came up now and then; and as soon as I got to be
+known as a reliable man, I began to get the peculiar sort of practice I
+wanted. Notwithstanding all my efforts, however, I found myself at the
+close of three years with all my means spent, and just able to live
+meagrely from hand to mouth, which by no means suited a person of my
+luxurious turn. Six months went by, and I was worse off than ever,--two
+months in arrears of rent, and numerous other debts to cigar-shops and
+liquor-dealers. Now and then, some good job, such as a burglar with a cut
+head, helped me up for a while; but on the whole, I was like Slider
+Downeyhylle in poor Neal's Charcoal Sketches, and "kept going downer and
+downer the more I tried not to." Something must be done.
+
+One night, as I was debating with myself as to how I was to improve my
+position, I heard a knock on my shutter, and, going to the door, let in a
+broad-shouldered man with a white face and a great hooked nose. He wore a
+heavy black beard and mustache, and looked like the wolf in the pictures of
+Red Riding-Hood which I had seen as a child.
+
+"Your name 's Sandcraft?" said the man, shaking the snow over everything.
+"Set down, want to talk to you."
+
+"That's my name. What can I do for you?" said I.
+
+The man looked around the room rather scornfully, at the same time throwing
+back his coat, and displaying a red neckerchief and a huge garnet pin.
+"Guess you 're not overly rich," he said.
+
+"Not especially," said I.
+
+"Know--Simon Stagers?"
+
+"Can't say I do," said I. Simon was a burglar who had blown off two fingers
+when mining a safe, and whom I had attended while he was hiding.
+
+"Can't say you do," says the wolf.
+
+"Well, you can lie, and no mistake. Come now, Doctor, Simon says you 're
+safe, and I want to do a leetle plain talk with you." With this he laid ten
+eagles on the table; I put out my hand instinctively.
+
+"Let 'em alone," cried the man sharply. "They 're easy earned, and ten more
+like 'em."
+
+"For doing what?" said I.
+
+The man paused a moment, looked around him, eyed me furtively, and finally
+loosened his cravat with a hasty pull. "You 're the coroner," said he.
+
+"I! What do you mean?"
+
+"Yes, you,--the coroner, don't you understand?" and so saying he shoved the
+gold pieces towards me.
+
+"Very good," said I, "we will suppose I 'm the coroner."
+
+"And being the coroner," said he, "you get this note, which requests you to
+call at No. 9 Blank Street to examine the body of a young man which is
+supposed--only supposed, you see--to have--well, to have died under
+suspicious circumstances."
+
+"Go on," said I.
+
+"No," he returned, "not till I know how you like it. Stagers and another
+knows it; and it would n't be very safe for you to split, besides not
+making nothing out of it; but what I say is this. Do you like the business
+of coroner?"
+
+Now I did not like it, but two hundred in gold was life to me just then; so
+I said, "Let me hear the whole of it first."
+
+"That 's square enough," said the man; "my wife 's got"--correcting himself
+with a little shiver--"my wife had a brother that 's been cuttin' up rough,
+because, when I 'd been up too late, I handled her a leetle hard now and
+again. About three weeks ago, he threatened to fetch the police on me for
+one or two little things Stagers and I done together. Luckily, he fell sick
+with a typhoid just then; but he made such a thunderin' noise about opening
+safes, and what he done, and I done, and so on, that I did n't dare to have
+any one about him. When he began to mend, I gave him a little plain talk
+about this business of threatening to bring the police on us, and next day
+I caught him a saying something to my wife about it. The end of it was, he
+was took worse next morning, and--well he died yesterday. Now what does his
+sister do, but writes a note, and gives it to a boy in the alley to put in
+the post. Luckily, Stagers happened to be round; and after the boy got away
+a bit, Bill bribes him with a quarter to give him the note, which was n't
+no less than a request to the coroner to come to our house to-morrow and
+make an examination, as foul play was suspected."
+
+Here he paused. As for myself, I was cold all over. I was afraid to go on,
+and afraid to go back, besides which I did not doubt that there was a good
+deal of money in the case. "Of course," said I, "it's all nonsense; only I
+suppose you don't want the officers about, and a fuss, and that sort of
+thing."
+
+"Exactly," said my friend, "you 're the coroner; you take this note and
+come to my house. Says you, 'Mrs. File, are you the woman that wrote this
+note? because in that case I must examine the body.'"
+
+"I see," said I; "she need n't know who I am, or anything else. But if I
+tell her it's all right, do you think she won't want to know why there
+ain't a jury, and so on?"
+
+"Bless you," said the man, "the girl is n't over seventeen, and does n't
+know no more than her baby."
+
+"I 'll do it," said I, suddenly, for, as I saw, it involved no sort of
+risk; "but I must have three hundred dollars."
+
+"And fifty," added the wolf, "if you do it well."
+
+With this the man buttoned about him a shaggy gray overcoat, and took his
+leave without a single word in addition.
+
+For the first time in my life I failed that night to sleep. I thought to
+myself at last that I would get up early, pack a few clothes, and escape,
+leaving my books to pay, as they might, my arrears of rent. Looking out of
+the window, however, in the morning, I saw Stagers prowling about the
+opposite pavement, and, as the only exit except the street door was an
+alleyway, which opened alongside of the front of the house, I gave myself
+up for lost. About ten o'clock I took my case of instruments, and started
+for File's house, followed, as I too well understood, by Stagers.
+
+I knew the house, which was in a small street, by its closed windows and
+the craped bell, which I shuddered as I touched. However, it was too late
+to draw back, and I therefore inquired for Mrs. File. A young and
+haggard-looking woman came down, and led me into a small parlor, for whose
+darkened light I was thankful enough.
+
+"Did you write me this note?" said I.
+
+"I did," said the woman, "if you 're the coroner. Joe, he 's my husband, he
+'s gone out to see about the funeral. I wish it was his, I do."
+
+"What do you suspect?" said I.
+
+"I 'll tell you," she returned, in a whisper. "I think he was made away
+with. I think there was foul play. I think he was poisoned. That 's what I
+think."
+
+"I hope you may be mistaken," said I. "Suppose you let me see the body."
+
+"You shall see it," she replied; and, following her, I went up stairs to a
+front chamber, where I found the corpse.
+
+"Get it over soon," said the woman, with a strange firmness. "If there
+ain't no murder been done, I shall have to run for it. If there is," and
+her face set hard, "I guess I 'll stay." With this she closed the door, and
+left me with the dead.
+
+If I had known what was before me, I never should have gone into the thing
+at all. It looked a little better when I had opened a window, and let in
+plenty of light; for, although I was, on the whole, far less afraid of dead
+than living men, I had an absurd feeling that I was doing this dead man a
+distinct wrong, as if it mattered to the dead, after all. When the affair
+was over, I thought more of the possible consequences than of its relation
+to the dead man himself; but do as I would at the time, I was in a
+ridiculous tremor, and especially when, in going through the forms of a
+_post-mortem_ dissection, I had to make the first cut through the skin. Of
+course, I made no examination of the internal organs. I wanted to know as
+little as possible about them, and to get done as soon as I could.
+Unluckily, however, the walls of the stomach had softened and given way, so
+that I could not help seeing, among the escaped contents of the stomach,
+numerous grains of a white powder, which I hastened to conceal from my
+sight by rapidly sewing up the incisions which I had made.
+
+I am free to confess now that I was careful not to uncover the man's face,
+and that when it was over I backed to the door, and hastily escaped from
+the room. On the stairs opposite to me Mrs. File was seated, with her
+bonnet on, and a small bundle in her hand.
+
+"Well," said she, rising as she spoke, and with a certain eagerness in her
+tones, "what killed him? Was it arsenic?"
+
+"Arsenic, my good woman!" said I; "when a man has typhoid fever, he don't
+need poison to kill him."
+
+"And you mean to say he was n't poisoned," said she, with more than a trace
+of disappointment in her voice,--"not poisoned at all?"
+
+"No more than you are," said I. "If I had found any signs of foul play, I
+should have had a regular inquest. As it is, the less said about it the
+better; and the fact is, it would have been much wiser to have kept quiet
+at the beginning. I can't understand why you should have troubled me about
+it at all."
+
+"Neither I would," said she, "if I had n't been pretty sure. I guess now
+the sooner I leave, the better for me."
+
+"As to that," I returned, "it is none of my business; but you may rest
+certain that you are mistaken about the cause of your brother's death."
+
+As I left the house, whom should I meet but Dr. Evans. "Why, halloa!" said
+he; "called you in, have they? Who 's sick?"
+
+You may believe I was scared. "Mrs. File," said I, remembering with horror
+that I had forgotten to ask whether at any time the man had had a doctor.
+
+"Bad lot," returned Evans; "I was sent for to see the brother when he was
+as good as dead."
+
+"As bad as dead," I retorted, with a sickly effort at a joke. "What killed
+him?"
+
+"I suppose one of the ulcers gave way, and that he died of the
+consequences. Perforation, you know, and that sort of thing. I thought of
+asking File for a _post_, but I did n't."
+
+"Wish you luck of them. Good-by."
+
+I was greatly alarmed at this new incident, but my fears were somewhat
+quieted that evening when Stagers and the wolf appeared with the remainder
+of the money, and I learned that Mrs. File had fled from her home, and, as
+File thought likely, from the city also. A few months later, File himself
+disappeared, and Stagers found his way into the Penitentiary.
+
+I felt, for my own part, that I had been guilty of more than one mistake,
+and that I had displayed throughout a want of intelligence for which I came
+near being punished very severely. I should have made proper inquiries
+before venturing on a matter so dangerous, and I ought also to have got a
+good fee from Mrs. File on account of my services as coroner. It served me,
+however, as a good lesson, but it was several months before I felt quite
+easy in mind. Meanwhile, money became scarce once more, and I was driven
+to my wit's end to devise how I should continue to live as I had done. I
+tried, among other plans, that of keeping certain pills and other
+medicines, which I sold to my patients; but on the whole I found it better
+to send all my prescriptions to one druggist, who charged the patient ten
+or twenty per cent over the correct price, and handed this amount to me.
+
+In some cases I am told the percentage is supposed to be a donation on the
+part of the apothecary; but I rather fancy the patient pays for it in the
+end. It is one of the absurd vagaries of the profession to discountenance
+the practice I have described, but I wish, for my part, I had never done
+anything worse or more dangerous. Of course it inclines a doctor to change
+his medicines a good deal, and to order them in large quantities, which is
+occasionally annoying to the poor; yet, as I have always observed, there is
+no poverty so painful as your own, so that in a case of doubt I prefer
+equally to distribute pecuniary suffering among many, rather than to
+concentrate it on myself.
+
+About six months after the date of my rather annoying adventure, an
+incident occurred which altered somewhat, and for a time improved, my
+professional position. During my morning office-hour an old woman came in,
+and, putting down a large basket, wiped her face with a yellow cotton
+handkerchief first, and afterwards with the corner of her apron. Then she
+looked around uneasily, got up, settled her basket on her arm with a jerk,
+which decided the future of an egg or two, and remarked briskly, "Don't see
+no little bottles about; got to the wrong stall I guess. You ain't no
+homoeopath doctor, are you?"
+
+With great presence of mind, I replied, "Well, ma'am, that depends upon
+what you want. Some of my patients like one, and some like the other." I
+was about to add, "You pays your money and you takes your choice," but
+thought better of it, and held my peace, refraining from classical
+quotation.
+
+"Being as that 's the case," said the old lady, "I 'll just tell you my
+symptoms. You said you give either kind of medicine, did n't you?"
+
+"Just so," I replied.
+
+"Clams or oysters, whichever opens most lively, as my Joe says. Perhaps you
+know Joe,--tends the oyster-stand at stall No. 9."
+
+No, I did not know Joe; but what were the symptoms?
+
+They proved to be numerous, and included a stunnin' in the head, and a
+misery in the side, and a goin' on with bokin' after victuals.
+
+I proceeded of course to apply a stethoscope over her ample bosom, though
+what I heard on this or similar occasions I should find it rather difficult
+to state. I remember well my astonishment in one instance, where, having
+unconsciously applied my instrument over a large chronometer in the
+watch-fob of a sea-captain, I concluded for a brief space that he was
+suffering from a rather remarkable displacement of the heart. As to the old
+lady, whose name was Checkers, and who kept an apple-stall near by, I told
+her that I was out of pills just then, but would have plenty next day.
+Accordingly I proceeded to invest a small amount at a place called a
+Homoeopathic Pharmacy, which I remember amused me immensely.
+
+A stout little German, with great silver spectacles, sat behind a counter
+containing numerous jars of white powders labelled concisely, Lach., Led.,
+Onis., Op., Puls., etc., while behind him were shelves filled with bottles
+of what looked like minute white shot.
+
+"I want some homoeopathic medicine," said I.
+
+"Vat kindst?" said my friend. "Vat you vants to cure?"
+
+I explained at random that I wished to treat diseases in general.
+
+"Vell, ve gifs you a case, mit a pooks";--and thereupon produced a large
+box containing bottles of small pills and powders, labelled variously with
+the names of diseases, so that all you required was to use the headache or
+colic bottle in order to meet the needs of those particular maladies.
+
+I was struck at first with the exquisite simplicity of this arrangement;
+but before purchasing, I happened luckily to turn over the leaves of a
+book, in two volumes, which lay on the counter, and was labelled,
+"Jahr--Manual." Opening at page 310, Vol. I., I lit upon Lachesis, which,
+on inquiry, proved to be snake-venom. This Mr. Jahr stated to be indicated
+in upwards of a hundred maladies. At once it occurred to me that Lach. was
+the medicine for my money, and that it was quite needless to waste cash on
+the box. I therefore bought a small jar of Lach. and a lot of little pills,
+and started for home.
+
+My old woman proved a fast friend; and as she sent me numerous patients, I
+by and by altered my sign to "Homoeopathic Physician and Surgeon,"
+whatever that may mean, and was regarded by my medical brethren as a lost
+sheep, and by the little-pill doctors as one who had seen the error of his
+ways.
+
+In point of fact, my new practice had decided advantages. All the pills
+looked and tasted alike, and the same might be said of the powders, so that
+I was never troubled by those absurd investigations into the nature of the
+remedies which some patients are prone to make. Of course I desired to get
+business, and it was therefore obviously unwise to give little pills of
+Lach. or Puls. or Sep., when a man distinctly needed full doses of iron, or
+the like. I soon discovered, however, that it was only necessary to
+describe cod-liver oil, for instance, as a diet, in order to make use of it
+where required. When a man got impatient over an ancient ague, I usually
+found, too, that I could persuade him to let me try a good dose of quinine;
+while, on the other hand, there was a distinct pecuniary advantage in those
+cases of the shakes which could be made to believe that it was "best not to
+interfere with nature." I ought to add, that this kind of faith is uncommon
+among folks who carry hods or build walls.
+
+For women who are hysterical, and go heart and soul into the business of
+being sick, I have found the little pills a most charming resort, because
+you cannot carry the refinement of symptoms beyond what my friend Jahr has
+done in the way of fitting medicines to them, so that, if I had been
+disposed honestly to practise this droll style of therapeutics, it had, as
+I saw, certain conveniences.
+
+Another year went by, and I was beginning to prosper in my new mode of
+life. The medicines (being chiefly milk-sugar, with variations as to the
+labels) cost next to nothing; and, as I charged pretty well for both these
+and my advice, I was now able to start a gig, and also to bring my sister,
+a very pretty girl of fourteen years old, to live with me in a small house
+which I rented, a square from my old office.
+
+This business of my sister's is one of the things I like the least to look
+back upon. When she came to me she was a pale-faced child, with large,
+mournful gray eyes, soft, yellow hair, and the promise of remarkable good
+looks. As to her attachment to me, it was something quite ridiculous. She
+followed me to the door when I went out, waited for me to come in, lay
+awake until she heard my step at night, and, in a word, hung around my neck
+like a kind of affectionate mill-stone.
+
+
+
+
+WRITINGS OF T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE.
+
+
+"I Am indebted to you for a knowledge of life in the old cathedral towns of
+England,--of the ecclesiastical side of society, so minute and authentic
+that it is like a personal experience." Thus I replied to Anthony
+Trollope's declaration that he lacked an essential quality of the
+novelist,--imagination. "Ah," he replied, "when you speak of careful
+observation and the honest and thorough report thereof, I am conscious of
+fidelity to the facts of life and character; but," he added, with that
+bluff heartiness so characteristic of the man, "my brother is more than an
+accurate observer: he is a scholar, a philosopher as well, with historical
+tastes and cosmopolitan sympathies,--a patient student. You should read his
+books";--and he snatched a pencil, and wrote out the list for me.[13] Only
+two of Thomas Adolphus Trollope's volumes have been republished in this
+country,--one a novel of English life, in tenor and traits very like his
+brother's, the other a brief memoir of a famous and fair Italian.[14] This
+curious neglect on the part of American publishers induces us to briefly
+record this industrious and interesting author's claims to grateful
+recognition, especially on the part of those who cherish fond recollections
+of Italian travel, and enjoy the sympathetic and intelligent illustration
+of Italian life and history.
+
+In a literary point of view "An Englishman in Italy," in the last century,
+would be suggestive of a classical tour like that of Addison and
+Eustace,--a field of study and speculation quite apart from the people of
+the country, who, except for purposes of deprecatory contrast, would
+probably be ignored; and, in our own times, the idea is rather identified
+with caricature than sympathy,--we associate these insular travellers with
+exclusiveness and prejudice. As a general rule, they know little and care
+less for the fellow-creatures among whom they sojourn, holding themselves
+aloof, incapable of genial relations, and owning no guide to foreign
+knowledge but Murray and the Times. Farce and romance have long made
+capital out of this obtuse and impervious nationality; and it is the more
+refreshing, because of the general rule, to note a noble exception,--to see
+an Englishman, highly educated, studious, domestic, and patriotic, yet
+dwelling in Italy, not to despise and ignore, but to interpret and endear
+the country and people,--making his hospitable dwelling, with all its
+Italian trophies and traits, the favorite rendezvous for the best of his
+countrymen and the native society,--there discussing the principles and
+prospects of civic reform, doing honor to men of genius and aspiration,
+irrespective of race,--blending in his _salon_ the scholarly talk of Landor
+with the fervid pleas of "Young Italy," giving equal welcome to English
+radical, Piedmontese patriot, American humanitarian, and Tuscan
+_dilettante_,--and thus, as it were, recognizing the free and faithful
+spirit of modern progress and brotherhood amid the old armor, bridal
+chests, parchment tomes, quaintly carved chairs, and other mediaeval relics
+of a Florentine _palazzo_.
+
+But this cosmopolitan candor, so rare as a social phenomenon among the
+English in Italy, is no less characteristic of Adolphus Trollope as a
+writer. As he entertained, in his pleasant, antique reception-room or
+garden-terrace, disciples of Cavour, of Mazzini, and of Gioberti, with men
+and women of varied genius and opposite convictions from England and the
+United States, extending kindly tolerance or catholic sympathy to all, so
+he sought, in the history of the past and the facts of the present in the
+land of his love and adoption, evidences of her vital worth and auspicious
+destiny. Long residence abroad liberalized, and long study enriched, a mind
+singularly just in its appreciation, and a heart naturally kind and
+expansive. All his friends recognize in Adolphus Trollope that rare union
+of rectitude and reflection which constitutes the genuine philosopher. Mrs.
+Browning aptly called him Aristides. Thus living in the atmosphere of broad
+social instincts, and sharing the literary faculty and facility of his
+family, this Englishman in Italy set himself deliberately to study the
+country of his sojourn, in her records, local memorials, and social life,
+and, having so studied, to reproduce and illustrate the knowledge thus
+gleaned, with the fidelity of an annalist and the tact of a _raconteur_. It
+was a noble and pleasant task, and has been nobly and pleasantly fulfilled.
+Let us note its chief results, and honor the industry, truth, and humane
+wisdom manifest therein.
+
+The range of Mr. Trollope's investigations may be appreciated by the fact
+that, while he is the author of "A History of Florence from the Earliest
+Independence of the Commune to the Fall of the Republic in 1531," he has
+also given to the press the most clear and reliable account of the
+revolution of our own day, under the title of "Tuscany in 1849"; thus
+supplying the two chronicles of the past and the present which together
+reveal the origin, development, and character of the state and its people.
+In the Preface to the former work he suggests this vital connection between
+the ancient republic and the modern city. "It contains," he observes, "such
+an exposition of the old Guelph community as sufficiently demonstrates the
+fitness of this culmination of the grand old city's fortunes." It is this
+liberal and comprehensive tone, this "looking before and after," which,
+united to careful research and patient narration, renders the author so
+well equipped and inspired for his task. He has brought together the
+essential social and political facts of the past, and, associating them
+with local traits and transitions, enabled us to realize the rise,
+progress, and alternations of the Italian state, as it is next to
+impossible for the Anglo-Saxon reader to do while exploring the partial,
+prejudiced, and complicated annals of the native historians. This is a
+needful, a timely, and a gracious service, for which every intelligent and
+sympathetic traveller who has learned to love the Tuscan capital, and grown
+bewildered over the complex story of her civil strifes, will feel grateful,
+while his obligations are renewed by the moderate but candid statement of
+those later movements, which, culminating in a childlike triumph, were
+followed by a reaction whose hopelessness was more apparent than real, and
+has subsequently proved an auspicious trial and training for the discipline
+and privileges of constitutional liberty.
+
+The "History of Florence" is remarkable for the skilful method whereby the
+author has arranged, in luminous sequence, a long and confused series of
+political events. He has confined his narrative to the essential points of
+an intricate subject, omitting what is of mere casual or local interest,
+and aiming to elucidate the civic growth of the little city on the banks of
+the Arno. It is an admirable illustration of the conservative principles of
+free municipal institutions in the Middle Ages, notwithstanding their
+limited sway and frequent perversion. There is no attempt at rhetorical
+display, but great precision and authenticity of statement, and a
+conscientious citation of authorities; the style often lapses into
+colloquial freedom, not inappropriate to the familiar discussion of some of
+the curious details involved in the theme; and there are episodes of
+judicious and philosophical comment, with apt historical parallels, not a
+few of which come home to our recent national experience. The author's
+previous studies in Italian history, and intimate familiarity with the
+scene of his chronicle, give him a grasp and an insight which render his
+treatment at once thorough, sensible, and facile. But it is upon the more
+special subjects of Italian history that Mr. Trollope has expended his time
+and talents to the best advantage,--subjects chosen with singular judgment
+and imbued with fresh local and personal interest.
+
+The scope and method of these historical studies are such as at once to
+embody and illustrate what is normally characteristic in time, place, and
+individual, while completeness of treatment is secured, and a person and
+period made suggestive of a comprehensive historical subject. Thus in "The
+Girlhood of Catharine de' Medici" we have the key to her mature and
+relentless bigotry, the logical origin of the massacre of St. Bartholomew,
+while, at the same time, the discipline of a convent and the intrigues of a
+ruling family in the Middle Ages are elaborately unfolded. Grouped around
+and associated with so remarkable an historical woman, they have a definite
+significance to the modern reader, otherwise unattainable; the Palazzo
+Medici, the Convents of St. Mark, Santa Lucia, and Murate, become scenes of
+personal interest; the Cardinal Clement and Alessandro, in their relation
+to the young Catharine, grow more real in their subtlety, family ambitions,
+and unscrupulous tyranny; and the surroundings, superstition, fanaticism,
+and domestic despotism which attended the forlorn girl until she became the
+wife of Henry of France, explain her subsequent career and execrated
+memory. Incidentally the life of mediaeval Tuscany is also revealed with
+authentic emphasis. In "Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar," all the singular
+circumstances whereby a priest of Rome became the instrument of striking
+the first effectual blow at her absolute spiritual dominion are narrated
+with precision and tact. The prolonged quarrel between the Vatican and the
+Republic of Venice, the ecclesiastical and civic power, then opened the way
+to human freedom, and Sarpi is truly exhibited as the pioneer reformer. His
+liberal studies, foreign friends, and independent and intrepid mind
+rendered him admirably fitted for the task he undertook, and the Papal
+government only added infamy to despotism by the baffled attempt to
+assassinate him. It is difficult to imagine a better introduction to the
+subsequent history of free thought and spiritual emancipation, which
+culminated in the Reformation, than this biographical sketch, where a great
+historical development is made clear and dramatic by the carefully told
+story of the lives of the two chief actors and agents therein.
+
+There is a power in the state, unofficial, but essential, and therefore
+more intimately blended with its welfare and identified with its fortunes
+than pope, emperor, or prince,--and that is the Banker. Even in modern
+times the life of such a financier as Lafitte is part of the social and
+political history of France; but in mediaeval times, when "the sinews of
+war" and the wages of corruption so often turned the scale of ambition and
+success, the rich bankers of the Italian cities were among the most
+efficient of their social forces and fame. In writing the memoirs of
+Filippo Strozzi, Mr. Trollope struck the key-note of local associations in
+the Tuscan capital. The least observant or retrospective stranger is
+impressed with the sight of the massive walls and grated windows of the
+Strozzi Palace, and is attracted by such a monument of the past to the
+story of its founder. A standard drama and novel were long since made to
+illustrate those annals,[15] but it was reserved for an Englishman in Italy
+to record, in a well-digested and authentic narrative, the career of
+Filippo, whose immense wealth, marriage to a Medici, family ambition,
+scholarship, political and social distinction, enterprise, and luxury, and
+especially his financial relations with both rulers and ruled, make him one
+of those central figures of an historic group that serve as expositors of
+the time. He was indeed, by his accomplishments and his profligacy, his
+intrigues and associations, his alliances and enmities, his domestic and
+his political life, a representative man, whose character and career aptly
+embody and illustrate a most stirring era of European and Italian history.
+He escorted Catharine de' Medici on her bridal journey from Florence,
+talked philosophy at Medicean banquets, was closeted with popes and kings,
+was the boon companion of reigning dukes, a courtier to princes and people,
+a magnificent entertainer, a fugitive, exile, prisoner, sceptic, scholar,
+and suicide,--typifying in his life the luxury and lawlessness, the culture
+and the crime, the splendor and the degradation, the manners and morals, of
+his country and his age,--and hence a most instructive biographical study,
+which Mr. Trollope has treated with equal fulness, insight, and
+authenticity.
+
+But the most felicitous of the series is the "Decade of Italian Women." The
+idea of this work is worthy of a philosopher, and its execution, of a
+humane scholar. It has long been an accepted theory, that, to understand
+the talent and pervasive spirit of an age or country, we must look to the
+influence and character of the women. A subtile social atmosphere exhales
+from their presence and power in the state and the family; and the dominant
+elements of faith, as well as the tone of manners and the tendencies of
+character, find in the best endowed and most auspiciously situated of the
+sex, an embodiment and inspiration which are the most authentic, because
+the most instinctive, test and trait of the life of the time. Shakespeare
+has, with exquisite insight and memorable skill, illustrated this
+representative function of woman by creating types of female character
+which, while they modify and mould persons and events, preserve intact
+their essential quality of sex, and yet represent none the less the spirit
+and manners of their respective epochs. Scott has done the same thing in an
+historical direction, that Shakespeare realized in a psychological way. We
+regard it, therefore, as a most judicious experiment to indicate the
+characteristics of mediaeval Italy by delineating her representative women.
+They inevitably lead us to the heart of things,--to the palace, the
+convent, the court, the vigil of battle, and the triumph of art,--to the
+loves of warrior, statesman, and priest,--to the inmost domestic
+shrine,--to the festival and the funeral; and all this we behold, not
+objectively, but through our vivid interest in a noble, persecuted,
+saintly, impassioned, or gifted woman, and thus partake, as it were, of the
+life of the age, realize its inspiration, recognize its meaning, in a
+manner and to a degree impossible to be derived from the formal narrative
+of events, without a central figure or a consecutive life which serves as a
+nucleus and a link, giving vital unity and personal significance to the
+whole.
+
+The period of time embraced in these female biographies extends from the
+birth of St. Catherine of Siena, in 1347, to the death of the celebrated
+_improvvisatrice_ Corilla, in 1800. With the career of each is identified a
+salient phase of Italian history, manners, or character; incident to the
+experience of all are special localities, political and social conditions,
+relations of art, of faith, of culture, of rule, and of morals, whereby we
+obtain the most desirable glimpses of the actual life and latent tendencies
+of Italy, considered as the focus of European civilization. We gaze upon a
+woman's portrait, but beyond, beside, and around her are the warriors,
+statesmen, prelates, poets, and people of her time. Through her triumphs
+and trials, her renown or degradation, her love, ambition, sorrows,
+virtues, or sins, we feel, as well as see, the vital facts of her age and
+country. Nor is this all: each character is not only full of interest in
+itself, but is essentially typical and representative. Thus we have the
+fair saint of the Middle Ages, the energetic and sagacious ruler, the
+gracious reformer, the artist, the near kinswoman of prince or
+ecclesiastic, the poetess, the _chatelaine_, the nun, the profligate, the
+powerful, the beautiful, and the base,--all the forms and forces of womanly
+influence as modified by the life of the time and country. They move before
+us a grand procession, now awakening admiration and now pity, here
+ravishing in beauty or genius and there forlorn in disaster or disgrace,
+yet always bearing with them the strong individuality and attractive
+expression which, to the imagination, so easily transforms the heroines of
+history into the ideals of the drama, or the characters of romance. And yet
+in these delineations the author has indulged in no rhetorical
+embellishments: he has arrived simply, and sometimes sternly, at the clear
+statement of facts, and left them to convey their legitimate impression to
+the reader's mind. The lives of many of these women have been written
+before, some of them elaborately; but they are here grouped and contrasted
+as illustrative of national life, and hence gain a fresh charm and
+suggestiveness, especially as the fruits of research and the method of a
+disciplined _raconteur_ are blent with the light and life of personal
+observation as to scenes and memorials,--the land where they once dwelt,
+its natural aspect and ancient trophies, being fondly familiar to the
+biographer. Eloquent memoirs of female sovereigns have become popular
+through the genial labors of Agnes Strickland and Mrs. Jameson, while
+Shakespeare's women furnish a perpetual challenge to psychological critics;
+but the "Decade of Italian Women" has a certain unity of aim and relative
+interest which makes it, as a literary record, analogous to a complete,
+though limited, gallery of family portraits, inasmuch as, however diverse
+the characters, they own a common bond of race and nationality, and are
+memorable exemplars thereof. First in the list is Catherine of Siena, the
+Saint,--an accurate mediaeval religious delineation which all who have
+visited the old city where her relics are preserved and her name reverenced
+will value. Then we have Catherine Sforza,--the fair representative of one
+of those powerful and princely families whose history is that of the state
+they rule. Next comes the noblest and most gifted woman of the Middle Ages,
+the friend of Michel Angelo, the ideal of a wife, and a lady of culture,
+genius, and patriotism,--Vittoria Colonna. The Bishop of Palermo's
+illegitimate daughter--a famous poetess, Tullia d' Arragona--precedes the
+learned, pure, intrepid Protestant, Olimpia Morata, who takes us to the
+court of Ferrara in its palmy days, to show how "like a star that dwells
+apart" is a woman of rectitude and wisdom and faith amid the shallow, the
+sensual, and the bigoted. The renowned Paduan actress, Isabella Adrieni,
+gives us a striking illustration of the influence, traits, and triumphs of
+histrionic genius in Italy of old; while among the prone towers and gloomy
+arcades of Bologna we become intimate with the chaste and charming
+aspirations and skill of Elisabetta Sirani, whose pencil was the pride of
+the city, and whose character hallows her genius. Of La Corilla it is
+enough to say, that she was the original of Madame de Stael's "Corinne";
+and no woman could have been more wisely selected to represent the
+fascination, subtlety, force of purpose, ambition, resources, passion, and
+external success of an unprincipled patrician Italian beauty of the Middle
+Ages than Bianca Capello.
+
+With such a basis of research it is easy to infer how authentic, as a
+picture of life, would be the superstructure of romantic fiction by an
+author adequately equipped. Accordingly, the Italian novels of Thomas
+Adolphus Trollope are most accurate and detailed reflections of local
+characteristics; they are full of special information; and, while they
+enlighten the novice as to the domestic economy, habits, ways of thinking,
+costume, and social traditions of the people, they revive, with singular
+freshness, to the mind of one who has sojourned in Italy, every particular
+of his experience,--not only the _corso_, the opera, and the carnival, but
+the meals, the phraseology, the household arrangements,--all that is most
+individual in a district, with all that is most general as nationally
+representative. Indeed, not a fact or trait of modern Tuscan life seems to
+have escaped the author's vigilant observation and patient record; the life
+of the effete noble, the frugal citizen, the shrewd broker, the pampered,
+ecclesiastic, the peasant, and the artist is revealed with the most precise
+and graphic detail. We are taken to the promenade and the _caffe_, to the
+_piazza_ and the church, to the farm-house and the _palazzo_; and there we
+see and hear the actual everyday intercourse of the people. The Tuscan
+character is drawn to the life, without exaggeration, and even in its more
+evanescent, as well as normal traits; its urbanity, gossip, thrift,
+geniality, self-indulgence, and latent courage are admirably delineated;
+its superior refinement, sobriety, love of show, and class peculiarities
+are truly given; the old feudal manners that linger in modern civilization
+are accounted for and illustrated, especially in the relation of dependants
+"occupying every shade of gradation between a common servant and a bosom
+friend." The author's ecclesiastic portraits are as exact, according to our
+observation, as his brother's. Each class of Italian priests is portrayed
+with discrimination, and no writer has better exemplified the paralyzing
+and perverting influence of Romanism upon the integrity of domestic life,
+and the purity and power of political aspirations. The women, too, are
+typical,--remarkably free from fanciful embellishment, eloquent of race,
+instinct with nature. Their limited culture, social prejudices, artless
+charms, frugal lives, naive or reticent characters, as modified by town and
+country, patrician or popular influences, we recognize at once as
+identical with what we have known in the households or social circles of
+Florence. Mr. Trollope, in all this, is a Flemish artist, and, as much of
+the interest of his pictures depends on their truthfulness, perhaps they
+are really appreciated only by those who have enjoyed adequate
+opportunities of becoming intimate with the original scenes, situations,
+and personages depicted. In the fidelity of his art he abstains from all
+attempts at brilliancy, and ignores the intense and highly dramatic,
+finding enough of wholesome interest in the real life around him, and well
+satisfied to reproduce it with candor and sympathy; now and then indulging
+in a philosophical suggestion or a judicious comment, and thus gradually,
+but securely, winning the grateful recognition of his reader.
+
+"La Beata" as completely takes those familiar with its scene into the life
+and moral atmosphere of Florence, as does "The Vicar of Wakefield" into the
+rural life of England before the days of railways and cheap journalism. The
+streets, the dwellings, the people and incidents are so truly described,
+the perspective is so correct, and the foreground so elaborate, that, with
+the faithful local coloring and naive truth of the characters, we seem, as
+we read, to be lost in a retrospective dream,--the more so as there is an
+utter absence of the sensational and rhetorical in the style, which is that
+of direct and unpretending narrative. The heroine is a saintly model,
+though at the same time a thoroughly human girl,--such a one as the
+artistic, superstitious, frugal, and simple experience of her class and of
+the place could alone have fostered; the artist-hero is no less
+characteristic,--a selfish, clever, amiable, ambitious, and superficial
+Italian; while the old wax-candle manufacturer, with his domicile,
+daughter, and church relations, is a genuine Florentine of his kind. The
+life of the studio, then and there, is drawn from reality. The peculiar and
+traditional customs, social experience, church ceremonials, popular fetes,
+home and heart life, have a minute fidelity which renders the picture
+vivid and winsome to one who well knows and wisely loves the Tuscan
+capital. An English family delineated without the least exaggeration, and
+with the striking contrasts such visitors always present to the native
+scene and people of Italy, adds to and emphasizes the salient traits of the
+story. Among the subjects described and illustrated with remarkable tact
+and truth is that most interesting charitable fraternity, the
+_Misericordia_, of which every stranger in Florence has caught impressive
+glimpses, but of whose social influence and real significance few are
+aware. Add to this the description of Camaldoli, with its famous pines, its
+Dantesque associations, and its remorseful convent, and we have a scope and
+detail in the scene and spirit of this little local romance which
+concentrate the points of interest in Florentine life and bring into view
+all that is most familiar and characteristic in the place and people. We
+see the gay boats on St. John's eve from the bridges of the Arno, the
+procession of the black Madonna, the interior of the studios, the
+ceremonies, the saintly traffic and social subterfuge and naive
+manners,--the tradesman, painter, devotee, priest,--pride, piety, and
+passion,--whereof even the casual observation of a traveller's sojourn had
+given us so curious or attractive an idea, that, thus expanded and defined,
+they seem like a personal experience. There is singular pathos in the
+character and career of La Beata, as there is in the expression of Santa
+Filomena for which she was the recognized and inspired model. The integrity
+of her sentiment is as Southern-European as is her lover's falsehood and
+voluntary expiation. That absolute ignorance of the world and childlike
+trust, which we rarely meet except in Shakespeare's women, is a moral fact
+of which the stranger in Italy, who has grown intimate with families of the
+middle class, is cognizant, and which he is apt to recall as one of those
+elemental and primitive phases of human nature which justify the most pure
+and plaintive creations of the poet. Herein the author has shown an
+insight as honest and suggestive as his keen and patient observation and
+candid record thereof.
+
+"Marietta" is the genuine embodiment of that local attachment and ancestral
+pride so remarkable in the mediaeval Florentines, and still manifest in an
+exceptional class of their descendants. The modern life of a decayed branch
+of the Tuscan nobility in the nineteenth century, the process and method of
+its decadence, the charm of "a local habitation and a name," once
+identified with the vital power of the old republic, and the sad,
+effeminate, yet not unromantic sentiment incident to its passing away,
+through the prosperous encroachments of new men, with whom money is the
+power once only attached to birth, are most aptly described. The thrifty
+farmer of the Apennine, and his slow and handsome son, are capital types of
+the frugal and shrewd _fattore_ and rustic proprietor of Tuscany; and his
+more astute and polished brother is equally typical of the old money-lender
+and goldsmith of the Ponte Vecchio. Simon Boccanera well represents the
+tasteful artificer of Florence, and the Gobbo the feudal devotee, whose
+political faith has been expanded by French ideas. In the _bon vivant_, the
+amateur musician, the amiable and easy Canonico Lunardi, what a true
+portrait of the priestly epicure, the self-indulgent but kindly churchman
+of the most urbane of Italian communities, and in the Canon of San Lorenzo,
+how faithful a picture of the elegant and unscrupulous aspirant and
+intriguer! The two girls of the story are veritable specimens, in looks,
+dress, talk, domestic aspect and aptitudes, not only of Italian maidenhood,
+but of that of the state and city of their birth,--such maidens as are only
+encountered on the banks of the Arno. This pleasant story takes us into one
+of those massive old Florentine palaces, with its lofty _loggia_
+overlooking mountain, river, olive orchard and vineyard, dome and
+tower,--its adjacent church with the family chapel and ancestral
+effigies,--its several floors let out as lodgings,--its heavy portal,
+stone staircase, faded frescos, barred windows, paved court-yard,
+moss-grown statues, and damp green garden. We recognize the familiar
+elements of the local life,--the frugal dinner, the wine flask, the
+coal-brazier, the antique lamp, the violin, the snuff-box, the ample coarse
+cloak, the frugality, _bonhommie_, shrewdness, proverbs, greetings, grace,
+cheerfulness, chat, rural and city traits, prejudices, pride, and
+pleasantness of Tuscan life and character. These all appear in suggestive
+contrast, and with accurate detail, woven into a tale which breathes the
+very atmosphere of the place.
+
+"Giulio Malatesta," on the other hand, opens with distinctive glimpses of
+an old Italian university town; initiates us into the prolonged and patient
+political conspiracies of Romagna and the ideal hopes of Gioberti's
+disciples. Its hero is a student at Pisa, and one of the brave champions of
+Italy who led the Tuscan volunteers to patriotic martyrdom, in 1848, at
+Curtone. Nowhere have we read so graceful and graphic a picture of that
+noble episode in the history of Tuscany, which redeemed her character and
+proved the latent manliness of her children. There is a touching similarity
+between the description of the march of the Corpo Universitario from Pisa
+to the Mincio,--the fight at the mill, and the death of the generous and
+lovely boy, Enrico Palmieri,--and recent scenes in our own civil war,
+wherein appeared the same youthful enthusiasm and utter inexperience, the
+same hardships and fortitude, valor and faith. In striking contrast with,
+these scenes of battle and self-sacrifice, including the tragic incidents
+attending the third anniversary of the Tuscan martyrs in the church of
+Santa Croce at Florence, three years later, are the episodes of fashionable
+and carnival life in that delightful capital. The Cascine and the Pergola
+are reproduced with all their gay life and license; the Contessa Zenobia
+and her _cavalier servente_, so comical, yet true, are but slight
+exaggerations of what many of us have witnessed and wondered at. Provincial
+and conventual life in Italy is photographed in this story; fresh forms and
+phases of the ecclesiastical element are incarnated from careful
+observation; and the political feeling, faith, and transitions of the
+period are vividly illustrated. Carlo, the young noble, is a true portrait
+of the kindly, genial, but shallow and pleasure-seeking Florentine youth of
+the day, such as we have loitered with on the promenade and chatted beside
+at the Caffe Doney,--without convictions, playful, always half in love,
+with a little stock of philosophy and a lesser one of religion, yet alert
+to do a kindness,--full of tact, charming in manner, tasteful and tolerant,
+with no higher aim than being agreeable and ignoring care,--impatient of
+duty, fond of pastime, utterly incapable of giving pain or attempting hard
+work. His friend Giulio Malatesta, on the other hand, adequately
+personifies the earnest, thoughtful, and patriotic Italian, to whom _Viva
+l' Italia!_ means something,--who is ready to suffer for his country, and
+who knows her poets by heart, believes in her unity, and has boundless
+faith in her future. Francesca Varini is described with an exactitude which
+defines her peculiar charms and traits to any reader who has fondly noted
+the modifications of female beauty and character incident to race and
+locality in Italy; and old Marta Varini is such a stoical, acute, and
+persistent woman as signalized the days of the Carbonari; while Stella and
+Madalina are local heroines with characteristic national traits.
+
+In "Beppo the Conscript" we are transported to "the narrow strip of
+territory shut in between the Apennines and the Adriatic, to the south of
+Bologna and the north of Ancona," where European civilization once centred,
+Tasso sung and raved, and the Dukes of Urbino flourished. But not to revive
+their past glories are we beguiled to the decayed old city of Fano, and the
+umbrageous valleys that nestle amid the surrounding hills; it is the
+normal, primitive, agricultural life and economy of the region, and the
+late political and social condition of the inhabitants, which this story
+illustrates. The means and methods of rural toil,--the "wine, corn, and
+oil" of Scriptural and Virgilian times; the avarice, the pride, the love,
+the industry, and the superstition of the _Contadini_ of the Romagna; a
+household of prosperous rustics, their ways and traits; and the subtle and
+prevailing agency of priest-craft in its secret opposition to the new and
+liberal Italian government,--are all exhibited with a quiet zest and a
+graphic fidelity which take us into the heart of the people, and the
+arcana, as well as the spectacle, of daily life as there latent and
+manifest. The domestic, peasant, and provincial scenes and characters are
+drawn with fresh and natural colors and faithful outlines.
+
+The scene of the last-published domestic novel[16] of the series is laid at
+Siena; and, although the story is based upon one of those impassioned
+tragedies of love and jealousy which can only be found in the family
+chronicles of Italy, the still-life, social phases, and local traits of the
+romance are delineated with the same quiet simplicity and graphic truth
+which constitute the authenticity of the author's previous delineations of
+modern Italian life. The grave, conservative, and old-fashioned Tuscan city
+reappears, with its mediaeval aspect and traditional customs. Convent
+education, the homes of the patrician and the citizen, the little gig of
+the _fattore_, with the small, wiry ponies of the region, the local
+antiquarian and doctor, the letter-carrier, family servant, lady-superior,
+pharmacist, the noble and plebeian, the costumes, phrases, and natural
+language characteristic of that non-commercial and isolated Tuscan city
+before the days of railroads and annexation, are drawn with emphasis and
+significant detail. Shades and causes of character are finely
+discriminated; the old mediaeval _festa_ peculiar to Siena, with all its
+original features and social phenomena, is vividly enacted in the elaborate
+description of the "Palio" on the 15th of August; while the insalubrious
+and picturesque Maremma is portrayed, from the Etruscan crypts of the
+ravines to the desolate streets of Savona, by an artistic and philosophic
+hand. Incidentally the solidarity of families and the antagonism of
+_contrade_, dating from the Middle Ages, are defined in explanation of
+modern traits. We pace the bastions of the fortress built by Cosmo de'
+Medici for "the subjection of his newly conquered subjects"; we haunt the
+cabinet of a numismatic enthusiast, and the forlorn palace-chamber of a
+baffled and beautiful scion of the old, fierce Orsini race; we overhear the
+peasants talk, and watch the exquisite gradations of color at sunset on the
+adjacent mountains, across the lonely plains, or gaze down upon St.
+Catherine's house in the dyers' quarter, and muse in deserted church, urban
+garden, and precipitous street, consciously alive the while to the aspect
+and atmosphere, not only of the Siena we have visited or imagined, but of
+mediaeval Tuscany, and its language and life of to-day, as they are
+incidentally reflected in the experience of a few distinctly individualized
+and harmoniously developed characters,--true to race, period, and locality,
+and far more complete and authentic, as a record and revelation, than dry
+annals on the one hand, or superficial travel-sketches on the other.
+
+The _justice_ which these writings display, in revealing the latent
+goodness in things evil, the instinctive and spiritual graces as well as
+the social perversions of the Italian character, is quite as refreshing as
+the correct observation of external traits and the true record of
+historical causes. A generous and intelligent sympathy imparts "a precious
+seeing to the eye" of the agreeable story-teller, who has thus patiently
+and fondly explored the past, delineated the present, and hailed the future
+of Italy, in a spirit of liberal wisdom and true humanity.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[13] _A History of Florence_, in four volumes; _Paul the Pope and Paul the
+Friar_; _Filippo Strozzi_; _The Girlhood of Catharine de' Medici_; _A
+Decade of Italian Women_; _Tuscany in 1849_; _La Beata_; _Marietta_;
+_Giulio Malatesta_; _Beppo the Conscript_. London: Chapman and Hall.
+1856-1865.
+
+[14] _Lindisfarn Chase._ Harper and Brothers, 1863. _Life of Vittoria
+Colonna._ Sheldon & Co., 1859.
+
+[15] _Filippo Strozzi_, Tragedia par G. B. Niccolini. _Luisa Strozzi_,
+Romanzo par G. Rossini.
+
+[16] _Gemma._ A Novel in three volumes. London: Chapman and Hall. 1866.
+
+
+
+
+A NATIVE OF BORNOO.
+
+
+Nicholas Said, at the time of his enlistment in the army of the Union,
+during the third year of the great Rebellion, was about twenty-eight years
+of age, of medium height, somewhat slenderly built, with pleasing features,
+not of the extreme negro type, complexion perfectly black, and quiet and
+unassuming address.
+
+He became known to the writer while serving in one of our colored
+regiments; and attention was first directed to his case by the tattooing on
+his face, and by the entry in the company descriptive book, which gave
+"Africa" as his birthplace.
+
+Inquiry showed that he was more or less acquainted with seven different
+languages, in addition to his native tongue; that he had travelled
+extensively in Africa and Europe, and that his life had been one of such
+varied experience as to render it interesting both on that account and also
+on account of the mystery which surrounds, notwithstanding recent
+explorations, the country of his birth.
+
+At the request of those who had been from time to time entertained by the
+recital of portions of his history, he was induced to put it in writing.
+The narrative which follows is condensed from his manuscript, and his own
+language has been retained as far as possible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reader, you must excuse me for the mistakes which this article will
+contain, as you will bear in mind that this language in which I am now
+trying to write is not my mother tongue; on the other hand, I never had a
+teacher, nor ever was at school for the purpose of acquiring the English.
+The only way I learned what little of the language I know was through
+French books.
+
+I was born in the kingdom of Bornoo, in Soodan, in the problematic central
+part of Africa, so imperfectly known to the civilized nations of Europe
+and America.
+
+Soodan has several kingdoms, the country of the Fellatahs and Bornoo being
+the most powerful,--the territorial extent of the latter being some 810,000
+square miles.
+
+These nations are strict Mohammedans, having been converted some two or
+three centuries ago by the Bedouin Arabs and those from Morocco, who,
+pushed by want of riches, came to Soodan to acquire them. Different
+languages are found in each nation, some written and some not; but the
+Arabic is very much in use among the higher class of people, as the Latin
+is used by the Catholic priests. Especially the Koran is written in Arabic,
+and in my country no one is allowed to handle the Sacred Book unless he can
+read it and explain its contents.
+
+Bornoo, my native country, is the most civilized part of Soodan, on account
+of the great commerce carried on between it and the Barbary States of
+Fezzan, Tunis, and Tripoli. They export all kinds of European articles to
+Central Africa, and take gold-dust, ivory, &c., in return.
+
+Bornoo has had a romantic history for the last one hundred years. The whole
+of Soodan, more than two thousand miles in extent, was once under the Mais
+of Bornoo; but by dissensions and civil wars nearly all the tributaries
+north of Lake Tchad were lost. In 1809 a shepherd arose from the country of
+the Fellatahs and assumed the title of Prophet. He said to the ignorant
+portion of his countrymen, that Allah had given him orders to make war with
+the whole of Soodan, and had promised him victory. They believed his story,
+and the legitimate king was dethroned and the false prophet, Otman
+Danfodio, was proclaimed Emperor of the Fellatahs. The impostor went at
+once to work, and in less than two years conquered almost the whole of
+Soodan, excepting Kanem, a tributary to my country. Bornoo, after a manly
+effort, was compelled by force of arms to submit to the yoke of the
+Fellatahs.
+
+In 1815 Bornoo arose from its humiliating position, to shake off the yoke
+of Danfodio. Mohammed el Anim el Kanemy, the Washington of Bornoo, was the
+man who undertook to liberate his country and restore her former prestige.
+This immortal hero could collect from the villages of Bornoo but a few
+hundreds of horsemen; but in Kanem he got eight hundred men, and accepted
+an engagement with the enemy. He gained the first victory, and took such
+good advantage of his success, that in the space of two months he won forty
+battles, drove the enemy entirely out of Bornoo, and captured a great many
+places belonging to the Fellatahs.
+
+At the close of the war, El Kanemy found himself at the head of
+twenty-eight thousand horsemen, and the real ruler of Bornoo. Like all
+great men, he refused the sceptre, and, going to the legitimate heir of the
+throne, Mais Barnoma, told him he was at his disposal. Barnoma,
+notwithstanding the noble actions of El Kanemy, was jealous of his fame,
+and tried a plan to dispose of him, which he thought would be best, and of
+which the public would not suspect him. Accordingly he wrote to the king of
+Begharmi, promising to pay the expenses of his troops, and some extra
+compensation beside, if he would make as though he were really at war with
+Bornoo. He agreed to the proposal, and crossed with his army the great
+river Shary, the natural frontier of the two kingdoms. El Kanemy was then
+in the city of Kooka, which he had built for himself. He heard finally of
+the war between Bornoo and Begharmi, and, hastily calling out his ancient
+veterans, he reported to Engornoo, where the king resided. The combined
+forces numbered some forty thousand men. El Kanemy knew nothing of the
+infamous act of the king; but Allah, who protects the innocent and punishes
+the guilty, was smiling over him. The armies pitched their camps opposite
+to each other; and the king of Begharmi sent a messenger with a letter to
+Mais Barnoma, informing him that the heaviest assault would be made upon
+the left, and that, if he would give El Kanemy command there, the bravest
+of the assailants would surround and kill him at once. This letter the
+messenger carried to El Kanemy instead of the king, who, at once seeing the
+plot, immediately answered the important document, signing the name of
+Barnoma, and loading the messenger with presents of all descriptions for
+his master. The next morning El Kanemy went to the king and told him that
+the heaviest assault would be made on the right, and that he should not
+expose his precious life there. As Barnoma got no letter from the king of
+Begharmi, he thought El Kanemy was right, and acted accordingly.
+
+The battle finally began, and the Sycaries of Begharmi, attacking the left
+where they thought El Kanemy was, surrounded Mais Barnoma and killed him,
+supposing him El Kanemy. The battle, however, went on, and the king of
+Begharmi found out before long that he had killed the wrong lion. His army,
+in spite of their usual courage, were beaten, and obliged to recross the
+river Shary, at that place more than two miles wide, with a loss of half
+their number. The victorious army of El Kanemy also crossed the river, and,
+pursuing the retreating forces, captured Mesna, the capital of Begharmi,
+and drove the king into the country of Waday.
+
+El Kanemy now found himself the absolute ruler of Bornoo, nor had that
+kingdom ever any greater ruler. Under his reign the nation prospered
+finely. He encouraged commerce with Northern and Eastern Africa, and,
+building a fleet of small vessels, sailed with a strong force against a
+tribe who inhabited the main islands of Lake Tchad, and who used to commit
+depredations upon the neighboring sections of Bornoo, and chastised them
+severely. These islanders are the finest type of the African race,
+possessing regular features, and large, expressive eyes, though they are
+the darkest of all Africans. El Kanemy also subdued many of the surrounding
+tribes and nations, until the population of Bornoo and its provinces
+amounted to nearly fifteen millions.
+
+My father was the descendant of a very illustrious family. He was the first
+man who had a commission under El Kanemy when he went to Kanem to recruit
+his forces. He was made a Bagafuby, or captain of one hundred cavalry, and
+was in every engagement which El Kanemy went through. The name by which my
+father was known was Barca Gana.[17] My great-grandfather was from Molgoi.
+He established himself in Bornoo many years ago, and was greatly favored by
+the monarchs of that country. My mother was a Mandara woman, the daughter
+of a chief. I was born in Kooka, a few years after the Waday war of 1831.
+We were in all nineteen children, twelve boys and seven girls. I was the
+ninth child of my mother. All my brothers were well educated in Arabic and
+Turkish. Two of them, Mustapha and Abderahman, were very rich, having
+acquired their wealth by trading in ivory and gold-dust. Both had been to
+Mecca as pilgrims. My father himself was rich, but when he was killed, our
+elder brother seized the greater part, and those who were not eighteen
+years of age had to leave their share in their mother's hands. Five cleared
+farms and a considerable amount of gold fell to my share. I do not know how
+much the gold amounted to, but my mother used to tell me, that, when I got
+to be twenty years of age, I would have as much as either of my elder
+brothers.
+
+After my father's death I was given to a teacher to be instructed in my
+native tongue, and also in Arabic. In the space of three years I could read
+and write both languages. I was tried in my native tongue, and passed; but
+I could not pass in Arabic, and my mother and uncle returned me to the
+teacher for eighteen months. I stayed the required time, and then was tried
+and passed.
+
+I was then old enough to be circumcised. Three hundred boys went through
+the ceremony at once, and were then dressed in white clothes, and received
+according to custom a great many presents. Fifteen days we ate the best
+that Kooka had, the king himself giving us the best he had in his palace.
+This generally happens only to the sons of those who have distinguished
+themselves in the army, or, to explain myself better, to those of the
+military aristocracy. At the end of this time all of us went home. For my
+part, this was the first time I had slept in my father's house for four
+years and seven months. I was very much welcomed by my mother, sisters, and
+brothers, and was a pet for some time.
+
+After returning from school to my father's house, I judge about four or
+five years afterwards, I was invited, in company with three of my brothers,
+by the eldest son of the governor of the province of Yaoori and Laree, who
+lived in the town of the latter name, to visit him. This part of the
+province is very charming. The forests are full of delicious game, and the
+lake of fish and beautiful aquatic birds; while in the dry seasons the
+woods and uncultivated plains are worthy to be called the garden of Eden.
+In my childhood I had quite a passion for hunting, one of my father's great
+passions also. In spite of the efforts of my elder brothers to check me in
+it, I would persuade the other boys to follow me into the thick woods, to
+the danger of their lives and mine. My worthy mother declared several times
+that I would be captured by the Kindils, a wandering tribe of the desert.
+Her prophecy was fulfilled after all, unhappily for myself, and perhaps
+more so for those I had persuaded with me. While on the visit just spoken
+of, one day,--it was a Ramadan day, anniversary of the Prophet's day,--I
+persuaded a great number of boys, and we went into the woods a great way
+from any village. We came across nests of Guinea fowl, and gathered plenty
+of eggs, and killed several of the fowl. We made fire by rubbing two pieces
+of dry stick together, and broiled the chickens and eggs. Then we proceeded
+farther, and came across a tree called Agoua, bearing a delicious kind of
+fruit. We all went up the tree, eating fruit and making a great deal of
+noise. We frolicked on that tree for many hours. Presently several of the
+boys told me they heard the neighing of horses. We then all agreed not to
+make so much noise, but we were just too late. In about a quarter of an
+hour we were startled by the cry, "Kindil! Kindil!" The boys who were
+nearest to the ground contrived to hide themselves in the thicket. It
+happened that I was higher than any one, and while coming down with haste,
+I missed my hold and fell, and lay senseless. When I opened my eyes, I
+found myself on horseback behind a man, and tied to him with a rope. Out of
+forty boys, eighteen of us were taken captive. I wished then that it was a
+dream rather than a reality, and the warnings of my mother passed through
+my mind. Tears began to flow down my cheeks; I not only lamented for
+myself, but for those also whom I persuaded into those wild woods.
+Meanwhile, our inhuman captors were laughing and talking merrily, but I
+could not understand them. About six hours' ride, as I suppose, brought us
+to their camp. The tents were then immediately taken down, the camels
+loaded, and we started again, travelling night, and day for three long
+days, until we came to a temporary village where their chief was. After we
+got there we were all chained together, except four, who were taken pity
+upon, on account of their age and birth. It was then night, and nearly all
+the camp was under the influence of hashish, an intoxicating mixture made
+of hemp-seed and other ingredients, which when too much is eaten will
+intoxicate worse than whiskey, or even spirits of wine. While the robbers
+were drunk, we boys were consulting and plotting to run away. We succeeded
+in breaking the chains, and four of the oldest boys took their captors'
+arms, cut their throats, jumped on their horses, and succeeded in making
+their escape. When it was found out, they gave each of us fifteen strokes
+in the hollows of our feet, because we did not inform them.
+
+A little while after our comrades' escape we started on again. This time we
+had to go on foot for five days, until we reached a town called Kashna,
+belonging to the Emperor of the Fellatahs, but situated in the country of
+Houssa, where we were all dispersed to see each other no more. Fortunately,
+none of my brothers were with me in the woods.
+
+My lot was that of an Arab slave, for I was bought by a man named
+Abd-el-Kader, a merchant of Tripoli and Fezzan. He was not an Arabian,
+however, but a brown-skinned man, and undoubtedly had African blood in his
+veins. He had at this time a large load of ivory and other goods waiting
+for the caravan from Kano and Sacca-too. This caravan soon came, and with
+it we started for Moorzook, capital of the pachalic of Fezzan. Although we
+numbered about five hundred, all armed except slaves who could not be
+trusted, a lion whom we met after starting, lying in our path, would not
+derange himself on our account, and we had to attack him. Twelve men fired
+into him. Four men he killed, and wounded five or six, and then escaped. He
+was hit somewhere, as they found blood where he lay, but it was not known
+where. When he roared, he scared all the horses and camels composing the
+caravan. Abd-el-Kader was one of those who attacked the lion, but he was
+not hurt.
+
+Five days after we left Kashna, we came to the first oasis. Here the plains
+were all barren and sandy, but full of gazelles, antelopes, and ostriches.
+The principal tree growing here was the date-palm, and the water was very
+bad, tasting salty.
+
+As the caravan travelled toward the east, the ground rose by degrees. If I
+am not mistaken, we passed five oases before we came into the country of
+Tibboo, a mountainous region between Bornoo and Fezzan, the inhabitants of
+which suffer considerably from the Kindils, though they are also robbers
+themselves. The capital of Tibboo is Boolma, built on a high mountain. I
+was disappointed when I saw the city, for I had heard that it was quite a
+large place. Laree, the smallest town in Bornoo, is a place of more
+importance. The people of Tibboo are of dark-brown complexion, and are
+noted in Soodan for their shrewdness. The day that the caravan happened to
+be at Boolma, two parties were in a warlike attitude about a fair maid whom
+each wished their chief to have for a wife. We did not stay long enough to
+see the issue of the fight, and two days' journey took us out of the
+kingdom of Tibboo.
+
+As soon as the oasis of Tibboo was left, the country became very
+rocky,--the rock being a kind of black granite; and the Arabs had to make
+shoes for both their camels and slaves, for the rocks were very sharp, and
+if this precaution had not been taken, in a few hours their feet would have
+been so cut that they could not have proceeded farther. Some Arabs would
+rather lose four or five slaves than a single camel. They rode very seldom.
+In a journey of ten or twelve weeks I saw Abd-el-Kader ride but once, and
+the majority never rode at all.
+
+In these rocky regions of the desert a great amount of salt is found
+also,--what is called in our language Kalboo, and I believe, in English,
+carbonate of soda. Soodan is supplied by the Moors and Kindils with salt
+from the desert. Sea-shells are also occasionally found in this region.
+After we left Tibboo fire was never allowed, even in the oases, but I do
+not know for what reason.
+
+The mountainous regions of the desert passed, we came to a more level
+country, but it was not long before we saw other mountains ahead. As we
+passed over the last of them, we found them very dangerous from their
+steepness, and a few camels were lost by falling into the ravines. After
+passing this dangerous place, a sign of vegetation was seen, oases were
+more frequent, and at last forests of date-palm, the fruit of which forms
+the principal food of both the inhabitants of Fezzan and their camels,
+became abundant.
+
+El Kaheni is the first town or human habitation seen after leaving Tibboo.
+It is a small walled town, like all other places in Fezzan. Here I first
+saw the curious way in which the Fezzaneers cultivate their land by
+irrigation. Each farm has a large well, wide at the top and sloping toward
+the bottom, out of which water is drawn by donkeys, and poured into a
+trough, from which it runs into small ditches. This process is renewed
+every few days until the crop no longer needs watering.
+
+The people of El Kaheni were very courteous. I had a long talk with a young
+man, who gave me a description of the capital, Moorzook, but his story did
+not agree with that which Abd-el-Kader told me. I afterwards found that the
+young man's story was correct. We left El Kaheni the next day, taking a
+large load of dates, superior to those of Soodan in size and sweetness.
+After three days' journey we could see in the distance a large flag on a
+long pole, on the top of the English Consulate, the largest house in the
+metropolis of Fezzan. We passed several villages of trifling importance,
+and at about noon arrived within the walls of Moorzook. There the caravan
+dissolved, and each man went to his own house.
+
+I found Moorzook to be not larger than a quarter of my native town of
+Kooka; but the buildings were in general better, every house being of
+stone, though of course very poorly built in comparison with European
+dwellings. The city has four gates, one toward each cardinal point of the
+compass. The northern is the one by which the caravan entered; the eastern
+is a ruin; the southern, which is behind the Pacha's palace, has mounted
+by it two guns of large calibre; while the western, and the best of all, is
+situated near the barracks, which are fine buildings, larger even than the
+Pacha's palace. The pachalic of Fezzan is a tributary of the Ottoman Porte,
+and the Pacha, a Turk, is very much hated by the Bedouins.
+
+After reaching Abd-el-Kader's house, I found that he was a poor man. The
+reader can form some idea from his living in the capital, and having but
+one wife, all his property consisting of a piece of land about two and a
+half miles from the city, a few donkeys, ten camels, old and young, an Arab
+slave, and myself. While I was yet with him he bought also a young Fellatah
+girl. As soon as we arrived, he sent me with Hassan, his slave, to the
+farm, where I worked some fifteen days. I told him then that I was not used
+to such work, and prayed him to sell me to some Turk or Egyptian. He asked
+me what my father used to do, and I told him that he was a warrior and also
+traded in gold-dust and ivory. On hearing my father's name he opened his
+eyes wide, and asked me why I did not tell him that in Soodan. He had known
+my father well, but had not seen him for fifteen rainy seasons. From that
+day Abd-el-Kader was very kind to me, and said he had a great notion to
+take me back. He, however, sold me after all to a young Turkish officer
+named Abdy Agra, an excellent young man, full of life and fun. This officer
+was always with the Pacha, and I believe was one of his aides. His wife was
+a Kanowry woman. He used to bring home money every night and often gave me
+some. After he had dressed me up, I accompanied him to the Pacha's every
+day. He spoke my language very correctly, only with an accent, like all
+strangers trying to speak Kanowry, and he began to teach me Turkish.
+Strange to say, in Fezzan the Bornoo tongue is in great vogue, rich and
+poor speaking Kanowry. I stayed with Abdy Agra more than three months; but
+one day he told me that he had to send me to his father in Tripoli. So
+long as I had to be a slave, I hated to leave so excellent a man, but I had
+to go. Accordingly, when the caravan was to start, he sent me in charge of
+Abd-el-Kader, the man from whom he had bought me. Before leaving the city
+we went to a house that I had never seen before, and had our names
+registered in a book by a very benevolent-looking man, who wore spectacles
+on his eyes, something I had never seen before, and which made me afraid of
+him. As we passed out of the city gate we were counted one by one by an
+officer.
+
+On our arrival at Tripoli, Abd-el-Kader took me to an old house in a street
+narrow and dirty beyond description, where we passed the night. The next
+morning he went with me to my new master, Hadji Daoud, the father of Abdy
+Agra. When we found him he was sitting on a divan of velvet, smoking his
+narghile. He looked at that time to be about forty-five years old, and was
+of very fine appearance, having a long beard, white as snow. Abd-el-Kader
+seemed well acquainted with him, for they shook hands and drank coffee
+together. After this we proceeded to the Turkish Bazaar, where I found that
+he was a merchant of tobacco, and had an extensive shop, his own property.
+Hadji Daoud had three wives; the principal one was an Arabian, one was a
+native of my country, and one, and, to do her justice, the best looking of
+them all, was a Houssa girl. He believed in keeping a comfortable table,
+and we had mutton almost daily, and sometimes fowls. He had but one son,
+and he was far away. He told me that he intended to treat me as a son, and
+every day I went to the shop with him. He treated me always kindly, but
+madam was a cross and overbearing woman.
+
+About this time my master started on his third pilgrimage to Mecca, leaving
+a friend in charge of his store, and taking me with him. We went by sail
+from Tripoli to Alexandria, touching at Bengazi. From Alexandria we went by
+cars to Ben Hadad, thence to Saida and Cairo, the capital of Egypt. From
+Cairo we travelled to Kartoom, at the forks of the Nile, and thence to
+Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia, where we stayed only twenty-four hours,
+my master being in continual fear of his life from the natives, who
+differed from him in belief, and then started for Zela, a port on the Red
+Sea. From Zela we sailed to Muscat, and thence proceeded to Mecca. I had
+not come of my own free will and for the express purpose of a pilgrimage,
+and therefore I was not permitted to go with Daoud to the grave of the
+Prophet, and was obliged to content myself without the title of Hadji,
+which is one much respected among the Mohammedans. We had returned as far
+as Alexandria on our way home, when my master was informed that his store
+and a great deal of property, in fact, all his goods and money, had been
+destroyed by fire. This made the good man almost crazy. He did not hesitate
+to tell me that he should have to sell me; but said that he would take care
+that I should have a rich and good master, a promise which he kept. The
+next day, with the present of a good suit of clothes, I was put on board a
+vessel bound for Smyrna and Constantinople. I was to be landed at the
+former city. On this vessel was a young man of eighteen, one of the crew,
+who spoke my own language. I have heard it only twice, I think, since that
+time.
+
+At Smyrna I was sold to a Turkish officer, Yousouf Effendi, a very wealthy
+man, and brother-in-law to the celebrated Reschid Pacha, the Minister of
+Foreign Affairs. He had a great many houses in Smyrna, as well as
+Constantinople. We sailed the next day for the latter city in a man-of-war
+steamer, the Abdul Medjid. My duty was that of a Tchidboudji, which
+consists in filling and cleaning the pipes and narghiles. This was all that
+I had to do, while I was well dressed in cloths and silks, and had plenty
+of leisure time. After a service of eighteen months with Yousouf Effendi,
+he gave me to his younger brother, Yousouf Kavass, less wealthy than
+himself. This brother was, however, a very kind-hearted man, and treated
+his slaves, a Nubian, a native of Sennar, and myself, very kindly. While in
+this service I became known to Prince Mentchikoff, the Envoy Extraordinary
+of Russia at Constantinople, and was finally sold to him by my master. At
+the declaration of the Crimean war, after sending his things on board the
+Russian steamer Vladimir, the Prince started with despatches for his august
+master, via Corfu, Athens, Zara, Trieste, Vienna, Cracow, and Warsaw, to
+St. Petersburg. I accompanied him on the journey, and, as the despatches
+were of the utmost importance, we travelled with the greatest speed.
+
+The house of my master, to which we went, in St. Petersburg, was situated
+on the Nevskoi Prospekt, the Broadway of the city, and was built of
+granite, in the Doric style, and very spacious. His family consisted of his
+wife, one son, and three daughters, while his servants numbered about
+thirty. The Prince, however, was not so immensely rich as some Russian
+aristocrats of his standing. Shortly after his arrival at St. Petersburg,
+Prince Mentchikoff was assigned to command in the army of the Crimea, and
+he hastened there, leaving me in St. Petersburg. After his departure, not
+being satisfied with the way in which the head servant treated me, I
+engaged service with Prince Nicholas Troubetzkoy.
+
+This family, better known as Le Grand Troubetzkoy, are descendants of the
+Grand Duke of Lithuania. The Prince's father was noted for skill and
+bravery in the war of 1828. The Troubetzkoys claim relationship with the
+Emperor of France, the Duc de Morny, the half-brother of the Emperor,
+having married the daughter of Prince Serges Troubetzkoy.
+
+Prince Nicholas was the youngest of five sons, and lived with his brother
+Andre, not far from the Italian theatre, both of them being single.
+
+While in this service, I was baptized in St. Petersburg, November 12,
+1855, into the Greek Church, my name being changed from
+Mohammed-Ali-Ben-Said to Nicholas Said. Prince Nicholas was my godfather. I
+shall always feel grateful, so long as I live, for Prince Nicholas's
+kindness to me; but I cannot help thinking that the way I was baptized was
+not right, for I think that I ought to have known perfectly well the nature
+of the thing beforehand. Still, it was a good intention the Prince had
+toward my moral welfare. After I was baptized he was very kind to me, and
+he bought me a solid gold cross to wear on my breast, after the Russian
+fashion. I was the Prince's personal servant, going always in the carriage
+with him.
+
+As the Czar Nicholas was godfather to the Prince, he had free access to the
+palace. Though he had several chances to become minister at some European
+court, he always refused, preferring to live a life of inaction. His
+health, however, was not very good, and he was very nervous. I have seen
+him faint scores of time in Russia; but when he left Russia, his health
+began to improve very much.
+
+Everybody acquainted with Russia knows that Czar Nicholas used to make all
+the aristocracy tremble at his feet. No nobleman, to whatever rank he might
+belong, could leave the country without his consent, and paying a certain
+sum of money for the privilege. This measure of the Czar was not very well
+liked by the nobility, but his will was law, and had to be executed without
+grumbling.
+
+Prince Troubetzkoy had several times made application for permission to
+travel, but without success, so long as Czar Nicholas lived; for he hated
+liberal ideas, and feared some of his subjects might, in the course of
+time, introduce those ideas from foreign countries into Russia.
+
+The Prince passed the summer season outside of the city, a distance of
+about twenty-five versts, at a splendid residence of his own, a marble
+house about the size of the Fifth Avenue Hotel of New York City. Adjoining
+it was a small theatre, or glass house, containing tropical fruits, and a
+menagerie, where I first saw a llama, and the interior of the palace was
+lined with pictures and statues. It was a magnificent building, but was
+getting to be quite old, and the Prince used to talk of repairing it,
+though he remarked it would cost many thousand roubles. This estate
+contained many thousand acres, and four good-sized villages, and was about
+eight miles square. I had here some of the happiest days of my life.
+
+About this time I went with the Prince to Georgia,--his brother-in-law, a
+general in that department, having been wounded by the Circassians under
+Schamyl. We reached Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, in January, and
+remained there until after the capture of Kars by the English and Turks.
+While in the Caucasus, the Prince visited some of the neighboring parts of
+Persia, including Teheran and some smaller towns, and he returned to Russia
+by way of Novgorod.
+
+After the death of Czar Nicholas, Alexander, his successor, gave the Prince
+permission to travel where he chose, without limit of time, and on the 24th
+of February he started, going first to Warsaw, and thence, via Cracow, to
+Vienna. Here I remained for two months, in charge of his effects, while he
+visited a sister in Pesth, in Hungary. On his return we went to Prague, and
+thence to Dresden. At this place, I was greatly bothered by the children.
+They said that they had never seen a black man before. But the thing which
+most attracted them was my Turkish dress, which I wore all the time in
+Europe. Every day, for the three weeks we remained in Dresden, whenever I
+went to take my walk I was surrounded by them to the number of several
+hundred. To keep myself from them, I used to ride in a carriage or on
+horseback, but this was too expensive. I thought the way I could do best
+was to be friendly with them. So I used to sit in the garden and speak
+with them,--that is, those who could understand French. They took a great
+liking to me, for I used sometimes to buy them fruits, candies, and other
+things, spending in this way a large amount. Prince Troubetzkoy had a
+brother, Prince Vladimir, living in Dresden, a very handsome and a very
+excellent man, but suffering from consumption. He treated me very kindly,
+and when we left gave me several very interesting books, both religious and
+secular.
+
+From Dresden we went to Munich, thence to Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, Coblenz,
+Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, Brussels, and Ostende; then, returning to
+Brussels, visited the field of Waterloo, and proceeded to Switzerland,
+passing through Berne, Interlachen, over the Jura and St. Gothard's, to
+Zurich. From Zurich we went to Como in Lombardy, where the Prince's eldest
+brother, Alexander, had a villa on the borders of the lake. After a short
+stay here, we went on to Verona, and then to Milan, where I was left while
+the Prince made a short visit to Venice. Here, while left alone, I did not
+behave as well as I might have done, sometimes drinking too much, and
+spending my money foolishly. Here also I saw, for the first time since
+leaving Africa, a countryman. He was named Mirza, and was born about
+thirty-five miles from Kooka, my native place. He was considerably older
+than I, and had been away from Africa some fifteen years. He was waiting on
+a Venetian Marquis whose name I have forgotten.
+
+After a stay of four weeks in Milan, we started, via Genoa, Leghorn, and
+Pisa, for Florence. Here I attended my master at two levees,--one at the
+palace of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, where I believe I had a better time
+than the Prince, and the other at Prince Demidoff's. This latter gentleman
+is a very wealthy Russian, and is very widely known. He is not a nobleman
+in Russia, however, but has his title from the Grand Duke. He is well known
+for the disagreeable propensity he has for beating his servants. While he
+was in Vienna he was worsted in an attempt to chastise a Hungarian footman,
+but he would not quit the practice, and has paid several fines imposed by
+law in consequence.
+
+Our next stopping-place was Rome, where the Prince remained for the winter,
+making meanwhile a short visit to Naples, and leaving in the spring for
+Paris. We were in Paris when the Prince Imperial was born, and stayed until
+his christening, which was a very important day there. I remember well the
+wonder of a young Russian servant-girl, that France should have still so
+many soldiers as appeared in the procession,--a fraction only, of course,
+of her army,--after losing so many in the Crimea. The Prince always took a
+great pride in dress, both for himself and his servants, and particularly
+here. I was always dressed in Turkish costume, embroidered with gold, and
+never costing less than two or three hundred dollars.
+
+After a three months' stay in Paris we went to London, where the Prince
+took rooms at a first-class boarding-house; but he was invited almost all
+the time to different country seats, where I had very gay times, for the
+English servants live better than any in Europe.
+
+At the conclusion of his English visit, the Prince returned to Baden-Baden,
+this time renting a house. While there Napoleon III. passed through the
+place on his way to meet the Czar Alexander; and Prince Troubetzkoy was
+summoned to Frankfort-on-the-Main to attend on the latter. Here I was one
+day told by the Prince to dress myself in my best, and go to the Russian
+Ambassador's to wait on the Emperor at dinner. There were present beside
+the two Emperors, the King of Wurtemberg, the Grand Dukes of Baden, Hesse
+Darmstadt, and Nassau, the Ministers of France and Belgium, the Burgomaster
+of Frankfort, Messrs. Rothschild, and many others. A splendid dinner was
+served at six o'clock, the usual Russian dinner-hour, and was followed by
+a ball, which continued until two in the morning. A day previous to the
+monarch's departure Prince Gortchakoff handed my master thirty thalers as a
+present for me.
+
+About this time I began to think of the condition of Africa, my native
+country, how European encroachments might be stopped, and her nationalities
+united. I thought how powerful the United States had become since 1776, and
+I wondered if I were capable of persuading the kings of Soodan to send
+several hundred boys to learn the arts and sciences existing in civilized
+countries. I thought that I would willingly sacrifice my life, if need be,
+in realizing my dreams. I cried many times at the ignorance of my people,
+exposed to foreign ambition, who, however good warriors they might be,
+could not contend against superior weapons and tactics in the field. I
+prayed earnestly to be enabled to do some good to my race. The Prince could
+not but see that I was very sober, but I never told him my thoughts.
+
+We stayed at Baden-Baden all summer and part of the fall, and then left for
+Paris. The Prince made this journey to visit his niece, who had just been
+married to the Duc de Morny, formerly the French Ambassador to Russia. She
+was a most beautiful person, only seventeen years of age. I was taken to
+see her, and kiss her hand, according to custom. She at first hesitated to
+give me her hand, undoubtedly being afraid. I had never seen her in Russia,
+as she was at the Imperial University, studying. After two weeks we again
+left Paris for Rome, via Switzerland, again passed the summer at
+Baden-Baden, again visited Paris, and various other points, until the year
+1859 found the Prince again in London.
+
+My desire to return to my native country had now become so strong, that I
+here told the Prince I must go home to my people. He tried to persuade me
+to the contrary, but I was inflexible in my determination. After he found
+that I was not to be persuaded, he got up with tears in his eyes, and
+said: "Said, I wish you good luck; you have served me honestly and
+faithfully, and if ever misfortune happens to you, remember I shall always
+be, as I always have been, interested in you." I, with many tears, replied
+that I was exceedingly thankful for all he had bestowed on me and done in
+my behalf, and that I should pray for him while I lived. I felt truly sorry
+to leave this most excellent Prince. As I was leaving, he gave me as a
+present two fifty-pound bills. It was many days before I overcame my
+regret. Often I could hardly eat for grief.
+
+I now went to board at the Strangers' Home, at the West India Dock, five
+miles from where the Prince stopped. Here I waited for a steamer for
+Africa. Hardly had I been there two weeks, when a gentleman from Holland
+proposed to me a situation to travel with him in the United States and West
+India Islands. I had read much about these countries, and my desire to see
+them caused me to consent, and we left Liverpool soon after New Year's,
+1860.
+
+With this gentleman I went via Boston and New York to New Providence, Long
+Keys, Inagua, Kingston, Les Gonaives, St. Marc, Demerara, Martinique,
+Guadeloupe, and then back to New Providence, and from there by steamer to
+New York. We remained in New York two months, and then visited Niagara,
+Hamilton, Toronto, Kingston, Montreal, Quebec, and Ottawa, until, finally,
+at a small village called Elmer, my employer's funds gave out, and I lent
+him five hundred dollars of my own money. Of this five hundred I received
+back only three hundred and eighty, and this failure compelled me to remain
+in this country and earn my living by work to which I was unaccustomed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point the written narrative of Nicholas ends, at some date during
+the year 1861. He afterward went to Detroit, and taught a school for those
+of his own color, meeting there, I believe, a clergyman whom he had seen
+years before in Constantinople, while a servant to Prince Mentchikoff. At
+Detroit he enlisted in a colored regiment in the summer of 1863. He served
+faithfully and bravely with his regiment as corporal and sergeant in the
+Department of the South, and near the close of the war was attached, at his
+own request, to the hospital department, to acquire some knowledge of
+medicine. He was mustered out with the company in which he served, in the
+fall of 1865. But, alas for his plans of service to his countrymen in his
+native land! like many a warrior before him, he fell captive to woman,
+married at the South, and for some time past the writer, amidst the changes
+of business, has entirely lost sight of him.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] Barca Gana is alluded to in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Vol. V. p.
+54) as the general of the Scheik of Bornoo.--EDS.
+
+
+
+
+BY-WAYS OF EUROPE.
+
+FROM PERPIGNAN TO MONTSERRAT.
+
+
+"Out of France and into Spain," says the old nursery rhyme; but at the
+eastern base of the Pyrenees one seems to have entered Spain before leaving
+France. The rich vine-plains of Roussillon once belonged to the former
+country; they retain quite as distinct traces of the earlier Moorish
+occupancy, and their people speak a dialect almost identical with that of
+Catalonia. I do not remember the old boundaries of the province, but I
+noticed the change immediately after leaving Narbonne. Vine-green, with the
+grays of olive and rock, were the only colors of the landscape. The tower,
+massive and perched upon elevations, spoke of assault and defence; the
+laborers in the fields were brown, dark-haired, and grave, and the
+semi-African silence of Spain seemed already to brood over the land.
+
+I entered Perpignan under a heavy Moorish gateway, and made my way to a
+hostel through narrow, tortuous streets, between houses with projecting
+balconies, and windows few and small, as in the Orient. The hostel, though
+ambitiously calling itself an hotel, was filled with that Mediterranean
+atmosphere and odor which you breathe everywhere in Italy and the
+Levant,--a single characteristic flavor, in which, nevertheless, you fancy
+you detect the exhalations of garlic, oranges, horses, cheese, and oil. A
+mild whiff of it stimulates the imagination, and is no detriment to
+physical comfort. When, at breakfast, red mullet came upon the table, and
+oranges fresh from the tree, I straightway took off my Northern nature as a
+garment, folded it and packed it neatly away in my knapsack, and took out,
+in its stead, the light beribboned and bespangled Southern nature, which I
+had not worn for some eight or nine years. It was like a dressing-gown
+after a dress-coat, and I went about with a delightfully free play of the
+mental and moral joints.
+
+There were four hours before the departure of the diligence for Spain, and
+I presume I might have seen various historical or architectural sights of
+Perpignan; but I was really too comfortable for anything else than a lazy
+meandering about the city, feeding my eyes on quaint houses, groups of
+people full of noise and gesture, the scarlet blossoms of the pomegranate,
+and the glitter of citron-leaves in the gardens. A one-legged fellow, seven
+feet high, who called himself a _commissionnaire_, insisted on accompanying
+me, and I finally accepted him, for two reasons;--first, he knew nothing
+whatever about the city; and secondly, tourists are so rare that he must
+have been very poor. His wooden leg, moreover, easily kept pace with my
+loitering steps, and though, as a matter of conscience, he sometimes
+volunteered a little information, he took my silence meekly and without
+offence. In this wise, I gained some pleasant pictures of the place; and
+the pictures which come with least effort are those which remain freshest
+in memory.
+
+There was one point, however, where my limping giant made a stand, and set
+his will against expostulation or entreaty. I _must_ see the avenue of
+sycamores, he said; there was plenty of time; France, the world, had no
+such avenue; it was near at hand; every stranger went to see it and was
+amazed;--and therewith he set off, without waiting for my answer. I
+followed, for I saw that otherwise he would not have considered his fee
+earned. The avenue of sycamores was indeed all that he had promised. I had
+seen larger trees in Syria and Negropont, but here was a triple avenue,
+nearly half a mile in length, so trained and sculptured that they rivalled
+the regularity of masonry. Each trunk, at the height of ten or twelve feet,
+divided into two arms, which then leaned outwards at the same angle, and
+mingled their smaller boughs, fifty feet overhead. The aisles between them
+thus took the form of very slender pyramids, truncated near the top. If the
+elm gives the Gothic, this was assuredly the Cyclopean arch. In the
+beginning, the effect must have been artificially produced, but the trees
+were now so old, and had so accustomed themselves to the forms imposed,
+that no impression of force or restraint remained. Through the roof of this
+superb green minster not a beam of sunshine found its way. On the hard
+gravel floor groups of peasants, soldiers, nurses, and children strolled up
+and down, all with the careless and leisurely air of a region where time
+has no particular value.
+
+We passed a dark-haired and rather handsome gentleman and lady. "They are
+opera-singers, Italians," said my companion, "and they are going with you
+in the diligence." I looked at my watch and found that the hour of
+departure had nearly arrived, and I should have barely time to procure a
+little Spanish money. When I reached the office, the gentleman and lady
+were already installed in the two corners of the _coupe_. My place,
+apparently, was between them. The agent was politely handing me up the
+steps, when the gentleman began to remonstrate; but in France the
+regulations are rigid, and he presently saw that the intrusion could not be
+prevented. With a sigh and a groan he gave up his comfortable corner to me,
+and took the middle seat, for which I was booked! "Will you have your
+place?" whispered the agent. I shook my head. "You get the best seat, don't
+you see?" he resumed, "because--" But the rest of the sentence was a wink
+and a laugh. I am sure there is the least possible of the Don Juan in my
+appearance; yet this agent never lost an opportunity to wink at me whenever
+he came near the diligence, and I fancied I heard him humming to himself,
+as we drove away,--
+
+    "Ma--nella Spagna--mille e tre!"
+
+I endeavored to be reasonably courteous, without familiarity, towards the
+opera-singers, but the effect of the malicious winks and smiles made the
+lady appear to me timid and oppressed, and the gentleman an unexploded mine
+of jealousy. My remarks were civilly if briefly answered, and then they
+turned towards each other and began conversing in a language which was not
+Italian, although melodious, nor French, although nasal. I pricked up my
+ears and listened more sharply than good manners allowed,--but only until I
+had recognized the Portuguese tongue. Whomsoever I may meet, in wandering
+over the world, it rarely happens that I cannot discover some common or
+"mutual" friend, and in this instance I determined to try the experiment.
+After preliminaries, which gently led the conversation to Portugal, I
+asked:--
+
+"Do you happen to know Count M----?"
+
+"Only by name."
+
+"Or Senhor O----, a young man and an astronomer?"
+
+"Very well!" was the reply. "He is one of the most distinguished young men
+of science in Portugal."
+
+The ice was thereupon broken, and the gentleman became communicative and
+agreeable. I saw, very soon, that the pair were no more opera-singers than
+they were Italians; that the lady was not timid, nor her husband jealous;
+but he had simply preferred, as any respectable husband would, to give up
+his comfortable seat rather than have a stranger thrust between himself and
+his wife.
+
+Once out of Perpignan, the Pyrenees lay clear before us. Over bare red
+hills, near at hand, rose a gray mountain rampart, neither lofty nor
+formidable; but westward, between the valleys of the Tech and the Tet,
+towered the solitary pyramid of the Canigou, streaked with snow-filled
+ravines. The landscapes would have appeared bleak and melancholy, but for
+the riotous growth of vines which cover the plain and climb the hillsides
+wherever there is room for a terrace of earth. These vines produce the
+dark, rich wine of Roussillon, the best vintage of Southern France. Hedges
+of aloes, clumps of Southern cypress, poplars by the dry beds of winter
+streams, with brown tints in the houses and red in the soil, increased the
+resemblance to Spain. Rough fellows, in rusty velvet, who now and then dug
+their dangling heels into the sides of the mules or asses they rode, were
+enough like _arrieros_ or _contrabandistas_ to be the real article. Our
+stout and friendly coachman, even, was hailed by the name of Moreno, and
+spoke French with a foreign accent.
+
+At the post-station of Le Boulou, we left the plain of Roussillon behind
+us. At this end of the Pyrenean chain there are no such trumpet-names as
+Roncesvalles, Fontarabia, and the Bidassoa. Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne,
+and the Saracens have marched through these defiles, and left no grand
+historic footprint, but they will always keep the interest which belongs to
+those natural barriers and division walls whereby races and histories were
+once separated. It was enough for me that here were the Pyrenees, and I
+looked forward, perhaps, with a keener curiosity, to the character and
+forms of their scenery, than to the sentiment which any historic
+association could produce. A broad and perfect highway led us through
+shallow valleys, whose rocky sides were hung with rows of olive-trees, into
+wilder and more abrupt dells, where vegetation engaged in a struggle with
+stone, and without man's help would have been driven from the field. Over
+us the mountains lifted themselves in bold bastions and parapets,
+disforested now, if those gray upper plateaus ever bore forests, and of a
+uniform slaty-gray in tone, except where reddish patches of oxidation
+showed like the rust of age.
+
+But, like "all waste and solitary places," the scenery had its own peculiar
+charm. Poussin and Salvator Rosa would have seated themselves afresh at
+every twist of the glen, and sketched the new picture which it unfolded.
+The huge rocks, fallen from above, or shattered in the original upheaval of
+the chain, presented a thousand sharp, forcible outlines and ragged facets
+of shadow, and the two native growths of the Pyrenees--box and
+cork-oak--fringed them as thickets or overhung them as trees, in the
+wildest and most picturesque combinations. Indeed, during this portion of
+the journey, I saw scores of sketches waiting for the selected artist who
+has not yet come for them,--sketches full of strength and beauty, and with
+a harmony of color as simple as the chord of triple tones in music. When to
+their dark grays and greens came the scarlet Phrygian cap of the
+Catalonian, it was brighter than sunshine.
+
+The French fortress of Bellegarde, crowning a drum-shaped mass of rock,
+which blocked up the narrow valley in front, announced our approach to the
+Spanish frontier. The road wound back and forth as it climbed through a
+stony wilderness to the mouth of a gorge under the fortress, and I saw,
+before we entered this last gateway into Spain, the peak of the Canigou
+touched with sunset, and the sweep of plain beyond it black under the
+shadow of storm-clouds. On either side were some heaps of stone, left from
+forts and chapels of the Middle Ages, indicating that we had already
+reached the summit of the pass, which is less than a thousand feet above
+the sea-level. In ten minutes the gorge opened, and we found ourselves
+suddenly rattling along the one street of the gay French village of
+Perthus. Officers from Bellegarde sat at the table in front of the smart
+_cafe_, and drank absinthe; soldiers in red trousers chatted with the
+lively women who sold tobacco and groceries; there were trees, little
+gardens, arbors of vine, and the valley opened southwards, descending and
+broadening towards a cloudless evening sky.
+
+At the end of the village I saw a granite pyramid, with the single word
+"Gallia" engraved upon it; a few paces farther two marble posts bore the
+half-obliterated arms of Spain. Here the diligence paused a moment, and an
+officer of customs took his seat beside the coachman. The telegraph-pole
+behind us was of barked pine, the next one in front was painted gray; the
+_vente de tabac_ became _estanco nacional_, and the only overlapping of the
+two nationalities which I observed--all things else being suddenly and
+sharply divided--was that some awkward and dusty Spanish soldiers were
+walking up the street of Perthus, and some trim, jaunty French soldiers
+were walking down the road, towards the first Spanish wine-shop. We also
+went down, and swiftly, in the falling twilight, through which, erelong,
+gardens and fields began to glimmer, and in half an hour drew up in the
+little Spanish town of La Junquera, the ancient "place of rushes." Here
+there was a rapid and courteous examination of baggage, a call for
+passports, which were opened and then handed back to us without _vise_ or
+fee being demanded, and we were declared free to journey in Spain. Verily,
+the world is becoming civilized, when Spain, the moral satrapy of Rome,
+begins to pull down her barriers and let the stranger in!
+
+I inspected our "insides," as they issued forth, and found, in addition to
+a priest and three or four commercial individuals with a contraband air, a
+young French naval officer, and an old German who was too practical for a
+professor and too stubborn in his views to be anything else. He had made
+fifteen journeys to Switzerland, he informed me, knew Scotland from the
+Cheviots to John o' Groat's, and now proposed the conquest of Spain. Here
+Moreno summoned us to our places, and the diligence rolled onward. Past
+groups of Catalans, in sandals and scarlet bonnets, returning from the
+harvest fields; past stacks of dusky grain and shadowy olive-orchards; past
+open houses, where a single lamp sometimes flashed upon a woman's head;
+past a bonfire, turning the cork-trees into transparent bronze, and past
+the sound of water, plunging under the idle mill-wheel, in the cool,
+delicious summer air,--we journeyed on. The stars were beginning to gather
+in the sky, when square towers and masses of cubic houses rose against
+them, and the steady roll of our wheels on the smooth highway became a
+dreadful clatter on the rough cobble-stones of Figueras.
+
+The Pyrenees were already behind us; the town overlooks a wide, marshy
+plain. But the mountains make their vicinity felt in a peculiar manner. The
+north-wind, gathered into the low pass of Bellegarde and drawn to a focus
+of strength, blows down the opening valley with a force which sometimes
+lays an embargo on travel. Diligences are overturned, postilions blown out
+of their saddles, and pedestrians carried off their feet. The people then
+pray to their saints that the _tramontana_ may cease; but, on the other
+hand, as it is a very healthy wind, sweeping away the feverish exhalations
+from the marshy soil, they get up a grand annual procession to some
+mountain-shrine of the Virgin, and pray that it may blow. So, when the
+Virgin takes them at their word, the saints are invoked on the other side,
+and the wonder is that both parties don't get out of patience with the
+people of Figueras.
+
+The diligence drew up at the door of a _fonda_, and Moreno announced that
+we were to take supper and wait until midnight. This was welcome news to
+all; but the old German drew me aside as we entered the house, and
+whispered, "Now our stomachs are going to be tried." "Not at all," I
+answered, "we shall find very good provender." "But the guide-book says it
+is very bad," he persisted. And he looked despondent, even with a clean
+table-cloth and a crisp roll of bread before him, until the soup steamed
+under his nose. His face brightened at the odor, grew radiant at the
+flavor, and long before we reached the roast pullet and salad he expressed
+his satisfaction with Spanish cookery. With the dessert came a _vino
+rancio_, full of summer fire, and the tongues of the company were loosened.
+From the weather and the Paris Exposition we leaped boldly into politics,
+and, being on Spanish soil, discussed France and the Mexican business. The
+French officer was silent and annoyed: he was a pleasant fellow, and I, for
+one, had a little sympathy with his annoyance, but I could not help saying
+that all Americans (except the Rev. ----) considered the action of France
+as an outrage and an impertinence, and were satisfied with her miserable
+failure. The Spanish passengers nodded and smiled.
+
+I should not have spoken, had I foreseen one consequence of my words. The
+German snatched the reins of conversation out of our hands, and dashed off
+at full speed, trampling France and her ruler under his feet. At the first
+pause, I said to him, in German: "Pray don't be so violent in your
+expressions,--the gentleman beside me is a naval officer." But he answered:
+"I don't care,--I must speak my mind, which I could not do in Paris. France
+has been the curse of Spain, as well as of all Europe, and there will be no
+peace until we put a stop to her pretensions!" Thereupon he said the same
+thing to the company; but the Spaniards were too politic to acquiesce
+openly. The officer replied, "France has not injured Spain, but, on the
+contrary, has protected her!" and he evidently had not the slightest
+suspicion that there was anything offensive in his words. The Spaniards
+still remained silent, but another expression came into their eyes. It was
+time to change the subject; so the principle of non-intervention, in its
+fullest, most literal sense, was proposed and accepted. A grave Majorcan
+gentleman distributed cigars; his daughter, with her soft, melodious voice,
+was oil to the troubled waters, and before midnight we were all equally
+courteous and cosmopolitan.
+
+Of the four ensuing hours I can give no account. Neither asleep nor awake,
+hearing with closed eyes, or seeing with half-closed senses, one can never
+afterwards distinguish between what is seen and what is dreamed. This is a
+state in which the body may possibly obtain some rest, but the mind becomes
+inexpressibly fatigued. One's memory of it is a blurred sketch, a faded
+daguerreotype. I welcomed that hour when
+
+          "The wind blows cold
+    While the morning doth unfold,"
+
+for it blew away this film, which usurped the place of the blessed mantle
+of sleep. Chill, even here in African Spain, where the pale pearl of the
+dawn foretold a burning noon, and where, in May, the harvests were already
+reaped, the morning brightened; but we were near the end of the journey. At
+sunrise, the towers of Giron stood fast and firm over the misty level of
+the shimmering olive-groves; then the huge dull mass of the cathedral, the
+walls and bastions of the hill-forts, which resisted a siege of seven
+months during the Peninsular war, and finally the monotonous streets of the
+lower town, through which we drove.
+
+The industrious Catalans were already awake and stirring. Smokes from
+domestic hearths warmed the cool morning air; cheerful noises of men,
+animals, and fowls broke the silence; doors were open as we entered the
+town, and the women were combing and twisting their black hair in the
+shadows within. At the post some brown grooms lounged about the door. A
+priest passed,--a genuine Don Basilio, in inky gown and shovel-hat; and
+these graceless grooms looked after him, thrust their tongues into their
+cheeks, and made an irreverent grimace. The agent at Perpignan came into my
+mind; I winked at the fellows, without any clear idea wherefore, but it
+must have expressed something, for they burst into a laugh and repeated the
+grimace.
+
+The lower town seemed to be of immense length. Once out of it, a superb
+avenue of plane-trees received us, at the end of which was the
+railway-station. In another hour the train would leave for Barcelona. Our
+trunks must be again examined. When I asked the reason why this annoying
+regulation, obsolete elsewhere in Europe, is here retained, the Spaniards
+gravely informed me that, if it were abolished, a great many people would
+be thrown out of employment. Not that they get much pay for the
+examination,--but they are constantly bribed not to examine! There was a
+_cafe_ attached to the station, and I advised my fellow-passengers to take
+a cup of the delicious ropy chocolate of Spain, after which one accepts the
+inevitable more patiently.
+
+I found the landscapes from Giron to Barcelona very bright and beautiful.
+Our locomotive had fallen into the national habit: it was stately and
+deliberate, it could not be hurried, its very whistle was subdued and
+dignified. We went forward at an easy pace, making about fifteen miles an
+hour, which enabled me to notice the patient industry of the people, as
+manifested on every plain and hillside. The Catalans are called rough and
+ungraceful; beside the sprightly Andalusians they seem cold and repellent;
+they have less of that blue blood which makes the beggar as proud as the
+grandee, but they possess the virtue of labor, which, however our artistic
+tastes may undervalue it, is the basis from which all good must spring.
+When I saw how the red and rocky hills were turned into garden-terraces,
+how the olive-trees were pruned into health and productiveness, how the
+wheat stood so thick that it rolled but stiffly under the breeze, I forgot
+the jaunty _majos_ of Seville, and gave my hearty admiration to the
+strong-backed reapers in the fields of Catalonia.
+
+The passengers we took up on the way, though belonging to the better class,
+and speaking Spanish whenever it was necessary, all seemed to prefer the
+popular dialect. Proprietors of estates and elegant young ladies conversed
+together in the rough patois of the peasants, which to me was especially
+tantalizing, because it sounded so familiar, and yet was so unintelligible.
+It is in reality the old _langue limousine_ of France, kindred to the
+Provencal, and differs very slightly from the dialect spoken on the other
+side of the Pyrenees. It is terse, forcible, and expressive, and I must
+confess that the lisping Spanish, beside it, seems to gain in melody at the
+expense of strength.
+
+We approached Barcelona across the wide plain of the Llobregat, where
+orange-gardens and factory chimneys, fountains "i' the midst of roses" and
+machine-shops full of grimy workmen, succeed each other in a curious tangle
+of poetry and greasy fact. The Mediterranean gleams in a blue line on the
+left, the citadel of Montjoi crowns a bluff in front; but the level city
+hides itself behind the foliage of the plain, and is not seen. At the
+station you wait half an hour, until the baggage is again deposited on the
+dissecting-tables of the customs officers; and here, if, instead of joining
+the crowd of unhappy murmurers in the anteroom, you take your station in
+the doorway, looking down upon porters, pedlers, idlers, and policemen, you
+are sure to be diverted by a little comedy acted in pantomime. An outside
+porter has in some way interfered with the rights of a station-porter; a
+policeman steps between the two, the latter of whom, lifting both hands to
+heaven in a wild appeal, brings them down swiftly and thrusts them out
+before him, as if descending to earthly justice. The outsider goes through
+the same gestures, and then both, with flashing eyes and open mouths, teeth
+glittering under the drawn lips, await the decision. The policeman first
+makes a sabre-cut with his right arm, then with his left; then also lifts
+his hands to heaven, shakes them there a moment, and, turning as he brings
+them down, faces the outside porter. The latter utters a passionate cry,
+and his arms begin to rise; but he is seized by the shoulder and turned
+aside; the crowd closes in, and the comedy is over.
+
+We have a faint interest in Barcelona for the sake of Columbus; but, apart
+from this one association, we set it down beside Manchester, Lowell, and
+other manufacturing cities. It was so crowded within its former walls, that
+little space was left for architectural display. In many of the streets I
+doubt whether four persons could walk abreast. Only in the Rambla, a broad
+central boulevard, is there any chance for air and sunshine, and all the
+leisure and pleasure of the city is poured into this one avenue. Since the
+useless walls have been removed, an ambitious modern suburb is springing up
+on the west, and there will in time be a new city better than the old.
+
+This region appears to be the head-quarters of political discontent in
+Spain,--probably because the people get to be more sensible of the misrule
+under which they languish, in proportion as they become more active and
+industrious. Nothing could have been more peaceable upon the surface than
+the aspect of things; the local newspapers never reported any disturbance,
+yet intelligence of trouble in Catalonia was circulating through the rest
+of Europe, and _something_--I could not ascertain precisely what it
+was--took place during my brief visit. The telegraph-wires were cut, and
+some hundreds of soldiers were sent into the country; but the matter was
+never mentioned, unless two persons whom I saw whispering together in the
+darkest corner of a _cafe_ were discussing it. I believe, if a battle had
+been fought within hearing of the cannon, the Barcelonese would have gone
+about the streets with the same placid, unconcerned faces. Whether this was
+cunning, phlegm, or the ascendency of solid material interests over the
+fiery, impulsive nature of the Spaniard, was not clear to a passing
+observer. In either case it was a prudent course.
+
+If, in the darkened streets--or rather lanes--of Barcelona, I saw some
+suggestive pictures; if the court-yard of the cathedral, with its fountains
+and orange-trees, seemed a thousand miles removed from the trade and
+manufacture of the city; if the issuing into sunshine on the mole was like
+a blow in the eyes, to which the sapphire bloom of the Mediterranean became
+a healing balm; and if the Rambla, towards evening, changed into a shifting
+diorama of color and cheerful life,--none of these things inclined me to
+remain longer than the preparation for my further journey required. Before
+reaching the city, I had caught a glimpse, far up the valley of the
+Llobregat, of a high, curiously serrated mountain, and that old book of the
+"Wonders of the World," (now, alas! driven from the library of childhood,)
+opened its pages and showed its rough woodcuts, in memory, to tell me what
+the mountain was. How many times has that wonderful book been the chief
+charm of my travels, causing me to forget Sulpicius on the AEgean Sea, Byron
+in Italy, and Humboldt in Mexico!
+
+To those who live in Barcelona, Montserrat has become a common-place, the
+resort of Sunday excursions and picnics, one fourth devotional, and three
+fourths epicurean. Wild, mysterious, almost inaccessible as it stands in
+one's fancy, it sinks at this distance into the very material atmosphere of
+railroad and omnibus; but, for all that, we are not going to give it up,
+though another "Wonder of the World" should go by the board. Take the
+Tarragona train then with me, on a cloudless afternoon. In a few minutes
+the scattered suburban blocks are left behind, and we enter the belt of
+villas, with their fountained terraces and tropical gardens. More and more
+the dark red earth shows through the thin foliage of the olives, as the
+hills draw nearer, and it finally gives color to the landscapes. The vines
+covering the levels and lower slopes are wonderfully luxuriant; but we can
+see how carefully they are cultivated. Hedges of aloe and cactus divide
+them; here and there some underground cavern has tumbled in, letting down
+irregular tracts of soil, and the vines still flourish at the bottom of the
+pits thus made. As the plain shrinks to a valley, the hills on either side
+ascend into rounded summits, which begin to be dark with pine forests;
+villages with square, brown church-towers perch on the lower heights;
+cotton-mills draw into their service the scanty waters of the river, and
+the appearance of cheerful, thrifty labor increases as the country becomes
+rougher.
+
+All this time the serrated mountain is drawing nearer, and breaking into a
+wilder confusion of pinnacles. It stands alone, planted across the base of
+a triangular tract of open country,--a strange, solitary, exiled peak,
+drifted away in the beginning of things from its brethren of the Pyrenees,
+and stranded in a different geological period. This circumstance must have
+long ago impressed the inhabitants of the region,--even in the
+ante-historic ages. When Christianity rendered a new set of traditions
+necessary, the story arose that the mountain was so split and shattered at
+the moment when Christ breathed his last on the cross of Calvary. This is
+still the popular belief; but the singular formation of Montserrat,
+independent of it, was sufficient to fix the anchoretic tastes of the early
+Christians. It is set apart by Nature, not only towering above all the
+surrounding heights, but drawing itself haughtily away from contact with
+them, as if conscious of its earlier origin.
+
+At the station of Martorel I left the train, and took a coach which was in
+waiting for the village of Collbato, at the southern base of the mountain.
+My companion in the _coupe_ was a young cotton-manufacturer, who assured me
+that in Spain the sky and soil were good, but the _entresol_ (namely, the
+human race) was bad. The interior was crowded with country women, each of
+whom seemed to have four large baskets. I watched the driver for half an
+hour attempting to light a broken cigar, and then rewarded his astonishing
+patience with a fresh one, whereby we became good friends. Such a peaceful
+light lay upon the landscape, the people were so cheerful, the laborers
+worked so quietly in the vineyards, that the thought of a political
+disturbance the day before seemed very absurd. The olive-trees, which
+clothed the hills wherever their bony roots could find the least lodgement
+of soil, were of remarkably healthy and vigorous growth, and the regular
+cubic form into which they were pruned marked the climbing terraces with
+long lines of gray light, as the sun slanted across them.
+
+"You see," said the Spaniard, as I noticed this peculiarity, "the
+_entresol_ is a little better in this neighborhood than elsewhere in Spain.
+The people cut the trees into this shape in order that they may become more
+compact and produce better; besides which, the fruit is more easily
+gathered. In all those orchards you will not find a decayed or an unhealthy
+tree; they are dug up and burned, and young ones planted in their place."
+
+At the village of Esparaguerra the other passengers left, and I went on
+towards Collbato alone. But I had Montserrat for company, towering more
+grandly, more brokenly, from minute to minute. Every change in the
+foreground gave me a new picture. Now it was a clump of olives with twisted
+trunks; now an aloe, lifting its giant candelabrum of blossoms from the
+edge of a rock; now a bank of dull vermilion earth, upon which goats were
+hanging. The upper spires of the mountain disappeared behind its basal
+buttresses of gray rock, a thousand feet in perpendicular height, and the
+sinking sun, as it crept westward, edged these with sharp lines of light.
+Up, under the tremendous cliffs, and already in shadow, lay Collbato, and I
+was presently set down at the gate of the _posada_.
+
+Don Pedro, the host, came forward to meet and welcome me, and his pretty
+daughter, sitting on the steps, rose up and dropped a salute. In the
+entrance hall I read, painted in large letters on the wall, the words of
+St. Augustine: "_In necessariis unitas; in dubiis libertas; in omnibus,
+caritas._" (If these sayings are _not_ St. Augustine's, somebody will be
+sure to correct me.) Verily, thought I, Don Pedro must be a character. I
+had no sooner comfortably seated myself in the doorway to contemplate the
+exquisite evening landscape, which the Mediterranean bounded in the
+distance, and await my supper, than Don Pedro ordered his daughter to bring
+the guests' book, and then betook himself to the task of running down a
+lean chicken. In the record of ten years I found that Germans were the most
+frequent visitors; Americans appeared but thrice. One party of the latter
+registered themselves as "gentlemen," and stated that they had seen the
+"prom_a_nent points,"--which gave occasion to a later Englishman to comment
+upon the intelligence of American gentlemen. The host's daughter, Pepita,
+was the theme of praise in prose and raptures in poetry.
+
+"Are you Pepita?" I asked, turning to the girl, who sat on the steps before
+me, gazing into the evening sky with an expression of the most indolent
+happiness. I noticed for the first time, and admired, her firm, regular,
+almost Roman profile, and the dark masses of _real_ hair on her head. Her
+attitude, also, was very graceful, and she would have been, to impressible
+eyes, a phantom of delight, but for the ungraceful fact that she
+inveterately scratched herself whenever and wherever a flea happened to
+bite.
+
+"No, senor," she answered; "I am Carmen. Pepita was married first, and
+then Mariquita. Angelita and myself are the only ones at home."
+
+"I see there is also a poem to Angelita," I remarked, turning over the last
+leaves.
+
+"O, that was a poet!" said she,--"a funny man! Everybody knows him: he
+writes for the theatre, and all that is about some eggs which Angelita
+fried for him. We can't understand it all, but we think it's good-natured."
+
+Here the mother came, not as duenna, but as companion, with her distaff and
+spindle, and talked and span until I could no longer distinguish the thread
+against her gray dress. When the lean chicken was set before me, Don Pedro
+announced that a mule and guide would be in readiness at sunrise, and I
+could, if I chose, mount to the topmost peak of San Geronimo. In the base
+of the mountain, near Collbato, there are spacious caverns, which most
+travellers feel bound to visit; but I think that six or seven caves, one
+coal mine, and one gold mine are enough for a lifetime, and have renounced
+any further subterranean researches. Why delve into those dark, moist,
+oppressive crypts, when the blessed sunshine of years shows one so little
+of the earth and of human life? Let any one that chooses come and explore
+the caverns of Montserrat, and then tell me (as people have a passion for
+doing), "You missed the best!" The best is that with which one is
+satisfied.
+
+Instead of five o'clock, when I should have been called, I awoke naturally
+at six, and found that Don Pedro had set out for San Geronimo four hours
+before, while neither guide nor mule was forthcoming. The old woman pointed
+to some specks far up in the shadow of the cliffs, which she assured me
+were travellers, and would arrive with mules in fifteen minutes. But I
+applied the words _in dubiis libertas_, and insisted on an immediate animal
+and guide, both of which, somewhat to my surprise, were produced. The black
+mule was strong, and the lank old Catalan shouldered my heavy valise and
+walked off without a murmur. The sun was already hot; but once risen above
+the last painfully constructed terrace of olives, and climbing the stony
+steep, we dipped into the cool shadow of the mountain. The path was
+difficult but not dangerous, winding upward through rocks fringed with
+dwarf ilex, box, and mastic, which made the air fragrant. Thyme, wild flax,
+and aconite blossomed in the crevices. The botany of the mountain is as
+exceptional as its geology; it includes five hundred different species.
+
+The box-tree, which my Catalan guide called _bosch_ in his dialect, is a
+reminiscence, wherever one sees it, of Italy and Greece,--of ancient
+culture and art. Its odor, as Holmes admirably says, suggests eternity. If
+it was not the first plant that sprang up on the cooling planet, it ought
+to have been. Its glossy mounds, and rude, statuesque clumps, which often
+seem struggling to mould themselves into human shape, cover with beauty the
+terrible rocks of Montserrat. M. Delavigne had warned me of the dangers of
+the path I was pursuing,--walls on one side, and chasms a thousand feet
+deep on the other,--but the box everywhere shaped itself into protecting
+figures, and whispered as I went by, "Never fear; if you slip, I will hold
+you!"
+
+The mountain is an irregular cone, about thirty-five hundred feet in
+height, and cleft down the middle by a torrent which breaks through its
+walls on the northeastern side. It presents a perpendicular face, which
+seems inaccessible, for the shelves between the successive elevations, when
+seen from below, appear as narrow fringes of vegetation, growing out of one
+unbroken wall. They furnish, indeed, but scanty room for the bridle-path,
+which at various points is both excavated and supported by arches of
+masonry. After nearly an hour, I found myself over Collbato, upon the roofs
+of which, it seemed, I might fling a stone. At the next angle of the
+mountain, the crest was attained, and I stood between the torn and scarred
+upper wilderness of Montserrat on the one hand, and the broad, airy sweep
+of landscape, bounded by the sea, on the other. To the northward, a similar
+cape thrust out its sheer walls against the dim, dissolving distances, and
+it was necessary to climb along the sides of the intervening gulf, which
+sank under me into depths of shadow. Every step of the way was inspiring,
+for there was the constant threat, without the reality, of danger. My mule
+paced securely along the giddy brinks; and though the path seemed to
+terminate fifty paces ahead, I was always sure to find a loop-hole or
+coigne of vantage which the box and mastic had hidden from sight. So in
+another hour the opposite foreland was attained, and from its crest I saw,
+all along the northern horizon, the snowy wall of the Pyrenees.
+
+Here a path branched off to the peak of San Geronimo,--a two hours' clamber
+through an absolute desert of rock. My guide, although panting and sweating
+with his load, proposed the ascent; but in the film of heat which
+overspread the land I should have only had a wider panorama in which all
+distinct forms were lost,--vast, no doubt, but as blurred and intangible as
+a metaphysical treatise. I judged it better to follow the example of a
+pious peasant and his wife whom we had overtaken, and who, setting their
+faces toward the renowned monastery, murmured an _Ave_ from time to time.
+Erelong, on emerging from the thickets, we burst suddenly upon one of the
+wildest and most wonderful pictures I ever beheld. A tremendous wall of
+rock arose in front, crowned by colossal turrets, pyramids, clubs, pillars,
+and ten-pin shaped masses, which were drawn singly, or in groups of
+incredible distortion, against the deep blue of the sky. At the foot of the
+rock, the buildings of the monastery, huge and massive, the church, the
+houses for pilgrims, and the narrow gardens completely filled and almost
+overhung a horizontal shelf of the mountain, under which it again fell
+sheer away, down, down into misty depths, the bottom of which was hidden
+from sight. I dropped from the mule, sat down upon the grass, and, under
+pretence of sketching, studied this picture for an hour. In all the
+galleries of memory I could find nothing resembling it.
+
+The descriptions of Montserrat must have made a powerful impression upon
+Goethe's mind, since he deliberately appropriated the scenery for the fifth
+act of the Second Part of Faust. Goethe was in the steadfast habit of
+choosing a local and actual habitation for the creations of his
+imagination; his landscapes were always either painted from nature, or
+copied from the sketch-books of others. The marvellous choruses of the
+fifth act floated through my mind as I drew; the "Pater Ecstaticus" hovered
+in the sunny air, the anchorites chanted from their caves, and the mystic
+voices of the undeveloped child-spirits came between, like the breathing of
+an AEolian harp. I suspect that the sanctity of the mountain really depends
+as much upon its extraordinary forms, as upon the traditions which have
+been gradually attached to it. These latter, however, are so strange and
+grotesque, that they could only be accepted here.
+
+The monastery owes its foundation to a miraculous statue of the Virgin,
+sculptured by St. Luke, and brought to Spain by no less a personage than
+St. Peter. In the year 880, some shepherds who had climbed the mountain in
+search of stray goats heard celestial harmonies among the rocks. This
+phenomenon coming to the ears of Bishop Gondemar, he climbed to the spot,
+and was led by the music to the mouth of a cave, which exhaled a delicious
+perfume. There, enshrined in light, lay the sacred statue. Gondemar and his
+priests, chanting as they went, set out for Manresa, the seat of the
+diocese, carrying it with them; but on reaching a certain spot, they found
+it impossible to move farther. The statue obstinately refused to accompany
+them,--which was taken as a sign that there, and nowhere else, the shrine
+should be built. Just below the monastery there still stands a cross, with
+the inscription, "Here the Holy Image declared itself immovable, 880."
+
+The chapel when built was intrusted to the pious care of Fray Juan Garin,
+whose hermitage is pointed out to you, on a peak which seems accessible
+only to the eagle. The Devil, however, interfered, as he always does in
+such cases. He first entered into Riquilda, the daughter of the Count of
+Barcelona, and then declared through her mouth that he would not quit her
+body except by the order of Juan Garin, the hermit of Montserrat. Riquilda
+was therefore sent to the mountain and given into the hermit's charge. A
+temptation similar to that of St. Anthony followed, but with exactly the
+opposite result. In order to conceal his sin, Juan Garin cut off Riquilda's
+head, buried her, and fled. Overtaken by remorse, he made his way to Rome,
+confessed himself to the Pope, and prayed for a punishment proportioned to
+his crime. He was ordered to become a beast, never lifting his face towards
+heaven, until the hour when God himself should signify his pardon.
+
+Juan Garin went forth from the Papal presence on his hands and knees,
+crawled back to Montserrat, and there lived seven years as a wild animal,
+eating grass and bark, and never lifting his face towards heaven. At the
+end of this time his body was entirely covered with hair, and it so
+happened that the hunters of the Count snared him as a strange beast, put a
+chain around his neck, and took him to Barcelona. In the mansion of the
+Count there was an infant only five months old, in its nurse's arms. No
+sooner had the child beheld the supposed animal, than it gave a loud cry
+and exclaimed: "Rise up, Juan Garin; God has pardoned thee!" Then, to the
+astonishment of all, the beast arose and spoke in a human tongue. He told
+his story, and the Count set out at once with him to the spot where
+Riquilda was buried. They opened the grave and the maiden rose up alive,
+with only a rosy mark, like a thread, around her neck. In commemoration of
+so many miracles, the Count founded the monastery.
+
+At present, the monks retain but a fragment of their former wealth and
+power. Their number is reduced to nineteen, which is barely enough to guard
+the shrine, perform the offices, and prepare and bless the rosaries and
+other articles of devotional traffic. I visited the church, courts, and
+corridors, but took no pains to get sight of the miraculous statue. I have
+already seen both the painting and the sculpture of St. Luke, and think him
+one of the worst artists that ever existed. Moreover, the place is fast
+assuming a secular, not to say profane air. There is a modern restaurant,
+with bill of fare and wine list, inside the gate, ticket-office for
+travellers, and a daily omnibus to the nearest railway station. Ladies in
+black mantillas lounge about the court-yards, gentlemen smoke on the
+balconies, and only the brown-faced peasant pilgrims, arriving with weary
+feet, enter the church with an expression of awe and of unquestioning
+faith. The enormous wealth which the monastery once possessed--the offering
+of kings--has disappeared in the vicissitudes of Spanish history, the
+French, in 1811, being the last pillagers. Since then, the treasures of
+gold and jewels have not returned; for the crowns offered to the Virgin by
+the city of Barcelona and by a rich American are of gilded silver, set with
+diamonds of paste!
+
+I loitered for hours on the narrow terraces around the monastery,
+constantly finding some new and strange combination of forms in the
+architecture of the mountain. The bright silver-gray of the rock contrasted
+finely with the dark masses of eternal box, and there was an endless play
+of light and shade as the sun burst suddenly through some unsuspected gap,
+or hid himself behind one of the giant ten-pins of the summit. The world
+below swam in dim red undulations, for the color of the soil showed
+everywhere through its thin clothing of olive-trees. In hue as in form,
+Montserrat had no fellowship with the surrounding region.
+
+The descent on the northern side is far less picturesque, inasmuch as you
+are perched upon the front seat of an omnibus, and have an excellent
+road--a work of great cost and labor--the whole way. But, on the other
+hand, you skirt the base of a number of the detached pillars and pyramids
+into which the mountain separates, and gain fresh pictures of its
+remarkable structure. There is one isolated shaft, visible at a great
+distance, which I should judge to be three hundred feet in height by forty
+or fifty in diameter. At the western end, the outline is less precipitous,
+and here the fields of vine and olive climb much higher than elsewhere. In
+an hour from the time of leaving the monastery, we were below the last
+rampart, rolling through dust in the hot valley of the Llobregat, and
+tracing the course of the invisible road across the walls of Montserrat,
+with a feeling of incredulity that we had really descended from such a
+point.
+
+At the village of Montrisol, on the river, there is a large cotton factory.
+The doors opened as we approached, and the workmen came forth, their day's
+labor done. Men and women, boys and girls, in red caps and sandals, or
+bareheaded and barefooted, they streamed merrily along the road, teeth and
+eyes flashing as they chatted and sang. They were no pale, melancholy
+factory slaves, but joyous and light-hearted children of labor, and, it
+seemed to me, the proper successors of the useless idlers in the monastery
+of Montserrat. Up there, on the mountain, a system, all-powerful in the
+past, was swiftly dying; here, in the valley, was the first life of the
+only system that can give a future to Spain.
+
+
+
+
+DINNER SPEAKING.
+
+A LETTER TO MY NEPHEW.
+
+
+So you did not enjoy your first Phi Beta dinner, dear Tom, because you were
+afraid all the time that the new members would be toasted, and then "the
+fellows" had said you must reply for them. That is a pity. As, after all,
+the fellows were not toasted, it is a great pity. I am glad you write to me
+about it, however, and now it is for me to take care that this never
+happens to you again.
+
+I will tell you how to be always ready. I will tell you how I do.
+
+My first Phi Beta dinner was, like yours, my first public dinner. It was on
+the day, which this year everybody remembered who was old enough, when Mr.
+Emerson delivered his first Phi Beta oration at Cambridge. How proudly he
+has the right to look back on the generation between, all of which he has
+seen, so much of which he has been! Well, he is no older this day, to all
+appearance, than he was then,--and your uncle, my dear boy, though older to
+appearance, is not older in reality. What is it dear G---- Q----
+sings,--who sat behind me that early day at Phi Beta?
+
+    "When we 've been there ten million years,
+      Bright shining as the sun,
+    We 'll _have more days_
+    To sing God's praise,
+      Than when we first begun!"
+
+Remember that, my dear oldest nephew, as the ten million years go by,--and,
+remembering it, keep young or grow young.
+
+Mr. Emerson was young, I say,--and I. We were all young.
+
+Mr. Edward Everett was young. He was then Governor,--and, I think,
+presided, certainly spoke, at that Phi Beta dinner. By the almanac he must
+have been that year forty-five years old,--just as old, dear Tom, as some
+other people are this year by the almanac. He had been pretty much
+everything, had gone most everywhere, had seen almost all the people that
+were worth seeing, and remembered more than all the rest of us had
+forgotten. And he was very young. To those who knew him he always was. The
+day he died he was about the youngest man in most things that I knew.
+
+And so it happened that he made the first dinner speech that I remember. We
+were all in the South Commons Hall of University, now used as somebody's
+lecture-room, say, at a guess, Professor Lovering's. And he gave some
+charming reminiscences of Charles Emerson, brother of the philosopher, too
+early lost, and everywhere loved,--and then, speaking of the oration of the
+day, and of the new philosophy to which it belonged, and of which the
+orator was, is, and will be the prophet, he said, in his gracious, funny,
+courtly, and hearty way, that he always thought of its thunders as he did
+of the bolts of Jupiter himself! Could one have complimented an orator more
+than to compare him to Jupiter? And then he went on to verify the
+comparison, by quoting the description,--
+
+    "Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
+    Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri,"--
+
+and translated the words for his purpose,--
+
+    "Three ports were raging fire, and three the whelming waves!
+    But three were _thirsty cloud_, and three were _empty wind_!"
+
+Ah well, my boy! You do not remember what all the world, except a few of
+the elect, then said of "Transcendentalism." So you cannot imagine the
+scream of fun and applause which saluted this good-natured analysis of its
+thunder.
+
+And I,--I was delighted at this aptness of quotation. Should I ever bring
+my capping lines to such a market? Here was a hit as good as the famous
+parliamentary retorts, which were so precious to us in the I. O. H. and in
+the Harvard Union. Should I ever live to see the happy day when I should
+find that it was wise, witty, and just the thing to say,
+
+    "Tu quoque litoribus nostris AEneia nutrix"?
+
+or,
+
+    "Tityre dum redeo, brevis est via, pasce capellas,"
+
+or any other of the T's? Or,
+
+    "AEsopus auctor quam materiam reperit,"
+
+or,
+
+    "AEacus ingemuit, tristique ita voce locutus,"
+
+or any other of the AE diphthongs? It did not seem possible, but we would
+see.
+
+Now it happened that, in the vacation following, a French steamer, I think
+the Geryon, came to Boston. And there was, perhaps a civic dinner,
+certainly an excursion down the harbor, to persuade her officers, and
+through them Louis Philippe, for this was in the early age of stone, that
+Boston Harbor was the best point for the projected line of French packets
+to stop at,--and somebody invited me to go. And it turned out that few of
+the Frenchmen spoke English, and few of the Common Councilmen spoke French,
+so that poor little I came to some miserable use as a half-interpreter. I
+remember telling a Lieutenant de Vaisseau that the "Centurion" rock was
+called so because the 74 Centurion was lost there; and that an indignant
+civic authority, guessing out my speech, told me they did not want the
+Frenchmen to know anything was ever lost in Boston Harbor! Perhaps that was
+the reason the French packets never came. Well, by and by there was the
+inevitable collation in the cabin. (A collation, dear boy, is a dinner
+where you have nothing to eat.) And we went down stairs to collate. I began
+to think of the speeches. Suppose they should call on the youngest of the
+interpreters, what could he say? What Latin quotation that would answer?
+Not Tityrus certainly! No. Nor AEneas's nurse certainly, for she went
+overboard,--bad luck to her!--or was she buried decently? Bad omen that!
+But--yes! certainly--what better than the thunderbolts of Jove?
+Steam-navigation forever,--Robert Fulton, Marquis of Worcester, madman in
+the French bedlam,--bolts of heaven secured for service of
+earth,--Franklin,--the great alliance,--steam-navigation uniting the world!
+Was not the whole prefigured, _messieurs, quand le grand poete_ forged the
+very thunderbolts of the _Dieu des Cieux_?
+
+    "Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
+    Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri."
+
+What better description of the power which at that moment was driving us
+along,--
+
+    "Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three more,
+    Of winged southern winds, and cloudy store,
+    As many parts the dreadful mixture frame"?
+
+Could anything have been more happy? And fortunately no member of Phi Beta
+was present but myself. But, unfortunately, there was no speaking, and for
+the moment I lost my opportunity.
+
+But not my preparation, dear Tom. And for this purpose have I written this
+long story, to show you how, in thirty happy years since, when I have had
+nothing else to say, "Tres imbris torti radios" has always stood me in
+stead. One good quotation makes an after-dinner speaker the match of the
+whole world. And if you have it in Latin, the people who understand that
+language enjoy it especially, and those who do not always appear to enjoy
+it more especially. Perhaps they do. There is also the advantage of slight
+variations in the translation. Note the difference between Mr. Everett's
+above, and John Dryden's.
+
+Imagine yourself, for instance, an invited guest at a Cincinnati dinner in
+Wisconsin. Unfortunately, my dear boy, none of your ancestors rose even to
+the rank of drummer in the army of the Revolution. Your great-grandfather's
+brother had Chastellux to dinner one day. If you can, make your speech out
+of that. But I do not think you can. Still, you are called up to speak:
+"Our friend from New England,"--"Connecticut,--Israel Putnam,--Bunker
+Hill,--Groton,--Wooster," &c., &c. What will you do, my boy? You must do
+something, and you must not disgrace old Wooster. Do! You have your
+thunderbolts.
+
+"This army,"--"gathered from North and South and East and West,"--"like
+another army,"--"whose brave officers still linger among us,--cheer us,"
+&c., &c.,--"this army,"--"combining such various elements of power,
+endurance, and wisdom,--this army, always when I think of it,--more than
+ever to-day, sir, when I see these who represent it in another
+generation,--when I think of Manly coming from the yeasty waves of the
+outstretched Cape,--of Ethan Allen descending from the cloudy tops of the
+Green Mountains,--of Knox, sweaty and black from the hot furnace work of
+Salisbury, where
+
+    'He created all the stores of war,'--
+
+all meeting at the same moment with the Morgans, and Marions, and the one
+Washington from the distant South,--this army always seems to me to be the
+prefigured thunderbolt which the Cyclops forged for Jupiter.
+
+    'Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
+    Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri.'
+
+    'Three from the sultry South, three from the storm-beat shore,
+    Three parts from distant mountains' cloudy store,
+    While raging heat fused all with three parts more!'"
+
+You see, dear Tom, these audiences are always good-natured, and by no means
+critical of your version.
+
+Why, at the only time I was ever at a regimental dinner on the Plains, long
+before the war, you know, when to the untaught mind it did seem as if there
+was no reason why we were there, and no pretence for mutual congratulation,
+I remember when poor Pendergrast called me up to represent science, (I was
+at that time in the telegraph business,) the dear old quotation came to my
+relief like an inspiration. I got round to the Flag. Do you remember how
+safe General Halleck always found it to allude to the Flag?
+
+"The Flag, gentlemen,"--"colors,"--"rainbow of our liberties,"--"Liberty
+everywhere." "Blue, white, and red of Low Countries,"--"Red, white, and
+blue of France,"--"English Constitution,"--"Puritan fathers, Cavaliers,"
+&c., &c.
+
+"Does it seem too much to say, gentlemen, that, with the divine instinct of
+poetry, the unequalled bard of the court of Augustus, looking down the ages
+beyond the sickly purple of the palace, to the days when armies should be
+the armies of freemen, and not the Praetorian guards of a tyrant,--that he
+veiled the glad prophecy of the future in the words in which he describes
+even the thunderbolt itself? The white crest of the foam, the blue of the
+sky, the red of the fiery furnace, are all tossed together, and play
+together, and rejoice together, there in the smiles or in the rage of the
+very breeze of Heaven.
+
+    'Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
+    Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri.'
+
+    'Three parts of white the crested billows lent,
+    Three parts of blue the heavens themselves had sent,
+    Three parts of fiery red with these were blent,
+    And on the free-born wind across the world they went.'"
+
+You are not old enough, my dear nephew, to remember the great consistory
+which the Pope held at Somerville, when for a moment he thought that the
+churches of the world had recognized that Union which in fact does make
+them one, and were willing to offer one front to the Devil, instead of
+fighting, as they always had done, on ten thousand hooks of their own. You
+understand, it was not this pope, Pius IX. It was the pope who came after
+Gregory XVII. and before Pius IX. Well, at that immense dinner-table, which
+had been built on the plan of John O'Groat's, so that each of the eleven
+thousand six hundred and thirty popes present might sit at the head,--I was
+fortunate enough to be appointed to represent the Sandemanian clergy,--the
+only body, as I will venture to say to you, which really preserves the
+simplicity of Gospel institutions, or in the least carries into our own
+time the spirit and life of fundamental Christianity. Now you may imagine
+the difficulty of speaking on such an occasion. I had thought it proper to
+speak in Latin. The difficulty was not so much in the language as in what
+to say, that one might be at once brave as a Sandemanian, and at the same
+time tolerant, and catholic as a Christian. Now it is not for me to say how
+well I acquitted myself. If you want to see my speech, you had better look
+in the _Annales de Foi_; and, if it is there, you will certainly find it. I
+did not think it amiss, certainly, that I was able to close by comparing
+the great agencies which the United Church would be able to employ to the
+thunderbolt itself. We had there present bishops from England of perpetual
+rain, from Sitka of perpetual cloud, from the eternal fires of the torrid
+zone, and from the farthest south of Patagonia. When we selected our sacred
+twelve, it was easy for us to take them, as if we were forging thunders.
+
+    "Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
+    Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri."
+
+Now, my dear Tom, I am sure my lesson needs no moral. Of course I do not
+think you had better start in life with my quotation. To tell you the
+truth, I am still young. I am a life-member of many societies, and, as
+they outlive other usefulness, the more frequently do they dine together. I
+may therefore have some other occasion when I may be reminded of the
+Cyclops. But if, at your dinner, I had happened to be called upon, I
+think,--I do not know, but I think that, seeing such men as you describe, I
+should have been irresistibly led to consider the varied gifts which the
+University every year scatters over the land, and the exquisite harmony by
+which, from such different callings, different homes, and different
+destinies, they unite in the merriment or in the wisdom of her festivities.
+The men of practice who have been taming the waterfall, and made it
+subservient; the men of the gentle ministries of peace, whose blessings
+distil upon us like the very dews of heaven; and the men of the spoken
+word,--of the spirit of truth, of which, like the wind itself, no man
+knoweth whence it cometh or whither it goeth,--these, and the men of war
+who have passed through its fires to give us the free America of to-day,
+all were around you. Surely in such a union I should have been reminded of
+the divine harmony by which elements the most diverse were welded into the
+bolts of Jove.
+
+    "Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosae
+    Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri."
+
+    "Three parts like dews from heaven, three from the wave-beat shore,
+    Three from the soft-winged breeze, and three from blood-red war."
+
+    Always, dear Tom, your affectionate uncle,
+
+                    FREDERIC INGHAM.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+     _The Champagne Country._ By ROBERT TOMES. New York:
+     Hurd and Houghton.
+
+The fear, or hope, that photography will supersede tourists, and at last
+take travel out of literature, scarcely concerns this admirable book and
+the books of its kind. The class is as yet small, but it increases; and it
+is probable that in travel, which is a sort of contemporary history, there
+will be more and more works devoted to a single phase of European life, as
+studied in a particular city or province; just as, in the history of the
+past, the tendency is toward the illustration of certain periods, or even
+episodes, in the lives of nations.
+
+The chief topic Mr. Tomes discusses is the manufacture of champagne wines;
+but his book is also descriptive of life in Rheims and the adjacent
+country, as he knew it during two years' residence in that ancient city.
+Indeed, it is only when the reader remembers his former ignorance of
+everything concerning champagne, excepting its pop and sparkle and flavor,
+that he realizes how thoroughly instructive Mr. Tomes's agreeable pages
+are. In them an intelligent sympathy follows the grape through all the
+processes of its change to wine;--through the vintage, when it is gathered
+by the yeomen of La Champagne, from their own land, and sold to the great
+champagne lords of Rheims; through the expression of its juice in presses
+obedient to the trained and sensitive touch of hands which give neither
+more nor less strength than is adequate to the extraction of the most
+delicate flavor; through the season of its first fermentation in casks, and
+its second in bottles; through its "marriage" with the kindred juices,
+whose united offspring is champagne; through the crisis when it is doctored
+with the cordial that bestows a life-long sweetness; through its final
+corking and sale in every civilized country. As Mr. Tomes's style is light
+and easy, and as he has a quick, unforced sense of humor, his information
+is as delightful as it is honest. He counts nothing alien to him that
+concerns champagne, and he sketches with a pleasant and graphic touch the
+champagne lords and their history, beginning with the great Clicquot
+(whose widow, after inheriting him so many years, died only the other day),
+and bringing down the list with the Heidsiecks, the Roederers, Moet and
+Chandon, the Mumms, and De St. Marceaux, last but not least of the great
+champagne houses. As appears from their names, most of these are Germans,
+and, according to Mr. Tomes, most of the business of Rheims is conducted by
+Germans, who far excel the French in capacity for commerce. They are the
+agents and chief clerks even in French houses; it is some German of
+enormous physique and iron constitution who is selected as
+_commis-voyageur_ to sell the wines and attract custom, by pouring them out
+and convivially drinking them wherever he goes. Mr. Tomes's conviction is,
+that this commercial traveller leads a difficult and precarious life, for
+he cannot eject the wine when once taken into the mouth, as is the custom
+of the more fortunate dealers in selling to buyers at the manufactories.
+
+It is around the wine-trade, the great central feature of life in Rheims,
+that Mr. Tomes groups notices of the city's minor traits, and gossips of
+its cathedral and ecclesiastical history, its picturesqueness, its
+antiquities, its dulness, its contented and prosperous ignorance, its
+luxury and depravity. His pictures are always artistic, and have an air of
+fidelity, and we may believe that they reflect with sufficient truth
+provincial society under the second French Empire. Society it is not, of
+course, in our sense, and perhaps civilization is the better word. Many of
+its characteristics are those common to all Latin Europe,--a religion and
+an atheism alike immoral, an essential rudeness under a polished show of
+good-breeding, an inviolable conventionality, and an unbounded license. But
+to these the Empire has added some traits of its own,--an intellectual
+apathy to be matched nowhere else, a content and pride in mere material
+success, an enjoyment of none but sensual delights. The government seems to
+have besotted the provinces in the same degree that it has corrupted Paris.
+
+Mr. Tomes treats an unworn topic with freshness and authentic skill, and we
+welcome his bright and candid book as a more valuable contribution to
+literature than most contemporary novels and poems.
+
+
+     _Deus Homo: God-Man._ By THEOPHILUS PARSONS. Chicago:
+     E. B. Myers and Chandler.
+
+The author of this book assures us that it is in no sense a criticism of
+either of the two remarkable works which have lately agitated the religious
+and philosophical world; that it is a reply neither to "Ecce Deus" nor to
+"Ecce Homo," but that its title is rather descriptive of the belief which
+inspired it, than indicative of a controversial purpose. Indeed, it is a
+notably calm and uncontroversial statement of the Swedenborgian idea of
+Christ's life and character, and presents with great clearness and
+simplicity the doctrines of the very earnest sect to which its author
+belongs. The author fully accepts the fact of Swedenborg's illumination,
+but the reader is only asked to consider the reasonableness of his
+philosophy, as applied to the elucidation of all Scriptural truth, and more
+particularly the acts and essence of Christ. The people of the New Church
+(as the followers of Swedenborg call themselves) affirm the divinity of
+Christ with an emphasis which excludes from the Godhead any other
+personality than his; and it is in the light of this creed that Mr. Parsons
+regards his character, and discusses the facts of his birth, his sojourn in
+Egypt, his temptations, his death, the miracles, the parables, the supper,
+the Apostles. Naturally, the author has frequent recourse to that science
+of correspondences by which Swedenborg interprets Scripture, and so far
+there is an air of mysticism in his work; but it is on the whole a most
+intelligible declaration of the main Swedenborgian ideas. As such, it must
+have an interest for all candid thinkers; and it appears fortunately at
+this time, when the life of Swedenborg has been made the subject of fresh
+inquiry, as well as the Life which Swedenborg's philosophy is here employed
+to illustrate.
+
+
+     _The Sayings of Doctor Bushwhacker and other Learned
+     Men._ By FREDERICK S. COZZENS. New York: A. Simpson &
+     Co.
+
+The best thing in this book is that brief sketch of travel, called "Up the
+Rhine," in which the British tourist is presented with a delightful
+fidelity. Eyes that have once beheld him never forget him, and it is good
+to gaze upon him here in his extraordinary travelling-costume, with all his
+sightseer's panoply upon him. It affects one like a personal recollection,
+when he addresses the American and says:--
+
+"'Going to Switz'land?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'Y' got Moy for Switz'land?'
+
+"'Moy? I beg pardon.'
+
+"'Yes, Moy,--Moy; got Moy for Switz'land?'
+
+"'Moy! Do you mean money? I hope so!'
+
+"'Ged gad, sir, no! I say Moy.'
+
+"'Upon my word, I _do not_ comprehend you.'
+
+"'Moy, sir, Moy!' rapping vehemently on the red cover of my guide-book that
+lay on the table, 'I say Moy for Switz'land.'
+
+"'O, you mean Murray?'
+
+"'Certainly, sir; did n't I say Moy?'"
+
+This is a touch of nature; and nothing else in the book is done with a hand
+so free and artistic. Doctor Bushwhacker is passably entertaining in his
+talk of tea and coffee and chocolate and wine and salad; but when he comes
+to speak of literature, he makes us suspect that the latest thing in
+criticism which his professional duties have left him leisure to read is E.
+A. Poe's "American Literati." He discourses of "Accidental Resemblances"
+between Mr. Longfellow and other poets, defends the venerable Halleck from
+the charge of copying "Don Juan" in his "Fanny," and pronounces Joseph
+Rodman Drake the only original American poet.
+
+Among the contributions to these "Sayings" by other learned men than Dr.
+Bushwhacker, the most admirable are the two imitations of Macaulay by the
+late Colonel Porter; of their kind they are nowhere surpassed. But the
+editor of the book has left the retiring muse of criticism little to say of
+these productions of his _collaborateurs_. In his Preface he efficiently
+praises them all, specifying one as "sparkling," and another as
+"excellent," and others as coming from persons who have exquisite taste for
+true humor, and assemble in themselves great moral, religious, and literary
+merits; and finally offers his thanks to the gentleman who indefatigably
+urged him to publish the collection.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No.
+120, October, 1867., by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, OCTOBER 1867 ***
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