Dear Don Bobus,--Pardon my abruptness. _In medias res_ is the rule,

you know, _formose puer_, my excellent old boy! Bring out the Saint

Peray, if there be a bottle of that flavorous and flavous tipple in

your extensive cellars,--which I doubt, since you never had more

than a single flask thereof, presented to you by a returned traveller,

who bought it, to my certain knowledge, of a mixer in Congress Street,

in Boston. We drank it, O ale-knight, _sub teg. pat. fag._ more

than five years ago, of a summer evening, in dear old Cambridge, then

undisfigured by the New Chapel. That it did not kill us as dead as

Stilpo of Megara (_vide_ Seneca _de Const_. for a notice of that

foolish old Stoic) was entirely owing to my abstinence and your

naturally strong constitution; for I remember that you bolted nearly

the whole of it. You proved yourself to be a Mithridates of white

lead; while I--but I say no more. I could quote you an appropriate

passage from the tippler of Teos, and in the original Greek, if I

had not long ago pawned my copy of Anacreon (Barnes, 12 mo. Cantab.

1721) to a fellow in Cornhill, who sold it on the very next day to

a total-abstinence tutor. Episodically I may say, that the purchaser

read it to such purpose, that within a week he rose to the honor of

sleeping in the station-house, from which keep he was rescued by a

tearful friend, who sent him to the country, solitude, and

spruce-beer.

"It is useless," says the Staggerite, "for a sober man to knock at

the door of the Muses." It may also be useless for a sober man to

try to write letters to "The New York Scorpion." In your perilous

and unhappy situation you must be a rule unto yourself. But remember,

O Bobus, the saying of Montaigne, that "apoplexy will knock down

Socrates as well as a porter." You are not exactly Socrates; but

your best friends have remarked that you are getting to be

exceedingly stout. Stick to your cups, but forbear, as Milton says,

"to interpose them oft." _In medio tutissimus_,--Half a noggin is

better than no wine. For the sake of the dear old times, spare me the

pain of seeing you a reformed inebriate or a Martha Washington!

Between Drunken Barnaby and Neal Dow there is, I trust, a position

which a gentleman may occupy. Because I have a touch of Charles

Surface in my constitution, I need not make a Toodles of myself. So

bring out the smallest canakin and let it clink softly,--for I have

news to tell you.

I remember, Bob, my boy, once upon a certain Fourth of July,--I

leave the particular Fourth as indefinite as Mr. Webster's "_some_

Fourth" upon which we were to go to war with England,--while there was

a tintinnabulation of the bells, and an ear-splitting tantivy of brass

bands, and an explosion of squibs, which, properly engineered, would

have prostrated the great Chinese Wall, or the Porcelain Tower itself,

--in short, a noise loud enough to make a Revolutionary patriot turn

with joy in his coffin,--that I left my Pottery, after dutifully

listening to Mrs. Potter's performance of twenty-eight brilliant

variations, _pour le piano_, on "Yankee Doodle," by H. Hertz,

(_Op_. 22,378,)--and sought the punches and patriotism, the

joy and the juleps of the Wagonero Cottage. I found you, Bobus,

as cool as if Fahrenheit and Reaumur were not bursting around you.

Well do I remember the patriarchal appearance which you presented,

seated in your own garden, (I think you took the prize for pompions

at the county exhibition soon after,) under your own wide-spreading

elm-tree, reading for facts in one of those confounded cigars, with

which, being proof against them yourself, you were in the habit of

poisoning your friends. Solitary and alone, you would have reminded

me of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,--three distinguished heads of families

rolled into one,--but, surrounded as you were by the fruits of a happy

union, the triple comparison was not to be resisted. Notwithstanding

your hearty welcome, I was a little dispirited,--for I had come from a

childless home. God had taken my sole little lamb,--and many miles

away, with none to care for the flowers which in the first winter of

our bereavement we had scattered upon her rounded grave, she who was

the light of our eyes was sleeping. And while we were thus stricken

and lonesome and desolate, your quiver was full and running over. I do

not mind saying now, that I envied you, as I distributed the squibs,

rockets, and other pyrotechnical fodder which I had brought in my

pocket for your flock. I gulped it all down, however, with a pretty

good grace, and went to my dinner like a philosopher. Do you not

remember that I was particularly brilliant upon that occasion, and that

I told my best story only three times in the course of the evening?

I flatter myself that I know how to conceal my feelings,--although

I punished your claret cruelly, and was sick after it.

I have a notion, dear Don, that I am not writing very coherently,

as you, whether _pransus_ or _impransus_, almost always do. Under

agitating circumstances you are cool, and I verily think that you

would have reported the earthquake at Lisbon without missing one

squashed _hidalgo_, one drop of the blue blood spilt, one convent

unroofed, or one convent belle damaged. Your report would have been

minutely circumstantial enough to have found favor with Samuel Johnson,

LL.D., who for so long a time refused to believe in the Portuguese

convulsion. But we are not all fit by nature to put about butter-tubs

in July. I plead guilty to an excitable temperament. The Bowery youth

here speak of a kind of perspiration which, metaphorically, they

designate as "a cast-iron sweat." This for the last twelve hours has been

my own agonizing style of exudation. And, moreover, the startling event

of which I am to write has (to borrow again from the sage Montaigne)

created in me "so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another,

without design or order, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their

strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing,

hoping in time to make them ashamed of themselves." The novelty of

my position causes me to shamble and shuffle, now to pause painfully,

and then to dance like a droll. I go out from the presence of my

household, that I may vent myself by private absurdities and

exclusive antics, I retire into remote corners, that I may grin

fearfully, unseen of Mistress Gamp and my small servant. I am

possessed by a shouting devil, who is continually prompting me to

give the "hip-hip-hurrah!" under circumstances which might split

apex and base of several of my most important arteries,--which

might bring on apoplexy, epilepsy, suffusion of the brain, or

hernia,--which might cause death,--yes, Sir,--death of the mother,

father, and child.

--Really, good friends, I ask your pardon! I do not know what I have

done. Did I collar you, Dr. Slop? Send in your bill tomorrow! Did I

smash the instruments beyond repair? And should you say now,--just

speaking off-hand,--that two hundred and fifty dollars would be

money enough to repair them? Of course, I can commit highway robbery,

if it be absolutely necessary. My dear Mrs. Gamp, I fully appreciate

the propriety of your suggestions. You want one quart of gin;--I

comprehend. Shall it be your Hollands, your Aromatic Scheidam, your

Nantz, or our own proud Columbian article? You want one quart of rum,

_potus e saccharo confectus!_ You want one quart of brandy. You

want one gallon of wine. You want a dozen of brown-stout. You

want the patent vulcanized India-rubber pump. You want anise,--

_pimpinella anisum_;--I comprehend. You want castor-oil,--a very

fine medicine indeed,--I tasted it myself when a boy. You want

magnesia. You want the patent Vesuvian night-lamp. Madam, that

volcanic utensil shall be forthcoming.

Do I rave, Don Bob? Has reason caught the royal trick of the century,

and left her throne? Let me be calm, as becometh one suddenly

swelled into ancestral proportions! This small lump of red clay

shall inherit my name, and my estate, which I now seriously purpose

to acquire. For her will I labor. For her I will gorge "The Clarion"

with leading articles. For her I will write the long dreamed-of poem

in twenty-four parts. For her I will besiege the private dens of my

friends the booksellers. Dear, helpless little atomy! infinitesimal

object of love! bud, germ, seed, blossom, tidbit, morsel, mannikin,

tomtit, abbreviation, concentration, quintessence! tiny _multum in

parvo!_ charming diamond edition! thou small, red possibility!

weeping promise of glad days to come! For thee will I put the world

under contribution! For thee will I master 'pathy and 'logy and

'nomy and 'sophy! All was and is for thee! For thee sages have

written; for thee science has toiled; for thee looms are clanking,

ships are sailing, and strong men laboring! Thou art born to a

fortune better than one of gold! I am but thy servant, to bring all

treasures and lay them at thy feet! Be remorseless, exacting, greedy

of our love and our lore! Come, young queen, into thy queendom! All

is thine!

Bobus, my friend, you undoubtedly think that I am beside myself. You

are a tough, knotty old tree, and I have only one tender shoot. You

may sneer, or you may pity,--I care not one baubee for your praise

or your blame. I shall take my own course. I feel my responsibility,

Sir! I shall not come to you for advice! I shall pursue the path of

duty, Sir!--Come to you, forsooth! What could you give? A lot of

rubbish from Confucius, with a farrago of useless knowledge anent

the breeching and birching of babies in Japan. I shall seek original

sources of information. What do you know, for instance, of lactation

and the act of sucking, Sir? I have been, like a good Christian, to

my Paley already. Hear the Archdeacon of Carlisle! "The teeth are

formed within the gums, and there they stop; the fact being, that

their farther advance to maturity would not only be useless to the

new-born animal, but extremely in its way; as it is evident that the

act of _sucking_, by which it is for some time to be nourished, will

be performed with more ease, both to the nurse and to the infant,

whilst the inside of the mouth and edges of the gums are smooth and

soft, than if set with hard-pointed bones. By the time they are

wanted, the teeth are ready." Now, dear Don, is not that an

interesting piece of information? You are not a mother, and probably

you never will be one; but can you imagine anything more unpleasant

to the maternal sensibilities than a child born with teeth? Mentally

and prophetically unpleasant, as suggestive of the amiable Duke of

Gloser, who came into the world grinning at dentists; physically

unpleasant, in respect of bites, and the impossibility of emulating

the complying conduct of Osric the water-fly, whose early politeness

was vouched for by the Lord Hamlet. Bethink you, moreover, Don, of a

wailing infant, full furnished with two rows of teeth--and nothing

to masticate! whereas he must have been more cruel than the

"parient" of the Dinah celebrated in song as the young lady who did

not marry Mr. Villikins, that does not have something ready for them

to do by the time the molars and bicuspids appear. I know the perils

of dentition. But have we not the whole family of carminatives? Did

the immortal Godfrey live and die in vain? Did not a kind Providence

vouchsafe to us a Daffy? Are there not corals? Are there not

India-rubber rings? And is there not the infinite tenderness and

pity which we learn for the small, wailing sufferer, as, during the

night which is not stilly, while the smouldering wick paints you, an

immense, peripatetic _silhouette_, upon the wall, you pace to and

fro the haunted chamber, and sing the song your mother sang while

you were yet a child? What a noble privilege of martyrdom! What but

parental love, deathless and irresistible, could tempt you thus,

in drapery more classical than comfortable, to brave all dangers,

to aggravate your rheumatism, to defy that celebrated god,

Tirednature'ssweetrestorer, and to take your snatches of sleep

_à pied_, a kind of fatherly walking Stewart, as if you were doing

your thousand miles in a thousand hours for a thousand dollars, and

were sure of winning the money? Believe me, my friend, the world has

many such martyrs, unknown, obscure, suffering men, whose names Rumor

never blows through her miserable conch-shell,--and I am one of them.

As Bully Bertram says, in Maturin's pimento play,--"I am a wretch,

and proud of wretchedness." A child, the offspring of your own loins,

is something worth watching for. Such a father is your true Tapley;

--there _is_ some credit in coming out jolly under such circumstances.

The unnatural parent, as those warning cries break the silence, may

counterfeit Death's counterfeit, and may even be guilty of the

surpassing iniquity of simulating a snore. _Nunquam dormio_; I am

like "The Sun" newspaper,--sleepless, tireless, disturbed, but

imperturbable. I meet my fate, and find the pang a pleasant one. And

so may I ever be, through all febrile, cutaneous, and flatulent

vicissitudes,--careful of chicken-pox, mild with mumps and measles,

unwearied during the weaning, growing tenderer with each succeeding

rash, kinder with every cold, gentler with every grief, and

sweeter-tempered with every sorrow sent to afflict my little woman!

'Tis a rough world. We must acclimate her considerately.

Of the matter of education I also have what are called "views." I

may be peculiar. School-committee-men who spell Jerusalem with a G,

drill-sergeants who believe in black-boards and visible numerators,

statistical fellows who judge of the future fate of the republic by

the average attendance at the "Primaries," may not agree with me in

my idea of bending the twig. I do believe, that, if Dame Nature

herself should apply for a school, some of these wise Dogberries

would report her "unqualyfide." I will not murder my pretty pet.

So she be gentle, kindly, and loving, what care I if at sixteen

years of age she cannot paint the baptism of John upon velvet,

does not know a word of that accursed French language, breaks

down in the "forward and back" of a cotillon, and cannot with

spider fingers spin upon the piano the swiftest Tarantelle of

Chopin.--[Illustration: musical note] = 2558 Metronome? We will

find something better and braver than all that, my little Alice!

Confound your Italianos!--the birds shall be the music-masters of

my tiny dame. Moonrise, and sunset, and the autumnal woods shall teach

her tint and tone. The flowers are older than the school-botanies;--

she shall give them pet names at her own sweet will. We will not go

to big folios to find out the big Latin names of the butterflies;

but be sure, pet, they and you shall be better acquainted. And

long before you have acquired that most profitless of all arts,

the art of reading, we will go very deeply into ancient English

literature. There is the story of the enterprising mouse, who,

at one o'clock precisely, ran down the clock to the cabalistic tune

of "Dickory, dickory, dock." There are the bold bowl-mariners of

Gotham. There is "the man of our town," who was unwise enough to

destroy the organs of sight by jumping into a bramble-bush, and who

came triumphantly out of the experiment, and "scratched them in again,"

by boldly jumping into another bush,--the oldest discoverer on

record of the doctrine that _similia similibus curantur_. There are

Jack and Gill, who, not living in the days of the Cochituate, went

up the hill for water, and who, in descending, met with cerebral

injuries. There are the dietetic difficulties of Mr. and Mrs. Sprat,

with the happy solution of a problem at one time threatening the

domestic peace of this amiable pair. Be sure, little woman, we will

find merry morsels in the silly-wise book! And there will be other

silly-wise books. Cinderella shall again lose her slipper, and marry

the prince; the wolf shall again eat little Red Ridinghood; and the

small eyes grow big at the adventures of Sinbad, the gallant tar.

Will not this be better, Don Bob, than pistil and stamen and radicle?

--than wearing out BBB lead pencils in drawing tumble-down castles,

rickety cottages, and dumpling-shaped trees?--than acquiring a

language which has no literature fit for a girl to read?--than

mistressing the absurd modern piano music?--than taking diplomas

from institutes, which most certainly do not express all that young

women learn in those venerable seats of learning? We will not put

stays upon our pet until we are obliged to do so. Birdie shall abide

in the paternal nest, and sing the old home-songs, and walk in the

old home-ways, until she has a nice new nest of her own.

Do I dote, Don Bob? Is there a smirk, a villanous, unfeeling,

disagreeable, cynical sneer, lurking under your confounded moustache?

I know you of old, you miserable, mocking Mephistopheles!--you

sneerer, you scoffer, you misbeliever! No more of that, or I will

travel three hundred miles expressly to break your head. Take a

glass of claret, Bob, and be true to your better nature; for I

suppose you have a better nature packed away somewhere, if one could

but get at it. Those who have no children may laugh, but as a

_paterfamilias_ you should be ashamed to do so. And after all, this

is a pretty serious business. As I sit here and dream and hope and

pray, and try to compute the infinite responsibility which has come

with this infinite joy, I am very humble, and I murmur, "Who is

sufficient? who is sufficient?" And if you will look at the

right-hand corner of this page, you will find a great splashy blot.

Lachrymal, Bob, upon my word! 'Tis time to write "Yours, &c."

Moreover, I am needed for some duty in the nursery. Pleasant dreams!

Health and happiness to Senora Wagonero, and all the little

doubleyous. With assurances, &c., I remain, &c., &c.,

PAUL POTTER.

P.S.--Could you tell me the precise age at which Japanese children

begin to learn the use of globes?

P.P.S.--Do Spanish nurses use Daffy? Is there any truth in the

statement of Don Lopez Cervantes Murillo, that Columbus was

"brought up by hand"?

P.P.P.S.--Could you give me the aggregate weight of all the children

born in the Island of Formosa, from 1692 to the present time, with

the proportion of the sexes, and the average annual mortality, and

any other perfectly useless information respecting that island?

P. P.

THE LAST LOOK.

Naushon, September 22d, 1858.

Behold--not him we knew!

This was the prison which his soul looked through,

Tender, and brave, and true.

His voice no more is heard;

And his dead name--that dear familiar word--

Lies on our lips unstirred.

He spake with poet's tongue;

Living, for him the minstrel's lyre was strung:

He shall not die unsung!

Grief tried his love, and pain;

And the long bondage of his martyr-chain

Vexed his sweet soul,--in vain!

It felt life's surges break,

As, girt with stormy seas, his island lake,

Smiling while tempests wake.

How can we sorrow more?

Grieve not for him whose heart had gone before

To that untrodden shore!

Lo, through its leafy screen,

A gleam of sunlight on a ring of green,

Untrodden, half unseen!

Here let his body rest,

Where the calm shadows that his soul loved best

May slide above his breast.

Smooth his uncurtained bed;

And if some natural tears are softly shed,

It is not for the dead.

Fold the green turf aright

For the long hours before the morning's light,

And say the last Good Night!

And plant a clear white stone

Close by those mounds which hold his loved, his own,--

Lonely, but not alone.

Here let him sleeping lie,

Till Heaven's bright watchers slumber in the sky,

And Death himself shall die!

A SAMPLE OF CONSISTENCY.

Mr. Caleb Cushing,--"the Ajax of the Union," as he has lately been

styled,--for what reason we know not, unless that Ajax is chiefly

known to the public as a personage very much in want of light,--Mr.

Caleb Cushing has received an invitation to dine in South Carolina.

This extraordinary event, while it amply accounts for the appearance

of the comet, must also be held to answer for the publication by

Mr. Cushing of a letter almost as long, if not quite so transparent,

as the comet's tail. Craytonville is the name of the happy village,

already famous as "the place of the nativity" of Mr. Speaker Orr,

and hereafter to be a shrine of pilgrimage, as the spot where

Mr. Cushing might have gone through the beautiful natural processes

of mastication and deglutition, had he chosen. We use this elegant

Latinism in deference to Mr. Ex-Commissioner Cushing; for, as he

evidently deemed "birth-place" too simple a word for such a complex

character as Mr. Orr, we could not think of coupling his own name

with so common a proceeding as eating his dinner. It may be

sectionalism in us,--but, at the risk of dissolving the Union, we

will not yield to any Southern man a larger share of the dictionary

(unless it be Webster's) than we give to a gentleman who was born at

--we beg pardon, the place of whose nativity was--Newburyport.

Mr. Cushing has distinguished himself lately as the preacher-up of a

crusade against modern philanthropy; and we do not wonder at it, if

the offer of a dinner be so rare as to demand in acknowledgment a

letter three columns long. Or perhaps he considered the offer itself

as an instance of that insane benevolence which he reprobates, and

accordingly punished it with an epistle the reading of which would

delay the consummation of the edacious treason till all the meats

were cold and the more impatient conspirators driven from the table.

Or were those who had invited him _negrophilists_, (to use

Mr. Cushing's favorite word,) and therefore deserving of such

retribution? Not at all; they were all _leucophilists_, as

sincere and warm-hearted as himself. Or perhaps this letter

expresses Mr. Cushing's notion of what a proper answer to a

dinner-invitation should be. We have no "Complete Letter-Writer"

at hand, and consequently cannot compare it with any classic models;

but, if we remember rightly, that useful book is not in as many

volumes as the Catalogue of the British Museum is to be, and

the examples there given must necessarily be denied so sea-serpentine

a voluminousness. We suspect that the style is original with the

Ex-Brigadier-Attorney-General, but, while we allow it the merit of

novelty, we think there are some grave objections to its universal

adoption. It would be a great check on hospitality; for, by parity

of reason, the invitation should be as tedious as the reply, and a

treaty of dinner would take nearly as much time as a treaty of peace.

This would be a great damage to the butchers, whose interests

(to borrow a bit of political economy from Mr. Cushing's letter) are

complementary to those of the dinner-giver and the diner. Again, it

would be fatal to all conversation, supposing the dinner at last to

take place; for the Amphitryon, on the one hand, has already

exploited everything he knows and does not know, from Sanconiathon,

Manetho, and Berosus, to Dr. Hickok,--and the guests--but the

thought of their united efforts is too appalling. In short, (if we

may use that term in connection with such a subject,) we cannot

believe, and certainly do not hope, that Mr. Cushing's system will

ever become popular. Even if it should, we think that an improvement

upon it might be suggested. We subjoin a form of invitation and

answer, which any of our readers are at liberty to use, if they

should ever need them.

_Punkinopolis_, 28th Sept., 1858.

My dear N. N.,

I send, by the bearer, the Correspondence of Horace Walpole and

Burke's "Letters on a Regicide Peace" which are, probably, as

entertaining and eloquent as anything I could write. I send also

Cicero "De Amicitia," Brillat-Savarin's "Physiologie du Gout" the

Works of Athenæus, and the "Banquet" of Plato. If, after a perusal

of these works, you are not convinced that I entertain the most

friendly feelings towards you, and that I wish you to dine with me

on this day twelvemonth, I do not know what further arguments to

employ.

Yours faithfully,

&c. &c.

Baldeagleville, Feb. 10, 1859.

My dear &c. &c.,

The wagon, which accompanies this, will bring you a copy of the

"Encyclopaedia Britannica." The reading of this choice morçeau of

contemporary literature will suggest to you nearly all I have to say

in reply to your interesting communication of the 28th September

last. By reading, in succession, the articles Confucius,

Fortification, Sandwich Islands, and Æsthetics, you will form some

notion of the mingled emotions with which I remain:

Yours truly,

N.N.

P. S. The amount of time required for mastering the Greek language,

in order thoroughly to enjoy some passages of your charming note,

alone prevents me from sending so full an answer as I should wish.

In these days, when everybody's correspondence is published as soon

as he is dead,--or during his life, if he is unfortunate enough to

be the Director of an Observatory, and there is a chance of injuring

him by the breach of confidence,--we cannot help thinking that the

forms we have given above are not only more compendious, but safer,

than Mr. Cushing's. If his method should come into vogue, posterity

would be deprived of the letters of this generation for nearly a

century by the time necessary to print them, and then, allowing for

the imperious intervals of sleep, would hardly contrive to get

through them in less than a couple of centuries more. We leave to

those who have read Mr. Cushing's reply to the Craytonville

invitation the painful task of estimating the loss to the world from

such a contingency. Meanwhile, the perplexing question arises,--If

such be the warrior-statesman's measure of gratitude for a dinner,

what would be his scale for a breakfast or a dish of tea? Cæsar

announced a victory in three words; but in this respect he was very

inferior to Mr. Cushing, whose style is much more copious, and who

shows as remarkable talents in the command of language as the other

general did in the command of troops.

On first reading Mr. Cushing's letter, its obscurity puzzled us not

a little. There are passages in it that would have pleased Lycophron

himself, who wished he might be hanged if anybody could understand

his poem. Dilution was to be expected in a production whose author

had to make three columns out of "Thank you, can't come." Even a

person overrunning with the milk of human kindness, as Mr. Cushing,

on so remarkable an occasion, undoubtedly was, might be pardoned for

adopting the shift of dealers in the dearer vaccine article, and

reinforcing his stores from a friendly pump. The expansiveness of

the heart would naturally communicate itself to the diction. But,

on the other hand, repeated experiments failed to detect even the

most watery flavor of conviviality in the composition. The epistles

of Jacob Behmen himself are not farther removed from any

contamination with the delights of sense. Was this, then, a mere

Baratarian banquet, a feast of reason, to which Mr. Cushing had

been invited? Or did he intend to pay an indirect tribute of respect

to his ancestry by sending what would produce all the hilarious effect

of one of those interminable Puritan graces before meat? No, the

dinner was a real dinner,--the well-known hospitality of South Carolina

toward Massachusetts ambassadors forbids any other supposition,--and

Mr. Cushing's letter itself, however dark in some particulars, is

clear enough in renouncing every principle and practice of the founders

of New England. We must find, therefore, some other reason why the

Ex-Commander of the Palmetto Regiment, when the Carolinians ask the

pleasure of his society, gives them instead the agreeable relaxation

of a sermon,--an example which, we trust, will not prove infectious

among the clergy.

It occurred to us suddenly that the next Democratic National

Convention is to assemble in Charleston. It is not, therefore, too

early to send in sealed proposals for the Presidency; and if this

letter is Mr. Cushing's bid, we must do him the justice to say that

we think nobody will be found to go lower. We doubt if it will avail

him much; but the precedent of Northern politicians going South for

wool and coming back shorn is so long established, that a lawyer like

himself will hardly venture to take exception to it. Like his great

namesake, the son of Jephunneh, he may bring back a gigantic bunch

of grapes from this land of large promise and small fulfilment, but

we fear they will be of the variety which sets the teeth on edge,

and fills the belly with that east wind which might have been had

cheaper at home.

If, nevertheless, Mr. Cushing is desirous of being a candidate, it

is worth while to consider what would be the principles on which he

would administer the government, and what are his claims to the

confidence of the public. We are beginning to discover that the

personal character of the President has a great deal to do with the

conduct of the almost irresponsible executive head of the Republic.

What, then, have been Mr. Cushing's political antecedents, and what

is his present creed?

There are many points of resemblance between his character and

career and those of the present Chancellor of the English Exchequer.

Belonging to a part of the country whose opinions are to all intents

and purposes politically proscribed, he has gone over to a party

whose whole policy has tended to harass the commerce, to cripple the

manufactures, and to outrage the moral sense of New England, and has

won advancement and prominence in that party by his talents,

contriving at the same time to make his origin a service rather than

a detriment. Like Mr. Disraeli, he has been consistent only in

devotion to success. Like him, accomplished, handsome, plucky,

industrious, and dangerous, if unconvincing, in debate, he brings to

bear on every question the immediate force of personal courage and

readiness, but none of that force drawn from persistent principle,

whose defeats are tutorings for victory. With a quick eye for the

weak point of an enemy, and a knack of so draping commonplaces with

rhetoric that they shall have the momentary air of profound

generalizations, he is also, like him, more cunning in expedients

than capable of far-seeing policy. Adroit in creating and fostering

prejudice, acute in drawing metaphysical distinctions which shall

make wrong seem right by showing that it is less wrong than it

appeared, he is unable to see that public opinion is never moulded

by metaphysics, and that, with the people, instinct is as surely

permanent as prejudice is transitory. Like Mr. Disraeli, versatile,

he is liable to forget that what men admire as a grace in the

intellect they condemn as a defect in the character and conduct.

Gifted, like him, with various talents, he has one which overshadows

all the rest,--the faculty of inspiring a universal want of

confidence. As a popular leader, the advantage which daring would

have given him is more than counterpoised by an acuteness and

refinement of mind which have no sympathy with the mass of men, and

which they in turn are likely to distrust from imperfect

comprehension. Ill-adapted for the rough-and-tumble contests of a

Democracy, he is admirably fitted to be the minister or the head of

an oligarchical Republic. We wish all our Northern Representatives

had the boldness and the abilities, we hope none of them will be

seduced by the example, of Mr. Cushing.

He is one of those able men whose imputed is even greater than their

real mental capacity; because the standard of ordinary men is success,

--and success, of a certain kind, is assured to those mixed

characters which combine the virtue of courage with the vice of

unscrupulousness. An ambitious man, like Louis Napoleon, for example,

who sets out with those two best gifts of worldly fortune, a lace

with nothing but brass and a pocket with nothing but copper in it,

has a brilliant, if a short, career before him, and will be sure to

gain the character of ability; for if ambition but find selfishness

to work upon, it has that leverage which Archimedes wished for. But

time makes sad havoc with this false greatness, with this reputation

which passes for fame, and this adroitness which passes for wisdom,

with merely acute minds. When Plausibility and Truth divided the

world between them, the one chose To-day and the other To-morrow.

To enable us to construct a theory of Mr. Cushing's present position,

we have two recent productions in print,--his Fourth of July Oration

at New York, and his Letter to the Craytonville Committee. But he

has seen too many aspirants for the Presidency contrive to drown

themselves in their inkstands, and is far too shrewd a man, to

elaborate any documentary evidence of his opinions. If we arrive at

them, it must be by a process of induction, and by gathering what

evidence we can from other sources. Mr. Cushing knows very well that

the multitude have nothing but a secondary office in the making of

Presidents, and addresses to them only his words, while the

initiated alone know what meaning to put on them. If, for example,

when he says _servant_ he means _slave_, when he says _Negrophilist_

he means _Republican_, and when he says _false philanthropy_ he

means _the fairest instincts of the human heart_, we have a right to

suspect that there is also an esoteric significance in the phrases,

_Loyalty to the Union_, _Nationality_, and _Conservatism_.

Had a constituent of Mr. Cushing, in the Essex North District, taken

a nap of twenty years,--(and if he had invited his Representative to

dinner, and got such an answer as the Craytonville letter, the

supposition is not extravagant,)--what would have been his amazement,

on waking, to find his Member of Congress haranguing an assembly of

Original Democrats in Tammany Hall! Caius Marcius addressing the

Volscian council of war would occur to him as the only historic

parallel for such a rhetorical phenomenon. The one was an ideal, as

the other is a commonplace example of the ludicrous contradictions

in which men may be involved, who find in personal motives the

justification of public conduct. That the chairman of the meeting

should have had in his pocket a letter from the candidate of the

Buffalo Convention, and that Mr. John Van Buren should have sat upon

the platform, while the orator charged the leaders of the Republican

Party with interested motives, were merely two of those incidental

circumstances by which Fact always vindicates her claim to be more

satiric than Fiction. But when Mr. Cushing speaks with exultation of

the past and with confidence of the future of the Original

Democratic Party, we can think of nothing like it but Charles II.

taking the Solemn League and Covenant, with an unctuous allusion to

the persecutions WE Covenanters have undergone, and the triumphs of

vital piety to which WE look forward.

Mr. Cushing claims that the Democratic Party has originated and

carried through every measure that has become a part of the settled

policy of the government. This is not very remarkable, if we

consider that the party has been in power during by far the

greater part of our national existence, and that under our system

the administration is practically a dictatorship for four years.

Mr. Everett long ago pointed out the advantage we should gain by

having a responsible ministry. As it is, the representative branch

of our government is practically a nullity. What with his immense

patronage, the progress of events, and the chance of luring the

opposing party into by-questions, the Presidential Micawber of the

moment is almost sure that something will turn up to extricate him

from the consequences of his own incompetency or dishonesty. The only

check upon this system is the chance that the temerity engendered by

irresponsible power may lead the executive to measures which, as in

the case of Kansas, shall open the eyes of thinking men to the real

designs and objects of those in office. An opposition is necessarily

transitory in its nature, if it be not founded on some principle

which, reaching below the shifting sands of politics, rests upon the

primary rock of morals and conscience. In such a principle only is

found the nucleus of a party which the adverse patronage of a

corrupt executive can but strengthen by attracting from it its baser

elements. Such an opposition the Democratic Party seems lately to

have devoted all its policy to build up, and now, confronted with it,

can find no remedy but in the abolishment of morals and conscience

altogether.

The Democratic Party, like the distinguished ancestor of Jonathan

Wild, has been impartially on both sides of every question of

domestic policy which has arisen since it came into political

existence. It has been _pro_ and _con_ in regard to a Navy, a

National Bank, Internal Improvements, Protection, Hard Money, and

Missouri Compromise. Its leading doctrine was State Rights; its whole

course of action, culminating in the Dred Scott decision, has been

in the direction of Centralization. During all these changes, it has

contrived to have the Constitution always on its side by the simple

application of Swift's axiom, "Orthodoxy is _my_ doxy, Heterodoxy is

_thy_ doxy," though it has had as many doxies as Cowley. Sometimes

it has even had two at once, as in refusing to the iron of

Pennsylvania the protection it gave to the sugar of Louisiana.

Pennsylvania avenged herself by the fatal gift of Mr. Buchanan.

There is one exception to the amiable impartiality of the party,--it

has been always and energetically pro-slavery. In this respect

Mr. Cushing has the advantage of it, for he has been on both sides

of the Slavery question also. It must be granted, however, that his

lapse into _Negrophilism_ was but a momentary weakness, and that

without it the Whig Party would have lost the advantage of his

character, and the lesson of his desertion, in Congress. He is said

to be master of several tongues, and it is therefore quite natural

that he should have held a different language at different times on

many different questions.

A creed so various that it seemed to be, not one, but every creed's

epitome, could not fail to be strangely attractive to a mind so

versatile as that of Mr. Cushing; yet we cannot deny to his

conversion some remarkable features which give it a peculiar interest.

In some respects his case offers a pleasing contrast to that of the

Rev. John Newton; for, as the latter was converted from slave-trading

to Christianity, so Mr. Cushing (whatever he may have renounced)

seems to have embraced something very like the principles which the

friend of Cowper abandoned,--another example of the beautiful

compensations by which the balance of Nature is preserved. And his

conversion was sudden enough to have pleased even Jonathan Edwards

himself. Up to the ripe age of forty-two he had been joined to his

idols. It is a proverb, that he who is a fool at forty will be a

fool at fourscore; yet Mr. Cushing, who is certainly no fool, had

been blind to the beauties of Original Democracy for a year or two

beyond that alliterative era. The Whigs had just succeeded in

electing their candidates, and it seemed as if nothing short of an

almost Providential interposition could save him. That interposition

came in the death of General Harrison, which took away the last earthly

hope of Whig advancement. It was what the jockeys call "a very near

thing." But for that,--it is a sad thought,--Mr. Cushing might have been

on our side now. This was the _gratia operans_. Mr. Tyler, who

succeeded to the Presidency, had Democratic proclivities; this was

the _gratia coöperans_; and finally we see the _gratia perficiens_

in the appointment of our catechumen to the Chinese Commissionership.

From the Central Flowery Kingdom he returned a full-blown Original

Democrat. In 1853, Mr. Pierce, finding himself elected President

for no other reason apparently than that he had failed to distinguish

himself in the Mexican War, appointed Mr. Cushing his Attorney

General on the same benevolent principle,--consoling him for having

to sheathe a bloodless sword by giving him a chance to draw the more

dangerous Opinion.

We have alluded only to such facts in Mr. Cushing's history as are

fresh in the remembrance of our readers; and it would not have been

worth our while to allude even to these, if he had not seen fit to

speak of the leading men of the Republican Party as "dangerous,

because they have _no fixed principle, no stable convictions, no

samples of consistency to control their acts_; because their _only

creed is what has been called the duty of success_; and because

their success--the successful accomplishment of a sectional

organization of the government on the ruins of its nationality--

would be the _de facto_ dissolution of the Union." In his Letter he

says also, that "it is a fact humiliating to confess that the cant

of negroism still has vogue as one of the minor instruments of

demagoguy in Northern States." The coolness of such charges, coming

from Mr. Cushing, is below the freezing-point of quicksilver. Shall

we take lessons in fixedness of principle from the Whig-Antislavery

Member from Federalist Essex?--in stable convictions from the

Tyler-Commissioner to China?--in consistency from the Democratic

Attorney-General?--in an amalgam of all three from the Coalition

Judge? Shall we find a more pointed warning of the worthlessness of

success in the words than in the example of the orator? Since Reynard

the Fox donned a friar's hood, and, with the feathers still sticking

in his whiskers, preached against the damnable heresy of hen-stealing,

there has been nothing like this!

In China, they set great store by porcelain that has been often

broken and mended again with silver wire, prizing it more highly

than that which is sound and fresh from the hands of the potter.

There is a kind of political character of the same description,

--hollow-ware, not generally porcelain, indeed,--cracked in every

direction, but deftly bound together with silver strips of preferment,

till it is consistent enough to serve all the need of its possessor

in receiving large messes of the public pottage. How the Chinese

would have admired Mr. Tyler's Commissioner, if they had known the

exquisite perfection of _crackle_ displayed in his political career!

To be sure, the Chinese are our antipodes.

The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound

politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject

himself. Fools and dead men are the only people who never change

their opinions or their course of action. The course of great

statesmen resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable

obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels

of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following

and marking the almost imperceptible slope of national tendency, yet

forever recruited from sources nearer heaven, from summits where the

gathered purity of ages lies encamped, and sometimes bursting open

paths of progress and civilisation through what seem the eternal

barriers of both. It is a loyalty to great ends, an anchored cling

to solid principles, which knows how to swing with the tide, but not

to be carried away by it, that we demand in public men,--and not

persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism

to the inevitable. But we demand also that they shall not too lightly

accept Wrong instead of Right, as inevitable; and there is a kind of

change that is suspicious because it is sudden,--and detrimental to

the character in proportion as it is of advantage to the man; and the

judgment of mankind allows a well-founded distinction between an

alteration of policy compelled by events, and an abandonment of

professed principles tainted with any suspicion of self-interest. We

hold that a Representative is a trustee for those who elected him,

--that his political apostasy only so far deserves the name of

conversion as it is a conversion of what was not his to his own use

and benefit; and we have a right to be impatient of instruction in

duty from those whom the hope of promotion could nerve to make the

irrevocable leap from a defeated party to a triumphant one, and who

can serve either side, if so they only serve themselves. It is this

kind of freedom from prejudice that has brought down our politics to

the gambling level of the stock-market; it is this kind of unlucky

success, and the readiness of the multitude to forgive and even to

applaud it, that justify the old sarcasm, _Patibulum inter et

statuam quàm leve discrimen!_

It is not for inconsistencies of policy in matters of indifference

that we should blame a mart or a party, but for making questions of

honor and morals matters of indifference. Inconsistency is to be

settled, not by seeming discrepancies between the action of one day

and that of the next, but by the experience which enables us to

judge of motives and impulses. Time, which reconciles apparent

contradictions, impeaches real ones, and shows a malicious satirical

turn, in forcing men into positions where they must break their own

necks in attempting to face both ways. Nor is it for inconsistency

that we condemn the Democratic Party. There are no trade-winds for

the Ship of State, unless it be navigated by higher principles than

any the political meteorologists have yet discovered. But there have

been mysterious movements, of late, which raise a violent

presumption that our Democratic captain and officers are altering

the rig and adapting the hold of the vessel to suit the demands of a

traffic condemned by the whole civilized world. They are painting

out the old name, letter by letter, and putting "Conservative" in its

stead. They seem to fancy there is such a thing as a slave-trade-wind,

and are attempting to beat up against what they profess to believe a

local current and a gust of popular delusion. We think they are

destined to find that they are striving against the invincible drift

of Humanity and the elemental breath of God. It is an ominous

_consistency_ with which we charge the Democratic Party.

Mr. Cushing affirms, that the Republicans have no argument but the

"cry of _Slavepower!_"--which is as eloquent a one as the old

Roman's _Delenda est Carthago_, to those who know how many years of

bitter experience, how many memories of danger and forebodings of

aggression, are compressed in it. But he is mistaken; Democratic

administrations have been busy in supplying arguments, and we

complain rather of their abundance than their paucity. The repeal of

the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas policy, which even office-holders

who had gulped their own professions found too nauseous to swallow,

and the Dred Scott decision,--if these be not arguments, then

history is no teacher, and events have no logic.

Mr. Cushing adroitly evades the real matter in issue, and assumes

that it is a mere question of the relative amount of federal office

secured by the North and the South respectively. This may be a very

natural view of the case in a man whose map of nationality would

seem to be bounded North by a seat in Congress, East by a Chinese

Embassy, West by an Attorney-Generalship, and South by the vague

line of future contingency; but it hardly solves the difficulty.

With characteristic pluck he takes the wolf by the ears. The charge

being, that the power of the Slave States has been gaining a steady

preponderance over that of the Free States by means of the federal

administration, he answers it by saying that he has made it a

subject of "philosophic study," and has found that Massachusetts has

had a "pretty fair run of the power of the Union,"--whatever that

may be. The phrase is unfortunate, for it reminds one too much of

the handsome competence with which a father once claimed to have

endowed his son in giving him the run of the streets since he was

able to go alone. But let us test Mr. Cushing's logic by an

equivalent proposition. He is executor, we will suppose, of an

estate to be divided among sixteen heirs; he pays A his portion, and

claims a discharge in full. What would not Mr. Buchanan give for a

receipt by which office-seekers could be so cheaply satisfied!

"Philosophic study," to be sure! It may be easy for gentlemen, the

chief part of whose productive industry has been the holding of

office or the preparing of their convictions for the receipt of more,

to be philosophic; but it is not so easy for Massachusetts to be

satisfied, when she sees only those of her children so rewarded who

misrepresent her long-cherished principles, who oppose the spread of

her institutions, who mock at her sense of right and her hereditary

love of freedom, and are willing to accept place as an equivalent

for the loss of her confidence. The question, Who is in office? may

be of primary importance to Mr. Cushing, but is of little

consequence to the Free States. What concerns them is, How and in

what interest are the offices administered? If to the detriment of

free institutions, then all the worse that sons of theirs can be

found to do that part of the work which involves (as affairs are now

tending) something very like personal dishonor. It is no matter of

pride to us that the South has never been able to produce a sailor

skilful enough and bold enough to take command of a slaver.

Mr. Cushing affects to see in the history of the Slavery Agitation

nothing but a series of injuries inflicted by the North on the South.

He charges "some of the Northern States" with acts of aggression

upon the South "which would have been just cause of war as between

foreign governments." He prudently forbears to name any. Does he mean,

that persons have been found in some of those States unnational

enough, un-Original-Democratic enough, to give a cup of water to a

hunted Christian woman, or to harbor an outcast Christian man,

without first submitting their hair to a microscopic examination?

Does he mean, that we have said hard things of our Southern brethren?

Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue" is open to them

as well as to us, and the Richmond "South" is surely not in the

habit of sprinkling the Northern subjects of its animadversion with

rose-water. No,--what Mr. Cushing means is this,--that there are men

at the North who will not surrender the principles they have

inherited from three revolutions because they are threatened with a

fourth that will never come,--who do not consider it an adequate

success in our experiment of self-government that we can produce

such types of nationality as reckon the value of their country by

the amount of salary she pays,--who will not believe that there is

no higher kind of patriotism than complicity in every violent

measure of an administration which redeems only its pledges to a

faction of Southern disunionists,--who will not admit that

slave-holding is the only important branch of national industry,

because the profession of that dogma enables unscrupulous men to

enter the public service poor and to leave it rich. Has any citizen

of a Southern State ever failed to obtain justice (that is to say,

in the language of Original Democracy, his _nigger_) in a Northern

court? Has Massachusetts ever mobbed an envoy or brutally assaulted

a Senator of South Carolina? Has any Northern State ever nullified

an article of the Federal Constitution, as every seaboard

Slave-State has always done in respect to the colored citizens of

the North? When a man's allowing himself to be kicked comes to be

reckoned an outrage on the kicker, then Mr. Cushing's notion of what

constitutes a "just cause of war" will deserve as much consideration

as Mr. G.T. Curtis's theory that hustling a deputy-marshal is

"levying" it. We can remember when the confirmation of an ambassador

to England (where the eminent fitness of the nomination was

universally conceded) was opposed by several Southern Senators on

the ground that he had expressed an interest in the success of West

India emancipation. If Original Democrats have their way, it will

not be long before it is made constructive treason to have read that

chapter of the Acts of the Apostles which relates the misguided

philanthropy of Philip in endeavoring to convert an Ethiopian into

anything but a chattel.

We are inclined to think that a too amiable willingness to be kicked

has been generally considered "just cause of war as between foreign

governments,"--especially on the part of the stronger of the two.

History seems to show this,--and also, that the sooner a nation gets

over its eccentric partiality for this kind of appeal to its

reasoning faculty, the more likely it is to avoid the risks of war.

At any rate, the forbearance of the South has been such, that, in

spite of the great temptation, she has hitherto refrained from

sending her fleets and armies northward, and we are glad to find

that Mr. Cushing is inclined to take a cheerful view of the

permanency of our institutions. He tells us, it is true, in one place,

that the success of the Republican Party would be "the _de facto_

dissolution of the Union"; but in a moment of calmer reflection he

assures us that there are thirty million Americans who stand ready

"to devour and swallow up" the "handful of negrophilist Union-haters."

We have great faith in the capacity of the American people, yet we

somewhat doubt whether any one of them could swallow up what he had

already devoured, unless, indeed, he performed that feat which has

hitherto been the opprobrium of Jack-puddings, and jumped down his

own throat afterwards. However, a man of Mr. Cushing's warmth of

nature might well find himself carried beyond the regions of

ordinary rhetoric in contemplating so beautiful and affecting a

vision, and it is enough that we have the consolation of knowing

that he either spoke with a disregard of the census, which we cannot

believe possible in one so remarkable for accuracy of statement, or

that he acquits every man, woman, and child in the country of any

hostility to the Union. It is cheering to have this matter set

finally at rest by so eminent an authority, and we are particularly

glad that the necessity for so painful an experiment in swallowing

is a great way off; for, though a "handful" would not go far among so

many, yet, if its components be as unpleasant as Mr. Cushing

represents them, it would certainly give a colic to every patriot

who got a bite. After so generous an exculpation of the American

people from any desire to pull their own house about their ears, we

are left to conclude that the only real danger to be apprehended, in

case of a Republican success, is a _de facto_ and _de jure_

dissolution of that union between certain placemen and their places

which has lasted so long that they have come to look on it as

something Constitutional. When that day is likely to arrive, we

shall see such samples of consistency, and such instances of stable

conviction, in finding out on which side of their bread the butter

lies, as cannot fail to gratify even Mr. Cushing himself.

But we must not congratulate ourselves too soon. In the interval

between the fifth of July, when his oration was delivered, and the

seventh of August, which is the date of the Craytonville letter,

Mr. Cushing seems to have reviewed his opinion on the state of the

Union. There is more cause for alarm than appeared on the surface;

but this time it is not because we have fallen out of love with the

South, but that we have become desperately enamored of negroes.

Nurses will have to scare their refractory charges with another

bugaboo; for the majority of Massachusetts infants would jump at the

chance of being carried off by the once terrible Ugly Black Man. Our

great danger is from _Negrophilism_; though Mr. Cushing seems

consoled by the fact, that it is a danger to Massachusetts, and not

to South Carolina. We think Mr. Cushing may calm his disinterested

apprehensions. We believe the disease is not so deep-seated as he

imagines; and as we see no reason to fear the immediate catastrophe

of the Millennium from any excess of benevolence on the part of

Mr. Cushing and his party toward white men, (whose cause he

professes to espouse,) we are inclined to look forward with

composure to any results that are likely to follow from sporadic

cases of sympathy with black ones. There is no reason for turning

alarmist. In spite of these highly-colored forebodings, it will be a

great while before our colored fellow-citizens, or fellow-denizens,

(or whatever the Dred Scott decision has turned them into,) will

leave mourning-cards in Beacon Street, or rear mulatto-hued houses

on that avenue which it is proposed to build from the Public Garden

into the sunset.

It is adroit in Mr. Cushing thus to shift the front of his defence,

but it is dreadfully illogical. It is very convenient to make it

appear that this is a quarrel of races; for, in such a case, a

scruple of prejudice will go farther than a hundredweight of argument.

In assuming to be the champion of the downtrodden whites against the

domineering blacks, Mr. Cushing enlists on his side the sympathy and

admiration which are sure to follow the advocate of the weak and the

defenceless. He comes home to New England, finds his own color

proscribed, and at once takes the part of _amicus curiæ_ for the

weak against the strong in the forum of Humanity. We do not wonder,

that a gentleman, who has devoted so much ingenuity, so much time

and talent, to making black appear white, should at last deaden the

nicety of his sense for the distinction between the two, and thus

reverse the relation of the two colors; but we do wonder, that, in

choosing Race as a convenient catchword, he should not see that he

is yielding a dangerous vantage-ground to the Native American Party,

whose principles he seems so pointedly to condemn. We say _seems_,

--for he is carefully indefinite in his specifications, and hedges

his opinions with a thicket of ambiguous phrases, which renders it

hard to get at them, and leaves opportunity for future evasion. If a

war of race be justifiable in White against Black, why not in

so-called Anglo-Saxons against Kelts? The one is as foolish and as

wicked as the other, and the only just method of solution is the

honest old fair field and no favor, under which every race and every

individual man will assume the place destined to him in the order of

Providence. We have a great distrust of ethnological assumptions; for

there is, as yet, no sufficient basis of observed fact for

legitimate induction, and the blood in the theorist's own veins is

almost sure to press upon the brain and disturb accurate vision, or

his preconceptions to render it impossible. Gervinus reads the whole

history of Europe in the two words, _Teutonic_ and _Romanic_;

Wordsworth believed that only his family could see a mountain;

Dr. Prichard, led astray by a mistaken philanthropy, believed color

to be a matter of climate; and Dr. Nott considers that the outline

shown by a single African hair on transverse section is reason

enough for the oppression of a race. If the black man be radically

inferior to the white, or radically different from him, the folly of

white-washing him will soon appear. But, on the other hand, if his

natural relation to the white man be that of slave to master, our

Southern brethren have wasted a great deal of time in prohibitory and

obscurantist legislation; they might as well have been passing acts

to prevent the moon from running away, or to make the Pleiades know

their place.

It will be a blessed day for the world when men are as willing to

help each other as they are to assist Providence. The "London

Cotton-Plant," a journal established to sustain the interests of

Slavery in the Old World, is almost overpowered with acute distress

for the Order of Creation, and offers its sustaining shoulder to the

System of the Universe. "Fear nothing," it seems to say, "glorious

structure of the Divine Architect! Giddings shall not touch you, nor

shall Seward lay his sacrilegious hand on you!" "Who are ye?"

murmurs the Voice, "that would reedit the works of the Almighty?"

"Sublime, but misguided object of our compassion, we prefer to

remain in the modest seclusion of namelessness, but we are published

at Red-Lion Court, Fleet Street, and are sold for one shilling!" To

judge from Mr. Cushing's letter, he has studied this organ of the

sympathizers with the Pre-established Harmonies,--certainly there is

a singular coincidence in the sentiments of both, so far as we can

make them out. Both call themselves conservative, both are

anti-philanthropists, both claim that public opinion is tending in

the direction of their views, both affirm that their cause is that

of the white man, and both appear to mean by white man the same

thing,--the owner of a slave.

But is not Mr. Cushing's anxiety misdirected, and wilfully so, in

seeking the material for its forebodings of danger to the Union in

the Free States? The only avowed disunionists of the North are the

radical Abolitionists, whose position is the logical result of their

admitting that under the Constitution it is impossible to touch

Slavery where it exists, and who, therefore, seek in a dissolution

of the federal compact an escape from complicity with what they

believe an evil and a wrong,--with what, till within the last twenty

years, was conceded to be such by the South itself. If Mr. Cushing

be so great an admirer of stability in conviction, he might have

found in these men the subject of something other than vituperation.

There are men among them who might have won the foremost places of

political advancement, could they have sacrificed their principles

to their ambition, could they believe that public honors would heal

as well as hide the wounds of self-respect. It is the South that

advocates disunion, from sectional motives, and adds the spice of

treason. The "London Cotton-Plant" says,--

"If she [the South] is denied 'equality'

within the Union, she can have 'independence'

out of it. Already in European cabinets

the possibility of this contingency is

contemplated. We but perform a public duty

when we tell Mr. Douglas that _there is in

Europe more than one power able and willing

and prepared to take the Cotton States of America,

and with them the other 'Slave'-States,

so-called by free-negroists, under their protection,

as valuable and desirable allies_ ... And

more, _he can say by authority that she [the

South] has active and successful agents in every

part of Europe preparing the way for equal existence,

commercially as well as politically, so

long as the Union exists, or the active support of

powerful allies, if driven as a last resort to appeal

to the civilized world against tyranny and

oppression_." [1]

But what does the "Cotton-Plant" understand by "equality"? Nothing

less than the reopening of the slave-trade. Speaking of the chance

that the captured slaves of the "Echo" would be sent back to

Africa, and resenting such a procedure as "a brand upon our

section and upon our social condition," it affirms that:

"This labor-question of the South does

not depend upon such miserable clap-trap

as Kansas or the Fugitive Slave Law. It

rests upon a full, open, and deliberate recognition

of the rights of the Southern people;

and the Senator from Illinois, _by moving the

abrogation of the so-called slave-trade treaty

with England, allowing the South to supply herself

with labor as she may see fit, would give,

indeed, unquestioned assurance of his disposition

and courage to follow the principle of the

white-basis to its logical and constitutional consequence_."

It declares that the sending home of the Africans would be "a

practical reversal of the Dred Scott decision," and adds,--"We have

no fear that our people _will long remain passive under such an

accumulating weight of inequality._" [2]

Is not this explicit enough? and does not the "white-basis"

sufficiently explain what is meant by the systematic depreciation of

the colored race in Mr. Cushing's letter?

The Democratic Party is the party of "Progress." What is the

direction of that progress likely to be? What is the lesson of the

past? Hitherto this party has been the ally and the tool, not of the

moderate, but of the extreme propagandas of the South. The

Carolinians with their Scotch blood received also a strong infusion

of Scotch logic. They felt that their system was inconsistent with

the immortal assertion of Jefferson in the Declaration of

Independence, and with the principles of the Revolution,--that its

extension was a direct reversal of the creed and the policy of the

men by whom our frame of government was established. They accepted

the alternative, and assumed the aggressive. The principles of the

Revolution must be crushed out, the traditions of the Fathers of the

Republic repudiated,--and that, too, by means of the party calling

itself Democratic, through which alone the South could control the

policy of the government.

Accordingly, a reaction was put in motion and steadily pressed,

precisely similar in kind to that organized by Louis Napoleon

against the principles of the French Revolution, and supported by

precisely the same warnings of the danger of civil commotion, and by

appeals to the timidity of Property and the cupidity of Trade. The

party which had so long vaunted the derivation of its fundamental

truth from the Law of Nature was compelled to make it a part of its

creed that there was nothing higher than an ordinance of man. The

party of State-Rights was forced to proclaim that a decision of the

Supreme Court was sovereign over all the rights of the States. The

party whose leading dogma it is, that all power proceeds from and

resides in the people, that all government rests on the consent of

the governed, was driven into refusing to submit a constitution to

the people whose destiny was to be decided by it. And all this has

been done, not for the security of Slavery where it exists, but to

serve the truculent purposes of its indefinite extension. To

acquiesce in the honesty and justice of such a course of policy as

the last few years have shown, to assist in inaugurating a future

that shall accord with it, is nationality and conservatism! No

wonder Mr. Cushing is charmed with the consistency of his new allies.

Do they propose to steal Cuba?--they are the party who would extend

the area of Freedom. Do they make Slavery a matter of federal concern

by means of the Supreme Court?--they are the party who maintain that

it is an affair of local law. Do they disfranchise a race?--they are

the party of equal rights. And the whole wretched imbroglio of creed

which is the condemnation of their action, and of action, which is

the death of their creed, is dubbed Nationality. If sectionalism be

the reverse of all this, we confess that we prefer sectionalism. It

is a nationality which has no Northern half, a conservatism which

abolishes all our heroic traditions.

If the Democratic Party has been urged to such extreme measures and

such motley self-stultification by the pressure of the South, if

every downward step has been only the more likely to be taken

because it seemed impossible six months before, what are we not to

look for, now that its leaders are emboldened by success, and its

lieutenants are eager for more plunder at the easy price of more

perfidy? Already, as we have seen, the reopening of the slave-trade

is demanded; already fresh enactments are called for, expressly to

render it in future impossible for the people of a Territory to

loosen the grip of Slavery, as those of Kansas have done. And to

prepare the way for this, we are forced to hear continual homilies

on the supremacy of law, on what are called "legal conscience" and

"legal morality,"--phrases which sound well, but cover nothing more

than the absurd fallacy, that everything is legal which can by any

hocus-pocus be got enacted. The doctrine, that there is no higher

law than the written statute, is but one of the symptoms of the

steady drift of our leading politicians toward materialism, toward

a faith which makes the products of man's industry of more value

than man himself, and finds the god of this lower world in the

law of demand and supply. "Cotton is King!" say such reasoners as

Mr. Cushing;--"Conscience is King!" said such actors as the Puritans.

To have a moral sense may be very unwise, very visionary, very

unphilosophic; but most men are foolish enough to have one, and the

enforcing of any law which wounds it is sure to arouse a resistance

thoroughly pervading their whole being and lasting as life itself.

The carrying away of a single fugitive[3] gave the Republicans a

tenure of power in Massachusetts, as firm, and likely to be as

enduring, as that of the Whigs was once. The propagandists of

Slavery overreached themselves when they compelled the people of the

North to be their accomplices. The higher law is not a thing men

argue about, but act upon. People who admit the right of property a

thousand miles off go back to first principles when the property

comes to their door in the upright form of man and appeals for

sympathy with a human voice.

Mr. Cushing represents Massachusetts to be a Babel of _isms_, so

many square miles of Bedlam, from Boston Corner to Provincetown. Is

this intended as a depreciation of our free institutions, by showing

the results to which they inevitably lead? Has a Rarey for vicious

hobbies been a _desideratum_ so long, and has such a benefactor of

his species found his avatar at last in Mr. Cushing? He tells us,

however, that the delusion of _Negrophilism_, that is, Republicanism,

is on the wane, and is destined to speedy extinction. The very

extravagancies he speaks of as so rife and so rampant are to us

evidence of the contrary. They prove the depth to which the

religious instincts of the Northern people have been stirred upon

the question of Slavery. Such extravagancies have accompanied every

great moral movement of mankind. The Reformation, the great Puritan

Rebellion, the French Revolution, brought them forth in swarms. A

profound historical thinker, Gervinus, remarks, that the political

enthusiasm of a nation is slow to warm and swift to cool, but that

its moral enthusiasm is quickly stirred and long in subsiding.

Thinking men will ask themselves whether the _isms_ Mr. Cushing

enumerates be not the external symptoms of such an enthusiasm,--and

whether it be wise, under the names of "Nationality" and "Conservatism,"

to urge aggressions to the point where it becomes the right and the

duty of men to consider the terrible necessity of a change in their

system of government; whether it be unpatriotic to resist the

extension of a system which makes the mass of the population an

element of danger and weakness in the body politic, as its advocates

admit by their scheme for a foreign protectorate of their proposed

independent organization,--a system which renders public education

impossible, exhausts the soil, necessitates sparseness of population,

and demoralizes the governing classes.[4]

The ethical aspects of Slavery are not and cannot be the subject of

consideration with any party which proposes to act under the

Constitution of the United States. Nor are they called upon to

consider its ethnological aspect. Their concern with it is confined

to the domain of politics, and they are not called to the discussion

of abstract principles, but of practical measures. The question,

even in its political aspect, is one which goes to the very

foundation of our theories and our institutions. It is simply,

--Shall the course of the Republic be so directed as to subserve the

interests of aristocracy or of democracy? Shall our Territories be

occupied by lord and serf, or by intelligent freemen?--by laborers

who are owned, or by men who own themselves? The Republican Party

has no need of appealing to prejudice or passion. In this case,

there is a meaning in the phrase, Manifest Destiny. America is to be

the land of the workers, the country where, of all others, the

intelligent brain and skilled hand of the mechanic, and the patient

labor of those who till their own fields, are to stand them in

greatest stead. We are to inaugurate and carry on the new system

which makes Man of more value than Property, which will one day put

the living value of industry above the dead value of capital. Our

republic was not born under Cancer, to go backward. Perhaps we do

not like the prospect? Perhaps we love the picturesque charm with

which novelists and poets have invested the old feudal order of

things? That is not the question. This New World of ours is to be

the world of great workers and small estates. The freemen whose

capital is their two hands must inevitably become hostile to a system

clumsy and barbarous like that of Slavery, which only carries to its

last result the pitiless logic of selfishness, sure at last to

subject the toil of the many to the irresponsible power of the few.

It may temporarily avail the Party of Slavery-Extension to announce

itself as the party of the white man, of the sacredness of property,

and the obligation of law; it may draw to their ranks a few

well-meaning persons, whose easy circumstances make them uneasy,--a

few leaders of defunct parties, with a general capacity for

misdirection and nobody to misdirect; but it will avail the

Republican Party more to claim and to prove that it is the party of

Man, no matter what his color or creed or race,--of the sacredness of

that property which every human being has in himself,--and of the

obligation of that law which outlives legislatures and statute-books,

and is the only real security of all law. The cry of "Conservatism"

may be efficacious for a season; but time will make plainer and

plainer the distinction between the false conservatism which for its

own benefit would keep things as they are, which smooths imminent

ruin delusively over, as Niagara is smoothest on the edge of the

abyss, and that true conservatism which works upon things as they are,

to prepare them for what they must be,--recognizes the necessity of

change, to forestall revolution with healthy development,--and

believes that there is no real antagonism between Old and New, but

only a factitious one, the result of man's obstinacy or self-seeking.

[Footnote 1: London Cotton-Plant, 21st August, 1858.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_. 18th September. 1858.]

[Footnote 3: It is a coincidence that the recapture of runaways

did more than anything else to abolish villanage in England.]

[Footnote 4: See COBB _on Slavery_, (Philadelphia: T. & J.W.

Johnson & Co., 1858,) where these admissions are made. (Introd. pp.

218-220.) This work, written by Mr. Thomas R. R. Cobb, of Georgia, is,

considering the natural prepossessions of the author, singularly calm

and candid. We commend it to our readers, as bringing together a

great deal of information, and still more as showing the remarkable

change which has come over the Southern mind, even among moderate men,

on the subject of Slavery. We shall take a future occasion to notice

it more fully.]

LITERARY NOTICES.

_Brief Expositions of Rational Medicine; To which is prefixed The

Paradise of Doctors, a Fable_. By JACOB BIGELOW, M.D., Late

President of the Massachusetts Medical Society, Physician of the

Massachusetts General Hospital, etc. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and

Company, 13, Winter Street. 1858.

Two doctrines, each containing a fraction of truth, have lain

soaking in the mind of our free-and-easy community so long, that

what strength they had is well-nigh got out of them.

Doctrine the first is, that a man who has devoted himself to a

particular calling is to be considered necessarily ignorant thereof,

--and that certain babes and sucklings in that particular branch of

knowledge, and all others, are to be accepted as the true oracles

with regard to its mysteries. Doctrine the second is, that every new

theory accepted by any number of persons has some important truth at

the bottom of it.

The first of these doctrines has its real meaning. It is true that

there may be a common feeling of justice in the minds of ignorant

people which shall override the decisions of a learned Chief Justice.

It is true that a man may brutalize himself by a contemplation of

theological cruelties, until decent parents are ashamed to have

their children listen to his libels on the Father of All. It is true

that a physician may become such a drug-peddling routinist, that

sensible mothers see through him, and know enough to throw his trash

out of the window as soon as he turns his back.

The second doctrine has its real meaning. Until men turn into beasts,

they must have some arguments addressed to their reason before they

will believe, and still more before they will act. Spiritualism has

its significance, as an appeal from the gross materialism and

heathen ideas of another life so commonly entertained. Mormonism has

its logic, as an appeal from the enforced celibacy of one sex, and to

the Oriental Abrahamic instincts of the other. Homoeopathy has its

fraction of sanity, as a protest against that odious tendency of

physicians to give nauseous stuff to people because they are ailing,

which sickened the pages of old pharmacopoeias with powders of

earthworms and _album Græcum_, and even now makes illness terrible

where it reigns unrebuked.

Swallow these two paragraphs of concession as the infusion drawn

from those two doctrines laid down at starting, and throw away the

effete axioms as fit only for old women to coddle and drench

themselves withal. Having done this, the reader is ready for the

book the title of which we have prefixed.

DR. BIGELOW'S name is a guaranty that it shall contain many thoughts

in not over-many words. It is a pledge that we shall be emancipated

from all narrow technicalities and officinal idols, while following

his guidance. As a man of rare sagacity and wide range of knowledge,

a man of science before he became a leading practitioner in the

highest range of his profession, a philosopher whom his fellows have

thought worthy to preside over their deliberations, a physician whom

his brethren have honored with their highest office, though no man

among them ever assailed the pleasing and profitable delusions of

his craft so sharply,--he may well be listened to, even though he

has given his life to the subject on which he writes.

As this little book is neither (to speak in pharmaceutic phrase) the

water, nor the spirit, but the very _essential oil_, of the author's

thoughts on the matters of which he treats, it is only by a

destructive analysis we can resolve it into its elements. We shall

only touch upon its contents, and recommend the book itself to all

who have ever known sickness, or expect ever to know it, or to have

a friend liable to it.

"The Paradise of Doctors" is a pleasant bait to those wary readers

who will bite at the bare hook of quackery, but must be tempted

before they will venture into a book of medicine which has not lying

as its staple material.

Then comes a consideration of the five methods of treating

disease now most prevalent in civilized countries; namely,

1. The Artificial.

2. The Expectant.

3. The Homoeopathic.

4. The Exclusive.

5. The Rational.

Perfect candor, perfect clearness, the good-nature of a successful

man above all petty jealousies, the style of a scholar who has

hardly an equal among us in his profession and few equals out of it,

the honesty which belongs to science, and the acuteness which is

conferred by practice mark this brief essay. It follows in the same

course of thought as the admirable "Discourse on Self-limited

Diseases," the delivery of which many years ago marked the

commencement of a new epoch in the movement of the medical mind

among us. An hour's reading given to this new lesson of wisdom will

turn many a self-willed, proud-hearted medical skeptic into a humble

and consistent patient of the regular profession.

_Thoughts on Matter and Force: or Marvels that encompass us_:

comprising Suggestions illustrative of the Theory of the Universe.

By THOMAS EWBANK. New York: D. Appleton & Co. London: Trübner & Co.

1858.

The human longing for the Infinite is as strong now as it was when

the first _ology_, aiming to grasp it, conceived its first myth, and

comprehended something so far below what humanity itself now is or

knows, that we use it, along with the more recent productions of

Mrs. Goose, to amuse children. This persistent trait in human nature

is truly noble, however fruitless. But it is not altogether fruitless.

Though the intellectual world has really come no nearer the object

of its search, it has advanced far beyond its starting-point, and

made valuable progress, which a lower motive could never have

prompted. The wisest of mean men, as he was the meanest of wise ones,

did very well to check the metaphysical modes and tendencies of

human study, and advise the previous comprehension of facts within

reach. This worldly wisdom has already made us all wonderfully rich

in the chariots and horses of thought. The consequence is, we now

rush forth into the infinite in various directions, and, from

inconceivable distances of time and space, bring home marvels that

are truly sublime.

Mr. Ewbank's "Suggestions" are of this sort, though the turn-out

with which he has been exploring the boundless is not, perhaps,

quite up to the latest improvements in the Baconian carriage-factory,

There can be no doubt of the boldness with which his really modest

and unpretending little book grapples with the largest of all

subjects, whatever we may think of its success. Postulating, for the

purpose of his cosmogony, two, and only two, absolute entities,

--matter and spirit,--Mr. Ewbank makes force a property or attribute

of the former, which the latter can only direct or make use of, not

originate. He does not admit that spirit can overcome the inertia of

matter. Whatever inertia may be, it is superable or destructible only

by the force or motion of matter itself,--matter being incapable of

rest. "Instead of matter being innately inert," says Mr. Ewbank,

"as many think, motion is its natural condition." How the spiritual

direction--or shall we call it _bossing_?--of motion or force

(which only, according to Mr. Ewbank, produces results) applies

itself,--what is its _point d'appui_, its mode of modifying, its

why of causing,--he does not attempt to explain to us. He recognizes

the universal gravitating or contractile force, from which, as

successive sequences, proceed heat and expansion; but he does not

suggest that spirit has any more to do with the first than with any

succeeding term in the series. It exerts no force, moves nothing;

yet spirit produces all the results. "No regular or useful form,"

says our author, "can be produced by unbridled force. Intelligence

must be present." So it is the business of the spirit to bridle force,

--or matter's motion,--mount the restless steed, and ride to a

purpose! Shall we ever see the bits of that bridle?

On the subject of material form, we find the following passage, which,

while, perhaps, the most original in the book, is to us the least

instructive:--

"However multiplied interior actions may be, the universe, as a whole,

must have a _common movement_, or none. One division cannot, in

relation to the rest, stand still, lag behind, fly off, or diverge

from its place, without destroying all unity. The earth is full of

motions; but they do not interfere with her general and uniform

motion. So it is with the universal orb: its rotation is, we believe,

fundamental,--the basis of all other movements, without which there

could be none other.

"In everything, there is virtue in FORM; and we surmise that vastly

more depends on the configuration and movement of matter as _one mass_,

than has been suspected. As perfect a whole as any of its parts,

must not the universe have a definable outline or shape,--one to

which nothing amorphous can possibly belong? What is its figure? It

can hardly be a cube, cylinder, or prism of any kind; indeed, we

might as reasonably suppose it a three-sided figure as one bounded

at all by straight lines. No one extending in one direction more

than in another could have met the exigencies of creation; and that

the universe is a sphere may also be inferred from fluid matter

naturally assuming that form,--perhaps because its elements have it.

Had atoms been bounded by plane surfaces, so, we may suppose, had

worlds, drops of water, and soap-bubbles.

"The universe is spherical, then, because its molecules are: and it

moves, because they are incapable of rest."

Does this mean that the totality of matter is finite?--that it can

be viewed, spiritually, from the outside,--even from such a distance

as to appear infinitely small? If so, can there be infinite power,

either material or spiritual? If the universe is spherical because

its molecules are, can the molecules compose any other than the

spherical form? Do we gain much by reasoning from an assumption

below the ken of the microscope to a conclusion above that of the

telescope?

Mr. Ewbank, however, does not often indulge in a logical stride so

long or on such shaky footing as this. Through more or less

cloudiness of expression, he gives us many striking and satisfactory

views, looking towards a complete synthesis of the glorious system

of things to which we belong, makes out the universe as habitable

and cheerful as it is wide, and leaves us admiring its good more

than marvelling at its evil. He maintains that all solar and

planetary bodies have a central, vital heat, produced and maintained

by the same cause,--to wit, the gravitating or condensing force; its

intensity being as the mass. In the sun, the mass is so great, that,

in spite of its inferior density, more and intenser heat is

generated by condensation than in any or all of the planets. If the

whole orb is not incandescent, there is such intense heat in its

central portion as to generate gases, which, being thrown up through

its atmosphere, to a height at least as great as the whole diameter

of our globe, condense there again with an ineffably brilliant

combustion. The solid crust of the sun, he thinks, may be

comparatively cool,--as cool, perhaps, as our tropical climates,--by

the favor of cloud-curtains, which operate as screens, and reflect

off into space the heat of the combustion overhead. He might have

given more reasons than he has for this conclusion. Whether our

terrestrial aurora-borealis is caused by the combustion of gases that

have been generated by internal heat or not, we know that the

combustion of gas in the upper regions of our atmosphere would not

warm the surface of the earth much more than it would that of the

moon. It is easy enough to make out, from facts which our terrene

science has revealed to us, how the sun may be a perpetual fountain

of light, heat, and force to its most distant planets, without

having itself any superabundance of either of these emanations for

its own domestic consumption. The solar population may have no more

sunshine than we do, and may have even that mitigated with the

luxury of ice-creams, if not with that of arctic explorations and

polar bears. Whether they have as good opportunities as we for

astronomical observations is a little doubtful; but their

thermological studies must flourish abundantly, to say nothing of

their advantages in pyrotechnics.

_A Text-Book of Vegetable and Animal Physiology, designed for the

Use of Schools, Seminaries, and Colleges in the United States_. By

HENRY GOADBY, M.D., Professor of Vegetable and Animal Physiology

and Entomology in the State Agricultural College of Michigan, Fellow

of the Linnaean Society of London, etc., etc. Embellished with

upwards of four hundred and fifty Illustrations. New York: D.

Appleton and Company, 346 and 348, Broadway. 1858.

The name of Mr. Goadby is embalmed in a preservative solution

invented by him and known as Goadby's Fluid. Those who have visited

the Royal College of Surgeons in London tell us of very exquisite

anatomical preparations made by him while employed as Minute

Dissector to that institution. We are grateful to Mr. Goadby for

consecrating his narrow but sure immortality and his excellent

mechanical talent to the service of the New World and especially of

the State of Michigan.

It does not follow from this that Mr. Goadby has written a good book

on Animal and Vegetable Physiology, nor that he could write such a

book. Starting with this proposition, we are candid rather than

sanguine as we open the volume. We find that it is not in any true

sense a treatise upon Physiology, but chiefly upon the Minute

Anatomy of Animals and Vegetables, with some incidental physiological

commentaries.

On closer examination, we find it to be the work of a microscopist,

and not that of a physiologist or a scholar. Its merits are

principally its illustrations, many of which are from original

dissections, some of which are very good diagrams, others ordinary,

and some--such as the view of the human brain and spinal chord on

page 282--wretched. The colored figures are washed with dull tints

in a very shabby and negligent way. The text is mainly an account of

the objects illustrated in the figures, and will prove interesting to

the working microscopist as explaining the observations of a skilful

dissector. As a "Text-Book of Physiology for Schools and Colleges,"

it is of course without value.

English microscopists, if we might judge by this work and that of

Mr. Hassall, are not remarkable for scholarship. The showy and in

some respects valuable work of the latter gentleman was disgraced by

constant repetitions of gross blunders in spelling. Mr. Goadby is

not much above his countryman in literary acquirements, if we may

judge by his treatment of the names of Schwann and Lieberkuhn, whom

he repeatedly calls Schawn and Leiberkuhn, and by the indignity

which he offers to the itch-insect by naming it _Aearus Scabiæi_. It

is not necessary to give further examples; but, if the general

statement be disputed, we are prepared to speckle the book with

corrections until it looks like a sign-board with a charge of small

shot in it.

Nothing that we have said must be considered as detracting from

Mr. Goadby's proper merits as an industrious and skilful specialist,

who is more able with his microscope than with his pen, and more at

home with the latter in telling us what he has seen than in writing

a general treatise on so vast a subject as Physiology.

_Lettres de Silvio Pellico_, recueillies et mises en ordre, par

M. GUILLAUME STEFANI. Traduites et précédées d'une Introduction, par

M. ANTOINE DE LATOUR. Paris: 1857. pp. liii, 493. 8 vo.

Silvio Pellico is one of the most touching ghosts that glide through

the chambers of the memory. Even the rod of the pedagogue and the

imprisonment of the school-room (for it has been the misfortune of

"Le mie Prigioni" to be doomed to serve as a "class-book" to

beginners in modern languages) have proved unable to diminish the

sympathy felt for the Spielberg prisoner.

This volume will increase his pure fame. It will be read with

painful interest. It will do more for Italian independence

than all the ravings of revolutionary manifestoes and all the

poignard-strokes of political assassins which can be written or given

from now till doomsday. No one can read it without a swelling heart

and a tear-filled eye, for it discloses involuntarily and indirectly

the unspeakable unhappiness of Italy. Here are the sad accounts of

some loved friend or admired countryman snatched away to prison, or

hurried into exile, for a letter written, or a visit paid, or an

intemperate speech uttered; while no preparation is made for the

long departure, and papers, even the most familiar and prized, are

seized and never restored. Another page presents the exile's

struggles for daily bread, his privations, his longings for the

Italian sun and sky and soil, for the native land; another, the

earnest prayer from jail-walls for the Bible, for books upon our

Saviour's sufferings (nothing less than voices from heaven can

breathe comfort in Austrian dungeons!) Then the moving letters

written from one prisoner's family to another's (yesterday

unacquainted, to-day near kinsmen in the bonds of sorrow) to sustain

each other in the common afflictions, craving with avidity the least

intelligence from the living tombs of tyranny, sharing with generous

alacrity all their tidings. How musically endearing Italian

diminutives fall upon the ear employed in this office! Here we have

Pellico's own letters to his parents to calm their natural grief,

filled with pious concealment of his own mental and bodily torment,

with encouragements to hope an early pardon, and to turn their eyes

to Religion, which never yet refused consolation to the afflicted.

We have never read a more distressing letter than he wrote to his

family, when, at last pardoned, he was once more free. Seven years

had passed away since he heard from them; he knew not if one still

lived to welcome him home,--if his kindred had forgotten, or

execrated him as one who had dragged their common parents sorrowing

and gray-haired down to the grave. Has the world among all its

manifold sorrows any sorrow like unto this?

The late M. de Lamennais was wont to speak with contempt of Silvio

Pellico, as being a weak, spiritless craven, who accepted with

resignation when he should have plotted to end the thraldom of his

country. Yet what can a man do, when the classes above him and those

below him, when noble and priest and peasant, live contented in the

silence of despotism, (calling it peace,) without one thought of

other days, without one sentiment of pride in the deeds of their

illustrious forefathers? What is a Christian's duty, when his country

is bled and plundered and ground down to the dust under the iron

heel of military despotism, when the political fabric of his native

land is crumbling, and his countrymen are listless, selfish, sensual,

unpatriotic, not unhappy so long as their bellies are filled and

their backs covered? Shall he lift his streaming eyes to heaven with

the resigned ejaculation, "Father, not my will, but thine, be done"?

--or shall he, in holy despair, throw his life away on Austrian

bayonets? Terrible problem!

_The Household Book of Poetry_. Collected and edited by CHARLES A.

DANA. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1858. pp. 798.

This book contains extracts from upwards of three hundred authors of

all periods and countries. It is made more complete by the addition

of some of the most famous Latin hymns and canticles of the Church.

The different pieces are classified upon a judicious system. It is

handsomely printed, and not cumbrous in form. What can we say more

in its praise? Only this,--that, after giving it a pretty thorough

examination, we are satisfied that it is the best collection in the

language. Individual tastes and idiosyncrasies will, of course, find

some wants to lament, and some superfluities to condemn. A book

containing so much from living writers will excite jealousies; and

the writers themselves will, in some cases, be dissatisfied with the

selections made from their works. But what the general reader asks

is only, whether the compiler has shown skill in suiting the general

taste, as well as judgment in directing it. We think this collection

the most catholic and impartial we have ever seen. That is the

highest praise we can bestow, and it implies that the editor has

attained the success most difficult as well as essential in such an

undertaking.

_Curiosities of Literature_. By ISAAC DISRAELI. 4 vols. Boston:

William Veazie. 1858.

Possessing this book, Robinson Crusoe might have enjoyed all the

pleasures of what Dr. Johnson called "browsing in a library," and

that a large and choice one. It contains in itself all the elements

of a liberal education in out-of-the-way-ness.

Everybody knows and likes this _Museum Absconditum_, as Sir Thomas

Browne would have called it,--and we take particular pleasure in

being able to recommend to our readers so beautiful an edition of it.

It is in all respects equal to the handsomest kind of English

printing, and has the added merit of being cheap. It is from the

press of Houghton & Company, which has done so much to raise the

standard of American printing. If Mr. Houghton go on as he has begun,

his name will deserve a place with those of Elzevir, Baskerville,

Foulis, and others of his craft, who have done good books the

justice of a mechanical that matches their intellectual workmanship.

* * * * *

We have not space in this number to give Mr. White's Shakspeare the

welcome it deserves. We have examined it with some care, and can

speak with decision of its very great merits. It is characterized

by taste, industry, and conscientiousness. We believe it to be,

in all essential respects, the best--it is certainly the most

beautiful--edition of Shakspeare. This is also from the press of

Houghton & Company.

* * * * *

We notice with pleasure among recent literary announcements those of

a History of France, by Parke Godwin, Esq., and of New England, by

Dr. J.G. Palfrey. Both are _desiderata_, and the reputation of the

authors is such as to warrant the highest anticipations.