"Many of our churches defy Protestantism. Grand cathedrals are they,

which make us shiver as we enter them. The windows are so constructed

as to exclude the light and inspire a religious awe. The walls are of

stone, which makes us think of our last home. The ceilings are sombre,

and the pews coffin-colored. Then the services are composed to these

circumstances, and hushed music goes trembling along the aisles, and men

move softly, and would on no account put on their hats before they reach

the door; but when they do, they take a long breath, and have such a

sense of relief to be in the free air, and comfort themselves with the

thought that they've been good Christians!

"Now this idea of worship is narrow and false. The house of God should

be a joyous place for the right use of all our faculties."

"There ought to be such an atmosphere in every Christian church, that

a man going there and sitting two hours should take the contagion of

heaven, and carry home a fire to kindle the altar whence he came."

"The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, _but

to be better than yourself_. Religion is relative to the individual."

"My best presentations of the gospel to you are so incomplete!

Sometimes, when I am alone, I have such sweet and rapturous visions of

the love of God and the truths of his word, that I think, if I could

speak to you then, I should move your hearts. I am like a child, who,

walking forth some sunny summer's morning, sees grass and flower all

shining with drops of dew. 'Oh,' he cries, 'I'll carry these beautiful

things to my mother!' And, eagerly plucking them, the dew drops into his

little palm, and all the charm is gone. There is but grass in his hand,

and no longer pearls."

"There are many professing Christians who are secretly vexed on account

of the charity they have to bestow and the self-denial they have to use.

If, instead of the smooth prayers which they _do_ pray, they should

speak out the things which they really feel, they would say, when they

go home at night, 'O Lord, I met a poor curmudgeon of yours to-day, a

miserable, unwashed brat, and I gave him sixpence, and I have been sorry

for it ever since'; or, 'O Lord, if I had not signed those articles of

faith, I might have gone to the theatre this evening. Your religion

deprives me of a great deal of enjoyment, but I mean to stick to it.

There's no other way of getting into heaven, I suppose.'

"The sooner such men are out of the church, the better."

"The youth-time of churches produces enterprise; their age, indolence;

but even this might be borne, did not _these dead men sit in the door

of their sepulchres, crying out against every living man who refuses to

wear the livery of death_. In India, when the husband dies, they burn

his widow with him. I am almost tempted to think, that, if, with the end

of every pastorate, the church itself were disbanded and destroyed, to

be gathered again by the succeeding teacher, we should thus secure an

immortality of youth."

"A religious life is not a thing which spends itself. It is like a river

which widens continually, and is never so broad or so deep as at its

mouth, where it rolls into the ocean of eternity."

"God made the world to relieve an over-full creative thought,--as

musicians sing, as we talk, as artists sketch, when full of suggestions.

What profusion is there in his work! When trees blossom, there is not

a single breastpin, but a whole bosom full of gems; and of leaves they

have so many suits, that they can throw them away to the winds all

summer long. What unnumbered cathedrals has he reared in the forest

shades, vast and grand, full of curious carvings, and haunted evermore

by tremulous music! and in the heavens above, how do stars seem to have

flown out of his hand, faster than sparks out of a mighty forge!"

"Oh, let the soul alone! Let it go to God as best it may! It is

entangled enough. It is hard enough for it to rise above the

distractions which environ it. Let a man teach the rain how to fall, the

clouds how to shape themselves and move their airy rounds, the seasons

how to cherish and garner the universal abundance; but let him not teach

a soul to pray, on whom the Holy Ghost doth brood!"

He recognizes the difference between religion and theology.

"How sad is that field from which battle hath just departed! By as much

as the valley was exquisite in its loveliness, is it now sublimely sad

in its desolation. Such to me is the Bible, when a fighting theologian

has gone through it.

"How wretched a spectacle is a garden into which the cloven-footed

beasts have entered! That which yesterday was fragrant, and shone all

over with crowded beauty, is to-day rooted, despoiled, trampled, and

utterly devoured, and all over the ground you shall find but the

rejected cuds of flowers and leaves, and forms that have been champed

for their juices and then rejected. Such to me is the Bible, when the

pragmatic prophecy-monger and the swinish utilitarian have toothed its

fruits and craunched its blossoms.

"O garden of the Lord! whose seeds dropped down from heaven, and to

whom angels bear watering dews night by night! O flowers and plants of

righteousness! O sweet and holy fruits! We walk among you, and gaze with

loving eyes, and rest under your odorous shadows; nor will we, with

sacrilegious hand, tear you, that we may search the secret of your

roots, nor spoil you, that we may know how such wondrous grace and

goodness are evolved within you!"

"What a pin is, when the diamond has dropped from its setting, is the

Bible, when its emotive truths have been taken away. What a babe's

clothes are, when the babe has slipped out of them into death and the

mother's arms clasp only raiment, would be the Bible, if the Babe of

Bethlehem, and the truths of deep-heartedness that clothed his life,

should slip out of it."

"There is no food for soul or body which God has not symbolized. He

is light for the eye, sound for the ear, bread for food, wine for

weariness, peace for trouble. Every faculty of the soul, if it would but

open its door, might see Christ standing over against it, and silently

asking by his smile, 'Shall I come in unto thee?' But men open the door

and look down, not up, and thus see him not. So it is that men sigh on,

not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our

yearnings are homesickness for heaven; our sighings are for God; just

as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in

their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's

inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, but

having no one to tell them what it is that ails them."

"I feel sensitive about theologies. Theology is good in its place; but

when it puts its hoof upon a living, palpitating, human heart, my heart

cries out against it."

"There are men marching along in the company of Christians on earth,

who, when they knock at the gate of heaven, will hear God answer,

'I never knew you.'--'But the ministers did, and the church-books

did.'--'That may be. I never did.'

"It is no matter who knows a man on earth, if God does not know him."

"The heart-knowledge, through God's teaching, is true wealth, and they

are often poorest who deem themselves most rich. I, in the pulpit,

preach with proud forms to many a humble widow and stricken man who

might well teach me. The student, spectacled and gray with wisdom, and

stuffed with lumbered lore, may be childish and ignorant beside some old

singing saint who brings the wood into his study, and who, with the

lens of his own experience, brings down the orbs of truth, and beholds

through his faith and his humility things of which the white-haired

scholar never dreamed."

He has eminent integrity, is faithful to his own soul, and to every

delegated trust. No words are needed here as proof. His life is daily

argument. The public will understand this; men whose taste he offends,

and whose theology he shocks, or to whose philosophy he is repugnant,

have confidence in the integrity of the man. He means what he says,--is

solid all through.

"From the beginning, I educated myself to speak along the line and in

the current of my moral convictions; and though, in later days, it

has carried me through places where there were some batterings and

bruisings, yet I have been supremely grateful that I was led to

adopt this course. I would rather speak the truth to ten men than

blandishments and lying to a million. Try it, ye who think there is

nothing in it! try what it is to speak with God behind you,--to speak so

as to be only the arrow in the bow which the Almighty draws."

With what affectionate tenderness does this great, faithful soul pour

out his love to his own church! He invites men to the communion-service.

"Christian brethren, in heaven you are known by the name of Christ.

On earth, for convenience's sake, you are known by the name of

Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and

the like. Let me speak the language of heaven, and call you simply

Christians. Whoever of you has known the name of Christ, and feels

Christ's life beating within him, is invited to remain and sit with us

at the table of the Lord."

And again, when a hundred were added to his church, he says:--

"My friends, my heart is large to-day. I am like a tree upon which rains

have fallen till every leaf is covered with drops of dew; and no wind

goes through the boughs but I hear the pattering of some thought of joy

and gratitude. I love you all more than ever before. You are crystalline

to me; your faces are radiant; and I look through your eyes, as through

windows, into heaven. I behold in each of you an imprisoned angel, that

is yet to burst forth, and to live and shine in the better sphere."

He has admirable power of making a popular statement of his opinions. He

does not analyze a matter to its last elements, put the ultimate facts

in a row and find out their causes or their law of action, nor aim at

large synthesis of generalization, the highest effort of philosophy,

which groups things into a whole;--it is commonly thought both of these

processes are out of place in meeting-houses and lecture-halls,--that

the people can comprehend neither the one nor the other;--but he gives

a popular view of the thing to be discussed, which can be understood on

the spot without painful reflection. He speaks for the ear which takes

in at once and understands. He never makes attention painful. He

illustrates his subject from daily life; the fields, the streets, stars,

flowers, music, and babies are his favorite emblems. He remembers that

he does not speak to scholars, to minds disciplined by long habits of

thought, but to men with common education, careful and troubled about

many things; and they keep his words and ponder them in their hearts. So

he has the diffuseness of a wide natural field, which properly spreads

out its clover, dandelions, dock, buttercups, grasses, violets, with

here and there a delicate Arethusa that seems to have run under this

sea of common vegetation and come up in a strange place. He has not the

artificial condensation of a garden, where luxuriant Nature assumes the

form of Art. His dramatic power makes his sermon also a life in the

pulpit; his _auditorium_ is also a _theatrum_, for he acts to the eye

what he addresses to the ear, and at once wisdom enters at the two

gates. The extracts show his power of thought and speech as well as of

feeling. Here are specimens of that peculiar humor which appears in all

his works.

"Sects and Christians that desire to be known by the undue prominence of

some single feature of Christianity are necessarily imperfect just in

proportion to the distinctness of their peculiarities. The power of

Christian truth is in its unity and symmetry, and not in the saliency

or brilliancy of any of its special doctrines. If among painters of

the human face and form there should spring up a sect of the eyes, and

another sect of the nose, a sect of the hand, and a sect of the foot,

and all of them should agree but in the one thing of forgetting that

there was a living spirit behind the features more important than them

all, they would too much resemble the schools and cliques of Christians;

for the spirit of Christ is the great essential truth; doctrines are but

the features of the face, and ordinances but the hands and feet."

Here are some separate maxims:--

"It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim-milk."

"The mother's heart is the child's school-room."

"They are not reformers who simply abhor evil. Such men become in the

end abhorrent themselves."

"There are many troubles which you can't cure by the Bible and the

Hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of

fresh air."

"The most dangerous infidelity of the day is the infidelity of rich and

orthodox churches."

"The fact that a nation is growing is God's own charter of change."

"There is no class in society who can so ill afford to undermine the

conscience of the community, or to set it loose from its moorings in

the eternal sphere, as merchants who live upon confidence and credit.

Anything which weakens or paralyzes this is taking beams from the

foundations of the merchant's own warehouse."

"It would almost seem as if there were a certain drollery of art which

leads men who think they are doing one thing to do another and very

different one. Thus, men have set up in their painted church-windows the

symbolisms of virtues and graces, and the images of saints, and even

of Divinity itself. Yet now, what does the window do but mock the

separations and proud isolations of Christian men? For there sit

the audience, each one taking a separate color; and there are blue

Christians and red Christians, there are yellow saints and orange

saints, there are purple Christians and green Christians; but how few

are simple, pure, white Christians, uniting all the cardinal graces, and

proud, not of separate colors, but of the whole manhood of Christ!"

"Every mind is entered, like every house, through its own door."

"Doctrine is nothing but the skin of Truth set up and stuffed."

"Compromise is the word that men use when the Devil gets a victory over

God's cause."

"A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the majority, though he

be alone; for God is multitudinous above all populations of the earth."

But this was first said by Frederic Douglas, and better: "_One with God

is a majority._"

"A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it; else the hand would cut

itself, which sought to drive it home upon another. The worst lies,

therefore, are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true."

"It is not conviction of truth which does men good; it is moral

consciousness of truth."

"A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled.

We expect old men to be conservative; but when a nation's young men are

so, its funeral-bell is already rung."

"Night-labor, in time, will destroy the student; for it is marrow from

his own bones with which he fills his lamp."

A great-hearted, eloquent, fervent, live man, full of religious emotion,

of humanity and love,--no wonder he is dear to the people of America.

Long may he bring instruction to the lecture associations of the North!

Long may he stand in his pulpit at Brooklyn with his heavenly candle,

which goeth not out at all by day, to kindle the devotion and piety of

the thousands who cluster around him, and carry thence light and warmth

to all the borders of the land!

We should do injustice to our own feelings, did we not, in closing, add

a word of hearty thanks and commendation to the Member of Mr. Beecher's

Congregation to whom we are indebted for a volume that has given us

so much pleasure. The selection covers a wide range of topics, and

testifies at once to the good taste and the culture of the editress.

Many of the finest passages were conceived and uttered in the rapid

inspiration of speaking, and but for her admiring intelligence and care,

the eloquence, wit, and wisdom, which are here preserved to us, would

have faded into air with the last vibration of the preacher's voice.

MERCEDES.

Under a sultry, yellow sky,

On the yellow sand I lie;

The crinkled vapors smite my brain,

I smoulder in a fiery pain.

Above the crags the condor flies;

He knows where the red gold lies,

He knows where the diamonds shine;--

If I knew, would she be mine?

Mercedes in her hammock swings;

In her court a palm-tree flings

Its slender shadow on the ground,

The fountain falls with silver sound.

Her lips are like this cactus cup;

With my hand I crush it up;

I tear its flaming leaves apart;--

Would that I could tear her heart!

Last night a man was at her gate;

In the hedge I lay in wait;

I saw Mercedes meet him there,

By the fire-flies in her hair.

I waited till the break of day,

Then I rose and stole away;

I drove my dagger through the gate;--

Now she knows her lover's fate!

* * * * *

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

[This particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a paper

by my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or intercalated.

I would suggest to young persons that they should pass over it for the

present, and read, instead of it, that story about the young man who was

in love with the young lady, and in great trouble for something like

nine pages, but happily married on the tenth page or thereabouts, which,

I take it for granted, will be contained in the periodical where this

is found, unless it differ from all other publications of the kind.

Perhaps, if such young people will lay the number aside, and take it

up ten years, or a little more, from the present time, they may find

something in it for their advantage. They can't possibly understand it

all now.]

My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary sort

of way. I couldn't get at the difficulty for a good while, but at last

it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old man.--He didn't

mind his students calling him _the_ old man, he said. That was a

technical expression, and he thought that he remembered hearing it

applied to himself when he was about twenty-five. It may be considered

as a familiar and sometimes endearing appellation. An Irish-woman calls

her husband "the old man," and he returns the caressing expression by

speaking of her as "the old woman." But now, said he, just suppose a

case like one of these. A young stranger is overheard talking of you as

a very nice old gentleman. A friendly and genial critic speaks of your

green old age as illustrating the truth of some axiom you had uttered

with reference to that period of life. What _I_ call an old man is a

person with a smooth, shining crown and a fringe of scattered white

hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping as he walks,

bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling old stories,

smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits; one

that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps a little

night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the lamp is not

upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it to prevent the

puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. That's what I call an old man.

Now, said the Professor, you don't mean to tell me that I have got to

that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time when--[I

knew what was coming, and could hardly keep from laughing; twenty years

ago he used to quote it as one of those absurd speeches men of genius

will make, and now he is going to argue from it]--several years short

of the time when Balzac says that men are--most--you know--dangerous

to--the hearts of--in short, most to be dreaded by duennas that

have charge of susceptible females.--What age is that? said I,

statistically.--Fifty-two years, answered the Professor.--Balzac ought

to know, said I, if it is true that Goethe said of him that each of his

stories must have been dug out of a woman's heart. But fifty-two is a

high figure.

Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.--The Professor took

up the desired position.--You have white hairs, I said.--Had 'em any

time these twenty years, said the Professor.--And the crow's-foot,--_pes

anserinus_, rather.--The Professor smiled, as I wanted him to, and the

folds radiated like the ridges of a half-opened fan, from the outer

corner of the eyes to the temples.--And the calipers, said I.--What

are the _calipers_? he asked, curiously.--Why, the parenthesis, said

I.--_Parenthesis_? said the Professor; what's that?--Why, look in the

glass when you are disposed to laugh, and see if your mouth isn't framed

in a couple of crescent lines,--so, my boy ( ).--It's all nonsense, said

the Professor; just look at my _biceps_;--and he began pulling off his

coat to show me his arm.--Be careful, said I; you can't bear exposure to

the air, at your time of life, as you could once.--I will box with you,

said the Professor, row with you, walk with you, ride with you, swim

with you, or sit at table with you, for fifty dollars a side.--Pluck

survives stamina, I answered.

The Professor went off a little out of humor. A few weeks afterwards he

came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a paper, which I

have here, and from which I shall read you some portions, if you don't

object. He had been thinking the matter over, he said,--had read Cicero.

"De Senectute," and made up his mind to meet old age half way. These

were some of his reflections that he had written down; so here you have

THE PROFESSOR'S PAPER.

There is no doubt when old age begins. The human body is a furnace which

keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less. It burns about

three hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other fuel,) when in

fair working order, according to a great chemist's estimate. When the

fire slackens, life declines; when it goes out, we are dead.

It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the amount of

combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains stationary

to about forty-five, and then diminishes. This last is the point where

old age starts from. The great fact of physical life is the perpetual

commerce with the elements, and the fire is the measure of it.

About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live,--for that,

you know, regulates matrimony,--you may be expecting to find yourself a

grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic felicity that gives

one a cool shiver of delight to think of, as among the not remotely

possible events.

I don't mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale,

telling her about life's declining from _thirty-five_; the furnace is in

full blast for ten years longer, as I have said. The Romans came very

near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from seventeen to

forty-six years.

What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or the

movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of life that

flows through us? We are old fellows from the moment the fire begins to

go out. Let us always behave like gentlemen when we are introduced to

new acquaintance.

_Incipit Allegoria Senectutis_.

Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.

_Old Age_.--Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well. I have known you for

some time, though I think you did not know me. Shall we walk down the

street together?

_Professor_. (drawing back a little)--We can talk more quietly,

perhaps, in my study. Will you tell me how it is you seem to be

acquainted with everybody you are introduced to, though he evidently

considers you an entire stranger?

_Old Age_.--I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person's

recognition until I have known him at least _five years_.

_Professor_.--Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as that?

_Old Age_.--I do. I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I am

afraid you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.

_Professor_.--Where?

_Old Age_.--There, between your eyebrows,--three straight lines running

up and down; all the probate courts know that token,--"Old Age, his

mark." Put your forefinger on the inner end of one eyebrow, and your

middle finger on the inner end of the other eyebrow; now separate the

fingers, and you will smooth out my sign-manual; that's the way you used

to look before I left my card on you.

_Professor_.--What message do people generally send back when you first

call on them?

_Old Age.--Not at home_. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I call;

get the same answer; leave another card. So for five or six,--sometimes

ten years or more. At last, if they don't let me in, I break in through

the front door or the windows.

We talked together in this way some time. Then Old Age said again,--

Come, let us walk down the street together,--and offered me a cane, an

eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes.--No, much obliged to you,

said I. I don't want those things, and I had a little rather talk with

you here, privately, in my study. So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way

and walked out alone;--got a fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a

lumbago, and had time to think over this whole matter.

_Explicit Allegoria Senectutis_.

We have settled when old age begins. Like all Nature's processes, it is

gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions, and all

its little griefs soothed by natural sedatives. But the iron hand is

not less irresistible because it wears the velvet glove. The buttonwood

throws off its bark in large flakes, which one may find lying at its

foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off, by that tranquil movement from

beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too powerful to be arrested.

One finds them always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth

drops from us,--scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the

tender and immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively,

the changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and

indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has

called "the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures."

My lady's cheek can boast no more

The cranberry white and pink it wore;

And where her shining locks divide,

The parting line is all too wide----

No, no,--this will never do. Talk about men, if you will, but spare the

poor women.

We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably good

observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it, yet I have

been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural analysis into no

less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the five primary divisions,

infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, each of these has its

own three periods of immaturity, complete development, and decline. I

recognize an _old_ baby at once,--with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of

candy and a porringer,)--so does everybody; and an old child shedding

its milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his

permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it were,

of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his late suppers

now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen stages at any rate,

and that it would not be hard to make twenty-five; five primary, each

with five secondary divisions.

The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same ingenuous

simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them that the first

stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The great delusion of

mankind is in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is

universal and according to law. A person is always startled when he

hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on

board of vessels,--in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into

maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have drifted

far away from port before we awake out of our illusions. But to carry us

out of maturity into old age, without our knowing where we are going,

she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we stagger along with wide open

eyes that see nothing until snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse

our comatose brains out of their stupid trances.

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical

ones;--I mean the formation of _Habits_. An old man who shrinks into

himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the

reach of outside influences as if they were governed by clockwork. The

_animal_ functions, as the physiologists call them, in distinction from

the _organic_, tend, in the process of deterioration to which age

and neglect united gradually lead them, to assume the periodical or

rhythmical type of movement. Every man's _heart_ (this organ belongs,

you know, to the organic system) has a regular mode of action; but I

know a great many men whose _brains_, and all their voluntary existence

flowing from their brains, have a _systole_ and _diastole_ as regular

as that of the heart itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal

system to the organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest

function of being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in

full view of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an

action in present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a

_vis a tergo_ for the evolution of living force.

When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a

year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he must

economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving invention which

enables a man to get along with less fuel,--that is all; for fuel is

force, you know, just as much in the page I am writing for you as in the

locomotive or the legs that carry it to you. Carbon is the same thing,

whether you call it wood, or coal, or bread and cheese. A reverend

gentleman demurred to this statement,--as if, because combustion is

asserted to be the _sine qua non_ of thought, therefore thought is

alleged to be a purely chemical process. Facts of chemistry are one

thing, I told him, and facts of consciousness another. It can be proved

to him, by a very simple analysis of some of his spare elements,

that every Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more

phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days. But then

he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it, and save his

phosphorus and other combustibles.

It follows from all this that _the formation of habits_ ought naturally

to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age. As for the muscular

powers, they pass their maximum long before the time when the true

decline of life begins, if we may judge by the experience of the ring. A

man is "stale," I think, in their language, soon after thirty,--often,

no doubt, much earlier, as gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are

exceedingly apt to keep their vital fire burning _with the blower up_.

----So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading the

treatise, "De Senectute." It is not long, but a leisurely performance.

The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to

his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two

or three years older. We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all

about it for thirty years, and then take it up again by a natural

instinct,--provided always that we read Latin as we drink water, without

stopping to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at school or

college ought to do.

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is what

would be called in vulgar phrase "slow." It unpacks and unfolds

incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back

of, and toss each to its pigeonhole. I think ancient classics and

ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some

contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the patient

would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit

with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested,

would be an agreeable mode of passing the time. He mentioned, in his

written account of his contrivance, various works that might amuse the

weary hour. I remember only three,--Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and _Watts

on the Mind_.

It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as a

lyceum lecture, (_concio popularis_,) at the Temple of Mercury. The

journals (_papyri_) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana,"--"Tribunus

Quirinalis,"--"Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one

of which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the

analysis I intended to make.

IV. Kal. Mart....

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well attended

by the _élite_ of our great city. Two hundred thousand sestertia were

thought to have been represented in the house. The doors were besieged

by a mob of shabby fellows, (_illotum vulgus_,) who were at length

quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (_gladio

jugulati_). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,--the

subject, Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very

unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname

of _chick-pea_ (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is

public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (_toga_) was of

cheap stuff and somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance

of dress and manner (_habitus, vestitusque_) were somewhat provincial.

The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and Laelius.

We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a few moments for

refreshment (_pocula quoedam vini_).--All want to reach old age, says

Cato, and grumble when they get it; therefore they are donkeys.--The

lecturer will allow us to say that he is the donkey; we know we shall

grumble at old age, but we want to live through youth and manhood, _in

spite_ of the troubles we shall groan over.--There was considerable

prosing as to what old age can do and can't--True, but not new.

Certainly, old folks can't jump,--break the necks of their thigh-bones,

(_femorum cervices_,) if they do, can't crack nuts with their teeth;

can't climb a greased pole (_malum inunctum scandere non possunt_); but

they can tell old stories and give you good advice; if they know what

you have made up your mind to do when you ask them.--All this is well

enough, but won't set the Tiber on fire (_Tiberim accendere nequaquam

potest_).

There were some clever things enough, (_dicta haud inepta_,) a few of

which are worth reporting.--Old people are accused of being forgetful;

but they never forget where they have put their money.--Nobody is so old

he doesn't think he can live a year.--The lecturer quoted an ancient

maxim,--Grow old early, if you would be old long,--but disputed it.--

Authority, he thought, was the chief privilege of age.--It is not great

to have money, but fine to govern those that have it.--Old age begins

at _forty-six_ years, according to the common opinion.--It is not every

kind of old age or of wine that grows sour with time.--Some excellent

remarks were made on immortality, but mainly borrowed from and credited

to Plato.--Several pleasing anecdotes were told.--Old Milo, champion of

the heavy weights in his day, looked at his arms and whimpered, "They

are dead." Not so dead as you, you old fool,--says Cato;--you never

were good for anything but for your shoulders and flanks.--Pisistratus

asked Solon what made him dare to be so obstinate. Old age, said Solon.

The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our culture

and civilization.--The reporter goes on to state that there will be no

lecture next week, on account of the expected combat between the bear

and the barbarian. Betting (_sponsio_) two to one (_duo ad unum_) on the

bear.

----After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise, "De

Senectute," are the stories of men who have found new occupations when

growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in the extreme period of

life. Cato learned Greek when he was old, and speaks of wishing to learn

the fiddle, or some such instrument, (_fidibus_,) after the example of

Socrates. Solon learned something new, every day, in his old age, as he

gloried to proclaim. Cyrus pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees

he had planted with his own hand. [I remember a pillar on the Duke of

Northumberland's estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar

words, if not the same. That, like other country pleasures, never wears

out. None is too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to

enjoy it.] There is a New England story I have heard more to the point,

however, than any of Cicero's. A young farmer was urged to set out some

apple-trees.--No, said he, they are too long growing, and I don't want

to plant for other people. The young farmer's father was spoken to about

it; but he, with better reason, alleged that apple-trees were slow and

life was fleeting. At last some one mentioned it to the old grandfather

of the young farmer. He had nothing else to do,--so he stuck in some

trees. He lived long enough to drink barrels of cider made from the

apples that grew on those trees.

As for myself, after visiting a friend lately,--[Do remember all the

time that this is the Professor's paper,]--I satisfied myself that I had

better concede the fact that--my contemporaries are not so young as they

have been,--and that,--awkward as it is,--science and history agree in

telling me that I can claim the immunities and must own the humiliations

of the early stage of senility. Ah! but we have all gone down the hill

together. The dandies of my time have split their waistbands and taken

to high-low shoes. The beauties of my recollections--where are they?

They have run the gantlet of the years as well as I. First the years

pelted them with red roses till their cheeks were all on fire. By and by

they began throwing white roses, and that morning flush passed away. At

last one of the years threw a snow-ball, and after that no year let

the poor girls pass without throwing snow-balls. And then came rougher

missiles,--ice and stones; and from time to time an arrow whistled and

down went one of the poor girls. So there are but few left; and we don't

call those few _girls_, but----

Ah, me! here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed _Ai, ai!_ and

the old Roman, _Eheu!_ I have no doubt we should die of shame and grief

at the indignities offered us by age, if it were not that we see so many

others as badly or worse off than ourselves. We always compare ourselves

with our contemporaries.

[I was interrupted in my reading just here. Before I began at the next

breakfast, I read them these verses;--I hope you will like them, and get

a useful lesson from them.]

THE LAST BLOSSOM.

Though young no more, we still would dream

Of beauty's dear deluding wiles;

The leagues of life to graybeards seem

Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles.

Who knows a woman's wild caprice?

It played with Goethe's silvered hair,

And many a Holy Father's "niece"

Has softly smoothed the papal chair.

When sixty bids us sigh in vain

To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,

We think upon those ladies twain

Who loved so well the tough old Dean.

We see the Patriarch's wintry face,

The maid of Egypt's dusky glow,

And dream that Youth and Age embrace,

As April violets fill with snow.

Tranced in her Lord's Olympian smile

His lotus-loving Memphian lies,--

The musky daughter of the Nile

With plaited hair and almond eyes.

Might we but share one wild caress

Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall,

And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress

The long cold kiss that waits us all!

My bosom heaves, remembering yet

The morning of that blissful day

When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,

And gave my raptured soul away.

Flung from her eyes of purest blue,

A lasso, with its leaping chain

Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew

O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.

Thou com'st to cheer my waning age,

Sweet vision, waited for so long!

Dove that wouldst seek the poet's cage,

Lured by the magic breath of song!

She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid,

Love's _drapeau rouge_ the truth has told!

O'er girlhood's yielding barricade

Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold!

Come to my arms!--love heeds not years;

No frost the bud of passion knows.--

Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?

A voice behind me uttered,--Rose!

Sweet was her smile,--but not for me;

Alas, when woman looks _too_ kind,

Just turn your foolish head and see,--

Some youth is walking close behind!

As to _giving up_ because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that it

is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such thing. I

grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people

of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, _la lèvre

inférieure déjà pendante_, with what little life they have left mainly

concentrated in their epigastrium. But as the disease of old age is

epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody that lives long enough is

sure to catch it, I am going to say, for the encouragement of such as

need it, how I treat the malady in my own case.

First. As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less time

for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my attention more

thoroughly, and use my time more economically than ever before; so that

I can learn anything twice as easily as in my earlier days. I am not,

therefore, afraid to attack a new study. I took up a difficult language

a very few years ago with good success, and think of mathematics and

metaphysics by-and-by.

Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected privileges and

pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a little courage to enjoy

them. You may well suppose it pleased me to find that old Cato was

thinking of learning to play the fiddle, when I had deliberately taken

it up in my old age, and satisfied myself that I could get much comfort,

if not much music, out of it.

Thirdly. I have found that some of those active exercises, which are

commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed at a much

later period.

A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of the

journals, entitled, "Saints and their Bodies." Approving of his general

doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal experience, I cannot

refuse to add my own experimental confirmation of his eulogy of one

particular form of active exercise and amusement, namely, _boating_.

For the past nine years, I have rowed about, during a good part of the

summer, on fresh or salt water. My present fleet on the river Charles

consists of three rowboats. 1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape

of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys. 2. A fancy "dory" for two

pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with my young folks. 3.

My own particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat,

twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with

ten-foot sculls,--alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him

out, if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around the

Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, up

the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of steamboats, which have

a swell after them delightful to rock upon; I linger under the

bridges,--those "caterpillar bridges," as my brother Professor so

happily called them; rub against the black sides of old wood-schooners;

cool down under the overhanging stern of some tall India-man; stretch

across to the Navy-Yard, where the sentinel warns me off from the

Ohio,--just as if I should hurt her by lying in her shadow; then strike

out into the harbor, where the water gets clear and the air smells of

the ocean,--till all at once I remember, that, if a west wind blows up

of a sudden, I shall drift along past the islands, out of sight of the

dear old State-house,--plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at

home, but no chair drawn up at the table,--all the dear people waiting,

waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the

great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't want

my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in company with

devils'-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached

crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long, narrow wings for home. When

the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid fight to get through

the bridges, but always make it a rule to beat,--though I have been

jammed up into pretty tight places at times, and was caught once between

a vessel swinging round and the pier, until our bones (the boat's, that

is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of Behemoth. Then back to my

moorings at the foot of the Common, off with the rowing-dress, dash

under the green translucent wave, return to the garb of civilization,

walk through my Garden, take a look at my elms on the Common, and,

reaching my habitat, in consideration of my advanced period of life,

indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.

When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-calluses on

my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my fifteen miles at a

stretch without coming to grief in any way, when I can perform my mile

in eight minutes or a little less, then I feel as if I had old Time's

head in chancery, and could give it to him at my leisure.

I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city

through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an old

inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who, in the

course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue called

_Myrtle Street_, stretching in one long line from east of the Reservoir

to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down on the grim

abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a promenade so

delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with glimpses down the

northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with its iron river of the

horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding back and forward over it,--so

delightfully closing at its western extremity in sunny courts and

passages where I know peace, and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age

must be perpetual tenants,--so alluring to all who desire to take their

daily stroll, in the words of Dr. Watts,--

"Alike unknowing and unknown,"--

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal the

secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is an

immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly to avail

itself.

Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather. The

principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you may be

sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing. One's

_hepar_, or, in vulgar language, liver,--a ponderous organ, weighing

some three or four pounds,--goes up and down like the dasher of a

churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements, at every step of

a trotting horse. The brains also are shaken up like coppers in a

moneybox. Riding is good, for those that are born with a silver-mounted

bridle in their hand, and can ride as much and as often as they like,

without thinking all the time they hear that steady grinding sound as

the horse's jaws triturate with calm lateral movement the bank-bills and

promises to pay upon which it is notorious that the profligate animal in

question feeds day and night.

Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this

empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in

a more scientific form.

The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical impression,

and secondly to a sense of power in action. The first source of pleasure

varies of course with our condition and the state of the surrounding

circumstances; the second with the amount and kind of power, and the

extent and kind of action. In all forms of active exercise there are

three powers simultaneously in action,--the will, the muscles, and the

intellect. Each of these predominates in different kinds of exercise.

In walking, the will and muscles are so accustomed to work together

and perform their task with so little expenditure of force, that the

intellect is left comparatively free. The mental pleasure in walking,

as such, is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery. But in

riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will, and my

muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his four hoofs,

instead of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in this extension of

my volition and my physical frame into another animal, my tyrannical

instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at once gratified. When

the horse ceases to have a will of his own and his muscles require no

special attention on your part, then you may live on horseback as Wesley

did, and write sermons or take naps, as you like. But you will observe,

that, in riding on horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after

all, it is not you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents

the satisfaction from being complete.

Now let us look at the conditions of rowing. I won't suppose you to be

disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging in which is

to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to bestriding an Arab. You

know the Esquimaux _kayak_, (if that is the name of it,) don't you? Look

at that model of one over my door. Sharp, rather?--On the contrary, it

is a lubber to the one you and I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to

Psyche, contrasted with what I will tell you about.--Our boat, then, is

something of the shape of a pickerel, as you look down upon his back,

he lying in the sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in

among the lily-pads. It is a kind of a giant _pod_, as one may say,--

tight everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit.

Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from sixteen to

thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand why you want those

"outriggers," or projecting iron frames with the rowlocks in which the

oars play. My rowlocks are five feet apart; double or more than double

the greatest width of the boat.

Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with arms,

or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more than twenty

feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly

into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat,

and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your

oars,--oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own

special direction. This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to

flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk

sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you

will, in the most luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied

spirit. But if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the

river, which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen

minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion scullers, you

remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little warmed up or not! You

can row easily and gently all day, and you can row yourself blind and

black in the face in ten minutes, just as you like. It has been long

agreed that there is no way in which a man can accomplish so much labor

with his muscles as in rowing. It is in the boat, then, that man finds

the largest extension of his volitional and muscular existence; and

yet he may tax both of them so slightly, in that most delicious of

exercises, that he shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or

recall the remarks he has made in company and put them in form for the

public, as well as in his easy-chair.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that

intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are

smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up

with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me like

those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining

for many a long rood behind me. To lie still over the Flats, where the

waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding

busily and silently beneath the boat,--to rustle in through the long

harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek,--to take shelter from the

sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its

interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded

with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while

overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is

a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the

ocean,--lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that

the columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from

life,--the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against

the half-sunken pillars,--why should I tell of these things, that I

should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened

with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots

we must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and

wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with

skaters!

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed,

soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic

cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. Of the

females that are the mates of these males I do not here speak. I

preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this matter a good while

ago. Of course, if you heard it, you know my belief is that the total

climatic influences here are getting up a number of new patterns of

humanity, some of which are not an improvement on the old model.

Clipper-built, sharp in the bows, long in the spars, slender to look at,

and fast to go, the ship, which is the great organ of our national

life of relation, is but a reproduction of the typical form which the

elements impress upon its builder. All this we cannot help; but we can

make the best of these influences, such as they are. We have a few

good boatmen,--no good horsemen that I hear of,--nothing remarkable, I

believe, in cricketing,--and as for any great athletic feat performed

by a gentleman in these latitudes, society would drop a man who should

run round the Common in five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers,

single-stick players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of.

Boxing is rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow.

Anything is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all

tend.

I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening. It

did my heart good to see that there were a few young and youngish youths

left who could take care of their own heads in case of emergency. It is

a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving himself into the primitive

constituents of his humanity. Here is a delicate young man now, with an

intellectual countenance, a slight figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a

most unassuming deportment, a mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or

Jonathan from between the ploughtails would of course expect to handle

with perfect ease. Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles! Ah,

he is divesting himself of his cravat! Why, he is stripping off his

coat! Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk shirt, and with two

things that look like batter puddings in the place of his fists. Now see

that other fellow with another pair of batter puddings,--the big one

with the broad shoulders; he will certainly knock the little man's

head off, if he strikes him. Feinting, dodging, stopping, hitting,

countering,--little man's head not off yet. You might as well try to

jump upon your own shadow as to hit the little man's intellectual

features. He needn't have taken off the gold-bowed spectacles at all.

Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches all the fierce lunges

or gets out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes

one of the batter puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the

other into the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping,

tripping, collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a

miscellaneous bundle.--If my young friend, whose excellent article I

have referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence

among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should have better sermons and

an infinitely less quarrelsome church-militant. A bout with the gloves

would let off the ill-nature, and cure the indigestion, which, united,

have embroiled their subject in a bitter controversy. We should then

often hear that a point of difference between an infallible and a

heretic, instead of being vehemently discussed in a series of newspaper

articles, had been settled by a friendly contest in several rounds,

at the close of which the parties shook hands and appeared cordially

reconciled.

But boxing you and I are too old for, I am afraid. I was for a moment

tempted, by the contagion of muscular electricity last evening, to try

the gloves with the Benicia Boy, who looked in as a friend to the noble

art; but remembering that he had twice my weight and half my age,

besides the advantage of his training, I sat still and said nothing.

There is one other delicate point I wish to speak of with reference

to old age. I refer to the use of dioptric media which correct the

diminished refracting power of the humors of the eye,--in other words,

spectacles. I don't use them. All I ask is a large, fair type, a strong

daylight or gas-light, and one yard of focal distance, and my eyes are

as good as ever. But if _your_ eyes fail, I can tell you something

encouraging. There is now living in New York State an old gentleman who,

perceiving his sight to fail, immediately took to exercising it on the

finest print, and in this way fairly bullied Nature out of her foolish

habit of taking liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout. And now

this old gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his pen,

showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes. I should be afraid

to say to you how much he writes in the compass of a half-dime,--

whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms _and_ the Gospels, I

won't be positive.

But now let me tell you this. If the time comes when you must lay down

the fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too stiff, and drop the

ten-foot sculls, because your arms are too weak, and, after dallying

awhile with eye-glasses, come at last to the undisguised reality of

spectacles,--if the time comes when that fire of life we spoke of has

burned so low that where its flames reverberated there is only the

sombre stain of regret, and where its coals glowed, only the white ashes

that cover the embers of memory,--don't let your heart grow cold, and

you may carry cheerfulness and love with you into the teens of your

second century, if you can last so long. As our friend, the Poet, once

said, in some of those old-fashioned heroics of his which he keeps for

his private reading,--

Call him not old, whose visionary brain

Holds o'er the past its undivided reign.

For him in vain the envious seasons roll

Who bears eternal summer in his soul.

If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay,

Spring with her birds, or children with their play,

Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art

Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart,--

Turn to the record where his years are told,--

Count his gray hairs,--they cannot make him old!

_End of the Professor's paper_.

[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several instalments,

and accompanied by various comments from different persons at the table.

The company were in the main attentive, with the exception of a little

somnolence on the part of the old gentleman opposite at times, and a

few sly, malicious questions about the "old boys" on the part of that

forward young fellow who has figured occasionally, not always to his

advantage, in these reports.

On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of,

I have always tried to give a more appropriate character to our

conversation. I have never read them my sermon yet, and I don't know

that I shall, as some of them might take my convictions as a personal

indignity to themselves. But having read our company so much of the

Professor's talk about age and other subjects connected with physical

life, I took the next Sunday morning to repeat to them the following

poem of his, which I have had by me some time. He calls it--I suppose,

for his professional friends--THE ANATOMIST'S HYMN; but I shall name

it--]

THE LIVING TEMPLE.

Not in the world of light alone,

Where God has built his blazing throne,

Nor yet alone in earth below,

With belted seas that come and go,

And endless isles of sunlit green,

Is all thy Maker's glory seen:

Look in upon thy wondrous frame,--

Eternal wisdom still the same!

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves

Flows murmuring through its hidden caves

Whose streams of brightening purple rush

Fired with a new and livelier blush,

While all their burden of decay

The ebbing current steals away,

And red with Nature's flame they start

From the warm fountains of the heart.

No rest that throbbing slave may ask,

Forever quivering o'er his task,

While far and wide a crimson jet

Leaps forth to fill the woven net

Which in unnumbered crossing tides

The flood of burning life divides,

Then kindling each decaying part

Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.

But warmed with that unchanging flame

Behold the outward moving frame,

Its living marbles jointed strong

With glistening band and silvery thong,

And linked to reason's guiding reins

By myriad rings in trembling chains,

Each graven with the threaded zone

Which claims it as the master's own.

See how yon beam of seeming white

Is braided out of seven-hued light,

Yet in those lucid gloves no ray

By any chance shall break astray.

Hark how the rolling surge of sound,

Arches and spirals circling round,

Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear

With music it is heaven to hear.

Then mark the cloven sphere that holds

All thoughts in its mysterious folds,

That feels sensation's faintest thrill

And flashes for the sovereign will;

Think on the stormy world that dwells

Locked in its dim and clustering cells!

The lightning gleams of power it sheds

Along its hollow glassy threads!

O Father! grant thy love divine

To make these mystic temples thine!

When wasting age and wearying strife

Have sapped the leaning walls of life,

When darkness gathers over all,

And the last tottering pillars fall,

Take the poor dust thy mercy warms

And mould it into heavenly forms!

* * * * *

LITERARY NOTICES.

_Library of Old Authors.--Works of John Marston_. London: John Russell

Smith. 1856-7.

Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the Works of Marston,

(Vol. I. p. xxii.,) says, "The dramas now collected together are

reprinted absolutely from the early editions, which were placed in the

hands of our printers, who thus had the advantage of following them

without the intervention of a transcriber. They are given as nearly as

possible in their original state, the only modernizations attempted

consisting in the alternations of the letters _i_ and _j_, and _u_ and

_v_, the retention of which" (does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the

"alternations"?) "would have answered no useful purpose, while it would

have unnecessarily perplexed the modern reader."

This not very clear; but as Mr. Halliwell is a member of several learned

foreign societies, and especially of the Royal _Irish_ Academy, perhaps

it would he unfair to demand that he should write clear English. As one

of Mr. Smith's editors, it was to be expected that he should not write

it idiomatically. Some malign constellation (Taurus, perhaps, whose

infaust aspect may be supposed to preside over the makers of bulls and

blunders) seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Saturn when the

Library was projected. At the top of the same page from which we have

made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of "conveying a favorable

impression _on_ modern readers." It was surely to no such phrase as this

that Ensign Pistol alluded when he said, "_Convey_ the _wise_ it call."

A literal reprint of an old author may be of value in two ways: the

orthography may in certain cases indicate the ancient pronunciation, or

it may put us on a scent which shall lead us to the burrow of a word

among the roots of language. But in order to this, it surely is not

needful to undertake the reproduction of all the original errors of the

press; and even were it so, the proofs of carelessness in the editorial

department are so glaring, that we are left in doubt, after all, if we

may congratulate ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders

of the Elizabethan typesetters in their integrity and without any

debasement of modern alloy. If it be gratifying to know that there lived

stupid men before our contemporary Agamemnons in that kind, yet we

demand absolute accuracy in the report of the _phenomena_ in order to

arrive at anything like safe statistics. For instance, we find (Vol. I.

p. 89) "ACTUS SECUNDUS, SCENA PRIMUS," and (Vol. III. p. 174) "_exit

ambo_," and we are interested to know that in a London printing-house,

two centuries and a half ago, there was a philanthropist who wished to

simplify the study of the Latin language by reducing all the nouns to

one gender and all the verbs to one number. Had his emancipated theories

of grammar prevailed, how much easier would that part of boys which

cherubs want have found the school-room benches! How would birchen bark,

as an educational tonic, have fallen in repute! How white would have

been the (now black-and-blue) memories of Dr. Busby and so many other

educational _lictors_, who, with their bundles of rods, heralded not

alone the consuls, but all other Roman antiquities to us! We dare not,

however, indulge in the grateful vision, since there are circumstances

which lead us to infer that Mr. Halliwell himself (member though he be

of so many learned societies) has those vague notions of the speech of

ancient Rome which are apt to prevail in regions which count not the

_betula_ in their _Flora_. On page xv. of his Preface, he makes

Drummond say that Ben Jonson "was dilated" (_delated_,--Gifford gives it

in English, _accused_) "to the king by Sir James Murray,"--Ben, whose

corpulent person stood in so little need of that malicious increment!

What is Mr. Halliwell's conception of editorial duty? As we read along,

and the once fair complexion of the margin grew more and more pimply

with pencil-marks, like that of a bad proof-sheet, we began to think

that he was acting on the principle of every man his own washerwoman,

--that he was making blunders of set purpose, (as teachers of languages

do in their exercises,) in order that we might correct them for

ourselves, and so fit us in time to be editors also, and members of

various learned societies, even as Mr. Halliwell himself is. We fancied,

that, magnanimously waving aside the laurel with which a grateful

posterity crowned General Wade, he wished us "to see these roads

_before_ they were made," and develope our intellectual muscles in

getting over them. But no; Mr. Halliwell has appended notes to his

edition, and among them are some which correct misprints, and therefore

seem to imply that he considers that service as belonging properly to

the editorial function. We are obliged, then, to give up our theory that

his intention was to make every reader an editor, and to suppose that he

wished rather to show how disgracefully a book might be edited and yet

receive the commendation of professional critics who read with the ends

of their fingers. If this were his intention, Marston himself never

published so biting a satire.

Let us look at a few of the intricate passages, to help us through

which Mr. Halliwell lends us the light of his editorial lantern. In the

Induction to "What you Will" occurs the striking and unusual phrase,

"Now out up-pont," and Mr. Halliwell favors us with the following note:

"Page 221, line 10. _Up-pont_.--That is, upon't." Again in the same play

we find--

"Let twattling fame cheatd others rest,

I um no dish for rumors feast."

Of course, it should read,--

"Let twattling [twaddling] Fame cheate others' rest,

I am no dish for Rumor's feast."

Mr. Halliwell comes to our assistance thus: "Page 244, line 21, [22

it should be,] _I um_,--a printer's error for _I am." Dignus vindice

nodus_! Five lines above, we have "whole" for "who'll," and four lines

below, "helmeth" for "whelmeth"; but Mr. Halliwell vouchsafes no note.

In the "Fawn" we read, "Wise _neads_ use few words," and the editor says

in a note, "a misprint for _heads_"! Kind Mr. Halliwell!

Having given a few examples of our "Editor's" corrections, we proceed to

quote a passage or two which, it is to be presumed, he thought perfectly

clear.

"A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap,

A button'd frizado sute, skarce eate good meate,

_Anchoves, caviare_, but hee's satyred

And term'd phantasticall. By the muddy spawne

Of slymie neughtes, when troth, phantasticknesse--

That which the naturall sophysters tearme

_Phantusia incomplexa_--is a function

Even of the bright immortal part of man.

It is the common passe, the sacred dore,

Unto the prive chamber of the soule;

That bar'd, nought passeth past the baser court.

Of outward scence by it th' inamorate

Most lively thinkes he sees the absent beauties

Of his lov'd mistres."--Vol. I. p. 241.

In this case, also, the true readings are clear enough:--

"And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn

Of slimy newts";

and

----"past the baser court

Of outward sense";--

but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here deserted by our

_fida compagna_?

Again, (Vol. II. pp. 55-56,) we read, "This Granuffo is a right wise

good lord, a man of excellent discourse, and never speakes his signes to

me, and men of profound reach instruct aboundantly; hee begges suites

with signes, gives thanks with signes," etc.

This Granuffo is qualified among the "Interlocutors" as "a silent lord,"

and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be confessed, is

rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing.

It is plain enough that the passage should read, "a man of excellent

discourse, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of profound reach

instruct abundantly," etc.

In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader

to set the text right. But if not difficult for the reader, it should

certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what

Broome was said to have done for Pope in his Homer,--"gone before and

swept the way." An edition of an English author ought to be intelligible

to English readers, and, if the editor do not make it so, he wrongs the

old poet, for two centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes

to play the gentleman-usher. A play written in our own tongue should not

be as tough to us as Aeschylus to a ten-years' graduate, nor do we wish

to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way

through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only to find (as is

generally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all.

But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in

that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it

is in a speech of _Erichtho_, in the first scene of the fourth act of

"Sophonisba," (Vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to us in

this shape:--

----"hard by the reverent (!) ruines

Of a once glorious temple rear'd to Jove

Whose very rubbish....

....yet beares

A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac'd, [razed,]

Hurl'd down by wrath and lust of impious kings,

So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing

Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow,

The ill-voyc'd raven, and still chattering pye,

Send out ungratefull sounds and loathsome filth;

Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs,

* * * * *

Where tombs and beautious urnes of well dead men

Stood in assured rest," etc.

The verse and a half in Italics are worthy of Chapman; but why did not

Mr. Halliwell, who explains _up-pont_ and _I um_, change "Joves acts

were vively limbs" to "Jove's acts were lively limned," which was

unquestionably what Marston wrote?

In the "Scourge of Villanie," (Vol. III. p. 252,) there is a passage

which has a modern application in America, though happily archaic in

England, which Mr. Halliwell suffers to stand thus:--

"Once Albion lived in such a cruel age

Than man did hold by servile vilenage:

Poore brats were slaves of bondmen that were borne,

And marted, sold: but that rude law is torne

And disannuld, as too too inhumane."

This should read--

"_Man_ man did hold in servile villanage;

Poor brats were slaves (of bondmen that were born)";

and we hope that some American poet will one day be able to write in the

past tense similar verses of the barbarity of his forefathers.

We will give one more scrap of Mr. Halliwell's text:--

"Yfaith, why then, caprichious mirth,

Skip, light moriscoes, in our frolick blond,

Flagg'd veines, sweete, plump with fresh-infused joyes!"

which Marston, doubtless, wrote thus:--

"I'faith, why then, capricious Mirth,

Skip light moriscoes in our frolic blood!

Flagged veins, swell plump with fresh-infused joys!"

We have quoted only a few examples from among the scores that we had

marked, and against such a style of "editing" we invoke the shade of

Marston himself. In the Preface to the Second Edition of the "Fawn,"

he says, "Reader, know I have perused this coppy, _to make some

satisfaction for the first faulty impression; yet so urgent hath been my

business that some errors have styll passed, which thy discretion may

amend_."

Literally, to be sure, Mr. Halliwell has availed himself of the

permission of the poet, in leaving all emendation to the reader; but

certainly he has been false to the spirit of it in his self-assumed

office of editor. The notes to explain _up-pont_ and _I um_ give us a

kind of standard of the highest intelligence which Mr. Halliwell dares

to take for granted in the ordinary reader. Supposing this _nousometer_

of his to be a centigrade, in what hitherto unconceived depths of cold

obstruction can he find his zero-point of entire idiocy? The expansive

force of average wits cannot be reckoned upon, as we see, to drive them

up as far as the temperate degree of misprints in one syllable, and

those, too, in their native tongue. _A fortiori_, then, Mr. Halliwell is

bound to lend us the aid of his great learning wherever his author has

introduced foreign words and the old printers have made _pie_ of them.

In a single case he has accepted his responsibility as dragoman, and the

amount of his success is not such as to give us any poignant regret that

he has everywhere else left us to our own devices. On p. 119, Vol. II.,

_Francischina_, a Dutchwoman, exclaims, "O, mine aderliver love." Here

is Mr. Halliwell's note. "_Aderliver_.--This is the speaker's error for

_alder-liever_, the best beloved by all." Certainly not "the _speaker's_

error," for Marston was no such fool as intentionally to make a

Dutchwoman blunder in her own language. But is it an error for

_alder-liever?_ No, but for _alderliefster_. Mr. Halliwell might have

found it in many an old Dutch song. For example, No. 96 of Hoffmann von

Fallersleben's "Niederländische Volkslieder" begins thus:--

"Mijn hert altijt heeft verlanghen

Naer u, die _alderliefste_ mijn."

But does the word mean "best beloved by all"? No such thing, of course;

but "best-beloved of all,"--that is, by the speaker.

In "Antonio and Mellida" (Vol. I. pp. 50-51) occur some Italian verses,

and here we hoped to fare better; for Mr. Halliwell (as we learn from

the title-page of his Dictionary) is a member of the "_Reale Academia

di Firenze_." This is the _Accademia della Crusca_, founded for the

conservation of the Italian language in its purity, and it is rather

a fatal symptom that Mr. Halliwell should indulge in the heresy of

spelling _Accademia_ with only one _c_. But let us see what our Della

Cruscan's notions of conserving are. Here is a specimen:--

"Bassiammi, coglier l'aura odorata

Che in sua neggia in quello dolce labra.

Dammi pimpero del tuo gradit' amore."

It is clear enough that the first and third verses ought to read,

"Lasciami coglier,--Dammi l'impero,"

though we confess that we could make nothing of _in sua neggia_ till

an Italian friend suggested _ha sua seggia_. But a Della Cruscan

academician might at least have corrected by his dictionary the spelling

of _labra_.

We think that we have sustained our indictment of Mr. Halliwell's text

with ample proof. The title of the book should have been, "The Works

of John Marston, containing all the Misprints of the Original Copies,

together with a few added for the First Time in this Edition, the whole

carefully let alone by James Orchard Halliwell, F.R.S., F.S.A." It

occurs to us that Mr. Halliwell may be also a Fellow of the Geological

Society, and may have caught from its members the enthusiasm which leads

him to attach so extraordinary a value to every goose-track of the

Elizabethan formation. It is bad enough to be, as Marston was, one of

those middling poets whom neither gods nor men nor columns (Horace had

never seen a newspaper) tolerate; but, really, even they do not deserve

the frightful retribution of being reprinted by a Halliwell.

We have said that we could not feel even the dubious satisfaction of

knowing that the blunders of the old copies had been faithfully followed

in the reprinting. We see reason for doubting whether Mr. Halliwell ever

read the proof-sheets. In his own notes we have found several mistakes.

For instance, he refers to p. 159 when he means p. 153; he cites "I,

but her _life_," instead of "_lip_"; and he makes Spenser speak of "old

Pithonus." Marston is not an author of enough importance to make it

desirable that we should be put in possession of all the corrupted

readings of his text, were such a thing possible even with the most

minute painstaking, and Mr. Halliwell's edition loses its only claim to

value the moment a doubt is cast upon the accuracy of its inaccuracies.

It is a matter of special import to us (whose means of access to

originals are exceedingly limited) that the English editors of our old

authors should be faithful and trustworthy, and we have singled out Mr.

Halliwell's Marston for particular animadversion only because we think

it on the whole the worst edition we ever saw of any author.

Having exposed the condition in which our editor has left the text, we

proceed to test his competency in another respect, by examining some of

the emendations and explanations of doubtful passages which he proposes.

These are very few; but had they been even fewer, they had been too

many.

Among the _dramatis personae_ of the "Fawn," as we said before, occurs

"Granuffo, _a silent lord_." He speaks only once during the play, and

that in the last scene. In Act I., Scene 2, _Gonzago_ says, speaking to

_Granuffo_,--

"Now, sure, thou are a man

Of a most learned _scilence_, and one whose words

Have bin most pretious to me."

This seems quite plain, but Mr. Halliwell annotates

thus:--"_Scilence_.--Query, _science?_ The common reading, _silence_,

may, however, be what is intended." That the spelling should have

troubled Mr. Halliwell is remarkable; for elsewhere we find "god-boy"

for "good-bye," "seace" for "cease," "bodies" for "boddice," "pollice"

for "policy," "pitittying" for "pitying," "scence" for "sense,"

"Misenzius" for "Mezentius," "Ferazes" for "Ferrarese,"--and plenty

beside, equally odd. That he should have doubted the meaning is no less

strange; for on page 41 of the same play we read, "My Lord Granuffo, you

may likewise stay, for I know _you'l say nothing_,"--on pp. 55-56, "This

Granuffo is a right wise good lord, _a man of excellent discourse and

never speaks_,"--and on p. 94, we find the following dialogue:--

"_Gon._ My Lord Granuffo, this Fawne is an excellent fellow.

"_Don._ Silence.

"_Gon._ _I warrant you for my lord here._"

In the same play (p. 44) are these lines.--

"I apt for love?

Let lazy idlenes, fild full of wine

Heated with meates, high fedde with lustfull ease

Goe dote on culler [color]. As for me, why, death a sence,

I court the ladie?"

This is Mr. Halliwell's note:--"_Death a sence_.--'Earth a sense,' ed.

1633. Mr. Dilke suggests:--'For me, why, earth's as sensible.' The

original is not necessarily corrupt. It may mean,--why, you might as

well think Death was a sense, one of the senses. See a like phrase at

p. 77." What help we should get by thinking Death one of the senses, it

would demand another Oedipus to unriddle. Mr. Halliwell can astonish us

no longer, but we are surprised at Mr. Dilke, the very competent editor

of the "Old English Plays," 1815. From him we might have hoped for

better things. "Death o' sense!" is an exclamation. Throughout these

volumes we find _a_ for _o_',--as, "a clock" for "o'clock," "a the side"

for "o' the side."

A similar exclamation is to be found in three other places in the same

play, where the sense is obvious. Mr. Halliwell refers to one of them

on p. 77,--"Death a man! is she delivered!" The others are,--"Death a

justice! are we in Normandy?" (p. 98); and "Death a discretion! if I

should prove a foole now," or, as given by Mr. Halliwell, "Death, a

discretion!" Now let us apply Mr. Halliwell's explanation. "Death a

man!" you might as well think Death was a man, that is, one of the

men!--or a discretion, that is, one of the discretions!--or a justice,

that is, one of the quorum! We trust Mr. Halliwell may never have the

editing of Bob Acres's imprecations. "Odd's triggers!" he would say,

"that is, as odd as, or as strange as, triggers."

Vol. III., p. 77,--"the vote-killing mandrake." Mr. Halliwell's note

is, "_vote-killing_.--'Voice-killing,' ed. 1613. It may well he doubted

whether either be the correct reading." He then gives a familiar

citation from Browne's "Vulgar Errors." "Vote-killing" may be a mere

misprint for "note-killing," but "voice-killing" is certainly the better

reading. Either, however, makes sense. Although Sir Thomas Browne does

not allude to the deadly property of the mandrake's shriek, yet Mr.

Halliwell, who has edited Shakspeare, might have remembered the

"Would curses kill, _as doth the mandrake's groan_,"

(2d Part Henry VI., Act III. Scene 2.)

and the notes thereon in the _variorum_ edition. In Jacob Grimm's

"Deutsche Mythologie," (Vol. II. p. 1154,) under the word _Alraun_, may

be found a full account of the superstitions concerning the mandrake.

"When it is dug up, it groans and shrieks so dreadfully that the digger

will surely die. One must, therefore, before sunrise on a Friday, having

first stopped one's ears with wax or cotton-wool, take with him an

entirely black dog without a white hair on him, make the sign of the

cross three times over the _alraun_, and dig about it till the root

holds only by thin fibres. Then tie these by a string to the tail of the

dog, show him a piece of bread, and run away as fast as possible. The

dog runs eagerly after the bread, pulls up the root, and falls stricken

dead by its groan of pain."

These, we believe, are the only instances in which Mr. Halliwell has

ventured to give any opinion upon the text, except as to a palpable

misprint, here and there. Two of these we have already cited. There is

one other,--"p. 46, line 10. _Iuconstant_.--An error for _inconstant_."

Wherever there is a real difficulty, he leaves us in the lurch. For

example, in "What you Will," he prints without comment,--

"Ha! he mount Chirall on the wings of

fame!" (Vol. I. p. 239,)

which should be "mount cheval," as it is given in Mr. Dilke's edition

(Old English Plays, Vol. II. p. 222). We cite this, not as the worst,

but the shortest, example at hand.

Some of Mr. Halliwell's notes are useful and interesting,--as that

on "keeling the pot," and some others,--but a great part are utterly

useless. He thinks it necessary, for instance, to explain that "_to

speak pure foole_, is in sense equivalent to 'I will speak like a pure

fool,'"--that "belkt up" means "belched up,"--"aprecocks," "apricots."

He has notes also upon "meal-mouthed," "luxuriousnesse," "termagant,"

"fico," "estro," "a nest of goblets," which indicate either that the

"general reader" is a less intelligent person in England than in

America, or that Mr. Halliwell's standard of scholarship is very low.

We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply him with a reference

which will explain the allusion to the "Scotch barnacle" much

better than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Giraldus

Cambrensis,--namely, note 8, on page 179 of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr.

Ramesey, court physician to Charles II.

Next month we shall examine Mr. Hazlitt's edition of Webster.

_Waverley Novels_. Household Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 16mo.

This beautiful edition of Scott's Novels will be completed in

forty-eight volumes. Thirty are already published, and the remaining

eighteen will be issued at the rate of two volumes a month. As this

edition, in the union of elegance of mechanical execution with cheapness

of price, is the best which has yet been published in the United States,

and reflects great credit on the taste and enterprise of the publishers,

its merits should be universally known. The paper is white, the type new

and clear, the illustrations excellent, the volumes of convenient size,

the notes placed at the foot of the page, and the text enriched with the

author's latest corrections. It is called the "Household Edition";

and we certainly think it would be a greater adornment, and should be

considered a more indispensable necessity, than numerous articles of

expensive furniture, which, in too many households, take the place of

such books.

The success of this edition, which has been as great as that of most new

novels, is but another illustration of the permanence of Scott's hold on

the general imagination, resulting from the instinctive sagacity with

which he perceived and met its wants. The generation of readers for

which he wrote has mostly passed away; new fashions in fiction have

risen, had their day, and disappeared; he has been subjected to much

acute and profound criticism of a disparaging kind; and at present

he has formidable rivals in a number of novelists, both eminent and

popular;--yet his fame has quietly and steadily widened with time, the

"reading public" of our day is as much his public as the reading public

of his own, and there has been no period since he commenced writing when

there were not more persons familiar with his novels than with those of

any other author. Some novelists are more highly estimated by certain

classes of minds, but no other comprehends in his popularity so many

classes, and few bear so well that hardest of tests, re-perusal. Many

novels stimulate us more, and while we are reading them we think they

are superior to Scott's; but we miss, in the general impression they

leave on the mind, that peculiar charm which, in Scott, calls us back,

after a few years, to his pages, to revive the recollection of scenes

and characters which may be fading away from our memories. We doubt,

also, if any other novelist has, in a like degree, the power of

instantaneously withdrawing so wide a variety of readers from the

perplexities and discomforts of actual existence, and making them for

the time denizens of a new world. He has stimulating elements enough,

and he exhibits masterly art in the wise economy with which he uses

them; but he still stimulates only to invigorate; and when he enlivens

jaded minds, it is rather by infusing fresh life than by applying fierce

excitements, and there is consequently no reaction of weariness and

disgust. He appeases, satisfies, and enchants, rather than stings and

inflames. The interest he rouses is not of that absorbing nature which

exhausts from its very intensity, but is of that genial kind which

continuously holds the pleased attention while the story is in progress,

and remains in the mind as a delightful memory after the story is

finished. It may also be said of his characters, that, if some other

novelists have exhibited a finer and firmer power in delineating higher

or rarer types of humanity, Scott is still unapproached in this, that he

has succeeded in domesticating his creations in the general heart and

brain, and thus obtained the endorsement of human nature as evidence of

their genuineness. His characters are the friends and acquaintances of

everybody,--quoted, referred to, gossipped about, discussed, criticized,

as though they were actual beings. He, as an individual, is almost lost

sight of in the imaginary world his genius has peopled; and most of

his readers have a more vivid sense of the reality of Dominie Sampson,

Jennie Deans, or any other of his characterizations, than they have of

himself. And the reason is obvious. They know Dominie Sampson through

Scott; they know Scott only through Lockhart. Still, it is certain that

the nature of Scott, that essential nature which no biography can give,

underlies, animates, disposes, and permeates all the natures he has

delineated. It is this, which, in the last analysis, is found to be the

source of his universal popularity, and which, without analysis, is felt

as a continual charm by all his readers, whether they live in palaces or

cottages. His is a nature which is welcomed everywhere, because it is at

home everywhere. The mere power and variety of his imagination cannot

account for his influence; for the same power and variety might have

been directed by a discontented and misanthropic spirit, or have obeyed

the impulses of selfish and sensual passions, and thus conveyed a bitter

or impure view of human nature and human life. It is, then, the man

in the imagination, the cheerful, healthy, vigorous, sympathetic,

good-natured, and broad-natured Walter Scott himself, who, modestly

hidden, as he seems to be, behind the characters and scenes he

represents, really streams through them the peculiar quality of life

which makes their abiding charm. He has been accepted by humanity,

because he is so heartily humane,--humane, not merely as regards man in

the abstract, but as regards man in the concrete.

We have spoken of the number of his readers, and of his capacity to

interest all classes of people; but we suppose, that, in our day, when

everybody knows how to read without always knowing what to read, even

Scott has failed to reach a multitude of persons abundantly capable of

receiving pleasure from his writings, but who, in their ignorance of

him, are content to devour such frightful trash in the shape of novels

as they accidentally light upon in a leisure hour. One advantage of such

an edition of his works as that which has occasioned these remarks is,

that it tends to awaken attention anew to his merits, to spread his fame

among the generation of readers now growing up, and to place him in

the public view fairly abreast of unworthy but clamorous claimants for

public regard, as inferior to him in the power to impart pleasure as

they are inferior to him in literary excellence. That portion of the

public who read bad novels cannot be reached by criticism; but if they

could only be reached by Scott, they would quickly discover and resent

the swindle of which they have so long been the victims.

_A Dictionary of Medical Science_, etc. By ROBLEY DUNGLISON, M.D., LL.D.

Revised and very greatly enlarged.

It does not fall within our province to enter into a minute examination

of a professional work like the one before us. As a Medical Dictionary

is a book, however, which every general reader will find convenient at

times, and as we have long employed this particular dictionary with

great satisfaction, we do not hesitate to devote a few sentences to its

notice.

We remember when it was first published in 1833, meagre, as compared

with its present affluence of information. A few years later a second

edition was honorably noticed in the "British and Foreign Medical

Review." At that time it was only half the size of Hooper's well-known

Medical Dictionary, but by its steady growth in successive editions it

has reached that obesity which is tolerable in books we consult, but

hardly in such as we read. The labor expended in preparing the work

must have been immense, and, unlike most of our stereotyped medical

literature, it has increased by true interstitial growth, instead of

by mere accretion, or of remaining essentially stationary--with the

exception of the title-page.

We can confidently recommend this work as a most ample and convenient

book of reference upon Anatomy, Physiology, Climate, and other subjects

likely to be occasionally interesting to the general reader, as well as

upon all practical matters connected with the art of healing.

In the present state of education and intelligence, he must be a dull

person who does not frequently find a question arising on some point

connected with this range of studies. The student will find in this

dictionary an enormous collection of synonymes in various languages,

brief accounts of almost everything medical ever heard of, and full

notices of many of the more important subjects treated,--such as

Climate, Diet, Falsification of Drugs, Feigned Diseases, Muscles,

Poisons, and many others.

Here and there we notice blemishes, as must be expected in so huge

a collection of knowledge. Thus, _Bronchlemmitis_ is not _Polypus

bronchialis_, but _Croup_.--The accent of _laryngeal_ and _pharyngeal_

is incorrectly placed on the third syllable. In this wilderness of words

we look in vain for the New York provincialism "Sprue." The work has

a right to some scores, perhaps hundreds, of such errors, without

forfeiting its character. If the Elzevirs could not print the "Corpus

Juris Civilis" without a false heading to a chapter, we may excuse a

dictionary-maker and his printer for an occasional slip. But it is a

most useful book, and scholars will find it immensely convenient.

_Scenes of Clerical Life_. By GEORGE ELIOT. Originally published in

"Blackwood's Magazine." New York: Harper & Brothers. 1858.

Fiction represents the character of the age to which it belongs, not

merely by actual delineations of its times, like those of "Tom Jones"

and "The Newcomer," but also in an indirect, though scarcely less

positive manner, by its exhibition of the influence of the times upon

its own form and general direction, whatever the scene or period it may

have chosen for itself. The story of "Hypatia" is laid in Alexandria

almost two thousand years ago, but the book reflects the crudities of

modern English thought; and even Mr. Thackeray, the greatest

living master of costume, succeeds in making his "Esmond" only a

joint-production of the Addisonian age and our own. Thus the novels of

the last few years exhibit very clearly the spirit that characterizes

the period of regard for men and women as men and women, without

reference to rank, beauty, fortune, or privilege. Novelists recognize

that Nature is a better romance-maker than the fancy, and the public is

learning that men and women are better than heroes and heroines, not

only to live with, but also to read of. Now and then, therefore, we get

a novel, like these "Scenes of Clerical Life," in which the fictitious

element is securely based upon a broad groundwork of actual truth, truth

as well in detail as in general.

It is not often, however, even yet, that we find a writer wholly

unembarrassed by and in revolt against the old theory of the necessity

of perfection in some one at least of the characters of his story.

"Neither Luther nor John Bunyan," says the author of this book, "would

have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing

but what is true, feels nothing but what is excellent, and does nothing

but what is graceful."

Sometimes, indeed, a daring romance-writer ventures, during the earlier

chapters of his story, to represent a heroine without beauty and without

wealth, or a hero with some mortal blemish. But after a time his

resolution fails;--each new chapter gives a new charm to the ordinary

face; the eyes grow "liquid" and "lustrous," always having been "large";

the nose, "naturally delicate," exhibits its "fine-cut lines"; the mouth

acquires an indescribable expression of loveliness; and the reader's

hoped-for Fright is transformed by Folly or Miss Pickering into a

commonplace, tiresome, _novelesque_ Beauty. Even Miss Bronté relented

toward Jane Eyre; and weaker novelists are continually repeating,

but with the omission of the moral, the story of the "Ugly Duck."

Unquestionably, there is the excuse to be made for this great error,

that it betrays the seeking after an Ideal. Dangerous word! The ideal

standard of excellence is, to be sure, fortunately changing, and the

unreal ideal will soon be confined to the second-rate writers for

second-rate readers. But all the great novelists of the two last

generations indulged themselves and their readers in these unrealities.

It is vastly easier to invent a consistent character than to represent

an inconsistent one;--a hero is easier to make (so all historians have

found) than a man.

Suppose, however, novelists could be placed in a society made up of

their favorite characters,--forced into real, lifelike intercourse with

them;--Richardson, for instance, with his Harriet Byron or Clarissa,

attended by Sir Charles; Miss Burney with Lord Orville and Evelina;

Miss Edgeworth with Caroline Percy, and that marvellous hero, Count

Altenburg; Scott with the automatons that he called Waverley and Flora

McIvor. Suppose they were brought together to share the comforts (cold

comforts they would be) of life, to pass days together, to meet every

morning at breakfast; with what a ludicrous sense of relief, at the

close of this purgatorial period, would not the unhappy novelists

have fled from these deserted heroes and heroines, and the precious

proprieties of their romance, to the very driest and mustiest of human

bores,--gratefully rejoicing that the world was not filled with such

creatures as they themselves had set before it as _ideals_!

To copy Nature faithfully and heartily is certainly not less needful

when stories are presented in words than when they are told on canvas or

in marble. In the "Scenes from Clerical Life" we have a happy example of

such copying. The three stories embraced under this title are written

vigorously, with a just appreciation of the romance of reality, and with

honest adherence to truth of representation in the sombre as well as the

brighter portions of life. It demands not only a large intellect, but a

large heart, to gain such a candid and inclusive appreciation of life

and character as they display. The greater part of each story reads like

a reminiscence of real life, and the personages introduced show little

sign of being "rubbed down" or "touched up and varnished" for effect.

The narrative is easy and direct, full of humor and pathos; and the

descriptions of simple life in a country village are often charming from

their freshness, vivacity, and sweetness. More than this, these stories

give proof of that wide range of experience which does not so much

depend on an extended or varied acquaintance with the world, as upon an

intelligent and comprehensive sympathy, which makes each new person with

whom one is connected a new illustration of the unsolved problems of

life and a new link in the unending chain of human development.

The book is one that deserves a more elegant form than that which the

Messrs. Harper have given it in their reprint.

_Twin Roses: A Narrative._ By ANNA CORA RITCHIE, Author of

"Autobiography of an Actress," "Mimic Life," etc. Boston: Ticknor &

Fields. 16mo.

This volume belongs to a series of narratives intended to illustrate

Mrs. Ritchie's experiences of theatrical life, and especially to do

justice to the many admirable people who have adopted the stage as

a profession. Though it has many defects, in respect to plot and

characterization, it seems to us the most charming in style and

beautiful in sentiment of Mrs. Ritchie's works. The two sisters, the

"twin roses," are, we believe, drawn from life; but the author's own

imagination has enveloped them in an atmosphere of romantic sweetness,

and their qualities are fondly exaggerated into something like

unreality. They seem to have been first idolized and then idealized, but

never realized. Still, the most beautiful and tender passages of the

whole book are those in which they are lovingly portrayed. The scenes

in the theatre are generally excellent. The perils, pains, pleasures,

failures, and triumphs of the actor's life are well described. The

defect, which especially mars the latter portion of the volume, is the

absence of any artistic reason for the numerous descriptions of scenery

which are introduced. The tourist and the novelist do not happily

combine. Still, the sentiment of the book is so pure, fresh, and

artless, its moral tone so high, its style so rich and melodious, and

its purpose so charitable and good, that the reader is kept in pleased

attention to the end, and lays it down with regret.

* * * * *

EDITORIAL NOTE.

In our review of Parton's Life of Burr, published in the March number,

the following passage occurs, as a quotation from that work:--"Hamilton

probably implanted a dislike for Burr in Washington's breast."

Upon this the author of the biography has had the effrontery to bring

against us a charge of _forgery_. He affirms that neither the sentence

above quoted nor any resembling it can be found in his book.

Mr. Parton, speaking of Washington's refusal to nominate Burr to the

French mission, (p. 197,) speaks of the President's dislike for him;

and, endeavoring to account for it, says: "Reflecting upon this

circumstance, the idea will occur to the individual long immersed in the

reading of that period, _that this invincible dislike of Colonel Burr

was perhaps implanted, certainly nourished, in the mind of General

Washington by his useful friend and adherent, Alexander Hamilton."_

We do not wonder that Mr. Parton should have been annoyed by so damaging

a criticism of his book, but we can account for his forgetfulness only

by supposing that he has been so long "immersed in the reading of

that period" as to have arrived nearly at the drowning-point of

insensibility.