CHAPTER I.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. IV.--JULY, 1859.--NO. XXI.

THOMAS PAINE'S

SECOND APPEARANCE IN THE UNITED STATES.

"Nay, so far did he carry his obstinacy, that he absolutely invited a

professed Anti-Diluvian from the Gallic Empire, who illuminated the

whole country with his principles and his nose."--Salmagundi.

We lukewarm moderns can hardly conceive the degree of violence and

bitterness reached by party-feeling in the early years of the United

States Constitution. A Mississippi member of Congress listening to a

Freesoil speech is mild in demeanor and expression, if we compare his

ill-nature with the spiteful fury of his predecessors in legislation

sixty years ago. The same temper was visible throughout the land. Nobody

stood aloof. Two hostile camps were pitched over against each other, and

every man in Israel was to be found in his tent. Our great experiment

was a new one; on its success depended the personal welfare of every

citizen, and naturally every citizen was anxious to train up that

experiment in the way which promised to his reason or to his feelings

the best result.

The original Federalists of 1787 were in favor of effacing as much

as possible the boundary-lines of the Thirteen Colonies, and of

consolidating them into a new, united, and powerful people, under a

strong central government. The first Anti-Federalists were made up of

several sects: one branch, sincere republicans, were fearful that the

independence of the States was in danger, and that consolidation would

prepare the way for monarchy; another, small, but influential, still

entertained the wish for reunion with England, or, at least, for the

adoption of the English form of government,--and, hoping that the

dissensions of the old Confederation might lead to some such result,

drank the health of the Bishop of Osnaburg in good Madeira, and objected

to any system which might place matters upon a permanent republican

basis; and a third party, more numerous and noisy than either, who knew

by long experience that the secret of home popularity was to inspire

jealousy of the power of Congress, were unwilling to risk the loss of

personal consequence in this new scheme of centralization, and took good

care not to allow the old local prejudices and antipathies to slumber.

The two latter classes of patriots are well described by Franklin in his

"Comparison of the Ancient Jews with the Modern Anti-Federalists,"--a

humorous allegory, which may have suggested to the Senator from Ohio his

excellent conceit of the Israelite with Egyptian principles. "Many,"

wrote Franklin, "still retained an affection for Egypt, the land of

their nativity, and whenever they felt any inconvenience or hardship,

though the natural and unavoidable effect of their change of situation,

exclaimed against their leaders as the authors of their trouble,

and were not only for returning into Egypt, but for stoning their

deliverers.... Many of the chiefs thought the new Constitution might be

injurious to their particular interests,--that the profitable places

would be engrossed by the families and friends of Moses and Aaron, and

others, equally well born, excluded."

Time has decided this first point in favor of the Unionists. None of

the evils prophesied by their opponents have as yet appeared. The

independence of the individual States remains inviolate, and, although

the central executive has grown yearly more powerful, a monarchy

seems as remote as ever. Local distinctions are now little prized in

comparison with federal rank. It is not every man who can recollect the

name of the governor of his own State; very few can tell that of the

chief of the neighboring Commonwealth. The old boundaries have grown

more and more indistinct; and when we look at the present map of the

Union, we see only that broad black line known as Mason and Dixon's, on

one side of which are neatness, thrift, enterprise, and education,--and

on the other, whatever the natives of that region may please to call it.

After 1789, the old Egypt faction ceased to exist, except as grumblers;

but the States-Rights men, though obliged to acquiesce in the

Constitution, endeavored, by every means of "construction" their

ingenuity could furnish, to weaken and restrict the exercise and the

range of its power. The Federalists, on the other hand, held that want

of strength was the principal defect of the system, and were for adding

new buttresses to the Constitutional edifice. It is curious to remark

that neither party believed in the permanency of the Union. Then

came into use the mighty adjectives "constitutional" and

"unconstitutional,"--words of vast import, doing equally good service

to both parties in furnishing a word to express their opinion of the

measures they urged and of those they objected to. And then began to be

strained and frayed that much-abused piece of parchment which Thomas

Paine called the political Bible of the American people, and foolishly

thought indispensable to liberty in a representative government. "Ask an

American if a certain act be constitutional," says Paine, "he pulls out

his pocket volume, turns to page and verse, and gives you a correct

answer in a moment." Poor Mr. Paine! if you had lived fifty years

longer, you would have seen that paper constitutions, like the paper

money you despised so justly, depend upon honesty and confidence for

their value, and are at a sad discount in hard times of fraud and

corruption. Unprincipled men find means of evading the written agreement

upon their face by ingenious subterfuges or downright repudiation. An

arbitrary majority will construe the partnership articles to suit their

own interests, and _stat pro constitutione voluntas_. It is true that

the _litera scripta_ remains, but the meaning is found to vary with the

interpreter.

In 1791, when the two parties were fairly formed and openly pitted

against each other, a new element of discord had entered into politics,

which added the bitterness of class-feeling to the usual animosity of

contention. Society in the Middle and Southern States had been composed

of a few wealthy and influential families, and of a much more numerous

lower class who followed the lead of the great men. These lesser

citizens had now determined to set up for themselves, and had enlisted

in the ranks of the Anti-Federalists, who soon assumed the name and

style of Democrats, an epithet first bestowed upon them in derision, but

joyfully adopted,--one of the happiest hits in political nomenclature

ever made. _In hoc verbo vinces:_ In that word lay victory. If any one

be tempted, in this age, to repeat the stupid question, "What's in a

name?" let him be answered,--Everything: place, power, pelf, perhaps we

may add peculation. "The Barons of Virginia," chiefs of State-Rights,

who at home had been in favor of a governor and a senate for life, and

had little to fear from any lower class in their own neighborhood, saw

how much was to be gained by "taking the people into partnership," as

Herodotus phrases it, and commenced that alliance with the proletaries

of the North which has proved so profitable to Southern leaders. In New

England, the land of industry, self-control, and superior cultivation,

(for the American Parnassus was then in Connecticut, either in Hartford,

or on Litchfield Hill,) there was, comparatively speaking, no lower

class. The Eastern men, whose levelling spirit and equality of ranks

had been so much disliked and dreaded by the representatives from other

Colonies in the Ante-Revolutionary Congresses, had undergone little or

no social change by the war, and probably had at that period a more

correct idea of civil liberty and free government than any other people

on the face of the earth. General Charles Lee wrote to an English

friend, that the New-Englanders were the only Americans who really

understood the meaning of republicanism, and many years later De

Tocqueville came to nearly the same opinion:--_"C'est dans la Nouvelle

Angleterre que se sont combinées les deux ou trois idées principales,

qui aujourd'hui forment les bases de la théorie sociale des

États-Unis."_ In this region Federalism reigned supreme. The

New-Englanders desired a strong, honest, and intelligent government;

they thought, with John Adams, that "true equality is to do as you would

be done by," and agreed with Hamilton, that "a government in which every

man may aspire to any office was free enough for all purposes"; and

judging from what they saw at home, they looked upon Anti-Federalism not

only as erroneous in theory, but as disreputable in practice. "The name

of Democrat," writes a fierce old gentleman to his son, "is despised; it

is synonymous with infamy." Out of New England a greater social change

was going forward. Already appeared that impatience of all restraint

which is so alarming a symptom of our times. Every rogue, "who felt the

halter draw," wanted to know if it was for tyranny like this that the

Colonies had rebelled. "Such a monster of a government has seldom or

never been known on earth. A blessed Revolution, a blessed Revolution,

indeed!--_but farmers, mechanics, and laborers had no share in it._ We

are the asses who pay." This was the burden of the Democratic song.

But the real issue between the two parties, which underlay all their

proposed measures and professed principles, was the old struggle of

classes, modified of course by the time and the place. The Democrats

contended for perfect equality, political and social, and as little

power as possible in the central government so long as their party was

not in command. The Federalists, who held the reins, were for a strong

conservative administration, and a wholesome distinction of classes.

The two parties were not long in waiting for flags to rally around, and

fresh fields on which to fight. The French Revolution furnished both.

In its early stages it had excited a general sympathy in America; and,

indeed, so has every foreign insurrection, rebellion, or riot since, no

matter where or why it occurred, provided good use has been made of the

sacred words Revolution and Liberty. This cry has never been echoed in

this country without exciting a large body of men to mass-meetings,

dinners, and other public demonstrations, who do not stop to consider

what it means, or whether, in the immediate instance, it has any meaning

at all. John Adams said in his "Defence of American Constitutions," "Our

countrymen will never run delirious after a word or a name." Mr. Adams

was much mistaken. If, according to the Latin proverb, a word is

sufficient for a wise man, so, in another sense, it is all that is

needful for fools. But as the Revolution advanced in France towards

republicanism, the Federalists, who thought the English system, less the

king and the hereditary lords, the best scheme of government, began to

grow lukewarm. When it became evident that the New Era was to end in

bloodshed, instead of universal peace and good-will towards men,--that

the Rights of Man included murder, confiscation, and atheism,--that

the Sovereignty of the People meant the rule of King Mob, who seemed

determined to carry out to the letter Diderot's famous couplet,--

"Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre

Serrez le cou du dernier des rois,"--

then the adjective _French_ became in Federal mouths an epithet of

abhorrence and abuse; up went the flag of dear Old England, the defender

of the faith and of social order. The opposition party, on the contrary,

saw in the success of the French people, in their overthrow of kings

and nobles, a cheerful encouragement to their own struggle against the

aristocratic Federalists, and would allow no sanguinary irregularities

to divert their sympathy from the great Democratic triumph abroad. The

gay folds of the tricolor which floated over them seemed to shed upon

their heads a mild influence of that Gallic madness that led them into

absurdities we could not now believe, were they not on record. The

fashions, sartorial and social, of the French were affected; amiable

Yankees called each other _citizen_, invented the feminine _citess_,

and proposed changing our old calendar for the Ventose and Fructidor

arrangement of the one and indivisible republic. (We wish they had

adopted their admirable system of weights and measures.) Divines are

said to have offered up thanks to the Supreme Being for the success of

the good _Sans-culottes_. At all events, their victories were celebrated

by civic festivals and the discharge of cannon; the English flag was

burned as a sacrifice to the Goddess of Liberty; a French frigate took

a prize off the Capes of the Delaware, and sent her in to Philadelphia;

thousands of the populace crowded the wharves, and, when the British

colors were seen reversed, and the French flying over them, burst into

exulting hurras. When a report came that the Duke of York was a prisoner

and shown in a cage in Paris, all the bells of Philadelphia rang peals

of joy for the downfall of tyrants. Here is the story of a civic _fête_

given at Reading, in Massachusetts, which we extract from a newspaper of

the time as a specimen of the Gallo-Yankee absurdities perpetrated by

our grandfathers:--

"The day was ushered in by the ringing of the bells, and a salute of

fifteen discharges from a field-piece. The American flag waved in the

wind, and the flag of France over the British in inverted order. At noon

a large number of respectable citizens assembled at Citizen Raynor's,

and partook of an elegant entertainment. After dinner, Captain Emerson's

military company in uniform assembled and escorted the citizens to the

meeting-house, where an address pertinent to the occasion was delivered

by the Rev. Citizen Prentiss, and united prayers and praises were

offered to God, and several hymns and anthems were well sung; after

which they returned in procession to Citizen Raynor's, where three

farmers, with their frocks and utensils, and with a tree on their

shoulders, were escorted by the military company formed in a hollow

square to the Common, where the tree was planted in form, as an emblem

of freedom, and the Marseillaise Hymn was sung by a choir within a

circle round the tree. Major Boardman, by request, superintended the

business of the day, and directed the manoeuvres."

In the Gallic jargon then fashionable, England was "an insular Bastille

of slaves," and New England "the Vendée of America." On the other side,

the Federalists returned cheer for cheer,--looked with true British

contempt on the warlike struggles of the restless Frenchman,--chuckled

over the disasters which befell "his little popgun fleets,"--and damned

the Democrats for a pack of poor, dirty, blasphemous cutthroats. Hate

one another was the order of the day. The religious element, which

always exasperates dissension, was present. French Democrats had set

up the Goddess of Reason (in private life Mme. Momoro) as an object of

worship; American Democrats were accused of making Tom Paine's "Age of

Reason" their Bible; "Atheist" and "Infidel" were added to the epithets

which the Federalists discharged at their foes. So fierce and so general

was the quarrel on this European ground, that a distinguished foreigner,

then travelling in this country, said that he saw many French and

English, but scarcely ever met with an American. Weld, a more humble

tourist, put into his book, that in Norfolk, Virginia, he found half the

town ready to fight the other half on the French question. Meanwhile,

both French and English treated us with ill-disguised contempt,

and inflicted open outrages upon our commerce. But it made little

difference. One faction was willing to be kicked by England; and the

other took a pleasure in being _souffleté_ by France. The rival flags

were kept flying until the close of the war of 1812.

An outbreak of Democratic fury bordering upon treason took place, when

Senator Mason of Virginia violated the oath of secrecy, and sent a

copy of Jay's treaty with England to the "Aurora." Meetings passed

condemnatory resolutions expressed in no mild language. Jay was "a

slave, a traitor, a coward, who had bartered his country's liberties for

British gold." Mobs burned Jay in effigy, and pelted Alexander Hamilton.

At a public meeting in Philadelphia, Mr. Blair threw the treaty to the

crowd, and advised them to kick it to hell. They carried it on a pole

in procession, and burned it before the English minister's house. A

Democratic society in Richmond, Virginia, full of the true modern South

Carolina "sound and fury," gave public notice, that, if the treaty

entered into by "that damned arch traitor, John Jay, with the British

tyrant should be ratified, a petition will be presented to the next

General Assembly of Virginia praying that the said State may recede

from the Union, and be left under the government and protection of

one hundred thousand free and independent Virginians!" A meeting at

Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, resolved, "that it was weary of the tardiness

of Congress in not going to war with England, and that they were _almost

ready_ to wish for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France

for a short space, in order to punish the miscreants who enervate and

disgrace the government." Mr. Jefferson's opinion of the treaty is well

known from his rhetorical letter to Rutledge, which, in two or three

lines, contains the adjectives, _unnecessary, impolitic, dangerous,

dishonorable, disadvantageous, humiliating, disgraceful, improper,

monarchical, impeachable_. The Mazzei letter, written not long after the

ratification, displays the same bitter feeling.

The Federalists had a powerful ally in William Cobbett, who signed

himself Peter Porcupine, adopting for his literary _alias_ a nickname

bestowed by his enemies. This remarkable writer, who, like Paine,

figured in the political conflicts of two nations, must have come into

the world bristling with pugnacity. A more thorough game-cock never

crowed in the pit. He had been a private in the English army, came

to the United States about 1790, and taught French to Americans, and

English to Frenchmen, (to Talleyrand among others,) until 1794, when

the dogmatic Dr. Priestley arrived here, fresh from the scene of his

persecutions. The Doctor losing no time in laying his case before the

American public, Cobbett answered his publication, ridiculing it and the

Doctor's political career in a pamphlet which became immediately popular

with the Federalists. From that time until his departure for England, in

1800, Cobbett's pen was never idle. His "Little Plain English in Favor

of Mr. Jay's Treaty" was altogether the best thing published on that

side of the question. Cobbett had more than one point of resemblance to

Paine, the object of his early invective, but later of his unqualified

admiration. These two men were the best English pamphleteers of their

day. In shrewdness, in practical sense, Cobbett was fully Paine's equal.

He was as coarse and as pithy in expression, but with more wit, a better

education, more complete command of language, and a greater variety of

resources. Cobbett was a quicker and a harder hitter than Paine. His

personal courage gave him a great advantage in his warfaring life. In

1796, in the hottest of the French and English fight, the well-known

Porcupine opened a shop in Philadelphia. He filled his show-window with

all the prints of English kings, nobles, and generals he could collect,

and "then," he says, "I took down the shutters, and waited."

Party-feeling reached the boiling-point when Washington retired to Mount

Vernon. Mr. Adams, his successor, had none of that divinity which

hedged the Father of his Country to protect him. Under the former

administration, he had been, as Senator Grayson humorously called him,

"his superfluous Excellency," and out of the direct line of fire. He

could easily look down upon such melancholy squibs as Freneau's "Daddy

Vice" and "Duke of Braintree." But when raised above every other head by

his high office, he became a mark for the most bitter personal attacks.

Mr. Adams unfortunately thought too much about himself to be the

successful chief of a party. He allowed his warm feelings to divert

him from the main object and end of his followers. He was jealous of

Hamilton,--unwilling, in fact, to seem to be governed by the opinion of

any man, and half inclined to look for a reëlection outside of his own

party. Hamilton, the soul of the Federalists, mistrusted and disliked

Mr. Adams, and made the sad mistake of publishing his mistrust and

dislike. It must be confessed that the gentlemen who directed the

Administration party were no match as tacticians for such file-leaders

as Jefferson and Burr. Many of their pet measures were ill-judged, to

say the least. The provisional army furnished a fertile theme for fierce

declamation. The black cockade became the badge of the supporters of

government, so that in the streets one could tell at a glance whether

friend or foe was approaching. The Alien and Sedition Laws caused much

bitter feeling and did great damage to the Federalists. To read these

acts and the trials under them now excites somewhat of the feeling

with which we look upon some strange and clumsy engine of torture in a

mediaeval museum. How the temper of this people and their endurance of

legal inflictions have changed since then! There was Matthew Lyon, a

noted Democrat of Irish origin, who had published a letter charging the

President with "ridiculous pomp, idle parade, and selfish avarice." He

was found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to four months' imprisonment

and a fine of one thousand dollars. There was Cooper, an Englishman,

who fared equally ill for saying or writing that the President did not

possess sufficient capacity to fulfil the duties of his office. What

should we think of the sanity of James Buchanan, should he prosecute

and obtain a conviction against some Black-Republican Luther Baldwin of

1859, for wishing that the wad of a cannon, fired in his honor, might

strike an unmentionable part of his august person? What should we say,

if Horace Greeley were to be arrested on a warrant issued by the Supreme

Court of New York for a libel on Louis Napoleon, as was William Cobbett

by Judge McKean of Pennsylvania for a libel on the King of Spain?

Fiercer and more bitter waxed party-discord, and both sides did ample

injustice to one another. Mr. Jefferson wrote, that men who had been

intimate all their lives would cross the street and look the other way,

lest they should be obliged to touch their hats. And Gouverneur Morris

gives us a capital idea of the state of feeling when he says that a

looker-on, who took no part in affairs, felt like a sober man at a

dinner when the rest of the company were drunk. Civil war was often

talked of, and the threat of secession, which has become the rhetorical

staple of the South, produced solely for exportation to the North, to be

used there in manufacturing pro-slavery votes out of the timidity of men

of large means and little courage or perspicacity, was then freely

made by both divisions of the Union. Had we been of French or

Spanish descent, there would have been barricades, _coup-d'états,

pronunciamentos_; but the English race know better how to treat the

body-politic. They never apply the knife except for the most desperate

operations. But where hard words were so plenty, blows could not fail.

Duels were frequent, cudgellings not uncommon,--although as yet the

Senate-Chamber had not been selected as the fittest scene for the use

of the bludgeon. It is true that molasses-and-water was the beverage

allowed by Congress in those simple times, and that charged to

stationery.

What terrible fellows our ancestors were for calling

names,--particularly the gentlemen of the press! If they had been

natives of the Island of Frozen Sounds, along the shore of which

Pantagruel and Panurge coasted, they would have stood up to their

chins in scurrilous epithets. The comical sketch of their rhetoric in

"Salmagundi" is literally true:--"Every day have these slangwhangers

made furious attacks on each other and upon their respective adherents,

discharging their heavy artillery, consisting of large sheets loaded

with scoundrel, villain, liar, rascal, numskull, nincompoop, dunderhead,

wiseacre, blockhead, jackass." As single words were not always explosive

enough to make a report equal to their feelings, they had recourse to

compounds;--"pert and prating popinjay," "hackneyed gutscraper," "maggot

of corruption," "toad on a dung-heap," "snivelling sophisticating

hound," are a few of the chain-shot which strike our eyes in turning

over the yellow faded files. They are all quiet now, those eager,

snarling editors of fifty years since, and mostly forgotten. Even the

ink which records their spiteful abuse is fading away;--

"Dunne no more the halter dreads,

The torrent of his lies to check,

No gallows Cheetham's dreams invades,

Nor lours o'er Holt's devoted neck."

Emerson's saying, that involuntarily we read history as superior beings,

is never so true as when we read history before it has been worked

up for the public, in the raw material of letters, pamphlets, and

newspapers. Feverish paragraphs, which once excited the enthusiasm of

one party and the fiercest opposition of the other, lie before us as

dead and as unmeaning as an Egyptian mummy. The passion which once

gave them life is gone. The objects which the writers considered

all-important we perceive to have been of no real significance even in

their day. We read on with a good-natured pity, akin to the feeling

which the gods of Epicurus might be supposed to experience when they

looked down upon foolish mortals,--and when we shut the book, go out

into our own world to fret, fume, and wrangle over things equally

transitory and frivolous.

When it became evident that the Administration party ran the risk of

being beaten in the election of 1800, their trumpeters sounded the

wildest notes of alarm. "People! how long will you remain blind? Awake!

be up and doing! If Mr. Jefferson is elected, the equal representation

of the small States in the Senate will be destroyed, the funding

system swept away, the navy abolished, all commerce and foreign trade

prohibited, and the fruits of the soil left to rot on the hands of the

farmer. The taxes will all fall on the landed interest, all the churches

will be overturned, none but Frenchmen employed by government, and

the monstrous system of liberty and equality, with all its horrid

consequences, as experienced in France and St. Domingo, will inevitably

be introduced." Thus they shouted, and no doubt many of the shouters

sincerely believed it all. Nevertheless, and in spite of these alarums,

the Revolution of '99, as Mr. Jefferson liked to call it, took place

without bloodshed, and in 1801 that gentleman mounted the throne.

After this struggle was over, the Federalists, some from conviction and

some from disgust at being beaten, gave up the country as lost. Worthy

New-Englanders, like Cabot, Fisher Ames, and Wolcott, had no longer

hope. They sank into the position of mere grumblers, with one leading

principle,--admiration of England, and a willingness to submit to any

insults which England in her haughtiness might please to inflict. "We

are sure," says the "Boston Democrat," "that George III. would find more

desperately devoted subjects in New England than in any part of his

dominions." The Democrats, of course, clung to their motto, "Whatever

is in France is right," and even accepted the arbitrary measures of

Bonaparte at home as a mere change of system, and abroad as forced upon

him by British pirates. It is curious to read the high Federalist papers

in the first days of their sorrow. In their contradictory fault-finding

sulkiness, they give some color of truth to Mr. Jefferson's accusation,

that the Federal leaders were seeking to establish a monarchy,--a charge

well known to be unfounded, as Washington said at the time. "What is the

use of celebrating the Fourth of July?" they asked. "Freedom is a stale,

narcotic topic. The Declaration of Independence a useless, if not an

odious libel upon a friendly nation connected with us by the silken band

of amity." Fenno, in his paper, said the Declaration was "a placard

of rebellion, a feeble production, in which the spirit of rebellion

prevailed over the love of order." Dennie, in the "Portfolio,"

anticipating Mr. Choate, called it "an incoherent accumulation of

indigestible and impracticable political dogmas, dangerous to the

peace of the world, and seditious in its local tendency, and, as a

composition, equally at variance with the laws of construction and the

laws of regular government." The Federalist opinion of the principles

of the Administration party was avowed with equal frankness in their

papers. "A democracy is the most absurd constitution, productive of

anarchy and mischief, which must always happen when the government of a

nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, harebrained vulgar. All

the miseries of men for a long series of years grew out of that infamous

mode of polity, a democracy; which is to be reckoned to be only the

corruption and degeneracy of a republic, and not to be ranked among the

legitimate forms of government. If it be not a legitimate government, we

owe it no allegiance. He is a blind man who does not see this truth; he

is a base man who will not assert it. Democratic power is tyranny, in

the principle, the beginning, the progress, and the end. It is on its

trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy."

These and other foolish excerpts were kept before their readers by the

"Aurora" and "Boston Chronicle," leading Democratic organs, and

served to sweeten their triumph and to seal the fate of the unlucky

Federalists.

The difference between the tone of these extracts and that of our

present journalists, when they touch upon the abstract principles of

government, may indicate to us the firm hold which the Democratic theory

has taken of our people. As that conquering party marched onward, the

opposition was forced to follow after, and to encamp upon the ground

their powerful enemy left behind him. To-day when we see gentlemen who

consider themselves Conservatives in the ranks of the Democrats, we may

suppose that the tour of the political circle is nearly completed.

A momentary lull had followed the storm of the election, when Mr.

Jefferson boldly threw down another "bone for the Federalists to gnaw."

He wrote to Thomas Paine, inviting him to America, and offering him a

passage home in a national vessel. "You will, in general, find us," he

added, "returned to sentiments worthy of former times; in these it will

be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as much effect as any

man living. That you may live long, to continue your useful labors and

reap the reward in the thankfulness of nations, is my sincere prayer.

Accept the assurance of my high esteem and affectionate attachment." Mr.

Jefferson went even farther. He openly announced his intention of giving

Paine an office, if there were one in his gift suitable for him. Now,

although Paine had been absent for many years, he had not been forgotten

by the Americans. The echo of the noise he made in England reached our

shores; and English echoes were more attentively listened to then even

than at present. His "Rights of Man" had been much read in this country.

Indeed, it was asserted, and upon pretty good authority, that Jefferson

himself, when Secretary of State, had advised and encouraged the

publication of an American edition as an antidote to the "Davila" of Mr.

Adams. Even the "Age of Reason" had obtained an immense circulation from

the great reputation of the author. It reminded the Rev. Mr. Goodrich,

and other Orthodox New-Englanders, of Milton's description of Death,--

"Black it stood as night,

Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell."

Yet numbers of people, nothing frightened, would buy and read. "No

work," Dr. Francis tells us, "had a demand for readers comparable to

that of Paine. The 'Age of Reason,' on its first appearance in New York,

was printed as an orthodox book by orthodox publishers,--doubtless

deceived," the charitable Doctor adds, "by the vast renown which the

author of 'Common Sense' had obtained, and _by the prospects of sale_."

Paine's position in the French Convention, his long imprisonment,

poverty, slovenly habits, and fondness for drink, were all well

known and well talked over. William Cobbett, for one, never lost an

opportunity of dressing up Paine as a filthy monster. He wrote his

life for the sake of doing it more thoroughly. The following extract,

probably much relished at the time, will give some idea of the tone and

temper of this performance:--

"How Tom gets a living now, or what brothel he inhabits, I know not, nor

does it much signify. He has done all the mischief he can do in this

world; and whether his carcass is at last to be suffered to rot on

the earth, or to be dried in the air, is of very little consequence.

Whenever or wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow

nor compassion; no friendly hand will close his eyes, not a groan will

be uttered, not a tear will be shed. Like Judas, he will be remembered

by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant,

treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by the single monosyllable of

Paine."

Cobbett also wrote an _ante-mortem_ epitaph, a fit inscription for the

life he had composed. It ends thus:--

"He is crammed in a dungeon and preaches up Reason;

Blasphemes the Almighty, lives in filth like a hog;

Is abandoned in death, and interred like a dog."

This brutal passage does not exaggerate the opinion of Paine's character

held by the good people of America. He was an object of horror

to them,--a rebel against government and against God,--a type of

Jacobinism, a type of Infidelity, and, with what seemed to them, no

doubt, a beautiful consistency, a type of all that was abandoned and

vile. Thomas Paine, a Massachusetts poet of _ci-devant_ celebrity,

petitioned the General Court for permission to call himself Robert Treat

Paine, on the ground that he had no Christian name. In New England,

Christianity and Federalism were looked upon as intimately connected,

and Democracy as a wicked thing, born of Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, and

the Father of Lies. In this Trinity of Evil, Thomas Paine stood first.

During the struggle for the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson had been accused,

from every Federal stump, of the two unpardonable sins to Yankee

minds,--namely, that his notes could be bought for five shillings in the

pound, and that he did not believe in Revolution. Since his election, he

had been daily reminded of his religious short-comings by keen newspaper

attacks. He knew that he strengthened the hands of his enemies by

inviting home the Arch-Infidel. We are and were then a religious people,

in spite of the declaration in Mr. Adams's Tripolitan treaty that the

government of the United States was "not in any sense founded on the

Christian religion," and Paine could find few admirers in any class. Mr.

Jefferson, too, was well aware that the old man was broken, that the

fire had gone out of him, and that his presence in the United States

could be of no use whatever to the party. But he thought that Paine's

services in the Revolution had earned for him an asylum, and their old

acquaintance made him hasten to offer it. We think that the invitation

to Paine was one of the manliest acts of Jefferson's life.

When the matter became public, there arose a long, loud cry of abuse,

which rang from Massachusetts Bay to Washington City. Anarchy,

confusion, and the downfall of not only church, but state, were

declared to be the unavoidable consequences of Paine's return to our

shores,--that impious apostate! that Benedict Arnold, once useful, and

then a traitor! The "United States Gazette" had ten leaders on the text

of Tom Paine and Jefferson, "whose love of liberty was neither more

rational, generous, or social, than that of the wolf or the tiger." The

"New England Palladium" fairly shrieked:--"What! invite to the United

States that lying, drunken, brutal infidel, who rejoices in the

opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation,

bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights?" Why, even

the French called him the English orang-outang! He was exposed with a

monkey and a bear in a cage in Paris. In 1792, he was forbidden to haunt

the White-Bear Tavern in London. He subsisted for eight years on the

charity of booksellers, who employed him in the morning to correct

proofs; in the afternoon he was too drunk. He lodged in a cellar. He

helped the _poissardes_ to clean fish and open oysters. He lived in

misery, filth, and contempt. Not until Livingston went to France did any

respectable American call upon him. Livingston's attentions to him not

only astonished, but disgusted the First Consul, and gave him a very

mean opinion of Livingston's talents. The critical Mr. Dennie caused his

"Portfolio" to give forth this solemn strain: "If, during the present

season of national abasement, infatuation, folly, and vice, any portent

could surprise, sober men would be utterly confounded by an article

current in all our newspapers, that the loathsome Thomas Paine, a

drunken atheist and the scavenger of faction, is invited to return in

a national ship to America by the first magistrate of a free people.

A measure so enormously preposterous we cannot yet believe has been

adopted, and it would demand firmer nerves than those possessed by Mr.

Jefferson to hazard such an insult to the moral sense of the nation. If

that rebel rascal should come to preach from his Bible to our populace,

it would be time for every honest and insulted man of dignity to flee to

some Zoar as from another Sodom, to shake off the very dust of his feet

and to abandon America." "He is coming," wrote Noah Webster, ("the

mender and murderer of English,") "to publish in America the third part

of the 'Age of Reason.'" And the epigrammatists, such as they were,

tried their goose-quills on the subject:--

"He passed his forces in review,

Smith, Cheetham, Jones, Duane:

'Dull rascals,--these will never do,'

Quoth he,--'I'll send for Paine.'

"Then from his darling den in France

To tempt the wretch to come,

He made Tom's brain with flattery dance

And took the tax from rum."

The Administration editors held their tongues;--the religious side of

the question was too strong for them.

Paine was unable to accept the passage offered him in the frigate, and

returned in a merchant-vessel in the autumn of the next year (1802).

The excitement had not subsided. Early in October, the "Philadelphia

Gazette" announced that "a kind of tumultuous sensation was produced in

the city yesterday evening in consequence of the arrival of the ship

Benjamin Franklin from Havre. It was believed, for a few moments, that

the carcass of Thomas Paine was on board, and several individuals were

seen disgracing themselves by an impious joy. It was finally understood

that Paine had missed his passage by this vessel and was to sail in a

ship to New York. Under the New York news-head we perceive a vessel from

Havre reported. Infidels! hail the arrival of your high-priest!"

A few days later, the infidel Tom Paine, otherwise Mr. Paine, arrived

safely at Baltimore and proceeded thence to Washington. The journalists

gave tongue at once: "Fire! Age of Reason! Look at his nose! He drank

all the brandy in Baltimore in nine days! What a dirty fellow! Invited

home by a brother Tom! Let Jefferson and his blasphemous crony dangle

from the same gallows." The booksellers, quietly mindful of the

opportunity, got out an edition of his works in two volumes.

As soon as he was fairly on shore, Paine took sides with his host, and

commenced writing "Letters to the People of the United States." He

announced in them that he was a genuine Federalist,--not one of that

disguised faction which had arisen in America, and which, losing sight

of first principles, had begun to contemplate the people as hereditary

property: No wonder that the author of the "Rights of Man" was attacked

by this faction: His arrival was to them like the sight of water to

canine madness: He served them for a standing dish of abuse: The leaders

during the Reign of Terror in France and during the late despotism

in America were the same men in character; for how else was it to be

accounted for that he was persecuted by both at the same time? In every

part of the Union this faction was in the agonies of death, and, in

proportion as its fate approached, gnashed its teeth and struggled: He

should lose half his greatness when they ceased to lie. Mr. Adams, as

the late chief of this faction, met with harsh and derisive treatment in

these letters, and did not attempt to conceal his irritation in his own

later correspondence.

Paine's few defenders tried to back him with weak paragraphs in the

daily papers: His great talents, his generous services, "in spite of a

few indiscreet writings about religion," should make him an object of

interest and respect. The "Aurora's" own correspondent sent to his paper

a favorable sketch of Paine's appearance, manner, and conversation:

He was "proud to find a man whom he had admired free from the

contaminations of debauchery and the habits of inebriety which have been

so grossly and falsely sent abroad concerning him." But the enemy had

ten guns to Paine's one, and served them with all the fierceness of

party-hate. A shower of abusive missiles rattled incessantly about his

ears. However thick-skinned a man may be, and protected over all by the

_oes triplex_ of self-sufficiency, he cannot escape being wounded by

furious and incessant attacks. Paine felt keenly the neglect of his

former friends, who avoided him, when they did not openly cut him. Mr.

Jefferson, it is true, asked him to dinners, and invited the British

minister to meet him; at least, the indignant Anglo-Federal editors

said so. Perhaps he offered him an office. If he did, Paine refused it,

preferring "to serve as a disinterested volunteer." Poor old man! his

services were no longer of much use to anybody. The current of American

events had swept past him, leaving him stranded, a broken fragment of a

revolutionary wreck.

When the nine days of wonder had expired in Washington, and the

inhabitants had grown tired of staring at Paine and of pelting him with

abuse, he betook himself to New York. On his way thither, he met with an

adventure which shows the kind of martyrdom suffered by this political

and religious heretic. He had stopped at Bordentown, in New Jersey, to

look at a small place he owned there, and to visit an old friend and

correspondent, Colonel Kirkbride. When he departed, the Colonel drove

him over to Trenton to take the stage-coach. But in Trenton the Federal

and Religious party had the upperhand, and when Paine applied at the

booking-office for a seat to New York the agent refused to sell him one.

Moreover, a crowd collected about his lodgings, who groaned dismally

when he drove away with his friend, while a band of musicians, provided

for the occasion, played the Rogue's March.

Among the editorial celebrities of 1803, James Cheetham, in New York,

was almost as famous as Duane of the "Aurora." Cheetham, like many of

his contemporaries, Gray, Carpenter, Callender, and Duane himself, was

a British subject. He was a hatter in his native land; but a turn for

politics ruined his business and made expatriation convenient. In the

United States, he had become the editor of the "American Citizen," and

was at that time busily engaged in attacking the Federalists and Burr's

"Little Band," for their supposed attempt to elect Mr. Burr in the place

of Mr. Jefferson. To Cheetham, accordingly, Paine wrote, requesting him

to engage lodgings at Lovett's, afterwards the City Hotel. He sent for

Cheetham, on the evening of his arrival. The journalist obeyed the

summons immediately. This was the first interview between Paine and the

man who was to hang, draw, and quarter his memory in a biography. This

libellous performance was written shortly after Paine's death. It was

intended as a peace-offering to the English government. The ex-hatter

had made up his mind to return home, and he wished to prove the

sincerity of his conversion from radicalism by trampling on the remains

of its high-priest. So long as Cheetham remained in good standing with

the Democrats, Paine and he were fast friends; but when he became

heretical and schismatic on the Embargo question, some three or four

years later, and was formally read out of the party, Paine laid the rod

across his back with all his remaining strength. He had vigor enough

left, it seems, to make the "Citizen" smart, for Cheetham cuts and stabs

with a spite which shows that the work was as agreeable to his feelings

as useful to his plans. His reminiscences must be read _multis cum

granis_.

In New York Paine enjoyed the same kind of second-rate ovation as in

Washington. A great number of persons called upon him, but mostly of the

laboring class of emigrants, who had heard of the "Rights of Man,"

and, feeling disposed to claim as many rights as possible in their new

country, looked with reverence upon the inventor of the system.

The Democratic leaders, with one or two exceptions, avoided Paine.

Respectabilities shunned him as a contamination. Grant Thorburn was

suspended from church-membership for shaking hands with him. To the boys

he was an object of curious attention; his nose was the burden of their

songs.

Cheetham carried round a subscription-list for a public dinner. Sixty or

seventy of Paine's admirers attended. It went off brilliantly, and was

duly reported in the "American Citizen." Then the effervescence of New

York curiosity subsided; Paine became an old story. He left Lovett's

Hotel for humble lodgings in the house of a free-thinking farrier.

Thenceforward the tale of his life is soon told. He went rarely to his

farm at New Rochelle; he disliked the country and the trouble of keeping

house; and a bullet which whizzed through his window one Christmas Eve,

narrowly missing his head, did not add agreeable associations to the

place. In the city he moved his quarters from one low boarding-house to

another, and generally managed to quarrel with the blacksmiths, bakers,

and butchers, his landlords. Unable to enjoy society suited to his

abilities and large experience of life, Paine called in low company to

help him bear the burden of existence. To the men who surrounded him,

his opinions on all subjects were conclusive, and his shrewd sayings

revelations. Among these respectful listeners, he had to fear neither

incredulity nor disputation. Like his friend Elihu Palmer, and the

celebrated Dr. Priestley, Paine would not tolerate contradiction.

To differ with him was, in his eyes, simply to be deficient in

understanding. He was like the French lady who naïvely told Dr.

Franklin, "_Je ne trouve que moi qui aie toujours raison_." Professing

to adore Reason, he was angry, if anybody reasoned with him. But herein

he was no exception to the general rule,--that we find no persons so

intolerant and illiberal as men professing liberal principles.

His occupation and amusement was to write for the papers articles of

a somewhat caustic and personal nature. Whatever subject occupied the

public mind interested Paine and provoked his remarks. He was bitter in

his attacks upon the Federalists and Burrites for attempting to jockey

Jefferson out of the Presidency. Later, when Burr was acquitted of

treason, Paine found fault with Chief-Justice Marshall for his rulings

during the trial, and gave him notice, that he (Marshall) was "a

suspected character." He also requested Dr. Mitchell, then United States

Senator for New York, to propose an amendment to the Constitution,

authorizing the President to remove a judge, on the address of a

majority of both houses of Congress, for reasonable cause, when

sufficient grounds for impeachment might not exist. General Miranda's

filibustering expedition against Caracas, a greater failure even than

the Lopez raid on Cuba, furnished Paine with a theme. He wrote a

sensible paper on the yellow fever, by request of Jefferson, and one or

two on his iron bridge. He was ardent in the defence of Mr. Jefferson's

pet scheme of a gun-boat navy, and ridiculed the idea of fortifying

New York. "The cheapest way," he said, "to fortify New York will be to

banish the scoundrels that infest it." The inhabitants of that city

would do well, if they could find an engineer to fortify their island in

this way.

When the Pennsylvanians called a Convention in 1805 to amend the

Constitution of the State, Paine addressed them at some length, giving

them a summary of his views on Government, Constitutions, and Charters.

The Creoles of Louisiana sent to Congress a memorial of their "rights,"

in which they included the importation of African slaves. Paine was

indignant at this perversion of his favorite specific for all political

ailments, and took the Franco-Americans soundly to task:--"How dare you

put up a petition to Heaven for such a power, without fearing to be

struck from the earth by its justice?" It is manifest that Paine could

not be a Democrat in good standing now. Mingled with these graver

topics were side-blows at the emissary Cullen, _alias_ Carpenter, an

Englishman, who edited a Federal paper,--replies to Cheetham, reprimands

to Cheetham, and threats to prosecute Cheetham for lying, "unless he

makes a public apology,"--and three letters to Governor Morgan Lewis,

who had incensed Paine by bringing an action for political libel against

a Mr. Thomas Farmer, laying his damages at one hundred thousand dollars.

Among his last productions were two memorials to the House of

Representatives. One can see in these papers that old age had weakened

his mind, and that harsh treatment had soured his feelings towards the

land of his adoption.

"Ma république à jamais grande et libre,

Cette terre d'amour et d'égalité,"

no longer seemed to him as lovely as when he composed these verses for

a Fourth-of-July dinner in Paris. He claimed compensation for his

services in Colonel Laurens's mission to France in 1781. For his works

he asked no reward. "All the civilized world knows," he writes, "I have

been of great service to the United States, and have generously given

away talents that would have made me a fortune. The country has been

benefited, and I make myself happy in the knowledge of it. It is,

however, proper for me to add, that the mere independence of America,

were it to have been followed by a system of government modelled after

the corrupt system of the English government, would not have interested

me with the unabated ardor it did." "It will be convenient to me to know

what Congress will decide on, because it will determine me, whether,

after so many years of generous services and that in the most perilous

times, and after seventy years of age, I shall continue in this country,

or offer my services to some other country. It will not be to England,

unless there should be a revolution."

The memorial was referred to the Committee on Claims. When Paine heard

of its fate, he addressed an indignant letter to the Speaker of the

House. "I know not who the Committee on Claims are; but if they were

men of younger standing than 'the times that tried men's souls,' and

consequently too young to know what the condition of the country was

at the time I published 'Common Sense,'--for I do not believe that

independence would have been declared, had it not been for the effect of

that work,--they are not capable of judging of the whole of the services

of Thomas Paine. If my memorial was referred to the Committee on Claims

for the purpose of losing it, it is unmanly policy. After so many years

of service, my heart grows cold towards America."

His heart was soon to grow cold to all the world. In the spring of 1809,

it became evident to Paine's attendants that his end was approaching. As

death drew near, the memories of early youth arose vividly in his

mind. He wished to be buried in the cemetery of the Quakers, in whose

principles his father had educated him. He sent for a leading member

of the sect to ask a resting-place for his body in their ground. The

request was refused.

When the news got abroad that the Arch-Infidel was dying, foolish old

women and kindred clergymen, who "knew no way to bring home a wandering

sheep but by worrying him to death," gathered together about his bed.

Even his physician joined in the hue-and-cry. It was a scene of the

Inquisition adapted to North America,--a Protestant _auto da fé_. The

victim lay helpless before his persecutors; the agonies of disease

supplied the place of rack and fagot. But nothing like a recantation

could be wrung from him. And so his tormentors left him alone to die,

and his freethinking smiths and cobblers rejoiced over his fidelity to

the cause.

He was buried on his farm at New Rochelle, according to his latest

wishes. "Thomas Paine. Author of 'Common Sense,'" the epitaph he had

fixed upon, was carved upon his tomb. A better one exists from an

unknown hand, which tells, in a jesting way, the secret of the sorrows

of his later life:--

"Here lies Tom Paine, who wrote in liberty's defence,

And in his 'Age of Reason' lost his 'Common Sense.'"

Ten years after, William Cobbett, who had left England in a fit of

political disgust and had settled himself on Long Island to raise

hogs and ruta-bagas, resolved to go home again. Cobbett had become an

admirer, almost a disciple of Paine. The "Constitution-grinder" of '96

was now "a truly great man, a truly philosophical politician, a mind as

far superior to Pitt and Burke as the light of a flambeau is superior to

that of a rush-light." Above all, Paine had been Cobbett's teacher on

financial questions. In 1803, Cobbett read his "Decline and Fall of the

English System," and then "saw the whole matter in its true light; and

neither pamphleteers nor speech-makers were after that able to raise a

momentary puzzle in his mind." Perhaps Cobbett thought he might excite a

sensation in England and rally about him the followers of Paine, or it

may be that he wished to repair the gross injustice he had done him by

some open act of adherence; at all events, he exhumed Paine's body and

took the bones home with him in 1819, with the avowed intention of

erecting a magnificent monument to his memory by subscription. In the

same manner, about two thousand two hundred and fifty years ago, the

bones of Theseus, the mythical hero of Democracy, were brought from

Skyros to Athens by some Attic [Greek: Kobbetaes]. The description

of the arrival in England we quote from a Liverpool journal of the

day:--"When his last trunk was opened at the Custom-House, Cobbett

observed to the surrounding spectators, who had assembled in great

numbers,--'Here are the bones of the late Thomas Paine.' This

declaration excited a visible sensation, and the crowd pressed forward

to see the contents of the package. Cobbett remarked,--'Great, indeed,

must that man have been whose very bones attract such attention!' The

officer took up the coffin-plate inscribed, 'Thomas Paine, Aged 72. Died

January 8, 1809,' and, having lifted up several of the bones, replaced

the whole and passed them. They have since been forwarded from this town

to London."

At a public dinner given to Cobbett in Liverpool, Paine was toasted as

"the Noble of Nature, the Child of the Lower Orders"; but the monument

was never raised, and no one knows where his bones found their last

resting-place.

Cobbett himself gained nothing by this resurrectionist performance,

except an additional couplet in the party-songs of the day:--

"Let Cobbett of borough-corruption complain,

And go to the De'il with the bones of Tom Paine."

The two were classed together by English Conservatives, as "pestilent

fellows" and "promoters of sedition."

It is now fifty years since Paine died; but the _nil de mortuis_ is no

rule in his case. The evil associations of his later days have pursued

him beyond the grave. A small and threadbare sect of "liberals," as they

call themselves,--men in whom want of skill, industry, and thrift has

produced the usual results,--have erected an altar to Thomas Paine,

and, on the anniversary of his birth, go through with a pointless

celebration, which passes unnoticed, unless in an out-of-the-way corner

of some newspaper. In this class of persons, irreligion is a mere form

of discontent. They have no other reason to give for the faith which

is not in them. They like to ascribe their want of success in life to

something out of joint in the thoughts and customs of society, rather

than to their own shortcomings or incapacity. In France, such persons

would be Socialists and _Rouges_; in this country, where the better

classes only have any reason to rebel, they cannot well conspire against

government, but attack religion instead, and pride themselves on their

exemption from prejudice. The "Age of Reason" is their manual. Its bold,

clear, simple statements they can understand; its shallowness they

are too ignorant to perceive; its coarseness is in unison with their

manners. Thus the author has become the Apostle of Free-thinking

tinkers and the Patron Saint of unwashed Infidelity.

To this generation at large, he is only an indistinct shadow,--a faint

reminiscence of a red nose,--an ill-flavored name, redolent of brandy

and of brimstone, his beverage in life and his well-earned punishment

in eternity, which suggests to the serious mind dirt, drunkenness, and

hopeless damnation. Mere worldlings call him "Tom Paine," in a tone

which combines derision and contempt. A bust of him, by Jarvis, in the

possession of the New York Historical Society, is kept under lock and

key, because it was defaced and defiled by visitors, while a dozen

other plaster worthies that decorate the institution remained intact.

Nevertheless, we suspect that most of our readers, if they cannot date

back to the first decade of the century, will find, when they sift their

information, that they have only a speaking acquaintance with Thomas

Paine, and can give no good reason for their dislike of him.

And it is not easy for the general reader to become intimate with him.

He will find him, of course, in Biographical Dictionaries, Directories

of the City of the Great Dead, which only tell you where men lived, and

what they did to deserve a place in the volume; but as to a life of him,

strictly speaking, there is none. Oldys and Cobbett tried to flay him

alive in pamphlets; Sherwin and Clio Rickman were prejudiced friends and

published only panegyrics. All are out of print and difficult to find.

Cheetham's work is a political libel; and the attempt of Mr. Vail of

the "Beacon" to canonize him in the "Infidel's Calendar," cannot be

recommended to intelligent persons. We might expect to meet with him in

those books of lives so common with us,--collections in which a certain

number of deceased gentlemen are bound up together, so resembling each

other in feature that one might suppose the narratives ground out by

some obituary-machine and labelled afterward to suit purchasers. Even

this "sign-post biography," as the "Quarterly" calls it, Paine has

escaped. He was not a marketable commodity. There was no demand for him

in polite circles. The implacable hand of outraged orthodoxy was against

him. Hence his memory has lain in the gutter. Even his friend Joel

Barlow left him out of the "Columbiad," to the great disgust of Clio

Rickman, who thought his name should have appeared in the Fifth Book

between Washington and Franklin. Surely Barlow might have found room for

him in the following "Epic List of Heroes":--

"Wythe, Mason, Pendleton, with Henry joined,

Rush, Rodney, Langdon, friends of humankind,

Persuasive Dickinson, the farmer's boast,

Recording Thompson, pride of all the host,

Nash, Jay, the Livingstons, in council great,

Rutledge and Laurens, held the rolls of fate."

But no! Neither author nor authorling liked to have his name seen in

company with Thomas Paine. And when a curious compiler has taken him up,

he has held him at arm's length, and, after eyeing him cautiously, has

dropped him like some unclean and noxious animal.

Sixty years ago, Paine's friends used to say, that, "in spite of some

indiscreet writings on the subject of religion," he deserved the respect

and thanks of Americans for his services. We think that he deserves

something more at the present day than this absolute neglect. There is

stuff enough in him for one volume at least. His career was wonderful,

even for the age of miraculous events he lived in. In America, he was a

Revolutionary hero of the first rank, who carried letters in his pocket

from George Washington, thanking him for his services. And he managed

besides to write his radical name in large letters in the History of

England and of France. As a mere literary workman, his productions

deserve notice. In mechanics, he invented and put up the first iron

bridge of large span in England; the boldness of the attempt still

excites the admiration of engineers. He may urge, too, another claim

to our attention. In the legion of "most remarkable men" these United

States have produced or imported, only three have achieved infamy:

Arnold, Burr, and Paine. What are Paine's titles to belong to this trio

of disreputables? Only these three: he wrote the "Age of Reason"; was a

Democrat, perhaps an unusually dirty one; and drank more brandy than was

good for him. The "Age of Reason" is a shallow deistical essay, in which

the author's opinions are set forth, it is true, in a most offensive and

irreverent style. As Dr. Hopkins wrote of Ethan Allen,--

"One hand was clenched to batter noses,

While t'other scrawled 'gainst Paul and Moses."

But who reads it now? On the other hand, no one who has studied Paine's

career can deny his honesty and his disinterestedness; and every

unprejudiced reader of his works must admit not merely his great ability

in urging his opinions, but that he sincerely believed all he wrote. Let

us, then, try to forget the carbuncled nose, the snuffy waistcoat, the

unorthodox sneer. We should wipe out his later years, cut his life short

at 1796, and take Paine when he wrote "Common Sense," Paine when he

lounged at the White Bear in Piccadilly, talking over with Horne Tooke

the answer to Mr. Burke's "Reflections," and Paine, when, as "foreign

benefactor of the species," he took his seat in the famous French

Convention.

It would repay some capable author to dig him up, wash him, and show him

to the world as he was. A biography of him would embrace the history of

the struggle which established the new theory of politics in government.

He is the representative man of Democracy in both hemispheres,--a good

subject in the hands of a competent artist; and the time has arrived, we

think, when justice may be done him. As a general rule, it is yet too

soon to write the History of the United States since 1784. Half a

century has not been sufficient to wear out the bitter feeling excited

by the long struggle of Democrats and Federalists. Respectable

gentlemen, who, more pious than Aeneas, have undertaken to carry their

grandfathers' remains from the ruins of the past into the present era,

seem to be possessed with the same demon of discord that agitated the

deceased ancestors. The quarrels of the first twenty years of the

Constitution have become chronic ink-feuds in certain families. A

literary _vendetta_ is carried on to this day, and a stab with the steel

pen, or a shot from behind the safe cover of a periodical, is certain

to be received by any one of them who offers to his enemy the glorious

opportunity of a book. Where so much temper exists, impartial history is

out of the question.

Our authors, too, as a general rule, have inherited the political jargon

of the last century, and abound in "destiny of humanity," "inalienable

rights," "virtue of the sovereign people," "base and bloody despots,"

and all that sort of phrase, earnest and real enough once, but little

better than cant and twaddle now. They seem to take it for granted that

the question is settled, the rights of man accurately defined, the true

and only theory of government found,--and that he who doubts is blinded

by aristocratic prejudice or is a fool. We must say, nevertheless, that

Father Time has not yet had years enough to answer the great question of

governing which was proposed to him in 1789. Some of the developments

of our day may well make us doubt whether the last and perfect form,

or even theory, is the one we have chosen. "_Les monarchies absolues

avaient deshonoré le despotisme: prenons garde que les républiques

démocratiques ne le réhabilitent_." But Paine's part in the history of

this country after 1783 is of so small importance, that in a life of him

all such considerations may be safely waived. The democratic movement of

the last eighty years, be it a "finality," or only a phase of progress

towards a more perfect state, is the grand historical fact of modern

times, and Paine's name is intimately connected with it. One is always

ready to look with lenity on the partiality of a biographer,--whether he

urge the claims of his hero to a niche in the Valhalla of great men, or

act as the _Advocatus Diaboli_ to degrade his memory.

OF BOOKS AND THE READING THEREOF.

BEING A THIRD LETTER FROM PAUL POTTER, OF NEW YORK, IN THE CITY AND

COUNTY OF NEW YORK, ESQ., TO THE DON ROBERTO WAGONERO, OF WASHINGTON,

_olim_, BUT _nunc_ OF NOWHEREINPARTICULAR.

If any person, O my Bobus, had foretold that all these months would go

by before I should again address you, he would have exhibited prescient

talent great enough to establish twenty "mediums" in a flourishing

cabalistic business. Alas! they have been to me months of fathomless

distress, immensurate and immeasurable sorrow, and blank, blind, idiotic

indifference, even to books and friends, which, next to the nearest and

dearest, are the world's most priceless possession. But now that I have

a little thrown off the stupor, now that kindly Time has a little balmed

my cruel wounds, I come back to my books and to you,--to the _animi

remissionem_ of Cicero,--to these gentle sympathizers and faithful

solacements,--to old studies and ancient pursuits. There is a Latin

line, I know not whose, but Swift was fond of quoting it,--

_"Vertiginosus, inops, surdus, male gratus amicis,"_--

which I have whispered to myself, with prophetic lips, in the long, long

watches of my lonesome nights. Do you remember--but who that has read

it does not?--that affecting letter, written upon the death of his

wife, by Sir James Mackintosh to Dr. Parr? "Such was she whom I have

lost; and I have lost her when her excellent natural sense was rapidly

improving, after eight years of struggle and distress had bound us fast

together and moulded our tempers to each other,--when a knowledge of

her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, before age had

deprived it of much of its original ardor. I lost her, alas! (the choice

of my youth, and the partner of my misfortunes,) at a moment when I had

the prospect of her sharing my better days."

But if I am getting old, although perhaps prematurely, I must be casting

about for the _subsidia senectuti_. Swift wrote to Gay, that these

were "two or three servants about you and a convenient house"; justly

observing, that, "when a man grows hard to please, few people care

whether he be pleased or no"; and adding, sadly enough, "I should hardly

prevail to find one visitor, if I were not able to hire him with a

bottle of wine"; and so the sorrowful epistle concludes with the

sharpest grief of all: "My female friends, who could bear with me very

well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me." It is odd that Montaigne

should have hit upon the wine also as among the _subsidia senectuti_;

although the sage Michael complains, as you will remember, that old men

do not relish their wine, or at least the first glass, because "the

palate is furred with phlegms." But I care little either for the liquor

or the lackeys, and not much, I fear, at present, for "the female

friends." I have, then, nothing left for it but to take violently to

books; for I doubt not I shall find almost any house convenient, and I

am sure of one at last which I can claim by a title not to be disturbed

by all the precedents of Cruise, and in which no mortal shall have a

contingent remainder.

To books, then, I betake myself,--to books, "the immortal children" of

"the understanding, courage, and abilities" of the wise and good,--ay!

and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity

and ignorance,--books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and

pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots

taught the Spartan boys sobriety. Montaigne "never travelled without

books, either in peace or war"; and as I found them pleasant in happier

days, so I find them pleasant now. Of course, much of this omnivorous

reading is from habit, and, _invitâ Minervâ_, cannot be dignified by

the name of study,--that stiff, steady, persistent, uncompromising

application of the mind, by virtue of which alone the _Pons Asinorum_

can be crossed, and the Forty-Seventh Problem of Euclid--which I

entirely disbelieve--mastered.

I own to a prodigious respect, entertained since my Sophomore year at

the University, for those collegiate youth whose terribly hard study of

Bourdon and Legendre seems to have such a mollifying effect upon their

heads,--but, as the tradesmen say, that thing is "not in my line." I

would rather have a bundle of bad verses which have been consigned to

the pastry-cook. I suppose--for I have been told so upon good authority

--that, if "equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equal." I do

not see why they should not be, and, as a citizen of the United States

of America, the axiom seems to me to be entitled to respect. When a

youthful person, with a piece of chalk in his hand, before commencing

his artistic and scientific achievements upon the black-board, says:

"Let it be granted that a straight line may be drawn from any one point

to any other point," I invariably answer, "Of course,--by all manner of

means,"--although you know, dear Don, that, if I should put him upon

mathematical proof of the postulate, I might bother him hugely. But

when we come to the Fourteenth Proposition of Euclid's Data,--when I am

required to admit, that, "if a magnitude together with a given magnitude

has a given ratio to another magnitude, the excess of this other

magnitude above a given magnitude has a given ratio to the first

magnitude; and if the excess of a magnitude above a given magnitude has

a given ratio to another magnitude, this other magnitude together with a

given ratio to the first magnitude,"--I own to a slight confusion of

my intellectual faculties, and a perfect contempt for John Buteo and

Ptolemy. Then, there is Butler's "Analogy"; an excellent work it is, I

have been told,--a charming work to master,--quite a bulwark of our

faith; but as, in my growing days, it was explained to me, or rather was

not explained, before breakfast, by a truculent Doctor of Divinity, whom

I knew to be ugly and felt to be great, of course, the good Bishop and I

are not upon the best of terms.

I suppose that for drilling, training, and pipe-claying the human mind

all these things are necessary. I suppose, that, in our callow days, it

is proper that we should be birched and wear fetters upon our little,

bandy, sausage-like legs. But let me, now that I have come to man's

estate, flout my old pedagogues, and, playing truant at my will, dawdle

or labor, walk, skip, or run, go to my middle in quagmires, or climb to

the hill-tops, take liberties with the venerable, snub the respectable,

and keep the company of the disreputable,--dismiss the Archbishop

without reading his homily,--pass by a folio in twenty grenadier volumes

to greet a little black-coated, yellow-faced duodecimo,--speak to the

forlorn and forsaken, who have been doing dusty penance upon cloistered

shelves in silent alcoves for a century, with none so poor to do them

reverence,--read here one little catch which came from lips long ago

as silent as the clod which they are kissing, and there some forgotten

fragment of history, too insignificant to make its way into the world's

magnificent chronologies,--snapping up unconsidered trifles of

anecdote,--tasting some long-interred _bon-mot_ and relishing some

disentombed scandal,--pausing over the symphonic prose of Milton, only

to run, the next moment, to the Silenian ribaldry of Tom Brown the

younger,--and so keeping up a Saturnalia, in which goat-footed sylvans

mix with the maidens of Diana, and the party-colored jester shakes

his truncheon in the face of Plato. Only in this wild and promiscuous

license can we taste the genuine joys of true perusal.

I suppose, my dear friend, that, when you were younger and foolisher

than you now are, you were wont, after the reading of some dismal

work upon diet and health, to take long, constitutional walks. You

"toddled"--pardon the vulgar word!--so many miles out and so many miles

in, at just such a pace, in just the prescribed time, during hours fixed

as the Fates; and you wondered, when you came home to your Graham bread

and cold water, that you did not bring an appetite with you. You had

performed incredible pedestrian achievements, and were not hungry, but

simply weary. It is of small use to try to be good with malice prepense.

Nature is nothing, if not natural. If I am to read to any purpose,

I must read with a relish, and browse at will with the bridle off.

Sometimes I go into a library, the slow accretion of a couple of

centuries, or perhaps the mushroom growth from a rich man's grave, a

great collection magically convoked by the talisman of gold. At the

threshold, as I ardently enter, the flaming sword of regulation is

waving. Between me and the inviting shelves are fences of woven iron;

the bibliographic Cerberus is at his sentryship; when I want a full

draught, I must be content with driblets; and the impatient messengers

are sworn to bring me only a single volume at a time. To read in such a

hampered and limited way is not to read at all; and I go back, after

the first fret and worry are over, to the little collection upon my

garret-shelf, to greet again the old familiar pages. I leave the main

army behind,--"the lordly band of mighty folios," "the well-ordered

ranks of the quartos," "the light octavos," and "humbler duodecimos,"

for

"The last new play, and frittered magazine,"--

for the sutlers and camp-followers, "pioneers and all," of the

grand army,--for the prizes, dirty, but curious, rescued from the

street-stall, or unearthed in a Nassau-Street cellar,--for the books

which I thumbed and dogs-eared in my youth.

I have, in my collection, a little Divinity, consisting mostly of quaint

Quaker books bequeathed to me by my grandmother,--a little Philosophy, a

little Physic, a little Law, a little History, a little Fiction, and a

deal of Nondescript stuff. Once, when the _res angusta domi_ had become

_angustissima_, a child of Israel was, in my sore estate, summoned to

inspect the dear, shabby colony, and to make his sordid aureat or argent

bid therefor. Well do I remember how his nose, which he could not,

if his worthless life had depended upon it, render _retroussé_, grew

sublimely curvilinear in its contempt, as his hawk-eyes estimated my

pitiful family. I will not name the sum which he offered, the ghoul, the

vampire, the anthropophagous jackal, the sneaking would-be incendiary

of my little Alexandrian, the circumcised Goth! He left me, like

Churchill's Scotch lassie, "pleased, but hungry"; and I found, as

Valentine did in Congreve's "Love for Love," "a page doubled down in

Epictetus which was a feast for an emperor."

I own, my excellent Robert, that a bad book is, to my taste, sometimes

vastly more refreshing than a good one. I do not wonder that Crabbe,

after he had so sadly failed in his medical studies, should have

anathematized the medical writers in this fine passage:--

"Ye frigid tribe, on whom I waited long

The tedious hours, and ne'er indulged in song!

Ye first seducers of my easy heart,

Who promised knowledge ye could not impart!

Ye dull deluders, Truth's destructive foes!

Ye Sons of Fiction, clad in stupid prose!

Ye treacherous leaders, who, yourselves in doubt,

Light up false fires, and send us far about!--

Still may yon spider round your pages spin,

Subtle and slow, her emblematic gin!

Buried in dust and lost in silence dwell!

Most potent, grave, and reverend friends,--farewell!"

I acknowledge the vigor of these lines, which nobody could have written

who had not been compelled, in the sunny summer-days, to bray drugs in a

mortar. Yet who does not like to read a medical book?--to pore over its

jargon, to muddle himself into a hypo, and to imagine himself afflicted

with the dreadful disease with the long Latin name, the meaning of which

he does not by any means comprehend? And did not the poems of our friend

Bavius Blunderbore, Esq., which were of "a low and moderate sort," cause

you to giggle yourself wellnigh into an asphyxy,--calf and coxcomb as

he was? Is not ----'s last novel a better antidote against melancholy,

stupendously absurd as it is, than foalfoot or plantain, featherfew or

savin, agrimony or saxifrage, or any other herb in old Robert Burton's

pharmacopoeia? I am afraid that we are a little wanting in gratitude,

when we shake our sides at the flaying of Marsyas by some Quarterly of

Apollo,--to the dis-cuticlcd, I mean. If he had not piped so stridently,

we should not have had half so much sport; yet small largess does the

miserable minstrel get for tooting tunelessly. Let us honor the brave

who fall in the battle of print. 'Twas a noble ambition, after all,

which caused our asinine friend to cloak himself in that cast leonine

skin. Who would be always reciting from a hornbook to Mistress Minerva?

What, I pray you, would become of the corn, if there were no scarecrows?

All honor to you, then, my looped and windowed sentinel, standing upon

the slope of Parnassus,--standing so patiently there, with your straw

bowels, doing yeoman-service, spite of the flouts and gibes and cocked

thumbs of Zoïlus and his sneering, snarling, verjuicy, captious

crew,--standing there, as stood the saline helpmate of Lot, to fright

our young men and virgins from the primrose-pitfalls of Poesy,--standing

there to warn them against the seductions of Phoebus, and to teach them

that it is better to hoe than to hum!

The truth is, that the good and clever and _polyphloisboic_ writers have

too long monopolized the attention of the world, so that the little,

well-intentioned, humble, and stupid plebeians of the guild have been

snubbed out of sight. Somebody--the name is not given, but I shrewdly

suspect Canon Smith--wrote to Sir James Mackintosh,--"Why do you not

write three volumes quarto? You only want this to be called the greatest

man of your time. People are all disposed to admit anything we say of

you, but I think it unsafe and indecent to put you so high without

something in quarto." This was, of course, half fun and half truth.

As there is, however, little need of setting the world on fire to

demonstrate some chemical theory, so it is possible that the flame of

culture may be cherished without kindling a conflagration, and truth

transmitted from sire to son without the construction of edificial

monsters too big for the knees, too abstruse for the brains, and too

great for the lifetime of humanity. I am not a very constant reader

of Mr. Robert Browning, but I own to many a pleasant grin over his

Sibrandus Schafnabrugensis dropped into the crevice of the plum-tree,

and afterward pitifully reclaimed, and carried to its snug niche with

the promise,--

"A.'s book shall prop you up, B.'s shall cover you,

Here's C. to be grave with, or D. to be gay;

And with E. on each side, and F. right over you,

Dry-rot at ease till the Judgment Day!"

How often, when one is roving through a library in search of adventures,

is he encountered by some inflated champion of huge proportions, who

turns out to be no better than a barber, after all! Gazing upon

"That weight of wood, with leathern coat o'erlaid,

Those ample clasps, of solid metal made,

The close-pressed leaves, unloosed for many an age,

The dull red edging of the well-filled page,

On the broad back the stubborn ridges rolled,

Where yet the title stands, in burnished gold,"--

what wisdom, what wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge,

what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we

anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no

more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the

seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a

century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them

to be great. They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation in

neglect,--as some fools pass for philosophers by preserving a close

mouth and a grave countenance.

"Safe in themselves, the ponderous works remain."

It was a keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which

barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him

either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried

the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want

of philosophy!" So in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," he, half

in jest and half in earnest, declares that "wisdom is like a cheese,

whereof to a judicious taste the maggots are the best." _Vive la

bagatelle!_ trembled upon his lips at the age of threescore; and he

amused himself with reading the most trifling books he could find, and

writing upon the most trifling subjects. Lord Bolingbroke wrote to him

to beg him "to put on his philosophical spectacles," and wrote with

but small success. Pope wrote to him, "to beg it of him, as a piece of

mercy, that he would not laugh at his gravity, but permit him to wear

the beard of a philosopher until he pulled it off and made a jest of it

himself." Old Weymouth, in the latter part of Anne's reign, said to

him, in his lordly Latin, "_Philosopha verba ignava opera,_" and Swift

frequently repeated the sarcasm. One cannot figure him as the "laughing

old man" of Anacreon, for there was certainly a dreadful dash of vinegar

in his composition; but if he did not hate hard enough, hit hard enough,

and weigh men, motives, and books, nicely enough to satisfy Dr. Johnson,

the Bolt-Courtier must have been a very leech of verjuice. There is a

passage in one of his letters to Pope,--I cannot just now put my hand

upon it,--in which he suggests, in rather coarse language, the subject

of "The Beggar's Opera" as a capital subject for their common friend,

Gay. And yet one can barely suppress a sigh at all this luxury of

levity, when he remembers that dreadful "_Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius

cor lacerare nequit_," and reflects upon the hope deferred which vented

itself in that stinging couplet,--

"In every court the parallel will hold; And kings, like private folks,

are bought and sold."

I remember a hack-writer,--and of such, I am afraid, is too exclusively

my literary kingdom,--who classified the vices which Swift smote so

fearfully in "The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms"; and the curious catalogue

contained "avarice, fraud, cheating, violence, rapine, extortion,

cruelty, oppression, tyranny, rancor, envy, malice, detraction,

hatred, revenge, murder, bribery, corruption, pimping, lying, perjury,

subornation, treachery, ingratitude, gaming, flattery, drunkenness,

gluttony, luxury, vanity, effeminacy, cowardice, pride, impudence,

hypocrisy, infidelity, blasphemy, idolatry, and innumerable other vices,

many of them the notorious characteristics of the bulk of humankind."

Delightful catalogue! How odd, indeed, that a man with such work to do

should not have sported with Amaryllis, or played with the tangles of

Neaera's hair,--should not have worn well-anointed love-locks and snowy

linen,--should, on the other hand, have bared his brawny arm, and sent

the hissing flail down swiftly upon the waled and blistered back of

Sham! How much better would it have been, if he had written a history,

in twelve elephantine volumes, of the rise, culmination, and decay of

the Empire of Barataria, which we would have gone to prison, the rack,

and the drop, with rapture rather than read!

How low seems Fielding, with his pot-house heroes, Tom Jones, Squire

Western, and Jonathan Wild, when we contrast them with the elegant,

cleanly-polished, and extremely proper Sir Charles Grandison! What a

coarse drab is Molly Seagrim, when juxtaposited with the princess of all

prudes, the indomitably virtuous Pamela! How childish was it of Cowper

to sing of sofas, poultry, rabbits, orchards, meadows, and barnyards!

How much more nobly employed was John Dryden in manufacturing a

brand-new, truculent, loud-voiced, massively-calved, ensiferous

Alexander! Who but an addle-headed sot would have wandered up and down

the lanes, like Morland, chalking out pigs and milkmaids, when he might

have been painting, like Barry, pictures, by the acre, of gods and

goddesses enacting incomprehensible allegories! Let us be respectable, O

my Bobus, and wear good coats and the best hats to be had for money or

upon credit; let us carefully conceal our connection with "The Gotham

Revolver," although the honest people who print it do give us our beer

and mutton; let us write great histories which nobody will read, engage

in tractations to which nobody will listen, build twelve-storied epics

which nobody will publish, and invent Gordian philosophies which nobody

can untie. Surely it is quite time for Minerva to have a general

house-cleaning, to put on a fresh smock, and to live cleanly. Rabelais

shall be washed, and Sterne sad-ironed into gravity; De Foe shall be

made as decorous as a tract; Mandeville shall be reburned, and we will

kindle the fire with half the leaves of this dry and yellow Montaigne.

Nobody shall approach the waters of Castaly save upon stilts; and

whoever may giggle, as he takes his physic, shall be put upon a

dreadfully plentiful allowance of Guieciardini for bread, and of the

poems of ----- ------- for water.

But, alas! Brother Bobus, where to begin our purification, and where to

end it? We may, like the curate in "Don Quixote," reprieve Amadis de

Gaul, but shall we, therefore, make Esplandian, "his lawful-begotten

son," a foundation for the funeral-pile we are to set a-blazing

presently? To be sure, there is sense in the observation of the good and

holy priest upon that memorable occasion. "This," said the barber, "is

Amadis of Greece; and it is my opinion that all those upon this side are

of the same family." "Then pitch them all into the yard," responded

the priest; "for, rather than miss the satisfaction of roasting Queen

Pintiquiniestra and the pastorals of Darinel the Shepherd and his damned

unintelligible speculations, I would burn my own father along with

them, if I found him playing at knight-errantry." So into the yard went

"Olivante de Laura, the nonsensical old blockhead," "rough and dull

Florismart of Hyrcania," "noble Don Platir," with nothing in him

"deserving a grain of pity," Bernardo del Carpio, and Roncesvalles, and

Palmerin de Oliva. What a delicious scene it is! The fussy barber, tired

of reading titles and proceeding to burn by wholesale, passing down

books in armfuls to the eager housekeeper, more ready to burn them than

ever she had been to weave the finest lace. And how charming is the hit

of the Curate! "Certainly, these cannot be books of knight-errantry,

they are too small; you'll find they are only poets,"--the supplication

of the niece that the singers should not be spared, lest her uncle, when

cured of his knight-errantry, should read them, become a shepherd,

and wander through forests and fields,--"nay, and what is more to be

dreaded, turn poet, which is said to be a disease absolutely incurable."

So down went "the longer poems" of Diana de Montemayor, the whole of

Salmantino, with the Iberian Shepherd and the Nymphs of Henares. The

impatience of the curate, who, completely worn out, orders all the rest

to be burned _á canga cerrada_, fitly rounds the chapter, and sends us

in good-humor from the _auto da fé_, while the poor knight is in his

bedchamber, all unconscious of the purification in progress, which, if

he had known it, mad as he was, would have made his madness starker

still, thrashing about with his sword, back-stroke and fore-stroke,

and, as Motteux translates it, "making a heavy bustle." 'Tis all droll

enough; especially when we find that the housekeeper made such clean

work of it in the evening, in spite of the good curate's reservations,

and burnt all the books, not only those in the yard, but all those that

were in the house; but I should think twice before I let Freston the

necromancer into any library with which I am acquainted.

Let us be gentle with the denizens of Fame's proud temple, no matter how

they came there. You remember, I suppose, Swift's couplet,--

"Fame has but two gates,--a white and a black one;

The worst they can say is I got in at the back one."

"I have nothing," wrote Pope to his friend Cromwell, "to say to you in

this latter; but I was resolved to write to tell you so. Why should not

I content myself with so many great examples of deep divines, profound

casuists, grave philosophers, who have written, not letters only, but

whole tomes and voluminous treatises about nothing? Why should a fellow

like me, who all his life does nothing, be ashamed to write nothing, and

that, too, to one who has nothing to do but read it?" And so, with "_ex

nihilo nil fit_," he laughingly ends his letter.

And now, while I am at it, I must quote a passage, somewhat germane,

from the very next letter, which Pope wrote to the same friend:--"You

talk of fame and glory, and of the great men of antiquity. Pray, tell

me, what are all your great dead men, but so many living letters? What a

vast reward is here for all the ink wasted by writers and all the blood

spilt by princes! There was in old time one Severus, a Roman Emperor. I

dare say you never called him by any other name in your life; and yet

in his days he was styled Lucius, Septimius, Severus, Pius, Pertinax,

Augustus, Parthicus, Adiabenicus, Arabicus, Maximus, and what not? What

a prodigious waste of letters has time made! What a number have here

dropped off, and left the poor surviving seven unattended! For my own

part, four are all I have to take care of; and I'll be judged by you, if

any man could live in less compass. Well, for the future, I'll drown

all high thoughts in the Lethe of cowslip-wine; as for fame, renown,

reputation, take 'em, critics! If ever I seek for immortality here, may

I be damn'd, for there's not much danger in a poet's being damn'd,--

'Damnation follows death in other men,

But your damn'd Poet lives and writes agen.'"

And so they do, even unto the present, otherwise blessed day. But, dear

old friend, is not this sublime sneering? and is there not an honest ray

or two of truth mingled here and there in the colder coruscations of

this wit? Of the sincerity of this repudiation and renunciation so

fashionable in the Pope circle I have nothing to say; but in certain

moods of the mind it is vastly entertaining, and cures one's melancholy

as cautery cures certain physical afflictions. It may be amusing for you

also to notice that Don Quixote's niece and Pope were of the same

mind. She called poetry "a catching and incurable disease," and Pope's

unfortunate Poet "lives and writes agen."

And, after all, Bobus, why should we not be tender with all the

gentlemen who crowd the catalogues and slumber upon the shelves? It may

be all very well for you or me, whose legend should be

"Prandeo, poto, cano, ludo, lego, coeno, quiesco,"

to laugh at them; but who shall say that they did not do their best,

and, if they were stupid, pavonian, arrogant, self-sufficient, and

top-heavy, that they were not honestly so? I always liked that boast of

Flaccus about his "monument harder than brass." It is a cheerful sight

to see a poor devil of an author in his garret, snapping his fingers at

the critics. "No beggar," wrote Pope, "is so poor but he can keep a cur,

and no author so beggarly but he can keep a critic." And, after all,

abuse is pleasanter than contemptuous and silent neglect. I do honestly

believe, that, if it were not for a little too much false modesty, every

author, and especially the poets, would boldly and publicly anticipate

posthumous fame. Do you think that Sir Thomas Urquhart, when he wrote

his "[Greek: EKSKUBALAURON], or, The Discovery of a most Precious

Jewel," etc., fancied that the world would willingly let his

reverberating words faint into whispers, and, at last, into utter

silence?--his "metonymical, ironical, metaphorical, and synecdochal

instruments of elocution, in all their several kinds, artificially

affected, according to the nature of the subject, with emphatical

expressions in things of great concernment, with catachrestical in

matters of meaner moment; attended on each side respectively with

an epiplectic and exegetic modification, with hyperbolical, either

epitatically or hypocoristically, as the purpose required to be

elated or extenuated, they qualifying metaphors, and accompanied

with apostrophes; and, lastly, with allegories of all sorts, whether

apologal, affabulatory, parabolary, aenigmatic, or paroemial"? Would you

have thought that so much sesquipedality could die? Certainly the Knight

of Cromartie did not, and fully believing Posterity would feel an

interest in himself unaccorded to any one of his contemporaries, he

kindly and prudently appended the pedigree of the family of Urquharts,

preserving every step from Adam to himself. This may have been a vanity,

but after all it was a good sturdy one, worthy of a gentleman who could

not say "the sun was setting," but who could and did say "our occidental

rays of Phoebus were upon their turning oriental to the other hemisphere

of the terrestrial globe." Alas! poor Sir Thomas, who must needs babble

the foolish hopes which wiser men reticently keep cloistered in their

own bosoms! who confessed what every scribbler thinks, and so gets

laughed at,--as wantons are carried to the round-house for airing their

incontinent phraseology in the street, while Blowsalinda reads romances

in her chamber without blushing. Modesty is very well; but, after all,

do not the least self-sufficient of us hope for something more than the

dirty dollars,--for kindness, affection, loving perusal, and fostering

shelter, long after our brains have mouldered, and the light of our eyes

has been quenched, and our deft fingers have lost their cunning, and the

places that knew us have forgotten our mien and speech and port forever?

Very, very few of us can join in Sir Boyle Roche's blundering sneer at

posterity, and with the hope of immortality mingles a dread of utter

oblivion here. Will it not be consoling, standing close by the graves

which have been prepared for us, to leave the world some little legacy

of wisdom sedulously gleaned from the fields of the fading past,--some

intangible, but honest wealth, the not altogether worthless accumulation

of an humble, but earnest life,--something which may lighten the load of

a sad experience, illuminate the dark hours which as they have come to

all must come to all through all the ages, or at least divert without

debauching the mind of the idler, the trifler, and the macaroni? I

believe this ingenuous feeling to be very far removed from the wheezy

aspirations of windy ignorance, or the spasms for fame which afflict

with colic the bowels, empty and flatulent, of sheer scribblers and

dunces who take a mean advantage of the invention of printing. Let us

be tender of the honest gentlemen who, to quote Cervantes, "aim at

somewhat, but conclude nothing." I cannot smile at the hopes of the boy

Burns,--

"That _he,_ for poor auld Scotland's sake,

Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,

Or sing a sang at least."

And while I am in a humor for quotation, I must give you this muscular

verse from Henry More's "Platonic Song of the Soul":--

"Their rotten relics lurk close under ground;

With living weight no sense or sympathy

They have at all; nor hollow thundering sound

Of roaring winds that cold mortality

Can wake, ywrapt in sad Fatality:

To horse's hoof that beats his grassie dore

He answers not: the moon in silency

Doth passe by night, and all bedew him o'er

With her cold, humid rayes; but he feels not Heaven's power."

How we shiver in the icy, midnight moonbeams of the recluse of Christ's

College! How preciously golden seem the links of our universal

brotherhood, when the Fates are waving their dark wings around us, and

menace us with their sundering! I am not sure, my worthy Wagonero, that,

rather than see my own little cord finally cut, I would not consent to

be laughed at by a dozen generations, in the hope that it might happen

to me that the thirteenth, out of sheer weariness at the prolonged

lampooning, might grow pitiful at my purgatorial experiences, and so

betake itself to nursing and fondling me into repute, furnishing me

with half-a-dozen of those lynx-eyed commentators who would discern

innumerable beauties and veracities through the calfskin walls of

my beatified bantling. They might find, at last, that I had "the

gold-strung harp of Apollo" and played a "most excellent diapason,

celestial music of the spheres,"--hearing the harmony

"As plainly as ever Pythagoras did,"

when "Venus the treble ran sweet division upon Saturn the bass."

Write for posterity! Pray, whom should we write for, in this age which

makes its own epic upon sounding anvils, and whose lyric is yelled from

the locomotive running a muck through forest and field and beside the

waters no longer still? Write poetry now, when noise has become normal,

and we are like the Egyptians, who never heard the roaring of the fall

of Nilus, because the racket was so familiar to them! The age "capers

in its own fee simple" and cries with the Host in "The Merry Devil of

Edmonton," "Away with punctilios and orthography!" Write poetry now!

Thank you, my ancient friend! "My fiddlestick cannot play without

rosin." To be sure, I am, like most minstrels, ready for an offer; and

should any lover of melody propose

"Two hundred crowns, and twenty pounds a year

For three good lives,"

I should not be slow in responding, "Cargo! hai Trincalo!" and in

presently getting into the best possible trim and tune. But the poet may

say now, with the Butler in the old play, "Mine are precious cabinets,

and must have precious jewels put into them; and I know you to be

merchants of stock-fish, dry meat, and not men for my market; then

vanish!"

Barrow said that "poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense"; and I think,

that, deceived by the glut, the present time is very much of Barrow's

mind. But, courage, my music-making masters! Your warbling, if it be of

genuine quality, shall echo upon the other side of the hill which hides

the unborn years. Only be sure, the song be pure; and you may "give the

_fico_ to your adversaries." You may live in the hearts and upon the

lips of men and women yet unborn; and should the worst come, you may

figure in "The Bibliographer's Manual," with a star of honor

against your name, to indicate that you are exceedingly scarce and

proportionally valuable; rival collectors, with fury in their faces,

will run you up to a fabulous price at the auction, and you will at last

be put into free quarters for life in some shady alcove upon some lofty

shelf, with unlimited rations of dust, as you glide into a vermiculate

dotage. Why should you be faint-hearted, when the men of the stalls ask

such a breath-stretching price for the productions of William Whitehead,

Esq., who used to celebrate the birthdays of old George the Third after

this fashion:--

"And shall the British lyre be mute,

Nor thrill through all its trembling strings,

With oaten reed and pastoral flute

While every vale responsive rings?"

Ben Jonson called Inigo Jones Sir Lanthorn Leatherhead, but St. Paul's

still stands; and how many flies are there in the sparkling amber of

"The Dunciad"! Have the critics, poor birdling, torn your wings, and

mocked at your recording? I know, as Howell wrote to "Father Ben," that

"the fangs of a bear and the tusks of a wild-boar don't bite worse and

make deeper gashes than a goose-quill sometimes; no, not the badger

himself, who is said to be so tenacious of his bite that he will not

give over his hold until he feels his teeth meet and bone crack." I know

all about it, my minstrel boy! for have I not, in my day, given and

taken, and shouldered back again when I have been shouldered? Pray, do

not finger your eyes any longer! Screw your lyre up to concert pitch,

and go on with your stridulous performances! Neither you nor I know how

bad may be the taste of our grandchildren, or how high you may stand

when they have

"Made prostitute and profligate the Muse."

If you cannot be a poet, be a poetaster; and if you cannot be that, be a

poetess, or "she-poet," as Johnson, in his big dictionary, defines the

word. So "gently take all that ungently comes," and hammer away as

sedulously as old Boileau. Somebody will, undoubtedly, in the next age,

relish your rinsings. A poet, you know, is a prophet. Console yourself

by vaticinating in the bower of your bed-chamber, as you count the feet

upon your fingers, your own immortality. If 'tis a delusion, 'tis a

cheap one, to which even a poet can afford to treat himself. Play with

and humor your life, till you fall asleep, and then the care will be

over! Meanwhile, you must be more stupid than I think, if you cannot

find somebody to give you your fodder of flattery. You need not blush,

for I know that you like it, and you need not be ashamed of liking it.

We all do,--we are all women in that regard; although the honestest man

to confess it that I ever heard of was Sir Godfrey Kneller, who said to

Pope, when he was painting his picture, "I can't do so well as I should

do, unless you flatter me a little; pray, flatter me, Mr. Pope! You know

I love to be flattered."

You see, my excellent Robert, that, by some hocus-pocus which I do not

exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a

letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of

the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing

admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you. You are

something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck,

"something of a philosopher _and_ something of a poet"; for I do not

believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies _minus_

one in your life; and I shrewdly suspect, that, so far from knowing the

difference between a male and a female rhyme, you are unfamiliar with

the close family connection between "trees" and "breeze," or between

"love" and "dove." My episodical remarks are for the benefit of

young Dolce Pianissimo, who has taken, I am sorry to say, to gin,

shirt-collars prodigious, and the minor magazines, and whose friends are

standing aghast and despairing at his lunacy. But, after all, 'tis my

best irony quite thrown away; for the foolish boy will believe me quite

in earnest, and will still be making love to that jade, Mistress Fame,

although he knows well enough how many she has jilted. But as he grows

in stature, he may grow in sense. If you see him very savagely cut up

in "The Revolver," you will recognize the kindly hands which held the

bistoury, scalpel, and tenaculum, and the gentleman who wept while he

wounded.

But I have long enough, I fear too long, tormented you with my drivel.

It must be your consolation, that, in spirit, you have been with me

to-night, as I have thought of the old days, pausing for a moment over

these mute but eloquent companions, to dream or to sigh, and then once

more turning the old familiar pages as I try to forget, for just a

little while, that dear familiar face. If something of indifference has

tinctured these hurried lines, if I have been unjust in my estimate of

the world's honors and the rewards of the Muses, you will forgive me,

if you will remember how the great Burke reduced the value of earthly

honors and emoluments to less than that of a peck of wheat. My fire is

gone out. My candle is flickering in the socket. There is light in the

cold, gray East. Good-morning, Don Bob!--good-morning!

AFTER THE BALL.

They sat and combed their beautiful hair,

Their long, bright tresses, one by one,

As they laughed and talked in the chamber there,

After the revel was done.

Idly they talked of waltz and quadrille,

Idly they laughed, like other girls,

Who over the fire, when all is still,

Comb out their braids and curls.

Robe of satin and Brussels lace,

Knots of flowers and ribbons, too,

Scattered about in every place,

For the revel is through.

And Maud and Madge in robes of white,

The prettiest night-gowns under the sun,

Stockingless, slipperless, sit in the night,

For the revel is done,--

Sit and comb their beautiful hair,

Those wonderful waves of brown and gold,

Till the fire is out in the chamber there,

And the little bare feet are cold.

Then out of the gathering winter chill,

All out of the bitter St. Agnes weather,

While the fire is out and the house is still,

Maud and Madge together,--

Maud and Madge in robes of white,

The prettiest night-gowns under the sun,

Curtained away from the chilly night,

After the revel is done,--

Float along in a splendid dream,

To a golden gittern's tinkling tune,

While a thousand lustres shimmering stream,

In a palace's grand saloon.

Flashing of jewels, and flutter of laces,

Tropical odors sweeter than musk,

Men and women with beautiful faces

And eyes of tropical dusk,--

And one face shining out like a star,

One face haunting the dreams of each,

And one voice, sweeter than others are,

Breaking into silvery speech,--

Telling, through lips of bearded bloom,

An old, old story over again,

As down the royal bannered room,

To the golden gittern's strain,

Two and two, they dreamily walk,

While an unseen spirit walks beside,

And, all unheard in the lovers' talk,

He claimeth one for a bride.

Oh, Maud and Madge, dream on together,

With never a pang of jealous fear!

For, ere the bitter St. Agnes weather

Shall whiten another year,

Robed for the bridal, and robed for the tomb,

Braided brown hair, and golden tress,

There'll be only one of you left for the bloom

Of the bearded lips to press,--

Only one for the bridal pearls,

The robe of satin and Brussels lace,--

Only one to blush through her curls

At the sight of a lover's face.

Oh, beautiful Madge, in your bridal white,

For you the revel has just begun;

But for her who sleeps in your arms to-night

The revel of Life is done!

But robed and crowned with your saintly bliss,

Queen of heaven and bride of the sun,

Oh, beautiful Maud, you'll never miss

The kisses another hath won!

ROCK, TREE, AND MAN.

It is an interesting thought, that will occur to a contemplative mind,

that the world contained, from the time when it was a nebulous mass, all

the materials of the future individuals of the animate and inanimate

creation,--that the elaborate creatures of the vegetable and animal

kingdoms, as well as every mineral, were floating in amorphous masses

through space. Human beings, like genius that was condensed from vapor

at the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp, were diffused in gases, waiting the

touch of the Great Magician's wand to bring them into form and infuse

them with life. In all the distinct creations of God, from the time

when the waters first subsided and the dry land appeared, in everything

organized and inorganized, earth, air, sea, and their inhabitants, there

is no element which was not in existence when the earth was without form

and void.

Philosophers tell us that three hundred and fifty millions of years

elapsed after the globe began to solidify, before it was fitted for the

lowest plants. And more than one million years more were necessary,

after the first plants began to grow upon its young surface, to bring it

forward to the condition which the Divine Father deemed suitable for the

reception of man. If the days of Cain and Abel were the infancy of the

world,--as we have sometimes heard,--when will it come to maturity? Its

divisions of life cannot follow the plan of animated beings; for, with

an embryonic condition of an indefinite period, and an infancy of three

hundred and fifty millions of years, more or less, we can hardly expect

that it will really have begun to enjoy the freedom of adult life,

before the human race will have attained to its earthly limit of

perfectibility, or have so overstocked the surface of the globe as to

make it necessary to remove to some larger sphere.

It is curious, we say, to think that everything now on the earth or

composing its substance was present, though in far different form, at

the beginning,--that the Almighty gathered together in this part of

the universe all the materials out of which to create all the forms of

things which it was his pleasure to evolve here through all time,--that

in that nebulous mass were revolving, not only the gases which were at

last to combine in various manners and proportions to form the rocky

crust and the watery investment of the earth, but that in that dense and

noisome cloud floated also the elements of all the beautiful objects

that furnish the daily enchantments of life. Flowers and trees, birds

and fishes, locusts and mastodons, all things, from the tiniest

animalcule to man, were there, unmodelled, not even in embryo,--their

separate existences then only in the mind of God. There, Christian and

Saracen, Jew and Gentile, Caucasian and Negro, Hindoo and Pariah, all

the now heterogeneous natures which are as oil and water, were blended

in one common vapor.

Finally the condensation of all the gaseous elements began, and the

aëriform masses became liquid, and the waters,--what mineral waters

they were, when they were saturated with granite and marble, diamonds,

rubies, arsenic, and iron!--thus deposited by the vapor, left a gas

above them light enough to bear some faint resemblance to our air.

Still this atmosphere was surcharged with vapors which no lungs could

tolerate, whether of man or reptile; and other steps must be taken to

clear it of its unwholesome properties. Then did the Almighty will

introduce, one after another, the germs of plants,--first of all, the

lower orders, the ferns, which seek the shade, and the lichens, which

grow in damp and dark recesses, mosses, which cling to bare rocks,

living almost on air and water alone,--everything which needed not

bright sunlight to invigorate it nor soil to cling to. Year by year and

age by age did these humble plants extract their nourishment from the

murky vapors that shrouded the earth, and, after fashioning those gases

into a living tissue of stems and leaves, year after year did they die

and lay their remains upon the rocks, accumulating by slow steps a soil

which would in time be capable of giving holding-ground to mightier

plants. The trees came,--and gigantic they must have been; and every

species of tree, shrub, and herb now upon the earth, and of all animals

that walk, fly, or swim, was introduced before the creation of man.

It was as if the elements were too gross for the constitution of man,

when they were first collected from the nebulous mass,--as if they

needed to go through the intermediate forms of plants and animals,

passing in succession from one to another, before they could be

permitted to enter into the bodies of those beings who were to be in

God's likeness. But, in very truth, the elements were unaltered by their

many transmigrations. It was the divine act of God which caused every

plant to spring forth and gave birth to every living thing. Every seed

and every egg was at the first formed by Him. No sudden effort of man's

will, such as that by which Pygmalion was believed to have animated the

work of his chisel, nor any industrious current of electricity, passed

for uninterrupted weeks through the purest gum, and stimulated by the

enthusiasm of a Cross, can transform the worm to a breathing being, or

reach the human climax by slow steps, even if the first one be in the

humble form of a louse. When a new plant appeared, it was the hand of

God that formed the seed. When a new species of animal came upon the

earth, it was the same Power that created it. But the materials were not

new; "out of the dust of the earth" was man created.

Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and Nitrogen,--do not turn away from us,

gentle reader, we will not be grimly scientific, but a few of the terms

of science must be employed, even here,--these four elements are the

chief ingredients of all vegetable and animal structures. When separated

from their connections, three of them are gases; and the fourth, in

union with one of the others, is also a gas. In various combinations

they form literally the dust of the earth, they make rock and water,

vapor and air. In the hand of the Almighty, they are so many plastic

elements, that form now a plant of the lowliest condition, now a

magnificent oak, now a fish, and now a man. And the germ of each

organized being bequeathes to its offspring the power to reproduce its

likeness,--so that each succeeding generation is a repetition of its

predecessor. There is no change in plants and animals from the first;

the same materials in the same proportions that were selected by the

earliest trees for their composition are chosen now; and in form and

function the last animal is a precise copy of the first of his race.

If we attempt to trace a particle of matter, we shall find its

wanderings endless. Annihilation is a term which is not applicable to

material things. Matter is never destroyed; it rarely rests. Oxygen,

for instance, the most important constituent of our atmosphere, is the

combining element of all things, the medium of communication between the

kingdoms of Nature, the agent of the interchanges that are continually

taking place among all created things. Oxygen keeps life in man, by

combining with his blood at every inhalation; it is absorbed by flowers,

to be employed in the perfection of the fruit; many minerals are

incapable of the various uses of society, until oxygen has attacked and

united with them. It gives us lime and soda, the oil of vitriol, and

common salt; the mineral pigments in common use are impossible without

it; and the beautiful colors of our autumn leaves are due to the

combination of oxygen with their juices. It enters into all plans and

operations with a helping hand; animals and plants owe their lives to

it; but when the shadow of death begins to fall upon them, it is

as ready to aid in their destruction. Like calumny, which blackens

whatsoever is suspected, oxygen pounces upon the failing and completes

their ruin. The processes of fermentation and putrefaction cannot

commence in any substance, until it has first taken oxygen into

combination. Thus, cans of meat, hermetically sealed, with all the air

first carefully expelled, undergo no change so long as the air does not

get access to them. If the minutest opening remain, the oxygen of the

atmosphere combines with the contents of the can, and fermentation or

putrefaction follows. Rust, which takes the keen edge from the knife, is

only another name for oxydation: keep the knife bright, and no oxygen

dares touch it; but the slightest blemish is made a loophole for the

entrance of the ever-watchful enemy, who never again leaves it until its

destruction is complete.

All the elements have a great love of society; they cannot live alone;

they have their likes and their dislikes; they contract alliances which

endure for a time, but are dissolved in favor of stronger attractions.

We have mentioned the names of several natural elements. Let us see what

they are, and what they have to do with man and the kingdoms of Nature.

Beginning with man, let us see what becomes of him in course of time,

what physical metamorphoses he undergoes, to what vile but excellent

uses he is put.

That which forms the bone and muscle of a man this year may be upon his

own table in the shape of potatoes or peaches one summer later. When

Hamlet talked of turning the clay of Alexander into the bung of a

beer-barrel, he spoke the simple truth. In that great play, Shakspeare

appears to have had the transformations of material things much in his

mind; for we find him alluding, in several passages, to the reciprocity

which subsists between the elements of animate and inanimate things,

and between the different members of the same kingdom;--as when, in

conversation with the king about the dead Polonius, he makes Hamlet say,

"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat the fish

that hath fed of the worm"; or where, over the grave of Ophelia, he

traces the two ancient heroes back to their mother earth, in words some

of which we have quoted.

The ancient mythology, which shadowed forth some truth in all its

fables, turned these facts of Nature to its purpose. The gods of

Greece, when they saw fit to remove a human being from life, sometimes

reproduced him in another form of beauty, without any intermediate

stages of decay. Apollo seemed to have a particular fancy for planting

the boys and girls whom he had loved where he might enjoy their fragrant

society. Thus, a boy named Cyparissus, who had the misfortune to kill a

favorite deer, was so unwilling to be consoled, that he besought Apollo

to make his mourning perpetual; and the kind god changed him into a

cypress, which is still a funereal tree. The modest virgin Daphne, who

succeeded in escaping the violence of his passion, was transformed into

a laurel, which is ever green and pure. And the sweet youth Hyacinthus,

beloved of Apollo, being accidentally killed by a quoit which the god

of day was throwing, that divinity, in his grief, caused those sweet

flowers which bear his name to spring from his blood, where it fell upon

the ground. It is only in the annihilation of the intervals of time

between different forms of existence that these old metamorphoses, which

Ovid relates, are fabulous. If our readers will bear us company a

few steps, through ways which shall have diversions enough to forbid

weariness, we will endeavor to satisfy them that these apparent fables

are very near to every-day truths. We must begin with some plain

statements.

The air which we expel from the lungs at every breath has a large

proportion of carbonic acid. Let a man be shut up in an air-tight room

for a day, and he will have changed nearly all the oxygen in it into

this carbonic acid, and rendered it unfit for animal life. Dogs, cats,

and birds would die in it. But, poisonous as it is to man and other

animals, it is a feast to plants. They want it all day and every day;

not in the night,--at that time they have a taste for oxygen. This

effete air, which men and animals exhale, so charged with carbonic acid,

the plants drink in through every pore. They take it from the mouth of

man, appropriate it to their daily uses, and in time render it back to

him mingled with other ingredients in wholesome fruit. Carbonic acid is

death when it combines with the blood,--as it does when we inhale

it; but not so when it enters the stomach in small quantities. One

inspiration of it is enough to make us dizzy,--as when we enter an old

well or stoop over a charcoal fire; but a draught of water fully

charged with it is exhilarating and refreshing, as we know by repeated

experiences at marble fountains that meet us on so many city-corners.

If plants had souls, they would be pure ones, since they can bear such

contamination and not be harmed,--nay, since even from such foul food

as we give them they can evolve results so beautiful. We give them our

cast-off and worn-out materials, and they return us the most beautiful

flowers and the most luscious fruits.

Beside carbonic acid, there are two other principal materials, which

are every day passing off in an effete state, though capable of being

transferred to the uses of plants. But when an animal dies, the whole

substance is then at Nature's disposal. We must set aside a great deal

of it for the ants and flies, who will help themselves in spite of us.

If any one has never seen a carcass rapidly disappearing under the

steady operations of the larvae of the flesh-fly, he has yet to learn

why some flies were made. The ants, too, carry it off in loads larger,

if not heavier, than themselves. But carcasses of animals may go to

decay, undisturbed by the ravages of these useful insects. That is, the

limited partnership of Oxygen, Hydrogen, & Co., under which they agreed

to carry on the operations of sheep, fox, or fish, having terminated

by the death of the animal, the partners make immediate use of their

liberty and go off in inorganic form in search of new engagements,

leaving sulphur, phosphorus, and the other subordinate elements of the

animal, to shift for themselves. They were in the employ of a sheep;

they will now carry on a man or an oak-tree, a colony of insects,

or something else. Under the form of carbonate of ammonia, the four

elements diffuse themselves through the air, or are absorbed by the

earth, and offer themselves at once to the roots and leaves of the

trees, as ready to go on with their vivifying operations as they were in

behalf of the animals. There are some plants which seem not to be left

to the chances of securing their nourishment from the carbonate of

ammonia that the air and the soil contain, but are contrived so as

to entrap living animals and hold them fast while they undergo

decomposition, so that all their gases may be absorbed by them alone.

Thus, "the little Sundew exudes a gluey secretion from the surface of

its leaves, which serves to attract and retain insects, the decay of

whose bodies seems to contribute to its existence." And the Dionaea,

or Venus's Fly-trap of the Southern States, has some leaves which fold

together upon any insect that alights upon their upper surface; and by

means of a row of long spines that fringes the leaves, they prevent his

escape. The more active the struggles of the captive, the closer grows

the hold of the leaf, and speedily destroys him. The plant appears to

derive nutriment from the decomposition of its victims. "Plants of this

kind, which have been kept in hot-houses in England, from which insects

were carefully excluded, have been observed to languish, but were

restored by placing little bits of meat upon their traps,--the decay of

these seeming to answer the same purpose."

The four elements already referred to are by no means all the material

ingredients of animal bodies. There are, also, phosphorus, lime,

magnesia, soda, sulphur, chlorine, and iron; and if you believe some

chemists, there is hardly a mineral in common use that may not be found

in the human body. We doubt, however, whether lead, arsenic, and silver

are there, without the intervention of the doctor.

What becomes of the phosphorus and the rest, when an animal dies? Oh,

they take up new business, too. They are as indispensable to the animal

frame as the four most prominent ingredients. We eat a great deal of

bread and meat, and a little salt,--but the little salt is as important

to continued life as the large bread. There is hardly a tissue in the

body from which phosphorus, in combination with lime, is absent; so that

the composition of lucifer-matches is by no means the most important

use of this element. The luminous appearance which some putrefying

substances, particularly fish, present at night, is due to the slow

combustion of phosphorus which takes place as this element escapes into

the air from the decomposing tissues.

The necessity for the steady supply of phosphorus and lime to the body

is the cause of the popularity of Mapes's superphosphate of lime as a

manure. The farmers who buy it, perhaps, do not know that their bones

and other parts are made of it, and that this is the reason they must

furnish it to their land; for between the land and the farmer's bones

are two or three other factories that require the same material. All

the farmer knows is, that his grass and his corn grow better for the

superphosphate. But what he has not thought of we will tell you,--that

man finds his phosphate of lime in the milk and meat of the cow, and she

finds her supply in the grass and corn, which look to the farmer to see

that their stock of this useful mineral compound does not fall short.

Thus in milk and meat and corn, which constitute so large a part of our

diet, we have always our phosphate of lime. There are many other sources

whence we can derive it, but these will do for the present. And thus,

when an animal dies and has no further use for his phosphate of lime, it

is washed into the soil around, after decomposition of the body has set

it free, and goes to make new grass and corn. Bone-earth (pounded bones)

is a common top-dressing for grass-lands.

A small proportion of sulphur is found in flesh and blood. We prove its

presence in the egg by common experience. An egg--from which it escapes

more easily than from flesh--discovers its presence by blackening

silver, as every housekeeper knows, whose social position is too high

for bone egg-spoons or too low for gold ones. This passion which sulphur

entertains for silver is very strong, as every one knows who has ever

been under that wholesome discipline which had its weekly recurrence at

the delightful institution of Dotheboy's Hall; and what Anglo-Saxon ever

grew up, innocent of that delectable vernal medicine to which we refer?

Has he not found all the silver change in his pocket grow black,

suggesting very unpleasant suspicions of bogus coin? The sulphur, being

more than is wanted in the economy of the system, has made its escape

through every pore in his skin, and, of course, fraternizes with the

silver on its way. But it was of the sulphur which is natural to the

body and always found there that we were speaking. When the animal

dies, and the vital forces give way to chemical affinities, when the

phosphorus and the rest take their departure, the sulphur, too, finds

itself occupation in new fields of duty.

Chlorine and sodium, two more of the elements of animal structures,

produce, in combination, common salt,--without which our food would be

so insipid, that we have the best evidence of its being a necessary

article of diet. The body has many uses for salt. It is found in the

tears, as we are informed by poets, who talk of "briny drops" and "saut,

saut tears"; though why there, unless to keep the lachrymal fluid from

spoiling, in those persons who bottle up their tears for a long time, we

cannot divine.

Perhaps we had better take the rest into consideration together,--the

magnesia and iron, and whatever other elements are found in the body.

Though some of them are there in minute quantities, the structure cannot

exist without them,--and for their constant and sufficient supply our

food must provide.

To see what becomes of all these materials after we have done with them,

we must extend our inquiries among the articles of ordinary diet and

ascertain from what sources we derive the several elements.

It has been sometimes believed that none but animal food contains all

the elements required for the support of life. Thanks to Liebig, we have

discovered that vegetable substances also, fruits, grains, and

roots, contain them all, and, in most cases, in very nearly the same

proportions as they are found in animals. We are not lecturing on

dietetics; therefore we will not pause to explain why, although either

bread or meat alone contains the various materials for flesh and bone,

it is better to combine them than to endeavor to subsist on one only.

Whither, then, go these elements when man has done with them? The answer

is,--All Nature wants them. Every plant is ready to drink them up, as

soon as they have taken forms which bring them within its reach. As

gases, they are inhaled by the leaves, or, dissolved in water, they

are drunk up by the roots. All plants have not the same appetites, and

therefore they can make an amicable division of the supply. Grasses and

grains want a large proportion of phosphate of lime, which they convert

into husks. Peas and beans have little use for nitrogen, and resign it

to others. Cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips, and celery appropriate a

large share of the sulphur.

The food of plants and that of animals have this great difference:

plants take their nourishment in inorganic form only; animals require

to have their food in organic form. That is, all the various

minerals, singly or combined, which compose the tissues of plants and

animals,--carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, and the rest, which we have

already named,--are taken up by plants in mineral form alone. The food

of animals, on the other hand, consists always of organized forms. There

is no artificial process by which oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen can be

brought into a form suitable for the nourishment of animals. As oxygen,

carbon, and hydrogen, they are not food, will not sustain our life,

and human art cannot imitate their nutritious combinations. Artificial

fibrine and gluten (organic principles) transcend our power of

contrivance as far as the philosopher's stone eluded the grasp of the

alchemists. We know exactly how many equivalents of oxygen, hydrogen,

carbon, and nitrogen enter into the composition of each of the animal

elements; but we can no more imitate an organic element than we can form

a leaf. What we cannot do the vegetable world does for us. Thus we see

why it was necessary that the earth should be clothed with vegetation

before animals could be introduced. A field-mouse dies and decays, and

its elements are appropriated by the roots around its grave; and we

can easily imagine the next generations of mice, the children and

grandchildren of the deceased rodent, feasting off the tender bark which

was made out of the remains of their parent. The soil of our gardens and

the atmosphere above it are full of potential tomatoes, beans, corn,

potatoes, and cabbages,--even of peaches of the finest flavor, and

grapes whose aroma is transporting.

Plants, as well as animals, have their peculiar tastes. Cut off the

supply of phosphate of lime from a field of corn, and it will not grow.

You can easily do this by planting the same land with corn for three

or four successive years, and your crop will dwindle away to nothing,

unless you supply the ground every year with as much of the mineral as

the corn takes away from it. All plants have the power of selecting from

the soil the materials necessary to their growth; and if they do not

find them in the soil, they will not grow. It is now a familiar fact,

that, when an old forest of deciduous trees has been felled, evergreens

will spring up in their places. The old oaks, hickories, and beeches,

as any observer would discover, pass their last years in repose, simply

putting out their leaves and bearing a little fruit every year, but

making hardly any new wood. An oak may attain to nearly its full size,

in spread of branches, in its first two hundred years, and live for five

or six hundred years longer in a state of comparative rest. It seems to

grow no more, simply because it has exhausted too much of the material

for its nourishment from the ground around its roots. At least, we know,

that, when we have cut it down, not oaks, but pines, will germinate

in the same soil,--pines, which, having other necessities and taking

somewhat different food, find a supply in the ground, untouched by

their predecessor. Hence the rotation of crops, so much talked of by

agriculturists. Before the subject was so well understood, the ground

was allowed to lie fallow for a year or two, when the crops began to

grow small, that it might recover from the air the elements it had lost.

We now adopt the principle of rotation, and plant beans this year where

last year we put corn.

It is not merely that plants deprive themselves of their future support

by exhausting the neighboring earth of the elements they require. Some

of them put into the ground substances which are poisonous to themselves

or other plants. Thus, beans and peas pour out from their roots a very

notable amount of a certain gum which is not at all suited to their

own nourishment,--so that, if we plant beans in the same spot several

successive seasons, they thrive very poorly. But this gum appears to be

exactly the food for corn; if, therefore, we raise crops of beans and

corn alternately, they assist each other. Liebig gives the results of a

series of experiments illustrating the reciprocal actions of different

species of plants. Various seeds were sprouted in water, in order to

observe the nature of the excretions from their roots. It was found

"that the water in which plants of the family of the _Leguminosae_

(beans and peas) grew acquired a brown color, from the substance which

exuded from their roots. Plants of the same species, placed in water

impregnated with these excrements, were impeded in their growth, and

faded prematurely; whilst, on the contrary, corn-plants grew vigorously

in it, and the color of the water diminished sensibly, so that it

appeared as if a certain quantity of the excrements of the _Leguminosae_

had really been absorbed by the corn-plants." The oak, which is the

great laboratory of tannin, not only lays up stores of it in its bark

and leaves, but its roots discharge into the ground enough of it to tan

the rootlets of all plants that venture to put down their suction-hose

into the same region, and their spongioles are so effectually closed

by this process, that they can no longer perform their office, and the

plant that bears them dies. Plants whose roots ramify among the roots

of poppies become unwilling opium-eaters, from the exudation of this

narcotic principle into the ground, and are stunted, like the children

of Gin Lane.

The Aquarium furnishes a very interesting example of the mutual

dependence of the three natural kingdoms. Here, in a box holding a few

gallons of water and a little atmospheric air, is a miniature world,

secluded, and supplying its own wants. Its success depends on the number

and character of the animals and plants being so adapted as to secure

just the requisite amount of active growth to each to sustain the life

of the other: that the plants should be sufficient to support, by the

superfluities of their growth, the vegetarians among the animated tribes

that surround them; and that all the animal tribes of the aquarium,

whether subsisting upon the vegetables or on their smaller and weaker

fellow-creatures, should restore to the water in excrements the mineral

substances which will enable the plants to make good the daily loss

occasioned by the depredations of the sea-rovers that live upon them.

Thus an aquarium, its constituents once correctly adjusted, has all the

requisites for perpetuity; or rather, the only obstacle to its unlimited

continuance is, that it is a mortal, and not a Divine hand, that

controls its light and heat.

In the examination of the materials appropriated by plants from the

soil, we find that mineral substances are sometimes taken up in solution

in larger amount than the growth of the plant and the maturation of its

fruit require, and the excess is deposited again, in crystalline form

in the substance of the plant. If we cut across a stalk of the

garden rhubarb, we can see, with the aid of a microscope, the fine

needle-shaped crystals of oxalate of potash lying among the fibres of

the plant,--a provision for an extra supply of the oxalic acid which is

the source of the intense sourness of this vegetable. When the sap of

the sugar-maple is boiled down to the consistence of syrup and allowed

to stand, it sometimes deposits a considerable amount of sand; indeed,

this is probably always present in some degree, and justifies, perhaps,

the occasional complaint of the grittiness of maple-sugar. But it is a

native grit, and not chargeable upon the sugar-makers. It is nothing

less than flint, which the roots of the maple absorbed, while it was

dissolved in water in the soil. The sap, still holding the flint in

solution, flows out, clear as water, when the tree is tapped; but when

it is concentrated by boiling, the silicious mineral is deposited in

little crystals, so that the bottom of the pan appears to be covered

with sand. We could not select a more interesting example of the very

wide diffusion of some compound substances than this one of silicic

acid. It is found in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. Being a

mineral, it cannot be appropriated to animal uses, without being

decomposed and transformed into an organic condition; but in the

numerous species of plants whose stalks require stiffening against

the winds,--in the grasses and canes, including all our grains, the

sugar-cane, and the bamboo,--a silicate (an actual flint) is taken up by

the roots and stored away in the stalks as a stiffener. The rough, sharp

edge of a blade of grass sometimes makes an ugly cut on one's finger by

means of the flint it contains. Silex is the chief ingredient in quartz

rock, which is so widely diffused over the earth, and enters into the

composition of most of the precious stones. The ruby, the emerald, the

topaz, the amethyst, chalcedony, carnelian, jasper, agate, and garnet,

and all the beautiful varieties of rock crystal, are mostly or entirely

silex. Glass is a compound of silex and pearlash. One who is curious in

such things may make glass out of a straw, by burning it and heating the

ashes with a blowpipe. A little globule of pure glass will form as the

ashes are consumed. The following curious instance, quoted by that

interesting physiologist, Dr. Carpenter, shows the same effect upon a

large scale. A melted mass of glassy substance was found on a meadow

between Mannheim and Heidelberg, in Germany, after a thunder-storm. It

was, at first, supposed to be a meteor; but, when chemically examined,

it proved to consist of silex, combined with potash,--in the form

in which it exists in grasses; and, upon further inquiry, it was

ascertained that a stack of hay had stood upon the spot, of which

nothing remained but the ashes, the whole having been ignited by the

lightning.

There is nothing in Nature more striking to the novice than the first

suggestions of the various, and apparently contradictory, at least

unexpected, positions in which the same mineral is found. Now carbon is

one of the minerals whose exchanges are peculiarly interesting. Chemists

say that the diamond is the only instance in Nature of pure carbon:

it burns in oxygen under the influence of intense heat, and leaves no

ashes. Next to this--strange gradation!--is charcoal, which comes within

a very little of being a diamond. But just that little interval is

apparently so great, that none but a chemist would suspect there was

any relationship between them. Then come all those immense beds of coal

which compose one of the geological strata of the earth's crust, a

stratum that was formed before the appearance of the animated creation,

when the earth was clothed with a gigantic forest, whose mighty trunks

buried themselves with their fallen leaves, and became, in time, a

continuous bed of carbonaceous stone.

If we look at the vegetable and animal kingdoms, we find carbon entering

into the composition of every tissue. But there are certain tissues and

anatomical elements (as physicians say) which are formed largely of

carbon and have no nitrogen whatever. These are oils and fats and

everything related to them. What will be chiefly interesting, however,

to our readers, is the power of transformation of one of these

substances into another. Starch, gum, and sugar can all be changed into

fat. The explanation of it is in the fact, that these substances are all

chemically alike,--that is, they all have nearly the same proportions of

carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, and no nitrogen; but by slight differences

in the combination of these elements, they exist in Nature as so many

distinct substances. Their approach to identity is further confirmed

by the fact, that starch can be made into gum, and either of them into

sugar, in the laboratory. The transformation of starch and gum into

sugar is also constantly going on in the ripening of fruits. When

country-dames make currant-jellies and currant-wine, they know very

well, that, if they allow the berries to get dead-ripe, their jelly will

not be so firm as when they seize an early opportunity and gather them

when first fully red. They may also have observed that jelly made late,

besides being less firm, is much more likely to candy. At first, the

currants contain hardly any sugar, but more gum and vegetable jelly

(glue); when dead-ripe, they have twelve times as much sugar as at

first, and the gum and glue are much diminished. The gummy and gluey

materials have been transformed into sugar. Every ripe fruit gives us

evidence of the same manufacture of sugar that has gone on under the

stimulus of the sun's rays; and in the greatest source of sugar, the

cane, the process is the same. A French physician, M. Bernard, has,

within the last twelve years, discovered that the liver of animals is

constantly making sugar out of all kinds of food, while the lungs are

all the time undoing the work of the liver and turning it back into its

chemical elements. And although, in the laboratory of the liver, it is

discovered that no alimentary substance is quite deficient in sweetness,

yet there, as elsewhere, starch and gum yield a far greater amount of it

than animal substances.

We have stated that starch and gum can be turned into sugar by art,--but

as no chemist has yet succeeded in imitating an animal substance, the

change of these three into fat takes place only in the body. There

are proofs enough within general observation, that one object of this

portion of our diet is the supply of fat. The Esquimaux fattens on his

diet of blubber and train-oil; the slaves on the sugar-plantations grow

fat in the boiling-season, when they live heartily on sugar; the Chinese

grow fat on an exclusively rice diet,--and rice is chiefly starch. But

one of the most interesting observations of the transformation of sugar

into a fat is that made by Huber upon bees. It was the discovery, that

bees make their wax out of honey, and not of pollen, as was formerly

believed. When Huber shut up some bees in a close hive, and kept them

supplied with pure honey or with sugar alone, they subsisted upon it,

and soon began to build the comb. Wax is a fat, and the honey which is

eaten by the bee is partly transformed into wax in his body. In about

twenty-four hours after his stomach has been filled with honey, thin

plates of wax appear on the scales of his abdomen, having oozed through

eight little openings in the scales and there hardened. Of this they

build their cells.

We have wandered far from the consideration of the propensity of certain

species of plants to take up special compound substances from the

earth; but the wide-spread silex, with which we set out, displayed so

interesting a field of observation, that it could not be resisted, and

encouraged a disposition to rove, which has been to us instructive and

entertaining. To return to plants,--we find they make use of compounds

for certain special ends; but, as we have seen, the whole vegetable

kingdom uses the eight or ten primitive elements which it has in common

with the animals, and out of these alone forms the infinite variety of

products which we derive from it for food and various economical

and aesthetical purposes. Among the many processes of Nature whose

contemplation fills us with ever new delight, this power of the

adaptation of a few means to an infinite number of ends is one of the

most enchanting. We endeavor to explain by chemical laws the reduction

of the materials which earth and air furnish, to a form in which they

can be appropriated by the tree; by endosmose and exosmose we think we

have overcome the obstacles to a clear comprehension of the circulation

of the sap; and by a cell-theory we believe we have explained the whole

growth of wood and leaves and fruit. But what microscope or what alembic

shall ever tell us why a collection of tubes and cells in one tree

creates the most wholesome and delicious fruit, while in another an

organization precisely similar, so far as we can discern, produces only

harsh and poisonous berries? why the acacia tribe elaborate their gum,

the pine family turpentine, the almond prussic acid, the sorrels oxalic

acid? why the tall calisaya-tree of the Andes deposits in its bark the

valuable medicine cinchona, and the oak, the hemlock, the tea-plant, and

many others, make use of similar repositories to lay up stores of

tannic acid? The numberless combinations of the same materials, and

the wonderful power which rests in a single seed to bring about with

unvarying uniformity its own distinct result, attest to us every day the

admirable wisdom and goodness of the Creator.

These regular, every-day transformations of material elements from rock

to tree, from tree to man, and back through a continual circuit, would

repay us for spending our leisure hours in studying it, with our own

eyes as well as with the eyes of others. The glance we have given is

sufficiently suggestive to turn the attention of our readers that way.

Before parting with them, however, we wish to make a few excursions

into the natural world, to follow out some of the more peculiar and

unexpected migrations of material atoms. Suppose we take a little

marble,--which, in chemical constitution, is carbonate of lime,--that

very marble, for instance, which forms the palaces of Venice, against

which the waters of the Mediterranean have dashed for so many centuries,

and have not dashed in vain. In their perpetual washing, they have worn

away the stone and carried off its particles,--an insignificant amount,

it is true, but, little as it is, it has not remained unused. For

that very carbonate of lime, which once shared the proud state of the

"glorious city in the sea," now helps to form the coarse shells of

oysters, or is embodied in the vast coral reefs that shoot out from the

islands of the West Indies, or is deposited year after year by dying

shell-fish, which are slowly carpeting the ocean-bed with their remains.

Much of this same Venice marble has doubtless been appropriated by

fishes from the sea-water which dissolved it, been transformed into

their bones, cast upon the soil of Italy, disintegrated, and imbibed by

the thirsty roots of forests in sight of the very walls from which it

parted. And who can say that parts of it do not now adorn the necks of

some Venetian dames, in coral, or more costly pearls? What says Ariel to

the orphaned Ferdinand?

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

This is but a hint of the mutability of created things. Marble,

sea-shells, the chalk-cliffs of Dover, the limestone fossils which

preserve for us animal forms of species long since extinct, the coral

formations that are stretching out in dangerous reefs in so many seas

of the tropics, are all identical in their chief ingredient, and, as

we see, are by natural processes and various accidents constantly

interchanging their positions.

It ought to be consoling to those who think a great deal of their

bodies, to reflect, that, if we may tend "to base uses," we may also

tend to very noble ones. In the course of their transmigrations, the

elements of a worthless individual may get into far better company than

they have before enjoyed,--may enter into brains that immortalize their

owner and redeem the errors of the old possessor. Whoever bases his

merit on a long line of ancestors who have nothing but a perpetuated

name to boast of, may be likened to the last of many successive tenants

of a house who have hired it for their temporary uses. The inheritance

of a brave spirit and a noble mind is a sufficient justification for a

reasonable pride; but not so with the heritage of materials which are

continually interchanging with the clod.

There need be nothing humiliating in such thoughts; the operations

of Nature are always admirable. But when the relics of humanity are

deliberately appropriated to such mechanical or scientific purposes

as we shall relate, before they have entirely lost their original (we

should say latest) form, then most men would look upon the act as

in some sort a desecration. With what holy horror would the ancient

Egyptians regard the economical uses to which their embalmed bodies were

appropriated a few centuries ago! In the words of Ambrose Paré, the

great surgeon of five French kings in the sixteenth century, is a full

account of the preparation and administration of "mummie,"--that is,

Egyptian mummies, powdered and made into pills and potions,--"to such

as have falne from high places or have beene otherwise bruised." The

learned physician enters his protest against the use of it, (which he

says is almost universal with the faculty,) as quite inefficacious and

disgusting. His disgust, however, arises principally from the fact that

the "mummie" prepared by the apothecaries must have been derived "from

the carcases of the basest people of Egypt; for the nobelmen and cheefe

of the province, so religiously addicted to the monuments of their

ancestors, would never suffer the bodyes of their friends and kindred to

be transported hither for filthy gaine and detested use."

If such traffic be base, what shall we say of some priests of Nicaragua,

who renovate their burial-grounds by exhuming the bones of the dead,

with the earth that surrounds them, and selling the mass to the

manufacturers of nitre? No sentiment of reverence for the sepulchres

of their fathers incites them to resist the inroads of foreign

pirates,--for they manufacture their fathers' bones into gunpowder.

Let us turn away from the revolting picture. The glimpses of Nature's

revolutions which we have enjoyed are more agreeable. We are no

advocates for any attempts of preserving the human body from

decomposition; that which will restore the beloved forms of friends

most readily to their primitive elements, and avert the possibility

of anything so dear remaining to excite our aversion or disgust, or

becoming a pestilential agent, we would cordially encourage. There can

be no doubt that use would soon render cremation as little disagreeable

to the feelings as consigning the precious remains to slow decay and

food for worms; and few will long be pained at the thought of mingling

at once with the common earth and air, and returning to usefulness in

other forms, after the soul has passed to heavenly spheres to enjoy the

blessings of immortal life.

* * * * *

CHIP DARTMOUTH.

It is wonderful how Nature provides for the taking off and keeping down

of her monsters,--creatures that carry things only by force or fraud:

your foxes, wolves, and bears; your anacondas, tigers, and lions; and

your cunning or ferocious men of prey, of whom they are the types.

Storms may and must now and then rage and ravage, volcanoes must have

their destructive fits, and the darkness must do its mean and tyrannical

things while men are asleep; but calmness and sunshine triumph

immeasurably on the whole. Of the cubs of iniquity, only here and there

an individual escapes the crebrous perils of adolescence, develops into

the full beast, and occupies a sublime place in history; whereas the

genial men of sunshine, plenty as the fair days of summer, pass quietly

over from the ruby of life's morning to the sapphire of its evening, too

numerous to be written of or distinctly remembered. There are, it is

quite true, enough biographies of such in existence to read the world to

sleep by for ages. It can hardly keep awake at all, except over lives of

the other sort; hence, one of great and successful villany is a prize

for the scribe. In the dearth of such, let us content ourselves with

briefly noticing one of the multitude of abortive cubs, its villany

nipped--as Nature is wont to nip it--in the promising bud of its

tenderness. Many a flourishing young rogue suddenly disappears, and the

world never knows how or why. But it shall know, if it will heed our

one-story tale, how Chip Dartmouth of these parts was turned down

here,--albeit we cannot at present say whether he has since turned up

elsewhere.

Our hero was baptized simply Chipworth, in compliment to a rich uncle,

who was expected on that account to remember him more largely in his

will,--as he probably did; for he soon left him a legacy of twenty

thousand dollars, on the express condition that it should accumulate

till he was of age, and then be used as a capital to set the young man

up in business. As the inheritance of kingdoms spoils kings, so this

little fortune, though Chip could not finger a mill of it during his

minority, all the while acted on him like a controlling magnet, inducing

a strong repellency to good advice and a general exaltation of views, so

that, when he came into possession of it, he was already a fast young

man in almost every respect. He had settled it as the maxim of his life

to gain fast and spend fast; and having had considerable opportunity to

spend before he had any to gain, he had on becoming a business man, some

secret deficits to make good before he could really be as rich as people

supposed him. As his deficits had not been made by daylight, so daylight

must have nothing to do in wiping them out; and hence darkness became

more congenial than its reverse to all his plans, and he studied, as he

thought, with singular success, the various tricks of blinding people

to the state of his finances, as well as of bettering it. While he was

supposed to be growing rich very rapidly, he really was doing so about

half as fast as everybody thought. Chip would not steal,--that was

vulgar. But he would take every possible advantage of other people by

keeping close his own counsels and pumping out theirs. He would slander

a piece of property and then buy it. He would monopolize on a short

market, and fill his purse by forestalling. Indeed, he was, altogether,

one of the keen, and greatly admired in business circles.

It was not easy for Chip to love any being but himself,--not even a

woman. But his smart figure, for which Nature and the tailors had done

their best, set the general female imagination into the most

lively action. Many were the dreams about him,--day-dreams and

night-dreams,--that were dreamed in front of all manner of little

filigree bird nest bonnets and under snowy nightcaps; and at the

slightest encouragement on his part, no doubt, the idea of himself which

had been manufactured in many minds would have been fallen in love with.

The reality certainly would not have been. Miss Millicent Hopkins wore

one of the caps set for Chip, and her he professed vehemently to love.

But she was the daughter of a millionnaire of a very set temper, who had

often said and sworn that his daughter should not have any man who had

not proved by more than mushroom or retail success in business that he

was able and likely to better her fortune. Miss Millicent must plainly

either be run away with, or fairly won on old Hopkins's plan of

wholesale, long-winded business success. Miss Millicent's good looks,

if they did not amount to beauty, did, nevertheless, add something to

the attractiveness of her vast pecuniary prospects. Chip had obtained

the young lady's decided favor without absolutely crossing the Rubicon

himself, for he had no notion of taking her without any of the funds her

father had to bestow. It was arranged between them that his paternal

consent should be asked, and the die or live of matrimony should depend

on that. But, with confidence, or what is sometimes called brass, enough

to put any sort of question, it was impossible for Chip Dartmouth to

state the case to old Mr. Hopkins as it was. Having obtained a private

interview, he grasped the old gentleman by the hand with an air as

familiar as it was apparently cordial.

"Ah! I am very glad to see you, Mr. Hopkins, for I have been thinking

what a fool I must be not to pay my addresses to Miss Millicent; and I

can take no steps, you know, without your consent."

"You can take none with it, Sir," was the emphatic reply of the severe

parent, with a sort of annihilating look. "I admire your prudence and

frankness, my young friend; but, till you show yourself a merchant, of

my own sort, I beg you will excuse me and my family from any of the

steps you contemplate. Good-morning, Sir,--good-morning!"

The showing-out was irresistible, leaving nothing more to be said.

Chip now resolved that he would double his diligence in making money,

out of spite to the father, if not love for the daughter. The old fogy's

wealth he would have at any rate, and Millicent with it, if possible, as

a sort of bonus. So, obtaining an interview with his fair intended and

intending, at the earliest moment, without revealing a hint of his own

diplomatic blunder, he told her that her father had refused his consent

to their union because his fortune was not sufficient, and she must not

expect to see him again till it was so, which he fancied would be in a

much shorter time than the old gentleman supposed.

Chip had not long to wait for a chance to strike the first blow in

carrying out his new resolution of fast trading. The day after his

memorable rebuff, he was sitting in the choky little counting-room of a

crammed commission-warehouse in India Street, musing and mousing over

the various schemes that occurred to his fertile brain for increasing

the profits of his business. He had already bought cotton pretty largely

on speculation. Should he monopolize further, make a grand rush in

stocks, or join the church and get large trust-funds into his hands on

the strength of his reputation for piety? All these and a hundred other

questions were getting rapidly and shrewdly discussed in his mind, when

a rather stubbed man, with a square, homely face and vinegar expression,

opened, or partly opened, the little glass door of the counting-room,

and, looking round it more greedily than hopefully, said,--

"You don't want the cargo of the 'Orion' at a bargain?"

"Can't say I do. But walk in, Captain Grant,--walk in!"

Captain Grant did walk in, though he said it was no use talking, if Chip

didn't want the cotton. Chip saw instinctively, in the sad, acid look of

his visitor, that he was anxious to sell, and could be made to take a

despondent view of the market. Taking him by the button, he said, rather

patronizingly,--

"I know, Captain, you ship-owners want to keep your ships at work at

something besides storage. But look there," pointing to the bales of

cotton filling the immense floor; "multiply that pile by four and add

the basements of two churches, and you see a reason why I should not buy

above the level of the market. Now, taking that into consideration, what

do you ask for your two hundred and fifty bales in the 'Orion?'"

"Seven cents."

"I know somebody who would feel rich, if he could sell at that,"

returned Chip, with a queer grin. "No, no, Captain Grant, that won't do

at all. Prices are sinking. If I should buy at that figure, every sign

of margin would fade out in a fortnight. I haven't five bales that have

been bought at any such price."

It was true, he had not; for they had been bought at seven-and-a-half

and eight.

"Well, I will say six-and-a-half at sixty days, to you," said the

humiliated Grant.

"My dear Sir," replied Chip, "you don't begin to tempt me. I must burn

all my foreign correspondence and forget the facts before I can begin to

look at anything beyond six cents and ninety days."

"Ninety days won't do," said Mr. Grant, tersely. "If we must sacrifice,

it must be for something a bank will look at, Mr. Dartmouth. But I want

the ship cleared, and if you will say six at two months for the whole,

it's a bargain, bad as it is for me."

"Not a bargain for me to be in a hurry about; but I'll think of it. Hold

on till to-morrow. But, on the whole, you needn't do that. It wouldn't

be an object."

"But I will do it, if you say so, till noon to-morrow."

"Better say five-and-three-fourths and have it done to-day," said Chip,

"for I may not give that to-morrow. But if you hold on, and I buy

anything at six, it shall be your lot."

Captain Grant, beginning to believe that he should, after all, sell a

little above the bottom of the market, took his leave for his home among

the Waltham hills, a little less grouty than when he entered.

That same night, Chip, after having dropped in at numerous resorts of

the fast men, in most of which somewhat of his conscience, such as it

was, dropped out, was proceeding homeward through Devonshire Street,

with the brightest of his wits still about him. It was a raw night, one

of the rawest ever got up by a belated equinoctial, with almost nothing

stirring in the streets but the wind, and the loose shutters and old

remnants of summer awnings left to its tender mercies. Aeolus, with

these simple instruments of sound, added to the many sharp corners of

city architecture, managed to get up something of a symphony, enough

almost to make up for the nocturnal cats, now retired to silence and the

snuggest attainable quarters. The hour was one of the short ones

ayont the twal, and sleep reigned everywhere except in the

daily-newspaper-offices and in the most fashionable of the grog-shops.

Besides Chip, the only living thing in Devonshire Street was a

thinly-clad stripling, with a little roll of yellowish tissue-paper in

his hand, knocking and shaking feebly at a door which grimly refused to

open. His powers of endurance were evidently giving way, and his grief

had become both vocal and fluent in the channel of his infant years.

"What's the matter, my boy?" asked Chip,--"locked out, hey?"

"No,--bo-hoo. No, Sir, the door's blowed to and froze up, and I can't

git this pos'crip' up to the office."

"Oh, oh! you're the telegraph-boy, are you?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Most froz'n, aren't you?"

"O-oo-oo, that I be, Sir."

Here a very bright idea struck Chip, and he inquired,--

"Is this all that's coming?"

"Boo-hoo. Yes, Sir. They've sent good-night once before, and this is the

pos'crip'. The wires is shut off now, and some of the papers is shut

off, too; for I've been to three before this, and can't git into nary

one on 'em."

"Never mind, my poor fellow; I belong up here. I'll take the sheets and

send 'em round to all the other papers that are open. Never mind; you

take that, and go right home to your mother."

"Thank you, Sir," said the shivering lad, and, giving up the yellow roll

and taking the loose coppers offered him in the quickest possible time,

he scampered off around the corner of Water Street and left Chip in

company with two temptations.

"Now," thought Chip, "it will be certainly a clean and gentlemanly

thing, if, after having relieved this poor little devil of his trouble

and responsibility, I should oblige the still poorer devil of a concern

up-stairs by giving 'em this postcript of foreign news, which, by

working so late, they will probably have exclusively. That would be most

truly honest, benevolent, and philanthropic. It would make at least one

newspaper my friend, and, on the whole, it is something of a temptation.

But let me see what it will cost."

Giving the black door a vigorous push, he entered, and by the gas-burner

on the first landing discovered that the postcript in his possession

gave the state of the Liverpool cotton-market a day later than the body

of the dispatch, which had already gone into type, and, what was more to

the purpose, announced a rise of a penny-and-a-half on the pound. Chip

clutched the gauzy sheets in his fist, closed the door as softly as

possible, and yielded himself a doomed captive to temptation number two.

Here was a little fortune on the cotton he had in store at any rate,

and, if he really had in his grasp all the news of the rise, he might

make by it a plump ten thousand dollars out of Captain Grant's "Orion."

But to this end he must be sure that not a lisp of the rise would be

published in the morning papers, and he must see Captain Grant and close

his bargain for the "Orion's" cargo before the wires should begin to

furnish additional news by the "Africa" to the evening papers. They

would not, after obtaining such news, lose a moment in parading it on

their bulletin-boards, and Captain Grant might get hold of it before

reaching the little counting-room in India Street. Chip, of course,

saw what to do, and did it. Waiting in one of the little

"meals-at-all-hours" saloons till he heard the churning of the

press-engines, he sallied out and bought of the overloaded carriers the

earliest copies of the morning papers, and made himself sure that the

foreign news did not disclose any change of the cotton-market. The

next thing was to transfer himself to Captain Grant's residence in

Waltham,--exactly whereabout in Waltham he did not know, but, of course,

he could easily find out,--and, without exciting the grouty old salt's

suspicions of false play, make sure of the cotton at his own price. On

the whole, he thought it safer, as well as cheaper, to use the early

train than to hire a special team.

Arrived in Waltham, to his great vexation, it appeared, after

much inquiry, that Captain Grant lived full three miles from the

station,--and what was worse, every omnibus, hack, buggy, and dog-cart

was engaged for a muster in one direction or a cattle-show in another.

Nothing on wheels could be hired at any price,--at least, none could be

found in an hour's search from one hotel or livery-stable to another.

Chip, whose sleepless night and meditated fraud had not left much of the

saint in him, swore the whole of Waltham as deep as the grimmest view of

predestination would allow. And he restrained himself from being still

more profane only lest his wrath should awaken inconvenient suspicions.

After all, there was one old tavern a little way out, where possibly a

one-horse affair could be raised. The Birch House was a sort of seedy,

dried-up, quiet, out-of-the-way inn, whose sign-post stood forth like a

window without sash, the rectangular ligneous picture of a man driving

cattle to Brighton having long ago been blown out of its lofty setting

and split to pieces by the fall. What was the use of replacing it? No

one was likely to call, who did not already know that the Widow Birch

still kept tavern there, and just how she kept it. It was doubtful if a

new sign would attract a single new customer. Indeed, since the advent

of railroads, a customer was not a common occurrence any way, though

there still remained a few that could be depended on, like the Canada

geese, in their season, and their custom was handsomely profitable. The

house, a white wooden one, with greenish blinds, had two low stories,

the first of which was nearly level with the ground. There was a broad,

low entry running through the middle, and on either side two rather

spacious square rooms. One of those in front had a well-sanded,

well-worn pine floor, with a very thirsty-looking counter across one

corner, supporting a sort of palisade that appeared to fortify nothing

at all,--a place, however, which had evidently been moist enough in

the olden times. In the other front room was a neat carpet, plain,

old-fashioned furniture, and a delightful little plantation of fresh and

cozy flower-pots, surrounding a vase full of gold-fishes, and overhung

by a bright-eyed, mellow-throated canary, the whole of that paradise

being doubtless under the watch and care of little Laura Birch. This was

the ladies' parlor,--the grand reception-room, also, of any genteel male

guest, should one for a wonder appear. Little Laura, however, was no

longer as little as she had been,--though just as innocent, and ten

times as bewitching to most people who knew her. You could not but

particularly wish her well, the moment her glad, hopeful, playful,

confiding, half-roguish eye met yours. With the most conscientious

resolution to make herself useful, under her mother's thrifty

administration, in the long, clean New England kitchen which stretched

away behind the square dining-room, interposed between it and the dry

bar-room, she had a taste for books and a passion for flowers, which

absorbed most of her thoughts, and gained her more chidings from her

mother for their untimely manifestations than her handiest services

gained thanks or any signs of grateful recognition. She and the flowers,

including the bird and the fishes, seemed to belong to the same

sisterhood. She had copied their fashion of dress and behavior, rather

than the Parisian or any imported style,--and so her art, being all

learned from Nature, was quite natural. On the very morning in question,

she was engaged in giving this little conservatory the benefit of her

thorough skill and affectionate regard, when good Dame Birch broke in

upon her with,--

"Why, Laury, what are you thinking about? It's always just so. Here is a

gentleman in the bar-room, and he's a'most sure to order breakfast, and

them eels isn't touched, and not a thing ready but cold victuals and

pie. Them eels would be so nice and genteel! and you know they won't

keep."

"But you didn't tell me to fry them now, mother," said Laura.

"But I told you to fix 'em all ready to fry."

"Well, mother," replied Laura, "I'll come as soon as these things are

set to rights. It won't do to leave them just so."

"Well, it's always just so," said the maternal Birch. "I must do it

myself, I see. Don't be all day, Laury,--now don't!"

She disappeared, muttering something about "them plaguy flower-pots."

In point of fact, Chip Dartmouth was all this while in the aforesaid dry

bar-room, engaged in an earnest colloquy with Frank Birch, a grown-up

son of the landlady, a youth just entered on the independent platform of

twenty-one, Laura being three years younger. Chip had arrived rather out

of breath and excited, having got decidedly ahead of the amenities

that would have been particularly expedient under the circumstances.

Approaching a door of the bar-room, which opened near its corner towards

the barn, and which stood open at the time, he descried Frank within

busily engaged mending harness.

"Hallo! young man, I say, hurry up that job, for I've no time to lose."

"Well, I'm glad on't," retorted Frank, hardly looking up from his work,

"for I ha'n't."

"Look here!" said Chip, entering, "you're the man I've been looking for.

I must have a ride to Captain Grant's, straight off, at your own price."

"Maybe you must, but I'm goin' to the Concord cattle-show, and Captain

Grant's is four miles out of the way. I can't think of goin' round, for

I shall be too late, any way."

"Never mind that, my young friend, if you 'r' 'n such a hurry, put on

the string and look to me for the damage."

"Maybe you can't pay it," replied Frank, looking rather scornful.

"The Devil!" exclaimed Chip, "are all the Waltham people born idiots?"

"No! some of 'em are born governors," said Frank, "and Boston people may

find it out one of these days."

On this, Landlady Birch intervened, taking the bar-room in her way from

the parlor to the kitchen.

"What is that you say, Frank? The gentleman can have as good a breakfast

here as he can have anywhere out of Boston, I'm sure, though I say it

myself. We don't have so many to cook for, and so, perhaps, we take a

little more pains, Sir,--ha! ha!"

And with that good Mrs. Birch put on a graciousness of smile worthy of

the most experienced female Boniface in Anglo-Saxondom.

"The gentleman don't want any breakfast, mother; he only wants a ride

round to Captain Grant's, and he ha'n't got the manners to ask for it,

like a gentleman;--he _must_ have it. I say he mus'n't in my buggy, for

I a'n't goin' that way."

"Why, son, the gentleman of course expects to pay for it."

"Yes, Madam," said Chip, "I am willing and expect to bleed freely."

_Frank_. "Well, I should like to know what you mean by that? _I_ don't

want your blood, or that of any other Boston squirt."

_Mrs. Birch (to Chip, after a reproving glance at Frank)_. "I think we

can accommodate you, Sir. The buggy is at the blacksmith's, and will be

done in half-an-hour. If you want, you can have breakfast while you are

waiting; and you will find a comfortable fire in the parlor to sit by,

at any rate."

With this, Mrs. Birch made her exit, to hurry matters on the cook-stove.

"There! that's her, all over!" grumbled Frank. "If she can sell a meal

of victuals, she don't care what becomes of me. But I'll let her know

the mare's mine, and the buggy's mine, all but the harness; and I tell

_you_, Sir, I'll see the mare drowned in Charles River and the buggy

split into kindling-wood, before you shall have a ride to Captain

Grant's this day."

"But here's a five-dollar-bill," quoth Chip, displaying a small handful

of banknotes.

_Frank_. "You may go to thunder with the whole of 'em! I tell you I've

set my foot down, and I won't take it up for my own mother,--and I'm

sure I won't for anything that ever was or will be under your clo'es."

With this, he jerked up the harness and went off to the barn, with an

air that convinced Chip that the controversy between mother and son was

not likely to be decided in his favor at a sufficiently early hour to

answer his purpose. But where else should he go, or what else should

he do? As he was a little more inclined now to bet on calmness than on

passion, he decided to take a seat in the parlor, and keep it, at

least, till he could dispose of his present doubt. Easily might he have

measured three miles over the Waltham hills, in the bracing morning-air,

with his own locomotive apparatus, while he had been looking in vain for

artificial conveyance. But if that plan had occurred to him at all at

first, it would have been dismissed with contempt as unbusinesslike. He

must not, by any possibility, appear to Captain Grant to be so madly

anxious to close the bargain. He did a little regret neglecting the

service of his own proper pegs, but it was now entirely too late to

walk, and he must ride, and at a good pace, too, or lose the entire

benefit of the news which the lightning had so singularly confided to

his honest hands. The feeling with which he flung himself into that

quiet, little, economical parlor was, probably, even more desperate than

Richard's, when he offered his kingdom for a horse. It was, in fact,

just the feeling, of all others in the world, to prevent a man's getting

a horse. Had he carried it into a pasture full of horses, it would have

prevented him from catching the tamest of them. But the good influences

of the Universe, that encourage and strengthen the noble martyrs of

truth and workers of good in their arduous labors, do sometimes also

help on villains to their bad ends. Never were troubled waters more

quickly smoothed with oil, never were the poles of a magnet more quickly

reversed, than Chip's rage and rancor abated after he entered that door.

Not that he relaxed his purpose at all, or felt any essential change of

his nature, but his temper was instantly turned the right side up

for success. He was, of course, unconscious of the cause,--for it is

certainly nothing wonderful, even in the neighborhood of Boston, to see

a neat Yankee lass, in her second or third best dress, putting things

to rights of a morning, with a snowy handkerchief over her head, its

corners drawn into a half-knot under her sweet chin, and some little

ruddy outposts on her cheeks, ready, on the slightest occasion, to

arouse a whole army of blushes. Laura had just given the finishing touch

to her flower culture, changed the water of her fishes, replenished the

seed-bucket of the canary, and was about leaving the room. Almost any

man would have been glad of an excuse to speak to her. Chip could have

made an excuse, if one had not been ready-made, that was to him very

important, as well as satisfactory.

"Miss Birch, I presume?"

"Yes, Sir," said Laura, with a curtsy, not quite so large as those that

grow in dancing schools, but, nevertheless, very pretty.

"Well, Miss Birch," said Chip, blandly advancing and taking her nice

little hand, half covered with her working-mitts,--whereat the

aforesaid outposts promptly did their duty,--"or shall I call you Miss

Susan Birch?"

"No, Sir, my name is Laura," said the girl, shrinking a little from a

contact which rather took her by surprise.

"Oh, Laura!--that is better yet," proceeded Chip. "Now, Miss Laura, I

have got myself into a terrible scrape; can you help me out of it?"

"I can't tell, indeed, Sir, till I know what it is," said Laura, with a

bright twinkle of reassurance.

"Well, it is this:--I have mortally offended your brother,--for so I

take him to be by his looks,--and I most sincerely repent it, for he

owns the only team left in Waltham. If I cannot hire that team for an

hour, I lose money enough to buy this house twice over. I want you to

reconcile us. Will you offer my apology and prevail on him to take this

and be my coachman for an hour?" asked Chip,--slipping a gold eagle

into her hand with the most winning expression at his command.

"Oh, yes, Sir,--I'm sure I'll try without that, Sir. He will be glad to

oblige you, when he knows how you need it," she said, offering to return

the coin.

"No, no, Miss Laura, I want to pay him well; and if you succeed,--why,

no money can pay _you_, Miss Laura; I don't profess to be rich enough to

do it."

Here the outposts gave another alarm, and again the hosts of the ruby

uniform were gathering hurriedly in their two muster-fields.

"Why, I will go and try, Sir," said Laura, so much confused by the

novelty and magnitude of the circumstances that she opened the

closet-door before opening the only one that led out of the room.

Fairly out of Chip's presence, she saw instantly and instinctively the

worthlessness of that gold eagle, however genuine, compared with her

sisterly love, in her mission to Frank. So she ran directly to her

mother in the long kitchen, and, planking the American eagle upon the

sloppy little table where the eels were rapidly getting dressed, said,--

"Why, mother, that gentleman wants to hire Frank to carry him to Captain

Grant's, and I'm sure he ought to go without hiring. I'll go right out

and see him."

"That's right, Laury; tell him he ought to be ashamed of himself!"

"Oh, no, mother, I won't tell him any such thing," said Laura,

laughingly, as she hopped and skipped towards the barn.

"Well, Frank, how's Nell Gwyn, this morning?" cheerily cried Laura to

Frank, who seemed to be getting his harness into a worse snarl, in his

grouty attempts to get it out of one.

"The mare's well enough, if she hadn't been insulted."

"Why, that's abominable, Frank! But let me get that snarl out."

"You get it out! You get out yourself, Laule."

"Why, that's all I'm good for, Frank; I always pick out the snarls in

the house, you know, and I should like to try it once in the barn."

"The tarnal old thing's bewitched, I believe," said Frank, allowing his

sister to interfere and quietly untwist and turn right side out the

various parts which he had put wrong by all sorts of torsion. "I'll

teach Boston chaps to know that there are some things they can't have

for money! When Nell and I have agreed to have a good time, we a'n't

goin' to be ordered off nor bought off;--we'll _have_ it."

"So _I_ say, Frank. But suppose _I_ wanted you to give _me_ a ride,

Frank?"

"Why, Laule, you know I would go to the North Pole with you. If Mam

would only let _you_ go to Concord with me, I'd wait till noon for you."

"Well, maybe she will, Frank. She wants you to carry that man to

Captain Grant's bad enough to let me go in the afternoon."

"But I told him I wouldn't carry him,--and, gol darn it, I won't!"

"Of course you won't carry him on his own account, or for the sake of

his money,--but for my sake perhaps you will."

"Well, Sis, perhaps I will. But, mind, before I do, Mam shall promise,

sartin sure, to let you go by half-past twelve o'clock, and not a minit

later."

"Well, I'll see she does; you harness Nell, and get the buggy. The man

says he's sorry he spoke to you so. If he's carried to Captain Grant's

and back, I'll answer for it's being the best for all of us."

She was off to the house like a bird, and the rest of her diplomacy was

too simple and straightforward to need special record.

As the buggy was at the door before the table presented the savory

temptation of fried eels, Chip declined breakfast at present, but

decidedly promised to take it on his return. He dropped in on Captain

Grant, as he was careful to tell that gentleman, having had business in

Waltham that morning, and thinking he might perhaps save him a journey

to town. The ship-owner had just finished the news of the morning

papers, for which he had sent a messenger express to the post-office,

and said, after the cordial salutation which a rough sort of man always

gives in his own house,--

"Well, Mr. Dartmouth, I see the market is as close-reefed as ever.

Maybe you think I will sell at five and three-fourths to-day, but I've

concluded to make a floating warehouse of the 'Orion' for the winter,

rather than do that."

"I don't blame you for that, my friend; but in the present state of

advices, six at two months is the highest mill that will do. If you will

close the 'Orion's' cargo at that, I am your man."

"What I've said, I'll do, Sir, of course," said the tough old salt; "and

since you've taken the trouble to come out here and save my lame toes,

let's nail the bargain with a bottle of my old Madeira,--some of the

ripest this side of the herring-pond, I'll be bound."

"Not a drop, I thank you; for, besides being a teetotaller, Captain, I'm

behind time to-day, and must bid you good-morning."

"Well, Sir, I'm much obliged to you; the bill of sale shall be at your

counting-room directly; the clerk will receive the notes and deliver the

cotton. Good-morning, Sir,--good-morning!"

In truth, Chip had not the slightest objection to wine, as wine, even

had it not been the ripest on this continent; but, like any other

mitigated villain, he did not quite relish taking wine with the man he

was basely cheating. He would much rather partake of Ma'am Birch's fried

eels and coffee, especially if Laura Birch should, peradventure, be the

Hebe of such an ambrosial entertainment. She was not, however,--and the

disappointment considerably overclouded the commercial victory of the

morning. Madam Birch herself did the honors of whatever sort, while Chip

played a fantasia solo at the _table d'hôte_. The good lady enlarged

volubly on her destitution of help, and how, if she had any such as

we get now-a-days, they were more plague than profit,--how Laura was

getting ready to go with Frank to the cattle-show, and she herself was

likely to be the only living mortal in the house for the rest of the

day.

"Such a son as you have is a fortune, Madam; and as for the daughter,

she is a gem, a genuine diamond, Madam."

"Ha! ha! do you really think so, Sir?" said the mother, evidently

gratified with the superlativeness of the compliment. "Well, they do say

children are jewels.--but I've found, Sir, they are pretty

troublesome and pretty costly jewels. Mine, as you say, are very good

children,--though Frank is pretty wilful, and Laury is always gettin'

her head above the clouds. Oh, dear! they want a great deal done for

'em,--and the more you do, the more you may do. Frank is bewitched to

sell out and go to Kansas or Californy, or, if he stays here, he must go

to college or be a merchant. And Laury, even she isn't contented; she

wants to be some sort of artist, make statters or picters,--or be a

milliner, at least. So you see I haven't a minute's peace of my life

with 'em."

Of course Chip saw it, and the more's the pity.

"All the better, Madam," said he. "Young America must go ahead. There's

nothing to be had without venturing. If I can ever be of service to

either of your children in forwarding their laudable ambition, I am sure

it will give me the greatest pleasure."

"You are very kind, Sir, but I only wish you could persuade 'em to let

well alone, and at least not try the world till they know more of it."

"Not touch the water till they have learned to swim, eh? That's not

quite so easy, Madam. Never fear; I'll be bound, a boy that can say _No_

like yours is perfectly safe anywhere; and as to Laura, why, Madam, I

never heard of an angel getting into difficulty in the wickedest of

worlds."

"Our old minister, Parson Usher that was, used to say some of the Bible

angels fell,--and I am sure, Sir, the human angels have a worse chance.

They are about the only ones that run any risk at all."

"True, true enough, Ma'am, in one point of view. Too much care cannot be

taken to select the society in which young people are to move. In the

right society, such a girl as Laura would win homage on every side, and

make herself happy by making everybody else so."

"I believe you are right there, Sir," said Mrs. Birch, quite charmed

with such beautiful appreciation of what she felt to be Laura's

excellence; "and I don't wonder sometimes that she should be

discontented with the society she has here, poor girl!"

"When you see the sun begin to shine in the morning, you may be sure

enough it will keep rising all the forenoon," said Chip, with the air

of a great moral philosopher, conscious of having made a decided

impression. And suddenly recollecting how valuable was his time in town,

and that the train would be due in five minutes, he swallowed the last

of his coffee, paid his bill, told the landlady how happy he was to have

made her acquaintance and that of her interesting family, promised he

would never stop in Waltham without calling, and strode away.

The lightning flashed from a good many eyes in the telegraph-office when

the morning members of the associated press inquired why they had not

been served with the latest news,--why, in fact, the only item of any

significance was reserved for the evening papers of the day. Not a press

of all the indignant complainants was ready to admit that it had locked

up its forms and gone to bed before the wires had completed their task.

Very bitter paragraphs testified, the next day, that, in the opinion of

many sage and respectable editors, the wires had been tampered with

by speculators. The poor little half-frozen telegraph-boy was closely

catechized, first by the officers of the telegraph-company, and

afterwards by certain shrewd detectives, but no clue could be got to the

fine gentleman who so generously relieved him of his responsibility, and

no result followed, except his dismissal and the employment of another

lad of more ability and probably less innocence. Captain Grant was the

man most likely to have come to a discovery in the matter, and most

heartily did he curse his luck--his "usual luck"--of giving away a

fortune by selling a cargo a day too soon. But being kept at home

by uncomfortable toes, no suspicious mortal, such as abound in the

lounging-rooms of insurance-offices and other resorts of business-men in

town, happened ingeniously to put his suspicions on a scent, and he did

not come within a league of the thought that Chip Dartmouth could have

had anything to do with the strange and blamable conduct of the wires.

As he made no proclamation of his loss, and no other case of sale

during the abeyance of the news came to the knowledge of the parties

interested, the matter, greatly to Chip's comfort, fell into entire

oblivion before a fortnight had passed. The understanding was, that,

though great mischief might have been done, none had been,--and

that somebody had simply made waste-paper of the little yellow

thunderbolt-scrawls.

For the first fortnight, Chip's nervousness, not to say conscience, very

much abated the pleasure of the many congratulations he received from

his friends, and from hundreds of people whom he had never before known

as his friends. He couldn't get through the streets any day without

meeting the solidest sort of men, with whom he had never exchanged

a word in his life, but whose faces were as familiar as that of the

Old-South clock, who took him by the hand quite warmly, and said,--

"Ah, Mr. Dartmouth, permit me to congratulate you on your good-fortune.

You have well deserved it. I like to see a young man like you make such

a ten-strike, especially when it comes in consequence of careful study

of the market."

The truth was, Chip had been playing a pretty hazardous game in the

cotton-market, chiefly at the risk of other parties; and the slice he

had so feloniously carved out of poor Captain Grant was quite small

compared with the gains he had managed to secure by thus venturing a

little of his own and a great deal of other people's money. The shrewd

minds in the secrets of the business world were not slow to see that

he must have realized at least a hundred thousand units of commercial

omnipotence by the operations of the first week after the rise.

Everybody was glad of an opportunity to speak to such a man. Even Mr.

Hopkins, immensely retired as he was, driving into State Street

about noon one genial day to receive a bank dividend or two, stepped

considerably out of his way, in walking from his low-hung turnout to the

door of one of the banks, in order to catch Mr. Dartmouth's notice, and

say to him, "Good-morning, Mr. Dartmouth! I hope you are very well,

Sir!" Chip recognized the salutation with a superb nod, but without the

accompaniment of any verbal rhetoric which was audible above the buzz of

the pavement; and the retired millionnaire passed on about his business.

"Ah!" thought Chip, "I am getting to be a merchant of the right sort, I

see,--and by the time he is ready to change that low-hung little chariot

for the hard, angular ebony with raven plumes, I shall be ready to step

into the other plump little vehicle, which is really so nice and cozy."

But we must leave Chip to the easy task of ballooning upward in public

estimation, with his well-inflated bank-account. He was, in fact,

reformed by his great commercial success to this extent, that his vices

had become of the most distinguished and unvulgar grade. He was now

courted by the highest artists in iniquity, and had the means of

accomplishing results that none but men who are known to be really rich

can command. He, therefore, now quitted all vulgar associations, and

determined not to outrage any of the virtues, except under varnish,

gilding, and polish that would keep everything perfectly respectable.

Let him trust to that as long as he can.

Don't talk of the solitude of a night in the primeval forests, however

far from the abodes of man;--the squirrels and the partridges may be

asleep then and there, but the katydids are awake, and, with the support

of contralto and barytone tree-toads, manage to keep up a concert which

cannot fail to impress on you a sense of familiar and friendly company.

Don't talk of the loneliness of a deserted and ruinous castle;--the

crickets have not left it, and, if you don't have a merry time with

their shrill jokes, it will be your own fault. But if you would have a

sense of being terribly alone, come from long residence in some quiet

country-home on the border of a quiet country-village, into the

hurry-skurry of a strange city, just after nightfall. Here is an

infinite brick-and-stone forest, stern, angular, almost leafless. Here

is a vast, indistinguishable wilderness of flitting human shapes, not

one of which takes half so much notice of you as a wild bush would.

Speak to one; it answers without the slightest emotion, and passes on.

Your presence is absolutely no more to any soul of them, provided they

have souls, than if you were so much perfectly familiar granite. You

feel, that, with such attention as you receive, such curiosity as you

excite, you must be there hundreds of years to be either recognized or

missed.

Had you been a stranger in Boston, one moist and rather showery

summer-evening, not a year after the events we have narrated, you might

have been recovered from the sense of loneliness we have described by

observing one pretty female figure hurrying along the crowded sidewalk

with a very large and replete satchel, and without any of the

_sang-froid_ which characterizes city pedestrianism. You might have

noticed that this one human being, like yourself, was evidently not at

home. Every glare of gas-light revealed a deeply-flushed face, eyes that

had been weeping and which were now flashing with a wild earnestness

and an altogether preternatural resolution. A gazelle, started by the

huntsman's pack, could not have thrown more piercing glances at every

avenue of escape than this excited girl did at every cross street, and

indeed at everything but the human faces that passed her. All of them

she shunned, with a look that seemed equally anxious to avoid the known

and the unknown. She should seem to have narrowly escaped some peril,

and was carrying with her a secret not to be confided to friend or

stranger, certainly not to either without due consideration. Had you

watched her, as the crowds of people, returning from the various evening

amusements, died away in the streets, you would have seen the deep

color of her cheeks die away also to deadly paleness; had you been

sufficiently clairvoyant, you might have seen how two charming rows of

pearls bit the blanched lips till the runaway blood came back into the

sad gashes, how the tears welled up again, and with them came relief and

fresh strength just as she was about to faint and drop in the street.

Then returned again the throb of indignant resolution, as her mind

recurred to the attempted ruin of her paradise by a disguised foe;

then succeeded shame and dread lest the friends she had left in her

childhood's rural home should know how differently from her fond

anticipations had turned out the first week of her sojourn in the great

city. She was most thoroughly resolved, that, if possible, they should

not know anything of the wreck of her long-cherished hopes till she had

found some foothold for new ones. She felt that she was a Yankee girl in

the metropolis of New England, with wit, skill, and endurance equal to

any employment that ever falls to the lot of Yankee women; but having

given up the only chance which had ever opened to her, how could she

find another? Were she of the other sex, or only disguised in the outer

integuments of it, with the trifling sum in her purse, she would get

lodgings at the next hotel, and seek suitable employment without

suspicion. In the wide wilderness of a city there was not an

acquaintance she did not dread to meet, in her present circumstances,

even worse than death itself, or, what is next door to it, a

police-station.

The streets had emptied themselves of their rushing throngs, the patter

of feet and the murmur of voices had given place to measured individual

marches here and there, the dripping of cave-spouts and the flapping of

awnings could be heard tattling of showers past and future, and the last

organ-grinder had left the ungrateful city to its slumbers, when the

poor girl first became conscious that she had been lugging hither

and thither her entire outfit of wardrobe, valuables, and keepsakes.

Aggravated by fatigue, her indecision as to how she should dispose of

herself was gradually sinking into despair, and the official guardians

of the night, who had doubtless noticed her as she passed and repassed

through their beats, were beginning to make up their official minds,

generally and severally, that the case might by-and-by require their

benevolent interference, when she was startled by a female voice from

behind.

"Arrah, stop there, ye rinaway jade! I know ye by yer big bag, ye big

thafe, that ye are!"

Glad at any voice addressed to her, and gladder at this than if it had

been more familiar or more friendly, our forlorn maiden turned and said,

in the sweetest voice imaginable,--

"Oh, no, my friend, I am not a thief."

"Och, I beg your pardon, honey! I thought sure it was Bridget, that's

jist rin away wid a bagful of her misthress's clo'es and a hape o' mine,

and it's me that's bin all the way down to Pat Mahoney's in North Street

to git him to hunt her up; and the Blessed Mother forgive me, whin I

seen you in the dark, stalin' along like, wi' that bag, I thought it

was herself it was, sure. Och, ye're a swate lass, I see, now; but what

makes ye out this time o' night, dear?"

"Well, I'm too late for the train, you see, and I really don't know what

to do or where to go," said the Yankee girl, putting on the air natural

to such circumstances, with the readiness of her race.

"Och, I see, that's the mailing o' the bag, thin. Poor thing! ye jist

come along wid me. I'll lift the bag for ye, me darlint, an' I'll pit

clane sheets on Bridget's bed, and ye're welcome to slape there as long

as ye like; for the Blessed Mother knows it's powerful tired ye're

lookin', it is. I'm cook for more nor twinty years for the Hopkinses in

Bacon Street, and I can make ye jist as welcome in my quarthers as if it

was nobody but meself that owned it at all at all."

"Oh, my dear woman, I thank you kindly! That bag _was_ beginning to grow

heavy," replied the overjoyed outcast; and presently, with a ready eye

to business, she added, "And since Bridget is gone, who knows but I can

take her place? I came to the city on purpose to find something to do,

and I can do anything that is not dishonest."

"Och! the likes o' ye take her place? Niver a bit of it! Why! I see by

the gas-light ye're a leddy as iver was at all at all; and ye could

niver come in the shoes of sich a thafe as Bridget Maloney, as is gone,

and the Divil catch her!"

"No, no, not in her shoes to steal anything, I hope; but I can do

housework, sweep, make beds, sew, and make myself useful,--as I will

show, if I can have a trial."

"An' ye may well say that's a hape more nor _she_ iver could. But if

it's a thrial ye want, it's me that'll give't ye as soon as ye plase.

I'll answer for ye's to Misthress Millicent,--and that's what I niver

did for Bridget, and it's right glad I am of that. Now niver fear, me

darlint, it's a powerful good place, it is too, to thim as kapes the

right side o' Misthress Millicent; for she's the only daughter, and the

mother is dead and gone, poor soul!"

They were now approaching the opulent mansion over the _cuisine_ of

which our special police-woman had so long had the honor of presiding.

Almost delighted enough with her capture to forget, if not forgive, her

fugitive fellow-servant Bridget, the florid and fat Aunt Peggy Muldoony

hurried along as if the bag were a feather, her words flowing like a

spring flood, and introduced her charge at a postern-door into her own

house, as she called it. This was, in fact, a very comfortable and

somewhat spacious dwelling, which stood almost distinct in the rear of

the mansion in which the Hopkins family proper resided, so that there

should be ample accommodations for servants, and the steam of cooking

could not annoy the grand parlors. Here we might leave the beautiful

waif, so strangely picked up in the dark street, to the working of her

own genius. She had fallen into a place which had control of all the

chamber-work of a modern palace, with ample assistance. Aunt Peggy, her

guardian angel, at once instructed her in the routine of the duties, and

she very soon had occasion to wonder how the care of so many beautiful

flowers, vases, statues, pictures, and objects of splendor and taste,

not to speak of beds that the Queen of Sheba might have envied, could

have been committed to a domestic who could be tempted to run away with

a few hundred dollars' worth of silks and laces. The legal owner himself

could hardly enjoy his well-appointed paradise better than she did, in

keeping every leaf up to its highest beauty. It must require a pretty

strong dose of tyranny to drive her away, she thought.

But tyranny, if it were there, did not show itself. After a number of

serious, but vain attempts, on the part of Miss Millicent, to gratify

her curiosity by unravelling the mystery of her new servant, whose

industry, skill, and taste produced visible and very satisfactory

effects in every part of the mansion, she settled down to the

conclusion, that, finally, a treasure had fallen to her lot which it was

best for her to keep as carefully as possible and make the most of. She

could now smile and assume airs of great condescension when her worthy

female friends complained of careless, incompetent, and unfaithful

domestics, and have the pleasure of being teased in vain to know what

she did to be so well served.

The satisfaction of Miss Millicent at having found and attached to her

service a young woman of such superlative domestic genius and taste, who

seemed to be so thoroughly contented with her situation, was especially

enhanced by the fact, that her own marriage was approaching, an occasion

which any bride of good sense would wish to have free from the annoyance

of slack and untrustworthy Bridgets.

A few months after the period of which we have been speaking, the

long-expected event of the last paragraph was evidently on the eve of

accomplishment. There was sitting in the distinguished parlor of Mr.

Hopkins, himself, occupying an easy-chair of the most elaborate design

and costly materials. It had all manner of extensibilities,--conveniences

for reclining the trunk or any given limb at any possible

angle,--conveniences for sleeping, for writing, for reading,

for taking snuff,--and was, withal, a marvel of upholstery-workmanship

and substantial strength. Another still more exquisite combination

of rosewood, velvet, spiral springs, and cunning floral carving,

presenting a striking resemblance to that great ornament of

the English alphabet, the letter S, held Miss Millicent Hopkins, in

one curve, face to face with Mr. Chipworth Dartmouth, already known to

the reader, in the other. Near by the half-recumbent millionnaire, at a

little gem of a lady's writing-desk, sat Mr. Frank Sterling, the junior

partner of the distinguished law-firm of Trevor and Sterling, engaged in

reading to all the parties aforesaid a very ingenious and interesting

document, which he had drawn up, according to the general dictation of

Mr. Hopkins aforesaid. It was, in fact, a marriage-settlement, of which

the three beautifully engrossed copies were to be signed and sealed

by all the parties in interest, and each was to possess a copy. Frank

Sterling read over the paragraphs which settled enormous masses of funds

around the sacred altar where Hymen was so soon to apply his torch, with

great professional coolness, as well as commendable rapidity; but when

he came to the conclusion, and, looking at both father and daughter,

said, that all that remained, if the draught now met their approbation,

was, to have witnesses called in and add the signatures, he betrayed a

little personal feeling, which it behooves the reader to understand.

Frank Sterling, though one of the best fellows in the world, with a

joyous face, a bright eye, a hearty laugh, and the keenest possible

relish for everything beautiful and good, was a bachelor, because a mate

quite to his judgment and taste had never fallen in his way. With Mr.

Hopkins, he had been, for a year or two, a favorite lawyer. Professional

business had often brought him to the house, and at Miss Millicent's

parties he had often been a specially licensed guest. There had been a

time, he felt quite sure, when, if he had pushed a suit, he could have

put his name where that of Dartmouth stood in the marriage-settlement,

and, as he glanced at Miss Millicent, as she sat in the mellow light of

the purplish plate-glass of that superb parlor, she seemed so beautiful

and queenly that he almost wished he had done it. Was it quite fit that

such a woman should be thrown away upon one of the mere beasts of the

stock-market? The air with which Chip took his victory was so exactly

like that matter-of-course chuckle with which he would have tossed over

the proceeds of a shrewd bargain into his bank-account, that the young

lawyer's soul was shocked at it, and he almost wished he had prevented

such a shame. However, his discretion came to the rescue, and told him

he had done right in not linking his fortunes to a woman who, however

beautiful, was too passive in her character to make any man positively

happy. Had it been his ambition to spend his life in burning incense to

an exquisitely chiselled goddess, here was a chance, to be sure, where

he could have done it on a salary that would have satisfied a _pontifex

maximus_; but, with a fair share of the regard for money which

characterizes his profession, Mr. Sterling never could make up his mind

to become a suitor for the hand of Miss Millicent, nor get rid of the

notion that he was to bless and be blessed by some woman of positive

character and a taste for working out her own salvation in her own

way,--some woman who, not being made by her wealth, could not be unmade

by the loss of it. It was, therefore, only a momentary sense of choking

he experienced, as he laid the manuscripts on the leaf of Mr. Hopkins's

chair, and said,--

"Shall I ring the bell, Sir?"

"If you please, Mr. Sterling. Now, Millicent, dear, whose name shall

have the honor of standing as witness on this document? There is Aunt

Peggy,--is good at using pothooks, but not so good at making them. Her

mark won't exactly do."

"Why, father! I shall, of course, have my little favorite, Lucy

Green; her signature will be perfectly beautiful. And by the way, Mr.

Dartmouth, here is a thing I haven't thought of before. With this Lucy

of mine for an attendant, I am worth about twice as much as I should

have been without her, and yet no mention has been made of this in the

bargain."

"Ha! ha!" said Chip. "Thought of in good time. Let Mr. Sterling add the

item at once. I am content."

"First, however, you shall see the good girl herself, Mr. Dartmouth,

and then we can have a postscript--or should I say a codicil?--on her

account. John, please say to Lucy, I wish her to come to me. After all

the stocks and bonds in the world, Mr. Dartmouth, our lives are what our

servants please to make them."

"True, indeed, my love; but the comfort is, if we are well stocked with

bonds of the right sort, servants that don't suit can be changed for

those that do."

"And the more changes, the worse, commonly;--an exception is so rare,

I dread nothing like change. The chance of improving a bad one is even

better, I think."

"I don't believe there is anything good in the flunkey line that money

won't buy. I have always found I could have anything I wanted, if I saw

fit to pay its price. Money, no matter what simpletons preach, money, my

dear, is"----

"Why, Lucy, what is the matter?" exclaimed Miss Millicent, with some

surprise and anxiety, as she saw the girl, who had just entered, instead

of advancing, awkwardly shrink on one side into a chair behind the door,

with a shudder, as if she had trod on a reptile. The next moment she was

at her side, earnestly whispering something in her ear, evidently an

explanation of the circumstances of the case, to which Lucy had hitherto

been an entire stranger.

"Pray, excuse me, Ma'am," was the girl's scarce audible response to some

request.

"It is only to write your name, Lucy."

"Not to _such_ a paper, for the world!"

"Not to oblige me?"

"I would do anything, Ma'am, to oblige you, but that would not. Never!

never!" said the excited girl, catching another glimpse of Chip, who was

now looking obliquely at the whispering couple, and drumming with his

fingers on the rosewood of that part of the letter S from which his

intended had just risen, as if he were hurriedly beating a _reveille_

to rally his faltering impudence. "No, Ma'am;--it is too bad, it is too

bad, it is too"----Here her utterance became choked, her cheeks pallid

as death, and her form wilted and fell like a flower before the mower's

scythe. Millicent prevented the fall, while Sterling rang for water,

and Chip, peering about with more agitation than any one else, finally

remarked,--

"The girl must be sick;--better take her out."

The young lawyer, with the aid of a servant, did bear her to another

apartment, where, after the usual time and restoratives, she recovered

her consciousness, and the maiden blood again revealed tints that the

queen of flowers might envy. Chip and the millionnaire remained in the

parlor, while the others were taking care of the proposed witness, and

great was the anxiety of the former that their absence should not be

prolonged. Suddenly he recollected a forgotten engagement of great

importance, pulled out his watch, fidgeted, suggested that the lawyer

and Miss Millicent should be recalled, that the papers might be signed

before he went. Mr. Hopkins was of that opinion, and sent a servant to

call them. Miss Millicent came, but could not think of completing the

contract without the signature of her favorite domestic. Argument enough

was ready, but she was fortified by a sentiment that was more than a

match for it. Mr. Hopkins was all ready, and would have the matter

closed as soon as the lawyer arrived, affirming that his daughter would

have too much sense, at last, to stand out on such a trifle.

In the mean time, the supposed Miss Lucy having had time to collect her

scattered senses, there occurred the following dialogue between her and

Frank Sterling, whose curiosity, not to speak of any other interest, had

been thoroughly roused by the strange patient for whom he had just been

acting in a medical, rather than legal capacity.

_Frank_. "We are all right, now, I think, Miss Lucy,--and they are

waiting for us in the parlor, you know."

_Lucy_. "That paper must not be signed, Sir. If Miss Millicent knew what

I do about that man, he would be the last man in the world she would

think of for a husband."

_Frank_. "But he is one of the merchant princes,--respectable, of

course. What harm can you know of him?"

_Lucy_. "If he is not so great a villain as he might be, let him thank

my escape from Mrs. Farmthroy's the night I came here. If he is to be

at home here, I shall not be; but before I leave, I wish to restore him

what belongs to him. Excuse me a moment, Sir, and I will fetch it."

"A regular previous love-affair," thought Frank, and expected her

to return, bringing a small lot of erotic jewelry to be returned to

Chipworth, as the false-hearted donor thereof. Great was his surprise,

when, instead of that, she brought a small parcel or wad of yellowish

paper, variegated with certain scrawls of rapid writing, of the manifold

sort.

"Why, that," said Frank, after unfolding the half-dozen sheets, all of

the same tenor, "is a set of news-dispatches, and of a pretty ancient

date, too."

_Lucy_. "But it is his property, Sir; and though worthless itself, being

worth as much as he is, it may be valuable to him."

_Frank_. "Yes, yes. I begin to see. Cotton-Market. This reminds me of

the case of our client Grant. Why, pray, how did you come by these?"

_Lucy_. "Perhaps I ought not to tell you all. But if I may rely on your

honor as a gentleman, I will."

_Frank_. "As a gentleman, a man, and a lawyer, you may trust me that

every word shall be sacredly confidential."

_Lucy_. "Well, Sir, my name is not Lucy Green, but Laura Birch. My

mother keeps the Birch House in Waltham; and this man, whom you call a

merchant prince, came to my mother's the very day after the date on them

papers, and hired my brother to carry him to Captain Grant's. When he

took out his pocketbook to pay, which he did like a prince, perhaps,

he probably let these papers fall. At any rate, no one else could have

dropped them; and I saved them, thinking to give them to him when he

should call again. I have seen him but once since, at a place where,

through his interest, I supposed I had obtained a situation to learn the

milliner's trade. I needn't say why I did not return his property then.

If, now, I had in my possession even an old shoestring that had ever

been his, I would beg you to return it to him, and find out for me where

I can go never to see him."

_Frank_. "But I shall take care of these dispatches. There's a story

about these papers, I see. Here's a ray of daylight penetrating a dark

spot. Two links in the chain of circumstances, to say the least. Captain

Grant's unfortunate sale of cotton to Dartmouth just before the rise,

and the famous lost dispatch found on Dartmouth's track to Grant. Did

you see him have these papers, Miss Lucy--I beg your pardon--Miss

Laura?"

_Lucy_. "No, Sir; but I know he left them, just as well as if I had seen

them in his hands."

_Frank_. "True, true enough in fact, but not so good in law."

_Lucy_. "Is there anything by which the law can reach him, Sir? Oh, I

should be so glad, if the law could break off this match, even if it

cannot break his neck; and he deserves that, I am afraid, if ever a

villain did."

_Frank_. "Yes,--there's enough in this roll to banish such a fellow, if

not to hang him. And it shall be done, too."

_Lucy_. "And Miss Millicent be saved, too? Delightful!"

Sterling, with the roll of yellow paper in his fist, now returned to the

parlor, where Mr. Hopkins impatiently opened upon him, before he could

close the door.

"Well, Mr. Counsellor, we are all waiting for you. Mr. Dartmouth has

urgent business, and is in haste to go. We shall be holden in heavy

damages, if we detain him."

"He will be in more haste to go by-and-by, Sir. I have some papers here,

Sir, which make it necessary that this marriage-contract should stand

aside till some other matters can be settled, or at least explained. I

refer to these manifold dispatches, detailing the latest news of the

Liverpool cotton-market, by the fraudulent possession of which on the

part of somebody, a client of mine, Captain Grant of Waltham, was

cheated out of a small fortune. Perhaps Mr. Dartmouth knows who went to

Waltham one morning to close a bargain before the telegraph-news should

transpire. It is rather remarkable that certain lost dispatches should

have been found in that man's track."

Whether Chip Dartmouth heard three words of this harangue may be

doubted. The sight of that yellowish paper did the business for him. His

expression vibrated from that of a mad rattlesnake to that of a dog with

the most downcast extremities. At last he rushed to the door, saying he

"would stand no such nonsense."

"But you will have to stand it!"

Chip was gone. Mr. Hopkins was in a state of amazement; and Millicent,

if she did not swoon, seemed to herself in a trance. Neither of them

could see in the cause anything to account for the effect. How could a

merchant prince quail before so flimsy a piece of paper? Mr.

Sterling explained. Mr. Hopkins begged the matter might not be made

public,--above all things, that legal proceedings should be avoided.

"No," said Sterling,--"I shall punish him more effectually. The proof,

though strong as holy writ, would probably fail to convict him in court.

Therefore I shall let him off on these conditions: He shall disgorge to

Captain Grant his profits on that cotton with interest, relinquish Miss

Millicent's hand, if she so pleases, and, at any rate, relieve Boston of

his presence altogether and for good. He may do it as soon as he likes,

and as privately."

This course at once met the approbation of all parties, and was carried

out.

What became of Squire Sterling, whether he married the mistress of that

mansion or her maid, this deponent saith not; though he doth say that he

did marry one of them, and had no cause to regret the same.

* * * * *

SEEN AND UNSEEN.

The wind ahead, the billows high,

A whited wave, but sable sky,

And many a league of tossing sea

Between the hearts I love and me.

The wind ahead: day after day

These weary words the sailors say;

To weeks the days are lengthened now,--

Still mounts the surge to meet our prow.

Through longing day and lingering night

I still accuse Time's lagging flight,

Or gaze out o'er the envious sea,

That keeps the hearts I love from me.

Yet, ah, how shallow is all grief!

How instant is the deep relief!

And what a hypocrite am I,

To feign forlorn, to 'plain and sigh!

The wind ahead? The wind is free!

Forever more it favoreth me,--

To shores of God still blowing fair,

O'er seas of God my bark doth bear.

This surging brine _I_ do not sail,

This blast adverse is not my gale;

'Tis here I only seem to be,

But really sail another sea,--

Another sea, pure sky its waves,

Whose beauty hides no heaving graves,--

A sea all haven, whereupon

No hapless bark to wreck hath gone.

The winds that o'er my ocean run

Reach through all heavens beyond the sun;

Through life and death, through fate, through time,

Grand breaths of God, they sweep sublime.

Eternal trades, they cannot veer,

And, blowing, teach us how to steer;

And well for him whose joy, whose care,

Is but to keep before them fair.

Oh, thou God's mariner, heart of mine,

Spread canvas to the airs divine!

Spread sail! and let thy Fortune be

Forgotten in thy Destiny!

For Destiny pursues us well,

By sea, by land, through heaven or hell;

It suffers Death alone to die,

Bids Life all change and chance defy.

Would earth's dark ocean suck thee down?

Earth's ocean thou, O Life, shalt drown,

Shalt flood it with thy finer wave,

And, sepulchred, entomb thy grave!

Life loveth life and good: then trust

What most the spirit would, it must;

Deep wishes, in the heart that be,

Are blossoms of Necessity.

A thread of Law runs through thy prayer,

Stronger than iron cables are;

And Love and Longing toward her goal

Are pilots sweet to guide the Soul.

So Life must live, and Soul must sail,

And Unseen over Seen prevail,

And all God's argosies come to shore,

Let ocean smile, or rage and roar.

And so, 'mid storm or calm, my bark

With snowy wake still nears her mark;

Cheerly the trades of being blow,

And sweeping down the wind I go.

PERCIVAL.

Among my letters is one from Dr. E.D. North, desiring me to furnish any

facts within my reach, relating to the scientific character and general

opinions of the late James G. Percival. This information Dr. North

proposed to incorporate into a memoir, to be prefixed to a new edition

of Percival's Poems. The biographer, with his task unfinished, has

followed the subject of his studies to the tomb.

Dr. North's request revived in me many recollections of Percival; and

finally led me to draw out the following sketch of him, as he appeared

to my eyes in those days when I saw him often, and sometimes shared his

pursuits. Vague and shadowy is the delineation, and to myself seems

little better than the reminiscence of a phantom or a dream. Percival's

life had few externalities,--he related himself to society by few points

of contact; and I have been compelled to paint him chiefly by glimpses

of his literary and interior existence.

My acquaintance with him grew out of some conversations on geological

topics, and commenced in 1828, when he was working on his translation of

Malte-Brun's Geography. The impression made on me by his singular person

and manners was vivid and indelible. Slender in form, rather above than

under the middle height, he had a narrow chest, and a peculiar stoop,

which was not in the back, but high up in the shoulders. His head,

without being large, was fine. His eyes were of a dark hazel, and

possessed uncommon expression. His nose, mouth, and chin were

symmetrically, if not elegantly formed, and came short of beauty

only because of that meagreness which marked his whole person. His

complexion, light without redness, inclined to sallow, and suggested a

temperament somewhat bilious. His dark brown hair had become thin above

the forehead, revealing to advantage that most striking feature of his

countenance. Taken all together, his appearance was that of a weak man,

of delicate constitution,--an appearance hardly justified by the fact;

for he endured fatigue and privation with remarkable stanchness.

Percival's face, when he was silent, was full of calm, serious

meditation; when speaking, it lighted up with thought, and became

noticeably expressive. He commonly talked in a mild, unimpassioned

undertone, but just above a whisper, letting his voice sink with rather

a pleasing cadence at the completion of each sentence. Even when most

animated, he used no gesture except a movement of the first and second

fingers of his right hand backward and forward across the palm of the

left, meantime following their monotonous unrest with his eyes, and

rarely meeting the gaze of his interlocutor. He would stand for hours,

when talking, his right elbow on a mantel-piece, if there was one near,

his fingers going through their strange palmistry; and in this manner,

never once stirring from his position, he would not unfrequently

protract his discourse till long past midnight. An inexhaustible,

undemonstrative, noiseless, passionless man, scarcely evident to you by

physical qualities, and impressing you, for the most part, as a creature

of pure intellect.

His wardrobe was remarkably inexpensive, consisting of little more than

a single plain suit, brown or gray, which he wore winter and summer,

until it became threadbare. He never used boots; and his shoes, though

carefully dusted, were never blacked. A most unpretending bow fastened

his cravat of colored cambric. For many years his only outer garment was

a brown camlet cloak, of very scanty proportions, thinly lined, and a

meagre protection against winter. His hat was worn for years before

being laid aside, and put you in mind of the prevailing mode by the law

of contrast only. He was never seen with gloves, and rarely with an

umbrella. The value of his entire wardrobe scarcely exceeded fifty

dollars; yet he was always neat, and appeared unconscious of any

peculiarity in his costume.

An accurate portrait of him at any period of his life can scarcely be

said to exist. His sensitive modesty seems to have made him unwilling to

let his features be exposed to the flaring notoriety of canvas. Once,

indeed, he allowed himself to be painted by Mr. George A. Flagg; but the

picture having been exhibited in the Trumbull Gallery of Yale

College, Percival's susceptibility took alarm, and he expressed

annoyance,--though whether dissatisfied with the portrait or its public

exposure I cannot say. The artist proposed certain alterations, and the

poet listened to him with seeming assent. The picture was taken back to

the studio; objectionable or questionable parts of it painted out; the

likeness destroyed for the purpose of correction; and Percival was to

give another sitting at his convenience. That was the last time he put

himself within painting reach of Mr. Flagg's easel.[A]

[Footnote A: I remember to have seen an excellent portrait of him, by

Alexander, in the studio of that artist, in the year 1825; but in whose

possession it now is, I am unable to say.]

In those days of our early acquaintance, he occupied two small chambers,

one of which fronted on the business part of Chapel Street (New Haven).

His books, already numerous, were piled in double tiers and in heaps

against the walls, covering the floors also, and barely leaving space

for his sleeping-cot, chair, and writing-table. His library was a

_sanctum_ to which the curious visitor hardly ever gained admittance. He

met even his friends at the door, and generally held his interviews

with them in the adjoining passage. Disinclined to borrow books, he

was especially averse to lending. Dr. Guhrauer's assertion respecting

Leibnitz, that "his library was numerous and valuable, and its possessor

had the peculiarity that he liked to worm in it alone, being very

reluctant to let any one see it," applies equally well to Percival.

He was rarely visible abroad except in his walks to and from the

country, whither he often resorted to pass not hours only, but

frequently entire days, in solitary wanderings,--partly for physical

exercise,--still more, perhaps, to study the botany, the geology, and

the minutest geographical features of the environs; for his restless

mind was perpetually observant, and could not be withheld from external

Nature, even by his poetic and philosophic meditation. In these

excursions, he often passed his fellow-mortals without noticing them. A

friend, if observed, he greeted with a slight nod, and possibly stopped

him for conversation. Once started on a subject, Percival rarely quitted

it until it was exhausted; and consequently these interviews sometimes

outlasted the leisure of his listener. You excused yourself, perhaps;

or you were called away by some one else; but you had only put off the

conclusion of the discourse, not escaped it. The next time Percival

encountered you, his first words were, "As I was saying,"--and taking

up the thread of his observations where it had been broken, he went

straight to the end.

The excellent bookstore of the late Hezekiah Howe, one of the best in

New England, and particularly rich in those rare and costly works

which form a bookworm's delight, was one of Percival's best-loved

lounging-places. He bought freely, and, when he could not buy, he was

welcome to peruse: He read with marvellous rapidity, skipping as if by

instinct everything that was unimportant; avoiding the rhetoric, the

commonplaces, the falsities; glancing only at what was new, what was

true, what was suggestive, he had a distinct object in view; but it was

not to amuse himself, nor to compare author with author; it was simply

to increase the sum of his own knowledge. Perhaps it was in these rapid

forays through unbought, uncut volumes, that he acquired his singular

habit of reading books, even his own, without subjecting them to the

paper-knife. People who wanted to see Percival and obtain his views on

special topics were accustomed to look for him at Mr. Howe's, and always

found him willing to pour forth his voluminous information.

His income at this time was derived solely from literary jobs, and was

understood to be very limited. What he earned he spent chiefly for

books, particularly for such as would assist him in perfecting that

striking monument of his varied and profound research, his new

translation and edition of Malte-Brun. For this labor the time had been

estimated, and the publishers had made him an allowance, which, if he

had worked like other men, would have amounted to eight dollars a

day. But Percival would let nothing go out of his hands imperfect; a

typographical error, even, I have heard him say, sometimes depressed

him like actual illness. He translated and revised so carefully, he

corrected so many errors and added so many footnotes, that his industry

actually devoured its own wages; and his eight dollars gradually

diminished to a diurnal fifty cents.

Percival made no merely ceremonial calls, few friendly visits, and

attended no parties. If he dropped in upon a family of his acquaintance,

he rarely addressed himself to a lady. Otherwise there was nothing

peculiar in his deportment; for, if silent, he was not embarrassed,--and

if he talked, it was without any appearance of self-consciousness.

Judging from his isolated habits, some persons supposed him

misanthropic. Let me give one instance of his good-nature. One of the

elder professors of Yale had fallen into a temporary misappreciation

with the students, who received his instructions, to say the least, with

an ill-concealed indifference. They whispered during his lectures,

and in other ways rendered themselves strenuously disagreeable to the

sensitive nerves of the professor. Indignant at such behavior toward

a worthy and learned man, who had been his own instructor, Percival

proposed a plan for stopping the annoyance. It was, that a number of old

graduates, professors, and others, himself being one, should attend

the lectures, listen to them with the respect they merited, and so,

if possible, bring the students to a sense of propriety and of the

advantages they were neglecting.

No, Percival was not a misanthrope. During an acquaintance of

twenty-five years, I never knew him do an act or utter a word which

could countenance this opinion. He indulged in no bitter remarks,

cherished no hatred of individuals, affected no scorn of his race; on

the contrary, he held large views concerning the noble destinies of

mankind, and expressed deep interest in its advancement toward greater

intelligence and virtue. The local affections he certainly had, for he

was gratified at the prosperity of his fellow-townsmen, proud of his

native State, and took a pleasure in defending her name from unjust

aspersions. Patriotic, too,--none more so,--he rejoiced in the welfare

of the whole country, knew its history thoroughly, and bestowed on

its military heroes, in particular, a lively appreciation, which was

singular, perhaps, in a man of such gentle habits and nature. I

cannot forget the excited pleasure with which we visited, when on the

geological survey of Connecticut, Putnam's Stairs at Horseneck, and

Putnam's Wolf-Den in Pomfret. At the latter place, Percival's enthusiasm

for the heroic hunter and warrior led him to carve his initials on a

rock at the entrance of the chasm. It was the only place during the tour

where he left a similar memorial.

American statesmen he admired scarcely less than American soldiers; nor

did he neglect any information within his reach concerning public

men and measures. It was singular to observe with what freedom from

excitement he discussed the most irritating phases of party,--speaking

of the men and events of his own day with as much philosophic calmness

as if they belonged to a previous century; not at all deceived, I

think, by the temporary notoriety and power which frequently attend the

political bustler,--quite positive, indeed, that many of our "great men"

were far inferior to multitudes in private life. Webster he respected

greatly, and used to regret that his fortune was not commensurate with

his tastes. Like a true poet, he believed devoutly in native genius,

considered it something inimitable and incommunicable, and worshipped it

whereever he found it.

Percival was indifferent and even disinclined to female society. There

is a common story that he had conceived an aversion to the whole sex

in consequence of a youthful disappointment in love. I know nothing

concerning this alleged chagrin, but I am confident that he cherished no

such antipathy. He never, in my hearing, said a hard thing of any woman,

or of the sex; and I remember distinctly the flattering and even poetic

appreciation with which he spoke of individual ladies. Of one who has

since become a distinguished authoress of the South, he said, that "her

conversation had as great an intellectual charm for him as that of any

scholar among his male acquaintances." Of a lady still resident in

New Haven, he observed, that "there was a mysterious beauty in her

thoughtful face and dark eyes which reminded him of a deep and limpid

forest-fountain." But although he did not hate women, he certainly was

disinclined to their society,--an oddity, I beg leave to say, in any

man, and a most surprising eccentricity in a poet. Constitutional

timidity may have founded this habit during youth; for, as I have

already observed, his modesty was sensitive and almost morbid. Then came

his multitudinous studies, which absorbed him utterly, and in which,

unfortunately for Percival, if not for the ladies, these last took so

little interest that conversation was not mutually desirable. A remark

he made to a scientific friend, who had just been married, will,

perhaps, throw some light on the subject. "How is this?" said he; "I

thought you were wedded to science." This was all the felicitation he

had to offer; and without asking for the bride, he plunged into the

discussion which was the object of the visit.

In 1835 commenced the geological survey of Connecticut, and I became

Percival's companion in labor. To him was intrusted the geology proper,

and to myself the mineralogy and its economical applications. During the

first season, we prosecuted our investigations together, travelling in

a one-horse wagon, which carried all our necessary implements, and

visiting, before the campaign ended, every parish in the State. Great

was the wonder our strange outfit and occupation excited in some rustic

neighborhoods; and very often were we called upon to enlighten the

popular mind with regard to our object and its uses. This was never a

pleasant task to Percival. He did not relish long confabulations with a

sovereign people somewhat ignorant of geology; and, moreover, his style

of describing our business was so peculiar, that it rarely failed to

transfer the curiosity to himself, and lead to tiresome delays. In New

Milford, an inquisitive farmer requested us, in a somewhat ungracious

manner, to give an account of ourselves. Percival replied, that we were

acting under a commission from the Governor to ascertain the useful

minerals of the State; whereupon our utilitarian friend immediately

demanded to be informed how the citizens at large, including himself,

were to be benefited by the undertaking,--putting question on question

in a fashion which was most pertinacious and almost impertinent.

Percival became impatient, and tried to hurry away. "I demand the

information," exclaimed the New Milfordite; "I demand it as my right.

You are only servants of the people; and you are paid, in part, at

least, out of my pocket." "I'll tell you what we'll do," said Percival;

"we can't stop, but we'll refund. Your portion of the geological

tax,--let me see,--it must be about two cents. We prefer handing you

this to encountering a further delay." Our agricultural friend and

master did not take the money, although he did the hint,--and in sulky

silence withdrew from our company.

Driving through the town of Warren, we stopped a farmer to inquire

the way to certain places in the vicinity. He gave us the information

sought, staring at us meanwhile with a benevolently inquisitive

expression, and, at last, volunteering the remark, that, if we wanted a

job, we had better stop at the factory in the hollow. We thanked him

for his goodness, and thought, perhaps, of Sedgewick geologizing by the

road-side, and getting a charitable half-crown flung at him by a noble

lady who was on her way to dine in his company at the house of a mutual

acquaintance.

Let us grant here one brief parenthesis of respect and astonishment to

the scientific knowledge and philological acumen of a distinguished

graduate of Yale College, and member of Congress, whom we encountered

on our travels. Hearing us speak of mosaic granite, a rock occurring

in Woodbridge, to which we had given this name, from the checker-like

arrangement of its felspathic ingredient, he concluded that we

attributed its formation to the era of Moses, and asked Percival what

evidence he had for such an opinion. Small blame to him, perhaps, for

the blunder, but it seemed a very droll one to geologists.

In Greenwich, the extreme southwestern town of the State, we encountered

an incident to which my companion would sometimes refer with a slight

degree of merriment. In general, he was no joker, no anecdotist, and had

but a feeble appreciation of droll sayings or humorous matters of

any kind. But in Greenwich he heard a memorable phrase. Among the

tavern-loungers was a man who had evidently seen better days, and who,

either for that reason or because of the large amount of rum he had

swallowed, entertained a lofty opinion of himself, and discoursed _de

omnibus rebus_ in a most consequential fashion. He soon made himself a

sort of medium between ourselves and his fellow-loafers. Overhearing us

say that we wished to pass the New York frontier for the sake of tracing

out the strata then under examination, he proceeded with much pomposity

to declare to his deeply curious auditory, that "it was his opinion

that the Governor of the State should confer upon these gentlemen

_discretionary powers_ to pass the limits of Connecticut, whenever and

wherever, in the prosecution of their labors, the interests of science

required them so to do." After this, we rarely crossed the State line

but Percival observed, "We are now taking advantage of our discretionary

powers."

Of the few stories Percival told me, here is one. In one of our

country-places, a plain, shrewd townsman fell into chance conversation

with him, and entertained him with some account of a neighbor who had

been seized with a mania for high Art, and had let loose his frenzy upon

canvas in a deluge of oil-colors. If I mistake not, Percival was invited

to inspect these productions of untaught and perhaps unteachable genius.

They were vast attempts at historical scenes, in which the heads and

legs of heroes were visible, but played a very secondary part in the

interest, compared with a perfect tempest of drapery, which rolled in

ungovernable masses, like the clouds of a thunder-storm.

"What do you think of them?" inquired Percival.

"Well, I don't claim to be a judge of such things," replied his

cicerone; "but the fact is, (and I told the painter so,) that, when I

look at 'em, about the only thing I can think of is a resurrection of

old clothes."

In the town of Lebanon, an incident occurred which affected us rather

more seriously. Turning a corner suddenly, we came upon an old man

digging up cobble-stones by the road-side and breaking them in pieces

with an axe. "A brother-geologist," was our first impression. At that

moment the old man sprang toward us, the axe in one hand and half a

brick in the other, shouting eagerly,--

"I guess Mr. ----" (name indistinguishable) "will be glad to see you,

gentlemen."

"For what?"

"Why, he has got several boxes of jewels; and I gave an advertisement in

the paper."

"Whose are they?"

"King Jerome's."

"And who is he?"

"The king of the world!" shouted the maniac, still advancing with a

menacing air, and so near the wagon by this time that he might almost

have hit Percival with his axe.

Without pausing to hear more about the jewels, a sudden blow to the

horse barely enabled us to escape the reach of our fellow-laborer before

he had time to use his axe on our own formations.

In the following year, when Percival was pursuing the survey by himself,

on horseback, some of the elements of this adventure were repeated,

but reversed after a very odd fashion. The late Dr. Carrington, of

Farmington, who told me the tale, being ten miles from home on a

professional excursion, drove up to a tavern and found himself welcomed

with extraordinary emphasis by the innkeeper. The Doctor was just the

person he wanted to see; the Doctor's opinion was very much needed about

that strange man out there; he wished the Doctor to have a talk with

him, and see whether he was crazy or not. The fellow had been there a

day or two, picking up stones about the lots; and some of the boys had

been sent to watch him, but could get nothing out of him. This morning

he wanted to go away, and ordered his horse; but the neighbors wouldn't

let it be brought up, for they said he was surely some mad chap who

had taken another man's horse. Thus talking, the landlord pointed out

Percival, surrounded by a group of villagers, who, quietly, and under

pretence of conversation, were holding him under a sort of arrest. The

Doctor rushed into the circle, addressed his friend Percival by name,

spoke of the survey, and thus satisfied the bystanders, who, guessing

their mistake, dispersed silently. No open remonstrance was needed,

and perhaps Percival never understood the adventure in which he thus

unconsciously formed the principal character.

While we were in Berlin, the native town of Percival, he related to me

several incidents of his earlier life. His father was discussing some

geographical question with a neighbor; and the future geologist, then

a boy of seven or eight, sat by listening until the ignorance of his

elders tempted him to speak. "Where did you learn that?" they asked,

in astonishment. With timid reluctance, he confessed that he had been

reading clandestinely Morse's large geography, of which there was a copy

in a society-library kept at his father's house. The book, he added, had

an indescribable attraction for him; and even at that almost infantile

age he was familiar with its contents. It was this reading of Morse,

perhaps, which determined his taste for those geographical studies

in which he subsequently became so distinguished. With him, as with

Humboldt and Guyot, geography was a term of wide signification. Far from

confining it to the names and boundaries of countries, seas, and lakes,

to the courses of rivers and the altitudes of mountains, he connected

with it meteorology, natural history, and the leading facts of human

history, ethnology, and archaeology. He knew London as thoroughly as

most Americans know New York or Philadelphia, and yet he had never

crossed the Atlantic.

An instance of the minuteness of his geographical information was

related to me by the Rev. Mr. Adam, a Scottish clergyman, long resident

at Benares, but subsequently settled over the Congregational Church in

Amherst, Massachusetts. On his way to visit me at New Haven, he met in

the stage-coach a countryman of his, who soon opened a controversy with

him respecting the course of a certain river in Scotland. The discussion

had continued for some time, when another passenger offered a suggestion

which opened the eyes of the debaters to the fact (not unfrequently the

case in such controversies) that they were both wrong. "How long since

you were there, Sir?" they asked; and the reply was, "I never was in

Scotland." "Who are you, Sir?" Mr. Adam wanted to ask, but kept the

question until he could put it to me. I did not feel much hesitation in

telling him that the stranger must have been Percival; and Percival it

was, as I afterwards learned by questioning him of the circumstance.

But we must return to Berlin, in order to hear one more of Percival's

stories. Passing a field, half a mile from his early home, he told an

incident connected with it, and related to his favorite study of natural

history. The field had belonged to his father, who, besides being the

physician of Berlin, indulged a taste for agriculture. Just before the

harvest season, it became palpable that this field, then waving with

wheat, was depredated upon to a wasteful extent by some unknown subjects

of the animal kingdom. Having watched for the pilferers in vain by

day, the proprietor resolved to mount guard by night, and accordingly

ambushed himself in the invaded territory. Near midnight, he saw his own

flock of geese, hitherto considered so trustworthy, approach silently

in single file, make their entry between the rails, and commence

transferring the wheat-crop into their own crops, after a ravenous

fashion. Having eaten their fill, they re-formed their column of march,

with a venerable gander at the head, and trudged silently homeward,

cautiously followed by their owner, who noticed, that, on regaining his

door-yard, they set up a vociferous cackle, such as he had repeatedly

heard from them before at about the same hour. It was a most evident

attempt to establish an _alibi_; it was as much as to say, "If you miss

any wheat, we didn't take it; we are honest birds, and stay at

home o'nights, Dr. Percival." The next morning, however, a general

decapitation overtook the flock of feathered hypocrites. "It was a

curious instance of the domestic goose reverting to its wild habit of

nocturnal feeding," remarked my narrator, dwelling characteristically

upon the natural-history aspect of the fact.

Percival was almost incapable of an irrelevancy. The survey was the

business in hand, and he rarely discoursed much of things disconnected

with it, except, perhaps, when we were retracing our routes, or when the

labors of the day were over. Of poets and poetry he was not inclined to

speak. I never heard him quote a line, either his own or another's, nor

indulge in a single poetic observation concerning the objects which

met us in our wanderings. Indeed, he confessed that he no longer felt

disposed to write verses, being satisfied that his productions were

not acceptable to the prevailing taste; although he admitted that he

composed a few stanzas occasionally, in order to make trial of some

unusual measure or new language. He told me that he had versified in

thirteen languages; and I have heard from others that he had imitated

all the Greek and German metres.

Of politics, foreign and domestic, he talked frequently, but always

philosophically and dispassionately, much as if he were speaking of

geological stratification. His views of humanity were deduced from a

most extensive survey of the race in all its historical and geographical

relations. He distinctly recognized the fact of its steady advance

from one stage to another, in accordance with a plan of intellectually

organic development, as marked as that detected by the geologist in

the gradual preparation of the earth for the abode of our species. The

slowness and seeming vacillation of man's upward movement could not

stagger his faith; for if it had taken thousands of ages to make earth

habitable, why should it not take thousands more to bring man to his

completeness? Equally free was he from misgiving on account of the

remaining presence of so much misery and wretchedness; for these he

considered as the indispensable stimuli to progress. Even war, he used

to say, is sometimes necessary to the welfare of nations, as sickness

and sorrow plainly are to that of individuals; although, to his moral

sense, the human authors of this scourge were no more admirable than the

devisers of any private calamity. Improvements in knowledge he regarded

as the only elements of real progress; and these he looked upon as true

germinal principles, bound up organically in the constitution of the

human soul. Indeed, that philosophical calmness which was characteristic

of him seemed to flow in some measure from his settled persuasion that

the same matchless wisdom and benevolence he recognized throughout

Nature wrought with a still higher providence and a more earnest love

for man and would make all things finally conduce to his welfare. It was

clear that he drew a profound tranquillity from the thought that he was

a part of the vast and harmonious whole.

Concerning his religious views he was exceedingly taciturn. He had no

taste for metaphysical or theological discussions, although his library

contained a large number of standard works on these subjects. Religion

itself he never alluded to but with the deepest respect. Talking to

me of Christianity, he quoted the observation of Goethe, that "it had

brought into the world a light never to be extinguished." He spoke of

Jesus with poetic, if not with Christian fervor. He contrasted his

teachings and deeds with the prevailing maxims and practice of the

people among whom he appeared, with the dead orthodoxy of its religious

teachers, and with the general ignorance and hypocrisy of the masses.

"Had I lived in such a state of society," he said, "I am certain that it

would have driven me mad."

He expressed an earnest esteem for the doctrines of the Evangelical

clergy, and even approved, though more moderately, the religious

awakenings which occur under their labors. He described to me, with

some particularity, a revival he had witnessed in his native town, when

young; and repeated some of the quaint exhortations of the lay brethren,

all in a manner perfectly serious, but calculated, perhaps, to leave the

impression, that such views of religion were not necessary to himself,

although they might be quite suited to the minds of others.

The rational theology he regarded as anti-poetic in influence, and of

very doubtful efficacy in working upon the masses. He appreciated,

however, the honesty and superior culture of the Unitarian scholars and

clergy of Boston, with many of whom he had been on terms as intimate as

his shyness accorded to any one.

He attended church but once with me while we were engaged in the survey.

We heard a discourse from a Rev. Dr. E----, upon the conduct of the

young ruler who inquired his duty of Christ. The speaker argued from the

sacred narrative a universal obligation to devote our possessions

to religious purposes,--and upheld, as an example to all men, the

self-devotion of a young missionary (then somewhat known) who had

despised a splendid fortune, offered him on condition of his remaining

at home, and had consecrated himself to the Christianization of Africa.

"How did you like the sermon?" I inquired of Percival.

"I consider it an animating and probably useful performance," he

replied; "but it does not accord with comprehensive conceptions of

humanity, inasmuch as its main inference was drawn from the exception,

and not from the rule. There always have been, and probably always

will be, men possessed of the self-immolating or martyr spirit. Such

instances are undoubtedly useful, and have my admiration; but they

cannot become general, and never were meant to be."

During the survey, we were invited to pass an evening in a family

remarkable for its musical talent, and I remember distinctly the evident

pleasure with which Percival listened to the chorus of organ tones and

rich cultivated voices. In general, however, his appreciation of music

was subordinate to his study of syllabic movement in versification; and

it was with reference chiefly to poetic measure, I have been told, that

he acquired what mastery he had over the accordion and guitar.

Percival's favorite topics, when evening came and we rested from our

stony labors, were the modern languages and the philosophy of universal

grammar. They seemed to have filled the niches in his heart, from which

he had banished, or tried to banish, the Muses. The subtile refinements

of Bopp were a perpetual luxury to him; he derived language from

language as easily as word from word; and, once started in the

intricacies of the Russian or the Basque, there was no predicting the

end of the discourse. Thus were thrown away, upon a solitary listener,

midnight lectures which would have done honor to the class-rooms of

Berlin or the Sorbonne. In looking at such an instance of intellectual

pleasure and acumen, as connected in no small degree with the study of

foreign languages, one cannot avoid associating together the unsolved

mystery of that discrepancy of tongues prevailing in different countries

with the disagreeing _floras_ and _faunas_ of the same regions,--each

diversity bearing alike the unmistakable marks of Omnipotent design for

the happiness and improvement of man.

The perfection of his memory was amazing. During the year following

the survey, when we had frequent occasion to compare recollections, I

observed that no circumstance of our labors was shadowy or incomplete

in his memory. He could refer to every trifling incident of the tour,

recall every road and path that we had followed, every field and ledge

that we had examined, particularize the day of the week on which we had

dined or supped at such a tavern, and mention the name of the landlord.

I asked him how he was able to remember such minutiae. He replied, that

it was his custom, on going to bed, to call up, in the darkness and

stillness, all the incidents of the day's experience, in their proper

order, and cause them to move before him like a diorama through a

spiritual morning, noon, and evening. "It has often appeared to me," he

said, "that in this purely mental process I see objects more distinctly

than I behold them in the reality."

But his memory doubtless gained an immense additional advantage from his

habitual seclusion, from his unconcern with the distracting customs of

society, and, most of all, from the imperturbable abstraction under

which he studied and observed. With him there was no blending of

collateral subjects, no permitted intrusion of things irrelevant or

trivial, so that the channels of his thoughts were always single,

deep, and traceable. It was a mental straightforwardness and

conscientiousness, as rare, perhaps, as moral rectitude itself.

In diet, Percival was the most abstemious person I ever knew. His health

was uniformly good,--the specimens of a geologist, when he collects them

himself, being as favorable to digestion and appetite as the pebbles to

a chicken; yet, I am persuaded, my companion in no case violated the

golden rule of leaving the table unsated. No matter how long had been

his fast, he showed no impatience of hunger, made no remark upon the

excellence of any dish, found fault with nothing, or, at most, only

seemed to miss drinkable coffee and good bread, articles seldom to be

met with in the country. He ate slowly, selecting his food with the

discrimination which ought to belong to a chemist or physiologist, and

then thought no more about it. Alcoholic drinks he never tasted, except

an occasional glass of wine, to which his attention perhaps had been

called on account of its age or superior excellence. Even then it

was not the flavor which interested him, so much as the history,

geographical and other.

Peculiar as he was in his own habits of diet, he offered no strictures

upon the practice of others, however different, unless it ran into

hurtful excesses. The maxim of Epictetus in the "Enchiridion," "Never

preach how others ought to eat, but eat you as becomes you," seemed to

be his rule. Indeed, Percival was one of those rare men who withhold

alike censure and praise respecting the minor matters of life. Not that

he was without opinions on such subjects; but, to obtain them, one was

forced to question him. On the whole, I do not think it would be going

too far to apply to him the above-named moralist's description of the

wise man:--"He reproves nobody, praises nobody, blames nobody, nor even

speaks of himself; if any one praises him, in his own mind he contemns

the flatterer; if any one reproves him, he looks with care that he be

not unsettled in the state of tranquillity that he has entered into.

All his desires depend on things within his power; he transfers all

his aversions to those things which Nature commands us to avoid. His

appetites are always moderate. He is indifferent whether he be thought

foolish or ignorant. He observes himself with the nicety of an enemy or

a spy, and looks on his own wishes as betrayers."

Percival's solitary habits, combined with the invariable seriousness

of his manner, led many persons to believe him melancholy, and even

disposed to suicide. He did, indeed, confess to me, that he sometimes

felt giddy on the edge of a precipice. This was his nearest approach, I

am confident, to the idea of self-destruction. While we were examining

the great iron furnaces of Salisbury, he told me that he was afraid of

walking near the throat of a chimney when in blast, and that more than

once he had turned and run from the lurid, murky orifice, lest a sudden

failure of self-control should cause him to reel into the consuming

abyss. No,--Percival neither felt nor expressed disgust with life.

On the contrary, he was strongly attached to it; the acquisition of

knowledge clothed it with inexpressible value; the longest day was ever

too short to fulfil his designs. Like the wise, laborious men of all

ages, he almost repined at the swiftness of the years. "I am amazed at

the flight of time," he said to me, on the arrival of his forty-second

birthday; "it seems only a year since I was thirty-two;--I have lost ten

years of my life."

Before entering upon the survey of Connecticut, he was not specially

devoted to any one branch of physics, although his tastes inclined him

most toward geology. While he could sympathize perfectly, he said, with

those who threw their whole force into a single study, he felt

himself attracted equally by the entire circle of Nature, and thought

omniscience a nobler object of ambition than any one science. He

admitted that the search after all knowledge is incompatible with

eminence in any particular department; but he believed that it affords

higher pleasure to the mind, and confers ability to do signal service

to mankind in pointing out the grand connections, the general laws, of

Nature.

It is not, perhaps, widely known, that Percival was a well-informed

botanist. He studied this branch when a medical student under Professor

Ives, and assisted his instructor in laying out a small botanical

garden, the plants of which were arranged after the natural orders of

Jussieu. Soon after finishing his medical education, he gave a course of

lectures on botany in Charleston, South Carolina, before a very select

audience, composed mostly of Ladies. The only drawback to the lecturer's

success was his excessive timidity. As an evidence of the assiduity with

which he botanized, it may be mentioned that he had seen the _Geranium

Robertianum_ (a plant which nestles in the sunny clefts of our trap

mountains) in bloom, during every month of the year. One year he found

its blossoms in December, another in January, and so on, until the round

of the monthly calendar was completed.

Percival was an earnest advocate of popular education. He manifested

much interest in the first systematic attempt (at the instance of

Mr. James Brewster) to furnish the people of New Haven with popular

instruction in the form of lectures. At a public dinner, given by Mr.

Brewster, on the occasion of opening the building in which rooms had

been fitted up for these lectures, the late Mr. Skinner gave the toast,

"Our mechanics, the right arm of New Haven," and Percival followed with,

"Science, the right eye which directs the right arm of New Haven." He

believed most fully in the superiority of intelligent labor. He pointed

out cases in which a college-training had been connected with signal

eminence in mechanical invention, and said, that, according to his

observations, persons engaged in industrial pursuits usually succeeded

in proportion to the thoroughness of their education.

Percival himself gave a course of lectures, or rather, lessons, in New

Haven,--not in the building above mentioned, for his natural timidity

was too great to encounter a public audience, but in the theological

lecture-room of Yale College. They were on the German language, and

consisted chiefly of translations of prose and poetry into English,

intermingled with philosophical commentaries on the peculiarities of the

original. It was pure grammar; he did not talk German, and claimed no

acquaintance with the niceties of pronunciation; but all his listeners,

most of whom were graduates, were struck with his perfect mastery of the

subject.

Percival held one peculiar opinion concerning a branch of college

education. He objected to the modern practice of teaching the natural

sciences by means of a profusion of drawings, models, showy experiments,

and other expedients addressing the mind so strongly through the eye.

While these might be allowable in popular lectures, before audiences

lacking in early intellectual discipline, where amusement was a

consideration, and where without it the public ear could not be secured,

he thought that the collegian should study differently,--that his

understanding should be taxed severely, and that he should be inured,

from the first, to rigid attention, in order to a lasting remembrance

of the truths offered to him. It would be a useful exercise for the

instructor, he thought, to elucidate obscure phenomena and complicated

structures by words only, assisting himself, perhaps, occasionally, by

extemporaneous drawings. Such a course would inspire the scholar with

deference for his teacher, and confidence in his own ability to acquire

a similar grasp of the subject. While there is certainly some truth in

this opinion, it would not be difficult, perhaps, to invalidate its

general force. Why should the ear be the only admitted means of

acquiring knowledge? Nature, the greatest of teachers, does not judge

thus: she conveys half her wisdom to us by sight, instead of by faith;

she gives her first lessons to the infant through the eye. Would

Percival, in looking for his attentive audiences, have preferred a

congregation of blind men?

Speaking of literary composition, he said that he often took great pains

with his productions, shifting words and phrases in many ways, before

satisfying himself that he had attained the best form of expression; and

he assured me that these slowly elaborated passages were the very ones

in which he afterwards recognized the most ease and nature, and which

others supposed him to have thrown off carelessly. I asked him how it

was that children, in their unpremeditated way, expressed themselves

with so much directness and beauty. They have but a single idea to

present at a time, he said; they seize without hesitation on the first

words that offer for its expression, unperplexed by any such choice of

terms as would surely occur to maturer minds; and most important of

all, perhaps, they are wholly unembarrassed by limiting qualifications

arising from a fuller knowledge of the subject.

His prose style is a rare exemplification of classic severity and

perspicuousness. In each paragraph the ideas arrange themselves in

faultless connection, like the molecules of a crystal around its centre.

The sentences are not long, the construction is simple, the words are

English in its purity, without admixture of foreign phrase or idiom. But

the most striking peculiarity of his diction is the utter absence

of ornament; for Percival evidently held that the chief merits of

composition are clearness and directness. Poetic imagery, brilliant

climaxes and antitheses, fanciful or grotesque turns of expression, he

rejected as unfavorable to that simple truth for which he studied and

wrote. This dry, almost mathematical style, was no necessity with him;

few men, surely, have had at command a richer vocabulary, English and

foreign, than Percival; few could have adorned thought with more or

choicer garlands from the fields of knowledge and imagination.

To letter-writing he had a great aversion. I have never seen a letter

or note from him to which his signature was attached. The

autograph-fanciers, therefore, will find a scanty harvest when they come

to forage after the name of Percival. His handwriting corresponded in

some sense with his character. It was fine; the lines straight and

parallel; the letters completely formed, though without fulness of

curve; no flourishes, and no unnecessary prolongations of stroke, above

or below the general run of the line. There were few erasures, the

punctuation was perfect, and the manuscript was fit for the press as it

left his hand.

Literary criticism he rarely indulged in, being too disinclined to

praise or blame, and too intensely devoted to the acquisition of

positive knowledge. If he commented severely upon anything, it was

usually the slovenly diction of some of our State Surveys, or the

inaccuracies of translations from foreign languages.

His only published criticism, of which I am aware, was discharged at

a phrenological lecturer, whose extraordinary assumptions and

_ad-captandum_ style had excited his disgust. Percival did not reverence

the science of bumps, and believed, in the words of William Von

Humboldt, that "it is one of those discoveries which, when stripped of

all the _charlatanerie_ that surrounds them, will show but a very meagre

portion of truth." Dr. Barber, an Englishman, and a somewhat noted

teacher of elocution, having been converted to the phrenological faith,

delivered certain magniloquent lectures on the same to the citizens of

New Haven, and took pay therefor, after the manner of his sect. Percival

responded with a sharp newspaper pasquinade, entitled "A Lecture on

Nosology." At the head of the article was a wood-cut of a gigantic nose,

mapped out into faculties. "Gentlemen, the nose is the most prominent

feature in this bill," commenced the parody. "The nose is the true seat

of the mind; and therefore, gentlemen, Nosology, or the science of the

nose, is the true phrenology. He, who knows his nose, foreknows; for he

knows that which is before him. Therefore Nosology is the surest guide

to conduct. Whatever progress an individual may make, his nose is always

in advance. But society is only a congeries of individuals; consequently

its nose is always in advance,--therefore its proper guide. The nose,

rightly understood, will assuredly work wonders in the cause of

improvement; for it is always going ahead, always first in every

undertaking, always soonest at the goal. The ancients did not neglect

the nose. Look at their busts and statues! What magnification and

abduction in Jove! What insinuation and elongation in the Apollo!

Then [Greek: nous] (intellect) was surely the nose,--[Greek: gnosis]

(knowledge) noses,--[Greek: Minos] my nose. What intussusception, what

potation, and, as a necessary consequence, alas! what rubification! But

I have seen such noses. Beware of them!--they are bad noses,--very bad

noses, I assure you.... Do not, I pray you, consider me irreverent,

if I say that Nosology will prove highly favorable to the cause of

religion. This is indeed an awful subject, and I would not touch it on

slight grounds; but I sincerely believe that what I say is true.

Nosology will prove highly favorable to the cause of religion! Does

not the nose stand forth like a watchman on the walls of Zion, on the

look-out for all assailants? and when our faces are directed upwards in

devotion, does not the nose ascend the highest and most especially tend

heavenward?... Nosology is a manly science. It stands out in the open

light. It does not conceal itself behind scratches and periwigs,--nor

does it, like certain false teachers mentioned by St. Paul, go about

from house to house, leading astray silly women......Finally, gentlemen,

you may rest assured that Nosology will not gently submit to insult.

_Noli me tangere!_ Who ever endured a tweak of the nose? It will know

how to take vengeance. As Jupiter metamorphosed the inhospitable Lycians

into frogs, so its contemners will suddenly find themselves [Greek:

Barbarophonoi]!"

Percival has been thought over-tenacious of his opinions. He was

certainly very circumspect in changing them. I have witnessed, however,

several instances in which he yielded to the force of evidence in

the modification of his views. He seemed to recognize geology, in

particular, as a progressive science, in which new facts are constantly

accruing, and therefore compelling re-adaptations of our views. He felt,

indeed, in respect to all knowledge, the mathematics excepted, that

modifications of belief, in well-regulated minds, are unavoidable, as

the result of new information. Approach to higher truth through the

sciences he seemed to regard under the aspect of that of besiegers to a

beleaguered fortress. Principles and deductions, which were a boon and a

triumph for us yesterday, lose their value to-day, when a new parallel

of approach has been attained. He lost his interest in what was

abandoned, necessary as it had been to the present position, only in the

advantage of which, and its sure promise of what was still higher, he

allowed himself to rejoice.

But where evidence was wanting, he was never to be moved to a change by

any amount of importunity or temptation. This trait of character made

him somewhat impracticable as a collaborator, in the philological task

he was employed to perform under Dr. Noah Webster. Disagreements were to

have been anticipated from the striking contrasts in their minds.

They agreed in industry; but Webster was decided, practical, strongly

self-reliant, and always satisfied with doing the best that could

be done with the time and means at command. Percival was timid and

cautious, and, from the very breadth of his linguistic attainments,

undecided. He often craved more time for arriving at conclusions. When

he happened to differ from the great lexicographer, he would never yield

an iota of his ground. These differences led to an early rupture in

the engagement, almost before two letters of the alphabet had been

completed. He much preferred to relinquish a profitable undertaking to

going forward with it under circumstances not agreeable to his elevated

standard of literary accuracy and completeness. He felt that he could

live on bread and water, or even give up these, if necessary; but he

could not violate his convictions of what was true and right. He was a

perfect martyr to his literary and scientific conscientiousness.

He evinced the same spirit in respect to the geological survey. As his

mind was not satisfied, he would not make known his results to the

Legislature. They demanded the report, and he asked for an extension of

time. Thus he continued his labors from year to year, upon a stipend

scarcely adequate to cover his expenses. Instead, however, of nearing

the goal, he only receded from it. New difficulties met him in the work;

fresh questions arose, in the progress of geology itself, that called

for reëxaminations. His notes swelled to volumes, and his specimens

increased to thousands. He was in danger of being crushed under the

weight of his doubts and his materials. At last, the people clamored

for the end of the work. The Legislature became peremptory, and forced

Percival to acquiesce.

In 1842 (seven years from the commencement of the survey) he rendered an

octavo report of four hundred and ninety-five pages, in the introduction

to which he observes,--"I regret to say, I have not had the means

allowed me for additional investigations, nor even for a proper use of

my materials, either notes or specimens. The number of localities from

which I have collected specimens I have estimated at nearly eight

thousand; the records of dips and bearings are still more numerous.

The report which follows is but a hasty outline, written mainly from

recollection, with only occasional reference to my materials, and under

circumstances little calculated for cool consideration. It was written,

however, with an intention to state nothing of the truth or probability

of which I did not feel satisfied. None can regret more than I do its

imperfection; still I cannot but hope that it will contribute something

towards the solution of the problem of the highest practical as well as

scientific importance, the exact determination of the geological system

of the State."

Of this remarkable production it may very briefly be said, that it will

ever remain a monument to the scientific and literary powers of its

author. It describes every shade of variation in the different rocks,

and their exact distribution over the surface of the State. This it

accomplishes with a minuteness never before essayed in any similar work.

The closeness and brevity of his descriptions make it one of the dryest

productions ever issued on geological science, scarcely omitting the

work of Humboldt, in which he sought to represent the whole of geology

by algebraic symbols. Percival's work actually demands, and would richly

repay, a translation into the vernacular of descriptive geology,--the

language and mode of illustration employed by Murchison and Hitchcock.

In its present form, it is safe to say, it has never found a single

reader among the persons for whose benefit it was written.

It is no part of my plan to speak of his poetical reputation. This I

leave to others better able to do him justice. Indeed, he had nearly

abandoned poetical composition before our acquaintance began. But it is

safe, perhaps, to say here, that his writings have placed him among

the first of our national poets; and had he resumed this species of

composition, he could scarcely have failed of maintaining, in the

fullest manner, his poetic fame. He possessed all the qualities reckoned

essential to poetical excellence. We have already spoken of his

astonishing memory, a trait regarded of such importance to the poet by

the ancients as to have led them to call the Muses the daughters of this

mental faculty. His powers of abstraction and imagination were no less

remarkable,--while for extreme sensitiveness he was unsurpassed. His

judgment was clear, and his appreciation of language refined to the last

degree. His musical feeling, too, as well of time as of harmony, was

intense; while he had at command the universal stores of literature and

science.

In closing these reminiscences, I cannot avoid noticing some of the

useful impressions exerted by Percival upon the literary community

amidst which he passed so large a portion of his life. To some the

influence of such a recluse will doubtless seem insignificant. The

reverse, however, I am persuaded, was the fact. Few students came to New

Haven without bringing with them, imprinted on their youthful memories,

some beautiful line of his poetry. Few had not heard of his universal

scholarship and profound learning. Next to an acquaintance with the

teachers from whom they expected to derive their educational training,

their curiosity led them to inquire for Percival. The sight of this

modest, shrinking individual, as the possessor of such mines of

intellectual wealth, it may well be understood, produced the deepest

interest. In him they recognized a man superior to the clamor of vulgar

gratification; his indifference to gain, to luxury, and every form of

display, his constant preference of the spiritual over the sensual, was

always an impressive example to them. The indigent student took fresh

courage as he saw in him to what a narrow compass exterior wants might

be reduced; the man of fashion and the fop stood abashed before the

simplicity of his dress and daily life. And wherever the spirit of

classic literature had been imbibed, and the capacity acquired of

perceiving the severe worth of the true philosopher, the inspection of

such a character, compared with the mere description of it in history,

was like the difference between a statue and a living, breathing man. As

at early dawn or in the gray twilight his slender form glided by, the

thoughtful and poetic scholar could scarce refrain from uttering to

himself,--"There goes Diogenes or Chrysippus! There goes one, by the

side of whom many a bustler in letters is only a worthless drone, many

an idolized celebrity a weak and pitiful sham!" Such a character as

Percival's, in the presence of a scholastic community, was a perpetual

incentive to industry and manliness; and although he rarely spoke in its

hearing, and has left us fewer published works than many others, still

I believe that thousands yet live to thank him for lessons derived from

the simple survey of his daily life.

Though there is little likelihood that his example of self-abnegation

and devotion to study will be followed by many of our youth,

nevertheless, the occurrence of such a model now and then in the

republic of letters constitutes a pleasing as well as useful

phenomenon,--if for no other reason, because it breaks in upon the

monotony of literary biography, and communicates a portion of that

picturesqueness to scholastic life which belongs to Nature in everything

else. That his course was fraught with happiness to himself cannot be

doubted; that it was beneficial also to his fellow-men is equally

true; and though he may be judged less leniently by minds incapable of

pronouncing that to be a character honorable in the sight of God or

man, which deviates from their own standard or creed,--to others, who

recognize the highest possible cultivation of the mental faculties and

unsullied purity of life as the noblest ends of our being, he will ever

occupy a position shared by few of mortal race.

* * * * *

ZELMA'S VOW.

IN TWO PARTS.

PART FIRST. HOW IT WAS MADE.

Who does not remember his first play?--the proudly concealed impatience

which seemed seething in the very blood,--the provoking coolness of old

play-goers,--the music that rather excited than soothed the fever

of expectation,--the mystery of mimic life that throbbed behind the

curtain,--the welcome tinkle of the prompter's bell,--the capricious

swaying to and fro of that mighty painted scroll,--its slow uplift,

revealing for an instant, perhaps, the twinkle of flying dancers' feet

and the shuffle of belated buskins? And then, the unveiled wonders

of that strange, new world of canvas and pasteboard and

trap-doors,--people, Nature, Art, and architecture, never before beheld,

and but faintly conceived of,--the magic of shifting scenes,--the

suddenness and awfulness of subterranean and aerial descents and

ascents,--the solemn stage-walk of the heroine,--the majestic strut

of the hero,--the princely sweep of velvet,--the illusive sparkle of

paste,--the rattle of Brobdignagian pearls,--the saucy tossing of pages'

plumes,--the smiles, the wiles, the astonishing bounds and bewildering

pirouettes of the dancing Houries,--the great sobs and small shrieks

of persecuted beauty,--the blighting smile of the villain,--the lofty

indifference of supernumeraries!

It was the first play of our heroine, Zelma Burleigh, and of her Cousin

Bessie. The morning before, a fragrant May morning, scores of summers

ago, Roger Burleigh, a stout Northumbrian Squire, had rolled himself,

in his ponderous way, into the snug family-parlor at the Grange, and

addressed his worthy dame with a bluff--

"Well, good wife, wouldn't like to go see the players to-night?"

Ere the good lady could collect herself to reply with the decorous

deliberateness becoming her years and station, an embroidery-frame at

her side was overturned, and there sprang eagerly forward a comely

young damsel of the pure Saxon stock, with eyes like England's

violets,--clear, dewy, and wide-awake,--cheeks and lips like its

rose-bloom, and hair which held tangled in close, golden folds its

fickle and flying sunshine.

"Ay, father!" she cried, "that we would! Zelma and I have never seen any

players, save the tumblers over at the Hall, on Sir Harry's birthday,

and we are in sad need of a little pleasuring."

"Who spoke to you, or of you, Mistress Bessie?" replied the Squire,

playfully. "And what is all your useless, chattering life but

pleasuring? The playhouse is but a perilous place for giddy-brained

lasses like you; but for once, harkee, for _once_, we'll venture on

taking you, if you'll promise to keep your silly head safe under the

mother-hen's wing."

"Not so close but that I can get a peep at the players now and then,"

said Bessie, archly. "They say there are some handsome young men and a

pretty woman or two among them. Eh, Zelma?"

"Handsome young men!--pretty women!" exclaimed the Squire, with an

explosive snort of contempt. "An arrant set of vagabonds and tramps,--of

ranting, strutting, apish creatures, with neither local habitations nor

names of their own. And what does Zelma know about them? Out with it,

girl!"

The person thus addressed, without lifting the folds of a heavy

window-curtain which concealed her, replied in a quiet, though somewhat

haughty tone,--

"I saw them all, yesterday afternoon, on their way to Arden. I found

them near the entrance to our avenue. One of their carts had broken

down, and somebody was hurt. I dismounted to see if I could be of any

assistance. My pony pulled away from me and ran up the road. One of the

young men caught her for me. I told Cousin Bessie I thought him handsome

and proud enough for a lord. I think so still. That is all I know of the

players."

"And, gad, that's enough! Take _you_ to the play, indeed! Why, we shall

have you strolling next, like your"--Here the Squire, for some reason

known to himself, suddenly paused and grew very red in the face. Dame

Margery took the word, and, in a tone meant to be severe, but which was

only dry, remarked,--

"Zelma is quite too young to go to the play."

"Just one week younger than my Cousin Bessie. So, please you, aunt, I

will wait a few days," was the quiet reply from the invisible.

"Right cleverly answered, lass!" said the Squire, with a good-humored

chuckle. "Well, we will try you, too, for once; but mind, if I find you

making eyes at any of the villains, I'll cut you off with a shilling."

"That is more than I look for from you, Uncle Roger," replied the

hitherto hidden speaker, emerging from the window-seat, holding in her

hand the fashionable and interminable novel of "Sir Charles Grandison."

As she spoke, she laughed lightly, but her voice was somewhat cold and

bitter, and there was in her laugh more of defiance than merriment.

"Oh, _don't_, Zella!" exclaimed the Squire, with a look of comic

deprecation,--"don't speak in that way to your old uncle! He's

blunt and rough-spoken, but he means kindly, and does kindly, in his

way,--don't he?"

"Yes, that he does!" said the young girl, frankly; "and I beg his pardon

for my pettishness."

Zelma Burleigh, as she stood thus, a faint, regretful smile softening

the habitual _hauteur_ of her face, was beautiful, and something more;

yet nobody in the country round about the Grange had ever dreamed of

calling her "a beauty." She was a tall, gracefully-formed girl, with

that strong, untamable character of figure and feature, and that

peculiar, sun-tinted, forest-shadowed hue of the skin, which betray the

slightest admixture of gypsy blood. In fact, Zelma Burleigh was the

fruit of a strange _mésalliance_ between the younger brother of the

Squire, a reckless, dissipated soldier of fortune, and a beautiful

Spanish Zineala, whom he met in a foreign campaign, and whom he could

not bind to himself by any tie less honorable than marriage. She was

said to be of Rommany blood-royal, and was actually disowned by her

tribe for _her mésalliance_. She followed the camp for a few years, the

willing, though sad and fast-fading slave of her Ishmaelitish lord,

himself the slave of lawless passions, yet not wholly depraved,

--fitfully tender and tyrannic,--and when, at last, he fell in some

inglorious skirmish, she buried him with her own hands, and wept and

fasted over his shallow grave till she died. There was a child, but she

had no look of the father to charm that poor, broken heart back to life;

she was left in the camp and became a little "Daughter of the Regiment."

At last, however, she was taken to England by a faithful comrade of the

dead soldier, who sought out her uncle and left her in his care, taking

leave of the frightened, clinging little creature with a grim, unspoken

tenderness, and a strange quiver of his gray moustache.

Roger Burleigh, after having made himself sure of the legitimacy of

the child, adopted the poor, wild thing, made her the companion of his

daughter, and honestly strove to treat her, at all times, with parental

care and affection.

Here, in the hospitable circle of an English home, the orphan alien

had grown up with her kinsfolk, but not of them,--proud, reticent,

ambitious, secretly hating the monotonous duties and pursuits, the

decorous forms and prescribed pleasures of the social and domestic life

around her. Nomadic and lawless instincts stirred in her blood; vague

longings for freedom and change, though in wandering, peril, and want,

sometimes filled her soul with the spirit of revolt and unrest.

In her bluff uncle's house all were kind, and one, at least, was fond.

Her Cousin Bessie, gay and tender heart, had found the southern exposure

of her nature, and had crept up it, and clambered over it, and clasped

it, and bloomed against it, and ripened on it, till nothing cold, hard,

or defiant could be seen on that side. And Zelma seemed well content to

be the sombre background and strong support of so much bloom, sweetness,

and graceful dependence.

Nothing could be more unlike than the two cousins. Bessie was small,

her form inclining to fulness, her face childlike in dimpled smiles and

innocent blushes,--betraying no lack of intellect, but most expressive

of a quiet, almost indolent amiability. Zelma was large, but lithe,

supple, and vigorous, with a pard-like freedom and elasticity of

movement,--dark, with a subdued and changing color,--the fluttering

signal of sudden emotion, not the stationary sign of robust health. She

had hair of a glistening blackness, which she wore turned back from a

strong, compact forehead, in the somewhat severe style which imperial

beauty has rendered classic in our time. Her eyes were of the Oriental

type,--full, heavy-lidded, ambushed in thick, black lashes,--themselves

dark and unfathomable as the long night of mystery which hangs over the

history of her wild and wandering race, those unsubduable, unseducible

children of Nature,--the voluntary Pariahs of the world. Sad were those

eyes always, but with a vague, uncommunicable sadness; soft they were in

times of quiet; beautiful and terrible they could be, with live gleams

of suddenly awakened passion.

With but one affection not poisoned by a sense of obligation and

condescension, and that a sentiment in which her intellect had little

share, a gentle, protective, household love, which quickened no daring

fancy, inspired no dream of freedom or power, Zelma's mind was driven

in upon itself, and out of the seclusion and triteness of her life

fashioned a fairy world of romance and beauty. With the high-wrought,

sentimental fictions of the day for her mental aliment, she grew more

and more distinct and apart from the actual, prosaic existences around

her; the smouldering fires of genius and ambition glowed out almost

fiercely at times, through the dark dream of her eyes, startling the

dullest apprehension, as she moved amid a narrow circle of country

gentry, the fox-hunting guests of her uncle, the prim gossips of her

aunt, the gay lovers and companions of her cousin, an unrecognized

heroine, an uncrowned tragedy-queen.

The small provincial town of Arden possessed no playhouse proper, but,

after a good deal of hesitation and discussion, the venerable Hall

of St. George, the glory of all Ardenites, had been accorded to the

players, "for a few nights only."

On the night of the first performance, Squire Burleigh and his family

arrived betimes, and took their places with some bustle and ceremony.

The master of Burleigh Grange appeared in the almost forgotten glory of

his court suit,--a coat of crimson velvet, a flowered waistcoat, satin

knee-breeches, and a sword at his side. The mistress wore an equally

memorable brocade, enormous bouquets thrown upon a silvery ground, so

stiff and shiny that it seemed a texture of ice and frozen flowers. Her

hair was cushioned and powdered; she looked comely and stately, and

wore her lustres well. The pretty Bessie was attired in maidenly

white muslin, an India fabric of marvellous fineness, with a sash and

streamers of blue, and the light fleecy curls of her hair unadorned save

by a slight pendent spray of jasmines. Her cousin's dress, though in

reality less costly, was more striking, being composed of materials and

colors which admirably harmonized with the darkness and richness of her

beauty. Her lustrous black hair was arranged as usual; but a wreath,

formed of some delicate vine hung thick with drooping scarlet blossoms,

ran like flowering flame around her head. Like the sumptuous exotic of

Zenobia, it was an ornament which seemed to bloom out of the character

of the woman.

Bessie cast about her bright, innocent looks of girlish curiosity, which

yet shrank from any chance encounter with the furtive glance or cool

stare of admiration. Zelma sat motionless and impassive. Her eyes

wandered naturally, but coldly, over the audience, seeming to take no

cognizance of any face, strange or familiar; but when they were lifted

above the crowd, to the old carved ceiling of the hall, or dropped upon

the beautiful hands which lay listlessly folded in her lap, the cold,

blank look she had set against the world went out of them. Then, in

their mystic depths of brooding, introverted thought, new spheres of

life, rarer, brighter, fairer, seemed rounding into form and dawning

like stars.

Mrs. Margery Burleigh sat with her face turned from the stage, to

dissemble the secret impatience with which she awaited the uprolling of

the curtain, and slowly waved to and fro a huge, flowered fan, which

charged the air with a heavy Indian perfume.

At length, soft, mournful music arose from the orchestra, and every

heart stirred to the premonitory waver and lift of the curtain. Slowly

it rose, and discovered a mourning apartment, with a lady in mourning,

sitting in a mourning chair, and attended by a mourning maid. The play

was Congreve's tragedy of "The Mourning Bride," one of the best of a

class of sentimental and stiltified dramatic productions which the

public of our great-grandfathers meekly accepted,--quaffing the frothy

small-beer of rant and affectation, in lieu of deep draughts of Nature

and passion, the rich, red wine of human life, poured generously

forth by the dramatists of a better era. The excesses of fashion then

prevailing, hoops, high heels, powder, and patches, were not more

essentially absurd and artificial than such representations of high-life

and high-tragedy.

"The Mourning Bride" contains a few situations in which real passion can

have play, some fine points and poetic passages, and its moral tone is

at least respectable,--not great things to say of a famous tragedy,

certainly, but they give it an honorable distinction over many plays of

its time. There figure in it one or two characters which can be made

interesting, and even impressive, by uncommon power in the actor; though

they were usually given, at the period of which I write, in a manner

sufficiently tame to suit the dullest of courts,--likely to disturb

neither my lord in his napping nor my lady in her prim flirting.

Zara, the Captive Queen, is beyond comparison the strong character of

this play. There is a spice and fire even in her wickedness, which

make her terribly attractive, and give her a more powerful hold on the

sympathies than the decorous and dolorous Almeria, for all her virtuous

sorrows and perplexities. Zara's passion is of the true Oriental type,

leaping from the extremes of love and hate with the fierceness and

rapidity of lightning.

It is a character in which several great actresses have distinguished

themselves,--chief among them Siddons. On the memorable night at Arden,

however, it was but wretchedly rendered by a tall, small-voiced,

flaxen-haired young woman, who stalked about the stage in high-heeled

shoes and prodigious hoops, and declaimed the most fiery passages with

an execrable drawl. The remainder of the company were barely passable as

strolling players, with the exception of the actor who personated Osmyn.

This was a young man named Bury, of respectable parentage and education,

it was said, and considerable reputation, though his aspiring buskin had

never yet trod the London boards. He was a handsome, shapely person,

with an assured, dashing manner, and a great amount of spirit and fire,

which usually passed with his audience, and always with himself, for

genius.

His voice was powerful and resonant, his elocution effective, if not

faultless, and his physical energy inexhaustible. Understanding and

managing perfectly his own resources, he produced upon most provincial

critics the impression of extraordinary power and promise, few

perceiving that he had already come into full possession of his dramatic

gifts.

Only finely-trained ears could discover in this sounding, shining metal

the lack of the sharp, musical ring of the genuine coin. Young men grew

frantic in applause of his bold action, his stormy declamation,

his startling _tours de force_; while young women wondered, wept,

languished, and swooned. It was said, that, whenever he died in Romeo,

Pierre, or Zanga, numbers of his fair slain were borne out of the

playhouse, to be revived with difficulty by the application of salts and

the severing of stay-lacings.

But his effects, though so positive, were superficial and

evanescent,--audible, visible, and, as it were, physical. There was

always wanting that fine shock of genuine passion, striking home to

kindred passions in the breasts of his auditors, and sending through

every nerve a magnetic shiver of delight,--that subtile, mysterious

element of genius, playing like quick flame along the dullest lines of

the poet and charging them with its own life and fire.

In the virtuous, but negative character of Osmyn there was little room

for effective declamation; our actor was fain to content himself with

being interesting, through the misfortunes of the Prince of Valentia,

his woful lawful love, and the besettings of an unreturned passion. In

this he succeeded so well, that the feminine portion of his audience

grew tender with Almeria, and despairing with Zara.

In the first scene with Almeria, who was a shade worse than the Zara of

the night, the young actor indulged himself in a cool, comprehensive

glance at the house, over her fair shoulders. As his keen gaze swept

round the small aristocratic circle, it encountered and seemed

to recognize the face of Zelma Burleigh, now kindling with a new

enthusiasm, which was never wholly to die out of her breast. There was

something in the watchful, absorbed gaze of her great dark eyes so

unlike the wondering or languishing looks usually bent by women upon

the rising actor, that on the instant he was struck, pierced, by those

subtile shafts of light, to the heart he had believed till then vowed

alone to the love of his art and the schemes of a sleepless ambition.

Reluctantly he withdrew his regard from a face which bespoke a character

of singular originality and force, not wanting either in womanly pride

or tenderness,--a face in which beauty itself was so subordinate to

something higher, more ineffable, that one could scarcely define feature

or color through the illuminated and changeful atmosphere of soul which

hung about it,--the shadows of great thoughts, the light mists of dreamy

and evanescent fancy.

It was toward the close of the second act, when Sir Harry Willerton, of

Willerton Hall, entered his box, accompanied by three or four dashing

companions, who, it was soon whispered about, were titled young bloods

from London.

Sir Harry Willerton was a fresh, frank-looking young gallant,--fast,

from the fiery impulses of youth and a high spirit,--not pricked on by

vanity, nor goaded by low passions,--not heartless, not _blasé_,--the

only kind of a rake for whom reformation is possible or reclamation

worth the while.

Sir Harry was not fond of tragedy; and after five minutes' strained

attention to the players, he turned his eyes from the stage, and began

casting easy, good-humored glances of curiosity or recognition over

the audience. He bowed to all his neighbors with a kindly familiarity,

untainted by condescension, but most courteously, perhaps, to the party

from the Grange. He liked the bluff Squire heartily,--as who did not?

Then his eye--a laughing blue eye it was--rested and lingered, not on

the dark, dramatic face of Zelma, but on the pretty, girlish head of her

cousin.

Bessie sat with her face partly averted from the baronet's gay party,

and her gaze fixed intently upon the stage. Sir Harry could only see

half the rose of one cheek, and the soft sweep of golden hair which

lightly shaded it; and feasting his fancy on that bit of fluctuating

color, entangled in the meshes of a tremulous screen of curls, he

settled himself to await the close of the act.

It was with a child's eager interest and pliant imagination that Bessie

looked and listened,--susceptible, credulous, unfastidious. To her,

the Osmyn of the night was radiant with all heroic qualities and manly

graces, the weakly simulated sorrow of Almeria brought real tears to her

eyes, and she drew her white shoulders forward with a shudder when

the wooden Zara kindled into cursing and jealous rage. Illusions most

transparent to others hoodwinked her senses; her willing fancy supplied

feeling, and even made up for deficiencies of art in the players, till

the mimic world before her became more real than reality.

Not so with Zelma. She was satisfied, even charmed, with the personation

of Osmyn; but, from the first, she could not abide either of the

heroines, who, each in her part, strove to outdo the other in mincing,

mouthing, attitudinizing, and all imaginable small sins against Nature

and Art. She saw at once, by the sure intuitions of genius, how

everything they did could be done better, and burned to do it. The part

of Almeria she soon dismissed from her thoughts, as mere milk-and-water;

but she saw that in that of Zara there was a stream of lava, though

dulled and crusted over by the coldness of the actress, which might

be made to sweep all before it. Her critical dissatisfaction with the

personation became, at last, little short of torture; there was an

involuntary lowering of her dark brows, a scornful quiver of her

spirited nostril, she bit her lip with angry impatience, and shrugged

her shoulders with irrepressible contempt.

In the great scene where Zara surprises Almeria in the cell of Osmyn,

it was astonishing how the flaxen-haired representative of the Captive

Queen managed to turn her fiery rain of curses into a little pattering

shower of womanish reproaches. It was really a masterly performance, in

its way.

At this point Zelma threw herself back in utter weariness and disgust,

exclaiming, audibly,--"Miserable!--most miserable." When, looking round,

she saw the traces of her cousin's innocent emotion, the flush and

tearfulness which bespoke her uncritical sympathy with passions so

unskilfully represented, she could not suppress a smile at such childish

simplicity. And yet this was also her first play.

The tragedy was succeeded by a farce, at which Bessie laughed as

heartily as she had wept a little while before, but which was utterly

distasteful to Zelma; and at an alarmingly late hour, for that quiet

community, the green curtain came heavily plunging down on the final

scene of all, and the audience dispersed to their homes.

On the day following, Sir Harry Willerton's guests returned to town,

but, to their surprise, unaccompanied by their host, who seemed to have

suddenly discovered that his presence was needed on his estate. So he

remained. Soon it was remarked that a singular intimacy had sprung

up between him and Squire Burleigh, with whom, at length, the larger

portion of his time was passed, either in following the hounds or dining

at the Grange. There were rumors and surmises that the attractions which

drew the young baronet to his bluff neighbor's hospitable hall were not

the Squire's hearty cheer, old wine, and older stories, but a pair of

shy, yet tender eyes,--red lips, that smiled a wordless welcome, and

sometimes pouted at a late coming,--cheeks whose blushes daily grew

warmer in love's ripening glow,--a voice whose tones daily grew deeper,

and seemed freighted with more delicious meanings.

There was little discussion as to which of the young ladies of the

Grange was the enchantress and the elect Lady Willerton.

"Surely," said the gossips, "it cannot be that gypsy niece of the

Squire, that odd, black-browed girl, who scours over the country in all

weathers, on that elfish black pony, with her hair flying,--for all the

world as though in search of her wild relations. No, the blood of the

Willertons would never run so low as that;--it must be sweet Miss

Bessie, and she is a match for a lord."

For once the gossips were right. But it is with the poor "Rommany girl,"

not with the heiress of Burleigh Grange, that we have to do.

On the morning succeeding the play, Zelma Burleigh, taking in her hand

an odd volume of Shakspeare, one of the few specimens of dramatic

literature which her uncle's scant library afforded, strolled down a

lonely lane, running back from the house, toward the high pasture-lands,

on which grazed and basked the wealthy Squire's goodly flocks and

herds. This was her favorite walk, as it was the most quiet, shaded,

out-of-the-way by-path on the estate. She now directed her steps to a

little rustic seat, almost hidden from view by the pendent branches

of an old willow-tree, and close under a hawthorn-hedge, now in full,

fragrant bloom. Here she seated herself, or rather flung herself down,

half languidly, half petulantly, an expression of _ennui_ and unrest

darkening her face,--the dusky traces of a sleepless night hanging

heavily about her eyes. She opened her book at the play of "Romeo and

Juliet," and began to read, not silently, nor yet aloud, but in a low,

dreamy tone, in which the sounds of Nature about her, the gurgle of a

brook behind the hedge, the sighing of the winds among the pendulous

branches of the willow, the silver shiver of the lance-like leaves, the

murmurous coming and going of bees, the loving duets of nest-building

birds, all seemed to mingle and merge. As she read, a new light seemed

to illumine the page, caught from her recent experience of dramatic

personation and scenic effects, limited and unsatisfactory though that

experience had been. In fancy, she floated over the stage, as the gay

young Juliet at the masquerade; then she caught sight of young Romeo,

and, lo! his face was that of the sentimental hero of the last night's

tragedy, but ennobled by the glow and dignity of genuine passion. In

fancy, she sat on the balcony, communing with night and the stars,--the

newly-risen star of love silvering all life for her. Then, leaning her

cheek upon her hand, she poured forth Juliet's impassioned apostrophe.

When she came to the passage,--

"O Romeo, Romeo!--wherefore art thou Romeo?"

she was startled by a rustling of the leaves behind her. She paused and

looked round fearfully. A blackbird darted out of the hedge and away

over the fields. Zelma smiled at her own alarm, and read on, till she

reached the tender adjuration,--

"Romeo, doff thy name;

And for thy name, which is no part of thee,

Take all myself!"

when,--suddenly, a fragrant shower of hawthorn-blossoms fell upon the

page before her, and the next instant there lightly vaulted over the

hedge at her side the hero of her secret thoughts, the young player,

Lawrence Bury! He stood before her, flushed and smiling, with his head

uncovered, and in an attitude of respectful homage; yet, with a look and

tone of tender, unmistakable meaning, took up the words of the play,--

"I take thee at thy word.

Call me but love, and I'll be new-baptized;

Henceforth I never will be Romeo."

Poor Zelma did not have the presence of mind to greet this sudden

apparition of a lover in the apt words of her part,--

"What man art thou, that, thus bescreened in night,

So stumblest on my counsel?"

She had no words at all for the intruder, but, frightened and

bewildered, sprang from her seat and turned her face toward home, with a

startled bird's first impulse to flight. As she rose, her book slid from

her lap and fell among the daisies at her feet. The actor caught it up

and presented it to her, with the grace of a courtly knight restoring

the dropped glove of a princess, but, as he did so, exclaimed, in a

half-playful tone, looking at the volume rather than the lady,--

"I thank thee, O my master, for affording me so fair an excuse for mine

audacity!"

Then, assuming a more earnest manner, he proceeded to make excuses and

entreat pardon for the suddenness, informality, and presumption of his

appearance before her:--

"You know, Madam," he said,--"if, indeed, you are so unfortunate as

to know anything about us,--that we players are an impulsive,

unconventional class of beings, lawless and irresponsible, the Gypsies

of Art."

Here Zelma flushed and drew herself up, while a suspicious glance shot

from her eyes;--but the stranger seemed not to understand or perceive

it, for he went on quite innocently, and with increasing earnestness of

tone and manner:--

"I know I have been presuming, impertinent, audacious, in thus intruding

myself upon you, and acknowledge that you would be but severely just in

banishing me instantly from your bright presence, and in withdrawing

from me forever the light of your adorable eyes. Oh, those eyes!" he

continued, clasping his hands in an ecstasy of lover-like enthusiasm,

--"those wild, sweet orbs!--bewildering lights of love, dear as life,

but cruel as death!--can they not quicken, even as they slay? Oh, gentle

lady, be like her of Verona!--be gracious, be kind, or, at least, be

merciful, and do not banish me!--

'For exile hath more terror in his look,

Much more, than death; do not say banishment!'"

He paused, but did not remove his passionate looks from the young girl's

face,--looks which, though cast down, for he was much the taller of the

two, had the effect of most lowly and deprecating entreaty;--and then

there happened an event,--a very slight, common, natural event,--the

result more of girlish embarrassment than of any conscious emotion or

purpose, yet of incalculable importance at that moment, and, perhaps,

decisive of the fate of two human hearts,--Zelma smiled. It was a

quick, involuntary smile, which seemed to _escape_ from the firm lips

and half-averted eyes, flashed over the face, touched the cold features

with strange radiance, and then was gone,--and, in its place, the old

shadow of reserve and distrust, for the moment, darker than ever.

But to the adventurous lover that brief light had revealed his doubtful

way clear before him. He saw, with a thrill of exultation, that

henceforth he had really nothing to fear from such womanly defences as

he had counted on,--coldness, prejudice, disdain,--that all he had taken

for these were but unsubstantial shadows. Still he showed no premature

triumph in word or look, but remained silent and humble, waiting the

reply to his passionate appeal, as though life or death, in very truth,

were depending upon it. And Zelma spoke at last,--briefly and coldly,

but in a manner neither suspicious nor unfriendly. She herself, she

said, was unconventional, in her instincts, at least,--so could afford

to pardon somewhat of lawlessness in another,--especially, she added,

with a shy smile, in one whom Melpomene, rather than Cupid, had made

mad. Still she was not a Juliet, though he, for all she knew, might be

a Romeo; and only in lands verging on the tropics, or in the soul of a

poet, could a passion like that of the gentle Veronese spring up, bud,

and blossom, in a single night. As for her, the fogs of England, the

heavy chill of its social atmosphere, had obstructed the ripening

sunshine of romance and repressed the flowering of the heart--

"And kept your beautiful nature all the more pure and fresh!" exclaimed

Mr. Lawrence Bury, with real or well-assumed enthusiasm; but Zelma,

replying to his interruption only by a slight blush, went on to say,

that she had been taught that poetry, art, and romances were all idle

pastimes and perilous lures, unbecoming and unwholesome to a young

English gentlewoman, whose manifest destiny it was to tread the dull,

beaten track of domestic duty, with spirit chastened and conformed.

She had had, she would acknowledge, some aspirations and rebellious

repinings, some wild day-dreams of life of another sort; but it was best

that she should put these down,--yes, doubtless, best that she should

fall into her place in the ranks of duty and staid respectability,

and be a mere gentlewoman, like the rest.--Here a slight shrug of the

shoulders and curl of the lip contradicted her words,--yet, with a tone

of rigid determination, she added, that it was also best she should

cherish no tastes and form no associations which might distract her

imagination and further turn her heart from this virtuous resolution;

and therefore must she say farewell, firmly and finally, to the, she

doubted not, most worthy gentleman who had done her the honor to

entertain for her sentiments of such high consideration and romantic

devotion. She would not deny that his intrusion on her privacy had, at

first, startled and displeased her,--but she already accepted it as an

eccentricity of dramatic genius, a thoughtless offence, and, being, as

she trusted, at once the first and the last, pardonable. She wished him

happiness, fame, fortune,--and a very good morning! Then, with a wave

of the hand which would have done honor to Oldfield herself, she turned

and walked proudly up the lane.

Mr. Bury saw her depart silently, standing in a submissive, dejected

attitude, but with a quiet, supercilious smile lightly curling his

finely-cut lips; for did he not know that she would return to her haunt

the next day, and that he would be there to see?

And Zelma did return the next day,--persuading herself that she was

only acting naturally, and with proper dignity and independence. She

argued with herself that to abandon her favorite walk or avoid her usual

resting-place would be to confess, if not a fear of the stranger's

presuming and persistent suit, at least, a disturbing consciousness of

his proximity, and of the possibility of his braving her displeasure

by a second and unpardonable intrusion. No, she would live as she had

lived, freely, carelessly; she would go and come, ride and walk, just as

though nothing had happened,--for, indeed, nothing _had_ happened that

a woman of sense and pride should take cognizance of. So, after a

half-hour's strange hesitation, she took her book and went to the old

place. Longer than usual she sat there, idly and abstractedly turning

over the leaves of her Shakspeare, starting and flushing with every

chance sound that broke on the still, sweet air; yet no presumptuous

intruder disturbed her maiden meditations, and she rose wearily at last,

and walked slowly homeward, saying to herself, "It is well. I have

conquered," but feeling that nothing was well in life, or her own heart,

and that she was miserably defeated. Ah, little did she suspect that her

clouded, dissatisfied face had been keenly scanned by the very eyes she

dreaded, yet secretly longed to meet,--that her most unconscious sigh

of disappointment had been heard by her Romeo of the previous day, now

lying just behind the hedge, buried in the long brook-side grass, and

laughing to himself a very pleasant laugh of gratulation and triumph.

That night, the good Squire of Burleigh Grange relented from his

virtuous resolve, and took his wife, daughter, and niece to the play.

The piece was Howe's tragedy of "Tamerlane." Mr. Bury personated the

imperial Tartar, a noble _rôle_, which so well became him, costumes

and all, and brought him so much applause, that Zelma's heart was

effectually softened, and she even felt a regretful pride in having

received and rejected the homage of a man of such parts.

The next day, as the hour for her stroll arrived, she said to herself,

"I can surely take my walks in safety now,--_he_ will never come near me

more." So she went,--but, to her unspeakable confusion, she found

him, quietly seated in her little rustic bower, his head bared to

the sunshine, and his "Hyperion curls" tossed and tumbled about by

a frolicsome wind. He rose when the lady appeared, stammered out an

apology, bowed respectfully, and would have retired, but that Zelma,

feeling that she was the intruder this time, begged him to remain. She

thought herself, simple child! merely courteous and duly hospitable, in

giving this invitation; but the quick, eager ear of the actor and lover

heard, quivering through the assumed indifference and cold politeness

of her tones, the genuine impulse and ardent wish of her heart. So

he yielded and lingered, proffering apologies and exchanging polite

commonplaces.

After a little time, Zelma, to prove her freedom from embarrassment or

suspicion, quietly seated herself on the rustic bench, giving, as she

did so, a regal spread to her ample skirts, that there might be no

vacant place beside her. The actor stood for a while before her, just

going, but never gone, talking gayly, but respectfully, on indifferent

topics,--till, at last, touching on some theme of deeper interest, and

apparently forgetting everything but it and the fair lady, who neither

expressed nor looked a desire to shorten the interview, he flung

himself, with what seemed a boy's natural impulse, upon the soft,

inviting turf, under the shade of the willow. There, reclining in the

attitude of Hamlet at the feet of Ophelia, he rambled on from subject

to subject, in a careless, graceful way, plucking up grass and picking

daisies to pieces, as he talked, giving every now and then, from beneath

the languid sweep of his heavy eyelashes, quick flashes of tender

meaning, as fitful and beautiful as the "heat-lightnings" of summer

twilights, and _apparently_ as harmless.

There was something so magnetic and contagious in this frank,

confiding manner, that Zelma, ere she was aware, grew unrestrained and

communicative in turn. One by one, the icicles of pride and reserve,

which a strange and ungenial atmosphere had hung around her affluent and

spontaneous nature, melted in the unwanted sunshine, dropped away from

her, and the quick bloom of a Southern heart revealed itself in

smiles and blushes. The divine poet whose volume she now held clasped

caressingly in both hands had prepared the way for this, by sending

through every vein and fibre of her being the sweet, subtile essence of

passionate thought,--the spring-tide of youth and love, which makes the

story of Romeo and Juliet glow and throb with immortal freshness and

vitality.

So, at length, those two talked freely and pleasantly together. They

discussed the quiet rural scenery around them, the deep green valley of

Arden, shut in by an almost unbroken circle of hills, and Zelma told of

a peculiar silvery mist which sometimes floated over it, like the ghost

of the lake which, it was said, once filled it; they spoke of wood,

stream, moor, and waterfall, sunsets and moonlight and stars, poetry

and--love; floating slowly, and almost unconsciously, down the smooth

current of summer talk and youthful fancies, toward the ocean of all

their thoughts, whose mysterious murmurs already filled one heart at

least with a tender awe and a vague longing, which was yet half fear.

The next day, and the next, and every day while the players remained at

Arden, the two friends met by tacit agreement in the lane of Burleigh

Grange, and, gradually, Lawrence Bury became less the actor and more

the man, in the presence of a genuine woman, without affectation or

artifice, stage-rant or art-cant,--one from whose face the glare of the

foot-lights had not stricken the natural bloom, whose heart had never

burned with the feverish excitement of the stage, its insatiable

ambition, its animosities and exceeding fierce jealousies. For Zelma,

she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the more she bestowed

from a "bounty boundless as the sea."

It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose,--the fragrant

snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they

met,--and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of

human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned

as the simplest lesson of Nature.

To Zelma the romance and secrecy of this love had an inexpressible

charm. The Zincala in her nature revelled in its wildness and adventure,

in its crime against the respectable conventionalities she despised. She

had a keen pleasure in the very management and concealment to which she

was compelled;--her imagination, even more than her heart, was engaged

in hiding and guarding this charming mystery.

On the day succeeding her first interview with the young actor in the

lane, she had tried to beguile her _ennui_, while lingering in her

lonely bower, by curiously peering into the nest of a blackbird, deeply

hidden in the long grass at the foot of the hedge, and which she had

before discovered by the prophetic murmurs of the mother-bird. She found

five eggs in the nest. She took the little blue wonders in her hand,

and thought what lives of sinless joy, what raptures and loves, what

exultations of song and soaring slept in those tiny shells! Suddenly,

there was an alarmed cry and an anxious flutter of wings in the hedge

above her! She turned, and saw the mother-bird eyeing her askance. From

that day the lowly nest with its profaned treasures was forsaken, and

the world was the poorer in gladness and melody by five bird-lives of

joy and song that might have been.

So, had any luckless intruder chanced to discover Zelma's

trysting-place, thrown open to the world the hidden romance in which

she took such shy and secret delight, and handled in idle gossip the

delicate joys and fragile hopes of young love, it is more than likely

that she would have been frightened away from bower and lane, shocked

and disenchanted. But the preoccupation of her cousin and her own

eccentric and solitary habits prevented suspicion and inquiry,--no

unfriendly spy, no rude, untoward event, disturbed the quiet and

seclusion of this charmed scene of her wooing, where Nature, Romance,

and Poetry were in league with Love.

The players played out their engagement at Arden, with the usual

supplement, "A few nights only by special request," and were off to a

neighboring town. On their last night, after the play, Zelma met her

lover by moonlight, at the trysting-place in the lane, for a parting

interview.

It was there that the actor, doffing the jaunty hat which usually

crowned his "comely head," and, flinging himself on his knees before

his fair mistress, entreated her to rule his wayward heart, share his

precarious fortunes, and bear his humble name.

Poor Zelma, when in imagination she had rehearsed her betrothal scene,

had made her part something like this:--"And then will I extend my hand

with stately grace, and say to my kneeling knight, 'Arise!'--and after,

in such brief, gracious words as queens may use, (for is not every woman

beloved a queen?) pronounce his happy doom."

But when that scene in her life-drama came on, it was the woman, not the

tragedy-queen, that acted. Naturally and tenderly, like any simple girl,

she bent over her lover, laid her hand upon his head, and caressingly

smoothed back from his brow the straggling curls, damp with night-dew.

As she did so, every lock seemed to thrill to her touch, and to wake in

her soft, timorous fingers a thousand exquisite nerves that had never

stirred before. And then, with broken words and tears, and probing

questions and solemn adjurations, she plighted her vows, and sought to

bind to her heart forever a faith to which she trusted herself, alas!

too tremblingly.

The melodramatic lover was not content with a simple promise, though

wrung from the heart with sobs. "_Swear_ it to me!" he said, in a hoarse

stage-whisper; and Zelma, again laying her hand upon his head, and

looking starward, swore to be his, to command, to call, to hold,--in

life, in death, here, hereafter, evermore.

[To be continued.]

* * * * *

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

ATTORNEY AT LAW AND SOLICITOR IN CHANCERY.

Somewhat more than three-quarters of a century ago, George Steevens, the

acutest, and, perhaps, the most accomplished, but certainly the most

perverse and unreliable of Shakespeare's commentators and critics, wrote

thus of Shakespeare's life: "All that is known, with any degree

of certainty, concerning Shakespeare, is, that he was born at

Stratford-upon-Avon; married and had children there; went to London,

where he commenced actor,[A] and wrote poems and plays; returned to

Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried." From 1780, when this

was written, to the present day, the search after well-authenticated

particulars of Shakespeare's life has been kept up with a faithfulness

equal to that of Sir Palomides after the beast glatisaunt, and by as

many devotees and with as much hope of glory as in the quest for the

Sangreal. But the fortune of the paynim, rather than the virgin knight,

has fallen to all the members of the self-devoted band, and we

know little more of the man Shakespeare than was known by our

great-grandfathers. For, although there have been issued to us of the

present generation pamphlets professing to give new particulars of the

life of Shakespeare, and tomes with even more pretentious titles, from

all these there has been small satisfaction, save to those who can

persuade themselves, that, by knowing what Shakespeare might have done,

they know what he did, or that the reflex of his daily life is to

be found in documents inscribed on parchment, and beginning, "This

indenture made," etc., or "_Noverint universi per presentes_." It is

with no disrespect for the enthusiasm of Mr. Knight, and as little

disposition to underrate the laborious researches of Mr. Collier and Mr.

Halliwell, that we thus reiterate the assertion of the world's ignorance

of Shakespeare's life: nay, it is with a mingled thankfulness and

sorrowful sympathy that we contemplate them wasting the light of the

blessed sun (when it shines in England) and wearing out good eyes (or

better barnacles) in poring over sentences as musty as the parchments

on which they are written and as dry as the dust that covers them.

But although we gladly concede that these labors have resulted in the

diffusion of a knowledge of the times and the circumstances in

which Shakespeare lived, and in the unearthing of much interesting

illustration of his works from the mould of antiquity, we cannot accept

the documents which have been so plentifully produced and so pitilessly

printed,--the extracts from parish-registers and old account-books,--not

Shakespeare's,--the inventories, the last wills and testaments, the

leases, the deeds, the bonds, the declarations, pleas, replications,

rejoinders, surrejoinders, rebutters, and surrebutters,--as having aught

to do with the life of such a man as William Shakespeare. We hunger,

and we receive these husks; we open our months for bread, and break our

teeth against these stones. As to the law-pleadings, what have their

discords, in linked harshness long drawn out, to do with the life of

him whom his friends delighted to call Sweet Will? We wish that they at

least had been allowed to rest. Those who were parties to them have been

more than two centuries in their graves,--

"Secure from worldly chances and mishaps.

_There_ lurks no treason, _there_ no envy swells,

_There_ grow no damned grudges; _there_ no storms,

No noise, but silence and eternal sleep."

Why awaken the slumbering echoes of their living strife?

[Footnote A: _Commenced actor, commenced author, commenced tinker,

commenced tailor, commenced candlestick-maker:_--Elegant phraseology,

though we venture to think, hardly idiomatic or logical, which came into

vogue in England in the early part of the last century, and which,

as it is never uttered here by cultivated people, it may be proper to

remark, is there used by the best writers. Akin to it is another mode of

expression as commonly met with in English books and periodicals, e.g.,

"immediately he arrived at London he went upon the stage," meaning, as

soon as he arrived, etc., or, when he arrived at London, he immediately

went upon the stage. As far as our observation extends, Lord Macaulay,

alone of all Great-Britons, has neglected to add the latter lucid

construction to the graces of his style.]

Yet these very law-papers, in the reduplicated folds of which dead

quarrels lie embalmed in hideous and grotesque semblance of their living

shapes, their lifeblood dried that lent them all their little dignity,

their action and their glow, and exhaling only a faint, sickening

odor of the venom that has kept them from crumbling into

forgetfulness,--these law-papers are now held by some to have special

interest Shakespeare-ward, as having to do with a profession for which

he made preparatory studies, even if he did not enter upon its practice.

Yes, in spite of our alleged ignorance of Shakespeare's life, and

especially of the utter darkness which has been thought to rest upon the

years which intervened between his marriage in Stratford and his joining

the Lord Chamberlain's company of players in London, the question is,

now, whether the next historical novel may not begin in this wise:--

CHAPTER I.

THE FUGITIVE.

At the close of a lovely summer's day, two horsemen might have been seen

slowly pacing through the main street of Stratford-on-Avon. Attracting

no little attention from the group of loiterers around the market-cross,

they passed the White-Lion Inn, and, turning into Henley Street, soon

drew their bridles before a goodly cottage built of heavy timbers and

standing with one of its peaked gables to the street. On the door was a

shingle upon which was painted,

Willm. Shakspere,

Attornei at Lawe and Solicitor

in Chancere.

One of the travellers--a grave man, whose head was sprinkled with the

snows of fifty winters--dismounted, and, approaching the door, knocked

at it with the steel hilt of his sword. He received no answer; but

presently the lattice opened above his head, and a sharp voice sharply

asked,--

"Who knocks?"

"'Tis I, good wife!" replied the horseman. "Where is thy husband? I

would see him!"

"Oh, Master John a Combe, is it you? I knew you not. Neither know I

where that unthrift William is these two days. It was but three nights

gone that he went with Will Squele and Dick Burbage, one of the player

folk, to take a deer out of Sir Thomas Lucy's park, and, as Will's

ill-luck would have it, they were taken, as well as the deer, and there

was great ado. But Will--that's my Will--and Dick Burbage, brake from

the keepers in Sir Thomas' very hall, and got off; and that's the last

that has been heard of them; and here be I left a lone woman with these

three children, and----Be quiet, Hamnet! Would ye pour my supper ale

upon the hat of the worshipful Master John a Combe?"

"What! deer-stealing?" exclaimed John a Combe. "Is it thus that he apes

the follies of his betters? I had more hope of the lad, for he hath a

good heart and a quick engine; and I trusted that ere now he had

drawn the lease of my Wilmecote farm to Master Tilney here. But

deer-stealing!--like a lord's son, or a knight's at the least. Could not

the rifling of a rabbit-warren serve his turn? Deer-stealing! I fear me

he will come to nought!"

The speaker remounted, and soon the two horsemen might again have been

seen wending their way back through the deepening twilight.

* * * * *

There are several points that would be novel in such a passage. Among

others, we would modestly indicate the incident of the two horsemen

as evincing some ingenuity, and as likely to charm the reader by its

freshness and originality. But one point, we must confess, is not

new, and that is the representation of Shakespeare as a lawyer. The

supposition, that the author of "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "King Lear,"

was a bustling young attorney, is of respectable age, and has years

enough upon its beard, if not discretion. It has been brought forward

afresh by two members of the profession for which is claimed the honor

of having Shakespeare's name upon its roll,--William L. Rushton,

Esquire, a London Barrister, and John Campbell, Lord Chief Justice of

the Queen's Bench.[B] Lord Campbell, indeed, addressing himself to

Mr. John Payne Collier, says, (p. 21,) that this is a notion "first

suggested by Chalmers, and since countenanced by Malone, yourself, and

others." An assertion this which savors little of legal accuracy. For

Chalmers, so far from being the first to suggest that Shakespeare passed

his adolescent years in an attorney's office, was the first to sneer at

Malone for bringing forward that conjecture.[C] Malone, in his first

edition of Shakespeare's works, published in 1790, has this passage, in

the course of a discussion of the period when "Hamlet" was produced:--

"The comprehensive mind of our poet embraced almost every object of

Nature, every trade, every art, the manners of every description of men,

and the general language of almost every profession: but his knowledge

of legal terms is not such as might be acquired by the casual

observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of

_technical_ skill; and he is so fond of displaying it, on all occasions,

that I suspect he was early initiated in at least the forms of law, and

was employed, while he remained at Stratford, in the office of some

country attorney, who was at the same time a petty conveyancer, and

perhaps, also, the seneschal of some manor court."--Vol. I. Part I. p.

307.

[Footnote B: _Shakespeare a Lawyer_. By William L. Rushton. 16mo. pp.

50. London: 1858.

_Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered_. By John Lord Campbell,

LL.D., F.R.S.E. 12mo. pp. 117. London: 1859.]

[Footnote C: Into the trap so innocently set the London _Athenaeum_ thus

plunges headlong:--"Chalmers, we believe, first put Shakespeare in an

attorney's office. Malone _accepted the hint_."]

To this, Chalmers, some years after, (1797,) in his "Apology for the

Believers in the Shakespeare Papers which were exhibited in Norfolk

Street," (some contemptible forgeries, by a young scapegrace named

William Ireland, which should not have deceived an English scholar of

six months' standing,) made the following reply:--

"Mr. Malone places the aspiring poet 'in the office of some country

attorney, or the seneschal of some manor court'; and for this violation

of probability he produces many passages from his dramas to evince

Shakespeare's _technical skill_ in the _forms of law_. ...But was it not

the practice of the times, for other makers, like the bees tolling from

every flower the virtuous _sweets_, to gather from the thistles of the

law _the sweetest_ honey? Does not Spenser gather many a metaphor from

these weeds, that are most apt to grow in _fattest_ soil? Has not

Spenser his law-terms: his _capias, defeasance_, and _duresse_; his

_emparlance_; his _enure, essoyn_, and _escheat_; his _folkmote,

forestall_ and _gage_; his _livery_ and _seasin, wage_ and _waif_? It

will be said, however, that, whatever the learning of Spenser may have

gleaned, the law-books of that age were impervious to the illiterature

of Shakespeare. No: such an intellect, when employed on the drudgery of

a wool-stapler, who had been high-bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon, might

have derived all that was necessary from a very few books; from Totell's

'Presidents,' 1572; from Pulton's 'Statutes,' 1578; and from the

'Lawier's Logike,' 1588. It is one of the axioms of the 'Flores Regii,'

that, To answer an improbable imagination is to fight against a

vanishing shadow."--p. 553.

And again, in his "Supplemental Apology," etc., 1799, Chalmers

remarks,--

"The biographers, without adequate proofs, have bound Shakespeare an

apprentice to some country attorney; as Mr. Malone has sent him without

sufficient warrant to the desk of some seneschal of a county court: but

these are obscurities that require other lights than conjecture and

assertion, which, by proving nothing, only establish disbelief."--p.

226.

So much for Chalmers's having "first suggested" the theory, of which

Lord Campbell has undertaken the support. Surely his Lordship must have

been verifying Rosalind's assertion, that lawyers sleep between term and

term, or else he is guilty of having loosely made a direct assertion in

regard to a subject upon which he had not taken the trouble to inform

himself; although he professes (p. 10) to have "read nearly all that has

been written on Shakespeare's _ante-Londinensian_ life, and carefully

examined his writings with a view to obtain internal evidence as to his

education and breeding."

One exhibition of his Lordship's inaccuracy is surprising. Commenting

upon Falstaff's threat, "Woe to my Lord Chief Justice!" (2d _Henry_ IV.,