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Title: From the Easy Chair, series 3

Author: George William Curtis

Release Date: May 12, 2011 [EBook #36090]

Language: English

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F R O M   T H E
E A S Y   C H A I R

BY
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

THIRD SERIES

NEW YORK
HARPER AND BROTHERS
MDCCCXCIV

 
Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
———
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

HAWTHORNE AND BROOK FARM

N his preface to the Marble Faun, as before in that to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne complained that there was no romantic element in American life; or, as he expressed it, "There is as yet no such Faery-land so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own." This he says in The Blithedale preface, and then adds that, to obviate this difficulty and supply a proper scene for his figures, "the author has ventured to make free with his old and affectionately remembered home at Brook Farm as being certainly the most romantic episode of his own life, essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact, and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality." Probably a genuine Brook-Farmer doubts whether Hawthorne remembered the place and his life there very affectionately, in the usual sense of that word, and although in sending the book to one of them, at least, he said that it was not to be considered a picture of actual life or character. "Do not read it as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm [which essentially it has not], but merely for its own story and characters," yet it is plain that it is a very faithful picture of the kind of impression that the enterprise made upon him.

Strangely enough, Hawthorne is likely to be the chief future authority upon "the romantic episode" of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart more than he whose faith and hope and energy were all devoted to its development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent record, have never done so, and it is already so much of a thing of the past that it will probably never be done. But the memory of the place and of the time has been recently pleasantly refreshed by the lecture of Mr. Emerson and the Note-Book of Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson, whose mind and heart are ever hospitable, was one of the chief, indeed the chiefest, figure in this country of the famous intellectual "Renaissance" of twenty-five years ago, which, as is generally the case, is historically known by its nickname of "Transcendentalism," a spiritual fermentation from which some of the best modern influences of this country have proceeded.

In his late lecture upon the general subject, Mr. Emerson says that the mental excitement began to take practical form nearly thirty years ago, when Dr. Channing counselled with George Ripley upon the practicability of bringing thoughtful and cultivated people together and forming a society that should be satisfactory. "That good attempt," says Emerson, with a sly smile, "ended in an oyster supper with excellent wines." But a little later it was revived under better auspices, and as Brook Farm made a name which will not be forgotten. Mr. Emerson was never a resident, but he was sometimes a visitor and guest, and the more ardent minds of the romantic colony were always much under his influence. With his sensitively humorous eye he seizes upon some of the ludicrous aspects of the scene and reports them with arch gravity. "The ladies again," he says, "took cold on washing-days, and it was ordained that the gentlemen shepherds should hang out the clothes, which they punctually did; but a great anachronism followed in the evening, for when they began to dance the clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their pockets." And again: "One hears the frequent statement of the country members that one man was ploughing all day and another was looking out of the window all day—perhaps drawing his picture, and they both received the same wages."

In Hawthorne's just published Note-Book he records a great deal of his daily experience at Brook Farm. But he was never truly at home there. Hawthorne lived in the very centre of the Transcendental revival, and he was the friend of many of its leaders, but he was never touched by its spirit. He seems to have been as little affected by the great intellectual influences of his time as Charles Lamb in England. The Custom-house had become intolerable to him. He was obliged to do something. The enterprise at Brook Farm seemed to him to promise Arcadia. But he forgot that the kingdom of heaven is within you, and when he went to the tranquil banks of the Charles he found himself in a barn-yard shovelling manure, and not at all in Arcadia. "Before breakfast I went out to the barn and began to chop hay for the cattle, and with such 'righteous vehemence,' as Mr. Ripley says, did I labor, that in the space of ten minutes I broke the machine. Then I brought wood and replenished the fires, and finally went down to breakfast and ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes. After breakfast Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitchfork, and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure."

Hawthorne was a sturdy and resolute man, and any heap of manure that he attacked must yield; but he had not come to Arcadia to sweat and blister his hands, and his blank and amused disappointment is evident. He had a subtle and pervasive humor, but no spirits. He sees the pleasantness of the place and the beauty of the crops, having knowledge of them and a new interest in them; and he has a quiet conscience because he feels that he is really doing some of the manual work of the world; but he is always a spectator, a critic. He went to Brook Farm as he might have gone to an anchorite's cell; but the fervor that warms and adorns the cold bare rock he does not have, and the mere consciousness of well-doing is a chilly abstraction. "I do not believe that I should be patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life. I fear it is time for me, sod-compelling as I am, to take the field again. Even my Custom-house experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally brutified!" Very soon, of course, the pilgrim to Arcadia escapes from the manure-yard, and declares as he runs that it was not he, it was a spectre of him, who milked and hoed and toiled in the sun. Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm but a few months, and after he left he never returned thither, even for a visit.

The Blithedale Romance shows that he was not unmindful of its poetic aspect; but his genius was stirring in him, and he felt that he could not work hard with his hands and write also. So he went off, and never came back; and although he may have remembered certain persons kindly, his memory of the place and of his life there could not have been very affectionate. Probably there were other diaries kept at Brook Farm; certainly there were many and many letters written thence, in which still lie, and will forever lie, buried the material for its history. But it is likely to become a tradition only, and upon its finer side more and more unreal, because of such sketches as those of Hawthorne. The most comical part of the whole was its impression—that is, such impression as it made, and without exaggerating its extent or importance upon the steady old conservatism of Boston, which was of the most inflexible and antediluvian type. The enterprise was the more appalling because it seemed somehow to be a natural product of the spirit of society there. The hen of the tri-mountain had herself hatched this inexpressible duckling. Dr. Channing, indeed, was the honored intellectual chief; the culture of Boston had owed much to the liberal theology; old Dr. Beecher had battered that theology in vain; but the liberality of Boston was like the British Whiggery of the last century: it was more intelligent and more patrician than Toryism itself.

Mr. Emerson, as we said, was practically the head—or, at least, the accepted representative—of the new movement. His discourses before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, his address to the divinity students, and his noble Dartmouth oration, followed by his lectures in Boston and his Nature had set the barn-yard—not offensively to retain the metaphor of the hen—into the most resonant cackle, in the midst of Theodore Parker's South Boston sermon, and there was universal thunder. The pulpits which Dr. Beecher had assaulted, and which had watched him serenely, when they heard Parker thought that the very foundations of things were going. The most distinguished chanticleers went to Mr. Emerson's lectures, and when asked if they understood him, shook their stately combs and replied, with caustic superiority, "No; but our daughters do." And when the experiment began at Brook Farm there was no doubt in conservative circles that for their sins this offshoot of Bedlam was permitted in the neighborhood. What it was, what it was meant to be, was inexplicable. Are they fools, knaves, madmen, or mere sentimentalists?... Is this Coleridge and Southey again with their Pantisocracy and Susquehanna Paradise? Is it a vast nursery of infidelity; and is it true that "the abbé or religieux" sacrifices white oxen to Jupiter in the back parlor? What may not be true, since it is within Theodore Parker's parish, and his house, crammed with books, and modest under the pines, is only a mile away?

These extraordinary and vague and hostile impressions were not relieved by the appearance of such votaries of the new shrine as appeared in the staid streets and halls of the city. There is always a certain amount of oddity latent in society, which rushes into such an enterprise as a natural vent, and in youth itself there is a similar latent and boundless protest against the friction and apparent unreason of the existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise this was everywhere observable. The freedom of the anti-slavery reform and its discussions had developed the "come-outers," who bore testimony at all times and places against Church and State. Mr. Emerson mentions an apostle of the gospel of love and no money, who preached zealously, but never gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the protestants against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious metaphysics upon milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder was to injure the maternal instincts of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee cannibalism, and the destruction of the tender germ of life; to swallow an oyster was to mask murder. A still selecter circle denounced the chains that shackled the tongue and the false delicacy that clothed the body. Profanity, they said, is not the use of forcible and picturesque words; it is the abuse of such to express base passions and emotions. So indecency cannot be affirmed of the model of all grace, the human body. The fig-leaf is the sign of the fall. Man returning to Paradise will leave it behind. The priests of this faith, therefore, felt themselves called upon to rebuke true profanity and indecency by sitting at their front doors upon Sunday morning with no other clothes than that of the fig-leaf period, tranquilly but loudly conversing in the most stupendous oaths, by way of conversational chiaro-oscuro, while a deluded world went shuddering to church.

These were the harmless freaks and individual fantasies. But the time was like the time of witchcraft. The air magnified and multiplied every appearance, and exceptions and idiosyncrasies and ludicrous follies were regarded as the rule, and as the logical masquerade of this foul fiend Transcendentalism, which was evidently unappeasable, and was about to devour manner, morals, religion, and common-sense. If Father Lamson or Abby Folsom were borne by main force from an antislavery meeting, and the non-resistants pleaded that those protestants had as good a right to speak as anybody, and that what was called their senseless babble was probably inspired wisdom, if people were only heavenly-minded enough to understand it, it was but another sign of the impending anarchy. And what was to be said—for you could not call them old dotards—when the younger protestants of the time came walking through the sober streets of Boston and seated themselves in concert-halls and lecture-rooms with hair parted in the middle and falling to their shoulders, and clad in garments such as no human being ever wore before—garments which seemed to be a compromise between the blouse of the Paris workman and the peignoir of a possible sister? For tailoring underwent the sage revision to which the whole philosophy of life was subjected, and one ardent youth, asserting that the human form itself suggested the proper shape of its garments, caused trousers to be constructed that closely fitted the leg, and bore his testimony to the truth in coarse crash breeches.

These were the ludicrous aspects of the intellectual and moral fermentation or agitation that was called Transcendentalism. And these were foolishly accepted by many as its chief and only signs. It was supposed that the folly was complete at Brook Farm, and it was indescribably ludicrous to observe reverend doctors and other dons coming out to gaze upon the extraordinary spectacle, and going as dainty ladies hold their skirts and daintily step from stone to stone in a muddy street, lest they be soiled. The dons seemed to doubt whether the mere contact had not smirched them. But droll in itself, it was a thousandfold droller when Theodore Parker came through the woods and described it. With his head set low upon his gladiatorial shoulders, and his nasal voice in subtle and exquisite mimicry reproducing what was truly laughable, yet all with infinite bonhommie and a genuine superiority to small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and as excellent a mimic as he was noble and fervent and humane a preacher. On Sundays a party always went from Brook Farm to Mr. Parker's little country church. He was there just exactly what he was afterwards, when he preached to thousands of eager people at the Boston Music Hall—the same plain, simple, rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal friends. They loved him and were proud of him; and his geniality and tender sympathy, his ample knowledge of things as well as of books, his jovial manliness and sturdy independence, drew to him all ages and sexes and conditions.

The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of person. There were the ripest scholars, men and women of the most æsthetic culture and accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers, the industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. But they associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, with some extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and there was a kind of high esprit de corps—at least in the earlier or golden age of the colony. There was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the founding of an earthly paradise upon a New England farm is no pastime. But with the best intention, and much practical knowledge and industry and devotion, there was in the nature of the case an inevitable lack of method, and the economical failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But there were never such witty potato patches and such sparkling cornfields before or since. The weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson or Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay and bright as any brilliant midnight at Ambrose's. But in the midst of it all was one figure, the practical farmer, an honest neighbor who was not drawn to the enterprise by any spiritual attraction, but was hired at good wages to superintend the work, and who always seemed to be regarding the whole affair with a most good-natured wonder as a prodigious masquerade. Indeed, the description which Hawthorne gives of him at a real masquerade of the farmers in the woods depicts his attitude towards Brook Farm itself: "And apart, with a shrewd Yankee observation of the scene, stands our friend Orange, a thick-set, sturdy figure, enjoying the fun well enough, yet rather laughing with a perception of its nonsensicalness than at all entering into the spirit of the thing." That, indeed, was very much the attitude of Hawthorne himself towards Brook Farm and many other aspects of human life.

But beneath all the glancing colors, the lights and shadows of its surface, it was a simple, honest, practical effort for wiser forms of life than those in which we find ourselves. The criticism of science, the sneer of literature, the complaint of experience is that man is a miserably half-developed being, the proof of which is the condition of human society, in which the few enjoy and the many toil. But the enjoyment cloys and disappoints, and the very want of labor poisons the enjoyment. Man is made body and soul. The health of each requires reasonable exercise. If every man did his share of the muscular work of the world no other man would be overwhelmed with it. The man who does not work imposes the necessity of harder toil upon him who does. Thereby the first steals from the last the opportunity of mental culture, and at last we reach a world of pariahs and patricians, with all the inconceivable sorrow and suffering that surround us. Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will substitute co-operation for competition.

That some such generous and noble thought inspired this effort at practical Christianity is most probable. The Brook-Farmers did not interpret the words, "The poor ye have always with ye" to mean, "We must keep always some of you poor." They found the practical Christian in him who said to his neighbor, "Friend, come up higher." But apart from any precise and defined intention, it was certainly a very alluring prospect: that of life in a pleasant country, taking exercise in useful toil, and surrounded with the most interesting and accomplished people. Compared with other efforts upon which time and money and industry are lavished, measured by Colorado and Nevada speculations, by California gold-washing, by oil-boring, and by the Stock Exchange, Brook Farm was certainly a very reasonable and practical enterprise, worthy of the hope and aid of generous men and women. The friendships that were formed there were enduring. The devotion to noble endeavor, the sympathy with what is most useful to men, the kind patience and constant charity that were fostered there, have been no more lost than grain dropped upon the field. It is to the Transcendentalism that seemed to so many good souls both wicked and absurd that some of the best influences of American life to-day are due. The spirit that was concentrated at Brook Farm is diffused but not lost. As an organized effort, after many downward changes, it failed; but those who remember the Hive, the Eyrie, the Cottage, when Margaret Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright humor; when Emerson and Parker and Hedge joined the circle for a night or day; when those who may not be named publicly brought beauty and wit and social sympathy to the feast; when the practical possibilities of life seemed fairer, and life and character were touched ineffaceably with good influence, cherish a pleasant vision which no fate can harm, and remember with ceaseless gratitude the blithe days at Brook Farm.

BEECHER IN HIS PULPIT AFTER
THE DEATH OF LINCOLN

ROSS the Fulton Ferry and follow the crowd" was the direction which was said to have been given humorously by Mr. Beecher himself to a pilgrim who asked how to find his church in Brooklyn. The Easy Chair remembered it on the Sunday morning after the return of the Fort Sumter party; and crossing at an early hour in the beautiful spring day, he stepped ashore and followed the crowd up the street. That at so early an hour the current would set strongly towards the church he did not believe. But he was mistaken. At the corner of Hicks Street the throng turned and pushed along with hurrying eagerness as if they were already too late, although it was but a little past nine o'clock. The street was disagreeable like a street upon the outskirts of a city, but the current turned from it again in two streams, one flowing to the rear and the other to the front of Plymouth Church. The Easy Chair drifted along with the first, and as he went around the corner observed just before him a low brick tower, below which was an iron gate.

The gate was open, and we all passed rapidly in, going through a low passage smoothly paved and echoing, with a fountain of water midway and a chained mug—a kind thought for the wayfarer—and that little cheap charity seemed already an indication of the humane spirit which irradiates the image of Plymouth Church. The low passage brought us all to the narrow walk by the side of the church, and to the back door of the building. The crowd was already tossing about all the doors. The street in front of the building was full, and occasionally squads of enterprising devotees darted out and hurried up to the back door to compare the chances of getting in.

The Easy Chair pushed forward, and was shown by a courteous usher to a convenient seat. The church is a large white building, with a gallery on both sides, two galleries in front, and an organ-loft and choir just behind the pulpit. It is spacious and very light, with four long windows on each side. The seats upon the floor converge towards the pulpit, which is a platform with a mahogany desk, and there are no columns. The view of the speaker is unobstructed from every part. The plain white walls and entire absence of architectural ornamentation inevitably suggest the bare cold barns of meeting-houses in early New England. But this house is of a very cheerful, comfortable, and substantial aspect.

There were already dense crowds wedged about all the doors upon the inside. The seats of the pew-holders were protected by the ushers, the habit being, as the Easy Chair understood, for the holders who do not mean to attend any service to notify the ushers that they may fill the seats. Upon the outside of the pews along the aisles there are chairs which can be turned down, enabling two persons to be seated side by side, yet with a space for passage between, so that the aisle is not wholly choked. On this Sunday the duties of the ushers were very difficult and delicate, for the pressure was extraordinary. There was still more than an hour before the beginning of the service, but the building was rapidly filling; and everybody who sank into a seat from which he was sure that he could not be removed wore an edifying expression of beaming contentment which must have been rather exasperating to those who were standing and struggling and dreadfully squeezed around the doors.

Presently the seats were all full. The multitude seemed to be solid above and below, but still the new-comers tried to press in. The platform was fringed by the legs of those who had been so lucky as to find seats there. There was loud talking and scuffling, and even occasionally a little cry at the doors. One boy struggled desperately in the crowd for his life, or breath. The ushers, courteous to the last, smiled pitifully upon their own efforts to put ten gallons into a pint pot. As the hour of service approached a small door under the choir and immediately behind the mahogany desk upon the platform opened quietly, and Mr. Beecher entered. He stood looking at the crowd for a little time, without taking off his outer coat, then advanced to the edge of the platform and gave some directions about seats. He indicated with his hands that the people should pack more closely. The ushers evidently pleaded for the pew-holders who had not arrived; but the preacher replied that they could not get in, and the seats should be filled that the service might proceed in silence. Then he removed his coat, sat down, and opened the Hymn-Book, while the organ played. The impatient people meantime had climbed up to the window-sills from the outside, and the great white church was like a hive, with the swarming bees hanging in clusters upon the outside.

The service began with an invocation. It was followed by a hymn, by the reading of a chapter in the Bible, and a prayer. The congregation joined in singing; and the organ, skilfully and firmly played, prevented the lagging which usually spoils congregational singing. The effect was imposing. The vast volume filled the building with solid sound. It poured out at the open windows and filled the still morning air of the city with solemn melody. Far upon every side those who sat at home in solitary chambers heard the great voice of praise. Then amid the hush of the vast multitude the preacher, overpowered by emotion, prayed fervently for the stricken family and the bereaved nation. There was more singing, before which Mr. Beecher appealed to those who were sitting to sit closer, and for once to be incommoded that some more of the crowd might get in; and as the wind blew freshly from the open windows, he reminded the audience that a handkerchief laid upon the head would prevent the sensitive from taking cold. Then opening the Bible he read the story of Moses going up to Pisgah, and took the verses for his text.

The sermon was written, and he read calmly from the manuscript. Yet at times, rising upon the flood of feeling, he shot out a solemn adjuration or asserted an opinion with a fiery emphasis that electrified the audience into applause. His action was intense but not dramatic; and the demeanor of the preacher was subdued and sorrowful. He did not attempt to speak in detail of the President's character or career. He drew the bold outline in a few words, and leaving that task to a calmer and fitter moment, spoke of the lessons of the hour. The way of his death was not to be deplored; the crime itself revealed to the dullest the ghastly nature of slavery; it was a blow not at a man, but at the people and their government; it had utterly failed; and, finally, though dead the good man yet speaketh. The discourse was brief, fitting, forcible, and tender with emotion. It was a manly sorrow and sympathy that cast its spell upon the great audience, and it was good to be there. When words have a man behind them, says a wise man, they are eloquent. There was another hymn before the benediction, a peal of pious triumph, which poured out of the heart of the congregation, and seemed to lift us all up, up into the sparkling, serene, inscrutable heaven.

KILLING DEER

HAT shall he have that kill'd the deer?" sang the foresters in Arden. If you are in the wild woods of the Adirondacks you lie behind a log or rock by which the animal is likely to pass; you scarcely breathe as you wait with your hand grasping your rifle. The slow hours drag by, and you are very wet, or the gnats and mosquitoes sting, or you are hungry, cramped, or generally uncomfortable—but hark! What's that? A slight rustle! You are all alert. Your heart beats. Your hands tingle. Breathlessly you stare towards the sound. And then—nothing. A twig dropped.

Ah well! that's nothing. Very cautiously you stretch the leg which has the most stitch in it lest you should alarm the deer. The position and the progress of affairs are a little monotonous; but if the day that counts one glorious nibble is a day well spent, how much more so that which gives you the chance of a deer! 'St! A slight but decided crashing beyond the wood. A faint, startled, hurrying sound; and the next moment, erect, alive in every hair, the proud antlers quivering, the eye wild but soft, the form firm and exquisitely agile, the buck bounds into view. Crack you go, you poor miserable skulker behind a rotten log, and off he goes, the dappled noble of the forest!

Perhaps you hit him and kill him. You outwit him and murder him. Well, in Venice the bravos hid in dark doorways and stabbed the gallants hieing home from love and lady. Anybody can stab in the dark, or shoot from an ambush. To kill an animal for sport is wretched enough; but if you talk of manliness and use other fine words, be at least fair. Give him a chance. Put your two legs, your two arms, a knife, and your human wit against his four legs, greater strength, antlers, and want of brain. Then is the contest fair. You who seek his life for fun give him a chance at yours for self-defence. The sylvan shades approve the equal strife; and if you fall you are at least not disgraced.

If you are a deer-stalker you creep up stealthily to find them feeding, and if you can creep near enough, you blaze away. I hope that you have seen Doyle's picture of you, a company of you, scrambling up the side of a hill hoping to catch the prey over the brow. But you will not do it. They are off, the blithe beauties, and you may get up from your stomachs as soon as you choose.

Or you may hunt in a deer preserve with drivers and hounds. You pass beyond the thicket in which they lurk, leaving the drivers to urge them forth. You emerge upon sunny open spaces waving with thin, long, dry grass, tufted with thick shrubs, and dotted with convenient mossy rocks. Here is a favorite path of the flying deer, and you post yourself expectant behind a rock. How calm and lovely the brilliant October day! How the mass of the foliage shines in the clear sunlight! How every prospect pleases, and only man is—hark, again! They are coming. Lie low. Still as death. Oh! the beauties! There they are! And one glorious chief of chiefs darts straight and swift towards your ambush. Just beyond is the covert. He believes that safety is there. The quiet sunny nooks in which he shall lie and feed, the pleasant shades at noon, the leafy lair—they are all there a hundred rods before. Press on! press on! oh delicate, swift feet! He is not man who does not follow you with human sympathy. Innocence, purity, helplessness, they skim the sunny space with you. Too late! A sharp, mean sound, the bounding falters, the panting racer falls. The dogs and men rush on. They slay the hapless victim. 'Tis a noble sport! 'Tis a manly business!

Lately I saw two deer, two stately bucks. It was a solitary, sunny opening upon which I suddenly came. They were lying at the edge of the wood, and rose with a startled spring, for an instant looked, and with one bound, as if they would leap over the tree tops, were lost in the thicket. The grace and charm they gave to the wood were indescribable. Into the remotest gloom they sent a flash of sunlight. Nothing fierce, or treacherous, or repulsive, consorts with the image of a deer, and when they vanished the whole wood was peopled with their lovely forms. If I had gone back to dinner dragging a mangled body along the wood road, or carrying the piteous burden in a wagon, how could that sunlit beech wood ever again be so sylvan sweet and Arcadian? The tranquil, secluded, happy scene would have been blood-stained. It would have been a fantastic remorse, but how could I have justified the killing of the deer?

No. I have not killed deer in the Adirondacks, nor moose at Moosehead. I do not quarrel with those who have; and I hope they are as satisfied as I am. One day I hope to reach those pleasant places, but I hope to see deer, not to kill them. I am content that other people should slay my venison as well as my beef; and I shall not pretend to find any sport in the shambles, whether in the outskirts of the city or in the mountain valleys. I do not insist upon killing the chickens that I eat, nor the partridges, nor the quail. The noble art of Venery is a fine term to describe the butcher's business. A man who sees a heron streaming through the tranquil summer sky and only wishes for his gun, or who sees the beautiful bound of a deer in the woods with no other wish than that of killing it, I do not envy, as I do not envy the farmer slaughtering pigs. The bravest and most robust manhood is not necessarily developed nor proved either by sticking pins into grasshoppers or firing shot into deer.

"Ah yes! but you treat it too seriously," says young Nimrod. "It is not a matter of reason, but of feeling and excitement. As you lie in your ambush and hear suddenly the shouting of the drivers, the barking of the dogs, the crackling and rustling of boughs and leaves, you cannot help the intense excitement. Your blood burns, your nerves tingle, your ears quiver, your eyes leap from your head, and, upon my honor, sir, when our best sportsman saw the deer near him last year in Maine, he fixed his eyes steadily upon him, but such was his nervous twitter that he pointed his rifle straight into the ground and fired. He wounded the ground severely, but the deer escaped. What is the use of talking to him about butchery? Nothing in the world interests or charms him so much as hunting. Besides, you get used to it. It is not pleasant, probably, for the tyro, who is a surgical student, to see men's legs and arms cut off. You could not see it without shuddering, perhaps not without sickening and fainting. But there must be surgeons, and how long would it be before you would actually enjoy it?

"There. Hark! tally ho, tantivity! Is not the language rich with metaphors derived from the hunt? Does not literature ring with hunting songs and choruses and glees? Is it not all inwrought with romance and poetry? Waken, lords and ladies gay! The baying hound, the winding horn, the scarlet huntsman, the flying fox, the streaming, flashing dash across the country—they are of the very essence of the life and civilization from which we spring. They are the soul of the 'Merrie England' which is our chief tradition. Come, come! to the Adirondacks! to Moosehead!

"'All nature smiles to usher in
The jocund Queen of morn,
And huntsmen with the day begin
To wind the mellow horn!'"

Yes, the horn winds far and sweet in story and song, until it becomes the horn of elf-land faintly blowing, and man is a carnivorous animal who feeds on flesh. But butchers and fishermen are provided to supply the market. Is the carnivorous formation of man a reason that boys should stone birds or men shoot deer, that we should bait dogs and fight cocks and kill scared pigeons, not for food, but for fun? Foxes may be a pest that should be exterminated, like bears in a frontier country. But when a country is so advanced in settlement and civilization that prosperous gentlemen dress themselves gayly in scarlet coats and buckskin breeches, and ride blooded horses, and follow costly packs of hounds across country hunting a frightened fox, the fox is no longer a pest, and the riders are not frontiersmen and honest settlers; they are butchers, not for a lawful purpose, but for pleasure. Yes; the law solemnly takes life, but the judge who should take life for sport—!

Nimrod, despite the winding horn, the human relation to domestic animals that serve us is still barbarous. No man can see what treatment a noble horse, straining and struggling to do his best, often receives from his owner, without wincing at the fate that abandons so fine a creature to so ignoble and cruel a tormentor. But the kindly hand of civilization has at last reached the animals. In Cincinnati there is a statue newly raised to their protector. They will never know him, but the American list of worthies is incomplete in which the name of Henry Bergh is not "writ large."

AUTUMN DAYS

HE "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" comes long before the maples are crimson and the birches yellow. The splendor of the summer is very brief. If it be really hot, July is not over before you may see the leaves slightly shrivelling, and the woods have a half-crisp, curdled aspect. The intense heat of the year gives a sense of violent and rapid struggle, as if all the natural processes were wonderfully accelerated by an access of fever, and the long cool repose of convalescence follows in the clear, bright autumn days.

The enjoyment of these things is a kind of test of character. If a man found himself ceasing to take pleasure in the moon and flowers and children—if the red leaf of the fall gave him the same emotion as the green leaf of the spring—he might well feel that he was old and his heart worn out.

The finest sight is the autumn of age, like that of the year. Some men shrivel and dry up as they grow old. Some become coarse, or cynical, or sad. Some, after a noble promise and even a full flowering, ripen no fruit at all, and leave only a few reluctant and blighted results. Some stand covered with "nurly" balls, hard, dry, and useless. Others are stripped and bare. But a genial, golden age has all the qualities of a warm October day. There is soft repose upon the landscape. No harsh winds blow, no sharp chills freeze. The distance on all sides is delicate and lost in luminous haze. Behind, it is romantic and fair; before, it is beautiful and alluring. On all the misty hill-tops visible summer seems to linger. The fields are crimson and yellow with the riches of the orchard; the purple grape glistens kindly, and the golden pumpkin lies comfortably under the stooks of dry corn. In the woods the light winds shake the trees and the dropping nuts patter upon the fallen leaves. Along the road the profuse golden-rod waves its bright spray, and the cool, scentless asters gleam like pallid stars. The heat is so honest that the round earth seems to bask in it with conscious joy. That shining sky hides no lightning. It hangs serenely over—a visible benediction. Night and day the barn doors stand wide open, and the great barn is bursting with its heaped treasures. The wagons come and go, and the beat of the flail begins. Bright and beautiful and abundant is the cheery scene, but there is a pervading sense of accomplishment. The cattle graze in the pastures, and in the meadows where the growth is over. The harvest fields will clearly do no more. The green of June has faded into the russet of October, and even the gorgeous leaves burn, a hectic hue, upon the landscape. The earth has done its work for the year, and there is a feeling of gathering in, of closing the doors, and of going to rest.

When the autumn of a man's life is thus sweet and fruitful and serene, we see how outward nature merely hints and foreshows its master. In great, visible, palpable operations and results it images the fine and unmarked processes that go on in man. And yet, by its unfailing method, its annual return, the regular spring and bud and flower and fruit, it is a ceaseless, silent monitor. Measured by our own lives, how touching the fidelity of the year! Who is not rebuked by the honest apple-tree in his own garden? The plums are more like us. They are almost infallibly stung by the curculio. But how many a man who fights the curculio with all his fortune is himself stung all over by selfishness and pride! We might well be ashamed to walk in the woods. The mute obedience of the trees ought to be too impressive for us. Yes, in the long autumn nights they wrestle and roar. Their mighty voice thunders out and smites the heart of the awakening sleeper. But will you claim that it is their protest against the inevitable law, that they too are rebellious and forgetful and disdainful as we are? It seems to me only piercingly sad in its wildest tumult. It is the blind king feeling for his peers and crying out when he does not find them. "Lords of the world" shout the autumn woods, tossing their branches and groping blindly in the air—"men and women who are the latest born, the Benjamins of heaven, who are set over us to subdue and govern, ye alone, in all the wide creation, are false and heedless! What man of you all is as true and noble for a man as the oak upon your hill-top for an oak? The oak obeys every law, regularly increases and develops, stretches its shady arms of blessing, proudly wears its leafy coronal, and drops abundant acorns for future oaks as faithful; but who of ye all does not violate the law of your life—so that we, if we follow you, would be so death-struck with dry-rot that the trees would fail upon every hand and the earth become a desert!"

So wail and roar the storm-swept autumn woods. In the late October nights you may awaken, when the world is lost in the mystery of darkness, and hear that appealing cry. Time and civilization have slain the dryads and sweet sylvan populace, as Herod slew the innocents. But although common-sense has buried them, the imagination will not let them die. They survive in other forms, and with other voices they speak to us—not as the spirits of the trees, but as their conscious life, they yet whisper, and our hearts listen. Let the hickories and pine-trees preach to us a little in these warm October afternoons. A stately elm is the archbishop of my green diocese. In full canonicals he stands sublime. His flowing robes fill the blithe air with sacred grace. The light west winds and watery south are his fresh young deacons, his ecclesiastical aides-de-camp. He rules the landscape round. And I—this penitent old Easy Chair—attend devoutly when I hear the eloquent rustling of his voice—as the neighbors of Saint George Herbert, of Bemerton, used to stop their ploughs in the furrow and bow, with uncovered head, while the sound of his chapel-bell tinkled in the air.

FROM COMO TO MILAN DURING THE WAR OF 1848.

S the afternoon was ending—walking from Lago Maggiore and the Lake of Lugano to the Lake of Como—we passed a shrine at which a mother and children were kneeling and chanting the Ave Maria, and an ass with loaded panniers jogged slowly by. The vesper bells began to ring from an old church-tower upon a mountain-side, while far over the rounding tops of orange and fig trees in the warm-descending vale a triangle of dark-blue water was the first glimpse of Como. My knees bent a little, not with fatigue, but with reverence, as if I were again entering the very court and heart of Italy. A group of girls, less timorous or more interested than the crowd upon the Lugano Lake shore, asked us if there were any news—if France were coming to help Italy. But ours, alas! were not the beautiful feet upon the mountains. We could only say "nothing" and "good-bye."

At Santa Croce we came out in full view of the lake, upon which lay the splendor of sunset, and, taking a path which we were told would shorten the journey, we lost our way upon a huge hill-side. But as we reached the summit the full moon rose from behind the heights upon the opposite shores of Como, and a handsome Italian boy showed us a straight path to Cadenabia upon the margin of the lake. I gave him a silver trifle, and he wished us "felice viaggio" with his black eyes and his musical lips; and leaving him like a shepherd boy of the purer Arcadia of the hills, we descended rapidly into a vineyard, and so came to the shore.

It was a moment of mingled twilight and moonlight. A glittering path lay from the Cadenabia shore to the Villa Melzi opposite; and, hailing an old boatman, we glided up that golden way to the vine-clustered balcony which I knew at Bellagio under the moon. The air was calm and bland. The water was oily and gleaming. The mountains stood around us dusky and vast in the ghostly light as we went silently over the lake.

We landed, and took tea upon the balcony at the hotel whose only rival in Europe for romantic picturesqueness is the Trois Couronnes at Vevey upon the Lake of Geneva. The "magic casement" of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" was ours at Bellagio. The lake murmured with music everywhere. We saw the boats full of people singing choruses, then talking and laughing as they floated away. The sound of instruments, the throb of strings, the sad, mellow peal of horns, filled the air; and long after midnight a band was still playing in the village. About midnight Edmund and Frank bathed in the lake. Their figures were white as marble in the black water, and they struck the calm into sparkles of splendor as they swam out....

The boat which we took to descend the lake to the town of Como had three rowers. The chief, whom I remembered from last year, groaned bitterly over the war, because there were so few strangers.

"Trade, you see, is conservative," said I to Edmund.

"Como is conservatism itself," he tranquilly replied.

"We live upon the strangers," continued Giovanni Battista, the boatman, with a simplicity and truthfulness that made us laugh; "and this year nobody comes. The Italians are driven away, and the foreigners are frightened."

He had not been to Como for two months, although his business is plying upon the lake, and his winter depends upon his summer. "The war is bad for all of us," he said, "and after all the Germans are back again."

... Farther on, and nearer Como, the shore is covered with handsome villas, of which the most remarkable for beauty and fame are Madame Pasta's, a magnificent estate, and Taglioni's, which is not yet finished, and the stately Odescalchi. As we passed Madame Pasta's the old boatman shrugged his shoulders and trilled with his voice. "That's the way the money came there," he said, contemptuously. He was clearly of opinion that only the decaying and decayed families whose names he had heard all his life, and whose ancestors his fathers knew, were to be spoken of with praise.

"Whose villa is that?" asked I.

"Eh! che! nobody's," he replied; "if it were anybody's we should know."

At five o'clock we rounded the point over which I had stood upon the height the year before on a still September afternoon hearing the girls sing in a boat below, and so came to the shore at Como.

Everywhere there was an air of consternation. The Austrians had just re-occupied the town, and the streets were full of the "hated barbarians," rattling about with long swords and standing on guard at the doors of public buildings. The walls bristled with military notices. Among others I read one exhorting all well-disposed people to surrender arms of every kind by a certain day at a place named. The people seemed to be stupefied, and gazed in dull wonder upon the soldiers.

Out of the square, ringing with Austrian sabres, we stepped into the Duomo, dim and lofty and hushed, untouched by revolutions or triumphs. A few inodorous sinners were kneeling and praying. They were very poor and ignorant. But this was their palace, and they looked as if they knew that the great Emperor of the barbarians had not one more gorgeous or solemn.

We tried to secure seats in the post for Milan. There was no place. We applied at the offices of public and private diligences. It was still impossible. The evening was cool and clear, and we considered. The distance to Milan was but eight hours of our walking, and we were making a walking tour. And although we had scarcely bargained for a promenade over the plains of Lombardy in an August sun—yet this perfect moon? Should we turn back without seeing the Goths encamped around the most glorious of Gothic cathedrals?

It was nine o'clock when we shouldered our knapsacks and set forth. The dwellers in romantic Como, standing at their doors, looked wonderingly upon the four pedestrians marching in regular resolute tramp along the streets, evidently moving upon Milan. The small children plainly thought us a part of the imperial and royal army. "Here come the Austrians," whispered one boy to another, as he gazed at the gray wide-awakes and knapsacks.

The mild Francis looked at him with the air of an army which would respect persons and property so long as it was unmolested, and wished the boy so soft a buona notte that he smiled gently, and I am sure his dreams were not disturbed.

We passed out of the gate of Como full against the round rising moon, and took the broad hard highway for Milan. We passed a few wagons loaded with the furniture of some fugitive rolling slowly along. As we pushed on, the idea of penetrating by night and on foot into a country at war was stimulating and novel. But what consciousness of war could survive in the deep peace of that night? The fields were covered with high corn, and the hard straight road went before us in dim perspective. There were no other travellers. Two or three empty vetturas or a wine cart straggled lazily by, the little bells upon the horses tinkling, and the drivers fast asleep. Nor were the villages many. As we passed a group of half a dozen houses a fellow was sleeping soundly upon a bench at a door. When we broke in upon the silence of night by asking the name of the village, he sprang up nimbly and limped rapidly out of sight as if the question had been a pistol-shot and had wounded him. Everybody was nervous "in questo momento." Towards midnight we stopped at a house which should have been near the point at which we meant to sleep until sunrise, and roused an old lady who shrilly chirped and twittered her terror through the slide in the door. But satisfying her that we were neither Croats nor cannibals, she told us that we were yet a mile or two from Balasina.

It was now twelve o'clock, and the land seemed sunk in a sleep of death. There was no sound but our own echoes as we entered the dreary, dismal village, which, like all Italian villages, is merely a dirty street bordered with gloomy houses. They looked so hopeless with their grim stone fronts, high-barred windows out of reach, and huge gates, as if expecting nothing but hostility, that when we stopped before the inn we felt like the wretched wights who beheld the dungeons of an ogre; and when Edmund exclaimed in what seemed a terrible voice, so still was the night, "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" we started as if he had joked in church. Then the vision of a pleasant inn hung for a moment in our minds, and the sense of the preposterous contrast awakened a loud peal of laughter which died away echoing among those houses which were as hospitable as sea-crags. While we stood debating, a group of peasants, with their jackets slung over their shoulders, passed spectrally by, staring steadily at us, as if they would not be unwilling to strike a final blow for the kingdom of Italy.

They disappeared, and we struck a resounding blow upon the door of the albergo, and another and another. After a while there was a sound of stealthily unbarring window-shutters, followed by a voice demanding the reason of the tumult. We explained that we were friends who wanted beds for the night. No, that was impossible, "the voice replied far up the height;" there were no beds, and we had better push on to the next tavern. We expostulated in many tongues with the dimly-visioned head that now appeared, pleading that we were strangers from a far country who were very tired and sleepy. The head disappeared for a few moments and we heard a low colloquy. Then the great gate of the albergo swung sullenly open, and we stepped into a dim court, and the dimly-visioned face became a face like a dull razor, it was so thin-featured and stupid. The man asked us to stop, and, stepping aside, he called a woman's name, then stood waiting, his wretched dozing face illuminated by the weak lustre of a long-wicked tallow-candle which he held. Presently he moved on along the windows of the court conversing with an invisible within the house. When those murmuring arrangements were made, he led us up a dirty stone staircase, trying to open various doors with keys that did not fit the locks; and finally, after a desperate wrestle with one, he swore fiercely in a thin, wiry voice that made the blood run cold, and then smashed the door of the chamber, carrying away wood-work and lock together. It was a vast room of immense discomfort, and after barricading the disabled door with tables and chairs, we lay down and fell asleep upon beds which could furnish no dreams.

In the morning we ate grapes and peaches, and finding a wagon which we could hire, we bribed our pedestrian consciences and bowled over the beautiful road to Milan as republicans, reluctantly confessing that the imperial and royal post-roads were the best in the world.

"Yes—but not for the public benefit," said the mild Francis; "they are for the quicker transport of troops and artillery to oppress the people."

Silent, broken-hearted Milan! No, not yet visibly broken-hearted, for the Cathedral sparkled pure and lofty in the rare, blue summer air. It was the morning of the Feast of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary, to whom the Cathedral is dedicated, and was therefore high festival. But the people had little aspect of joy. We stopped at the gate, and sat in the steady glare of the sun while our passports were closely inspected. Outside the city wall lay a wilderness of tree trunks, which had been levelled in expectation of a siege by the Austrians. They were useless now; and groups of soldiers in gray slouched hats and black plumes—a kind of Robin Hood uniform—were clustered idly and curiously about the gate. They looked worn and red and wasted, and I fancied had taken part in the fight of the burning day which had made almost as many idiots as corpses in the Austrian army.

Within the city the streets were broken up, and the paving-stones designed for barricades were merely roughly laid back again in their places. In the long vista of the streets there was no shop open. The only signs of traffic were the stands of the fruit-merchants shaded by gayly-striped awnings, and covered with piles of glowing fruit. Multitudes of brightly-dressed people strolled idly and curiously up and down, and a company of sappers and miners marched by without music, but carrying their implements and their soiled accoutrements. They were dirty and draggled, like a corps marching across a battle-field to dig a hopeless ditch. There were no carriages moving; there was no noise, no hurry, no excitement, only that scuffling murmur which makes the silence of a great city spectral. The stately Milanese women walked finely by. Their long black hair was drawn away from the forehead and folded in massive plaits; and the black veil that hung from the back of the head was partly gathered over the arm. Queen-like they walked, carrying the bright-colored fan which was raised to shield their eyes from the sun, or languidly waved against their bosoms. Forms of the Orient or of Spain, the imagination touched them with pathetic dignity—matrons of a lost country.

HERBERT SPENCER ON THE YANKEE

T was a very distinguished and agreeable company that greeted Mr. Herbert Spencer at dinner, and the speaking was capital. His own address was an interesting paper, in which he preached "the gospel of relaxation." In an interview published some time before, he had made some incisive criticisms upon American life and character, and in his dinner address he said that he was going to find fault.

"The Redcoats all talk to us like uncles or pedagogues," exclaimed Americus, impatiently. "What business have they to lecture us in this style? We are quite old enough to take care of ourselves, and quite able to run this continent without any instruction from Englishmen. Suppose that some American guest in England should say to his hosts that he wanted to give them some good advice, and point out to them a few of their defects, and then proceed to pat them on the head with patronizing praise, don't you think there would be a storm? If strangers like us, very well; if they don't like us, very well. It is a matter of supreme indifference to us."

Why, then, Americus, do we ask them how they like us? And why should the people of one country scornfully decline to hear the comments of sensible people of other countries? Every man is, or ought to be, glad to receive intelligent counsel, and to see his life from other points of view than his own. Why should not the citizen be equally sensible? We did not ask De Tocqueville to come and see us and analyze our political institutions and their operations. We did not ask Von Holst to write our constitutional history. But De Tocqueville and Von Holst have laid us and all other lovers of popular constitutional liberty under great obligations. Both of them have written better books of their kind about us than any American has written.

It is absurd to snarl that we don't care what they say, and that they had better stay at home and not lecture us. When Dickens stung us with the satire of Martin Chuzzlewit, he was not only accused of ingratitude—as if a man were bound to find no fault with any abuse, and not to criticise any tendency, in a country where he had been kindly welcomed—but he was told to look at home, and assured that if he wanted to depict outrageous evils and ridiculous people he had only to portray his beloved England. That was said with a fine air of indignation. But what else was Dickens doing all his life? What are his books, in this point of view, but a prolonged arraignment of the abuses and of the absurd social types of his native England? But when Henry James, Jun., draws a good-natured and shrewd sketch of the American girl abroad in Daisy Miller, although it is plainly intended to show to conventional Europe that the American girl is misjudged, we petulantly wonder why he could not choose another type to illustrate.

The observations of intelligent foreign critics are no more hostile than the American criticisms which they confirm. When, for instance, after a very intelligent recognition of the material advantages of this country, Mr. Spencer says that if there had been another and higher progress commensurate with the material advance there would be nothing to wish, he says nothing which very many Americans have not felt and said, and he adds an improvement from history which had occurred to many Americans, and had been strongly stated by them, that while the republics of the Middle Ages surrounded themselves with material splendor, their liberty decayed. And what is this but a contemporary statement of the old truth which Goldsmith put into memorable verse a hundred years ago,

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay."

Mr. Spencer's further remarks that under the forms of freedom we may lose its substance, and that in some ways, which he points out, we are losing it, is the burden of the warning of many an intelligent American, which does not need the old illustration of Cæsar's introduction of the empire under republican forms, nor the warning of Burke, that "ambition, though it has ever the same general views, has not at all times the same means nor the same particular objects." So when Mr. Spencer says that paper constitutions will not work as they are intended to work, and that the real basis and bulwark of national greatness and of progressive liberty is character and not education, he says what every thoughtful American perceives and believes. He does not say, indeed, what many Americans know, and what explains the emphasis with which we insist upon education, that the perception of the desirability of general education is in itself an evidence of character. Education alone may not save a people from political trouble, but constitutional liberty will not be maintained by an ignorant people.

That our good-nature is a kind of moral indifference which is really a defect of character is another of Mr. Spencer's observations which is a corroboration of much American comment upon American life. It has an explanation in the conditions of that life for which Mr. Spencer does not make allowance. But his remark is only that of the railroad traveller last summer which this Easy Chair recorded. In a new country—if an American without incurring the penalty of high-treason may call this a new country—everybody must good-humoredly help everybody else, and make the best of everything.

Perhaps Mr. Spencer has not heard the story of the American gentleman travelling in a certain part of the country, who was quartered in a hotel, in a room of which the window opened upon the piazza where his fellow-citizens sat tilted back in chairs, talking, reading the newspapers, and expectorating. There was no shade or shutter to the window. The traveller, desiring to change his dress, for want of any other curtain hung a shirt over the window to secure his seclusion. But a watchful fellow-citizen chanced to see the unwonted attempt to escape the public eye, and the traveller was surprised in the most intimate stage of his change of raiment to see the improvised curtain suddenly torn away, and a face thrust inquiringly into the window with the remark, "I jess wanted to see what you're so—— private about." The case was an extreme one, and a laugh was certainly a better recourse than a revolver.

In everything that involves a principle, as Mr. Spencer truly says, there is profound wisdom in Hamlet's phrase, "Greatly to find quarrel in a straw." But this again is only a new face of the old wisdom obsta principiis. For a straw shows which way the wind blows. How can a sensible American quarrel with the shrewd and kindly insight of a quiet Englishman who, when he is asked his opinion, shows that he agrees with the asker? At the dinner Mr. Spencer did not speak as an Englishman, or a critic, or a cynic, but as a philosopher. The end of all our study and endeavor, he said, should be complete living. We do not learn for learning's sake, we are not self-denying for the sake of self-denial, but all is for fuller and richer living. Intemperate devotion to work of any kind, like all intemperance, weakens the power of right living. In America, as in England, there is this absorbing passion for work. Therefore, in the interest of a better and more truly efficient life, let us heed the gospel of relaxation and recreation.

It was, as he said, an unconventional after-dinner speech, and Carl Schurz very happily cited the speaker himself as a striking illustration—as striking as any Yankee—of the consequences of disregarding his own doctrine of the desirability of recreation for a completer life. But it was not an English uncle "tipping" his bumptious American nephew with good advice, nor a pedagogue lecturing us upon our follies and defects, nor a supercilious foreigner condescending. It was a thoughtful guest of our own kindred, of the same high and generous purpose that we attribute to the best of our countrymen, comparing notes in the most friendly way, and speaking to us not distinctively as Americans so much as men living in America. If any American of corresponding standing with Mr. Spencer should go to England and speak to Englishmen after dinner in the same simple and friendly way, they would be very foolish fellows if they listened with any less courtesy and heed than we have listened to Mr. Spencer.

HONOR

HESE are very precious words of Lovelace:

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."

And Francis First's message to his mother after Pavia, "All is lost but honor," is in the same key. Yet honor has been as much travestied as liberty, and the crimes committed in its name are as many. Falstaff's is a sharp antistrophe: "What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air." But for that whiff of air how many noble lives have been sacrificed!

Alexander Hamilton knew his own time, and he decided that his refusal of Burr's challenge would be regarded as cowardly, and destroy his prestige and influence. We may say that a morally greater man would nevertheless have dared to refuse it, but we must also consider that Hamilton knew the popular estimate of his own standard of life, and would naturally test his conduct by that standard. He was a soldier and a man of the world of the eighteenth century. Dr. Nott, the echoes of whose famous sermon on Hamilton's death still linger in tradition, might have declined to fight and been justified. He was a clergyman, and popular feeling excused him from resorting to the field of honor. But it is very doubtful if it would have excused Hamilton.

He might have urged that Burr had no right to make his demand. But Hamilton knew that he had spoken most strongly of Burr, and he knew that Burr knew it. He thought Burr an unprincipled and dangerous fellow, and he said so plainly. But there was the familiar preface to Hamilton's explanation of the charges against him as Secretary of the Treasury. Could he take the lofty height of moral principle? Or could he stand upon the technical punctilio of the duel? His honor, by which he meant the consistency of his life and the standards that he acknowledged, seemed to him to allow him no alternative, and he was slain by the necessity of what is unquestionably a false sense of honor.

A man's honor, in the sense that we may attribute to the lines of Lovelace, is his most precious possession. But it is something which is wholly in his own keeping, and is not at the mercy or whim of another. He can soil it, but except himself the whole world cannot smirch it. If a man had told Dr. Channing that he lied, or had dashed a glass of wine in his face, the honor of Dr. Channing would still have remained unsullied, not because he was a minister, but because of a reason which is equally applicable to all other men—because of his moral rectitude and courage. That a ribald tongue railed at him for lying when he had spoken the truth could not affect him except with pity or wonder. Even if the charge were true and he had told a lie, he would, indeed, have soiled his own honor, but the railer would not have touched it.

This view assumes that honor is something else than notoriety, which in turn is something very different from fame or character. Notoriety is current familiarity with a man's name, which is given by much mention of it arising from any kind of conduct. Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds or noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind. But honor is absolutely individual and personal. It is conscious and willing loyalty to the highest inward leading. It is that quality which cannot be insulted. This is the sublime instinct of which Lovelace sings. I could not so much love thee, Lucasta, purest of the pure, if I did not love purity more. Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis amica veritas.

The ordinary talk about honor is a parody of this spiritual loyalty. A man seizes another by the nose at a public table, or he slaps his face in the street, or he tells him in the sacred precincts of the club that he lies, or he posts him as a coward, or he insults his wife or daughter—such a man invites summary retaliation, and he generally gets it. But there is no question of honor involved. "Suppose your nose pulled at the opera," said a gentleman at the club, discussing the ethics of honor—"your nose, you know," he said, with horror, and unconsciously holding his own forward—"what could be a more unspeakable insult?" "Yes," answered his protagonist; "but does a man carry his honor in his nose?" Nature has provided instincts and weapons for the defence of our noses. But she has not made the nose the citadel of honor, nor has she left honor at the mercy of a sot who may choose to drench it with wine.

There was a quarrel the other day between two men, one of whom had said that the way in which the other had done something was not the way of a gentleman; the other replied that he would not stand being called ungentlemanly. There was a closing and grappling, and then one whipped out a pistol and began firing at the other, who took to the street, and most naturally but inconsiderately dodged behind innocent citizens in the street to avoid the bullets. The pursuer fired as opportunity served, while the pursued dashed into a hotel to borrow a pistol to return the broadside. Stanley might have seen such a performance in the Mmjumbo regions on the shores of Lake Nyanza or the banks of the Zambesi, but what had it to do with honor? Is that what Lovelace loved more than Lucasta? Is that what King Francis—more's the pity if this were the thing—did not lose at Pavia!

Our honor is solely in our own keeping. To have your nose pulled is not to be dishonored, but so to behave that it deserves pulling. But, Alcibiades of the clubs, remember that it is not the pulling which makes the dishonor.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

And Cassius also says what bears a very different interpretation from that which he designed:

"Well, honor is the subject of my story.
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be, as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself."

Fear of yourself, fear of your own rebuke, fear of betraying your consciousness of your duty and not doing it—that is the fear which Lovelace loved better than Lucasta; that is the fear which Francis, having done his duty, saved, and justly called it honor.

JOSEPH WESLEY HARPER

FTEN during the long and sorrowful days of the war, as the Easy Chair wound its slow way to its corner, it heard a quiet greeting, and, looking up, saw a friend standing aside upon the steps, calm, unhurried, and the greeting was followed by the significant and challenging question, "Well?" The tone was tender and tranquil, and conveyed all the meaning of many words: "Where are we now? What will come of this last news? How, when, and where will the bitter struggle end?" Then stepping out upon one of the bridges that connect the tower of the staircase with the various floors of the huge buildings in which this Magazine is prepared, the Easy Chair and its friend conversed. There was a singular sagacity and justice in all that the calm friend said, and the most truculent opponent of the cause to which his hopes and faith were given would have heard nothing acrid or exasperating from his lips, even in the darkest hour of the struggle. As they parted and the Easy Chair resumed its way, it was with a soothed and cheerful conviction that whatever might happen to states and nations, nothing could shake the power of steadfast, manly character.

During the same day or any other, if it chanced to move into some other part of the buildings, whether in the artists', the engravers', or the editor's room; in the bindery, the press-rooms, the folding-rooms, the composing-rooms, or in the counting-room, the Easy Chair encountered that same friendly, serene presence which had yet its voice of authority upon occasion, but which seemed to pervade all the rooms like sunshine. And upon all who met him that friend made the same impression. To every one, editor, printer, errand-boy, unknown visitor, or distinguished guest, he was so simply courteous and kind that he controlled without commanding; and in other days, when he had been the head of the most turbulent work-room, he had kept the peace without an oath or a blow. It was the man, not his clothes or his condition, that this man regarded. It was as natural for him to stop in the street and talk with an old black woman whom he knew as with the most renowned author whose works he published. When Oliver Goldsmith lay in his coffin the poor women who had known him sat weeping upon the stairs of the house. And so when this true gentleman died, even the old pie-woman who sells cakes and apples through the buildings left her traffic for a day, and, clad in her sad best, stood, tearful at his funeral.

It was not strange, therefore, that when the fire of twenty years ago seemed to have destroyed everything and to have ruined him and his partners, the quality of the man appeared reflectively in the feeling that was shown towards him by those who see us all without disguise. When the misfortune was supposed to be complete the domestics in his family assembled, apparently by a common feeling, to consider how they could express their sympathy; and as he returned home at evening he was met by one of them whom they had chosen, to tell him that they had all agreed to continue their service at reduced wages, or for no wages at all, until he should recover from the heavy loss. "I stood everything very well up to that time," he said to a friend who tells the story to the Easy Chair, and who had asked him if it were true, "but that broke me down." And the tears were in his eyes as he said it.

Of course every one who, during the last forty-five years, has been familiar with this publishing house, knows that the Easy Chair is speaking of Joseph Wesley Harper, the third of the four brothers by whom the house was founded, and who recently died in the sixty-ninth year of his age. He was so truly modest, he avoided publicity so unostentatiously, that the Easy Chair almost feels as if it were doing wrong to mention him here with praise; so hard is it to believe that his eyes will not rest upon these lines with all the old kind appreciation. But it is a sermon or a poem which none of us can spare, the life of a man who in very great prosperity kept not only the true heart of a child, but the humble heart that owned no inferior. We are judged usually by our public successes, by the esteem of distinguished persons. But the real test of character is the feeling of those before whom we play no part. What does the nurse in the nursery think of us, or the porter in the store, or the butcher-boy? If a man's children confide in him, if all whom he employs at home or in his business feel that he is full of thought and sympathy for them as for brethren, if those who meet him perceive the charm of his urbanity, and as they draw nearer and know him better, honor and love him more and more, we can be very sure that he has the noblest human qualities, whose influence will be a possession to us forever.

Such was the friend whom for so many years in its little labors upon these pages the Easy Chair has constantly seen, and whom it will see no more; and as it meditates, not sadly, but with the sober cheerfulness which his own serene faith in the divine order could not but inspire, upon that good life now peacefully ended, it feels how truly Wesley Harper will always be remembered by those who knew him well.

"The wise who soar but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home."

REVIEW OF UNION TROOPS

1865

HE victorious armies had marched home and into history. The two days of review at the end of May was a spectacle not likely to be forgotten by those who saw it or did not see it. It belonged to that series of events for which there is no precedence, because there never was before a continental republic. Like every remarkable occurrence in these remarkable days of ours, the disbanding of the armies of the East and West, and their quiet absorption into the mass of the people, is a spectacle which has another illustration to the extreme practicability of a popular government. Usually the return of the victorious army is dreaded by its country somewhat as its advance is by the enemy, and government provides other wars to employ it. But our men are citizens who have been defending their own rights. It is their own government they have been maintaining. The endeavor to represent the government as a power different from the people and dangerous to their liberty has failed several times during the war, and will always fail so long as the broadest base of the government is jealously guarded. And nothing is more honorable to human nature, nothing so truly vindicates the wisdom of our institutions and the faith that supports them, than that during the Civil War, of which the event seemed sometimes doubtful, there has not been even the suspicion of a desire upon the part of any popular general to seize power and dictate to the authorities. Indeed, in the only instance in which such a whisper was breathed the suggestion was known to come from the politicians who surrounded the general, and not from himself.

The review was, according to all reports, a noble sight. The Army of the Potomac, which, often baffled, at last struck the crowning blow of the war, and the Army of the West, whose history is immortal, poured through the capital amid the shouts and exultation of thousands of spectators, and marched, with the inspiring clash and peal of martial music, before the President, the Lieutenant-General, and the notable civilians all the day. The Western Army had with them the spoils of war: large red roosters and fighting-cocks, tied on to the backs of mules; cows, donkeys, and goats came also. The army moved as though Washington were but a village upon the road of its march through Georgia or the Carolinas. The critical spectators thought they observed the Western men were of a finer physique and more entirely American, and the Eastern of a stricter military drill. The slouched hat was worn by the officers and men of the West, the French kepi by the more showy Eastern officers. Sherman himself, the hero of the magnificent campaign which the Richmond papers said was merely the flight of an arrow through the air—but which literally pierced the rebellion to the heart—was saluted by the grandest acclamations. History will rank him with the really great soldiers. His men are very proud of him—how could they help it?—and if for a moment there was wonder at his arrangements with Johnson, there is no man now so poor as to doubt his sincerity or question his patriotism.

It would have been pleasant if, with the other heroes, the eager, proud crowd could have seen General Thomas, the soldier who, by indomitable tenacity, saved the day at Chickamauga and destroyed the rebel army before Nashville; but he was on duty elsewhere.

As the armies passed it must have been impossible to forget—as in reading of the spectacle we constantly remember—the disbanding of the army of the Revolution. The soldiers at the review are only a part of the men now in arms, yet they were about two hundred thousand. Since the war began there have been many more than a million in the armies. During the Revolution (as we learn from Professor G. W. Greene's very interesting volume on the Revolution), there were altogether in the service 239,791 regulars in the Continental army and 56,163 of the militia, and the sufferings of that early army are not to be described. "During the first winter soldiers thought it hard that they should have nothing to cook their food with; but they found, before the close, that it was harder still to have nothing to cook." Few Americans have ever known what it was to suffer for want of clothing; but thousands, as the war went on, saw their garments falling by piecemeal from around them, till scarce a shred remained to cover their nakedness. They made long marches without shoes, staining the frozen ground with the blood from their feet. They fought battles with guns which were hardly safe to bear half a charge of powder. They fought, or marched, or worked at the intrenchments all day, and laid them down at night with but one blanket to three men.

Mr. Greene tells us that the condition of the officers was hardly better than that of the men. They, too, had suffered cold and hunger; they, too, had been compelled to do duty without sufficient clothing, to march and watch and fight without sufficient food. We are told of a dinner where no officer was admitted who had a whole pair of pantaloons, and of all who were invited there was not one who did not establish his claims for admission.

The treatment of the army of the Revolution by the Continental Congress was unworthy the fame of that body which Lord Chatham so loftily praised to Dr. Franklin. The army was disbanded stealthily, "as if the nation were afraid to look their deliverers in the face; all through the summer of 1783 furloughs were granted freely, and the ranks gradually thinned. Then on the 18th of October a final proclamation was issued for their discharge. On the 2d of November Washington issued his final orders from Rocky Hill, near Princeton. On the 3d they were disbanded. There was no formal leave-taking. Each regiment, each company, went when it chose. Men who had stood side by side in battle, who had shared the same tent in summer, the same hut in winter, parted, never to meet again. Some still had homes, and, therefore, definite hopes. But hundreds knew not whither to go.... For a few days taverns and streets were crowded. For weeks soldiers were to be seen on every road, or lingering bewildered about public places, like men who were at a loss to know what to do with themselves. There were no ovations for them as they came back, toilworn before their time, to the places that had once known them; no ringing of bells; no eager opening of hospitable doors. The country was tired of the war, tired of the sound of the drum and fife; anxious to get back to sowing and reaping, to buying and selling, and town meetings, and general elections."

These were the veterans of one of the most glorious and important wars in the progress of the race. Yet the men who were so unhandsomely suffered to depart from the service were also grudgingly paid when they were released. "Their claims were disputed inch by inch. Money which should have been given cheerfully as a righteous debt was doled out with a reluctant hand as a degrading charity."

It is refreshing to turn from the page of this melancholy historian to the newspaper of to-day, and read that the men who have received the jubilant ovation of the review are not only to be paid in full and at once, as the most sacred of national debts, but that the most strenuous effort will be made to employ them by preference in the public offices to which they may be fitted, while private persons will bear in mind the same just and generous purpose. Indeed, there is no forgetfulness of the soldiers of to-day. The sense of their vital service to the country is universal and commanding. They will be honored heroes while they live, and our children shall be proud that we cherish them.

It is not easy even yet, although the victors have returned and are disbanded, fully to comprehend that the war is over and the country saved. But it is so, and the living and the dead are joined in a glorious remembrance. How many an eye must have grown dim, swimming in tears as it gazed on the splendid pageant because of the brave and beautiful who had shared the peril and the long, long doubt and struggle, but not the triumph of victory and return. The victory is won; the country is saved; but at what inestimable cost! Four years ago Theodore Winthrop fell at Great Bethel, on a summer morning, and those that loved him learned that the war had begun. Three years ago, on a winter evening, Joseph Curtis sank dead from his horse at Fredericksburg, and Theodore Parkman perished at Princeton on an autumn day. Two years ago, on a soft midsummer night, Robert Shaw fell upon the ramparts of Wagner, and was "buried with his niggers." Eight months ago, in the Shenandoah Valley, Charles Lowell died at Cedar Creek, in the very shock of victory. They were five only, all young, and they gave gladly for us all that makes life glad and beautiful. Yet how many as young and brave and beloved as they have died like them, and, like them, are remembered and mourned! They, too, let us believe, smile still above us, and bend over us with serene joy at this happy time. Let their sweet memory hallow our jubilee! Let us take care that our lives are worthy their glorious death.

APRIL, 1865

MOST genial and friendly letter to the Easy Chair, dated simply "Home," and speaking tenderly of the late President, reminds us that our loss is a blow to every home in the country. This peculiar personal affection for Mr. Lincoln was so evident that every orator spoke of it, and with an emotion that attends a private sorrow. No tribute could be so pathetic and so suggestive of the character of the man who had more deeply endeared himself to the heart and fixed himself in the confidence of the American people than any man in our history. Among the inscriptions that were displayed during the days of mourning in the city there was one hung upon a shop that was touching in its very baldness: "Alas! alas! our father Abraham is dead." That was the feeling in all true hearts and homes. It was a feeling which no Cæsar, no Charlemagne, no Napoleon ever inspired. The Netherlands wept with a sorrow as sore for the Prince of Orange, France bewailed with romantic grief the death of Henry IV. But the people of England and France were comparatively few, and the relation between the victims and the mourners was that of prince and subjects. Our leader was one of the poorest of the people. He was great in their greatness. They felt with him and for him as one of themselves, and in his fall, more truly than Rome in that of Cæsar, we all fell down.

The month of April, 1865, was curiously eventful in the annals of this country. General Grant moved upon the enemy's works, and Petersburg and Richmond fell. He pursued and fought the retreating army, and the rebel commander-in-chief surrendered. In the very jubilee of a national joy the President was murdered. While yet his body was borne across the country by the reverent hands of a nation, his murderer was tracked, brought to bay, shot, and buried in a nameless spot to protect his corpse from wild popular fury. In the midst of the tragical days General Sherman, whom, only last month, the Easy Chair was celebrating as so skilful and resistless a soldier, instead of summoning Johnston to a surrender upon the terms granted to Lee, allowed himself to sign recognition of the rebel government and to open a future political discord, while he was yet able to prescribe the simple surrender of an army. The shock of disappointment and regret was universal. The authorities unanimously disapproved his convention. The Lieutenant-General went immediately to the front, and the month that had opened with President Lincoln trusted and beloved, with Davis defended by Lee and his army in the rebel capital, and Sherman confronted by Johnston, and Mobile holding out, closed with the rebel capital in possession of the government, Lee a paroled prisoner, his army disbanded, Davis a skulking fugitive, Johnston and his army paroled prisoners, Mobile captured, President Lincoln dead, President Johnson at the head of the government, and the assassin dead and buried.

Through such a succession of great events this country had never as rapidly passed. It swept the scale of emotion. From the height of joy triumphant it sank to the very depths of sorrow, from confidence and pride in a military leader it passed to humiliating amazement, yet not for a moment paused in its work or shook in its purpose, and was never so calm, so strong, so grand, as in that tumult of emotion.

Every man who has been proud of his country hitherto has now profounder cause for pride. Our system has been tried in every way; it rises purified from the fire. No one man is essential to her, however deeply beloved, however generously trusted. The history of the war from May, 1861, to May, 1865, proves that she cannot be hopelessly bereaved. The sceptics who have sneered, the timid who have feared, the shrewd who have doubted, must now see that the principles of popular government have been amply vindicated. We have only clearly to understand and fearlessly to trust these principles, and the future, like the past, is secure.

In the earlier days of the war a sagacious foreign observer, resident in the country, said that he feared we were making a mistake perilous to the American principle. The suspension of the habeas corpus he thought a very dangerous political, however necessary a military, experiment it might be. But he was answered by another European, who had been a political pupil of Cavour's, that, unlike such an act in other countries, it was here done by the people themselves, and they must be trusted in it, or else the whole American experiment failed. Such power must be used, he said; the crucial test is the way in which it is used. If the people cannot use it in a way which shall be permanently harmless, then they are not capable of self-government. Oh, wise young judge! In the whole world no heart will be more sincerely glad, no face more bright with joy, or sadder with sorrow, at the strange April news from America than yours!

What a May day! Stricken as all hearts are, what a May day! Budding and blooming on every hand, on every hill-side and meadow and wood, flushing and glittering with the lavish beauty of the spring softly gliding over grieving hearts, and with her royal touch healing our varied sorrow, came the Queen of May, for whom the people sighed and the land yearned, came the well-beloved, the long-desired, palms in her hand and doves flying before her; and the name of that May-day Queen was Peace.

WASHINGTON IN 1867

HE gay young European diplomatist, accustomed to the charms of the great foreign capitals—London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, and the scores of small but delightful cities—probably regards an attachment to the embassy of his country in the United States as a B[oe]otian exile. But when, eagerly curious to see the capital of this remote region, he is dumped in the railroad-shed at Washington, and emerges upon the depthless mud or blinding dust of the city, upon its hackmen and porters, greedy of his last penny, and upon its general hopelessness of aspect, it is not difficult to imagine how his heart sinks and how bitter the exile seems.

To the independent native of the country, however, Washington as a city is simply exasperating and ridiculous. Its one truly magnificent building, the Capitol, seems to have absorbed everything else. Like a huge wen, it has apparently sucked up all the life of the other buildings. Feeble, shapeless, ineffective, they huddle along the sides of the vast avenues, and, however closely they stand, give nothing but the impression of a straggling and clumsy village. Then there is the eternal absurdity of the plan. It is not only a straggling and clumsy village, but it is utterly dislocated. Washington is laid out upon the plan of cart-wheels within cart-wheels. The stranger is always going wrong. You meet him, say, near the junction of some avenue with some Fourth and a Half Street north. He has the expression of a long-confirmed but mild lunatic; and after gazing at you blandly and inquiringly for a moment, he says, "I am trying to find the corner of Ninth and Fifteenth streets." Of course he is; we all are in Washington. The folly would be evident elsewhere, but in Washington it is the most natural effort possible. There is but one reply to the candid and inquiring fellow-maniac: "My dear sir, I have not the remotest conception where I am, or where anything is." There is a fond delusion that the city radiates from the Capitol. Nothing is more fallacious. Washington is a system of hubs, and a consequent combination of radiations.

The depression arising from arrival and the problem of streets is hardly relieved by arrival at Willard's. The entrance to that hotel is a cigar-shop, a newspaper-stand, and a loafing-room. You press through to the office. But what is man that an American landlord should regard him? The house is full, has been full, will be full. A few crisp words inform you that by-and-by, some time, perhaps, possibly, you may be stowed away in the seventh story, and allowed to pay four or five dollars a day. The moderation of the landlords is always a subject of wonder and gratitude. It seems a matter of mere grace and good-will that they do not charge twenty dollars a night, with the privilege of making your own bed.

"Whew!" cried Don Giovanni when, arriving at the capital of this country, he was made to undergo these initiatory steps, "will you please to tell me one single particular in which travel in Europe is not incomparably more agreeable and comfortable than in this country?" And he went on to compare the universal comfort and courtesy of foreign travel, sadly to the disadvantage of the home of the brave. "Certainly there is no country in which the guest upon reaching his hotel is treated with such laughable condescension as in this. A wretched hole of a room, shabbily furnished, the dirty walls and a suspicious bed, with a quart of water and a pocket-handkerchief of a towel, for which he is to pay four or five dollars or more daily, is awarded to the humbly expectant visitor as a high favor. A great American hotel is a penitentiary for travellers, and the gentlemen at the office are the lofty turnkeys and lord high-constables. A self-respecting man will travel here as little as possible."

"There is no doubt that much travel at home is a discipline," replied the Easy Chair.

"Yes," continued the indignant Don. "If you are known personally to the gentlemanly gentleman who dispenses chambers you may be tolerably quartered. But if you are merely one of the herd who have the temerity to arrive by steamer or car, you may thank your stars if you are graciously permitted to leave your luggage in the hall and to have a room by-and-by."

Now the Easy Chair humbly hopes that all gentlemanly gentlemen concerned will not understand him as making these remarks. They all proceeded from the person named, who is alone responsible. The Easy Chair has not quite come to the end of his travels; and would he malign the gentlemanly and accommodating? He desires to state distinctly that if he could not open the window of his room, it was merely because he had a foolish wish for fresh air; and if he could not turn round, it was because of the inordinate size of his trunk; and if his fingers went through the towel, it was because his manner was rude towards a chamber ornament so delicate and small; and if the sheets of the bed were not wholly fresh, it was because the gentlemanly and accomplished chamber-maiden lady was of a nobly economical turn of mind; and if the bell would not ring, it was because some former guest had been so little able to restrain himself as to pull it down. Indeed, there was nothing which did not admit of the fullest explanation. It is only the unreasonable who would complain of paying four or five dollars a day for such accommodations. "Let me tell you, sir," whispered the gentlemanly gentleman at a certain office to a bewildered person who had been ordered up to a burrow in the seventh story, "you are very lucky to get in at all." But the bewildered traveller's face, it is asserted, was not so humbly grateful as circumstances demanded.

Washington itself merely multiplies the impression of Willard's. Everything is feverish and transitory. The fine houses are rented by senators, by representatives, by foreign ministers, by army and navy officers, by families from other cities. They are taken for a season. Those who occupy them have no permanent interest in the city. The rule is almost universal. The Capitol, the White House, the departments, the public buildings are all full of men who came yesterday and are going to-morrow. Washington is a huge perch. All this tumult of twittering is from birds upon the wing, who have lighted for a moment only. Even the noisiest crows, the most solemn owls, are but for a day, or for two years, or four years, or for six years.

There is a certain permanent population of the military and naval bureaus, over whose heads the storms of fashion and politics roar and break like tempests that toss the surface of the sea far above the placid monsters and coral insects of the deep. And there are a few memorial office-holders—quiet men, who have grown old in certain ruts in which they can run with a facility that is absolutely essential. They feel that they have become part of the government. The very oldest senators and representatives excite in their breasts a kind of compassionate sympathy as mere boys and tyros. And like heirs of old royal lines long since superseded, who cherish a secret conviction that modern times are a mere delusion and progress an absurd infatuation, and who are sure that some day the world will discover what a huge mistake it made in not continuing to be governed by the extinct line, and so return to its allegiance, the faithful plodders in the official ruts do still believe that the party, whatever it was, which appointed them is the Heaven-appointed ruler of the country, and that when the froth of the present moment is blown away, the clear, deep, sound good old times will be again discerned. The droll old Jacobites! They drink to the king over the water. They might as well drink to the king with his head off!

RECEPTION TO THE JAPANESE AMBASSADORS AT THE WHITE HOUSE

ERR Teufelsdrockh informs those who read his famous book, the Tailor Sewer Over; or, the Philosophy of Clothes, that Mr. Pellum announces, among other canons regulating human apparel, that it is permitted to mankind, under certain conditions, to wear white waistcoats. But it now appears that, under certain conditions also, straw-colored gloves are not only permissible, but imperative. When a Japanese ambassador appears, and the white flag with the orb of day in its centre is unfurled, straw-color, as to the hands, is the only wear. Therefore, when the reception was to take place in Washington the deeply initiated held hands of that mystic color. The only chagrin was that nobody seemed to know the significant fact nor to care for it; and one honorable gentleman asked with interest whether it would not be extremely orthodox to wear a straw-hat. But these levities were ill becoming the august occasion.

The feast of the straw-colored gloves in honor of the Japanese ambassadors fell upon an evening when the poetic policeman thought of every belle who stepped from her carriage,

"The bleak winds of March
Made her tremble and shiver."

But he thought it only; he did not say it. Yet the bleak wind of the cold night had little chance at the guests, for a pavilion was laid to the very curb-stone, and everybody stepped out into friendly shelter. Then up the steep stairs, just as the illustrious guests were passing from the cloak-room to the hall. As they entered it the crowd, swelling upward from the door below, made for the ladies' room, or for the little hole in a corner into which the gentlemen were to thrust their coats, in the vague hope that they might be recovered. Some of the Japs who at a later hour were buffeting the crowd and struggling towards the aperture must have been impressed, if they were philosophers, with the fact that a nation of so many happy contrivances as they fondly believe us to be has not yet learned how to take charge of overcoats at public feasts. It would not be very difficult to avoid the fierce crush at the cloak-room; but it is not avoided, and it is as good-humored as it is disagreeable and unnecessary.

But who cared for the crush at the door of the opera-house on a Jenny Lind night, when coat skirts strewed the pavement, and the most elaborately tied cravats were undone? Not otherwise was this pressure when the door was passed and the pretty hall entered. Was this also an opera? And had the curtain risen? For the first impression of the brilliant scene was that of the trilling and warbling of canaries in clusters of cages hung high overhead, and for a moment giving a sense of enchanted gardens and rose bowers upon Bendermere's stream. Was this impression disturbed when from their tiring-room the nymphs and dames emerged powdered, beflowered, effulgent? There were toilets of all kinds. There were even ladies in bonnets, as if they had run in neighborly to hobnob an hour with Iwakura. There were others in the very extreme of fashion. There was every kind of tasteful and rich and beautiful and plain and grotesque attire. And now and then behold! the ineffable calm of the lady—not one, but many—of whom Mr. Emerson tells the excellent story that she said to feel herself perfectly well dressed imparted a tranquil happiness that religion itself could not bestow.

The hall was very light, draped and festooned simply with the American and two Japanese flags intertwined, the whole giving a certain gauzy effect, which was pretty, if not fairy-like nor magnificent. Upon a little platform at the end of the hall stood the guest and other distinguished ministers. The space in the middle of the hall, between improvised columns, was kept clear for some time, so that the picture was charming. The throng pressed slowly up one side of the room towards the platform, and, passing across it in front of the various members of the embassy, were received by the Secretary of State and the Japanese minister, and by the latter presented to Iwakura. He was dressed, with all his associates, in the sad sables with which Western nations mourn their own gayety. Instead of some glittering cloth of gold, in which, whatever the fact may have been at the White House, we might have expected an ambassador from Zipango or El Dorado to be arrayed, we had the familiar and useful black broadcloth coat and trousers of civilization. But when Sir Philip Sidney, in flowered velvet, was presented to the great William of Orange, William was clad in a plain serge coat, and Sir Philip probably did not know it, or forgot it. And as the gallant Sidneys at this feast were presented to the chief ambassador, they doubtless saw the man and not his clothes.

Iwakura is about fifty years old; not a large man; of great dignity and serenity of character and manners, with a high-bred and elegant air, and a face of clear intelligence and refinement. He bowed courteously to every guest, with a subtile distance of salutation without offence which is peculiar to many men of high self-respect. Hand-shaking is the most religiously observed of all the social rites in Washington, and especially and amusingly by the diplomatic corps, who evidently constrain themselves to observe punctually this sacred habit; but Iwakura did not offer his hand, yet did not refuse to engage in the ceremony when it was unavoidable. Beyond him in the line were the chief ladies of the occasion, the wives of the Vice-President, of the Secretary of State, of the Speaker, and of the other secretaries. It was simply a republican court, recalling the days when President Washington and his wife stood upon a slightly raised dais at the end of the hall, there being about those three inches of monarchy left at the beginning of the republic, before Thomas Jefferson, alighting from his horse, hitched him by the bridle to the fence, and then went into the Capitol to be inaugurated President.

Descending from the immediate presence, the guests gathered in lines along the hall, or slowly promenaded, engaged in watching and in criticising each other. Meanwhile the band played, and the canaries, excited by the music and the lights, sang loud and clear. Not so sweetly sang the gossips, as they whispered and exclaimed at each other's fresh oddity or extravagance of attire. Gently, good gossips! gently! for even at this moment is the Scripture fulfilled, and ye who judge are judged. "In a world where Martin Farquhar Tupper passes to the thirty-seventh edition," said Thackeray, in a company of authors, "let us all think small-beer of ourselves." When to the eye of men the dress of the fairer sex is altogether bewildering, and certainly not, as Professor Teufelsdrockh would say, unbeautiful, why should the good gossip invidiously discriminate? Peace, peace! The sober matron at whom you smile wears the plain dress because she preferred to pay her boy's college bills with the money that would have arrayed her in Parisian robes had he stayed at home. And you, dear madam, daughter of Fortunatus and heiress of his purse, you wear those ponderous diamonds and nudge your neighbors to look and laugh with you.

Hark the soft prelude of the waltz. What is the mysterious pathos of that long pulsing strain? Why is that measure, moving to which the joy and the hope of youth celebrate their triumph, of all measures the most passionately sad? One after another the partners glide into the dance. They swim, they float, they circle, they move in music and to music. And what is this, and who is here? this comet, this meteor of a couple, who come pumping and dashing through the throng. Are her hands really laid upon his shoulders? Do his hands clasp her elbows, or is it an extraordinary dream? No wonder that Japan draws to the edge of the dais and gazes in wonder, for America also looks on in amazement. The amused incredulity of the foreign guests as they watch the dancing is interesting to see. Iwakura regards the scene with smiling gravity. To him the spectacle seems a thousandfold more against nature than the vision of a woman voting can possibly be to the most conservative American. Yet the ambassador will find that the loveliest woman may waltz with a man and still be womanly, and the conservative American may go and do likewise. The fashions of a time and the traditions of a nation are not the final laws of nature, and even Horatio's philosophy does not exhaust the things in heaven and earth that are yet to be.

The ambassadors are still gazing, the band is still playing, and the birds are still singing over the happy dancers as we come away. There is a desperate but brief struggle at the orifice in the corner, whence, to our delight, our coats emerge. We have a glimpse into the ladies' tiring-room, where, like bright-winged birds, they are pluming themselves for flight. Upon the steep staircase, where they stand waiting for their carriages, there is tranquillity and order, so excellent are the arrangements. Scores of sentences are left in fragments upon the stairs, for in the midst of a remark the cry resounds, "The Honorable Mr. Iago's carriage, Mrs. Bluebeard's, The Ambassador from San Salvador, Mr. Smith-Jones's carriage!" And instantly the bright-winged birds are flown, and rose-buds and violets go home to happy dreams.

THE MAID AND THE WIT

HE fabled stream that sank from sight, and emerged far away, still flowing, is an image of the course of all progress. The argument which establishes the reason and the benefit of reform does not, therefore, at once establish it, still less complete it. There are obstructions, delays, disappearances; but still the stream flows, seen or unseen, still it swells, and reappearing far beyond where it vanished, moves brimming to the sea.

The Lady Mavourneen, who, coming to us straight from Paris, found here a courteous regard for women, which she said that after a life's residence she had not found in France, was only just to Americans. Nowhere is there such instinctive and universal consideration for the gentler sex, notwithstanding the occasional spectacle of the woman standing in the elevated railroad car, and the necessity under which the elderly wit found himself in the omnibus, when, seeing a comely young woman standing, he said to his son sitting in his lap, "My son, why don't you get up and give the lady your seat?"

Despite such gayety in the omnibus, and such devout reading of the newspapers in the elevated cars that the devotees cannot see women standing, even those women, if they are travelled, would agree that, upon the whole, in no civilized country have they encountered more deference to the sex as such than in America. Yet the courtesy is that of a clever as well as polite people. If the comely maid in the omnibus had suddenly and sweetly asked the elderly wit whether he was a true American, and believed that taxation and representation should go together, he would have promptly replied, "Yes, ma'am." But if she had then whipped out her logical rapier and thrust at him the question, "Are you, then, in favor of giving me a vote?" his cleverness and his courtesy would have blended in his reply, "Madam, when women demand it, they will have it." It is the universal reply of the ingenious patriot who is aware that the argument is against him, but who is still unconvinced. The stream of logic sinks in the sands of his scepticism, but it will reappear still further on, flowing with a fuller current towards its goal.

If the omnibus were a convenient ground for such bouts of argument, the maid has plenty of other keen rapiers in reserve with which she would pierce his courteous incredulity. One of the sharpest would be the rejoinder of inquiry whether it was the general custom of Legislatures to wait until everybody interested in a reform asked for it before granting it. Having inserted the point of the weapon, she would turn it around, to the great inconvenience of the elderly wit, by further asking specifically whether imprisonment for debt was abolished because poor debtors as a body requested it or because it was deemed best in the general interest that it should be abolished, or whether hanging for stealing a leg of mutton was renounced because the hapless thieves demanded it, or because Romilly showed that humanity and the welfare of society and of respect for law required it.

The comely maid, once aroused, would not spare him, and while declining to occupy his son's seat, she would challenge him to say whether the slave-trade was stopped and the West Indian slaves emancipated by England because the slaves petitioned, or because Parliament thought such reforms desirable for the interests of England. That inquiry, doubtless, she would have pushed more closely home, and there would have been no escape for the nimble wit except in some happy and elusive epigram. Nothing would have followed. He would have lifted his hat courteously as the lady smiled and left the omnibus. The stream of logic would have disappeared. But its volume would have been stronger, and when it reappeared, it would have been flowing nearer its goal.

The comely maid recently smiled, probably as if she saw the reappearance, when she learned that venerable Yale, even before venerable Harvard, had opened her post-graduate courses upon absolutely the same conditions to women as to men. This is not co-education; far from it; it is as far as eleven o'clock from twelve. Still less is it co-suffrage. No, indeed; it is as different as the blossom of May from the fruit of September. It means no more than that the good sense of Yale, perceiving that there is a goodly company of women actually devoted to higher studies, and not perceiving anything unwomanly or undesirable in larger knowledge and stricter intellectual training, invites Hypatia and Mrs. Somerville and Maria Mitchell to avail themselves of her opportunities and resources to prosecute their studies, and recognizes that in a modern world of larger and juster views, which permits women to use every industrial faculty to the utmost, and to own property and dispose of it, it is useless longer to insist with chivalry that woman is a goddess "too bright and good," or with the Orient that she is a slave in this world and a houri in the next.

As for the logic of such an invitation, Yale is doubtless indifferent. She invites women to study not with her under-graduates, but with her post-graduates. Probably she recoils with instinctive conservatism from the vision of a possible Hypatia seated among her faculty in a professorial chair. That might do in Alexandria in the fifth century. But in New Haven in the nineteenth, or even the twentieth—? She recoils still further from the prospect of covoting. Elizabeth Tudor was a creditable head of a kingdom and a fellow-counsellor of state with Burleigh and Walsingham. But does it follow that a Connecticut woman possessed of great estates should have a voice in the disposition of her property? Probably Yale would agree that when all such amply endowed women unite in asking for such a voice, it might be worth while to consider. Meanwhile she opens the hospitable doors of her post-graduate intellectual treasury, and every woman who will may enter and share the riches.

Oliver asked for more, but not until he had consumed his portion. The comely maid of the omnibus smiles as she sees those treasury doors hospitably opening. She seems perhaps to see the stream of logic at once vanishing and reappearing. If a woman may mingle wisely with post-graduates, why not with under—but no. Something, she would say with womanly good sense, may be left to time and the inevitable sequence of events. Shall all be done at once, and the sound seed be spurned because it must be planted and grow and ripen before there is a harvest? In this Columbian year shall we think that nothing was gained when Columbus reached San Salvador, as we used to be taught, or Watling Island, or Grand Turk, or Samana, among which bewildered knowledge now doubtfully gropes—because he had not reached the continent, and because he believed it to be the old and not a new India?

That comely damsel, with her face towards the morning, says, quietly, with Durandarte, "Patience, and shuffle the cards." One glance at the woman in the Athens of Pericles and at woman in the New Haven of President Dwight answers the question which the nimble elderly wit eluded.

THE DEPARTURE OF THE GREAT EASTERN.

SAW the Great Eastern sail away. The afternoon was exquisite—one of the cool, clear, perfect days that followed the storm in the middle of August; and it seemed to hang over the great ship like a cordial smile. But it was the only smile the poor Leviathan received. There was a Christian resignation in her departure. The big ship, like Falstaff, "'a made a finer end and went away, an it had been any christom child: 'a parted even just between" four and five, "ev'n at turning o' the tide." But as when a prince is born, and the bells are rung, and the cannon fired, and the city is illuminated, and with music and shouting the people swarm the streets—and when the same prince, grown to be a bad king and tyrant, dies, outcast and contemned, with never a tear to fall nor a bell to toll for him—even such was the coming and the going of the Great Eastern.

I remember also the June afternoon when she arrived, and at the same hour. The city was excited as London used to be by the news of a famous victory. It was reported early in the morning that she was below, and public expectation, which had been feeding upon print and picture of her, was despatching the population to the Battery, to the wharves, to the excursion boats, and wherever she could be seen. At four o'clock you could see, off Staten Island, a pyramid of towering masts above all other masts. She looked a mighty admiral; and as she came up the bay, attended by the little boats—for all other craft are little beside her—you could easily remember the approach of Columbus to the shore and the canoes of curious savages that darted and swarmed around his ship. Her very size gave her a kind of superiority: the silence of her progress was full of majesty.

The shores teemed with people. The heights of Staten Island twinkled and fluttered with the gay toilets of the spectators that covered them. The Jersey shores were alive. The Battery looked white with human faces. The piers upon the river, the decks of vessels in the stream, and the windows and roofs of the buildings that commanded the water, were crowded with eager watchers. But the prettiest sight was the convoy of every kind that attended the surprising guest. Yachts, sloops, schooners, steamers, and tow-boats, large and small, moved down towards her, came out from the shore, sailed round her, sailed beside her, crossed her bows, followed her, so that the bay was bewitched with excitement. Cannon roared, bells rang, flags waved, and the crowd huzzaed welcome.

Through all the great ship glided majestically on. In response to each fresh salute of steam-whistle the bell was touched upon the deck—it was the quiet nod or smile of a prince in reply to the noisy complimenting of a Common Council. There was an air of dignity and of grandeur in the size and movement of the ship; and as the public was not disappointed in her size, but found that she really looked as large as she had been described and represented; and as every circumstance of her arrival was propitious, so that she slipped quietly into her dock, like a ferry-boat—it may fairly be claimed that the Great Eastern had already won the hearty regard of the New York public.

How she lost it—is it not all related in indignant reports and letters and caricatures? How she dared to charge a dollar for admission—how hapless sailors lost their lives—how she went to Cape May—and there black night rushes down upon the tale. After a visit of forty-nine days, in which she had unhappily, but too surely, worn out her welcome, she prepares to depart. But at the last moment petty suits almost detain her. She shakes them off, however, and with them the cables that bound her to our shore. She slips into the stream. She promptly points her head down the bay. It is a lovely afternoon—it is the same river full of craft—there are the wharves, the windows, the roofs—but where, oh! where are the people? She fires her departing gun. A few loiterers, whom chance or business has called to the water-side, look up for a moment as she goes by. Idle boys upon the wharves joke and jeer at her. Where are the wolves, naughty boys? How dare you cry bald-head? Everything in the river and the city slouches in the every-day costume of habit. There are no gala garments, no fluttering flags, and merry bells, and booming guns, and cheering crowds. The Great Eastern is going away—who cares? She will never come back—so much the better! Alas! the poor old King of yesterday is dying, and there is no one to close his eyes. No; the courtiers are booted and spurred to dash away the moment the breath is out of his body and salute the young Prince, the next Sensation, who shall rule the realm for a day.

When she came in I saw her come up the bay. I saw her come down as she departed. In the distance, blending with the spires of the city and the lesser masts, there was the towering cluster rising above all. I listened for the guns. I looked for the attendant craft. There were neither, except a brief salute from the Cunarder in port. But the bay of New York will be watched for many a year before so grand and stately a sight will be seen again as that great ship making her way through the Narrows to the sea. When she entered the bay she seemed majestic and conciliatory; as she left it, she was majestic and disdainful. Yet this was only the impression of a moment and of the distance. As she neared the forts at the Narrows entirely alone, with no accompanying steam or sail vessel, with all the hard luck of her life behind her and following her even to the latest hour of her stay in America, with the fact that she had utterly lost all hold upon public interest made glaringly palpable by the absolute loneliness of her departure, she yet fired a proud salute as she swept out of the upper bay—a stern farewell that echoed coldly from unanswering shores—and with the stars and stripes floating at her peak, magnificent and majestic, the Great Eastern departed.

Gradually, as she passed far down the lower bay, she returned into the same hazy vastness that I remembered when I first saw her—in which, in the memories of all who saw her, she will forever remain.

CHURCH STREET

N the earliest of the really spring-like mornings as the Easy Chair turned into Church Street it could not help perceiving that in some romantic ways the New-Yorker has the advantage of the Londoner and Parisian. Church Street does not, indeed, seem at the first mention to be a promising domain of romance, nor a fond haunt of the Muses. Indeed, it must not be denied that it has an unsavory name; and when the city loiterer recalls Wapping, or a May morning on the Seine quais, he will smile at Church Street as a field of romance, and the Easy Chair grants him absolution. London, perhaps, does not strike the American imagination, or, let us more truly say, the imagination of the travelling American, as a romantic city. That citizen of the world reserves for himself Venice, Constantinople, Grand Cairo. Yet if after his arrival he will buy Peter Cunningham's Hand-book for London at the nearest book-store, and turn its pages slowly, he will discover that for him, an American, he is in a very romantic city indeed. Mr. Hepworth Dixon's Tower of London will show him how copious a sermon may be preached from one romantic text. Of course he can be expected to have no feeling but pity for the unfortunates who fill the streets, and whose fate it was to be born Britishers. Yet, let him reflect that it was not their fault, and except for that precise unhappy fact of being Britishers, which causes all the mischief, their parents too would have lived elsewhere.

Then the American citizen of the world, pitying England, will cross to France, to another country, a new world, and in Paris will breathe more freely as being at last in the metropolis of the globe—always excepting New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, or Chicago, as the case may be. If he opens Galignani's Guide, the excellent and well-informed traveller will immediately discover that he is in another romantic city, and that there is something more to see and consider than the bal d'opera, and the Château Rouge; and if some Easy Chair accidentally encountered straying along the Boulevards, or seated at the door of a café, should chance to ask whether the well-informed traveller had ever taken a romantic stroll in Church Street, New York, he would be rewarded with a smile for his admirable humor. By-and-by, after the coffee was drunk and the pipe smoked out, the Easy Chair and his approving Mentor would perhaps stroll about until they came far away from the haunts of to-day to the respectable old Place Louis Quinze. It is always an attractive spot for that well-informed traveller. He looks at it with pensive emotion, and turns warmly to the Easy Chair and says:

"How delightful this is! Here dwelt the noblesse! This is the Fifth Avenue—what do I say?—the Murray Hill of old Paris! And now all is gone! Fashion is an emigré. Inquire in the Faubourg St. Germain. What a pity we have nothing of this kind in America."

"But we have," replies the Easy Chair.

The incredulous well-informed traveller again smiles a mild, melancholy smile at the inscrutable methods of Providence, which has provided no Place Louis Quinze for the Yankees and aborigines.

"We certainly have," persists the Easy Chair.

"Where, pray?"

"Well, Church Street."

The reply seems to be beating out a jest very thin; but gradually the Easy Chair contrives to explain.

The movement of life in New York is so rapid, fashion and trade sweep from one point to another with such impetuosity, that the romance of changed interest can be enjoyed in the same spot twice or thrice in a lifetime. In older cities, in Paris or London, it is not the individual experience, but history only which covers the change. The gentlemen and dames of the Louis Quinze era do not moralize over the Place from which the glory has departed, but only their descendants. The change is so gradual that it is not within their personal experience. It is a tide that rises and falls once in sixscore years, not in six hours. But the fortunate New-Yorker has his romance making for him while he sleeps. The sorry streets of to-day will disappear within a dozen years, and the instant they are gone, or seen just at the moment of the final lapse, they have passed into the realm of romance.

Here is Church Street, for instance; it is not very long, and you turn into it from Fulton or from Canal. So turned the Easy Chair, and there was the long, narrow vista walled by lofty buildings, the spacious houses of trade, built yesterday, piled with dry goods, bold with prosperous newness, but instantly suggesting the street of palaces in Genoa. And a few rods off some old Knickerbocker is gravely stalking down Broadway who has not turned aside into Church Street for many a year, and who supposes Church Street is still a place not to be named, an unspeakable Gehenna. So it was a dozen years ago. Once, also, it was the Black Broadway. It was a kind of voluntary Ghetto of the colored people. Then, again, it was an offshoot of the Five Points. There were low ranges of dingy buildings. Dirty men and women slouched along on the walks and lounged out of the windows, and their idle, ribald laughter echoed along the street that few carriages travelled. Dens of every kind were just around every corner. Slatternly women emptied slops upon the pavement, and the stench was perpetual. Dirty little children screamed and played, and sickly babies squalled unheeded. It was a street fallen out of Hogarth; the street of worst repute in the city.

And now it is a double range of stately buildings—symmetrical, massive. Horse-cars struggle on it with light carts of dry-goods dealers, with the slow, enormous teams that shake the ground. At every corner there is an inextricable snarl of wagons, and porters are heaving boxes, and young clerks are directing, and huge windows are filled with huge pattern cards, so that the narrow way is tapes-tried. "Look out, there!" cries a porter-compelling clerk to the Easy Chair, which smiles to think that only yesterday it was in Exchange Place, and Pearl Street, and elsewhere that the peremptory youth was ordering him to mind his eye. And if the employer who now sits in the spacious office opposite had known that his clerk was familiar with Church Street, he would have warned him of the gates of destruction, and have admonished him that Church Street, though a narrow street, was a broad way.

The people that push and hurry and skip along this busy avenue are alert and well dressed. The slouchers and loungers, the old slatterns with the slop-pails, the fat, frouzy, jolly, dirty women with bare red arms and loud voices, the sneaks, the thieves, and the unclean groups at the grog-shop, where are they? No sneaks now, no thieves—honorable gentlemen with clean collars everywhere. What a consolation! As you watch the passers closely, as you read the signs, it occurs to you that the population, with the universal tendency in our mental and spiritual habits that Matthew Arnold sparklingly deplores, is clearly Hebraized. Here, where this especially fine warehouse or handsome shop stands, stood the French church. It has jumped up-town a few miles. Here was the church of Dr. Potts. Could you believe that the people who go to meeting in the snug, brown little edifice in an ivy mantle at the corner of University Place and Tenth Street, which probably seems to the young clerk coeval with the city, day before yesterday, as it were, came down here among the merchants? Then they came once a week for an hour or two. What did you say was the name of the deity to whom these temples were dedicated?

And at this corner—why, if it were an April thicket it could not more sweetly bubble with song, only this music is the spirit ditty of no tone—here was the old National Theatre. Do you see that very respectable old gentleman in the office who carries an ostrich egg in his hat? for so his grandchildren describe grandpapa's baldness. He sits and reads the paper, and is presently going down to the bank of which he is a director, and of which he seems always to those grandchildren to smell, so tenacious is the peculiar odor of a bank; that is the very gentleman who in the temple of the Drama upon this spot used to lead the loud applause, and at whom in his buckish costume of those merry days and nights, the lovely Shirreff herself used to level her eyes and her voice as she trilled: "Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad." Can you imagine that excellent grandparent kissing his hand rapturously to the retiring prima donna, going off to sup at the Café de l'Independence, and hieing home at two in the morning waking the echoes of Murray Street with a reproduction of that arch song, followed by a loud whistle to prove whether that vision of delight really will come to him, and bringing only the gruff Charley, obese guardian of the night? Will you find in your famous Place Louis Quinze any roisterer of the regency grown old and careful of his diet?

Here is one wall which survives from the prehistoric days of thirty years ago; it is the rear wall of the old hospital, that blessed green spot in the midst of the city, which is to be green no more, but will soon be piled with more palaces. And opposite this wall is a short street running from Church to West Broadway. A few years ago this was one of the worst of city slums. At the corner of West Broadway a wooden building still remains—a sullen, sickly, defiant cur of a building—that sits and snarls impotent over the savagery departed. And there is one tall rookery still, a tenement-house, with a system of fire-escapes in front, and the slattern slopping at the curb as in the ancient day, and a cooper's shop, and a blacksmith's, and one, two, three, how many whiskey shops? But they are all faint and feeble and submerged in the lofty buildings, and to-morrow all trace of them will be gone. And then who will remember the murder? The mysterious, awful, romantic murder. The murder that filled all the newspapers, and fed speculation at all the corner groggeries and in all offices. The murder that was done into a romance, and of which the hero—that is the murderer—was acquitted, after one of the famous eloquent criminal appeals which are so effective because their power is measured by human life. And this hero occasionally reappears in the newspapers even to this day. Somebody writes from a remote somewhere that on a steamer far away a mysterious man, after much mysterious conduct, imparts the awful truth that he is the hero. Does he sometimes return to this spot? Does he look at the site of the house where the deed was done? Does he appear in the guise of a merchant, a jobber, a retailer from that remote southwestern somewhere, and higgle and chaffer in the noble warehouse on the very site of the wretched building where he murdered his mistress? Good heavens! Do you see that man of about those years, looking about as if to find a sign or number? (As if he didn't know the very place; as if it were not burned and cut into his heart and conscience!) Do you think it could possibly be he, or is it, after all, only the honest Timothy Tape, the modest retailer from Skowhegan or Palmyra?... The typhus-fever used to rage here; the cholera was fearful. The sanitary reports say that there were always cases of the worst diseases to be found here. The city missionaries also used to find their worst cases here too, and now, what cleanliness of collar, what modishness of coat! No more sin; what a consolation!

And so, as the Easy Chair strolled along, bumped and hustled and severely looked upon by the eager throng in the narrow street, more radically reconstructed than any doubtful State, it could not help feeling that London with Her Majesty's Tower, and Paris with her deserted Place Louis Quinze, are not the only romantic cities in the world, and that a city of such rapid and incessant change as New York offers even some poetic aspects which its elder sisters want. The Easy Chair has pleaded formerly for some respect towards old historic buildings, like the old State-house in Boston, for instance, and has been indignantly laughed at for its pains. It will not deny that, unabashed by such laughter, it contemplates the old Walton House with satisfaction. It repairs, also, to the corner of Broad and Pearl streets, and, reflecting upon General Washington's parting with his officers, turns its eyes towards Wall Street, and beholds the Grecian temple which has taken the place of the old City Hall, upon whose balcony the first predecessor of President Grant was inaugurated. But the romance of Church Street is of another kind. It is the romance of striking and sudden change merely, not of historic interest, nor of personal association. Perhaps the gentle reader may not find it when he goes there. Then let him carry it.

HISTORIC BUILDINGS

FEW months ago the Easy Chair, seeing that changes were making in the old State-house in Boston, one of the few Revolutionary and truly historic buildings that remain, modestly ventured to regret it, and to deplore the rapid disappearance of the venerable relics that had come down to us from former generations. It suggested, or meant to suggest, or might, could, would, or should have suggested, and will now, under correction, suggest that there are very few buildings in New York which recall that earlier epoch of the country. With a national and pardonable logic, or association of ideas, the Easy Chair enlarged upon the value of historical relics, of monuments, of visible traditions; and urged possibly that it made life a little barer, a little less poetic, here than it would otherwise be.

The temerity of such a strain of remark does not seem very extravagant; it might indeed be put forth without any secret hostility to human rights, to liberty, to the equality of men, and even without a sigh for the repose of effete despotisms, and the traditions of outworn monarchies. But not in the opinion of a certain excellent journal, which we will agree to call the Bugle of Freedom, and which blew a sonorous blast and rallying cry against the sentiments of the Easy Chair's mild and innocent suggestions. "Monuments!" blew the Bugle of Freedom, "monuments! remains, traditions! Old lumber and rotten timber! What in the name of humanity have all these to do with a manly and patriotic sentiment? Look at Egypt; what have the Pyramids done for the civilization of Egypt? and we hope they are monuments, and ancient enough. Look at Greece; the very queen-mother of the noblest architecture! Look at Italy, teeming with 'storied monuments,' and what do we see?" played the Bugle of Freedom. "What do we see? Do we wish to be Egyptians, or modern Greeks, or Italians? Heaven forbid!" And the resounding Bugle seemed to execute roulades and runs and trills of contempt at the unhappy Easy Chair, which was gazing vacantly at Egypt, Greece, and Italy, as the Bugle had directed.

Has the Bugle of Freedom no drawer, or box, or casket of any kind, in which there is, possibly, a yellow rose-bud, faded years and years ago, in the days when it was a mere raw, shrill, piping flageolet? Has it no bundle of letters, worn and parted at the seam; no knotted handkerchief hidden out of sight, that shall never be more unknotted; no glove, delicate and perfumed, still holding the form gained by soft pressure upon a hand that shall never again be pressed. Is there no tree in the garden, in a public square, by the road-side, in a green field by a brook, under which, at every hour of the day and night, whenever and with whomsoever it is passed, there stand a youth and maid who shall be seen of men no more. Is there no house in town or country from whose windows long vanished faces look when the Bugle passes by, and in whose unchanged rooms there are figures of old and young whose presence is infinitely tender and chastening? Would life be richer and better and more manly and inspiring for the Bugle if all these were swept away? Would the rights of man and eternal justice be more secure if some morning Biddy should throw old letters, old rose-buds, and old handkerchiefs into the fire, and the woodman would not spare the old tree, and the haunted old household be burned up or pulled down? That is the whole question.

It is merely a matter of association. It is in human nature; the Easy Chair did not put it there. The mysterious delight in the most ancient and inarticulate remains of human skill is the recognition by the soul of man of its identity and endless continuation; and when you descend from that Cyclopean work in the foundation of the wall of the temple at Jerusalem to the knotted handkerchief and the yellow bud, you have only come, O Bugle, to the individual delight in one's own experience, to the unsealing of sweet fountains forgotten, and the quickening of sanitary emotions. Surely when you were travelling and delighting yourselves in Greece you did not come upon the plain of Marathon with the same emotion that you cross the Hackensack meadows in the Philadelphia train. But what was the difference? Byron's lines sang themselves out of your mouth:

"The mountains look upon Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea."

Why did Byron's lines rise in your memory? Why did Byron write the lines? Why was your glance eager and your mind pensive and your imagination alert and your soul full of generous impulse when you stood on the plain of Marathon? Because of the great conflict between two civilizations long and long and long ago—the conflict of ideas of which you are the child; the conflict of men essentially like you and your brothers who fought at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

But if there be this subtle and over-powering influence in association with a place, although it is earth and trees and grass and stone, is there not the same charm and power in association with a building, a tree, a stream? And while Marathon has not saved Greece from decline, has it not been one of the natural influences that have pleaded against national decay? And could Marathon and Salamis and Platæa have been swept out of mind, would not the decline have been a thousandfold hastened? Are we not stronger and braver for Bunker Hill and Saratoga, for the sunken Alabama and the Wilderness?

For the same reason, O loud-blowing Bugle of Freedom, that it would be a national injury to forget the great deeds, it is in a lesser degree a misfortune, although an inevitable one, gradually to lose from sight the objects that recall them. Would it be a pity to shovel Bunker Hill into Boston Back Bay? The battle of Bunker Hill would still remain in history, the advantages of the Revolutionary War which it began would still survive; but something we should have lost, and the argument that urged the sparing of the hill would be sound and natural. So with the old State-house. To destroy it or essentially to change it was in a lesser degree to shovel Bunker Hill into the Back Bay.

The town of Stratford-upon-Avon seemed not to be conscious of the great truth which the Easy Chair is expounding when it seemed disposed to let the house of Shakespeare be sold, and even moved away. But England at least was wiser, and the house remains. Some day—and the Easy Chair dedicates the remark as a conciliatory conclusion to the Bugle of Freedom—some day the Bugles of that same honored name will gaze at the present printing-office, where a sympathetic Easy Chair trusts the jobs are many and profitable, and will say, with emotion, "There the parental Bugle of Freedom blew its melodious note." It will do the Buglets no harm, as they return to their palatial mansions, to reflect upon the simple and sturdy origin of their prosperity.

The Easy Chair has the more feeling upon this subject because directly opposite to the vast and many-windowed building from which it surveys the world stands the old Walton House. Eighty years ago it was one of the finest houses in town. The Square, where now business hums and roars, then softly murmured with fashion, and this was the Faubourg St. Honoré of the republican city. The house still has the stately air of the old régime. The stone pediment of the windows is elaborate and arrests the idle eye. But it is now a sailors' boarding-house. The walls are cracked, and the house has an indescribable aspect of shabbiness and neglect. Surrounded by the mere mob of three-storied modern brick buildings, it has evidently become reckless and lost to shame, like a king's heir fallen into debauched and degraded courses. Long since slighted and forgotten, its peers utterly gone, their descendants moved miles away, and become a modern generation about the reservoir on Murray Hill, the Easy Chair has yet more than once, late on a summer afternoon, when trade had gone up-town, and silence and dreams were setting in, beheld the old Walton House glancing covertly across the street at our modern, many-windowed, bustling palace of busy traffic with a look of high-born haughtiness and contempt. "There may be trade going on within my walls," it seems to say as it gazes, "but I am innocent of it. I was not built for trade, at least." And then the Easy Chair, with its own eyes fixed upon the cracked and leaning walls, seems to see it reeling away into its dingy obscurity.

It is a tradition of Franklin Square that Washington once lived in the Walton House; and it is certain that Citizen Genet married there the daughter of Governor George Clinton. Once indeed, some years since, the Easy Chair, hearing an extraordinary and novel sound like the smooth rolling of a stately chariot, thought, as the day was late and the twilight was already beginning, that some of the fine old societies of that fine old day had somehow forgotten themselves into somehow returning to the scene of so much last-century festivity; and anxious to see both them and their amazement at the transformation of the fashionable square, rolled itself to the window, and, looking out—saw the first horse-car rumbling gravely along to the neighboring ferry.

Remaining at the window, and mindful of Washington at the old Walton House, the Easy Chair was aware of Mercury, who runs the editorial errands and is a much-meditating young messenger, standing by his side with one of the editorial brethren.

"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you know who Washington was?"

"The father of his country," promptly replied the messenger.

"And what did he ever do that was notorious and disreputable?"

Mercury was plainly indignant at this question, and answered, evasively: "Well, he never told a lie, if he did chop down his father's apple-tree."

"And what else did he do?"

With energy Mercury responded: "He whipped the bloody Britishers."

"And what became of him when he grew up?"

"He was President."

"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you see that house across the street?"

"The old Walton House?"

"The old Walton House."

"Of course I do."

"Well, Mercury, he lived there."

"Who lived where?" demanded Mercury, with wide-opening eyes.

"George Washington lived in the old Walton House."

"But not the same George?" asked Mercury, doubtfully. "Not the first President?"

"The first wood-chopper of fame, and the first President," replied the brother quill.

Mercury gazed at the house earnestly for a little while and then warmly demanded, "Why don't they keep his old sign-board up to let folks know?"

Bugle of Freedom! out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the truth proceeds. It was the same instinct that caused the Easy Chair to exclaim a year ago, as it contemplated the prospect of changing the old and famous State-house, "Why take the old sign down?"

THE BOSTON MUSIC HALL

T is not, of course, possible that New York feels any chagrin that Boston has given the most colossal concert ever known upon the continent; but it is observable that, as wind and fire finally levelled the last timbers of the Boston Coliseum in the dust, the first step taken was taken towards the Beethoven Centennial Celebration, in New York. The project is not yet matured; but a vision of something very large indeed, something "metropolitan," begins to allure expectation; and Boston, having scored handsomely in the game, sits upon the ruins of her Coliseum and the profits of her Jubilee to see what New York will do.

If New York will build a proper hall for music and other public purposes, she will do well, and the Beethoven Centennial will not be in vain. The Cooper Institute hall is large enough for political meetings, and Steinway Hall is good for many purposes; but it is not a beautiful nor imposing room, as a great hall should be. The most impressive hall in the country is still the Boston Music Hall, where the great height and the two galleries, one above the other, with the organ and imposing statue of Beethoven, give a feeling of dignity. But the Music Hall lacks one of the chief characteristics of a noble room for the purposes to which it is devoted, and that is brilliancy. It is too dark. There is no smiling splendor of effect, which is always so enlivening. The darkness of the hall may be agreeable to weak eyes, it may even be described as "very much better than a glare of light," but brilliancy remains an indispensable quality of a great hall devoted to popular enjoyment.

Yet, whether dark or light, how much has been enjoyed in that stately room! What memorable figures have passed across that platform! What exquisite strains of music, sung, played, or spoken, have died along those walls! No one who is familiar with our history for the last twenty years will sit in the hall for any purpose but suddenly he sees it crowded with a silent and attentive throng; sees a reading-desk with vases of flowers, and a man[A] of sturdy figure standing behind it, whose voice is deep and penetrating and sincere; whose words are things; who has a certain rustic shyness of movement; but whose sentences roll and flash like volleys of trained soldiery, and who stands in the warmth of his own emotion and the sympathy of his audience, an indomitable gladiator, compelling the admiration even of his enemies as he fights with the Ephesian beasts. Against him, as he stands there every Sunday preaching to that vast multitude what seems to him the truth, and breaking to them what he believes to be the very bread of life, other men are preaching and praying, and the excommunications of the Vatican against Luther, shorn of their thunder and lightning, are hurled. Who is he that judges motives and sincerity? We do not know in this world what is believed, but only what is said and done.

This man, with bald head set low upon high square shoulders, who looks firmly at the great audience through spectacles, and speaks in a low half-nasal tone, visits the widows and fatherless, and keeps himself unspotted from the world. What he believes, others may question. What he is, every aspiring soul must admire. Although almost every one of them would have theologically cast him out and have recoiled from him with dismay, yet he preserves more than any other the traditional power and individualism of the old New England clergy. He applies the eternal truth and the moral law as he feels it to the life and times around him. They are heated white, and his words are blows of a sledge-hammer to mould them into noble form. That dauntless mien is the true symbol of his mental aspect as he confronts the menacing principalities and powers, and the man whose voice has so often charmed the crowded hall is one of the few who distinctly see and foretell the terrible war.

Long since his tongue is silent. He who came of the toughest stock and might have looked to live almost a century, died when it was half spent. It may have seemed to the great throng easy to climb that platform and preach a sermon every Sunday morning; but to study early and late as if he would master all knowledge; to write books, lectures, and speeches; to travel hard by night and day, losing his sleep and his food, and by the dim light in the car still pushing out the frontiers of his learning; to deny himself exercise and needful rest while the mental tension was so constant and the moral warfare so intense—this was not easy; this was to violate all the laws of life, which none knew better; and suddenly the stretched harp-string snapped, and there was no more music!

Not every one who knew his power knew into what sweetness and tenderness it could be softened, nor suspected that in the gladiator there was the loving and simple heart of the boy. Here, as the Easy Chair sits listening to the orchestra, it recalls the preacher when he was the minister of a rural parish, and used to come strolling through the fields and patches of wood to measure his wit with the friendly scholar who was the chief at Brook Farm, or to sit docile at his feet of counsel and sympathy. Or, again, it sees him in his country pulpit, the same sturdy, heroic athlete, trying and tempering the weapons with which he was to fight upon this larger scene. It was a noble character; a devoted, generous, inspiring life, a memory always hallowed in this hall. The conductor waves his baton! The symphony thunders from a hundred instruments, but through them all breathes the low tone of the remembered voice.

"Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?"

And as the concert proceeds—one of the series of the Harvard Musical Association, whose concerts are the musical pride of Boston, at which the performance is all of the purest classical music, so pure and so severe that the profane sometimes secretly ask whether melody in music is the unpardonable sin, and are peremptorily answered by the elect: "No, but rub-a-dub-dub and tumti-id-dity are not music"—and as the concert proceeds it is surely a striking spectacle. The great hall, rather dimmer than ever because of the consciousness of daylight outside, is full of people, gathered in the afternoon not only from the city, but from all the environs within twenty miles, and they sit as attentive and absorbed as a class of students at an interesting lecture. If, in such a concert, melody is not the unpardonable sin, whispering is. Woe betide the whisperer at a Harvard Musical. It were better for him, or even her, that the money for the ticket had been expended at the minstrels or the museum. You might as well be a forger, a swindler, a perjurer, or a burglar in ordinary life as to be a whisperer at a Harvard Musical. Yes, you might as well "speak right out in meetin'" itself as whisper here.

Such a disciplined audience, so quiet, so attentive, so susceptible to the slightest sigh of the oboe or wail of the violin, is a marvellous spectacle. They are hearing the finest and much of the freshest music in the world. They are not exactly sympathetic; perhaps the character of the music does not permit it. They applaud calmly—as it were, with reservations. It really seems sometimes as though they approve the music rather than enjoy it. But the Easy Chair reflects with pride that the organizer of these concerts, if such a word may be used, and certainly with no exclusion of the co-operation which alone makes such concerts possible, is a Brook-Farmer; and it complacently smiles upon the great multitude as unconscious pupils of that Arcadian influence.

And, indeed, in other days in this same city of Boston, in the halcyon days of the "Academy" concerts at the old Odeon, or still more ancient Boston Theatre, many of the Brook-Farmers were present in the flesh. Those were the days—or, rather, the nights—when Beethoven was truly introduced to America. Preluded with the pretty "Zannetta" overture by Auber, or with the "Serment" or the "Domino Noir," or with Herold's shrill "Zanetta," or some strain which would not now be tolerated in the Harvard concerts, the Fifth Symphony was played until it became familiar. And the long, willowy Schmidt stood at the head directing, proud as a general commanding his column. In the audience, earnest, interested, attentive, sparkling with humor, was Margaret Fuller, not hesitating, when the thoughtless girls whispered and tittered and giggled in the most solemn adagio strains, to lean over when the movement ended and to say to the offenders: "But let us have our turn, too; some of us came to hear the music."

There, also, was the delegation from Brook Farm, in whose appearance it was plain to see that in Arcadia the hair was worn long, that the stiff collar and cravat were repudiated, and that woollen blouses were a mute protest against the body coats of a selfish and competitive civilization. Those young fellows walked in from Brook Farm and out again. They made nothing of ten miles or so each way under the winter stars. And with them and of them, already accomplished in the beautiful science, already familiar with the great works of the great composers, was the present tutelary genius of the Harvard concerts, whose life, consecrated as critic and lover to this art, has been a true service to his city, and, reflectively, to the country.

But even Boston does not deny the charm of Theodore Thomas's orchestra and the delight of the New York Philharmonic music. Indeed, there was no audience which, for its training, was more authorized to judge the great excellence of the Thomas orchestra than that of the Harvard concerts. But when he went to Boston it was not as a doubting Thomas. He did not play Bach and Beethoven only, but he tickled the amazed multitude with positive tunes. He raised his baton, and his varied orchestra, a single instrument in his magic grasp, consented to waltzes; or, like a cathedral choir becoming suddenly a lark, trilled airy roundelays, at which the delighted (but not all assured of the propriety of delight) audience smiled and shook, and the youngest catechumens even tapped time faintly with their feet!—a sound which, could it be conceived audible in the midst of one of the Harvards, would probably cause such a shudder of horror that the hall itself would fall as by an earthquake.

Thus the Music Hall itself is a kind of symphony of memories. It is full of delightful ghosts. Among the visible figures there are a host of the unseen, and every singer, player, speaker, as he stands for an hour upon the platform, is measured by the masters of his art. But in the famous Peace Jubilee it had no part. Indeed, the musical taste of which it is peculiarly the temple resisted the colossal and continuous concert with bells, anvils, and cannon as something monstrous, and as repulsive to true art as a huge and clumsy Eastern idol. But not even the finest taste of the Music Hall denied the impressiveness and grandeur of the result. New York, in the Beethoven Centennial, will have immense advantages. The musical resources of the city are truly "metropolitan," and such should the festival be.

PUBLIC BENEFACTORS

HERE is a class of unrecognized public benefactors to which the Easy Chair wishes to offer a respectful tribute of gratitude. Their service is none the less because it is unconscious; and it is not confined to either sex. It is, besides, a very varied service, as will be readily seen as we advance in our description. Let us, then, without delay, and to begin with, specify as benefactors of this kind the young and other gentlemen who do duty at club windows, and the ladies who kindly appear only in the latest fashions. Most men, intent upon the necessary industry wherewith they maintain their families, are content to live plainly, and can seldom escape their work. There is Sunday, indeed, and a happy hour in the Park, and perhaps a run in the summer for a week or two to Long Branch or the mountains. But black care generally attends as a body-servant, not always or immediately recognizable, but like that solemn waiter whom Mr. George Hadder describes at a dinner given by Leech, the artist, who announced the feast with the air of an undertaker, and who proved to be the clerk of the neighboring parish,—a little story which may be found, with much other entertaining reading, in a handy volume of Mr. Stoddard's "Bric-à-Brac Series."

But the busy man's imagination is still at play, and he fancies a life which he does not know, a life of elegant and boundless leisure, which hovers above and around his weary routine, and a life in which his home is spacious and splendid, where he is clad in handsome clothes and never troubled by his tailor's bill, because he has always a balance in the bank; a life in which he opens his eyes in the morning, not to wonder if he has overslept himself and to plunge out of bed and into his clothes and through his breakfast, to hurry to the car or omnibus, dreading to be too late—opens his eyes, we say, not for this, but languidly to wonder, as he looks from under the hangings, how most easily and pleasantly to while away the time. A wise author says that the beauty of the landscape is only a mirage seen from the windows of a diligence. So is the life of leisure which the busy man sees in fancy and in the tales which in his hasty way he sometimes reads on a rainy Sunday or in the evening. Yet it would be mere fable to him except for the benevolent genii in the club window. As he hurries homeward when his day's work is done, he lifts his eye as he passes upon the sidewalk, or he peers from the omnibus window, and lo! there stands the man to whom this leisure of his dreams is a daily reality.

The figure which is making these dreams real, and which he cannot but regard as a benefactor, stands in the spacious window, and there is often a group of such figures; always with the hat on, and generally with a cane in the hand, and such garments as are seen only in the plates of the fashions and upon the tailor's lay-figures. Why, being in a warm house, he should wear his hat, when he takes it off upon entering all other houses, doth not appear. But it is part of his office to wear it. For this representative of leisure models himself upon the habits of similar ministers in those tales which the busy man sometimes reads; and as Fitz-Clarence Mortimer wears his hat in the club window upon Pall Mall, so must the hat be worn in our own club windows. Do not think that hatted figure gazing at the passing ladies and carriages rolling to the Park is a useless dandy. Nature wastes nothing. Nature does not inspire him to pay tailors and shoemakers and jewellers and hatters, and then to stand sucking the head of a cane in a club window without a purpose. The brilliancy and perfume of flowers and the song of birds, as science shows, are not for our delight only; they serve the reproduction and perpetuity of life. The final cause of that hatted figure is not the advertising of a tailor; it is the effect upon the imagination. It serves the end of all art. It makes real to the busy citizen that life of leisure and of opportunity of which he reads and dreams.

Nor does it end with the suggestion. As the busy man goes by and beholds the apparition, he reflects upon the use of such opportunity as is revealed to him at the window. That man, he says, born to a fortune, or having by faithful industry and sagacity early amassed it, is now master of his life. He commands time and money, the two levers which are so powerful in heaving the world forward. He has but to devise how he can be of service to others, and obey the leading of his generous soul. Think of the hearths and the hearts that he cheers! Think of the knowledge that he acquires, the studies that he pursues, for the enlightenment of legislation and the practical advantage of government! Think how gladly he bears his part in the work of organized charities! He has what so few of us have—time and money. He can do so much, so much! What can he not do? So muses the busy man, who must give all his day, and some of the night often, to earning the pittance upon which he lives. And as he muses his good heart asks him why he should require everything of the hatted figure of leisure in the club window, and discharge his own debt of duty by thinking how easily another can discharge his. Everything in its degree, he says, as his steps quicken with the thought. One star differeth from another star in glory. Why, because that man, born in the purple or winning it, can do so much, can I do nothing? Because his whole life is that leisure of endless opportunity of which I can only dream, have I no minutes, no chances? Haunted by this thought, he finds even his full-stretched day elastic. He pulls it out until he, too, cheers some hearth and heart that would otherwise have been frozen! and the busy man is busier, indeed, but happier, and the amount of human suffering is a little less. In this light does not the hatted figure at the window become a real benefactor? Nothing, indeed, is further from its mind. It does not even see the busy citizen by whom it is seen. But Nature has attained the object for which she placed it in a club window with a hat on and sucking the head of a cane.

MR. TIBBINS'S NEW-YEAR'S CALL

R. Tibbins wishes that his experience in making New-Year's calls may be made useful as an illustration of the deceitfulness of appearances. He is one of the gentlemen who do not keep dogs, although he lives in the country, and who decline social visits to persons who do. Mr. Tibbins is, however, just and impartial. "My friends," he says, "shall not complain of any obscurity in my conduct. I simply offer them the alternative, me or your dog—not both. If your tastes and preferences are such that you will have large or small animals lying within your gates, yelping and growling at every person who enters, smelling at ankles, and producing lively apprehensions which are not in the least allayed by calling the beast a good fellow, and remarking that he was never known to bite,—if," says Mr. Tibbins to his friends, "these are your preferences, we will not quarrel. I respect your idiosyncrasies, and I beg you to respect mine, while I embrace this occasion to mention that among the most prominent of mine is an indisposition to have my ankles smelled at by dogs of any breed or of any size, whether they are good fellows or not, and an insuperable disgust with the barking of beasts when I go to make a call. That it is very selfish in you or any person to subject his friends to such ordeals I do not say; that I leave entirely to your own judgment, only remarking that although black snakes and green snakes are not venomous reptiles, and are probably 'good fellows,' I do not think that those who delight in having them coiling and gliding about their parlors ought to be vexed with their neighbors for not calling. The line must be drawn somewhere," says Mr. Tibbins; "you may not draw it until you come to snakes; I draw it at dogs."

When, therefore, you stroll about the delightful country in his neighborhood and mark the abodes of the rich and great, and say to him, "That is a charming place," Mr. Tibbins answers, "Yes, he has dogs; I never go there." Mr. Tibbins was naturally very much exhilarated by the hydrophobia excitement last summer, and hoped at one time that the public feeling might be carefully kindled to a general crusade against dogs. "I lately read in Mr. Warner's letter from the Nile," he said, "of an African king who had never seen a horse until Colonel Long came riding into his capital. Think, oh, my friend, of the happy island valley of Avillon, where never a dog barked loudly or was ever seen." Of course so severe a taste as Tibbins's in a world so largely canine produces inconvenience, as a dislike to butter in a society which holds to a natural and necessary relation between bread and butter will often expose the dissenter to difficulty. Such a man, in a crowded and elegant assembly, who at supper has incautiously bitten a heavily buttered sandwich, in the midst of a bout of badinage with youth and beauty, understands the emotion of those who, with Mr. Tibbins, dislike to have their ankles smelled at by dogs, yet who suddenly, within a neighbor's grounds and far from help, perceive that a dog is actually engaged in that office.

But Mr. Tibbins went out merrily upon New-Year's morning, resolved at least to pay one visit long neglected to a neighbor who had become his neighbor the summer before, who had given no signs of dogs, and who, as Tibbins assured himself, was much too sensible a man to allow them about the house and grounds. Our friend began the day prosperously, finding everybody cordial and gay, and doing, as he thought, his full share towards the enlivenment of each call. At last he came to the new neighbor's, and went humming gayly up the neat plank-walk from the gate, when, turning briskly around the house—putting it, as it were, between himself and retreat—he was advancing rapidly towards the front door when he suddenly stopped, with a sickening sense of betrayal, as it were, in the house of a friend, for directly before him, within easy spring, so to speak, lay a large dog upon the door-mat and directly under the bell. He was asleep, and upon perceiving him Mr. Tibbins, as if upon tiptoe for silence, reconnoitred the situation. To advance and ring the bell was simple madness, for the dog would of course awake the moment a foot struck the step, and in the confusion of sudden awakening and of close quarters with an intruder he would probably be very reckless and sanguinary, and not in the least amenable to the "good fellow" blandishment. Mr. Tibbins, therefore, without moving, looked at the windows, hoping to see somebody looking out whom he might with beaming pantomime summon to the door, and so save himself the contact which seemed to be inevitable. But there was no one looking out, and the closed windows seemed to him to stare with blank indifference, so that he says he had had before no idea how cruel windows can be. It then occurred to him that if he could open communication with the kitchen, and entice some maid or man to the door without ringing, the difficulty would disappear, because the maid or man would pacify the dog. But to reach the kitchen required a lateral movement which would leave the enemy directly across his line of retreat. Moreover, any movement whatever exposed Mr. Tibbins to the risk of making a noise, which would arouse the foe and precipitate the engagement. He therefore maintained his position, looking hopefully towards the kitchen, but, seeing no one, he reluctantly held a further counsel with himself.

The obvious heroic course was to step upon the piazza and ring the bell. But he saw again that it was impossible to touch the bell without bringing himself close to the dog, who would then, of course, awake and snap immediately at the nearest object, which would be Tibbins his leg. And what was the possible use of heroism under such circumstances? He might as well advance and kick the dog. But was the dog asleep? Was he not dead? Was he not—why shouldn't he be—a stuffed dog, an old family favorite, perhaps, now placed upon his familiar resting-place as his own monument? This thought cleared the prospect for a moment, but instant gloom shut down again, as Mr. Tibbins saw a slight breathing motion, and perceived that the beast still lived. One of the advantages, or misfortunes, of New-Year's Day in the country, according to the point of view, is the infrequency of visitors. To our friend this infrequency seemed to be, upon this occasion, a misfortune. Had there only been a merry group turning the corner at the moment, he would have joyously joined it, and so long as he could see other legs between himself and his enemy his soul would have been at rest.

But his position was peculiarly solitary, nor did any other visitor appear, and Mr. Tibbins remained for some time motionless regarding the situation. There was no sign of relief. No visitor came to go in, so none came out. No friendly face shone at the windows, no helping hand opened the door. At any moment the dog might open his eyes, and, in that case, he would certainly not be content with a survey of the situation. Mr. Tibbins, who is no mean classic, remembered Xenophon and various other great and renowned commanders who retired in good order and not in the least demoralized, and reflecting that the sage truly defined prudence as the crown of wisdom, he gently turned and, careful by no rude noise to disturb the peaceful slumbers of an innocent animal which, some poets have suggested, might properly share our heaven, he tiptoed quietly around the house, and rapidly descending the plank-walk, firmly closed the gate behind him, and felt his heart swelling with gratitude for a great mercy.

A few days afterwards he met his neighbor, and said to him that he had designed to call upon him on New-Year's Day, but that he had discovered a dog in the path, and as he never called where dogs were kept, he had been compelled to lose the pleasure of a visit. He then told the story of his attempt, in the midst of which the neighbor broke into the most prolonged and immoderate laughter, and when Mr. Tibbins had ended, said to him, "My dear sir, that dog is immemorially old and superannuated, and he is blind, deaf, and toothless."

"Indeed!" replied Mr. Tibbins. "But he might not have been."

"And yet I will confess," he said to the Easy Chair, later, "that the incident is a very pretty sermon upon the deceitfulness of appearances, which I respectfully offer to your acceptance."

THE NEW ENGLAND SABBATH

HERE are still villages among the hills of New England—we cannot call them remote hills, because the locomotive darts up every valley and fills the woods upon the highest hill-side with the shrill, eager cry of hurrying life and bustling human society, but even where the steam is heard, softened and far away, there are yet villages nestling in the hills in which also the old New England Sabbath lingers and nestles. The village street, broad and arched with thick-foliaged sugar-maples, is always still. In the warm silence of a summer noon, as you sit reading upon the piazza or in the shade of a tree, the only moving object in the street is a load of hay slowly passing under the maples, drawn by oxen, or a group of loiterers in front of the village store pitching quoits. The creak of the wagon, the ring of the quoits, or the laugh and exclamation of the players are the only sounds, except, indeed, the musical clangor of the blacksmith's anvil, as his quick hammer moulds the sparkling horseshoe or beats out the bar.

These are drowsy summer sounds that only emphasize the stillness of the week-day. But the stillness of Sunday is startling. A faint tinkle of cows in the early morning filing to the pasture, the warning shout of the barefooted boy who drives them, are the only sounds that break the Sabbath silence, except, again, the chirp and song of birds in the trees, which are no respecters of days, and which sing as blithely, even in the deacon's maples, on "Sabbath morning" as in the tavern ash on the Fourth of July. The cows pass and all is still. The street is deserted, save by, at intervals, a solitary figure upon some small errand. The sun lies hot upon the pastures and hill-sides. There is no mail on Sunday, no newspaper, no barber to visit. Now and then men in their daily dress are seen at the barn door or in the shed or yard doing their chores. They are bringing wood, milking, feeding the cattle. But all is spectral. There is no sound. Even the wind in summer fears to be a Sabbath-breaker. It is an enchanted realm. Have the blue-laws such vitality? Are we still held by their grim spell?

It is nine o'clock, and the meeting-house bell, with a bold voice of authority, as if it had the sole right to disturb the silence and to speak out, warns the village and the outlying farms that it is the Sabbath, and everybody must prepare to come to meeting; and the little children hear the bell with awe as if it were a living voice, and sacred as a part of the Sabbath, and to be heeded under unknown penalties. Obey thy father and mother; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt go to meeting—seem to them all commandments of the first table. The sound of the bell lingers in their ears and hearts as a Thus saith the Lord. And, lo! at the second bell, the men, who have changed their daily dress and put on their Sabbath clothes, issue from the houses on the village street with their wives and children, and through the street, closely following each other and pounding along in a cloud of dust, comes the long line of wagons from the farms. The sun beats down remorselessly, and the man in heavy woollens, such as he wears in the sleigh in January, sits between two women in their Sabbath garments, the horses trot with a Sabbath jog, and all turn up to the stone platform by the meeting-house, upon which the women alight, and the man drives the horse under the shed, and then chats soberly with the others at the door.

But the minister passes in, not clad in gown and bands and cocked hat of the older day, but in plain black clothes. The chatting loiterers follow him in. The bell which has gathered the village into the sacred fold rests from its labors. There is no one in the street. There is no sound. But after a few moments the music of "Old Hundred" pours out of the open doors and windows of the meeting-house, sung by a well-balanced and well-trained choir. It is the opening hymn, and it has a full, vigorous, triumphant sound. Once more Thus saith the Lord. There is another interval of silence, but at a little distance you can hear the voice of reading and prayer. Hark! another hymn. It is "Federal Street," or "Coronation," or "Dundee," but whatever it is, it is a strain from other years, and voices and faces and scenes and days that are no more all blend in the familiar music, and a Sabbath benediction rests upon the listener's soul.

A longer silence follows, broken by fragmentary sounds of energetic speech. Is the preacher emphasizing and elucidating the five points? Is he denouncing and alarming that tough regiment in woollen, or winning the wondering and doubting mind? Is his sermon upon an official and perfunctory discourse by which little children are soothed to sleep and in which the elders like unqualified damnation and the hottest fire as a toper likes "power" in his dram? Or is his pure and manly life and conversation his true preaching, and the Sabbath sermon only a statement of the principles of such holy living, and a revival of the colors in the immortal portrait of the holy life of the Gospel?

Before we can answer there is a burst of music, then two strokes of the bell to announce that "meeting is out;" then an issue of the congregation, a procession homeward, a driving away of wagons, and soon once more the solitary street. In the afternoon there is the Sabbath-school, and the good pastor preaches at one of the school-houses in a farther part of the town. But it is always the Sabbath, in every sight and sound until the sun has set, and then from the neighboring house upon the hill above the village street comes a clear, resonant soprano voice singing hymns and prolonging the solemn spell of the holy day.

The tithing-men are gone, and the deacons do not sit severe and conspicuous in the meeting-house, and the minister has not the air of a lord spiritual of the village; and the genius of modern times and the spirit of the age are entertained with full consciousness of what they are. But it is still the sober and constrained and decorous New England Sabbath which recurs every seventh day; and the honest, industrious, intelligent, self-respecting, plain-living village recalls remotely the day of the severer dispensation, and illustrates the noble manhood that the severe dispensation fostered.

THE REUNION OF ANTISLAVERY VETERANS. 1884

N a pleasant day and evening during the autumn a few venerable graybeards and bald-heads met in a church in the city, and sang and spoke, and told old tales of former meetings, and rejoiced that they had not died before their eyes had seen the glory. The meeting produced no ripple upon the surface of the city life. The newspapers printed brief reports of it among the other city news. But the return of the Philadelphia baseball players, and the "mill" between Sullivan and other bruisers, challenged very much more space and a very much more public attention.

Yet fifty years before, when those gray beards were brown, and those bald heads were shaggy as Samson's, their meeting convulsed the city, and occasioned a riot which was the precursor of similar desperate disturbances, and the forerunner of one of the greatest of civil wars. The meeting was then denounced in advance in double-leaded editorials, which were the direct, and doubtless the intentional incitements to bloodshed and the subversion of popular rights; for the popular right which is the foundation of all other rights is that of free speech. The mere announcement of the meeting drew a vast and excited throng to prevent it. Men of standing in the community made themselves leaders of the mob, and occupied in advance the entrance to the hall where it was to take place. The proprietors of the hall, appalled by the evidences of furious hostility to the meeting and its purposes, refused to open it to those who had engaged it, and they went elsewhere.

But the obstructing mob did not relax their purpose. They hastened to another hall where men of respected and even noted names harangued them violently, introducing resolutions decrying the purpose of the original meeting; and suddenly hearing that the projectors were assembled elsewhere, the crowd rushed wildly to the place, which was a small chapel, and, swarming in eager for crime, found the chapel deserted. The holders of the meeting had accomplished their object and retired from the rear of the building as the mob burst in through the front doors. The press of the city, with one or two notable exceptions, the next morning celebrated the intended suppression of a peaceful meeting by an angry mob as if it had been a national victory over piratical invaders. It denounced the leaders of the meeting with a malignant bitterness with which the familiars of the Inquisition might have anathematized Luther and his friends, and the few voices in the papers which protested against treating the holders of the meeting with violence, yet spoke of them in a strain of abhorrence which virtually branded them as public enemies.

Who were these dangerous and desperate men whose mere proposal to meet and organize themselves for a purpose which was plainly declared, and which was to be sought by legal methods only, had so profoundly disturbed the city and startled the press into sounding a furious alarm? They were a few persons who asserted the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and demanded that all Americans should enjoy the rights which the Declaration affirmed to belong to all men. The object of the meeting was the formation of a city antislavery society, and those who assembled in October of this year were the survivors of that meeting. Their object has been accomplished, and the views whose announcement fifty years ago convulsed the city are now common-places of universal acceptance. It would be incredible that the sentiment of the city within easy memory of men living was so hostile to the American principle and its fundamental guarantees if a still later experience had not illustrated the same hostility.

It seems almost cruel to recall the names of those who spoke of the purposes of men who proposed to appeal to public opinion against a monstrous public wrong, and of the men themselves, as "the folly, madness, and mischief of these bold and dangerous men," and as "persons who owe what notoriety they have to their love of meddling with agitating subjects." This was the way in which those who thought themselves to be in the van of freedom and of civilization spoke of the beginning of one of the great historic movements in the progress of the race, and of men who took up the work of the fathers of the country only to carry it further and logically forward. It was with this stupid and insolent contempt that the press, which prided itself upon its liberty, and in a country which guaranteed the right of free peaceful assembly and free speech, struck at both of them as fatal to the common welfare. Had Philip II. and the sanguinary Alva controlled a press in the Netherlands three centuries ago, they would have denounced the beginning of the great contest with the black despotism of the Inquisition in the same tone of vindictive hatred and disdain with which that little meeting at the Chatham Street chapel was assailed by the press of New York in 1833.

It is no wonder that the pioneers of that famous evening wished to come together upon its fiftieth anniversary to rejoice that they had entered into the promised land. The fact that their meeting excited no general interest, and was almost unobserved, was the evidence of the completeness of their triumph. Their "folly, madness, and mischief" have become patriotic wisdom. The "bold and dangerous men" have grown into a mighty nation. And for the brethren of the press that anniversary has some very significant suggestions. First and chief is the consideration that the spirit of the newspapers, and not of the meeting in Chatham Street chapel, was the dangerous spirit. There is no blacker traitor to popular institutions than the man who incites an angry mob against peaceful meetings and free speech. Free speech is precious not for popular but for unpopular opinions. It is to secure in the land of the Inquisition a voice against the inquisition; in the land of slavery, a voice for liberty. That freedom has overthrown those two tyrants by developing a public opinion which has made them impossible. The first duty of a free press is to defend the right of the free assertion of unpopular opinions, however dangerous they may seem to government or to society; and it is but just to record that the only paper in New York which, "when this old coat was new," stated clearly and conclusively the true principle upon this subject was the Journal of Commerce.

If, among the exulting crowd that welcomed King William of glorious and happy memory to England, a spectator had seen the flowing white locks of some old soldier of Cromwell's Ironsides, as the men of Hadley were fabled to have seen the venerable head of Goffe, the regicide, suddenly appearing as their deliverer, he would have felt his heart throbbing with gratitude at the vision of one of the heroes who founded the liberty which William came to complete. So some musing observer in the church where the reverend graybeards met to renew their friendship and to tell their story might well have gazed with gratitude, amid the peace and prosperity of the country, upon the thinned and thinning remnant of that old guard whose constancy and devotion made that peace and prosperity possible.

REFORM CHARITY

HE State Board of Charities in New York would deal severely with Elia if it found him upon the street, stammering out his admiration of the fine histrionic powers of a beggar, and searching in his pocket for a penny. Lamb said that it was shameful to pay a crown for a seat in the theatre to enjoy the representation of woes that you knew to be fictitious, and to grudge a sixpence to the street performer who was so excellent that you could not tell whether his sufferings were real or affected. He is undoubtedly responsible for a great deal of easy and irresponsible alms-giving, which greatly increases human suffering and the expense of society. It is not possible to conceive anything more comical than Lamb's probable reception of a politico-economical or scientific view of charity. He would have felt his genius for humor to be hopelessly surpassed. His view would have been the ludicrous aspect of the idea which is more solemnly held by those who regard ordinary alms-giving as one of the cardinal virtues, and who have a vague conviction that a liberal disbursement of money to the poor in this world is a strong lien upon endless felicity in the next. There is, indeed, something very affecting in the old picture of conventional charity—the groups of disabled and destitute assembling at the great gate or in the courtyard, and the benign priests distributing food and clothing. And there is a similar picturesque interest in the ancient English bounties—a trust which secures to every wayfarer who may demand it a loaf of bread or a mug of beer.

That charity meant this, and nothing more, was long the conviction, as it was the tradition, of society. It was thought to have the highest Christian sanction. There were to be always poor among us. The poor were to be relieved, and relief, or charity, consists in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Yet out of that simple, unreflecting, seemingly innocent faith, have sprung enormous suffering, demoralization, and crime. The whole subject of charitable relief was as misunderstood as that of penal imprisonment before John Howard. There will be criminals, was the theory, and they must be punished. They must therefore be secured in jails, and the object of imprisonment is intimidation from crime, not the improvement of criminals. The result of this view was that society dismissed the subject, and regarded prisoners as mere outcasts, so that the inhumanity of their treatment was revolting. Happily the neglect revenged itself. The jails became sores. They were nurseries of loathsome disease. Judges and sheriffs were smitten by the pestilence that exhaled from prisons, and John Howard, like a purifying angel, in cleansing the prisons began also to cleanse society.

So alms-giving and the relief of the poor arrested the attention of humane persons who were not content with Elia's philosophy. They had sometimes watched the skilful street performer, and had seen him slip round the corner and spend at the gin-palace in a dram the money which, with some fine histrionic genius, he had besought for the sick wife and the starving children. They found the wife was also an accomplished histrione, and that the children were receiving parental instruction in the same calling. They found that the amiable, careless, unquestioning alms-giving was breeding a class of paupers, people who did not seek work nor wish to work, but who lived, and who meant to live, by beggary, who bred their children to do likewise, and whose haunts and associations and habits became great nurseries of crime. The evil had become enormous, and was most deeply seated before it was accurately observed. But wise men and wise women everywhere are now, and for some years have been, earnestly engaged in studying how to save society from the curse of pauperism, while taking care that all helpless and innocent suffering shall be relieved. This is what Elia and his amiable, thoughtless friends denounce as "machine charity." But their amiability is only selfishness. How many of those who decry "machine charity" ever went home with a single street beggar to whom they gave, or ever ascertained or cared whether his story was true, or told for any other purpose than to get the price of a dram? What they call their Christian charity and common humanity and apostolic alms-giving is often mere fostering of lying, drunkenness, and crime, and the indefinite increase of suffering.

It is upon this spirit that knaves and charlatans play and prey in establishing great charitable agencies, of which they are managers, and, in the vivid French phrase, touch the funds. There are thousands of kind-hearted people in every city who devote a share of their income to charity. They know that there is immense suffering, and they would gladly do their share in relieving it. But they do not know how to do it. They are conscious that there is deception upon all sides, and they cannot spare the time to ascertain for themselves who, of the host of the poor, are proper objects of charity. But it is only less difficult to decide upon a trusty agency. Here is the chance of the ingenious and plausible rascal. If he can only obtain the co-operation of those whose names make societies respectable, and who will permit him to be the society, and especially to disburse the moneys, he will be as satisfied as Ferdinand Count Fathom with any of his "little games." It is not always difficult for such a rascal to secure the conditions of his success. The consequences are both lamentable and ludicrous. For under this solemn form of a Christian charitable foundation the most selfish purposes are served, and when the mischief is exposed it is denounced as one of the abuses to which delegated or "machine" charity is inevitably liable. To perfect the comedy, this criticism is usually made by those whose own alms are generally transferred from their pockets directly to the till of the dram-shop.

It is evident from the letters that have been written to the newspapers during the winter that there are those who sincerely think that careful inquiry regarding poverty, and regulations of relief based upon it, must somehow deaden human sympathy and deepen the suffering of the poor. This is so ingeniously incorrect a theory that it would be exceedingly amusing if it were not so sincere and even general. The very first thing that careful investigation accomplishes is to acquaint the comfortable class with the real condition of the suffering, and to show the latter that they are not forsaken or turned off with uninquiring alms. They are conscious of an intelligent sympathy with which falsehood will be of no avail. They are taught self-respect by the perception that they are not forsaken, and self-respect is the main-spring of successful exertion. When the street-beggar understands that his tale will be tested, that if he needs succor he will receive it, and that if his plea is but asking for a dram he will not receive it, the number of street-beggars will sensibly decrease. And the sturdy tramp and professional pauper, when they know that they must go to the work-house or starve, will often conclude that even work is better than the poor-house, and they too will cease to be a nuisance and a terror.

Nor need it be feared, on the other hand, that if irresponsible street-giving is stopped nobody will investigate the actual situation of the poor. What is asked of the street-giver is not that he will close his pocket and his hand and his heart and his soul; but that, if he will not take the trouble to inquire before giving, he will give his alms to somebody who will take that trouble, that his alms may be true charity and relieve suffering, instead of relieving nothing whatever, but fostering vice and crime. He must see that he is not a good Christian exercising the heavenly gift of charity, but an indolent and reckless citizen who is promoting poverty and multiplying the public burden of the honest poor. He is that lazy absurd boy who wishes to eat his cake and have it. He would satisfy his soul that he is good because he gives, without seeing that to give ignorantly is, socially, to be bad. Nobody is exhorted to surrender inquiry to others. Every one may inquire for himself. If a beggar stops you and asks for a penny in the name of God, and says that his family is starving, go and see if it is so. If you have not the time—O sophistical Sybarite! inclination—send him to those who, as you know, will inquire. Will his family starve in the meantime? That is something you do not believe yourself. Do you fear that the visitor will not go? Then go yourself. Do your engagements prevent? Then you know that it is a thousand to one the story is but a plea for whiskey. Will you take the chance? Then you become an immediate accomplice in the vast multiplication of hereditary pauperism and crime. The pretence of your giving is Christian charity and humanity; the real cause is indolent self-indulgence and saving yourself trouble.

The charity that is beautiful in the old stories is actual charity. It is the friendly feeding of those who are really hungry, and the clothing of those who shiver with the cold. The Elia's charity is only a refined selfishness, a whim of humor. He rewarded the deceit, he did not relieve the suffering. Of course, his plea was an exquisite jest, and so he felt it to be. But his jest is made earnest and changed into a sober rule of life by gentle Sybarites, who, if they have ever heard of the Englishman Edward Denison, are lost in amazement and cigarette smoke as they meditate his career. The story may be found in a tender and graphic sketch in the entertaining volume of papers by the author of the admirable History of the English People, J. R. Green. Edward Denison, born in 1840, was the son of the Bishop of Salisbury, and nephew of the Speaker, and was educated at Oxford. Then he travelled on the Continent, and studied the condition of the Swiss peasantry. Returning to England, he engaged practically in the work of poor relief as an almoner of a charitable society. He soon learned the uselessness of relief by doles, and, determined to deal with the subject thoroughly, he withdrew from the clubs, Pall Mall, and Mayfair, and taking lodgings in Stepney, made himself the friend of the poor, built and endowed a school, in which he taught, gave lectures, and organized a self-helping relief. He went to France and to Scotland to study their poor-law systems. In 1868 he was elected to Parliament, where his knowledge of the general subject would have been invaluable. But his health failed before he took his seat. He sailed for Melbourne, still intent upon his life's purpose, and died there seven years ago, in his thirtieth year. A little volume of his letters has been published, and Mr. Green's affectionate and pathetic sketch draws the outline of this true modern knight and gentleman, the Sir Launfal of this time. The street-giver, seeking a rule of conduct, may more profitably heed the counsel of Edward Denison than the delicious humor of Charles Lamb.

BICYCLE RIDING FOR CHILDREN

HERE has been some joking over Mr. Gerry's proposal to bring Mr. Barnum to legal judgment for violating the statute in exhibiting the young riders upon the bicycle. Mr. Barnum invited a distinguished company, including eminent physicians, to witness the performance; the physicians added that it was no more than healthful exercise. Thereupon the cynics, who have never given a thought or lifted a hand to relieve suffering or to remedy wrong, sneer at superserviceable philanthropy. Mr. Bergh also complained of the killing of the elephant Pilate, and when the matter was explained there was contemptuous chuckling at the sentimental tomfoolery of philanthropic busybodies, and the usual exhortation to reformers to supply themselves with common-sense.

But meantime the mere knowledge that there is an association for the protection of children from cruelty, and another for the defence of animals against human brutes, is in itself a protection for both classes of victims. No parent or employer can wreak his vengeance or ill-temper upon a child, no driver or owner can torment an animal, without the consciousness that some agent may learn of it, or perhaps see it, and bring the offender to justice. Both of these movements, which at first seemed to so many intelligent persons to be strange and impracticable fancies, are among the greatest proofs of the deeper and wiser humanity of the age. These are illustrations of the same spirit which organizes charity and ameliorates penal systems. Mr. Bergh and Mr. Gerry are in the right line of moral descent from John Howard and Sir Samuel Romilly and Mrs. Fry and Miss Carpenter, and when Mr. McMaster brings his history of the American people down to the last decade he will record the purpose and work of the two modest societies as among the striking illustrations of the actual progress of that people.

It is in Lecky's detailed account of the horrible carelessness and suffering, and of the inhuman desertion of prisoners and the poor of the last century in England that we get the true key to the actual condition of the country. Mr. McMaster has thrown a similar light upon the same inhumanity in this country a hundred years ago. Yet every endeavor to correct that inhumanity, to remember the man in the criminal, and wisely to succor a brother in the beggar, has been greeted as an effort to make a silk purse of a sow's ear, to make water run uphill, as the rose-water philanthropy and the coddling of scoundrels, by the same spirit which sneers at the work of Mr. Gerry and Mr. Bergh. Left to that spirit England would be to-day where it was a hundred and fifty years ago, and the signal triumphs of the century would have been unwon. Such a spirit is mingled of ignorance, cowardice, and stupid selfishness. It is always the obstruction of advancing humanity, always the contempt of generous and courageous minds.

It is true, undoubtedly, that every forward step is not wisely taken, and that there are the most absurd parodies of philanthropy, as well as a great deal of pseudo philanthropy, which is merely the mask of knavery. We have taken great pleasure in these very columns in stripping off sundry masks of such philanthropy which is pursued by impostors of both sexes in this city. Common-sense, careful scrutiny, and intelligence, are indispensable in every form of charity and beneficence. But because of the conduct of Shepherd Cowley shall nothing be done for the relief of wretched children? Because of the elaborate system of fraudulent charity of the reverend knave who has been exposed here and elsewhere shall the poor be left without succor?

Everything said and done by the friends of the societies for protecting children and animals may not be wise; but there could be nothing more exquisitely ridiculous than to deride the societies and their labors for that reason. Those who lead the van of reforms are so much in earnest that they must sometimes offend, sometimes mistake, or nothing would ever be done. Emerson says that if Providence is resolved to achieve a result it over-loads the tendency. This produces enthusiasm and fanaticism, and also the indomitable devotion and energy which cannot be defeated. It is when the new way to the Indies becomes his one idea that Columbus discovers America. It is when Luther defies all the opposing devils, although they are as many as the tiles upon the roofs, that he establishes Protestantism.

The doctors and the distinguished company decide upon Mr. Gerry's complaint that the bicycle-riding of the children at Barnum's is healthful and not injurious; and to Mr. Bergh's remonstrance about killing the elephant Pilot, Mr. Barnum replies that he is not likely to inflict a serious loss upon himself by killing one of his animals unless it were clearly necessary. All this may be conceded. But it is very fortunate for the community that there are sentinels of humanity who will summarily challenge and compel a clear and complete explanation. It appears that the riding of the children is not harmful, and the court dismisses Mr. Gerry's complaint. The result is not that Mr. Gerry is "left in a questionable position," but that every circus manager and every exhibitor of children knows that a vigilant eye watches his conduct, and that a prompt hand will deal even with seeming cruelty and severity and exposure. It is very possible that Pilot was despatched as humanely as practicable. But Mr. Bergh's challenge was not an impertinent intermeddling. It reminds every brute in the city that he cannot lose his temper and kick his horse with impunity. Both acts establish a moral consciousness of constant surveillance, which stays the angry hand and succors the limping animal and the friendless child. It is those who relieve pain and suffering, not those who laugh at their zeal, whom history remembers and mankind blesses.

THE DEAD BIRD UPON CYRILLA'S HAT AN ENCOURAGEMENT OF "SLARTER"

HE story of the butcher who looked out in the soft summer moonlight and announced that something ought to be done on so fine a night, and he guessed he would go out and "slarter," was told to Melissa, who ejaculated pretty ohs and ahs, and said, "But how vulgar." Yet had some dreadful Nathan heard the words, and beheld Melissa as she spoke, he would have raised his voice and pointed his finger and said, "Thou art the woman!" For the delicate Melissa was the wearer of dead birds in her hat, and encouraged the "slarter" of the loveliest and sweetest of innocent song-birds merely to gratify her vanity. The butcher, madam, may be vulgar, but at least he does not kill in order to wear the horns and tails of his victims.

"How hideous!" exclaims Belinda, as she sees the pictured head of the savage islander, "rings in his nose! how hideous!" And the gentle Belinda shakes the rings in her ears in protest against such barbarism. Sylvia, too, laughs gayly at the wife of the Chinese ambassador stumping along upon invisible feet; and Sylvia would laugh more freely except for her invisible waist. "It is so preposterous to squeeze your feet," she remarks; "it is a deformity, it outrages nature;" and the superb and benignant Venus of Milo smiles from her pedestal in the corner, and with her eyes fixed upon Sylvia's waist, echoes Sylvia's words, "It is a deformity, it outrages nature."

The Puritan preacher who, somewhat perverting his text, cried, "Topknot, come down!" declared war upon the innocent ribbons that, carefully trained and twisted and exalted into a towering ornament, doubtless nodded from the head of Priscilla to the heart of John Alden and melted it completely, while the preacher could not even catch his wandering eyes. The preacher's course was clear. Topknots must come down if they allured to a sweeter worship than he inculcated. But those ribbons were made for that pretty purpose of adornment; they were not victims. They silenced no song; they hardened no heart; they rewarded no wanton cruelty; they destroyed no charm of the field or wood. They were not memorials of heartless slaughter. They were simply devices by which maidenly charms were heightened, and a little grace and taste and beauty lent to the sombre Puritan world.

But the topknots of to-day are bought at a monstrous price. Carlyle says of certain enormous fire-flies on an island of the East Indies that, placed upon poles, they illuminate the journeys of distinguished people by night. "Great honor to the fire-flies!" he exclaims; "but—" It is a great honor to the golden-winged woodpecker to be shot and then daintily poised upon the hat of Cyrilla as, enveloped in a cloud of dudes, she promenades the Avenue on Sunday afternoon; great honor to the woodpecker; but—The naughty dog in the country who hunts and kills chickens is made to wear a dead chicken hung around his neck, and is at last shamed out of his murderous fancy. How if Cyrilla, strolling in the summer fields, haply with young Laurence hanging enthralled upon her sweet eyes, her low replies, should chance to meet the cur disgraced with the dead chicken hung around his neck, she with the dead woodpecker upon her head!

The lovely lady puts a premium upon wanton slaughter and unspeakable cruelty. She incites the murderous small boy and all the idlers and vagrants to share and shoot the singing bird, and silence the heavenly music of the summer air. She cries for "slarter," and, like the white cat enchanted into the Princess, who leaps to the floor in hot chase when the mouse appears, the Queen of Beauty, with a feathered corpse for a crown, begins to seem even to Laurence unhappily enchanted.

CHEAPENING HIS NAME

DISTINGUISHED public man once said to the Easy Chair that after an election in which he had taken part, and in which his party had succeeded, he always signed the recommendations of anybody who asked him for any office he wished. And when the Easy Chair remarked that he must have sadly cheapened his name with the appointing power, the excellent statesman answered, "Not at all; because I wrote by mail that no attention was to be paid to my request." Perhaps he thought that this was not cheapening his name. But what must the appointing power have secretly thought of a man who respected his own name so little? And an eminent public officer of long service told the Easy Chair that a recommendation was once delivered to him by an office-seeker from a President of the United States; and when the officer, delaying the applicant, asked the President if he really wished the person appointed, the President replied, "Not in the least; but I gave the letter to him to get rid of him."

Any Easy Chair must be often reminded of such incidents when it reads in the papers the cards and notices and invitations and petitions to which conspicuous names are attached. It discovers, for instance, that the most eminent ministers, merchants, lawyers, and capitalists are very anxious to hear Dr. Dunderhead upon the history of chaos. They compliment the learned doctor's erudition and eloquence, and beg him to name the evening when he will speak to them. The doctor replies in blushing rhetoric, and will yield to their desires on Thursday evening, the 32d. On that evening the Easy Chair, which has perused the correspondence with eager expectation, and which has a profound interest in chaos, repairs to the hall, finds a dozen surprised stragglers like itself, but not one of the conspicuous clergymen, lawyers, merchants, or capitalists, and goes home in bewilderment to read in the morning's paper an elaborate report of Dr. Dunderhead's lecture, delivered at the request of the following distinguished gentlemen—who are duly named; and it slowly dawns upon the Easy Chair that it has been assisting at an advertisement, that the invitation to Dr. Dunderhead was also written by Dr. Dunderhead, that the gentlemen signed because they were asked to do so, and that the whole proceeding is intended to impress the rural districts, and to procure the learned and erudite Dunderhead invitations to lecture in other places.

Have these gentlemen no respect for their names? They would not indorse the note of a stranger for a thousand dollars because somebody asked them to do it for good-nature. But it is just as dishonorable to indorse a man's learning and eloquence when you know nothing of it as to indorse a man's promise to pay of whose solvency you are equally ignorant. Indeed, in the one case you could supply the money if the maker of the note failed. But, dear sirs, can you supply the eloquence and erudition which you indorsed in Dr. Dunderhead, for which many Easy Chairs paid many dollars, and which Dunderhead failed to display? You cannot, indeed, be sued at the City Hall, but you are prosecuted at another, even loftier tribunal, and you are mulcted in damages. Your own good name pays the penalty, and is thereafter less respected. If a man does not respect his own name, who will? But if he publicly announces that his name is of no weight, how can he complain if it becomes a jest?

There are every day great public meetings at which a long list of familiar names appears as vice-presidents. Very often the gentlemen are notified that their names are to be used, and that if they are unwilling they may inform the managers. But very often, also, they know nothing of the complicity until they read their names in the report of the meeting. Upon this discovery most men shrug their shoulders, and wish impatiently that people wouldn't do so. But they have a feeling that the occasion is passed; that they will be derided as courting notoriety if they write to the papers stating that their names were used without authority; so they grumble and acquiesce. But they nevertheless connive at the abuse of their names. They embolden to further abuse, and they weaken both the power and the effect of disavowal. They condoned the abuse when they were made vice-presidents of the immense and enthusiastic meeting in favor of the annexation of Terra del Fuego; and why, sneers Mrs. Grundy and Mrs. Candour—why should they be too nice to assist at the grand demonstration of fraternity for the Philippine Islands? If the correspondents of Dr. Dunderhead would show that they respected their own names, they would soon find that other people would not trifle with them.

But neither must they cheapen them by constant use. There are well-known names that appear upon every occasion. They ask all the Dunderheads to lecture; they petition for and against all public objects; they recommend everything from a Correggio to a corn-plaster; they offer benefits to actors; they are honorary directors of institutions of which they are painfully ignorant; their names appear so universally and indiscriminately that they have no more effect upon public attention or confidence than the machines with which the Chinese bonzes grind out prayers can be supposed to have upon the Divine intelligence. The consequence is that all sensible men come to regard these signatures as those of men of straw. And why not, since they give straw bail for the appearance of that which does not appear, or for the excellence of that of which, if it be excellence, they know nothing?

And so, says the old story, after crying wolf so long that the shepherds no longer heeded him, one day the boy cried wolf lustily, for the wild beast had really come. But the louder he cried, the louder they sneered: "No, no; we've learned your tricks at last, you wicked boy, and you may shout until you are hoarse!" And while they laughed the wolf devoured the boy. Remember, then, dear Dunderhead correspondents, that, when Plato himself comes, and some foolish touter obtains your names, or even yourselves this time know that the truly seraphic doctor has arrived, whose golden wisdom would make the whole world richer, it will be in vain. You have invited discredit for your names; and we, who have been deluded, when we see that you earnestly invite us all to hear Plato, shall only smile incredulously—"Plato indeed! 'tis only Dunderhead Number Twenty."

CLERGYMEN'S SALARIES

HETHER we bear or forbear, it is difficult to appease Mrs. Candour. Her responsibility is incessant, and the world always needs her correction. A certain religious society recently decided to give their minister a certain salary, which was apparently larger in the opinion of Mrs. Candour than any minister should receive, and she expressed herself to the effect that no society ought to offer and no clergyman ought to accept so large a sum. Mrs. Candour's impertinence is certainly as striking as her sense of responsibility. What business can it possibly be of hers whether a clergyman, or a lawyer, or a carpenter, or a physician, or a railroad superintendent, or a shoemaker, or a bank president, is paid more or less for his services? It is a purely private arrangement between private persons, and if Mrs. Candour had a quick sense of humor, which we sincerely hope, but are constrained to doubt, and were the editor of a paper, how she would smile if the Easy Chair should gravely remark: "We learn with great pain that the proprietors of the weekly Green Dragon have decided to pay the editor, Mrs. Candour, twenty thousand dollars a year. This is a sum much too large for the proprietors of any journal to offer, and very much more than an editor ought to receive." Does the laborer cease to be worthy of his hire when he enters the editorial room or the pulpit?

The facts of the case make this remark of Mrs. Candour's the more comical. The receipts of the society in question are very large indeed. They enable it to do good works of many kinds, and upon the largest scale—the Bethel, for instance, one of the wise charities of good men, which gathers in the poor, young and old, and thoughtfully and tenderly gives them glimpses of a bright and cheerful life. The large resources, overflowing in benefactions, are perhaps chiefly due to the minister, whose fame and eloquence constantly draw multitudes to the church. The salary which he receives, therefore, is really but a part of the money which he makes. And to put the argument as before, if Mrs. Candour, editing the paper, "ran it up" and increased the profits, for instance, by fifty thousand dollars, could she feel unwilling to receive ten thousand dollars in addition to her present salary?

Or is she of those who think that clergymen ought not to be well paid? Then she belongs to the class whose opinion is faithfully followed. The clergy are the worst-paid body of laborers in the country. They work with ability and zeal. They are educated, sensitive men, often carefully nurtured, and they are expected to be everybody's servant, to hold their time and talents at the call of all the whimsical old women of the parish and of the selectmen of the town. They are to preach twice or thrice on Sunday, to lecture and expound during the week, to make parochial calls in sun or storm, to visit the poor, to be the confidant and counsellor of a throng, and always in every sermon to be fresh and bright, and always ready to do any public service that may be asked. Of course the clergyman must be chairman of the school committee, and a director of the town library, and president of charitable societies. He cannot give a great deal of money for educational and charitable and æsthetic purposes—not a very great deal—but he can always give time, and he can always make a speech, and draw the resolutions, and direct generally.

He is, in fact, the town pound, to which everybody may commit the truant fancies that nobody else will tolerate upon the pastures and lawns of his attention. He is the town pump, at which everybody may fill himself with advice. He is the town bell, to summon everybody to every common enterprise. He is the town beast of burden, to carry everybody's pack. With all this he must have a neat and pretty house, and a comely and attractive wife, who must be always ready and well-dressed in the parlor, although she cannot afford to hire sufficient "help." And the good man's children must be well-behaved and properly clad, and his house be a kind of hotel for the travelling brethren. Of course he must be a scholar, and familiar with current literature, and he may justly be expected to fit half a dozen boys for college every year. These are but illustrations of the functions he is to fulfil, and always without murmuring; and for all he is to be glad to get a pittance upon which he can barely bring the ends of the year together, and to know that if he should suddenly die of overwork, as he probably will, his wife and children will be beggars.

And when a man who does his duties of this kind so well that a great deal of money gladly given is the result, and it is proposed that he shall be paid as every chief of every profession is paid, Mrs. Candour exclaims in effect that the alabaster box had better be sold and given to the poor. If the good lady is of this opinion, let her advocate the method of the Church of Rome. If she thinks that a minister is a priest of the old dispensation, a part of a complete ecclesiastical system, let his support be made part of the system. But if she prefers that a minister shall be a man and a citizen, like the rest of us, discharging all the duties of a parent and an equal member of society, and leading the worship of those who invite him to that office—then let him have the same chances and fair play with other men. Now one of the proper aims of other men is a provision for their families; the possibility of saving something for the day of inaction, of ill-health, of desertion. If the reward of labor which is offered a clergyman is more generous than Mrs. Candour thinks to be becoming for him—if she insists that, like certain friars of the Roman Church, he shall take the vow of poverty, let her, at least, be as just to her own communion as those of that Church are to theirs. Let her also insist that he shall not marry, that he shall not be left to the mercy of a congregation that may tire of him, and that he shall be supported when he is not in service, or is unable to serve longer.

Does it occur to Mrs. Candour why the cleverest men hesitate long before they become clergymen? "Yes," said the great leader of a sect in this country, a few years ago, in a convention of his fellow-believers—"yes, you wonder why the standard of the profession seems to decline. I will tell you why. If any brother has a son whom he does not know what to do with, he makes a—minister of him." And if the good lady with whom the Easy Chair is expostulating fears that if there are great prizes in the pulpit the religious character of the teacher will decline, and that the profession will become attractive to merely clever men, she states a good reason for changing the voluntary system, but a very poor one for starving ministers. Nor must she forget to ask herself, on the other hand, whether religion itself gains by identifying its preaching with feeble and timid men. There will, indeed, always be the great, devoted souls who, under any circumstances, in riches, in poverty, in health or sickness, in life or death, will give themselves to the work of the evangelist. But Mrs. Candour is not speaking of them; she speaks of an established profession like that of editing, in which she is, let us hope, prosperously engaged. If she is morally bound to give her labor for nothing, or to stint her family, when there is plenty of money made by her honest work, she may speak with the fervor of conviction, indeed, if not of persuasion, upon the impropriety of paying a minister well.

If Mrs. Candour ever looks into English history she will remember the condition of the country curate and the squire's chaplain a century and a half ago. She will recall the contemptuous manner in which he was treated. Macaulay tells of him. Fielding describes him. The plays have him. He is everywhere in the literature of the time, and everywhere a pitiful figure. Whether the portrait of the chaplain be accurate or not, it certainly faithfully shows the feeling with which he was regarded. And if the feeling were justified by the character of the men, what was the reason that the men were what they were? Because the general opinion was then what Mrs. Candour's is now—that a clergyman should not be well paid. The chaplain was a pauper, and he was treated accordingly. The result was certain. Human nature always revenges itself. If you arbitrarily set apart certain men as ex-officio a peculiarly holy class, and deny them the advantages and chances of other men, they will become servile and mean, and lose the noble spirit of a true man. Mrs. Candour may point to the fat English bishoprics—to such a shameful correspondence as that which Massey records between William Pitt and Dr. Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield—and ask if prizes of such a kind are a good thing, and if anything could more corrupt good men than such chances. Yes, one thing could; and that is sure penury and starvation. But there is no need of fat pulpit appointments. Wherever they exist they will be the objects of intrigue and chicanery. What has that to do with a society giving their minister part of the money that he makes for them?

If Mrs. Candour insists that the money should not be made, and that the preaching should be free, the argument is still against her, because infinitely more good can be done by the charitable organizations which the money supports than by mere free preaching. Besides, the money to which she objects founds free churches and sustains free preaching. If she will fall back upon the other system, and have the churches built and the pulpits supported by established funds, then, at least, she will be consistent. But does she think it desirable for the welfare of society that there should be huge ecclesiastical funds? Would she restore the dead hand? Upon the whole, is it better that the priesthood, or the Church as such, should hold great properties, and dispose of unlimited money? The voluntary system has, at least, this advantage, that the money is not ecclesiastically held, and while it is the system of her choice, Mrs. Candour has no right to complain of those who are willing to pay to hear a great preacher, and thereby enable countless others to hear preaching, and to be taught and succored for nothing.

Her position, indeed, is that of those who sometimes invite a speaker to lecture for the benefit of a charity, who agree to pay the lecturer what he asks, and then ask him to take half as much, giving the rest to the charity. They either think that the lecture is not worth the price agreed upon, or that it is the lecturer's duty to bestow a sum equal to half his fee. The reply to such gentlemen is short: It was a fair bargain; you have profited by it; and what the lecturer does with his part is none of your business. And there really is no other reply to Mrs. Candour: Madam, the minister and his friends have made a fine sum of money; and what they will do with it is none of your business, unless they fall to corrupting the public.

But, indeed, there was no need, madam, to argue for the reduction of the salaries of clergymen. We hear in no direction of any tendency to excess; but we do hear everywhere of those abominations, "donation-parties!" Do we make donation-parties to other people whom we pay honestly for honest service? Are bakers and lawyers and tailors and doctors surprised by donation-parties? They are public confessions of our meanness. If we paid the minister adequately, why should we abuse the language by "donating" the necessaries of life to the parsonage? Some kind soul knows that we starve our shepherd, that he is pinched and cramped in his household, that his wife is thinly clad and his children shabby, and that the man of whom we demand that he should be a model of all the cardinal virtues is torn with anxious doubts for his family; and that generous soul proposes that we should club our sugar and butter and help him out. If we do not do it next year, what is to become of him? If we do, why not make it a certainty; why not, dear Mrs. Candour, raise his salary? And if you, madam, would only issue a tariff or sliding scale, so that we might know how much a religious teacher under different circumstances might properly receive—in fine, whether all boxes, or only the alabaster box, must be sold and given to the poor—it would be the most valuable service you are ever likely to perform to society.

THE END

By GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

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