of his own age, fostered, a love for solitude and a taste for reading.
He received a good classical education; but poor health prevented him
from pursuing his studies at college. At his family's wish he entered a
law office instead; but the literary instinct was strong within him.
Literature at this time was scarcely considered a profession. Magazine
circulations were too limited for publishers to pay for contributions,
and all an author usually got or expected to get was some copies to
distribute among his friends. To please his prudent home circle, Brown
dallied for a while with the law; but a visit to New York, where he was
cordially received by the members of the "Friendly Club," opened up
avenues of literary work to him, and he removed to New York in 1796 to
devote himself to it.

The first important work he produced was 'Wieland: or the
Transformation' (1798). It shows at the outset Brown's characteristic
traits--independence of British materials and methods. It is in
substance a powerful tale of ventriloquism operating on an unbalanced
and superstitious mind. Its psychology is acute and searching; the
characterization realistic and effective. His second book, 'Ormond: or
the Secret Witness' (1799), does not reach the level of 'Wieland.' It is
more conventional, and not entirely independent of foreign models,
especially Godwin, whom Brown greatly admired. A rapid writer, he soon
had the MS. of his next novel in the hands of the publisher. The first
part of 'Arthur Mervyn: or Memoirs of the Year 1793' came out in 1799,
and the second part in 1800. It is the best known of his six novels.
Though the scene is laid in Philadelphia, Brown embodied in it his
experience of the yellow fever which raged in New York in 1799. The
passage describing this epidemic can stand beside Defoe's or Poe's or
Manzoni's similar descriptions, for power in setting forth the horrors
of the plague.

In the same year with the first volume of 'Arthur Mervyn' appeared
'Edgar Huntly: or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker.' Here he deals with the
wild life of nature, the rugged solitudes, and the redskins, the field
in which he was followed by Cooper. A thrilling scene in which a
panther is chief actor was long familiar to American children in their
school reading-books.

In 1801 came out his last two novels, 'Clara Howard: In a Series of
Letters,' and 'Jane Talbot.' They are a departure from his previous
work: instead of dealing with uncanny subjects they treat of quiet
domestic and social life. They show also a great advance on his previous
books in constructive art. In 1799 Brown became editor of the Monthly
Magazine and American Review, and contributed largely to it.

In the autumn of 1801 he returned to Philadelphia, to assume the
editorship of Conrad's Literary Magazine and American Review. The duties
of this office suspended his own creative work, and he did not live to
take up again the novelist's stylus. In 1806 he became editor of the
Annual Register. His genuine literary force is best proved by the fact
that whatever periodical he took in charge, he raised its standard of
quality and made it a success for the time.

He died in February, 1810. The work to which he had given the greater
part of his time and strength, especially toward the end of his life,
was in its nature not only transitory, but not of a sort to keep his
name alive. The magazines were children of a day, and the editor's
repute as such could hardly survive them long. The fame which belongs to
Charles Brockden Brown, grudgingly accorded by a country that can ill
afford to neglect one of its earliest, most devoted, and most original
workers, rests on his novels. Judged by standards of the present day,
these are far from faultless. The facts are not very coherent, the
diction is artificial in the fashion of the day. But when all is said,
Brown was a rare story-teller; he interested his readers by the novelty
of his material, and he was quite objective in its treatment, never
obtruding his own personality. 'Wieland,' 'Edgar Huntly,' and 'Arthur
Mervyn,' the trilogy of his best novels, are not to be contemned; and he
has the distinction of being in very truth the pioneer of
_American_ letters.

WIELAND'S STATEMENT

Theodore Wieland, the prisoner at the bar, was now called upon for his
defense. He looked around him for some time in silence, and with a mild
countenance. At length he spoke:--

It is strange: I am known to my judges and my auditors. Who is there
present a stranger to the character of Wieland? Who knows him not as a
husband, as a father, as a friend? Yet here am I arraigned as a
criminal. I am charged with diabolical malice; I am accused of the
murder of my wife and my children!

It is true, they were slain by me; they all perished by my hand. The
task of vindication is ignoble. What is it that I am called to
vindicate? and before whom?

You know that they are dead, and that they were killed by me. What more
would you have? Would you extort from me a statement of my motives? Have
you failed to discover them already? You charge me with malice: but your
eyes are not shut; your reason is still vigorous; your memory has not
forsaken you. You know whom it is that you thus charge. The habits of
his life are known to you; his treatment of his wife and his offspring
is known to you; the soundness of his integrity and the unchangeableness
of his principles are familiar to your apprehension: yet you persist in
this charge! You lead me hither manacled as a felon; you deem me worthy
of a vile and tormenting death!

Who are they whom I have devoted to death? My wife--the little ones that
drew their being from me--that creature who, as she surpassed them in
excellence, claimed a larger affection than those whom natural
affinities bound to my heart. Think ye that malice could have urged me
to this deed? Hide your audacious fronts from the scrutiny of heaven.
Take refuge in some cavern unvisited by human eyes. Ye may deplore your
wickedness or folly, but ye cannot expiate it.

Think not that I speak for your sakes. Hug to your hearts this
detestable infatuation. Deem me still a murderer, and drag me to
untimely death. I make not an effort to dispel your illusion; I utter
not a word to cure you of your sanguinary folly: but there are probably
some in this assembly who have come from far; for their sakes, whose
distance has disabled them from knowing me, I will tell what I have
done, and why.

It is needless to say that God is the object of my supreme passion. I
have cherished in his presence a single and upright heart. I have
thirsted for the knowledge of his will. I have burnt with ardor to
approve my faith and my obedience. My days have been spent in searching
for the revelation of that will; but my days have been mournful, because
my search failed. I solicited direction; I turned on every side where
glimmerings of light could be discovered. I have not been wholly
uninformed; but my knowledge has always stopped short of certainty.
Dissatisfaction has insinuated itself into all my thoughts. My purposes
have been pure, my wishes indefatigable; but not till lately were these
purposes thoroughly accomplished and these wishes fully gratified.

I thank Thee, my Father, for Thy bounty; that Thou didst not ask a less
sacrifice than this; that Thou placedst me in a condition to testify my
submission to Thy will! What have I withheld which it was Thy pleasure
to exact? Now may I, with dauntless and erect eye, claim my reward,
since I have given Thee the treasure of my soul.

I was at my own house; it was late in the evening; my sister had gone to
the city, but proposed to return. It was in expectation of her return
that my wife and I delayed going to bed beyond the usual hour; the rest
of the family, however, were retired. My mind was contemplative and
calm--not wholly devoid of apprehension on account of my sister's
safety. Recent events, not easily explained, had suggested the existence
of some danger; but this danger was without a distinct form in our
imagination, and scarcely ruffled our tranquillity.

Time passed, and my sister did not arrive. Her house is at some distance
from mine, and though her arrangements had been made with a view of
residing with us, it was possible that through forgetfulness, or the
occurrence of unforeseen emergencies, she had returned to her
own dwelling.

Hence it was conceived proper that I should ascertain the truth by going
thither. I went. On my way my mind was full of those ideas which related
to my intellectual condition. In the torrent of fervid conceptions I
lost sight of my purpose. Sometimes I stood still; sometimes I wandered
from my path, and experienced some difficulty, on recovering from my fit
of musing, to regain it.

The series of my thoughts is easily traced. At first every vein beat
with raptures known only to the man whose parental and conjugal love is
without limits, and the cup of whose desires, immense as it is,
overflows with gratification. I know not why emotions that were
perpetual visitants should now have recurred with unusual energy. The
transition was not new from sensations of joy to a consciousness of
gratitude. The Author of my being was likewise the dispenser of every
gift with which that being was embellished. The service to which a
benefactor like this was entitled could not be circumscribed. My social
sentiments were indebted to their alliance with devotion for all their
value. All passions are base, all joys feeble, all energies malignant,
which are not drawn from this source.

For a time my contemplations soared above earth and its inhabitants. I
stretched forth my hands; I lifted my eyes, and exclaimed, "Oh, that I
might be admitted to thy presence! that mine were the supreme delight of
knowing Thy will and of performing it!--the blissful privilege of direct
communication with Thee, and of listening to the audible enunciation of
Thy pleasure!

"What task would I not undertake, what privation would I not cheerfully
endure, to testify my love of Thee? Alas! Thou hidest Thyself from my
view; glimpses only of Thy excellence and beauty are afforded me. Would
that a momentary emanation from Thy glory would visit me! that some
unambiguous token of Thy presence would salute my senses!"

In this mood I entered the house of my sister. It was vacant. Scarcely
had I regained recollection of the purpose that brought me hither.
Thoughts of a different tendency had such an absolute possession of my
mind, that the relations of time and space were almost obliterated from
my understanding. These wanderings, however, were restrained, and I
ascended to her chamber. I had no light, and might have known by
external observation that the house was without any inhabitant. With
this, however, I was not satisfied. I entered the room, and the object
of my search not appearing, I prepared to return. The darkness required
some caution in descending the stair. I stretched out my hand to seize
the balustrade, by which I might regulate my steps. How shall I describe
the lustre which at that moment burst upon my vision?

I was dazzled. My organs were bereaved of their activity. My eyelids
were half closed, and my hands withdrawn from the balustrade. A nameless
fear chilled my veins, and I stood motionless. This irradiation did not
retire or lessen. It seemed as if some powerful effulgence covered me
like a mantle. I opened my eyes and found all about me luminous and
glowing. It was the element of heaven that flowed around. Nothing but a
fiery stream was at first visible; but anon a shrill voice from behind
called upon me to attend.

I turned. It is forbidden to describe what I saw: words, indeed, would
be wanting to the task. The lineaments of that Being whose veil was now
lifted and whose visage beamed upon my sight, no hues of pencil or of
language can portray. As it spoke, the accents thrilled to my
heart:--"Thy prayers are heard. In proof of thy faith, render me thy
wife. This is the victim I choose. Call her hither, and here let her
fall." The sound and visage and light vanished at once.

What demand was this? The blood of Catharine was to be shed! My wife was
to perish by my hand! I sought opportunity to attest my virtue. Little
did I expect that a proof like this would have been demanded.

"My wife!" I exclaimed: "O God! substitute some other victim. Make me
not the butcher of my wife. My own blood is cheap. This will I pour out
before Thee with a willing heart; but spare, I beseech Thee, this
precious life, or commission some other than her husband to perform the
bloody deed."

In vain. The conditions were prescribed; the decree had gone forth, and
nothing remained but to execute it. I rushed out of the house and across
the intermediate fields, and stopped not till I entered my own parlor.
My wife had remained here during my absence, in anxious expectation of
my return with some tidings of her sister. I had none to communicate.
For a time I was breathless with my speed. This, and the tremors that
shook my frame, and the wildness of my looks, alarmed her. She
immediately suspected some disaster to have happened to her friend, and
her own speech was as much overpowered by emotion as mine. She was
silent, but her looks manifested her impatience to hear what I had to
communicate. I spoke, but with so much precipitation as scarcely to be
understood; catching her at the same time by the arm, and forcibly
pulling her from her seat.

"Come along with me; fly; waste not a moment; time will be lost, and the
deed will be omitted. Tarry not, question not, but fly with me."

This deportment added afresh to her alarms. Her eyes pursued mine, and
she said, "What is the matter? For God's sake, what is the matter? Where
would you have me go?"

My eyes were fixed upon her countenance while she spoke. I thought upon
her virtues; I viewed her as the mother of my babes; as my wife. I
recalled the purpose for which I thus urged her attendance. My heart
faltered, and I saw that I must rouse to this work all my faculties. The
danger of the least delay was imminent.

I looked away from her, and, again exerting my force, drew her toward
the door. "You must go with me; indeed you must."

In her fright she half resisted my efforts, and again exclaimed, "Good
heaven! what is it you mean? Where go? What has happened? Have you
found Clara?"

"Follow me and you will see," I answered, still urging her reluctant
steps forward.

"What frenzy has seized you? Something must needs have happened. Is she
sick? Have you found her?"

"Come and see. Follow me and know for yourself."

Still she expostulated and besought me to explain this mysterious
behavior. I could not trust myself to answer her, to look at her; but
grasping her arm, I drew her after me. She hesitated, rather through
confusion of mind than from unwillingness to accompany me. This
confusion gradually abated, and she moved forward, but with irresolute
footsteps and continual exclamations of wonder and terror. Her
interrogations of "What was the matter?" and "Whither was I going?" were
ceaseless and vehement.

It was the scope of my efforts not to think; to keep up a conflict and
uproar in my mind in which all order and distinctness should be lost; to
escape from the sensations produced by her voice. I was therefore
silent. I strove to abridge this interval by haste, and to waste all my
attention in furious gesticulations.

In this state of mind we reached my sister's door. She looked at the
windows and saw that all was desolate. "Why come we here? There is
nobody here. I will not go in."

Still I was dumb; but, opening the door, I drew her into the entry. This
was the allotted scene; here she was to fall. I let go her hand, and
pressing my palms against my forehead, made one mighty effort to work up
my soul to the deed.

In vain; it would not be; my courage was appalled, my arms nerveless. I
muttered prayers that my strength might be aided from above. They
availed nothing.

Horror diffused itself over me. This conviction of my cowardice, my
rebellion, fastened upon me, and I stood rigid and cold as marble. From
this state I was somewhat relieved by my wife's voice, who renewed her
supplications to be told why we come hither and what was the fate of my
sister....

The fellness of a gloomy hurricane but faintly resembled the discord
that reigned in my mind. To omit this sacrifice must not be; yet my
sinews had refused to perform it. No alternative was offered. To rebel
against the mandate was impossible; but obedience would render me the
executioner of my wife. My will was strong, but my limbs refused
their office.

That accents and looks so winning should disarm me of my resolution was
to be expected. My thoughts were thrown anew into anarchy. I spread my
hand before my eyes that I might not see her, and answered only by
groans. She took my other hand between hers, and pressing it to her
heart, spoke with that voice which had ever swayed my will and wafted
away sorrow:--

"My friend! my soul's friend! tell me thy cause of grief. Do I not merit
to partake with thee in thy cares? Am I not thy wife?"

This was too much. I broke from her embrace and retired to a corner of
the room. In this pause, courage was once more infused into me. I
resolved to execute my duty. She followed me, and renewed her passionate
entreaties to know the cause of my distress. I raised my head and
regarded her with steadfast looks. I muttered something about death, and
the injunctions of my duty. At these words she shrunk back, and looked
at me with a new expression of anguish. After a pause, she clasped her
hands, and exclaimed:---

"O Wieland! Wieland! God grant that I am mistaken! but something surely
is wrong. I see it; it is too plain; thou art undone--lost to me and to
thyself." At the same time she gazed on my features with intensest
anxiety, in hope that different symptoms would take place. I replied to
her with vehemence:--

"Undone! No; my duty is known, and I thank my God that my cowardice is
now vanquished and I have power to fulfill it. Catharine, I pity the
weakness of thy nature; I pity thee, but must not spare. Thy life is
claimed from my hands; thou must die!"

Fear was now added to her grief. "What mean you? Why talk you of death?
Bethink yourself, Wieland; bethink yourself, and this fit will pass. Oh,
why came I hither? Why did you drag me hither?"

"I brought thee hither to fulfill a divine command. I am appointed thy
destroyer, and destroy thee I must." Saying this, I seized her wrists.
She shrieked aloud, and endeavored to free herself from my grasp; but
her efforts were vain.

"Surely, surely, Wieland, thou dost not mean it. Am I not thy wife? and
wouldst thou kill me? Thou wilt not; and yet--I see--thou art Wieland no
longer! A fury resistless and horrible possesses thee. Spare
me--spare--help--help--"

Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help, for mercy. When she
could speak no longer, her gestures, her looks appealed to my
compassion. My accursed hand was irresolute and tremulous. I meant thy
death to be sudden, thy struggles to be brief. Alas! my heart was
infirm, my resolves mutable. Thrice I slackened my grasp, and life kept
its hold, though in the midst of pangs. Her eyeballs started from their
sockets. Grimness and distortion took the place of all that used to
bewitch me into transport and subdue me into reverence. I was
commissioned to kill thee, but not to torment thee with the foresight of
thy death; not to multiply thy fears and prolong thy agonies. Haggard
and pale and lifeless, at length thou ceasedst to contend with
thy destiny.

This was the moment of triumph. Thus had I successfully subdued the
stubbornness of human passions: the victim which had been demanded was
given; the deed was done past recall.

I lifted the corpse in my arms and laid it on the bed. I gazed upon it
with delight. Such was the elation of my thoughts that I even broke into
laughter. I clapped my hands and exclaimed, "It is done! My sacred duty
is fulfilled! To that I have sacrificed, O my God, Thy last and best
gift, my wife!"

For a while I thus soared above frailty. I imagined I had set myself
forever beyond the reach of selfishness; but my imaginations were false.
This rapture quickly subsided. I looked again at my wife. My joyous
ebullitions vanished, and I asked myself who it was whom I saw.
Methought it could not be Catharine. It could not be the woman who had
lodged for years in my heart; who had slept nightly in my bosom; who had
borne in her womb, who had fostered at her breast, the beings who called
me father; whom I have watched with delight, and cherished with a
fondness ever new and perpetually growing; it could not be the same.
Where was her bloom? These deadly and blood-suffused orbs but ill
resemble the azure and ecstatic tenderness of her eyes. The lucid stream
that meandered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont to sit
upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid stains and this hideous
deformity. Alas! these were the traces of agony; the gripe of the
assassin had been here!

I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate and outrageous sorrow. The
breath of heaven that sustained me was withdrawn, and I sunk into _mere
man_. I leaped from the floor; I dashed my head against the wall; I
uttered screams of horror; I panted after torment and pain. Eternal fire
and the bickerings of hell, compared with what I felt, were music and a
bed of roses.

I thank my God that this degeneracy was transient--that He deigned once
more to raise me aloft. I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to
duty, and _was calm_. My wife was dead; but I reflected that though this
source of human consolation was closed, yet others were still open. If
the transports of a husband were no more, the feelings of a father had
still scope for exercise. When remembrance of their mother should excite
too keen a pang, I would look upon them and _be comforted_.

While I revolved these ideas, new warmth flowed in upon my heart. I was
wrong. These feelings were the growth of selfishness. Of this I was not
aware; and to dispel the mist that obscured my perceptions, a new
effulgence and a new mandate were necessary. From these thoughts I was
recalled by a ray that was shot into the room. A voice spake like that
which I had before heard:--"Thou hast done well. But all is not
done--the sacrifice is incomplete--thy children must be offered--they
must perish with their mother!--"

Thou, Omnipotent and Holy! Thou knowest that my actions were conformable
to Thy will. I know not what is crime; what actions are evil in their
ultimate and comprehensive tendency, or what are good. Thy knowledge, as
Thy power, is unlimited. I have taken Thee for my guide, and cannot err.
To the arms of Thy protection I intrust my safety. In the awards of Thy
justice I confide for my recompense.

Come death when it will, I am safe. Let calumny and abhorrence pursue me
among men; I shall not be defrauded of my dues. The peace of virtue and
the glory of obedience will be my portion hereafter.

JOHN BROWN

(1810-1882)

John Brown, the son of a secession-church minister, was born in Biggar,
Lanarkshire, Scotland, September 22d, 1810, and died in Edinburgh, May
11th, 1882. He was educated at the Edinburgh High School and at the
University, and graduated in medicine in 1833. For a time he was a
surgeon's assistant to the great Dr. Syme, the man of whom he said "he
never wasted a drop of ink or blood," and whose character he has drawn
in one of his most charming biographies. When he began to practice for
himself he gradually "got into a good connection," and his patients made
him their confidant and adviser. He was considered a fine doctor too,
for he had remarkable common-sense, and was said to be unerring in
diagnosis.

[Illustration: JOHN BROWN]

Dr. Brown did not, as is commonly believed, dislike his profession; but
later on he took a view of it which seemed non-progressive, and his
success as a writer no doubt interfered with his practice. His friend
Professor Masson draws a pleasant picture of him when he first settled
in practice, as a dark-haired man with soft, fine eyes and a benignant
manner, the husband of a singularly beautiful woman, and much liked and
sought after in the social circles of Edinburgh. This was partly owing
to the charm of his conversation, and partly to the literary reputation
he had achieved through some articles on the Academy exhibition and on
local artists. Though he had little technical training, he had an eye
for color and form, an appreciation of the artist's meaning, and an
instinct for discovering genius, as in the case of Noel Paton and David
Scott. He soon became an authority among artists, and he gave a new
impulse to national art.

He contributed largely to the North British Review. In 1855 he published
'Horæ Subsceivæ,' which contained, among medical biography and
medico-literary papers, the immortal Scotch idyl, 'Rab and his Friends.'
Up to this time the unique personality of the doctor, with its
delightful mixture of humor and sympathy, was known only to his own
circle. The appearance of 'Rab and his Friends' revealed it to the
world. Brief as it is in form, and simple in outline, Scotland has
produced nothing so full of pure, pathetic genius since Scott.

Another volume of 'Horæ Subsceivæ' appeared two years after, and some
selections from it, and others from unpublished manuscript, were printed
separately in the volume entitled 'Spare Hours.' They met with instant
and unprecedented success. In a short time ten thousand copies of
'Minchmoor' and 'James the Doorkeeper' were sold, fifteen thousand
copies of 'Pet Marjorie,' and 'Rab' had reached its fiftieth thousand.
With all this success and praise, and constantly besought by publishers
for his work, he could not be persuaded that his writings were of any
permanent value, and was reluctant to publish. In 1882 appeared a third
volume of the 'Horæ Subsceivæ,' which included all his writings. A few
weeks after its publication he died.

The Doctor's medical essays, which are replete with humor, are written
in defense of his special theory, the distinction between the active and
the speculative mind. He thought there was too much science and too
little intuitive sagacity in the world, and looked back longingly to the
old-time common-sense, which he believed modern science had driven away.
His own mind was anti-speculative, although he paid just tributes to
philosophy and science and admired their achievements. He stigmatized
the speculations of the day as the "lust of innovation." But the reader
cares little for the opinions of Dr. Brown as arguments: his subject is
of little consequence if he will but talk. By the charm of his
story-telling these dead Scotch doctors are made to live again. The
death-bed of Syme, for instance, is as pathetic as the wonderful paper
on Thackeray's death; and to-day many a heart is sore for 'Pet
Marjorie,' the ten-year-old child who died in Scotland almost a hundred
years ago.

As an essayist, Dr. Brown belongs to the followers of Addison and
Charles Lamb, and he blends humor, pathos, and quiet hopefulness with a
grave and earnest dignity. He delighted, not like Lamb "in the habitable
parts of the earth," but in the lonely moorlands and pastoral hills,
over which his silent, stalwart shepherds walked with swinging stride.
He had a keen appreciation for anything he felt to be excellent: his
usual question concerning a stranger, either in literature or life, was
"Has he wecht, sir?"--quoting Dr. Chalmers; and when he wanted to give
the highest praise, he said certain writing was "strong meat." He had a
warm enthusiasm for the work of other literary men: an artist himself,
he was quick to appreciate and seize upon the witty thing or the
excellent thing wherever he found it, and he was eager to share his
pleasure with the whole world. He reintroduced to the public Henry
Vaughn, the quaint seventeenth-century poet; he wrote a sympathetic
memoir of Arthur Hallam; he imported 'Modern Painters,' and enlightened
Edinburgh as to its merits. His art papers were what Walter Pater would
call "appreciations,"--that is to say, he dwelt upon the beauties of
what he described rather than upon the defects. What he did not admire
he left alone.

As the author of 'Rab' loved the lonely glens on Minchmoor and in the
Enterkin, or where Queen Mary's "baby garden" shows its box-row border
among the Spanish chestnuts of Lake Monteith, so he loved the Scottish
character, "bitter to the taste and sweet to the diaphragm": "Jeemes"
the beadle, with his family worship when he himself was all the family;
the old Aberdeen Jacobite people; Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune, who
in her day bewitched Edinburgh; Rab, Ailie, and Bob Ainslie. His
characters are oddities, but are drawn without a touch of cynicism. What
an amount of playful, wayward nonsense lies between these pages, and
what depths of melancholy under the fun! Like Sir Walter, he had a great
love for dogs, and never went out unaccompanied by one or two of them.
They are the heroes of several of his sketches.

Throughout the English-speaking world, he was affectionately known as
Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. He stood aloof from political and
ecclesiastical controversies, and was fond of telling a story to
illustrate how little reasoning went to forming partisans. A minister
catechizing a raw plowboy, after asking the first question, "Who made
you?" and getting the answer "God," asked him, "How do you know that God
made you?" After some pause and head-scratching, the reply came, "Weel,
sir, it's the clash [common talk] o' the kintry." "Ay," Brown added,
"I'm afraid that a deal of our belief is founded on just 'the clash o'
the kintry.'"

MARJORIE FLEMING

From 'Spare Hours'

One November afternoon in 1810--the year in which 'Waverley' was resumed
and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last two volumes in three
weeks, and made immortal in 1814; and when its author, by the death of
Lord Melville, narrowly escaped getting a civil appointment in
India--three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like
schoolboys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm-in-arm down Bank
Street and the Mound in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet.

The three friends sought the _bield_ of the low wall old Edinburgh boys
remember well, and sometimes miss now, as they struggle with the stout
west wind....

The third we all know. What has he not done for every one of us? Who
else ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and
entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely? We are fain to say not
even Shakespeare, for his is something deeper than diversion, something
higher than pleasure; and yet who would care to split this hair?

Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a
change he would see! The bright, broad laugh, the shrewd, jovial word,
the man of the Parliament House and of the world; and next step, moody,
the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible;
his shut mouth like a child's, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad;
he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding
look. As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, "How it raves and
drifts! On-ding o' snaw,--ay, that's the word,--on-ding--" He was now at
his own door, "Castle Street, No. 39." He opened the door and went
straight to his den; that wondrous workshop, where in one year, 1823,
when he was fifty-two, he wrote 'Peveril of the Peak,' 'Quentin
Durward,' and 'St. Ronan's Well,' besides much else. We once took the
foremost of our novelists--the greatest, we would say, since Scott--into
this room, and could not but mark the solemnizing effect of sitting
where the great magician sat so often and so long, and looking out upon
that little shabby bit of sky, and that back green where faithful dog
Camp lies.

He sat down in his large green morocco elbow-chair, drew himself close
to his table, and glowered and gloomed at his writing apparatus, "a very
handsome old box, richly carved, lined with crimson velvet, and
containing ink-bottles, taper-stand, etc., in silver, the whole in such
order that it might have come from the silversmith's window half an hour
before." He took out his paper, then starting up angrily, said, "'Go
spin, you jade, go spin.' No, d---- it, it won't do,--

     "'My spinnin' wheel is auld and stiff,
       The rock o't wunna stand, sir;
     To keep the temper-pin in tiff
       Employs ower aft my hand, sir.'

I am off the fang. I can make nothing of 'Waverley' to-day; I'll awa'
to Marjorie. Come wi' me, Maida, you thief." The great creature rose
slowly, and the pair were off, Scott taking a _maud_ (a plaid) with him.
"White as a frosted plum-cake, by jingo!" said he, when he got to the
street. Maida gamboled and whisked among the snow, and his master strode
across to Young Street, and through it to 1 North Charlotte Street, to
the house of his dear friend, Mrs. William Keith, of Corstorphine Hill;
niece of Mrs. Keith of Ravelston, of whom he said at her death, eight
years after, "Much tradition, and that of the best, has died with this
excellent old lady, one of the few persons whose spirits, and
_cleanliness_ and freshness of mind and body, made old age lovely and
desirable."

Sir Walter was in that house almost every day, and had a key, so in he
and the hound went, shaking themselves in the lobby. "Marjorie!
Marjorie!" shouted her friend, "where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin'
doo?" In a moment a bright, eager child of seven was in his arms, and he
was kissing her all over. Out came Mrs. Keith. "Come your ways in,
Wattie." "No, not now. I am going to take Marjorie wi' me, and you may
come to your tea in Duncan Roy's sedan, and bring the bairn home in your
lap." "Tak' Marjorie, and it _on-ding o' snaw_!" said Mrs. Keith. He
said to himself, "On-ding,'--that's odd,--that is the very word. Hoot,
awa'! look here," and he displayed the corner of his plaid, made to hold
lambs [the true shepherd's plaid, consisting of two breadths sewed
together, and uncut at one end, making a poke or _cul-de-sac_]. "Tak'
your lamb," said she, laughing at the contrivance, and so the Pet was
first well happit up, and then put, laughing silently, into the plaid
neuk, and the shepherd strode off with his lamb,--Maida gamboling
through the snow, and running races in her mirth.

Didn't he face "the angry airt," and make her bield his bosom, and into
his own room with her, and lock the door, and out with the warm rosy
little wifie, who took it all with great composure! There the two
remained for three or more hours, making the house ring with their
laughter; you can fancy the big man's and Maidie's laugh. Having made
the fire cheery, he set her down in his ample chair, and standing
sheepishly before her, began to say his lesson, which happened to
be,--"Ziccotty, diccotty, dock, the mouse ran up the clock; the clock
struck one, down the mouse ran, ziccotty, diccotty, dock." This done
repeatedly till she was pleased, she gave him his new lesson, gravely
and slowly, timing it upon her small fingers,--he saying it after her,--

     "Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven;
     Alibi, crackaby, ten and eleven;
     Pin, pan, musky dan;
     Tweedle-um, twoddle-um, twenty-wan;
     Eerie, orie, ourie,
     You, are, out."

He pretended to great difficulty, and she rebuked him with most comical
gravity, treating him as a child. He used to say that when he came to
Alibi Crackaby he broke down, and Pin-Pan, Musky-Dan, Tweedle-um
Twoddle-um made him roar with laughter. He said Musky-Dan especially was
beyond endurance, bringing up an Irishman and his hat fresh from the
Spice Islands and odoriferous Ind; she getting quite bitter in her
displeasure at his ill behavior and stupidness.

Then he would read ballads to her in his own glorious way, the two
getting wild with excitement over 'Gil Morrice' or the 'Baron of
Smailholm'; and he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat
Constance's speech in 'King John,' till he swayed to and fro, sobbing
his fill....

Scott used to say that he was amazed at her power over him, saying to
Mrs. Keith, "She's the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and
her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does."

Thanks to the unforgetting sister of this dear child, who has much of
the sensibility and fun of her who has been in her small grave these
fifty and more years, we have now before us the letters and journals of
Pet Marjorie,--before us lies and gleams her rich brown hair, bright and
sunny as if yesterday's, with the words on the paper, "Cut out in her
last illness," and two pictures of her by her beloved Isabella, whom she
worshiped; there are the faded old scraps of paper, hoarded still, over
which her warm breath and her warm little heart had poured themselves;
there is the old water-mark, "Lingard, 1808." The two portraits are very
like each other, but plainly done at different times; it is a chubby,
healthy face, deep-set, brooding eyes, as eager to tell what is going on
within as to gather in all the glories from without; quick with the
wonder and the pride of life; they are eyes that would not be soon
satisfied with seeing; eyes that would devour their object, and yet
childlike and fearless. And that is a mouth that will not be soon
satisfied with love; it has a curious likeness to Scott's own, which has
always appeared to us his sweetest, most mobile and speaking feature.

There she is, looking straight at us as she did at him,--fearless and
full of love, passionate, wild, willful, fancy's child.

There was an old servant, Jeanie Robertson, who was forty years in her
grandfather's family. Marjorie Fleming--or as she is called in the
letters and by Sir Walter, Maidie--was the last child she kept. Jeanie's
wages never exceeded £3 a year, and when she left service she had saved
£40. She was devotedly attached to Maidie, rather despising and
ill-using her sister Isabella, a beautiful and gentle child. This
partiality made Maidie apt at times to domineer over Isabella. "I
mention this," writes her surviving sister, "for the purpose of telling
you an instance of Maidie's generous justice. When only five years old,
when walking in Raith grounds, the two children had run on before, and
old Jeanie remembered they might come too near a dangerous mill-lade.
She called to them to turn back. Maidie heeded her not, rushed all the
faster on, and fell, and would have been lost, had her sister not pulled
her back, saving her life, but tearing her clothes. Jeanie flew on
Isabella to 'give it her' for spoiling her favorite's dress; Maidie
rushed in between, crying out, 'Pay (whip) Maidie as much as you like,
and I'll not say one word; but touch Isy, and I'll roar like a bull!'
Years after Maidie was resting in her grave, my mother used to take me
to the place, and told the story always in the exact same words." This
Jeanie must have been a character. She took great pride in exhibiting
Maidie's brother William's Calvinistic acquirements when nineteen months
old, to the officers of a militia regiment then quartered in Kirkcaldy.
This performance was so amusing that it was often repeated, and the
little theologian was presented by them with a cap and feathers.
Jeanie's glory was "putting him through the carritch" (catechism) in
broad Scotch, beginning at the beginning with "Wha made ye, ma bonnie
man?" For the correctness of this and the three next replies, Jeanie had
no anxiety; but the tone changed to menace, and the closed _nieve_
(fist) was shaken in the child's face as she demanded, "Of what are you
made?" "DIRT," was the answer uniformly given. "Wull ye never learn to
say _dust_, ye thrawn deevil?" with a cuff from the opened hand, was the
as inevitable rejoinder.

Here is Maidie's first letter, before she was six, the spelling
unaltered, and there are no "commoes."

"MY DEAR ISA--I now sit down to answer all your kind and beloved letters
which you was so good as to write to me. This is the first time I ever
wrote a letter in my Life. There are a great many Girls in the Square
and they cry just like a pig when we are under the painfull necessity of
putting it to Death. Miss Potune a Lady of my acquaintance praises me
dreadfully. I repeated something out of Dean Swift and she said I was
fit for the stage and you may think I was primmed up with majestick
Pride but upon my word I felt myselfe turn a little birsay--birsay is a
word which is a word that William composed which is as you may suppose a
little enraged. This horrid fat simpliton says that my Aunt is
beautifull which is intirely impossible for that is not her nature."

What a peppery little pen we wield! What could that have been out of the
sardonic Dean? what other child of that age would have used "beloved" as
she does? This power of affection, this faculty of _be_loving, and wild
hunger to be beloved, comes out more and more. She periled her all upon
it, and it may have been as well--we know, indeed, that it was far
better--for her that this wealth of love was so soon withdrawn to its
one only infinite Giver and Receiver. This must have been the law of her
earthly life. Love was indeed "her Lord and King"; and it was perhaps
well for her that she found so soon that her and our only Lord and King
Himself is Love. Here are bits from her Diary at Braehead:--

"The day of my existence here has been delightful and enchanting. On
Saturday I expected no less than three well-made Bucks the names of whom
is here advertised. Mr. Geo. Crakey [Craigie], and Wm. Keith and Jn.
Keith--the first is the funniest of every one of them. Mr. Crakey and I
walked to Crakyhall [Craigiehall] hand in hand in Innocence and
matitation [meditation] sweet thinking on the kind love which flows in
our tender hearted mind which is overflowing with majestic pleasure no
one was ever so polite to me in the hole state of my existence. Mr.
Craky you must-know is a great Buck and pretty good-looking."

"I am at Ravelston enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing
sweetly--the calf doth frisk and nature shows her glorious face."

Here is a confession:

"I confess I have been very more like a little young divil than a
creature for when Isabella went up stairs to teach me religion and my
multiplication and to be good and all my other lessons I stamped with my
foot and threw my new hat which she had made on the ground and was sulky
and was dreadfully passionate, but she never whiped me but said Marjory
go into another room and think what a great crime you are committing
letting your temper git the better of you. But I went so sulkily that
the Devil got the better of me but she never never never whips me so
that I think I would be the better of it and the next time that I behave
ill I think she should do it for she never does it.... Isabella has
given me praise for checking my temper for I was sulky even when she was
kneeling an hole hour teaching me to write."

Our poor little wifie, _she_ has no doubts of the personality of the
Devil!--"Yesterday I behave extremely ill in God's most holy church for
I would never attend myself nor let Isabella attend which was a great
crime for she often, often tells me that when to or three are geathered
together God is in the midst of them, and it was the very same Divil
that tempted Job that tempted me I am sure; but he resisted Satan though
he had boils and many many other misfortunes which I have escaped.... I
am now going to tell you the horible and wretched plaege that my
multiplication gives me you can't conceive it the most Devilish thing is
8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure."

This is delicious; and what harm is there in her "Devilish"? it is
strong language merely; even old Rowland Hill used to say "he grudged
the Devil those rough and ready words." "I walked to that delightful
place Crakyhall with a delightful young man beloved by all his friends
especially by me his loveress, but I must not talk any more about him
for Isa said it is not proper for to speak of gentalmen but I will never
forget him! ... I am very very glad that satan has not given me boils
and many other misfortunes--In the holy bible these words are written
that the Devil goes like a roaring lyon in search of his pray but the
lord lets us escape from him but we" (_pauvre petite_!) "do not strive
with this awfull Spirit.... To-day I pronounced a word which should
never come out of a lady's lips it was that I called John a Impudent
Bitch. I will tell you what I think made me in so bad a humor is I got
one or two of that bad sina [senna] tea to-day,"--a better excuse for
bad humor and bad language than most.

She has been reading the Book of Esther:--"It was a dreadful thing that
Haman was hanged on the very gallows which he had prepared for Mordecai
to hang him and his ten sons thereon and it was very wrong and cruel to
hang his sons for they did not commit the crime; _but then Jesus was not
then come to teach us to be merciful_." This is wise and beautiful,--has
upon it the very dew of youth and holiness. Out of the mouths of babes
and sucklings He perfects his praise.

"This is Saturday and I am very glad of it because I have play half the
Day and I get money too but alas I owe Isabella 4 pence for I am finned
2 pence whenever I bite my nails. Isabella is teaching me to make
simmecoling nots of interrigations peorids commoes, etc.... As this is
Sunday I will meditate upon Senciable and Religious subjects. First I
should be very thankful I am not a beggar."

This amount of meditation and thankfulness seems to have been all she
was able for.

"I am going to-morrow to a delightfull place, Braehead by name,
belonging to Mrs. Crraford, where there is ducks cocks hens bubblyjocks
2 dogs 2 cats and swine which is delightful. I think it is shocking to
think that the dog and cat should bear them" (this is a meditation
physiological) "and they are drowned after all. I would rather have a
man-dog than a woman-dog, because they do not bear like woman-dogs; it
is a hard case--it is shocking. I came here to enjoy natures delightful
breath it is sweeter than a fial of rose oil."

Braehead is the farm the historical Jock Howison asked and got from our
gay James the Fifth, "the gudeman o' Ballengiech," as a reward for the
services of his flail when the King had the worst of it at Cramond Brig
with the gipsies. The farm is unchanged in size from that time, and
still in the unbroken line of the ready and victorious thrasher.
Braehead is held on the condition of the possessor being ready to
present the King with a ewer and basin to wash his hands, Jock having
done this for his unknown king after the _splore_; and when George the
Fourth came to Edinburgh, this ceremony was performed in silver
at Holyrood.

It is a lovely neuk, this Braehead, preserved almost as it was two
hundred years ago. "Lot and his wife," mentioned by Maidie,--two
quaintly cropped yew-trees,--still thrive; the burn runs as it did in
her time, and sings the same quiet tune,--as much the same and as
different as _Now_ and _Then_. The house is full of old family relics
and pictures, the sun shining on them through the small deep windows
with their plate-glass; and there, blinking at the sun and chattering
contentedly, is a parrot, that might, for its looks of eld, have been in
the ark, and domineered over and _deaved_ the dove. Everything about the
place is old and fresh.

This is beautiful:--"I am very sorry to say that I forgot God--that is
to say I forgot to pray to-day and Isabella told me that I should be
thankful that God did not forget me--if he did, O what would become of
me if I was in danger and God not friends with me--I must go to
unquenchable fire and if I was tempted to sin--how could I resist it O
no I will never do it again--no no--if I can help it." (Canny wee
wifie!) "My religion is greatly falling off because I dont pray with so
much attention when I am saying my prayers, and my charecter is lost
among the Braehead people. I hope I will be religious again--but as for
regaining my charecter I despare for it." [Poor little "habit
and repute"!]

Her temper, her passion, and her "badness" are almost daily confessed
and deplored:--"I will never again trust to my own power, for I see that
I cannot be good without God's assistance--. I will not trust in my own
selfe, and Isa's health will be quite ruined by me--it will indeed."
"Isa has giving me advice, which is, that when I feel Satan beginning to
tempt me, that I flea him and he would flea me." "Remorse is the worst
thing to bear, and I am afraid that I will fall a marter to it."

Poor dear little sinner!--Here comes the world again:--"In my travels I
met with a handsome lad named Charles Balfour Esq., and from him I got
ofers of marage--offers of marage, did I say? Nay plenty heard me." A
fine scent for "breach of promise"!

This is abrupt and strong:--"The Divil is curced and all works. 'Tis a
fine work 'Newton on the profecies.' I wonder if there is another book
of poems comes near the Bible. The Divil always girns at the sight of
the Bible." "Miss Potune" (her "simpliton" friend) "is very fat; she
pretends to be very learned. She says she saw a stone that dropt from
the skies; but she is a good Christian."

Here come her views on church government:--"An Anni-babtist is a thing I
am not a member of--I am a Pisplekan (Episcopalian) just now, and" (O
you little Laodicean and Latitudinarian!) "a Prisbeteran at
Kirkcaldy"--_(Blandula! Vagula! coelum et animum mutas quoe trans mare_
[i.e., _trans Bodotriam] curris!_)--"my native town."

"Sentiment is not what I am acquainted with as yet, though I wish it,
and should like to practise it" (!) "I wish I had a great, great deal of
gratitude in my heart, in all my body." There is a new novel published,
named 'Self-Control' (Mrs. Brunton's)--"a very good maxim forsooth!"

This is shocking:--"Yesterday a marrade man, named Mr. John Balfour,
Esq., offered to kiss me, and offered to marry me, though the man" (a
fine directness this!) "was espused, and his wife was present and said
he must ask her permission; but he did not. I think he was ashamed and
confounded before 3 gentelman--Mr. Jobson and 2 Mr. Kings." "Mr.
Banesters" (Bannister's) "Budjet is to-night; I hope it will be a good
one. A great many authors have expressed themselves too sentimentally."
You are right, Marjorie. "A Mr. Burns writes a beautiful song on Mr.
Cunhaming, whose wife desarted him--truly it is a most beautiful one."
"I like to read the Fabulous historys, about the histerys of Robin,
Dickey, flapsay, and Peccay, and it is very amusing, for some were good
birds and others bad, but Peccay was the most dutiful and obedient to
her parients." "Thomson is a beautiful author, and Pope, but nothing to
Shakespear, of which I have a little knolege. 'Macbeth' is a pretty
composition, but awful one." "The 'Newgate Calender' is very
instructive." (!)

"A sailor called here to say farewell; it must be dreadful to leave his
native country when he might get a wife; or perhaps me, for I love him
very much. But O I forgot, Isabella forbid me to speak about love." This
antiphlogistic regimen and lesson is ill to learn by our Maidie, for
here she sins again:--"Love is a very papithatick thing" (it is almost a
pity to correct this into pathetic), "as well as troublesome and
tiresome--but O Isabella forbid me to speak of it."

Here are her reflections on a pineapple:--"I think the price of a
pineapple is very dear: it is a whole bright goulden guinea, that might
have sustained a poor family." Here is a new vernal simile:--"The hedges
are sprouting like chicks from the eggs when they are newly hatched or,
as the vulgar say, _clacked_". "Doctor Swift's works are very funny; I
got some of them by heart." "Moreheads sermons are I hear much praised,
but I never read sermons of any kind; but I read novelettes and my
Bible, and I never forget it, or my prayers." Brava, Marjorie!

She seems now, when still about six, to have broken out into song:--

     EPHIBOL [EPIGRAM OR EPITAPH--WHO KNOWS WHICH?] ON MY DEAR
     LOVE ISABELLA.

     "Here lies sweet Isabel in bed,
     With a night-cap on her head;
     Her skin is soft, her face is fair,
     And she has very pretty hair;
     She and I in bed lies nice,
     And undisturbed by rats or mice.
     She is disgusted with Mr. Worgan,
     Though he plays upon the organ.
     Her nails are neat, her teeth are white,
     Her eyes are very, very bright.
     In a conspicuous town she lives,
     And to the poor her money gives.
     Here ends sweet Isabella's story,
     And may it be much to her glory."

Here are some bits at random:--

     "Of summer I am very fond,
     And love to bathe into a pond:
     The look of sunshine dies away,
     And will not let me out to play;
     I love the morning's sun to spy
     Glittering through the casement's eye;
     The rays of light are very sweet,
     And puts away the taste of meat;
     The balmy breeze comes down from heaven,
     And makes us like for to be living."

"The casawary is an curious bird, and so is the gigantic crane, and the
pelican of the wilderness, whose mouth holds a bucket of fish and water.
Fighting is what ladies is not qualyfied for, they would not make a good
figure in battle or in a duel. Alas! we females are of little use to our
country. The history of all the malcontents as ever was hanged is
amusing." Still harping on the Newgate Calendar!

"Braehead is extremely pleasant to me by the companie of swine, geese,
cocks, etc., and they are the delight of my soul."

"I am going to tell you of a melancholy story. A young turkie of two or
three months old, would you believe it, the father broke its leg, and he
killed another! I think he ought to be transported or hanged."

"Queen Street is a very gay one, and so is Princes Street, for all the
lads and lasses, besides bucks and beggars, parade there"

"I should like to see a play very much, for I never saw one in all my
life, and don't believe I ever shall; but I hope I can be content
without going to one. I can be quite happy without my desire
being granted."

"Some days ago Isabella had a terrible fit of the toothake, and she
walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I
thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer--balmy
sleep--but did not get it--a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to
make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe.
Superstition is a very mean thing, and should be despised and shunned."

Here is her weakness and her strength again:--"In the love-novels all
the heroines are very desperate. Isabella will not allow me to speak
about lovers and heroins, and 'tis too refined for my taste." "Miss
Egward's [Edgeworth's] tails are very good, particularly some that are
very much adapted for youth (!) as Laz Laurance and Tarelton, False
Keys, etc., etc."

"Tom Jones and Gray's Elegey in a country churchyard are both excellent,
and much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men." Are our
Marjories now-a-days better or worse, because they cannot read 'Tom
Jones' unharmed? More better than worse; but who among them can repeat
Gray's 'Lines on a Distant Prospect of Eton College' as could
our Maidie?

Here is some more of her prattle:--"I went into Isabella's bed to make
her smile like the Genius Demedicus [the Venus de' Medicis] or the
statute in an ancient Greece, but she fell asleep in my very face, at
which my anger broke forth, so that I awoke her from a comfortable nap.
All was now hushed up again, but again my anger burst forth at her
biding me get up."

She begins thus loftily,--

     "Death the righteous love to see,
     But from it doth the wicked flee."

Then suddenly breaks off [as if with laughter],--

"I am sure they fly as fast as their legs can carry them!"

     "There is a thing I love to see,
     That is our monkey catch a flee."

     "I love in Isa's bed to lie,
     Oh, such a joy and luxury!
     The bottom of the bed I sleep,
     And with great care within I creep;
     Oft I embrace her feet of lillys,
     But she has goton all the pillys.
     Her neck I never can embrace,
     But I do hug her feet in place."

How childish and yet how strong and free is her use of words!--"I lay at
the foot of the bed because Isabella said I disturbed her by continial
fighting and kicking, but I was very dull, and continially at work
reading the Arabian Nights, which I could not have done if I had slept
at the top. I am reading the Mysteries of Udolpho. I am much interested
in the fate of poor, poor Emily."

Here is one of her swains:--

     "Very soft and white his cheeks,
     His hair is red, and gray his breeks;
     His tooth is like the daisy fair,
     His only fault is in his hair."

This is a higher flight:--

     DEDICATED TO MRS. H. CRAWFORD BY THE AUTHOR, M. F.

     "Three turkeys fair their last have breathed,
     And now this world forever leaved;
     Their father, and their mother too,
     They sigh and weep as well as you;
     Indeed, the rats their bones have crunched,
     Into eternity theire laanched.
     A direful death indeed they had,
     As wad put any parent mad;
     But she was more than usual calm:
     She did not give a single dam."

This last word is saved from all sin by its tender age, not to speak of
the want of the _n_. We fear "she" is the abandoned mother, in spite of
her previous sighs and tears.

"Isabella says when we pray we should pray fervently, and not rattel
over a prayer--for that we are kneeling at the foot-stool of our Lord
and Creator, who saves us from eternal damnation, and from
unquestionable fire and brimston."

She has a long poem on Mary Queen of Scots:--

     "Queen Mary was much loved by all,
     Both by the great and by the small,
     But hark! her soul to heaven doth rise?
     And I suppose she has gained a prize;
     For I do think she would not go
     Into the _awful_ place below.
     There is a thing that I must tell--
     Elizabeth went to fire and hell!
     He who would teach her to be civil,
     It must be her great friend, the divil!"

She hits off Darnley well:--

     "A noble's son,--a handsome lad,--
     By some queer way or other, had
     Got quite the better of her heart;
     With him she always talked apart:
     Silly he was, but very fair;
     A greater buck was not found there."

"By some queer way or other": is not this the general case and the
mystery, young ladies and gentlemen? Goethe's doctrine of "elective
affinities" discovered by our Pet Maidie!

     SONNET TO A MONKEY

     O lively, O most charming pug:
     Thy graceful air and heavenly mug!
     The beauties of his mind do shine,
     And every bit is shaped and fine.
     Your teeth are whiter than the snow;
     Your a great buck, your a great beau;
     Your eyes are of so nice a shape,
     More like a Christian's than an ape;
     Your cheek is like the rose's blume;
     Your hair is like the raven's plume;
     His nose's cast is of the Roman:
     He is a very pretty woman.
     I could not get a rhyme for Roman,
     So was obliged to call him woman.

This last joke is good. She repeats it when writing of James the Second
being killed at Roxburgh:--

     He was killed by a cannon splinter,
     Quite in the middle of the winter;
     Perhaps it was not at that time,
     But I can get no other rhyme.

Here is one of her last letters, dated Kirkcaldy, 12th October, 1811.
You can see how her nature is deepening and enriching:--

     MY DEAR MOTHER--You will think that I entirely forget you but
     I assure you that you are greatly mistaken. I think of you
     always and often sigh to think of the distance between us two
     loving creatures of nature. We have regular hours for all our
     occupations first at 7 o'clock we go to the dancing and come
     home at 8 we then read our Bible and get our repeating and
     then play till ten then we get our music till 11 when we get
     our writing and accounts we sew from 12 till 1 after which I
     get my gramer and then work till five. At 7 we come and knit
     till 8 when we dont go to the dancing. This is an exact
     description. I must take a hasty farewell to her whom I love,
     reverence and doat on and who I hope thinks the same of

     MARJORY FLEMING.

     P.S.--An old pack of cards (!) would be very exceptible.

This other is a month earlier:--

     "MY DEAR LITTLE MAMA--I was truly happy to hear that you were
     all well. We are surrounded with measles at present on every
     side, for the Herons got it, and Isabella Heron was near
     Death's Door, and one night her father lifted her out of bed,
     and she fell down as they thought lifeless. Mr. Heron said,
     'That lassie's deed noo'--'I'm no deed yet.' She then threw
     up a big worm nine inches and a half long. I have begun
     dancing, but am not very fond of it, for the boys strikes and
     mocks me.--I have been another night at the dancing; I like
     it better. I will write to you as often as I can; but I am
     afraid not every week. _I long for you with the longings of a
     child to embrace you--to fold you in my arms. I respect you
     with all the respect due to a mother. You don't know how I
     love you. So I shall remain, your loving child_,

     M. FLEMING."

What rich involution of love in the words marked! Here are some lines to
her beloved Isabella, in July, 1811:--

     "There is a thing that I do want--
     With you these beauteous walks to haunt;
     We would be happy if you would
     Try to come over if you could.
     Then I would all quite happy be
     _Now and for all eternity_.
     My mother is so very sweet,
     _And checks my appetite to eat_;
     My father shows us what to do;
     But O I'm sure that I want you.
     I have no more of poetry;
     O Isa do remember me,
     And try to love your Marjory."

In a letter from "Isa" to

     "Miss Muff Maidie Marjory Fleming,
     favored by Rare Rear-Admiral Fleming,"

she says:--"I long much to see you, and talk over all our old stories
together, and to hear you read and repeat. I am pining for my old friend
Cesario, and poor Lear, and wicked Richard. How is the dear
Multiplication table going on? are you still as much attached to 9 times
9 as you used to be?"

But this dainty, bright thing is about to flee,--to come "quick to
confusion." The measles she writes of seized her, and she died on the
19th of December, 1811. The day before her death, Sunday, she sat up in
bed, worn and thin, her eye gleaming as with the light of a coming
world, and with a tremulous, old voice repeated the lines by
Burns,--heavy with the shadow of death, and lit with the fantasy of the
judgment-seat,--the publican's prayer in paraphrase:--

     Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene

It is more affecting than we care to say to read her mother's and
Isabella Keith's letters, written immediately after her death. Old and
withered, tattered and pale, they are now: but when you read them, how
quick, how throbbing with life and love! how rich in that language of
affection which only women and Shakespeare and Luther can use,--that
power of detaining the soul over the beloved object and its loss....

In her first letter to Miss Keith, Mrs. Fleming says of her dead
Maidie:--"Never did I behold so beautiful an object. It resembled the
finest wax-work. There was in the countenance an expression of sweetness
and serenity which seemed to indicate that the pure spirit had
anticipated the joys of heaven ere it quitted the mortal frame. To tell
you what your Maidie said of you would fill volumes; for you were the
constant theme of her discourse, the subject of her thoughts, and ruler
of her actions. The last time she mentioned you was a few hours before
all sense save that of suffering was suspended, when she said to Dr.
Johnstone, 'If you will let me out at the New Year, I will be quite
contented.' I asked what made her so anxious to get out then. 'I want to
purchase a New Year's gift for Isa Keith with the sixpence you gave me
for being patient in the measles; and I would like to choose it myself.'
I do not remember her speaking afterwards, except to complain of her
head, till just before she expired, when she articulated, 'O
mother! mother!'"

Do we make too much of this little child, who has been in her grave in
Abbotshall. Kirkyard these fifty and more years? We may of her
cleverness,--not of her affectionateness, her nature. What a picture the
_animosa infans_ gives us of herself, her vivacity, her passionateness,
her precocious love-making, her passion for nature, for swine, for all
living things, her reading, her turn for expression, her satire, her
frankness, her little sins and rages, her great repentances. We don't
wonder Walter Scott carried her off in the neuk of his plaid, and
played himself with her for hours....

We are indebted for the following--and our readers will be not unwilling
to share our obligations--to her sister:--"Her birth was 15th January,
1803; her death 19th December, 1811. I take this from her Bibles. I
believe she was a child of robust health, of much vigor of body, and
beautifully formed arms, and until her last illness, never was an hour
in bed. She was niece to Mrs. Keith, residing in No. 1 North Charlotte
Street, who was _not_ Mrs. Murray Keith, although very intimately
acquainted with that old lady....

"As to my aunt and Scott, they were on a very intimate footing. He asked
my aunt to be godmother to his eldest daughter Sophia Charlotte. I had a
copy of Miss Edgeworth's 'Rosamond' and 'Harry and Lucy' for long, which
was 'a gift to Marjorie from Walter Scott,' probably the first edition
of that attractive series, for it wanted 'Frank,' which is always now
published as part of the series under the title of 'Early Lessons.' I
regret to say these little volumes have disappeared."

Sir Walter was no relation of Marjorie's, but of the Keiths, through the
Swintons; and like Marjorie, he stayed much at Ravelstone in his early
days, with his grand-aunt Mrs. Keith....

We cannot better end than in words from this same pen:--"I have to ask
you to forgive my anxiety in gathering up the fragments of Marjorie's
last days, but I have an almost sacred feeling to all that pertains to
her. You are quite correct in stating that measles were the cause of her
death. My mother was struck by the patient quietness manifested by
Marjorie during this illness, unlike her ardent, impulsive nature; but
love and poetic feeling were unquenched. When lying very still, her
mother asked her if there was anything she wished: 'Oh yes! if you would
just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the
Leal,' and I will lie and _think_, and enjoy myself' (this is just as
stated to me by her mother and mine). Well, the happy day came, alike to
parents and child, when Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the
nursery to the parlor. It was Sabbath evening, and after tea. My father,
who idolized this child, and never afterwards in my hearing mentioned
her name, took her in his arms; and while walking up and down the room,
she said, 'Father, I will repeat something to you; what would you
like?' He said, 'Just choose yourself, Maidie.' She hesitated for a
moment between the paraphrase 'Few are thy days, and full of woe,' and
the lines of Burns already quoted, but decided on the latter, a
remarkable choice for a child. The repeating these lines seemed to stir
up the depths of feeling in her soul. She asked to be allowed to write a
poem; there was a doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case
of hurting her eyes. She pleaded earnestly, 'Just this once;' the point
was yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she wrote
an address of fourteen lines, 'To her loved cousin on the author's
recovery,' her last work on earth:--

     'Oh! Isa, pain did visit me,
     I was at the last extremity;
     How often did I think of you,
     I wished your graceful form to view,
     To clasp you in my weak embrace,
     Indeed I thought I'd run my race:
     Good care, I'm sure, was of me taken,
     But still indeed I was much shaken.
     At last I daily strength did gain,
     And oh! at last, away went pain;
     At length the doctor thought I might
     Stay in the parlor all the night;
     I now continue so to do;
     Farewell to Nancy and to you.'

She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with
the old cry of woe to a mother's heart, 'My head, my head!' Three days
of the dire malady 'water in the head' followed, and the end came."

     "Soft, silken primrose, fading timelessly!"

It is needless, it is impossible to add anything to this; the fervor,
the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye,
the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling
child; Lady Nairne's words, and the old tune, stealing up from the
depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong
like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark;
the words of Burns touching the kindred chord; her last numbers, "wildly
sweet," traced with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last
enemy and friend,--_moriens canit_,--and that love which is so soon to
be her everlasting light, is her song's burden to the end.

     "She set as sets the morning star, which goes
     Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
     Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
     But melts away into the light of heaven."

THE DEATH OF THACKERAY

From 'Spare Hours'

We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he
was walking with two friends along the Dean road, to the west of
Edinburgh,--one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely
evening,--such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud
hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed
in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a
narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color, lucid, and as
if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object
standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of
Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this
pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was
so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was,
unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at
it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle,
and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word "CALVARY!" The
friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that
evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of
divine things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing
his simple faith in God and in his Savior.

There is a passage at the close of the 'Roundabout Paper' No. 23, 'De
Finibus,' in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked; the whole
paper is like a soliloquy. It opens with a drawing of Mr. Punch, with
unusually mild eye, retiring for the night; he is putting out his
high-heeled shoes, and before disappearing gives a wistful look into the
passage, as if bidding it and all else good-night. He will be in bed,
his candle out, and in darkness, in five minutes, and his shoes found
next morning at his door, the little potentate all the while in his
final sleep. The whole paper is worth the most careful study; it reveals
not a little of his real nature, and unfolds very curiously the secret
of his work, the vitality and abiding power of his own creations; how he
"invented a certain Costigan, out of scraps, heel-taps, odds and ends of
characters," and met the original the other day, without surprise, in a
tavern parlor. The following is beautiful: "Years ago I had a quarrel
with a certain well-known person (I believed a statement regarding him
which his friends imparted to me, and which turned out to be quite
incorrect). To his dying day that quarrel was never quite made up. I
said to his brother, 'Why is your brother's soul still dark against me?
_It is I who ought to be angry and unforgiving, for I was in the
wrong_.'" _Odisse quem læseris_ was never better contravened. But what
we chiefly refer to now is the profound pensiveness of the following
strain, as if written with a presentiment of what was not then very far
off:--"Another Finis written; another milestone on this journey from
birth to the next world. Sure it is a subject for solemn cogitation.
Shall we continue this story-telling business, and be voluble to the end
of our age?" "Will it not be presently time, O prattler, to hold your
tongue?" And thus he ends:--

"Oh, the sad old pages, the dull old pages; oh, the cares, the _ennui_,
the squabbles, the repetitions, the old conversations over and over
again! But now and again a kind thought is recalled, and now and again a
dear memory. Yet a few chapters more, and then the last; after which,
behold Finis itself comes to an end, and the Infinite begins."

He had been suffering on Sunday from an old and cruel enemy. He fixed
with his friend and surgeon to come again on Tuesday, but with that
dread of anticipated pain which is a common condition of sensibility and
genius, he put him off with a note from "yours unfaithfully, W.M.T." He
went out on Wednesday for a little, and came home at ten. He went to his
room, suffering much, but declining his man's offer to sit with him. He
hated to make others suffer. He was heard moving, as if in pain, about
twelve, on the eve of--

     "That happy morn
     Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King,
     Of wedded maid and virgin-mother born,
     Our great redemption from above did bring."

Then all was quiet, and then he must have died--in a moment. Next
morning his man went in, and opening the windows found his master dead,
his arms behind his head, as if he had tried to take one more breath. We
think of him as of our Chalmers, found dead in like manner: the same
childlike, unspoiled, open face; the same gentle mouth; the same
spaciousness and softness of nature; the same look of power. What a
thing to think of,--his lying there alone in the dark, in the midst of
his own mighty London; his mother and his daughters asleep, and, it may
be, dreaming of his goodness. God help them, and us all! What would
become of us, stumbling along this our path of life, if we could not, at
our utmost need, stay ourselves on Him?

Long years of sorrow, labor, and pain had killed him before his time. It
was found after death how little life he had to live. He looked always
fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost infantine
face, but he was worn to a shadow, and his hands wasted as if by eighty
years. With him it is the end of Ends; finite is over and, infinite
begun. What we all felt and feel can never be so well expressed as in
his own words of sorrow for the early death of Charles Buller:--

     "Who knows the inscrutable design?
        Blest He who took and He who gave!
      Why should your mother, Charles, not mine,
        Be weeping at her darling's grave?
      We bow to heaven that willed it so,
        That darkly rules the fate of all,
      That sends the respite or the blow,
        That's free to give or to recall."

CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE (ARTEMUS WARD)

(1834-1867)

BY CHARLES F. JOHNSON

Charles Farrar Brown, better known to the public of thirty years ago
under his pen-name of Artemus Ward, was born in the little village of
Waterford, Maine, on the 26th day of April, 1834. Waterford is a quiet
village of about seven hundred inhabitants, lying among the foot-hills
of the White Mountains. When Browne was a child it was a station on the
western stage-route, and an important depot for lumbermen's supplies.
Since the extension of railroads northerly and westerly from the
seaboard, it has however shared the fate of many New England villages in
being left on one side of the main currents of commercial activity, and
gradually assuming a character of repose and leisure, in many regards
more attractive than the life and bustle of earlier days. Many persons
are still living there who remember the humorist as a quaint and tricksy
boy, alternating between laughter and preternatural gravity, and of a
surprising ingenuity in devising odd practical jokes in which good
nature so far prevailed that even the victims were too much amused to be
very angry.

[Illustration: Charles F. Browne]

On both sides, he came from original New England stock; and although he
was proud of his descent from a very ancient English family, in
deference to whom he wrote his name with the final "e," he felt greater
pride in his American ancestors, and always said that they were genuine
and primitive Yankees,--people of intelligence, activity, and integrity
in business, but entirely unaffected by new-fangled ideas. It is
interesting to notice that Browne's humor was hereditary on the paternal
side, his father especially being noted for his quaint sayings and
harmless eccentricities. His cousin Daniel many years later bore a
strong resemblance to what Charles had been, and he too possessed a
kindred humorous faculty and told a story in much the same solemn
manner, bringing out the point as if it were something entirely
irrelevant and unimportant and casually remembered. The subject of this
sketch, however, was the only member of the family in whom a love for
the droll and incongruous was a controlling disposition. As is
frequently the case, a family trait was intensified in one individual to
the point where talent passes over into genius.

On his mother's side, too, Browne was a thorough-bred New-Englander. His
maternal grandfather, Mr. Calvin Farrar, was a man of influence in town
and State, and was able to send two of his sons to Bowdoin College. I
have mentioned Browne's parentage because his humor is so essentially
American. Whether this consists in a peculiar gravity in the humorous
attitude towards the subject, rather than playfulness, or in a tendency
to exaggerated statement, or in a broad humanitarian standpoint, or in a
certain flavor given by a blending of all these, it is very difficult to
decide. Probably the peculiar standpoint is the distinguishing note, and
American humor is a product of democracy.

Humor is as difficult of definition as is poetry. It is an intimate
quality of the mind, which predisposes a man to look for remote and
unreal analogies and to present them gravely as if they were valid. It
sees that many of the objects valued by men are illusions, and it
expresses this conviction by assuming that other manifest trifles are
important. It is the deadly enemy of sentimentality and affectation, for
its vision is clear. Although it turns everything topsy-turvy in sport,
its world is not a chaos nor a child's play-ground, for humor is based
on keen perception of truth. There is no method--except the highest
poetic treatment--which reveals so distinctly the falsehoods and
hypocrisies of the social and economic order as the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of humor; for all human institutions have their ridiculous
sides, which astonish and amuse us when pointed out, but from viewing
which we suddenly become aware of relative values before misunderstood.
But just as poetry may degenerate into a musical collection of words and
painting into a decorative association of colors, so humor may
degenerate into the merely comic or amusing. The laugh which true humor
arouses is not far removed from tears. Humor indeed is not always
associated with kindliness, for we have the sardonic humor of Carlyle
and the savage humor of Swift; but it is naturally dissociated from
egotism, and is never more attractive than when, as in the case of
Charles Lamb and Oliver Goldsmith, it is based on a loving and generous
interest in humanity.

Humor, must rest on a broad human foundation, and cannot be narrowed to
the notions of a certain class. But in most English humor,--as indeed in
all English literature except the very highest,--the social class to
which the writer does not belong is regarded _ab extra_. In Punch, for
instance, not only are servants always given a conventional set of
features, but they are given conventional minds, and the jokes are based
on a hypothetical conception of personality. Dickens was a great
humorist, and understood the nature of the poor because he had been one
of them; but his gentlemen and ladies are lay figures. Thackeray's
studies of the flunky are capital; but he studies him _qua flunky_, as a
naturalist might study an animal, and hardly ranks him _sub specie
humanitatis_. But to the American humorist all men are primarily men.
The waiter and the prince are equally ridiculous to him, because in each
he finds similar incongruities between the man and his surroundings; but
in England there is a deep impassable gulf between the man at the table
and the man behind his chair. This democratic independence of external
and adventitious circumstance sometimes gives a tone of irreverence to
American persiflage, and the temporary character of class distinctions
in America undoubtedly diminishes the amount of literary material "in
sight" but when, as in the case of Browne and Clemens, there is in the
humorist's mind a basis of reverence for things and persons that are
really reverend, it gives a breadth and freedom to the humorous
conception that is distinctively American.

We put Clemens and Browne in the same line, because in reading a page of
either we feel at once the American touch. Browne of course is not to be
compared to Clemens in affluence or in range in depicting humorous
character-types; but it must be remembered that Clemens has lived thirty
active years longer than his predecessor did. Neither has written a line
that he would wish to blot for its foul suggestion, or because it
ridiculed things that were lovely and of good report. Both were educated
in journalism, and came into direct contact with the strenuous and
realistic life of labor. And to repeat, though one was born and bred
west of the Mississippi and the other far "down east," both are
distinctly American. Had either been born and passed his childhood
outside our magic line, this resemblance would not have existed. And yet
we cannot say precisely wherein this likeness lies, nor what caused it;
so deep, so subtle, so pervading is the influence of nationality. But
their original expressions of the American humorous tone are worth ten
thousand literary echoes of Sterne or Lamb or Dickens or Thackeray.

The education of young Browne was limited to the strictly preparatory
years. At the age of thirteen he was forced by the death of his father
to try to earn his living. When about fourteen, he was apprenticed to a
Mr. Rex, who published a paper at Lancaster, New Hampshire. He remained
there about a year, then worked on various country papers, and finally
passed three years in the printing-house of Snow and Wilder, Boston. He
then went to Ohio, and after working for some months on the Tiffin
Advertiser, went to Toledo, where he remained till the fall of 1857.
Thence he went to Cleveland, Ohio, as local editor of the Plain Dealer.
Here appeared the humorous letters signed "Artemus Ward" and written in
the character of an itinerant showman. In 1860 he went to New York as
editor of the comic journal Vanity Fair.

His reputation grew steadily, and his first volume, 'Artemus Ward, His
Book,' was brought out in 1862. In 1863 he went to San Francisco by way
of the Isthmus and returned overland. This journey was chronicled in a
short volume, 'Artemus Ward, His Travels.' He had already undertaken a
career of lecturing, and his comic entertainments, given in a style
peculiarly his own, became very popular. The mimetic gift is frequently
found in the humorist; and Browne's peculiar drawl, his profound gravity
and dreamy, far-away expression, the unexpected character of his jokes
and the surprise with which he seemed to regard the audience, made a
combination of a delightfully quaint absurdity. Browne himself was a
very winning personality, and never failed to put his audience in good
humor. None who knew him twenty-nine years ago think of him without
tenderness. In 1866 he visited England, and became almost as popular
there as lecturer and writer for Punch. He died from a pulmonary trouble
in Southampton, March 6th, 1867, being not quite thirty-three years old.
He was never married.

When we remember that a large part of Browne's mature life was taken up
in learning the printer's trade, in which he became a master, we must
decide that he had only entered on his career as humorous writer. Much
of what he wrote is simply amusing, with little depth or power of
suggestion; it is comic, not humorous. He was gaining the ear of the
public and training his powers of expression. What he has left consists
of a few collections of sketches written for a daily paper. But the
subjoined extracts will show, albeit dimly, that he was more than a
joker, as under the cap and bells of the fool in Lear we catch a glimpse
of the face of a tender-hearted and philosophic friend. Browne's nature
was so kindly and sympathetic, so pure and manly, that after he had
achieved a reputation and was relieved from immediate pecuniary
pressure, he would have felt an ambition to do some worthy work and take
time to bring out the best that was in him. As it is, he had only tried
his 'prentice hand. Still, the figure of the old showman, though not
very solidly painted, is admirably done. He is a sort of sublimated and
unoffensive Barnum; perfectly consistent, permeated with his
professional view of life, yet quite incapable of anything underhand or
mean; radically loyal to the Union, appreciative of the nature of his
animals, steady in his humorous attitude toward life: and above all, not
a composite of shreds and patches, but a personality. Slight as he is,
and unconscious and unpracticed as is the art that went to his creation,
he is one of the humorous figures of all literature; and old Sir John
Falstaff, Sir Roger de Coverley, Uncle Toby, and Dr. Primrose will not
disdain to admit him into their company; for he too is a man, not an
abstraction, and need not be ashamed of his parentage nor doubtful of
his standing among the "children of the men of wit."

EDWIN FORREST AS OTHELLO

Durin a recent visit to New York the undersined went to see Edwin
Forrest. As I am into the moral show biziness myself I ginrally go to
Barnum's moral museum, where only moral peeple air admitted, partickly
on Wednesday arternoons. But this time I thot I'd go and see Ed. Ed has
bin actin out on the stage for many years. There is varis 'pinions about
his actin, Englishmen ginrally bleevin that he's far superior to Mister
Macready; but on one pint all agree, & that is that Ed draws like a
six-ox team. Ed was actin at Niblo's Garding, which looks considerable
more like a parster than a garding, but let that pars. I sot down in the
pit, took out my spectacles and commenced peroosin the evenin's bill.
The awjince was all-fired large & the boxes was full of the elitty of
New York. Several opery glasses was leveled at me by Gotham's fairest
darters, but I didn't let on as tho I noticed it, tho mebby I did take
out my sixteen-dollar silver watch & brandish it round more than was
necessary. But the best of us has our weaknesses & if a man has gewelry
let him show it. As I was peroosin the bill a grave young man who sot
near me axed me if I'd ever seen Forrest dance the Essence of Old
Virginny. "He's immense in that," sed the young man. "He also does a
fair champion jig," the young man continnered, "but his Big Thing is the
Essence of Old Virginny." Sez I, "Fair youth, do you know what I'd do
with you if you was my sun?"

"No," sez he.

"Wall," sez I, "I'd appint your funeral to-morrow arternoon, & the
_korps should be ready_. You're too smart to live on this yerth."

He didn't try any more of his capers on me. But another pussylanermuss
individooul in a red vest and patent leather boots told me his name was
Bill Astor & axed me to lend him 50 cents till early in the mornin. I
told him I'd probly send it round to him before he retired to his
virtoous couch, but if I didn't he might look for it next fall as soon
as I'd cut my corn. The orchestry was now fiddling with all their might
& as the peeple didn't understan anything about it they applaudid
versifrusly. Presently old Ed cum out. The play was Otheller or More of
Veniss. Otheller was writ by Wm. Shakspeer. The seene is laid in Veniss.
Otheller was a likely man & was a ginral in the Veniss army. He eloped
with Desdemony, a darter of the Hon. Mr. Brabantio, who represented one
of the back districks in the Veneshun legislater. Old Brabantio was as
mad as thunder at this & tore round considerable, but finally cooled
down, tellin Otheller, howsoever, that Desdemony had come it over her
par, & that he had better look out or she'd come it over him likewise.
Mr. and Mrs. Otheller git along very comfortable-like for a spell. She
is sweet-tempered and lovin--a nice, sensible female, never goin in for
he-female conventions, green cotton umbrellers, and pickled beats.
Otheller is a good provider and thinks all the world of his wife. She
has a lazy time of it, the hird girl doin all the cookin and washin.
Desdemony in fact don't have to git the water to wash her own hands
with. But a low cuss named Iago, who I bleeve wants to git Otheller out
of his snug government birth, now goes to work & upsets the Otheller
family in most outrajus stile. Iago falls in with a brainless youth
named Roderigo & wins all his money at poker. (Iago allers played foul.)
He thus got money enuff to carry out his onprincipled skeem. Mike
Cassio, a Irishman, is selected as a tool by Iago. Mike was a clever
feller & a orficer in Otheller's army. He liked his tods too well,
howsoever, & they floored him as they have many other promisin young
men. Iago injuces Mike to drink with him, Iago slily throwin his whiskey
over his shoulder. Mike gits as drunk as a biled owl & allows that he
can lick a yard full of the Veneshun fancy before breakfast, without
sweatin a hair. He meets Roderigo & proceeds for to smash him. A feller
named Mentano undertakes to slap Cassio, when that infatooated person
runs his sword into him. That miserble man, Iago, pretends to be very
sorry to see Mike conduck hisself in this way & undertakes to smooth the
thing over to Otheller, who rushes in with a drawn sword & wants to know
what's up. Iago cunningly tells his story & Otheller tells Mike that he
thinks a good deal of him but that he cant train no more in his
regiment. Desdemony sympathises with poor Mike & interceds for him with
Otheller. Iago makes him bleeve she does this because she thinks more of
Mike than she does of hisself. Otheller swallers Iagos lyin tail & goes
to makin a noosence of hisself ginrally. He worries poor Desdemony
terrible by his vile insinuations & finally smothers her to deth with a
piller. Mrs. Iago comes in just as Otheller has finished the fowl deed &
givs him fits right & left, showin him that he has been orfully gulled
by her miserble cuss of a husband. Iago cums in & his wife commences
rakin him down also, when he stabs her. Otheller jaws him a spell & then
cuts a small hole in his stummick with his sword. Iago pints to
Desdemony's deth bed & goes orf with a sardonic smile onto his
countenance. Otheller tells the peple that he has dun the state some
service & they know it; axes them to do as fair a thing as they can for
him under the circumstances, & kills hisself with a fish-knife, which is
the most sensible thing he can do. This is a breef skedule of the
synopsis of the play.

Edwin Forrest is a grate acter. I thot I saw Otheller before me all the
time he was actin &, when the curtin fell, I found my spectacles was
still mistened with salt-water, which had run from my eyes while poor
Desdemony was dyin. Betsy Jane--Betsy Jane! let us pray that our
domestic bliss may never be busted up by a Iago!

Edwin Forrest makes money actin out on the stage. He gits five hundred
dollars a nite & his board & washin. I wish I had such a Forrest in
my Garding!

Copyrighted by G.W. Dillingham and Company, New York.

HIGH-HANDED OUTRAGE AT UTICA

In the fall of 1856 I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in
the State of New York.

The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her
prases.

1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual
flowry stile, what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk
up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord's Last Supper, and
cease Judas Iscariot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then
commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.

"What under the son are you abowt?" cried I.

Sez he, "What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?" & he hit
the wax figger another tremenjus blow on the hed.

Sez I, "You egrejus ass that air's a wax figger--a representashun of the
false 'Postle."

Sez he, "That's all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man,
that Judas Iscariot can't show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn
site!" with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man
belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him and the Joory
brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.

Copyrighted by G.W. Dillingham and Company, New York.

AFFAIRS ROUND THE VILLAGE GREEN

And where are the friends of my youth? I have found one of 'em,
certainly. I saw him ride in a circus the other day on a bareback horse,
and even now his name stares at me from yonder board-fence in green and
blue and red and yellow letters. Dashington, the youth with whom I used
to read the able orations of Cicero, and who as a declaimer on
exhibition days used to wipe the rest of us boys pretty handsomely
out--well, Dashington is identified with the halibut and cod interests
--drives a fish-cart, in fact, from a certain town on the coast back
into the interior. Hurburtson--the utterly stupid boy--the lunkhead who
never had his lesson, he's about the ablest lawyer a sister State can
boast. Mills is a newspaper man, and is just now editing a Major General
down South. Singlingson, the sweet-faced boy whose face was always
washed and who was never rude, _he_ is in the penitentiary for putting
his uncle's autograph to a financial document. Hawkins, the clergyman's
son, is an actor; and Williamson, the good little boy who divided his
bread and butter with the beggar-man, is a failing merchant, and makes
money by it. Tom Slink, who used to smoke Short Sixes and get acquainted
with the little circus boys, is popularly supposed to be the proprietor
of a cheap gaming establishment in Boston, where the beautiful but
uncertain prop is nightly tossed. Be sure the Army is represented by
many of the friends of my youth, the most of whom have given a good
account of themselves.

But Chalmerson hasn't done much. No, Chalmerson is rather of a failure.
He plays on the guitar and sings love-songs. Not that he is a bad man--a
kinder-hearted creature never lived, and they say he hasn't yet got over
crying for his little curly-haired sister who died ever so long ago. But
he knows nothing about business, politics, the world, and those things.
He is dull at trade--indeed, it is the common remark that "Everybody
cheats Chalmerson." He came to the party the other evening and brought
his guitar. They wouldn't have him for a tenor in the opera, certainly,
for he is shaky in his upper notes; but if his simple melodies didn't
gush straight from the heart! why, even my trained eyes were wet! And
although some of the girls giggled, and some of the men seemed to pity
him, I could not help fancying that poor Chalmerson was nearer heaven
than any of us all.

Copyrighted by G. W. Dillingham and Company.

MR. PEPPER

From 'Artemus Ward: His Travels'

My arrival at Virginia City was signalized by the following incident:--

I had no sooner achieved my room in the garret of the International
Hotel than I was called upon by an intoxicated man, who said he was an
Editor. Knowing how rare it is for an Editor to be under the blighting
influence of either spirituous or malt liquors, I received this
statement doubtfully. But I said:

"What name?"

"Wait!" he said, and went out.

I heard him pacing unsteadily up and down the hall outside.

In ten minutes he returned, and said, "Pepper!"

Pepper was indeed his name. He had been out to see if he could remember
it, and he was so flushed with his success that he repeated it joyously
several times, and then, with a short laugh, he went away.

I had often heard of a man being "so drunk that he didn't know what town
he lived in," but here was a man so hideously inebriated that he didn't
know what his name was.

I saw him no more, but I heard from him. For he published a notice of my
lecture, in which he said that I had _a dissipated air!_

HORACE GREELEY'S RIDE TO PLACERVILLE

From 'Artemus Ward: His Travels'

When Mr. Greeley was in California, ovations awaited him at every town.
He had written powerful leaders in the Tribune in favor of the Pacific
Railroad, which had greatly endeared him to the citizens of the Golden
State. And therefore they made much of him when he went to see them.

At one town the enthusiastic populace tore his celebrated white coat to
pieces and carried the pieces home to remember him by.

The citizens of Placerville prepared to fête the great journalist,
and an extra coach with extra relays of horses was chartered
of the California Stage Company to carry him from Folsom to
Placerville--distance, forty miles. The extra was in some way delayed,
and did not leave Folsom until late in the afternoon. Mr. Greeley was to
be fêted at seven o'clock that evening by the citizens of Placerville,
and it was altogether necessary that he should be there by that time. So
the Stage Company said to Henry Monk, the driver of the extra, "Henry,
this great man must be there by seven to-night." And Henry answered,
"The great man shall be there."

The roads were in an awful state, and during the first few miles out of
Folsom slow progress was made.

"Sir," said Mr. Greeley, "are you aware that I must be in Placerville at
seven o'clock to-night?"

"I've got my orders!" laconically replied Henry Monk.

Still the coach dragged slowly forward.

"Sir," said Mr. Greeley, "this is not a trifling matter. I _must_ be
there at seven!"

Again came the answer, "I've got my orders!"

But the speed was not increased, and Mr. Greeley chafed away another
half-hour; when, as he was again about to remonstrate with the driver,
the horses suddenly started into a furious run, and all sorts of
encouraging yells filled the air from the throat of Henry Monk.

"That is right, my good fellow," said Mr. Greeley. "I'll give you ten
dollars when we get to Placerville. Now we are going!"

They were indeed, and at a terrible speed.

Crack, crack! went the whip, and again "that voice" split the air, "Get
up! Hi-yi! G'long! Yip-yip."

And on they tore over stones and ruts, up hill and down, at a rate of
speed never before achieved by stage horses.

Mr. Greeley, who had been bouncing from one end of the stage to the
other like an India-rubber ball, managed to get his head out of the
window, when he said:--

"Do-on't-on't-on't you-u-u think we-e-e-e shall get there by seven if we
do-on't-on't go so fast?"

"I've got my orders!" That was all Henry Monk said. And on tore the
coach.

It was becoming serious. Already the journalist was extremely sore from
the terrible jolting--and again his head "might have been seen from
the window."

"Sir," he said, "I don't care-care-air if we _don't_ get there at
seven."

"I've got my orders!" Fresh horses--forward again, faster than
before--over rocks and stumps, on one of which the coach narrowly
escaped turning a summerset.

"See here!" shrieked Mr. Greeley, "I don't care if we don't get there at
all."

"I've got my orders! I work fer the California Stage Company, I do.
That's wot I _work_ fer. They said, 'Get this man through by seving.'
An' this man's goin' through, you bet! Gerlong! Whoo-ep!"

Another frightful jolt, and Mr. Greeley's bald head suddenly found its
way through the roof of the coach, amidst the crash of small timbers and
the ripping of strong canvas.

"Stop, you--maniac!" he roared.

Again answered Henry Monk:--

"I've got my orders! _Keep your seat, Horace!_"

At Mud Springs, a village a few miles from Placerville, they met a large
delegation of the citizens of Placerville, who had come out to meet the
celebrated editor, and escort him into town. There was a military
company, a brass band, and a six-horse wagon-load of beautiful damsels
in milk-white dresses, representing all the States in the Union. It was
nearly dark now, but the delegation was amply provided with torches, and
bonfires blazed all along the road to Placerville.

The citizens met the coach in the outskirts of Mud Springs, and Mr. Monk
reined in his foam-covered steeds.

"Is Mr. Greeley on board?" asked the chairman of the committee.

"_He was, a few miles back_!" said Mr. Monk. "Yes," he added, looking
down through the hole which the fearful jolting had made in the
coach-roof, "Yes, I can see him! He is there!"

"Mr. Greeley," said the chairman of the committee, presenting himself at
the window of the coach, "Mr. Greeley, sir! We are come to most
cordially welcome you, sir!--Why, God bless me, sir, you are bleeding at
the nose!"

"I've got my orders!" cried Mr. Monk. "My orders is as follows: Git him
there by seving! It wants a quarter to seving. Stand out of the way!"

"But, sir," exclaimed the committee-man, seizing the off-leader by the
reins, "Mr. Monk, we are come to escort him into town! Look at the
procession, sir, and the brass-band, and the people, and the young
women, sir!"

"_I've got my orders_!" screamed Mr. Monk. "My orders don't say nothin'
about no brass bands and young women. My orders says, 'Git him there by
seving.' Let go them lines! Clear the way there! Whoo-ep! Keep your
seat, Horace!" and the coach dashed wildly through the procession,
upsetting a portion of the brass band, and violently grazing the wagon
which contained the beautiful young women in white.

Years hence, gray-haired men who were little boys in this procession
will tell their grandchildren how this stage tore through Mud Springs,
and how Horace Greeley's bald head ever and anon showed itself like a
wild apparition above the coach-roof.

Mr. Monk was on time. There is a tradition that Mr. Greeley was very
indignant for a while: then he laughed and finally presented Mr. Monk
with a brand-new suit of clothes. Mr. Monk himself is still in the
employ of the California Stage Company, and is rather fond of relating a
story that has made him famous all over the Pacific coast. But he says
he yields to no man in his admiration for Horace Greeley.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

(1605-1682)

BY FRANCIS BACON

When Sir Thomas Browne, in the last decade of his life, was asked to
furnish data for the writing of his memoirs in Wood's 'Athenæ
Oxonienses,' he gave in a letter to his friend Mr. Aubrey in the fewest
words his birthplace and the places of his education, his admission as
"Socius Honorarius of the College of Physitians in London," the date of
his being knighted, and the titles of the four books or tracts which he
had printed; and ended with "Have some miscellaneous tracts which may be
published."

This account of himself, curter than many an epitaph, and scantier in
details than the requirements of a census-taker's blank, may serve, with
many other signs that one finds scattered among the pages of this
author, to show his rare modesty and effacement of his physical self. He
seems, like some other thoughtful and sensitive natures before and
since, averse or at least indifferent to being put on record as an
eating, digesting, sleeping, and clothes-wearing animal, of that species
of which his contemporary Sir Samuel Pepys stands as the classical
instance, and which the newspaper interviewer of our own day--that
"fellow who would vulgarize the Day of Judgment"--has trained to the
most noxious degree of offensiveness.

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS BROWNE]

Sir Thomas felt, undoubtedly, that having admitted that select
company--"fit audience though few"--who are students of the 'Religio
Medici' to a close intimacy with his highest mental processes and
conditions, his "separable accidents," affairs of assimilation and
secretion as one may say, were business between himself and his grocer
and tailor, his cook and his laundress.

The industrious research of Mr. Simon Wilkin, who in 1836 produced the
completest edition (William Pickering, London) of the literary remains
of Sir Thomas Browne, has gathered from all sources--his own note-books,
domestic and friendly correspondence, allusions of contemporary writers
and the works of subsequent biographers--all that we are likely, this
side of Paradise, to know of this great scholar and admirable man.

The main facts of his life are as follows. He was born in the Parish of
St. Michael's Cheap, in London, on the 19th of October, 1605 (the year
of the Gunpowder Plot). His father, as is apologetically admitted by a
granddaughter, Mrs. Littleton, "was a tradesman, a mercer, though a
gentleman of a good family in Cheshire" (_generosa familia_, says Sir
Thomas's own epitaph). That he was the parent of his son's temperament,
a devout man with a leaning toward mysticism in religion, is shown by
the charming story Mrs. Littleton tells of him, exhibiting traits worthy
of the best ages of faith, and more to be expected in the father of a
mediæval saint than in a prosperous Cheapside mercer, whose son was to
be one of the most learned and philosophical physicians of the age of
Harvey and Sydenham:--"His father used to open his breast when he was
asleep and kiss it in prayers over him, as 'tis said of Origen's father,
that the Holy Ghost would take possession there." Clearly, it was with
reverent memory of this good man that Sir Thomas, near the close of his
own long life, wrote:--"Among thy multiplied acknowledgments, lift up
one hand unto heaven that thou wert born of honest parents; that
modesty, humility, patience, and veracity lay in the same egg and came
into the world with thee."

This loving father, of whom one would fain know more, died in the early
childhood of his son Thomas. He left a handsome estate of £9,000, and a
widow not wholly inconsolable with her third portion and a not unduly
deferred second marriage to a titled gentleman, Sir Thomas Button,--a
knight so scantily and at the same time so variously described, as "a
worthy person who had great places," and "a bad member" of "mutinous and
unworthy carriage," that one is content to leave him as a problematical
character.

The boy Thomas Browne being left to the care of guardians, his estate
was despoiled, though to what extent does not appear; nor can it be
considered greatly deplorable, since it did not prevent his early
schooling at that ancient and noble foundation of Winchester, nor in
1623 his entrance into Pembroke College, Oxford, and in due course his
graduation in 1626 as bachelor of arts. With what special assistance or
direction he began his studies in medical science, cannot now be
ascertained; but after taking his degree of master of arts in 1629, he
practiced physic for about two years in some uncertain place in
Oxfordshire. He then began a course of travel, unusually extensive for
that day. His stepfather upon occasion of his official duties under the
government "shewed him all Ireland in some visitation of the forts and
castles." It is improbable that Ireland at that time long detained a
traveler essentially literary in his tastes. Browne betook himself to
France and Italy, where he appears to have spent about two years,
residing at Montpellier and Padua, then great centres of medical
learning, with students drawn from most parts of Christendom. Returning
homeward through Holland, he received the degree of doctor of medicine
from the University of Leyden in 1633, and settled in practice at
Halifax, England.

At this time--favored probably by the leisure which largely attends the
beginning of a medical career, but which is rarely so laudably or
productively employed,--he wrote the treatise 'Religio Medici,' which
more than any other of his works has established his fame and won the
affectionate admiration of thoughtful readers. This production was not
printed until seven years later, although some unauthorized manuscript
copies, more or less faulty, were in circulation. When in 1642 "it
arrived in a most depraved copy at the press," Browne felt it necessary
to vindicate himself by publishing a correct edition, although, he
protests, its original "intention was not publick: and being a private
exercise directed to myself, what is delivered therein was rather a
memorial unto me than an example or rule unto any other."

In 1636 he removed to Norwich and permanently established himself there
in the practice of physic. There in 1641 he married Dorothy Mileham, a
lady of good family in Norfolk; thereby not only improving his social
connections, but securing a wife "of such symmetrical proportion to her
worthy husband both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed
to come together by a kind of natural magnetism." Such at least was the
view of an intimate friend of more than forty years, Rev. John
Whitefoot, in the 'Minutes' which, at the request of the widow, he drew
up after Sir Thomas's death, and which contain the most that is known of
his personal appearance and manners. Evidently the marriage was a happy
one for forty-one years, when the Lady Dorothy was left _mæstissima
conjux_, as her husband's stately epitaph, rich with many an _issimus_,
declares. Twelve children were born of it; and though only four of them
survived their parents, such mortality in carefully tended and
well-circumstanced families was less remarkable than it would be now,
when two centuries more of progress in medical science have added
security and length to human life.

The good mother--had she not endeared herself to the modern reader by
the affectionate gentleness and the quaint glimpses of domestic life
that her family letters reveal--would be irresistible by the ingeniously
bad spelling in which she reveled, transgressing even the wide limits
then allowed to feminine heterography.

It is noteworthy that Dr. Browne's professional prosperity was not
impaired by the suspicion which early attached to him, and soon
deepened into conviction, that he was addicted to literary pursuits. He
was in high repute as a physician. His practice was extensive, and he
was diligent in it, as also in those works of literature and scientific
investigation which occupied all "snatches of time," he says, "as
medical vacations and the fruitless importunity of uroscopy would
permit." His large family was liberally reared; his hospitality and his
charities were ample.

In 1646 he printed his second book, the largest and most operose of all
his productions: the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar
and Common Errors' the work evidently of the _horæ subsecivæ_ of many
years. In 1658 he gave to the public two smaller but important and most
characteristic works, 'Hydriotaphia' and 'The Garden of Cyrus.' Beside
these publications he left many manuscripts which appeared posthumously;
the most important of them, for its size and general interest, being
'Christian Morals.'

When Sir Thomas's long life drew to its close, it was with all the
blessings "which should accompany old age." His domestic life had been
one of felicity. His eldest and only surviving son, Edward Browne, had
become a scholar after his father's own heart; and though not inheriting
his genius, was already renowned in London, one of the physicians to the
King, and in a way to become, as afterward he did, President of the
College of Physicians. All his daughters who had attained womanhood had
been well married. He lived in the society of the honorable and learned,
and had received from the King the honor of knighthood[1].

[Footnote 1: As for this business of the knighting, one hesitates fully
to adopt Dr. Johnson's remark that Charles II. "had skill to discover
excellence and virtue to reward it, at least with such honorary
distinctions as cost him nothing." A candid observer of the walk and
conversation of this illustrious monarch finds room for doubt that he
was an attentive reader or consistent admirer of the 'Religio Medici,'
or 'Christian Morals'; and though his own personal history might have
contributed much to a complete catalogue of Vulgar Errors, Browne's
treatise so named did not include divagations from common decency in its
scope, and so may have failed to impress the royal mind. The fact is
that the King on his visit to Norwich, looking about for somebody to
knight, intended, as usual on such occasions, to confer the title on the
mayor of the city; but this functionary,--some brewer or grocer perhaps,
of whom nothing else than this incident is recorded,--declined the
honor, whereupon the gap was stopped with Dr. Browne.]

Mr. John Evelyn, carrying out a long and cherished plan of seeing one
whom he had known and admired by his writings, visited him at Norwich in
1671. He found Sir Thomas among fit surroundings, "his whole house and
garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities, and that of the best
collections, especially medails, books, plants, and natural things[2]."
Here we have the right background and accessories for Whitefoot's
portrait of the central figure:--

     "His complexion and hair ... answerable to his name, his
     stature moderate, and habit of body neither fat nor lean but
     [Greek: eusarkos;] ... never seen to be transported with
     mirth or dejected with sadness; always cheerful, but rarely
     merry at any sensible rate; seldom heard to break a jest, and
     when he did, ... apt to blush at the levity of it: his
     gravity was natural without affectation. His modesty ...
     visible in a natural habitual blush, which was increased upon
     the least occasion, and oft discovered without any observable
     cause.... So free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that
     he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse;
     though when he was so, it was always singular and never trite
     or vulgar."

[Footnote 2: These two distinguished authors were of congenial tastes,
and both cultivated the same Latinistic literary diction. Their meeting
must have occasioned a copious effusion of those "long-tailed words in
osity and ation" which both had so readily at command or made to order.
It is regrettable that Evelyn never completed a work entitled 'Elysium
Brittannicum' which he planned, and to which Browne contributed a
chapter 'Of Coronary Plants.' It would have taken rank with its author's
'Sylva' among English classics.]

A man of character so lofty and self-contained might be expected to
leave a life so long, honorable, and beneficent with becoming dignity.
Sir Thomas's last sickness, a brief but very painful one, was "endured
with exemplary patience founded upon the Christian philosophy," and
"with a meek, rational, and religious courage," much to the edification
of his friend Whitefoot. One may see even a kind of felicity in his
death, falling exactly on the completion of his seventy-seventh year.

He was buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where his monument
still claims regard as chief among the _memorabilia_ of that noble
sanctuary[3].

[Footnote 3: In the course of repairs, "in August, 1840, his coffin was
broken open by a pickaxe; the bones were found in good preservation, the
fine auburn hair had not lost its freshness." It is painful to relate
that the cranium was removed and placed in the pathological museum of
the Norwich Hospital, labeled as "the gift of" some person (name not
recalled), whose own cranium is probably an object of interest solely to
its present proprietor. "Who knows the fate of his own bones? ... We
insult not over their ashes," says Sir Thomas. The curator of the museum
feels that he has a clever joke on the dead man, when with a grin he
points to a label bearing these words from the 'Hydriotaphia':--"To be
knaved out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and
our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are
tragical abominations escaped in burning burials."]

At the first appearance of Browne's several publications, they attracted
that attention from the learned and thoughtful which they have ever
since retained. The 'Religio Medici' was soon translated into several
modern languages as well as into Latin, and became the subject of
curiously diverse criticism. The book received the distinction of a
place in the Roman 'Index Expurgatorius,' while from various points of
view its author was regarded as a Romanist, an atheist, a deist, a
pantheist, and as bearing the number 666 somewhere about him.

A worthy Quaker, a fellow-townsman, was so impressed by his tone of
quietistic mysticism that he felt sure the philosophic doctor was guided
by "the inward light," and wrote, sending a godly book, and proposing to
clinch his conversion in a personal interview. Such are the perils that
environ the man who not only repeats a creed in sincerity, but ventures
to do and to utter his own thinking about it.

From Browne's own day to the present time his critics and commentators
have been numerous and distinguished; one of the most renowned among
them being Dr. Johnson, whose life of the author, prefixed to an edition
of the 'Christian Morals' in 1756, is a fine specimen of that facile and
effective hack-work of which Johnson was master. In that characteristic
way of his, half of patronage, half of reproof, and wholly pedagogical,
he summons his subject to the bar of his dialectics, and according to
his lights administers justice. He admits that Browne has "great
excellencies" and "uncommon sentiments," and that his scholarship and
science are admirable, but strongly condemns his style: "It is vigorous,
but rugged; it is learned, but pedantic; it is deep, but obscure; it
strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure; his
tropes are harsh and his combinations uncouth."

Behemoth prescribing rules of locomotion to the swan! By how much would
English letters have been the poorer if Browne had learned his art
of Johnson!

Notwithstanding such objurgations, some have supposed that the style of
Johnson, perhaps without conscious intent, was founded upon that of
Browne. A tone of oracular authority, an academic Latinism sometimes
disregarding the limitations of the unlearned reader, an elaborate
balancing of antitheses in the same period,--these are qualities which
the two writers have in common. But the resemblance, such as it is, is
skin-deep. Johnson is a polemic by nature, and at his best cogent and
triumphant in argument. His thought is carefully kept level with the
apprehension of the ordinary reader, while arrayed in a verbal pomp
simulating the expression of something weighty and profound. Browne is
intuitive and ever averse to controversy, feeling, as he exquisitely
says, that "many have too rashly charged the troops of error and remain
as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just
possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender."
Calmly philosophic, he writes for kindred minds, and his concepts
satisfying his own intellect, he delivers them with as little passion as
an Æolian harp answering the wind, and lingers not for applause or
explanation. His being

     "Those thoughts that wander through eternity,"

he means that we too shall "have a glimpse of incomprehensibles, and
thoughts of things which thoughts but tenderly touch."

How grandly he rounds his pregnant paragraphs with phrases which for
stately and compulsive rhythm, sonorous harmony, and sweetly solemn
cadences, are almost matchless in English prose, and lack only the
mechanism of metre to give them the highest rank as verse.

"Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave,
solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting
ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature;" "When personations
shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall
rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever:"--such passages as
these, and the whole of the 'Fragment on Mummies,' one can scarcely
recite without falling into something of that chant which the blank
verse of Milton and Tennyson seems to enforce.

That the 'Religio Medici' was the work of a gentleman before his
thirtieth year, not a recluse nor trained in a cloister, but active in a
calling which keeps closest touch with the passions and frailties of
humanity, seems to justify his assertion, "I have shaken hands with
delight [_sc._ by way of parting] in my warm blood and canicular days."
So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so austere its
morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of those later and
sadder years that bring the philosophic mind. Its frank confessions and
calm analysis of motive and action have been compared with Montaigne's:
if Montaigne had been graduated after a due education in Purgatory, or
if his pedigree had been remotely crossed with a St. Anthony and he had
lived to see the _fluctus decumanus_ gathering in the tide of
Puritanism, the likeness would have been closer.

"The 'Religio Medici,'" says Coleridge, "is a fine portrait of a
handsome man in his best clothes." There is truth in the criticism, and
if there is no color of a sneer in it, it is entirely true. Who does not
feel, when following Browne into his study or his garden, that here is a
kind of cloistral retreat from the common places of the outside world,
that the handsome man is a true gentleman and a noble friend, and that
his best clothes are his every-day wear?

This aloofness of Browne's, which holds him apart "in the still air of
delightful studies," is no affectation; it is an innate quality. He
thinks his thoughts in his own way, and "the style is the man" never
more truly than with him. One of his family letters mentions the
execution of Charles I. as a "horrid murther," and another speaks of
Cromwell as a usurper; but nowhere in anything intended for the public
eye is there an indication that he lived in the most tumultuous and
heroic period of English history. Not a word shows that Shakespeare was
of the generation just preceding his, nor that Milton and George Herbert
and Henry Vaughan, numerous as are the parallels in their thought and
feeling and in his, were his contemporaries. Constant and extensive as
are his excursions into ancient literature, it is rare for him to make
any reference to writers of his own time.

Yet with all his delight in antiquity and reverence for the great names
of former ages, he is keen in the quest for new discoveries. His
commonplace books abound in ingenious queries and minute observations
regarding physical facts, conceived in the very spirit of our modern
school:--"What is the use of dew-claws in dogs?" He does not instantly
answer, as a schoolboy in this Darwinian day would, "To carry out an
analogy;" but the mere asking of the question sets him ahead of his age.
See too his curious inquiries into the left-footedness of parrots and
left-handedness of certain monkeys and squirrels. The epoch-making
announcement of his fellow-physician Harvey he quickly appreciates at
its true value: "his piece 'De Circul. Sang.,' which discovery I prefer
to that of Columbus." And here again a truly surprising suggestion of
the great results achieved a century and two centuries later by Jenner
and Pasteur--concerning canine madness, "whether it holdeth not better
at second than at first hand, so that if a dog bite a horse, and that
horse a man, the evil proves less considerable." He is the first to
observe and describe that curious product of the decomposition of flesh
known to modern chemists as adipocere.

He is full of eager anticipation of the future. "Join sense unto
reason," he cries, "and experiment unto speculation, and so give life
unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos.... What libraries
of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new world of
knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few ages may
joyfully declare."

But acute and active as our author's perceptions were, they did not
prevent his sharing the then prevalent theory which assigned to the
devil, and to witches who were his ministers, an important part in the
economy of the world. This belief affords so easy a solution of some
problems otherwise puzzling, that this degenerate age may look back with
envy upon those who held it in serene and comfortable possession.

It is to be regretted, however, that the eminent Lord Chief Justice Hale
in 1664, presiding at the trial for witchcraft of two women, should have
called Dr. Browne, apparently as _amicus curiæ_, to give his view of
the fits which were supposed to be the work of the witches. He was
clearly of the opinion that the Devil had even more to do with that case
than he has with most cases of hysteria; and consequently the witches,
it must be said, fared no better in Sir Matthew Hale's court than many
of their kind in various parts of Christendom about the same time. But
it would be unreasonable for us to hold the ghost of Sir Thomas deeply
culpable because, while he showed in most matters an exceptionally
enlightened liberality of opinion and practice, in this one particular
he declined to deny the scientific dictum of previous ages and the
popular belief of his own time.

The mental attitude of reverent belief in its symbolic value, in which
this devout philosopher contemplated the material world, is that of many
of those who have since helped most to build the structure of Natural
Science. The rapturous exclamation of Linnæus, "My God, I think thy
thoughts after thee!" comes like an antiphonal response by "the man of
flowers" to these passages in the 'Religio Medici':--"This visible world
is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are
not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real
substance in that invisible fabric." "Things are really true as they
correspond unto God's conception; and have so much verity as they hold
of conformity unto that intellect, in whose idea they had their first
determinations."

[Illustration: Signature: Fr's. Bacon]

FROM THE 'RELIGIO MEDICI'

I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an
opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that
from which within a few days I should dissent myself. I have no genius
to disputes in religion, and have often thought it wisdom to decline
them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might
suffer in the weakness of my patronage. Where we desire to be informed,
'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and
establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own,
that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in
ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own. Every man is not a
proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause
of verity: many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an