piano. From the sanctum so chosen, seldom opened to others, and never
allowed upon any pretence to be disarranged, came his choicest
compositions. His disposition was naturally amiable, although, from the
tax imposed by close application to study upon his nervous system, he
was liable to fits of fretfulness and scepticism that, only occasional
and transient as they were, told nevertheless with disturbing effect
upon his temper. In the same unfortunate direction was the tendency of a
habit grown insidiously upon him,--a habit against the damning control
of which (as no one better than the writer of this article knows) he
wrestled with an earnestness indescribable, resorting to all the
remedial expedients which professional skill or his own experience could
suggest, but never entirely delivering himself from its inexorable
mastery.

In the true estimate of genius, its achievements only approximate the
highest standard of excellence as they are representative, or
illustrative, of important truth. They are only great as they are good.
If Mr. Foster's art embodied no higher idea than the vulgar notion of
the negro as a man-monkey,--a thing of tricks and antics,--a funny
specimen of superior gorilla,--then it might have proved a tolerable
catch-penny affair, and commanded an admiration among boys of various
growths until its novelty wore off. But the art in his hands teemed with
a nobler significance. It dealt, in its simplicity, with universal
sympathies, and taught us all to feel with the slaves the lowly joys and
sorrows it celebrated.

May the time be far in the future ere lips fail to move to its music, or
hearts to respond to its influence, and may we who owe him so much
preserve gratefully the memory of the master, STEPHEN COLLINS FOSTER.

THE FEAST OF HARVEST.

    The fair Earth smiled and turned herself and woke,
      And to the Sun with nuptial greeting said:--
    "I had a dream, wherein it seemed men broke
      A sovran league, and long years fought and bled,
    Till down my sweet sides ran my children's gore,
      And all my beautiful garments were made red,
        And all my fertile fields were thicket-grown,
      Nor could thy dear light reach me through the air;
    At last a voice cried, 'Let them strive no more!'
      Then music breathed, and lo! from my despair
        I wake to joy,--yet would not joy alone!

    "For, hark! I hear a murmur on the meads,--
      Where as of old my children seek my face,--
    The low of kine, the peaceful tramp of steeds,
      Blithe shouts of men in many a pastoral place,
    The noise of tilth through all my goodliest land;
      And happy laughter of a dusky race
        Whose brethren lift them from their ancient toil,
      Saying: 'The year of jubilee has come;
    Gather the gifts of Earth with equal hand;
        Henceforth ye too may share the birthright soil,
      The corn, the wine, and all the harvest-home.'

    "O, my dear lord, my radiant bridegroom, look!
      Behold their joy who sorrowed in my dreams,--
    The sword a share, the spear a pruning-hook;
      Lo, I awake, and turn me toward thy beams
    Even as a bride again! O, shed thy light
      Upon my fruitful places in full streams!
        Let there be yield for every living thing;
      The land is fallow,--let there be increase
    After the darkness of the sterile night;
      Ay, let us twain a festival of Peace
        Prepare, and hither all my nations bring!"

    The fair Earth spake: the glad Sun speeded forth,
      Hearing her matron words, and backward drave
    To frozen caves the icy Wind of the North,--
      And bade the South Wind from the tropic wave
    Bring watery vapors over river and plain,--
      And bade the East Wind cross her path, and lave
        The lowlands, emptying there her laden mist,--
      And bade the Wind of the West, the best wind, blow
    After the early and the latter rain,--
        And beamed himself, and oft the sweet Earth kissed,
      While her swift servitors sped to and fro.

    Forthwith the troop that, at the beck of Earth,
      Foster her children, brought a glorious store
    Of viands, food of immemorial worth,
      Her earliest gifts, her tenderest evermore.
    First came the Silvery Spirit, whose marshalled files
      Climb up the glades in billowy breakers hoar,
        Nodding their crests,--and at his side there sped
      The Golden Spirit, whose yellow harvests trail
    Across the continents and fringe the isles,
      And freight men's argosies where'er they sail:
        O, what a wealth of sheaves he there outspread!

    Came the dear Spirit whom Earth doth love the best,
      Fragrant of clover-bloom and new-mown hay,
    Beneath whose mantle weary ones find rest,
      On whose green skirts the little children play:
    She bore the food our patient cattle crave.
      Next, robed in silk, with tassels scattering spray,
        Followed the generous Spirit of the Maize,--
      And many a kindred shape of high renown
    Bore in the clustering grape, the fruits that wave
        On orchard branches or in gardens blaze,
      And those the wind-shook forest hurtles down.

    Even thus they laid a great and marvellous feast,
      And Earth her children summoned joyously,
    Throughout that goodliest land wherein had ceased
      The vision of battle, and with glad hands free
    These took their fill, and plenteous measures poured,
      Beside, for those who dwelt beyond the sea;
        Praise, like an incense, upward rose to Heaven
      For that full harvest,--and the autumnal Sun
    Stayed long above,--and ever at the board,
        Peace, white-robed angel, held the high seat given,
      And War far off withdrew his visage dun.

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.

It is the misfortune of American biography that it must needs be more or
less provincial, and that, contrary to what might have been predicted,
this quality in it predominates in proportion as the country grows
larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged centre of national life and
thought, our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than growth;
reputations must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a surface, and
the substance of most hardly holds out to the boundaries of a single
State. Our very history wants unity, and down to the Revolution the
attention is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among
thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred on a single clew.
A sense of remoteness and seclusion comes over us as we read, and we
cannot help asking ourselves, "Were _not_ these things done in a
corner?" Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands
for its evidence a more distant and prolonged reverberation. To the
world at large we were but a short column of figures in the corner of a
blue-book, New England exporting so much salt-fish, timber, and Medford
rum, Virginia so many hogshead of tobacco, and buying with the proceeds
a certain amount of English manufactures. The story of our early
colonization had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was
altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of Mexico or
Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of our nation, are bare of
those foregone and far-reaching associations with names, the
divining-rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the Old
World get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians
and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as well as to the
long-established stand, of the shop of glory. Time is, after all, the
greatest of poets, and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being
the heirs of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace in
saying,

    "Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
    Trita solo";

but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece and Rome
behind him, and can begin his poem with invoking a goddess from whom
legend derived the planter of his race. His eyes looked out on a
landscape saturated with glorious recollections; he had seen Cæsar, and
heard Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato Four
Corners,--with Israel Putnam or Return Jonathan Meigs? We have been
transplanted, and for us the long hierarchical succession of history is
broken. The Past has not laid its venerable hands upon us in
consecration, conveying to us that mysterious influence whose force is
in its continuity. We are to Europe as the Church of England to her of
Rome. The latter old lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with
ten horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that vast
spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet everywhere, whose revenues
are none the less fruitful for being levied on the imagination. We may
claim that England's history is also ours, but it is a _de jure_, and
not a _de facto_ property that we have in it,--something that may be
proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satisfaction, and does not
savor of the realty. Have we not seen the mockery crown and sceptre of
the exiled Stuarts in St. Peter's? the medal struck so lately as 1784
with its legend, HEN IX MAG BRIT ET HIB REX, whose contractions but
faintly typify the scantness of the fact?

As the novelist complains that our society wants that sharp contrast of
character and costume which comes of caste, so in the narrative of our
historians we miss what may be called background and perspective, as if
the events and the actors in them failed of that cumulative interest
which only a long historical entail can give. Relatively, the crusade of
Sir William Pepperell was of more consequence than that of St. Louis,
and yet forgive us, injured shade of the second American baronet, if we
find the narrative of Joinville more interesting than your despatches to
Governor Shirley. Relatively, the insurrection of that Daniel whose
Irish patronymic Shea was euphonized into Shays, as a set-off for the
debasing of French _chaise_ into _shay_, was more dangerous than that of
Charles Edward; but for some reason or other (as vice sometimes has the
advantage of virtue) the latter is more enticing to the imagination, and
the least authentic relic of it in song or story has a relish denied to
the painful industry of Minot. Our events seem to fall short of that
colossal proportion which befits the monumental style. Look grave as we
will, there is something ludicrous in Counsellor Keane's pig being the
pivot of a revolution. We are of yesterday, and it is to no purpose that
our political augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that
to-morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail hereafter.
Things do really gain in greatness by being acted on a great and
cosmopolitan stage, because there is inspiration in the thronged
audience, and the nearer match that puts men on their mettle. Webster
was more largely endowed by nature than Fox, and Fisher Ames not much
below Burke as a talker; but what a difference in the intellectual
training, in the literary culture and associations, in the whole social
outfit, of the men who were their antagonists and companions! It should
seem that, if it be collision with other minds and with events that
strikes or draws the fire from a man, then the quality of those might
have something to do with the quality of the fire,--whether it shall be
culinary or electric. We have never known the varied stimulus, the
inexorable criticism, the many-sided opportunity of a great metropolis,
the inspiring reinforcement of an undivided national consciousness. In
everything but trade we have missed the invigoration of foreign rivalry.
We may prove that we are this and that and the other,--our
Fourth-of-July orators have proved it time and again,--the census has
proved it; but the Muses are women, and have no great fancy for
statistics, though easily silenced by them. We are great, we are rich,
we are all kinds of good things; but did it never occur to you that
somehow we are not interesting, except as a phenomenon? It may safely be
affirmed that for one cultivated man in this country who studies
American, there are fifty who study European history, ancient or modern.

Till within a year or two we have been as distant and obscure to the
eyes of Europe as Ecuador to our own. Every day brings us nearer,
enables us to see the Old World more clearly, and by inevitable
comparison to judge ourselves with some closer approach to our real
value. This has its advantage so long as our culture is, as for a long
time it must be, European; for we shall be little better than apes and
parrots till we are forced to measure our muscle with the trained and
practised champions of that elder civilization. We have at length
established our claim to the noblesse of the sword, the first step still
of every nation that would make its entry into the best society of
history. To maintain ourselves there, we must achieve an equality in the
more exclusive circle of culture, and to that end must submit ourselves
to the European standard of intellectual weights and measures. That we
have made the hitherto biggest gun might excite apprehension (were there
a dearth of iron), but can never exact respect. That our pianos and
patent reapers have won medals does but confirm us in our mechanic and
material measure of merit. We must contribute something more than mere
contrivances for the saving of labor, which we have been only too ready
to misapply in the domain of thought and the higher kinds of invention.
In those Olympic games where nations contend for truly immortal wreaths,
it may well be questioned whether a mowing-machine would stand much
chance in the chariot-races,--whether a piano, though made by a
chevalier, could compete successfully for the prize of music.

We shall have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism,
and must strive to make the best of it. In it lies the germ of
nationality, and that is, after all, the prime condition of all
thorough-bred greatness of character. To this choicest fruit of a
healthy life, well rooted in native soil, and drawing prosperous prices
thence, nationality gives the keenest flavor. Mr. Lincoln was an
original man, and in so far a great man; yet it was the Americanism of
his every thought, word, and act which not only made his influence
equally at home in East and West, but drew the eyes of the outside
world, and was the pedestal that lifted him where he could be seen by
them. Lincoln showed that native force may transcend local boundaries,
but the growth of such nationality is hindered and hampered by our
division into so many half-independent communities, each with its
objects of county ambition, and its public men great to the borders of
their district. In this way our standard of greatness is insensibly
debased. To receive any national appointment, a man must have gone
through precisely the worst training for it; he must have so far
narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to be acceptable
at home. In this way a man may become chairman of the Committee on
Foreign Affairs, because he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus
County, or sent ambassador to Barataria, because he has drunk bad
whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should we ever attain to a
conscious nationality, it will have the advantage of lessening the
number of our great men, and widening our appreciation to the larger
scale of the two or three that are left,--if there should be so many.
Meanwhile we offer a premium to the production of great men in a small
way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of two of its
immortals in the Capitol. What a niggardly percentage! Already we are
embarrassed, not to find the two, but to choose among the crowd of
candidates. Well, seventy-odd heroes in about as many years is pretty
well for a young nation. We do not envy most of them their eternal
martyrdom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimination. We fancy even
native tourists pausing before the greater part of the effigies, and,
after reading the names, asking desperately, "Who was _he_?" Nay, if
they should say, "Who the devil was _he_?" it were a pardonable
invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act as
_cicerone_ among such palpable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of
the Uffizj at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities; but
Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli,--shall the inventor of the
sewing-machine, even with the button-holing improvement, let us say,
match with these, or with far lesser than these? Perhaps he was more
practically useful than any one of these, or all of them together, but
the soul is sensible of a sad difference somewhere. These also were
citizens of a provincial capital; so were the greater part of Plutarch's
heroes. Did they have a better chance than we moderns,--than we
Americans? At any rate they have the start of us, and we must confess
that

    "By bed and table they lord it o'er us,
    Our elder brothers, but one in blood."

Yes, one in blood; that is the hardest part of it. Is our provincialism
then in some great measure due to our absorption in the practical, as we
politely call it, meaning the material,--to our habit of estimating
greatness by the square mile and the hundredweight? Even during our war,
in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were not our
speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten
times of the thousands of square miles it covered with armed men, for
once that they alluded to the motive that gave it all its meaning and
its splendor? Perhaps it was as well that they did not exploit that
passion of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum or
Perham. "I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, but when I'm mad I weigh
two ton," said the Kentuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdupois.
That ideal kind of weight is wonderfully increased by a national
feeling, whereby one man is conscious that thirty millions of men go
into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient, and the Englishman in
modern times, have been most conscious of this representative solidity,
and wherever one of them went there stood Rome or England in his shoes.
We have made some advance in the right direction. Our civil war, by the
breadth of its proportions and the implacability of its demands, forced
us to admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own despite, great
soldiers and sailors, allowed for such by all the world. The harder
problems it has left behind may in time compel us to have great
statesmen, with views capable of reaching beyond the next election. The
criticism of Europe alone can rescue us from the provincialism of an
over or false estimate of ourselves. Let us be thankful, and not angry,
that we must accept it as our touchstone. Our stamp has so often been
impressed upon base metal, that we cannot expect it to be taken on
trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be equally persuasive the
world over. Real manhood and honest achievement are nowhere provincial,
but enter the select society of all time on an even footing.

Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look into. Those
Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolution while the powder lasts,
and sure to burn the fingers of whoever attempts intervention, have also
their great men, as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe.
The following passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar might allay
many _motus animorum_, if rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, was
travelling in Italy, and his biographer tells us that "near Castiglione
he was present at the grand review made by Napoleon of the columns
defiling into the plain large enough to contain sixty thousand men. The
throne was situated on an eminence that overlooked the plain, and
Napoleon on several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and his
companions, who were at the base of the hill. The hero Cæsar could not
imagine that he beheld the liberator of the world of Columbus!" And
small blame to him, one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the only
foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to take for granted. The great
Genoese did not, as we supposed, draw that first star-guided furrow
across the vague of waters with a single eye to the future greatness of
the United States. And have we not sometimes, like the enthusiastic
biographer, fancied the Old World staring through all its telescopes at
us, and wondered that it did not recognize in us what we were fully
persuaded we were _going_ to be and do?

Our American life is dreadfully barren of those elements of the social
picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. And without anecdote, what
is biography, of even history, which is only biography on a larger
scale? Clio, though she take airs on herself, and pretend to be
"philosophy teaching by example," is, after all, but a gossip who has
borrowed Fame's speaking-trumpet, and should be figured with a teacup
instead of a scroll in her hand. How much has she not owed of late to
the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia? In what gutters has
not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with which he has put together
his admirable mosaic picture of England under the last two Stuarts? Even
Mommsen himself, who dislikes Plutarch's method as much as Montaigne
loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of ancient Rome, without
running to the comic poets and the anecdote-mongers. He gives us the
very beef-tea of history, nourishing and even palatable enough,
excellently portable for a memory that, must carry her own packs, and
can afford little luggage; but for our own part, we prefer a full,
old-fashioned meal, with its side-dishes of spicy gossip, and its last
relish, the Stilton of scandal, so it be not too high. One volume of
contemporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies, (for lies to be
good for anything must have a potential probability, must even be true
so far as their moral and social setting is concerned,) will throw more
light into the dark backward of time than the gravest Camden or Thuanus.
If St. Simon is not accurate, is he any the less essentially _true_? No
history gives us so clear an understanding of the moral condition of
average men after the restoration of the Stuarts as the unconscious
blabbings of the Puritan tailor's son, with his two consciences, as it
were,--an inward, still sensitive in spots, though mostly toughened to
India-rubber, and good rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining
them, and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs. Pepys.
But we can have no St. Simons or Pepyses till we have a Paris or London
to delocalize our gossip and give it historic breadth. All our capitals
are fractional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men, centres of
business rather than of action or influence. Each contains so many
souls, but is not, as the word "capital" implies, the true head of a
community and seat of its common soul.

Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic than it once
was? As the clearing away of the woods scants the streams, may not our
civilization have dried up some feeders that helped to swell the current
of individual and personal force? We have sometimes thought that the
stricter definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the
different callings in modern times, as it narrowed the chance of
developing and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest
of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided by so impassable a
barrier as now. There was hardly such a thing as a _pékin_. Cæsar gets
up from writing his Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of
history, and make so many things possible,--among the rest our English
language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a colonel; and from Æschylus,
who fought at Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low
Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A man's
education seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a less
æsthetic distance than Goethe. It raises our confidence in Sir Kenelm
Digby as a physicist, that he is able to illustrate some theory of
acoustics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the effect of his guns
in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would expect the proportions of
character to be enlarged by such variety and contrast of experience.
Perhaps it will by and by appear that our own civil war has done
something for us in this way. Colonel Higginson comes down from his
pulpit to draw on his jackboots, and thenceforth rides in our
imagination alongside of John Bunyan and Bishop Compton. To have stored
moral capital enough to meet the drafts of Death at sight, must be an
unmatched tonic. We saw our light-hearted youth come back with the
modest gravity of age, as if they had learned to throw out pickets
against a surprise of any weak point in their temperament. Perhaps that
American shiftiness, so often complained of, may not be so bad a thing,
if, by bringing men acquainted with every humor of fortune and human
nature, it puts them in fuller possession of themselves.

But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances, the main interest
of biography must always lie in the amount of character or essential
manhood which the subject of it reveals to us, and events are of import
only as means to that end. It is true that lofty and far-seen exigencies
may give greater opportunity to some men, whose energy is more sharply
spurred by the shout of a multitude than by the grudging _Well done!_ of
conscience. Some theorists have too hastily assumed that, as the power
of public opinion increases, the force of private character, or what we
call originality, is absorbed into and diluted by it. But we think
Horace was right in putting tyrant and mob on a level as the trainers
and tests of a man's solid quality. The amount of resistance of which
one is capable to whatever lies outside the conscience, is of more
consequence than all other faculties together; and democracy, perhaps,
tries this by pressure in more directions, and with a more continuous
strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an
example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest approach to a
pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and
self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the
public and private man was so wholly of a piece that they were truly
everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the
hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. The phrase "a
great public character," once common, seems to be going out of fashion,
perhaps because there are fewer examples of the thing. It fits Josiah
Quincy exactly. Active in civic and academic duties till beyond the
ordinary period of man, at fourscore and ten his pen, voice, and
venerable presence were still efficient in public affairs. A score of
years after the energies of even vigorous men are declining or spent,
his mind and character made themselves felt as in their prime. A true
pillar of house and state, he stood unflinchingly upright under whatever
burden might be laid upon him. The French Revolutionists aped what was
itself but a parody of the elder republic, with their hair _à la_ Brutus
and their pedantic moralities _à la_ Cato Minor, but this man
unconsciously was the antique Roman they laboriously went about to be.
Others have filled places more conspicuous, few have made the place they
filled so conspicuous by an exact and disinterested performance of duty.

In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son, there is something of the
provincialism of which we have spoken as inherent in most American works
of the kind. His was a Boston life in the strictest sense. But
provincialism is relative, and where it has a flavor of its own, as in
Scotland, it is often agreeable in proportion to its very intensity. The
Massachusetts in which Mr. Quincy's habits of thought were acquired was
a very different Massachusetts from that in which we of later
generations have been bred. Till after he had passed middle life, Boston
was more truly a capital than any other city in America, before or
since, except possibly Charleston. The acknowledged head of New England,
with a population of wellnigh purely English descent, mostly derived
from the earlier emigration, with ancestral traditions and inspiring
memories of its own, it had made its name familiar in both worlds, and
was both historically and politically more important than at any later
period. The Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a freer
current to the tendencies of its past. Both by its history and position,
the town had what the French call a solidarity, an almost personal
consciousness, rare anywhere, rare especially in America, and more than
ever since our enormous importation of fellow-citizens to whom America
means merely shop, or meat three times a day. Boston has been called the
"American Athens." Æsthetically, the comparison is ludicrous, but
politically it was more reasonable. Its population was homogeneous, and
there were leading families; while the form of government by
town-meeting, and the facility of social and civic intercourse, gave
great influence to popular personal qualities and opportunity to new
men. A wide commerce, while it had insensibly softened the asperities of
Puritanism and imported enough foreign refinement to humanize not enough
foreign luxury to corrupt, had not essentially qualified the native tone
of the town. Retired sea-captains (true brothers of Chaucer's Shipman),
whose exploits had kindled the imagination of Burke, added a not
unpleasant savor of salt to society. They belonged to the old school of
Gilbert, Hawkins, Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-soldiers all of them, who
had commanded armed ships and had tales to tell of gallant fights with
privateers or pirates, truest representatives of those Vikings who, if
trade in lumber or peltry was dull, would make themselves Dukes of
Dublin or Earls of Orkney. If trade pinches the mind, commerce
liberalizes it; and Boston was also advantaged with the neighborhood of
the country's oldest College, which maintained the wholesome traditions
of culture,--where Homer and Horace are familiar there is a certain
amount of cosmopolitanism,--and would not allow bigotry to become
despotism. Manners were more self-respectful, and therefore more
respectful of others, and personal sensitiveness was fenced with more of
that ceremonial with which society armed itself when it surrendered the
ruder protection of the sword. We had not then seen a Governor in his
chamber at the State-House with his hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and
his feet upon the stove. Domestic service, in spite of the proverb, was
not seldom an inheritance, nor was household peace dependent on the whim
of a foreign armed neutrality in the kitchen. Servant and master were of
one stock; there was decent authority and becoming respect; the
tradition of the Old World lingered after its superstition had passed
away. There was an aristocracy such as is healthful in a well-ordered
community, founded on public service, and hereditary so long as the
virtue which was its patent was not escheated. The clergy, no longer
hedged by the reverence exacted by sacerdotal caste, were more than
repaid by the consideration willingly paid to superior culture. What
changes, many of them for the better, some of them surely for the worse,
and all of them inevitable, did not Josiah Quincy see in that wellnigh
secular life which linked the war of independence to the war of
nationality! We seemed to see a type of them the other day in a colored
man standing with an air of comfortable self-possession while his boots
were brushed by a youth of catholic neutral tint, but whom nature had
planned for white. The same eyes that had looked on Gage's red-coats,
saw Colonel Shaw's negro regiment march out of Boston in the national
blue. Seldom has a life, itself actively associated with public affairs,
spanned so wide a chasm for the imagination. Oglethorpe's offers a
parallel,--the aide-de-camp of Prince Eugene calling on John Adams,
American Ambassador to England. Most long lives resemble those threads
of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly prolonged,
scarce visible pathway of some worm from his cradle to his grave; but
Quincy's was strung with seventy active years, each one a rounded bead
of usefulness and service.

Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type. Since the settlement of
the town, there had been a colonel of the Boston regiment in every
generation of his family. He lived to see a grandson brevetted with the
same title for gallantry in the field. Only child of one among the most
eminent advocates of the Revolution, and who but for his untimely death
would have been a leading actor in it, his earliest recollections
belonged to the heroic period in the history of his native town. With
that history his life was thenceforth intimately united by offices of
public trust, as Representative in Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and
President of the University, to a period beyond the ordinary span of
mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would not claim to be
_emeritus_, but came forward to brace his townsmen with a courage and
warm them with a fire younger than their own. The legend of Colonel
Goffe at Deerfield became a reality to the eyes of this generation. The
New England breed is running out, we are told! This was in all ways a
beautiful and fortunate life,--fortunate in the goods of this
world,--fortunate, above all, in the force of character which makes
fortune secondary and subservient. We are fond in this country of what
are called self-made men (as if real success could ever be other); and
this is all very well, provided they make something worth having of
themselves. Otherwise it is not so well, and the examples of such are at
best but stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false democracy. The gist
of the matter is not where a man starts from, but where he comes out. We
are glad to have the biography of one who, beginning as a gentleman,
kept himself such to the end,--who, with no necessity of labor, left
behind him an amount of thoroughly done work such as few have
accomplished with the mighty help of hunger. Some kind of pace may be
got out of the veriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the
thorough-bred has the spur in his blood.

Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father's life with the skill
and good taste that might have been expected from the author of
"Wensley." Considering natural partialities, he has shown a discretion
of which we are oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it. He has
given extracts enough from speeches to show their bearing and
quality,--from letters, to recall bygone modes of thought and indicate
many-sided friendly relations with good and eminent men; above all, he
has lost no opportunity to illustrate that life of the past, near in
date, yet alien in manners, whose current glides so imperceptibly from
one generation into another that we fail to mark the shiftings of its
bed or the change in its nature wrought by the affluents that discharge
into it on all sides,--here a stream bred in the hills to sweeten, there
the sewerage of some great city to corrupt. We cannot but lament that
Mr. Quincy did not earlier begin to keep a diary. "Miss not the
discourses of the elders," though put now in the Apocrypha, is a wise
precept, but incomplete unless we add, "Nor cease from recording
whatsoever thing thou hast gathered therefrom,"--so ready is Oblivion
with her fatal shears. The somewhat greasy heap of a literary
rag-and-bone-picker, like Athenæus, is turned to gold by time. Even the
_Virgilium vide tantum_ of Dryden about Milton, and of Pope again about
Dryden, is worth having, and gives a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There
is much of this quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy's book, enough to make us
wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President Washington, in 1795,
who reminded Mr. Quincy "of the gentlemen who used to come to Boston in
those days to attend the General Court from Hampden or Franklin County,
in the western part of the State. A little stiff in his person, not a
little formal in his manners, not particularly at ease in the presence
of strangers. He had the air of a country-gentleman not accustomed to
mix much in society, perfectly polite, but not easy in his address and
conversation, and not graceful in his gait and movements." Our figures
of Washington have been so long equestrian, that it is pleasant to meet
him dismounted for once. In the same way we get a card of invitation to
a dinner of sixty covers at John Hancock's, and see the rather
light-weighted great man wheeled round the room (for he had adopted
Lord Chatham's convenient trick of the gout) to converse with his
guests. In another place we are presented, with Mr. Merry, the English
Minister, to Jefferson, whom we find in an unofficial costume of studied
slovenliness, intended as a snub to haughty Albion. Slippers down at the
heel and a dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and threaten more
serious war. Thus many a door into the past, long irrevocably shut upon
us, is set ajar, and we of the younger generation on the landing catch
peeps of distinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive in
from Mr. Lyman's beautiful seat at Waltham (unique at that day in its
stately swans and half-shy, half-familiar deer) with John Adams, who
tells us that Dr. Priestley looked on the French monarchy as the tenth
horn of the Beast in Revelations,--a horn that has set more sober wits
dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those were days, we are inclined
to think, of more solid and elegant hospitality than our own,--the
elegance of manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men who
had better uses for wealth than merely to display it. Dinners have more
courses now, and, like the Gascon in the old story, who could not see
the town for the houses, we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of
its details. We might seek long before we found so good cheer, so good
company, or so good talk as our fathers had at Lieutenant-Governor
Winthrop's or Senator Cabot's.

We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong of picking out in advance
all the plums in his volume, leaving to the reader only the less savory
mixture that held them together,--a kind of filling unavoidable in books
of this kind, and too apt to be what boys at boarding-school call
_stick-jaw_, but of which there is no more than could not be helped
here, and that light and palatable. But here and there is a passage
where we cannot refrain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all of
us, and a reviewer were nothing without it. Josiah Quincy was born in
1772. His father, returning from a mission to England, died in sight of
the dear New England shore three years later. His young widow was worthy
of him, and of the son whose character she was to have so large a share
in forming. There is something very touching and beautiful in this
little picture of her which Mr. Quincy drew in his extreme old age.

"My mother imbibed, as was usual with the women of the period, the
spirit of the times. Patriotism was not then a profession, but an
energetic principle beating in the heart and active in the life. The
death of my father, under circumstances now the subject of history, had
overwhelmed her with grief. She viewed him as a victim in the cause of
freedom, and cultivated his memory with veneration, regarding him as a
martyr, falling, as did his friend Warren, in the defence of the
liberties of his country. These circumstances gave a pathos and
vehemence to her grief, which, after the first violence of passion had
subsided, sought consolation in earnest and solicitous fulfilment of
duty to the representative of his memory and of their mutual affections.
Love and reverence for the memory of his father was early impressed on
the mind of her son, and worn into his heart by her sadness and tears.
She cultivated the memory of my father in my heart and affections, even
in my earliest childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and
obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were best adapted to
her own circumstances and feelings. Among others, the whole leave-taking
of Hector and Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one of
her favorite lessons, which she made me learn and frequently repeat. Her
imagination, probably, found consolation in the repetition of lines
which brought to mind and seemed to typify her own great bereavement.

    'And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be,--
    A widow I, a helpless orphan he?'

These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's address and
circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, which seemed
relieved by the tears my repetition of them drew from her."

Pope's Homer is not Homer, perhaps; but how many noble natures have felt
its elation, how many bruised spirits the solace of its bracing, if
monotonous melody! To us there is something inexpressibly tender in this
instinct of the widowed mother to find consolation in the idealization
of her grief by mingling it with those sorrows which genius has turned
into the perennial delight of mankind. This was a kind of sentiment that
was healthy for her boy, refining without unnerving, and associating his
father's memory with a noble company unassailable by time. It was
through this lady, whose image looks down on us out of the past, so full
of sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy became of kin with Mr.
Wendell Phillips, so justly eminent as a speaker. There is something
nearer than cater-cousinship in a certain impetuous audacity of temper
common to them both.

When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to Phillips Academy at Andover,
where he remained till he entered college. His form-fellow here was a
man of thirty, who had been a surgeon in the Continental Army, and whose
character and adventures might almost seem borrowed from a romance of
Smollett. Under Principal Pearson, the lad, though a near relative of
the founder of the school, seems to have endured all that severity of
the old _a posteriori_ method of teaching which still smarted in
Tusser's memory when he sang,

    "From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,
    To learn straightways the Latin phrase,
    Where fifty-three stripes given to me
    At once I had."

The young victim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded with the parish
minister, in whose kindness he found a lenitive for the scholastic
discipline he underwent. This gentleman had been a soldier in the
Colonial service, and Mr. Quincy afterwards gave as a reason for his
mildness, that, "while a sergeant at Castle William, he had seen
something of mankind." This, no doubt, would be a better preparative for
successful dealing with the young than is generally thought. However,
the birch was then the only classic tree, and every round in the ladder
of learning was made of its inspiring wood. Dr. Pearson, perhaps,
thought he was only doing justice to his pupil's claims of kindred by
giving him a larger share of the educational advantages which the
neighboring forest afforded. The vividness with which this system is
always remembered by those who have been subjected to it would seem to
show that it really enlivened the attention, and thereby invigorated the
memory, nay, might even raise some question as to what part of the
person is chosen by the mother of the Muses for her residence. With an
appetite for the classics quickened by "Cheever's Accidence," and such
other preliminary whets as were then in vogue, young Quincy entered
college, where he spent the usual four years, and was graduated with the
highest honors of his class. The amount of Latin and Greek imparted to
the students of that day was not very great. They were carried through
Horace, Sallust, and the _De Oratoribus_ of Cicero, and read portions of
Livy, Xenophon, and Homer. Yet the chief end of classical studies was
perhaps as often reached then as now, in giving young men a love for
something apart from and above the more vulgar associations of life. Mr.
Quincy, at least, retained to the last a fondness for certain Latin
authors. While he was President of the College, he told a gentleman,
from whom we received the story, that, "if he were imprisoned, and
allowed to choose one book for his amusement, that one should be
Horace."

In 1797, Mr. Quincy was married to Miss Eliza Susan Morton of New York,
a union which lasted in unbroken happiness for more than fifty years.
His case might be cited among the leading ones in support of the old
poet's axiom, that

    "He never loved, that loved not at first sight";

for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later life he tried in a most
amusing way to account for this rashness, and to find reasons of
settled gravity for the happy inspiration of his heart. He cites the
evidence of Judge Sedgwick, of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, of the Rev.
Dr. Smith, and others, to the wisdom of his choice. But it does not
appear that he consulted them beforehand. If love were not too cunning
for that, what would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its
wonder and freshness for every generation? Let us be thankful that in
every man's life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of the
senses by the soul, that makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy
caught the enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns heard from the
next room conveying the infection,--a fact still inexplicable to him
after lifelong meditation thereon, as he "was not very impressible by
music"! To us there is something very characteristic in this rapid
energy of Mr. Quincy, something very delightful in his naïve account of
the affair. It needs the magic of no Dr. Heidegger to make these dried
roses, that drop from between the leaves of a volume shut for seventy
years, bloom again in all their sweetness. Mr. Edmund Quincy tells us
his mother was "not handsome"; but those who remember the gracious
dignity of her old age will hardly agree with him. She must always have
had that highest kind of beauty which grows more beautiful with years,
and keeps the eyes young, as if with a sort of partial connivance of
Time.

We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely through his whole public
life, which, beginning with his thirty-second, ended with his
seventy-third year. He entered Congress as the representative of a party
privately the most respectable, publicly the least sagacious, among all
those which under different names have divided the country. The
Federalists were the only proper tones our politics have ever produced,
whose conservatism truly represented an idea, and not a mere selfish
interest,--men who honestly distrusted democracy, and stood up for
experience, or the tradition which they believed for such, against
empiricism. During his Congressional career, the government was little
more than an _attaché_ of the French legation, and the opposition to
which he belonged a helpless _revenant_ from the dead and buried
Colonial past. There are some questions whose interest dies the moment
they are settled; others, into which a moral element enters that hinders
them from being settled, though they may be decided. It is hard to
revive any enthusiasm about the _Embargo_, though it once could inspire
the boyish Muse of Bryant, or in the impressment quarrel, though the
Trent difficulty for a time rekindled its old animosities. The stars in
their courses fought against Mr. Quincy's party, which was not in
sympathy with the instincts of the people, groping about for some
principle of nationality, and finding a substitute for it in hatred of
England. But there are several things which still make his career in
Congress interesting to us, because they illustrate the personal
character of the man. He prepared himself honestly for his duties, by a
thorough study of whatever could make him efficient in them. It was not
enough that he could make a good speech; he wished also to have
something to say. In Congress, as everywhere else, _quod voluit valde
voluit_; and he threw a fervor into the most temporary topic, as if his
eternal salvation depended upon it. He had not merely, as the French
say, the courage of his opinions, but his opinions became principles,
and gave him that gallantry of fanaticism which made him always ready to
head a forlorn hope,--the more ready, perhaps, that it was a forlorn
hope. This is not the humor of a statesman,--no, unless he holds a
position like that of Pitt, and can charge a whole people with his own
enthusiasm, and then we call it genius. Mr. Quincy had the moral
firmness which enabled him to decline a duel without any loss of
personal _prestige_. His opposition to the Louisiana purchase
illustrates that Roman quality in him to which we have alluded. He
would not conclude the purchase till each of the old thirteen States had
signified its assent. He was reluctant to endow a Sabine city with the
privilege of Roman citizenship. It is worth nothing, that while in
Congress, and afterwards in the State Senate, many of his phrases became
the catchwords of party politics. He always dared to say what others
deemed it more prudent only to think, and whatever he said he
intensified with the whole ardor of his temperament. It is this which
makes Mr. Quincy's speeches good reading still, even when the topics
they discussed were ephemeral. In one respect he is distinguished from
the politicians, and must rank with the far-seeing statesmen of his
time. He early foresaw and denounced the political danger with which the
slave power threatened the Union. His fears, it is true, were aroused
for the balance of power between the old States, rather than by any
moral sensitiveness, which would, indeed, have been an anachronism at
that time. But the Civil War justified his prescience.

It was as Mayor of his native city that his remarkable qualities as an
administrator were first called into requisition and adequately
displayed. He organized the city government, and put it in working
order. To him we owe many reforms in police, in the management of the
poor, and other kindred matters,--much in the way of cure, still more,
in that of prevention. The place demanded a man of courage and firmness,
and found those qualities almost superabundantly in him. His virtues
lost him his office, as such virtues are only too apt to do in peaceful
times, where they are felt more as a restraint than a protection. His
address on laying down the mayoralty is very characteristic. We quote
the concluding sentences:--

"And now, gentlemen, standing as I do in this relation for the last time
in your presence and that of my fellow-citizens, about to surrender
forever a station full of difficulty, of labor and temptation, in which
I have been called to very arduous duties, affecting the rights,
property, and at times the liberty of others; concerning which the
perfect line of rectitude--though desired--was not always to be clearly
discerned; in which great interests have been placed within my control,
under circumstances in which it would have been easy to advance private
ends and sinister projects;--under these circumstances, I inquire, as I
have a right to inquire,--for in the recent contest insinuations have
been cast against my integrity,--in this long management of your
affairs, whatever errors have been committed,--and doubtless there have
been many,--have you found in me anything selfish, anything personal,
anything mercenary? In the simple language of an ancient seer, I say,
'Behold, here I am; witness against me. Whom have I defrauded? Whom have
I oppressed? At whose hands have I received any bribe?'

"Six years ago, when I had the honor first to address the City Council,
in anticipation of the event which has now occurred, the following
expressions were used: 'In administering the police, in executing the
laws, in protecting the rights and promoting the prosperity of the city,
its first officer will be necessarily beset and assailed by individual
interests, by rival projects, by personal influences, by party passions.
The more firm and inflexible he is in maintaining the rights and in
pursuing the interests of the city, the greater is the probability of
his becoming obnoxious to the censure of all whom he causes to be
prosecuted or punished, of all whose passions he thwarts, of all whose
interests he opposes.'

"The day and the event have come. I retire--as in that first address I
told my fellow-citizens, 'If, in conformity with the experience of other
republics, faithful exertions should be followed by loss of favor and
confidence,' I should retire--'rejoicing, not, indeed, with a public and
patriotic, but with a private and individual joy'; for I shall retire
with a consciousness weighed against which all _human suffrages_ are but
as the light dust of the balance."

Of his mayoralty we have another anecdote quite Roman in color. He was
in the habit of riding early in the morning through the various streets
that he might look into everything with his own eyes. He was once
arrested on a malicious charge of violating the city ordinance against
fast driving. He might have resisted, but he appeared in court and paid
the fine, because it would serve as a good example "that no citizen was
above the law."

Hardly had Mr. Quincy given up the government of the city, when he was
called to that of the College. It is here that his stately figure is
associated most intimately and warmly with the recollections of the
greater number who hold his memory dear. Almost everybody looks back
regretfully to the days of some Consul Plancus. Never were eyes so
bright, never had wine so much wit and good-fellowship in it, never were
we ourselves so capable of the various great things we have never done.
Nor is it merely the sunset of life that casts such a ravishing light on
the past, and makes the western windows of those homes of fancy we have
left forever tremble with a sentiment of such sweet regret. We set great
store by what we had, and cannot have again, however indifferent in
itself, and what is past is infinitely past. This is especially true of
college life, when we first assume the titles without the
responsibilities of manhood, and the President of our year is apt to
become our Plancus very early. Popular or not while in office, an
ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic cheers at every college
festival. Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win favor with the
young,--that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck.
With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of
those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and
which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to
superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep
there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to make even
the shortest offhand speech to the students,--all the more singular in a
practised orator,--his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to
hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried
with it,--the old-fashioned courtesy of his, "Sir, your servant," as he
bowed you out of his study,--all tended to make him popular. He had also
a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humor, not
without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of
the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest
compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless,
will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were
"the _best-dressed_ class that had passed through college during his
administration"? How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful
levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to
experience it. A visitor not long before his death found him burning
some memoranda of college peccadilloes, lest they should ever rise up in
judgment against the men eminent in Church and State who had been guilty
of them. One great element of his popularity with the students was his
_esprit de corps_. However strict in discipline, he was always on _our_
side as respected the outside world. Of his efficiency, no higher
testimony could be asked than that of his successor, Dr. Walker. Here
also many reforms date from his time. He had that happiest combination
for a wise vigor in the conduct of affairs,--he was a conservative with
an open mind.

One would be apt to think that, in the various offices which Mr. Quincy
successively filled, he would have found enough to do. But his
indefatigable activity overflowed. Even as a man of letters, he occupies
no inconsiderable place. His "History of Harvard College" is a valuable
and entertaining treatment of a subject not wanting in natural dryness.
His "Municipal History of Boston" his "History of the Boston Athenæum,"
and his "Life of Colonel Shaw" have permanent interest and value. All
these were works demanding no little labor and research, and the
thoroughness of their workmanship makes them remarkable as the
by-productions of a busy man. Having consented, when more than eighty,
to write a memoir of John Quincy Adams, to be published in the
"Proceedings" of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he was obliged to
excuse himself. On account of his age? Not at all, but because the work
had grown to be a volume under his weariless hand. _Ohne Hast ohne
Rast_, was as true of him as of Goethe. We find the explanation of his
accomplishing so much in a rule of life which he gave, when President,
to a young man employed as his secretary, and who was a little
behindhand with his work: "When you have a number of duties to perform,
always do the most disagreeable one first." No advice could have been
more in character.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy's life was his old age.
What in most men is decay, was in him but beneficent prolongation and
adjournment. His interest in affairs unabated, his judgment undimmed,
his fire unchilled, his last years were indeed "lovely as a Lapland
night." Till within a year or two of its fall, there were no signs of
dilapidation in that stately edifice. Singularly felicitous was Mr.
Winthrop's application to him of Wordsworth's verses:--

    "The monumental pomp of age
    Was in that goodly personage."

Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had in deserved
abundance,--the love, the honor, the obedience, the troops of friends.
His equanimity was beautiful. He loved life, as men of large vitality
always do, but he did not fear to lose life by changing the scene of it.
Visiting him in his ninetieth year with a friend, he said to us, among
other things: "I have no desire to die, but also no reluctance. Indeed,
I have a considerable curiosity about the other world. I have never been
to Europe, you know." Even in his extreme senescence there was an April
mood somewhere in his nature "that put a spirit of youth in everything."
He seemed to feel that he could draw against an unlimited credit of
years. When eighty-two, he said smilingly to a young man just returned
from a foreign tour, "Well, well, I mean to go myself when I am old
enough to profit by it." We have seen many old men whose lives were mere
waste and desolation, who made longevity disreputable by their untimely
persistence in it; but in Mr. Quincy's length of years there was nothing
that was not venerable. To him it was fulfilment, not deprivation; the
days were marked to the last for what they brought, not for what they
took away.

The memory of what Mr. Quincy did will be lost in the crowd of newer
activities; it is the memory of what he was that is precious to us.
_Bonum virum facile crederes, magnum libenter._ If John Winthrop be the
highest type of the men who shaped New England, we can find no better
one of those whom New England has shaped than Josiah Quincy. It is a
figure that we can contemplate with more than satisfaction,--a figure of
admirable example in a democracy as that of a model citizen. His courage
and high-mindedness were personal to him; let us believe that his
integrity, his industry, his love of letters, his devotion to duty, go
in some sort to the credit of the society which gave him birth and
formed his character. In one respect he is especially interesting to us,
as belonging to a class of men of whom he was the last representative,
and whose like we shall never see again. Born and bred in an age of
greater social distinctions than ours, he was an aristocrat in a sense
that is good even in a republic. He had the sense of a certain personal
dignity _inherent_ in him, and which could not be alienated by any whim
of the popular will. There is no stouter buckler than this for
independence of spirit, no surer guaranty of that courtesy which, in its
consideration of others, is but paying a debt of self-respect. During
his presidency, Mr. Quincy was once riding to Cambridge in a crowded
omnibus. A colored woman got in, and could nowhere find a seat. The
President instantly gave her his own, and stood the rest of the way, a
silent rebuke of the general rudeness. He was a man of quality in the
true sense,--of quality not hereditary, but personal. Position might be
taken from him, but _he_ remained where he was. In what he valued most,
his sense of personal worth, the world's opinion could neither help nor
hinder. We do not mean that this was conscious in him; if it had been,
it would have been a weakness. It was an instinct, and acted with the
force and promptitude proper to such. Let us hope that the scramble of
democracy will give us something as good; anything of so classic dignity
we shall not look to see again.

Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office; from first to last he and it were
drawn together by the mutual attraction of need and fitness, and it
clung to him as most men cling to it. The people often make blunders in
their choice; they are apt to mistake presence of speech for presence of
mind; they love so to help a man rise from the ranks, that they will
spoil a good demagogue to make a bad general; a great many faults may be
laid at their door, but they are not fairly to be charged with
fickleness. They are constant to whoever is constant to his real self,
to the best manhood that is in him, and not to the mere selfishness, the
_antica lupa_ so cunning to hide herself in the sheep's fleece even from
ourselves. It is true, the contemporary world is apt to be the gull of
brilliant parts, and the maker of a lucky poem or picture or statue,
the winner of a lucky battle, gets perhaps more than is due to the solid
result of his triumph. It is time that fit honor should be paid also to
him who shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achievement of
character, who shapes his life to a certain classic proportion, and
comes off conqueror on those inward fields where something more than
mere talent is demanded for victory. The memory of such men should be
cherished as the most precious inheritance which one generation can
bequeath to the next. However it might be with popular favor, public
respect followed Mr. Quincy unwaveringly for seventy years, and it was
because he had never forfeited his own. In this, it appears to us, lies
the lesson of his life, and his claim upon our grateful recollection. It
is this which makes him an example, while the careers of so many of our
prominent men are only useful for warning. As regards history, his
greatness was narrowly provincial; but if the measure of deeds be the
spirit in which they are done, that fidelity to instant duty, which,
according to Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years
should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, whose life may
be compared with his for the strange vicissitude which it witnessed,
carried with him out of the world the respect of no man, least of all
his own; and how many of our own public men have we seen whose old age
but accumulated a disregard which they would gladly have exchanged for
oblivion! In Quincy the public fidelity was loyal to the private, and
the withdrawal of his old age was into a sanctuary,--a diminution of
publicity with addition of influence.

    "Conclude we, then, felicity consists
    Not in exterior fortunes....
    Sacred felicity doth ne'er extend
    Beyond itself....
    The swelling of an outward fortune can
    Create a prosperous, not a happy man."

THE CONSPIRACY AT WASHINGTON.

The people of the United States now have the mortification of standing
before the world in the attitude of a swindled democracy. Their
collective will is crossed by the will of one individual, whose only
title to such autocracy is in the fact that he has cheated and betrayed
those who elected him. There might be some little compensation for this
outrage, if the man himself possessed any of those commanding qualities
of mind and disposition which ordinarily distinguish usurpers; but it is
the peculiarity of Mr. Johnson that the indignation excited by his
claims is only equalled by the contempt excited by his character. He is
despised even by those he benefits, and his nominal supporters feel
ashamed of the trickster and apostate, while condescending to reap the
advantages of his faithlessness. No party in the South or in the North
thinks of selecting him as its candidate, for the vices and weaknesses
which make an excellent accomplice and tool are not those which any
party would consider desirable in a leader. Whatever office-seekers,
partisans, traitors, and public enemies may find in Mr. Johnson, it is
certain that they find in him nothing to respect. He is cursed with that
form of moral disease which sometimes renders a man ridiculous,
sometimes infamous, but which never renders him respectable,--namely,
vanity of will. Other men may be vain of their talents and
accomplishments, but he is vain of the personal pronoun itself, utterly
regardless of what it covers and includes. Reason, conscience,
understanding, have no impersonality to him. When he uses the words, he
uses them as synonymes of his determinations, or as decorative terms
into which it pleases him to translate the rough vernacular of his
wilfulness and caprices. The "Constitution," also, a word constantly
profaned by his lips, is not so much, as he uses it, the Constitution of
the United States as the moral and mental constitution of Andrew
Johnson, which, in his view, is the one primary fact to which all other
facts must be subordinate. His gross inconsistencies of opinion and
policy, his shameless betrayal of his party, his incapacity to hold
himself to his word, his hatred of a cause the moment its defenders
cease to flatter him, his habit of administering laws he has vetoed, on
the principle that they do not mean what he vetoed them for meaning, his
delight in little tricks of low cunning,--in short, all the immoral and
unreasonable acts of his administration have their central source in a
passionate sense of self-importance, inflaming a mind of extremely
limited capacity.

Such a person, whose mere presence in the executive chair of a
constitutional country is itself "a high crime and misdemeanor," is of
course the natural prey of demagogues, and he now appears to be
surrounded by demagogues of the most desperate class. His advisers are
conspirators, and they have so wrought on his vulgar and malignant
nature that the question of his impeachment has now come to be merged in
the more momentous question whether he will submit to be impeached.
Constitutionally, there is no limit to the power of Congress in this
respect but that which Congress may itself impose. The power is plain,
and there can be no revision of the judgment of the Senate by any other
power in the government. But Mr. Johnson thinks, or says he thinks, that
Congress itself, as at present constituted, is unconstitutional. He
believes, or says he believes, that the defeated Rebel States whose
representatives Congress now excludes are as much States in the Union,
and as much entitled to representation, as New York or Ohio. As he
specially represents the defeated Rebel States, it is hardly to be
supposed that he will consent to be punished for crimes committed in
their behalf by a Congress from which their representatives are
excluded; and it is also to be presumed that the measures he is now
taking to obstruct the operation of the laws of Congress relating to
reconstruction are but preliminary to a design to resist Congress
itself.

The madness of such a scheme leads judicious people to disbelieve in its
possibility; but in respect to Mr. Johnson it has been found that the
only way to prevent the occurrence of mischief is to diffuse extensively
among the people the suspicion that it is meditated. Judicious and
dispassionate persons are often poor judges of what men of fierce
passions and distempered minds will do; for they unconsciously attribute
to such men some of their own ideas of honesty, propriety, and regard
for the public welfare. The legislators whom Louis Napoleon outwitted
were overthrown, because, bad as their opinion of him was, it was not so
bad as events proved it ought to have been. In the case of Mr. Johnson,
there is not the same excuse for misconception, since his cunning is
utterly divorced from sagacity, and he has not the intelligence to
conceal what his impulses prompt him to attempt. The kind of man he is
would seem to be obvious to the most superficial observer; the natural
inference is, therefore, that he will act after his kind; but this is an
inference which dispassionate statesmen have hesitated fully to draw.
They have been continually surprised at acts which they should have
foreseen. They were surprised that, during the months he was left to his
own devices and to the counsels of Southern politicians, he matured his
policy of reconstruction. They were surprised that he would not abandon
his policy rather than break with the Republican party. They were
surprised when they learned that he meditated a _coup d'état_ on the
assembling of the Fortieth Congress. They were surprised when they found
that no law could be made which would bind him according to its intent.
They were surprised when, as soon as Congress adjourned, he began to
take measures which can have no other intelligible purpose than that of
making him master of Congress when it reassembles. And to crown all,
though it has been apparent since February, 1866, that he was the enemy
of the country, they have still had technical reasons for retaining him
as the proper executive of its laws.

It would then seem that, in dealing with such a man as Andrew Johnson,
it is the part of wisdom to suspect the worst. Without any special
knowledge of the treasonable intrigue now going on in Washington, it is
still possible to fathom the President's designs, and to understand the
resources on which he relies. In the first place, his conceit makes him
believe that he is the first man in the nation, and that he is not only
adored at the South, but popular at the North. The slightest sign of
reaction in Northern and Western elections he considers a testimony to
his individual merit, and an indorsement of his policy. In case he
refuses to recognize the present Congress, turns its members by military
power out of their seats, and appeals for support to the white
population of the Rebel as well as Loyal States, he will count on being
sustained by the nation. The Democratic party agrees with him as far as
regards the constitutionality of the laws which he will, in the name of
the Constitution, be compelled to disregard in order to get possession
of the military power of the country; and he thinks that party will
support him in resuming those functions as commander-in-chief of which
he has been deprived by a "usurping" Congress. The army and navy, with
all Republican officers removed, including, of course, General Grant and
Admiral Farragut, he thinks will obey his orders. The South, he
supposes, will rally round him to a man. The thoroughly Rebel military
organization in Maryland, controlled by a Governor after his own heart,
will interpose obstacles to the passage of troops from the Northern
States to Washington. The Democrats in those States will do all they
can to prevent troops from being sent. Before there could be any
efficient military organization in the Loyal States brought to bear on
his dictatorship, he expects to have a Congress of "the whole nation"
around him, of which at least a majority will be defeated Rebels and
Copperheads. The whole thing is to be done in the name of the
Constitution; and the Proclamation he has issued to all officers of the
United States, civil and military, telling them to obey the Constitution
(i. e. Mr. Johnson), may be considered the first step in the development
of the scheme.

It is needless to say that such a scheme could only find hospitable
reception in the head of a spiteful, inflated, and unprincipled egotist,
for such an egotist Mr. Johnson assuredly is. It is needless to say that
it would break down through the refusal of General Grant to give up his
command, and through the refusal of the great body of the army to obey
the President; for the danger is not so much the success of the attempt
as the convulsion which, the mere attempt would occasion. That the
danger is a serious one, provided the October and November elections
show a considerable Republican loss, is evident from a consideration of
the President's position. He has already gone far enough in his course
to exasperate Congress, and unite its Republican members, conservative
and radical, in favor of his impeachment. Without going over the long
list of delinquencies and usurpations which would justify that measure,
it is sufficient to name the recent Proclamation of Amnesty as an act
which promises to secure it. That Proclamation is a plain violation of
the Constitution as the Constitution is understood by Congress; and it
is upon the Congressional interpretation of the Constitution that, in
the matter of impeachment, the President must stand or fall. Congress,
by giving the power of granting amnesty to Mr. Lincoln, evidently
conceived that it was not a power given to him by the Constitution; by
taking it away from Mr. Johnson, it as evidently conceived that it
could not be exercised by him except by usurpation. In usurping this
power, Mr. Johnson must have known that his act belonged, in the opinion
of Congress, to the class of "high crimes and misdemeanors," for the
commission of which the Constitution expressly provides that Presidents
may be impeached; and he must also have known that Congress, in judging
of his infractions of the Constitution, would be bound neither by his
individual opinion of his constitutional powers nor by the opinion of
the Supreme Court, but was at perfect liberty to act on its own
interpretation of his constitutional duty. It is not therefore to be
supposed that he intended to limit his defiance of Congress to the mere
issuing of the Amnesty Proclamation, especially as the principle on
which that Proclamation was issued would cover his refusal to carry out
the whole Congressional plan of reconstruction. His conviction or
assertion that Congress has no right to withhold from him the power to
pardon defeated rebels and public enemies by the wholesale, is certainly
not greater or more emphatic than his conviction or assertion that, in
its plan of reconstruction, Congress has granted to subordinates powers
which constitutionally belong to him. If he can exalt his will over
Congress in the one case, there is no reason why he should not do it in
the other.

Indeed, in the Proclamation of Amnesty, Mr. Johnson practically claims
that his power to grant pardons extends to a dispensing power over the
laws. But it is evident that the Constitution, in giving the President
the power to pardon criminals, does not give him the power to dispense
with the laws against crime. At one period, Mr. Johnson seems to have
done this in respect to the crime of counterfeiting, by his repeated
pardons extended to convicted counterfeiters.--Still there is a broad
line of distinction between the abuse of this power to pardon criminals
after conviction, and the assumption of power to restore to whole
classes of traitors and public enemies their forfeited rights of
citizenship. By the pardon of murderers and counterfeiters, the
President cannot much increase the number of his political supporters;
by the pardon of traitors and public enemies, he may build up a party to
support him in his struggle against the legislative department of the
government. The reasons which have induced Mr. Johnson to dispense with
the laws against treason are political reasons, and bear no relation to
his prerogative of mercy. Nobody pretends that he pardoned
counterfeiters because they were his political partisans; everybody
knows he pardons traitors and public enemies in order to gain their
influence and votes. A public enemy himself, and leagued with public
enemies, he has the impudence to claim that he is constitutionally
capable of perverting his power to pardon into a power to gain political
support in his schemes against the loyal nation.

But it is not probable that the President will limit his usurpations to
a measure whose chief significance consists in its preliminary
character. Before Congress meets in November, he will doubtless have
followed it up by others which will make his impeachment a matter of
certainty. The only method of preventing him from resisting impeachment
by force, is an awakening of the people to the fact that the final
battle against reviving rebellion is yet to be fought at the polls. Any
apathy or divisions among Republicans in the State elections in October
and November, resulting in a decrease of their vote, will embolden Mr.
Johnson to venture his meditated _coup d'état_. He never will submit to
be impeached and removed from office unless Congress is sustained by a
majority of the people so great as to frighten him into submission.
Elated by a little victory, he can only be depressed by a ruinous
defeat; and such a defeat it is the solemn duty of the people to prepare
for him. Even into his conceited brain must be driven the idea that his
contemplated enterprise is hopeless, and that, in attempting to commit
the greatest of political crimes, he would succeed only in committing
the most enormous of political blunders.

Still, it is not to be concealed that there are circumstances in the
present political condition of the country which may give the President
just that degree of apparent popular support which is all he needs to
stimulate him into open rebellion against the laws. It is, of course,
his duty to recognize the people of the United States in their
representatives in the Fortieth Congress; but, on the other hand, it is
the character of his mind to regard the people as multiplied duplicates
of himself, and a mob yelling for "Andy" under his windows is to him
more representative of the people than the delegates of twenty States.
In the autumn elections only two Representatives to Congress will be
chosen; the political strife will relate generally to local questions
and candidates; and it is to be feared that the Republicans will not be
sufficiently alive to the fact, that divisions on local questions and
candidates will be considered at Washington as significant of a change
in the public mind on the great national question which it is the
business of the Fortieth Congress to settle. That Congress needs the
moral support of a great Republican vote _now_, and will obtain it
provided the people are roused to a conviction of its necessity. But a
large and influential portion of the Republican party is composed of
business men, whose occupations disconnect them from politics except in
important exigencies, and who can with difficulty be made to believe
that politics is a part of their business, as long as the safety of
their business is not threatened by civil disorders. They think the
reconstruction question is practically settled, and when you speak to
them of plots such as are now hatching in Washington, and which seem as
preposterous as the story of a sensational novel, their incredulity
confirms them in the notion that it is safe to allow things to take
their course. Their very good sense makes them blind to the designs of
such a Bobadil-Cromwell as Andrew Johnson. The great body of the
Republican party, indeed, shows at present a little of the exhaustion
which is apt to follow a series of victories, and exhibits altogether
too much of the confidence which so often attends an incompleted
triumph.

The Democratic party, on the contrary, is all alive, and is preparing
for one last desperate attempt to recover its old position in the
nation. Its leaders fear that, if the Congressional plan of
reconstruction be carried out, it will result in republicanizing the
Southern States. This would be the political extinction of their party.
In fighting against that plan, they are, therefore, fighting for life,
and are accordingly more than usually profligate in the character of the
stimulants they address to whatever meanness, baseness, dishonesty,
lawlessness, and ignorance there may be in the nation. Taxation presses
hard on the people, and they have not hesitated to propose repudiation
of the public debt as the means of relief. The argument is addressed to
ignorance and passion, for Mirabeau hit the reason of the case when he
defined repudiation as taxation in its most cruel and iniquitous form.
But the method of repudiation which the Democratic leaders propose to
follow is of all methods the worst and most calamitous. They would make
the dollar a mere form of expression by the issue of an additional
billion or two of greenbacks, and then "pay off" the debt in the
currency they had done all they could to render worthless. In other
words they would not only swindle the public creditor, but wreck all
values. A party which advocates such a scheme as this, to save it from
the death it deserves, would have no hesitation in risking a civil
convulsion for the same purpose. Indeed, the reopening of the civil war
would not produce half the misery which would be created by the adoption
of their project to dilute the currency.

Now, if by apathy on the part of Republicans and audacity on the part
of Democrats the autumn elections result unfavorably, it will then be
universally seen how true was Senator Sumner's remark made in January
last, that "Andrew Johnson, who came to supreme power by a bloody
accident, has become the successor of Jefferson Davis in the spirit by
which he is governed, and in the mischief he is inflicting on the
country"; that "the President of the Rebellion is revived in the
President of the United States." What this man now proposes to do has
been impressively stated by Senator Thayer of Nebraska, in a public
address at Cincinnati: "I declare," he said, "upon my responsibility as
a Senator of the United States, that to-day Andrew Johnson meditates and
designs forcible resistance to the authority of Congress. I make this
statement deliberately, having received it from an unquestioned and
unquestionable authority." It would seem that this authority could be
none other than the authority of the Acting Secretary of War and General
of the Army of the United States, who, reticent as he is, does not
pretend to withhold his opinion that the country is in imminent peril,
and in peril from the action of the President. But it is by some
considered a sufficient reply to such statements, that, if Mr. Johnson
should overturn the legislative department of the government, there
would be an uprising of the people which would soon sweep him and his
supporters from the face of the earth. This may be very true, but we
should prefer a less Mexican manner of ascertaining public sentiment.
Without leaving their peaceful occupations, the people can do by their
votes all that it is proposed they shall do by their muskets. It is
hardly necessary that a million or half a million of men should go to
Washington to speak their mind to Mr. Johnson, when a ballot-box close
at hand will save them the expense and trouble. It will, indeed, be
infinitely disgraceful to the nation if Mr. Johnson dares to put his
purpose into act, for his courage to violate his own duty will come from
the neglect of the people to perform theirs. Let the great uprising of
the citizens of the Republic be at the polls this autumn, and there will
be no need of a fight in the winter. The House of Representatives, which
has the sole power of impeachment, will in all probability impeach the
President. The Senate, which has the sole power to try impeachments,
will in all probability find him guilty, by the requisite two thirds of
its members, of the charges preferred by the House. And he himself,
cowed by the popular verdict against his contemplated crime, and
hopeless of escaping from the punishment of past delinquencies by a new
act of treason, will submit to be removed from the office he has too
long been allowed to dishonor.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

    _The New Life of_ DANTE ALIGHIERI. Translated by CHARLES ELIOT
    NORTON. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

In "The New Life" Dante tells how first he met Beatrice and loved her;
but how he feigned that it was another lady he loved, making a defence
of her and others still that his real passion might not be known; how
Beatrice would not salute him, believing him false and inconstant with
these ladies, her friends; how being at a banquet where she was, he was
so visibly stricken with love that some of the ladies derided him; how
Beatrice's father died, and how Dante himself fell ill; how Beatrice
quitted the city, and soon after the world; and how Dante was so
grateful to another lady who pitied his affliction that his heart turned
toward her in love, but he restrained it, and remained true to Beatrice
forever. Part of this is told as the experience of children in years,
Dante being nine at the time he first sees his love, and she of "a very
youthful age"; but the narrative then extends over the course of sixteen
years. The incidents of the slight history furnish occasion for sonnets
and canzonets, which often repeat the facts and sentiments of the prose,
and which are again elaborately expounded.

Such is "The New Life,"--a medley of passionate feeling, of vaguest
narrative, of scholastic pedantry. It is readily conceivable that to
transfer such a work to another tongue with verbal truth, and without
lapse from the peculiar spirit of the original, is a labor of great and
unusual difficulty. The slightest awkwardness in the translation of
these mystical passages of prose and rhyme connected by a thread of fact
so fragile and so subtle that we must seem to have done it violence in
touching it, would be almost fatal to the reader's enjoyment, or even
patience. Their version demands deep knowledge, not only of the language
in which they first took form, but of all the civil and intellectual
conditions of the time and country in which they were produced, as well
as the utmost fidelity, and exquisite delicacy of taste. It appears to
us that Mr. Norton has met these requirements, and executed his task
with signal grace and success.

The translator of the "Vita Nuova" has not departed from the principle
which Mr. Longfellow's translation of the "Commedia" is to render sole
in the version of poetry. Indeed, there was a greater need, if possible,
of literalness in rendering the less than the greater work, while the
temptations to "improvement" and modification of the original must have
been even more constant. Yet there is a very notable difference between
Mr. Longfellow's literality and Mr. Norton's, which strikes at first
glance, and which goes to prove that within his proper limits the
literal translator can always find room for the play of individual
feeling. Mr. Longfellow seems to have developed to its utmost the Latin
element in our poetical diction, and to have found in words of a kindred
stock the best interpretation of the Italian, while Mr. Norton
instinctively chooses for the rendering of Dante's tenderness and
simplicity a diction almost as purely Saxon as that of the Bible. This
gives the prose of "The New Life" with all its proper archaic quality;
and those who read the following sonnet can well believe that it is not
unjust to the beauty of the verse:--

    "So gentle and so modest doth appear
      My lady when she giveth her salute,
      That every tongue becometh, trembling, mute;
      Nor do the eyes to look upon her dare.
    Although she hears her praises, she doth go
      Benignly vested with humility;
      And like a thing come down, she seems to be,
      From heaven to earth, a miracle to show.
    So pleaseth she whoever cometh nigh,
      She gives the heart a sweetness through the eyes,
      Which none can understand who doth not prove.
    And from her countenance there seems to move
      A spirit sweet, and in Love's very guise,
      Who to the soul is ever saying, Sigh!"

Mr. Norton has in all cases kept to the metres of the original, but in
most of the canzonets has sacrificed rhyme to literality,--a sacrifice
which we are inclined to regret, chiefly because the translator has
elsewhere shown that the closest fidelity need not involve the loss of
any charm of the original. "We have not room here to make any general
comparison of Mr. Norton's version with the Italian, but we cannot deny
ourselves the pleasure of giving the following sonnet, so exquisite in
both tongues, for the better proof of what we say in praise of the
translator:--

    "Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore;
      Per che si fa gentil ciocch' ella mira:
      Ove ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira,
      E cui saluta fa tremar to core.
    Sicchè bassando 'l viso tutto smuore,
      Ed ogni suo difetto allor sospira:
      Fugge dinanzi a lei superbia ed ira.
      Aiutatenmi, donne, a farle onore.
    Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile
      Nasce nel core, a chi parlar la sente,
      Onde è laudato chi prima la vide.
    Quel, ch' ella par, quando un poco sorride,
      Non si puo dicer, nè tenerc a mente;
      Si è nuovo miracolo, e gentile."

    "Within her eyes my lady beareth Love,
      So that whom she regards as gentle made;
      All toward her turn, where'er her path is laid,
      And whom she greets, his heart doth trembling move;
    So that with face cast down, all pale to view,
      For every fault of his he then doth sigh;
      Anger and pride away before her fly:--
      Assist me, dames, to pay her honor due.
    All sweetness truly, every humble thought,
      The heart of him who hears her speak doth hold;
      Whence he is blessed who hath her seen erewhile.
    What seems she when a little she doth smile
      Cannot be kept in mind, cannot be told,
      Such strange and gentle miracle is wrought."

The poems are of course rendered with varying degrees of felicity, and
this we think one of the happiest versions; though few in their
literality lack that ease and naturalness of movement supposed to be the
gift solely of those wonder-workers who render the "spirit" of an
author, while disdaining a "slavish fidelity" to his words,--who as
painters would portray a man's expression without troubling themselves
to reproduce his features.

It appears to us that generally the sonnets are translated better than
the canzonets, and that where Mr. Norton has found the rhyme quite
indispensable, he has all the more successfully performed his task. In
the prose there is naturally less inequality, and here, where excellence
is quite as important as in the verse, the translator's work is
irreproachable. His vigilant taste seems never to have failed him in the
choice of words which should keep at once all the dignity and all the
quaintness of the original, while they faithfully reported its sense.

The essays appended to the translation assemble from Italian and English
writings all the criticism that is necessary to the enjoyment of "The
New Life," and include many valuable and interesting comments by the
translator upon the work itself, and the spirit of the age and country
in which it was written.

The notes, which, like the essays, are pervaded by Mr. Norton's graceful
and conscientious scholarship, are not less useful and attractive.

We do not know that we can better express our very high estimate of the
work as a whole, than by saying that it is the fit companion of Mr.
Longfellow's unmatched version of the "Divina Commedia," with which it
is likewise uniform in faultless mechanical execution.

    _The Bulls and the Jonathans; comprising John Bull and Brother
    Jonathan, and John Bull in America._ By JAMES K. PAULDING.
    Edited by WILLIAM I. PAULDING. New York: Charles Scribner and
    Company.

"John Bull and Brother Jonathan" is an allegory, conveying in a strain
of fatiguing drollery the history of the relations between Great Britain
and the United States previous to the war of 1812, and reflecting the
popular feeling with regard to some of the English tourists who overran
us after the conclusion of peace. In this ponderous travesty John Bull
of Bullock is England, and Brother Jonathan the United States; Napoleon
figures as Beau Napperty, Louis XVI. as Louis Baboon, and France as
Frogmore. It could not have been a hard thing to write in its day, and
we suppose that it must once have amused people, though it is not easy
to understand bow they could ever have read it through.

"John Bull in America" is a satire, again, upon the book-making
tourists, and the ideas of our country generally accepted from them in
England. It is in the form of a narrative, and probably does not
exaggerate the stories told of us by Captain Ashe, Mr. Richard
Parkinson, Farmer Faux, Captain Hamilton, Captain Hall, and a tribe of
now-forgotten travellers, who wrote of adventure in the United States
when, as Mr. Dickens intimates, one of the readiest means of literary
success in England was to visit the Americans and abuse them in a book.
Mr. Paulding's parody gives the idea that their lies were rather dull
and foolish, and that the parodist's work was not so entirely a
diversion as one might think. He wrote for a generation now passing
away, and it is all but impossible for us to enter into the feeling that
animated him and his readers. For this reason, perhaps, we fail to enjoy
his book, though we are not entirely persuaded that we should have found
it humorous when it first appeared.

    _The Life and Death of Jason._ A Poem. By WILLIAM MORRIS.
    Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Whether the reader shall enjoy and admire this poem or not, depends
almost solely upon the idea with which he comes to its perusal. If he
expects to find it a work of genius, with an authentic and absolute
claim upon his interest, he will be disappointed. If he is prepared to
see in it a labor of the most patient and wonderful ingenuity, to behold
the miracle of an Englishman of our day writing exactly in the spirit of
the heroic ages, with no thought or feeling suggested by the experience
of the last two thousand years, it will fully answer his expectations.
The work is so far Greek as to read in many parts like Chapman's
translation of the Odyssey; though it must be confessed that Homer is,
if not a better Pagan, at least a greater poet than Mr. Morris. Indeed,
it appears to us that Mr. Morris's success is almost wholly in the
reflected sentiment and color of his work, and it seems, therefore, to
have no positive value, and to add nothing to the variety of letters or
intellectual life. It is a kind of performance in which failure is
intolerably offensive, and triumph more to be wondered at than praised.
For to be more or less than Greek in it is to be ridiculous, and to be
just Greek is to be what has already perfectly and sufficiently been. If
one wished to breathe the atmosphere of Greek poetry, with its sensuous
love of beauty and of life, its pathetic acceptance of events as fate,
its warped and unbalanced conscience, its abhorrence of death, and its
conception of a future sad as annihilation, we had already the Greek
poets; and does it profit us that Mr. Morris can produce just their
effects and nothing more in us?

We are glad to acknowledge his transcendent talent, and we have felt in
reading his poem all the pleasure that faultless workmanship can give.
He is alert and sure in the management of his materials; his
descriptions of sentiment and nature are so clever, and his handling of
a familiar plot so excellent, that he carries you with him to the end,
and leaves you unfatigued, but sensible of no addition to your stock of
ideas and feelings.