Matthew Lowrie 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 yjSIVERSlTY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS. 
 
MATTHEW LOWR1E. 
 
777 
 

 :HAIR 
 
 *IA 
 
OTHER ESSAYS FROM THE 
 
 EASY CHAIR 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER AND BROTHERS 
 
 MDCCCXCI1I 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 PAVIS 
 
Copyright, 1893, by HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 All rights reserved 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PACK 
 THE NEW YEAR . . ...._*.. . . i 
 
 THE PUBLIC SCOLD i 
 
 NATIONAL NOMINATING CONVENTION . . . 16' 
 
 BRYANT'S COUNTRY .23 
 
 NTHE GAME OF NEWPORT 31 
 
 THE LECTURE LYCEUM 39 
 
 TWEED 47 
 
 COMMENCEMENT .... ..... 60 
 
 THE STREETS OF NEW YORK 69 
 
 THE MORALITY OF DANCING 76 
 
 THE HOG FAMILY 81 
 
 THE ENLIGHTENED OBSERVER 88 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 94 
 
 HENRY WARD BEECHER ... ... no 
 
 THE GOLDEN AGE 9 
 
 SPRING PICTURES 126 
 
 PROPER AND IMPROPER 130 
 
 BELINDA AND THE VULGAR 137 
 
 DECAYED GENTILITY . . 142 
 
 THE PHARISEE 149 
 
 LADY MAVOURNEEN ON HER TRAVELS . . .155 
 
 GENERAL SHERMAN .162 
 
 THE AMERICAN GIRL .166 
 
 ANNUS MIRABILIS 174 
 
 STATUES IN CENTRAL PARK 186 
 
 THE GRAND TOUR 193 
 
 " EASY DOES IT, GUVNER " 203 
 
 SISTE, VIATOR 208 
 
 CHRISTENDOM vs. CHRISTIANITY . . . . .216 
 
 FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW .222 
 
THE NEW YEAR. 
 
 Germany on Sylvesterabend 
 the eve of Saint Sylves- 
 ter, the last night of the 
 year you shall wake and 
 hear a chorus of voices sing- 
 ing hymns, like the English waits at 
 Christmas or the Italian pifferari. In 
 the deep silence, and to one awakening, 
 the music has a penetrating and indefin- 
 able pathos, the pathos that Richter re- 
 marked in all music, and which our own 
 Parsons has hinted delicately 
 
 " Strange was the music that over me stole, 
 For 'twas born of old sadness that lives in my 
 soul." 
 
 There is something of the same feeling 
 in the melody of college songs heard at a 
 little distance on awakening in the night 
 before Commencement. The songs are 
 familiar, but they have an appealing mel- 
 ancholy unknown before. Their dying 
 
cadences murmur like a muffled peal her- 
 alding the visionary procession that is 
 passing out of the enchanted realm of 
 youth forever. So the voices of Sylves- 
 ter's Eve chant the requiem of the year 
 that is dead. So much more of life, of 
 opportunity, of achievement, passed ; so 
 much nearer age, decline, the mystery of 
 the end. The music swells in rich and 
 lingering strains. It is a moment of ex- 
 altation, of purification. The chords are 
 dying ; the hymn is ending ; it ends. The 
 voices are stilled. It is the benediction 
 of Saint Sylvester : 
 
 ' * She died and left to me . . . 
 The memory of what has been, 
 And nevermore will be." 
 
 But this is the midnight refrain The 
 King is dead ! With the earliest ray of 
 daylight the exulting strain begins Live 
 the King! The bells are ringing; the 
 children are shouting ; there are gifts 
 and greetings, good wishes and gladness. 
 " Happy New Year ! happy New Year !" 
 It is the day of hope and a fresh begin- 
 ning. Old debts shall be forgiven ; old 
 
feuds forgotten ; old friendships revived. 
 To-day shall be better than yesterday. 
 The good vows shall be kept. A blessing 
 shall be wrung from the fleet angel Op- 
 portunity. There shall be more patience, 
 more courage, more faith ; the dream 
 shall become life ; to-day shall wear the 
 glamour of to-morrow. Ring out the old, 
 ring in the new ! 
 
 Charles Lamb says that no one ever re- 
 garded the first of January with indiffer- 
 ence ; no one, that is to say, of the new 
 style. But a fellow-pilgrim of the old 
 style, before Pope Gregory retrenched 
 those ten days in October, three hundred 
 years ago, or the British Parliament those 
 eleven days in September, a hundred and 
 thirty-five years ago, took no thought of 
 the first of January. It was a date of no 
 significance. To have mused and moral- 
 ized upon that day more than upon any 
 other would have exposed him to the 
 mischance against which Rufus Choate 
 asked his daughter to defend him at the 
 opera : " Tell me, my dear, when to ap- 
 plaud, lest unwittingly I dilate with the 
 wrong emotion." The Pope and the Par- 
 
liament played havoc with the date of 
 the proper annual emotion. Moreover, 
 if a man should happen to think of it, 
 every day is a new-year's day. If we pro- 
 pose a prospect or a retrospect we can 
 stand tiptoe on the top of every day, yes, 
 and of every hour, in the year. Good- 
 morning is but a daily greeting of Happy 
 New Year. 
 
 But these smooth generalizations and 
 truisms do not disturb the charm of reg- 
 ularly recurring times and seasons. That 
 the fifth of October, or any day in any 
 month, actually begins a new year, does 
 not give to that date the significance and 
 the feeling of the first of January. Our 
 fellow-pilgrim of the old style must look 
 out for himself. He may have begun his 
 year in March, and a blustering birth it 
 was. But we are children of the new 
 style, and the first of January is our New 
 Year. That is our day of remembrance, 
 our feast of hope, the first page of our 
 fresh calendar of good resolutions, the 
 day of underscoring and emphasis of the 
 swift lapse of life. " A few more of them, 
 and then " whispers the mentor, who is 
 
not deceived by the jolly compliments of 
 the season, and the sober significance of 
 the whisper is plain enough. " Eheu ! 
 Posthume," sang the old Roman. " This 
 world and the next, and all's over !" said 
 airy Tom Lackwit to the afflicted widow. 
 The relentless punctuality, the unwea- 
 ried urgency, of old Time, who turns his 
 hour-glass with such a sonorous ring on 
 New- Year's Day, seems sometimes a lit- 
 tle wanting in the best breeding. It fur- 
 nishes so unnecessary a register. The 
 slow whitening and thinning of the hair ; 
 the gradual incision of wrinkles ; the 
 queer antics of the sight, which holds the 
 newspaper at farther and farther removes, 
 until at last it is forced to succumb to 
 glasses ; the abated pace in walking ; the 
 dexterous avoidance of stone walls in 
 country rambles ; the harmless frauds 
 lurking in the expressed reasons for fre- 
 quent pauses in climbing a hill to turn 
 and see the landscape frauds which the 
 tears of my Uncle Toby's good angel 
 promptly wash away ; the general and 
 gradual adjustment to greater repose 
 all these surely are adequate reminders 
 
and signs of the sovereignty of Time. 
 Why should he be greedy of more ? Why 
 thump and rattle at the door, as it were, 
 on the first of January, and bawl out to 
 the whole world that we are a year older, 
 and that makes ! 
 
 It is disagreeably unnecessary. Why 
 should not the old fellow do his duty 
 quietly, and tell off another year without 
 such an outrageous uproar ? Does he 
 think it so pleasant to hear his increas- 
 ing tally forty, five, fifty, five, sixty, five ? 
 Peace ! peace ! Why not have it under- 
 stood that the tally beyond well, say 
 fifty, is a gross impertinence ? Let some- 
 thing be left to the imagination. Besides, 
 what is the use of wigs and hair-dye and 
 padding, and what not coloring and enam- 
 elling, and other juvenescent procedures 
 of the feminine arcana, if annual procla- 
 mation of impertinent dates and facts is 
 to be made ? 
 
 The worst of it is that it is a positive 
 interference with the just play of the 
 fundamental truth that age is not justly 
 measurable by the mere lapse of time. 
 Some people are never young, others defy 
 
age. This, indeed, is due to tempera- 
 ment. But that is not all. Those gray 
 hairs and wrinkles, that eyesight of less 
 keenness, that disinclination to leap walls, 
 and those fraudulent halts to survey the 
 rearward landscape, are enemies whose 
 assaults are by no means regular. They 
 come at very different times to different 
 people. Adolphus at sixty despises spec- 
 tacles. Triptolemusat thirty is bald. The 
 hair of Horatius at sixty-five is as affluent 
 as Hyperion's, and as dark without un- 
 guents as the raven's plume. Let facts 
 speak to a candid world. Why should 
 that graybeard Paul Pry called Time 
 blare through a speaking-trumpet that 
 the brave Valentine 
 
 4 ' As wild his thoughts and gay of wing 
 As Eden's garden bird" 
 
 is just as old as old, toothless, tottering, 
 decrepit Orson ? 
 
 Every well - regulated citizen of the 
 world is interested, and more vitally in- 
 terested with every closing year, that 
 upon the point of age all men shall be 
 left to their merits, and shall not be 
 
measured arbitrarily by that Procrustean 
 standard of years. It is notorious that 
 men grow wiser every year, and it is ob- 
 servable that the more years they have, 
 the more they look with doubt and ques- 
 tioning upon the Family Record. Those 
 leaves of births following the doubtful 
 books of Scripture, registered with such 
 painful and needless particularity of dates, 
 partake of the doubtf ulness^of their neigh- 
 borhood. They are mere intercalations, 
 new books of the Apocrypha. Yet they 
 often cause young fellows of seventy to 
 be accused and convicted of being old 
 men. 
 
 Since, then, we cannot stop the flight 
 of Time, let him pass. But he must not 
 calumniate as he passes. He must not 
 be allowed to stigmatize vigor and health 
 and freshness of feeling and the young 
 heart and the agile foot as old merely 
 because of a certain number of years. 
 This is the season of good resolutions. 
 The new year begins in a snow-storm 
 of white vows. So be it. But let our 
 whitest vow be, after that for a whiter 
 life, that age shall no longer be measured 
 
by this arbitrary standard of years, and 
 that those deceitful and practical octo- 
 genarians of thirty shall not escape as 
 young merely because they have not yet 
 shown the strength to carry threescore 
 and ten with jocund elasticity. 
 
 Then Happy New Year shall not mean 
 Good-night, but Good-morrow. 
 
THE PUBLIC SCOLD. 
 
 E Easy Chair was lately 
 asked whether it thought 
 the office of public scold 
 an agreeable one. There 
 was a certain tartness in 
 the question, as if its real purpose was 
 to learn from the Easy Chair whether // 
 enjoyed that position, and upon looking 
 further it appeared that the question had 
 been suggested by a remark of the Easy 
 Chair's to the effect that a certain class 
 of our fellow-creatures seemed to be dis- 
 posed to do their duty in a manner 
 that might be improved. But what is 
 an Easy Chair but a kind of censor mo- 
 runi ! Would the kind critic of its con- 
 duct have it say to the gentleman whose 
 hands are soiled that they are as pure 
 as the morning, and to the tactless dame 
 who makes all her neighbors uncomforta- 
 ble that her manners are charming? 
 Probably this is really what the critic 
 
meant, for he continued by saying that it 
 is so much better to dilate upon what is 
 pleasant than to discuss the unpleasant 
 aspects of life. That is true. It was the 
 principle of the Vicar of Bray. That 
 reverend gentleman always avoided fric- 
 tion. He was a chip of the Polonius 
 block. The cloud was a camel or a 
 whale, according to the fancy of his com- 
 panion. The good vicar looked askance 
 at Rome under Henry and Edward, and 
 told his beads piously under Mary, and 
 upon reflection eschewed the mass-house 
 under Elizabeth. He dilated upon the 
 pleasant aspects of affairs. We can im- 
 agine him saying to Ridley in the time of 
 Mary, " My dear bishop, why think your- 
 self wiser than your time?" and a little 
 later to Parker, Elizabeth's Archbishop 
 (Ridley having been burned in the mean- 
 while), " My dear archbishop, Rome, I 
 see, is much too stringent." The Vicar 
 of Bray was not a scold. He was, accord- 
 ing to the abused text, all things to all 
 men. 
 
 Yet his profession, our censor must re- 
 member, was a scolding profession at 
 
least in the sense in which the word is 
 often used. His duty was to admonish 
 and exhort, to adjure his flock to quit the 
 error of their ways. Perhaps he was a 
 poor illustration of it. Perhaps, true to 
 his temperament rather than to his pro- 
 fession, instead of urging repentance be- 
 cause the kingdom was at hand, he was 
 accustomed to say : " Brethren, I observe 
 that you lie and steal and slander your 
 neighbors a good deal. But in such a 
 world as this what is to be expected ? 
 We are all poor, weak, fallible things. 
 Which of us can hope to strike twelve 
 every time ? Let him that thinketh he 
 standeth take heed lest he fall. We must 
 all beware of hypocrisy, dear brethren, 
 and of pretending to be better than our 
 neighbors. You remember the Pharisee 
 who thanked God that he was not as 
 other men. Let him be a warning against 
 the sin of presumption. There is the 
 beautiful lesson of the beam and the 
 mote. We must not forget it. We are 
 all miserable sinners, and therefore we 
 must not twit each other with sinning. 
 We ought to tell the truth, my friends. 
 
But we don't. We all lie. Let us there- 
 fore not scold each other, since we are all 
 equally wicked. But let us avoid Phari- 
 seeism and all that assumption of superi- 
 or virtue which is implied in saying to a 
 foul-mouthed brother that he ought to 
 speak cleanly. Beware of Phariseeism 
 as of the unpardonable sin. Scold not, 
 dear brethren, but talk of the things 
 which are pleasant, and instead of re- 
 buking the liar, commend his goodness 
 to the poor, and instead of silencing the 
 backbiter, praise his subscription to the 
 soup kitchen. For what says Dr. Watts? 
 
 " ' Let dogs delight to bark and bite.' 
 
 Dogs naturally scold, but we, brethren, 
 we have the gift of avoidance, and, O 
 liars, thieves, and slanderers, let us live 
 together in peace, and say nothing about 
 falsehood, stealing, and calumny." 
 
 This was probably the tenor of the ser- 
 mons of the Vicar of Bray, and this was 
 the way that he strove to save souls. But 
 Fenelon and John Knox and Edwards 
 and Whitefield and Wesley and Channing 
 and St. Paul, each in his own way, said, 
 
" Thou art the man," and rebuked both 
 the sin and the sinner. Yet all of them 
 were very human and very fallible, and 
 all came very short of the ideal of duty. 
 To point out a defect in a picture, or 
 to exhort the artist to avoid it, is not to 
 declare yourself an incomparable artist. 
 To demand honesty in public affairs is 
 not to proclaim yourself a saint. To say 
 that school-teachers should be thorough 
 and use their common-sense as well as 
 a text -book is not to scold them. Ro- 
 milly was not a scold because he de- 
 nounced the unjust criminal laws, nor 
 John Howard because he rebuked the 
 inhumanity of prisons, nor John the 
 Baptist because he exhorted men to re- 
 pent. 
 
 The poets rebuke our lives by the fair 
 ideals that they draw, but they do not 
 scold. If a man preaches a little sermon 
 illustrating the way in which men in a 
 certain profession, let us say, shirk their 
 duty, and somebody cries out, " Don't 
 scold so !" the preacher may safely ex- 
 claim, " Fellow-sinner, thou art the man." 
 But the best illustration is closer at hand. 
 
If the Easy Chair reproves certain fellow- 
 sinners for remissness in doing their duty, 
 and for that offence is a scold, what is 
 the censor who scolds the Easy Chair for 
 scolding? Let us avoid Phariseeism, 
 brethren, and the assumption of superior 
 virtue. 
 
NATIONAL NOMINATING CON- 
 VENTION. 
 
 was a wise newspaper 
 that recently advised every 
 American who could do so 
 to see a national nominat- 
 ing convention. It is a spec- 
 tacle visible in no other country, and the 
 most exciting political spectacle in this. 
 It is the arena in which the prolonged 
 and passionate strife of countless ambi- 
 tions, intrigues, interests, and conspiracies 
 is decided ; and it is the more exciting 
 because, with every effort to predeter- 
 mine the result, the result is still at the 
 mercy of chance. The action of the con- 
 vention is a lottery. Suddenly, at the 
 decisive moment, an unexpected combi- 
 nation, an impulse, a whim, like an over- 
 whelming tidal wave, sweeps away all 
 plans and calculations, and the result is 
 as complete as it is unanticipated. 
 
 Even the device of a two-thirds vote to 
 
make a nomination valid does not avail 
 to secure the real preference of the party 
 which the convention represents. The 
 two-thirds rule, as it is called, was de- 
 signed to baffle the fundamental demo- 
 cratic principle, which is the rule of the 
 majority. When that is abandoned, the 
 proportion selected is purely arbitrary. 
 It may as well be nine tenths as two 
 thirds. But even such a dam will not 
 resist the swelling waters of feeling in a 
 convention. The French say that it is 
 the unexpected that happens, but in a 
 national convention it is the unforeseen 
 which is anticipated. The palpitating 
 multitude, which has been stimulating its 
 own excitement, confronts every doubtful 
 moment with an air which says plainly, 
 " Now it's coming." 
 
 There is always a preliminary contest 
 of various cities before the national party 
 committee to decide where the conven- 
 tion shall be held. Local orators with 
 honeyed persuasion dazzle the commit- 
 tee with statistics of the superior conve- 
 nience, accommodation, beauty, health- 
 fulness, resources, facilities, and whatever 
 
else their good genius may suggest, of the 
 city for which each one of them contends. 
 The convention is held in the largest 
 hall, or in a building erected for the pur- 
 pose, like the Wigwam in Chicago in 1860. 
 The convention itself is composed of 
 about nine hundred state delegates, their 
 seats designated by a flag with the name 
 of the state placed by the seat of the 
 chairman of the delegation. The alter- 
 nates are also seated. 
 
 Every convention is full of distinguished 
 leaders and members of the party, and 
 as any of them appears, either entering or 
 rising to speak, they are greeted with 
 great applause. If the temporary chair- 
 man be an eminent party chief or an elo- 
 quent popular orator, his address touches 
 the springs of emotion and arouses hearty 
 enthusiasm. But the friends of the lead- 
 ing candidates deprecate the mention of 
 names until the candidates are presented 
 by the chosen orator. The reason is that 
 the applause of the convention is one of 
 the counters in the game. There are 
 hired claques in the conventions which 
 keep up a humming cry which is a sub- 
 
stitute for applause, and which is some- 
 times continued for a quarter of an hour. 
 The longer the hum, the more popular 
 the candidate. 
 
 Forgetfulness or ignorance of the val- 
 ue of applause under such circumstances 
 reveals the comparative popularity of 
 candidates in the eager mass of delegates 
 and spectators. In one convention the 
 permanent president in his address, but 
 without any sinister purpose, or indeed 
 any other purpose than kindling the con- 
 vention, mentioned successively, and, of 
 course, with impartial compliment, the 
 name of every candidate who was known 
 to be on the list. Involuntarily he thus 
 tested the feeling of the convention. The 
 galleries also swelled the acclaim, but in 
 the galleries the claque is shrewdly dis- 
 tributed, and in critical moments the ap- 
 proval or disapproval of the turbulent 
 galleries undoubtedly impresses the dele- 
 gates, and recalls the galleries of the 
 French convention a hundred years ago. 
 
 There are occasional skirmishes of de- 
 bate upon motions or resolutions, but the 
 first great interest of the regular proceed- 
 
ings is the report of the platform com- 
 mittee. It is a tradition of conventions 
 that the platform should be accepted as 
 reported, both to gain the prestige of per- 
 fect unanimity and to escape "tinkering," 
 which may lead to endless discussion and 
 discordant feeling. But when the mo- 
 tion is made to proceed to the nomina- 
 tion of candidates, the excitement is in- 
 tense. The orators are usually carefully 
 selected, not alone as eloquent speakers, 
 but as men of weight and influence, and 
 of what at the moment is more indispen- 
 sable than everything else tact. The 
 speeches are made with the fundamental 
 understanding that, however glowing and 
 elaborate the praise of the candidate may 
 be, there shall be an explicit assurance 
 that whatever the merits of any candi- 
 date, the candidate who shall be nomi- 
 nated by the convention will receive the 
 universal and enthusiastic support of the 
 party. 
 
 On one occasion, when this fundamen- 
 tal rule was forgotten by an ardent ora- 
 tor, who, in the warmth of his devotion 
 to his candidate, declared that no other 
 
man was so certain to draw out the whole 
 party vote in the state for which he spoke, 
 a hurricane of hisses from the conven- 
 tion and the galleries silenced him, and 
 the friends of his candidate were instant- 
 ly aware that a fatal injury had befallen 
 him. In another convention the orator 
 who nominated one of the candidates 
 was so exasperated by what he felt to be 
 the treachery to his candidate of a con- 
 spicuous friend of another that his de- 
 nunciation of the traitor was held to be 
 a covert assault upon the traitor's can- 
 didate, and again a tempest of universal 
 hissing overwhelmed the luckless orator 
 and his candidate. 
 
 The announcement by states of the 
 first formal vote for candidates is made 
 in impressive silence, followed by im- 
 mense applause. But the second ballot 
 is more significant ; and whenever upon 
 any ballot the announcement of a vote 
 is seen by the tally to decide the nomi- 
 nation, the feeling culminates in an inde- 
 scribable tumult of frenzied acclamation, 
 and the convention generally adjourns to 
 consider the Vice-Presidency. But the 
 
interest in its work is at an end, and it is 
 astounding to see the happy-go-lucky 
 Providence which presides over the se- 
 lection of the officer who has thrice be- 
 come the President of the United States. 
 
 In the history of national conventions 
 there is no more touching incident than 
 that of Mr. Seward awaiting at his home 
 in Auburn the result of the balloting at 
 the convention of 1860, which nominated 
 Mr. Lincoln. By what is called the logic 
 of the situation Mr. Seward's nomination 
 was assured, and no disappointment could 
 have been greater than the selection of 
 another. How bitter it was was not sus- 
 pected until his life was recently pub- 
 lished ! But he encountered the shock 
 with his usual equanimity, and before the 
 election he had made the most extraor- 
 dinary series of speeches for his party 
 which the annals of any campaign record. 
 
 The journal's advice was sound. See 
 a national convention if you can. 
 
BRYANT'S COUNTRY. 
 
 JHE traveller in western Mas- 
 sachusetts, reaching some 
 quiet village upon the 
 hills, which seems to him 
 singularly lonely and re- 
 mote, often finds some little incident 
 in its annals which connects it with the 
 great world. Coming to Goshen, a soli- 
 tary little town wholly unknown to most 
 of our readers, he is conscious of the 
 height, of the purity of the air, and the 
 peacefulness of the wooded landscape, and 
 far below, towards the east, he sees the 
 undulating line of Holyoke, and on some 
 fortunate day may catch the gleam of 
 the placid Connecticut winding through 
 broad meadows and between Tom and 
 Holyoke to the Sound. 
 
 The little town itself is a grassy street, 
 with a meeting-house and a hotel, which 
 has a desolate air of mistaken enterprise 
 declining into disappointment, with long 
 
anticipation of a crowd of summer pil- 
 grims, who might well turn their steps 
 hither, but who have never come. Be- 
 yond the village street upon the same 
 plateau is the great Goshen reservoir, 
 which lies hushed in grim repose over 
 the town of Williamsburg, a few miles 
 below, the town which was overwhelmed 
 some years ago by the bursting of the 
 Mill River dam. Such events are the 
 tragedies of the hills, which become tra- 
 ditions told in the village store, and in- 
 vesting with dignity, as the years pass, 
 the villagers who recall the direful day. 
 
 Among the traditions of Goshen is 
 that of the passage of some of the sol- 
 diers of Burgoyne on their march from 
 Saratoga to Cambridge. When the brill- 
 iant British general swept down Lake 
 Champlain to the Hudson, capturing Ti- 
 conderoga as he came, it was feared in 
 these hills that he would march trium- 
 phantly from Albany to Boston. There 
 was a general rally of all able-bodied 
 men to the rescue ; and as they marched 
 away from their fields ripe for the har- 
 vest the prospect was dismal, until the 
 
able-bodied ' women marched into the 
 fields and gathered and housed the crops. 
 The British invaders reached Goshen, 
 indeed, on their march from Albany to 
 Boston, but only as prisoners of war. 
 
 All this peaceful neighborhood was 
 originally granted by the State to the 
 heirs of soldiers in the early New England 
 wars. Goshen and its neighbor Chester- 
 field, another city set upon a hill six or 
 seven miles to the south, were grants to 
 the descendants of soldiers in the Narra- 
 gansett expedition of King Philip's war. 
 From Goshen the Chesterfield meeting- 
 house can be seen against the southern 
 horizon, and the road lies through high 
 pastures and lonely farms to the pleasant 
 town. When you climb its hill and look 
 around, you see a cluster of hospitable 
 houses, around which the neatly kept 
 grounds give an air of refinement to the 
 whole village, which is steeped in rural 
 tranquillity. 
 
 The broad hills slope westward towards 
 the valley of the Westfield, and beyond 
 lie the shaggy sides of the Cummington 
 range. Chesterfield has its special tradi- 
 
tion of Lafayette passing the night in its 
 old tavern, on his way from Albany to 
 Boston, in 1824. It is a characteristic 
 representative of the hill towns, so still 
 that the air seems drowsy as in Rip 
 Van Winkle's village. But such tranquil 
 towns, in which a moving figure is half 
 spectral and almost a surprise, were the 
 beginnings of the nation. From these 
 sequestered springs the mighty river 
 flows. 
 
 Chesterfield has not half the popula- 
 tion that it counted seventy years ago. 
 The whole town now reports scarcely 
 seven hundred persons. Yet, with all 
 the old spirit, it invited its neighbors in 
 Hampshire County to come and dine on 
 one of the loveliest of summer days this 
 year. It was the annual festival of the 
 Hill -side Agricultural Society, and fully 
 a thousand people filled the friendly 
 town. The feast was spread upon tables 
 on a green space beside the old house in 
 which Lafayette slept, and under a bower 
 of leafy white birch boughs. The mag- 
 nates of the county were all present, and 
 it was whispered privately that there were 
 
private whisperings among eminent poli- 
 ticians, who, however, with the non- 
 political, or the political of the wrong 
 side, talked cheerfully of the charming 
 day and the promising crops. Politics is 
 the breath of our patriotic nostrils, and it 
 was a stimulating thought that while we 
 were listening to the humorous but well- 
 merited praises of Strawberry Hill pork, 
 some of our bland companions were sav- 
 ing their bacon in other ways ; and while 
 we dreamed of crisp sausages and savory 
 ham, were contriving Senators and Coun- 
 cillors, and even a Governor himself. 
 
 The simple courtesy and universal in- 
 telligence were of the old New England, 
 nor less so the composure and ease with 
 which speaker after speaker mounted the 
 bench on which he sat, and in what he 
 said, and the way in which he said it, 
 showed that he was a graduate of the 
 town meeting. The pastor of Goshen, 
 asked to speak of some of the more 
 noted citizens of the neighboring towns, 
 might well have occupied with so fruitful 
 a text all the hours until sunset. But 
 with exemplary discretion he mentioned 
 
but a few, and among them some that 
 surprised a New-Yorker, who had not 
 known, but might have guessed, that 
 Gideon Lee, former Mayor of the city, 
 and Luther Bradish, Lieutenant - Gov- 
 ernor of the State, came from the little 
 town upon the Cummington hills oppo- 
 site, where Bryant studied law. 
 
 The whole region before us, indeed, 
 was especially Bryant's. Upon the slope 
 yonder he was born, and we could see 
 the house in which as a boy he lived. 
 " Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his med- 
 itations among those solitary woods. 
 There, upon the nearer hill, high over 
 Plainfield, where he wrote the poem 
 the " Water-fowl," forever floating in the 
 twilight heavens 
 
 ' * Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue 
 Thy solitary way." 
 
 We were looking upon the cradle of 
 American literature. Here its first en- 
 during poem was written. The poet 
 himself never escaped the spell of the 
 hills. The child was father of the man. 
 Bryant in the city was always the grave 
 
2 9 
 
 and unchanged genius of New England. 
 The city did not wear off the rusticity 
 of his manner. His air was reserved 
 and remote, and he was still wrapped in 
 the seclusion of the hills. It is in such 
 scenes and among such people on such 
 a day that the power of these hills and 
 their influence upon our national life and 
 literature are perceived. 
 
 These hidden springs have overflowed 
 the prairies of the West; and how much 
 of the wealth and prosperity, the energy, 
 industry, and enlightenment of New York 
 have trickled down from them, you may 
 hear, if you doubt, every year on Fore- 
 fathers' Day at the New England dinner 
 in New Amsterdam. As there is alto- 
 gether too much glory to be adequately 
 celebrated in one day, another has been 
 added, to accommodate the Yankee city 
 of Brooklyn, and it is not the fault of the 
 sons of New England if on those two days 
 the whole continent does not hear the me- 
 lodious thunder of their eloquence pro- 
 claiming that New England always led, is 
 leading still, and will lead forever, the tri- 
 umphal procession of American progress. 
 
Supported by such a history it is a nat- 
 ural boast. There is, however, one inex- 
 orable condition. To do what New Eng- 
 land has done, New England must be 
 what she has been. 
 
THE GAME OF NEWPORT. 
 
 | HERE is nothing more de- 
 lightful than the gravity 
 with which the game of 
 Newport is played. To as- 
 sist at one of the solemn 
 " functions " like a coach parade is not 
 unlike attendance upon a function of 
 the ancient Church in Rome. On a true 
 Newport afternoon, as soft and sweet 
 and luminous an air as can be breathed, 
 Newport, in every kind of stately and. 
 comfortable and light and graceful car- 
 riage, with the finest horses and the most 
 loftily disdainful of coachmen, proceeds 
 down the avenue to behold the stately 
 procession along the ocean drive. 
 
 Of its kind there is no more beautiful 
 drive in the world. The shore winds 
 among rocks which are massed, a shrewd- 
 eyed traveller said, as on the shores of 
 Greece. The bold character of the coast 
 of Rhode Island and its picturesque ef- 
 
fects are wholly unknown upon its neigh- 
 bor Long Island. The endless reach of 
 sand and the monotony of the vast level 
 land on Long Island have a certain vague 
 charm as of a sea -shore becoming or 
 about to become picturesque. But that 
 point is fully reached by its northern 
 neighbors of the New England coast, and 
 the ocean drive in Newport is in itself in- 
 comparable. 
 
 For its company on the day of a great 
 social function it is quite as incompara- 
 ble. Hyde Park, the Bois, the Cascine, 
 the Prater, show no such sumptuous dis- 
 play. If the street boy were a philosopher, 
 he would say, probably, as he watched 
 the spectacle, " My eyes ! money plays 
 here for all it is worth." The American 
 street boy of every degree is not sup- 
 posed to need any stronger impression 
 of the value of money than he already 
 possesses. But Newport is the great 
 school for that instruction, and it is open 
 free to the whole world. Money else- 
 where has the same instincts and desires. 
 But in a city, in winter, its sports and 
 effects, however splendid, are divided 
 
and hidden. In summer Newport they 
 are concentrated under most fortunate 
 conditions, and proceed in the open 
 air. 
 
 It is all the more striking because mon- 
 ey has built its summer city close by and 
 just above one of the oldest and most his- 
 toric of our cities. It has improvised its 
 magnificence and mad profusion upon the 
 outskirts of simplicity and moderation. 
 But that simplicity and moderation are 
 observant, for all their plainness. When 
 they were asked what effect the new town 
 produced upon the old, whether the rol- 
 licking city on the hill harmed or helped 
 the plodding seaport, they answered : 
 " Until Croesus and Midas came, it was 
 beneficial. But they have ruined New- 
 port." 
 
 Perhaps not, however. The Newport 
 on the hill of to-day is the legitimate 
 offspring of the earlier summer retreat. 
 That was a group of the select who came 
 to Newport to enjoy themselves for the 
 summer. They were well-to-do, some of 
 them. But not many dwelt in cottages. 
 The multitude lived in hotels. They 
 
danced, they dined, they drove, they 
 sauntered. It was the green tree. It was 
 less money enjoying itself as more money 
 enjoys itself now. The gossip, the flirting, 
 the display were not of another kind, they 
 were the same as to - day, but the scale 
 was more limited. Mrs. Candour, Mrs. 
 Malaprop, Sir Benjamin Backbite, and 
 the brothers Surface were already there. 
 The standards of conduct, the ideals of 
 honor, were not essentially different. 
 
 A generation ago Sir Benjamin bowed 
 and danced and supped at Mrs. Mala- 
 prop's ball with all the gay world of 
 that time, which is now in wigs, caps, 
 turbans, or heaven; and the next day, 
 dining with Mrs. Candour, Sir Benjamin 
 told, with infinite relish and to the great 
 amusement of the table, the story of his 
 hostess's verbal trips and stumbles. It 
 did not seem to be conduct essentially 
 base, because this sparkling summer 
 realm by the sea is like Charles Lamb's 
 conception of the artificial comedy of 
 the eighteenth century : " I confess, for 
 myself, that, with no great delinquencies 
 to answer for, I am glad for a season 
 
to take an airing beyond the diocese of 
 the strict conscience not to live always 
 in the precincts of the law courts but 
 now and then, for a dream-while or so, 
 to imagine a world with no meddling 
 restrictions, to get into recesses whither 
 the hunter cannot follow me 
 
 ' ' * secret shades 
 Of wooded Ida's inmost grove, 
 While yet there was no fear of Jove/ " 
 
 To take permanent lodgings beyond the 
 diocese of the strict conscience, however, 
 is a critical enterprise. If you take a house 
 in Capua, you must needs breathe the 
 Capuan air. The magnetic rock in Sind- 
 bad's story drew out the nails of the ships 
 that ventured too near. Old Mithridates 
 fed on poisons until they " became a kind 
 of nutriment," as Dr. Rappaccini fed his 
 daughter, until, too late, he discovered 
 that she was doomed. The graybeards 
 who drive out to see the coach parade, 
 and recall the days, before the ocean 
 drive, when the rocks beyond Lily Pond 
 were a glimmering land of Beulah, may 
 prattle of the golden age of Newport 
 
as of a happy past in which the gray- 
 beards were born. But will they seri- 
 ously contend that the age of Croesus 
 and Midas is not the golden age of New- 
 port ? 
 
 While they are gossiping, the coaches 
 approach. They have been through the 
 town, and are driving out by the Fort 
 road ; and as they appear, the vast throng 
 of carriages which have driven out to 
 meet them pull to the side of the road 
 to allow a free course. A multitude of 
 spectators awaiting a festal procession, 
 which at last is coming, naturally sug- 
 gests applause. But there is profound 
 silence. There is no cheer for every 
 spectator to catch up and pass on. The 
 first coach is at hand, and gravely pass- 
 es at a deliberate pace, and the great 
 world in carriages gravely looks on. The 
 second coach deliberately follows, and is 
 surveyed with equal gravity. The next 
 perhaps will strike a spark of applause. 
 But the next passes deliberately amid 
 a silence profound. One friend, per- 
 haps, in the stately procession gravely 
 nods to another gravely gazing from a 
 
carriage. The " function " proceeds. Far 
 out at sea the white sails flash, and 
 the summer surf breaks gently along the 
 shore. Every coach rolls slowly by. The 
 moment for cheering has not yet arrived. 
 Indeed, it does not arrive before the pag- 
 eant has passed, and the reviewing car- 
 riages are turning and following on in its 
 wake. It is truly a solemn function. Gray- 
 beard recalls nothing like it for multitude 
 and display in the old drives on " beach 
 days " along the beach in what he calls 
 the golden age. But does he doubt that 
 old Newport would have done it gladly 
 if it could have done it ? 
 
 If the ghost of Heliogabalus haunts the 
 villa'd shore, it is with no hope of re- 
 suming the imperial crown. His court 
 merely makes a pretty summer spectacle 
 when the opera ends. The coach and the 
 stately equipage and the flashing splendor 
 of busy idleness are the pageant which is 
 kindly displayed gratis for the passengers 
 in the omnibus, for the pedestrians and 
 the nurses. They sit and stroll and stare 
 at their ease while the gay play proceeds 
 before their eyes. Nowhere more con- 
 
stantly than in the summer Newport 
 does the remark of the little child watch- 
 ing the march of the soldiers recur 
 " Mamma, how good they are to make 
 such a show !" 
 
THE LECTURE LYCEUM. 
 
 ^HE Utica Herald in a pleasant 
 article recently recalled the 
 lecture lyceum of a quarter 
 of a century ago. It was 
 then what is called a power. 
 It greatly influenced public opinion. Its 
 spirit was indicated by the reply of Wen- 
 dell Phillips to an invitation which asked 
 him his terms and his subject. He an- 
 swered that for a literary lecture he should 
 expect a hundred dollars, but he would 
 deliver an antislavery address for nothing, 
 and pay his own expenses. The lecturers 
 who were most sought at that time were 
 almost without exception men of very 
 strong convictions upon the great ques- 
 tion which, however evaded and dexter- 
 ously hidden, was the vital thought of the 
 country ; and every successive week from 
 November to April, in the largest cities 
 and the smallest cities, along the belt of 
 country from the Kennebec through New 
 
England and New York westward through 
 Ohio and the Northwest to the Missis- 
 sippi, before thousands of the most intel- 
 ligent American citizens, this band of 
 lecturers advanced, like a well - ordered 
 platoon of sharp-shooters, and delivered 
 their destructive volley at what they felt 
 to be the common enemy. 
 
 Edward Everett, " the monarch of the 
 platform," as Mr. Edward Parker called 
 him in his book upon American contem- 
 porary orators, during part of this same 
 time was making a tour through much of 
 the same region with his oration upon 
 Washington, for the benefit of the fund 
 for the purchase of Mount Vernon, and 
 he was also writing the Mount Vernon 
 papers for the Ledger, in one of which 
 he gave an entertaining description of a 
 night in a sleeping-car, when those itin- 
 erant bedchambers had but recently taken 
 to the road. Mr. Everett's conservative 
 temperament made his oration a kind of 
 corrective of the influence of the great 
 tendency of the lyceum lecture. But pa- 
 triotic as his purpose undoubtedly was, 
 his effort to stem the rapidly rising tide 
 
of public sentiment was like the protests 
 of Governor Hutchinson and the Colo- 
 nial conservatives against the fervid rev- 
 olutionary appeals of Otis and Adams 
 and Quincy. Other popular speakers of 
 the same sympathy as that of Mr. Everett 
 found themselves out of tune with the 
 lyceum audience, and were but meteors 
 flashing across the stage, whose light was 
 lost in the steady and increasing glow of 
 the group of men who were identified 
 with the great day of the lyceum lecture. 
 These men were not all like Wendell 
 Phillips, open leaders of a specific agita- 
 tion, nor were these lectures always osten- 
 sibly upon what are called public ques- 
 tions. But the influence of the lecturers 
 was unmistakable. They were all men 
 known to be in the strongest sympathy 
 with the most advanced feeling of the 
 agitation. It was the plain spirit and 
 tone and drift of those lectures, an occa- 
 sional allusion and the necessary applica- 
 tion of the remarks, however general, to 
 the actual situation, rather than any de- 
 liberate discussion of the question itself, 
 which characterized the lyceum of that 
 
day. There was sometimes an attempted 
 reaction against this tendency. In Phil- 
 adelphia it was discovered that colored 
 persons were not admitted to the Musi- 
 cal Fund Hall, in which the lectures had 
 been given. The leading lecturers in- 
 stantly informed the committee that they 
 declined to speak in the hall so long as 
 the restriction continued. In Albany the 
 reactionary sentiment in the Young Men's 
 Association succeeded in electing a lect- 
 ure committee which was resolved upon 
 a purely "literary" course, and which 
 would not invite the usual lecturers. The 
 result was an independent course, under 
 the auspices of dissatisfied members of 
 the association, in which the rejected 
 lecturers spoke in the largest hall in the 
 city, and the signal triumph of the seced- 
 ers lay in the immense audience which 
 assembled in contrast to the attenuated 
 attendance upon the regular course. 
 
 The singular success of the lyceum 
 lecture of that time was due, undoubted- 
 ly, to two causes the simultaneous ap- 
 pearance of a remarkable group of ora- 
 tors, and their profound sympathy with 
 
the question which absorbed the public 
 mind. The weekly lecture was not merely 
 a display of oratory, not only an amusing 
 recreation, but it brought wit and accom- 
 plishment and eloquence to strengthen 
 the public feeling and arouse the public 
 conscience, and to confirm the earnest 
 spirit which was universal, and which 
 forecast the great events and the no- 
 ble elevation of the public mind that 
 followed. Emerson, Wendell Phillips, 
 Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Starr King, The- 
 odore Parker, could of themselves carry 
 any course of lectures, and each in his own 
 way was thoroughly in accord with the 
 truest American life of that time. The 
 situation and the condition of the public 
 mind would not have availed, indeed, 
 without the happy chance of such ora- 
 tors to create the lyceum, but with that 
 chance the lyceum of that day was as re- 
 markable a continuous display of various 
 and effective eloquence as has been ever 
 known. 
 
 If the faithful diary of any lecturer who 
 went the grand rounds twenty-five years 
 ago, from Maine to the Mississippi, could 
 
be published, it would be full of the most 
 amusing stories. The lecturers all had 
 them to tell, and they were all men. of 
 a singularly fine perception of humor. 
 James T. Fields, the publisher in Boston, 
 was the friend of all the lyceum orators, 
 and towards the close of his life he was 
 himself a popular and attractive lecturer 
 upon literary subjects. His little cell or 
 private office in the old corner book-store 
 in Boston was an exchange of lecturers 
 for that neighborhood, which teemed with 
 lyceums, and no similar space has ever 
 'heard fresher stories better told, or has 
 ever echoed with gayer laughter. 
 
 It was the pleasant company in that 
 little retreat which first heard, the day 
 after it occurred, the tale of the belated 
 lecturer who, hurrying from the cars in a 
 carriage to the hall in Boston, long be- 
 yond the hour, dinnerless, and with no 
 chance to dress, opened his travelling- 
 bag, and proceeded, to the consternation 
 of the lady who had taken a seat in the 
 same carriage, and whose pardon he po- 
 litely and briefly invoked, to change his 
 collar and his coat. As he began to pull 
 
off his coat, having pulled off his collar, 
 his amazed and terrified fellow-passenger 
 began to pull at the door, and to call 
 loudly upon the driver, who was furiously 
 whipping his horses into a pace that in- 
 creased both the noise of the carriage and 
 the conviction of the terrified lady that 
 she was the victim of some dreadful con- 
 spiracy, or the hapless victim of a maniac. 
 The maniac's earnest but interjectional 
 explanation as he proceeded in his toilet, 
 begging his companion to be pacified, as 
 he was merely going to lecture, was an 
 unintelligible asseveration, which only 
 made his madness more indisputable and 
 awful, and what might have befallen the 
 poor lady, if the carriage had not sud- 
 denly stopped at the hall, and the lect- 
 urer, in his clean collar and black coat, 
 had not begged her pardon for frighten- 
 ing her, with a fervor that frightened her 
 all the more, and disappeared from the 
 vehicle with his travelling-bag, shawl, and 
 umbrella, he was not prepared to say. 
 But the tale, as he told it the next morn- 
 ing with infinite humor in Fields's corner, 
 was received, as he ruefully admitted, with 
 
4 6 
 
 louder shouts of laughter than had greet- 
 ed the brightest witticisms of his lecture. 
 Fields is gone, and his old friend and 
 neighbor Whipple, who was one of the 
 earliest of the noted lyceum lecturers. 
 The old corner in the old corner book- 
 store is gone, and with it have vanished 
 many of the happy company that gath- 
 ered there, not only of orators, but of 
 famous authors. The lyceum of the last 
 generation is gone, but it is not surpris- 
 ing that those who recall with the Utica 
 Herald its golden prime should cherish a 
 kindly and regretful feeling for an institu- 
 tion which was so peculiarly American, 
 and which served so well the true Ameri- 
 can spirit and American life. 
 
TWEED. 
 
 )HERE are many persons who 
 wonder why Tweed did not 
 evade justice by forfeiting 
 his bail. He had every 
 chance to escape, they say ; 
 why did he stay? His chief confederates 
 are safe in Europe, where he might easily 
 have been, yet he was foolish enough to 
 take the risk of a trial, and he is impris- 
 oned, probably for the rest of his life. 
 The explanation, however, is very obvi- 
 ous. He did not believe there was any 
 risk. Tweed was the most striking illus- 
 tration of a very common faith belief 
 in the Almighty Dollar. He is the vic- 
 tim of a most touching fidelity to the 
 great principle which every good Amer- 
 ican will surely be the last to flout. His 
 creed was very simple . it was that money 
 would buy everything, and he reposed 
 upon his belief with the sweet security of 
 the Mussulman who sees by faith a heaven 
 
of houris. Certainly his confidence was 
 not surprising. He had proved his creed. 
 He had seen money work miracles. He 
 had seen himself, a man of no cleverness 
 and of no advantages, rising swiftly by 
 means of it from insignificant poverty to 
 the control of a great party. It had made 
 him master of one of the great cities of 
 the world. It had secured for him Gov- 
 ernors, Legislatures, councils, and legal 
 and executive authorities of every kind. 
 He invested in land and judges. He 
 bought dogs and lawyers. He silenced 
 the press with a golden muzzle, and money 
 made his will law. 
 
 Here was a man who wanted nothing 
 that money could not buy : was it strange 
 that he had unbounded faith in it ? Every 
 form of virtue was to him mere affecta- 
 tion, a more or less ingenious and tena- 
 cious "strike" for money. If a man 
 spoke of honesty, patriotism, self-respect, 
 the public welfare, public opinion, truth, 
 justice, right, Tweed smiled at the fine 
 phrases in which the auctioneer, anxious 
 to sell himself, cried, " Going ! going !" 
 Argument, reason, decency they were 
 
meaningless to him. If an opponent held 
 out, he simply asked, " How much ?" 
 The world was a market. Life was a 
 bargain. He felt himself with pride to 
 be the largest operator in his way, as 
 Vanderbilt in his, or Stewart in his. 
 
 In Albany he had the finest quarters at 
 the Delavan, and when he came into the 
 great dining-room at dinner-time, and 
 looked at all the tables thronged with 
 members of the Legislature and the lob- 
 by, he had a benignant, paternal expres- 
 sion, as of a patriarch pleased to see his 
 retainers happy. It was a magnificent 
 rendering of Fagin and his pupils. You 
 could imagine him trotting up and down 
 in the character of an unsuspicious old 
 gentleman .with his handkerchief hanging 
 out of his pocket, that his scholars might 
 show their skill in prigging a wipe. He 
 knew which of that cheerful company was 
 the Artful Dodger and which Charley 
 Bates. And he never doubted that he 
 could buy every man in the room if he 
 were willing to pay the price. So at the 
 Capitol, where sits the Legislature of a 
 noble commonwealth of four millions of 
 
souls, he moved about with an air of fat 
 good-nature, like the chief shepherd of 
 the flock. If he stood at the door of the 
 Assembly looking in, it is easy to fancy 
 him saying to himself, The State pays 
 these men two or three hundred dollars 
 for four months' service ; I will give them 
 better wages. He did not doubt that it 
 was a. fair transaction. What is the State ? 
 It is only four millions of people, he 
 thought, who are all trying to be rich 
 struggling, cheating, by hook or by crook, 
 every man for himself, and the devil take 
 the hindmost, to be rich. These men 
 would be fools not to take my money. 
 And he smiled his fat smile, and paid 
 liberally for all that was in market. 
 
 There were some papers, whose price 
 he could not ascertain, which persisted 
 in speaking ill of him and his pals. If 
 the fools did not know their own interest 
 enough to be content with a good price 
 say, of corporation advertising they must 
 be silenced. The conceit of virtue must 
 not be pushed too far. So one day his 
 Legislature passed a bill virtually giving 
 his judges power to imprison editors at 
 
their pleasure. But virtue that is, in 
 the Tweed theory of life, obstinacy in 
 holding out fora higher price mustered 
 such a really respectable protest that the 
 public project of coercion failed, and pri- 
 vate methods were tried. Tweed had no 
 doubt that reputation could be bought as 
 well as power. Peter Cooper builds an 
 institute for the education of the poor, 
 does he ? You mean, said Tweed, a mon- 
 ument to his own glory. He pays a cer- 
 tain number of thousands of dollars for 
 the reputation of philanthropy. And Mr, 
 Stewart builds a working-woman's palace. 
 Ah ! And Mr. Astor founds a library. 
 Indeed ! And they are benevolent gen- 
 tlemen and benefactors of their kind ? 
 Not at all. They merely invest money in 
 a certain kind of fame. That pleases their 
 taste, as fast horses and yachts and pict- 
 ures please the taste of other people. I 
 will show you how 'tis done, says the 
 faithful believer in the Dollar. And he 
 gives fifty thousand dollars to the poor 
 just as winter is beginning. " Let the 
 cavillers say what they will," exclaim 
 a myriad voices, " that shows a good 
 
heart." Tweed, as it were, tips a wink. 
 I told you how it was done, he seems to 
 say : what is there that money will not 
 buy? 
 
 Is it surprising that such a man did not 
 try to evade justice ? Justice in his view 
 was a commodity like legislative honor, 
 like newspaper independence, like the 
 reputation of benevolence. The reform 
 movement was to him a sudden and con- 
 fusing flurry, in which strikers, to whose 
 terms he would not yield, had somehow 
 gained a momentary advantage. He had 
 perhaps made a mistake in not buying 
 them at their own price. Success had 
 possibly put him off his guard. He was 
 sure that if an indictment were found, 
 that would be the end of it, and he had 
 no feeling of shame. His friend Fisk had 
 shown what lawyers were made of, and 
 he himself would buy lawyers and judges, 
 sheriffs and juries. He knew that the 
 one thing that in a needy and greedy 
 world cannot fail is money. He came to 
 his first trial, and the jury disagreed : nat- 
 urally, for he had bought some of them. 
 The evidence is, of course, moral only, 
 
but it is conclusive. If justice, face- 
 tiously so called, wanted another bout, 
 he would " come up smiling." There was 
 no trick or quibble that lawyers could de- 
 vise for which he had not made munifi- 
 cent preparation, even to asserting that 
 the judge who obstinately refused to name 
 a price was disqualified from sitting at 
 the trial. Money had never failed before ; 
 it certainly would not at this last pinch. 
 
 But it did, and the bewilderment and 
 consternation of this simple devotee were 
 pitiful. He had but one article in his 
 faith, and that was now destroyed. He 
 had staked everything upon the certainty 
 of the Almighty Dollar, and he had lost. 
 But there was something not less notice- 
 able than his unquestioning faith. It was 
 that his faith was so generally held. For 
 what gave the universal and intense in- 
 terest to the Tweed trial? Here was a 
 common thief, except in the amount of 
 his theft, of whose guilt nobody had any 
 doubt, against whom, as the judge said, 
 the evidence was a mathematical demon- 
 stration, and his conviction was hailed as 
 a kind of national deliverance and vindi- 
 
cation of human justice. There was but 
 one reason for this, and it was the feeling 
 that money would free him. Of course 
 it was known that the judge could not be 
 bought, nor the Attorney-General, nor 
 the prosecution. Tweed might as well 
 have offered to buy the moral law. But 
 public knowledge ended there. And in 
 the degree of the universality of the belief 
 that somehow, by actual bribery, or by 
 legal quirk or shift or sham, money would 
 buy him off, is the value of the lesson of 
 his conviction, which is that the utmost 
 power of money fails before firm, saga- 
 cious, and intelligent honesty. There is 
 not a saloon in New York in which the 
 Tweed contempt of honorable motives 
 is the sole faith which has not had an 
 astounding revelation, and learned that 
 money is not omnipotent. 
 
 Those saloons have learned one other 
 thing that stealing is the same crime, 
 whether it be the theft of public or of 
 private property. The Robin Hood jol- 
 lity that surrounded Tweed, his familiar 
 name, the " Boss," the laughing stories 
 that were told of him, showed that he was 
 
held in very different estimation from an 
 ordinary thief. The baser newspapers 
 evidently regarded him as the French no- 
 bleman regarded himself who was firmly 
 convinced that the Almighty would think 
 twice before condemning such a gentle- 
 man as he. So when Tweed went to the 
 Tombs the same feeling attended him. 
 The officers could not believe that it was 
 really meant so rich a man, who had lived 
 in so fine a house, and had spent money 
 so profusely, should be treated as a com- 
 mon offender. The wretch who steals a 
 loaf to feed his starving children must 
 have short shrift, and Black Maria de- 
 spatches him at the earliest moment. But 
 a " statesman " who steals millions of dol- 
 lars from the people really the law must 
 think twice before handling him impo- 
 litely ! A day or two after he had been 
 taken to jail, on his way to the peniten- 
 tiary, the papers said, as if he had been a 
 beloved prisoner of state whom cruel gov- 
 ernments might torture, but whom the 
 people would still honor : " A great many 
 improvements have been made in his cell 
 by his friends, and it has now quite a 
 
cosey, comfortable appearance. The floor 
 is covered with a carpet of a dark green 
 ground. The walls are hung with dark 
 green cloth, and the panes in the win- 
 dows opening on Centre Street, which 
 were cracked and broken a few days ago, 
 have been newly glazed. In the centre 
 of the room is a large round table, at 
 which the ' Boss ' takes his three regular 
 meals, served up in the best manner from 
 the prison restaurant. There is a luxu- 
 rious leather-covered lounge in one cor- 
 ner, and five chairs, including a large, 
 comfortable rocking-chair. Besides these 
 few articles of furniture are a wash-stand 
 and a book-case. The prisoner is plenti- 
 fully supplied with reading matter; and 
 as for creature comforts, the solicitude 
 of his friends and relatives leaves nothing 
 to be desired except liberty. Crowds of 
 people have called to see him for the past 
 two days, but none were admitted with- 
 out passes from the Commissioners." 
 
 This feeling was akin to that which in- 
 spires the proverb and the practice that 
 " all's fair at the Custom-house." When 
 Robin Hood stepped politely to the door 
 
57 
 
 of my Lord Bishop's carriage and request- 
 ed him to alight under the greenwood 
 tree, and proceeded to rifle the carriage 
 of all the treasure that his lordship was 
 conveying, he was not felt to be a com- 
 mon thief. Far from it ; he was the peo- 
 ple's tax-gatherer in green. He scattered 
 with a free hand among the poor the 
 money which the rich man could lose 
 without feeling it. Nobody suffered. My 
 Lord Bishop was admonished that he had 
 the poor always with him, and the poor 
 rejoiced in his involuntary largess. So 
 "the boys" thought of Tweed. While 
 the "Boss" was king there was always 
 money about, as they said ; and when did 
 Robin Hood himself ever bestow fifty 
 thousand dollars in a lump upon the poor? 
 Besides, who could say that he was 
 robbed ? The rich could not feel it ; and 
 was any poor orphan defrauded by him, 
 any poor widow pinched, any honest la- 
 borer burdened ? 
 
 Yes, they were. It was public money 
 that he stole. And what is public money ? 
 It is the taxes. And who pay the taxes 
 the rich? No, the poor, the producers. 
 
They come out of the rent of the tene- 
 ment-house ; out of the price of tea and 
 sugar and coal ; out of the pittance of the 
 widow and orphan, and the small wages 
 of the laborer. It was from the poor 
 who cowered gratefully over the coal 
 that he gave them that he stole the 
 coal. His confederate, Sweeny, planted 
 hyacinths in the city parks, and for every 
 flower some poor soul was pinched. Gay 
 Robin Hood strips the baron, and the poor 
 bless him as he flings them the gold. 
 Then the baron goes home to his castle 
 and wrings teeth out of the jaws of Isaac 
 of York, to force him to give money. 
 Then Isaac of York advances at a more 
 ruinous rate than yesterday the interest 
 upon the money he lends. So when 
 Tweed steals from the public treasury he 
 picks every private pocket. Every stroke 
 of his hammer, if he hammers stone with 
 other thieves, refreshes in the public mind 
 these familiar truths. It is humiliating 
 that the conviction of an evident offend- 
 er in a court of law should be a cause 
 of public congratulation. But, on the 
 other hand, it is cheering that shameless 
 
59 
 
 crime intrenched in every way, and defy- 
 ing the course of law, should by that 
 course be quietly convicted and surely 
 punished. 
 
COMMENCEMENT. 
 
 is a changed college world 
 since Nat. Willis's Philip 
 Slingsby was the hero of 
 many a maiden's dream, 
 and the stories of Willis 
 reflected the modest gayety of the socie- 
 ty of his time. Nahant was then a sum- 
 mer resort of importance, and had not 
 become, as one of its denizens said in 
 later years, only " cold Boston." Willis's 
 heroes, like Byron's, were largely himself, 
 and it was but a thin veil that covered in 
 them persons familiar in the society that 
 he knew, and incidents drawn from his 
 own experience. 
 
 He was the college hero of his time. 
 But his Scripture poems, which had great 
 vogue and were printed in all the " class- 
 books " and " readers," and his " Burial of 
 Arnold," a young and brilliant Senior at 
 Yale, and his bright and blithe " Satur- 
 day Afternoon," are quite passed out of 
 
current knowledge. They are not the 
 kind of verse which is produced in col- 
 lege now. Their Byronic sentimentality 
 is not to the taste of the college club 
 and Greek Letter Society man of to-day ; 
 and Charles Coldstream, who looks on 
 listlessly at the college athletic games, 
 leaves enthusiasm to " the Fresh," and 
 has "really never read those things of 
 Willis's." 
 
 Yet the dominant emotions of Com- 
 mencement this year were very much 
 what they were when Philip Slingsby 
 dared the waltz, and even the more eman- 
 cipated belles shuddered a little as they 
 slid into the charmed circle. Youth and 
 hope and the passion which " is not all a 
 dream " are forever renewed, and if the 
 fashion changes, the substance remains. 
 In the crowded church at Commence- 
 ment this year, with the gay dresses 
 and the flowers and the music and the 
 soft summer air breathing in at the 
 open doors and windows, there are still 
 palpitating bosoms, and a color that 
 comes and goes, and glances that meet 
 and mingle "read the language of 
 
those wandering eye-beams the heart 
 knoweth." 
 
 It was " Nat. Willis " yesterday, in a 
 high-collared coat and an ample cravat 
 such as Brummel wore, and even D'Orsay. 
 It is a quaint and a droll costume, as you 
 see it in those old Fraser pictures of Eng- 
 lish authors " 'tis sixty years since." But 
 in that guise it is you, sir, of to-day, and 
 if your oration is spoken to one auditor, 
 in all that lovely throng in the gallery, 
 whose heart answers " pity Zekle " to 
 your pitapat, do you think that the divine 
 Una's grandmother was never young, and 
 that the droll high-collared coats did not 
 cover hearts as sensitive and hopes as high 
 as the faultless summer attire of Name- 
 less, Jun., class of '90 ? The actors change, 
 but the spectacle is the same. Even the 
 members of the reverend and venerable 
 the corporation, those bald and white- 
 haired worthies who seem vaguely always 
 to have been sitting unchanged in the 
 front pews, like those austere senators of 
 Rome of whom the tradition tells us that 
 they sat motionless although the invader 
 came even they are living monuments, 
 
and on their hearts, as on tablets, the 
 story of the wandering eye-beams is en- 
 graved. 
 
 There is not one of the young heroes 
 of the Commencement hour whom those 
 elders do not scan with knowledge. These 
 wise young judges carry no secrets which 
 the elders do not share. Is it a strange 
 world that of Willis and his Philip Slings- 
 by ? It is the world of the moment and 
 of this Commencement. 
 
 But there is something else in Com- 
 mencement besides this romance of feel- 
 ing and tradition. It is the celebration 
 of the intellectual life. The eloquence, 
 indeed, is sometimes rather copious. An 
 oration in the morning before one literary 
 society; in the afternoon before another; 
 and a sermon in the evening before the 
 Missionary Association, is good measure 
 heaped up and running over. There 
 is some jealousy also even in academic 
 groves. In the older day, if the Melpom- 
 ene had its oration in the morning and 
 the Euterpe in the afternoon, and you read 
 on the following Sunday, scrawled on the 
 blank page of the hymn-book in the pew, 
 
6 4 
 
 " Words, words, words, oration of Cice- 
 ro," and " Genius, eloquence, common- 
 sense, oration of Demosthenes," you knew 
 that you read the comment upon the rival 
 orator of a Melpomenean or a Euterpean, 
 as the case might be. But if the orator 
 was not always wise or eloquent, there 
 were also discourses which have pro- 
 foundly influenced the lives of those who 
 heard or read them, giving a direction 
 and inspiring a fidelity which, like Words- 
 worth's thoughts of his past years, breed 
 perpetual benediction. 
 
 It is a recollection blended of many 
 feelings, that which the recurring Com- 
 mencement brings to the alumnus. But 
 the deep and permanent charm is the 
 consciousness of the infinite worth and 
 consolation of letters. Theoretically the 
 college course was a series of years de- 
 voted to making acquaintance with the 
 treasures of human genius. Possibly there 
 was in fact some divergence from the 
 theory. But that was the opportunity. 
 The gates were set ajar, and if the neo- 
 phyte did not choose to enter, he lost 
 as the teacher said to his pupil who went 
 
fishing rather than to hear Webster's 
 eulogy on Adams and Jefferson he lost 
 what he can never regain. 
 
 Is there some fatality which makes the 
 pen that treats of Commencement horta- 
 tory and didactic ? Is there some secret 
 charm which still allies the college to the 
 pulpit, so that to talk about it is present- 
 ly to begin to preach ? The Easy Chair 
 asks because it feels that it is about to 
 take the sacerdotal tone, and remind the 
 youth who is leaving or entering college 
 that, like every other epoch in life, col- 
 lege is an opportunity. It is what you 
 make it. Fate, as the older times would 
 have said life, as we prefer to say gives 
 us a chance. But the improvement of it 
 we give ourselves. The tragedy of the 
 refrain, " Too late, too late ; ye cannot 
 enter now," is that of the man who, 
 in our simple phrase, wasted his col- 
 lege years. The tender spell of Whit- 
 tier's "Maud Muller" lies in its saddest 
 words of tongue or pen. But the mem- 
 ory of what might have been is so pro- 
 foundly pathetic because it might not 
 have been, and we were the arbiters 
 
 5 
 
of fate and did not choose to turn up- 
 ward. 
 
 Kind sir of the college, who lend to the 
 preacher of the moment your listening 
 ear, the preacher himself may be a weari- 
 some chaplain, but you are the young 
 judge of the summer afternoon, smelling 
 the meadows sweet with hay, and stop- 
 ping at the cool spring where Maud Mul- 
 ler hands you the refreshing draught. Do 
 you follow the allegory, and see in that 
 maid what really she is ? To you she is 
 a maiden who rakes the hay ; to Numa 
 she was Egeria by the other fountain. It 
 is a sweet illusion, for the maid is not 
 Egeria nor Maud Muller, but under those 
 gentle forms she is the nymph of oppor- 
 tunity. Woo her and win her, and all 
 the happiness that might have been will 
 be yours. 
 
 There is nothing more touching than 
 the inability of the chooser to compre- 
 hend the choice. Why did not the judge 
 yield to the soft persuasion of that sim- 
 ple loveliness? Why did he not embrace 
 the opportunity, and fold his happiness 
 to his heart? Well, sir, that is always the 
 
6 7 
 
 ^question. But if he did not know that in 
 that fair figure opportunity stood before 
 him, you do know it. Don't be satisfied 
 to hum "in court an old love tune." 
 You remember the legend of the Sibyl's 
 books. Was it interpreted to you in the 
 class-room ? Do you interpret it to your- 
 self? 
 
 The most inspiring tradition in every 
 college is not that of the boat or the ball, 
 of copious gold and flowing wine, of Milo 
 or Sardanapalus or Midas ; it is not that 
 of the "dig" or the " prig," of Dryasdust 
 or Casaubon ; but it is that of the youth, 
 by whatever name he was called in your 
 college, who did not, like the judge, "clos- 
 ing his heart," ride on who knew that 
 four such years as yours in college would 
 never return, and that they offered him 
 the golden keys which, polished by his 
 labor, would open the heaped treasures of 
 genius in all ages and lands. It is he who 
 in taking the keys did not grudge the 
 labor, and to whose life those treasures 
 have been wide open. 
 
 No, the inspiring personal tradition of 
 college was not the pleasant Philip Slings- 
 
by ; it was rather Philip Sidney, who rod 
 with the best and was a man in every 
 manly enterprise, but who had so used 
 his opportunities in study and affairs that 
 Hubert Languet, most accomplished of 
 scholars, called him friend, and William 
 of Orange called him master. 
 
THE STREETS OF NEW YORK. 
 
 the Pan-Americans pro- 
 test that the streets of New 
 York are dirty. It is very 
 comical, but it is true, that 
 all our marvellous prosper- 
 ity, our genius of invention, our quick- 
 ness of wit, and profusion of resource ; 
 all *our patriotism and pride, our great 
 traditions of liberty and heroism, our free 
 soil, free speech, and free press ; and all 
 the force and intelligence of our free 
 government cannot keep the streets of 
 New York clean. Miss Edwards, the 
 most courteous and friendly of visitors, 
 is compelled to say : " I found on all sides 
 nothing but holes of mud, gutters, and 
 dirt piles, an endless rush and a block of 
 street traffic. There are so many dangers 
 and the state of the highways is such as 
 to make it incomprehensible to English 
 people that enterprising Americans would 
 long endure it." 
 
Miss Edwards is familiar with the dirt 
 of Egypt, which is universal and intoler- 
 able, but even that does not mollify or al- 
 leviate the awful impression of dirty New 
 York. Then a Pan-American, perhaps 
 from Bogota, from Callao, from Lima, 
 from Santiago, from Buenos Ayres, from 
 Rio de Janeiro, from Guayaquil cities in 
 which we had not supposed impeccable 
 highways to be politely flagellates us, 
 and ignominiously discrowns Broadway. 
 " It was impossible not to notice the de- 
 plorable condition of the streets. t)ur 
 carriages plunged terribly into the holes 
 which at frequent intervals were met 
 with, and the wheels at every turn sent 
 whirls of mud, which compelled the pass- 
 ers-by to keep at a respectful distance." 
 
 We may indeed reply that this is the 
 fling of a Pan-American. And who, for- 
 sooth, is a Pan-American? Is he the 
 superior nay, does he presume to be the 
 peer of a North American ? Are we 
 not notoriously the greatest nation in the 
 world ? Does not our population redu- 
 plicate incalculably ? Have we not car- 
 ried civilization from sea to sea? Have 
 
we not the largest lakes, the longest rivers, 
 the broadest prairies, the greatest cata- 
 ract, in the world ? And shall the min- 
 ions of monarchies and the pigmies of 
 tuppenny temporary republics snap their 
 ridiculous fingers at us, and presume to 
 say that the streets of New York are 
 dirty ? The idea is preposterous. It is 
 contemptible. Moreover, it is insulting, 
 and the streets of New York are 
 
 It is plain sailing or slipping, as chance 
 may determine whether we go in the 
 water or the mud so far, but it is a lit- 
 tle difficult to end that sentence in the 
 same key. Let us try another, possibly a 
 little less perfervid. The population of 
 the United States is some sixty millions. 
 Taken altogether they form undoubtedly 
 the most intelligent community, with the 
 .highest average well-being, in the world. 
 They are self-governing down to alder- 
 men and coroners. More than in any 
 country at any time in history, the will 
 of the majority of the adult male popu- 
 lation determines the government. The 
 city of New York is one of the three or 
 four chief cities of the world. It is con- 
 
fessedly the metropolis of this blessed 
 and absolutely self-governing country, 
 and the streets of New York can't be 
 kept clean. 
 
 Is there any possible method of de- 
 scribing the unquestionable greatness 
 and undoubted glory of the country, its 
 resplendent history and its miraculous 
 achievements, in an ascending and cu- 
 mulative series of epithets and epigrams 
 which shall end truthfully in the resound- 
 ing allegation, "and the streets of New 
 York are kept clean"? Indeed, is not 
 this little joker worse than that of the 
 thimble ? Does he not grin at us from 
 every pile of mud, and laugh out of every 
 hole, and snicker and sneer on every side 
 of the unremoved and apparently irre- 
 movable dirt and disorder? 
 
 It is absurd, as the boys say, to " bjame " 
 this situation upon somebody else some 
 street commissioner, or scavenger, or 
 other officer, or employe. Nobody is 
 ever guilty of misrule in this country but 
 the rulers, and the rulers are the people. 
 The citizens of New York elect the city 
 officers who are to do the city work which 
 
the citizens pay for. They give some of 
 those officers authority to dismiss others 
 who are derelict in their duty, and the 
 governor can deal with the chief officers 
 who do not obey the command of the 
 people. If the taxes are outrageously 
 heavy, if the money is squandered, if the 
 streets are dirty 'and city government a 
 farce, nobody is to blame but the citizens. 
 They have as good a government as they 
 choose, and the kind of government they 
 desire. 
 
 Then they desire dirty streets? Cer- 
 tainly. That is to say, they don't desire 
 clean streets strongly enough to secure 
 them. Then popular government has 
 failed in cities ? Rather there are some 
 things in cities in which popular gov- 
 ernment is not especially interested. If 
 there are two hundred and fifty thousand 
 voters in the city of New York, how many 
 of them really care enough for clean 
 streets and proper municipal administra- 
 tion to spend time and trouble to secure 
 them ? 
 
 Consider the lilies of the field that 
 is to say, look at the aldermen and the 
 
74 
 
 municipal officers, the representatives in 
 the State Legislature and in Congress 
 that the city of New York elects. Do 
 they represent what we call its intelli- 
 gence and character? Yet undeniably 
 they are representatives of the majority 
 of the voters, and if that majority be cor- 
 rupt or stupid, it is either because there 
 are more knaves and fools than intel- 
 ligent and honest citizens among the 
 voters, or because such citizens do not 
 care to take the trouble to vote and to 
 be represented ; in which case the Al- 
 dermen and Co. that we see are, morally 
 speaking, true representatives of the city. 
 The minions of monarchies and the 
 pigmies of tuppenny temporary republics, 
 as they bump and wallow and flounder, 
 bespattered and contemptuous, through 
 the streets of New York, may truly say 
 that they are such streets as the citizens 
 desire, because if the people desired clean 
 streets, unless popular government be a 
 failure, they would have them. If the 
 mayor did not appoint officers who would 
 clean the streets, they would require the 
 governor to deal with the mayor. 
 
Does it necessarily follow, because pop- 
 ular government is, upon the whole, the 
 best government, that the governing peo- 
 ple desire all good things that govern- 
 ment can supply ? Liberty they want, 
 and equality, and fair play but do they, 
 because they are self - governing, desire 
 beautiful buildings and clean streets? 
 Might not a good-natured despot of fine 
 taste and sanitary enlightenment and a 
 sense of order give his dominions nobler 
 public works and a better municipal ad- 
 ministration than a republic which is 
 neither tuppenny nor temporary, but in 
 which there is easy and indolent indiffer- 
 ence to public beauty and public order? 
 
 " Above all," said the English bishop 
 to the young catechumen, "don't mistake 
 zeal for knowledge." Above all, says the 
 good genius of America, don't confound 
 national bumptiousness with patriotism. 
 
THE MORALITY OF DANCING. 
 
 jjHE gravity of the discussion 
 of the morality of dancing is 
 exceedingly amusing. The 
 dancing of young people is 
 as natural and instinctive as 
 their laughing and singing, and the old 
 Easy Chairs about the wall might as wise- 
 ly quarrel with the song of the bobolink 
 in the fields as with the dance upon the 
 floor. But the grave censors who con- 
 demn it must be heard. There is reason 
 in the way in which they often put their 
 objections. Excitement, late hours, ex- 
 posure of health, all these are bad. But, 
 on the other hand, exercise, cheerfulness, 
 friendly conversation, all these are good. 
 The zealous censors confound uses and 
 abuses. The Easy Chair has seen a wor- 
 ^thy temperance apostle ingulfing cups of 
 coffee in the pauses of an exhortation to 
 abstinence, until it marvelled at the ca- 
 pacity of the apostolic stomach. Could 
 
there be no intemperance in coffee-drink- 
 ing ? But was coffee not to be drunk ? 
 The Easy Chair has seen such frantic 
 gobbling at a railway eating-room that it 
 could only gaze in wonder at the sottish 
 and, so to speak, drunken eating. But is 
 food not to be eaten? The Easy Chair 
 has seen little children, extravagantly 
 dressed and decorated, dancing in great 
 hotel parlors on hot summer nights at 
 an hour when they should all have been 
 sound asleep in their beds, while their 
 parents should have been soundly chas- 
 tised for not putting them there. But is 
 the dancing of young persons therefore 
 wrong? 
 
 This is probably to the censorial mind 
 nothing but the base compromise and 
 sophistry of " moderate drinking." But 
 nevertheless most of the evils of this kind 
 are perversions of good things. There 
 are a great many young and ignorant par- 
 ents who become impatient with the in- 
 cessant activity and restlessness of their 
 children. They condemn them to sit still 
 in a chair and make no noise. Dear ma- 
 dame, it is nature's intention that the child 
 
shall be restless, to develop his limbs. 
 You apply to him rules that are fit and 
 easy for us who are old, and whom nature 
 equally admonishes to sit still in chairs. 
 Our little Procrustean beds are merely 
 furniture that tortures. The desire of 
 youth for enjoyment is as worthy as its 
 desire for knowledge, for truth, for excel- 
 lence. And it is the spirit, not the meth- 
 od, of enjoyments which are not obvious- 
 ly wrong, that is chiefly to be regarded. 
 A good man asks whether he could go 
 from dancing to console a dying bed. 
 But could he go from skating, or reading 
 Pickwick, or from heartily laughing, to 
 console a dying friend ? Would it not, 
 even in his own view, depend wholly upon 
 the mood in which he was doing it ? 
 
 Let him select an act which he would 
 approve. Let him be reading a serious 
 book, or thinking in his study, or going 
 upon a visit of charity w r hen he is sum- 
 moned, and he would say that he could 
 go with perfect composure and the ut- 
 most propriety. But how if he were pee- 
 vish as he read the serious book, or if he 
 were thinking angrily in his study, or if 
 
he were mentally reproaching the duty 
 that drew him from his comfortable room 
 to pay a visit of charity, could he then 
 more properly hasten to console the dy- 
 ing than if he had been cheerfully dan- 
 cing, his mind full of pleasant thoughts 
 and the delight of the music and the 
 measured movement ? It is not the thing 
 that he is doing, but the spirit in which 
 he is doing it, that should be considered. 
 How different a view of the pleasant 
 recreation of dancing may be taken by 
 an intellectual man, from that of one who 
 thinks the waltz a device of Satan, is 
 shown by a passage of De Quincey, the 
 beginning of which the Easy Chair will 
 quote, and which will find an echo in 
 many a memory : " And in itself, of all 
 the scenes which this world offers, none 
 is to me so profoundly interesting, none 
 (I say deliberately) so affecting, as the 
 spectacle of men and women floating 
 through the mazes of a dance; under 
 these conditions, however, that the music 
 shall be rich and festal, the execution of 
 the dancers perfect, and the dance itself 
 of a character to admit of free, fluent, and 
 
continuous action. And whenever the 
 music happens not to be of a light, trivial 
 character, but charged with the spirit of 
 festal pleasure, and the performers in the 
 dance so far skilful as to betray no awk- 
 wardness verging on the ludicrous, I be- 
 lieve that many persons feel as I feel in 
 such circumstances, viz., derive from the 
 spectacle the very grandest form of pas- 
 sionate sadness which can belong to any 
 spectacle whatsoever." 
 
THE HOG FAMILY. 
 
 is a good sign of the times 
 that the crusade against 
 the large and omnipresent 
 family of Hog which the 
 Easy Chair long ago 
 preached has been vigorously renewed. 
 Public manners are a common interest. 
 The private conduct of the most famous 
 personages is of small concern beyond 
 their domestic circle. But the conduct 
 of the person in the next room at a hotel, 
 or in the next seat in a railroad car, is 
 of great interest to us. Yet the remedy 
 is not obvious. Even if we should 
 propose a school of manners, it is not 
 certain that the pupils for whom it 
 would be especially designed would at- 
 tend. 
 
 If a fellow-guest at the Grand Hotel 
 of the Universe comes in at two in the 
 morning, and going humming along the 
 corridor to his room, flings his boot 
 
down upon the floor at his door with a 
 resounding blow that awakens all neigh- 
 boring sleepers, you may cover him with 
 expletives, and consign him in imagina- 
 tion to a hundred direful dooms, but nev- 
 ertheless he goes unpunished. Or you 
 may suddenly confront him in all the 
 majesty of nocturnal dishabille, and ad- 
 monish him severely of the wicked self- 
 ishness of his ways. But the probability 
 is that you will have either an extremely 
 amused audience, who will "guy" your 
 appearance without mercy, or receive a 
 surly rejoinder in the form of a boot or 
 a volley of vituperation. In any event, 
 the school of manners will not be hon- 
 ored by the exercises. 
 
 Yet the Hog family is not American, 
 nor is it by any means peculiar to this 
 country. The Lady Mavourneen who 
 said with enthusiasm that she could trav- 
 el without insult from the Atlantic to 
 the Pacific, and that every American of 
 the other sex seemed to make himself 
 her protector, said only what is generally 
 true of the American. He is naturally 
 courteous and invincibly good-natured. 
 
Indeed, it is his good-nature which has 
 permitted the family Hog to develop to 
 such proportions. A man enters a hotel 
 " as if it belonged to him." Will he not 
 be forced to pay for his accommodation 
 and roundly ? Shall he not take his ease 
 in his inn ? Is he not willing to settle for 
 all the food, drink, comfort, trouble, that 
 he may require or occasion ? Shall he 
 put himself out for others ? If number 
 one does not look out for itself, who will 
 look out for it ? 
 
 And to all this Jonathan good-natured- 
 ly assents. If number one takes more 
 than his share of the sofa, Jonathan moves 
 up. If number one puts his feet on a 
 chair, Jonathan does not stare. If num- 
 ber one still more grossly demonstrates 
 his porcine lineage, Jonathan dislikes to 
 make trouble until number one comes 
 to despise those whom he insults, and 
 plainly expects every circle to bow to the 
 sovereignty of selfishness. This is a fa- 
 tal form of good-nature, but it has a not 
 unkindly origin. It springs from a social 
 condition in which everybody is expected 
 to help everybody else, because every- 
 
8 4 
 
 body needs help as in a frontier commu- 
 nity. Indeed, in many a rural neighbor- 
 hood still, this spirit of lending a hand is 
 supreme. Everybody expects to submit 
 to inconvenience, because he knows that 
 he will require others to submit. 
 
 But these refinements of mutual de- 
 pendence must not be allowed to justify 
 the outrages of selfishness. The passen- 
 ger in the boat or the train who occupies 
 more than his seat, who sits in one chair, 
 covers another with his feet, and a third 
 with his bundles, and smokes, and widely 
 squirts tobacco juice around him until his 
 vicinity is not "a little heaven," but an- 
 other kind of " h " below, is a public pest 
 and general nuisance, for whose punish- 
 ment there should be a common law of 
 procedure. But this can be found only 
 where there is a common contempt and 
 resolution which will deprive him of his 
 ill-gotten seats in the first place, and 
 make him feel, in the second, the gen- 
 eral scorn of his neighbors. 
 
 But as we are told constantly and cor- 
 rectly that we are a reading people, it is 
 through reading that the members of the 
 
family which is hostis hitmani generis 
 will learn that they are the most detest- 
 able and detested of the great families of 
 the race. You, sir, whose eyes are skim- 
 ming this page, and who never give your 
 seat to a woman in the elevated car " on 
 principle " the principle being either that 
 a woman ought not to get into a crowded 
 car, knowing that she will put gentlemen 
 to inconvenience ; or that the company 
 ought to forbid the entry of more passen- 
 gers than there are seats ; or that first 
 come should be first served ; or that num- 
 ber one, having paid for a seat, has a 
 right to occupy it; or whatever other 
 form the " principle " may assume you 
 are one of the host against whom the 
 crusade is pushed. Thou art the well, 
 for the sake of euphony we will say man, 
 but it is not man that is in the mind of 
 your censors. 
 
 Or you, madam, who enter the railroad 
 car with an air of right, and a look of re- 
 proval at every man who does not spring 
 to his feet, and who settle yourself into 
 the seat offered you without the least rec- 
 ognition of the courtesy that offers it 
 
for you it would be well if the urbane 
 mentor of another day were still here, 
 who, having given his seat to a dashing 
 young woman who seemed unconscious 
 of his presence, looked at her until she 
 impatiently demanded if he wanted any- 
 thing, and he responding, said, blandly, 
 " Yes, madam ; I want to hear you say 
 thank you." 
 
 Both this sir and madam may learn 
 from the daily papers as from this page 
 that even in a car where they recognize 
 no acquaintance a cloud of witnesses 
 around hold them in full survey, and 
 whatever the fashion or richness of their 
 garments, and however supercilious their 
 air, perceive at once whether they belong 
 to the family of ladies and gentlemen, 
 or to that of Charles Lamb's " Mr. H." 
 Thackeray's hero could not have been 
 more aghast to see his divine Ottilia con- 
 sume with gusto the oysters which were 
 no longer fresh than Romeo to learn by 
 his Juliet's question to that urbane men- 
 tor of other years that his mistress must 
 be of kin to the unmentionable family. 
 
 The next time those boots are flung 
 
8 7 
 
 down in the reverberating hotel corridor 
 there will be no harm in remarking to 
 the clerk the next morning in the crowd- 
 ed office that it is not necessary for you 
 to look upon the register to know that 
 one of the Hog family arrived during the 
 night. 
 
THE ENLIGHTENED OBSERVER. 
 
 } H E Enlightened Observer 
 from Europe who is study- 
 ing American institutions 
 asked the Easy Chair the 
 other day what was meant 
 by the statement that- a candidate for a 
 high elective office had opened head- 
 quarters in the neighborhood of a nomi- 
 nating convention. The Enlightened Ob- 
 server said that he had always supposed 
 that such conventions were assemblies 
 which nominated persons whose public 
 services and personal ability and charac- 
 ter had distinguished them among their 
 fellow-citizens, and shown them to be 
 especially fitted for the offices which 
 were to be filled. "Am I mistaken," he 
 asked, " in supposing that to be the theo- 
 ry of your institutions ?" 
 
 The Easy Chair could not say that he 
 was, and conceded that such was the 
 theory. 
 
" In other words," continued the En- 
 lightened Observer, " a republic secures 
 good government because it intrusts the 
 government not to the chance of birth, 
 which may give to Oliver Cromwell a 
 son Richard, and make the heir of Alex- 
 ander the Great an Alexander the Lit- 
 tle, but because it calls to its great of- 
 fices of every degree those citizens who 
 have demonstrated their peculiar fit- 
 ness." 
 
 " That is certainly the theory of our 
 republican institutions," returned the 
 Easy Chair. 
 
 " Well ?" said the Enlightened Ob- 
 server. 
 
 "Well?" echoed the Easy Chair. 
 
 " Yes, but why, then, does a candidate 
 open headquarters ?" 
 
 " Yes, certainly. Why that is it is 
 to make himself known." 
 
 " But the theory seems to assume that 
 he is known already. Is it that he per- 
 forms public services at the headquarters, 
 or exhibits there his character and abil- 
 ities ? Is not the time a little limited 
 and the space somewhat inconvenient for 
 
9 
 
 such demonstrations ? I am at a little loss. 
 I can see that the personal appearance 
 and manners of a candidate might be 
 displayed favorably at a headquarters, 
 and that, in a charming phrase of your 
 country, he might dispense a generous 
 hospitality in a hotel parlor, but how can 
 he display his fitness for a high office 
 in such narrow quarters as headquarters 
 must be ? Am I to understand that when 
 Mr. John Jay was selected as a candidate 
 for the Governorship of New York he 
 had repaired previously to the place of 
 nomination and had opened headquar- 
 ters ? Did General Washington pursue a 
 similar course ? If the services and char- 
 acter of a candidate have commended 
 ' him to public favor and designated him 
 as a suitable officer, why is not that 
 enough ?" 
 
 " Undoubtedly," answered the Easy 
 Chair, "why isn't it? But I am afraid 
 that you have not pursued your enlight- 
 ened observations quite far enough, or 
 you would have learned that in this 
 country a kind providence is supposed 
 to help those who help themselves, and 
 
that those who expect to have Governor- 
 ships and Senatorships and other large 
 and highly flavored political morsels of- 
 fered to them on golden salvers and on 
 bended knees will be seriously disap- 
 pointed." 
 
 " I see," said, courteously, the Enlight- 
 ened Observer, " that my excellent friend 
 the Easy Chair is pleased to speak in 
 metaphor. If I may penetrate it, he is 
 declaring that great places are to be won 
 like precious prizes, and do not drop into 
 idle hands like fruit overripe. But if I 
 may hold him to the point, is it not the 
 theory of your institutions that it is ser- 
 vices and character and ability that win 
 the precious political prizes, and surely 
 such qualities and services cannot be de- 
 scribed as idle hands ? I agree that prov- 
 idence helps those who help themselves, 
 but who helps himself more than he who 
 helps the entire community? And how 
 does he help the community who opens 
 headquarters to secure a prize for himself ? 
 Moreover, have I not heard that office 
 should pursue the man, and not the man 
 the office ? Yet what is opening head- 
 
quarters but pursuing office, as a hound 
 a hare?" 
 
 The Easy Chair was obliged to suggest 
 that there was no harm in knowing " the 
 boys," and in showing the affability of a 
 simple citizen "without airs," and making 
 the acquaintance of important political 
 personages, all of which the Enlightened 
 Observer conceded, but still politely in- 
 sisted that knowing the boys and show- 
 ing affability and refraining from lofty 
 demeanor did not demonstrate fitness for 
 great place, and was a loss of proper per- 
 sonal dignity that ought not to be re- 
 quired of any one who had really ap- 
 proved himself as a suitable officer. He 
 concluded that he might not have mis- 
 taken the theory, but he had certainly 
 not apprehended the practice of our in- 
 stitutions. 
 
 " But surely," said the Easy Chair, " 'tis 
 but a small price to pay." 
 
 "True," said the Enlightened Observ- 
 er, " it is a very small price ; but I had 
 not supposed that in the republic office 
 was sold at any price. I thought that 
 the good Santa Claus of public approval 
 
93 
 
 dropped it as a Christmas gift into the 
 stocking of the most deserving. It 
 seems, however, to be rather a raisin in 
 snap-dragon the prize of the toughest 
 fingers." 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 E beauty of Israel has 
 fallen in its high place," 
 said the voice of Emer- 
 son's friend and neighbor, 
 Judge Hoar,tremblingand 
 almost hushed in emotion, and everybody 
 who heard felt the singular felicity of the 
 words. The plain little country church 
 was crowded, and a vast throng stood 
 outside in the peaceful April sunshine. 
 Before the pulpit the eyes forever closed, 
 the voice forever silent lay the man 
 whose aspect of sweet and majestic se- 
 renity Death had not touched, and which 
 recalled his own words ; " Even the corpse 
 that has lain in the chambers has added 
 a solemn ornament to the house." It was 
 the man who was beloved of his neigh- 
 bors and honored by the world, whose 
 modest counsel in grave affairs guided 
 the village, and whose thought led the 
 thought of Christendom. " He belonged 
 
95 
 
 to all men, but he is peculiarly ours," said 
 Judge Hoar truly, speaking for the quiet 
 historic town of which Emerson's grand- 
 father had been the minister, and in 
 which he lived during the larger part of 
 his life, and to which his memory will 
 lend an imperishable charm. 
 
 Concord when he first knew it was al- 
 ready famous. A hundred years ago, at 
 the bridge over the placid river, the Mid- 
 dlesex farmers, hastening as minute men 
 from all the neighboring country, had 
 obeyed the first military summons to fire 
 upon the king's regulars; and the red- 
 coated regulars, turning, had begun, amid 
 the blazing patriot volley of twenty miles, 
 their long retreat to Yorktown and over 
 the sea. At the point where the highway 
 by which the soldiers marched enters the 
 village, under the hill along whose ridge 
 the hurrying countrymen pressed to cut 
 off the soldiers' retreat, lived for more 
 than forty years the scholar who belongs 
 to Concord as Shakespeare belongs to 
 Stratford. 
 
 " Nature," said Emerson in his first 
 book, written in the old Manse at Con- 
 
9 6 
 
 cord, which Hawthorne afterwards inhab- 
 ited, and which he has so beautifully com- 
 memorated " Nature stretcheth out her 
 arms to embrace man : only let his thoughts 
 be of equal greatness. Willingly does she 
 follow his steps with the rose and the 
 violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and 
 grace to the decoration of her darling 
 child. Only let his thoughts be of equal 
 scope, and the frame will suit the picture. 
 A virtuous man is in unison with her 
 works, and makes the central figure of the 
 visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, 
 Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our 
 memory with the geography and climate 
 of Greece. The visible heavens and the 
 earth sympathize with Jesus. " And in 
 common life whoever has seen a person 
 of powerful character and happy genius 
 will have remarked how easily he took 
 all things along with him, the persons, 
 the opinions, and the day, and nature be- 
 came auxiliary to a man." So is Emer- 
 son associated with the tranquil land- 
 scape of the old Middlesex town the 
 gentle hills, the long sweep of meadow- 
 land, the winding river, the woodland, 
 
and the pastures under the ample sky. 
 The broad horizon and rural repose were 
 the fitting home of the lofty and benefi- 
 cent genius whose life and word perpet- 
 ually illustrated the supreme worth and 
 beauty of truth, purity, and morality. 
 Whoever saw him there or elsewhere, 
 saw the " sweet and virtuous soul " which 
 George Herbert likened to seasoned tim- 
 ber that never gives. 
 
 The sincerity and serenity of Emer- 
 son's character were unsurpassed. The 
 freshness and glow of his interest in life 
 were perennial. With a sober tenderness 
 of regret he said to a friend who con- 
 gratulated him upon his seventieth birth- 
 day, "Yet it is a little sad to me, for I 
 count to-day the end of youth." In no 
 other sense than the lapse of years, how- 
 ever, was it true. That auroral freshness 
 of soul which is the distinctive charm of 
 youth lingered when even memory some- 
 what failed. " How long it is since I have 
 seen you!" he said at Longfellow's fu- 
 neral to a friend whom he had accosted 
 just before. But he said it with all that 
 heartiness of sympathy and expectation 
 
which, in the golden prime of his life, 
 when he was in many ways the most 
 striking and original figure in his coun- 
 try, made him greet every comer as if he 
 expected to hear from him a wiser word 
 than had yet been spoken. A youth, 
 fascinated by this .simple graciousness of 
 manner, declared that Emerson greeted 
 the most ordinary persons like a King of 
 Spain receiving an ambassador from the 
 Great Mogul. The expectancy of his 
 manner implied that every man had some 
 message to deliver, and he bent himself 
 to hear. 
 
 But his shrewdness of perception was 
 exquisite. He did not take dross because 
 he hoped for gold. His reproof was as 
 sure and incisive as the stroke of a deli- 
 cate Damascus blade. When a young 
 man, hearing Emerson say that every- 
 body ought to read Plato, followed his 
 advice, and read, he thought, with the 
 audacity of youth, that he detected faults 
 in Plato, and wrote an essay to set them 
 forth. He asked Emerson to read it, and 
 when he returned it to the youth, Emer- 
 son said, pleasantly, " My boy, when you 
 
strike at the king, you must kill him." 
 One day he sat at dinner with a distin- 
 guished company of statesmen. He was 
 by far the most famous man at the table ; 
 but he modestly followed the conversa- 
 tion, turning from each guest who spoke, 
 to the next, with the old sweet gravity of 
 earnest expectation. When all the not- 
 able company had gone, a guest who re- 
 mained said to him : " I saw you talking 
 with the English Minister. He is a brill- 
 iant man, and I hope that you found him 
 agreeable." " A very pleasant gentle- 
 man," replied Emerson ; " but he does 
 not represent the England that I know." 
 Despite this sharp apprehension, how- 
 ever, Emerson was sometimes unable to 
 find any charm in writings which have 
 apparently taken a permanent place in 
 literature. He could see nothing inter-, 
 esting or valuable in Shelley. " When I 
 read Shelley," he once said, " I am like a 
 man who thinks that he sees gold at the 
 bottom of a stream. He reaches for it, 
 but his hands come up cold, with a little 
 common sand in them." The wayward- 
 ness and disorder of Shelley's life may 
 
have troubled him. But this would not 
 have affected his intellectual judgment. 
 His acute intellect was supremely inde- 
 pendent and absolutely courageous. " He 
 must embrace solitude as a bride," he said 
 of the scholar ; " he must have his glees 
 and his glooms alone." When as a young 
 man he quietly closed his pulpit door, 
 and declined to preach any more, because 
 he no longer felt any value in certain re- 
 ligious rites, there was no protest, nor 
 ostentation, nor newspaper " sensation." 
 It was simply the closing of a book that 
 he had read, and the amazement and 
 censure and grief of others could not 
 possibly persuade him to do, or to say, 
 or to affect, the thing that was not true. 
 Emerson's moral and intellectual integ- 
 rity was transparently simple, but it was 
 sublime. It was not expressed in stormy 
 self-assertion nor cynical contempt. It 
 spoke in tranquil and beautiful affirma- 
 tion, perfectly courteous, but absolutely 
 sincere. 
 
 But no man more charitably and dili- 
 gently sought to understand others, and 
 to be just to what was obscure and for- 
 
eign to him. He listened patiently to 
 music. But it did not charm him. He 
 was punctual in the duties of a citizen. 
 But he had no proper political tastes. 
 Yet for the true politics, the application 
 of the moral law to the control of public 
 affairs, no man was more perceptive or 
 uncompromising. He was always on the 
 right side of great public questions. His 
 hospitable sympathy entertained every 
 good cause, and in all our antislavery 
 literature there is no nobler or more per- 
 manent work than his address upon the 
 anniversary of West India emancipation 
 in 1844. The only cloud that ever arose 
 upon his regard for Carlyle was his dis- 
 pleasure with Carlyle's contemptuous 
 and cynical sneers at our civil war. He 
 was deeply impatient of doubtful and 
 half-hearted Americans during the war. 
 " They call themselves gentlemen, I be- 
 lieve," he said of certain persons, and in 
 a tone which showed that his lofty and 
 patriotic honor instinctively and utterly 
 repudiated the pinchbeck claims of edu- 
 cated feebleness to bear " the grand old 
 name of gentleman." 
 
Those who recall Emerson when he 
 was a clergyman in Boston remember a 
 singular spiritual beauty in the man, and 
 an indescribable charm of manner in his 
 public speech. But apparently he im- 
 pressed his earlier associates with the 
 purity and refinement of his mind and 
 life, his lofty intellectual tastes and sym- 
 pathy, and his literary accomplishment, 
 rather than by the peculiar force of a 
 genius which was to give the most power- 
 ful spiritual impulse of the generation to 
 American thought. This is the more 
 singular because there was always some- 
 thing breezy and heroic in his tone, 
 which might have led to the suspicion of 
 the fact that he was from the first a fond 
 reader of Plutarch, from whose " Lives " 
 he draws so many illustrations. As in a 
 mountain walk the traveller is suddenly 
 aware of wafts of perfumed air, now of 
 the wild-grape blossom, now of the aza- 
 lea or sweet-brier, so the strain of Emer- 
 son suggests his sympathy with Plutarch 
 and Montaigne, the Oriental poets and 
 the Platonists. 
 
 But no one could describe accurately 
 
"liis "system" of philosophy, nor fit him 
 into a " school " of poetry. He was con- 
 tent to call himself a scholar, and no 
 name was more significant and precious 
 to him. He shunned notoriety, but he 
 had the instinctive desire of every artist 
 and of all genius for an audience. When 
 a friend asked him of a young man whose 
 literary talent had seemed to him to prom- 
 ise great achievement, Emerson said: 
 "He does nothing; and I doubted his 
 genius when I saw that he did not seek a 
 hearing." When his own first slight vol- 
 ume, " Nature," was published, they were 
 but a few, a very few, who perceived in it 
 the ripe and beautiful work of a master 
 in literature and thought. The richness 
 and originality and picturesque simplic- 
 ity of this book, its subtle perception, 
 its tone of jubilant power, and the soft 
 glimmering light of lofty imagination 
 which irradiates every page, do not lose 
 by familiarity, and are as charming, al- 
 though of course not so surprising, as 
 when they first took captive the readers 
 of nearly fifty years ago. With the eager- 
 ness of classification which characterizes 
 
many active minds, Emerson was imme-* 
 diately labelled a Berkeleyan, an idealist, 
 and a mystic. But he eluded the precise 
 classification as noiselessly and surely as 
 a cloud changes its form. Astonishment, 
 satire, indignation, contradiction, spent 
 themselves in vain. Like a rose-tree in 
 June, which blossoms sweetly whether 
 the air be chilly or sunny, his thought 
 quietly flowered into exquisite expres- 
 sion. You might like it or leave it. 
 But the rose would be still a rose. 
 
 There was a fashion of calling Emer- 
 son obscure. But there is no style in 
 literature of more poetic precision than 
 his. It is full of surprises of beauty and 
 aptness. His central doctrine of the 
 identity of men, the grandeur of every 
 man's opportunity, and the essential 
 poetry of the circumstances of common 
 life, was a living faith. "The great 
 man," he said, " makes the great thing." 
 " In the sighing of these woods ; in the 
 quiet of these gray fields ; in the cool 
 breeze that sings out of these Northern 
 mountains ; in the workmen, the boys, 
 the maidens you meet ; in the hopes of 
 
the morning, the ennui of noon, and 
 sauntering of the afternoon ; in the dis- 
 quieting comparisons ; in the regrets at 
 want of vigor ; in the great idea and the 
 puny execution behold Charles the 
 Fifth's day ; another, yet the same ; be- 
 hold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, 
 Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day day of 
 all that are born of women. The differ- 
 ence of circumstance is merely costume. 
 I am tasting the self-same life its sweet- 
 ness, its greatness, its pain which I so 
 admire in other men." The temptation 
 to complete the splendid passage is al- 
 most irresistible. But in every page you 
 are drawn on as in a stately symphony 
 of winning music. 
 
 This passage is from the Dartmouth 
 College address, and it has all the flow- 
 ing cadence of a discourse written to be 
 spoken. Yet Emerson had little of the 
 orator's temperament save the desire of 
 an audience, and an earnestness which 
 was pure and not passionate. But no 
 orator in the country has exercised a 
 deeper or more permanent influence. 
 His discourses were but essays, but their 
 
thought was so noble, their form so sym- 
 metrical, their tone so lofty, and they 
 were spoken with such alluring rhythm, 
 that they threw over young minds a spell 
 which no other eloquence could com- 
 mand. Emerson himself was very sus- 
 ceptible to the power of fine oratory. 
 No man ever praised more warmly the 
 charm of Everett in his earlier day. 
 When Webster delivered his eulogy 
 upon Adams and Jefferson in Faneuil 
 Hall, Emerson was teaching in Cam- 
 bridge, and Richard H. Dana, Jun., was 
 one of his pupils. The day before Web- 
 ster spoke, the teacher announced that 
 there would be no school upon the mor- 
 row, and he earnestly exhorted his pu- 
 pils not to lose the memorable oppor- 
 tunity of hearing the great orator. Dana 
 was of an age to prefer fishing to ora- 
 tory, and strolled off with his line to 
 the river, where he passed the day. 
 When school was resumed, Mr. Emerson 
 with sympathetic interest asked him if 
 he had heard Webster. The fisher, half 
 ashamed, reluctantly owned his absence. 
 Emerson looked at him with regret and 
 
almost pain, and said to him, gravely : 
 " My boy, I am very sorry ; you have 
 lost what you can never recover, and 
 what you will regret to the last day of 
 your life." 
 
 But those who heard his own Divinity 
 School address, or the Cambridge or 
 Dartmouth oration, or the Emancipation 
 address, would not exchange that recol- 
 lection even to have heard the Olympian 
 orator in Faneuil Hall. " Tell me," said 
 a Senator famous for his oratory, to a 
 friend in Washington, "what do you call 
 eloquence ? Repeat to me an eloquent 
 passage." The friend quoted from Em- 
 erson the unequalled passage from the 
 Dartmouth College address in which the 
 scholar appeals to the young men to be 
 true to the ideals of their youth a pas- 
 sage which no generous youth can read 
 to-day without deep emotion and a thrill 
 of high resolve. The Senator listened 
 with an air of perplexed incredulity. "Do 
 you call that eloquent ? Now see what 
 I call eloquence," and he declaimed a 
 glowing piece of rhetoric with ardent 
 feeling. It was a passage from Charles 
 
Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration in Bos- 
 ton sixty years ago. But effective as it 
 was, his friend reminded the Senator that 
 if the test of eloquence be glow of feeling 
 and splendor and sincerity of expression, 
 with an inner power of appeal which 
 searches the heart and moulds the life, 
 no really greater results in this country 
 could be traced to any speech than to 
 that of Emerson, who read the greater 
 part of his essays as addresses, and who 
 sometimes reached a lyrical strain which 
 not the magnificent Burke nor any other 
 great orator surpasses. 
 
 To talk of Emerson, even if the 
 talker were not of the circle of his inti- 
 mate friends, is to raise the flood-gate of 
 happy and inspiring recollections. It is 
 one of the tenderest of the thoughts that 
 hover around his memory, as the low 
 winds sigh through the pine-*rees over 
 his grave, that, as with Longfellow, there 
 are no excuses to be made for grotesque 
 eccentricities of genius, nor for a life at 
 any point unworthy of so great a soul. 
 He said of his friend Thoreau, who is 
 buried near him, that he was like the 
 
Alpine climber who gathers the edel- 
 weiss, the flower that blooms at the very 
 edge of the glacier. He too lived at 
 'those pure heights, and taught us how to 
 tread them undazzled and undismayed. 
 Happy teacher, whose long and lovely 
 life illustrated the dignity and excellence 
 of the truth, old as the morning and as 
 ever fresh, that fidelity to the divine law 
 written upon the conscience is the only 
 safe law of life for every man. Noble 
 and beneficent preacher, who, in a sense 
 that the pensive Goldsmith did not in- 
 tend, 
 
 4< Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way." 
 
HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 forty years Mr. Beecher 
 had been minister of Plym- 
 outh Church when on a 
 Sunday morning suddenly 
 came the news that his 
 ministry and probably his life were end- 
 ed ; and he died a day or two after- 
 wards. The preacher and the church 
 were more widely known than any oth- 
 ers in the Union, and during all his pas- 
 torate he was one of the most conspic- 
 uous figures in the country. He was un- 
 doubtedly also one of the most famous 
 preachers of his time and of the English 
 race, and the death of Wendell Phillips 
 left him the most eminent of American 
 orators. There have been popular preach- 
 ers during Mr. Beecher's career, like Mof- 
 fit and other revivalists, and there are 
 always eloquent and scholarly orators in 
 the American pulpit. The tradition of 
 Summerfield presents a beautiful youth 
 
and a captivating speaker. The charm 
 of Channing was profound and indescrib- 
 able. But Beecher recalls Whitefield 
 more than any other renowned preacher. 
 Like Whitefield, he was what is known 
 as a man of the people ; a man of strong 
 virility, of exuberant vitality, of quick 
 sympathy, of an abounding humor, of a 
 rapid play of poetic imagination, of great 
 fluency of speech ; an emotional nature 
 overflowing in ardent expression, of strong 
 convictions, of complete self-confidence ; 
 but also not sensitive, nor critical, nor 
 judicial ; a hearty, joyous nature, touch- 
 ing ordinary human life at every point, 
 and responsive to every generous moral 
 impulse. 
 
 Mr. Beecher was not a pioneer, nor a 
 leader of forlorn hopes, but of the main 
 column of the army. He marched just 
 ahead of the advance, and touched with 
 his elbows those who moved forward 
 with him. He liked to feel the warmth 
 of their breath upon his cheek, and the 
 magnetism of their neighborhood. He 
 spoke for them as they could not speak 
 for themselves. He liked the crowd. 
 
The hum and throb of multitudinous life 
 inspired and cheered him. He was at 
 home in streets and towns ; with a bright 
 jest for every comer; a happy quip and 
 repartee ; with an eye and a heart for the 
 unfortunate and forlorn, and a ready re- 
 buke for insolence and injustice. He 
 had nothing of the recluse or scholarly 
 habit ; no fastidious taste. He was fond 
 of pictures and music and all forms of 
 art, without especial aesthetic accomplish- 
 ment ; a man of cheery presence, of cor- 
 dial address ; with a willing word for the 
 reporter, chaffing the interviewer ; jump- 
 ing on the street-car in motion ; yet al- 
 ways seemly, and always, despite his 
 slouched hat and careless dress, unde- 
 niably, clerical, but with no undue pro- 
 fessional sense of dignity or decorum. 
 
 In the pulpit, or, more truly, upon the 
 platform for whether preaching, or lect- 
 uring, or speaking at table or upon the 
 stump, he seemed to be always upon the 
 platform he inculcated right living rath- 
 er than traditional doctrine. He was a 
 soldier of the church militant, but his 
 warfare was with human w r rong and mis- 
 
ery, and false theories of life, and low 
 aims and poor ambitions. He aimed to 
 build up righteousness of life, and in the 
 ardor of the strife he liked to pause and 
 wink, and let fly a bright-tipped, winged 
 word at the opponent, against whom he 
 bore no kind of malice. He hated the 
 wrong, but not the wrong-doer. Ardent 
 and impulsive, his generous emotions 
 often overwhelmed his judgment ; and 
 in politics, although the most popular of 
 stump-orators, and never happier or more 
 truly himself than in a political speech, 
 in which, with the instinct of a born 
 fighter, he " drank delight of battle," yet 
 he sometimes amazed and confounded 
 his friends, who, however, could not doubt 
 his sincerity nor question his purpose. 
 
 The great cloud that fell upon his 
 life seemed also to darken the country. 
 The grief and consternation showed how 
 strong a hold he had upon the national 
 mind and heart, which indeed was never 
 so firm as at- the very moment that his 
 good name seemed to be obscured. It 
 was the most tremendous ordeal to which 
 any public man of his peculiar character 
 
and quality of eminence has ever been 
 exposed in this country. The most re- 
 markable fact in it all was the way in 
 which he endured it. The blacker the 
 cloud appeared to be, the more sturdy 
 was his stern defiance, and for weeks of 
 seemingly accumulating and insurmount- 
 able obstruction he faced unflinchingly a 
 possible doom the mere prospect of which 
 might well have withered a brave heart 
 conscious of innocence. That the cloud 
 ever wholly disappeared cannot be said, 
 in view of the tone of the press even as 
 he lay dead in his house. But that he 
 could never have maintained his position 
 as he did if he had not been generally 
 acquitted in the public mind seems to be 
 indisputable. If the relation of his later 
 life to the country was somewhat changed, 
 the result was due to the decline of con- 
 fidence in what had been believed to be 
 his strongest quality, supreme good sense 
 and sound judgment, rather than to doubt 
 of his moral integrity. 
 
 No man lived more in the public eye 
 and for the public than Mr. Beecher. In 
 his speeches and sermons and writings 
 
he took the public into his confidence 
 with a freedom that was characteristic 
 and natural in him, but which would 
 have been extraordinary in any other 
 man. He could not pass through the 
 street without universal recognition, and 
 no man in the two cities was so well 
 known to everybody as he. At public 
 meetings and at dinners where he was 
 to speak, he came late amid smiling and 
 expectant applause, and with the air of 
 saying, " Where MacGregor sits, there is 
 the head of the table." He had the right 
 to that air, for wherever he was to speak 
 he was the chief orator. But he was no 
 niggard of generous praise and sympa- 
 thy, and no man spoke with more fervent 
 eulogy and eloquent approval of other 
 men. Doubtless, like an actor or singer, 
 the long habit of receiving applause had 
 made it pleasant to him, and as is the 
 fact with all extempore speaking, the 
 greater the applause the higher the elo- 
 quence of his strain. It is a reciprocal 
 action. Of Mr. Beecher's later platform 
 speeches, the most remarkable was his 
 political address at the Brooklyn Rink 
 
in 1884, which was delivered amid a storm 
 of enthusiasm, while in the delivery he 
 was himself wrought to the highest feel- 
 ing. 
 
 His power over the emotions of an au- 
 dience was unsurpassed in this country 
 probably since Patrick Henry. Thomas 
 Corwin and Sergeant Prentiss perhaps 
 were as great masters of humor and pa- 
 triotic appeal upon the stump ; but Beech- 
 er added to these a pathos and sentiment 
 and poetic tone in which the others did 
 not excel. He had not the fine, glitter- 
 ing, incisive touch of Wendell Phillips's 
 fatal sarcasm and vituperation. Phillips 
 stood quietly and played his polished ra- 
 pier with a flexible wrist, but its point 
 was deadly ; Beecher smote, and crushed. 
 One was the deft Saladin with his chased 
 and curving cimeter, the other was Rich- 
 ard with his heavy battle-axe. In the 
 great controversy in which both were 
 engaged, upon the same side, indeed, but 
 under different banners and wearing dif- 
 ferent colors, Beecher and Phillips, amid 
 a chorus of eloquence, were the two chief 
 voices. Garrison was not distinctively 
 
an orator, while Phillips was the espe- 
 cial and distinctive orator of the cause, 
 and his fame as a public man belongs to 
 that cause alone. But Beecher had many 
 interests and relations, and his oratory 
 had other strains. They were friends 
 always, and Phillips spoke often in Plym- 
 outh Church, and uttered many a glow- 
 ing word of his fellow-laborer. 
 
 When these words are published the 
 freshness of the impression of Beecher's 
 death will have passed, and from every 
 part of the country his eulogy will have 
 been spoken. The universal emotion, 
 the warmth and tenor of the tributes, 
 will have shown how eminent a figure 
 he was, and that his death is felt to be 
 a national loss. One of the papers de- 
 scribed him as the last of a great gener- 
 ation, and Senator Cullom, speaking of 
 Logan in the crowded Brooklyn Acade- 
 my on the evening of Beecher's death, 
 called a roll of illustrious names, of which 
 his was the latest, and among which it 
 surely belongs. His profession was the 
 preaching of peace and good-will. But 
 how often he must have felt that his 
 
Master came not to bring peace, but a 
 sword ! His buoyant temperament, his 
 perfect health, his love of nature and 
 of man, of children and flowers, of the 
 changing sky and landscape, his abound- 
 ing sympathy, his rich and sensitive hu- 
 mor, made his life joyous and often hap- 
 py. But it was none the less a stormy 
 life, ending at last, amid the sorrow of 
 a country, in happy rest and the good 
 fame of a great orator for human wel- 
 fare. 
 
THE GOLDEN AGE. 
 
 this country we are inclined 
 to believe that the epoch 
 that followed the Revolu- 
 tion was one of the utmost 
 purity and simplicity. But 
 it was one of the " fathers " who said to a 
 friend upon the adjournment of the first 
 Congress, " Do you suppose such a set of 
 rascals will ever assemble again ?" In his 
 diary John Adams appeals to the calmer 
 mind and juster judgment of the coming 
 age meaning that in which we live, and 
 from which we look wistfully back to 
 old John Adams's cocked hat and knee- 
 breeches as the symbols of a nobler time. 
 Then there is Fisher Ames, one of the 
 famous orators and conspicuous leaders 
 of the beginning of the century, who, 
 studying his country at the time to which 
 we recur as the age of high purpose and 
 lofty men, bewails the sordidness, selfish- 
 ness, and Degradation around him. " Of 
 
course/' he says, seventy years ago, "the 
 single passion that engrosses us, the only 
 avenue to consideration and importance 
 in our society, is the accumulation of 
 property : our inclinations cling to gold, 
 and are bedded m it as deeply as that 
 precious ore in the mine. ... As expe- 
 rience evinces that popularity in other 
 words, consideration and power is to be 
 procured by the meanest of mankind, the 
 meanest in spirit and understanding, and 
 in the worst of ways, it is obvious that at 
 present the incitement to genius is next 
 to nothing." 
 
 We might suppose that we were listen- 
 ing to a contemporary cynic ; and who- 
 ever reads the history of the politics of 
 that time will find that " the better days 
 of the republic " were very like the days 
 in which we deplore their disappearance. 
 When Mr. Ames died, Mr. John Quincy 
 Adams wrote a review of his works, in 
 which, with the equanimity and modera- 
 tion of the golden age, he remarks, " It is 
 a melancholy contemplation of human 
 nature to^see a mind so highly cultivated 
 and so richly gifted as that of Mr. Ames 
 
soured and exasperated into the very rav- 
 ings of a bedlamite." He then proceeds 
 to speak of those who, without believ- 
 ing Mr. Ames's " absurd and inconsist- 
 ent political creed," are selfishly eager 
 for its propagation, being " choice spir- 
 its, amounting to at most six hundred " 
 (their name was the Essex Junto !), and 
 who hold that " the porcelain must rule 
 over the earthenware, the blind and 
 sordid multitude must put themselves, 
 bound hand and foot, into the custody 
 of the lynx-^eyed, seraphic souls of the 
 six hundred, and then all together must 
 go and squat for protection under the 
 hundred hands of the British Briareus." 
 
 To this gentle strain Mr. John Lowell 
 replied in a similar vein, beginning by 
 speaking of the malignity of Mr. Adams's 
 sarcasm, and of his following Mr. Ames 
 to the grave with crocodile tears, inform- 
 ing him that he had no need to assail Mr. 
 Ames's friends with all the venom of an 
 infuriated partisan, because he had al- 
 ready obtained his reward for " ratting " 
 from the Federalists, and this act of grat- 
 itude to his benefactors was unnecessary. 
 
Mr. Lowell ends his reply by saying that 
 in the course of a short political life Mr. 
 Adams had received more than seventy 
 thousand dollars from the public, and 
 that while no man pitied Mr. Ames, " Mr. 
 Adams is an object of sincere commiser- 
 ation with many a man of high and hon- 
 orable feelings, while it is to be doubted 
 whether he is the object of envy to any 
 man on earth." 
 
 These are glimpses of the golden age, 
 of that " better day " of the republic 
 with which our own is so often and so 
 injuriously contrasted. Indeed, there is 
 no finer cordial for despondency than a 
 glance at the paradise that hovers behind 
 our retreating steps. The mountain trav- 
 eller turns and sees a lovely vision float- 
 ing in the sky. 
 
 " How faintly flushed, how phantom-fair, 
 Was Monte Rosa, hanging there 
 
 A thousand shadowy-pencil'd valleys, 
 And snowy dells in a golden air." 
 
 Good lack ! he cries, are those the crags 
 and precipices along which I slid and 
 stumbled in terror of my life ? The hang- 
 
ing gardens of the past, the halcyon epoch 
 of our history, the lost paradise of our 
 fathers, are all crags and precipices along 
 which the race and our country have 
 stumbled and slid. If any man is dis- 
 posed to think that he has fallen upon 
 evil times, let him open his history. It 
 is a marvellous tonic. 
 
 Does he think republics ungrateful ? 
 Look at Mr. Motley's vivid portrait of 
 John of Barneveld. When he was sev- 
 enty-two years old he writes from his 
 prison to his wife and family: "I receive 
 at this moment the very heavy and sor- 
 rowful tidings that I, an old man, for all 
 my services done well and faithfully to 
 the fatherland for so many years . . . 
 must prepare myself to die to-morrow." 
 Does he think irreligion undermining so- 
 ciety ? Look into Smiles's " Huguenots in 
 France after the Revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantes." For attending Huguenot 
 meetings men were captured by soldiers 
 and sentenced to the galleys, mostly for 
 life. They were chained by the neck 
 with murderers and other criminals, and 
 were quartered in Paris in the dungeon 
 
of the Chateau de la Tournelle. Thick 
 iron collars were attached by iron chains 
 to the beams. The collar was closed 
 around the prisoner's neck, and riveted 
 with blows of a hammer upon an anvil. 
 Twenty men in pairs were chained to 
 each beam. They could not sleep ly- 
 ing ; they could not sleep sitting or 
 standing up straight, for the beam was 
 too high for the one and too low for 
 the other. This was done in the name 
 of religion. The age of Louis the Four- 
 teenth is called one of the great epochs 
 of the world. It was an age in which 
 the king's mistress persuaded him to 
 slaughter and banish hundreds of thou- 
 sands of his subjects because of their re- 
 ligious faith, and the great preachers of 
 his church applauded, and the Holy Fa- 
 ther approved, and even Madame de Se- 
 vigne, whose letters some young ladies at 
 Newport and Saratoga are diligently read- 
 ing, and sighing for the good old witty 
 times in which she lived, wrote of the 
 most innocent and most devoted men : 
 " Hanging is quite a refreshment to me. 
 They have just taken twenty-four or 
 
thirty of these men, and are going to 
 throw them off." 
 
 The golden age is not yesterday or to- 
 morrow, but to-day. It is the age in 
 which we live, not that in which some- 
 body else lived. The trouble, vexation, 
 corruption, weakness, selfishness, mean- 
 ness, which dismay us and tempt us to 
 despair are the old lions that have always 
 beset the path. No man is born out of 
 time ; and what man living to-day, who 
 is not pinched with poverty or disease, 
 would have lived a thousand years ago? 
 If our politics seem mean and our men 
 small, how does Alfred's time seem, or 
 the glory of Athens, or the court of Louis 
 the Fourteenth, or Luther's Germany? 
 What did Jefferson think of Hamilton, or 
 the Aurora say of Washington? 
 
SPRING PICTURES. 
 
 *N a late beautiful spring after- 
 noon the Easy Chair rolled 
 itself into the suburbs for 
 a stroll. There were every- 
 where the signs of the ad- 
 vance of a great city and the pathetic 
 forlornness of the municipal frontier. 
 Pleasant country - houses, spacious, ram- 
 bling, with broad piazzas and gardens 
 and lawns, had been apparently suddenly 
 overtaken by streets and stone sidewalks 
 and lamps. There were the rattle and 
 shriek of the incessant railway trains near 
 by. Tall factory chimneys smoked and 
 machinery hummed and steam - whistles 
 blew all around the quiet old houses. 
 The contrast gave them a kind of con- 
 scious life. They seemed to be aware of 
 the incongruity of their character with 
 the new neighborhood. They had a help- 
 less air, as if nothing remained but sub- 
 mission to division into regular building 
 
lots and the absolute extinction of rural 
 seclusion and charm. There was the im- 
 pression of a faint and futile struggle be- 
 tween city and country, in which, indeed, 
 for a moment the excellence of each was 
 lost, but the result of which was not 
 doubtful. 
 
 As the Easy Chair pushed on, it saw in 
 fancy the old pastoral peace and retire- 
 ment of the places when they were indeed 
 in the country. It recalled the noted 
 men of that older day who sought here 
 relaxation and repose. There was the 
 placid river, on which no restless steamer 
 foamed, but only silent sloops drifted or 
 careened. Yonder were the leafy coves 
 under the wooded and rocky banks, from 
 which the Indian had but recently pad- 
 dled his canoe. No railroad harmed the 
 virgin shyness of the shore. It was El Do- 
 rado, Arcadia, the land of Goshen. It was 
 the home of peace, of plenty, of content. 
 
 Such a poet, such a painter, is idealiz- 
 ing memory on a spring afternoon in the 
 suburbs. It seemed so gross a wrong 
 that sidewalks and gas lamps and factory 
 chimneys and steam-whistles should in- 
 
vade and devastate the tranquil fields 
 that indignant imagination filled them as 
 fact with all the fancies that tranquil 
 fields suggest. Doubtless in the closets 
 of those quiet houses there were the 
 bones of plenty of old skeletons. Those 
 spacious, sunny rooms were the scenes of 
 the familiar domestic tragedies against 
 which not the most romantic of country- 
 houses can shut the door. Up those steps 
 have swayed and hesitated the doubtful 
 feet of the oldest son, heir of precious 
 hopes and child of fervent prayers, hesi- 
 tating and lingering at hours long past 
 midnight, watched for and waited for by 
 the mother's heart that breaks but does 
 not falter. In that broad hall, on the 
 brightest of May mornings, the daughter 
 of the house has stood, radiant as the 
 day, and crowned with orange blossoms. 
 There have met the hopes and joys of 
 youth, the tears and blessings and fare- 
 wells of older years. The pretty pageant 
 filled the house, and faded slowly and ut- 
 terly away. The old house has known, 
 too, the solemn shadow that falls on every 
 house. It seems to regretful memory the 
 
abode of unchanging delight. But from 
 that door the slow procession moved, and 
 those whose hospitable smile and word 
 had hallowed every room returned no 
 more. They are gone, the bride, the 
 parent, the friend ; " they are all gone, the 
 old familiar faces," the age, the society, 
 the politics, the interests. They are all 
 gone. Why should not the house go too ? 
 It was early spring, and the Easy Chair, 
 looking up, saw half a dozen kites flying 
 in the air. A little further, and laughing 
 girls were skipping rope. Boys were 
 spinning peg-tops and playing marbles 
 and driving hoops. The boys and girls 
 who lived in the quiet old country-house 
 did the same a hundred years ago. They 
 flew kites and drove hoops, and that lit- 
 tle bride skipped rope and carried dolls. 
 The age, the society, the politics, the in- 
 terests, were very different. They are, in- 
 deed, all changed. But tops are change- 
 less, marbles are immortal, and so are 
 boys and girls. They know nothing of 
 the old house over which the Easy Chair 
 becomes pensive. They belong to the 
 new time, which demands its demolition. 
 
PROPER AND IMPROPER. 
 
 )ONGFELLOW has commem- 
 orated in a beautiful son- 
 net the delightful evenings 
 of Mrs. Kemble's readings ; 
 and certainly it was a sin- 
 gular pleasure to see and to hear her. 
 Her historic name associated her with 
 her uncle John and her aunt Mrs. Sid- 
 dons, and she had always the port of one 
 conscious of a famous lineage. She used 
 to say, with a half-humorous, half-proud 
 emphasis, that she belonged to her maj- 
 esty's players, and in her presence it was 
 easy to believe that her majesty's players 
 were an important body in the state. Her 
 power of identification with the various 
 characters in the plays, and the skill with 
 which she maintained the individuality 
 throughout, were always remarkable, and 
 the symmetry and completeness of the 
 whole performance left nothing to be 
 criticised. The only observation that 
 
suggested itself might be that the stage 
 traditions were evident in her rendering. 
 But that, in turn, only suggested the fur- 
 ther question whether the traditions were 
 not worthy of respect. Dramatic and 
 histrionic forms of art, like all others, 
 are but representations of nature under 
 certain conditions and limitations. They 
 are not an imitation, a fac-simile, and 
 every man will be at odds with any work 
 of art in any kind who does not bear 
 this in mind. 
 
 The spectator complains of unnatural- 
 ness upon the stage; the substance of his 
 feeling is that people do not talk and act 
 so in ordinary life. That is true ; but 
 if the theatre should show us men and 
 women doing upon the stage what they 
 do in ordinary life, the theatre would be 
 no more attractive than the street or the 
 parlor. It is not the spectacle of ordi- 
 nary life that we expect to see in the 
 theatre. It is a view of human life and 
 nature under ideal conditions, and it is as 
 irrelevant to require that the player shall 
 seem to us like the man with whom we 
 have been transacting business as that he 
 
should speak plain prose instead of blank 
 verse. If Mrs. Kernble had read the 
 words of Rosalind or of Portia, of Shy- 
 lock or Mercutio, as if they were neigh- 
 bors of hers and people whom we were 
 in the habit of meeting, the effect would 
 have been ludicrous. When she came in 
 the Fanny Kemble of Talfourd and of 
 the wild enthusiasm of the grandfathers 
 of to-day, ripened into the comely and 
 queenly woman and seated herself at 
 the little table on which the great vol- 
 ume lay open, she was the magician who 
 was to open to us the realm of faery, the 
 world of imagination, not to take us back 
 into the familiar scenes of the world of 
 New York or Chicago. The spell was 
 resistless. The deep, rich, melodious 
 voice flowed out like an enchanted sing- 
 ing river, along which we glided seeing 
 visions and dreaming dreams. To sit 
 and listen to her was like sitting and 
 watching Titian laying on the canvas the 
 gorgeous tints which before our eyes 
 took on the forms of men and angels. 
 A rarer, a more refined delight, which of 
 us has known ? Did it ever occur to us 
 
that Mrs, Kemble was doing anything 
 improper, anything unwomanly ? In the 
 wonderful picture of Portia that " her 
 voice's music" drew, was there anything 
 a little repulsive, a little unfeminine ? 
 
 This question was suggested to the 
 Easy Chair by the remark of one of 
 the most devoted and delighted of all the 
 listeners at those readings, that he was 
 very sorry to see that the University of 
 London had decided to admit women to 
 all its degrees upon precisely equal terms 
 with men. The secret reason of the re- 
 gret, of course, is the feeling that there 
 would be something unwomanly in the 
 act of competing for a degree which 
 would open the pursuit of professions 
 especially the medical profession which 
 are usually and often exclusively culti- 
 vated by men. 
 
 Yet, when pressed, the Easy Chair's 
 interlocutor admitted that there was 
 nothing more essentially unfeminine in 
 the practice of medicine by a woman 
 than in the recitation of Shakespeare 
 for the entertainment of a miscellaneous 
 crowd. It is a question of habit, not of 
 
instinct, nor of principle, nor of reason. 
 When the old Greek and Oriental idea 
 of absolute seclusion and subordination 
 is abandoned, a woman's reading from 
 Shakespeare for the pleasure of the pub- 
 lic is an action not different in kind 
 from her practising medicine or serving 
 on a school committee. This gener- 
 ation, however, is more used to the one 
 than to the other. It is a habit, nothing 
 more. 
 
 Charles Lamb regrets in one of his later 
 essays that "we have no rationale of 
 sauces, or theory of mixed flavors ; as to 
 show why cabbage is reprehensible with 
 roast beef, laudable with bacon ; why the 
 haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of 
 currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth 
 it ; why loin of veal (a pretty problem), 
 being itself unctuous, seeketh the adven- 
 titious lubricity of melted butter; and 
 why the same part in pork, not more 
 oleaginous, abhorreth from it ; ... why 
 oysters in death rise up against the con- 
 tamination of brown sugar, while they 
 are posthumously amorous of vinegar; 
 why the sour mango and the sweet jam 
 
by turns court and are accepted by the 
 compilable mutton hash she not yet 
 decidedly declaring for either. We are 
 as yet but in the empirical stage of 
 cookery." 
 
 It is not in cookery alone that this 
 mystery is still unsolved. Why, for in- 
 stance, should it seem a womanly use of 
 Heaven's gift that Jenny Lind should sing 
 for the pleasure of a thousand men, and 
 something strange and unfeminine that 
 Portia should plead with eloquence in 
 a court to save a hapless woman from 
 prison or the cord? Why is it fitting 
 that Mrs. Kemble should professionally 
 read Shakespeare, and "queer" that she 
 should professionally attend women in 
 peril and sickness ? Do we not natu- 
 rally and logically glide into the part of 
 the citation from Lamb that we just now 
 omitted? "why salmon (a strong sapor 
 per se) fortifieth its condition with the 
 mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are 
 fatal to the delicater relish of the tur- 
 bot." Must we not say that we are as 
 yet but in the rudimentary knowledge of 
 what is and is not feminine ? 
 
When the example of the London Uni- 
 versity is not singular, but when all op- 
 portunities are opened equally to all 
 talent and vocation, when it is not forbid- 
 den a woman to do any honorable work 
 for which she is by nature and by study 
 and training properly equipped, unless 
 the laws of nature fail, will any greater 
 catastrophe befall, will there be any more 
 signal reversion of the order of things, 
 than if cabbage should come at last to be 
 eaten with roast beef, and currant jelly 
 cement an alliance with the mutton's 
 shoulder ? 
 
BELINDA AND THE VULGAR. 
 
 is perhaps because the 
 Easy Chair sometimes dis- 
 cusses questions of behav- 
 ior that it is occasionally 
 asked to express an opinion 
 upon more difficult social points. Thus 
 it was lately requested to say whether it 
 did not think that the great want of our 
 society is a social standard. The inquiry 
 was made by the lovely Belinda, who was 
 charmingly dressed for a select party, and 
 the Easy Chair was obliged to own that 
 it did not at once comprehend the scope 
 of the inquiry, and to seek an explana- 
 tion. As Belinda proceeded to elucidate 
 her meaning it seemed to be tolerably 
 plain that she was contemplating some 
 kind of rank, or visible and recognized 
 distinction, which should separate " so- 
 ciety " from what is not society, and it 
 was impossible not to feel that, however 
 high the dividing line, and however small 
 
the circle which it enclosed, she was her- 
 self included within it. 
 
 The Easy Chair thereupon described to 
 her a conversation which it held long ago 
 with a distinguished man upon English so- 
 cial life and the advantages of an aristocra- 
 cy. The distinguished man's views were 
 very much like those which are set forth 
 in Disraeli's "Sibyl" and " Coningsby," 
 and which were known forty years ago as 
 those of Young England. They proposed 
 a national life blended of feudal romance 
 and modern philanthropy. There was to 
 be a gracious nobility of very blue blood 
 which had been clarified in the veins of 
 the Plantagenets, who were to live in 
 stately castles in the midst of superb 
 demesnes, and to be exceedingly good 
 to their tenants and retainers, for whom 
 there were to be May-poles, and flitches 
 of bacon at Christmas, and greased poles 
 to climb at appropriate times, and sacks 
 to run races in, and who were to be vis- 
 ited at their neat little cottages, when 
 they were ill, by the ladies from the 
 castle, and who were to be industrious 
 and obedient and humble and grateful, 
 
and, above all things, to know their 
 place. The nobility were to own the 
 land, and govern the country, and live 
 in splendid idleness, and the happy peas- 
 antry were to do all the work, and bow 
 respectfully when the nobility passed by, 
 and go to bed when the curfew tolled, 
 and to make no trouble. 
 
 This was the Young England pro- 
 gramme, and the Arcadia of the Disraeli 
 novel. And this also showed its familiar 
 features in the talk of the distinguished 
 man as he bewailed the social bareness 
 of American life and descanted upon the 
 charm of an ancient and well-ordered 
 society. But when the Easy Chair mis- 
 chievously asked him whether he did not 
 think that he might tire of the greased 
 pole, and the dance upon the lawn, and 
 the gracious patronage, and the respect- 
 ful gratitude, the amusing bewilderment 
 of the distinguished man showed that in 
 his admiration of the society that he 
 described he assumed always that he 
 was to belong to the class that lived in 
 the stately castles and benignly conde- 
 scended to the humble cottagers. His 
 
view, therefore, was very simple. It was 
 merely that he should like to live in 
 splendid idleness, steeped in luxury, and 
 surrounded by respectful servants. 
 
 Belinda listened to this story, of which 
 the Easy Chair made no application, with 
 a slight blush; and to the polite inquiry, 
 what kind of social standard she con- 
 templated, she responded that she meant 
 a certain fixed line which should ex- 
 clude the vulgar. But she was immedi- 
 ately silent, as if reflecting upon a diffi- 
 cult proposition, and did not answer 
 when she was asked what she thought 
 would be the consequence of removing 
 the vulgar from the circles which she 
 considered most select. 
 
 Her benevolent attention invited fur- 
 ther question, especially as at the same 
 moment a lady entered the room who 
 bore one of the most noted family names 
 in the country, and most familiar in fash- 
 ionable annals, a family which delights 
 to trace its lineage to a royal source. 
 This proud dame had married her 
 daughter as if by main force to a cor- 
 oneted lord of hereditary acres. It was 
 
a familiar fact of the society in which 
 she was a conspicuous figure, and it ' 
 was impossible not to ask : " Can there 
 be anything more coarsely vulgar than 
 to sell a daughter for money and a 
 title to a man for whom she does not 
 care ; and shall we begin to erect the 
 social standard by expelling the vulgar 
 offender ?" 
 
 Belinda was still silent, and the brilliant 
 rooms began to fill and murmur with a 
 gay company. Among them came the 
 loud and diamonded Mrs. Smasher, to 
 whose unparalleled fetes even Belinda 
 would be almost willing to request a 
 card. The Smasher lineage is not re- 
 nowned or regal ; the Smasher mind is 
 imperfectly educated ; the Smasher man- 
 ners are those of the suddenly rich who 
 are not also suddenly refined. 
 
 " Is any conceivable vulgarity greater 
 than the Smasher vulgarity, O Belinda ; 
 and shall we continue these exercises by 
 expelling also this essentially vulgar per- 
 son ?" 
 
 Belinda was still silent. She has re- 
 mained silent even to this day. 
 
DECAYED GENTILITY. 
 
 DECAYED gentility has great 
 interest for the novel-read- 
 er, and the man and wom- 
 an who " have seen better 
 days " are familiar figures 
 in actual life. Hampton Court is re- 
 garded by some travellers with pensive 
 regard as a kind of almshouse for this 
 class of the indigent, and institutions 
 nearer home are described with a defer- 
 ential courtesy and avoidance as homes 
 for decayed gentlewomen. It cannot be 
 pleasant to the persons themselves to 
 be so described, but the founders of 
 such places have perhaps a comfortable 
 sense of reflected honor, as if the im- 
 pulse to provide a retreat of the kind 
 were of itself a sign of "very gentility." 
 Despite the plaintive little plea which 
 the description itself urges for this de- 
 cayed class of our fellow - beings, the 
 people who " have seen better days " are 
 
not generally an engaging multitude. A 
 person whose chief distinction is that he 
 was once more prosperous than he is 
 now seems to renounce any present claim 
 upon consideration, and to offer his in- 
 ability as a ground of regard. It is an 
 appeal to pity, but pity of old has a dis- 
 agreeable relative. 
 
 The pathos of the appeal lies, first, in 
 the sense of contrast, and then in the 
 spiritual rather than the material poverty 
 which it discloses. The lady who lets 
 lodgings, and whose air and the allusions 
 of whose conversation constantly suggest 
 that she has seen better days, is a per- 
 son who is mastered by circumstances, 
 and therefore does not compel respect. 
 But a woman who is the perfectly self- 
 respecting lady fulfils simply the duty 
 of the moment with no conscious appeal 
 for sympathy ; and if by chance you dis- 
 cover that she has been more prosperous, 
 the fact that she has not the conceit of 
 it strengthens your regard. For it is no 
 personal credit to have been more pros- 
 perous. As your landlady shows you 
 the convenience of the room, she lets fall 
 
that her father the Bishop, or her uncle 
 the Senator, or her lamented cousin the 
 millionnaire would be deeply grieved if 
 he could know that his kinswoman was 
 actually letting lodgings. 
 
 " Then, madam, you have seen better 
 days ?" 
 
 " Ah, sir" 
 
 But how is it personally creditable to 
 the good woman that her uncle was 
 honorable and her cousin rich ? She re- 
 calls the circumstances of others at the 
 expense of her own character. The 
 lodger wishes to hire rooms upon their 
 own merits. He resents the bribery of 
 pity to take them. If they are a little 
 stuffy, they certainly seem no airier be- 
 cause his landlady once sat upon a crim- 
 son sofa and read novels all day long. If 
 some philanthropist builds a retreat to 
 which she can retire gratis, and pass her 
 declining years in regretful recollection 
 of the crimson sofa, so let it be. Such 
 a retreat may be dedicated to sentimen- 
 tal repining. But a woman of spirit and 
 character never becomes a decayed gen- 
 tlewoman, however destitute she may be. 
 
This refusal to succumb to circum- 
 stances and to make the best of it, which 
 is all that can be asked, is charmingly 
 sketched in Lamb's Captain Jackson. 
 The Captain's frugal table had the air of 
 a feast, such was the magic of his cheer- 
 fulness. His plain cheese was served 
 like Stilton or Roquefort, and slipping 
 a shred of it upon his guest's plate, he 
 contented himself with the rind, gayly 
 declaring that the nearer the bone the 
 sweeter the meat. Poverty was no pleas- 
 anter to him than to the rest of us. 
 But had he gone to the almshouse he 
 would not have complained, and in no 
 word or sigh of his would you have dis- 
 covered that he had seen better days. 
 
 The family of Captain Jackson is by 
 no means extinct. The other day the 
 Easy Chair met one of them in Broad- 
 way an elderly gentleman in a well- 
 brushed, exceedingly threadbare suit, 
 moving briskly along the pavement. His 
 greeting was alert and courteous. There 
 was a little chat of the day's news, a gay 
 jest or two, and then good - morning. 
 Half a century ago this was a young 
 
i 4 6 
 
 man about town, the heir sf a fortune, a 
 youth of "family," who dressed and drove 
 and dined and danced like the golden 
 youth of to-day. When the first Italian 
 opera troupe came, he was nightly be- 
 hind the scenes. In the circle of Knick- 
 erbocker wits he was one. He wrote 
 verses, and had a kind of literary name. 
 His portrait was published in a weekly 
 paper. He sat at the good tables. His 
 name was Fortunio. 
 
 Everything is gone but the cheerful 
 spirit. Nobody knows exactly how he 
 lives, but only that it is in extreme pov- 
 erty. But he preserves the tone of pros- 
 perity. He writes notes in a beautiful 
 and graceful hand upon very cheap paper. 
 " You remember our conversation the oth- 
 er morning about 'Anstey's Bath Guide'; 
 and if you will look in your Fraser for 
 this month, you will find that I was 
 right." Here is the assumption that ev- 
 ery gentleman takes Fraser, and that your 
 correspondent may have dipped into his 
 before you have looked at yours. Doubt- 
 less he had seen it at some reading- 
 room, perhaps, or on Brentano's counter. 
 
One day we had spoken of a famous 
 author. A little while afterwards came 
 a comely package containing an old and 
 choice work of his, and a note : " Dear 
 Easy Chair, I thought it might be a 
 pleasure to you to own this rather un- 
 common copy of an author whom you 
 evidently admire, and which it is a pleas- 
 ure to my shelves to spare." What a 
 fine air of elegant leisure in a library ! 
 But the " shelves " were a few remnant 
 books, probably worthless to sell, but af- 
 fording the friendly soul true satisfaction 
 in giving. Fortunio is not a decayed 
 gentleman. His gentility, in the best 
 sense, is in full vigor. Everything but 
 that, indeed, is decayed. But there is no 
 unmanly moping about better days, al- 
 though in few men's lives could there be 
 a sharper contrast between the past and 
 the present. 
 
 This cheerful steadiness is largely due 
 to temperament, but it is not therefore 
 beyond those who have not the same 
 temperament. Character can emulate it. 
 " It's bad enough to be poor," said one of 
 the Captain Jackson family, " but it's a 
 
great deal worse to be sulky too." It is 
 very easy, indeed, for prosperity to preach 
 resignation to adversity, and to urge it to 
 bear up bravely. But it is a true gospel, 
 although it be easy to preach. Pure La- 
 crima Christi is as precious when poured 
 from a glass of Murano as from a pewter 
 mug. 
 
THE PHARISEE. 
 
 |HERE is no more beautiful 
 and impressive passage in 
 the New Testament than 
 that which contrasts the 
 Pharisee thanking God that 
 he is not as other men are and the Pub- 
 lican who asks mercy as a sinner. But 
 there is no passage, also, which has been 
 more ingeniously perverted, and it is ex- 
 ceedingly amusing to hear Jeremy Did- 
 dler or Robert Macaire or Dick Turpin 
 railing at honest and industrious men as 
 Pharisees because they prefer honesty 
 and industry to knavery. 
 
 The taste for honesty and sobriety 
 seems natural and simple enough, and 
 the qualities themselves quite as valu- 
 able as those of Diddler, or even of Jona- 
 than Wild the Great. But Jonathan will 
 have none of them. They are Pharisaic 
 impertinences. They are impracticable 
 and visionary speculations, which assume 
 
heaven while yet we stand upon the 
 green earth ; and Mr. Wild, who assures 
 us that he does not desire to pass him- 
 self off as better than other men, de- 
 clares, with the noble candor which dis- 
 tinguishes him, that simple, downright 
 dishonesty is good enough for him. He 
 does not, indeed, choose that precise 
 word, but he conveys that precise idea. 
 
 Tis a good trick, and it is generally 
 sure of applause. But it is only another 
 version of a familiar maxim, that when 
 you have no argument, you must abuse 
 the plaintiff's attorney. As a matter of 
 fact, your client did steal the handker- 
 chief, or forge the name, or fire the barn. 
 But I ask you, gentlemen of the jury 
 you may well say and I appeal to all 
 good citizens, is not this ostentation of 
 superior virtue, this fine air of moral 
 indignation toward my client simply be- 
 cause he happened to slip his hand into 
 the wrong pocket, a little suspicious ? 
 Are we angels ? I ask your honor is this 
 work-a-day world the celestial seat and 
 the Mount of Vision, and is a man so 
 very much better than his fellows merely 
 
because he rolls up his sanctimonious 
 eyes with the Pharisee and thanks God 
 that he is holier than other men ? Nay, 
 gentlemen, have we not in this sublime 
 and immortal parable a Divine warning 
 against this Phariseeism which denounces 
 the slides and slips of our common frail 
 humanity? I ask you, gentlemen, by 
 your verdict not to place a premium upon 
 that most odious of all repulsive arro- 
 gancies Phariseeism. 
 
 But it is upon the political platform 
 that the gibes and sneers at Pharisee- 
 ism are intended to be most stinging. 
 The Honorable JonathanlVild the Great 
 comes out strong, as his henchmen tru- 
 ly declare, against his political oppo- 
 nents. With one vast comprehensive 
 sneer he brands them as Pharisees, as if 
 he were snorting consuming fire. It is 
 not surprising, because they have had 
 their eye upon Jonathan. They have 
 seen him in bad company. They have 
 caught him " conveying " public treasure. 
 They know all about him, and he knows 
 that they know all about him. He called 
 himself Tweed, and he made a mesh of 
 
statutes to legalize robbery. But how 
 good he was to the poor ! How he dis- 
 tributed coal to the chilly ! How he 
 planted pinks and daisies in the City 
 Hall Park, and made the Battery to 
 bloom as the rose ! How he received 
 wedding gifts for his daughter from our 
 best citizens; and how generously they 
 subscribed to erect his statue to com- 
 memorate that bright flower of the 
 State ! And now a sneaking, mousing 
 gang of would-be archangels prate about 
 common honesty, and demand that pub- 
 lic hands shall be clean hands ! Fellow- 
 citizens, Jonathan Wild is a man of the 
 people. He doesn't pretend to be higher 
 and purer and better than other men. 
 He didn't graduate at a college, indeed, 
 and he never read the Iliad in the orig- 
 inal Greek. No, fellow-citizens, there is 
 no cambric handkerchief and oh-de-co- 
 logne about him. He is just one of the 
 boys. He whoops it up with the plain 
 people, and, thank God, whatever he is, 
 he is not a Pharisee. 
 
 The argument is ingenious. It does 
 not deny that he is a thief. It only in- 
 
sists that those who assert it are Phari- 
 sees and Pharisees are so odious that it 
 is much better to scoff at them than to 
 punish Mr. Wild. There was a good old 
 countryman who had been early taught 
 to take men as they are, which means 
 to consider them liars and rascals. One 
 day a neighbor remarked to him that he 
 thought that the old man had lost the 
 money with which he bought voters, 
 because, he said, while they take your 
 money, the other side take their votes. 
 " The deuce they do ! " said the old 
 countryman. "Yes," said the other; 
 "and you will find, in the long-run, 
 that political honesty is the best political 
 policy." " You think so, do you ?" was 
 the reply. "Well, do you know that 
 you're a blanked metaphysical Pharisee ?" 
 It is obvious that when the advocacy 
 of common honesty in any relation of 
 life is savagely and scornfully decried 
 as Phariseeism, it is because somebody's 
 withers are wrung. It is a plea of guilty. 
 It is the cry of Squeers when the picture 
 of Dotheboys Hall was displayed to the 
 world : " I didn't do it." If a man de- 
 
154 
 
 mands honesty in politics, and it is re- 
 torted, " You're a Pharisee," it is because 
 the dishonesty cannot be denied or dis- 
 proved, and the retort is therefore a sum- 
 mons to all honest men to look out for 
 thieves. 
 
 To deride the demand for decency is 
 to concede that anything but indecency 
 is impracticable. If it be only Pharisees 
 who insist that sugar shall not be sanded, 
 that milk shall not be swill-fed, that cof- 
 fee shall not be chiccory, that nutmegs 
 shall not be wood, that cloth shall not be 
 shoddy, that employes of the govern- 
 ment shall not be forced to pay for their 
 places, that public officers shall be hon- 
 est, and that government shall not be 
 venal, it is pleasant to think how many 
 intelligent, upright, industrious, and prac- 
 tical Americans are Pharisaical. 
 
LADY MAVOURNEEN ON HER 
 TRAVELS. 
 
 |HE passenger in the crowd- 
 ed street railway car is 
 often disturbed by the 
 conscious absorption of 
 his masculine neighbors 
 in their newspapers when a woman en- 
 ters and looks for a seat. If she be 
 young and pretty, there are apparently 
 seats enough, however great the crowd, 
 and even if a man is slow to rise, he 
 may yet, with Mr. Readywit, exhort his 
 son sitting upon his knee to get up and 
 give the lady his seat. The impatient 
 passenger, in his indignation at the want 
 of courtesy upon the part of others, 
 sometimes forgets, indeed, to rise him- 
 self. But there is always some Nathan 
 comfortably seated farther away whose 
 amused look says to the impatient but 
 stationary David, " Thou art the man." 
 It would be very unfair to generalize 
 
from this frequent situation that the 
 American is uncourteous. On the con- 
 trary, he is the most truly polite man 
 among men of all nations. Lady Ma- 
 vourneen, who is familiar with the soci- 
 ety and the manners of many countries, 
 and who has been always accustomed 
 to hear Americans in Europe described 
 everywhere and with pungent empha- 
 sis as " those Americans," was amazed 
 upon coming here to find universal cour- 
 tesy. " In the street or at the rail- 
 way station," she said, " if I ask any- 
 body any question, I receive the most 
 prompt and polite reply. Everybody is 
 at my service, not with much bowing or 
 flourishing, but heartily and honestly. I 
 have never seen such universal courtesy." 
 When she was asked whether she had 
 observed the absorption of the street- 
 car passengers in their newspapers, she 
 smiled and said that she had never been 
 obliged to stand, because some one was 
 sure to rise. But in Paris she said that 
 often as she was passing to a seat Mon- 
 sieur Crapeaud, raising his hat politely, 
 and saying, warmly, Pardon ! pressed by 
 and secured the seat. 
 
Lady Mavourneen, who tells a little 
 story with great humor, described a scene 
 in a crowded church in Paris. An ap- 
 parent lady was disturbing everybody by 
 pushing along toward a distant chair in 
 the row, when Lady Mavourneen arose 
 to allow her to pass more easily, and 
 the apparent lady immediately slipped 
 into my lady's chair, and held it fast, 
 saying only, in reply to her earnest re- 
 monstrance ; " Madame, you left the 
 chair ; I took it. You have lost it. 
 Voila !" A vagabond of this kind took 
 the seat of a gentleman who had risen 
 to help a lady off a street car. When 
 the gentleman returned he mentioned 
 to the interloper that it was his seat. 
 The interloper shrugged his shoulders, 
 remarked that it was an empty seat 
 when he took it, and that he should 
 continue to occupy it. " If you don't 
 get out of that seat, I'll take you out," 
 was the rejoinder of the gentleman, 
 whose shoulders were broad. The squat- 
 ter scowled and abdicated. 
 
 Lady Mavourneen found, what every 
 lady will find, that she could travel 
 
everywhere in "the States" alone, with 
 entire safety and surrounded by the ut- 
 most courtesy. The word " lady " with 
 which she will be accosted by hackmen 
 and porters and conductors is spoken 
 with kindly respect, and even if some 
 person in a lady's garb thrusts herself 
 into the cue of passengers slowly ad- 
 vancing to the window of the ticket of- 
 fice to buy tickets, there may be sour 
 looks and amazed stares, but she will 
 generally have her way. So great is 
 our courtesy that we honor the coun- 
 terfeit claim. The source of the most 
 serious objection to the demand of suf- 
 frage for women is the secret apprehen- 
 sion that men will lose their sincere def- 
 erence, and treat women as they treat 
 other men, thus robbing life of the tender 
 romance of chivalric courtesy. Emer- 
 son says of the successful lover and his 
 mistress, " She was heaven, while he pur- 
 sued her as a star ; can she be heaven 
 if she stoops to such an one as he ?" 
 
 Yet, while this feeling is frequent, and 
 seems to many very plausible, it is the 
 true respect of the American for women 
 
which is the real strength of this very 
 movement. The European sentiment for 
 woman is still somewhat mediaeval. She 
 is still the goddess of the troubadours 
 and the minnesingers, but a goddess 
 who is treated as the South-sea Island- 
 ers treat their gods, beating them when 
 they are not propitious. To the Amer- 
 ican she is Wordsworth's " Phantom of 
 Delight " seen upon nearer view, and it 
 is idle to prattle about her " sphere," as 
 if she did not instinctively know it more 
 truly than men. The universal courtesy 
 which Lady Mavourneen remarked is es- 
 sential respect and kindliness of feeling, 
 which no more permits a man to gild 
 his selfishness with a " Pardon " and a 
 touching of his hat than it permits him 
 to strike a woman. 
 
 Yet although courtesy is essentially 
 in the heart, and is kind feeling rather 
 than respectful manner, it is not worth 
 while to despise the manner. If we 
 must choose between the good heart 
 and suavity of address, between Boy- 
 thorne and Lovelace, of course we shall 
 choose Boythorne. But why not both ? 
 
i6o 
 
 Why not the mens sana in corpore sano ? 
 In " The Iron Pen," Longfellow says : 
 
 " And in words not idle and vain 
 
 I shall answer and thank you again 
 For the gift, and the grace of the gift, 
 O beautiful Helen of Maine !" 
 
 It is not only the gift, it is the grace in 
 giving which completes the charm. 
 
 The young American of to-day puffs 
 his cigarette in the face of his partner 
 on the balcony, in the boat, or in the 
 wagon, and smiles at the frilled Lothario 
 of yesterday bowing in his flowered coat 
 and paying stately compliments as stiff 
 as her brocade to the dame whom he ad- 
 dresses. The youth is right in saying that 
 the flowered coat and the stately com- 
 pliment were the dress and the speech 
 of an old sinner. But he would be right 
 also if he remembered that familiarity 
 breeds contempt, and that he may wisely 
 distrust his feeling for any woman who 
 does not put him upon his good behav- 
 ior. The courtesy which Lady Mavour- 
 neen observed in the railway station and 
 in the street was plain, but it was gen- 
 
uine. Respect naturally produces cour- 
 tesy. Good manners are the cultiva- 
 tion of natural courtesy : the gift and the 
 grace of the gift. 
 
 This was the chief remembrance, and 
 it was a unique and precious treasure, 
 which Lady Mavourneen carried back to 
 Europe from America. 
 
GENERAL SHERMAN. 
 
 >ONE of his great contempo- 
 raries was universally be- 
 loved more than General 
 Sherman, perhaps none so 
 much. The rare happiness 
 was his not only of becoming famous by 
 taking a great part in a great historic 
 achievement, but of the complete enjoy- 
 ment of fame. His later years forecast 
 the future. He saw not only that his 
 name would be remembered, but remem- 
 bered with personal affection. Very few 
 men have been able to foresee this, and 
 very few more clearly than Sherman. It 
 is due not to achievement alone, but to 
 personal quality blended with achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 In his last years he was wholly with- 
 drawn from public affairs, and with ex- 
 traordinary tact, although constantly in 
 the public eye and mind, and although 
 the sense of his historic personality, so 
 
to speak, was constant, he refrained from 
 declarations upon pending public ques- 
 tions, and the remarks of his interviews 
 were not devoted to subjects of general 
 controversy. This was doubtless the re- 
 sult of his accurate apprehension of his 
 relation to the country. He had been 
 educated by it, and had served it as a sol- 
 dier. He had strong convictions and 
 was frank of speech, but he belonged to 
 all. He could not well be a common 
 partisan. He was apparently untouched 
 by political ambition. If he had felt its 
 spur at all, he was happily able to prefer 
 the general permanent affectionate popu- 
 lar regard to the fierce enthusiasm of a 
 political campaign and the passionate 
 ardor of partisanship. 
 
 Whatever the reason, he held aloof. 
 Perhaps at one moment, had he assented, 
 his name might have been caught up in 
 a vast and tumultuous political conven- 
 tion, and to a burning and skilful appeal 
 to patriotism and the still glowing memo- 
 ries of the war a palpitating party might 
 have responded, and made him its leader. 
 But if others doubted and hesitated he 
 
i6 4 
 
 did not. He comprehended the situation 
 as in a comprehensive and far-extending 
 military movement. He knew himself, 
 and he refused. The opportunity for 
 which the most illustrious and the most 
 famous of Americans have longed and 
 labored and pined offered itself to him, 
 unsought, unwished, and he smiled it 
 away. 
 
 Among the chief figures of the epoch 
 of the war probably Lincoln and Sher- 
 man were the most individual and origi- 
 nal. The most romantic and picturesque 
 of the many renowned events of that 
 time was the march to the sea. It has 
 already a distinctive character, like that 
 of the Greeks in Xenophon's story of the 
 ten thousand. When the news of its 
 successful issue reached this part of the 
 country, it served to show the simple 
 and honest patriotism of one of the 
 more unfortunate of the Union generals. 
 Burnside, after the explosion of the mine 
 at Petersburg, had been relieved, and 
 was staying with a company of friends at 
 a country-house on Narragansett Bay. 
 The company were all sitting one morn- 
 
ing upon the spacious piazza, when a 
 messenger rode up and announced Sher- 
 man's success. Burnside's delight was 
 enthusiastic. All thought of himself van- 
 ished. The good cause only was in his 
 mind and heart, and, running to his wife, 
 he joyfully kissed her, saying, " I know 
 that the company feels as I do, and will 
 forgive me." 
 
 It was the feeling of a soldier as simple 
 and true-hearted and patriotic, but not 
 so fortunate, as Sherman ; and it was the 
 same candor and manly sweetness of nat- 
 ure that softened Sherman's voice when- 
 ever he spoke of the soldiers of the war 
 to whom fate had seemed to be unkind. 
 He is gone, the last of the old familiar 
 figures, some of his old foes bearing him 
 tenderly to the grave. And are not Lin- 
 coln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Porter, 
 Seward, Chase, Stanton, Sumner, and 
 their fellows, historic figures worthy to 
 rank with the elder Revolutionary group 
 dear to all Americans? 
 
THE AMERICAN GIRL. 
 
 PLEASING and constant 
 topic of English writers is 
 the American girl. One of 
 the later commentators says 
 of her, " American girls 
 have shown they can receive, travel, and 
 live without chaperons, escorts, or hus- 
 bands, and are fast developing a bright, 
 clear, intelligent, self-reliant, courageous, 
 and refreshing variety of the human 
 race." And again, " Even if in future 
 years the slender Yankee belle is hidden 
 behind the ampler beauty of the English 
 matron, we may still hear from her lips 
 the wit and shrewdness, the acute accent, 
 the intelligent question, and the rapid 
 repartee that proclaim her original na- 
 tionality." The " society " pictures in the 
 papers and magazines represent the dis- 
 may of the British matron with mar- 
 riageable daughters as she surveys the 
 avatar of the American divinity and rival. 
 
i6 7 
 
 The essential differences of society in the 
 two countries are at once suggested, and 
 the alarm of the watchful parent is justi- 
 fied. 
 
 The charm of Miss Austen's novels is 
 their acknowledged fidelity of portraiture 
 of the society with which they deal. They 
 are miniatures, but the likeness is wrought 
 with exquisite skill of detail, and as the 
 American reader reflects he perceives 
 that the great object of the game which 
 they describe is eligible marriage. In- 
 deed the motive of the novel in general 
 is love and marriage. We open the book, 
 we are at once introduced to Paul, and 
 presently to Virginia, and we proceed 
 over the pages until we hear the ap- 
 proaching beat of the Wedding March, 
 which in fact we have heard from the 
 first page, and we know that the end is at 
 hand. But in the English novel of society, 
 although the theme be marriage, it is not 
 necessarily love. If that were essential, a 
 host of rival fair ones with golden locks 
 would bring no pang to the maternal 
 bosom, because she would know that love 
 will find out the one among the thousand. 
 
The passages that we have quoted ap- 
 parently describe by contrast, which is a 
 fact which does not seem to have occur- 
 red to the writer. Doubtless at heart he 
 is loyal to the English girl, and does not 
 admit even in debate that her supremacy 
 of maidenhood can be disputed. When 
 he says that American girls have shown 
 that they can receive, travel, and live 
 without chaperons, escorts, or husbands, 
 he seems to mean that they have shown 
 this distinctively as compared with other 
 girls. When he adds that they are fast 
 developing a bright, clear, intelligent, self- 
 reliant, courageous, and refreshing vari- 
 ety of the human race, can he mean that 
 those words describe a new variety of 
 girl, and that it is not perfectly familiar 
 in England ? So in the other passage, 
 when, supposing the American girl trans- 
 formed into the British matron, he re- 
 marks, with evident admiration, " we 
 may still hear from her lips the wit and 
 shrewdness, the acute accent, the intel- 
 ligent question, and the rapid repartee 
 that proclaim her original nationality," 
 would he have us understand that these 
 
i6 9 
 
 arc not the characteristics of the British 
 matron of to-day? Or does he inti- 
 mate only that the coming of the Ameri- 
 cans will but enlarge the number of these 
 delightful ladies ? 
 
 The writer certainly seems to describe 
 by contrast, but he has wisely left a little 
 cloud in which to envelop his retreat in 
 case of emergency. Certainly we need 
 not press him. Whatever he may think 
 or say of the English girl, he has spoken 
 well and truly of her American sister. 
 His description applies to the girl who 
 grows up amid the average conditions of 
 American life, the girl who is portrayed 
 in her more jejune condition in Henry 
 James's Daisy Miller. The two chief 
 qualities of that young woman, as repre- 
 sented by the shrewd and subtle artist, 
 are self-respect and self-reliance. The 
 perplexity of the phenomenon to the for- 
 eign reader lies in the fact that she does 
 what the European girl without self-re- 
 spect does. 
 
 A distinguished writer in New York, no 
 longer living, once said to the Easy Chair, 
 with an air of consternation : " Do you 
 
know that the best girls in New York 
 go without escort to the matinees at the 
 Academy ? Goodness knows what will 
 be the end of it !" The good man was 
 seriously troubled. He seemed to appre- 
 hend that the young woman who could 
 go to a matinee without an escort would 
 probably run off with a circus troupe, and 
 presently ride in a very short skirt 
 bare-backed horses in the ring. He evi- 
 dently felt that the young women whom 
 he had seen were in grave danger of losing 
 maidenly reserve, and that their conduct 
 betrayed a want of refinement of feeling. 
 The secret of his alarm lay in the fact that 
 the social conventions of foreign society 
 had acquired in his mind the force of 
 rules of morality. He shared the feelings 
 of the delightful lady who remarked that 
 in her opinion it was immodest to go 
 abroad without gloves. Nothing is more 
 common than this confusion of mind, 
 and one of the advantages of genuinely 
 American society is that it dissipates such 
 illusions. The Lady Mavourneen, who 
 was familiar with the finest society both 
 in France and England, said that the re- 
 
spect shown to women in this country was 
 so sincere and universal that she should 
 not hesitate to cross the continent alone. 
 Why, then, should the Easy Chair's friend 
 have been troubled that young women 
 went unattended to the concert at the 
 Academy ? Every man there would have 
 been their instant defender against insult. 
 But they went, and they were allowed to 
 go, because the insult was more improb- 
 able than fire, while the defence was sure. 
 In what is called distinctively society 
 in large cities there is a great deal of the 
 feeling evinced by the observer at the 
 Academy. There is abundant regard for 
 misplaced conventions. Young women 
 in Vienna and Paris who go unattended 
 are generally working-women or another 
 class, and as working-women are not re- 
 spected by Lovelace and Lothario, they 
 are exposed to insult. To avoid the 
 chance of insult, therefore, a young wom- 
 an must have an escort in a partially 
 civilized city like Paris or Vienna. But 
 no presumption lies against any woman 
 in America. Her self-respect and self- 
 reliance are unquestioned, and American 
 
women, old and young, are perpetually 
 passing in railway trains by day and night 
 from one" part of the country to another, 
 unsuspected and unsuspecting. 
 
 In a country where social classes are 
 not permanent or rigidly defined, as hith- 
 erto in America they have not been, the 
 daughter as well as the son of the house 
 contemplates the possibility of self-sup- 
 port. In such a country the harem view 
 of the sphere and occupation of wom- 
 an, however modified, wholly disappears. 
 The word "obey" gradually vanishes 
 from the marriage service, or is smoothed 
 away by interpretation. The ideal of 
 woman changes, and, as we think in Amer- 
 ica, improves. All the excellent qualities 
 which the London writer attributes to 
 the American girl spring from this change, 
 from social conditions which foster self- 
 respect and self-reliance. The demand 
 of the suffrage, the rise of the woman's 
 college, the challenge to the great univer- 
 sities to lift up their gates that woman 
 may come in, show no decline of the fem- 
 inine ideal of woman, but its transfor- 
 mation from the fancy of a goddess or a 
 
toy into the old Scriptural conception of; 
 the helpmeet. 
 
 The British matron, as she scrutinizes 
 what she may hold to be an invader of 
 her realm, will not find that in any femi- 
 nine quality or grace, even to the most 
 exquisite taste in dress, or deUcate charm 
 of manner, or essential refinement of 
 mind, Pocahontas defers to Boadicea. 
 Where the American imitates the English 
 or any other, as when the English girl 
 affects the French, she must suffer from 
 the inevitable inferiority of all imitation. 
 When her self-reliance is boisterous, or 
 without tact and fine perception, Daisy 
 Miller will be as crude and distasteful as 
 Lady Clara Vere de Vere is heartless and 
 cruel. But Rosalind and Viola and Be- 
 atrice, and Tennyson's Eleanore and Ade- 
 line and Margaret, meet in the American 
 a sister of the same lineage as their own, 
 bred in an atmosphere most fortunate 
 and fair. 
 
ANNUS MIRABILIS. 
 
 | HIS year, the centenary of 
 the opening of our nation- 
 al constitutional epoch, will 
 be a Washington year. As 
 on a saint's day there is a 
 special service in his honor, so through 
 all this year there will be especial remem- 
 brance of Washington, and natural self- 
 congratulation that in him we have a 
 glory beyond that of other nations. The 
 last striking tribute to him is also most 
 timely, for it is that of Mr. Bryce in his 
 " American Commonwealth," whose pub- 
 lication happily coincided with the open- 
 ing of this annus mirabilis. He says, 
 in speaking of Hamilton's death, " One 
 cannot note the disappearance of this 
 brilliant figure, to Europeans the most 
 interesting in the earlier history of the 
 republic, without the remark that his 
 countrymen seem to have never, either 
 in his lifetime or afterward, duly recog- 
 
nized his splendid gifts." The explana- 
 tion of this seeming want of appreciation 
 is, however, very characteristic, for it lies 
 in the instinctive American regard for 
 morality. 
 
 Mr. Bryce touches it when he pro- 
 ceeds : " Washington, indeed, is a far 
 more perfect character. Washington 
 stands alone and unapproachable, like a 
 snow-peak rising above its fellows into 
 the clear air of morning, with a dignity, 
 constancy, and purity which have made 
 him the ideal type of civic virtue to suc- 
 ceeding generations. No greater ben- 
 efit could have befallen the republic 
 than to have such a type set from the 
 first before the eye and mind of the 
 people." That benefit is incalculable, 
 and it will be acknowledged with every 
 form of stately ceremonial and of elo- 
 quent enthusiasm during this year. 
 
 The great event of 1789 was Wash- 
 ington's inauguration as President, and 
 it is the most important event in the 
 annals of the city. The cosmopolitan 
 character of the city from its settlement 
 and in the early time of the little town, 
 
i 7 6 
 
 when it was said that more than a 
 dozen different languages were spoken 
 in its streets, down to the present, when 
 it is the third or fourth city in size upon 
 the globe, has always checked the sen- 
 timent of local pride which is so great 
 a force in the development of a com- 
 munity. Among all the original States 
 New York has seemed to care least for its 
 significant events and its great men. 
 That the Revolution was tactically large- 
 ly a contest for the control of the Hud- 
 son, that the contest culminated at Sar- 
 atoga, and that the new national order 
 which resulted from the Revolution be- 
 gan in the city of New York, are facts 
 which are known, indeed, but which have 
 not grown into a proud tradition univer- 
 sally cherished and constantly repeated 
 and celebrated like similar great events 
 in New England. 
 
 This year, however, the last event, 
 Washington's inauguration, will be the 
 occasion of a great national observance. 
 The President and cabinet, Senators and 
 Representatives and judges, distinguish- 
 ed delegates from every State, will at- 
 
tend, and there will be religious and ora- 
 torical exercises and civil and military 
 display. One fact, indeed, invests such a 
 celebration with especial triumph. It is 
 that while the government which was 
 organized a hundred years ago was un- 
 precedented in form and wholly untried 
 in the experience of states, and while it 
 was regarded with interest but with in- 
 credulity as essentially unequal to the 
 great shocks of fate to which other 
 states have succumbed, it has passed, 
 within the century, not only unshaken 
 but strengthened, through the most tre- 
 mendous and prolonged ordeal to which 
 such a government could be submitted. 
 
 Chief among its extraordinary good 
 fortunes at its organization was that of 
 the presence of a man without whom at 
 that time its establishment would have 
 been hardly possible. The French Min- 
 ister at the time of the inauguration 
 wrote home to his government that it 
 was the universal confidence in Wash- 
 ington which secured assent to the Con- 
 stitution. John Lamb, who was unfriend- 
 ly to the Constitution, told Hamilton in 
 
i 7 8 
 
 Wall Street that only his faith in Wash- 
 ington overcame his repugnance to it. 
 The hour had plainly come for union, 
 but except for the man it is probable 
 that union would not then have been ef- 
 fected. 
 
 The value of Washington to his coun- 
 try transcends that of any other man to 
 any land. Take him from the Revolu- 
 tion, and all the fervor of the Sons of 
 Liberty would seem to have been a 
 wasted flame. Take him from the con- 
 stitutional epoch, and the essential con- 
 dition of union, personal confidence in a 
 leader, would have been wanting. Frank- 
 lin, when the work of the Constitutional 
 Convention was completed, said that un- 
 til then he had not been sure whether 
 the sun depicted above the President's 
 chair was a rising or a setting sun, but 
 now his doubt was solved. Yet it was 
 not the symbolic figure above the chair, 
 it was the man within it, which should 
 have forecast the great result to that sa- 
 gacious mind. 
 
 From the moment that independence 
 was secured no man in America saw more 
 
clearly the necessity of national union, or 
 defined more wisely and distinctly the 
 reasons for it. He is the chief illustra- 
 tion in a popular government of a great 
 leader who was not also a great orator. 
 Perhaps that fact gave a solid force to 
 his influence by depriving all his expres- 
 sions of a rhetorical character, and pre- 
 serving in them throughout a simplic- 
 ity and moderation which deepened the 
 impression of his comprehensive sagac- 
 ity. He was felt as both an inspiring 
 and ^sustaining power in the prelimi- 
 nary movement for union, and by nat- 
 ural selection he was both President 
 of the Convention and the head of the 
 government which it instituted. John 
 Adams was Vice-President, and Hamil- 
 ton and Jefferson were in the cabinet. 
 After Washington himself, they were 
 the three most eminent figures in the 
 country. But it is not possible to con- 
 ceive any one of them organizing and 
 establishing the new system without 
 controversy which would have rent it 
 asunder. 
 
 Indeed this year commemorates the 
 
i8o 
 
 auspicious beginning of the most ar- 
 duous task which devolved upon Wash- 
 ington, and which transcends that to 
 which any other man in history has 
 been called. Yet how little in his per- 
 formance of that task his countrymen 
 would change ! During the course of 
 the century they have been divided 
 largely upon views of the Constitution 
 and upon principles of administration, 
 and have engaged in a long and mo- 
 mentous civil war, but they would cer- 
 tainly not desire that any chief act of 
 Washington's administration should have 
 been other than it was. IK- aeled with- 
 out precedent, but with the calm maj- 
 esty of rectitude, and although the ser- 
 pent of party spirit struck at him as he; 
 retired, no honest, partisan to-day either 
 distrusts his motives or doubts his wis- 
 dom. 
 
 It is a benignant fortune that so great 
 a celebration as that of this year is an 
 act of homage to so great a man. It 
 was his happiness to know the affec- 
 tionate reverence in which he was held. 
 The memoirs and letters of the time 
 
t8i 
 
 show iii.-ii Washington'! \\ 1 1 m.t ,-i tardy 
 
 and posthumous iM'eatness, hut th;it those 
 wlio knew him best honored him most, 
 and I hat Amei i< .1 wa . < n ,< i< >US o| I lie 
 woi I h of her chief cit i/en. ( )n< < ! i In- 
 
 mo i n iking contemporary personal trib- 
 utes to him is that of John Hi i naid, the 
 
 Knvlish actor, who was in tin, <>untry 
 .it the close of the last century, ;md who 
 
 met Washington near tin- end ol In, 
 
 liie. l>y chance and without knowing him, 
 
 neai Mount Veinon. 
 
 I',, i naid had paid a visit to a fri< nd 
 upon the banks <>l tin- l'otma . and u.i . 
 
 K turning upon horseback to Alexandria 
 
 Ix'lund a chaise vvhi li seemed to he in 
 diliK nil ies, and was present Iv n|set. The 
 :K i"t listened to the rescue simnltan.- 
 
 on ,ly with anol her hoi ,eman, and alh i 
 some exei I i< >ns i IM-V su< < ceded in pl.u ni" 
 I I,, (.< < 1 1 p.i nl , <.| I h<- < 1 1. 1 1 ,< .1 man and 
 
 \\< in. in, who were fortunately not in jnn-d 
 
 in upon I IK ir way. After t IM-II de 
 part lire I lei nard's ompanin poliiely of- 
 leied to dust his < oat, ami in returning 
 Ilie favoi I lei naid made a < lose sin vey ol 
 his < ompanioii. 
 
11 He was a tall, erect, well-made man, evi- 
 dently advanced in years, but who seemed to 
 have retained all the vigor and elasticity re- 
 sulting from a life of temperance and exercise. 
 His dress was a blue coat buttoned to his chin 
 and buckskin breeches. Though the instant he 
 took off his hat I could not avoid the recogni- 
 tion of familiar lineaments which, indeed, I 
 was in the habit of seeing on every sign-post 
 and on every fire-place still I failed to iden- 
 tify him." 
 
 Washington recognized Bernard as the 
 actor whom he had " had the pleasure of 
 seeing perform " in Philadelphia during 
 the previous winter, and after some pleas- 
 ant chat an invitation to ride with him 
 to Mount Vernon, only a mile distant, re- 
 vealed to Bernard the name of his com- 
 panion. He was profoundly impressed, 
 and upon reaching Mount Vernon they 
 found that Mrs. Washington was indis- 
 posed, and the General ordered refresh- 
 ments into a little parlor looking upon 
 the Potomac. 
 
 At some length his guest describes the 
 commanding presence of Washington, in 
 which " a feeling of awe and veneration 
 stole over you." During a conversation 
 
of an hour and a half " he touched on 
 every topic that I brought before him 
 with an even current of good sense, if he 
 embellished it with little wit or verbal 
 elegance." 
 
 " When I mentioned to him the difference I 
 perceived between the inhabitants of New Eng- 
 land and of the Southern States, he remarked : 
 ' I esteem those people greatly ; they are the 
 stamina of the Union, and its greatest benefr.c- 
 tors. They are continually spreading them- 
 selves, too, to settle and enlighten less favored 
 quarters. Dr. Franklin is a New-Englander.' 
 When I remarked that his observations were 
 flattering to my country, he replied, with great 
 good-humor : ' Yes, yes, Mr. Bernard, but I 
 consider your country the cradle of free prin- 
 ciples, not their arm - chair. Liberty in Eng- 
 land is a sort of idol ; people are bred up in 
 the belief and love of it, but see little of its 
 doings. They walk about freely, but then it 
 is between high walls ; and the error of its 
 government was in supposing that after a por- 
 tion of their subjects had crossed the sea to 
 live upon a common, they would permit their 
 friends at home to build up those walls about 
 them.' 
 
 "A black coming in at this moment with a 
 jug of spring-water, I could not repress a smile, 
 which the General at once interpreted. ' This 
 
may seem a contradiction,' he continued, ' but 
 I think you must perceive that it is neither a 
 crime nor an absurdity. When we profess, as 
 our fundamental principle, that liberty is the 
 inalienable right of every man, we do not in- 
 clude madmen or idiots ; liberty in their hands 
 would become a scourge. Till the mind of the 
 slave has been educated to perceive what are 
 the obligations of a state of freedom, and not. 
 to confound a man's with a brute's, the gift 
 would insure its abuse. We might as well be 
 asked to pull down our old warehouses before 
 trade has increased to demand enlarged new 
 ones. Both houses and slaves were bequeathed 
 to us by Europeans, and time alone can change 
 them an event, sir, which, you may believe 
 me, no man desires more heartily than I do. 
 Not only do I pray for it on the score of human 
 dignity, but I can clearly foresee that nothing 
 but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate 
 the existence of our Union, by consolidating it 
 in a common bond of principle.' " 
 
 At the end of a century which has 
 vindicated his view so nobly and so com- 
 pletely it is pleasant to read these words, 
 and iri this new and vivid glimpse of our 
 Washington to find only a stronger title 
 to our veneration. Bernard recalls the 
 words of De Chastellux : 
 
i8 5 
 
 " The great characteristic of Washington Li- 
 the perfect union which seems to subsist be- 
 tween his moral and physical qualities, so that 
 the selection of one would enable you to judge 
 of all the rest. If you are presented with med- 
 als of Trajan or Caesar, the features will lead 
 you to inquire the proportions of their persons ; 
 but if you should discover in a heap of ruins 
 the leg or arm of an antique Apollo, you would 
 not be curious about the other parts, but con- 
 tent yourself with the assurance that they were 
 all conformable to those of a god." 
 
STATUES IN CENTRAL PARK 
 
 IN 1889. 
 
 E Easy Chair recently spoke 
 of the statue of Longfellow 
 which has been erected in 
 the city of Portland, where 
 he was born, and " Charter 
 Oak," writing from Connecticut, asks 
 why there is as yet no statue of Wash- 
 ington Irving in Central Park, the beau- 
 tiful sylvan resort of his native city of 
 New York. It is a question which the 
 Easy Chair has already asked, and which 
 must constantly suggest itself in the spa- 
 cious public grounds which are becom- 
 ing the most comprehensive of Walhallas. 
 The London Times calls Westminster 
 Abbey "our Walhalla," meaning that of 
 England only. But the pleasure-ground 
 of New York is truly a Pantheon. It is 
 dedicated to all the gods except its own. 
 With unwonted metropolitan modesty 
 the city honors especially those who are 
 not children of New York. 
 
i8 7 
 
 Webster is there, but not John Jay ; 
 Shakespeare and Scott and Burns and 
 Dante and Halleck even, but not Irving. 
 It is grotesque that a space set apart in 
 New York for recreation, and decorated 
 with marbles and bronzes commemo- 
 rating illustrious men, and among them 
 authors and statesmen, should still lack 
 a fitting memorial of the greatest states- 
 man and the greatest author who were 
 born in the city. Webster's famous pane- 
 gyric of Jay, that when the ermine of the 
 Chief-Justiceship fell upon his shoulders 
 it touched nothing that was not as pure 
 as itself, suggests that a statue of John 
 Jay might be of peculiar service as an 
 object of admonitory meditation in the 
 bowery seclusion of a city that more re- 
 cently contemplated a statue to Tweed. 
 In Couture's picture of the " Decadence 
 of the Romans," behind the luxurious 
 and voluptuous groups of intoxicated 
 revellers in the foreground stand in sad 
 severity the statues of the elder Romans 
 surveying the scene. In the lofty aspect 
 of Jay, filling with calm dignity the seclu- 
 sion of some winding walk, would there 
 
be felt amazement and reproof? Is it to 
 escape the sculptured rebuke of contrast 
 with the civic heroes of to-day that it is 
 not seen, and that the eye of the student 
 who reflects that the city of New York 
 has contributed few very great names to 
 our history seeks in vain the statue of 
 John Jay in Central Park ? 
 
 Irving has every claim to this especial 
 distinction. It is his kindly genius which 
 made the annals of New Amsterdam the 
 first work of our creative literature, and 
 which invested the great river of New 
 York with imperishable romance. Un- 
 doubtedly he wrote those annals in char- 
 acters of rollicking fun, and even over 
 the heroism of the doughty Peter Stuy- 
 vesant he has cast a humorous halo. But 
 not all our authors combined are so iden- 
 tified with New York as Irving. His ear- 
 lier squib of "Salmagundi" treats "the 
 town " with an arch memory of the Spec- 
 tator loitering in London, and his spell 
 was such that in a later day Dennett, in 
 the Nation, happily nicknamed the work 
 of the talent which he had quickened the 
 Knickerbocker literature. 
 
The same genius in a tenderer mood 
 colored the shores of the Hudson with 
 the softest hues of legend. The banks 
 at Tarrytown stretching backward to 
 Sleepy Hollow, the broad water of the 
 Tappan Zee, the airy heights of the 
 summer Katskill, were mere landscape, 
 pleasing scenery only, until Irving suf- 
 fused them with the rosy light of story, 
 and gave them the human association 
 which is the crowning charm of land- 
 scape. In many a scene a hundred moun- 
 tain ranges survey the lower land far 
 reaching to the ocean. The scene is 
 grand, but nameless, bare of tradition, 
 and forgotten. But where 
 
 " The mountains look on Marathon, 
 And Marathon looks on the sea," 
 
 the eye and the heart are enchanted with 
 the story of Greece and its heroic human 
 associations. 
 
 In the first century of our literature, 
 which is ending, very few of our authors 
 have laid this legendary spell upon Amer- 
 ican scenes as Irving did upon the Hud- 
 son. They have not much endeared the 
 
country to the popular imagination, like 
 Burns and Scott in Scotland, where 
 every hill and stream and bird and flow- 
 er is reflected individually and fondly in 
 tale and song. The Easy Chair once met 
 at Niagara a young Scotchman who had 
 come straight from his native land, and 
 at every turn and glimpse upon Goat Isl- 
 and and along the banks of the river 
 he fairly bubbled and murmured with 
 the music of Burns and the other poets 
 about Scottish streams and scenes, of 
 which he was reminded at every step. 
 So in his " Poems of Places" Longfellow 
 reveals the charm which literature im- 
 parts to scenery a charm which he il- 
 lustrates in his " Nuremberg " and " Bel- 
 fry at Bruges," and in his " Lost Youth," 
 with its beautiful pictures of Portland, a 
 poem which probably gives to a larger 
 number of persons a more distinct and 
 pleasing interest in that delightful city 
 than anything else connected with it. 
 
 Irving is the magician who has cast 
 this glamour upon New York, the roar- 
 ing mart of trade, the humming hive of 
 industry. He shows us in these crowded 
 
and hurried streets the leisurely forms of 
 old Dutch burghers, their comely wives 
 and buxom daughters, and their tranquil 
 existence. Upon this very spot, which 
 thus becomes a palimpsest, one life over- 
 writing another, he awakens a romantic 
 interest which gives it an endless fasci- 
 nation. He is thus a universal benefac- 
 tor. 
 
 His Rip Van Winkle, indolent but 
 kindly vagabond that he is, asserts the 
 charm of a loitering life in the woods and 
 fields, against all the tremendous energy 
 and lucrative devotion to dollars, the 
 overpowering crowd and crushing com- 
 petition, of the whirring emporium. It 
 is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or 
 justify him as a moral exemplar. Pax, 
 good Zeal-in-the-land Busy ! But how 
 soothing, as we mop our brows in the ar- 
 dent struggle, and waste our lives in the 
 furious accumulation of the means of liv- 
 ing, to behold that figure stretched by 
 the brook, or pleasing the children, or 
 sauntering homeward at sunset ! Other 
 figures allure us, but still he holds his 
 place. The new writers create their 
 
worlds. The new standards, another lit- 
 erary spirit, a fresh impulse, appear all 
 around us. But still Rip Van Winkle 
 lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of 
 the imagination, the first distinct crea- 
 tion of our literature, the constant, un- 
 conscious satirist of our life. 
 
 The edicts of Fortune are caprices. 
 Halleck, who sang of Marco Bozzaris, 
 has his statue in the Park. Bryant still 
 awaits his, and Irving, first of all, is with- 
 out his memorial. The Germans have 
 justly honored Humboldt in our Wal- 
 halla, the Scotch have commemorated 
 Burns, the Italians have given to it Maz- 
 zini. The Puritan Pilgrim, ancestor of 
 distinctive America, New England in 
 bronze, is properly there. But where, 
 asked the thoughtful child, reading the ep- 
 itaphs in the graveyard, where be the 
 bad people buried ? Those whom the 
 statues recall are all well and wisely hon- 
 ored in this most cosmopolitan of coun- 
 tries and of cities. But where, amid Ger- 
 mans and Italians and Scotchmen and 
 great New-Englanders where be the 
 New-Yorkers ? 
 
THE GRAND TOUR. 
 
 ?OBODY could have written 
 this book a London Re- 
 view recently said of Long- 
 fellow's " Hyperion " who 
 could have reached the 
 Rhine in a few hours. It needed the 
 ocean, thought the critic, to make the 
 Rhine and Switzerland remote and ro- 
 mantic to the poet. But he forgot " Childe 
 Harold," a book written by an English- 
 man, which has given to the Rhine and 
 Italy a more romantic glamour for John 
 Bull upon his travels than any book he 
 reads. It is not the distance, it is the 
 imagination susceptible to association 
 which is the secret. 
 
 The traveller of to-day is not likely to 
 be affected as his father was by the mel- 
 ancholy melody of Byron ; but it is an 
 interesting illustration of the power of 
 his genius that Byron has imposed his 
 interpretation of so many scenes upon 
 
the mind of the modern English and 
 American observer. His view makes 
 Italy, as Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait 
 of John Kemble made Hamlet. If we 
 stand in the Capitol and look at the 
 Dying Gladiator, we must also see " his 
 young barbarians all at play" upon the 
 Danube. If at Terni we see the Velino 
 " cleave the wave-worn precipice," the 
 Byronic lines murmur along our lips. 
 As we step into the gondola and glide 
 gently upon the Grand Canal, memory 
 keeps time to the measure of the dip- 
 ping oar with the words whose charm 
 is unexhausted : 
 
 " In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more, 
 And silent rows the songless gondolier,." 
 
 At "a tomb in Arqua," at "Clarens, sweet 
 Clarens," we are still led, like Dante, by 
 the singing guide. The Guide-book is 
 full of him. The travel-books are full of 
 him. He is familiar almost to common- 
 place. Who comes to " Belgium's capi- 
 tal" for the first time without listening 
 for "the sound of revelry"? Who goes 
 to the field of Waterloo remembering 
 
195 
 
 " the unreturning brave," and does not 
 sigh, 
 
 " And Ardennes waves above them her green 
 
 leaves." 
 
 Sitting quietly here in a great land 
 which looks to the future, not to the 
 past, it is pleasant to think of the 
 throngs of travellers who have gone 
 hence for a summer wandering in Eu- 
 rope. Yet so intense is the delight of 
 European travel, so freshly remembered 
 is it when almost another generation of 
 travellers are ready to begin their jour- 
 ney, that the patriarch who goes to the 
 wharf to say farewell to the newer voy- 
 agers looks at them with tenderness and 
 pity, and there is even a sadness in his 
 congratulations, not because they are 
 sailing away, but because he cannot be- 
 lieve that they will find what he found, 
 nor possibly enjoy what he enjoyed. 
 These newer voyagers will see a France 
 and a Switzerland and an Italy ; they 
 will eat oranges at Sorrento, and gaze 
 upon the Mediterranean from Capri, and 
 hear the fisher's song at Amalfi ; but 
 
they will not hear and see through the 
 enchantment of lapsed years. 
 
 In his lively book of travelling letters 
 Dr. Bellows says that he went up the 
 Nile in a steamer of seventy berths. An 
 ancient mariner of the Nile cannot com- 
 prehend it. In a steamer ? With pad- 
 dles or screws whisking the water ? And 
 steam blowing off? Making innumer- 
 able miles a day ? The round trip to 
 Philse in two weeks, or a week? But 
 how could you see Egypt, or feel it ? 
 That slow floating southward upon 
 white wings ; the sinking deeper and 
 farther from the world we knew ; the 
 sense of infinite strangeness and dis- 
 tance ; the weeks passing with no sign 
 of accustomed life ; slowly, one by one, 
 the temples, the tombs ; in the still days 
 the crew dragging the boat along and 
 singing the wild minor refrain ; a voyage 
 of wonder and of dreams is that Egypt 
 to be seen in a steamer ? It is useless to 
 say that you may go in the old way if 
 you choose. You cannot go in the old 
 way, because it is no longer what it was, 
 if there be a newer. You may drive from 
 
i 9 7 
 
 London to Oxford. But is that going 
 by the old English stage-coach when it 
 was the only way, when the guard wound 
 his horn, and the cherry-nosed coachman 
 threw down the ribbons at each relay, 
 and the neat inns stood smiling with 
 open doors, and tra-la-la sped the nimble 
 team by the park gate and the hawthorn 
 hedge ? You may go by sloop from New 
 York to Albany. But is that now the 
 romantic Hudson voyage which it was 
 when it could be made in no other 
 way? 
 
 No sensible ancient mariner will quarrel 
 with all this, nor desire to banish the 
 steamer of seventy berths from the Nile. 
 When he shakes a farewell hand with 
 the youth who are going to run up to 
 Rome by train, and are not going to stop 
 at a certain point upon the Campagna, 
 and run forward to the top of a hill 
 whence they can see far away upon the 
 horizon the faintly outlined dome of St. 
 Peter's and who are not going from 
 Leghorn to Florence through the grape 
 harvest, their carnage heaped with the 
 luscious clusters, but are 'to whiz through 
 
Tuscany in an hour or so, the regret in 
 his tone is not personal or selfish, it is 
 for a whole order of things passed away. 
 
 Such an ancient mariner would, how- 
 ever, be indeed sorry if he supposed that 
 anybody suspected him of a very com- 
 mon and very odious kind of remark, 
 against which he kindly warns all the 
 throngs of travellers of whom mention 
 has been made. The remark in question 
 may be called the capping remark. Thus 
 one traveller says to another as Marco 
 Polo to George Sandys 
 
 " You went to Jerusalem ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " And to Jericho ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " And to the Jordan ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Did you see the white stone on the 
 bottom near where the river flows into 
 the Dead Sea?" 
 
 " Well let me see ! I don't exactly 
 seem to remember that I did precisely 
 see that." 
 
 " Ah !" replies Marco Polo. 
 
 It is a very brief sound, but being- 
 
interpreted it means, " Then, my dear 
 George Sandys, you might just as well 
 not have seen the Jordan at all." Not 
 that the white stone was famous or worth 
 seeing, but that Marco Polo wished .to 
 " rub in '' upon George Sandys's mind 
 the conviction that he, Polo, had seen 
 more than he, Sandys, in the same direc- 
 tion. 
 
 This capping process sometimes leads 
 to very droll results. Young Green heard 
 Gray and Brown comparing their notes 
 of travel. Each was naturally anxious to 
 have seen and done rather more than 
 the other ; but it appeared that each had 
 been in about the same places, and had 
 had very much the same experience. 
 
 " Lago Maggiore is a lovely sheet of 
 water," remarked Gray. 
 
 " Truly exquisite," replied Brown. 
 
 " And Isola Bella is most beautiful," 
 suggested Gray. 
 
 " Dear me ! dear me !" approvingly 
 assented Brown. 
 
 " How high is the statue of San Carlo 
 Borromeo ?" asked Gray. 
 
 " About sixty feet," answered Brown. 
 
" It's a wonderful prospect from his 
 eye," said Gray. 
 
 " Whose eye ?" asked Brown. 
 
 " San Carlo Borrorneo's," replied Gray, 
 whose mind instantly suspected that he 
 had caught the adversary, and who fol- 
 lowed up his advantage vigorously and 
 suddenly. " Of course you went up San 
 Carlo?" 
 
 " Up San Carlo ? You mean the church 
 at" 
 
 " Oh no ! the statue on Lago Mag- 
 giore." 
 
 " Went up the statue ! what do you 
 mean ?" snapped Brown, foreseeing dis- 
 comfiture. 
 
 " Oh ! I thought you probably ktiew," 
 retorted the triumphant Gray, "that the 
 statue is hollow." 
 
 " Oh ! ah ! yes !" returned Brown, in- 
 differently. 
 
 "And you didn't go up?" pressed 
 Gray. 
 
 " Not exactly," feebly rejoined Brown. 
 
 " Nor sit in his nose ?" continued 
 Gray. 
 
 " Not exactly," muttered Brown. 
 
" Nor look out of his eyes ?" said Gray. 
 
 " I thought I wouldn't," murmured 
 Brown, in full retreat. 
 
 "Oh!" smiled Gray, with the air of 
 David holding the head of Goliath by 
 the hair, and displaying it to mankind 
 "oh!" 
 
 Young Green heard all this, and he re- 
 solved that whatever he did not do when 
 he went to Europe, he would at all hazards 
 sit in the nose of San Carlo Borromeo. 
 The next year he came to Lago Maggiore. 
 He saw the statue. He remembered the 
 conversation and his high resolve, and he 
 essayed the deed. It was fearful. He 
 tore his hands; he tore his clothes; he 
 was half suffocated ; and, wedging himself 
 into the nose, he stuck fast, and was only 
 rescued at the peril of his life. When he 
 told Gray afterward, and reminded him 
 of the colloquy with Brown, that expe- 
 rienced traveller laughed until the tears 
 ran down his cheeks. "My dear Green," 
 said he, " I never went up the confounded 
 thing; but it was necessary to take Brown 
 down somehow, and I employed the good 
 saint for the purpose." He laughed again 
 
to tears ; but Mr. Green soberly resolved 
 that he would eschew the capping talk of 
 travel. And he chose the wiser course. 
 
 The truth is that Green should not 
 trust too much the tales, nor indeed the 
 regrets, of the ancient mariners. 
 
 " For travellers tell no idle tales, 
 But fools at home believe them." 
 
 Certainly when this one remarks that 
 he feels in saying farewell that young 
 Green will never see the Europe that he 
 saw, he has not the remotest idea of dim- 
 ming his bright hope nor of asserting an 
 advantage. What is it, indeed, but a way 
 of saying that he is no longer the same 
 man he was ? If he were, what would be 
 the gain of travel ? It is not only an en- 
 largement of the scenery of the mind, not 
 only a richer and more various memory 
 that he has acquired, but a riper expe- 
 rience. He has grown wiser ; aad per- 
 haps all that he feels when he shakes 
 Green's parting hand is that Green is not 
 so wise as he will one day be. 
 
EASY DOES IT, GUVNER." 
 
 'ICKENS'S Rogue Rider- 
 hood, who says " Easy does 
 it, guvner," was a very prac- 
 tical man. But there is no 
 motto which is more sus- 
 ceptible of perversion. Mr. Seward said 
 the same thing in his last great speech. 
 " I early learned from Jefferson that in 
 politics we must do what we can, not 
 what we would." It is not only plausible, 
 but it is true. Yet its truth can be most 
 readily abused to defeat everything for 
 which it is urged. 
 
 " ' I weep for you/ the walrus said ; 
 
 ' I deeply sympathize.' 
 With tears and sobs he sorted out 
 
 Those of the largest size, 
 Holding his pocket-handkerchief 
 Before his streaming eyes." 
 
 It was necessary that the walrus should 
 eat, and it was very sad that the oysters 
 
should satisfy the necessity. But it is 
 obvious that wicked walruses who have 
 no intention whatever of not eating oys- 
 ters would sob aloud with heart-rending 
 vehemence as proof of a virtue which 
 they do not possess. The foes of progress 
 are always anxious that its friends should 
 go easily. " Easy does it, guvner." But 
 meanwhile they are anything but easy in 
 obstructing. In the race, the sly gentle- 
 man who bets on Tom whispers confiden- 
 tially to the jockey who rides Jerry that 
 he had better " go easy." The friends of 
 the saloon hope that the true friends of 
 temperance are aware that the only way 
 of success is to avoid fanaticism. But 
 they omit to hide their bodies as well as 
 their heads, for they are unsparing fanat- 
 ics on their own behalf. 
 
 When Gustavus, in deference to his 
 dear Griselda, promised to begin to re- 
 form the baleful habit of smoking, his 
 Griselda was jocund as the dawn. But 
 at the end of a week she did not observe 
 that there were fewer cigars consumed, 
 and she pleasantly asked him if the good 
 resolution had escaped his memory. " By 
 
no means," he answered ; " quite the con- 
 trary. But you remember what Rogue 
 Riderhood said, ' Easy does it, guvner.' 
 We must move warily upon the intrench- 
 ed enemy, dearest Grizzle. Remember 
 that Rome was not built in a day." Gri- 
 selda remembered faithfully. But still 
 the cigars continued, and upon a further 
 gentle remonstrance Gustavus rejoined : 
 " Certainly ; but we must be reasonable. 
 There are many steps, my dear Griselda. 
 In siege operations the great masters of 
 war approach by parallels, after making 
 ample and thorough preparation. That 
 is what I am doing. I am beginning to 
 prepare to begin. Easy does it, you know. 
 Don't forget Rome." 
 
 Still Gustavus smoked, and still Gri- 
 selda waited, and at the end of six months 
 she asked with a smile how far he had 
 advanced in abandoning the habit of 
 smoking. " Dear Grizzle," he answered, 
 " you remember the weeds that sprang 
 up and soon withered because they had 
 no depth of soil. I wish my reform of 
 this naughty habit to be well rooted, that 
 it may long endure. None of your spas- 
 
modic virtue, your superficial goodness, 
 for me ! Great reforms, even in personal 
 habits, my dear Mrs. Gustavus, cannot be 
 accomplished in a day. Even Rome was 
 not built in that time. I am working for 
 great results, to which all my tastes and 
 habits must conform. I must lay the 
 foundations broad and deep. Easy does 
 it, my rose-bud." 
 
 Gustavus continues to smoke, and Easy 
 continues to do it. But there is another 
 saying quite as wise as that of Rogue 
 Riderhood, which exhorts him who puts 
 his hand to the plough not to look back. 
 The trouble with Riderhood's apothegm 
 is that it supplies an endless excuse for 
 not doing it. If the habit is too strong, 
 and will not budge, you can soothe your 
 conscience and make the most plausible 
 of pleas by insisting that human nature 
 and long custom and uniform tradition 
 and the honest doubt whether smoking 
 is, after all, injurious, must all be care- 
 fully considered. That is what Dickens 
 also calls the great art of how not to do 
 it. " My son, if you wish a thing done, 
 do it yourself ; if not, send," said the 
 
wise father; and the pioneers, the men 
 without whose one idea and uncompro- 
 mising energy and conciliation nothing 
 would be accomplished, say with Sum^ 
 ner, " There is but one side," and with 
 Cato, " Delenda est Carthago." 
 
 It is true that everything cannot be 
 done at once, but something must be 
 done all the time ; and you will observe 
 that it is not when the work is advanc- 
 ing, but when it stops or goes backward, 
 that we hear the familiar wisdom of the 
 Rogue that Easy does it. That is what 
 makes it a suspicious saying. " What are 
 you doing, sir?" thundered the master 
 to the boy. "Nothing, sir," replied the 
 frightened pupil. "Just as I thought, 
 sir. Don't you know that your business 
 is to do something?" When a man says 
 " Easy does it," he may be doing all that 
 he can but the immense probability, the 
 almost absolute certainty, is that he is 
 doing nothing, or, like the amiable Gus- 
 tavus, he is " beginning to prepare to be- 
 gin." 
 
SISTE, VIATOR. 
 
 is still very difficult to dis- 
 cover where the bad people 
 are buried. The cemeteries 
 are still symbolically white 
 with monuments to the de- 
 parted. Shylock and Ralph Nickleby are 
 still, upon their tombstones, the most 
 respected of deceased citizens. Here lies 
 Clytemnestra, a model of the wifely virt- 
 ues, whom an inconsolable spouse de- 
 plores. Beneath this marble, in the tran- 
 quil hope of a joyful resurrection, repose 
 the remains of lago, who kept the noise- 
 less tenor of his way. Beyond sleeps 
 Solomon, most faithful of husbands ; and 
 under this turf of buttercups and daisies 
 lie Paris and Lovelace, arcades ambo, too 
 early lost. 'Tis pathetic to reflect how 
 much worthier is the world under-ground 
 than that which still cumbers its surface ; 
 and if we, whose lives are indifferent 
 honest, had only had the good fortune 
 
to die a century ago, our memories would 
 by this time have been upon our tomb- 
 stones a very odor of sanctity to the 
 sense of the age which knows us, per- 
 haps, but too well. 
 
 In one of his terrible inscriptions sug- 
 gested for the monuments of the Georges, 
 Thackeray says, " He left an example for 
 youth and for age to avoid. He never 
 did well by man or by woman." Has 
 there been only one such George in the 
 world ? And if more, and in every age, 
 in what cemetery have you found their 
 epitaphs? Catiline was a fascinating and 
 accomplished man. He had many fol- 
 lowers, and if his political views and proj- 
 ects were open to differences of opinion, 
 he was certainly well-mannered. Has 
 there been but one Catiline in history? 
 Or is he confined wholly to a public 
 sphere? Cicero described him as "a 
 corrupter of youth," and no one has 
 denied it. Where is Catiline buried? If 
 you sought his grave by that epitaph, 
 where would you find it ? Is there no 
 corrupter of youth now? Have there 
 been none within the last century? None, 
 
if you may trust the epitaphs. How long 
 will you abuse our patience, O Catiline, 
 and be annually buried, like Cato the 
 Censor, with crosses of white camellias 
 laid upon your coffin, and wreaths of im- 
 mortelles hung upon the weeping effigy 
 of Virtue which guards your sleep? 
 
 But because a man was brutal and 
 coarse and cruel in his life, must we needs 
 insist upon it when he is gone ? When 
 Mawworm leaves us, must we write upon 
 his grave, he lying below defenceless, 
 " Hie jacet a hypocrite " ? When old 
 Sathanas departs to a sphere of light 
 and truth, shall we carve upon his mon- 
 ument, " Father of lies " ? Is it manly ? 
 Shall we have no mercy ? Do we really 
 know any man ; and shall charity be for- 
 gotten ? To be human is to be frail ; and 
 is not the fact that we must die at all, of 
 which the grave is proof, itself sufficient 
 comment upon our weakness? Here lies 
 Colonel Newcome tender, generous, 
 noble, child-like heart ! Shall we add 
 that he was credulous and ignorant ? 
 Dear Uncle Toby is in the next grave. 
 Shall we shout in marble, " Siste, viator, 
 
contemplate his foibles " ? Sacred to the 
 memory of Samuel Pickwick. Is the in- 
 scription incomplete if we do not chisel 
 beneath it, " A wind - bag pricked by 
 Death " ? 
 
 Epitaphs are written more forcibly than 
 upon tombstones. When old Silenus dies, 
 and the white camellias and the lilies-of- 
 the-valley and the rose-buds are strewn 
 upon his bier, and the "universally la- 
 mented " is cut upon the monument, 
 the satire is pathetic, but it is slight. 
 But when the bloated old debauchee is 
 cautiously and forgivingly praised in the 
 papers, and everybody solemnly pretends 
 not to know what everybody knows that 
 everybody else does know, it is a sign 
 not of charity, but of public demorali- 
 zation. Catiline corrupts youth by his 
 example. Then his own offences bring 
 him to a sudden end, and the news- 
 papers speak of him so deprecatingly, 
 so gingerly, that as a good man being 
 dead yet speaketh, so a bad man being 
 dead yet corrupteth. His evil influ- 
 ence is not suffered to perish with him, 
 but it is cherished and extended and 
 
confirmed, and his death, like his life, 
 demoralizes. 
 
 Dick Turpin no longer rides in jack- 
 boots upon Hounslow Heath, stopping 
 my Lord Bishop and the Right Honor- 
 able the Earl of Garter ; and no longer 
 stands at the dock, the hero of St. Giles's; 
 and goes no longer to the gallows in a 
 blaze of glory, with a huge nosegay in 
 his button -hole. Richard Turpin is a 
 very different fellow in his costume of 
 to-day, but he is the same Dick of the 
 jack -boots and the heath, this vulgar 
 robber who smirks and is called smart. 
 He drives a fine equipage, and lives luxu- 
 riously, and keeps a harem, and frequents 
 Wall Street, and beats everybody in the 
 game of making money, and spending it 
 profusely and splendidly. He dazzles the 
 eyes of the widow's son, and bewilders 
 his mind. The boy sees the money with 
 which Richard surrounds himself by 
 means which honorable men despise. He 
 hears him called good-humoredly a great 
 rascal, and sees that he buys judges, and 
 steals vast properties, and procures laws 
 to protect him. The boy hears that all 
 
men are fallible, and that some men are 
 no worse than other men, and that money 
 is a fine thing, and honor and truth and 
 respect and all the rest of it are very well, 
 but see what power, what pleasure, what 
 luxury Turpin commands ! Then the 
 poor boy rushes for the same prizes, and 
 fails, and ends in disgrace, the jail, sui- 
 cide. And Dick Turpin tosses a hundred 
 dollars to the boy's mother, and a gener- 
 ous press exclaims, " Not a model man, 
 perhaps ; but what noble generosity ! 
 The friend of the widow and the orphan ! 
 When he dies, how many poor homes 
 will be darkened with grief !" Yes, and 
 the hundred dollars probably pays the 
 widow for her boy. 
 
 It is not difficult to be generous with 
 the money of others. A year ago it was 
 announced that Greed had given forty 
 or fifty thousand dollars to the poor. 
 " There," said the admirers of Turpin, 
 " you may say what you will of Greed. 
 He, too, is not a polished man ; he is not 
 a scholar nor a dainty gentleman ; but he 
 is one of the people ; he is large-hearted 
 and generous. Who else has given fifty 
 
thousand dollars to the poor?" Yes, 
 and who else has stolen five millions ? 
 The politest gentlemen of the highway 
 were notoriously gallant. The Marquis 
 of Goutytoe they compelled to descend 
 from his carriage, and sent the trudging 
 market-woman home in it. They eased 
 the pockets of the Spanish ambassador, 
 and threw a doubloon to the leper hiding 
 behind the hedge. It was a cheap munif- 
 icence. So was Greed's. It was not his 
 fifty thousand dollars, the giving of which 
 caused such a burst of good feeling, and 
 the exclamation, " There now !" It was 
 only a little of the millions that were 
 not his. He gave it to the poor dwellers 
 in tenement-houses, and it was said that 
 there was no wretched hovel to which he 
 did not send a load of coal or a barrel of 
 flour during the winter months. But he 
 took them first from those wretched dens. 
 Somebody paid the taxes that he stole, 
 and it is the poor who at last pay taxes. 
 Where be the bad people buried ? When 
 Turpin dies, we have Greed's opinion of 
 him and his ways gravely paraded in a 
 newspaper. Madame Brinvilliers's opin- 
 
ion of Lucrezia Borgia would be edifying 
 reading ! 
 
 Shall we have no charity, then? and 
 when a man lies dead and defenceless, 
 shall not warfare cease? Warfare may 
 cease ; but should death condone all of- 
 fences? The malignant lover who de- 
 nounced his rival to the Inquisition, and 
 in the very moment of his rival's death 
 by fire himself fell dead shall we write 
 over him, De mortuis? Shall we Romans, 
 whose sons he corrupted, go dumb and 
 sorrowing behind the corpse of Catiline ? 
 When a bad man dies, let us say that he 
 was bad. Although he was very rich and 
 very splendid, shall we remember only 
 that he gave in charity one quarter of 
 one per cent, upon the amount of his 
 thefts ? The Italian brigand chief, when 
 his band had slaughtered the travellers, 
 said, " There are twelve of us, and we will 
 share equally ; but the first equal share 
 shall be for the mother of God." When 
 we tell his story, shall we see only that 
 share ? 
 
CHRISTENDOM vs. CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 is remarkable that what is 
 called the practical sense 
 of Christendom virtually 
 rejects the Christian ideals 
 as impracticable. Its high- 
 est ideal is obedience to the Divine will, 
 and its instinct, therefore, should repre- 
 sent the religious man as the perfec- 
 tion of vigorous manhood. The more 
 manly, the finer the bloom of health, the 
 sounder the body for the sound and puri- 
 fied mind, the truer and more satisfac- 
 tory the type, the more symmetrically 
 revealed the Christian man. This is the 
 simple and natural ideal among living 
 men of unthwarted and normal Christian 
 excellence. 
 
 But so little is this the fact that the 
 oldest traditions of Christian art depict 
 the founder of Christianity Himself not 
 as a blooming man, not as a figure of the 
 inward and outward health that proceeds 
 
inevitably from complete and absolute 
 conformity to the Divine will, but as a 
 wan and wasted personality plainly worst- 
 ed by the world. This conception ex- 
 tends to the constant and organized con- 
 trol of the Church, and the general feel- 
 ing of Christendom regards the ministers 
 of its religion either as official person- 
 ages or as excluded from actual knowl- 
 edge of life ; not masters of the arena, 
 but professionally unfit to cope with the 
 world. 
 
 It may, indeed, be said that the tradi- 
 tions of Christian art show a misappre- 
 hension of the essential character of the 
 Christian faith. But however that may 
 be, it is certainly true that these tradi- 
 tions do not misrepresent the general 
 conception of Christianity which is pro- 
 fessed by those who practically reject its 
 ideals. Here goes Solomon Gunnybags 
 to Christian worship on Sunday morn- 
 ing. He " abashiates " himself in his 
 pew, and his confession that he is a mis- 
 erable sinner is so sonorous and impres- 
 sive that the hearer sighs sympatheti- 
 cally with Solomon's consciousness of the 
 
enormous burden of wrong -doing that 
 he carries. 
 
 Now what is Solomon doing in his 
 pew? He is solemnly professing con- 
 fidence in and reverence for certain 
 principles of faith and conduct, not only 
 as lofty in themselves, but as absolutely 
 essential to his soul's salvation. Then, 
 unless the whole universe is a farce, and 
 religion and the soul impostures, they 
 are the most practical and practicable 
 of all possible principles, because other- 
 wise the soul's salvation could not be 
 made by beneficent Omnipotence depend- 
 ent upon fidelity to them. But if some 
 attendant spirit should say to Solomon 
 Gunnybags, as he w r alks home with the 
 happy consciousness of duty done, " Sol- 
 omon, the golden rule and the Chris- 
 tian religion forbid you to ' unload ' 
 upon David the stock that you believe 
 to be very shaky," he would unques- 
 tionably feel, if he did not say : " Stuff ! 
 Every man for himself. Of course 
 Christianity is an excellent thing, but 
 it doesn't mean that." Gunnybags does 
 not expressly repudiate Christian prin- 
 
ciple as unpractical ; he only believes it 
 to be so. 
 
 The fundamental doctrine of the Chris- 
 tian life is love. The Christian millen- 
 nium is peace. But it is Christendom 
 that maintains the vast standing ar- 
 mies ; and when the International Peace 
 Congress meets in London and pro- 
 poses disarmament, the good - natured 
 reply of Christendom is, " Well yes 
 perhaps some time," with a smile of 
 amused incredulity, as when a child se- 
 riously asks for the moon. Yet this is 
 Christendom, and the Christian princi- 
 ples are entirely familiar, and every Sun- 
 day and saint's day in all the Christian 
 churches we protest that the practice of 
 them is essential to our soul's salvation. 
 Then we wipe our eyes, and smile kindly 
 upon any one who really insists that we 
 should offer the other cheek, and forgive 
 seventy times seven. Oh no, we say; that 
 is an eccentric view. No man in this 
 world that is, in Christendom can af- 
 ford to allow himself to be imposed upon. 
 If we don't look out for number one, who 
 will take charge of that precious numeral? 
 
So it is that on some bright July day, 
 looking in imagination upon the respect- 
 able Universal Peace Congress in the 
 Hotel Metropole in London, and hear- 
 ing the Bishop of Durham offer a reso- 
 lution for international arbitration, and 
 denouncing the folly, the waste, the woe 
 and wickedness and wrong of war, we 
 hear also, not the immediate and in- 
 stinctive assent of Christendom, but its 
 wistful prayer and half-despairing hope 
 that some time Christianity may be found 
 to be practicable, and something more 
 than a pretty dream. Yet is there any- 
 thing more certain than that the Chris- 
 tendom which actually rejects the Chris- 
 tian ideals and principles as impracti- 
 cable, denounces most savagely those 
 who practically illustrate them, even if 
 they theoretically reject them ? 
 
 The moral of this little sermon is alto- 
 gether Christian, for it is charity. Since 
 Christendom is in practice so universally 
 unchristian, and holds its own funda- 
 mental principles in such practical con- 
 tempt, every member of that vast frater- 
 nity should be very modest in judging 
 
others. Could there be a more radically 
 unchristian figure in human history than 
 Torquemada? If Christianity be what 
 it declares itself to be, the least throb 
 of sound Christian feeling in his bosom 
 would have held his hand. The Inquisi- 
 tion, the fierceness of sects, the religious 
 wars, offensive wars of any kind, are pos- 
 sible only among Christians who hold 
 Christianity to be impracticable. 
 
 Yet when the Easy Chair saw a gentle 
 lady going to morning prayers on a hap- 
 py saint's day, and heard through the 
 open window the murmuring music of 
 the promise when two or three are gath- 
 ered together, and marked during all 
 the day and in daily conduct the unself- 
 ishness, the sympathy, the courtesy, the 
 kindly care of old and young, the faith- 
 ful doing of duty, the nameless charm of 
 lofty character, the Christian ideal was 
 no longer the mirage of an unreached 
 and unattainable oasis in the desert ; it 
 was already come down to earth ; it was 
 here, a little heaven below. 
 
FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW. 
 
 1882. 
 
 beginning his tender and 
 charming paper upon 
 Washington Irving and Ma- 
 caulay, Thackeray recalls 
 the beautiful story of which 
 he was so fond, of Sir Walter Scott's last 
 words to his son-in-law Lockhart : " Be 
 a good man, my dear; be a good man." 
 It was a soft autumnal day. The win- 
 dows were wide open. The low sound of 
 the rippling Tweed stole into the cham- 
 ber. The most renowned and the most 
 widely beloved of living men lay dying, 
 after a career of admiration and adula- 
 tion, and of gratified ambition almost 
 unexampled, and in the clear and serene 
 light of the moment that shows things as 
 they are, the one lesson and moral gar- 
 nered by that marvellous life is spoken 
 in the simple words, " Be a good man, 
 my dear." . . . 
 
There are men whose simplicity and 
 dignity and strength and purity of char- 
 acter, whose sound judgment and su- 
 preme common-sense, dispose of sophis- 
 try and artifice in all relations and pur- 
 suits, as surely and completely as the 
 sun dries the dew. They are gentlemen, 
 because they know other men only as 
 men, touching electrically whatever of 
 manhood there may be in them, and 
 whose contact is a silent and consum- 
 ing rebuke of pretence and falsehood. 
 Whatever his own advantage or attrac- 
 tion or position or grace, the man of this 
 quality takes hold of the reality in other 
 men, man meeting man, as when the 
 grave William of Orange, in his plain 
 serge coat, met the brilliant Philip Sid- 
 ney in his gold -flowered doublet, and 
 neither was troubled by the clothes of 
 the other. 
 
 Such a man lately died. The mingled 
 strength and simplicity and sweetness of 
 his nature, the lofty sense of justice, the 
 tranquil and complete devotion to duty > 
 the large and humane sympathy, not lost 
 in vague philanthropic feeling, but mind- 
 
ful of every detail of relief the sound 
 and steady judgment, the noble indepen- 
 dence of thought and perfect courage of 
 conviction, the blended manliness and 
 modesty of a life which was unstained, 
 and of a character which seemed with- 
 out a flaw, all belonged to what we call 
 the ideal man. 
 
 Passing from college to the counting- 
 room of a great commercial business, his 
 sagacity, energy, and executive power 
 were all brought into successful action. 
 He went to Europe and to the West In- 
 dies, but much of the spirit of trade and 
 many of its practices were uncongenial 
 to him, and he quietly withdrew, despite 
 wonder and affectionate remonstrance, 
 to lead his own life in his own way. By 
 taste and temperament an out-door man, 
 he made his home in the rural neighbor- 
 hood of Boston, busy with country cares 
 and various studies, but interested chiefly 
 in helping other men. He was allied by 
 sympathy more than by much previous 
 actual association with the founders of 
 Brook Farm. But when they chose the 
 site for their enterprise not far from his 
 
house, he was soon in the pleasantest re- 
 lations with the leaders, for their spirit 
 and purpose were in harmony with his 
 own. He was a parishioner and warm 
 personal friend of Theodore Parker, who 
 lived near him, and his keen common- 
 sense and mastery of practical affairs 
 were most useful to Parker as to Ripley. 
 Indeed, the hospitality of such a man for 
 every generous endeavor and for all new 
 and humane ideas was a happy augury 
 for the philanthropic pioneers, because 
 it seemed to promise the final approval 
 and adhesion to their cause of the most 
 conservative and substantial sentiment 
 of the community. 
 
 Such a man was, of course, an aboli- 
 tionist in the days when the name was as 
 repugnant to what is called " society " as 
 the name Christian was to the Jewish 
 Sanhedrim or Methodist to the English 
 Establishment a century and a half ago. 
 He generously aided the cause, which 
 seemed to him that of practical Chris- 
 tianity and of American patriotism, and 
 he held most friendly relations with its 
 chief representatives, who were ostra- 
 15 
 
cized and denounced. But his sympa- 
 thy was not an abstract regard for man 
 rather than for men, and his interest in 
 the effort to help a race and to forecast 
 a happier social organization did not dull 
 his heart or close his hand to the neces- 
 sities of his neighbor. His life, indeed, 
 was a prolonged charity, but a charity 
 directed by a singularly calm and shrewd 
 judgment. His exhaustless generosity 
 was not the sport of wayward impulse. 
 It was not a well-meaning weakness, but 
 a wise force which helped others to help 
 themselves, but knew also when such 
 self-help was impossible. 
 
 Yet the strength and reserve and inde- 
 pendence of his character were such that 
 the man was never lost in the reformer. 
 His fine nature instinctively asserted his 
 own individuality. He quietly shunned 
 the wearisome artificiality of society, but 
 he did not merge his own home in the 
 general home of his friends and neigh- 
 bors at Brook Farm, and his house was 
 always a glimpse of the social refinement 
 and grace, the mental and moral charm, 
 to which the dreams of social regenera- 
 
tion and the elaborate fancies of Fourier 
 pointed fancies which greatly interest- 
 ed him as hints of a happier social order. 
 Long absence with his family in Eu- 
 rope, and a long and final residence 
 upon Staten Island, only matured and 
 developed the man, in whom not only 
 was there no guile, but in whom even 
 the most intimate eye could not note a 
 fault. Clarendon might have studied 
 from him his portrait of Falkland: "his 
 inimitable sweetness of, and delight in, 
 conversation ; his flowing and obliging 
 humanity; his goodness to mankind; 
 and his primitive simplicity and integ- 
 rity of life." Disinclined to public life of 
 every kind, he was yet full of the high- 
 est public spirit, and it was but natural 
 that his only son should have been se- 
 lected by Governor Andrew to command 
 the first colored regiment that marched 
 from Massachusetts in the war. In his 
 young person all that was best in the 
 New England youth of his time, all the 
 strength of the elder colonial and Rev- 
 olutionary day, blended with all the 
 grace and tenderness and gentleness of 
 
its modern life, the stern old Puritan 
 softened into a humaner Bayard, was 
 typified. It was the flower of Essex 
 that two hundred years ago was with- 
 ered in the fatal Indian ambush in the 
 Deerfield Meadows. It was the flower 
 of New England that fell upon a hun- 
 dred redder fields within a score of 
 years. 
 
 But no sorrow could fatally chill a 
 faith which was reflected in the perpet- 
 ual summer of the father's presence and 
 temperament. The frank urbanity of his 
 greeting, the hearty grasp of his hand, 
 the lofty simplicity of his courtesy, were 
 but the signs of that unwasting freshness 
 of sympathy which held him true to the 
 ideals and aims of earlier life. His help- 
 ing hand reached invisibly into a hundred 
 homes, and upheld a hundred faltering 
 lives. But, besides this, as president of 
 the Freedman's Aid Association his ad- 
 ministrative skill and his wise benevo- 
 lence enabled him to bear a most effec- 
 tive part in the great settlement of the 
 war. His invincible modesty and scorn 
 of ostentation veiled his beneficent ac- 
 
229 
 
 tivities, public and private. But noth- 
 ing could veil the pure and steadfast and 
 unwearying devotion to the well-being of 
 other men. Kindly but firmly he pro- 
 tected his own seclusion, and he permit- 
 ted no man, in Emerson's phrase, to de- 
 vastate his day. The freshness of feeling 
 which keeps the heart young was un- 
 wasted to the end. His full life brim- 
 ming purely to the sea reflected heaven 
 as clearly when at last it mingled with 
 the main as when it ran a limpid rivulet 
 from its spring. Young and old, man and 
 boy, he was still the simplest, noblest, 
 most devoted, best. How truly he was 
 the man that every thoughtful man se- 
 cretly wishes he might be, those only 
 know who knew Francis George Shaw. 
 
 THE END. 
 
HARPER'S AMERICAN ESSAYISTS. 
 
 i6mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $i oo each. 
 
 PICTURE AND TEXT. By HENRY JAMES. With 
 Portrait and Illustrations. 
 
 AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS, With Other 
 Essays on Other Isms. By BRANDER MATTHEWS. 
 With Portrait. 
 
 FROM THE BOOKS OF LAURENCE HUTTON. 
 
 With Portrait. 
 
 CONCERNING ALL OF US. By THOMAS WENT- 
 WORTH HIGGINSON. With Portrait. 
 
 FROM THE EASY CHAIR. By GEORGE WILLIAM 
 CURTIS. With Portrait. 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS FROM THE EASY CHAIR. By 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. With Portrait. 
 
 AS WE WERE SAYING. By CHARLES DUDLEY 
 WARNER. With Portrait and Illustrations. 
 
 CRITICISM AND FICTION. By WILLIAM DEAN 
 HOWELLS. With Portrait. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. 
 Sgp^ The above works are for sale by all booksellers, 
 or will be sent by the ptiblishert, postage prepaid^ to any 
 part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt 
 of the price. 
 
By GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 
 
 FROM THE EASY CHAIR. With Portrait. i6mo, 
 Cloth, Ornamental, $i oo. 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS FROM THE EASY CHAIR. 
 
 With Portrait. i6mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $i oo. 
 
 PRUE AND I. Illustrated Edition. 8vo, Illuminated 
 Silk, $3 50. Also i2mo, Cloth, Gilt Tops, $i 50. 
 
 LOTUS-EATING. A Summer Book. Illustrated by 
 KENSETT. i2mo, Cloth, Gilt Tops, $i 50. 
 
 NILE NOTES OF A HOWADJI. i 2 mo, Cloth, 
 Gilt Tops, $i 50. 
 
 THE HOWADJI IN SYRIA. tamo, Cloth, Gilt 
 Tops, $i 50. 
 
 THE POTIPHAR PAPERS. Illustrated by HOFPIN. 
 tamo, Cloth, Gilt Tops, $i 50. 
 
 TRUMPS. A Novel. Illustrated by HOPPIN. i 2 mo, 
 Cloth, Gilt Tops, $2 oo. 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Illustrated. i6mo 
 Cloth, Ornamental, 50 cents. 
 
 WENDELL PHILLIPS. A Eulogy. 8vo, Paper, 
 25 cents. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. 
 ftSJT' The above works are for sale by all booksellers, 
 or will be sent by the publishers, postage prepaid, to any 
 part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt 
 of the price. 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 RENEWED BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE 
 RECALL 
 
392750 
 
 PS1485 
 Curtis, G.W. Al 
 
 Other essays from 1893 
 the easy chair. 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 DAVIS 
 
 -