THE COLLECTOR.

THE
COLLECTOR

ESSAYS ON

BOOKS, NEWSPAPERS, PICTURES, INNS, AUTHORS,
DOCTORS, HOLIDAYS, ACTORS, PREACHERS.

BY
HENRY T. TUCKERMAN.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
DR. DORAN,
Author of “Table Traits,” “Monarchs Retired from Business,” “History of
Court Fools,” “Their Majesties’ Servants,” &c. &c.

LONDON:
JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN, PICCADILLY.
(All Rights Reserved.)

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

t was one of the conclusions arrived at by Adelung, that the same language would not maintain itself beyond the limit of a hundred and fifty thousand square miles; but by means of books the limits of the world alone are the limits within which language and the enjoyment of it can be confined. Letters waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole, and printed volumes carry thoughts that breathe and words that burn over the great oceans from one quarter of the world to another.

Such a volume is the one now in the hand of the reader. It is freighted with a dozen pleasant papers or essays, the subjects of which are not confined to America exclusively. They furnish us with text, and afford opportunity for illustrative comment.

Profiting by this opportunity, let me commence by observing, in reference to the opening essay, that the inns and taverns of London underwent a great change after the death of James the First. The rights of honest topers were suppressed by his son King Charles, who, for the poor fee of an annual three pounds sterling, granted licences to tavern-keepers to sell wines at what prices they pleased, in spite of all statutes to the contrary! You may fancy how flushed the face of a thirsty Cockney might become, who, on putting down his eightpence for a quart of claret, was told by Francis, the drawer, that the price was a full quarter noble, or ‘one-and-eightpence’!

Lord Goring, who issued these licences, pocketed a respectable amount of fees in return. By statute, London had authority only for the establishment of forty taverns. But what did roystering George Goring care for statute, since the king gave him licence to ride over it? Taverns multiplied accordingly, not only in the city but in those ‘suburbs,’ as they were once called, fragrant Drury Lane and refined ‘Convent Garden.’ With competition came lower prices, however, and the throats of the Londoners were refreshed, while their purses were not so speedily lightened.

Jolly places they became again; but when they not only increased all over the town, but took to ‘victualling,’ as it was termed, as well as ‘liquoring,’ the authorities began to inquire into the matter. With the claret that was drunk, a corresponding amount of venison was eaten. At the same time the king’s bucks began to disappear, and suspicion arose that gentlemen in taverns dined off his sacred majesty’s deer! A watch was set to prevent such felonious fare being carried into London from any of the royal parks, chases, or forests. Still haunches smoked on the boards of those naughty victualling taverns, and haughty Cockneys, ‘greatly daring, dined’! The stolen bucks were smuggled in over Bow Bridge; and not till that passage was occupied by representatives of legal authority did the venison intended for the court cease to find its way into the city.

The drama at this time lingered about Blackfriars and the Bankside. Bacchus emigrated westward, before Thespis. In 1633, in ‘Convent Garden’ and the ‘little lane’ adjacent, which had then just begun to be called Russell Street, there were not less than eight taverns and twenty alehouses. This was thought to be so much beyond the requirements of the public thirst, that an order was issued to reduce the number of taverns to two and the alehouses to four. The suburban public cried out against the drinking privileges of the city, where claret was tapped in taverns and ale ran from the spigot from before breakfast till after supper-time. The Council directed the attention of the Lord Mayor thereto, and in 1633 inquiry was made as to how many taverns had been newly opened since the year 1612. The reply was, ‘sixty and one.’ In the return it is pleasant to read of the ‘Boar’s Head,’ as ‘an ancient tavern.’ Teetotallers will, perhaps, entertain due regard for ‘Bagsishaw Ward,’ as being the only one in the city described as having ‘never a tavern within that ward.’ But, then, Basing Hall, or Bagsishaw Ward, was of such small extent as to be rather contemptuously spoken of by Stowe himself, who calls it ‘a small thing consisting of one street.’

An inhabitant of this ward had, therefore, only to step into the next street if he wanted a stoup of Bordeaux or a flagon of ale. If he swore over his liquor he was liable to the penalty of a shilling; and if he went on his way home noisily, with more claret under his belt than he well knew how to carry, he might be mulcted of a crown. These fines were distributed among the poor, so that the more drinking and profanity abounded, the better for those poor. To be blasphemous was to be on one of the blessed paths of charity. City chronicles tell of one Richard Dixon, who, having more of an eccentric compassion for the distressed than regard for propriety, swallowed his claret, swore a score of oaths, and deposited twenty shillings with the town clerk for London paupers.

Sober people in the city, however, complained of the increasing number of inns and taverns. Orders were issued accordingly, and a Boniface here and there took down his bush at the beginning of the week, but hung it up again before Saturday. The temperance party furnished a list of 211 taverns, new and old, in the city, in October, 1633. At that time Shakspeare’s and Washington Irving’s ‘Boar’s Head,’ in Eastcheap, was kept by one William Leedes, ‘not by any licence from the king’s majesty,’ but ‘as a freeman.’ Will Leedes may well have seen Shakspeare, who had not then been dead a score of years; and we may fancy mine host’s guests discussing the second edition of the Folio, which had then been out of the press not much above twelve months.

In spite of the law for the suppression of certain taverns, these remained open, and new inns were built. The fashion and delicacy of Drury Lane were deeply affected by the threatened building of a tavern in that refined locality, in addition to eleven already existing there. The master of his majesty’s tents, one Thomas Jones, resided in Drury Lane, and he petitioned the Council to prohibit the above building, as being to the great prejudice of the royal tent-master ‘and other neighbours, being men of eminent quality.’

The greatest blow at the old taverns was the prohibition of ‘victualling.’ Tavern-keepers beset the king for licences to cook and retail meat, ‘it being,’ says one petition, ‘a thing much desired by noblemen and gentlemen of the best rank, and others (for the which, if they please, they may also contract beforehand, as the custom is in other countries), there being no other place fit for them to eat in the city.’ This was in Cheapside; but there was also Will Mead’s house in Bread Street. It had ever been resorted to by citizens and foreigners, on account of its famous fish dinners. The company had always been ‘well-affected,’ of the very best quality, too; gentlefolk, who conformed themselves to the laws made for eating fish upon days appointed. If Will Mead be not permitted to vend his Lenten fare, then he is ‘deprived of his best way of subsistence, having applied himself and bred up many servants only for the dressing of fish.’ As licence had been given to two vintners to ‘dress and vent flesh,’ Will prays for similar licence to dress and vend fish also. Will was landlord of that very ‘Mermaid’ of which Mr. Tuckerman speaks in his first essay—the ‘Mermaid’ of Ben Jonson, who had then just closed his dramatic career with Love’s Welcome—the ‘Mermaid’ which, some thirty years earlier, had been kept by the poet’s namesake, Johnson, and which had been a ‘Mermaid,’ where men of quality took their wine, as early at least as the time when the Houses of York and Lancaster were at bloody strife for the crown of ‘this our England.’

But, occasionally, men of quality died as well as drank in a London inn. I am not sure that it was not in this very ‘Mermaid’ that Richard de Grey, the sixth Lord Grey of Ruthyn, died, in 1523, an utterly penniless gambler. His son Henry, from poverty, never assumed any title of honour; and it was not until the time of his great-grandson, Reginald, that the honour and fortune were restored of a family of which the present Baroness Grey de Ruthyn is the representative.

Those old inns had their tragic as well as their gayer aspects. A man was as likely to die poisoned as ruined by gaming in some of them. For example, in 1635 eighteen pipes of white wine, belonging to Peter van Paine, a foreigner, were seized, and Lord Mayor Parkhurst wrote to the Council that ‘in eight of them were found eight bundles of weeds, in four some quantities of sulphur, in another a whole piece of match, besides in every cask a kind of gravel mixture, by which mixtures the wines are conceived to be very unwholesome, and of the like nature with those which were formerly destroyed.’ Peter van Paine must have dealt in a compound of the quality of modern Hamburg sherry, a compound that would have been deeply declined by the poorest of those authors who form the subject of the second essay.

oor Authors! Against no class of men have the acutely-pointed shafts of satire been more frequently darted. Congreve, who had so little cause to be ashamed of the name, yet persistently rejected the honour of being supposed to be one of the brotherhood. When Voltaire visited him, the French writer expressly stated that the compliment was addressed to the author, and not to merely Mr. Congreve. The latter remarked that he was a ‘gentleman,’ and not an author. Whereupon the polite Frenchman rejoined that if Congreve had been only a gentleman, he, the French author, would never have thought of calling upon him at all.

A wicked wit, some hundred and odd years ago, made the early pages of Sylvanus Urban lively by inventing a census of surviving English authors. These he set down in round numbers at three thousand, who had produced in the preceding year, of abortive works, 7,000; born dead, 3,000; and not one that survived the year itself. Three hundred and twenty perished by sudden death, and a few thousands went to line trunks, make sky-rocket cases, hold pies, or were consumed by worms. One thousand of these literary gentlemen are said to have died of lunacy, a rather greater number were ‘starved,’ seventeen were hanged, fifteen committed suicide, five pastoral poets died of fistula, others in various ways; while a difference was suggested as to the diet, lives, and deaths of aldermen and authors in a zero, indicating the number of writers who died of ‘surfeit.’

Perhaps one of the most singular reasons for founding a periodical, and undertaking much of the authorship and editorship, presents itself in the case of the celebrated French physician, Théophraste Renaudet. He had a number of nervous, anxious, restless patients, who required little more than to have their minds drawn from the unprofitable occupation of dwelling upon the condition of the body. The great doctor did not wish that the thoughts of his patients should be allowed to dwell very much upon anything. Books of science, politics, or polemical theology, were not at all what he required. The romances of the day were stilted, pompous things, quite as difficult for invalids to read as any of the inflated treatises on scientific, political, and theological subjects. Renaudet may be said to have been a pupil of the philosophical school of Hippias. That self-reliant teacher of Elis maintained that a portion at least of manly virtue consisted in being able to dispense with the assistance of other men. Hippias never allowed any man to help him in any matter wherein he could help himself. He was accordingly his own tailor, shoemaker, hairdresser, laundress, and cook! How the philosopher looked when he went abroad, or how he fared when he dined at home, it is at once awful and amusing to think of! Renaudet did not go quite so far as the Elian; but in case of his patients failing to find help in others, he took the matter into his own hands, and founded the Gazette de France. It was better, if not for himself, at least for his patients, than if he had discovered a new remedy for prevalent diseases. Those pleasant little paragraphs of news were as so many pleasant fillips to the lazy intelligences of the nervous. Those fresh supplies of little scandals were as fresh pinches of rappee to the arid nostril all athirst for dust. Those brief hints and innuendoes were as gentle titillations, not strong enough to exhaust, but just sufficient to exhilarate, refresh, and strengthen. Nervous patients recovered, many who might otherwise have become so did not fall ill, and every one was delighted with Renaudet’s attempt at authorship except his fellow-practitioners, the most of whom then lived upon the nerves of the fashionable public.

Renaudet’s authorship had a benevolent and unselfish motive. As an example of audacity in the same line, I know nothing that can compare with a circumstance which occurred in the middle of the last century. There was at that time in Oxford an honest watchmaker, named Greene. He was a great reader and a great admirer of Milton; but, like the artist who had just finished a painting on a signboard, and contemplated his performance with a commiserating thought of Titian, and the complacent cry of ‘Poor little Tit!’ so the Oxford watchmaker tapped his forehead, like poor André Chenier before execution, and thought he had ‘something there’ beyond any possession that could be boasted of by mortal sons of song. Accordingly, Greene published a specimen of a new version of Paradise Lost, in blank verse of the watchmaker’s own adaptation, ‘by which,’ he modestly remarked, ‘that amazing work is brought somewhat nearer the summit of perfection.’ Poor Greene’s ‘summit of perfection’ might lead one to believe that his ideas of improvement were not directed towards Milton only, but that he wished to give a new version to the old joke, the point of which lay in ‘the height of acme’!

It is a singular fact that one of the best literal renderings of Milton into a foreign language is one into French by Jean de Diur. It is lineal, metaphrastic, and literal; consequently you have, as it were, the words of the song, but only faint, or rather no echoes of the music. Nevertheless, the patience and conscientiousness of the translator are to be seen in the fidelity with which he has interpreted the significance of the terms.

Another original phase of authorship may be here recorded, since it is in connection with Milton. While the Oxford watchmaker was carrying Paradise Lost to the summit of perfection by his improvements, Landor was carrying through the press his Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns. The author described the attempt as one hitherto never made in prose or rhyme. The method by which he sought to prove his case against Milton was by naming certain authors whom he supposed the poet to have consulted, and then giving quotations from them to expose Milton’s plagiarisms. The case startled the world only for a while. Competent defenders of Milton’s authorship arose, and they proved that Milton had not plagiarised from the sources named by Landor, but that the latter had forged his quotations in order to traduce Milton! The discovery made every one eager to avoid Landor as a rogue, and to possess his book as a curiosity.

A French author flung his poisoned dart also at Milton. Voltaire accused him of taking his epic from an old Italian mystery, the Adamo, by Andréivi. But Milton has had gallant champions in French authors, too. Their judgment is, that if Milton created his great epic out of the chaos of the old mystery, he, in a certain sense, resembled the Creator, who, out of brute clay, created man in the image of the Creator himself.

Cædmon, in Anglo-Saxon, and St. Avitus, in Latin, likewise treated of the Creation and the Fall, long before Milton. But, as another French author, M. Guizot, has remarked, ‘It is of little importance to Milton’s glory whether he was acquainted with them or not. He was one of those who imitate when they please, for they invent when they choose, and they invent even while imitating.’ True authorship could not be more happily defined than under those words; and they may be applied in reference to another attempt to question Milton’s originality, in the statement that he founded his epic on the old drama Adamo Caduto, by Salandra. Moreover, there is nothing more in common between Milton and his predecessors than that he selected a subject which they had sung before him. Their tune is on an oaten reed; but Milton sits down to the organ, and billows of sound roll forth to awe and enchant the world.

In our own country Milton made but ‘slow way,’ not merely with the general but with the educated public. Dryden supposed he wrote Paradise Lost in blank verse because he was unable to do it in rhyme! Johnson depreciated him by asserting that if he could cut a colossus out of the rock he could not carve heads upon cherry-stones; as if Milton’s briefer poems and sonnets were unworthy of the author of the great epic! Hannah More united with Johnson, not only in thinking these briefer poems bad, but in critically examining why they were so! But there is no end to the vagaries of authors when judging of other writers. Dryden, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, makes Shakspeare the Homer and Johnson the Virgil of dramatic composition; but, in his Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada, he informs us that Shakspeare abounds in solecisms and nonsense, in lameness of plot, meanness of writing, in comedy that cannot raise mirth, and tragedy that cannot excite sympathy; and, most wonderful of all, placing Shakspeare on a level with Fletcher, he says: ‘Had they lived now they would doubtless have written more correctly’! If you would know to what correct level Dryden thought Shakspeare might have been brought, had he had the good luck to live later, the knowledge is vouchsafed in the assertion that ‘the well placing of words for the sweetness of pronunciation was not known till Mr. Waller introduced it.’ This is quite as bad as the criticism of Addison, who bracketed Lee and Shakspeare together, accused them of a spurious sublimity, and gave it as his opinion that ‘in those authors the affectation of greatness often hurts the perspicuity of style’!

These great literary artists understood Shakspeare so indifferently, that they were unable to picture him truly to themselves or to represent him naturally to others. Milton called sweetest Shakspeare ‘Fancy’s child.’ Dryden says his Fancy limped; and Addison hints that his sublimity rendered him obscure!

erhaps some among us may be inclined to smile at Mr. Tuckerman’s allusion, in his chapter on Pictures, to a portrait of ‘an American matronly belle of the days of Washington, by Stewart, which represents the type of mingled self-reliance and womanly loveliness that has made the ladies of our Republican court so memorably attractive.’ Of the attraction of the ladies there can be no doubt, but can a Republic care to pride itself on such an institution as a ‘court’? La Rochefoucauld said very well of royal courts in Europe that they did not render those that tarried in them happy, but that they prevented those who had tarried at them from being happy elsewhere. It may be added that there is only one royal court on record where every one was equal, and that was the proverbially celebrated ‘Cours du Roi Pétaut.’ But the equality there led to inextricable confusion, because every one wished to command and no one cared to obey. Now, the court of King Pétaut has very much extended itself. So wide, indeed, are its limits that it may be said to embrace all society, which has become a grand court where dissimulation and distrust, splendour without and anxieties within, abundantly prevail. Some one has compared that tremendous institution called ‘Society,’ as well as courts generally, to those magnificent, ill-regulated, gilt clocks to be seen in France. The exterior is dazzling with beauty, but inside everything is going wrong.

Among old court fashions of the last century was one of having a portrait of the eye. Of course this was only of ladies’ eyes—eyes that slew the peace of mortal man,—and the counterfeit presentiment of one of which was held to be a solace to the memory and a stimulant to hope. Lovers carried about with them the figure of one of the (presumed) two eyes of their respective ladies. There was an affected modesty in this fashion; and, if I may so speak, the mode most prevailed when modesty, or a decent reserve which might pass for it, was least in fashion.

It has been a disputed question whether painting or poetry was the earlier born. It would be as difficult to determine whether Calliope wrote heroic songs before Clio painted heroic deeds. Probably poetry, which preceded prose in the early festive ceremonies of the human race (bards sang of high deeds before less gifted men made long speeches about them), was earlier than painting. The actions of heroes were first fixed on the artist’s imagination by the songs of the bards and the praise of orators. But there is a prettier theory touching the origin of portrait-painting, in the story of the youth who drew the outline of the one face he loved by tracing with charcoal its shadow on the wall, purposely disposed to enable him to display this primitive effort of art and of affection.

As we may not take all portraits of our ancestors for veræ effigies, so are the portraits of more modern heroes not to be accepted without due reserve. There was, for instance, a series of Lives of the British Admirals, with illustrative portraits, and Charles Lamb sat for them all!

Desmahis says, rather saucily, of the ladies (but they must have been those of his time, and not the general sex), that when they go to have their portraits taken they wish the artist to be faithless and the portrait to be a likeness! Steele has similar satire. Clerimont, in the Tender Husband, says that his fancy is utterly exhausted with inventing faces for his sitters. ‘I gave my Lady Scornwell,’ he says, ‘the choice of a dozen frowns before she found one to her liking.’ I suppose in these days the fair are not so exacting. In the very ancient days noble sitters were even more so. It was death to the painter, as well as to his reputation, if he failed to please a Roman emperor. I shudder when I think of the artist who received a commission to paint a full-length of Nero. It was more than life size; it was a hundred and twenty feet high! and there was possible death in every inch of it.

Michael Angelo had a good idea of the simple dignity of an artist. On being told of one who painted pictures with his fingers, ‘The simpleton,’ said he; ‘he had better keep to his pencils.’ A picture painted without pencils is, however, not so curious a fact as publishing a book that never was written. Mr. Tuckerman’s volume reminds me of another set of essays, which were published in 1844, called Colloquies Desultory, but chiefly upon Poetry and Poets. It is a very agreeable volume of 250 pages, but not a word of it was really ever written. The clever printer and publisher, Mr. Lordan of Romsey, set up the types as fast as he mentally composed the book; and the latter is highly creditable to the author, who, however, never wrote it! Lord Palmerston respected this ingenious man; and collectors of singular books keep a good look out for a work that was published before the author penned a word of it.

he next curiosity to an author who did not write his own book, passing over the authors who really did write books by other people, is, perhaps, the physician who scorned to take fees. Mr. Tuckerman has pretty well exhausted the subject of Doctors. Let me notice how few of them resemble those proto-Christian physicians, Cosmas and Damian, who won the glorious name of Anargyri, or the ‘feeless,’ because out of their abundant charity they gave ‘advice gratis,’ which, it must be said, is a commodity often worth the price it costs when you get it for nothing.

Those last-named amiable physicians were Arabians by birth, and among those people some curious ideas still prevail touching the relations between medical men and patients. When the late Dr. Hogg was travelling with Lamartine in the East, it was the physician’s happiness to cure, of a very horrible disease, a poor and pious Arab who had been reduced almost to despair. The cure was slow, but at last it was perfect; and the gratitude of the Arab to God, the Prophet, and Dr. Hogg was beyond all bounds. The convalescent waited on his mortal benefactor, and told him that he was the greatest of the wonders of the world. The medico, fancying the grateful fellow might embarrass himself by overstraining his means, in order to evince his gratitude, told him that all had been done for the love of God and the good of a fellow-creature, and that nothing more was to be said about it. But the Arab had much more to say about it. ‘God,’ he remarked, ‘had conferred upon the Christian doctor a power beyond that possessed by any other man. The Prophet had permitted him to find a remedy for the maladies which had beset one of the faithful. Gratitude, taking the form of cash payment, was therefore indispensable.’ ‘I need no payment,’ said the doctor. ‘Just so, Effendi,’ replied the countryman of Cosmas and Damian; ‘it is so, I understand it. But the chief of doctors will not be ungrateful for the power he has been permitted to exercise. Behold the servant whom he has been allowed to make whole. Let the Effendi show his thankfulness by bestowing on his servant bakshish.’ Between these two extremes of physicians altogether declining fees, and patients requesting them from physicians as testimonies of gratitude for cure almost miraculously wrought, modern practice has established itself on a pretty good basis. But the old theory, yet not the old reality as to fees, still exists. The honorarium is slipped into the physician’s hand with an air of there being nothing in it, and that unworldly person often looks like Cosmas and Damian, as if he had taken nothing by it.

A question of health connects itself closely with the subject of the next essay, on Holidays. Many a soldier in the noble army of workers owes much of his health to the keeping of holidays. Mr. Tuckerman regrets that his country does not take rest and rejoice on some common national holiday at least once a year. Now, all Christian nations have one that they may celebrate once a week. But some among us are doing their conscientious best to turn the joyous festival into a gloomy fast. God granted the day, but some among us misinterpret the meaning of the grant, obstruct rest and enjoyment, and only change one sort of labour for another. Let all the nation go up and praise the Lord; but, for

‘Other things mild Heav’n a time ordains,
And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.’

The making of a holiday rendered famous for ever a philosopher whose reputation would not have spread so widely through his philosophy. When Anaxagoras was dying he was asked if he had any particular desire that should be fulfilled. ‘Ay,’ said the Clazomenian, ‘on the anniversary of my death let all the boys have a holiday.’ Thence arose the Anaxagorica, festivals in which the boys rejoiced, not that Anaxagoras had died on that day, but that he had lived during many years of usefulness before it. Mr. Bright never shook the faith of his own followers so much as when he voted against the shortening of the hours of labour of women and children in the cotton mills. The contrast between the ancient and the modern philosopher is not to the disadvantage of the heathen. But there are some persons who are averse to much leisure time on working-days, and to any air of enjoyment on Sundays. A Scotchman, who had gone back to his country after a long absence, declared after going to kirk that the whole kingdom was on the road to perdition. ‘The people,’ he said, ‘used to be reserved and solemn on the Sabbath, but now they look as happy on that day as on any other.’

ith regard to what is asserted in this volume respecting the judicial and legal excellence of modern times compared with a past period, the assertion cannot be admitted without a certain reserve. We may look back at those old Brehon laws which St. Patrick himself could not amend or even make more clear, when he attempted to be for them what Coke afterwards was upon Lyttleton. For instance, if a Brehon judge were to utter an absurdity—were he, for instance, to say that he was inclined to believe in the folly of a criminal, which folly had led to crime, and were the judge to inflict a ridiculously light sentence in consequence, the ‘truth of nature,’ as the phrase then ran, would have been violated, and a blotch would fix itself on the face of the judge for ever!

One might reasonably suppose that no Brehon judge ever exposed himself to be twice so branded. But human nature is as weak as it is perverse. We read in the ancient laws of Ireland of a certain Sencha Mac Aililla, who, the more he was ‘blotched,’ the wickeder he grew. He seemed to defy the brand, as others have defied public opinion. He did not care what the law was. When he had to administer it between a member of his own tribe and one of another clan, he would decide in favour of his own ‘country,’ as he called it, irrespective of law and justice. This exemplary Sencha used to retire from the judgment-seat daily with three additional fiery blotches to those he bore the day previous. The monster became so ugly that he was fain at last to withdraw from the public gaze.

It was the same with the lawyers in those felicitous times. If one ventured upon a ‘Scotch insinuation,’ such as deliberately accusing a witness of forgery, and, on the accusation being immediately shown to be groundless, pleading that the charge was simply an ‘insinuation,’ perfectly professional, on the Brehon nose of such an unworthy lawyer a carbuncle would establish itself, like a light on a disagreeable object to help you to avoid it. A Brehon lawyer never even played with a lie but a pimple started on his tongue and checked his speech. If a Brehon judge were addicted to the wine-cup, it was as much as his nose, or at least the end of it, was worth to potter about excess, from the bench. If he lived an unclean life, and then judicially talked solemn sham to the ignorant and immoral, a burning St. Anthony’s fire, or whatever name it was called before St. Anthony, overspread his face, and never left it. Nay, there is record of unjust kings and judges laughing at the commission of crime till their mouths extended from ear to ear, and remained so for ever after.

It must have been then that divine Astræa bandaged her eyes. Were she to open them now and glance over the world, she would behold bench and bar unstained by a blush. Nevertheless, a sigh may be permitted for the good old Brehon times, when wicked lawyers blushed in spite of themselves.

n many respects those old times, or their customs, have not so completely passed away as might be generally thought. In connection with Mr. Tuckerman’s next subject of Sepulchres, I may notice those military funerals at which the horse of the dead rider follows his master to the grave. There is now no significance in such a matter; but it was once of very stern reality, and not a mere form. It is now simply a relic of the times when the steed was slain at the side of the tomb of his defunct master, a tomb which the horse was destined to share with the departed soldier. The faithful horse, like the Indian’s dog, was to keep him company in the fields beyond the waters of oblivion. It was a pagan ceremony, but it did not finally go out till somewhat late in the Christian era—in fact, not till towards the close of the last century. On the 13th of February, 1781, there was a military burial at Treves. A cavalry general, in the service of the Palatinate, a Teutonic knight, and commander of Lorraine, named Frederick Kasimir, was then and there buried according to the rites of the Order of Chivalry, of which he was a member. As soon as the coffin was lowered into the grave, the general’s horse was led up by the officer who had had it in charge during the funeral procession. An official then advanced, and, by a skilful sweep of a sharp hunting-knife across the animal’s throat, stretched him dead, after which the dead horse was thrown into the grave on the top of the coffin. It was a hideous ceremonial, the origin of which dates from the days when skeleton knights were supposed to require skeleton chargers. The above was the last occasion on which such a ceremony was performed. The favourite horse that followed the Duke of Wellington’s funeral car, the caparisoned steed that was but yesterday led after the bier of the dragoon who used to mount him, were but formalities, the meaning of which is for the most part forgotten.

There was a period when a grave and much ceremony were thus afforded to brutes, but when also the grave ‘was begrudgingly allowed,’ and all ceremony denied, to men. I allude to the Actors, which pleasant brotherhood forms the subject of Mr. Tuckerman’s next essay. This has been especially the case in France. Thence some erroneously suppose that actors were excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church; whereas the ecclesiastical authorities at Rome especially protected the Italian players in Paris from the ban proclaimed by the Gallican bishops against actors and actresses. In England there has been more liberality of feeling towards the players. These have had individual clerical enemies, from Archbishop Grindal down to Dean Close; but they have also had as many friends, from Archbishop Bancroft down to the present Archbishop of Dublin, who, amidst groups of actors and a large general public, in Stratford Church, at the last Shakspeare centenary, gave expression to wise and loving testimony in behalf of that poor player on whom God conferred the gifts that made of him the foremost poet of the entire world.

As between plaintiff and defendant, the opposite cases were succinctly stated by Dean Close and Mr. Buckstone. The Dean once denounced the brethren of the drama generally as wicked people. Mr. Buckstone simply replied that, while there was no crime subject to capital punishment but that a clergyman had suffered for it, there was no instance of an actor ever having been hanged for any crime. This is not quite correct, but the rare exception testifies to the general rule. One actor has been hanged, and two or three, richly deserved to be; but, speaking generally, they have been distinguished for the good observance of prudence and the excellent practice of charity. Lord Southampton described the players at the ‘Blackfriars’ as ‘married men and of reputation.’ Even in Grindal’s days, though there were some among them of equivocal conduct and character, they were designated as ‘those grave and sober actors.’ Burbage’s fortune is a proof of their thrift; Alleyn’s noble bequests are so many proofs of his godlike charity. In every path of his life, from St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, down to Dulwich College, he has left proofs of a benevolence which still brings enjoyment to numberless legatees. Alleyn’s letters afford us a glance into the household of a player of the seventeenth century, and they show that the house was well kept, and that a spirit of piety sanctified it. So of Betterton; his hand and his heart were open and liberal. What were Quinn’s faults in the light of his delicate and profuse charity? The same question might be asked in reference to many other actors. They have not only shown, as the Tatler once said of his dramatic contemporaries, a wonderful benevolence towards the interests and necessities of each other, but towards those of all who needed succour. They have played equally well in this respect on and off the stage, and all that need be added in regard to them may be said in the quaint words of Sir Thomas Overbury, who remarks: ‘I value a worthy actor by the corruption of some few of the quality, as I would do gold in the ore; I should not mind the dross, but the purity of the metal.’

Theatrical criticism in early days found no place in our newspapers. Even as late as the first appearance of Sprangor Barry, in ‘Othello’ (A.D. 1746), the journalist only recorded the fact, adding, as a sort of critical notice, that the gentleman got as much applause as could be expected!

An essay on Newspapers might extend to a folio volume. They have all been founded on the insatiable appetite that humanity has to know what has happened to its fellows. The difference is not so great between the earliest and the latest samples of newspapers. The ‘leading article,’ which so often misleads, is comparatively of modern origin; but the Roman Acta Diurna may be said to correspond with our reports and general intelligence, chronicling human errors, heroism, and rascality, pillorying the names of young fellows who had quaffed too deeply of the Falernian, and noting how the fine imposed on a felonious butcher who gave short weight was to be devoted to the building of a chapel in the temple of Tellus for the propagation of the gospel of that deity, and the reformation of light weights.

If the subject of newspapers could be exhausted in a single essay, it has been done by Mr. Tuckerman. Of journalism generally, a very summary phrase of Southey’s renders a rather acrid judgment. He had been alluding to the fact of Marchmont Needham having published the Mercurius Britannicus for the Parliament, the Mercurius Pregmaticus in the king’s interest, and the Mercurius Politicus in support of Oliver. His consequent remark was that ‘journalists in that age had about as much probity as in this.’ But these Mercurii were something like the Moniteur, the official paper of the predominant power for the time being. In the latter, ‘His Imperial Majesty Napoleon’ of one day was ‘the Corsican usurper’ of the next. One man may have written both phrases, but two governments uttered them. The writer was a part of the pen used by a couple of superior officials, each of whom employed the pen to express antagonistic sentiments.

There was once a period when the office now performed by a journalist was occasionally undertaken by the preacher. We learn from old chroniclers that scarcely an event which very closely affected the public ever took place without its being shadowed forth from the pulpit. Rufus was in all probability not slain by Sir Walter Tyrrel; but that he was treacherously slain cannot be disputed, if the record be true that God’s vengeance against the wicked in high places was a theme very much dwelt upon by the popular preachers of the day—men who addressed themselves to the judgments, impulses, and prejudices of the people. In the reign of the second Edward, contemporary events were employed for illustrative purposes from the pulpit. The putting away of the king was discussed there under similitudes, as a matter in a solemn national crisis might now be weighed and examined more openly in an eloquent leader. The pulpit at Paul’s Cross alone would furnish a thousand illustrations of how the preacher could deftly mingle politics with religion. Patriotism was then stimulated, in a time of approaching war, by the priest reciting the ‘bede roll’ of the king’s enemies, and solemnly cursing every one of them, amidst the popular acclamation. Church and State met and shook hands, sometimes with a mask on the face of each, at the trysting-place of Paul’s Cross.

But there may be sermons efficiently delivered from other places besides pulpits. ‘Sermons in stones’ formed a poet’s phrase, which led to another rendering of the sentiment included in it by a modern poetess. Mrs. Browning, in her sonnet on Power’s Greek Slave, sees a purpose as well as a beauty in it, and she exclaims—

‘Appeal, fair stone,
From God’s pure height of beauty, against man’s wrong;
Catch up in thy divine face not alone
East griefs but West, and strike and shame the strong
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.’

The image, indeed, is rather a bold one, reminding us of the soliloquy in a French tragedy, commencing with the observation—‘Quel silence se fait entendre.’

While directing attention to Mr. Tuckerman’s pleasant paper on Statues, it may be worth while recording that under the Christian era sculpture was first employed by a woman, under the influence of gratitude for a manifestation of the divine mercy. The story is, indeed, only traditional, but it is ancient, and comes down to us through Eusebius. According to that historian the woman of Paneas, after having been cured of her disease, as mentioned in the Gospels, returned to her native place and set up in one of the streets there an image of the Saviour, with the figure of herself in the act of adoration. This group of statuary (the material, indeed, is not mentioned, and the word image sometimes implies picture) was the progenitor of all the effigies of God and the saints that have since been erected in public highways in order to stimulate the religious fervour of the passers by. If that alleged proto-group did not exactly effect this, the story of the grateful woman and her statuary led to the same result. It may be a mere legend; but even then the legend itself was in such case invented for the purpose of bringing about the adoption of the fashion of setting up images challenging the reverence of all who looked on them, and it was afterwards appealed to as authority, alike for the fashion and the observance.

Nowhere have statues been erected with greater effect than on Bridges. They who remember the bridge at Prague, over the Moldau, with the statues and groups of saints, St. John Neoponuck towering over all, will confirm this fact. The fashion has not been followed in our own country, where there are some relics, however, of bridge architecture said to be as old as the days of the Britons. Such are rather fondly said to be the small red stone arches spanning the streams in some of the Cornish valleys. We may rest more satisfied, however, with the triangular bridge at Croyland, which was completed in the year after the island was first called England, namely, A.D. 830. Whether we can, in the days of Queen Victoria, detect in the structure any of the stones the laying of which was watched by the curious Lincolnshire folk in the reign of King Egbert, may be reasonably doubted. The foundations rather than the superstructure of the original bridge alone remain. This bridge was of great importance to the monastery of Croyland, but indeed as much may be said of all bridges and their vicinities. To build them was a holy work. The title of ‘Pontifex’ belonged to the highest of the sacred classes of Rome. ‘Pontifex Maximus’ is a designation which the pope himself inherits from the Roman emperors, and ‘Pontificum Cœnæ’ is a phrase by which we learn from Horace that the sacred successors of those who erected the Sublician bridge were persons who, with some care for the souls and well-being of the people, had a special regard for their own bodies.

Perhaps it was because of this connection between holy men and bridges that in early English times the keeping of our bridges and of the roads leading to them was intrusted to hermits, who were in fact the original toll-takers and turnpike-keepers in England. Old London Bridge, which was commenced in 1176 and finished in 1209, which was the only bridge at London over the Thames till that of Westminster was opened in 1738, and which lasted till the new bridge was inaugurated in 1831 by William the Fourth, was the work of a holy Pontifex, Peter Colechurch, chaplain of St. Mary’s in the Poultry. The architect found fitting burial place in the crypt of the chapel of St. Thomas, which stood in the centre of the bridge itself. Thus the London Bridge which Peter built became his sepulchre and monument when Peter died.

But it is time that I should be at least as silent as Peter himself, since Mr. Tuckerman is ready and the stage prepared. The first little piece is played out, and the curtain now rises to a better sustained drama and to a finished actor—Plaudite!

J. DORAN.

INNS.

‘Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Whate’er his fortunes may have been,
Must sigh to think how oft he’s found
Life’s warmest welcome at an inn.’
Shenstone.

he old, legitimate, delightful idea of an Inn is becoming obsolete; like so many other traditional blessings, it has been sacrificed to the genius of locomotion. The rapidity with which distance is consumed obviates the need that so long existed of by-way retreats and halting-places. A hearty meal or a few hours’ sleep, caught between the arrival of the trains, is all the railway traveller requires; and the modern habit of moving in caravans has infinitely lessened the romantic probabilities and comfortable realities of a journey: the rural alehouse and picturesque hostel now exist chiefly in the domain of memory; crowds, haste, and ostentation triumph here over privacy and rational enjoyment, as in nearly all the arrangements of modern society. Old Walton would discover now but few of the secluded inns that refreshed him on his piscatorial excursions; the ancient ballads on the wall have given place to French paper; the scent of lavender no longer makes the linen fragrant; instead of the crackle of the open wood-fire, we have the dingy coal-smoke, and exhalations of a stove; and green blinds usurp the place of the snowy curtains. Not only these material details, but the social character of the inn is sadly changed. Few hosts can find time to gossip; the clubs have withdrawn the wits; the excitement of a stage-coach arrival is no more; and a poet might travel a thousand leagues without finding a romantic ‘maid of the inn,’ such as Southey has immortalized. Jollity, freedom, and comfort are no longer inevitably associated with the name; the world has become a vast procession that scorns to linger on its route, and has almost forgotten how to enjoy. Thanks, however, to the conservative spell of literature, we can yet appreciate, in imagination at least, the good old English inn. Goldsmith’s Village Alehouse has daguerreotyped its humble species, while Dr. Johnson’s evenings at the ‘Mitre’ keep vivid the charm of its metropolitan fame. Indeed, it is quite impossible to imagine what British authors would have done without the solace and inspiration of the inn. Addison fled thither from domestic annoyance; Dryden’s chair at ‘Will’s’ was an oracular throne; when hard pressed, Steele and Savage sought refuge in a tavern, and wrote pamphlets for a dinner; Farquhar found there his best comic material; Sterne opens his Sentimental Journey with his landlord, Monsieur Dessein, Calais, and his inn-yard; Shenstone confessed he found ‘life’s warmest welcome at an inn;’ Sheridan’s convivial brilliancy shone there with peculiar lustre; Hazlitt relished Congreve anew, reading him in the shady windows of a village inn after a long walk; even an old Almanac, or Annual Register, will acquire an interest under such circumstances; and a dog-eared copy of the Seasons found in such a place induced Coleridge to exclaim, ‘This is fame!’ while Byron exulted when informed that a well-thumbed volume of the English Bards had been seen, soon after its publication, at a little hostel in Albany. Elia’s quaint anecdote of the Quakers when they all ate supper without paying for it, and Irving’s ‘Stout Gentleman,’ are incidents which could only have been suggested by a country inn; and as to the novelists, from Smollett and Fielding to Scott and Dickens, the most characteristic scenes occur on this vantage-ground, where the strict unities of life are temporarily discarded, and its zest miraculously quickened by fatigue, hunger, a kind of infinite possibility of events, a singular mood of adventure and pastime, nowhere else in civilized lands so readily induced. It is, therefore, by instinct that these enchanting chroniclers lead us thither, from old Chaucer to our own Longfellow. Gil Bias acquired his first lesson in a knowledge of the world, by his encounter with the parasite at the inn of Panafleur; and Don Quixote’s enthusiasm always reaches a climax at these places of wayside sojourn. The ‘Black Bull,’ at Islington, is said to have been Sir Walter Raleigh’s mansion; ‘Dolly’s Chop-House’ is dear to authors for the sake of Goldsmith and his friends, who used to go there on their way to and from Paternoster Row. At the ‘Salutation and Cat,’ Smithfield, Coleridge and Lamb held memorable converse; and Steele often dated his Tatlers from the ‘Trumpet.’ How appropriate for Voltaire to have lodged, in London, at the ‘White Peruke’! Spenser died at an inn in King Street, Westminster, on his return from Ireland. At the ‘Red Horse,’ Stratford, is the ‘Irving room,’ precious to the American traveller; and how renowned have sweet Anne Page and jolly Falstaff made the very name of the ‘Garter Inn’! In the East a monastery, in the Desert a tent, on the Nile a boat, a hacienda in South America, a kiosk in Turkey, a caffé in Italy, but in Britain an inn, is the pilgrim’s home, and one not less characteristic. The subject, as suggestive of the philosophy of civilization, is worth investigation.

In England and in towns of Anglo-Saxon origin, where the economies of life have a natural sway, we find inns representative; in London, especially, a glance at the parlour wall reveals the class to whose convenience the tavern is dedicated: in one the portraits of actors, in another scenes in the ring and on the racecourse; here the countenance of a leading merchant, and there a military effigy, suggest the vocation of those who chiefly frequent the inn. Nor are local features less certain to find recognition: a view of the nearest nobleman’s estate, or his portrait, ornaments the sitting-room; and the observant eye can always discover an historical hint at these public resorts. Heywood, the dramatist, aptly specified this representative character of inns:—

‘The gentry to the King’s Head,
The nobles to the Crown,
The knights unto the Golden Fleece,
And to the Plough the clown;
The churchman to the Mitre,
The shepherd to the Star,
The gardener hies him to the Rose,
To the Drum the man of war;
To the Feathers, ladies, you; the Globe
The seamen do not scorn;
The usurer to the Devil, and
The townsman to the Horn;
The huntsman to the White Hart,
To the Ship the merchants go,
But you that do the Muses love
The sign called River Po;
The bankrupt to the World’s End,
The fool to the Fortune hie,
Unto the Mouth the oyster-wife,
The fiddler to the Pie;
······
The drunkard to the Vine,
The beggar to the Bush, then meet
And with Sir Humphrey dine.’

Inn signs are indeed historical landmarks: in the Middle Ages, the ‘Cross Keys,’ the ‘Three Kings,’ and ‘St. Francis,’ abounded; the Puritans substituted for ‘Angel and Lady,’ the ‘Soldier and Citizen;’ the ‘Saracen’s Head’ was a device of the Crusades; and before the ‘Coach and Horses’ was the sign of the ‘Packhorse,’ indicative of the days of equestrian travel. Many current anecdotes attest the virtue of an old, and the hazards of a new inn sign; as when the loyal host substituted the head of George the Fourth for the ancient ass, which latter effigy being successfully adopted by a neighbouring innkeeper, his discomfited rival had inscribed under the royal effigy, ‘This is the real ass.’ Thackeray cites an inn sign as illustrative of Scotch egotism: ‘In Cupar-Fife,’ he writes, ‘there’s a little inn called the “Battle of Waterloo,” and what do you think the sign is? The “Battle of Waterloo” is one broad Scotchman laying about him with a broadsword.’

The coffee-room of the best class of English inns, carpeted and curtained, the dark rich hue of the old mahogany, the ancient plate, the four-post bed, the sirloin or mutton joint, the tea, muffins, Cheshire and Stilton, the ale, the coal-fire, and The Times, form an epitome of England; and it is only requisite to ponder well the associations and history of each of these items, to arrive at what is essential in English history and character. The impassable divisions of society are shown in the difference between the ‘commercial’ and the ‘coffee-room;’ the time-worn aspect of the furniture is eloquent of conservatism; the richness of the meats and strength of the ale explain the bone and sinew of the race; the tea is fragrant with Cowper’s memory, and suggestive of East India conquests; the cheese proclaims a thrifty agriculture, the bed and draperies comfort, the coal-fire manufactures; while The Times is the chart of English enterprise, division of labour, wealth, self-esteem, politics, trade, court-life, ‘inaccessibility to ideas,’ and bullyism.

The national subserviency to rank is as plainly evinced by the plates on chamber-doors at the provincial inns, setting forth that therein on a memorable night slept a certain scion of nobility. And from the visitor at the great house of a neighbourhood, when sojourning at the inn thereof, is expected a double fee. As an instance of the inappropriate, of that stolid insensibility to taste and tact which belongs to the nation, consider the English waiter. His costume is that of a clergyman, or a gentleman dressed for company, and in ridiculous contrast with his menial obeisance; perhaps it is the self-importance nourished by this costume which renders him such a machine, incapable of an idea beyond the routine of handing a dish and receiving a sixpence.

Old Hobson, whose name is proverbially familiar, went with his wain from Cambridge to the ‘Bull Inn,’ Bishopsgate Street, London. ‘Clement’s Inn’ tavern was the scene of that memorable dialogue between Shallow and Sir John; at the ‘Cock,’ in Bond Street, Sir Charles Sedley got scandalously drunk. ‘Will’s Coffee-house’ was formerly called the ‘Rose;’ hence the line—

‘Supper and friends expect me at the Rose.’

‘Button’s,’ so long frequented by the wits of Queen Anne’s time, was kept by a former servant of Lady Warwick; and there the author of Cato fraternized with Garth, Armstrong, and other contemporary writers. Ben Jonson held his club at the ‘Devil Tavern,’ and Shakspeare and Beaumont used to meet him at the ‘Mermaid;’ the same inn is spoken of by Pope, and Swift writes ‘Stella’ of his dinner there. Beaumont thus reveals to Ben Jonson their convivial talk:—

‘What things have we seen
Done at the “Mermaid”! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle fire,
As if that every one from whom they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.’

The author of Peter Wilkins was a frequent visitor at an hostel near Clifford’s Inn, and Dr. Johnson frequented all the taverns in Fleet Street. Old Slaughter’s coffee-house, in St. Martin’s Lane, was the favourite resort of Hogarth; the house where Jeremy Taylor was born is now an inn; and Prior’s uncle kept an inn in London, where the poet was seen, when a boy, reading Horace. This incident is made use of by Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, in a very caustic manner; for, after relating it, he observes of Prior, that ‘in his private relaxations he revived the tavern, and in his amorous pedantry he exhibited the college.’

There is no city in Europe where an imaginative mood can be so indefinitely prolonged as at Venice; and in the early summer, the traveller, after gliding about all day in a gondola, and thinking of Barbarossa, Faliero, Titian, and the creations of Shakspeare, Otway, Byron, and Cooper, at evening, from under the arches of St. Mark’s Square, watches the picturesque, and sometimes mysterious figures, and then, between moss-grown palaces and over lone canals, returns to his locanda to find its aspect perfectly in accordance with his reverie; at least, such was my experience at the ‘Golden Lion.’ The immense salle-à-manger was dimly lighted, and the table for two or three guests set in a corner and half surrounded by a screen; when I raised my eyes from my first dinner there, they fell on a large painting of the Death of Seneca, a print of which had been familiar to my childhood; and thus memory was ever invoked in Venice, and her dissolving views reflected in the mirror of the mind, unbroken by the interruptions from passing life that elsewhere render them so brief. The mere fact of disembarking at the weedy steps, the utter silence of the canal, invaded only by the plash of the gondolier’s oar, or his warning cry at the angle, the tessellated pavement and quaintly-carved furniture of the bedroom, and a certain noiseless step and secretive gravity observable in the attendants, render the Venetian inn memorable and distinct in reminiscence, and in perfect harmony with the place and its associations.

During the late revolutionary era in Europe, the inn tables of Germany afforded the most reliable index of political opinion; the free discussion which was there indulged brought out every variety of sentiment and theory, as it included all classes, with a due sprinkling of foreigners. From the old novel to the new farce, indeed, the extremes of public opinion and the average tone of manners, the laughable contre-temps and the delightful adventure, are made to reveal themselves at inns, so that political sects and all vocations are identified with them. To Rip Van Winkle, the most astonishing change he discovered in his native village, after his long nap, was the substitution of Washington’s likeness for that of King George on the tavern sign.

The dark staircase, rising from the mule stable of a posada, the bare chambers, wool-knotted mattresses, odour of garlic, and vegetables swimming in oil, are items of the Spanish inn not likely to be forgotten by the epicurean traveller. But good beds and excellent chocolate are to be found at the most uninviting Spanish inns; and the imaginative traveller enjoys the privilege of sojourning at the very one where Don Quixote was knighted. In highly-civilized lands, inns have not only a national, but a professional character; the sign, the pictures on the wall, and the company, have a certain individuality,—marine in sailors’ inns, pugilistic in sporting ones, and picturesque in those haunted by artists; the lines of demarcation are as visible as those which separate newspapers and shops; in the grand division of labour that signalizes modern life, the inn also has thus become an organ and a symbol. Even their mottoes and symbols give traditional suggestions, or emblazon phases of opinion; natural history has been exhausted in supplying effigies; mythology has yielded up all her deities and institutions; heroes and localities are kept fresh in the traveller’s imagination by their association with ‘creature comforts.’ Thus he dreams of Cromwell at the ‘Tumble-down Dick,’ and of the Stuarts at the ‘King Charles in the Oak,’ the days of chivalry at the ‘Star and Garter’ or the ‘Croix de Malta,’ of brilliant campaigns at the ‘Wagram and Montmorency,’ of woman’s love at the ‘Petrarch and Laura,’ and of man’s at the ‘Freemasons’ Tavern.’[1]

My host at Ravenna had been Byron’s purveyor during the poet’s residence there; and he was never weary of descanting upon his character and the incidents of his sojourn; in fact, upon discovering my interest in the subject, he forgot the landlord in the cicerone, and gave no small part of a day to accompanying me to the haunts of the bard. Our first visit was to the Guiccioli Palace, and here he described his lordship’s dinners with the precision and enthusiasm of an antiquarian certifying a document or medal; then he took me to the Pine Forest, and pointed out the track where Byron used to wheel his horse at full gallop, and discharge his pistol at a bottle placed on a stump—exercises preparatory to his Grecian campaign. At a particular flagstone, in the main street, my guide suddenly paused; ‘Signore,’ said he ‘just as milord had reached this spot one evening, he heard the report of a musket, and saw an officer fall a few rods in advance; dismounting, he rushed to his side, and found him to be a familiar acquaintance, an agent of the government, who had thus become the victim to private vengeance. Byron had him conveyed to his own apartment and placed on a bed, where in half an hour he expired. This event made a deep impression on his mind; he was dispirited for a week, and wrote a description of death from a shot, which you will find in his poems, derived from this scene.’ With such local anecdotes my Byronic host entertained me so well, that the departed bard ever since has seemed to live in my remembrance rather than my fancy.

Whoever has eaten trout caught in the Arno at the little inn at Tivoli, or been detained by stress of weather in that of Albano, will not forget the evidences the walls of both exhibit that rollicking artists have felt at home there. Such heads and landscapes, caricatures and grotesque animals, as are there improvised, baffle description.

A well is the inn of the desert. ‘The dragoman usually looks out for some place of shelter,’ says the author of Over the Lebanon to Balbek; ‘the shadow of a ruin or the covering of a grove of fig-trees is the most common, and, if possible, near a well or stream. The first of all considerations is to reach a spot where you can get water; so that throughout the East the well answers to the old English “Half-way House,” and road-side “Accommodation for Man and Beast,” which gave their cheerful welcome to the “Tally Ho” and “Red Rover” that flourished before this age of iron.’

The pedestrian in Wales sometimes encounters a snug and beautifully-situated hostel (perhaps the ‘Angler’s Rest’), where five minutes beside the parlour fire, and a chat with the landlady or her pretty daughter, give him so complete a home feeling that it is with painful reluctance he again straps on his knapsack; at liberty to muse by the ever-singing tea-kettle if the weather is unpropitious, stroll out in view of a noble mountain or a fairy lake in the warm sunset, or hear the news from the last wayfarer in the travellers’ room; and there is thus mingled a sense of personal independence, comfort, and solitude, which is rarely experienced even in the most favoured domain of hospitality. An equally winsome but more romantic charm holds the roaming artist who stops at Albano or Volterra, where the dreamy campagna or Etruscan ruins alternate with groups of sunburnt contadini, lighted up by the charcoal’s glow in a way to fascinate Salvator, before his contented gaze; his portfolio fills up with miraculous rapidity; and the still life is agreeably varied by the scenic costumes and figures which grace the vintage or a festa. Some humble Champollion could easily add to the curiosities of literature by a volume gleaned among inn inscriptions—from the marble tablet announcing the sojourn of a royal personage, to the rude caricature on the whitewashed wall, and the sentimental couplet on the window-pane; to say nothing of the albums which enshrine so many tributes to Etna and the White Mountains—the heirlooms of Abbaté, the famous padrone of Catania, and Crawford of the Notch.

Sicily is famous for the absence of inns, and the intolerable discomfort of those that do exist; but mine host of Catania was the prince of landlords. A fine specimen of manly beauty, and with the manners of a gentleman, he seemed to think his guests entitled to all the courtesy which should follow an invitation; he made formal calls upon them, and gave sage advice as to the best way to pass the time; fitted them out with hospitable skill and experienced counsels for the ascent of Etna, and brought home choice game from his hunting excursions, as a present to the ‘stranger within his gates.’ His discourse, too, was of the most bland and entertaining description; he was ‘a fellow of infinite wit, of most excellent fancy;’ and these ministrations derived a memorable charm from a certain gracefulness and winsome cordiality. No wonder his scrap-book is filled with eulogiums, and that the traveller in Sicily, by the mere force of contrast, records in hyperboles the merits of the ‘Corona d’Oro.’ Alas for the mutability of inns and their worthy hosts! Abbaté was killed by an accidental shot, during an émeute in Catania, in 1848.

The waxed floor, light curtains, and gay paper of a Parisian bedroom, however cheerful, are the reverse of snug; but in the provincial inns of the Continent, with less of comfort there is often more historical interest than in those of England; the stone staircases and floors, and the scanty furniture are forlorn; and the exuberance of the host’s civility is often in ludicrous contrast with the poverty of his larder. An hour or two in the dreary salle-à-manger of a provincial French inn on a rainy day is the acme of a voyageur’s depression. The restaurant and café have superseded the French inns, of whose gastronomic renown and scenes of intrigue and violence we read in Dumas’s historical novels; romance and tragedy, the convivial and the culinary associations, are equally prominent. ‘Suburban cabarets,’ observes a popular writer, ‘were long dangerous rendezvous for Parisians;’ before and during the Grand Monarque’s reign the French taverns were representative, the army, court, men of letters, and even ecclesiastics having their favourite haunt: Molière went to the ‘Croix de Lorraine,’ and Racine to the ‘Mouton Blanc;’ the actors met at ‘Les Deux Faisans;’ one of the last of the old-school Parisian landladies—she who kept the ‘Maison Rouge’—is celebrated in Béranger’s Madame Gregoire; Ravaillac went from a tavern to assassinate Henry the Fourth; and fashionable orgies were carried on in the ‘Temple Cellars.’ It is not uncommon to find ourselves in a friar’s dormitory, the large hotels in the minor towns having frequently been erected as convents; and in Italy, such an inn as that of Terracina, with its legends of banditti and its romantic site, the waves of the Mediterranean moaning under its lofty windows, infallibly recalls Mrs. Radcliffe. In the cities many of the hotels are palaces where noble families have dwelt for centuries, and about them are perceptible the traces of decayed magnificence and the spell of traditional glory and crime. To an imaginative traveller these fanciful attractions often compensate for the absence of substantial merit, and there is something mysterious and winsome in the obsolete architecture and fallen grandeur of these edifices;—huge shadows glide along the high cornices, the mouldy frescoes look as if they had witnessed strange vicissitudes, and the imagination readily wanders through a series of wonderful experiences of which these old palazzi have been the scene. Here, as elsewhere in the land, it is the romantic element, the charm of antiquity, that is the redeeming feature. For picturesque beauty of situation, neatness, and rural comfort, some of the inns of Switzerland are the most delightful on the Continent, inviting the stranger to linger amid the clear, fresh, and glorious landscape, and relish the sweet butter, white bread, and unrivalled honey and eggs, served so neatly every morning by a fair mountaineer with snowy cap and gay bodice.

I am a lover of the woods, and sometimes cross the bay, with a friend, to Long Island, and pass a few hours in the strip of forest that protected our fugitive army at the Battle of Flatbush; there are devious and shadowy paths intersecting it, and in spring and autumn the wild flowers, radiant leaves, and balmy stillness cheer the mind and senses, fresh from the dust and bustle of the city. Often after one of these woodland excursions we have emerged upon a quiet road, with farm-houses at long intervals, and orchards and grain-fields adjacent, and followed its course to a village, whose gable-roofed domicile and ancient graveyard indicate an old settlement; and here is a little inn which recalls our idea of the primitive English alehouse. It has a little Dutch porch, a sunny garden, the liquor is served from the square bottles of Holland, the back parlour is retired and neat, and the landlady sits all day in the window at her sewing, and, when a little acquainted, will tell you all about the love-affairs of the village; the cheese and sour-krout at dinner suggest a Flemish origin.

The old sign that hangs at the road-side was brought to this country by an English publican, when the fine arts were supposed to be at so low a stage as to furnish no Dick Tinto equal to such an achievement. It represents the arms of Great Britain, and doubtless beguiled many a trooper of his Majesty when Long Island was occupied by the English; no sooner, however, had they retreated, than the republican villagers forced the landlord to have an American eagle painted above the king’s escutcheon. Indeed, it is characteristic of inns that they perpetuate local associations: put your head into an Italian boarding-house in New York, and the garlic, macaroni, and red wine lead you to think yourself at Naples; the snuff, dominoes, and gazettes mark a French café all the world over; in Montreal you wake up in a room like that you occupied at Marseilles; and at Halifax the malt liquor is as English as the currency.

‘The sports of the inn yards’ are noted often in the memoirs of Elizabeth’s reign. In a late biography of Lord Bacon, his brother Anthony is spoken of as ‘having taken a house in Bishopsgate Street, near the famous “Ball Inn,” where plays are performed before cits and gentlemen, very much to the delight of Essex and his jovial crew.’ And in allusion to the Earl’s conspiracy, the lower class of inns then and there are thus described: ‘From kens like the “Hart’s Horn” and the “Shipwreck Tavern,” haunts of the vilest refuse of a great city, the spawn of hells and stews, the vomit of Italian cloisters and Belgian camps, Blount, long familiar with the agents of disorder, unkennels in the Earl’s name a pack of needy ruffians eager for any device that seems to promise pay to their greed or licence to their lust.’ It has been justly remarked by Letitia Landon, that ‘after all, the English hostel owes much of its charm to Chaucer; our associations are of his haunting pictures—his delicate prioress, his comely young squire, with their pleasant interchange of tale and legend:’ still less remote and more personal associations endear and identify these landmarks of travel and sojourn in Great Britain. Scarcely a pleasant record of life or manners, during the last century, is destitute of one of these memorable resorts. Addison frequented the ‘White Horn,’ at the end of Holland House Lane. When Sir Walter Scott visited Wordsworth, he daily strolled to the ‘Swan,’ beyond Grasmere, to atone for the plain fare of the bard’s cottage. ‘We four,’ naïvely writes the Rev. Archibald Carlyle, speaking of his literary comrades, ‘frequently resorted to a small tavern at the corner of Cockspur Street, the “Golden Ball,” where we had a frugal supper and a little punch, as the finances of none of the company were in very good order; but we had rich enough conversation on literary subjects, enlivened by Smollett’s agreeable stories, which he told with peculiar grace.’ And his more than clerical zest for such a rendezvous is apparent in his notice of another favourite inn: ‘It was during this assembly that the inn at the lower end of the West Bow got into some credit, and was called the “Diversorium.” Thomas Nicholson was the man’s name, and his wife’s Nelly Douglas. Nelly was handsome, Thomas a rattling fellow.’ Here often met Robertson the historian, Horne the dramatist, Hume, Jardine, and other notable men of the Scotch metropolis. To facilitate their intercourse when in London, they also ‘established a club at a coffee-house in Saville Row, and dined together daily at three with Wedderburn and Jack Dalrymple.’ By the same candid autobiographer we are informed that, at a tavern ‘in Fleet Street, a physicians’ club met, had original papers laid before them, and always waited supper for Dr. Armstrong to order.’ These casual allusions indicate the essential convenience and social importance of the inn, before clubs had superseded them in Britain, and cafés on the Continent. A writer, whose Itinerary is dated 1617, thus describes entertainment at the English inns of his day: ‘As soone as a passenger comes to an inne, the servants run to him, and one takes his horse and walkes him about till he is cool, then rubs him down and gives him feed; another servant gives the passenger his private chamber, and kindles his fire; the third pulls off his bootes and makes them cleane; then the host and hostess visit him, and if he will eate with the hoste, or at a common table with the others, his meale will cost him sixpence, or, in some places, fourpence; but if he will eate in his own chamber, he commands what meat he will, according to his appetite; yea, the kitchen is open to him to order the meat to be dressed as he likes beste. After having eaten what he pleases, he may with credit set by a part for next day’s breakfast. His bill will then be written for him, and should he object to any charge, the host is ready to alter it.’ An Italian nobleman of our own day,[2] his appreciation of free discussion quickened by political exile, was much impressed with the influence and agency of the English inn in public affairs. ‘Taverns,’ he writes, ‘are the forum of the English; it was here that arose the triumph of Burdett when he left the Tower, and the curses of Castlereagh when he descended into the tomb; it is here that begins the censure or the approval of a new law.’

Charles Lamb delighted to smoke his pipe at the old ‘Queen’s Head,’ and to quaff ale from the tankard presented by one Master Cranch (a choice spirit) to a former host, and in the old oak-parlour where tradition says ‘the gallant Raleigh received full souse in his face the contents of a jolly black-jack from an affrighted clown, who, seeing clouds of tobacco smoke curling from the knight’s mouth and nose, thought he was all on fire.’

‘A relic of old London is fast disappearing,’ says a journal of that city—‘the “Blue Boar Inn,” or the “George and Blue Boar,” as it came to be called later, in Holborn. For more than two hundred years this was one of the famous coaching-houses, where stages arrived from the Northern and Midland counties. It is more famous still as being the place—if Lord Orrery’s chaplain, Morrice, may be credited—where Cromwell and Ireton, disguised as troopers, cut from the saddle-flap of a messenger a letter which they knew to be there, from Charles the First to Henrietta Maria.’

The ‘Peacock,’ at Matlock on the Derwent, was long the chosen resort of artists, botanists, geologists, lawyers, and anglers; and perhaps at no rural English inn of modern times has there been more varied and gifted society than occasionally convened in this romantic district, under its roof.

The ‘Hotel Gibbon,’ at Lausanne, suggests to one familiar with English literature the life of that historian, so naïvely described by himself, and keeps alive the associations of his elaborate work in the scene of its production; and nightly colloquies, that are embalmed and embodied in genial literature, immortalize the ‘sky-blue parlour’ at Ambrose’s ‘Edinburgh Tavern.’

Few historical novelists have more completely mastered the details of costume, architecture, and social habits in the old times of England, than James; and his description of the inns of Queen Anne’s day is as elaborate as it is complete: ‘Landlords in England at that time—I mean, of course, in country towns—were very different in many respects, and of a different class, from what they are at present. In the first place, they were not fine gentlemen; in the next place, they were not discharged valets-de-chambre or butlers, who, having cheated their masters handsomely, and perhaps laid them under contribution in many ways, retire to enjoy the fat things at their ease in their native town. Then, again, they were on terms of familiar intercourse with two or three classes, completely separate and distinct from each other—a sort of connecting link between them. At their door, the justice of the peace, the knight of the shire, the great man of the neighbourhood, dismounted from his horse, and had his chat with mine host. There came the village lawyer, when he gained a cause, or won a large fee, or had been paid a long bill, to indulge in his pint of sherry, and gossiped as he drank it of all the affairs of his clients. There sneaked in the doctor to get his glass of eau-de-vie, or plague-water, or aqua mirabilis, or strong spirits, in short, of any other denomination, and tell little dirty anecdotes of his cases and his patients. There the alderman, the wealthy shopkeeper, and the small proprietor, or the large farmer, came to take his cheerful cup on Saturdays, or on market-day. But, besides these, the inn was the resort—though approached by another door—of a lower and a poorer class, with whom the landlord was still upon as good terms as with the others. The wagoner, the carter, the lawyer’s and the banker’s clerk, the shopman, the porter even, all came there; the landlord was civil, and familiar, and chatty with them all.’

Geoffrey Crayon’s ‘Shakspearian Research’ culminated at the ‘Boar Head,’ Eastcheap; his story of the ‘Spectre Bridegroom’ was appropriately related in the kitchen of the ‘Pomme d’Or,’ in the Netherlands; and he makes Rip’s congenial retreat from his virago spouse, the ‘coin of vantage’ in front of the village inn. Irving’s own appreciation of these vagabond shrines and accidental homes is emphatic; he commends the ‘honest bursts of laughter in which a man indulges in that temple of true liberty, an inn,’ and quotes zestfully the maxim that ‘a tavern is the rendezvous, the exchange, the staple of good fellows.’ His personal testimony is characteristic: ‘To a homeless man there is a momentary feeling of independence, as he stretches himself before an inn fire: the arm-chair is his throne, the poker is his sceptre, and the little parlour his undisputed empire.’ How little did the modest author imagine, when he thus wrote, that the poker with which he stirred the fire in the parlour-grate of the ‘Red Lion’ would become a sacred literary relic wherewith his partial countrymen are beguiled of extra fees, while the bard of Avon and the gentleman of Sunnyside mingle in the reverie of fond reminiscence.

‘I went by an indirect route to Lichfield,’ writes Hawthorne, in his English sketches, ‘and put up at the “Black Swan.” Had I known where to find it, I would rather have established myself at the inn kept by Mr. Boniface, and so famous for its ale in Farquhar’s time.’ Gossip and gaiety, the poor man’s arena and the ‘breathing-time of day’ of genius, thus give to the inn a kind of humane scope. Beethoven, wearied of his palace-home and courtly patronage, and the ‘stately houses open to him in town and country, often forsook all for solitude in obscure inns, escaping from all conventionalities to be alone with himself.’ ‘Nous voyons,’ says Brillat-Savarin, ‘que les villageois font toutes les affaires au cabaret;’ Rousseau delighted in the frugal liberty thereof; and the last days of Elia are associated with the inn which was the goal of his daily promenade. ‘After Isola married,’ writes one of his friends, ‘and Mary was infirm, he took his lonely walk along the London road, as far as the “Bell of Edmonton;” and one day tripped over a stone and slightly wounded his forehead; erysipelas set in, and he died.’ Somewhat of the attractiveness of the inn to the philosopher is that its temporary and casual shelter and solace accord with the counsel of Sydney Smith, ‘to take short views,’ and Goëthe’s, to ‘cast ourselves into the sea of accidents;’ and a less amiable reason for the partiality has been suggested in ‘the wide capability of finding fault which an inn affords.’ A genial picture of one is thus drawn by a modern poet:—

‘This cosy hostelrie a visit craves;
Here will I sit awhile,
And watch the heavenly sunshine smile
Upon the village graves.
Strange is this little room in which I wait,
With its old table, rough with rustic names.
’Tis summer now; instead of blinking flames,
Sweet-smelling ferns are hanging o’er the grate.
With curious eyes I pore
Upon the mantel-piece, with precious wares;
Glazed Scripture prints, in black, lugubrious frames,
Filled with old Bible lore:
The whale is casting Jonah on the shore;
Pharaoh is drowning in the curly wave;
And to Elijah, sitting at his cave,
The hospitable ravens fly in pairs,
Celestial food within their horny beaks;
On a slim David, with great pinky cheeks,
A towered Goliath stares.
Here will I sit at peace,
While, piercing through the window’s ivy veil,
A slip of sunshine smites the amber ale;
And as the wreaths of fragrant smoke increase,
I’ll read the letter which came down to-day.’[3]

As a contrast to this, take Longfellow’s ‘Wayside Inn,’ at Sudbury, Massachusetts:—

‘As ancient is this hostelry
As any in the land may be,
Built in the old colonial day,
When men lived in a grander way,
With ampler hospitality;
A kind of old Hobgoblin hall,
Now somewhat fallen to decay,
With weather-stains upon the wall,
And stairways worn, and crazy doors,
And creaking and uneven floors,
And chimneys huge and tiled and tall.
A region of repose it seems,
A place of slumber and of dreams,
Remote among the wooded hills!’

The facilities of modern travel and its vast increase, while they have modified the characteristic features of the inn, have given it new economical importance; and, not long since, the American hotel-system was earnestly discussed in the English and French journals, as a substitute for the European: the method by which all the wants of the traveller are supplied at an established price per diem, instead of the details of expense and the grades of accommodation in vogue abroad. In Paris, London, some of the West India Islands, and elsewhere, the American hotel has, in a measure, succeeded. But it is in its historical and social aspect that we find the interest of the subject; as regards convenience, economy, and comfort, the question can perhaps only be met in an eclectic spirit, each country having its own merits and demerits as regards the provision for public entertainment of man and beast. The inns of Switzerland will bear the test of reminiscence better than those of any other part of the Continent; the solitary system of the English inn is objectionable; discomfort is proverbial in Havannah hotels; the garden-tables and music in the German hostels are pleasant social features; and, with all their frugal resources, the farm-stations in Norway boast the charm of a candid and naïve hospitality which sweetens the humble porridge of the weary traveller. ‘It is scarcely credible,’ says an ‘unprotected female,’ in her record of travel there, ‘that such pre-adamite simplicity of heart still exists on earth.’ In pictures and diaries, the German landlord is always light-haired, and holds a beer tankard; and the hotels in the British West Indies, according to a recent traveller, are always kept by ‘fat, middle-aged, coloured ladies, who have no husbands.’ Rose, writing to Hallam from Italy, hints the union of romantic and classical associations which some of the inns conserve and inspire; that of ‘Civita Castellana,’ he remarks, ‘is on the classic route from Rome to Florence, and is a type of the large Italian inns, such as one finds in romances: balconies, terraces, flowers of the south, large courts open for post-chaises—nothing is wanting.’ When Heine visited Germany, he tells us how the conservative habits of his fatherland newly impressed him in the familiar and old-fashioned dishes, ‘sour-krout, stuffed chestnuts in green cabbages, stockfish swimming in butter, eggs and bloaters, sausages, fieldfares, roasted angels with apple-sauce, and goose.’

In mediæval times, in that part of Europe, from the isolation of inns they were emphatically the places to find an epitome of the age—soldiers, monks, noblemen, and peasants surrounded the same stove, shared the contents of the same pot, and often the straw which formed their common bed; the proverb was, ‘Inns are not built for one.’ The salutations, benisons, and curses; the motley guests, the lack of privacy, the trinkgeld and stirrup-cup, the murders and amours, the converse and precautions, the orgies and charities thereof; were each and all characteristic of the unsettled state of society, the diversities of rank, the common necessities, and the priestly, military, and boorish elements of life and manners. But the rarity of any public-house, as we understand the term, is more characteristic of those times than the incongruous elements therein occasionally exhibited. ‘There seems,’ says an ancient historian, ‘to have been no inns or houses of entertainment for the reception of travellers during the middle ages. This is a proof of the little intercourse which took place between different nations. The duty of hospitality was so necessary in that state of society, that it was enforced by statutes; it abounded, and secured the stranger a kind reception under any roof where he chose to take shelter.’[4]

On first entering an inn at Havre-de-Grace, I found the landlady taking leave of the captain of an American packet ship. He had paid his bill, not without some remonstrance, and his smiling hostess, with true French tact, was now in the act of bidding so pleasing a farewell as would lure him to take up his quarters there on the return voyage. She had purchased at the market a handsome bouquet, and tied it up jauntily with ribbons. The ruddy sea-dog face of the captain was half turned aside with a look of impatience at the idea of being inveigled into good-nature after her extortion; but she, not a whit discouraged, held her flowers up to him, and smiling, with her fair hand on his rough dread-naught overcoat, turned full to his eye a sprig of yellow blossom, and with irresistible naïveté whispered,—‘Mon cher Capitaine, c’est immortel comme mon attachement pour vous.’ It was a little scene worthy of Sterne, and brought the agreeableness and the imposition of the innkeepers of the Continent at once before me. One evening, in Florence, I was sent for by a countryman, who lodged at the most famous hotel in that city, and found him perambulating his apartment under strong excitement of mind. He told me, with much emotion, that the last time he had visited Florence was twenty years before, with his young and beautiful wife. The belle of the season that winter was the Marchesa ——. She gave a magnificent ball, and in the midst of the festivities took the young American couple into her boudoir, and sung to them with her harp. Her vocal talent was celebrated, but it was a rare favour to hear her, and this attention was prized accordingly. ‘You know,’ added my friend, ‘that I came abroad to recover the health which grief at my wife’s death so seriously impaired; and you know how unavailing has proved the experiment. On my arrival here I inquired for the best inn, and was directed hither; upon entering this chamber, which was assigned me, something in the frescoes and tiles struck me as familiar; they awoke the most vivid associations, and at last I remembered that this is the very room to which the beautiful Marchesa brought us to hear her sing on that memorable evening; the family are dispersed, and her palace is rented for an hotel; hence this coincidence.’

Among the minor local associations to be enjoyed at Rome, not the least common and suggestive are those which belong to the old ‘Bear Inn,’ where Montaigne lodged. Not only the vicissitudes but the present fortunes of European towns are indicated by the inns. I arrived at ancient Syracuse at sunset on a spring afternoon, and dismounted at an inn that looked like an episcopal residence or government house, so lofty and broad were the dimensions of the edifice; but not a person was visible in the spacious court, and as I wandered up the staircases and along the corridors, no sound but the echo of my steps was audible. At length a meagre attendant emerged from an obscure chamber, and explained that this grand pile was erected in anticipation of the American squadron in the Mediterranean making their winter quarters in the harbour of Syracuse: a project abandoned at the earnest request of the King of Naples, who dreaded the example of a republican marine in his realm; and then so rarely did a visitor appear, that the poor lonely waiter was thrown into a fit of surprise, from which he did not recover during my stay.

To the stranger, no more characteristic evidence of our material prosperity and gregarious habits can be imagined than that afforded by the large, showy, and thronged hotels of our principal cities. They are epitomes of the whole country; at a glance they reveal the era of upholstery, the love of ostentation, the tendency to live in herds, and the absence of a subdued and harmonious tone of life and manners. The large mirrors and bright carpets which decorate these resorts are entirely incongruous—the brilliancy of the sunshine and the stimulating nature of the climate demand within doors a predominance of neutral tints to relieve and freshen the eye and nerves. It is characteristic of that devotion to the immediate which De Tocqueville ascribes to republican institutions, that these extravagant and gregarious establishments in our country are so often named after living celebrities in the mercantile, literary, and political world. This custom gives those who enjoy this distinction while living ‘the freedom of the house.’ It greatly amused the friends of our modest Geoffery Crayon, when, encouraged by his affectionate kinswoman and his friend Kennedy to ‘travel on his capital,’ under the pressure of necessity he once thus desperately claimed the privileges of his honoured name, wherefrom his sensitive nature habitually shrunk. ‘I arrived in town safe,’ he writes from New York to his niece, ‘and proceeded to the “Irving House,” where I asked for a room. What party had I with me? None. Had I not a lady with me? No; I was alone. I saw my chance was a bad one, and I feared to be put in a dungeon as I was on a former occasion. I bethought myself of your advice; and so, when the book was presented to me, wrote my name at full length—“from Sunnyside.” I was ushered into an apartment on the first floor, furnished with rosewood, yellow damask, and pier-glasses, with a bed large enough for an alderman and his wife, a bath-room adjoining. In a word, I was accommodated completely en prince. The negro waiters all call me by name, and vie with each other in waiting on me. The chambermaid has been at uncommon pains to put my room in first-rate order; and if she had been pretty, I absolutely should have kissed her; but as she was not, I shall reward her in sordid coin. Henceforth I abjure all modesty with hotel-keepers, and will get as much for my name as it will fetch. Kennedy calls it travelling on one’s capital.’

The extravagant scale upon which these establishments are conducted is another national feature, at once indicating the comparative ease with which money is acquired in the New World, and the passion that exists here for keeping up appearances. It would be useful to investigate the influence of hotel life in this country upon manners: whatever may be the result as to the coarser sex, its effect upon women and children is lamentable—lowering the tone, compromising the taste, and yielding incessant and promiscuous excitement to the love of admiration; the change in the very nature of young girls, thus exposed to an indiscriminate crowd, is rapid and complete; modesty and refinement are soon lost in over-consciousness and moral hardihood. But, perhaps, the most singular trait in the American hotel is the deference paid to the landlord: instead of being the servant of the public, he is apparently the master; and a traveller who makes the now rapid transition from a New York to a Liverpool hotel, might think himself among a different race; the courteous devotion, almost subserviency, in the one case, being in total contrast with the nonchalance and even despotism of the other. The prosperous security of the host with us, and the dependence of his guest for any choice of accommodation, is doubtless the most obvious reason for this anomaly; but it is also, in a degree at least, to be referred to the familiarity with which even gentlemen treat the innkeepers. To use a vulgar phrase, they descend to curry favour and minister to the self-esteem of a class of men in whom it is already pampered beyond endurable bounds. No formula of republican equality justifies this behaviour; and it usually reacts unfavourably for the self-respect of the individual. Some foreigner remarked, with as much truth as irony, that our aristocracy consisted of hotel-keepers and steamboat captains; and appearances certainly warrant the sarcasm. It was not always thus. When Washington lodged at the old Walton Mansion-house, which had been converted to an inn, the old negro who kept it was the ideal of a host; an air of dignity as well as comfort pervaded the house; through the open upper half of the broad door played the sunshine upon the sanded threshold; at the head of the long easy staircase ticked the old-fashioned clock; full-length portraits, by Copley, graced the parlour wall; the old Dutch stoop looked the emblem of hospitality; no angular figures were ranged to squirt tobacco-juice; no pert clerks lorded it from behind a mahogany barricade; but the glow of the windows at night, the alacrity of the sedate waiter, the few but respectable guests, and the prolonged meals, of which but two or three partook, gave to the inn the character of a home. Lafayette wrote to his wife in 1777, while descanting with enthusiasm upon the simplicity of manners in this country: ‘The very inns are different from those in Europe; the host and hostess sit at table with you, and do the honours of a comfortable meal; and, on going away, you pay your fare without higgling.’ An English traveller, who visited this country soon after the Revolutionary War, speaks of the ‘uncomplying temper of the landlords of the country inns in America.’ ‘They will not,’ says another, ‘bear the treatment we too often give ours at home. They feel themselves in some degree independent of travellers, as all of them have other occupations to follow; nor will they put themselves into a bustle on your account; but with good language they are very civil, and will accommodate you as well as they can. The general custom of having two or three beds in a room, to be sure, is very disagreeable; it arises from the great increase of travelling within the last few years, and the smallness of their houses, which were not built for houses of entertainment.’

It is a most significant indication of our devotion to the external, that ovations at which the legislators of the land discourse, and eulogies that fill the columns of the best journals, celebrate the opening of a new tavern, or the retirement of a publican. The confined and altitudinous cells into which so many of the complacent victims of these potentates are stowed, and their habits of subserviency to the rules of the house which are perked up on their chamber-walls, induced a Sicilian friend of mine to complain that sojourners at inns in this land of liberty were treated like friars. The gorgeous luxury of the metropolitan inns is reversed in the small towns, where, without the picturesque situation, we often find the discomfort of the Continent.

Under date of March 4, 1634, John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, records in his journal: ‘Samuel Cole set up the first house of common entertainment’ in Boston. According to the famous literary ruse of Irving and Wirt, Knickerbocker’s facetious history and the Letters of a British Spy were found in the inn-chamber of a departed traveller. Of old, the American inn, or tavern as it was called, subserved a great variety of purposes. One of New England’s local historians says:—

‘The taverns of olden time were the places of resort for gentlemen; and one consequence was, good suppers and deep drinking. They also performed the office of newspapers. The names posted on the several tavern-doors were a sufficient notice for jurors. Saturday afternoon was the time when men came from all quarters of the town to see and hear all they could at the tavern, where politics and theology, trade, barter, and taxes, were all mixed up together over hot flip and strong toddy.

‘The taverns served also as places for marketing. During most of the winter they were filled every night with farmers, who had brought their pork, butter, grain, seeds, and poultry to market. Most families supplied themselves through these opportunities, and purchased the best articles at moderate prices.

‘Landlords could not grow rich very fast on country custom. The travelling farmer brought all his food for himself in a box, and that for his horse in a bag. He therefore paid only twelve cents for his bed, and as much for horse-keeping. It was not uncommon to have six days’ expenses amount only to two dollars. Auctions, theatricals, legerdemain, caucuses, military drills, balls, and dancing-schools, all came in place at the tavern. Especially, sleigh-riding parties found them convenient.’[5]

‘You will not go into one,’ wrote Brissot in 1788, ‘without meeting with neatness, decency, and dignity. The table is served by a maiden, well-dressed and pretty, by a pleasant mother whose age has not effaced the agreeableness of her features, and by men who have that air of respectability which is inspired by the idea of equality, and are not ignoble and base, like the greater part of our own tavern-keepers.’ In 1792, Wansey, the commercial traveller already cited, tells us he lodged at the ‘Bunch of Grapes,’ in Boston, and paid five shillings a day, including a pint of Madeira. He had an interview with Citizen Genet and Dr. Priestley at the ‘Tontine,’ near the Battery in New York; and saw Frenchmen with tricolour cockades at the ‘Indian Queen,’ on the Boston road;—trivial data for his journal then, and yet now suggestive of the political and economical condition of the land, whereof even tavern bills and company are no inadequate test. A sagacious reminiscent informs us that ‘the taverns of Boston were the original business exchanges: they combined the Counting-house, the Exchange-office, the Reading-room, and the Bank; each represented a locality. To the “Lamb Tavern,” called by the sailors “sheep’s baby,” people went to “see a man from Dedham”—it was the resort of Norfolk County; the old “Eastern Stage-house,” in Ann Street, was frequented by “down-easters,” captains of vessels, formerly from the Penobscot and Kennebec; there were to be seen groups of sturdy men seated round an enormous fireplace, chalking down the price of bark and lumber, and skippers bringing in a vagrant tarpaulin to “sign the articles.” To the “Exchange Coffee-house” resorted the nabobs of Essex County; here those aristocratic eastern towns, Newburyport and Portsmouth, were represented by shipowners and shipbuilders, merchants of the first class. Dealers in butter and cheese went to the “City Tavern,” in Brattle Street—a favourite sojourn of “members of the General Court,”—its court-yard crowded with teams loaded with the best pork from Vermont and Western Massachusetts, and the “wooden notions” of Yankee rustics. The last of the old Boston taverns was the once famous “Elm-street House,” a rendezvous of stage-coaches, teams, and transient boarders, which was kept up in the old style until fairly drawn from the field by “modern improvements.”’ Indeed, this slight mention of the functions and fortunes of inns in the New England metropolis hints, more than a volume of statistics, the progress of her growth and the cause of her social transitions; locomotion has completely done away with the local affinities of the past, and emigration modified the individuality of class and character which of old gave such special interest to the inn; we are too gregarious, luxurious, and hurried to indulge in these primitive expedients.

At the old ‘Raleigh Tavern,’ in Virginia—not long since destroyed by fire,—Patrick Henry lodged when he made his memorable début, as a patriotic orator, in the House of Burgesses; and it was in a chamber of this inn that he prepared his speeches, and that the great leading men of the Revolution, in that State, assembled to consult. Some of the inns in Canada are named after the Indian chiefs mentioned in the earliest records of exploration by Cartier. At the ‘Frauncis Tavern,’ in New York, Washington took leave of his officers, and the ‘Social Club,’ still famous in the annals of the city, met. Military men appreciate good inns; Washington wrote to Frauncis, and Lafayette praised him. One of the latest of memorable associations connected with the inns of New York, is that which identifies the ‘City Hotel’ with the naval victories of the last war with England. No one who listened to the musical voice of the late Ogden Hoffman, as he related to the St. Nicholas Society at their annual banquet his personal memories of that favourite hotel, will fail to realize the possible dramatic and romantic interest which may attach to such a resort, even in our unromantic times and in the heart of a commercial city. Visions of naval heroes, of belles in the dance, witty coteries and distinguished strangers, political crises and social triumphs, flitted vividly before the mind as the genial reminiscent called up the men, women, fêtes, and follies there known. A recent English traveller in the United States, in alluding to the resemblance he discovered to what was familiar at home, speaks of one relic which has caught the eye of few as suggestive of the old country. ‘There is,’ he observes, ‘in Baltimore an old inn, with an old sign, standing at the corner of Eutaw and Franklin streets, just such as may still be seen in the towns of Somersetshire; and before it are to be seen old wagons, covered and soiled and battered, about to return from the city to the country, just as the wagons do in our own agricultural counties.’[6]

How near to us the record of ‘baiting at an inn’ brings the renowned! ‘After dinner,’ writes Washington in the diary of his second visit to New England, ‘through frequent showers we proceeded to the tavern of a Mrs. Haviland, at Rye, who keeps a very neat and decent inn.’ Mendelssohn, ideal as was his tone of mind, wrote zestfully to his sister:—‘A neat, civil Frenchwoman keeps the inn on the summit of the Simplon; and it would not be easy to describe the sensation of satisfaction caused by its thrifty cleanliness, which is nowhere to be found in Italy.’ Lockhart, when an assiduous Oxford scholar, found his choicest recreation in ‘a quiet row on the river, and a fish-dinner at Godstow;’ and there is not one of his surviving associates, says his biographer, ‘who fails to look back at this moment, with melancholy pleasure, on the brilliant wit, the merry song, and the grave discussion which gave to the sanded parlour of the village alehouse the air of the Palæstra at Tusculum, or the Amaltheum of Cumæ.’

It is impossible to conceive any house of entertainment more dreary than some of the stage-houses, as they were called in New England; the bar-room with an odour of stale rum, the parlour with its everlasting sampler over the fireplace, weeping willow, tombstone, and inscription; the peacock’s feathers or asparagus boughs in the chimney, as if in cheerful mockery; the looking-glass that reflects every feature awry, the cross-lights of the windows, inquisitive loungers, pie-crust like leather, and cheese of mollified oak,—all defied both the senses and digestion, and made the crack of the coachman’s whip a joyful alarum.

The inns near famous localities identify themselves to the memory with the most attractive objects of travel; thus the inn, so rural and neat, at Edensor, with the marvels of Chatsworth; the ‘Red Horse,’ at Stratford-on-Avon, with Shakspeare’s tomb; and the ‘Nag’s Head,’ at Uttoxeter, with Johnson’s penance. It was while ‘waiting for the train,’ at an inn of Coventry, that Tennyson so gracefully paraphrased the legend of Godiva; and the sign of the ‘Flitch’ is associated with the famous bequest of the traditional patron of conjugal harmony. ‘A wayside inn at which we tarried, in Derbyshire, I fancied must have sheltered Moreland or Gainsborough, when caught in the rain, while sketching in that region. The landlady had grenadier proportions and red cheeks; a few peasants were drinking ale beneath a roof whence depended flitches of bacon, and with the frocks, the yellow hair, and the full, ruddy features we see in their pictures; the windows of the best room had little diamond-shaped panes, in which sprigs of holly were stuck. There were several ancient engravings in quaint-looking frames on the wall; the chairs and desk were of dark-veined wood that shone with the polish of many a year’s friction; a great fire blazed in the chimney, and the liquor was served in vessels only seen on this other side of the water, in venerable prints. It was an hostel where you would not be surprised to hear the crack of Tony Lumpkin’s whip, or to see the Vicar of Wakefield rush in, in search of Olivia—an alehouse that, you knew at once, had often given “an hour’s importance to the poor man’s heart,” and where Parson Adams or Squire Western would have felt themselves entirely at home.’[7]

Goldsmith has genially celebrated the humble, rustic inn in the Deserted Village, and his own habits confirmed the early predilection. ‘His favourite festivity,’ says one of his biographers, ‘his holiday of holidays, was to have three or four intimate friends to breakfast with him at ten, to start at eleven for a walk through the fields to Highbury Barn, where they dined at an ordinary, frequented by authors, templars, and retired citizens, for tenpence a head; to return at six to “White’s,” Conduit Street, and to end the evening with a supper at the “Grecian,” or “Temple Exchange Coffee-house.” The whole of the expense of the day’s fête never exceeded a crown, for which the party obtained “good air, good living, and good conversation.”’ ‘He, Goldsmith, however,’ adds Foster, ‘would leave a tavern if his jokes were not rewarded with a roar.’ One of Ben Jonson’s best comedies is the New Inn, and Southey’s most popular ballad is Mary of the Inn. Chaucer makes his Canterbury pilgrims set out from an inn at Southwark. We all remember the inns described by Scott. Elliston’s ‘larks’ at the ‘White Hart’ and ‘Red Cow’ were comical episodes, that read like a vaudeville. She Stoops to Conquer, L’Auberge Pleine, and The Double-bedded Room, are a few of the countless standard plays of which an inn is the scene. ‘What befell them at the Inn,’ is the heading of Don Quixote’s best chapters, for the knight always mistook inns for castles. Grammont’s adventures frequently boast the same scene, and it was ‘in the worst room of the worst inn’ that the accomplished, and dissolute Villiers died. Foote frequented the ‘Bedford’ in Covent Garden, and old Macklin doffed the buskin for the apron and carver. Philosophers, from Horace at the inn of Brundusium, to Montaigne noting the furniture, dishes, and prices at the inns where he rested on his journey into Italy, have found this a most suggestive and characteristic theme.

In German university towns, the professors frequent the ‘Hereditary Prince,’ or some other inn, at evening, to drink beer, smoke pipes, and discuss metaphysics. The jocose reproof which Lamb administers to the sentimental donor of Cœlebs was—

‘If ever I marry a wife,
I’ll marry a landlord’s daughter,
And sit in the bar all day,
And drink cold brandy and water.’

Quaintly pious is the allusion of John Winthrop, in a letter—more than two centuries old—to his father, the first governor of Massachusetts, when the project of immigration was about to be realized: ‘For the business of New England, I can say no other thing but that I believe confidently that the whole disposition thereof is from the Lord; and, for myself, I have seen so much of the vanity of the world, that I esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveller that hath lodged in the best or in the worst findeth no difference when he cometh to his journey’s end.’[8]

It has been said of Socrates that he ‘looked upon himself as a traveller who halts at the public inn of the Earth.’ ‘Was I in a condition to stipulate with death,’ writes Sterne, ‘I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends, and therefore I never seriously think upon the mode and the manner of this great catastrophe, but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it, that it happen not to me in my own house, but rather in some decent inn.’ Aaron Burr realized in a forlorn manner Yorick’s desire when, after years of social ostracism, he expired at a tavern on Staten Island.

The beautiful significance of the first incident in the life of Christ is seldom realized, offering, as it does, so wonderful and affecting a contrast between the humblest mortal vicissitudes in the outward circumstances of birth and the highest glory of a spiritual advent: they ‘laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.’ It was to an inn that the Good Samaritan carried the traveller who had ‘fallen among thieves.’ Joseph’s brethren rested at an inn on their way to Egypt; and it was at the ‘Three Taverns,’ in the suburbs of Rome, that Paul was met by the brethren. Venerable as are these allusions in sacred history, the visible token of the antiquity of inns that strikes our imagination most vividly is the wine-stains on the marble counter in Pompeii.

Falstaff absolutely requires the frame of an inn to make his portrait intelligible, with the buxom figure of Mrs. Quickly in the background; and it may safely be asserted that no public house of entertainment has afforded such world-wide mirth as the ‘Boar’s Head,’ Eastcheap. The freaks of Tony Lumpkin have their natural scope at an alehouse; and Goldoni’s Locandiera is a fine colloquial piece of real life; even the most eloquent of England’s historians cites the superior inns that existed in the range of travel there, during the early part of the seventeenth century, as a reliable evidence of the prosperity and civil advancement of the nation. These inns are, in fact, the original retreats for ‘freedom and comfort,’ whence our pleasant ideas on the subject are derived; they still exist in some of the rural districts of the kingdom; and the cleanliness, good fare, and retirement of the old-fashioned English inn, as well as the freshness and urbanity of the host, wholly justify their renown. The exigencies of the climate, and the domestic habits of the people, explain this superiority; where so much enjoyment is sought within doors, and the national character is reserved and individual, better provision is naturally made both for the physical well-being and the privacy of the wayfarer than is required under less inclement skies, and among a more vivacious and social race.

A most characteristic note of Boswell’s is that which records his idol’s hearty encomiums on a tavern, while dining at one in London. Both the man and the place then combined to realize the perfection of the idea, for that dim and multitudinous city invites to secluded conviviality; and that irritable, dogmatic, yet epicurean sage required the liberty of speech, an absolute deference, and the solid physical comforts so easily obtained at a London tavern. There he could make ‘inarticulate, animal noises over his food’ without restraint; there he could bring only such companions as would bear to be contradicted, and there he could refresh body and mind without fear of intrusion from a printer’s devil or needy author. Bores and duns away, a good listener by, surrounded with pleasant viands and a cheerful blaze, a man so organized and situated might, without extravagance, call a tavern-chair the throne of human felicity, and quote Shenstone’s praise of inns with rapture. Beneath this jovial appreciation, however, there lurks a sad inference; it argues a homeless lot, for lonely or ungenial must be the residence, contrast with which renders an inn so attractive; and we must bear in mind that the winsome aspect they wear in English literature is based on their casual and temporary enjoyment; it is as recreative, not abiding places, that they are usually introduced; and, in an imaginative point of view, our sense of the appropriate is gratified by these landmarks of our precarious destiny, for we are but ‘pilgrims and sojourners on the earth.’ Jeremy Taylor compared human life to an inn, and Archbishop Leighton used to say he would prefer to die in one.

AUTHORS.

‘High is our calling, friend! Creative Art,
Whether the instrument of words she use,
Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,
Demands the service of a mind and heart,
Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part
Heroically fashioned—to infuse
Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse,
While the whole world seems adverse to desert.’
Wordsworth.

ome of the fondest illusions of our student-life and companionship were based on literary fame. The only individuals, of the male gender, who then seemed to us (indiscriminate and mutual lovers of literature) worthy of admiration and sympathy, were authors. Our ideal of felicity was the consciousness of distributing ideas of vital significance, and causing multitudes to share a sentiment born in a lonely heart. The most real and permanent sway of which man is capable we imagined that of ruling and cheering the minds of others through the medium of literature. Our herbals were made up of flowers from the graves of authors; their signatures were our only autographs. The visions that haunted us were little else than a boundless panorama that displayed scenes in their lives. We used continually to see, in fancy, Petrarch beside a fountain, under a laurel, with the sweet penseroso-look visible in his portraits; Dante in the corridor of a monastery, his palm laid on a friar’s breast, and his stern features softened as he craved the only blessing life retained for him—peace; rustic Burns, with his dark eye proudly meeting the curious stare of an Edinburgh coterie; Camœns breasting the waves with the Lusiad between his teeth; Johnson appalling Boswell with his emphatic ‘Sir;’ Milton—his head like that of a saint encircled with rays—seated at the organ; Shakspeare walking serenely, and with a benign and majestic countenance, beside the Avon; Steele jocosely presiding at table with liveried bailiffs to pass the dishes; the bright face of Pope looming up from his deformed body in the cool twilight of a grotto; Voltaire’s sneer withering an auditor through a cloud of snuff; Molière reading his new comedy to the old woman; Landor standing in the ilex path of a Tuscan villa; Savage asleep on a bulk at midnight, in one of the London parks; Dryden seated in oracular dignity in his coffee-house arm-chair; Metastasio comparing notes with a handsome prima donna at Vienna; Alfieri with a magnificent steed in the midst of the Alps; Swift stealing an interview with Miss Johnson, or chuckling over a chapter of Gulliver; the funeral pyre of Shelley lighting up a solitary crag on the shores of the Mediterranean; and Byron, with marble brow and rolling eye, guiding the helm of a storm-tossed boat on the Lake of Geneva! Such were a few only of the tableaux that haunted our imagination. We echoed heartily Akenside’s protest against the sermon on Glory:

‘Come, then, tell me, sage divine,
Is it an offence to own
That our bosoms e’er incline
Towards immortal glory’s throne?
For with me nor pomp nor pleasure,
Bourbon’s might, Braganza’s treasure,
So can fancy’s dream rejoice,
So conciliate reason’s choice,
As one approving word of her impartial voice.
‘If to spurn at noble praise
Be the passport to thy heaven;
Follow thou those gloomy ways;
No such law to me was given;
Nor, I trust, shall I deplore me,
Faring like my friends before me;
Nor a holier place desire
Than Timoleon’s arms acquire,
And Tully’s curule chair, and Milton’s golden lyre.’

In our passion for native authors we revered the memory of Brockden Brown, and detected in his romantic studies the germs of the supernatural school of fiction; we nearly suffocated ourselves in the crowded gallery of the old church at Cambridge, listening to Sprague’s Phi Beta Kappa poem; and often watched the spiritual figure of the ‘Idle Man,’ and gazed on the white locks of our venerable painter, with his ‘Monaldi’ and ‘Paint King’ vividly remembered. We wearied an old friend of Brainard’s by making him repeat anecdotes of the poet; and have spent hours in the French coffee-house which Halleck once frequented, eliciting from him criticisms, anecdotes, or recitations of Campbell. New Haven people that came in our way were obliged to tell all they could remember of the vagaries of Percival, and the elegant hospitality of Hillhouse. We have followed Judge Hopkinson through the rectangular streets of his native metropolis, with the tune of Hail, Columbia! humming in our ears; and kept a curious eye on Howard Payne through a whole evening party, fondly cognizant of Sweet Home. Beaumont and Fletcher were our Damon and Pythias. The memorable occurrence of our childhood was the advent of a new Waverley novel, and of our youth a fresh Edinburgh Review. We loved plum-colour because poor Goldy was vain of his coat of that hue; and champagne, partly because Schiller used to drink it when writing; we saved orange-peel because the author of The Rambler liked it; and put ourselves on a course of tar-water, in imitation of Berkeley. Roast pig had a double relish for us after we had read Elia’s dissertation thereon. We associated goldfish and china jars with Gray, skulls with Dr. Young, the leap of a sturgeon in the Hudson with Drake’s ‘Culprit Fay,’ pine-trees with Ossian, stained-glass windows with Keats (who set one in an immortal verse), fortifications with Uncle Toby, literary breakfasts with Rogers, waterfowl with Bryant, foundlings with Rousseau, letter-writing with Madame de Sévigné, bread and butter with the author of Werther, daisies with Burns, and primroses with Wordsworth. Mrs. Thrale’s acceptance of Piozzi was a serious trouble to our minds; and whether ‘little Burney’ would be happy after her marriage with the noble emigré was a problem that made us really anxious until the second part of her Diary was procurable and relieved our solicitude. An unpatriotic antipathy to the Pilgrim Fathers was quelled by the melodious pæan of Mrs. Hemans; and we kept vigils before a portrait of Mrs. Norton, at an artist’s studio, with a chivalric desire to avenge her wrongs.

This enthusiasm for authors was not altogether the result of a literary idiosyncrasy or local influences; it grew out of a consciousness of personal obligation. Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Porter, and Maturin were the clandestine intimates of childhood; the English poets became the confidants of youthful sentiment, which met but a cool reception from those by whom we were surrounded; and when judgment was enough matured to discriminate the charms of style, a new world opened under the guidance of Mackenzie and Sterne, Lady Montagu and Sir Thomas Browne. Books are endeared, like people, by the force of circumstances; ideal tendencies, a spirit of inquiry, a thirst for sympathy, will often drive minds whose environment is uncongenial to seek therein what is elsewhere denied; and when in early life this resource becomes habitual, it is not surprising that a deep personal feeling should be gradually engendered, and that we should come to regard favourite authors as the most reliable and dearest of our companions; and this without an inkling of pedantry or a title to scholarship, but from a thoroughly human impulse intellectually vindicating itself. To such a pitch did the feeling once possess us that we resented any imputation cast upon our chosen authors as if they were actual friends. We honoured the critic that defended Bacon from the charge of meanness, and longed to applaud his prowess; we disliked to admit the evidence that Johnson was dogmatic, and ascribed his arrogance to a kind of excusable horse-play; we contended that Thomson was not lazy, but encouraged ease to escape ambition; we grew very warm if any one really believed Shelley an atheist, and argued that his faith transcended that of the majority of so-called Christians; we never would admit that Sterne was heartless, or Moore a toady. We could have embraced Dr. Madden after reading his Infirmities of Genius, and thought the most brave of Sidney’s deeds his Defence of Poesy. How we longed to go a-fishing with Walton, to walk in Cowley’s garden, to see Roscoe’s library, to hear Coleridge talk, to feel the grasp of Burns’s hand, to drink whisky with John Wilson, to pat Scott’s dogs, to go to the theatre with Lamb, to listen to D’Israeli the elder’s anecdotes, to look on the lakes of Westmoreland at the side of Wordsworth, and to ride through ‘our village’ in Miss Mitford’s pony chaise!

The first time we saw an author was an epoch. It was in a church. Some one whispered, just as the sermon began, that a lady in the next pew was the writer of a moral tale then rated high in our little circle. We did nothing the rest of the service but watch and speculate upon this, to us, wonderful personage. We were disappointed at her every-day look and attire; there was no fine frenzy in eye or gesture; there she sat, for all the world like any other lady—mild, quiet, and attentive. We were somewhat consoled by noting the extreme paleness of her complexion, and a kind of abstraction in her gaze. Her habiliments were dark and faded; in fact, as we afterward discovered, she was poor, and her book had been printed by subscription. Thenceforth, for a long time, we imagined all female authors were dressed in black, looked pensive, and had no colour. This illusion, however, was banished, some years later, when we were taken to a literary soirée where all the female authors were fat, dressed in a variety of colours, and, instead of being melancholy, had an overwhelming vivacity that made us realize how the type had changed. By degrees we became enlightened, and our authormania cooled. In the first place, we were shocked by seeing a pathetic writer, whose universal tribute was tears, in a flashy vest; then we encountered a psychologist, whose forte was sublimity, enacting the part of a mendicant; it was our misfortune to conduct a bard, whose highly-imaginative strain had often roused our aspirations, home from a party in a state of inebriety; one author we were prepared to love turned out a disagreeable egotist; another wearied us by the exactions of his vanity; a third repelled by intense affectation, and a fourth by the bitterness of his comments; one, who had written only the most refined sentiment, proved, upon acquaintance, an acute Yankee; one, who had sung the beauty of nature, we found to be an inveterate dandy; and another, whose expressed ideas betokened excess of delicacy, grossly violated the ordinary instincts of gentle blood.

On one of our earliest visits to ———, the illusive charm attached to the idea of a female author became, indeed, changed to a horror from which we have never wholly recovered. We were requested to escort a lady to what we understood was an ordinary social gathering. After entering a rather small and somewhat obscure drawing-room, saluting the hostess, and taking the proffered seat, we were struck with the formal arrangement of the company. They formed an unbroken row along the walls of the room, except at one end, at which stood a table surmounted by an astral lamp; and in an arm-chair beside it, in studied attitude, like one poséd for a daguerreotype, sat a woman of masculine proportions, coarse features, and hair between yellow and red, which fell in unkempt masses down each side of her broad face. She was clad in white muslin of an antiquated fashion. We noticed that the guests cast looks, partly of curiosity, partly of uneasiness, upon this Herculean female, who rolled her eyes occasionally, and smiled on us all with a kind of complacent pity. We ventured, amidst the silence, to ask our neighbour the name of the gigantic unknown. She appeared extremely surprised at the very natural question. ‘Why, don’t you know? We’re invited here to meet her, and, I assure you, it is a rare privilege. That is Mrs. Jones, the celebrated author of the Affianced One!’ At this moment a brisk little woman in the corner, with accents slightly tremulous, and a manner intended to be very nonchalant, broke the uncomfortable hush of the room. ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ said she, ‘as one of your earliest and most fervent admirers, allow me to inquire if your health does not suffer from the intense state of feeling in which you evidently write?’ The Amazonian novelist sighed—it was funny to see that operation on so large a scale,—and then, in a voice so like the rougher sex that we began to think she was a man in disguise, replied: ‘When I reach the catastrophe of my stories, it is not uncommon for me to faint dead away; and, as I always write in a room by myself, it has happened more than once that I have been found stretched, miserable and cold, on the floor, with a pen grasped in my fingers, and the carpet littered with manuscript blotted with tears!’ The Siddonian pathos of this announcement sent a thrill round the circle; glances of admiration and pity were thrown upon the self-immolated victim at the shrine of letters, and other inquiries were adventured, which elicited equally impressive replies, until the psychological throes of authorship—particularly in the female gender—assumed the aspect of an experience combined of epilepsy and nightmare. The tragic egotism of these revelations at length overcame our patience; and, leaving our fair companion to another’s escort, we slipped out of the room. A thunder-storm had arisen; the rain was pouring down in torrents; upon the door-steps we encountered a very pale, thin, little man, with an umbrella under his arm and a pair of overshoes in his hands. As we passed, he addressed us in a very meek and frightened voice: ‘Please, sirs, is there a party here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Please, sirs, is the celebrated Mrs. Jones here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Please, sirs, do you think I could step into the entry? I’m Mr. Jones!’

Hastening to our lodgings in another metropolis at twilight, we passed a dwarf standing on a threshold, who leaped down and caught us by the arm, eagerly pronouncing our name, and requesting a moment’s interview. He led the way to a little room lighted by a single candle, closed the door, and, with a quivering impatience of gesture, introduced himself. We remembered his name at once. He was the author of a feeble imitation of Pope. We never beheld such an ogre. His little green eyes, ape-like limbs, and expression indicative of sensitiveness and conceit, in that lone and dusky cabinet, were appalling. From a cupboard he took down what we supposed to be a ledger, and, placing it on the table, gave an emphatic slap to the worn brown cover. ‘There,’ said he, ‘is garnered the labour of years. I have heard of your enthusiasm for authors, and I will read you specimens of a poem destined to see the light a twelvemonth hence. Listen!’ It was an epic in blank verse—dreary, monotonous, and verbose. His recitation was like the refrain of a bull-frog; it grated on the ear and made the nerves shrink. The candle burned thick; the air seemed mephitic, and in a little while we were oppressed and fevered as by a glamour cast over our brain; we looked toward the door and moved uneasily; the green eye was cast fiercely up from the page, and the tone of the deformed became malicious. We had heard of his vindictive spirit, and felt as if in the cave of an imp spellbound and helpless. The complacent hardihood with which he read on made us inwardly frantic. We thought of the fair being who waited for us at a neighbouring fireside, of the free air we had quitted, and we writhed under the infliction. Hours passed; a numb, half-unconscious sense of misery stole over us, and still the little demon glared and spouted. ‘Words, words, words’—how detestable seemed they then! At last, in a fit of desperation, we clapped our hand to our forehead, and murmuring something about a congestive tendency, sprang up, ran through the hall and out at the door, and looking back, after hurrying on a few yards, beheld the dwarf, with his enormous book clasped to his heart, gazing after us with the implacable look of a disappointed savage.

Literature is no more regulated by accident than nature; lucky hits and the tricks of pencraft are as temporary as all other artificial expedients. The authors truly remembered and loved are men in the best sense of the term; the human, the individual informs and stamps their books with an image or an effluence not born of will or mere ingenuity, but emanating from the soul; and this is the quality that endears and perpetuates their fame. Hence Goldsmith is beloved, Milton reverenced, and the grave of Burns a ‘Mecca of the mind.’ At the commencement of the last century there appeared in the London Gazette the offer of a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of a certain person thus described: ‘A middle-sized, spare man, about forty years of age, of a brown complexion and dark brown hair, though he wears a wig, having a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mouth.’ This was Daniel Defoe, the victim of partisan injustice, for whose rights every schoolboy would fight now, out of sheer gratitude to the author of Robinson Crusoe. Let the writers who debase authorship into a perversion of history, a sickly medium for egotistical rhetoric, a gross theft of antecedent labours, a base vehicle for spite, or a mechanical knack of book-making, realize that they are foredoomed to contempt, and that character is as little disguised by types as by costume. The genuine author is recognized at once; his integrity is self-evident.

It was sunset on the Arno. Far down the river, over mountain ranges where snow yet lingered, a warm tint, half rose and half amethyst, glowed along the horizon; beside the low parapet that bordered the street people were loitering back from their afternoon promenade at the Cascine: here a priest, there a soldier, now an Englishman on horseback, and then a bearded artist; sometimes an oval-faced contadina, the broad brim of whose finely-woven straw hat flapped over his eyes of mellow jet; and again a trig nurse, with Saxon ringlets, dragging a petulant urchin along; and over all these groups and figures was shed the beautiful smile of parting day; and by them, under graceful bridges, flowed the turbid stream, its volume doubled by the spring freshets. I surveyed the panorama from an overhanging balcony, where I stood awaiting the appearance of a friend upon whom I had called. Hearing a movement behind, I stepped back into the salon, and found a middle-aged gentleman seated on a divan near the window. We exchanged salutations and began to converse. He alluded, in unexceptionable English, to the beauty of the hour. ‘I came here from Geneva,’ he said. ‘There I work—in Italy I recreate; and it is wonderful how this country ministers to intellectual repose, even by the very associations it excites. We feel a dream-like relation with the past, and enter readily, for a time, into the dolce-farniente spirit of the people; and then return to task-work invigorated and with new zest.’ There was a bland, self-possessed, and paternal look about this chance acquaintance that insensibly won my confidence and respect. He was the image of a wise and serene maturity. His ample brow, his strong physique, his affable manner, and kindly eye, suggested experience, intelligence, and benignity. I was certain that he was a philosopher of some kind, and fancied him an optimist; but the utter absence of pretension and the simple candour of his address gave no hint of a man of renown. Accordingly, I soon found myself engaged in a most pleasant, and to me instructive colloquy. Following up the hint he had thrown out, I spoke of the difficulty of combining mental toil with health—reverting in my own mind to our American race of scholars, a majority of whom are confirmed invalids. ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘there is vast error on this subject. Be assured that we were intended for intellectual labour, and that there is a way of making it subservient to health. I will tell you a few rules founded on experience. Vary the kind of work—let it be research one hour, meditation another; collation to-day, and revision to-morrow. Do this on system; give the first part of the day to the hardest study, the afternoon to exercise, and the evening to social intercourse; let the mind be tasked when the brain is most vigorous—that is, after sleep; and woo the latter blessing, not in the feverish hour of thought and emotion, but after the gentle exercise of the mind, which comes from pastime and friendliness.’ I looked at the hale, contented face of the speaker, about whom no sign of nervous irritability or exhaustion was discoverable, and asked myself what experience of mental toil could have led him to such inferences. He looked like a temperate country gentleman, or unambitious and well-to-do citizen. He then spoke of the changes he observed upon each successive visit to Italy, of the climate of Switzerland, and the society of Geneva; then he referred to America, divining at once that it was my country, and exhibiting entire familiarity with all that had been accomplished there in literature. He betrayed a keen sense of enjoyment, recognized a genial influence in the scene before us, and gradually infected me with that agreeable feeling only to be derived from what poor Cowper used to call ‘comfortable people.’ I led him to speak of his own method of life, which was one of the most philosophical order. He considered occasional travel and prudent habits the best hygiène for a man of sedentary pursuits; and the great secret both of health and successful industry the absolute yielding up of one’s consciousness to the business and the diversion of the hour—never permitting the one to infringe in the least degree upon the other. I felt an instinctive respect toward him, but at the same time entirely at home in his company; the gentleman and the scholar appeared to me admirably fused in, without overlaying, the man. Presently the friend we mutually expected came in, and introduced me to Sismondi. I was fresh from his Italian Republics and Literature of the South of Europe, and he realized my ideal of a humane and earnest historian.

Quite in contrast with this tranquil and robust votary of letters was the appearance and manner of Silvio Pellico. No one who has ever read the chronicle of his imprisonments can forget the gentle and aspiring nature just blooming into poetic development, which, by the relentless fiat of Austrian tyranny, was cut off in a moment from home, intelligent companionship, and graceful activity, and subjected to the loneliness, privation, and torments of long and solitary confinement; nor is the spirit in which he met the bitter reverse less memorable than its tragic detail—recorded with so much simplicity, and borne with such loving faith. When I arrived in Turin he was still an object of espionage, and it was needful to seek him with caution. Agreeably to instructions previously received, I went to a café near the Strada Alfieri, just at nightfall, and watched for the arrival of an abbé remarkable for his manly beauty. I handed him the card of a mutual friend, and made known my wishes. The next day he conducted me through several arcades, and by many a group of noble-looking Piedmontese soldiers, to a gateway, thence up a long flight of steps to a door, at which he gave a significant knock. In a few moments it was quietly opened. He whispered to the old serva, and we tarried in an ante-chamber until a diminutive figure in black appeared, who received me with a pensive kindliness that, to one acquainted with Le Mie Prigioni, was fraught with pathos. I beheld in the pallor of that mild face and expanded brow, and the purblind eyes, the blight of a dungeon. His manner was subdued and nervous, and his very tones melancholy. I was unprepared to find, after years of liberty, the effects of his experience so visible, and felt almost guilty of profane curiosity in having thus intruded upon his cherished seclusion. I had known other victims of the same infernal tyranny; but they were men of sterner mould, who had resisted their cruel fate by the force of will rather than the patience of resignation. Pellico’s very delicacy of organization barbed the arrows of persecution; and when at length he was released, loneliness, hope deferred, and mental torture had crushed the energy of his nature. The sweetness of his autobiography was but the fragrance of the trampled flower—too unelastic ever again to rise up in its early beauty. A smile lighted up his brooding expression when I told him of the deep sympathy his book had excited in America, and he grasped my hand with momentary ardour; but the man too plainly reflected the martyr. The stifling air he breathed under the leads of Venice and the damps of his Spielberg cell seemed yet to weigh upon his soul; no glimmer of the patriotic fire which beams from Francesca da Rimini, no ray of the vivacious observation that beguiled his solitude and quickened his pen, redeemed the hopeless air of the captive poet; the shadow of the power he had braved yet lay on his form and face; and only the solace of filial love and the consolations of religion gave hope to his existence.

That is but a vulgar idea of authorship which estimates its worth by the caprices of fashion or the prestige of immediate success. Like art, its value is intrinsic. There are books, as there are pictures, which do not catch the thoughtless eye; and yet are the gems of the virtuoso, the oracles of the philosopher, and the consolations of the poet. We love authors, as we love individuals, according to our latent affinities; and the extent of the popular appreciation is no more a standard to us than the world’s estimate of our friend, whose nature we have tested by faithful companionship and sympathetic intercourse. He who has not the mental independence to be loyal to his own intellectual benefactors is as much a heathen as one who repudiates his natural kin. Indeed, an honest soul clings more tenaciously to neglected merit in authors as in men; there is a chivalry of taste as of manners. Doubtless Lamb’s zest for the old English dramatists, Addison’s admiration of Milton’s poetry, and Carlyle’s devotion to German favourites, were all the more earnest and keen because they were ignored by their neighbours. In the library, an original mind is conscious of special and comparatively obscure friends; as the lover of nature has his pet flower, and the lover of art his favourite old master. It is well to obey these decided idiosyncrasies. They point, like the divining-rod, to hidden streams peculiarly adapted to our refreshment. I knew an old merchant that read no book except Boswell’s Johnson, and a black and hump-backed cook whose only imaginative feast was the Arabian Nights.

No one really can, indeed, love authors as a class without a catholic taste. If thus equipped, how inexhaustible the field! He is independent of the world. Is he retrospective in mood? Plutarch will array before him a procession of heroes and sages. Does he yearn for conviviality? Fielding will take him to a jolly tavern. Is he eager for intellectual communion? Landor is at hand with a choice of ‘imaginary conversations.’ Would he exercise causality? Bishop Butler will put to the test his power of reasoning. Is he in need of a little gossip by way of recreation? Horace Walpole will amuse by the hour. Is the society of a sensible woman wanted? Call in Maria Edgeworth or Jane Austin. Is the bitterness of a jilted lover in his heart? Locksley Hall will relieve it. Would he stroll in the forest? Evelyn or Bryant will take him there in a moment. By the sea-shore? Crabbe and Byron are sympathetic guides. Are his thoughts comprehensive and inclined for the generalities of literature? Open De Staël or Hallam.

The relation of authorship to society varies with political influences and average culture. The class of degraded penwrights so often alluded to by Fielding, the ferocious quarrels recorded of and by Pope and Johnson with critics and publishers, are phases of literary life, which, if not extinct, have become essentially modified with the progress of civilization. Yet a quite recent quarterly reviewer speaks of this class of men as ‘a kind of ticket-of-leave lunatics;’ and modern experiences, if less dark than old annals of Grub Street, include some quite as remarkable instances of reckless extravagance in prosperity and barbarous neglect in adversity. The Bohemian class is confined to no epoch or country. Yet charming is the group of authors that illustrate and signalize every period of British history—an intellectual alleviation to the monotony of fashionable, and the rancour of political life. Every era of French government also has its brilliant salon of philosophers and poets. Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Montagu assembled, in their day, as exclusive a coterie as used to cluster about Dryden’s chair, dine with Sir Joshua Reynolds, keep Burns’s birthday at Edinburgh with Scott at the head of the table, rally at Jeffrey’s call, dispute with Hume, chat over Rogers’s breakfast, fraternize with the lakers at Keswick and Grasmere, or pass an evening with Lamb. From the days of Shakspeare to those of Evelyn and Sydney Smith, from La Fontaine to Lamartine, from Klopstock to Goëthe, and from Mather to Channing, every cultivated city abroad and at home has boasted its author circle, to which kindred tastes ever revert with zest, and whose traditions as well as ‘works’ prolong a spell more refined and memorable than any other social prestige. Weimar, Bordeaux, Florence, Edinburgh, and Boston, as well as London and Paris, are thus consecrated by reminiscences of Goëthe, Schiller, Montaigne, Alfieri, Wilson, Mackenzie, some Concord Sage, or Spanish Historian, some Autocrat, Wizard of the North, or Ettrick Shepherd of the pen. To have seen Niccolini on the ‘Lung’ Arno; Elizabeth Browning at a Casa Guidi window; Rossini, the historical novelist, at a bookstore in Pisa; Hillhouse under the New Haven elms; Hawthorne at the Athenæum; Elia at his India-house desk; poor Heine on his ‘mattress grave,’ or Freiligrath at his bank-counter, requires but the perspective of time to be as impressive or winsome an experience as the first survivors of Pope, Chatterton, Milton, or Burke realized in rehearsing their personal cognizance of these famous authors. Such is the instinctive attraction of congenial or eminent authorship. If this subject were nomenclated and analyzed in the naturalistic way, there is scarcely a sphere of humanity or a form of character which might not be identified with or illustrated by authorship; the mad, the mendicant, the charlatan—combative, contemplative, heroic, and sybarite,—are but a few of the varieties which literary biography reveals. Their amours, diseases, profits, calamities, triumphs, quarrels, personal tastes and habits, domestic life, and most individual traits and fortunes, have been minutely recorded, so as to form, on the whole, the best and most accessible psychological cabinet for the student of human nature. Of no other class of men and women with whom we never had personal acquaintance, do we know so many details; Chatterton’s despair, Young’s skull-light, Milton’s organ, Berkeley’s tar-water, Coleridge’s opium, Swift’s lady-loves, Cowper’s hymns and hares, Rogers’s table-talk, Scott’s dogs, Steele’s debts, Lamb’s folios, are as familiar to us as if they appertained to some neighbour or kinsman. The prisons of Cervantes, Raleigh, Pellico, Hunt, and Montgomery, have a pathetic charm which no other record of captivity boasts. Even the self-delusions of authors awaken a considerate interest; the mistaken judgment of Petrarch and Milton, in regard to the comparative merit of their writings; and the exaggerated estimate of their own verses by such able statesmen as Frederic and Richelieu, tend to enhance the mysteries of the craft and sanction its illusions. But it must be confessed that the romance of authorship is fast disappearing in its reality; so numerous have become the votaries of a once rare pursuit, so common the renown, so universal the practice, that the individual and characteristic, the curious and interesting elements thereof, are more and more merged in the commonplace and familiar.

A distinction has often been insisted on between the critical and the creative in literature; but modern criticism, in its best development, is essentially reproductive; so intimate, deep, and affluent is its dealing with authors, that they often are restored in all their vital worth; and the process has endeared such writers as Lamb, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Arnold, and St. Beuve, as true intellectual benefactors. Such philosophical and æsthetic interpreters of authorship have engendered an eclectic appreciation and enjoyment of authors, and made us what Allston calls ‘wide likers.’ Hence the prevalence and promise of what may be called a cosmopolitan, in distinction to a provincial taste, whereby we learn to value the greatest diversities of style, subject, and character in literature. Fastidious and severely disciplined minds, indeed, coldly ignore certain authors, and warmly espouse others; but to a spirit at once generous and cultivated, sympathetic and intelligent, though a special charm will invest favourite authors, all of the fraternity who are genuine have a recognized claim to grateful recognition; and even the unequal and incongruous development of modern English literature, incident to the absence of what Matthew Arnold calls ‘any centre of intelligent and urbane spirit,’ like the French Academy. Desirable as such a discipline and standard is in quelling eccentricity and incorrectness, the free and energetic development, the honest, though sometimes rude, exercise of authorship in our vernacular, is no small compensation. We confess a partiality for the richly-diversified phases of mental life thus induced—an eclectic relish for the varieties of national and personal characteristics. The artistic French, the meditative German, the practical English writers, have each their attraction and use; the desultory style of Richter, the quaint individuality of Lamb, the verbose dignity of Johnson, the mosaic finish of Gray, the grotesque eloquence of Carlyle, the flowing rhetoric of Macaulay, Wordsworth’s pastoral isolation, Scott’s feudal enthusiasm, Byron’s intense consciousness, Shelley’s disinterested idealism, the homely images of Crabbe, and the sensuous luxury of Keats, are all, in their way and at times, accordant with our mental wants, congenial to our receptive moods. Why should not we tolerate and enjoy the various elements of literature as fully and fondly as those of nature and society? Does it not argue a narrowness of mind inconsistent with genuine intellectual and moral health to perversely confine our appreciation of authorship to certain schools, forms, and individuals? Are not the philosophical, the piquant, the earnest, the playful, the solemn, gay, impressive, winsome, acute, wise, and humorous traits and triumphs of written thought as legitimate, in their infinite variety, as means of human culture, discipline, and pleasure, as the myriad tints and tones of nature, and the diversities of character and manners? A true lover of authors will not only find something to enjoy and appropriate in the most diverse forms of expression and qualities of genius, both in the literature of power and in that of knowledge as finely discriminated by De Quincey; but will separate the inspired and the journeyman work of each author, and do justice to what is genuine while repudiating the conventional. If what Goëthe maintained is literally true, and genuine authorship is the reflex of consciousness upon outward life, then all its spontaneous products must have a vital element of human life, love, and truth, more or less congenial to all readers of candid, clear, and humane instincts: for we agree with a liberal and acute critic, when he says that the gift of literary genius ‘lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere—by a certain order of ideas; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations, making beautiful works of them.’

It is a new and glorious era in our experience of books when the vital significance of authorship is heartily realized; dilletantism, excusable in the novice, gives place to the worship of truth. To write for the mere sake of writing, to amuse with the pen, becomes in our estimation what it is—a thing of less interest than the most simple and familiar phenomena of nature. As life reveals itself, and character matures, we long, above all, for reality; we perceive that growth is our welfare, and that earnestness, faith, and new truth are the only joy of a manly intellect. Then we read to nerve our moral energies, to extend the scope of perception, and to deepen the experience of the soul: the butterflies of literature allure no longer; the imitators we pass by; but the deep thinkers, the original, the brave, lead us on to explore, analyze, and conquer. ‘Literature,’ says Schlegel, ‘according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infamy, a pastime, a dry labour, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue;’ and this diversity is true, not only of authors in general, but sometimes of the same individual. Many a poet, whose early utterance was inspired, has degenerated into a hack, a truckster, and a mercenary penman; and many a youthful dabbler in letters, by some deep experience, has been matured into the bold advocate or heroic pioneer in the world of thought.

We soon learn heartily to sympathize with one of the unfortunate originals of Goëthe’s Werther, and declare with him,—‘I have resolved in future to take good care how I write anything to an author, save what all the world may see;’ only extending the prudential resolve to conversation,—for whatever advance has been made in refinement in the use of language, in the abuse of confidence modern writers are so destitute of scruples, that the sanctities of life and social intercourse have no greater or more profane intruder than the author.

Nor is the ‘heart of courtesy’ the only high quality risked by the vocation; it almost seems, in vain and unchivalric natures, to sap manhood itself. Some one has said,—‘The man who has learned to read has lost one portion of his courage; if he writes verses, he has lost a double portion.’ There is a fatal fluency, an arrogant expressiveness, whereby the robust and honest material of character is, as it were, evaporated in words; for nothing characterizes the genuine author more than a reticent tone, an integrity of utterance, which makes it apparent that his authorship, instead of a graft, is a growth of his best humanity. So proverbial is the social barrenness of the craft, in its average conventional scope, that a facetious Florentine barber, in one of the best of modern historical novels, Romola, is quite appropriately made to say,—‘I am sorely afraid that the good wine of my understanding is going to run off at the spigot of authorship, and I shall be left an empty cask, with an odour of dregs, like many other incomparable geniuses of my acquaintance.’ All meanness is disenchanting; but selfish economy of intellectual treasures, and egotistical insensibility to the merit of others, not only robs the author of all sympathetic charm, but almost invariably signalizes his essential mediocrity or unfounded pretensions.

Under the two diverse aspects of an inspiration and a career, authorship thus offers the extremes of attraction and antagonism to candid and earnest souls; if the spontaneous gift and charm of the former are justly endeared to all lovers of humanity, the artificial conditions, worldly motives, and forced relations of the latter, often dispel the illusions of fame in the realities of vulgar notoriety and mercenary zeal. We can well understand how a reverent, delicate, and true nature, like Maurice de Guèrin, shrinks from professional authorship, when the original beauty and truth of his utterances led his friends to urge that vocation upon him: ‘The literary career,’ he writes, ‘seems to me unreal, both in its own essence and in the rewards one seeks from it; and, therefore, fatally marred by a secret absurdity.’

At this moment our vernacular is the only tongue in which men can express themselves fearlessly; it appropriately enshrines the literature of freedom. We seldom realize this noble distinction of the English language. I was half-asleep one afternoon, in the cabin of a steamer in the Bay of Naples, when suddenly the violent pitching of the vessel ceased, and I hastened on deck to learn the reason of the change, and found, to my surprise, that we were returning into the harbour, the captain having decided that it was too great a risk to venture to sea in such a gale. Pleasant as was the transition from tossing waves to smooth water, every traveller in that region who has gone through the business of a departure—the passport signatures, the tussle with porters, drivers, and boatmen, the leave-takings, packing-ups, directions at post-office and banker’s, an embarkation in the midst of cries, rushings to and fro, disputes for gratuities, beggars, missing baggage, attempts to secure a berth, wringing of hands, waving of handkerchiefs, and, it may be, embraces at parting,—every traveller, cognizant of this experience, will understand how vexatious it was, within an hour after this tantalizing process, to find one’s self, in travelling costume, once more in the city for the afternoon, with no lodging, no appointment, and no sight-seeing to do. I was not long in resolving to visit once more my old dining-place, the ‘Corona di Ferro.’ At the opposite table to that at which I was seated, appeared a handsome young man, with a dark, intelligent eye, and a bearing indicative of spirit and courtesy. Seeing me hesitate over the carte, he suggested a dish which had proved molto buono that day, and having followed the kindly counsel, we engaged in a desultory chat about the weather, the opera, the last news from France, &c., and by the time dessert came on, had established quite a pleasant understanding. At length he made an inquiry based upon the idea that he was addressing an Englishman. I corrected the error, and his politeness at once warmed into enthusiasm at the discovery that he was talking with an American. After dinner he invited me to his apartments. I found the sitting-room adorned with pictures and littered with books. Having ordered coffee, we were soon engaged in a serious discussion of literary subjects, in which my new friend proved a tasteful votary. He wished for a definite statement as to the extent of the liberty of the press in the United States. I explained it; and he became highly excited, paced the room, quoted Alfieri, sighed, pressed his brow, and at length flung himself into a chair, declaring that, if it were not for kindred who had claims upon him, he would emigrate at once to America. To account for his feelings, he showed me a pile of MSS., the publication of which had been prohibited by the government censors on account of their liberal sentiment. He then exhibited several beautiful poems founded on scientific truths, yet mystically involving great and humane principles—a ruse he had been compelled to resort to in order to express publicly his opinions. As I recognized the evidences of genius, watched his chafed mood, and noted his manly spirit, I felt deeply the crushing influence of despotism upon authorship, and realized the natural antagonism between poets and kings.

There is no greater fallacy than that involved in the notion of an essential diversity between an author and his books. Professed opinions do not reveal the truth of character, but unconscious phases of style, habits of thought, and tones of expression, like what is called natural language, make us thoroughly acquainted with the man. Is not Jeremy Taylor’s religious sentiment manifest in the very method of his utterance? Can we not see at a glance the improvidence and the fascination of Sheridan in the tenor of his plays? Who would not avouch the honesty of John L. Stephens after reading his travels? What reverent heart is not magnetized by the genuineness of devotion in Watts, however crudely expressed? Is not prudence signified in the very style of Franklin? Are we not braced with the self-confident frankness of Cooper in the spirit as well as the characters of his nautical and forest tales? Critics betray their arrogant temper under the most courteous phrases; a gentleman is still a gentleman, and a puppy a puppy, on paper as in life; the sham and the true are equally discernible in print and in society. Montaigne exhibits his worldly wisdom as plainly in his essays as he ever did in his acts. It is not, therefore, the insidious but the obvious perils of authorship that threaten the novice. Lamentable is it to see mediocre men take up as a vocation either literature or art, for in both a certain amount of character alone insures respectability; and this is less requisite in pursuits that do not so openly challenge observation.

One day, I was told a gentleman had called and waited for me in the drawing-room. As I entered, he was gazing from the window in the shadow of a damask curtain, which threw a warm tint upon as strongly moulded a face as I remembered to have seen in one so young. His forehead was compactly rounded, his hair curly and raven, and his eye dark and luminous. As I approached, he handed me a note of introduction from a friend, refused the proffered seat, and wore so earnest and grave an expression that I almost thought he was the bearer of a challenge. ‘Sir,’ he began, ‘I have come to you for sympathy in a great undertaking. I wish to be cheered in a mission, encouraged in a career, advised in an experiment.’ There was a certain wildness in the manner of this sententious address which breathed of an excited fancy. I expressed a willingness to aid him to the extent of my humble ability. He drew a thick packet from his coat, and proceeded: ‘I am a native of a little village in a neighbouring State. My father is an agriculturist, and has endeavoured to render me content with that lot; but there is something here’—and he laid a large red hand on his capacious breast—‘that rebels against the decree. I aspire to the honours of literature. I long to utter myself to the world. Here is a tragedy and some lyrics; and I have come to town to test my fortune as an author.’ I saw that he was an enthusiast, and calmly pointed out the obstacles to success. He became impatient. I enlarged on the healthfulness and wisdom of a country life, on the precarious subsistence incident to pencraft. His eye flashed with anger. I urged him to consider well the risk he incurred, the danger of failure, the advantages of a reliable vocation, the comfort of an independent though secluded existence. He advanced toward me with an indignant stride. ‘Sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I have been misinformed; you are not the man I took you for; farewell, for ever!’ and he rushed from the house. Six months had elapsed, and I was sitting over a book in my quiet room one day, when a terrific knock at the door aroused me, and an instant after the stranger entered and impetuously grasped my hand. ‘Sir—my dear friend, I mean,’—he said, ‘I have done you injustice, and I have come to apologize. For a month after my former interview, I passed a feverish novitiate, hawking my manuscripts around, deceived by plausible members of the trade, snubbed by managers, frozen out of the sanctums of editors, yawned at by casual audiences, baffled at every turn, until worn out, mortified, and despairing, I went home. The feel of the turf, the breath of the wind, the lowing of the kine, the very scent of hay was refreshing. I thought over your counsel, and found it true. I now farm the paternal acres on shares, write verses during the long winter evenings, lead the choir on Sundays, am to marry the pride of the village next week, and am here to beg your pardon, and invite you to my wedding.’

The delectable quality of authorship is its impersonality. Consider a moment the privilege and the immunity. If we address a multitude or an individual, the impression may be pleasing or wearisome, but courtesy requires that it be endured with equanimity. A book is unobtrusive, silent, objective. It can be taken up or let alone. In it, if genuine, there is a thought that craves hospitality to be caught in a favourable mood, as the fallow hillock receives the seed borne on the vagrant wind. It may take root, and the originator thereof has unconsciously given birth to an undying impulse or yielded spiritual refreshment. The whole process is like that of nature,—unostentatious, benign, and of inestimable benefit; and yet how latent, beyond observation, secreted in consciousness! All power of expression—whether by means of pen, colour, or chisel,—all artistic development, is but a new vocabulary that reveals character. The author and the artist differ from their less gifted fellows simply in this—that they have more language; the endowment does not change their natures; if coarse, artificial, vain,—if brave, truthful, or shallow,—they thus appear in books and marble, or on canvas; and hence it is that character is the true gauge of authorship, and wins or repels confidence, respect, and love, in the same proportion as do living men. ‘By their fruit shall ye know them.’ Therefore authors themselves most effectually disenchant readers. They are disloyal to their high mission; they compromise their own ideal, write gossip instead of truth, describe themselves instead of nature, dip their pens in the venom of malevolence, corrupt their style with vulgarity, keep no faith with aspiration, truckle to power and interest, and so bring their vocation itself into merited disdain.

How charming, on the other hand, is the spontaneous bard, who sings from an overflowing and musical nature! There is a court in one of the most populous quarters of London which rejoices in the name of Spring Gardens. Doubtless the spot, at one time, was a rural domain; at present, a few trees peering over a wall, and a retired and quaint look about some of the brick domiciles that line the street, alone justify the pleasant name it bears. In one of these houses is the office of the Commissioners of Lunacy; and there, one winter morning, I had the satisfaction of a brief tête-à-tête with Procter. His plainly-cut frock-coat, long and black, his white hair and quiet bearing, made him appear a curate such as Goldsmith portrayed. It is a curious vocation for a poet—that of testing the wits of people suspected of being out of their mind,—and a painful one for a sensitive nature, to inspect the asylums devoted to their use. But I remembered that Procter’s early taste drew him into intimate love and recognition of the old English dramatists, whose natural element was the terrible in human passion and woe; I considered the profound tenderness of his muse, and I felt that even the tragic scenes it was his duty to witness and to study, were not without a certain sad affinity with genius. Kean visited madhouses to perfect his conception of Lear; and he who sings of human weal and sorrow is taught to deepen and hallow his strain by the misery as well as the amenities of his life. The heart of courtesy, the mood of aspiration, have not been quelled in Procter by the stern professional business which is his daily task. They loomed up even in that dusky office, and kept faith with my previous ideal; but it was especially in the poet’s eye that I read the spirit of his muse; ineffably mild and tender is its expression, deepening under the influence of emotion like the tremulous cadence of music that is born of sentiment. I saw there the soul that dictated ‘How many summers, love, hast thou been mine?’ ‘Send down thy pitying angel, God!’ and so many other lays of affection endeared to all who can appreciate the genuine lyrics of the heart identified with the name of Barry Cornwall.

With all its occasional disenchantment, my love of authors imparted a singular charm to the experience of travel; the lapse of time and new localities united then to revive the dreams of youth. What a new grace the first view of the hills of Spain derived from the memory of Cervantes, and the gleanings in that romantic field of Lockhart and Irving; how rife with associations was the dreary night-ride beyond Terracina, near the scene of Cicero’s murder; and what an intense life awoke in desolate Ravenna, at the sight of Dante’s tomb! The rustling of dry reeds in the gardens of Sallust had an eloquent significance; the figures on Alfieri’s monument, in Santa Croce, seemed to breathe in the twilight; the rosemary plucked in Rousseau’s old garden at Montmorency had a scent of fragrant memory; in the cafés at Venice, Goldoni’s characters appeared to be talking, and Byron’s image floated on her waters like a sculptor’s dream; in the Florentine villa Boccacio’s spirit lingered; in the Cenci palace Shelley’s deep eyes glistened; in the shade of the pyramid of Cestus the muse of Keats scattered flowers; on the shores of Como hovered the creations of Manzoni, and a cliff in Brittany rose like a cenotaph to Chateaubriand; while the cadence of Virgil’s line chimed with the lapsing wave on the beach at Naples. I thought, at Lausanne, of Gibbon’s last touch to the Rise and Fall, and his reverie that night; sought the tablet that covers Parnell’s dust at Chester, craved Montgomery’s blessing at Sheffield, looked for Sterne’s monk at Calais, and beheld the crown on Tasso’s cold temples beneath the cypresses of St. Onofrio. Defoe lighted up gloomy Cripplegate, Addison walked in the groves of Oxford, Johnson threaded the crowd in Fleet Street, and Milton’s touch seemed to wake the organ-keys of St. Giles. But it is not requisite to wander from home for such experiences.

It was a delicious morning in June. I had passed the previous night at a village on the Hudson; a violent thunder-storm just before dawn had laid the dust, freshened the leaves, and purified as well as cooled the sultry air. Attracted by the sweet breath and vivid tints of the landscape, I determined to walk to a steamboat-landing four miles off, and on my way make a long-meditated visit to Sunnyside. Taking an umbrageous path that wound through a shady lane, I sauntered along, sometimes in view of the crystal expanse of Tappan Zee, sometimes catching a glimpse of the hoary and tufted Palisades, and again pausing under a majestic elm on whose pendent spray a yellow-bird chirped and swung, or from whose dense green canopy a locust trilled its drowsy note. The breeze was scented with clover and woodbine; sleek cattle grazed in the meadows; amber clouds flecked a heaven of azure; fields of grain waved like a shoreless lake of plumes; the maize stood thick and tasselled; the lofty chestnuts shook their feathery bloom; now and then a solitary crow hovered above, or a brown robin hopped cheerily by the wayside. It was one of those clear, serene, luxurious days of early summer which, in our capricious climate, occasionally unite the gorgeous hues of the Orient with the balm and the softness of Italy; pearly outlines stretched along the hills, the broad river gleamed in sunshine, and every shade of emerald flashed or deepened over the wide groves and teeming farms. As I drew near to Irving’s cottage, the bees were contentedly humming round the locusts, and the ivy-leaves that clustered thickly about the old gables were dripping with the tears of night; every bugle of the honeysuckle was a delicate censer, and the turf and hedge wore their brightest colours; even the old weathercock, trophy of an ancient colonial Stadt-house, dazzled the eye as it caught the lateral rays of the sun; the fowls strutted about with unwonted complacency, and the house-dog bounded through the beaded grass as if exhilarated by the scene. On the veranda that overlooks the river, from which it is divided by a little grove, sat our favourite author, with a book on his knee, the embodiment of thoughtful content. His home looked the symbol of his genius, and his expression the reflex of his life. They harmonized with a rare completeness, and fulfilled to the heart the picture which imagination had drawn. Here was no castle in the air, but a realized daydream. Sleepy Hollow was at hand; an English cottage, like that to which poor Leslie brought his angel wife; a Dutch roof such as covered Van Tassell’s memorable feast; the stream up which floated the incorrigible Dolph; the mountain range whose echoes resounded with the mysterious bowls, and where Rip took his long nap—all identified with the author’s virgin fame,—gave the vital interest of charming association to the silent grace of nature; and, above all, the originator of the spell was there, as genial, humorous, and imaginative, as if he had never wandered from the primal haunts of his childhood and his fame. That he had done so, and to good purpose, however, was evident in his conversation. News had just arrived of a new French émeute, and that led us to speak of the first Revolution; and Irving gave some impressive reminiscences of his visits to the localities of Paris which are identified with those scenes of violence and blood. He recurred to them with keen sensibility and in graphic details. It was delightful thus to commune with a man whose name was associated with my first conscious relish of native authorship, and detect the same moral zest and picturesque insight in his talk which so long ago had endeared his writings. I felt anew the conservative power of a love of nature and an artistic organization; they had kept thus fresh the sympathies, and thus enjoyable the mind. Retirement was as grateful now as when he sought it as a juvenile dreamer; the noble river won as fond a glance as when first explored as a truant urchin; and the kindly spirit beamed as truly in his smile as when he mused in the Alhambra, or walked to Melrose with Scott for a cicerone. My authormania revived in all its original fervour; here were the mellow hues on the picture that beguiled my boyhood; and the man, the scene, and the author blended in a graceful unity of effect, without a single incongruity.

PICTURES.

‘Look on this picture, and on this.’
Hamlet.

t is not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a riddle to be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about colour, style, chiaro-oscuro composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction,—like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations. In these latter spheres it is not thought presumptuous to assert and enjoy individual taste; the least independent talkers will bravely advocate their favourite composer, describe the landscape which has charmed or the book which has interested them; but when a picture is the subject of discussion, few have the moral courage to say what they think; there is a self-distrust of one’s own impressions, and even convictions, in regard to what is represented on canvas, that never intervenes between thought and expression where ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody. Nor is this to be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the want of appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the principles of art, but of the elements of nature. Good observers are rare. The peasant’s criticism upon Moreland’s ‘Farmyard’—that three pigs never eat together without one foot at least in the trough—was a strict inference from personal knowledge of the habits of the animal; so the surgeon found a head of the Baptist untrue, because the skin was not withdrawn somewhat from the line of decollation. These and similar instances show that some knowledge of or interest in the thing represented is essential to the appreciation of pictures. Soldiers and their wives crowded around Wilkie’s ‘Chelsea Pensioners,’[9] when first exhibited; French soldiers enjoy the minutiæ of Vernet’s battle-pieces; a lover can judge of his betrothed’s miniature; and the most unrefined sportsman will point out the niceties of breed in one of Landseer’s dogs. To the want of correspondence so frequent between the subject of a picture and the observer’s experience may, therefore, be attributed no small degree of the prevalent want of sympathy and confident judgment. ‘Gang into an exhibition,’ says the Ettrick Shepherd, ‘and only look at a crowd o’ Cockneys, some with specs and some wi’ quizzing-glasses, and faces without ae grain o’ meaning in them o’ ony kind whatsomever, a’ glowering, perhaps, at a picture o’ one o’ nature’s maist fearfu’ or magnificent warks! What, I ask, could a Prince’s Street maister or missy ken o’ sic a wark mair than a red deer wad ken o’ the inside o’ George’s Street Assembly-rooms?’

The incidental associations of pictures link them to history, tradition, and human character, in a manner which indefinitely enhances their suggestiveness. Horace Walpole wove a standard collection of anecdotes from the lives and works of painters. The frescoes of St. Mark’s, at Florence, have a peculiar significance to the spectator familiar with Fra Angelico’s life. One of the most pathetic and beautiful tragedies in modern literature is that which a Danish poet elaborated from Correggio’s artist career. Lamb’s great treasure was a print from Da Vinci, which he called ‘My Beauty,’ and its exhibition to a literal Scotchman gave rise to one of the richest jokes in Elia’s record. The pen-drawing Andre made of himself, the night before his execution—the curtain painted in the space where Faliero’s portrait should have been, in the ducal palace at Venice, and the head of Dante, discovered by Mr. Kirkup, on the wall of the Bargello, at Florence—convey impressions far beyond the mere lines and hues they exhibit; each is a drama, a destiny. And the hard but true lineaments of Holbein, the aërial grace of Malbone’s ‘Hours,’ Albert Durer’s mediæval sanctities, Overbeck’s conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds’s ‘Strawberry Girl,’ one of Copley’s colonial grandees in a New England farmer’s parlour, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer’s, the misty depths of Turner’s ‘Carthage,’ Domenichino’s ‘Sibyl,’ Claude’s ‘Sunset,’ or Allston’s ‘Rosalie’—how much of eras in art, events in history, national tastes, and varieties of genius, do they each foreshadow and embalm! Even when no special beauty or skill is manifest, the character of features transmitted by pictorial art, their antiquity or historical significance, often lends a mystery and meaning to the effigies of humanity. In the carved faces of old German church choirs and altars, the existent facial peculiarities of race are curiously evident; a Grecian life breathes from many a profile in the Elgin marbles, and a sacred marvel invests the exhumed giants of Nineveh; in the cartoons of Raphael, and the old Gobelin tapestries, are hints of what is essential in the progress and the triumphs of painting. Considered as a language, how definitely is the style of painters associated with special forms of character and spheres of life! ‘There certainly never was a painter,’ says a traveller in Spain of Murillo, ‘who, without much imagination, and telling no story, could yet vision his eyes with such pure love, and make lips so parting with prayer, as Murillo; himself a father, he loved to paint the child-Saviour in conjunction with thin-faced saints.’ It is this variety of human experience, typified and illustrated on canvas, that forms our chief obligations to the artist; through him our perception of and acquaintance with our race—its individuality and career, its phases and aspects—are indefinitely enlarged. ‘The greatest benefit,’ says a late writer, ‘we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying our experience and extending our contact with our fellow-creatures beyond the bounds of our personal lot.’

‘A room with pictures in it, and a room without pictures,’ says an æsthetic essayist, ‘differ by nearly as much as a room with windows and a room without windows. Nothing, we think, is more melancholy, particularly to a person who has to pass much time in his room, than blank walls with nothing on them; for pictures are loopholes of escape to the soul, leading it to other spheres. It is such an inexpressible relief to the person engaged in writing, or even reading, on looking up, not to have his line of vision chopped square off by an odious white wall, but to find his soul escaping, as it were, through the frame of an exquisite picture, to other beautiful and perhaps idyllic scenes, where the fancy for a moment may revel, refreshed and delighted. Is it winter in your world? Perhaps it is summer in the picture; what a charming momentary change and contrast! And thus pictures are consolers of loneliness; they are a sweet flattery to the soul; they are a relief to the jaded mind; they are windows to the imprisoned thought; they are books; they are histories and sermons—which we can read without the trouble of turning over the leaves.’

The effect of a picture is increased by isolation and surprise. I never realized the physiognomical traits of Madame de Maintenon until her portrait was encountered in a solitary country-house, of whose drawing-room it was the sole ornament; and the romance of a miniature by Malbone first came home to me when an ancient dame, in the costume of the last century, with trembling fingers drew one of her husband from an antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist. Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on A Portrait by Vandyke, which gives us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind of genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than that with which we contemplate (as is not infrequent in some old gallery of Europe) a portrait which deeply interests or powerfully attracts us, and whose history is irrevocably lost. A better homily on the evanescence of human love and fame can scarcely be imagined: a face alive with moral personality and human charms, such as win and warm our stranger eyes; yet the name, subject, artist, owner, all lost in oblivion! To pause before an interesting but ‘unknown portrait’ is to read an elegy as pathetic as Gray’s.

The mechanical processes by which nature is so closely imitated, and the increase of which during the last few years is one of the most remarkable facts in science, may, at the first glance, appear to have lessened the marvellous in art, by making available to all the exact representation of still-life. But, when duly considered, the effect is precisely the reverse; for exactly in proportion as we become familiar with the mechanical production of the similitudes of natural and artificial objects, do we instinctively demand higher powers of conception, greater spiritual expression in the artist. The discovery of Daguerre and its numerous improvements, and the unrivalled precision attained by photography, render exact imitation no longer a miracle of crayon or palette; these must now create as well as reflect, invent and harmonize as well as copy, bring out the soul of the individual and of the landscape, or their achievements will be neglected in favour of the fac-similes obtainable through sunshine and chemistry. The best photographs of architecture, statuary, ruins, and, in some cases, of celebrated pictures, are satisfactory to a degree which has banished mediocre sketches, and even minutely-finished but literal pictures. Specimens of what is called ‘Nature-printing,’ which gives an impression directly from the veined stone, the branching fern, or the sea-moss, are so true to the details as to answer a scientific purpose; natural objects are thus lithographed without the intervention of pencil or ink. And these several discoveries have placed the results of mere imitative art within reach of the mass; in other words, her prose language—that which mechanical science can utter—is so universal, that her poetry—that which must be conceived and expressed through individual genius, the emanation of the soul—is more distinctly recognized and absolutely demanded from the artist, in order to vindicate his claim to that title, than ever before.

Perhaps, indeed, the scope which painting offers to experimental, individual, and prescriptive taste, the loyalty it invokes from the conservative, the ‘infinite possibilities’ it offers to the imaginative, the intimacy it promotes with nature and character, are the cause of so much originality and attractiveness in its votaries. The lives of painters abound in the characteristic, the adventurous, and the romantic. Open Vasari, Walpole, or Cunningham, at random, and one is sure to light upon something odd, genial, or exciting. One of the most popular novelists of our day assured me that, in his opinion, the richest unworked vein for his craft, available in these days of civilized uniformity, is artist-life at Rome, to one thoroughly cognizant of its humours and aspirations, its interiors and vagrancies, its self-denials and its resources. I have sometimes imagined what a story the old white dog, who so long frequented the ‘Lepri’ and the ‘Caffé Greco,’ and attached himself so capriciously to the brother artists of his deceased master, could have told, if blessed with memory and language. He had tasted the freedom and the zest of artist-life in Rome, and scorned to follow trader or king. He preferred the odour of canvas and oil to that of conservatories, and had more frolic and dainty morsels at an al fresco of the painters, in the Campagna, than the kitchen of an Italian prince could furnish. His very name betokened good cheer, and was pronounced after the manner of the pert waiters who complacently enunciate a few words of English. Bif-steck was a privileged dog; and though occasionally made the subject of a practical joke, taught absurd tricks, sent on fools’ errands, and his white coat painted like a zebra, these were but casual troubles; he was a sensible dog to despise them, when he could enjoy such quaint companionship, behold such experiments in colour and drawing, serve as a model himself, and go on delicious sketching excursions to Albano and Tivoli, besides inhaling tobacco-smoke and hearing stale jests and love soliloquies ad infinitum. I am of Bif-steck’s opinion. There is no such true, earnest, humorous, and individual life, in these days of high civilization, as that of your genuine painter; impoverished as it often is, baffled in its aspirations, unregarded by the material and the worldly, it often rears and keeps pure bright, genial natures whose contact brings back the dreams of youth. It is pleasant, too, to realize, in a great commercial city, that man ‘does not live by bread alone,’ that fun is better than furniture, and a private resource of nature more prolific of enjoyment than financial investments. It is rare comfort here, in the land of bustle and sunshine, to sit in a tempered light and hear a man sing or improvise stories over his work; to behold once more vagaries of costume; to let the eye rest upon pictorial fragments of Italy—the ‘old familiar faces’ of Roman models, the endeared outlines of Apennine hills, the contadina bodice and the brigand hat, until these objects revive to the heart all the romance of travel.

Vernet’s sympathies were excited by the misfortunes of a worthy tradesman of Marseilles, and he attended the sheriff’s auction at the bankrupt’s house, where, among the crowd, he recognized a would-be connoisseur in art, of ample wealth. The painter fixed his eyes upon a dim and mediocre picture on the wall, and bid fifteen francs; immediately the rich amateur scented a prize; a long contest ensued, and at length the picture was knocked off to Vernet’s antagonist for so large a sum that the honest bankrupt was enabled to pay his creditors in full, and recommence business with a handsome capital. With the progress of civilization pictures have grown in permanent market value. A Quaker who incurred the reproach of his brethren for securing a Wouverman for a large sum, was excused for this ‘vanity’ by his shrewd friends, when he demonstrated to them that he had made an excellent investment. Literature affords many illustrations of the romance of the pictorial art, of which, among our own authors, Allston and Hawthorne have given memorable examples in Monaldi and Twice-told Tales. Unknown portraits have inspired the most attractive conjectures, and about the best known and most fascinating hover an atmosphere of intensely personal interest or historical association. Vasari, Mrs. Jameson, Hazlitt, and other art-writers have elaborated the most delectable facts and fancies from this vast individual sphere of the picturesque.

The technicalities of art, its refinements of style, its absolute significance, are, indeed, as dependent for appreciation on a special endowment as are mathematics; but the general and incidental associations, in which is involved a world of poetry, may be enjoyed to the full extent by those whose perception of form, sense of colour, and knowledge of the principles of sculpture, painting, music, and architecture are notably deficient. It is a law of life and nature, that truth and beauty, adequately represented, create and diffuse a limitless element of wisdom and pleasure. Such memorials are talismanic, and their influence is felt in all the higher and more permanent spheres of thought and emotion; they are the gracious landmarks that guide humanity above the commonplace and the material, along the ‘line of infinite desires.’ Art, in its broad and permanent meaning, is a language—the language of sentiment, of character, of national impulse, of individual genius; and for this reason it bears a lesson, a charm, or a sanction to all—even to those least versed in its rules, and least alive to its special triumphs. Sir Walter Scott was no amateur, yet, through his reverence for ancestry and his local attachments, portraiture and architecture had for him a romantic interest. Sydney Smith was impatient of galleries when he could talk with men and women, and made a practical joke of buying pictures; yet Newton and Leslie elicited his best humour. Talfourd cared little and knew less of the treasures of the Louvre, but lingered there because it had been his friend Hazlitt’s Elysium. Indeed, there are constantly blended associations in the history of English authors and artists; Reynolds is identified with Johnson and Goldsmith, Smibert with Berkeley, Barry with Burke, Constable and Wilkie with Sir George Beaumont, Haydon with Wordsworth, and Leslie with Irving. The painters depict their friends of the pen, the latter celebrate in verse or prose the artist’s triumphs, and both intermingle thought and sympathy; and from this contact of select intelligences, of diverse vocation, has resulted the choicest wit and the most genial companionship. If from special we turn to general associations, from biography to history, the same prolific affinities are evident, whereby the artist becomes an interpreter of life, and casts the halo of romance over the stern features of reality. Hampton Court is the almost breathing society of Charles the Second’s reign; the Bodleian Gallery is vivid with Britain’s past intellectual life; the history of France is pictured on the walls of Versailles; the luxury of colour bred by the sunsets of the Euganean hills, the waters of the Adriatic, the marbles of San Marco, and the skies and atmosphere of Venice, are radiant on the canvas of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese; Michael Angelo has embodied the soul of his era, and the loftiest spirit of his country; Salvator typified the half-savage picturesqueness, Claude the atmospheric enchantments, Carlo Dolce the effeminate grace, Titian the voluptuous energy, Guido the placid self-possession, and Raphael and Correggio the religious sentiment of Italy; Watteau put on canvas the fête champêtre; the peasant life of Spain is pictured by Murillo, her asceticism by the old religious limners; what English rustics were before steam and railroads, Gainsborough and Moreland reveal; Wilkie has permanently symbolized Scotch shrewdness and domesticity, and Lawrence framed and fixed the elegant shapes of a London drawing-room; and each of these is a normal type and suggestive exemplar to the imagination, a chapter of romance, a sequestration and initial token of the characteristic and the historical, either of what has become traditional or what is for ever true.

The indirect service good artists have rendered by educating observation has yet to be acknowledged. The Venetian painters cannot be even superficially regarded, without developing the sense of colour; nor the Roman, without enlarging our cognizance of expression; nor the English, without refining our perception of the evanescent effects in scenery. Raphael has made infantile grace obvious to unmaternal eyes; Turner opened to many a preoccupied vision the wonders of atmosphere; Constable guided our perception of the casual phenomena of wind; Landseer, that of the natural language of the brute creation; Lely, of the coiffure; Michael Angelo, of physical grandeur; Rolfe, of fish; Gerard Dow, of water; Cuyp, of meadows; Cooper, of cattle; Stanfield, of the sea; and so on through every department of pictorial art. Insensibly these quiet but persuasive teachers have made every phase and object of the material world interesting, environed them with more or less of romance, by such revelations of their latent beauty and meaning; so that, thus instructed, the sunset and the pastoral landscape, the moss-grown arch and the craggy seaside, the twilight grove and the swaying cornfield, an old mill, a peasant, light and shade, form and feature, perspective and anatomy, a smile, a gesture, a cloud, a waterfall, weather-stains, leaves, deer—every object in nature, and every impress of the elements, speaks more distinctly to the eye, and more effectively to the imagination.

The vicissitudes which sometimes attend a picture or statue furnish no inadequate materials for narrative interest. Amateur collectors can unfold a tale in reference to their best acquisitions which outvies fiction. Beckford’s table-talk abounded in such reminiscences. An American artist, who had resided long in Italy, and made a study of old pictures, caught sight at a shop window in New Orleans of an ‘Ecce Homo’ so pathetic in expression as to arrest his steps and engross his attention. Upon inquiry, he learned that it had been purchased of a soldier fresh from Mexico, after the late war between that country and the United States; he bought it for a trifle, carried it to Europe, and soon authenticated it as an original Guercino, painted for the royal chapel in Madrid, and sent thence by the government to a church in Mexico, whence, after centuries, it had found its way, through the accidents of war, to a pawnbroker’s shop in Louisiana. A lady in one of our eastern cities, wishing to possess, as a memorial, some article which had belonged to a deceased neighbour, and not having the means, at the public sale of her effects, to bid for an expensive piece of furniture, contented herself with buying for a few shillings a familiar chimney-screen. One day she discovered a glistening surface under the flowered paper which covered it, and when this was torn away, there stood revealed a picture of ‘Jacob and Rachel at the Well,’ by Paul Veronese; doubtless thus concealed with a view to its secret removal during the first French Revolution. The missing Charles First of Velasquez was lately exhibited in this country, and the account its possessor gives of the mode of its discovery and the obstacles which attended the establishment of its legal ownership in England is a remarkable illustration both of the tact of the connoisseur and the mysteries of jurisprudence.[10]

Political vicissitudes not only cause pictures to emigrate like their owners, but to change their costume—if we may so call a frame,—with equal celerity: that which now encloses Peale’s Washington, at Princeton, once held the portrait of George the Third; and there is an elaborate old frame which holds the likeness of a New England poet’s grandfather whence was hurriedly taken the portrait of Governor Hutchinson, in anticipation of a domiciliary visit from the ‘Sons of Liberty.’

There is scarcely, indeed, an artist or a patron of art, of any eminence, who has not his own ‘story of a picture.’ Like all things of beauty and of fame, the very desire of possession which a painting excites, and the interest it awakens, give rise to some costly sacrifice, or incidental circumstance, which associates the prize with human fortune and sentiment.

A friend of mine, in exploring the more humble class of boarding-houses in one of our large commercial towns, in search of an unfortunate relation, found himself, while expecting the landlady, absorbed in a portrait on the walls of a dingy back parlour. The furniture was of the most common description. A few smutched and faded annuals, half-covered with dust, lay on the centre-table, beside an old-fashioned astral lamp, a cracked porcelain vase of wax-flowers, a yellow satin pincushion embroidered with tarnished gold-lace, and an album of venerable hue filled with hyperbolic apostrophes to the charms of some ancient beauty; which, with the dilapidated window-curtains, the obsolete sideboard, the wooden effigy of a red-faced man with a spyglass under his arm, and the cracked alabaster clock-case on the mantel, all bespoke an impoverished establishment, so devoid of taste that the beautiful and artistic portrait seemed to have found its way there by a miracle. It represented a young and spirituelle woman, in the costume, so elegant in material and formal in mode, which Copley has immortalized; in this instance, however, there was a French look about the coiffure and robe. The eyes were bright with intelligence chastened by sentiment, the features at once delicate and spirited; and altogether the picture was one of those visions of blended youth, grace, sweetness, and intellect, from which the fancy instinctively infers a tale of love, genius, or sorrow, according to the mood of the spectator. Subdued by his melancholy errand, and discouraged by a long and vain search, my friend, whose imagination was quite as excitable as his taste was correct, soon wove a romance around the picture. It was evidently not the work of a novice; it was as much out of place in this obscure and inelegant domicile, as a diamond set in filigree, or a rose among pigweed. How came it there? who was the original? what her history and her fate? Her parentage and her nurture must have been refined; she must have inspired love in the chivalric; perchance this was the last relic of an illustrious exile, the last memorial of a princely house.

This reverie of conjecture was interrupted by the entrance of the landlady. My friend had almost forgotten the object of his visit; and when his anxious inquiries proved vain, he drew the loquacious hostess into general conversation, in order to elicit the mystery of the beautiful portrait. She was a robust, gray-haired woman, with whose constitutional good-nature care had waged a long and partially successful war. That indescribable air which speaks of better days was visible at a glance; the remnants of bygone gentility were obvious in her dress; she had the peculiar manner of one who had enjoyed social consideration; and her language indicated familiarity with cultivated society; yet the anxious expression habitual to her countenance, and the bustling air of her vocation which quickly succeeded conversational repose, hinted but too plainly straitened circumstances and daily toil. But what struck her present curious visitor more than these casual traits were the remains of great beauty in the still lovely contour of the face, the refined lines of her mouth, and the depth and varied play of the eyes. He was both sympathetic and ingenious, and ere long gained the confidence of his auditor. The unfeigned interest and the true perception he manifested in speaking of the portrait rendered him, in its owner’s estimation, worthy to know the story his own intuition had so nearly divined. The original was Theodosia, the daughter of Aaron Burr. His affection for her was the redeeming fact of his career and character. Both were anomalous in our history. In an era remarkable for patriotic self-sacrifice, he became infamous for treasonable ambition; among a phalanx of statesmen illustrious for directness and integrity, he pursued the tortuous path of perfidious intrigue; in a community where the sanctities of domestic life were unusually revered, he bore the stigma of unscrupulous libertinism. With the blood of his gallant adversary and his country’s idol on his hands, the penalties of debt and treason hanging over him, the fertility of an acute intellect wasted on vain expedients—an outlaw, an adventurer, a plausible reasoner with one sex and fascinating betrayer of the other, poor, bereaved, contemned,—one holy, loyal sentiment lingered in his perverted soul—love for the fair, gifted, gentle being who called him father. The only disinterested sympathy his letters breathe is for her; and the feeling and sense of duty they manifest offer a remarkable contrast to the parallel record of a life of unprincipled schemes, misused talents, and heartless amours. As if to complete the tragic antithesis of destiny, the beloved and gifted woman who thus shed an angelic ray upon that dark career was, soon after her father’s return from Europe, lost in a storm at sea, while on her way to visit him, thus meeting a fate which, even at this distance of time, is remembered with pity. Her wretched father bore with him, in all his wanderings and through all his remorseful exile, her picture—emblem of filial love, of all that is beautiful in the ministry of woman, and all that is terrible in human fate. At length he lay dangerously ill in a garret. He had parted with one after another of his articles of raiment, books, and trinkets, to defray the expenses of a long illness; Theodosia’s picture alone remained; it hung beside him—the one talisman of irreproachable memory, of spotless love, and of undying sorrow; he resolved to die with this sweet relic of the loved and lost in his possession; there his sacrifices ended. Life seemed slowly ebbing; the unpaid physician lagged in his visits; the importunate landlord threatened to send this once dreaded partisan, favoured guest, and successful lover to the almshouse; when, as if the spell of woman’s affection were spiritually magnetic, one of the deserted old man’s early victims—no other than she who spoke—accidentally heard of his extremity, and, forgetting her wrongs, urged by compassion and her remembrance of the past, sought her betrayer, provided for his wants, and rescued him from impending dissolution. In grateful recognition of her Christian kindness, he gave her all he had to bestow—Theodosia’s portrait.

The indiscriminate disparagement of the old masters which has so long been the paradox of Ruskin’s beautiful rhetoric, Haydon’s suicidal devotion to the ‘grand style,’ Mrs. Jameson’s gracious exposition of religious art, and the extravagant encomiums which the fashionable painter of the hour elicits from accredited critical journals, indicate the antagonistic theories and tastes that prevail; and yet these are all authentic and recognized oracles of artistic knowledge—all more or less true; and yet, in a comparative view, offering such violent contrasts as to baffle and discourage a novice in search of the legitimate picturesque.

So thoroughly identified with the possibility and probability of deception is the very name of a picture-dealer, that to the multitude an ‘Old Master’ is a bugbear;—the tricks of this trade form a staple of Paris correspondents and travelled raconteurs. The details of manufacture in perhaps this most lucrative branch of spurious traffic are patent; and, although the legitimate products of world-renowned painters are authenticated and on record, scarcely a month passes without some extensive fraud. The amateur in literature, sculpture, and music, is comparatively free from this perpetual danger; the sense of mystery does not baffle his enthusiasm; and while the pictorial votary or victim is disputing about an ‘Andrea del Sarto,’ or a ‘Teniers,’ or bewildered by the conflicting theories of rival artists in regard to colour, tone, composition, foreshortening, chiaro-oscuro, &c., he enjoys, without misgiving, the noi ci darem of Mozart, revels over the faded leaves of his first edition of a classic, or discourses fluently about the line of beauty in his copy of a Greek statue. ‘God Almighty’s daylight,’ wrote Constable, ‘is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart-grease, tar, and snuff of candle.’ The practical lesson derivable from these anomalous results of ‘Pictures’ is that we should rely upon our individual impressions, enjoy what appeals gratefully to our consciousness, repudiate hackneyed and conventional terms, judgments, and affectations, and boldly declare with the poet, before the picture which enchants us,—

‘I leave to learned fingers and wise hands
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the indescribable;
I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream
Wherein that image shall for ever dwell;
The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream
That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam.’

There are heads of men and women delineated hundreds of years ago, so knit into the mystic web of memory and imagination, so familiar through engravings, cameos, and other reproductive forms of art, and so identified with tragic experience, ideal aspiration, or heroic deeds, that the first view of the originals is an epoch in life; we seem to behold them down a limitless vista of time, and they appeal to our consciousness like the faces of the long-loved, long-lost, and suddenly restored. It is as if we had entered a spiritual realm, and were greeted by the vanished idols of the heart, or the ‘beings of the mind and not of clay,’ once arbiters of destiny and oracles of genius. Beatrice Cenci, through soulful eyes, infinitely deepened by a life of tears dried up by the fever of intense anguish, looks the incarnation of beauty and woe—beauty we have adored in dreams, woe we have realized through sympathy. With the first sight of that alabaster skin, those lips quivering with pain, those golden locks, the theme of poets, that corpse-like headband; the fragility, the fervour, the sensibility, and the chaste, ineffable grace; above all, the soulful world of terror, pity, and meekness in the lustrous and melancholy orbs, how familiar, yet how new, how pathetic, yet sublime! The hoary wretch who called her child, seems lurking somewhere in that hushed and sombre palace; the brother whose fair brow was lacerated by parental violence; the resigned mother, the infernal banquet, the prison, the tribunal, the bloody axe, flit with fearful distinctness between our entranced vision and the picture; for tradition, local association, Shelley’s muse, the secret pen of the annalist, and the pencil of Guido, combine to make absolutely real an unparalleled story of loveliness and persecution, maidenhood and martyrdom. It is but recently that the true history of this picture has been authenticated. According to Guerazzi, who has minutely explored contemporary archives, the ‘study’ from which it was painted, Ubaldo Ubaldini made from memory, to console his sister for the loss of Beatrice. He was one of the many artists who loved the beautiful victim, with the passion of youth and the fancy of a painter; one of the courageous but inadequate band who conspired to rescue her at the scaffold;[11] and it was long believed that he died of indignant grief after the catastrophe. Imagine him with the shadow of that mighty sorrow upon his soul, his hand inspired by tender recollection, secluded with her image stamped on his broken heart, and patiently reproducing those delicate features and that anguished expression—his last offering to her he so quickly followed into the valley of death! His ‘study’ fell into the hands of Maffei Barberini, and furnished Guido Reni the materials for this, his most effective and endeared creation. Its marvellous, almost magnetic expression, doubtless gave rise to the belief, so long current, that he sketched Beatrice on her way to execution; but the later explanation is more accordant with probability and more satisfactory to the mind, for such a work requires for the conditions of success both the inspiration of love and the aptitude of skill. Ubaldini furnished one, and Guido the other.

Many travellers, especially women, have expressed great disappointment with the ‘Fornarina.’ They cannot associate a figure so much the reverse of ethereal, and charms so robust, with the refined taste and delicate person of Raffaelo. But such objections are founded on an imaginative not philosophic theory of love. There never was a genuine artist who, in matters of feeling, was not a child of Nature; and we have but to recognize the idiosyncrasies of poet and painter to find a key to their human affinities. What a peculiar interest we feel in the objects of love whose affection cheered, and whose sympathy inspired those products of pen and pencil, which have become part of our mental being! I have seen a crowd of half-bashful and wholly intent English girls watch the carriage which contained the obese, yet still fair-haired Countess, whose youthful charms so long made Byron a methodical hermit at Ravenna; and the respectable matron who, as a child, was deemed by sentimentalists in Germany and her own exaggerated fancy the object of Goëthe’s senile passion, was long courted on that account, at tea-drinkings, by foreign visitors enamoured of Faust and Wilhelm Meister. Still more natural is the sentiment which lures us to earnest acquaintance with the countenance, on which he who gave an angelic semblance to maternity and caught the most gracious aspect of childhood used to gaze with rapture; the eye that responded to his glance, the smile that penetrated his heart, and were fixed on his canvas. The impression which the ‘Fornarina’ of the Tribune instantly gives, is that of genuine womanhood: there is generosity, a repose, a world of latent emotion, an exuberance of sympathetic power, in the full impassioned eye, the broad symmetrical bosom, the rich olive tint; it is precisely the woman to harmonize by her simple presence, and to soothe or exalt by her spontaneous love, the mood of a man of nervous organization and ardent temper. There is a tranquil self-possession in the face and figure which the sensitive and excitable artist especially finds refreshing—a candid nature such as alone can inspire such a man’s confidence, a majestic simplicity peculiar to the best type of Roman women, more delightful to the over-tasked brain and sensibilities than the highest culture of an artificial kind; and there is the fresh, unperverted, richly-developed, harmoniously-united heart and physique, which, notwithstanding the modern standard of female charms, is the normal and the essential basis of honest, natural affinity. I could never turn, in the Florence Gallery, from the pale, delicately-rounded, ideal brow, the almost pleading eye, and the cherubic lips of Raffaelo, instinct with the needs as well as the immortal longings of genius, to the mellow, calm, self-sustained, and healthful ‘Fornarina,’ without fancying the support, the rest, the inexhaustible comfort—in Othello’s sense of that expressive word—which the sensitive artist could find in the cheerful baker’s daughter, the irritable seeker in the serene and satisfied woman, the delicate in the strong, the gentle in the hearty, the ideal in the real, the poetic in the practical, the spiritual in the human; and I contemplated her noble contour, her contented smile, her beaming cheek, and eye undeepened by the experience that withers as it teaches—yet soulful with latent emotion, with an ever-increasing sense of her native claims to Raphael’s love.

Musical organizations are especially sensitive to the pictorial spell; the letters of Mendelssohn indicate how it influenced his development. Writing from Venice of church services he attended, he says:—‘Nothing impressed me with more solemn awe than when, on the very spot for which they were originally created, the “Presentation of Mary and the Child in the Temple,” “The Assumption of the Virgin,” “The Entombment of Christ,” and “The Martyrdom of St. Peter,” in all their grandeur, gradually steal forth out of the darkness in which the long lapse of time has veiled them. Often I feel a musical inspiration, and since I came here have been busily engaged in composition.’ And from Florence he writes:—‘There is a small picture here which I discovered for myself. It is by Fra Bartolomeo, who must have been a man of most devout, tender, and earnest spirit. The figures are finished in the most exquisite and consummate manner. You can see in the picture itself that the pious master has taken delight in painting it, and in finishing the most minute details, probably with a view of giving it away to gratify some friend; we feel as if the painter belonged to it, and still ought to be sitting before his work, or had this moment left.’ This personal magnetism about pictures is an authentic evidence of their vital relation to character, and it is felt often in an incredible way by the imaginative and susceptible. The same gifted and generous composer, who thus wrote of Titian and Fra Bartolomeo, speaks of the impression he received from Raphael’s portrait by himself:—‘Youthful, pale, delicate, and with such inward aspirations, such longing and wistfulness in the mouth and eyes, that it is as if you could see into his very soul; that he cannot succeed in expressing all that he sees and feels, and is thus impelled to go forward, and that he must die an early death;—all this is written on his mournful, suffering, yet fervid countenance.’

Vandyke’s portraits of Charles the First impress the spectator with regal fanaticism, and a tragic destiny, more than some of the written histories of his reign. The exquisite hands of Leonardo’s ‘Gioconde’ are as eloquent of feminine grace and sensibility as the most elaborate description. Correggio’s ‘Magdalen,’ in the remorseful abandon and beautiful sadness of its expression, reveals her who ‘loved much,’ repented, and was forgiven. Giovanni di Medici, in the Uffizzi Gallery, fulfils to the imagination the ideal of mediæval Italian soldiership. Stuart’s ‘Washington’ embodies the serene conscience, the self-control, the humane dignity and birthright of command, which consecrate our peerless chief; and Delaroche’s ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’ perpetuates the intense purpose and insatiable ambition that won so many battles and died of anxiety on an ocean-rock. Such instances, which might easily be multiplied, prove how a single department of art, and that the least estimated, is allied to history, patriotism, and sentiment, and capable of touching their secret springs and unveiling their limitless perspective at a glance. Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ is a biblical poem. Hamlet’s filial reproaches borrow their keenest sting from two ‘counterfeit presentments,’ and Trumbull’s faithful and assiduous pencil has transmitted the individualities of our Revolutionary drama. And thus the art of portraiture, even in its general relations, may become, through illustrious subjects and rare fidelity, the romance which association of ideas breeds from reality.

I was never more impressed with the absolute line of demarcation between the imitative and the inventive, even in the lighter processes of art, than when examining the graphic series of illustrations of The Wandering Jew. Nature is represented under all forms—the woods, the desert, the ocean, caves, meadows, and skies; and these fixed elemental features might be well reflected by mechanical aids, photographed or reproduced through chemical and optical means; but the true meaning of each picture consisted in the ever-present shadow pursuing the Wanderer—the form of the Holy One bowed under his cross: it glimmered in the water, was stamped on the rock, outlined in the gnarled forest branches, pencilled in the floating vapour, reflected in the ice-mirrored lake, with a latent and inevitable yet unobtrusive and apparently accidental omni-presence, as if wrought into the texture of nature through the creative anguish of conscience—which emphatically announced an intelligence far beyond all mechanical art, and interfused the material with the abstract, the imaginative, and the human, as only genius can. The same thing is evinced by comparing the best photographs of architecture, figures, or landscapes with the sketch-book of a genuine artist; in certain points there will be found a special intelligence and feeling which transcend the most remarkable imitative truth. How much of this is suggested, for instance, by the mere catalogue of an album on the table at a Parisian soirée: fleurs de Redonté, chevaux de Carl Vernet, Bedouins d’Horace, aquarelles de Ciceri, petit paysages de Géniole, caricatures de Grandville et de Monnier, beaux brigands de Schnetz—‘tous chéfs d’œuvre au petit pied.’

A portrait of little Fritz drumming, in the Berlin Gallery, Carlyle hails, in his Life of Frederick the Great, as ‘one tiny islet of reality amid the shoreless sea of fantasms, Flaying of Bartholomews, Rape of Europas,’ &c. Napoleon was delighted to remember that his mother reclined on tapestry representing the heroes of the Iliad, when she brought him into the world.

For how long and with what vividness are certain pictures associated with localities. Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy,’ and Reynolds’s ‘Strawberry Girl,’ are among the salient retrospective images of the English school at the Manchester Exhibition. We think of Correggio with Parma, Perugino with Perugia, Fra Angelico with Florence, Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ and Guercino’s ‘Hagar’ with Milan, Murillo with Seville, Vandyke with Madrid, Rubens with Antwerp, Watteau with Paris, and Paul Potter’s ‘Bull’ with the Hague.

The Dutch school, in a philosophical estimate, is but the compensation afforded by the romance of art for its deficiency in nature; the element of the picturesque not found in mountains, forests, and cataracts, the lowland painters wrought from flowers and firesides; the radiant tulips and exquisite interiors, the humble but characteristic in life and manners. To seize upon individuality is the conservative tact of both painter and poet; whoever does this effectively contributes to the world’s gallery of historical portraits, and keeps before the living the faces, costume, and actions of bygone races and heroes. Catlin’s aboriginal portraits introduced the American native tribes to Europe; a naturalist abroad has but to turn over Audubon’s portfolio to become intimately acquainted with every bird whose plumage or song makes beautiful our woodlands and seashore; the traveller who rests an hour at Perugia may trace on the walls of a church the original, crude, yet pious expression which Raphael developed into angelic beauty. Vernet has, by the very multiplicity of his battle-pieces, signalized on canvas the military genius of the French nation; the faith which so distinguishes the fifteenth from the speculation of the eighteenth century is manifest to us most eloquently in the masterpieces of religious art which yet remain in peerless beauty to attest the holy convictions that inspired them; and all that is peculiar in Grecian culture has found no exponent like the statues of her divinities. Hogarth preceded Crabbe and Dickens in making palpable the shadows of want, crime, and luxury. The Italian satirist, who endowed animals with speech and made them represent the absurdities of humanity, hinted their possible significance less than Landseer who individualized their most salient traits, or Kaulbach who revealed the brute creation in the highest intuitive expression. There is a piquant rustic beauty by Greuze, which embodies and embalms, in its exquisite suggestiveness, the special claim of naïve brightness and grace that belongs almost exclusively to French lovable women; and there is a portrait of an American matronly belle of the days of Washington, by Stuart, which represents the type of mingled self-reliance and womanly loveliness that has made the ladies of our Republican court so memorably attractive.

DOCTORS.

‘Throw physic to the dogs.’
Macbeth.

‘Friend of my life, which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song.’
Pope.

n the moving panoramas of cities are to be seen certain vehicles of all degrees of locomotive beauty and convenience, from the glossy and silver-knobbed carriage with its prancing grays, to the bacheloric-looking sulky with its one gaunt horse, in which are seated gentlemen of a learned and professional aspect, usually wearing spectacles, and always an air of intense respectability, or of contemplation and seriousness. They recognize numerous acquaintances as they pass with a peculiar smile and nod, and are usually accompanied by ‘a little man-boy to hold the horse,’ as the French cook in the play defines a tigre. These mysterious personages rejoice in the title of Doctor—once a very distinctive appellation, but now as common as authorship and travelling. A moralist, watching them gliding by amid fashionable equipages, crowded omnibuses, hasty pedestrians, and all the phenomena of life in a metropolis, would find a striking contrast between the rushing tide around and the hushed rooms they enter. To how many their visit is the one daily event that breaks in upon the monotony of illness and confinement; how many eyes watch them with eager suspense, and listen to their opinion as the fiat of destiny; how many feverishly expect their coming, shrink from their polished steel, rejoice in their cheering ministrations, or dread their long bills! ‘The Doctor!’—a word that stirs the extremest moods, despair and jollity!

There is no profession which depends so much for its efficiency on personal traits as that of medicine; for the utility of technical knowledge here is derived from individual judgment, tact, and sympathy. In other words, the physician has to deal with an unknown element. Between the specific ailment and the remedy there are peculiarities of constitution, the influence of circumstances, and the laws of nature to be considered; so that although the medical adviser may be thoroughly versed in physiology, the materia medica, and the symptoms of disease, if he possess not the discrimination, the observant skill, and the reflective power to apply his learning wisely, it is comparatively unavailing. The aim of the divine and the attorney, however impeded by obstacles, is reached by a more direct course; logic, eloquence, and zeal, united to professional attainment, will insure success in law and divinity; but in physic, certain other qualities in the man are requisite to give scope to the professor. Hence we associate a certain originality with the idea of a doctor; are apt to regard the vocation at the two extremes of superiority and pretension, and justly estimate the individuals of the class according to their capacity of insight and their principles of action, rather than by their mere acquisitions or rank as teachers. The uncertainty of medicine, as a practical art, thus induces a stronger reliance on individual endowments than is the case in any other liberal pursuit.

A philosophical history of the art of healing would be not less curious than suggestive. The absurd theories which checked its progress for centuries, the secrets hoarded by Egyptian priests, the union of medical knowledge with ancient systems of philosophy, the epoch of Galen, the Arabian and Salerno schools, the reformation of Paracelsus, the brilliant discoveries which, at long intervals, illumined the track of the science, and the enlightened principles now realized—if fully discussed—would form an extraordinary chapter in the biography of man. Herein, as with other vocations, modern division of labour has concentrated professional aptitudes. ‘L’ affluence des postulants,’ says Balzac, ‘a forcé la médecine a se diviser en catégories; il y a le médecin qui professe, le médecin politique et le médecin militant et la cinquième divisions, celle des docteurs qui vendent des remèdes.’

St. Luke and the Good Samaritan are yet the favourite signs of apothecaries, confirming the original charity of the art; and in the south of Europe may still be seen over the barbers’ shops the effigy of a human arm spouting blood from an open vein—an indication of the once universal custom of periodical depletion. It is now acknowledged that diverse climates require modified treatment of the same disease; that nervous susceptibility is far greater in one latitude than another, and that habits of life essentially individualize the constitution. Indeed, the widest difference exists in the relation of persons to the doctor; some never see him, and others must have a consultation upon the most trifling ailment,—so great is the dependence which can be had upon nature, and so extreme both the faith and the scepticism which exist in regard to curative science.

Popular literature is full of hits at the profession. ‘Le barbier fait plus de la moitié d’ un médecin,’ says Molière, who, in La Malade Imaginaire, has so acutely given the current philosophy of the subject by satirizing the pedantry and charlatanism of the doctors of his day; ‘Nous voyons que, dans la maladie tout le monde a recours aux médecins;—c’est une marque de la faiblesse humaine et non pas de la vérité de leur art;’ and of all ailments the hardest to cure is ‘la maladie des médecins.’ Imagination has been called by a German philosopher ‘the mediatrix, the nurse, the mover of all the several parts of our spiritual organism.’ ‘I have the worst luck of any physician under the cope of heaven,’ complains Sancho Panza; ‘other doctors kill their patients, and are paid for it too, and yet they are at no further trouble than scrawling two or three cramp words for some physical slip-slop, which the apothecaries are at all the pains to make up.’

It would seem, indeed, as if the advance of science improved medical practice negatively—that is, by inducing what in politics has been called a masterly inactivity; and there is no doubt that no small degree of the success attending Hahnemann’s theory is to be attributed to the comparative abstinence it inculcates in the use of remedial agents. The fact is a significant one, as indicative of the want of positive science in the healing art; and the consequent wisdom of leaving to nature, as far as possible, the restorative process. Indeed, to assist nature is acknowledged, by just observers, to be the only wise course; and this brings us to the inference that a good physician is necessarily a philosopher; it is incumbent on him, of all men, to exercise the inductive faculty; he must possess good causality, not only to reason justly on individual cases, but to apply the progress of science to the exigencies of disease. It is related of Bixio that such was his zeal for science, having long wished to ascertain whether a man instinctively turns when wounded in a vital part, asked his adversary in a duel to aim at one, and, although fatally hurt, exclaimed with ardour, as he involuntarily spun round—‘It is true, they do turn!’

The comparatively slow accumulation of scientific truth in regard to the treatment of disease, is illustrated by the fact that not until the lapse of two thousand years after medicine had assumed the rank of a science, under the auspices of Hippocrates, was the circulation of the blood discovered—an era in its history. The fiery discussion of the efficacy of inoculation, and its gradual introduction, is another significant evidence of the same general truth. But in our own day the rapid and valuable developments of chemistry have, in a measure, reversed the picture. Numerous alleviating and curative agents have been discovered; the gas of poisonous acids is found to eradicate, in many cases, the most fatal diseases of the eye; heat, more penetrating than can be created by other means, is eliminated from carbon in an aëriform state, passes through the cuticle without leaving a mark on its surface, and restores aching nerves or exhausted vitality. Vegetable and mineral substances are refined, analyzed, and combined with a skill never before imagined; opium yields morphine, and Peruvian bark quinine, and all the known salubrious elements are thus rendered infinitely subservient to the healing art. Chloroform is one of the most beneficent of these new agents; and has exorcised the demon of physical pain by a magical charm, without violating, in judicious hands, the integrity of nature.

There is a secret of curative art in which consists the genius of healing; it is that union of sympathy with intelligence, and of moral energy with magnetic gifts, whereby the tides of life are swayed, and one ‘can minister to a mind diseased.’ Fortunate is the patient who is attended by one thus endowed; but such are usually found out of the professional circle;—they are referees ordained by nature to settle the difficulties of inferior spirits; the arbiters recognized by instinct who soothe anger, reconcile doubt, amuse, elevate, and console, by a kind of moral alchemy; and potent coadjutors are they to the material aids of merely technical physicians. ‘Who dare say,’ asks Rénan, in allusion to the calming and purifying influence of Jesus, ‘that in many cases, and apart from injuries of a dreaded character, the contact of an exquisite person is not worth all the resources of pharmacy?’ ‘It was agony to me,’ wrote Hahnemann, ‘to walk in darkness, with no other light than could be derived from books.’ One of his opponents, from this confession, infers the fallacy of his system; ‘the conviction,’ he observes, ‘is irresistibly forced upon us that he was not a born physician.’ If our ancestors were less enlightened in regard to hygiène, and if their physicians were less scrupulous in tampering with the functions of nature, they had one signal advantage over us in escaping the inhuman comments, made after every fatal issue, on the practice and the treatment adopted—no matter with how much conscientious intelligence. We not only suffer the pangs of bereavement, but the reproaches of devotees of each school of medicine and of rival doctors, of having by an unwise choice sacrificed the life for which we would have cheerfully resigned our own! Somewhat of this occult healing force might have been read in the serene countenance of Dr. Physic, of Philadelphia; it predominated in the benevolent founder of the Insane Asylum of Palermo, who learned from an attack of mental disorder how to feel for, and minister to, those thus afflicted. The late Preissnitz, of Graefenberg, seems to have enjoyed the gift which is as truly Nature’s indication of an aptitude for the art, as a sense of beauty in the poet. But this principle is ‘caviare to the general.’

Medicine has lost much of its inherent dignity by the same element, in modern times, that has degraded art, letters, and society—the spirit of trade. This agency encourages motives, justifies means, and leads to ends wholly at variance with high tone and with truth. The gentleman, the philosopher, the man of honour, and with them that keystone in the arch of character—self-respect, are wholly compromised in the process of sinking a liberal art into a common trade. In the economy of modern society, however, the physician has acquired a new influence; he has gained upon the monopoly of the priest: for while the spirit of inquiry, by trenching on the mysterious prerogatives which superstition once accorded, has retrenched the latter’s functions, the same agency, by extending the domain of science and rendering its claims popular, has enlarged the sphere of the other profession. To an extent, therefore, never before known, the doctor fills the office of confessor; his visits yield agreeable excitement to women with whom he gossips and sympathizes; admitted by the very exigency of the case to entire confidence, often revered as a counsellor and friend, as well as relied on as a healer, not infrequently he becomes the oracle of a household. Privileges like these, when used with benevolence and integrity, are doubtless honourable to both parties, and become occasions for the exercise of the noblest service and the highest sentiments of our nature; while, on the other hand, they are liable to the grossest abuse, where elevation of character and gentlemanly instincts are wanting. Accordingly there has sprung into existence, in our day, a personage best designated as the medical Jesuit; whose real vocation, as well as the process by which he acquires supremacy, fully justifies the appellation. Like his religious prototype, he operates through the female branches, who, in their turn, control the heads of families; and the extent to which the domestic arrangements, the social relations, and even the opinions of individuals are thus regulated, is truly surprising. ‘Women,’ says Mrs. Jameson, ‘are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real sympathy, where the look and tone of each have become merely habitual and conventional, I may say professional.’ Yet a popular novelist, in his ideal portrait of the physician, justly claims superiority to impulse and casual sympathy as an essential requisite to success. ‘He must enter the room a calm intelligencer. He is disabled for his mission if he suffer aught to obscure the keen glance of his science.’[12]

The natural history of the doctor has not yet been written, but the classes are easily nomenclated; we have all known the humorous, the urbane, the oracular, the facetious, the brusque, the elegant, the shrewd, the exquisite, the burly, the bold, and the fastidious; and the character of people may be inferred by their choice of each species. Those in whom taste predominates over intellect, will select a physician, for his agreeable personal qualities; while such as value essential traits, will compromise with the roughest exterior and the least flattering address for the sake of genuine skill and a vigorous and honest mind. As a general rule, in large cities, vanity seems to rule the selection; and it is a lamentable view of human nature to see the blind preference given to plausible but shallow men, whose smooth tongues or gallant air win them suffrages denied to good sense and candid intercourse. The most detestable genus is that we have described under the name of medical Jesuits; next in annoyance are the precisians; the most harmless of the weaker order are the gossips; and there is often little to choose in point of risk to ‘the house of life’ between the very timid and the dare-devils; in a great exigency the former, and in an ordinary case the latter are equally to be shunned. In the Horæ Subsecivæ of Dr. John Brown, we find some apt and needed counsel to the aspirants for medical success:—‘The young doctor must have for his main faculty, sense; but all will not do if Genius is not there; such a special therapeutic gift had Hippocrates, Sydenham, Pott, Purcell, John Hunter, Delpech, Dupuytren, Kellie, Cheyne, Baillie, and Abercrombie. Moreover, let me tell you, my young doctor friends, that a cheerful face and step and neckcloth and buttonhole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, and the power of executing and setting a-going a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised.’ Brillat Savarin declares, doctors easily become gourmands because so well received.

In Paris, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, all the world over, the medical student is an exceptional character. Their pranks are patent: the rough ones like to kick up rows, and the more quiet are unique at practical jokes. Bob Sawyer is a typical hero. If, like the portrait-painter, doctors are often the playthings of fortune in cities, where the arbitrary whims of fashion decree success; in the country their true worth is more apt to find appreciation, and the individualities of character having free scope, quite original children of Apollo are the result. The name of Hopkins is still memorable in the region where he practised, as one of the literary clique of which Humphries, Dwight, and Barlow were members. Dr. Osborn, of Sandwich, Mass., wrote the popular whaling-song yet in vogue among Nantucketers. Dr. Holyoke, of Salem, is renowned as a beautiful instance of longevity; and the wit of Dr. Spring was proverbial in Boston. The best example of a medical philosopher, in our annals, is that of Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia; he reformed the system of practice; first treated yellow fever successfully, made climate a special study, and, like Burke, laid every one he encountered under contribution for facts. His life of seventy years was passed in ardent investigation. It is remarkable that the first martyr to American liberty was a physician; and, before he fell, Warren eloquently avowed his principles, like Körner in Germany, rousing the spirit of his countrymen, and then consecrating his sentiments with his blood. Boylston, the ancestral portraits of whose family are among the best of Copley’s American works, nearly fell a victim to public indignation for his zealous and intelligent advocacy of inoculation, and natural science owes a debt to Barton, Morton, and De Kay, which is acknowledged both at home and abroad. A French doctor has noted the historical importance of his confrères, and tells us Hamond was Racine’s master, Lestocq helped to elevate Catharine to the Russian throne, Haller was a poet and romancer, Cuvier was the greatest naturalist of his age, and Murat was a doctor. French médecins have figured in the Chamber and on the Boulevards.

If by virtue of the philosophic instinct and liberal tastes the doctor is thus allied to belles-lettres, he is allured into the domain of science by a still more direct sympathy. To how many has the study of the materia medica, and the culling of simples, proved the occasion of botanical research; and hence, by an easy transition, of exploring the entire field of natural science. Thus Davy was beguiled into chemical investigation; and Abercrombie, by the vestibule of physiological knowledge, sought the clue to mental philosophy; while Spurzheim and Combe ministered to a great charity by clearly explaining to the masses the natural laws of human well-being. It is an evidence of the sagacity of the Russian Peter, that he sought an interview with Boerhaäve; for by these varied links of general utility the medical office enters into every branch of social economy, and is only narrowed and shorn of dignity by the limited views or inadequate endowments of its votaries. The Jewish physician preserved and transmitted much of the learning of the world, after the fall of the Alexandrian school.[13] Life-insurance and quarantines have become such grave interests, that through them the responsibility of the physician to society is manifest to all; that to individuals is only partially recognized. How Cowper and Byron suffered for wise medical advice, and what ameliorations in states of mind and moral conditions have been induced by the now widely-extended knowledge of hygienic laws! Charles Lamb reasons wisely as well as quaintly in this wise:—‘You are too apprehensive of your complaint. The best way in these cases is to keep yourself as ignorant as the world was before Galen, of the entire construction of the animal man; not to be conscious of a midriff; to hold kidneys to be an agreeable fiction; to account the circulation of the blood an idle whim of Harvey’s; to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For once fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like bad humours. Above all, take exercise, and avoid tampering with the hard terms of art. Desks are not deadly. It is the mind, and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting. Think of the patience of the tailors; think how long the Lord Chancellor sits; think of the brooding hen.’

In literature the doctor figures with a genial dignity; he has affinities with genius, and a life-estate in the kingdom of letters: witness Garth’s poem of The Dispensary; Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination; Armstrong’s Art of Health; Cowley’s verses, Sprat’s life of him, and Currie’s of Burns; Beattie’s Minstrel; Darwin’s Botanic Garden; Moore’s Travels in Italy; Zimmerman’s Solitude; Goldsmith’s Vicar and Village; Aikin’s Criticisms; Joanna Baillie’s gifted brother, and Lady Morgan’s learned husband. Burke found health at the house of the benign Dr. Nugent, of Bath, at the outset of his career, and married the daughter of his medical friend. ‘Les médecins sont souvent tout a la fois conseillors, arbitres et magistrats au sein des familles.’ The best occasional verses of Dr. Johnson are those that commend the humble virtues of Levett, the apothecary.[14] Dr. Lettson wrote the life of Carver, the American traveller, and his account of that adventurous unfortunate led to the establishment of the Literary Fund Society. Among the graves near Archibald Carlyle’s old church at Inveresk, where that handsome clerical and convivial gossip is buried, is that of the sweet versifier, beloved as the ‘Delta’ of Blackwood, Dr. Moir, who so genially united the domestic lyrist and the good doctor; a Delta framed in bay adorns the pedestal of his monument. Rousseau, an invalid of morbid sensibility, recognizes the professional superiority of the physician as a social agent:—‘Par tous le pays ce sont les hommes les plus véritablement utiles et savants.’ The Médecin de Campagne of Balzac, and the Dr. Antonio of Ruffini, are elaborate and charming illustrations of this testimony of the author of Emile. What a curious chapter would be added to the Diary of a Physician, had Cabanis kept a record of his interviews with those two illustrious patients—Mirabeau and Condorcet. The social affinities of the doctor prove indirectly what we before suggested, that it is in the character more than in the learning, in the mind rather than the technical knowledge, that medical success lies. One of the shrewdest of the profession, Abernethy, declared thereof,—‘I have observed, in my profession, that the greatest men were not mere readers, but the men who reflected, who observed, who fairly thought out an idea.’ Almost intuitive is the venerable traditional ideal of the physician; among the aborigines of this continent, the ‘medicine man’ was revered as nearest to the ‘Great Spirit.’ ‘I hold physicians,’ said Dr. Parr, ‘to be the most enlightened professional persons in the whole circle of human arts and sciences.’ In our own day, Lever’s Irish novels, and in our own country the writings of Drake, Mitchell, Holmes, Bigelow, Francis, and others, indicate the literary claims of the profession. Think of Arbuthnot beside Pope’s sick-bed, and the latter’s apostrophe:—

‘Friend of my life, which did not you prolong,
The world had wanted many an idle song;’

of Garth ministering to Johnson, and Rush philosophizing, with Dr. Franklin, and the friendship of Pope and Cheselden. Bell’s comments on art, Colden’s Letters to Linnæus, and Thatcher’s Military Journal, are attractive proofs of that liberal tendency which leads the physician beyond the limits of his profession into the field of philosophical research. The bequest of Sir Hans Sloane was the nucleus of the British Museum. We all have a kind of affection for Dr. Slop, who, drawn from Dr. Burton, of York—a cruel, instrumental obstetrician,—is the type of an almost obsolete class, as the doctor in Macbeth is of the sapient pretender of all time. As to ideal doctors, how real to our minds is that Wordsworthean myth Dr. Fell, the physician of Sancho Panza, and the Purgon of Molière; while Dulcamara is a permanent type of the clever quack, Dr. Bartolo of the solemn professor, and Sangrado of the merciless phlebotomist. To think it ‘more honourable to fail according to rule than to succeed by innovation,’ is a satire of no local significance, but the constant creed of the medical pedant. Satirized years ago by the French comic dramatist, the profession was caricatured the other day by a young disciple of Esculapius, who in a clever drawing represented the votary of homœopathy with a little globule between thumb and finger, engaged in a kind of airy swallowing; the allopathic patient in an easy-chair is making wry faces over a large spoonful of physic; the believer in hydropathy sits forlorn and shivering in a sitz-bath, with a large goblet of water raised to his lips; while the Thomsonian victim is writhing and nauseating in anguish; and in the midst a skeleton, with a syringe for a baton, is dancing in a transport of infernal joy. Southey took a wise advantage of the popular idea of a doctor, in the genial and speculative phase of the character, when he gave the title to his last rambling, erudite, quaint, and charming production. Men of letters accordingly are wont to fraternize with the best of the profession; and there has always been a reciprocal interchange between them, both of affection and wit. Thus Halleck tells us, in Fanny,—

‘In Physic, we have Francis and M’Neven,
Famed for long heads, short lectures, and long bills;
And Quackenboss and others, who from heaven
Were rained upon us in a shower of pills;
They’d beat the deathless Esculapius hollow,
And make a starveling druggist of Apollo.’

The record of our surgeons in the war for the Union is alike honourable to their patriotism, humanity, and skill.

Popular writers have indicated the claims and character of the profession, not only in a dramatic or anecdotal way, but by personal testimony and observation; and those who have had the best opportunities, and are endowed with liberal sympathies, warmly recognize the possible usefulness and probable benevolence of a class of men more often satirized than sung. The privations and toil incident to country practice half a century ago are scarcely imagined now. Sir Walter Scott tells us,—‘I have heard the celebrated traveller Mungo Park, who had experienced both courses of life, rather give the preference to travelling as a discoverer in Africa, than to wandering by night and day the wilds of his native land in the capacity of a country practitioner.’ Dr. Johnson, a livelong invalid, and not apt to overlook professional foibles, gives a high average character to the doctor. ‘Whether,’ he observes, ‘what Sir William Temple says be true, that the physicians have more learning than the other faculties, I will not stay to inquire; but I believe every man has found in physicians great liberality and dignity of sentiment, very prompt effusion of beneficence, and willingness to exert a lucrative art where there is no hope of lucre.’

It is a nervous process to undergo the examination of a Parisian medical professor of the first class. Auscultation was first introduced by one of them, Laennec, and diagnosis is their chief art. In their hands the stethoscope is a divining-rod. So reliable is their insight, that they seem to read the internal organism as through a glass; and one feels under Louis’s inspection as if awaiting sentence. The laws of disease have been thoroughly studied in the hospitals of Paris, and the philosophy of symptoms is there understood by the medical savans with the certainty of a natural science, but the knowledge and application of remedies is by no means advanced in equal proportion. Accordingly, the perfection of modern skill in the art seems to result from an education in the French schools, combined with experience in English practice; thorough acquaintance with physiology, and habits of acute observation and accurate deduction, are thus united to executive tact and ability. And similar eclectic traits of character are desirable in the physician, especially the union of solidity of mind with agreeableness of manner; for in no vocation is there so often demanded the blending of the fortiter in re with the suaviter in modo.

The absence of faith in positive remedies that obtains in Europe is very striking to an American visitor, because it offers so absolute a contrast to the system pursued at home. I attended the funeral of a countryman a few days after reaching Paris, and on our way to Père la Chaise his case and treatment were fully discussed; his disease was typhus fever. Previous to delirium he had designated a physician, a celebrated professor, who only prescribed gomme syrop. For a week I travelled with a Dominican friar, who had so high a fever that in America he would have been confined to his bed; he took no nourishment all the time but a plate of thin soup once a day, and when we reached our destination he was convalescent. Abstinence and repose are appreciated on the Continent as remedial agencies; but they are contrary to the genius of our people, who regard active enterprise as no less desirable in a doctor than a steamboat captain.

Veteran practitioners have demonstrated that certain diseases are self-limited, that the art of treating diseases is still ‘a conjectural study,’ and avowed the conviction that ‘the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less if all disease were left to itself, than it now is under the multiform, reckless, and contradictory modes of practice.’ A conscientious student, of high personal character, entered upon the profession with enthusiastic faith; experience in the use of remedies made him sceptical, and he resorted to evasion by giving water only under various pretexts and names. His success was so much greater than that of his brethren, that he felt bound to reveal the ruse; but continued thenceforth to assert that, all things being equal, more patients would survive, if properly guarded and nourished, without medicine than with.

The influence of the mind upon the body is, in some instances, so great, that it accounts for that identity of superstition and medicine which is one of the most remarkable traits in the history of the science. Sir Walter Raleigh’s cordial was as famous in its day as Mrs. Trulbery’s water praised by Sir Roger de Coverley. In Egypt, old practitioners cure with amulets and charms; among the Tartars they swallow the name of the remedy with perfect faith; and from the Puritan horseshoe to keep off witchcraft, to Perkins’ tractors to annihilate rheumatism, the history of medical delusions is rife with imaginary triumphs. As late as the seventeenth century, when Arabian precepts and the Jewish leech of chivalric times had disappeared, when the square cap and falling beards had given place to the wig and cane, in some places the mystic emblems of skull, stuffed lizards, pickled fetus, and alembic gave a necromantic air to the doctor’s sanctum.

The unknown is the source of the marvellous, and the relation between a disease and its cure is less obvious to the common understanding than that between the evidence and the verdict in a law case, or religious faith and its public ministration in the office of priest. The imagination has room to act, and the sense of wonder is naturally excited, when, by the agency of some drug, mechanical apparatus, or mystic rite, it is attempted to relieve human suffering and dispel infirmity. Hence the most enlightened minds are apt to yield to credulity in this sphere, much to the annoyance of the ‘regular faculty,’ who complain with reason that quackery, whether in the form of popular specifics or the person of a charlatan, derives its main support from men of civic and professional reputation. Think of Dr. Johnson, in his infancy, being touched for king’s evil by Queen Anne, in accordance with a belief in its sovereign efficiency, unquestioned for centuries. Sir Kenelm Digby was as much celebrated in his day for his recipe for a sympathetic powder, which he obtained from an Italian friar, as for his beautiful wife or his naval victory; and the good Bishop Berkeley gave as much zeal to the Treatise on the Virtues of Tar-water as to that on the Immateriality of the Universe.

Shakspeare has drawn a quack doctor to the life in Caius, the French physician, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and uttered an impressive protest against the tribe in All’s Well that Ends Well:—

‘King. But may not be so credulous of cure,
When our most learned doctors leave us; and
The congregated college have concluded
That labouring art can never ransom nature
From her inaidable estate: I say we must not
So stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope,
To prostitute our past-cure malady
To empirics; or to dissever so
Our great self and our credit, to esteem
A senseless help, when help past sense we deem.’

An American member of the medical profession[15] has traced in the great bard of nature a minute knowledge of the healing art, citing his various allusions to diseases and their remedies. Thus we have in Coriolanus the ‘post-prandial temper of a robust man,’ and the physiology of madness in Hamlet and Lear. The wasting effects of love, melancholy, the processes of digestion, respiration, circulation of the blood, infusion of humours, effects of passions on the body, of slow and swift poisons, insomnia, dropsy, and other phenomena described with accuracy. Cæsar’s fever in Spain, Gratiano’s warning, ‘creep into a jaundice by being peevish;’ the physical effects of sensualism in Antony and Cleopatra, the external signs of sudden death from natural causes in Henry VI., and summary of diseases in Troilus and Cressida, are described with professional truth. How memorable his Apothecary’s portrait! while the medical critic assures us that, in a passage in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, the ‘accessories of a sickly season are poetically described,’ and that Falstaff admirably satirizes the ‘ambiguities of professional opinion,’ while, in Mrs. Quickly’s description of his death, and the dying scene of Cardinal Beaufort, as well as the senility of Lear, the mellow virility of old Adam, the ‘thick-coming fancies’ of remorse, and Ophelia’s aberration—every minute touch in the memorable picture of ‘a mind diseased’—indicate a profound insight, and suggest, as no other poet can, how intimately and universally the ‘ills that flesh is heir to,’ and the vocation of those who minister to health, are woven into the web of human destiny and the scenes of human life. Who has so sweetly celebrated ‘Nature’s sweet restorer’ and the ‘healing touch’? or more emphatically declared, ‘when the mind’s free the body’s delicate,’ and—

‘We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands
The mind to suffer with the body.’

The memoirs of celebrated men abound with physiological interest; their eminence brings out facts which serve to vindicate impressively the phases of medical experience, and the relation of the soul to its tabernacle. Madden’s Infirmities of Genius is a book which suggests an infinite charity, as well as exposes the fatal effects of neglecting natural laws. Lord Byron used to declare that a dose of salts exhilarated him more than wine. Shelley was a devoted vegetarian. Cowper spoke from experience when he sang the praises of the cups ‘that cheer but not inebriate.’ Johnson had faith in the sanative quality of dried orange-peel. When Dr. Spurzheim was first visited by the physicians in his last illness, he told them to allow for the habitual irregularity of his pulse, which had intermitted ever since the death of his wife. George Combe used to tell a capital story, in his lectures, of the manner in which a pious Scotch lady made her grandson pass Sunday, whereby, while outwardly keeping the Sabbath, he violated all the rules of health. Two of the most characteristic books in British literature are Greene’s poem of the Spleen, and Dr. Cheyne’s English Malady; and another is the history of the Gold-headed Cane, or rather of the five doctors that successively owned it. The cane, indeed, was ever an indispensable symbol of medical authority. The story of Dr. Radcliffe’s illustrates its modern significance; but the association of the walking-staff and the doctor comes down to us from mediæval times. ‘He smelt his cane,’ in the old ballads, is a phrase suggestive of a then common expedient; the head of the physician’s cane was filled with disinfectant herbs, the odour of which the owner inhaled when exposed to miasma. Even at this day, in some of the provincial towns in Italy, we encounter the doctor in the pharmacist’s shop, awaiting patients,—his dress and manner such as are reproduced in the comic drama, while the quack of the Piazza is recognized on the operatic stage.

How unprofessional medicine is becoming may be seen in current literature, when De Quincey’s metaphysical account of the effects of opium, and Bulwer’s fascinating plea for the Water-Cure, are ranked as light reading. To the lover of the old English prose-writers there is no more endeared name than Sir Thomas Browne, and his Religio Medici and quaint tracts are among the choicest gifts for which philosophy is indebted to the profession; while the classical student owes to Dr. Middleton a Life of Cicero. The vivacious Lady Montagu is most gratefully remembered for her philanthropic efforts in behalf of inoculation for smallpox; and our Brockden Brown has described the phenomena of an epidemic, in one of his novels, with more insight though less horror than Defoe.

It is in pestilence and after battle that the doctor sometimes rises to the moral sublime, in his disinterested and unwearied devotion to others. It must, however, be confessed that, notwithstanding these incidental laurels, the authority of the profession has so declined, the malades imaginaires so increased with civilization, and the privileges of the faculty been so encroached upon by what is called ‘progress,’ that a doctor of the old school would scorn to tolerate the fallen dignity of a title that once rendered his intercourse with society oracular, and authorized him with impunity to whip a king, as in the case of Dr. Willis and George the Third.

‘The philosophy of medicine, I imagine,’ observed Dr. Arnold, ‘is zero; our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less happy.’ None have been more sceptical than physicians themselves in regard to their own science: Broussais calls it illusory, like astrology; and Bichat declares ‘it is, in respect to its principles, taken from most of our materia medicas, impracticable for a sensible man; an incoherent assemblage of incoherent opinions, it is, perhaps, of all the physiological sciences, the one which shows plainest the contradictions and wanderings of the human mind.’ Montaigne used to beseech his friends that, if he fell ill, they would let him get a little stronger before sending for the doctor. Louis XIV., who was a slave to his physicians, asked Molière what he did for his doctor. ‘Oh, sire,’ said he, ‘when I am ill I send for him. He comes; we have a chat, and enjoy ourselves. He prescribes; I don’t take it,—and I am cured.’

‘There is a certain analogy,’ says an agreeable writer, ‘between naval and medical men. Neither like to acknowledge the presence of danger.’ On the other hand, each patient’s character as well as constitution makes a separate demand upon his sympathy; for in cases where fortitude and intelligence exist, perfect frankness is due, and in instances of extreme sensibility it may prove fatal; so that the most delicate consideration is often required to decide on the expediency of enlightening the invalid. If it is folly to theorize in medicine, it is often sinful to flatter the imagination for the purpose of securing temporary ease. A physician’s course, like that of men in all pursuits, is sometimes regulated by his consciousness, and he is apt to prescribe according to his own rather than his patient’s nature; thus a fleshy doctor is inclined to bleed, and recommend generous diet; a nervous one affects mild anodynes; a vain one talks science; and a thin, cold-blooded, speculative one, makes safe experiments in practice, and is habitually non-committal in speech. Almost invariably short-necked plethoric doctors enjoy freeing the vessels of others by copious depletion, and those more delicately organized advocate fresh air and tonics; the one instinctively reasoning from the surplus, and the other from the inadequate vitality of which they are respectively conscious. I knew a doctor who scarcely ever failed to prescribe an emetic, and the expression of his countenance indicated chronic nausea.

Medicine enjoys no immunity from the spirit of the age. Who does not recognize in the popularity of Hahnemann’s system the influence of the transcendental philosophy, a kind of intuitive practice analogous to the vague terms of its disciples in literature; those little globules with the theoretical accompaniment catch the fancy; castor-oil and the lancet are matter-of-fact in comparison. And so with hydropathy. There is in our day what may be called a return-to-nature school. Wordsworth is its expositor in poetry, Fourier in social life, the Pre-Raphaelites in painting. The newly-appreciated efficacy of water accords with this principle. It is an elemental medicament, limpid as the style of Peter Bell, free from admixture as the individual labour in a model community, and as directly caught from nature as the aërial perspective of England’s late scenic limner. Even what has been considered the inevitable resort to dissection in order to acquire anatomical knowledge, it is now pretended, has a substitute in clairvoyance. Somewhat of truth in this spiritualizing tendency of science there doubtless is; but fact is the basis of positive knowledge, and the most unwarrantable of all experiments are those involving human health.

If the mental experience of a doctor naturally leads to philosophy, the moral tends to make him a philanthropist. He is familiar with all the ills that flesh is heir to. The mystery of birth, the solemnity of death, the anxiety of disease, the devotion of faith, the agony of despair, are phases of life daily open to his view; and their contemplation, if there is in his nature a particle either of reflection or sensibility, must lead to a sense of human brotherhood, excite the impulse of benevolence, and awaken the spirit of humanity. Warren’s Diary of a Physician gives us an inkling of what varieties of human experience are exposed to his gaze. Vigils at the couch of genius and beauty, full of the stern romance of reality, or imbued with tenderness and inspiration, are recorded in his heart. He is admitted into sanctums where no other feet but those of kindred enter. He becomes the inevitable auditor and spectator where no other stranger looks or listens. Human nature, stripped of its conventionalities, lies exposed before him; the secrets of conscience, the aspirations of intellect, the devotedness of love, all that exalts and all that debases the soul, he beholds in the hour of weakness, solitude, or dismay; and hard and unthinking must he be if such lessons make no enduring impression, and excite no comprehensive sympathies.

‘The corner-stone of health,’ says a German writer, ‘is to maintain our individuality intact;’ and while the hygienic reformer has lessened the bills of mortality, personal culture has emancipated society from much of the ignorant dependence and insalubrious habits of less enlightened times.

HOLIDAYS.

‘And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition and doing away with altogether of those consolatory interstices and sprinklings of freedom through the four seasons—the red-letter days, now become to all intents and purposes dead-letter days.’—Charles Lamb.

hile we accord a certain historical or ethical significance to our holidays, we also feel their casual tenure, their want of recreative rest, of enjoyable spirit, and of cordial popular estimation; and are irresistibly prompted to discuss their claims as one of the neglected elements of our national life. It is an anomalous fact in our civilization that we have no one holiday, the observance of which is unanimous. It is an exceptional trait in our nationality that its sentiment finds no annual occasion when the hearts of the people thrill with an identical emotion, absorbing in patriotic instinct and mutual reminiscence all personal interests and local prejudices. It is an unfortunate circumstance that no American festival, absolutely consecrated and universally acknowledged, hallows the calendar to the imagination of our people. Anniversaries enough, we boast, of historical importance, but they are casually observed; events of glorious memory crowd our brief annals, but they are not consciously identified with recurring periods; universal celebrities are included in the roll of our country’s benefactors; but the dates of their birth, services, and decease, form no saints’ days for the Republic. How often in the crises of sectional passion does the moral necessity of a common shrine, a national feast, a place, a time, or a memory sacred to fraternal sympathies of general observance, appal the patriotic heart with regret, or warm it with desire! How much of sectional misunderstanding, hatred, and barbarism culminating in a base and savage mutiny, will the future historian trace in the last analysis to the absence of a common sentiment and occasion of mutual pleasure and faith. Were such a nucleus for popular enthusiasm, such a goal for a nation’s pilgrimage, such a day for reciprocal gratulation our own—a time when the oath of fealty could be renewed at the same altar, the voice of encouragement be echoed from every section of the Union, the memory of what has been, the appreciation of what is, and the hope of what may be, simultaneously felt,—what a bond of union, a motive to forbearance, and a pledge of nationality would be secured! Were there not in us sentiments as well as appetites, reflection as well as passion, humanity might rest content with such ‘note of time’ as is marked on a sun-dial or in the almanac; but constituted as we are, a profound and universal instinct prompts observances wherewith faith, hope, and memory may keep register of the fleeting hours and months. In accordance with this instinct, periodical sacrifice, song, prayer, and banquet, in all countries and ages, have inscribed with heartfelt ceremony the shadowy lapse of being. Without law or art, the savage thus identifies his consciousness with the seasons and their transition; anniversaries typifying vicissitude; the wheel of custom stops awhile; events, convictions, reminiscences, and aspirations are personified in the calendar; and that reason which ‘looks before and after’ asserts itself under every guise, from the barbarian rite to the Christian festival, and begets the holiday as an institution natural to man. If the ballads of a people are the essence of its history, holidays are, on similar grounds, the free utterance of its character; and, as such, of great interest to the philosopher, and fraught with endearing associations to the philanthropist.

The spontaneous in nations as well as individuals is attractive to the eye of philosophy, because it is eminently characteristic. The great charm of biography is its revelation of the play of mind and the aspect of character, when freed from conventional restraints; and in the life of nations how inadequate are the records of diplomacy, legislation, and war—the official and economical development—to indicate what is instinctive and typical in character! It is when the armour of daily toil, the insignia of office, the prosaic routine of life, are laid aside, that what is peculiar in form and graceful in movement become evident. In the glee or solemnity of the festival, the soul breaks forth; in the fusion of a common idea, the heart of a country becomes freely manifest.

Accordingly, the manner, the spirit, and the object of festal observances are among the most significant illustrations of history. An accurate chart of these, from the earliest time, would afford a reliable index to the progress of humanity, and suggest a remarkable identity of natural wants, tendencies, and aspirations. There is, for instance, a singular affinity between the Saturnalia of the ancient and the Carnival of the modern Romans, the sports of the ancient circus and bull-fights of Spain; while so closely parallel, in some respects, are Druidical and Monastic vows and fanaticism, that one of the most popular of modern Italian operas, which revived the picturesque costume and sylvan rites of the Druids, was threatened with prohibition, as a satire upon the Church. It would, indeed, well repay antiquarian investigation to trace the germ of holiday customs from the crude superstitions of barbarians, through the usages incident to a more refined mythology, to their modified reappearance in the Catholic temples, where Pagan rites are invested with Christian meaning, or the statue of Jupiter transformed into St. Peter, and the sarcophagus of a heathen becomes the font of holy baptism. Gibbon tells us how shrewd Pope Boniface professed but to rehabilitate old customs when he revived the secular games in Rome. Not only are traces of Pagan forms discoverable in the modern holidays, but the mediæval taste for exhibitions of animal courage and vigour still lives in the love of prize-fights and horse-racing, so prevalent in England; and the ring and the cockpit minister to the same brutal passions which of old filled the Flavian amphitheatre with eager spectators, and gave a relish to the ordeal of blood. In the abuses of the modern pastime we behold the relics of barbarism; and the perpetuity of such national tastes is evident in the combative instinct which once sustained the orders of chivalry, and in our day has lured thousands to the destructive battle-fields of the Crimea and Virginia.

Not only do the social organizations devoted to popular amusements and economies thus give the best tokens of local manners and average taste, but they directly minister to the culture they illustrate. The gladiator, ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday,’ nurtured with his lifeblood and dying agonies the ferocious propensities and military hardihood of the imperial cohorts. The graceful posture and fine muscular display of the wrestler and discus-player of Athens reappeared in the statues which peopled her squares and temples. The equine beauty and swiftness exhibited at Derby and Ascot keep alive the emulation which renders England famous for breeds of horses, and her gentry healthful by equestrian exercise. The custom of musical accompaniments at every German symposium has, in a great measure, bred a nation of vocal and instrumental performers. The dance became a versatile art in France, because it was, as it still is, the national pastime.[16] The Circassian is expert with steed and rifle from the habit of dexterity acquired in the festive trials of skill, excellence in which is the qualification for leadership. The compass, flexibility, and sweetness of the human voice, so characteristic of the people of Italy, have been attained through ages of vocal practice in ecclesiastical and rural festivals; and the copious melody of their language gradually arose through the canzoni of troubadours and the rhythmical feats of improvisatori. The deafening clang of gongs, the blinding smoke of chowsticks, and the dazzling light of innumerable lanterns, wherewith the Chinese celebrate their national feasts, are to European senses the most oppressive imaginable token of a stagnant and primitive civilization; the festive elements of the semi-barbarism artistically represented by their grotesque figures, ignorance of perspective, interminable alphabet, pinched feet, bare scalps, and implacable hatred of innovation, both in the processes and the forms of advanced taste.

Even the aboriginal feasts of this continent were the best indication of what the American Indians, in their palmy days, could boast of strength, agility, and grace. Thus, from the most cultivated to the least developed races, what is adopted and expressed in a recreative or holiday manner—what is thus done and said, sought and felt,—the rallying-point of popular sympathy, the occasion of the universal joy or reverence,—is a moral fact of unique and permanent interest; on the one hand, as illustrative of the kind and degree of civilization attained, and of the instinctive direction of the national mind, and, on the other, as indicative of the means and the processes whereby the wants are met and the ideas realized, which stimulate and mould a nation’s genius and faith.

The testimony of observation accords with that of history in this regard. The foreign scenes which haunt the memory, as popular illustrations of character, are those of holidays. The government, literature, art, and society of a country may be individually represented to our minds; but when we discuss national traits, we instinctively refer to the pastimes, the religious ceremonials, and the festivals of a people. Where has the pugilistic hilarity of the Irish scope as at Donnybrook Fair?[17] Is a dull parliamentary speech, or an animated debate at the racecourse, most vivid with the spirit of English life? Market-day, and harvest-home, and saintly anniversaries, evoke from its commonplace level the life of the humble and the princely, and they appear before the stranger under a genuine and characteristic guise. We associate the French, as a people, with the rustic groups under the trees of Montmorency, or the crowds of neatly-dressed and gay bourgeoise at the Jardin d’Hiver,—finding in the green grass, lights, cheap wine and comfits, a flower in the hair, a waltz and saunter, more real pleasure than a less frugal and mercurial people can extract from a solemn feast, garnished with extravagant upholstery, and loaded with luxurious viands. We recall the Italians and Spaniards by the ceaseless bells of their festas vibrating in the air, and the golden necklace and graceful mezzano of the peasant’s holiday; the tinkle of guitars, the bolero and processions, or the lines of stars marking the architecture of illuminated temples, the euphonious greeting, the light-hearted carol, the abundant fruit, the knots of flowers, the gay jerkin and bodice, which render the urbane throng so picturesque in aspect and childlike in enjoyment. The sadness which overhung the very idea of Italy, considered as a political entity, exhaled like magic before the spectacle of a Tuscan vintage. The heaps of purple and amber fruit, the gray and pensive-eyed oxen, the reeking butts, the yellow vine-leaves waving in the autumn sun, form studies for the pencil; but the human interest of the scene infinitely endears its still life. Kindred and friends, in festal array, celebrate their work, and rejoice over the Falernian, Lachryma Christi, or Vino Nostrale, with a frank and naïve gratitude akin to the mellow smile of productive Nature: the distance between the lord of the soil and the peasant is, for the time, lost in a mutual and innocent triumph; they who are wont to serve become guests; the dance and song, the compliment and repartee, the toast and the smile, are interchanged, on the one side with artless loyalty, and on the other with a condescension merged in graciousness. It seems as if the hand of Nature, in yielding her annual tribute, literally imparted to prince and peasant the touch which makes ‘the whole world kin.’

The contrast, in respect of pastime, is felt most keenly when we observe life at home, with the impressions of the Old World fresh in our minds. We have perhaps joined the laughing group who cluster round Punch and Judy on the Mole of Naples; we have watched the flitting emotions on swarthy listeners who greedily drink in the story-teller’s words on the shore of Palermo; we have made an old gondolier chant a stanza of Tasso, at sunset, on the Adriatic; our hostess at Florence has decked the window with a consecrated branch on Palm Sunday; we have seen the poor contadini of a Roman village sport their silver knobs and hang out their one bit of crimson tapestry, in honour of some local saint; we have examined the last mosaic saint exhumed from Pompeii, brilliant with festal rites, and thus, as an element both of history and experience, of religion and domesticity, the recreative side of life appears essential and absolute, while the hurrying crowd, hasty salutations, and absorption in affairs around us, seem to repudiate and ignore the inference, and to confirm the opinion of one whose existence was divided between this country and Europe, that ‘the Americans are practical Stoics.’

To appreciate the value of holidays merely as a conservative element of faith, we have but to remember the Jewish festivals. Ages of dispersion, isolation, contempt, and persecution—all that mortal agencies can effect to chill the zeal or to discredit the traditions of the Hebrews—have not, in the slightest degree, lessened the sanction or diminished the observance of that festival, to keep which the Divine Founder of our religion, nineteen centuries ago, went up to Jerusalem with his disciples. And it is difficult to conceive a more sublime idea than is involved in this fact. On the day of the Passover, in the Austrian banker’s splendid palace, in the miserable Ghetto of Rome, under the shadow of Syrian mosques, in the wretched by-way hostel of Poland, at the foot of Egyptian pyramids, beside the Holy Sepulchre, among the money-changers of Paris and the pawnbrokers of London, along the canals of Holland, in Siberia, Denmark, Calcutta, and New York, in every nook of the civilized world, the Jew celebrates his holy national feast; and who can estimate how much this and similar rites have to do with the eternal marvel of that nation’s survival?

The conservatism inherent in traditional festivals not only binds together and keeps intact the scattered communities of a dispersed race, but saves from extinction many local and inherited characteristics. I was never so impressed with this thought as on the occasion of an annual village fête in Sicily. Perhaps no territory of the same limits comprehends such a variety of elements in the basis of its existent population as that luxuriant and beautiful but ill-fated island. Its surface is venerable with the architectural remains of successive races. Here a Grecian temple, there a Saracenic dome; now a Roman fortification, again a Norman tower; and often a mediæval ruin of some incongruous order attracts the traveller’s gaze from broad valleys rich with grain, olive-orchards, and citron-groves, vineyards planted in decomposed lava, hedges of aloe, meadows of wild-flowers, a torrent’s arid path, a holly-crowned mountain, a cork forest, or seaward landscape. But the more flexible materials left by the receding tide of invasion are so blended in the physiognomies, the customs, and the patois of the inhabitants, that only nice investigation can trace them amid the generic phenomena of nationality now recognized as Sicilian. Yet the people of a village but a few miles from the capital have so identified their Greek origin with the costume of a holiday, that, as one scans their festal array, it is easy to imagine that the unmixed blood of their classic progenitors flushes in the dark eyes and mantles in the olive cheeks. This ancestral dress is the endeared heirloom in the homes of the peasantry, assumed with conscious pride and gaiety to meet the wondering eyes of neighbouring contadini, curious Palermitans, and delighted strangers, who flock to the spectacle.

The love of power is a great teacher of human instincts; and despotism, both civil and spiritual, has, in all ages, availed itself of the natural instinct for festivals, to multiply and enhance shows, amusements, and holidays, in a manner which yields profitable lessons to free communities intent on adapting the same means to nobler ends. The stated pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet is an important part of the superstitious machinery of the Mohammedan tyranny over the will and conscience; and it is difficult to conceive now to what an extent the zeal and unity of the early Christians were enforced by specific days of ceremonial, and by such a hallowed goal as Jerusalem.

Imperial authority in France is upheld by festive seductions, adapted to a vivacious populace; and by masque balls, municipal banquets, showers of bon-bons, and ascent of balloons, contrives to win attention from republican discontent. Mercenary rulers of petty states, by the gift of stars and red ribbons, and liberal contributions to the opera, obtain an economical safeguard. The policy of the Romish Church is nowhere more striking than in her holiday institutions, appealing to native sentiment through pageantry, music, and impressive rites in honour of saints, martyrs, and departed friends, to propitiate their intercession or to endear their memories.

While the pastimes in vogue typify the national mind, and are to serious avocations what the efflorescence of the tree is to its fruit—a bountiful pledge and augury of prolific energy,—it is only when kept as holidays, set apart by law and usage, consecrated by time and sympathy, that such observances attain their legitimate meaning; and to this end, a certain affinity with character, a spontaneous and not conventional impulse is essential. The Tournament, for instance, was the natural and appropriate pastime of the age of chivalry; it fostered knightly prowess, and made patent the twinborn inspiration of love and valour. As described in Ivanhoe, it accords intimately with the spirit of the age and the history of the times; as exhibited to the utilitarian vision and mercantile habits of our own day, in Virginia, it comes no nearer our associations than any theatrical pageant chosen at hap-hazard. What other species of grown men could, in this age, enact every year, in the neighbourhood of Rome, the scenes which make the artists’ holiday? As a profession, they retain the instincts of childhood, with little warping from the world around. But imagine a set of mechanics or merchants attempting such a masquerade. The invention, the fancy, the independence, and the abandon congenial with artist-life, gives unity, picturesqueness, and grace to the pageant; and the speeches, costumes, feasting, and drollery, are pre-eminently those of an artist’s carnival. It is indispensable that the spirit of a holiday should be native to the scene and the people; and hence all endeavours to graft local pastimes upon foreign communities signally fail. This is illustrated in our immediate vicinity. The genial fellowship and exuberant hospitality with which the first day of the year is celebrated in New York were characteristic among the Dutch colonists, and have been transmitted to their posterity, while the tone of New England society, though more intellectual, is less urbane and companionable; accordingly, the few enthusiasts who have attempted it have been unable, either by precept or example, to make a Boston New Year’s day the complete and hearty festival which renders it par excellence the holiday of the Knickerbockers. Charitable enterprise, for several years past, in the Puritan city, has distinguished May-day as a children’s floral anniversary; but who that is familiar with the peasant-songs that hail this advent of summer in the south of Europe ever beheld the shivering infants and the wilted leaves, paraded in the teeth of an east wind, without a conscious recoil from the anomalous fête? The facts of habit, public sentiment, natural taste, local association, and of climate, cannot be ignored in holiday institutions, which, like eloquence, as defined by Webster, must spring directly from the men, the subject, and the occasion. Any other source is unstable and factitious. Of all affectations, those of diversion are the least endurable; and there is no phase of social life more open to satire, nor any that has provoked it to more legitimate purpose, than the affectation of a taste for art, sporting, the ball-room, the bivouac, the gymnasium, foreign travel, country life, nautical adventure, and literary amusements; an affectation yielding, as we know, food for the most spicy irony, from Goldoni’s Filosofo Inglese to Hood’s cockney ruralist and Punch’s amateur sportsman or verdant tourist. And what is true of personal incongruities is only the more conspicuous in social and national life.

When our literary pioneer sought to waken the fraternal sentiment of his countrymen towards their ancestral land, he described with sympathetic zest an English Christmas in an old family mansion; and the most popular of modern novelists can find no more potent spell whereby to excite a charitable glow in two hemispheres than a Christmas Carol. In New as well as in Old England the once absolute sway of this greatest of Christian festivals has been checked by Puritan zeal. We must look to the ancient ballads, obsolete plays, and musty church traditions, to ascertain what this hallowed season was in the British islands, when wassail and the yule-log, largess and the Lord of Misrule, the mistletoe bough, boars’ heads, holly wreaths, midnight chimes, the feast of kindred, the anthem, the prayer, the games of children, the good cheer of the poor, forgiveness, gratulation, worship—all that revelry hails and religion consecrates,—made holiday in palace, manor, and cottage, throughout the land; winter’s robe of ermine everywhere vividly contrasting with evergreen decorations, the frosty air with the warmth of household fires, the cold sky with the incense of hospitable hearths; when King Charles acted, Ben Jonson wrote a masque, Milton a hymn, lords and peasants flocked to the altar, parents and children gathered round the board, and church, home, wayside, town, and country bore witness to one mingled and hearty sentiment of festivity. Identical in season with the Roman Saturnalia, and the time when the Scalds let ‘wildly loose their red locks fly,’ Christmas is sanctioned by all that is venerable in association as well as tender and joyous in faith. It is deeply to be regretted that with us its observance is almost exclusively confined to the Romanists and Episcopalians. The sentiment of all Christian denominations is equally identified with its commemoration, the event it celebrates being essentially memorable alike to all who profess Christianity; and although the forlorn description by Pepys of a Puritan Christmas will not apply to the occasion here, its comparative neglect, which followed Bloody Mary’s reign, continues among too many of the sects that found refuge in America. There are abundant indications that if the clergy would initiate the movement, the laity are prepared to make Christmas among us the universal religious holiday which every consideration of piety, domestic affection, and traditional reverence unite to proclaim it.

The humanities of time, if we may so designate the periods consecrated to repose and festivity, were thoroughly appreciated by the most quaint and genial of English essayists. The boon of leisure, the amenities of social intercourse, the sacredness and the humours of old-fashioned holidays, have found their most loving interpreter, in our day, in Charles Lamb. Hear him:—

‘I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition and doing away with altogether of those consolatory interstices and sprinklings of freedom through the four seasons—the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul and Stephen and Barnabas, Andrew and John, men famous in old times,—we used to keep all their days holy, as long back as when I was at school at Christ’s. I remember their effigies by the same token, in the old Basket Prayer-book. I honoured them all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot, so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred; only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon—clubbing, as it were, their sanctities together to make up one poor gaudy day between them, as an economy unworthy of the dispensation. These were bright visitations in a scholar’s and a clerk’s life,—“far off their coming shone.” I was as good as an almanac in those days.’[18]

And who has written, like Lamb, of the forlorn pathos of the charity boy’s ‘objectless holiday;’ of the ‘most touching peal which rings out the old year;’ of ‘the safety which a palpable hallucination warrants’ on All Fools’; and the ‘Immortal Go-between,’ St. Valentine?

The devotion to the immediate, the thrift, the enterprise, and the material activity which pertain to a new country, and especially to our own, distinguish American holidays from those of the Old World. Not a few of them are consecrated to the future, many spring from the triumphs of the present, and nearly all hint progress rather than retrospection. We inaugurate civil and local improvements; glorify the achievements of mechanical skill and of social reform; pay honour by feasts, processions, and rhetoric to public men; give a municipal ovation to a foreign patriot, or a funeral pageant to a native statesman. Our festivals are chiefly on occasions of economic interest. Daily toil is suspended, and gala assemblies convene, to rejoice over the completion of an aqueduct or a railroad, or the launching of an ocean steamer. One of the earliest of these economical displays—in New York, memorable equally from the great principle it initiated and the felicitous auguries of the holiday itself—was the celebration of the opening of the Erie Canal, the first of a series of grand internal improvements which have since advanced our national prosperity beyond all historical precedent; and one of the last was the grand excursion which signalized the union by railroads of the Atlantic seacoast and the Mississippi river. The two celebrations were but festive landmarks in one magnificent system. The enterprise initiated in Western New York, in 1825, was consummated in Illinois, in 1854, when the last link was riveted to the chain which binds the vast line of eastern seacoast to the great river of the West, and the genius of communication, so essential to our unity and prosperity, brought permanently together the boundless harvest-fields of the interior and the mighty fleets of the seaboard. To European eyes the sight of the thousand invited guests conveyed from New York to the Falls of St. Anthony would yield a thrilling impression of the scale of festal arrangements in this Republic; and were they to scan the reports of popular anniversaries and conventions in our journals, embracing every class and vocation, representative of every art, trade, and interest, a conviction would inevitably arise that we are the most social and holiday nation in the world; on the constant qui vive for any plausible excuse for public dinners, speeches, processions, songs, toasts, and other republican divertisements. One month brings round the anniversary banquet of the printers, when Franklin’s memory is invoked and his story rehearsed; another is marked by the annual symposium and contributions of the Dramatic Fund; a temperance jubilee is announced to-day, a picnic of Spiritualists to-morrow; here we encounter a long train of Sunday scholars, and there are invited to a publishers’ feast in a ‘crystal palace;’ the triumph of the ‘Yacht America’ must be celebrated this week, and the anniversary of Clay’s birth or Webster’s death the next; a clerk delivers a poem before a Mercantile Library Association, a mechanic addresses his fellows; exhibitions of fruit, of fowls, of cattle, of machines, of horses, ploughing-matches, schools, and pictures, lead to social gatherings and volunteer discourses, and make a holiday now for the farmer and now for the artisan; so that the programme of festivals, such as they are, is coextensive with the land and the calendar. All this proves that there is no lack of holiday instinct among us, but it also demonstrates that the spirit of utility, the pride of occupation, and the ambition of success, interfuse the recreative as they do the serious life of America. The American enters into festivity as if it were a serious business; he cannot take pleasure naturally like the European, and is pursued with a half-conscious remorse if he dedicates time to amusement; so that even our holidays seem rather an ordeal to be gone through with, than an occasion to be enjoyed. At many of these fêtes, too, we are painfully conscious of interested motives, which are essentially opposed to genuine recreation. Capital is made of amusement, as of every other conceivable element of our national life. It is often to advertise the stock, to introduce the breed, to gain political influence, to win fashionable suffrages to a scheme or a product of art or industry, that these expensive arrangements are made, these hospitalities exercised, these guests convened. Too many of our so-called holidays are tricks of trade; too many are exclusively utilitarian; too many consecrate external success and material well-being; and too few are based on sentiment, taste, and good-fellowship. In a panorama of national holidays, therefore, instead of a crowd of gracefully-attired rustics waltzing under trees, an enthusiastic chorus breathing as one deep voice the popular chant, ladies veiled in tulle following an imperial infant to a cathedral altar, the garlands and maidens of Old England’s May-day, or the splendid evolutions of the continental soldiery,—we should be most aptly represented by a fleet of steamers with crowded decks and gay pennons, sweeping through the lofty and wooded bluffs of the Upper Mississippi, the procession of boats and regiment of marines disembarking in the bay of Jeddo, or the old Hall, in whose sleeping echoes lives the patriotic eloquence of the Revolution, alive with hundreds of children invited by the city authorities to the annual school festival; for these occasions typify the enterprise at home, the exploration abroad, and the system of public instruction, which constitute our specific and absolute distinction in the family of nations. A jovial eclectic could, notwithstanding, gather traces of the partial and isolated festivals of every race and country in America;—harvest-songs among the German settlers of Pennsylvania, here a ‘golden wedding,’ there a private grape-feast; in the South a tournament, at Hoboken a cricket-match, and an archery club at Sunnyside; a Vienna lager-beer dance in New York, or a vine-dressers’ merry-making in Ohio.

If from those holidays which arise from temporary causes we turn to those which, from annual recurrence, aspire to the dignity of institutions, the first thing which strikes us is their essentially local character. ‘Pilgrim-day,’ wherever kept, is a New England festival; ‘Evacuation-day’ belongs to the city of New York; the anniversary of the battle of Bunker Hill is celebrated only in Charlestown; and the victory on Lake Erie, at Newport, where its hero resided. The events thus commemorated deserve their eminence in our regard; and patriotic sentiment is excited and maintained by such observances. Yet in many instances they have dwindled to a lifeless parade, and in others have become a somewhat invidious exaggeration of local self-complacency. The latter is the case, for instance, with the New England Society’s annual feast in the commercial metropolis of the Union. It occasionally tries the patience and vexes the liberal sentiment of the considerate son of New England, to hear the reiterated laudation of her schools, her clergy, her women, her codfish, and her granite, at the hospitable board where sits, perhaps, a venerable Knickerbocker, conscious that the glib orators and their people have worked themselves into all places of honour and profit, where the honest burgomaster used to smoke the pipe of peace and comfort in his generous portico, his children now superseded by the restless emigrants from the Eastern States, thus boastfully tracing all that redeems and sustains the republic to the wisdom, foresight, and moral superiority of their own peculiar ancestry. The style of the festival is often in bad taste; there is too little recognition of the hospitality of their adopted home, too little respect for Manhattan blood; an exuberance of language too conspicuously triumphant over a race which the best of comic histories illustrates by the reign of Peter the Silent, so that, at length, a jocose reproof was administered by the toast of a humorist present, who gave, with irresistible nasal emphasis,—‘Plymouth Rock—the Blarney-stone of New England.’

It is, however, an appropriate illustration of the cosmopolitan population of New York, that every year her English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, French, German, and Dutch children, after their own fashion, recall their respective national associations. In point of oratory the New England Society carries the day, inasmuch as it usually presses into its service some distinguished speaker from abroad; in geniality, antique customs, and long-drawn reminiscences, the St. Nicholas excels; at St. Andrew’s board the memory of Burns is revived in song; Monsieur extols his vanished Republique; Welsh harps tinkle at St. David’s; ‘God save the Queen’ echoes under the banner of St. George; green sprigs and uncouth garments mark the Irish procession of St. Patrick; and the Germans multiply their festivals by summer picnics, at which lager-beer, waltzing, and fine instrumental music recall the gardens of Vienna. ‘Thanksgiving-day’ is of Puritan origin, and was designed to combine family reunions with a grateful recognition of the autumnal harvest. The former beautiful feature is not as salient now as when the absence of locomotive facilities made it a rare privilege for the scattered members of a household to come together around the paternal hearth. The occasion has also diminished in value as one of clerical emancipation from Sabbath themes, when the preacher could expatiate unreproved on the questions of the day and the aspects of the times,—that privilege being now exercised, at will, on the regular day of weekly religious service. ‘Fast-day’ has also become anomalous; its abolition or identification with Good Friday has been repeatedly advocated; strictly speaking, its title is a misnomer, and the actual observance of it is too partial and ineffective to have any true significance.

An old town on the north-eastern extremity of an island, the nearest approach to which overland is from the southern shore of Cape Cod, was eagerly visited annually, until within a few years, by those who delight in primitive character and local festivals. The broad plain beyond the town was long held in common property by the inhabitants as a sheep-pasture. It may be that the maritime occupations of the natives, their insular position and frugal habits, imparted, by contrast, a singular relish to the rural episode thus secured in their lives of hazardous toil and dreary absence, as sailors and whalemen; but it is remarkable that amid the sands of that island flourished one of the heartiest and most characteristic of New England festivals. Simplicity of manners, hardihood, frankness, the genial spirit of the mariner, and the unsophisticated energy and kindliness of the sailor’s wife, gave to the Nantucket ‘Sheep-shearing’ a rare and permanent freshness and charm. Unfortunately discord, arising from the conflicting interests of these primitive islanders, at length made it desirable to restore peace by sacrificing the flocks—innocent provocations of this domestic feud;—the sheep were sold, and the unique festival to which they gave occasion vanished with them. We must turn to that most available resource, an old newspaper, for a description of this now obsolete holiday:—

‘Sheep-shearing.—This patriarchal festival was celebrated on Monday and Tuesday last, in this place, with more than ordinary interest. For some days previous, the sheep-drivers had been busily employed in collecting from all quarters of the island the dispersed members of the several flocks; and committing them to the great sheepfold, about two miles from town, preparatory to the ceremonies of ablution and devestment.

‘The principal enclosure contains three hundred acres; towards one side of this area, and near the margin of a considerable pond, are four or five circular fences, one within the other—like Captain Symmes’s concentric curves,—and about twenty feet apart, forming a sort of labyrinth. Into these circuits the sheep are gradually driven, so as to be designated by their “ear-marks,” and secured for their proper owners in sheepcotes arranged laterally, or nearly so, around the exterior circle. Contiguous to these smaller pens, each of which is calculated to contain about one hundred sheep, the respective owners had erected temporary tents, wherein the operation of shearing was usually performed. The number of hands engaged in this service may be imagined from the fact that one gentleman is the owner of about 1,000 sheep, another of 700, and numerous others of smaller flocks, varying in number from three or four hundred down to a single dozen. The business of identifying, seizing, and yarding the sheep, creates a degree of bustle that adds no small amusement to the general activity of the scene. The whole number of sheep and lambs brought within the great enclosure is said to be 16,000. There are also several large flocks commonly sheared at other parts of the island.

‘As these are the only important holidays which the inhabitants of Nantucket have ever been accustomed to observe, it is not to be marvelled at that all other business should on such occasions be suspended; and that the labours attendant thereon should be mingled with a due share of recreation. Accordingly, the fancies of the juvenile portion of our community are, for a long time prior to the annual “Shearing,” occupied in dreams of fun and schemes of frolic. With the mind’s eye they behold the long array of tents, surmounted with motley banners flaunting in the breeze, and stored with tempting titbits, candidates for money and for mastication. With the mind’s ear they distinguish the spirit-stirring screak of the fiddle, the gruff jangling of the drum, the somniferous smorzando of the jews-harp, and the enlivening scuffle of little feet in a helter-skelter jig upon a deal platform. And their visions, unlike those of riper mortals, are always realized. For be it known, that independent of the preparations made by persons actually concerned in the mechanical duties of the day, there are erected on a rising ground in the vicinity of the sheep-field, some twenty pole and sail-cloth edifices, furnished with seats, and tables, and casks, and dishes, severally filled with jocund faces, baked pigs, punch, and cakes, and surrounded with divers savoury concomitants in the premises, courteously dispensed by the changeful master of ceremonies, studious of custom and emulous of cash. For the accommodation of those merry urchins and youngsters who choose to “trip it on the light fantastic toe,” a floor is laid at one corner, over which presides some African genius of melody, brandishing a cracked violin, and drawing most moving notes from its agonized intestines, by dint of griping fingers and right-angled elbows.

‘We know of no parallel for this section of the entertainment, other than what the Boston boys were wont to denominate “Nigger ’Lection,”—so called in contradistinction from “Artillery Election.” At the former anniversary, which is the day on which “who is Governor” is officially announced, the blacks and blackees are permitted to perambulate the Mall and Common, to buy gingerbread and beer with the best of folks, and to mingle in the mysteries of pawpaw. But on the latter day, when that grave and chivalrous corps, known as the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company, parade for choice of officers,—which officers are to receive their diplomas directly from the hands of His Excellency the Governor and Commander-in-Chief in open day, and in the august presence of all sorts of civil and martial dignitaries,—why, woe to the sable imp that shall then adventure his woolly poll and tarnished cuticle within the hallowed neighbourhood of nobility!

‘On previous days the sheep had been collected from every quarter of the island, driven into the great fold at Miacomet (the site of an ancient Indian settlement, about a mile from town), selected and identified by their respective owners, placed in separate pens, and subjected to the somewhat arduous process of washing, in the large pond contiguous. After this preparatory ablution, they were then ready to “throw off this muddy vesture of decay” by the aid of some hundreds of shearers, who began to ply their vocation on Monday morning, seated in rude booths, or beneath umbrageous awnings ranged around the circular labyrinth of enclosures, wherein the panting animals awaited the divestment of their uncomfortable jackets. The space partially occupied by the unshorn sheep and their contented lambs, and in other spots exhibiting multitudes stripped of their fleece and clamorously seeking their wandering young, presented to the eye and ear of the stranger sights and sounds somewhat rare.’

We have sometimes been tempted to believe that all illustrious occasions, men, and things, in this Republic, must inevitably be profaned,—that, as a compensatory balance to the ‘greatest good of the greatest number,’ secured by democratic institutions, there must exist a sacrifice of the hallowed, aspiring, and consecrated elements of national feeling and achievement. If there is an anniversary which should compel respect, excite eternal gratitude, and win unhackneyed observance, it is that of the day when, for the first time in the world’s history, the select intelligences of a country proclaimed to the nations, with deliberate and resolved wisdom, the principles of human equality and the right of self-government, pledged thereto their lives, fortunes, and honour, and consistently redeemed the heroically prophetic pledge. Subsequent events have only deepened the significance of that act, and extended its agency; every succeeding year has increased its moral value and its material fruits; the career of other and less happy nations has given more and more relief to its isolated grandeur; and not a day fraught with more hope and glory lives in the calendar. Yet what is the actual observance, the average estimation, it boasts among us? In our large cities, especially in New York, ‘Independence’ is, by universal consent, a nuisance. It is most auspicious to the Chinese, from increasing the importation of fire-crackers. The municipal authorities provide for it as for a lawless saturnalia; the fire-department dread its approach as indicative of conflagrations; physicians, as hazardous to such unfortunate patients as cannot be removed into the country; quiet citizens, as insufferable from incessant detonation; the prudent, as fraught with reckless tomfoolery; and the respectable, as desecrated by rowdyism. John Adams, when he prophesied that the Fourth of July would be hailed, in all after-time, by the ringing of bells, the blaze of bonfires, and the roar of cannon, was far from intending, by this programme of Anglo-Saxon methods of popular rejoicing, to indicate the exclusive and ultimate style of our national holiday. On its earlier recurrence, when many of the actors in the scenes it commemorates still lived, there was an interest and a meaning in the ceremonies which time has lessened. Yet it is difficult to account for the absence of all that high civilization presupposes, in the celebration of our only holiday which can strictly be called national; and if the sympathies of the most intelligent of our citizens could be enlisted, so as to make the occasion a genuine patriotic jubilee—instead of a noisy carnival, or a time for political animosity to assert itself with special emphasis,—much would be gained on the score of rational enjoyment and American fraternity. As it is, although the ‘Hundred Boston Orators’ nobly vindicate the talent and good taste of one city in regard to this anniversary, and is a most pleasing historical memorial of the occasion, it cannot be denied that our usual synonyme for bombast and mere rhetorical patriotism is ‘a Fourth of July Oration,’ and that Pickwickian sentiment, pyrotechnic flashes, torpedoes, arrests, bursting cannon, draggled flags, crowded steamboats, the retiracy of the educated and the uproar of the multitude, make up the confused and wearisome details of what should and might be a sacred feast, a pious memory, a hallowed consecration, a ‘Sabbath day of Freedom.’ Perhaps the real zest of this holiday is felt only abroad, when, under some remote consular flag, at the board of private and munificent hospitality in London, or at an American réunion in the French capital, distance from home, the ties of common nativity in a foreign land, and the contrast of uneducated masses or despotic insignia around, with the prosperous, free, and enlightened population of our own favoured country, to say nothing of superior festal arrangements, render the occasion at once charming and memorable.

One of the most noticeable features of American life to a stranger’s eye is the prevalent habit of travel; and although the incessant and huge caravans that rush along the numerous railways which make an iron network over this Union are, for the most part, impelled by motives of enterprise and thrift, yet the common idea of recreation is associated with a ‘trip.’ Whether the facilities or the temperament of our country, or both, be the reason of this locomotive propensity, it is a characteristic which at once distinguishes the American from the home-tethered German, the Paris-bound Frenchman, and the locally-patriotic Italian. The schoolboy in vacation, the college graduate, the bridegroom, the overtasked professional man,—all Americans who give themselves a ‘holiday,’ are wont to dedicate it to a journey. But even this resource has lost much of its original charm from the catastrophes which have associated some of the most beautiful scenery of the land with the most agonizing of human tragedies. In the crystal waters of Lake George, by the picturesque banks of the Hudson, amid the fertile valleys of the Connecticut, on the teeming currents of Long Island Sound, have perished, often through reckless hardihood, always by more or less reprehensible negligence, some of the fairest and the noblest of our citizens. The statistics of these melancholy events, which have so often appalled the public, have yet to be written; but their moral effect may be divined by a mere glance at the mercenary hardihood and soulless haste that mark our civilization. ‘Les dangers personnels,’ says an acute writer; ‘quand ils attegnent une certaine limite, bouleversent tous les rapports et l’oublie de l’espérance changé presque notre nature.’ The zest, too, of a journey in America is much diminished by the monotonous character of the people, and by the gregarious habits, the rapid transits, and the business motives of the voyageurs, so that it is only at the terminus that we enjoy our pilgrimage; there the sight of a magnificent prairie or mountain range, cataract or mammoth cave, may, indeed, vindicate our locomotive taste, and the wonders of Nature make, for the imaginative and reverential, a glorious holiday.

A pleasing feature in the recreative aspect of American life is the literary festival. It is a beautiful custom of our scholars annually to meet amid the scenes of their academical education and renew youthful friendships, while they listen to the orator and poet, who dwell upon those problems of the times which challenge an intellectual solution and identify the duties of the citizen with the offices of learning. Within the memory of almost all, there is probably at least one of these occasions when the interest of the performances or the circumstances of the hour lent a memorable charm to the collegiate holiday; when, under the shade of venerable elms that witnessed the first outpouring of mental enthusiasm or the earliest honours of genius and attainment, they who parted as boys meet as men, and the classic dreamer felt himself a recognized and practical thinker for the people; when the language of eloquent wisdom or poetic beauty came warm from lips hallowed by the chalice of fame. Who that listened ever can forget the anniversary graced by the chaste eloquence of Buckminster, that on which Bryant recited The Ages, or Everett’s musical periods welcomed Lafayette to the oldest seat of American learning? What New England scholar, after years of professional labour in a distant State, ever found himself once more within the charmed precincts of his alma mater, and surrounded by the companions of his youthful studies, without a thrill of happy reminiscence? Yet even these rational opportunities for what should be a genuine holiday to mind and heart are but casually appreciated. The sultry period of their occurrence, the irregularity of attendance, and the precarious quality of the ‘feast of reason’ provided, have caused them gradually to lose a tenacious hold upon the affections, while there are few habitués, the majority, especially those who live at a distance from the scene, and whose presence is therefore especially desirable,—are not loyal pilgrims to the shrine where their virgin distinction was earned and their intellectual armour forged. To many, our literary festivals are but technical ceremonies; to not a few, wearisome forms; associated rather with fans, didactics, perspiration, and cold viands, than with any social or intellectual refreshment. The ‘lean annuitant’ who loved to visit ‘Oxford in vacation,’ and fancy himself a gownsman, and the ingenious ‘Opium Eater’ who has recorded the enduring claims of those venerable cloisters to the scholar’s gratitude, enjoyed speculatively more of the real luxury of academic repose and triumph than is often attained by those who ostensibly participate in our college festivals; and seldom do her children go up to the altars of wisdom consecrated by the pious zeal of our ancestors, with the faithful recognition of the venerable pastor, so long the statistical oracle of the surviving graduates, who, while his strength sufficed, cheerily walked from his rural parish to Old Harvard, to lead off the anniversary psalm, with genial pride and honest self-gratulation.

Of our purely social holidays, New Year’s day, as observed in the city of New York, bears the palm. Initiated by the hospitable instinct of the Dutch colonists, neither the heterogeneous population which has succeeded them, nor the annually enlarged circuit of the metropolis, has diminished the universality or the heartiness of its observance. When the snow is massed in the thoroughfares, and the sunshine tempers a clear, frosty atmosphere, a more cheerful scene, on a large scale, it is impossible to imagine. From morning to midnight, sleighs, freighted with gay companions and drawn by handsome steeds, dash merrily along,—the tinkling of their bells and the scarlet lining their buffalo-robes redolent of a fête; the sidewalks are alive with hurrying pedestrians who exchange cordial greetings as they pass one another; doors incessantly fly open; guests come and go; every one looks prosperous and happy; business is totally suspended; in warm parlours, radiant with comfort or splendid with luxury, sit the wives, daughters, sisters, or fair favourites of these innumerable visitors, the queens of the day; the neglects of the past are forgiven and forgotten in the welcome of the present; kindred, friends, and acquaintances all meet and begin the year with mutual good wishes; in every dwelling a little feast stands ready, encompassed with smiles; and all varieties of fortune, all degrees of intimacy, all tastes in dress, entertainment, and manners, on this one day, are consecrated by the liberal and kindly spirit of a social carnival.

Of associations expressly instituted for the observance of holidays there is no lack; of days technically devoted to festivity, in the aggregate, our proportion equals that of older communities; and the legitimate occasions for pastime and ceremony, social pleasure, or historical commemoration, are as numerous as is consistent with the industrious habits and the civic prosperity of the land. The traveller who should make it his specialty to discover and note the ostensible merrymakings and pageants of America would find the list neither brief nor monotonous. In the summer he would light upon many an excursion on our beautiful lakes, many a chowder-party to the seaside, and picnic in the grove; and in the winter would catch the shrill echo of the skating frolic. Here, through pillared trunks, he would behold the smoke-wreaths of the sugar-camp; there watch laughing groups clustered round the cider-mill or hop-field; and in woods radiant with autumnal tints, or prairies balmy with a million flowers, would sounds of merriment announce to him the cheerful bivouac. Nor have American holidays, even in their most primitive aspect, been devoid of use and beauty. The once-renowned ‘musters’ fostered military taste, and the cattle-shows encouraged agricultural science; with the increase of horticultural festivals, our fruits and flowers have constantly improved; regattas and yacht-clubs have indirectly promoted nautical architecture; school festivals attest the superiority of our system of popular education; family gatherings, on the large scale observed in several instances, have induced genealogical research; historical celebrations have led to the collection and preservation of local archives and memorials; the Cincinnati Society annually renews the noblest patriotic sympathies; and the genius for mechanical invention is proclaimed by the fairs which, every October, bring together so many trophies of skilful handiwork and husbandry, and recognize so emphatically the dignity and scientific amelioration of labour. Yet these facts do not invalidate the general truth that our festivals are too much tinctured with utilitarian aims to breathe earnestness and hilarity; that they are so specific as to represent the division rather than the social triumphs of human toil; that they are too partial in their scope, too sectional in their objects, and too isolated in their arrangements, to meet the claims of popular and permanent interests. Our harvests are songless. Reaping-machines have diminished the zest of autumn’s golden largess, as destructive inventions have lessened the miracles of chivalry. Here and there may yet convene a quilting-party, but locomotive facilities have deprived rural gatherings, in sparse neighbourhoods, of their marvel and their joy; and the hilarious huskings of old chiefly survive in Barlow’s neglected verse:—

‘The days grow short; but though the fallen sun
To the glad swain proclaims his day’s work done;
Night’s pleasant shades his various tasks prolong,
And yield new subjects to my various song.
For now, the corn-house filled, the harvest home,
The invited neighbours to the husking come;
A frolic scene, where work and mirth and play,
Unite their charms to chase the hours away.
Where the huge heap lies centred in the hall,
The lamp suspended from the cheerful wall,
Brown, corn-fed nymphs, and strong, hard-handed beaux,
Alternate ranged, extend in circling rows,
Assume their seats, the solid mass attack;
The dry husks rustle, and the corn-cobs crack;
The song, the laugh, alternate notes resound,
And the sweet cider trips in silence round.
The laws of husking every wight can tell,
And sure no laws he ever keeps so well:
For each red ear a general kiss he gains,
With each smut ear he smuts the luckless swains;
But when to some sweet maid a prize is cast,
Red as her lips and taper as her waist,
She walks the round and culls one favoured beau,
Who leaps the luscious tribute to bestow.
Various the sports, as are the wits and brains
Of well-pleased lasses and contending swains;
Till the vast mound of corn is swept away,
And he that gets the last ear wins the day.’

Progress in taste and sentiment, however, is already obvious in our recreative arrangements. There is vastly more of intellectual dignity and permanent use in the fêtes of the Lyceum than in those of the training-days and election-jubilees which formerly were the chief holidays of our rural population; exhibitions of flowers mark a notable advance upon the coarse diversions of the ring and the race-ground; and, within a few years, statues by native artists, worthy of their illustrious subjects, have been inaugurated by public rites and noble eloquence.

A radical cause of the inefficiency, and therefore of the indifferent observance of our holidays, may be found in our national inadequacy of expression, in the want of those modes of popular rejoicing and ceremonial that win and triumph, from their intrinsic beauty. As a general truth, it may be asserted that but two methods of representing holiday sentiment are native to the average taste of our people,—military display and oral discourse. These exhaust our festal resources. Our citizens have an extraordinary facility in making occasional speeches; and the love of soldiership is so prevalent that it is the favourite sport of children, and all classes indulge in costly uniforms and volunteer parades. But the language of art, which in the Old World lends such a permanent attraction to holidays, with us hardly finds voice. Had we requiems conceived with the eternal pathos of Mozart; harmonious embodiments of rural pastime, like that which Beethoven caught while sitting on a style amid the subdued murmurs of a summer evening; melodious invocations to freedom, such as Bellini’s thrilling duo; were a symphony as readily composed in America as an oration; tableaux, costumes, and processions as artistically invented here as in France; were dance and song as spontaneously expressive as among the European peasantry; had we vast, open, magnificent temples, free gardens, statues to crown, shrines to frequent, palatial balconies, fields Elysian for both rich and poor, a sensibility to music, and a sense of the appropriate and beautiful, as wide and as instinctive as our appreciation of the useful, the practical, and the comfortable,—it would no longer be requisite to resort exclusively to drums, fifes, powder, substantial viands, and speechifying, to give utterance to the common sentiment, which would find vent in tones, forms, hues, combinations, and sympathies, that respond to the heart, through the imagination, and conform ‘the show of things to the desires of the mind.’

Other causes of our deficient holidays are obvious. The primary are to be found in the absorption in business and the dominion of practical habits, both of thought and action. Enterprise holds Carnival while Poetry keeps Lent. The facts of to-day shut out of view the perspective of time, or, at best, lure the gaze forward with boundless expectancy. To rehearse the fortunate achievements of the past gratifies our national egotism; but the sensibility and meditation which consecrate historical associations find no room amid the rush and eagerness of the passing hour. Content to point to the heroic episode of the Revolution, to the wisdom and justice of our Constitution, to the caravans that sweep on iron tracks over leagues of what a few years ago was a pathless forest, to the swiftest keels and most graceful models that traverse the ocean, to the aërial viaducts that span dizzy heights and impetuous torrents, to the exquisite vignettes of a limitless paper currency, to the dignified and consistent maintenance of usurped law in younger States of the Union, and to the continually increasing resources of its older members; we are disposed to sneer at the childish love of amusement which beguiles the inhabitants of European capitals, and to pity the superstition and idleness which retain, in this enlightened age, the melodramatic church shows of Romanism. In all this there is doubtless a certain manly intelligence; but there is also an inauspicious moral hardihood. If, as a people, we cultivated more heartily the social instincts and humane sentiments expressed in holiday rites, life would be more valued, the whole nature would find congenial play, and our taskwork and duty, our citizenship and our natural advantages, would be adorned by gracefulness, alacrity, and repose. Quantity would not be so grossly estimated above quality, speed above security, routine above enjoyment. We need to win from time what is denied to us in material. Other nations have in art a permanent and accessible refreshment, which prevents life from being wholly prosaic; the humblest dweller on English soil can enter a time-hallowed and beautiful cathedral; the poorest rustic in Italy can feel the honest pride of a distinctive festal attire; the veriest clod-hopper in Germany can soften the rigours of poverty by music; the London apprentice may wander once a week amid the venerable beauties of Hampton Court; and the Parisian shopkeeper may kindle pride of country by reading the pictorial history of France at Versailles. It is not the expensive arrangements, but the national provision, and, above all, the personal sentiment, which makes the holiday. There was more holy rapture in the low cadence of the hymn stealing from the Roman catacombs, where the hunted Christians of old kept holy the Sabbath day, than there is in the gorgeous display and complex melody under the magnificent dome of St. Peter’s. There was more of the grace of festivity in such a dance as poor Goldsmith’s flute enlivened on the banks of the Loire, than there is in the grand ball which marks the season’s climax at an American watering-place. In public not less than private banquets, the scriptural maxim holds true: ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is.’ Our national life is too diffusive to yield the best social fruits. The extent of territory, the nomadic habits of our people, the alternations of climate, the vicissitudes of trade, the prevalence of spasmodic and superficial excitements, the boundless passion for gain, the local changes, the family separations, and the incessant fevers of opinion, scatter the holy fire of love, reverence, self-respect, contemplation, and faith. What a senseless boast, that the United States has thirty-five thousand miles of railroad,[19] while England claims but ninety-two hundred, France forty-eight hundred, if against the American overplus are to be arrayed countless hecatombs of murdered fellow-citizens, and desolating frauds unparalleled in the history of finance! What a mockery the distinction of having accumulated a fortune in a few years, by sagacity and toil, if, to complete the record, it is added that mercenary ambition risked and lost it in as many months, or the want of self-control and mental resources made its possession a life-long curse from ennui or tasteless extravagance! It is as a check to the whirl of inconsiderate speculation, an antidote to the bane of material luxury, an interval in the hurried march of executive life, that holidays should ‘give us pause,’ and might prove a means of refinement and of disinterestedness. We could thus infuse a better spirit into our work-day experience, refresh and warm the nation’s heart, and gradually concentrate what of higher taste and more genial sympathy underlies the restless and cold tide that hurries us onward, unmindful of the beauty and indifferent to the sanctities with which God and Nature have invested our existence.

Of natal anniversaries we have in our national calendar one which it would augur well for the Republic to observe as a universal holiday. Every sentiment of gratitude, veneration, and patriotism has already consecrated it to the private heart; and every consideration of unity, good faith, and American feeling designates its celebration as the most sacred civic fête of the land. Recent demonstrations in literature, art, and oratory, indicate that the obligation and importance of keeping before the eyes, minds, and affections of the people the memory of Washington, are emphatically recognized by genius and popular sentiment. Within a few years, the pen of our most endeared author, the eloquence of our most finished orator, and the chisel of our best sculptors, have combined to exhibit, in the most authentic and impressive forms of literary and plastic art, the character and image of the Father of his Country. Copies of Stuart’s masterly portrait have multiplied. A monument bearing the revered name is slowly rising at the Capital, the materials of which are gathered from every part of the globe. One of the last and most noble efforts to renew the waning national sentiment, ere its lapse brought on civil war, was that of a New England scholar, patriot, and orator who, despite the allurements of prosperity and the claims of age and long service, traversed the length and breadth of the Republic, eloquently expatiating on the character of Washington, retracing his spotless and great career, and evoking his sacred memory as a talisman to quicken and combine a people’s love. With the large contributions thus secured, and those gathered by the daughters of the Republic, the home and grave of Washington has been redeemed as national property. Let the first homage of a free people be paid at that shrine; and alienated fellow-citizens gather there as at a common altar: his tomb is thus doubly hallowed. In Virginia is a sculptured memorial of enduring beauty and historical significance. A new and admirable biography, with all the elements of standard popularity, makes his peerless career familiar to every citizen from the woods of Maine to the shores of the Pacific. One effective statue already ornaments the commercial emporium, and another is about to be erected in the city of Boston. These, and many other signs of the times, prove that the fanaticism of party strife has awakened the wise and loyal to a consciousness of the inestimable value of that great example and canonized name, as a bond of union, a conciliating memory, and a glorious watchword. Desecrated as has been his native State by rebels against the government he founded and the nation he inaugurated, profaned as has been his memory, now that Peace smiles upon the land his august image will reappear to every true, loyal, and patriotic heart with renewed authority, and hallowed by a deeper love. The present, therefore, is a favourable moment to institute the birthday of Washington—hitherto but partially and ineffectually honoured—as a solemn National Festival. Around his tomb let us annually gather; let eloquence and song, leisure and remembrance, trophies of art, ceremonies of piety, and sentiments of gratitude and admiration, consecrate that day with an unanimity of feeling and of rites, which shall fuse and mould into one pervasive emotion the divided hearts of the country, until the discordant cries of faction are lost in the anthems of benediction and of love; and, before the august spirit of a people’s homage, sectional animosity is awed into universal reverence.

LAWYERS.

‘To vindicate the majesty of the law.’—Judge’s Charge.

‘Why may not this be a lawyer’s skull? Why does he suffer this rude knave to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action for battery?’—Hamlet.