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BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. DLXXI.      MAY 1863.      Vol. XCIII.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET.

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PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE

No. DLXXI.      MAY 1863.      Vol. XCIII.

WILSON’S PREHISTORIC MAN.[^[1]]

The title of ‘Prehistoric Man’ in Mr Wilson’s book applies not only to those races who lived and expired before any history whatever was written, but to all races, even those who are contemporary with us, who are incapable of delivering a history of themselves to other nations or their own posterity. They are rather the un-historic, the speechless people—speechless so far as their posterity is concerned, on whom his inquiries are directed. In fact, that portion of the development of mankind which pertains to savage life, or to the very earliest stages of civilisation, is the subject of Mr Wilson’s book. The subject is far from being new, but far from being exhausted; and our author’s archæological knowledge has enabled him to invest it with a novel interest. His position is somewhat singular in its advantages. A European archæologist and antiquarian, he finds himself in that new world where forms of human life are still lingering akin to those which he has been hitherto studying by the light only of such remains as have been preserved for ages buried in the earth. His stone, his bronze, his iron periods are all found living about him. The flint weapon dug up in London or Glasgow from the lowest strata of human remains, has, in this new world, hardly fallen from the hand of the native. The men of the stone period are still alive, though half a century more may see them either absorbed in the more civilised races, or altogether extinguished.

This combination of the knowledge of the antiquarian with the observations of the traveller has a singular charm for us: but there is another combination which is still more attractive; it is where the philosophical historian, familiar with the myths of antiquity, traces in the living barbarians around him the same play of fancy, or the same curious development of thought, that he has been accustomed to study in the obscure records of a dead language. Mr Wilson is an historian as well as an archæologist, and is in both capacities an enlightened student of such living antiquity as may still exist in that continent, where the earliest and the latest forms of civilisation were destined to meet and to recognise each other.

Our author might, we think, have put his materials together in a more compact form, and arranged them more carefully. The headings of the several chapters lead us to expect a more definite arrangement than we find in the book itself: and this must be partly our excuse if our own observations should seem to be of a miscellaneous character. It must be confessed, also, that there is sometimes a want of precision and accuracy of language on just those occasions where precision is most needed, and that this is not compensated by a rather too lavish display of a florid species of eloquence, better fitted for the lecture-room than the written composition. It is good of its kind, but there is too much of it. We presume that a large portion of the book was written originally for the lecture-room. But notwithstanding these minor defects, we confidently recommend these volumes as replete with information on a variety of interesting topics, and suggestive of many trains of reflection. They will assuredly repay an attentive perusal.

Mr Wilson commences with a glance at that problem of the “antiquity of man” which Sir Charles Lyell has still more lately and more fully treated. Perhaps, if he had written after the publication of Sir Charles Lyell’s work, he would have expressed himself with more distinctness on the subject; yet he seems substantially to have arrived at whatever safe conclusions the evidence hitherto collected enables us to rest in. He has said all that can really be said at present on the matter. He observes that “the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the initial chapters of archæology and ethnology.” It is plain that man could not make his appearance upon the earth till the earth was fitted for his habitation; and it is a reasonable conjecture that it would not long be so prepared for him before, in some part of the world, he made his appearance. Mr Wilson is not disposed to be incredulous as “to the traces of fossil human bones mingling with those of the extinct mammals of the drift;” but we gather from his work that he would be slow to rest his belief on the great antiquity of man solely on the discovery of such flint implements as have been dug out of the valley of the Somme and elsewhere. We think that, notwithstanding the confidence of certain experts who have pronounced that these flints have received their form from the hand of man, there is a well-founded suspicion that, after all, they may have been broken into their present shape by natural or physical forces. They are not ground to a point, it must be remembered, nor sharpened to an edge, only chipped into a wedge-like form. When we read of great numbers of these flints being discovered in a certain spot, and that a selection is made of such as seem to have been chipped by the hand of man, and that this selection is a matter of acknowledged difficulty, we may be excused for suspending our judgment as to the fact whether any one of them was ever the tool or implement of a human being. We may be excused if, in the present state of the evidence, we require that this testimony of the flints be confirmed by other testimony,—by the presence of human bones, or of indisputable works of human art in the same post-pliocene formation.[^[2]] We do not presumptuously reject their evidence altogether; we do not take it upon ourselves to say that not one of the stones collected from the valley of the Somme has been fashioned by man; we have little trust in our own judgment upon such a matter; but it is not evidence which can stand alone. This Sir Charles Lyell admits himself, though in some passages of his work he seems to forget his own admission. But such antiquity as we can assign to man on other evidence—by the discovery in certain positions of human remains or indisputable relics of human art—is very great, and sufficient for all the purposes of the ethnologist. The elaborate, and, to the geologist, highly interesting work of Sir Charles Lyell demands a separate and careful examination; we here merely content ourselves with remarking that the very great antiquity of man—that which would compel us to believe that he existed for some almost immeasurable period in the condition of the savage—rests hitherto on unsatisfactory grounds.

The ethnologist who believes, as Mr Wilson does, in the unity of the human race, requires a long period of time for the development of those varieties which had become permanent prior to the epoch of the building of the Egyptian Pyramids. Mr Wilson takes what he requires, but does not, as matters stand at present, contest for more. To those who, on the grounds of the sacred text, would dispute his right to even this modest inroad upon the illimitable Past, he answers,—that the chronology popularly supposed to be that of the Bible is in fact the chronology only of certain learned interpreters, and that there is nothing in the sacred text to exclude the supposition that a much longer interval may have passed than is generally supposed between the creation of Adam and, let us say, the appearance of Abraham. Interpreting the Noachian Deluge as partial—as not, in the literal sense of the term, universal—he finds scope enough within the limits of the sacred text for that slow and gradual development of civilised man which his archæology has taught him to believe in. Nor does he find any difficulty whatever in reconciling this slow progress from the savage to the civilised man with what is recorded of the creation of Adam, or the attributes of our first parents. Their superior excellence, he considers, consisted in their perfect morality, in the predominance of the benevolent affections, and in that reason which is one with self-knowledge: it could not have consisted, he argues, in knowledge of the arts and sciences; certainly not in the knowledge of arts quite needless in the warmth, abundance, and security of the garden of Paradise. When, therefore, their descendants, deprived of this high moral excellence, found themselves scattered abroad upon the earth, what could they, in fact, have become but ignorant savages? They would have to evolve from their own natural sagacity those arts of life which their new relation to the external world rendered necessary. They would have to commence that long and toilsome ascent to civilisation which the speculative historian has so often attempted to describe.

We feel persuaded that our author would be unwilling that, in any notice of his work, these explanations should be omitted, and therefore it is that we give them here so prominent a place. For ourselves, so confident are we that scientific truth and religious truth will be found in the end to be inextricably combined, and to be reciprocally sustaining each other, that we are not very solicitous to patch up hasty and perhaps needless reconciliations. At present we have to settle our science; when this is done, it will be time to ask ourselves what it is that needs reconcilement.

Although the archæologist can point with triumph to the evidence of successive tombs, or cromlechs, as proving the sequence of his three ages of stone and bronze and iron, he can nowhere carry us back to the first stone period, and from this to the first development of the bronze and the iron. He can show us that on a certain spot—say the soil on which London stands—there have been generations of men distinguished by the kind of tools they had framed for themselves. But it is the history of men on that spot which his materials enable him to write; they do not enable him to write the history of the progress of man from his earliest condition of existence. For the first men who lived on the banks of the Thames had come, we presume, from other countries; they had had a history, and were the products of some kind of human society before they settled there; and the generations that followed might have received their arts, as in one case we know they did, from foreign nations. It is, after all, therefore, from a priori speculation—from what we infer must have been the course of things—that we describe mankind as proceeding from the rudest modes of existence to the more civilised. The testimony which the archæologist appeals to confirms these speculations; it can do no more. It never brings us to the real history of human art. We have still to guess how men lived at first, whether on the fruits of the earth or by the chase; we have still to guess how men discovered the use of fire, how they elaborated mere vocal signs into a grammatical language; we have still to conjecture when or where the first canoe or the first house was built. We make this remark not to detract from the labours of the archæologist, but simply to put the subject on its right basis. We have nowhere that kind of evidence which takes us back to the first developments of the human intellect; the nature of these must still be matter of inference. We still argue, to a great extent, in a purely speculative manner; we conclude that a progress like that which history and historical monuments enable us to trace, was the kind of progress which the first families of the earth passed through; but we know nothing historically of that early progress.

In the old European or Asiatic continent we had been accustomed to regard the earliest generations of mankind as entirely lost in the mists of antiquity; but, till lately, we looked on the continent of America as being, in respect of its population, far more recent, and as affording a more simple subject for ethnological speculation. The civilisation of Mexico and Peru, destroyed by the Spaniards, was traced to Egypt, or to some other portion of the Old World. The vagrant tribes of savages that lived upon the chase were the still more degenerate children of Europe. But this new continent is now found to have been the habitation of man at so remote a period, that the civilisations of Mexico and Peru, however they originated (and they were probably native), must rank amongst its modern events. Ruins of more ancient cities are found buried in its forest, and monuments of some forgotten worship are traced upon the banks of its rivers. The remains of man himself—parts of the human skeleton—have been found in positions which suggest an antiquity far beyond that of the cities of the Nile or the Euphrates. Some of these cases are well known, and well known on account of the disputes and discussions they have given occasion to; others, from which (geologically speaking) only a modest antiquity has been inferred, seem to our author to be worthy of credit. He says:—

“In the post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, exposed along the bed of the Ashley River, remains of the megatherium, megalodon, and other gigantic extinct mammals, occur, not only associated with existing species peculiar to the American continent, but also apparently with others hitherto believed to have been domesticated and introduced for the first time by modern European colonists. But, still more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly indicating the contemporaneous existence of some of those strange extinct mammals with man, are notices of the remains of human art in the same formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of fossils from the post-pliocene of South Carolina before the Academy of Natural Science at Philadelphia, remarked:—‘Dr Klipstein, who resides near Charleston, in digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming a large swamp, discovered and sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with the request that I should go down and visit the place, as there were indications of the bones and teeth of the animal still remaining in the sands which underlie the peat-bed. Accordingly, with a small party of gentlemen, we visited the doctor, and succeeded not only in obtaining several other teeth and bones of this animal, but nearly one entire tusk; and immediately alongside of the tusk discovered the fragment of pottery which I hold in my hand, and which is similar to that manufactured at the present time by the American Indians.’

“It would not be wise,” continues Mr Wilson, “to found hasty theories on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely separated periods. The Ashley River has channeled for itself a course through the eocene and post-pliocene formations of South Carolina, and where these are exposed on its shores the fossils are washed from their beds, and become mingled with the remains of recent indigenous and domestic animals, and objects of human art. But the discovery of Dr Klipstein was made in excavating an undisturbed, and, geologically speaking, a comparatively recent formation.”

After alluding to the magnificent skeleton of the Mastodon Ohioticus which is now in the British Museum, and in companionship with which an Indian flint arrow-head was found, he adds:—

“Another remarkable account, preserved in the ‘American Journal of Science,’ describes the bones of a mastodon, with considerable portions of the skin, found in Missouri, associated with stone spear-heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death, and partially consumed by fire. Such contiguity of the works of man with those extinct diluvial giants warns us at least to be upon our guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of man’s ancient presence in the New World as well as the Old. If the evidence is inconsequential or untruthful, future discoveries will not fail to bring it to nought; if, on the contrary, it involves glimpses of an unseen truth, no organised scepticism will prevent the ultimate disclosure of its amplest revelations.”

Had man, during the whole of this early prehistoric epoch, whatever its duration may have been, lived like the savage, in what we call the stone period? Or had the use of metals and other arts been discovered and lost again—lost, perhaps, because human societies had not attained that coherence and stability necessary to the preservation of the arts? However this may be, it cannot be doubted that the use of the metal tool forms an important era in the progress of civilisation. And Mr Wilson mentions a fact which enables us to understand very readily the transition from the use of stone to the use of metal. Copper is still found in the New World, and probably was at first found in the Old World, in a pure state—in nuggets, as an Australian gold-digger would call them—and these could at once be beaten into the shape of an axe by stone hammers without the application of fire. The fragment of copper was to the Indian a new kind of stone, which had the fortunate property of malleability.

“In the veins of the copper region of Lake Superior, the native metal occurs in enormous masses weighing hundreds of tons; and many loose blocks of considerable size have been found on the lake shore, or lying detached on the surface, besides smaller pieces exposed on and mingled with the superficial soil in sufficient quantities to supply all the wants of the nomade hunter. This, accordingly, he wrought into chisels and axes, armlets and personal ornaments of various kinds, without the use of the crucible and any knowledge of metallurgic arts; and, indeed, without recognising any precise distinction between the copper which he mechanically separated from the mass, and the unmalleable stone or flint out of which he had been accustomed to fashion his spear and arrow heads.”

Whilst applauding the metal tool, copper or iron, and acknowledging what we owe to it, let us not pass over the stone—that handful of rock or flint by the aid of which the metal, in the first instance, was wrought and fashioned—without its meed of gratitude. It seems a slight unnoticeable fact that there should be these manageable fragments of hard substance ready to the hand of man; that the whole earth was not divided between the bed of rock and the bed of sand or clay; that there should have been there mere stones (mere litter, you would say), of which the floor of the earth had better have been swept clean. Yet those nodules of flint formed slowly in the chalk—yet those rolled stones upon the deserted beach, that the sea has fashioned for the human palm, and left high and dry upon the land—seem to have entered as much into the preparation for man as the fauna or the flora amongst which he was to live.

Who first applied fire to the metal, and thus made it plastic as the clay and sharper than the stone? who first discovered fire itself? No one knows; nor is the question worth asking. But there is one thing well worth noticing: it is the answer given to the question, and that in the rudest of times and amongst many various nations. Some god bestowed it. This tendency to look for a supernatural giver is very soon and very widely developed. And what is more, the idea of a giver has called forth amongst rude selfish people struggling for existence, the desire to manifest their gratitude by some act of worship which should also be some act of self-denial. On a certain day of the year all lights shall be extinguished, and one man amongst them (endowed for the very purpose with imaginary sanctity) shall rekindle the flame, thus acknowledging by this symbol its reception from the divine Giver. The ancient Peruvians drew their fire on this solemn occasion at once from the sun; they collected its rays into a focus by a concave mirror of polished metal, and thus ignited some dried cotton, or bark, or fungus. Nothing could be more expressive and appropriate than such a symbolic act. It is a pity that the historian has to record that other symbolic acts (if such they are to be considered) were of a cruel and hideous description. The savage is not accustomed only to thank God; he has, he thinks, to propitiate His favour; and as he has nothing to give, he destroys in honour of the universal Bestower. The worship of the American Indian is tainted more than any other we read of with the rite of human sacrifice.

Various methods for obtaining fire have been invented, but the earliest seems to have been by the friction of two dry pieces of wood. It was a progressive step, we presume, when the bark of a certain tree or a dried fungus was used for tinder. However produced, it was to the savage, in the first instance, itself a tool, the immediate instrument he employed to cut down the tree which would have resisted a long while his flint hatchet. We thought that all known people had made discovery of fire and converted it to their own purposes; but the inhabitants of the Ladrones, when discovered by the Spaniards, are said to have shrunk from fire as from a thing they simply feared: “they called it a devil, a god that bit fiercely when it was touched, and lived on wood, which they saw it devour.”

Mr Wilson entitles the chapter which treats on this subject ‘The Promethean Instinct: Fire.’ The next chapter is headed ‘The Maritime Instinct: the Canoe.’ Then we have ‘The Technological Instinct,’ and so on. Why this ostentatious use of the term Instinct? Did men hunt after fire even before they had seen it, as an animal might be supposed to hunt after food even before it had eaten? Do men build canoes as birds their nests or beavers their dams? What is the leading idea of Mr Wilson when he thus liberally applies to us the term Instinct? We have desires and we have intelligence suggesting means to an end. Is it the desire that is instinctive, or the apprehension of the means whereby the desire can be gratified? Men have a desire to pass from one side of the river to the other; perhaps the animal they were in chase of has swam the stream; they have observed that wood will float, that a large piece of wood will float with a man on it; they procure such piece of wood, and paddle themselves across. The knowledge which the man displays in all this follows from his previous perceptions. Perception, memory, judgment, are all exercised in a quite normal manner, and the desire to float across the stream has arisen from the peculiar circumstances in which the man was placed. What element of mystery is there in this transaction which calls for the name of Instinct? For the word Instinct is applied to certain actions of animals because the ordinary laws of psychology are, or seem, inadequate to explain them—because a certain mystery hangs over the event which we mark by the name Instinct. When we see animals acting, without the teaching of experience, in the same sort of way in which we act after that teaching of experience, we, perplexed to explain this anomaly, pronounce the action instinctive. The bee and the bird build in this inexplicable manner. Probably a more minute investigation may enable us to resolve whatever we call Instinct into some delicacy of the senses, or some rapidity of the judgment, peculiar to the animal. Meanwhile the term is serviceable as marking a class of unexplained phenomena. But how is it applicable to man in his capacity of boat-builder? The sort of canoe he will build, the materials he will use, the tools he will work with, are all determined for him by existing circumstances, and the actual amount of his knowledge. Or is it the vague desire to put to sea, prompting some manner of boat-building, that Mr Wilson calls our “maritime instinct?” Are we driven to sea like ducks to a pond? The peasantry of an inland country are not conscious of any such instinct, and would be very unfortunate if they possessed it.

We have no wish to expel the terms instinct and instinctive from our popular diction, even when applied to human actions. There are cases when men act with a suddenness and decision which remind us of the animal in his promptest moods, and we naturally apply to these the term instinctive; and sometimes we apply the term to a tendency or desire which we cannot at the time trace to our senses, or to the usual operations of the mind. But when an author formally—in the very titles of his chapters—supplies us with “Promethean and maritime instincts,” we may be excused if we ask for some precise definition of the term.

“Speech is one of the instincts of man, but it is by the voluntary exercise of his intellectual faculties, as we conceive, that he is enabled to develop it into language.” This sounds oracular, but, like most oracles, it is very obscure. What does Mr Wilson mean by speech as contrasted with language? Is speech the mere giving of names to things, and language the formation of a grammar? But grammar is only a naming of a more complex kind, a naming of things and events in their more complicated relations. And what speech was ever formed that had not some grammar, that was not also a language? If by speech, in contrast to language, is meant the mere utterance of articulate sounds which have no meaning attached to them, then what proof have we that men ever passed through a stage of unmeaning gibberish? or could anything so purposeless be dignified with the name of an instinct? The desire to speak, or to communicate our thoughts or our wants, is sometimes spoken of as an instinct. But the need man has of co-operation, and the ability he has to co-operate, and those general sympathies and affections which render him a social being, are sufficient to explain this desire. Such a desire may be contemplated as existing apart and prior to the possession of language, but there can be no reason for applying the term instinct to it, unless we apply that term to all our desires. So strong and inevitable is this desire to express our thoughts, that we have not the least doubt that, if the human larynx had not been fitted for speech, man would have invented a language of signs. His hands and feet would have talked, if his tongue and palate did not. His larynx being mute and all other faculties remaining the same, he would have talked with his fingers and written as the Chinese write, whose characters are signs for things, not for words.

The maritime or boat-building instinct has, at all events, been very much under the control of circumstances. Sometimes the tree was felled and hollowed, sometimes the bark was stretched over wicker-work, or skins of beasts were employed, or planks were made into a raft. The Egyptian bound some of his water-jugs together and made a raft of them. Some tribes have limited themselves to the paddle or the oar; some have spread the sail, and spread it very boldly. The Malay hoists his large sail over a couple of planks of wood sewed together with bark, and balances this fragile craft by means of two long spars fastened athwart and projecting to windward. In such a vessel as this he will scud fearlessly through tempestuous seas from one island to another. We may boast, and very justly, of our steam-engines, our electric telegraphs, and of other triumphant employments of the powers of nature; but even to this day there is not a more pleasing or thrilling spectacle, or a more glorious instance of the powers of nature turned to the service of man, than when some solitary boatman sits, at the helm with sail outspread, borne by the wind along the surface of the sea. The water floats him, the wind speeds him; he is for the moment master of the two great elements. Verily the savage has his joy, his hour of pride and exultation.

It is curious that the natives of North America limited themselves to the oar or the paddle. The Peruvians appear to have been the only people of this continent who, at the time of its discovery by Columbus, employed the sail. This is a striking instance of the very general fact, almost amounting to a law, that when a people have attained to a certain proficiency in the arts, sufficient to render life tolerable, there ensues a long pause in the career of progress. It requires the stimulus of an urgent want to set at work the inventive faculties of the savage; and when his invention has secured to him an agreeable existence, or what he considers such, there intervenes the force of habit and the attachment to familiar customs. Fortunately the differences of climate, or other external circumstances, require or suggest different inventions, even in this early stage of society, and thus one barbarian may be able to teach another. A people who had brought the canoe propelled by oars to perfection, would probably rest contented with it; they could not have invented the sail themselves; they might receive it from another people with whom it had been, from the commencement, their favourite mode of traversing the sea. Our “technological instincts,” as Mr Wilson calls them, go to sleep in the savage when he is no longer pinched by hunger or cold, or other pressing inconvenience. They awake again in the civilised man, with whom invention itself has become an agreeable effort or an intellectual triumph. Some sort of culinary vessels are wanted, and if these have been once shaped out of clay, the same kind of pottery will content a people for ages. If nature has thrown them the calabash, a ready-made vessel, their instinct of pottery will not be developed at all; they will content themselves with the calabash.

Mr Wilson brings together in a very pictorial manner the two extremes of this human art of boat-building:—

“On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam; but meanwhile, underneath these very shipbuilders’ yards, lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back up the stream of human industry far into prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt designation of St Enoch’s Croft. This primitive canoe, hewn out of a single oak, rested in a horizontal position on its keel; and within it, near the prow, there lay a curiously suggestive memorial of the mechanical arts of the remote era to which the ancient ship of the Clyde must be assigned. This was a beautifully finished stone axe or celt, doubtless one of the simple implements of the allophylian Caledonian to whom the canoe belonged, if not, indeed, the tool with which it had been fashioned into shape.”

From the hollowed trunk of a tree, hewn with a stone axe by this “allophylian,” as Mr Wilson delights in calling him, to the iron steam-vessel that would have carried him and all his tribe across the Atlantic, the advance is great indeed. And a very curious sentiment must arise in the man who has seen this canoe dug up from under the busy streets of Glasgow, and then afterwards in another continent, on some lake or river not yet quite appropriated by the white man, has watched some prowling Indian paddling about in a canoe not much unlike it. The past and the present seem to live together before him: it is not the ends of the earth only that are brought together for him; he appears to embrace the first and the last of the generations of mankind.

We turn from the rude arts of men to their still ruder thinking—to customs springing from some sentiment or some strange imagination. Of these the most universal and the most significant are customs connected with the burial of the dead. To the habit of interring with the dead man the implements he most valued in life—his tools or weapons—we owe the little knowledge we possess of our very primitive ancestors. It is generally said that these articles were buried with the man, that he might have them ready for use in another world; and, no doubt, some vague idea of this kind has extensively prevailed: but if we may speculate on a subject so obscure as the imaginations of the savage, we should say that this idea grew out of the custom of burying with the dead man his own previous possessions, and that the custom itself at first originated in simple regret and respect for the dead. We cannot have any strong sentiment without feeling the desire in some way to manifest it. The dead man was loudly lamented—wept and wailed over—and the mourners often cut and wounded themselves as an exhibition of their grief. Well, at such a moment, instead of appropriating to themselves the possessions of the deceased, the survivors threw them into the grave with him. They were still in a manner his property. It would manifest a disrespect to the dead if at once, as soon as the hand of his chief was cold, another man had seized upon his spear and carried it to his own hut. Thus this one passionate desire to manifest grief and respect to a late friend or chief would sufficiently account for the act of interring with the body the instruments or weapons he had been in the habit of using. The custom once adopted, superstition would step in and enforce it, and the imagination would invest it with a new significance. Some poet of the land would first suggest that, if the dead man rose from his tomb, he would find himself equipped for the chase or for war. Sometimes the buried arms, vessels, or other implements, were broken before they were deposited in the grave, which does not seem to accord with the idea that they were laid there for any future use. It looks like the interpretation of a subsequent generation when it is said that the savage expected the broken tool or perforated vessel, like the decayed human body, to be restored again and made fit for his use. Here is an Indian, a Chinook, buried in his canoe. Within the canoe a broken sword is deposited. Am I to gather that the Chinook expected a maritime life hereafter, and even to revive floating upon the waters? Does not the whole act seem, at least in its initiation, to be symbolical? All was at an end. The man would float no more—would fight no more. The canoe was buried, the sword was broken.

But whether we are right or not in our supposition as to the origin of this idea—namely, that the articles buried in the tomb with the deceased would be useful to him in an after life—it is plain that such an idea has been entertained, and certainly all our learned writers upon these ancient customs of burial attribute this motive to our imaginative forefathers. When, in the old pagan burrows of the wold of Yorkshire or elsewhere, some British or Saxon charioteer has been exhumed, with the iron wheel-tires and bronzed horse-furniture (the wreck of the decayed war-chariot), and the skeletons of the horses, eloquent antiquarians have not failed to say (as Mr Wilson does) that the dead chief was buried thus “that he might enter the Valhalla of his gods, proudly borne in the chariot in which he had been wont to charge amid the ranks of his foes.” We presume they find themselves justified in this interpretation.

Here, again, we find that the new continent sets almost before the eyes of our traveller scenes similar to those which, as a European archæologist, he had been laboriously endeavouring to reconstruct in some remote antiquity.

“Upwards of forty years since, Black Bird, a famous chief of the Omahaws, visited the city of Washington, and on his return was seized with smallpox, of which he died on the way. When the chief found himself dying, he called his warriors around him, and, like Jacob of old, gave commands concerning his burial, which were as literally fulfilled. The dead warrior was dressed in his most sumptuous robes, fully equipped with his scalps and war-eagle’s plumes, and borne about sixty miles below the Omahaw village to a lofty bluff on the Missouri, which towers far above all the neighbouring heights, and commands a magnificent extent of landscape. To the summit of this bluff a beautiful white steed, the favourite war-horse of Black Bird, was led; and there, in presence of the whole nation, the dead chief was placed with great ceremony on its back, looking towards the river, where, as he had said, he could see the canoes of the white men as they traversed the broad waters of the Missouri. His bow was placed in his hand, his shield and quiver, with his pipe and medicine-bag, hung by his side. His store of pemmican and his well-filled tobacco-pouch were supplied, to sustain him on the long journey to the hunting-grounds of the great Manitou, where the spirits of his fathers awaited his coming. The medicine-men of the tribe performed their most mystic charms to secure a happy passage to the land of the great departed; and all else being completed, each warrior of the chiefs own band covered the palm of his right hand with vermilion, and stamped its impress on the white sides of the devoted war-steed. This done, the Indians gathered turfs and soil, and placed them around the feet and the legs of the horse. Gradually the pile arose under the combined labour of many willing hands, until the living steed and its dead rider were buried together under the memorial mound; and high over the crest of the lofty tumulus which covered the warrior’s eagle plumes a cedar post was reared, to mark more clearly to the voyagers on the Missouri the last resting-place of Black Bird, the great chief of the Omahaws.”

But there is one passage in Mr Wilson’s book which, we think, to the student of the ancient myth or religious legend must be replete with interest. It occurs in the chapter which treats on the use of tobacco and that custom of smoking which we have imported from the savage, much to the delectation, no doubt, of those who inhale the fumes of what they are pleased to call the fragrant weed, and much, assuredly, to the disgust and suffering of those who are involved, most unwillingly, in the smoke which others are exhaling around them. Never were two parties more sharply divided than the smokers and the non-smokers. The first will doubtless agree with the Indian in the belief that tobacco was of divine origin. Did not two hunters of the Susquehannas share their venison with a lovely squaw who mysteriously appeared before them in the forest? and did they not, “on returning to the scene of their feast thirteen moons after, find the tobacco-plant growing where she had sat?” and do not Indians tell us that the Great Spirit freely indulges in the intoxicating fumes which they themselves love so well? The non-smokers hold a different faith. They see no celestial gift in this black, fuliginous amusement; and if they do not ascribe to it a devilish origin, they assert that it is enjoyed with a devilish indifference to those to whom their beloved smoke is but stench and sickness. Into this custom of tobacco-smoking Mr Wilson enters at large, and bestows much learning on the inquiry; but it is especially to the institution of the pipe of peace amongst the Indians that we would now direct the attention of the reader.

We have, as Mr Wilson tells the story, the complete dissection of a myth; we see how a legend arises, or may arise, partly from the most trivial causes, and partly from generous impulses and high imaginations. Between the Minnesota and the Missouri rivers there stands a bold perpendicular cliff, “beautifully marked with distinct horizontal layers of light grey and rose or flesh-coloured quartz.” Near this a famous red pipe-stone is procured; a material, we presume, better fitted than any other for making pipes. Traces of both ancient and modern excavation prove that it has been the resort, during many generations, of Indian tribes, seeking this famous red pipe-stone. A spot to which independent tribes came for this purpose, and for this only, became neutral ground; became a spot on which they might meet in peace—perhaps to discuss their points of difference. But in process of time it became a sacred spot, and the peace between hostile tribes was preserved by a religious sanction. There are marks on the rock resembling the track of a large bird. These were converted into the footsteps of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit, therefore, at one time descended upon the rock and taught—what else could he be supposed to teach?—the sacred neutrality of the spot, and the privilege and duty of all tribes to renew their pipes there, and especially the calumet, or pipe of peace. The last version of the tradition runs thus:—

“Many ages,” say the Sioux, “after the red men were made, when all the different tribes were at war, the Great Spirit called them all together at the Red Rocks. He stood on the top of the rocks, and the red nations were assembled in infinite numbers in the plain below. He took out of the rock a piece of the red stone, and made a large pipe. He smoked it over them all; told them that it was part of their flesh; that though they were at war they must meet at this place as friends; that it belonged to them all; that they must make their calumets from it, and smoke them to him whenever they wished to appease him or get his goodwill. The smoke from his big pipe rolled over them all, and he disappeared in the cloud.”

The Sioux, notwithstanding this good teaching of the very tradition which they still repeat to the stranger, have, by the right of the strongest, taken possession of the sacred neutral ground; and they, and all other tribes of the red race, are either being absorbed into the white population or exterminated by it. The development of the myth and the people of the myth has been therefrom alike arrested. But how clearly we see its growth and formation! To what a mystical faith that flesh-coloured quartz was conducting! And what mingling of the divine and human would have been suggested by the act recorded of the Great Spirit! If these Indian tribes had finally coalesced in one nation, the myth would have been exalted, and the Great Spirit would have taught them an eternal bond of peace and brotherhood. If civilisation and culture had still further advanced, this peace and brotherhood would have embraced all mankind, and assumed the form of the highest moral teaching.

A considerable portion of Mr Wilson’s book is occupied with those ancient remains, whether in the valley of the Mississippi or in the forests of Central America, which speak of a civilisation, or at least of nations and of cities that had existed and left their ruins behind them, anterior to what we call the discovery of the New World. The subject is highly interesting, and it loses none of its interest in the hands of our author. He speaks very decidedly on the great antiquity of the mounds and the earthworks of the valley of the Mississippi; less decidedly on the antiquity of the monumental pillars and other architectural remains which were first brought to the knowledge of the English public through the travels of Mr Stephens in Central America. The work of Mr Squiers still contains, we believe, the fullest account we possess of those vast circular mounds, and other extraordinary earthworks, discovered within the territory of the United States. Both these writers, Mr Stephens and Mr Squiers, produced at the time of the publication of their several works a very vivid impression on the reading public of England. Both of them broke ground into quite new fields of inquiry, but both of them left the mind rather excited than informed. This was to be expected when the subject was of so novel and surprising a character. Mr Squiers saw evidences of serpent-worship and of other religious rites which his study of the antiquities of the Old World had made familiar to his imagination, in the circular mounds which he traced in the open field: and Mr Stephens, as he broke his way through the forests, saw the ruins of another Egypt stand before him.

That no tradition should exist amongst the present race of Indians with respect to these primitive “mound-builders,” is not surprising; nor would this alone indicate any very great antiquity. Mr Wilson thinks the state in which the skeletons were found within the tumuli—crumbling to dust on being touched—is sufficient proof of their great age. One must know all the circumstances of the burial, all the influences to which the skeleton has been exposed, before any safe conclusion can be drawn from this fact. But, leaving undetermined the antiquity of these remains, we think it plain that the first discoverers of them, whether of the mounds or of the ruined cities, have, with the natural enthusiasm pertaining to all discoverers, exaggerated the evidence they display of civilisation, or progress in the arts. After all, the soundest opinion seems to be that the “mound-builders” and the builders of the deserted cities were but the intellectual progenitors of those half-civilised Mexicans and Peruvians whom the Spaniards encountered and destroyed. It is not likely that any higher or equal state of civilisation had been attained and lost before the arrival of the Spaniards.

The quite circular form of an extensive mound or earthwork is thought to imply a knowledge of geometry or trigonometry, because a modern surveyor would proceed in a certain scientific manner to lay out such a circle. But the slow process of measuring a number of radii from a given centre, and connecting their terminal points, would probably have sufficed for all that these early geometers executed. Or they might have drawn a smaller circle, in the first instance, by a movable radius, and then traced a larger and a larger one outside of this, till they had obtained one of the requisite magnitude. Time and labour will accomplish much, and with very little help from art or science. But where imagination seems to play the subtlest tricks with our antiquarians is in their appreciation of the beautiful in such relics of the fine arts as are discovered in these mounds and cities. We have prints given us here of carved pipes found in the tombs, which we are told are very beautiful. To our eye they do not look beautiful at all, and very little in advance of other prints which represent pipes carved by the present race of Red Indians. But it is when the antiquarian critic finds himself amongst the remains of the rude sculptures of Central America that he shows himself most under the influence of this glamour. If we had not the pictures or engravings by which to check the text, we should think that Thebes and Memphis had been long ago outrivalled on the other side of the Atlantic.

Our readers, we are sure, have not forgotten Mr Stephens’s book of travels; they will remember how he entered with his guide into what seemed an untrodden forest at Copan, apparently undisturbed from its very creation; and how, as he made his way with his axe through the brushwood, he found himself face to face with an upright column of stone elaborately carved. In the centre of this a human face of gigantic proportions stared out upon him. Some of these monuments had been overpowered by the vigorous growth of the surrounding trees, and displaced from their upright position by huge branches that half encircled them; others lay upon the ground, as if bound down by the vines and other great creepers of the American forest. Nothing disturbed the solitude of the scene except a grimacing procession of monkeys, who from the branches of the trees were looking alternately at the traveller, and at the mysterious objects which had attracted the traveller’s attention. As he proceeded he came upon a truncated pyramid, with a flight of steps leading to a broad surface, on which evidently some other structure had been raised; and then again he entered a square enclosure with steps, which might have been intended for seats, running up on all sides, reminding him of a Roman amphitheatre. No books had told him of the existence even of this ruined city. Who had built it, who had lived in it, no one could say. The people of the country could only answer him with their “Quien sabe?” who knows?—an answer always sufficient for themselves. There was not even a tradition, not even a palpable lie, to be heard. Men were as silent about these cities as the forest itself.

What wonder that the enthusiasm of the traveller should be excited, and that he should see more than the eye—as a simple optical instrument—disclosed to him? Assuredly his enthusiasm as to the beauty of the sculpture is not supported by the drawings he has given us. He commends to us these drawings of the artist as being, “next to the stones themselves,” the most perfect materials on which to form our judgment. And of one thing we may be certain, that a modern artist, trained to the correct representation of the human figure, would err, if he erred at all, by improving the drawing in these grotesque sculptures. It would require a distinct effort in the modern artist to depart from the true outline and proportions of the human form; and whenever his attention relaxed, he would infallibly become more correct than his original. Well, we see in the delineation here given us a mere pillar, in the centre of which is carved a human face, and lower down two fat arms, which the imagination is to connect with the unmeaning face above them; and we are told in the text “that the character of this image is grand, and it would be difficult to exceed the richness of the ornament.” We turn the page and see another gigantic head, with huge saucer eyes, such as a child would draw, and we are told that “the style is good,” and that “the great expansion of the eyes seems intended to inspire awe.” So are the masks sold in our toy-shops to mischief-loving boys. But very silly savages must those have been in whom such absurd figures could have inspired awe. Mr Stephens is constantly being “arrested by the beauty of the sculpture.” The bas-reliefs at Palenque are indeed superior to anything he met with at Copan, and some drawings from these exhibit an unexpected grace, and an outline perhaps unconsciously improved by the hand of the artist. But here also we are startled at the discrepancy between the description of the enraptured traveller and the representation in the engravings. We have, in one of them, a figure sitting cross-legged upon a narrow bench; his legs are tucked up under him painfully tight, and his balance must be preserved with great difficulty; his large nose is in manifest danger of breaking itself upon the floor. We are told that this figure sits “on a couch, ornamented with two leopards’ heads,” and that “the attitude is easy, and the expression calm and benevolent.” The first discoverer must evidently have looked with something of a lover’s eye.

The learned antiquarian has been nowhere more exposed to delusion than in this New World. Mr Wilson gives us an amusing account of the inscription on the Dighton Rock, which has received so many various interpretations. It stands in New England; and at a time when it was a favourite speculation of its theologians, that the Phœnicians had been the earliest colonists of America, and that the accursed race of Canaan had been banished there, this inscription was decided to be Punic. Dr Stiles, President of Yale College, when preaching in 1783 before the Governor and State of Connecticut, appealed to the Dighton Rock, graven, as he believed, in the old Punic or Phœnician character and language, in proof that the Indians were of the cursed seed of Canaan, and were to be displaced and rooted out by the European descendants of Japhet! “The Phœnicians,” says Dr Stiles, “charged the Dighton and other rocks in Narraganset Bay with Punic inscriptions remaining to this day, which last I myself have repeatedly seen and taken off at large, as did Professor Sewell. He has lately transmitted a copy of this inscription to M. Gebelin of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, who, comparing them with the Punic palæography, judges them to be Punic, and has interpreted them as denoting that the ancient Carthaginians once visited these distant regions.”

Various copies, all professing to be most carefully executed, of this inscription, were sent to antiquarian societies, to museums, to colleges, as well in Europe as in America. A learned Colonel Vallency, of the London Antiquarian Society, undertook to prove that the inscription was neither Phœnician nor Punic, but Siberian. Then it became the fashion to look upon the Danes and the Northmen as the first discoverers of America, or its first colonists, and the Punic was changed into a Runic inscription. The names of Thorfinn and other Norse heroes were plainly read in this wild scrawl upon the Dighton Rock. Learned Danes themselves found no difficulty in deciphering the name at least of the chief hero who conducted the expedition of which this is a memorial, though they confess that the names of his associates are not quite so legible.

“Surely no inscription,” continues Mr Wilson, “ancient or modern, not even the Behistun cuneatics or the trilingual Rosetta Stone, ever received more faithful study. But the most curious matter relating to this written rock is, that after being thus put to the question by learned inquisitors for a hundred and fifty years, it did at length yield a most surprising response. Mr Schoolcraft tested the origin and significance of the Dighton Rock inscription, by submitting a copy of it to Chingwauk, an intelligent Indian chief, familiar with the native system of picture-writing. The result was an interpretation of the whole as the record of an Indian triumph over some rival native tribe, and the conviction on Mr Schoolcraft’s part that the graven rock is simply an example of Indian rock-writing, attributable to the Wabenakies of New England.... And such is the conviction reluctantly formed in the mind of the most enthusiastic believer in the discovery and colonisation of New England by the Northmen.”

We are in danger of losing our way entirely amongst the multitude of interesting subjects which Mr Wilson’s two thick volumes present to us—and present, it must be confessed, in a somewhat confused array. A rather pleasant effect is produced by the bringing together the knowledge of the European archæologist with the observations of the modern traveller; but this leads to a discursive style. In spite of the distinct titles of the several chapters, we never know precisely what we are discussing, and where to look for anything a second time which we may remember to have read. We are now engaged with the wild Indians, and are reminded of such human curiosities as the “Flatheads,” who glory in producing a deformed skull by a distressing pressure on the infant’s head, of which process we have a gilded picture strangely ornamenting our learned volumes. These Flatheads are plainly uninjured in their intellects by this distortion of the skull; so as there is room left for the development of the cerebrum, all seems right; and even when nature keeps the formation of the skull in her own hands, we apprehend this is all that is wanted. These Flatheads contrive to make slaves of the neighbouring round-headed Indians,—who, by the way, are not permitted to flatten the heads of their children, this being jealously guarded as a sign of freedom and aristocratic privileges. They are said to look with contempt on the whites, as bearing in the shape of their heads the hereditary mark of slaves. After contemplating for a time these unprogressive natives, some railroad car comes whizzing past, or the posts of the electric telegraph remind the author of the go-ahead American who is gradually appropriating all the soil to himself. We have a highly characteristic trait mentioned of the new race. Not only does he cut down forests and break up the prairie, but he trades in water-lots—in land still covered with water; appropriates and sells half the soil of a lake which has yet to be reduced to the economical proportion he intends to allow it.

The two races cannot plainly long reside on the same continent; but Mr Wilson brings before us a fact which will probably be new to most English readers. It is almost as much an absorption into the white race as a process of extinction that is now going on amongst the Red Indians. Wherever the whites, whether they are French, or English, or Scotch, have been long settled in the neighbourhood of Indian tribes, there has grown up a mixed race or half-breed. This half-breed, in some instances, remains in the settlement of the whites, but in others it still follows the mode of life of its Indian parent, and a race grows up that is neither European nor Indian. Whole tribes seem now to be constituted of this half-breed, and they are distinguished for their power of endurance and their greater faculty for social organisation. But in proportion as they approximate to the European, the less likelihood is there that they will long remain distinct and separated from the European by their mode of life.

“The idea,” says Mr Wilson, “of the absorption of the Indian into the Anglo-American race will not, I am aware, meet with a ready acceptance, even from those who dwell where its traces are most perceptible; but fully to appreciate its extent, we must endeavour to follow down the course of events by which the continent has been transferred to the descendants of its European colonists. At every fresh stage of colonisation or pioneering into the wild west, the work has necessarily been accomplished by the hardy youths, or the hunters and trappers of the clearing. Rarely indeed did they carry with them their wives or daughters; but where they found a home amongst savage-haunted wilds, they took to themselves wives of the daughters of the soil. To this mingling of blood, even in its least favourable aspects, the prejudices of the Indian presented little obstacle. Henry, in his narrative of travel among the Cristineaux, says, ‘One of the chiefs assured me that the children borne by their women to Europeans were bolder warriors and better hunters than themselves.’ The fact is unquestionable that all along the widening outskirts of the newer clearings, and wherever an outlying trading or hunting post is established, we find a fringe of half-breed population, marking the transitional border-land which is passing away from its aboriginal claimants.... At all the white settlements near those of the Indians the evidence of admixture is abundant, from the pure half-breed to the slightly-marked remoter descendant of Indian maternity, discoverable only by the straight black hair, and a singular watery glaze in the eye, not unlike that of the English gypsy. There they are to be seen, not only as fishers, trappers, and lumberers, but engaged on equal terms with the whites in the trade and business of the place. In this condition the population of all the frontier settlements exists; if, as new settlers come in, the mixed element disappears, it does so purely by absorption.

“Nor are such traces confined to the frontier settlements. I have recognised the semi-Indian features in the gay assemblies at a Canadian Governor-General’s receptions, in the halls of the Legislature, among the undergraduates of Canadian universities, and mingling in the selectest social circles. And this is what has been going on in every new American settlement for upwards of three centuries, under every diversity of circumstance.”

This is a far more agreeable idea than that the Indians are being everywhere starved out of existence by the encroachments of the European. But that portion of the mixed offspring which adhered to the Indian tribe, and became Indian in its habits, affords a still more interesting subject of speculation. On the Red River there is a settlement of half-breeds, numbering about six thousand. A marked difference, we are told, “is observable, according to their white paternity. The French half-breeds are more lively and frank in their bearing, but also less prone to settle down to drudgery of farming, or other routine duties of civilised life, than those chiefly of Scottish descent.” If in both cases the half-breed has been entirely educated by its Indian parent, this would be a good instance of the influence of race as separable from the influence of education. These half-breeds are generally superior in physical as well as mental qualities, and have greater powers of endurance than any of the native tribes exhibit. Mr Wilson assures us “that the last traces of the Red blood will disappear, not by the extinction of the Indian tribes, but by the absorption of the half-breed minority into the new generations of the predominant race.”

Of the warlike tribes of native Indians some have been induced to settle down as agriculturists. Some are Roman Catholics, some Protestants. But we believe it may be stated that all signal amendments or progressive changes have been accompanied by a mixture of European blood. To this very day the full-blooded Indian despises the civilisation of the white man, or at least thinks it something that may be good for the white man, but by no means good for him. The fierce tribes that constituted the famous confederacy of the Iroquois, and who have settled in Canada, have been all more or less tamed, but they have all lost the purity of their race; and when we hear of the hunter of the prairies taking upon himself the mode of life of European colonists, we may be sure that this change has been facilitated by an intermixture of the two races. Some of these tribes have forgotten their own language, and speak only a French patois.

We do not imply by this observation that the native Indian would have been incapable of advancing by a slow and natural progression of their own on the road of civilisation: on the contrary, we believe that the civilisation of the Aztecs and the Peruvians may be seen in its earliest stage amongst the Iroquois. But when the European encounters the savage, there is a gap between them which the latter cannot suddenly traverse. The intermediate steps are not presented to him. The time is not given him by which slow-changing habits can be formed and transmitted. He is required to proceed at a faster pace than his savage nature can accomplish. Now, as every generation that has advanced upon its predecessors, transmits, together with its knowledge, some increasing aptitude for the acquisition of such knowledge, there is no difficulty in believing that the savage would be expedited in his career of civilisation as well by an intermixture of race as by a participation of knowledge.

The whole chapter of Mr Wilson on the Red Race is well worthy of perusal. The reader will find in it many interesting details, which, of course, our space will not permit us to allude to. We shall conclude our notice by some reference to a topic especially interesting when we speak of the progress of civilisation—namely, the mode of transmitting ideas, the art of writing, or letters. Our author, according to his favourite phraseology, entitles his chapter on this subject ‘The Intellectual Instinct: Letters.’

The origin of language may be open to discussion. Its gradual growth from the wants, the social passions, the organisation, the mimetic and reasoning powers of man, may to many persons seem an unsatisfactory account. But no one disputes that writing is an invention of man. Even if the steps of this invention had not been traced, we should have been unable to frame any other hypothesis with regard to an art possessed by one people and not possessed by another. We may define writing to be the transmission of ideas by visible and permanent signs, instead of by momentary sounds and gestures. The art of writing, it must be remembered, is not complete till the characters upon the paper, or the parchment, or the plaster of the wall, or the graven rock, interpret themselves to one who knows the conventional value of the several signs. So long as any picture-writing or symbolic figures act merely as aids to the memory, in retaining a history of events which is, in fact, transmitted by oral tradition, writing is not yet invented. The picture, however faithful, gives its meaning only to those who know many other facts which are not in the picture itself. When a system of signs has been invented, by which alone the ideas of one person, or one generation, can be communicated to another person or another generation, then the art has been attained, whether those signs are hieroglyphics or alphabetical, whether they are signs of things or signs of words.

This is necessary to be borne in mind, because there is a certain use of pictorial and symbolic signs which is in danger of being confounded with the perfect hieroglyph; and we are inclined to think this confusion has been made with regard to some of the sculptured remains discovered in Central America. We doubt if these “hieroglyphics,” which scholars are invited to study and to interpret, are hieroglyphics as the word is understood by the Egyptologist. Granting that they always have a meaning, and are not introduced, in some cases, as mere ornaments (just as we introduce the heads of stags or the figures of little children on any vase we desire to ornament), still it may be a meaning of that kind which could be only intelligible to one who from other sources knew the history or the fable it was intended to bring to remembrance. A representation of this kind, half pictorial and half symbolic, would help to keep alive the memory of an event; but, the memory of it once extinct, it could not revive the knowledge of the event to us. We should waste our ingenuity in vain attempts to read what was not, in fact, any kind of writing.

The Peruvians had manifestly not advanced beyond a system of mnemonics, a kind of memoria technica. With certain knots in strings of different colours they had associated certain ideas. A Peruvian woman could show you a bundle of knotted strings and tell you her whole life “was there.” To her it was, but to no one else. If all the Peruvians agreed to associate the history of Peru with other bundles of knotted cords, their quipus would still be only an aid to memory; the history itself must be conveyed from one mind to another by oral communication. Some of the North American Indians had their wampum, their many-coloured belt, into which they talked their treaty, or any other matter it was desirable to remember. The Mexicans had mingled symbols with their picture-writing, but they had not wrought the hieroglyphic into a system, by means of which alone ideas could be conveyed from one generation to another. With them it could not be said that the art of writing was known. But antiquarians have formed, it seems, a different opinion of the mixture of symbol and picture discovered in the ruins of Copan and Palenque; and, partly on this ground, they arrived at the conclusion that these cities were built and inhabited by a people in advance of the Mexicans or Aztecs discovered by the Spaniards. Mr Wilson says very distinctly of those mysterious sculptures: “They are no rude abbreviations, like the symbols either of Indian or Aztec picture-writing; but rather suggest the idea of a matured system of ideography in its last transitional stage, before becoming a word-alphabet like that of the Chinese at the present day.”

We should be open to the charge of great presumption, if, with nothing before us but a few engravings by which to guide our judgment, we ventured to offer an opinion opposed to that of Mr Wilson, or of others who have made the subject one of especial study. But opposite to the very page (p. 140, vol. ii.) from which we take this last sentence we have quoted, Mr Wilson gives us an engraving of what are denominated “hieroglyphics.” It appears to us as if the pillar here represented had been divided into compartments, and each compartment had been filled by the artist with some appropriate subject, generally some human figure whose action and attitude are unintelligible to us; but the whole conveys the idea, not of a series of hieroglyphics, but of individual representations, each of which has its own independent meaning. Other engravings, indeed, approximate more nearly to the hieroglyphic; the arbitrary sign is more conspicuous, and there is a more frequent repetition of the same subject; but when we consider the poverty of invention that even in later times afflicts the arts, and the tendency to repeat and to copy which is very noticeable in rude times, we are not surprised that the same subject is often found on the same monument, or that it has spread from Copan to Palenque. There is nothing in the engravings before us, or in the account given of them, which proves that a really hieroglyphic system had been invented; and we cannot but suspect that those who undertake the task of deciphering them will inevitably fail, not because the key cannot be found, but because no key ever existed.

Suppose a monument erected or a medal struck in honour of one of our own excellent missionaries; suppose it represented the missionary-standing with one foot on a broken image, or idol, and that by his side knelt some half-naked savage with a cross in his hands—this mixture of picture and of symbol would tell its tale very intelligibly to us, for we have heard before of the labours of the missionary. But suppose this and other pictures of the same kind were handed down to a remote posterity, who had no information except what the pictures themselves conveyed by which to understand them, what hopeless perplexities would they for ever remain! And the use of the repeated symbol might lead to the persuasion that they were composed on some hieroglyphic system. We might imagine learned men toiling for ever over such representation, and never coming to any satisfactory result.

What different impressions the same pictorial representation may convey to two different persons, we have many an amusing instance of in the history of our Egyptian discoveries, or efforts at discovery. We borrow an example from the pages before us. On the wall of the temple at Philæ, at the first cataract of the Nile, a figure is seen seated at work on what seems a potter’s wheel, and there is a group of hieroglyphics over its head. One learned translator reads and explains thus:—“Kaum the Creator, on his wheel, moulds the divine members of Osiris (the type of man) in the shining house of life, or the solar disk.” Another learned man, Mr Birch of the British Museum, soars, if possible, still higher for a meaning:—“Phtah Totonem, the father of beginnings, is setting in motion the egg of the sun and moon, director of the gods of the upper world.” Mr Wilson, we presume, in accordance with a still later interpretation, calls this figure simply the “ram-headed god Kneph,” without explaining what he is doing with his wheel. If the picture and the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a pictorial representation alone.

We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own conjectures. He says:—

“On the sculptured tablets of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, as well as on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites in Central America, groups of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged in perpendicular or horizontal rows, as regularly as the letters of any ancient or modern inscription. The analogies to Egyptian hieroglyphics are great, for all the figures embody, more or less clearly defined, representations of objects in nature or art. But the differences are no less essential, and leave no room to doubt that in these columns of sculptured symbols we witness the highest development to which picture-writing attained, in the progress of that indigenous American civilisation so singularly illustrative of the intellectual unity which binds together the divers races of man. A portion of the hieroglyphic inscription which accompanies the remarkable Palenque sculpture of a figure offering what has been assumed to represent an infant before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the characteristics of this form of writing.”

What is the antiquity of these ruined cities? The first tendency was to carry them back into some very remote period, far beyond the memory or knowledge of the Mexicans and Peruvians. This was the first impression of Mr Stephens; afterwards he was disposed to bring them nearer the epoch of the Spanish conquest. He had lent a credulous ear to the story of some good padre, who had assured him that a native Indian city, greater than Copan could have ever been, still existed in a flourishing and populous condition, in some district untrodden by the European traveller. And this faith, that a Copan still existed, naturally induced him to believe that the ruined Copan, not belonging to an extinct civilisation, might not be so old as he first presumed it to be. He seems to have thought it possible that some of these cities might have been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and that others at that period were already a heap of ruins. War appears to have been incessant amongst almost all the tribes of the native Americans. On this account it appears to us very probable that many cities may have been built and destroyed, and a partial civilisation won and lost in them, prior to the epoch of the Spanish conquest. Such oscillations, very likely, occurred in the progress of American civilisation. And in some of these oscillatory movements a nearer approach might have been made to the art of writing than in that one phase of this civilisation in which the European discovered and destroyed it for ever. But our impression is, that, viewing the history of this continent as a whole, there has been a slow irregular progress, which had reached its highest point in the epoch of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.

The earliest stages of human progress are very slow, and much interrupted by wars of conquest and extermination. We find no difficulty, therefore, in assigning a great antiquity to some of these ruined cities, and a still greater antiquity to the curious mounds and earthworks in the valley of the Mississippi, without necessarily inferring that these are the remains of any civilisation superior to what history has made known to us. And before these mounds were constructed, there might have passed a long epoch in which man wandered wild by the rivers and in the forests of this continent. This last-mentioned epoch of mere savage existence, some of our speculative philosophers would extend to an enormous duration. We are not disposed, by any evidence yet submitted to us, to expand this period to what we must not call a disproportionate length, because we have not the whole life of the human race before us; but which, arguing on those progressive tendencies which, notwithstanding the impediments and checks they receive, constitute the main characteristic of the species, seems an improbable length. Let the geologist, however, to whom this part of the problem must be handed over, pursue his researches, and we need not say we shall be happy to receive whatever knowledge of the now forgotten past he can bring to light.

CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’

PART XVI.

NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.

Every description of literature has its appropriate art. This truth is immediately acknowledged in works of imagination. We speak, in familiar phrase, of the Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry. But the presence of art is less generally recognised in works addressed to the reason. Nevertheless, art has its place in a treatise on political economy, or in a table of statistics. For in all subjects, however rigidly confined to abstract principles or positive facts, the principles and facts cannot be thrown together pell-mell; they require an artistic arrangement. Expression itself is an art. So that even works of pure science cannot dispense with art, because they cannot dispense with expression. What is called method in Science is the art by which Science makes itself intelligible. There is exquisite art in the arrangement of a problem in Euclid. If a man have a general knowledge of the fact that all lines drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are equal, but has never seen that fact proved by Euclid, let him attempt to prove it in his own way, and then compare his attempt with the problem in Euclid which demonstrates the fact, and he will at once acknowledge the master’s art of demonstration. Pascal is said to have divined, by the force of his own genius, so large a number of Euclid’s propositions, as to appear almost miraculous to his admirers, and wholly incredible to his aspersers. Yet that number did not exceed eighteen. In fact, art and science have their meeting-point in method.

And though Kant applies the word genius (ingenium) strictly to the cultivators of Art, refusing to extend it to the cultivators of Science, yet the more we examine the highest orders of intellect, whether devoted to science, to art, or even to action, the more clearly we shall observe the presence of a faculty common to all such orders of intellect, because essential to completion in each—a faculty which seems so far intuitive or innate (ingenium) that, though study and practice perfect it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz., the faculty of grouping into order and symmetrical form, ideas in themselves scattered and dissimilar. This is the faculty of Method; and though every one who possesses it is not necessarily a great man, yet every great man must possess it in a very superior degree, whether he be a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, a general; for every great man exhibits the talent of organisation or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organisation nor construction. But in art, method is less perceptible than in science, and in familiar language usually receives some other name. Nevertheless, we include the meaning when we speak of the composition of a picture, the arrangement of an oration, the plan of a poem. Art employing method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth: but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct; while, in the first, it escapes from sight amid the shows of colour and the curves of grace.

And though, as I have said, Art enters into all works, whether addressed to the reason or to the imagination, those addressed to the imagination are works of Art par emphasis, for they require much more than the elementary principles which Art has in common with Science. The two part company with each other almost as soon as they meet on that ground of Method which is common to both,—Science ever seeking, through all forms of the ideal, to realise the Positive—Art, from all forms of the Positive, ever seeking to extract the Ideal. The beau ideal is not in the reason—its only existence is in the imagination. To create in the reader’s mind images which do not exist in the world, and leave them there, imperishable as the memories of friends with whom he has lived, and of scenes in which he has had his home, obviously necessitates a much ampler and much subtler Art than that which is required to make a positive fact clear to the comprehension. The highest quality of Art, as applied to literature, is therefore called “the Creative.” Nor do I attach any importance to the cavil of some over ingenious critics, who have denied that genius in reality creates; inasmuch as the forms it presents are only new combinations of ideas already existent. New combinations are, to all plain intents and purposes, creations. It is not in the power of man to create something out of nothing. And though the Deity no doubt can do so now—as those who acknowledge that the Divine Creator preceded all created things, must suppose that He did before there was even a Chaos—yet, so far as it is vouchsafed to us to trace Him through Nature, all that we see in created Nature is combined out of what before existed. Art, therefore, may be said to create when it combines existent details into new wholes. No man can say that the watch which lies before me, or the table on which I write, were not created (that is, made) by the watchmaker or cabinetmaker, because the materials which compose a watch or a table have been on the earth, so far as we know of it, since the earth was a world fit for men to dwell in. Therefore, neither in Nature nor in Art can it be truly said that that power is not creative which brings into the world a new form, though all which compose a form, as all which compose a flower, a tree, a mite, an elephant, a man, are, if taken in detail, as old as the gases in the air we breathe, or the elements of the earth we tread. But the Creative Faculty in Art requires a higher power than it asks in Nature; for Nature may create things without life and mind—Nature may create dust and stones which have no other life and mind than are possessed by the animalcules that inhabit them. But the moment Art creates, it puts into its creations life and intellect; and it is only in proportion as the life thus bestowed endures beyond the life of man, and the intellect thus expressed exceeds that which millions of men can embody in one form, that we acknowledge a really great work of Art—that we say of the Artist, centuries after he is dead, “He was indeed a Poet,” that is, a creator: He has created a form of life which the world did not know before, and breathed into that form a spirit which preserves it from the decay to which all of man himself except his soul is subjected. Achilles is killed by Paris; Homer re-creates Achilles—and the Achilles of Homer is alive to-day.

By the common consent of all educated nations, the highest order of Art in Literature is the Narrative, that is the Epic; and the next to it in eminence is the Dramatic. We are, therefore, compelled to allow that the objective faculty—which is the imperative essential of excellence in either of these two summits of the ‘forked Parnassus’—attains to a sublimer reach of art than the subjective—that is, in order to make my scholastic adjectives familiar to common apprehension, the artist who reflects vividly and truthfully, in the impartial mirror of his mind, other circumstances, other lives, other characters than his own, belongs to a higher order than he who, subjecting all that he contemplates to his own idiosyncrasy, reflects but himself in his various images of nature and mankind. We admit this when we come to examples. We admit that Homer is of a higher order of art than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets; ‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the Sonnets being the most subjective poems which the Elizabethan age can exhibit.

But it is not his choice of the highest order of art that makes a great artist. If one man says “I will write an epic,” and writes but a mediocre epic, and another man says “I will write a song,” and writes an admirable song—the man who writes what is admirable is superior to him who writes what is mediocre. There is no doubt that Horace is inferior to Homer—so inferior that we cannot apportion the difference. The one is epic, the other lyrical. But there is no doubt also that Horace is incalculably superior to Tryphiodorus or Sir Richard Blackmore, though they are epical and he is lyrical. In a word, it is perfectly obvious, that in proportion to the height of the art attempted must be the powers of the artist, so that there is the requisite harmony between his subject and his genius; and that he who commands a signal success in one of the less elevated spheres of art must be considered a greater artist than he who obtains but indifferent success in the most arduous.

Nevertheless, Narrative necessitates so high a stretch of imagination, and so wide a range of intellect, that it will always obtain, if tolerably well told, a precedence of immediate popularity over the most exquisite productions of an inferior order of the solid and staple qualities of imagination—so much so that, even where the first has resort to what may be called the brick and mortar of prose, as compared with the ivory, marble, and cedar of verse, a really great work of Narrative in prose will generally obtain a wider audience, even among the most fastidious readers, than poems, however good, in which the imagination is less creative, and the author rather describes or moralises over what is, than invents and vivifies what never existed. The advantage of the verse lies in its durability. Prose, when appealing to the imagination, has not the same characteristics of enduring longevity as verse;—first and chiefly, it is not so easily remembered. Who remembers twenty lines in ‘Ivanhoe’? Who does not remember twenty lines in the ‘Deserted Village’? Verse chains a closer and more minute survey to all beauties of thought expressed by it than prose, however elaborately completed, can do. And that survey is carried on and perpetuated by successive generations. So that in a great prose fiction, one hundred years after its date, there are innumerable beauties of thought and fancy which lie wholly unobserved; and in a poem, also surveyed one hundred years after its publication, there is probably not a single beauty undetected. This holds even in the most popular and imperishable prose fictions, read at a time of life when our memory is most tenacious, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ or the ‘Arabian Nights.’ We retain, indeed, a lively impression of the pleasure derived from the perusal of those masterpieces; of the salient incidents in story; the broad strokes of character, wit, or fancy; but quotations of striking passages do not rise to our lips as do the verses of poets immeasurably inferior, in the grand creative gifts of Poetry, to those fictionists of prose. And hence the Verse Poet is a more intimate companion throughout time than the Prose Poet can hope to be. In our moments of aspiration or of despondency, his musical thoughts well up from our remembrance. By a couple of lines he kindles the ambition of our boyhood, or soothes into calm the melancholy contemplations of our age.

Cæteris paribus, there can be no doubt of the advantage of verse over prose in all works of the imagination. But an artist does not select his own department of art with deliberate calculation of the best chances of posthumous renown. His choice is determined partly by his own organisation, and partly also by the circumstances of his time. For these last may control and tyrannise over his own more special bias. For instance, in our country, at present, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that there is no tragic drama—scarcely any living drama at all; whether from the want of competent actors, or from some disposition on the part of our public and our critics not to accord to a successful drama the rank which it holds in other nations, and once held in this, I do not care to examine; but the fact itself is so clear, that the Drama, though in reality it is, in itself, the highest order of poem, next to the Epic, seems to have wholly dropped out of our consideration as belonging to any form of poetry whatsoever. If any Englishman were asked by a foreigner to name even the minor poets of his country who have achieved reputation since the death of Lord Byron, it would not occur to him to name Sheridan Knowles—though perhaps no poet since Shakespeare has written so many successful dramas; nay, if he were asked to quote the principal poets whom England has produced, I doubt very much whether Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, or Otway, would occur to his mind as readily as Collins or Cowper. We have forgotten, in short, somehow or other, except in the single instance of Shakespeare, that dramas in verse are poems, and that where we have a great dramatist, who can hold the hearts of an audience spell-bound, we have a poet immeasurably superior, in all the great qualities of poetry, to three-fourths of the lyrical, and still more of the didactic versifiers who, lettered and bound as British poets, occupy so showy a range on our shelves. It is not thus anywhere except in our country. Ask a Frenchman who are the greatest poets of France, he names her dramatists immediately—Corneille, Racine, Molière. Ask a German, he names Goethe and Schiller; and if you inquire which of the works of those great masters in all variety of song he considers their greatest poems, he at once names their dramas. But to return; with us, therefore, the circumstances of the time would divert an author, whose natural bias might otherwise lead him towards dramatic composition, from a career so discouraged; and as the largest emoluments and the loudest reputation are at this time bestowed upon prose fiction, so he who would otherwise have been a dramatist becomes a novelist. I speak here, indeed, from some personal experience, for I can remember well, that when Mr Macready undertook the management of one of those two great national theatres, which are now lost to the national drama, many literary men turned their thoughts towards writing for the stage, sure that in Mr Macready they could find an actor to embody their conceptions; a critic who could not only appreciate, but advise and guide; and a gentleman with whom a man of letters could establish frank and pleasant understanding. But when Mr Macready withdrew from an experiment which probably required more capital than he deemed it prudent to risk in the mere rental of a theatre, which in other countries would be defrayed by the State, the literary flow towards the drama again ebbed back, and many a play, felicitously begun, remains to this day a fragment in the limbo of neglected pigeon-holes.

The circumstances of the time, therefore, though they do not arrest the steps of genius, alter its direction. Those departments of art in which the doors are the most liberally thrown open, will necessarily most attract the throng of artists, and it is the more natural that there should be a rush toward novel-writing, because no man and no woman who can scribble at all, ever doubt that they can scribble a novel. Certainly, it seems that the kinds of writing most difficult to write well, are the easiest to write ill. Where are the little children who cannot write what they call poetry, or the big children who cannot write what they call novels?—

“Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim,”

says Horace of the writers of his day. In our day the saying applies in most force to that class of poemata, which pretends to narrate the epic of life in the form of prose. For the docti as well as the indocti—men the most learned in all but the art of novel-writing—write novels, no less than the most ignorant; and often with no better success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with a sermon, puts it into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is for political disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and Low Church and no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and speculators on Utopia, fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to the ordinary understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with which a novel has no more to do than it has with astronomy. Certainly it is in the power of any one to write a book in three volumes, divide it into chapters, and call it a novel; but those processes no more make the work a novel, than they make it a History of China. We thus see many clever books by very clever writers, which, regarded as novels, are detestable. They are written without the slightest study of the art of narrative, and without the slightest natural gift to divine it. Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analysed the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written fiction—is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealised image of a truth. As Hegel well observes, “that which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.” A fiction, therefore, which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination, sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political, or moral, his work may or not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.

Religion and politics are not, indeed, banished from works of imagination; but to be artistically treated, they must be of the most general and the least sectarian description. In the record of the Fall of Man, for instance, Milton takes the most general belief in which all Christian nations concur,—nay, in which nations not Christian still acknowledge a myth of reverential interest. Or again, to descend from the highest rank of poetry to a third rank in novel-writing; when Mr Ward, in his charming story of ‘Tremaine,’ makes his very plot consist in the conversion of an infidel to a belief in the immortality of the soul, he does not depart from the artistic principle of dealing, not with particulars, but with generals. Had he exceeded the point at which he very wisely and skilfully stops, and pushed his argument beyond the doctrine on which all theologians concur, into questions on which they dispute, he would have lost sight of art altogether. So in politics—the general propositions from which politics start—the value of liberty, order, civilisation, &c.—are not only within the competent range of imaginative fiction, but form some of its loftiest subjects; but descend lower into the practical questions that divide the passions of a day, and you only waste all the complicated machinery of fiction, to do what you could do much better in a party pamphlet. For, in fact, as the same fine critic, whom I have previously quoted, says, with admirable eloquence:—

“Man, enclosed on all sides in the limits of the finite, and aspiring to get beyond them, turns his looks towards a superior sphere, more pure and more true, where all the oppositions and contradictions of the finite disappear—where his intellectual liberty, spreading its wings, without obstacles and without limits, attains to its supreme end. This region is that of art, and its reality is the ideal. The necessity of the beau-ideal in art is derived from the imperfections of the real. The mission of art is to represent, under sensible forms, the free development of life, and especially of mind.”

What is herein said of Art more especially applies to the art of narrative fiction, whether it take the form of verse or prose. For, when we come to that realm of fiction which, whether in verse or prose, is rendered most alluring to us, either by the fashion of our time or the genius of the artist, it is with a desire to escape, for the moment, out of this hard and narrow positive world in which we live; to forget, for a brief holiday, disputes between High and Low Church, Tories and Radicals—in fine, to lose sight of particulars in the contemplation of general truths. We can have our real life, in all its harsh outlines, whenever we please it; we do not want to see that real life, but its ideal image, in the fable land of art. There is another error common enough in second-rate novelists, and made still more common because it is praised by ordinary critics—viz., an attempt at the exact imitation of what is called Nature; one writer will thus draw a character in fiction as minutely as he can, from some individual he has met in life—another perplexes us with the precise patois of provincial mechanics—not as a mere relief to the substance of a dialogue, but as a prevalent part of it. Now I hold all this to be thoroughly antagonistic to art in fiction—it is the relinquishment of generals for the servile copy of particulars.... It cannot be too often repeated that art is not the imitation of nature; it is only in the very lowest degree of poetry—viz., the Descriptive, that the imitation of nature can be considered an artistic end. Even there, the true poet brings forth from nature more than nature says to the common ear or reveals to the common eye. The strict imitation of nature has always in it a something trite and mean—a man who mimics the cackle of the goose or the squeak of a pig, so truthfully, that for the moment he deceives us—attains but a praise that debases him. Nor this because there is something in the cackle of the goose, and the squeak of pig, that in itself has a mean association; for as Kant says truly, “Even a man’s exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.” Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature—takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess—viz., the mind and the soul of man.

Just as he is but a Chinese kind of painter, who seeks to give us, in exact prosaic detail, every leaf in a tree, which, if we want to see only a tree, we could see in a field much better than in a picture; so he is but a prosaic and mechanical pretender to imagination who takes a man out of real life, gives us his photograph, and says, “I have copied nature.” If I want to see that kind of man I could see him better in Oxford Street than in a novel. The great artist deals with large generalities, broad types of life and character, and though he may take flesh and blood for his model, he throws into the expression of the figure a something which elevates the model into an idealised image. A porter sate to Correggio for the representation of a saint; but Correggio so painted the porter, that the porter, on the canvass, was lost in the saint.

Some critics have contended that the delineation of character artistically—viz., through the selection of broad generalities in the complex nature of mankind, rather than in the observation of particulars by the portraiture of an individual—fails of the verisimilitude and reality—of the flesh-and-blood likeness to humanity—which all vivid delineation of human character necessarily requires. But this objection is sufficiently confuted by a reference to the most sovereign masterpieces of imaginative literature. The principal characters in Homer—viz., Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor, Paris, Thersites, &c.—are so remarkably the types of large and enduring generalities in human character, that, in spite of all changes of time and manners, we still classify and designate individuals under those antique representative names. We call such or such a man the Ulysses, or Nestor, or Achilles, or Thersites of his class or epoch. Virgil, on the contrary, has, in Æneas, but a feeble shadow reflected from no bodily form with which we are familiar, precisely because Æneas is not a type of any large and lasting generality in human character, but a poetised and half-allegorical silhouette of Augustus. There is, indeed, an antagonistic difference between fictitious character and biographical character. In biography, truth must be sought in the preference of particulars to generals; in imaginative creations truth is found in the preference of generals to particulars. We recognise this distinction more immediately with respect to the former. In biography, and indeed in genuine history, character appears faithful and vivid in proportion as it stands clear from all æsthetic purposes in the mind of the delineator. The moment the biographer or historian seeks to drape his personages in the poetic mantle, to subject their lives and actions to the poetic or idealising process, we are immediately and rightly seized with distrust of his accuracy. When he would dramatise his characters into types, they are unfaithful as likenesses. In like manner, if we carefully examine, we shall see that when the Poet takes on himself the task of the Biographer, and seeks to give minute representations of living individuals, his characters become conventional—only partially accurate—the accuracy being sought by exaggerating trivial peculiarities into salient attributes, rather than by the patient exposition of the concrete qualities which constitute the interior nature of living men. Satire or eulogy obtrudes itself unconsciously to the artist; and mars the catholic and enduring truthfulness which, in works of imagination, belongs exclusively to the invention of original images for æsthetic ends.

Goethe, treating of the drama, has said, that “to be theatrical a piece must be symbolical; that is to say, every action must have an importance of its own, and it must tend to one more important still.” It is still more important, for dramatic effect, that the dramatis personæ should embody attributes of passion, humour, sentiment, character, with which large miscellaneous audiences can establish sympathy; and sympathy can be only established by such a recognition of a something familiar to our own natures, or to our conception of our natures, as will allure us to transport ourselves for the moment into the place of those who are passing through events which are not familiar to our actual experience. None of us have gone through the events which form the action of Othello or Phèdre; but most of us recognise in our natures, or our conceptions of our natures, sufficient elements for ardent love or agonising jealousy, to establish a sympathy with the agencies by which, in Othello and Phèdre, those passions are expressed. Thus, the more forcibly the characters interest the generalities of mankind which compose an audience, the more truthfully they must represent what such generalities of mankind have in common—in short, the more they will be types, and the less they will be portraits. Some critics have supposed that, in the delineation of types, the artist would fall into the frigid error of representing mere philosophical abstractions. This, however, is a mistake which the poet who comprehends and acts upon the first principle of his art—viz., the preference of generals to particulars—will be the less likely to commit, in proportion as such generals are vivified into types of humanity. For he is not seeking to personate allegorically a passion; but to show the effects of the passion upon certain given forms of character under certain given situations: And he secures the individuality required, and avoids the lifeless pedantry of an allegorised abstraction, by reconciling passion, character, and situation with each other; so that it is always a living being in whom we sympathise. And the rarer and more unfamiliar the situation of life in which the poet places his imagined character, the more in that character itself we must recognise relations akin to our own flesh and blood, in order to feel interest in its fate. Thus, in the hands of great masters of fiction, whether dramatists or novelists, we become unconsciously reconciled, not only to unfamiliar, but to improbable, nay, to impossible situations, by recognising some marvellous truthfulness to human nature in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the character represented, granting that such a character could be placed in such a situation. The finest of Shakespeare’s imaginary characters are essentially typical. No one could suppose that the poet was copying from individuals of his acquaintance in the delineations of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Iago, Angelo, Romeo. They are as remote from portraiture as are the conceptions of Caliban and Ariel. In fine, the distinctive excellence of Shakespeare’s highest characters is that, while they embody truths the most subtle, delicate, and refining in the life and organisation of men, those truths are so assorted as to combine with the elements which humanity has most in common. And it is obvious to any reader of ordinary reflection, that this could not be effected if the characters themselves, despite all that is peculiar to each, were not, on the whole, typical of broad and popular divisions in the human family.

Turning to prose fiction, if we look to the greatest novel which Europe has yet produced (meaning by the word novel a representation of familiar civilised life)—viz., ‘Gil Blas’—we find the characters therein are vivid and substantial, capable of daily application to the life around us, in proportion as they are types and not portraits—such as Ambrose Lamela, Fabricio, the Archbishop of Toledo, &c.; and the characters that really fail of truth and completion are those which were intended to be portraits of individuals—such as Olivares, the Duke de Lerma, the Infant of Spain, &c. And if it be true that, in Sangrado, Le Sage designed the portrait of the physician Hecquet (the ingenious author of the “Système de la Trituration),” and, in the poetical charlatan Triaquero, aimed at a likeness of Voltaire, all we can say is, that no two portraits can be more unfaithful to the originals; and whatever belongs to the characters worthy the genius of the author is to be found in those strokes and touches by which the free play of humour involuntarily destroys the exactitude of portraiture. Again, with that masterpiece of prose romance or fantasy ‘Don Quixote,’ the character of the hero, if it could be regarded as that of an individual whom Cervantes found in life, would be only an abnormal and morbid curiosity subjected to the caricature of a satirist. But regarded as a type of certain qualities which are largely diffused throughout human nature, the character is psychologically true, and artistically completed; hence we borrow the word “Quixotic” whenever we would convey the idea of that extravagant generosity of enthusiasm for the redress of human wrongs, which, even in exciting ridicule, compels admiration and conciliates love. The grandeur of the conception of ‘Don Quixote’ is its fidelity to a certain nobleness of sentiment, which, however latent or however modified, exists in every genuinely noble nature. And hence, perhaps, of all works of broad humour, ‘Don Quixote’ is that which most approximates the humorous to the side of the sublime.

The reflective spirit of our age has strongly tended towards the development of a purpose in fiction, symbolical in a much more literal sense of the word than Goethe intended to convey in the extract I have quoted on the symbolical nature of theatrical composition. Besides the interest of plot and incident, another interest is implied, more or less distinctly or more or less vaguely, which is that of the process and working out of a symbolical purpose interwoven with the popular action. Instead of appending to the fable a formal moral, a moral signification runs throughout the whole fable, but so little obtrusively, that, even at the close, it is to be divined by the reader, not explained by the author. This has been a striking characteristic of the art of our century. In the former century it was but very partially cultivated, and probably grows out of that reaction from materialism which distinguishes our age from the last. Thus—to quote the most familiar illustrations I can think of—in Goethe’s novel of ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ besides the mere interest of the incidents, there is an interest in the inward signification of an artist’s apprenticeship in art, of a man’s apprenticeship in life. In ‘Transformation,’ by Mr Hawthorne, the mere story of outward incident can never be properly understood, unless the reader’s mind goes along with the exquisite mysticism which is symbolised by the characters. In that work, often very faulty in the execution, exceedingly grand in the conception, are typified the classical sensuous life, through Donato; the Jewish dispensation, through Miriam; the Christian dispensation, through Hilda, who looks over the ruins of Rome from her virgin chamber amidst the doves.

To our master novelists of a former age—to Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett—this double plot, if so I may call it, was wholly unknown. Swift, indeed, apprehended it in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ which I consider the greatest poem—that is, the greatest work of pure imagination and original invention—of the age in which he lived; and Johnson divined it in ‘Rasselas,’ which, but for the interior signification, would be the faulty and untruthful novel which Lord Macaulay has, I venture to opine, erroneously declared it to be. Lord Macaulay censures ‘Rasselas’ because the Prince of Abyssinia does not talk like an Abyssinian. Now, it seems to me that a colouring faithful to the manners of Abyssinia, is a detail so trivial in reference to the object of the author of a philosophical romance, that it is more artistic to omit than to observe it. Rasselas starts at once, not from a positive but from an imagined world—he starts from the Happy Valley to be conducted (in his progress through actual life, to the great results of his search after a happiness more perfect than that of the Happy Valley) to the Catacombs. This is the interior poetical signification of the tale of ‘Rasselas’—the final result of all departure from the happy land of contented ignorance is to be found at the grave. There, alone, a knowledge happier than ignorance awaits the seeker beyond the catacombs. For a moral so broad, intended for civilised readers, any attempt to suit colouring and manners to Abyssinian savages would have been, not an adherence to, but a violation of, Art. The artist here wisely disdains the particulars—he is dealing with generals.

Thus Voltaire’s ‘Zadig’ is no more a Babylonian than Johnson’s ‘Rasselas’ is an Abyssinian. Voltaire’s object of philosophical satire would have been perfectly lost if he had given us an accurate and antiquarian transcript of the life of the Chaldees; and, indeed, the worst parts in ‘Zadig’ (speaking artistically), are those in which the author does, now and then, assume a quasi antique oriental air, sadly at variance with meanings essentially modern, couched in irony essentially French.

But the writer who takes this duality of purpose—who unites an interior symbolical signification with an obvious popular interest in character and incident—errs, firstly, in execution, if he render his symbolical meaning so distinct and detailed as to become obviously allegorical—unless, indeed, as in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ it is avowedly an allegory; and, secondly, he errs in artistic execution of his plan, whenever he admits a dialogue not closely bearing on one or the other of his two purposes, and whenever he fails in merging the two into an absolute unity at the end.

Now, the fault I find chiefly with novelists is their own contempt for their craft. A clever and scholarlike man enters into it with a dignified contempt. “I am not going to write,” he says, “a mere novel.” What, then, is he going to write? What fish’s tail will he add to the horse’s head? A tragic poet might as well say, “I am not going to write a mere tragedy.” The first essential to success in the art you practise is respect for the art itself. Who could ever become a good shoemaker if he did not have a profound respect for the art of making shoes? There is an ideal even in the humblest mechanical craft. A shoemaker destined to excel his rivals will always have before his eye the vision of a perfect shoe, which he is always striving to realise, and never can. It was well said by Mr Hazlitt, “That the city prentice who did not think the Lord Mayor in his gilded coach was the greatest of human beings would come to be hanged.” Whatever our calling be, we can never rise in it unless we exalt, even to an exaggerated dignity, the elevation of the calling itself. We are noble peasants or noble kings just in proportion as we form a lofty estimate of the nobility that belongs to peasants or the nobility that belongs to kings.

We may despair of the novelist who does not look upon a novel as a consummate work of art—who does not apply to it, as Fielding theoretically, as Scott practically, did, the rules which belong to the highest order of imagination. Of course he may fail of his standard, but he will fail less in proportion as the height of his standard elevates his eye and nerves his sinews.

The first object of a novelist is to interest his reader; the next object is the quality of the interest. Interest in his story is essential, or he will not be read; but if the quality of the interest be not high, he will not be read a second time. And if he be not read a second time by his own contemporaries, the chance is that he will not be read once by posterity. The degree of interest is for the many—the quality of interest for the few. But the many are proverbially fickle, the few are constant. Steadfast minorities secure, at last, the success of great measures, and confirm, at last, the fame of great writings.

I have said that many who, in a healthful condition of our stage, would be dramatists, become novelists. But there are some material distinctions between the dramatic art and the narrative—distinctions as great as those between the oratorical style and the literary. Theatrical effects displease in a novel. In a novel much more than in a drama must be explained and accounted for. On the stage the actor himself interprets the author; and a look, a gesture, saves pages of writing. In a novel the author elevates his invention to a new and original story; in a drama, I hold that the author does well to take at least the broad outlines of a story already made. It is an immense advantage to him to find the tale he is to dramatise previously told, whether in a history, a legend, a romance, or in the play of another age or another land; and the more the tale be popularly familiarised to the audience, the higher will be the quality of the interest he excites. Thus, in the Greek tragedy, the story and the characters were selected from the popular myths. Thus Shakespeare takes his story either from chronicles or novels. Thus Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire take, from scenes of antiquity the most familiarly known, their fables and their characters. Nor is it only an advantage to the dramatist that the audience should come to the scene somewhat prepared by previous association for the nature of the interest invoked; it is also an advantage to the dramatist that his invention—being thus relieved from the demand on its powers in what, for the necessities of the dramatic art, is an unimportant if not erroneous direction of art—is left more free to combine the desultory materials of the borrowed story into the harmony of a progressive plot—to reconcile the actions of characters, whose existence the audience take for granted, with probable motives—and, in a word, to place the originality there where alone it is essential to the drama—viz., in the analysis of the heart, in the delineation of passion, in the artistic development of the idea and purpose which the drama illustrates through the effects of situation and the poetry of form.

But in the narrative of prose fiction an original story is not an auxiliary or erroneous, but an essential, part of artistic invention; and even where the author takes the germ of his subject and the sketch of his more imposing characters from History, he will find that he will be wanting in warmth of interest if the tale he tells be not distinct from that of the history he presses into his service—more prominently brought forward, more minutely wrought out—and the character of the age represented, not only through the historical characters introduced, but those other and more general types of life which he will be compelled to imagine for himself. This truth is recognised at once when we call to mind such masterpieces in historical fiction as ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Kenilworth,’ ‘Quentin Durward,’ and ‘I Promessi Sposi.’

In the tragic drama, however, historical subjects appear to necessitate a different treatment from that which most conduces to the interest of romantic narrative. There is a dignity in historical characters which scarcely permits them to be transferred to the stage without playing before the audience the important parts which they played in life. When they enter on the scene they excite a predominating interest, and we should not willingly see them deposed into secondary agencies in the conduct of the story. They ought not to be introduced at all, unless in fitting correspondence with our notions of the station they occupied and the influence they exercised in the actual world; and thus, whether they are made fated victims through their sufferings, or fateful influences through their power, still, in the drama, it is through them that the story moves: them the incidents affect—them the catastrophe involves—whether for their triumph or their fall.

The drama not necessitating an original fable nor imaginary characters, that which it does necessitate in selecting a historical subject is, the art of so arranging and concentrating events in history as to form a single action, terminating in a single end, wrought through progressive incidents clearly linked together. It will be seen that the dramatic treatment is, in this respect, opposed to the purely historical treatment; for in genuine history there are innumerable secondary causes tending to each marked effect, which the dramatist must wholly eliminate or set aside. He must, in short, aim at generals to the exclusion of particulars.

And thus, as his domain is the passions, he must seek a plot which admits of situations for passion, and characters in harmony with such situations. Great historical events in themselves are rarely dramatic—they are made so on the stage by the appeal to emotions with which, in private life, the audience are accustomed to sympathise. The preservation of the Republic of Venice from a conspiracy would have an interest in history from causes appealing to political reasoning, that would be wholly without interest on the stage. The dramatist, therefore, places the preservation of Venice in the struggle of a woman’s heart between the conflicting passions, with which, in private life, the audience could most readily sympathise. According as Belvidera acts, as between her husband and her father, Venice will be saved or lost. This is dramatic treatment—it is not historical. All delineations of passion involve the typical; because whoever paints a passion common to mankind presents us with a human type of that passion, varied, indeed, through the character of an individual and the situations in which he is placed; but still, in the expression of the passion itself, sufficiently germane to all in whom that passion exists, whether actively or latently, to permit the spectator to transfer himself into the place and person of him who represents it. Hence the passions of individuals, though affecting only themselves, or a very confined range of persons connected with them, command, in reality, a far wider scope in artistic treatment than the political events affecting millions in historical fact. For political events, accurately and dispassionately described, are special to the time and agents—they are traced through the logic of the reason, which only a comparative few exercise, and even the few exercise it in the calm of their closets, they do not come into the crowd of a theatre for its exercise. But the passions of love, ambition, jealousy—the conflict between opposing emotions of affection and duty—expressed in the breast of an individual, are not special,—they are universal. And before a dramatic audience the safety of a state is merged or ignored in the superior interest felt in the personation of some emotion more ardent than any state interest, and only more ardent because universal amongst mankind in all states and all times. If the domestic interest be the strongest of which the drama is capable, it is because it is the interest in which the largest number of human breasts can concur, and in which the poet who creates it can most escape from particulars into generals. In the emancipation of Switzerland from the Austrian yoke, history can excite our interest in the question whether William Tell ever existed—and in showing the large array of presumptive evidence against the popular story of his shooting the apple placed on his son’s head. But in the drama William Tell is the personator of the Swiss liberties; and the story of the apple, in exciting the domestic interest of the relationship between father and son, is that very portion of history which the dramatic artist will the most religiously conserve,—obtaining therein one incalculable advantage for his effect—viz., that it is not his own invention, and therefore of disputable probability; but, whether fable or truth in the eyes of the historical critic, so popularly received and acknowledged as a truth, that the audience are prepared to enter into the emotions of the father, and the peril of the son.

It is, then, not in the invention of a story, nor in the creation of imaginary characters, that a dramatist proves his originality as an artist, but in the adaptation of a story, found elsewhere, to a dramatic purpose; and in the fidelity, not to historical detail, but to psychological and metaphysical truth with which he reconciles the motives and conduct of the characters he selects from history, to the situations in which they are placed, so as to elicit for them, under all that is peculiar to their nature or their fates, the necessary degree of sympathy from emotions of which the generality of mankind are susceptible.

But to the narrator of fiction—to the story-teller—the invention of fable and of imaginary character is obviously among the legitimate conditions of his art; and a fable purely original has in him a merit which it does not possess in the tragic or comic poet.

On the other hand, the skilful mechanism of plot, though not without considerable value in the art of narrative, is much less requisite in the Novelist than in the Dramatist. Many of the greatest prose fictions are independent of plot altogether. It is only by straining the word to a meaning foreign to the sense it generally conveys, that we can recognise a plot in ‘Don Quixote,’ and scarcely any torture of the word can make a plot out of ‘Gil Blas.’ It is for this reason that the novel admits of what the drama never should admit—viz., the operation of accident in the conduct of the story: the villain, instead of coming to a tragic close through the inevitable sequences of the fate he has provoked, may be carried off, at the convenient time, by a stroke of apoplexy, or be run over by a railway train. Nevertheless, in artistic narrative, accident, where it affects a dénouement, should be very sparingly employed. Readers, as well as critics, feel it to be a blot in the story of ‘Rob Roy’ when the elder brothers of Rashleigh Osbaldistone are killed off by natural causes unforeseen and unprepared for in the previous train of events narrated, in order to throw Rashleigh into a position which the author found convenient for his ultimate purpose.

A novel of high aim requires, of course, delineation of character, and with more patient minuteness, than the drama; and some novels live, indeed, solely through the delineation of character; whereas there are some tragedies in which the characters, when stripped of theatrical costume, are very trivial, but which, despite the poverty of character, are immortal, partly from the skill of the plot, partly from the passion which is wrought out of the situations, and principally, perhaps, from the beauty of form—the strength and harmony of the verse. This may be said of the French drama generally, and of Racine in especial. The tragic drama imperatively requires passion—the comic drama humour or wit; but a novel may be a very fine one without humour, passion, or wit—it may be made great in its way (though that way is not the very highest one) by delicacy of sentiment, interest of story, playfulness of fancy, or even by the level tenor of everyday life, not coarsely imitated, but pleasingly idealised. Still mystery is one of the most popular and effective sources of interest in a prose narrative, and sometimes the unravelling of it constitutes the entire plot. Every one can remember the thrill with which he first sought to fathom the dark secret in ‘Caleb Williams’ or ‘The Ghost-Seer.’ Even in the comic novel, the great founder of that structure of art has obtained praise for perfection of plot almost solely from the skill with which Tom Jones’s parentage is kept concealed; the terror, towards the end, when the hero seems to have become involved in one of the crimes from which the human mind most revolts, and the pleased surprise with which that terror is relieved by the final and unexpected discovery of his birth, with all the sense of the many fine strokes of satire in the commencement of the tale, which are not made clear to us till the close.

To prose fiction there must always be conceded an immense variety in the modes of treatment—a bold licence of loose capricious adaptation of infinite materials to some harmonious unity of interest, which even the most liberal construction of dramatic licence cannot afford to the drama. We need no lengthened examination of this fact; we perceive at once that any story can be told, but comparatively very few stories can be dramatised. And hence some of the best novels in the world cannot be put upon the stage; while some, that have very little merit as novels, have furnished subject-matter for the greatest plays in the modern world. The interest in a drama must be consecutive, sustained, progressive—it allows of no longueurs. But the interest of a novel may be very gentle, very irregular—may interpose long conversations in the very midst of action—always provided, however, as I have before said, that they bear upon the ulterior idea for which the action is invented. Thus we have in ‘Wilhelm Meister’ long conversations on art or philosophy just where we want most to get on with the story—yet, without those conversations, the story would not have been worth the telling; and its object could not, indeed, be comprehended—its object being the accomplishment of a human mind in the very subjects on which the conversations turn. So, in many of the most animated tales of Sir Walter Scott, the story pauses for the sake of some historical disquisition necessary to make us understand the altered situations of the imagined characters. I need not say that all such delays to the action would be inadmissible in the drama. Hence an intelligent criticism must always allow a latitude to artistic prose fiction which it does not accord to the dramatic, nor indeed to any other department of imaginative representation of life and character. I often see in our Reviews a charge against some novel, that this or that is “a defect of art,” which is, when examined, really a beauty in art—or a positive necessity which that department of art could not avoid—simply because the Reviewer has been applying to the novel rules drawn from the drama, and not only inapplicable, but adverse, to the principles which regulate the freedom of the novel. Now, in reality, where genius is present, art cannot be absent. Unquestionably, genius may make many incidental mistakes in art, but if it compose a work of genius, that work must be a work of art on the whole. For just as virtue consists in a voluntary obedience to moral law, so genius consists in a voluntary obedience to artistic law. And the freedom of either is this, that the law is pleasing to it—has become its second nature. Both human virtue and human genius must err from time to time; but any prolonged disdain, or any violent rupture, of the law by which it exists, would be death to either. There is this difference to the advantage of virtue (for, happily, virtue is necessary to all men, and genius is but the gift of few), that we can lay down rules by the observance of which any one can become a virtuous man; but we can lay down no rules by which any one can become a man of genius. No technical rules can enable a student to become a great dramatist or a great novelist; but there is in art an inherent distinction between broad general principles and technical rules. In all genuine art there is a sympathetic, affectionate, and often quite unconscious adherence to certain general principles. The recognition of these principles is obtained through the philosophy of criticism; first, by a wide and patient observation of masterpieces of art, which are to criticism what evidences of fact are to science; and next, by the metaphysical deduction, from those facts, of the principles which their concurrence serves to establish. By the putting forth of these principles we cannot make bad writers good, nor mediocre writers great; but we may enable the common reader to judge with more correctness of the real quality of merit, or the real cause of defect, in the writers he peruses; and by directing and elevating his taste, rectify and raise the general standard of literature. We may do more than that—we may much facilitate the self-tuition that all genius has to undergo before it attains to its full development, in the harmony between its freedom and those elements of truth and beauty which constitute its law. As to mere technical rules, each great artist makes them for himself; he does not despise technical rules, but he will not servilely borrow them from other artists; he forms his own. They are the by-laws which his acquaintance with his special powers lays down as best adapted to their exercise and their sphere. Apelles is said to have made it a by-law to himself to use only four colours in painting: probably Apelles found his advantage in that restraint, or he would not have imposed it on his pallet. But if Zeuxis found that he, Zeuxis, painted better by using a dozen colours than by confining himself to four, he would have used a dozen, or he would not have been Zeuxis.

On careful and thoughtful examination we shall find, that neither in narrative nor dramatic fiction do great writers differ on the principles of art in the works which posterity accepts from them as great—whereas they all differ more or less in technical rules. There is no great poetic artist, whether in narrative or the drama, who, in his best works, ever represents a literal truth rather than the idealised image of a truth—who ever condescends to servile imitations of nature—who ever prefers the selection of particulars, in the delineation of character or the conception of fable, to the expression of generals—who does not aim at large types of mankind rather than the portraiture of contemporaries—or, at least, wherever he may have been led to reject these principles, it will be in performances that are allowed to be beneath him. But merely technical rules are no sooner laid down by the critics of one age, than they are scornfully violated by some triumphant genius in the next. Technical rules have their value for the artist who employs them, and who usually invents and does not borrow them. Those that he imposes on himself he seldom communicates to others. They are his secret—they spring from his peculiarities of taste; and it is the adherence to those rules which constitutes what we sometimes call his style, but more properly his manner. It is by such rules, imposed on himself, that Pope forms his peculiar cæsura, and mostly closes his sense at the end of a couplet. When this form of verse becomes trite and hackneyed, up rises some other poet, who forms by-laws for himself, perhaps quite the reverse. All that we should then ask of him is success: if his by-laws enable him to make as good a verse as Pope’s in another way, we should be satisfied; if not—not. One main use in technical rules to an author, if imposed on himself, or freely assented to by himself, is this—the interposition of some wholesome impediment to the over-facility which otherwise every writer acquires by practice. And as this over-facility is naturally more apt to be contracted in prose than in verse, and in the looseness or length of the novel or romance, than in any other more terse and systematic form of imaginative fiction—so I think it a wise precaution in every prolific novelist to seek rather to multiply, than emancipate himself from, the wholesome restraints of rules; provided always that such rules are the natural growth of his own mind, and confirmed by his own experience of their good effect on his productions. For if Art be not the imitator of Nature, it is still less the copyist of Art. Its base is in the study of Nature—not to imitate, but first to select, and then to combine, from Nature those materials into which the artist can breathe his own vivifying idea; and as the base of Art is in the study of Nature, so its polish and ornament must be sought by every artist in the study of those images which the artists before him have already selected, combined, and vivified; not, in such study, to reproduce a whole that represents another man’s mind, and can no more be born again than can the man who created it; but again to select, to separate, to recombine—to go through the same process in the contemplation of Art which he employed in the contemplation of Nature; profiting by all details, but grouping them anew by his own mode of generalisation, and only availing himself of the minds of others for the purpose of rendering more full and complete the realisation of that idea of truth or beauty which has its conception in his own mind. For that can be neither a work of art (in the æsthetic sense of the word) nor a work of genius in any sense of the word, which does not do a something that, as a whole, has never been done before; which no other living man could have done; and which never, to the end of time, can be done again—no matter how immeasurably better may be the other things which other men may do. ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Childe Harold’ were produced but the other day; yet already it has become as impossible to reproduce an ‘Ivanhoe’ or a ‘Childe Harold’ as to reproduce an ‘Iliad.’ A better historical romance than ‘Ivanhoe,’ or a better contemplative poem than ‘Childe Harold,’ may be written some day or other; but, in order to be better, it must be totally different. The more a writer is imitated the less he can be reproduced. No one of our poets has been so imitated as Pope, not because he is our greatest or our most fascinating poet, but because he is the one most easily imitated by a good versifier. But is there a second Pope, or will there be a second Pope, if our language last ten thousand years longer?

THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS, BART.[^[3]]

When the announcement first appeared that a biography of the late Sir Howard Douglas was in progress, the impression made upon our minds was anything but favourable to the enterprise. Of the good and gifted man himself, as he mixed in general society, our recollections were indeed of the most pleasurable kind. He stood before us with his kindly manner, his noble appearance, his high bearing, his generous nature, the perfect model of what an English officer and gentleman ought to be. And casting our eyes across the room to the shelf on which his ‘Naval Gunnery’ and ‘Military Bridges’ were ranged, we thought of him as a man of science more than ordinarily well read in his profession. But not all our desire to find in connection with him materials for a consecutive history, helped us to any other conclusion than this, that the story of his life, if told at length, must be a dull one. We acknowledge, less with shame than with satisfaction and some surprise, that we were quite mistaken. Sir Howard Douglas’s career had more of romance about it than that of many a man who has filled a much larger space in the world’s observation. It was successful as far as it carried him, because a sound judgment controlled good abilities, and directed them to a wise end. And, above all, it reads this lesson to coming generations, that he who honestly seeks the wellbeing of others rarely fails, sooner or later, to secure his own. Nor must we omit to render to Sir Howard’s biographer the commendation which he deserves. Mr Fullom has executed his task well; neither overlaying his narrative with details, which sometimes weary, nor keeping back anything which might conduce to its completeness, he has given us one of the pleasantest books which, for some time past, has come under our notice.

The house of Douglas has from the earliest times been renowned in Scottish story. Its alliance with the royal family began in the fourteenth century, when the Lord of Dalkeith took to wife Mary the fifth daughter of James I. On this same Lord of Dalkeith the earldom of Morton was not long afterwards conferred by his brother-in-law, James II. From father to son, or from uncle to nephew, the earldom passed through twelve generations, and narrowly escaped coming in the thirteenth to the father of Sir Howard. But Charles Douglas, if he missed a coronet, won for himself a baronetcy and great distinction as a British sailor. He it was who, when Arnold and Montgomery besieged Quebec, forced his squadron through the ice on the St Lawrence and relieved the place. He it was who first of all constructed a flotilla for himself, and then swept the Canadian lakes of the rebel gunboats; and by-and-by, on the 12th of April 1782, he caught, as if by inspiration, that idea, the application of which enabled Admiral Rodney to break the enemy’s line, and to save at a critical moment the honour of the British fleet.

Of this Sir Charles Douglas, Howard was the eldest son by a second marriage. Sir Charles’s first wife, a foreign lady, had brought him two sons and a daughter, so that Howard’s prospects, so far as title and fortune were concerned, could not have been in his infancy very bright: and they would have been entirely overcast by the early death of his mother, had not her place been well supplied by a maternal aunt. Under the roof of this lady, Mrs Bailey of Olive Bank, near Musselburgh, the little fellow grew and prospered, repaying all the tenderness with which he was reared by his affectionate and gentle disposition, as well as by his industry and success over his books.

Howard’s brothers both entered the navy. This was natural, and it was perhaps equally so that Howard should desire to follow their example; but Sir Charles considered that, if his three sons were all to embrace the same profession, the chances were that they would only stand in each other’s way. He gave directions, therefore, that Howard should be educated for a different walk in life, and the boy ascended in due time from the charge of the governess to the grammar-school. Yet the child’s tastes were entirely naval all the while. He built toy ships, and sailed them on a pond in the garden; he made friends of the fisher-lads and cabin-boys along the coast, and became so initiated into the mysteries of their craft that none among them could better manage than he a fishing-boat or a ship’s yawl. It thus became clear to Sir Charles Douglas, who visited his sister in 1789, previously to assuming the command on a foreign station, that nature had designed his youngest son for a career similar to his own, and he made up his mind to take Howard with him, and to rate him as a midshipman on board the flag-ship. But the coveted flag he was never destined to hoist. A sudden illness carried him off while the guest of his sister, and Howard’s lot was cast for him in the army.

The Royal Academy at Woolwich was more easily entered in those days than it is now. A pass examination was, however, required; and young Douglas, strange to say, in spite of his marked bias for practical mechanics, failed in the elements of geometry. But he had made so good a figure in other respects, and appeared so cast down by the circumstance, that the examiner, Dr Hutton, encouraged him to try again; and three weeks spent with a clever crammer sufficed to bring him up to the mark. He therefore presented himself a second time, passed, and was admitted.

There is one defect in Mr Fullom’s history which puts his readers to considerable inconvenience—he is not very accurate in his dates. We do not quite make out, for example, when young Douglas made his way into the Academy, or how long he continued a cadet; but we are told, what is extremely probable in itself, that he was much beloved by his contemporaries, and that he soon took the lead among them both in the playground and in the class-room. His passion for naval affairs continued as strong as ever, and he indulged it by frequent boat excursions on the Thames. He swam, also, like a duck, and paid many a furtive visit to Deptford dockyard, where he studied by fits and starts the art of shipbuilding. His vacations he spent in Scotland, passing to and from Leith in one of the smacks;—an intense delight to him, because he was instructed by the crews in the arts of knotting and splicing, of plaiting points and gaskets, of making gammets, and heaving the lead. It is not often that a youth displays such unmistakable aptitude for a career which he is not destined to follow; and it still more rarely happens that the amusements of the boy, whom circumstances in after life place in a groove apparently wide apart from them, turn out to have been by no means the least useful branches of his education, either to himself or to others.

After completing his college course, Douglas received a lieutenant’s commission, and in 1795 assumed the command of a small artillery corps in the north of England. His headquarters were in Tynemouth Castle, and he had detachments at Sunderland, Hartlepool, and Berwick-upon-Tweed. His entire force in gunners fell short of fifty men; yet this was at a time when the risk of invasion appeared to be imminent, and Douglas and his gunners were necessarily exposed to bear the brunt of it. The young lieutenant felt how perfectly inefficient his force was, and cast about to devise some means of increasing it. He asked first for a reinforcement of artillerymen, which could not be afforded. He then suggested to the general officer of the district the propriety of drilling a portion of his infantry to the great-gun exercise; and himself, with unwearied diligence, instructed thirty men from each of the regiments quartered within many miles of Tynemouth. He was not, however, satisfied even with this—the thought struck him that he might enlist the sympathies of the fishermen and coasting sailors in the cause which he had at heart; and having obtained through General Balfour the sanction of the Government, he invited them to form themselves into companies of volunteer artillery. Upwards of five hundred fine fellows answered to the call; and the thoughtful lad had soon the satisfaction of knowing that danger, if it did come, would not find him unprepared, and that the merit of having provided a remedy for a great and acknowledged evil was entirely his own.

It is not to be supposed that the young man was so given up to serious matters as to turn away from the recreations common to his age and profession: on the contrary, Douglas seems to have been at Tynemouth the gayest of the gay. He danced well, rode well, established a yacht in which he made many adventurous cruises, and won the hearts of young and old by his frank and graceful manners. But sterner work awaited him, and the romance of his existence began.

Early in August 1795 he received orders to take charge of a detachment of troops, which, with women and children, were to proceed from Woolwich to Quebec. He joined the Phillis transport at Gravesend, and found himself the senior officer, with six subalterns besides himself on board. To him the prospect of a voyage across the Atlantic was a positive delight. What cared he about the inadequacy of accommodation, or the wretched nature of the food which was then issued to soldiers embarked? His thoughts were entirely given up to the great object of his boyish fancy—the actual navigation of a ship out of sight of land, and all the enterprise and excitement incident thereto. Never neglecting his own proper duties, he accordingly found time to make himself one of the crew, and, sharing their labours, and evincing perfect intelligence of all that was required, he won more than the goodwill, the confidence and respect of every one on board.

The Phillis was a slow sailer. She encountered various changes of weather, behaving, upon the whole, tolerably well, though sometimes uneasy and always uncomfortable. At last, however, a tempest overtook her about forty leagues to the east of the southern entrance of the Gulf of St Lawrence, and the sea swept over her decks, knocking the boats from their fastenings. The gale lasted all that day and throughout the night; but a lull came in the morning, and the women and children, who had been kept below, were allowed to come on deck. The same evening the officers entertained the skipper, and all were rejoicing in the prospect of escape from danger, when the mate suddenly broke into the cabin and requested the captain to follow him. Douglas guessed from the manner of the two men that something must be wrong. He ran up the companion-stair, and heard—for he could see nothing—the roar of breakers close ahead. The ship had drifted before the wind, and was already in imminent danger. Immediately the soldiers were ordered up, and, with their assistance, the best bower anchor was let go. But though it seemed to check the vessel for a moment, it soon began to drag; and, with breakers on the bow, practised eyes discovered that there was land on both quarters—that the ship was embayed.

It was evident, under such circumstances, that the single chance of saving the lives of those on board was to force the Phillis, if possible, round a projecting reef on her lee bow. But this could be done only by making more sail, and to go aloft at that moment and shake out reefs was a service of the utmost hazard. The seamen ordered to do so hung back, whereupon Douglas sprang into the shrouds, and, followed by two cabin-boys, accomplished the operation. The consequence was that the Phillis bore up and cleared the point, though very narrowly; but it was a mere respite from danger. The storm grew more and more tremendous. The boats could with difficulty be moved, and one of them (the long-boat) was scarce got over the side ere she went to pieces. The ship was now upon the rocks, and another boat was lowered chiefly by the exertions of the soldiers. But she in her turn seemed in danger of being broken to pieces; whereupon Douglas, followed by two officers, sprang in, hoping to fend her off from the ship’s side. Already she was more than half full of water, which compelled the three youths to spring back, in doing which Douglas missed his footing and fell into the sea. Happily he had divested himself of most of his clothing, and his skill as a swimmer stood him in good stead, for he rose upon the top of a wave, and one of his friends, seizing his collar at the moment, dragged him on to the deck.

Shipwreck under any circumstances is an awful thing. The wreck of the Phillis went on, so to speak, through two days and as many nights. Men and women went overboard; children died from exposure in their mothers’ arms. One poor fellow struck out in despair for the land, and was lost among the breakers. The first raft which the survivors constructed carried two of their number to the shore, who, regardless of the fate of their companions, immediately deserted. A second raft was put together, and on that Mr Douglas reached the land. He had carried a rope with him, and began immediately to construct a bridge. Fortunately the wind lulled at this moment, and the wreck was cleared of its living occupants. But scarcely was this done ere the Phillis went to pieces without an opportunity having been afforded of securing the means of subsistence even for a single day.

The sufferings of these poor people on the barren cliff to which they escaped were dreadful. Happily the waves brought ashore some pieces of cloth as well as a cask of wine and a quantity of smoked pork. But the sailors seized the wine and drank it; and the first night was spent in cold and misery, for the snow lay deep on the ground, and there was no fuel with which to make a fire. All lay down and slept—a sleep from which they would probably never have wakened had not Douglas been roused by a fearful scream, to which the wife of his servant gave utterance. She had gone mad from privations and excitement, and died shrieking to the last, so that her voice was heard over the wind and rain. She had outlived all the women who went on board at Gravesend, and not a child survived.

Mr Douglas was at this time barely nineteen years of age, yet such was the force of his character that all about him, seamen as well as soldiers, looked to him for instructions. He rescued a second cask of wine from being broached this time by soldiers, though not without a struggle. “We are all equals now,” said the leader of the mutineers; “we’ll take no orders from you or anybody else.” “Won’t you!” cried Douglas, springing at his throat with a knife; “you are under my command; and if you don’t obey, by heavens, I’ll kill you!” The man yielded; the small stock of provisions and wine was secured, and after a vain attempt to penetrate through the forest, the whole party returned again to the cliff—there to wait till either help should come from the sea, or famine do its work and destroy them.

A feeling of despair was beginning to gain the mastery, when one day the cry was heard, “A sail! a sail!” They had already set up a spar, and hoisted a piece of cloth upon it; but the object was small, and might not be discerned from a distance, and then what a fate awaited them! It was not, however, so ordered. The sail approached; she was a small schooner trading between St John and Great Jarvis; and the crew gave back the cheer which the poor castaways raised in their agony, crowding at the same time to the beach. They were all taken off and carried to the place whither the schooner was bound, and spent the winter, roughly but not unhappily, among the honest fishermen who had there established themselves.

The winter seemed long, the days being very short in that latitude. Not ungrateful, but tired of the monotony, Douglas purchased a whale-boat, and, having fitted it with a deck, determined, as soon as the season should advance a little, to risk a voyage to the West Indies. Several of his brother officers agreed to share the danger with him, and they got a St Lawrence pilot and a seaman from Newfoundland to join them. But a succession of heavy gales hindered them from starting till April was far spent. At last, just as their preparations were completed, there arrived in the harbour a schooner bound from Halifax to St John, the commander of which had heard of their misfortunes, and gone out of his way to offer them assistance. Adventurous as they were, Douglas and his friends did not hesitate to abandon their own project, and to avail themselves of the superior accommodation thus placed at their disposal. They were accordingly conveyed in the first instance to St John, Mr Douglas doing seaman’s duty throughout the voyage, and by-and-by to Halifax, whither, after discharging cargo, the schooner returned.

The Duke of Kent, the father of her present Majesty, was at that time Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Nova Scotia. He had heard of the fate of the Phillis, and of the sufferings of the crew and passengers, and sent an aide-de-camp to request that such of the officers as might be in a state to be moved, should present themselves at Government House. Douglas and his friend Mr Forbes obeyed the summons, and were most kindly treated by the Royal Duke. But their destination was Quebec, whither, as soon as means of transport could be found, they proceeded. The reception awarded them there, and especially Mr Douglas, was gratifying in the extreme. The important services rendered by the father to the colony had not yet passed out of men’s minds, and they believed that they saw in the son qualities which proved him worthy of his parentage. He was taken at once, so to speak, to the hearts of the people, and had the still higher gratification to find that the authorities, civil and military, entertained a just appreciation of his talents, and were determined to make use of them.

There was an alarm of a French fleet hovering near the coast, and not a single cruiser lay in the St Lawrence. The Governor became anxious, and having often observed Mr Douglas guiding with remarkable adroitness a sailing-boat in boisterous weather about the bay, he bethought him that the nautical skill of the young officer might be applied to better purposes than those of mere amusement. Douglas was sent for, and asked if he would be disposed to take command of an armed coaster, and go off as far as the Banks of Newfoundland in search of the enemy. He accepted the trust without a moment’s hesitation; and, carrying with him, in addition to a good crew, artillerymen enough to man his ten guns, he hoisted his pennant on board a schooner of 250 tons burden, and stood out to sea. Though never coming up with the French fleet—which, indeed, had steered in a different direction—he found more than one opportunity of showing how well qualified he was, under trying circumstances, to manage a ship of war, and probably to fight her. And many a time in after life he used to tell the story, adding that, “after all, a naval life was that for which nature had peculiarly fitted him.”

So passed a year in Lower Canada, at the close of which the roster of service carried Mr Douglas to Toronto, where he still found vent for his marine propensities on Lake Ontario. He became likewise a great sportsman, as well with the gun as with the fishing-rod, and made frequent incursions into the forests in search of game. This brought him more than once in contact with the Red men, over whom, by his cool courage and endurance of fatigue, he acquired a remarkable ascendancy. Among other circumstances worth noticing was his encounter in the bush with a young white girl, of surpassing beauty, who had lived among the Indians from her infancy. He states in his note-book that she had been carried off by a party of warriors who had ravaged a settlement, and that they treated her, as she grew up, with the utmost kindness and respect. “A strange chance discovered her to her brother, and he entreated her to return home; but she refused, declaring that she was perfectly happy, and could not support a different existence.”

In the autumn of 1798, tidings reached Mr Douglas of the death of the elder of his half-brothers. The event rendered necessary his immediate return to England, and he took a passage in the last ship of the season, a little brig, timber-laden and bound for Greenock. It seems to have been his destiny never to go to sea without encountering danger and difficulty. One night, shortly after clearing the Bay of St Lawrence, Mr Douglas was awakened by the vessel giving a sudden lurch, for which he could not account otherwise than by supposing she had struck on some sunken rock. He jumped out of bed, and, staying only to throw a greatcoat about him, ran upon deck. A brisk gale was blowing, and the brig, having got into the trough of the sea, staggered under single-reefed topsails, main-top-gallant-sails, and jib, and fore-and-aft main-sail, with the wind on the beam. The mate, whose watch it was, had got drunk, and gone below, and the helmsman seemed quite at a loss how to guide the rudder. Douglas saw that there was not a moment to be lost. He took the command of the ship, called up all hands, issued with clearness and promptitude orders which were instantly obeyed, and kept the vessel from foundering. The tumult brought the captain on deck, who stood by astonished and speechless. No sooner, however, had he satisfied himself of the untrustworthiness of the mate, than he directed the vessel to be put about, and would have returned to Quebec had not Mr Douglas volunteered to do mate’s duty during the remainder of the passage. There could be no hesitation on the captain’s part, after what he had just seen, to accede to this proposal: so the brig held her course, and arrived safe in the Clyde, where, with protestations of mutual respect and esteem, he and his friendly skipper parted.

Mr Douglas had not been long in Scotland before he fell in love, and soon afterwards married Miss Anne Dundas, a young lady of great personal beauty and cultivated mind. He obtained his promotion likewise in 1799; and having done duty for a while as adjutant of a battalion, he was subsequently posted to the horse-artillery. But better things than the command of a troop were in store for him. The military authorities had established at High Wyckham a cadet school, with a senior department attached to it, in which officers might be instructed for the Staff; and General Zamy, an old aide-de-camp of Frederick the Great, being appointed commandant, it was proposed to Captain Douglas that he should undertake the superintendence of the Staff College. Captain Douglas was not unnaturally reluctant to give up the proper line of his profession, but finding the Duke of York bent upon the arrangement, and being tempted to accede to it by the offer of a step of rank, he passed from the artillery into the line as a major, and took the place for which both his natural talents and acquired information eminently fitted him.

From 1804 up to 1814 Douglas continued to be connected with the educational department of the army. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of the services which he rendered. He not only instructed candidates for Staff employment by lessons gathered from the past, but deduced, from his own clear perception of things, hints and suggestions which were then entirely new. He had many differences because of this habit with General Zamy, who, like veterans in general, was slow to believe that the tactics and strategy of his own youth could be improved upon. But in 1806 the old man retired, and Douglas, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, took his place at the head of the establishment. A fresh impulse was immediately given to the course of study. Not surveying only, but pontooning, artillery, and the theory of the whole art of war, were taught, and those brilliant Staff officers sent out who in the Peninsular struggle gave to the Great Duke such efficient support. Sir Howard, however—for he had by this time succeeded by the death of another brother to the baronetcy—yearned for active employment in the field. He applied for and obtained permission to join Sir John Moore’s army, which he overtook just as the retreat from Benevente began; and he shared its fortunes both in the painful marches which it accomplished, and in the battle near Corunna, which enabled it to re-embark without dishonour. By-and-by, when the expedition to the Scheldt was fitted out, Sir Howard prevailed upon the Duke of York to appoint him to the Staff of Lord Chatham’s army as Deputy Quartermaster-General. The enterprise grievously failed; and the loss by disease among the troops and ships’ companies engaged was very severe. But even under such circumstances Sir Howard proved of great service to his chief: for having kept a journal of each day’s proceedings as it occurred, he was able to show, when examined concerning the causes of the failure, that by far the largest share of blame rested with the navy, or rather with the officer whom the Admiralty had placed at its head.

For two years subsequently to his return from Walcheren, Sir Howard led a quiet and useful life as head of the Military College. In 1811, however, a fresh opportunity was found for employing him abroad. The Government of that day put a far higher value on the services of the Spanish guerillas than they deserved, and were incredulous of Lord Wellington’s assurances, that on the regular armies of Spain no dependence could be placed. It seemed to Lord Liverpool and his colleagues that the Spaniards, if properly armed and supplied, were capable by their own valour of driving the French beyond the Pyrenees; and they made choice of Sir Howard Douglas to go among them, because they believed that he possessed talents and energy enough to awaken them to a sense of their duty. He received instructions, therefore, towards the end of July, to proceed without delay to Lord Wellington’s headquarters, and to arrange with him all details respecting his future proceedings. Perhaps there is no interval in the long and useful career of Sir Howard Douglas which afforded him more frequent opportunities of doing good service to his country than that which, extending over little more than a year, was spent by him in Spain; but the tale is one which will not bear condensation.

After conferring with Lord Wellington on the Portuguese frontier, Sir Howard rode across the country to Oporto, and thence took a passage by sea to Corunna. He entered there into relations with Spanish juntas, Spanish generals, and the chiefs of guerilla bands, and found them all, with the exception of one or two individuals belonging to the latter class, even more impracticable than he had been led to expect. He gave them first arms, money, clothing, and had the mortification to learn that the best battalions and batteries, as soon as they became fit for war, were shipped off for South America. He turned next to the irregulars, and succeeded in getting a levy en masse set on foot, which very much perplexed, and gave constant occupation to, the French troops scattered over that and the adjoining provinces. But the circumstance which more than any other affected his own fortunes, was a combined attack on the fortified convent of St Cintio Rey by Sir Home Popham’s squadron from the sea, and the guerilla band of Don Gaspar on shore. It was while watching the effect of the Venerable’s fire that Sir Howard became struck with the ignorance of the first principles of gunnery which manifested itself both among officers and men, and that he conceived the idea of applying, should leisure ever be afforded him, a proper remedy to the evil. From that idea emanated his first great treatise, to which the British navy owes so much, and of which the rulers of the British navy, the Lords of the Admiralty, did not condescend, for many months after it had been submitted to them, even to acknowledge the receipt.

There can be no doubt that to Sir Howard’s activity in Galicia the successful issues of Lord Wellington’s campaign, in the early summer of 1812, were greatly owing. Had he not managed to find employment for two whole divisions of French infantry, these, with a division of cavalry, must have joined Marmont’s army; in which case the battle of Salamanca would have either not been fought at all, or it might have ended less triumphantly than it did. But no man can work impossibilities; and the time arrived when, having accomplished the main purpose of his mission, Sir Howard received orders to return to England. He could not quit the Peninsula, however, without once again communicating with Lord Wellington, whom he found just about to undertake the siege of the Castle of Burgos. To Douglas’s practised eye the place appeared of immense strength in proportion to the means disposable for its reduction; and a private reconnaissance led him to conclude that the whole plan of attack was faulty. In both opinions he stood alone; yet such was the respect in which his judgment was held, that the chiefs of artillery and engineers communicated what he had said to Lord Wellington, and Lord Wellington sent for him. The following is Mr Fullom’s account of this interview:—“‘Well, Sir Howard, you have something to say about the siege?’ ‘I think the place is stronger than we supposed, my Lord.’ ‘Yes, by G—; but our way is to take the hornwork, and from there breach the wall, and then assault over the two advanced profiles.’ ‘I would submit to your Lordship whether our means are equal to such an attack?’ ‘I am not satisfied about our ammunition,’ replied Lord Wellington. ‘The enemy’s guns are 24-pounders, my Lord, and we have only three 18-pounders and five 24-pound howitzers. The 18-pounders will not breach the wall, and our fire must be overpowered, unless your Lordship brings up some guns from the ships at Santander.’ ‘How would you do that?’ ‘With draught oxen as far as the mountains, and then drag them on by hand; we can employ the peasantry, and put a hundred men to a gun.’ ‘It would take too long.’ ‘I think the place may be captured, with our present means, from the eastern front, my Lord,’ returned Sir Howard; and he disclosed his plan, with his reasons for thinking it the most practicable. Lord Wellington made no remark. Possibly he saw the defects of his own plan, but it had been deliberately adopted, and he was not convinced that it ought to be abandoned.”

Mr Fullom has not told this anecdote quite correctly. Sir Howard was more closely questioned as to the mode of conveyance for the guns, and answered more pertinently, than is here set down. He suggested that the 24-pounders should be dismounted, the guns placed in the boles of trees hollowed out, and the carriages run forward by themselves. Thus the narrowest track through woods and round rocks would suffice for the conveyance of the former, while the latter, being comparatively light, would offer no formidable resistance wherever men or bullocks could travel. Lord Wellington, however, adhered to his own plan, and sustained the only reverse which marks the progress of an experience in war extending wellnigh over a quarter of a century. It is just towards both parties to observe, that the baffled hero was too magnanimous not to acknowledge his error. “Douglas was right,” he exclaimed, as he mounted his horse to begin the retreat; “he was the only man who told me the truth.”

Sir Howard returned to England, and there resumed his occupations as a military instructor; but his mind was full of a project for forcing attention to gunnery on the chiefs of the navy; and the disastrous results of the first frigate-actions in the American war not a little quickened his zeal. He had a more herculean task before him, however, than he himself imagined. Strange to say, his disinclination to the study of pure mathematics had never been overcome; and now he found himself obliged to master all the arcana of the science, so far as these had any relation to the movement of a vessel through water under all possible contingencies. While pursuing these studies he effected such improvements in the reflecting circle and semicircle for land and marine surveying as attracted the attention of the Royal Society, which immediately elected him a member; and then he gave himself up steadily to the object for which all this abstruse study had been only the preparation. He produced a treatise in which every point connected with the theory and practice of artillery was handled. He discussed not only the power and range of various kinds of ordnance, with the uses of their several parts, and the effects of transit, windage, recoil, and suchlike, but he explained how a school of naval gunnery could be established, and submitted the whole in MS. for the consideration of the Lords of the Admiralty. Weeks and months passed by, however, without bringing him so much as a written acknowledgment of its receipt; and then, and not till then, he wrote privately to his friend Sir Graham Moore. Sir Graham made such apology as the case would admit of, and did his best to fix upon the subject the attention of his colleagues; but a year elapsed before any decided steps were taken. At last the scheme was adopted; and in 1819, Sir Howard, having first of all obtained the sanction of the Government, gave his valuable treatise to the world. It attracted at once the attention of scientific men both at home and abroad, and led to frequent correspondence between the author and all persons capable of appreciating and taking an interest in so important a matter.

Promoted to the rank of Major-General, Sir Howard was nominated in 1824 to the Governorship of New Brunswick, and to the command of the troops stationed there, and in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. Mr Fullom tells an amusing story of Sir Howard being met on the pier at Halifax by Mr Justice Haliburton, which fails in this respect, that it happens unfortunately not to be accurate. It was not Sam Slick, but his cousin of the same name, who in 1796 had served in the Fusiliers, and in 1824 greeted his old comrade as Governor of New Brunswick. But there is so much of vraisemblance in the matter, that the anecdote may very well remain where it is. On the other hand, Mr Fullom’s narrative of Sir Howard’s administration of the province is not only correct to the letter, but extremely interesting. It came to pass while he was there that one of those fires occurred, of the appalling effects of which we in this old world of Europe can form no conception. It was an unusually dry summer, the third of a succession of such, when first in the town, and by-and-by far off in the forest, flames suddenly broke out. Government House was the first to be burned down; then whole streets ignited at once; and just as a line began to be drawn between what remained of the town and the ashes of dwellings consumed, a lurid glare, seen afar off, gave warning that even a worse calamity was in progress.

“Several days elapsed before the fire subsided, and then it became masked by a smoke which darkened the whole country. But night proved that it had not burned out; for showers of flame shot up at intervals, and trees stood glaring in the dark, while the mingled black and red of the sky seemed its embers overhead. Thus a week passed, when Sir Howard determined to penetrate the forest, and visit the different settlements. A friend has described his parting with Lady Douglas and his daughters, whose pale faces betrayed their emotion, though they forbore to oppose his design, knowing that nothing would keep him from his duty. But this was not understood by others, and the gentlemen of the town gathered round his rough country waggon at the door, and entreated him to wait a few days, pointing to the mountains of smoke, and declaring that he must be suffocated if he escaped being burned. He thanked them for their good feeling, grasped their hands, and mounted the waggon. It dashed off at a gallop, and wondering eyes followed it to the woods, where it disappeared in the smoke.

“The devastation he met exceeded his worst fears; for the settlements he went to visit no longer existed. The fire seems to have burst in every quarter at once; for it broke out at Miramichi the same moment as at Fredericktown, though one hundred and fifty miles lay between. But here its aspect was even more dreadful, and its ravages more appalling, as Miramichi stood in the forest completely girt round except where escape was shut off by the river. Many were in bed when they heard the alarm; many were first startled by the flames, or were suffocated in their sleep, leaving no vestige but charred bones; others leaped from roof or window, and rushed into the forest, not knowing where they went, or took fire in the street, and blazed up like torches. A number succeeded in gaining the river, and threw themselves in boats or on planks, and pushed off from the banks, which the fire had almost reached, and where it presently raged as fiercely as in the town. One woman was aroused from sleep by the screams of her children, whom she found in flames, and caught fire herself as she snatched up an infant and ran into the river, where mother and child perished together. Then came the hurricane, tearing up burning trees and whirling them aloft, lashing the river and channel to fury, and snapping the anchors of the ships, which flew before it like chaff, dashing on the rocks, and covering the waves with wreck. Blazing trees lighted on two large vessels, and they fired like mines, consuming on the water, which became so hot in the shallows that large salmon and other fish leaped on shore, and were afterwards found dead in heaps along the banks of the river. What can be said of such horrors, combining a conflagration of one thousand miles with storm and shipwreck, and surprising a solitary community at midnight? Happily the greater number contrived to reach Chatham by the river; but floating corpses showed how many perished in the attempt, and nearly three hundred lost their lives by fire or drowning.”

No small portion of Sir Howard’s time henceforth was spent in devising means for the relief of the unfortunate people whom this calamity had ruined. He made strong appeals to the benevolence of the British public, which were not disregarded, and he advanced from his own funds more than he could well spare. Nor was he inattentive to other matters. He made a voyage from harbour to harbour throughout the extent of his military command, and, with his usual luck, twice narrowly escaped shipwreck. Indeed, so completely was his name up as a Jonah, that the captain of the Niemen frigate, with whom he had been a passenger, took the alarm.

“The following day” (the day after one of these mishaps) “brought Captain Wallace to dine with the Governor, and it came out that he had been hearing tales about his Excellency which he did not consider to his advantage, for he suddenly asked him if he had not once been shipwrecked. Sir Howard replied by telling the story, and the captain’s face became longer as he proceeded, though he made no remark till the close. He then observed that his regard for him was very great, and he valued their interchange of hospitality in port and ashore, but should never like to take him to sea again; for he had been twenty years afloat without mishap, except on the two occasions when they had been together; and he should now look upon his appearance in his ship as a passenger as a very bad omen indeed.”

On both occasions the ship had struck for lack of proper beacons, and Sir Howard at once applied the remedy. He caused lighthouses to be built where they were most required; and in order to improve the internal communications of the province, he made roads, and proposed a plan for connecting by a canal the Bay of Fundy with the Gulf of St Lawrence. Meanwhile he was not neglectful of the intellectual wants of the colonists, as yet very imperfectly attended to. He founded, endowed, and, after a good deal of opposition, obtained a charter for the University of Fredericktown, of which, in 1829, he became the first Chancellor, giving at the same time his own name to the College. These were works of peace; and he was equally careful in guarding against the chances of war. The treaty of 1783 had left the boundary-line between Great Britain and the United States very imperfectly defined; and as the inhabitants of the latter country increased in number, they began to encroach on the territories of the former. A good many squatters had forced themselves into New Brunswick, and been driven away, till at last a person named Baker, bolder than the rest, took possession of an outlying portion of land, and hoisted the American standard. The proceeding was much approved by the Government of Maine, and strong parties of the militia were turned out in anticipation of a collision with the garrison of Fredericktown.

Sir Howard Douglas, however, knew better than to precipitate hostilities. He contented himself with sending a civil message to Baker, requesting him to withdraw; and when no attention was paid to it, he gave such orders to the troops as would bring them to the frontier in a few hours should their presence be required. This done, a parish constable was desired to perform his duty; and the man, coming upon Baker without any fuss or parade, cut down the flag-staff, seized the squatter, and carried him off in a waggon to the capital of the province. All Maine was thrown into a ferment. The Governor threatened, and demanded that Baker should be set at liberty. Sir Howard refused so much as to see the messenger intrusted with this demand, justly alleging that he could hold communication on such subjects only with the Central Government at Washington. The result was, that Baker, being put upon his trial, was found guilty, and sentenced to pay a fine; which fine, after an enormous amount of bluster, was duly paid. For his firm yet judicious conduct throughout this awkward affair Sir Howard received the approbation of the Home Government, becoming at the same time more than ever an object of enthusiastic admiration to the people whom he governed.

While approving all that their representative had done, the British Government saw that it would be impossible with safety to leave the boundary question longer unsettled. Arrangements were accordingly made with the United States for referring the points at issue to arbitration; and the King of the Netherlands being accepted as arbitrator, Sir Howard was requested to return to Europe, and to watch proceedings. The King’s decision gave, however, little satisfaction to either party. England, indeed, would have acquiesced in it, though feeling herself wronged; but America failed to get all that she coveted, and refused to be bound. It remained for her, by sharp practice at a future period, to gain her end; and for England, under the management of Lord Ashburton and Sir Robert Peel, to be made a fool of. The part played by Sir Howard Douglas during the progress of this negotiation was every way worthy of his high reputation; but that which strikes us most is the sagacity with which, so early as 1828, he foretold events in the States themselves, which have since come to pass. In a paper addressed to the Secretary for the Colonies, which points out endless grounds of quarrel between the Federal Government and the Governments of the several States, he thus expresses himself:—

“Here we may see the manner in which the Union will be dissolved—viz., the secession of any State which, considering its interest, property, or jurisdiction menaced, may no longer choose to send deputies to Congress. This is a great defect in the Bond of Union, which has not, perhaps, been very generally noticed, cloaked as it is under article 1st, section 5th of the Constitution, which states ‘that where there are not present, of either House, members sufficient to form a quorum to do business, a smaller number may be authorised, for the purpose of forming one, to compel the attendance of absent members.’ But this appears only to be authorised for the purpose of forming a quorum, and only extends over members actually sworn in, who, being delegated to Congress by the States they represent, are subjected to whatever rules of proceeding and penalties each House may provide, with the concurrence of two-thirds of its members. But there is nothing obligatory upon the several ‘Sovereign States’ to send members to Congress, or to prevent those sent from being withdrawn. The ‘Sovereign States’ have never bound themselves to do either; so that the process of dissolution in this way is very simple, and the danger imminent of a separation being thus effected, whenever the interests of any particular State or States are touched by the Government, or brought into discussion in Congress, although those interests may be outvoted by the preponderating influence of other States having different interests. But the State or States which are to suffer will not, it is clear, send members to vote their own injury or ruin; and it may safely be pronounced, from what I have shown in this paper, that this is the manner in which the American Union will come to a natural death.”

Sir Howard returned to England from the Hague, to find the Government bent on equalising the duties on foreign and colonial timber, and thereby depriving the people of New Brunswick of one of the most lucrative branches of their trade. He could not sit still and see done what he himself regarded as an act of great injustice. He made immense exertions, therefore, personally and through the press, to defeat the Ministerial measure, and he succeeded. It was impossible, under such circumstances, to return to New Brunswick, and he therefore resigned the government. Not even their satisfaction at the victory which he had achieved for them could reconcile the New Brunswickers to the loss of their Governor; and they marked their gratitude for all that he had done by presenting him with a magnificent service of plate. Indeed, it is very touching to remember how, up to the latest day of his life, every person connected with New Brunswick, on visiting England, sought him out as if he had been a private friend, and laid open to him matters, not of public only, but of private business. The Whig Ministers, on the other hand, naturally piqued at their defeat, left him for four years without any employment. Hence it was not till 1835, when Sir Robert Peel acceded to office, that Sir Howard received the appointment of Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. It was again his fate to be mixed up with calamities brought on by natural causes, and with political difficulties of no common order. There arrived one day from Ireland, at Government House, a Right Rev. Dr Hynes, a protégé of Daniel O’Connell, who introduced himself to Sir Howard as Bishop of Corfu, and handed him a letter from Lord Glenelg, at that time Colonial Secretary.

“‘You seem not to be aware that there is already a Bishop in Corfu,’ remarked Sir Howard. Dr Hynes intimated that he was a Catholic Bishop appointed by the Pope. ‘I know of but one Bishop here, sir,’ replied Sir Howard, ‘and no other could be recognised.’ Dr Hynes remonstrated, and pointed out the importance to England of the Roman Catholic interest in the islands; but Sir Howard could not be persuaded that the British Government was not strong enough to hold its ground without this bulwark. The prelate appealed to the letter of the Minister of the Colonies, but was shown that this was no recognition, nor could such be given without the sanction of the Ionian Senate. He declared he would assume his functions, and abide the consequences; but met a firmness surpassing his own, and learned that he would not be permitted to remain on the island. He denied that he could be expelled, and warned the Lord High Commissioner that his conduct must be answered in England. ‘I have only to say,’ was the reply, ‘that you will be removed by the police if you are not gone within twenty-four hours.’”

The Bishop was unable to resist such an argument as this, and Papal aggression received a temporary check in Corfu. But Sir Howard had another battle to fight, and he fought it to a successful issue. Wherever he exercised authority, his great object seems to have been to promote the physical and moral wellbeing of society, and he applied himself with this view to compile a sound code of laws for the Ionians. Nothing could be more offensive to those who profited by bad laws; and the priests in particular, set on by the Patriarch of Constantinople, as he was set on by Russia, offered all the opposition in their power. Sir Howard’s mode of defeating this move of the Hellenistic faction proved at once novel and effective. He waited till the preparations for revolt (for open revolt was meditated) were complete; and then surrounded the house where the chief conspirators sat, arrested them all, and took possession of papers which placed the complicity of the Patriarch beyond doubt. These he sent to the British Minister at Constantinople, who obtained without difficulty the deposition of the Patriarch, and the setting up of a successor less disposed to become a tool in the hands of Russia.

Of the great earthquake which shook Zante to its centre the memory will not soon pass away. It began just as Sir Howard entered the harbour on one of his tours of inspection, and continued, with shocks recurring at narrow intervals, for a whole fortnight. The people, paralysed with terror, knew not what to do, or whither to betake themselves, till the Lord High Commissioner appeared among them, calm and collected. He gave the necessary orders for extricating the wounded from the ruins: he directed men, women, and children where to go; caused temporary barracks to be erected for their shelter; and appeared to them as a guardian angel in their hour of need. His good offices on that occasion, as well as a brief experience of the working of his laws, brought about a thorough change of opinion both with regard to them and to him. When he resigned his office, which he was obliged to do in consequence of the not very generous conduct towards him of Lord John Russell, then Colonial Secretary, he left scarce one enemy in the island, and had the honour of having an obelisk erected to him, by vote of the Senate, bearing this inscription: “Howard Douglas, Cavalier, and General, High Commissioner, Benefactor of the Ionian Islands.”

Sir Howard sat in Parliament for Liverpool during Sir Robert Peel’s last administration, and spoke and voted on all occasions like a sound yet thoughtful Conservative. In 1847 he retired from the House of Commons, and thenceforth applied his energies to the service of the country as a writer on professional and scientific subjects. His treatise on ‘Naval Gunnery’ had already gone through several editions, as did his volume on ‘Fortification;’ and he now compiled and published his ‘Military Bridges,’ perhaps the most generally interesting, if not the most important, of all his works. But it was not thus alone that he continued to be useful. His opinions were sought and freely given to each successive Government on every question connected with the improvement of arms, the selection of points to be fortified, the management of the navy, and the steps to be taken for putting the country in a state of defence. It is extremely interesting to know that, like the great Duke of Wellington, Sir Howard laid aside all party feeling whenever the honour or interests of the country came to be considered; and that he possessed, as he deserved, the entire confidence of Whigs not less than of Tories. His opinions as to the relative value of iron and wooden ships are well known; he was entirely opposed to the former, though he did not object to the process of casing the latter with mail; while in his ‘Naval Warfare with Steam’ he advocated a system of tactics which should bring the management of fleets very much into the same category with the management of armies in the day of battle.

Thus, honoured and beloved, Sir Howard grew old, without losing one jot of the elasticity of spirit which had characterised him in earlier days. He was very happy also in his family till death began to cut it short, and blow after blow fell so heavily, that, brave as he was, he sometimes reeled. In 1854 a grandson, the bearer of his own name, died; then came tidings of the decease of his eldest son, Charles, far away; then his second son left him; then two of his daughters, Mrs Harcourt and Mrs Murray Gartshore. The loss of Mrs Gartshore affected him very deeply; and well it might, for she was one of those gifted and beautiful creatures who shed light around them wherever they go, seeming too pure and noble for earth. And scarcely were his tears dry when Lady Douglas, his companion for fifty-seven years, followed her daughters. Two daughters and one son alone remained to him, and one of these daughters was a widow; the other kept his house, and was, indeed, everything to him. But she likewise was taken from him, in a manner as trying as could be to his Christian patience and courage. She had been in apparent health and cheerful with him at dinner one day, and next morning was found dead in her bed. If the old man’s head had fallen into the dust, who could have wondered? But it did not. “No one can tell,” he observed to Mr Bateman, the medical gentleman who was called in, “what a loss she is to me: she has devoted herself to me; but I must do what is to be done. She will sleep beside her mother, where I will soon join them.”

In this manner the sun went gradually down till it sank beneath the horizon. Not that he suffered himself to be unmanned by sorrow; quite otherwise. But the physical frame felt the shock, and yielded to it perceptibly.

“Sir Howard enjoyed excellent health up to Miss Douglas’s death. All his teeth were sound; he walked three or four miles a-day, and obtained eight hours’ sleep at night. But that event gave his system a shock, and the controversy about armour-ships wore it more, showing his friends a marked change. His sleep was less regular and composed, and he frequently recited the lines of our great poet—

‘Oh, sleep! oh, gentle sleep!

Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh mine eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge,

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deafening clamours in the slippery clouds,

That with the hurly death itself awakes.’

“But he hid his sorrows, appearing calm and cheerful, though his manner was subdued and his conversation less animated. His vivacity revived at times, particularly when he spoke of Scotland, the theme he liked best; or when he recalled his early life in America, and described the pathless forests, the villages of wigwams, or the falls of Niagara, reciting Thomson’s lines—

‘Smooth to the shelving brink a copious flood

Rolls fair and placid,’ &c.

“He derived little benefit from the Folkstone breezes on his last visit, though enjoying his walks on the promenade, which he pronounced the noblest platform in Europe. Its attractions were just to his taste, for he could here see the coast of France, against which he had raised such bulwarks, watch the yachts and shipping in harbour and Channel, and glance around at the military strollers. Shorncliff Camp was within reach, as well as the Military School at Hythe, in which he took great interest, highly appreciating General Hay. He supported the Volunteer movement, and aided in its organisation, addressing a letter of advice to the National Rifle Association through his friend General Hay, and receiving an acknowledgment in his election as an honorary member. So well did he keep abreast with the age. He showed the same interest in the movements at the Camp, and attended any display, though not always to commend. He particularly censured a sham fight, representing an attack on an enemy who had landed in a bay near Hythe. The troops were marched down, and skirmishers thrown out on the beach, when the whole body fell back on the heights, holding them to cover their retreat. ‘What an absurd proceeding!’ remarked Sir Howard to Mr Bateman, who was by his side; ‘the movement ought to be exactly reversed. They should have brought down every man and gun as quickly as possible if the enemy had landed, and attacked him, and driven him into the sea. There would be some sense in that.’

“Sir Howard looked a soldier to the last, retaining his erect bearing, and walking with a firm step, though cautiously, and with looks bent on the ground. His sight had begun to fail, and cataracts were forming on both his eyes, but he did not submit them to medical treatment. ‘They will last my time,’ he remarked to the author. He contrived to write by never raising his pen, forming the letters by habit, and all were plain to one acquainted with his hand. A career of threescore years and ten left his character much what it first appeared, with all its elements of dash, vigour, enterprise, aptitude, and perception, its habits of industry, its generous instincts, and its warm sympathies. Neither heart nor mind showed the wear of life, and he is the same at eighty-five as at seventeen; inspiring the Volunteers at Hythe as he inspired them at Tynemouth, and exercising the inventive genius which scared the rats in improving the screw propeller. The hand that caught up the child in the shipwreck, obeyed the same impulse still; and Mr Bateman saw him walking up the street at Folkstone with a loaded basket which he had taken from a poor little girl. ‘My dear, give that to me,’ he said, as he saw her bending under the weight; ‘I am better able to carry it than you.’ The words were reported by a lady who heard them in passing, as the General of eighty-five and the poor child of five walked away together.”

We are not going to draw an elaborate character of one whose life may be said to have formed his epitaph. Sir Howard Douglas needs no panegyrist to tell the world what he was. Chivalrous, truthful, high-minded, brave, he secured the esteem, not less than he commanded the respect, of all who approached him. Had circumstances so ordered it that he had ever directed the movement of troops in the field, we take it upon us to say, that among English generals few would have attained to higher eminence than he. As it was, he did more for the British army, and navy too, in his books and by his teaching, than either army or navy, or the heads of both branches of the service, have ever had the grace to acknowledge. To these more shining qualities of head and temperament he added the faith and humility of a Christian man: a humility which was far too real to be obtruded on careless observers; a faith which had not one shade of hypocrisy or fanaticism about it. Rest to his noble spirit! it will be long before we look upon his like again.

ITALIAN BRIGANDAGE.

Terrorism, in one shape or other, is the bane of Italy. By a system of organised terrorism the princes of Italy have governed their states, and by means of terror the peoples have replied to their rulers. From the wide diffusion of this sentiment throughout the nation, secret societies took their root in the land, and men became banded together for attack, protection, resistance, or revenge. There was none so high in character or so elevated by station that he might not be denounced; there was not one so degraded that he might not be associated with the secret acts of the Government. The only idea of rule was through the instrumentality of a secret police. All were suspected—all were watched. The report of the secretary was entertained as to the character and the acts of the minister, and the secretary was himself under the close inspection of some underling in his office. The work of the State went on under the assumption that no man was honest; and it was really curious to see how all the complicated questions of a Government could be dealt with by a system whose first principle was that there was no truth anywhere. It impaired nothing of a man’s position or influence that he was known to take bribes. Corruption was the rule, from the star-covered courtier beside the throne, down to the half-naked lazzarone on the Mole. “Take care of your pockets, gentlemen, there’s a minister coming,” was the decorous pleasantry of King Ferdinand at one of his last receptions, and the speech had a significance which all could appreciate. It was especially in Southern Italy that this corruption prevailed the most. Amongst a race long enervated and demoralised, the work of Government went easily on by means of such agency. The great efforts of the rulers were directed, not to repress crimes against property and offences against society, but to meet political disaffection and discontent. The noted thief would be leniently dealt with, while the Liberal journalist would be sentenced to the ergastolo. Assassination and robbery went on increasing, and none seemed to feel terrified; while the imprisonment of one man for some expression of Liberal opinions, or some half-implied censure of the Government, was sure to strike terror into many a heart.

The “Government” was, in fact, very little else than an organised conspiracy against the spread of all civilisation. Its efforts were directed to keeping the people in a degraded ignorance—the slaves of priestly superstition, thinking little of the present and utterly regardless about the future. The Neapolitan temperament was well suited for such a system. Caring wonderfully little how life was sustained, so that no labour was exacted for its maintenance,—light-hearted, even to recklessness—indifferent to almost all privations,—such a people were neither subject to the same fears nor stirred by the same hopes as the Northern Italian. They asked, in fact, for little beyond the permission to exist. Discontent, in its political significance, had no place among them; they had never heard of any better liberty than idleness, and if they had, they could not have prized it. With natural acuteness, however, they saw the corruption that surrounded them—how the minister took bribes from the contractor, and how the contractor cheated the State—how the customs officer was bribed by the smuggler, and how the first merchants of the capital filled their warehouses with contraband goods. They saw that no man’s integrity ever interfered to his disadvantage, but that self-interest was the mainspring of every action; and could a people so acute to learn be slow to profit by the lesson they acquired? Out of this system of terror, for it was and is a system, grew two institutions in Southern Italy—Brigandage and the Camorra. The former of these asserted its influence over the country at large; the latter, which was an “organised blackmail,” limited its operations to towns and cities. Brigandage is no new pestilence in Italy; it has existed for centuries. From the character of the country, so difficult to travel and so interlaced with cross paths only known to the inhabitants, all pursuit of these robbers has been rendered difficult; but besides this, another and far greater obstacle has presented itself in the sympathy of the peasantry, who, partly from affection and partly from fear, have always taken part with the brigands to protect or to conceal them. The same disposition of the country people to side with those who break the law that we see every day in Ireland, is recognisable here. Like the Irish, the lower Italians have never regarded the law but as a harsh and cruel tyranny. They only know it in its severity and in its penalties—they have never had recourse to it for protection or defence; it has never been to them a barrier against the exactions of the great man, or the unjust pressure of the powerful man; they have felt it in its moods of vengeance, and never in its moments of commiseration. Elevated above their fellows by a certain wild and savage chivalry, the brigands have long exercised a terror over the people of the South. Their lives were full of marvellous adventures, of terrible incidents and hairbreadth escapes, sure to excite interest in the minds of an uneducated and imaginative race, who grew to regard the relators in the light of heroes. Nor did the Church itself scruple to accept the ill-gotten gains of the highwayman: and the costly robe of the Virgin, and the rich gems that decked her shrine, have often and often displayed the spoils that have been torn from the luckless traveller.

In this mixture of religious superstition with a defiance of all human law, we see again a resemblance between the Italian and the Irishman, whose traits have indeed an almost unerring similarity in everything. That “wild justice” of which the great Irish rhetorician once spoke, is the rule of each. Assuming that society has formed a pact against them, they have taken up arms in their own defence; and whether it be the landlord or the traveller, it matters little who shall pay the penalty. It is next to impossible to deal with crime where the general sentiment favours the criminal. The boasted immunity of the policeman in England is but another name for the ascendancy of the law. How comes it otherwise that one man armed with a mere truncheon dares to arrest a thief in the midst of his accomplices and associates, while we see in Italy ninety thousand soldiers unable to repress Brigandage in two provinces of the South, where the number of the brigands is set down as four hundred? Such in substance is the report lately furnished to the Chamber of Deputies at Turin by the order of General Lamarmora. The forces for the repression of Brigandage amount to ninety thousand well-armed and well-disciplined soldiers, and the enemy are stated as four hundred half-naked and scarcely armed wretches, as destitute of courage as of food. Such is the picture given of them; and we are left in utter astonishment to guess why, with such a disparity of numbers, the curse of Brigandage should yet be known in the land.

Why cannot ninety thousand deal with four hundred, even were the cause at issue less one of equity and justice? If, as has often been asserted, the Brigandage has been fed from Rome—if the gold of Francis II. and the blessing of the Pope go with those who cross the frontier to maintain the disturbance in Southern Italy—what should be easier, with such a superiority of numbers, than to cut off the communication? With sixty thousand men a cordon could be drawn from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic in which each sentinel could hail his neighbour. Were the difficulty to lie here, could it not be met at once? It was declared a few weeks back by Mr Odo Russell, that a whole regiment, armed and clothed in some resemblance to French soldiers, passed over to the south; and we are lost in amazement why such resources should be available in the face of an army greater than Wellington ever led in Spain or conquered with at Waterloo. To understand a problem so difficult, it is first of all necessary to bear in mind that this same Brigandage is neither what the friends of the Bourbons nor what the advocates of united Italy have pronounced it. If the Basilicata and the Capitanata are very far from being La Vendée, they are also unlike what the friends of Piedmontism would declare—countries well affected to the House of Savoy under the temporary dominion of a lawless and bloody tyranny from which they are utterly powerless to free themselves. If Brigandage is not in its essence a movement of the reactionists, it has nevertheless been seized upon by them to prosecute their plans and favour their designs. To render the Neapolitan States ungovernable—to exhibit to the eyes of Europe a vast country in a state of disorganisation, where the most frightful cruelties are daily practised—where horrors that even war is free from are hourly perpetrated—was a stroke of policy of which the friends of the late dynasty were not slow to avail themselves. By this they could contrast the rule of the present Government with that of the former ones; and while the press of Europe still rang with the cruelties of the Bourbons, they could ask, Where is the happy change that you speak of? Is it in the proclamations of General Pinelli—the burning of villages, and the indiscriminate slaughter of their inhabitants? Do the edicts which forbid a peasant to carry more than one meal to his daily labour, tell of a more enlightened rule? Do the proclamations against being found a mile distant from home, savour of liberty? Are the paragraphs we daily read in the Government papers, where the band of this or that brigand chief has been captured or shot, the only evidences to be shown of a spirit which moves Italians to desire a united nation? You tell us of your superior enlightenment and cultivation, say the Bourbonists, and the world at large listens favourably to your claims. But why, if it be true, have the last two years counted more massacres than the forty which have preceded them? Why are thousands wandering homeless and shelterless through the mountains, while the ruins of their dwellings are yet smoking from the ruthless depredations of your soldiery? If Brigandage numbers but four hundred followers, why are such wholesale cruelties resorted to? The simple fact is this: the Brigandage of Southern Italy is not a question of four hundred, or four thousand, or four hundred thousand followers, but of a whole people utterly brutalised and demoralised, who, whatever peril they attach to crime, attach no shame or disgrace to it. The labourers on one of the Southern Italian lines almost to a man disappeared from work, and on their return to it, some days after, frankly confessed they had spent the interval with the brigands. They were not robbers by profession nor from habit; but they saw no ignominy in lending themselves to an incidental massacre and bloodshed. The National Guards of the different villages, and the Syndics themselves, are frequently charged with a want of energy and determination; but the truth is, these very people are the very support and mainspring of Brigandage. The brigands are the brothers, the sons, or the cousins of those who affect to move against them. So far from feeling the Piedmontese horror of the brigand, these men are rather irritated by the discipline that bands them against him. They have none of that military ardour which makes the Northern Italian proud of being a soldier. Their blood has not been stirred by seeing the foreigner the master of their capital cities; their pride has not been outraged by the presence of the hated Croat or the rude Bohemian at their gates. To them the call to arms has been anything but a matter of vain glory. Besides this, there seems in the unrelenting pursuit of the Brigandage a something that savours of the hate of the North for the South. Under the Bourbons the brigand met a very different measure, as he did under the French rule, and in the time of Murat. Men of the most atrocious lives, stained with many and cruel murders, were admitted to treat with the Government, and the negotiations were carried on as formally as between equals. When a Capo Briganti desired to abandon his lawless and perilous life, he had but to intimate his wish to some one in authority. His full conditions might not at first or all be acceded to, but he was sure to be met with every facility for his wish; and in more than one case was such a man employed in a situation of trust by the State; and there yet lives one, Geosaphat Talarico, who has for years enjoyed a Government pension as the reward of his submission and reformation.

Under the old Bourbon rule, all might be pardoned, except an offence against the throne. To the political criminal alone no grace could be extended. The people saw this, and were not slow to apply the lesson. Let it also be borne in mind, that the brigand himself often met a very different appreciation from those who knew him personally to that he received at the hands of the State. The assassin denounced in wordy proclamations, and for whose head a price was offered, was in his native village a “gran’ Galantuomo,” who had done scores of fine and generous actions.

To revolutionise feeling in such a matter is not an easy task. Let any one, for instance, fashion to his mind how he would proceed to turn the sympathies of the Irish peasant against the Rockite and in favour of the landlord, to hunt down the criminal and to favour his victim. It would be a similar task to endeavour to dispose the peasant of the Abruzzi to look unfavourably on Brigandage. Brigandage was, in fact, but another exercise of that terrorism which they saw universally around them. Was the Capo Briganti more cruel than the tax-gatherer? was he not often more merciful? and did he ever press upon the poor? Were not his exactions solely from the rich? Was he not generous, too, when he was full-handed? How many a benevolent action could be recorded to his credit! If this great Government, which talked so largely of its enlightenment, really wished to benefit the people, why did it not lighten the imposts, cheapen bread, and diminish the conscription? instead of which we had the taxes quadrupled, food at famine prices, and the levies for the services more oppressive than ever. They denounced Brigandage; but there were evils far worse than Brigandage, which, after all, only pressed a little heavily on the rich, and took from them what they could spare well and easily.

It is thus the Neapolitan reasons and speaks of that pestilence which is now eating like a cancer into the very heart of his country, and taxing the last energy of her wisest and best to meet with success. At this moment Southern Italy is no more under the control of the Italian Government than are the States of the Confederacy under the sway of President Lincoln, and all the powerful energies of the North are ineffectual to eradicate a disease which is not on the surface, but in the very heart of the people.

The Italian Brigand, like the Irish Rockite, is by no means of necessity the most depraved or most wicked of his native village. Perhaps his fearlessness is his strongest characteristic. He is in other respects pretty much like those around him. He has no great respect for laws, which he has often seen very corruptly administered. He has been familiar with perjury all his life. He has never seen the rites of the Church denied to the blackest criminals, and he has come to believe that, except in the accidents of station, men are almost alike, and the great difference is, that the filchings of the minister are less personally hazardous than the spoils of the highwayman.

That these men take pay and accept service from the Bourbonist is easy enough to conceive. To cry Viva Francesco Secondo, when they stop the diligence or pillage a farmhouse, is no difficult task; but that they are in any sense followers, or care for the King or his cause, is utterly and ridiculously untrue. The reactionists affect to believe so, for it gives them the pretext of a party. The French like to believe so, for it proclaims, what the press continues unceasingly to assert, that the North has no footing in the South, and that no sympathy ever has existed, or ever will exist, between peoples so totally and essentially dissimilar.

The Piedmontese, too, unwilling to own that the event they have so ineffectually struggled against has not all the force of a great political scheme, declare that the Brigandage is fed from Rome, and would not have a day’s existence, if the ex-King were compelled to leave that capital, and the favour of the Papal Court withdrawn from its support.

That the present rulers of Italy pursue the brigands with an energy, and punish them with a severity never practised before, is cause even to prefer the reign of the Bourbons to that of the Piedmontese. There is no need for them to enter upon the difficult questions of freedom and individual liberty, to contrast the rights enjoyed under one government with those available under another. It is quite sufficient that they see what was once tolerated will no longer be endured, and that the robber chief who once gave the law to the district he lived in is now hunted down with the remorseless severity that will only be satisfied with his extermination.

It may be asked, How could the people feel any sympathy for a system from which they were such heavy sufferers, or look unfavourably on those who came to rid them of the infliction? The answer is, that long use and habit, a sense of terror ingrained in their natures, and, not less than these, a reliance in the protective power of the brigand, disposed the peasant to prefer his rule to that of the more unswerving discipline of the State. The brigand was at least one of his class, if not of his own kindred. He knew and could feel for the peculiar hardships which pressed upon the poor man. If he took from the proud man, he spared the humble one; and, lastly, he possessed the charm which personal daring and indifference to danger never fail to exercise over the minds of the masses.

Let us again look to Ireland, to see how warmly the sympathies of the peasant follow those who assume to arraign the laws of the State, and establish a wild justice of their own—how naturally they favour them, with what devotion they will screen them, and at what personal peril they will protect them; and if we have to confess that centuries have seen us vainly struggling with the secret machinery which sustains crime amongst ourselves, let us be honest enough to spare our reproaches to those who have not yet suppressed brigandage in Southern Italy. It is not, in fact, with the armed and mounted robber that the State is at issue, but with a civilisation which has created him. He is not the disease, he is only one of its symptoms; and to effect a cure of the malady the remedies must go deeper.

Nor is the question an easy one to resolve; for though Garibaldi with a few followers sufficed to overthrow a dynasty, the whole force of a mighty army, backed by a powerful public opinion, has not succeeded in firmly establishing a successor.

Piedmont is not loved in the South. There is not a trait in the Piedmontese character which has not its antitype in the Neapolitan; and they whose object it was to exhibit the sub-Alpine Italian in the most unfavourable colours, could not lack opportunity to do so. The severities practised towards the brigands—which were not always, nor could they be, exercised with discrimination—furnished ample occasion for these attacks. Many of these assumed a Garibaldian, or even Mazzinian tone, and affected indignation at cruelties of which the people—the caro popolo—were always the victims. One of the chief brigands, Chiavone, pretended to imitate Joseph Garibaldi; and in dress, costume, and a certain bold, frank manner, assumed to represent the great popular leader. Amongst his followers he counted Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Belgians, and, it is said, Irish. One of these foreigners was a man of high rank and ancient lineage, Count Alfred de Trazégnies—a near relative of M. de Merode’s: he was taken prisoner and shot. Another was the famous Borjès, from whom was taken the instructions given him by General Clary, and, more interesting still, a journal written in his own hand.

Though his “instructions” are full of grandiloquent descriptions of battalions and squadrons and batteries—horse, foot, and dragoons—with exact directions given as to the promotions, the staff appointments, the commissariat,—let us hear how he himself describes the first steps of his enterprise.

Having with great difficulty succeeded in obtaining about twenty muskets at Malta, he saw himself in some embarrassment as to getting away from the island, where intimations as to his project were already about. He succeeded, however, in getting on board of a small coasting vessel with his officers, and landed after a two days’ voyage at Brancaleone. “The shore,” he says, “was totally deserted, no trace of habitation to be seen; and, directed at last by the glimmer of a solitary light, we came upon the hut of a shepherd, who received us kindly and hospitably. The next day he guided us to the little town of Precacore, where we were met by the curate, and amidst cries of Viva Francesco Secondo conducted into the Piazza. I was cheered by this,” says he, “and deemed it a lucky augury. About twenty peasants enrolled themselves here under my command, and we moved on to Caraffa, where I was told a friendly welcome awaited me. On passing, however, near St Agata, a company of the mobilised National Guard, about sixty in number, opened a sharp fire on us, and my new recruits took to their heels, leaving me alone with my officers. Sustained, however, by a strong position, we held our own for an hour and a half, after which a deputation from Caraffa came to offer me the hospitality of that city—an offer I was fortunate enough to refuse, for another and far more serious ambuscade was prepared for me there.”

At Cirella he came up with a Bourbon partisan named Mittica, with one hundred and twenty men under him, but who refused to accept him as a leader, and in fact treated him and his officers as spies and prisoners.

After many dangers and much suffering, deserted by Mittica and his band, Borjès found himself in Tovre, “where an old soldier of the 3d Cacciatori offered to accompany me—the only follower I have met with up to this day.”

His narrative, simply and unaffectedly written, is one of the most extraordinary records of suffering, privation, and peril, and at the same time of devotion to his enterprise and zeal in the cause of the ex-King. He firmly believes that the mass of the people are “royalist,” that he only needs five hundred men, well armed and disposed to obey him, to “overthrow the revolution” and restore the sovereign.

He met his death like a brave man. He was surprised with some of his followers at a farmhouse in the very last village before crossing the Roman frontier, to which he was hastening. A young Piedmontese Major, Franchini, with a detachment of Bersaglieri and some mounted gendarmes, surrounded the house and at last set fire to it, on which Borjès surrendered and was immediately shot. “I was on my way to tell the King,” said he with his last words, “that he has nothing but cowards and scoundrels to defend him—that Crocco is a villain and Langlais a fool.” Then turning to the Major he added, “Thank fortune for it that I did not start one hour earlier this morning, for I should have gained the Roman frontier, and you would have heard more of me.”

The Piedmontese have been severely blamed for the execution of Borjès. Indeed he has found no less an advocate than Victor Hugo, who would not consent to have him ranked with Crocco, Ninco Nancho, and the rest, mere brigands and robbers on the highway. That the popular sentiment of Italy was not disposed in his favour may be assumed from the indignation felt by all the villages of the frontier when General Lamarmora consented that the body of Borjès should be exhumed and conveyed to Rome. There is little doubt, however, that his being a Spaniard influenced this feeling. In no country of Europe is the foreigner regarded with the same jealousy and distrust.

While the report of General Lamarmora shows that no disparity of force, not even ninety thousand to four hundred, is sufficient to deal with the Neapolitan Brigandage, it affects to explain why. In fact, the report is one insinuated accusation of the French, who by their occupation of Rome supply arms and money to the reactionists, and feed a movement which, if left to its own resources, must perish of inanition. The report shrinks from the avowal that the whole inhabitants of two great provinces are friends and sympathisers with the brigands; that however little political reasons enter into the issue, the priests have contrived to give a political colouring to the struggle, and by contrasting the immunities of the past with the severities of the present, have made the peasant believe that the rule of the Bourbon was more favourable to him than that of the House of Savoy. It is not merely in the conscription for the regular army that the pressure is felt, but in the very enrolment for the National Guard, which, liable as it is to being “mobilised,” exacts all the services and all the privations of soldiering. So much as 3000 francs have been paid for a substitute, rather than serve in a force which compels the shopkeeper to desert his business or the farmer his fields for eight or ten months of the year!

If we have heard much of the personal unpopularity of the Piedmontese in Southern Italy, it is a theme which cannot be exaggerated. There is not, perhaps, throughout Europe a people who have less in common than the sub-Alpine and the South Italian. If Garibaldi and his followers came as liberators, the Piedmontese entered Naples as conquerors. The Garibaldians won all the suffrages of a people who loved their free-and-easy manners, their indiscipline, that “disinvoltura” so dear to the Italian heart;—their very rags had a charm for them. The rigid, stiff, unbending Piedmontese, almost unintelligible in speech and repulsive in look, were the very reverse of all this. Naples was gay, animated, and happy under the sway of the same lawless band of red-shirted adventurers, but she felt crushed and trampled down by the regular legions of the King.

In the great offices of the State, and in the Prefectures, it was easy enough for the Piedmontese to appoint their own partisans; but how do this throughout the rural districts, the small towns, and the villages? In these the choice lay between a Royalist—that is, a Bourbonist—and a Mazzinian. If you would not accept a follower of the late King, you must take one who disowned sympathies with all royalty. The Syndics and “Maires” of the smaller cities have been almost to a man the enemies of the Northern Italian. It is through these all the difficulties of propagating “union” sentiments have been experienced. It is by their lukewarmness, if not something worse, that Brigandage is able still to hold its ground, not so much because they are well affected to the Bourbons, or that they cherish sentiments of Mazzinianism, but simply that they disliked Northern Italy, nor could any rule be so distasteful to them as that which came from that quarter. That the French occupation of Rome has tended to maintain and support Brigandage cannot for a moment be disputed. The policy of France, from the very hour of the treaty of Villafranca, has been to perpetuate the difficulties of Italian rule—to exhibit the country in a state of permanent disorder, and the people unquiet, dissatisfied, and unruly—to reduce the peninsula to that condition, in fact, in which not only would the occupation of Rome be treated as a measure of security to Europe at large, but the graver question urged whether a more extended occupation of territory might not be practicable and possible.

If Garibaldi’s expedition had not terminated so abruptly at Aspromonte, it is well known the French would have occupied Naples. When they would have left it again, it is not so easy to say. It is clear enough then to see, how little soever the French may like that Brigandage that now devastates the South, they are not averse to the distress and trouble it occasions to the Italian Government, all whose ambitions have been assumed as so many menaces against France. Had you been content with the territory we won for you—had you remained satisfied with a kingdom of six millions, who spoke your own language, inherited your own traditions, and enjoyed your own sympathies, you might have had peace and prosperity, say the oracles of the Tuileries; but you would be a great nation, and you are paying the penalty. “This comes of listening to England, who never aided you, instead of trusting to us who shed our blood in your cause.”

France never has consented to a united Italy; whether she may yet do so is, however improbable, still possible; one thing is, however, clear—until she does give this consent, not in mere diplomatic correspondence, but in heart and wish, the southern provinces of the peninsula will remain unconquered territories, requiring the presence of a large force, and even with that defying the power of the Government to reduce them to obedience.

Brigandage is but the open expression of a discontent which exists in every class and every condition in the districts it pervades. It is the assertion of the Catholic for the Pope, of the Royalist for the Bourbon, of the Revolutionist against a discipline, and last of all, of the Southern Italian against being ruled by that Northern race whose intelligence he despises, and for whose real qualities of manliness he has neither a measure nor a respect.

One word as to the Camorra before we conclude: and first of all what is this Camorra of which men talk darkly and in whispers, and whose very syllables are suppressed while the servants are in the room? The Camorra is an organised blackmail, which, extending its exactions to every trade and industry, carries the penalties of resistance to its edicts even to death.

The Camorra has its agents everywhere. On the Mole, where the boatman hands over the tenth of the fare the passenger has just paid him—at the door of the hotel, where the porter counts out his gains and gives over his tithe—at the great restaurant, at the theatre, at the gaming-table—some one is sure to present himself as the emissary of this dreaded society, and in the simple words, “for the Camorra,” indicate a demand that none have courage to resist.

The jails are, however, the great scenes for the exercise of this system. There the Camorra reigns supreme. In the old Bourbon days the whole discipline of the prisons was maintained by the Camorristi, who demanded from each prisoner as he entered the usual fees of the place. The oil for the lamp in honour of the Madonna had to be paid for, then came a sort of fee for initiation, after which came others in the shape of taxes on the income of the prisoner and his supposed means, with imposts upon leave to smoke, to drink, or to gamble. His incomings too were taxed, and a strict account demanded of all his gains, from which the tenth was rigidly subtracted. To resist the imposts was to provoke a quarrel, not unfrequently ending fatally; for the Camorristi ruled by terror, and well knew all the importance of maintaining their “prestige.”

The revenues of the Camorra, amounting to sums almost incredibly large, are each week handed over to the treasurer of the district, and distributed afterwards to the followers of the order by the Capo di Camorra, according to the rank and services of each, any concealment or malversation of funds being punished with death. The society itself not only professes to protect those who belong to it, but to extend its influence over all who obey its edicts; and thus the poor creature who sells his fruit at the corner of the street sees his wares under the safeguard of one of these mysterious figures, who glide about here and there, half in listlessness, and whose dress may vary from the patched rags of almost mendicancy to the fashionable attire of a man of rank and condition.

In the cafés where men sit at chess and dominoes, the Camorrist appears, and with his well-known whisper demands his toll. In vain to declare that the play is not for money; it is for the privilege to play at all that his demand is now made. The newly appointed clerk in a public office, the secretary to the minister, it is said, have been applied to, and have not dared to dispute a claim which would be settled otherwise by the knife.

Recognised by the old police of Naples, tolerated and even employed to track out the crimes of those who did not belong to the order, the Camorrists acquired all the force and consideration of an institution. Men felt no shame at yielding to a terror so widespread; nor would it have been always safe to speak disparagingly of a sect whose followers sometimes lounged in royal antechambers as well as sought shelter under the portico of a church.

It has been more than once asserted that Ferdinand II. was a sworn member of the order, and that he contributed largely to its funds. Certain it is the Camorra in his reign performed all the functions of a secret police, and was the terror of all whose Liberalism made them suspected by the Government. To the Camorra, too, were always intrusted those displays of popular enthusiasm by which the King was wont to reply to the angry remonstrances of French or English envoys. The Camorra could at a moment’s notice organise a demonstration in honour of royalty which would make the monarch appear as the loved and cherished father of his people.

It was, however, by the Liberals themselves the Camorra was first introduced into political life, and Liberio Romano intrusted the defence of the capital to these men as the surest safeguard against the depredations of the disbanded soldiers of the King; and, strange to say, the hazardous experiment was a perfect success, and for several weeks Naples had no other protectors than the members of a league who combined the atrocities of Thuggee with the shameless rapine of the highwayman. The stern discipline of Piedmont would not, however, condescend to deal with such agents; and Lamarmora has waged a war, open and avowed, against the whole system of the Camorra. Hundreds of arrests have been made, and the jails are crowded with Camorrists; but men declare that all these measures are in vain—that the magistracy itself is not free from the taint: and certain it is that the system prevails largely in the army and navy, and has its followers in what is called the world of fashion and society.

The Mezzo Galantuomo is the most terrible ingredient in the constitution of a people. The man who is too bad for society but a little too good for the gallows, is a large element in this land, and it will require something more than mere statecraft to deal with him.

A Parliamentary Commission is at present engaged in the investigation of the whole question of Brigandage, and their “Report” will probably be before the world in a few days. It is very doubtful, however, if that world will be made much the wiser by their labours. There is, in fact, no mystery as to the nature of this pestilence, its source, or its progress.

It may suit the views of a party to endeavour to connect it with Bourbonism, but it would be equally true to assert that the peasant-murderers in Ireland were adherents of the Stuarts! The men who take to the mountains in the Capitanata are not politicians. They have no other “cause” at heart than their own subsistence, for which they would rather provide at the risk of their heads than by the labour of their hands. All that they know of civilisation is taxation and the conscription. In these respects the old régime was less severe than the present; neither the imposts were so heavy, nor the levies so large; not to add that, under the Bourbons, soldiers led lives of lounging indolence, and “no one was ever cruel enough to lead them against the Austrians.”

The Bourbon Government of Naples had many faults, but the Piedmontese rule has had no successes. There is that of ungeniality in the Northern temperament that renders even favours at their hands little better than burdens, and their justice has a smack of severity in it that wonderfully resembles revenge.

What may be the future fate of Southern Italy it is not easy to say; but one thing at least is certain, the influence of Piedmont has not obtained that footing there which promises to make her cause their cause, or her civilisation their civilisation. If the Bourbons governed badly, their successors do not govern at all!

LUDWIG UHLAND.

Incontestably, since the death of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has been, at least in the hearts of the people, the Laureate of Germany. He is not a poet who took the world by storm with his earliest productions; but he has been gradually growing in favour and general acceptance, until his death is now deplored as a national affliction. He died quietly at Tübingen, the place of his birth, on the 13th of November 1862, in his seventy-sixth year, having been born on the 26th of April 1787. He was said never to have known a day’s illness until his last, which was occasioned by his attending the funeral of a friend and brother poet, Justin Kerner, in inclement weather.

The parents of the poet were Johann Friedrich Uhland, Secretary to the University of Tübingen, and Elizabeth (born) Hoser, daughter of one Hoser who held a similar office. He had a brother, Fritz, who died in his ninth year, and a sister, Luise, who married Meyer, the pastor of Pfullingen, near Reutlingen. His education conduced to bringing out the talent that was latent in him, as it was the custom of Kauffmann, the rector of the Tübingen school, to give free themes to be worked out in prose or verse, according to the inclinations of his scholars; and the young Uhland generally chose the latter, and was early distinguished in his choice. Even at school he was known as an enthusiastic student of German and Scandinavian antiquities. At the age of sixteen and seventeen he produced many compositions of merit, but only two, ‘Der Sterbender Held,’ and ‘Der Blinder König,’ found their way into that collection of his poems which was published in 1815. At this time he was hesitating between the professions of law and medicine. As a youth, though given to long walks alone in the beautiful neighbourhood of Tübingen, he was distinguished by his love of social manly exercises, particularly of skating. Two of his earliest poetical friends were Schröder, who was afterwards drowned in the Baltic, and Harpprecht, who fell in the Russian campaign of Napoleon. This is the friend who is alluded to in the exquisite poem of ‘Die Ueberfahrt’ as “brausend vor uns allen,” while the fatherly friend spoken of there is Uhland’s maternal uncle, Hoser, the pastor of Schmiden. He was also much influenced in his tastes by Haug of Stuttgard, and Gortz, Professor of Ancient Literature in Tübingen. Later he became acquainted with Justin Kerner, whose talent he placed above his own, Oehlenschläger the Danish poet, and Varnhagen von Ense the historian. Goethe he had seen once when a boy in 1797, and he records his impressions in the ‘Münstersage.’ In 1810 Uhland went to Paris, in order to work at the treasures of Romance literature contained in the Imperial Library. On his return he applied himself to practice as an advocate at Stuttgard, without remitting his poetic labours. His tragedy, ‘Herzog Ernst von Schwaben,’ which belongs to this period, elicited the warm admiration of Goethe. In 1819 he was elected a deputy of the Würtemberg States. In 1820 he married Emma Vischer, a daughter, by a former marriage, of a celebrated woman, Frau Emilie Pistorius, to whose memory Rückert dedicated a poem called ‘Rosen auf das Grab einer edlen Frau.’ In 1834 he was made Professor of German Literature at Tübingen. He distinguished himself as a political character in 1848, though without joining the extreme Liberal party, and on one occasion presented an address to the King of Würtemberg, praying for the restoration of the Constitution, the prayer of which was immediately granted, as most prayers of the kind were at that particular time, from prudential motives. He had already resigned, in 1833, his office of deputy, finding it incompatible with his professorship, and had returned to his residence at Tübingen. His marriage with Emma Vischer was in many respects a fortunate one. He appears to have lived with her in great harmony till his death, and the dowry she brought him, though not large, was sufficient to keep from his door the anxieties which usually beset a priest of the Muses. On the other hand, the marriage was not blest by children. There are old pictures extant of Uhland as a child, with a fair honest face and powdered hair. His later face is now familiar to the Germans. Its first impression is decidedly heavy. The upper-lip is long, the cheekbones high, the eyes not large, the forehead broad over the brows, and narrower above—altogether an ordinary honest man’s face, nothing more. A phrenologist in a steamboat, to whom the poet was unknown, once guessed him to be a watchmaker, adding, to console him, that every one could not be a poet. Uhland’s manners appear to have been plain and unpretending—rather those of a man who makes friends than acquaintances. Yet those who knew him, knew him as a hearty and even jovial companion. He was shy, and shunned publicity, and could not bear to be treated as a literary lion. On one occasion, when he was presented with a crown of laurel, he hung it and left it on an oak beside the road. His habits were early and healthy. In summer he lived in his open garden-house, and at ten o’clock every morning used to go out for a long walk, prefaced by a plunge in the Neckar when the weather was genial. At Tübingen, which is a very pretty quaint little university town, lying in that finely-broken country which intervenes between the Black Forest and the Alps, he owned a plain house on the country side of the Neckar bridge, only ornamented by Corinthian pilasters in front; behind it was his garden, arranged in terraces, and his “Weinberg,” from which he made his own ordinary supply of wine. He was of social habits, but, at the same time, fond of musing and solitude. The homely but intellectual society of Tübingen fully sufficed him. He was not a man to care for that of those above him in station, as his sterling independence shrank from patronage in the same way in which his diffidence shrank from general notoriety.

Politically, Uhland was a people’s man without being a Radical. His love of medieval literature imbued his mind with respect for hereditary rank, station, and honours, while his love of freedom and optimist views of the future of his country and mankind in general, made him a sturdy opponent of any attempt to infringe on what he called “the good old right.” In England he might have been a Tory or Conservative Whig. In Germany, it has pleased the powers that be to count him with the Democratic party; hence the admiration or policy which prompted Louis Napoleon to make a national affair of the funeral of Béranger, was wanting in the case of Uhland, who was buried, as he had lived, in privacy. Although this does not tell well for the temper of the Government of Würtemberg, and fully accounts for the hatred of Englishmen which is said to be dominant at Stuttgard, the deceased poet would probably not have wished it otherwise. No doubt he was, as far as the honours that proceed from the great are concerned, to the end of his life an unacknowledged and unappreciated man. But he had all he wanted—robust health, self-respect, and the respect of those he loved, sufficient worldly means, and that divine gift which Homer himself thought a full compensation even for blindness.

The uneventfulness of Uhland’s life, his unpretending presence, his very look and bearing, his intense love for nature, the simplicity of his habits, his steady domestic character, and unaffected religious feeling, all bring to mind our own Wordsworth; and in his poems, as in those of Wordsworth, the gems are to be sought among the shorter compositions. But Wordsworth made it his business to sit down at the Lakes and paint nature in words, as the pre-Raphaelite or naturalistic school of landscape painters sit down and paint her in colours. Wordsworth wooed the beauty of nature immediately and for itself. His human figures are merely put in roughly to help out the foreground. But Uhland rarely paints nature directly; he rather uses natural scenery as a background to his “genre” pictures, which interest chiefly by presenting the phases of human feeling, and the joys and sorrows of mankind. All his poems are alive with the breath of Spring—fresh, luminous, and joyous; but we are aware of his surroundings rather from the effects they produce upon him than from any actual descriptions. His poems have the ring of the true singer; an internal melody permeates his verse, capricious rather than monotonous, changing its airs and cadences like the voice of a bird, rather than flowing on with the mechanical jingling of a musical box. This is the quality which gives the bardic stamp to the compositions of a Burns, a Béranger, a Tennyson, and a want of which is felt in the glowing rhetoric of Byron, and in

“The beauty for ever unchangingly bright,

Like the soft sunny lapse of a summer day’s light,”

which belongs to the poetry of Moore. In matter and choice of subject, and in some measure in respect of treatment, he has much in common with Walter Scott. His preparatory studies were much of the same nature, consisting in the history, scenery, and legends of his own country. He has done for Germany what even Schiller and Goethe with all their greatness omitted to do in the same degree. He has immortalised her local recollections. Second only to the man who leads an army to rescue his country from the stranger, such a man is a patriot of the true kind, whatever the colour of his politics may be. Some poems he has written are like those exquisite ancient miniature pictures on a gold ground, best to be understood and appreciated by the educated connoisseur, while others are so plain in language and sentiment that they have sunk into the hearts of the people, and will flow for ever from the lips of the people in the shape of national songs. Uhland differs most from the twin stars of Germany—Schiller and Goethe—in that his poetry is more exclusively objective than theirs. Goethe was all wrapt in his glorious self, and his all-absorbing devotion to art. Like Horace’s hero, a world might have fallen in ruins about him and he would not have quailed; and, indeed, all the crash of empires and clash of armies in which he lived left his brow as serene as that of one of the gods of Epicurus. But Uhland could not sing through the humiliation of his country, and his voice sank within him through the French occupation; but when Germany arose at length, and with incredible hardihood pushed back the flood of invasion, Uhland, like Körner and others, did manful service, not by fighting and falling among the foremost, as Körner did, but with even better judgment, as husbanding his gifts, becoming the Tyrtæus of the Liberation War. His songs of that time have a deep and manly note peculiarly their own, and they are such as no lesser circumstances could have called forth. Uhland, again, as distinguished from Schiller and Goethe, was the prominent poet of the Romantic school. But he was to them what Socrates was to the Sophists—counted with them, but not of them. From whatever source he derived his inspirations, he always remained fast rooted in truth and nature. The unreal and morbid sentimentality of Tieck and Novalis was unknown to him; nor did he share the Romeward tendencies of Friedrich Schlegel, while fully appreciating the beauty of the Roman Catholic ritual and associations, and freely interweaving them with the golden tissue of his compositions. On the whole, he is the most German of German poets, as he owes none of his inspiration to “the gods of Greece,” and little to any foreign source, except those old Romance writers whom he studied at Paris; but then it must be borne in mind that the early threads of history in France and Germany are closely interwoven, and the empire of the Franks in particular belonged as much to one as to the other.

In attempting to present to the English reader some of the best of the poems of Uhland, we must premise that to translate a perfect poem from one language into another is simply an impossibility, and difficult exactly in proportion to the degree in which any poem approaches perfection. The special difficulty of translating German poetry into English, and vice versâ, consists in this, that though the two languages are not in their basis much more than dialects of the same original stock, yet German is as generally dissyllabic as English is monosyllabic, owing in part to English having discarded inflection where German retains it. We are aware that many of Uhland’s poems are already known through very good translations, one of those most highly spoken of being that of Mr Platt. Longfellow has also done freely into English verse the ‘Castle by the Sea,’ ‘The Black Knight,’ the ‘Luck of Edenhall,’ and others, and has succeeded admirably in catching the spirit of the original. Not having Mr Platt’s translations before us, as we write in Germany, we must apologise, in our zeal for Uhland’s memory, for attempts of our own in the same direction, in which we have tried to reproduce as nearly as we can the ideas of the original in the metres in which they appeared. It is impossible to find a song in the whole collection more perfect than ‘Der Wirthin Töchterlein.’ There is not a word or thought one would wish changed. The pathos is expressed, without a single pathetic epithet, solely by the situation. This poem has been interpreted politically, as alluding to the different feelings with which three classes of patriots regard the corpse of German liberty. But to our mind this spoils the simplicity of the picture. It is more likely to be true that the poem was occasioned by an incident of Uhland’s youth, since it is said that he once stopped some students who were singing it under his window, telling them not to end it, as the end had too close a personal interest for him. If this be true, the poem is more complimentary to the memory of the fair maid of the inn than to the lady who became Frau Uhland. But poets will be poets, as boys will be boys.

THE LANDLADY’S DAUGHTER.

Three students they hied them over the Rhine,

And there they turned in at a landlady’s sign.

“Landlady, hast thou good beer and wine?

And where is that beauteous daughter of thine?”

“My beer and wine are fresh and clear;

My daughter she lies on the funeral-bier.”

And when they did enter the inner room,

There lay she all white in a shrine of gloom.

The first from her face the veil he took,

And, gazing upon her with sorrowful look,

“Oh, wert thou living, thou fairest maid,

’Tis thee I would love from this hour,” he said.

The second let down on the face that slept

The veil, and turned him away and wept:

“Alas for thee there on the funeral-bier!

For thee I have loved full many a year.”

The third, he lifted again the veil,

And kissed her upon the mouth so pale:

“I loved thee before, I love thee to-day,

And I will love thee for ever and aye!”

The last line, “Und werde dich lieben in ewigkeit,” would be more correctly rendered, “And I will love thee in eternity.” And we are equally aware that our “landlady’s sign” is objectionable, as the original is simply, “They turned in there to a landlady’s.” But it would be hard to render it otherwise without losing the quadruple rhyme, which has a certain mournful elegance. ‘The Landlady’s Daughter’ naturally leads us to ‘The Goldsmith’s Daughter.’ In this poem we must not suppose that the hero and heroine meet for the first time. The maiden has fallen in love with the knight, her superior in station, but scarcely dares even confess it to herself, till the knight agreeably surprises her by adorning her as his bride, taking her acceptance for granted. We would not spoil the romance by hinting that it may not have been an uncommon case in the middle ages for young noblemen of small fortune to seek their brides from the rich bourgeoisie of the Free Towns.

THE GOLDSMITH’S DAUGHTER.

A goldsmith stood within his stall,

Mid pearl and precious stone:

Of all the gems I own, of all,

Thou art the best, Heléna,

My daughter, darling one.

One day came in a knight so fine:

“Good morrow, maiden fair;

Good morrow, worthy goldsmith mine;

Make me a costly crownlet,

For my sweet bride to wear.”

The crown was made, the work was good,

It shone the eye to charm,

But Helen hung in pensive mood

(I trow, when none was by her)

The trinket on her arm.

“Ah! happy happy she to bear

This glittering bridal toy;

Would that true knight give me to wear

A crownlet but of roses,

How full were I of joy!”

Ere long the knight came in again,

Did well the crown approve:

“Now make me, goldsmith, best of men,

A ring with diamonds set,

To deck my lady-love.”

The ring was made, the work was good,

The diamonds brightly shone,

But Helen drew ‘t in pensive mood

(I trow, when none was by her)

Her finger half-way on.

“Ah, happy happy she to bear

This other glittering toy;

Would that true knight give me to wear

But of his hair a ringlet,

How full were I of joy!”

Ere long the knight came in again,

Did well the ring approve:

“Thou’st made me, goldsmith, best of men,

The gifts with rarest cunning,

For my sweet lady-love.

“Yet would I prove them how they sit;

So prithee, maiden, here

Let me on thee for trial fit

My darling’s bridal jewels:

In beauty she’s thy peer.”

’Twas on a Sunday morn betime;

It happed the maiden fair,

Expectant of the matin chime,

Had donned her best of raiment

With more than wonted care.”