Chapter 2

Alfieri, History and Genius of 229

American female Poets, Opinions of, by a Frenchman, 452

Anspach, Margravine of 303

American Missions in Ceylon and Sir E. Tennant, 308

American Saint, An, 163

Adventures and Observations in Nicaragua. (Illustrated.) 437

_Arts, The Fine_--Public Works by the King of Prussia, 136.--Herr Hiltensperger, 135.--Picture by Leonardo Da Vinci, 136.--Art-Union of Vienna, 136.--Another Picture by Raffaelle Discovered, 136.--Steinhauser's Group for Philadelphia, 136.--The Hillotype, 136.--Baron Hackett, 137.--Statue of Giovanni de Medici, 137.--Lectures before the New-York Artists, 137.--Belgian Exhibition, 137.--Brady's Gallery of Illustrious Americans, 137.--Portrait of Cervantes, 137.--Portraits by Mr. Osgood, 137.--Discoveries at Prague, 137.--Exhibition of the British Institution, 137.--Lortzing, 137.--Statue of Wallace, 137.--Engravings of the Art-Unions, 180.--Exhibition of the National Academy, 181.--Bulletin of the Art-Union, 181.--Girodet, 181.--Kotzbue, 181.--Mr. Elliott, 181.--Schwanthaler, 181.--Museum of Berlin, 181.--Munich Art-Union, 181.--Kaulbach, 181--French Contribution to the Washington Monument, 181--Widnmann, 181.--The Exhibitions in New-York, 327.--Prizes and Prospects of the Art-Union, 329.--Delaroche, 329.--Mr. Kellogg, 329.--L'Imitation de Jesus Christ, by Depaepes, 330.--New Members of the National Academy, 330.--Sculptures Discovered at Athens, 470.--New Works by Nicholas, 471.--German Criticism of Powers, 471.--Diorama of Hindostan, 471.--Unveiling the Statue of Frederick the Great, 471.--Jenny Lind, 471.--The Opera, 471.

_Authors and Books._--The Russian Archives, 26.--Humboldt on the State, 26.--Russian Geographical Society, 26.--Recollections of Paris, by Hertz, 26.--The latest German Novels, 27.--Schäffner's History of French Law, 27.--Fate of Bonpland, the Traveller, 27.--Russian Account of the War in Hungary, 28.--Bülau's Secret History of Mysterious Individuals, 28.--Italy's Future, by Dr. Kölle, 28.--German Translation of Channing, 28.--Essays by M, Flourens, 28.--Jacques Arago, 28.--New Book on Napoleon, by Colonel Höpfner, 28.--Vaublanc's History of Prance in the Time of the Crusades, 28.--Works on the Statistics of Ancient Nations, 28.--French Version of McCulloch, 28.--MM. Viardot and Circourt on the History of the Moors in Europe, 29.--Breton Poets, 29.--Louis Phillippe's Last Years, as Described by Himself, 30.--M. Audin, 31.--Collection of Spanish Romances, by F. Wolf, 31.--Le Bien-Etre Universel, 31.--Notices of English Literature by the _Revue Brittanique_, 31.--History of French Protestants by Felice, 31.--Works in Modern Greek Literature, 32.--Dictionary of Styles in Poetry by Planche, 33.--Continuation of Louis Blanc's History of Ten Years, 33.--Mr. Hallam, 33.--General Napier and his Wife, 33.--Plagiarism by Charles Mackay, 33.--English Books on the Roman Catholic Question, 33.--New Work by R. H. Horne, 33.--Miss Martineau's Book against Religion, 34.--Sir John Cam Hobhouse, 34.--Another Book on "Junius", 34.--Fourier on the Passions, 34.--Mr. Grattan coming again to America, 34.--Poems by Alaric A. Watts, 35.--The Stowe MSS., 35.--The Scott Copyrights, 35.--Dr. Layard, 35.--Henry Alford, 35.--Letter by Washington Irving, 35.--Speech on Art, by Alison, 36.--Pensions to Poets, 36.--Lavengro, 36.--James T. Fields, 36.--W. G. Simms, 36.--Nile Notes by a Howadji, 36.--Use of Documents in the Historical Society's Collections, 36.--Fanny Wright, 37.--Prof. Channing's Resignation, 37.--Mr. Livermore on Public Libraries, 37.--Fenelon never in America, 37.--Mr. Goodrich and Mr. Walsh, 37.--Works of Major Richardson, 37.--Mr. Squier's forthcoming Works on American Antiquities, 38.--Letter from Charles Astor Bristed, on his Contributions to _Fraser_, 39--The Sillimans in Europe, 39.--Works of John Adams, 39.--The Cæsars, by De Quincy, 39--Jared Sparks, and his Historical Labors, 40--The Opera, by Isaac C. Pray, 40.--Frederic Saunders, 40.--The Duty of a Biographer, 40.--Dr. Andrews's new Work on America, 663.--Bodenstedt's Thousand and One Days in the East, 165.--German Emigrant's Manual, 165.--Hungarian Biographies, 165.--Caccia's Europe and America, 165.--Fanny Lewald, 166.--German Reviewals of George Sand, 166.--Scherer's German Songs, 166.--New Book by Henry Mürger, 166.--Ebeling's Tame Stories of a Wild Time, 167.--Grillpazer, the Dramatist, 167.--Rhine Musical Gazette, 167.--Eddas, by Simrock, 167.--Transactions of the Society of Northern Antiquaries, 167.--Raumer's Historical Pocket Book, 167.--_Bilder aus Oestreich_, 167.--Poems by Dinglestedt, 167.--Autobiography of Jahn, 167.--The _Deutsches Museum_, 168.--The Constitutional Struggle in Electoral Hesse, 168.--Translations of the Scriptures in African Languages, 168.--History of the Prussian Court and Nobility, 168.--Biographical Dictionary of Illustrious Women, 168.--Countess Hahn Hahn, 168.--Italia, 168.--Humboldt, as last described, 169.--Rewards of Authors, 169.--New Translations of Northern Literature, by George Stephens, 169.--Old Work on Etherization, 169.--Phillip Augustus, a Tragedy, 169.--Bianchi's Turkish Dictionary, 169.--General Daumas, on Western Africa, 170.--De Conches, the Bibliopole, 170.--Jules Sandeau, 170.--French Play of Massalina, 170.--New French Review, 170.--Victor Hugo's New Works, 170.--M. de St. Beuve, 170.--The Shoemakers of Paris, 170.--Recovery of a Comedy by Molière, 171.--Memoirs of Bishop Flaget, 171.--Travels in the United States by M. Marmier, 171.--Guizot and Thiers, 171.--M. Mignet, 171.--Lamartine, 171.--Michelet, 171.--Paris and its Monuments, 171.--Mullie's Biographical Dictionary, 171.--The Chancellor d'Auguesseau, 171.--Romance and Tales by Napoleon Bonaparte, 172.--Henry's Life of Calvin, 172.--Discovery of lost Books by Origen, 173.--Important Discoveries of Greek MSS. near Constantinople, 173.--Prose Translation of Homer, 173.--Gillie's Literary Veteran, 173.--Lord Holland's Reminiscences, 173.--Meeting of the British Association, 173.--Miss Martineau and the Westminster Review, 174.--Fielding and Smollett, 174.--Mr. Bigelow's Book on Jamaica, in England, 174.--Macready and George Sand, 174.--The Stones of Venice, 175.--Bulwer Lytton's New Play, 175.--The Last Scenes of Chivalry, 166.--Fanny Corbeaux, 176.--John G. Taylor on Cuba, 176.--Lady Wortley's Travels in the United States, 176.--Opinions of Mr. Curtis's Nile Notes, 177.--Rev. Satan Montgomery, 177.--Documentary History of New-York, 177.--Albert J. Pickett's History of Alabama, 178.--Mrs. Farnham, 178.--Mr. Gayarre on Louisiana, 178.--Lossing's Field Book of the Revolution, 178.--Rev. J. H. Ingraham, and his Novels, 178.--Mrs. Judson.--The Lady's Book, 179.--Mr. J. R. Tyson, 179.--Dr. Valentine's Manual, 179.--Episodes of Insect Life, Mr. Willis, 179.--Robinson's Greek Grammar, 179.--Kennedy's Swallow Barn, 179.--American Members of the Institute of France, 179.--Works of Walter Colton, 179.--Cobbin's Domestic Bible, 179.--Works of Several American Statesmen now in Press, 180.--Professor Gillespie's Translation of Comte, 180.--Lincoln's Horace, 180.--New Novel by the Author of Talbot and Vernon, 180.--Life in Fejee, 180.--S. G. Goodrich in England, 180.--Recent American Novels, 180.--Publications of the Hakluyt Society, 180.--Dr. Mayo's Romance Dust, 180.--Thackeray's Lectures, 180.--Mr. Alison, 180.--Dr. Titus Tobler on Professor Robinson, 312.--New German Novels, 313.--Kohl, the Traveller, 313.--Anastasius Grun and Lenau, 313.--Sir Charles Lyell's American Travels Reviewed in Germany, 313.--More of the Countess Hahn-Hahn, 313.--German Translations of _David Copperfield, Richard Edney_, and Mrs. Hall's _Sorrows of woman_, 313.--Books on Affairs at Vienna, 314.--Travels of the Prince Valdimar, 314.--De Montbeillard on Spinosa, 314.--Joseph Russeger, 314.--Dr. Strauss, 314.--German Universities, 314.--Frau Pfieffer, the Traveller, 314.--Parisians sketched by Ferdinand Hiller, 314.--The Diplomats of Italy, 315.--A Parisian Willis, 315.--De Castro on the Spanish Protestants, 316.--Books on the Hungarian Matters, 316.--Literature in Bengal, 316.--Publications on the late Revolutions, at Turin and Florence, 317.--Pensions to Authors in France, 317.--MSS. by Louis XVI., 317.--Memoirs of Balzac, 317.--Quinet on a National Religion, 318.--New Life of Marie Stuart, 318.--Count Montalembert, 318.--English Biographies by Guizot, 319.--Romieu's _Spectre Rouge_ de 1852, 319.--Novel by Count Jarnac, 319.--French inscriptions in Egypt, 319.--Saint Beauve and Mirabeau, 319.--Democratic Martyrs, 319.--Prosper Merimee on Ticknor's Spanish Literature, 320.--Innocence of M. Libri, 320.--The _Politique Nouvelle_, 320.--New Labors of Lamartine, 320.--An Assyrian Poet in Paris, 320.--The Edinburgh Review and The Leader on Cousin, 321.--Walter Savage Landor in Old Age, 321.--Moses Margoliouth, 321.--Publications of the Ecclesiastical History Society, 321.--The Life of Wordsworth, 322.--Blackwood on American Poets, 322.--Comte's new Calendar, 323.--Old Tracts against Romanism, 323.--The Scott Copyrights, 323.--Mrs. Browning's new Poems, 323.--Mrs. Hentz's last Novel Dramatized, 323.--New Book on the United States, 323.--The Guild of Literature and Art, 324.--Rev. C. G. Finney's Works in England, 324.--Talvi, 324.--Mrs. Southworth's new Novel, 324.--Dr. Spring's last Work, 324.--Mrs. Sigourney, 324.--Henry Martyn, 324.--Algernon Sydney, 324.--New Volumes of Poems, 324.--Paria, by John E. Warren, 325.--Klopstock in Zurich, 458.--Wackernagel's History of German Literature, 458.--German Dictionary with Americanisms, 458.--Carl Heideloff's new Book in Architecture, 458.--Siebeck on Beauty in Gardening, 459.--Schafer's Life of Goethe, 459.--Franz Liszt, 459.--History of the Khalifs, by Weil, 459.--Von Rhaden's Reminiscences of a Military Career, 459.--Life of Baron Stein, 459.--Adalbert Kellar, 460.--Heeren and Uckert's Histories of the States of Europe, 460.--The Countess Spaur on Pius IX., 460.--Illustration of German Idioms, 460.--Last Book of the Countess Hahn-Hahn, 460.--"Intercourse with the departed by means of Magnetism," 460.--Languages in Russia, 461.--Professor Thiersch, 461.--"The Right of Love," a new German Drama, 461.--New German Travels in the United States, 461.--Dr. Ernst Foster, 461.--New Work on the use of Stucco, 461.--Russian Novels and Poems, 461.--Captain Wilkes's Exploring Expedition and Taylor's Eldorado in German, 461.--Collection of Greek and Latin Physicians, 462.--Correspondence of Mirabeau, 462.--Louis Blanc's _Pius de Girondins_, 462.--Anecdote of Scribe, 462.--A Siamese Grammar, 462.--"The Death of Jesus," by Citizen Xavier Sauriac, 463.--Dufai's Satire on Socialist Women, 463.--Remains of Saint Martin, 463.--Documents respecting the Trial of Louis XVI., 463.--Another Book on the French Revolutions, 463.--Letters on the Turkish Empire by M. Ubicini, 463.--Collection of Sacred Moralists, 463.--M. Regnault's History, 463.--New Novel by Mery, 464.--French Revolutionary Portraits, 464.--Swedish Version of "Vala," by Parke Godwin, 464.--An Epic by Lord Maidstone, 464.--A Defence of Ignorance, 464.--New Story by Dickens, 464.--Thackeray's Lectures on British Humorists, 464.--Theodore S. Fay, 465.--Works Published by Mr. Hart, 465.--Carlyle's Life of Sterling, 465.--Historical Memoirs of Thomas H. Benton, 465.--New Life of Jefferson, 466.--Life of Margaret Fuller, by Emerson and Channing, 466.--The late Rev. Dr. Ogilby's Memoirs, 466.--Dr. Gilman on Edward Everett, 466.--W. Gilmore Simms, 466.--Works on "Women's Rights," 466.--Illness of Rev. Dr. Smyth, 466.--New Novels, 467.--Miss Bremer, 467.--Vestiges of Civilization, 467.--Shocco Jones, 467.--Works in Press of Mr. Scribner, 467.--John Neal, 467.--Poems of Fanny Green, 467.--Ik. Marvel, 467.--Martin Farquhar Tupper, 467.--Dr. Holbrook, 467.--New Edition of "Margaret," 467.--Mr. Schoolcraft's Memoirs, 467.--New Work by Mr. Melville, 467.--Col. Pickett's History of Alabama, 468.--Dr. Baird's Christian Retrospect, 469.--The Parthenon, 469.--Cardinal Wiseman's Lectures, 469.--Works of Walter Colton, 469.--History of the French Protestants, 469.--New Poems of Alice Carey, Boker, &c., 470.

Botello, Astonishing Adventures of James.--_By Dr. Mayo_, author of "Kaloolah," 40

Biography of a Bad Shilling, 92

Borrow, Real Adventures and Achievements of George, 183

Butchers' Leap at Munich, 298

Beautiful Streamlet and the Utilitarian, the 307

Benevolent Institutions of New-York. (Illustrated.) 434

Cooper, James Fenimore. (With a Portrait.) 1

Calhoun, Powers's Statue of John C. (Illustrated.) 8

Cocked Hats, A Supply of, 97

Costume of the Future, 103

Coleridge, Hartley and his Genius, 249

Conspiracy of Pontiac, 440

Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V. 376

Crystal Palace, the. A Letter from London. (Illustrated.) 444

Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V., 520

Doddridge, and some of his Friends, 77

Donkeys at Smithfield, 97

Duelling Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago--_By Thomas Carlyle_, 108

Dog Alcibiades, the,--_By C. Astor Bristed_, 211

Dewey, George W., and his Writings. (Portrait.) 286

Dickens and Thackeray, 532

Egyptian Antiquities, Preservation of 299

Fashions. Ladies' (Illustrated.) 143, 287, 429

Fiddlers, Last of the,--_By Berthold Auerbach_, 87

First Ship in the Niger.--_By W. A. Russell_, 127

Faun over his Goblet.--_By R. H. Stoddard_, 184

Festival upon the Neva, 357

French Feuilletonistes upon London, 446

Gibbon, an Inedited Letter of Edward, 126

Genlis, Madame de, and Madame de Stael, 392

Glimpse of the Great Exhibition, 409

Great Men's Wives, 413

Grave of Grace Aguilar.--_By Mrs. S. C. Hall_, 513

Hindostanee Newspapers. _The Flying Sheet of Benares_, 24

Herbert Knowles: "The Three Tabernacles," 57

Hogarth, William. (Six Engravings.) 149

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. (Portrait.) 156

Has there been a great Poet in the Nineteenth Century? 182

Hat Reform: A Revolution in Head-Gear, 187

Heart Whispers.--_By Mary E. Hewitt_, 200

Herbert, Henry William. (Portrait, &c.) 289

Halleck, Fitz Greene. (A Portrait.) 433

_Historical Review of the Month_, 127, 269, 423, 585

Jews and Christians, 162

Jesuit Relations: New Discoveries of MSS. in Rome, 185

Jeffrey and Joanna Baillie, 312

Kendall, George Wilkins. (Portrait.) 145

Layard, Discoverer of Nineveh, to.--_By Walter Savage Landor_, 98

Life in Persia in the Nineteenth Century, 105

Littleness of a Great People: Mr. Whitney, 161

Leading Editors of Paris, 239

Love.--_By John Critchly Prince_, 247

Lyra, a Lament.--_By Alice Carey_, 253

London Described by a Parisian, 306

Lion in the Toils, the,--_By C. Astor Bristed_, 366

Legend of St. Mary's,--_By Alice Carey_, 416

Marcy, Dr., and Homoeopathy. (Portrait.) 429

Mining under the Sea, 102

My Novel.--_By Sir E. Bulwer Lytton_, 110, 253, 399, 541.

Marie Antoinette.--_By Lord Holland and Mr. Jefferson_, 23

Music.--_By Alfred B. Street_, 25

Monte Leone.--_By H. De St. Georges_, 58, 201, 346, 489.

Modern Haroun Al Raschid, 245

Man of Tact, the, 372

Meeting of the Nations in Hyde Park.--_By W. M. Thackeray_, 330

Mary Kingsford: a Police Sketch, 417

Mayo, Dr., author of "Kaloolah." (Portrait.) 442

Marie, Jeanne, and Lyrical Poetry in Germany, 457

Nell Gwynne.--_By Mrs. S. C. Hall._ (Portrait and six other Illustrations.) 9

Natural Revelation.--_By Alfred B. Street_, 200

Nicholas Von der Flue.--_By the author of "Rural Hours,"_ 472

Old Maids, a Family of, 289

Otsego Hall--Residence of J. F. Cooper. (Illustrated,) 285

Our Phantom Ship among the Ice, 386

Our Phantom Ship--Japan, 534

Policarpa La Salvarietta, the Heroine of Colombia, 162

Professional Devotion in a Lawyer, 188

Paganini, Anecdotes of, 237

Prospects of African Colonization, 397

Politeness in Paris and London.--_By Sir Henry Bulwer, K.C.B._, 363

Physiology of Intemperance, 98

Prophecy.--_By Alice Carey_, 244

_Recent Deaths_:--(Portrait of Joanna Baillie.)--Viscount Gardinville, 140.--Rev. Dr. Ogilby, 140.--George Thompson, 140.--The Emir Bechir, 140.--Dr. Leuret, 140.--M. Kockkoek, 140.--Joanna Baillie, 140.--Spontini, the Composer, 142.--Charles Coqurel, 142.--Col. George Williams, 142.--Charles Matthew Sander, 142.--Lord Bexley, 143.--John Pye Smith, 143.--Samuel Farmer Jarvis, D.D., LL.D., 279.--Judge Burnside, 279.--Ex-Governor Isaac Hill, 280.--Judge Daggett, 231.--Major James Rees, 281.--M. M. Noah, 282.--John S. Skinner, 282.--Major General Brooke, 282.--F. Gottlieb Hand, 282.--M. Jacobi, 282.--Hans Christian Oersted, 283.--Henri Delatouche, 283--Madame de Sermetz, 284.--Marshal Dode de la Bruniere, 284.--M. Maillau, 284.--Dr. Henry de Breslau, 284.--Commissioner Lin, 284.--John Louis Yanoski, 284.--Count d'Hozier, 284.--George Brentano, 284.--Francis Xavier Fernbach, 284.--Jules Martien, 284.--Captain Cunningham, 428.--John Henning, 428.--Padre Rozavan, 428.--Prince Wittgenstein, 428.--Lord Langdale, 428.--E. J. Roberts, 428,--Professor Wahlenberg, 428.--Philip Hone, Archbishop Eccleston, Gen. Brady, 428.--Dr. Samuel George Morton, 563.--Richard Lalor Shiel, 563.--Richard Phillips, 565.--Dowton, the Comedian, 565.--Admiral Codrington, 565.--Lord Chancellor Cottenham, 565.

_Record of Scientific Discovery_--Photography, 138.--London Society of Arts, 138.--Barry 138.--Gold, 138.--Light and Heat, 138.--Chinese Coal, 138.--Water of the Ocean, 138.--The Asteroids, 139.--Shooting Stars, 139.--Geology of Spain, 139.--Scientific Researches in Abyssinia, 139.--New Motors, 276.--Water Gas, 276.--Improvements in the Steam Engine, 276,--New Applications of Zinc, &c., 276.--New Adaptation of Lithography, 276.--Annual of Scientific Discovery, 276.--Oxygen from Atmospheric Ari, 277.--Whitened Camera for Photography, 277.--M. Laborde on Photography, 277.--Abich on the Country near the Black Sea, 277.--D'Hericourt on African Discoveries, 277.--Enormous Fossil Eggs, 277.--Papers by Leverrier and others before the Paris Academy of Sciences, 278.--Barth and Overweg in Africa, 278.--General Radowitz on Philology, 278.--Latour, on Artificial Coal, 278--Scientific Congress at Paris, 278.--Experiments at the Porcelain Factories in Sevres, 279.--Captain Purnell on Ship Cisterns, 279.--Electric Sun at Gotha, 279.--Letter from Professor Morse on the Hillotype, 566.--Professor Blume and the French Academy, 566.

Rotation of the Earth. (Illustrated.) 296

Shelley, Memoir of the late Mrs. Percy Bysshe, 16

Shakspeare, Mr. Hudson's New Edition of, 18

"Stones of Venice," the,--_By John Ruskin_, 19

Story Without a Name.--_By G. P. R. James_, 45, 189, 333, 477.

Sweden, Sketches of Life in, 450

Sorcery and Magic, History of 247

Snowdrop in the Snow.--_By Sydney Yendys_, 201

Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, and his Works. (Portrait.) 300

Second Wife, or the Tables Turned, 331

Smuggler Malgre Lui, the, 394

Sorel, Agnes, True History of--_By R. H. Horne_, 396

Strauss, Dr. David, in Weimar, 410

Schalken, the Painter: A Ghost Story, 449

Scenes at Malmaison, 504

Transformation: A Tale.--_By the late Mrs. Shelley_, 70

Thurlow, Lord, and his Terrible Swearing, 85

Twin Sisters.--_By Wilkie Collins_, 221

Trenton Falls.--_By N. P. Willis._ Four Engravings, 292

Tobacco, 311

Washington. (Two Engravings.) 146

Wilfulness of Woman.--_By the late Mrs. Osgood_, 188

Wreck of the Old French Aristocracy, 373

Walpole's Opinions of his Contemporaries, 488

"Work Away," 533

Yeast: A Problem.--_By the author of "Alton Locke,"_ 160

THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

_Of Literature, Art, and Science._

Vol. III NEW-YORK. APRIL 1, 1851. No. I

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.

The readers of the _International_ have in the above engraving, from a Daguerreotype by Brady, the best portrait ever published of an illustrious countryman of ours, who, as a novelist, take him all in all, is entitled to precedence of every other now living. "With what amazing power," exclaims Balzac, in the _Revue de Paris_, "has he painted nature! how all his pages glow with creative fire! Who is there writing English among our contemporaries, if not of him, of whom it can be said that he has a genius of the first order?" And the _Edinburgh Review_ says, "The empire of the sea, has been conceded to him by acclamation;" that, "in the lonely desert or untrodden prairie, among the savage Indians or scarcely less savage settlers, all equally acknowledge his dominion. 'Within this circle none dares walk but he.'" And Christopher North, in the _Noctes_: "He writes like a hero!" And beyond the limits of his own country, every where, the great critics assign him a place among the foremost of the illustrious authors of the age. In each of the departments of romantic, fiction in which he has written, he has had troops of imitators, and in not one of them an equal. Writing not from books, but from nature, his descriptions, incidents, and characters, are as fresh as the fields of his triumphs. His Harvey Birch, Leather Stocking, Long Tom Coffin, and other heroes, rise before the mind, each in his clearly defined and peculiar lineaments, as striking original _creations_, as actual persons. His infinitely varied descriptions of the ocean, ships gliding like beings of the air upon its surface, vast solitary wildernesses, and indeed all his delineations of nature, are instinct with the breath of poetry; he is both the Horace Vernet and the Claude Lorraine of novelists; and through all his works are sentiments of genuine courtesy and honor, and an unobtrusive and therefore more powerful assertion of natural rights and dignity.

WILLIAM COOPER, the emigrant ancestor of JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, arrived in this country in 1679, and settled at Burlington, New Jersey. He immediately took an active part in public affairs, and his name appears in the list of members of the Colonial Legislature for 1681. In 1687, or subsequent to the establishment of Penn at Philadelphia, he obtained a grant of land opposite the new city, extending several miles along the margin of the Delaware and the tributary stream which has since borne the name of Cooper's Creek. The branch of the family to which the novelist belongs removed more than a century since into Pennsylvania, in which state his father was born. He married early, and while a young man established himself at a hamlet in Burlington county, New Jersey, which continues to be known by his name, and afterward in the city of Burlington. Having become possessed of extensive tracts of land on the border of Otsego Lake, in central New-York, he began the settlement of his estate there in the autumn of 1785, and in the following spring erected the first house in Cooperstown. From this time until 1790 Judge Cooper resided alternately at Cooperstown and Burlington, keeping up an establishment at both places. James Fenimore Cooper was born at Burlington on the fifteenth of September, 1789, and in the succeeding year was carried to the new home of his family, of which he is now proprietor.

Judge Cooper being a member of the Congress, which then held its sessions in Philadelphia, his family remained much of the time at Burlington, where our author, when but six years of age, commenced under a private tutor of some eminence his classical education. In 1800 he became an inmate of the family of Rev. Thomas Ellison, Rector of St Peter's, in Albany, who had fitted for the university three of his elder brothers, and on the death of that accomplished teacher was sent to New Haven, where he completed his preparatory studies. He entered Yale College at the beginning of the second term of 1802. Among his classmates were John A. Collier, Judge Cushman, and the late Justice Sutherland of New-York, Judge Bissel of Connecticut, Colonel James Gadsden of Florida, and several others who afterwards became eminent in various professions. John C. Calhoun was at the time a resident graduate, and Judge William Jay of Bedford, who had been his room-mate at Albany, entered the class below him. The late James A. Hillhouse originally entered the same class with Mr. Cooper; there was very little difference in their ages, both having been born in the same month, and both being much too young to be thrown into the arena of college life. Hillhouse was judiciously withdrawn for this reason until the succeeding year, leaving Cooper the youngest student in the college; he, however, maintained a respectable position, and in the ancient languages particularly had no superior in his class.

In 1805 he quitted the college, and obtaining a midshipman's warrant, entered the navy. His frank, generous, and daring nature made him a favorite, and admirably fitted him for the service, in which he would unquestionably have obtained the highest honors had he not finally made choice of the ease and quiet of the life of a private gentleman. After six years afloat--six years not unprofitably passed, since they gave him that knowledge of maritime affairs which enabled him subsequently, almost without an effort, to place himself at the head of all the writers who in any period have attempted the description of the sea--he resigned his office, and on the first day of January, 1811, was married to Miss De Lancey, a sister of the present Bishop of the Diocese of Western New-York, and a descendant of one of the oldest and most influential families in America.

Before removing to Cooperstown he resided a short time in Westchester, near New-York, and here he commenced his career as an author. His first book was _Precaution_. It was undertaken under circumstances purely accidental, and published under great disadvantages. Its success was moderate, though far from contemptible. It is a ludicrous evidence of the value of critical opinion in this country, that _Precaution_ was thought to discover so much knowledge of _English_ society, as to raise a question whether its alleged author could have written it. More reputation for this sort of knowledge accrued to Mr. Cooper from _Precaution_ than from his subsequent real work on England. It was republished in London, and passed for an English novel.

_The Spy_ followed. No one will dispute the success of _The Spy_. It was almost immediately republished in all parts of Europe. The novelty of an American book of this character probably contributed to give it circulation. It is worthy of remark that all our own leading periodicals looked coldly upon it; though the country did not. The _North American Review_--ever unwilling to do justice to Mr. Cooper--had a very ill-natured notice of it, professing to place the _New England Tale_ far above it! In spite of such shallow criticism, however, the book was universally popular. It was decidedly the best historical romance then written by an American; not without faults, indeed, but with a fair plot, clearly and strongly drawn characters, and exhibiting great boldness and originality of conception. Its success was perhaps decisive of Mr. Cooper's career, and it gave an extraordinary impulse to literature in the country. More than any thing that had before occurred, it roused the people from their feeling of intellectual dependence. The popularity of _The Spy_ has been so universal, that there is scarcely a written language into which it is not translated. In 1847 it appeared in _Persian_ at Ispahan.

In 1823 appeared _The Pioneers_. This book has passages of masterly description, and is as fresh as a landscape from another world; but it seems to me that it has always had a reputation partly factitious. It is the poorest of the Leather Stocking tales, nor was its success either marked or spontaneous. Still, it was very well received, though it was thought to be a proof that the author was written out. With this book commenced the absurdity of saying Mr. Cooper introduced family traits and family history into his novels. How little of truth there is in this supposition Mr. Cooper has explained in his revised edition, published the present year.

_The Pilot_ succeeded. The success of _The Pilot_ was at first a little doubtful in this country; but England gave it a reputation which it still maintains. It is due to Boston to say that its popularity in the United States was first manifested there. I say _due_ to Boston, not from considerations of merit in the book, but because, for some reason, praise for Mr. Cooper, from New England, has been so rare. The _North American Review_ took credit to itself for magnanimity in saying some of his works had been rendered into French, when they were a part of every literature of Europe. America, it is often said, has no original literature. Where can the model of The Pilot be found? I know of nothing which could have suggested it but the following fact, which was related to me in a conversation with Mr. Cooper. The Pirate had been published a short time before. Talking with the late Charles Wilkes, of New-York--a man of taste and judgment--our author heard extolled the universal knowledge of Scott, and the sea portions of The Pirate cited as a proof. He laughed at the idea, as most seamen would, and the discussion ended by his promising to write a sea story which could be read by landsmen, while seamen should feel its truth. The Pilot was the fruit of that conversation. It is one of the most remarkable novels of the time, and every where obtained instant and high applause.

_Lionel Lincoln_ followed. This was a second attempt to embody history in an American work of fiction. It failed, and perhaps justly; yet it contains one of the nicest delineations of character in Mr. Cooper's works. I know of no instance in which the distinction between a maniac and an idiot is so admirably drawn; the setting was bad, however, and the picture was not examined.

In 1826 came _The Last of the Mohicans_. This book succeeded from the first, and all over Christendom. It has strong parts and weak parts, but it was purely original, and originality always occupies the ground. In this respect it is like The Pilot.

After the publication of The Last of The Mohicans, Mr. Cooper went to Europe, where his reputation was already well established as one of the greatest writers of romantic fiction which our age, more prolific in men of genius than any other, had produced. The first of his works after he left his native country was _The Prairie_. Its success every where was decided and immediate. By the French and English critics it has been deemed the best of his stories of Indian life. It has one leading fault, however, that of introducing any character superior to the family of the squatter. Of this fault Mr. Cooper was himself aware before he finished the work; but as he wrote and printed simultaneously, it was not easy to correct it. In this book, notwithstanding, Natty Bumpo is quite up to his mark, and is surpassed only in The Pathfinder. The reputation of The Prairie, like that of The Pioneers, is in a large degree owing to the opinions of the reviews; it is always a fault in a book that appeals to human sympathies, that it fails with the multitude. In what relates to taste, the multitude is of no great authority; but in all that is connected with feeling, they are the highest; and for this simple reason, that as man becomes sophisticated he deviates from nature, the only true source of all our sympathies. Our feelings are doubtless improved by refinement, and vice versa; but their roots are struck in the human heart, and what fails to touch the heart, in these particulars, fails, while that which does touch it, succeeds. The perfection of this sort of writing is that which pleases equally the head and the heart.

_The Red Rover_ followed The Prairie. Its success surpassed that of any of its predecessors. It was written and printed in Paris, and all in a few months. Its merits and its reception prove the accuracy of those gentlemen who allege that "Mr. Cooper never wrote a successful book after he left the United States." It is certainly a stronger work than The Pilot, though not without considerable faults.

_The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish_ was the next novel. The author I believe regards this and Lionel Lincoln as the poorest of his works. It met with no great success.

_The Water Witch_ succeeded, but is inferior to any of the other nautical tales. It was the first attempt by Mr. Cooper--the first by any author--to lay the scene of a tale of witchcraft on the coast of America. It has more imagination than any other of Mr. Cooper's works, but the blending of the real with the ideal was in some parts a little incongruous. The Water Witch was written in Italy and first printed in Germany.

Of all Americans who ever visited Europe, Mr. Cooper contributed most to our country's good reputation. His high character made him every where welcome; there was no circle, however aristocratic or distinguished, in which, if he appeared in it, he was not observed of all observers; and he had the somewhat singular merit of _never forgetting that he was an American_. Halleck, in his admirable poem of Red Jacket, says well of him:

COOPER, whose name is with his country's woven, First in her fields, her pioneer of mind, _A wanderer now in other lands, has proven_ _His love for the young land he left behind._

After having been in Europe about two years he published his _Notions of the Americans_, in which he "endeavored to repel some of the hostile opinions of the other hemisphere, and to turn the tables on those who at that time most derided and calumniated us." It contained some unimportant errors, from having been written at a distance from necessary documentary materials, but was altogether as just as it was eloquent in vindication of our institutions, manners, and history. It shows how warm was his patriotism; how fondly, while receiving from strangers an homage withheld from him at home, he remembered the scenes of his first trials and triumphs, and how ready he was to sacrifice personal popularity and profit in defence of his country.

He was not only the first to defend and to praise America, but the first to whom appeals were made for information in regard to her by statesmen who felt an interest in our destiny. Following the revolution of the Three Days, in Paris, a fierce controversy took place between the absolutists, the republicans, and the constitutionalists. Among the subjects introduced in the Chambers was the comparative cheapness of our system of government; the absolutists asserting that the people of the United States paid more direct and indirect taxes than the French. La Fayette appealed to Mr. Cooper, who entered the arena, and though, from his peculiar position, at a heavy pecuniary loss, and the danger of incurring yet greater misfortunes, by a masterly _exposé_ silenced at once the popular falsehoods. So in all places, circumstances, and times, he was the "_American_ in Europe," as jealous of his country's reputation as his own.

Immediately after, he published _The Bravo_, the success of which was very great: probably equal to that of The Red Rover. It is one of the best, if not the very best of the works Mr. Cooper had then written. Although he selected a foreign scene on this occasion, no one of his works is more American in its essential character. It was designed not only to extend the democratical principle abroad, but to confirm his countrymen in the opinion that nations "cannot be governed by an irresponsible minority without involving a train of nearly intolerable abuses." It gave aristocracy some hits, which aristocracy gave back again. The best notice which appeared of it was in the famous Paris gazette entitled _Figaro_, before Figaro was bought out by the French government. The change from the biting wit which characterized this periodical, to the grave sentiment of such an article, was really touching, and added an indescribable grace to the remarks.

_The Heidenmaur_ followed. It is impossible for one to understand this book who has not some acquaintance with the scenes and habits described. It was not very successful.

_The Headsman of Berne_ did much better. It is inferior to The Bravo, though not so clashing to aristocracy. It met with very respectable success. It was the last of Mr. Cooper's novels written in Europe, and for some years the last of a political character.

The first work which Mr. Cooper published after his return to the United States was _A Letter to his Countrymen_. They had yielded him but a hesitating applause until his praise came back from Europe; and when the tone of foreign criticism was changed, by acts and opinions of his which should have banded the whole American press for his defence, he was assailed here in articles which either echoed the tone, or were actual translations of attacks upon him by foreigners. The custom peculiar to this country of "quoting the opinions of foreign nations by way of helping to make up its own estimate of the degree of merit which belongs to its public men," is treated in this letter with caustic and just severity, and shown to be "destructive of those sentiments of self-respect and of that manliness and independence of thought, that are necessary to render a people great or a nation respectable." The controlling influence of foreign ideas over our literature, fashions, and even politics, are illustrated by the manner in which he was himself treated, and by what he considers the English doctrines which have been broached in the speeches of many of our statesmen. It is a frank and honest book, which was unnecessary as a vindication of Mr. Cooper, but was called for by the existence of the abuse against which it was chiefly directed, though it seems to have had little effect upon it. Of the political opinions it contains I have no more to say than that I do not believe in their correctness.

It was followed by _The Monikins_, a political satire, which was a failure.

The next publications of Mr. Cooper were his _Gleanings in Europe_. _Sketches in Switzerland_, first and second series, each in two volumes, appeared in 1836, and none of his works contain more striking and vivid descriptions of nature, or more agreeable views of character and manners. It was followed by similar works on France, Italy, and England. All of these were well received, notwithstanding an independence of tone which is rarely popular, and some absurdities, as, for example, the imputations upon the American Federalists, in the Sketches of Switzerland. The book on England excited most attention, and was reviewed in that country with as much asperity as if its own travellers were not proverbially the most shameless libellers that ever abused the hospitality of nations. Altogether the ten volumes which compose this series may be set down as the most intelligent and philosophical books of travels which have been written by our countrymen.

_The American Democrat, or Hints on the Social and Civil Relations of the United States of America_, was published in 1835. The design is stated to be, "to make a commencement toward a more just discrimination between truth and prejudice." It is essentially a good book on the virtues and vices of American character.

For a considerable time Mr. Cooper had entertained an intention of writing _The History of the Navy of the United Stated_, and his early experience, his studies, his associations, and above all the peculiar felicity of his style when treating of nautical affairs, warranted the expectation that his work would be a solid and brilliant contribution to our historical literature. It appeared in two octavo volumes in 1839, and reached a second edition in 1840, and a third in 1846.[A] The public had no reason to be disappointed; great diligence had been used in the collection of materials; every subject connected with the origin and growth of our national marine had been carefully investigated, and the result was presented in the most authentic and attractive form. Yet a warm controversy soon arose respecting Mr. Cooper's account of the battle of Lake Erie, and in pamphlets, reviews, and newspapers, attempts were made to show that he had done injustice to the American commander in that action. The multitude rarely undertake particular investigations; and the attacks upon Mr. Cooper, conducted with a virulence for which it would be difficult to find any cause in the History, assuming the form of vindications of a brave and popular deceased officer, produced an impression so deep and so general that he was compelled to defend the obnoxious passages, which he did triumphantly in a small volume entitled _The Battle of Lake Erie, or Answers to Messrs. Burgess, Duer, and Mackenzie_, published in 1843, and in the notes to the last edition of his Naval History. Those who read the whole controversy will perceive that Mr. Cooper was guided by the authorities most entitled to the consideration of an historian, and that in his answers he has demonstrated the correctness of his statements and opinions; and they will perhaps be astonished that he in the first place gave so little cause for dissatisfaction on the part of the friends of Commodore Perry. Besides the Naval History and the essays to which it gave rise, Mr. Cooper has published, in two volumes, _The Lives of American Naval Officers_, a work of the highest merit in its department, every life being written with conciseness yet fulness, and with great care in regard to facts; and in the Democratic Review has published an unanswerable reply to the attacks upon the American marine by James and other British historians.

The first novel published by Mr. Cooper after his return to the United States was _Homeward Bound_. The two generic characters of the book, however truly they may represent individuals, have no resemblance to classes. There may be Captain Trucks, and there certainly are Steadfast Dodges, but the officers of the American merchant service are in no manner or degree inferior to Europeans of the same pursuits and grade; and with all the abuses of the freedom of the press here, our newspapers are not worse than those of Great Britain in the qualities for which Mr. Cooper arraigns them. The opinions expressed of New-York society in _Home as Found_ are identical with those in _Notions of the Americans_, a work almost as much abused for its praise of this country as was _Home as Found_ for its censure, and most men of refinement and large observation seem disposed to admit their correctness. This is no doubt the cause of the feeling it excited, for a _nation_ never gets in a passion at misrepresentation. It is a miserable country that cannot look down a falsehood, even from a native.

The next novel was _The Pathfinder_. It is a common opinion that this work deserves success; more than any Mr. Cooper has written. I have heard Mr. Cooper say that in his own judgment the claim lay between _The Pathfinder_ and _The Deerslayer_, but for myself I confess a preference for the sea novels. Leather Stocking appears to more advantage in _The Pathfinder_ than in any other book, and in _Deerslayer_ next. In _The Pathfinder_ we have him presented in the character of a lover, and brought in contact with such characters as he associates with in no other stages of his varied history, though they are hardly less favorites with the author. The scene of the novel being the great fresh water seas of the interior, sailors, Indians, and hunters, are so grouped together, that every kind of novel-writing in which he has been most successful is combined in one complete fiction, one striking exhibition of his best powers. Had it been written by some unknown author, probably the country would have hailed him as much superior to Mr. Cooper.

_Mercedes of Castile_, a Romance of the Days of Columbus, came next. It may be set down as a failure. The necessity of following facts that had become familiar, and which had so lately possessed the novelty of fiction, was too much for any writer.

_The Deerslayer_ was written after Mercedes and The Pathfinder, and was very successful. Hetty Hunter is perhaps the best female character Mr. Cooper has drawn, though her sister is generally preferred. The Deerslayer was the last written of the "Leather Stocking Tales," having come out in 1841, nineteen years after the appearance of The Pioneers in 1822. Arranged according to the order of events, The Deerslayer should be the first of this remarkable series, followed by The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie.

_The Two Admirals_ followed The Deerslayer. This book in some respects stands at the head of the nautical tales. Its fault is dealing with too important events to be thrown so deep into fiction; but this is a fault that may be pardoned in a romance. Mr. Cooper has written nothing in description, whether of sea or land, that surpasses either of the battle scenes of this work; especially that part of the first where the French ship is captured. The Two Admirals appeared at an unfortunate time, but it was nevertheless successful.

_Wing-and-Wing, or Le Feu Follet_, was published in 1842. The interest depends chiefly upon the manoeuvres by which a French privateer escapes capture by an English frigate. Some of its scenes are among Mr. Cooper's best, but altogether it is inferior to several of his nautical novels.

_Wyandotte, or the Hutted Knoll_, in its general features resembles The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer. The female characters are admirable, and but for the opinion, believed by some, from its frequent repetition, that Mr. Cooper is incapable of depicting a woman, Maud Meredith would be regarded as among the very first class of such portraitures.

Next came the _Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief_, in one volume. It is a story of fashionable life in New-York, in some respects peculiar among Mr. Cooper's works, and was decidedly successful. It appeared originally in a monthly magazine, and was the first of his novels printed in this manner.

_Ned Myers_, in one volume, which followed in the same year, is a genuine biography, though it was commonly regarded as a fiction.

In the beginning of 1844 Mr. Cooper published _Ashore and Afloat_, and a few months afterward _Miles Wallingford_, a sequel to that tale. They have the remarkable minuteness yet boldness of description, and dramatic skill of narration, which render the impressions he produces so deep and lasting. They were as widely read as any of his recent productions.

The extraordinary state of things which for several years has disgraced a part of the state of New-York, where, with unblushing effrontery, the tenants of several large proprietors have refused to pay rents, and claimed, without a shadow of right, to be absolute possessors of the soil, gave just occasion of alarm to the intelligent friends of our institutions; and this alarm increased, when it was observed that the ruffianism of the "anti-renters," as they are styled, was looked upon by many persons of respectable social positions with undisguised approval. Mr. Cooper addressed himself to the exposure and correction of the evil, in a series of novels, purporting to be edited from the manuscripts of a family named Littlepage; and in the preface to the first of these, entitled _Satanstoe, a Tale of the Colony_, published in 1845, announces his intention of treating it with the utmost freedom, and declares his opinion, that the "existence of true liberty among us, the perpetuity of our institutions, and the safety of public morals, are all dependent on putting down, wholly, absolutely, and unqualifiedly, the false and dishonest theories and statements that have been advanced in connection with this subject." Satanstoe presents a vivid picture of the early condition of colonial New-York. The time is from 1737 to the close of the memorable campaign in which the British were so signally defeated at Ticonderoga. _Chainbearer_, the second of the series, tracing the family history through the Revolution, also appeared in 1845, and the last, _The Red Skins_, story of the present day, in 1846. "This book," says the author, in his preface, "closes the series of the Littlepage manuscripts, which have been given to the world as containing a fair account of the comparative sacrifices of time, money, and labor, made respectively by the landlord and the tenants, on a New-York estate, together with the manner in which usages and opinions are changing among us, and the causes of these changes." These books, in which the most important practical truths are stated, illustrated and enforced, in a manner equally familiar and powerful, were received by the educated and right-minded with a degree of favor that showed the soundness of the common mind beyond the crime-infected districts, and their influence will add to the evidences of the value of the novel as a means of upholding principles in art, literature, morals and politics.

_The Crater, or Vulcan's Peak_, followed in 1847. It is a story of the Pacific, embracing some of Mr. Cooper's finest sea pictures, but altogether is not so interesting as the average of his nautical tales.

_Oak Openings, or the Bee-Hunter_, came next. It has the merits characteristic of his Indian novels, masterly scene-painting, and decided individuality in the persons introduced.

_Jack Tier, or the Florida Reef_, appeared in 1848, and is one of the best of the sea stories. The chief character is a woman, deserted by a half smuggler, half buccaneer, whom she joins in the disguise of a sailor, and accompanies undiscovered during a cruise. In vividness of painting and dramatic interest it has rank with the Red Rover and The Pilot.

_The Sea Lions, or the Lost Sealers_, was published in 1849. It deals to some extent in metaphysics, and its characters are for the most part of humble conditions. It has more of domestic life than any of the other nautical pieces.

In the spring of 1850 came out _The Ways of the Hour_, the last of this long series of more than thirty novels, and like the Littlepage MSS. it was devoted to the illustration of social and political evils, having for its main subject the constitution and office of juries. In other works Mr. Cooper appears as a conservative; in this as a destructive. The book is ingenious and able, but has not been very successful.

In 1850 Mr. Cooper came out for the first time as a dramatic writer, in a comedy performed at Burton's theatre in New-York. A want of practice in writing for the stage prevented a perfect adaptation of his piece for this purpose, but it was conceded to be remarkable for wit and satirical humor. He has now in press a work illustrative of the social history and condition of New-York, which will be published during the summer by Mr. Putnam, who from time to time is giving to the public the previous works of Mr. Cooper, with his final revisions, and such notes and introductions as are necessary for the new generation of readers. The Leather Stocking Tales, constituting one of the great works to be ranked hereafter with the chief masterpieces of prose fiction in the literature of the world, are among the volumes now printed.

It cannot be denied that Mr. Cooper is personally unpopular, and the fact is suggestive of one of the chief evils in our social condition. In a previous number of this magazine we have asserted the ability and eminently honorable character of a large class of American journals. The spirit of another class, also in many instances conducted with ability, is altogether bad and base; jealous, detracting, suspicious, "delighting to deprave;" betraying a familiarity with low standards in mind and morals, and a consciousness habituated to interested views and sordid motives; degrading every thing that wears the appearance of greatness, sometimes by plain denial and insolent contempt, and sometimes by wretched innuendo and mingled lie and sophistry; effectually dissipating all the romance of character, and all the enthusiasm of life; hating dignity, having no sympathies with goodness, insensible to the very existence of honor as a spring of human conduct; treating patriotism and disinterestedness with an elaborate sneer, and receiving the suggestions of duty with a horse-laugh. There is a difference not easily to be mistaken between the lessening of men which is occasioned by the loftiness of the platform whence the observation is made, and that which is produced by the malignant envy of the observer; between the gloomy judicial ferocity of a Pope or a Tacitus, and the villain levity which revels in the contemplation of imputed faults, or that fiendishness of feeling which gloats and howls over the ruins of reputations which itself has stabbed.

For a few years after Mr. Cooper's return from Europe, he was repeatedly urged by his friends to put a stop to the libels of newspapers by an appeal to the law; but he declined. He perhaps supposed that the common sense of the people would sooner or later discover and right the wrong that was done to him by those who, without the slightest justification, invaded the sacredest privacies of his life for subjects of public observation. He finally decided, at the end of five years after his return, to appeal to the tribunals, in every case in which any thing not by himself submitted to public criticism, in his works, should be offensively treated, within the limits of the state of New-York. Some twenty suits were brought by him, and his course was amply vindicated by unanimous verdicts in his behalf. But the very conduct to which the press had compelled him was made a cause of ungenerous prejudices. He has never objected to the widest latitude or extremest severity in criticisms of his writings, but simply contended that the author should be let alone. With him, individually, the public had nothing to do. In the case of a public officer, slanders may be lived down, but a literary man, in his retirement, has no such means of vindication; his only appeal is to the laws, and if they afford no protection in such cases, the name of law is contemptible.

I enter here upon no discussion of the character of the late Commander Slidell Mackenzie, but observe simply that no one can read Mr. Cooper's volume upon the battle of Lake Erie and retain a very profound respect for that person's sagacity or sincerity. The proprietors of the copyright of Mr. Cooper's abridged Naval History offered it, without his knowledge, to John C. Spencer, then Secretary of the State of New-York, for the school libraries of which that officer had the selection. Mr. Spencer replied with peculiar brevity that he would have nothing to do with such a partisan performance, but soon after directed the purchase of Commander Mackenzie's Life of Commodore Perry, which was entirely and avowedly partisan, while Mr. Cooper's book was rigidly impartial. Commander Mackenzie returned the favor by hanging the Secretary's son. A circumstance connected with this event illustrates what we have said of obtaining justice from the newspapers. A month before Commander Mackenzie's return to New-York in the Somers, Mr. Cooper sent to me, for publication in a magazine of which I was editor, an examination of certain statements in the Life of Perry; but after it was in type, hearing of the terrible mistake which Mackenzie had made, he chose to suffer a continuation of injustice rather than strike a fallen enemy, and so directed the suppression of his criticism. Nevertheless, as the statements in the Life of Perry very materially affected his own reputation, in the following year, when the natural excitement against Mackenzie had nearly subsided, he gave his answer to the press, and was immediately accused in a "leading journal of the country" of having in its preparation devoted himself, from the date of that person's misfortune, to his injury. The reader supposes, of course, that the slander was contradicted as generally as it had been circulated, and that justice was done to the forbearance and delicacy with which Mr. Cooper had acted in the matter; but to this day, neither the journal in which he was assailed, nor one in a hundred of those which repeated the falsehood, has stated these facts. Here is another instance: The late William L. Stone agreed with Mr. Cooper to submit a certain matter of libel for amicable arbitration, agreeing, in the event of a decision against him, to pay Mr. Cooper two hundred dollars toward the expenses he must incur in attending to it. The affair attracted much attention. Before an ordinary court Mr. Cooper should have received ten thousand dollars; but he accepted the verdict agreed upon, the referees deciding without hesitation that he had been grossly wronged by the publication of which he had complained. After the death of Mr. Stone one of the principal papers of the city stated that his widow was poor, and had appealed to Mr. Cooper's generosity for the remission of a fine, which could be of no importance to a gentleman of his liberal fortune, but had been answered with a rude refusal. The statement was entirely and in all respects false, and it was indignantly contradicted upon the authority of President Wayland, the brother of Mrs. Stone; but the editors who gave it currency have never retracted it, and it yet swells the tide of miserable defamation which makes up the bad reputations of so many of the purest of men. Numerous other instances might be quoted to show not only the injustice with which Mr. Cooper has been treated, but the addiction of the press to libel, and its unwillingness to atone for wrongs it has itself inflicted.

It used to be the custom of the _North American Review_ to speak of Mr. Cooper's works as "translated into French," as if thus giving the highest existing evidence of their popularity, while there was not a language in Europe into which they did not all, after the publication of The Red Rover appear almost as soon as they were printed in London. He has been the chosen companion of the prince and the peasant, on the borders of the Volga, the Danube, and the Guadalquivir; by the Indus and the Ganges, the Paraguay and the Amazon; where the name even of Washington was never spoken, and our country is known only as the home of Cooper. The world has living no other writer whose fame is so universal.

Mr. Cooper has the faculty of giving to his pictures an astonishing reality. They are not mere transcripts of nature, though as such they would possess extraordinary merit, but actual creations, embodying the very spirit of intelligent and genial experience and observation. His Indians, notwithstanding all that has been written to the contrary, are no more inferior in fidelity than they are in poetical interest to those of his most successful imitators or rivals. His hunters and trappers have the same vividness and freshness, and in the whole realm of fiction there is nothing more actual, harmonious, and sustained. They evince not only the first order of inventive power, but a profoundly philosophical study of the influences of situation upon human character. He treads the deck with the conscious pride of home and dominion: the aspects of the sea and sky, the terrors of the tornado, the excitement of the chase, the tumult of battle, fire, and wreck, are presented by him with a freedom and breadth of outline, a glow and strength of coloring and contrast, and a distinctness and truth of general and particular conception, that place him far in advance of all the other artists who have attempted with pen or pencil to paint the ocean. The same vigorous originality is stamped upon his nautical characters. The sailors of Smollett are as different in every respect as those of Eugene Sue and Marryat are inferior. He goes on board his ship with his own creations, disdaining all society and assistance but that with which he is thus surrounded. Long Tom Coffin, Tom Tiller, Trysail, Bob Yarn, the boisterous Nightingale, the mutinous Nighthead, the fierce but honest Boltrope, and others who crowd upon our memories, as familiar as if we had ourselves been afloat with them, attest the triumph of this self-reliance. And when, as if to rebuke the charge of envy that he owed his successes to the novelty of his scenes and persons, he entered upon fields which for centuries had been illustrated by the first geniuses of Europe, his abounding power and inspiration were vindicated by that series of political novels ending with The Bravo, which have the same supremacy in their class that is held by The Pilot and The Red Rover among stories of the sea. It has been urged that his leading characters are essentially alike, having no difference but that which results from situation. But this opinion will not bear investigation. It evidently arose from the habit of clothing his heroes alike with an intense individuality, which under all circumstances sustains the sympathy they at first awaken, without the aid of those accessories to which artists of less power are compelled to resort. Very few authors have added more than one original and striking character to the world of imagination; none has added more than Cooper; and his are all as distinct and actual as the personages that stalk before us on the stage of history.

To be American, without falling into Americanism, is the true task that is set before the native artist in literature, the accomplishment of which awaits the reward of the best approval in these times, and the promise of an enduring name. Some of our authors, fascinated very excusably with the faultless models of another age, have declined this condition, and have given us Spectators and Tattlers with false dates, and developed a style of composition of which the very merits imply an anachronism in the proportion of excellence. Others have understood the result to be attained better than the means of arriving at it. They have not considered the difference between those peculiarities in our society, manners, tempers, and tastes, which are genuine and characteristic, and those which are merely defects and errors upon the English system; they have acquired the force and gayety of liberty, but not the dignity of independence, and are only provincial, when they hoped to be national. Mr. Cooper has been more happy than any other writer in reconciling these repugnant qualities, and displaying the features, character, and tone of a great rational style in letters, which, original and unimitative, is yet in harmony with the ancient models.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The first and second editions appeared in Philadelphia, and the third in Cooperstown. It was reprinted in 1830 in London, Paris, and Brussels: and an abridgment of it, by the author, has been largely introduced into common schools.

STATUE OF JOHN C. CALHOUN, BY HIRAM POWERS.

The above engraving of the statue of JOHN C. CALHOUN is from a daguerreotype taken in Florence immediately after the work was completed, and therefore presents it as it came from the hand of the sculptor, unmutilated by the accidents to which it was subjected in consequence of the wreck of the Elizabeth. The statue of Mr. Calhoun was contracted for, we believe, in 1845, and completed in 1850. It is the first draped or historical full-length by Mr. Powers, and it amply justifies the fame he had won in other performances by the harmonious blending of such particular excellences as he had exhibited in separation. It indeed illustrates his capacities for the highest range of historical portraiture and characterization, and will occasion regrets wherever similar subjects have in recent years been confided to other artists. We have heard that it is in contemplation to place in the park of our own city a colossal figure of Mr. Webster, by the same great sculptor. It is fit that while Charleston glories in the possession of this counterfeit of her dead Aristides (for in the indefectable purity of his public and private life Mr. Calhoun was surpassed by no character in the temples of Grecian or Roman greatness), New-York should be able to point to a statue of the representative of those ideas which are most eminently national, and of which she, as the intellectual and commercial metropolis of the whole country, is the centre. For plastic art, Mr. Webster may be regarded as perhaps the finest subject in modern history, and the head which Thorwaldsen thought must be the artist's ideal of the head of Jove, when modelled to the size of life, in the fit proportions of such a statue as is proposed, would be more imposing than any thing that has appeared in marble since the days of Praxitiles.

This figure of Mr. Calhoun is considerably larger than that of the great senator. The face is represented with singular fidelity as it appeared ten years ago. The incongruous blending of the Roman toga with the palmetto must be borne: civilization is not sufficiently advanced for the historical to be much regarded in art; and our Washingtons, Hamiltons, Websters and Calhouns, must all, like Mr. Booth and Mr. Forrest, come before us in the character of Brutus. With this exception as to the design, every critic must admit the work to be faultless; and Charleston may well be proud of a monument to her legislator, which illustrates her taste while it reminds her of his purity, dignity, and watchful care of her interests.

By the wreck of the ship Elizabeth, the left arm of the statue was broken off, and the fragment has not been recovered.

NELL GWYNNE.

The above picture is from Sir Peter Lely's portrait, copied in the Memoirs of Grammont. Nell Gwynne has been the heroine of a dozen books, in the last ten years, and a very interesting work respecting her life and times is now being published in _The Gentleman's Magazine_. We copy the following article, with its illustrations, from the _Art Journal_, in which it appears as one of Mrs. S. C. Hall's "Pilgrimages to English Shrines."

There may be some who will object to the application of so honored a term to the dwelling of an actress of lost repute; but surely that may be a "shrine" where consideration can be taught--where mercy is to be learned--and--that which is "greater" than even faith and hope--charity!

However agreeable may be the present, and we have no reason to complain of it in any way, there is inexhaustible delight in reverting to the past. We do not mean living over again our own days; for though, if we could "pick and choose," there are sundry portions of our lives we might desire to repeat, yet, beginning from the beginning, taking the bad and the good "straight on," there can be few, men or women, who would willingly pass again through the whole of a gone-by career. And this, properly considered, is one of our greatest blessings; stifling much of vain regret, and teaching us to "look forward" to the future. We have always had, if we may so call it, a domestic rambling propensity; a desire to see "dwellings," not so much for their pictorial as their, so to say, personal celebrity: and sometimes, as on our visit to Barley Wood, this longing comes upon us at the wrong season, when a cheerful fire at "home" would be a meet companion. It is now six years ago--six years, last month--that, pacing along Pall Mall, we paused, and turned to the left hand corner of St. James's Square, full of painful and un-English memories of the Asiatic court of the second Charles; the sovereign who had endured adversity without discovering that "sweet are its uses;" who had "suffered tribulation" without "learning mercy"--the king who makes us doubt if, as a people, we have any claim to what is called "national character"--for the change that came over England, within a few brief years, from gloomy fanaticism to reckless license, is one of the marvels that give to history the aspect of romance. We had been walking round Whitehall,[B] recalling the change that had swept away nearly all relics of the past in that quarter, and strolled so far out of our home-ward path to look at the house in Pall Mall (recently removed from its place) which tradition says was the dwelling of Nell Gwynne, besides her apartment at Whitehall, to which she was entitled by virtue of her office as lady of the bed-chamber to a most outraged queen. One of our friends remembers supping in the back room on the ground-floor of that very house, the said room being called "the Mirror Chamber," because the walls were panelled with looking-glass[C]. There are others who affirm that Nelly lodged at the _opposite_ side of Pall Mall, because Evelyn gossips of her leaning from her window, "talking to the king," who was lounging in St. James's Park, thereby wounding the propriety of many, who think vice only vice when it becomes notorious. Evelyn was always sadly perplexed by his faithful and high devotion to Charles, the king, and his abhorrence of the vices of Charles, the man; while Pepys jogged on, sometimes in the royal seraglio, sometimes at church, sometimes with my Lady Castlemaine, sometimes with "Knip" at the "king's house," seeing, admiring, and repeating--his morality held in abeyance; and yet always, even to the kissing of "Mistress Nelly," "a sweet pretty soul," companioned by his wife. If Pepys was a curiosity, what must Madame Pepys have been![D] What must the "court set" of those days have been, when we are absolutely refreshed by turning from them to the uneducated but frank-hearted and generous woman,--tainted as she is to all history by the worse than imperfections arising out of her position, yet redeemed in a degree, by virtues, which, in that profligate court, were entirely her own!

The scene in St. James's Park to which Evelyn refers, was an index to the age[E].

Blessed as we are in the knowledge that nowhere in England are the domestic virtues better cultivated or more truly flourishing than in our own pure and high-souled court, we are almost inclined to treat as a mythological fable, the history of Whitehall during the reign of Charles the Second. No one trait of the father's better nature redeems that of the son. His life was indeed

"a sad epicure's dream,"

and worse. He was not worthy even of the earnest devotion which the poor orange-girl, of all his favorites, alone manifested to the last.

Poor Nell! the sympathy which every right-thinking woman feels it a Christian duty to give to her and her class, far from extenuating vice, is only a call upon the virtuous to be more virtuous, and to the pure to be more pure. No one would plunge into crime, merely for the sake of being redeemed therefrom; no one take the sin, who looked first at the shame, hideous and enduring as it must be--however overshadowed by the broad wings of mercy; the burn of the brand can never be effaced, however skilfully healed. And when the wit, the loveliness, the generosity, the fidelity of "Madame Ellen," when the memory of the well-spent evening of her checkered life, and the allowance we make for the early impressions of a young creature, called upon to sing her first songs in a tavern, and sell oranges in the depraved and depraving saloon of "the King's House;"--when all these aids are exerted to excite our sympathy, we only accord the sentiment of pity to "poor Nell Gwynne!"

While looking at the house said to have been inhabited by this "_femme d'esprit par la grace de Dieu_!" we vowed a pilgrimage to Sandford Manor House, at Sandy End, Fulham,--to the dwelling where there is no doubt she spent many summer months. Near as it is to our own, we were doubtful of the way, and determined to inquire of our opposite neighbor, who keeps the old Brompton tollbar.

"Sandford Manor House," repeated he, "I never heard tell of such a place in these parts. Whereabouts is it?"

"Exactly what we want to know. It is a very old dilapidated house, by the side of a little stream that runs into the Thames somewhere by Old Chelsea. I think you must have heard of it. It was once inhabited by the famous Nell Gwynne." I might almost as well have talked Hebrew to our neighbor, who seemed born to lay in wait for market-carts, and pounce upon them for toll.

"Old house! Nell Gwynne!" he again repeated, and something like an expression of life and interest moved his features while he added--"It's the Nell Gwynne public-house you're after, I'm thinking; that was in Chelsea; but whether it's there now or not, is more than I can tell."

"No, no," we answered, perhaps, sharply, "it is the house she lived in we want to see--Sandford Manor House."

"Perhaps it's the madhouse," he suggested. We walked on. "Please," said a little rosy-faced boy, "if you want to find out any thing about old houses, Hill, the rat-catcher, knows them all, as he hunts up the rats and sparrows about; and you have only to go down Thistle Grove, into the Fulham road--straight on. His is a low house, ma'am--his name in the window--you can't pass it, for the birds and white mice."

And is there no one left, we thought, to tell where the witty, light-hearted, true-hearted Nelly lived--she who was the friend of Dryden and Lee, the favorite of Lord Buckhurst, the rival of the Duchess of Cleveland, the protector of the soldiers of England--the one unselfish friend of the selfish Charles? Is there no one in a district that once echoed with the praise of her charities--no one to tell where she resided, but Hill, the old rat-catcher? We proceeded through the prettily-built, but gangrened-looking, cottages located in Thistle Grove, once called Brompton Heath, (or Marsh, we forget which,) until the sounds of traffic reminded us that we were in the Fulham road. Presently the sharp voice of a starling, just above us, attracted our attention.

"Poor Tom!" said the bird--"Tom!--poor Tom!"

The old rat-catcher invited us to enter. He is a man of powerful frame, with a massive head, fringed round with an abundance of gray hair, with deep well-set eyes, and a quiet smile. Two sharp, bitter-looking, wiry-haired terriers began smelling, casting their sly eyes upwards, to see if we feared them or were friendly to their advances, and, after a moment or two, seemed sufficiently satisfied with the scrutiny to warrant their wagging their short stumpy tails in rude welcome. The room was hung round with cages of the songbirds of England--some content with their captivity, others restless, and passing to and fro in front of the wires, eager for escape. Strong inclosures, containing both rats and ferrets, were ranged along the sides of the small room; the latter, long, yellow, pink-eyed, and pink-nosed creatures, lithe as a willow wand, courting notice; while the rats, on the contrary, moved their whiskers in defiance, and, with bright, black, determined eyes, sat lumped up in the distant corners of their dens, ready 'to die game,' if die they must. Gay-colored finches, the gold and the green, graced the window in little brown bob cages; while mice of all colors, from the burnt sienna-colored dormouse, who was more than half asleep within the skin of an apple which it had scooped out, to the matronly white mouse, who was sitting composedly amid a progeny of thirteen young ones, attracted groups of little gazers, every now and then dispersed by the larger terrier, who ran out amongst them, snarling and threatening, but doing them no harm. "Come in, old chap; that will do, old fellow," said his master, adding, "I would not keep a dog that would hurt any thing but a _varmint_."

"Oh, oh! Nell's old house," he replied to our inquiries; "Nell Gwynne's house at Sandy End, where runs the little river they deepened into a canal--the stream I mean that divides Chelsea from Fulham--Sandford Manor House! Ay, that I do, and I'd match it against any house in the county for rats!--terrible place--I lost two ferrets there, this time two years, and one of them was found t'other side of the canal; it must have been a pleasant place in those days, when the king was making his private road through the Chelsea fields, and the stream was as clear as a thrush's eye, and birds of all sorts were so tamed by Madame Ellen, that they'd come when she'd call them. Ah, a pretty woman might catch a king, but it's only a kind one that could tame the wild birds of the air; I know that; I'll show you the way with pleasure." "Poor Tom," sung out the starling. "Your bird is calling you," we observed, after he had told his wife not to let the jay pick "the splints" off his broken leg, and we were leaving the door. "It's not me he's calling," answered the old man, with a heavy sigh. "Now that's a bit of nature, ma'am. A bird, I'm thinking, remembers longer than a Christian does. Poor Tom's wife is married again, but the starling still calls for its master. It's hard to say, what they do or do not know; the bird often wrings my heart; but for all that, I could not part with him." At any other time we would have asked him the reason, but just then we were thinking more of Nell Gwynne than of our guide. We walked on, until we came to the "World's End." "It is nothing but a common public-house now," observed our companion, who had not spoken again, except to his dog: "but I remember when it was more than that; and, moreover, in Nell's time, it was a place of great resort for noblemen and fine ladies--a royal tea-garden, they say--filled with the best of good company; they liked the country and the open air in those days." We continued silent, until at last our guide called "Stop!" so suddenly, as to make us start. "Do you see that bank just under the arch of the bridge we stand on? The hardest day's work I ever had was digging an old rat out of that bank. This is Sandy End; and that house opposite is Sandford Manor House[F]."

There was nothing in the sight of those green, grim walls to excite any feeling of romance. Yet positively our heart beat more rapidly than usual for a minute or two--"a way it has" when we are at all interested. We turned down a lane seamed with ruts, by the side of a paling black with gas tar. We passed two or three exceedingly old houses, and one in particular with three windows in front. It was evident that the paling had been run across the garden, which must have been very extensive. After waiting a few minutes for permission from the master of the gas-works, to whom the Manor House belonged, to enter, an elderly man of respectable appearance opened the gate, and told us he resided there, and that the servant would show us all over the house. The rat-catcher commenced poking his stick into the various mounds of earth wherever there was the appearance of a hole, and his dogs became at once busy and animated. There was but one of the three walnut trees said to have been planted by royal hands, remaining, and that stood gnarled, and thick, and stunted, close to the present entrance--bent it was, like a thing whose pleasantest days are gone, and which cares not how soon it may be gathered into the garner. A circular plot of thick green grass was directly opposite the hall door, and in its centre grew a young golden holly, some of the turf being cleared away from round its root. This was encircled by a fair gravel walk, leading to the house, which was entered through a rustic porch, covered with ivy; very old and rampant it was, and its deep heavy foliage, so densely green, had a pall-like look, as it rustled and sighed in the sharp keen air. It was flanked by two cypress trees, well-shaped and well-grown. Dank ivy and deep cypress where the living Nell would have twined roses and passion-flowers! You see the old door-way when under the porch; it is of no particular order, but massive and pointed,--the hall is like the usual entrance to old-fashioned country-houses, panelled with oak. The staircase is very remarkable, as Mr. Fairholt's sketch will show; broad twisted iron rods, of great thickness, springing from the oak square pillars which flank the turnings, and assisting to support the flight above. The room on the right is large, the ceiling low, the windows deep set in the thick walls. A very gentle looking little maid was nursing a pretty white cat by the fire; her young fresh face and bright smile were like sunbeams in a tomb; what did she there? We could fancy old withered crones in such a dwelling, rather than a fair tender child, and yet she looked so happy, and so full of joy! The opposite room had been fitted up as a kitchen, and was clean and cold. We paced up the stairs so often trodden by Nell's small feet, when they descended briskly to meet the lounging heavy footfalls of her royal master, whom she loved for himself, and careless of her own future, as she was of her own person, cared more for the honor of the indolent Charles, than ever he cared for his own! In nature, in feeling, in all honors _save the one_, how superior was the poor orange-girl to her rivals; they envied and slandered each other, disdaining no article to fix the fancy of the king, who desired nothing more than that they should all live peaceably together, and was not able to comprehend why they did not agree when he endeavored to please them; they copied each other--but Nell resembled only herself. Instead of going like the generality of her sex from bad to worse, the more her opportunities of evil increased, the better she became. The ladies of the court swore, drank, and gambled; it was the fashion to be coarse and vicious, and the more coarse they were, the better they pleased the English Sultan; and if the poor orange-girl endeavored to keep her lover by what bound him to others,--where's the wonder? Her manners had their full taste of the time; but we look in vain elsewhere for the generous bravery, the kind thoughts, the disinterested acts, which have retained her in our memories. "Poor Nell!" we said aloud, "poor, poor Nell!" "Please, if you will only go on, I will show you her bed-room and dressing-room, them's little more than closets; but this was her bed-room, and that, the madam's dressing-room," said the servant, a little impatient of delay. Both rooms were furnished, but cold and gloomy; the floor of what the girl called her dressing-room was chippy and worm-eaten. "And there," persisted the servant, "in that corner just by, if not in that little cupboard, the money was found." "What money?" "The money the madam, or some one about her, forgot, fifteen thousand good pounds, I am told; and a gentleman came here once, who told me he had some of the coins that were discovered there." "That must be a mistake," we said. "Oh, there's no knowing. Why should the gentleman tell a story?" We saw the girl was determined we should believe her, contrary both to our knowledge and reason, so we made no further observation, while she muttered that she would "just go and put her own room straight a bit." We were left alone in Nell's dressing-chamber! She never bestowed much time upon her toilet; and Burnet, who was particularly hard upon her at all times, says that, after her "elevation," she continued "to _hang_ on her clothes with the same slovenly negligence;" and, truly, Sir Peter Lely, would make it appear that all the "ladies" of the court, however rich the materials that composed their dresses, and well assorted the colors, "hung" them full carelessly over their persons; nay, it would be difficult to imagine how they could stand up without their dresses falling off; they certainly have a most uncomfortable look[G]. However she dressed, she certainly succeeded in winning, and even keeping, the _fancy_ (for we may doubt if he had any _affection_ for the ministers of his vices) of Charles until the end. And although Burnet was marvellously angry that at such a time the thought of such a "creature" should find its way into the mind when it was about to lay aside the draperies of royalty for the realities of eternity--yet the only little passage in the life of the voluptuary that ever touched us was, his entreaty to his brother James, "Not to let poor Nelly starve!" We closed our eyes in reverie, and endeavored to picture the "beauties" upon whom the licentious king conferred a shameful immortality. Unfortunately the most powerful female influence in the Cabinet has generally been exercised by worthless women; an argument, if one were needed, to prove that a woman is little tempted to interfere with State affairs if her mind is untainted, and directed to the source of woman's legitimate power.

How loathsome was the King's subjection to the abandoned vixen, my Lady Castlemaine! And yet how powerful must have been her beauty! Can we not, in fancy, see her now,--stepping out of her carriage at Bartholomew Fair, whither she had gone to view the rare puppet-show of "Patient Grizzle," hissed when recognized by the honest mob; yet upon turning the light of her radiant and beautiful face towards them, they exchange their jibes and curses for admiration and hurras.

"Poor Nelly" was no proficient in pen-craft, for she could only sign with the initials--E. G.

Until the publication of Mrs. Jameson's "Beauties," there existed a popular fallacy, that every one of Sir Peter Lely's portraits, represented a woman of tainted reputation; this was any thing but true; however poisonous a _malaria_ may be, there are always some who escape its influence, and the pure and high-souled Lady Ossory, and the noble Countess de Grammont would adorn even a court such as our own; we wish that Evelyn or Pepys had recorded how those ladies treated "Nell," for they must have met her during their attendance on the outraged Queen, and hardly less insulted Duchess of York; they must have encountered her at Whitehall, and noted her dimpled cheeks, and small bright laughing eyes; and contrasted her unaffected child-like bearing, with the boisterous arrogance of the Duchess of Cleveland, and the cat-like cunning of the French _courtezan_, (the Duchess of Portsmouth,) who could not with all her arts detach the sovereign from poor Nell, whose genuine wit, generosity of mind, as well as purer life, and careless buoyant humor, were reliefs to the caprices and eternal French cabals,--which troubled his unenergetic nature, in the gorgeous _salon_ of the most extravagant of his favorites. From such women as Madame de Grammont and Lady Ossory the untitled actress could have met no offence; for women of high virtue are merciful; women who affect it, are not.

We could fancy Nell's silver laugh, passing along those damp walls of Sandford Manor House; we could imagine her leaning from that window, conversing with, and rallying, her royal "lover," who stands beneath, amid the flowers, once so bright and abundant, where only weeds and stinging thistles were to be seen this winter-time. As for him, wisdom came not with years; "consideration" never whipped the offending Adam out of him--in his character there was no "nettle," but there was no "strawberry." What does he reply to her merrie rallying as she dallies with her looking-glass? He leans his white and jewelled hand upon his hip, and, with a faded smile, listens to her mingled love and reproof. She talks of the old soldiers, and wonders why the builders pause in the erection of the Hospital, for lack of cash, when certain ladies sport new diamonds, and glitter in fair coaches; and he tells her he will take her, if she likes, from where she is, and give her the palace by the water-side, in exchange for her sweet words and sweeter smiles. She will none of this, but answers she would rather content her in the humblest house in his dominions, so that the soldiers who fought his battles should be worthily lodged in their old age. He repeats to her the last bit of Sedley, and diverts her with news of a new play, for well he knows those who once lived by the buskin love the buskin still:[H] and she listens, and is pleased, but returns to her first theme; and, provoked at last by an indifference she cannot understand, she becomes bitter, and then Charles laughs at "little pig-eyed Nelly." "Ah, Nell, Nell!" he says, stroking, at the same time, the fair tresses that grace the head of a pretty boy, her son, "you are like the fruit that will come of yonder trees, a rough and bitter outside, but a sweet and pleasant soul within."

We composed our thoughts, or rather we aroused from those waking dreams in which all indulge sometimes--more or less. The house contains fourteen rooms--and must have been pleasant, long ago, as a retreat where poor Nell could bring her titled children--whom she doubtless loved with all the enthusiasm of her ardent nature. We crossed the garden, but could find no trace of the pond in which tradition reports Madam Ellen's mother to have been drowned. Not long ago, a very old woman resided in Chelsea, whose grandmother, it was said, was Nell's stage-dresser; this was before old Ranelagh was built over, and when the site of Eaton Square was intersected by damp pathways and nursery-gardens. We entered the meadows at the back, to see how the house looked from thence, which greatly delighted the rat-catcher's terriers.

Modern "improvement" long spared this locality. When we knew and loved it first, we could see the Thames from our windows in one direction, and Kensington Gardens in another. But old houses, standing within their own park-like inclosures, and old trees and green fields, are nearly all gone.[I] We used to have the nightingales in the elm-avenue leading to Hereford Lodge, but the only nightingale we had last spring was one who came from the FAR NORTH. Many hereafter will do pilgrimage to her shrine with a far deeper feeling of respect, than, with all our charity, we can bestow upon Sandford Manor House.

If the women of England could forget this period of our history, which, as Mrs. Jameson truly and beautifully observes, "saw them degraded from objects of adoration to servants of pleasure, and gave the first blow to that chivalrous feeling with which their sex had hitherto been regarded, by levelling the distinction between the unblemished matron and her 'who was the ready spoil of opportunity'"--if this were possible, it might be well, like Claire, when she threw the pall over the perishing features of Julie, to exclaim--

"Maudite soit l'indigne main qui jamais soulevera ce voile,"

but so it is not; and it becomes our duty to look on Charles, and those who were corrupted by his example and his influence, as plague-spots upon the fair brow of our beloved country. We should learn to speak of him, not as distinguished for "gallantry," but as the monarch who reduced those he insulted by his love below the level of the poor Georgian slave, who knows no higher destiny than to glitter for a few short moons as the star of the harem. But if some of the women of that court were deeply degraded--if the termagant and imperious Castlemaine; the lovely and intriguing Denham; the coquettish, cold, and cunning Richmond; the innately-dissipated and unrestrainable Southesk; the equivocal Middleton; the rapacious, prodigal, and insinuating Querouaille,--are rendered infamous in our national history--let us not confound the innocent with the guilty. We can point out to our daughters, for admiration and example, the patient, affectionate, and enduring Lady Northumberland, the beloved sister of Lady Rachel Russel; the beautiful Miss Hamilton; the peerless Lady Ossory; the matchless Jennings;--women passing through the ordeal of the Whitehall court, at such a time, with unstained repute, may be well believed to have possessed innate virtue and true feminine dignity.

We have not classed Nell Gwynne among the court profligates; nor can we so describe her. She was most unfortunate, but not innately vicious; we may say so without danger to others. Neither the circumstances of her life or death hold out temptations to follow her example. She endured vexation and contumely enough, during the most brilliant period of her life, to embitter even a less sensitive spirit than hers. The deep and earnest love she bore the worthless king, must have been a sore scourge to her own heart. The very piety of her nature, overcome as it was by circumstances, and the lack of those virtues which, slow of growth, only attained strength during the last seven years of her life, and were not deemed unworthy the Christian forbearance and even commendation of Doctor Tennison,[J] whose funeral sermon preached in memory of the poor orange-girl, proves that she must have suffered much from the reproofs of conscience, even when her sin to all appearance most revelled in its "glory." The canker eat into the rose--soiled and marred its perfectness--chipped and wasted its beauty--but could not destroy its perfume!

That there must have been great good, and great fascination, in Nell Gwynne, is proved by the kind of memory in which her name is enshrined. While we say "Poor Nell!" we shake our heads--the sigh and the smile mingle together--we regret and pity her. We wonder she was so good--we sorrow at the impurity,--not so much of the beset actress, as of her position. We know that, though fallen, she was not depraved. She was not avaricious, nor intriguing, nor ill-tempered, nor unjust. Her regard for literature (though she could hardly sign her own name) proved the up-looking of her better nature; and her charity was unbounded. Shall we--reared and instructed in all righteous ways--shall we show less charity to the memory of one who in her latter days rose out of the slough into which circumstance--not vice--had plunged her? Shall we be less charitable than the bishop who honored her memory and his own character by recording her benevolence, her penitence, her exemplary end? The good bishop's testimony renders it needless that we "point a moral." There was "joy in heaven" over one sinner that repented. Who but One can judge the heart? Let charity hold up her warning finger, often, when we "think evil:" and consideration, "like an angel" come, when harsh judgment dooms an "erring sister." Above all, let us adopt the sentiment of the poet (and our pilgrimage to Sandford Manor House will not be in vain):

"If thy neighbor should sin, old Christoval said, Never, never, unmerciful be! For remember it is by the mercy of God, Thou art not as wicked as he!"[K]

FOOTNOTES:

[B] The appearance of Whitehall from the Thames in the reign of Charles II. may be seen in our woodcut. The beautiful Banqueting-house of Inigo Jones was crowded among a heterogeneous mass of ugly buildings connected with the exigencies of the court. Beside the houses, to the spectator's left, was a large garden extending to the river, with fountains and parterres. A small garden also projected into the river in front of the buildings; and here Charles used to view the civic processions of the Lord Mayor, who on the day of his taking the oaths at Westminster, generally gratified the sovereign and other sight-seers with a pageant on the Thames, in some degree adulatory of the monarch. The king resided here so constantly, that the most striking pictures of his private manners are recorded to have happened at Whitehall, and for which the graphic pages of Pepys, Evelyn, and De Grammont may be consulted. Whitehall, indeed, has obtained its chief interest from its connection with the Stuarts. The Banqueting-house, erected by James I., in front of which his unfortunate son was executed; the residence of Cromwell here in a quietude, strangely contrasted with the voluptuousness of the Restoration; the flight of James II., and his queen's escape with her infant son by the water-gate, shown in our cut, closes the history of the Stuart family in this country of sovereigns; and the history also of the palace; for, on the 10th April, 1691, the greater part was burnt by a fire, which was succeeded by another in 1698, which destroyed nearly every building but the Banqueting-house, and Whitehall ceased to be the residence of royalty.

[C] Nell's "town-house" was in Pall Mall. Pennant says, "it was the first good one on the left hand of St. James's Square, as we enter from Pall Mall. The back room on the second floor was (within memory) entirely of looking-glass, as was said to have been the ceiling. Over the chimney was her picture, and that of her sister was in a third room." At this house she died in 1691, and was pompously interred in the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, leaving that parish a handsome sum yearly, that every Thursday evening there should be six men employed for the space of one hour in ringing, for which they were to have a roasted shoulder of mutton and ten shillings for beer.

[D] Pepys was Secretary to the Admiralty, and it was he who published, from the king's dictation, the minute and interesting account of his escape from the Battle of Worcester, and adventures a Boscobel, and in the "Royal Oak." He kept a very minute and amusing diary, in which he neglected not to enter the most trivial matters, even the purchase of a new wig, or a new riband for his wife. This very littleness of detail has made his Memoirs the most extraordinary picture we possess of the times. He appears to have been a coarse but shrewd man, and fully alive to the faults of his master.

[E] Previous to the restoration of Charles II., the park of St. James's appears to have attracted little attention, and to have been left to the guidance of nature alone. Charles seems to have had Versailles in view when he laid it out from Le Notre's design. A long straight canal was formed in its centre from a square pond which existed at its foot near the Horse Guards. Rows of elm and lime trees were planted on each side of it, an aviary was formed in that place still called the "Bird Cage Walk;" and in the large space between this walk and the canal, and nearest the Abbey, an extensive decoy for wild fowl was constructed, popularly termed "Duck Island," and of which the famous St. Evremond was appointed a salaried governor. Charles, who was exceedingly fond of walking, and who tired out many a courtier who tried to keep up with his quick pace, was continually seen here amusing himself with the birds, playing with the dogs, or feeding the ducks. On the opposite side of the canal, three broad walks were constructed and shaded with trees, one for coaches, the other for walking, and the central one for the game of "Pall Mall," an athletic exercise of which the king and the gentlemen of the day were fond. The game consisted in driving a ball through a ring at the extremity of the walk, which had a narrow border of wood on each side of it to keep the ball within bounds. The floor of this portion of the park was made of mixed earth, covered with sea-sand and powdered shells as at Versailles. The park was much secluded, except on this side, which was that only accessible to the public in general. There, Spring Gardens, with its bowling-greens and gaming-tables, seduced the idle and dissipated, until the Mulberry Garden (which stood on the site of Carlton Gardens) put forth its attractions; and which, as Evelyn says, became "the only place of refreshment about the town for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at." The plays of the period abound with intrigue and adventure carried on at both places. The Mall ceased to be the resort of royalty at the death of Charles, but it continued to be the fashionable promenade until the close of the last century.

[F] The house at Sandy End has been altered within the last few years. The characteristic gables of the roof, which so well marked its age, and display the taste of the period when it was constructed, are removed, and the house is so much modernized as to lose the greater part of its interest, and at first sight induce a doubt of its antiquity. The extensive gardens still remain, and some very old houses beside it, with a characteristic old wall bounding the King's road, inclosing some venerable walnut trees. Three years ago, a pretty view of these old houses, with Nell's in the back-ground, might have been obtained from the adjacent bridge over the brook: but now a large public house, "the Nell Gwynne," obstructs the view, a row of small "Nell Gwynne cottages" effectually block the path, and the primitive character of the scene has passed away for ever.

[G] In the History of Costume in England, by the author of these notes, it has been remarked that the freedom and looseness, as well as ease and elegance of female costume at this period is to be attributed to the taste of Sir Peter Lely, rather than to that exhibited by the _Beauties_ of Charles's court. "It was to his taste, as it was to that of a later artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, that we are indebted for the freedom which characterized their treatment of the rigid and somewhat ungraceful costumes before them." Walpole, in his "Anecdotes of Painting," says, "Lely supplied the want of taste with _clinquant_; his nymphs trail fringes, and embroidery, through meadows and purling streams. Vandyke's habits are those of the times; Lely's, a sort of fantastic night-gown fastened with a single pin." Lely's ladies are not unfrequently _en masque_, and are habited in the conventional dresses adopted for goddesses in the court of Versailles.

[H] Nell appears to have first fixed the attention of the King by appearing at the King's Theatre in an Epilogue written for her by Dryden; who, taking a _pique_ at the rival theatre, when Nokes, the famous comedian, had appeared in a hat of large proportions, which mightily delighted the silly and volatile frequenters of the place, brought forward Nell in a hat as large as a coach-wheel, which gave her short figure so grotesque an air, that the very actors laughed outright and the whole theatre was in convulsions of merriment. His Majesty was nearly suffocated by the excess of his delight; and the _naïve_ manner of the actress, her wit, archness, and beauty, received additional zest by the extravagance of "the broad-brimmed hat and waist-belt" in which Dryden had attired her, and which fixed her permanently in the memory of "the merry Monarch."

[I] "Improvement" has extended far beyond Old Brompton. The little wooden house of the old rat-catcher has been swept away, and he is obliged to locate himself and his live stock in some back lane, where none but his friends can find him; and as he is disastrously poor, their number is very limited.

[J] Then vicar of St. Martin's, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. In that sermon he enlarged upon her benevolent qualities, her sincere penitence, and exemplary end. When, says Mrs. Jameson, this was afterwards mentioned to Queen Mary, in the hope that it would injure him in her estimation, and be a bar to his preferment, "And what then?" answered she, hastily. "I have heard as much; it is a sign that the poor unfortunate woman died penitent; for, if I can read a man's heart through his looks, had she not made a pious and Christian end, the Doctor would never have been induced to speak well of her."

[K] We have much yet to do for a class whom it is a shame to name, and that much _must be done by women_--by women, themselves _sans tache_, _sans reproche_. It is not enough that we repeat our Saviour's words, "Go and sin no more:" we must give the sinner a refuge to go to. Asylums calculated to receive such ought to be more sufficiently provided in England. One lady, as eminent for her rare mental powers as for her charity and great wealth, is now trying an experiment that does her infinite honor; she has set a noble example to others who are rich and ought to be considerate; safe in her high character, her self-respect, and her virgin purity, she has provided shelter for many "erring sisters,"--in mercy beguiling

"by gentle ways the wanderer back."

Of all her numerous charities, this is the truest and best; like the fair Sabrina she has heard and answered the prayers of those who seek protection from the most terrible of all dangers--

"Listen! for dear honor's sake Listen--and save!"

MARY WOLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY.

The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wolstonecraft, and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, died at the age of fifty-three, in Chester Square, Pimlico, London, on the first day of February. What woman had ever before relations so illustrious! Daughter of Godwin and wife of Shelley! These few words unfold a remarkable history, unparalleled, and unapproached in romantic dignity. In the dedication to her of the noble poem of _The Revolt of Islam_, Shelley says:

"They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth, Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child. I wonder not--for One then left this earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild, Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of its departing glory; still her fame Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name."

In the introduction to one of her novels, she herself says of her youth:

"It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled; and my favorite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.' Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air--the indulging in waking dreams--the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator--rather doing as others had done, than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. What I wrote was intended at least for one other eye--my childhood's companion and friend; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed--my dearest pleasure when free. I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them: they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then--but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations."

Her connection with Shelley commenced in 1815, and she gives this account of the following year, in which she wrote her famous novel, _Frankenstein_:

"After this my life became busier, and reality stood in place of fiction. My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was for ever inciting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it. At this time he desired that I should write, not so much with the idea that I could produce any thing worthy of notice, but that he might himself judge how far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter. Still I did nothing. Travelling, and the cares of a family, occupied my time; and study, the way of reading, or improving my ideas in communication with his far more cultivated mind, was all of literary employment that engaged my attention. In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland, and became the neighbors of Lord Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores: and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him. But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost in Hamlet, in complete armor, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon's fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapt upon the stalk. I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday. 'We will each write a ghost story,' said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole--what to see I forget--something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.

"I busied myself _to think of a story_,--a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror--one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered--vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. _Have you thought of a story?_ I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it. Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. Night waned upon this talk; and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw--with shut eyes, but acute mental vision--I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

"I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark _parquet_, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story,--my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night! Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. 'I found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.' On the morrow I announced that I had _thought of a story_. I began that day with the words, _It was on a dreary night of November_, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream."

The next year Shelley and herself were in Buckinghamshire, where the great poet wrote _The Revolt of Islam_. In the spring of 1818, they quitted England for Italy, and their eldest child died in Rome. Soon after, they took a house near Leghorn--half way between the city and Monte Nero, where they remained during the summer.

"Our villa," she says, "was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and at night the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on, and the fire-flies flashed from among the myrtle hedges:--nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed."

_The Cenci_ and several other poems were written here. The summer of 1818 they passed at the Baths of Lucca, and in the autumn went to a villa belonging to Lord Byron, near Venice, whence they proceeded to Naples, where the winter was spent; after which they visited Florence, and in the fall of 1820 took up their residence at Pisa. The next year--in July--Shelley's death occurred: he was drowned in the gulf of Lerici. The details must be familiar to all readers of literary history. Mrs. Shelley wrote of the time:

"This morn thy gallant bark Sailed on a sunny sea, 'Tis noon, and tempests dark Have wrecked it on the lee, Ah woe! Ah woe! By spirits of the deep Thou'rt cradled on the billow, To thy eternal sleep.

Thou sleep'st upon the shore Beside the knelling surge, And sea-nymphs evermore Shall sadly chant thy dirge. They come! they come, The spirits of the deep, While near thy sea-weed pillow My lonely watch I keep.

From far across the sea I hear a loud lament, By echo's voice for thee, From ocean's caverns sent. O list! O list, The spirits of the deep; They raise a wail of sorrow, While I for ever weep."

Mrs. Shelley returned to England, and for nearly twenty years supported herself by writing. In the last ten years--more especially since 1844, when her son succeeded to the Shelley estates--she had no need to write for money, and it is understood that she devoted the time to the composition of _Memoirs of Shelley_.

The _Frankenstein_, _or Modern Prometheus_, of Mrs. Shelley,--a fearful and fantastic dream of genius--was never very much read; it was one of those books made to be talked of; her _Lodore_ was more easily apprehended; it is a love story, from every-day life, but written with remarkable boldness and directness, and a real appreciation of the nature of both woman and man. The hero of this novel is the son of a gentleman ennobled for his services in the American war, and some of the scenes are in New-York. The _Last Man_ has for its hero her husband, whose character is delineated in it with singular delicacy, but the book is in the last degree improbable and gloomy, while abounding in scenes of beauty and intense interest. She wrote also _Perkin Warbeck_, _Falkner_, _Walpurga_, and other novels, _Journal in Italy and Germany_, and _Lives of eminent French Writers_, besides editing the _Poems_ and the _Letters_ of Shelley--a labor which she performed judiciously, and with feeling and accuracy.

Mrs. Shelley's son succeeded to his grandfather's baronetcy on the 24th of April, 1844, and is the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, Bart., of Castle Goring, in Sussex.

REV. H. N. HUDSON'S EDITION OF SHAKSPEARE.

It has been known among his friends for several years that the Rev. Henry N. Hudson was preparing for the press an edition of the works of Shakspeare. The office of a Shakspeare restorer and commentator at this time is one of the most ambitious in the republic of letters. More than any collection of works except the Holy Scriptures--to which only they are second in dignity and importance among books--the Works of Shakspeare demand for their fit illustration not only the most varied and profound scholarship but the most eminent qualities of mind and feeling. Mr. Hudson had vindicated his capacities for the noble service upon which he has entered in his Lectures upon Shakspeare, published about three years ago. The fame he then acquired will be increased by his present performance, of which, we understand, the initial volume will in a few days be published by James Munroe & Co., of Boston, who will issue at short intervals the other ten, the last of which will embrace a Life of the Poet by the editor. Some of the main characteristics of this edition may be inferred from these paragraphs, which we are enabled to make from an early copy of the preface.

"The celebrated Chiswick edition, of which this is meant to be as near an imitation as the present state of Shaksperian literature renders desirable, was published in 1826, and has for some time been out of print. In size of volume, in type, style of execution, and adaptedness to the wants of both the scholar and the general reader, it presented a combination of advantages possessed by no other edition at the time of its appearance. The text, however, abounds in corruptions introduced by preceding editors under the name of corrections. Of the number and nature of these corruptions no adequate idea can be formed but by a close comparison, line by line, and word by word, with the original editions.

"The Chiswick edition, though perhaps the most popular that has yet been issued, has never, strange to say, been reprinted in this country. For putting forth an American edition retaining the advantages of that, without its defects, no apology, it is presumed, will be thought needful. How far those advantages are retained in the present edition, will appear upon a very slight comparison: how far those defects have been removed, we may be allowed to say that no little study and examination will be required to the forming of a right judgment. In all of the plays, the chief, and in many of them the only, basis and standard whereby to ascertain the true text, is the folio of 1623. In our preparing of copy we have this continually open before us, at the same time availing ourselves of whatsoever aid is to be drawn from earlier impressions, in case of such plays as were published during the author's life. So that, if a thorough revisal of every line, every word, every letter, and every point, with a continual reference to the original copies, be a reasonable ground of confidence, then we can confidently assure the reader that he will here find the genuine text of Shakspeare.

"The process of purification has been rendered much more laborious, and therefore much more necessary, by the mode in which it was for a long time customary to edit the poet's works. This mode is well exemplified in the case of Malone and Steevens, who, carrying on their editorial labors simultaneously, seem to have vied with each other which should most enrich his edition with textual emendations. Both of them had been very good editors, but for the unwarrantable liberty which they not only took, but gloried in taking, with the text of their author; and, even as it was, they undoubtedly rendered much valuable service. And the same work, though not always in so great a degree, has been carried on by many others: sometimes the alleged corrections of several editors have been brought together, that the various advantages of them all might be combined and presented in one. Thus corruptions of the text have accumulated, each successive editor adding his own to those of his predecessors. Many of these so-called improvements were thrown out by the editor of the Chiswick edition; but no decisive steps in the way of a return to the original text were taken till within a very limited period. Knight, Collier, Verplanck, and Halliwell, to all of whom this edition is under great obligations, have pretty effectually put a stop to the old mode of Shaksperian editing; nor is there much reason to apprehend that any one will at present venture upon a revival of it.

"Of the editions hitherto published in America, Mr. Verplanck's is the only one, so far as we know, that is at all free from the accumulated emendations of preceding editors. Adopting, in the main, the text of Mr. Collier, he brought to the work, however, his own excellent taste and judgment, wherein he as far surpasses the English editor as he necessarily falls short of him in such external advantages as the libraries, public and private, of England alone can supply. And Mr. Collier's text is indeed remarkably pure: nor, perhaps, can any other man of modern times be named, to whom Shaksperian literature is, on the whole, so largely indebted. How much he has done, need not be dwelt upon here, as the results thereof will be found scattered all through this edition. Yet it seems not a little questionable whether both he and Knight have not fallen into a serious error; though it must be confessed that such error, if it be one, is on the right side, inasmuch as their fidelity to the original text extends to the adopting, sometimes of probable, sometimes of palpable, or nearly palpable misprints. In these Mr. Verplanck has judiciously deviated from his English model, and his fine judgment appears to equal advantage in what he adopts and in what he rejects. Of his critical remarks it is enough at present to express the belief, that in this department he has no rival in this country, and will not soon be beaten. Further acknowledgments, both to him and to the other three editors named, will be duly and cheerfully made, as the occasions for them shall arise....

"In the Introductions our leading purpose is to gather up all the historical information that has yet been made accessible, concerning the times when the several plays were written and first acted, and the sources whence the plots and materials of them were taken. It will be seen that in the history of the poet's plays, the indefatigable labors of Mr. Collier and others, often resulting in important discoveries, have wrought changes amounting almost to a total revolution, since the Chiswick edition was published. And we dwell the more upon what Shakspeare seems to have taken from preceding writers, because it exhibits him, where we like most to consider him, as holding his unrivalled inventive powers subordinate to the higher principles of art. Besides, if Shakspeare be the most original of writers, he is also one of the greatest of borrowers; and as few authors have appropriated so freely from others, so none can better afford to have his obligations in this kind made known."...

THE STONES OF VENICE--RELIGION, GLORY, AND ART.

Mr. John Ruskin, the "Oxford Student," whose _Modern Painters_ and _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ have made for him the best fame in the literature of art, has just completed the most remarkable of his works, _The Stones of Venice_, and from advance sheets of it (for which we are indebted to Mr. John Wiley, his American publisher), we present some of his preliminary and more general observations, indicating his great argument that THE DECLINE OF THE POLITICAL PROSPERITY OF VENICE WAS COINCIDENT WITH THAT OF HER DOMESTIC AND INDIVIDUAL RELIGION. Popular as the previous works of Mr. Ruskin have been, we cannot doubt that this splendid performance will be the most read and most admired of all.

"Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction. The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the Prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their warning: for the very depth of the Fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once 'as in Eden, the garden of God.' Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak--so quiet,--so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow. I would endeavor to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the STONES OF VENICE.

"It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,--barred with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sandbank are mingled with the sky. The inquiries in which we have to engage will hardly render this outline clearer, but their results will, in some degree, alter its aspect; and, so far as they bear upon it at all, they possess an interest of a far higher kind than that usually belonging to architectural investigations. I may, perhaps, in the outset, and in few words, enable the general reader to form a clearer idea of the importance of every existing expression of Venetian character through Venetian art and of the breadth of interest which the true history of Venice embraces, than he is likely to have gleaned from the current fables of her mystery or magnificence.

"Venice is usually conceived as an oligarchy: she was so during a period less than the half of her existence, and that including the days of her decline; and it is one of the first questions needing severe examination, whether that decline was owing in any wise to the change in the form of her government, or altogether, as assuredly in great part, to changes in the character of the persons of whom it was composed. The state of Venice existed Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six years, from the first establishment of a consular government on the island of the Rialto, to the moment when the General-in-chief of the French army of Italy pronounced the Venetian republic a thing of the past. Of this period, Two Hundred and Seventy-six years were passed in a nominal subjection to the cities of old Venetia, especially to Padua, and in an agitated form of democracy, of which the executive appears to have been intrusted to tribunes, chosen, one by the inhabitants of each of the principal islands. For six hundred years, during which the power of Venice was continually on the increase, her government was an elective monarchy, her King or doge possessing, in early times at least, as much independent authority as any other European sovereign, but an authority gradually subjected to limitation, and shortened almost daily of its prerogatives, while it increased in a spectral and incapable magnificence. The final government of the nobles, under the image of a king, lasted for five hundred years, during which Venice reaped the fruits of her former energies, consumed them,--and expired.

"Let the reader therefore conceive the existence of the Venetian state as broadly divided into two periods: the first of nine hundred, the second of five hundred years, the separation being marked by what was called the 'Serrar del Consiglio; that is to say, the final and absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty, and the establishment of the government in their hands, to the exclusion alike of the influence of the people on the one side, and the authority of the doge on the other. Then the first period, of nine hundred years, presents us with the most interesting spectable of a people struggling out of anarchy into order and power; and then governed, for the most part, by the worthiest and noblest man whom they could find among them, called their Doge or Leader, with an aristocracy gradually and resolutely forming itself around him, out of which, and at last by which, he was chosen; an aristocracy owing its origin to the accidental numbers, influence, and wealth, of some among the families of the fugitives from the older Venetia, and gradually organizing itself, by its unity and heroism, into a separate body. This first period includes the Rise of Venice, her noblest achievements, and the circumstances which determined her character and position among European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated, we find the names of all her hero princes,--of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.

"The second period opens with a hundred and twenty years, the most eventful in the career of Venice--the central struggle of her life--stained with her darkest crime, the murder of Carrara--disturbed by her most dangerous internal sedition, the conspiracy of Falier--oppressed by her most fatal war, the war of Chiozza--and distinguished by the glory of her two noblest citizens (for in this period the heroism of her citizens replaces that of her monarchs), Vittor Pisani and Carlo Zeno. I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418; the _visible_ commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes at Caravaggio. In 1454, Venice, the first of the states of Christendom, humiliated herself to the Turk: in the same year was established the Inquisition of State, and from this period her government takes the perfidious and mysterious form under which it is usually conceived. In 1477, the great Turkish invasion spread terror to the shores of the lagoons; and in 1508, the league of Cambrai marks the period usually assigned as the commencement of the decline of the Venetian power; the commercial prosperity of Venice in the close of the fifteenth century blinding her historians to the previous evidence of the diminution of her internal strength.

"Now there is apparently a significative coincidence between the establishment of the aristocratic and oligarchical powers, and the diminution of the prosperity of the state. But this is the very question at issue; and it appears to me quite undetermined by any historian, or determined by each in accordance with his own prejudices. It is a triple question: first, whether the oligarchy established by the efforts of individual ambition was the cause, in its subsequent operation, of the Fall of Venice; or (secondly) whether the establishment of the oligarchy itself be not the sign and evidence rather than the cause, of national enervation; or (lastly) whether, as I rather think, the history of Venice might not be written almost without reference to the construction of her senate or the prerogatives of her Doge. It is the history of a people eminently at unity in itself, descendants of Roman race, long disciplined by adversity, and compelled by its position either to live nobly or to perish:--for a thousand years they fought for life; for three hundred they invited death; their battle was rewarded, and their call was heard.

"Throughout her career, the victories of Venice, and, at many periods of it, her safety, were purchased by individual heroism; and the man who exalted or saved her was sometimes (oftenest) her king, sometimes a noble, sometimes a citizen. To him no matter, nor to her: the real question is, not so much what names they bore, or with what powers they were intrusted, as how they were trained, how they were made masters of themselves, servants of their country, patient of distress, impatient of dishonor; and what was the true reason of the change from the time when she could find saviours among those whom she had cast into prison, to that when the voices of her own children commanded her to sign covenant with Death.

"The evidence which I shall be able to deduce from the arts of Venice will be both frequent and irrefragable, that the decline of political prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion. I say domestic and individual; for--and this is the second point which I wish the reader to keep in mind--the most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial interest,--this the one motive of all her important political acts, or enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor, but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their faculty. The fame of success remains, when the motives of attempt are forgotten; and the casual reader of her history may perhaps be surprised to be reminded, that the expedition which was commanded by the noblest of her princes, and whose results added most to her military glory, was one in which while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its devotion, she first calculated the highest price she could exact from its piety for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement of her own private interests, at once broke her faith and betrayed her religion.

"And yet, in the midst of this national criminality, we shall be struck again and again by the evidences of the most noble individual feeling. The tears of Dandolo were not shed in hypocrisy, though they could not blind him to the importance of the conquest of Zara. The habit of assigning to religion a direct influence over all _his own_ actions, and all the affairs of _his own_ daily life, is remarkable in every great Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens reaches the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its course where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced. I sincerely trust that the inquirer would be disappointed who should endeavor to trace any more immediate reasons for their adoption of the cause of Alexander III. against Barbarossa, than the piety which was excited by the character of their suppliant, and the noble pride which was provoked by the insolence of the emperor. But the heart of Venice is shown only in her hastiest counsels; her worldly spirit recovers the ascendency whenever she has time to calculate the probabilities of advantage, or when they are sufficiently distinct to need no calculation; and the entire subjection of private piety to national policy is not only remarkable throughout the almost endless series of treacheries and tyrannies by which her empire was enlarged and maintained, but symbolized by a very singular circumstance in the building of the city itself. I am aware of no other city of Europe in which its cathedral was not the principal feature. But the principal church in Venice was the chapel attached to the palace of her prince, and called the "Chiesa Ducale." The patriarchal church, inconsiderable in size and mean decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the greater number of travellers passing hastily through the city. Nor is it less worthy of remark, that the two most important temples of Venice, next to the ducal chapel, owe their size and magnificence, not to national effort, but to the energy of the Franciscan and Dominican monks, supported by the vast organization of those great societies on the mainland of Italy, and countenanced by the most pious, and perhaps also, in his generation, the most wise, of all the princes of Venice, who now rests beneath the roof of one of those very temples, and whose life is not satirized by the images of the Virtues which a Tuscan sculptor has placed around his tomb.

"There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we have to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo Alto. We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to demonstrate from such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry presents. And, thus far, all is natural and simple. But the stopping short of this religious faith when it appears likely to influence national action, correspondent as it is, and that most strikingly, with several characteristics of the temper of our present English legislature, is a subject, morally and politically, of the most curious interest and complicated difficulty; one, however, which the range of my present inquiry will not permit me to approach, and for the treatment of which I must be content to furnish materials in the light I may be able to throw upon the private tendencies of the Venetian character.

"There is, however, another most interesting feature in the policy of Venice, which a Romanist would gladly assign as the reason of its irreligion; namely, the magnificent and successful struggle which she maintained against the temporal authority of the Church of Rome. It is true that, in a rapid survey of her career, the eye is at first arrested by the strange drama to which I have already alluded, closed by that ever memorable scene in the portico of St. Mark's, the central expression in most men's thoughts of the unendurable elevation of the pontifical power; it is true that the proudest thoughts of Venice, as well as the insignia of her prince, and the form of her chief festival, recorded the service thus rendered to the Roman Church. But the enduring sentiment of years more than balanced the enthusiasm of a moment; and the bull of Clement V., which excommunicated the Venetians and their doge, likening them to Dathan, Abiram, Absalom, and Lucifer, is a stronger evidence of the great tendencies of the Venetian government than the umbrella of the doge or the ring of the Adriatic. The humiliation of Francesco Dandolo blotted out the shame of Barbarossa, and the total exclusion of ecclesiastics from all share in the councils of Venice became an enduring mark of her knowledge of the spirit of the Church of Rome, and of her defiance of it. To this exclusion of papal influence from her councils the Romanist will attribute their irreligion, and the Protestant their success. The first may be silenced by a reference to the character of the policy of the Vatican itself; and the second by his own shame, when he reflects that the English Legislature sacrificed their principles to expose themselves to the very danger which the Venetian senate sacrificed theirs to avoid.

"One more circumstance remains to be noted respecting the Venetian government, the singular unity of the families composing it,--unity far from sincere or perfect, but still admirable when contrasted with the fiery feuds, the almost daily revolutions, the restless succession of families and parties in power, which fill the annals of the other states of Italy. That rivalship should sometimes be ended by the dagger, or enmity conducted to its ends under the mask of law, could not but be anticipated where the fierce Italian spirit was subjected to so severe a restraint: it is much that jealousy appears usually commingled with illegitimate ambition, and that, for every instance in which private passion sought its gratification through public danger, there are a thousand in which it was sacrificed to the public advantage. Venice may well call upon us to note with reverence, that of all the towers which are still seen rising like a branchless forest from her islands, there is but one whose office was other than that of summoning to prayer, and that one was a watchtower only: from first to last, while the palaces of the other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart, and fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the bow, the sands of Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and her roof terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended on the leaves of lilies.

"These, then, appear to me to be the points of chief general interest in the character and fate of the Venetian people. I would next endeavor to give the reader some idea of the manner in which the testimony of art bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which the arts themselves assume when they are regarded in their true connection with the history of the state: 1st. Receive the witness of painting. It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice as far back as 1418. Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini, and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or sympathies either in himself or in those for whom he painted. His larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial rhetoric,--composition and color. His minor works are generally made subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connection between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who surround her. Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up in faith, Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of Venice had expired.

"The _vital_ religion, observe, not the formal. Outward observance was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were painted, in almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna or St. Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of the Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's, in the ducal palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there is a curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of one of Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal. The eye is first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of Venice was in her wars, not in her worship. The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or portraiture. The evidence might be accumulated a thousand-fold from the works of Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,--that the fifteenth century had taken away the religious heart of Venice.

"Such is the evidence of painting. To give a general idea of that of architecture: Phillipe de Commynes, writing of his entry into Venice in 1495, observed instantly the distinction between the elder palaces and those built 'within this last hundred years; which all have their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away, and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine upon their fronts.'...

"There had indeed come a change over Venetian architecture in the fifteenth century; and a change of some importance to us moderns: we English owe to it our St. Paul's Cathedral, and Europe in general owes to it the utter degradation or destruction of her schools of architecture, never since revived."...

"The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in Architecture, by Sansovino and Palladio.

"Instant degradation followed in every direction,--a flood of folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then perverted into feeble sensualities, take the place of the representations of Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous under the treatment of men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs without rusticity, nymphs without innocence, men without humanity, gather into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of landscape gradually usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,--the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionary idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditch-water. And thus Christianity and morality, courage, and intellect, and art all crumbling together into one wreck, we are hurried on to the fall of Italy, the revolution in France, and the condition of art in England (saved by her Protestantism from severer penalty) in the time of George II.

"I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done any thing towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting. But the harm which has been done by Claude and the Poussins is as nothing when compared to the mischief effected by Palladio, Scamozzi, and Sansovino. Claude and the Poussins were weak men, and have had no serious influence on the general mind. There is little harm in their works being purchased at high prices: their real influence is very slight, and they may be left without grave indignation to their poor mission of furnishing drawing-rooms and assisting stranded conversation. Not so the Renaissance architecture. Raised at once into all the magnificence of which it was capable by Michael Angelo, then taken up by men of real intellect and imagination, such as Scamozzi, Sansovino, Inigo Jones, and Wren, it is impossible to estimate the extent of its influence on the European mind; and that the more, because few persons are concerned with painting, and, of those few, the larger number regard it with slight attention; but all men are concerned with architecture, and have at some time of their lives serious business with it. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building. Nor is it merely wasted wealth or distempered conception which we have to regret in this Renaissance architecture: but we shall find in it partly the root, partly the expression of certain dominant evils of modern times--over-sophistication and ignorant classicalism; the one destroying the healthfulness of general society, the other rendering our schools and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass through them.

"Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the grave.

"It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only, that effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else."

CONTRASTED PORTRAITS OF MARIE ANTOINETTE.

In the last number of _The International_ we quoted the remarks of Lord Holland upon the character of the wife of Louis XVI. The sketch presented by the noble author has been the subject of much and various criticism. The London _Times_ says:

"The virtue of the unfortunate consort of a most unhappy monarch is without a flaw. Enmity, hatred, and every evil passion, have done their worst to palliate murder and to blacken innocence, but the ineradicable spot cannot be fixed to the fair fame of this true woman. Faultless she was not. We are under no obligation to vindicate her imprudent, wilful, and fatal interference with public questions in which she had no concern; we say nothing of her ignorance of the high matters of state into which her uninformed zeal conducted her, to the bitter cost of herself and of those she loved dearest on earth; but of her purity, her uprightness, her beneficence, her devotion, her sweet, playful, happy disposition, in the midst of those home endearments, which were to her the true occupation and charm of life, there cannot exist a doubt. Misfortune fell upon her house to strengthen her love and to confirm her piety. Persecution, imprisonment, calamity that has never been surpassed, and a dreadful end, which, in its bitterness, has seldom been equalled, found and left her, a meek but perfect heroine. One historian has told us, that as 'an affectionate daughter and a faithful wife, she preserved in the two most corrupted courts of Europe the simplicity and affections of domestic life.' It is sufficient to add, that she ascended the scaffold enjoining her children to a scrupulous discharge of duty, to forgive her murderers, to forget her wrongs; and that her last words on earth were directed to the beloved husband who had preceded her, whose spirit she was eager to rejoin, yet whose bed, if we are to believe my Lord Holland, she had oftener than once defiled."

And _The Times_ intimates elsewhere that Lord Holland is alone among reputable authors in condemning the Queen. How _The Times_ regards THOMAS JEFFERSON, we cannot tell, but certainly it is claimed by our democracy that he was a witness with a character. Jefferson says of Marie Antoinette:

"The King was now become a passive machine in the hands of the National Assembly, and had he been left to himself, he would have willingly acquiesced in whatever they should devise as best for the nation. A wise constitution would have been formed, hereditary in his line, himself placed at its head, with powers so large, as to enable him to do all the good of his station, and so limited, as to restrain him from its abuse. This he would have faithfully administered, and more than this, I do not believe, he ever wished. But he had a Queen of absolute sway over his weak mind, and timid virtue, and of a character, the reverse of his in all points. This angel, as gaudily painted in the rhapsodies of Burke, with some smartness of fancy, but no sound sense, was proud, disdainful of restraint, indignant at all obstacles to her will, eager in the pursuit of pleasure, and firm enough to hold to her desires, or perish in their wreck. Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d'Artois, and others of her _clique_, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the guillotine, drew the King on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calamities which will for ever stain the pages of modern history. I have ever believed, that had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution. No force would have been provoked, nor exercised. The King would have gone hand in hand with the wisdom of his sounder counsellors, who, guided by the increased lights of the age, wished only, with the same pace, to advance the principles of their social constitution. The deed which closed the mortal course of these sovereigns, I shall neither approve nor condemn. I am not prepared to say, that the first magistrate of a nation cannot commit treason against his country, or is unamenable to its punishment; nor yet, that where there is no written law, no regulated tribunal, there is not a law in our hearts, and a power in our hands, given for righteous employment in maintaining right, and redressing wrong. Of those who judged the King, many thought him wilfully criminal; many, that his existence would keep the nation in perpetual conflict with the horde of Kings, who would war against a regeneration which might come home to themselves, and that it were better that one should die than all. I should not have voted with this portion of the legislature. I should have shut up the Queen in a convent, putting harm out of her power, and placed the King in his station, investing him with limited powers, which, I verily believe, he would have honestly exercised, according to the measure of his understanding. In this way, no void would have been created, courting the usurpation of a military adventurer, nor occasion given for those enormities which demoralized the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy, millions and millions of its inhabitants."

A majority of the French authors of the time agree with Mr. Jefferson.

HINDOSTANEE NEWSPAPERS: THE FLYING SHEETS OF BENARES.

One of the most successful applications of lithography is in the reproduction of the Hindostanee or Persian writing, used in India. It is too irregular and complicated to be represented by ordinary types. Accordingly lithographic printing establishments have been set up in the principal cities of India, where original works, translations of the ancient tongues of Asia or the modern ones of Europe, as well as newspapers are published. Calcutta, Serampore, Lakhnau, Madras, Bombay, Pounah, were the first cities to have these printing offices, but since then a great number have been established in the north-west provinces, where the Hindostanee is the sole language employed. A year since that part of the country contained twenty-eight offices, which in 1849 produced a hundred and forty-one different works, while the number of journals was twenty-six, which, with those printed in other provinces, makes about fifty in the native dialect, in all Hindostan. Within the last year, new establishments and new periodicals have been commenced. At Benares, the ancient seat of Hindoo learning, where the Brahmins used to resort to study their language and read the vedas and shasters, a new journal is called the _Sâïrin-i Hind_ (The Flying Sheets of India), making the sixth in that city. It is edited by two Hindoo literati, Bhaïrav Praçâd and Harban Lâl, who had before attempted a purely scientific publication under the title of _Mirât Ulalum_ (Mirror of the Sciences), which has been stopped. The new paper, of which only three numbers have come to our notice, is published twice a month, each number having eight pages of small octavo size. The pages are in double columns. The subscription is eight _anas_, or twenty-five cents a month, or six _roupies_, or three dollars a year. The paper is divided into two parts, the first literary and scientific, the second devoted to political and miscellaneous intelligence. The first number commences with a rhapsody in verse upon eloquence, by the celebrated national poet Haçan, of which the following is the _International's_ translation:

"Give me to taste, O Song, the sweet beverage of eloquence, that precious art which opens the gate of diction. I dream night and day of the benefits of that noble talent. What other can be compared with it? The sage who knows how to appreciate it, puts forth all his efforts for its acquisition. It is eloquence which gives celebrity to persons of merit. The brave ought to esteem eloquence, for it immortalizes the names of heroes. It is through the science of speaking well that the noble actions of antiquity have come down to us; the language of the _calam_ has perpetuated remarkable deeds. What would have become of the names of Rustam, Cyrus, and Afraciab, if eloquence had not preserved their memory like the recital of a remote dream? It is by the pearls of elocution that the sweet relations between distant friends are preserved. The study of this sublime art is like a market always filled with buyers. It will remain in the world as long as the ear shall be sensible to harmony, or the heart to persuasion."

This is followed by a sort of prospectus, elegantly written, of course with the oriental ornaments of alliteration and antithesis, in which the editors proclaim the usefulness of instruction to the cause of religion and morality. These are the ends they have in view in the publication of the new journal, and they appeal to those who approve of their purposes to encourage rather than criticise their efforts. To prove how much easier it is to criticise than to do well the thing criticised, they cite the well known fable of the miller, his son, and the ass. In publishing a new periodical, they consider that they are merely supplying a want of the public, which desires to be informed as to passing events, new discoveries in science, the proceedings in lawsuits, &c. This journal will interest all classes of readers, not only people in easy circumstances who live on their income, but merchants and mechanics, who will find in it intelligence of which they stand in need. Those who find in it articles not in their line, are advised not to be vexed thereat, but to reflect that they may be agreeable and useful to others, and that a journal ought to contain the greatest possible variety. For the rest, the editors will thankfully receive such information and suggestions as their friends may choose to give them. Their prospectus concludes with a panegyric on the English government, for favoring education among the natives, saying that not only speculative, but practical knowledge is necessary, as says the poet-philosopher Saadi: "Though thou hast knowledge, if thou dost not apply the same, thou art of no more value than the ignorant; thou art like an ass laden with books."

Next they give a table of _the chain_ of human knowledge, by way of programme of the subjects which will be likely to be discussed in the journal. This is followed by political and miscellaneous news from Persia, Cabul, Bombay, Aoude, and Calcutta, and other provinces. Under the last head is a statement of the present population of the capital of British India, as follows:

Europeans, 6,433 Georgians, 4,615 Armenians, 892 Chinese, 847 Other Asiatics, 15,342 Hindoos, 274,335 Mussulmans, 110,918

Total 413,182

The second number opens with an article of above five columns, on the inconvenience of not knowing what is taking place, or of knowing it imperfectly, followed by a second article of two columns on astronomy, and the discovery of planets, by way of introduction to an account of the discovery of _Parthenope_, which took place at Naples the 10th of May last.

This is followed by news and advertisements of new books, published from the printing office of the paper. In the third number there is in the news department an article on the _marvellous news from Europe_, in which the editors speak of the scientific progress of the Europeans, and the astonishing discoveries which daily occur among them. In this connection they mention a singular experiment tried by a geologist of Stockholm. This savant having found a frog living after having been six or seven years in the ground, without air or food, concluded that men might live in that way for hundreds of years. Accordingly he solicited and obtained from the government, permission to try it for twenty-five years on a woman aged twenty. This piece of information is given with satisfaction, and the editors refer to the fact that some years since a faquir appeared at the court of Runjeet Singh, asking to be buried for several days, which was done. When the time arrived he was disinterred, as much alive as ever. The editors add, that although many Englishmen saw this, they had not believed it, but that this intelligence from Stockholm ought to convince them. The same number contains some remarks on the Ambassador of Nepaul, who was then in Europe. The following is our translation of this article:

"Jung Bahâdur, has thought best to visit Paris, the capital of France, before returning to India. The first Indian who visited Paris was Râm Mohan Roy, who was succeeded by Dwarkánath Thakur and others. But these were not true Hindoos, of the good school, for they were of the sect of Râm Mohan [who established a sort of philosophic religion under the name of _Brahma-Sabhâ_, or the "Reunion of Deists"]. General Jung Bahâdur, Kunwar, Rânâji, and his brothers are then in reality, the first orthodox Hindoos who have honored Europe with their presence. We do not know how these personages can have followed the prescriptions of the _schastars_ in their passage across the ocean, but we learn by the news from Europe, that they have not taken a single meal with the English, and have neither eaten nor drank with them, though this does not render it certain that they have been free from fault in other respects. It is said beside, that in order to repair every thing, when the Ambassador returns to Nepaul, the King will cast water upon him and thus will purify his _pabitra_ [Brahaminic insignia]. Should this arrangement take place and be adopted in other parts of Hindostan, we can believe that many Hindoos of every class will go to feast their eyes with the marvels of Europe."

_Original Poetry._

MUSIC.

By Alfred B. Street.

Music, how strange her power! her varied strains Thrill with a magic spell the human heart. She wakens memory--brightens hope--the pains, The joys of being at her bidding start. Now to her trumpet-call the spirit leaps; Now to her brooding, tender tones it weeps. Sweet music! is she portion of that breath With which the worlds were born--on which they wheel? One of lost Eden's tones, eluding death, To make man what is best within him feel! Keep open his else sealed up depths of heart, And wake to active life the better part Of his mixed nature, being thus the tie That links us to our God, and draws us toward the sky!

_Authors and Books._

In a late number of the _Archives for Scientific Information Concerning Russia_, a Russian publication, are some interesting facts upon the colonization of Siberia, and its present population. It seems that that country began to be settled in the reign of the Czar Alexis Michaelowich, who issued a law requiring murderers, after suffering corporeal punishment and three years' imprisonment, to be sent to the frontier cities, among which the towns of Siberia were then included. Indeed, under the Empress Elizabeth Petrowna (1741--1761), the whole of Southern Siberia was called the Ukraine. The beginning of regular transportation to Siberia was made by the Czar Theodore Alexeiwich, who ordered in 1679 that malefactors should be sent with their families to settle in Siberia. About this time many serfs escaped to Siberia from service in Europe, and stringent measures were adopted to reclaim the fugitives, and prevent such an offence from being repeated and continued. In 1760 a ukase was issued permitting landlords and communes to send to Siberia, and have entered as recruits, all persons guilty of offences of any kind or degree. In 1822 another ukase allowed the crown serfs of the provinces of Great Russia to emigrate to Siberia, where they became free, a privilege which they still enjoy. The main part of the present inhabitants of the country is composed of the descendants of these colonists and exiles, of the banished Strelitzes, and of the captured Swedes and Poles. The varied habits, customs, creeds, ideas, costumes, and dialects of these motley races have by long contact with each other become reduced to something like unity. The former extreme rudeness of the people has also of late years undergone a great improvement from the influence of new-comers. Still, however, Siberia is socially any thing but a tolerable country, even in comparison with Russia, and vices which in enlightened lands would be thought monstrous, are not occasions of any astonishment or special remark to the mass of the inhabitants.

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A work by WILLIAM HUMBOLDT, just published at Breslau, excites a good deal of attention in Germany. It is called _Notions toward an attempt to define the Boundaries of the Activity of the State_. It was written many years ago, at the time when the author was intimate with Schiller, who took an interest in its preparation, but other engagements prevented its being finished. It is now published exactly from the original manuscript, under the editorial care of Dr. Edward Cauer. Its doctrinal starting point is found in the nature and destiny of the individual. Its philosophy is essentially that of Kant and Fichte, and is of course liberal in its tendencies, though by no means satisfactory to the democracy of the present day.

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The _Journal of the Russian Ministry for the Enlightenment of the People_, for December last, reports a statement made by Mr. Kauwelin to the Russian Geographical Society in the previous September. The Society had received, by way of reply to an appeal it had issued, more than five hundred communications, from various parts of the empire, in relation to the Sclavonic portion of the people. These documents, as he said, contain a mass of valuable information, not only as to ethnography, but also as to Russian archæology and history. He showed by several examples how ancient local myths and traditions reached back into remote antiquity. He proposed the publication of the entire mass of documents, because "they enrich history with vivid recollections of the most ancient ante-historic life-experience of which the traditions of the non-Sclavonic portion of Europe have preserved only obscure intimations and vague traces."

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Hertz, of Berlin, has just published a book which we think can hardly fail of a speedy reproduction in both English and French. Its title is _Erinnerungen aus Paris_ (Recollections of Paris) 1817-1848. It is written by a German lady, who passed these eventful years, or most of them, in the French capital, and here narrates, in a lively and genial style, her observations and experiences. She was connected with the _haute finance_, moved among the lords of the exchange and their followers, and being endowed by nature with remarkable penetration, taste for art, no aversion to politics, and a genial social faculty, she knew all the more prominent personages of the time in public affairs, society, art, science, and money-making, and brings them before her readers with great success. Louis XVIII. and the members of his family, Talleyrand, Decazes, Courier, Constant, Humboldt, Cuvier, Madame Tallien, De Stael, Delphine Gay, Gerard, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Liszt, are among the actors whom she introduces in most real and living proportions. Here is a charming specimen of her skill in portraiture. She is speaking of Madame Tallien, then Princess of Chimay, whom she saw in 1818: "She was then some forty years old. Her age could to some extent be arrived at, for it was known that in 1794 she was scarcely twenty, and her full person, inclining to stoutness, showed that the first bloom of youth was gone, but it would be difficult again to find beauty so well preserved, or to meet with a more imposing appearance. Tall, commanding, radiant, she recalled the historic beauties of antiquity. So one would imagine Ariadne, Dido, Cleopatra; a perfect bust, shoulders, and arms; white as an animated statue, regular features, flashing eyes, pearly teeth, hair of raven blackness, hers was a mien, speech, and movement, which ravished every beholder." Had we space we might give some longer translations from this interesting volume, for which our readers would thank us, but we must forbear.

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THE LATEST GERMAN NOVELS.--Theodore Mügge, who is somewhat known in this country through Dr. Furness's translation of his novel on Toussaint L'Ouverture, has published at Ensleben _König Jacob's Letzte Tage_ (the Last Days of King James), a historical romance, with the English James II. for its hero. The principal characters, that of the King, of Jeffreys, and William of Orange, are drawn successfully. The critics complain, however, that it lacks continuous interest, and a continuous and connected plot. To understand it, one must have a history of the period at hand to refer to. Mügge is not a great romancer, even for Germany. In politics he is one of those democrats who would yet have a hereditary chief at the head of the government. Glimpses of this tendency appear in this novel. Arnold Ruge has also spent a portion of his enforced leisure (he is an exile at London) in writing a romance called the _Demokrat_, which he has published in Germany, along with some previous similar productions, under the title of _Revolutions-Novellen_. It is full of Ruge's keen, logical talent, and on-rushing energy, but is deficient in esthetic beauty and interest. He never forgets the Hegelian dialectics even when he writes novels. _Clemens Metternich_, _and Ludwig Kossuth_, by Siegmund Kolisch, is a skilfully done but not great production. Uffo Horn has a new series of tales, which he calls _Aus drei Iahrhunderten_ (From three Centuries.) They are stories of 1690, 1756, and 1844, and are worth reading. Horn seizes with success upon the features of an epoch, but is not so good in depicting individual character. The _Freischaren Novellen_ (Free-corp Novels) of W. Hamm, are stories of modern warlike life, and are written with point and spirit. Stifter has published the sixth volume of his _Studien_, which, to those who know this charming off-shoot of the disappearing romantic school, it is high praise to say, is as good as any of the former volumes, if not better. Stifter always keeps himself remote from the agitations of the time, and sings his song, and weaves his still and lovely enchantments, as if they were not. This new volume contains a complete romance, the _Zwei Schwestern_ (Two Sisters), which cannot be read without touching the inmost heart, while it delights the fancy. Spindler has a humorous novel, whose hero, a travelling clerk or bagman, meets with a variety of amusing adventures. Like many other books of the comical order, it is tedious when taken in large doses. The reader, at first amused, soon lays it down. Caroline von Göhren appears with a series of _Novellen_, which receive no great commendation. The _Ostergabe_ (Easter Gift), by Frederica Bremer, which has just appeared in Germany, is spoken of as her best production. It contains pictures of northern life, and of those domestic influences which Miss Bremer so delights to glorify. The _Gesammelte Erzählungen_ (Collected Tales) of W. G. von Horn, lately published at Frankfort, are worth the attention of those whose novel reading is not confined to our own language. The style is clear and pleasing, and the characters full of truth and naturalness. The _Erzählungen aus dem Volksleben der Schwerz_ (Tales of Popular Life in Switzerland) by Ieremias Gotthelf, also deserves a respectful mention. Gotthelf is a religious moralist, who sets forth the doctrines of virtue, religious trust in God, and the blessed influence of domestic life, in a pleasing and effective manner.

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DR. SCHÄFFNER'S _Geschichte der Rechtsverfassung Frankreichs_ ("History of French Law"), just published, is noticed with high praise by the _Frankfurt Oberpostamts Zeitung_. The work has just been completed by the publication of the fourth volume, which only confirms the reputation which the earlier portions gained for the author among the jurists of all Europe. Dr. Schäffner, with equal learning and perspicacity, sets forth the relation of French law, and the changes it has undergone, to the history of the political institutions of the country. In this respect the work interests a much wider public than is ordinarily addressed by a juridical treatise. It opens with an account of the conflict between the elements of Roman and German law in France. Then it exposes the establishment of the feudal aristocracy and its contests with the power of the Church; next, the culmination of the royal authority, based on a bureaucratic administration, its final fall into the hands of the triumphant revolution, and its subjection to the various powers that have succeeded each other within the last sixty years. The fourth and last volume contains the history of the Constitution, of Law, and of the administration from the revolution of 1789 to the revolution of 1848. Dr. Schäffner exhibits in this volume no admiration for the various attempts to re-create the State according to abstract theories; he goes altogether for moderate progress, gradual reform, and keeping up the relation between the present and the past.

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The fate of BONPLAND, the eminent traveller and naturalist, is a topic of discussion in Germany. It seems that in a speech made in the Senate of Brazil, in August last, Count Abrantes said that Bonpland, after being released from his eighteen years' detention in Paraguay, had so far lost the habits and tastes of civilization that he had settled in a remote corner of Brazil, near Alegrete, in the province of Rio Grande du Sol, where he got his living by keeping a small shop and selling tobacco, &c., and that he avoided all mention of his former scientific labors and reputation. It seems, however, that Bonpland still maintains a correspondence on scientific subjects with his old friend Humboldt, which exhibits no falling off either in his tendencies or powers. On the other hand, some suppose that he does not return to Europe because he has taken an Indian wife, and finds himself happier in the wilderness in her company.

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An _official Russian account of operations in Hungary during_ 1849 has been published at Berlin, in two volumes. It is by a colonel of the general staff, and gives a detailed narrative of the entire doings of the Russian forces in that memorable campaign. It casts a full light upon the differences between Paskiewich and Haynau, and accuses the latter, apparently not without reason, of the grossest mismanagement. Even his famous march to Szegedin, which has passed for as brilliant and well-planned as it was a successful manoeuvre, is not spared. Of course, as regards matters of detail, this writer varies largely from previous statements of the Austrians.

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The second volume of Bülau's _Secret History and Mysterious Individuals_ has just been published by Brockhaus at Leipzic. The first volume was published at the beginning of last year, and has been made known to American readers by an interesting review of it in _Blackwood's Magazine_, accompanied by copious extracts. It is undeniable that Professor Bülau has had access to materials unknown to previous writers, which he has used with laudable conscientiousness, to clear up many obscure points in history, and to explain the motives of many persons whose actions have been wondered at but not understood.

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A work of some pretensions has just been published at Stuttgart, with the title, _Italiens Zukunft_ (Italy's Future), by FR. KÖLLE, who gives in it the fruit of seventeen years' residence in the country he treats of. He begins with the original elements composing the Romanic Nations, and goes on to consider the state of the country at the time of the Revolution, the doings of the French, the Restoration, the cities, commerce and navigation, the nobles, the peasantry, the Church, monastical religious orders, the Jesuits, possibility of Church reform, foreign influence, intellectual and scientific activity, Mazzini, prospects in case of a future revolution, &c.

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A German translation of selections from the works of Dr. CHANNING is being published at Berlin. There are to be fifteen small volumes, of which six or seven have already appeared. The _Grenzboten_ does not think much of the author, but classes him with Schleiremacher and his school. It says that Dr. Channing was a special favorite with women, which it seems not to intend for a compliment.

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M. FLOURENS, one of the perpetual secretaries of the French Academy of Science, has published at Paris a collection of elegant and valuable essays. They comprise a dissertation on George Cuvier, one on Fontenelle, who is said to have best succeeded in casting on the sciences the light of philosophy, and an examination of phrenology, which M. Flourens discusses in the spirit of a disciple of Descartes and Leibnitz.

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JACQUES ARAGO, author of _Souvenirs d'un Aveugle_ (A Voyage Round the World), &c., and brother of the astronomer and ex-minister, is one of the most remarkable characters of Paris. He is stone _blind_, and has been so for years; and yet he placed himself at the head of a band of gold seekers, and conducted them to California. Recently he returned to Paris, with little gold--indeed, with none at all--but in his voyage he met some extraordinary adventures, and is about to communicate them to the public in a volume. Jacques Arago is eminent in Paris not more for his abilities as a man of letters than for his fastidiousness, devotion, and success as a _roué_. If Love is sometimes blind, he is keen-sighted for the sightless Arago, who boasts of having loved and been loved by the most beautiful women of France.

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The military history of the Napoleonic period has received a new contribution in the _War of 1806 and 1807_, just published at Berlin, by Col. Höpfner, in two volumes. It is prepared from documents in the Prussian archives, and illustrated with maps and plans of battles. Not only does it add to our previous stock of information as to the military operations in Germany during these eventful years, but it serves at the same time as a history of the dissolution of that state which Frederic the Great erected with such labor and perseverance. We have here, in short, a picture of the downfall of the old Prussian military-system.

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A new work on FRENCH HISTORY during the middle ages is _La France au temps des Croisades_, by M. Vaublanc, which has lately made its appearance at Paris, in four handsome octavo volumes. It is the fruit of long and conscientious researches, and is written in a style of seductive elegance. The author is no dry chronicler, or plodding statician, but an artist, fully alive to the picturesqueness of his topic. He carries his reader with him into the time and the scenes he describes, and makes him a participant in the romantic and adventurous life of the period. His book is thus as entertaining as it is instructive.

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A convenient book of reference for those who deal with the more recondite and interesting questions of history is the _Statistique des Peuples de l'Antiquité_, by M. Moreau de Jonnés, just published at Paris. It is a work of great erudition and even originality. All sorts of facts as to the social condition of the Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Gauls, may be gathered from it. Another new work of a similar character is entitled _Du Probleme de la Misére et de sa solution chez tous les Peuples Anciens et Modernes_, by M. Moreau Christophe. Two volumes only have been published; a third is to follow. Price $1.50 a volume.

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A translation of M'CULLOCH' _Principles of Political Economy_ has appeared at Paris, in four vols. 8vo. The translator is M.A. Planche.

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LOUIS VIARDOT has published in Paris a _Histoire des Arabes et des Mores d'Espagne_. The excellent translator of _Don Quixote_ ought to produce a striking work on this subject. The Count ALBERT DE CIRCOURT, too, has published a new edition of his _Histoire des Mores Mudejares et des Morisques; ou des Arabes d'Espagne sous la domination des Chrétiens_. Few topics in history have been until recently so much neglected as that of the Moorish races in Europe, and a good deal of what has appeared on the subject has been put together rather with a view to romantic effect than with a proper respect for the responsibility of the historian; though all Spanish history, Christian or Saracen, so abounds in romantic interest that there is less excuse, as less necessity, for outstepping the limits of truth, or giving undue prominence to the pathetic and marvellous. From this defect of most of his predecessors, the work of the Count de Circourt is in a great measure free. He has made a dexterous and conscientious use of the materials within his reach, and produced a work which unites to an unusual degree popularity of style with matter of great novelty and interest. There are few spectacles in modern times more attractive, or hitherto more imperfectly understood, than the condition of the Spanish Moors, from the time when they became a subject race, until their final expulsion from Europe in 1610. The reason why more attention has not been given to this subject, must be looked for in the fact that the expelled people were Mahometans, and that they took refuge in Africa, not in Europe. They had not, as the Protestants of France had, an England, Holland, and Germany to sympathize with and shelter them;--though, taking it with all its consequences, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was not a more important event in history, or more pregnant with injury to the power that enforced it, than the expulsion of the Moors from Spain. In folly and perversity the last transaction has pre-eminence. Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes, when he and his empire were at the summit of their power; but Philip III. chose the luckless moment for expatriating the most energetic and industrious of the inhabitants of Spain, when the virtual acknowledgment of the independence of the Dutch, and the concession to them of free trade to India, now assailed the prestige of Spanish supremacy in Europe, and the commerce of Portugal, at that time subject to Spain. From that hour the Peninsula declined with unexampled rapidity; and though, in course of time, the progress of decay became less marked, it was not finally arrested until two centuries after, when the invasion of Napoleon re-awakened Spanish energies, and freed them from the trammels which had impeded their development. Two centuries of degradation are a heavy penalty for a nation to pay for pride and intolerance; though not heavier than Spanish perfidy and cruelty to the Moors most richly deserved. In accordance with his design of treating of the Moors as a subject race, the Count de Circourt has given only a brief summary of their early history when they were ascendant in Spain. With the rise of the Christian and decline of the Mahometan power, the subject is more minutely, but still succinctly treated, the four centuries from the capture of Toledo to that of Granada being comprised in the first volume. The two remaining volumes are occupied exclusively with the history of the Moors from the overthrow of Grenada to their final expulsion from Spain. The various efforts made to convert and control them, and their struggles to regain their independence and preserve their faith, are copiously treated, but a subject so peculiar and hitherto so unjustly neglected, needed early discussion. We know not where the character of that worst species of oppression, where the antagonism of race is aggravated by differences of creed, can be so advantageously studied as in this portion of Spanish history. Nor is the early history when the Moors, still a powerful people, were treated with comparative consideration by their antagonists, deficient in traits of the highest interest, and lessons which oppressors of the present day would do well to lay to heart.

We observe that M. de Circourt agrees very nearly with Madame Anita George (whose views upon the subject we recently noticed in _The International_) respecting Queen Isabella. He says:

"The Spaniards speak only with enthusiasm of this Princess. They place her in the rank of their best monarchs, and history, adopting the popular judgment, has given her the title of "Great." If we consider merely the grandeur of the fabric she erected, the appellation will appear merited; if its solidity had been taken into consideration, her reputation must have suffered. Nations in general make more account of talents than of the use that has been made of them. They reserve for princes favored by fortune the homage which they ought to pay to good and honest princes, who have exercised paternal rule. They deify him who knows how to subjugate them. Thus it happens in all countries that the king who has established absolute monarchy is styled the great king. But it happens often that such founders have built up the present at the expense of the future. In Spain absolute monarchy sent forth for a time a formidable lustre, and then came suddenly a protracted period of progressive decay, which ended in the revolutions of which we have been witnesses. Barren glory, shameful prostration, interminable and possibly fruitless revolution, are all the work of Isabella."

This is very different from the estimate of Mr. Prescott, but perhaps more just. In his forthcoming _Memoirs of the Reign of Philip the Second_, Mr. Prescott will have to trace the results of Spanish policy toward the Moors. We shall compare his views with those of MM. Circourt and Viardot.

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M. DE VILLEMERQUE has translated the _Poème des Bardes Bretons du VI. Siècle_, and the book is praised by the French critics.

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LOUIS PHILIPPE'S last apology for his policy as King of the French has just made its appearance at Paris, and justly excites attention. It is a pamphlet written by M. Edward Lemoine, and bears the title of _L'abdication du roi Louis Philippe racconteé par lui méme_. It is the report of a series of conversations which M. Lemoine had with the deceased King during the month of October, 1849, and which he was authorized to give to the world after his death. The writer gives every thing in the words of Louis Philippe, as they were uttered either in reply to questions or spontaneously in reference to the topics under discussion. The exiled monarch defends his conduct in every particular with ingenuity and force, dwelling especially on his abdication, on his refusal to yield to the opposition and admit the demanded reform, which brought on the revolution, on his abandoning Paris with so little effort at resistance, on his peace policy, and on the Spanish marriages. He denies emphatically that he or his family had thought of or undertaken any conspiracy with a view to recovering the throne. His children, he said, had been taught that when their country spoke they must obey, and that the duty of a patriot was to be ready, whatever she might command. This they had understood, and in all cases practised. Accordingly they had always been, and always would be strangers to intrigues.

As for his persistence in keeping the Guizot ministry, that was commanded by every constitutional principle. That ministry had a majority in the Chambers as large even as that which overthrew Charles X.; how then should the King interfere against this majority? Besides, had not what happened since February demonstrated that he was right? The policy of every government since June, 1848, had resembled, as nearly as could be conceived, the very policy of the ministry so much and so unjustly complained of.

Guizot had in fact promised reform. He had said that the instant the Chambers should vote against him he would retire, and the first measure of his successors would be reform. As for himself, said Louis Philippe, he had understood that this was only a pretext. Reform would be the entrance on power of the opposition, the entrance of the opposition would be war, would be the beginning of the end. Accordingly he had determined to abdicate as soon as the opposition assumed the reins of government; for he no longer would be himself supported by public opinion. The want of this support it was which finally caused him to abandon the throne without resistance. He could not have kept it without civil war. For this he had always felt an insurmountable horror, and he had never regretted that in February Marshal Bugeaud had so soon ordered the firing to stop. Besides, nobody advised him to defend himself, but the contrary. He had then nothing to do but to follow the example of his ministers who had abdicated, of his friends who had abdicated, of the national guard who had abdicated, of the public conscience which had abdicated. He did not take this step till after the universal abdication. But if he had fought and lost, and died fighting, who could tell the horrors that would have ensued? Or if he had triumphed, all France would have exclaimed against him as sanguinary and selfish, a bad prince, a scourge to the nation, and ere many months a new insurrection would have made an end. Victory would have been more disastrous than exile. He had done well to abdicate, and were the crisis to recur, he would not act otherwise. He had abandoned power (of which he was accused of being so greedy) as soon as he understood that he could no longer hold it to the advantage of his country.

As for the charge of avarice, that was abundantly disproved by the publication of the manner in which he had employed the civil list, and by the fact that he was covered with debts. He had spent like a King without counting, and now that he had to pay he was obliged to borrow. And it is rather curious, said he, that the furniture employed in the festivals of the Republican President of the Assembly is my personal property, and that the horses and carriages of which so free use has been made, had been paid for from my own purse. This however, was a trifle not worth speaking of.

If he had suffered from falsehoods printed in the journals, print had however done him justice in giving to the world his private letters. These had set right his private character as well as his public policy. He only wished that those papers had all been published, and published more widely. They did more for the glorification of his policy than the speeches of his most eloquent ministers. They proved that his had never been a policy of peace at any price. He had besieged Antwerp without the consent of England; he had sent an army to Ancona, though Metternich had declared that a Frenchman in Italy would be war in Europe. His government had always acted boldly and firmly, and had been respected. Why, only a few weeks before February, the great powers of Europe had asked of France to settle with her alone, and without consulting England, some of the questions which might compromise the equilibrium of Europe. Such was the consideration in which France was then held.

As to the Spanish marriages, that was all done in the interest of France, and not, as had been charged, of his dynasty. If the latter were the thing he had aimed at, would he have refused the crown of Belgium, or of Greece, or of Portugal, for Nemours? Would he have refused the hand of Isabella for Aumale or Montpensier? No; he merely sought to render his country independent of England, and not her dupe. The _entente cordiale_ in the hands of Lord Palmerston was becoming treacherous. He recollected the saying of Metternich, that the alliance of France and England was useful, like the alliance of man and horse. He determined to be the man, and by those marriages accomplished it. There was already a Cobourg in Belgium, one in England, and one in Portugal; could France allow another to be set up in Spain? So far the conversations of Louis Philippe relate to matters of his own history. From this he was led to speak briefly of Charles X., and things preceding the downfall of that prince. For this we must refer our readers to the pamphlet itself, which will doubtless be imported by some of our booksellers, if not soon translated into English and published entire. It cannot be read without interest. We give its substance above, without thinking it necessary to criticise any of the statements of the exiled prince.

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M. AUDIN, a French historian, whose histories of Leo X., Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII., are known to those who have sought an acquaintance with the Catholic view of those personages and their times, died on the 21st February, in his carriage, near Avignon. He was returning to Paris from Rome, where he had been to finish a new work, and to recover his health, which intense devotion to study had undermined. His expectations were not realized, and he returned to his own country to expire before reaching his home. At Marseilles, where he landed, the physicians dissuaded him from attempting to go further, but he refused to be guided by their advice. The works of Audin have been much read in this country. They are singularly unscrupulous.

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The Imperial Academy of Sciences at Vienna has just published an essay by the eminent Spanish scholar Ferdinand Wolf, which justly excites attention in the learned circles of Europe. It is on a collection of Spanish romances which exists in manuscript in the library of the University at Prague. Among these are many which are found in no other collection, and have hitherto remained unknown. Some of them, relating to the Cid, are very remarkable. They make a hundred romances discovered by Wolf, whose former collection (_Rosa de Romances_), published in 1846, and whose work on the romance-poetry of the Spaniards, are known to all students of that kind of literature.

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A new weekly journal, under the title of _Le Bien-Etre Universel_ (The Universal Well-Being), appeared at Paris on the 24th February. It advocates Girardin's idea of the abolition of taxes, and the support of the government by the assumption by the latter of the whole business of insurance. Among the contributors are Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, Francois Vidal, E. Quinet, Alphonse Esquiros, and Eugene Pelletan. It is published in quarto form, of the largest size permitted by the law, at $1.20 a year, and furnishes, in addition to its political and economical articles, a full summary of news, political, commercial, literary, and miscellaneous.

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The _Revue Brittanique_ has some interesting facts as to the English book trade. It says: "The great booksellers, like Longman & Murray, must be encouraged by the result of the speculations ventured on by the booksellers of Paris." Is it not wonderful that articles from reviews, which one would suppose would lose their interest in the course of time, and which have been circulated in the Edinburgh or Quarterly to the extent of ten thousand or twelve thousand copies, should be sold in reprints at a high price, and live through two, three, or even six editions? The articles of Macaulay are going through the sixth edition, although the book costs a pound sterling. Of Macaulay's History of England Longman has sold between 20,000 and 30,000 copies, and Thirlwall's and Grote's Histories of Greece, though they have not the same immediate, exciting interest, sell well, notwithstanding they are so long. Mure's and Talfourd's Histories of Greek literature are put forth in new editions. The reviews, instead of injuring the sale of solid works, increase it. Occasional books, like travels, biographies, &c., naturally have their public interest, but most of them are sold at half price within three months of their appearance. At London there are circulating libraries which lend out books, not only in the city itself, but all over England: the railroads have extended their business very greatly. In order to satisfy as many customers as possible, they buy some works by hundreds. For instance, such a circulating library has two hundred copies of Macaulay's History, a hundred of Layard's Nineveh, a hundred of Cumming's hunting adventures, and so on. When the first excitement about a book is over, these extra copies are put into handsome binding and disposed of for half price. The system of cheap publishing has not yet much affected the circulating libraries in England, while in this country it has destroyed them. Books can be bought here now for the former cost of reading them.

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A book worthy of all commendation is the _Histoire des Protestants de France_, from the Reformation to the present time, by M. G. de Felice, published at Paris. The author treats his subject with all that peculiar talent which renders French historians always interesting and instructive. He is clear, forcible, judicious, and profound, without pedantry or sectarian zeal. The action of his story is dramatic, the delineation of his characters as glowing as it is just, and his sympathies so true and generous, and at the same time so tolerant, that the reader follows him attentively from the beginning to the end. The Huguenots were worthy of such a historian, for though persecuted for their opinions, they never ceased to love their country, or to wish to live at peace with their enemies and serve her. Rarely has a body of men produced nobler characters. This book fills a vacuum in French history.

* * * * *

Modern Greek Literature is by no means so wild and imperfect as might be expected from a nation in such a chaotic and uncultivated condition. The people of Greece are hardly more civilized than the Servians, the Dalmatians, or any other of the half-savage tribes that inhabit the south-eastern corner of Europe, but the influence exercised by the antique glory of the land still remains to develop among them a degree of artistic power and beauty unknown to their neighbors. And little as Greece has gained generally from the introduction of German royalty and German office-holders, it has no doubt profited by the greater attention thus excited toward the works of the mighty poets who stand alone and unharmed after all else that their times produced has fallen into ruin. Thus, since the incoming of the Bavarians there has been growing up a disposition in favor of the early literature, and against the newer and less elegant forms of the modern language. The purification of the latter, and its restoration to something like the old classical perfection, the abandonment of rhyme, which is the universal form of the proper new Greek verse, and even the employment of the ancient mythological expressions, are the characteristic aims of some of the most gifted of living Hellene writers. In this way there are two distinct classes of cotemporaneous literature to be found in the Peninsula; the one consists of these somewhat reactionary and romantic lovers of the past, the other of the fresh, native products of the people, independent as far as possible of antiquity, and altogether unaffected by learned studies. The latter is mainly lyric in its character, and has often a wild beauty, which is none the less attractive because it is purely natural. These songs deal more with nature than those of the Sclavonic tribes, with which Mrs. Robinson has made us so well acquainted. The brooks, the hills, the sky, the birds, appear in them, and for human interest, some adventurous _Klepht_, some fighting and dying robber, is brought upon the scene.

The best of the Romaic literature is no doubt the dramatic. This is natural, for the Greeks are still a representative and dramatic people. Until comparatively lately the poets confined themselves, if not to modern subjects, at least to the modern genius of their language. Their dramas were written in rhyme, and with a total disregard of the antique principles of rhythm. Quantity was supplanted by following the accents, and the exterior of the piece was more that of a French play than like the drama of any other nation. The specimen of this style most accessible to American students is the _Aspasia_ of Rizos, published in Boston some twenty years ago, a tragedy, by the way, well worth reading. But latterly, the antique tendency prevailing, plays are written in the old measures, and with all the old machinery. This is in fact a revolutionary proceeding, but we hope may not be without its use, for Greece is not now rich enough to make useless experiments. One of these plays has been translated into German, and thus made accessible to those of the readers of that language whose studies have not reached into the musical Romaic. It is called _The Wedding of Kutrulis_, an Aristophanic Comedy, by Alexandros Rhisos Rhangawis. The form used by the great Athenian satirist is perfectly reproduced, and an original and hearty wit is not wanting. The Aristophanic dress is justified by the poet in some lines which we thus render into the rudeness of English:

Though he trimeters boldly arranges together, and anapæsts weaves with each other, 'Tis not weakness in words that compels him, nor fear at the rhymes' double ringing; In spans he can syllables harness with skill, as a fledgling should do of the muses, And where thoughts and poetic ideas there are none, words can heap up in [Greek: ia] and [Greek: azei], But mid the verdure of laurels eternally green, and by Castaly's ever pure fountains, There found he all broken and voiceless the pipe that, in rage at these poets profaning, At these now-a-day sons of Marsyas, the noble old Muse had flung from her.

The subject and story of this comedy are drawn from the actual life of the people. Spyros, a tavern-keeper in Athens, has promised his daughter Anthusia to Kutrulis, a rich tailor. The young lady's notions are however above tailors; her husband must wear epaulettes and orders. If Kutrulis wants her hand, he must become minister. He despairs at first, but as others have become ministers, there is a chance for him. Accordingly, the needful intrigues and solicitations are set on foot. The strophe of the chorus by the sovereign public is too characteristic and too Attic for us not to try to render it, though perhaps only the few who have dipped in the well of the antique drama can appreciate it:

O muse of the billiard room, Thou that from mocha's odor-pouring steam, And from the ringlets, white-curling from pipes on high Thine inspiration drawest, of venal sort! Here's a new minister must be appointed now. Up and strike the praising strings! Up, O muse of the mob's grace, Put forth in the rosy pages of newspapers Dithyrambic articles! The hero praise aloud!

To succeed in his ambition, Kutrulis must choose a party with which to identify himself. Accordingly the Russian, the British and the French parties, the three into which Greek public men are divided, are introduced, and each urges the reasons why he should become its partisan. This gives the poet an admirable opportunity for the use of satire, which he improves excellently. Kutrulis pledges himself to each of these candidates for his support, but mean while his friends have spread the report that he has actually been appointed minister. Now the swarm of office-seekers and speculators of all sorts come to solicit his favor and exhibit their own corruption. This part of the drama is treated with keen effect. While the report of his appointment is believed by himself and others, Kutrulis marries the scheming Anthusia, who presently wakes from her illusion to find that she is only a tailor's wife after all. She declares that by way of revenge she will compel her husband to give her a new dress every week, and the piece ends to the amusement of everybody.

* * * * *

M. PLANCHE, the oldest Professor and the most learned Grecian at Paris, has just issued the first number of a _Dictionnaire du Style poétique dans la Langue Grecque_. This dictionary is in fact a concordance of Greek, Latin, and French poetry. It offers a complete and curious illustration of the origin and growth of figurative words and phrases, and of their transfer from one language to another. The word _anchor_, for instance, was one of the earliest among the Greeks, a marine people, to take on a metaphorical sense. We see this even in Pindar, who speaks of his heroes as _casting anchor on the summit of happiness_. M. Planche follows this typical use of the word in Virgil, in Ovid, and in Racine, the last of whom says in the _Pleaders_:

"Natheless, gentlemen, The anchor of your goodness us assures."

To the curious student of words and their internal senses this Dictionary is evidently a book worth having.

* * * * *

M. ELIAS REGNAULT has undertaken to continue the _Dix Ans_ of LOUIS BLANC, in the shape of _L'Histoire de Huit Ans_ 1840--48. Few works had ever so powerful an influence as Blanc's "Ten Years." The events of the eight years of which Regnault proposes a history were in no inconsiderable degree fruits of this work.

* * * * *

MR. HALLAM, on the 13th of February, sent a letter to the Society of Antiquaries, in London, announcing in consequence of his recent bereavement, he wished at the next anniversary to relinquish the office of Vice-President, which he had filled for the last thirty years; having been a member of the Society for more than half a century, and having during that period contributed many papers to its transactions. A resolution was proposed by Mr. Payne Collier, seconded by Mr. Bruce, expressive of respect for Mr. Hallam, sincere sympathy with his afflictions, and sorrow at his retirement. In a subsequent letter, Mr. Hallam stated that he should continue to be a member of the Society.

* * * * *

GENERAL SIR WILLIAM NAPIER has published a new edition of his History of the War in the Peninsula--the best military history in the English language--and in his new preface he states that he is indebted to Lady Napier, his wife, not only for the arrangement and translation of an enormous pile of official correspondence, written in three languages, but for that which is far more extraordinary, the elucidation of the secret ciphers of Jerome Bonaparte and others.

* * * * *

In a recent number of _The International_ we printed a poem by Charles Mackay, entitled _Why this Longing?_ without observing that it was a plagiarism from a much finer poem by Harriet Winslow List, of Portland, which may be found in The Female Poets of America, page 354.

* * * * *

A descriptive catalogue of the books and pamphlets educed by the reinstitution of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy in England, would be a very entertaining work. It is astonishing how active the English become in pamphleteering when any such engrossing subject comes before the people or the parliament. The Duke of Sussex carefully preserved every thing in this shape that was printed during the discussion of Catholic Emancipation, and after his death we purchased his collection, which amounted to about _seventy thick volumes_, and includes autograph certificates of presentation from "Peter Plimley," and perhaps a hundred other combatants. The present discussions will be not less voluminous, and it promises to be vastly more entertaining. The matter of the holy chair of St. Peter, with the Mohammedan inscription, upon which the _verd antique_ Lady Morgan has published two or three letters as witty and pungent as ever came from the pen of an Irishwoman, will afford pleasant material for the last chapter of her ladyship's memoirs. Warren, the author of _Ten Thousand a Year_, Dr. Twiss, the biographer of Eldon, Dr. George Croly, the poet, Walter Savage Landor, and Sheridan Knowles, the dramatist, are among the more famous of the disputants on the Protestant side. The author of "Virginius" professes to review Archbishop Wiseman's lectures on _Transubstantiation_, and the _Literary Gazette_ says he thoroughly demolishes that dogma, which, however, "no one supposes that any Romanist of education and common sense believes. It is understood on all hands that whatever defence or explanation is offered, is only for the sake of affording plausible apology to the vulgar for a dogma which the infallibility of the church requires to be unchangeably retained. The reply of the philosophical churchman, _populus vult decipi et decipiatur_, is that which many a priest would give if privately pressed on the subject." The _Literary Gazette_ makes a very common but very absurd mistake, for which no Roman Catholic would thank him. The church does maintain the doctrine, and the most "philosophical" churchman would be dealt with in a very summary manner if he should publicly deny it. The _Literary Gazette_ adds that Knowles "displays complete mastery of the principles and familiarity with the details of the controversy," which we can scarcely believe upon the _Gazette's_ testimony until it evinces for itself a little more knowledge of the matter.

The only one of these works that has been reprinted in this country is Landor's, which we receive from Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston.

* * * * *

R. H. HORNE, the dramatist, and author of _Orion_,--upon which his best reputation is likely to rest--has just published in London _The Dreamer and the Worker_, in two volumes.

* * * * *

Mr. ROEBUCK, the radical member of Parliament, is continuing his History of the Whigs.

* * * * *

It is not be denied that Miss MARTINEAU is one of the cleverest women of our time; deafness and ugliness have induced her to cultivate to the utmost degree her intellectual faculties, and several of her books are illustrations of a mind even masculine in its power and activity; but the constitutional feebleness, waywardness, and wilfulness of woman is nevertheless not unfrequently evinced by her, and as she grows older the infirmities of her nature are more and more conspicuous; vexed with neglect, without the kindly influences of home or friendship, without the consolations or hopes of religion, she seems now ambitious of attention only, and willing to sacrifice every thing womanly or respectable to attract to herself the eyes of the world--the last thing, in her case, one would think desirable. In the book she has just published--_Letters on Man's Nature and Development, by Harriet Martineau and H. G. Atkinson_--she avows the most positive and shameless atheism: Christians have had little regard for Pagan deities--she will have as little for theirs! The sun rose yesterday; the fishes still swim in the sea; all the world goes on as before; but she cares not a fig for any deities, Christian or pagan--and don't believe a word of the immortality of the soul! In this new book, of which she is the chief author, the interlocutors place implicit credence in all the phenomena of mesmerism, and they cannot believe there is any thing in man's being or existence or conscience beyond what the senses reach, beyond what the scalpel discloses in the brain. They trace acts and motions and even inclinations to the brain, and deny that there is or can be any thing in contact which can influence it. _Cerebrum et præterea nihil_ is their motto. The book is the apotheosis of that lump of marrow and fibre. And yet this brain, which is so jealously guarded from any spiritual or immaterial influence, is declared to be completely under the direction of any man or woman who may pass a hand, with faith, backwards and forwards over the skull. The extremities of the body--the fingers--send forth and radiate certain electric, or galvanic, or invisible influences, and thus one has full power over another's organization and volition! But as to any influence beyond the sensible world, that Miss Martineau stoutly denies. The following passage is not an uninteresting specimen of this foolish production:

"I observed that under the influence of mesmerism some patients would spontaneously place their hand, or rather the ends of their fingers, on that part of the brain in action; and these were persons wholly ignorant of phrenology. In some cases the hand would pass very rapidly from part to part, as the organs became excited. If the habit of action was encouraged, they would follow every combination with precision: and if one hand would not do they would use both to cover distant parts in action at the same time. I was delighted with their effects; but did not consider them very extraordinary, because I had been accustomed to observe the same phenomena, in a lesser degree, in the ordinary or normal condition. I know some, who on any excitement of their love of approbation, will rub their hand over the organ immediately. Others, I have observed, when irritated, pass the hand over destructiveness. I have observed others hold their hand over the region of the attachments, as they gazed on the object of their affections. I have watched the poet inspired to write with the fingers pressing on the region of ideality, and those listening to music leaning upon the elbow, with the fingers pressing on the organ of music; and I catch myself performing those actions continually, as if I were a puppet moved by strings. You will observe, besides, how the head follows the excited organ. The proud man throws his head back; the fine man carries his head erect; vanity draws the head on one side, with the hat on the opposite side; the intellect presses the head forward; the affections throw it back on the shoulders; and so with the rest."

* * * * *

The Right Honorable Sir JOHN CAM HOBHOUSE is created a peer with the title of Baron Broughton de Gyfford, in the county of Wilts. His fame in literature has long been lost, in England, in his reputation as a politician; but in this country we know him only as rather a clever man of letters. His most noticeable works that we remember, are, _A Journey through Albania, in 1809, Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, The State of Literature in Italy_, and two volumes entitled _Letters from Paris during the last Reign of Napoleon_. His lordship must be in the vicinity of seventy-five years of age.

* * * * *

Of "JUNIUS" there is still another book--though many good libraries contain not so many volumes as have been written upon the subject--and the journals have almost every month some new contributions to the mystery, increasing the accumulation by which the face of the author is hidden. The last work is entitled "Fac-simile Autograph Letters of Junius, Lord Chesterfield and Mrs. C. Dayrolles, showing that the wife of Mr. Solomon Dayrolles was the amanuensis employed in copying the letters of Junius for the printer; with a Postscript to the first Essay on Junius and his Works: by William Cramp, author of 'The Philosophy of Language.'"

* * * * *

The _Passions of the Human Soul_, by Charles Fourier, translated from the French by the Rev. John Reynell Morell, with critical annotations, a biography of Fourier, and a general introduction, by Hugh Doherty, has been published by Baliere of London (and of Fulton-street, New-York), in two octavos. This is one of Fourier's greatest works, and the attention given to his principles of society in this country will secure for it many readers here.

* * * * *

THOMAS COLLEY GRATTAN, the author of _Highways and By-ways, Jacqueline of Holland_, &c., and a few years ago, British Consul at Boston, is coming to this country to give lectures. He will not be very successful.

* * * * *

THE POEMS OF ALARIC A. WATTS, lately published in London, in a very sumptuous edition,--though some of the plates have an oldish look--are much commended in nearly all the reviews, and civilly treated even by Fraser, who once described Watts as a fellow "of some talent in writing verses on children dying of colic, and a skill in putting together fiddle-faddle fooleries, which look pretty in print; in other respects of an unwashed appearance; no particular principles, with well-bitten nails, and a great genius for back-biting." Watts some twenty years since had a controversy with Robert Montgomery who wrote _Satan_, in such a manner as very much to please his hero (a difficult task in biography), and one of the subjects of protracted and sharp discussion concerned the names of the disputants. Watts maintained that the author of "Hell," "Woman," "Satan," &c., was the son of a clown at Bath, named Gomery; and in return Montgomery, who, allowing that as Watts was the lawfully begotten son of a respectable nightman of the name of Joseph Watts, he had a fair title to the patronymic, denied that he had any claim to the gothic appellation of Alaric. "The man's name," said Montgomery, "is Andrew." This was a great while ago, and the quarrels of the time are happily forgotten. Watts is now fifty-seven years old, and age has sobered him, and given him increase of taste, both as to scandal and to writing verses. There are some extremely pretty things in this book (which may be found at Putnam's).

* * * * *

THE STOWE MSS., including the unpublished diaries and correspondence of George Grenville, have been bought by Mr. Murray. The diary reveals, it is said, the secret movements of Lord Bute's administration, the private histories of Wilkes and Lord Chatham, and the features of the early madness of George III.; while the correspondence exhibits Wilkes in a new light, and reveals (what the Stowe papers were expected to reveal) something of moment about _Junius_. The whole will form about four volumes, and will appear among the next winter's novelties.

* * * * *

The copyrights, steel plates, wood-cuts, stereotype plates, &c. of _Walter Scott's works, and of his life, by Lockhart_, were to be sold in London, by auction, on the 26th March. This property belonged to the late Mr. Cadell of Edinburgh. The copyright of "Waverly" has five years more to run, and that of the works generally does not terminate for twenty years. This is the largest copyright property ever sold.

* * * * *

MR. LAYARD's fund having been exhausted, a subscription was lately set on foot for him in London, and its success we hope will enable him to prosecute his investigations with renewed vigor. He has, we hear, entirely recovered from his late indisposition, and needs but a supply of money to recommence his operations with renewed vigor.

* * * * *

HENRY ALFORD, a very pleasing poet, a profound scholar, and most excellent man, is at the present time vicar of Wymeswold, in Leicestershire, England. He was born in London in 1810, and in 1832 graduated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he was afterwards Fellow. In 1835 he was married to his cousin, to whom are written some of his most charming effusions. At Easter in 1844 they lost one of their four children, and the bereavement seems to have induced the composition of many pieces full of tenderness and of remarkable beauty, which appear in the collection of his poems. In 1841 he was elected one of the lecturers in the University of Cambridge, and he is now, we believe, Examiner in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and Logic in the University of London. He has published, besides his poetical works, which appeared in two volumes, some years since, several volumes of sermons, a work entitled _Chapters on the Poets of Ancient Greece_, written for the Nottingham mechanics; a volume of _University Lectures_; a work intended as a regular course of exercises in classical composition; and the _Greek Testament_, with a critically revised text, digest of various readings, &c., in which he has displayed sound learning and judgment. He is also editor of a very complete collection of the "Works of Donne", published some years ago at Oxford. The great labor of his life, however, centres in his edition of the _Greek Testament_, the first volume of which only, containing the four Gospels, has appeared. He is now working hard, eight or ten hours a day, in his theological researches, which promise a liberal harvest. We understand that he has in contemplation a poem of considerable length, the composition of which is to be the pleasant solace of his declining years. Mr. Alford's minor poems have within a few years been very popular in America, and won for their author the warm friendship and sympathy of many who will probably never know him personally. His pure domestic feeling, and hearty appreciation of whatever is most genial and hopeful in human nature, entitle him to the distinction he enjoys of being one of the truest "poets of the heart."

* * * * *

In a sketch of the artist ANDREW WILSON, who died in Edinburgh two years ago, the _Art Journal_ gives the following postscript of a letter from Sir David Wilkie to Wilson:

MADRID, _Dec. 24th, 1827._

MY DEAR SIR,--Having been employed by our mutual friend, Mr. Wilkie, to copy the above, I cannot let the opportunity pass unimproved of speaking a word in my own name, and to call to your mind the pleasant hours we occasionally passed together many years since. Let me express, my dear sir, my great pleasure in thus renewing, after so long an interval, our acquaintance. You, of course, if you can recollect any thing of me, can only remember me as a raw, inexperienced youngster, while you were already a man, valuable for information, acquirements, and weight of character. With great regard, my dear sir, believe me, truly yours,

WASHINGTON IRVING.

* * * * *

MR. ALISON, the historian, at a recent meeting of the Glasgow section of the Architectural Institute of Scotland, delivered an address in which he reviewed the state and progress of architecture, and its general influence on the mind and on the progress of civilization, from the period when it first became identified with Art to the present time.

* * * * *

The diet of Denmark has just voted to three poets of that nation a yearly pension of 1,000 thalers each. Two of them were H. Herz and Puludan Müller; the name of the third we do not know.

* * * * *

The book of the month in New-York has been _Lavengro_ (published by Putnam and by the Harpers in large editions.) Its success was a consequence of the fame won by the author in his "Bible in Spain," &c., and of clever trickery in advertising. Generally, we believe, it has disappointed. We agree very nearly about it with the London _Leader_, that--

"It is worth reading, but not worth re-reading. A certain freshness of scene, with real vigor of style, makes you canter pleasantly enough through the volumes; but when the journey is over you find yourself arrived Nowhere. It is not truth, it is not fiction; neither biography nor romance; not even romantic biography; but three volumes of sketches without a purpose, of narratives without an aim. Mr. Borrow has hit the English taste by his union of the clerical and scholarly with what we may call _manly blackguardism_. His sympathies are all with the blackguards. Not with the ragged nondescripts of the streets, but the poetic vagabonds of the fields--the Rommany Chals--the Gipsies, who are as great in "horse-taming" as Hector of old, and great in the art of "self-defence" as any Greek before the walls of Troy--not to mention other peculiarities in respect of property and its conveyance which they share with the Greeks--the Gipsies in short who are vagabonds in the true wandering sense of the term."

* * * * *

JAMES T. FIELDS has in press a new edition of his Poems, embracing the pieces which he has written since the edition of 1849. Mr. Fields has a just sense of poetical art; his compositions are happily conceived, and uniformly executed with the most careful elaboration. A few days ago we saw a letter from Miss Mitford, addressed to a friend in this country, in which he is referred to as one of the "living classics of our tongue." We perceive that he is to be the next anniversary poet of the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard.

* * * * *

W. G. SIMMS has published at Charleston a fine poem entitled _The City of the Silent_, written for the occasion of the consecration of a cemetery near that city. It flows in natural harmony, and in thought as well as in manner has an appropriate dignity. We wonder that there has appeared no complete collection of the poems of Mr. Simms, which fill at least a dozen volumes, nearly all of which are now out of print. Some of his pieces have remarkable merit.

* * * * *

"NILE NOTES BY A HOWADJI," is not a book of travel, but the book of a traveller. The traveller is obviously a very charming and veracious one, but after all, the landscape and the persons, scenes, and manners he describes are so idealized by him as to have lost much of their natural identity, and put on the somewhat artificial look of museum specimens. However, the _Notes_ are not, therefore, to us the less, but all the more, readable, because we have abundance of mere books of travel, and scarcely any traveller worth remarking. Mr. Kinglake, the author of _Eothen_, to be sure, was a host in himself. And Mr. Thackeray, in his _Journey from Cheapside to Cairo_, proved himself a fit companion of that gentleman. But a certain sneering humor, a certain mephistophelian irony, in these persons, prevent one from feeling entirely at ease with them, or believing, in fact, in their complete sincerity. It is not so with the author of _Nile Notes_, than whom a June breeze is not more bland, and moonlight not less gairish or oppressive. This conviction, indeed, strikes us in a very peculiar manner as we read, that no more genial nature ever penetrated that dismal and incredible East, to avouch the eternal freshness of man against the decay of nature and the mutability of institutions. An actually weird effect is produced by the sight of this plump and rosy Christian pervading the graves of dead empires, and thinking democracy amidst the listening ghosts of the Pharaohs. Did these solemn empires, did these absolute and strutting monarchs mistake their grandeur, and exist after all only that this modern democrat might laugh and live a life devoid of care? Such is the lesson of the book. It is sweeter to know the freshness and kindly nature that penned it; it is sweeter to feel the graceful and humane fancies that baptize every page of it, than to remember whole lineages of buried empires, or recognize whole pyramids of absolute and dissolved Pharaohs. The book is a mine of beautiful descriptions, and of sentences which tickle your inmost midriff with delight. (Harpers.)

* * * * *

We have been surprised lately at several long discussions in the New-York Historical Society of the question whether copies, extracts, or abstracts of the MSS. and other historical documents in the Society's collections might be published without the Society's special permission. We do not know who introduced the prohibitory proposition, but it is in the last degree ridiculous; there cannot be said in its support one syllable of reason; that it has been entertained so long is discreditable to the Society. The prime object of the Society is the collection and preservation of the materials of history; the more numerous the multiplication of copies, the more certain the probabilities of their preservation. A private collector may for obvious reasons hoard his treasures, and wish for the destruction of all copies of them; but the considerations which govern him are the last that should influence a historical society under similar circumstances.

* * * * *

FANNY WRIGHT, some dozen years ago, entered into a sort of limited partnership with one of Robert Owen's old New-Harmony associates, and has since been known as Frances Wright D'Arusmont. They lived together a few months, but women grow old, and these infidel philosophers are very apt to live according to their liberties; Madame resided in Paris, Monsieur in Cincinnati: Madame wanted more money than Monsieur would allow, and she returned, and is now before the courts of Ohio with a plea (of _eighty thousand words_) for property held by D'Arusmont, which she says is hers. We know little of the merits of the case, but if there is to be domestic unhappiness, we are content that she should be a sufferer, whose whole career has been a warfare upon the institutions which define the true position, and guard the best interests of her sex. It is more than thirty years since Fanny Wright wrote her _Views of Society and Manners in America_. The brilliant woman who lectured to crowds in the old Park Theatre, against decency, is old now, and an atheist old woman, desolate, is rather a pitiable object.

* * * * *

EDWARD T. CHANNING, a brother of the Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing, and for thirty years Professor of Rhetoric in Harvard College, has resigned his place, and his resignation is one of the weightiest misfortunes that has befallen this school for some time. Professor Channing's fitness for the professorship of English literature was shown in his admirable article upon the Poetry of Moore, in the _North American Review_ for 1817. He has written much and well in criticism, and is perhaps equally familiar with both Latin and English literature. His lectures, described as eminently rich, suggestive, and practical, we hope will be given to the press. It is intimated that Mr. George Hillard will be his successor in the college, and we know of no man so young who could more nearly fill his place.

* * * * *

"PUBLIC LIBRARIES," is the title of a very interesting article in the February number of _The International_, erroneously credited to Chambers's _Papers for the People_. The Edinburgh publisher, it seems, took two articles from the _North American Review_, cut them in pieces and transposed the sentences, prefixed a few remarks of his own, added a few words at the end of his Mosaic, and issued this "Paper for the People" as an original contribution to bibliothecal literature, without a word as to its real authorship or the sources whence it was derived. Such things are often done, and if Messrs. Chambers always evince as much sagacity in their appropriations, their readers will have abundant cause to be grateful. The articles in the _North American Review_ were written by Mr. George Livermore, a Boston merchant, who has the accomplishments of a Roscoe, and who as a bibliographer is scarcely surpassed in knowledge or judgment by any contemporary.

* * * * *

FENELON, the Archbishop of Cambray, it was proved to the satisfaction of somebody, who read a paper upon the subject before the New-York Historical Society, a year or two ago, was once a missionary in America. But Mr. Poore, while in Paris for the collection of documents illustrative of the history of Massachusetts, investigated the matter, with his customary sagacity and diligence, and a communication by him to _The International_ most satisfactorily shows that the supposition was entirely wrong. The Fenelon who was in this country was tried at Quebec, in a case of which the famous La Salle was one of the witnesses, and of which the _process verbal_ is now in the _Archives de l'Amérique_, in Paris; and the Archbishop was at the time of the trial certainly in France.

* * * * *

MR. S. G. GOODRICH, of whose works we recently gave a reviewal, will sail in a few days for Paris, where he will immediately enter upon the duties of the consulship to which he has been appointed by the President. This will be pleasant news for American travellers in Europe. Mr. Walsh has never been very liberal of attentions to his countrymen unless their position was such as to render their society an object of his ambition. Mr. Goodrich himself recently passed several months in Paris, bearing letters to the consul, who in all the time offered him not even a recognition. He will be apt to pay more regard to the letter which Mr. Goodrich bears from the Secretary of State.

* * * * *

MAJOR RICHARDSON's _Wacousta, or the Prophecy_, is a powerfully written novel, originally printed twenty years ago, and lately republished by Dewitt & Davenport. The descriptions are graphic, and the incidents dramatic, but the plot is in some respects defective. The prophecies which have such influence over the race of De Holdimars should have been pronounced in his infancy, and not only a few days before the terrible results attributed to it; the introduction of the race at Holdimar's execution, is injudicious; and the circumstances under which Wacousta finds Valletort and Clara his auditors not well contrived. But altogether the book is one of the best we have illustrating Indian life. Major Richardson is a British American; his father was an officer in Simcoe's famous regiment; other members of his family held places of distinction in the civil or military service; and he was himself a witness of some of the most remarkable scenes in our frontier military history, and was made a prisoner by the United States troops at the battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh was killed--_not_ by Colonel Johnson, very certainly. Major Richardson subsequently served in Spain, and resided several years in Paris, where he wrote _Ecarté_, a very brilliant novel, of which we are soon to have a new edition. A later work from his hand, which we need not name, is more creditable to his abilities than to his taste or discretion; but _Wacousta_ and _Ecarté_ are worthy of the best masters in romantic fiction.

* * * * *

The subject of _American Antiquities_ has been very much neglected by American writers. Even the remains of an ancient and high civilization which are scattered so profusely all through Mexico and Central America have hitherto been illustrated almost exclusively by foreigners, and the most complete and magnificent publication respecting them that will ever have been made is that of Lord Kingsborough. Recently, however, our own country has furnished an antiquary of indefatigable industry, great perseverance and sagacity, in Mr. E. G. Squier, who was lately _Chargé d'Affaires_ of the United States to the Republic of Central America, and is now engaged in printing several works which he has completed, in this city. The splendid volume by Mr. Squier which was published two years ago by the _Smithsonian Institution_, upon the Antiquities of the Valley of the Mississippi, illustrates his abilities, and is a pledge of the value of his new performances. The first of his forthcoming volumes will, like that, be issued by the Smithsonian Institution, and it will constitute a quarto of some two hundred pages, with more than ninety engravings, under the title of _Aboriginal Monuments of New-York, comprising the results of Original Surveys and Explorations, with an Appendix_. This is now, we believe, on the eve of publication. A second volume is entitled, _The Serpent Symbol, and the Worship of the Reciprocal Principle, in America_. It contains, also, extended incidental illustrations of the religious systems of the American aborigines, and of the symbolical character of the ancient monuments in the United States. It will form a large octavo of two hundred and fifty pages, with sixty-three engravings, and will be published by Mr. Putnam.

The first of these works, constituting part of the second volume of the "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," may be regarded as a continuation of the author's _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, forming the first volume of those contributions. It gives a succinct account of the aboriginal remains of the state of New-York, which were thoroughly investigated by the author, under the joint auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and the New-York Historical Society, in 1848. It strips the subject of all the absurd hypotheses and conjectures with which it has been involved by speculative and fanciful minds, and gives us a new and full statement of facts, from which there is no difficulty in getting at correct results. The appendix, which forms quite half of the volume, is devoted to the consideration of several of the more interesting questions stated in connection with the subject of our antiquities generally, and has a closer relation to the previously published volume than to the present memoir. The _rationalé_ of symbolism is very elaborately deduced from an analysis of the primitive religious structures of the Greeks, and applied, as we think, with entire success, to the elucidation of the origin and purposes of a large part of the monumental remains in the western United States. Indeed this whole work is dependent on, and illustrative of, the other, which must be imperfectly understood without it.

The same is true of the second work, on the "Serpent Symbol," etc., which, however, is chiefly devoted to inquiries into the philosophy and religion of the aboriginal American nations, and the relations which they sustained to the primitive systems of the other continent. The principal inquiry is, how far the identities which, in these respects, confessedly existed between the early nations of both worlds, may be regarded as derivative, or the result of like conditions and common mental and moral constitutions. These are radical questions, which must be decided before we can, with safety, attempt any generalizations on the subject of the origin of the American race, which has so long occupied speculative minds. Mr. Squier, in this volume, has brought together a vast number of new and interesting facts, demonstrating the existence of some of the most abstract oriental doctrines in America, illustrated by precisely identical or analogous symbols; but he does not admit that they were derivative, without first subjecting them to a rigid analysis, in order to ascertain if they may not have originated on the spot where they were found, by a natural and almost inevitable process. The work, therefore, is essentially critical, and may be regarded as initiatory to the investigation of these subjects, on a new and more philosophical system. It is the first of a series, under the general title of "American Archæological Researches," of which, it is announced in the advertisement, "The Archæology and Ethnology of Central America," and "The Mexican Calendar," will form the second and third volumes.

Besides these works, Mr. Squier has now in press, _Nicaragua: Its Condition, Resources, and Prospects; being a Narrative of a Residence in that Country, and containing also chapters illustrative of its Geography, Topography, History, Social and Political Condition, Antiquities, &c., illustrated by Maps and Engravings_. This cannot fail of being a book of much interest and value. We are confident that it will be worth more than all the hundred other volumes that have been printed upon the subjects which it will embrace. Mr. Squier, while _Chargé d'Affaires_ to Central America, and Minister to Nicaragua, enjoyed extraordinary opportunities, in his relations with the chief persons of those countries and his frequent tours of observation, for obtaining full and accurate information, and the general justness of his apprehensions respecting affairs may be relied upon.

* * * * *

The REV. DR. SCHROEDER has in press a _History of Constantine the Great_, in which we shall have his views of the Church in the fourth century.

* * * * *

MR. CHARLES ASTOR BRISTED, whose clever sketches of American Society we have copied into the _International_ as they have appeared in the successive numbers of _Fraser's Magazine_, has addressed the following letter to Mr. Willis, upon an intimation in the _Home Journal_ that under the name of Carl Benson he described himself:

"MY DEAR SIR:--Several intimations to the above effect have already reached me, but now for the first time from a source deserving notice. Allow me to deny, _in toto_, any intention of describing myself under the name of Henry Benson. Were I disposed to attempt self-glorification, it would be under a very different sort of character. Here I should, in strictness, stop; but, as you have done me the honor to speak favorably of certain papers in _Fraser_, perhaps you will permit me to intrude on your time (and your readers', if you think it worth while), so far as to explain _what_ (not _whom_) Mr. Benson is meant for.

"The said papers (ten in all, of which four still remain in the editor's hands), were originally headed, 'The Upper Ten Thousand,' as representing life and manners in a particular set, which title the editor saw fit to alter into 'Sketches of American Society'--not with my approbation, as it was claiming for them more than they contained, or professed to contain. Harry Benson, the thread employed to hang them together, is a sort of fashionable hero--a _quadratus homo_, according to the 'Upper Ten' conception of one; a young man who, starting with a handsome person and fair natural abilities, adds to these the advantages of inherited wealth, a liberal education, and foreign travel. He possesses much general information, and practical dexterity in applying it, great world-knowledge and _aplomb_, financial shrewdness, readiness in composition--speaks half-a-dozen languages, dabbles in literature, in business, _in every thing but politics_--talks metaphysics one minute, and dances a polka the next--in short, knows a little of every thing, with a knack of reproducing it effectively; moreover, is a man of moral purity, deference to women and hospitality to strangers, which I take to be the three characteristic virtues of a New-York gentleman. On the other hand, he has the faults of his class strongly marked--intense foppery in dress, general Sybaritism of living, a great deal of Jack-Brag-ism and show-off, mythological and indiscreet habits of conversation, a pernicious custom of sneering at every body and every thing, inconsistent blending of early Puritan and acquired Continental habits, occasional fits of recklessness breaking through the routine of a worldly-prudent life. The character is so evidently a type--even if it were not designated as such in so many words, more than once--that it is surprising it should ever have been attributed to an individual--above all, to one who is never at home but in two places--outside of a horse and inside of a library. Most of the other characters are similarly types--that is to say, they represent certain styles and varieties of men. The fast boy of Young America (from whose diary Pensez-y gave you a leaf last summer), whose great idea of life is dancing, eating supper after dancing, and gambling after eating supper; the older exquisite, without fortune enough to hurry brilliantly on, who makes general gallantly his amusement and occupation; the silent man, _blazé_ before thirty, and not to be moved by any thing; (a variety of American much overlooked by strangers, but existing in great perfection, both here and at the south;) the beau of the 'second set,' dressy, vulgar and good natured; these and others I have endeavored to depict. Now, as every class is made up of individuals, every character representing a class must resemble some of the individuals in it, in some particulars; but if you undertook to attach to each single character one and the same living representative, you would soon find each of them, like Mrs. Malaprop's Cerberus, 'three gentlemen at once,' if not many more; and should one of your 'country readers,' anxious to 'put the right names to them,' address--not _one_, but _five_ or _six_--of his 'town correspondents,' he would get answers about as harmonious as if he had consulted the same number of German commentators on the meaning of a disputed passage in a Greek tragedian. Some of the personages are purely fanciful--for instance, Mr. Harrison--such a man as never did exist, but I imagine might very well exist, among us. But, as the development of these characters is still in manuscript, it would be premature to say more of them.

"Yet one word. The sketches were written entirely for the English market, so to speak, without any expectation of their being generally read or republished here. This will account for their containing many things which must seem very flat and common-place to an American reader--such as descriptions of sulkies and trotting-wagons, how people dress, and what they eat for dinner, etc.; which are nevertheless not necessarily uninteresting to an Englishman who has not seen this country. Excuse me for trespassing thus far on your patience, and believe me, dear sir, yours very truly

C. A. BRISTED."

* * * * *

BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, LL.D. and his son Benjamin Silliman, junior, of Yale College, sailed a few days ago for Europe, for the purpose chiefly of making a geological exploration of the central and southern portion of that continent. After visiting the volcanic regions of central France, they will make the tour of Italy, visiting Vesuvius and Etna, and will return to England in time to attend the meeting of the British Academy of Sciences, at Ipswich, in July. They will next visit Switzerland and the Alps, and return home in the autumn.

* * * * *

The second volume of _The Works of John Adams_, we understand, has been very well received by the book-buyers. It is frequently observed of it, that it vindicates the title of its eminent author and subject to a higher distinction than has commonly been awarded to him in our day. It certainly is one of the most interesting biographies of the revolutionary period that we have read. The third and fourth volumes will be published by Little & Brown about the beginning of May.

* * * * *

"THE CÆSARS," by De Quincy, is the last of the works by that great author issued by Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, who promise us in their beautiful typography all that the "Opium Eater" has written. "The Cæsars" is a very remarkable book.

* * * * *

OF THE EDITION OF THE WRITINGS OF WASHINGTON by JARED SPARKS, we published some years ago in the Philadelphia _North American_ an opinion which was amply vindicated by citations and comparisons, and more recently, in the _International_ for last December, we substantially repeated our judgment in the following words, in reply to some observations on the subject in the Paris _Journal des Debats_:

"But the omissions by Mr. Sparks--sometimes from carelessness, sometimes from ignorance, and sometimes from an indisposition to revive memories of old feuds, or to cover with disgrace names which should be dishonored, and his occasional verbal alterations of Washington's letters, prevent satisfaction with his edition of Washington."

Since then an able and ingenious writer in the _Evening Post_ has criticised the labors of Mr. Sparks in the same manner, and in a second paper conclusively replied to his defenders. We profess thoroughly to understand this matter; we have carefully compared the original letters of Washington, as they are preserved in the Department of State, in the Charleston Library, the New-York Historical Society's Library, and in numerous other public and private collections, and we have come to the conclusion that instead of having done any service to American History by his editions of Morris, Franklin, and Washington, Mr. Sparks has done positive and scarcely reparable injury; since by his incomplete, inaccurate and injudicious publications, he has prevented the preparation of such as are necessary for the illustration of the characters of these persons and the general history of their times. We shall not at present enter into any particulars for the vindication of our dissent from the very common estimation of the character of Mr. Sparks as a historian; but we may gratify some students in our history by stating that _A Complete Collection of the Writings of Washington, chronologically arranged, and amply illustrated with Introductions, Notes, &c._, is in hand, and will be published with all convenient expedition. It will embrace about twice as much matter as the edition by Sparks, but will be much more compactly printed. It would have appeared before the present time, but for an absurd misapprehension in regard to certain assumed copyrights, which one of our most eminent justices, and several lawyers of the highest distinction, have declared null and impossible.

* * * * *

MR. ISAAC C. PRAY is the author of a beautiful volume on the eve of publication, on the History of the Musical Drama. One hundred and sixty pages are devoted to "Parodi and the Opera." Mr. Pray is a capital critic in this department; he has been many years familiar with the various schools of musical art, and at home behind the scenes in the great opera houses of Europe: so that probably no writer in America has more ample material for such a work as he has undertaken. He proposes a series of some half-dozen volumes on the subject.

* * * * *

MR. FREDERIC SAUNDERS, an industrious literary antiquary, is publishing in the _Methodist Quarterly Review_ and the _Christian Recorder_, a series of pleasant reminiscences of the great lights of the church in England, in the last generation. Among his papers that have appeared are entertaining sketches of Edward Irving and Dr. Chalmers.

* * * * *

"THE DUTY OF A BIOGRAPHER," is very justly described by a writer on this subject in the last _Democratic Review_. They certainly managed these things better in the days of king Cheops, but biographies would still be written truthfully and to some purpose if there were more honesty in criticism--if the mob of people who fancy they may themselves sometimes be heroes of such writing, did not for their prospective safety denounce every _post-mortem_ exhibition of infirmities; or if to the creatures most largely endowed with the means of hearing, slavering were not more easy than dissection.

ASTONISHING ADVENTURE OF JAMES BOTELLO.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE

BY W. S. MAYO, M.D. AUTHOR OF KALOOLAH, ETC.

To an author who has been accustomed to deal with the startling and the marvellous in the way of incident and adventure, nothing can be more amusing than the confident opinions of critics and readers as to the improbability, and frequently the impossibility, of particular scenes which often happen to be faithful descriptions of actual occurrences. In this manner several passages from "Kaloolah" and "The Berber" have been indicated by some of my many good natured and liberal critics in this country and in England, as taxing a little too strongly the credulity of readers. Among such passages, the escape, in the first pages of the Berber, of the young Englishman, by jumping overboard in the bay of Cadiz, and hiding himself in the darkness of the night beneath the overhanging stern of his boat, has been particularly pointed out. Now, if this was pure invention, it might be safely left to a jury of yankee boatmen or Spanish _barquéros_ to decide whether the incident was not in the highest degree probable and natural; but being literally founded in fact, it is perhaps unnecessary to make any such appeal. There may be, however, a few unadventurous souls who will still persist in their doubts as to the probability of the incident. For the especial benefit of such I will relate the true story of a boat adventure, which in every way is a thousand times more strange and incredible than any of the wildest inventions of the wildest romance.

The voyage of Vasco di Gama around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, was the beginning of a complete revolution in the trade of Europe and the East. This trade, which, following the expensive route of Egypt and the Red Sea, had been for a long time in the hands of the Venetians and Genoese, suddenly turned itself into the new and cheap channel opened by the enterprise of the Portuguese. The merchants of Genoa and Venice found themselves unexpectedly cut off from their accustomed sources of wealth, while a tide of affluence rolled into the mouth of the Tagus, and Lisbon became the commercial mart of the world.

The success of the Portuguese gave a new impulse to the spirit of enterprise which had already been excited among the maritime nations of Europe by the discoveries of Columbus, and efforts to divert a portion of the golden current soon began to be made. The Spaniards, debarred from following the direct route of the Portuguese, by their own exclusive pretensions in the west, and the consequent decision of the Pope, granting to them the sole right of exploration beyond a certain line of longitude to the west, and confining the Portuguese to the east, had, under the guidance of the adventurous Magellan, found a westerly route to the Indies. The English were busy with several schemes for a short cut to the north-west. The Dutch were beginning to give signs of a determination, despite the Pope's decision, to follow the route by the Cape of Good Hope. As may be imagined, these movements aroused the jealousy of the court and merchants of Lisbon. They trembled lest their commercial monopoly should be encroached upon, and every care was taken to keep the rest of Europe in ignorance of the details of the trade, and of the discoveries and conquests of their agents in the East.

Of course nothing could be more injurious to a Portuguese of the time than to be suspected of a design to aid with advice or information the schemes of foreign rivals. Unluckily for James Botello such a suspicion lighted upon him. It was rumored that he was disposed to sell his services to the French. He was known to be a gentleman of parts, well acquainted with the East--having served with credit under the immediate successors of Vasco de Gama--and as competent as any one to lead the Frenchman into the Indian Ocean, and to initiate him into the mysteries of the trade. The suspicion, however, could not have been very strong, and probably had no real foundation in truth, or else more stringent measures than appear to have been used would have been adopted by an unscrupulous court to prevent his carrying his designs into execution. The rumor, however, had its effect; and Botello soon found that his influence at court was gone, and that he had become an object of jealous observation.

Anxious to give the lie to this calumny, and to regain the favor of his sovereign, John III, Botello embarked as a volunteer in the fleet which was taking out to Calicut the new viceroy, De Cunna. Upon the arrival of this fleet, the operations of the Portuguese, both military and commercial, were carried on with renewed vigor; and in all these Botello bore his part, but without being able wholly to remove the suspicions with which he was sensible his actions were still watched by his superiors. A favorite project of the Portuguese--one that had been pursued with energy and by every means of diplomacy or war--was the establishment of a fort in Diu, a town situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Cambaya. Several times the capture of the place had been attempted by force, but without success. Even the great Albuquerque had been foiled in a furious attack. Failing in this, the Portuguese repeatedly endeavored to get permission to erect a fort for the protection of their trade, by persuasion or artifice. It had become an object of the most ardent desire, as well with the king and court at home, as with the viceroys and their officers in the East.

It happened now in the year 1534, that Badur, king of Cambaya, was sorely pressed by his enemy the Great Mogul--so much so, that he was compelled to call in the assistance of his other enemy, the Portuguese. The price of this assistance was to be permission to erect and garrison a fort at Diu. Badur hesitated; he knew that if the Portuguese were allowed a fort, they would soon be masters of the whole town; but his necessities were urgent, and he finally acceded to the demand. De Cunna rushed to Diu; a treaty was speedily concluded with Badur--the fort was planned, and its erection commenced with vigor.

No one better than Botello knew how pleased King John would be with the news. He resolved to be the bearer of the good tidings, and thus to restore himself to the royal favor. His plan was a bold and daring one; in fact, considering the known dangers of the sea, and the then imperfect state of navigation, it must have seemed almost hopeless; but he suffered no doubts or apprehensions to prevent him from carrying it into immediate effect. In order to conceal his design, he gave out that he was going on a boat excursion up the Gulf of Cambaya, to visit the court of the now friendly Badur. Two young soldiers, of inferior degree, named Juan de Sousa and Alfonzo Belem, readily consented to accompany him. The boat selected for the voyage was a small affair--something like a modern jolly boat, though of rather greater beam in proportion to its other dimensions; its length was sixteen feet, its breadth nine feet. Four Moorish slaves from Melenda, on the coast of Africa, were selected to work the boat, while two native servants, having Portuguese blood in their veins, completed the crew.

Botello's preparations for the voyage were soon made; and waiting only to secure a copy of the treaty with Badur, and plans of the fort which had been commenced, he ordered the short mast, with its tapering lateen yard, to be raised, and the sail trimmed close to the breeze blowing into the roadstead of Diu. But instead of turning up along the northern coast of the Gulf of Cambaya, he directed the bow of his little bark boldly out to sea.

His companions knew but little of navigation; but they knew enough to know that a south-westerly course was hardly the one on which to reach Cambaya. To the remonstrances of Juan and Alfonzo, Botello simply replied that he preferred sailing south with the wind, to rowing north against it; and they would find the course he had chosen the safest and shortest in the end.

In this way they sailed for three days. On the morning of the fourth, Botello found that it would be impossible for him longer to turn a deaf ear to the mutterings of discontent among his crew. It was high time for an explanation of his plans; and trusting to his eloquence and influence, he proceeded to unfold his design.

Imagine the astonishment and dismay depicted in the countenances of the servants and sailors when he told them that he purposed making the long and dangerous voyage to Lisbon in the miserable little boat in which they had embarked. But as he went on commenting upon the feasibility of the project, discussing the real dangers of such voyage, and ridiculing the imaginary, and dilating upon the honors and rewards which they would win by being the first bearers of the tidings they carried, a change from dismay to hope and confidence took place in the minds of all his hearers, excepting the African sailors, who did not much relish the idea of so long a voyage to Christian lands. They, however, were slaves and infidels, and their opposition was not much heeded.

To every objection Botello had a plausible reply. He confidently asserted his knowledge of a safe route, and of his ability to preserve their little craft amid all the dangers of the sea.

"But may we not be forestalled in our news, after all," demanded Alfonzo, "by the vessels from Calicut?"

"No fear of that," replied Botello. "The news from Diu will not reach Calicut for a month, and then it will be too late in the monsoon to dispatch a vessel, even if one were ready. Besides, I have certain information that the viceroy has determined that no dispatches shall be sent home until he can announce the completion of the fort."

"I like not this new route you propose," said Juan. "Why leave the usual course to Melenda?"

"Because we should be in danger of exciting the suspicions of our brethren who now garrison the forts of Melenda, Zanzabar, and Mozambique, and perhaps be detained. No, we will take a more direct course--strike the coast of Africa below Sofalo, and then follow the shore around the Cape of Good Hope."

"And what are we to do for provisions and water, in the mean time?"

"Of provisions we have a store that will last until we reach land, when we can obtain supplies from the natives; as to water, we must go at once upon the shortest possible allowance, and daily pray for rain--St. Francis will aid us. I can show you something that will set your minds easy upon that point."

Botello produced a box from beneath the stern sheets, and opening it, took out with an air of reverence a leaden image of the saint.

"See this," he exclaimed, in a tone of exultation. "It was modelled from the portrait recognized by the aged Moor. Have you not heard of the miracle?--true, you were not at Calicut. Know, then, that a few months since, a native of India was presented to the viceroy, whose reputed age amounted to three hundred years. His story was, that in early youth he encountered an aged man lingering upon the banks of a stream which he was anxious to pass. The youth tendered the support of his strong shoulders, and bore him across the water. As a reward for the service, the old man bade the youth to live until they should meet again. And thus had he lived, until a few months since he was presented to De Cunna, when he at once recognized in a portrait of St. Francis the holy man whom he had carried across the stream. This image was modelled from that portrait; it was blessed by the pious convert in whose person was performed the miracle. Our voyage must be prosperous with this on board."

The sight of an image taken from a portrait acknowledged to be the saint himself, removed all doubt. And what Botello's arguments and persuasions might have failed to accomplish, was easily effected by the little image of lead. A heretic might, perhaps, have questioned the saint's power over the physical phenomena of the sea, but he could not have denied his moral influence over the minds of the adventurous voyageurs who confided in him. No hesitation remained, except in the minds of the four slaves, who, having been forcibly converted from the errors of Mohammed, were yet somewhat weak in the true faith.

It was this want of faith that led to one of the most lamentable events of the voyage. They had been out more than a month without having had sight of land, and not even a distant sail had lighted up the dismal loneliness of the ocean. It must be recollected what a solitude was the vast surface of the Indian and Pacific seas in those days. Beside the Portuguese fleets that followed each other at long and regular intervals, Christian commerce there was none, while Arabian trade was small in amount, and confined to certain narrow channels. The Moorish slaves had never before been so long in the open sea, and their fears increased as day after day the little boat bore them farther to the south. The provisions were also, by this time, nearly exhausted, and the daily allowance of water proved barely sufficient to moisten their parched lips. The slaves, after taking counsel among themselves, demanded that the course of the boat should be arrested.

"And which way would you go?" asked Botello. "Back to Diu? It would take three months to reach the port, and long ere that we should starve."

"Let us steer, then, directly for the African coast. Melenda must be our nearest port."

"Never!" returned the resolute Botello. "I will run no risk of having our voyage frustrated by the jealousy of my old enemy, Alfonzo Peristrello, who has command at that station. Courage for a few days more, and we shall see land. There are isles hereaway that you will deem fit residences for the blessed saints--such fruits! such flowers!"

The promises of Botello had influence with all of his companions excepting the Moors, whose muttered discontent suddenly assumed a fierce and menacing aspect. Luckily, Botello was as wary as he was brave.

It was in the middle of the night that, stretched upon the midship thwart of the boat, he noticed a movement among the Moors, who occupied the bow. One of them moved stealthily towards him, and bending over him, cautiously sought the hilt of his dagger; but before he could draw it, the grasp of Botello was upon his throat, and he was hurled to the bottom of the boat. With a shout, the other Moors seized the boat hooks and stretchers, and rushed upon Botello; but Juan and Alfonzo were upon the alert, and, drawing their long daggers, rushed to his defence. Never was there a more desperate conflict than on that starlit night, in that frail boat, that floated a feeble, solitary speck of humanity on the bosom of the vast Indian sea.

The conflict was desperate, but it was soon over. The Portuguese of those days were other men than their degenerate descendants of the present age; and, besides, the slaves were overmatched both in arms and numbers. Three were slain outright, and the fourth driven overboard. One of the Portuguese servants was killed; thus diminishing the number of the voyageurs more than one-half--a lucky circumstance, without which, most probably, the whole would have perished.

For a week longer the little bark stood on its course, when a violent storm threatened a melancholy termination to the voyage. The wind, however, was accompanied by rain, and Botello kept up the spirits of his friends by attributing the storm to St. Francis, who had sent it expressly to save them from dying by thirst. It would have been perhaps more easy to believe in the saint's agency in the matter had there been less wind; for in addition to the danger of being ingulfed by the heavy sea, their clothing, which they spread to collect the rain, was so deluged with salt spray as to make the water exceedingly brackish. Bad as it was, however, it served to maintain life until they reached a little rocky, uninhabited island in the channel of Mozambique.

It was with some difficulty that a landing place was found. Upon ascending the rocks, a few scattered palms exhibited the only appearance of vegetation. Their chief necessity--freshwater--however, was found in abundance, standing in the hollows of the rocky surface, where it had been deposited by the recent storm. Several kinds of wild fowl showed themselves in abundance, and so tame as to suffer themselves to be caught without any trouble; while crowding the little sandy inlets were thousands of the finest turtle.

At this spot Botello and his companions rested for a week; which was spent in caulking and repairing their boat and sail, drying and salting the flesh of fowl and turtle, and in filling every available vessel with the precious fluid so liberally furnished by their patron St. Francis.

A succession of storms followed their departure, and tossed them about here and there for so many days, that their reckoning became exceedingly confused. Botello, however, was an accomplished navigator, and his sailor instinct stood him in good stead. Upon returning fair weather he conjectured that he was abreast of Cape Corientes, and the bow of the boat was directed, due east, for the African coast.

Calms followed storms. The oars were got out, and day after day the clumsy boat was pulled through the long rolling swell of the glassy sea. Still no sight of land. Their provisions were getting short again--their water was reduced to the lowest possible allowance, and the labor of the oar was rapidly exhausting their strength. The image of St. Francis was hourly appealed to. Sometimes his aid was implored in most humble prayers--sometimes demanded with the wildest imprecations and threats. One day Botello seized the little St. Francis, and whirling him on high, threatened to throw him into the sea, unless he instantly granted a sight of land; no land showed itself, and the saint was reverentially replaced in his box. But he was not to rest there long in quiet. The next day the ingenious Botello announced to his sinking companions that he had a plan to compel the saint to terms. The image was produced from its box, a cord was fastened around its neck, and it was then thrown overboard. Down went his leaden saintship into the depths of the ocean. "And there he shall remain," exclaimed Botello, "until he sends us land or rain." An hour had not expired when a faint bluish haze in the eastern horizon attracted all eyes. A favorable breeze springing up, the sail was hoisted, and as the boat moved under its influence, the haze grew in consistency and size. Land was in sight.

The reader may perhaps smile with contempt at the superstitious faith of Botello and companions in the connection between this happy land-fall and their ingenious compulsion of the saint's miraculous power; but it may be questioned whether there was not good ground for their belief--at least as good ground as there is for faith in any of the facts of animal magnetism, clairvoyance, and spiritual rappings.

The land proved to be a point in Lagoa Bay--a familiar object to Botello. Upon going ashore, a party of natives received him, with whom friendly relations were soon established, and from whom provisions and water were readily obtained. A few days served to recruit the exhausted strength of the party, when taking again to their boat, they coasted along the shore, landing at frequent intervals, until they reached the dreaded Cape of Storms, as the southern point of Africa was called by its first discoverer, Bartholomew Diaz.

The Cape did not belie its reputation. From the summit of Table Mountain, and the surrounding high lands, it sent down a gust that drove the unfortunate voyageurs away from the land a long distance to the south-west; and many weary and despairing days were passed before they were able to make the harbor of Saldahana. Here the chief necessity of life--fresh water--was found in abundance, and a supply of provisions obtained, consisting chiefly of the dried flesh of seals, with which the harbor was filled. A few orange and lemon-trees, planted by the early Portuguese discoverers, were loaded with fruit, and afforded a grateful and effectual means of removing the symptoms of scurvy which were beginning to appear.

Saldahana being a resting place for the outward bound Portuguese fleets, Botello made his stay as short as possible, lest he should be intercepted and turned back by some newly appointed and jealous viceroy. For the same reason he avoided several points on the coast of western Africa where his countrymen had stations--keeping well out to sea and from the mouth of the Congo, and steering a direct course across the Gulf of Guinea. He knew that if a Portuguese admiral had sailed at the appointed time, he must be somewhere in that Gulf, and that his tall barks would hug the shore, creeping from headland to headland slowly and cautiously. The energetic Botello and his companions had encountered too many dangers to be frightened at the perils of a run across the Gulf, and the resolution was adopted to give the Portuguese fleet, by the aid of St. Francis, the go-by in the open sea.

The run was successfully achieved; not, however, without many weary days at the oar, and many an appeal to St. Francis for favoring winds, and for aid in the sudden tornadoes which frequently threatened to ingulf them. Cape de Verd was reached; the barren shore of the great desert was passed, with but a single stoppage in the Rio del Ouro--a slender arm of the sea setting up a few miles into the sands of Sahara. Here a few dates and some barley cakes were purchased of a family of wandering Arabs; and again putting to sea, the shores of Morocco were cautiously coasted. Without further adventure, but not without further suffering, and labor, and danger, the short remaining distance was passed. The head of the Straits of Gibraltar--the headlands of Spain--the southern point of Algarve, successively came in sight; and then the smiling mouth of the golden Tagus greeted their longing eyes.

And thus was happily finished this wonderful voyage--a voyage which, if performed in the present day, with all the means and appliances of navigation, would excite the admiration of the world, but which, under the circumstances of the age, the prejudices and ignorance of the voyageurs, and the imperfect state of maritime science, may truly be considered the most astonishing upon record. It must be observed, too, that this was no involuntary boat expedition--no desperate alternative of some foundering ship's crew--but the deliberate, carefully considered project of an experienced sailor; and that the hardihood evinced in its conception was surpassed by the resolution, perseverance, and skill, with which it was conducted to its end.

The presence of Botello was soon known to his friends; and the rumor spread through the city that an Indian fleet had arrived off the mouth of the Tagus. It reached the court, so that upon his application for an audience of the king, he found no detention except from the curiosity of the courtiers and ministers; which, however, he resolutely refused to satisfy, until he had communicated his news to the royal ear.

Botello exhibited his copy of the convention with Badur, king of Cambaya, and the plans of the fort which was being erected at Diu, and related the history of his adventurous voyage. King John freely expressed his astonishment and delight, and calling around him the members of his household, familiarly questioned Botello as to all the little details of his voyage.

There was a pause in the conversation. Botello threw himself upon his knees. "There is one point," he exclaimed, "upon which your majesty has not condescended to question me."

"What is that?" demanded the king.

"My reasons," replied Botello, "for undertaking this long and hazardous voyage. Your majesty knows, or at least many of your majesty's enemies know, that I am one not over cautious in confronting danger, either by sea or land; but I should never have had the courage to make myself the bearer of tidings however important, as I have done, without some reason other than the desire of astonishing the world by a feat which by many will be pronounced simply fool-hardy. Your majesty will believe me--I had another and a better reason."

"And that reason was--"

"The favor of my sovereign, and the removal of the undeserved suspicions with which my motives and feelings had been visited."

"Rise," replied the king, extending his hand, and smiling graciously. "Our suspicions were of the slightest. We will take some fitting opportunity of showing that they are gone for ever."

The courtiers overwhelmed Botello and his companions with congratulations. The king accompanied him to see the boat, and upon dismissing him, renewed his assurances of favor and reward--assurances which Botello found were destined never to be realized. The next day a change had come over the royal countenance--the jealousy of trade had been aroused. It would be a terrible blow to the commercial monopoly, already threatened from so many quarters, to have it known that the voyage from the East Indies had been performed in an open boat. Botello was informed that, for reasons of state, his boat must be destroyed, but that he himself should ever continue to enjoy the favorable opinion of his sovereign. As an earnest of the royal favor, which was some day to exhibit itself more openly, he was appointed to an office of no great consequence, and which had also the disadvantage attached to it of a residence in the interior of the country.

Once installed, he found that he was little better than a prisoner for life. His movements were closely watched by the officials around him; his communications with the capital cut off, and to all his remonstrances and petitions the only reply was that the king's service required his continual residence in his department. Botello was not a man to quietly submit to such unjust restraint; but unluckily his health began to fail. His body found itself unable to withstand the chafings and struggles of his energetic and adventurous spirit under the mortifications and disappointments of his position; the fears and suspicions of the court of Lisbon were soon removed by his death. His boat had been burned--his companions had been sent back to India, and it was not long before the fact of his extraordinary voyage had passed from the public mind.

A STORY WITHOUT A NAME[L]

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE

BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.

_Continued from page 494, vol. II._