University of Virginia Library

THE CLOISTER.

Committee—(solus).—Oh, most beset of brigadiers!
Most civil of military men! (for half a firm, the most
yielding partner of my acquaintance!) when, oh responsible
general, will you get through with your particular
callers and come to confab? True, I have
dined, and can wait! True, there are joint letters to
answer! True, I can listen, and look out into the
back yard! Hark! Syphax, my black boy, loquitur.

Syphax.—(to the general).—Shall I cut out them
favorable notices from the exchanges, sir?

Brigadier.—Those favorable notices, Syphax!

Heavens! what an unfeeling man! For the love
of pity, corrupt not the innocent grammar of the lad,
my dear brigadier! Out of seven black boys sent me
for trial by the keeper of an intelligence-office, six, to
my disgust, spoke with the painful accuracy of Doctor
Pangloss. The last, my inestimable Syphax,
whom that finished brigadier would fain bring to his
own level of heartless good grammar—was ignorant
(virtuous youth!) even of the sexes of pronouns! He
came to me innocent; and, I need not say to any
writer—to any slave of the rule-tied pen—to any man
cabined, cribbed, confined, as are public scribblers
to case and number, gender and conjugation, participle
present, and participle past—I need not say, to such
a victim, what an oasis in the desert of perfection was
the green spot of a black boy's cacology! Oh, to
the attenuated ear of the grammar-ridden!—to the
tense mood of unerring mood and tense—what a luxury
is an erring pronoun—what a blessed relief from
monotony is a too-yielding verb, seduced, from its singular
antecedent, by a contiguity of plural! Out on
perfectionists! Out on you, you flaw-less brigadier!
Correct your own people, however! Inveigle not my
Syphax into rhetoric! Ravish not from my use the
one variation, long-sought and chance-found, from the
maddening monotone of good grammar!

And this brings to my mind (if I get time to jot it
down before the brigadier comes to cloister) a long-settled
conviction of my own, that the corrections in
American manners brought about by the criticisms of
Trollope and others, have been among the worst influences
ever exercised upon the country. Gracious
heaven! are we to have our national features rasped
off by every manner-tinker who chooses to take up a
file! See how it affects the English to laugh at their
bloat of belly and conceit, their cockney ignorance
and their besotted servility to rank. Do they brag
less, and drink less beer? Do they modify their Bowbell
dialect one hair, or whip off their hats with less
magical celerity when spoken to by a lord? Not a
bit! They will be English till they are smothered
with Russians—English ghosts (those who die before
England is conquered by Russia), with English manners,
at doomsday. They are not so soft as to be
moulded into American pottery, or German pottery,
or French pottery, because an American, or a German,
or a Frenchman, does not find them like his own
country's more common utensils! Where do national
features exist? Not among well-bred people! Not
where peas are eaten with a fork and soup-plates left
untilted by the hungry! All well-bred people are
monotonously alike—whatever their nation and whatever
the government they have lived under. Differences
of manners are found below this level, and the
mistake—the lamentable mistake—lies in submitting
to correct this low level by the standard of coxcombs!
What a picture would be without shade—what music
would be without discords—what life would be without
something to smile at—what anything would be
without contrast—that are we becoming by our sensitiveness
to criticism. Long live our (Bull-judice)
“abominations.” Long live some who spit and whittle,
some who eat eggs out of wine-glasses and sit on
four chairs, some who wear long naps to their hats,
some who eat peas with a knife, some who pour out
their tea into saucers, and some who are civil to unprotected
ladies in stage-coaches! Preserve something
that is not English, oh, my countrymen!

[Enter the brigadier.]

Brigadier.—Forgive me, my dear boy—what is that
I see written on your paper about Russia?

So says old Tuberville, the traveller—and now to business.
Jot!

Committee.—What?

Brigadier.—Jot—that we are glad to offer to the
patrons of the “Mirror Library” a book they will
thank us for, at every line—“The Plea of the Midsummer
Fairies,” and other admirable poems, pregnant
with originality and richness, by Thomas Hood.
His poetry is the very attar, the aroma, the subtlest
extract of sweet imagination. “Eugene Aram” is
one of those included in this volume.

Committee.—What else are you glad of?

Brigadier.—Glad to be sorry that Parke Godwin's
fine analytical mind and bold foundry of cast-iron
English are not freighted with a more popular subject
than Fourierism—worthy though the theme be
of the regard of angels whose approbation don't pay.
Politics should be at a lift to deserve the best energies
of such a writer—but they are not, and so he
turns to philosophy.

Committee.—But he should play Quintus Curtius,
and write up politics to his level, man! The need is
more immediate than the need of Fourierism.

Brigadier.—My dear boy, give away nothing but
what is saleable. Gifts, that would not otherwise have
been money in your purse, are not appreciated—particularly
advice. We love Godwin—let us love his
waste of ammunition, if it please him to waste it.

Committee.—

if his brains be not coinable to gold. I would make
a merchant of genius! The world has need of brains
like Godwin's, and need makes the supply into commodity,
and commodity is priceable. That's the logic
by which even my poor modicum is made to thrive.
Apropos—what do you think of these lines on “bells,”
by Duganne? A poet, I should say:—

Brigadier.—Kernel-ish and quaint. But, my dear
boy,

is beginning to blur the distinctness of the cheeks on
that apron drying upon the line in the back yard.
Shall we go to tea?

The opening of the exhibition at the National Academy
is like taking a mask from one of the city's most
agreeable features. And it is only those who live in
the city habitually, and who live as fast as the city does,
who are qualified to enjoy it with the best appreciation.
Did you ever notice, dear reader, how behind
the tide you feel, on arriving in town, even after an
absence of a week—how whirling and giddy your sensations
are—how many exciting things there seem for
you to do—how “knowing” and “ahead-of-you” seem
all the takers-coolly whom you meet—how incapable
you are of any of the tranquil pleasures of the metropolis,
and with what impatient disgust you pass any
exhibition which would subtract you, mind and body,
from the crowd. It is not for strangers, then, that the
exhibition is the highest pleasure. It is for those who
have laid behind them the bulk of the city excitements
in a used-up heap—to whom balls are nuisances,
theatres satiety, concerts a bore, Broadway stale,
giants, dwarfs, and six-legged cows, “familiar as your
hand.” It is only such who have the cool eye to look
critically and enjoyingly at pictures. It is for such
that Durand has laid into his landscape the touch that
was preceded by despair—for such that Ingham elaborates,
and Page strains invention, and Sully woos the
coy shade of expression. And, truth to say, it is not
one of the least of the gratuitous riches of existence,
that while we are sifting away the other minutes of
the year in commonplace business or pleasure, forgetful
of art and artists, these gifted minds are at work,
producing beautiful pictures to pamper our eyes with
in spring! If you never chanced to think of that
before, dear render, you are richer than you thought!
Please enclose us the surplus in bankable funds!
Ehem!

There are more portraits in the exhibition than will
please the dilettanti—but hang the displeased! We
would submit to a thousand indifferent portraits, for the
accident of possessing a likeness of one friend unexpectedly
lost. For Heaven's sake, let everybody be
painted, that, if perchance there is a loved face
marked, unsuspected by us, for heaven, we may have
its semblance safe before it is beyond recall! How
bitter the regret, the self-reproach, when the beautiful
joy of a household has been suddenly struck into the
grave, that we might have had a bright image of her
on canvass—that we might have removed, by holding
converse with her perpetuated smile, the dreadful
image of decay that in sad moments crowds too closely
upon us! For the sake of love and friendship, let
that branch of the art, now in danger of being disparaged
by short-sighted criticism—let it be ennobled, for
the sacred offices it performs! Is an art degrading to
its follower which does so much—which prolongs the
presence of the dead, which embellishes family ties,
which brightens the memory of the absent, which
quickens friendship, and shows the loved, as they were
before ravage by sadness or sickness? There should
rather be a priesthood of the affections, and portrait-painters
its brotherhood—holy for their ministering
pencils.

We have a customer in Andover, to whose attention
particularly we commend the truly delicious poetry of
“The Sacred Rosary,” as some atonement for having
inveigled him into the purchase of the “Songs of the
Bard of Poor Jack.” That mis-spent shilling troubled
our friend, and he wrote us a letter and paid eighteen
pence postage to complain of it!—but non omnia possum-us
omnes (we can't play 'possum with all our subscribers),
and we humbly beg our kind friend (who
lives where we learned our Latin) to refresh his piety
with the “Rosary,” and forgive the Dibdin. The
apology over, however, we must make bold to say that
of all the publications of the “Mirror Library,” this
collection of Dibdin's songs has sold the best. It has
been indeed what our Andover friend scornfully calls
“a catch-penny affair,” and we wish there were (what
there never will be) another catch-penny like it. No—
by Castaly! such a book will never again be written!
If ever there was honest, hearty, natural, manly feeling
spliced to rhyme, it is in these magnificent songs.
England's naval glory—her esprit-de-man-o'-war—her
empire of the sea—lies spell-bound in that glorious
song-book! She owes more to Dibdin than to Chatham
or Burke—as much as to Howard or Wilber-force!
Ah, dear Anonym of Andover, you have
never hung your taste out to salt over the gunwale!
You don't know poor Jack. Find out when your
lease of life is likely to run out—go first to sea—read
Dibdin understandingly, e poi mori!”

The proprietor of the “Connecticut pie depot”
(corner of Beekman and Nassau), writes us that he
will be happy to have us “call and taste his pies when
we are sharp-set,” and that he hails from Boston and
takes a pride in us. So we do in him, though, for a

puff, our pen against his rolling-pin for a thousand
pound! He evidently thinks us “the cheese,” for he
says he wishes to be noticed in our “dairy of town
trifles.” Well, sir, we don't “fill our belly with the
east wind,” nor eat pies, since we left Boston, but we
rejoice in your pie-ous enterprise, and agree, with you,
to consider ourselves mutually the flour of the city we
come from. Apropos—we can do our friend a service
which we hope he will reciprocate by opening a subscription-book
in his pie-magazine, and procuring us
five hundred subscribers (payments invariably in advance).
A young lady has written to us, imploring
the Mirror's aid in reforming the prog at fashionable
boarding-schools. There are symptoms of a “strike”
for something better to eat in these coops of chicken-angels,
and the establishment of a “Connecticut pie
depot” seems (seems, madam, nay, it is!) beautifully
providential! We can not trace our anonymous note
to any particular school, but we hereby recommend
to the young ladies in every “establishment,” “nunnery,”
and “seminary,” to “hang their aprons on the
outer wall,” and hoist in our friend's pastry, on trial.
The French pockets will be filled the first day gratis,
we undertake to promise. The second day and after,
of course, the bill will be presented to tante or the
music-master.

There are poems which the world “does not willingly
let die,” but which this same go-to-bed world,
tired of watching, covers quietly up with the ashes of
neglect, and leaves to grow as black as the poker and
tongs of criticism that stand unused beside them.
Stop the first twenty men (gentlemen, even) whom you
see in the street, and probably not one can tell you
even the argument of Goldsmith's great poem! And
the “pourquoy Sir Knight” is simply that “The
English Poets,” in six formidable volumes, are too
much for cursory readers to encounter! The poems
and passages they would “thumb,” if they could light
readily on them, are buried up in loads of uninteresting
miscellany. They want the often-quoted, undeniable,
pure fire, raked out of this heap of embers.
Our last number of the Mirror Library begins a supply
of this want, under the title of “Live Coals,
raked from the Embers of English Poetry.”

The following advertisement is cut from “The
Sun:”—

“Notice—To the gentleman that pushed the man
over the curbstone in Broadway, at the corner of Lispenard
street, with his dinner-kettle in his hand, from
this time forth never to lay his hand on David Brown
again.”

Now, what other country than America would do
for David Brown? God bless the land where a man
can pour his sorrows into the sympathizing bosom of
a newspaper! Query—does not this seventy-five cent
vent supersede altogether the use of that dangerous
domestic utensil, a friend! Add to this the invention
of an unexpressive substitute for gunpowder, and the
world will be comparatively a safe place.

Point of fact—we delight in all manner of old things
made young again, particularly in all kinds of venerable
and solemn humbug “showing green.” If ever
there was a monster, grown out of sight of its natural
and original intention—a bloated, diseased, wen-covered,
abate-worthy nuisance of a monster, it is the
newspaper. The first newspaper ever published in
France was issued by a physician to amuse his patients.
“To this complexion” would we reduce it
once more. Fill them with trifles, or with important
news (the same thing as to amusement), and throw a
wet blanket, and keep it wet, over congressional twaddle,
polemical fubbery, tiresome essays, political cobwebberies—yes,
especially politics! People sometimes
cease to talk when there are no listeners, and it
might be hoped, with God's blessing and help (“Ave
Maria! ora pro nobis!”) that congress members would
cease to put us to shame as well as to bore us to extinction,
if there were no newspapers to fan their
indignant eloquence. It is a query worth sticking a
pin in—how many nuisances would die (beside congress)
if newspapers were restored to their original
use and purpose? Any symptom of this regeneration
inexpressibly refreshes us. Hence our delight at
the advertisement of David Brown. Who would not
rather know that a man had run against David Brown
at the corner of Lispenard street, with a dinner-kettle
in his hand (and had better not do it again), than to
read the next any ten speeches to be delivered on the
rowdy floor of congress! We have said enough to
give you a thinking-bulb, dear reader, and now to our
next—but

Apropos—we wish our friend Russell Jarvis, or any
analytically-minded and strong writer half as good,
would prepare us a speculative essay on the query
which is the natural inference of the late Washington
doings, viz.: how curious must be the process
of mind by which a gentleman (there are one or
two in congress) could be brought to consent to
stay there—hail from there—frank from there—have
his letters addressed there—in any way or shape take
upon himself a member's share of this lustrum's obloquy
and abomination? Not but what we think it
wholesome—we do! You can not cure festers without
bringing them to a head. The wonder is, how
gentlemen are willing to be parts of a congress that is
only the nation's pustule—the offensive head and vent
of all the purulent secretions of the body politic!
Thank God, they are coming to a head—to this head,
if need be (it is rather conspicuous, it is true—like
a pimple on a lady's nose, which might be better situated)—to
have the worst issue of our national shame
on the floor of Congress; but better so than pent
up—better so than an inward mortification precursory
of dissolution! For our own part (though we are no
politician, except when stung upon our fifteen millionth
of national feeling), we think we could do very
well without a congress. We believe the supreme
court capable of doing all the legislative grinding necessary
for the country, or, if that would not do, we
think a congress convened only for the first three
months of every administration, in which speaking
was prohibited, would answer all wise ends. We are
over-governed. The reign of grave outrages and
solemn atrocities is at its height, and Heaven overturn
it, and send us, next after, a dynasty of laws “left to
settle,” and trifles paramount. Amen.

We are not of the envious and discontented nature
of a muttou candle, blackest at the wick—that is to
say, we do not think every spot brighter than the one
we live in. We seek means to glorify New York—
since we live here. Pat to our bosom and business,
therefore, comes a letter “from a gentleman to his
sister,” apotheosistic (we will have our long word if we
like) of this same pleasant municipality. Our friend
and anonymous correspondent does not go quite
enough into detail, and we cut off his long peroration,
in which he compares himself very felicitously to “a
bottle of soda-water, struggling for vent.”—“Now
then,” he continues, “to uncork (off hat) and let my
exuberant contents be made manifest:—

“Once more in New York—dear, delightful New
York! the spot of all spots and the place of all places!
the whereabout which the poet dreamed of when he

spoke of `the first flower of the earth and first gem of
the sea;' and once more here, too, not to look upon
it for a moment, and then depart, but to stay, lo live,
to be, to exist, and to enjoy. You do not know the
love I bear New York; it is, beyond all others, the
place where existence is; where time passes, not like
a summer's dream, but as time should pass, in a succession
(constant) of employments and enjoyments.

“I love the city, as I love everything loveable, with
a full and abiding joyousness. There is nothing passing,
or in still life, but goes to make up the sum. The
very odor of the atmosphere, which might shock your
delicate, country-bred olfactories, is more to me than
all the fragrance of all the green fields that were ever
babbled of.

“The country is all very well, in its way. I love
that also—at a distance, or in moderate quantities.
Homeopathetically, as it were—as, for instance, the
Battery. I love to walk there, to inhale the sea-breeze,
and enjoy the sweet smell of the growing
grass and the budding trees; and to look over to Long
Island or New Jersey, and see the country blooming
(afar off) under the loving smiles of spring. Yes, the
country is, no doubt, very desirable—for a few days in
the summer—for a change, or to come back from with
a new relish for the real life that awaits one on his
return.

“I love to stand on the docks, of a still evening, and
hear the tide rush past. The very rime of the sea
drifts in music to my ear. The rushing of the free
and ever-changing waters, the glad dancing of its
waves, the glowing reflex of the stars in their bosom,
the rifting foam, and the swift gushing sound, like a
continuous echo, stir up the dormant poetry of one's
soul, and send him, with a glowing heart, back to his
lonely home, happier for the sweet communion.

“All the time, too, is thought-filled; there is no
standing still here. Business is part of life, perhaps
life itself, and it is constantly going on around and
with us. If I choose a walk, Broadway is full of
life—never-ending, never-tiring. So all over the city.
One can not stroll anywhere but he meets with something
new, something strange, something interesting;
some chapter opens, which has till then been to him
as a dead letter.

“Somebody, who wanted to express in strong language
that nature might be improved by art, has said
that `God made the country, man made the town.'
How true it is! And, beyond that, here are congregated
hundreds of thousands of `featherless bipeds'
(men and women), of whom, perhaps, you know not
a dozen, but every one of whom, in your walks, is to
you a study.

“Then, again, the very situation—the form, structure,
and appliances—of New York, are delightful
and fascinating beyond compare. Such a beautiful
promontory, swelling up from two magnificent rivers,
rising from either, gently, to the palace-lined thoroughfare
on its crown; and crossbarred with a thousand
avenues to both rivers—inlets for pure air, ever
fresh rising from the sea, blowing over and into every
habitation, and freighted with health like the gales
of Araby the blest.

“Nature has been wonderfully prodigal of her bestowments
on this spot, and the hand of man has not
been niggardly in completing what the fair dame commenced,
by putting a worthy superstructure on her
noble foundation. I have often thought of the remark
made by some one, that the man who first stood on
Manhattan island, and looked around him with an eye
and a mind that could comprehend and appreciate its
wonderful beauties and advantages, must have `held
his very breath' in wonder and admiration.

“And then more of its present beauties to the
dwellers therein. Should one, in hot and dusty
weather, choose to change the scene, how joyous a
trip to Sandy Hook! Often have I stood on the
heights, and looked off on old Ocean, holding in my
gaze one of the most glowing scenes that this world
shows. The wide and boundless view—the noble
Hudson and the city above, the green beauties of
Long island before, and the heaven ocean below, spread
out in its grand sublimity; the sails of all nations
flashing on its breast and blending in its glory,

“Oh who, with such a prospect before him, feels
not his soul elevated and his thoughts sublimated!
Thoughts, indeed, too wild for utterance, are born,
not for others, but to sink deep in the heart and leave
him a wiser if not a better man.

“This, you will say is the country—ah, but it is the
country of New York, close by, and part of city life
itself. Then there is another country (yours is only
one) over the other shoulder, where the moderate
sum of sixpence will waft us to the delightful walks,
the green lawns, the shady groves, and cool zephyrs
of dear, charming Hoboken. Doubly dear to a New-Yorker.
Fresh smelling and fragrant in the spring,
cool and breezy in the hot days of summer; and, with
the rustling leaf of autumn, dear in its remembered
beauties, its fading foliage, and the ever-sounding surges
that beat with melancholy moan at the foot of its
beetling crags and sloping lawns. Ah, lovely Hoboken,

“Mr. Stevens, we owe you much; and we can afford
to owe; but we pay you a large annual interest
in gratitude and praise. `'Tis all we have, we can no
more.”'

We also cut off the irrelevant tail of our friend's
letter (tipped with a “G.”), and beg another from him
with a finer nib to his pen—going more into the individualities.
If you would like a subject suggested (exempli
gratia) give us the hopes, trials, temptations, and
aspirations of a Broadway shop-tender. They seem
fine youths, those silk-and-suavity venders. Who
knows what is their pay and prospects? How can
they afford such good manners and fine waistcoats?
What is the degree of friendly acquaintance bred between
them and the ladies in the course of a bargain?
Have they legs (below the counter)?—Do they marry?—Have
they combinations, and esprit de corps?—
Which are the honorablest goods to sell?—As to the
“beating down” of grass-cloth and stockings—is it
interesting, or more so than the cheapening of calico?
When do they eat? Do handsomer ones get higher
wages? May their “cousins” come to see them?
How do they look with hats on? What is the duration
of their chrysalis—the time of metamorphosis
from boy to “boss”—and what are their several stages
of mental discipline? The most saleable book in
the world would be the autobiography of a Broadway
clerk—(dry goods, retail). Let this “verbum” be
“sat” to a sapienti.

We have undertaken to make ourselves acquainted
with the island on which we live. We mean to give
our readers, bit by bit, the results of our observations
upon the customs, manners, geography, and morals
of the island of New York, as noted down in our rambles.
We do not take our walks in chapters, however,
and we shall, therefore, be equally miscellaneous
and disorderly in our arrangement of topics. It is a
curious island, and some of the inhabitants are curious
islanders. Those who only walk up the city's
backbone (Broadway) know very little of its bowels
and extremities. Little by little, we hope to make

out its truthful anatomy—veins, pulses, functions, and
arteries.

We should like to know, among other things, why
the broadest, most accessible, most convenient street
in New York, the noble avenue of West Broadway,
is entirely given up to negroes? The rage is to move
up town—but there are people who are not rajahs,
who are willing to pay high rents—people who don't
care where the fashionable people go to (while they
live), and who simply desire to reside in broad streets
for air and light, and above all, to be near, if possible,
to their business. Now the narrowest part of this be-streeted
island is of course the most wholesome, as the
air from the two rivers comes over fewer chimneys
and gutters. The broader the street the better, both
for health and show. The access to a street should
be good, and West Broadway, in its whole length, is
parallel to Broadway, and approachable by Chambers
street, Murray, Warren, and all the best short avenues
of the city. It has, besides, near by, the beautiful
“lungs” of St. John's park, the hospital grounds,
and College Green, and is crossed at its upper end by
the broad ventilator of Canal street. Where, on the
island, is there a street more calculated to be wholesome—dirty
as it now is from the character of its occupants?
It would require, it is true, an entire renovation,
before any one person, desirous of good neighborhood,
could live there—but that renovation (we
prophesy it) will be done. Some speculator will buy
lots in it, and call a meeting of proprietors to suggest
a general turn-out and improvement, or some one of
the Wall street Astor-hood will buy the street, from
lamp-post to lamp-post, and fill it with fashionable
dwelling-houses. The up-town tide will partly ebb,
the natural advantages of the Battery and Lower
Broadway will regain their ascendency, and the sandalled
foot of the island will again wear jewels on its
instep.

Pearl street (if Manhattan lie on his back) would be
the main artery of his left leg, and Franklin square,
which occupies a natural knoll, would be his kneepan.
This gives you some idea of its geography,
though, probably, dear reader, if you are not in the
dry-goods line, you have never visited it. It is a curious
place historically, and was once the aristocratic
centre of the city. There are still two famous houses
in it—one the old Walton mansion, and the other a
building that was once the headquarters of Washington.
In the yard of the latter house is a pear-tree of
Washington's planting. And, by the way, our companion
(in a first visit which we made to Franklin
square a day or two since) told us a story that may be
new or old, touching an attempt made to poison
Washington. A dish of some vegetables from a forcing-bed
was put upon the table for dinner, and the
general, remarking that growths so much earlier than
was natural were not wholesome, threw them out of
the window. Some pigs in the yard were poisoned
by eating them. Colonel Stone can tell us if the
story be true—always presuming it is not in some
veritable history of New York.[2] The Walton house
is still a noble-looking mansion, with its English mouldings
in good preservation, and is now occupied as a
lodging-house. The headquarters of Washington are
tenanted by a pianoforte builder, and all around looks
trafficky and dull.

One of the favorite spring amusements of the people
of New York—(of course of the silly people, of
whom there are at least several)—is to attend the auction
sales at private houses. We heard of one silly
but honest woman (they are often honest) who, on being
rallied a day or two since at having so passed the
last fortnight, said, “La! it's so amusing to see how
people live!” And, truly enough, you may find out
by this process how every class “furnishes,” which is
a considerable feature in living, and it is wonderful
with how little ceremony and reluctance the household
gods are stripped to the skin and exposed to the
gaze of a public invited in by the red flag of an auction!
It is possibly a very natural feature of a new
country to have no respect for furniture; but to our
notion it comes close after “honor thy father and
mother” to honor the chairs and tables at which they
have eaten and prayed, counselled and-blessed. And
even this were easier got over—the selling of the mere
mahogony and damask—if the articles were removed
to a shop and disassociated from the places where
they had become hallowed. But to throw open
sacred boudoirs, more sacred bedrooms, breakfast-rooms,
bath-rooms, in which (as has been the case
once or twice lately) lovely and cherished women
have lived, and loved, and been petted, and secluded,
and caressed—to let in vulgar and prying curiosity to
sit on the damask seats and lounge on the silken sofas,
and breathe the air impregnated with perfume
that could betray the holiest secrets if it had a tongue
—and then to stand by while an auctioneer chaffers,
and describes, and tempts the vulgar appetite to buy!
Why, it seems to us scarce less flagrant and atrocious
than the ride of Lady Godiva—desecrating to those
who sell out, and a profanity and license in those who
go to see!

It is a famous time, now, to buy cheap second-hand
furniture, by the way—for the fashion of French furniture
has come in lately, with a rush, and the nabobs
are selling out from sideboard to broom, and furnishing
anew à la Française, from skylight to basement.
By a year from this time there will be more houses in
New York above a certain cost and up to a marquis's
taste and wants, than either in Paris or London.
(And this estimate is not extravagant, for only “the
few” abroad spend money as “the many” do here.)
There is a drygoods retailer in Broadway, who has a
house furnished as sumptuously, and in as good taste,
as the most extravagant nobleman's house in London.
The thing is done very simply. The dimensions of
the house, and an accurate description of the way it is
lighted and arranged, are sent out to the first upholsterers
of Paris—men who are artists in their way,
and who have furnished for royalty and rank all over
Europe. Carte blanche as to expense, and out comes
your “interior,” complete, lustrous, and as good as
his majesty's—wanting only (really only) the society
suitable to enjoy it—which is like (something like) a
very fine play without a symptom of an audience.

So marked is this change of taste, and the new
school of furnishing, that the oldest and most wealthy
of the cabinet warehouse-men in this city has completely
abandoned the making of English furniture.
He has sold out an immense stock of high-priced articles
at auction, and sent to France for models and
workmen to start new with the popular taste. It is a
great chance, by the way, to establish the European
fashion of hotels garnis for strangers—giving them the
temporary hire of houses ready furnished, by the
week or month—their meals sent to them from a restaurateur.
Such investments bring large profits; and
the convenience of the custom, to families coming
from the south or west, and wishing for greater privacy
and more room than they can get at a hotel, is very
great. So may good come out of an extravagant folly.

The Antique Cabinet.—Whether it is a perverse
pleasure in seeing costly things out of place, or an
aversion we have to new things (except new thoughts,

new toothpicks, and new ladies' gear), or the natural
love for miscellany common to all mankind—whether
it is for one of these reasons, or for a little of each—
we are in the habit of bestowing the loose ends of our
idleness upon the warehouses of second-hand furniture.
Nothing grows upon a man like a habit of choice
between such entertainment and any society merely
tolerable—the preference given, of course, to the
shabby but more suggestive damask and mahogany.
Ah, the variety of things people sell to get money!
What curious places shops are, where they will buy
anything that is “sacrificed!” How entertaining to
mousle about among old portraits, broken ornaments,
miniatures soiled by wearing in the bosom, unstrung
harps, battered statuary, and furniture that has kept
proud company! How curious-minded must become
at last these dealers in nothing with a gloss on! How
exactly they must know the duration and value of
fashionable newness! How well they must understand
the pitiless transit from ornament to lumber—
how well the sudden chill of the money-test to articles
valued, till then, only by affection! But we can
not afford a digression here.

Resting our umbrella on the steps to a high bed
the other day, and our chin on our umbrella (a
posture taken for the leisurely perusal of a crowded
corner of an old furniture shop), we began to pick out
from the mass, an outline of an old cabinet secretary.
Now we have been that degree of vagabond, that we
have to confess having fairly topped our meridian without
the knowledge of more luxury in writing-tools than
any table, any pen, and any conceivable vagary of ink-holder.
It is true, that while travelling we got accustomed
to fastening the other end of our thought-string
to an old black trunk—a companion to our
hithering and thithering for seven long years—and, by
dint of habit in many a far country, we could ill write,
at last, where that old portmanteau was not ready to
receive our eyes as they came off the paper. But, in
reforming our baggage for matrimony, the old trunk
was degraded to a packing-box, and at present it
peacefully reposes, smelling of quinces, and holding
the modest Sunday-clothes of our farmer's dame at
Glenmary. Save and since this, our travelled and
“picked pen of countries” has been without appanage
or equipage, wearing all its honors upon its bare
plume of service, and, like a brave and uncomplaining
soldier, scorning to claim the dignities which should
have been plucked down by its deservings. Well—
well! “the whirligig of time!” “Pen!” we mentally
ejaculated, as we made out the odd corners and
queer angles of the antique cabinet—“thy proper
honors are in flower! Thou shalt do thy work in
luxury after this! What pigeon-holes can do to
make thee comfortable—what drawers, what slits,
what niches and nooks—is as good as done! Rise
to-morrow rich and glorious!”

We had the advantage to be favorably known to the
furniture-dealer. He was a man who rejoiced in our
promotions. We bought the old secretary without
chaffer, “at the lowest figure,” and requested that it
might be dug out from its unsold neighbors, and sent
home, not too vigorously dusted. Here it is. We
are writing upon its broad let-down leaf, and our pen
struts like a knight wearing for the first hour his well-earned
spurs. It is an old chamberer—the secretary
—brown-black mahogany, inlaid with sandal-wood—
and has held money, and seen frowns and smiles. In
its experience (for which we would give a trifle) we
ourself are but a circumstance. The hand that first
wrote at it is cold; and, for the hands that are to
write at it hereafter, nature may not yet have sorted
out the nails. Our own hand will give over its cunning
and turn to ashes, meantime. One man's life
and using are but of the duration of a coat of varnish,
to this old cabinet's apprehension. Ah “we!”

“By the pricking of our thumbs,” the brigadier is
mounting the stairs. Since the possession of our
first operative luxury, we have taken a disgust to the
cloister—conceiting that the smell of soap, from the
lavendering in the back yard, gave a stain to such
flowers of imagination as were born there. The brigadier
says we grow superfine. Soit! It is time—
after “taking it as it comes” for so many years. Besides,
we must have something to set off against his
epaulettes! Glory in your staff, dear brigadier, but
leave us our cabinet!

Brigadier—(entering out of breath).—Paff! paff!
How the breath of life flutters with this vicinity to
heaven! Paff! paff!—prophetic nature! How are
you, my dear upster?

Committee.—You see the ink wet in my pen—I was
just about to dash into a critique. That straw-colored
volume of poems, by Mrs. Lewis, shows feathers
from Pegasus; though, as usual with lady-poems,
without any parings from the hoof—any trace of that
part of the old steed that touches earth. It takes
wrongs and sufferings—like those of Mrs Norton,
L. E. L., and Mrs. Hemans—to compound a poetess
of any reality and strength. Soil, that, if torn up with
a ploughshare, may yield the heavy grain of anguish,
will yield nothing but daisies and white clover, lying
undisturbed in the sunshine. Yet this same white
clover is very sweet grazing, and Mrs. Lewis's is a very
sweet book. May she never writer a better one—by
having suffered enough to “qualify!”

Brigadier.—Amen! I say, my boy, what a clever
thing Inman is making of his magazine! The May
number is beautiful. What a good pick he has
among the magazine-writers!

Committee.—Excellent—but he uses himself up
with making his correspondents work, and sets too
little value on his own writings. He wants a sub. for
drudgery. He could, with his strong fabric of good
sense (which is genius), and his excellent critical powers,
make all the rest of the “Columbian” subservient
to his own articles.

Brigadier.—Tell him so.

Committee.—Will he stand it—as your firm ally?

Brigadier.—Bless your soul, he has told you many
a plainer thing in print.

Committee.—Has he? Here goes, then:—

But now we think of it, you are bound to be particularly
good-natured, my dear brigadier. With what
enthusiasm they received your song the other night
at the Tabernacle—“The Pastor's Daughter!”
That, and “Boatman haste,” and “Cheerly o'er the
mountains,” are three songs, that, skilfully built, as
they are, upon three of our most exquisite national
melodies, and intrinsically beautiful in words and music,
will be classies. Atwill has published them charmingly,
too. What lots of money you ought to make
out of these universalities!

Brigadier.—My dear boy, stop praising me at a judicious
place—for praise, like “heat, hath three degrees:
first, it indurateth or maketh strong; next,
it maketh fragile; and lastly, it doth encinerate or
calcinate, or crumble to pieces.”

Committee.—Subtle tactician! How you have corrupted
my rural simplicity! Mff—mff—mff! I
think I sniff mint! The wind sets this way from
Windust's. How it exhausts the juices to talk pleasantly
with a friend; and, by-the-way, soft crabs are in
the market. What say to a dish of water-cresses,
and such other things as may suggest themselves—
we two—over the way! We are in too good humor
to dine in public to-day. We should seem to lack
modesty, with this look of exultation on our faces.

Brigadier.—To dinner, with all my heart—for the

Mirror has an appetite—the philosopher's tranquil
appetite—idem contemptui et admirationi habitus.

Committee.—I go to shave off this working face,
my dear general! Please amuse yourself with my
warm pen. Our correspondents, “Y.” and “E. K.”
—two “treasures trove,” if such periodical ever had—
should be gracefully and gratefully thanked. Do it
while I am gone, with your usual suaviter.

[Brigadier writes.]

I gave in to a friend's proposition to “poke about,”
lately, one afternoon, and, by dint of turning every
corner that we had never turned before, we zig-zagged
ourselves into a somewhat better acquaintance with
the Valley of Poverty lying between Broadway and
the Bowery. On our descent we stopped at the Tombs,
making, however (as many do), rather an unsatisfactory
visit. We lacked an Old Mortality to decipher the
names and quality of the tenants. It is a gloomy access
to Justice, up the dark flight of steps frowned over
by these Egyptian pillars; and the resolute-looking
constables, and the anxious-looking witnesses and
prisoners' friends who lean and group at the bases of
the columns, or pace up and down the stony pavement,
show, with gloomy certainty, that this is not the
dwelling of “Hope, with eyes so fair.” We turned
out of the dark portico into the police court—a dingy
apartment with the dust on the floor—not like other
unswept apartments, but ground into circles of fine
powder by hurried and twisting footprints. No culprit
was before the court, and the judge's terrors were laid
on the desk with his spectacles. We looked about in
vain for anything note-worthy. Even the dignity of
“the presence” was unrecognised by us, for (not being
in the habit of uncovering where there is neither
carpet, lady, nor sign of holy cross) we were obliged
to be notified by the “hats off, gentlemen,” of the one
other person in the room—apparently a constable on
duty.

A side door led us downward to the watch-house,
which occupies the basement of the Egyptian structure.
It is on a level with the street, and hither are
brought newly-caught culprits, disturbers of the peace,
and, indeed (so easy is disgrace), anybody accused by
anybody! It is not an uncommon shape of malice
(so the officer told us in answer to my query) for the
aggressor in a quarrel to give the sufferer in charge
to the watchman and have him locked up! The
prisoner is discharged, of course, the next morning,
the complainant not appearing to prosecute; but
passing a night in a cell, even on false accusation, is
an infliction which might fall with some weight on an
honest man, and the power to inflict it should not be
quite so accessible—“thinks I to myself.” (I made
a mental promise to get better information on the subject
of arrests, and generally on the subject of the drawing
of the first line between “ourselves” and the
guilty. With Miss Lucy Long's privilege, I shall
duly produce what I can gather.)

On application at the door of the prisons, we were
informed nonchalantly (and figuratively, I presume)
that it was “all open,” and so indeed it seemed, for
there was no unlocking, though probably the hinges
would have somehow proved reluctant had a prisoner
tried the swing of them. We walked in to the prison-yard
unattended, and came first to the kitchens. A
very handsome woman, indeed, was singing and washing
at a tub, and up and down, on either side of the large
boilers, promenaded a half-dozen men in couples—
sailors and loafers, “in for a month,” as we were afterward
informed. They looked as happy as such men
do elsewhere, I thought, and wearing no prison-dress,
they seemed very little like prisoners. It is considered
quite a privilege, by the way, to be employed in
the kitchen.

The inner prison-door looked more like one's idea
of a “Tolbooth,” and by it we gained the interior of
the Tombs. Gadsby's Hotel at Washington is a very
correct model of it, on a somewhat large scale. The
cells all open upon a quadrangle, and around each of
the four stories runs a light gallery. In the place of
Gadsby's fountain is a stove and the turnkey's desk,
and, just as we entered, one of the prisoners was cooking
his mess at the fire with quite an air of comfort
and satisfaction. It chanced to be the time of day
when the cell-doors are thrown open, and the tenants
were mostly outside, hanging over the railings, smoking,
chatting with each other and the keepers, and
apparently not at all disturbed at being looked at.
Saunders, the absconding clerk, whose forgery made
so much noise not long ago, was pointed out to us,
and a more innocent-looking fair-haired mother's boy
you could scarce pick out of a freshman class. He
has grown fat in the Tombs. His accomplice, Raget,
the Frenchman, is not much older, but he looked
rather more capable of a clever bad trick, and Frenchman-like,
he preserved, even in prison, the dandy air,
and wore his velvet dressing-cap with as jaunty an air
of assurance as if just risen to an honest man's breakfast.
He is handsome, and his wife still voluntarily
shares his cell. A very worthy-looking old gentleman
leaned at his cell-door, a celebrated passer of
counterfeit money; and a most sanctimonious and
theological-student-looking young man was pacing
one of the galleries, and he had been rather a successful
swindler. Truly “looks is nuffin,” as Sam. Weller
was shrewd enough to discover.

We looked into one or two of the cells. To a man
who has ever suited his wants to the size of a ship's
state-room, they are very comfortable lodgings, and
probably a sailor would think quarters in the Tombs
altogether luxurious. Punishment of this kind must
be very unequal, until it is meted out by what a man
has been used to. (Till then, at least, it is better not
to steal!) Two or three of the cells were carpeted
and decked with pictures, and the walls of one I looked
into were covered with drawings. Friends are
permitted, of course, to bring to prisoners any luxuries
except liberty; and on the small shelf of another cell
we saw a pyramid of gingerbread—the occupant, probably,
still a youth.

We passed over to the female prison. The cell-doors
were all open as in the other wards. But here
were strong symptoms that, however “it is not good
for man to be alone,” it is much more unpalatable to
woman. A poor girl who had just been brought in,
and was about to be locked up, was pleading piteously
with the keeper not to be shut up alone. Seven others
who had just been sentenced and were “waiting for
their carriage” to go to Sing-Sing, sat around the
stove in the passage, and a villanous-looking set they
were. It is a pity women ever sin. They look so
much worse than we—(probably from falling so much
farther)—and degradation in dress is so markedly unbecoming!
Most of the female cells were double-bedded,
I observed; and in one, which was very nicely
furnished, stood a tall and well-dressed, but ill-favored
woman, who gave back our look of curiosity
with a ferocious scowl. It struck me as curious, that,
out of nineteen or twenty women whom we saw in the
Tombs, two thirds had scratched faces!

One of the police-officers joined us in the latter part
of our rounds, but too late for the thorough inquiries
I wished to make; and promising myself another visit
to the Tombs, accompanied by some one in authority,
I made my envied and unobstructed exit.

It was a sunny spring afternoon, the kind of weather
in which, before all other blessings, to thank God for

liberty. With a simultaneous expression of this
feeling as we cleared the prison steps, my friend and
I crossed the rail-track which forms the limit of the
New York Alsatia, and were presently in the heart
of the Five Points—very much in the same “circle”
of society as we had just left, the difference probably
consisting in scarce more than cleanly restraint without
want, and dirty liberty with it. Luckily for the
wretched, the open air is very nearly as pleasant for
half the year as the inside of a millionaire's palace, and
the sunshine is kept bright and the sky clear, and the
wind kept in motion—alike for the pauper setting on
his wooden door-step and the rich man on the silk
ottoman in his window. Possibly, too, there is not
much difference in the linings of their content, and if
so, the nominal value of the distinctions between rich
and poor should be somewhat modified. At the Five
Points, to all appearance, nobody goes in doors except
to eat and sleep. The streets swarm with men, women,
and children, sitting down. The negro-girls with
their bandanna turbans, the vicious with their gay-colored
allures, the sailors tired of pleasures ashore,
the various “minions of the moon” drowsing the day
away—they are all out in the sun, idling, jesting,
quarrelling, everything but weeping, or sighing, or
complaining. The street is dirty, but no offence to
their nostrils! The police officers are at the watch-house
door, always on the alert, but (probably from
possessing little imagination) the culprits of to-morrow
have no apprehension till apprehended. A viler place
than the Five Points by daylight you could not find,
yet to the superficial eye, it is the merriest quarter of
New York. I am inclined to think Care is a gentleman,
and frequents good society chiefly. There is
no print of his crow's-foot about the eyes of these outcasts.
Who knows how much happiness there is in
nothing to dread—the downfall well over?

We strolled slowly around the triangular area which
is the lungs of the Five Points, and, spoken to by
some one in every group we passed, escaped without
anything like a rudeness offered to us. The lower
story of every second house is a bar-room, and every
bench in them had a sleeper upon it. There are
some houses in this quarter that have been pretentious
in their day, large brick buildings with expensive cornice
and mouldings—one particularly at the corner of
the famous “Murdering Alley,” which would bring
a six-hundred-dollar rent, “borne like Loretto's
chapel through the air” to a more reputable neighborhood.

We wound our way into the German quarter, which
occupies the acclivity between the Five Points and
the Bowery; but as I wish to connect, with a description
of this, some notices of the habits and resorts of
foreigners generally in New York, I shall drop the
reader at the corner.

It is right and wholesome that a new country should
be the paradise of the working-classes, and that ours is
so may be seen very readily. A wealthy merchant,
whose family is about leaving the city, sold out his
household furniture last week, and among other very
expensive articles, a magnificent piano. It was bid
off at a very fair price, and the purchaser turned out
to be the carman usually employed at the merchant's
warehouse! He bought it for his daughters. The
profits of this industrious man's horse and cart were
stated by this gentleman to approach three thousand
dollars a year!

A drygoods palace is now going up in Broadway,
which will probably exceed in splendor even the cele
brated shops which are the prominent features of
London and Paris. “Stuart” is the projecter, and
when it is completed, he will leave the low-browed
and dingy long-room in which he has amassed a
fortune, and start fresh in this magnificent “bezestein.”
Extending back to a great depth, the new
structure is to open by a right angle on another
street, giving the facility of two entrances. “Shopping”
is to be invested with architectural glories—
as if its Circean cup was not already sufficiently
seductive!

Even this chrysalis-burst of Stuart's, however, is a
less forcible exponent of the warrant for the importation
of luxuries, than the brilliant CURIOSITY SHOP of
Tiffany and Young. No need to go to Paris now
for any indulgence of taste, any vagary of fancy. It
is as well worth an artist's while as a purchaser's,
however, to make the round of this museum of luxuries.
The models of most of these fancy articles have
been the perfected work approached with slow degrees,
even by genius. Those faultless vases, in which not
a hair line is astray from just proportion, are not the
chance work of a potter! Those intricate bronzes
were high achievements of art! Those mignon gems
of statuary are copies of the most inspired dreams and
revelations of human beauty! The arts are all there
—their best triumphs mocked in luxurious trifles.
Poetry is there, in the quaint and lovely conception
of keepsakes and ornaments. Even refinements upon
rural simplicity are there, in the simple and elegant
basket furniture of Germany. The mechanic arts are
still more tributary in the exquisite enamel of porlfolios,
the contrivance of marvellous trinkets, the fine
carving and high finish of the smithery of precious
metals. And then, nowhere such trim shape and
dainty color in gloves—nowhere such choice dandy
appointments in the way of chains and canes—nowhere
such mollifiers of the hearts of sweethearts in the way
of presents of innumerable qualities, kinds, values, and
devices. I think that shop at the corner of Broadway
and Warren is the most curious and visit-worthy spot
in New York—money in your pocket or no money.
And—(left out of our enumeration)—these enterprising
luxurifers have lately opened a second story, where
they show such chairs and work-tables as are last invented—things
in their way gorgeous and unsurpassable.
If the gods have any design of making me rich,
I wish it might be done before Tiffany and Young
get too old to be my caterers.

The theatrical astronomers have been much interested
in the birth of a new star—lovely Mrs. Hunt of
the Park—who has suddenly found her sphere and
commenced shining brilliantly in a range of characters
seemingly written for the express purpose of developing
her talent. Her arch, half-saucy, and yet natural
and earnest personation of Fortunio has “taken the
town.” She had made the success also of a very indifferent
piece—a poor transfer of the celebrated
Gamin de Paris—in which she played the character
of a young rascal with a very good heart. The increasing
applause with which Mrs. Hunt is nightly
greeted, after having had her light so long “hidden
under the bushel” of a stock actress, must be a high
gratification to “Strong-back,” her husband. Indeed,
his undisguised enjoyment of her clever acting (as he
plays with her in Fortunio), is as “good as a play”
and much more edifying. Success to her, pray I!

The Cabinet.—With difficult and analytical de
liberation, we have, at last, duly distributed, to the
slits, pigeon-holes, drawers, and cavities of our antique

cabinet, their several and appropriate offices and
functions. It was a discipline of our talent at strategy,
was this job of office-giving—for, to confess a weakness,
we have become superstitious touching this venerable
piece of furniture. It seems to us haunted!
We have harbored it, now, some three weeks, and
have attempted with it, in that time, certain liberties
of arrangement which have been mysteriously cross-purposed.
Nothing about it would stay arranged.
We put our approved contributions into one pigeon-hole,
and our doubtfuls into another, our to-be-noticed
into the upright slits, and our damned into the horizontal.
We had a topic-drawer, and a drawer for
memoranda—an oblivion-hole and a cave of ridicule.
We committed the proper documents to each, and
thanking Heaven for a tried secretary, commenced our
tranquil reign. A week had not glided by, before all
was in confusion. Every hole seemed to have kicked
out its tenant. The “approved” had scrambled in
with the “doubtfuls,” and the “damned” into the
“noticed-hole,” and “things to be written about,”
“things to be laughed at,” and “things to be forgotten,”
had changed places with marvellous and decisive
celerity! We tried to restore order, but the confusion
increased. Nothing would stay put. It was
manifestly a Tyler cabinet—the doomed victim of disarrangement.

How order has been restored—by what spirit-fingers
our labels have been changed—what intimations
as to the occupancy of each particular pigeon-hole
we have been compelled to regard—is more than a
cabinet secret. We have had (to make a confession)
enough of telling ghost-stories. We have been called
on by all manner of men and women for our facts as
to the only glimpse into the spirit-world which we
ever described. It has cost us any quantity of brass
(in the wear of our knocker) to satisfy curiosity on
that subject. Enough that our pigeon-holes are labelled
with supernatural certainty. Our contributors,
now, will go to their appointed niche by a selective
destiny of which the responsibility is not ours. The
rejecteds will be kind enough to note this, and curse
the cabinet—not us! If their manuscripts lodge in
the upright slits of the “damned,” it is because the
“accepted” would not hold, keep, or harbor them.
We wash our hands.

Our first three pulls from the topic-drawers are letters
of complaint against postmasters for the postage
on the Mirror. According to the interpretation of the
law by some village postmasters, the government may
charge more for carrying the light weight of the Mirror
than we for editing, printing, embellishing, and
wrapping it! The dunce in the Charlestown postoffice
has compelled our subscribers to have their papers
sent to Boston, the nearest office presided over
by a gentleman. Another pig's head has control of
the Dedham office, and by-the-way, we clipped from
a Dedham paper, the following results of his readings
of the postage law:—

Tweedledum.—The postage at the Dedham office
for the New World newspaper of 32 pages, is “one
and 4-8ths of a cent.”

Tweedledee.—The postage for the New Mirror
newspaper of 16 pages, smaller in size, with a plate, is
“3 and 12-16ths, or twenty-four thirty-twoths of a
cent!”

Tweedledum second.—The postage of a New Mirror
extra, of 32 pages of smaller size, is five cents!

There are one or two offices in the interior of this
state where the postage on a single copy of the Mirror
has been charged fifteen cents—of course leaving
it unredeemed in the office for the postmaster's use—
as he expected!

Now, pray (we ask of our friend the town-pump),
what is the use of the much-vaunted blessing of
“cheap literature,” if the government, or its petty
officials, are to stand between the publishers and the
people, making it dear by charging as much as its
whole value for carrying it! Ought the government
to favor the circulation of intelligence or not? Is it
proper to put the most oppressive, or the least oppressive
construction, on all cases which affect the spread
of art and literature? It is a fact, that revenue sufficient
has been received at the port of New York in
the last two months to pay the whole expenses of the
government of the United States for one year. (So
we were authentically informed yesterday.) But, if
government must have more revenue, should not literature
(we scarce have patience to ask it) be the last
thing taxed? Should not luxuries, vanities, goods
and chattels, be levied upon, to the crack of endurance,
for the support of authority, before one ray of light is
stopped on its way to the public mind—stopped to be
converted into a perquisite for the pocket of a petty
despot? Of the postmasters in the larger cities there
is no complaint. They are generally enlightened
men. Mr. Graham here—Mr. Green in Boston—
throw no obstacles in the way of literature. On the
contrary, they do all in their power to promote and to
facilitate it. It is the petty, ignorant, peppercorn postmaster
of a small village, who, clothed with a little
brief authority, and knowing that his oppressions
leaves the disputed article in his hands, reads the law
perversely, and at last shuts his whole neighborhood
against everything but newspapers!

It is rather a reproach to a country whose boast and
whose reliance for the perpetuity of its free institutions
is the superior intelligence of its population, that
monarchical countries (England and France) should
be before us in the reduction of taxes on the conveyance
of intelligence. It has struck us as extraordinary,
too, that in the revising of postage laws, the increase
of facilities for carrying the mails should not
have suggested a reduction of postage! But at any
rate—leaving the laws as oppressive as they are—we
call upon on enlightened statesman like Mr. Wickliffe
to insist upon the most lenient and most favorable
interpretation of them—instead of having his administration
of the department distinguished, as it has
been and is, for more postoffice oppressions than were
ever known before. The postage on the Mirror, for
one instance—never before charged higher than the
newspapers which it scarce equals in weight—now
varies (in some of the country postoffices) from five
to fifteen cents—a gross “sliding-scale” of oppression
which must put a stop to our enterprise, if persevered
in, or cause us to give up cover and embellishment,
and circulate only the newspaper sheet, suited to the
petty letter of the law! The great majority of postmasters,
however, we are happy to add, charge mere
newspaper postage for the Mirror, “as the law” (properly
understood) “directs.”

Our favorite adversary of the American finds palatable
fault with us for not appending Leigh Hunt's
name to such good things as we have copied from him.
Why should we? We do not claim them as original,
nor are they leaded, as original contributions are
wont to be. The original object of giving the author's
name is lost (we conceive) at the distance of this
country from England. Leigh Hunt collects and
publishes in volumes all he writes, and his good things
are well labelled and guarded in his own country.
Neither his fame, his profit, nor his consequence (the
three ends he aims at), could be affected by adding his
name to what we occasionally take from him. Besides—
tit-for-tat-ically considered—the English steal
our articles by the dozen, and not only leave out our
name but appropriate them, by other initials, as their
own. They have at this moment a cheap edition of
our poems in the press without our leave or license,
and we have helped swell most of the collections of
English poetry, with no clue left for posterity to discover

that the author had also the honor of the
“American's” frequent notice. Besides again, there
is a precedent in nature. The rice-birds of the south
are the bobolinks of the north—losing their name and
copyright altogether by emigration. But now, having
defended our castle, we would fain express our pleasure
at the tone and quality of the “American's”
fault-findings, invariably done in good taste, and confined
always within legitimate critical bounds. This,
which in a Utopia, would be like praising water for
running down hill, is great praise in an unmitigated
republic. Fault found with our writings, without a
smutch on ourself, is “a thing to thank God on”—as
things go. In the same breath let us laud the Boston
Atlas, who says of us, with something between a
pickle and a sweetmeat, that “he has one fault—he
caters for his readers as for himself, and novelty or
eccentricity of expression sometimes usurps the place
which should only be accorded to thoughts of real
value.” We kiss the rod.

(Enter the Brigadier.)

Brigadier.—My dear boy, what could have possessed
you to get up so early? Ten o'clock, and the
last page all written, and not a subject touched, I'll
wager a julep, out of forty that were indispensable!
Have you said no word of the “Mirror Library?”

Cabinet.—Supererogatory, brigadier! Why add
perfume to the violet! Our selections for the Library
are appreciated—they sell! They advertise themselves.
They breathe sweetness.

Brigadier.—Like the lady's breath, which made all
men exclaim, “Hereof be scent-bags made!” Eh,
my boy?

Cabinet.—The “Rubric of Love”—that bundle of all
the delicious things ever written on the exciting subject
of love—what but its very name and purpose is
wanting to make that universal? Everybody, whose
lease of love is not quite run out, must have a copy
of it!

Brigadier.—They must! they must! It is a book,
charming and cheap at any price. But—

Cabinet.—I'll stave off your “but” with a passage
from Milton's Comus, for I'll talk of work no more.
Did you know that the julep was to Milton what gin
was to Byron? Listen!—

Let us to this “Nepenthé”—for we thirst with
Milton.

It would probably flabbergast most barn-door fowl
to be asked the meaning of eccalobeon, though, call it
the hatching of eggs, and they would laugh at being
acquainted with anything else. This big word has
mystified the posts and corners for a fortnight, and
yesterday my curiosity came to a head. I looked at
the bottom of the placard to see where the Eccalobeon
was to be exhibited, and soon found myself at a small
boy, keeping door opposite Washington Hall. (The
lad was so small and pale, by the way, that I thought
it warrantable to inquire whether he was produced by
eccalobeon. It appeared that he was not. He had a
regular mother, who “knew he was out.”)

The chirruping of chickens saluted our ears as we
opened the door, and we observed that a corner of the
room was picketed off, where a dozen or two of these
pseudo-orphans (who had lost their mother by not
having been suffered to have one), were pecking at
gravel and evidently doing well. Very good manners,
for chickens, though, as the man in the menagerie
says, “where they got them 'mity knows.” It began
to look very much as if mothers were a superfluity.

The centre of the room was occupied by the artificial
mother—a square brick structure, containing
ovens in which lay the eggs in different stages of progress.
Pieces of carpet were suspended before the
openings, and, on raising them and putting in the
hand, the temperature within seemed to be at about
blood-heat. The keeper took out an egg that was
about to enter upon its new destiny of skewer and
gravy. The chicken had been twenty days on the
road from spoon-victual land, and its little beak was
just hardened sufficiently to prick a hole into the
world in which it was to be eaten. It lay in a heap,
rather confusedly packed, its thigh bone close at its
beak (apparently ready to be used as a fulcrum in prying
the crack open), and its downy feathers, wet and
forlorn, just lifted by respiration. This premature
removal of the shell, however, the man said, would be
fatal. The destiny of that little well-contrived heart,
as far as this world was concerned, was to furnish
material for this sigh and paragraph!

In dishes upon the table were eggs, without shells,
in all the different stages of formation. In some the
veins were just reddening, and the vessels filling around
the heart, and in one, just opened, the newly-formed
heart, a red globule of the size of a pin's head, was
playing backward and forward, like a shuttle in a
miniature loom. With a glass, every phase of the
process of chicken-making could be distinctly seen.
The yolk, I was surprised to learn, does not contribute
to the material of the body—the most valuable portion
of its existence, as an egg, being, therefore, of no value
to it in its after-life of chicken! The provision is
certainly a wise one by which winged creatures, that
could not well fly if gravid like other animals, are
provided with a removable womb in the shape of an
egg, so that their parturition can be carried on outside
the body, and their buoyancy of locomotion is not interfered
with. The comparison between the incubation
of fowls and human gestation immediately suggests
itself, and the superior convenience of the former to
the shape-destroying, beauty-marring, and painful maternity
of our race, seems a blessing to be envied, at
least by the beautiful. How long might women continue
ornamental, and to what age would their personal
loveliness be undiminished, if the care and suffering
of maternity could be delegated to a brick oven!

I am inclined to think it is not peculiar to myself
to have a sabbath taste for the water-side. There is
an affinity, felt I think by man and boy, between the
stillness of the day and the audible hush of boundaries
to water. Premising that it was at first with the turned-up
nose of conscious travestie, I have to confess
the finding of a sabbath ramble, to my mind, along
the river-side in New York—the first mile toward
Albany on the bank of the Hudson. Indeed, if quiet
be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the
walk on Sunday. You would think, to cross the city
anywhere from river to river, that there was a general
hydrophobia—the entire population crowding to the
high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen
on either the East river or the Hudson. But, with a
little thoughtful frequenting, those deserted river-sides
become contemplative and pleasant rambling-places,
and, if some whim of fashion do not make the bank
of the Hudson like the Marina of Smyrna, a fashionable
resort, I have my Sunday afternoons provided for,
during the pigritude of city durance.

Yesterday (Sunday) it blew one of those unfolding
west winds, chartered expressly to pull the kinks out
of the belated leaves—a breeze it was delightful to set
the face to—strong, genial, and inspiriting, and smelling

(in New York) of the snubbed twigs of Hoboken.
The Battery looked very delightful, with the grass
laying its cheek to the ground, and the trees all astir
and trinkling, but on Sunday this lovely resort is full
of smokers of bad cigars—unpleasant gentlemen to
take the wind of. I turned the corner with a look
through the fence, and was in comparative solitude
the next moment.

The monarch of our deep water-streams, the gigantic
“Massachusetts,” lay at her wharf, washed by the
waving hands of the waters taking leave of the Hudson.
The river ends under the prow—or, as we might say
with a poetic license, joins on, at this point, to Stonington—so
easy is the transit from wharf to wharf in
that magnificent conveyance. From this point up,
extends a line of ships, rubbing against the pier the
fearless noses that have nudged the poles and the
tropics, and been breathed on by spice-islands and ice-bergs—an
array of nobly-built merchantmen, that,
with the association of their triumphant and richly-freighted
comings and goings, grows upon my eye
with a certain majesty. It is a broad street here, of
made land, and the sidewalks in front of the new stores
are lumbered with pitch and molasses, flour and red
ochre, bales, bags, and barrels, in unsightly confusion
—but the wharf-side, with its long line of carved figure-heads,
and bowsprits projecting over the street, is an
unobstructed walk—on Sundays at least—and more
suggestive than many a gallery of marble statues.
The vessels that trade to the North sea harbor here,
unloading their hemp and iron; and the superb French
packet-ships, with their gilded prows; and, leaning
over the gangways and tafferails, the Swedish and
Norwegian sailors jabber away their Sunday's idle
time; and the negro-cooks lie and look into the puddles,
and altogether it is a strangely-mixed picture—
Power reposing and Fret and Business gone from the
six-days' whip and chain. I sat down on a short
hawser-post, and conjured the spirits of ships around
me. They were as communicative as would naturally
be expected in a tête-á-tête when quite at leisure.
Things they had seen and got wind of in the Indian
seas, strange fishes that had tried the metal of their
copper bottoms, porpoises they had run over asleep,
wrecks and skeletons they had thrown a shadow across
when under prosperous headway—these and particulars
of the fortunes they had brought home, and the
passengers coming to look through one more country
to find happiness, and the terrors and dangers, heart-aches
and dreams, that had come and gone with each
bill of lading—the talkative old bowsprits told me all.
I sat and watched the sun setting between two out-landish-looking
vessels, and, at twilight, turned to go
home, leaving the spars and lines drawn in clear tracery
on a sky as rosy and fading as a poet's prospects
at seventeen.

Postoffice Abuses.—“It will none otherwise be,”
says Sir Thomas More, “but that some stumblinge
blockes will always bee, by malicious folk, laid in good
people's way.” Upon this text we propose to preach
a little sermon.

We have given in to the rage of the day, which is
the cheapening of brain-work, not very willingly at
first, but heartily when our mind was made up to it.
The author is depreciated, and that is, perhaps, not
well—but the public is benefited, and that is, very
certainly, good. Millions are touched by the lengthened
wand of literature, who were beyond its reach
till it was eked out by cheapness.

The old Mirror, at five dollars per annum, occasionally
embellished by a plate, was considered, by the
successive postmasters-general for twenty years, as a
popular good, which it was well worth their while to
favor and foster. It throve accordingly. Had Mr.
Wickliffe been postmaster-general when it was started,
it would not have lived a year! With or without its
plate, with or without its cover, it went rigorously to
all parts of the country, at newspaper postage. No
village postmaster would have ventured to charge
more upon it; and if one had been pragmatical enough
to twist the law into a new reading for that purpose,
the very first complaint would have set it right, or removed
him. The editors had no trouble on the subject,
and they went on, pioneering the way into the
fields of art and elegant literature, and setting an example
which has been followed by the large troop of
tasteful periodicals now in existence, to the no small
diffusion of taste and intelligence.

Literature began to cheapen. It was proposed to
bring refinement, delicate sentiment, the ennobling
love of poetry, and an acquaintance with heroic models
through song and story, within reach of the humbler
classes. New periodicals were started on this
basis. The old Mirror was superseded by cheaper
works—works which, for three dollars, gave as much
or more matter, but without embellishment, and of
very inferior typography and paper. That rage had
its day. The circulation of light literature was very
much enlarged, and the people, of all classes, became
interested in the current writing of the eventful present
hour. This sudden spread of taste (we may say
in passing) was an ingredient thrown into the national
character which no doubt powerfully furthered—what
it seems Mr. Wickliffe's sole mission to retard—the
refinement and growing intelligence of the American
people.

But there was one more effort to be made. Complaints
began to be heard that these cheap publications
were inelegant; that, sent forth damp, unpressed
and unembellished, they became smutched and grew
unsightly and hurtful to the eyes; and that more
careful workmanship and better type and paper were
desirable. The founder of the old Mirror took the
subject into examination and study. He made the
closest calculations of the cost of fair print and embellishment,
and after much thought and inquiry, aided
by twenty years of experience and success, he matured
the plan of the present “New Mirror.” It
was the plan of a periodical to be suited to the now
refined taste of the “greatest number,” as well as
adapted to the means of the greatest number, and the
uniting of these two desirable extremes brought its
price within a hair's breadth of its cost, and left the
feasibility of the project dependant wholly on the
chance of sailing at once, and smoothly, into an enormous
circulation. The item of postage was not overlooked—but
as the New Mirror, cover and plate included,
would scarce weigh half as much as the Albion,
Spirit of the Times, and other weekly papers
which went for newspaper-postage, and it was no
heavier than the old Mirror, which went for the same
postage, the subject was not thought worth a doubt.

Well—the New Mirror made its appearance. A
type worthy of the choicest library, a cover convenient
and elegant, a beautiful steel plate, and sixteen
pages of matter edited with careful experience and
labor, were offered to the public for this same manageable
price of “three dollars a year!” The poorest
citizen need not now be without his fair share of
knowledge of the arts and literature. Nothing seemed
to stand in the way. The manifest high order of
style and spirit in the design of the work, combined
with its accessibility by cheapness, sent it abroad like
day-rising. Its circulation became, as it well needed
to be, enormous. And now, you ask, what is the
matter? And we will tell you, and we wish Mr.
Wickliffe to listen.

A gentleman called at our office a week or two
since, and bought a copy or two of the “Mirror Library,”
expressing his regret that it was not convenient

for him to take the Mirror. He lived in Vernon,
Oneida county, New York, and the postage
charged him by Mr. J. W. Jenkins, the postmaster
of that place, was FOURTEEN CENTS on each copy—
bringing the cost of the Mirror up to ten dollars twenty-eight
cents a year! We immediately addressed a
letter to Mr. J. W. Jenkins, inquiring respectfully
into the reason of this exorbitant charge, and that
letter Mr. J. W. Jenkins has never answered. The
gentleman assured us that several persons of his acquaintance
in Vernon had been deterred from subscribing
to the Mirror by Mr. J. W. Jenkins's overcharge
of postage. Again: we have discovered, in many instances,
that our subscribers, after paying their subscriptions,
have let their papers lie in the postoffice
rather than submit to the extortionate charge of postage,
and the postmasters have never notified us of the
fact. Again: the Mirrors miscarry, to a degree that
shows more than neglect on the part of the postmasters
or their subordinates. The complaints and stoppages
for this last reason are out of all precedent and
proportion. Again: the postage charged on the New
Mirror varies, as we have said before, from one cent
to fifteen, in some of the country postoffices, more or
less, according to the whim or tyranny of the dull official.
The postmaster of Great Barrington is one
of those pigheaded dunces, charging postage on the
Mirror sent to the “Berkshire Courier”—in direct violation
of the law which exempts papers from postage
on exchanges.

What is the remedy for these abuses? We have
complained to Mr. Wickliffe of the irregularity and
extortion in regard to the postage on the Mirror, and
have received in turn a letter of sesquipedalian flummery,
the compounding of which required the education
of a Virginia politician; and, our letter once
answered, the abuse was probably never thought of
in the department. Yet it was a matter serious
enough to be worth Mr. Wickliffe's attention. These
petty tyrants with their “little brief authority,” stand
between the public and the supply for public refinement
and intelligence. They change the cost of the cheapest
and most elegant publication of the day from
$3.52 (postage and all) to $10.28! They strangle
literary enterprise in the cradle. And for whose advantage?
Not the government's—for subscribers will
rather leave their Mirrors in the office than pay the extortionate
charge. For the benefit of the postmasters
themselves—who, by this indirect fraud, obtain a nice
handful of periodicals weekly, to dispose of as one of
the perquisites of their office! This is surely a matter
worth Mr. Wickliffe's while to look after.

To the majority of postmasters we owe thanks rather
than reproaches. They have rightly judged that the
spirit of the law did not intend a difference of two
cents between a paper stitched and a paper not stitched
—(a difference made by some of the Dogberry postmasters).
They feel justly that if there is a question
as to the intention of a postage-law, the cause of intelligence
and literature is to have the benefit of the
most favorable interpretation. No law can exactly
describe every periodical likely to be started. No
senate, in making a law, intends to charge more for
carrying three printed pieces that weigh one ounce,
than one printed piece that weighs two or three ounces
—yet, so, again, do these petty Dogberrys interpret
the law.

There is another point about which we would inquire
of the committee now engaged on the revised
postage-laws. Why should literary papers of the same
weight be more taxed than newspapers? Is the circulation
of moral and refining influences twice as taxable
as the circulation of scandal and politics, rapes
and murders, amusements and advertisements? Surely
the intelligence that enlightens the community is
as much contained in the weeklies and monthlies as in
the daily papers. Yet in the bill now before the
house, the former are taxed at twice the price of the
latter! This, we suppose, is some of Mr. Wickliffe's
handiwork.

We give up the postmaster-general—leave him to
be bewildered with the technicalities of his office—
careful of the husks while the grain sifts away from
him. We make an appeal to the fountain of his official
power—public opinion! Let this matter be understood,
and let every petty postmaster who plays
the tyrant, or misuses his authority, be memorialized
out of office. The government ought not to be one
penny richer for carrying the mails. No revenue
should be derivable to the treasury from the carrying
of intelligence. The cheapest postage-rate possible
should be set by law, and the law should be bent to
suit circumstances in all cases where the cost of carrying
is not thereby made greater. Public opinion
should so instruct the public servant. The postmaster-general,
and the lesser postmasters who obey his
dictum, should be made to feel that the least pretence
for extortion or oppression on their part, or any want
of accommodation and liberal conduct, would be
promptly punished. We write freely on this subject,
for our enterprise is at stake, and we speak somewhat,
too, for other interests than our own. To offer a periodical
for three dollars a year, that is made to cost
ten by the oppression of postmasters, is to advertise a
misnomer. Let the Wickliffe dynasty prevail, and
we shall be obliged to leave off cover, plate, and
stitching, and change the Mirror to a simple printed
sheet, without protection from wear and tear, and
without embellishment or capability of binding and
preservation.

We have always felt great sympathy for the blind.
We have felt also great curiosity to know exactly how
much of human knowledge is forbidden to go in at
the ear—and how much that is turned aside, as inadmissible
at that one portal, can be smuggled in afterward
under the cloak of explanation and description.
The accounts of Laura Bridgman interested us proportionably
more from her greater deprivations. It
is putting this curiosity in a much more spicy vein of
gratification, however, to know that a poet is imprisoned
in one of these windowless temples, and to discover
how he lives without light and color—as well
as how much he is the purer and better from escaping
all that offends the eye, which, by-the-way, is not a
little. The poems of Miss Frances Jane Crosby,
a pupil of the New York Institution for the Blind,
lie before us, and we have read them with great modification
of our pity for the blind. Eyes could scarce
do more.

No one in reading the miscellaneous poems by
Miss Crosby would suspect that she was blind. She
seems to forget it herself. She talks of “crimson
teints” and “purple west” and “stars of mildest hue,”
with quite the familiarity of those who see. But it
is evident that her ear has more than a common share
of nicety and susceptibility to measure, for in no carly
poems that we remember is there such smooth elegance
of rhythm.

The volume is composed principally of poems of
the affections, and well-expressed, musical, and creditable
to the authoress, are all the pieces. The price
of such a volume should be nominal merely, and the
kindly-disposed should give for it what their benevolence
prompts. We would suggest to the publishers
to send it round by agents with this view.

There are things in the world better than poetry,
and things written without genius that more stir the

soul of a man than would some things ticketed for
immortality. Now we do not make sure that we are
not “weak” on the subject of young children. We
always thought them quite eligible to any possible
choir of cherubim. But we will venture to unmask
our foible, if foible it be, by declaring that we have
read the following downright, homely, truthful, and
funny verses—(sent to us by some charming mother)
—read them with delight. It is good honest poetry,
with a foothold to it, and we should like to see the
baby, since reading it:—

We are fortunate in a troop of admirable contributors
who write for love, not money—love being the
only commodity in which we can freely acknowledge
ourselves rich. We receive, however, all manner of
tempting propositions from those who wish to write
for the other thing—money—and it pains us grievously
to say “No,” though, truth to say, love gets
for us as good things as money would buy—our readers
will cheerfully agree. But, yesterday, on opening
at the office a most dainty epistle, and reading it
fairly through, we confess our pocket stirred within
us! More at first than afterward—for, upon reflection,
we became doubtful whether the writer were not
old and “blue”—it was so exceedingly well done!
We have half a suspicion, now, that it is some sharp
old maid in spectacles—some regular contributor to
Godey and Graham, who has tried to inveigle us
through our weak point—possibly some varlet of a
man-scribbler. But no! it is undeniably feminine.
Let us show you the letter—the latter part of it, at
least, as it opens rather too honeyedly for print:—

“You know that the shops in Broadway are very
tempting this spring. Such beautiful things! Well,
you know (no, you don't know that, but you can guess)
what a delightful thing it would be to appear in one
of those charming, head-adorning, complexion-softening,
hard-feature-subduing Neapolitans; with a little
gossamer veil dropping daintily on the shoulder of one
of those exquisite balzarines, to be seen any day at
Stewart's and elsewhere. Well, you know (this you
must know) that shopkeepers have the impertinence
to demand a trifling exchange for these things, even
of a lady; and also that some people have a remarkably
small purse, and a remarkably small portion of
the yellow `root' in that. And now, to bring the matter
home, I am one of that class. I have the most
beautiful little purse in the world, but it is only kept
for show; I even find myself under the necessity of
counterfeiting—that is, filling the void with tissue-paper
in lieu of bank-notes, preparatory to a shopping
expedition!

“Well, now to the point. As 'Bel' and I snuggled
down on the sofa this morning, to read the New Mirror
(by-the-way, cousin 'Bel' is never obliged to put
tissue-paper in her purse), it struck us that you would
be a friend in need, and give good counsel in this
emergency. 'Bel', however, insisted on my not telling
what I wanted the money for; she even thought
that I had better intimate orphanage, extreme suffering
from the burdens of some speculating bubble, illness,
etc., etc.; but did not I know you better! Have
I read the New Mirror so much (to say nothing of the
graceful things coined `under a bridge,' and a thousand
other pages flung from the inner heart), and not
learned who has an eye for everything pretty? Not
so stupid, Cousin 'Bel'—no, no!

“However, this is not quite the point, after all; but
here it is. I have a pen—not a gold one (I don't
think I could write with that), but a nice little feather-tipped
pen, that rests in the curve of my fore-finger
as contentedly as on its former pillow of down.
(Shocking! how that line did run down hill! and this
almost as crooked! dear me!) Then I have little
messengers racing `like mad' through the galleries of
my head, spinning long yarns, and weaving fabrics
rich and soft as the balzarine which I so much covet,
until I shut my eyes and stop my ears and whisk away
with the `wonderful lamp' safely hidden in my own
brown braids. Then I have Dr. Johnson's dictionary—capital
London edition, etc., etc.; and, after I
use up all the words in that, I will supply myself with
Webster's wondrous quarto, appendix and all. Thus
prepared, think you not I should be able to put something
in the shops of the literary caterers—something
that, for once in my life, would give me a real errand
into Broadway? Maybe you of the New Mirror pay
for acceptable articles—maybe not. Comprenez-vous!

“O I do hope that beautiful balzarine like 'Bel's
will not be gone before another Saturday! You will
not forget to answer me in the next Mirror; but pray,
my dear editor, let it be done very cautiously, for
'Bel' would pout all day if she should know what I
have written. Till Saturday, your anxiously-waiting
friend, “Fanny.”

Well—we give in! On condition that you are under
twenty-five, and that you will wear a rose (recognisably)
in your boddice the first day you appear in
Broadway with the hat and “balzarine,” we will pay
the bills. Write us thereafter a sketch of “'Bel”' and
yourself as cleverly done as this letter, and you may
“snuggle down” on the sofa and consider us paid and
the public charmed with you.

In the days when we were “possessed” with horses,
and horse-racing, we were sadly well-acquainted with
a jockey who lost his wits in the excitement of losing
a race. He hung about race-courses for some years
after becoming an idiot, and by dint of always denying
a horse's good qualities in the stable, and of never
speaking well of one except at the winning moment,
he contrived to preserve, through all his idiocy, some
influence in the judgment of horseflesh. We have
been reminded of our old friend Spavin (call him
Spavin—“nil mortuis”) by certain of our critical
brother editors, and their very kindly-intended (possibly)
critiques on the Mirror. Come a week (as such
weeks will come) when our health is queasy, and when
our spirits are gathering violets in dells where a paving-stone
would be stoned to death as a monster (and
there are dells incapable of a paving-stone)—come
such a week, we say, and let the Mirror go forth,
without such quantity of our own work as strains our

extremest fibre to the crack, and down comes this
vigilant critic upon us with a cry of “no go,” “falling
off,” “idle,” and “better formerly”—disparagements
that would take the conceit out of a church steeple!
And why does he do this? Why should we not be
better at some times than at others, without being
criticised like a steam-engine—a thing incapable of
mood, humor, and caprice? Simply because this
sort of critique is easy to write, and so favors, in the
writer, the very idleness he criticises in us. But, good
heavens! are we not entitled to our worser, as well as
our better moments! Shall we always be at tiptop
speed, and never have freedom from disparagement
except when winning a race?

We boldly lay claim to more industry than rightly
falls to us as our share of the curse! Supposing, for
the moment, that our writings are better for the Mirror
than what takes their place occasionally (a flattering
inference from our critic's critique), we do more in
quantity, in the course of the year, than one editor in
a hundred. There is more copied from the Mirror
(we have often had occasion to observe) than from any
two periodicals in the country. The truth is, we are
too famous for comfort!

You see what troubles us, dear reader!

The flowering into glory of such a century-plant
of excellence as our worthy friend and fellow-publisher,
James Harper, has in it, with all our willing acclamation,
some occasional provocation to a smile.
The sudden call for “his picture”—the eager lithograph
of his fun-bestridden nose and money-making
spectacles—the stir he has made among the abuses,
with his Cliff-street way of doing business, and the
salutary feel we get of the wand of power in his
clutch, while we still see him in his accustomed
haunts, busy and unpedestaled as before—there is
something in the contrast which makes us say, with
Prince Hal, “Ned, come out of that fat room and
give us thy hand to laugh a little,” though, with all
our heart, we rejoice in his authority. The Courier,
speaking of the likeness just published of Mr. Harper,
says: “The new mayor's pleasant, shrewd, and
half-quizzical countenance is cleverly hit off, and he
is peering through the official eye-glasses in a manner
that portends trouble to all municipal delinquents.
Let them look to their ways, and let all subordinate
official functionaries look to the streets; for this portrait
would convince us, even if we were not acquainted
with the original, that the chief magistrate has an
eye upon them.”

This bit of speculation as a preface to our laudamus
of Mayor Harper's administration, as felt particularly
in two or three abated nuisances. The hackmen
are no longer permitted to devour passengers on
their arrival in steamboats, nor to make a chevaux-de-frise
of their whips at the landing-piers, but must sit
quietly on their coach-boxes till called for. The
omnibus-racing is to be put a stop to, we understand,
and that should really be celebrated in an appropriate
“northern refrain.” There are two refrains more
that we would suggest to our city Harper—that hose-boys
should be made to refrain from flooding the
sidewalks under the thin shoes of ladies, and that gentlemen
who must smoke in the street should refrain
from the windward side of ladies, particularly those
who prefer air that has not been used.

And apropos—(it will be seen that we were born to
make a world)—we wish to suggest to enterprise another
abatement of the nuisances of Broadway. It
is desirable to reduce the number of omnibuses in
this great thoroughfare, for many very cogent reasons—but
as long as they pay—that is to say, as long
as the public require them—they must even go on—
deafening promenaders, and endangering private carriages
and the lives of people crossing the street. But
who that is down town in a summer's day, and wishes
to go anywhere to the western side of the city, would
not prefer to take a ferry-boat (if there were one)
from the foot of Maiden lane round the Battery to
Chelsea? How preferable the fresh air, and beautiful
scenery of the rivers and bay, to a crowded omnibus
in hot weather! How much more desirable would be
a residence in Chelsea, if there were such a convenience!
The boats might touch at the foot of Cortland
street and the Battery, and, indeed, extend their
course up the East river to the foot of Pike street—
plying, say, every ten minutes, from Pike street to
Chelsea, and back—rounding the Battery, and touching
wherever it was convenient. Who would not prefer
this to omnibussing? Let this line communicate
with Stevens's upper ferry to Hoboken, and the line
would be continuous from that beautiful spot, all
round the city. Quite aside from its utility, this
would be one of the prettiest pleasure trips that could
be invented. Penscz-y, Messrs. Stevens.

If any charitable person has an old man or woman
whom he would like to set up in an easy and profitable
business, we have a plan to suggest. Give them
half a dozen light chairs, and send them to the Battery
or the Park. In all public promenades in France
there are chairs to be hired for two cents an hour, and
besides being a good trade for the lame and old, this
convenience is wanted.

By the way, where are the good things, clever
couplets, and flings of wit, that used to fly about at
the municipal elections? Squibs grow dull. Where
is that witty conservative whig who, when “Forest
and Liberty” was placarded by the democrats, put up
a rival bill of “Povey and the Constitution?” Wit
and poetry (we might have remembered) seem to
have gone into advertisements. When people have
done with “Who is Seatsfield?” we shall start a new
query—“Who is the bard of Stoppani?” Moore's
oriental flow of melting stanza and balmy imagery is
quite paled in its glory by Stoppani's advertisement:—

Mellifluously musical! Who is the distinguished author?

The advertisement of a hatter plausibly sets forth
that the Miller prophecy being exploded, and the
world really not coming to an end (at least within a
hat's-wear of time), the prospects of the globe's continuance
justifies the venture of a new hat! We
think we see a hat bought on that hypothesis!

We are happy to see that our imported word, rococo,
is coming into general use. A critic in the Herald,

noticing the opera, says: “This concert-piece has
been rococo for some time, and, like an old maid, is
getting, every year, two years older.” This is a clever
critic, by the way, though in the sentence we have
quoted he reminds us of a bit of dialogue in an old
play:—

“Manes.—Didst thou not find that I did quip thee?

Psy.—No, verily. What is a quip?

Manes.—A short saying of a sharp wit, with a bitter
sense in a sweet word.”

The True Sun quotes, with a clincher, from the
Buffalo Commercial, “The common use of the word
lady, instead of the definite honored term wife, is
an atrocious vulgarism that should be universally
scouted.” We think the ladies should be informed
of the etymological meaning of the two words, and
take their choice after. Wife is derived from the Anglo-Saxon
word signifying to weave, and means the
person who weaves for the family. Lady originally
meant a woman raised to the rank of her husband—
from the Saxon word signifying elevated. The propriety
of calling a man's better half his lady, depends,
of course, on the fact whether she was made more
respectable by the match; and the propriety of calling
her his wife, hangs upon her expertness and industry
at the loom. Which will the fair sex prefer?

New Literary Epoch.—We have been, for the
last year, not only working among, but watching, “the
signs of the times” in the way of literature. We have
been trying, not only to make out a living, but to
make out head and tail to our epoch—to see what
way the transition was tending, and when there was
likely to be any reliable shape and form to American
literature; or (to change the figure) whether the literary
boatmen, who stand with their barques hauled
ashore, uncertain of the current, and employing themselves
meantime in other vocations, could be called
upon to launch and dip their oars, sure at last of tide
and channel.

International copyright has died a natural death.
There was not a statesman in the country who had the
courage to take the chance of making or marring his
political fortunes by espousing the question. At the
same time—palpably just, honorable, and expedient,
as would be the giving of copyright to English authors—there
was some excuse for shying the subject,
in the violent abuse that was indiscreetly showered
upon us by Dickens and the Reviews, at the very
moment when general public attention had been
called to the subject, and when there was every
prospect of its turning the crisis favorably. It would
have taken the statesmanship and eloquence of Clay
or Webster to have made the discussion at all endurable
to congress, and we are quite sure that it will be
ten years before the public irritation against English
travellers and critics will have sufficiently abated to
tolerate any measure in their favor. Dickens, and his
friend, the critic of the Foreign Quarterly, therefore,
have sanded their own bread and butter in throwing
dirt at us.

But the great end of international copyright is coming
about without the aid of legislation. The abuse
has been that American authors were thrown out of
the market by English works that were to be had for
nothing—(justice to the English author, of course, a
secondary consideration). But this abuse is losing
strength by surfeit. The publishers and periodical
agents are aghast, at this very moment, of the falling
off of interest in the most attractive publications. The
zest for novelty has been so pampered, that only the
first number or two, of anything new, sells well. And
not from any falling off in their character. The English
pictorial papers (for one example) have rather improved
in merit, but a publisher informed us a day or
two since that they do not now sell ten where they
sold a hundred a month or two ago. Such enterprises
used to begin small, and grow into favor gradually.
Now, the cornucopia of their prosperity is reversed—the
small end turned from the publisher.
Copyrighted American books, and American periodicals,
though dearer than reprints, sell much better,
and in our opinion the American public, in three
months more, will give a preference so decided to
home literature, and home periodicals, that, as far as
protection to our native authors is concerned, the international
copyright will be useless. The truth is,
that literature, to be permanently popular, must be
produced under the meridian of the country it is to
supply. Who will pretend that any periodical in this
country is edited with half the ability of the London
magazines and reviews? The leading intellects of
the age—men who in this country would be eminent
lawyers and politicians, devote themselves to magazine-writing
abroad, and, besides, they are a trained
class of professed authors, such as we have no idea of
in America. Our contributors are men who dash off
an article as by-play, and make no investment of
thought or money in it—and of course it can not compare
to the carefully-written and well-considered articles
of English weeklies and monthlies. But look at
the difference of circulation. See how periodicals
languish that are made up of the cream of these London
magazines, and see how Graham and Godey, Inman
of the Columbian, and ourselves, quadruple them
in vogue and prosperity! It was to be expected—it
is the most natural thing in the world—that America
should grow American, at last! What more natural
than that we should tire of having our thinking done
in London, our imaginations fed only with food that
is Londonish, and our matters of feeling illustrated
and described only by London associations, tropes,
and similitudes? This weariness of going to so distant
a well for better water, we do say, is to be relied
upon as a sign of the literary times. The country is
tired of being be-Britished. It wants its own indigenous
literature, and we think we should be safe to-morrow
in issuing a replevin upon law, politics, and
commerce, for the men of genius draughted for their
employ, during the want of a literary market. Give
up the blood horses harnessed into your dull drays,
oh, Wall street and Pearl! Untie your fetters of red
tape, and let loose your enslaved poets and novelties,
oh, Nassau and Pine! Discharge Halleck, oh, Astor;
and give up Wetmore, oh, crates of crockery! Lead
off with a new novel, Mr. Cooper, and let the public
give us a five years' benefit of their present disgust
with imported literature, to recover from the numbness
of inaction and discouragement. Give us five
years of the home tide of sympathy that is now setting
westward, and we will have an American literature
that will for ever prevent the public taste and patronage
from ebbing back again to England.

Things as they come.—We know of a matter we
mean to write about, somewhere between this and the
bottom of the next column—somewhere within this
half-cent's-worth, that is to say—(this page costs you
not quite half a cent, dear reader!)—but we must first
haul out two or three things that lie a-top of it in our
fact-drawer; facts being, as everybody knows, obstinate
as nails in a keg, when you want a particular one from
underneath.

We have whims (this lies a-top), about the face of
newspaper type. There are some most worthy and
able periodicals that we could not read our own obituary

in, without an effort—the type is so unexplainably
anti-pathetic. Every editor who turns over exchange
papers will know precisely what we mean. There is
no necessity for naming those which we should never
open if we had them in our pocket “forty days in the
wilderness,” but we can, without offence, name an opposite
example—the Picayune—which, from the
mere witchery of type, a man would like to take out
of the postoffice on his way to execution. The Boston
Transcript is another—(fact No. 2)—which we
fatuitously read, and should read, even if it were edited
by that broken mustard-spoon, the Portland Thersites.
The type is captivating—a kind of insinuating, piquant,
well-bred brevier, that catches the eye like a coquette
in a ball-room. And this, be it noted, spite of the
“burnt child's” prejudice, for the fair editress does
not always put on her gloves, before taking a tweak at
our immortality! And, apropos—there is an editor
“down south” who sympathises with this typical
weakness of ours—declaring in a late paper that the
reputation of our letters to the Intelligencer “was
entirely owing to the large type in which they were
printed.” And this we not only believe, but if we
ever get rich, we will “fork over the swindle” to our
deluded employers.

The reader will see that we are trying to apologise
for our dissipation in reading—newspapers being such
very loose mental company, and we, as news-writer,
having, no more business with the luxury of news
written, than a shoemaker with wearing the patent
leathers he makes for his gentlemen customers. But
we have read an article in the seductive type of the
Transcript which led us to philosophise a little touching
a point of contrast between Boston and New
York; and as we grew up in Boston, but were dug
up, and trimmed, and watered into flowering, in New
York, we claim to know both places well enough to
run a parallel with fairish fidelity.

The article we speak of was a letter, containing,
among other things, a touch-up of the Astor house;
but the Astor is so much the best hotel in the world,
that fault-finding, merited as it may be, will send nobody
from its door in search of a better. Without
alluding farther to the letter, let us jot down the speculation
it suggested.

New York is far more vicious than Boston, without
a doubt. But it is not much more vicious than it was,
when it was of Boston's size. We have often wished
to preach a sermon to the Bostonians from 1 Corinthians
iv. 7: “For who maketh thee to differ from
another? And what hast thou, that thou didst not
receive?” Up to the present time, the Puritan obedience
to authority, and the “power paramount” of
good principles, have never been sapped or shaken in
Boston. It is but one community, with one class of
leading prejudices, and worked by one familiar set of
moral, social, and political wires. The inhabitants
are nearly all Americans, all church-goers of some
sect or other, implicitly subject to general and time-honored
principles, and as controllable by mayor and
aldermen as an omnibus by passengers and driver.
Indeed, the municipal history of Boston for the last
twenty years, is a Utopian beau-ideal of efficiency and
order, which will never be repeated. The authoritative
break-up of the first formidable symptom of mobocracy
two years ago, for example—when bold mayor
Elliott quietly took the fire-engines from their turbulent
companies, and put them into the hands of a paid
fire-police—could never have been done in any other
city of this country; and ten years hence (Boston
continuing to increase and vitiate), a similar pluck at
the beard of mob license would be a dangerous experiment.

But look at New York in comparison. There are
at least a hundred thousand Irish in this city, twenty
thousand French, sixty thousand Germans, and a
miscellany of other nations, that probably leaves scarce
one fourth of the population (say a hundred thousand),
for indigenous and home-spirited New-Yorkers. One
quarter too, of the general population, is in a condition
that is scarce known in Boston—that of desperate extremity
of livelihood, and readiness to do anything for
the moment's relief, vicious, turbulent, or conspirative.
The municipal government of New York is, unfortunately,
in some measure, a political tool, and compelled
to shape its administration somewhat with a
view to politics. Harsh measures, used in Boston
upon the first germ or symptom of license, are reserved
in New York for such signal instances as are melodramatically
flagrant—such as can not be perverted,
by the party out of power, into a counter-current of
sympathy and resentment. What there is now remaining
of the Knickerbocker influence in New York, is the
degree in which New York can compare with Boston
—and this small remainder of the old Dutch character
is, as to power and check, about equal to what will be
left of Puritan character in Boston, when Boston, by
aid of railroads and inducements for foreign residence,
shall have four hundred thousand inhabitants. Look
at the difference in the observance of Sunday in the
two places! At least twenty thousand people cross
to Hoboken alone, to pass the sabbath in the fields—
foreigners, mostly, who have been in the habit of
making it a holyday at home. The Bostonians would
suppress the ferry, without the slightest hesitation!
There are four or five Sunday newspapers in New
York, and Boston will not support one. There are
German balls in various places in this city, on Sunday
evening; and oyster-shops, and bar-rooms, and the
drinking-places, in all directions in the suburbs, have
overflowing custom on that day. The government
of the city is, of course, in some degree, a reflex of
this large proportion of the sovereign voters, and when
public opinion countenances a degree of license, it is
next to impossible to bring in a city government that
can control it. We have not room to follow out this
comparison in detail—but we wished to outline it, as
a reply to the condemnations of New York (for the
sale of vicious publications, etc., etc.), made from
time to time, by our more virtuous brethren in the
north. We shall take another opportunity to enlarge
upon it.

We have received several truly delightful and gratifying
letters from eminent clergymen of different persuasions,
thanking us for the Sacred Numbers of the
Mirror Library, and sending us the choice poems
which they had severally laid aside, to add to another
collection. We had no idea there was so much beautiful
religious poetry in existence! This rich vein of
literature has been unworked and overlooked, and we
assure the religious world, confidently, that we are
doing a most important work in the collection of these
gems of piety and poetry in a cheap and accessible
form. “Songs for the Sabbath,” falls behind
none of them in interest, and will be a classic in religious
books, as long as religious literature exists.

We do not know whether we were particularly in a
mood to be pleased on the night of Simpson's benefit
at the Park, but several things pleased us more than
they seemed to please other people—the dancing, for
example, both of Korponay, and of Desjardins.
(Of the acting we do not speak, and by-the-way, we
may as well say, here, that the stage is so much better
kept in hand by the theatrical critic of the Albion
than we could possibly do it, that we generally shie
that part of criticism, from a sort of consciousness
that it will be done for the public by abler hands. We

love good criticism, and we love “honor to whom
honor is due.”) We did not see Korponay at his
début at Palmo's—but a friend pronounced his dancing
a failure. As an attempt at anything in Vestris's
line, it certainly was a failure. But that is not the
dish to which the well-made Pole invites us. He is,
among dancers, what olives are at a feast—“bad
pickles” to the vulgar, but artful appetisers to the
refined. Korponay seemed to us like a symmetrical
and dashing nobleman, doing gracefully a difficult and
grotesque dance for the amusement and admiration of
a court—leaning as far away as possible from the airs
of a professed dancer, and intent only on showing the
superb proportion of his figure and the subtle command
over his limbs. His face expressed exactly this
role of performance. It was full of mock solemnity
and high-bred assurance. He seemed to us exactly
the sort of noble masquer that, at a Venetian festival
of old time, would have “topped the jaunty part,” and
carried away the flower, the ladies' favor.

But the untrumpeted deservings of Monsieur Korponay
are less surprising than the want of appreciation
of Mademoiselle Desjardins. We never saw her
before, though she has been dancing in town for some
time, and, considering how easily most any hook and
line of public amusement catches us, it is very plain
that the bait has not been skilfully angled. In the
first place, as to qualifications, we never have seen, in
all our travels from Niagara to the Black sea (the two
poles of our “inky orbit”), so well-bridged an instep,
and so Dianesque a pair of serviceable ankles. She
should have stood to John of Bologna for his poised
Mercury! There is not a woman's heart better
mounted, we venture to say, between Ontario and the
Euxine. And she uses these communicators with
earth deftly and Ariel-wise! We only saw her in the
Polacca, which is a kind of attitudinizing dance, and
possibly, better suited to her abilities than a more difficult
pas. But she walked and acted it with spirit
and grace enough to be charming, and though she is
not to be named with Ellsler, she is enough of a danseuse,
in Ellsler's absence, to give one's eyes their
night's rations very satisfactorily. Underrated she is!

We see, by one of the careful and elaborate reports
of the Republic, that the Mercantile Library Association
have had a report from a despair-committee, on
the subject of the decline of lectures. Eloquence
don't pay for the candle, it seems. This excellent
association, however, shrinks the wrong way from the
plague they have had with it. The taste for eloquence
is no more dead or torpid in New York than the love
of war or the relish for lions. While people have
brains and hearts they will love a true orator. But
they are tired (and reasonably enough) of the bald and
ungarnished style in which oratory is served up to
them. To go moping into the dark and silent Tabernacle—the
gas economized till the rise of the orator,
and a deathly and gloomy silence maintained for an
hour (more or less) before the commencement of the
lecture—to have the orator's first opening addressed
to chilled, oppressed, and unelevated minds, and all
this in a house of such structure, that unless seated
clear of the pent-house galleries, the hearer loses
everything but the emphatic words in a sentence—to
sit an hour amid these disadvantages, and then hear a
chance speaker, for whom they are not prepared by
any previous information except the name of his subject—this,
we say, is indeed “lenten entertainment.”
It is making of eloquence what the ascetic makes of
religion—a dry crust instead of a relishing loaf. No,
no! Religion should be adorned with its proper and
consistent graces, as woman should be beautifully
attired; and eloquence has its natural ornaments and
accompaniments as well. See how eloquence was
made a pleasure in the gardens of the academy of
Athens! Instead of treating our orators as we do the
fountain in the Park (giving them a broad margin of
bare ground), we should surround their oratory with
tributary ornament. The audiences now, at lectures,
are that passionless and abstract portion of the community
that can stand anything in the shape of an intellectual
bore—the Grahamites of amusement. But
give us orators on popular subjects, at Palmo's, with
dress-circle, bright lights, opera-music, scenery, and
interludes for conversation and change of place, and
eloquence, from being a jewel dulled with the dirt of a
mine, will be a gem in the fit setting of a sparkling
tiara. This would be, beside, a kind of premium
upon eloquence, that would foster it into a national
excellence. There are men at the bar, in the press,
and in business, who have the “volcano of burning
words” within them, and would make eloquence a
study, were it a source of renown and profit. What
say to a new niche for oratory, oh, amiable public!
Let us get a new screw upon public feeling, to use
with effect when we have patriotism to arouse, or
abuses to overthrow—passions to awake for good purposes.
Let us have a power at the public ear that will
be a check-balance to newspapers, that have a monopoly
of the public eye. Let music, oratory, and painting,
combine in a tripod to support each other—a fine
orchestra, a glowing oration, and beautiful scenery—
and we shall have public amusement in which the
serious classes will join with the gay, and in which
instruction shall be dressed, as it always may be, and
should be, with captivating flowers.

And while we have this thread in our loom, let us
express the delight with which we listened, not long
since, to oratory in a silk gown—an oration on CONTEMPT,
that was linked naturally enough to a text and
a pulpit, but which would have been a noble piece of
intellectual oratory in a public hall or theatre. The
orator was Rev. Henry Giles, and the sermon was
delivered in a place that is used to eloquence—the
pulpit of Mr. Dewey. There were passages in this
discourse that were worked up, both in fervor of language
and concentrated fire of delivery, to a pitch
that we should call truly Demosthenian. Mr. Giles
is a natural orator—a man of expanded generalizing
powers. It is a treat to hear him, such as would not
be second in interest to any dramatic entertainment,
and properly combined with other things as agreeable
to the taste, there would be an attraction in such oratory
that would draw better than a play. We really
wish that some “manager” would undertake the getting
up of the scenery and musical accessories to oratory,
and let secular eloquence take leave of the pulpit
where it does not properly belong, and come into
a field more natural to its aims and uses.

We had a June May, and a May June, and the brick
world of Manhattan has not, as yet, become too hot to
hold us. This is to be our first experiment at passing
the entire summer in the city, and we had laid up
a few alleviations which have as yet kept the shelf,
with our white hat, uncalled for by any great rise in
the thermometer. There is no knowing, however,
when we shall hear from Texas and the warm “girdle
round the earth” (the equator—no reference to
English dominion), and our advice to the stayers in
town may be called for by a south wind before it is
fairly printed. First—our substitute for a private yacht.
Not having twenty thousand dollars to defray our
aquatic tendencies—having, on the contrary, an occasional
spare shilling—we take our moonlight trip on
the river—dividing the cool breezes, 'twixt shore and
shore—in the Jersey ferry-boat. Smile those who have

private yachts! We know no pleasanter trip, after
the dusk of the evening, than to stroll down to the
ferry, haul a bench to the bow of the ferry-boat,
and “open up” the evening breeze for two miles and
back, for a shilling! After eight o'clock, there are,
on an average, ten people in the boat, and you have
the cool shoulder under the railing as nearly as possible
to yourself. The long line of lamps on either
shore makes a gold flounce to the “starry skirt of
heaven”—the air is as pure as the rich man has it in
his grounds, and all the money in the world could not
mend the outside of your head, as far as the horizon.
(And the horizon, at such place and hour, becomes a
substitute for the small hoop you have stepped out of.)
No man is richer than we, or could be better off—till
we reach the Jersey shore—and we are as rich going
back. Try this, of a hot evening, all who prefer
coolness and have a mind that is good company.

Then, there is our substitute for an airing. There
is a succession of coaches, lined with red velvet, that,
in the slope of the afternoon, ply, nearly empty, the
whole length of Broadway—two or three miles, at an
easy pace, for sixpence. We have had vehicles, or
friends who had vehicles, in most times and places
that we remember, and we crave our ride after dinner.
We need to get away from walls and ceiling stuck
over with cares and brain-work, and to be amused
without effort—particularly without the effort of walking
or talking. So—

we step out from our side street to the brink of Broadway,
and presto, like magic, up drives an empty coach
with two horses, red velvet lining, and windows open;
and by an adroit slackening of the tendons of his left
leg, the driver opens the door to us. With the leisurely
pace suited to the hour and its besoin, our carriage
rolls up Broadway, giving us a sliding panorama
of such charms as are peculiar to the afternoon of the
great thoroughfare (quite the best part of the day, for
a spectator merely). Every bonnet we see wipes off a
care from our mental slate, and every nudge to our
curiosity shoves up our spirits a peg. Easily and
uncrowded, we are set down for our sixpence at
“Fourteenth street,” and turning our face once more
toward Texas, we take the next velvet-lined vehicle
bound down. The main difference betwixt us and
the rich man, for that hour, is, that he rides in a
green lane, and we in Broadway—he sees green leaves
and we pretty women—he pays much and we pay
little. The question of envy, therefore, depends upon
which of these categories you honestly prefer. While
Providence furnishes the spare shilling, we, at any
rate, will not complain. Such of our friends as are
prepared to condole with us for our summer among
the bricks, will please credit us with the two foregoing
alleviations.

The postoffice irregularities of which we have so
often complained, have drawn from one of our good-natured
subscribers, a lament in poetry. We wish all
our friends would take it as kindly, but give voice to
it as expressively:—

We very seldom buy a volume of new poetry, but
the portrait on the first leaf of Mrs. Butler's book, a
portrait by the admirable and spiritualizing pencil of
Sully, and engraved by the as admirable and spiritualizing
burin of Cheney was worth quite the price of the
volume. We have since read the poetry. The picture
bears a slight resemblance to the poetess, Mrs.
Norton, and the poetry is very like Mrs. Norton's in
its intention. But both in features and verse, Mrs.
Butler is very far that glorious woman's inferior. We
have been vexed to see how narrow an escape Mrs.
Butler has had of being a fine poetess, however—how
easily with a little consistent labor, and some little
unity of sentiment and purpose, she might have filled
out the penumbra which provokingly shows what she
might have been—but for the eclipse of caprice or
carelessness. We have struck a word in this last
sentence which seems to us to be the master-chord
of all her poetry—caprice! She begins nobly and
goes evenly and beautifully half through her strain,
and then falters and winds weakly or inconsequently
off. We could quote passages from this book as fine
as anything of Mrs. Norton's, but there is no one finished
poem in it worth reprinting. In all this, we
are looking at it with the world's eye. To a poet,
who judges of a fragment, as the connoisseur knows
the statue of Hercules, by the foot, this volume is full
of genius. There is a massy fulness in the use of
epithets and figures that shows a Sapphic prodigality
of fervor and impulse, and there is, moreover, a masculine
strength of passionateness in the moulding and
flinging off of emotion, that, well carried out, would
have swept the public heart like a whirlwind. We had
marked many passages of Mrs. Butler's book for extract,
but on looking at them again, we find the best
and most creditable blemished with flaws, and, with
strong admiration for what the authoress might have
been, we lay the book aside.

Our readers will remember a very clever letter,
written to us by an anonymous lady who wished to
conjure a new bonnet and dress out of her inkstand.
The inveiglement upon ourselves (to induce us to be
her banker), was so adroit and fanciful that we suspected
the writer of being no novice at rhetorical trap
—one, indeed, of the numerous sisterhood who, denied
the concentrated developments of maternity, scatter
their burthensome ammunition of contrivance and resource
upon periodical literature. We “gave in,”
however—walking willingly into the lady's noose—on
a condition, that she should wear a rose recognisably
in Broadway the day she first sported the balzarine
and Neapolitan, and afterward send us a sketch of
herself and her cousin. The “sketch” we have received,
and when we have seen the rose we shall not
hesitate to acknowledge the debt. In the following
parts of the letter which accompanied the sketch, the
reader will see that the authoress feels (or feigns marvellously
well) some resentment at our suspicions as
to her age and quality:—

“Have you never heard, my de—(pardon! I fear it
is a habit of mine to write too `honeyedly')—but have
you not heard that `suspicion is a heavy armor, which,
with its own weight impedes more than it protects.'
Suspicion is most assuredly a beggarly virtue. It

may, now and then, prevent you from being `taken in,'
but it nips you in the costs most unmercifully. Oh!
sharpsightedness is the most extravagantly dear whistle
that poor humans ever purchased! That you should
suspect me too, when I was opening my heart away
down to the core. How could you? `Inveigle!' no
inveigling about it! I want a bonnet and dress, and
said so, frankly and honestly. And I never wrote a
line for Graham in my life, no! nor for Godey either.
As for le couleur des bas, your keen-eyed hawk pounced
on less than a phantom there. From the day that I
stood two mortal hours with my finger poked into my
eye, and a fool's-cap on my head, because I persisted
in spelling `b-a-g, baker,' to the notable morning of
christening my cousin by her profession, I have been
voted innocent of all leaning toward the uncelestial.
Indeed it is more than suspected by my friend (cousin
'Bel' excepted) that I affect dame Nature's carpet,
rather than her canopy. Maybe I am `some varlet
of a man scribbler'—Oh! you are such a Yankee at
guessing! `Old!' ah, that is the unkindest cut of all!
You an editor, and the son of an editor, and not know
that `old maids' are a class extinct at the present day,
save in the sewing societies, etc., of some western village,
subject only to the exploring expeditions of the indefatigable
`Mary Clavers!' Have you never heard
of five-and-twenty's being a turning point, and ken ye
not its meaning? Why, faire maydens then reverse
the hour-glass of old gray-beard; and, one by one,
drop back the golden sands that he has scattered, till,
in five years, they are twenty again. Of course, then,
I must be `under twenty-five;' but, as a punishment
for your lack of gallantry, you shall not know whether
the sands are dropping in or out of my glass. One
thing, however, is indisputable: I am not `sharp,' my
face has not a single sharp feature, nor my temper (it
is I, who know, that say it), a sharp corner, nor my
voice a sharp tone. So much in self-justification, and
now to the little package which you hold in the other
hand.

“I send my sketch in advance, because I am afraid
cousin 'Bel' and I might not interest you and the public
so much as we do ourselves; and then how are we
to `consider you paid.' In truth, I can not write
clever things. 'Bel' might, but she never tries. Sometimes
she plans for me; but, somehow, I never can
find the right words for her thoughts. They come into
my head like fixed up visiters, and `play tea-party'
with their baby neighbors, until I am almost as much
puzzled by their strange performances as the old
woman of the nursery rhyme, who was obliged to call
on her `little dog at home' to establish her identity.
No, no! I can not write clever things, and particularly
on the subject to which I am restricted; but if it is
the true sketch that you would have for the sake of
the information, why here it is. You will perceive
that I have been very particular to tell you all.

“Pray, do you allow us carte blanche as far as the hat
and dress are concerned? You had better not, for
'Bel' never limits herself. How soon may we have
them? The summer is advancing rapidly, and my
old muslin and straw are unco' shabby. Yours with
all due gratitude, “Fanny Forester.”

Whoever our fair correspondent may be, old or
young, naive or crafty, we can tell her that talent like
hers need never want a market. We commend her,
thus in print, to those princes of literary paymasters,
Graham and Godey, with our assurance that no more
entertaining pen strides a vowel in this country. The
sketch of “The Cousins,” which we shall give hereafter,
has a twixt-tear-and-smile-fulness which shows
the writer's heart to be as young as a school-girl's
satchel, whatever kind of wig she wears, and whatever
the number of her spectacles. And she will be as
young forty years hence—for genius will be a child,
eternity through, in Heaven. If, by chance, the lady
is a sub-twenty-fivity, she is a star rising, and we should
like to visit her before she culminates.

The rest of what we have to say.—There is a
circulation that beats newspapers—beats them particularly
in this—the Tuesday's paper overtakes the Monday's,
but the lie of Monday is never overtaken by the
truth of Tuesday. Some time since a sketch appeared
in the Mirror, written by a correspondent, which was
seized upon immediately by some of the busy-bodies of
society, as an intentional attack upon one of the first
families in this city. A week or two after its publication,
a friend informed us of the rumor, and we read the
sketch over again to see what was objectionable in it.
With the exception of a correction made by the proof-reader,
and one accidental circumstance, invented by
the writer to round a sentence, there was nothing in
it that could possibly apply to the family in question,
and we were amazed at the interpretation put upon it.
Subsequent knowledge of the writer and her object
has completely removed from our mind, and that of
the family alluded to, all shadow of suspicion that any
particular person or persons were in her mind while
writing it. The story has again come round to us,
however, and in so hold a shape that we think it worth
while to nail it again with a denial. There never has
been in the Mirror, and there never will be, any offensive
allusion to individuals in private life. Descriptive
writers constantly describe classes, and, if they describe
them well, they will apply as the essays in the Spectator
do, to hundreds of persons. The amiable Miss
Sedgwick, utterly incapable of an intentional wound
to the feelings of any one, has lived in constant hot
water, from the offence taken at the supposed personalities
of her descriptions. It is very easy for a malicious
person to take any sketch of character, and find
for it a most plausible original. But there should be a
watch kept for those who first name these discoveries—
the first finders of the key to a mischievous allusion.
The first time you hear a malicious story, MARK THE
TELLER OF IT—for ten to one, in that person, male or
female, lies the whole malice of the invention and application.
Such people do not work in the dark,
however. Mischief-making is a most unprofitable
trade, and we trust that, in the future school of American
morals, the certain infamy of being the first teller
of a malicious tale, will be a predominant feature. It
can easily be made so, by “keeping the subject before
the people.”

One of the most curious features of New York is
the gradual formation of a Paternoster Row—or
the making of Ann street to correspond with that
famous book-mine and fame-quarry of London. Our
enterprising and thrifty friends and neighbors, Burgess,
Stringer, &Co., are the “Longmans” of this
publishing Row, and truly, the activity of their sales,
and the crowds leaning continually over their counter,
give a new aspect to the hitherto contemplative current
of merchandise in literature. Their central and spacious
shop on the corner of Broadway, is a thronged
book-market, as vigorously tended and customered as
the sales of pork and grain. They have lately added
to their establishment two stores intervening between
them and us, and, with the office of our friends of the
“New World” farther down the street, and several
intermediate publishing and forwarding offices, we of
the Mirror are in the midst of a formidable literary
mart, that seems destined to concentrate the book-trade,
and make, of Ann street, as we said just now, a
Paternoster Row. The Turks (who, by the way,
have many other sensible notion, besides washing
themselves instead of their shirts), devote each differ

ent lane of their grand bazar to a single commodity
—no shoemakers to be found out of Shoemaker-lane,
and no books out of Book-alley. The convenience
of this arrangement, to the public, is very great, and
it would be, in this city, a prodigious saving of labor,
in cartage and traffic, to the booksellers themselves.
We have a faint hope of seducing over, to our Row,
the agreeable cliques of our friend Porter of the
“Spirit,” and we hope Inman of the Columbian will
follow after (to save rent), and in this way, we shall
have a morning lounge in Ann street for the beaux
esprits, that will enable us to combine into a literary
social order and have some fun and more weight.
Nothing like combination, oh, fellow-pensmen! Why
should we not have a head, and wag it, like the chamber
of commerce and the powerful presbytery? For
a class that keeps the key of the city's to-morrow, the
press in New York is as strangely unorganized and
segregate a body as anarchy of public opinion could
possibly desire. But we are trenching here on something
we have in petto, to write upon more gravely
hereafter.

We seldom read a novel. We can not afford the
sympathy, even when we have the time. But, somewhat
liquefied on a warm afternoon of last week, our
resolution would not hold, and we took up “The
Rose of Thistle Island,” a Swedish novel by Emilie
Carlen, just published by Winchester. The story
took hold of us immediately, and we read the book
through before going to bed, charmed with its earnest
and graphic truth of narration and character, and particularly
with the entire fusion of the style, betraying
no thumb-spot from the dictionary-cover, and no
smack of haste or clumsiness in the transfer. It reads
like a book original in English, and that, to our professional
superfinery of noun and pronoun, is no small
difference from ordinary translations.

The Remainder.—One of the greatest pleasures
of living in our free country, is the unceasing satisfaction
one feels at not having died last week—fortunately
surviving to put down one more lie that, if you
had been dead, would be as durable as your tomb-stone.
Another peculiarity of our country—good or
bad as you chance to feel about it—is the necessity to
talk a great deal about yourself, if you would keep
up a lively popularity. With these two patriotic
promptings, let us say a word of a trip we made lately
to Albany.

It is not perhaps generally known that Albany was
our birthplace. We were born once before, it is true,
in Portland, somewhere about half a life ago—a
“man-child.” But in Albany, in 1827, we first opened
our eyes, as an adult lion. Up to that period we
had been under tutors, and had known only boy-friends.
By a fortunate chance we suddenly acquired
the friendship of a man of great talent and accomplishment,
and on a visit to this, our first man-friend
at Albany, we stood, for the first time, clear of the
imprisoning chalk-lines of boyhood. Those who have
“hived the honey” of their summers of the heart,
know well how intoxicatingly sweet was the first garden
of life in which they walked as men. Still a child
at home, and still a college-boy at New Haven, we
were, at Albany, a man who had written a book, and as
the companion and guest of our fashionable and popular
friend,[3] we saw beauty enough, and received kind
ness enough, to have whipped a less leathery brain into
syllabub. The loveliness of the belles of Albany at
that time, and the brilliancy of its society, are perpetuated
in a remembrance that will become a tradition;
and we have never since seen, in any country or society
of the world, an equal proportion of elegant men
and beautiful and accomplished women. It was so
acknowledged over the whole country. The regency
of fashion, male and female, was confessedly at Albany.
New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore,
were provinces to this castle of belle-dom! We have
an object in showing what Albany was, at the time
we were in the habit of visiting it, and how inevitably,
from a combination of circumstances, it became and
has remained, to us, a paradise of enchanting associations.
There is no spot in this country which we remember
with equal pleasure. It was the first leaf
turned over in our book of manhood.

We went to Albany with these memories upon us,
a week or more ago, to lecture. We spent the morning
in finding old friends and reviving old associations,
and in the evening we had an audience much larger
than we looked for, and as brilliant as hope born of
such memories could have prefigured it; and we returned
to the city the morning after, gratified and delighted.
But (and here comes the matter in hand)
there seems to have been a gentleman in Albany who
was unwilling we should be delighted. We have not
seen the article he wrote, but, as condensed in another
paper, it goes to show that the reasons why we were
unsuccessful at Albany were, first, that we have been
in the habit of abusing its Dutch aristocracy, and
second, that two years ago we “insulted a lady there
and refused a challenge from her friend!” Now here
are four items of absolute news to us: 1, that we did
not succeed—2, that we ever insulted a lady anywhere—3,
that we ever declined any fight that was
ever proposed to us—4, that we ever abused the
Dutch at Albany.

On the fourth count of the indictment, alone, a
friend has thrown a little light. We did once, inadvertently,
use an adjective, in a way which has been
remembered fifteen years! We said of the swine in
the streets of Albany (in some trifling article for a
newspaper), that they were a nuisance “more Dutch
than decent.” The alliteration seduced us somewhat,
but there was provocation as well—for, the night

before writing it, strolling home from a party in Albany,
we had been brought from the seventh heaven
to the sidewalk, tripped up by a pig! Now, to us,
the pig was Dutch. We had lived only in New England,
where this animal, from some prejudice against
his habits, has not the freedom of the city. Visiting
two Dutch cities, New York and Albany, we found
the pig master of the pavé, and the offending adjective,
lubricated by our disaster, slipped into its place
with inevitable facility. We have heard from time to
time, of this perversion of the word Dutch, as a thing
remembered against us. We had hoped that the
great fire in Wall street, the death of Harrison, the
Miller-prophecy, and the other events of the last fifteen
years, would have wiped that small adjective out.
We do not know why it should outlive the poets who
have written and been forgotten in that time—the
steamboats that have been built and used up—the
politicians who have flourished and fallen—the comets
that have glittered and gone—the newspapers that
have started and stopped. The secret of that little
adjective's imperishableness is worth analyzing—
especially by poets and the patentees of “asbestos
safes.” We wish we could stumble upon as long-lived
a conjunction!

Seriously, we are annoyed and hurt at the discovery
of a hostility that could make itself heard, in a
place we owe so much to for past happiness. We
beg the Albanians to forgive us for the unintentional
offence, and to take us and our Mirror into that favor
of which we have always been ambitious.

The spot where all the winds of heaven turn the
corner—the coolest and most enjoyable spot in the
hottest and least enjoyable summer's day—is the outside
bastion of Castle Garden. We made our way
there a few days ago, when the streets were fairly in
a swoon with the breathless heat, and it was as cool
and breezy, outside the round castle, as a hill-top on
a May morning. For children—for happy idlers with
a book—for strangers who wish to study the delicious
panorama of the bay—there is no place comparable
to the embrasures, parapets, and terraces of Castle
Garden.

Two or three little matters.—There is no
struggling against it—we have a need to pass the summer
in some place that God made. We have argued
the instinct down—every morning since May-day—
while shaving. It is as cool in the city as in the
country, we believe. We see as many trees, from
our window (living opposite St. Paul's churchyard),
and as much grass, as we could take in at a glance.
The air we breathe, outside the embrasures of Castle
Garden, every afternoon, and on board the Hoboken
and Jersey boats, every warm evening, are entire recompenses
to the lungs for the day's dust and stony
heat. And then God intends that somebody shall live
in the city in summer-time, and why not we? By
the time this argument is over, our chin and our rebellious
spirit are both smoothed down. Breakfast is
ready—as cool fruit, as delicious butter under the ice,
and as charming a vis-à-vis over the white cloth and
coffee-tray as we should have in the country. We
go to work after breakfast with passable content. The
city cries, and the city wheels, the clang of the charcoal
cart and the importunities of printer's imp—all
blend in the passages of our outer ear as unconsciously
and fitly as brook-noises and breeze-doings. We are
well enough till two. An hour to dinner—passed in
varnished boots and out-doors-inesses—somewhat a
weary hour, we must say, with a subdued longing for
some earth to walk upon. Dinner—pretty well!
Discontent and sorrow dwell in a man's throat, and go
abroad while it is watered and swept. The hour after
dinner has its little resignations also—coffee, music,
and the “angel-visit” from the nursery. Five o'clock
comes round, and with it nature's demand for a pair
of horses. (Alas! why are we not centaurs, to have
a pair of horses when we marry?) We get into an
omnibus, and as we get toward the porcelain end of
the city, our porcelain friends pass us in their carriages,
bound out where the earth breathes and the
grass grows. An irresistible discontent overwhelms
us! The paved hand of the city spreads out beneath
us, holding down the grass and shutting off the salutary
earth-pores, and we pine for balm and moisture!
The over-worked mind offers no asylum of thought.
It is the out-door time of day. Nature calls us to
her bared bosom, and there is a floor of impenetrable
stone between us and her! At the end of the omnibus-line
we turn and go back, and resume our paved
and walled-up existence, and all the logic of philosophy,
aided by icecreams and bands of music, would
fail to convince us, that night, that we are not victims
and wretches. For Heaven's sake, some kind old
man give us an acre off the pavement, and money
enough to go and lie on the outside of it of summer
afternoons!

Let us out of this great stone oven! The city is
intolerable! Oh, from these heated bricks and stones,
what moistureless, what wilted, what fainting air comes
to the nostrils! The two river-breezes doing their best
to meet across the island, swoon in Broadway. The
pores gasp, the muscles droop, the mind is blank and
nerveless. Let us out somewhere!

We had such a fever upon us as is expressed above,
when a friend offered to drive us to Rockaway. With
a mental repetition of the affecting prayer of the poor
woman in the ballad,

we crept into his wagon, and bowled away silently on
the road to Jamaica. It was a hot evening, but the
smell of the earth, and the woods, and the dairy-farms,
roused our drooping petals a little. Jamaica lies
somewhat in the island's lap, however, and it was not
till we began to sniff the salt of the open Atlantic, that
we were once more “capable creatures.” But what
a revivification as we approached Rockaway! The
sea-breeze nudged up our drooping eyebrows, gave a
pull to the loose halliards of our let-go smiles, crisped
our pores, and restored everything to its use and its activity—the
irrevocable starch in our shirt-collars alone
incapable of rally. Rockaway (we write only for
those who know nothing of it) is part of the snowy
edge of the Atlantic—St. George's hotel, at Portsmouth,
England, being all but next door to the Rockaway
pavilion. Of course there is nothing to take the
saline coolness out of the breeze (unless by chance
it has come across St. Helena or the Azores), and the
difference between the “entire quadruped” in the
way of a sea-breeze, and the mixtures they get in
some other sea-side places, is worth taking pains for.
But let us tell, in plain language, what sort of place
Rockaway is—for the benefit of those who are choosing
a month's resort for health or pleasure.

The pavilion of Rockaway is an immense hotel,
whose majestic portico forms the centre of a curving
beach of two or three miles in the bend, on the southern
shore of Long Island. From this portico, and
from the windows of the hotel, the delightful sight
and sound of the beating surf are visible and audible
—eternal company to eye and ear. The beach extends
for miles either way—a broad floor as smooth as
marble, and so hard that a carriage wheel scarce

leaves a print, and this, as a drive, we presume to be
the most delightful and enjoyable in the world. The
noiseless tread of the horse, and the unheard progress
of the wheels, the snowy surf along the edge of which
you keep your way, and the high exhilaration given
to the spirits by the sea-breeze, and the enlivening
beat of the waves upon the sand at your feet, form,
altogether, an enchantment to which, in the way of
out-door pleasure, we scarce know a parallel. And,
as a walk, the pure hard floor of that interminable
beach is, of course, equally delightful.

The arrangements for bathing are very well managed.
There are some twenty bathing-houses on the
beach, near the house, and, between the hours of ten
and twelve in the forenoon, the ocean-side is guarded
and kept exclusive to the ladies and their attendants.
An omnibus constantly plies between the bathing-houses
and the hotel, and to ladies and children, to
old men and young, the hour spent in the invigorating
surf is the pleasure of the day. All, alike, come back
elated and animated, and the society of the place
shows very markedly the fillip given by the sea-bathing
to health and spirits. Children, more especially,
who have drooped in the city, pluck up appetite and
vigor immediately at Rockaway.

As the favorite and regular resort of many of the
best families of the city, the society of the pavilion has
always been acknowledged to be of a more refined
quality and on a more agreeable footing than that of
any other watering-place. It is equally removed from
useless ceremony and undesirable freedom. Those
who wish to combine gayety with the pursuit of
health and the enjoyment of luxury, have facilities for
all these at Rockaway, in a degree as desirable as it is
unusual. The table is not surpassed by that of any
hotel even in the city, and this, in a watering-place, is
a peculiarity! Mr. Cranston, the keeper of the house,
thoroughly understands his business.

As to facilities for getting to Rockaway, the railroad
from Brooklyn ferry takes you to Jamaica in half an
hour; from Jamaica, on the arrival of the cars, starts
regularly a mammoth omnibus with six horses, and
other roomy conveyances are supplied if necessary,
which bring you to Rockaway in an hour. All delays
included, it is about two hours from the city.

Certain coolness and certainly-improved health thrown
into the scale, the desirableness of Rockaway, as a
summer resort, far outweighs that of every other watering-place
in the country.

A late number of the Southern Literary Messenger
contains two poems of uncommon merit for the drift
of a periodical. One is by Mr. Gilmore Simms
(whose much-worked mine has now and then a very
golden streak of poetry), and the other is by H. B.
Hirst—a poem of fifty-seven stanzas on the subject of
Endymion. This latter is after Keats. It is very
highly studied, very carefully finished, and very airily
and spiritually conceived. Its faults are its conceits,
which are not always defensible—for instance, the one
in italics, in the following beautiful description of Diana
as she descended to Endymion:—

Now we know as well as anybody what the “round of
a period” is, and we have seen, here and there, a goddess's
knee, and we declare there is no manner or
shape of likeness that justifies the comparison! With
the exception of two or three of these lapses away
from nature, however, it is a beautiful poem—this
“Endymion”—and will read well in a volume. By
the way, let us wonder whether the sweet poetess by
the same name is a sister of Mr. Hirst.

We consider Niblo's garden one of the chief
“broideries” upon our woof of probation in this dirty
planet, and if there are to be offsets for good things
enjoyed this side of Cocytus, we expect to pay for
Mitchell. Oh, thou pleasant Mitchell! And he to
grow fat under the exercise of such a wand of industrious
enchantment! What is the man made of, besides
brains!

We sat through the “Revolt of the Harem,” a
night or two ago, and saw all its funny sights, seriatim.
The ballet, as intended to be seen, was excellent—for
the time and material, indeed, quite wonderful. But
we had our little pleasures (not down in the bill), and
one of them was to see pretty Miss Taylor, the clever
opera-singer, figuring as an Odalisque danseuse! If
that pretty actress he not abducted, and sold to the
sultan within a year, we shall think less of the enterprise
of Salem privateers! She only wants to forget
that she is Miss Taylor, indeed, to dance uncommonly
well—the consciousness of her silk stockings being at
present something of a damper to the necessary abandon.
But, modesty and all, she is very charming in
this ballet, and one wonders what Mitchell will make
of her next! Korponay, too—the elegant Korponay
—figuring as an Abyssinian eunuch! That, truth to
say, had for us a dash of displeasure! He entered
into it with all his might, it is true, and played the
nigger with Jim Crow facility: but the part, for him,
was out of character, and we shall not be content till
he is dis-niggered by appearing once more in the role
of a gentleman. The bath-scene was well arranged,
though the prettiest girls were not in the water—(pray
why, Master Mitchell?) And the military evolutions
of the revolted ladies were very well done, and will be
better done—with a little more practice, and the mending
of that corporal's stocking with a hole in it. The
town seemed pleased, we thought.

We have not yet mentioned the premitre danseuse.
Mademoiselle Desjardins, who did very well in the
way of her vocation, but from whose feet have departed,
with the boots she wore, the exquisite symmetry
we admired at Simpson's benefit. Ah, ladies, you
should wear boots! Here were two feet in tightly-sandalled
shoes, looking like two tied-up parcels from
Beck's, which, a night or two before, in brodequins
bien faits, looked models of Arabian instep! Can
boots do that? We hereby excommunicate, from the
church of true love, all husbands, fathers, and guardians,
who shall rebel against the preference, by wife,
ward, or daughter, of Nunn's boots at $3 50, over
Middleton's slippers at ten shillings. The embellishment
is worth the difference!

We have received a very testy letter from some old
gentleman, requesting us to reform the gait of the
New York ladies. He manages to convey what peculiarity
it is that offends his eye, but he is mistaken as
to the stoop. The lady within stands straight enough!
If he knows this, and means covertly to attack the artificial
portion of the outline, we can tell him that he
rashly invades, not merely a caprice of fashion (which
in itself were formidable enough), but the most jealous
symbol and citadel of female domination! There are
thousands of ladies who would resign carriages and

satin without a sigh, but who would die by fire and
fagot rather than yield the right to mount on horseback
in the masculine riding habit! “Wearing the
breeches” is a worn-out figure of speech, but does
anybody in his senses believe that the usurpation has
not taken refuge in a new shape? Need we open our
correspondent's eyes any further? What bird is the
most pronounced and unequivocal type of martial and
masculine bravery? What bird is the farthest remove,
in shape, air, and habits, from his female partner?
What bird lives up systematically to woman's
ideal of a hero—a life of fighting and making love?
Draw the outline from the comb of a fighting-cock to
the feather-tip of his bustle, and you have the eidolon
of male carriage—and the dressmaker's ne plus ultra!
We warn off our correspondent!

The time will come, perhaps, when we shall be a
connoisseur in snuff-boxes, insects, or autographs—
but, meantime, we are curious in the cultivation of
the rarer kinds of friendship. The ingenious idea occurred
to us, some ten years ago, of turning the waste
overflow of our heart into some such special and
available irrigation, and the result we shall leave to be
published posthumously, under the title of Amiculture,
or a Treatise on Love-Waste. Our proper
channels of affection being first supplied to the point
of overflow, we have felt free to venture upon very
bold experiments with the remainder, and some of our
specimens, of course, are simply curiosities; but we
have them (friends) of every quality, form, and condition,
male and female, preserved with studious care
and industry—guardedly confining ourselves to only
one of a kind. Some of the humbler specimens are
of great beauty, but will show better preserved and
pressed in a posthumous amibarium. We can only
venture, in our lifetime, to give specimens of the
more ornamental varieties; and our object now is to
introduce a leaf of the species “callow dandy”—in
other words, to give you a letter from a very elegant
lad with a nascent mustache, a prized friend of ours,
now, for the first time, at Saratoga. He writes about
trifles, but in hot weather we (for one) like trifles best;
and as he writes, after all, with a dash of philosophy,
we have not thought it worth while to omit or alter.
Here is his letter, written in the vanishing legibility of
a once good school-hand:—