University of Virginia Library

DASHES AT LIFE
WITH A FREE PENCIL.

3. PART III;
EPHEMERA.

FROM SARATOGA.
TO THE JULIA OF SOME YEARS AGO.

August 2, 1843.

I have not written to you in your boy's lifetime—
that fine lad, a shade taller than yourself, whom I
sometimes meet at my tailor's and bootmaker's. I
am not very sure, that after the first month (bitter
month) of your marriage, I have thought of you for
the duration of a revery—fit to be so called. I loved
you—lost you—swore your ruin and forgot you—
which is love's climax when jilted. And I never expected
to think of you again.

Beside the astonishment at hearing from me at all,
you will be surprised at receiving a letter from me at
Saratoga. Here where the stars are, that you swore
by—here, where the springs and colonnades, the
woodwalks and drives, the sofas and swings, are all
coated over with your delicious perjuries, your “protested”
protestations, your incalculable bankruptcy of
sighs, tears, caresses, promises! Oh, Julia—mais,
retiens toi, ma plume!

I assure you I had not the slightest idea of ever
coming here again in the world—not the slightest!
I had a vow in heaven against it, indeed. While I
hated you—before I forgot you, that is to say—I
would not have come for your husband's million—
(your price, Julia!) I had laid Saratoga away with
a great seal, to be reopened in the next star I shall
inhabit, and used as a lighthouse of warning. There
was one bannister at Congress Hall, particularly—
across which we parted nightly—the next object my
hand touched after losing the warm pressure of
yours—the place I leaned over with a heart under my
waistcoat which would have scaled Olympus to be
nearer to you, yet was kept back by that mahogany
and your “no”—and I will believe that devils may
become dolls, and ghosts play around us like the
smoke of a cigar, since over that bannister I have
thrown my leg and sat thinking of the past without
phrensy or emotion! And none have a better right
than we to laugh now at love's passionate eternities!
For we were lovers, Julia—I, as I know, and you, as I
believe—and in that entry, when we parted to dream,
write, contrive for the blissful morrow—anything but
sleep and forget—in that entry and over that bannister
were said words of tenderness and devotion, from as
deep soundings of two hearts as ever plummet of this
world could by possibility fathom. You did love me—
monster of untruth and forgetfulness as you have
since been bought for—you did love me! And that
you can ride in your husband's carriage and grow
fat, and that I can come here and make a mock of it,
are two comments on love worthy of the common-place-book
of Mephistophiles. Fie on us!

I came to Saratoga as I would look at a coat that I
had worn twenty years before—with a sort of vacant
curiosity to see the shell in which I had once figured.
A friend said, “Join me at Saratoga!” and it sounded
like, “Come and see where Julia was adorable.” I
came in a railcar, under a hot sun, and wanted my
dinner, and wished myself where Julia, indeed, sat
fat in her fauteuil—wished it, for the good wine in the
cellar and the French cook in the kitchen. And I
did not go down to “Congress Hall,” the old palais
d'amour—but in the modern and comfortable parlor
of the “United States,” sat down by a pretty woman
of these days, and chatted about the water-lily in her
bosom and the boy she had up stairs—coldly and every-day-ishly.
I had been there six hours, and you
had not entered my thoughts. Please to believe
that, Julia!

But in the evening there was a ball at Congress
Hall. And though the old house is unfashionable
now, and the lies of love are elsewhere told and listened
to, there was a movement among the belles in
its favor, and I appended myself to a lady's arm and
went boldly. I say boldly, for it required an effort.
The twilight had fallen, and with it had come a memory
or two of the Springs in our time. I had seated
myself against a pillar of the colonnade of the “United
States,” and looked down toward Congress Hall—
and you were under the old veinclad portico, as I
should have seen you from the same spot, and with
the same eye of fancy, sundry years ago. So it was
not quite like a passionless antiquary that I set foot
again on that old-time colonnade, and, to say truth,
as the band struck up a waltz, I might have had in
my lip a momentary quiver, and some dimness in my
world-weary eye. But it passed away.

The ball was comme ca, and I found sweet women
(as where are they not—given, candles and music?)
and aired my homage as an old stager may. I danced
without thinking of you uncomfortably, though the
ten years washing of that white floor has not quite
washed out the memory of your Arab instep with
its embracing and envied sandal, gliding and bounding,
oh how airily! For you had feet, absolute in
their perfection, dear Julia!—had you not?

But I went out for fresh air on the colonnade, in
an evil and forgetful moment. I strolled alone toward
the spring. The lamp burned dim, as it used to
burn, tended by Cupid's minions. And on the end
of the portico, by the last window of the music-room,
under that overhanging ivy, with stars in sight that I
would have sworn to for the very same—sat a lady in
a dress like yours as I saw you last, and black eyes,
like jet lamps framed in velvet, turning indolently toward
me. I held by the railing, for I am superstitious,
and it seemed to me that I had only to ask why you
were there—for, ghostly or bodily, there I saw you!
Back came your beauty on my memory with yesterday's

freshness of recollection. Back came into my
heart the Julia of my long-accursed adoration! I
saw your confiding and bewildering smile, your fine-cut
teeth of pearl, your over-bent brow and arch look
from under, your lily shoulders, your dimpled hands.
You were there, if my senses were sufficient evidence,
if presence be anything without touch—bodily there!

Of course it was somebody else. I went in and
took a julep. But I write to tell you that for a minute—a
minute of enormous capacity—I have loved
you once more. For one minute, while you probably
were buried deep in your frilled pillow—(snoring, perhaps—who
knows?)—for one minute, fleeting and
blissful, you have been loved again—with heart, brain,
blood, all on fire with truth, tenderness, and passionate
adoration—by a man who could have bought you
(you know I could!) for half the money you sold for!
And I thought you would like to know this, Julia!
And now, hating you as before, in your fleshy forgetfulness,
Yours not at all.

Did it ever strike you how much more French than
English we are in many of the qualities, especially the
superficies and physiognomy, of our national character?
In dressing, dancing, congregating—in chivalry
to women, facility of adaptation to new circumstances,
inflammability of excitement, elasticity of recuperation
from trouble—in complexion and figure even,
how very French! The remark, perhaps, is more
particularly true of New York. Where in the world
is there such a copy of the sweeter features of the
jour de l'an at Paris, as to-day in the bons-bons shops
of Broadway? Here, as there, ingenuity and art are
taxed to their utmost to provide gay and significant
presents of confectionary for children and friends, and
the shops are museums of curiosities. Everybody
has a child or two by the hand; everybody is abroad,
and alive to the spirit and baby-supremacy of the
hour; everybody abandons his monotone of daily life,
to strike into the general diapason, a full octave
higher, for Christmas. But Christmas has not these
superficial features in England. This is the way they
keep Christmas in France; and the French extravagance
of confectionary is one of the outer indices of
the original from which we copy, and points us
directly to Paris.

Were the language of the three countries the same,
we should seem to a traveller's eye, I am inclined to
think, much more like a nation of French origin than
English. Although our communication with England
is much more intimate, we hardly copy anything
English except its literature and religion. Our fashions
in dress, male as well as female, are principally
Parisian. The style of cookery in our hotels, and at
all private tables of any pretension, is French. Our
houses are furnished a la Française; our habits of
society, our balls, private concerts, and places of entertainment
for the idlers about town, are all French.
We have a hundred French bootmakers to one English.
We have a large colony of Americans in Paris
engaged in the business of exporting French fabrics,
elegancies, and conveniences, for this country, and
almost none of the same class in England. In fact,
if England is our mother-country, France is the
foster-nurse from whom we draw the most of our
nourishment, of the tasteful and ornamental order.

In the society of New York I think the predominance
of Gallicism over Anglicism is still more striking.
The French language is heard all over a
crowded drawing-room; and with costume entirely,
and furniture mainly, French, it is difficult sometimes
at a party in this city, not to fancy one's self on the
other side of the Atlantic. Frenchmen are quite at
home in New York, while no Frenchman is at home
in England. And lately the fashion of soirées, beginning
with music and ending with a dance, another
Parisian usage, has followed on the heels of the
matinées which I referred to in a previous letter. We
certainly have not inherited, with our English blood,
the English reluctance to copy even an excellence, if
it be French; and it is a curious mark of the difference
made in such matters by national antipathy, that,
with a separation of only twenty miles from the
French coast, the English assimilate not at all, even to
the acknowledged superiorities of French life, while
we, at a distance of three thousand miles, copy them
with the readiness of a contiguous country.

There was, of course, a period when every work
the country was English; and it would be a curious
chapter in a historical memoir to trace back our Gallicism
to its incipient point, and give its rise and progress
in detail. And, apropos of suggestions, which
sometimes travel like the seed in the migrating bird,
what an interesting book might be written (and by no
man living so admirably and ably as by your correspondent,
Mr. Walsh) tracing the influences that have
spread from our country eastward; and to what degree
our institutions, opinions, and discoveries, have
affected European countries, and paid back our debt
of literature and refinement!

The snow-storm of Wednesday cleared up at nightfall
with an old-fashioned frosty and sparkling northwester.
While the south wind was disputing his
ground, however, the sun found a chink to creep
through, and quietly took to himself the scanty remainder
of the city's mantle of snow. I chanced to
look down upon the Park while the ground was covered;
and I wished that the common council might
see it with my eyes, for the fountain was playing beautifully
in a basin of spotless white, which, if exactly
imitated in marble, would be better worthy of that
radiant column than the mingled mud and greensward
that commonly surround it. I have been surprised to
notice the complete satiety of public curiosity to this
superb object. A column of water, fifty or sixty feet
high, is continually playing in the most thronged
thoroughfare of the city, and it already attracts as
little attention as the trees in the Park, or the liberty-cap
on Tammany hall. Seldom a passer-by stops to
gaze at it; and I have watched in vain, in my daily
stroll through Broadway, for the turning toward it of
the refined eyes of shoppers and danglers. I understand
there is to be another jet in the Bowling-Green,
and another on the Battery—though this last will be
bringing the rural water-nymph into very close contact
with the uproarious Neptune.

The joy of New York comes to Broadway as color
comes with the same impulse to the cheek. The excitement
of shoving off the old year and helping in
the new, was made visible by a pave as thronged on
Saturday night at twelve, as it commonly is on a holyday
at noon. Sunday (the superseded first) was pretty
gayly infringed upon by sleighing parties; for even in
Broadway the sleighing was tolerable, and, out of
town, said to be excellent. To-day is “black Monday”
for horse-flesh! Such ringing of sleigh-bells
and plunging of runners through the mud-holes, and
laughing, and whipping, and hurrying by, is enough
to give inexperienced Forty-three a most confused
impression of the world he is called upon to govern.
It is snowing slightly at this moment, and gives promise
of a violent storm by noon.

The temperance people have made a strong effort
to discountenance, this year, the giving of wine and

other stimulants to visiters on New Year's day. But
there is a much more powerful principle at work in
the same cause, or rather in a cause which covers
this—the destroying of the custom of New Year's
visiting altogether—and that principle is omnipotent
fashion. The aristocratic feeling now is against the
receiving on that day; and some of the leading fashionables
have reduced their observance of the custom
to a matter of pasteboard—a servant standing at the
door to take in cards. The truth is, the good feeling
of the day has been abused of late years. The hilarity
amounted to a general saturnalia, in which everybody
went anywhere and everywhere to drink and
shake hands, and exclusiveness was very much offended,
and so, very often were propriety and delicacy—three
very implacable members of society!
Once well understood that fashionable people do not
receive—presto! the custom will vanish like a ghost at
cock-crowing. If this formidable gun could be
brought to bear upon some other things, now?

A score at least of the aristocratic dames in the
upper part of Broadway have adopted the fashion of a
matinée—receiving visits one morning only in the
week. This is rather a usage en prince, but, ambitious
as it seems, it is a novelty which common sense
might father if it had been disowned by fashion. In
the first place, it leaves to those who thus entertain,
six mornings in the week, if they please, of excusable
closed doors—a very available privilege for very many
important uses. In the second place, it saves much
outlay of time consumed in ineffectual attempts to see
people; it times your visit when the ladies are in a
dress-humor to receive! and (last, though perhaps
least important) the class of gregarious idlers, so fast
increasing in our country, are provided with a resource
against ennui, which may profitably take the place of
less innocent amusement. It may be put down as an
accidental advantage, also, that ladies may dress very
gayly with propriety to pass two or three hours in a
reception-room, and, with this compensation, perhaps
our fair countrywomen may be willing to forego that
showiness of street costume which has been so often
objected to. The most becoming toilet (which is
undoubtedly that of out-doors, at least to all women
past seventeen) must have its field of display, and this
necessity has been amply proved by the fashion peculiar
to our country of dressing highly for steamboatdecks
and street promenades—the only opportunities
for showing the hat and its accompaniments. In England,
ladies dress plainly in the street, but they dress
showily for Hyde park and the opera. In default of a
Hyde park and an opera, our persevering countrywomen
have adopted the matinée. Sequitur—Broadway
will be shorn of the genteeler rays of its splendor;
ladies will heighten the style of their visiting
toilets till they can not visit without equipages, and
so the aristocracy of money takes another long stride
toward exclusiveness and empire.

An advertisement of “fifteen Indians and squaws to
be seen at the American Museum in their NATIVE costume,”
drew me into this place of popular resort last
evening. I found a crowd of five or six hundred people
collected in the upper story, and the performances
of a small theatre going on, with the Indians sitting,
in full costume, on the stage; not “native costume,”
certainly, unless they are born in wampum and feathers.
There were only nine Indians upon the stage,
and several of these seemed to have bad coughs; and
I was told that those who were not visible were confined
to their skins with severe colds and fevers. I am
not surprised that these hardy sons of the forest suc
cumb under the delicacies (?) of civilization. They
all sleep in one small room in the museum building,
their buffalo-skins spread around a stove—heated to
an insufferable degree with anthracite coal—and they
ascend to the terrace-roof of the house to smoke their
pipes, and are regaled with a daily sleigh-ride,
changing their temperature continually from ninety
to zero. The old chief who “has killed with his own
hand one hundred Osages, three Mohawks, two
Sioux, and one Pawnee,” and “No-chee, or the Man
of Fire,” are the principal victims to the luxury of
anthracite. I saw but one of the squaws, “Do-hum-me,
or the Productive Pumpkin,” a handsome and
benign looking woman, who was married a few days
ago to Cow-kick-ke, son of the principal chief of the
Iowas. The bride and bridegroom sat together, she
leaning very affectionately upon her husband; but I
observed that the “Productive Pumpkin” modestly
turned her eyes away during the pirouettes of La
Petite Celeste, a savage niaiserie which will, of course,
wear away with civilization. Still, I could wish that
some of the “daughters of the pale faces,” in this
respect, at least, were more like “Productive Pumpkin.”
These Indians, I believe, are well authenticated
as the first people of their important tribes; and
the question arises whether, in becoming a shilling
show at the museum, they have entered civilized society
upon a stratum parallel to their own. Is “No-nos-ee,
the She-Wolf' (a niece of Blackhawk, and,
of course, an Indian princess), on a level, as to rank,
with the dancing and singing girls of a museum? But
this question of comparative rank would lead a great
way, and, as it stands, it makes a very pretty topic of
discussion for your female readers.

You will have seen mentioned in the papers the
death of the young squaw at the museum. She had
been married but six weeks, and was a very beautiful
creature. I saw her, a few days ago, at the Park
theatre, with a circlet of jewels around her head, and
thought her by far the prettiest woman in the house.
She was the survivor of the two females of the party,
the other squaw having died a few weeks since. The
immediate cause of her death was a violent cold,
taken in coming home a night or two before from a
ball at the Tivoli. The omnibus in which they were
returning broke down in Hudson street, and they were
obliged to walk a mile through a light snow falling at
the time. Their thin moccasins were no protection,
and four or five of the Indians were ill the next morning,
the bride worst of all. She died in dreadful
agony, of congestion of the blood, on the third day,
spite of the best medical attendance and every care on
the part of the ladies of the neighborhood. The Indians
were all standing around her, and on being told
that she was dead, they tore the rings from their ears,
and stood for some minutes in silence, with the blood
streaming upon their cheeks. Their grief afterward
became quite uncontrollable. They washed off all the
paint with which they have been so gayly bedecked
while here, and painted the dead bride very gaudily
for burial. She was interred in the Greenwood cemetery.
The most passionate affection existed between
her and her husband. He is a magnificent fellow, the
handsomest Indian we have ever had in the cities, and
a happier marriage was never celebrated. She followed
close at his heels wherever he went, and had
scarce been separated from him five minutes at a time
since her marriage. The poor fellow is an object of
great commiseration now, for he seems completely inconsolable.
His wife was the idol of the party. They
are very impatient to be away since this melancholy
event, and will start westward as soon as the sick
recover.

Public opinion, which is notoriously unkind to the
misdoings of old men, has at last taken up the matter
of—

There are strong symptoms (in everything but the inflexible
thermometer) that the spring is universally
believed to have arrived. A steamboat made its way
on Wednesday as far as Poughkeepsie, ploughing up
the ice where it was at least eighteen inches thick.
People were running out from every side to meet her,
and many climbed up her sides while she was making
way. Some heavily-laden sleighs were obliged to
whip up to get out of her course, and altogether the
skirmish between hot and cold water (both a l'outrance)
is said to have been very daringly fought.

The “town” is “verdant.” The enchanting spring-hats
of the ladies are breezily exposed in the plate-glass
windows of the milliners. The airy, delicate,
daisy-mead patterns for ladies' wear in the transition
month make every shop-window like a landscape of
May in Arcady; the men-tailors “turn out for lining
to the sun” the light woofs of the “demme!” tribe
for the demi-season; the Croton pipers water the
streets; the small wooden signs hang on every leafless
tree in the park, warning you to “keep off the grass;”
people are beginning to discuss the resorts of the sultry
season; and, in fact, everything is here but the month
itself. The table is set, and the hour and the appetite
come, but the dinner is not served.

Apropos of Croton water—there has been a great
overturn lately of “mill-privileges” in some of the
cellars of New York. The authorities have ferreted
out, it is said, an incredible quantity of usurped waterpower,
applied to almost every branch of mechanism,
and drawn very quietly from the main “race” down
Broadway. One scratches one's head and wonders
he never thought of it before, the adaptation seems
so simple; but as the Common Council will hear no
argument about “natural privileges” and “backwater,”
the interloping wheels will easily be stopped turning.

As I presume you are interested in the one portion
of New York made classic by a foreign pen, let me
jot you down a mem. or two from my first visit to
Dickens's Hole at the Five Points, made one evening
last week with a distinguished party under the charge
of the Boz officer.

I had had an idea that this celebrated spot was on
the eastern limit of the city, at the end of one of the
omnibus-routes, and was surprised to find that it was
not more than three minutes' walk from Broadway,
and in full view from one of the fashionable corners.
It lies, indeed, in a lap between Broadway and the
Bowery, in what was once a secluded valley of the
island of Manhattan, though to believe it ever to have
been green or clean, requires a powerful effort of imagination.
We turned into Anthony street at half-past
ten, passed “the Tombs,” and took the downward
road, as did Orpheus and Dickens before us. It
was a cold night, but women stood at every door with
bare heads and shoulders, most of them with something
to say, and, by their attitudes, showing a complete
insensibility to cold. In everything they said,
they contrived to bring in the word “shilling.” There
were very few men to be seen, and those whom we
met skulked past as if avoiding observation—possibly
ashamed to be there, possibly shrinking from any further
acquaintance with officer Stevens, though neither
of these feelings seemed to be shared by the females
of the community. A little turn to the left brought
us up against what looked to me a blind, tumble-down
board fence; but the officer pulled a latch and opened
a door, and a flight of steps was disclosed. He went
down first and threw open a door at the bottom, letting
up a blaze of light, and we followed into the
grand subterranean Almack's of the Five Points.
And really it looked very clean and cheerful. It was
a spacious room with a low ceiling, excessively white-washed,
nicely sanded, and well lit, and the black proprietor
and his “ministering spirits” (literally fulfilling
their vocation behind a very tidy bar) were well-dressed
and well-mannered people, and received Mr. Stevens
and his friends with the politeness of grand
chamberlains. We were a little early for the fashionable
hour, the “ladies not having arrived from the
theatres;” and, proposing to look in again after making
the round of the other resorts, we crept up again to
the street.

Our next dive was into a cellar crowded with negroes,
eating, drinking, and dancing, one very well
made mulatto-girl playing the castinets, and imitating
Elssler in what she called the cracoveragain. In their
way, these people seemed cheerful, dirty, and comfortable.
We looked in afterward at several drinking-places,
thronged with creatures who looked over their
shoulders very significantly at the officer; found one
or two barrooms kept by women who had preserved
the one virtue of neatness (though in every clean
place the hostess seemed a terrible virago), and it was
then proposed that we should see some of the dormitories
of this Alsatia. And at this point must end
all the cheerfulness of my description. This is called
“murdering alley,” said our guide. We entered between
two high brick walls, with barely room to pass
and by the police-lantern made our way up a broken
and filthy staircase, to the first floor of a large building.
Under its one roof the officer thought there usually
slept a thousand of these wretched outcasts. He
knocked at a door on the left. It was opened unwillingly
by a woman who held a dirty horse-blanket
over her breast, but at the sight of the police-lantern
she stepped back and let us pass in. The floor was
covered with human beings asleep in their rags; and
when called by the officer to look in at a low closet
beyond, we could hardly put our feet to the ground,
they lay so closely together, black and white, men,
women, and children. The doorless apartment beyond,
of the size of a kennel, was occupied by a woman
and her daughter, and the daughter's child, lying
together on the floor, and covered by rags and cloths
of no distinguishable color, the rubbish of bones and
dirt only displaced by their emaciated limbs. The
sight was too sickening to endure, but there was no
egress without following close to the lantern. Another
door was opened to the right. It disclosed a low
and gloomy apartment, perhaps eight feet square.
Six or seven black women lay together in a heap, all
sleeping except the one who opened the door. Something
stirred in a heap of rags, and one of the party
removing a dirty piece of carpet with his cane, discovered
a newborn child. It belonged to one of the
sleepers in the rags, and had had an hour's experience
of the tender mercies of this world! But these details
are disgusting, and have gone far enough when
they have shown those who have the common comforts
of life how inestimably, by comparison, they are
blessed! For one, I had never before any adequate
idea of poverty in cities. I did not dream that human
beings, within reach of human aid, could be
abandoned to the wretchedness which I there saw—
and I have not described the half of it, for the delicacy
of your readers would not bear it, even in description.
And all these horrors of want and abandonment
lie almost within sound of your voice, as

you pass Broadway! The officers sometimes make a
descent, and carry off swarms to Blackwell's Island—
for all the inhabitants of the Five Points are supposed
to be criminal and vicious—but still thousands are
there, subjects for tears and pity, starving, like rats
and dogs, with the sensibilities of human beings!

As we returned we heard screams and fighting on
every side, and the officers of the watch were carrying
off a party to the lock-up-house. We descended
once more to the grand ballroom, and found the dance
going on very merrily. Several very handsome mulatto
women were in the crowd, and a few “young
men about town,” mixed up with the blacks; and altogether
it was a picture of “amalgamation,” such
as I had never before seen. I was very glad to get
out of the neighborhood, leaving behind me, I am
free to confess, all discontent with my earthly allotment.
One gentleman who was with us left behind
him something of more value, having been robbed at
Almack's of his keys, pencilcase, and a few dollars,
the contents of two or three pockets. I wind up my
“notes” with the hope that the true picture I have
drawn may touch some moving-spring of benevolence
in private societies, or in the Common Council, and
that something may be soon done to alleviate the horrors
of the Five Points.

I took a stroll or two while in Boston, and was
struck with the contrast of its physiognomy to that
of New York. There is a look of staid respectability
and thrift in everything that strikes the eye in Boston.
The drays, carts, omnibuses, and public vehicles,
are well horsed and appointed, and driven by respectable-looking
men. The people are all clad very
warmly and very inelegantly. The face of every pedestrian
in the street has a marked errand in it—gentlemen
holding their nerves to the screw till they
have achieved the object of being out of doors, and
ladies undergoing a “constitutional” to carry out a
system. There are no individuals in Boston—they
are all classes. It is a cohesive and gregarious town,
and half a dozen portraits would give you the entire
population. Every eye in Boston seems to move in
its socket with a check—a fear of meeting something
that may offend it—and all heads are carried in a posture
of worthy gravity, singularly contagious. It
struck me the very loaves in the bakers' windows had
a look of virtuous exaction, to be eaten gravely, if at
all.

New York seems to me to differ from all this, as a
dish of rice, boiled to let every grain fall apart, differs
from a pot of mush. Every man you meet with in
our city walks with his countenance free of any sense
of observation or any dread of his neighbor. He has
evidently dressed to please himself, and he looks about
with an eye wholly at ease. He is an integer in the
throng, untroubled with any influence beyond the
risks of personal accident. There is neither restraint
nor curiosity in his look, and he neither expects to be
noticed by the passers-by, nor to see anything worthy
of more than half a glance in the persons he meets.
The moving sights of the city have all the same integral
and stand-alone character. The drays, instead
of belonging to a company, are each the property of
the man who drives it; the hacks and cabs are under
no corporate discipline, every ragged whip doing as
he likes with his own vehicle; and all the smaller
trades seem followed by individual impulse, responsible
to nothing but police-law. Boston has the advantage
in many things, but a man who has any taste
for cosmopolitism would very much prefer New York.

Wednesday was a long warm summer's day, with
no treachery in it to the close; and the rivulet of
Croton, which ripples round the sidewalk of the park,
and goes down the great throat of the drain, seemed
giving the dry city to drink. The pavement, of
Broadway burst into flower. Birds were hung out at
the windows; hyacinths were put out to breathe;
and open casements and doors, lounging footsteps and
cheerful voices in the street, all gave sweet token of
summer. Thursday was a fine day, too, with a little
soupcon of east wind in its blandishments, and the
evening set in with a gentle summer rain, welcome as
most things are after their opposites, for the dust was
a nuisance; and to-day, Friday, it rains mildly and
steadily.

March made an expiring effort to give us a springday
yesterday. The morning dawned mild and bright,
and there was a voluptuous contralto in the cries of
the milkmen and the sweeps, which satisfied me, before
I was out of bed, that there was an arrival of a
south wind. The Chinese proverb says, “when thou
hast a day to be idle, be idle for a day;” but for that
very elusive “time when,” I irresistibly substitute the
day the wind sweetens after a sour northeaster. Oh,
the luxury (or curse, as the case may be!) of breakfasting
leisurely with an idle day before one!

I strolled up Broadway between nine and ten, and
encountered the morning tide down; and if you never
have studied the physiognomy of this great thorough-fare
in its various fluxes and refluxes, the differences
would amuse you. The clerks and workies have
passed down an hour before the nine o'clock tide, and
the sidewalk is filled at this time with bankers, brokers,
and speculators, bound to Wall street; old merchants
and junior partners, bound to Pearl and Water; and
lawyers, young and old, bound for Nassau and Pine.
Ah, the faces of care! The day's operations are
working out in their eyes; their hats are pitched forward
at the angle of a stagecoach with all the load on
the driver's seat, their shoulders are raised with the
shrug of anxiety, their steps are hurried and short,
and mortal face and gait could scarcely express a
heavier burden of solicitude than every man seems to
bear. They nod to you without a smile, and with a
kind of unconscious recognition; and, if you are unaccustomed
to walk out at that hour, you might fancy
that, if there were not some great public calamity,
your friends, at least, had done, smiling on you.
Walk as far as Niblo's, stop at the greenhouse there,
and breathe an hour in the delicious atmosphere of
flowering plants, and then return. There is no longer
any particular current in Broadway. Foreigners coming
out from the cafès, after their late breakfast, and
idling up and down, for fresh air; country-people
shopping early; ladies going to their dress-makers in
close veils and demi-toilets; errand-boys, news-boys,
duns, and doctors, make up the throng. Toward
twelve o'clock there is a sprinkling of mechanics going
to dinner—a merry, short-jacketed, independent-looking
troop, glancing gayly at the women as they
pass, and disappearing around corners and up alleys,
and an hour later Broadway begins to brighten. The
omnibuses go along empty, and at a slow pace, for
people would rather walk than ride. The side-streets
are tributaries of silks and velvets, flowers and feathers,
to the great thoroughfare; and ladies, whose
proper mates (judging by the dress alone) should be
lords and princes, and dandies, shoppers, and loungers
of every description, take crowded possession of the
pavé. At nine o'clock you look into the troubled
faces of men going to their business, and ask yourself
“to what end is all this burden of care?” and at
two, you gaze on the universal prodigality of exterior,
and wonder what fills the multitude of pockets that
pay for it! The faces are beautiful, the shops are
thronged, the sidewalks crowded for an hour, and

then the full tide turns, and sets upward. The most
of those who are out at three are bound to the upper
part of the city to dine; and the merchants and lawyers,
excited by collision and contest above the depression
of care, join, smiling, in the throng. The
physiognomy of the crowd is at its brightest. Dinner
is the smile of the day to most people, and the
hour approaches: Whatever has happened in stocks
or politics, whoever is dead, whoever ruined since
morning, Broadway is thronged with cheerful faces
and good appetites at three! The world will probably
dine with pleasure up to the last day—perhaps
breakfast with worldly care for the future on dooms-day
morning! And here I must break off my Daguerreotype
of yesterday's idling, for the wind came
round easterly and raw at three o'clock, and I was
driven in-doors to try industry as an opiate.

The first day of freedom from medical embargo is
equivalent, in most men's memories, to a new first impression
of existence. Dame Nature, like a provident
housewife, seems to take the opportunity of a sick
man's absence to whitewash and freshen the world he
occupies. Certainly, I never saw the bay of New
York look so beautiful as on Sunday noon; and you
may attribute as much as you please of this impression
to the “Claude Lorraine spectacles” of convalescence,
and as much more as pleases you to the
fact that it was an intoxicating and dissolving day of
spring.

The Battery on Sunday is the Champs-Elysées of
foreigners. I heard nothing spoken around me but
French and German. Wrapped in my cloak and
seated on a bench, I watched the children and the
poodle-dogs at their gambols, and it seemed to me as
if I were in some public resort over the water. They
bring such happiness to a day of idleness—these foreigners—laughing,
talking nonsense, totally unconscious
of observation, and delighted as much with the
passing of a rowboat, or a steamer, as an American
with the arrival of his own “argosy” from sea. They
are not the better class of foreigners who frequent the
Battery on Sunday. They are the newly-arrived, the
artisans, the German toymakers and the French boot-makers—people
who still wear the spacious-hipped
trousers and scant coats, the gold rings in the ears,
and the ruffled shirts of the lands of undandyfied
poverty. They are there by hundreds. They hang
over the railing and look off upon the sea. They sit
and smoke on the long benches. They run hither
and thither with their children, and behave as they
would in their own garden, using and enjoying it just
as if it were their own. And an enviable power they
have of it!

There had been a heavy fog on the water all the
morning, and quite a fleet of the river-craft had drifted
with the tide close on to the Battery. The soft
south wind was lifting the mist in undulating sweeps,
and covering and disclosing the spars and sails with a
phantom effect quite melo-dramatic. By two o'clock
the breeze was steady and the bay clear, and the horizon
was completely concealed with the spread of canvass.
The grass in the Battery plots seemed to be
growing visibly meantime, and to this animated sea-picture
gave a foreground of tender and sparkling
green; the trees look feathery with the opening buds;
the children rolled on the grass, and the summer
seemed come. Much as Nature loves the country,
she opens her green lap first in the cities. The valleys
are asleep under the snow, and will be for weeks.

I think I may safely announce to you the opening of
a new channel for literature. Mr. Stetson, mine host
of the Astor, as you are aware, is a man of genius, whose
advent, like Napoleon's, was the answer to a demand
in the national character. The peculiarly American
passion for life in hotels, and the mammoth size to which
these luxurious caravansaries have grown, demanded
some mind capable of systematizing and generalizing,
and of bringing these Napoleonic qualities to bear upon
the confused details of comfort and comestibles. I
need not enlarge upon the well-known military discipline
of the Johns and Thomases at the Astor, as most
of your readers have witnessed their matutinal drill,
and seen the simultaneous apparition of the smoking
joints, when the hundred and ten covers have been
whisked off by the word of command, like the heads
of so many Paynim knights decapitated in their helmets.
It has been reserved for this epoch to take and
digest beef and pudding by platoon, in martinet obedience
to a controlling spirit in white apron and carving-knife;
but, as I said before, it was the exigency
of the era, and the historian who records the national
trait will emblazon the name of Stetson as its interpreter
and moulding genius. I am wandering a little
from my design, however, which was simply to make
an admiring comment on the tact and adaptation of
Mr. Stetson, and to show how such minds open the
doors to important changes and innovations. Mr.
Stetson's observing eye had long since detected, that,
if there was any point in which his table d'hote suffered
by comparison with private and princely banquets,
it was in the poverty of conversation and the
absence of general hilarity. This, of course, was owing
partly to the temperance reform, but more particularly
to the want of topics common to the guests,
the persons meeting there being but slightly acquainted.
Music would have furnished a good diapason for
harmonizing the animal spirits of the company, but
this was too expensive; and the first tentative to the
present experiment was the introduction of a very facetious
wine list on the back of the carte. When
people no longer smiled at “Wedding Wine,” “Wanton
Madeira, exceedingly delicate,” &c., the French
carte was suddenly turned into English (explaining
many a sphinx riddle to faithful believers in the cook),
and a postscript was added, containing a list of the times
of arrival and departure of the mails, and information
relative to steamboats and railroads. And with the
spring, I understand, this is to be extended into a
“Daily Pradial Gazette,” and a copy to be furnished
to each guest with the soup, containing the arrivals
of the day at the hotel, the range of the thermometer,
the prospect of rain, “burstings-up” in Wall street,
and general advice as to the use of the castors—the
whole adapted to the meridian of a table d'hote, and
the ascertained demand of subjects for conversation.

In this improvement your prophetic eye will see,
probably, a new field for the ambition of authors (the
addition of one poem per diem, for example, coming
quite within the capacity of such a gazette), and, if I
might venture to saddle Mr. Stetson with advice, I
should recommend that it be confined as long as possible
to the debuts of young poets, the genial criticism
with which they would be read at such time and place
being an “aching void” in their present destiny.

The City Hotel re-opens to-morrow under the care
of the omni-recognisant Willard and his partner of
the olden time. The building has been entirely refreshed,
refitted, and refurnished, and I am told that
in comfort and luxury it far exceeds any hotel in this
country. The advances in the commodiousness and
elegance of these public houses, their economy compared
with housekeeping, and the difficulty of obtaining
tolerable servants, combine to make an inroad
upon the Lares and Penates of the metropolis, which

may have an influence upon national character at
least worth the noting. Hundreds of persons who, up
to these disastrous times, have nursed their domestic
virtues in the privacy of their own firesides, are now
living at these gregarious palaces, passing their evenings
in such society as chance brings together, and
subjecting their children to such influences of body
and mind as belong more properly to a community of
Owen. Other more obvious objections aside, these
collections of families are not the most harmonious
communities in the world, and the histories of the
conflicting dignities and jostling interests of these
huddled masses will yet furnish most amusing material
to some future Pickwickian writer. The ladies
of the Carlton have lately sent in a remonstrance
against the admission of errandless bachelors into their
privileged drawing-room, and the brawls of the Guelphs
and Ghibellines are but a faint type of the contentions
in the ladies' wing of the Astor for places at
table, &c., &c. I should like to have the opinion of
some such generalizing mind as Dr. Channing's or
Mr. Adams's as to whether the peculiar gregariousness
of Americans is a crudity of national character
which will refine away, or is only a kind of bolder
crystallization characteristic of the freer nuclei of our
institutions. Channing long ago fastened the reproach
upon us of having weaker domestic ties than
the nations of Europe, though he did not see in it a
possible adaptation of Providence to the wants of a
wide country waiting for emigrants from families
easily dismembered; and it would not require much
ingenuity, perhaps, to find a special Providence in the
fact commented on above. But this is getting to be
a sermon.

Since commencing this letter, I have taken a stroll
up Broadway, and looked in at the City hotel. Willard
was in his place behind the bar, a little fatter than of
old, and somewhat gray with cabbage-growing, but his
wonderful memory of names and faces seemed in full
vigor; and, what with the tone of voice, the dexterity
of furnishing drinks, the off-hand welcome to every
comer-in, and the mechanical answering of questions
and calling to servants, he seemed to have begun precisely
where he left off, and his little episode of farming
must seem to him scarcely better than a dream.
A servant showed us over the house. A new gentlemen's
dining-room, lighted from the roof, has been
built in the area behind, and the old dining-room is
cut up into a reading-room and private parlors. The
famous assembly-room in the second story is also divided
up into parlors and ladies' dining-room; but the
garnishing and furnishing of the public and private
parlors are quite beyond anything I know of short of
the houses of nobility and royal palaces. The carpets
are of the finest Wilton and Brussels; the paper
upon the walls of the latest Parisian pattern; a new
piano in every parlor; and the beds and their belongings
of the most enticing freshness and comfortability.
The proprietors have not seen fit, however, to adopt
the fashion of “prices to suit the times,” but have
begun, plump and bold, at two dollars a day, and a
shilling a drink. Until the fine edge of all this novelty
wears off, they may reap a harvest which will re-pay
them for their outlay in paint and garnish. One
remark might be dropped into Willard's ear to some
advantage—that while he has been resting on his oars
at Dorchester, the people “on the town” have become
over-epicurean in their exactions of luxuries at hotels,
and it will take some “sharp practice” to beat the
“United States” at Philadelphia, and the Astor here.
People, at first, who have been accustomed to live at
the latter place, will find a certain relief at not being
helped to fish and pudding by fire of platoon, but in
the long run the systematic service of the Astor
achieves comfort. The Atlantic hotel, opposite the
Bowling Green, is also in progress of rifacimento; and
its old landlord, Anderson, who made a fortune in it
once, and kept one of the best houses in the country,
opens with it again on the 1st of May.

I am happy to announce to you that the leaves of
the trees in Trinity churchyard have fairly come to
light. The foliage in this enclosure is always a week
in advance of all others in the city, possibly from cadaverous
stimulus (“to such base uses may we come
at last”), and perhaps accelerated particularly, this
year, by the heat of the steam-engine, which, with
remorseless travestie, perpetually saws stone for the
new building over the “rœequiescat in pace!” I read
the names on desecrated tombstones every day in passing,
and associate them in my mind with the people aggrieved
(of whom one always has a list, longer or shorter).
Poor ghosts! as if there was no other place for a
steam-engine and a stonecutter's saw than a-top of the
sod which (if hymn and prayer go for anything) is expected
to “lie lightly on the dead man's breast!”
There is many a once wealthy aristocrat, powdered
over with the pumice of that abominable saw, who, if
he could rise and step down into Wall street, would
make sharp reckoning with heirs and executors for
suffering his small remainder of this world's room and
remembrance to be so robbed of its poetry and respect!
Meantime, this exquisitely-conceived piece
of architecture (Trinity church) is rising with admirable
effect, and, when completed, it will doubtless be
the first Gothic structure in America.

We had rather a novel turn-out of a four-in-hand
yesterday in Broadway—a vehicle drawn by four elephants.
There was some grandeur in the spectacle,
and some drollery. These enormous specimens of
the animal, most like us in intellect and least like us
in frame, are part of a menagerie; and they drew, in
the wagon to which they were attached, a band of music
belonging to the concern. They were, all four,
en chemise—covered with white cotton cloths to the
knees—but, Elssler-like, making great display of their
legs and ivory. The ropes were fastened to their
tusks, and they were urged by simple pounding on
the rear—which was very like flogging the side of a
hill, for they were up to the second stories of the
houses. To walk round one of these animals in a
tight fit of a booth is a very different thing from seeing
him paraded under the suitable ceiling of the sky.
I had no idea they could go over the ground so swimmingly.
They glided along with the ease of scows
going down with the tide, and, with their trunks playing
about close to the pavement, seemed to be walking
Broadway like some other loafers—looking for
something green!

The Battery, or, as it has been called in England,
the “Marine Parade,” is never lovelier than in the
early freshness of the morning. The air is yet unimpaired
by the myriad fires of the city—the dew is untrodden,
and the velvet sheen sparkles in the sunshine—
the walks are all neatly swept; and, treading pleasantly
upon the elastic earth, invigorated by the fresh
breeze from the sea, we cast our eyes over a scene of
beauty and enchantment unsurpassed in the world.
The correspondent of the Intelligencer says: I have
been out on the Battery this morning enjoying life,
and everything I saw was in the same humor—trees,
children, ladies, and ships-of-war. The very port-holes
of the Warspite seemed pleased to have their
eyelids up. The Battery is a good deal thronged
before breakfast, and really I do not remember a promenade
in Europe which contains so much that is
beautiful. Just now we have three men-of-war lying

on the stream—the majestic North Carolina and the
Independence having come round to their summer
moorings. Jersey shore looks fringed with willows,
and the islands and Brooklyn heights are bright and
verdant. The Croton river is bubbling up in a superb
fountain in Castle Garden. The craft in the bay
always seem doing a melo-drama—they cross and
mingle so picturesquely; and the trees are always
there; and the grass grows better for the children's
playing on it. Many thanks to fashion for having
taken the rich up-town and left their palaces and the
Battery to those who “board.”

I have spent an afternoon, since I wrote to you, in
the “animal kingdom” of Herr Driesbach. Four elephants
together were rather an uncommon sight, to
say nothing of the melo-drama performed by the lion-tamer.
There was another accidental feature of interest,
too—the presence of one or two hundred deaf
and dumb children, whose gestures and looks of astonishment
quite divided my curiosity with the show.
Spite of the repulsiveness of the thought, it was
impossible not to reflect how much of the difference
between us and some of the brute animals lies merely
in the gift of speech, and how nearly some human
beings, by losing this gift, would be brought to their
level. I was struck with the predominating animal-
look in the faces of the boys of the school, though
there were some female children with countenances of
a very delicate and intellectual cast.

I was an hour too early for the “performances,”
and I climbed into the big saddle worn by “Siam,”
and made a leisurely study of the four elephants and
their keepers and visiters. I had not noticed before
that the eyes of these huge animals were so small.
Those of “Hannibal,” the nearest elephant to me, resembled
the eyes of Sir Walter Scott; and I thought,
too, that the forehead was not unlike Sir Walter's.
And, as if this was not resemblance enough, there was
a copious issue from a bump between his forehead and
his ear! (What might we not expect if elephants
had “eaten paper and drunk ink?”) The resemblance
ceased with the legs, it is but respectful to Sir Walter
to say; for Hannibal is a dandy, and wears the fashionable
gaiter-trowser, with a difference—the gaiter
fitted neatly to every toe! The warlike name of this
elephant should be given to Siam, for the latter is the
great warrior of the party, and in a fight of six hours
with “Napoleon,” some three months since, broke off
both his tusks. He looks like a most determined
bruise. “Virginius” (the showman told me) killed
his keeper, and made an escapade into the marshes of
Carolina, not long ago; and, after an absence of six
weeks, was subdued and brought back by a former
keeper, of whose discipline he had a terrific recollection.
There are certainly different degrees of amiability
in their countenances. I looked in vain for
some of the wrinkles of age, in the one they said was
much the oldest. Unlike us, their skins grow smoother
with time—the enviable rascals! I noticed, by-the-way,
that though the proboscis of each of the others
was as smooth as dressed leather, that of Siam resembled
in texture, a scrubbing-brush, or the third day of
a stiff beard. Why he should travel with a “hair-trunk,”
and the others not, I could not get out of the
showman. The expense of training and importing
these animals is enormous, and they are considered
worth a great deal of money. The four together consume
about two hundred weight of hay and six bushels
of oats per diem. Fortunately they do their own
land transportation, and carry their own trunks.

At four o'clock Siam knelt down, and four or five
men lifted his omnibus of a saddle upon his back.
The band then struck up a march, and he made the
circuit of the immense tent; but the effect of an elephant
in motion, with only his legs and trunk visible
(his body quite covered with the trappings), was
singularly droll. It looked like an avenue taking a
walk, preceded by a huge caterpillar. I could not
resist laughing heartily. After one round, Siam
stopped, and knelt again to receive passengers. The
wooden steps were laid against his eyebrow, and
thence the children stepped to the top of his head,
though here and there a scrambler shortened the step
by putting his foot into the ear of the patient animal
The saddle was at last loaded with twelve girls; and
with this “fearful responsibility” on his back, the elephant
rose and made his rounds, kneeling and renewing
his load of “innocence” at every circuit.

The lion-tamer presently appeared, and astonished
the crowd rather more than the elephant. A prologue
was pronounced, setting forth that a slave was to be
delivered up to wild beasts; etc., etc. A green cloth
was spread before the cages in the open tent (“parlous
work,” I thought, among such tender meat as two
hundred children), and out sprung suddenly a full-grown
tiger, who seized the gentleman in flesh-colored
tights by the throat. A struggle ensues, in which
they roll over and over on the ground, and finally, the
victim gets the upper hand and drags out his devourer
by the nape of his neck. I was inclined to think once
or twice that the tiger was doing more than was set
down for him in the play; but as the Newfoundland
dog of the establishment looked on very quietly, I
reserved my criticism.

The Herr next appeared in the long cage with all
his animals—lions, tigers, leopards, etc. He pulled
them about, put his hands in their mouths, and took
as many liberties with his stock of peltry as if it was
already made into muffs and tippets. They growled
and showed their teeth, but came when they were
called, and did as they were bid, very much to my
astonishment. He made a bed of them, among other
things—putting the tiger across the lion for a pillow
stretching himself on the lion and another tiger, and
then pulling the leopard over his breast for a “comforter!”
He then sat down, and played nursery. The
tiger was as much as he could lift, but he seated him
upright on his knees, dandled and caressed him, and
finally rocked him apparently asleep in his arms! He
closed with an imitation of Fanny Elssler's pirouette,
with a tiger standing on his back. I was very glad, for
one, when I saw him go out and shut the door.

A man then brought out a young anaconda, and
twisted him round his neck (a devil of a boa it looked)
and, after enveloping himself completely in other
snakes, took them off again like cravats, and vanished.
And so ended the show. Herr Driesbach stood at the
door to bow us out, and a fine, handsome, determined-looking
fellow he is.

Pardon us, ladies—those riding-hats let the sun
look in upon your alabaster foreheads—ay, and ever
cross the bridge of your delicate noses! Take advice!
Wear your hats with a pitch forward rather
like the dames in Charles the Second's time. You
look very charmingly on Roulstone's well-broken and
well-trained horses, but take not your pleasure at the
expense of the bright complexions which we admire.
“Sun-burnt,” in old English, was an epithet of contumely,
and

let alone the sun.

We have been paid for letting the world know a
great many things that were of no consequence to the
world whatever—and, among other nothings, a certain
metropoliphobia of our own, on which we have expended
a great deal of choice grammar and punctuation.
We trust the world believes, by this, that, capable
as we are of loving our entire species (one at a

time), we have a city collectively. Having a little
moan to make, with a little moral at the close, we put
this private prejudice once more into type, trusting to
your indulgence, good reader.

This is June—and “where are you going this summer?”
though a pertinent question enough, and seasonable,
and just what anybody says to everybody he
meets, has to our ear a little offence in it. If it were
asked for information—a la bonne heure!—we are
willing to tell any friend where we are going—this side
the Styx. But though the question (aked with
most affectionate earnestness by your friend) is merely
a preface to enlightening you as to his own “watering-place,”
there must still be an answer! And suppose
that answer, though not a whit attended to, touches
upon your secret sorrow—your deucedest bore! Suppose—but
you see our drift! You understand that
we are to sweat out the summer solstice within the
“bills of mortality!” You see that we are to comfort
our bucolic nostrils as we best may, with municipal
grass—picking here and there a clover-top or an aggravating
dandelion 'twixt postoffice and city-hall.
Heaven help us!

True, New York is “open at the top.” We are
prepared to be thankful for what comes down to us—
air, light, and dew. But alas! Earth is our mother!—
Earth, who sends all her blessings upward—Earth,
who, in the city, is stoned over and hammered down,
paved, flagged, suffocated—her natural breath quite
cut off or driven to escape by drain and gas-pipe—her
flowers and herbs prevented—her springs shut down
from gushing! This arid pavement, this hot smell of
dust, this brick-color and paint—what are they to the
fragrant lap of our overlaid mother, with her drapery
of bright colors and tender green? Answer, oh
omnibus-horse! Answer, oh worky-editor!

But there be alleviations! It is to these that hangs
“the moral of our tale.” We presume most men
think themselves more worthy than “sparrows” of the
attention of Providence, and of course most men believe
in a special Providence for themselves. We do.
We believe that we shall not “fall to the ground without”
(a) “notice.” (But this, let us hope, is anticipating.)
We wish to speak now of the succedaneum
thrown in our path for our pastoral deprivations—for
the lost brook whose babbling current turned the
wheel of our idleness. Sweet brook, that never
robbed the pebbles of a ray of light in running over
them! It became a type to us—that brook. Our
thoughts ran brook-wise. Bright water, braiding its
ripples as its ran, became our vehicle of fancy. We
lagged, we dragged, we were “gravelled for lack of
matter” without it. And now mark!—Providence has
supplied it—(through his honor the mayor). A
brook—a clear brook—not pellucid, merely, but transparent—a
brook with a song, tripping as musically
(when the carts are not going by) as the beloved brook
now sequestered to the Philistines—trips daily before
us! Our daily walk is along its border—for (say) a
rod and a half. Meet us there if you will, oh congenial
spirit! As we go to the postoffice, we span its
fair current at the broadest, and take a fillip in our
fancy for the day. Would you know its geography
more definitely? Stand on the steps of the Astor,
and gaze over to the sign of “P. Pussedu, wig-maker,
from Italy.” Drop then the divining-rod to the left,
and a much frequented pump will become apparent,
perched over a projecting curb-stone, around which
the dancing and bright water trips with sparkling feet,
and a murmur audible at least to itself. It is the
outlet of the fountain in the Park, and, as Wordsworth
says,

as an order is first necessary from the corporation.
Oh! (if it were not for being taken to the watch-house)
we could sit by this brook in the moonlight,
and pour forth our melancholy moan! But the cabmen
wash their wheels in it now, and the echo would
be, “Want a cab, sir?” Metropolises, avaunt!

Lady Sale's Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan
impresses us somewhat with the idea that her ladyship
was a Tartar; and she was, perhaps, as “well bestowed”
in the army as anywhere else, in a world so generally
peaceful. It is a roughly-written book, too, in
point of style. Indeed she avows: “I do not attempt
to shine in rounded periods, but give everything that
occurs as it comes to my knowledge.” It appears,
however, that some injustice to officers, committed, as
she acknowledges, “in the heat of temper,” have
awakened a little censure in England, and have been
apologized for by her ladyship. This allowed, there
is much to admire—her manly modesty, among other
things. Toward the close of her journal, she remarks:
“Nothing can exceed the folly I have seen in
the papers regarding my wonderful self—how I headed
the troops, &c. Certainly I have headed the troops,
for the chiefs told me to come on with them for safety
sake; and thus I certainly did go far in advance of the
column; but it was no proof of valor, though one of
prudence.” We can readily believe that the qualities
which gained her ladyship such general admiration,
were not of a showy order. As a “soldier's wife,”
the title she gives herself, she esteemed it her duty to
take her part in danger, hardship, and captivity, without
complaint—to oppose a brave resistance to the foe
when others thought only of base submission, and to
set an example of invincible fortitude to the host of
meaner spirits in the camp. In the extremity of peril
and suffering she never murmurs, except when the
weakness of the commanders wrings from her some
expression of disgust and contempt. Of all the persons
attached to the army, she had the most real cause
of alarm, yet manifested the least. Unlike the other
ladies, she was separated from her husband, and heard
continually of his battles, his exposure, his wounds.
Her son-in-law dies in her arms, and she is left with
her widowed daughter in the hands of a band of merciless
savages, without one male relative to support
her. She is harassed by continual marches in the
depth of winter among mountain passes, where the
path is so thickly strewn with the mangled corpses of
her countrymen, that the hoofs of her horse tread
them into the earth; yet these multiplied ills fail to
quell her spirits or conquer her presence of mind. A
bullet pierces her arm; but when the ball is extracted,
she treats the wound as a scratch. This kind of fortitude
is the only courage which appears estimable or
becoming in a woman, and shines with as much lustre
in the conduct of Lady Sale throughout those trying
transactions, as in any character of which history
makes mention. It is scarcely necessary to add, that
few books published of late years have such strong
claims upon the attention of the public as the present.
The author evidently does not desire display; but her
courage and magnanimity will secure, in the annals of
heroic women, a foremost place for the name of Florentine
Sale.

Porcelain and crockery, champagne and cider, sunshine
and candlelight, silver cup and tin dipper, are
not of more different quality to our apprehension, than
people beautiful and people plain. We do not believe
they are to have the same destiny. We believe
that the plain and the beautiful are to be reproduced
in their own likeness in another world, and that
beauty must be paramount alike among men and angels.

We believe everything should be given to
beauty that beauty wants—everything forgiven if
beauty err. We have no limit to our service of
beauty—no imaginable bound to our devotion. We
are secondary—subject—born thrall to beauty. And
in this faith we shall die.

But beauty in America is a very differently prized
commodity from beauty in England. Let us keep
clear of making an essay of this, and show what we
mean by parallel examples. Take two beautiful girls,
of the same comparative station—Miss Smith, of London,
daughter of a master-in-chancery, and Miss
Brown, of New York, daughter of a master-carpenter:
—for the former gentleman is about as far below an
earl as the latter is below any aristocrat of New York,
supposed or acknowledged.

Miss Brown, of the Bowery, is a lovely creature.
She excites curiosity in Broadway. She hinders devotion,
right and left, when she turns round in church.
In the best society of New York there is not a prettier
girl, and nature has made her elegant in her manners,
and education has done as much for her as was
at all necessary. Her father delights in her beauty,
and her mother is very proud of her, and she carries
her heart in her bosom to do what she pleases with it
—but neither Mr. Brown, nor Mrs. Brown, nor Miss
Brown, ever dream that her beauty will advance their
condition in life one peg. They love her for it—she
controls the family by it—she exercises influence as
a belle in their own circle of acquaintance—but that
is all. She lives a very gay and pleasant life, hears
of balls in more fashionable parts of the town without
dreaming that, for her beauty, she should be there;
and continues a Bowery belle till she marries a Bowery
beau. And beauty, once married, in that class
of our country, is like a pair of shoes once sold—
never inquired for again.

Miss Smith, of London, is a superb girl. Her father
was of dark complexion and her mother a blonde;
and jet and pearl have done their daintiest in her dark
eyes and radiant skin. At twelve she is considered a
beauty past accident. Her sisters, who were either
“all father” or “all mother,” grimy dark, or parsnip
blonde, are married off to such husbands as would undertake
them. But for the youngest there is a different
destiny—for she is a beauty. The father wishes
for advancement and a title. The mother wishes to
figure in high life before she dies. And Miss Smith,
young as she is, is taught the difference between a
plain young lord in a cab and a handsome lawyer's
clerk with a green bag. Beauty, well managed, may
be made to open every door in England. Masters—
the best of masters for Miss Smith! More money
is spent in “finishing” her than was given to all her
sisters for dowries. She is permitted to form few
acquaintances of her own sex, none of the other.
And when Miss Smith is sixteen, Mrs. Smith makes
her first strong push at Lady Frippery (for Mr. Smith
has put Lord Frippery under obligations, which make
it inevitable that the first favor asked should be granted),
and out comes Miss Smith, chaperoned by Lady
Frippery at a mixed subscription ball. It is for the benefit
of the Poles, and the liberal nobility are all there;
and all the beaux of St. James's street, of course, for they
like to see what novelty will turn up in such places.
One hour after the ball opens, Miss Smith's beauty has
been pronounced upon by half the noble eyes of London,
and Lady Frippery is assailed for introductions.
The beauty turns out high-bred. Lord George and
Lord Frederick torment their Right Honorable mammas
into calling on Mrs. Smith, and having the
beauty at their next ball; and so climbs Miss Smith
to a stratum of society unattainable by her father's
law or her mother's wealth, or anything in the world
but beauty. She is carefully watched, keeps herself
chary, and by-and-by chooses between Lord Freder
ick and Lord George, and elevates her whole family
by an alliance with the peerage—for in England there
is no mésalliance if the lady descended to be of great
beauty, as well as virtuous, modest, and well educated.

But—as we would show by these examples—personal
beauty is undervalued in America. At least, it
is less valued than in England and older countries.
An eminent English artist, recently returned home,
expressed his surprise that he had so few beauties
among his sitters. “The motive to have a miniature
done,” said he, “seems, in America, to be affection.
In England it is pride. Most of my sitters” (and he
had a great many at a very high price) “have been
old people or invalids, or persons going away; and
though they wished their pictures made as good-looking
as possible, their claim to good looks was no part
of the reason for sitting. It was only to perpetuate
that which was loved and would soon be lost.”

Pray take notice, madam, that we give no opinion
as to the desirableness of the English value of beauty.
Whether beauty and worldly profit should be kept
separate, like church and state—whether it is desecrated
by aiding the uses of ambition—whether it should
be the loadstar of affection or pride—we leave with
you as an open question.

We know nothing of a more restless tendency than
a fine, old-fashioned June day—one that begins with
a morning damp with a fresh south wind, and gradually
clears away in a thin white mist, till the sun
shines through at last, genial and luxurious, but not
sultry, and everything looks clear and bright in the
transparent atmosphere. We know nothing which so
seduces the very eye and spirit of a man, and stirs in
him that gipsy longing, which, spite of disgrace and
punishment, made him a truant in his boyhood.
There is an expansive rarity in the air of such a day
—a something that lifts up the lungs, and plays in the
nostrils with a delicious sensation of freshness and
elasticity. The close room grows sadly dull under it.
The half-open blind, with its tempting glimpse of the
sky, and branch of idle leaves flickering in the sun,
has a strange witchery. The poor pursuits of this
drossy world grow passing insignificant; and the
scrawled and blotted manuscripts of an editor's table
—pleasant anodyne as they are when the wind is in
the east—are, at these seasons, but the “Diary of an
Ennuyee”—the notched calendar of confinement and
unrest. The commendatory sentence stands half-completed;
the fate of the author under review, with
his two volumes, is altogether of less importance than
five minutes of the life of that tame pigeon that sits
on the eaves washing his white breast in the spout;
and the public good-will, and the cause of literature,
and our own precarious livelihood, all fade into dim
shadow, and leave us listening dreamily to the creeping
of the sweet south upon the vine, or the far-off
rattle of the hourly, with its freight of happy bowlers
and gentlemen of suburban idleness.

What is it to us, when the sun is shining, and the
winds bland and balmy, and the moist roads with then
fresh smell of earth tempting us away to the hills—
what is it, then, to us, whether a poor-devil-author
has a flaw in his style, or our own leading article a
“local habitation and a name?” Are we to thrust
down our heart like a reptile into its cage, and close
our shutter to the cheerful light, and our ear to all
sounds of out-door happiness? Are we to smother
our uneasy impulses, and chain ourselves down to a
poor, dry thought, that has neither light, nor music,
nor any spell in it, save the poor necessity of occupation?
Shall we forget the turn in the green lane
where we are wont to loiter in our drive, and the cool

claret of our friend at the Hermitage, and the glorious
golden summer sunset in which we bowl away to the
city—musing and refreshed? Alas—yes! the heart
must be closed, and the green lane and the friend that
is happier than we (for he is idle) must be forgotten,
and the dry thought must be dragged up like a wilful
steer and yoked to its fellow, and the magnificent sunset,
with all its glorious dreams and forgetful happiness,
must be seen in the pauses of articles, and
the “bleared een” of painful attention—and all this
in June—prodigal June—when the very worm is all
day out in the sun, and the birds scarce stop their
singing from the gray light to the dewfall!

What an insufferable state of the thermometer!
We knock under to Heraclitus, that fire is the first
principle of all things. Fahrenheit at one hundred
degrees in the shade! Our curtain in the attic
unstirred! Our japonica drooping its great white
flowers lower and lower. It is a fair scene, indeed!
not a ripple from the pier to the castle, and the surface
of the water, as Shelley says, “like a plane of
glass spread out between two heavens”—and there is
a solitary sloop, with the light and shade flickering on
its loose sail, positively hung in the air—and a gull, it
is refreshing to see him, keeping down with his white
wings close to the water, as if to meet his own snowy
and perfect shadow. Was ever such intense, unmitigated
sunshine? There is nothing on the hard,
opaque sky, but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handkerchief
on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the
shadow of that tall chimney is as definite as a hair,
and the young elm that leans over the fence is copied
in perfect and motionless leaves like a very painting
on the broad sidewalk. How delightful the night
will be after such a deluge of light! How beautiful
the modest rays of the starlight, and the cool dark
blue of the heavens will seem after the dazzling clearness
of this sultry noon! It reminds one of that exquisite
passage in Thalaba, where the spirit-bird
comes, when his eyes are blinded with the intense
brightness of the snow, and spreads her green wings
before him!

I went to the Opera last night for the first time.
The theatre was filled half an hour before the rising
of the curtain, and with a very fashionable audience.
The ladies had not quite made up their minds whether
it was a full-dress affair, but the pit and boxes had a
very paré look. The neighborhood of the orchestra,
particularly, looked very Parisian and dressy, as the
French beaux (whose heads are distinguishable from
Yankee heads by their soigne trimness and polish)
crystallize to the beau-nucleus of foreign theatres—
the stalles between stage and pit! One of the drop-curtains
was a view of Paris; and the principal curtain,
though representing, I believe, the Croton reservoirs,
had a foreground of figures such as are never
to be seen on this side of the Atlantic.

The opera was “L'Ambassadrice, by Auber,” and
the orchestra played the overture with a spirit and finish
of execution which was quite enchanting. It
was much the highest treat in music which I have
yet had in this country. The story of the opera has
been the rounds of the papers—an actress marrying
an ambassador, trying the mortifications and vexations
of sudden elevation to high-life, and returning to her
profession. As a play, it was very indifferently performed,
with the exception only of the part of the
duenna by Madame Mathieu. As an actress of comedy
(if I may judge after seeing her once) we have no
one in our theatres at all comparable to this lady.
Madame Lecourt was next best, and the rest, as players,
were not worth criticising. As an opera, the music
rested entirely on the orchestra and the prima donna,
the tenor being good for nothing, and the rest
mere stopgaps. The great attraction put forward in
the advertisements was Mademoiselle Calvé, the prima
donna, and, seeing and hearing her over such very
large capitals, I was somewhat disappointed. Mademoiselle
Calvé has had a very narrow escape of being
a remarkably pretty person. Indeed, filled out to
her model—plump as Nature intended her to be—she
would be very handsome; and to be what every young
Frenchwoman is, is far on the road to beauty—grace
and manner, which are common to them all, having
so much to do with the effect of the celestial gift.
But though she trips charmingly across the stage,
gives charming glances, dresses charmingly, and would
probably be a very charming acquaintance, she is an
inanimate and inexpressive actress. When, for example,
she discovers suddenly that her old lover is in
her presence (she becomes a dutchess and he still in
his profession as first tenor), she exclaims, “Benedict!”
as quietly as if she were calling her brother to
bring her a chair. There is no interest in her acting
—far less any enthusiasm or passion. She sings,
however, with great sweetness and correctness, and,
if she were not over-advertised, she would probably
surprise most persons agreeably. After all, she is a
great acquisition to the amusements of the city, and
I hope, for one, that she and the “troop” may find it
worth their while to do pendulum regularly between
this and New Orleans.

Niblo's Garden opened last week for the season,
and to compare it to “a scene of enchantment” would
be doing great injustice to its things to drink. I specify
this because public gardens are commonly very
slipslop in what they term their “refreshments,” and
(as it was a very exhausting night for the bodily
juices) we had an opportunity of testing the quality
of ices and “coblers.” This aside, there is a great
deal about Niblo's, probably, that is very like enchantment.
The ticket (price fifty cents) admits you to a
brilliantly-illuminated hall, opening on one side to a
delicious conservatory full of the rarest plants, and on
the other to a labyrinthine garden glittering with
lights and flowers; large mirrors at either end of the
hall make it look interminable, and the walks are so
ingeniously twisted around fountains and shrubberies,
as to seem interminable too; and in the immense hall
of refreshment there is a bifrons bar, which effectually
embarrasses you as to the geography of your julep—all
very mystical and stimulative. Thus far,
however, it is only tributary to the French theatre,
which is completely open on one side to the garden,
with half the audience out of doors, and the lobby as
cool and summery as a garden-alley. Between the
acts the audience go out and air and ice themselves,
and a resounding gong gives notice to the stragglers
in the labyrinths that the curtain is rising. I have
seen no public place so well appointed as this—waiters
badged and numbered—seats commodious, and service
prompt—and, above all, a very strict watch at the
door for the exclusion of miscellany.

The play was “Le Vicomte de Peturieres”—a kind
of Frenchification of Don Juan. The young vaurien
was played by Madame Lecourt, and played with a
charm of talent and vivacity for which her personification
of Charlotte, in “L'Ambassadrice,” had not
prepared me. She is the very soul of witching espieglerie,
and made love and did mischief in her hose
and doublet to the perfect delight of the audience.
The other members of the French company have
very much improved on the public liking since their
first appearance, and, with more or less excellence,
they all belong to a good school of acting. The prima
donna, Mademoiselle Calvé, is too ill to appear.

One likes to see every best thing of its kind in the
world, and never having been present at any of the

Fashion's races, I took a cold ride to Long Island
to see her gallop over the course. On the way I
picked up some of the statistics of milk, from a communicative
fellow-passenger “who knew,” and it
may or may not surprise you to know that there are
three qualities in this supposed innocent simple of nature.
There is milk—milk once watered, and milk
twice watered; and sold as such, with three prices, by
the owners of the dairies, to the venders in the city.
A friend of my companion is a dairyman, he told me,
and supplies the American hotel with milk No. 1, at
a high price; so that in the milk line, at least, we
may certify that Mr. Cozzens cozens us not. Unluckily
for the Long Island cowmongers, the long arm
of the Erie railroad has taken to milking Orange
county for the New York market, and the profits of
milk and water have very much diminished with the
competition.

It was the great day of the Union races, but the
course presented a very dreary sight. There were
just people enough to make solitude visible, and the
“timer” in the stand looked as bleak as a bell-ringer
setting the clock on a cold day in a country belfry.
Here and there one of the jockey-club walked about
with his blue badge forlorn in his buttonhole, and
here and there an unhappy-looking pie-seller set down
his full baskets to blow his fingers; and there were a
few sporting trotters in sulkies, and two turnouts such
as are common at races, and a wight or two like myself
wondering who enjoyed the “sport” except the
riders. All of a sudden a single horse was discovered
half round the course, and before I could find out
what it was, Fashion had made one of her two-hundred-dollar
rounds. To take the eight hundred (uncontested
sweepstakes), she was obliged to go around
four times, and I had a good opportunity to see her
movement. She is smaller than I expected, and runs
less like a horse and more like a greyhound than any
racer I have seen. Sorrel is a color I dislike in beard
or horsehair, and her complexion suited me not; but,
in make, action, and particularly in expression of face,
Fashion is an admirable creature. Of course it takes
a sporting-eye to admire the tension of muscle in
high training, and the queen of the course would be
a better model for a sculptor after a month's grass;
but she is a beautiful sight, and even with the little I
have seen of her, I should know her again among a
thousand horses—so marked is superiority, in horse or
man.

The other races were nothing very extraordinary.
I started for home, cold and sorry. On the road our
jarvey stopped to “water horses and liquor passengers,”
and I got sight of a dance calculated to soften
my next criticism of the Park ballet. A ferret-eyed
fiddler struck up a tune, and an old farmer with gray
hairs and one “hermit tooth,” jumped into the middle
of the barroom and commenced a jig. As the
spring of his instep had gone with his teeth, he did
the work on his unmitigated heels, and a more sturdy
performance I never saw. He danced in greatcoat
and hat, with whip in hand, and, after ending his
dance by jumping up into a chair and dropping down
from it like a pavior's beetle, he paid for amusing the
spectators (and this was not à la Fanny the “divine”)
by giving the fiddler half a dollar. With a look
round at the company, and an inquiry whether anybody
would like “something wet,” he took his drink
and got into his wagon. This is one man's taste in a
flare-up.

There is a great change in the “surface of society”
within the last two days—straw and white hats having
become nearly universal. As we are a nation of black
coats (the English call Broadway a procession of undertakers),
this somewhat brightens up the superficial
aspect of the city. Summer came upon us with a
jump out of a raw easterly fog, and what with the
lack of premonition, and the natural incredulity of
flannel waistcoats, people went about yesterday clad
for cold weather and looking uncomfortably hot. Today
the surprised clouds are gathering for a thunder-storm.

I see by the papers that the snow prophesied for
June by Lorenzo Dow, has fallen in several parts of
the country. The other two horns of his triple
prophesy for June, 1843, have also come true, for
there is “no king in England,” and “no president
over the United States”—strictly speaking.

I quite longed yesterday for a magnetic eye, to
look into the heads of two or three Chinese who
were let loose in the vestibule of the Astor newly
landed from a Canton trader. Their “first impressions”
of New York, fully daguerreotyped, would be
amusing. I understand they have come over in the
suite of the Rev. Mr. Boone, missionary from Kulang-sa
(wherever that is).

During the summer solstice, the guests at the gentleman's
ordinary at the Astor are to be furnished
with linen jackets to dine in—one on the back of every
chair, “without respect of (the size of) persons.”
I am told privately that half the expense of these airy
furnishings is borne by the venders of fancy suspenders,
as it is presumed that no gentleman will be willing
to “shift himself” before company who is not daintily
provided in this line.

Fond, as we are reproached with being, of foreigners
in the ornamental walks of society, I observe, by
the general tenor of advertisements, that we prefer the
indigenous worky. “Wanted,” says an advertiser in
the True Sun, “a smart American woman who can go
right through with the work of a small religious family.”
Vague as this specification would seem to an
English eye, the advertiser's want is most definitely
expressed to an American.

You will have seen with regret the accounts of the
sudden death of Mr. Abbott—one of the few remaining
actors of the Kemble school. He was, in private
life, one of the most agreeable and cultivated of men,
and is deeply regretted. I understand that his widow
is entitled to a pension from the Theatrical Fund of
London, of about seven hundred dollars per annum.
She was married to him a few months since—a Miss
Buloid of the Park theatre. Abbott is said to have
been, in his youth, one of the gay associates of the
Prince of Wales.

The Broughams have returned from Boston, and
commenced an engagement at the Park Theatre.
We are likely to have no more theatrical importations
for some time, I think, the late declension of the
drama having somewhat damped the repute in London
of American starring. Actors coming out, now,
require an advance, and an insurance of a certain degree
of success, and this our managers are not in a
condition to pay. The sufferers by theatrical depression
in this country are the actors, who do not get
their money unless they draw it. In England the
manager must pay his company, by the law of rigorous
usage, and he is the sufferer till his theatre closes.

Booth has been playing wonderfully well at the
Park of late, and I understand that the pretty Mrs.
Hunt has been cast in one or two new characters,
which have drawn out her abilities, very much to the
pleasure and surprise of the theatre-goers.

Broadway has a very holyday aspect now from the
competition in the splendor of omnibuses. Several
new ones of mammoth size have been turned out,
drawn by four and six horses, and painted in the gayest
colors. The handsomest one I have seen is called
“The Edwin Forrest.”

The Scotch, who have formed themselves into a
military company, and dress in the uniform of the

highland regiments of the British army, came out
yesterday in philebig and tartan, making a most imposing
and gallant appearance. The bare legs looked
rather cool in Broadway, but nature suits the animal
to his native climate, and Scotch legs are very comfortably
hairy. I observed that a physician, with no
distinctive dress except a plaid scarf over his shoulder,
walked with the lieutenant—ready for ministering
to any member of the corps who might find the
exposure unsalutary. He should be skilled in curing
rheumatism, I should say. Apropos of adaptations of
the physiological features to climate, it is said, I know
not with how much truth, that there are islands north
of Great Britain where the females are web-footed.
Hence, perhaps, Grace Darling's heroic self-confidence
on the water.

New York is all alive with a new musical prodigy—
Mr. Wallace. There is no doubt that he is so far the
best pianist we have ever heard in this country, as to
dwarf all others in comparison. The musical people
all allow this with enthusiasm. As a violinist, those
who should know say he is equal to Paganini. I have
not heard him, but I understand he is a most unconscious
man of genius, very eccentric, and is on his
way back to Ireland, after having traversed South and
North America on foot. His pedestrian and musical
passions are strangely compounded. He has set to a
magnificent air a national anthem, which has been
sung by the class under the direction of Mr. George
Loder, of this city, with immense effect. In this anthem
Mr. Wallace nas made a remarkable contribution
to the musical stores of this country.

Editors have a very sublime way of lumping Europe,
Asia, Africa, and America, and under the diminished
monosyllable of the “world,” spanning it with
their reflections as they would shade an ant-hill with
an umbrella. We tell you with becoming coolness
what the “gay world” is about, viz.: that a few families
up-town have taken to giving matinées. By the
“pious world,” we convey the Broadway Tabernacle—
by the “mercantile world,” Wall street or Pearl. The
English have become tired of the phrase, and call the
world “Mrs. Grundy.” What will be said about anything,
anywhere between the antipodes, is, “what will
Mrs. Grundy say?” And we like this—(as we like
anything which aggrandizes the editorial individual)—
only there is the little inconvenience, that when we
wish to speak of the world, as defined in the dictionary,
we are subjected to a periphrasis which cumbers
our style, or we have to explain that we really mean
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.

The world is getting on—wrote we at the head of
this article, and scratched it out again till we had made
a comment on the phrase. We were going into a
little disquisition on the evident approach of a new
order of things under the sun, as shown by wonderful
changes and discoveries all over the world—apropos,
however, of a very interesting book which has just
fallen into our hands, and of which we wish to give the
essence to the reader, in brief. We will omit the disquisition
on the approach of the millenium (to write
which, to say the truth, we sat down this morning),
for the weather is too hot, on second thoughts, to do
more than allude to a subject connected with a general
conflagration. Let us come at once to the book
in question.

Elevation by hemp has been considered a sovereign
remedy for low spirits, and indeed for most of the intolerable
evils of life—subject, however, to the drawback
that the remedy could be used but once. Will our
readers believe that this drawback is entirely removed
by a late discovery?

Intoxication has been long known to be a state of very
considerable happiness, subject to a “tariff which
amounts to a prohibition,” viz.: complete destruction
of the physical man by the residuum. Will the
reader believe that, by this same discovery, the residuous
penalty is removed?

By the same discovery, the hydrophobia is changed
to a death of physical pleasure—acute and chronic
rheumatism are first modified into ecstasy, then
cured—a “persuasion of high rank” is engendered in
the bosom of the humblest, a “feeling as if flying” is
communicated to the dullest and most plethoric. And
all this with no penalty, no subsequent physical prostration,
none of the long train of evils which, till now,
have been the inseparable pursuers of intoxication.

In telling our readers thus much, we have given
them the butt-end of one of the most curious subjects
we have for a long time been called upon to handle.
What we have said is far from a joke. A drug has
been discovered by the English in India, which has
these wonderful properties; and the mode in which it
is gathered, which we will tell with the same butt-endity,
is as novel as the drug. “Men clad in leathern
dresses run through the fields, brushing through the
plant with all possible violence; the soft resin adheres
to the leather, and is subsequently scraped off, and
kneaded into balls. In Nipal the leathern attire is
dispensed with, and the resin is gathered on the skins
of naked natives.”

The plant from which this extraordinary drug is extracted,
is Indian hemp; differing from the hemp of
this and other northern countries only by the presence
of this narcotic stimulant. There are several preparations
of it—one for smoking, one for sweetmeats, and
others for beverages and medical compounds—but the
effects are, with slight variations, the same. “From
the beverage, intoxication ensues in half an hour.
The inebriation is of the most cheerful kind, causing
the person to sing and dance, to eat food with great
relish. The intoxication lasts about three hours,
when sleep supervenes. No nausea or sickness of the
stomach succeeds, nor are the bowels at all affected.”

The preparation for smoking is called gunjah, the
confection is called majoon, and the resin is called
churrus. Gunjah is used for smoking only. One
hundred and eighty grains, and a little dried tobacco,
are rubbed in the palm of the hand, with a few drops
of water. This suffices for three persons. A little
tobacco is placed in the pipe first, then a layer of the
prepared gunjah, then more tobacco, and the fire
above all.

Four or five persons usually join in this debauch.
The hookah is passed round, and each person takes a
single draught. Intoxication ensues almost instantly;
and from one draught to the unaccustomed, within
half an hour; and after four or five inspirations to
those more practised in the vice. The effects differ
from those occasioned by the sidhee. Heaviness, laziness,
and agreeable reveries, ensue; but the person
can be readily roused, and is able to discharge routine
occupations, such as pulling the punkah, waiting at
table, &c. We add the following passages from the
treatise:—

“The fourth case of trial was
cooley, a rheumatic malingerer,
grain of hemp resin was given
first day's report will suffice for
old gentleman became talkative
eral stories, and sang songs
lighted auditors, at the
scribed for him in the
uries we can scarcely
fell soundly asleep,
morning. On the
free from headache
and begged

which he was indulged for a few days and then discharged.

“While the preceding case was under treatment,
and exciting the utmost interest in the school, several
pupils commenced experiments on themselves to ascertain
the effects of the drug. In all, the state of the
pulse was noted before taking a dose, and subsequently
the effects were observed by two pupils of much intelligence.
The result of several trials was, that in as
small doses as a quarter of a grain the pulse was
increased in fulness and frequency; the surface of
the body glowed; the appetite became extraordinary;
vivid ideas crowded the mind; unusual loquacity occurred;
and, with scarcely any exception, great aphrodisia
was experienced.

“In one pupil, Dinonath Dhur, a retiring lad of
excellent habits, ten drops of the tincture, equal to a
quarter of a grain of the resin, induced in twenty
minutes the most amusing effects I ever witnessed. A
shout of laughter ushered in the symptoms, and a
transitory state of cataleptic rigidity occurred for two
or three minutes. Summoned to witness the effects,
we found him enacting the part of a rajah giving orders
to his courtiers. He could recognise none of his
fellow-students or acquaintances; all, to his mind,
seemed as altered as his own condition. He spoke
of many years having passed since his student's days;
described his teachers and friends with a piquancy
which a dramatist would envy; detailed the adventures
of an imaginary series of years, his travels, his attainment
of wealth and power. He entered on discussions
on religious, scientific, and political topics, with
astonishing eloquence, and disclosed an extent of
knowledge, reading, and a ready, apposite wit, which
those who knew him best were altogether unprepared
for. For three hours, and upward, he maintained the
character he at first assumed, and with a degree of
ease and dignity perfectly becoming his high situation.
A scene more interesting, it would be difficult to imagine.
It terminated nearly as suddenly as it commenced,
and no headache, sickness, or other unpleasant
symptom, followed the innocent excess.”

The treatise on this subject, from which we have
made the foregoing extracts, is a reprint from the
Transactions of the Medical Society of Calcutta, and
written by a surgeon in the Bengal army, Mr.
O'Shaughnessy, now in this country. It is, as our
readers will have seen by the extracts, a very able
treatise; and the experiments, of which we had only
room to quote here and there an exponent passage,
are described with most lucid clearness. We may
refer to this interesting topic again.

On the day the president arrived, the be-windowed
houses of New York seemed to have none too many
windows, and if all the men on the tiles had been Tyler
men, the president's party might for once have
been declared formidably uppermost. We know several
things since Mr. Tyler's visit: how many people
roofs will hold; how many heads can look out of one
window; for how little ladies will wave their pocket-handkerchiefs;
“what swells the soldier's warlike
rather, what becomes of all the cotton);
extra horse hair it takes to make a dra-
a prayer may be put up by
people, for the cutting of the
” how the devils may be cast
and four, commonly used to take
how a chief magistrate and his
in; how gayly a city may
for the president of fif-
and partly for the “fat girl”
of horses' hoofs lies
” and how long and
far, at a “sink-a-pace,” will last the smile of Mr.
Tyler.

I presume the entire sanitary and locomotive population
of New York turned out to the show, and a very
fine show it was altogether. The military companies
would alone have made a sight worth coming far to see,
for (by the measurement on Broadway) their brilliant
uniforms cover a mile and a half—an expanse of tailoring
(with the exception of the trouserless Highlanders)
that should make politicians deal kindly with
“cross-legs.” I remarked, by the way, that, though
all the officers of the companies are not fat men, all
the fat men among them are officers—a tribute to
avoirdupois which should delight the ghost of Sir
John Falstaff, spite of his “give me the spare men,
and spare me the great ones.” I saw one of the
plethoric captains rubbing the calf of his leg, after his
march of five or six miles over the round stones, and
I presume he might have said to the “prince royal,”
as Sir John did at Gadshill, “S'blood! I'll not bear
mine own flesh as far afoot again, for all the coin in
thy father's exchequer.”

Some English friends who were with me, expressed
continual wonder at the total absence of raggedness or
poverty in the dress of the populace. We can hardly
realize how striking is this feature of our country to
the eye of a European. They were a good deal
amused, too, with the republican license given to a
fellow on horseback, either drunk or saucy, who chose
to ride in the staff of one of the generals with his coat
off, and with the good-nature and forbearance manifested
by the crowd in their occasional resistings of the
encroachments of mounted constables.

I was told that not only the president, but his
friends and suite, were exceedingly surprised at the
reception given him. It was certainly, in every way,
calculated to show the honor paid by the people to
the office of the chief magistrate; and Mr. Tyler can
not but feel, that while hedged in with the dignity of
his office, he is an object of interest and attention
with which mere politics conld have but little to do.

The president having got through with the weather
of New York, it was at liberty to rain next day, and it
rained. The clouds parenthesised his visit, laying the
dust the night before he arrived, and holding up till the
night after his departure. I presume it did not rain in
Boston next morning—King Lucky having occasion for
a dry day. I have heard of but one partial exception
to the accurate culmination of the Tyler star. The
officer in command on the Battery, finding that he
could not see through the walls of Castle Garden, requested
to have a flag raised, or some other sign given,
to make the movement for the salute, when the
president should land. “Oh!” said the marshal,
“you needn't bother about that. You'll know by
the cheers.” The cheers not being audible, however,
the artillery rather “hung fire,” letting off their congratulatory
welcome as the president landed—from
the high flight of his oration. He had been landed
from the steamboat some time before! Perhaps the
congratulation was well timed, and so, very likely,
his star (which must be a planet) intended to plan it.
A man should be felicitated when he touches terra
firma once more, after most public speeches.

There seems to be a finger pointing the way, even
in the picking of flowers by the wayside, for his happy
“Accidency.” Some pleasurable surprise has been
expressed at the careful zeal with which the president
kissed the ladies twice round on several occasions,
where a limited number had been introduced to him.
I was at a loss to know how a man, bred in a state
distinguished for the deferential proprieties, should
have jumped, ready-armed, to such an act of popularity,
when a visit to the presidential parlor at Howard's
explained the “starry influence.” A French
painting, with figures of the size of life, representing

Don Juan giving Haidee a most realizing kiss, had
been introduced into the apartment by the sumptuary
committee! There it stood, a silent indication to
thought during his hours of revery, and as the mystic
intimation occupied, frame and all, one entire
wall of the room, the lesson was inevitable. Sequitur
—the above-mentioned liberal dispensation of kisses.

I am told that a game of chess is child's play to the
diplomacy at work, during the president's visit, for the
control of his movements. Office-seekers and officeholders,
“authorities,” private friends, Spartaus, repealers,
whigs, and locofocos, tugged at his ear and
button continually. I trust, if he is fond of contrast,
that his ex-excellency will try a second first impression
of New York a year or two hence.

The president's departure was most felicitous as to
weather—the loveliness of the sunset, and the beauty
of the bay, making up for him the finest of back-ground
effects. Some hundreds of people were on
the Battery, and the steamboat-wharf was crowded
with spectators. As the boat started, the crews of the
men-of-war ran up the rigging like disturbed ants, and
saluted her as she passed with three cheers. He went
out of the harbor with relays of “Hail Columbia,”
the band on board the boat beginning with it, and the
two ships taking it up as he went along. So Columbia
is decidedly hailed—if it will do it any good!

I saw an amusing resurrection of a horse yesterday.
One of the military companies were marching gayly
down the street on their way to embark for Boston,
when a blind horse in a swill-cart, whose calamity was
forgotten for the instant by his occupied master,
walked deliberately into one of the Croton excavations.
The harness was just strong enough to break
his fall, the cart was left above ground, and he stood
on the bottom, as comfortably out of the way as
“truth in a well.” The driver was a man for an
emergency, and, indeed, acted so much as if it was
“part of the play,” that a Chinese traveller would
probably have recorded it as a melo-dramatic accompaniment
to the show. He took off his coat very quietly,
picked up one of the shovels of the absent workmen,
and commenced filling up the ditch. The loose
dirt went in very fast, and the horse, with an instinct
against being buried alive, rose with the surface.
From being some inches below the pavement,
his head was getting above ground when I left him;
and as the old man was still piling on very industriously,
I presume he soon had him once more at the
level of cock-crowing.

There have been various definitions of “a gentleman,”
but the prettiest and most poetic is that given
by a young lady of this city the other day: “A gentleman,”
said she, “is a human being, combining a
woman's tenderness with a man's courage.”

“Cheap literature” is shaking in its shoes. I understand
the publishers “see the expediency” of making
their editions more costly, and accommodating
them to the smaller sales. The great American maw
is surfeited with “new novels” at last. I trust that
booksellers and authors will now become slightly acquainted.

What shall it be? If we understand you rightly,
you would prefer on this last page, some well-contrived
nonsense—to wind off trippingly, as it were.
Wisdom is respectable. Pictures, poetry, prose, pathos,
and puffery, are all very well—but after being
instructed, you wish to be let out of school. Is
that it?

Something about “town,” of course. Folly lives
here, all the year round. Fashion is exclusively urban.
And when we have mentioned these two, we
have named the persons in our acquaintance about
whom there is, by much, the liveliest curiosity. What
Folly is doing in town, and what is the last antic of
Fashion, are departments of news that are read before
the deaths and marriages—“as nobody can deny.”
Fashion be our theme, then, “for the nonce.” We
would devote this page to it eternally, if we dared.
That we should please you by so doing, we very well
know. But the owl is the king of types, and wisdom
has, of print, a chartered monopoly—hang her!

Well, madam, the fashions. Let us begin at the
small end of the horn, and touch first upon the crockery
sex—winding off with the china and porcelain.

The gentlemen, who had been previously let up,
have been lately let down. Straps were abandoned by
the cognoscenti last autumn—with the first “slosh.”
Suspenders were abandoned with the first intimation
of the present summer solstice. There is at present
no unnatural restraint upon trousers. They are prevented
from coming up by their natural gravity—from
coming down by being “caught on the hip.” Shoulders
are emancipated from the caprices of genuflection.
The hollow of the foot suffers no longer from
the shrug of incredulity. The nether man, in short,
is free, sovereign, and independent.

Among the advantages of this revolution is the
cleanly circumstance that the boot, in its nightly exit,
is no longer compelled to make a thoroughfare of the
leg of the pantaloon. This is an “inexpressible” relief.
Buttons, also, are subjected no longer to the
severe trials of stooping. Boots, unhappily, can no
longer conceal their “often infirmities”—high polish
and indifference to surprise and exposure being indispensable
accompaniments to their present loose associations.
As an offset to the expensiveness of this,
the pantaloons themselves will not be so frequently
in-kneed.

Frock-coats are going out of fashion, and Newmarket
cut-aways are worn for the morning. Very well
for those who have small hips, as the latter are rather
spready. This exacts also great tidiness in the cut of
the “continuations.” Waistcoats are made longer,
and with drooping wings, to conceal any little vagaries
in the newly emancipated trousers. But this, too,
exaggerates unbecomingly the apparent size of the
hips. “The pyramid inverted” is our model, by the
laws of art, as the “pyramid proper” is that of the
ladies. Gaiters are the mode—but they require a
neat pastern. Your greyhound breed of man looks
well in them. They should be made separate from
the shoe, for they require washing, and your unscrupulous
dingy shoe is an abomination. Patent leather,
of course, till death.

Hats are a delicate subject. There should be as
many fashions of them as there are varieties of human
faces. Indeed, hats should be destined and allotted
to men, as irrevocably as noses and hair—suitable by
infallible harmonies of physiognomy. We should be
born in hats—hats that would grow without materially
altering in shape or expression. We would as soon
let a barber choose us a nose as a hatter a hat. And
as to a fashion in hats—one fashion for all men—
where is thy rebuke, oh Nature, tortured and travestied!
But still, fashions there be! John Bull is at
present wearing his hat very small—the Frenchman is
wearing his very large. The Yankee wears his very
peaked—the German wears his very flat. We scorn
to give the encouragement of print to any one of
these. Suit yourself—since Nature has left you unfinished.
Take counsel of an artist or of a woman.
Buy no hat rashly.

As to the ladies, we would not, like

but we must be permitted to record our little private
distress and apprehension at the utter cessation of all
novelty in their fashions. The one new stuff of
“Balzarine,” unless we are in a most benighted state
of ignorance, comprises the entire variety of the season.
We meet our few sins of idolatry in the very
bonnets, the very boddices, the very namelessnesses
of last year's product and admiration! Are the brains
of milliners subject to drought? Is invention dried up
—fancy, imagination, quite squeezed dry? Are we to
be subjected to sameness in angels—one eternal and
unchanging exterior? Forbid it, while the world
continues sinful, oh sumptuary powers! We could
not bear, in our present state of mind, the angelic livery
of one eternal gown (wings, if you like to call it
so), with no new hat, no ravishing garniture for the
shoulders! Oh no! Immolate the milliners for their
dull brains! Turn your genius into this seemingly
exhausted channel, oh, unemployed painters! Show
us woman—like the opal or the cloud—dressed in
new colors whenever she comes into the sun! Adorably
sweet as she is, she is sweeter for the outer spice
of variety!

If to lack classes of society which another nation
possesses, be a falling behind that nation in refinement
(query, whether!), we are behind England, at
least, in this degree, that we possess no class of table-talkers.
Dinner-parties in this country are gatherings-together
of friends, chiefly to eat, and to chat,
as it may happen. The host has been at great pains
to procure a haunch of venison, but he has not
thought of “the wit” for dinner. He has neither
overlooked the olives nor the currant-jelly—but, alas!
the attic salt is forgotten! The tomatoes will flank
the roast, and the celery-sauce the boiled—but who
is to listen to Doctor Gabble, or draw out Alderman
Mumchance? There will be two misses and no “eligible,”
or two eligibles and no miss. The dinner is
arranged with studied selection, but the guests are invited
by the alphabet. The eating will be zealous and
satisfactory, but the “entertainment” as the god of
dulness pleases.

So provides not his dinner, this gentleman's foreign
correspondent (we take one of the same class), in
Russell square. Mr. Mordaunt Figgins (large trader
and small banker, of Throgmorton street) wishes, we
will say for example, to give a very smart and impressive
dinner to Mr. Washington, Wall street, just arrived
with a travelling credit from New York. The
butler sees to the dinner—ca va sans dire. Who
shall be asked? Smith, of course. His jokes will be
all new to the Yankee, and it will look spirituelle to
have an author. He will be sure to come—for Figgins
discounts his bills. Put down Smith. Who
next? We must have a lord. Smith won't show off
without a lord, and the American will all but go into
fits to meet one at dinner. Let's see! There's old
Lord Fumble, always wanting to borrow ten pounds,
Put down Lord Fumble. So—a lord and a wit. Now,
two good listeners. They must be ladies, of course.
We shall have too many black-coats. What, ladies
listen, Mrs. Figgins? The Pimpkinsons. Well—they
are poor and stylish-looking, and the Yankee knows
nothing of the blue-book. Say the Pimpkinsons.
Now for a dandy or two, and one handsome woman
that flirts, in case Jonathan is a gay man. And, I
say, Mrs. Figgins, there'll be a spare seat, and you
may ask your mother—only she must dress well and
say nothing of “the shop.” And duly at eight
o'clock Mr. Figgins's guests arrive—Smith wishing
bills could be discounted without black-mail interest—
my Lord Fumble turning up his (inward) nose, but
relieved to meet Smith—the dandies hungry and supercilious—the
Misses P. delighted and frisky—and
the Yankee excessively well-dressed and dumbfounded
to meet Smith and a live lord. Smith talks to the
lord and at the Yankee, the rest play their parts “as
cast in the bill,” and everybody goes off delighted.
The dinner was a hit, and Smith was “never so bril
liant”—if Mrs. Figgins and Mr. Washington, Wall
street, can be relied on.

Let us glance at another phase of the “life of the
diner-out.” Mr. Smith has accepted one of his mos
agreeable invitations—a west-end dinner, with a nobleman
for his host. Mr. Smith is the son of a music
master, and of course was born with an indisputable
claim to the supreme contempt of his noble convives.
By his talents, and more particularly by his agreeable
powers, however, he has uncurled the lip of scorn,
and moves in aristocratic society, a privileged intruder.
In the drawing-room, before dinner, Mr. Smith
is ceremoniously polite—he is the one man in the company
who dare not venture to be at his ease. Dinner
is announced. The ladies are handed down by those
who are born his betters, and he follows, silent and
alone. He takes the seat that is left, wherever it be,
and feels that he must be agreeable to his neighbor,
whoever it be—at least till the conversation becomes
general, when he is expected to shine. Meantime
his brain is busier than his stomach, for he is watching
for an opening to a pun, and studying the gnests
around him to arm his wit and lay traps for his stories.
If, by chance, he is moody or ill at ease, he
has not the noble privilege of reserve or silence.
Not to talk—Smith not to be funny—were outrageous!
“What was the man asked for?” would have been
the first exclamation after his departure. Oh, no! he
must be brilliant, coute qu'il coute; and as he is expected
to extemporize verses at the piano after dinner,
he must be cudgelling his invention at the same time
to get together the material, and weave in the current
news of the day, and the current scandal of the hour,
with, of course, the proper seasoning of compliment
to lords and ladies present. Hic, labor, hic opus est!
The dishes are removed and the desert is set on the
table, and Mr. Smith, who has hitherto kept up a
small fire of not very old puns on the meats and their
concomitants, becomes the object of general, but impassive
and supercilious expectation. His listeners
are waiting to be amused, without feeling the slightest
obligation to draw out his wit by their own, and after
this wet blanket has made his efforts hang fire for
some time, the master of the house calls for “that
very droll story”—the same song and story having
been not only told often before, but expanded and embellished
in the New Monthly or the John Bull.
Wishing lords would tell stories of their own (which
they never do), and dreading lest the company are already
familiar with his story, Smith affects to select
one listener to whom it is quite new, and to tell it for
his individual amusement. In the midst of his narration,
he discovers by some maladroit interruption that
this person knows the story by heart, and, obliged to
finish it without the zest of novelty, he makes a
failure, and concludes amid a general silence. We
have seen this happen once, and, from the nature of
things, it must happen often. Who would wear such
laurels? Who would wish this state of society introduced—this
yet unforged link added to the socral
chain of America?

It is the common argument with the advocates of a
monarchical form of government, that the arts and
literature would be better fostered—that the wealth
of which patronage is a growth, is only accumulated
by primogeniture and entail. Heaven defend us from
such fostering, say we! Heaven defend us from such
patronage! No, no! Genius is proud! Genius is
humbled and cowed, damped and degraded by patronage—“patronage”
so called, we mean. The man
gifted by his God with superiority to his fellows, does
not, without an anguish of shame, yield precedence
to the nobility of a king's patent. He is self-humbled
when he does it. He loses the sense of superiority,
without which he is no more noble in genius than the
knight is noble in the field when his spurs are hacked

off by the herald. There is no equality, felt or understood,
between lord and author in England. It
pleases authors so to represent it in books, but they
never felt it. We have seen the favorites of the day
in their hour of favor, and heard enough said of them
to show us how much more would be said to ears
more confidential. Through all the abandon, through
all the familiarity of festive moments, when there is
nothing which could be named which marks a distinction
between noble and simple, there is an invisible
arm for ever extended, with reversed hand, which the
patronized author feels on his breast like a bar of iron.
He never puts it aside. He never loses the remembrance
of his inferiority. He is always a parasite—
always a belier of God's mark of greatness, the nobility
of mind.

If we are remarkable for anything worth putting
your finger on, it is for a kind of divining-rod faculty
that we have—useful to everybody but ourself. We
can point to hidden treasure with a dip infallible—if
it be for another man's benefit. In our own case, and
for our own profit, we are, like all enchanted rods
when dropped from the hand of the enchanter—a
manifest and incapable stick. In the exercise of this
vicarious faculty, we are about to take a walk up
Broadway (on paper), and by pointing to undiscovered
values, show to several persons how they can make
their fortunes.

Here we are at the Battery—the most popular resort
in town, and the most beautiful promenade in the
known world. Within three minutes' walk of this
lovely spot reside at least two or three thousand foreigners,
the lower part of Broadway being their chosen
and favorite quarter, and the “marine walk” their
constant lounge. Bachelors innumerable of our own
nation herd hereabout. The great baths of the city
are near by, and any additional inducement would be
the last drop in the bucket of attraction, and would
double the number of Battery-frequenters. Where
in the world beside, is there—unoccupied—such a
place for a café?

Dispossess yourself, dear reader, of all impressions
of cafés as you see them now, and of all idea of coffee
and other friandises such as are commonly served
to you in places so called. We speak of a Parisian
café—a palace of cushions, gilding and mirrors, sumptuous
as a thing rubbed out of the lamp of Aladdin,
and presided over by a queen of the counter in the
shape of a lady only less pretty than respectable.
We speak of a luxurious and fashionable saloon,
where, in the neighborhood of a lovely promenade,
gentlemen and their dames and daughters can find
faultless coffee, and faultless ices and fruits—a place
to resort to in the slow hours, to rest in after a walk, to
find refreshment after a bath, to meet friends and acquaintances.
Why, in any city of Europe there
would be dozens of cafés around a spot so enchanting.
And we are fast overtaking Europe in the taste for
these approved luxuries, and, in our opinion, the public
is quite ready for this! In the month of April
just gone by, there were placards “to let” upon the
doors of the two houses facing the Battery between
Greenwich street and Broadway. What an opportunity
lost! What safer investment of capital could
there be than to have expended a few thousand dollars
upon the lower story and basement of this block,
making of it a grand café? What in Europe could exceed
the beauty of the prospect from its windows and
doors, the freshness of its unpolluted air, the shade
upon its sidewalk from the magnificent trees in front,
and the charms of scenery and promenade immediately
adjoining? We only wonder that to such a
“call” of opportunity, a café did not spring through the
ground like a mushroom, ready furnished with coffee
and curaçoa, silver spoons and a lady at the counter!

Since we are not a Frenchman, nor a German, nor
an “adult alien” of any description, we are sorry to
say that these ultra-marine dwellers among us have
more taste than we for fine scenery, elegant resorts,
and fresh air. Foreigners monopolize the bright spot
of Manhattan. The Battery is their nucleus. Fashion,
indigenous fashion, has gone up town—an “up-town”
hedged off from the rivers on either side by
streets unfootworthy, and neighborhoods never penetrated
to the water-side on any errand but business
—leaving to foreigners the only spot in this vast
island-city where the view and fresh air of the sea are
decently accessible. On this string we have harped
before, and we leave it now with a little suggestion
that we can not so well bestow elsewhere—that while
this café project is in process of incubation, the authorities
would oblige us and the remainder of the
public by giving us a comfortable seat or two with
backs to them in the shady avenues of the Battery.

And now, to come up Broadway a little. In all
countries but this, rooms commanding advantages of
view have a proportionate high value as lodgings, and
are furnished and let accordingly. Without stopping
at the buildings whose value as residences are so much
increased by the oppositeness of the superb structure
and its leafy surroundings in Trinity churchyard, let
us come at once to the Park. From the corner of
the American Museum to the church in Beekman
street extends a line of buildings, the advantages of
which as to neighborhood and prospect would command
the highest price, as lodgings, in any other city
in the world. The superb fountain—the trees and
grass of the enclosure—the views of the magnificent
church and hotels, and the thronged pavement of
Broadway opposite, are all visible from those desirable
chambers. The large company of single gentlemen
who occupy rooms similarly situated in other cities—
gentlemen who want lodging-rooms and breakfast, and
dine wherever they like—are compelled to dive into
the dark side-streets, and either live in pent-up quarters
quite away from this centre of attraction, or undertake
the life of hotels which has, for many of
them, serious objections. Luxuriously fitted and
furnished, with a housekeeper and the usual appliances
of English lodging-houses, this line of buildings
would be unequalled in attractions to bachelors.
Everything they desire in a residence would be there
attained—centrality, comfort, and accessibility. We
recommend to the landlords who now let rooms, commanding
such advantages, for cheap lodgings, barber's
shops, and lumber-rooms, to turn their attention
forthwith to this obviously better account, and at the
same time embellish and improve the most conspicuous
part of the city.

We were going into various other details of the unimproved
capabilities of New York, but verbum sap.
Our drift is visible, and it is only necessary in reference
to such subjects to set the wide-awake to thinking.

The extreme heats of the last week or two have
depopulated country-seats, and driven thousands from
the open glare and thin roofs of rural resorts, to the
shady sidewalks and stone walls of the more temperate
city. The dim and cool vestibules of the large hotels
are thronged with these driven-in strangers; and in
the refreshing atmosphere of the manifold iced drinks
and their varied odors of mint and pine-apple, they
bless Heaven for the cooling luxuries of cities, pitying
all those whose destiny or poverty confines them to
the unmitigated country. Enjoying, as we do, the
blessings of metropolitan protection in July, we feel
called upon to express our deep sympathy with those

unfortunate beings, who, in places of public resort, or
in private cottages, are fulfilling their sad destiny of
sultry exposure. The once porous hill-sides and valleys,
baked by the sun to the induration of a paved
street, lack the delicious sprinklings of Croton water-pipes.
The warm milestones, few and far between,
do but remind the scorched passer-by of the gushing
hydrants of Broadway. The tepid spruce-beer and
chalky soda-water of the country-inns only deepen the
agony of absence from “juleps” and “cobblers.”
What would not these poor sufferers give for a brick
block between them and the sun! How would they
not bless Heaven for the sight of the cold sweat on a
wall of unheated and impermeable granite! What
celestial bliss would it not be, to see, on a country
road, at every few yards' distance, black boys, unpaid
and unthanked, directing, like benign angels, streams
of the pellucid element across their sultry way! Ah!
the luxury, in the summer-heats, of city-walls and
city refrigerations!

It has been unreflectingly thought that there were
two classes of human beings overworked and uncared
for. It has been said that there was no Providence
for housemaids and editors. The predecessors of
these laborious animals, it was supposed, had, in some
previous metempsychosis, committed sins which
doomed their posterity to perpetual toil. It is true,
theirs is a destiny of crash, in a world, for others, of
comparative diaper and dimity. But, mark the alleviations!
The first of July comes round, and Heaven
inflicts upon the task-masters and mistresses of these
oppressed maids, a locomotive insanity. With toil
and sweat they pack up their voluminous traps, and
embarking in a seething boat they depart, panting and
red-faced, on their demented travels. They go from
place to place, packing and unpacking, fretting and
sweating from day to day, and arriving at last at the
grand fool-dom of Saratoga, they take up their lodging
for a month in chambers of pill-box dimensions,
pitiably persuaded that the smell of pine partitions,
and the pitchy closeness of shingled roofs reeking in
the sun, are the fragrance of the fields, and a blessed
relief from the close air of the city! So, for weeks,
they absent themselves, deluded. The housemaid,
meantime, has possession of the cool and spacious
dwellings deserted for her use. The dragged muscles
relax over her collar-bone and shoulders, for she has
now no water to carry up-stairs and down. She recovers
the elasticity in the small of her back, and the
natural distribution of red and white in her flushed
and overheated complexion. The well-contrived blinds,
closed in the freshness of the morning-hours, keep the
house cool and dim for her noontide repose. The spacious
drawing-rooms are hers, in which to wander at
will, barefoot if she likes, on the luxurious carpets.
The bath-rooms are near her bed, and the ice-man
comes daily to the door, and unless she choose to step
out upon the sidewalk at noon, she scarce need know
it is summer. Ah, the still coolness of thick brick
walls and ample rooms within! Her worn-out frame
recovers its powers, and in the goodness of her heart
she can afford to send pitying thoughts after the exiled
and infatuated sufferers at Saratoga!

Negatively blessed is her fellow-sufferer, the editor,
meantime—liable as he is to this same locomotive lunacy,
and kept within reach of enjoyable and health-preserving
luxuries by the un-let-up-able nature of his
vocation. Nor this alone. He has his minor reliefs.
Omni-acquainted as he necessarily is, and mostly with
the unhappy class self-exiled to the inclement country,
his weary arm now lies supine in delicious indolence
at his side. The habitual five hundred visits,
per diem, of his right hand to the rim of his hat, are
no more exacted. The two hundred and fifty suggestions,
per diem, as to the conduct of his paper, the
course of his polities, and his private morals, are no
longer to be thankfully received. The city is full, but
full of strangers, charmingly unconscious of his extreme
need of counsel. He walks to and fro at
ease, looking blandly at the hydrants, blandly at the
strange faces, blandly at the deliciously unfamiliar
contents of the omnibuses. He dwells in a crowd, in
heavenly solitude. He is like a magnetized finger on
the body of a man with a toothache—apart from the
common pulse, sequestered from the common pain—
yet in his habitual place and subject to no separation.
He has no engagements to meet gentlemen or committees,
for the better manufacture of public opinion.
He can shilling it to Staten Island for sea-air, or sixpence
it to Harlem for an evening sight of the blood-warm
grass, in blessed silence! And so fly the summer
months, like three leaves of the book of paradise
turned back by chance; and, refreshed with new courage,
the doomed editor renews, in September, the
multitudinous extras of his vocation. Oh kindly
Providence, even for housemaids and editors!

A true leaf from the thoughts of a woman of genius
on the subject of woman's love, is stuff to dwell upon
in the reading. We totally differ from one of the
sweetest writers of the time. Mrs. Seba Smith, on the
following disparaging passage touching the love of a
gentle and confiding woman as contrasted with that
of a proud one. Let our readers judge. The passage
occurs, by-the-way, in a story which is the gem
of the whole year of monthlies, called “The Proud
Ladye”—in Godey's Lady's Book. “The love of a
gentle and confiding woman, with its perpetual appeals
to tenderness and protection, must be dear, very
dear to a manly heart; but then it too often lacketh
that exclusive and earnest devotion which imparts a
last touch of value, its sympathies are too readily excited,
and the images of others, faint and shadowy it
may be, yet still images, too often sit, side by side, with
the beloved. But the love of a proud woman, with
its depths of untold tenderness, rarely stirred, yet,
when once awakened, welling up a perpetual fountain
of freshness and beauty, its concentred and earnest
faith, its unmingled sympathies, its pure shrine, raised
to the beloved, burning no incense upon strange altars,
and admitting no strange oblations, the love of such a
one should invest manhood with tenfold dignity—
should make him feel as a priest in the very presence
of the divinity.”

“Things lost in air” are not always unproductive.
Signora Castellan having received, last night, about
two thousand dollars for singing four songs. Signor
Giampietro, her husband, may well say that “a sweet
voice is a most excellent thing in woman.” I made
one of the twenty-five hundred who composed the
audience of this successful cantatrice last evening, and
having missed her introductory concert, this was the
first time I had seen her. I should take Madame
Castellan to be about twenty-three. She is a plump
little Jewess, with an advantage not common to plumptitude—a
very uppish and thoroughbred neck, charmingly
set on. A portrait of her dimpled shoulders
and the back of her head would be a fit subject for
Titian. Her countenance expresses an indolent sweetness,
with none of the wide-awakity so common to her
tribe—and, indeed, the description of the Persian
beauty by Hafiz occurred to me in looking at her:—

A most amiable person I am sure she is—but, unless
I am much mistaken, there is none of Malibran's
intellectual volcano in the “crayther,” and the molten
lava is what is wanting to make her equal or comparable
to that wonderful woman. I certainly do not
think we have heard a voice in this country, not even
Malibran's, of more astonishing compass than Madame
Castellan's. There is not a chamber in her
throat where a cobweb could remain unswept for a
moment. Her contralto notes are far beyond the plummet
of ordinary “soundings,” and as rich and effortless
as the gurgle of a ringdove, while her soprano
tones go up with the buoyancy of a lark, and raise on
tiptoe all the audience who are not fortunate enough
to obtain seats. Still, in ascending and descending on
this angel's ladder, she misses a round now and then.
There are transitions which catch, somehow. She
wants fusion. In her trills more particularly, the balance
is one-sided, and there is a nerve in the listener's
besoin which is not reached by the warble. Give her
more practice, however, more passionateness or brandy
and water, and she would melt over these trifling
flaws, without a doubt. So near perfection as she is,
it seems almost impertinent to criticise her.

New York has some radii to its outer periphery
which are well worth the stranger's following in the
way of excursions. The promontory which makes
the jumping-off place at the seaward end of the Narrows,
is one of these, and upon it (next door to the
fishing huts of Galway), stands one of the most luxurious
hotels in this country. A friend gave me a
delightful drive to it the other day, via a little flourish
among the knolls of Long Island, and, as it chanced
to be the hottest day of the season, I can speak advisedly
of the ocean air of Fort Hamilton. To be
handed over from the Battery to such a cool place, in
half an hour, by the long arm of a steamer, is one of
the possibilities that make New York very habitable.

The marvel of New York just now is “the Alhamra”—an
ice-cream resort lately opened a little
below Niblo's. The depth of the building on Broadway
is pierced for a corridor entrance, and this is lined
with counters tended by the prettiest Hebes of their
class. Traversing this alley of temptation, you descend
to a marble-paved circular court, teated with
gayly striped awnings and gorgeous colors of barbaric
architecture. The seats are around a fountain, and a
statue of a water-nymph stands in the centre, holding
above her head a horn, from which issues the water,
in a jet resembling a glass umbrella. The basin is
rimmed with flowers, the falling water makes the constant
murmur which is needful for a tête-à-tête, the sky
looks in through the lacings of the blue and white awning,
and “the ices are made of pure cream.” The
whole scene is more oriental than Spanish, and would
have been better named a serail or a kiosk than the
Alhamra, but it is a “fairy-spot” (as well as a man
can judge who has not seen fairy-land), and, for the
price of an ice-cream, it gives the untravelled a new
idea of luxury.

Great as the difference is between the scents of
moist earth and splashed dust, the latter, faute de
mieux,. comes up to your nostrils very agreeably, as
you sit at your summer morning's work in a city window.
It is a day to be thankful for “wet” in almost
any shape. Yet it shows of what accommodating
stuff we are made, when, instead of the gentle ministry
of the exhaling dews, we feel prepared to bless a
fat negro with a leathern pipe, dispensing, as it were,
the city branch of nature's distribution of moisture.
The sable vicegerent of the Croton, whom I have in
my eye (hight Jackson)—now brushing the boots of
Mr. Stopintown, the poor scribbler, now directing at
will the prodigal outgush of water that comes forty
miles to do his bidding—stands, as well he may, petrified
with astonishment at the zealous activity with
which the obedient element follows the turn of his
finger. Negro amazement is evidently taken in at the
mouth. My friendly moistener airs his trachea very
fixedly from the beginning to the end of his easy
function. Thanks to his influence, the thermometer
beside me, I observe, has sunk two degrees with the
tepid abatement of the morning air.

Whatever else may be left unfinished at the end of
the world, we are quite sure that there has been
enough written! The “bow of promise” was no security
against a deluge of books—and it has come!

the waves of this great flood receding, and nothing
visible but the “unwritten” mud! We would fain
have books “done away.” We would begin again
with “two of every kind,” and wait with patience for
a posthumous work by Ham, Shem, or Japhet!
which, we believe are Shelley's “sentiments better
expressed.”

And, by-the-way, it is a marvel where all these
books go to. We do not mean, of course, the type
and paper. We mean the spirit, black, or white, or
gray, that on this bridge of print passes from the author's
heart into the reader's and there abides—more
difficult to cast out than the devils exiled into pork
three thousand years ago, and still guarded against by
the abhorrent synagogue. Fifteen millions of people,
all ductile, imitative, and plastic—all, at some
moment or other, waiting for a type upon which to
mould their characters—and all supplied, helter-skelter,
at shilling the pair, with heroes and heroines
made to sell—the creatures God has first created in
his own image, taken soft from his hand, and shaped,
moulded, and finished by De Kock and Bulwer! Who
is there, high or low, that is not reached by these possessing
and enchanting spirits? We are sure we do
not overrate their power. In our own case, a novel of
Bulwer's, read in a day, possesses us exclusively and
irresistibly for a week, and lingers in our brain for
many a day after. Like or dislike the character he
draws—we can not resist the fascination. Yet you
would think the reading of a book, by an editor, would
be like sweeping out the water from a brook. What
must it be to the farmer who reads it by his pine-knot
fire in the country, and thinks of it all day over his
plough—to the apprentice who reads it on Sunday and
ponders on it for a week over his bench. We are only
looking at them as infusions into the fountains of
opinion and impulse; and, if we had time, we should
like to trace them till they appeared in classes of
events, or in features of national character. To do
this in detail would require the space of a lecture or
an essay. But, at a glance—to what do we owe the
fact, that, throughout all the middle and lower classes
of American life, everything except toil and daily
bread is looked at through the most sentimental and
romantic medium? In their notions, affections, and
views of life, the Americans are really the most romantic
people on earth. We do not get this from our
English forefathers—the English are as much the
contrary as is possible. We do not get it from
our pursuits—what can be more unromantic than the
daily cares of an American? We do not get it from
our climate—it is a wonder how romance, fled from
the soft skies of Spain and Italy, can stay among us.
We get it from books—from the hoisting of the floodgates
of copyright—from the inundation of works of
fiction. There are few, we venture to say—few below
the more intellectual classes, whose views of life are
not shaped and modelled, and whose ambitions are not
aimed by characters and impulses found in the attractive

pages of “cheap literature.” We do not condemn
this, we repeat—we do not know that we would
stop it if we could. At any rate, we prefer it to the
inoculation of English low life—the brutality of the
Jack Sheppard school of novels; and we vastly prefer
it to the voluptuousness of the literature most popular
in France. Thieves are not heroes among us, and
woman is enshrined in respect and honor; and with
these respective differences from England and France,
we can almost rest content under the influences that
make us what we are.

Sit back in your chair, and let me babble! I like
just to pull the spiggot out of my discretion, and let
myself run. No criticisms if you please, and don't
stare! Eyelids down, and stand ready for slip-slop.

I was sitting last night by the lady with the horn
and the glass umbrella, at the Alhamra—I drinking a
julep, she (my companion) eating an ice. The water
dribbled, and the moon looked through the slits in the
awning, and we chatted about Saratoga. My companion
has a very generalizing mind, situated just in
the rear of a very particularly fine pair of black velvet
eyes, and her opinions usually come out by a little
ivory gate with a pink portico—charming gate, charming
portico, charming opinions. I must say I think
more of intellect when it is well lodged.

I am literally at a dead loss to know whether she
said it, or I said it—what my mind runs on at this moment.
It's all one, for if I said it, it was with the velvet
approbation of her ineffable eyes, and before such
eyes I absorb and give back, like the mirror that I am.
These, then, are her reflections about Saratoga.

Why, in mamma's time, it was a different affair.
There was a cabinet of fashion in those days, and the
question was settled with closed doors. Giants have
done being born, and so have super-beautiful women—
such women as used to lay down hearts like blocks in
the wooden pavement, and walk on nothing else.
There were about three in each city—three belles of
whom every baptized person in the country knew the
name, style, and probable number of victims. Their
history should have been written while they lasted—for
of course the gods loved them, and “whom the gods
love die first,” and they are dead, and have left no
manuscripts nor models. Well, these belles were
leagued, and kept up their dynasty by correspondence.
New York was the seat of government, and the next
strongest branch was at Albany (where the women at
one time were lovelier than at any known place and
period since the memory of woman). In New York
alone, however, were married ladies admitted to the
councils. Here and there a renowned beau was kept
in the antechamber for advice. April came, and then
commenced a vigorous exchange of couriers. “The
Springs,” of course, but which? Saratoga, or Lebanon,
or Ballston? What carried it, or who decided it,
was enshrined in the most eternal mystery—but it was
decided and known to a few beaux and the proprietors
of the hotels by the middle of May. Wine and
Johnson's band were provided accordingly. The summer
was more punctual in those days, and July particularly
was seldom belated. After the fourth, the
cabinet started, and then commenced a longitudinal
radiation from north to south—after what, and to follow
whom, was only a secret to the uninitiated. And
such times—for then the people had fortunes, and the
ladies drank champagne! La! how'ma talks about it!

But now!—Eheu fugaces! (Latin for “bless my
soul”)—change has drank all the spirit of our dream.
There is so much aristocracy in New York that there
is none at all. Beauty has been scrambled for, and
everybody has picked up a little. There must be
valleys to make mountains—ugly people before there
can be belles—but everybody being rather pretty, who
can be divine? Idem, gentility! Who knows who
isn't “genteel” in New York? There are fifty circles
as like as peas—and not even an argument as to the
perihelion. Live where you please, know whom you
please, wear what you please, and ride freely in the
omnibuses, and nobody makes a remark! Social
anarchy!

Why, what a state of things it is when it is as much
trouble to find out where the prettiest people have
gone to pass the summer as it is to inquire out
“good” ness in Wall street! No cherishing, either,
of belle or beau descent! The daughters of the
charming tyrants of ten or twenty years ago, the boys
of the beaux of that time, walk about unpointed at
and degenerate. The “good society” of twenty years
ago is most indifferent society now.

goes for a crockery pipkin.

A great pity they don't have coffee at the Alhamra!
And no curacoa—and what is ice-cream without a
drop of curacoa! It's a pretty place—a very pretty
place! And there should be nobody to wait on you
here but dainty and dapper slaves—such as the Moors
had, with golden rings on their ankles, in the veritable
Alhambra. That tall, crooked blackamoor hurts my
eye.

So there was no “Mr. Hicks,” and no “legacy to
Washington Irving.” More's the pity! I wish a
Mr. Hicks might be created impromptu, on purpose.
And more Mr. Hickses for more authors. Birds that
sing should be provided with cages and full cups.
What could be done better with spare moneys than to
take the footworn pilgrim of genius and send him
softly down from the temple of fame shod with velvet!
In every rich man's will there should be at least one
line illuminated with a bequest to genius. Heaven
give us a million that we may set the glorious example!

And now, lady, who are you that in this gossiping
dream has held converse with me! I have murmured
to the black cross, suspended by its braid of hair upon
your throat of ivory, without asking your name—content
that you listened. But now (if spiritual visiters
have arms)—put your arm in mine and come out
under a better-devised ceiling! The night is fragrant.
Heaven is sifting love upon us through the
sieve of the firmament—starlight, you took it for!
And as much falls in Broadway as elsewhere. And
the stars are as sweet, seen from this sidewalk, as they
are from the fountain of Egeria. I have sighed in
both places, and know. “Allons! faites moi l'amour—
car je suis dans mon humeur des Dimanches.”

We are making a study of this big book of a city
we live in. We mean, in good time, to peruse it all—
its blotted passages no less than the lines of it which
fall in pleasant places. And we'll tell you what we
think of it as we go along. Not with shovel and
pickaxe. Order is a law of industry, and industry, as
the child of sin, we virtuously abhor. We shall read
this great book, as we do everything else—in the style
of the antelapsarians—idly and paradise-wise. The
ant and the “little busy bee” were unknown to Adam
and Eve, it may be safely conjectured; and we scorn
to take them for models, as enjoined in the primer.
Butterflies for ever! We shall flit from flower to
flower, and tilt upon any stem that we fancy will support
us—as do these full-dress and faineant gentlemen
of no care. Pray expect nothing in particular!
Stand ready to hop off. Any perfume that comes
down the wind may tempt us to follow its invisible
track back—for so butterflies detect the self-betraying

flowers of Paradise. (Though, for this zigzagery in
our courses it is, that we butterflies are called volatile
and capricious—as if we had no right, in our own
way, to follow our more spiritual and finer noses!
And to be blamed, too, for imitating, as far as in us
lies, the innocent nothing-to-do-ity of angels!)

But, the animated book of Manhattan. Turn we
to a plain passage, on which we were just now pondering.

There seems to us a poor economy of the animal
spirits in the mode of life of the New-Yorkers. Let
us take a single example, for the convenience of our
over-worked adjectives and pronouns.

Mr. Splitfig, the eminent wholesale grocer, is at the
age of virtue—thirty-five. He rises in the morning
at half-past seven, makes so much of his toilet as appears
above the tablecloth, and makes his breakfast of
the morning paper, a nibble at a roll, and coffee at
discretion. He is too newly up to eat—too recently
arrived from the spiritual land of dreams, as my adorable
friend Lyra would express it. He is grave and
quiet. The sobriety of a fifteen hours' fast is upon
him—for he has not eaten meat since yesterday at
three. Refreshed by sleep, however, and cheerful
after his coffee, he draws on his walking seldom-alluded-tos,
and goes out to be gone till dinner. At eleven,
or thereabout, his spirits begin to flag. He would
rather not see a friend, except on business, for he
hates the trouble of talking. Debts and peccadilloes
lie at the bottom of the stomach, and his heart drops
down to them for want of a betweenity of beefsteak.
He begins to be faintish, but he is principled against
lunching or drinking before dinner, and by one o'clock
his animal spirits have sunk into his boots, and, from
that time till three, he is a dispirited fag, going through
with his habitual routine of business, but, of a civil
word or a smile as incapable as Caliban. It is while
the chambers of his head are thus unlighted and untenated,
however, that the most of his friends and
acquaintances see him and judge of his capacity for
entertainment. He speaks to fifty people in the
course of those two exhausted hours, and speaks sullenly
and coldly, and, of these fifty, not one considers
that

lies over a floating bridge of comestibles which has
sunk with an unnatural ebbtide. What says Menenius,
the rough and wise?—

But, at three, Mr. Splitfig dines—and as he gives
them something to stand on, his spirits jump up and
look out of his eyes. His tongue feels the moisture
at its root, and grows flowery, and the one man who
sits opposite to the unctuous grocer at table thinks
him the best of fellows.

Splitfig keeps a trotter, and, after dinner, happy and
agreeable, he jumps into his wagon, and distributes,
along the milestones and hedges of the Bloomingdale
road, smiles and good-natured glances, that were much
more wisely got up four hours earlier in the day, and
sown among his friends for a crop of popularity. To
change the similitude, Splitfig makes his day's voyage
with a cold boiler, and gets up the steam on arriving
at the wharf!

Not so Monsieur Toutavous, the French importer.
Toutavous takes a cup of coffee at waking, and on
the strength of it, dresses, reads the papers, and writes
the two or three business-letters which require the
coolest head. He keeps for his own society exclu
sively the melancholy hour or two of every day, during
which “the stomach is apprehensive that the
throat is cut”—the communication is so interrupted.
Yet as these unsmiling hours are excellent for
thought and calculation, he so shapes his business
that he can pass them, alone, without inconvenience.
He has taken his coffee, observe, but he has not breakfasted.
At eleven he goes to Delmonico's on his way
to the “shop.” A beefsteak and a pint of claret dress
his countenance in smiles, and invigorate his fingers
for the friendly clasp exacted by courtesy. He gets to
his counting-house a little before twelve, enters upon
the hard work of the day with a system alert and lively,
and impresses everybody whom he sees with the idea
that he is born to good fortune, and has the look of
it, and is a good fellow, with no distrust of his credit
nor of himself. Sensible of Toutavous—is it not?

Pity, we say again, that the personal, physical economies
are so little regarded among us. The ladies
lack also a little “fernseed in their ears,” but we
would not put them off with the tail of a paragraph.
We have, for them, a chapter in lavender; not of our
own devising altogether! A superb female Machiavel
whom we once knew, who came always to a ball
at three in the morning, fresh as a rosebud after a
night's sleep, entrancing you with her dewy coolness
when everybody else was hot and weary—she, capable
of this brilliant absurdity, once discoursed to us
on the economies of heart-breaking. We will show
you the trick some day. Meantime, salaam!

The first visiter to the bay of New York, and the
writer of the first description on record, was John
de Verrazzano, a Florentine, in the service of Francis
the First. This bold navigator had been for some
time in command of four ships, cruising against the
Spaniards. But his little fleet being separated in a
storm. Verrazzano determined, with one of them, the
Dauphin, to take a voyage in search of new countries.
He arrived on the American coast, somewhere near
North Carolina, and first proceeded south as far as
“the region of palm-trees,” probably Florida. He
then turned, and proceeded north till he entered a
harbor, which he describes thus, in a passage of a letter
addressed by him to his royal master:—

“This land is situated in the paralele of Rome, in
forty-one degrees and two terces; but somewhat more
colde by accidentall causes. The mouth of the haven
lieth open to the south, half a league broad; and
being entred within it, between the east and the north,
it stretcheth twelve leagues, where it wareth broader
and broader, and maketh a gulfe about twenty leagues
in compass, wherein are five small islands, very fruitfull
and pleasant, full of hie and broad trees, among
the which islands any great navie may ride without
any feare of tempest or other danger.”

In this harbor Verrazzano appears to have remained
about fifteen days. He and his men frequently went
on shore to obtain supplies and see the country. He
says, in another part of his letter: “Sometimes our
men stayed two or three daies on a little island neere
the ship for divers necessaries. We were oftentimes
within the land five or six leagues, which we found as
pleasant as is possible to declare, very apt for any
kind of husbandry, of corne, wine, and ayle. We
entered afterward into the woods, which we found so
thicke that any army, were it never so great, might
have hid itself therein; the trees whereof are okes,
cypress-trees, and other sorts unknown in Europe.”

These were probably the first European feet that
ever trod on any part of the territory now included in
the state of New York. Verrazzano and his crew

seem to have had considerable intercourse with the
natives, and generally to have been treated well,
though by his own account he did not always deserve
it. Speaking of an excursion made by his men somewhere
on the coast, he says: “They saw only one
old woman, with a young maid of eighteen or twenty
yeeres old, which, seeing our companie, hid themselves
in the grasse for feare. The old woman carried
two infants on her shoulders, and the young
woman was laden with as many. As soon as they
saw us, to quiet them and win their favors, our men
gave them victuals to eate, which the old woman received
thankfully, but the young woman threw them
disdainfully on the ground. They took a child from
the old woman to bring into France; and going about
to take the young woman, which was very beautiful,
and of tall stature, they could not possibly, for the
great outcries that she made, bring her to the sea;
and especially having great woods to pass thorow, and
being far from the ship, we proposed to leave her behind,
bearing away the child only.”

In a subsequent part of this narrative, Verrazzano
presents a very favorable picture, not only of the amenity,
but of the discretion of the aborigines: “They
came in great companies of their small boats unto the
ship, with their faces all bepainted with divers colors,
and bringing their wives with them, whereof they
were very jealous; they themselves entering aboard
the ship, and staying there a good space, but causing
their wives to say in their boats; and for all the entreatie
that we could make, offering to give them divers
things, we could never obtaine that they would
suffer them to come aboard the ship. And oftentimes
one of the two kings coming with his queene, and
many gentlemen for their pleasure to see us, they all
stayed on shore, two hundred paces from us, sending
us a small boat to give us intelligence of their coming;
and as soon as they had answere from us they
came immediately, and wondered at hearing the cries
and noyses of the mariners. The queene and her
maids stayed in a very light boat at an island a quarter
of a league off, while the king abode a long space in
our ship, uttering divers conceits with gestures, viewing
with great admiration the furniture of the shippe.
And sometimes our men staying one or two days on
a little island near the ship, he returned with seven or
eight of his gentlemen to see what we did; then the
king drawing his bow, and running up and down with
his gentlemen, made much sport to gratify our men.”

The sail-studded bay of New York at this day presents
another scene; and one of these same “gentlemen”
is now almost as great a curiosity here as was
John de Verrazzano, only three centuries ago, to the
rightful lords of this fair land and water.

If we are not “qualifying” for the doom of Sodom
and Gomorrah, we must look elsewhere for the causes
of the accelerated pace at which goes on our national
demoralization. How many pegs down we have
dropped within three or four years, in political principle,
how many in mercantile honor and credit, how
many in the demand and consequent quality of literature,
and how many in the dignity of the periodical
press, are four very pregnant texts for sermons, as
well as questions for political economy. But more
striking than any of these changes for the worse,
seems to us the demoralization of private life—the
increase of scenes of bloodshed, of shocking immoralities,
of violence toward the unprotected, of calumnies,
revenges, sabbath-breakings, and all the abominations
common to more corrupt and older countries.
When is this unnaturally rapid tide to ebb, and to
what is it tending?

In the comparative idleness of Americans at present—the
stagnation of business and the food for bad
passions, which always lies under misfortune and desperation—we
may doubtless find the immediate causes
of these evil changes, and in this there lies a hope,
that, with the country's reviving prosperity and industry,
its morals, public and private, will mend. But
there are other and more permanent principles of evil
at work among us, which will grow with our growth
and strengthen with our strength—as they have grown
and strengthened with the progress and prosperity of
every country under the sun. In a most philosophical
and able letter on the condition of the different
countries of Europe, which appeared lately in the
National Intelligencer, the writer (President Durbin)
remarks upon the gradual diminution of the middle
classes in England, and the “widening separation between
the rich, who are becoming richer, and the
poor, who are becoming poorer.” This middle class
—which is the population without its extremes of aristocracy
and beggary—constitutes the body and
strength of England, and when its wealth has been
drawn to the aristocracy, and its wants to the beggary
of that country, she will be ready for the next stages
of national history—revolution and downfall. America,
however, has as yet neither extreme to any considerable
extent. Our population are almost entirely
persons of such means and pursuits as would place
them within the pale of the middle class in England.
There is no well-defined aristocracy—no inevitable
and irremediable beggary. But the tendency is toward
these extremes, and in that tendency—irritated
and strengthened just now by the peculiar prostration
of “the times”—we see the causes of no small portion
of the evils we have alluded to. The first step
taken toward the formation of an aristocracy is the
adoption of its vices, as the first result of inevitable
or impending beggary is the contemplation of crime.
The refined pursuits of a man born to a certainty of
wealth and station, can not be adopted in a moment,
nor can suffice for the desires of a man suddenly
grown rich. Nor are the higher pleasures of taste
and intellect at all satisfying, except after a youth of
high culture and ennobled association. The result is,
that the corrupted or vacant mind of the fortunate
possessor of wealth turns to the pursuit of pleasure,
and pleasure in such minds soon degenerates into vice.
A virtuous aristocracy, if it ever exist at all, is the
slow creation of pride of ancestry, and a well-instilled
conviction of the true path of distinction and honor—
but meantime the beginners at luxury and power are
established as a class of ostentatious and unprincipled
members of society, and the license and indulgence
they exact is yielded them with exasperation on the
part of those they displace and injure. Seduction
and intrigue, hushed up, winked at, paid for with
money, in European countries, is here resented with
the murder of the offender. Public opinion, which,
in Europe, under such circumstances, would forgive
the offence, and sympathise only with the seducer,
takes, in this country, as yet, the other side. To be
idle, which was formerly a reproach, is becoming a
merit here, as it is in countries where none are gentlemen
but the idle. But gambling by night for the
means of extravagant idleness takes the place of industry
by day, and the heart-burnings, jealousies, and
unemployed passions of this class, lead almost certainly
to scenes of violence and bloodshed. The
presence in our community of a large body of idlers
(such as exists in all the countries of Europe), whose
whole occupation in life is profligacy, is an evil very
fast coming upon this country, and one which should
at least be guarded against by a total change in the
education and guardianship of women.

If you have never been on the Beacon course at
Hoboken, you have never seen the opening lips of
the Hudson river to advantage. As if nature was of

the same opinion, the long city, with the dot of Governor's
island below it, looks like a note of admiration
jotted down on the other side. This high table
of land in so near neighborhood to New York is a superb
natural esplanade, and I marvel much that such
unequalled sites for villas can be monopolized by a
racecourse. I will spare you the “fine writing” with
which the view inspired me while there. It cools too
rosy for prose.

I went over in the suite of a choice “Spirit of the
Times,” to see the great match between saddle and
wheels—the Oneida Chief, a pacer in harness, against
Lady Suffolk and Beppo, two trotters, under jockeys
in stirrups. It was rather a new mode of racing—
new to me, at least—and I expected a great crowd,
but the spectators were in scores instead of thousands.
On the way, and in the stand, I was amused with the
physiognomy and phraseology of the persons drawn
from the city by the sporting nucleus. There was a
sprinkling of nobodies, like myself, of course, and
some strangers from the hotels; but the remainder
had a peculiarity which marked them as a class, and
at which I can only fling a conjecture in the way of a
definition. Every sense and faculty about them
seemed abandoned to jollity, except the eye. The
eye looked cool and unsympathetic. In the heartiest
laugh, the lids did not relax. The sharp scrutinizing
wrinkle and the brow pressed down, remained immovable
while the sides were shaking. I am not sure
that the whole expression lay in this; but there was
an expression, very decided, about them of a reservation
from fun somewhere, and, with all their frolic and
nonsense, they looked as cool and ready as a slate
and pencil. Sharp boys, I should take them to be,
seen singly anywhere.

The horses were breathed a little before the race,
and as they went to and fro before the stand, I had a
fair look at them. Lady Suffolk has all the showiness
of the trio, and she looks more like a narrow escape
of beauty than beauty itself. She is a large dappled
gray mare, with a tail fit for a pacha's standard,
legs not particularly blood-like, stiff walking gait, and
falls off behind and slopes under the hamstrings like a
corn-crib built to shed rain. Cover her head up
(which looks knowing enough for a Wall street broker's),
and she would not sell, standing still at a country
market, for a hundred dollars. A little study of
her structure, however, shows you that she is made
for something or other very extraordinary, and when
she starts from you with a rider on her back, she goes
off like something entirely different from any velocity
of leg that you are acquainted with. The speed of
two passing steamers going at twenty miles an hour—
you on one and a horse on the deck of the other—
would give you the same sensation of unnatural go-away-ness.
Seen coming, from a little distance, she
rocks like a pendulum swinging from the rider's head,
and when she goes by at full speed, a more pokerish,
awkward, and supernatual gait could scarce be
got out of a cross between a steam-paddle and an
ostrich. Every time her haunches draw up, she
shoots ahead as if she was hit behind with an invisible
beetle. Nothing in the way of legs seems to
explain it.

The Oneida Chief is not half so fine an animal
to look at as his driver, Hiram Woodruff, the great
whip of the turf. He is as fine a specimen of the
open-air man, born for a field open to all comers, as I
have met with in my life. He has a fine frank countenance,
a step like a leopard, a bold eye, and a most
compact, symmetrical, and elastic frame, fit for a
gladiator. In his sulky, he looked as all riders in
those ugly contrivances do, like an animal with an
axletree through him, and wheels to his hips, but he
drove so beautifully as to abate the usual ridicule of
the vehicle. The Oneida Chief is a sorrel, and a
wonderful pacer, but, as he was beaten, I will say no
more about him.

Beppo, the second best horse, is the most comical
little animal I have ever seen. His color is like a
shabby brown plush, and he looks, at a first glance, as
if he might have been a cab-horse, or a baker's horse,
or in some other much-abused line, but retaining,
withal, a sort of cocked-pistol expression of eye and
limb, and a most catgut extension of muscle. His
loins are like a greyhound, and every hair on him seems
laid in the most economical way to go, and when he
does go there is no outlay for any other purpose. A
more mere piece of straightforward work than Beppo's
action I could never imagine. Whatever balk there
was in starting, he was just at the mark, and he neither
broke nor bothered, but did it all in round honest
trotting, coming up on the last quarter stretch like a
whipped-up arrow. As he only lost the first heat by
a head, he of course did his mile, as Lady Suffolk
did, in two minutes twenty-six seconds—the fastest
trotting on record.

“How d'ye do!—how d'ye do!” as greetings, have
passed away. Those two never-answered interrogatories
have yielded to the equally meaning salutations,
“Eh, back!” “Where?” In your autumn trip to
the city remember to salute your friends and acquaintances.
For some three weeks this has been the
vogue, and (grown a gravity with use) people now
shake hands over “Eh back!” “Where?” with all
the sober earnestness which attended the habitual
“how d'ye do?” “how d'ye do?” I give it you by
way of early report of the prevailing fashion.

Since I wrote to you I have aired my magnetic
circle with a trip into the solitude of the Highlands.
“Retiring from the crowd” is an impoverished phrase
for the withdrawal of one's ten thousand spiritual feelers
from the interlaced contact and influence of four
hundred thousand neighbors. We can get used to
anything—thanks to the adaptability of our natures—
and my four hundred thousandth part of the space,
light, air, and locomotion of the island of Manhattan,
had grown by habit to be a comfortable allowance;
but it was no less a relief to send up my breath to the
sky without mixture, and to look about without tangling
my retina with the optic nerves of other people.
The ordinary accompaniments of departure from
town give the fullest effect to the contrast. The pellet
of potato, crowded into the quill of a boy's popgun,
does not escape with a more sudden relief than
the passenger departing by the North river steamer.
The crowd grows closer and tighter as you get to the
wharf, and the last five minutes before casting off are
as close a pressure of flesh, blood, and personal atmosphere,
as can well be endured with any prospect of
recovered elasticity. Suddenly there is a rush ashore,
and you shoot out into the calm and open bay, and
dropping into a chair, instantly commence the perusal
of a rural shore, gliding stilly athwart your eye like
the lines of a pastoral poem:—no people between you
and it, no eyes looking at you from the Palisades, no
hats on the trees, no bows from the ripples as you pass,
no jostle in the fresh air, no greeting, no beggar, no
bore. As a sudden release of mind and body from a
tight place, I know nothing (short of death at the
Five Points) to exceed it.

I was on board “the Swallow,” the stillest skimmer
of the waters in which I have yet travelled, and I trust
the green trees, and indented bays, nooks, and knolls
of Hoboken and Westchester, were sensible of the
fresh intensity of my admiration, as we glided, dream-like
and un-steamer-like, by. I made one or two
mundane and gregarious observations, by-the-by, on
the voyage, and the principal one was the watchful
and delicate attention of the captain of the boat to the

comfort of the ladies and children on board, and,
apropos of that, the superiority of this class in our
country over those of every other. I could wish the
foreign travellers among us might take our steamboat
captains on the Hudson as specimens of our habits
and manners, and, for the three whom I have the
pleasure to know (the captains of the Troy, Swallow,
and Empire), I am quite sure that no gentleman could
desire, for wife or daughter, more courteous and well-bred
care than they habitually bestow on the passengers
who embark with them. As an instance (which
I noticed and think worth recording), Captain McLean
chanced to discover, at the moment a lady was going
ashore with a child and a nurse at nine o'clock at
night, that her destination was on the other side of the
river, near a landing where the boats do not regularly
touch. As it looked like rain, and she was to cross in
a row-boat, he stopped the baggage on the plank,
begged her to be seated for a few minutes, and ran
“The Swallow” across, landing her almost at her
own door, very much to her delight and relief. It
should be set down in his honor, and long may devotion
to women be, as it certainly is now, a national
and peculiar feature of the Americans.

When I stated to you that Mr. Morse would probably
be the biographer of Allston, I had for the moment
forgotten that the great artist married a sister of
Richard Dana, who, by every claim and qualification,
is, of course, the proper person to undertake it. I
trust it will not be a “cold abstraction.” It is true,
the personal and familiar character of all men of genius
will not bear posthumous unveiling—but Allston's
will. He was, in the phraseology of the old
dramatists, “a sweet gentleman.” God never wove
the woof and warp of taste, feeling, and intellect, under
a more clear and transparent surface than in the
“Paint King” of our country. You read his mind
first, in seeing him. His frame was but the net that
held it in. Everybody loved him. Everybody did
homage to him—as a man no less than as an artist.
Mr. Dana would write for his family circle the kind of
memoir we want for the world. He lives in an atmosphere
of cold, un-cosmopolite, provincial observance,
in Boston, and I am afraid his book will smack of the
place and climate. I wish he would go to Florence
and write it—off, among the artists, at a proper perspective
distance, and with his blood warmed up with
the climate and his kinsman's far-off praises. The
biography of Allston should embrace the history of
the first cycle of American art—from the beginning
to Allston's death. It is truly a rare chance for a
model biography, and Dana has it in him—minus
fusion. But he will think “the schoolmaster is
abroad,” and I will say no more.

If you are not particularly acquainted with us, dear
reader, pray consider this last page in the light of a
private letter—inviolable if not addressed simply to
yourself. We have tried to convey this for some
weeks past by caption—as “More Particularly,”
“Confidentially,” “Just you and I,” etc., etc.—but
with no apparent success. We are evidently read.
Our private slip-slop, twaddled under the secrecy
of this page en dishabille, comes back to us, commented
on with full-dress criticism by the pastoral
editors. Now (courage, while we administer a
slice of the dictionary!) our idiosyncracy is a passion
for individual proximity We would fain be familiar—with
one at a time. We write and compile
fifteen mortal pages, addressed to the universe. We
know by education that it is proper to do so. The
snail comes out occasionally from his suitable house,
and walks in the open globe. But we are a-cold out
of our privacy. We want something between us and
the promiscuous points of compass. We yearn to be
personal and particular—tête-à-tête. And on this sixteenth
page we indulge our little weakness. If you
do not love us—you that have turned over this leaf
—pardon us, but you intrude!

If there be a time for all things, there is a time to
cease to be gregarious. To measure age by years is
to weigh gems against paving-stones—but there is a
point in middle age—(from thirty to fifty, as you wear)
—when the card-case should be burnt in solemn holocaust.
For acquaintances you have no more time.
The remainder of life is little enough for friends, and,
between friends, pasteboard is superfluous. We have
ripened to that point—we! In our pyramid of life
the base was broad and sympathetic. We spread
ourselves as far as we could reach—but with the rise
of the pyramid of years the outer edges have dropped
away, and the planes have lessened. We are limited
to friends, now. Our mind runs friendship-wise. We
tu-toi, as the French say. We like to chat familiarly
—with the world shut out—indulged and slip-shod.

We have knocked our head against this corner of
speculation, while making threescore or more bows of
acknowledgment to editors kind and complimentary.
Somebody loves us, there is no doubt. We are
wished well in our vocation. And that is much in
a world where it is so difficult to butter the dry crust
of industry. But, with no design to annoy or rebuke
us, there is a leaning, in these friendly notices, to find
fault with our frivolity. We are too frisky for breakfast
reading. “The spirits of the wise sit in the
clouds and mock us.” And for this we are sorry.

That the following (from the New Bedford Bulletin)
was written by a man who loves us, nobody will
doubt—yet see the word we have underlined!—

“The New Mirror for last week is an exquisite number.
Willis has scattered his gems of humor, wit, and puppyism,
all over it, making it odorous and sparkling as a fountain
playing rose-water. Willis is the best American prose-writer
of a certain class now living. He is as delicious as Tom
Moore, and a great deal more decent.”

Now, what is “puppyism?” That it is “odorous,”
we may venture to take upon our friend's authority.
But, if “sparkling as a fountain playing rose-water,”
Heaven bless the puppy-most, still say we! Would
you have us graver? Is there not gravity enough in
the world that you can forego our little contribution?
Have you no funerals, no false friends, no leaden politics,
and no notes to pay—that you must come for our
gravity to eke you out? Or do you find fault with
our dabble in the superfineries? Is that it? Mustn't
we mention “patent leather” and “velvet eyes?”
Can't we call the mouth of a charming woman a
“pink portico with an ivory door”—without offending
you? Come, come, you are not quite the anchorite
you would label yourself, and, while flowers will
bloom, hortus siccus be hanged—say you not so? Let
us talk about the things we like. Life is too short for
hypocrisy. Try the trick yourself. Write a paragraph
or two in our flummery way, and see how trippingly
it comes off, and what an uncoiling from your
heart it is of the dull serpent of care!

Put this French proverb in your pipe and smoke it
—“Ne pouvoir tolerer les faiblesses d'autrui, voila la
faiblesse.” If you never thought of that, thank us
for a new precept, and slip a copy of it under your
friendships. It keeps out moths like camphor.

Not quite one hundred years after Verrazzano's discovery
of the bay of New York, during all which
period we have no account of its having been visited
by a European vessel, Hudson made the capes of
Virginia on his third cruise in search of the northwest

passage. Standing still on a northward course, he
arrived in sight of the Narrows, distinguishing from a
great distance the highlands of Neversink, which his
mate, Robert Juet, described in the journal he kept as
a “very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to
see.”

The most interesting peculiarity of our country to
a European observer, is the freshness of its early history,
and the strong contrast it presents of most of the
features of a highly-civilized land, with the youth and
recent adventures of a newly-discovered one. The
details of these first discoveries are becoming every
day more interesting; and that part of the journal of
the great navigator which relates to his first view of
them is very interesting. The following extracts describe
the Narrows as they were two hundred years ago:

“At three of the clock in the afternoone we came
to three great rivers. So we stood along to the northermost,
thinking to have gone into it, but we found
it to have a very shoald barre before it, for we had but
ten foot water. Then we cast about to the southward,
and found two fathoms, three fathoms, and three and
a quarter, till we came to the souther side of them,
then we had five or six fathoms, and anchored. So we
sent in our boat to sound, and they found no less water
than foure, five, six, and seven fathoms, and returned
in an hour and a halfe. So we weighed and went in,
and rode in five fathoms, ose ground, and saw many
salmons, and mullets, and rayes, very great.

“The fourth, in the morning, as soone as the day
was light, we saw that it was good riding farther up.
So we sent our boate to sound, and found that it was a
very good harbour; them we weighed and went in with
our ship. Then our boat went on land with our net
to fish, and caught ten great mullets, of a foot and a
half long apeece, and a ray as great as foure men could
hale into the ship. So we trimmed our boat, and
rode still all day. At night the wind blew hard at the
northwest and our anchor came home, and we drove
on shore, but took no hurt, thanked bee God, for the
ground is soft sand and ose. This day the people of
the country came aboard of us, seeming very glad of
our comming, and brought greene tobacco, and gave
us of it for knives and beads. They go in deere
skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper.
They desire cloathes, and are very civill. They have
great store of maise, or Indian wheate, whereof they
make good bread. The country is full of great and
tall oaks.

“The fifth, in the morning, as soone as the day was
light, the wind ceased; so we sent our boate in to
sound the bay. Our men went on land there and saw
great store of men, women, and children, who gave
them tobacco at their coming on land. So they went
up into the woods, and saw great store of very goodly
oakes, and some currants.

“The sixth, in the morning, was faire weather, and
our master sent John Colman with foure other men in
our boat over to the north side, to sound the other
river” (the Narrows). “They found very good riding
for ships, and a narrow river to the westward” (probably
what is now called the Kills, or the passage between
Bergen Neck and Staten Island), “between two
islands. The lands, they told us, were as pleasant,
with grasse and flowers, and goodly trees, as they ever
had seen, and very sweet smells came from them. So
they went in two leagues and saw an open sea, and
returned; and as they came backe they were set upon
by two canoes, the one having twelve, the other fourteen
men. The night came on, and it began to raine,
so that their match went out; and they had one man
slain in the fight, which was an Englishman, named
John Colman, with an arrow shot into his throat, and
two more hurt. It grew so dark that they could not
find the shippe that night, but laboured to and fro on
their oares.

“The seventh was fair, and they returned aboard
the ship, and brought our dead man with them, whom
we carried on land and buried.”

On the eighth, Hudson lay still, to be more sure of
the disposition of the natives before venturing farther
in. Several came on board, but no disturbance occurred,
and on the ninth he got under weigh, passed
the Narrows, and proceeded by slow degrees up the
river destined to bear his name.

The current of life seems to be too rapid in America
to allow time for reflection upon anything which
can possibly be deferred. The monuments are left
unfinished on our battle-field; the tombs of great men
become indistinguishable before marked with a stone;
and the sacred places where patriotism has dwelt, are
rated by the value of their material, and left to decay.
It is difficult to visit Mount Vernon, and feel, from
any mark of care or respect visible about it, that
America owes anything to the sacred ashes it entombs.

The family tomb at Mount Vernon has once been
robbed by a sacrilegious ruffian, whose ignorance
alone preserved for us the remains of Washington. It
has been proposed to Congress to buy Mount Vernon,
and establish a guard over relics so hallowed. Why
should not this be done, and a sufficient sum be appropriated
to enclose and keep in order the whole
estate, improve the execrable road leading to it from
Alexandria, and employ persons to conduct strangers
over the place?

The vault in which the ashes of Washington repose,
is at the distance of, perhaps, thirty rods from
the house, immediately upon the bank of the river.
A more romantic and picturesque site for a tomb can
scarcely be imagined. Between it and the Potomac
is a curtain of forest-trees, covering the steep declivity
to the water's edge, breaking the glare of the prospect,
and yet affording glimpses, of the river, where
the foliage is thickest. The tomb is surrounded by
several large native oaks, which are venerable by their
years, and which annually strew the sepulchre with
autumnal leaves, furnishing the most appropriate drapery
for the place, and giving a still deeper impression
to the memento mori. Interspersed among the oaks,
and overhanging the tomb, is a copse of red cedar,
whose evergreen boughs present a fine contrast to the
hoary and leafless branches of the oak; and while the
deciduous foliage of the latter indicates the decay of
the body, the eternal verdure of the former furnishes
a fitting emblem of the immortal spirit. The sacred
and symbolic cassia was familiar to Washington, and,
perhaps, led to the selection of a spot where the evergreen
flourished.

One of the most interesting associations with the
tomb of Washington, is Lafayette's visit to it, as
related by Levasseur:—

“After a voyage of two hours, the guns of Fort
Washington announced that we were approaching the
last abode of the father of his country. At this
solemn signal, to which the military band accompanying
us responded by plaintive strains, we went on
deck, and the venerable soil of Mount Vernon was before
us. At this view an involuntary and spontaneous
movement made us kneel. We landed in boats, and
trod upon the ground so often trod by the feet of
Washington. A carriage received General Lafayette;
and the other visiters silently ascended the precipitous
path which conducted to the solitary habitation of
Mount Vernon. In re-entering beneath this hospitable
roof, which had sheltered him when the reign of
terror tore him violently from his country and family,
George Lafayette felt his heart sink within him, at no
more finding him whose paternal care had softened his
misfortunes; while his father sought with emotion for
everything which reminded him of the companion of
his glorious toils.

“Three nephews of General Washington took La

fayette, his son, and myself, to conduct us to the tomb
of their uncle; our numerous companions remained
in the house. In a few minutes the cannon, thundering
anew, announced that Lafayette rendered homage
to the ashes of Washington. Simple and modest as
he was during life, the tomb of the citizen hero is
scarcely perceived among the sombre cypresses by
which it is surrounded. A vault, slightly elevated and
dotted over—a wooden door without inscriptions—
some withered and green garlands, indicate to the traveller
who visits the spot where rest in peace the puissant
arms which broke the chains of his country. As
we approached, the door was opened. Lafayette descended
alone into the valut, and a few minutes after
reappeared, with his eyes overflowing with tears. He
took his son and me by the hand, and led us into the
tomb, where, by a sign, he indicated the coffin. We
knelt reverentially, and rising, threw ourselves into
the arms of Lafayette, and mingled our tears with
his.”

There are manifest signs that the summer is here.
The ladies who are on their travels, and the ladies who
are not, wear alike the toilet of transit—dust-proof
dresses and green veils. “Bound for the Springs” is
palpably intended to be expressed by every apparition
of beauty in Broadway. The gentlemen, in the absence
of the more approved targets at which their
irresistiblenesses are aimed, go about in calico coats,
ungloved, unwaistcoated, unstrapped, and uncravatted.
Hot corn is cried at midnight. Raspberries are
treacherous. Green apples and pears grace the tables
of the hucksters. The daily papers show signs of the
rustication of the leading editors. Hotels crammed,
and a pervading odor of the fruity drinks extending a
hundred yards from them in every direction. The
summer has arrived, I believe—but I feel called upon
to admit that count D'Orsay and Lady Blessington
have not. Colonel Stone's virtuous horrification at
the mention of such improper people by your correspondent
has probably driven them into an incognitude
which has cost the count his whiskers, at least. Without
them, Niagara itself would not recognise him—
brother wonder as he is—and, if in the land of Boz-worship
at all, they probably pass for a big Kentuckian
and his handsome mother. Keep a look out as
you travel, however, amis voyageurs!

Kissing has no longer the drawback of wear and
tear. I see that Dr. Ellsworth of Hartford has succeeded
in restoring a lost upper lip. The paper
which describes it says: “Upon the red facing may
possibly be detected the point of connexion between
the two halves. The lip is really a handsome
one—quite equal to the best cures of hare-lip. No
one would for a moment suspect that it had travelled
from the cheeks to its present location, which it
graces as well as the original, except that it has not
quite as free and easy a motion, although enough for
all common purposes.”

Passengers up the Hudson who wish to take the
early trains west, embark at present on the forward
deck of the “Empire.” Those who are not in a
hurry take passage in the after cabin, and on the
mooring of the boat at Albany, pay their respects to
the ex-president at Kinderhook, from the stern taffrail.
She is commanded by Captain Roe, who, in the extent
of his jurisdiction, ranks with the governor of Rhode
Island, and is a potentate to be propitiated in politics.
Seriously, this noble steamer is a very great curiosity.
The saloon on her promenade deck is nearly three
hundred feet long, and, with four or five hundred people
on board, she seems to have few passengers. The
sight of her engine at work is an imposing affair.
Some of the state-rooms above are small drawing-rooms
to accommodate parties, and she is furnished
and managed with a luxury and tact worth making a
trip to see.

I understand it has lately occurred to some gentlemen
with open eyes, that anchorage is cheaper than
ground-rent—that a ship-of-war is but a spacious
hotel upside-down, and that the most desirable site for
a summer residence, as to pure air, neighborhood,
novelty, and economy, is now occupied by the “Independence”
and “North Carolina,” the men-of-war
just off the Battery. The latter ship being unseaworthy,
it is proposed to purchase her of the government
for the experiment. It is estimated that she can
accommodate comfortably three hundred persons. The
immense upper-deck is to be covered with a weather-proof
awning, blue and white, in the style of the Alhamra,
and given up entirely to dining, dancing,
lounging, and the other uses of hotel drawing-rooms.
A more magnificent promenade than this immense
deck, cleared of guns and lumber fore-and-aft, and
surrounded entirely by luxurious sofas, could scarcely
be imagined. The kitchens and offices are to occupy
the forward part of the second deck, or, if the vessel
is crowded, to be transferred to a small tender alongside.
The port-holes are to be enlarged to spacious
windows, and the two decks below, which are above
the water-line, will be entirely occupied by splendid
rooms, open to the entire breadth of the bay, and furnished
in the oriental and cushioned style, suitable to
the luxurious wants of hot weather. Minute-barges
will ply to and from the shore, connected with the
Waverely line of omnibuses; bath-houses will be
anchored just astern; a café and ice-cream shop will
be established in the main and mizen-tops (to be
reached by a covered staircase); and sofas, for the
accommodation of smokers, will be put undr a pent-house
roof, outside the vessle, in the main-chains.
The cockpit and hold will of course unite the uses of
a hotel-garret and cellar. It will have the advantage
of other hotels, in swinging round with the tide, so
that the lodgers on both sides of the ship will see, by
turns, from the windows, the entire panorama of the bay.
When lightened of her guns, and her upper spars and
rigging, it is thought she will float so much higher as
to bear piercing for another line of port-hole windows,
affording some bachelor's rooms at the water-line, corresponding
in price and convenience with the sky-chambers
of the Astor. An eccentric individual, I
am told, has bargained for a private parlor, to be suspended
under the bowsprit, in imitation of the nest of
the hanging-bird. Altogether, the scheme seems
charming and feasible. The name of the hotel, by-the-way,
is to be “Saratoga Afloat;” the waiters are
to be dressed in the becoming toggery of tars; and
the keeper of the house is to wear a folded napkin,
epaulet fashion, on either shoulder, and to be called
invariably “commodore.”

This seems to be the age of invention. Several
houses in the city are being made rather higher, by
raising them ten feet on screws, and building a story
under them—a great economy of the loins of hod-carriers.

As a metropolis of wealth and fashion, New York
has one great deficiency—that of a driving park.
Rome has its Pincian Hill, Florence its Cascine,
Paris its Bois de Bologne, and London its Hyde Park;
and most other capitals have places of resort-on-wheels,
where fresh air and congenial society may
be met in the afternoon hours. Such a place is
only not considered indispensable in New York, because
it has never been enjoyed. It is, for the rich,
the highest of luxuries. The Cascine of Florence,

for example, is a park of two miles square, laid out in
wooded avenues; and to its winding roads and forest
glades resort, every afternoon, the entire equipaged
population of the court and city. At sunset, the carriages
meet in an open square in the centre, and the
“lords and ladies” pass the two hours of the delicious
twilight in visiting from vehicle to vehicle, forming
parties for the evening, flirting, making acquaintances,
talking scandal, and other dainty diversions—breaking
up in time to go to the opera or dress for a ball. There
is enough room for such a park in the neighborhood
of Union square, or on the East or North river; and
the importance of such spaces, left open for lungs to
a crowded city, has been long inculcated by physicians.
I think it possible such an exclusive resort might be at
first a little unpopular (remembering that some three
years ago a millionaire was stoned for riding through
Broadway with a mounted servant in livery behind
him), but, as one of the hand-to-mouth class, I do
not care how soon the rich get richer and the poor
poorer—leaving a comfortable middle class, in which
ambition might stop to breathe.

I notice the introduction of the Italian verandah
curtains to New York—the sort of striped demi-umbrella,
put out from the top of the window with falling
side folds, which are so common in Venice and Naples.
Two or three shops in Broadway have them,
and Cozzens has lately fitted them on to the windows
of his ladies' dining-room—and most showy and picturesque
luxuries they are.

Howard has chosen, for the decoy of his hotel, an
intermittent relay of governors. The immense flag
which sweeps the top of the omnibuses in Broadway
on the arrival of such functionaries, seems to have no
sinecure of it, and his house is, in consequence, continually
overrun. He keeps a table suitable to a court
hotel, and seems to be the only one of his class who
is independent of “travelling seasons.”

I observe that the paviors are at work in the upper
part of Broadway, removing the wooden pavement,
and substituting the broad, flat stones, such as are laid
in the streets of Florence. The wooden blocks were
certainly in a deplorable condition, but I do not think
they have had fair play as an experiment. They were
badly laid, and were left to annoy the public long after
they should have been repaired.

A periodical journal in Boston gives the name and
true history of Tom Thumb, the dwarf now at the
Museum. He was christened Charles Stratton. His
parents were of the usual size, and he has two sisters
of the usual proportions. General Thumb has not
grown since he was six months old, and he is now
eleven, and twenty-two inches tall. He is perfectly
formed, very athletic for his size, and in perfect health
and spirits. In mind he remains childish and unchanged,
as in body.

You may have noticed in the New York papers,
lately, a great abundance of essays upon bathing.
Since the Croton facilities, public attention has been
turned a good deal that way, and the prices of baths
have been universally diminished, while new bathing
establishments have been advertised in various parts of
the city. The new one lately opened by Stoppani in
Broadway, near the Apollo rooms, exceeds in splendor
anything we have yet seen in this line. A sumptuous
refectory is part of it; and the long, arched passages
of bathing-rooms remind one of the Roman establishments
in the way of baths. These were, anciently,
the centres around which luxuries of every description
were clustered; and Stoppani seems to have built this
with a view to sumptuous idling and enjoyment.

The most comprehensive view of Niagara is, no
doubt, that from the galleries of Clifton house;
but it is, at the same time, for a first view, one of the
most unfavorable. Clifton house stands nearly opposite
the centre of the irregular crescent formed by
the Falls; but it is so far back from the line of the
arc, that the height and grandeur of the two cataracts,
to an eye unacquainted with the scene, are deceptively
diminished. After once making the tour of the points
of view, however, the distance and elevation of the
hotel are allowed for by the eye, and the situation
seems most advantageous. This is the only house at
Niagara where a traveller, on his second visit, would
be content to live.

Clifton house is kept in the best style of hotels in
this country; but the usual routine of such places,
going on in the very eye of Niagara, weaves in very
whimsically with the eternal presence and power of
the cataract. We must eat, drink, and sleep, it is
true, at Niagara, as elsewhere; and indeed, what with
the exhaustion of mind and fatigue of body, we require
at the Falls perhaps more than usual of these
three “blessed inventions.” The leaf that is caught
away by the rapids, however, is not more entirely possessed
by this wonder of nature, than is the mind and
imagination of the traveller; and the arrest of that
leaf by the touch of the overhanging tree, or the
point of a rock amid the breakers, is scarce more momentary
than the interruption to the traveller's enchantment
by the circumstances of daily life. He
falls asleep with its surging thunders in his ear, and
wakes—to wonder, for an instant, if his yesterday's
astonishment was a dream. With the succeeding
thought, his mind refills, like a mountain channel,
whose torrent has been suspended by the frost, and he
is overwhelmed with sensations that are almost painful,
from the suddenness of their return. He rises
and throws up his window, and there it flashes, and
thunders, and agonizes—the same almighty miracle
of grandeur for ever going on; and he turns and wonders—what
the deuce can have become of his stockings!
He slips on his dressing-gown and commences
his toilet. The glass stands in the window, and with
his beard half achieved, he gets a glimpse of the foam-cloud
rising majestically over the top of the mahogany
frame. Almost persuaded, like Queen Christina
at the fountains of St. Peter's, that a spectacle of
such splendor is not intended to last, he drops his
razor, and with the soap drying unheeded on his chin,
he leans on his elbows, and watches the yesty writhe
in the abysm, and the solemn pillars of crystal eternally
falling, like the fragments of some palace-crested
star, descending through interminable space. The
white field of the iris forms over the brow of the cataract,
exhibits its radiant bow, and sails away in a vanishing
cloud of vapor upon the wind; the tortured
and convulsed surface of the caldron below shoots out
its frothy and seething circles in perpetual torment;
the thunders are heaped upon each other, the earth
trembles, and—the bell rings for breakfast! A vision
of cold rolls, clammy omelets, and tepid tea, succeeds
these sublime images, and the traveller completes his
toilet. Breakfast over, he resorts to the colonnade,
to contemplate untiringly the scene before him, and
in the midst of a calculation of the progress of the
fall toward Lake Erie—with the perspiration standing
on his forehead, while he struggles to conceive the
junction of its waters with Lake Ontario—the rocks
rent, the hills swept away, forests prostrated, and the
islands uprooted in the mighty conflux—some one's
child escapes from its nurse, and seizing him by the
legs, cries out, “Da-da.”

The ennui attendant upon public houses can never
be felt at Clifton house. The most common mind
finds the spectacle from its balconies a sufficient and
untiring occupation. The loneliness of uninhabited
parlors, the discord of baby-thrummed pianos, the
dreariness of great staircases, long entries, and barrooms

filled with strangers, are pains and penalties of
travel never felt at Niagara. If there is a vacant half-hour
to dinner, or if indisposition to sleep create that
sickening yearning for society, which sometimes
comes upon a stranger in a strange land, like the calenture
of a fever—the eternal marvel going on without
is more engrossing than friend or conversation,
more beguiling from sad thought than the Corso in
carnival-time. To lean over the balustrade and watch
the flying of the ferry-boat below, with its terrified
freight of adventurers, one moment gliding swiftly
down the stream in the round of an eddy, the next,
lifted up by a boiling wave, as if it were tossed up
from the scoop of a giant's hand beneath the water;
to gaze hour after hour into the face of the cataract,
to trace the rainbows, delight like a child in the
shooting spray-clouds, and calculate fruitlessly and
endlessly by the force, weight, speed, and change of
the tremendous waters—is amusement and occupation
enough to draw the mind from anything—to cure
madness or create it.

I met Weir, the painter, at West Point, and he
was kind enough to give me a look at his just-finished
picture for the Rotundo at Washington. It was but
a glimpse of five minutes, while I was waiting for the
boat, but I have remembered every line of the picture
so distinctly since, that I can speak confidently,
at least, of its effect and power of possessing the
spectator. Let me transcribe for you the historical
passage taken for illustration:—

“And the time being come that they must depart,
they were accompanied with most of their brethren
out of the city to a town called Delft-Haven, where
the ship lay ready to receive them. The next day
the wind being fair, they went on board, and their
friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight
of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs
and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them, what
tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches
pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch
strangers that stood on the key as spectators could
not refrain from tears; yet comfortable and sweet it
was to see such lively and true expressions of dear
and unfeigned love. But the tide, which stays for no
man, calling them away that were thus loath to depart,
their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and
they all with him, with watery cheeks commended
them with most fervent prayers unto the Lord and his
blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many
tears, they took their leave one of another, which
proved to be the last leave to many of them. Thus
hoisting sail, with a prosperous gale of wind, they
came in a short time to Southampton, where they
found the bigger ship come from London.”

It would be a curious subject of thought to a man
unfamiliar with the wardrobe of the imagination, if
he would keep this plain and simple passage of history
in his mind while he looks at the gorgeous investiture
in which it is clad by the genius of the painter—
to compare the picture in his mind while he read it
with the picture made of it on this canvass. I will
not attempt here—indeed I could not attempt, without
seeing it again—anything like a criticism on this
painting—but may say what I feel while it deepens in
my memory, that I have seen no such glorious work
of art in this country, and I have not been more filled
and wrought upon by any of the great chefs d'œuvre
of the masters in Europe. The effect on the mind
is that of expanding the capacity to embrace it.
Weir has drawn his figures on a scale larger than
life, and the immense canvass is filled with groups of
the most exquisite naturalness of posture and relation
to each other but at the same time finished with
a breadth and strength of effect that looks done with
a hand accustomed to minister only to power without
limit. The coloring in the two wings of the picture
is exceedingly gorgeous, but the centre, around the
kneeling pastor, is admirably subdued in middle teints
appropriate to the objects they envelope, and the pastor
himself, in face, attitude, and costume, is the most
masterly embodiment of hallowed piety and devotion
which it is possible for poet to conceive. The presence,
on board of the vessel, of Mr. and Mrs. Winslow
(the new-married people of fortune, who, while
travelling for pleasure, fell in with and joined the emigrants
for conscience sake), gives the artist the necessary
liberty to enrich the costume of his picture, and
there are two or three other female figures very splendidly
drawn and colored—among them the wife of
Miles Standish, whose soldierly form in the foreground
is one of the most conspicuous objects. Of the
twenty-odd figures in this grand picture, there is not
one about which a great deal might not be written,
even with my transiently impressed memory of it, but
I reserve it for a more detailed description after another
visit. Weir has flung his soul upon this work with
the complete abandonment of inspiration, and he has
wrought out of it, for his country as well as himself,
honor imperishable.

I think it is some thirty miles from Albany to Saratoga,
and we did it at the respectable leisure of five
hours—rather more time than it took formerly on
wheels. True, we did not “devour the way” as we
used to do, and it was a comfort to arrive without a
lining of dust in one's mouth, but I missed the blowing
of the horn, the chirrup and crack of the whip
with which we used to dash through the sandy hollow
of Congress Spring and pull up at Congress Hall
and I missed the group in the portico, and the greetings
and the green vines, and I missed—alas, for all
the misses of the past! The cars stop in the rear of
the “United States,” and the outstretched arms of
that new caravansary, in the shape of two yellow
wings extending to the depot, embrace you as you
come to the ground. My friends were all there, and
Congress Hall was down hill, in fact and in figure of
speech, and casting poetry and the past behind me, I
rattled to the rising sun and took lodgings with the
Marvins. The ex-president was there, with the thirty
or forty pounds of flesh that would not be recognised
by the presidential chair, and from five to six
hundred of his former subjects sat down with him to
dine. Mr. Van Buren has stuck to the “United
States,” till fashion has gone over to him, for he frequented
the house when the belles were on the other
side of the street. Whether in the dance of politics,
the democracy “chassez across,” and leave him on
the fashionable side, remains to be seen.

I had not been at “The Springs” for some years,
and between the changes in the place and the changes
in myself, I was, for a while (as the French charmingly
express it) desorienté. In the times that were, a gentleman,
on arriving at Saratoga, made his submission
to one or two ladies in whom was vested the gynocracy
of the season—the mother of a belle, or an ex-belle
well preserved, or some marvellous old maid,
witty and kindly. Through this door, and this only,
could the society of the place be reached, and to this
authority the last appeal was made in all cases of doubt
and difficulty. The beaux and belles conformed and
submitted, exchanged hearts and promised hands, and
drove and danced, fished and picnicked, in obedience
to this administration—Coventry the dreadful alternative.
There were fashionable old-bachelor beaux
in those days who were the masters of ceremony, and
there were belles, upon whom, individually, was concentrated
the beauty now distributed in small parcels
over the female population of a state. Every girl is
tolerably pretty now. Everybody is, to the extent of

his natural capacity, a beau. There is no authority
higher than every young lady's mamma. Sent to
Coventry by one party, you may stay “at court” with
another. Flirts are let flirt without snaffle or martingal.
Fortunes are guarded only by the parental
dragon. Nabobs and aristocrats are received upon
their natural advantages without prestige or favor, and
everybody knows everybody, particularly if not from
the same city. Having been happiest myself under
the old régime, this agrarian anarchy somewhat offended
me; and the more, perhaps, that among the
company at the “United States,” naturally secluding
herself somewhat from the crowd, is one of the concentrations
of the beauty of ten years ago—a most
magnificent woman whom that lustrum of time has
passed over as lightly as a night's sleep.

Still, there is beauty at Saratoga—enough, indeed,
for all purposes of dreaming or waking. The ball at
the “United States” on Friday evening was exceedingly
brilliant, and at the concert of Castellan on Saturday,
when the more serious beauties of Union Hall
were added to the assembly, the large saloon was
thought to be very thickly spangled with loveliness.
At this last-named hotel, by the way, they have introduced
family prayers at nine o'clock, and at another
less-frequented house they give tea with the dinner—
little differences which seem to classify the patronage
very effectively. This is the great season of Saratoga,
more persons being now at its different hotels than
were ever recorded in any previous season. I must
not omit to mention the charming improvements by
Mr. Clark in the gem of a valley above Congress
spring (by walks, shrubbery, etc.), nor the elegance
of Marvin's grounds and embellishments at the United
States—a superb hotel indeed, in all its appointments.

This is “hop-night” at the Astor, and among the
crowd of ladies in the house are a few on their return
from Saratoga. The beaux tire of “The Springs”
sooner than the belles, and in Broadway yesterday I
saw a thick sprinkling of the desirables. Indeed, the
weather has been temperate enough to make the city
agreeable, and the southerners prefer enjoying Niblo's
and the comfortable hotels, when the thermometer
ranges below ninety. The boats down the river are
very full just now. I came down from West Point in
the Empire on Thursday, and found her crowded
with presentable company; and with the elegance of
the saloons and decks, looking very drawing-roomsical
and gay. There is a great deal of gammon in the
reasons given for going and for not going to the Springs;
and it is the fashion now for those who are not there
to ascribe their absence to a horror of the letter-writers,
as if any would be mentioned at all by those immortality-bestowing
gentry who did not, by flirting
and display, show an appetite for notoriety, and in a
crowd, too, quite as promiscuous as the reading public!
It would surprise a believing Judeus, after listening
to the indignation current in the saloon of Saratoga
in the evening, on the subject of the penny papers,
to see with what eagerness they are read the
next morning, and with what manifest pleasure each
lady mentioned shows to her admirers the paragraph
peccant. That such letters as I refer to are a very
great evil no man who respects the delicacy of private
life can doubt; but one half of the mischief, at least,
lies in the unwomanly passion for notoriety to which
they minister.

Those who linger longest at Saratoga are the families
of resident New-Yorkers, their return to town being
the return to the solitude of a house to themselves.
For “mineral waters” read “society in large doses;”
and the real object of attraction is as easily found at
the “Astor” or the “American” as at Saratoga. The
sea air of Rockaway may stand for a tenth of its attractions,
and the other nine parts lie in the necessity
of some excusable resort in the neighborhood of the
city, which shall supply to the New-Yorkers what the
hotels (as a sequel to the Springs) are to travelling
strangers. From about the twentieth of this month
to the first cool weather, Rockaway will be thronged
with excellent society, mostly from this city; and
there is a nucleus of half a dozen of the most delightful
women in any country, summering there regularly;
three admirably lively and accomplished ladies of one
family the leading constellation. It is a part of the
commonplacery of fashionable chat to fret at the
crowd, and wish for more suitable privacy; but it is
amusing to observe what a difference of opinion there
seems to be between the feet and tongue of the fair
exclusive. The belle at Saratoga rises at six and
walks to Congress spring. The ostensible object is
to drink the waters, which she might have in quite as
salutary a state by ringing the bell of her apartment.
The platform around the spring is crowded with fashionables;
and, elbowed and stared at rather freely, and
complaining of both very feelingly, she remains in the
crowd till breakfast—solitary walks of the most shaded
coolness though there be, hard by and accessible.
She breakfasts with five hundred persons, and from
the table comes to the drawing-room, where she
promenades, and is elbowed as before, till eleven. At
that hour she goes with a party to the bowling-alleys,
where she amuses herself till the dressing-bell for dinner.
And after dinner she mingles in the full-dress crowd
once more till tea-time (with perhaps the parenthesis
of a drive with a party to the lake), and from tea-time
till midnight she is in the same crowd, and goes to
bed late to get up again early, and so, burning her
candle at both ends, finds Saratoga enchanting. But
it is not the less “dreadfully crowded,” and “horridly
mixed.”

The music at Saratoga was one of its pleasures to
me. The band plays at the spring from six to eight
in the morning, and the morning hours (anacreontics
to the contrary notwithstanding) are the part
of the day when the senses are most acutely sensitive
to pleasure. If I am to see a fine picture with the
clearest eye, or read a page of poetry with the subtlest
appreciation, or listen to the sweet divisions of music
with the nicest and most interpreting ear, or hear a
deep-found thought of love, friendship, or philosophy,
give it me in the early morning of midsummer. The
perturbed blood flows evenly, and the perceptions
have settled over-night like a roiled well; and (if in
temperate health) the heart is softer and more susceptible.
To express a plain fact poetically—the marble
lid is lifted from the fountain of tears at that hour,
and though the waters do not “well forth,” they are
open to the dropping in of those pearls of attendant
angels—love, beauty, and music. Yet, “before
breakfast” is said commonly to be the prose of the day.

One hour of music after dinner is made tributary to
the smokers. The ladies and the tobacco eschewers
are out of its reach in the drawing-room, but the papas
and the inveterates bring their chairs out to the
grassy area of the “United States,” and smoke under
the shade, listening to the German band contentedly
and contemplatively. And that is a very pleasant
hour; and taken advantage of by those who, like myself,
find comfort in the ellipses of conversation.

As to living at Saratoga, no reasonable person would
expect a comfortable dinner, sitting down with five or
six hundred persons. The meats get cold in the
spreading. But, to those who are drinking the waters,
any check upon the appetite is not unsalutary,
and, for the gourmet, the Lake House and one or two
other resorts in the neighborhood, offer game and fish
dinners in compensatory perfection. I went over to
Barhydt's dark lake, the scene of the loves of the lustrum
gone by, and found it looking neglected and forsaken.
The old Dutchman is dead, and his quiet
successors look out with repelling surprise upon the

gay and intruding visiters. It has ceased to be frequented.

I saw at the engraver's yesterday a portrait of
Halleck, engraved for Graham's Magazine, which exceeds
anything I have before seen, as a worthy and
truthful representation of a poet. It is to be published
in the September number, I believe, and is one of the
well-conceived series of portraits in progress of publication
in that magazine. The keen, joyous, analytical
gusto which give such a “sauce Robert” to Halleck's
poetry is admirably conveyed in this picture,
and a more faithful likeness was never drawn. The
original is by Inman.

Broadway in August is like a pocket-full of change
with the gold and silver picked out of it; and like the
disrespectful finger thrust by its owner into its scarce
diminished bulk, Mr. Stopintown, the lounger, contemptuously
threads the crowd, of which he knows
the less precious and residual quality. But let us try
again—for this beginning is too Jeremy-Taylor-ous.

Have you ever started at Niblo's, dear reader, and,
with your eyes particularly open, walked down the
“shilling side” of Broadway to the Park? You
must have done this, and with speculation in your
eyes too, before you can detect, on the fashionable
side of Broadway in August, a certain class of promenaders
visible there in no other month, by gas or daylight.
Now it occurs to us, that, in the spiritual geography
of this shop-and-show land, we can very possibly
give you a lesson.

Few people live more in the eye of the world than
than those who are in transition from poverty to riches,
bound upward. None are so invisible as those
who are going over the same road, downward. The
eye, in the city, acquires a habit of selecting what it
shall see. Glimpse, the porter (to put it figuratively),
sits in the outer vestibule of sight, and passes his
judgment on all comers before they are admitted
to the presence of consciousness. Prosperity has a
color of its own, and a coat with a needy pocket in its
skirt is as invisible as the sick heart it is buttoned
over. You walk Broadway from the Battery to Bond
street (on the golden side), and you remark every flippery-flirt
and boy-beau, and could recal upon oath
their respective riband and waistcoat; yet a man of
genius has gone by, with a thought in his brain new
from God, but under a hat set distrustfully on, and
you would swear in a witness-box that he never
crossed your eye. Visible is an arbitrary word in
large cities.

But it is a devilish truth that in proportion as the
poverty-stricken become invisible, their consciousness
of being seen becomes painfully sensitive. They feel
pointed at with the finger when they are as totally unobserved
as the driver of an omnibus. The prosperous
and gay, too—the very persons who are blindest
to their presence—seem to them their most vigilant
and insulting observers. And as there is a side of the
street proper to the rich and the happy, the poor and
wretched walk on the other. The great haunt of the
distressed—the Alsatia of poverty and crime—the lair
of the outcast of hope and pity—borders Broadway
on the east. In their recoil from the abyss they hang
over—turning back in terror from the fiendish abandonment
of the Five Points, the last platform between
despair and death—the unhappy come to that limit of
Broadway and look across. And up and down, between
Prince street and Chamber, they walk, with a
shunning gait, and shoulders shrinking at your look
as from a blow, and watch the happy on the other
side—wretched men of all degrees of desperation,
from the first downward step to the last.

Oh, you should walk there, now and then! You
will walk there—perhaps you have, with unconscious
selection, already—when in want of money. With
the same clothes you wore when you had enough—
with a cravat as saucily expensive—gloved and booted
comme il faut—you will instinctively take the other
side of the street if out of pocket—if a five-dollar bill,
that is to say—unconsidered rag not long before—covers
now as much void as the zodiac! Oh, most comparative
five-dollar bill!

But the faces on the “shilling side” of Broadway!
If you want a heart-ache, to be succeeded by content
with your lot and a prayer to God, cross over and look
at one or two. The eyelid unrelaxed—the mouth
shut up within, and the lips bloodless with the compression
of the tongue matted to the teeth—the livid
pits beneath the eyes, and the veins blood-shot round
the pupil—the rigid neck—the jaw set up with desperate
endurance—the contracted nostril, and the complexion
set and dead. And this is the countenance
of only poverty—only the agony of one man wanting
a little of what another has too much of—of
which the church, building for the God of mercy at
the head of Wall street, has millions more than it can
spend without ingenuity of extravagance! Are you
and I parts of a world like this, dear reader!

But in August the gay and prosperous go off, and
the golden-side of Broadway is left to the mechanical
and the stranger. Of these the shabby and unhappy
have no dread, and they come over and walk, with
only their despair, in the haunts they once frequented.
You will see them in Broadway now—your attention
once directed to them—and if it be on Saturday, preach
who will on Sunday, you will have profited the day
before by a better sermon.

In looking down on the valley of Wyoming, made
memorable by savage barbarity and famous by the
poet's wand of enchantment, it is natural to indulge
in resentful feeling toward the sanguinary race whose
atrocities make up its page in story. It is a pity, however,
that they, too, had not a poet and a partial chronicler.
Leaving entirely out of view the ten thousand
wrongs done by the white man to the Indian, in the
corruption, robbery, and rapid extinction of his race,
there are personal atrocities, on our own records exercised
toward that ill-fated people, which, in impartial
history hereafter, will redeem them from all charge
except that of irresistible retaliation. The brief story
of the famous Cornstalk, sachem of the Shawanees,
and king of the northern confederacy, is sermon
enough on this text.

The northwestern corner of Virginia, and that part
of Pennsylvania contiguous, on the south, was the
scene of some of the bloodiest events of Indian warfare.
Distinguished over all other red men of this
this region, was Cornstalk. He was equally a terror
to the men of his own tribe (whom he did not hesitate
to hew down with his tomahawk if they showed any
cowardice in fight), and a formidable opponent to our
troops, from his military talents and personal daring.
He was, at the same time, more than all the other
chiefs of the confederacy, a friend to the whites; and,
energetic as he was when once engaged in battle,
never took up arms willingly against them. After the
bloody contest at Point Pleasant, in which Cornstalk
had displayed his generalship and bravery, to the admiration
of his foes, he came in to the camp of Lord
Dunmore, to make negotiations for peace. Colonel
Wilson, one of the staff, thus describes his oratory:
“When he arose, he was nowise confused or daunted,
but spoke in a distinct and audible voice, without
stammering or repetition, and with peculiar emphasis.
His looks, while addressing Dunmore, were truly
grand and majestic, yet graceful and attractive. I have

heard many celebrated orators, but never one whose
powers of delivery surpassed those of Cornstalk on
this occasion.”

In the spring of 1777, it was known that an extensive
coalition was forming among the tribes, and that
it only waited the consent and powerful aid of the
Shawances, to commence war upon the whites. At
this critical time, Cornstalk, accompanied by Red
Hawk, came on a friendly visit to the fort at Point
Pleasant, communicated the intentions of the tribes,
and expressed his sorrow that the tide set so strongly
against the colonists, that he must go with it in spite
of all his endeavors.

Upon receiving this information, given by the noble
savage in the spirit of a generous enemy, the commander
of the garrison seized upon Cornstalk and his
compamon as hostages for the peaceful conduct of his
nation, and set about availing himself of the advantage
he had gained by his suggestions. During his
captivity, Cornstalk held frequent conversations with
the officers, and took pleasure in describing to them
the geography of the west, then little known. One
afternoon, while he was engaged in drawing on the
floor a map of the Missouri territory, its water-courses
and mountains, a halloo was heard from the forest,
which he recognised as the voice of his son Ellinipsico,
a young warrior, whose courage and address
were almost as celebrated as his own. Ellinipsico entered
the fort, and embraced his father most affectionately,
having been uneasy at his long absence, and
come hither in search of him.

The day after his arrival, a soldier went out from
the fort on a hunting excursion, and was shot by Indians.
His infuriated companions instantly resolved
to sacrifice Cornstalk and his son. They charged
upon Ellinipsico that the offenders were in his company,
but he declared that he had come alone, and
with the sole object of seeking his father. When the
soldiers came within hearing, the young warrior appeared
agitated. Cornstalk encouraged him to meet
his fate composedly, and said to him, “My son, the
Great Spirit has sent you here that we may die together!”
He turned to meet his murderers the next
instant, and receiving seven bullets in his body,
expired without a groan.

When Cornstalk had fallen, Ellinipsico continued
still and passive, not even raising himself from his
seat. He met death in that position with the utmost
calmness. “The other Indian,” says the chronicle,
“was murdered piecemeal, and with all those circumstances
of cruelty with which the savage wreaks his
vengeance on his enemy.”

The day before his death, Cornstalk had been present
at a council of the officers, and had spoken to
them on the subject of the war, with his own peculiar
eloquence. In the course of his remarks, he expressed
something like a presentiment of his fate. “When
I was young,” he said, “and went out to war, I often
thought each would be my last adventure, and I
should return no more. I still lived. Now I am in
the midst of you, and, if you choose, you may kill
me. I can die but once. It is alike to me whether
now or hereafter!”

His atrocious murder was dearly expiated. The
Shawanees, the most warlike tribe of the west, became
thenceforward the most deadly and implacable foes to
the white man.

Nine o'clock—an August morning—and every breath
out of doors like a bird's life pressed into a minute!
The breast of the earth naked to the sun—the air in
a trance—the river breathless with the beauty of the
sky it mirrors—and at such an hour to see the ghost
of a mended pen and a stubborn resolution! Out
upon the art of writing! Is there no honest wood
chopper, no dog, no squirrel, no anything out of
doors, that will change lives with me! Down, school-boy
heart! and come hither, since thou must, pen,
ink, and paper!—stationary, indeed!

Close the shutters now, and bring candles! If I am
to sit at this table till noon, I will have it night. Slippers,
Thomas! And then shut the stable-door; my
horse neighs; lock up the saddle and lose the key!
And, Thomas! lend old Peter my boat, and break the
fishing-rod, and scare away the birds from the window.
Has a skylark possessed my soul or no—
that I so hate the roof over my head this radiant
morning.

Play to me ere I begin! Music is creative! What
a benefactor to the world is John Chickering! How
exquisitely balanced are those octaves, and how gloriously
(with that touch) the rich instrument revels
through the music! The builder of these caves of
harmony has a poet's vocation. What is poetry but
the vehicle of man's enthusiasm—the element in
which float fancy and feeling—the suggestive awakener
of intellect—the soother of care and pain! He who
writes a poem that is read and loved by a thousand
hearths, links himself with an angel's round of delight
and sympathy; and the builder of a thousand harmonious
instruments follows in the same bright orbit of
influence. It has been said that “he who can not find
happiness can not find an easy-chair.” For easy-chair
I read one of the evenly-balanced, rich, true; round-toned
and incomparable instruments of John Chickering.
I have erected mine into a household god!

Play me those “Hope Waltzes” again. They
come off like Ariel's spiriting. But to bewitch the
heels and stir the brain the “Flower Waltzes” against
the world! I have made out their language by daily
listening to them, and if I can not divine the composer's
thought when they were born, I can tell what
they express, as I can what all music expresses that I
love and hear often. It is the difference between good
and bad music, that one is an articulate thought, and
the other mere jingle and gibberish. Among the
“coming events” that “cast their shadows before,” is,
I think, a musical era, in which the intellectual qualities
of harmony in sounds will be studied and understood.
For one of the most powerful levers on the
human heart, singly or in mass, music has been
strangely undervalued, and its professors and masters
have been as strangely stigmatized as an idle and unintellectual
class of people. A revolution has begun in
church music, and in Boston (by the efforts of one
educated and enthusiastic man, Mr. Mason) the
church choirs have become as effective and eloquent
as the sermon. The perfection to which Chickering
has brought the structure of that universal instrument,
the piano; this musical reform in Boston; the
introduction of singing into the systems of education
for children, and last (not least surprising), the adoption
of music as a political engine, and its powerful
operation, are “signs of the times” which would warrant
a musical man of genius in creating a new liberal
profession—the adaptation of expression to sound,
and the marriage of emotion to music. Moore understands
this mystery, and when in Spain (I once heard
him say) wrote several of his most pathetic songs to
the gayest airs of the peasantry. We have tried rewording
old songs with some effect, and it is like
bringing notes to their right mind and making them
talk sense. There is a delicious thing by Topliff—
“Consider the lilies how they grow”—which makes
one feel as if the whole Bible should be chanted; and
the “Six Songs from Scripture,” by Moore, are very
beautiful. But admirably as Moore's words are always
married to his music, there is one song of his
set to an air of Bellini's, which seems to me the masterpiece
of sense linked to corresponding harmony. I
can not at this moment name the opera from which

the air is taken, nor the volume of Moore which contains
the poetry. It commences
and is published in a book called “Kingsley's Choir.”
It is a song to “lap you in Elysium.”

From Memnon to Helicon is but to “jump Jim
Crow.” Who is writing poetry? Nobody in England,
I think, but Mrs. Norton, and out of her sorrows
this beautiful woman is beginning to weave herself an
immortality. The allusion to her mother in one of
her late fugitive pieces, and the frequent mention of
her children, are touched in the very deepest truth of
nature as well as in the finest skill of the poet. It was
necessary for the world that this fine genius should be
“tried by fire.” With her remarkable beauty, naturally
gay spirits, and unequalled powers of fascination,
Mrs. Norton, had the course of her life and love run
smooth, would never have sounded those sorrowful
depths of her heart from which wells out the bitterness
so sweet in song. Happy—we should have
heard but of her beauty. Wronged, persecuted, and
robbed of her children and her good name — we
build her an altar in our hearts as the most gifted poetess
of her time, and posterity will perpetuate the worship.
Is this compensation or no?

By that blast upon the farmer's dinner-horn, twelve
o'clock! Avaunt, quill! “sweat of my brow!” In
how many shapes comes the curse of the fall upon us!
This horn, which calls in my farmer to repose from
his curse in his chair, releases me from mine to let me
amuse myself with his labor. My curse is worked
out indoors—his in the field. The literal “sweat of
the brow” is my greatest happiness, and his heavy fulfilment
of the anathema. Light sits his curse, however,
to my thinking, who bears it out of doors! The
yearning for physical action, impatience of confinement,
dislike of the cobweb niceties of life, seem to
me feelings which grow into passions with increasing
years. Will no one invent a daguerreotype for the
mind, that our thoughts may record themselves—letting
us walk where we list? The pencil is to be done
away with—why not the pen?

Weir; the painter, is moving his glorious picture to
Boston, for exhibition. It will be opened to visiters
there by the first of September. It is to be exhibited,
afterward, at the National Academy in New York—the
first home of the pilgrims having, very properly, the
honor of the first sight of it. Weir will steep himself
in his countrymen's hearts, as his picture shows them
how honestly, as well as with what splendor of genius,
he has executed their commission. I understand that
Vanderlyn's picture is very fine. There are several
persons employed in filling up his design, but Mr.
Vanderlyn's own pencil is to harmonize and finish it.
Mr. Morse has given up his palette and brushes, to
devote himself to his electro-galvanic telegraph, which
is now being laid down. The visit of Inman, the
painter, to England, is partly an errand for the study
of costume and data required for his picture for the
rotunda.

There seems to be a lull in literature, which I hope
is the precursor of a storm on the subject of copyright.
No new books of any description since the
“Last of the Barons.” The “Change for American
Notes” is not by Miss Sedgwick, and I presume that
the editor of the Enquirer, who must be acquainted,
as well as anybody, with her propriety “thrice bolted
o'cr,” had not looked into the free-and-easy pages of
the book when he pronounced her the authoress.
There is some dispute over julep-straws about the
authorship of “Philip in Search of a Wife.” It is
“by a Gentleman Butterfly,” and is a sequel to “Kate
in Search of a Husband,” by Lady Chrysalis. But
public rumor, which was foiled in striving to identify
the lady chrysalis with the brightest of the callow
divinities of Broadway, has covered the wings of the
gentleman butterfly with the same attractive petticoat.
Having no eyesight to spare, I wait for an Appleton
edition before reading the book. I think that the two
or three tricks practised upon title-pages not long ago,
have materially hurt the credit of those respectable
old truth-tellers, and at the same time have dampened
the interest in new publications.

The above curious letter was left in the dressing-table
drawer of No. —, United States Hotel. It
was not generally known that the young lady who had
occupied the room before a certain respectable spinster
(who handed us the letter, taking the responsibility
of its publication as a warning), eloped after the
third day of her belleship—as was to be expected.
The result of such pestilent advice is its own proper
moral.

Next to eating, drinking, loving, and money-making,
the greatest desire of human beings seems to be to
discover the lining of each other's brains; and the
great difference between authors and other people
seems mainly to consist in the faculty of turning out
this lining to the view. But in this same lining there
are many plaits, wrinkles, and corners, which even authors
scarce think it worth their while to expand, but
which, if accidentally developed, create an interest,
either by their correspondence with other people's
wrinkles, or by their intrinsic peculiarity.

Let us see if we can give a sketchy idea of the rise
and progress of literary celebrity in London; or, in
other words, the climbing into society, and obtaining
of notice by men who have a calling to literature.
Sterne's method of generalizing, by taking a single
instance, is a very good one, and we will touch here
and there upon the history of an individual whom we
know, and who, after achieving several rounds of the
ladder of society, is still, we believe, slowly making
his way upward—or downward. Let us call him
Snooks, if you please, for we can not give his real
name, and still speak as freely as we wish to do of his
difficulties in mounting. Snooks was a Manchester
boy of good birth, brought up to business—his position
at home about equal to that of a merchant's son
in New York. He began writing verses for the country
papers, and at last succeeded in getting an article
into the London New Monthly, and with this encouragement
came up to town to follow literature for a
livelihood. With a moderate stipend from his father,
he lived a very quiet life for a couple of years, finding
it rather difficult to give away his productions, and
quite impossible to sell them. There was no opening
at the same time through which he could even
make an attempt to get a footing in desirable society.
In the third year he became proof-reader to one of
the publishers, and being called upon to write anticipatory
puffs of works he had examined in manuscript,
he came under the notice of the proprietor of one of
the weeklies, and by a lucky chance was soon after
employed as sub-editor. This was his first available
foothold. It was his business, of course, to review
new books, and, as a “teller” in the bank of fame, he
was a personage of some delegated importance. His
first agreeable surprise was the receipt of a parcel in
scented paper, containing the virgin effusions of a
right honorable lady, who, in a little note, with her
compliments to Mr. Snooks (for she had inquired the
name of her probable critic through a literary friend),
begged a notice of her little book, and a call from
Mr. Snooks when he should have committed his criticisms
to paper. Snooks was a man of very indifferent
personables, his hair of an unmitigated red and
his voice of a very hair-splitting treble; but he had a

violent taste for dress, and a born passion for countesses;
and he wrote most unexceptionable poetry,
that would pass for anybody's in the world, it was so
utterly free from any peculiarity. This last quality
made him an excellent verse-tinker, and he was the
man of all others best suited to solder over the cracks
and chasms of right honorable poetry. He wrote a
most commendatory criticism of her ladyship's book,
quoting some passages, with here and there an emendation
of his own, and called at the noble mansion
with the critique in his pocket. By this bridge of
well-born vanity, paying the humiliating toll of insincere
praise, he crossed the repelling barrier of aristocratic
life, and entered it as the necessary incumbrance
in her ladyship's literary fame. Her ladyship was “at
home” on Thursday evenings, and Snooks became
the invariable first comer and last goer-away; but his
happiness on these Thursday evenings could only be
called happiness when it was reconnoitred from the
distance of Manchester. He went always in an irreproachable
waistcoat, fresh gloves, and varnished shoes,
but his social performances for the evening consisted
in his first bow to her ladyship, and her ladyship's
“How d'ye do, Mr. Snooks?” After this exciting
conversation, he became immediately interested in
some of the bijoux upon the table, striding off from
that to look at a picture in the corner, or to procure
the shelter of a bust upon a pedestal, behind which
he could securely observe the people, so remarkably
unconscious of his presence. Possibly, toward the
latter part of the evening, a dandy would level his
glass at him and wonder how the devil he amused
himself, or some purblind dowager would mistake him
for the footman, and ask him for a glass of water;
but these were his nearest approaches to an intimacy
with the set in which he visited. After a couple of
years of intercourse with the nobility on this footing,
he becomes acquainted with one or two other noble
authors at the same price, frequents their parties in
the same way, and having unequivocal evidence (in
notes of invitation) that he visits at the West End, he
now finds a downward door open to society in Russell
square. By dint of talking authentically of my lady
this, and my lord the other, he obtains a vogue at the
East End which he could only get by having come
down from a higher sphere, and through this vestibule
of aristocratic contempt he descends to the highest
society in which he can ever be familiar. Mr.
Snooks has written a novel in three volumes, and considers
himself fully established as one of the notabilities
of London; but a fish out of water is happy in
comparison with Snooks when in the society of the
friends he talks most about, and if he were to die tomorrow,
these very “friends” would with difficulty remember
anything but his red head, and the exemplary
patience with which he submitted to his own society.

The fact is, that the position of a mere literary
man in England, in any circle above that to which he
is born, is that of a jackall. He is invited for what
he contributes to the entertainment of the aristocratic
lions and lionesses who feed him. He has neither
power nor privilege in their sphere. He dare not introduce
a friend, except as another jackall, and it
would be for very extraordinary reasons that he would
ever name at the tables where he is most intimate, his
father or mother, wife, sister, or brother. The footman,
who sometimes comes to him with a note or
book, knows the difference between him and the other
guests of his master, and by an unpunishable difference
of manner, makes the distinction in his service.
The abandon which they feel in his presence, he never
feels in theirs; and we doubt whether Thomas Moore
himself, the pet of the English aristocracy for forty
years, ever forgot, in their company, that he was in
the presence of his superiors, and an object of condescension.

Now we have many people in this country, Americans
born, who are monarchists, and who make no
scruple in private conversation of wishing for a defined
aristocracy, and other infrangible distinctions between
the different classes of society. In the picture
they draw, however, they themselves figure as the
aristocrats; and we must take the liberty, for the moment,
of putting them “below the salt,” and setting
forth a few of their annoyances. Take the best-received
Americans in London—yourself, for example,
Mr. Reader! You have no fixed rank, and therefore
you have nothing to keep you down, and can rise to
any position in the gift of your noble entertainer. As
a foreigner, you circulate freely (as many well-introduced
Americans do) through all the porcelain penetralia
of the West End. You are invited to dine, we
will say, with his grace, the Duke of Devonshire.
There are ten or twelve guests, all noble except yourself;
and when you look round upon the five other
gentlemen, it is possible that, without vanity, you may
come to the conclusion, that in dress, address, spirit,
and natural gifts, you are at least the equal of those
around you. Dinner is late in being announced, and
meantime, as you know all the ladies, and are particularly
acquainted with the youngest and prettiest, you
sit down by the latter, and promise yourself the pleasure
of giving her an arm when the doors are thrown
open, and sitting by her at dinner. The butler makes
his appearance at last, and the lady willingly takes
your arm—when in steps my Lord Flummery, who
is a terrible “spoon,” but undoubtedly “my lord”
takes the lady from you, and makes his way to the
dinner-table. Your first thought is to follow and secure
a place on the other side of her, but still another
couple or two are to take precedence, and you are left
at last to walk in alone, and take the seat that is left—
perhaps between two men who have a lady on the
other side. Pleasant—isn't it?

Again. You are strolling in Regent street or the
park with an Englishman, whose acquaintance you
made on your travels. He is a man of fortune, and
as independent in his character as any man in England.
On the continent he struck you as particularly
high-minded and free from prejudice. You are chatting
with him very intimately, when a young nobleman,
not remarkable for anything but his nobility,
slips his arm into your friend's and joins the promenade.
From that moment your friend gives you
about as much of his attention as he does to his walking-stick,
lets your questions go unanswered, let them
be never so clever, and enjoys with the highest zest
the most remote spoonyosities of my lord. You,
perhaps, as a stranger, visit in my lord's circle of society,
and your friend does not: but he would as soon
think of picking my lord's pocket as of introducing
you to him, and, if you begin to think you are Monsieur
de Trop, and say “good morning,” your friend,
who never parted from you before without making an
engagement to see you again, gives you a nod without
turning his head from his lordship, and very dryly
echoes your “good morning.” And this, we repeat,
the most independent man in England will do, for
is brought up to fear God and honor a lord, and it is
bred in his bone and brain.

We could give a thousand similar instances, but
the reader can easily imagine them. The life of a
commoner in England is one of inevitable and daily
eclipse and mortification—nothing but the force of
early habits and education making it tolerable to the
Englishman himself, and nothing at all making it in
any way endurable to a republican of any pride or
spirit. You naturally say, “Why not associate with
the middle classes, and let the aristocracy go to the
devil?” but individually sending people to the devil
is of no use, and the middle classes value yourself
and each other only as your introduction to them is

aristocratic, or as their friends are approvable by an
aristocratic eye. There is no class free from this humiliating
weakness. The notice of a lord will at any
time take the wind out of your sails when a lady is in
the case; your tailor will leave you half-measured to
run to my lord's cab in the street; your doctor will
neglect your fever for my lord's cold; your friend will
breakfast with my lord, though engaged particularly
to you; and the out-goings and in-comings, the sayings
and doings, the stupidities, impudencies, manners,
greetings, and condescensions of lords and ladies,
usurp the conversation in all places, and to the
interruption or exclusion of the most grave or personal
topics.

Understand us, we grudge no respect to dignities or
authorities. Even to wealth as power, we are willing to
yield the wall. But we say again, that a republican
spirit must rebel against homage to anything human with
which it never can compete, and in this lies the only
distinction (we fervently hope) which will ever hedge
in an American aristocracy. Let who will get to
windward of us by superior sailing—the richer, the
handsomer, the cleverer, the stronger, the more beloved
and gifted—there was fair play at the start, and
we will pay deference and duty with the promptest.
But no lords and ladies, Mr. President, if you
love us.

I am very sorry to record a good piece of news for
the coachmakers:—that the ladies are beginning to
get superfine about riding in omnibuses. The omnibus
convenience has been upon an excellent footing
for the last few years, used, indeed, with a freedom
and propriety peculiar to this country, and somewhat
characteristic of its deference to the sex. From the
longitudinal shape of New York, it is easy to go anywhere
by omnibus, at any moment, and even if a carriage
could be kept for a shilling a day, the trouble
and delay attending a private equipage, would induce
many to give them up, and spend their shilling in the
“Broadway lines.” The gentility of the custom, too,
has induced the proprietors to embellish and enlarge
their vehicles, and for sixpence you may ride two or
three miles in a very elegant conveyance, and mostly
with very elegant people. Of late, however, it has
become a habit with an improper class of persons to
ride backward and forward, instead of walking Broadway,
and propriety has very naturally taken a fright.
I am very much afraid, from the symptoms, that omnibuses
will become in New York, what they are in
England and Paris—useful only to the un-ornamental
classes of society. If so, it will be another step
(among many I have noticed lately) toward separating
the rich from the middle classes by barriers of expense.
With an errand, or an acquaintance two
miles off, a lady must ride, at some cost, as a habit, if
omnibuses are tabooed.

I understand, by inquiry, that there are one hundred
and fifty omnibuses plying in New York city.
The receipts amount to about eight dollars per diem
for each one, and the expense wear and tear, &c.,
substract five from this sum, leaving a profit of three
dollars a day on each vehicle. Yet some of them go
a course of three miles for the invariable sixpence.
There are certain parts of the day when it is difficult
to get a place in an omnibus—wishing to ride up
Broadway, for instance, at the dinner hour or at dusk.
There are several drawn by four horses, which contain
twenty odd persons. One named for Forrest, the
tragedian, with “Edwin Forrest” splendidly emblazoned
on the body, is particularly magnificent. I saw
one last night for the first time on three wheels—with
two rows of seats, like two omnibuses put lengthwise
together. The change from hackney-coaches to cabs
is very unsatisfactory to passenger as well as horse.
The old New York jarveys were the best in the
world, with the offset of the most abominable imposition
in the known world, in the charges of drivers.
Cabs were introduced to remedy this; and now one
horse draws the load of two, and reduces the owner's
expenses one half, while the imposition is in no way
lessened. There are laws, but as ninety-nine persons
in a hundred would rather be fleeced than prosecute
or bully, the extortion goes on very swimmingly.

I was honored yesterday by being called in to a private
view of the fall fashion of hats, lying at present
perdu in tissue paper, and not to be visible to the promiscuous
eye till the first of September. I ventured
modestly to suggest an improvement, but was told,
with the solemnity of conviction, that the hatters had
decided upon the fashion, and the blocks were cut,
and the hats made, and there was no appeal. It is
rather a lower crown than has been worn—slightly
bell, brim a thought wider, and very much arched underneath.
The English hat that comes over now is
very small, and narrow brimmed, and the Parisian is
shaped like an inverted cone, truncated at the base.
Of course we have a right to a fashion of our own, but
a hat is, more than any article of dress, a matter of
whimsey, and any inexorable style, without reference
to particular physiognomy, seems to me somewhat in
the line of the bed of Procrustes. I recollect hearing
the remark made abroad, that Americans could always
be known by their unmitigated newness of hat. Certain
it is, that the hatters in this country are a richer
class, and many pegs higher in tradesman dignity,
than those of France or England—tant mieux, of
course. Apropos—in some slight research yesterday
for material to refresh the thread bareness of my outer
man, I looked in at one or two of the crack shops, and
was quite taken by surprise with the splendor and variety
of masculine toggeries. The waistcoat patterns,
the scarfs, the pantaloon stuffs, and dressing-gowns,
are sumptuous beyond all modern precedent. A man
must have a gentleman's means, now, to allow carte
blanche to his tailor. I was about to turn aside some
rich stuffs, as being, I was sorry to say, quite beyond
my style and condition, when the tailor forestalled me,
by the assurance that by the next packet, he should
receive something much more splendid and worthy
my attention! As I have remarked once or twice before,
those who live on literary profits will soon find
themselves stranded on the middle class—the rich ebbing
from their reach in one direction, and the poor
in the other. I have an aversion to the clerk's salt-and-pepper,
but I should be content with any other
outward mark of my means and belongings.

We had a very melo-dramatic out-of-doors exhibition
the other evening, in the illumination of the Bowling
Green fountain. An illumination waterfall is a
very phantom-like affair, and the eight ghostly gas-burners,
set round the rim of the basin in green hoods,
looked as much like demons, popping their heads
above water to gaze at the white spirit, as would have
been at all necessary for diabolical pantomime. The
fountain grows upon the public liking, I think, and
certainly, when lighted by red and blue fires (which is
part of the Friday evening show) it is a magnificent
object. The private fountains in the court-yards of
the hotels are very handsome. Bunker, in the rear
of his well-kept and most comfortable mansion, has
a fine jet under the noble old trees; and Cozzens
has opened an ornamental fountain in the rear of
the American—great luxuries, both, to the respective

hotels. I am told, by the way, that the Croton water
does not keep at sea.

The literary arena is now unoccupied, and it could
be wished that some of our own knights out of practice
would don their armor for a tilt—that Wetmore
would come away from his crockery, and Halleck
from his leger, Bryant from his scissors and politics,
and Sprague from his cerberus post at the Hades of
Discount—and give us some poetry. Another sea or
forest novel by Cooper would be most welcome now,
or a volume of prose by Longfellow, and these two, I
think, as the only American authors not regularly harnessed
in the car of Mammon, should have store laid
away for such exigencies of famine. Kendall's Recollections
of the chain round his neck in Mexico, and
Brantz Myer's, of his gold coat and court experience
at the same place and time, will come out pretty
nearly in the same week, and be excellent sauce to
each other. Epes Sargent is somewhere in the high
grass, rusticating and writing a book, and I hope, if it
is not a tragedy for Forrest, it is a novel of good society—either
of which would come out from under his
raven locks with little trouble, and of most excellent
quality. Placide, who has a scribli-phobia on his own
account, has offered his “Life and Times” to a friend,
to be delivered verbally over woodcock and sherry,
and several of the first chapters are uncorked and digested.
Mr. Richard Willis, younger brother of one
of the editors of the New Mirror, is residing at Frankfort,
in Germany, and preparing a book on the land of
beer and the domestic virtues. Mrs. Ellet's masculine
pen is nearly idle. Simms, the novelist, is in
New York, residing with his literary friend Lawson,
but not coquetting with the publishers to our knowledge.
Morris will not “die and leave the world no
copy,” as he has half a dozen songs about being married
to music—the banns shortly to be published. I
do not hear that Hoffman is doing anything except
the looking after his bread and butter. Mrs. Embury
is editing “The Ladies' Companion,” and the authoress
of “The Sinless Child” editing “The Rover,”
and Mrs. Stephens editing “The Ladies' World;”
and these are three ladies worthy the binding and
gilding of less ephemeral volumes. Neal and Snow
edit “The Brother Jonathan,” Neal living at Portland,
and snow being “on the ground.” Witty and
racy “Mrs. Mary Clavers” is about returning to “the
settlements” from her seclusion in Michigan—an event
to be rejoiced over like the return of the Lost Pleiad.
She is an accomplished linguist, and with her pure,
classic, and flowing style, she might occupy, here, the
position of Mary Howitt or Mrs. Austin in England—
gaining all the honors of authorship by eminence in
translation.

I understand a great enthusiasm is about to make
itself manifest on the subject of the State Monument
to Washington. The association is now incorporated
by the legislature, and the design, as it
stands formed at present, is one of unequalled magnificence,
worthy (and no more than worthy) of the subject.
Four hundred and twenty-five feet is the proposed
height; and this, one of the New York papers
states, will make it the highest building in the world
—not quite correctly, as the pyramid of Cheops is six
hundred feet high. To realize this prodigious elevation,
however, one must remember that the steeple of
the new Trinity church, which is to be the tallest in
this country, will only reach to two hundred and seventy-five
feet. It is not to be merely a monument,
but an immense public building, containing halls,
libraries, and other appropriate apartments. The
shape is to be a pentagon, and the style a florid Gothic.
Union square is named as the site; but the immense
size of the base, I should suppose, would require
an area of much greater extent—and it would
be a pity, besides, to break up the salutary fountain
and open park, already ornamental enough, in the
part of the city. The placing of this noble momment
on the central elevation now occupied by the
Tabernacle, and the opening of a new square, extending
back to the Bowery and the Five Points, would, in
the first place, turn that festering sink into lungs for
this crowded metropolis, and in the next place centralize,
in the neighborhood of the City Hall, the
prominent public buildings. This great monument
is to be built by subscriptions of one dollar each.
Fifty thousand dollars were collected some time since,
and are now at interest; and there is a sum of one
hundred thousand dollars in the treasury at Washington,
which it is hoped will be given to this. The object
is one which every American must feel interested
in; and there is no citizen, I presume, who would not
give his dollar toward it. Let it be, if Mr. Dicken
chooses so to call it, a “dollar” monument to Washington—showing
that, devoted to dollars as we are
(and yet not more than Englishmen to pounds, shillings,
and pence). our dollar-patriotism can raise to the
first patriot of history, the grandest monument of
modern times.

The respectable and zealous spinster who sent us
for publication, as a salutary warning, the very worldly
and trappy epistle, addressed to Miss Violet Maby, at
Saratoga, and published on a previous page, has laid
her fingers on another specimen of the same gentleman's
correspondence, which we give, without comment
or correction, as follows:—

MOORE AND BARRY CORNWALL.

Well—how does Moore write a song?

In the twilight of a September evening he strolls
through the park to dine with the marquis. As he
draws on his white gloves, he sees the evening star
looking at him steadily through the long vista of the
avenue, and he construes its punctual dispensation of
light into a reproach for having, himself a star, passed
a day of poetic idleness. “Damme,” soliloquizes the
little fat planet, “this will never do! Here have I
hammered the whole morning at a worthless idea,
that, with the mere prospect of a dinner, shows as
trumpery as a `penny fairing.' Labor wasted! And
at my time of life, too! Faith!—it's dining at home
these two days with nobody to drink with me! It's
eyewater I want! Don't trouble yourself to sit up
for me, brother Hesper! I shall see clearer when I
come back!

as my friend Barry sings. Poetry? hum! Claret?
Prithee, call it claret!”

And Moore is mistaken! He draws his inspiration,
it is true, with the stem of a glass between his thumb
and finger, but the wine is the least stimulus to his
brain. He talks and is listened to admiringly, and
that is his Castaly. He sits next to Lady Fanny at
dinner, who thinks him “an adorable little love,” and
he employs the first two courses in making her in
love with herself, i. e., blowing everything she says up
to the red heat of poetry. Moore can do this, for the
most stupid things on earth are, after all, the beginnings
of ideas, and every fool is susceptible of the
flattery of seeing the words go straight from his lips
to the “highest heaven of invention.” And Lady
Fanny is not a fool, but a quick and appreciative woman,
and to almost everything she says, the poet's
trump is a germ of poetry. “Ah!” says Lady Fanny
with a sigh, “this will be a memorable dinner—not
to you, but to me; for you see pretty women every
day, but I seldom see Tom Moore!” The poet looks
into Lady Fanny's eyes and makes no immediate answer.
Presently she asks, with a delicious look of
simplicity, “Are you as agreeable to everybody, Mr.
Moore?”—“There is but one Lady Fanny,” replies
the poet; “or, to use your own beautiful simile, `The
moon sees many brooks, but the brook sees but one
moon!”' (Mem. jot that down.) And so is treasured
up one idea for the morrow, and when the marchioness
rises, and the ladies follow her to the drawingroom,
Moore finds himself sandwiched between a
couple of whig lords, and opposite a past or future
premier—an audience of cultivation, talent, scholarship,
and appreciation; and as the fresh pitcher of
claret is passed round, all regards radiate to the Anacreon
of the world, and with that suction of expectation,
let alone Tom Moore. Even our “Secretary
of the Navy and National Songster” would “turn out
his lining”—such as it is. And Moore is delightful,
and with his “As you say, my lord!” he gives birth
to a constellation of bright things, no one of which is
dismissed with the claret. Every one at the table,
except Moore, is subject to the hour—to its enthusiasm,
its enjoyment—but the hour is to Moore a precious
slave. So is the wine. It works for him! It
brings him money from Longman! It plays his trumpet
in the reviews! It is his filter among the ladies!
Well may he sing its praises! Of all the poets,
Moore is probably the only one who is thus master of
his wine. The glorious abandon with which we fancy
him, a brimming glass in his hand, singing “Fly not
yet!” exists only in the fancy. He keeps a cool head
and coins his conviviality; and to revert to my former
figure, they who wish to know what Moore's electricity
amounts to without the convivial friction, may
read his History of Ireland. Not a sparkle in it, from
the landing of the Phenicians to the battle of Vinegar
Hill! He wrote that as other people write—with
nothing left from the day before but the habit of labor—and
the the travel of a collapsed balloon on a
man's back, is not more unlike the same thing, inflated
and soaring, than Tom Moore, historian, and Tom
Moore, bard!

Somewhere in the small hours the poet walks
home, and sitting down soberly in his little library, he
puts on paper the half-score scintillations that collision,
in one shape or another, has struck into the
tinder of his fancy. If read from this paper, the
world would probably think little of their prospect of
ever becoming poetry. But the mysterious part is done
—the life is breathed into the chrysalis—and the clothing
of these naked fancies with winged words, Mr.
Moore knows very well can be done in very uninspired
moods by patient industry. Most people have very
little idea what that industry is—how deeply language
is ransacked, how often turned over, how untiringly
rejected and recalled with some new combination,
how resolutely sacrificed when only tolerable enough to
pass, how left untouched day after day in the hope of a
fresh impulse after repose. The vexation of a Chinese
puzzle is slight, probably, to that which Moore has
expended on some of his most natural and flowing
single verses. The exquisite nicety of his ear, though

it eventually gives his poetry its honeyed fluidity,
gives him no quicker choice of words, nor does more,
in any way, than pass inexorable judgment on what
his industry brings forward. Those who think a song
dashed off like an invitation to dinner, would be edified
by the progressive phases of a “Moore's Melody.”
Taken with all its re-writings, emendations, &c.,
I doubt whether, in his most industrious seclusion,
Moore averages a couplet a day. Yet this persevering,
resolute, unconquerable patience of labor is the secret
of his fame. Take the best thing he ever wrote,
and translate its sentiment and similitudes into plain
prose, and do the thing by a song of any second-rate
imitator of Moore, one abstract would read as well as
the other. Yet Moore's song is immortal, and the
other ephemeral as a paragraph in a newspaper, and
the difference consists in a patient elaboration of language
and harmony, and in that only. And even
thus short, seems the space between the ephemeron and
the immortal. But it is wider than they think, oh,
glorious Tom Moore!

And how does Barry Cornwall write?

I answer, from the efflux of his soul! Poetry is
not labor to him. He works at law—he plays, relaxes,
luxuriates in poetry. Mr. Proctor has at no
moment of his life, probably, after finishing a poetic
effusion, designed ever to write another line. No
more than the sedate man, who, walking on the edge
of a playground, sees a ball coming directly toward
him, and seized suddenly with a boyish impulse, jumps
aside and sends it whizzing back, as he has not done
for twenty years, with his cane—no more than that
unconscious schoolboy of fourscore (thank God there
are many such live coals under the ashes) thinks he
shall play again at ball. Proctor is a prosperous barrister,
drawing a large income from his profession.
He married the daughter of Basil Montague (well
known as the accomplished scholar, and the friend of
Coleridge, Lamb, and that bright constellation of
spirits), and with a family of children of whom, the
world knows, he is passionately fond, he leads a more
domestic life, or, rather, a life more within himself and
his own, than any author, present or past, with whose
habits I am conversant. He has drawn his own portrait,
however, in outline, and as far as it goes, nothing
could be truer. In an epistle to his friend Charles
Lamb, he says:—

Proctor slights the world's love for his wife and
books, and, as might be expected, the world only plies
him the more with its caresses. He is now and then
seen in the choicest circles of London, where, though
love and attention mark most flatteringly the rare
pleasure of his presence, he plays a retired and silent
part, and steals early away. His library is his Paradise.
His enjoyment of literature should be mentioned
as often in his biography as the “feeding among
the lilies' in the Songs of Solomon. He forgets himself,
he forgets the world in his favorite authors, and
that, I fancy, was the golden link in his friendship
with Lamb. Surrounded by exquisite specimens of
art (he has a fine taste, and is much beloved by artists),
a choice book in his hand, his wife beside him,
and the world shut out, Barry is in the meridian of
his true orbit. Oh, then, a more loving and refined
spirit is not breathing beneath the stars! He reads
and muses; and as something in the page stirs some
distant association, suggests some brighter image than
its own, he half leans over to the table, and scrawls it
in unstudied but inspired verse. He thinks no more
of it. You might have it to light your cigar. But
there sits by his side one who knows its value, and it
is treasured. Here, for instance, in the volume I have
spoken of before, are some forty pages of “fragments”
—thrown in to eke out the volume of his songs. I
am sure, that when he was making up his book, perhaps
expressing a fear that there would not be pages
enough for the publisher's design, these fragments
were produced from their secret hiding-place to his
great surprise. The quotations I have made were all
from this portion of his volume, and, as I said before,
they are worthy of Shakspere. There is no mark of
labor in them. I do not believe there was an erasure
in the entire manuscript. They bear all the marks
of a sudden, unstudied impulse, immediately and unhesitatingly
expressed. Here are several fragments.
How evident it is that they were suggested directly
by his reading:—

The lighthouse near Caldwell's Landing is seen to
great effect by the passenger in the evening boat from
New York to Newburgh. Leaving the city at five in
the summer afternoon, she makes the intervening forty
miles between that hour and twilight; and while the
last tints of the sunset are still in the sky, the stars
just beginning to twinkle through the glow of the
west, the bright light of this lofty beacon rises up
over the prow of the boat, shining apparently on the
very face of the new-starred heaven. As he approaches,
across the smooth and still purpled mirror
of the silent river is drawn a long and slender line of
light, broken at the foot of the beacon by the wild
shrubbery of the rock on which it stands; and as he
rounds the point, and passes it, the light brightens
and looks clearer against the darker sky of the east,

while the same cheering line of reflection follows him
on his way, and is lost to sight as he disappears
among the mountains.

The waters of the river at this point were the scene
of the brief and tragic drama enacted so fatally to
poor André. Four or five miles below stands Smith's
house, where he had his principal interview with
Arnold, and where the latter communicated to him
his plans for the delivery of West Point into the hands
of the English, and gave him the fatal papers which
proved his ruin.

At Smith's house Mrs. Arnold passed a night on
her way to join her husband at West Point, soon after
he had taken command. The sufferings of this lady
have excited the sympathy of the world, as the first
paroxysms of her distress moved the kind but firm
heart of Washington. There seems to have arisen a
doubt, however, whether her long and well-known
correspondence with André had not so far undermined
her patriotism, that she was rather inclined to further
than impede the treason of Arnold; and consequently
could have suffered but little after Washington generously
made every arrangement for her to follow him.
In the “Life of Aaron Burr,” lately published, are
some statements which seem authentic on the subject.
It is well known that Washington found Mrs. Arnold
apparently frantic with distress at the communication
her husband had made to her the moment before his
flight. Lafayette, and the other officers in the suite
of the commander-in-chief, were alive with the most
poignant sympathy; and a passport was given her by
Washington, with which she immediately left West
Point to join Arnold in New York. On her way she
stopped at the house of Mrs. Prevost, the wife of a
British officer, who subsequently married Colonel
Burr. Here “the frantic scenes of West Point were
renewed,” says the narrative of Burr's biographer,
“and continued so long as strangers were present. As
soon as she and Mrs. Prevost were left alone, however,
Mrs. Arnold became tranquillized, and assured Mrs.
Prevost that she was heartily sick of the theatrics she
was exhibiting. She stated that she had corresponded
with the British commander; that she was disgusted
with the American cause, and those who had the management
of public affairs; and that, through great
persuasion and unceasing perseverance, she had ultimately
brought the general into an arrangement to
surrender West Point to the British. Mrs. Arnold
was a gay, accomplished, artful, and extravagant woman.
There is no doubt, therefore, that, for the purpose
of acquiring the means of gratifying her vanity,
she contributed greatly to the utter ruin of her husband,
and thus doomed to everlasting infamy and disgrace
all the fame he had acquired as a gallant soldier,
at the sacrifice of his blood.”

It is not easy to pass and repass the now peaceful
and beautiful waters of this part of the Hudson, without

recalling to mind the scenes and actors in the
great drama of the Revolution, which they not long
ago bore on their bosom. The busy mind fancies the
armed guard-boats, slowly pulling along the shore;
the light pinnace of the Vulture plying to and fro on
its errands of conspiracy; and not the least vivid picture
to the imagination, is the boat containing the
accomplished, the gallant André, and his guard, on
his way to his death. It is probable that he first admitted
to his own mind the possibility of a fatal result,
while passing this very spot. A late biographer of
Arnold gives the particulars of a conversation between
André and Major Tallmadge, the officer who had him
in custody, and who brought him from West Point
down the river to Tappan, the place of his subsequent
execution.

“Before we reached the Clove” (a landing just below
the beacon), “Major Andre became very inquisitive
to know my opinion as to the result of his capture.
When I could no longer evade his importunity, I remarked
to him as follows; `I had a much-loved classmate
in Yale college, by the name of Hale, who entered
the army in 1775. Immediately after the battle
of Long Island, Washington wanted information
respecting the strength of the enemy. Hale tendered
his services, went over to Brooklyn, and was taken,
just as he was passing the outpost of the enemy on
his return.' Said I, with emphasis, `Do you remember
the sequel of this story?'—`Yes,' said André he
was hanged as a spy. But you surely do not consider
his case and mine alike?' I replied, `Yes, precisely
similar; and similar will be your fate.' He endeavored
to answer my remarks, but it was manifest he
was more troubled in spirit than I had ever seen him
before.”

Sconcia's “Preceptor for the Pianoforte,” just published
by Christman, of this city, is a curious and valuable
work. Mr. Sconcia is a thorough musician,
and he has compiled the edition before us with much
labor and a clear understanding of the beautiful science
of which it treats. Mr. S. is also the author of
a valuable scientific work, entitled “An Introduction
to the Art of Singing,” which is universally popular
among the profession.

The Messrs. Appleton have sent us a volume of
delicious poetry, entitled the “Wife of Leon” and
other metrical effusions, by two sisters of the west.
We know nothing of these delightful authors beyond
their writings; but that they are gifted, true-hearted
and accomplished girls, is apparent in every line of
their beautiful productinos. The west has cause to
be proud of these sweet “sisters,” and so has the
country, to whose literary stores the volume before us
is a graceful and valuable contribution. If this is the
authors' first appearance in print, it is the most favorable
one we have ever witnessed in our whole editorial
career, and we shall place the book in our library,
on the same shelf with the works of Mrs. Hemans, to
be referred to frequently in hours stolen from severer
duties. The Messrs. Appleton—ever

deserve the thanks of the public for the elegant edition
of the poems before us.

I saw two very distinguished gentlemen sitting vis-à-vis
at the Astor house table a day or two since—
striking exceptions, both, to the physique of the climates
from which they severally come. The Hon.
Mr. Choate, of Massachusetts, was one, with his pale
but intellectual countenance, and Judge Wayne was
the other, as glowing a specimen of rosy health and
vigor as ever came from the more florescent nurture
of the north. It is painful to see the precious accumulation
of a great mind's treasure intrusted to so
fragile a casket as ill-health, and the contrary is proportionably
agreeable. Judge Wayne is at present at
West Point.

It is a pretty literal fulfilment of the penalty of
Adam's transgression to do more than breathe to-day,
and I have chopped down and chopped up many a
tree of twice my age with half the “sweat of the
brow” brought out by the harnessing of this first sentence
to grammar. A gentleman is walking up Broadway,
fanning himself, as I look out of the window.
The omnibus horses drip. What an Edlen would
come about again (for me, at least) if this penitential
sweat would trickle itself into these inky traceries
without the medium of brain and finger-work! One

would be almost content to become a black man to
facilitate the miracle.

Three successive boys have gone under my window,
whistling, “Dance, boatman, dance!” The air is one
that sticks in the popular memory, and, like some
other of these negro melodies, it is probably susceptible
of transmutation into a gem of music. I have
recorded somewhere else a remark Moore once made
in my presence, that one of the most pathetic of his
songs stole its air from a merry ballad of Spain, representing
a girl complaining of the wind's blowing her
petticoats about, and the change in its character was
effected by only playing it slower. No song was ever
more popular in this country than “On the lake where
drooped the willow,” which was a transfer of the negro
song “As I was a gwyin down Shinbone alley.”
Horn, who adapted it to a pathetic song by Morris,
took his hint from the pathos with which a black boy
at Natchez sang one of the songs peculiar to his race
and region. “The Northern Refrain,” another very
popular song by Morris and Horn, is based upon the
carol of the sweeps in New York city. Mr. Horn
says that “God save the King” was taken from an air
sung about the streets of London, and that “Di tanti
palpiti” was suggested to Rossini by hearing a fish-woman
sing it in the market while attending her stall.
“The Marseillaise” had an origin equally obscure.
The first attempt to dislocate these airs from their
ludicrous words creates a smile, of course, but it is
surprising how quickly the better clothing of music
throws its long-worn beggar-rag into forgetfulness.
Horn relates in one of his prefaces, that when Mrs.
Horn commenced singing before an audience, “Long
time ago,” with a serious air, there was a general
smile; but when the song was ended she left her auditors
with tears in their eyes. There is no end to
tracing back to their origin airs that are afloat among
a people, and if Moore's melodies are built upon
“Irish airs,” without going back to Milesian imagination,
these negro melodies may be called American,
without giving credit to Guinea or Timbuctoo. I
should think it worth a composer's while to travel leisurely
in the south, and bring away all the melodies
that inhabit the banjo of the slave, and better still
worth Morris's while to devote his singular tact and
delicacy of taste and ear to the clothing them with
appropriate poetry. He has been so successful in the
attempts he has already made, that the warrant is
good.

A German gentleman, residing at the Astor house,
has translated for me an account of a visit to Frederika
Bremer, by the Countess Von Hahn-Hahn, and a few
of its more personal particulars will not be uninteresting.
The countess is a celebrated person in the fashionable
world, and has just published her travels in
Sweden. She found Miss Bremer at a small country
estate near Stockholm, where she resides with her
mother and a younger sister. She says: “I had
formed some idea about her person from her books. I
figured to myself a quiet, serious person, with some
humoristic touches. I found her indeed thus in
reality, with an addition of an extraordinary degree
of sweetness in all her bearing.”—“I was offered a
promenade. I preferred to remain in the house,
though passionately fond of nature, open air, walking.
All the attraction for me was within—everything so
pleasant, so comfortable! I could comprehend how
`Home' here could be made so attractive. I desired
Miss Frederika to show me her own room. It was
arranged with the greatest simplicity—almost a cell.
It would not do for me at all. Besides, it was a corner-room,
with windows on two sides, consequently a
double supply of light. There were three square
tables, covered with books, papers, and writing-mate
rials; a sofa in a severe style (I mean one that coolly
and merely invites you to sit down without lolling,
which is my favorite position). On the walls there
were several pictures. `This is a genuine Teniers,
but I know you will not like it,' she said, laughing,
pointing to a beautiful little picture of a countryman
filling his pipe. I answered honestly, `no!' and in
general I found that I said `no' when she said `yes.'
Such a difference of opinion is only disagreeable when
you have a dislike to a person. I tried to persuade
her to make a voyage to Italy. We would go together.
But she would not. She does not like travelling.
She thinks that one may soon become overpowered,
carried away, get confused—and what to do
with all these foreign impressions! I said, `You will
soon conquer them—that is just the pleasantest thing,
I think.' She still took a lively interest in all I told
her of foreign countries, what I had seen, and what I
had written about them. I was naturally well-pleased
at this. Our conversation was carried on in French
and German. She expressed herself with great simplicity
and decision. She has beautiful, thinking
eyes; a clear, firm, I may almost say, a solid forehead,
under which the strongly-delineated eyebrows move
very much when she speaks. This becomes her very
much, particularly when an idea labors to shape itself
into words. She has a light and small figure, and was
dressed in black silk. In the parlor there were two
large bookcases. Miss Bremer paints beautifully in
miniature, and she has a collection of heads, done by
herself, to which was added mine. I generally get
sleepy when sitting to artists; therefore I do not like
to have my picture taken, as it hurts my vanity that
all my portraits look so immensely sheepish! This
time, however, the sitting went better off, for the
Countess Rosen was singing the whole time, with her
fine voice, some beautiful Swedish songs.”

By this extract the Countess Hahn-Hahn herself
seems a nice, natural creature enough.

I have been pleased to find that I rather under than
over-colored my slight description of Mr. Weir's picture
for the rotunda. The Bostonians have received
it with a full measure of enthusiasm; and Mr. Weir
has himself returned to West Point, laden not merely
with bountiful commendations, but with employment
for years in commissions for pictures. He will, probably,
realize a small fortune from the exhibition, alone,
of his great painting in the different cities; and altogether,
this is the best exemplification that has
occurred in my time of the policy (to say no more)
of a faithful discharge of a commission, which,
because intrusted literally to conscience and honor,
may be slighted with impunity. Mr. Weir, I understand,
has not yet drawn the price of his picture from
the treasury, intending to lay it by as an investment
for his children, unconscious, probably, how much
they will value the father's glory invested in the picture.
On it the painter has flung his soul prostrate;
and there is a circumstance connected with its working
upon his mind while painting it, which we do not
feel quite at liberty to mention here, but which will be
a thread of the purest gold to weave into the mingled
woof of his posthumous biography. By the first of
October, I understand, we are to have a view of the
“Embarkation” in New York.

I was among the liquesced victims of the buffalo-hunt
at Hoboken, and gathered little to compensate
me for “larding the lean earth” of the Messrs.
Stevens, except a strong impression of the peculiar
good-nature of a republican crowd. As our down-laden

ferry-boat reached the shore, another one, heavily
overfreighted, was starting to return. Some one
on our wheelhouse inquired in a stentorian voice,
“How did you like it?” and was answered by the five
hundred disappointed and roasted dupes with a general
shout of good-natured laughter. The Courier estimates
the crowd at twenty or thirty thousand, and certainly
the whole Jersey side was black with people, all
feeling humbugged and laughing merrily. I thought
I would ride up to the ground to see the embroidery
of so many moving figures on the green meadows, and
this was a fine sight. The lasso-rider, in a fantastical
costume, was galloping hard after his shadow, and
tossing his long rope into the air; and one of the buffaloes
was quietly munching a hollyhock in the small
enclosure of an Irish cabin on the roadside. The rest
of the herd, I was told, had made their escape to the
woods, offering the proprietor a real hunt for a sham.
The morning papers give accounts of some serious
accidents during the day.

The copyright club is organized with a most active
and efficient secretary in Mr. Mathews, and there has
been a general summoning of aid and counsel. Bryant,
the high-priest of American poetry, is very properly
chosen president. In addition to the fact which
I mentioned in my last as one that should be “kept
before the people,” viz., that the increase of price on
new publications would be very trifling and go to the
author—in addition to this, I say, another should be
mentioned. The worthless edition that is bought for
a shilling, and read with straining eyes from its bad
print, is perused and thrown away. Would it not be
as well to subscribe to a reading-club, and get the
book well-printed for less money, and return it at the
end of the week? The hint is worth considering—
and this is the way that reading is managed cheaply
in England.

Macready is to be here in October, and will be accompanied
by Miss Phillips (formerly of the National),
and Mr. Ryder—a unicorn team of his own breaking.
They both know the leader's paces. Conti Damoreau
follows later—but there is nothing very spicy on record
with regard to this prima donna; and the popular
telescope of expectation is fixed exclusively on the
charming Mrs. Nesbitt. Before I have had time to
be bribed by my share of the spell of this enchantress,
I may as well give you an honest inventory of her
attractions and professional merits. She is, imprimis,
a widow; that is to say, if she be not married within
a year or two, as is said, to the famous Mr. Feargus
O'Conner, keeping her previous name for theatrical
eclat Mr. Nesbitt was a dashing guardsman (son of
Lady Nesbitt, well known in the gay world), who
broke his neck driving tandem, and left his window the
idol of the dandies. She is rather above the middle
size, with blue eyes, meant to pass for black, black
hair, Greek nose, upper lip half scornful, half playful,
and a mouth made by none of the Graces' journeymen.
This last article is indeed delicious, as seen
from any part of the theatre, though, like Madame
George Sands, the owner smokes! But her charm lies
mainly in “the way she has with her.” Nobody that
sees her cares whether she plays well or ill. She
ministers at another door. Hang your head—she
plays to your heart! And it is one of her ways to
play very unevenly; and when she thinks you have
pouted long enough at her carelessness, to burst suddenly
upon you with a bewitching rally, and “bring the
house down,” as they alarmingly phrase it. A great
actress she probably is not—an enchanting woman she
certainly is. It is to be hoped that she will bring over
the pieces that have been written expressly for her, as
her every peculiarity of look, tone, and gesture, has
been most accurately measured and fitted by the dramatic
tailors of London.

The world looks disagreeable to us to-day. We are
“under the weather;” and, for to-day at least (and it
is odd how rare the wish is), we may say, we wish
ourselves fairly above the weather—that is, in heaven;
in heaven, where there are no Saturdays, and of
course, no expectations of New Mirrors.

For you forgive the dinner's not forthcoming, if the
cook be ill. And your washerwoman has her little
indulgences—hand scalded, or child sick. And you
forego your drive if your horse be ailing or off his
feed. What have we done, we should be pleased to
know, to be treated less kindly than the other three of
your quadruple necessities? We should like very
much to drop our head into our hand, and mope. But
you wouldn't like it.

No—you want us to chatter. You say as the child
says, when the story is done: “Tell us some more.”
And if we must, we must! But we're sick and savage,
and we'll rake up something that we can gnaw as
we tell it—some old resentment or other—and if we
don't feel better after it, we'll go to bed.

One of the morning papers, a week ago or more,
told a fib about us. In an article on American authors,
it is said that we (one of “we”) made more money by
our writings than any other American author, and
were fast growing rich! And out of that, a Boston
paper picks the reason that we “write so jauntily!”
As if a man were not always gayer as his pockets were
lighter, and as if our good humor were drawn with a
check—bankable!

Now we are not willing to submit to the odium of
prosperity. That we have made some thousands of
unnameables by two or three weeks' work, as this
writer asserts, we freely own—but it was not in this
country. We have sold, for a large price, in England,
books for which we tried in vain to find a publisher in
America. We can not now find a publisher in America
who will give us anything for a work, though we
have been looking for one these three years; and we
never found but one publisher who would give us, for
half-a-dozen works in a lump, money worth shutting
thumb and finger upon; and he gave it in notes, payable
by ourself—after the little privilege of a discount.
We don't complain of this—oh no! The worth of a
thing is, no doubt, what it will bring. But we are not
going to be lifted between human envy and the sun,
and be hated for throwing a shadow when we have no
substance! Not “we!”

That three meals a day come punctually round to
us, we consider no more a marvel than the arrangements
for the keeping in motion of any other “heavenly
body.” For that much we have safely trusted
hitherto, and we shall trust hereafter the crank, whatever
it may be, that turns our mortal orrery. We are
fed, and we don't care who envies us for it—for we
think we do work enough to earn it—but the possession,
at any time, for any considerable portion of an
hour, of one unbespoken dollar, we indignantly deny!
We are poor enough (either of us “we”) to please
the most fastidious, on the contrary. And so, fellow-paupers,
take us back to your affections!

But we have hopes (as who has not?) of living to
be “rich and envied!” We shall be less loved. That
is the tariff, and we are busy laying up love to pay it.
But we should like to know how it feels to be rich, and
whether for more love, one ever sighs to be poor
again! Please Heaven, we will know, some day—if
the Mirror keep prospering.

Two Sisters of the West.—I have done, almost
unawares, within the last twenty-four hours, what I
would not willingly have undertaken to do, viz., the
reading of two hundred and fifty pages of new poetry.
It was a book which came to my hand in the livery
of a début—cream-colored binding, most daintily lettered—and
when I opened it my anticipations extended
very little beyond the pleasure of rubbing my
thumb and finger on the seductive smoothness of the
cover. It is entitled, “The Wife of Leon, and other
Poems, by Two Sisters of the West,” written, as the
preface states, to “while away time and gratify a taste
for poetry,” and published “to gratify a parent to
whom they could refuse nothing.” With much of
the book I think you would be delighted. It seems
to me a careless exercise of very uncommon powers
—a kind of loitering into dream-land with no particular
errand, and here and there plucking a phantom
forth to the light as would be done by a concentrated
mind gone thither with disciplined determination for
the purpose. I speak, of course, now only of the
purely imaginative parts of the book. The affections
are, with women, no phantoms, and can scarcely be
written upon, except well, by any woman of talent;
and in this book the touches of feeling are exquisitely
true and well expressed. But in verse, which is here
and there very incompact and wordy, you will find
some bold conceptions, partially done justice to, which
show in these sisters a very unusual walk of fancy.
A piece called the “Death of the Master Spirit,”
seems to me particularly strong and unsuggested.
And in some lines beginning—

there is a most refreshing novelty and meaningness.
On the whole, I look upon this as rather a memorable
advent in poetry-world, and I hope we shall soon find
out who the “Sisters” are.

Percival has put forth a new volume, after a very
long silence as a poet. If poetry were nothing but an
exercise of imagination, Percival would doubtless be
the first of American poets. In the art of poetry,
probably he is—the art, I mean, as exemplified in this
very volume, in which there are no less than “one
hundred and fifty modifications of stanza.” But Percival's
poetry is singularly deficient in the very mundane
quality flesh and blood. His veins seem filled
with ether, and his Pegasus uses his wings always,
his legs never. I mention it less as a fault than a peculiarity,
for there may be a school of this quality
of poetry, and perfect in its way—but it is a peculiarity
which accounts fully for the inadequate effect
it has produced. Nothing of Percival's is popularly
known, except one or two pieces, which will
live for ever by the very flesh and blood pathos which
he has touched by chance, and which he probably
thinks beneath him. The poem beginning,

the mournful plaint of a deserted wife, is one of these,
and a most exquisite effusion of feeling. But here is
his idea of the harness with which a poet must go into
the arena, in a passage of his preface to his new
book:—

—“An art [poetry] which requires the mastery of
the riches and niceties of a language; a full knowledge
of the science of versification, not only in its own
peculiar principles of rhythm and melody, but in its
relations to elocution and music, with that delicate
natural perception and that facile execution which
render the composition of verse hardly less easy than
that of prose; a deep and quick insight into the na
ture of man, in all his varied faculties, intellectual and
emotive; a clear and full perception of the power and
beauty of nature, and of all its various harmonies with
our own thoughts and feelings; and, to gain a high
rank in the present age, wide and exact attainments
in literature and art in general. Nor is the possession
of such faculties and attainments all that is necessary;
but such a sustained and self-collected state of
mind as gives one the mastery of his genius, and at
the same time presents to him the ideal as an immediate
reality, not as a remote conception.”

Now, acknowledged, as Percival must be, to possess
these high requirements, I have no doubt that
the book I have spoken of above will be more read
than his own—though, probably, the alarm with which
“The Two Sisters” would have looked on this formidable
statement of requisites for poetry, presented
to them before they had so unconsciously achieved
the task, would have quite equalled the surprise of
the gentleman who found that he had all his life been
talking grammar without learning it. Percival's is a
great mind, however, wonderfully stored with learning,
and his poetry is a rich treat to the scholar and
the purely imaginative reader.

The Public Fountains.—The largest audiences
we see in the city, assemble on the advertised nights
of the illumination of the Bowling Green fountain.
The lower part of the city is rendered completely impassable
by the packed assemblages. With the aid
of the many-colored fires burned around it, it is certainly
a splendid fountain; but it would be beautiful
by day, and alone, as well as much more beautiful by
night, if the same volume of water sprang from some
ornamental structure instead of a huge heap of rocks.
In all countries but this, an artist would have been
employed to make a design for so costly and public a
fountain—a man whom peculiar genius and study had
qualified for the task. But the designer of this is an
engineer, and the designer of the Park fountain, if it
had one, was probably a well-digger or a mason. By
the way, as the Park is the most frequented part of
the city, and much used by persons wishing to get out
of the street for a moment's conversation, the plan of
the fountain of Lerna, at Corinth, would be a good
one. It was encircled by a beautiful portico, under
which were seats for the public to sit upon during
the extreme heats of summer, to enjoy the cool air
from the falling waters. The Park jet would be superb
seen between the marble columns of a portico
like this, and the seats would be certainly a great luxury,
situated as the Park is. For want of an original
idea of our own for a smaller fountain, Michael Angelo's
conception were a good one to copy—a sturdy
woman wringing a bundle of clothes, whence the
water issues that supplies the basin.

First Night of the Season.—The all-a-gogery
of the city on the reopening of the Park theatre,
drew me in from the country, coatrary to my Monday's
wont, and as I am bound to ride to your eye on
the top wave of the morning talk, I must jot you down
the memorabilia of the first night. The wooden
Shakspere, by the way, has been hoisted to its niche
in the façade of the house, and shows well among the
very composite order of the new architectural embellishments.
A traveller, aiming simply at the graphic,
would probably describe our principal theatre as one
long shed put on top of another, with a figure of
Shakspere standing in the door of the uppermost.
The new paint makes it all right, however. I can not
think Mr. Simpson farmed out Mr. Wallack to the

best advantage, for the first night of the new embellishments
would have filled the house without Wallack.
And very sufficient attraction it were too—for
the interior is most tasteful and elegant; except that
the seats in the boxes are calculated for dwarfs and
children, and the grown-up people sit between the
knees of the person behind. I see no objection that
can be made to the interior of the house. The new
drop curtain is admirably painted, and represents
Shakspere and two or three of the muses, tributary to
the glory of Macready, who sits with a volume in his
hand, the most dignified and conspicuous figure of
the group. The design, I understand, is taken from
a piece of plate presented to the actor in England, and
the use it is put to in the Park fairly out-Barnums
Barnum. The house was crammed, and the band
opened with “Hail Columbia”—(immense applause)
—followed by “Yankee Doodle”—(immense applause).
The gas was let on—(immense applause)—
the curtain was drawn up, and discovered Mrs. Sloman
(disinterred after many years of respected histrionic
sepulture) in the character of Elvira—(immense
applause). Sombody came on as Valverde—(immense
applause). Mr. Barry came on as Pizarro—
(immense applause). Mrs. Hunt came on looking
very handsome—(immense applause). The curtain
dropped on the first act and rose again—(two immense
applauses). Mr. Wallack came on as Rolla
—(immense applause). The high-priest of the Sun
sung his hymn—(immense applause)—and so the play
went on, and, wherever the actors left pauses, there
were immense applauses. And all the actors and supernumeraries
got as much applause as Mr. Wallack.
All charmingly levelling and republican. It was quite
evident, indeed, that the pleasure and interest in the
new lining and reopening of the house was, by much,
the predominant sentiment of the evening, and, as I said
before, Simpson might well have shelved Wallack till
he was more wanted. There were quite enough of
his special admirers present to have “brought the
house down,” it is true; but it was “down” all the
time, and nothing but an outbreak of pipes and French
horns could have emphasized the acclamations any
where in the course of the play. And if Wallack's
attraction depended at all on opportuneness, the majority
of his fashionable friends are out of the city. So
that, altogether, we shall hardly have a fair test of
his success till his second engagement, after Macready.
Meantime, he is barred from all the parts in which
the latter is to appear (“Benedict,” among others, in
which Wallack is far better than Macready), and
driven into the melodrame and farce, in which his
versatility makes him almost as “good a card.” His
“Rolla” was superbly played, and in “Dick Dashall”
it is well known he is unsurpassed. A plan was struck
out by a clever friend of mine, in conversation, of
combining the management of a New York and London
theatre, and of transferring the “gettings-up” in
the way of dresses and the more extensive stage properties.
The splendors of costume and scenery with
which Macready has represented plays within the last
year or two in England, could never be produced here
except by some such transfer, and the communication
by steam is now so rapid and punctual, that it might
be done with economy and convenience. By some
such combination we may stand a chance of renewing
the splendors of theatres in Rome in Nero's time,
though, I fear, the perfuming of the lobbies with
“Sicilian saffron,” and the leading of wine and water
all over the house, by pipes concealed within the
walls, are luxuries gone irrevocably over Lethe's
wharf.

We wish some of our friends knew how much
easier it is to go to the ship chandler for a cable than
to find a new cobweb in a much-swept upper-story,
“Waste time upon trifles,” quotha! We do waste
time upon them, indeed, if they are not more acceptable
to our readers than twice the bulk of disinterred
“information.” We thought this was settled long
ago, and that the “cap and bells” in which we industriously
labor at folly were considered a part of our
working livery—the least enviable and the most meritorious.
Few things are easier or more stupid than
to be wise—on paper. Nothing is easier, and few
tasks sooner done, than to cram, on any subject, and
astonish the world with “reading”—astonish without
delighting it, that is to say. Give us nothing to do
but to be wise, oh, “approved good masters,” and we
have leisure enough at once for some additional vocation—clerk
in a bank, or principal in a female seminary—(the
two trustworthy offices, we beg leave to
record, which have been thought suitable to our abilities).
Why, there is information enough on any conceivable
subject, and all within ten minutes walk of
where we sit and write, to stupify Minerva; and it is
as easy to unshelf, pick out, and embroider it upon
an editorial, as it is to buy grapes at Bininger's. It is
a very great mistake to suppose that anybody but a
donkey makes a packhorse of his memory, carrying
about the rubbish intended only for a storehouse of
reference, Let who likes

we do not believe he would sell to the newsboys—
which is our noble ambition. So, if you please (or if
you don't please), most worthy critic, we shall go on
“wasting our time upon trifles.” And, by way of a
Parthian fling, let us toss under your nose what Addison
says on this subject: “Notwithstanding pedants
of a pretended depth and solidity are apt to decry the
writings of a polite author as flash and froth, they all
of them show, upon occasion, that they would spare
no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they
seem to despise.” And (Parthian arrow No. 2) what
that esteemed model Lord Foppington says: “To
mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self
with the forced product of another man's brain. Now
I think a man of quality and breeding may be much
amused with the natural sprouts of his own.” And if
that is not a brace of quotations pungent and apt, we
know as little about quoting as our rebukers aver.

But we have been more specifically snubbed by a
morning paper, and we must say a word specifically
in reply—for the notice, done by no means in an
unfriendly spirit, was wind in our sail, for which
we are grateful, now and always. The writer objects
to our mentioning the nearest thing to woman—
apropos, as the allusion was, of a late change in the
fashion of it. He calls this frivolous! We are not
prepared to go the philosopher's length, that “there
is no such thing as a trifle in the world”—but we put
it point blank to issue, in any man's judgment, if this
be a trifle! Now we are called an unread ignoramus,
but we have read Ovid and Juvenal, and we well remember
blushing over the epithet “linen-wearing,”
applied frequently to the high-priests in the Egyptian
ceremonies—no poor precedent for the like of us, let
us modestly say, and the worthier the precedent the
more you disparage us. Sacred from the earliest
ages was held “cloth of flax,” and sacred in any deferential
mind is, to this day, the mention of linen.
But, history and precedent apart, how have we become
so consecrated, that anything, the least, which appertains
to woman, is too “frivolous” to be wrapt up in
our rhetoric? The particular aim of the peceant allusion
was to diffuse the knowledge of a new embellishment

for the sex—to give our poor aid to a worthier
clothing of beauty, which, after religion, is quite
the divinest vouchsafe from our Maker. If this be a
trifle, show us your importances! It is no trifle to
devote half a column of a newspaper to a new dahlia
—no trifle to bring to bear a fine-art criticism on a
satin skirt in a painting—no trifle to write for months
about the jet of a fountain. Yet what are these and
a thousand similar topics—what in worthiness and elevation—even
to the outlined shadow of a woman, if
(as it can not) that sweet shadow could be improved?
No! no!—We are not to be driven from our many-years'
worship by such unconsidered taking of exceptions.
We write not, besides, to please any critic—
(male). The New Mirror shall be masculine enough,
but all-tributary to the ladies—God bless them! We
are their slave—bound to bring to their use and knowledge
all that can please, and especially all that can
embellish them. We are here
and “if any man take exception, let him turn the
buckle of his girdle.”

Saunders, the excellent miniature-painter, went
home in the Great Western. He was in this country
about three years, and, though his prices were
much higher than any of our own painters, he had full
occupation from first to last. His delicious miniatures
(some of which you will have seen at Washington)
are scattered through our principal cities, and the
“fleeting show” of some beauty and much worth and
talent is preserved in them. He is a very observing
man, and he made a remark that interested me. He
said that the motive for sitting for a picture in this
country was almost always affection—in England it
was almost always pride. Though among his sitters
were a few of the loveliest women he had ever seen,
the majority were invalids, or old persons who might
soon die, or persons about going on far journeys—
those, in short, who were loved and might soon be
lost. In England, the subject of a miniature is usually
good-looking. It is a young girl the year she
comes out, or a beautiful child before his curls are
shorn to send him to a public school, or a young man,
in his first uniform after entering the army. Pride
appears somewhere in the reason for the doing of the
picture. And Mr. Saunder's remark confirms a previous
impression of my own—that personal beauty is
vastly more valued in countries over the water.

Some years since, Mr. Saunders was appointed
miniature-painter to the king of Hanover, and resided
some time at the royal palace, painting the different
members of the family. I met him subsequently in
Italy (ten years ago), where several noble ladies of
England were sitting to him. His success in this
country should be a stimulus to our own artists, for
he has proved that, spite of the depression of the
times, there is patronage enough for the high degrees
of art. He thought very highly, by-the-way, of Mr.
Hite, the miniature-painter, of this city, who is doubtless
the legitimate heir to his mantle.

Apropos of high prives for the arts, Mr. Catherwood
has opened a subscription, which appeals only
to the rich and liberal; and he is very likely to succeed
in his enterprise, I think. His splendid drawings
in seppia of the ruins of Central America are to
be engraved of the size of the originals, and the price
of one copy is to be a hundred dollars. I saw one
subscription-paper with several names upon it. But
a book of drawings by Catherwood at a hundred dollars,
and a novel of Bulwer's at a shilling, and both
successful, leave at least a wide field of betweenity.
Catherwood is an unsurpassed artist in his line, and I
trust we shall show our appreciation of his genius
while he honors us by residing among us.

The city is somewhat closer packed by the addition
to its contents of Thomas Thumb, jun., Esq., who
has returned from the south in time to escape the
“fell moscheto.” He occupies the American Museum
as before. Mr. Barnum, who is unsurpassed for
felicity of trap, has hit upon an amusing mode of
drawing attention to Mr. Thumb, and giving a “realizing
sense” of his diminutive proportions. On a
pole outside the Museum is placed a well-appointed
mansion, two feet square, with “T. Thumb, jun.” on
the brass-plate of the door. A pair of leather breeches,
about the size of a double opera-glass, hang outside
to dry; a pair of white-topboots of the same proportions
on another nail, and Mr. T.'s hat and coat on
another. The fun lies in all these articles being wellworn.
They are a little shabby indeed; and, in the
boots, the leather is represented as worn a little red
by the straps of his trousers! Whoever got them up
is an artist. Fit as Tommy is to be a “tiger” to
Queen Mab, his boots and breeches would require
stretching.

There is no end to the rivalry of hotels. Cozzens.
of the “American,” is making the attractive show of
Broadway tributary to his house. The former smoking-room
and reading-room on the corner of the second
story are being converted into a superb ladies
parlor, with a charming look-out over the park and
the new fountain; while the ground floor, formerly a
tailor's shop, is to be devoted to the loungers who
wish to sit in their chairs and see Broadway without
the trouble of walking. As a hotel, from which to
see what is going on to the best advantage, the “American”
will now be the best in the city; and, as mine
host is famous for his table, he may soon gather his
“plum.”

I see by the report of a late trial that an editor, in
the eyes of a counsellor-at-law, is considered “a mechanic
who carries on a newspaper”—the plea being
that a man in this condition of life should be taxed
with but small alimony for a divorced wife. It would
be convenient to some of the tribe to come down to
this classification, though most editors will probably
resist it, as ambitious boys sometimes object to being
let into a show for half-price. I wish the counsellor
had defined the luxuries proper to gentlemen that are
not proper for “mechanics.”

The races between the “Empire” and the other
boats on the Hudson occupy the city talk. I trust
they will have done their uttermost before anybody I
am very fond of has occasion to embark in them—for
I presume it is like the proving of guns. If the
boilers stand this, they will stand anything. The Empire
beats, but not by so much as was anticipated.
She is unmatched for comfort and beauty, however,
and a trip to Alhany in her, a month hence, will be a
treat worth looking forward to. She runs as a day-boat
hereafter.

One of the papers announces Count D'Orsay as
already arrived in New York. It is a mistake; and

so, I believe, is the announcement that he is coming
at all. He resisted strong inducements to come out
in the suite of his intimate friend, Lord Durham
(late governor of Canada), and if he had ever contemplated
a visit to America, he would have availed
himself of that opportunity.

Brough, the vocalist, had a concert recently of
renaissance, well-attended and rapturously applauded.
He sung better than ever. Mr. Frank Brown assisted
him—a very promising young singer, who is about
trying his musical fortun in Italy. He has a handsome
person and good talents, as well as an excellent
quality of voice, and will be heard of favorably hereafter,
I have little doubt.

Previous to the last six months, New York has
only been to me a place of transit, and for the benefit
of transitory travellers, it is perhaps worth while to
mention what I have missed till I became a resident.
Like the new Sunday-school pupil who was surprised
with the sight of “A,” of which he had often heard,
though he had never seen it before, I am quite full of
raptures about Hoboken—new to me till a day or two
since. Its extent, beauty, and particularly its nearness
to Broadway, were all surprises. With the exception
of the ferry, it lies at the foot of Barclay
street, which you know runs down from the Astor,
and if the proprietors of that hotel chose to advertise
the proximity of the “Elysian fields” as an attraction
to their establishment, the only objection would lie in
the dread of alarming the apoplectic. The stile over
which you step into these grounds is at the ferry-landing,
and you are immediately under the shade of
avenues leading to covert and winding walks, and to
a park which covers the beautiful promontory of Hoboken,
and which can not be surpassed in the world
for union of glade and distant view. Who keeps
these walks so smooth and trim, who laid them out
and gave them to the public, and who lives in the enviable
residence adjoining them, I do not know. But
the New-Yorkers may be satisfied that they have at
their service, and close at hand, grounds which equal
those of any nobleman in England. On week-days
they seem little frequented, too; though on Sundays,
I am told, the avenues are thronged.

I observed a new fashion in ladies' boots, which
would take, I should think, among the Orientals. The
Arabs, as you know, judge of aristocracy by the test
of a hollow under the instep—that if water will run
under the naked foot when standing on marble, the
ancestors of the owner could not have borne burdens.
Mr. Dick, ladies' bootmaker in Broadway, inserts a
steel spring into the sole to keep it snug under the
instep, supporting the foot very comfortably in walking,
and adding very much to its beauty. The amalgamationists
will probably oppose the fashion, as the
negro foot is entirely excluded from its advantages.

I think there was what is commonly called “an
opening” for a fashionable summer-theatre up town.
Gayety in private circles ceases very much by the first of
May; strangers, travelling for pleasure, and inclined to
bestow themselves for the evenings in the resorts of “silk
attire,” begin to arrive; few leave the city for touring
till August, and the great majority of the better classes
do not leave it at all except for country-seats in
the neighborhood, or for short periods; the other theatres
are shut; and the patrician complexion given to
a place by inducements like the foregoing, is the best
trap for what the manager would call “miscellaneous
patronage;” or, to express it by a maxim of theatrical
economy, white gloves in the first circle will insure
dirty hands in the third.

Mr. Niblo has cleverly stepped into this opening.
His pretty theatre is newly done up in gilding and
blue maroon[1] (an ill-omened stuff for theatrical lining);
it is brilliantly lighted; the scenery is peculiar and
new, and he begins with addressing his entertainment
solely to those who have either aired their manners
with travel, or “fed of the dainties that are bred in a
book.” The French company might as well deliver
themselves in pantomime as sing in French to most
of the ordinary frequenters of our theatres, but the
boxes understand; and it is worth the gallery's time
and money to have a three hours' perusal of the unbonneted
attractions of the boxes—the opera aside.

An “Admirable Crichton” of music, equally wonderful
on the piano-forte and the violin, has appeared
among us, in the person of Mr. Wm. Vincent Wallace,
Director of the Dublin Anacreontic Society.
Those who have heard Paganini and Thalberg, pronounce
decidedly that he is unsurpassed even by those
hitherto unequalled maestros! He performs upon the
piano a grand introduction and variations on the theme
of the Cracovienne, composed by himself. The instrument
becomes a full orchestra, under his hands,
which seems multiplied into a dozen; while, in the
rapid passages, his fingers are invisible as the spokes
of a locomotive-wheel in full career. He has no left
hand, but two right ones, equally independent of each
other. The brilliancy and power of his execution
set off admirably the delicate morceaux of melody interspersed,
and all unite to produce an effect before
unknown to us. But his performance on the violin
surpasses, if possible, that upon the piano. He executes
on this the Carnival of Venice, and the Witches'
Dance of Benevento, and several other difficult compositions,
as originally performed by Paganini, and never
before heard in this country; and the effect is most
startling and thrilling. In his hands, the violin does
more than speak—it sings, shrieks, supplicates, reproaches,
dies, revives, and realizes the fancy of Balzac,
that a soul is imprisoned within it. With his
bow he scatters a bright shower of melody through
the air, and rasps diamond-sparkles from the strings.
Our language may seem extravagant, but it falls fat
short of the reality. Musicians are in raptures with
the fulness and purity of his tones, the decision and
accuracy of his stopping, his left-handed pizzicato,
and his double notes on the fourth string. We rejoice
that such an artist bears an English name and
proves that wonderful musical genius is not contined
to foreign nations.

At the London Opera, no gentleman is admmitted
who is not in full dress. Ladies go there jewelled,
decolletées, and unbonneted of course. It is a dress-place.

Ladies must have a place to “dress.”

The New York ladies have ceased to dress gayly
in the street.

Private parties are not a sufficient vent for the passion
of dress among ladies.

Now, Mr. Niblo, do you see your way?

The above is a literal copy of a memorandum we
made for an article, while sitting out the expectant
half hour before the rising of the curtain, a might or
two ago, at the French Opera. We pitch it at you
head foremost, dear reader, because you are sometimes
willing to take us in the lump, or seriatim as it
is convenient for us to deliver ourselves—but more
particularly because the printer is clamorous for copy,
and, hurried or not hurried, copied we like to be.

But, to our text. A dress-opera is happily entailed
upon us by the change of the sumptuary character
of Broadway. Ladies now (and very likely we are

telling our country-friends a bit of news) are under
the necessity of having two bonnets. There must be
a plain straw with a green veil, to soften down and
properize any appearance in the street, on foot and
unattended. There must be a dress-bonnet for morning
calls, matinées, breakfast-parties, wedding-visits,
and, generally, for all daylight departures from home,
on errands of ceremony or pleasure. This dress-bonnet
requires other concomitants in keeping—lace,
feathers, flowers—whatever is required for a full parure.
And a full parure requires a carriage, of course.
And a carriage requires a fortune. And as all this is
the fasion, nobody can be fashionable who is not
rich. And so comes in the dynasty of the aristocracy
of money!

Now we like all this—offensive as it seems, at the
first blush, to a republican eye. Part the extremes—
widen the distance between wealth and poverty—and
you make room for a middle class, which is not yet
recognised in our country—everybody who is not
absolutely poor, striving to seem absolutely rich. Of
this middle class, literary men are a natural part and
parcel. So are many of the worthiest and most intelligent
people of this country—people who are now
occupying a station in life like Mohammed's coffin,
neither on the earth of poverty nor in the heaven of
riches, and in sad lack of a resting-place between.
Once recognise that station in society—once make it
respectable to set aside certain extravagances in dress
and living as not proper for a condition in life which
is still far above poverty—and you set at ease thousands
of familes that are now subjected to endless
uncertainties and mortifications. It requires, now,
both judgment and vigilance for many ladies not to
dress far above their condition in life—yet what more
distasteful than to have seen the husband in his place
of business, careworn and distressed, and the next
minute to meet his wife in Broadway, dressed out of all
keeping with his gains, and of course with no sympathy
for his troubles! We believe that, in fact, the ladies
are of our way of thinking in this matter. It is uncomfortable
for pride to be always “treading water,”
as the swimmers say. Better sink, and sink, and
sink, till you come to your true level—anybody will
say.

Of course we follow nature, however, and of course
we except beauty from all homely precepts and economies.
The peacock and the butterfly pay no penalty
that we know of for their extra-furnishings from
the shop of Rainbow & Co. Their business on earth
is to delight the eye; and that, we religiously believe,
is the errand of human beauty as well. No! Let
there be no “condition in life” for beautiful women!
Nature's princesses they are by the instinctive consent
of human nature; and the homage we can not but pay,
let us be bold enough to acknowledge. As to beauty's
being, “when unadorned, adorned the most,” it
is true of nothing but a statue. In real life, we think
flowers and gems are the natural belongings and ornaments
of personal loveliness. All beauty should be
so furnished—even if ugliness be compelled to “service
dure” to procure them.

But to return to the opera. Ladies should be reminded
that nothing adds more to the cheerfulness of
the scene, and its consequent attraction, than light
and bright colors. A dark dress has no business at
the opera, though indeed the dress itself may be
anything, so that the bust and head, which are alone
seen, are dressed gayly. No bonnets, and least of all,
veils! Let us have a dress place of amusement. Let
there be a resort in the long and vacant hours after
business, where we can seem to enter a brighter chamber
of this dingy world, and be compelled (we men)
to dress ourselves, and feel in a more holyday and liberal
atmosphere.

In the window of a Broadway shop we noticed, the
other day, a China dinner-set, otherwise magnificent,
but deformed by a representation on each plate of
“The great fire in New York.” Thus, on every festive
occasion, the guests would have their gayety
dampened by the suggestion of that scene of loss,
danger, and suffering. Such bad taste is too frequent.
It would be equally easy to impress devices calculated
to arouse cheerful and enlivening associations;
but, as a people, we are too careless of such matters.
Trifles in themselves they may be; but such little
items of enjoyment—such grains of pleasure—make
up in time quite a mountain of happiness.

Theodore Hook.—Good dinners will not make a
man immortal. The prince of diners-out is dead. It
would seem as if “good living” meant long living
too—for who ever thought Theodore Hook could
die!—“a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent
fancy.” “Where be your gibes now? your gambols?
your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont
to set the table in a roar? Not one now, to mock
your own grinning!” We have carried out the quotation
somewhat with a feeling of bitterness—not
against the dead, but for him. We could have begun
the passage with Hamlet—“Alas, poor Yorick!—I
knew him, Horatio!” Everybody knew Theodore
Hook, who has been “summered and wintered” in
London, and we knew him as others did, with that
far-reaching and half-pitying admiration which is
given to a wit of all work—a joker never out of harness—a
“funny man” by profession, as the children
thought Mathews. We have seen Theodore Hook
make excellent hits, and we have seen him make desperate
failures—many failures to one hit, indeed. But
so it must be, as every one knows who has thought
twice on wit as a “good continuer.”

Hook was the editor of the “John Bull” newspaper,
and his portrait would have served for its imprint.
He was the personification of John Bull, as the French
fancy him, and as he is represented on the stage.
Above the middle height, he looked short, from being
corpulent and short-necked. His person was “stocky”
altogether—thick legs, high chest, short arms, and
bluff, rubicund, and rather defying features. We have
not heard of what he died; but, we presume, of apoplexy,
for he looked of that habit, and lived in a way
to produce and feed it. Over his brows, however,
there seemed to be a region, like the sun above clouds
on a mountain-side, brighter than that below. His
forehead was ample and white, his head smoothly bald,
and, if the observer had seen but that portion of Theodore
Hook, he would have formed of him a far higher
opinion than in following him downward. To that
tablet of intellect his works of imagination, we believe,
never did justice. His novels are third-rate,
while his native powers were first-rate, and against
those two unattained steps on the ladder of immortality,
Hook's poor offset was his very mortal celebrity as
a table-wit—the diner-out, par excellence, of his day.

We believe in omens. In the days of Charlemagne
large possessions were transferred, not with wax and
paper, but with a ring. A ring has been given us by
a well-wishing stranger, and we here signify our belief
that, in it is transferred to us the prosperity of
the former proprietor—dead two thousand years ago
at the very least, but undeniably a most prosperous
gentleman. Let us look a little at the evidence.

It is generally supposed, we believe, that the mummies
preserved to this day are, in all human probability,

from two to three thousand years old. Some time
before the advent of our Savior, Egypt had become a
Roman province, and the more costly usages of the
Egyptians had been done away—the embalming of
the bodies of the rich and great being among the
most costly. Those which have defied time and corruption,
through two thousand years, of course were
such as were embalmed with the most cost and care,
and the poor, the antiquarians tell us, were merely
dried by salt and laid away in the catacombs. The
rings and other ornaments of the mummied great
were wrapped up with them.

The ring that was given us three days ago is of
silver, holding a stone covered with Arabic characters,
and was taken from the finger of a mummy,
bought at a great price for exhibition, and partly
opened. It is of rude work, and if Egypt's jewellers
did their best upon it, we can but say that our friend
Tenney, of Broadway, was only born too late to astonish
the Pharaohs. We have not yet found an Arabic
scholar to decipher it, but, if we had not known it to
be Arabic (or Coptic), we should have said it was a
device of three stars, a wrench, and two streaks of lightning—very
properly expressive of our three selves
(the editors and publisher), our manner of work, and
the way the Mirror is to go. And, on the whole, we
shall let it rest at that—without further translation.

We are not sure that, if the former proprietor of
this silver ring could wake, he would think his finger-ornament
handed down in the same line of life. The
classifications of society under the Ptolemies would
have put us down low (priests, soldiers, shepherds,
swineherds, mechanics, interpreters, and fishermen—
the literary profession being the last but one), yet,
after all, there is a resemblance between us, and I am
happy to say (no offence to the mummy) that it is not
in our personal appearance! It was necessary, to
embalm this gentleman, that his brains should first be
extracted through his nostrils. We trust to be embalmed
by letting ours ooze from our finger's ends—
and, on the whole, we may say, we prefer our way of
doing it. But that is all. We see no other resemblance.
The Egyptian was circumcised. He was
gloomy and superstitious. He increased his poultry
by artificially hatching eggs. The husband had the
charge of the domestic concerns; the wife of buying
and selling, and all affairs that were not of a domestic
character. He hated songs and dances. He
was a stranger to gayety, and he drank nothing
stronger than barley-beer. We trust that it is no
vanity on our part to congratulate his ring on conversance
for the future with a more pleasant state of
things—aristocratic comparisons apart.

Prosperous the Mirror is to be—thanks to the liberal
giver of the ring that foreshadows it! But (to
“out with a secret”) we should feel easier if the envious
would begin to manifest their displeasure. We
have a dread of “the primrose way to the everlasting
bonfire,” and should feel safer in a thronier path than
we tread now. This pushing all of one side makes
us fancy we topple. We would try our friends at opposition.
Feathers that go down with one wind
mount with a counter-current. We “cotton” to old
King Osymandyas, who caused to be graven on his
Colossus: “I am King Osymandyas—if any man will
know my greatness let him destroy one of my works.”
And of that jolly old monarch, the first owner of our
ring was possibly a subject—conjunctive omen of our
road to prosperity.

Beards in New York.—It is odd how a fashion
creeps from one country to another, unaware. Has
it occurred to you what a bearded nation we have become
within the last year or two—imitating La Jeune
France in that and other accompanying particulars?
My attention was called to it yesterday by a friend just
returned from a long residence in Europe. He was
expressing very emphatically his annoyance at the
loss of his mustache. On coming in sight of land
he had gone below and sacrificed it, as a thing “most
tolerable and not to be endured,” among the sober
friends to whom he was returning; when lo! on landing—every
second man in a full suit of beard! His
mustache and imperial chanced to be very becoming
to him, and his mortification, at being compelled to
put them again into nascent stubble, was unbounded.

Two schools of dress have prevailed in France for
the last six or seven years—the classic and the romantic;
the former with the Brutus head, short hair
and apparel of severe simplicity, and the other with
flowing locks, fanciful beard, and great sumptuousness
of cravat and waistcoat. The “romantic” is the
only one which has “come over,” and it prevails at
present in New York, with (to use the popular phrase)
“a perfect looseness.” Almost every man below forty
has tried his beard on, and most of the young men
about town show their fancy in something beyond the
mere toothbrush-whisker of the military. The latter,
by-the-way, is the only beard “let out” by the London
men whom the packets bring over, and in England
the synonyme is rigorous between “mustache”
and “adventurer.” It seems to me, however, that the
principles of taste which should affect the fashion of
a beard are but little regarded among us, and I rather
wonder that some ambitious barber has not set himself
up as an authority—to decide their shape by private
consultation, according to feature and complexion.
Perhaps I may feed a want of the era by putting
down what I have gathered on the subject of
beards by reading and travel.

In a country where all the hair which nature has
planted on the face is permitted to grow, a shaved
man certainly looks very silly. After a short passage
from Asia Minor to Malta, the clean-shaved English
officers struck me as a very denuded and inexpressive-looking
race, though much more athletic and handsome
than the Orientals I had left. The beards of
old men, particularly, are great embellishments, covering
as they do, the mouth, which most shows age
and weakness, by loss of teeth and feebleness of
muscle. When the mouth is covered, the whole expression
of the face is concentrated in the eyes, and
it is surprising how much the eyes gain in character
and brilliancy by a full mustache. A luxuriant and
silky beard on a young and clear skin is certainly very
beautiful, though, according to medical observation,
the faculties are much better matured when the beard
comes late. In bearded countries, the character is
very much judged of by the beard. There is an old
Irish proverb which says:—

In irritable persons, the beard grows thin and dry.
In those of milder temper it is thick and slightly
curling. The beard is affected very sensibly by the
nature of a man's nourishment; and this explains
why they know an aristocrat in the East by the luxuriance
of this appendage—poor food deteriorating its
quality. Diplomatists should always wear the mustache,
as it is much easier to control the expression
of the eye than of the mouth—useful to card-players
and stock-brokers, for the same reason. Shaving
among the ancients was a mark of mourning—though
at the era when beards were out of fashion, they were
let grow, by those who had lost friends. When a
man's mouth is beautiful and expressive, the beard
which covers it is a disadvantage, and we may guess
that Scipio Africanus (the first Roman who shaved
every day) wore on his lips the tenderness and magnanimity
which he displayed toward the bride of the
captive Allucius. The first shaving barber was one
Ticinius Mænas, who came from Sicily to Rome
about three hundred years before Christ, and then
commenced an era of smooth chins, interrupted, for a
short while only, by the emperor Adrian, who wore his
beard to conceal warts on his chin. With most nations
the beard has been considered an ornament. Moses
commended the Jews not to shave, and the ancient
Germans, and the Asiatics of a later day, have considered
no insult so mortal as the cutting off of one man's
beard by another. In France, shaving came into
fashion during the reigns of Louis XIII. and XIV.,
both of these monarchs having ascended the throne
when beardless, and their subjects imitating them, of
course. And as France gave the law of fashion to all
Europe, the sacrifice of part of the beard grew to be
common, though it is only since the beginning of the
last century that the shaving of the whole beard became
universal.

I have noticed, in New York, that men, who had formerly
no pretensions to good looks, have become very
handsome by the wearing of mustache and imperial,
and I have seen handsome men disfigured by adopting
the same fashion. The effect of a mustache and full
beard is to make the face more masculine, graver, and
coarser, and this is, of course, an improvement to one
whose features are over-delicate, or whose expression
is too frivolous. On a dapper man, it is quite out of
place, and he should wear a clipped whisker, if any
beard at all. The beard, I think, gives a middle-aged
look, and makes a man of twenty look older, and a
man of forty younger. The ladies like a beard—naturally
thinking faces effeminate which are as smooth
as their own, and not objecting to the distinctions
which nature has made between the sexes. When
the beard is but partially worn, some artistical knowledge
should be called in, as a short face may be made
longer, and a broad face narrower, a gay face graver,
and an undecided chin put in domino. But of all
abominations in this way, I think, the goat's beard,
growing under the chin only, is the most brutal and
disgusting, though just now, in New York, rather the
prevailing fashion. The mistake in taste is very common,
of continuing to wear a high shirt collar and
cravat, with a beard on the cheek and throat—the
beauty of a curling beard depending very much on its
freedom and natural adaptation to the mould of the
face. There are more people than Beatrice, of course,
who are willing to let a man's beard be “of the color
that God pleases,” but there are others who have
aversions to red beards and yellow, and there is great
trade in cirages and gums for the improvement of color
and texture. Most of the beards you meet in Broadway
glitter in the sun like steel filings. Altogether, I
think the fashion of wearing the beard a desirable one,
and I particularly wish it would prevail among old
men. A bearded senate would make a wiser and more
reverend show in congress, and anything which conceals
the decrepitude of age and moves respect (as
beards certainly do, both), is most desirable.

Macready's first Night.—Macready had a full,
not an overflowing house, to witness his debut last
night, and there were more of his own profession
among the audience than I ever before saw together
—(partly, perhaps, from curiosity to hear the “readings”
of Shakspere which the drop curtain represents
Macready as giving to the Muses). The play was
Macbeth, and Mr. Ryder, who accompanies Mr. Macready,
came on first as Macduff, and was very warmly
received—applauded, indeed, throughout the play, as
his playing deserved. He is a very correct actor, and
a “fine figure of a man.” Macready's appearance
brought the house “down” of course. He went at his
interview with the witches most artistically, and the
witches did their bedevilments more artistically than
we have seen them done before, and so of all the trick
and machinery of the play—for Macready is master
of “stage business,” and the scenery and supernumeraries
had been effectually cleared of cobwebs. The
play went on—with a beautiful procession of effects,
particularly by Macready in his exits and entrances,
his salutations and surprises—and to the theatre-going
people present it was an exhibition of drama-panorama
curiously managed, and all as clean and neat as
machinery—and just as moving. The attention was
close, but the applause grew less and less. I never
saw so cold a house. The most stormy and passionate
outbreaks of Macbeth's mingled ambition and remorse
were received like the catastrophes in a puppet-show—with
an unexcited smile of surprise. Each
“point” the actor made was looked at like the wheel
of a clock shown piecemeal. There was no passion
in the audience, no illusion, no general interest in the
progress of the story of the play—in short, no feeling.

My own sensations during the evening were those
of pain and annoyance. Mr. Macready is so accomplished
an artificer in his profession—everything he
does is so admirably “studied up”—

that a cold reception of so much pains seems most
ungracious. When he came in and knelt to the king
—when he entered Duncan's chamber to murder him
—when he received the first suggestions of crime from
Lady Macbeth—I could have shouted myself hoarse
with admiration of the artist—it was all done so differently
from another man, and so skilfully in a high
and finished conception of the character. Every step
he took on the stage was a separate study. Every
look, gesture, movement, was consummate. As pantomime
it would have been absolutely faultless. Yet,
strange to say, he walks the stage like a transparent
man—showing all his anatomy. He wants clothing
with natural flesh and blood. His voice wants nature.
It sounds like the breaking of crockery in a dry well.
He feels no passion and he moves none. What a pity
that scholarship, study, labor, patience, and taste,
should fall short, in their result, of the most unlabored
off-throwing of genius!

Italian Opera.—I saw only the first act of “Lucia
de Lammermoor,” and found little to admire except
the performance of the orchestra. Signor Antognini
certainly did not come up to his reputation as
a tenor, and he is the great star of the company. He
is a curious-looking man to play the lover. The muscles
of his face pull, every one, upon his nostrils, like
“taut halliards,” and with eyebrows pointing fiercely
at the bridge of his nose, and the mouth like an angry
dash of a pen under an emphasized word, he looks as
Mephistophilish as one of Retzch's drawings. Madame
Majocchi, the prima donna, is a fat woman with
a fat voice. She has a good contralto footing in her
throat, but her soprano notes are painfully tiptoe, and
you are glad when she is comfortably at the bottom
of her cadenza. The company appears pretty well
drilled, but they want a prima donna, and if they could
find a prima donna in want of them (Castellan, for instance)
we might have good opera. They say that
Antognini's voice is only grass-grown from neglect,
and that he would do brilliantly after a little practice.
Considering the certain fortune that waits upon a fine
tenor, it is surprising that there should continue to be
so few aspirants for the honors of the Rubini; for it
can not be that there are only half a dozen (if so
many) of human voices possessing his capabilities of
tone and cultivation. There is probably “full many

a” postillion of Lonjumeau “born to” “waste his
sweetness on the desert air,” and it would be a good
speculation to look them up and buy a life-interest in
their thoracic capabilities.

Dr. Howe.—It will be a curious piece of news to
you that our countryman, Dr. Howe (lately married
and gone abroad) has been stopped on the borders of
Prussia by a cabinet order, and of course is shut out
from so much of the Rhine as lies (if my geography
serves me) between Coblentz and Cologne. This
special edict on the part of a king with a standing
army of two hundred thousand men is no small compliment
to Dr. Howe's consequence; but perhaps it
would interest you to be made acquainted with the
cetera intus.

About ten years ago I had the honor (and as such
I shall always treasure the memory) of sharing Dr.
Howe's lodgings at Paris for some months. He was
then employed in learning that system of instruction
for the blind upon which he has since grafted improvements
that have made him a separate fame
among philanthropists. Philanthropy seems to be
his engrossing and only mission in life, however; for,
though giving the most of his day to the objects of
his special errand, he found time to make himself the
most serviceable man in France to the cause of Poland.
The disasters of Warsaw had filled Paris with
destitute refugees, and distinguished men who had
shared in that desperate battle were literally houseless
in the streets. Our common breakfast-room was
thronged with these unfortunate patriots, and, with
noble liberality, Dr.Howe kept open table for all who
came to him—many of them, to my knowledge, getting
no food elsewhere, and, among others, Lelewel,
the distinguished poet and patriot, coming in one
morning to ask a breakfast, as I well recollect, after
having slept out a winter's night in the street. Lafayette
was at that time at the head of the Polish
committee, and Fenimore Cooper (whose generosity
to the Poles should be chronicled, as well as the devotion
of his time and talents to the cause) shared
with Dr. Howe the counsel and most efficient agency
of the benevolent old man. At this time a sum of
money was raised to be sent, with some important and
secret despatches, to the Poles who had fled into
Prussia, and Dr. Howe offered to be the bearer. I
went with him to the Mesagerie and saw him off in
the diligence, very little suspecting the dangerous
character of his errand. He arrived at Berlin, and,
after passing the evening abroad, returned to his
hotel, and found a couple of gens-d'armes in his
room. They informed him that he must accompany
them to the police. The doctor understood his position
in a moment. By a sudden effort he succeeded
in pitching both the soldiers out of the room and closing
the door, for it was all-important that he should
gain time to destroy papers that he had about him.
The gens-d'armes commenced a parley with him
through the bolted door, which resulted in a compact
that he should be let alone till morning, on condition
of his agreeing to go with them peaceably at daylight—they
keeping sentry outside. He had no light,
but he passed the night in tearing into the smallest
possible fragments the important papers, and soaking
them in water. Among his papers, however, were
two or three letters from Lafayette to himself which
he wished to preserve, and after examining the room
he secreted these in the hollow of a plaster cast of the
king which chanced to be there, and so saved them;
for, though the minute fragments were picked out
and put together again (as he subsequently discovered),
he wrote to a friend at Berlin, six months after, who
went to the hotel and found the secreted letters safe
in the plaster king's keeping!

At dawn Dr. Howe opened his door, and was
marched immediately to prison. By chance, on the
evening of his arrival, he had met an American in the
entry of the hotel, who had recognised him, and the
next day came to call. From the mysterious manner
in which the people of the house denied all knowledge
of what had become of him, this gentleman suspected
an arrest, and wrote to Mr. Rives, our then minister
to France, stating his suspicion. Mr. Rives immediately
demanded him of the Prussian government, and
was assured, in reply, that they knew nothing of the
person in question. Mr. Rives applied a second time.
Dr. Howe had now been six weeks in solitary confinement,
and at the end of this period he was taken
out in silence and put into a carriage with closed windows.
They drove off, and it was his own terrible
belief for the first day that he was on his way to Siberia.
By the light through the covering of the carriage,
however, he discovered that he was going westward.

The sudden transition from close confinement to
the raw air, threw him into a fever, and on the third
day of his silent journey he begged to be allowed to
stop and consult a physician. They refused. On
the next morning, while changing horses, a physician
was brought to the carriage-door, who, after seeing
the prisoner, wrote a certificate that he was able to
proceed, and they again drove on. That day they
crossed a corner of the Hanoverian dominious, and
while stopping for a moment in a village, Dr. Howe
saw the red coats of some officers, and by a bold attempt
escaped from his guards and threw himself on
their protection. They quietly restored him to the
Prussians, and the carriage drove on once more—his
guard finally setting him down at Metz, on the borders
of Prussia, with orders never to enter again the
Prussian dominions. At present he is at Baden Baden,
and Mr. Everett is engaged in a negotiation,
through the Prussian minister at London (Chevalier
Bunsen), for the revocation of the cabinet order, and
permission for a simple citizen of the United States
to show his bride the Rhine! Mr. Greene, our consul
at Rome, who is now in New York, informs me
that Dr. Howe is also on the black list of the king
of Naples—of course as a general champion of liberty.

Dr. Howe's first reputation, as is well known, was
made as a Philhellene in the Greek revolution. He
left this country entirely without means, having just
completed his studies in surgery, and worked his passage
to Greece. He entered the service as surgeon,
and soon gained the highest promotion—serving part
of the time on board the armed steamer commanded
by Hastings—the only fault found with him being (as
a Hanoverian comrade of his told me at Paris) that he
would be in the fight, and was only a surgeon when
the battle was over. His whele career in Greece was
one of gallant acts of bravery, generosity, and self-sacrifice,
as represented by his companions there—and
if he could ever be made to overcome the unwillingness
with which he speaks of himself, his history of
personal adventure would, without doubt, be one of
the most curiously-interesting naratives in the world.
Dr. Howe's slight person, delicate and beautiful features,
and soft voice, would give one the impression
that he was more at home in his patient labor of winding
light through the labyrinth of the sense-imprisoned
Laura Bridgman; but a more fiery spirit, and one
more reluctant to submit to the details of quiet life,
does not exist, and the most trying service he has ever
done in the cause of philanthropy, I sincerely believe,
is this descipline of his tumultuous energies to the
patient teaching of the blind. He is still a young
man—not yet forty, I believe. I could not trust my
admiration and affection to say more of his character
than the giving of this simple statement of facts.

The New York American, after quoting from what
the editor calls “the agreeably gossiping New York correspondent
of the National Intelligencer,” remarks that
“this correspondence is not, to be sure, very reliable for
matters of fact”—which is very like disparaging a hasty
pudding for not being a rump-steak. This style of
criticising things by telling what they are not, suits the
“American” in the two respects, that it is both easy
and oracular. But I should prefer to be tried rather
by what I undertake to do, which is certainly not to
send you simply “matters of fact.” To wait for the
winnowing of error and exaggeration from truth, would
be to send you a correspondence as stale as some of
the columns in which I am found fault with. I profess
nothing of the kind. I send you the novelty and
gossip of the hour, and you, and all others (except
those who are “nothing if not critical,” and must find
a fault) take it as they take what they hear in their
day's walk—as material for conversation and speculation,
which may be mere rumor, may be truth. I am
happy to amuse a New York editor, but I do not write
for one so near my sources of information. I write
with only such of your subscribers in my eye as are
not resident in New York—who want a gay daguerreotype
of the floating news and chit-chat of the hour,
such as they would have gathered by observation and
conversation, if they had passed in New York the day
on which I write. Loose as is all this ministry to the
love of news, however, I will lay any bet which I could
have the conscience to take from that editor, that,
comparing paragraph by paragraph with his own paper,
for twenty columns, I will find more misstatements
in his than in my own—though you would
think by his criticism that he never committed an
error in his life.

And apropos of my sins of correspondence, I find
that propriety begins to require that all words signifying
exhilarating drinks must henceforth be decently
disembowelled—that cobblers must be written c—s,
and julaps j—s, slings s—s, and punches p—s.
I have had three letters and one poetic appeal addressed
to me, remonstrative against my shameless
mention of these iniquitous beverages in so exemplary
a paper as the Intelligencer. I consider this an exponent
of the leading enthusiasm of the era, and willingly
give way. One of my rebukers attacked me
more particularly for what he considered a slighting
allusion to the coming of Father Matthew to America.
To this, in intention at least, I plead not guilty. I
revere the character of that great reformer, and I consider
his mission sacred and salutary. My submission
shall be more emphatic, if necessary.

Macready draws well, and the town is fully occupied
in discussing why he only astonishes and never moves
the feelings of his audience. He is a most accomplished
player, and in these days, when theatrical
criticism can neither help nor harm an actor, he can
pursue the even tenor of his style with little interruption.

Longfellow, a poet who combines genius and workmanlike
finish, is in New York, under the case of
Elliot, the oculist. I trust he will keep an undamaged
pair of eyes, though the loss of sight would turn a
great deal of new light inward upon his mind—as it
did upon Milton's—and be a gain to the glory of his
country.

I am ministered to while writing to-day by the most
deliciously-tempered autumn air that ever intoxicated
the heart of a ripening grape. I only lament that the
distinct pleasure I feel in every pore and fibre will not
be channelled into the nib of my pen and flow to you
in rhetoric. The wind is a little northerly, however,
and it may bring you a sample.

To the Ladies.—We have nothing to write about
this morning, ladies!—quite nothing. We presume
you know that the crocus yellow and the blue of your
own eyes are the fashionable colors; that Middleton
cuts his slippers low behind for such ladies as know
what is becoming to the foot; that the late strain after
economy is yielding to a rebound of extravagance
(consequently, this winter you can wear nothing too
gorgeously sumptuous); that ruinous bracelets are utterly
indispensable to wrists with a swan's neck in them,
and that the New Mirror (pardon us!) is of the fashionable
crocus teint without, and as “blue” within as is
bearable by the copyrighted and intoxicating benightedness
of beauty. If you had sent for us to your
boudoir and ordered our memory spread out upon a
silk cushion, we could tell you no more.

If you are interested at all in us—we are having,
this morning, our little private mope, with no possible
flight of fancy beyond the ends of our fingers. We
have been sitting here two hours making caryatides to
hold up some spilt ink on our blotting-paper—(rather
nicely drawn, one of them, and looks like a Greek girl
we saw at Egina). Then we have had a revery on political
economy—musing, that is to say, whether we
should wear a ring on our right hand (which belongs
to the working-classes) or on the left, which is purely
an ornamental idler, born but to be gloved and kept
gentlemanly. Now, what do you think on that subject?
Here is this most virtuous and attached right
hand of ours, an exemplary and indefatigable provider
for himself and the other members of our family, who
has never failed to bring bread to our mouths since we
placed our dependance on him, and why should he
not be ornamented and made trim and respectable,
first and foremost. He is not defiled by his work. He
is clean when he is washed. He is made on the same
model as the idle dangler opposite, and though he
could do very well without that same Mr. Sinister
Digits, there would be no “living” for Mr. Sinister
Digits without him! Most meritorious worky! Put
the ring on his forefinger!

Um! it does not look so well on that hand! There
is a dingy groove on the inside of the second finger
(which you would not remark, perhaps, but for the
conspicuousness of the jewel)—a nasty soil of an
ill-effaced ink-spot, made by a quill. Faith! it calls
attention to “the shop,” and would do so in good
company! He must work in gloves if he is to be observed!
And the ring is not so becomingly carried as
by that other plumper and more taper gentleman,
whose joints, with less dexterity, look supple, and,
truth to own, more suitable!

No—no! “Take back the ring!” The bee works
hard enough to have his pick of wings, but he would
only be cumbered with the butterfly's. Indulgence
for ever to the ornamentals! Money to the ladies
whether you have it or no! Credit to the dandies!
And, befitting brown bread and plain blessings for the
labor-stained right hands of society—our own among
the worky-most and least complaining!

We have been ring-mad since the mummy's ring
(mentioned on a previous page) was slipped upon our
finger, and we have pulled out from our store of relies
a huge emerald (in whose light is locked up a history)
and it was of the wearing of it that we mused in this
morning's mope of idleness. The world is set in a
solid emerald, says the Mohammedan—“the emerald
stone Sakhral, the agitations of whose light cause
earthquakes.” We would make a pilgrimage (if our

“travels” would sell) to see the great “mother of emeralds”
worshipped by the Peruvians in the valley of
Manta—big as a gourd and luminous at murk midnight
(or so they say). Excuse us, when we meet
you, if we proffer our left hand for courtesy, for, on
the forefinger of that sits our agitated emerald—the
right hand kept, unrewarded by your touch, to serve
you only. Adieu—till they are dead who are to die
(one a minute) ere another Saturday—for, at the close
of our overflowings into your cup, this sad thought
runs over! And if, in the midst of our trifling, Providence
ministers such thoughts to us, they can scarce
be unseasonable, passed on, in the same company, to
you.

Mrs. Flimson.—Few women had more gifts than
Mrs. Flimson. She was born of clever parents, and
was ladylike and good-looking. Her education was
that of a female Crichton, careful and universal; and
while she had more than a smattering of most languages
and sciences, she was up to any flight of fashion,
and down to every secret of notable housewifery.
She piqued herself, indeed, most upon her plain accomplishments
(thinking, perhaps, that her more uncommon
ones would speak for themselves); and it
was a greater triumph, to her apprehension, that she
could direct the country butcher to the sweet-bread
in slaughtering his veal, and show a country-girl how
to send it to table with the proper complexion of a riz
de veau, than that she could entertain any manner of
foreigner in his own language, and see order in the
stars and diamonds in backlogs. Like most female
prodigies, whose friends expect them to be matched
as well as praised, Mrs. Flinson lost the pick of the
market, and married a man very much her inferior.
The pis aller, Mr. Flimson, was a person of excellent
family (after the fashion of a hill of potatoes—
the best part of it under ground), and possessed of a
moderate income. Near the meridian sun of a metropolis,
so small a star would of course be extingnished;
and as it was necessary to Mrs. Flimson's
existence that she should be the cynosure of something,
she induced her husband to remove to the
sparser field of a distant country-town, where, with
her diplomatic abilities, she hoped to build him up
into a member of congress. And here shone forth
the genius of Mrs. Flimson. To make herself perfectly
au fait of country habits, usages, prejudices,
and opinions, was but the work of a month or two of
stealthy observation. At the end of this short period,
she had mastered a manner of rustic frankness (to be
put on at will); she had learned the secret of all rural
economies; she had found out what degree of gentility
would inspire respect without offending, or exciting
envy, and she had made a near estimate of the
influence, consequence, and worth-trouble-ness of
every family within visiting distance.

With this ammunition, Mrs. Flimson opened the
campaign. She joined all the sewing-circles of the
village, refusing steadily the invidious honor of manager,
pattern-cutter, and treasurer; she selected one
or two talkative objects for her charity, and was studiously
secret in her manner of conveying her benefactions.
She talked with farmers, quoting Mr. Flimson
for her facts. She discoursed with the parson,
quoting Mr. Flimson for her theology. She was
intelligent and witty, and distributed plentiful scraps
of information, always quoting Mr. Flimson. She
managed the farm and the household, and kept all the
accounts—Mr. Flimson was so overwhelmed with
other business! She talked politics, admitting that
she was less of a republican than Mr. Flimson. She
produced excellent plans for charitable associations,
town improvements, and the education of children—
all the result of Mr. Flimson's hours of relaxation.
She was—and was only—Mr. Flimson's humble vicegerent
and poor representative. And everything would
seem so much better devised if he could have expressed
it in person!

But Mr. Flimson was never nominated for congress,
and Mrs. Flimson was very well understood
from the first by her country neighbors. There was
a flaw in the high polish of her education—an error
inseparable from too much consciousness of porcelain
in this crockery world. To raise themselves sufficiently
above the common level, the family of Mrs.
Flimson habitually underrated vulgar human nature,
and the accomplished daughter, good at everything
else, never knew where to find it. She thinks herself
in a cloud, floating far out of the reach of those
around her, when they are reading her at arm's length
like a book. She calculates her condescension for
“forty fathom deep,” when the object of it sits beside
her. She comes down graciously to people's capacity,
and her simplicity is set down for trap. And still
wondering that Mr. Flimson is allowed by his country
to remain in obscurity, and that stupid rusties will not
fuse and be moulded by her well-studied congenialities,
she begins to turn her attention to things more
on her own level, and on Sundays looks like a saint
distressed to be out of heaven. But for that one
thread of contempt woven into the woof of her education,
Mrs. Flimson might have shone as a star in
the world where she glimmers like a taper.

I think that a walk in New York to-day, if you had
been absent a year, would impress you very strongly
with the outbreak of showiness in costume. Whatever
spirit it is that presides over the fashions we take
so implicitly from France, he (this spirit of woof and
color) has well suited the last and newest invoice to a
moment of reaction from economy. Or (what may
better define the present era, perhaps) the moment
after prosperity has almost universally changed hands.
The stuffs in the shop-windows of Broadway are of a
splendor that would scarce be ventured upon (in the
street at least) by the severity of last year's aristocratic
taste; but the cruption has spread from the shop-windows
over the sidewalk, and the ladies are verily rainbow
clad! The prevailing colors are yellow and blue;
the most of the dresses put all the prismatic colors
under contribution, and the wearers would make Chinese
figures for Gobelin tapestry. It would be a fine
speculation in upholstery, indeed, to buy the cast-off
dresses of this period, and lay them up to sell for
window-curtains to the next generation. But the
ladies have it by no means to themselves. They are
only bolder and more consistent in their “bravery of
suits.” The waistcoats and cravats have taken a long
stride into splendor, leaving the coats and trousers in
their accustomed sobriety of hue. Jennings's great
emporium, opposite the Park, might furnish the
knights and courtiers for a new “field of cloth of
gold,” so effulgent are the velvets and satins: though
the bold youths who have ventured to put forth into
Broadway with their glittering waistcoats look like
butterflies half-born, the dull broadcloth worm still
adhering. For one, I should like the age of gands
and such matters to come round again, for I do not
see why the lords of nature should leave all the ornament
to the birds and flowers, and servants in livery; but let it be consistent, and entire, and when it is that,
it will be time to compound a gentleman of “a man,
a sword, and an equipage,” and to settle the sixty degrees
of precedence which are established in the
court of England. But as this will not all be in my
time, I think I shall not venture on the more luminous
stratum, to say the least, of Jennings's waistcoats.
The Americanism of the matter is the much more

violent array of these gorgeous stuffs in Chatham
street and the Bowery. The small tailors' shops in
these Alsatian quarters are quite in a glow with the
display of cravats and waistcoats, and their catering
for the taste of their customers is, of course, careful
and well-considered. The age is, perhaps, for ever gone
by, when a privileged class could monopolize finery of
garb; and, of all the civilized nations, it were least possible
in ours. I have seen already a dozen at least of
cheap-booted apprentices wearing velvet waistcoats
which, a few years ago, would have delighted D'Orsay.
This last lustrum of our history, by-the-way, corresponds
somewhat, as to sumptuary matters, with the
year 1759, and after, of French history. The nine
months' ministry of Silhouette (whose immortality
rests on the accident of giving his name to profiles)
was a temporary suspension of French extravagance,
somewhat similar to ours of the last year or two,
during which coats were worn without folds, snuff-boxes
made of plain wood, and painting portraits were
discarded for outlines in profile; every fashion, in
short, giving way to extreme parsimony. This period
was succeeded, as our economical days seem promising
to be, by a powerful reflux of the suspended extravagance.
The parallel must end here, thank
Heaven!

Brooklyn is as much a part of New York, for all
purposes of residence and communication, as “the
Borough” is of London. The steam ferry-boats cross
the half-mile between it and New York every five
minutes; and in less time than it usually takes to
thread the press of vehicles on London Bridge, the
elegant equipages of the wealthy cross to Long Island
for the afternoon drive; morning visits are interchanged
between the residents in both places—and, indeed, the
East river is now hardly more of a separation than the
same distance in a street. Brooklyn is the shire-town
of King's county, and is second in population only to
New York. It has become the fashion for business-men
of New York to build and live on the fine and
healthy heights above the river, where they are nearer
their business, and much better situated than in the
outskirts of this city itself. Brooklyn is built on the
summit and sides of an elevation springing directly
from the bank of the river, and commanding some of
the finest views in America. The prospect embraces
a large part of East river, crowded with shipping, and
tracked by an endless variety of steamers, flying
through the channel in quick succession; of the city
of New York, extending, as far as the eye can see, in
closely-piled masses of architecture; of the Hudson,
and the shore of Jersey, beyond; of the bay and its
bright islands; and of a considerable part of Long
and Staten islands, and the Highlands of Neversink.

This is “sodgering week,” ladies, and the general
has gone to the wars. Provided there be no Banquo
to sit in his leather-bottomed chair, I am quite alone,
and of course, immeasurably more than usual at your
service. Walk in, and make no ceremony—that is to
say, draw your foot under you, and sit on your heel.
Leave the general's chair unoccupied, if you please.
It will remind us that “WE” are out, and that I am at
home. Sit on that ream of paper, and let's be private
and personal.

A little scandal would be appetizing, this cloudy
morning. Suppose we put the general on the gridiron
and “do him brown!” Poets are so much better
for toasting!—(reason why: the first lyre was made
by the toasting of the sun—the tortoise-shell, found
by Hermes on the Nile, drawn tight by the contracted
tendons—or “so they say”). His health in a glass of
Elsinore cherry! And now, general, come over the
coals!

What has he to do (a poor various author, tucked
away in the “appendix” of the “Poetry of America”)—
I say, what has he to do with a lodging in the brain
and memory of every man, and in the heart and musicmaking
of every woman in the country! What has a
“various author” to do with as much popularity as a
baker's dozen of the big-bugs with their biographies.
What business has a “various author” to get his own
price for every scrap of a song, and be the only poetfather
in the country whose poetical daughters are run
after to be married to music! There is more of him
abroad “by heart,” than of anybody else! He is more
quoted, more sung, more trolled, more parodied, more
plucked at on his pedestal, than anybody else! He
uses his brevet as if he were full poet! If it weren't
for the “damnable iteration” of a cockatoo critic or
two, the world would never suspect—never—that
Morris is not a song-writer—the song-writer—and the
most sung and the best one of all the “Poets and
Poetry of America.” And, la!—to be sure!—what
a mistaken world we live in—that never knows what it
likes till it is told in a book!

It is something to be universal, as a poet—something
to get that far—it must be confessed. The
worth of a thing is (partly, at least) what it will bring—
particularly in the way of a long-winded popularity.
There is some bedevilment or other about Morris's
poetry that makes it stick in people's minds, and
answer people's want, in the way of an expression of
their poetical feelings—something that music jumps
to, and women remember and love him for—something
that satisfies the nine hundred and ninety-nine,
and displeases the nil admirari thousandth.

Let's try this varlet of a popularity-thief—you judge
and jury, and I the aggrieved plaintiff—one of the
robbed. Hand me up that big book, on the floor by
you, and let's see the law. He's a lyric poet if there's
any truth in the definition of that commodity:—

“Lyric poetry is that species of poetry by which
the poet directly expresses his emotions. It is necessary
that the feeling represented should be itself poetical,
and not only worthy to be preserved, but accompanied
by a variety of ideas, beauty of imagery, and a
musical flow of language. One distinct feeling should
predominate, giving tone to the whole; the feeling
must be worthy of the subject which caused it, corresponding
to the same both in degree and kind, and
must be so exhibited as to give a living picture of the
poet's mind; while at the same time, what is merely
individual and accidental must be excluded, so that
the poet shall be truly the representative of his race,
and awaken the sympathy of all. But this requires
genius of a high order.”

Quash the suit and turn the plaintiff out of court!—
there never was a more literal inventory of goods than
this of the peculiarities of Morris's poetry! Lyrist he
is, if that describe lyric poetry, and he has come honestly
by his popularity, and the world is right, that
said so before the trial. Court's adjourned.

We have sat down once or twice to criticise Weir's
picture of the Embarkation—but a criticism of it
would be but a recapitulation of its beauties, and as
these are quite apparent, and everybody will see the
picture, we think it not worth while. We have already
described the feeling with which it is seen for the first
time, and as we have seen it a dozen times with the
same glow, and as that description has been quoted, as
just, by many of the critics who have since seen the
picture, we can well stop where we are—recording
only the present thronging to the exhibition-room in
New York, and the universal delight the picture gives

to the public. Weir may well be a proud and happy
man.

We should be very happy to polish “M.'s” verses,
but as we have seldom seen a penknife that was sharp
after it was sharpened, so we never saw verses that
were good after being bettered—by anybody but the
original maker. Beside, it is not our vocation to
mend poets—though we might make one—Heaven
help us!

A “friend who knew us when a boy” (as if anything
but the crust of us be adult-erated), wishes us
to “write something for posterity.” Tut!—posterity
is welcome to all we write—though, if posterity will
pay us, or if anybody will “down with the dust,” as
posterity's “paying-teller,” we will write something
which posterity can publish as “entirely original.”
For the present we do not hold with the Apotactitæ,
that “property, wine, meat, and matrimony, are
things to be renounced”—and though the three last
seem to be the only ones to which our destiny has a
free copyhold, we are digging away at prose and poetry,
and would peddle pins or pottery to compass the
other.

One of the most curious and amusing resorts for a
man of taste, idle in New York, is the ANTIQUARIAN
BOOK-SHOP[2] of Bartlett & Welford, under the Astor.
The catalogue of rare and valuable books for sale at
this repository, numbers nearly four thousand, and
most of these are such works as are found only in
choice libraries, or in the possession of scholars.
Far from being interesting to antiquarians exclusively,
the curiosities of this choice shop would amuse the
most general reader, and a lounge at the well-stocked
counter of B. & W. is no indifferent relief to the
fatiguing idleness of a man stranded on the beach of
a hotel between the far-apart tides of breakfast and
dinner. Most courteous bibliopoles are these two
gentlemen, by-the-way, and happy to gratify the curiosity
of visiters.

Villanous editions, villanous cheap, are the fruits
of our present law of copyright, and if we had an
American language all to ourselves, we should have
no such thing as beauty in a book. Fortunately,
England has the same brick from Babel, and we can
corrupt, mutilate, defile, and misprint works of genius,
and still import, from our more liberal and appreciative
fatherland, a purer and worthier copy. Still it seems
to me surprising, that, of the publishers who have
grown rich with pirating in this country, no one has
felt inclined to distinguish himself by a school of fine
editions.[3] One would think that the example of Aldus,
who made himself as famous as the authors he
printed, would be stuff for emulation; and there are
some men, probably, even among publishers, who
agree with Charles Edwards, that “it is the devil to
be growing old as a person of no peculiarity.” Aldus's
press lasted eminent for near a hundred years,
and it is recorded in history that his ink was excellent,
his types beautiful, his paper invariably strong and
white, and above all, that his press was next to infallible
for correctness. Celebrity among BOOKBINDERS
probably sprung from this renown of a printer, and in
England there were famous names in this trade also.
Roger Payne received from twenty to thirty guineas
for binding a single volume, and he is much better remembered
than any lord-mayor of his time. There
has been a mania in bookbinding, however, and the
world is too poetical for such matters now. Jeffrey,
a London bookseller, had Fox's History bound in fox
skin; and an accentric bibliomaniast named (descriptively)
Askew, had a book bound in a human skin.
In the library at Konigsberg there are twenty books
bound in silver. Very far short of all this, however,
there is in this country an unreached point of excellence
in binding, and great opening for an ambitious
bookbinder to distinguish himself. Sat Verbum sapienti.

Rarity in books is such a difficult thing to define,
that a taste for it easily degenerates into absurdity.
The mania is very common, but there is a mania for
books according to their rare value to read, and a
mania for books valuable by accidental circumstances
—such as coming from a particular press, being made
of singular materials, having once belonged to a celebrated
library, or being the only ones of their kind.
In Italy they used to print valuable books on blue paper;
in France on rose-colored paper, and in Germany
on yellow or green; and copies of these are much
sought after now. Bibliomaniacs value those printed
on large paper with wide margin. In the advertisement
of rare books, you often see the phrase, “a tall
copy.” Longman had a single copy printed of
“Strutt's Dictionary of Engravers,” illustrated and
embellished at the cost of ten thousand dollars! The
copy sold, I do not know to what book-madman—but
his name should be linked in history to that of the
priest in Spain, who murdered three men to get possession
of their libraries!

By a turn of fortune not worth describing, Mr.
Goggins, a shipchandler, became suddenly a millionaire.
His half-score of grown-up children spread
themselves at once to their new dimensions, and after
a preliminary flourish at home, the whole family embarked
for foreign travel. They remained but a fortnight
in England—none in that land walking often invisible.
Germany seemed to the shipchandler a
“rubbishy” country, and Italy “very small beer,” and,
after a short residence in Paris, that gay capital was
pronounced the Paradise of money's worth, and there
the Goggineses took up their abode. To the apprehension
of most of their acquaintance, Mr. Goggins
was now in a speedy and fair way to return to his
blocks and oakum, poorer for his fortune. No stint
seemed put upon the extravagance of sons or daughters,
and in dress and equipage their separate displays
and establishments became the marvel of Paris. In
Goggins himself there was for awhile no great change
of exterior. His constitutional hardness of character
seemed in no way disturbed or embellished by the
splendors he controlled. He gave way to usages and
etiquette with patient facility, bowed through the receptions
at his first parties with imperturbable propriety,
and was voted stolid and wooden by the gay
world flaunting at his expense.

In the second year of his Parisian life, however,
Goggins took the reins gradually into his own hands.
He dismissed his sharp French butler, who had made
hitherto all the household bargains, and, promoting
to the servile part of his office an inferior domestic,
dull and zealous, he took the accounts into his own
hands, and exacted, of all the tradespeople he patronized,
schedules of their wares in English, and their
bills made equally comprehensible. Pocketing thus
the butler's perquisite, he reduced the charges of that
department one half, beside considerably improving
the quality of the articles purchased. Rejecting,

then, the intermediate offices of lease-agents and
hommes d'affaires, he advertised in Galignani, in good
plain English, for the most luxurious house in a certain
fashionable quarter, conducted the bargain by a
corrospondence in English, and finally procured it at
a large abatement, at least, from prices paid by millionaires.
He advertised in the same way for proposals
to furnish his house on the most sumptuous
scale, and in the prevailing fashion, and by dint of sitting
quietly in his office and compelling everything to
reach him through the medium of English manuscript,
he created a palace fit for an emperor, by fair
competition among the tradesmen and upholsterers,
and at a cost by no means ruinous. He advertised in
the same way for a competent man of taste to oversee
the embellishments in progress, and, when complete,
the “Hotel Goggins” was quite the best thing of its
kind in Paris, and was looked upon as the “folly” of
the ruined lessee. With this groundwork for display,
Mr. Goggins turned his attention to the ways and
means of balls and dinners, concerts and breakfast,
and having acquired a name for large expenditure, he
profited considerably by the emulation of cooks and
purveyors for the material, and privately made use of
the savoir faire of a reduced count or two who, for a
“trifling consideration,” willingly undertook the manner
of the entertainments. He applied the same sagacious
system of commissariat to the supplying of
the multifarious wants of his children, economizing
at the same time that he enhanced the luxury of their
indulgences, and the Gogginses soon began to excite
other feelings than contempt. Their equipages (the
production of the united taste of ruined spendthrifts)
outshone the most sumptuous of the embassies; their
balls were of unexceptionable magnificence, their dinners
more recherché than profuse. How they should
come by their elegance was a mystery that did not lessen
their consequence, and so the Gogginses mounted
to the difficult eminence of Parisian fashion—the
plain business-tact of a shipchandler their mysterious
stepping-stone.

Perhaps we should give more credit to this faculty
in Goggins. It is possibly not far removed from the
genius of a great financier or eminent state-treasurer.
It is the power of coming directly at values and ridding
them of their “riders”—of getting for less, what
others, from want of penetration, get for more. I am
inclined to think Goggins would have been quite as
successful in any other field of calculation, and one
instance of a very different application of his reasoning
powers would go to favor the belief.

While in Italy, he employed a celebrated but improvident
artist to paint a picture, the subject of
which was a certain event of rather an humble character,
in which he had been an actor. The picture
was to be finished at a certain time, and at the urgent
plea of the artist, the money was advanced. The
time expired and the picture was not sent home, and
the forfeited bond of the artist was accordingly put in
suit. The delinquent, who had not thought twice of
the subject, addressed one or two notes of remonstrance
to his summary employer, and receiving no
reply, and the law crowding very closely upon his
heels, he called upon Goggins and appealed, among
other arguments, to the difference in their circumstances,
and the indulgent pity due from rich to poor.

“Where do you dine to day?” asked Goggins.

“To-day—let me see—Monday—I dine with Lady
—.”

(The artist, as Goggins knew, was a favorite in the
best society in Florence.)

“And where did you dine yesterday?”

“Yesterday—hum—yesterday I dined with Sir
George —. No! I breakfasted with Sir George,
and dined with the grand chamberlain. Excuse me!
I have so many engagements—”

“Ah!—and you are never at a loss for a dinner or
a breakfast!”

The artist smiled. “No!”

“Are you well lodged?”

“Yes—on the Arno.”

“And well clad, I see.”

(The painter was rather a dandy, withal.)

“Well, sir!” said Goggins, folding up his arms, and
looking sterner than before, “you have, as far as I
can understand it, every luxury and comfort which a
fortune could procure you, and none of the care and
trouble of a fortune, and you enjoy these advantages
by a claim which is not liable to bankruptcy, nor to
be squandered, nor burnt—without the slightest anxiety,
in short.”

The artist assented.

“So far, there is no important difference in our
worldly condition, except that I have this anxiety and
trouble, and am liable to these very casualties.”

Goggins paused, and the painter nodded again.

“And now, sir, over and above this, what would
you take to exchange with me the esteem in which
we are severally held—you to become the rich, uneducated,
and plain Simon Goggins, and I to possess
your genius, your elevated tastes, and the praise and
fame which these procure you?”

The artist turned uneasily on his heels.

“No, sir!” continued Goggins, “you are not a man
to be pitied, and least of all by me. And I don't pity
you, sir. And what's more, you shall paint that picture,
sir, or go to prison. Good morning, sir!”

And the result was a painting, finished in three
days, and one of the master-pieces of that accomplished
painter, for he embodied, in the figure and
face of Goggins, the character which he had struck
out so unexpectedly—retaining the millionaire's friendship
and patronage, though never again venturing to
trifle with his engagements.

Music seems to be the passion of the hour in New-York.
Wallack had a house that would hardly pay
expenses last night—even the Ravels have somewhat
fallen off as they were going off—while Damoreau,
Wallace, and the “Hutchinson family,” draw well.
The latter are four children of a New Hampshire
patriarch—(four out of fifteen, as they say in an autobiographical
medley which they sing)—and having
been born with a singular natural talent for music,
they are turning it to account in a musical tour.
There are three brothers under twenty years of age,
and a very young sister. Their voices are good (particularly
the girl's, who is about fourteen), and they
confine themselves to simple melody, such as would
suit the least practised ear, while it can not fail, from
the truth and expression with which they sing, to
please the most fastidious. Their concerts are exceedingly
enjoyable.

Mrs. Sutton, well known everywhere as a most
charming singer, is about to perform a short engagement
as a prima donna to the Italian company at Niblo's.
I wish the success of the experiment might
bring Castellan and Cinti Damoreau upon the stage.
The latter, by the way, is the daughter of a French
door-porter, and might easily have been “the grave
of her deserving,” but for her perseverance and ambition.
Maroncelli is preparing a memoir of her, under
her own direction.

There is a particular season of the year (this is it)
when, as most people know, the law forbids the killing
and vending of certain game—the zest of illegality, of
course, giving great flavor to the birds, and, of course,
more than nullifying the law. Not the least in connexion

with this remark—I was very much astonished
a day or two since, dining with a friend at a neighboring
hotel, to find fairly printed in the bill of fare,
“Second Course—Roast Owls.” On the succeeding
day, at another table, I was startled with the enrolment
of a dish called “Just Try Me”—which, on experiment,
I found to be a bird—(with an egg-shaped
breast, and a very long bill thrust through it)—decently
laid on its back, and covered with a pork apron! The
latter name seemed very much to the point, and explained
the bird's errand. The former I was puzzled
with—but knowing the landlord of that hotel to be
very much ultra crepidam, I was induced to look into
ornithology for his meaning. I find that the peculiarity
of the owl is “an external toe which can be turned
behind at pleasure”—symbolical of the perverted beak
of the woodcock (as well as the making of false tracks
to evade the law), and serving in the same manner to
prepare an orifice for the sauce of lemon-juice and
cayenne. When this man cozens, you see, he cozens
with edifying knowledge and discretion.

Appleton is publishing a very neat and handsome
edition of valuable religious books. Among them is
the Disce Vivere of Sutton, prebend of Westminster,
in 1626—one of the choicest specimens of rich and
pregnant English that I have lately seen. Two sentences
from his preface will give you an idea of his
style, in which every word seems to drive a nail:—

“If to live were for no other but to draw in and to
breathe out the soft air, as the wise man speaketh, a
needless labor were it, good Christian reader, to lay
down any instructions to the world of `learning to
live;' for this is done naturally, both of men and
beasts, without any teaching or learning.

“If to live were no other but to cast about for
the favor and riches of the world, as some men are
wont to call it, the way to live, then would it soon follow,
the greater Machiavellians, the better livers.
Somewhat more than is required to live Christianly
than so, and that all shall one day find, than either
drawing in and breathing out the soft air, or the plotting
to compass the pleasures and profits of the world.”

A cold-water procession is going under my window
at this moment, in a very propitious shower of rain.
From my elevated look-out, the long line of umbrellas,
two and two, gives the street the dress look of a
fashionable Taglioni coat, with two rows of big buttons
down the middle. I noticed yesterday, by the
way, a most stalwart and gallant-looking company of
firemen, in an undress military uniform, marching out
for exercise at the target. Everything about them
was all right, except that their guests of honor were
placed before instead of behind—making of it a prisoner's
guard instead of a military escort.

I see criticised, in one or two papers, a poem which
was sent to me some time since as “printed, not published,”
called “Donna Florida,” by Mr. Simms, the
author of Southern Passages, &c. It is in the stanza,
and intended as an imitation of “Don Juan.” The
author says, in his preface, that he fancied “he might
imitate the grace and exceeding felicity of expression
in that unhappy performance—its playfulness, and
possibly its wit—without falling into its licentiousness
of utterance and malignity of mood. How he
has succeeded in this object, it would not be becoming
in him to inquire.” One of the easiest things fancied
possible, and one of the most difficult to do, is an
imitation of the qualities of that same poem of Don
Juan—and Mr. Simms, who has talent enough when
he stumbles on his right vein, has made a woful mistake
as to his capabilities for this. Two extracts will
show his idea of the slap-dash-ery vein:—

And, speaking of woman again:—

We should have disclaimed, in giving the portrait
of the most ornate man of modern times, all approbation
of dandyism—(as yet)—on this side the water.
Dandyism, in the abstract, we delight in, glorify, and
rejoice over. But it has its scenery and its appertainages.
A dandy, in place, is the foreground to a picture—the
forward star of a troop untelescoped by the
vulgar—the embroidered flower on the veil before a
life of mystery. His superior elegance is like the
gold edge of a cloud unfathomable; or (to come to
earth) like the soldier's uniform—tinsel but for its
association with force and glory. What were the
dandies of the firmament, for example—(comets)—
without those uninterpretable tails!

But—to alight in Broadway.

A dandy indigenous to New York has no background—no
untelescoped associations or connexions
—no power and glory—and no uninterpretable tail.
He is like a docked comet. He is like Tom Fool in
a uniform bought at the pawnbroker's. He is a label
on an empty bottle. Count D'Orsay drives by you in
the park, and a long ancestry of titled soldiers and
courtiers, and a present life of impenetrable scenery
and luxury untold, arise up for background to his cab
and tiger. Mr. James Jessamy drives by you in
Broadway, and you know at what trade his glory was
manufactured, and you know “what he does of an
evening,” and you know his “mechanical rogues” of
relations, the tailor who made him, the hatter who
thatched him, and the baker who sold him gingerbread
when a boy. You admire, or envy, D'Orsay, as you
happen to be constituted—but you laugh, you scarce
know why, at Mr. Jessamy. The latter, perhaps, has
the better right to his toggery and turn-out; but still
you laugh!

Very far short of dandyism, however, lies the point
of dressing judiciously—dressing, that is to say, so as
to make the most of your personal advantages. The
favor of women is of course the first of lifetime ambitions,
and the dear tyrants have a weakness for the exterior.
“Tu as du remarquer,” says Balzac; “si
toutefois tu es capable d'observer un fait moral, que la
femme aime le fat. Sais tu pourquoi la femme aime le
fat? Mon ami! les fats sont les seuls hommes qui
aient soin d'eur mêmes!” And there are ladies, even
on this plain side of the water, who adore a dandy, and
of course there are cases where the dread laugh (mentioned
at the close of the preceding paragraph) must
be braved to aid a particular magnetism. If your
dandy be a sensible man, and past the moulting age,
depend upon it he is ticketed for some two eyes only,
and can afford, for a consideration he has, to let “the
spirits of the wise sit in the clouds,” &c. Had Count
D'Orsay been born in Common-Council-dom and
gone home, sometimes by the Waverley line, sometimes
by the Knickerbocker, he never would have
been a dandy—(except, at least, for a motive paramount

to ridicule)—though, with his superb person,
he could hardly have dressed cleanly without being
called a fop by the shallow. D'Orsay is a man of
sense, and knows too much to open the public oyster
with his private razor. So don't come to America,
dear D'Orsay! Stay among your belongings—your

Stay where

Yet, if you should take the whim to come over the
water, count, I need scarce suggest to your good
sense that you had best come with a consignment of
buttons from Brummagem!

A gentleman in Saco has taken upon himself some
pains and postage to ask “our” two portraits served
up in two plates. We don't think the public would
stand it. That hold man, Mr. Graham, is to show an
outline of one of us in his February number, and then
anybody can have us, tale and all, for two shillings—a
cheap article, we must say! But we are surprised to
get this petition from Saco! We “come from” close-by-there,
and it strikes us our likeness would go east
with the welcome of coals to Newcastle. Doubtless
there are more like us in the same soil. We remember
hanging over a bridge in Saco half one moonlight
night (somewhere in our fourteenth year), and if rivers
have any memory or gratitude for admiration, our
likeness will be found in the water where we left it.

We wish our contributors would do us the favor
to baptize their own bantlings. Their delegation of
godfathership costs us sometimes a five minutes'
thought over a proofsheet while the press is waiting,
and time is “tin.” But, by the way, be particular in
naming your articles! Old Burton, in his Anatomy
of Melancholy, gives, by way of satire, what we think
an excellent rule (“experto crede Roberto”), and we
will lend it you for your uses: “It is a kind of policy
in these days to prefix a fantastical title to a book
which is to be sold; for, as larks come down to a daynet,
many vain readers will stand gazing like silly passengers
at an antic picture in a painter's shop, that will
not look at a judicious piece.”

I observe, looking from my window, that the Park
theatre hangs out a large American flag with a tricolor
banner appended to each of the two lower corners
(looking altogether very much like a pair of oriental
trousers), symbolical, probably, of the two arrivals
from France which made yesterday memorable.
The more interesting of these twin events, of course,
was General Bertrand's advent by the Boston boat at
seven, but the one which excited the more interest was
the opening of the winter fashions at “Madame Law
son's, in Park place,” at eight. The latter ceremonial
had been duly heralded for some days previous
by notes addressed to the leaders of fashion, and (as
far as can be known) the secrets of the Graces' unopened
cases had been impartially and unexceptionably
kept. Having “a friend at court,” I had been for
some days invited to witness the effulguration, but
was privately advised that there would be a rush, and
that six in the morning would not be too early to take
a stand upon the steps of the grand milliner in Park
place. Some unfinished business in dream-land obliged
me to waive to the sun the privilege of rising first,
however, and to my misfortune I did not arrive at Park
place till the premices de la mode had been ravished by
the most intrepid first-comers. The street was lined
with carriages, and the house was thronged. On the
staircase we met two or three ladies descending, flushed
with excitement, and murmuring millinery; and on
arriving at the landing on the second floor, the sharp
soprano of the hum within betrayed how even the
sweetest instruments may outrun modulation, played
on with a crescendo troppo furioso. The two saloons of
the second floor were crowded with the ladies of fashion,
and the walls lined all around with a single shelf
covered with snowy damask, on which stood the white
rods supporting the (as yet) brainless, though already
fashionable bonnets. And (begging pardon of Greenwich
and William streets) they were unapproachably
exquisite! There were some forced marriages of
colors among them—some juxtapositions Heaven
would not have ventured upon in bird-millinery—but
the results were happy. The bonnets are small, and
would probably divide, for the nose, a perpendicular
rain-drop; and the shape of the front edge would be
defined by the shadow on the wall of an egg truncated
at the smaller end—the choice of colors riotously
uncontrollable. Feathers, ruinous feathers, are absolutely
indispensable. No fashion this winter in a bonnet
without feathers—dyed feathers harmonious with
the satin. The plush bonnets were the first seized
on. Drab satin with very gay fineries, was the color
most complimented. The prices varied from twenty-two
dollars to fifty. It was very charming to see so
many pretty women trying on so many pretty bontiets,
and I feared that the two or three venturesome gentlemen
present might be seized upon as intruders
upon vestal mysteries; but, thanks to the “vestalis
maxima,” Miss Lawson, we escaped with credit.

I have seen General Bertrand several times. He is
of a very noble presence, though, like Napoleon, below
the middle height. His features express honesty,
firmness, and rapid intelligence—the latter expression
aided by eyes of unusual brillianey. His hair is
quite white. He is a man of few words, very collected,
but withal very courteous. These, at least, are
my impressions of him.

It is curious to remark, how the burning of our fingers
with Dickens makes us hold back from the fire
of enthusiastic receptions. If the general had been
ante instead of post-Dickens, he would have been
overwhelmed with popular acclamation. As it is, the
dues of honor are only paid à rigeur. One or two
brigades of artillery are ordered out to-morrow to escort
the general on his rounds to visit the objects of
curiosity, and the different staffs accompany him to
the theatre in the evening. This morning he is visiting
the fair of the Institute. The beautiful company
of the Life Guards made him a guest of honor at
their dinner last evening. Mr. Stetson, of the Astor
(who gave the dinner on his appointment as an officer
in the corps), complimented General Bertrand very
felicitously in his speech, and the applause was rapturous.
Stetson is naturally an “orator, as Brutus

is,” and has acquitted himself on several such occasions
with great credit.

I visited, the other evening, the beautiful rooms of
the Mercantile Library Association, and was exceedingly
interested in the history of its foundation and
progress. An advertisement expressing “a call for a
meeting of clerks” was the first germ. The paper
containing this was preserved and presented to the association
by William Wood, of Canandaigua, a very
zealous benefactor of the institute. It has at present
a library of nearly twenty thousand volumes, and it
has four thousand members. The late report of the
librarian shows that eight times the number of volumes
is annually taken from the library—an activity of use
for a library almost unparalleled. It is, without doubt,
one of the most useful institutions of the country, and
donations to it of books or money would be admirably
well bestowed.

Dr. Lardner has grown very much on the public
esteem in his last visit to New York. His clear, simple,
graphic talent, making abstruse science easy and
comprehensible, has never been equalled by another
lecturer.

Much honor and glory to the Boston publishers for
the beauty of their editions, and the credit (not small)
which that brings to this country. The most exquisite
edition of the exquisite songs of inspired Barry
Cornwall, published by Ticknor, should be between
every four walls where resides the relish for poetry or
taste in a book. It is a gem of poetry set in a gem
of printing, and most fit for a loving man's gift to a
sensible woman.

I find that “doctors differ” about Macready; and
the graphic and gay correspondent of the Providence
Journal, more particularly, gives as his great excellence,
that you forget the man in the character he
plays—just what I do not think. Heaven, it seems to
me, has done so little, and Macready so much, in
making himself the actor he is, that he deserves infinite
credit, and, as a piece of mechanism, his playing
is a fine thing to me, though more curious than overcoming.
Young Wheatley has turned over quite a
golden leaf of opinion with his personation of Ulric,
a very fine part in Byron's play of Werner.

I saw yesterday, among the daguerreotypes of
Chilton & Edwards, a most perfect one of Dr. Linn,
whose death was mentioned in a late paper. The value
of these things struck me forcibly—for to any one
who had ever seen the fine countenance of Dr. Linn,
this is a perfect remembrancer. They color them
skilfully now, and the gentlemen I speak of particularly
(Chilton & Edwards, who are to have a room in
the Capitol this winter), are daily making improvements
in the art. Some witty man corrupts the word
into derogatory-types, but they are derogatory no
longer.

We are likely to know something of Mexico between
the three authors who are about publishing
books on the subject, and the charming book of Madame
Calderon. Mr. Prescott's Mexico will of course
be a classic. Brantz Mayer and Kendall are up to
their elbows in proofsheets—both producing works
on Mexico, and both excellent writers.

I never saw, in New York, an audience of better
quality, for so large a quantity, than was assembled to
welcome the perfected Cinti. I presume there were
few “ears polite” anywhere else. At a dollar the
pair (long and short alike), Madame must have de
lighted these fastidious organs to the amount of five
thousand francs, to be diminished only by the expense
of room-light and accompaniment—a transmutation
of “evening wind,” that throws Bryant's coinage of
that commodity quite into the shade.

Mr. Timm (as is wise and usual) played the audience
into tune with an overture, and then the screen
gave up its prima donna—Madame Cinti Damoreau
in pink satin—three large roses on her breast—the
dress, air, and graces of 'teens, the composure, plentitude,
and, alas! the parenthesized smile of 'ties.
Madame Cinti has been a good animal resemblance
of the beautiful Mrs. Norton. The general mould
of the face, and the low forehead, the dark hair, and
the unfathomable dark eyes, are like in each to the
other.

With a trepidation which lasted only through the
first bar, she commenced the aria of “Fatal Goffredo”
(from Donisette's opera of Torquato Tasso), and
sang it to the breathless delight of the audience. No
such finished music has ever been breathed before
upon American air, I am persuaded. With not a
fourth of the power and volume of Castellan, and
none of the passion-lava of Malibran, she reaches a
finer fibre of the ear than either. The quality of her
voice is exceedingly sweet, and the mingled liquidness
and truth of her chromatics could never have
been exceeded. The ladder of harmony seemed
built a round or two nearer to heaven by her delicious
music.

Madame Damoreau, in the beginning of her career,
was hissed from the French stage for singing false—
lesson in study and perseverance which I wish could
be laid softly into the memory of Castellan. The latter
wonderfully-organized creature, with anything like
the same skill, would be the world's queen of song.
The New Orleans people, by-the-way, who are Parisians
in their nice appreciation of operatic talent,
consider Castellan a remarkable actress; and so great
was the enthusiasm for her there, that the necessary
sum to engage her was made up by private subscription.
It is several thousand pities, at least, that, in
the first capital of the country, there is not operatic
enthusiasm enough to bring this dormant genius upon
the stage.

Monsieur Artot, who accompanies Madame Damoreau
in her tour, alternated performances with her.
He is a very gentlemanly-looking young man, with a
figure that would make a very good case for his own
violin—a very long neck and a very small waist—and
he plays with execution enough for all practical purposes,
but with taste unsurpassed. Wallace knows
several heavens of the violin to which Monsieur Artot
has not yet ascended, but the latter knows enough to
give all the pleasure which that instrument can give
to ordinary listeners. The audience applauded Monsieur
Artot very long and loudly. I think, by-the-way,
that a series of musical contentions between
Wallace and Castellan “on the first part,” and Artot
and Cinti “on the second,” would be a most charming
and exciting tournament.

Madame Damoreau had the good sense not to desire
a musical contention with a performance on the
paving-stones by cabs and omnibuses, and the street
in front of Washington Hall was coated with tan.

There seems to be a kind of appendix-dawn of literature
in Italy. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella
is about being published at Florence in the Italian
translation. Sparks's Life of Washington, translated
by a young Neapolitan, is also nearly ready. A society
has been formed at Florence, called Sociitrice
Florentina, for the publication of translations of
the best foreign works, including those of American

literature. The Marquis Gino Capponi, one of the
most promiment names in Florentine history, has put
our country under obligation by his enthusiasm for
our literature, and his aid to the publication of the
works I have just mentioned. He is himself a remarkable
scholar. Our consul at Rome, Mr. George
Greene, has had a large agency in the same cause.
Mr. Greene, by-the-way, has devoted a labor of some
years to a history of Italy, which is still in progress.
He, as is known very well, is a credit to the talent
and scholarship of our country. The Marquis Capponi
has furnished Mr. Prescott with materials for
his history of Philip II.

Weir's picture of the “Embarcation” is now exhibiting
to throngs of admirers at the Society Library.
Its wonderful ingenuity and beauty of grouping,
and the variety and individuality of the faces of the
pilgrim company, are the excellences most dwelt upon.
I really must venture to record an opinion expressed
of this picture by Inman—who (as the artist of a rival-panel
in the Rotunda, and hindered in his work
by ill-health and other obstacles) is in a position to
speak invidiously, if he were capable of envy. Inman
was asked what he thought of it. “It is a glorious
picture,” he replied, “and its faults, if it has
them, are comparatively so trifling, that it would be
ungenerous to mention them.” And if that speech
did not come from a noble heart, I have read of such
things with slender profit to my judgment.

Mr. “Newbegin” must excuse us. We like grammar
even in a pun. His night-ride in the omnibus is
pretty fair, but it wont do to jolt pronouns out of
place. That

would shock our friend Wright into a new edition of
“Exercises.”

There is but one good couplet in “Tiskins's” communication:—

but his rhythm grounds at the overslaugh. He must
throw over his ballast of consonants, before his metrecraft
will swim buoyant enough to pass.

One of the Sunday critics (we hope he “got to
press” soon enough to have leisure for confession)
sneers at “one of us” for “quoting nothing” of Morris's
in our critique of his songs. As if it were necessary
in a periodical where Morris makes, of everything
he writes, a Corinthian capital for a column!
Truly the public are not likely to die in ignorance ofsongs
which stand on every piano-rack in the country,
and are sung in every concert-room and theatre, and
are being endlessly copied. Besides, we believe we
can tell “what manner of thing is your crocodile,”
without bringing the monster bodily in. How the
folks find fault with us! We shall really have to proclaim
ourselves an “object,” and

or, better, still, we shall be driven to get up a crusade
against the whip-poor-willises, and “bring up those
that shall try what mettle there is in orange-tawny.”

To the kind old lady who “knit us a pair of stockings
after reading some poetry” of ours, but “was
afraid to send them, and gave them to a beggar,” we
must say, in the words of the old ballad,

So, thanks for the good will, dear madam, and pray
knit us a pair of mittens against we make our fortune
and turn farmer.

“Aunt Charity” wishes us to write an article on
the “love of the intellect, and the possibility of a tender
affection for the old.” We will tell you a little
story out of an old book: “It is reported of Magdalen,
queen of France, that walking forth, an evening,
with her ladies, she spied Monsieur Alanus, one of
the king's chaplains, an old hard-favored man, fast
asleep in a bower, and kissed him sweetly. When
the ladies laughed at her for it, she replied that it was
not his person she did embrace, but, with a Platonic
love, the divine beauty of his soul.”

The up-town door-plates and bell-handles are shining
once more, and open shutters, clean windows,
and parted curtains, acknowledge, at last, the reluctant
truth, that the fashionables have returned from
travel, and are open to pasteboard and personal call.
The ice has been broken with a “jam,” echoed by
one musical soirée, and now—vogue la galêre till the
ice melts again! There is a talk that this is to be
more an intellectual winter than the last—more recitations,
more tableaux vivants, more conversaziones,
more finding and producing of new lions in the lamb-kingdom
of poetry. There is a also a murmur—a
“shadow cast before”—of the “coming out” of a
very extraordinary beauty, whose name and educational
cocoon are wrapt in profound mystery. As the
rumor started about a week since, and as “pretty
moths” are but twenty days in their chrysalis, we may
expect the emergence of her bright wings to light in
about a fortnight. She is said to be moulded after
the (supposed) lost type of the seven belles of Philadelphia,
whose culmination occurred under the autocracy
of Jackson—eyes furnished by Juno, mouth
by Hebe, and teeth and feet by the smaller fairies.
No corresponding Hyperion that I can hear of.

There is great fluttering and dismay among the
Bowery girls and the less alert followers of the fashions.
The remarkable splendor of the “spring goods,”
and the really beautiful and becoming style of the
new fabrics, left no doubt in most minds that these
were to be “the mode.” The autumn pin-moneys
of all the moderately “established” ladies and their
daughters “went the way of all” earnings accordingly,
and Broadway grew as splendid as a tulip-bed, bright
as the bazar of Smyrna. The exclusives were at
their invisible period meanwhile, but, from their carriages,
they probably saw “what was worn.” Down
dropped the mercury of the mode-ometer to extreme
simplicity! The few ladies who appeared, crossing
the pavement from their equipages to the shops, were
dressed in quiet silks, costly and neat, and the nameless
and the “unnamed,” at the same moment, seemed
to flaunt by in the choicest and gayest of the new
patterns. Studied simplicity, out of doors at least, is
high fashion now, and those who can not afford to
convert their new purchases into chair-covers and
bed-curtains, are left stranded, as it were, on a petrified
rainbow.

Ten thousand copies of the “Mysteries of Paris”
have been poured into our caldron of morals by a
single press in this city, and probably fifty thousand
will be circulated altogether. It is a very exciting
book, and at this moment making a great noise. The
translators are busily at work on other saleables of
French literature, and there will soon be little left unknown
of the arcana of vice. Eugene Sue, the author
of the “Mysteries of Paris,” is a connoisseur of
pleasure; and when I saw him, ten years ago, was an
elegant voluptuary of the first water. He was just
then creeping through the crust of the Chaussée
d'Antin into the more exclusive sphere of the Fau
bourg St. Germain—fat, good-looking, and thirty-two.
He is, by this time, “sloped” from his meridian, and
apparently turning his experiences into commodity.
I observe that he borrows my name for a wicked Florida
planter, who misuses a lady of color—a reproach
which I trust will not stick to “us.”

The publishers hang back from American fictions
now-a-days, possibly finding the attention of the reading-public
occupied with the more highly-spiced productions
of the class just alluded to, and it is impossible
to induce them to give anything for—hardly, indeed
to look at—an indigenous manuscript. Accident
threw into my hands, a few days ago, a novel
which had lain for some time unread in a publisher's
drawer, and after reading a few chapters I became
convinced that it was far above the average of modern
English novels, and every way worthy of publication.
It was entitled “The Domine's Daughter,” by Adam
Mundiver. Esq., and would have lain forgotten and
unexamined till doomsday, but for a friendly Orpheus
who made it his Eurydice and went to Lethe after it.
Such a book should surely represent money in a
country where literature is acknowledged.

I very seldom can find it in my backbone to sit out
a five-act play, but I saw Macready's “Richelien,”
and I have seen Forrest's, throughout. Forrest began
rather ineffectively, probably disturbed by the defence
he was obliged to make against an aspersion,
before the play commenced. He soon warmed into it,
however, and, to my thinking, played the character
far better than Macready. The details—the imitation
of decrepitude—the posturing and walking the
stage—were better done by Macready; but the passion
of the play, the expression, the transfusion of
actor to character, the illusion, the effect—these were
all vastly better achieved by Forrest. A line drawn
across the tops of Macready's “points” would leave
Forrest below in all matters of detail, but it would
only cut the base of the latter's pyramids of passion.
Forrest runs sometimes into the melo-dramatic, seduced
by the “way it takes,” but he has fine genius,
and if he played only to audiences of “good discretion,”
he would (or could) satisfy the most fastidious.

Wallack's friends, myself among the number, have
been annoyed at the many contretemps which have
conspired to make his latter engagement at the Park
so unsatisfactory. In genteel comedy, of which he
is the master-player now on the stage, he was unable
to do anything, from the lack of materials in that
stock-company for a cast; and, indeed, he played always
at the disadvantage of the one free horse in a
slow team. Mr. and Mrs. Brougham (both first-rate
players of high comedy, and the latter a very beautiful
and effective woman, into the bargain) might have
been engaged at the Park for the winter with great
ease, and then we might have seen (what is the most
agreeable kind of theatricals) comedies well cast and
played. I hope there will be some combination
among the actors to give us a “go,” with a wheel
with more than one spoke in it, and then we might
have Wallack as he should be—a dramatic gem in
proper setting.

I am not sure that I shall be able to make out a letter
this morning, or, if I do, it will be in spite of an
accompaniment of military music. My friend General
Morris has his battalions in arms for review, and
my pen “marks time,” as if its forked nib were under
the General's orders—(and as, perhaps, it should be,
coming from a very military bird, whose father's feathers
have seen service under him).

Apropos of procession, by-the-way, I have had a

moderate laugh at the effect of a typographical blunder
in Dr. Julius's German edition of his travels in
this country. The doctor is giving an account of an
abolition procession in Cincinnati, and he records in
English the inscriptions on the banners. One, he
says, had the reproachful and pathetic sentiment:
“Although our shins are black our souls are white.”
For “shins” read skins.

The sultan of the Comore islands has addressed a
letter to a gentleman in Wall street, a translation of
which by a very accomplished and self-taught linguist
(Mr. Cotheal), may be amusing to your readers.
The Comoro isles, as you know, lie in the Indian
ocean, off the north end of Madagascar, and are inhabited
by a very friendly race of Mohammedan
Arabs. The king resides in Johanna, the largest of
the islands, and (in London slang) he is a slap-up old
trader, getting ivory and gold-dust from Madagascar,
and swapping these and his cows, pigs, and poultry,
for Lowell factory-stuffs, or any other freight of
American vessels. He writes a very worshipful letter:—

“To the American city of New York: For the beloved
sheikh Aaron H. Palmer, No. 49 Wall street.
May Allah be his guide! Amen! Badooh!

“By the grace of the Most High:

“To the dearest, the most glorious, the most genererous
sheikh Aaron H. Palmer, the honored, the exalted,
the magnificent, the contented. May Allah,
the Most High, be his guide! Amen!

“Now, after offering thee honor and protection from
the Henzooanee city (Johanna) and its inhabitants,
this is what I tell thee. Thy noble letter arrived and
we read it. Thy friend understood its contents. May
Allah reward thee well! Thou sayest in thy letter
that thou desirest selling and buying in our land, and
that thou wishest friendship with us. Thou art welcome.
We thank thee, and accept thy offer. Thou
didst tell us that we should advise thee of anything that
we should need from thee. Again we thank thee,
and inform thee that thou mayest send to us a person
on thy part that shall dwell in the Henzooanee country.
In order that thy business may be complete, a
shop of the merchants, and everything that there is
in the country, shall be made ready, on our part, if it
please God. Whatever shall be wanted in these regions
shall be paid for on delivery.

“I and all my Henzooanee tribes request that thou
unite us with the American tribes in friendship and
good-fellowship, like as we are united with the English,
and we will serve you all as we serve them.
Now, we have conceived here a great desire for the
American tribes. Tell them to send us their letters,
or a man-of-war-ship[1] on their part, and we will bind
ourselves by a binding treaty. Now, the thing we
need and want from thee are sealed letters of advice
for our assurance; and in order that thou mayest
know that this letter is from us, we stamp it with our
seal. We request that thou send us all kinds of linen
goods and cottons, both white, and brown, and fine
stripes, and all kinds of woollen cloths; and ten bedsteads
and sixty chairs; all kinds of glass; lamps,
large and small, and some for placing on the table:
and fine silk handkerchiefs. This is what we tell
thee. Now salutation and prosperity be with thee for
ever!

“Dated the 10th of the month of Dool Heggeh
1252 (corresponding to about the 16th of March,
1837).

“From thy friend the sooltan the sublime, son of
the sooltan, Abd-Allah the sublime, Shirazy.”

As a long lesson of civilization, I have advised my
friend Palmer, “the magnificent, the contented,” to
send out to his friend, the sultan of the Comoros, a
youth accomplished in compounding the following
drinks (copied from the bill of fare of a new restaurant
in Boston):—

“Plain mint-julep, fancy do., mixed do., peach do.,
orange do., pineapple do., claret do., capped do.,
strawberry do., arrack do., racehorse do. Sherry-cobbler,
rochelle do., arrack do., peach do., claret do.,
Tip-and-Ty, fiscal agent, veto, I. O. U., Tippe-Na-Pecco,
moral suasion, vox-populi, ne-plus-ultra,
Shambro, pig-and-whistle, citronella jam, egg-nog,
Sargent, silver-top, poor-man's punch, arrack-punch,
iced punch, spiced punch, epicure's punch, milk-punch,
peach-punch, Jewett's fancy, deacon, exchange,
stone-wall, Virginia fancy, Knickerbocker,
smasher, floater, sifter, soda-punch, soda, mead, mulled
wines of all descriptions.”

After this array of compounds, I think the vexed
question of the ingredients of Falstaff's sack must
sink into insignificance. I understand that a shop is
opened in the Strand, London, for the sale of these
potations—one instance, at least, of a vice of civilization
going eastward. We must wear it for our feather—since
our drinks are the only feature of our country
for which Dickens gives us unqualified praise.

The “life-preserving coffin,” lately exhibited at the
fair of the Institute, is so constructed as to fly open
with the least stir of the occupant, and made as comfortable
within as if intended for a temporary lodging.
The proprietor recommends (which, indeed, it would
be useless without) a corresponding facility of exit
from the vault, and arrangements for privacy, light,
and fresh air—in short, all that would be agreeable to
the revenant on first waking. Not being, myself, a
person wholly incapable of changing my mind, I felt,
for the first time in my life, some little alarm as to the
frequency of trance or suspended animation, and seeing
a coffin-shop near Niblo's, I ventured to call on
the proprietor (Mr. D—, a most respectable undertaker)
and make a few inquiries. Mr. D. buries from
one to three persons a day, averaging from six to eight
hundred annually. He has never been called upon to
inter the same gentleman twice, in a professional
practice of many years. He has seen a great number
of coffins reopened, and never a sign of the person's
having moved, except by sliding in bringing down
stairs. I mentioned to him an instance that came to
my own knowledge, of a young lady, who was found
turned upon her face—disinterred the day after her
burial, to be shown to a relative. But even this, he
thought, was the result of rude handling of the coffin.
Mr. D. seemed incredulous as to any modern instance
of burial alive. He had spent much time and money,
however, in experiments to keep people dead. He
thought that in an exhausted receiver, made of an iron
cylinder, to resist the pressure of the air, the body
could be kept unchanged for fifty years, and that, immersed
in spirits and enclosed in lead, the face would
be recognisable after twenty years. (The process
seems both undesirable and contradictory, by-the-way,
for the posthumous drowning of a man makes his
death sure, and he is kept in spirits to prevent his vegetating—as
he would naturally after decay.)

Incidentally, Mr. D. informed me that a respectable
funeral in New York costs from two hundred to eight
hundred dollars, being rather more expensively done
in New York and Boston than in any other city except
New Orleans (where they say a man may afford to live
who can not afford to die). In Philadelphia they
make the coffin with a sloping roof, which, he remarked,
is inconvenient for packing in vaults, though

it seems accommodated to the one epitaph of the
Romans—sit illi terra levis. They line their coffins
more expensively in Philadelphia than elsewhere—
with satin or velvet instead of flannel—and bury the
dead in silk stockings and white gloves. We have
not yet arrived at the ceremony of hired mourners, as
in England, nor of plumes to the hearse and horses.

Notwithstanding the incredulity of my friend the
undertaker, however, asphyxia, or a suspension of life,
with all the appearance of death, is certified to in
many instances, and carefully provided for in some
countries. In Frankfort, Germany, the dead man is
laid in a well-aired room, and his hand fastened for
three days to a bell-pull. The Romans cut off one
of the fingers before burning the corpse, or otherwise
bestowing it out of sight. The Egyptians made sure
by embalming, and other nations by frequent washing
and anointing. Medical books say we should wait at
least three days in winter and two in summer, before
interring the dead. It has been suggested that there
should be a public officer who should carefully examine
the body and give a certificate, without which
the burial should be illegal.

The embellishment of burial-grounds is one of the
most beautiful and commendable features of our time
and country. There always seemed to me far too
much horror connected with the common idea of
death and burial. The Moravians make flower-gardens
of their graveyards, and inscribe upon the stone
at the head of the buried man the “day he came
hither and the day he went home”—his birthday and
time of death. This is clothing with the proper aspect
an event which is only an unlinking of a chain,
no part of which can decay—the spirit to return to its
fountain and the body to be reproduced in other
forms of life—and it is a curious thing that most
Christians represent death as a frightful skeleton,
while the Greeks, who had no happiness in their hereafter,
painted him as a sleeping child or a beautiful
youth. Death in the East was formerly attributed to
the attachment of a particular deity, who took his
favorite to a better world; to the love of Aurora, if
the death happened in the morning; of Selene, if it
happened at night; of the water-nymphs, if drowned;
of Jupiter, if killed by lightning. The caverns where
the martyrs were laid were called “chambers of repose.”
And this, surely, is the better impression to
give of death to those whose minds are forming.
Query—whether a society for the purpose of embellishing
cemeteries and brightening all the common
surroundings of death and burial would not be worthy
the attention of some philanthropic enthusiast? The
solemnities connected with a future life need not make
the gate to it always so dreadful; and, for one, I
should be content to put the separation of soul and
body on a level with the unlinking of a friendship or
a change of opinion—erecting a cenotaph for either of the three changes, as the Pythagoreans did to the
memory of those who left their sect. But this is
more an essay than an epistle.

A beautiful printed copy of a “Translation of ten
cantos of Dante's Inferno,” has been sent me. The
translator is Mr. Parsons, of Boston. It is done with
a great deal of scholarship and labor, and an uncommon
felicity of language—all of which, expended on an
original poem, might, with his talent, have produced
something as good as his translation, though not as
good as Dante's Inferno. It strikes me that any
transfer of a work of genius from one language to another—professing
more than a simple rendering of the
meaning and yet giving a deteriorated copy—is a loss
of time and an injury to the original author. Mr.
Parsons has done his translation in double rhyme,
depriving Dante of the beauty of the terza rima, and
at the same time weakening the literalness of the
translation by the fetters of rhyme, and this seems to
me ill-advised. There is no medium, I think, between
a translation of absolute fidelity, and a refusion and
recasting of the subject-matter by a genius almost
equal to the original author; and, after the comparative
failure of Byron at this, Mr. Parsons might hesitate.
I hope he will try something of his own.

A gentleman in New Jersey has sent us some
“Lines on the death of a young lady,” and they express
very natural feelings; but with neither novelty
nor force enough to entitle them to print. He should
be aware, that while grief is new, the most commonplace
expression of it seems forcible to the sufferer.
The ear to which

has the gladness in itself, as the wounded heart has in
its wound the eloquence of an old monotone of grief.
If he is disposed to sooth his sorrow by an exercise of
the imagination, however, he should brood upon such
pictures as Shelley draws in the Witch of Atlas:—

“T.,” a Virginian, has one good touch in his”Reminiscence.”

that is to say, if he meant to express the beauty of a
bright eye set in a dusky eyelid—a thing we exceedingly
admire. But the remainder is of a quality
inferior to what he sent us before, and we “put on the
break,” rather than let him go down hill.

“A friend” wishes us to “do our part” toward putting
down the abuses and perversions of criticism.
La! man! you can't reform the age! Besides, criticism
has killed itself by overdoing the matter. Who
judges of a book by a criticism upon it! The best
way is to keep overdoing it—to knock down the bull
the way he is going, not to keep him on his legs by
ineffectual opposition. Nobody is hurt by criticism
now—nobody mended. And what Utopia could
make it better? Coleridge was over-sensitive on the
subject, though he laments the degradation of authors
very eloquently. “In times of old,” he says, “books
were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they
next became venerable preceptors; they then descended
to the rank of instructive friends; and, as
their numbers increased, they sunk still lower to that
of entertaining companions; and, at present, they
seem degraded into culprits, who hold up their hands
at the bar of every self-elected judge who chooses to
write from humor or interest, enmity or arrogance.”

That our leaf

we have long known and often lamented. There was
a good horse-jockey spoiled, in the making a poet of
us, and we took to the swing of an axe like a tadpole
to swimming. But we were not aware that we were
appreciated. Some man, who sees through our poetic
visor, writes thus to the “Ohio Statesman”:—

“The Rev. Mr. Maffit is in town, exhorting sinners
to repentance. N. P. Willis has taken up his quarters
at the Astor house for the winter, I suppose. I think
Willis would do better in the backwoods than at the
Astor, for he is a stout, ablebodied man, and could
mall his hundred rails a day like a knife. I have no
notion of these overgrown, lazy fellows, laying around
the flash hotels, idling away their precious time.”

First correcting this gentleman's facts and cacology
(as we do not “lay” either eggs or wagers, and
are not “overgrown,” being six feet high to a hair)—
we entirely agree with him as to our original destination.
We are a crack chopster, and for several winters
have fulfilled our destiny with delight—chopping
an avenue through some woods that we thought
belonged to us (which avenue we finished, for somebody
else, before we discovered our mistake), and
never so happy as when up to the knees in snow, and
letting it into the hickories with a woodman's emphasis
and discretion! No steam-boiler ever rejoiced in
its escape-valve, no hawser in the captain's “let go!”
as we have done in swinging our heart round and banging
it into a tree—for the axe was but a vicar and a
vent! “Woodman, spare that tree!” was the bitterest
veto ever laid upon our pleasures.

But we didn't make money at it. We saved almost
three shillings a day (as to a “penny saved” being
“equal to a penny got,” we scorn the improbability),
and the principal profit was the willingness it gave us
to sit still in our chair and scribble. No! we loved
our axe with a passion. We feared it might somehow
turn out to be a sinful indulgence, it was so tempting
and pleasurable—but alas! we make more with a quill—

and while that is the case, the “correspondent of the
Ohio Statesman” must pity, not blame, our exile from
the woods to the Astor. Set us up—give us a clean
deed of Glenmary and its woods, a horse and saddle,
and our old axe—and never boy watched the darkening
of his beard with the delight with which we shall see
thicken again the vanished calluses in our palm! Fie
on a life with neither resistance nor antagonism—with
close air, pent lungs, arms aching, and muscles manacled
and numb! Horses to break and trees to chop
down are Paradise to it—we chance to know—but our
axe is rusty and our quill is busy. Invicem cedunt
dolor et voluptas.

Drums are beating in the Park, and the time and
finery of the industrial classes, who form the industrious
“forces” of New York, are under contribution
to glorify the killer of Tecumseh. Of those who see
the show, probably few will turn over a thought which
the ghost of the old warrior would not consider complimentary
to himself, and so perhaps it is one of those
cases in which two birds are killed with one stone—as
the drum, covered with Zisca's skin, both incited to
battle and commemorated Zisca. Tecumseh, though
a brigadier-general in the British service, should figure
as an honored American ghost, and doubtless will be
so appropriated in poetry, especially should there be
written a poem on moral courage, of which his running
away in his first fight, and being indomitable ever
after, shows, I think, a very natural and striking example.
There is another poetical feature in his history—his
being persuaded, against his will, to marry a
beautiful girl, after mature age, and making so good a
husband. Altogether he is a fine hero for an epic,
and a great deal more glorious for not surviving to engage
in a political campaign.

One of the most approvable novelties that I have seen
of late is a library of six volumes, upon Needlework.
It is a set of miniature hand-books for the use of
schools and families, most neatly printed and illustrated,
and letting the reader into all the mysteries of
“baby-linen, plain and fancy needlework, embroidery,
knitting, netting, and tatting, millinery, and dressmaking,”
and all very cheap and portable. Redfield,
of Clinton Hall, is the publisher, and the admirers of
the notable in woman-worth should be the purchasers.

Mr. Riker has issued the first of his series of annuals
called “The Opal,” of which Mr. Willis is to be
the editor. The present volume, which contains some
fine gems of literature, and is beautifully illustrated by
Chapman, was prepared by Mr. Griswold, though contributed
to and prefaced by the editor subsequently
employed for the series. The character of the work
is religious, and the preface states truly, that “the
mirth and the playful elegancies of poetry and descriptive
writing are as truly within the paths of religious
reading as anything else which shows the fulness and
variety of the provision made for our happiness when at
peace with ourselves. Nothing gay, if innocent (the
preface continues), is out of place in an annual intended
to be used as a tribute of affection by the good;
and in this annual, hereafter, that view will be kept
before the eye. Its contents will be opal-hued—reflecting
all the bright lights and colors which the prodigality
of God's open hand has poured upon the pathway
of life.”

Edward S. Gould, one of the most distinguished of
the merchant-author class so honorable to our country,
has put forth an abridgment of “Alison's History of
Europe.” In a terse and strongly-written preface, he
gives a résumer of the whole work, with a pungent
criticism on its faults and injustices, showing that he
(Gould) has not done his work “like a horse in a bark-mill,”
but with a proper spirit and with a clear insight.
Of Alison's chapter on the American war he says, very
justly, that “it is destined to a most unenviable notoriety
as a tissue of misrepresentation. As it has no
legitimate connexion with the history of Europe, it
is a gratuitous libel on the people and institutions of
the United States, and as it could not be admitted into
an American book without alterations contradictory to
the title-page of this volume, it has been wholly
omitted.” Mr. Gould is the son of the eminent jurist,
Judge Gould, of Connecticut, and is happy in having
the energy (in addition to his business pursuits) to
turn to account his fine natural powers and good education.
He is one of the best of our translators, also,
and the author of the new and humorous work. “The
Sleep-Rider in the omnibus.”

A great deal of fun, and as much genius and private
worth, have just left the city in the person of
Harry Placide, bound to New Orleans for a winter
engagement. The people of the cis-Atlantic Paris
are to be congratulated with all emphasis thereupon.
It is equal to a day's allowance of sunshine to see him
play at night. He knows humor, from elegant high
comedy to irresistible farce—from a hair-line delineation
of the ridiculous to a charcoal sketch—and fails
in nothing he undertakes. With the exception of
Farren, who is only his equal, Placide is unrivalled on
the English or American stage. I wish him well, and
well back again. God bless him!

I see copied into the “Literary Gazette and Quarterly
Advertiser” an article on “Macauley's Miscellanies,”
which appeared some time since in a Boston

periodical, and struck me at the time as somewhat remarkable.
A lecture on the habits and characters of
literary men, which was quoted from in the Boston
papers, has also attracted great attention by its brilliancy
and originality of view, and both these are by a
very young business-man in Boston, Mr. E. P. Whipple.
His mind is of the cast and calibre of the writers
for the English magazines of ten years ago, and I
consider him a mine to be worked with great profit by
the proprietors of the reviews. His kind is rare.

I see that Jules Janin “fobs off” another annual
upon us under the name of “The American in Paris.”
It is written in his sparkling vein, and translated, as
sparkle always is translated, with a loss. The truth
is, that an American gentleman of New York fell into
Janin's company in Paris, and showed him some notes
he had made of his Parisian amusements; that the
idea struck the great feuilletoniste of making this small
diary the cover for a more detailed description of Paris
than would otherwise seem “knowing,” and the first
having taken and sold, the second of a series has now
appeared. Between Eugene Sue's real “Mysteries
of Paris,” and Janin's presentable drawing-room pictures
of it, we may get a very fair idea of the gay
capital. Janin's preface is written with the intention
of being believed. He says: “Our American appears
before you once more. Last year, at the same period,
he described to you, in the best way he could, Parisian
life during the brilliant months of winter. He had
then arrived at the great city at the very moment when
the closing days of autumn were disappearing beneath
the yellow leaves. A traveller without affectation, he
asked nothing more than to take his part in the sweet
joys, lively emotions, and noisy pleasures of this world
of the powerful and the rich; he endured as well as
he could the intoxications and the delirium of the
masked ball—the thousand cross-fires of Parisian conversation—the
paradoxes, the slanders, and even the
innocent calumnies that he saw around him—he entered
into all; he wished to see everything, and he
fulfilled his wish. Not that he advanced very far into
the mysteries of the good city; but he stood, as one
may say, on the edge of the wood, and thence he
threw his curious and attentive look upon those gay
and quickly-changing lights and shades. For a fellow-countryman
of Franklin, our Yankee is certainly
somewhat of an acute observer. What he did not see
he guessed; not sometimes without a certain discrimination
and pertinence. That which we specially admire
in him, and which will not displease the reader,
is a great fund of benevolence, a happy good-humor
which has nothing affected about it, and an indiscribable
entraîn and rapture, which the greater part of
the time keeps the reader awake. This is all that we
can say in his favor, for we are not of the number of
those tiresome editors who are always saying, `Come
and see a masterpiece; come and salute a great man;
the great man and the masterpiece were both invented
by me.' We hope never to fall into this enthusiasm,
which is very unbecoming in him who is its object.
All our duty as editor we have faithfully fulfilled, and
now it is for the book to defend itself. If by chance
it is a good book, depend upon it the public will receive
it with favor. All our ambition is, that after
having thoroughly admired the embellishments of
Lami, you will read a few of those pages in which the
translator has endeavored to reproduce somewhat of
the grace, the vivacity, and the interest of the original
book.” I have made a long extract from the preface,
but I thought it would amuse you to see how the celebrated
critic can talk about himself, with a transparent
mask over his face.

A club bowling-alley has been established in Broadway,
near Franklin street, most luxurious in all its appointments—carpets,
ottomans, dressing-rooms, &c.
The families subscribing are of the most fashionable
cliques, and no male foot is suffered to enter this gynesian
gymnasium—the pins being set up by girls, and
the attendance exclusively feminine. The luxuries
remaining to our sex, up to the present time, are
fencing and boxing — the usurpation of which is
probably under consideration. The fashion, you
would suppose, would scarcely gain by masculinifying,
but the ladies are wearing broadcloth cloaks—for
a beginning. There is another article of male attire
which they have long been said to wear occasionally,,
but I am incredulous. Seeing would be believing.

Mr. Kendall, the popular and adventurous editor of
the Picayune, has been “Lucy-Long”-ing it somewhat
over his eagerly-expected book on Mexico, but
has lately discovered that his celebrity would stand
any halt in the trumpeting. He purchased recently a
copy of Captain Marryat's new book, “Monsieur Violet,”
to go to bed with of a rainy afternoon, and had
the pleasure of lying on his back and reading his own
adventures amplified in the best style by the author
of Peter Simple. Kendall's letters in the Picayune
were, of course, the basis of the extended and illustrated
work he has in press, and this basis, Captain
Marryat (who is a subscriber to the Picayune) has taken
bodily, and thereupon built his romance with but
a small outlay of his own clapboards and shingles. An
action of replevin for half the price of the captain's
copyright would “lie,” I should think—at least in the
to court of equity. Mr. Kendall, I had nearly forgotten
to say, is spoken ill of in one portion of the captain's
book, and his rejoinder has appeared in the Courier.

I have been looking through the new publication
called “Etiquette, by Count D'Orsay.” That D'Orsay
revised the book and lent it his name “for a consideration,”
I think very possible, but there is, to my
thinking, internal evidence in its style that he did
not write it. There is an acquaintance with vulgarity,
and a facility of “hitting it on the raw,” which could
only have been acquired by a conversance of fellowship
with vulgar people, and D'Orsay knows as much of
such matters as the thistle-down while afloat knows
of the mud it floats over. Besides, the vulgarities are
dwelt upon with a kind of unction totally foreign to
D'Orsay's nature. He is a most kindly,as well as
delicate and fastidious man, and his mind would instinctively
avoid the knowledge of such matters, let
alone the qualifying himself to describe them graphically.
From one or two little anecdotes told in the
book, I trace its authority to a Mr. Abraham Hayward,
a frequenter of many different strata of London
society, and probably the best judge in England of
what is “genteel,” by knowing better than anybody
in England what is vulgar. It is undoubtedly an invaluable
book, and circulated in one of these mammoth
editions at the shilling price, it will prepare
Americans of all classes, if they sin against food manners
at all, to sin with knowledge—taking away at
least the ridicule of the matter.

Dear pastoral-minded, centrifugally-bent, and mederately-well-off
Reader, I address you “with all the
honors,” to be quite sure that my letter will not be misapplied.
We, the parties in this correspondence, are
neither rich nor poor—as they express it elegantly in

the mother-country, “neither nob nor snob.” I would
the critics had not the trick of calling the having one's
own way “affectation;” else would I (simple though
I am), coin for my own use, since the language is deficient
in them, some of those epithets, descriptive of
a class, which are at the same time so crisp, definite,
and expressive. For instance: were I to address a
letter to a young man of a certain style (a very prevalent
style indeed), and wish to convey from the first
word my appreciation of the character at which I
aimed, I should be compelled to use the following circumlocution:
My dear universally-benevolent—i.e.—
spending-all-the-money-you-can-get-and-making-love-to-all-the-women-you-see,
young man. Now, the French
have a gracious and modest dissyllable for all this.
The word expansif expresses it all. How much
briefer, and more courteous, in the case just supposed,
could I commence in English with, My dear expansive!
Again: in English we should say, Oh, you-all-things-to-all-men—who-say-you-have-no-prejudices—but-are-

understood-by-your-friends-to-mean-no-principles! but
in German they phrase it, quite short, Oh, many-sided!
Understand me not as leaning at all to Carlyle's system
of personification and word-linking. Two and
three are five is better than Two and Three died when
Five was born, though this is but a moderate illustration
of Carlylism. I would introduce no new epithet
that is not the essence of a phrase, no new-linked
words that are not the chord of a circumlocutory arc.

Touching my trade:—

In the matter of pen-craft, I confess to a miserly
disposition, yearly increasing. It is natural, I suppose,
to tuck up close the skirts of those habits in
which we run for our lives (or livings), and it is not inconsistent,
I would fain hope, with prodigality of other
belongings. In my college days, ere I discovered that
a bore in my brains would produce any better metal
than brass (bored since for “tin”), I had a most
spendthrift passion for correspondence. Now—paid
duly for my blotted sheet—I think with penitential
avarice of the words I have run through!

People are apt to fancy it is a natural amusement—
laborum dulce lenimen—for an author to write letters,
epitaphs, &c. But there are two animals at least, who
might differ from that opinion—the author, and the
baker's horse, out on a Sunday's excursion, in the baker's
pleasure-wagon. The truth is, that the tax on
authors, in this particular, is a disease in the literary,
system, and since it is not likely to be cured while the
human race want autographs, epitaphs, epithalamia,
and opinions on MSS., the solace seems to lie in the
expediency of fat Jack—we should “turn the disease
into commodity.” If every third epitaph in the graveyards
of this country be not by the author of —,
&c., &c., all I can say is, there must be a very considerable
number of gravestones; and I am only sorry
that I did not take out copyrights from the start, and
serve injunctions on plagiarizing stonecutters. Here
is a letter now from a gentleman in Arkansas (whose
grammar, by the way, is not very pellucid), informing
me that his wife is dead, and giving me an inventory of
her virtues; and I am requested to write the lady's
epitaph, and send it on in time for the expectant marble.
Of course I am extremely sorry the lady is dead,
and since she was “such a pagoda of perfection,” as
Mrs. Ramsbottom would say, very sorry I had not the
pleasure of her acquaintance; but my “head” is not
“waters” (nor am I teetotaller enough to wish it
were), and I can not weep for all the nice women who
die, though grieved to think this particular style of
person should diminish. Ours is a most romantic
nation, for it would seem that there are few who do
not think their private sorrows worthy of poetry, and
the distinction between meum and tuum (as to authors)
having long ago been broken down by our copyright
robberies, the time and brains of poets are considered
common property. People, accustomed to call for
poetry when they want it, look upon the poet, quoad
hoc, as they do upon the town-pump, and would be as
much surprised at a charge for poetry as for water.
Possibly it is one of the features of a new country. I
have lived in a neighborhood where the stopping of a
man who should be taking what fruit he wanted from
your garden, or what fuel he wanted from your
woods, would surprise him as much as stopping his
nostrils with corks, till he was off your premises;
and with fruit and fuel, perhaps, time and brains may
assume a value. At present (it may as well be recorded
among the statistics of the country), poets,
lumber, and watermelous, are among the “inalienable
rights of freemen.”

One of the lesser evils of this appetite for sympathy
in rhyme, is the very natural forgetfulness of a
man absorbed in grief, touching the trifle of postage.
Reading a death in the newspaper affects me, now,
like seeing myself charged with eighteen and three
quarters cents at the grocer's. If I were writing from
the “palace of truth,” to one of my “bereaved husbands,”
I should still stoutly assure him of my sympathy,
having lost one and sixpence by the same melancholy
event. My bill of mortality (postage, they
call it) would frank me for beiled oysters at Florence's,
the year round, and, begging pardon of the
survivors (not the oyster-shells), I should like it in
that shape quite as well.

Hereafter, I shall make an effort to transfer the cipher
to the other side of the unit. If called upon to
mourn (in black and white) for people I never before
heard of, I propose to send my effusion as “commodity,”
to the first “enterprising publisher” who pays.
Honor bright as to by-gones—let them be by-gones!
Indeed, they are mostly too personal to interest the
public, one of the most felicitous of my elegies turning
(by request) on the deceased's “fascinating and
love-inspiring lisps.” But in all composed, after this
date, I shall contrive so to generalize on the virtues
and accomplishments commemorated, that the eulogy
will apply promiscnously to all overrated relatives—
of course, forming, for a literary magazine, an attraction
which comes home to everybody's business and
bosom. I may premise, by the way, that my advertisement
to this effect would be addressed only to
mourners of my own sex, and that ladies, as is hardly
necessary to mention, are supplied with epitaphs on
their husbands, without publicity or charge; though
it is a curious fact that my customers, in the epitaph
line, have hitherto been widowers only! Whether
widows choose usually some other vehicle for the
expression of their grief, preferring that it should be
recorded on tablets less durable than marble (pardon
me! more durable!) I have no data for deciding. I
merely contribute this fact also to statistics.

“Pray, how does that face deserve framing and glazing?”
asked a visiter, to-day. The question had
been asked before. It is a copy from a head in some
old picture—one of a series of studies from the ancient
masters, lithographed in France. It represents a peasant
of the campagna, and certainly, in Broadway, she
would pass for a coarse woman, and not beautiful for
a coarse one. I have been brought to think the head
coarse and plain, however, by being often called on to
defend it. I did not think so when I bought it in a
print-shop in London. I do not now, unless under
catechism.

To me, the whole climate of Italy is expressed in
the face of that Contadina. It is a large, cubical-edged,
massy style of feature, which, born in Scotland,
would have been singularly harsh and inflexible.
There is no refinement in it now, and, to be sure, little

mobility or thought—but it is a face in which there
is no resistance. That is its peculiarity. The heavy
eyelid droops in indolent animal repose. The lips are
drowsily sweet. The nostrils seem never to have
been distended nor contracted. The muscles of the
lips and cheeks have never tingled nor parched. It is
a face on which a harsh wind never blew. If the
woman be forty, those features have been forty years
sleeping in balm—enjoying only—resisting, enduring,
never. No one could look on it and fancy it had ever
suffered or been uncomfortable, or dreaded wind or
sun, summer or winter. A picture of St. Peter's—a
mosaic of Pæstum—a print of Vesuvius or the Campanile—none
of the common souvenirs of travel would
be to me half so redolent of Italy.

By special favor I got a sight, while in Boston, of
Crawford's statue of Orpheus, not yet open for public
exhibition. As I stated in a former letter, the Athenœum
has, most appreciatively, erected a new building
expressly for this work of art, and nothing remains to
be done but the finishing of the walls of the interior.
It is a lofty room, and the statue is placed on a pedestal
of masonry (rather oddly I thought) in the corner.
It was, unfortunately, badly packed at Florence, and
when taken from the box, in Boston, the legs were
found to be both broken off. Mr. Dexter, a young
sculptor of singular mechanical dexterity, as well as
promising genius (the author of the admirable bust of
Dickens), was employed to restore it, and has done it
wonderfully. It requires close examination to perceive
the fracture, and the discoloration might easily
be taken, even then, for stains in the marble, so evidently
are the statuary lines preserved as the artist
designed them.

The statue is of the size of life—nude, with the
exception of a short mantle, and sandals upon the
feet. Orpheus is represented as just emerging from
hell, and passing Cerberus, whom he has put to sleep
with his music. The three-headed dog is “nid, nid,
nodding” with his three heads, and either has two
tails (which was not down in my mythology) or his
unicaud is carefully combed away, madonna-wise, into
two parts. The figure is bent over, like a man emerging
from a cavern, and the right hand is held over
the eyes as if to protect them from the sudden blaze
of daylight, while the mantle is lifted from the back
by the current of air rushing in, leaving the body and
limbs, by this natural and poetical contrivance, nude
for sculpture. The face of Orpheus, like the action
and feeling of the limbs, expresses intent, but soft and
subdued earnestness. It is an exquisitely beautiful
youth, on the verge of manhood—slight, graceful, and
bloomingly filled out; and I thought the body one of
the most life-like and perfect representations of nature
I had ever seen in marble. I presume the artist
intended to represent Orpheus at the moment before
he sends his wife back to hell by looking prematurely
after her. (Query—moral?) He holds the lyre, with
which he has just charmed the infernals, upon his left
hip, and the eager action, expressing the instant preceding
the completion of a desperate undertaking, is
finely conceived, and breathed into sculpture. The
only objection I could make to the statue was one
that is simply a difference of conception, and, to his
own, the artist is quite entitled. I expected a less
effeminate person and countenance. Orpheus was an
“old married man,” and a reformer and lawgiver before
Eurydice's fatal flirtation with Aristæus; and his character,
both in fact and fable, in tradition and in Virgil's
verse, was one of the most masculine and self-denying
energy. He was a Grahamite, too (the only man of
that age who would not eat flesh and eggs), and was
finally torn in pieces by the women because he was an
incorrigible widower—both which evince rather harsh
qualities, and are not expressed in the Cupidon figure
of Crawford's Orpheus. I am glad I have such trouble
to find a fault, however, and I rejoice in the work altogether,
as a most triumphant effort of American
genius.

I saw another fine piece of art in Boston—Harding's
full-length portrait of Governor Seward. It carries
conviction, at a first glance, that it is true to the life,
and, indeed, a finer piece of work than the head can
not be found in the portrait-painting of this country
It is breathing with character and individuality and an
absolute likeness, besides being faultless in color. The
figure is correctly done, no doubt, but Jupiter himself
in black coat and trousers would be unpicturesque,
and Harding has done his possible, redeeming the horrors
of modern costume a little by an ingenious and
graceful disposition of the cloak. Beside this picture
stood the most capital portrait of the country, I
think—Harding's Allston. This “other self” of the
departed poet-artist is about to be engraved in the best
style of the art, I am happy to hear.

Speaking of Allston, I was told in Boston that his
funeral was by torch-light, after nine in the evening,
and one of the most impressive and befitting ceremonies
ever witnessed. He was laid on the bier, simply
wrapt in his shroud and covered with a pall, and was
borne on men's shoulders to the tomb, and there confined.
These differences from ordinary burial were of
his own directing some time before death. The wish
to be excepted from the commonplace horrors of
burial would be very natural to a mind like Allston's.

The lecturing system, which the Evening Post
thinks is dying by surfeit in New York, is in full vigor
in Boston, and it was thought that Macready would
have made more money at it than by theatricals. I
think myself that lecturers should be rather differently
chosen, and that the object should be rather to
come amusingly at the anatomy of society, than to
hear the preaching-and-water of which the lectures
are now delivered. Why not specify the subjects and
choose the lecturer accordingly. If Sprague the
cashier would lecture on the pathos of discount and
the anxieties of investment; if the head-clerk in a
retail dry-goods shop would unfold the inveiglements
used for cheapening and getting credit (life across the
counter, that is to say); if a fireman would give us the
pros and cons of excitement and combination, esprit
de corps, and what stimulant there would be in putting
out fires for charity were other stimulants to fail; if
any intelligent business-man or mechanic would lecture
simply on the threads of society and common life
which he lives by pulling—why, then, it seems to me,
lectures would be entertaining, and in no danger of
being thinly attended. The greatest mysteries of life
are the common linings of common brains, and since
people are tired of the “turning out to the sun” of
the satin and velvet of refinement and education, it
would be well to come to the plainer stuffs without
ceremony. A lecturer hired to pick each trade and
profession of its mysteries, by diligent inquiry, and to
embody these mysteries in presentable elocution,
might do a thriving business.

I was talking of pictures just now. A Boston merchant
told me that he had made a considerable speculation
lately by sending fifty “copies of the old masters”
(imported Italian pictures) to California! He
chanced to be passing a shop where they were to be
put up at auction, and bought the lot, fifty paintings,
at ten dollars each, frame and all. They sold to the

Californikers at a great profit. But the original faith
in the speculation is the miracle of the business.

The influenza is raging in Boston, everybody talking
thick through the nose. I never saw such universality
of grippe. The air in New York is as pitiless and
penetrating as a search-warrant, but it seems to have
the wholesomeness of the “Etesian breezes,” and a
bad cold I started with from Boston left me somewhere
in the Sound, for I arrived without it. Perhaps, like
Eurydice, it turned back at Hellgate.

The pulse of Broadway is accelerated to fever-beat.
There is good sleighing in the white margins of that
long page of black-letter, and the astonished coal and
smoke at weathercock level is doubtless agitated violently
with the change from the contralto monotone of
wheels to the “frightful tintamarre” of bell-metal.
Sidewalks wet and slippery.

A very short absence from a great city unhinges
one's metropolitan habitude, and on returning, one
looks at the placards on the walls as one does at the
features of a long-absent friend, doubtful of what degree
of change these superficial lines may be the exponents.
None but your diurnal cit reads playbills
with indifference and incredulity! The writing on
the walls just now is, more than usual, flowery in its
promises of amusement, and though “promising is the
very air o' the time,” and “performance is ever the duller
for his act,” I wanted last night a Mephistophilian
ubiquity—the temptations were so many. Niblo's
equestrian pageants are glowingly advertised, and said
to be very splendid. New dancing-girls at the Chatham—new
fun at Mitchell's Olympic—concerts in all
directions—lectures more than plenty—fortune-tellers
and jugglers, dwarfs and fat children, new oyster palaces,
and all manner of balls, bewilder the eye of the
street passenger with their rhetoric of placard.

Macready was playing Werner at the Park last
night, and I looked in for a few moments. The house
was about half full. As I entered he was commencing
the long passage of reproach to Ulric, which he utters
throughout at the tip-toe agony scream. A smart
friction of the tympanum of the ear with a nutmeg-grater
would be an emollient in comparison. Why
should this accomplished actor aggravate his defects
so painfully! That pipe of his would have been a
disqualification for any viva-voce vocation to the mind
of a less presevering man, but it seems to me that its
dissonance might be abated by the degree of discipline
he is willing to practise on other capabilities. He
was well supported, by the way, by Miss Cushman.
Mrs. Sloman has given place to this lady and returned
to the shades of the past generation. Her Orpheus,
Mr. Simpson, will not go after her again, it is to be
hoped.

A sudden impulse, as I came out of the theatre, led
me to the discovery of a new milliners'-land in New
York, the existence of which, “minion of the lamps”
as I have been, I had not suspected. I jumped into
an omnibus that was passing, with a mere curiosity to
see how far into the orient the brilliant shops of East
Broadway extended. We passed by the terra cognita
of Catharine street and Chatham, and their picturesque
sellers of chestnuts by torch-light, and kept up
the well-lighted avenue of the Bowery, when (to my
momentary disappointment) the omnibus turned
suddenly to the right, down Grand street. As the
brilliancy of the lamps and shop-windows did not
diminish, however, I kept my seat, and, to my sur
prise, rode on through a new Broadway which seemed
to me interminable. I got out at last to walk back
and look at it more leisurely. The shops on the
south side were nearly all those of milliners and fancy-article
dealers, differing from those of Greenwich
street, on the other side of the city, in being smaller,
brighter-colored in the array of goods (as if ministering
to a gaudier taste), and more in the style of street
stalls, such as are common in small Italian towns.
There was another primitive peculiarity in the apparent
custom in that region, for the whole family to
wait behind the counter. In one very crowded and
low-raftered shop, the sign of which was “Cheap
Jemmy,” the mother and half a dozen stout daughters
were all busy walting on customers, while a child
in arms was dandled by a little girl sitting by the stove.
Everything about the shop was of the strictest school
of the thrifty primitive. Seeing a pretty and intelligent-looking
milliner with her hand crossed over the glass
case on her counter, a few doors from “Cheap Jemmy,”
I went in and bought a pair of gloves, for the
sake of asking a question or two. She said rents
were much cheaper in Grand street than in the other
shopping streets of the city, and goods proportionably
cheaper. The colored people do their shopping principally
there. She was not acquainted at all in Grand
street. When she wanted to go out she got into an
omnibus and went down town. Altogether, the Grand
street shops are unlike the other parts of the city—
gayer and more picturesque—and life seems to be
centralized and crowded together there, as if it were a
suburb across a river. I must give you some notion
of the geography of this quarter. Imagine Manhattan
to be a man-with-a-hat-on (Union square the hat),
lying on his back, with Castle Garden for a bunnion
on his great toe, Broadway would be his spine and
intestinal canal, Chelsea and Greenwich his right arm,
Grand street his outstretched left arm, the Tabernacle
and Tombs, City Hall and Park, his rotund corporation,
spleen, liver, &c. In ancient times the resemblance
would have been seized upon at once for a
deification.

A chef d'æuvre of daguerreotype is in preparation.
The senate-chamber is to be engraved after photographs
in the best style of Apollo, Chilton, and
Edwards! These gentlemen (the god of light not the
least enterprising and efficient of the three) have in
preparation a magnificent engraving of the senators in
appropriate positions, after the manner of some of the
finest English prints. This is a bold and beautiful
undertaking, and from the known skill and enterprise
of these gentlemen, will doubtless be successfully
accomplished. Whether an adequate recompense
can be realized in this country remains to be seen.
Most of the miniatures for this engraving were obtained
at the daguerreotype gallery of these gentlemen,
and theirs is an art particularly suited to the
transfer of the strong lineaments of senatorial faces.
The engraving will be a curiosity. A celebrated
artist is to be employed for the grouping.

Late last night, the Norwegian, Olé Bull (pronounced
Olay Bull), did the magnanimous, and yielded
the use of one of the world's entire evenings to
his rival, Vieux-temps, whose concert comes off, therefore,
as announced, this evening. I shall go to hear
him, and will tell you all I can fathom in what I hear.

I do not believe that the leaven of cognoscenti,
which “leavens the whole lump” into rapture with
these performers, amounts to more than three people
in an audience of three thousand, and I think that
even those three would be puzzled to distinguish between

Wallace, Olé Bull, and Vieux-temps, if they
played the same pieces behind a screen. (I do not
mention Artot, because he plays to the heart exclusively.)

Nobody with nerves can sit out a concert, it is true,
without having the keys of tears occasionally swept
over, as a child, thrumming a piano, will occasionally
produce a sweet or mournful combination of sounds
by accident. But because our eyes are once or twice
moistened, and because we occasionally feel that the
corner of the veil is twitched which separates us from
the chainless articulation we ache after, it is no sign
that we at all comprehend the drift of the player's
meaning, or see into the world of complex harmony
whither he gropes but confusedly himself. I have
not heard the violin of Olé Bull, but I have talked with
him for an hour or two, and I think he is one of the
most inspired creatures (and I should have thought
so if I had met him as a savage in the woods) whose
conversation I have ever listened to. He talks a
braided language of French, Italian, and English,
plucking expression to himself with a clutch; and
though he moulds every idea with a powerful originality,
he evidently does not give birth to more than a
fraction of what is writhing in his brain. If there
were a volcano missing in Norway, I should fancy we
had encountered it on its travels—the crater not provided
for in its human metempsychosis. Probably
Olé Bull finds his violin a much more copious vent
than language, for his imprisoned lava—but to coin
that lava into language as he pours it out in tangled
chromatics, would be to comprehend his music, and
that, I say again, is not done by more than three in
three thousand, if done at ALL! I told him I should
like to hear him play a l'improvista, after he had seen
Niagara, and upon that he gave me a description of
wild Norwegian scenery, describing how he had tried
to utter in music the effect it had produced upon
him—gave it me with a “fine phrensy,” that pulled
hard (and I should like to know the philosophy of
that) upon the roots of my hair. There is something
weird and supernatural about the man.

Mechanical dexterity on the violin has as much to
do with music, I believe, as drawing a bank-check has
to do with credit at the bank—a very necessary part
of the matter, but owing its value entirely to what
has gone before. Music is mind expressed in one of
the half-dozen languages we possess—and as capable
of logic and transfer into words, as painting or poetry,
or expression of feature and gesture. Olé Bull, when
playing, has (or ought to have) an explainable argument
in his mind, and the bridge wanting between
him and his audience is a translation of his musical
argument into language—given before or after the
performance. This he could easily do. At present,
it is, to the audience, like a most eloquent oration in
an unknown tongue—comprehensible only to the orator.

I have elsewhere mentioned, that while at Vienna,
I saw a self-educated philosopher at the institute,
who was discovering the link between music and geometry.
He took a pane of glass and covered it
sparsely with dry sand, and then, by drawing a particular
note upon the edge with a fiddle-bow, he
drove the sand by the vibration into a well-defined
circle, or triangle, or square—whichever we chose of
half-a-dozen geometrical figures. I have looked ever
since, to hear of an advancement in this phase of daguerreotype.
Once reduced to a grammar, music
would be as articulate as oratory, and we should be
able to distinguish its sense from its gibberish.

In person, Olé Bull is a massive, gladiator-like
creature, rather uncouth, passionately impulsive in
his manners, and with a confused face, which only
becomes legible with extreme animation. Wide-awake,
he is often handsome—fast-asleep, he is doubt
less as plain as a Norwegian boulder-stone. If he
ever work his musical logic up to his musical impulse
and execution, he will hang the first lamp in the darkest
chamber of human comprehension.

I have two more steps to announce to you in the
advance of the gynocracy. There is a gymnasium
in the upper part of Broadway, where the LADIES don
the Turkish costume, and ARE TAUGHT SPARRING and
CLIMBING in jackets and loose trousers. Greatcoats
with a snug fit to the back are superseding cloaks for
ladies' out-of-door wear. “Merciful heavings!” as
Dick Swiveller would say.

I have been looking over a file of English papers,
published at Canton; China, in which I find that the
interpreter to the French consulate has obtained a
copy of the famous Chinese dictionary, which is an
encyclopedia of the history, sciences, arts, habits, and
usages of the Chinese, composed at the commencement
of the eighteenth century by order of the emperor
Ram-hi. A very small number of these was
printed, for the emperor and principal functionaries
of the empire only. It is to be reprinted immediately,
with a French and English translation. Mr. Cushing
goes there in a good time for finding the material he
will want for researches, literary and political.

It is curious how much may be born of “a scrape”
between catgut and horsehair! We have had two
nights of violin-phrensy, and applause, for a trick
with a fiddle-bow, that would have embalmed the
heart of Demosthenes within him. The beau monde
has given a fair hearing to the rival elbows, and, by acclamation,
at least, Olé Bull has it. As it is the rage,
and, as even sages take interest in rages, perhaps I
had better “make a clean breast,” and tell you all I
know about it—albeit, like barley-water, if the fever
were cured, it would be unpalatable slop.

The conversation of the town, of course, is largely
embroidered with the concernings of these fiddle-monsters,
and news, as you know, is stripped, like
corn, of much of its picturesque outer husk and silken
lining before it is ground into paragraph-cakes sent
to be devoured at a distance. Olé Bull is not simply
Olé Bull, but a star with four satellites—his messenger, and
keeper, his handsome secretary, his messenger, and
his lacquey. The door of his parlor at the Astor is
beset, antechamber-fashion, from morning till night,
with orchestra-people, people from the music-shops,
and all the tribe who get fat upon the droppings of
enthusiasm. What he says is made into anecdotes,
and wherever he goes follows the digito monstrari
There is an aristocracy of catgut, however, and Artot
and Vieux-temps look upon Olé Bull as the house
of lords look upon O'Connell, and greet him as the
rocks do the rising tide. Artot has been a king's
page, and Vieux-temps is, I believe, a chevalier decoré,
and both of them have the porcelain air. The French
population of New York make a “white-and-red-rose”
business of it; and it was remarked last night
that there was not a Frenchman to be seen at Olé
Bull's concert. Artot is quite a minion of popularity
with the fashionables—his expressive eyes and sentimental
elegance probably the raison pourquoi

Vieux-temps's first concert on Monday night was a
very stylish jam. He is a small, pony-built man, with
gold rings in his ears, and a face of genteel ugliness,
but touchingly lugubrious in its expression. With
his violin at his shoulder, he has the air of a husband
undergoing the nocturnal penance of walking the
room with “the child”—and performing it, too, with
unaffected pity. He plays with the purest and cold

est perfection of art, and is doubtless more learned on
the violin than either of the rival performers, but
there is a vitreous clearness and precision in his notes
that would make them more germaine to the humor
of before breakfast than to the warm abandon of vesper-tide.
His sister travels with him (a pretty blonde,
very unlike him), and accompanies him on the piano.

Olé Bull's concert was deferred till last evening,
and the immense capacity of the Tabernacle was filled
to suffocation. He appeared after the usual appetiser
of an overture, and was received with a tumult. Verily,
he is made for a “tribune of the people!” The
angel who “makes men politic” never moulded a
creature more native to the central plane of popularity.
A splendid animal—herculean and graceful—a
faculty of looking, at the same time, overpowered and
self-possessed—an unlimited suavity full of reserve—
calm lips and wild eyes—cool dexterity and desperate
abandonment to his theme—he would have done as
well at anything else as at music. He is what Mrs.
Ramsbottom would call a “natural pagoda.”

It is presumptuous in a layman of the religion of
music to attempt a critical distinction between these
two or three first violinists of the world. Anybody
can see differences in their playing, but only a musician
can define the degrees in which they differ.
Olé Bull's violin seems to have been made where
horses and cats were of a wilder breed. He gets out
of it a peculiar quality of note, not at first quite satisfactory
to the ear, but approaching articulate language
as it departs from the glassy melody drawn from the
instrument by others. I have no doubt that, to himself,
the instrument is as good as articulate. He expects
it to talk intelligibly to others; and it would,
possibly, to those who knew music and heard him
often. I proposed to him in conversation, what I
think would test the expression of his music very
fairly—the transfer of Collins's Ode on the Passions
to the violin. The audience could then follow him,
as they do an opera by a translated libretto.

Wallace is about to enter the field against the violinists,
many of the musical people here being quite
persuaded that he plays as well as any of them. He
is certainly the greatest pianist we ever had in America,
and he is really embarrassed between the two instruments—the
very highest degree of excellence requiring
complete devotion to one only. He and Olé
Bull met one evening at the duke of Devonshire's in
London, but without hearing each other play, and
they have run together, here, like drops of water—
similar in quality and degree of genius, as well as in
impulsive and poetical disposition. They met in
Bull's room an evening or two since and played duets
on the piano and violin, solos, &c., till morning.
Wallace likes New York so well that he has determined
to make it his residence, publishing his exquisite
musical compositions here, &c. He is a great accession
to the musical world, as he is a large essential
drop added to the soul resident in this great mass
of human life. I offer him one man's welcome.

I understand the piano rage is the next thing to
come off, and that Lizst and Thalberg are positively
coming over. Taking musical accomplishment in
such large slices as we do, our vast country is likely
to become the main body-corporate of the music of
the world. It pays better than any other field of musical
enterprise now.

Happy New-year!—Shake hands! Exchange
congratulations! Be merry! Be happy! Another
year is gone! It is poetry to regret the past—only
poetry. Rejoice that the incumbrance of another
year is thrust behind—that another gate onward is
flung open—that though this youth is passing or past,
you are by so much nearer to a new youth beyond—
and better and brighter, as well as beyond. There is
no instinct of regret for the past. Spite of Death
brought nearer, and the shroud unfolded to receive
us—spite of Decrepitude and Neglect and Pain rising
up like phantoms in the way—we are happy to grow
old. The soul rejoices. New-year! New-year!
Death closer, but something the soul yearns after
coming at his heels! Who, upon impulse, would retard
time! Who would—instinct only consulted—
go back! Eternal progress is the thirst of life, as it
is of the whole eternity of which life is a part. The
world says so by acclamation. The old year's death
is the festival of universal instinct. Visit your friends!
Brighten the links between you! Forgive slights,
neglects, injuries! Go laughing through the gate of
the new year!

The Hebrew Benevolent Society had a very brilliant
dinner on Thursday, I understand, and drew a
large contribution for its excellent objects from the
present possessors of the “divining-rod”—the violinists.
Olé Bull, whose heart is as prodigal as his genius,
and who gives money to street-beggars by the
handful, gave a hundred dollars, and Vieux-temps and
Wallace agreed to combine in a charity-concert. The
other contributions, I understand, were correspondingly
liberal.

One of the essays, the most ad rem that I have
lately seen, is an address on the “Prevention of Pauperism,”
by a relative of the late Dr. Channing. The
preface has a certain bold resignation about it which
is very idiosyncratic. Mr. Channing says that he
was desired to read a discourse before a society for
the prevention of pauperism, and agreed to try to do
so—but he did not know to what he had pledged himself.
He then defines very philosophically what he
found, upon reflection, was to be his task, and goes on
to say:—

“I went to work. That which might, in the reading,
be endured forty minutes, grew to twice that allotted
time, or more; and when the day came for the
anniversary, I found I could not read the half I had
set down. The auditory was very small; and the
few, at first, were less before the forty minutes were
up. The contribution-boxes came to the church-altar
with little weight of metal, and few bills—say
about twenty-seven dollars and twenty-three cents, all
told. Thus was my work accounted little and paid
harmoniously. But some, a very few, have asked me
to print my writing. From so small a company a
large request could hardly come. I have done what
those few friends have asked me to.”

The address is very philosophic, though tinctured
with peculiar views of the social system. The leading
propositions, which are very eloquently illustrated,
are worthy the room they will take in these columns,
if it were only as a skeleton map of the subject
carefully laid out, and available for the guidance
of inquirers:—

“1st. That every social institution, or custom,
which separates man from man—which produces distinct
classes in the community, having distinct privileges—which
is daily occupied to build higher and
stronger the partition-walls between men—such institution,
or custom, I say, produces and continues poverty.

“2d. That the political institutions of society, or
their administration, frequently become causes of the
extremest and widest national poverty.

“3d. That the spirit of party, so widely and deeply
cherished as it is by society, does, by its exclusiveness,

its selfishness, and its intolerance, minister directly to
the production and continuance of poverty.

“4th. That such employment of capital by society,
as in its products ministers only to the most debasing
habits, does directly produce and continue crime and
poverty.

“5th. The sudden reduction of wages, extended
to large numbers, is not only directly injurious to
wide interests, but produces pauperism.

“6th. That in a country like ours, in which the
law of entail does not exist to make property a permanent
possession in families, a system of education
which has regard only to simple mental culture, and
which leaves the physical powers uncultivated—in
which manual labor, a practical knowledge of farming,
or the mechanic arts, forms no part—I say that
such a system of early education favors the production
of pauperism.”

Apropos of beggars—the system of ingenious beggary,
so curiously described in Grant's “Great Metropolis,”
is beginning to be tried on in New York.
There is one young lady (of very correct habits, I
believe, in point of fact) who maks a living by means
that wear a somewhat questionable complexion, out of
“distinguished strangers.” A member of congress,
or a diplomatist in transit, for example, receives a
note, the day after his arrival is advertised, in a handwriting
of singular beauty. In the most graceful language,
and with the daintiest use of French phrases,
he is informed that a young lady who has long watched
his career with the deepest interest—who has a
feeling for him which is a mystery to herself—who
met him accidentally in a place she will recall to his
memory, should she be so fortunate as to see him
again—who is an unhappy creature of impulse, all too
fondly tender for this harsh world and its constructions—would
like to see him on a certain sidewalk
between eight and nine. By holding his hand across
his left breast, he will be accosted at that time and
place. The ladylikeness and good taste of the note,
so different from the usual tentatives of that description,
breed a second thought of curiosity, and the
victim is punctual. After a turn or two on the appointed
sidewalk, he encounters a tall young lady,
deeply veiled, who addresses him by name, takes his
arm, and discourses to him at first on his own ambitious
history, contriving to say the true and flattering
thing, for which she has duly informed herself.
She skilfully evades his attempts to make her talk of
things more particular, and regretting feelingly that
she can only see him on the sidewalk, appeals to his
“well-known generosity” for ten dollars to keep her
and her dear mother from being turned out of doors.
She takes it with tremulous pathos, demands of his
honor that he will not follow her, and slips round the
corner to meet another “distinguished stranger” with
whom she has appointed an interview fifteen minutes
later in the next street! I was in a company of strangers
at a hotel not long ago, when one of these dainty
notes was produced, and it so happened that every
man present had one in his pocket from the same
hand! Among the party there were four appointments
proposed by the same lady, to come off on the
four sides of a certain square, for that evening! She
is probably doing a good business.

There has been a certain most eligible shop, with a
most impracticable rent (3 Astor house, rent $1,000),
for a long time vacant. Yesterday the broad doors
were thrown open, and an effulgent placard announced
it as the depot of the Columbian Magazine. The
new periodical lay upon the counter in a most Chapman-esque
cover, lettered gorgeously in vermillion
and azure, with a device of Columbus on his pedestal,
John Inman, editor, in the blue of the scroll, and Israel
Post, publisher, in the vermilion of the supporting
tablet. (This arrangement is wrong, if there be any
meaning in colors, for the ingredients of vermilion are
sulphur and quicksilver—stuff of better prophecy for
an editor than a publisher.) I understand that the
foundations of this new magazine are thirty thousand
dollars deep, and as there is great store of experience
in both publisher and editor, it is likely to crowd Graham
and Godey—though it will require almost an
“avatar of Vishnu” to crush those giants of monthly
literature. We are to see whether magazine-popularity
is like the oil from the glass tomb of Belus—
which, once exhausted, never could be refilled.

The history of the monthlies, for the last few years,
forms a chapter by itself of American progress. It is
but a very short time since the “dollar-a-page” of the
North American Review was magnificent pay, and
considered quite sufficient for articles by Edward Everett!
The old New York Mirror paid five hundred
dollars a year for the original “Pencillings by the
Way”—the republication of which has paid the author
five thousand. Nathaniel Greene, of the Boston
Statesman, was the only man I could hear of, in 1827,
who paid regularly for poetry, and I have heard that
Percival was kept from starving in New York by selling
his splendid poem on the plague for five dollars!
I lost some of the intermediate steps of literary valuation,
but I think the burst on author-land of Graham's
and Godey's liberal prices was like a sunrise
without a dawn. They commenced at once paying
their principal contributors at the rate of twelve dollars
a page—nearly three times the amount paid by
English magazines to the best writers, and paying it,
too, on the receipt of the manuscript, and not, as in
London, on the publication of the article. We owe
to these two gentlemen the bringing out of a a host of
periodical talent, which, but for their generous and
prompt pay, would have remained dormant, or employed
in other channels; and they should be recorded
as the true and liberal pioneers of progress in this
branch of literature. They have done very much the
same thing with regard to engraving and the encouragement
of the arts, and I believe the effect they have
produced on the refinement of the country has been
worthy of note—their beautiful books having been
sent into its remotest corners by their unprecedented
circulation.

The prices paid now to acceptable magazine-writers
are very high, though the number of writers has
increased so much that there are thousands who can
get no article accepted. There are so many people,
too, who, like the Ancient Mariner, are under the dire
compulsion to tell their tale—paid or not paid—that
any periodical, with a good furbisher and mender,
may fill its pages, for nothing, with very excellent
reading. A well-known editor once told me that he
could make a very good living by the sums people
were willing to pay to see themselves in print. The
cacoethes scribendi would doubtless support—does
doubtless support—a good many periodicals.

Olé Bull played to another crammed audience at
the Park last night, but the angel or demon imprisoned
in this violin was not tractable. If it had been
his first appearance, he would have made a losing trip
to America. There was a tone in the applause which
showed very clearly that his music was turned back
at the inner vestibule of the ear. He will probably
redeem himself to-night at the Tabernacle—his closing
concert.

I hear great complaints that the canvass-back ducks
are not of as good flavor as usual this year. Will

you tell us the pourquoi—or whether it is that the
wild-celery is not in perfection this season? My own
experience goes the other way—for such delicious
ducks, so deliciously dressed, I never saw, as lately at
“Guy's Monument house,” in Baltimore. He is a
fit cook for Apicius, it is true, and perhaps his sauce
deceived me. But the canvass-back is part of our
national honor, and the causes of falling off should
be looked after.

I am delighted to see that our great comedian,
Harry Placide, is up to the lips in success and popularity
in New Orleans. God bless those southern
people—they know a good thing when they see it!
The theatres there are a kind of last appeal—confirming
just appreciation, and reversing very often the cold
injustice of the north. Wallack is gone there now,
and he will come away with warm pockets. Burton,
the comedian, is also in migration—a man of genius
with his pen, and a most attractive actor. I wish we
could have a good rollicking season of good acting at
the Park, and go in deep for old-fashioned close criticism.

I sent you a paragraph yesterday which I am anxious
to overtake with another—though the paragraphchase,
especially if the pursuer be a correction of an
error, is much more desperate than the shadow's hope
of overtaking the substance. Olé Bull, to my thinking
(corroborated since by the opinions of some musical
people), played without his inspiration the last
night he played at the Park, and so I stated. At the
Tabernacle on Tuesday night, his violin-fiend (or angel)
was at home, and so completely did he search
every chamber of my sense of musical delight, and so
triumphantly drive out all unbelief, and fill me with
passionate admiration and wonder at his skill and
power, that I feel a certain compunctious reproach
for ever having qualified my homage. One of his
themes was a rhapsody of religious music, composed
by himself, and, without irreverence, it seemed to me
that St. John, in the Apocalyptic vision, could scarcely
have been within the compass of music more rapt and
unearthly. More than four thousand people held
their breath in ravished ecstacy with this performance,
and the only drawback to my own rapture was the
conviction that, transparent and articulate as was the
meaning of every note, to translate it into language
the poet must first be himself translated—to the sphere
and capabilities of an angel. You will think that I,
too, am “bit by the dipsas”—but I, at least, gave up
my soul to this Olé Bull madness with some reluctance.
Genius-like, the Norse magician is journalier,
as the French say; but I pray that when he shall play
at Washington he may “give a rise” to the embodied
intellect of the capital which will show them a heaven
above politics.

The Hibernia has brought me a gossiping letter
or two from England; and, by way of letting you
down softly from the balloon-flight of the paragraph
foregoing, I will quote you a passage from the clever
hand of our friend S—, the artist, now resident in
London, and fully employed in transferring aristocratic
beauty to ivory. Buckwheat and molasses, it
should be premised, are undiscovered luxuries to the
Londoners, and it is pleasant and apposite, at this particular
season, when these friandises are in conjunctive
culmination, to see how they loom in the traveller's
memory. Says our friend:—

“So you have taken up your abode at the Astor.
You have done well. There are many good things
at the Astor; above all, the buckwheats; and I can
fancy you at this moment, while I am breaking my
fast upon a flabby `French roll' (so called because no
bread of the kind was ever seen in France), with a
pile of them smoking before you, and pouring over
them, with a liberal hand, copious libations of that
exquisite, delicate, transparent molasses which the Astor
alone provides, and which has always reminded me
of the wine of the veiled prophet—

A letter from a literary friend in London informs
me that Lady Blessington is suffering from a lethargy
from which she finds it next to impossible to arouse
herself for literary labor. The society she lives in
draws very exhaustingly upon her powers of attention,
and she has been all her life one of those who
“crowd a year's life into a day.” My friend adds:—

“You had some expectation of seeing D'Orsay in
America, but he never had any intention of going out.
He has been a prisoner for the last two years in Lady
Blessington's house, at Kensington. There is an
acre or two of garden, as you know, in the rear, shut
in with a wall high enough to keep out creditors, and
here D'Orsay takes his exercise on horseback. He
devotes himself entirely to painting, making portraits
of his friends and receiving money for them—in short,
making a profession of it. Every Saturday night, at
twelve o'clock, precisely, his cab is at the door, and
he drives to his club, and on Sundays he is to be seen
in the park, driving with Lady Blessington and her
two exquisitely beautiful nieces (the Misses Power)—
taking care to be home again, like Cinderella, before
twelve o'clock at night. Not long ago, a meeting of
his friends took place, and an effort was made to relieve
him. They subscribed twenty thousand pounds,
which would have given his creditors four shillings in
the pound. The proposal was made, and the creditors
refused to accept. The subscription was consequently
abandoned.”

There is an article afloat upon the raft of fugitive
literature (“a stick of timber among the flood (—)
trash.” as they say on the Susquehannah) which is
worth hauling ashore and preserving—Parke Godwin's
Essay on Shelley, in the Democratic Review. It
comes from a mind of the finest powers of analysis
and the warmest glow of poetical appreciation, and if
we had in our country the class of well patronized
sober magazines which they have in England, this
writer's pen and Whipple's would be the two best
worth paying in the country, for that kind of article.

Ticknor & Co. have republished a volume of devotional
poetry by Dr. Bowring, called Matins and Vespers.
It is pure, even, moderately-inspired, and scholar-like
poetry—of the best quality for family reading.
The doctor's pursuits are all on a lofty level—philanthropy,
patriotism, emancipation, and religion—and if
his other faculties (all of which are of more than respectable
calibre) were as largely developed as his
veneration, he would be the moral Washington of his
era. The last time I saw him he was in a great rage
with a certain Yankee, who, upon very cool acquaintance,
had drawn at sight upon his hospitality, by having
himself and his baggage set down in the doctor's
entry, and sending in the servant to borrow money to
pay his coach-fare from Liverpool! With the exception

of this private-life “repudiator,” however, he
is a great admirer of America and Americans.

The Langleys have got up a most presentable and
elegant edition of the poems of Eliza Cook—the most
fireside and home-like of modern poets. There is a
great deal in this volume that will touch the “business
and bosoms” of the many. Mrs. Osgood (herself
a poetess of the affections, and wanting nothing
but a little earth in her mixture) gives a sketch of
Miss Cook in the preface, which is as good as a personal
introduction.

When the “last page” morning arrives, dear reader,
we, for the first time in the week, pull the “stop
politic” in our many-keyed organ of livelihood-making,
and muse a little on expediency while the ink
dries upon our pen. This morning—this particular
morning—we chance to have “belayed,” as the sailors
say, “a loose halliard” in our rigging, and in casting
an eye “a-low and aloft,” to see how it draws
upon the canvass, we have determined to alter a little
our trim and ballast. You are our passenger, dear
reader, and our object is to make the voyage agreeable
to you, and the query is, therefore, how much you
would be interested in these same details of trim, ballast,
and rigging. Our coffee stands untasted (for we
write and breakfast, as an idle man breakfasts and
dawdles, all along through the up-hill of the morning),
and our omelet must cool while we amputate one
horn of this dilemma.

We have never explained (have we?) that as an artist
needs a “lay-figure” whereon to adjust drapery
and prepare effects, an editor in the fancy line (our
line) requires a personification, from the mouth of
which he may speak with the definite identity of an
individual. There are a thousand little whims and
scraps of opinion kicking about the floor of commonplace,
which, like bits of cloth and riband, might be
pinned on to a drapery with effect, though worthless
if simply presented to you in a bundle. A periodical
needs to be an individual—with a physiognomy that
is called up to the mind of the subscriber, and imagined
as speaking, while he reads. An apple given
to you by a friend at table is not like an apple taken
from the shelf of a huckster. An article on the leading
topic of the day, in a paper you are not accustomed
to, is not read as the same article would be in your
favorite periodical. The friend's choice alters the
taste and value of the apple, as the individual editor's
selection or approbation gives weight and value to the
article. The more you are acquainted with your
editor—even though, in that acquaintance, you find
out his faults—the more interest you feel in his
weekly visit, and the more curiosity you feel in what
he offers you to read. What made the fortune of
Blackwood but “Christopher North's” splendid egotism!
A magazine without a distinct physiognomy
visible through the type of every page, has no more
hold on its circulation than an orchard on the eaters
of apple-tarts. And if the making of this physiognomy
visible be egotism, then is egotism in an apothecary's
sign, or in the maker's name in your boot-leg.

There is, of course, a nice line to be drawn between
the saying that of editorial self which every reader
would like to know, and the incurring the deserved
charge of egotism; and it was by that line exactly
that we were trying to navigate in the dilemma with
which we started. Should we—or should we not—
bother the reader's brain with what was bothering ourselves?
To a limited and bearable degree, then, we will.

We determined to live by periodical literature, and
we came to New York prepared, of course, to unship
the wings of our Pegasus and let him trot—if trotting
is “the go”—quite sure that if he is worth keeping,
his legs are as sound as his feathers. It is one thing
to be “willing to come to the scratch,” however, and
another thing to find out definitely where the scratch
is. We were prepared to turn owl and and armadillo—to
be indefatigable in our cage, and abroad only by night
—to live on one meal a day—to be editor, proof-reader,
foreman, and publisher, and as many other things as
we could get out of life, limb, and twenty-four hours
—prepared for any toil and self-denial—in short, to
quash debt and keep up the Mirror. Excellent virtue
entirely thrown away! The Mirror rose as easy
as the moon, went on its way rejoicing, and is now out
of the reach of kites, rockets, and steeples! Which way
lay—then—the dragons to vanquish? This brings us
to the head and front of our dilemma. Personal slander
is the only obstacle in American literature

So be it! We do not complain of it. We have
not the presumption to be above our country. America
demands of her literary children that they should
submit to calumny—demands it in the most emphatic
of all voices, by her support of the presses which inflict
it. We agree. We can not make shoes, though
to that trade there is no such penalty. We should
throw away our apprenticeship, if we attempted to
live, now, by any but the one trade whose household
gods are outlawed. We honor our country. We will
live by American literature, with its American drawback.
We can suffer as much as another man. We
are no coward. We will step into the arena, and let
the country, that looks on, decide upon the weapons
and terms of combat. Yet still there is a dilemma.

We have tried for fifteen years the silent system—
the living down slanders, as the watchman wakes
down the stars that rise again in twelve hours. The
only exception to our rule occurred in England,
where an English pen assumed a few American misstatements—and
being “among the Romans,” we did
as they do in such cases—got the necessary retraction
through the “law of honor.” Lately, as perhaps the
reader knows, we have taken a fancy to see whether
there was any difference between public opinion and
the law, as to the protection of literary men against
slander. The author of a particular set of slanders
we chanced to light upon for the experiment, is, we
understand, a clergyman and an abolitionist, and,
though we have literally proved that he published
seven or eight direct lies against our private character,
we are condemned by many of the press for
what they call “Coopering an editor,” and one paper
in Philadelphia attacks our defence of our own character
as a shallow piece of ostentation, got up for
effect! We humbly ask which is most agreeable to
the public? Do they like it submitted to silently, or
do they prefer it defended, by dragging our private
life with all its details into the street? We will accomodate
them—for we must live in the country we
were born in, and live by literature!

One of the most beautiful sights I have lately seen
was the SPREAD for the New England dinner in the
large dining-room of the Astor. It would have given,
even to a “picked man of countries,” a heightened
standard of sumptuousness in banquet—in fact (and
republicans may as well know it), royal entertainments
in Europe beat it by nothing but the intrinsic value of
the table service. Galleries were erected for ladies
behind the columns at either end of the hall, and “all
went merry as a marriage bell.”

It struck me that the “old Plymouth rock” was a
little too much hammered upon, and, indeed, I thought,
during the dinner, that the fragment of it (which was
set upon the table) had better be used for the weight
and countenance it could give to objects worthy of
the pilgrim spirit, than as an anvil for self-glorification.

There are interests constantly arising of a philanthropic
character general enough for all parties to
partake in, and to the sluggish movement of which
the steam of local patriotism might worthily be applied.
Without the bugbear of a contribution at the
time, a fine orator and philanthropist like Horace
Mann might have been invited by the committee to
delight and instruct the picked audience with eloquence
on one of his apostolic schemes of benevolence.
As it was, the predominance of one political party
made it a whig dinner instead of a New England dinner.
Admiring Mr. Webster as I do, and willing as I
am to do more to see the other remaining Titan of
our country (Mr. Clay) in the presidential chair than
for any other object not personal to myself, I wished
that he had replied to the “common-school” toast
instead of the one he selected, and kept to the spirit
of New England exclusively in the determination of
his “thunder.” Mr. Bellows took up this just-mentioned
topic, and compared the red school-houses
(more graphically than felicitously) to an eruption on
the face of New England! He is a great pulpit orator,
but a man who is accustomed to steer by the sober
rudder of a pen runs adrift in trusting himself to extemporaneous
impulse. The best-judged and most
nicely-turned speech of the evening, I thought, was
by Mr. Colden—and quite the most applauded.

The overflow of the city's fountain of curiosity
pours just now into the fancy-stores and curiosity-shops—the
stockings of Santaclaus gaping wide for
“gratifications.” The new bazar, with the negroes
in cocked hats for “sticks in waiting,” is thronged
like a levee, and, truly, the variety of new nonsenses
is marvellous and bewildering. Tiffany's carries the
palm, and you would think, to walk around that museum
of elegancies, that the fine arts had turned their
whole force and ingenuity into the invention of trifles.
It would be curious to trace back the genius that invents
these things to its home and condition in life.

One of the new books that will most interest you
and the members of congress is “Simcoe's Military
Journal; a history of the operations of a partisan corps
called the Queen's Rangers, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel
Simcoe, during the war of the Revolution,
illustrated by engraved plans of action,” &c. Bartlett
& Welford, the great bibliologists of New York, found
a copy of the work in their researches in foreign libraries,
and Mr. Bartlett, who is a scholar, thus prefaces
the American republication:—

“The military journal of Lieutenant-Colonel Simcoe,
now first published, was privately printed by the author
in 1787 for distribution among a few of his personal
friends. The production has hitherto, it would seem,
entirely escaped the attention of those who are curious in
the history of our revolutionary war. As a record of
some interesting particulars and local occurrences of
that memorable struggle, and as a well-written documentary
illustration of the times and the circumstances
of the American rebellion, it deserves circulation
and favor. The fortunate procurement of a copy of
the work in London enables the publishers to present
it in an edition securing its preservation, and facilitating
a general knowledge of its contents. A memoir
of so much of the author's life as is not exhibited in
his journal, it is thought, will interest the reader and
increase the permanent value of the volume. Accordingly,
such a memoir has been prepared from available
and authentic materials, and, by the way of introduction,
may serve to fill out the history of the commander
of the Queen's Rangers, presenting also a few facts
concerning the corps, not otherwise appearing. Not
to extend that portion of the publication too far, however,
various relevant quotations from different sources,
interesting essentially and expletive in their character,
are thrown into the appendix, in addition to what the
journalist has given in that form himself.”

There is a very well-conducted paper in New York
called the “Mirror of Fashion,” the avowed object
of which is to furnish plates and descriptions of gentlemen's
fashions in dress—this feature taking the place,
in a sheet of general interest, which politics or religion
take in others. One sentence of the advertisement
runs thus:—

“I shall strive my utmost to make the Mirror of
Fashion reflect all the important changes in styles of
dress, whether in cut, color, or make, that may from
month to month be adopted in this metropolis, always
eschewing the freaks and follies of foreign fancy. I
shall, as I ever have done, recommend only that
which is strictly consonant with American feelings
and predilections.”

The motto of the paper, very properly, is taken from
Carlyle's, “Sartor Resartus.” Thus, in the one pregnant
subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included
all that men have thought, dreamed, done, or been;
the whole external universe, and what it holds, is but
clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the
philosophy of clothes. There is evidently a man of
reading and talent at the head of this paper, and the
subject touches men's “business and bosom” so closely
and widely that it may well be considered a quatrième
etat, and have its organ to represent it.

If May be the season for “the raging calenture of
love,” this is the calenture of the social affections—
the fever-crisis of the year, when the heat that is in
the system comes to the surface. Most quiet men
go to a ball or two in the holydays—dance a quadrille
or two to show the old year that they are not of its
party in going out—pay a compliment or two more
flowery than their wont; in short, put on the outer
seeming which would befit them in a Utopia. I have
tried on, like others, for the last week or two, this holyday
humor; and, though I shall be accused of “keeping
a sharp eye to business,” I must jot down for you
a thought or two that has occurred to me, critical and
comparative, or the present condition of New York
society.

It strikes me that there is no provision in the gay
society of New York for people of middle age. A
man between thirty-five and forty is invited to a large
party. He goes too early if he arrives before eleven.
He finds the two principal rooms stripped of carpets
and of most of the sitting-down furniture, and the reception-room
entirely lined with the mammas and
chaperons of the young ladies on the floor. However
he might be a “dancing man” in Europe, where
people dance till their knees fail them, he knows that
in this haste-to-grow-old country it would be commented
harshly upon, especially if he has a wife, for
whom it is expected his overflow of spirits should be
reserved. As he don't dance, he would like to converse.
The old ladies talk of nothing but their daughters,
and the daughters, if not dancing, think it would
repel a probable partner to seem much occupied in
conversation. He looks around for a sofa and a lady
who don't dance. Sofa there is none, and in a chair
in the corner perhaps there is one lady who is neither
young nor old—rara avis! He approaches her, and,
well nigh jammed against the wall, undertakes a conversation
not audible (he standing and she sitting) unless

kept up at a scream. After a half hour of this,
the lady, if she be discreet, remembers that “it looks
particular” to be engrossed more than half an hour by
one gentleman, and looks or says so. The middle-aged
man slides along the wall, gets back into the
crowded reception-room, talks a little to the chaperons,
comes back and looks on at the waltz, and so passes
the three hours till supper—on his legs. The ladies
take an hour to sup, and, about three o'clock, he gets
a corner for some oysters and champagne, and between
that and four o'clock gets home to bed. He is a business
man and rises at eight, and by three o'clock the
next day he looks and feels as a man naturally would
who had burnt his candle at both ends—for nothing!

It is not wonderful that there are no conveniences
for conversation in society, for there really is no conversation
to provide for. The want would create the
supply. It is one of the most peculiar of our country's
features that conversation is not cultivated as a pleasure.
When American women leave off dancing they think
they have done with society till they reappear to bring
out their daughters. All the agreeableness of their
middle life—the most attractive and delightful portion
of like too, perhaps—is expended on an appreciative
husband who wants and uses it all! Not at all as a
disparagement to this state of things, perhaps you will
allow me to mention a case, that may be somewhat parallel,
which has turned up in my zoological reading:
“These little insects (the coccus, of the family galinsecta)
are remarkable for many peculiarities in their
habits and conformation. The males have long large
wings! The females have no wings, but at a certain
period of their life attach themselves to the plant or
tree which they inhabit, and remain thereon immoveable
during the rest of their existence. As soon as
the eggs are produced, they pass immediately under
the female parent, whose body becomes their stationary
covering and guard. By degrees her body dries up
and flattens, and forms a sort of a shell, and, when life
is quite extinct, the young insects leave their hiding-place.”
Whether society has not some claim on them
—whether their minds would not be kept from narrowing
by conversation with agreeable men—whether the
one exclusive errand of the loveliest portion of humanity
is to rear children, are questions which in this
country must be handled very gingerly—at least in
print. I may be permitted to go on and say “how
they do in Spain,” however.

A middle-aged man in London may or may not be
a dancer. There is no comment either way—but he
must be something—dancer or good conversationist, or
he is dropped as “lumbering up the party.” Few
men can afford to be seen by the mistress of the house
to be unamused and unamusing. A cultivated man,
then, who don't dance, gets an hour or two of pleasant
society in the early part of the evening at the
opera. If there is a small party afterward he prefers
it to a ball; but if he goes to the ball he finds that the
pleasantest people there are the married women.
They do not sit together without room for a gentleman
between them, but every lady is bodily approachable,
and with a little management he can get a comfortable
seat beside any one whom he may know and
prefer. If he find her interesting, and talk to her the
whole evening, there is no scandal, unless there are
other corroborating circumstances; indeed, the openness
of the attention would rather discredit any unfavorable
comment. If there is a new lion present, or
any attraction peculiar to one person, a small circle is
formed in a corner, or a group stand around and let
the conversation be managed by the persons most
interested, like listening to music. You could seldom
go to a party in London without hearing something
worth telling to a person not there, and society (not the
newspapers) has the first use and enjoyment of all
news and novelties of every description. Newspapers
are stale to a man actively conversant in the best
society of London. People collect news, and see
sights, and invent theories, and study and think—to
have material for being brilliant in society, and for no
other purpose. A habitué of the best houses grows
well-informed by absorption only—if he keep his ears
open. And this entire stage of society is wanting in
New York.

An intelligent gentleman remarked lately upon the
absurdity of copying English hours for gayety, without
copying the compensating English hours for repose.
It is the aim of aristocracy to have such habits as to
distinguish aristocrats from the working-classes, and
lords and ladies please themselves with going home to
sleep when the clowns are getting up to toil. Until
we can afford to lie abed like a lord, till noon, we are
fools to lose the clown's slumber, and a fashionable
lady would deserve well of her country who would
tacitly acknowledge her husband to be a man of business,
by giving her party at hours when he and his
merchant-friends could attend without loss of needful
sleep. Who would not be glad to go to a ball at seven
instead of eleven? This change, and the introduction
of comforts and accommodations for conversible wall-flowers,
would, in my opinion, improve even the
charming circles of grown-up children who now constitute
New York society.

I see no very marked differences in the dress or
usages of the ball-room. Rather more waltzing and
less quadrilling, if anything—but still “marvellous
few” tolerable waltzers. Could most of the waltzing
men in New York “see themselves as others see
them,” they would practise the difficult ease of this
accomplishment elsewhere for a while. The lower
classes of Germans have balls in their peculiar haunts
which it would be good practice to attend.

How to make a paradise in the country.—
The back of the winter is broke, dear reader, and it is
down-hill to spring. Those who have not our brick
and mortar destiny, are chatting, over their evening
table, of gardens and fruit-trees, crops and embellishments,
and longing the snow off their lawns and fields,
and the frost out of their furrows. We have been
passing a leisure (not an idle) hour in reading our
friend Downing's elegant and tempting book on rural
architecture—a book which, with others by the same
scholarlike and tasteful pen, we commend to your possession—and
it brings to our mind a long letter we
wrote during our last year's residence on the Susquehannah,
on the subject of economical and comeatable
paradise-making in the country. For a change—let
us turn over for you this leaf of our common-sense
book. Thus runs the body of it:—

Landscape-gardening is a pleasant subject to expand
into an imaginative article, and I am not surprised that
men, sitting amid hot editorials in a city (the month
of July), find a certain facility in creating woods and
walks, planting hedges and building conservatories.
So may the brain be refreshed, I well know, even with
the smell of printing-ink in the nostrils. But landscape-gardening,
as within the reach of the small
farmer people, is quite another thing, and to be managed
(as brain-gardening need not be, to be sure) with
economy and moderation. Tell us in the quarterlies,
if you will, what a man may do with a thousand acres
and plenty of money; but we will endeavor to show
what may be done with fifty acres and a spare hour in
the evening—by the tasteful farmer, or the tradesman
retired on small means. These own their fifty acres
(more or less), up to the sky and down to the bottom
of their “diggings,” and as nature lets the tree grow
and the flower expand for a man, without reference to
his account at the bank, they have it in their power to

embellish, and most commonly, they have also the
inclination. Beginners, however, at this as at most
other things, are at the mercy of injudicious counsel,
and few books can be more expensively misapplied
than the treatises on landscape-gardening.

The most intense and sincere lovers of the country
are citizens who have fled to rural life in middle age,
and old travellers who are weary, heart and foot, and
long for shelter and rest. Both these classes of men
are ornamental in their tastes—the first because the
country is his passion, heightened by abstinence; and
the latter because he remembers the secluded and
sweet spots he has crossed in travel, and yearns for
something that resembles them, of his own. To begin
at the beginning, I will suppose such a man as either
of these in search of land to purchase and build upon.
His means are moderate.

Leaving the climate and productiveness of soil
out of the question, the main things to find united are
shade, water, and inequality of surface. With these
three features given by nature, any spot may be made
beautiful, and at very little cost; and, fortunately for
purchasers in this country, most land is valued and
sold with little or no reference to these or other capabilities
for embellishment. Water, in a country so
laced with rivers, is easily found. Yet there are hints
worth giving, perhaps, obvious as they seem, even in the
selection of water. A small and rapid river is preferable
to a large river or lake. The Hudson, for instance,
is too broad to bridge, and beautiful as the
sites are upon its banks, the residents have but one
egress and one drive—the country behind them. If
they could cross to the other side, and radiate in every
direction in their evening drives, the villas on that
noble river would be trebled in value. One soon tires
of riding up and down one bank of a river, and without
a taste for boating, the beautiful expanse of water
soon becomes an irksome barrier. Very much the
same remark is true of the borders of lakes, with the
additional objection, that there is no variety to the
view. A small, bright stream, such as hundreds of
nameless ones in these beautiful northern states,
spanned by bridges, at every half mile, followed always
by the roads which naturally seek the level, and winding
into picturesque surprises, appearing and disappearing,
continually, is, in itself, an ever-renewing
poem, crowded with changeable pictures, and every
day tempting you to follow or trace back its bright
current. Small rivers, again, insure to a degree the
other two requisites—shade and inequality of surface—
the interval being proportionately narrow, and backed
by slopes and alluvial soil, usually producing the
various nut and maple trees, which, for their fruit and
sap, have been spared by the inexorable axes of the
first settlers. If there is any land in the country, the
price of which is raised from the supposed desirableness
of the site, it is upon the lakes and larger rivers,
leaving the smaller rivers, fortunately, still within the
scale of the people's means.

One more word as to the selection of a spot. The
rivers in the United States, more than those of older
countries, are variable in their quantity of water. The
banks of many of the most picturesque, present, at
the season of the year when we most wish it otherwise
(in the sultry heats of August and September),
bared rocks or beds of ooze, while the stream runs
sluggishly and uninvitingly between. Those which
are fed principally by springs, however, are less liable
to the effects of drought than those which are the
outlets of large bodies of water; and indeed, there is
great difference in rivers in this respect, depending on
the degree in which their courses are shaded, and
other causes. It will be safest, consequently, to select
a site in August, when the water is at the lowest, preferring,
of course, a bold and high bank as a protection
against freshets and flood-wood. The remotest
chance of a war with water, damming against wash
and flood, fills an old settler with economical alarm.

It was doubtless a “small chore” for the deluge to
heave up a mound or slope a bank, but with one spade
at a dollar a day, the moving of earth is a discouraging
job, and in selecting a place to live it is well to
be apprized what diggings may become necessary, and
how your hay and water, wood, visiters, and lumber
generally, are to come and go. A man's first fancy
is commonly to build on a hill; but as he lives on,
year after year, he would like his house lower and
lower, till, if the fairies had done it for him at each
succeeding wish, he would trouble them at last to dig
his cellar at the bottom. It is hard mounting a hill
daily, with tired horses, and it is dangerous driving
down with full-bellied ones from the stable-door, and
your friends deduct from the pleasure of seeing you,
the inconvenience of ascending and descending. The
view, for which you build high, you soon discover is
not daily bread, but an occasional treat, more worth, as
well as better liked for the walk to get it, and (you
have selected your site, of course, with a southern
exposure) a good stiff hill at your back, nine months
in the year, saves several degrees of the thermometer,
and sundry chimney-tops, barn-roofs, and other furniture
peripatetic in a tempest. Then your hill-road
washes with the rains, and needs continual mending,
and the dweller on the hill needs one more horse and
two more oxen than the dweller in the valley. One
thing more. There rises a night-mist (never unwholesome
from running water), which protects fruit-trees
from frost to a certain level above the river, at
certain critical seasons, and so end the reasons for
building low.

I am supposing all along, dear reader, that you have
had no experience of country-life, but that, sick of a
number in a brick block, or (if a traveller) weary of
“the perpetual flow of people,” you want a patch of
the globe's surface to yourself, and room enough to
scream, let off champagne-corks, or throw stones,
without disturbance to your neighbor. The intense
yearning for this degree of liberty has led some seekers
after the pastoral rather farther into the wilderness
than was necessary; and while writing on the subject
of a selection of rural sites, it is worth while, perhaps,
to specify the desirable degree of neighborhood.

In your own person, probably, you do not combine
blacksmith, carpenter, tinman, grocer, apothecary,
wet-nurse, dry-nurse, washerwoman, and doctor.
Shoes and clothes can wait your convenience for
mending; but the little necessities supplied by the
above list of vocations are rather imperative, and they
can only be ministered to in any degree of comfortable
perfection, by a village of at least a thousand inhabitants.
Two or three miles is far enough to send your
horse to be shod, and far enough to send for doctor or
washerwoman, and half the distance would be better,
if there were no prospect of the extension of the village
limits. But the common diameter of idle boys'
rambles is a mile out of the village, and to be just
beyond that is very necessary, if you care for your
plums and apples. The church-bell should be within
hearing, and it is mellowed deliciously by a mile or
two of hill and dale, and your wife will probably
belong to a “sewing-circle,” to which it is very much
for her health to walk, especially if the horse is wanted
for ploughing. This suggests to me another point
which I had nearly overlooked.

The farmer pretends to no “gentility;” I may be
permitted to say, therefore, that neighbors are a luxury,
both expensive and inconvenient. The necessity
you feel for society, of course, will modify very much
the just-stated considerations on the subject of vicinage.
He who has lived only in towns, or passed his
life (as travellers do) only as a receiver of hospitality,
is little aware of the difference between a country and

city call, or between receiving a visit and paying one.
In town, “not at home,” in any of its shapes, is a
great preserver of personal liberty, and gives no
offence. In the country you are “at home,” will-you,
nill-you. As a stranger paying a visit, you choose the
time most convenient to yourself, and abridge the call
at pleasure. In your own house, the visiter may find
you at a very inconvenient hour, stay a very inconvenient
time, and as you have no liberty to deny yourself
at your country door, it may (or may not, I say,
according to your taste) be a considerable evil. This
point should be well settled, however, before you determine
your distance from a closely-settled neighborhood,
for many a man would rather send his horse
two miles farther to be shod than live within the convenience
of “sociable neighbors.” A resident in a
city, by-the-way (and it is a point which should be
kept in mind by the retiring metropolitan) has, properly
speaking, no neighbors. He has friends, chosen
or made by similarity of pursuit, congeniality of taste,
or accident, which might have been left unimproved.
His literal neighbors he knows by name—if they keep
a brass plate, but they are contented to know as little
of him, and the acquaintance ends, without offence,
in the perusal of the name and number on the door.
In the city you pick your friends. In the country
you “take them in the lump.”

True, country neighbors are almost always desirable
acquaintances—simple in their habits, and pure in
their morals and conversation. But this letter is addressed
to men retiring from the world, who look forward
to the undisturbed enjoyment of trees and fields,
who expect life to be filled up with the enjoyment of
dew at morn, shade at noon, and the glory of sunset
and starlight, and who consider the complete repose
of the articulating organs, and release from oppressive
and unmeaning social observances, as the fruition of
Paradise. To men who have experience or philosophy
enough to have reduced life to this, I should recommend
a distance of five miles from any village or any
family with grown-up daughters. In my character of
dollar, I may be forgiven for remarking, also, that this
degree of seclusion doubles an income (by enabling a
man to live on half of it), and so, freeing the mind
from the care of pelf, removes the very gravest of the
obstacles to happiness. I refer to no saving which infringes
on comfort. The housekeeper who caters for
her own family in an unvisited seclusion, and the
housekeeper who provides for her family with an eye
to the possible or probable interruption of acquaintances
not friends, live at very different rates; and the
latter adds one dish to the bounty of the table, perhaps,
but two to its vanity. Still more in the comfort
and expensiveness of dress. The natural and most
blissful costume of man in summer, all told, is shirt,
slippers, and pantaloons. The compulsory articles of
coat, suspenders, waistcoat, and cravat (gloves would
be ridiculous), are a tribute paid to the chance of visiters,
as is also, probably, some dollars' difference in
the quality of the hat.

I say nothing of the comfort of a bad hat (one you
can sit upon, or water your horse from, or bide the
storm in, without remorse), nor of the luxury of having
half a dozen, which you do when they are cheap,
and so saving the mental burthen of retaining the
geography of an article so easily mislaid. A man is
a slave to anything on his person he is afraid to spoil
—a slave (if he is not rich, as we are not, dear reader!)
to any costly habiliment whatever. The trees nod no
less graciously (it is a pleasure to be able to say), because
one's trousers are of a rational volume over the
portion most tried by a sedentary man, nor because
one's hat is of an equivocal shape—having served as
a non-conductor between a wet log and its proprietor;
but ladies do—especially country ladies; and even if
they did not, there is enough of the leaven of youth,
even in philosophers, to make them unwilling to appear
to positive disadvantage, and unless you are quite
at your ease as to even the ridiculous shabbiness of
your outer man, there is no liberty—no economical
liberty, I mean—in rural life. Do not mislead yourself,
dear reader! I am perfectly aware that a Spanish
sombrero, a pair of large French trousers plaited
over the hips, a well made English shoe, and a handsome
checked shirt, form as easy a costume for the
country as philosopher could desire. But I write for
men who must attain the same comfort in a shirt of a
perfectly independent description, trousers, oftenest,
that have seen service as tights, and show a fresher
dye in the seams, a hat, price twenty-five cents (by the
dozen), and shoes of a remediless capriciousness of
outline.

I acknowledge that such a costume is a liberty with
daylight, which should only be taken within one's own
fence, and that it is a misfortune to be surprised in it
by a stranger, even there. But I wish to impress upon
those to whom this letter is addressed, the obligation
of country neighborhood as to dress and table, and the
expediency of securing the degree of liberty which
may be desired, by a barrier of distance. Sociable
country neighbors, as I said before, are a luxury, but
they are certainly an expensive one. Judging by data
within my reach, I should say that a man who could
live for fifteen hundred dollars a year, within a mile of
a sociable village, could have the same personal comforts
at ten miles distance for half the money. He
numbers, say fifteen families, in his acquaintance, and
of course pays at the rate of fifty dollars a family for
their gratification. Now it is a question whether you
would not rather have the money in board fence or
Berkshire hogs. You may like society, and yet not
like it at such a high price. Or (but this would lead
me to another subject) you may prefer society in a
lump; and with a house full of friends in the months
of June and July, live in contemplative and economical
solitude the remainder of the year. And this latter
plan I take the liberty to recommend more particularly,
to students and authors.

Touching “grounds.” The first impulses of taste
are dangerous to follow, no less from their blindness to
unforeseen combinations, than from their expensiveness.
In placing your house as far from the public
road as possible (and a considerable distance from dust
and intrusion, seems at first a sine qua non) you entail
upon yourself a very costly appendage in the shape of
a private road, which of course must be nicely gravelled
and nicely kept. A walk or drive, within your
gate, which is not hard and free from weeds, is as
objectionable as an untidy white dress upon a lady,
and as she would be better clad in russet, your road
were better covered with grass. I may as well say
that a hundred yards of gravel-walk, properly “scored”
weeded, and rolled, will cost five dollars a month—a
man's labor reckoned at the present usage. Now no
person for whom this letter is written can afford to
keep more than one man servant for “chores.” A
hundred yards of gravel-walk, therefore, employing
half his time, you can easily calculate the distribution
of the remainder, upon the flower-garden, kitchen-garden,
wood-shed, stable, and piggery. (The female
“help” should milk, if I died for it!) My own opinion
is, that fifty yards from the road is far enough, and
twenty a more prudent distance, though, in the latter
case, an impervious screen of shrubbery along your
outer fence is indispensable.

The matter of gravel-walks embraces several points
of rural comfort, and, to do without them, you must
have no young ladies in your acquaintance, and,
especially, no young gentlemen from the cities. It
may not have occurred to you in your sidewalk life,
that the dew falls in the country with tolerable regularity;
and that, from sundown to ten in the forenoon,

you are as much insulated in a cottage surrounded
with high grass, as on a rock surrounded with forty
fathom water—shod a la mode, I mean. People talk
of being “pent up in a city” with perhaps twenty
miles of flagged sidewalk extending from their doorstone!
They are apt to draw a contrast, favorable to
the liberty of cities, however, if they come thinly shod
to the country, and must either wade in the grass or
stumble through the ruts of a dusty road. If you
wish to see bodies acted on by an “exhausted receiver”
(giving out their “airs” of course), shut up your
young city friends in a country cottage, by the compulsion
of wet grass and muddy highways. Better
gravel your whole farm, you say. But having reduced
you to this point of horror, you are prepared to listen
without contempt, while I suggest two humble succedanea.

First: On receiving intimation of a probable visit
from a city friend, write by return of post for the size
of her foot (or his). Provide immediately a pair of
India-rubber shoes of the corresponding number, and
on the morning after your friend's arrival, be ready
with them at the first horrified withdrawal of the damp
foot from the grass. Your shoes may cost you a
dollar a pair, but if your visiters are not more than
ten or twelve in the season, it is a saving of fifty per
cent., at least in gravelling and weeding.

Or, Second: Enclose the two or three acres immediately
about your house with a ring fence, and pasture
within it a small flock of sheep. They are clean and
picturesque (your dog should be taught to keep them
from the doors and porticoes), and by feeding down the
grass to a continual greensward, they give the dew a
chance to dry off early and enlarge your cottage
“liberties” to the extent of their browsings.

I may as well add, by the way, that a walk with the
sod simply taken off, is, in this climate, dry enough,
except for an hour or two after a heavy rain; and besides
the original saving in gravel, it is kept clean with
a quarter of the trouble. A weed imbedded in stones
is a much more obstinate customer than a score of
them sliced from the smooth ground. At any rate,
out with them! A neglected walk indicates that
worst of country diseases, a mind grown slovenly and
slip-slop! Your house may go unpainted, and your
dress (with one exception) submit to the course of
events—but be scrupulous in the whiteness of your
linen, tenacious of the neatness of your gravel-walks;
and, while these points hold, you are at a redeemable
remove from the lapse (fatally prone and easy), into
barbarianism and misanthropy.

Before I enter upon the cultivation of grounds, let
me lay before the reader my favorite idea of a cottage
—not a cottage ornée but a cottage insoucieuse, if I may
coin a phrase. In the valley of Sweet Waters, on the
banks of the Barbyses, there stands a small pleasure
palace of the sultan, which looks as if it was dropped
into the green lap of nature, like a jewel-case on a
birth-day, with neither preparation on the part of the
bestower, nor disturbance on the part of the receiver.
From the balcony's foot on every side extends an unbroken
sod to the horizon. Gigantic trees shadow
the grass here and there, and an enormous marble
vase, carved in imitation of a sea-shell, turns the silver
Barbyses in a curious cascade over its lip; but else,
it is all Nature's lap, with its bauble resting in velvet
—no gardens, no fences, no walls, no shrubberies—a
beautiful valley with the sky resting on its rim, and
nothing in it save one fairy palace. The simplicity
of the thing enchanted me, and, in all my yearnings
after rural seclusion, this vision of old travel has, more
or less, colored my fancy. You see what I mean,
with half an eye. Gardens are beautiful, shrubberies
ornamental, summer-houses and alleys, and gravelled
paths, all delightful—but they are, each and all, taxes
—heavy taxes on mind, time, and “dollar.” Perhaps
you like them. Perhaps you want the occupation.
But some men, of small means, like a contemplative
idleness in the country. Some men's time never
hangs heavily under a tree. Some men like to lock
their doors (or to be at liberty to do so), and be gone
for a month, without dread of gardens plundered,
flowers trod down, shrubs browsed off by cattle. Some
men like nothing out of doors but that which can take
care of itself—the side of a house or a forest-tree, or
an old horse in a pasture. These men, too, like that
which is beautiful, and for such I draw this picture
of the cottage insoucieuse. What more simply elegant
than a pretty structure in the lap of a green dell!
What more convenient! What so economical!
Sheep (we may “return to muttons”) are cheaper
“help” than men, and if they do not keep your green-sward
so brightly mown, they crop it faithfully and
turn the crop to better account. The only rule of
perfect independence in the country is to make no
“improvement” which requires more attention than
the making. So—you are at liberty to take your wife
to the springs. So—you can join a coterie at Niagara
at a letter's warning. So—you can spend a winter in
Italy without leaving half your income to servants who
keep house at home. So—you can sleep without
dread of hail-storms on your graperies or green-houses,
without blunderbuss for depredators of fruit, without
distress at slugs, cut-worms, drought, or breachy cattle.
Nature is prodigal of flowers, grapes are cheaper bought
than raised, fruit idem, butter idem (though you mayn't
think so), and as for amusement—the man who can
not find it between driving, fishing, shooting, strolling,
and reading (to say nothing of less selfish pleasures),
has no business in the country. He should go back
to town.

We have a pleasant and welcome correspondent
who signs himself “R. H. D.,” and we have a treasured
and admired friend known to the world as Richard H.
Dana—and they are two different persons. We must
beg our friend of the three disembodied initials to give
way to the embodied three of the poet, though, as we
well know, the three first letters of a man's name may
be as momentous to him as the three legs to the
“moving tripods” seen in the Indian temples by Apollonius.
His miracle may be in them! We ourself
have been un-phœnixed of late (we thought there was
but one of our kind!) by the discovery that there was
another N. P. Willis—(not a quill-pincher, we are
pleased to understand).

“Florian” wishes us to “draw the portrait of a man
fitted by nature to be an editor.” A model editor
would be very difficult to describe, but among other
things, he should answer to the description given in
the sporting books of the dunghill cock: “The best
cocks should be close hitters, deadly heelers, steady
fighters, good mouthers, and come to every point.”

The poem sent us without a signature, “on a lady
with a sweet breath,” implies rather too close quarters
for print. Poetry for these days must be at arms' length.
The new epithet “pimento breath” ought not to be
lost, however—quite the spiciest new word that has
lately been rolled under our tongue. It never occurred
to us before that there was one word to express
cinnamon, nutmegs, and cloves. We wish we could
manufacture more of these single triplicates. Does
our nameless correspondent know, by the way, that
bad breath in Prussia is good ground for divorce?
We recommend him to write a parody on “Knowst
thou the land,” &c.

The Boston papers are glorifying (as was to be expected)
the new volume of poems by Russell Lowell.
We wish for a sight of it, for we are his self-elected
trumpeter, and haste to know the key for a new blast.
By the way, we have taken the liberty (as the immortality
he is bound for is a long race) to drop the encumbrance
of James from his musical name, and hereafter
we shall economize breath, type, and harmony,
by calling him Russell Lowell.

An editor is not supposed (as the world and subscribers
to newspapers know) to require or possess the
luxury of sleep. We sleep with one eye open—we
scorn to deny. We see all that is going on about us,
daylight or dark, and Washington being the fountain
of law, order, and information, we duly give the alarm
—like the geese who saved the capitol. Our readers
have, from week to week, read our lucubrations in
this wise, and here are are some more of them. We
send them forth as daguerreotypes of the present—
sent as records of matters as they fly. We think
they are worth preserving bodily—and we so preserve
them.

The first day of '44 came in like a specimen number
of a magazine, and the open doors of New York
had at least one unexpected visiter in a veritable October
sun. The day was mild enough to make over-coats
uncomfortable in walking—the pavement was dry
and summery—and all the male world seemed abroad.
The household gods of Manhattan were probably unanimous
in their happiness—as all the ladies were “at
home,” and all the ladies' lords were bound to be
“out.” This morning the weather is still softer—
October, possibly, like other popular persons, not finding
one day to suffice for its visits.

I have a headache on the top of my pen, and can
not venture any further description of new-year's day
than the above facts, though yesterday I thought I
could make you a tip-top gossipy letter out of the
day's hilarities. The hosts of the Astor wound up the
excitement for their guests by a superb dinner at candlelight,
with champagne and sweetmeats “à discretion,”
and altogether, I think January one must be
marked with a white stone.

You have read, of course, and loved (much more,
of course) Leigh Hunt's poem of The Rimini. Ticknor
& Co., of Boston, have republished it in one of
their beautiful boudoir editions, and along with it, in
the same neat volume, the half dozen other poems,
most famed, of Hunt's prolific pen. The story (of the
lady who married one brother and loved the other) is
told with a sort of entire new-ness of style and language,
as if it were the one admirable work of a natural
but unpractised poet, and it sticks to the memory
after it is read like Moore's rose-scent to the vase.
Leigh Hunt is a born poet, but one of the most unhappy
citizens of the world that the world holds.
With all the mental capabilities (the wit, the delicacy,
the imagination, and the desire) to be the carpet-poet
of aristocracy that Moore is, he has a most wo-begone
person, and a most marvellous lack of tact and reliability.
He never can stay acquainted with the only
people who, by refinement and talent, are alone capable
of making friendship comfortable to him; and he
has quarrelled with most other of his great contemporaries,
as he did with Byron. And, by the way, he is
dead—by epigram! Moore's felicitously-witty verses
on Hunt's Life of Byron killed him quite out of contemporary
respect. The ludicrous image of the puppy-dog
desecrating the body of the dead lion follows
him into every drawing-room and walks behind him
in every street. He will never recover from that epigram.
Indeed, he has never been like himself since
it was written. It is the most signal extinction of a
great genius by ridicule that I know of on record—
more enduring, from the fact that the English, among
their other conservative peculiarities, have none of our
marvellous alacrity at public forgetting. Had Leigh
Hunt been born with a little thicker skin, somewhat
a cooler head, and the inestimable power of catching
the snowballs of ridicule in his bosom, and keeping
them there till they could be thrown back hardened
into ice, he might have been something between Fonblanque
and Moore, Thiers and Janin, and equal at
least to either of these powerful “penditti.” As it is,
he is uncomfortably poor, and more uncomfortably
un-complacent. With two lines, very Leigh-Hunt-ish,
I cut my paragraph short. He is describing
Apollo's revery while resolving upon the Feast of the
Poets:—

A very superb book of drawings is being subscribed
for in New York—“Forty Atmospheric Views of
American Scenery,” from water-color drawings by
George Harvey. The engravings ere to be in aquatint,
and to be beautifully and artistically colored, so as
closely to resemble the original designs. The views
consist of different atmospheric effects at different
times of day, beginning at daybreak and ending at
midnight—each view a complete landscape, and the
subjects emblematic of the progress of civilization,
from the log-cabin to the highest achievement in architecture.
Mr. Harvey is one of the leading artists
of the new water-color school, and this will probably
be the most superb work of its kind ever published.
A letter from Washington Allston to Mr. Harvey
says:—

“I am unwilling that you should leave Boston without
knowing how much I have been gratified by your
beautiful drawings of American scenery. To me it
appears that you have not only been successful in giving
the character of our scenery, but remarkably
happy in clothing it with an American atmosphere,
which you have expressed with great truth and variety.”

By the thermometer, the winter has commenced
this day, the 5th of January. People pass under my
window with their backs shrugged up to their bump
of philoprogenitiveness, and even the coats of the hard-working
omnibus horses “stare”—as the jockeys say.
I wish the physiologists would explain why horses'
coats do not lie closer when it is cold, and why men,
with the same sensation, raise their arms instinctively
from their sides. Cats and dogs seem to economize
their bodily heat better—lying down when cold in
such an attitude as to expose as little surface to the
air as possible.

Our thoughts are entirely occupied this morning
with two poets. It must be a pleasant book that we
take for company the first hour after waking, and to-day,
with his new volume of poems open on our dressing-table,
we dressed and read Lowell. Thence he
went with us to a tête-à-tête breakfast (for we chanced,
else, to be breakfasting alone), and we were reading
him with a cup of coffee in one hand and his book in
the other, when the letters came in from the post—
and one letter was from a poet new-plumaged, of
whom we had never heard, and who had probably
never heard of himself (as a poet), but still indubitably

a poet—albeit “an apprentice-boy in a printing
office” in a small village in Pennsylvania. We read
his timid letter and two sweet pieces of poetry enclosed
within it, marked the poetry “good” for the Mirror,
and then reverted to our breakfast and book. But,
so early in the morning, a little reading is enough for
a brainful of thought, and from pondering on Lowell's
“Shepherd King of Admetus,” we fell to thinking
over the probable position and destiny of these two
poets.

Lowell is the best-launched poet of his time, and
the defect of his poetry is an advantage to his go-along-ery.
He is stern and strong enough to “take
the wall” of Envy and Misfortune, but not yielding
and soft enough to bend to the unconscious and impulsive
abandonments of love. Love with him is sound
sense, not beautiful madness. He is too bold and abstract
for the

and, if he knows, he has a contempt for, the

The way Lowell handles the word love makes one
start like seeing Rolla pick up Cora's baby with one
hand. The fact is, he is a strong-minded, tough-sinewed,
defying poet, fit to be a martyr to opinion or a
partisan soldier, and if his love be not an excellent
lamp not yet lighted (which is possible), he has never
experienced its first timidity, nor is he likely to know
its ultimate phrensy and prodigality. He has drawn
his own portrait, however, in a “Sonnet written on
his Twenty-fourth Birthday,” and let us read his
character from it:—

What should you think would naturally follow this
“if,” dear reader? He is twenty-four—in the full
tide of blood and youth, and “Love's sun has filled
his soul with splendor.” In building up a climax of
his feelings at this impetuous and passionate age,
what should you fancy would rush up to crown it like
flame to a volcano? What would his “heart break”
for at passionate twenty-four?
In another poem on “Love” he describes “true
love” as
This is a cold description of “true love,” and it is
not half so warm as the “love” which Lowell exhibits
in his preface, for his friend William Page. Compare
the above description, in poetry, of true love for
a woman, with the following confession, in prose, of
love for a man:—

“My dear friend: The love between us, which can
now look back upon happy years of still enlarging confidence,
and forward with a sure trust in its own prophecy
of yet deeper and tenderer sympathies, as long as
life shall remain to us, stands in no need. I am well
aware, of so poor a voucher as an Epistle Dedicatory.
True, it is one of love's chiefest charms that it must
still take special pains to be superfluous in seeking
out ways to declare itself—but for these it demands no
publicity and wishes no acknowledgment. But the
admiration which one soul feels for another loses
half its worth, if it slip any opportunity of making
itself heard and felt,” etc.

Lowell is one kind of poet, and it is the worst manner
of criticism to tell what a poet is not, except more
clearly to define what he is. Though his sexual heart
never swims in his inkstand, he is warm enough in his
enthusiasm for all generous sentiments, and both daring
and delicate enough in his powers of imagination.
Truth, good sense, and fancy, were seldem more
evenly braided together than in his poem of “The
Heritage,” and Rosaline (though it never could have
been conceived by a man who had passionately loved)
is the very finest cobweb of fancy. Nobody could
help loving the truth, honesty, fearlessness, and energy,
stamped on all his poetry, and, as we said before,
he has the “vim” to carve out for himself any destiny
he pleases. He has determined to live by literature,
but we do not believe he will long remain a poet only.
He will wish to take the world by the beard in some
closer clutch than poetry gives room for, and his good
judgment as to the weight of heavy English words,
will try itself before long on more serious matter than
sonnets. At least, that is what we think while admiring
him over our breakfast.

As to the other poet, Bayard Taylor, we had a
great deal to say to him—sympathy, encouragement,
promise of watchfulness over his fame, etc., etc. But
he will need no special kindness yet awhile. Love is
plenty for new-found poets. Many people love little
chickens who are insensible to the merits of cocks
and hens, and we reserve our friendship till he is matured
and envied. Meantime, if he wants our opinion
that he is a poet, and can be, with toil and study—immortal—he
has it. His poetry is already worthy of
long preserving—apprentice-boy though he be.

I had quite a summery trip to Philadelphia on the
second day of the new year, sitting at the open window
of the railcar and snuffing the fragrance of the
soft, sun-warmed fields with as good comfort as I ever
found in April. But for the rudeness and incivility
of all the underlings employed upon the line (and I
am too old a traveller, and was in too sunny a humor,
to find fault unnecessarily). I should have given the
clerk of happiness credit for five hours “bankable”
satisfaction. It tells ill for the manners of the “Directors
of the Philadelphia and New York Railroad Line,”
that their servants are habitually insolent and profane—
servants being usually what their masters look on
without reproof.

Philadelphia makes an impression of great order,
comfort, and elegance, upon a stranger, and there is
no city in the country where I like better to “loiter
by the way.” Not feeling very “gregarious” the day
I was there, and having heard much mention of Sanderson's
restaurant—(moreover, having found a new
book at Lea & Blanchard's, a look into which promised
excellent dinner-company)—I left my hotel and
dined à la Française—I and my new book. I never
had a more capital dinner in France than this impromptu
one at Sanderson's, and I wish the book had

been American as well as the dinner—for the glory it
is to the country that produced it. It was to me
much more enchanting and captivating than a novel,
yet the subject was, “The Education of Mothers, or
the Civilization of Mankind”—a subject you would
naturally expect to find treated with somewhat trite
morality. This work, however (which gained the
prize offered by the French Academy), is written with
complete novelty and freshness, and—to define it in a
way that every thinking man will comprehend—it is a
most delightfully suggestive book—full of thoughts
and sentences that make you stop and close the volume
till you have fed awhile on what they convey to
you. If this book were properly presented to the appreciation
of the public, it would circulate widely on
the two levels of amusement and instruction, and be
as delightful in one field as it would be eminently useful
in the other. I commend it to every one who is
in want of enjoyable reading. The motto, by-the-way,
is that true sentiment from Rousseau: “Les
hommes seront toujours ce qu'il plaira aux femmes. Si
vous voulez qu'ils deviennent grands et vertueux, apprenez
aux femmes ce que c'est que grandeur et vertu.”

The New Mirror has published No. 3 of what a
morning paper calls “aristocratic shilling literature,”
an extra containing “The Lady Jane, and other Humorous
Poems,” by N. P. Willis. The Lady Jane
is a daguerreotype sketch of the London literary society
in which Moore, Bulwer, D'Israeli, Proctor, and
others of that class habitually live, and it is, at least,
done with the utmost labor limæ of the author. Byron,
in a manner, monopolized the Don Juan stanza
(in which this poem is written), and no one could now
attempt the stanza, however different the story and
style of thought, without being criticised inevitably
as an imitator. Still, it is the only stanza susceptible,
to any high degree, of mingled pathos and humor,
philosophy and fun, and it is likely to be used for such
purposes until the monopoly is lost sight of—a hundred
years hence. There is a great deal in “The
Lady Jane” which is truer and newer than most
sketches of society published in books of travel—a
great deal that could only be told in such a poem, or
in the rattle of familiar gossip.

I met just now, in the corridor of the Astor, Captain
Chadwick, of the London packet-ship Wellington,
just arrived in twenty-two days from England.
At this season of the year, and up-hill (as the sailors
call it, westerly winds always predominating on the
Atlantic), this is a remarkable passage, and could only
have been made by a fine ship, well sailed. I have
made two remarkably short passages across the water
with Captain Chadwick, and a more agreeable companion,
or a better “skipper,” I believe, never tightened
a halliard. He is one of those happy men famous
for “good luck,” which commonly means, “taking
good care.” This is the ship on board of which
the duke of Wellington made a speech (at a breakfast
given to him by the captain) very complimentary
to America and Americans.

There is a considerable outbreak lately in the way
of equipages in New York. Several four-horse vehicles
have made their appearance, driven by the
young men who own them. I have noticed also a
new curricle in beautiful taste (driven with a steel bar
over the horses' backs), and a tilbury with two servants
in livery, one on the seat with his master, and
another on horseback, following as an outrider. We
are to have a masked ball this evening, and a steeple-chase
is to come off on the twentieth (Viscount Bertrand
one of the riders, and each competitor entering
a thousand-dollar stake for the winner). I shall be at
the ball, not at the steeple-chase—for a horse must
have iron legs to run over frozen ploughed fields, and
a man must have less use for his life than I, who
would risk a fall upon a surface like broken stones.
The viscount has won several steeple-chases in England,
and has had some rough riding after the Arabs
in Algiers—so I would bet on him, unless there happened
to be a fox-hunting Irishman among the competitors.
There are six riders, I understand, and one
of them will win six thousand dollars, of course, and
probably six horses will be ruined, and one or two
necks broken. Fortunately, there is a superfluity of
horses and young men.

The story goes that “there is a skeleton in every
man's closet,” and there is, of course (in a country
as independent as ours is of les prestiges), a phantom
following every man who is conspicuous, and pointing
at his drawback. The drawback to any elaborate
novelty of luxury is at once read legibly in Broadway.
Seeing a new and very costly equipage in England,
you merely know that the owner had money enough
to buy it. The contrivance of it, the fitting of the
harness, the matching and breaking in of the horses,
are matters attended to by those who make these details
their profession. The turn-out is brought perfect
to the owner's door, and he pays, simply, money
for it. In this country, on the contrary, the purchaser
and driver of such a vehicle pays for it money, contrivance,
constant thought, and almost his entire attention.
The classes are yet wanting who purvey for luxuries
out of the ordinary course. There is no head-groom
whose business it is to save his master from all
thought and trouble as to his turn-out. The New
York “Glaucus” must go every day for a month to
the coachmaker's, to superintend the finishing of his
new “drag.” He must hurry his breakfast to go to
the stable to look after his irresponsible grooms. He
spends hours at the harness-maker's. He racks his
thought to contrive compact working-room for his
wheelers, and get the right pull on his leaders. He
becomes learned in harness-blacking and wheel-grease,
horse-shoes and horse-physic, and, in short, entirely
occupies what philosophers are pleased to call “an immortal
mind” in the one matter of a vehicle to drive.
(He could be conveyed, of course, the same distance
each day in an omnibus for sixpence—but he does not
believe the old satire of “aliquis in omnibus, nihil in
singulis.” Quite the contrary!) A man who is not
content, in this country, to be provided for with the
masses, and like the masses, becomes his own provider
—like a man who, to have a coat different from other
people, should make it himself, and, of course, be little
except an amateur tailor. We shall have these
supplementary links of society in time. There will
be, doubtless, the class of thought-savers. But, until
then, the same amount of thought that would serve a
constituency in Congress, will be employed in keeping
a “slap-up turn-out,” and rich young men will
at least have the credit of choosing between stable
knowledge and legislative ambition.

I had thought that the revenue which foreign theatres
derive from selling to young men, at large prices,
keys for the season to the behind-scenes, and the society
of the goddesses of the ballet while off the
stage, was not yet discovered in this country. The
following paragraph, from the True Sun, would seem
to show that the coulisses are visited for their society,
at least, and might be made “to pay:”—

“Among the cases which are set down for trial next
term, is one which will lift the curtain which conceals
the affairs of a certain cheap theatre in this city, and
give the public a bird's-eye view of what has been recently
going on behind the scenes. The developments,
if not prevented by an amicable arrangement,
will be rich and rare—showing the procedure by
which a luminary of the law has run out of his orbit,
displacing, in his new and erratic course, a luminary
of literature!”

The fine writing of this paragraph, by-the-way, is
rather piquant.

The belle of the Olympic, pretty Miss Taylor,
could scarce have a better advertisement for attraction
than a paragraph which announces that she “has
been robbed of six hundred dollars worth of jewelry,”
and that “MANY heavy articles of plate, rich dresses,
&c., were LEFT UNDISTURBED!” I am inclined to
think that this is a covert puff from Mitchell's genius—for
he is a genius, and quite capable of knowing
that everybody will go to have a look at an actress
who had “six hundred dollars' worth of jewelry and
many heavy articles of plate left undisturbed!” People,
like pictures, are made to “stand out” by a
well-contrived background! Ah, you bright fellow,
Mitchell!

The event ahead which has the most rose-colored
promise, just now, is the Annual Ball of the City
Guard—to be given at Niblo's on the twenty-fourth.
Niblo's finely-proportioned hall has been, for some
time, undergoing a transformation into a model of the
ancient Alhambra for the purpose, and Smith, the excellent
scene-painter of the Park, and a troop of decoraters
and upholsterers under his direction, are doing
all that taste and money can do to conjure up a
scene of enchantment “for one night only.” The
supper is to make the gods hungry and envious on
Olympus—so sumptuous, they say, are the preparations.
The City Guard, as you may know, is what
the English army-men call the “crack corps” of New
York. The probability is, that its members represent
more spirit, style, and character, than belong to
any other combination of young men in the state.
They have a great deal of fashion, as well as esprit du
corps, and, what with their superb uniform, uppish
carriage, superior discipline, and high-spirited union
of purpose, they constitute a power of no little weight
and consideration. Their ball will probably be the
most showy festivity of the season.

The masked ball which comes off to-night is, I am
told, got up by a party of literary ladies, to promote
ease in conversation! I can hardly fancy anything
more easy than the “freedoms of the press,” and, I
am told, most of the gentlemen of the press are invited,
myself among the number. A man is a block,
of course, who is not open to improvement.

I went to the masked ball without any very clear
idea of who were its purposers, or what were its
purposes. I found to my surprise that it was the
celebration of the opening of the Ladies' Club in
the upper part of Broadway. A fine house has been
taken and furnished, and the reading-room goes immediately
into operation, I understand. Like the
frolic they gave (in some country of which I have
read and desire to know more) to the nuns before
taking the irrevocable veil, the carpets were taken up
and music and men introduced to make the gynocrastic
seclusion hereafter more marked and positive.
Being “an early man,” I stayed but an hour, listening
to the band and looking on; but I saw beauty
there which might make one almost envy the newspapers
that are to be perused by a “club” of such,
and a general air enjoué more lovely than literary.
The masks were few, and the fun of them was quite
destroyed by the fact that every one seemed to know
who they were. Indeed, the pleasure of reputable
masking lies in the momentary breaking down of barriers
that in this country do not exist—in giving low
degree and high degree a chance to converse freely,
that is to say—and till we have unapproachable lords
and princes, and ladies weary of the thin upper air of
exclusiveness, masquerading will be dull work to us.
At present the mask makes rather than removes an obstacle
to intercourse. Anybody who is there in a
mask, would be just as glad to see you tête-à-tête by
daylight, the next morning in her parlor, as to chat
with you through pasteboard and black crape. Most
of the ladies at this literary ball were in fancy dresses,
however, and doubtless with their pastoral attractions
displayed to the best advantage; and this part of it
was commendable. If women knew what was attractive,
I think they would make every ball a “fancy
ball.” “Medora” jackets and “Sultana” trousers are
choses entrainantes.

I think you would agree with me, after reading it,
that Brantz Mayer's work on Mexico, recently
published, is as agreeably spiced with wit, humor, and
other pleasant metal pimento, as any book of travels
written within new-book memory. I have run through
it within a day or two with some suspense, as well as
great amusement—for so racy and sketchy a power
of description should be in the corps of professed,
not amateur authors. His descriptions of the outer
features of Mexican life, of Mexican character, Mexican
women, beggars, priests, and gamblers, are admirably
spirited and entertaining. There is also a
good deal of statistical matter industriously and carefully
got together, and the publisher has done justice
to it all in the printing and getting up. There will
be elaborate reviews of it elsewhere; but meantime I
express my pleasurable surprise and admiration in a
paragraph—commending it for the purchase of readers.

The fourth extra of the New Mirror has appeared,
embodying Morris's popular songs and melodies,
which have heretofore only been published with music,
or in a very expensive embellished edition of his
works. The hundred thousand lovers of married poetry
(music the wife, or husband, I don't know which)
will be glad to get these “winged words” in a lump
for a shilling. Morris's popularity will send this extra
to every corner of the land.

The betting upon the riders in the proposed hurdle-race
(not steeple-chase, as I mentioned before) goes
on vigorously. I rather doubt, however, whether it
will ultimately come off. There was a steeple-chase
got up on Long Island, last year, in which an Irishman
and an Englishman, whose fames had followed
them, as great hunters, were the competitors, and
after getting over two fences by pushing them down
with their horses' breasts, they got imprisoned in a
clover-lot, from which they were extricated with great
difficulty by the owner's letting down the bars and
leading the horses over! There is a compact, jockey-built
American among the competitors, who has great
skill as a horseman, and should there be snow on the
ground, his light weight and superior practice will

win the race for him without a doubt. The Viscount
Bertrand, though doubtless the boldest of riders, is
over six feet high, and a heavy man.

The Statistics of Puffing.—We have been induced
lately to look a little into the meum and tuum
of puffing—partly from having been untruly (qu. prematurely?)
accused of “receiving consideration for
the same,” but more to see whether the consideration
were worth the having, in case conscience (“John Tetzel,
vender of indulgences,” being dead) could be
brought to countenance it. We pique ourselves on
looking things in the face, and having and allowing
as few concealments as possible—so, first, for a clean
breast on the subject—say up to January 1, 1844.

We are not particular, as “Mrs. Grundy” knows,
as to the subject we write upon, nor the harness in
which we are put to work, nor the style, rhythm, or
rhyme, we are called upon to write in. We go altogether
for metallic magnetism. It is our duty (on
our way to Heaven) to try for a “plum”—in other
words, to be “diligent in business.” We write what
in our judgment is best calculated to sell. But, in
the course of this policy, it falls in our way to speak
of things to eat, and things to wear—very capable
topics, both, as to piquancy and interest. We have
had occasion to describe glowingly Florence's crustaceous
cave, and the ice-cream Alhamra, and to
pronounce Carpenter the ne plus ultra of coat-builders,
and Jennings's the emporium of “bang-up”
toggery, and for these and similar serviceable “first-rate
notices,” we have, in no shape,[2] received “con-sid-e-ra-tion.”
The gentlemen who have said so
(“the hawks” who would “pick out hawks' een”)
will please make an early meal of their little fictions.

As to literary puffs, we would as soon sell our tears
for lemon-drops, as to defile one of God's truthful
adjectives with a price for the using it. We never
asked for a literary puff in our life, nor made interest
for it in any shape, nor would we sell one for the
great emerald Sakhral. But if we love a man (as we
do many, thank God, whom we are called upon to
criticise), we pick out the gold that is inlaid in his
book, and leave to his enemies to find the brass and
tinsel. And if that's not fair, we don't very much care
—for we scorn to be impartial.

But let us hop off this high horse, and come down
to the trade part of it once more.

In England, all influences that aid business are
priced and paid. The puffs of new books in the
newspapers are invariably sent, ready-written, by the
publishers, and paid for at a much higher price than
avowed advertisements. The continued effect of this
abuse of the public ear is based upon the phlegmatic
dulness of perception in the English public, and their
consequent chronic humbuggability. It could never
“answer” in our country after being once fairly exposed.
It is, to a certain degree, practised, however
—as is pay for concert-puffing, music-puffing, theatrical-puffing,
etc.

Having confessed that we are willing to admit an
entering wedge of iniquity in this line—in other
words, that we are willing to know whether it be honest
to serve a man and contemplate his thanks in
lucre—let us “run the line,” as the surveyors say,
and see how our new territory of tribute may be virtuously
bounded.

Authors have “the freedom” of us, of course.
They are welcome to all we can do for them—if they
publish on their own account. Actors, singers, and
painters, are “chartered libertines” for whom we have
a weakness; and, besides, we can not feed on the
wages of pleasure-makers. All other pursuits, trades,
professions, we are half inclined to admit, will be at
liberty to make us such acknowledgments as they
choose for any furtherance to their merchandise (in
bales or brains) which may come legitimately in our
way. We shall, in any case, preserve the value of
our commendation by keeping it honest, and we shall
never commend any farther than is entertaining and
readable—but there is a choice between subjects to
write about, and a preference as to giving attention to
things about town, and it is for this choice and preference
that we may make up our mind to be susceptible
of corruption. We write this in the cool of the
morning. We don't know what we shall think in the
more impulsive hours. Meantime—send it to the
printer, and see what the governor says of it in the
proof-sheet.

A few gentlemen (Mr. Philip Hone apparently the
mover of the project) have combined to raise a subscription
for the purchase of Clevenger's statue of a
North American Indian. The circular addresses the
business-men of the city, and the statue, if purchased,
will be presented to the Mercantile Library Association.
Three thousand dollars is the sum fixed upon,
five hundred of which are to be appropriated to the
immediate relief of Mrs. Clevenger and her children.
It would strike, perhaps, even some of the subscribers
to this fund with surprise to tell them that the statue
they are to purchase is possibly still lying unquarried
in the mountains of Carrara. Clevenger is dead, but
his genius stands pointing its finger to a rude block of
marble, in which lies, unseen, a complete and immortal
statue, waiting only for the chisel of mechanical
workmen to remove the rough stone that encumbers
it. That finger is seen and obeyed three thousand
miles away (by the committee with Mr. Philip Hone
at its head), and the reluctant money will be forthcoming
and on its way to Italy in a month, and the
statue will be found and finished, imported, and exhibited
at Clinton Hall! (Plain matter-of-fact, all
this, and yet it sounds very like poetry!) I was told
by Thorwalsden, when at Rome, that there were several
of his statues he had never seen. They were finished,
as far as he was concerned, when they were
moulded in clay. They were then cast in plaster by
the mechanics who make a trade of it, and the plaster
models were sent to Carrara, where there is a large
village of copyists in marble living near the marble
quarries. From Carrara the statues were sent, when
finished, to Copenhagen, their ultimate destination,
and Thorwalsden, on his subsequent visit to his native
country, saw them for the first time. The cost of delivering
Clevenger's statue from the womb of the
mountain impregnated by his genius will be about one
thousand dollars—a round fee for the accouchement of
the stony mother of “a North American Indian!”

Burns's Letters to Clarinda have disappointed many
people, who expected, naturally, to find a poet's love
letters better written than another man's. I think the
contrary would naturally be true. Fine writing is an
arm's-length dexterity, and the heart works only at
close quarters. I should suspect the sincerity of a
poet's love-letter if it were not far within his habitual
tact and grace. Besides, in strong emotion, the heart
flies from the much-used channels of language, and
tries for something newer to its own ear, and, while an
ordinary man would find this novelty in poetical language,
a poet would seek to roughen, and simplify,

and break up the habitual art and melody of his periods.
By-the-way, the name of Burns reminds me
of a little anecdote I heard told with some humor by
Campbell, at a dinner-party in London. Count
D'Orsay and Barry Cornwall were present, and they
were drawing out the veteran bard as to his recollections
of the great men who were setting stars when he
was rising. “I was dining one day with Burns,” said
Campbell, “who, like Dr. Johnson and other celebrities,
had his Bozzy worshipper, a friend who was
always in his company. I have forgotten his name.
Burns left the room for a moment, and passing the
bottle to his friend, I proposed to drink the health
of Mr. Burns. He gave me a look of annihilation.
`Sir,' said he, `you will always be known as Mr.
Campbell, but posterity will talk of Burns!”' Such
an anecdote makes one look around in alarm, to see if
there are not some unrecognised mononoms in our time,
whom we are profaning, unaware, with our Mister-y.

It rains in Broadway—as it has often done before, it
is true; but it seems to me a particularly wet rain, for
there is an old black beggar standing in front of St.
Paul's, holding out his hat for what must be, at any
rate, a diluted charity. At a fair calculation (and I
have watched him while writing, for the last two
hours), every tenth passenger put something into his
hat. His gray wool must hold more water than his
leaky hat, and, at least, it acts like a sponge—on the
passers-by. Begging, as yet, is a good trade in
America, and I think that New York, particularly, is
a place where money has little adhesiveness—easily
made and readily given away.

I have noticed in history and real life that reformers,
great enthusiasts, and great philosophers, produce
effects quite commensurate with their ambitions, but
seldom by success in the exact line they had marked
out. Providence does not allow “steam” to be wasted.
In the search after the “elixir of life,” and the “philosopher's
stone,” for example, the alchymists have
stumbled over some of the most important discoveries
of chymistry. This is rather an essayish beginning to
a hasty-pudding letter, but I have been looking over
Brisbane's book on Fourierism, while eating my breakfast,
and it struck me how poorly the direct objects of
“socialism” succeeded, while combination, to produce
great and small results, seems to me to be the most
prominent novelty in the features of the time. Mercantile
houses are establishing partners in all the principal
capitals—new publications are circulated almost
wholly by a lately-arranged system of combined agencies—information,
formerly got by individual reading,
is now fed out to large societies; and the rumor just
now is, of a grand experiment of combining all the qualities
of half a dozen newspapers in one—establishing
something like the London Times, for instance, in
which the subscriber would be sure to find “everything
that is going.”

I went on Wednesday evening to the temperance
tea-party, at Washington Hall, given in honor of the
birthday of Franklin. Here was combination again—
tea-party, prayer-meeting, lecture, concert, promenade,
and tableau vivant (a printing-press worked in the
room), all given in one entertainment. There were
seven or eight long tables, with alleys between, and from
a thousand to twelve hundred ladies and gentlemen
seated “at tea,” and listening to the singing, praying,
instrumental music, and speech-making, with a great
appearance of comfort. I did not stay for the “promenade
all round,” but I am told that it was very
agreeable, and that the party did not separate till two
in the morning! The temperance combination has
been a great lesson as to the power of numbers united
for one end; though I fear the action of it has been
somewhat like the momentry sweeping dry of a
river's channel by a whirlwind, so strikingly seems
intemperance, of late, to have resumed its prevalence
in the streets.

I find that, by my hasty observations on New York
society in a late letter, I have given voice to a feeling
that has been for some time in petto publico, and I
have heard since a great deal of discussion of the
quality of New York gayety. It seems to be the
opinion of good observers, that the best elements of
society are not organized. The intellect and refinement
of the population (of which there is quite
enough for a fair proportion) lies “around in spots,”
it is thought, waiting only for some female Napoleon
to concentrate and combine them. Exclusively literary
parties would be as unattractive as exclusively
dancing or juvenile parties, and indeed variety is the
spice of agreeable social intercourse. In London,
beauty is, with great pains, dug out from the mine of
unfashionable regions, and made to shine in an aristocratic
setting; and talent of all kinds, colloquial, literary,
artistical, theatrical, is sought out, and mingled
with rank, wealth, and elegance, in the most perfect
society of Europe. Any sudden attempt to discredit
fashionable parties, and run an opposition with a
“blue” line, would be covered with ridicule. But I
think enough has been said, in a community as mercurial
and sympathetic of news as is the population of
New York, to induce the Amphytrions of gayety to
look a little into their social mixtures, and supply the
sweets or acids that are wanting. At the most fashionable
party lately given, Madame Castellan was the
guest of honor, and not called upon to sing—and this
is somewhat more Londonish than usual. It is one
of the newnesses of our country that we have no
grades in our admiration, and can only see the merits
of extreme lions. Second, third, and fourth-rate celebrities,
for whom in Europe there is attention justly
measured, pass wholly unnoticed through our cities.
It must be a full-blooded nobleman, or the first singer
or danseuse of the world, or the most popular author,
or the very first actor, or the miraculous musician, if
there is to be any degree whatever of appreciation or
enthusiasm. This lack of a scale of tribute to merit is
one reason why we so ridiculously overdo our welcomes
to great comets, as in the case of Dickens—
leaving very respectable stars, like Emerson, Longfellow,
Cooper, Sully, and all our own and some foreign
men of genius, to pass through the city, or remain
here for weeks, unsought by party-givers, and unwelcomed
except by their personal friends. To point
this out, fortunately, is almost to correct it, so ready
are we to learn; but I think, by the shadow cast
before, that the avatar of some goddess of fashion may
be soon looked for, who will shut her doors upon stupidity
and inelegance, rich or poor, and create a gayety
that will be enjoyable, not barely endurable.

I am very sorry to see by the English papers that
Dickens has been “within the rules of the Queen's
bench”—realizing the prophecy of pecuniary ruin
which has, for some time, been whispered about for
him. His splendid genius did not need the melancholy
proof of improvidence, and he has had wealth
so completely within his grasp that there seems a particular
and unhappy needlessness in his ruin. The
most of his misfortune is, he has lived so closely at
the edge of his flood-tide of prosperity, that the ebb
leaves him at high-water mark, and not in the contented

ooze of supplied necessity where it first took
him up. And by-the-way, it was in that same low-water
period of his life—just before he became celebrated—that
I first saw Dickens; and I will record
this phase of his chrysalis (“the tomb of the caterpillar
and the cradle of the butterfly,” as Linnæus
calls it), upon the chance of its being as interesting to
future ages as such a picture would now be of the
ante-butterflicity of Shakspere. I was following a
favorite amusement of mine one rainy day, in the
Strand, London—strolling toward the more crowded
thoroughfares with cloak and umbrella, and looking at
people and shop-windows. I heard my name called
from a passenger in a street-cab. From out the
smoke of the wet straw peered the head of my publisher,
Mr. Macrone (a most liberal and noble-hearted
fellow, since dead). After a little catechism as to my
damp destiny for that morning, he informed me that
he was going to visit Newgate, and asked me to join
him. I willingly agreed, never having seen this famous
prison, and after I was seated in the cab, he said he
was going to pick up, on the way, a young paragraphist
for the Morning Chronicle, who wished to write a
description of it. In the most crowded part of Holborn,
within a door or two of the “Bull and Mouth”
inn (the great starting and stopping-place of the stage-coaches),
we pulled up at the entrance of a large
building used for lawyers' chambers. Not to leave
me sitting in the rain, Macrone asked me to dismount
with him. I followed by long flights of stairs to an
upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted
and bleak-looking room, with a deal table and two
or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and
Mr. Dickens—for the contents. I was only struck at
first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it
that evening, as the strongest instance I had seen of
English obsequiousness to employers)—the degree to
which the poor author was overpowered with the
honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying to
myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair. “My good
fellow, if you were in America, with that fine face and
your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended
to by a publisher!” Dickens was dressed
very much as he has since described “Dick Swiveller”—
minus the “swell” look. His hair was cropped
close to his head, his clothes scant, though jauntily
cut, and after changing a ragged office-coat for a
shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and buttoned
up, the very personification, I thought, of a
close sailer to the wind. We went down and crowded
into the cab (one passenger more than the law allowed,
and Dickens partly in my lap and partly in Macrone's)
and drove on to Newgate. In his works, if you remember,
there is a description of the prison, drawn
from this day's observation. We were there an hour
or two, and were shown some of the celebrated murderers
confined for life, and one young soldier waiting
for execution; and in one of the passages we chanced
to meet Mrs. Fry, on her usual errand of benevolence.
Though interested in Dickens's face, I forgot him
naturally enough after we entered the prison, and I do
not think I heard him speak during the two hours. I
parted from him at the door of the prison, and continued
my stroll into the city.

Not long after this, Macrone sent me the “sheets
of Sketches by Boz,” with a note saying that they
were by the gentleman who went with us to Newgate.
I read the book with amazement at the genius displayed
in it, and in my note of reply assured Macrone that
I thought his fortune was made as a publisher if he
could monopolize the author.

Two or three years afterward. I was in London, and
present at the complimentary dinner given to Macready.
Samuel Lover, who sat next me, pointed out
Dickens. I looked up and down the table, but was
wholly unable to single him out without getting my
friend to number the people who sat above him. He
was no more like the same man I had seen than a tree
in June is like the same tree in February. He sat
leaning his head on his hand while Bulwer was speaking,
and with his very long hair, his very flash waistcoat,
his chains and rings, and withal a much paler
face than of old, he was totally unrecognisable. The
comparison was very interesting to me, and I looked
at him a long time. He was then in his culmination
of popularity, and seemed jaded to stupefaction. Remembering
the glorious works he had written since I
had seen him, I longed to pay him my homage, but
had no opportunity, and I did not see him again till
he came over to reap his harvest and upset his haycart
in America. When all the ephemera of his imprudences
and improvidences shall have passed away
—say twenty years hence—I should like to see him
again, renowned as he will be for the most original and
remarkable works of his time.

A friend lent me yesterday a late file of “The
Straits Messenger,” an English newspaper published
at Singapore. The leader of one number commences
with. “We have always had a hatred for republicanism,
and holding it to be the fosterer of every rascality
in public life, and every roguery in private, we are not
at all surprised when instances turn up to prove our
theory true.” This is apropos of some news of
“repudiation.” The advertisements in this paper
amused me somewhat, and this consist principally of
dissolutions of native partnership. Here are three of
them:—

“Notice. The interest and responsibility of Kim
Joo Ho in our firm ceased from the 8th January.
(Signed) Yep Hun Ho.”

“Notice. The interest and responsibility of the
undersigned in the firm of Chop Tyho ceased from
this date. (Signed) Chee Ong Seang, Chee Jin
Seo.”

“Notice. The interest and responsibility of Mr.
See Eng San in our firm ceased from the 5th January
(Signed Boonteeong & Co.”

In the old English of Gower's “Confessio Amantis”
there is wrapped up a little germ of wisdom which
you would hardly look for in the metaphysics of love,
but which contains the hand over hand, boiling pot
principle of most of the make-money ries of our
country:—

In England nobody gets ahead but by shoving on
all those who are before him, but a hundred instances
will occur to you of leap-frog experiment in our country,
by which all kinds of success in business is superseded.
The most signal and successful jump that I
have noticed lately is that of the periodical agents, over
the heads of the old publishers—(the trick, indeed,
which has hocus-pocused the old pirates into changing
their views on the subject of copyright!) Three
years ago the great apparatus for the circulation of
books, was entirely a secret in the hands of the trade,
and a man might as well have attempted to run a rail-car
across the fields by hand as an author to have attempted
to circulate his own book without the consent
of publishers. The names and terms of bookselling
correspondents, the means of transportation of
books, and the amount of profits on them, were matters
of inaccessible knowledge. The publisher kept the

gate of the public eye, and demanded his own toll—
two thirds of the commodity, if not all! The first
“little pin” that “bored through this castle wall,”
was the establishment of the mammoth newspaper, by
Day and Wilson, and the publication of entire novels
on one sheet; and, upon their agencies for the circulation
of these, is now built a scheme of periodical
agency totally separate from publishers, and comparing
with these as the expresses of Hale and Harnden and
Pomeroy do with the general post-office—cheaper,
more expeditious and open to competition.

It is, perhaps, not generally known, that any author,
now, can publish his own book, and get all the profits!
Any printer will tell him how to get it printed and
bound in paper covers—for which he pays simply what
publishers do. Stored up in his own room or a warehouse,
he has only to furnish it to the periodical agents,
who will take of him, at their wholesale price, all that
will sell—(bringing the risk directly on the proper
shoulders, those of the author)—and returning to him.
very promptly the money or the unsaleable copies.
There are no “six months publishers' notes” in the
business; no cringing or making interest. The author
is on a blessed level with the gingerbread bakers and
blacking sellers he has often envied—salesman of his
own commodity, if saleable it be, and made aware, to
a certainty, in a very brief time, whether he has mistaken
his vocation. Let but congress give us a law
which shall prevent English books from coming, not
into the market, but into the publishers' hands, for
nothing, and the only remaining obstacle to a worldwide
competition will be gloriously removed. And,
books will be no dearer than at present—as the memorials
to congress sufficiently show.

There are some delicious works of art now exhibiting
opposite the hospital, in Broadway—Harvey's
Atmospheric Effects of American Scenery. Those
who have not been observers in other countries are
scarcely aware how peculiar our country is in its atmospheric
phenomena—how much bolder, brighter,
and more picturesque. There is scarce a scene pictured
in this beautiful gallery which could be at all true
of any other country; but to the American eye they
are enchantingly faithful and beautiful. The artist
gives in his prospectus for engraving these works the
following interesting bit of autobiography:—

“In 1827 I entered upon the line of portrait-painting
in miniature: I pursued it for nine years with an
assiduity that impaired my health. Country air and
exercise being recommended me, I purchased a tract
of land on the majestic Hudson; built a cottage after
my own plan: amused myself by laying out grounds,
and gained health and strength by the employment.
These exercises in the open air led me more and more
to notice and study the ever-varying atmospheric effects
of this beautiful climate. I undertook to illustrate
them by my pencil, and thus almost accidentally,
commenced a set of atmospheric landscapes. The
number had reached twenty-two, and as yet I had no
thought of publication when business called me to
Europe. I carried them with me, and, while in London,
occasionally attended the Conversazione of Artists.
At one of these I accidentally heard a gentleman, on
leaving a little knot of connoisseurs assembled round
my portfolio, pass a most flattering eulogium on its
contents. I felt the more elated by his praise on
learning that he was Professor Farrady, the able successor
of Sir Humphrey Davy. At Paris, while partaking
of the courteous hospitality of the American
minister, Governor Cass, my portfolio was sent for and
received the approbation of that gentleman and his
guests. Governor Cass retained my drawings for a
week; on returning them to me he recommended
that I should have them engraved, and suggested that
it might be done at once, while I was in Paris. I was
too diffident, however, of their popular merit, to risk
so extensive an undertaking. On my return to New
York my personal friends encouraged me in the project,
and at last I made up my mind to lay the original
drawings before the Boston public; conceiving that I
owed it to that city, where I had received liberal encouragement
in my previous pursuits to give to them
the opportunity of originating the work of publication.”

Mr. Harvey went afterward to London to find print-colorists
who could execute the work to his satisfaction,
and, while there, Mr. Murray, who was formerly
in this country, and is now attached to her majesty's
household, showed to the queen the first number.
The royal subscription was immediately given to the
work at a munificent price. It is worth every one's
while to see this delicious work of art, and every person
of easy means should subscribe for a copy of the
engravings.

The SLEIGHS flying very briskly up and down Broadway
this morning remind me that Miss Howitt, in her
late preface to one of Miss Bremer's works, mentions,
among other phrases, our use of the words “sleighs,
sleds, and sleighing, for sled ges and sled ging,”—calling
them “Americanisms which all well-educated persons
will be careful not to introduce into their families.”
Miss Howitt might allow, to a continent of the size
of ours, the privilege of coining a word without the
tariff of her contempt; but she forgets that sled is a
good English word, and derived from the very language
of the book she has translated—from the Swedish
word slœda. Thomson says in his Seasons:—

And Fletcher says, in a fine passage of his Eclogue:—

The cold weather of the last week has justified
another Americanism, for it has been literally “a cold
spell”—dimming parlor lights, and arresting the flow
of thought. The gas-lights burn dim because water
freezes in the gasometers, and “whole stacks of new
publications” (as a periodical agent told me yesterday)
are “books and stationary,” from the interrupted navigation.

Palmo's new opera has been voted fashionable,
nem. con. (as I have been fashionably assured), and
the long ellipse of other theatricals will give it a flowing
launch. It is a small and beautiful edifice, and is
to be brilliantly lighted, and made every way conformable
to the exactions of white kid and cashmere. Its
situation is admirable—far enough up Chamber street
to be away from the noises of Broadway, and accessible
easily from all parts of the city. This evening
comes off the preparatory rehearsal, to which the
connoisseurs and gentlemen of the press are invited as
guests. The printed invitation by the way, makes
Mr. Palmo out to be (very properly) a fellow-citizen
of the Muses, and is altogether an amusing production.
A copy of it, filled up with the name of a friend of
ours, lies by me, running thus: “The honor of the
company of N. P. W—, Grand Scribe, are respectfully
invited to attend the first public rehearsal of the
Italian Opera, on Friday evening. The house will
be brilliantly illuminated, and the connoisseur in music

will have an opportunity of beholding an edifice erected
and dedicated to the Muses, by their fellow-citizen,
F. Palmo.”

This making “fellow-citizens” of the Muses reminds
me of a police report in the “True Sun,”
announcing that a namesake of the great Roman
emperor who was “Amor et deliciœ generis humani”
—a Mr. Titus—was “arrested and committed for
stealing a door-mat!” How a man with so great a
name could steal so little, is a psychological marvel.

In looking over a western paper, a day or two since,
my eye fell on an advertisement in very comical verse.
Here are a couple of stanzas—to the tune of “the
cork leg:”—

I think there should be a committee sent out to invite
Mr. Kibbe to become a poet.

“The Rococo” is the quaint, but, in fact, most
descriptive name of one of the “extras of the New
Mirror.” Those of our readers who have been lately
in France will be familiar with the word. The etymology
of rococo has been matter of no little fruitless
inquiry. It came into use about four or five years ago,
when it was the rage to look up costly and old-fashioned
articles of jewelry and furniture. A valuable stone,
for example, in a beautiful but antique setting, was
rococo. A beauty, who had the kind of face oftenest
painted in the old pictures, was rococo. A chair, or a
table, of carved wood, costly once, but unfashionable
for many a day, was rococo. Articles of vertu were
looked up and offered for sale with a view to the prevailing
taste for rococo. Highly carved picture-frames,
old but elaborately-made trinkets, rich brocades, etc.,
etc.—things intrinsically beautiful and valuable, in
short, but unmeritedly obsolete, were rococo. The
extra published by the proprietors of the New Mirror
answers this description exactly. It comprises the
three most exquisite and absolute creations of pure
imagination (in my opinion) that have been produced
since Shakspere: “Lillian” by Praed, “The Culprit
Fay” by Drake, and “St. Agnes' Eve” by Keats—all
three of which have been overlaid and in a measure
lost sight of in the torrent of new literature—but all
three now to be had altogether in fair type, price one
shilling! The man who could read these poems
without feeling the chamber of his brain filled with
incense—without feeling his heart warm, his blood
moved, and his inmost craving of novelty and melody
deliciously ministered to, does not love poetry enough
to “pessess a rose-teint for his russet cares.” I declare
I think it is worth the outlay of a fever to get
(by seclusion and depletion) the delicacy of nerve and
perception to devour and relish with intellectual nicety,
these three subtly-compounded feasts of the imagination.

We are indebted for many beautiful things not so
much to accident as to the quickness of genius to appreciate
and appropriate accident. I was pleased with
an instance that came to my knowledge last night.
Wallace (the omni-dexterous) was playing the piano
in my room, and, among others of his own inimitable
waltzes, he played one called the Midnight Waltz, in
which twelve strokes of the clock recur constantly
with the aria. In answer to an inquiry of mine, he
told me he was playing, one night, to some ladies in
Lima, when a loud silvery-toned clock in the room
struck twelve. He insensibly stopped, and beat the
twelve strokes on an accordant note on the piano,
and in repeating the passage, stopped at the same
place and beat twelve again. The effect was particularly
impressive and sweet, and he afterward composed
a waltz expressly to introduce it—one of the most
charming compositions I ever heard. Wallace is the
most prodigal of geniuses, and most prodigally endowed.
He has lived a life of adventure in the East ladies,
South America, New South Wales, and Europe,
that would fill satisfactorily the life-cups of a dozen
men, and how he has found time to be what he probably
is, as great a violinist and as great a pianist as the
greatest masters on those instruments, is certainly a
wonder. But this is not all. He was rehearsing for
a concert not long since in New York, when the clarionet-player,
in reply to some correction, said
“if Mr. Wallace wished it played better he might
play it himself.” Wallace took the clarionet from
the hand of the refractory musician, and played the
passage so exquisitely as quite to electrify the orchestra.
He is the most modest of men, and how many
more instruments he is master of (beside the human
voice, which he plays on in conversation very attractively),
it would be wild to guess.[3] By the way, it
would be worth the while of a music-publisher to
send for the music he has literally sown the world with
—for he has written over three hundred waltzes, of
most of which he has no copy, though they have been
published and left in the cities he has visited. He
composes many hours every day. I think Wallace
one of the most remarkable men I ever knew.

On Saturday night I was at the opening of the new
opera—the beginning, as I think, of a regular supply
of a great luxury. The bright, festal look of Palmo's
exquisite little theatre struck every one with surprise
on entering, and the cozy, sympathy-sized construction,
and pleasant arrangement of seats, etc., seemed
to leave nothing to be wished for. With a kindly fostering
for a while, on the part of the press and the
public, Palmo's theatre may become the most enjoyable
and refined resort of the city.

The new prima donna made a brilliant hit. New
York is, at this moment, in love with Signorina Borghese.
She dresses a-merveille, has a very intellectual
and attractive want of beauty, is graceful, vivid, a capital
actress, and sings with a bird-like abandon, that
enchants you even with her defects. Nature has given
her quite her share of attractiveness, and she uses
it all.

The opera was “I puritani”—Bellini's last, and
the one that was playing, for only the third time, the
night he died—(at the age of twenty-seven). It was
well selected for the opening opera—being full of intelligible
and expressive melody, and not compelling
the musically uninitiated to get on tiptoe to comprehend
it. These same uninitiateds, however, are the
class to cater for, in any country, and especially in
ours. It is a great mistake to fancy that, in the appreciation
of an opera, criticism goes before. On the
contrary, feeling goes before and criticism follows
very slowly. The commonest lover of music feels,
for instance, that Bellini's operas are marked by simplicity
and sameness—but, after having felt that, the

the critic comes in and follows up the idea like an
ink-fish, expressing that plain fact in cloudy technicalities
this-wise: “Bellini rather multiplies the repetitions
of the chord than gives distinct business to
the several components of the score!” Who cares
to know, when in tears at Rossini's exquisite harmony,
that it is produced by a “profuse use of the diminished
seventh,” or that one of his most electrical effects
is done by “an harmonic atrocity of consecutive
fifths.” To have one's tear shed on a piece of paper,
and thus analyzed, may be curious, once, but not very
necessary always, and I wish, with all my heart, that
the humbug of technicalities in this, as in many other
things, might be exposed. It would be a capital subject
for a popular lecture. I lend the suggestion to
Mr. Emerson—the man best capable of using it.

Supper is a natural sequence to music, and I must
mention a pair of canvass-backs that were sent me by
a Baltimore friend, and feasted on last night after “I
Puritani”—for the sake of giving you and “your public”
some valuable and toothsome directions for the
cooking of these birds, contained in a passage of my
friend's letter: “I have some anxiety,” he says, “about
the cooking of these ducks. Pray don't put them in
the power of a Frenchman! Get hold of a good English
or American cook, knowing in roasts. Let this
cook erect a strong, blazing fire, before which he (or
she) must tend the birds for about twenty-five or
thirty minutes. To determine if they are done, have
them held up by the feet, and if the gravy runs out of
the necks, of a proper color, they don't require another
turn. Serve them up with their own gravy. 'Tis
safer than a chafing-dish and made gravy. Eat them
with hommony patties, between which and the ducks
there is a delicate affinity. Beware, I conjure you
once more, of a Frenchman—except in the shape of
a glass of Chablis. May they prove luscious as those
we ate together at Guy's.”

Here is an epigram on the turning of Grenough's
Washington out of the capitol:—

Young Poets.—An old man with no friend but
his money—a fair child holding the hand of a Magdalen—a
delicate bride given over to a coarse-minded
bridegroom—were sights to be troubled at seeing. We
should bleed at heart to see either of them. But
there is something even more touching to us than
these—something, too, which is the subject of heartless
and habitual mockery by critics—the first timid
offerings to fame of the youthful and sanguine poet.
We declare that we never open a letter from one of
his class, never read a preface to the first book of one
of them, never arrest our critical eye upon a blemish
in the immature page, without having the sensation of
a tear coined in our heart—never without a passionate
though inarticulate “God help you!” We know
so well the rasping world in which they are to jostle,
with their “fibre of sarcenet!” We know so well the
injustices, the rebuffs, the sneers, the insensibilities,
from without, the impatiences, the resentments, the
choked impulses and smothered heart-boundings within.
And yet it is not these outward penances, and
inward scorpions, that cause us the most regret in the
fate of the poet. Out of these is born the inspired expression
of his anguish—like the plaint of the singing
bird from the heated needle which blinds him. We
mourn more over his fatuous imperviousness to counsel
—over his haste to print, his slowness to correct—over
his belief that the airy bridges he builds over the
chasms in his logic and rhythm are passable, by avoirdupois
on foot, as well as by Poesy on Pegasus. That
the world is not as much enchanted—(that we ourselves
are not as much touched and delighted)—with
the halting flights of new poets as with the broken
and short venturings in air of new-fledged birds—
proves over again that the world we live in were a
good enough Eden if human nature were as loveable
as the rest. We wish it were not so. We wish it
were natural to admire anything human-made, that
has not cost pain and trial. But, since we do not, and
can not, it is a pity, we say again, that beginners in
poetry are offended with kind counsel. Of the great
many books and manuscript poems we receive, there
is never one from a young poet, which we do not
long, in all kindness, to send back to him to be restudied,
rewritten, and made, in finish, more worthy
of the conception. To praise it in print only puts
his industry to sleep, and makes him dream he has
achieved what is yet far beyond him. We ask the young
poets who read this, where would be the kindness in
such a case?

A young lady in Brooklyn who signs herself “Short
and Sweet,” writes to us to say that she is very tired
of her name, and seeing no prospect of getting another
(with an owner to it), wishes to know whether
she may lawfully abandon the unsentimental prenomen
inflicted on her at baptism, and adopt one of her
own more tasteful selection. By an understanding
with all the people likely to put her name in their
wills, we should think she might. Names are a modern
luxury, and if she chose to be rococo, she might
do without one, or be known as the ancients were, by
some word descriptive of her personal peculiarities.
(So came into use the names of Brown, Long, Broadhead,
etc.) “Short and Sweet” would not be a bad
name. Or—if the lady chooses to follow the Arabian
custom, she (supposing her father's name to be a
well-sounding one—say Tiskins) would be called
“Tiskins's Short and Sweet daughter”—people in
Arabia being only designated as brown or fair, short
or tall, children of such and such parents. There
was a Roman fashion, too, that might help her out—
that of adding to the name any quality or exploit for
which the bearer was remarkable—Miss Short and
Sweet Heartbreaker, for example, or Miss “Noli-me-Tangere,”
or (after the favorite flower of the Irish),
Miss “Jump-up-and-kiss me.” (The Irish designate
Tom Moore by this pretty prenomen.) Our compliments
to the lady, and we are sorry she should want
a name—sorry she has a want we can not supply. It
happens to be the one thing we are out of.

The opera gets more crowded, more dressy, and
more fashionable, nightly. Some malicious person
started a rumor that the building was unsafe, and
many stayed away till it was tested. There are many,
too, who wait for the stamp of other people's approbation
before they venture upon even a new amusement.
The doubtfuls have now gone over, however,
and the opera is “in the full tide,” etc., etc. Some
of the first families have taken season-tickets in the
opera-boxes (there are but two private boxes, and
those very inconvenient and undesirable), and the best
seats in the pit are sold out, like the stalls at the
Italian opera in London, to bachelors in the market.
The prima donna, Borghese, improves with every
repetition, and what with dressing, singing, and acting—all
exceedingly well—she is a very enjoyable
rechauffée of Grisi, whose style she follows.

This is a day of such sunshine and air that those

must be in love with the sunny sidewalk of Broadway.
And this recalls to my mind a little book of poems,
better described by their title than any book whose
name I ever knew—“Droppings from the Heart,” by
Thomas Mackellar, lately published in Philadelphia.
Everybody must love the man who reads his book,
though its simplicity would sometimes make you
smile. He thus apostrophizes the city of New York:—

The credulity of this stanza is not weak-mindedness,
by any means—as the strength of expression and
beauty of poetry in the other parts of the book sufficiently
prove. The writer's only vent seems to be the
expression of affection. He loves everything. He
believes good of everything and everybody. I do not
know that, in my life, I ever saw a more complete picture
than this book of a heart overrunning with tenderness.
The lines to his “Sleeping Wife,” are as
beautiful as anything of Barry Cornwall's. The piece
called “The Heart-Longings,” too, is finely expressed.
A little infusion of distrust, bitterness, and contempt,
would make Mackellar a poet of the kind most admired
by critics, and most read and sympathized with
by the world. He is, I understand, a printer in Philadelphia,
and enjoys the kindly friendship of Mr.
Chandler, of the United States Gazette, to whom is
addressed one of the sonnets in his book. For family
reading, among people of simple lives and pure tastes,
the “Droppings from the Heart” is the best-adapted
book of poetry I have lately seen.

One of the most charming resuscitations from the
trance of oblivion that have come about lately, is the
republication (in the “Mirror Library”) of Pinckney's
Poems. Mr. Pinckney, your readers will perhaps
know, was the son of the Hon. William Pinckney, our
minister in 1802 at the court of St. James, and was
born in London during the diplomatic residence there
of his father. He was partly educated at college,
entered the navy, gave it up for the law, and, after
much disappointment and suffering, died at twenty-five.
With discipline and study, he might, I think,
have written as well as Moore. What poetry would
be in a world where Toil were not the Siamesed twin
of Excellence (in other words, where man had not
fallen), “is a curious question, coz!” The wild horse
runs very well in the prairie, but we give a preference
of admiration to the “good-continuer” by toilsome
training. Whether the fainéant angels who “sit in the
clouds,” admire more the objectless careerings of the
wild steed, or the “wind and bottom” of the winner
of the sweepstakes—whether fragmentary poetry,
dashed off while the inspiration is on, and thrown
aside ill-finished, when the whim evaporates, be more
celestial than the smooth and complete product of
painful toil and disciplined concentration—I have had
my luxurious doubts. Pinckney's genius, as evidenced
on paper, has all the impulsive abandonment which
marks his biography. He was a born poet—with all
needful imagination, discrimination, perception, and
sensibility; and he had, besides, the flesh-and-blood-fulness
necessary to keep poetry on terra-firma. Several
of his productions have become common air-known
and enjoyed by everybody, but without a name.
The song beginning—

—this, and two or three others of Pinckney's “entire
and perfect chrysolites,” should be regraven with his
name, for the world owes his memory a debt for them.
The small volume of his poetry from which the Mirror
Library edition is copied, was printed in 1825, and
has been long lost sight of. It contains—not the stuff
for a classic—but a delicious bundle of heart-reaching
passages, fresh and peculiar, and invaluable especially
to lovers, whose sweetest and best interpreter Pinckney
was. Every man or woman who has occasion to embroider
a love-letter with the very essence-flowers of
passionate verse, should pay a shilling for Pinckney's
poems.

The chair and pen of an editor should be assumed
with as binding vows and as solemn ceremony as were
the sword and war-horse of knighthood—for the editor,
like the armed and mounted knight, is an aggregation
of more power than nature properly allots to the
individual. Indeed, it is because the power has not
been well considered by law and by public opinion
that the penalties of maleficent pen and ink are not
more formidable than those of fist and dagger. Take
the consideration of this thought for a wile-time in
your next omnibus-ride, dear reader, and if you
chance to be young and have a lust for POWER, write
down EDITORSHIP for your second choice—the
CHURCH, of course, number one, and POLITICS, possibly,
number three.

The temptation to the abuse of pen-power is greater
as the mind of the editor is more little. It is so easy
to do brilliant tilting in the editorial lists, by slashing
alike at the offending and unoffending! Abuse is the
easiest, as courtesy is the most difficult kind of writing
to make readable, and as it is a relief for the
smooth-faced card-player to vent, before he sleeps, his
pent-up malice upon his wife, so a heart naturally
ill-willed makes a purulent bile-spigot of a pen—
relieved, so the venom is spent, no matter upon what.
There is so seldom good cause to be ill-natured
print, that it would be safe, always, when reading
ill-natured criticism, to “smell the rat” of a bad he
near by.

If perversion of pen and ink be very blameable, forbearance
should be laudable, and we claim credit for
much pains-taking in this latter way. The reputions,
ready-spitted, that are sent us for roasting,
would alone (did we publish them) sell our paper
the ten thousand malicious, who may be counted
as a separate stratum of patronage to periodicals
This is some temptation. Then we are often attacked,
and we could demolish the assailant very amusing
and we resist this temptation, though, if his pin be not
winced at, puny impunity will prick again. There is
much that is ludicrous, much that is pervertible
sport, in new books and new candidates to fame; and
by fault-finding only, or by abusing the author instead
of his book (easy and savory), the review is made readable
without labor in writing—and this tempts both
malice and idleness. No man can live, elbow
elbow, with competitors in love, life, and literature,
without his piques and his resentments, and
“turn” these pleasantly “to commodity,” with a laugh
that outstabs a dagger, is very tempting—very—to
those who can do it dexterously.

Now that you have read the three foregoing paragraphs,
dear reader, you are prepared to know
value of your acquittal, if you acquit the Mirror
ill-nature, of which it has been accused. We do

remember that, in its pages, we have ever, intentionally,
wounded feelings or trenched upon delicacy.

The Rococo No. 1, is ready for your shilling, dear
reader—one shilling for the three purest gems ever
crystaflized into poetry—three narrative fairy-tales in
verse, exquisitely full of genius. The book, too, is
beautifully printed, as are all the works of the Mirror
Library—suitable for company at a lavender-fingured
breakfast, or for the drawing-room table of your lady
fair.

Rococo No. 2, is also ready, containing Pinckney's
long-neglected and delicious poems, and you should
pay a shilling if it were only to know what the country
has to be proud of among its poetical dead. The
author of

had a smoothness in his touch of a thought like the
glide of a cloud-edge just under a star. For quaint
and sweet couplets of love-makery there are few books
like it. Witness this verse:—

The following Bryant-like, finished, and high-thoughted
poetry was written by a young lady of
seventeen, and her first published production. She is
the daughter of one of our oldest and best families,
resident on the Hudson. If the noon be like the
promise of the dawn of this pure intellect, we have
here the beginning of a brilliant fame:—

February 14.—This is the day, says the calendar,
“for choosing special loving friends”—as if there
were room for choice in a world where

The Lupercalian custom of keeping Valentine's
day (putting the names of all the marriageable girls
in the community into a box, and making the bachelors
draw lots for wives) would make a droll imbroglio
of “New York society.” By-the-way, if you know
a working poet out of employ, recommend to his no
tice the literature of valentines. Never till this year
have the copies of amatory verses, for sale in the fancy
shops, been comparably so well embellished, and the
prices of single valentines have ranged from two shillings
to two dollars—fine prices to build a trade upon!
The shops, for two or three evenings last past, have
been crowded with young men purchasing these, and
probably a little better poetry would turn the choice
in favor of any particular manufacture of such lovers'
wares. The favorite device seems to be stolen from
Mercury's detention of Mars and Venus—a paper net,
which, when raised, discloses a tableau of avowal.

Editorial skirmishing strikes a light into the people's
tinder sometimes, and there is a paragraph this morning
which explains the difference between paid puffs
and literary notices. The True Sun says: “The
man who edits the Hagerstown News can not, it
seems, distinguish between an editorial article and an
advertisement. He mistakes the long advertisement
of Verplanck's Shakspere, which appears in our
paper, for the production of the editors of the True
Sun, and declines inserting it in the News for less
than forty-five dollars. What does the man mean?
It is only surprising than an editor should be ignorant
that puffs paid are set in minion type, and puffs of volition
are set in brevier—a distinction not `plain' (as
yet) `to the commonest understanding.' ” The London
papers print the word “advertisement” over all
their puffs paid for, and, by using different type, the
True Sun has taken one step toward making the volunteer
distinguishable.

Mr. Verplanck's project, by-the-way, is a very noticeable
one. We have never had (to my knowledge)
an American annotator upon Shakspere, and Shakspere
is as much ours as England's. Very many of
the Shaksperian words are obsolete in England, but in
use here, and put down as Americanisms by travellers.
I do not know whether Mr. Verplanck promises to
show any new readings of Shakspere, but he is a man
of much higher education, and more cultivated and
scholarlike pursuits than Mr. Knight (whose edition
of Shakspere has lately been so popular in England),
beside being a man of productive original genius,
which Mr. Knight has no claim to be. The commentaries
upon works of genius by different men of genius
can never be repetitions, and are always interesting—
so I look with some interest for Mr. Verplanck's preface
and first number. As he is a man of large fortune
and entire leisure, there is no obstacle to his
doing it well.

The discovery of a gem in a dark mine is a poetical
matter, but (to my present thinking) it is even
a prosaic similitude for the sudden finding out of
a work of genius progressing in one of the houses of
a brick block. I had often passed Durand's house
in one of the retired close-built streets of New York,
without suspecting that it contained anything but the
domestic problem of felicity and three meals a day;
but a chance errand lately led me to knock at his
door. My business over, he placed upon the easel (in
a charming studio built in the rear of his house) a
large landscape to which he had just given the finishing
touch. I sat down before it, and (to use a good
word that is staled and blunted from overusing) it
absorbed me. My soul went into it. I was, it is true,
in good pictorial appetite. It was my studious time
of day, and I had seen no pictures out of my own
rooms for a week; but it seemed to me as if that landscape
alone would be a retreat, a seclusion, a world by
itself to retreat into from care or sad thoughts—so
mellow and deep was the distance, so true to nature

the coloring and drawing, so sweetly poetical the composition,
and so single-thoughted the conception of
the effect. The roofs of a comfortable farmhouse and
outbuildings were the subordinate life of the picture,
seen over a knoll on the right. The centre of the
foreground, and the brightest spot in the picture, was a
high grass-bank on which glanced a golden beam of
the setting sun. On it was a group of cattle in well-fed
repose, and over it stood the finest oak-tree I ever
saw painted. Twenty miles of landscape lay below,
enveloped in the veil of coming twilight, and a river
wound gracefully away from the eye and was lost in
the distance. It was indeed a glorious picture, and I
stake my judgment upon the opinion that no living
artist could surpass it. Durand, as you probably
know, has turned painter, after having long been the
first engraver of our country. He is patient of labor,
and has approached landscape-painting by a peculiar
education of hand and eye, and the probability is, that
if he live twenty years, he will have no equal in this
department of the arts. If you remember, I mentioned
my great surprise at the excellence of two of
his landscapes in the last exhibition of the academy
here. To see pictures with an appetite in the eye, one
should see them singly, however, and but two or three,
at farthest, in a day. Artists who would be deliberately
appreciated, should make their houses morning-resorts,
as they are, and very fashionable ones, in
France and Italy. There are people (and those, too,
who can afford to buy pictures) who yawn for some
such round of occupation during the summer mornings
of the travelling season.

The want of an excuse to put on bonnet, and go
out somewhere in the evening with father, husband,
brother, or lover, is doubtless the secret of most audiences,
whether in church or lecture-room. I arrived
at this conclusion sitting and watching the coming
in of an audience at a popular lecture a night or
two ago. The subject was of a character that would
only draw listeners (one would think) from the more
intellectual and cultivated classes—dry and of remote
interest—and one, too, that could be “read up,” to
perfect mental satisfaction, by sending a shilling to a
library, or buying a bit of the cheap hiterature of the
day. It was a cold, raw night, the lecturer was no
orator, and the benches of the lecture-room had no
cushions. With these premises, you would look to
see anything but a pleasure-loving and youthful audience.
Yet this was just the quality of the comers-in
till the room was crowded. There was scarce an unappropriated-looking
damsel among them, and not one
bald head or “adust” visage. That the young men
would have been there without the ladies, I do not
believe—nor that the ladies came there with any special
desire to know more of the subject of the lecture.

On this necessity for ladies to go somewhere of an
evening is based, of course, most of the popular enthusiasms
of the day—for they are never got up by
individual reading, and would fail entirely, but for the
opportunity to give, in one moment, one thought to
many people. This fact seems to me to indicate in
what way the inducements should be heightened
when audiences fall off; and, instead of cheapening
tickets, or spending more money in placards, I think
it would be better to treat the ladies to an interlude
of coffee and conversation, or to minister in some way
directly to the tastes of those in whom resides the
primum mobile of attendance.

I presume there are thousands of families in New
York that are not linked with any particular round of
acquaintance—very worthy and knowledge-loving people,
who can afford only a few friends, and shun acquaintances
as expensive. People in this rank are too
moderate-minded to be theatre-goers; but the wife
and daughters of the family must go somewhere of an
evening. Parties are costly, public balls both costly
and unadvisable, and there are eight months in the
year when it is too cold for icecream-gardens and
walks on the Battery. Lecture-tickets for a family
are cheap, the company there is good, the room is
warm, and so well lighted as to show comeliness or
dress to advantage, and the apparent object of being
there is creditable and reputable. I say again, that to
add to the social inducements of this attraction, would
be to make of the lecture system a great gate to the
public heart. I add this gratuitous mite of speculation
to the unused data that have been long waiting
for a compiler of the statistics of momenta.

We have had a week of spring-weather, and the
upper part of New York (all above the pavements, ca
va dire) has been truly enjoyable. Most persons who
do not wear their beards for a protection to
of the throat, have got the mumps—on dit
in a warm room with the throat pressed down upon a
thick cravat, and going into the open air with the
head raised and the throat of course suddenly left exposed—is
one of those provoking risks that “stand to
reason.” By the elaborate inventions to keep the
feet dry, there seems to be a “realizing sense” of the
danger of wet feet also.[4] Mr. Lorin Brook's invention
for expeditiously throwing an iron bridge over
every small puddle—(that is to say, of making boots
with a curved metallic shank under the hollow of the
foot)—has the advantage of adding to the beauty as
well as the protection of the exposed extremities.

Signor Palmo continues to pay his way and his
prima donna, and not much more—for the upper gallery
is so constructed that, though you can see the
stage from every part of it, you can only see the dress-circle
from the front row; and people go to plays a
little to see and hear, and a great deal to be seen and
heard of. The price of places being the same all over
the house, few will take tickets except for the lower
tier. The best evidence that the opera is growing on
the public liking is the degree to which the piques
and tracasseries of the company are talked about in
society. Quite a Guelph and Ghibelline excitement
was raised, a few nights ago, by the basso's undertaking
indignantly to sing as the critics advised him—
with more moderation. Signor Valtellina is a great
favorite, and has a famous voice, ben martellato. He
is a very impassioned singer, and when excited, loses
his flessibilita, and grows harsh and indistinct—(as
he himself does not think). By way of pleasing the
carpers for once, he sang one of the warmest passages
of the opera with a moping lamentivole that brought
out a hiss from the knowing ones. His friend, who
were in the secret, applauded. Valtellina laid his
hand on his heart and retired—but came back, as the
millers say, “with a head on,” and sang once more
passionately and triumphantly. Excuse the fop's alley
slang with which I have told this momentous
matter—quite equal in importance (as a subject of
conversation) to any couple of events eligible by
Niles's Register.

Our Library Parish.—Our heart is more spread
and fed than our pocket, dear reader, with the new

possession of this magic long arm by which we are
handing you, one after another, the books we have
long cherished. Almost the first manifestation of the
poet's love, is the sending of his favorite books to his
mistress, and no commerce of tenderness is more like
the conversance of angels (probably), than the sympathies
exchanged through the loopholes of starry
thoughts—(so like windows twixt soul and soul are
the love-expressing conceptions of poetry!) The
difference between an hour passed with friends and an
hour passed with strangers, will be some guide to you
in forming an estimate of the difference between writing
for our readers without, and writing for them with
the sympathy of books in common. The Mirror becomes,
in a manner, our literary parish—we the indulged
literary vicar, with whose tastes out of the
pulpit you are as familiar as with his sermons of criticism
when in; and you, dear reader, become our
loved parishioner, for whom we cater, at fountains of
knowledge and fancy to which you have not our facility
of access, and whose face, turned to us on Saturday,
inspires us like the countenance of a familiar
friend. This charming literary parish (now rising of
eleven thousand) we would not exchange for a bishopric,
nor for the constituency of a congress-member;
and we hold our responsibility to be as great as the
bishop's, and our chair better worth having than “a
seat” in the Capitol. Few things gratify us more
than the calls we occasionally get from subscribers
who have a wish to see us after reading our paper for
a while—and this feeling of friendly and personal acquaintance
is what we most aim at producing between
ourselves and our readers. We shall seldom be more
pleased hereafter than in taking one of our parish by
the hand—relying more upon the sympathy between
us, by common thoughts, than upon any possible ceremony
of introduction.

Let us beg our readers to have the different numbers
of the Rococo bound with blank letter-paper between
the leaves, and to read always with a pencil in
hand. There are such chambers within chambers of
comprehension and relish in repeated readings of such
sweet creations, and the thoughts they suggest are so
noteworthy and so delightful to recal! We have sent
a poem to the printer this morning (to be published
in the same shilling number with The Rimini), which
we do not believe ten of our readers ever saw—(a poem
never reprinted in this country, and apparently
quite lost sight of in England)—but which exercised
upon our imagination, when in college, an influence
tincturing years of feeling and revery. An English
copy was given us by an old man curious in books,
and it was soon so covered with pencil-marks that we
were obliged to rebind it with alternate leaves of white
paper, and we carried it with us for a travelling companion
through Europe, and re-read it (once again,
we well remember) sitting on the ruins of the church
of Sardis in Asia. It is a narrative-poem of inexpressible
richness and melody, and of the loftiest walk
of inventive imagination. It is so sweet a story, too,
that it would entertain a child like a fairy-tale. We
could go on writing about it for hours—for it brings
back to us days spent with it in the woods, green
banks where we have lain and mused over it, lovely
listeners who have held their breaths to hear it, and
oh, a long, long chain of associations steeped in love,
indolence, and sunshine! And this it is to have a favorite
author—to have a choice and small library of
favorite authors. It makes a wreath wherein to weave
for memory the chance flowers of a lifetime! It gives
Memory a sweet companion. It enables you to withdraw
yourself at any time from the world, or from
care, and recover the dreams built over these books
in the rare hours dream-visited. More valuable
still, it gives you—when you begin to love, and want
the words and thoughts that have fled affrighted away
—a thread to draw back the truants, and an instant
and eloquent language to a heart otherwise dumb.

“Sybilla” wants a poetical color given to the “transition
state” from the “uncertain age” to the “sad
certainty of youth gone by.” We can only give her
a verse from a piece of poetry written to a delightful
and fascinating old maid whom we once had a passion
for:—

Spring is close behind us, dear reader. What think
you of this bit of poetry, touching spring flowers?—

A country subseriber writes to know who “Mrs.
Grundy” is. She is the lady who lives next door,
madam—the lady at whose funeral there will be but
one mourner—the last man! We are not sorry that
we know her, but very sorry that she must needs know
us, and have her “say” about us.

February should be called the month of hope, for it
is invariably more enjoyable than the first nominal
fruition—more spring-like than the first month of
spring. This is a morning that makes the hand open
and the fingers spread—a morning that should be consecrated
to sacred idleness. I should like to exchange
work with any out-of-doors man—even with a driver
of an omnibus—specially with the farmer tinkering
his fences. Cities are convenient places of refuge
from winter and bad weather, but one longs to get out
into the country, like a sheep from a shed, with the
first warm gleam of sunshine.

I see that Moore has virtually turned to come down
from his long ladder of fame—his publishers, Longmans,
having made a final collection of his works
in an elaborate edition, and prefixed thereto a picture
of an old man—Tom Moore as he is! It is melancholy
to see this portrait. The sparse hair, made-the-most-of—the
muscles of the face retreating from the
habitual expression—the lamp within still unconscious
of losing brightness, yet the glass over it stained
and cracked. Moore should never have been painted
after thirty. This picture is like a decrepit cupid—
wholly out of character. His poetry is all youth, its
very faults requiring youthful feeling for an apology;
and to know that he has grown old—that he is bald

wrinkled, venerable—is like some unnatural hocus-pocus—some
hideous metamorphosis we would rather
not have seen even in melodrame. Moore has not
sobered away, twilight-wise, as he might have done.
His wit and song have kept admiration so warm around
him, that he has forgotten his sun was setting—that
it was time the shadows of his face grew longer—time
that his pen leaned toward life's downward horizon.
The expression on this face of frisky sixty, is of a
flogged-up hilarity that is afraid to relax. Moore will
look facetious and dining-out-ish in his coffin.

I see that Wallack has added lecturing, as a new
branch, to his profession, and is very successful. Mr.
Barry, the stage-manager of the Park, is to try on the
same experiment to-night at the Society Library.
“Two strings to your bow” is a good economy in any
profession, and there are sundry professions, the duties
of which do not interfere, for instance, with authorship.
A man who should read two hours before
going to bed, and write for the first two hours after
sunrise, would give time and attention enough to any
literary pursuit, while the business part of the day,
and a good part of the evening, would be still left unoccupied.
Actors particularly (so capricious is fortune
with them) should have a brace of vocations,
and a poet, with an honest trade besides, is more likely
to have his “lines fall in pleasant places.”

It appears by the English papers that Madame Catalani
indignantly denies being dead! She is still living,
and capable of enjoying “good living,” at her
villa, near Florence. The American story, which
went the rounds of the papers some time since, of a
man whose capacious throat had “swallowed a plantation
and fifty negroes,” finds its counterpart in the
villa and its dependants, which have come out of the
throat of Madame Catalani. I was fortunate enough
to enjoy much of her hospitality when in Italy, and
there are few establishments that I have seen where
the honors were done with a more princely liberality
and good taste. She was then, as she is probably
still, a well-preserved and handsome woman, of majestic
mien, and most affable manners, and at her own
little parties she sang, whenever asked, as well as ever
she had done in public. She seemed to me never to
have been intoxicated with her brilliant successes, and
to have had no besoin of applause left like a thirst in
her ears—as is the case with popular favorites too often.
Her husband, M. Valabreque, was a courteous
man and a fond husband, and their children were on
an equal footing of social position with the young nobility
of Florence. Most strangers who see anything
of the society of that delightful city, come away with
charming remembrances of Madame Catalani.

Washington's Birthday is growing into a temperance
anniversary, probably much to the pleasure,
and a little to the surprise of the distinguished ghost.
There was a grand temperance celebration at the Tabernacle
last evening, at which the eloquent author of
the Airs of Palestine, Rev. John Pierpont, delivered
an address. By-the-way, it is an overlooked feather
in the cap of temperance, that we owe to it the pleasant
invention of KISSING. In the course of my reading
I have fallen in with the historical fact, that, when
wine was prohibited by law to the women of ancient
Rome, male relatives had the right of ascertaining,
by tasting the lips of their sisters and cousins, whether
the forbidden liquor had passed in. The investigations
of this lip-police, it is said, were pushed with
a rigor and vigilance highly creditable to the zeal
of the republic, and for a time intemperance was
fairly kissed away. Subsequently, female intoxication
became fashionable again (temperance kisses notwithstanding),
and Seneca (in his Epistolœ) is thus
severe upon the Roman ladies: “Their manners have
altogether changed, though their faces are as captivating
as ever. They make a boast of their exploits
in drinking.[5] They will sit through the night
with the glass in their hands, challenging the men,
and often outdoing them.” Now, by restoring the
much-abused and perverted KISS to its original mission,
and making of it the sacred apostle of inquiry
that it was originally designed for, it strikes me that
the temperance-committees would have many more
“active members,” and the cause would assuredly
grow on public favor. I submit the hint to that admirable
enthusiast, Mrs. Child.

There are two establishments in the city of New
York which should be visited by those who require
stretchers to their comprehension of luxury—Meek's
furniture-warehouse, behing the Astor, and Tiffany's
bijou-shop, at the corner of Warren street and Broadway.
In a search I have lately made for a bookcase
of a particular fancy, I have made the round of furniture-warehouses,
and, as a grand epitome of all of
them—a seven-story building, crammed with furniture
on every floor—I should recommend the mere
idle sight-seer to spend a morning at Meeks's for his
amusement. Upon the simple act of sitting down
has been expended as much thought (in quantity) as
would produce another Paradise Lost. Some of the
chairs, indeed, are poems—the beautiful conception
and finish of them, taken into the mind with the same
sensation, at least, and the same glow of luxury.
The fancies of every age and country are represented,
those of the Elizabethan era and the ornate fashion
of Louis XIV predominant, though tables and sofas
on Egyptian models are more sumptuous. At so
much cost, they ought to put the mind at ease as well
as the body. And, by-the-way, the combining of
couch and chair in one (now so fashionable) would
have pleased the Roman dames, whose husbands kept
chairs for women and mourners—a man's sitting upon
a chair (in preference to a couch) being considered a
received sign of deep mourning or poverty. Few
people can trust their taste to go into such an immense
warehouse as Meeks's and select (in one style,
and that style suitable to their house, condition, and
manner of living) the furniture for an establisment.
It would be a good vocation for a reduced gentleman
to keep taste to let, holding himself ready to take orders,
and execute them at discretion, according to the
suitabilities of the employer.

Tiffany's is a fashionable pleasure-lounge already,
his broad glass doors and tempting windows being at
one of the most thronged corners of Broadway. It
is better than a museum, in being quite as well stocked
with surprises, and these all ministering to present
and fashionable wants. Where resides the prodigious
ingenuity expended on these superb elegances and
costly trifles, it would be hard to discover. A
seductive part of it is, that there are articles for all
prices, and you may spend a dollar, or five hundred,
in the same dainty line of commodity!

The times are “easy,” if we can judge by the articles
that find plenty of buyers. I heard yesterday

that a shopkeeper in Broadway had imported several
ladies' dresses, priced at one thousand dollars each,
and had no difficulty in selling them. Mr. Meeks informed
me that, of a certain kind of very costly chair,
he could not keep one unsold. It was certainly a superb
article, made of carved rosewood and purple velvet;
price (for a single chair) one hundred and fifty
dollars! We have not yet adopted, in this country,
the French custom of ornamenting dinner-tables very
expensively with silver vases and artificial flowers, nor
has the old Roman custom ever been resumed. I
think, of placing the “household gods” upon the table.
The aspect of a supper-table in Cicero's time,
indeed, must have been beyond the show even of
Bourbon sybarites; the guests in white and scarlet
robes, with chaplets of roses, myrtle, or ivy on their
heads, lying by threes on couches covered with purple
or embroidered with gold and silver—a crowd of
slaves, chosen for their beauty, waiting within the
square formed by the tables, and dressed in tunics of
the brightest colors—over all a canopy of purple cloth,
giving the room the appearance of a superb tent—
the courses brought in with a regular procession
marching to music—last (not least heightening to the
effect), the custom, borrowed of the Egyptians, of
bringing in a skeleton, in the midst of the feast, to
furnish a foil to the enjoyment. All these were common
features of Roman luxury at the time when
Rome had the treasures of the earth at her disposal,
and probably will never be reproduced in the same
splendor, unless we rebarbarize and make war upon
Europe under a military chieftain.

The February rehearsal of spring is over—the popular
play of April having been well represented by
the reigning stars and that pleasant company of players,
the Breezes. The drop-curtain has fallen, representing
a winter-scene, principally clouds and snow,
and the beauties of the dress-circle have retired (from
Broadway) discontented only with the beauty of the
piece. By-the-way, the acting was so true to nature,
that several trees in Broadway were affected to—budding!

So says Leigh Hunt.

The Land of Intermezzo.—If spring be cognate
to one poetical subject more than all others, it is to
the single dreamy fable upon which are founded three
immortal poems—one by Thomas Moore, one by
Lord Byron, and the third (quite as beautiful as either)
by the Rev. George Croly. The last—“The Angel
of the World,” by Croly, and the first, “The
Loves of the Angels,” by Moore, are issued in extras
of the Mirror. The other, Byron's “Heaven
and Earth” (so universal are the works of the noble
bard), we took for granted was already within the
reach of every reader. Apart from the excessive
beauty of these poems, it is curious to peruse them
with a view to comparison—to read first the short and
simple story of “Haruth and Maruth,” and then study
the different shapes into which it is cast by the kaleidoscope
imaginations of three of the master-minstrels
of the time.

[Stay—do you live in the country, dear reader?
Have you a nook near by—(natural)—or can you go
to one in imagination, or will you come to ours—
where our spirit is likely to be—that is to say, while
scribbling this page, this glorious morning? For
spring makes a madhouse of a city's brick walls, and
we must think in the country to-day—live, bodily,
where we will.]

Here we are, then, in a deep down dell—the apparent
horizon scarce forty feet from us—nothing visible
that has been altered since God made it—and a column
of clear space upward, topped by the zenith,
like a cover to a well—this dell the bottom of it.
(The zenith off, we should see heaven, of course!)
In my pocket are the three poems abovementioned, and
a few editorial memoranda—but we will bind ourselves
to nothing—not even to talk about these poems unless
we like, nor to remember the memoranda. Idleness
was part of Paradise, and with the weather of
Paradise it comes over us, irresistibly.

To bring heaven and earth together—to make heaven
half earth, and earth half heaven—is the doomed
labor and thirst of poetry; and of these three poems,
the desire for this pleasant intermezzo is the exclusive
under-tow, the unexpressed, yet predominating stimulus.
To Byron (with his earthly mind unmodified),
complete heaven would doubtless have been as unpalatable
as were evidently the mere realities of earth.
He, and Moore, and Croly, have seized upon the eastern
fable, of angels made half human and mortals
half divine, to give voice to the dumb ache of their
imaginations—an ache as native to the bosoms of the
“Mirror parish,” as to these three immortal subjects
of mortal Victoria. (She ought, by-the-way, to wear
a separate crown for her loyal immortals—the undying
men of genius who are her subjects exclusively,
and whose fame is, at least, usque-millenial and a
thousand years over.) Each of these has pulled
down angels to the love of flesh and blood—(the happiness
each would least like to lose, probably, in becoming
an angel)—but there are differences in the
other particulars of their half-and-half Paradise, most
characteristic of the qualities of the different poets,
and pleasant stuff for your idle hour's unravelling, oh
reader, rich in leisure!

But this land of Intermezzo—this kingdom of Middlings—this
beatific, and poet-loved half and half!
Let us talk of it some more!

We are inclined to think that HALF WAY, in most
things, is where happiness dwells. We say so timidly,
for we live in a country famous for extremes. It must
be Heaven “No. 1,” to tempt the Yankee! Paradise,
which lies between earth and heaven, would be poor
stock in Wall street! The best—only the best and
most exciting, in the way of pleasure, for this market
—Rags, or the best broadcloth, the only wear:—Sullen
privation or sudden luxury, the only living:—Stars,
or no actors:—Millions, or hand-to-mouth:—Perfectly
obscure, or highly fashionable! Medium—intermezzo—there
is (quasi) none in America!

In this sweet land of Intermezzo we find ourself,
of latter years, laying up treasure. Quiet lives there.
Revery is native there. Content dwells nowhere else.
Modesty retires there when she would escape envy,
for there envy never sets foot. St. Paul saw that land
when he said—“Give me neither poverty nor riches.”
“Something I must like and love,” says old Feltham,
“but nothing so violently as to undo myself with
wanting it.” Travel where you will, up to middle
age (says a certain Truth-angel, who sometimes stoops
to our ear), but abide, ever after, in the land of Intermezzo!

But, in the land of Intermezzo does not live FAME!
It is a land with an atmosphere of sober gray, and
fame is the shadow of one living in the sun. If we
may preach to the poets among our flock of parishioners,
we should say, forego this shadow! Think of it
as it is—only a shadow. Value it as you do the
shadow of your friend—nothing, but for the substance
that goes before. Live in the land of Intermezzo,

and let fame find you—taking for it no more care than
for your shadow when you walk abroad. Write—for
the voice the soul wants—the utterance without which
the heart seems over-full—but be not eager for the
world's listening! Fame is sweet when it comes unbeckoned.
The world gives, more willingly than it
pays on demand. In the quiet fields of Intermezzo,
pluck flowers, to dry unseen in your bosom, and if,
by chance, years after, they are unloaded in the sun,
they will be thrice fragrant for their shaded keeping.
Amen!

When books were scarcer and scholars given to
longer incubation, a pocket companion called a Go-with-me,
was the fashion—(Vade-mecum, it you like
it better in Latin). It was commonly a favorite author,
sometimes a volume of maxims, oftener yet a book of
devotion. The monks profess to entertain themselves
in all odd hours and quiet places with their pocket
BREVIARY—the concentrated and vital essence of
missal and prayer-book. We liked better, in our
youth (Heaven assoil us!) a self-compiled breviary
of beloved poetry—a book half scrap, half manuscript,
picked from newspapers and copied from readings—
and, in a protracted youth (enriched with a most
plentiful lack of anything-to-do), we struck together,
with pin and paste, sundry consecutive volumes which
had their consecutive day. Various were their uses!
There have occurred deserts, in our travels though
most of our loves and friendships, which could only
be pleasantly crossed in the company of such caravans
of poetry. There have been thoughts born without
words to them, aptly fitted to a vehicle by this varied
repository. We have been fed through many a famine
of hope, supplied through many a drought of tears
and memory, by these timely resources. We have
them yet. The longer poems we are giving to our
friends in the numbers of the Rococo. The shorter
ones we purpose giving in the Mirror, or possibly in a
sort of mosaic extra—imparting thus, piece-meal, the
whole of our Breviary of Idleness. Here and
there, it is possible, we may give something you have
seen before, but that will not happen often—for we
have frequented most the least known shelves of
libraries, and loved most the least-famed authors.
Here is a stray passage upon roses;—(but we don't
give you the best first!)

What we like about that is the well-contrived entanglements
compelling you to stop and re-read it,
and so find a new beauty—like the wheel of your carriage
coming off amid scenery you are travelling
through too rapidly.

The Vesuvius of new books has naturally its Pompeii,
in which merit, among other things, is buried
quietly under the cinders and remains long trodden
over and forgotten. Upon the excavations and disinterments
in this city of literary oblivion is founded, in a
great measure, the New Mirror project of a library
of favorite authors, and perhaps the most interesting
of its restorations to light, as yet, is the delicious
poem by Croly, “The Angel of the World.”
I hardly think there are ten people in the United
States who know this sweet book, though it is founded
on the same eastern fable as Moore's “Loves of the
Angels,” and, to my thinking, a finer expansion of
that splendid story. Byron's “Heaven and Earth,”
and the two poems just named are all founded on this
same tradition, and it is curious to read them with a
view to comparison, and see of what varieties of combination
the kaleidoscope of genius is capable. Byron
makes his the vehicle of his audacious defiance toward
sacred things, while Moore's is all love and
flowers, perfume and gems. Croly's is more a poem
of strong human passion and character, and comes
home more to the human “business and bosom.” It
is written (the latter) with wonderful splendor of diction
and imagery. Few poetical works will be more
popular in this country, I think—profoundly as it has
slept in Lethe for the last twenty years. Croly is a
clergyman (the Rev. George), and, having a fat living
from the church of England, his Pegasus has never
been in back harness, and, I think, shows the ease of
pasture-gambol in his verse.

Tammany Hall is graced to-day with a showy transparency
representing a huge owl sitting in a Gothic
window, and a Latin motto beneath, declaring that
“the countenance is the index of the mind.” I can
not see, by the morning papers, any explanation of
the objects of the club whose celebration comes off
under these ominous auspices; but if it be a physiognomical
society, as the motto would purport, they have
chosen well. It were a good symbol also for a club
of “minions of the moon,” if they were less fond of a
lark—better still for a society of poets, if poets were
ever (which is doubtful) fond of poetical society. It
is the poet's cue to look wise and say little, to get his
victual by night, to differ altogether in his habit, as
owls do, from birds of other feather. Virgil, indeed,
makes the owl a poet:—

Professor Bronson, whose lectures are “going on”
and still “come off,” draws a very attractive picture
in his advertised prospectus. “The lectures,” he
says, “will be comparatively free, an admission of
twenty-five cents only being required.” For this,
among many other things, he promises that “a key
shall be given to the connexion of natural and spiritual
things by which all mysteries may be explained!”
“The true source of our ideas on the sublime and
beautiful will be explained, together with the true
principles of taste and criticism.”—“The French
baquet, or grand mesmeric reservoir, will be exhibited,
and minerals, vegetables, animals, and several persons
at a time magnetized; the German rotary magnetic
machine for similar purposes; also three or four hundred
engravings pertaining to physiology, &c., and
each auditor furnished with them gratuitously, with the
evening programme; also several hundred paintings
(many expressly imported from London), to illustrate
the subjects of mineralogy, botany, natural history,
and astronomy. A common rose will be shown, as
developing from the bud to full bloom, appearing four
or five feet high, in all its glory; a butterfly in the
same manner several feet square, passing through its
three stages of development; and all the phenomena
of the natural heavens, to wit, the sun, moon, and
stars:” As a list of articles to be had for twenty-five
cents, I think you will allow the professor's advertisement
to be worthy of statistical preservation.

The girdle put around the earth by the English is,
to my mind, less powerfully figured forth in their
drum-beat (so finally alluded to by Webster) than
in the small colonial-looking newspaper—the same
article, whether it come from the pagodas of India or
the snows of Canada, the sheep-hills of New South
Wales, or the plantations of the Bermudas. By the
kindness of my friend Aaron Palmer, Esq. (who
does business with arms as long as the world's axis,
and has correspondences and exchanges newspapers
with every corner of the globe), I have by me, at this
moment a file of English papers published at the seat
of the Great Mogul, Delhi, and another published at
Bermuda. You would think them all edited by the
same man and supplied by the same contributors.
They are filled principally, of course, with old English
news, but the Delhi paper (only ninety days from the
heart of Hindostan!) has some strictures on Lady
Sale and her book, which show she is not to be a
heroine without the usual penalty of envy and malice.
An officer-contributor to the Gazette says:—

“We were nearly as much on the tiptoe of expectation
for Lady Sale's book as the good folks of England,
though the secret of its origin was here better
known. It would be amusing to print, in parallel
columns, the opinions on her production given by the
press of India and England; c'est a dire, of those who
know what they are writing about and those who do
not. I am safe in asserting that, for every eulogium
her ladyship has received in England, she has got at
least one set down in India.”

The same writer says, in another part of his letter:—

“We look forward to the notice of our Scinde
doings in England. Let not the profit of the acquisition
blind you to the iniquity. Our late dealings with
that country commenced in perfidy, and went on in
blood and rapine. May they not end in retribution!”

We have commonly two sweet hours of idleness in
the afternoon—two hours that are the juice of our
much-squeezed twenty-four hours—two hours that
(to borrow a simile from the more homely and toothsome
days of authorship) are “as sweet as a pot of
lambative electuary with a stick of licorice.” At
four o'clock,

we button our coat over our resignation (synonym for
dinner), and with some pleasant errand that has been
laid aside for such opportunity, stroll forth. It is
sometimes to an artist's room, sometimes to a print-shop,
sometimes to an unexplored street, sometimes
to look off upon the bay, or take a ride in an omnibus
—now and then to refresh our covetous desires at
Tiffany's. We have lately been the subject of a passion
for pawnbrokery, and taken the precaution to
leave our little pocket-money at home, we have tampered
with exploring and price-asking in these melancholy
museums of heart-ache.

“Twiddling” our pen, this morning (as Leigh
Hunt represents Apollo doing with a sunbeam), we
fell to speculating on what it was that made us think,
whether we would or no, of the pyramids! This is
last page-day, and we had forty things to write about,
but there!—there! (“in my mind's eye, Horatio!”)
stands the “wedge sublime” of a pyramid! Doubtless
the ghost of some word, deed, or similitude of the
day before—but why such pertinacity of apparition?
We did, nor noted, nothing pyramidal yesterday. We
watched the general; hanging up, in his new-garnished
office, Dick's fine print of Sir Walter's monument,
and that, it is true, is a pyramid in Gothic. We
bought yesterday, in our pawnbroking researches, a
bust of a man of genius whom we admired because he
found leisure to be a gentleman—the accomplished
victim of circumstances, just dead at Andalusia—and
a pyramid, truncated by a thunderbolt near the summit,
were an emblem of his career that may well have
occurred to us. We were talking and thinking much
yesterday of Moore's confessed completion of his literary
lifetime; and what is his toil, just finished, but
the building of an imperishable pyramid for the memory
of his finished thoughts.

Stay!—an anecdote of Moore occurs to us. He is
dead, “by brevet,” having seen to (and got the money
for), his own “last words;” and when, by the sythe
of the relentless mower, Tom Moore shall be no more,
to know more of his more personal qualities (what an
echo there is to the man's name!) will add spices to
his embalming. An old lady in Dublin, who was one
of Moore's indigenous friends (he was only aristocratic
as an exotic, perhaps you know), told us the story.
It is not likely to get into print except by our telling
for it records a virtue; and Moore is a man to have
selected his biographer with a special caveat against
all contributions to his “life” from its grocery source
—his respectable father, the Dublin grocer, probably
caring little for his “brilliant successes,” and only
cherishing in his brown-paper memory the small
parcel of his virtues. But—to the story—(which
Moore told the old lady, by the way, on one of his
reluctant Irish visits).

Moore had just returned from his government-office
in the West Indies, a defaulter for eight thousand
pounds. Great sympathy was felt for him among his
friends, and three propositions were made to him to
cancel the debt. Lord Lansdowne offered simply to
pay it. Longman and Murray offered to advance it
on his future works, and the noblemen at White's
offered the sum to him in a subscription. This was
at the time subscriptions were on foot for getting
Sheridan out of his troubles; and while Moore was
considering the three propositions just named, he
chanced to be walking down St. James street with two
noblemen when they met Sheridan. Sheridan bowed
to them with a familiar “how are you?”—“D—n the
fellow,” said one of the noblemen, “he might have
touched his hat! I subscribed a hundred pounds for
him last night!”—“Thank God! you dare make no
such criticism on a bow from me!” said Moore to
himself. The lesson sank deep. He rejected all the
offers made to relieve him—went to Passy, and lived
in complete obscurity, in that little suburb of Paris,
till he had written himself out of debt. Under the
spur of that chance remark were written some of the
works by which Moore will be best known to posterity.

This reminds us (and if we don't nab it now, it may
never again be nabable), of a laugh at Moore's expense
in a company of very celebrated authors. They were
talking him over, and one of the company quoted
Leigh Hunt's simile for him—“a young Bacchus
snuffing up the vine.” “Bah!” said another, “don't
quite deify the little worldling! He is more like a
cross between a toad and a cupid!”

We have got hold of a string and we may as well
pull away to see what will come of it. We had long
forgotten two or three trifles tied together, of which this
last paragraph is one, and we remember now, another
anecdote told by the caustic person whose comparison
we have just quoted. He said that Byron would never
have gone to Greece but for a tailor in Genoa. The
noble bard, he went on to say, was very economical,
as was well known, in small matters. He had hired a
villa at Genoa and furnished it, with the intention of
making it a permanent residence. Lord and Lady
Blessington and a large society of English people of
good style were residing there at the time. In the
fullest enjoyment of his house and his mode of life,
Byron wanted a new coat; and, having some English
cloth, he left it with his measure in the hands of a

Genoese tailor, with no particular instructions as to
the making. The tailor, overcome with the honor of
making a coat for an Eccellenza Inglese, embroidered
it from collar to tail, and sent it home with a bill as
thickly embroidered as the coat! Byron kept the
coat for fear of its being sold, as his, to an actor of
English parts on the stage, but resolutely refused to
pay for more than the making of a plain and plebeian
garment. The tailor threatened an attachment, and
Byron assigned over his furniture to his banker, and
finally quitted Genoa in disgust—ready of course, as
he would not otherwise have been, for a new project.
From indignation at an embroidered coat-tail the
transition to “liberty or death,” “wo to the Moslem!”
or any other vent for his accumulated bile, was easy
and natural! He embarked in the Greek cause soon
after, and the embroidered coat was not (as it should
have been) “flung to the breeze at Salamis”—the
banner of inspired heroism!

So was the tale told. So tell we it to you, dear
reader. It is no damage to the gods or demigods to
unpedestal them sometimes. The old Saturnalia,
when masters and slaves changed places for a while,
was founded on the principle in nature that all high-strung-itudes
are better for occasional relaxing.

We have not done what we sat down to do—which
was to run a pretty parallel between a fame and a
pyramid—apropos of some trifles bought of a pear-shaped
pawnbroker. Pity that ideas once touched are
like uncorked claret—good for one draught only!
We shall never dare to take up the figure again, so
we may as well hand you the gold thread we meant to
have woven into it—a little figurative consolation to
the unappreciated poet. To him who is building a
pyramid of poetical fame, a premature celebrity is like
the top-stone laid on his back and carried till he has
built up to it. We wish those of our contributors
whom we neither publish nor praise, would apply this
“parmeceti” to their “inward bruise.”

We take the vital centre of New York to be a certain
lamp-post from which radiate five crossings—one
pointing to the Astor, one to the American Museum,
one up Broadway, one up the Bowery, and the fifth
(dead east) to the office of the New Mirror—the
which office is clearly visible from the palm of the
spread hand upholding this medio-metropolitan lamp-post.
Having conceived—(you have—have you not,
dear reader?)—the laudable purpose of subscribing
for the Mirror's second year (now on the eve of commencing),
your first inquiry is the geography of
“Ann street,”—upon which money-welcoming spot
shines nightly this central lamp of the municipality.
You arrive safely at the Astor. You glide past its
substratum of apothecaries, perfumers, goldsmiths,
and hatters, and arrest your footsteps at the triple corner
studded with three of the notable structures of
Manhattan—the imperial Astor, the goodly St Paul's,
and the marvellous museum with the “fifty thousand
curiosities.” You now face due southward. Helm
down (coat-skirt down Vesey street, that is to say),
and you head east southeast, laying your course exactly.
Before you lies a crossing of flags by which
you may safely reach the islanded palm of the spread
hand (holding two granite posts guarding a lamp-post),
and, once there, you luff a little to the right, and
follow the pointed forefinger of that same hand to
the opening lips of Ann street. Cross over, keep
down a few doors to the right, and “there you are”—
(there we are!)—walk in!

And now, dear sir! (besides your receipt and the
benign smile of the Brigadier) what will you have?
Our visibilities to the naked eye are small, but there
be caves and storehouses of our primrose-colored
wares, and if we affect the Turkish fashion of a specimen
shop, with room only for one purchaser at a
time, it is for another reason besides saving the rent.
Philosophic, like us, is the French Amphytrion, who
does not show to his delicate guest the pieces de resistance.
The roasted joints stand upon a side-table,
removed from view, and if slices are handed you over
your shoulder, it is with an apposite commendation
which the sight of the whole dish would fatally
smother. Small as the shop is, however (parva, sed
apta mihi!) the welcome is spacious! All who come
there, come with a parishioner's regard, self-chosen
to our literary flock, and none turn the latch without
unlocking our heart with the same door-handle.
(“Qualis rex, talis grex!” Having found comfort in
loving ourselves, we venture the more easily to love
those who are like us.)

Touching this shop (of which we have now given
you the pictorial chart), we shall have more to say
hereafter. It has its history. Our landlord is a
“picked man of countries,” and has written his pleasant
book. Around us “volcanoes belch their fires”
of prodigal literature, and opposite us there is a deep-door
by which the modest wits about town descend to
Windust's, for news and things more succulent.
There sometimes dives the brigadier, to lunch with
needful celerity on the busy Saturday, and thence
emerge daily and shiny-ly (after their pot of ale) refreshed,
the manufacturers of public opinion. Oh, from
our modest window, we see sights! But, enough for
now!

I had a half-hour's interview with the TALKING
MACHINE this morning, and found him a more entertaining
android than most of my wooden acquaintances—(the
man who thinks for him being a very superior
person). I must first give you a tableau of the
room. A German woman takes your half dollar at
the door, and points you to a semi-boxed-up Turk
(query: Why are all automata dressed in turbans?)
—a Turk seated in a kind of low pulpit, with a green
shirt, a good complexion, a very fine beard, and a
pearl breastpin. Out from under his shoulder issues
a bunch of wooden sticks, arranged like a gamut of
pump-handles, and behind this, ready to play on his
Turk, sits Mr. Faber, the contriver. (I immediately
suggested to Mr. F., by the way, that the costume
and figure had better have been female, as the bustle
would have given a well-placed and ample concealment
for all the machinery now disenchantingly
placed outside—the performer sitting down naturally
behind, and playing on her like a piano.[7] ) The
Turk was talking to several ladies and gentlemen
when I entered, and my name being mentioned by
one of the party, he said, “How do you do, Mr.
—?” with perfect distinctness. There was a small
musical organ in the room, and one of the visiters
played “Hail Columbia!” the automaton singing the
words “like a man.” There was no slighting or
slurring of diphthong or vowel, sybillate or aspirate.
Duty was done by every letter with a legitimate claim
to be sounded—the only fault being a strong German
accent (which of course will wear off with travel), and
a few German peculiarities, such as pronouncing v's
like w's, gargling the gutturals, &c., &c.

I understood Mr. Faber to say that he was seven
years contriving the utterance of the vowel e. Mr. F
has a head and countenance fit for a speech-maker
(maker of the gift of speech, I mean)—a head of the

finest model, and a mouth strongly marked with intelligence
and feeling. He is simple, naif, and enthusiastic
in his manners. The rude musical organ in the
room was his own handiwork, and at the request of
one of the ladies he sat down to it and played a beautiful
waltz of his own composing. He may well be
completely absorbed, as he seems to be, in his androides.
It says anything, in any language. It can
not cough—not being liable to bronchitis: nor laugh
—being a Turk. But it can sing, and has a sweet
breath and well-governed tongue. In short, it is what
would pass in the world for “a very fine man.” Besides
those whom God has made (Boyle, the philosopher,
calls the world “an automation of God's ma
king”), I know of but one or two attempts before this
to make a talking-machine—the famous one by Von
Kempelen, and the celebrated brazen head constructed
by Friar Bacon. What could be uttered by this un
thinking brass has not come down to us. The statue
of Memnon could utter musical sounds, and Maelzel's
chess-player could say “echec.” A much more useful
automaton than any of these, Mr. Faber's included,
was one invented by one of the brothers Droz—
“a child, sitting at a desk, who dipped his pen in the
ink and wrote in French whatever was dictated to
him” (the inventor, of course, somewhere concealed).
It struck me as a great pity, indeed, that the admirable
ingenuity and perseverance of Mr. Faber
should have been wasted on a superfluity—(for there
is more talking than enough). Albertus Margnus invented,
with thirty years' labor, an automaton servant,
who would open the door when any one knocked, and
salute the visiter—capable, of course, of being able to
say “not at home,” and so saving the conscience of
the domestic; and this was, perhaps, worth the labor.
Less meritorious, again, was the automaton fly made
of iron by Regiomontanus, in the 14th century, which
would make the circuit of the room with a buz, and
return to its master. Something in the Pygmalion
line has been attempted within a few years by a Swiss
mechanician, Maillardet, who constructed a female
with a “bosom that would heave for an hour,” once
wound up. She would also play forty tunes on the
piano with her fingers, and look languishingly by casting
her eyes down—almost enough for one woman to
do! I think these are facts enough for a very speculative
essay on the value of such offices as may be
performed by the body without the aid of brains.

I have been prevented, of late, from going about as
much as my wont, and have hardly seen or heard
more of the city doings than the country readers of
your paper. This will account, if not apologize, for
some lack of variety in my letters. I broke through
my fireside habits last night, and went to the Methodist
chapel in Madison street, to hear the Rev. Mr.
Maffit's diatribe against “Boz”—admittance twenty
five cents. My surprise on being called on for money
at the door was pleasurable, for I rejoice in an injustice
turned by its victims “to commodity.” Two
hundred people were well amused, and religion (per
one of its ministers) was profited fifty dollars in pocket.
Except in this light, however, I should call the
using of “Boz” for a pulpit text a decided case of le
jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle. (The church gas-lights
seemed to be of that opinion, for they suddenly paled
their fires ten minutes before the conclusion of the
lecture!)

While I think of it—Dickens has contradicted the
report, published in the London papers, touching his
durance for debt. I am glad it was not true. Mis
takes of positive assertion and of this personal character
are so rare in the respectable English papers, that
I mentioned it in my letter to you with no suspicion
of its being an error—the assertion supported, moreover,
by the rumors, rife to the same purport, when I
was last in London. The reports, doubtless, were
born of the coupling of two well-known facts—the decrease
of the prices paid for his books by publishers,
and the increase of his “pledges,” with no corresponding
reductions apparent in his style of living.
The statement having once appeared in the papers of
his own country, an expression of sympathy (as far
off as the other shoulder of the world) was but complimentary
to Mr. Dickens.

Mr. Maffit's discourse was more of an event to me
than to most of his audience, probably; for his eloquence
made a great impression upon me when I was
a boy between ten and twelve years of age, and I had
not seen him since. He preached at that time in the
Bromfield chapel, Boston (in the next street to the
one in which I lived), and was then a “new light” in
the methodist church, and drew crowds after him. I
left my play eagerly to hear him, and I have often
since wished for an opportunity to analyze the peculiar
delight he gave me—for it was all pleasure, without
the slightest effect in the way of religious impression.
I could fill my letter with what came to me
upon the turned-back leaf of seeing Mr. Maffit in the
pulpit again, but the comparison between the effects
of oratory upon tastes mature and immature, though
interesting elsewhere, would be out of place here.
He was not so much changed as I anticipated. Macready
has always reminded me of him, and they are
still alike. Mr. Maffit did not use to shave his temples,
and from this peculiar tonsure, his forehead looks
higher and his hair less Hyperian and more oratorical
than formerly.

He commenced with some general remarks as to
the charm of variety in customs and manners, and the
common English weakness of condemning pitilessly
every departure from the cockney standards and peculiarities,
trying, by this test only, every country under
the sun. This part of the oration was written in lambent
and oily-hinged periods, and delivered—really, in
music absolute! I felt the spell over again. It is in
the voice and accent of Mr. Maffit that the philtre
lies hid. So sweet a tone no other man has, in my
knowledge. His inflexions, so long as he remains
unexcited, are managed with the skill of the subtlest
rhetorician. He hides the meaning of his sentences
under the velvet words that are sweetest to linger
upon, and to press with emphasis, and in this department
of oratory he seems to me unsurpassed. He
soon broke the spell, however. As he left generalizing,
and got from poetry to analysis, he began to
show bad taste and clumsy discrimination, and fell
into a kind of grimalkin sputter of sareasm, that let
down his dignity sadly. The audience began to applaud,
and, with their applause, he grew inflated, both
in matter and manner, and for the last half hour of his
discourse was entirely off his feet—trashy, inconsequent,
and absurd—most applauded, however, when
most incomprehensible. (And this ill-bestowed applause
may easily have been the reverend orator's Delilah.)
I remember little of what he said after the
first fifteen minutes. There was a good deal of illustration
to show that the “Yankees could whip the
British,” and much more of such clap-trap, and Dickens
and Mrs. Trollope were each served out with as
much pulpit-pounding and bitter epithet as is commonly
given the devil, at a dose. One comparative
testimony given by the orator is valuable, as he speaks
on both sides with authority. He assured us that the
society in every part of this country, “from the
Aroostook to the Sabine,” is as refined and delightful
as any society whatever, except that of heaven. He
did not mention how long he had resided in the latter
country, but he had been a travelling guest of American
families for the twenty years since he left Ireland,

and had been treated everywhere as a son and brother,
and spoke advisedly. I could wish this Irish and
celestial evidence in our favor might be put (for smoking)
into the pipe of the London Quarterly.

I have discovered lately that the household-gods
have a vocabulary of their own. Search after a trifling
invention led me to Windle's furnishing-shop in
Maiden lane, and after spending an hour in marvelling
at the mind that has been expended upon the invention
of household conveniences, I asked for a catalogue
of the shop's wares. A pamphlet of twenty-one
pages was handed me, and I give you, for your
despair, a few of the names of the necessary utensils
by which your comfort is ministered to: “Pope's
heads and eyes.” “Shakers' swifts,” “beefsteak pounders,”
“faucets and bungstarts,” “bootjacks and leg-resters,”
“salt and spit-boxes,” “Chinese swings,”
“Chinese punk in boxes,” “sillabub-sticks,” “oven-peels,”
“allblaze-pans,” “ice-cream pagodas,” “paste-jaggers
and cutters,” “crimping and goffering machines,”
“sugar-nippers and larding-pins,” “bread-rasps
and sausage-stuffers,” etc., etc., etc. This is vernacular,
of course, to the ladies, but Greek to us.

Apropos of words—there should be a replevin (by
poetry upon vulgar usage) to restore the word diaper
to its original meaning. Ford says in one of his plays
(The Sun's Darling):—

Diaper means literally, to embroider with raised
work—after a stuff which was formerly called d'Ipre,
from the town of Ipre in Flanders, where it was manofactured.
There is such a load of descriptiveness
in the word that it is a shame it should be lost to
poetry.

Moore's carefully revised and corrected edition of
his works is republished in this country at the price
of three dollars and a half. Half of it, at least, is
uninteresting to the general reader, consisting of his
satires (with names left in unexplained blanks), local
poetry, translations from the classics, and a mass of
labored notes. The popular portions, consisting of
“The Loves of the Angels,” “The Irish Melodies
and Sacred Songs,” and the “National Airs, Ballads,
and Miscellaneous Poems,” have been published in
three extras of the Mirror—five shillings for all of
them. This will form as beautiful an edition of the
enjoyable part of Moore's poetry as could be wished,
and as cheap as beautiful.

Charles Dibdin, “The Bard of Poor Jack,” as
he is commonly called, is one of those authors less
known than his works, particularly in this country,
where his songs are familiar to every lip, and his name
hardly recognised. General Morris has made a collection
of all the songs of Dibdin that are universal
in their popularity, and has added others which from
their bold and graphic excellence have been commonly
attributed to him. This shilling extra of the
Mirror will become, I think, the sailor's classic, embodying,
as it does, all their most remarkable songs.

Montgomery's “World before the Flood,” one of
the sweetest poems in the English language, is also in
press for the “Mirror Library.” On looking over the
biography of this good man and true poet, I find, by-the-way,
the following passage, referring, I believe, to
the father of one of the editors of the Intelligencer:
“Mr. Montgomery removed to Sheffield (England) in
1792, and engaged himself with Mr. Gales, the publisher
of a very popular newspaper, at that time known
by the title of the Sheffield Register. Mr. Mont
gomery became a useful correspondent to this paper,
and gained so far the good opinion and affection of
Mr. Gales and his family, that they vied with each
other in demonstrating their respect and regard for
him. In 1794, when Mr. Gales left England to avoid
a political prosecution, Montgomery, with the assistance
of another gentleman, became the editor of the
Register.” Critics have unanimously agreed that
“The World before the Flood” is the best production
of Montgomery's muse, and it certainly is a noble and
pure structure of elevated imagination. Among the
sacred classics, Montgomery, I think, will rank first.

Sorrow's Reluctant Gate.—This last-turned
leaf, dear reader, seems to us always like a door shut
behind us, with the world outside. We have expressed
this thought before, when it was a prelude to
being gayer than in the preceding pages. With the
closed door, now, we would throw off restraint, but it
is to be sadder than before. It is so with yourself,
doubtless. You sometimes break into singing on entering
your chamber and finding yourself alone—
sometimes you burst into tears.

There is nothing for which the similitudes of poetry
seem to us so false and poor, as for affliction by the
death of those we love. The news of such a calamity
is not “a blow.” It is not like “a thunderbolt,”
or “a piercing arrow;” it does not “crush and over-whelm”
us. We hear it, at first, with a kind of mournful
incredulity, and the second feeling is, perhaps, a
wonder at ourselves—that we are so little moved.
The pulse beats on as tranquilly—the momentary tear
dries from the eye. We go on, about the errand in
which we were interrupted. We eat, sleep, at our
usual time, and are nourished and refreshed; and if a
friend meet us and provoke a smile, we easily and forgetfully
smile. Nature does not seem to be conscious
of the event, or she does not recognise it as a calamity.

But little of what is taken away by death is taken
from the happiness of one hour, or one day. We
live, absent from beloved relatives, without pain. Days
pass without our seeing them—months—years. They
would be no more absent in body if they were dead.
But, suddenly, in the midst of our common occupations,
we hear that they are one remove farther from
us—in the grave. The mind acknowledges it true.
The imagination makes a brief and painful visit to the
scene of the last agony, the death-chamber, the
burial—and returns weary and dispirited, to repose.
For that hour perhaps we should not have thought of
the departed, if they were living—nor for the next.
The routine we had relied upon to fill up those hours
comes round. We give it our cheerful attention.
The beloved dead are displaced from our memory, and
perhaps we start suddenly, with a kind of reproachful
surprise, that we can have been so forgetful—that the
world, with its wheels of minutes and trifles, can thus
untroubled go round, and that dear friend gone
from it.

But the day glides on, and night comes. We lie
down, and unconsciously, as we turn upon our pillow,
commence a recapitulation that was once a habit of
prayer—silently naming over the friends whom we
should commend to God—did we pray—as those most
dear to us. Suddenly the heart stops—the breath
hushes—the tears spring hot to the eyelids. We miss
the dead! From that chain of sweet thoughts a link
is broken, and for the first time we feel that we are
bereaved. It was in the casket of that last hour before
sleeping—embalmed in the tranquillity of that hour's
unnamed and unreckoned happiness—that the memory
of the dead lay hid. For that friend, now, we
can no longer pray! Among the living—among our
blessings—among our hopes—that sweet friend is

nameable no more! We realize it now. The list of
those who love us—whom we love—is made briefer.
With face turned upon our pillow—with anguish and
fears—we blot out the beloved name, and begin the
slow and nightly task of unlearning the oft-told syllables
from our lips.

And this is the slow-opening gate by which sorrow
enters in! We wake on the morrow and remember
our tears of the past night; and as the cheerful sunshine
streams in at our window, we think of the kind
face and embracing arms, the soft eyes and beloved
lips, lying dark and cold, in a place—oh how pitiless
in its coldness and darkness! We choke with a suffused
sob, we heave the heavy thought from our bosom
with a painful sigh, and hasten abroad—for relief in
forgetfulness!

But we had not anticipated that this dear friend
would die, and we have marked out years to come
with hopes in which the dead was to have been a
sharer. Thoughts, and promises, and meetings, and
gifts, and pleasures, of which hers was the brighter
half, are wound like a wreath of flowers around the
chain of the future, and as we come to them—to the
places where these looked for flowers lie in ashes upon
the inevitable link—oh, God! with what agonizing
vividness they suddenly return!—with what grief, made
intenser by realizing, made more aching by prolonged
absence, we call up those features beloved, and remember
where they lie, uncaressed and unvisited!
Years must pass—and other affections must “sweep,
and garnish, and enter in” to the void chambers of the
heart—and consolation and natural forgetfulness must
do their slow work of erasure—and meantime grief
visits us, in unexpected times and places, its paroxysms
imperceptibly lessening in poignancy and tenacity,
but life in its main current, flowing, from the
death to the forgetting of it, unchanged on!

And now, what is like to this, in nature (for even the
slight sympathy in dumb similitudes is sweet)? It is
not like the rose's perishing—for that robs only the
hour in which it dies. It were more like the removal
from earth of that whole race of flowers, for we should
not miss the first day's roses, hardly the first season's,
and should mourn most when the impoverished spring
came one more round without them. It were like
stilling the music of a brook for ever, or making all
singing-birds dumb, or hushing the wind-murmur in
the trees, or drawing out from nature any one of her
threads of priceless repetition. We should not mourn
for the first day's silence in the brook, or in the trees—
nor for the first morning's hush after the birds were
made voiceless. The recurrent dawns, or twilights, or
summer noons, robbed of their accustomed music,
would bring the sense of its loss—the value of what
was taken away increasing with its recurrent season.
But these are weak similitudes—as they must needs
be, drawn from a world in which death—the lot alike
of all living creatures that inhabit it—is only a calamity
to man!

Spring is here, and, with its earliest sunshine,
Broadway puts out its first flowers in bright colors
and gay drapery. It is a lounge we should love were
we idle. We do not write for Autolycus, nor for
Timon. (Thieves and misanthropes do not commonly
take the papers.) And as all other classes of mankind
yield to the gregarious instincts of our race, we
feel free to discourse of Broadway as a place beloved.
Beloved it is—by the philanthropist, interested in the
peccant varieties of his fellow-creatures; by the old,
who love to look upon the young; and by the young,
who love to look upon each other; (ah! the celestial
quality of youth!)—by the serious, for whom there
would seem to be resorts less thronged with sinners
if need were), and by sinners who are at least spared
the sin of hypocrisy, for, with little disguise, they
“love one another.” Now, if beautiful women are
not laudable objects of contemplation and curiosity,
as St. Anthony avers (and he is welcome to let them
alone), we are not warned against beautiful children,
nor beautiful horses, nor the bright sunshine, nor the
gay product of the silkworm, nor the “stuffs from
Colchis and Trebizond.”

Very handsome—isn't she? And apparently in a
very great hurry, and apparently very much disgusted
at being seen in the street at all! You would think,
now, that that lady's coachman was ill and that she
was, for this once in her life, walking alone to her
mother's. But she is more amused at this moment
than she will be again to-day—and to-morrow she will
take the same walk to be happy again. She has a
husband, however, and a beautiful house, and not a
wish (that money can gratify) ungratified. And her
drawing-rooms are full of exquisite objects of art.
She might stay contentedly at home, you think? No!
She was a belle, pampered with admiration when she
married, and she married a cynical and cold-blooded
parsnip, who sits like a snarling ogre among his statnes
and pictures—a spot on his own ottoman—a blemish
in the elegance of his own house. She married him
for an establishment, but forgot he was a part of it—
dazzled with the frame, she overlooked the hideousness
of the picture. And he knows this—and likes
her, with his statues, as his property—and is pleased
to have her seen as his wife—though she is the wife
to but one part of him, his vanity! She finds it hard
to feel beautiful at breakfast, with her husband on the
other side of the table, and he finds it hard to be very
bland with a wife who looks at his acrid physiognomy
with a shudder.

A superb house with him in it, is like a fine tulip
with an adder in it. But she is a woman, and whether
she has a heart or no, she has a well-cultivated vanity,
and unluckily, the parents who taught her to secure
luxury in wedlock, taught her no foresight as to her
more needful supply of admiration. Love, she would
like very well—but admired she must be! And too
cold and worldly to be imprudent, and too proud to be
willing to seem pleased with the gaze of Broadway
idlers, she still thirsts after this very stare which is
given to her beauty by the passers-by, and has very
little happiness beyond her daily hurried walk on the
crowded pavé. She'll make a match of sentiment if
she gets another chance, or, at any rate, will marry
for some love and less money.

Heaven help her through with her present chrysalis!

“How are you?”

“How are you?”

What would a new-dropped angel think of these
two unanswered questions? Indeed, what would an
angel think of that smiling fellow who exchanged this
nonsense with me. He is one of a thousand in the
city who, “like the prodigal, squeezed through a
horn,” are happy from having got through the tightest
place of this mortal life. Though his dimeasions are
immeasurably smaller than they were not long ago, they
are so much easier than they grew to be after, that
he feels as if, like Uncle Toby's fly, there was room
enough in the world for him now. He is easy with the
rebound after being broke with overstraining. He was
a merchant, reputed to have made money enough.
Sensitive and punctilious in all the relations of life,
he was particularly soigné of his commercial honor.
Never a breath sullied that clear escutoheou! For
this he was supposed to be over-careful—for this he
was inflexible where his heart would have prompted
him to be indulgent—for this, it was soberly believed,
he would sacrifice his life. His wife was (and has
since proved herself by trial) an admirable woman,
and with fine children and good looks of his own, he
was one of those fallacious contradictions of the equal

distribution of mortal happiness. Well—his star began
to descend from its apogee, and he courageously
lugged out his philosophy and retrenched his expenditure.
And then began an agony of mind which
could be increased, even hereafter, by the increased
capacity of the mind—for, short of reason overturned,
he could suffer no more. A thousand years of a common
tenor of life would seem shorter than those six
terrible months of sinking into bankruptey. But now
comes the curious part of it! He suddenly took the
benefit of the bankrupt law. And instead of lying
still prostrate upon the ground, crushed and humiliated
—instead of hiding his head, as he longed to do while
he still promised to pay, degraded, spiritless, lost, to
the enjoyment of life—instead of still seeming an object
of pity to the most ruthless sufferer by his fall—
up, like a snapped spring, he bounds to the empyrean!
He could not be gayer with his debts paid and his
fortune in his hands again! He walks the street,
smiling, and with a light step. He is a little smarter
than he used to be in this dress. He eats well, and
the wrinkles have retreated, and his eyes have thrown
open their windows, and (as you saw when he passed)
there is not a merrier or more fortunate-looking idler
in this merry Broadway! Now, quere?—Is there a
provision in nature for honor to cast its skin? Becomes
it new, scarless and white, after a certain wear,
tear, and suffering? Does a man remember, till, with
the anguish of remembering, he forgets? Has God,
in our construction, provided a recuperative, to guard
us against over self infliction? Can we use up our
sense of shame with over-working it, and do we come
then to a stratum of self-approval and self-glorification?
Enfin—is this inward whitewashing confined
only to money-spots, and is nature hereby provided
with a corrective check to our implacabilities of
pocket?

TO OUR ONE WITHDRAWING SUBSCRIBER.

Sir: A French writer wittily turns the paradox:
“Il faut de l'argent même pour se passer d'argent”—
(is it necessary to have money to be able to do without
it)—and we please ourselves with suspecting that it is
only amid the forgetful ease of possession that you can
have made up your mind to forego us. If so, and
your first se'ennight of unmirrored solitude prove
heavier to bear than the aching three dollar void
balanced against it—so! The pathos of this parting
will have been superfluous.

Our connexion, sir, though born of a “promise to
pay,” has been a matter of friendship; and in dissolving
a friendship, it is desirable, on both sides, to have back
again the secrets safe only in a friend's keeping. It
is common and easy, as you well know, for one man
to “give” another “a piece of his mind,” and we ask
that piece of yours upon which we have stitched the
lining of ours. For the goods and chattels we have
sent you, that are yours, of course. Such third-person
matters as stories and poesies, pictures, drolleries,
gossipries and novelties—the visible contents of our
primrose cover—are—like the three dollars paid for
them—like the ear of rye up a schoolboy's sleeve—irrevertible!
They are yours. The money is (was)
ours. We would not willingly change back! But
other values have passed to your keeping, that are not
strictly commodities of barter. We have vent-pegs,
that are, as it may chance to turn out, largesses or
weaknesses. We are known, favorably or unfavorably,
for an incontinence of ourself—a certain need to expand
upon our neighbor. If we are happy it runs
over the brim—if we are sad, prodigal, too, with our
tears. Withal, we have a natural incredulity of breakings-off—walking
upright upon all manner of eternities
till we have tumbled over the end. Do you see how
subject we were to improvident confidences?

To fix upon the wares we would have back, you
have only to ask what a stranger could buy of us, and
subtract it from what you know of us. Could you
stop us in the street, for example, and buy the fulness
of our heart from us—such as has overflowed upon
our last page often and unaware—for sixpence? Could
you send to us for a thought that has sailed out of our
bosom upon our private tear, and enclose a shilling for
two copies through the village postmaster? Could
you point us out to a dirty newsboy, and tell him
“that gentleman had last week some pangs and some
pleasures, and I will give you sixpence to see them in
a Mirror, with their expressed gall or honey?” Could
you touch us upon the shoulder in Broadway and say,
“Sir, I should like to have sent to me, weekly, the
thoughts which are stirred by all you enjoy or suffer,
expressed in choice rhetoric and printed on fine paper;
and you may throw me in a fine steel plate, a new
story or two, all the gossip of the week, some criticisms
and any fine poetry that has come to your hand—for
which I will pay you sixpence per weekly copy?”
Oh, there is much that you have bought of us with
which you have no business, ceasing to be our friend!
And when you have sent that part back, your money's-worth
will still stretch its long legs comfortably under
the covering blanket of the remainder!

Well, sir, adieu! There is some machinery, of
one kind and another, that will now cease to labor,
at sixpence per week, for your gratification—sundry
male printers and engravers, sundry female folders and
stitchers, our post-office boy and wheelbarrow, such
trifling rail-roads and steamers as have been built to
convey the Mirror to you—these and we, with our
best brains and contributors, we are sorry to say, will
now cease to minister to you—but you will have, instead,
weekly, an unspent sixpence! Of this sixpence,
much foregone for, we wish you joy in the overbalancing
value of possession! And so, sir, drawing back
our complicated machinery that you may lift this
small silver bridge from between us, we bid you once
more, over the chasm of removed equivalent, a respectful
adieu!

TO OUR PUNCTUAL FIRMAMENT OF FIXED STARS.

Ladies and gentlemen: In the eleven thousand
shining sixpences which duly rise and dispense their
silver light upon our way, we see of course the
“Heaven of eternal change” toward whose “patines
of bright gold” we have been long stretching with
tiptoe expectation. We trust that, like the unpocketable
troop whose indefatigable punctuality you emulate,
there are still comers to your number unarrived,
and that the “Lost Pleiad” (the single heavenly body
upon whose discontinuance to rise we indited the
foregoing epistle), will come round again in his erratic
orbit, and take his place in the constellation he has
deserted. We give notice here, however, that, at
eleven thousand, we shall, like the nuns of St. Ursula,
stop numbering. There have been virgins since the
shelving of the bones of the “eleven thousand virgins
of Cologne,” yet the oft-told number is still told,
without increase, in the holy tradition. We believe
with the sainted sisterhood that human credence can
go no farther—that 'twixt millions and billions of
virgins the disciple's mind would not be likely to diseriminate.
You will still permit us, therefore, to cast
our horoscope upon this nominal number. As other
starry sixpences fall into the chinks of boundless space,
the perceptible increase of our brightness will alone
tell the tale—but they will be marked and welcomed
in the careful careful astronomy of our leger.

You are ours, oh pleasant eleven thousand! The
vain astronomer casts over the sky his net of parallels
and meridians and calls the caught heavens his own,
but the stars he numbers are not, like ours, convertible
to things to eat. We will envy Herschel when he
can change sixteen of his entrapped stars for a dollar
—when he can dabble with their shining faces as we
with our constellated “fips” You are ours, and
therefore we will care for you.

It occurred to me in an omnibus to-day, that it
would be curious to know with what eyes angels watch
us. My opinion as to the importance of “every hair
of our head” had been somewhat modified within the
previous half-hour by a look at one or two of my own
(hairs) through a solar microscope, and the thought
naturally suggested itself, that if the eyes of our spiritual
guardians were microscopic (as they may easily
be), there was no so great marvel in the care they
take of us. It was a warm, pleasant morning, and I
was letting myself ramble and look into windows. An
exhibition of a solar microscope came in my way, and I
went in. The wall of a large room was apparently
swarming with rats and mud-turtles when I opened
the door, and this was some of the dust from a fig,
held on the point of a pin, and magnified five million
times. I had seen many of these experiments in college,
of course, but one hears so many wonderful
things, when one is growing, that I do not remember
being much astonished in those days. It was different
now, for I really never was more amused and
amazed then at the snakes in the drop of vinegar, and
the formidable apparatus of a certain un-nameable little
customer, whose like I had occasion to slay in
great numbers in the poetical Orient. To bring the
thing home to my own business and bosom, however
(the microscope, not the pcdiculus!) I begged the
exhibitor to show me, magnified, one or two of my
own hairs. I plucked one from my bump of imagination
and another from my bump of acquisitiveness,
and gave them both to him, with some curiosity
to know if the roots would show the difference in the
soil. Somewhat to my surprise there was a difference.
He placed them carefully on his instrument,
and the root of the imaginative hair was shaped like a
claret bottle (and about its size), while that of the acquisitive
hair was like a short fat porter bottle—the
hairs themselves being, to the roots, in about the proportions
of the necks to the bottles. I must say I was
truly delighted at the discovery of this analogy, and
seldom have bought so good a fact for twelve and a
half cents. As I said before, “the hairs of our heads”
being “all numbered,” my guardian angel knows how
many dozen I have remaining of my imaginative claret,
and how my acquisitive porter improves by age, and
he looks after it all like one of Bininger's clerks, letting
none “fall to the ground” without careful putting
down. The exhibitor asked me to try another, but a
man thinks twice of plucking out a hair, impressed with
the idea that it will leave a hole in his head as big as
a claret-bottle! I declined.

But if every hair of my head be as big (to a microscopic
eye) as a bottle of porter with a neck a mile
long, and my body in proportion, at what a very moderate
charge (thought I, as I rode down) am I carried
a mile in the unmagnified omnibus! What would have
become of us if God had inflicted upon us a Babel of
the eye instead of the ear, making different men see
things through different lenses, diminishing and microscopic!
What work for the lawyers! I was beginning
to turn my mind to the quantity of magnified
body that one unmagnified soul could properly inhabit
(as a house may easily be expanded till one tenant
is an absurdity), when the omnibus stopped. It is
a very good subject for an extravaganza in Thomas
Hood's vein.

There is a certain curiosity to know “how the thing
went off,” even though the show in question was a
bore to the spectator. Perked up people think that
only such curiosity as would sit well upon George
Washington should be catered for in print, but I incline
to think that almost any matter which would be
talked about by any two people together would be entertaining
to one man reading by himself. So I think
I may put down what I saw at a show that was advertised
as an “Exhibition of Laughing Gas.”

My younger readers may perhaps require to be
told that nitrate of ammonia, like himself, has a soul
that fire will burn out of it. When the lamp over
which it is held gets too hot “to be stood” any longer,
up rises a little whitish cloud which has most of
the properties of common air, but which has a sweet
taste and an agreeable odor, and will pass into any human
soul's body upon very slight invitation. Once
in, however, it abuses the hospitality extended to it,
by immediately usurping all the functions of the body,
and behaves, in short, extremely like another more
notorious enemy, who, “when admitted into your
mouth steals away your brains.” The stimulus of
this intoxicating gas to the nervous system is very surprising.
Sir Humphrey Davy administered it to
Southey the poet, whose feelings are thus described:
“He could not distinguish between the first effects
and a certain apprehension, of which he was unable
to divest himself. His first definite sensations were a
fulness and dizziness in the head, such as to induce
the fear of falling. This was succeeded by a laugh
which was involuntary, but highly pleasurable, accompanied
by a peculiar thrilling in the extremities—
a sensation perfectly new and delightful. For many
hours after this experiment, he imagined that his
taste and smell were more acute, and is certain that
he felt unusually strong and cheerful. In a second
experiment he flet pleasure still superior, and has
since poetically remarked, that he supposes the atmosphere
of the highest of all possible heavens to be composed
of this gas!”

There were between three and four thousand penple
assembled in the Tabernacle. A platform in the
centre was hemmed in with benches, and it was advertised
that “twelve strong men” would be there to prevent
injury to the spectators. It was mentioned in the
advertisement, also, that the gallery would be reserved
for ladies, though I thought that the inviting of ladies
to be present at the removal of all restraint from
men's tongues and actions, was a strong mark of confidence
in the uppermost qualities of our sex. After
some impatience on the part of the audience, the professor
appeared with his specimen of “the highest
possible heaven” in an India-rubber bag. The candidates
for a taste of it were many and urgent, crowding
up from below like the applicants to St. Peter,
and the professor seemed somewhat embarrassed as to
a selection. A thick-necked and bony youth got possession
of the bag, however, and applied his mouth to
the stopper. After inhaling its contents for a minute
or two, he squared away and commenced pummelling
the professor in the most approved butcher-boy style
—which was possibly his idea of the “highest possible
heaven.” The “twelve strong men” rushed
to the rescue, the audience applauded vociferously,
and the lad returned to his senses, having been
out of them perhaps three minutes. A dozen others
took their turn, and were variously affected. I was
only very much delighted with one young man, who
coolly undertook a promenade over the the close-packed
heads of the audience. The impertiuence of
the idea seemed to me in the highest degree brilliant

and delightful. There was one corsair-looking man
who rushed up and down the stage, believing himself
on the deck of some vessel in pursuit of another, and
that was perhaps the best bit of acting. One silly
youth went to and fro, smirking and bowing, and another
did a scene in “Richard the Thrid,” and a tall,
good-looking young man laughed heartily, and suddenly
stopped and demanded of the audience, in indignant
rage, what they were laughing at! There
was nothing else worth even putting down among trifles,
and I was glad when it was over. The only imaginable
entertainment in such an exhibition would
be to watch the effect of self-abandonment on those
whose characters we know when under restraint.
Among acquaintances it would be charming—particularly
if the subjects were ladies. I should recommend
to the professor to advertise himself as open to
invitations to administer his “highest possible heaven”
to small and select parties. It would be better
than a masquerade and not so unlawful.

The etymology of April lies in dispute between
aperire, the Latin word for open (because at this time
the earth is preparing to open and enrich us with its
gifts), and Aphrodite, one of the names of the goddess
of love, to whom the mouth is especially
consecrated. By either derivation, it is the month
of promise, and like the trees, we feel the juices
lovingly ascending to our top, and we can venture to
enter upon that “promising” which is the very “air
o' the time,” without fearing that “performance” will
be “the duller for the act.” And, by-the-way, while
we think of it, we have been beset by a friendly letter
to cut short the present year, and commence a
new volume with January 1, 1845. We must be excused
for preferring, altogether, a commencement in
April, accident and convenience quite aside. There
is a fitness in commencing (putting out our first
leaves) with nature. After nature's example, we may
venture, with our first issue, to promise a prodigal
summer of flowers and a harvest of fruits, though
there we trust the parallel will stop, for we do not propose
with nature to “take our leaves” in October and
fall presently to decay! No, sir! Let us commence
our primrose-colored series in primrose-time.
Our hopes are April-ish, as looks our cover. We
hope to swell, not dwindle, from April into May—to
five out our products more lavishly in June, and
have a “harvest home” of prosperity in August.
What says old Drayton of the order of such matters?—

—-a fair picture of the art we mean to make manifest
in our medley of literary flowers. There are some
productions whose “luscious smell” requires the “al
laying” of common sense; and, now and then, a lily
of plain truth and simplicity, “pricked in” between
high-wrought prose and gorgeous poetry, makes
charming harmony. The periodical-writers of all
times have practised this trick of diversity. “If a
magaziner be dull” (says Goldsmith) “upon the Spanish
war, he soon has us up again with the ghost in
Cock-lane.”

A writer

complains of us for taking liberties with the queen's
English. He does not specify his instances. Mr.
King, of the American (we were not aware before
that he was the proprietor of the “King's English!”)
makes an outcry like Milton's stall-reader,[8] at the
title of the “Rococo.” If Mr. King will give us one
of his newspaper-words that conveys, like the single
word Rococo, the entire periphrasis of “intrinsically
valuable and beautiful, but accidentally and unjustly
obsolete,” we will send the offensive word back to
France, where we got it. Meantime, as Costard said
of his new word “remuneration,” we “will not buy
nor sell out of it.” But, withal, we confess to great
responsibility, in the adoption of new words and the
restoration of old, and we do not spare, upon every
instance, careful consideration. It is due to the literature
of our country, that those who write for popular
prints should sanction no corruptions of the country's
language; but it is also due to the dignity of
America, since she has come of age, that her popular
writers should claim her share of improving and embellishing
her inherited language, and even the right
of departing from the usage of the old country, if the
inevitable changes, which there creep in, should not
be conformable to American taste, customs, climate,
or scenery. We would not further, but we certainly
would not hinder, the having a language of our own,
for we think one language little enough for a republic
of fifteen or twenty millions. But, dependance
upon England apart, the language of a country is a
garden that requires looking after, and it needs grafting
and transplanting as much as weeding and pruning.
Who is to be the gardener? One man? One
Mr. King of the American? No—but fifty men, if
there be fifty popular writers. There are no trustees.
of the language appointed by congress. There is no
penalty for the launching of words new and unfreight-worthy.
Professors of colleges (unless accidentally
men of genius like Longfellow) have no power over
the uses or abuses of language. With whom lies the
responsibility? we ask again—for, upon its language,
much of the repute and credit of the commonwealth
is inevitably adrift. And we say again, with American
popular writers lies the burden of it. Mr. Irving's
administration of his trust in the country's language
is worth to us any two common years of Washington
legislation, and will tell with more favorable weight
upon our history than any two sessions of our late
congresses. We claim to have our small share of
this same responsibility, and our small privilege of
suggestion and appropriation. The language has
owed much to exotic introduction in other days, and
it may still be lawfully enriched by the same process;
and if we, in our reading, or in our travel, have stumbled
on more compact vehicles for meaning, and can
bring them effectively into common use at home, we
shall venture to claim praise for it. Indeed, we have
long had half a mind to devote a corner of the Mirror
to a record of the births and disinterments of the
words new and prematurely buried. Whom would
that horrify, besides Mr. King? Why, for example,
should not the beautiful old English word summersunstead
(descriptive of the season of the sun's stay
or stead in summer) be restored to poetry—its relapse
into Latin by the word summer-solstice being wholly
unavailable from its technical inelegance? This is
rather a forced instance, no other occurring to us atthe
moment; but our readers will remember pausing
with regret, as we have, over the sweet passages
which are the graves of lost words.

To the invariable question of “What's the news?”
the invariable answer is, “Nothing at all!”—yet he
who answers delivers his budget in the same breath—
a death and a marriage perhaps the least of his

announcements. I (the diarist) have no news—none!
I could “swear the gods into agues” that I have none!
Yet to entertain a visiter—to divert a country-cousin
—to bridge over an awful pause—what would one naturally
say? I ask for information.

The Park theatre is open—(very open—being nearly
empty!)—Mitchell's, on the contrary, is very close
—being nightly full. But I do not know that any one
cares about theatricals—to have them written or
talked about, that is to say. Critics, both of the
drama and of literature, I think, have, of late, been
shoved aside. The public are tired of interpreters to
their taste, and express their opinions, now, by acclamation,
not by one, man's pen. Who cares now (as
the Aurora said a day or two ago) for a column of
criticism on a personation of Hamlet? If there is to
be a play, or a concert, it is pretty fairly understood,
in the Bowery as in Broadway, in Hyperborean Chelsea
as in the tropics of the Battery, what will be the
quality of the goer's money's-worth. And three lines
in the morning-paper, when it is over, is all that
is needful or advisable to be written on the performance.
So, God speed the decline of criticism! Apropos,
Miss Turnbull, the danseuse, has now become
one of the regular Povey-dom of the Park—engaged
“since the memory of the oldest inhabitant.”

The cutaneous epidemic of the season has attacked
the museum with great violence—a breaking out of
its inside humors covering at present the entire surface.
In plainer phrase, Mr. Barnum has completely
covered the prominent and spacious fronts of the
American museum with oval paintings of the beasts,
birds, fishes, and Indians “on show” within, and a
more holyday-looking castle of curiosity could scarcely
be invented. The “Kentucky Minstrels” are the
allure just now, and the pictures of the four ebonbards,
large as life, over the balcony, and the remainder
of the be-windowed and be-pictured building,
with its indefatigable flags, its lantern steeple-high,
and its lofty windmill of Punch and Judy, must all
fall very gayly, to say the least, on the sober eye of
a Johnny Newcome.

The funny little hat, small as Mercury's, which was
laughed at upon the bagmen's heads six months ago,
has fairly prevailed, and is the mode, nem. con. Truly,
“every time serves for the matter (of hat) that is born
in it.” The eye can be argued with, and convinced.
It was stoutly maintained, three months ago, by one
who is well known as “the complete varnish of a
man,” that this fashion of hat was but a porringer
thing, and would never thrive in Broadway. And
now nothing but that scant porringer looks tip-top and
jaunty! Orlando Fish (who, as tiler number one, is a
man of more potent function, for my politics, than
Tyler the first) is making money out of the blocks
which my facetions dandy friend recommended him
rather to make tops of than tops on. Well—fashion
goes by “jerks of invention,” and as Holofernes says,
“the gift is good in those in whom it is acute.”

Reception is raging up town. All ladies may be
said to be “in a parlous state,” who have not a specified
morning to “receive.” Six months ago, the six
profane mornings of the week were the property of
six privileged ladies by right of first seizure. Such
pretenders to “society” as did not visit the week
through in this established succession were as “damned”
as Touchstone's friend, the uncourtly shepherd.
This was a vexations invention, for, in the stereotyped
innumerableness of fashionable houses, a man might
blissfully visit nowhere, and yet go undetected for a
culprit “not in society.” Heaven be praised, however,
for the “safety in numbers,” and especially for
the imitative gregariousness of our country. There
are now five hundred families who “receive!” Not
quite, as yet, in inextricable confusion, however. A
man of a generalizing mind may still comprehend his
morning's work, and with fast horses and invariable
French leave, may still refresh all necessary memories
as to its existence. There is the Monday set,
and the Tuesday set, and the Wednesday set, and so
on through the week—crystallized according to neighborhood,
with one or two supercilious and recusant
exceptions. The engravers are in full cry, however,
and every week brings out new cards, “at home on
Monday,” “at home on Tuesday,” etc., etc., and we
shall soon be

by a general acknowledgment of the fact that nobody
is more intensely at home than before, and everybody
who has a house is simply “at home” whenever those
who wish to see them can find leisure to ring the bell.

I don't know, by-the-way, that the compliment has
been paid our country by foreign naturalists, of ranking
us with the more virtuous wild-fowl, esteemed for
their gregariousness. The Rev. Sydney Smith shows
his lack of zoological learning in not modifying his
abuse of us by remembering that “no birds of prey
are gregarious.”—“Of wild-fowl,” says Grew, “those
which are the most useful fly not singly as other
birds, but are commonly gregarious.”—“Then for
birds of prey and rapacious animals,” says Ray, “it
is remarkable what Aristotle observes, that they are
solitary and go not in flocks.” Long live our multitudinous
hotels, our animated extinguishment of distinction
by imitation, our altogetherness of lordship
and ladyship! The danger is in the stiffening of this
fluidity of rank and condition before the scoria are
recognised, and before the mould of aristocracy can be
dexterously handled. We shall have lords and ladies
or their catamounts tantamounts (bother! which is
the word?) a few days, at least, before the millenium.
This big orchard of green fruit is too large not to be
destined to ripe and rot, reasonably and seasonably.

Apropos—I observe a spot advertised for sale that I
have always looked upon as the most beautiful and
aristocratic property in this country—an island cradled
by the Niagara, and in itself the best cradle nature
could possibly form for the family of a luxurious
exclusive. It is about eleven miles above the falls,
an arrow-shot from the American shore (with Grand
island between it and the Canadas), and contains a
hundred acres of land, charmingly wooded and varied,
which have been turned into a paradise by one
of the most refined gentlemen of this country. A
beautiful villa crowns it, and baths, hot-houses, and
all appliances to luxury, are there, and all fenced in
by the bright water about to rush over Niagara. The
island is called Tonawanda—a delicious word for the
name of a home. One sighs to think that a little
money could buy such a paradise for one's own.

I observe a new fashion of cap, which gives the ladies
an air

a cap that would fit a child's double-fist, worn perched
upon the summit of the organ of self-esteem, looking
like an apple-blossom on the top-knot of a French
chicken. It is one of those fashions whose worth depends
upon the wearer—very telling upon a pretty
coquette, and very ludicrous, topping dignity or sentiment.

Original literature in the lump is sadly at a discount
in this country. Miss Sedgwick, in the plenitude of
her intellectual power, has taken to school-keeping.
Another authoress, very superior to Miss Sedgwick in
the qualities necessary to saleable writing, Mrs. Mary
Clavers, is employed in the same ill-suited drudgery.
Cooper, I understand, makes nothing by his American
editions, and thinks of publishing only in England
and importing a few copies at English prices. American
literature has nearly ceased, or it is scattered in
such small rills of periodical-writing that it will make
no mark upon the time. Prescott is an exception,
it is true, but Prescott is a man of fortune, and writes
for fame, not bread and butter. Why should not a
subscription be raised by the patriotic to give fair play
and studious leisure to the original and poetic genius
of Mrs. Child—wasted now on ephemera for newspapers!
Money left for such uses, or given by the
living, would better embalm the memory of the giver
than many a common charity. What is to be the
effect on the national character of the present hiatus
of original American literature, and how long is it to
last? For how long are we to take our mental wardrobe
second-hand from England, and read to the
world as all wearers of unfitting garments seem—out of
harmony with our shape and model from nature?

It is stated in the Boston Daily Advertiser (in an
article headed “The greatest American author”),
that, in a work of no small authority and importance
in Germany, a continuation of Frederick Schlegel's
“History of Literature,” a writer by the name of
Sealsfield is put at the head of American literature,
and defined as “the great national painter of the characteristics
of his native land, who has unfolded the
poetry of American life and its various relations yet
better than Cooper and Irving.” The editor of the
Advertiser remarks that the critical opinion of this
work will be taken implicitly on this subject by half
Europe, and no American authority, at least, will be
able to gainsay it. He continues: “We have, therefore,
taking shame to ourselves for past ignorance,
made all reasonable inquiries in this matter. We have
applied at the principal bookstores and libraries in the
neighborhood, but to our surprise neither books or
author have as yet been heard of. The Athenæum,
Burnham, Little and Brown, and Redding and Co.,
are all in ignorance. We have applied to all literary
circles to which the humble conductors of diurnal
publications have the entrée, but a hearty laugh has
been the only answer to our anxious queries.

“We are yet unwilling to let this sin of ingratitude
rest upon American readers. We call upon the publice
to assist us and solve the question, `Where is
Sealsfield?' and absolve our country from the shame
of ignoring an author, who has been crowned with
the laurels of trans-Atlantic criticism. We trust the
subject may seem as important to the public as to ourselves,
and that if, as seems probable, some publisher
who lives by stealing the brains of foreign authors,
had added to his crimes by incarcerating in the dungeons
of Cliff street, or Ann street, or Water street,
this hero of our literature, let that public, or the
`American copyright club' have him disinterred immediately.”

The probability is that better information than I can
give will be brought out by this “call upon the public,”
but meantime I will record, that this great American
author, Sealsfield, is a German, who has resided
in this country for some years, returned to Germany a
few years since, and could probably be heard of in
the neighborhood of his intrepid reviewer and nomenclator.
He probably “furnished the facts” for the
review himself. He is (“to give the devil his due”)
a good writer, and while in this country contributed
some excellent articles to the old Mirror.

Leaving to other people my share of curiosity as to
the source of the Niger, I should like to know the
author of now and then a joke that goes the round of
the newspapers. Genius is the most promiscuous of
animals, and is found in all sorts of disreputable places,
dress, and company—in quack advertisements and
negro wit, as often as in patented inventions and publications
of gilt-edge. There is a kind of unlabelled
genius, which is wholly incapable of being turned to
any profit, but which how and then starts out from an
unsuspected quarter and takes probability by the beard
with a delicious intrepidity. This morning's paper
has an instance—a three-line story of a Yankee who
bought a bushel of shoe-pegs, and finding they were
made of rotten wood, sharpened the other ends and
sold them for oats! Quite aside from the fun of that,
it is worth analyzing as an absurdity of the most brilliant
audacity of invention. Will the respectable
author oblige me with his autograph?

Confab in the Cloister.—Not a small part of
our brain-twisting, dear reader, is the exercise of an
office that, at Roman feasts, was delegated to a particular
servant called the NOMENCLATOR. His business
was to inform the guests of the names and ingredients
of the dishes set before them. Simple as it seems when
well done, there are few things more difficult to do
well. It is to describe a book, or a series of books, in
the compass of a phrase, and that phrase attractive to
eye and ear, piquant, novel, and provocative of curiosity!
Try your hand at expressing the contents of a
charcoal-cart in the compass of a diamond!

It would amuse the reader to be present sometimes
when No. 4, Ann street, is resolved into a committee
of two for the finding of a good name. (Withings,
avaunt!) The firm is called together by a significant
motion of the forefinger of the brigadier founder of
the concern—called into THE CLOISTER, that is to say,
a room of the proportions of a lady's shoe, extending
to our (No. 4's) immediate rear. The door being
closed, and the window-curtain dropped to exclude
the uninspiring view of the clothes-lines of No. 4,
up-stairs—the one chair having become occupied by
his Serenity, and the remainder of the committee
being seated upon the upright end of a ream of paper,
the business in hand is forthwith put. Let no one
imagine, because he may have assisted at naming a
friend's child, that he has any, the most vague, idea of
the embarrassments that ensue! We have a passably
fertile invention. We have whiled away the dull
transit of what is commonly called “a liberal education”
by a diligent search after such knowledge as was
above being “turned to account.” We have been a
profligate of verbal intemperance, we mean to say, and
are likely to know the bin where lies in cobweb your
old word, toothsome and testeable. But for all this, it
is no easier. Like the search after happiness, ten to
one the thing sought lies near home—overstepped at
starting! But let us particularize.

The Brigadier.—My dear boy (a facetious way he
has of addressing the rest of the committee!)—my
dear boy, stop looking out of that back window, and
give your mind to business! Cast your eye over
these four incomparable tales! Irving's “Wife”—

Committee.—You don't say he's married, general!

Brigadier.—Tales, my dear boy, I speak of tales—
a new series of tales that want a good name! Come,
think of it, now!

Committee.—Describe me the article, brigadier!
What is the purpose, plot, character? Is it one book
or a series? “Open up,” as Bulwer says, and let us
know definitively what is wanted!

Brigadier.—You know how many men of genius
there are who are only capable of brief inspirations—

Committee.—Inspired to the length of a short tale.
Well!

Brigadier.—You know that long tales are now out
of fashion. People are tired of them.

Committee.—Indeed? Well!

Brigadier.—You know that such men as Brougham,
Canning, Macauley—statesmen who are scholars and
men of genius, and might have been authors—have
occasionally given vent to their pent-up imaginations
by a tale for the magazines.

Committee.—I do—witness Brougham's magnificent
story of the “man in the bell.” Well!

Brigadier.—We know what is good, that goes by
with the flood, don't we?

Committee.—We are professed tasters. Yes.

Brigadier.—For experiment, then, I have put together,
in one number, four tales that delighted me—
in more than one enchanted perusal. You shall select
the next. It will go, my dear boy!—people will give
their couple of shillings, if it were only for the rescue
we make, for them, of things they remember and have
lost sight of. There are g—l—o—rious things hit off,
here and there, at a heat, by periodical writers—one
hit in a thousand failures, it is true, but still enough
of them for a brilliant collection—and these we want
to gather into our beautiful library, and embalm
from perishing. See here! “Judith, or the Opera
Box, by Eugene Scribe”—(great, my boy, great!)—
“The Beggar-Girl of the Pont des Arts,” by a
German man, Hauff (ah! what a rich bit to read over
and over!)—“The Picnic Party,” by Horace Smith
(you know all about that?)—and “The Wife,” by
Irving—a worthy companion for them; and now, what
shall we call the series?

Committee.—Hm—m—m. How do you like “fannoms
and fopperies?”

Brigadier.—Bah!

Committee.—“Diapasms?”

Brigadier.—Poh!

Committee.—The “pomander-chain?”

Brigadier.—My dear boy, let it be English and
honest! You distress me with these affectations!
What have cataplasms and pomatum-chains to do
with a course of light reading? Don't waste time!

Committee.—A diapasm, my charming brigadier,
was a bunch of aromatic herbs made into a ball with
sweet water, and, in Ben Johnson's time, worn in a
lady's pocket. Gallants wore these scented balls strung
in a necklace under the shirt, and so worn, it was
called a pomander-chain. Pardon me, but these
would be good names, for want of better!

Brigadier.—Mr. King would be down upon us, and
the definition would never get through his hair! No,
my dear boy! We must be ostriches, and feel the
ground while we fly. Keep out of the clouds till
you're “sent for!” I like

and so does my regiment—I mean the public. Imagine
a good name, now, that would suit a plain man!

Committee.—Faith, it takes imagination to come at
that, sure enough! Hark! I have it!

Brigadier.—Come to my arms! What is it? Speak
quick, or it'll die in delivery!

Committee.—Did you ever hear of a river in Asia
called Pactolus?

Brigadier.—To be sure. An ass dipped his head
into it to be able to stop making money.

Committee.—That's the fable. And ever since there
have been gold sands in the river—“or so they say.”

Brigadier.—And that you think is like fugitive
literature?

Committee.—I do. I was there ten years ago, and
the gold sands were as scarce as good things in the
magazines.

Brigadier.—You'll swear to that?

Committee.—With a reservation, I will. I went to
the Pactolus one moonlight night, and filled my pockets
with sand to look at in the morning. I was travelling
with a caravan, and we were off before day, but
there was no gold in my pocket, come daylight—sifted
out, most likely!

Brigadier.—Shouldn't be surprised! “Sands of
Gold,” then, you think would be a good name.

Committee.—Sands of Gold, sifted from the flood
of fugitive literature.

Brigadier.—Good! passable good! Let the committee
rise.

You see how it is done, dear reader, and you will the
better comprehend, from this specimen, how we came
upon another—a name for a series of sacred poetry, of
which we are about to issue the first number. We
have called this series “The Sacred Rosary”—a
musical word that, in old English, meant a plantation
of roses, but which was afterward used to define the
verses of a church-psalter, strung together with beads
for an aid to memory. In either signification, it
figures forth what we enrol beneath it—for a more
beautiful collection of hallowed verse was never collected
than this we have to offer. We have always
especially loved poetry on sacred themes, and have
garnered up specimens of it, and let us assure the
reader that in this field of poetry there is a rich harvest
ungathered. Let him look at this first number
for a specimen of the mind and taste scattered abroad
in these stray leaves of poetry.

It will cut up for a fact, when you have done using
it as a pun, that “the first sign of spring in the city is
the prevalence of spring-carts.” (I borrow this of
the author, and lend him, in return, an analogy of my
own discovering—between sidewalks and green pastures—the
simultaneous outbreak of dandy-lions with
the first warm weather.) Oh, the moving! But it
should be remembered by those who groan over the
universal exposure of household gods and shabby furniture
on May-day, that when it ceases, our now mobile
republic will harden into a monarchy. The
“moss” of aristocracy is not “gathered” by the “rolling
stone.” People must live long in one place to
establish superiority for themselves or to allow it in
others. Mrs. Splitfig, the grocer's wife, is but just
beginning to submit patiently to the airs of Mrs. Ingulphus,
the banker's wife, when May-day comes
round, and away she goes with her tin and crockery
on a spring-cart, to start fair again with some other
pretender, in some other neighborhood. “Old families”
are of little use without old neighbors to keep
the record. The subduing of neighborhoods is (at
present) the battle of pretension with a hydra—one
set of heads sliced off, a new set is ready to come on.
So, long live our acquaintance with the shabby sides
of easy-chairs, and the humilities of bedding and
crockery. Some fifty May-days hence, we shall be
ready to stop shaking the sugar-bowl, satisfied that the
big lumps are all at the top.

The most courted value in New York at the present
time is unquestionably the “nimble sixpence.”
The new omnibuses that have been put upon the different
lines within a week or two, are of a costliness
and splendor that would have done for a sovereign's

carriage in the golden age. Claret bodies, silverplated
hubs, and yellow wheels, cut-velvet linings and
cushions, and all to tempt the once-unconsidered SIXPENCE
to get up and ride! (Query—as to the superiority
of the “mirror held up to nature,” over the
New Mirror held up to sixpence?)

The racing of omnibuses seems to be agreeable to
inside passengers, since it might always be prevented
by pulling the checkstring—but to those who have
the temerity or the dangerous necessity to cross
Broadway, it is become a frightful evil. King Sixpence
could regulate it very easily, if he had his wits
about him. As was said before, the checkstring is
always obeyed. Terrified ladies, who chance to have
no fancy for riding races in Broadway, should be
reminded of this leather preservative.

Those who have the bold wish to tamper with their
standard of human nature can now be gratified, as
there are giants at one museum and a dwarf at the
other. Mr. and Mrs. Anak, at the American museum,
are certainly two very tall people—more tall than
comely. The flat-chested and gaunt lady looks as if
she had been lengthened with a rolling-pin—her length
entirely at the expense of her intermediate belongings.
Not so the husband, who is a thick-lipped, big-eyed,
double-fisted, knoll-backed, and thick-tongued overgrowth.
For one, I do not like to have my notions
of human stature unsettled, and I abhor giants. Six-
feet stature is undervalued by familiarity with seven—
as diamonds would be ruined by the discovery of a
few as large as potatoes. I am happy to console the
eclipsed six-footers and under, by the information that
this large vessel of human nature does not seem
intended to hold more soul. He looks like as “regular
a spoon” as could be wished by those who are compelled
to look up to him—his wife, apparently, of the
same utensil capacity.

The dwarf at Peale's museum, Rado Scauf (that he
should ever have been thought worth baptizing!) is a
sweet-faced minion, with feet in the boots looking like
two cockroaches with heels to them. A two-fingered
lady's glove would make him an ample pair of tronsers,
and his walking-stick is a sizeable toothpick. He
has fine eyes, and would look like a nice lad, through
a magnifying-glass. If such bijous were plenty,
ladies would carry them in their pockets—portable
garter-claspers and glove-buttoners. Fancy the luxury!
It were worth a Yankee's while to send a venture
to Lilliput, to import them.

The Cloister.—Four o'clock and the Pomeridian
of an April day. The brigadier's andiences are suspended
to make room for a session of the committee,
and the door is closed—printers, poets, engravers,
stitchers and folders (these female), advertisers, carriers,
agents, stereotypers, ruthlessly excluded. Truly,
as Shakspere says, “every man hath business and desire”
(for the brigadier's society), “such as it is.”
Long last his “suaviter in modo,” his “fortiter in re!”

Brigadier.—To business, my boy! What lies in
that fourth pucker of your eyelid? Smile and let it
drop away easy!

Committee.—Thirteen letters by to-day's mail, containing
propositions to publish immortal works by
living and mortal American authors, most of them
never before heard of—postage nine and sixpence, of
which please make a memorandum in my favor.

Brigadier.—Fifty-nine cents each to the cause of
unbaptized literature! Are we not involuntary martyrs,
my boy! Why the mischief don't you last-page the
fact that we publish exclusively for the trans-Atlantics
and the trans-Styxians!—never for those who can
cross the water to “settle!”

Committee.—It shall be done, but there is one applicant
who deserves a hearing. One of the most
gifted women now living has employed her leisure in
compiling a book to be used as a round game played
with forfeits, or as a parlor fortune-teller. The book
is to be called “Oracles from the Poets.” Questions
are proposed, and by the choice of a number the
inquirer is referred to an answer, in a passage selected
from the poets. The selections are made with great
taste, so as not only to convey apposite answers, but
to make the reader familiar with the most beautiful
passages of poetry. What say to that?

Brigadier.—Worth lots of money to Riker or Appleton,
my boy, but we are in the rapid line, and that
sort of work takes time. Besides (and here the
Brigadier looked modestly at his nails), we couldn't
bring our minds to make money out of the sex, my
boy! Fancy a lovely woman calling on us to fork out,
as her publisher! Odious word, “publisher!” It has
been too long a synonym for “pirate,” and “Philistine.”
A few of us immortal bards have washed and donned
the gaberdine of late, but we must let it air, my boy,
we must let it air, before wearing it abroad—at least
into a lady's presence! Think of the maid's asking
you to “step into the back room,” if you called on a
lady and sent up your name as her “publisher!”

Committee.—Ah! my illustrious friend and song-builder,
dignity is a Minerva that needs no nurse. It
jumps out of your head and walks alone. I would not
only publish, but peddle from two tin boxes, if my
wants would not bear diminishing, and if only this
would supply them! We're earthy ants, not chartered
butterflies!

Brigadier.—Ha! ha! my boy! my dear boy!

Who else wants to gild a gold leaf in the Mirror
Library?

Committee.—Seven and two are nine—seven poetesses
and two he bardlings—pleading for print! We are

—will you write the declinatures, dear brigadier?

Brigadier.—Make a regret-circular, my boy! Say
that we are are a partnership of posterity. They must
die, to qualify. The “Home Library,” and the “Parlor
Library,” and the “Drawing-Room Library,” and
the “Knickerbocker Library,” and many more—(for
whose names, see puffs and advertisements)—these
publish for the equivocal immortals now living. We
publish only for the immortal dead, or for the buried
alive, disinterred with our own pick and shovel. Write
that out, and I'll have it lithographed to save time.
What next?

Committee.—We want a new head.

Brigadier.—Speak for yourself, my boy!

Committee.—A new caption, then (if you will be
critical) in the Mirror. Where can I praise things,
now? There's Headley's new book on Italy, worth
the best laurel-spring of my picking. There's “Amelia,”
of the Lousiville Journal, who has written some
poetry about hearing a sermon, that traverses your
back-bone like electricity, and where to praise that!
George Flagg has painted a delicious sketch of my
Glenmary-born Imogen, and I will praise him! I want
a place to praise—

Brigadier.—Hire a pew!

Committee.—Will you give me a column?

Brigadier.—To your memory, I will.

Committee.—Well, my memory wants a column, to
record the good things I should not forget to praise.

Brigadier.—Take it—take it—but for Heaven's
sake be pert and pithy, crisp and critical! Nothing

so dull as praise to everybody but the praisee. Anything
more?

Committee.—Yes—

as I to inform you of the approaching delivery, from
the press, of “Pencillings by the Way.” My travels
have seemed interminable.

Brigadier.—Well, as I assisted at their birth once
before, I can certify now to their being “born again.”
Is that what you want?

Committee.—No—for, half the book was never a
book before, not having been published except in the
old Mirror. I want you to make it trip

that I may hurry into “calf” all I have written up to
last year, and start fresh from my meridian with
“Dashes at Life,” and gossips in the cloister. For,
as says old Wotton in the “Reliquiœ,” “Though I
am a cloistered man in the condition of my present
life, yet, having spent so much of mine age among
noise abroad, there still doth hang upon me, I know
not how, a certain concupiscence of novelty.”

Brigadier.—Verbum sap. sat. Shall the committee
rise—by getting down off the table?

Committee.—Yes!—one minute! Have you read
the proof-sheets of that glorious—GLORIOUS—say
“glorious!”—

Brigadier.—Glorious.

Committee.—Hood's “Midsummer Fairies”—the
most delicious “Rococo” conceivable? Yes? Be off!

From the window in which I spin my cobweb, I
look directly on the most frequented portion in Broadway—the
sidewalk in front of St. Paul's. You walk
over it every day. Familiarity with most things alters
their aspect, however, Let me, after a long acquaintance
with this bit of sidewalk, sketch how it looks to
me at the various hours of the day. I may jot down,
also, one or two trifles I have observed while looking
into the street in the intervals of writing.

Eight in the morning.—The sidewalk is comparatively
deserted. The early clerks have gone by, and
the bookkeepers and younger partners not being abroad,
the current sets no particular way. A vigorous female
exerciser or two may be seen returning from a smart
walk to the Battery, and the orange-women are getting
their tables ready at the corners. There is to be a
funeral in the course of the day in St. Paul's churchyard,
and one or two boys are on the coping of the
iron fence, watching the grave-digger. Seamstresses
and schoolmistresses, with veils down, in impenetrable
incognito, hurry by with a step which says unmistakeably,
“don't look at me in this dress!” The return
omnibuses come from Wall street empty, on a
walk.

Nine and after.—A rapid throng of well-dressed
men, all walking smartly, and all bound Mammonward.
Glanced at vaguely, the sidewalk seems like a
floor with a swarm of black beetles running races
across it. The single pedestrians who are struggling
up stream, keep close to the curbstone or get rudely
jostled. The omnibuses all stop opposite St. Paul's
at this hour, letting out passengers, who invariably
start on a trot down Ann street or Fulton. The
museum people are on the top of the building drawing
their flags across Broadway and Ann by pulleys fastened
to trees and chimneys. Burgess and Stringer hanging
out their literary placards with a listless delibera
tion, as if nobody was abroad yet who had leisure to
read them. The “brigadier” dismounting from an
up-town 'bus with a roll of manuscripts sticking from
his pocket, and hands and handkerchiefs waved to him
from the omnibus windows.

Twelve and after.—Discount-seekers crowding into
the Chemical Bank with hats over their eyes. Flower-merchants
setting their pots of roses and geraniums
along the iron fence. The blind beggar arrived, and
set with his back against the church gate by an old
woman. And now the streaks, drawn across my side
vision by the passers under, glide at a more leisurely
pace, and are of gayer hues. The street full of sunshine.
Omnibuses going slowly, both ways. Female
exclusives gliding to and fro in studiously plain dresses
and with very occupied air—(never in Broadway without
“the carriage” of course, except to shop). Strangers
sprinkled in couples, exhausting their strength
and spirits by promenading before the show hour.
The grave dug in St. Paul's, and the grave-digger
gone home to dinner. Woman run over at the Fulton
crossing. Boys out of school. Tombs' bell ringing
fire in the third district.

One and after.—The ornamentals are abroad. A
crowd on St. Paul's sidewalk watching the accomplished
canary-bird whose cage hangs on the fence.
He draws his seed and water up an inclined plane in
a rail-car, and does his complicated feeding to the
great approbation of his audience. The price is high
—his value being in proportion (aristocracy-wise) to
his wants! It is the smoothest and broadest sidewalk
in Broadway—the frontage of St. Paul's—and the
ladies and dandies walk most at their ease just here,
loitering a little, perhaps, to glance at the flowers for
sale. My window, commanding this pavé, is a particularly
good place, therefore, to study street habits,
and I have noted a trifle or so, that, if not new, may
be newly put down. I observe that a very well-dressed
woman is noticed by none so much as by the women
themselves. This is the week for the first spring
dresses, and, to-day, there is a specimen or two of
Miss Lawson's April avatar, taking its first sun on the
promenade. A lady passed, just now, with a charming
straw hat and primrose shawl—not a very pretty
woman, but, dress and all, a fresh and sweet object to
look at—like a new-blown cowslip, that stops you in
your walk though it is not a violet. Not a male eye
observed her, from curb-stone in Vesey to curb-stone
in Fulton, but every woman turned to look after her!
Query, is this the notice of envy or admiration, and,
if the former, is it desirable or worth the pains and
money of toilet? Query, again—the men's notice
being admiration (not envy) what will attract it, and
is that (whatever it is) worth while? I query what I
should, myself, like to know.

Half past three.—The sidewalk is in shade. The
orange-man sits on a lemon-box, with his legs and
arms all crossed together in his lap, listening to the
band who have just commenced playing in the museum
balcony. The principal listeners, who have
stopped for nothing but to listen, are three negro-boys
(one sitting on the Croton hydrant, and the other two
leaning on his back), and to them this gratuitous music
seems a charming dispensation. (Tune, “Ole
Dan Tucker.”) The omnibus-horses prick up their
ears in going under the trumpets, but evidently feel
that to show fright would be a luxury beyond their
means. Saddle-horse, tied at the bank, breaks bridle
and runs away. Three is universal dinner-time for
bosses—(what other word expresses the head men of
all trades and professions?)—and probably not a single
portly man will pass under my window in this
hour.

Four to five.—Sidewalk more crowded. Hotel
boarders lounging along with toothpicks. Stout men
going down toward Wall street with coats unbuttoned.

Hearse stopped at St. Paul's, and the museum band
playing “Take your time, Miss Lucy,” while the
mourners are getting out. A gentleman, separated
from two ladies by the passing of the coffin across the
sidewalk, rejoins them, apparently with some funny
remark. Bell tolls. No one in the crowd is interested
to inquire the age or sex of the person breaking
the current of Broadway to pass to the grave. Hearse
drives off on a trot.

Five and after.—Broadway one gay procession.
Few ladies accompanied by gentlemen—fewer than
in the promenades of any other country. Men in
couples and women in couples. Dandies strolling
and stealing an occasional look at their loose demi-saison
pantaloons, and gaiter-shoes, newly sported with
the sudden advent of warm weather. No private carriage
passing except those bound to the ferries for a
drive into the country. The crowd is unlike the
morning crowd. There is as much or more beauty,
but the fashionable ladies are not out. You would
be puzzled to discover who these lovely women are.
Their toilets are unexceptionable, their style is a very
near approach to comme il faut. They look perfectly
satisfied with their position and with themselves, and
they do (what fashionable women do not)—meet the
eye of the promenader with a coquettish confidence he
will misinterpret—if he be green or a puppy. Among
these ladies are accidents of feature, form, and manner—charms
of which the possessor is unconscious—
that, if transplanted into a high-bred sphere of society
abroad, would be bowed to as the stamp of lovely aristocracy.
Possibly—probably, indeed—the very woman
who is a marked instance of this is not called pretty
by her friends. She is only spoken to by those whose
taste is common-place and unrefined. She walks
Broadway, and has a vague suspicion that the men of
fashion look at her more admiringly than could be
accounted for by any credit she has for beauty at
home. Yet she is not likely to be enlightened as to
the secret of it. When tired of her promenade, she
disappears by some side street leading away from the
great thoroughfares, and there is no clue to her unless
by inquiries that would be properly resented as
impertinence. I see at least twenty pass daily under
my window who would be ornaments of any society,
yet who, I know (by the men I see occasionally with
them), are unacknowledgable by the aristocrats up
town. What a field for a Columbus! How charming
to go on a voyage of discovery and search for these unprized
pearls among the unconscious pebbles! How
delightful to see these rare plants without hedges
about them—exquisite women without fashionable
affectations, fashionable hinderances, penalties, exactions,
pretensions, and all the wearying nonsenses
that embarrass and stupefy the society of most of our
female pretenders to exclusiveness!

Half-past six and after.—The flower-seller loading
up his pots into a fragrant wagon-load. Twilight's
rosy mist falling into the street. Gas-lamps alight
here and there. The museum band increased by two
instruments, to play more noisily for the night-custom.
The magic wheel lit up, and ground rather
capriciously by the tired boy inside. The gaudy
transparencies one by one illuminated. Great difference
now in the paces at which people walk. Business-men
bound home, apprentices and shop-boys carrying
parcels, ladies belated—are among the hurrying
ones. Gentlemen strolling for amusement take it
very leisurely, and with a careless gait that is more
graceful and becoming than their mien of circumspect
daylight. And now thicken the flaunting dresses of
the unfortunate outlaws of charity and pity. Some
among them (not many) have a remainder of ladylike-ness
in their gait, as if, but for the need there is to
attract attention, they could seem modest—but the
most of them are promoted to fine dress from sculle
ries and low life, and show their shameless vulgarity
through silk and feathers. They are not at all to be
pitied. The gentleman cit passes them by like the rails
in St. Paul's fence—wholly unnoticed. If he is vicious,
it is not those in the street who could attract him.
The “loafers” return their bold looks, and the boys
pull their dresses as they go along, and now and then
a greenish youth, well-dressed, shows signs of being
attracted. Sailors, rowdies, country-people, and
strangers who have dined freely, are those whose steps
are arrested by them. It is dark now. The omnibuses,
that were heavily-laden through the twilight,
now go more noisily because lighter. Carriages make
their way toward the Park theatre. My window shows
but the two lines of lamps and the glittering shops,
and all else vaguely.

I have repeatedly taken five minutes, at a time, to
pick out a well-dressed man, and see if he would walk
from Fulton street to Vesey without getting a look at
his boots. You might safely bet against it. If he is
an idle man, and out only for a walk, two to one he
would glance downward to his feet three or four times
in that distance. Men betray their subterfuges of
toilet—women never. Once in the street, women
are armed at all points against undesirable observation—men
have an ostrich's obtusity, being wholly
unconscious even of that battery of critics, a passing
omnibus! How many substitutes and secrets of dress
a woman carries about her, the angels know!—but
she looks defiance to suspicion on that subject. Sit
in my window, on the contrary, and you can pick out
every false shirt-bosom that passes, and every pair of
false wristbands, and the dandy's economical half-boots,
gaiter-cut trousers notwithstanding.

Indeed, while it is always difficult, sometimes impossible,
to distinguish female genuine from the imitation,
nothing is easier than to know at sight the
“glossed (male) worsted from the patrician sarsnet.”
The “fashion” of women, above a certain guide, can
seldom be guessed at in the street street except by the
men who are with them.

You should sit in a window like mine, to know how
few men walk with even passable grace. Nothing
so corrupts the gait as business—(a fact that would be
offensive to mention in a purely business country, if it
were not that the “unmannerly haste” of parcel-bearing
and money-seeking, may be laid aside with low-heeled
boots and sample cards.) The bent-kneed celerity,
learned in dodging clerks and jumping over
boxes in Cedar and Pearl, betrays its trick in the
gait, as the face shows the pucker of calculation and
the suavity of sale. I observe that the man used
to hurry, relies principally on his heel, and keeps his
foot at right angles. The ornamental man drops his
toe slightly downward in taking a step, and uses, for
elasticity, the spring of his instep. Nature has provided
muscles of grace which are only incorporated
into the gait by habitually walking with leisure. All
women walk with comparative grace who are not
cramped with tight shoes, but there are many degrees
of gracefulness in women, and oh, what a charm is
the highest degree of it! How pleasurable even to
see from my window a woman walking like a queen!

The magnetic threads of Saratoga begin to pull upon
the calculating bumps of foreseeing papas, and many a
hair whitens in these spring months that would have taken
another lease of youth but for the trip to Saratoga.
Ah, the contrivance! Ah, the calculation! Ah, the saving,
upon things undreamed of!—for extravagance is
like the lengthening of the Indian's blanket—the piece

cut from one end that is sewed on to the other! But,
out on monotony, and hey for Saratoga! If there be
an approach to a gayety-paradise on earth—if there be
a place where the mortifications of neighborhood are
forgotten, and “people's natural advantages” are prominent
and undisputed—if there be, this side Heaven,
a place where it is worth while to dress, worth while
to be pretty, worth while to walk, talk, and particularly
and generally outdo
it is sandy Saratoga—Marvin's United States Hotel!
Take your papa there, “for his health,” my dear
belle! “And tell him, too,” that it was the well-expressed
opinion of the philosopher Bacon, that
“money, like manure, is offensive if not spread.”
Tell your mamma to tell him how pale he is when he
wakes in the morning! Tell the doctor to prescribe
Congress water without the taste of the cork! Tell
him, if he does not, and you are not let go with a
chaperon, you will do something you shudder to
think of—bolt, slope, elope, with the first base
to which you are the heiress! For it is credibly and
currently reported “in high circles,” that the coming
season at Saratoga is to be of a crowded uncomfortableness
of splendor that was reserved for the making
fashionable, by Mr. Van Buren, of the “United
States” and its dependant colonies.

Among the alleviations to passing a summer in
town (misericordia pro nobis!) is the completion of
Mr. Stevens's Gothic cottage at the lip of the Elysian
Hoboken, where are to be had many good things, of
course, but where (I venture to suggest) it would be a
bliss ineffable to be able to get a good breakfast! What
a pleasure to cross the ferry, and, after a morning
ramble in that delicious park, to sit down in the fresh
air volant through the galleries of that sweet cottage,
and eat (if nothing more) a nice roll with a good cup
of French coffee! A restaurateur there would make
a fortune, I do think. Bring it about, Mr. “Person
Concerned,” and you shall lack neither our company
nor a zealous trumpeter.

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 continguity 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 Bow-bell
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 meiropolis,
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 reader, 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 Wilberforce!
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 ther 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,
raed 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 cob-webberies—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 mutton 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 knee-pan.
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.[9] 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 repect 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 foily.

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 inkholder.
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 portmantean 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 corner 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 write 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 classics. 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 el 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 portfolios,
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 has 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 deliberation,
we have, at last, duly distributed, to theslits,
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 post-office
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 icebergs—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, heartaches
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 outlandish-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 intelligenee. 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 early
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 hack-men
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. Pensez-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 to 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 tomorrow
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 out
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 faliers 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, may 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 bold 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 different

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 clique 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
esprit, 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 boyfriends.
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,[10] 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: I, 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 god
dess'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 be 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 premiére 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 horse-back
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:—

Of course there was a postscript, but that we must
reserve for posterity. Our friend 'Gus Iliho is not a
man to write altogether upon third person topics. But
we have another friend at Saratoga—a female specimen—and
we hope to hear from her, 'twixt this and
the season over. Our readers will please expect it.

THE CABINET.

(“The Committee” trimming pencil in the Eastern-most
bathing-house on Rockaway beach. Enter the brigadier
with nostrils inflated.)

Brig.—Fmff! fmff! God bless the Atlantic ocean!
Fmff! “Salt sea” indeed! I never smelt a breeze
fresher. Fmff! fmff! fmff! You got the start of
me, my dear boy! (pulls his last high heel out of the
deep sand and sits down on the threshold.) What say
to a strip and dip before we come to business?

Com.—Fie!—general, fie! Look through your
fingers at the other end of the beach! It is the hour
of oceanic beatitude—the ladies bathing! The murmuring
waters will be purer for the interview. Bathe
we in the first wave after!

Brig.—How can you

Did you bring a towel, mi-boy?

Com.—Tut!—would you offend the south wind, that
proffers the same office so wooingly? Walk on the
beach, man, and let the sun peruse you, while you dry!

Brig.—So should I be more red, with a vengeance!
But I don't like this dry-salting, mi-boy! It's too
sticky! Ye gods! look at the foam upon that wave!
What is that like, my poet?

Com.—Like the unrolling of a bale of lace on a
broad counter! The “tenth wave” is the head clerk,
and the clams and soft crabs are the ladies shopping!
How I love the affinities of Art and Nature!

Brig.—Poh! Where's Nature's twine and brown
paper? Don't be transcendental!

Com.—How ignorant you are, not to know eel-grass
and devil's apron—Nature's twine and brown paper!
My dear general, were you ever introduced to the
Atlantic? Is this your first visit? Stand up in the
doorway!

(Brigadier rises and the surf bows to the ground.)

General Morris! the Atlantic ocean. Atlantic
ocean! General Morris. I am happy to bring two
such distinguished “swells” together. Though (apropos,
Mr. “Heaving Main!”) the general is a gay man!
Look out for your “pale Cynthia!” The moon is
not famed for her constancy!

Brig.—What are you mumbling there, mi-boy!
I wish, under the tender influence of these suggesting
waters, to express a wish that you would write some
poetry, or give us a new tale, or dash us off a play, or—

Com.—Or, in some other way make rubbish for
posterity! No, sir! There are no pack-horses in
Posthumousland, and, as much as will ride in a ghost's
knapsack, with his bread and cheese, is as much, in
quantity, as any man should write who has pity for his
pedestrian soul on its way to dooms-day! Why,
general, the TALES which I am about to publish (including
“Inklings,” “Loiterings” etc., etc.), will
make, of themselves, a most adult-looking octavo.
My POEMS and PLAYS have tonnage enough to carry,
at least, all the bulk necessary to a fame; my MISCELLANIES,
yet to be collected, will make a most sizeable
volume of slip-slop; PENCILLINGS is no pamphlet; and
Letters from under a Bridge, and other epistolary
production—do you see how beautifully the sand
immortalizes the industrious waves that write successively
their sparkling lines on the beach!

Brig.—Don't malign your “eternal fame, mi-boy!”

Com.—More eternal, I believe, than the love of the
impertinent Lothario in the sonnet:—

but how much more eternal it would be, if they would
make the genesis of a man's works like that of the
patriarchs—dateable from the first satisfactory off-shoot
of his manhood! Do you remember the expressive
genealogy of Shem?

12. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years and begat
Salah:

13. And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred
and three years and begat sons and daughters.

14. And Eber lived four and thirty years and begat Peleg:

15. And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and
thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.

And so on, up to Abraham, whose father was seventy
years old when he was born. But don't you suppose
these boys did anything before they were thirty-odd?
Their history begins with their first creditable
production! Eber was nothing till he begat Peleg,
though, very likely, the critics of that time “preferred
very much his earlier productions.”

Brig.—And you think you could begin, now, with
your first Peleg and Salah?

Com.—You have said it. But, as I hinted before,
my posthumous knapsack is already full of rubbish,
and—a thought strikes me!

Brig.—“Call it out!”

Com.—I'll change my style and start a new reputation,
incog!

Brig.—Famous!

Com.—And sell some man the glory of it for an
annuity!

Brig.—Good!

Com.—(Thoughtfully)—The old countess of Desmond
shed her teeth three times.

Brig.—A precedent in nature.

Com.—(Firmly)—Soit! Done! So be it! Hang
me if I don't! You'll hear of a new author before
long—one that beats me hollow! Look me up a
purchaser, my dear brigadier! Literary fame furnished
at—say, three thousand dollars per annum!

Brig.—Mi-boy, the ladies have left the beach—I
wonder if the sea would condescend to us, now!

Com.—Peltry after roses and ivory!—I don't know!

Brig.—Talking of Esau—he should have lived in
cravat-time. Well-drest, your hirsute customers looks
not amiss! (No pun, you villain!) Stand back, my
unclad-boy! Here comes a wagon load of women!

Com.—Chambermaids and nurses; who, by the
way they flock to the beach in the male hours, must
either have eyes with a nictitating membrane, or a
modesty that is confined to what they hear. I wish to
heaven that all females were patricians—undesecrated
by low taste and servitude! It's like classifying owls
with angels because they are both feathered, to call
these rude creatures women! What's that scar on
your breast, brigadier?

Brig.—Slide down your “nictitating membrane,”
mi-boy, and don't be too observing! Here goes!
Hup! (The brigadier rushes into the surf, takes a
stitch through three frills of the island's shirt, and rises
like a curly-headed sun from the ocean.)

Com. (solus).—There he swims! God bless him
for a buoyant brigadier! How the waves tumble over
his plump shoulders, delighted to feel the place where
ride his epaulets and his popularity! Look out for
sharks, my dear general! They snuff a poet afar off!

Natural victims we are to them—on land or water!
Hear him laugh as he shakes the brine out of his
whiskers! Was ever such a laugh! His heart gives
that “ha! ha!” a fillip as it sets out! I must swim
off to him! Clear the beach, soft crab and sand-bird!
Morris and Willis must swim together!

Brig. (Sitting down to dry.)—This salting freshens
a man, and this wetting makes him dry. Oh for a
drink and the asp of Cleopatra—a cobbler and a viper!
Shake yourself, mi-boy!

Com.—Suppose we roll in the sand and take a
wrestle, like the athletæ of old—eh? How do you
propose to get the sand and gravel out from your
doigts du pied, general?

Brig.—“Gravelled,” we are, mi-boy, but not “for
lack of matter!” Let's dress first, and then go down
and rinse our feet with the aid of the moon's lover—
lacking a servant to bring a pail! Are you dry?

Com.—Inner and outer man—very! What's this—
dropped out of your pocket!

Brig.—A song[1] that I wrote for Brown to set to
music. Shall I read it to you?

(Brigadier reads with his hand on his breast.)

Com.—True and smooth as a locomotive on a “T”
rail! Is it sold and set?

Brig.—Beautifully set to music by Brown, and sold
to Atwill, who will publish it immediately.

Com.—It's a delicious song, my happy troubadour,
and destined to tumble over bright lips enough to make
a sunset. That we should so envy the things we
make! My kingdom for a comb! I shall never get
the salt out of my hair—I'm

If you want a curl, to keep, now's your time!

Brig.—Willis?

Com.—My lord?

Brig.—I hear you were voted in to the “Light
Guard” last week.

Com.—Yes, sir, an honorary private! I feel the
compliment, for they are a set of tip-top capables, joyous
and gentlemanly—but, my dear martinet, what the
devil do they want of a man's dura mater?

Brig.—A man's what?

Com.—The weary membrane of an author's brain.

Brig.—They want it, you say?

Com.—With the official announcement came an
order to equip myself according to directions, and
“deposite my fatigue-jacket” in the armory of the
corps! What fatigue-jacket have I, but the jacket of
my brain?

Brig.—True! Pick up your boots and come
along?

(Exit the brigadier barefoot, and the cabinet adjourns.)

Half an hour later—room No. 300, Rockaway Pavilion.
Two sherry cobblers on the table, with two
straws, erect in the ice.)

Brig.—How like this great structure on the sand
must be, to a palace amid the ruins of Persepolis!

Com.—The palace of Chilminar with forty columns
and stairs for ten horses to go up abreast!—very like
indeed—especially the sand! Somewhat like, in
another respect, by the way—that the palaces of
Persepolis were the tombs of her kings, and Rockaway
is the place of summer repose for the indignant
aristocracy of Manhattan.

Brig.—True, as to the aristocracy, but why “indignant?”

Com.—That there can be fashion without them at
Saratoga (which there could not be once), and that
“aristocratic” and “fashionable” are two separate
estates, not at all necessary to be combined in one
individual. Rockaway is full, now, of the purest
porcelain—porcelain fathers, porcelain mothers, porce
lain daughters!

Brig.—Then why is not the society perfect at Rockaway?

Com.—Because the beaux go after the crockery at
Saratoga. The rush, the rowdydow, the flirtations
and game suppers, are all at Saratoga! Aristocracy
likes to have the power of complaining of these things
as nuisances inseparable from its own attraction. Aristocracy
builds high walls, but it likes to have them
pertinaciously overleaped. The being let alone within
their high walls, as they are now at their exclusive
watering-places, was not set down in the plans of aristocratic
campaigns!

Brig.—But they are charming people here, mi-boy?

Com.—The best-bred and most agreeable people in
the world, but the others give a beau more for his
money. In all countries, but ours, people make acquaintances
for life. But the hinderances and obstacles
which are not minded at the beginning of a lifetime
acquaintance, are intolerable in an acquaintance for a
week (the length of most summer acquaintances with
us), and the floating beaux from the south, the west,
the Canadas, and the West Indies, go where they can
begin at the second chapter—omitting the tedious
preface and genealogical introduction.

Brig.—Rockaway is stupid, then.

Com.—Quiet, not stupid. The lack of beaux and
giddy times is only felt by the marriageable girls, and
there are a great many people in the world besides
marriageable girls. And upon this same “many
people,” will depend the prosperity of the Pavilion.
When it is known that it is a delightful place for
everything but flirting, it will be a centre for sober
people to radiate to, and a paradise for penserosos like
you and me, general—eh? I suppose Cranston would
as lief (liefer, indeed) that his rooms should be filled
with tame people as wild.

Brig.—How's your cobbler?

Com.—Fit to immortalize the straw that passes it!

Brig.—What birds are those, my Willis?

Com.—Shore birds that build in the sedge and feed
on molluscous animals—death on the soft crabs!
And, general, do you know that the male of this bird
(called the phalarope), is a most virtuous example to
our sex? What do you think he does?

Brig.—Feeds the little-uns?

Com.—Hatches them, half and half, with the she-bird,
and helps bring them up!

Brig.—Is the gender shown in the plumage?

Com.—No.

Brig.—So I thought. Your handsome peacock,
now, leaves it all to the hen. The domestic virtues
are their own reward—remarkably so! Is that the
dinner-bell?

Com.—Yes, it is that music!

“Give me excess of it—that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”

I'll meet you below, my dear general! Adieu!

(Cabinet adjourns for the day.)

THE CABINET.

(Rockaway beach, Sunday evening. The brigadier and
committee seated on their boot-legs, after walking two
miles, barefoot, on the hard sand.)

Brig.—Boots are durance vile, mi-boy! How much
we lose in not keeping our feet open to female assiduities!
Fancy one of those apostolic washings—a
sweet woman kneeling before you, and, with her hair
breathing perfumes over your ankles, performing it as
an office of tenderness and hospitality! Can patent
leather be weighed against desuetude so melancholy!

Com.—I am satisfied that the tender pink in your
toe-nails was intended by nature to be admired, my
dear brigadier! And there is nature's remonstrance—
eloquent in a corn—against the airless confinement of
boot and stocking! Why is a poet like a sandal?

Brig.—Philosophize, my dear boy, don't quibble!

Com.—Because he's a soul kept under with a thong!

Brig.—Willis, I love the sea!

Com.—So sung Barry Cornwall, “the open sea.”
As if Pharaoh had not yet passed over! To me the
sea seems, on the contrary, for ever slamming down
trap-doors of surf, and carefully covering the “treasures
of the deep” with cold water. I never saw anything
less “open!”

Brig.—There goes the sun down! as red as—what
shall I compare it to?

Com.—A wafer, sealing up this 17th of August for
the doomsday postoffice. Happy they who have not
forgotten the P. S. of repentance!

Brig.—Ah, mi-boy! that pious infancy of yours!
It oozes through the after-crust of your manhood in
drops of poetry! Pity you are less of a saint than
you were at seventeen!

Com.—Less of a saint I am not, though more of a
sinner I am! All I had seen at seventeen was beauty
and goodness, and with an innate sense of beauty and
goodness, I worshipped the Maker, my youth through,
with a poet's adoration! The heart melts and drops
upon its knees within a man, at any sudden revelation
of unusual loveliness; and I have worshipped God,
and loved one of his angelic creatures, with the white
quivering lip of the same rush of blood inward. If to
look often and adoringly “through nature up to nature's
God” be devotion, I am still devout. No sunset,
no morning's beauty, no rich and sudden sight of
loveliness in scenery, goes by without the renewal of
that worship in my heart that was once religion. I
praise God daily. Worldling as I am, and hardly as I
dare claim any virtue as a Christian, there is that
within me which sin and folly never reached or tainted.
The unprompted and irresistible thoughts, upsprings
in my mind in any scene of beauty, would seem
prayers, and pure ones, to many an humble Christian.
Pardon me for reading to you this inner leaf, my dear
brigadier!

Brig.—Thank you, on the contrary, for its philosophy,
my dear boy! Saints and worldlings have more
feelings in common than the pulpit admits. That I
believe.

Com.—The chasm between them in this world
should be narrowed, for they have many sympathies.
The bigot makes the separation unnaturally wide.
Who is the one man mentioned in Scripture as
“loved” by the Savior? The “young ruler” who
could not give up his “great possessions” “to inherit
eternal life!” Is not this tender interest in one “out
of the fold,” a lesson—a most unheeded lesson, to the
strict sect? I talk feelingly of this, for I have an admiration
of goodness and purity that has never separated
itself from my love of beauty. I love a simple
and unobtrusive piety, and am drawn irresistibly
toward the possessor. Yet this better part of my
nature is excluded with the rest, when I am denied
Christian sympathy. Come out of dream-land,
brigadier, and observe the tender violet in that upper
cloud!

Brig.—I was thinking whether the wave that falls
upon the beach is to be congratulated or pitied—comparing
its arrival, that is to say, with its “swell” time
upon the sea.

Com.—Congratulated, I should say. The hoary
locks with which it approaches the beach, though
they are breakers ahead when seen from the sea, are
beautiful when seen from the shore—as the head,
whitened with the dreaded troubles of life, grows
more beautiful in the eyes of angels, as it is more
whitened and troubled, approaching heaven! But
what hypocrites these shore-birds are, with their
whitest plumes turned earthward! See that dark-backed
snipe on the beach, with his white breast and
belly!

Brig.—Rather what knowledge of mankind they
have—preferring to keep their darker side for the
more forgiving eye of Heaven!

Com.—True—the better reading! Do you like
snipe?

Brig.—With a pork shirt they are fairish—that is,
if you can't get woodcock. But, mi-boy, it isn't you
that need ever eat snipe!

Com.—As how?

Brig.—(Pulling out the Sunday Mercury and reading)—“Willis,
it is said, has profited $5,000 by the
sale of the last edition of `Pencillings by the Way.”'

Com.—The mischief he has!—for “has” read would
be pleased to. Perhaps the editor of the Mercury
will be kind enough to fork over the difference between
fact and fiction! By-the-way, I have read the
book, myself, for the first time in eight years, and I
have been both amazed and amused with the difference
between what I saw then, and what I know now! And
I am going to give the public the same amazement
and amusement, by writing for the Mirror a review of
“Pencillings” with my new eyes—showing the interesting
difference between first impressions and after
familiarity.

Brig.—They'll want to read “Pencillings” over
again, mi-boy!

Com.—For a hasty pudding it has held out surprisingly
already. The fifth edition, embellished with
engravings, is still selling well in England, and in the
most stagnant literary month of the year we have sold
two editions, as you know. I am inclined to fear that
I shall be less known by my careful writings than by
this unrevised book—written between fatigue and
sleep, by roadsides and in most unstudylike places,
and republished, in the Mirror edition, exactly as first
written! There is a daguerreotypity in literal first
impressions, my dear general, and a man would write
an interesting letter, the first moment after seeing the
Colosseum for the first time, though a description from
memory, a month after, would be very stupid. Did
you ever feel posthumous, brigadier?

Brig.—No. I never was dead.

Com.—Nor I, except “in trespasses and sins”—but
a letter I received to-day has given me a most posthumous
sensation. It was sent me to publish, by a
lady who has lived several years abroad, and has lately
revisited Saratoga. It will “rub my brass” as the
maids say, to publish the passage about myself (quoted
from the letter of a German baron), but it may make
somebodies buy “Pencillings” to know that it has
passed abroad into a vade-mecum for travellers. So,
down modesty and swell pocket! Who knows but
that the “Sunday Mercury,” that “lighted on the
heaven-kissing hill” of $5,000, may be a better
prophet than historian! Set your heels comfortably
into the sand, general, and listen to this letter. There
are some sweet lines at the close, written by the same
lady after visiting the home of the young poetess Davidson,
whose precocious genius and premature death
have been so feelingly written upon:—

“When you and I, my dear sir, met so pleasantly
some weeks since at Saratoga, I forgot to give you an
extract from a letter which I had received from Germany.
No one can be insensible to deserved praise
from a far land, and I know you will read with gratification
these few lines from a distinguished friend of
mine: `I remember with pleasure our visit to your
splendid frigate, the United States, in the bay of Naples.
We met Mr. N. P. Willis on board, and after
his cruise I met him again at Lady Darley's. He will
not remember me, but if you ever see him, tell him
that a person who has visited almost all the spots
described in his “Pencillings by the Way,” feels the
greatest pleasure in reading his book at least twice a
year. It accompanies him regularly from Dresden to
his estates in the spring, and back to the city in the
autumn.'

“Not having seen Saratoga for many years, I was
curious to perceive what changes time had made. Of
course, its outward condition is greatly improved, and
the remarkable change of all is the transition of the
fashion and gayety from Congress hall to the United
States hotel. It would be unwise to compare this
latter establishment with any other that we have seen
in Europe, inasmuch as the whole order of arrangement
is entirely different; but this must be conceded,
that for a fortnight, no place in the world offers more
amusement. One may remain months at Carlsbad,
Baden-Baden, &c., without fatigue, in consequence
of the entirely independent manner of living; but
Saratoga must be taken, to be enjoyed, in homeopathic
doses of the beforementioned fourteen days. It is
really extraordinary how well-ordered and conducted
is the United States hotel, when we remember the
crowds that dwell within its four walls and its colonies;
and assuredly the brothers[2] who bring about
this state of things, deserve great commendation.
Having been repeatedly told, since my return from a
long absence, that Saratoga had deteriorated, I confess
to having seen nothing of the sort. I had the
good fortune to meet some of the most remarkable
men of my country, and many of the fairest of its
daughters, and to enjoy their society. I hold that
Saratoga must be visited upon broad American principles—
no cliques (like will come to like)—but a gracious
word for all. At Carlsbad, and all other continental
watering-places, the government provides a
master of ceremonies, who introduces, regulates the
balls, &c. The voice of the people gives this position,
at the United States hotel, to a citizen of Baltimore,
and allow me to say, that those who look upon
him as a mere manager of balls, totally mistake his
character; for a kinder and better heart never beat
within a human breast than he possesses. Indeed, Baltimore
seems to have been singularly well represented
this year—the incomparable beauty of its women
eclipsing all, and the wit alone of one finished gentleman
of that town being sufficient to leaven a `mass
meeting.'

“I think the visits of clergymen to watering-places
a signal benefit, when they resemble the Rev. Dr.
Bethune, engaging in pleasing conversation with
young and old, whom he enlivened by his eloquence.
He never lost sight of the great aim of his existence—
their improvement. Ever surrounded by eager listeners,
he left them better, wiser. On the whole, I think
we must consider Saratoga as a great public good—a
neutral ground, where the south discovers that the
north is not a Mont Blanc, and the north perceives
that the south is not a Versuvius!

“My last visit at Saratoga was to the late home of the
gifted Davidsons. Their brother kindly accompanied
me, and presented me to his bereaved father. It
seemed, as I lingered amidst their remains, a very home
of shadows[3] —a wondrous contrast to the surrounding
scenes. I considered myself quite fortunate in having
paid this visit, as Dr. Davidson leaves Saratoga
shortly, and the establishment will thereby be entirely
dismembered.

Com.—Theodore Fay, you, and I, supping together!

Brig.—You have a way of knowing opportunity
when you see it! I little dreamed of so long a lease
of you! Dear Theodore! how I should like to eat
that supper over again!

Com.—I am very glad it agreed with you (presuming
it is me and Theodore you want over again—not the
oysters!) They say Fay has grown fat, handsome
and diplomatic. When shall we have that sweet fellow
back among us?

Brig.—When they want the please for a green secretary,
who knows nothing of the court or court language.
As soon as a man has been long enough
attached to a legation to be presentable and useful,
they recall him! What is that other letter I brought
you?

Com.—From a lady at Fishkill, who is dazzled with
the upshoot of “Fanny Forester.” She thinks Fanny's
offhand piquancy is easy to do, and the letter
shows how much she is mistaken. I would fain say
an encouraging word, however, for she seems to have
the best of motives for wishing to be literary. Now,
is it kinder to discourage such beginners at once, or to
encourage them good-naturedly into a delusion?

Brig.—Always discourage, mi-boy, for if they have
genius, they will prosper

and if they have none, they are better stopped where
they are. How many heart-aching authoresses do we
know at this moment, who can write just well enough
to be wofully distressed with the reluctance of the
market! The only style saleable is the spicy but difficult
vein of bright Fanny Forester, and yet, to a
neophyte, that very woof seems the easiest woven!
A woman who is more intelligent than the people
around her, is very apt to believe that she might be
famous, and make money with her pen; and unless
she endeavors in this way to compensate herself for
the lack of belleship. Better raise flowers and sell
bouquets, dear Rosalie Beverly!

Com.—The gray lace of twilight's star-broidered
veil has fallen over the sea, brigadier. Let us paddle
back through the surf-edge to the bathing-houses, boot,
and reappear to a world (I don't think) disconsolate
without us.

THE CABINET.

(Shop-door, Ann street. The Brigadier and Committee
standing, sphinx-wise, outside.)

Brig.—The “devil” was here just now for “copy,”
my dear boy!

Com.—The devil here and no Fanny Forester!
We have given our readers a taste of this charming
incognito, brigadier, and now they'll not feast without
her! I wonder whether she's pretty?

Brig.—So would she be over-endowed. No, mi-boy!
I warrant that, with all her cleverness, she has
envied, many a time, the doll of the village!

Com.—A woman is, sometimes, wholly unadmired,
who would become enchanting by a change of her
surroundings. That playful wit of Fanny Forester's,
what-like shell soever it inhabits, would make her the
idol of a circle of appreciators—for its work is in her
face, somewhere! Do you remember George Sand's
description of one of her heroines? “Elle était jolie
par juxta-position. Heureuse, elle eût été ravissante.
Le bonheur est la poésie des femmes, comme la toilette
en est le fard. Si la joi d'un bal eût reflété ses
teints rosées sur ce visage pâle, si les douceurs d'une
vie élégante eussent rempli, eussent vermillioné ses
joues dejà légèrement creusées, si l'amour eût ranimé
ses yeux tristes, elle aurait pu lutter avec les plus
belles jeunes filles. Il lui manquait ce qui crée une
seconde fois la femme:—les chiffons et les billet-doux!”

Brig.—(who had gone in to escape the French quotation,
and returned as the last word lingered on the
committee's lips).—Write a “billetdoux” to the next
unrisen star, mi-boy, and ask her—(him, it, or her)—
to shine first, like Fanny Forester, in the columns of
the Mirror. I love the baptism of genius, and (modestly
speaking) I have been the St. John in the wilderness
of new writers.

Com.—Apostolic brigadier! You do know a star,
even “at the breast”—though, from sucking poets deliver
me mostly, oh, kind Heaven! They exact a
faith in their call and mission that precludes everything
but the blindest and most acquiescent admiration.
I remember my own difficult submissions to
the corrections of the kind, but truthful and consistent
critic of my youth, Buckingham of the Boston
Courier. He was always right, but it is hard, when
your feathers are once smoothed down, to pluck out
and re-stick them in your poetical peacockery! Ah,
juvenilities! We build bridges over chasms of meaning,
but they drop away behind us, as we pass over!
In Heaven, where there will be no grammar and dictionary,
we shall have a new standard of excellence—
thought. Here, it is thought's harness—language!
What makes these people throw their potato-parings
into the gutter, my dear general?

Brig.—Ann street, mi-boy, calls for the attention
of Mayor Harper. The Mirror has a dainty nostril
or two, and there are flower-pots in the windows opposite,
and Burgess & Stringer keep the choicest of
literary conservatories, yet we reside upon a rivulet
of swill! The simple enforcement of the law would
sweeten things, but there is no police except for criminals
in this land of liberty. Look at that brace of
turtle-doves coming up-street! What loving friendships
women have, at an age when boys are perfect
Ishmaelites.

Com.—Pardon me, my dear general, if I correct
your cacology. The sportsmen call two turtles a
dule of turtles, not a brace. Though, by-the-way, I
have not long been in possession of my learning upon
that point. Let me read you a chapter on the nomenclature
of such matters from this book in my hand.
Will you listen? The book is “Goodman's Social
History of Great Britain”—a gem of delightful reading:—

“The stags which ran wild in the king's forests
were named as early (if not earlier) as Edward III.
(1307), from their antlers; thus the first year the male
is called a calf, second year a brocket, third year a
spayer, fourth year a stag, fifth year a great stag, sixth
year a hart of the first head.

“In the notes of Sir Walter Scott's `Lady of the
Lake,' is a curious account of the brytling, breaking
up or quartering of the stag. `The forester had his
portion, the hounds theirs, and there is a little gristle,
called the raven's bone, which was cut from the brisket,
and frequently an old raven was seen perched
upon a neighboring tree waiting for it.

“The fallow-deer, which are kept in the English
parks, have also names, but not exactly the same as
for stags. The males and the females the first year
are called fawns, second year the females are called
does, which name she always retains; but the male
is called a prickett; third year he is called a shard;
fourth year, a sword; fifth year, a sword-ell, or sorrell;
sixth year, a buck of first head; seventh year,
a buck; eighth year, a full buck; he is then fit for
killing, and not before: and in the summer is very fat,
which he loses in winter. Buck-venison is not fit to
eat in winter, and ought not to be killed.

“When beasts went together in companies, there
was said to be a pride of lions, a lepe of leopards, a
herd of harts, of bucks, and all sorts of deer; a bevy
of roes, a sloth of bears, a singular of boars, a sowndes
of swine, a dryfte of tame swine, a route of wolves, a
harass of horses, a rag of colts, a stud of mares, a
pace of asses, a barren of mules, a team of oxen, a
drove of kine, a flock of sheep, a tribe of goats, a
sculk of foxes, a cete of badgers, a richess of martins,
a fessynes of ferrets, a huske or a down of hares,
a nest of rabbits, a clowder of cats, a kendel of young
cats, a shrewdness of apes, and a labor of moles.

“When animals are retired to rest, a hart was said
to be harbored; a buck lodged; a roebuck bedded; a
fox kennelled; a badger earthed; a hare formed; and
a rabbit seated.

“Dogs which run in packs are enumerated by
couples. If a pack of fox-hounds consists of thirty-six,
which is an average number, it would be said to
contain eighteen couples.

“Dogs used for the gun, or for coursing, two of
them are called a brace, three a leash; but two spaniels,
or harriers, are called a couple. They also say
a mute of hounds, for a number; a kennel of raches,
a cowardice of curs, and a litter of whelps.

“`The seasons for alle sortes of venery' were regulated
in the olden time as follows: The `time of
grace' begins at midsummer, and lasteth to holy-rood;

the fox may be hunted from the nativity to the annunciation
of our lady; the roebuck from Easter to
Michaelmas; the roe from Michaelmas to Candlemas;
the hare from Michaelmas to midsummer; the wolf,
as the fox and the boar, from the nativity to the purification
of our lady.

“So for birds there is a vocabulary; and first, for
aquatic birds: a herd of swans, of cranes, and of
curlews, a dropping of sheldrakes, a spring of teals,
a serges of herons and bitterns, a covert of cootes, gaggles
of geese, sutes of mallards, baddylynges of ducks.
Now for meadow and upland birds: a congregation
of plovers, a walk of snipes, a fall of woodcocks, a
muster of peacocks, a nye of pheasants, a dule of
turtles, a brood of hens, a building of rooks, a numeration
of starlings, a flight of swallows, a watch of
nightingales, a charm of goldfinches, flights of doves
and wood-pigeons, coveys of partridges, bevies of
quails, and exaltations of larks.

“When a sportsman inquires of a friend what he
has killed, the vocabulary is still varied; he does not
use the word pair—but a brace of partridges, or
pheasants, a couple of woodcocks; if he has three
of any sort, he says a leash.

“If a London poulterer was to be asked for a pair
of chickens, or a pair of ducks, by a female, he
would suppose he was talking to some fine finicking
lady's maid, who had so puckered up her mouth into
small plaits before she started, that she could not open
it wide enough to say couple.

“As the objects sportsmen pursue are so various,
and as the English language is so copious, various
terms have been brought into use: so that the everlasting
term pair, this pairing of anything (except in
the breeding-season) sounds so rude, uninstructive,
and unmusical, upon the ears of a sportsman, that he
would as soon be doomed to sit for life by the side of
a seat-ridden cribbage-player as to hear it.

“It is the want of this knowledge which makes the
writings of Howitt and Willis, when they write upon
this ever-interesting national subject, appear so tame;
the sportsman peruses their pages with no more zest
than he listens to the babble of a half-bred hound, or
'a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees—
leaving his game.”'

Mr. Goodman adds, in a note, the explanation of
my blunders in dog-nomenclature:—

“Mr. Willis, in vol. iii., p. 203, `Pencillings by the
Way,' gives the following information, speaking of
the duke's greyhounds (at Gordon Castle): “`Dinna
tak' pains to caress them, sir,” said the huntsman,
“they'll only be hanged for it.” I asked for an explanation.
He then told me that a hound was hung the
moment he betrayed attachment to any one, or in any
way showed superior sagacity. In coursing the hare,
if the dog abandoned the scent, to cut across or intercept
the animal, he was considered as spoiling the
sport. If greyhounds leave the track of the hare,
either by their own sagacity, or to follow the master
in intercepting it, they spoil the pack, and are hung
without mercy.' Perhaps Mr. Willis will excuse me
if I show how unsportsman-like this is. In the first
place, there are no packs of greyhounds; in the next
place, those who attend on them are not called huntsmen;
in the next place, they never run by scent: if
they did, they ought to be destroyed. As to the caressing,
no dog ought ever to be caressed without he
had first performed some extraordinary feat, and then
it should be done instantly. The everlasting petting
or patting a dog, spoils it in its nature, its disposition,
its temper, and its habits. It becomes worthless, except
as a lapdog, and that is the most contemptible
and worthless thing in all God's creation.

“Many years' close observation has convinced me,
that where the dog is once admitted into the house,
and petted, the dogs rule the children, and the chil
dren rule the rest; bringing in its train all the usual
concomitants of turbulence, filth, and frowsiness; and
turning the room into a dog-kennel.

The correction is very right—thanks to Mr. Goodman.
My attention was called to the blunder, by the
duke of Gordon himself, soon after the publication
of the book in England; and I should have corrected
it in this new edition, but for determining not to read
the proofs, that the letters might be published literally
from the first copy. But what beautifully descriptive.
words are those in the nomenclature of birds, my
dear general: “A watch of nightingales!—a charm of
goldfinches!—a numeration of starlings, and exaltations
of larks!” How pretty it would be, instead of
“Here come two pretty women!” to say, “Here
comes a charm of women!” Instead of, “There
stand Morris and Willis!” to have the shoemaker opposite
say, “Look at that pride of lions,” or that
“exaltation of editors!”

Brig.—A “muster of peacocks” hits my fancy—descriptive,
say, of two loungers in uniform! Aha!
mi-boy!—fine!

Com.—Most brigadierish of brigadiers! You
would rather be the sodger men have made you than
the poet God made you! So would not I!

Brig.—you rejoice in a destiny fulfilled, then?

Com.—Quite the contrary. I mean to say that God
made me a natural idler and trifler, and want made me
a poet and a worky; and unlike you, I would rather
be what God made me. By-the-way, do you know
the trouble there was in the first composing of a
horse? This same amusing book quotes from Fitz-herbert's
old book on agriculture: “A horse has fifty-four
properties, viz.: two of a man, two of a badger,
four of a lion, nine of an ox, nine of a hare, nine
of a fox, nine of an ass, and ten of a woman. This
description has been somewhat altered, but perhaps
not improved upon, viz.: three qualities of a woman,
a broad breast, round hips, and a long mane; three
of a lion, countenance, courage, and fire; three of a
bullock, the eye, the nostrils, and joints; three of a
sheep, the nose, gentleness, and patience; three of a
mule, strength, constancy, and good feet; three of a
deer, head, legs, and short hair; three of a wolf,
throat, neck, and hearing; three of a fox, ear, tail,
and throat; three of a serpent, memory, sight, and
cunning; and three of a hare or cat, cunning, walking,
and suppleness.”

THE CABINET.

(Committee's private study. Brigadier lounging in a
fauteuil.)

Com.—My dear general, what do you think, abstractly,
of industry? Does no shuddering consciousness
of awful platitude creep over you, in this
dreadfully exemplary career that we are pursuing? I
feel as if the very nose on my face were endeavoring
to “dress,” as you military men say—striving to come
down to the dull, cheek-bone level of tedious uniformity!
I declare I should be pleased to “hear
tell” of something out of the “way of business”—
sentiment of some sort!

Brig.—Listen to a song that I have just written.
There is a background of truth to it—the true sadness
of a lovely living woman—that would supply your
need of a sensation, if your imagination could picture
her.

Com.—It shall! Read away, my friend!

(Brigadier reads.)

Com.—That is a peculiarly musical and engaging
measure, and you have hung it upon hinges of honey.
It smacks of the days when poets wrote a song a
year, finishing, to the last vanishing point of perfection.
What do the women say to you for translating
their prose into angel-talk?

Brig.—They love poetry, mi-boy! The more poetical
you can make their life, the more they love life
and you! They would rather suffer than live monotonously.
So, beware the “even tenor!”

Com.—Even of prosperity, eh? I'll beware when
I see it coming!

Brig.—Ah, mi-boy, you have no idea of the intense
abstraction of mind necessary to bring a poetical imagination
down to habits of business.

Com.—Do you really wish to know what is to be
the new rage in society this winter?

Brig.—What?

Com.—Married belles! The 'teens dynasty is passing
away! The talk, this summer, at all the watering-places,
has been of beautiful women, who (if, perchance,
they have loved out their love) have not shone
out their shine! Heavens!—how many there are
completely shelved in American society, who have
never had more than two winters of vogue in the
world, and who are compelled to believe that, out of
thirty years of loveliness, only two are to be rescued
from the nursery—only two to intervene between the
nursery filial and the nursery maternal! What a
utensil woman is, in this way! For what did Heaven
give them their other powers? Heaven did not put
the smile of woman under her arm! No! it was
placed where it could not be covered without suffocation,
and, doubtless, with a purpose:—that the lips
and their outgoing should be kept open to society!
Till those lips fade—till the mind that speaks through
them loses its playfulness and attraction, woman can
not be monopolized without a manifest waste of the
gifts of nature—making that bloom for two years only,
that was constructed to bloom for forty! Besides—
these very charms are withdrawn from the world before
ripening—flowers permitted only to bud! There
never was a belle who was not more agreeable after
marriage than before. An unripe mind is far less
agreeable than a ripe one. The elegant repose of
lovely married women is far more enchanting than the
hoydenish romping or inexperienced sentiment of
girls. Speak up, brigadier! What say?

Brig.—It is highly natural, mi-boy, that this change
should be coming about, now! But it was both natural
and necessary that, hitherto—in the unornamental
foundation of American society, woman should
be reduced to her simple primitive mission—shining,
like the glow-worm, only long enough to attract the
male. When married, she passed into the condition
of an operative in a nation-factory—a working mother,
a working educatress, a working patriot-maker. Her
whole time was then needed for offices that are now
performed—(all but the first)—by schools, moral teachers,
surrounding example, and national routine. Lubricate
the child now with money, and it will slide on
to manhood over an inevitable railroad of education
and good influences. Of course, the mother is now
at liberty to shine as long as nature feeds the lamp:
and, indeed, it is in this way, only, that she can fulfil
her destiny—dispensing elsewhere the sweet influences
no longer needed exclusively by her children.

Com.—Statesmanlike and pellucid! Well, sir, this
great national metamorphosis is now coming about!
It has been secretly resolved, among the young married
men of New York, that there shall exist, this
winter, a post-connubial belle-ocracy; and that married
belles shall, accordingly, have the pas, in waltz,
quadrille, promenade, and conversation. How delicious!—isn't
it? It enlarges the field so! I believe,
general, that I, for one, shall “cast my slough,” and
try my youth on again!

and who knows? I may be agreeable in the reformed
baby-house of society!

Brig.—“Hope on—hope ever!”

THE CABINET.

(Committee and Brigadier in confidential session.)

Com.—My dear general, it won't do! Read these
two letters!

Brig.—I won't waste my eyes with them! It must
do! who says it won't do?

Com.—One Noggs.

Brig.—Who's Noggs?

Com.—By Jove, he writes a capital letter! Hear
this, my incensed brigadier!—(reads.)

“Dear Willis: You frightened me to-day, terribly,
in the hint you threw out in the course of conversation
with the `brigadier,' to wit: `Shall we
make it into a monthly?'

“Make the Weekly New Mirror into a monthly!
God forbid! I forbid, anyhow. `Who are you?' I
am a live Yankee, at your service, who lives in the
land of soles and codfish, whig pow-wows and democratic
clam-bakes—one who has not been so `decorously
brought up,' perhaps as some of your readers,
but `a man for a' that'—a constant reader of the Mirror,
at any rate—proof of my manhood, eh?

Well, sir, I, Newman Noggs, Esq., of Lynn, county
of Essex, etc., etc., do hereby seriously and ardently
protest against any such nonsense as is implied
in the above question. Excuse me, sir, but I couldn't
help it. I feel so worked up at the bare idea of the
visits of the Mirror coming only monthly, that I can
hardly stick to decency. Why, sir, I shouldn't be in
trim for my sabbath-day meeting—albeit a pious man
am I—were it not for the `preparatory' study in the
Mirror, Saturday nights. Not that you are so dreadfully
religious, but there is always sure to be something
in you that makes me feel better, and when I
feel `better' I want to go to church, of course, to let
myself and the world know that I'm getting kind o'
good. As for the literary merits of the Mirror, it
don't become the like o' me to be offering an opinion.
All I've got to say is, that I `individually' like it first-rate.
There's a sort of racy, spicy, off-hand, unstudied
wittiness about it that takes my eye amazingly. So,
for God's sake, or more particularly for my sake, dear
Willis, don't ye change it. Suppose it does cost
some folks a little more for postage than it would for
something else—what o' that? Who's afraid of a
cent or two? I'm a poor man 'long side o' some folk,
and yet I rather pay letter-postage than have it stop
So, Willis dear, just tell your postage friends to economize
in some other department, or, if they can't do
that, tell 'em I'll make it up to 'em.

“No, no, friend of my early youth, don't think of
any such thing, that is, if ye love me—for I could
better spare—something better, than the piquant dish
of conversation which weekly (oh, let it be ever weekly)
occurs between `mi-boy' and our dearly-beloved
general, the `brigadier.'

Com.—I have had twenty letters the last week
(none as good as that, but) all to the same purpose!
I am inclined to think, general, that Heaven's first periodical
(Sunday) was arranged in accordance with
some revolution of our mental nature, and that once
in seven days, as it is good to rest, so it is good to
read, or grieve, or go love-making. Friends dine together
once a week, making friendship a weekly periodical.
Lovers of nature in cities ride to the country
once a week. We eat a boiled dinner once a
week. Everybody in New England needs beans once
a week. The weather comes round once a week—
fair Sundays and wet Sundays coming in successive
dozens. There is nothing agreeable in nature that is
monthly, except the moon, and the very sight of that
periodical puts people to sleep!

Brig.—There is the monthly rose, mi-boy!

Com.—The poorest rose that blows!

Brig.—But here is a point I should like to make
clear to the public. With an enormous subscription
every day increasing, we are every day making less
money.

Com.—How, oh, business man?

Brig.—Thus: For Mirrors that we sell through
agents in cities, we get but four cents each. For
Mirrors that we send to subscribers by mail, we get the
full price—sixpence each. The irregular and exorbitant
postage has nearly killed our mail subscription,
on which we chiefly depended, while in cities, where
our patrons get them from the agents without postage,
we have a sale growing daily more enormous. The
deuse of it is, that the Mirror at sixpence is as cheap
as it can possibly be sold with anything like profit, and
selling it to agents literally at cost, the increase of the
agency circulation does us no manner of good!

Com.—Why sell to agents at cost?

Brig.—It was a necessary evil in the beginning—
lacking capital to hire the doing of what agents do.

Com.—And we must go on as we begun?

Brig.—Short of a six months' paralysis, which we
could not afford, there is no help for it! But the
postage is the great block in our way! Most people
would subscribe and have it sent to their houses by
mail, if the postage were not more than the subscription.

Com.—How would that be helped in the monthly
form.

Brig.—Ah! now you come to the matter. The
monthly Mirror goes for seven cents postage, and most
of our mail subscribers who remain, have the Mirror
sent in the monthly form, by mail—and I wish all who
value the Mirror, or care for us, would do the same. To
take it weekly from an agent, does not bring back to
you a single leaf of Glenmary, my dear boy!

Com.—Ah, my dear friend—Glenmary! Some
villain—some wanton and unfeeling villain—has destroyed
a vine I planted, which had completely embowered
that sweet cottage. In an Ithaca paper, sent
to me yesterday, I find a letter—here it is—from some
Owego gentleman to the editor. Let me read you
part of it:—

“The cottage you know, like a bird's nest, is almost
hid in the foliage. On one side is the road passing
over `the bridge,' and all around a sweet lawn,
sloping away to `Owego creek.' The bridge was
once white, and neat in its outward appearance. But
how Willis, even in the `summer months,' made his
`bridge-gipsying delicious,' is now a mystery. The
`groundwork' is flood-wood, and reptiles crawl where
`swallows peeped out from their nests against the
sleepers,' while every five minutes a baptism of dust
comes down from above, as a benediction from the
passing traveller. But the pruning hand of a man of
taste has been wanting to all this rural spot for two
years past, which may account for the blemishes we
find in the picture so beautifully drawn in `A l'Abri.
Some Caligula among shrubbery has cut the root of a
luxuriant vine, which spread itself over the cottage
front, making a delightful arbor of the piazza; and
its leaves and tendrils, already changed in hue, are
folding themselves to die. As through it the night-breeze
rustled, it seemed to breathe of the desolation
that had stolen upon this garden, sacred to the memory
of a lovely exotic which made it a paradise, and
the fadeless light of genius.”

That is written by some kind man, who understood
how a heartstring might be cut through with a vine
one had planted and cherished. Whoever may be
the perpetrator of that needless outrage, I commend
him to the notice of my friendly neighbors, adding a
petition from me, which may thus reach them, that
only Time's hand may be suffered to ravage my lost
paradise.

Brig.—The subject troubles me, mi-boy! Let us
change it. I've a funny communication here, from a
Rip Van Winkle, who dates fifty years hence, and—

Com.—Keep it till next week, general, and let us
get into the fresh air. I'm manuscript sick. Allons!
Stay—while I mend my outer man a little, read this
funny letter, sent me by the lady to whom it was
written. She thinks her friend, young “Cinna Beverley,”
is a genius.

(Brigadier reads, with an occasional laugh.)

“Fanny Forester.”—We have been accused, face
to face, several times, and by letter once or twice, of
being, ourself, that bewitching masquerader. We have
conjured some variety out of our workyday quill, it is
true, and have an unfulfilled and recorded vow of a
new alias—but in “Fanny Forester” there resides a
dimpled youthfulness and elasticity that is not found
so many miles on the road as our present sojourn!
Oh no, sweet Fanny! they slander you and do too
much credit to our industry and versatility! Those
who wish to know more of Fanny Forester, may hear
of her, now, among the high-priced contributors of
Graham and Godey.

Dr. Lardner's Lecture.—We did not chance to
hear Dr. Lardner's excellent and amusing lecture on
the “London literati,” etc., but the report of it in the
“Republic” has scraped the moss from one corner of
our memory, and we may, perhaps, aid in the true
portraiture of one or two distinguished men by showing
a shade or two in which our observation of them
differed from that of the doctor. We may remark
here, that Dr. Lardner has been conversant with all
the wits and scholars of England for the last two or
three lustrums, and we would suggest to him that,
with the freedom given him by withdrawal from their
sphere, he might give us a book of anecdotical biography
that would have a prosperous sale and be both
instructive and amusing. We shall not poach upon
the doctor's manor, by the way, if we give our impression
of one of these literati—himself—as he appeared
to us, once in very distinguished company, in
England. We were in a ball in the height of the
season, at Brighton. Somewhere about the later
hours, we chanced to be in attendance upon a noble
lady, in company with two celebrated men. Mr.
Ricardo and Horace Smith (the author of Brambletye
House, and Rejected Addresses), Lady Stepney,
authoress of the “New Road to Ruin,” approached
our charming centre of attraction with a proposition
to present to her the celebrated Dr. Lardner. “Yes,
my dear! I should like to know him of all things!”
was the reply, and the doctor was conjured forthwith
into the magic circle. He bowed “with spectacles
on nose,” but no other extraneous mark of philosopher
or scholar. We shall not offend the doctor by stating
that, on this evening, he was a very different looking
person from his present practical exterior. With
showy waistcoat, black tights, fancy stockings and
small patent-leather shoes, he appeared to us an elegant
of very bright water, smacking not at all, in manner
no more than in dress, of the smutch and toil of
the laboratory. We looked at and listened to him,
we remember, with great interest and curiosity. He
left us to dance a quadrille, and finding ourself accidentally
in the same set, we looked at his ornamental
and lover-like acquittal of himself with a kind of wonder
at what Minerva would say! This was just before the
doctor left England. We may add our expression of
pleasure that the Protean facility of our accomplished
and learned friend has served him in this country—
making of him the best lecturer on all subjects, and
the carver out of prosperity under a wholly new
meridian.

But, to revert to the report of the lecture:—

“The doctor gave some very amusing descriptions
of the personal peculiarities of Bulwer and D'Israeli,
the author of `Coningsby,' observing that those who
have read the works of the former, would naturally
conclude him to be very fascinating in private society.
Such, however, was not the case. He had not a
particle of conversational facility, and could not utter
twelve sentences free from hesitation and embarrassment.
In fact, Bulwer was only Bulwer when his
pen was in his hand and his meerschaum in his mouth.
He is intimate with Count D'Orsay, one of the handsomest
men of the day, and in his excessive admiration
of that gentleman has adopted his style of dress,
which is adapted admirably to the figure of the second
Beau Brummell, but sits strangely on the feeble, rickety
and skeleton form, of the man of genius.”

Now it struck us, on the contrary, that there was no
more playful, animated, facile creature in London
society than Bulwer. He seemed to have a horror
of stilted topics, it is true, and never mingled in general
conversation unless merrily. But at Lady Blessington's,
where there was but one woman present
(herself), and where, consequently, there could be no
têtes-á-têtes, Bulwer's entrance was the certain precursor
of fun. He was a brilliant rattle, and as to any
“hesitation and embarrassment,” we never saw a
symptom of it. At evening parties in other houses,
Bulwer's powers of conversation could scarce be fairly
judged, for his system of attention is very concentrative,
and he was generally deep in conversation with
some one beautiful woman whom he could engross.
We differ from the doctor, too, as to his style of dandyism.
Spready upper works, trousers closely fitting to
the leg, a broad-brimmed hat, and cornucopial whiskers,
distinguished D'Orsay, while Bulwer wore always
the loose French pantaloon, a measurable hat-brim,
and whiskers carefully limited to the cheek. We
pronounce the doctor's astrology (as to these stars)
based upon an error in “observation.”

The reporter adds:—

“D'Israeli he described as an affected coxcomb,
with a restless desire to appear witty; yet he never
remembered him to have said a good thing in his life
except one, and that was generally repeated with the
preface, `D'Israeli has said a good thing at last.”'

That D'Israeli is not a “bon-mot” man, is doubtless
true. It never struck us that he manifested a “desire
to appear witty.” He is very silent in the general
melée of conversation, but we have never yet seen him
leave a room before he had made an impression by
some burst in the way of monologue—eitheran eloquent
description or a dashing new absurdity, an anecdote
or a criticism. He sits indolently with his head on
his breast, taking sight through his eyebrows till he
finds his cue to break in, and as far as our observation
goes, nobody was ever willing to interrupt him. The
doctor calls him an “affected coxcomb,” but it is only
of his dress that this is any way true. No schoolboy
is more frank in his manners. This is true, even since
D'Israeli's “gobble up” of the million with a widow.
When we were first in London, he was the immortal
tenant of one room and a recess, and with manners
indolently pensive. Three years after, returning to
England, we found him master of a lordly establishment
on Hyde Park, and, except that he looked of a
less lively melancholy, his manners were as untroubled
with affection as before. We do not in the least
doubt the sincerity of the doctor's report, but it shows
how even acute observers (we two are that, doctor!)
will see the same thing with different eyes. This
article is too long.

New York has an unsupplied want—no less a thing
than a FASHIONABLE PROMENADE. Broadway, that

used to be the parade of all that was feminine, fashionable
and fair, has been, for some time, only a walk of
plain-dress-necessity to the noli-me-tangeries, and it
will soon be left entirely to the deaf and the humble
—so intolerable is the Bedlam racket of its abominable
omnibuses! (To get an audible answer to the “How
do you do?” one has need to take one's friend into a
store.)

Our ladies have done like the English, in giving up
shopping and walking the street in full dress, and now,
where is to be the English or French substitute—
our Hyde park or our Bois de Boulogne? Ladies,
in London, are supposed to be so incapable of walking
at all in the street, that, if they do so, it is rather
well-bred not to recognise them in passing. But
after shopping in disguise in Regent street (their
Broadway) they go home and “dress for the carriage,”
and drive out to meet all the world in the “Rotten
row” of the park. Up and down this half mile they
follow in slow procession, meeting as slow a procession
going the other way, and bowing at every carriage
length, and, no public hack being admitted into the
park, those who have no carriages have no promenade!

Don't let us improve with our eyes shut! We have
taken off our foot of fashion from one round of the
ladder. How long is it to be suspended in the air—
for, a driving park is the next inevitable step upward?

Odd Enough.—The best view of Trinity steeple and
almost the only view of Trinity church, is across some
old one-story wooden groceries in Greenwich street,
the spectator standing upon the opposite sidewalk!
“We never know to whom we look best,” said we to
the steeple, when we discovered it! To Broadway-gazers,
Trinity steeple is a Gothic column. The body
of the church is wholly lost as to effect, and it was a
great mistake not to set it sidewise upon the street.
But, let us suggest something to the enormously
wealthy vestry of that church. There is not a valuable
building, nor scarce a lot unoccupied by a nuisance,
between this splendid fabric and Greenwich street.
How easy to buy this advantageous slope, and make
of it an ascending foreground, unequalled except by
the ascent to the capitol at Washington! Besides
the addition to the beauty of the city, it would give
another “lungs” to the neighborhood of Wall street,
and grace, fitly and with additional beauty, the resting-place
of the gallant and lamented Lawrence.

Change in New York Habits.—The great peculiarity
of America—our gregariousness, as shown in
our populous hotels—has taken a large stride on its
way to the exclusivism of Europe. The office of the
lessee of the new hotel up-town has been overrun with
applicants, and most of them, we understand, with a
view of availing themselves of its privileges as a hotel
garni—or furnished house where the meals are discretionary,
as to place, time, and price. Let us look
a little into this.

A gentleman arrives at a London hotel. He alights
at the door of what resembles a private house. He is
shown to a small parlor and bed-room, and left alone
with his baggage and the peculiarly neat and unsociable
chairs and table. He orders his dinner and tea,
and it is served to him alone. He is as much alone
the remainder of the day and evening, and from that
time to doomsday, if he stay so long; and there is no
place about the house where he can vary this loneliness,
except the coffee-room, where the parlor class
of lodgers have no errand and rarely go. His engagement
with the landlord is to pay so much, by the day,
for his rooms, and for whatever else he chooses to order.
What with the absence of books, and all the comforts
and trifles that give a look of home, and, on the other
hand, the lack of the American compensations, such
as reading-room, ladies' drawing-room, sitting-rooms,
and thronged halls and entries, the solitude and gloom
of a hotel in the heart of London could scarce be
exceeded.

But, admirably suited as is the American system of
hotel to the relief and pleasure of the stranger and
traveller, there is a class of hotel-lodgers who would
be more comfortable in New York were there a hotel
after the European fashion—and it is with a view to
this class, mainly, that the new hotel up-town has
been designed. We refer to the class who wish a
luxurious home, but can not afford time, trouble, or
money, to be housekeepers. There are many families
of this description—families who pass the summer in
the country, but in the winter reside in town, and,
dreading the trouble and expense of a town house,
would still prefer a private table and drawing-room.
For such, a hotel garni, with elegant suites of apartments
and a restaurant on the floor before, is the well-adapted
provision, and this class is sufficiently large
to more than warrant the enterprise of the hotel up-town.

The great mass, however, even of families (and
certainly of bachelors), prefer the gregarious hotel,
where two or three hundred people form almost one
family, where eating and dancing and social pleasures
are all enjoyed in common, and where business and
amusement are closely, and without foresight or
trouble, closely intermingled. This style of living
best suits the great mass of a business community, and
it will not be till we have a ruling proportion of aristocratic
idlers, that the gregarious hotel will go out of
fashion. That may be fifty years hence, or our “gregariousness”
may become a national peculiarity, and
the Astor “stay put” for a century.

We speak the Tuscan, and lively Mr. Palmo is
betrayed by his soft c to be a Piedmontese or a Venetian—else
we should venture to give him the ideas
here-below embodied, in his own lingua de belleza.
We beg his worthy and eloquent legal counsellor,
however (whom we have the pleasure to know) to
translate to him, through some medium more pellucid
than the last, the nicer shades of our meaning. We
put up our prayer for its happy voyage to the manager's
harbor of comprehension.

An OPERA, like a woman, is never to be taken literally.
It is not, exclusively or mainly, a place wherein
to hear good music. If the music be the best that
can be procured (though it were only the best in
Ethiopia), the uncrowned but very executive King
Public is content. “Our” ear is merciful! But the
opera is a place for the advancing of two ends more—
human tenderness and human vanity. Ten go thither
to flirt, and forty to be seen, where one goes to pamper
his auricular nerve upon a cadenza. We don't see
that this requires enlarging upon.

We wish to enlighten those who have hitherto been
proudly content with their own country (haven't travelled,
and that's the reason), as to the true uses of the
opera abroad—the way it is truly used, that is to say,
where sing Rubini and his starry troupe. First, as to
construction. The London opera-house (like the
Parisian) is composed of a hundred or more private
boxes, and a pit. The private boxes are used by their
lady-proprietors to receive company during the evening,
and the pit is used to reconnoitre the boxes, to lounge,
to chat, and to be visible in white gloves and opera-glass
(this last a most necessary demonstration by
those who would not otherwise be considered “men
about town”). We have not yet mentioned the listening

to the opera. This very subordinate part of the
evening's entertainment commences at the signal
“sh!” “sh!” from the connoisseurs, indicating that
some favorite aria is commencing which is worth listening
to, or a duett or quartette, or fine point of
action, coming off, and, till this is past, the audience,
above and below, is breathlessly still and attentive. At
all other times during the performance of the opera,
it is rather green than otherwise to pay attention to
the stage, and anybody who should request that his
neighbors would not converse during the recitativo
secco, would be smiled at as “capital fun!” The
opera, in short, is considered as a help, an accompaniment
(or, if you like, a stop-gap) to conversation, and
the consequence is that nowhere are people so much at
their ease, and nowhere are so many bright and merry
things said as at the opera! We'll mend our pen,
dear reader, while you compare this with the quaker-meeting
attention so tediously given at Palmo's.

But this is to be mended (the practice, we mean—
the pen does pretty well), and the first thing we wish
to suggest to Mr. Palmo is an improvement in the
“fop's alley” part of it. To go round behind the
boxes, as the house is constructed now, is formidably
conspicuous, unless one has a direct errand to the lady
next the stage; yet this, with the exception of having
a seat in the pit, and sitting in it, is the only way to
get a look at the house and “see who is there.” Let
Mr. Palmo drop a staircase, passing under the stage-box
to the front of the pit, and there would be an excusable
lounge of observation all round the house—a
prodigious difference in the attraction for the dandies,
let us assure you, signor! You need the dandies!
You wish to make it among the necessities of
a “man about town,” that he should have a season-ticket
to the opera. But it is no pleasure to sit
cramped and silent in one seat, and no pleasure to
come in and stand behind the audience for the whole
evening, or for an hour. It would be a pleasure to
see the audience from the front, and that can not be
done now, without a pretty “cool” walk to the orchestra
and back. Now could it?

We have two or three other propositions to make
for the improvement of the social opportunities of
the opera, but this will do for to-day. Addio, signore!

We cordially approve of the reason for, and the
feeling which prompted the following paragraph.
We have the pleasure of knowing the three gentlemen
mentioned in it, particularly the urbane captain,
and we wish the Howards a happy retirement, and
Captain Roe a-bounding prosperity—but this done,
we wish to note a nationality as it passes; and first,
to quote a paragraph:—

“It has been announced in various quarters that
the Messrs. Howard, who have established the hotel
so extensively and favorably known as Howard's Hotel,
have disposed of that establishment to Captain
Roe, of the “Empire” steamboat. * * *
As for the Howards, we are glad that they have done
so well. We presume that, being relieved now from
the labor of keeping such a large establishment, they
will retire to some of those beautiful retreats with
which their native state, Vermont, abounds.”

It will be seen at once that a traveller who should
measure this trio by the European scale of condition
in life—(rank these gentlemen, that is to say, with
“mine host” in any other part of the world)—would
make a blunder. The difference between an American
hotel-proprietor, and a London Boniface, is not
merely that our hotels are six times as large. It is
not merely that he is six times as great a “proprietor.”
The vocation is almost wholly different—and
the difference is a result of the totally different hab
its of the two countries. In London, you may, by
chance, see the “land-lady,” daily, but you may be
months in the house without seeing the “land-lord.”
(Two terrible misnomers, by-the-way, for the hostess,
though she has no land, is not a lady but as a land
lady, and mine host is far enough from a lord with
land, though he is no lord except as a land-lord!)
The English host, therefore, is never an acquaintance
of his guest, and the guest knows his hostess only in
the quality of an upper servant. The reader will
have recognised the difference we wish to point to.
The American hotel-keeper has charge, not of twenty
or thirty people living wholly in their own private
rooms, but of two or three hundred, whose habits are
all gregarious, and to almost every one of them he (the
landlord) is a personal and familiar friend. The extent
of this friendly intercourse with persons mostly
of the better class, gives to the hote-proprietor a
mass of influence, direct and indirect, which makes
him a very important person in the community. He
is continually appealed to for knowledge on popular
subjects, such as is got only by great facilities of hearsay.
He is often made a reference in disputes, from
his necessary habit of impartiality. He is intrusted
with deposites of great value by his guests, and is the
confidant-general of the secrets and difficulties of
strangers, and of travelling lovers and mourners.
Ladies and families are committed to his charge.
Public entertainments are given by his advice and direction;
and, in short, he has so much harm, and so
much good influence, in his power, that he is, necessarily,
a person of high moral character, superior
judgment, discretion, and information—without all
which public opinion would not tolerate him in his
place—and, with which, while in the full exercise of
his vocation, he naturally holds a high station of republican
social rank. It is in tacit obedience to this
seale of valuation, that the change of masters in a
public hotel is made the subject of newspaper announcement
and comment—a notice of the fact which
would seem to a London editor wholly beyond its consequence
and value.

We are aware that it is rather Utopian to give nominal
rank to people according to their actual worth
and influence; but let us have our little bit of fancy
now and then! We should be afraid to call public
attention to the rank of editors—measuring it by their
power!

Ole Bull and his missing “spot.”—As we predicted,
this great luminary took the light of the
world to himself on Saturday night, and became visible
above the horizon of the footlights precisely at
eight,

Mrs. Child (the moon who reflects the masculine
gold of his music in the feminine silver of language)
sat in the stage-box, somewhat obscured in the penumbra
of a shocking cap. (We rely upon Miss
Dorsey to invent a “silver cloud,” or, at any rate,
some headdress more becoming for the waxing glory
of this charming reflector.) The Memnonian music
awoke, of course, with the appearance of Ole-Apollo,
and the crammed world of fashion sat breathless.
By the time the first piece was played, however, it
was felt that there was something wrong. The audience
was irresponsive. The ivory inside edge of the
moon's disk (disclosed by the tranquil smile at first),
became less and less visible, and disappeared. The
applause was mechanical. Madame Burkhardt arose
like a morning vapor, and clouded the horizon with
an abominable song. Ole Bull broke out again, and
though the shadows had shortened somewhat before
he finished his second piece, there was still a lack—
still but a dull acknowledgment of his glory.

We presently discovered the cause. A heavy forelock
of hair, which used to drop over the forehead
of the inspired Norwegian, descending “with the
linked sweetness long drawn out” of a cadenza, and
then tossed back like an absorbed comet with the revulsive
sweep of a return to the flon-flon of the air—
this expressive forelock, with the steeped sweetness
of the Niagara it had overheard, and the dreams of
melody it had stirred to, was gone to “— and scissors.”
The “sun was (the day before) shorn of his
beams”—by Cristadoro! Mingled with the hair of
the uninspired, that magic lock had been swept into
Broadway from the floor of the undiscriminating barber,
and, fallen from the heaven of harmony, is now
sticking to the wheels of omnibuses in a purgatory
of Sysiphus. Those in other cities who remember
the toss back of that wild lock of hair in the convulsive
transitions of Ole Bull's music, will understand
that there must have been, emphatically, a spot missing
on his luminous face.

Spite of politics and attractions elsewhere, the
house was crammed; and in spite of the missing
lock, Ole Bull recovered his power over the audience.
The last piece he played was electric, and the
curtain fell amid unlimited plaudits.

The pay for Periodical-Writing.—What a
butcher would think of veal, as a marketable article,
if everybody had an ambition to raise calves to give
away, is very near the conclusion that a merely business-man
would arrive at, on inquiring into the saleableness
of fugitive literature. It is as pleasant for
people not backneyed in authorship to see their
thoughts transferred to print, as it is for beauties to
see their faces transferred to canvass; and, if customary,
most contributors to periodicals would pay the
publisher as willingly as women pay the portrait-painter.
Another thing. Females are naturally facile
writers, and the attention paid to the mental culture
of women in our day, has set their thoughts
a-flow upon paper, as the letting in of sunshine upon
the dark floor of the forest draws to the surface new
springs of water. These facts to begin with, the
reader will easily understand the pourquoi of the unpromising
literary market we have to “open up” to
him.

There are several of the magazines that pay for
articles, but no one of them, we believe, pays for all
its contents. Graham and Godey (two men of noble
liberality to authors) pay prices to some of their contributors
that would far outbid the highest rates of
magazine-payment in England. Their prose-writers
receive from two to twelve dollars a page, and their
poets from five to fifty dollars an article. The Columbian
and the Ladies' Magazine also pay well.
The North American Review used to think it liberal
enough to pay Edward Everett a dollar a page. All
the paying magazines and reviews, however, reject
fifty articles to one that they accept, and they pay
nobody whose “name” would not enrich their table
of contents. In point of fact, but for the necessity of
a brag, and the misfortune that a writer, once made
famous, esteems pay a desirable manner of compliment
(whether he wants the money or not), the literary
periodicals in this country might do well, relying
only on the editor's pen and the epidemic “cacoethes.”
The Mirror did so—and was as cleverly contributed
to, we think, as any periodical in the country. The
rejected articles (offered to us, of course, as a gratuity)
would have filled, at least, a barrel a month!

Newspapers pay for reporting and editing, but seldom
or never for “articles.” The favor, on the con
trary, of giving room and circulation to another man's
ideas, is growing into a saleable commodity—the editor
(on the ground that he risks the popularity of
his paper by relinquishing the chance of a better article)
charging rent for his columns instead of hiring
a tenant. To every scheme of public interest—to
every society—to everything which newspapers can
hinder or further—there is attached some person who
is both desirous and able to present the subject
forcibly on paper; and, quite as readily and zealously,
if there be an objectionable side to it, springs up a
pen-and-ink caviller in opposition. Between them,
and with the desire to figure in print which besets
very many able men, newspaper-editors need pay for
little aid except eyewater and scissors, and they get
credit for a world of zeal in good causes by articles
they neither write nor pay for. We have got to the
footboard of our Procrustes bed.

Authors' Pay in America.—We have hot coals
smouldering in the ashes of “things put off,” which
we poke reluctantly to the surface just now—reluctantly
only because we wish to light beacous for an
author's crusade, and we have no leisure to be more
than its Peter the Hermit. We solemnly summon
Edgar A. Poe to do the devoir of Cœur de Lion—
no man's weapon half so trenchant! And now let
us turn the subject round, small end foremost.

These are days when gentlemen paint their own
boots, and we have latterly been our own publisher.
We have thereby mastered one or two statistics which,
we know not well why, never looked us in the face
before, and which we proceed to hold up by the nape
of the neck for the encouragement of the less stuffy
or less inquiring. Authors who can not find publishers,
and authors who, having found them, have been
as much respected by them as pig-iron by the razor-maker,
are invited to “lend us their ears”—on interest.

What proportion should an author have of the net
profits of a book? This seems a shallow question
enough, but there is a deep hole in it. Remember,
in the first place, that the author wrote the book—
that God gave him the monopoly of the vein from
which it is worked—that he has been at the expense
and toil of an education, and to other expenses and
toils—(as in travel)—that his mind's lease is far shorter
than his lease of life—and that thoughtsmiths should
be better paid than blacksmiths or goldsmiths (that is
to say, if the credit the work does to the country goes
for anything in the valuation). The question of the
division of profit is between author and publisher, and
the publisher gives his uneducated mental attention
to the sale, a brief use of his credit for the printing
and binding, and runs a most partial risk as to the result—for
he need not purchase the book except in
obedience to his own judgment and his readers', and
the cost is paid, of course, before there are any “net
receipts.” (There is great capital made of this
“risk,” but ninety-nine books in a hundred more than
clear expenses!) Now, taking a stereotyped dollarbook
for example, the plates, worth four or five hundred
dollars, are paid for, with a moderate sale, in the
first month. Suppose it to be three months. The
use of the publisher's credit for $500 for ninety days
has been his only outlay of consequence; but the
author has had his outlay of brain-work, time, genius,
and years of education. The printing and getting
up, after the plates are paid for, cost about one
fifth of the retail price—twenty cents on a dollar. To
charge ten cents more on each copy for the absolute
expense of selling and circulating, is more than liberal;
and now, how shall the remaining seventy cents—
the net profit—be divided between author and publisher?

We should like to have a watchmaker's answer to
that question. How much ought the jeweller to have
for buying it from the maker, warranting it “to go”
after examining it, for advertising it, and for selling it
across a counter? Suppose the watch to sell for a
hundred dollars, and seventy dollars to be the net
profit above cost of material. What would you say,
if the maker got but ten or twenty dollars, and the
retailer fifty or sixty? Yet that is the proportion at
which author and bookseller are paid for literary production—the
seller of the book being paid from twice
to five times as much as the author of it!

Certainly, the readiest-minded man we ever knew,
as well as one of the most brilliant and highly cultivated
conversationists, is Major Davezac, the subject
of the anecdote below. Never was a man more out
of place as a stump-orator and agitator, well as he
acquits himself in these turbulent vocations. It is
none of our business to discuss that point, however.
We were only about to roll the anecdotical snow-ball
a little larger, by recording a bon mot of the major's,
at the birth of which we chanced to be present.
Davezac was charge at Naples in eighteen hundred
and some time ago, and French being the language
he was born in, his wit of course played freely in the
court vernacular. He was quite the idol of the diplomatic
corps, and an “indispensable” at all dances and
masquerades. We were dining one evening in his
company during the carnival. The major sat opposite
to us, next to a very pretty German countess.
During the procession and the pelting of sugar-plums
which had occupied the early part of the day, the
countess had received a slight bruise upon her cheek.
Davezac wore court-plaster on his lip—a hit also from
the sugared ammunition. They were both complaining.
“Eh, Monsieur Davezac,” said the countess,
mournfully, “il faut reunir nos douleurs!”—“Oui,
madam, et nos blessures!” replied the major instantly,
placing his lip upon the cheek of the surprised sufferer.

Cosmopolite Attraction in Broadway.—Within
a few doors, in the neighborhood of Prince street,
are collected accidentally, at present, four most vivid
representations of four very distant and different
countries—Spain, India, Paris, and Constantinople—
the “Alhamra,” the “Panorama of Madras,” the
“Panorama of Paris,” and the new shop of “Turkish
curiosities.” He who wishes to realize what balloons
are to do for us in '55, can astonish and confuse
his geographical impressions to his entire satisfaction,
by a visit to all these in one morning.

The Turkish shop has articles for sale that could
seldom before be obtained except by a voyage to the
Orient. We brought some curiosities from Constantinople,
but we have a thousand times regretted, since,
that we had not quadrupled our purchases in the bazars
and bezestein—so much were the articles admired,
and so impossible was it, even in the curiosity-shops
of Europe, to find specimens of them. No person
who is luxurious in personal habits would willingly
be, for example, without the Turkish shirts—having
once seen them. They are the poetry of negligé
costume—the idealized romance of the drapery of
dishabille. Those who have time to make a luxury
of dressing-room or boudoir—the beautiful and idle
of either sex—should take a look at the gossamer
shirts from Constantinople. But there are all manner
of things in this shop beside. There are beautiful
gold-embroidered slippers, small carpets and ottoman-cloths,
attars in gold bottles, gold-embroidered
handkerchiefs and gilded pastilles—everything, in
short, that one buys of old Mustapha, near the Hippodrome
in Stamboul, confectionary included. We
inquired after old Mustapha yesterday, and the Greek
who keeps the shop (who was himself a confectioner
in Constantinople) delighted us with talking of him,
as if he had seen him yesterday! Picturesque and
jolly old turbaned Mustapha!—what fun it was to
have the curtain lifted by his grinning Abyssinian in
anklets and wristlets, and step into the back shop to
take coffee and try his essences! It quite came over
us like a dream yesterday—the chat with this Broadway
Constantinopolitan. If you have any curiosity,
dear reader, call and taste the confectionary at this
shop, and look at the translucent shirts, and see the
Persian inkstands, and handle the graceful cimeters,
and look at the Brusa silks and seraglio slippers—in
short, see Constantinople—for that is a palpable slice
of it!

Jumping the Pew.—We were once in the gallery
of a country church when an address was to be delivered
to a Sunday school. The body of the house
was reserved for the adult audience, and the boys were
confined to one of the side aisles. There was evidently
an understanding, however, that if not otherwise
wanted, the well-cushioned seat facing the chancel
was to be given up to as many lads as could occupy it.
It would hold, perhaps, twenty, and a hundred of
them were packed in the aisle like figs, waiting till the
class leader at the head should “open up.” Looking
on with some amusement, we found our eye arrested
by the bright face of a lad, half way down, who bore
the keeping back very impatiently. His struggles to
pass the other boys were vehement, but of no use.
He was slight, and his neighbors were bold and sturdy.
Presently he bit his lips, entered a pew, jumped the
partition into the central aisle, and walked round to
the front. There was a murmur of indignation among
the boys, and a general smile among the spectators,
but he secured his pick of seats. The clergyman, in
the course of his address, thought proper to get up
an impromptu colloquy, and, to the evident annoyance
of the other boys, selected the pew-jumper, who sat
just before him, for the honor. The lad arose, when
questioned, and surprised the whole audience with
the clearness of his replies. He sat down amid general
applause, and (whatever reproof he got in private
for his daring) he was the envied hero of the day. We
have often since had the successful boldness of this
lad recalled to our memory by the class of things it
illustrates, and our mental reply, after reading a letter
to which this was the preface, was—“Better jump
the pew!”

Our correspondent can not get a hearing from the
public! Few things are more difficult. We have
not read his book, but it may be excellent snuff to
keep a fame going, and yet not the stuff to start one.
Genius is expected “never to go into the water till it
knows how to swim”—never to expect to be read but
for having been read before! With any degree of
ability, more or less, it is easy to be almost hopelessly
overlaid. We, ourself, are a very humble example.
We “jumped the pew” unconsciously, in England,
with our furiously abused “Pencillings,” and immediately
sold, for the highest price, an edition of “Inklings
of Adventure”—a series of tales that had fallen
still-born into the lap of Boston, and for the first printing
of which we paid more than a thousand dollars on
our return to their birth-place. Instances of “jumping
the pew” will occur to every observer of men—
every reader of biography. It is the shabby door to
many a path of glory. Almost every profession begins
with a dilemma—hope deferred, or a pew to jump!
The starving lawyer in the west, who flogged his
neighbor to have a case to plead, jumped the pew!

The veteran Buckingham, one of the most judicious,
able and respected editors in the country, was starving
in Boston, when he “jumped the pew” with the abusive
“Galaxy”—making himself read from terror till
he was famous enough to be read for merit. The
game is dangerous, however, and the principle lies
in most questionable neighborhood. For one who
would succeed in it there are ninety-nine who would
fail, and failure is hopeless extinction! The pew can
be jumped but once. The attention of the public can
be but once summoned by a rude pluck at its beard;
and, to keep attention long enough to have the rudeness
forgotten, there must be merit that the public
would regret overlooking—merit, indeed, of which the
neglect was injury enough to justify violent extrication.

The Mirror Steam-Press.—It would be curious
not to lose sight of the Latin word, dropped for translation
into the scholar's ear, till it re-appears in English
on his tongue, but a half-hour's watching of the steam-press
on which the Mirror is printed would be hardly
a less instructive spectacle of contrivance. To complete
the assimilation of the second process to the
first, it would have been necessary, till lately, to employ
a boy to pull the word off the scholar's tongue;
but, by the ingenuity of R. Hoe & Co., the great
organ of public opinion is endowed with a happy delivery
of its own—laying off the sheet that was printed
and ready for utterance, that is to say, and drawing in
its iron tongue, unaided, to be laden with the meantime
coinage of another.

The improvements in printing-presses within the
last ten or fifteen years are probably far less remarkable
than some other progresses of mechanic invention,
yet they are wonderful enough to use up quite
as much curiosity as it is comfortable to find epithets
for, in a day. The difference between the old Ramage
press, and the steam-miracle in our present office, is
peculiarly impressive to ourself. There is a small
bar of iron in this press which fulfils precisely the
same destiny to which we were at one time devoted.
We were considered in an exemplary line of life while
performing exactly its office—that of inking the type
—during a long year of disgust with Latin—(when a
sensible papa took us at our word, and allowed us to
prefer a trade to a satchel!)

The ink was in those days kept in a wooden box,
and, with two stuffed leather balls, a boy or man, beside
the press, distributed it over the face of the type,
while the pressman was fixing the sheet for the impression.
We remember balling an edition of “Watts's
Psalms and Hymns,” which it took weeks to print,
and, by the same token, there are lines in that good
book of which we caught glimpses on the “frisket,”
that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the
ink-balls while conning them over! Reviving ambition
sent us back to school, however, and invention
soon after superseded the ink-boy's elbows (encumbered
with a stomach), by a bit of machinery that
neither required to be fed, nor committed verses to
memory while inking the type! This getting rid of
the boy was the peculiarity of the Smith press, and
then followed the Napier press, which dispensed with
the man, and needed only the tending of two girls or
boys; and now (thanks to Mr. Hoe), we have a steam-press,
which puts up three iron fingers for a sheet of
white paper, pulls it down into its bosom, gives it a
squeeze that makes an impression, and then lays it into
the palm of an iron hand which deposites it evenly on a
heap—at the rate of two thousand an hour! We often
stop with curiosity to look at the little arrangement
which does the work our elbows have ached with, and
we think the Mirror press altogether is a sight worth
your coming to see, dear reader!

The First Day of the World's New Lease
was clasped upon the last yesterday of the completed
series, by as glorious a retiring moon, and as brilliant
a rising sun, as were ever coveted by the “old graybeard,”
at whose funeral they are to be the expiring
candles. A finer night than last night—a finer day
than to-day—never relieved watch upon the “tented
heavens.” We stood looking up a steeple from our
bed-room window at midnight (having first finished
an article for to-day's paper, upon the venture of its
being wanted), and we stood shaving at the same
window when the gold smile of the unexpected sunrise
called upon the surprised weather-cock to look
about him as usual! We, therefore, certify to the
world's coming honestly by its “situation.” Go about
your business, oh, mankind!

Coming down the front steps of the Astor, at half-past
six, we naturally enough took a look up Broadway,
to see if, perchance, some blessed change in the
pavement might not give the first sign of a new Jerusalem.
But if the sapphire paviors had called upon
Mayor Harper, he had struck at something in the
contract. The old holes were there, with stones of
the accustomed complexion—(chafed “trap,” mineralogically
speaking)—and the mud evidently unaware
of a miracle. But, hey! HOW! WHAT! a rainbow
across Broadway?? Could we believe our eyes?—
a many-colored arch completely spanning the street,
hung with flowers, and men walking over it!!! Was
an advent forthcoming, after all?

While we write, that Advent is in progress! It is
the Advent of Youth—Juvenocracy in the ascendant!
A flowery arch spans the breadth of
Broadway, and under it winds, at this moment, the
procession in honor of first maturity—manhood in
youth! It scarce needed, it is true, that the world
should be born again before its new monarch should
make formal entry. It was, ten years ago, discovered
in France—two years ago in England—last year in
America—that the gray head was only the wisest while
there were no books but experience! That which men
once waited to know till the hair was silvered, is now
taught the child at school—conned in the ambitious
dream of the youth in his puberty. The world has
“hung fire” in other ages, from the damp of burnt-out
enthusiasm spread like a blanket over its brainpower.
Improvement has gone upon crutches.
Action waited for enterprise to cough. Courage
stayed to fumble for spectacles. The forenoon
shadows of the sun of human intellect were of untrustworthy
measure, and the dial to begin to work by
was shadowed till post-meridian!

Without touching upon the political articulation in
“the roar of the Young Lion,” we MARK THE EPOCH
—the epoch of “Young France,” “Young England,”
“Young America!” We could show, had we time,
how strikingly the peculiar habits of our land have
more prepared us than other countries, for the sovereignty
of Youth! We have no time now. We must
go forth with the crowd and see the bright cheek and
curling beard of the Young Monarch in his hour of
triumph. The cannon are pealing! The drums
shake upon the prophetic sunshine in the air!

12 o'clock.—We have been to Broadway. The
procession is soon to form. The mounted marshals
of the day are galloping to and fro with their ribanded
insignia—the pictorial outside of the Museum is perfectly
embroidered with petticoats (a charming relief!)
—the windows on both sides of Broadway are crammed
with gayly-dressed spectators—the 500 Boston
young men (fine, wholesome-looking fellows, who
certainly do credit to their “parsley bed”), are assembled
with their badges in front of the Astor—the town
is full of what the ladies would call “handsome young

strangers”—the omnibuses carry flags—the whole
street, from the triumphal arch to the pinnacles of
Trinity, looks impassable with the glittering crowd.
We never saw comparable preparation for a festal
march. It will be a day to be remembered—mocked
at, perhaps, as the first after a millenial crisis, but
glorified as the first in the great era of Youthfulhood!

Mass Meeting of Newsboys.—We may be permitted,
perhaps, to please our friends with the announcement
that we at least stand well upon the side-walk!
The exhaustion of our large edition at four
o'clock, yesterday afternoon, and a general return of
the newsboys from their routes with eager demands
for more, occasioned a multitudinous holding of
counsel among those piping potentates, and to the astonishment
of our corner and the neighborhood, the
assembled varlets actually gave the Evening Mirror
three cheers! We bow to the tattered vox populi, and
own the soft impeachment. Gentlemen newsboys!
give us your hand (with a newspaper between!) and
permit us to offer you a business suggestion. Astonish
one of your insinuating number with a while shirt,
and try the new trick of selling us with a smile to the
ladies! Call him the ladies' boy, and treat him delicately
when he is dressed and can't afford the results
of your familiarity! Your powerful body amounts at
present to some three or four hundred, and your
profits will soon tempt the competition of older gentlemen,
unless you find more worlds to conquer.
Hurrah for the ladies, gentlemen (waving whatever
you have to represent a pocket-handkerchief)—and
now, if you will graciously withdraw your attention,
we would speak to those over whom you have the advantage
of youth.

We have to thank the press all over the country for
the most flattering mention and the kindest encouragement.
Our own craft seem to love us. We thought
of quoting some of their felicitous notices, but our
grateful pride would thus fall into a shape used for
puffing, and we shrink from the medium. Thanks to
our friends—simply but fervently.

Gold Inkstand to the Authoress of the Scottish
Chiefs.—The works of Jane Porter have
probably brought more money into the hands of
booksellers than those of any writer except, perhaps,
Scott, and at this moment steam-presses are
employed in printing large editions of her delightful
novels. An enthusiastic man, a great admirer
of Miss Porter, has, for the second time, started a
subscription among the booksellers of this city to present
her with a gold inkstand, and the Harpers, Appletons,
Langleys, and others, have subscribed with
enthusiastic liberality. Perhaps a description of Jane
Porter with a little of her hitherto unwritten history may
not be unacceptable.

Miss Porter was the daughter of a gallant English
officer, who died, leaving a widow, and three children,
then very young, but all destined to remarkable fame
Sir Robert Ker Porter, Jane Porter, and Anna
Maria Porter. Sir Robert, as is well known, was
the celebrated historical painter, traveller in Persia,
soldier, diplomatist, and author, lately deceased. He
went to Russia with one of his great pictures when
very young, married a wealthy Russian princess, and
passed his subsequent years between the camp and
diplomacy, honored and admired in every station and
relation of his life. The two girls were playmates
and neighbours of Walter Scott. Jane published her
“Scottish Chiefs” at the age of eighteen, and became
immediately the great literary wonder of her time.
Her widowed mother, however, withdrew her immediately
from society to the seclusion of a country
town, and she was little seen in the gay world of London
before several of her works had become classics.
Anna Maria, the second sister, commenced her admirable
series of novels soon after the first celebrity of
Jane's works, and they wrote and passed the brightest
years of their life together in a cottage retreat. The
two sisters were singularly beautiful. Sir Thomas
Lawrence was an unsuccessful suitor to Anna Maria,
and Jane (said by Sir Martin Shee to have been the
handsomest woman he ever saw) was engaged to a
young soldier who was killed in the Peninsula. She
is a woman to have but one love in a lifetime. Her
betrothed was killed when she was twenty years of
age, and she has ever since worn mourning, and remained
true to his memory. Jane is now the only
survivor of her family, her admirable mother and her
sister having died some twelve or fourteen years ago,
and Sir Robert having died lately, while revisiting
England after many years' diplomatic residence in
Venezuela.

Miss Porter is now near sixty. She has suffered
within the last two or three years from ill-health, but
she is still erect, graceful, and majestic in person, and
still possessed of admirable beauty of countenance.
Her large dark eyes have a striking lambency of lustre,
her smile inspires love in all who see her, and her
habit of mind, up to the time we last saw her (three
or four years ago), was that of reflecting the mood of
others in conversation, thinking never of herself, and
endeavoring only to make others shine, and all this
with a tact, a playfulness and simplicity, an occasional
unconscious brilliancy and penetration, which have
made her, up to sixty years of age, a most interesting,
engaging, and lovely woman. We have had
the good fortune to pass several months, at different
times, under different hospitable roofs, with Jane
Porter, and, considering the extent of her charm,
over old and young, titled and humble, masters and
servants, we sincerely think we never have seen a
woman so beloved and so fascinating. She is the
idol of many different circles of very high rank, and
passes her time in yielding, month after month, to
pressing invitations from the friends who love her.
The dowager queen Adelaide is one of her warmest
friends, the highest families of nobility contend for
her as a resident guest, distinguished and noble foreigners
pay court to her invariably on arriving in
England, she has been ennobled by a decree of the
king of Prussia, and with all this weight of honor on
her head, you might pass weeks with her (ignorant of
her history) without suspecting her to be more than
the loveliest of women past their prime, and born but
to grace a contented mediocrity of station.

This is an impartial and truthful sketch of the celebrated
person for whom the above-mentioned compliment
is intended. We trust it may find her alive, and
with her accustomed bright smile upon her lips—God
guard and preserve her!

Rocking-Chair vice Inkstand resigned. We gave,
“by authority,” an account of a subscription paper,
the purpose of which was to present to Jane Porter
an inkstand of gold. Our publisher-mayor Mr. Harper,
headed the list with $40. We wrote a paragraph
on the subject, and the same evening were called to
see a rocking-chair into which the inkstand had been
suddenly converted by a rub against the Aladdin's lamp
of propriety. We went into Meeks's museum of
sumptuous furniture, and the chair was disrobed, for
us, of a beautiful chintz cover presented to Miss Porter
by Messrs. Meeks, the makers. The chair is a
bijou. The model is appropriately Elizabethan—(a

chair for the virgin queen of English romance, made
in the style of the virgin queen of English history)—
the carving in rosewood relief, and the lining of crimson
velvet. The exact model of the chair was sent
to Queen Victoria not long since, as a specimen of
American furniture, by a club of English gentlemen.
The cadeau goes out consigned by the mayor of New
York to the lord-mayor of London, for his worshipful
presentation, Mr. Griswold, the packet owner, giving
it an honorary passage. The following letter, written
on parchment and sealed with the city arms, accompanies
it:—

We have still another light to throw upon this famous
chair. The Wood, without which it might not
have been built, did not come from the West Indies
in planks of amyris balsamifera (rosewood), but from
Canandaigna, in the shape of a gentleman whose
heart distils a better balsam—of courtesy! We first
heard of Mr. Wood and the proposed presentation of
an inkstand, from Miss Porter herself. She inquired
whether we knew Mr. Wood, and gave us the history
of his project to compliment her, apropos of promising
us a sight of barrels of presents which had showered
upon her from all parts of the world. She expressed
a most simple-hearted delight in the extent
of her American reputation, and wished to see a copy
of one of the American editions.

On our return to this country we found a small
copy of the “Scottish Chiefs,” almost illegible with
grease and thumbing, in the kitchen of a remote tavern
in Pennsylvania. We sent it to her with a little
water added unintentionally to its romance—having
fallen overboard with it in our pocket while ferrying a
skiff across the Susquehannah. By the way, let us
here record an act of liberality in an English publisher,
which is apropos of this present from the
American bibliopoles. We were one day requested
by Mr. George Virtue, the enterprising publisher of
the American Scenery, to be the bearer of a message
to Miss Porter. He wished to publish her Scottish
Chiefs in a beautifully-embellished edition. The copyright,
by English law limiting duration, had long since
expired—but Mr. Virtue wished to give Miss Porter
£200—one thousand dollars—FOR HER FORMAL CONSENT.
The check was sent the next day, and the
edition, one of the most superb specimens of embellished
edition in the language, is since completed.

The old proverb says of a burn,

and we had a burn at our fingers' end as to the real
mover's getting his share of the credit of this compliment
to Miss Porter. There is little enough enthusiasm
for others' glory in the world—little enough to
prevent all fear of surfeit by mention. We have recorded,
therefore, against his express orders, the disinterested
zeal of William Wood in this matter.

The Overcoat Dilemma.—We have received a
note from a dismayed tailor in a thriving inland town
of Massachusetts, begging us, “for charity's sake,”
to inform him “what is the fashion for overcoats.”
He protests that the models sent him from the city
are inelegant and unbecoming—and he begs us to inquire
of some dandy, regnant or ci-devant, as to the
existence, among knowing men, of some outer habiliment
more becoming than the prevailing type. This
is our summing up of his wishes as expressed in a letter
of three pages.

Before venturing to tamper with so ticklish a subject,
let us fortify the ground by an extract from a
very grave and well-considered lecture on the “Changes
of the Fashions,” lately delivered before a lyceum in
Portsmouth:—

Although the inventors of new fashions and the
leaders in them are highly culpable for the injury
they do society—yet nine tenths of those whom we
see in fashionable attire are persons on whom no imputation
can be cast: neither is there one in a hundred
of their dressmakers or tailors, hatters or cordwainers,
who are deserving a breath of censure for doing
their work in a fashionable style. So powerful
an impetus has been moving the fashionable world,
that no individual can with safety hold up a resisting
hand. Nothing but a combined strength can overcome
it.

Common sense asks—why is it that a coat of a few
years' standing, with a broad back and long waist,
which the prudent man has kept for his holyday
wear, is not as really valuable as one in which the
seams are more nearly allied, or the buttons placed in
a different position?

Public opinion replies—the man is not in fashion.
The observers point him out among the multitude—
“There is a sample of old times”—“There goes a
miser who can't afford a new coat:” and a soft voice
whispers as he passes—“I wonder who would have
that old-fashioned man!” How frequently is the
public sympathy excited for an adroit rogue in fashionable
attire, who has received the just sentence of
the law—while the poorly-clad culprit by his side,
not more guilty, passes almost unpitied to the gallows.

Thus to be out of fashion a man is generally regarded
as wanting in spirit or purse; and it becomes
a matter of necessity for a modest man, who wishes
to elude the notice of the world, to follow along in
the wake of fashion. However much a person in
common life may be disgusted with its fluctuations,
he must bear the imputation of vanity, and in some
degree lose his influence in society, if he either has a
new dress made in an old style, or for convenience
appears in any new clothing which is made more

with a view to general utility than in subservience to
fashion.

With this warrant for giving a grave opinion on the
subject, we proceed to huddle together our kerseymere
ideas as follows:—

The sack-coat belongs to the climate of England,
and is wholly desorienté in this country. It was invented
as a kind of body-umbrella in which elegant
men could pass unwet from club to cab, in that climate
of eternal moisture, and was never meant to be
used but as a garment of transit. A dandy bien pointu
in his kid and varnish extremities, may certainly walk
the street safely in a sack-coat, as his quality would be
known by his gloves and boots only, were he otherwise
parenthesized in a barrel. But, unless redeemable
by the point of his boot or a finger of his glove, no
man is “dressed” in a sack. By universally making
sack-coats of coarse cloth in England, they class them
very definitely with hackney-coaches and umbrellas—
temporary conveniences of which the material is by
no means a point of honor.

In England, however, dandies dress to drive, and in
this country they dress to walk, and, of course, it is
more important here that the street coat should be becoming
to the shape than is thought necessary in England.
The paletot (for a description of which see
“Scott's” authentic “Mirror of Fashion”) is becoming
to men of fine carriage, and the “Taglioni,” when
cut into the back adroitly, is becoming to slender figures.
In the present anarchy of overcoat, however,
every man can choose for himself, and our pastoral
querist of the shears, we venture to assure him, is
perfectly safe in first suiting his customers, and then
swearing it to be the fashion. We would just hint,
in conclusion, that there is a mixture of cloak and
overcoat that we have seen on a “slap-up” man lately
from Paris, and this chanced to hit our weakness.
Any man who has genius in his shears will require no
broader hint of what the combination looks like!

Young Men's Procession.—The procession of
yesterday, was less remarkable for its numbers (estimated
at 3,000) than for the unusual interest taken in
it by the spectators—the enthusiasm of the ladies and
more quiet lookers-on, and the boundless heartiness
of the cheers by the people in the streets. The quality
of the general feeling, to our thinking, was more
nearly up to the warmth of the Lafayette Ovation,
than any procession that has taken place since. We
remarked, also, that in the escorts and cavalcade, there
was a large mixture of fashionable young men, which
is a new feature in the public processions of this city.
There were also more clergymen, who had errands in
town and about the streets, than usual—the white
cravat in rather uncommon proportion. Altogether,
we think the bed of this new party has a longer and
broader blanket—covering higher toward the fastidious
public head, and falling more kindly upon the serviceable
public feet—than any new-party blanket spread
within our recollection. Youth is beloved. Its hopes
are contagious. Its opinions are supposed free from
selfishness. Its ardor is credited with inspiration.
The party of youth, whenever it is combined for one
object, must triumph, it seems to us—for it carries
with it an outside atmosphere of electric sympathies
exclusively its own, while, within, it has the energy
of enthusiastic first manhood, and confidence unsubdued
by experience.

Opening of the Railroad to White Plains.—
The first rash of blood through the heart of Pygmalion's
statue, and the first rush of a rail-car, on Saturday,
through the bosom of the Bronx valley, would
seem to us a well-matched fable and fact, were not the
fact, both as a surprise and a change, more electric
than the fable. To realize it, one must get at the way
it is looked at by the rustic dwellers in the plains beyond.
They were called upon to believe that a city
which has, all their lives, been four hours distant,
“good driving,” would, after the forthcoming celebration,
be slid up to within one hour, “easy going.”
Their potatoes are to glide to market, and coal and
groceries to glide back, with magical facility—their
women-folks are to go to town, stop and get home between
dinner and supper—the morning newspapers
are to arrive from New York a little after breakfast—
the citizens are to come out by hundreds for an afternoon
walk—New York, in short, is four times as near
as it used to be, only the land is not knocked away between!
A gentleman told us, just before the cars
started on their return, from White Plains, that the
country-people, around, were not only incredulous as
to the completion of the road, up to the time of the
arrival of the cars, but that they still (6 o'clock
P. M.) looked upon the whole affair—celebration,
train, music and guns—as a humbug that could never
hold out—got up for some Millerite or political hocus-pocus,
and to end only in the ruin of their credulous
neighbors!

To start fair, however. We were invited to join
the worshipful society of aldermen, bank-directors,
stockholders, and judiciary, who, on Saturday afternoon,
were to invade, for the first time, by public railroad,
the virgin seclusion of the White Plains. The
access, through the valley of the Bronx, promised something
attractive in the way of landscape, and there
was a pull out of town in the soft air of the morning.
We were at the cars punctually at one, found a friend
inside, and a band of music a-top, and rolled away
from the City Hall with a double momentum—steam
to draw the cars, and the gentlemen in the cars who
are drawn on for the steam! We went on our musical
way through Centre street, embellishing it (by the
beauty attracted to the chamber-windows) as the moon
brightens the clouds in passing through, and with a
momentary chill from the deserted propriety of streets
up-town, were soon in the fields—fields by the way,
which are secured to Nature and shorn of their chief
value (nearness to town) by the railroad which makes
fields beyond quite as come-at-able.

We gave Harlem an outbreak of music in passing
through, stopped a moment at Williams' bridge, where
the road has hitherto terminated, and then proceeded
upon the new track through the Bronx valley.[1] The
scenery for the next twelve miles was as primitive and
fresh as if a three-days' journey lay between it and a
great city—the most unconscious looking old watermills
on the stream, the woods and hill-sides with a
look most innocent of snob and suburb, and a universal
gape of amazement on the faces of cottagers and
their cows. The seclusion and thorough country of
the whole twelve miles were enchanting, and we promised
ourselves a ramble to twenty successive nooks
that we saw (and twenty successive times of course
had occasion to remember that we had become a
utensil of daily use, labelled “never to be taken out
of the kitchen!” We are sorry to say the grass will
probably do pretty well without us, now, till we disturb
it to ask leave to pass under.)

The hill-sides suddenly fell back and we glided into
an open plain, where two or three hundred rustic-looking
people were assembled—six or seven of them

busy on a knoll near by, ramming a welcome up a gun.
The report rang as the engine stopped, and—White
Plains was cosmopolized! Out jumped Wall street
and City Hall. An old negro and his very old wife
commenced furiously opening oysters at a bench near
by. The cars stood in the middle of a corn-field.
The country people gathered around and looked hard
at the boots of the company. Two or three barrels
of crackers were rolled over the corn-hills to a new
stable building in the field. Everybody from the city
seemed exclusively occupied with smelling the ploughed
ground. Horses were tied to the fences all about.
The landscape (breasted with fine, fertile hills, and
having the White Plains for its lap), was slumbering
in a soft haze, with just sunshine enough to content
a man who would be contented without it, and altogether
the scene was simple and fresh near by, and
the distance more picturesque than the name of
“White Plains” had suggested.

On the floor of the new barn, half boarded and
nearly shingled, were spread four long tables, laden
with a very profuse and substantial repast, and, in
fifteen minutes after arrival, the president was in his
place, and the stockholders and their guests seated
and “in a fair way” to be enthusiastic. After a round
or two of champagne, the president's health was drank
and his report called for—but we will give the statistics
in another paragraph.

Pretty sure of hearing the report and reading the
speeches “in the way of business,” we accepted the
invitation of Mr. Lyon, and drove to his beautiful
residence, near by—a Gothic cottage of most absolute
taste, a sketch of which we had seen in the new edition
of “Downing's Rural Architecture.” It is
enough to make one doubt all the ills of life to see
such a place to pass it in. The table-land of the
White Plains lies behind the house, and a valley—
folded slope over slope, and sunk, knoll below knoll—
drops away from the lawn in front, showing miles of
wild-wood and fertile fields, with a shady glen leading
away to the left—the whole combination, for an inland
view, unsurpassed in variety and beauty. The cottage
is in the Tudor style, faultless within and without.
We wish we had time and space to say more of it and
its surroundings. We should add that Mr. Lyon has
been the zealous apostle of the road, and that a procession
was formed after the collation to make him a
complimentary visit. They went to his house, preceded
by the band, but were unfortunately missed by
Mr. Lyon, who was conducting his friends back by a
shorter path across the fields.

The White Plains moon rose to see us off, and, as
we got under way with music and cheers, she added
another full face to the gazing rustics, and, when last
seen, was apparently climbing up on a barrel to look
over the spectators' shoulders. As she was in town
when we arrived at half past nine, and as there were
no ladies invited by the directors, she must have got
a ride somehow behind, and whatever the conductor
may say (for we know her well!) the paying her passage
was probably “all moonshine.”

Labor and Brains.—We hear much about “protection
for labor,” and very little about protection for
brains—(except in the way of a hat). The working
men, those who use their hands skilfully and industriously,
have many advocates of their claims. The
politicians and the law-makers and the newspaper
press, take up their cause loudly and sincerely, but
those who “can not dig,” who are “ashamed to beg”
and have nothing but their brains—their intellect, to
depend upon—are whistled down the wind, “the prey
to fortune.”

One class of these luckless personages, is that of
editors and assistant editors, and their remuneration is
not only inadequate, generally speaking, to their support,
but far below their real merit. What would the
newspaper press of this city be but for these men?
Nothing! They are the indirect means of giving a
livelihood to thousands, and are never thanked for it.
For example. We know of a newspaper in this city
which owes its success to a small corps of editors,
whose whole pay is about two thousand dollars per
annum. If they should withdraw their aid, the paper
would stop beyond a question.

Let us see what their brains do for others. The
paper-makers receive from the establishment, $18,000
a year. The compositors receive about $10,000 more
—the reporters and clerks about $3,000 more. The
type-makers and ink-manufacturers about $2,000 more.
And this expenditure goes on from year to year. It
would be utterly impossible for this $32,000 to be received
and expended in this way, but for the talent and
tact of two or three persons connected with the paper.
A large number of persons is actually supported by
their brains, and yet there is not one among the number
thus supported, who does not think his own personal
labor and toil, far more important and praiseworthy
than that of the men who actually furnish them with
employment! This is the justice of the world! This
is the result of the ridiculous notions prevailing, that
the lifting of the sledge-hammer is more deserving of
reward than the skill which guides its blows. Mechanical
labor of all kinds is better paid than literary
labor, and it is time that just impressions prevailed on
this subject. Let us honor the working men, but
when they are aided by talent and literary industry,
they should honor them in return.

The editorial corps are making the fortunes of many
newspaper and magazine establishments in this country,
and yet many men of talent are starving under the
effort.

Portrait of Wordsworth by Henry Inman.—
Without wishing to compare our great painter to a
worm—except as having used up one system (of artistic
ideas) and being fairly on wing in a new one—we
think the worm in chrysalis and its emergent new
creature very fair types of the Inman that was, in
America, and the Inman that is, in England. Before
this time we think he would have gone abroad prematurely.
Genius requires to complete its first identity
—to ripen fully—to acquire the perfection of command
over, and familiarity with, its in-born peculiarities—before
trusting itself in a sphere which is both
removed from habit and aids to concentration, and
bewildering with the glitter and supremacy of other
models. No matter what the pursuit, there is a
natural mental chrysalis—a time after completed manhood,
when a change of scene, change of habits,
change of influences, external and internal, renew the
life of both mind and body, open chambers in the soul
hitherto unseen, and incredibly beautify and enrich
the whole existence. How many painters have we
seen confirmed into tame copyists—crushed by the
weight of the masters above them—by going abroad
with a new-born style just struggling into shape and
seeming of its own! In a minor way, how many
characters are smothered by being forced into a too
trying element of society before completing their
natural idiosyncrasy!

Power went abroad at the right stage of his existence
as a sculptor—Grenough, perhaps, too early.
Inman might, possibly, have gone earlier, with equal
advantage. He has been, for some time, gaining little
in his art. The easily-given and ill-weighed praise
of our country had long ago satiated him. He had
little stimulus beyond the profit of his pencil. But
the mind that lies fallow under such torpor, ripens and

collects richness under the surface, and ploughed
again, before it is mastered by weeds and tangle, it
shows wondrous fertility and vigor.

We have put down, now, what passed through our
mind while looking yesterday at a head of Wordsworth,
which is just received from Inman. It is a
masterly piece of work, though but a sketch. The
truth to nature convinces you that it is an infallible
portrait, without your ever having seen the original.
It is Wordsworth. It is the shell of the meat in his
books. His feeblenesses and his philosophic simplicities
are there. You see how he came to write
what we have read. He has done his own portrait—
a faithful copy, in poetry, of the same as this on canvass.
Majestic and weak, wise and silly, far-sighted
and credulous old man! He looks like his poetry,
and to a man who could read characters as some do,
there would be nothing new in his books after seeing
Inman's picture, nor any surprise in Inman's picture,
after seeing his books.

What will Broadway be like, with omnibuses excluded,
and two lines of railcars plying its entire length?
Where will the tracks be?—both in the middle,
or one on each side? If the latter, how will carriages
stand by the sidewalk with safety? If the
former, will there be room left for two carriages to
pass each other on either side? Will not the frequent
taking-up and setting-down of passengers, and
the consequent hinderance of cars behind, make the
passage up and down tediously slow? These are
questions that, with sundry others on the same subject,
will furnish table-talk to the city for the ensuing
week—the announcement of the corporation's intention
to have a railroad there being yesterday made
public. Let us mumble about it a little. The slowness
of the motion would justify a very narrow track.
By placing the seats lengthwise, and back to back,
the cars themselves might be made very narrow, and
with a roof overhead, and no sides (or sides removable
in fair weather), passengers might easily jump on
and off, and be sufficiently protected. They will
probably stop for passengers at the crossings only.
The fare will be taken by a boy inside, as soon as the
passenger is seated, to prevent delay. We shall have
the comfort (sitting back to back) of not becoming so
compulsively acquainted with anybody's face, breath,
knees, and umbrella. Our chances of being the subject
of a coroner's inquest will be diminished 100 per
cent.—the present rate and manner of omnibus-driving
having (we presume) nearly doubled the cost of life-insurance
to those who live in the upper part of the city.
There will probably be fast lines established in the
streets nearly parallel to Broadway, and the great tide
of human life, now concentrated in one thoroughfare,
will be divided into three. McNair & Scarpa, and
other sellers of “acoustic oil,” will languish under
the suspended deafening of Broadway, and that charming
lounge will be once more susceptible of enjoyment
by walk and talk. The danger of prying off a
wheel upon the railtrack, or coming in contact with
the cars, will deter the timid from taking their carriages
into Broadway, and we shall meet all the pretty
shopperesses on foot (the greatest Amelia-ration)!
The “Kipp & Brown” 'buses will be obliged to come
down Church street, and have their terminus at the
corner of Fulton street and Broadway—or (query?)
will the lower part of Broadway, between the Park
and Bowling-green, be necessarily left open to the
converging lines from east and west?

“Taglioni is coming to this country.” So say the
papers; and if it prove true, we shall see the differ
ence between the apparent efforts of a football and a
balloon—between common and rarefied air (in manner
as well as in motion)—between a smile which, beautifully
dissected from the muscles that might else move
it, is left stereotyped upon the face, and a smile timid,
natural, and impulsive—in short, the difference between
the “divine Fanny” and the womanly Taglioni.
(We prefer a woman to “a divinity” any day!) Like
all women permitted to be desirably famous, Taglioni
paid the inexorable penalty of being undesirably
mated. She has amassed a fortune or two from the
“gold dust” at the toe of her white slipper—dissipated,
they say, without pity, by her husband, and she
has at last cut him (in toto), and goes entirely upon
her own legs. We hope they and the Cunard paddles
will, indeed, bring her to this country. In seeing
any other stage-exhibition, one is conscious of
the seat he sits on and the trouble of holding his hat.
To see Taglioni is to be in a trance, during which
one might almost be content with the seat of St.
Lawrence—on a gridiron. We shall remember (talking
of seats), “while memory holds her seat” (and
has any pleasure in sitting on it), the first performance
of La Sylphide at Paris—by far the most entrancing
and intoxicating spectacle we ever witnessed. We
venture to refer the reader to our description of it in
“Pencillings.” We wonder whether Taglioni will
come! Echo—“come!”

Major Noah and his Apology for the Crucifixion.—Our
friend, the lecturer on the Restoration;
has written us a letter, phrased with great forbearance
and kindness, but finding grievous fault with our yesterday's
notice of his discourse at the Tabernacle.
His letter is too long to publish, as he requests, but
we will give its substance, and leave out only his expressions
of good will. He says he “understood
from a friend that we were fast asleep before the lecture
commenced, and slept throughout the whole of
it.” With his letter, the major sent us a copy of
the Mirror with the objectionable passages of our report
underlined. Here they are:—

“Major Noah arose and commenced with an apology
for the Jews as to the crucifixion of our Savior.”

“With the exception of his very adroit disparagement
of the Savior,” &c., &c.

Some extracts from the lecture, copied from his
MS. into the Express, were also sent us by the major,
and we extract the page which, in the delivery,
impressed us as represented in our objectionable sentences.

“The Jews were amazed, perplexed, and bewildered
at all they saw and heard. They knew Jesus
from his birth: he was their neighbor; they knew his
father Joseph, and Mary his mother, his brothers,
James and Judas; he was in constant intercourse
with his brethren in their domestic relations, and surrounded
by their household gods; they remembered
him a boy, disputing, as was the custom, most learnedly
with the doctors in the temple; as a man pursuing
to the age of thirty, the modest and laborious
calling of his profession; and yet he proclaimed himself
the Son of God, and performed most wonderful
miracles, was surrounded by a number of disciples,
poor, but extraordinary gifted men, who sustained his
doctrines, and had an abiding faith in his mission;
he gathered strength and followers as he progressed;
he denounced the whole nation, and prophecied
its destruction, with their altars and temples;
he preached against whole cities, and proscribed
their leaders with a force which, even at this day,
would shake our social systems. The Jews became
alarmed at his increasing power and influence, and
the Sanhedrim resolved to become his accuser, and

bring him to trial under the law as laid down in the
13th of Deuteronomy.

“In reflecting deeply on all the circumstances of
this, the most remarkable trial and judgment in history,
I am convinced, from the whole tenor of the
proceedings, that the arrest, trial, and condemnation
of Jesus of Nazareth, was conceived and executed under
a decided panic.”

Now it seemed to us, and it seems to us (for we are
wide awake now), that to represent the Son of God,
while on a mission from Jehovah for the salvation of
a world, made the victim of a “decided panic”—the
“earth quaking, the rocks rent, the sun darkened, the
graves opened, and the veil of the temple rent in
twain,” as the consequence of a “decided panic,” under
the influence of which the Jews had crucified one
whom they “knew as a boy,” and as an industrious
laborer—this does seem to us a “disparagement of the
Savior,” and of the dignity of his mission, and it
does seem to us as intended to “apologise for the
Jews.” What other aim or relevancy has this very
new and original reason for the crucifixion, but to
apologise for the act?

As this is the “first time for centuries” that the
Jews have had an apologist, our readers will be interested
to know more particularly how the crucifixion
is defended. We therefore yield to our own wish,
and give the following more extended extract from
Major Noah's lecture, underlining those passages
which we offendingly described as “adroit disparagement,”
and “apology for the Jews:”—

“The title of God was a title of power and dominion,
and frequently was conferred by the Almighty
himself on earthly rulers. `See, I have made thee a
God to Pharaoh,' as God supreme said to Moses.
Son of God was a title frequently conferred on those of
distinguished piety and learning, and on those possessing
the emanations of the divinity, and this title the
apostles themselves carry out in their writings.

“`The Son,' `My Son,' not the Father; the humanity,
not the divinity, the image of the invisible
God, not the invisible God himself; and as Paul said,
there is one God and one mediator between God and
man. Could the Almighty delegate a mediatorial
character to any one on earth? Who can doubt it?
God said to Moses, `Behold, I send an angel before
thee to keep thee in the way; provoke him not, for he
will not pardon your transgressions, for my name is
in him; my spirit is in him.' It was not therefore altogether
on the charge of Jesus having called himself
Son of God, that the Sanhedrim accused and condemned
him; political considerations mingled themselves,
and in a measure controlled the decision of the
council, and this is demonstrable from the declaration
of Caiaphas himself, as stated in the Gospel: `Better
that one man should die than that the nation should
be destroyed.'

“It was the sedition, and not altogether the blasphemy,
the terror and apprehension of political overthrow,
which led to conviction, and this political and national
characteristic was maintained throughout; it was that
consideration which induced the Jews to urge upon Pilate
a confirmation of the sentence. It was the charge
of assuming the prerogatives of Cesar, not the name
of the Divinity, which overcame the well-founded objections
of the Roman governor, and crucifixion itself
was a Roman and not a Jewish punishment. The
opprobrious insults heaped upon the master came
from the Roman soldiers, and that mixed rabble,
which, even in our day, desecrate all that is held sacred.

“I place these most absorbing events before you,
my countrymen, not to contrast things sacred with
those which are profane, but that you should understand
the exact position of the Jews at that time;
their painful situation, their prostrate condition, their
timidity, their hesitation, without even a ray of hope;
a people so venerable for their antiquity so beloved
and protected for their fidelity, on the very threshold
of political destruction.

“It is not my duty to condemn the course of our ancestors,
nor yet to justify the measures they adopted
in that dire extremity; but if there are mitigating circumstances,
I am bound by the highest considerations
which a love of truth and justice dictates, to spread
them before you, at the same time to protest against
any entailing upon us, the responsibility of acts committed
eighteen hundred years ago by our fathers, and
thus transmit to untold generations the anger and hatred
of a faith, erroneously taught to believe us the
aggressors.

“The Jews, my friends, were but the instruments
of a higher power, and in rejecting Jesus of Nazareth, we
have a great and overwhelming evidence of the infinite
wisdom of the Almighty. Had they acknowledged him
as their Messiah at that fearful crisis, the whole nation
would have gradually sunk under the Roman
yoke, and we should have had at this day paganism
and idolatry, with all their train of terrible evils, and
darkness and desolation would have spread over the
earth. But the death of Jesus was the birth of
Christianity; the Gentile church sprang from the ruins
which surrounded its primitive existence; its
march was onward, beset with darkness and difficulties,
with oppression and persecution, until the Sun
of Reformation rose upon it, dissipating the clouds
of darkness which had obscured its beauties, and it
shone forth with a liberal and tolerant brightness,
such as the Great Master had originally designed it.
Had not that event occurred, how would you have been
saved from your sins? The Jews in this did nothing
but what God himself ordained, for you will find it
written in the Acts of the Apostles, `And now, brethren,
I know that through ignorance ye did it, as did
also your rulers!”'

We leave it to any Gentile (saved by the “decided
political panic” of the Jews under Caiaphas), whether
it was not reasonable enough—at least for a man
“fast asleep”—to fancy he could detect in the above
argument, an “apology for the Jews,” and a “disparagement
of the Savior.” We were quite too fast
asleep to detect anything else!

No, dear major, we were not “asleep” when this
was delivered! Our head was down—for you had
two unshaded lamps, looking like blazing earrings, on
either side of your benevolent head, and our eyes are
as weak as your heartstrings—but we went to the
Tabernacle, not only with the interest of friendship
for yourself, but with high excitement in the unparalleled
background of your theme! We could not tell
you, without a seeming rhapsody—we could not trust
ourself to record, out of blank verse—the scope your
subject seemed to possess, the tragic sublimity of
your position, the climax of events you wished to be
instrumental in bringing to a close, and the interest
that might be awakened in the Christian world by an
eloquent, life-devoted, fervent apostle of the restoration!
There is no theme for eloquence with a thousandth
part of the pathos, depth, splendor, and present
convergency of this! Heavens! what a theme!
The key of the whole Christian era! The winding
up of a cycle of two thousand years numbered from
the crucifixion! The close of the one expiation
which is the theme of scripture-prophecy, and with
the closing of which comes in the millenial glory,
and the renewal of Paradise on earth! This theme,
on the lips of genius, one would think—genius accursed
eighteen hundred years ago, and to be one of
the forgiven at the second coming of the Messiah—
might burn like the fire upon the lips of Paul, and
turn all eyes toward waiting Jerusalem. This was
the view of the subject with which we went to the

Tabernacle, dear major!—almost envying you your
qualification by birth for the using of it. We meant
no disrespect in our notice. We were only a little
disappointed and annoyed that you did not kindle into
a crusader, or try on Peter the Hermit, till we gazed
at you, spite of your earrings!

And now—(“to step out of the carriage and see
ourselves go by”)—you are wrong if you are right,
major, and right if you are wrong! If your Jewish
creed be right, you are wrong to deny its manifest deduction.
If your Jewish creed be wrong, you are
right in wishing to explain it away. But you can
not have your cake and eat it, too. You can not reconcile
the church with the synagogue, nor can you
lecture palatably and frankly from the synagogue to
Christians. The time, at least, is not come. “At
the end of the world” (says a commentator on the Bible),
“Christ will unite the church with the synagogue,
the Jew with the Christian, the Christian with
the Gentile; then all things will be restored to a perfect
union, and there will be but one shepherd and
one flock.”

Prices of Women—cold and warm.—A lovely
female slave, warm from the mountains of Circassia,
and warranted not to be second-hand, may be bought
at Constantinople for three hundred dollars. A lovely
female statue, cold from the marble mountains of Carrara
(and spotless as the snow, without a doubt), was
lately sold by Mr. Power to the Hon. William Preston,
for three thousand dollars. Something would
seem to be wrong here—the “clay-tariff”—or the Ottoman
“protection”—or something! Various questions
arise. Is an original woman a favorite article?
Is the imitation by Power of the fabrics of Nature & Co.
an improvement upon the model? Is the presence of
the faculty of speech in the cheaper article any special
indication of a preference that can be relied upon in
the buyer? Perhaps some extensive dealer in both
articles will oblige us with a solution of this mercantile
problem.

We had a bonne bouche of opera last night at Niblo's
which made us long for the whole feast—a hint of a
ballet which provoked great desire for more—and just
such a sprinkling of judicious white gloves as satisfied
the cognoscents that there was something in the bill
that had a pull upon the town's fashion. Then, as
if it were to be nothing but an appetizer, Madame
Pico appeared in a private box, and the audience saw,
that, whatever the warble might be, the throat it would
come from was of the most capable fulness of beauty.
We have had our suspicions, from the quietness with
which she “bides her time,” that Madame Pico is a
star conscious of the swing for a large orbit, and very
sure of “putting a circle round the” town, whenever
she rises. It is a considerable spoke in the wheel of
this same orbit that she is a very superb woman. She
has the adorable low Greek forehead, like Mrs. Norton's
(the poetess), and a certain maintien of bust and
neck which shows the kind of passionate uppishness
the old gods used to be fond of. (Vide the gods'
old pictures.) We were not surprised last night to
overhear a foreigner telling one of his countrymen
that Madame Pico would make more impression in
New York than any prima donna since Malibran.
What say, Coroyui! Light up your dress-circle with
a little more gas, and give us ballet and opera with
Borghese and Pico on alternate nights!

In every civilizied country but this, the government
backs up the opera, as an important public refinement.
The royal treasurer is always half a stage manager.
With us, the people are the sovereign, but Chancellor
Bibb, not having, as far as we know, offered terms to
Madame Pico, we, as one of the royal pores, do our
part of the insensible perspiration, and express the
warm desire of the public, that Madame Pico should
appear. It is manifest dulness of enterprise, to have
no opera now. There are no parties, the autumn
weather is moderate, the strangers hang about town,
till after the Indian summer, and there is no room for
doubt that the thing would be supported.

There was a demonstration of enthusiasm, last night,
which appeared to be quite a l'improvista, at the performance
of the Polka, by “Master Wood and la
Petite Carline.” These two little miniatures—of
the size of children six years old—danced, to our
thinking, quite wonderfully. We are likely to have
no grown-up dancers, this year at least, who, reduced
to the same size by an inverted opera-glass, would do
the Polka any better. The necessary air of galliardise,
the precision, combined with abandon, the look
and gesture, were all capitally well done. They are
charming little people, and a good deal of a “good
card” for any theatre. Query, for Corbyn—Would
not a ballet, by these Lilliputians, got up for children,
to commence at four o'clock in the afternoon, and last
about one hour, be a paying enterprise?

One hint more: Is there not the making of a fine
actress and singer in Miss Rosina Shaw? She has
beauty, remarkable voice, grace and confidence—four
“pretty wells.” Keep an eye on her, Mr. Manager!

The Day after the Ballot.—The contention
for the favors of Mrs. Vox Populi is over. The difficult
dame has made her election. The future president
is in the ballot-box, and that womb of authority
is now silently waited upon by the paternal majority.
God bless whatever is to be brought forth!

Thank Heaven the town is stiller! There is more
noise upon the blacksmith's anvil and the shoemaker's
lap-stone—more clatter upon the tinman's vice and
the coppersmith's rivet—but the town's heart beats
less audibly, to-day, and the town's pulse less feverishly
and wildly. The political bully is looking around
unwillingly but peacefully for work. The club
wrangler's vocation is gone. The working-man will
give less of his evening to the bar-room and caucus.
Wives rejoice. Children are glad.

Considering only individuals, the immediate tumult
and recoil of politics seem only evil and violence.
The pore and the pediculus will complain of blood-letting
and blister. We believe the country at large
is benefited by the bringing of these bad humors to
the surface, however. We are sure at least that we
see all there is, in our body popular, that is dangerous.
There is evil disposition, antagonism, discontent, craving
for excitement, love of combination, dormant
energy, and ambition—qualities everywhere distributed,
and hungering, every one, for a field of action.
Where better would they break out, than in politics?
How, easier, should we know our neighbor's length
of conscience-string and proneness to trick and unfairness,
than by watching him when his passions are
roused and his cautiousness forgotten? What man
in a political committee knows too little of his fellows
for future living with them?

But, thank God, the tumult once over, the city returns
to peace, industry, and prosperity. Injury and
calumny stand no more behind the editor's chair—
literature and commerce, instead, look promptingly
over his shoulder. The merchant is relieved from
anxiety, and knows how to shape his venture. The
mechanic “hangs” politics for a plague and a bother.
The republic has set up its master, and is content to
be governed while it toils and prospers.

There is one feature of the late contest, however,
for which we can find no philosophical offset. We

refer to the unparalleled and insane extent to which
betting has been carried. Of any good this practice
does we do not see even a shadowing. Of its intolerable
evils we hear mournful accounts at every turn.
It seems to have infected, with a gambling mania,
those who never before hazarded money on a question
of chance or uncertainty. We have heard several
really most lamentable instances of fatuity and disaster
in this new demon-shape of party-spirit. Families
are ruined, creditors robbed, children deprived of education
and bread—by men who would as soon cut off
their hands as throw a stake at a gaming-table! Is
there no power in the law to put a stop to this new
evil of politics? We ask this question to provoke, if
possible, an answer.

And now—as politics walk out from the public mind,
and there is room for something else to walk in—let
us mention a great evil in this country of ours, and
tell some news that has an example by which to
mend it.

We toil too much!

Ladies' Dictionary—the word Alpaca. The Alpaca
is a South American animal, much used as a
beast of burden by the Indians, with long hair, principally
black, but slightly grizzled. It is an excessively
irritable animal, and indomitable till soothed. The
importance of this animal has already been considered
by the English, in their hat, woollen, and stuff trade,
and an essay on the subject has been published by
Dr. Hamilton of London. The wool is so remarkable,
being a jet black, glossy, silk-like hair, that it is fitted
for the production of texile fabrics differing from all
others, occupying a medium position between the
wool and the silk. It is now mingled with other materials
in such a singular manner, that while a particular
dye will affect those, it will leave the Alpaca
wool with its original black color, thus giving rise to
great diversity.

Who wants a Dress-Opera?—There is a large
class in every metropolis who are fond of gayety,
dress, and “a place to go to,” but who do not like
private parties for three or more reasons: 1st, the
lateness of the hours; 2d, the trouble of making the
agreeable; 3d, the card-and-visit nuisance, the management
and ceremony, necessary to keep up fashionable
vogue. The part of the evening between eight
and eleven is, to this class, the time of the twenty-four
hours in which they wish to be abroad, to be admired,
to be amused. The less trouble with it the better;
and they would rather give a dollar and think no more
about it, than leave a card at an expense of memory,
time, equipage, and politic calculation. They want a
place where everybody dresses; where it is light;
where they will see beauty, and be seen themselves
by appreciative eyes; where there is music to hear
and a show to look at if they like to be silent, or
friends in a box near by if they wish to converse—a
place where they can hear the gossip, have singers
to criticise, and “see the world”—in short, an Opera.

To the great majority of ball-goers—particularly to
the men—the time from eight to eleven hangs heavily.
They would gladly dress early and go first to the
opera, if it were habitually a dress-resort.

There are many well-off people to whom a dress-opera
is the only tolerable amusement—lame people;
ladies who only look well sitting, or look best in shawls
and opera-dress; foreigners who do not speak the
language; timid persons, who wish to see the gay
world without encountering it; and the many families
who have a competency to live and can afford
amusement, but want a handle to the door of society.

The first object of strangers in town (of whom there
are always several thousands), is to go where they can
see the well-dressed and fashionable people. Most
strangers, in a large city, would rather see the exclusives
in an opera-box, than the Croton reservoirs, or
the monsters in a menagerie.

People in ceremonious mourning find a great relief
in seeing the gay world from an opera-box.

Last (not least, unless you please!) some people
would frequent the opera, the season through, for the
music. It “soothes” our “savage breast”—for one,
and we think the “hang” of opera-music in the town
hum and whistle is a desirable and refining variety.

Now, with all this desirableness and frequentability,
is it not wonderful that no larger capitalist than Signor
Palmo (pocket edition), should have ventured to embark
in a scheme for an opera-house! It is not a
scheme to prosper—done by halves. It must be a splendid
affair, or a failure. There must be comfort in the
seats, breadth in the alleys, boundless prodigality in
the lights, luxury in the saloons and entrances, and
Alhambrian excellence in the refreshments. The
manager should be a mixture of Cæsar, Talleyrand,
and Bluebeard—awful, politic, punctual in pay, and
relentless to the caprices of primadonnas. Two slashing
critics should be employed to annihilate each other
daily, in opposing preferences for the performers.
The exaction of full dress for all comers should be
rigidly enforced. The names of the belles at every
last night's opera should be disembowelled and paragraphed
every morning. Prestige, celebrity, show,
humbug, and ceremony, should be added to the most
indefatigable real merit in the management, and then
the shareholders would make money.

Then, too, we should have a DRESS-RESORT—what
no theatre now is or ever has been in New York, but
what, of all refinements and resources, is the most
delightful and indispensable. We could write a
column about the blessing of beauty seen in public,
the chastening and refining influences of music, the
restraining proprieties of dress and observance, etc.,
etc., etc.—but we confine ourself to tangibilities. One
more fact—the existence of such an opera-house, so
conducted, would link New York in the operatic chain
of star-travel; and Grisi, Lablache, and the rest, would
as certainly come here from London and Paris, as go
to Vienna and St. Petersburgh, Berlin and Naples.
Our readers in Wall street will please consider this
as a “money article.”

PROMISCUOUS REPLIES TO LETTERS.

ETIQUETTE OF WEDDING-CARDS.

REPLY.

Unmarried People four times as liable to insanity
as Married People.—The “Concord Freeman,” in
a statistical article made up from hospital reports,
shows, that if a man is, perhaps, oftener out of pocket
when married, he is not so often out of his head. The
editor says: Few people are aware how much more
insanity prevails among bachelors and unmarried ladies
than among the married of both sexes. We
learn from the examination of very many reports, that
of every five of all lunatics sent to American hospitals,
three are unmarried, and only two are married, and
that almost all of them are over twenty-one years old.
On the other hand, it is pretty certain that in all the
community over twenty-one years of age, there are
more than three times as many in as out of wedlock.
If this be the case, then the unmarried are more than
four times as liable to become insane as married
people.

The Herald seems to think we have bought the
“Republic.” We are sorry that a republic is a marketable
commodity, but at any rate we have bought
nothing of that name or description. Our ambition,
somehow, does not seem to stumble upon things republican.
In this world we desire a farm, on which
we can be “monarch of all we survey,” and in the
next, we pray for a citizenship in the kingdom of
heaven.

“Up-Town” and “Down-Town.”—We see that
these names of the different halves of the city are becoming
the common language of advertisements, etc.
A person advertises in one of the papers a “Down-town
singing school,” and another a “Down-town
dancing academy.” We think our friend Billings
would better stick to “Up-town Hotel” as the better
designation of the new brick khan.

The new Sequel to Theatrical Intelligence.
—Since the bishops and deacons have taken to indicting
each other for fallings-away of which the public
like to read the Scan. Mag., we observe that the
particular column of newspapers which is devoted to
spicy news, theatricals, police incidents, etc., has
silently become the locality for brief paragraphs announcing
where distinguished preachers are to hold
forth. In the salad column of one of the papers there
is one announcement of a play followed by six announcements
of sermons! And in another paper
there are very nearly two columns of sketches of sermons,
from a specific “reporter!!”

We saw yesterday, for the first time in this country,
an equipage of full ceremonial splendor, faultless
in taste, and evidently not at all modified by any
dread of democratic prejudices. We admired the
“bravery” of the turn-out, and the courage of using
it. The ice broken, there will soon be conjured others
from the vaults in Wall street—but meantime, let
us look a little at the necessity for a promenade drive
in New York, and its probable locality.

In or near every capital of Europe there is a spot
which serves, for those who have carriages, the same
purpose which Broadway serves for promenaders on
foot. In London it is the Mayfair side of Hyde park;
in Paris it is the Champs Elysèes and Bois de Boulogne;
in Florence it is the Cascine; in Rome the
Pincian hill; in Naples the Strada Nuova. In all of
these capitals the title and wealthy avoid driving in
the crowded streets except upon errands of necessity,
and in London it is the custom to keep a plainer vehicle
with cob-horses expressly for use at night and
errands in the city. Ladies who have occasion to go
out in the morning, do so on foot and in the plainest
dress, followed invariably by a servant. They return
to lunch at one or two, and immediately after dress for
the show part of the day's out-door occupation. The
carriage comes round in full livery at the specified
hour, and, the shopping and business-errands having
been despatched in the forenoon, the equipage starts
upon the afternoon destination of ceremony or pleasure.

An hour before sunset or the dinner hour, the
principal drive is over, and the scattered equipages
meet, as upon a fashionable exchange, for a promenade
of display. This conventional assembling is relied
upon for recognition of acquaintance, for arrangements
as to the evening, for keeping advised of the
fashions, for seeing strangers, and for contests of style
in equipage and personal attire. The dandies must
be seen there, in cab or mounted; the women of “position”
must refresh there the memories of forgetful
tributaries; the new candidate for fashion must there
display that taste in “belongings” which can only be
guessed at in a ball-room; there are seen all whose
means make them eligible to expensive circles of society,
and who (by something that will and does tell,
in the equipage, or the mode of dressing for, and appearing
in, it) there make claim to fitness for, at least,
a ceremonious conversance with the haute volée.

Of course, there is a postern of society in all cities,
through which are admitted certain classes, who keep
no equipages—those who are to amuse, instruct, or
embellish the gay world—poets, parsons, and pretty
women; but the promenade on wheels is, to all others,
the inexorable vestibule, and, as far at least as this
gate, the ordinary seekers of the heaven beyond must
come with horses. Cowper only mentioned the barest
essentials when he said,

In New York, however undesirable to the mass, this
formidable gulf is about to be sunk, between wealth
and competency. At present there is no distinction
among the upper ten thousand of the city. There is
no place where equipages are exclusively looked for.
There are five or ten thousand young men who dress
as well as the millionare's son; five or ten thousand
ladies for whom milliners and mantua-makers do their
best; ten or twenty thousand who can show as well
on foot, and walk as well without heart-burnings, in
Broadway—one as another. New York is (at this
critical moment, before the shoot of the centripetal
particles to a new nucleus) the largest republic of
“first quality” people that the world ever saw.

There is one spot which has been talked of as a
promenade drive, and we believe some endeavor has
been made to purchase it for the purpose—the beautiful
wood on the right of the Third avenue. That
charming spot would stand to New York very much
as the Cascine to Florence. We doubt, however,
whether, yet awhile at least, the object would warrant
the purchase.

The first probable promenade drive, we should say,
would be the Fifth avenue, from Washington
square to the Croton reservoir. The splendor of the
houses on this broad highway is far beyond that of
any other portion of the city; it is no thoroughfare
for omnibuses; it leads from the wealthiest neighborhood
to a prominent public work; it is on the return
route from the loveliest drives on the island; and,
should the summit of the rising ground on which the
reservoir stands be fixed upon, as proposed, for the
Washington monument, and planted and decorated,
that limit would be a convenient turning-place, and a
charming and airy spot for a sunset soirée en voiture.

A Story for your Son, Sir.—The present king
of France, one very cold evening, was riding from
Boston to Salem on the outside of the stage. He
was entirely without money to pay for a lodging that
night, and he began to make friends with the driver to
get part of his bed. After a while the driver's compassion
was aroused. “You are not a very clean
looking chap,” said he to the poor Frenchman, “but
my bed is in the harness-room, where there's a stove,
and if you'll keep your trowsers on, and sleep outside,
I don't mind!”

The Republic of Broadway.—Eyes were contrived
at some trouble; the great sun shows only the

outside of things; the present and visible (Carlyle-ically
speaking) is the world God adapted our senses
to; and though some people like to live the life of a
sundial under ground, we prefer to throw to-day's
shadow from whatever we do—writing about what we
see, and thinking most about what jostles our elbow.
This explained.

We have a loose slip-slop or two for the young men
about town—not as to their invisible minds and morals,
but as to their visible walking and dressing. Having
“bought our doublet in Italy, our round hose in
France, our bonnet in Germany, and our behavior
everywhere,” we may perhaps excusably scale a pedestal
to give our opinion; though the credit we take
to ourselves may be granted in the spirit of Falstaff's
to Doll Tearsheet, “We catch of you, Doll, we catch
of you!”

There is nothing so republican as a dressy population.
We are no “leveller,” but we like to see things
level themselves; and the declaration of independence
is impotent in comparison with the tailor's goose. A
young man about town slips his miniature into five
thousand eyes per diem. Fifty of the five thousand
who see him know whether his father is a mechanic
or a rich man; and it depends wholly upon his dress
and mien whether the remaining four thousand nine
hundred and fifty take him to be a rich man's son or
a mechanic's son. It is reasonable, of course, to let
the fifty who know think what pleases them, and to
dress for the very large majority who don't know.
This is apparently the tacit philosophy of the young
men of New York. There is no telling, by any difference
in dress, whether the youth going by has,
probably, a sister who is an heiress, or a sister who is
a sempstress. There is no telling the merchant from
his bookkeeper—no guessing which is the diner on
eighteen pence, and which the gourmet of Delmonico's—no
judging whether the man in the omnibus,
whom you vaguely remember to have seen somewhere,
was the tailor who tried on your coat, or your
vis-à-vis last night at a ball.

As we said above, this is a true republic. A young
man whose appearance is four-story-housy, can very
well afford to let a few people know that he sleeps
over the shop. If he is more elegant than a rich
man's son, he gets as nearly the full value of the difference
as ordinary vanity would require. Every
young man finds means to dress to his liking, and of
course every young man starts fair, each morning,
with all of his age, for the day's competition in bright
eyes.

We shall be understood, now, in our republican effort
to add still another levelling to this of the tailor's
goose—to bring the attractions of plain men up to
those of the “aristoeracy of nature.” The hints we
have to throw out will be slighted by the good-looking;
taken advantage of by the plain—thus levelling,
in another respect, upward.

The rarest thing seen in Broadway is a young man
who walks well. A stoop in the back is almost national;
and an upright, graceful, gentlemanlike gait
is as rare as it is singularly striking. If you can afford
the time to walk slowly, high-heeled boots are a
great improvement. With time enough, you drop
the foot insensibly from a high heel, like an actor
walking down the slope of the stage. Beside, it
makes the instep look high, which implies that your
father did not carry a hod.

Avoid a broadcloth shirt, in the shape of a shapeless
garment with sleeves (one of the new fashions).
It looks colic-y, with the wind bellying it out in all
directions as you walk along.

Leave long cloaks to the clergy. The broad velvet
collar, turning over, diminishes your apparent breadth
of shoulders, and it should be worn with careful dramatic
propriety, not to be very awkward and inelegant.

If you are about to have an overcoat made, get a
fat friend to go and be measured for it. At any rate,
let not your diaphragm be so imprisoned, that the
first heroic sentiment will tear off a button. One of
Jenning's cutters is the apostle of a reform in this
matter—measuring you (if you request it) by a magnifying-glass,
from the waist upward.

These are not King Canute's days, when “none
under the rank of gentlemen dare presume to have a
greyhound to follow him.” The outward symbols,
once peculiar to elegance, are pretty well levelled up
to, as we said before—but, by careful observation,
you will now and then see a something that nice men
do, or do not do, which has not yet got through the
hair of the promiscuous. As an example, and in the
hope that it will not be generally understood, we will
mention, that very particular men, for the last year,
have walked the street invariably with a kind of
grieved look—very expressive and distinguishing.

We will resume this republican theme.

The Designation of the Lady Presidentess.—
If it had not been for a certain ante-expiatory “white
horse,” we should have prayed for the miraculous return
to this world of “John Tetzel, Vender of Indulgences.”
The editor of the Morning News did justice
to his Irish blood a day or two ago, by giving
back, to the loser's wife, a saddle-horse he had won
in a bet; but how, in the name of all the gallant proprieties,
can he justify himself to the ladies of the democracy
for making no distinction between their queen
and the (of course) less glorious queen of any country
on earth? The promiscuousness of two “Mrs.
P's!”

“White-House.—Among other consequences of
the election of Mr. Polk, it is said, will be to locate
in the White-house at Washington the handsomest
and perhaps the most accomplished lady that ever
presided in its stately halls. Mrs. P. has, for some
years, been remarkable not only for personal beauty,
but for that greater charm, graceful manners, and a
highly-cultivated mind.”

If, in this democratic country, one may venture to
say a word for the other “Mrs. P.,” we think that
Louis Philippe's having slept with a stagedriver in
this country (vide a late anecdote) might have procured
for his wife the easy privilege of at least one
distinguishing initial. It surely would not seriously
invade the simplicity of our court circular to add a
“J.” to the single-letter title of the lady presidentess
of fifteen millions and Texas! Be generous, gentlemen
people! Let us have some distinction in the
Queen “P.'s” of the two countries. The editor of
the Morning News will be some day minister to
France. Fancy his being called on to present “Mrs.
American P.” to “Mrs. French P.”

Overhaul of Sailing Orders.—The sails draw
—the freight sits trim in the hold—the ship minds
her helm, and the wind strengthens on the quarter
with a freshness that strains rope and spar. It is perhaps
the best moment that will occur, in the long
voyage before us, to overhaul our signals and sailing-papers,
and understand how we are to communicate
with the fleet, and go straightest and most prosperously
to our destined haven.

(Whoa, Pegasus! We have been as poetical as
will have been expected of us at one day's notice.
Drop to the ground and let us go off on a plain trot!)

We have always looked upon the gentlemen of the
daily press as among the enviably unlabelled potentates
of this country of King Everybody-nobody—

enviably as having enormous power and little responsibility
as to the using of it. The power will doubtless
remain as large and the responsibility as small. “A
free press” is the lesser of two evils. In the perpetuation
of this state of things, however, lies our future
vocation, and—while we have it yet in our power to
“make a clean breast,” and avow what we have obected
to in the exercise, by others, of the spells by
which we are to conjure—let us name at least the one
blot which most smirches the forward face of the profession.

It were of little use for one editor to declare that he
would make war freely upon opinions—never upon
persons. And the disadvantage is not merely that of
throwing away the dagger in battle, because the sword
is more gentlemanly—not merely a lessening of one's
formidabieness to an opponent. The evil is in the
greater curiosity to watch the stabber, felt by the lookers-on.
The temptation to be personally abusive lies
in the diseased appetite of the crowd that will follow
the abuser—leaving the scrupulous man alone with
his decency. Living as editors do, by the favor of
the crowd, if many are willing to minister to this diseased
appetite, decency in the few is a kind of slow,
business-suicide.

It would almost require a Utopian fancy to picture
the beauty of a press from which personalities and
illwilled abuse were wholly excluded. No personalities
in literature, and none in politics—the author,
editor, and statesman, alike intrenched in

—how completely the envy of malignant mediocrity
would be deprived of its now easy sting, and how
completely ruffianism and brutality would be confined
to the bully-club and dram-shop! Scholars would
wait on public opinion, at the editor's table, busied
only with embellishing, and not engrossed with defending
their fair fame; and gentlemen of sensitive
honor, who are now appalled at the calumnious gauntlet
of politics, would come forward to serve their
country at the small posts occupied now only by men
senseless to defamation.

To the coming about of this paradise of letters,
editorial consent is alone wanting. No one man could
live long, the only calumniator of the press. No one
man would dare to hold the only pen deficient in
courtesy and gentlemanlike regard to private character.
Complete silence from the rest of the press
toward the one offender, after a unanimous publication
of his disgrace—refusal, without exception, to
exchange papers with him from that time forward—
any combination, in short, which should make the ostracism
of such an individual, by his brethren of the
press, universally known—would suffice to purge the
press of him. One year of such united self-censorship
would so purify the public habit of news-reading,
that an offence against propriety would at least
startle and alarm the public sense; and, arrived at that
point, a very moderate apostleship might complete the
reform.

We do not anticipate this. Oh, no! We are

but, at the risk of being the “grave of our deserving,”
we shall do the leaning of one to the better side.
We shall have harder work for it. Nothing is easier
than to be popular by habitual illwill. Trashy minds
write most readable satire, and, with the mood on or
off—the industry willing or reluctant—fault-finding is
fecund production. But if good nature can be spiced
—if courteous treatment of our brother editors,
brother authors, and all nameable men, can be made
palatable to the public—if a paper wholly incapable
of an unkindness, but capable of all things pleasurable
else, can be fairly tested—we trust to do without the
price of giving pain, and we trust that the money so
turned out of our hand will not be like the lost oil of
the tomb of Belus—irreplaceable.

The Cost of Fashion.—From a pamphlet sent us,
we learn that five hundred millions of dollars are spent
annually in the United States for such articles of
dress as are subject to the fluctuations of fashion.
Of this sum, it is computed that sixteen millions are
spent for hats, probably about twenty millions for caps
and bonnets, and for other articles of dress not less
than four hundred millions!

So that not far from a million and a half dollars are
spent daily for clothing; of which, if the calls of
fashion claim but ten per cent. (but probably she receives
double that sum), one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars are sacrificed daily at the footstool of the
fickle goddess, by the enlightened citizens of the
United States!

Is it not time that some standard of national dress
was established? We certainly have had sufficient
experience to know what kinds of clothing are the
most convenient, and one good reason can not be produced
for the unmeaning changes which are every
day taking place.

It is not to be expected that in a free country, where
it is proverbial that “every man is at liberty to wear
shoes or go without,” an association to fix upon
a general standard of dress would lead all to adopt it.
No—there would be those still found who, lacking
other points to recommend them to public notice,
would act the cameleon still. But no small portion
of the community would recommend that course
which would most evidently be for the public good.

The number, if large and respectable, would exert
a sufficient influence by their example to prevent the
standard fashion from ever appearing out of date.
The ladies' bonnets would then be new at the end of
three years, instead of being old-fashioned at the end
of one. The gentlemen's hats would be fashionable
until worn out; and the wedding coat, which is saved
for holyday occasions, might descend from father to
son, a fashionable garment.

A HUMBUG FAME.

Thomas Carlyle.—We have nowhere seen a juster
view of this much-talked-of writer than is given in
the October number of the Biblical Repository, a
journal conducted with great ability by an association
of divines. The writer (Prof. J. T. Smith, of Newton
Theological Institute, Mass.) allows Carlyle to be
a “most vigorous, unique, and original thinker and
writer,” and that his “Past and Present” is “certainly
worth reading.” He allows further, that that work
contains many noble and truthful sentiments, uttered
with commanding energy. This, however, is the extent
of his commendation. “We must, on the whole,”
says the writer, “characterize it as a book, in style,
barbarous; in polities, incendiary; in philosophy, dubious;
and in theology, execrable.” This opinion
the reviewer supports by an analysis of the work, and
by a specification of particulars.

The barbarity of the style no one doubts, and no
one, except a few very warm admirers, defends. This
very barbarity seems to us only another manifestation
of that arrogance which characterizes all Carlyle's

attempts. A man who condemns everybody must
needs be an inventor.

The work is said to “breathe an overweening, morbid
admiration of the past.” Nothing of the present
satisfies Mr. Carlyle; nothing of the past but elicits
his commendation, and among other things, Scandinavian
savagery, Mohammedanism, twelfth century
catholicism, the fighting barons of feudal times, Popes
Gregory and Hildebrand, and other personages of like
stamp, each and all present to him some phase worthy
of special notice and admiration. The religion and
the systems of government of the present day, have
very hard fare at his hands, since the former is all
cant, hypocrisy, and quackery, and the latter nothing
better, to say the least. We are, in truth, recommended
to go back to the twelfth century for models
of religion and government. The HERO must be found
by some means—or he must find himself. A fighting
aristocracy like that of the twelfth century is no longer
possible; but a working aristocracy must take its
place, and the system of villanage be restored. Indeed,
American slavery seems essentially the system
recommended by this practical preacher.

The sum and substance of our own view of the
whole matter is, that while we sympathize to some extent
with Mr. Carlyle in his dissatisfaction with the
present state of things, the remedies he proposes in
his deep-mouthed and most oracular tone, are absolutely
naught—the mere dreams of a mind well-intentioned
enough, but half-crazed with overweening self-estimation.

He insists much on the necessity of a “French
revolution” in England. “There will be two, if
needed; there will be twenty, if needed... —The
laws of nature will have themselves fulfilled,” and
much more to the same purpose. Yet this inevitable
fulfilment of the laws of nature which is to work all
good, seems, according to the seer's estimate, as yet
to have wrought nothing but ill. His final hope is a
hero-king: “Yes, friends: hero-kings and a whole
world not unheroic—there lies the port and happy
haven,” &c. In fine, if Carlyle's words mean anything
(which, the more we read the more we doubt),
the whole people are to be roused to violent revolt,
and plunged into all sorts of horrors, as a preparation
for a better state of things!

Carlyle speaks of the last two centuries as godless
centuries—and that in contrast with the long ages
that went before them. What is this but to shock
the common sense of history? And his remedy is
HERO-HOOD. What is this but inane twaddle? Monstrous,
unblushing egotism, is one of Carlyle's striking
characteristics. Great and learned men, astronomers,
philosophers, and others, are “poor scientific
babblers;” he alone, it would seem, discerns the reality
of things, and has the key to the mysteries of
nature. “Insight” has been granted to no other.

One of the wonders of the age to us is, that such a
monstrosity as Carlyle should have attained so high a
place in its estimation. His merits are so overloaded
by the most shocking and unbounded affectation and
egotism, that we rise from the perusal of much that
he has written with no other sensations than those of
weariness and disgust.

The poems of the Kentucky Sappho, Amelia, have
been published in a very elegant gift-book volume, by
Tompkins, of Boston. We have expressed our almost
unqualified admiration of this lady's poems, as they
separately appeared. She has a mind fed equally
from a full heart and a prodigal imagination.

It was once remarked to us, by a critic as candid as
he is discerning, that there is a great development of
the poetic sentiment in this country; that many of our
collections, which, in their brief existence, resemble
the flowers that seem to be born only to die, like those
delicate, odorous, and lovely objects in nature, have
often a character of sweetness, purity, and freshness,
grateful to refined taste and a feeling heart. The
pieces contained in this volume are worthy of such
praise. A loving heart, and a soul in harmony with
the beauty of the world and the divine spirit which
informs it, dictated these poems.

We might make many beautiful selections from this
handsome volume; but we must content ourselves,
for the present, with naming one, “The Little Stepson,”
which, in its earnest simplicity, and its ringing
music, reminds us of that favorite translation, “My
ear-rings! my ear-rings! they've dropped into the
well!” Not merely that the measure is the same, but
that the whole tone seems the echo of far off and
primitive manners—the voice of untutored affection.

Miff between John Bull and Brother Jonathan.—The
offensive club exclusion by which English
aristocrats have undertaken to make Americans
pay their debts, does, unquestionably, put the
screw upon a national weakness. We are not sorry
for it—but there could have been nothing in worse
taste or showing a more ignorant lack of discrimination—setting
aside the fact of its being done by a class
of men, who are themselves, notoriously bad paymasters.
We do not believe, however, all that is in the
papers on the subject. The “Reform-Club,” in
which it originated, is a new combination of ill-ballasted
politicians, and the movement will be disclaimed
in some authoritative shape, before a month is over.
Trifling as the matter abstractly is, it would act very
pungently on any question of war-making which should
arise among us within a year.

Perhaps some of our readers would like to know
how far an exclusion from the clubs affects Americans
in England. The fact of not having the honorary
privilege of admission to the two principal clubs, was
(before this national exclusion) sufficient evidence
that a gentleman had not come well introduced. One
of the first and most natural questions addressed to a
stranger in London is, “What club are you in?”—
the intention being to ask you to a tête-à-tête club
dinner, if you turn out agreeable. This is almost the
only courtesy that a literary man in England has it in
his power to show you. He can give you a dinner
for a few shillings at his club (if you are a member of
it and not otherwise), which in point of style and comfort
is equal to a nobleman's entertainment. Or
(which is more common) he can say, “I dine at the
Athenæum to-day at six. If you have no better engagement,
we'll put our chairs together”—each man
in this case paying his own bill. An invitation to
club privilege is only got up by high interest, however.
It requires some person of consequence to play the
applicant, and the number of strangers in each club,
at one time, is seldom more than twenty or thirty.
The following are the formulas of invitation to the
two principal clubs:—

It is rather important to a man making his way in
London society, that he should be seen at the clubs.
The formidable “Who is he?” is always satisfactorily
answered by, “Don't know, but I saw him at the club.”
It influences all manner of introductions, breaking
down scores of invisible walls between the new-comer
and desirable things and people. A call at the clubs
is an invariable part of the routine of a fashionable
man's morning. He goes there to meet friends, to
hear the news, to bet, to smoke, to make engagements
—to prepare for the out-door part of the day, in short.
All notes, requiring a very private delivery, are addressed
to a man at his club. Men who have no libraries
of their own, do the most of their reading
there. It is the place to see great men, fashionable
men, famous men; and to see them without their
masks—for the security, as to the proper introduction
of all present, throws an atmosphere of marked laisser-aller
around sensitive greatness.

We sat down, however, to comment upon the ignorance
as to our country, shown by the late narrow-viewed
movement of club-exclusion—the evident ignorance
of any distinction between state responsibility
and national responsibility. To mention it is enough,
however; and we turn to that which will show the
out-lying proof of English ignorance of us.

One of the dullest, most arrogant, and unscrupulous
of travellers is commended in the last foreign quarterly,
by one of the most unfair and ignorant of critics.
If all travellers and critics were like this well-matched
pair, the subject of British tourists and reviewers, and
their opinions and statements concerning us would not
be worth a thought. Of the capacity and information
of the reviewer, take one or two specimens. “The
unanimity of whigs, tories, and radicals, upon the one
topic of American society (i. e., in condemnation) is a
thing to wonder at and reflect upon.” Two of the
most readable works of this class within the last ten
years are decidedly favorable—those of Miss Martineau,
and the Hon. Charles Augustus Murray. A more
striking instance still of the reviewer's utter ignorance
or most shameful falsification is his representing the
internal traffic in slaves as publicly repudiated, and
founding on that a charge of duplicity, since “men—
are ready to swear there is no such thing from one end
of America to the other as a trade in slaves.” A very
suitable person this to write comments on American
travels! With such endorsements Mr. Featherstonhaugh's
statements can not but pass current! We
did not suppose there was, in the obscurest corner of
Europe, one dabbler in ink so profoundly and inexcusably
ignorant as not to know that slaves were
openly bought and sold in the slave states of this
country. That such Cimmerian darkness (to make
the most charitable supposition) should envelope the
brain of a British reviewer is a marvel indeed!

It was not, however, to expose such ignorance that
we took up the pen, nor to draw the very natural conclusion
of the amount of information, which Mr. F.'s
book conveyed to his countrymen at large, since, notwithstanding
the title “slave states,” his reviewer concluded
there was no acknowledged slavery—for without
purchase and sale the system is of course knocked
on the head.

But such are not all British tourists, nor such all
British reviewers; and it is worth while to inquire why
it is, that, placing out of the account writers of this
class, there is still so large a proportion of our well-informed
and sensible visitants, who get an unfavorable
impression of our institutions and of our state of
society.

We ought to give up the idea of a prevalent ill-feeling
toward us in the fatherland of our ancestors,
or a wish to put us down, because we are on the wrong
side of the water. Few Englishmen like us the less
because we are Americans, and not French or German
or Russians. Thousands of us when abroad have experienced
the contrary.

Nor ought we to suppose that envy, jealousy, or
ancient grudges, are at the bottom of the hard measure
meted out to us by tourists. True, we have met in
war as enemies, and in peace as commercial rivals,
and have in both held our own; but meanness and spite
form no part of the character of John Bull. He has
tremendous faults, but he keeps tolerably clear of
pettinesses.

One fault shows itself with the English abroad,
wherever they are. Though the greatest travellers,
they are the least cosmopolitan. The island mania
attends them everywhere, except at home. Like
some mistresses to some lovers, old England seems
the dearer the farther they get away from her. Goldsmith's
Traveller's lengthening chain is no fiction.
Across the ocean it is often insupportable. Sometimes,
also, this distance has, at the outset of the
voyage, “lent enchantment to the view,” which, when
dispelled, leads to a bitter, though unreasonable disappointment.

The very resemblance which we bear to the English—and
must bear, from our origin, our language,
our literature, and our continued intercourse ever
since the ocean rolled between us—is unfavorable to a
just, and still more to a partial judgment of us, on
the part of those honestly disposed to do us justice.
To other people the British traveller can apply, in
some measure, the true standard—i. e., to each its
own; but for us, be can have only the home standard.
Weighed by this, we are, of course, found wanting.
He find us nine tenths English, and scolds that the
other tenth is not English too.

It is needless to discuss the point, whether that
tenth is better or worse—the English blood renforcés
(as some Frenchman has pronounced, justly we—
hope) or not—it is enough that it is not English for
the genuine John Bull to pronounce it ridiculous or
insufferable; to laugh or rail at it according to his
humor. The general resemblance he can not deny,
but he unreasonably demands an exact likeness. In
the points where this is not perceptible, he of course
considers us shockingly degenerate, altered altogether
for the worse. Now there are various points which
we should not expect him to appreciate justly, for we
know he is a creature full of prejudices and contradictions,
and he must see with his own eyes or not see
at all.

Another real difficulty is, that no mere passing
traveller can realize the crowning glory of our country
and of our institutions—the general diffusion of comfort
and intelligence. A traveller is looking out for
the salient points—something striking or marvellous
—something that will tell in his book and his memory.
A thousand comfortable or even elegant private dwellings
that he might pass, would not make upon him
so vivid an impression as one splendid palace—while
the former would indicate a thousand families living
in comfort and abundance, and the latter that there
was one family of over-grown wealth with a presumption
against its possessing the average worth of the
former, or even enjoying their average happiness.

We contribute to the severity of the judgments
against us by our own fault. Our sensitiveness lays
us peculiarly open to attack, and none reply to such
attacks with more violence. The foreigner who

knows this and who can not perhaps conscientiously
grant us all we ask, sharpens his weapons beforehand
for the encounter, and deals harder blows in anticipation
of those which he knows he is about to bring
down upon himself.

To this must be added our national vanity—a
characteristic which the candid among us own. From
demanding too indiscriminate praise, we do not get
that which we really deserve, as the trader, who praises
his wares extravagantly, is sure to have them undervalued.
If our claims were more moderate, they
would be oftener acknowledged. If we exacted less,
more would be voluntarily given. If we did not rise
up against deserved reproof, we should be oftener
spared that which we did not deserve.

When we claim the eloquence of a Chatham for
every stump orator, and then apply the same phrases
to our really great and eloquent men, the latter are
sufferers. If we claim for our every-day life or even
for our soirées recherchées the grace and polish of a
court, where they have nothing to do but to kill time
agreeably, the assertion is simply ridiculous. Some
traveller (Dickens we believe) says of the factory-girls
of Lowell, that they have the port and bearing (or
something to that effect) of well-bred ladies. Pretty
complimentary we should think! But an annotator
somewhere (but where we know not), is not satisfied.
He adds, that if Mr. Dickens should meet these persons
in private circles, he would find they had the
corresponding elegance and manners. As if any good
factory-girl at Lowell would pass muster at Queen
Victoria's drawing-room!

The new Prima Donna.—The haste with which
it is the fashion to write about prima-donnas, giving
them a cornucopial criticism, on their debut, and dropping
directly after into very brief notices, reminds us
of a lady's reproach to her lover, in the old play of the
Spanish friar: “You men are like watches, wound
up for striking twelve immediately; but after you are
satisfied, the very next that follows is the solitary
sound of single one.” We should like very much to
defer expressing an opinion of Madame Pico, till she
had a little recovered from the embarrassment of a
first performance, and (more important still in criticising)
till we had steeped our tympanum a little longer
in the honey the bees of Italy have shed upon her
lips; but—

The audience at Palmo's, last night, was, probably,
the best ever assembled since Malibran's time, as to
the capability of judging of a cantatrice by taste and
comparison. Madame Pico, even in Italy, would
scarce have dropped her golden cadences into more
judicious ears. Fortunately, too, the unripeness of
an entirely new opera was corrected by the predominance
of natural melody in the composer's style—making
it all come to the ear with the impromptu welcome
sometimes refused to the best music. By the
way—without knowing whether this opera will grow
upon us, and allowing, at once, that it has none of
Beethoven's under-song, nor any of the supernatural
combinations of Mozart—we must express our almost
passionate delight in its main burthen and character.
We write, it is true, by a past-time-to-go-to-bed candle,
and with the graciles-que sensus still reeling under the
intoxication of the cup of bewitched sound; but if
this gets to press (and we shall look it over before
breakfast, to-morrow morning), we congratulate the
every-day-ear of the city we live in, upon a opera that
is natural as a bird's song, and that can be enjoyed
with as simple a taste for music—at the same time,
no more to be disparaged, for its simplicity, than the
bird's throat for not having the harp-stop of a piano.
But let us go on, story-fashion.

The curtain drew up, and after the appearance of
the usual precedent foil of chorus-singers, Sanquirico,
the ben amato of the company, came on as a postillion
After making a bow, with the good-will of a waterfall,
in acknowledgment of the applause with which he
was met, he went on playing his part, and (to dismiss
him with this brief notice) most admirably to the
last. The make-way motions of the guard and the
aspettando impatience of the music, now prepared us
for the prima-donna. She was to represent a young
girl, under the protection of the prince and princess,
whose escape from ruin by a villain is the story of the
opera. “Chiara!” trilled the “cue” and in glided
Chiara!

Madame Pico has a look in her face as if “Sorrow
had passed that way.” She has had a narrow escape
of being superbly handsome, and, as it is, she could
personate, with small call upon the imagination, the
part of “Mrs. Helpless Ingulfus,” on the stage or off
it. Tho' not near so beautiful, she is a strong likeness
of Mrs. Norton—the same low, concentrative forehead,
the same something-or-other in the sweep of the dark
hair, the same caressing inwardness in the white round
of the shoulder. There is rather too much of a cadenza
in her bust, and her under lip does not always come
up with the alacrity we like in a woman, but we may
change our opinion. She was very much frightened,
and these matters are

The welcome of applause ceased, and the expected
voice trembled on the silence. It was listened to with
pricked ears, nodded to by the cognoscenti at the first
pause—approved, applauded. It was a rich, clouded
contralto, its depths hidden by a soprano part, like a
dark well impoverished by a slant beam of sunshine.
As she went on, gathering a little more control, her voice
sank to the inner sound-chamber where the heart sits
to listen, and the audience, instead of louder applauding,
began to murmur their admiration. Evident as
it was that the delicious home of her voice was never
reached, or borrowed from, by the notes of that soprano
part, there was a kind of full forth-shadowing of reserved
power which made, even what she did sing, satisfy
the ear. And then, occasionally, where the lower
notes approached her treasury of un-used power, she
flung out a contralto cadence upon the air with an effect
the audience waited impatiently to hear repeated.
We feel bespoken to be enchanted with a fair development
of that full throat's capabilities. Artistic comparison
apart, we have a passion for a contralto—nothing
that can pass the portal of an ear touching with
half the delicacy our levia affectuum vestigia. Those
who take our criticisms will, if they like, make allowance
for this weakness.

Borghese was in one of the avant-scene boxes, lending
her captive town to her rival with the best grace
imaginable. She well may—for a smiling rivalry between
her and Pico will give each new attraction,
particularly since their voices are of totally opposite
quality. The little soprano comme-il-faut has her
advantages, and Madame Pico has hers. Neither of
them is quite the “horn of Astolpho, at the sound
of which the hearer went mad,” but while hearing
either, as Esdras says, “a man remembereth neither
sorrow nor debt.” May they pull together “like
Juno's swans, coupled and inseparable!”

The FOOTRACE we have seen this afternoon “carried
the town” more completely than any excitement
we have yet been abroad in—politics not excepted.
We were late, but a thousand people were on the
road with us, and when we arrived, the first race was

just over, Jackson the winner. The weather was
Indian summer, in its most bracing smile—good
omen, a punster would say, for the red-skinned competitor!
The roads had been dried pretty well
by the sharp wind of yesterday, the grass looked
glossy, and King Pluribus was in unusual good humor—as
he generally is on the first bright day after
bad weather.

The stands looked like stacks of noses and hats,
and after a vain attempt to find room in the principal
ones, we descended to the course to take our chance
with the great company of the jostled. As it was an
object to get a near view of the runners at the end of
the first quarter of a mile, we crossed the area of the
field to the less thronged side of the course, and
awaited their coming. Several loads of undisguised
sinners were near us, one of whom, a professed matron,
apparently, coolly sat with a pair of pistols, waiting
some expected attack from a crowd of ruffians
who had surrounded them. She looked quite capable
of a tragedy; but the striking of the bell at the
stand drew off the rowdies to the ring-fence, and the
pistols in the gloved hands gave place to a bouquet.
We had been thinking that there should be a competitrix
in the race to inherit the honors of Atalanta,
and a female, by a pull of the forefinger, might easily
have taken the day's notoriety from the competitors
in the race.

A stroke of the bell—a shout from twenty thousand
throats—a sudden radiation, to one point, of all
the loose vagrants in the field—and around came the
horse-fence, that in single file kept pace with the runners,
hemming them in from the crowd. The grotesque-looking
pedestrians hugged the wooden railing
very closely as they came along, Barlow ahead, the
Indian close on his heels, and Gildersleeve, the victor
of the last race, quietly consenting to be number
three. The foremost man was simply “diapered,” as
the nurses say, exhibiting his white Saxon skin in
strong contrast to the smoked hams of the Indian behind
him, and if the race had depended on muscle
merely, a good anatomist might have picked out the
winner, by points fairly displayed, as easily as a horse's
capabilities are seen by the jockey.

They ran very differently. A plumbline, dropped
from the forehead of each, would have fallen a foot in
advance of Barlow's body, and eighteen inches in advance
of the Indian's, while it would have lain close
to the breast of the erect little Gildersleeve. Barlow
never took his eyes from the ground, and kept his
lower jaw relaxed in a kind of shame-faced smile.
We observed that his make was in exceeding good
distribution, and though he was slightly knock-kneed,
he made play as straight ahead as a pendulum, losing
nothing by sideling. Gildersleeve's natural ballast,
on the contrary, rounded him to, slightly, at every
step, and his shoulders were partly employed in counteracting
the swing. McCabe, who was compact all
over, trotted along like a stiff little pig, giving nowhere,
and the Indian, a long, stringy six-footer,
seemed to follow his head like a kite's bobs—the nearest
way for a wave. Gildersleeve, it struck us, was
lividly pale, the Indian ready to cry with anxiety,
McCabe spunky, and Barlow slyly confident of success.

We crossed over to the stands, where, we presume,
upon four acres of ground, there were twenty-five
thousand men. It was a peculiar-looking crowd—
sprinklings excepted, very game-y. We presume no
pick of New York city could have brought out of it,
so completely, the stuff it holds for an army. The
betting was going on vigorously—Barlow and Steeprock
the favorites, but every man talking up his countryman.
The Irish swore up McCabe as he came
along, the English applauded Barlow, the New-Yorkers
encouraged Gildersleeve and the Indian. Mean
time, the horse-fence-men rode open the crowd with
striking and shouting; betting-books were whipped
out at every completed mile; boys cried cigars; rowdies
broke down barriers and climbed into the stands;
the men on the roofs pointed after the runners, and
hallooed the gainings and losings; and every third
minute the naked white shoulders came round ahead,
and it was manifest that Barlow gained constantly,
and, unless the little Yankee or the Indian could overhaul
him by a miraculous push, he was sure to win.

They came along for the tenth mile, and the crowd
were almost still with anxiety. The overtaking rush,
by which Gildersleeve won in the last race, was now
expected of him by his backers. Barlow passed, a
hundred feet ahead; Steeprock strained after, with a
sponge at his lips, and his knees tottering; Gildersleeve
came third, a spectacle of pallor and exhaustion;
Greenhalgh, another Englishman, was evidently
making more speed—and that was the last we saw of
them in motion.

With the thousands rushing in from all sides we
were swept toward the judges' stand. The horsemen
came on, in the midst of a sea of heads keeping pace
with them, whips going, shouts pealing, boys and bullies
screaming, swearing, and crowding. “Barlow!”
“Barlow!” “Barlow!” arose from hundreds of wild
voices, and the tumult of inquiry as to the others
grew deafening. We backed out a little to hear the
victor called off by the judges. A moment's stillness
was procured, and the competitors were named from
the stand in the order in which they had come in:
Barlow, Steeprock, Greenhalgh, Gildersleeve. The
time made by the winner was ten miles in fifty-four
minutes twenty-one seconds.

As we turned away, Gildersleeve was brought along
by two men, with his eyes half closed and his tongue
loose in his lips; and he seemed just able to place his
feet, one after the other, mechanically, as he was
lifted over the ground. A sicker-looking man we
never saw. A minute after, Barlow appeared above
the crowd, on a man's shoulders, waving his hand and
smiling quite composedly, and the shouts, apparently
from every voice, hailed him victor.

P. S. We had nearly forgotten a good conundrum
the race gave birth to:—

Question.—Why did Barlow run so like a locomotive
yesterday?

Answer.—Because he had behind him an Indian-near.

New Trial of Culprit Poets.—Mrs. Gilman
has invented a new kind of book (“Oracles from the
Poets,” of which we gave a notice a few days ago),
and the opening preface, very charmingly written,
tries the poets by new standards altogether. She had
occasion to ransack all the popular authors for answers
to the fate-questions of her Fortune-Teller, and
of course she discovered where lay the most thought
and feeling of a peculiar character. She begins by
finding out that poets are benevolent. She had great
difficulty in finding sixty answers to the question,
“To what have you a distaste or aversion?” while
“What gratifies your taste or affections?” was stuff as
common as clover. She says that in Shakspere there
is a singular lack of mention of places of residence, and
there seems not to be even a fair proportion of passages
descriptive of musical sounds, hours, seasons,
and (except in the Winter's Tale) of flowers. In
Wordsworth, scarcely a flower or musical sound is described.
They are alluded to, but not painted out.
The poetry of Crabbe, though abounding in numerous
characters, could furnish almost nothing for her
purpose, on account of their being woven into the
general strain of his narrations. Shelley, Landon,
and Howitt, are eminently the poets of flowers, while

Darwin, with a whole “Botanic Garden” before him,
and Mason, in his “English Garden,” gave none
fairly entitled to selection. Few passages of any sort,
except those hackneyed into adages, could be gained
from Milton, on account of the abstract, lofty, and
continuous flow of his diction. Coleridge has corresponding
peculiarities. Keats and Shelley are the
poets of the heavens. Byron, with faint exceptions,
does not describe a flower, or musical sound, or place
of residence. The American poets, in contradistinction
to their elder and superior brethren of the
fatherland, display a more marked devotion to nature,
with which a continued glow of religious sentiment
aptly harmonizes.

Apropos—as the living American poets are in process
of 'broidery, would it not be well to know where
their worsteds are deficient, that they may shop up
their lacking threads in the Broadway of contemplation?
Will not some of our several sleeping female
geniuses (intellectual dolce-far-nientes, of whom we
know at least a capable dozen) take up the American
poets and go through them with a discriminating bodkin,
showing what colors lack replenishing? It would
serve the poetry of Bryant-dom—the present passing
age in which this faultless poet is the flower in most
palpable relief. Come, ladies! tell us what Lowell
(whose fame is being worked just now) had better
thread his inspired needle with! Tell us what Longfellow
is out of. Tell us whether Halleck has done
enough to cover the pattern, and whether some others
hadn't better unravel and work it all over again!
At any rate, turn up their frames of immortality and
show us the wrong side! Let them mend, if they
like,

The Upper Ten Thousand of New York City.—
The first three of the following paragraphs are from
the True Sun of November 22, and the last is from
the same paper of a day or two previous:—

“Politically, we are all republicans—socially, we
are divided into classes on the `European plan.'
There is a certain class, for instance, that takes exercise
only on one side of Broadway—the west side.
The `canaille,' to-be-sure, may walk there too, because,
fortunately, our aristocracy, with all its pride
and vanity, has no power; but what perfumed and
ringleted exquisite would ever think of sporting his
white kids, mustaches, and goatee, on the east side
of our great thoroughfare? That would be literally
wasting his sweetness on the desert air. We understand,
by-the-by, that Stewart is severely censured
for choosing the site of Washington Hall as the location
of his new temple of taste and fashion, merely
because it is situated on the east side of Broadway.
However, if the pavement in front is sprinkled thrice
a day with eau de Cologne, and Mr. Stewart doubles
the price of his goods, in order to give ton to the location,
it may do away with the fashionable prejudice
against the promenade of the nobodies, and thereby
equalize the value of the property on the two sides
of the street. At present there is a very material
difference in the price of the brick and mortar which
borders the two pavements.”

“The Opera.—That this is a refined and elegant
amusement, no one can doubt; but to exaggerate its
consequence, to make it a grand controlling feature
in our society, is, in our judgment, giving it undue
importance. With regard to its being a very `aristocratic'
affair in New York, we can only say, that a
complete refutation of such an idea may be easily had
at any time by a glance at the dress-circle habitues.”

“The Aristocracy.—We must confess we do not
think that wealth is the only essential necessary to
place one in `good society.' We can imagine many
refined, intellectual, and charming people, who do
not drive equipages lined with silk, and who have neither
coachman nor footman bedizened with lace.
What would be thought of the elegance of a leader
of the ton, who could take a peculiarly-dressed partridge
from a dinner-table, and place it in his hat, in
order to carry it home with him? We do not imagine
that such an attempt (for it was unsuccessful) marks
any very superior degree of refinement!”

“There are some, again, who study a profound reserve,
or rather adopt an appearance of hauteur.
They are stiff, quiet, and unapproachable. These
are the dandies of the cities, who adopt the Horatian
sentiment of

You must not come `between the wind and their nobility.'
They wear the last productions of Watson,
or Jennings, or Carpenter, and display a clean pair of
kid gloves, with the last fashion of wrist-buttons.
You might, if uninitiated, suppose them some distinguished
foreigners on their travels. In nine cases
out of ten they belong to the parvenu order of the
aristocracy. Whiskey or codfish has taken a rise,
and their honored father has made a fortune. The
family-mansion in a back lane has been abandoned for
some fashionable quarter, and visits—on one side—
have been paid throughout the neighborhood. If
they choose, they could astonish, but they would not
condescend. The railroad-car does not shake down
their consequence. They regret this progress of one
art, which makes so many other arts useless. They
are delighted when they escape from the crowd and
seek the hotel, where the extravagant charges prevent
the danger of further collision.”

We received yesterday an anonymous letter, reproving
us, in sober bad English, for ministering to
the vanity of the rich, by an article in the Mirror on
the selection of “a promenade drive.” This, the reproof
also given us a day or two since by a political
paper for an article on the prima-donna, and the foregoing
paragraphs from a neutral paper, aimed principally
at popularity with the working classes, are sufficient
indications, we think, that some bitter weed,
passing for an aristocracy-nettle, is rolled up in the
present cud of the reposing people.

We commence taking exceptions to the tone of
these articles, by stating what seems to us a fact of
general notoriety—that the ten thousand people uppermost
in this city—(aristocrats, if wealth and position
make them so)—are the most moral and scrupulous
ten thousand in the four hundred thousand of
the population. There is probably about this number—ten
thousand—who are rich enough, if they
choose, to keep a carriage. Two thirds of them, we
presume, were poor men a few years ago, and the
children of three fourths of them will be obliged to
work for a living (a flying-fish aristocracy, who are
hardly long enough out of the water, one would
think, to give offence by their brief airs to those left in
the element below them). There is a smaller class—
perhaps two thousand families—who have been respectable
and well off for two or more generations. There is
a third class, still—perhaps one or two hundred—whose
display is offensive, from no one's knowing where
their money comes from, or from their being supposed
to live dishonestly above their means, or from
being notoriously vicious.

Of these three classes—an “aristocracy” of ten
thousand—one half, at least, are religious, and the
remainder seek refined pleasures, and attend theatres
and operas; but, with the exception of the third
and smallest class last named, we venture to repeat,
that the upper ten thousand are by much the most

exacting of moral character in their friends, the most
rigid in the support of moral opinions and charities,
and the most exemplary in their individual private
life. This is true of the upper ten thousand of no other
country in the world. It would sound Utopian in England
to assert this to be true of the upper classes of
any city on the face of the earth. Look at the difference
of the standards in ordinary matters. To
make a good match, here, it is necessary that a young
man should be moral; and if he be of high character
in this respect (and the lady willing), public opinion
will not suffer his pretensions to be slighted by the
richest man! In every other country the lover's morality
is altogether a secondary consideration—family
and fortune far before it. Morality is a young man's
best card in New York; whether his object be influence,
matrimony, good business-connexion, appointments
from societies, or general position in the best
circles. This truth needed only to be put in print to
make people wonder it had not been said before!

It is a wretched trick caught from English papers
and English plays, to talk of the rich as certainly
vicious, and of the poor as necessarily virtuous. We
live in a country where the sovereignty (that part of
society which vice commonly noses and follows close
after) resides at the opposite end from the sovereignty
of England. The more virtuous class, here as there, is
comparatively powerless at the polls. The rowdy
drunkard and the gambler do as much toward president-making
and the selection of lawgivers, as the
thrifty merchant, and the rich father of a family of
virtuous daughters; and, as there are a hundred husbands,
of either of the first-named classes, to one of
either of the others, virtue and order keep company
with sovereignty—in this country as little as in Europe!
Power is at the surface of a country, and the
scum rises to it. We are quite aware, that the pen
and inkstand with which we write these sentiments
will not be, to all readers, “a pot of lambative electuary
with a stick of licorice.”

Rivalry at the Opera.—The musical tilt, to decide
which was the more prime of the prima-donnas,
came off last night, to the very great entertainment
of the town's ornamentals. It reminded us very
strongly of the contention between the lute and the
nightingale, in the old play of the “Lover's Melancholy.”
Borghese drops dead in the last act, very
soon after a glorious and triumphant outbreak by
Pico; and we will quote a passage to show how this
resembles the poetic story—premising, by-the-way,
that a musician, playing in the woods, is overheard by
a bird, who mocks him till the lute-player gets angry
at the excellence of the rivalry:—

But, to tell the other story—“after the manner of
men.”

The opera was “Lucrezia Borgia.” Signorina
Borghese represents (as well as we could understand
the story) a bad mother, who, in poisoning a large
party of youths, half rakes, half conspirators, for having
insulted her sign over the door, poisons one too
many—her son. Madame Pico represents the leader
of the set, and does the noise and the jollification.
She descends upon the stage the first thing after the
rising of the curtain, dressed in a very modest suit of
male attire, and figures about as a Roman Captain
Rynders, bandying dialogue here and there, but with
no chance of display in the three or four first acts.
Borghese, we began to think, was to have the best of
it all the way through. She was exquisitely dressed,
sang with as little of the split-straw in her soprano as
we ever heard her sing with, and acted to her singing
(as she always does) with what the Greeks called onomatopeia—movement
linked with sound indivisibly.
The applause was pretty well, but not overpowering.

The fourth act represented the youths at the fatal
supper, Pico the principal customer. After a little
hobnobbing on the other side of the table, she glides
round, upon her plumptitudinous locomotives, and
dashes into a song, rich, rollicking, and risvegliato!
Down went the bucket for the first time into her well
of contralto, and up came the liquid and golden music,
of a round, true fulness, that made the ear's thirst
a luxury. It was a passage full of involutions, abrupt,
startling, and bacchanal; but her skill in flinging her
voice from point to point, with the capricious surprises
of the music, was wonderfully subtle. The audience
was, for the first time in the evening, fairly
lifted clear of the ground. On the part of the stage-company,
no encore was looked for at this point of the
opera. The closing of Pico's song is the signal for a
death-bell and the disclosing of a hearse a piece for
the jolly junketers. The audience were not ready,
however. The applause kept on till the hearses
backed out, and the song was sung over again. Oh,
how deliciously it was sung! No voice, however
large its compass, was ever sweeter, rounder, mellower
in its quality, than Madame Pico's. The audience
murmured, and leaned forward, and ejaculated, and
with one unhesitating accord, it seemed to us, gave
over the palm to the contralto. The chorus-singers
seemed surprised—she herself forgot her male attire,
and courtesied (the first time we ever saw how it was
done, by-the-by), a tributary bouquet flew over the
footlights, and Lucrezia Borgia rose up once more,
like an apparition amid the hearses in waiting.

The last act, like the first three, was all Borghese's.
It is deep tragedy, and she played it well. The young
man, poisoned by mistake, held his stomach till he
was done for, and his letting go was the signal for
Borghese to give her “C sharp,” and go after him.
The curtain dropped, and the applause rose immediately.
Borghese came out and was cheered till she
courtesied out, but still the applause continued. No
reply. The canes began to rap, and the audience
seemed not beginning to go. “Pico!” shouted somebody.
“Pico!” shouted everybody. Still no answer.
The deafening uproar at last lifted the curtain,
and there was Borghese! led forward by Perozzi,
and courtesying again! And presently, all alone,
with her hair down her back, her mustache gone, and
a loose dressing-gown about her, the real queen by
acclamation took the honors there was no longer any
denying her. The will of the audience, and the will
of the Italian corps, were two entirely different matters.

We really do not see why these fine-throated people
can not consent to do their best, and let the public
like which they please. The two singers are both
admirable, each unrivalled in her way: and, because
we admire the new-comer, it is no reason why we
should not still appreciate our former favorite. But
see how unlike musical people in prose are to musical
people in poetry. We will quote the conclusion of
the pretty story we began our criticism with, for a
lesson of magnanimity, after the bird dropped, broken-hearted,
upon the lute.

Another night we trust to see Borghese submitting
resignedly, like the bird, to be beaten; though if the
conquering Pico undertakes, in consequence, to “pash
herself against a tree,” we trust the manager will
“suddenly step in.”

The Historical Society Dinner.—We went to
the dinner of the Historical Society last evening, with
a mood in our mental pocket, which was as useless to
us as the wrong mask for a night of carnival. We
went to indulge in relaxation and gratify curiosity.
We decided in the midst of confusing avocations, that
it would be delightful to see Mr. Adams and Mr. Gallatin,
pleasant to listen to the voices whose words we
should read in the next morning's papers, and curious
to see the first menu of the opening hotel up-town.
We presumed there would be some dull talking,
which the dinner and the friends around would keep
off with the by-play of conviviality, and that we
should, at any rate, hear wit, get our cares jostled
from astride us, and store up, for illustration to future
thought and reading, two pictures of men who are
soon to pass over to history.

But—(the two great statesmen who were to be
present set aside for the moment)—it is not easy to
come at all into the presence of a large number of
men of superior intellect, without feeling the dormant
thunder of the cloud about us. This is partly a moral
magnetism, we presume, but there is a physiognomy
in crowds; and, to the eye accustomed to see men
“as they come,” the look of an assemblage of master-intellects
is the laying of a spirit-hand upon the beholder.
There were present the leading minds of
this great metropolis—able divines, merchant princes,
formidable politicians, brilliant lawyers, scheming capitalists,
influential citizens, philanthropists, scholars,
poets, and journalists—none of them common men,
and none without the sympathy-read print upon the
forehead—distinction's philactery of pain.[1] Seated at
table, we looked about upon the men we knew, and
followed back into their bosoms the visible thread of
which we knew the knot at the heart-strings. We
have no time here—(our hasty thoughts going from
us, sentence by sentence, into irrevocable print, as we
record them)—no time to separate and describe the
crowding influences that changed our careless preparatory
mood into an overshadowed and attentive
silence. We passed an evening of resistless revery—
much of it homage, much of it quickening to ambition,
and in part a coveting of fellowship and sympathy.
But we can not go on with this misplaced record
of emotions.

There are weighty and wide influences exercised
by an historical society, which, again, we can only
hint at, far too hastily. Historical record is the
paymaster of the immortality toiled for by greatness;
and it is vital to the existence of great motives, that
this treasurer's trust should be faithfully discharged,
and his accounts chronicled in blazon. Affecting
mention was drawn from Mr. Adams of his coming
reward from history—the reward of justificatory triumph—for
having passed through the fire of calumny.
It was over these heated plough-shares that he has
walked to the luminous door by which he is about to
pass from the world; and if he could be sure of no
brother-spirits left behind, to see the truth written in
characters legible to the world, he would have done
his great services to his country, by sufferings, indeed,
mournfully thankless. In a republic, especially in an
age of free-thinking and irreverence for usage, like
ours—the influence of a society which brightens and
keeps manifest the coolly-proved wisdom of the past,
is more especially all-needful. History forgotten, the
present is a ship without chart or compass, trusting to
the stars alone in the clouded storm-nights of politics.
Ambition, with that watchful dragon asleep—no record
to be dreaded beyond the memory of the living—
would be a fiend loosed upon the world. History is
our citadel of safety.

New kind of Hotel up-town.—We have thought
that it would, perhaps, interest our readers to go into
a detail of the differences between the popular hotel
(like the Astor, the American, Howard's, &c.) and
what is understood in Europe as the hotel-garni—of
which the up-town hotel is the new example in this
country.

The hotel-garni is a furnished house, in which the
lodging is the only charge not variable at the option
of the guest. A certain price is charged for the
rooms occupied, and the other expenses are according
to what is ordered. A popular bachelor, for example,
makes a great economy of this. He pays for
his rooms and his breakfast; and, if invited out to
dine five times in the week, saves the corresponding
items in his bill—five dinners and five bottles of wine.
This, in Europe, is considered a fair offset against
patent blacking, white gloves, and hack-hire; and
puts society on a level with health, sunshine, reputation,
and other plain matters-of-course. A common
table and a restaurant are not necessary parts of a hotel-garni,
but they serve to increase its eligibility.
There is a certain price for a dinner at the table d'hote,
charged separately every day; but in Europe few
dine at the common table except strangers in town.
A fashionable man avoids it as an implied confession,
1st, that he has not been invited out that day, and, 2d,
that he can content himself with everybody's dinner
and company. For families, particularly if there are
unmarried daughters, it is irreconcilable with position,
if not with propriety, to live at the public table. The
rooms in these hotels are arranged so as to unite a drawing-room
with each bedroom, and every person, or family,
respectably lodged, has a private parlor for meals and
reception of visits. There is no large common drawing-room,
of course. The meals are furnished by express
order, given each day, to the restaurant below,
and sent up with tablecloth, silver, glass, &c.—all
at the appointed hour, and all removed together when
dinner is over—giving the lodger no trouble, except
to wait on himself while dining, or provide a servant
to do so. As each dish is for one person only, however
(or one family), the expense of such a dinner is
much greater than where the dishes are cooked in
larger quantities for a hundred people. To dine in
private on as many dishes as you may taste for fifty
cents at a public table, would cost, probably, from two
to five dollars.

The ordinary hotel is, of course, described by
specifying the peculiarities of the other. It will
be seen at once that the hotel-garni must prevail
with the increase of exclusiveism in this country. It
is only in new countries that families can do without
household gods; and it is only where the whole male
society of a country is only unharnessed for sleep
from the eternal drag of money-making, that the domestic
virtues can be left safely without private altars

and locked doors, single roof-trees, and four-walled
simplicity. Twenty years hence, we venture to say,
the Astor's splendid drawing-room will be occupied
by some nabob of a lodger—needed no longer as a
common parlor—and its long galleries will be but
suites of apartments, every third bedroom converted
into a cosy saloon, and the occupants seeing as little
of each other as neighbors in a “block.”

There are some very republican advantages in our
present system of hotels, which the country is not
yet ready to forego. Tell a country lady in these
times that when she comes to New York she must
eat and pass the evening in a room by herself, and she
would rather stay at home. The going to the Astor,
and dining with two hundred well-dressed people, and
sitting in full dress in a splendid drawing-room with
plenty of company—is the charm of going to the city!
The theatres are nothing to that! Broadway, the
shopping, and the sights, are all subordinate—poor
accessories to the main object of the visit. A large
company as cheap as none at all—a hundred dishes
as cheap as one—a regal drawing-room at her service,
with superb couches, piano, and drapery, and costing
no more than if she stayed in her bedroom—plenty of
eyes to dress for if not to become acquainted with,
and very likely a “hop” and a band of music—bless
my soul, says the country lady, I hope they'll never
think of improving away all that!

And, there lies the pinch! The senator now on his
way to congress, dines with his family at the public
table. The gentleman who does not choose to keep
house, invites his friends to dine with him at the public
table. The man who prefers to dine in a private
parlor is satirically made welcome to his own society
—if he prefers it! The distinguished, the fashionaable,
the dressy, and handsome, may all dine, without
peril of style, at the public table. But—since so moy
the opposites of all these, and anybody else who is
tolerably dressed and well-behaved—the public table
is the tangible republic—the only thing palpable and
agreeable that we have to show, in common life, as
republican. And when the exclusivism of the hotel-garni
draws its dividing line through this promiscuous
community of habits, the cords will be cut which
will let some people UP, out of reach, and drop some
people DOWN, out of all satisfactory supposible contact
with society.

Growth of Western Literature.—We are
happy to notice that seven out of the seventeen articles
with the names of the authors, in the last two
numbers of the Biblical Repository, are from persons
connected with literary institutions west of the mountains.
Among the subjects of the western writers are,
The Writings of Martin Luther; Evidences from
Nature for the Immortality of the Soul; and the
Natural History of Man in his Spiritual Relations.
Another article contains an able defence of presbyterianism.
So far as we can judge from a hasty view,
these subjects, some of which are the greatest that
can employ the pen anywhere, are treated with tact
and ability, and give us a favorable opinion of the condition
of our western seminaries of learning. The
remaining contributions are from New England, with
the exception of one from Virginia. New York does
not appear in the list of contributors' names.

The Opera.—The “stars” of the opera are just
through their night's work and the stars of heaven are
half way through theirs. We have not the pleasure
of a personal acquaintance with a single individual in
either company—knowing neither Venus nor Pico,
Lyra nor Borghese, “off the stage.” We are about
to announce an ASTROLOGICAL CONJUNCTION, however,
and, as “many an inhumane thought hath arisen from
a man's sitting uncomfortably in his chamber,” we
have sent for an emollient to our arm chair, in the
shape of cold duck and champagne—expecting thereby
to achieve our nearest perihelion to the calm clear-sightedness
of Copernicus.

Up-town New York, a week ago, was in the situation
the starry firmament was in, about two hundred
years before the Christian era. Pythagoras recorded
his conviction at that time that there were two stars
wanting to complete the harmony of a certain portion
of the heavens, and, in the very spots named by the
great philosopher, Mars and Jupiter did soon after
make their first appearance. In like manner a Daily
Pythagoras, of this city (we think it was Mr. King of
the American), darkly hinted in a late evening paper,
that there were two stars necessary—contralto and
soprano—to complete harmony of the Palmospheric
constellation; and, in that very troop, Pico and Borghese
did soon after take their places in similarly harmorious
conjunction. We trust history will do us
justice for linking together these two marked foreshadowings
of stars' “doing something for their families.”

[Your health, dear reader, in a glass of Cordon-bleu—m—m—mplck!—delicious!]

And now we have to beg the discreet portion of
the public to step with us behind the curtain—not
that (representing the rosy dawn) which drops before
Mars and Jupiter, but that (representing Jupiter feeling
the pulse of Minerva) which drops before Borghese
and Pico. There has been a terrible rowdydow
in the operatic green-room. Borghese has been
hitherto queen of the zodiac, and her orbit was only
intersected by nebulæ of nameless supernumeraries.
The breaking of Pico upon the gaze of the impartial
star-worshippers, however, and their undeniable preference,
of the star at fifty dollars a night to the star at
double the money, sent Borghese sick to her bed;
and she is said to have vowed (with the spunk of the
Lost Pleiad, who died for jealousy of her six brighter
sisters) that she would never rise again—if papa
would excuse her.

[Our astronomy is used up, dear reader, but the
champagne still holds out. A glass to Borghese's
better resignation, and let us go on, in terrestrial
phraseology.—M-m-mplck!]

Borghese commenced making position, a year or
more ago, and has pursued it very skilfully, and,
therefore, very creditably to herself. For a winter,
or more, before showing herself as an admirable actress,
she revolved in the japonica circles up-town,
as a singer at parties, and made acquaintances and
friendships exclusively among the forced-plant customers
of Hogg and Thorburn. Her manners were
of that well-studied, eager unconsciousness, which
is the modesty of nature in a hot-house school; and
her tact, elegance, and musical science, were leaved
like a rose-bud tied up with a string—showing what
the prima-donna might be, if the young lady were
loosed and expanded. As the parent-stem required
to be relieved of her, she prepared to throw herself
on the public; and when she did, she was, of course,
plucked from neglect, and cherished in the protecting
bosom of the society that had secluded her. She
has been worn in triumph, as the first flower of the
opera, for a couple of seasons—as you know, dear
public!

But nature exacts an equilibrium; and where there
is more public harmony, there will be more private
discord. The children of the “boot on the map,”
kick against authorities, and every tuneful rehearsal
had its offset in a quarrel. Signor Borghese (the
star-father), not being of the sect of the Apotactitæ,
who renounce property, took advantage of a tight

place in the treasury, and bought in, “for a song,”
the theatrical weapons and wardrobe. Of course,
whatever solvent might separate the other parts of the
company, they crystallized, again, around their only
possible nucleus—the prima-donna who had the toggery!
And, at this stage of the Borghese monocracy
—came Pico!

Months passed away. The story of Pico's errand
—her husband a political prisoner at Venice, and her
voice the only probable conjurer of the gold key to
release or relieve him—was told and apparently forgotten.
We heard it, and reserved our republican
sympathy till she should appear. The Mirror suggested
a concert—knowing nothing of her powers—but
her friends thought she had better bide her time with
the opera. She has done so. At half the pay of
Borghese, she played to-night for the second time, in
the opera of Lucrezia Borgia.

We have come home from hearing her—“possessed”
(as this undevoured cold duck is our witness)—
our capacity for delight plummeted—our cistern of
unshed tears strangely and pleasurably troubled—our
pen as gushing with welcome to Pico as the miraculous
oil-spring of old Rome that welcomed home the conquering
Angustus.

[Her health in this last glass of champagne—God
bless her!]

The house was crowded. Borghese sang beautifully,
and played as no other female in America can
play. She was heartily applauded—but—as on the
last opera night—the tumult of the house was reserved
for the drinking song of Pico. It is her first chance
to unchain soul and voice after nearly a whole opera
of subservient by-play. Oh how the first swooping
away into those clear silver caverns of her throat—
dropping through unfathomable love-depths with her
fearless down-cadences, and turning with an easy up
lift again toward the summit-perch of the careless
altissimo—how like an eagle's swoop it careered!
overtaking the dew falling, and the perfume rising
into the sky, and, with all its fierce swiftness, robbing
the cleft air of nothing but fragrance and softness.

[We are getting poetical—but champagne after
Pico, is, as the Venetians say, tanto amorevole! We'll
go to bed and sum up in the morning.]

Thursday Morning.—Our friend of the “Morning
News,” expresses, in his paper of to-day, a regret that
“a feeling of rivalry is encouraged between Borghese
and Pico.” We are surprised at this discouragement,
on his knowing part, of the great secret of good opera
and good everything else. When are they ever so
likely to sing so well, and to draw so well, as when

He adds, that “Pico fairly out-Pico'd Pico,” and we
should say the same of Borghese, if the name would
come as pat.

No! no! let them be rivals! What could be prettier?—more
gracefully done, and more touchingly
enlisting to the feelings—than Borghese's picking up
the wreath again, last night, and giving it generously
to Pico? We broke a new malacca stick in applauding
that action alone. Viva Borghese! Viva Pico!
You are two halves of a scissors, dear ladies, and
rivalry is your rivet. Divide the public—since both
halves are your own, after they are divided!

Pico and Borghese.—These two ladies are certainly
most poculent commodities, and the town drinks
their delicious music with unquestionable intoxication.
The crammed opera-house was as breathless
with absorbed attention last night as if Pico's rosy-lipped
cup ministered to every heart's measure of ful
ness—one palate common to all. For ourself, we confess
immeasurable delight in Pico. Her voice has a
road to the heart upon which criticism takes no toll
—the gate-opening facility of music going home. One
listens to it as Shelley seems to have listened to the
witch of Atlas—

—the very inmost tenant of your bosom, somehow,
seeming to have “expected it, all along.”

Borghese is a treasure to a town—an uncommon
creature—such an actress and artist as we shall not
see again until we deserve a benefit from the gods—
but Pico! oh, Pico is of quite another invoice of goods
from paradise. Borghese is the most ingenious harmony-pump
that, for many a year, has offered patronage
a handle—the other is a natural-well spring of
passionate and careless music, that would flow as
bountifully, for a bird to drink, as for an emperor to
stoop to. Pico's voice would cut up like a polypus
—not a fragment without the making of a woman in
it. She neither sings, nor moves, nor smiles, as if
she remembered ever doing it before; and if she has
not the great “art of concealing art” (of which we
have had our half a suspicion), she is one of those
helpless irresistibles that could as soon become invisible
as not bewitch.

The drinking song (Pico's only good chance in the
whole opera), was stunningly applauded last night,
and, at the close, a wreath was thrown to her from a
very select company in a private box, and thrown with
a pretty good aim—for she caught it upon her bosom.
Out of it—(or the place where she caught it—we
could not tell which)—dropped a sealed note, which
we trust contained a check payable in favor of the imprisoned
husband at Venice.

If we had a moderate thought during the opera of
last night, it was that there could be no question of
a keen taste for music in New York—for here was a
crowded audience, attentive, appreciative, measuring
its applause most judiciously, and leaving the house
delighted. We are sure a large opera-house would do
—with more inducements to foreign subordinates,
more enterprise to procure visits from the Parisian
and London operatics, better regulations for private
boxes, etc., etc. We think, for one, that there is no
greater pleasure, away from a man's hearth, than a
good opera.

Envy of the Rich, or, the Flying-fish Aristocracy,
and the No. 1 Passenger left behind.
—In the hurry of composition, yesterday, we stumbled
upon a similitude (a “flying-fish aristocracy”)
which, we think, expresses that transitory duration of
American “up-in-the-world,” which should make the
greater number of rich people looked upon with indulgent
affection by those left temporarily below. Of
such short-lease wings as most American “first families”
fly with, there need be little envy, one would
think—in the democratic element they drip with till
they drop again. There are families, however—a
small number—who hold their own for three or four
generations; and, in the “measureless content” of
these with their position, the democrats find offence;
but one of the most curious social problems we know
of, is the manner in which the old families of New
York are let alone, and tacitly eclipsed by the more
newly prosperous; and we must offer to our readers
a descriptive similitude for this also. (Our object, it
will be seen, is to take away the offence of aristocracy,
if possible, and induce King Public to let us cater for
them, as for all other classes, with level editorial republicanism!)

A half hour before the starting of the Oxford night
mail, a fat gentleman was discovered fast asleep in the
coach, which was still under the shed. He occupied
the back seat, and his enormous bulk filled it so completely
that there was no room for the usual fourth
inside passenger. But four seats were taken and paid
for, and the last man booked insisted on his right to a
place—fat man, or no fat man! The stout gentleman
was waked, and requested to come out till the other
three were seated.

and having mentioned his name, and inquired whether
it was not first on the book, settled his chin into his
cravat, and speedily snored again! “Is this Oxford?
—bless me, how I have slept!” said the fat man, rubbing
his eyes, when the coach door was opened the
next morning—in the same place where it stood when
he went to sleep! The driver had hitched his team to
another coach, and the three unprivileged customers
last booked were probably breakfasting in Oxford!

It strikes us that the people who are last booked, in
this community, may very well monopolize the envy
—(success in arriving at their destination of conspicuousness
being, of course, the chief matter of envy)—
and the fat sleepers, upon the usurped seats, once left
out of the proscription, the charity for “flying-fish”
easily forgives the remainder.

If the above does not please our friend “Cheap
Jemmy,” we will never do a good-natured thing again
as long as we live. If he knew Latin, we should
send him in a bill for a diaphoretic.

AFTER THE OPERA.

(Supper in 184's room at the Astor—the brigadier here
“on business”—a poulet pique, and a bottle of champagne
in silver tissue paper, also here “on business”—Eleven
O'clock, Esq., just parting from the
bell of St. Paul's, with a promise to be “round in the
morning.”)

Brig. (nodding, and taking up his glass).—Mi-boy!

184 (laying his hand on the general's arm).—Not in
such profane haste, my prompt sodger! That glass
of wine is the contemporary of bliss—sent to us to be
drank to the health of a bride, now three hours past
the irrevocable gate.

Brig. Married at eight? Do you say that? God
bless her, in a bumper! (gazes abstractedly into the
bottom of the glass, and speaks musingly.)—Ten minutes
past eleven!—Well, who's the lady, and who the
happy man?

184. One of our parish, who, though he does not
personally know us, wishes us to be made aware of
his happiness. We have written ourselves into his
bosom. God bless him for the loving door in his
eye—isn't so, my tree-sparer! So may all men take
us in! Try a bit of chicken now, general, or that
tear in your eye will fall back on an empty stomach!

Brig. And what a difference it makes—what it falls
back upon, mi-boy! The salt in a tear is not natural,
depend on it, or the in'ards would take to it more
kindly. What an etiquette of mercy it would be,
now, to make pathos and bad news matters of full-dress—never
to be alluded to in good society, till a
man has ceased, as Menenius says, “to pout upon the
morning!” What's your to-morrow's leader?

184. Not coming to business at the second glass, I
hope? Fie on you for a disrespect to the bride.
(The brigadier blushes, and covers his confusion by
reading the label on the bottle.) How enchantingly
old Belisario and his captive sung their vows of friendship
to-night! Ah, music and lights!—things are so
much finer for embellishing! Our small friendship
now, general—brought forward to the prompter's cupboard
and foot-lights—do you think it would be encored,
like that?

Brig. As you don't ask for information, mi-boy,
let's proceed to business. Can you give me an idea
of your to-morrow's editorial?

184. No!

Brig. And the boy is to come for it at seven!

184 (seizing a pen). What shall it be?

Brig. Why, there's the mud in the streets—and
the Bohemian Girl—and the wretched weather—and
the menagerie—and Vandenhoff—and Stuart's candy-shop—and
Mrs. Coles—

184. By—the—by!—a discovery!—Tryon ought
to head his play-bills with the Marsellois war-cry—
“to arms!—to arms!” I never saw a pair in my life
more exquisitely moulded and polished than Mrs.
Coles's, of the Bowery circus—as shown after her
third undoing on horseback! It takes a symmetrical
woman, of course, to stand tiptoe upon a flying horse,
and strip, from a jacketed Cracovienne to a short
sleeved evening dress—but ladies of this vocation, well
made in all other respects, are usually thin from the
elbow to the shoulder. Shall I make a “leader” of
Mrs. Coles?

Brig. Certainly not, mi-boy! nor a follower either!
Just indicate, as it were—call attention mysteriously
—hint somehow—that there is a part of the equestrian
performance that reminds you of things you saw in
Italy—statuary or something—delicately, mi-boy—
very delicately! What else have you got down there
in your memorandum-book?

184. Half a dozen topics. Here's a note that
smells of “above Bleecker,” requesting us to implore
of Japonica-dom not to give parties on opera-nights!
Really, they should not! The opera is a rare luxury,
without which a metropolis is like a saloon without a
mirror, and there should be a little combination,
among refined people—if not to give it extra support,
at least to throw no hinderance in its way. They do
this in London—(where, by the way, there are but
two operas a week, and it would be quite enough here)
—Lady Blessington, for one, never “at home” on
opera-nights, and dinner-parties are given at an earlier
hour to release people in time. The quality of the
opera depends, of course, on its enthusiastic support,
and those who can appreciate it can do no less, I
think, than to go in full dress, and go habitually. It
is far pleasanter than a party, is over at bearable bed-time,
and, just now, the company at Palmo's is too
good to be slighted. And, by the way, have you
thought how gloriously Pico has beggared the loud
trumpet we blew for her on her first appearance!
“Ants,” says the old proverb, “live safely till they
have gotten wings, and juniper is not thrown away till
it hath gotten a high top.” She is neither your ant
nor your juniper-blossom—is she general?

Brig. (who has been dozing). Not my aunt, mi-boy,
whoever you're talking of. I never had one—
hope I never shall!

184. What's that note falling out of your pocket,
meantime?

Brig. Well thought of—I brought it to you for a
paragraph. What do you think it is? A complaint
from the ladies that the young men waylay them on
the staircases!

184. Heavens and Sabines! wait till I dip my pen
in the thunder-stand! Who? How? When? How
many?

Brig. At parties—at parties—my dear boy—don't
be violent! This lady declares (brigadier opens the
note) that it is a “perfect nuisance, the mere descent
from the dressing-room to the ball-room”—“a pretty
girl has to come down a perfect ladder of boys—every
stair an engagement to dance”—“no chance for a

pick”—“her mind fatigued with the effort to remember
her partners”—“no hope of dancing with a grown-up
man from Christmas to April”—“green talk altogether”—“dreadful
sense of unripeness”—“no subject
but Pico and Polka”—“begs we will write the
boys off the staircase,” etc., etc. You see your subject.

184. Shall I tell you why that was not written by a
woman? Don't you see that if this system of long
lists of engagements were done away, a lady would
have no escape from a disagreeable partner—no plea
of too many engagements—no chance for a lie whiter
than many a truth? Don't you see, that (now duelling
is laughed at) a lady can leave out an early partner
on the list, or slip a tardy one in, with perfect
ease and comfort—distressing nobody's mamma with
fears of Hoboken! Leave the ladies alone for putting
down troublesome usages! Your letter was
written by some old coxcomb going out of fashion,
who can get nobody to dance with him, and lays it to
the boys on the staircase! Tut!

Brig. Twelve o'clock, and where's your leader?
Oh, mi-boy, think of to-morrow's paper!

184. Hang the leader! Let's go without it—once
in a way!

Brig. Gracious! no! What will the public say?
There goes one o'clock! Bed-time (for me—not for
you)—and nothing from you for the boy in the morning!
Oh, mi-boy, sit up! Go and wash your face,
and feel fresh! Write a paragraph requesting the
Mirror brides to send their champagne, hereafter, exclusively
to the talking partner! Where's my hat?
Get inspired, mi-boy, get inspired! Good night!

184. Stay—stay—stay! Listen to this! (184 reads
the foregoing dialogue to the brigadier, whose face
gradually reassumes its usual serene placidity. He
lays down his hat and picks another wing of the
chicken.)

Brig. And you have been writing this down, all the
time, with your hand deep in that old cabinet! Bless
me, what a boy you are for expedients! I thought
you was scratching autographs, or writing “Pico,”
or sketching Glenmary, or something! But you
haven't mentioned the weekly?

184. Poh! it doesn't want mentioning.

Brig. Not more than the sun and moon, and other
periodicals—but you trust the world's memory too
much, my worky! They'd forget the sun shone if it
wasn't down in the almanac! Say something!

184. Well, let's see! It's our diary of the world's
goings-on and what we think of it—published every
seventh day. It is a week's corn, ground, sifted, and
bagged, for those who can't go to mill every day. It
is a newspaper without the advertisements and other
trumpery—at half price, in consequence of lumber
left out and one postage instead of seven. It is edited
every day, and other weeklies are edited once a week.
It gives the news, the fashions, the fun, the accidents,
the operas, and our all-spice to make it keep, in a
handsome, preservable shape—bindable for reference
and re-reading—“the times” as it were, “boned and
potted.” Shall I say any more?

Brig. Three dollars a year—

184. Mum, man! Never mention money after
midnight! What will the angels say! Go to bed!
go to bed! (Exit brigadier, after a silent embrace.)

AFTER THE OPERA.

A FEW GRAVE REMARKS WHILE SUPPER IS COMING.

The Cinderella-tude of Madame Pico's own situation,
in the operatic corps, and her still disputed claim
to the “glass slipper” of preference, sent us to Palmo's,
to-night, with somewhat of an owl upon our
shoulder. We dreaded Prince Public's final choice
between her and the favorite daughter of Don Magnifico—for
the real life opera had come to its last act,
and, as she should or should not, make the most of
the opportunity (of which we had done our best to
be the “Pilgrim Alidoro”), she would, or would not,
wear to-morrow the crown of Palmo-dom. The curtain
is down, and—

ENTER SUPPER FOR NO. 184.

Before we grow too enthusiastic for the nice distinctions
of criticism, let us say a word of the general
performance of the opera. Why the frisky Signor
Antognini, whose conceit,

was cast in a part that the unemployed Perozzi would
have done so much better, and so much more agreeably
to the public, we have no Italian spectacles to
see. And—apropos—if it is the object of the company
to please and draw, why did not Borghese (except
that silver is less tractile than gold) take the second
role in this opera, as Pico did in Lucrezia Borgia?
The part sustained by Miss Moss has rather
more scope in it than that of Orsini, and how vastly
more attractive the opera, so cast, would be to the
public! Signor Tomasi showed the vertebræ in his
voice, to-night, more than he did in Belisario—probably
from stooping with difficulty to the comic; but
Sanquirico—what shall we say of his admirable personable
of Don Magnifico? We'll drink his health
by way of answer. (A lei, Sanquirico!) And so
ends our fault-finding.

SECOND GLASS.

This glass of purple Tinta, steeped in the latitude
of Italy, tastes, of course, of the climate of Pico's
voice; and we are glad to vary, with this redolent
bumper, the avenue to our heart—so breaking up the
ear's monopoly of toll. Health to Cindrella triumphant!
Her voice has a flavor—(if this wine be
like it—and it is the sun's fault if it is not like it—for
the same cupful of his mellow light fed the grape
from which gushed the wine and the lip from which
poured the melody)—worthy of the immortality of
Falernian. (For this discovery of homogeneousness
of pulp we beg a medal from the Institute.)

We were afraid, as we said before, that Pico, “like
a careless farrier, would lame her well-shod glory
with the last nail,” but she sang throughout with unblemished
deliciousness, and the “piu mestar,” at the
close, fairly took the town! Nothing has been heard
like it, in this city, since Malibran, either in voice or
execution. We have made up our mind about Pico.
Her abandon is like the apparent carelessness of all
kinds of genius—fearless trust after finished study.
Of that desperate and intoxicating let-go, Borghese
has none. She is artistic and careful in the most passionate
extremity, dying, even, “with her wits all
about her.” Pico fastens each link of the composer's
melody in her brain, with workmanlike fidelity; but
when she comes out from her music-smithy, she
brings with her no memory of the clink of hammer
and rivet. In that relying forgetfulness lies the mystery
of her charm. It is recognised, by the instinct
men have that this is the quality of those who do
best—statesmen or soldiers, poets or lovers—the most
successful, in all enterprises, throwing themselves on
what they have once made up their minds to, as a
bird launches from the cliff. Nature prodigally seconds
the unhesitating trust of Pico's execution. Her
voice follows her concerted thought with the certainty
of a shadow and the fulness of a floodtide. The
plentitude of every shade and semi-tone, insures,
in the first five minutes of hearing her, an absence
of all dread of flaw or falling off—an assurance,

that whatever height or depth she stoops her neck to
swoop for, it will bring, for the listener,

WE DRINK TO THE JACOB'S LADDER OF MUSIC.

A new light breaks upon us as to the uses of the
opera. As (to the wicked) common speech is a convenience
and swearing a luxury, so poetry is a convenience
to passion, and music its luxury. An unharmonized
shout—a succession of cries—may mean
anything; but a chorus, or a concerted transition of
cries, has a meaning to convey floodtides out of the
soul. Poetry may fall cold upon the eye, but music
must melt in the ear. These premises allowed, the
opera becomes (does it not?) a healthful vent to the
passions of a metropolis—a chance (for those who
long to swear and do violence), by a more innocent
“giving way,”

How common the feeling “to want a spree!” and
who that for three hours has choked back tears in his
throat, and been enraptured with a contralto across
the footlights, is not ready to go to bed like a gentleman?
An opera is a blessed succedaneum to the
many. To the few it is the loan of a dictionary from
Heaven! Thoughts otherwise mute—feelings whose
dumbness is the inner man buried alive, leap to free-breathing
utterance with music. It is for this reason
that an unknown language is the best vehicle for an
opera. We wish to hear the harmony, and let our
souls furnish the articulation. Don't you see, now,
my dear “Bohemian Girl!” the plain reason of the
platitude of English opera! Italian music has words
to it, and so has a dancing-girl a carotid artery—but
you wish to feel your own heart beat delightfully, and
not to count the quickening pulses of Taglioni's—
you wish to embark your own thoughts in music's enchanted
boat, and not see how it was first laden with
other people's. A man's soul can have nothing in it
unsaid, when he wants a libretto to help him listen
understandingly to Pico!

And now, having translated into grammatical English,
the inarticulate contents of a chicken's breast,
and a pint-bottle of Tinta (for the benefit of a public
to whom these eloquent midnight companions would
otherwise have spoken in vain), let us to bed—apropos-imously
remarking, that, in the paragraph precedent
to this, there is a hint as to the uses of an opera,
worthy the attention of the society of moral reform.
As the clergy are, probably, asleep at this hour (3
o'clock), we say no more.

(Exit “184,” with a candle.)

The Mirror held up to the Times.—It is a
trick of ours to begin at the other end, when the subject
would otherwise open dry—bespeaking attention,
as it were, by first naming the inducement. As we
have lately been pulled up for not giving credit, we
may as well mention, that we took this peculiarity of
style from Mother Goose's politic inducement to the
five reluctant patrons of the milkpail:—

Silk gown:—we are about to show how we have
arrived at the conclusion, that, in the state of the
country now “opening up,” it will be necessary for
every gentleman to be a pugilist.

We beg to premise, that the state of things we are
about to show forth is by no means a sign of republican
retrogression. We are about to record no dis
paragement to the outline of the republic. It is a
pyramid, in fair progression, but refinement sits within
it like an hourglass. Half-way up the ascent of
political perfection, the social diagram within is at its
inevitable “tight place;” and while we remember on
what a breadth of polite foundation public opinion
built up society at the Revolution, and while we believe
that, half a century hence, we shall have as refined
standards as any country on earth, we believe
that, now, there is a squeeze upon good-breeding in
this country (less protection for private rights and
feelings than there was once, and will be again), and it
is as well that those who are to suffer by the tight
place should be prepared to stand it.

To protect that upon which the proprietor has a right
to put a value, is the object of law and civilization.
Five dollars, paid back, will satisfy a man who has
been robbed of five dollars; but the thief goes to
prison besides. A wound given to a man is soon
healed and forgotten, but the assailant is condemned
for a felon. A newspaper-attack upon a man, for peculiarities
with which the public have no business
may be a deeper offence to him than the loss of half
his fortune, yet the attempt at remedy by law is worse
than bearing it in silence. The damages given are
trifling and nominal, and the prosecution propagates
the evil.

The above is a skeleton statement, to which the
memory of every newspaper-reader will supply the
flesh-and-blood illustrations. A late decision in Massachusetts,
justifying an unnecessary libel on the
ground of its truth, threw off, to our thinking, the last
skin of the metamorphosis. There is left, now, no
protection, by law or public opinion, to anything but
the pocket and the person of the citizen. His private
feelings, his domestic peace, his hard-won respect
from other men, his consciousness of respectability
abroad—commodities of more value to him than
money—are outlawed, and, if wronged, left to his individual
avenging.

Few republicans need to be told that the law casts
no formidable shadow unless shone upon by public
opinion. The law of libel is powerless, because the
license of the press is agreeable to the public. If it
were not so, the libeller would not find himself, after
conviction, still on the sunny side of public favor—
nor would judges charge juries with the little emphasis
they do—nor would juries give, as they do, damages
that turn the plaintiff into ridicule!

There is another thing that republicans need not be
told: that where a just remedy is denied by the law,
the individual takes the penalty into his own hands—
the same public that left him to administer it, kindly
warding off the law when he is tried for the retributive
assault and battery. A case of this sort lately
occurred in the tabernacle city. A family of the
most liberal habits and highest private worth—just
risen to wealth by two generations of honest industry
—chose to marry a daughter with entertainments proportionate
to their fortune. A malicious editor, avowedly
“to make his paper sell,” and for no other reason,
came out with a foul-mouthed ridicule of the
festivities, that completely destroyed the happiness of
the brightest domestic event of their lives. One hundred
thousand dollars would have been no inducement
to the family to suffer the pain and mortification that
were, and will be for years, the consequences of that
unprovoked outrage. But where lay the remedy?
The law would perpetuate the ridicule, without giving
damages that would outweigh the additional sale
of the paper. It chanced, in this case, that the injured
man was of athletic habits and proportions, and
the editor was small and puny. The plaintiff (that
would have been, had there been public opinion to
give power to the law) called on the defendant (that
would have been) and whipped him severely; and

when tried for the assault and battery, was punished
with a fine next to nothing. The public opinion of
the city of “broad philacteries” virtually justified
both outrages. But where would have been the remedy,
if the physical superiority had been on the other
side, or if the popular blight-monger had been an
unassailable cripple?

Another case of legal justification of club-law lately
occurred in this city. It is so marked an instance,
also, of the social impunity of printed injuries (the inflictor,
Mr. Gliddon, being still a popular lecturer,
and glorified daily by the model family-newspaper of
Boston), that we venture to quote three or four passages
from the libel. Mr. Cooley, the flogger, had
described, with humorous ridicule, some people he
saw in Egypt, and Mr. Gliddon takes it for granted
(though it is denied by Mr. Cooley) that the ridicule
was aimed at himself and his father. A pamphlet of
thirty or forty pages of abuse of Cooley is the retort
to this supposed allusion, and from a notice of the
pamphlet in a daily paper, we copy three or four of
its quoted sentences:—

“If, since the publication of `The American in
Egypt,' it be a work of supererogation on his part
(Gliddon's) to place upon public record the petulant
vagaries of an upstart, to recall the petty shifts of an
itinerant miser, to unmask the insidious insipidities of
a would-be author, or to refute the falsehoods of a
literary abortion, it will be allowed that the deed is
none of his seeking, but has been fastened on him, as
the only course within the letter of American laws
whereby a poltroon can receive chastisement from
those who would have gladly vindicated their honor
by means to them far more satisfactory.”

“Again Mr. Gliddon says: `I grieved that, not having
been gifted with prophetic vision. I neglected to
apply it [the corbash] in the Thebaid to Mr. Cooley
himself, for I may never have such an eligible chance
again.”'

“Had he been in Cairo at the time [of my departure
from that city], he should have laid aside all official
character, even at the risk of eventual censure,
and Mr. Cooley should not have perpetrated his pasquinade
in `Arabia Petrea and Palestine,' before he
[Gliddon] had hung a `cowskin on those recreant
limbs!”'

“If he [Gliddon] do not now apply a horsewhip to
Mr. Cooley's shoulders, it is solely because, in a community
among which both are residing, the satisfaction
he should derive from a physical expression of
his obligations to Mr. Cooley, might prove more expensive
than the pleasure is worth.”

“Our relative positions have been, and, so far as
may depend on him, will remain perfectly distinct;
for possible affluence will never raise Mr. Cooley to
the social standing of a gentleman.”

“Mr. Cooley's fractiousness is confined to paper
pellets. Innate cowardice is a guaranty for his never
resorting to a different manifestation of his vicious,
though innocuous waspishness.”

The first time Mr. Cooley saw Mr. Gliddon after
these expressions of restrained warlike impatience, he
gave him a beating. Mr. Gliddon prosecuted him for
assault and battery, recovered “five dollars damages,”
and went on lecturing with high popular favor. What
was Mr. Cooley's remedy for being published as “no
gentlemen,” a “miser,” and a “coward,” who had
three times escaped personal chastisement? Mr.
Cooley is not the “loafer” these epithets would seem
to make him. He is a man of fortune, and a most
excellent citizen, with highly-respectable connexions,
and a hearth blessed with the presence of beauty and
refinement. A duel would have brought upon him
a ridicule more formidable than personal danger—the
law on the subject is a cipher—and, to remove the
pointed finger from waiting on him at his very table,
he was obliged to chastise the man who stigmatized
him.

One more proof of the same new state of things,
though in a different line. A highly-educated young
lawyer in this city, in canvassing for the whigs, during
the late political contest, was severely whipped by
three members of the leading democratic club. He
lay a-bed a week, recovering from his bruises, and, at
the end of that time, walked into a meeting of the
club referred to and demanded a hearing. Order was
called, and he stated his case, and demanded of the
president of the club that a ring should be formed,
and his antagonists turned in to him—one after the
other. It was enthusiastically agreed to, and the
three bullies being present, were handed over to him
and handsomely flogged, one after the other. Of
course this is not all we are to hear of such a man;
but who will deny, that when he comes to stand for
congress, he will not have counterbalanced, by this
act, the disadvantage of belonging to one of the most
aristocratic families of the city?

We are expressing no discontent with our country.
We are playing the Mirror only—showing the public
its face, that it may not forget “what manner of man”
it is. We have shown by facts, that there is no more
remedy among us, for the deepest injuries that can
be inflicted, than there is among wild beasts in the
forest. Duelling is as good as abolished, we rejoice
with all our hearts—but it owes its abolition to the
country's having sunk below the chivalric level at
which that weed could alone find nourishment. We
leave to others to draw conclusions and suggest remedies.
We are not reformers. We submit. But we
should think a man as improvident, not forthwith to be
rubbing up his sparring, as a gentleman would have
been in Charles the Second's time, to have walked
abroad without his sword. They have a saying in
the Mediterranean (from the custom of yoking a hog
with a donkey together for draught), “You must
plough with a hog if you stay in Minorca!”

Rev. Sidney Smith's description of himself from a
letter to a correspondent of the New York American.—
“I am seventy-four years old; and being a canon of
St. Paul's, in London, and rector of a parish in the
country, my time is equally divided between town and
country. I am living amidst the best society in the
metropolis, am at ease in my circumstances, in tolerable
health, a mild whig, a tolerating churchman, and
much given to talking, laughing, and noise. I dine
with the rich in London, and physic the poor in the
country—passing from the sauces of Dives to the sores
of Lazarus. I am, upon the whole, a happy man,
have found the world an entertaining world, and am
heartily thankful to Providence for the part allotted to
me in it.”

We can add a touch or two to the auto-sketch of
the witty prebend, who, we think, is one of the men
most thought about just now. He is a fat man,
weighing probably between two and three hundred
pounds, with a head and stomach very church-man-like
—(that is to say in the proportion of a large church
with a small belfry)—a most benevolent yet humorous
face, and manners of most un-English boisterousness
and cordiality. At a party he is followed about, like
a shepherd by his sheep, and we remember, once, at
his own house, seeing Lord Byron's sister, the Hon.
Mrs. Leigh, one of the laughing flock browsing upon
the wit that sprung up around him. One would
think, to see him and know his circumstances, that
the gods had done their best to make one of the Mr.
Smiths perfectly happy.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

(In reply to our respected private correspondent, and the
editor with his puddle against every man, and every man's
inkstand against him.)

When is a statesman beyond accusation? Not while
he is still armed in the arena!—NOT while he has
neither dismounted from the car of ambition, nor,
even once, made sign to the world, that he would fain
stop and turn his face to his Maker!

We are understood as referring to Mr. Adams.
We consider this present active member of congress
as, beyond competition, the most potent spirit in
America. “Venerable” he is—and “his hand trembles”—but
his venerableness is a cavern of power, and
his uplifted forefinger

We know there is a level on the mountain of life,
where the air is pure and cold—a height at which impurity
can scarce come, more, between the climber
and his God—but, it is above where the lightning comes
from—it is above the dark cloud where sleeps the
thunder, collected from below, and charged with inseparable
good and harm. This incorrupt level is, at
least, one step above the cloud in which Mr. Adams
has pertinaciously lingered; and if his friends insist
that he has been long enough lost to common scrutiny
to have reached the upper side of the cloud of dangerous
power, we must be excused for pointing our conductor
till he is done stirring in the thunder.

Persuade us that Mr. Adams is so “venerable” as
to have outlived all liability to the license described
by the poet:—

Persuade us that a vindictive man may be safely bowed
before, for an angel, with his hand, for the first time,
fetterlessly clutched on this world's thunderbolts!
Persuade us that Mr. Adams could not stoop his
statesmanship to resent, and that he is not one of those
dreaders of political extinction, who feel that “not to
be at all is worse than to be in the miserablest condition
of something.” Persuade us, in short, that no
provocation in argument, no lull of responsibility, no
oracular unanswerableness, no appetite for the exercise
of power, no
could tempt Mr. Adams, with his present undiminished
mental vigor, to swerve a hair line from good—by
weight thrown upon public measure, or by influence
wrongfully exercised over the fair fame of the dead
and the private feelings of the living—persuade us
of all this, and we will allow that he is beyond—
“venerably” beyond—the remindings of human censure!

But now—having arms-lengthed it, in reply to a
very formal letter we received last evening condemning
the admission into our columns of a communication
accusatory of Mr. Adams—let us come closer to the
reader with a little of our accustomed familiarity.

We were called upon a day or two since, by one
of the first scholars and most intelligent of business-men
among us—this communication in his hand.
He left us to read it at our leisure. We, at first,
were unpleasantly affected by it, and slipped it upon
our refusal hook—sorry that so great a man as Mr.
Adams should have an unbeliever (and so weighty an
unbeliever), in greatness so ready for its closing seal.
We should have stopped at this regret, probably, and
only thought of the subject again when returning the
manuscript, but that we had been previously impressed
with our friend's courage in historical justice—on a
wholly different subject. This brought about the
sober second thought, and we turned it over somewhat
as follows:—

Of the allowed Upper Triumvirate of this country
—Clay, Jackson, and Adams—the peaceful good
name of the first is, just now, closed for history, by
his willing relinquishment of public action. The
world owes him the glorified repose for which he has
signified his desire. The second has also retired;
and, though he sometimes has sent his invincible
banner to wave again in the political field, it would
be a harsh pen that would transmute, and make readable
by judicious eyes, the silly abuses syringed at
the venerable old chieftain by the Bedouin squirt of
the “Express.”

The third—Mr. Adams—we could not but feel, at
once, was off the pedestal where the world had willingly
placed him, and had come down, once more

(We shall be pardoned, by the way, for quoting what
is recalled by this chance-sprung quotation—a comparison
which seems to us singularly to picture Mr.
Clay and Mr. Adams as to loftiness of public life and
motive.) Dante says:—

We felt, at once, that this latter character—this
aliquis in omnibus, nihil in singulis—was, as displayed
in Mr. Adams's career, rather the mettle of invincible
obstinacy and unrest acting upon strong talent, than
the ring of the clear metal of human greatness. There
was nothing in Mr. Adams's life of toil that had not
fed his innate passion for antagonism. He was a born
ascetic, in whose nostrils the fiery perils of other men
were but offensive smoke—who had no temptation to
softer pleasure than a pasquinade against a political
rival—who had made the most of the morality which
came natural to him, and which, in this land, covers
more sins than charity. He was not, like Clay and
Jackson, great in spite of the impassioned nature for
which we (so inconsistently), love the man and disclaim
his greatness. He has been the terror of his
time for wounds worse than murder—yet gave no
stab that could be “stopped with parsley.” He
needed no shirt of penance to make him remember
that

He has profited by men's not remembering that (in
the zoology of the pleasures), the sin of the sloth
were a merit in the armadillo—one hating to move,
and the other hating to be still, and both tested by
their activity of motion. In short, Mr. Adams—
though he has unquestionably walked to the topmost
stone of the temple of statesmanship, and is now the
third greatest man in the country that shakes under
him—has exclusively pampered his own desires, topmost
and undermost, by the practice of the virtues
that have shielded him. The toils that have advanced
him were begun in the pastime of an aristocratic
youth; and position, up to quite the end of that
“second heat” of his ambition-race, was an inheritance
perseveringly thrust on him. Can such a man, while
our destiny is still hourly hanging on his lips, be
“venerable” beyond the possibility of censure?

With this unwilling mental review of the “boiled
peas” of Mr. Adams's pilgrimage to greatness—unwillingly,
as it was irresistibly and truthfully disparaging—we
reverted to our first picture of his present
position. We had been truly, and even tearfully, affected,
on seeing the old man, at the late festival of
the Historical Society—doubtless very near his grave,
but fighting his way determinately backward through
the gate of death—and we expressed ourself in terms
of high respect and honor, when we wrote of it the
morning after. It is a recompensing ordinance of
Nature, that the glory and virtues of a great man accompany
his person and his sins lie where they first
fall—in the furrow of history. It is hard to look upon
any man's face, and remember ill of him; and there
is many a great man, who has a halo where he comes,
and none where he is heard of.

We remembered nothing disparaging to Mr. Adams
that evening. But in our office, with a shade drawn
over our eyes, to compel a disagreeable decision of
duty, we saw that the age and decrepitude, which
apparently exacted submission to his will, had left no
joint open in his harness, loosened no finger upon his
weapons of attack. He can defend himself—he has
hundreds to defend him, should he be silent. His
much talked-of “diary” lacks no evidence that truth
can furnish; and if the charges against him are “mere
cobwebs in a church bell,” the best of prayers is, that
he may burst them with one stroke of living triumph,
and not leave even that slight violence to be done by
the knell of his departure.

The last thought that came to us, and the only one
we thought necessary for a preface to the communication,
was, that now would probably be the time chosen
by Mr. Adams himself for denying (and they MUST
BE DENIED!) these indictments against his greatness.
The five years' silence that will follow his death, had
better harden over no ulcer—to be re-opened and
cleansed, to the world's offence, hereafter. We took
some credit to ourself, for simply saying this, without
recording what we have been compelled to record now
—the reasons of our thinking gravely of the communication.
We would have taken the other side
and entered into the defence quite as willingly—but
the writer, as well as Mr. Adams, is a man not to be
denied a hearing. We may perhaps be permitted to
close this article—written in a most unwonted vein,
for us—with a little editorial comfort from Shakspere:—

“Money Article” on the Opera.—We were delighted
to hear it whispered about at the opera, last
night, that there is a movement among the people of
taste and influence to “set up,” by a liberal subscription,
the present excellent, but impoverished and
struggling operatic company. The first thought that
occurs to any one hearing of this, would, probably, be
a surprise that, with such full houses as have graced
the opera, they have not been thriving to the fullest
extent of reasonable expectation. We understand,
however, that it is quite the contrary. When the
present company commenced their engagement, there
was an arrearage of gas expenses to be paid up, the
license was to be renewed, at $500; and the house,
even when full, gives but a slender dividend over the
expenses of the orchestra, scenery, lights, stage properties,
and dresses. At the only “division of the
spoils” that has yet been made, Madame Pico received
but sixty dollars—so insufficient a sum being
all that this admirable singer has received for several
months' waiting, and one month's playing and singing!
Her dresses alone cost her twice the sum! Borghese
received twice this amount, but the other performers,
of course, much less even than Pico.

In the history of the first introduction of Italian
music into England, in 1692, it is stated that the singers
(an “Italian lady,” a basso, and a soprano) were
taken up by two spirited women of fashion, wives of
noblemen, who arranged benefit concerts at their own
houses, for the “charming foreigners,” and inviting
their friends as if to a ball—demanding five guineas
for each invitation! The rage for these expensive
concerts is recorded as a curious event of the time,
and it was a grievous mark of unfashionableness not
to be honored with a ticket.

The American public is a hard master to these
children of the sun. They take no comfort among
us, if they lay up no money. Our climate is both
dangerous and disagreeable! Our usages, and prejudices,
and manner of life, all at variance with-theirs!
Their hearts are bleak here, and their pockets at
least should have a warm lining! And (by the way)
see what a difference there is, even between our country
and chilly England, in the way society treats
them! We chance to possess an autograph letter of
Julia Grisi's, given us by the lady to whom it was
addressed—a daughter of Lucien Bonaparte married
to an English nobleman. Look at the position this
little chance record reveals of a prima donna in England:—

We chance to have another dramatic autograph, a
note of Leontine Fay's, given us by the same noble
lady (and we may say here, apropos, that we should
be very happy to show these, and others, to persons
curious in autographs)—showing the same necessary
reliance on special patronage:—

This is dated from the French theatre in London,
but we treasured up the autograph with no little avarice,
for Leontine Fay was in the height of her glory,
in Paris, when we first went abroad; and, to us, she
seemed a new revelation of things adorable. She
was made for the stage by nature—as scenery is
adapted by coarse lines for distant perspective. Her
eyes were dark, luminous, and of a size that gave
room for the whole audience to “repose on velvet” in
them.—But we wander! We resume our subject,
after saying that we never envied prince or king, till
we heard, at that time, that Leontine Fay passionately
loved the prince royal—the young duke of Orleans.
He is dead, she is grown ugly, and we are left
to admire Pico. “Much after this fashion,” etc., etc.

Grave people (though by no means all grave people)
are inclined to bid the opera “stand aside” as a
thing unholy. We think this is a mistake. We believe

music to be medicinal to body and soul. With
entire reverence, we take leave to remind the religious
objector of the cure of Saul, and to quote the passage:—

“But the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil
spirit from the Lord troubled him. And Saul's servants said
unto him, Behold now, an evil spirit troubleth thee. Let our
Lord now command thy servants which are before thee, to
seek out a man who is a cunning player on a harp; and it
shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon
thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.

“And it came to pass that when the evil spirit from God
was upon Saul, that David took a harp and played with his
hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil
spirit departed from him.”

The medicinal value attached to music by the ancients
is also shown in the education of Moses at the
court of Pharaoh. Clemens Alexandrinus has recorded
that “Moses was instructed by the Egyptians
in arithmetic, geometry, rhythm, harmony, but, above
all, in medicine and music.” Miriam sang and danced
in costume, and David “in his linen ephod,” and the
only reproach made by Laban to Jacob, for carrying
off his two daughters, was, that he did not give him
the opportunity to send him away “with mirth and with
songs, with tabret and with harp.” We refer to these
historic proofs, to remind the objecting portion of the
community that scenic musical representation was a
vent for domestic and religious feeling among the ancients,
and that, in an opera—particularly one unaccompanied
by modern ballet—there is no offence to
moral feeling, but, on the contrary, authorized good.

To revert to our purpose, in this article—(chronologically,
somewhat spready!)—We do not know
what shape the aroused liberality of the wealthy classes
of New York will take, but we should think that
Madame Pico—(as she has given us the most pleasure,
at the greatest expense to herself, and is an unprotected
and exemplary woman, alone among us)—
should have a special benefit by subscription concert,
or some other means as exclusive to herself. We
suggest it—but we presume we are not the first it has
occurred to. Will the wealthy gentlemen who are
nightly seen in the dress-circles, delighted with her
exquisite music, turn the subject over at their luxurious
firesides?

To and arout our Correspondents.—We wish
to “define our position” with regard to our correspondents
and their opinions.

Were an editor to profess an agreement of opinion
with every writer for his paper, he would either claim
a superhuman power of decision on all possible subjects,
at first sight, or he would exclude communications
on all subjects, except his own mental hobbies
and matters of personal study and acquaintance. To
avoid both horns of this fool's dilemma, he opens a
correspondence column, in which anything (short of an
invasion of a cardinal virtue, or violation of a palpable
truth) may very properly and irresponsibly appear.
The only questions the editor asks himself are, whether
it will interest his readers, and whether it is worth its
space in the paper.

But there are people for whom it is necessary that
we should go back to the very catechism of political
economy, and show upon what principle is founded
the expediency of a FREE PRESS—a press untrammelled
by a king in a kingdom, and by the sovereign republicans
in a republic.

Opinions have been well likened to steam—powerless
when diffused abroad, resistless when shut in and
denied expansion. The unconscious apostleship of
Mr. Adams—procuring an explosion in favor of abolition,
by his obstinacy in provoking an undue suppression
of the subject—is a striking illustration of this.
Nothing makes less impression on the mind than ab
stract principles to which there is no opposition—
nothing is dearer to the heart than opinions for which
we have been called on to contend and suffer. A
free press, therefore, keeping open gate for all subjects
not prohibited by law and morals, is far safer
than a press over-guarded in its admissions to the
public eye.

Having thus repeated, as it were, a page of the
very spelling-book of freedom, let us bespeak, of our
subscribers, a let-off, as far as we personally are concerned,
for any decent opinions expressed under the
head of “correspondence.” We throw open that part
of our paper. It is interesting to know what people
think who do not agree with us. We court variety.
We would not (in anything but love) be called a bigot.
New opinions, even the truest, are reluctantly
received, and, we think, very often culpably distrusted.
As far, therefore, as the yea or nay may go, on any
proper subject, we care not a fig which side writes
first to us, and we hereby disclaim responsibility for
all articles under “our correspondence,” except on the
score of morals and readableness.

The Opera.—The Puritani is one of those operas
with which musical criticism has little or nothing
to do. If only tolerably sung, the feeling of the audience
goes on before—making no stay with fault-finding.
The applause last night, after a most limping
and ill-paced duett between Tomasi and Valtellina,
was tempestuous; and Antognini, in one passage, ran
off his voice, and was gone for several notes in some
unknown region, and yet, on spreading out his hands
immediately after, there was great approbation by the
audience! Great effort was made by the audience to
encore “Suoni la tromba,” but the two bases thought
more basely of their bases than the audience, and did
not repeat it. Is there no way to implore Valtellina
to abate a little of his overreaching of voice, in that
superb invocation? He overdoes it terribly.

We are not writing in very good humor, we are
afraid—but the enthusiasm of a crammed house needs
no propping. We would not find fault if they needed
our praise. Borghese did well—but will do better at
the next representation. She would sing with fuller
tone for a little egg beat up with brandy. We longed
to unreef her voice—in some way crowd a little more
abandon into it. She acted as she always does—to a
charm.

Pico was in one of the proscenium boxes, looking
very charming, and evidently enjoying the whole opera
with un-envious enthusiasm. She went with a
bouquet for Borghese—so said a bird in our ear.

OLE BULL'S NIAGARA.

(AN HOUR BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE.)

Saddle, as, of course, we are, under any very striking
event, we find ourselves bestridden, now and then,
with a much wider occupancy than the plumb-line
of a newspaper column. Ole Bull possesses us over
our tea-table; he will possess us over our supper-table—his
performance of Niagara equi-distant between
the two. We must think of him and his violin for
this coming hour. Let us take pen and ink into our
confidence.

The “origin of the harp” has been satisfactorily
recorded. We shall not pretend to put forward a
credible story of the origin of the violin; but we wish
to name a circumstance in natural history. The
house-cricket that chirps upon our hearth, is well
known as belonging to the genus Pneumora. Its insect
size consists almost entirely of a pellucid abdomen,

crossed with a number of transverse ridges. This,
when inflated, resembles a bladder, and upon its tightened
ridges the insect plays like a fiddler, by drawing
its thin legs over them. The cricket is, in fact, a
living violin; and as a fiddler is “scarce himself”
without his violin, we may call the cricket a stray
portion of a fiddler.

Ole Bull “is himself” with his violin before him—
but without it, the commonest eye must remark that
he is of the invariable build of the restless searchers
after something lost—the build of enthusiasts—that is
to say, chest enormous, and stomach, if anything,
rather wanting! The great musician of Scripture, it
will be remembered, expressed his mere mental affliction
by calling out “My bowels! my bowels!” and,
after various experiments on twisted silk, smeared
with the white of eggs, and on single threads of the
silk-worm, passed through heated oil, the animal fibre
of cat-gut has proved to be the only string that answers
to the want of the musician. Without trying to reduce
these natural phenomena to a theory (except by
suggesting that Ole Bull may very properly take the
cricket as an emblem of his instinctive pursuit), we
must yield to an ominous foreboding for this evening.
The objection to cat-gut as a musical string is its
sensibility to moisture; and in a damp atmosphere it
is next to impossible to keep it in tune. The string
comes honestly enough by its sensitiveness (as any
one will allow who has seen a cat cross a street after
a shower)—but, if the cat of Ole Bull's violin had the
least particle of imagination in her, can what is left of
her be expected to discourse lovingly of her natural
antipathy—a water-fall?

But—before we draw on our gloves to go over to
Palmo's—a serious word as to what is to be attempted
to-night.

Old Bull is a great creature. He is fitted, if ever
mortal man was, to represent the attendant spirit in
Milton, who

but it seems to us that, without a printed programme,
showing what he intends to express besides the mere
sound of waters, he is trusting far too rashly to the
comprehension of his audience and their power of
musical interpretation. He is to tell a story by music!
Will it be understood?

We remember being very much astonished, a year
or two ago, at finding ourself able to read the thoughts
of a lady of this city, as she expressed them in an admirable
improvisation upon the piano. The delight
we experienced in this surprise induced us to look
into the extent to which musical meaning had been
perfected in Europe. We found it recorded that a
Mons. Sudre, a violinist of Paris, had once brought
the expression of his instrument to so nice a point
that he “could convey information to a stranger in
another room,” and it is added that, upon the evidence
thus given of the capability of music, it was proposed
to the French government to educate military bands
in the expression of orders and heroic encouragements
in battle! Hayden is criticised by a writer on music
as having failed in attempting (in his great composition
“The Seasons”) to express “the dawn of day,”
“the husbandman's satisfaction,” “the rustling of
leaves,” “the running of a brook,” “the coming on
of winter,” “thick fogs,” etc., etc. The same writer
laughs at a commentator on Mozart, who, by a “second
violin quartette in D minor,” imagines himself
informed how a loving female felt on being abandoned,
and thought the music fully expressed that it was
Dido! Beethoven undertook to convey distinct pictures
in his famous Pastoral Symphony, but it was
thought at the time that no one would have distinguished
between his musical sensations on visiting
the country and his musical sensations while sitting
beside a river—unless previously told what was coming!

Still, Ole Bull is of a primary order of genius, and
he is not to wait upon precedent. He has come to
our country, an inspired wanderer from a far away
shore, and our greatest scenic feature has called on
him for an expression of its wonders in music. He
may be inspired, however, and we, who listen, still
be disappointed. He may not have felt Niagara as we
did. He may have been subdued where a meaner
spirit would be aroused—as

(Seven o'clock, and time to go.)

(AFTER THE PERFORMANCE.)

We believe that we have heard a transfusion into
music—not of “Niagara,” which the audience seemed
bona-fide to expect, but—of the pulses of the human
heart AT Niagara. We had a prophetic boding of the
result of calling the piece vaguely “Niagara”—the
listener furnished with no “argument,” as a guide
through the wilderness of “treatment” to which the
subject was open. This mistake allowed, however,
it must be said that Ole Bull has, genius-like, refused
to mis-interpret the voice within him—refused to play
the charlatan, and “bring the house down”—as he
might well have done by any kind of “uttermost,” from
the drums and trumpets of the orchestra.

The emotion at Niagara is all but mute. It is a
“small, still voice” that replies within us to the thunder
of waters. The musical mission of the Norwegian
was to represent the insensate element as it was to
him—to a human soul, stirred in its seldom-reached
depths by the call of power. It was the answer to
Niagara that he endeavored to render in music—not
the call! We defer attempting to read further, or
rightly, this musical composition till we have heard
it again. It was received by a crowded audience, in
breathless silence, but with no applause.

Miss Julia Northall's first appearance as a public
singer was very triumphant. If her heart had not
kept beating just under her music-maker, she would
have made much better music, however. When we
tell the lovely debutante, that persons in besieged
fortresses can detect the direction of the enemy's approach
under ground, by placing sanded drums on
the surface, which betray the strokes of the mining
pickaxes by the vibrations of the particles, she will
understand how the beating of her heart may disturb
the timbre of her voice—to say nothing of the disturbance
in the air by the accelerated beating, of the
anxious hearts of her admirers! She has great advantages—a
rich voice deep down with an upper
chamber in it (what the musicians call a contralto
sfogato), and a kind of personal beauty susceptible of
great stage embellishments. “Modest assurance”
(with a preponderance of assurance if anything), is her
great lack.

Sanquirico sang admirably—but his black coat
spoiled it for all but the cognoscenti.

We came out of the opera-house amid a shower of
expressions of disappointment, and we beg pardon of
“the town” for remembering what Antigenides of
Athens said to a musical pupil who was once too little
applauded. “The next time you play,” said Antigenides,
“shall be to me and the Muses.”

The two new Fashions, White Cravats and
Ladies' Tarpaulins.—Here and there a country
reader will, perhaps, require to be informed that no
man is stylish, now, “out” in the evening, without a

white cravat. To those who frequent the opera this
will be no news, of course; as no eye could have
failed to track the “milky way,” around the semicircle,
from stage-box to stage-box. The fact thus
recorded, however, we proceed to the diagnosis of the
fashion (and of another fashion, of which we shall
presently speak)—premising only that we are driven
to the discussion of these comparatively serious
themes, by the frivolous character of other news, and
the temporary public surfeit of politics, scandal, and
murder.

The white cravat was adopted two years since, in
London, as the mark of a party—“Young England.”
Our readers know, of course, that for ten years, they
have been worn only by servants in that country, and
that a black coat and white cravat were the unmistakable
uniform of a family butler. The cravat having
been first worn as the distinction of a certain reforming
club, in Cromwell's parliament, however, the
author of Vivian Grey adopted it as the insignium of
the new political party, of which he is the acknowledged
leader; and, as the king of the white cravats, he
has set a fashion for America. The compliment we
pay him is the greater, by the way, that we do not
often copy the tight-legged nation in our wearables.

It was established in Brummell's time that a white
cravat could not be successfully tied, except upon the
critical turn preceding the reaction of a glass of champagne
and a cup of green tea. A felicitous dash of
inspired dexterity is the only thing to be trusted, and
failure is melancholy! As to dressiness, a white cravat
is an intensifier—making style more stylish, and the
lack of it more observable; but artistically it is only
becoming to light complexions—by its superior whiteness,
producing an effect of warmth on a fair skin,
but impoverishing the brilliancy of a dark one. As a
sign of the times, the reappearance of the white cravat
is the forerunner of a return to old-fashioned
showiness in evening dress, and, as the wheel comes
round again, we shall revive tights, buckles, and shoes
—expelling the levelling costume of black cravat and
boots, and making it both expensive and troublesome
to look like a gentleman after candlelight. So tilts
the plank in republics—aristocratic luxury going up
as aristocratic politics are going down!

But what shall we say of trains and tarpaulins for
ladies wear! Jack's hat, copied exactly in white satin,
is the rage for a head-dress, now—(worn upon the
side of the head with a ruinous feather)—and a velvet
train is about becoming indispensable to a chaperon!
It will be a bold poor man that will dare to marry a
lady ere long—what with feathers and trains and
pages' wages! We rejoice that we had our fling in
the era of indifferent pocket. Keep the aristocracy
unemployed on politics for another administration or
two, and we shall drive matrimony to the extremities
of society—none but the very rich, or very poor, able
to afford the luxury!

Merry Christmas.—Our paper of this evening—
(Christmas eve)—is to be read by the light of the
“YULE LOG,”—or whatever else represents the bright
centre around which, dear reader! your family does
its Christmas assembling. We shall perhaps amuse
you by suggesting a comparison between the elegant
lamp, which diffuses its light over your apartment,
and the expedient resorted to by your English ancestors
to brighten the hall for their Christmas evening.
“I myself,” says an old historian, “have seen table-cloths,
napkins, and towels, which being taken foul
from the table, have been cast into the fire, and there
they burned before our faces upon the hearth.” This,
of course, was by way of illustrating the greasy habits
of our ancestors at table, and gives an amusing piquan
cy to the injunction of wisdom that we should cherish
the “lights of the past.”

There are two points of freedom in which we envy
the condition of slaves at the south—FREEDOM from
responsibility at all times, and FREEDOM from all manner
of work from Christmas to New Year. “The
negroes” (says a writer on the festivals, games, and
amusements, in the southern states), “enjoy a week's
recreation every winter, including Christmas and New
Year's; during which they prosecute their plays and
sports in a very ludicrous and extravagant manner,
dressing and masking in the most grotesque style, and
having, in fact, a complete carnival.” We confess
this let-up from the pressure of toil is enviable. The
distinction between horse and man, in the latter's requiring
mental as well as bodily rest, should be legislated
upon—all business barred with penalties, except
for the necessaries of life, during the Christmas holydays
and during another week somewhere in June.
We are a monotonous people in this country. The
festivals of the Jews occupied a quarter of the year,
and eighty days were given to festivals among the
ancient Greeks! We do not fairly keep more than
one in New York—New Year's day—the only day,
except Sundays, when newspapers are not issued and
shops are all shut.

We are sorry we can not paragraph America into
more feeling for holydays, but we may perhaps prevent
a gradual desuetude of even keeping Christmas, by
heaping up our regrets when it comes round. We
shall join the procession of visiters to the toy-shops
and confectioners to-night, and we think, by the way,
that these rounds to the gift-venders, might be made
exceedingly agreeable. “Guion,” “Sands,” “Thompson,”
“Tiffany & Young,” “Stuart's Candy
Palace,” “Bonfanti's,” and “the Alhamra,” are
beautiful places for a range of soirees in hat and bonnet,
and we went this round last Christmas eve with
great amusement. Happy children are beautiful
sights, and we can still see bons-bons with their eyes.

Reader! a merry Christmas! and let us repeat
once more to you the old stanza (tho' old Trinity is
no longer what it was when this was written):—

The other side of Broadway.—It is time that
the decline of the era of shopping a-foot was fairly announced
as at its fall—an epoch gone over to history.
Washington Hall has been purchased as a property
no longer objectionable from its being the other side
of mud, and is to be speedily converted into the most
magnificent “ladies store” within the limits of silk
and calico. We are credibly assured that this last
assertion is fully borne out by the plans of Mr. Stuart,
the projector. No shop in London or Paris is to
surpass it. But the best part of it remains to be told:
—The building is to have a court for carriages in the
centre, so that shoppers will thunder in at a porte
cochére, like visiters to the grand duke of Tuscany!
There will of course be a spacious door on the street,
for those who can cross Broadway without a carriage
—(poor zealous things!)—but the building is contrived
for those to whom the crowded side of the street
is rather an objection, and who wish their hammer-cloths
to stand out of the spatter of omnibuses while
they shop!! There is a comment on “the times”
in this plan of Mr. Stuart's which we commend to the
notice of some other parish.

Farther down-town, however (156) the shilling side
of Broadway has been embellished by a new store, intended
for all comers and customers, and certainly an
ornament to the town—occupied by Beebe & Costar,
hatters. No more showy and sumptuous saloon
could possibly be contrived than this “hatter's shop;”
and it is very well that they keep one article of ladies'
wear—(riding-hats)—for it is altogether too pretty a
place for a monastery. The specimen hats stand on
rows of marble tables, and the room is lined with mirrors
and white panels—the effect very much that of a
brilliant French café. As to the article of merchandise,
Beebe & Costar have made tributary the “lines
of beauty” to a degree which gives their hats a most
peculiar elegance of shape, and it is worth the while
of those who are nice in their tegmen, to “look in.”

Apropos:—The only god who employed a hatter
was Mercury—why is not that “English clever”
deity, with his winged hat, installed as a hatter's
crest? The propriety of it must have occurred to the
hatters. Possibly we are so mercurial a nation, that
it was thought impolitic—no man wanting any more
mercury in his hat—at least when it is on. We see
that the annual hatters' ball comes off on the 26th.
May we venture to suggest as topics of discussion in
the quadrilles—1st, Mercury's claims to the arms of
the assembly, and, 2d, what peltry was probably used
by the hatter of Olympus, and 3d, whether (as it was
a winged hat) it must not have been made of the only
quadruped that flies fur, the flying squirrel? “Curious
questions, coz!”

France versus England, or the Black Cravat
versus the White.—We have received, in a very
London-club-y handwriting, a warlike reply to the
note we published lately from a French gentleman on
the subject of the white cravat. The two nations
seem to have separated into hostile array on the subject.
Our English correspondent certainly brings
cogent arguments in favor of the white, and indeed
of English costume generally. After asking very
naturally what our French correspondent's phrase,
“perfidious Albion,” had to do with it, and suggesting
that “black cravat” had better “reflect on the late
conduct of the French in the Pacific,” he goes on
with the matter in question:—

“The English fashion for gentlemen's dress is never
to sacrifice comfort to appearance, which the French
fashion invariably does; the clothes of the English
are loosely made, so that every limb of the body is
free. You see nothing in the dress that can be called
effeminate; they appear to eschew everything that
approaches the `Miss Nancy school;' no man with
them is considered well-dressed, however costly his
attire, if he be not manly in his appearance. Now, a
Frenchman's clothes are made to fit so tight, that it
is impossible for him to look at his ease. A Frenchman
dressed looks as if he had just come out of a
band-box; he looks like a pretty doll which you see
in the shop windows in Paris. To hand a lady a
chair, he runs the danger of bursting his coat, or
cracking his waist-band; he can not stoop to pick up
a lady's fan, without danger to his inexpressibles.
The Frenchman dressed is no longer the easy, pliant,
laughing man, that we know him to be when in dishabille—but
he is stiff, unnatural, and effeminate.

“The English fashion abhors display; the French,
on the contrary, invites it. With the Frenchman
dress is a great affair, for he intends to make a sensation.
With the Englishman it is but secondary, for
he does not believe that mere dress can have any influence.
You may form an idea of the sentiments
of both nations from this national character—the
English (and Americans) are proud, but not vain;
the French are very vain, but have little pride.

“Again: we like the Englishman's fondness for
white linen, and in this we can not imitate him too
closely. It is not only in the evening, as with the
Frenchman, that he puts on his fine linen, but at
rising he must have it.—Though he may wear a
shaggy morning coat, his under garments must be
spotless. You may know him when travelling on the
continent, by the unrivalled whiteness of his linen.
The same cleanliness makes the white cravat preferable.
It has its recommendation in being a clean
fashion—for no gentleman can wear it more than
once; whereas, the black satin cravat, which your
correspondent so much extols, is an exceedingly dirty
fashion—for, after dancing, the perspiration settles in
the satin; and with the dust in the room, &c., it becomes
unfit to wear more than twice, whereas the
French wear their cravats until they are worn out.”

The sun “kept Christmas” yesterday, by appearing
“in his best.” We never saw a more joyous, kindly,
holyday quality of sunshine. All who had hearts to
go abroad with, went abroad, and a-Broadway was a
long aisle of beauty in nature's roofless cathedral.
God help all who were not happy yesterday! We
picked up a bit of real-life poetry (by-the-way) in a
very unexpected place yesterday—a confectioner's
shop! The circumstance is at such a distance from
poetry, that the flash comes before the report—a
laugh before the eye is moistened. At Thompson's,
the best confectioner of the city, we saw a large pound-cake,
with a figure of a nun standing on it, dressed in
white, and we were told that a cake had just gone to
the sisters of the Barclay-street convent, with this little
figure in mourning instead of white—sent by a
young catholic lady who had just lost her mother.
As a conveyance of a thought, intended to be entirely
between the mourner and the sympathising sisters,
we think this was very beautiful. Perhaps we
spoil it by giving the coarse-minded a chance to ridicule
it.

We wish to introduce to the reader the word tonality.
Let us show its availableness at once by using
it to express the secret of Pico's overwhelming effect
upon the audience on Saturday evening. As musical
people know, melody is the natural “concord of sweet
sounds,” and harmony may be tolerably defined as the
artificial creation of surprises to vary melody. Malibran
saw, for instance, that one of her rustic audiences
could feel melody, but was incapable of appreciating
harmony, when they tumultuously encored her in
“Home, Sweet Home,” and let her “Di tanti palpiti”
go by without applause! It takes more than
one hearing, for persons not learned in music, to appreciate
the harmony of an opera, though if there be
in it an air of simple melody, a child will listen to
it, for the first time, with delight. But there are operas,
much cried up, where the melody and harmony
are not in TONE; and though people may be made to
like them against nature (as they like olives), the majority
of the audience will feel incredulous as to its
being “good music.” (We were two or three years
opera-going before these unwritten distinctions got
through our dura mater, dear reader; and if you are
not in a hurry, perhaps you will pay us the compliment
of reading them over again, while we mend our
pen for a new paragraph.)

Pico sang a part in the opera of Saturday night,
which, in our opinion, owed its electric power to three
tonalities: tone No. 1, between the harmony and melody
of the music—tone No. 2, between the music

and her own impression on the public as a woman—
and tone No. 3, between the opera and the mood of
the public for that evening.

Tone No. 1 is already explained. Tone No. 3 was,
perhaps, a combination of pleasurable accidents—
both the donnas in one piece, the house crammed
with fashion, and graced with more beauty than usual,
and (last, not least) the change in the weather. A sudden
south wind in December, makes even fashion affectionate,
and, with such influences in the air, music
that is “the food of love,” may “play on”—with
entire confidence as to its reception. Of tone No. 2
(the part in Donizetti's opera) we wish to speak more
at large, but we can not trust ourself afloat with it in
a paragraph already under headway.

Donizetti is commonly rated as a trite and not very
vigorous composer. As a musical convoy, he never
drops the slowest sailor below the horizon. But, that
he lets his heart steer the music whenever he can persuade
science to give up the helm, everybody must
have felt who has embarked a thought in one of his
operas. The music written down for Orsini (Pico's
part) expresses the character that Shakspere's words
give to Mercutio—the prince of thoughtless good
fellows, careless, loveable, and amusing. Between
this and Pico's personal qualities (as made legible
across the footlights), there is a tonality the town has
felt—a joyous recognition, by the audience, of a complete
correspondence between the good-fellow music
she sings and the good fellow nature has made her.
There is a class of such women—some of them the
most captivating of their sex, and every one of them
the acknowledged “best creature in the world” of the
circle she lives in. Here and there a person will understand
better what we mean if we mention that
Pico sat in the proscenium-box on the night of Ole
Bull's concert, and, with a full house looking at her
with eager curiosity, sat and munched her under-lip
most unbecomingly, in perfect unconsciousness of
any need of forbearing to do in public what she would
have done if she were alone! We must say we like
women that forget themselves!

We heard twenty judicious persons comment on
the opera of Saturday, and with but one expression
of never, in any country, having enjoyed opera more.
The universal tonality, to which we have tried to play
the interpreter, is partly a matter of coincidence, and
may not happen again; but we assure the two donnas
and our friend Signor Sacchi, that with the remembrance
of it, and with them both in the glorious opera
of Semiramide, next week, they will want a larger
house than Palmo's.

And, by-the-way, this amiable “Quintius Curtius”
of the opera, who has procured us the luxury of a
temple of music by jumping into the gulf with his
$47,000—excellent Signor Palmo—claims of the public
a slight return; no more than that they should acknowledge
the fact of his disaster! It has been doubted
that he has lost money, and some of the world's
cruelty has been dealt out to him in the shape of a
sneer at his sincerity. We copy (literally) the explanation
sent us on the subject, and bespeak for him
present public regard, and some future more tangible
demonstration:—

“Being attracted by a statement made in the Mirror
in reference to the Italian company at Palmo's
opera-house, showing the receipts and disbursements
for twelve nights, leaving but a small amount to be
divided by the company, after having as good and better
houses than when under the auspices of Signor
Palmo, whose honesty has been imputed to have made
money, and made the public and his creditors believe
the contrary, now the mystery is solved, and the public
should be satisfied of Signor Palmo's integrity,
who is ready to show by bills paid, and his books, that
he has lost $47,000 the last four years.”

SUPER AFTER THE OPERA.

Private room over the Mirror office, corner of Ann and
Nassau—Supper on the round table, and brigadier
mixing summat and water—Flagg, the artist, fatiguing
the salad with a paper-folder—Devil in waiting—Quarter
past ten, and enter “Yours Truly”
from the opera.

Brig.—Here he comes, like a cloud dropping from
Olympus—charged with Pico-tricity! Boy (to the
“devil”), stick a steel pen in my hat for a conductor!
Now—let him rain!

Flagg.—Echo—let him reign!

Yours Truly—(looking at the salad-dish).—Less
gamboge for me, if you please, my dear artist! Be
merciful of mustard when you mix for public opinion!
But, nay! brigadier!

Brig.—Thank you for not calling on me to bray,
mi-boy! What shall I neigh at?

Yours Truly.—How indelicate of you to call on
an artist to exercise his profession on a party of pleasure!

Brig.—How?

Yours Truly—Setting him to grind colors in a salad-dish!
What are you tasting with that wooden
ladle, my periodical sodger?

Brig.—Two of “illicit” to one of Croton—potheen
from a private still in the mountains of Killarny!
Knowles sent it to me! You have no idea what a
flavor of Kate Kearney there is about it!—(fmff! fmff!)

Flagg—(absently).—I smell the color of the heath-flowers
in it—crocus-yellow on a brown turf!

Brig.—Stick a pin there, mi-boy!—a new avenue
to the brain for things beautiful! Down with privileged
roads in a republic! Why should the colors
mixed for a limitless sense of beauty go in only at the
eye?

Flagg.—No reason why. I wish we could hear
colors!

Brig.—So you can, my inspired simplicity! and
taste them, too! You can hear things that are read,
and you can taste the brown in a turkey! (Turning
to Yours Truly)—Was that well said, my dear boy?

Yours Truly.—Pardon me if I suggest still an improvement
in the aristocracy of the senses! The
eye has a double door of fringed lids, and the mouth
an inner door of fastidious ivory; and, with the power
to admit or exclude at will, these are the exclusive organs!
The republicans are the nose and ear—open
to all comers, and forced to make the best of them!

Flagg.—A new light, by Jupiter! Let us pamper
the aristocracy! An oyster for my ivory gate, if you
please, general, and let us spite the ear's monopoly
of Pico by drinking her in silence! (—)

Brig.—(—)

Yours Truly.—(—)

Brig.—Touching Pico—is she, or isn't she?—you
know what I want to know, my boy! Disembowel
your mental oyster! What ails Borghese? What
is a “contralto?” Is it anything wrong—or what?

Yours Truly.—A contralto, my particular general,
is a voice that touches bottom—rubs your heart with
its keel, as it were, while floating through you—comparing
with a soprano, as the air on a mountain-top
compares with a breeze from lower down.

Brig.—Best possible description of yourself, mi-boy!
Go on, my contralto!

Flagg.—Yes—go on about Borghese—what is the
philosophy of Borghese's salary being the double of
Pico's?

Yours Truly.—Ah! now you touch the weight
that keeps Borghese down! The public, like yourself,
ask why the prima-donna who gives them the
more pleasure is the poorer paid! Borghese—but
first let me tell you what I think of her, comparison

apart. (Boy, light a cigar, and keep it going with the
bellows, a la pastille! I like the smoke, but to talk
with a cigar in the mouth spoils the delicacy of discrimination.)

Brig.—Spare us the scientific, mi-boy!

Yours Truly.—Why, what do you mean? I am as
ignorant of music, my dear sodger, as an Indian is of
botany—but he knows a weed from a flower, and I
talk of music as the audience judge of it—by what I
hear, “mark, and inwardly digest.”

Brig.—But the big words, my dear contralto!

Yours Truly.—“Foreign slip-slops,” I grant you—
but nothing more!—I lived three years in Italy, and,
of course, heard Italian audiences express themselves,
and here and there a phrase sticks to me—but if I
know “B sharp” from “B flat” (which is more than
some musical critics know), it is the extent of my
knowledge. No, general! there is no sillier criticism
of music than technical criticism. You might as well
paint cannon-balls piebald and then judge of their
effect by remembering which color showed through
the touch-hole before priming! Notes go to the ear;
effects shower the nerves. A musician who is a critic,
judges of a prima-donna by the accuracy with which
she imitates what he (the musician) has played on
an instrument—like a tight-rope dancer criticising his
brother of the slack-rope, because he don't swing over
the pit! Analyze the applause at an opera! There
are, perhaps, ten persons in a Palmo audience who are
scientific musicians. These ten admire most what
they can most exclusively admire—rapid and difficult
passages (what the Italians call fiorituri, or “flourishes”)
executed with the most skilful muscular effort
of the vocal organs. These ten, however, pass over,
as very pleasant accidents of the opera, the part which
pleases the rest of the audience—the messa di voce—
the tender expression of slower notes which try the
sweetness of the voice—the absoluteness of the “art
concealing art,” and which, more than all, betrays the
personal sensibility and quality of the actress's mind.
My dear brigadier, true criticism travels a circle, and
ends where it began—with nature. But as the art of
the prima-donna brings her to the same point, the unscientific
audience are most with the most skilful prima-donna—nearer
to a just appreciation of her than
musicians are.

Brig.—Now I see the reason I am so enchanted
with Pico, mi-boy! I was afraid I had no business to
like her—as I didn't know Italian music! What a
way you have of making me feel pleasant!

Yours Truly.—Pico has enchanted the town, brigadier!
and I have endeavored to put the flesh and
blood of language to the ghost of each night's enchantment.
That ghost of remembrance sticks by us
through the next day, and I thought it would be
agreeable to the Mirror readers to have the impression
of the music recalled by our description of it.
Have I done it scientifically? Taste forbid!—even if
I knew how! I interpret for “the million”—not for
“the ten.”

Flagg.—But about Borghese!

Yours Truly.—Well—I have a great deal to say
about Borghese—I have a great deal of the “flesh
and blood” I just spoke of, in reserve for Borghese;
but I shall follow a strong public feeling, and not
clothe her enchantments with language, till she slacks
her hold upon the purse-strings, and shares equally,
at least, with the donna whom the public prefer.
There goes the brigadier—fast asleep! Good night,
gentlemen! (Exit “Yours Truly.”)

Ole Bull's Concert.—We longed last night for
one of “Curtis's acoustic chairs,” by which all the
sound that approaches a man is inveigled into his ear
and made the most of, for we heard Niagara attentively
through, and at every change in the music
wished it louder. We thought even the “dying fall”
too expiring. It occurred to us, by the way, that if
the text of this discoursed music had been one of the
psalms instead of God's less interpretable voice in the
cataract, the room for enthusiasm, as well as the
preparation for it, on the part of the audience, would
have been vastly greater. In a mixed assembly (of
the quality of that at Palmo's last night) no chamber
of imagination is furnished or tenanted except that of
religion, and the very name of a bible psalm on the violin
would have clothed any music of Ole Bull's performing
with the aggrandizing wardrobe of association
kept exclusively for “powerful sermons” and
“searching prayers.” We rather wonder that this
ready access to the excitability of the mass has not
been taken advantage of by the violinists.

We confess to a little surprise in Ole Bull's organization.
With the

a superb build for a gladiator or an athlete—his violin
is a woman! The music he draws from it is all delicacy,
sentiment, pathos, and variable tenderness—
never powerful, masculine, or imposing. “The
Mother's Prayer,” and the “Solitude of a Prairie,”
are more effective than “Niagara,” for that reason.
The audience are prepared for a different sex in a
cataract. We know very well that the accordatura of
a violin is of all compass, and that Paganini “played
the devil” on it, as well as the angel, and we repeat
our surprise, that, even in a piece whose name suggests
nothing but masculine power, the burthen should
be wholly feminine! Fact, as this unquestionably is,
we leave it to our readers to reconcile with another fact
—that the applause at one of Ole Bull's concerts bears
no proportion to the enthusiasm, as the ladies, without
exception, are enchanted with him, and the men (who
do the applauding) are, almost without exception, dissatisfied
with him.

Even at the high price of tickets, nobody draws
like the Norwegian. A very sensible correspondent
of ours proposed to him (through the Mirror) to lower
his price, and allow those who could not afford the
dollar to have an opportunity of hearing him. He is
the soul of kindness and charity, and we should suppose
this would strike him as a felicitous hint.

Battle of the Cravats.—The front row of the
opera resembles a pianoforte with its white and black
keys—the alternation of black and white cravats is so
evenly distributed. The Frenchmen are all in black
cravats of course, and the English and Americans in
white, and a man might stop his ears and turn his
back to the orchestra (when the two donnas are on
the stage together) and tell who is singing, Pico or
Borghese, by the agitation of the black cravats or the
white. It is a strong argument in favor of the white
cravats, apropos, that the Americans, whose sympathy
is with the French in almost everything, should
have joined the English in this division of opinion.
We have received two or three most bellicose letters
on each side of this weighty argument, and would
publish them if we had a spare page.

The Opera.—Madame Pico was evidently struggling,
last evening, against the effects of her late illness;
but she delighted the audience as usual, with
her impassioned and effective singing. The opera

is a very trying one, and, to us, not the most agreeable
in its general character—particularly in the lachrymose
tone, throughout, of the part allotted to Pico.
Sanquirico was a relief to this ennui, and he so
charmed one lady in the house, that she threw him a
bouquet! He played capitally well—barring one little
touch of false taste in using two English words by
way of being funny. It let him down like the falling
out of the bottom of a sedan.

Several of our French friends, by the way, have requested
us to contradict the on dit we mentioned in
the Mirror, touching a “cabal to keep Pico subservient
to Borghese.” A regularly-formed one there
doubtless is not—but the French are zealous allies,
and every one of them does as much for Borghese as
he can, and, of course, as much as he could do in a
cabal. On the contrary, there seems to be no one individual
taking any pains about Pico—the general enthusiasm
at the opera excepted. Let us state a fact:
We have received many visits and more than a dozen
letters, to request even our trifling critical preference
for Borghese; and no sign has been given, either by
Pico or her friends, that our critical preference was
wished for, or otherwise than tacitly acknowledged.
This being true of a mere newspaper, what must be
probably the difference of appeal to more direct sources
of patronage? One or two persons have talked
feelingly of pity for Borghese's mortification! We
are watching to see when her mortification will be so
insupportable that she will slacken her grasp upon
Pico's just share of the profits! We are not only the
true exponent of public opinion in reference to the
merits of these ladies, but, if we are not personally
impartial, it is because (though we have no acquaintance
with either of the two ladies) we chance to know
most of Borghese's friends. Pico is evidently a kind-hearted
person, indolently careless of her pecuniary
interests, and it is impossible to see the shadows of
mental suffering in her face and not wish to aid her—
but we should not sacrifice critical taste to do even
that, and we have not written a syllable that her effect
on the public has not more that justified. At the
same time we have never said a syllable to disparage
Borghese, and have only forborne to say as much of
her merits as we should otherwise have done, because
she was overpaid and strongly hedged in with supporters.

Servants in Livery, Equipages, etc.—There is
a stage of civilization at which a country will not—and
a subsequent stage at which a country will—tolerate
liveried servants. In a savage nation, an able-bodied
man who should put on a badge of hopeless and submissive
servitude for the mere certainty of food and
clothing, would be considered a disgrace to his tribe.
The further step of making that badge ornamental to
the servile wearer, would probably be resented as an
affront to the pre-eminence of display which is the
rightful prerogative of chiefs and warriors.

In a crowded and highly-civilized country, it is
found convenient for patricians to secure the tacit
giving-way of plebeian encounter in thronged places—
convenient for them to distinguish their own servants
from other people's in a crowd at night—and, more
particularly, in large and corrupt cities, it is convenient
to have such attendants for ladies as may secure
them from insult in public—the livery upon the follower
showing that the person he follows is not only respectable,
but of too much consequence to be annoyed
with impunity. The ostentation of servants in livery
is scarce worth a comment, as, unless newly assumed,
it is seldom thought of by the owner of the equipage,
nor is it offensive to the passer-by, except in a country
where it is not yet common.

The question whether a country is ready for liveries
—that is to say, whether it has arrived at that stage
where the want they imply is felt, and where the distinctions
they imply are acknowledged—is the true
point at issue. It is a curious point, too, for, in every
other nation, liveries may be excused as traditional
—as being only modifications of the dresses of feudal
retainers—while Americans, without this apology,
must defend the abrupt adoption of liveries on the
mere grounds of propriety and convenience.

We certainly have not yet arrived at that point of
civilization where liveries are needed—as in England
—to protect a lady from insult in the street. A female
may still walk the crowded thoroughfares of
New York by daylight—as she dare not do in London—unattended,
either by a gentleman or a servant
in livery. (We live in hope of overtaking the civilization
of the mother-country!) Neither has a liveried
equipage, as yet, the tacit consequence, in America,
which secures to it in London the convenient concessions
of the highway. We are republican enough,
thus far, to allow no privileges to be taken for granted;
and he who wishes to ride in a vehicle wholly invisible
to omnibus-drivers, and at the same time to
have his lineage looked into and perpetuated without
the expense of heraldic parchment, has only to appear
in Broadway with liveried equipage!

We differ from some of our luxurious friends, by
thinking, that, as long as the spending of over five
thousand dollars a year makes a gentleman odious in
the community, liveries are a little premature. It
is a pity to be both virtuous and unpopular. The
moving about in a cloud of reminded lordship is a
luxury very consistent with high morality, but it
comes coldly between republicans and the sun—
whatever fire of heaven the offending cloud may embosom.
We wonder, indeed, at the remaining in this
country, of any persons ambitious of distinctions in
the use of which we are thus manifestly “behind the
age.” It is so easy to leave the lagging American
anno domini of aristocracy, and sail for the next century—by
the Havre packet!

That Heaven does not disdain such love of each
other as is quickened by personal admiration, is
proved by the injunctions to the children of Israel to
appear in cheerful and becoming dresses on festal days
—those days occupying rather more than a quarter of
a year. The Jews also ornamented their houses on
holydays, not as we do with evergreens (a custom we
have taken from the Druid “mistletoe, cut with the
golden knife”), but with such ornaments as would
best embellish them for the reception of friends. The
French nation is to be admired for supremacy, in this
age, in the exhibition of the kindly feelings and the
brightening of the links of relationship and friendship.
It has been stated (among statistics) that for bons-bons
alone, in Paris, on new year's day, were expended
one hundred thousand dollars! We copy the French
with great facility in this country, and (until the proposed
“annexation of Paris”) we rejoice in the prosperity
of Stuart's candy quarry in New York, and
the myriad cobwebs of affection that stick, each by
one thread, to the corner of Chambers and Greenwich
streets! If not quite a “pilgrimage to Jerusalem,”
it is a pilgrimage to our best signs and emblems of
Jerusalem usages, to go the rounds of the gift-shops
during the holydays; and no kindly Christian parent,
who wishes to throw out an anchor for his children
against the storm of political ruffianism, should neglect
to bind friendship and family by a new tie in the
holydays! We see a use in the skill at temptation
shown by such admirable taste-mongers as Tiffany

& Young, Woodworth, Guion, and others,
which is beyond the gratification of vanity, and far
from provocatives to “waste of money.” But this is
no head under which to write a sermon.

We have (ourselves) a preference among the half
dozen curiosity-shops of the city—a preference which
may, perhaps, be called professional—springing from
love for the memory of a departed poet. The son of
Woodworth, the warm-hearted author of the “Old
Oaken Bucket” and other immortal embodiments of
the affections, in verse, is the present proprietor of the
establishment known as Bonfanti's—(by our just mentioned
theory of the holy ministration of gifts, employed
on somewhat the same errand in life as the bard who
went before). It may not be improper to mention
here, that the last few painful years of the poet's life
were soothed with a degree of filial devotion and tenderness
which makes the Woodworths cherished
among their friends, and this is a country, thank God,
where such virtues bring prosperity in business!

BREAKFAST ON NEW YEAR'S DAY.

Astor house, No. 184—nine o'clock in the morning—
breakfast for two on the table—enter the brigadier.

Brig.(Embracing “us”).—Mi-boy! GOD BLESS
YOU!!!

“We.” (With his hand to his forehead.)—With
what a sculptured and block-y solidity you hew out
your benedictions, my dear general! You fairly
knock a man over with blessing him! Sit down and
wipe your eyes with that table-napkin!

Brig.—Well—how are you?

“We.”—Hungry! I'll take a wing of the chicken
before you—killed probably last year. How many
“friends, countrymen, and lovers,” are you going to
call on to day?

Brig.—I wish I knew how many I shall not call on!
What is a—(pass the butter if you please)—what is
a pat of butter, like me, spread over all the daily bread
of my acquaintance?

“We.”—

I'll tell you what I have done, general. Here is a list
of all my circle of pasteboard. It begins with those
I love, and ends with those with whom I am ceremonious.
Those whom I neither love nor am ceremonious
with, form a large betweenity of indifference;
and though you may come to love those with whom
you are ceremonious, you never can love those you
are wholly indifferent to. I have crossed out this betweenity.
Life is too short to play even a game of
acquaintance in which there is no possible stake.

Brig.—How short life is, to be sure!

“We.”—Shorter this side the water than the other!
In Europe a man is not bowed out till he is ready to
go! Here, he is expected to have repented and made
his will at thirty-seven! I shall pass my “second
childhood” in France, where it will pass for a continuation
of the first!

Brig.—My dear boy, don't get angry! Eat your
breakfast and talk about New Year's. What did the
Greeks used to do for cookies?

“We.”—Well thought of—they made presents of
dates covered with gold leaf! Who ever gilds a date
in this country? No! no! general! You will see
dozens of married women to-day who have quietly
settled down into upper servants with high-necked
dresses—lovely women still—who would be belles for
ten years to come, in France! Be a missionary,
brigadier! Preach against the unbelievers in mulie
brity! It's New Year and time to begin something!
Implore your friends to let themselves be beautiful
once more! (Breast-bone of that chicken, if you
please!) I should be content never to see another
woman under thirty—their loveable common-sense
comes so long after their other maturities!

Brig.—What common-place things you do say, to
be sure! Well, mi-boy, we are going to begin another
year!

“We.”—Yes—prosperously, thank God! And,
oh, after the first in-haul of rent from these well-tenanted
columns, what a change we shall make in
our paper! Let us but be able to afford the outlay
of laborious aid, which other editors pay for, and see
how the Mirror will shine all over! I have a system
in my brain for a daily paper—the fruit of practical
study for the last three months—which I shall begin
upon before this month has made all its icicles; and
you shall say that I never before found my true vocation!
The most industriously edited paper in the
country is but the iron in the razor; and thought it is
not easy to work that into shape, anybody can hire it
done, or do it with industry. The steel edge, we shall
find time to put on, when we are not, as now, employed
in tinkering the iron!

Brig.—Black-and-white-smiths—you and I!

“We.”—No matter for the name, my dear general!
—one has to be everything honesty will permit, to
get over the gulf we have put behind us. Civilized
life is full of the most unbridged abysses. Transitions
from an old business to a new, or from pleasure to
business, or from amusing mankind to taking care of
yourself, would be supposed, by a “green” angel, to
be good intentions, easy enough carried out, in a
world of reciprocal charities. But let them send
down the most popular angel of the house of Gabriel
& Co., to borrow money for the most brilliant project,
without bankable security! And the best of it is, that
though your friends pronounce the crossing of a business-gulf,
on your proposed bridge of brains, impossible
and chimerical, they look upon it as a matter of
course when it is done! You and I are poets—if the
money and fuss we have made will pass for evidence
—yet nobody thinks it surprising that we have taken
off our wings, and rolled up our shirt-sleeves to carry
the hod! Not to die without having experienced all
kinds of sensations, I wish to be rich—though it will
come to me like butter when the bread is gone to
spread it on. Heigho!

Brig.—How you keep drawing similitudes from
what you see before your eyes! Let me eat my
breakfast without turning it into poetry! It will sour
on my stomach, my dear boy!

“We.”—So you are ordered out to smash the Helderbergers,
general!

Brig.—Ordered to hold myself in readiness—that's
all at present. I wish they'd observe the seasons, and
rebel in pleasant weather! Think of the summit of
a saddle with the thermometer at zero! Besides, if
there is any fighting to do one likes an enemy. This
campaign to help the constable, necessary as it is, goes
against my stomach.

“We.”—Fortify it, poor thing! What say to a
drop of curacoa before you begin your New Year's
round? (Pouring for the general and himself.) Burke
states, in his “Vindication of Natural Society,” that
your predecessor, Julius Cesar, was the means of
killing two millions one hundred thousand men! How
populous is Helderberg—women and all?

Brig.—Twelve o'clock, my dear boy, and time to
be shaking hands and wishing. Take the first wish
off the top of my heart—a happy New Year to you,
and—

“We.”—Gently with that heavy benediction!

Brig.—God bless you, mi-boy!

(Exit the brigadier, affected.)

Themes for the Table.—Among the “upper
ten thousand,” there are, of course, many persons, not
only of really refined taste, but of practical common
sense, and to them we wish to proffer a hint or two,
touching the usages just now in plastic and manageable
transition among the better classes. The following
note, received a day or two since, suggests one of
the improvements that we had marked down for comment:—

There is another very burthensome matter, the
annoyance of which might be transferred to the penny-post—
card leaving! When men are busy and ladies
ill (the business and the illness equally unlikely to be
heard of by way of apology) it would often be a most
essential relief to commit to envelopes a dozen cards,
and, with an initial letter or two in the corner,[1] expressive
of good-will but inability to call in person,
make and return visits without moving from counting
house or easy-chair. This, in a country where few
keep carriages, and where every man worth knowing
has some business or profession, should be an easy
matter to bring about; and, if established into a usage
that gave no offence, would serve two purposes—relieving
the ill or busy, and compelling those, who
really wish to keep up an acquaintance, at least to
send cards once in a while, as reminders.

We wish that common sense could be made fashionable
among us—vigorously applied, we mean, to the
fashions of the best style of people. Why should not
the insufferable nuisance of late parties be put down
in this country by a plot between a hundred of our
sensible and distinguished families? In England they
are at the dinner-table between six and ten; but why
should we, who seldom dine later than three or four,
yawn through a long unoccupied evening before going
out, merely because they go to parties at eleven in
London? Why should it not be American, to revise,
correct, and adapt to differences of national character,
the usages we copy from other countries? The subject
of late parties is constantly talked over, however,
and as all are agreed as to the absurdity of the fashion,
a hint at it, here, is enough.

There are other usages which require remodelling
by this standard, but while we defer the mention of
them at present, we wish to allude to another argument
(in favor of common sense applied to fashion)
remoter and perhaps weightier than mere convenience.
It is simply, that, if an aristocracy is to be formed in
this country, the access to its resorts must be kept
convenient for men of sense, or society will be left exclusively
to fools. Believers in the eternity of de
mocracy might wish fashion kept inconvenient, for this
very purpose; but our belief is, that there is no place
like a republic for a positive and even violent aristocracy,
and, if inevitable, it is as well to compound it
of good elements in the beginning. Simply, then, no
intellectual man, past absolute juvenility, would consent
to enfeeble his mind by fashionable habits injurious
to health. Late hours and late suppers (in a
country where we can not well sleep till noon as they
do in Europe) are mental suicide. Hours and usages,
therefore, which are not accommodated to the convenience
of the best minds of the country, will drive
those minds from the class to which they form the
objection, and the result is easily pictured. We
shall resume the topic.

Liveries and Opera-Glasses.—There is really no
way of foreseeing what the Americans will stand and
what they will not. An aristocratic family or two,
unwilling to compete with the working-classes in personal
attire, choose to transfer the splendors of their condition
to the backs of their servants. They dress plainly
themselves and set up a liveried equipage—as they
have an absolute and (one would think) an unoffending
right to do. This, however, the American publie
will not bear—and the persons so doing are insulted
by half the presses in the country.

But what they will bear is much more remarkable.
In the immense theatres of Europe, where the upper
classes are all in private boxes, with blinds and curtains
to shut out observation if they please, the use of opera-glasses
has gradually become sanctioned. It is found
convenient for those classes to diminish the distance
across the house, since they have the choice of seclusion
behind curtains—which those in the pit have not.
Abstractly, of course, the giving to a vulgarian the
power to draw a lady's face close to him for a half-hour's
examination, would be permitting a gross license.
This being the custom in Europe, however,
it is adopted with no kind of comparisons of reasons
why, in New York. We build an opera-house, scarce
larger than a drawing-room, and light it so well, and
so arrange the seats, that people are as visible to each
other as they would be in a drawing-room; and in
this cosy place, allow people to coolly adjust their
opera-glasses and turn them full into the faces of those
they wish to scrutinize. So near as the glass is, too,
it is utterly impossible not to be conscious of being
looked at, and the embarrassment it occasions to very
young ladies is easy enough shown. We have used
this impertinence ourself (because in Rome we do as
Romans do), but we never yet have levelled a glass
upon a face without seeing that the scrutiny was at
once detected. Since we have preached on the subject,
however, we shall “go and sin no more.”

“We ask for information:”—is the difference of
reception, for these two European customs, explainable
on the ground that opera-glasses are a luxury
within the reach of most persons, and liveries are not?
Do republicans only object to exclusive impertinences?

Opera last night.—We presume we are safe in
saying that no four inhabitants in New York gave as
much pleasure last night as Pico, Borghese, Perozzi,
and Valtellina. We certainly would not
have missed our share for any emotion set down
among the pleasures of Wall street—well as we know
the let-up of an opportune discount! That emperor
of Rome who poisoned Britannicus because he was
a better tenor than himself, and slept in his imperial
bed with a plate of lead on his stomach to improve
his voice, knew where music went to, and of what

recesses, within his empire, he was not monarch without
it. (We suggest a meeting of gentlemen up-town
to erect a monument to Nero, now for the first time
appreciated!)

Let us tell the story of Semiramide—and we must
take the liberty, for clearness sake, to use the names
of the performers without the Siamese-ry of the names
of the characters.

Borghese is queen of Babylon. She and Valtellina,
who is an old lover of hers, have killed her former
husband, a descendant of Belus by whom she had a
child. This child is Pico, rightful heir to the throne.
At the time the curtain rises, Borghese and Valtellina
suppose that Pico also is killed, and the throne
vacant for a new husband to Borghese. Valtellina
wishes to be that husband; but Borghese, partly from
dislike of him, and partly from having had enough of
matrimony, takes advantage of a thunder-storm to put
off her expected decision. Meantime Pico arrives
(acquainted only with Mr. Meyer, apparently, who is
a high-priest of Belus), and Queen Borghese, not
knowing that it is her own child, falls in love with
him! There is a Miss Phillips who is a descendant
of this same Belus, and who is to have the throne if
Borghese does not marry Valtellina. Pico loves Miss
Phillips for some reason only hinted at, and has come
to Babylon to see her. Mr. Meyer, who is the only
one aware that Pico is the prince supposed to be lost,
takes him down into the tomb of the dead king, tells
him who he is, gives him his father's “things” in a
box, and leaves him there to have a conversation with
his mother who happens to drop in. It is all cleared
up between them, and they sing a duet together, and
go out for a little fresh air. Valtellina, mousing about
after the queen, comes afterward to the tomb and
meets the high-priest there; and one after another
drops in, till the tomb is full, and the ghost of the old
king takes the opportunity to get up and mention
what he died of. Great confusion of course; and,
soon after, Pico, feeling called upon to kill the murderer
of the sleepless old gentleman, stabs at somebody
in the dark and kills his mother! Valtellina is
led off by the police, Pico faints in the arms of Mr.
Meyer, the satraps and Babylonians rush in, and the
curtain falls—leaving Pico to marry Miss Phillips and
succeed to the throne. All this of course took place
in a city built two generations after Ham (brother of
Shem and Japhet) but what with the look of the
“tombs,” and the way people were stabbed and poisoned,
it was impossible not to wonder what Justice
Matsell would have done in the premises.

We shall hear Semiramide again to-night, and speak
more advisedly of the music on Monday. At present,
we can not convince ourself that Grisi and Persiani
sang any better when we heard them in London. We
can never hope for—and we need not wish—a better
opera. Borghese is a most accomplished creature,
with (among other things) an intoxicating way of
crushing her eyes up to express passion (in a way that
none but people of genius do) and she does nothing
indifferently. Pico, with her wonderful at-home-ative-ness
anywhere between the lowest note and the highest,
faultless in her science, and personally of the kind
of women most loveable, is enough, of herself, to keep
a town together. Perozzi, with his sweet, pure
voice, and gentlemanly taste (he was king of Egypt
last night, by the way, and a candidate for Borghese's
hand), is worthy to be a third star in any such Orion's
belt, and the fourth may well be Valtellina, whose
thorough base, we have no doubt, first suggested the
idea of the forty-horse excavator lately patented by
congress.

But what shall we say of the scenery? We were
taken completely by surprise, with the taste as well as
splendor of it, and we think Stanfield himself, the
great artist who produces occasionally such marvels
in the spectacles of Drury Lane, would have taken a
pride in claiming it. Certainly no comparable scenery
has been exhibited, to our knowledge, in this
country. The costumes were also admirable.

Abstaining as we do, for to-day, from musical
criticism, we can not help alluding to the electric effect,
upon the audience, of the duet between Pico
and Borghese—the well-known “Giorno d'orrore.”
The house was uncomfortably crammed, but a pin
might have been heard to drop, at any moment during
the singing of it. It was a case of complete musical
intoxication. The applause was boundless, but
unluckily the encore (which we trust will not be foiled
again to-night) was defeated by an evident fear on the
part of the audience of interrupting a part of the duet
not yet completed. If you love your public, dear
Semiramide, nod, to-night, to the orchestra, after the
bouquets have descended!

BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Brig.—Oh, mi-boy! To think of the trouble of
“getting along,” and the very small place in which
we sleep, when we get there! I wonder whether a
man would be much behind the time at his own funeral
if he stopped working! I'm tired, Willis! I'll
send my ticket for the afterpiece, and “go home,” as
the Moravians say.

“We.”—You forget! Editors are on the “free
list” in the theatre of life, and “not entitled to a
check.”

Brig.—Talk plain to me, my dear boy, and save
your heliotropes for the paper! The work I have
done this week! Is it you that say somewhere,
“there's no poetry in a steamboat?” Think of the
blessed cry of “stop her!”

“We.”—And so you are fairly fagged, my “martial
Pyrrhus!”

Brig.—Fagged and dispirited! Moving the printing
office—getting all the advertisements set up in
new type—little indispensable nothings plaguing my
life out—new arrangements in every corner, and the
daily paper going on besides—

“We.”—I don't wonder you're dead!

Brig.—That is the least of my trouble, I was going
to say—(though, to be sure, what we have done this
last week, changing office, and renewing type, without
stopping the daily, is very much like shoeing
your horse without slacking his trot)—but the “benefit,”
my dear boy, the benefit.

“We.”—So long since you have had any money to
lend—is that what you mean? You are afraid you
have lost the art of making yourself out poorer
than the man who comes to borrow. Why, my poor
general!

Brig.—Doesn't it strike you as a dreadful mortification,
my dear Willis?

“We.”—The whole business?

Brig.—The whole business.

“We.”—Inasmuch as for genius to be rich, after
being poor, would make a god of the man so enriched
(by the intensity of his enjoyment, and his natural
inoculation against catching the canker from his
money)—it is wisely ordained by Providence that we
shall not receive it in sums larger than $3, city bill,
without mental agony. We should else be in heaven

before our time, my dear general—purgatory omitted!

Brig.—But isn't your pride wounded for me, my
dear boy?

“We.”—As Cassio says (who, by the way, loved
general Othello very much as I do you),

I have no tear to shed on the subject. I have
thought it all over, and would have stood in your
place and received the painful thousands myself, if I
had thought it more than you could bear—but let me
tell you how I look at it.

Brig.—Do, mi-boy, and don't joke more than you
can help!

“We.”—Editors are the pump-handles of charity,
always helping people to water, and never thought to
be thirsty themselves!

Brig.—You funny Willis!—so we are!

“We.”—You, particularly, have not only been
bolted to the public cistern for every benefit of the
last twenty years, the fag and worky of every possible
charitable committee, but your paper has been called
upon (and that people think nothing of) to blow wind
into the sail of every scheme of benevolence, every
device for the good of individuals or the public. People
see your face on every printed note that comes to
them. You are the other-folks-beggar of the town.
When you die—

Brig.—No painful allusions now, mi-boy!

“We.”—I was only going to say, my dear general,
that they will wish they had unmuzzled the ox that
trod out the corn!

Brig. (swallowing something apparently). But I have
had so many misgivings about this benefit concert, my
dear Willis!

“We.”—The pump-handle changing places with
the pail! Well—it will be a shower-bath at first, but
you'll be full when it's over!

Brig.—There you go again!

“We.”—I was letting that simile trickle off my
lips while I fished up, from my practical under-current,
another good reason for your benefit. Suffer
me to be tedious a moment!

Brig.—Be so, mi-boy—be so! I love you best
when you're tedious!

“We.”—Well, then! Political economy differs
from the common estimates of things, by taking into
consideration not only their apparent value at the
time of sale, but what it has cost, directly or indirectly,
to attain that value. Do you understand me?

Brig.—No.

“We.”—For example, then!—a leg of mountain
mutton may weigh no more than a leg of lowland
mutton—but as the fibre of the meat is finer from being
fed on highland grass, it is reasonable to estimate
it by something besides its weight—i. e., the shepherd's
risk of losing it by wild beasts, and the trouble
of driving it up and down the mountain.

Brig.—True.

“We.”—Thus, a lawyer charges you fifty dollars
for an opinion which it takes him but ten minutes to
dictate to his clerk. A savage would laugh at the
price, and offer to talk twice the time for half the
money—but a civilized man pays it, allowing for the
education, study, and talent, which it cost to give the
opinion value.

Brig.—True again. Now for our “mutton.”

“We.”—You and I, my dear general, are brain-mongers—which
is an exceedingly ticklish trade. We
start with our goods in supposition, like the capital
of a western bank—locked up in a safe, that is to say
(the skull), to which the “teller” alone has the key.
We are never sure, in point of fact, that the specie is
there, and we are likely at any moment to be “broke”
by the critics “making a run upon the bank.”

Brig.—Now that's what I call clear!—

“We.”—Don't interrupt me! The risks of success
in literature, the outlay for education, the delay
in turning it to profit, the endurance of the gauntlets
of criticism, and the rarity of the gift of genius from
God, should be added to the usually fragile shop in
which its wares are embarked for vending. The poet,
by constitution least able to endure rude usage, is the
common target of coarseness and malice. Here and
there, to be sure, a man is born, like me—with brains
enough, but more liver than brains—and such men
sell thoughts as they would potatoes, and don't break
their hearts if customers find specks in them; but the
literary profession, generally, is of another make, and
“political economy” should compensate proportionally.
They do it for clergymen! What clergyman
feels it an indignity to be sent abroad by subscription,
if his health fails? He considers that he is inadequately
paid unless his parish take the risks of his
health! And you!—besides the reason you have,
wholly apart from our joint business, for needing this
benefit—here you are, after passing your life in serving
people, with a pair of eyes you can scarce sign
your name by, and a prospect of a most purblind view
of the City Hall when they make you mayor.

Brig.—Mi-boy! oh!

“We.”—There's but one pair of well-endorsed eyes
between us, and suppose somebody leaves me money
enough to unharness me from this omnibus, and turn
me out to grass at Glenmary! What will become of
you?

Brig.—Heaven indissolubly Siamese us, my dear
boy!

“We.”—And I have not even named yet, the ostensible
ground for this concert—the songs you have
loaded the women's lips with, and never received
even a kiss for your trouble!

Brig.—What a fellow you are for reasons, Willis!

“We.”—My dear friend, I am going to state all
this to the committee for your benefit! By the way
—did you ever hear of Ismenias, the D'Orsay of ancient
Corinth?

Brig.—Never.

“We.”—Ismenias commissioned a friend to buy a
jewel for him. The friend succeeded in purchasing
it at a sum below its value. “Fool!” said Ismenias,
“you have disgraced the gem!” Did you suppose,
general, that I was going to give the public the pleasure
of paying you this tribute without taxing their
admiration as well as their pockets! No! (Hear
him!) No! I trust every woman who has sung, or
heard sung, a song of yours, will be there to wave a
handkerchief for you! I hope every man who loves
literature, and has a corner in his heart for the poet
who has pleased him, will be there to applaud you!
I hope David Hale will give us gas enough to see
you on the platform. I hope—God bless me, twelve
o'clock!

Operatic Party.—As our readers are aware, a
private sparkle from the stars of an operatic constellation,
is one of the luxuries rated as princely in Europe
—a proper fitness in the other circumstances of the
entertainment requiring a spaciousness of saloons and
a magnificence of menu which only the very wealthiest
have to offer. The private dwelling-houses of
this city, till within a few years, have been much too
small for the introduction of this advanced phase of
pleasure. Last night, however, a sumptuous residence,
that might compare to advantage with any interior
in Europe, was thrown open, and its “wilderness
of beauty” delighted with private performances
by the operatic company now in such admirable combination.

As being the head of a new chapter of national
refinement, it would, perhaps, be posthumously
worth while to depict the scene—not only as to its
sumptuary splendors and costumes, but with a description
of the “beauty that bewitched the light”—
but however posterity might thank us for such an inky
Arethusa, we have too much to do with what is above
ground, just now, to bury charms for the future.

Madame Pico remarked, before the commencement
of the performance, that it was almost as trying for
singers used to a theatre to adapt the voice, impromptu,
to a saloon, as for an amateur to calculate, at once,
the volume of voice necessary to fill a theatre. The
first two or three pieces were, notwithstanding this
judicious apprehension, a little too loud. Signor
Valtellina must have the credit of having been the
first to reduce the “fill of the empyrean” to the capacity
of a saloon, and, after the measure was taken,
the music was exquisitely enjoyable. After tea
(served in an adjoining apartment at the close of the
first part) the artists assumed, to a charm, the necessary
abandon, and the singing between tea and supper
was, to our ear, faultless. The pianist only, M.
Etienne seemed lacking in the magnetism to quicken
the movement with the acceleration of Pico's climax,
and we wished a younger or more sympathetic hand
in the accompaniment; but this charming cantatrice
has too infallible an ear to outrun the instrument, and
the effect was sufficiently enchanting. She and Signorina
Borghese were rapturously encored, and a
laughing terzetto between Borghese, Sanquirico, and
Perozzi, was called for, a second time, with boundless
delight and enthusiam.

We had never before seen Madame Pico off the
stage. Care has left no foot-print on the threshold
of the gate of music, and her mouth is infantine in
texture and expression; but her eyes have that indefinable
look which betrays

Her person shows to more advantage in a drawing-room
than on the stage, and her manners, like those of
all gifted Italians, are of a natural sculpture beyond
the need of artificial chiseling. Borghese, too, has
charming manners, and we were pleased with the cordial
accueil given to the prima-donnas by the ladies
of the party. Altogether, the absolute good taste of
the entertainment, and the unusually choice mixture
of elements, social, sumptuous, and professional, made
the evening one of high enchantment.

Opera Singers.—At the benefit of Mademoiselle
Borghese, lately, the centre of the ceiling suddenly
gave birth (at the close of the first act) to a shower of
billets-doux, which, being immediately followed by the
descent of the drop-scene, representing Jupiter feeling
the pulse of Juno, was understood by the audience
“as well as could be expected.” The delivery was
rather a relief to the feeling of the house, for the
crowd and pressure had been very uncomfortable,
and some critical event was needed to relieve the endurance.

We have been pleased at the example, set by the
good authority of the party of Monday evening, of
giving a cordial, social welcome to distinguished musical
strangers. America profits by having two nations
marching immediately before her in civilization—
each unwilling to imitate the other, but both open to
study, by us, with no impediment as to our selection
of points for imitation or rejection. The French and
English are wholly at variance on the point we have
just alluded to—the social position given to celebrated
musicians. In the high circles of France, when a
party is given at which the operatic singers perform a
concert, the reception for the musicians consults only
their personal comfort.—Chairs are placed for them,
which they rarely leave to mix with the party, and
their supper is always separate from that of the guests

There is no intention shown, of treating them like
equals. In England, on the contrary, the operatic
company are the pets of society. Pasta, Catalani,
Persiani, Grisi, and the male singers, Lablache,
Rubini, Ivanhoff, and others, were free of all exclusion
on the score of rank, and “dined and têted”
familiarly like noble strangers from other countries.
We have seen the duke of Wellington holding the
gloves of Grisi, while she pulled to pieces a bunch of
grapes at the supper table of Devonshire house; and
we have a collection of autographs of public singers
(two of which we published the other day), addressed
to persons of high rank, and expressed in terms of
the most confessed feeling of ease as to relative position.

We repeat that we rejoice in the power to select
footsteps to follow in civilization (from those of two
nations gone on before), and we take pride, that, in
this latest instance, we have copied the more liberal
and kindly-hearted usage. These children of a passionate
clime are not justly measured by our severe
standards: and we should receive them like airs from
a southern sky, without cooling them first by a chymical
analysis. They are, commonly, ornaments to
society—joyous, genial, free from the “finikin” superfineries
of some of those inclined to abase them—and
the difference of the pleasure they give, when their hearts
are in it, is offset enough for any sacrifice made in excusing
the “low breeding” of their genius!

Borghese, whose benefit came off so triumphantly
last night, is a woman of very superior mind, of manners
faultlessly distinguished, and (essential praise to
a woman) a model of toilet-ability. She is, besides, a
remarkable actress, and a very accomplished musician.
This is a pretty good description of an agreeable acquaintance;
and, if we were to sketch Madame Pico,
it would be in terms still more warmly eulogistic.
We leave to the ladies who throw bouquets to Sanquirico,
to laud the men of the opera, and wind up
this essay of political economy, by drawing an instructive
example, of the effect of what we preach, from
the manufacture of a prima-donna into a queen and
goddess, in the days of venerable antiquity.

“Among the female performers of antiquity, Lamia
is certainly the most celebrated; how much her fame
may have been aided by her beauty we can not determine.
She was everywhere received with honor, and
according to Plutarch, equally admired for her wit,
beauty, and musical performance. She was a native
of Athens, but travelled into Egypt to hear the celebrated
flute-players of that country. During her residence
at the court of Alexandria, Ptolemy Soter was
defeated in a naval engagement by Demetrius, and all
his wives and domestics fell into the hands of the
conqueror. Lamia was among the number; but
Demetrius was so attracted by her beauty and skill,
that he raised her to the highest rank, and from her
solicitations, conferred such benefits on the Athenians,
that they gave him divine honors and dedicated a temple
to `Venus Lamia.”'

Madame Pico's Benefit.—We should be happy
if Europe would inform us why this remarkable cantatrice
comes to us “new as a tooth-pick,” as to fame,
and whether (the same lack of previous trumpeting
having given us a surprise in Malibran), we are to
have the credit also of the eccalobeion of Pico! Even
without the “deep-sea plummet” of her contralto
(which certainly does touch bottom for which most

voices lack fathoms of line) she has a compass as a
mezzo soprano, which would alone serve for remarkable
success in her profession. She is a most correct
musician too—(the only false note we have heard
from her, having been occasioned by her striking her
chest too violently while singing defiance to Valtellina)
—and, withal, a most gifted and charming woman,
every way formed to be an idol for the public. We
have written a great deal about Madame Pico, and,
her benefit being the last occasion we shall find, to do
more than chronicle her movements, we shall send
this quill to our friend Kendall of the Picayune (as
the Highlanders send the lighted brand), enveloped
in a stanza addressed by an Italian poet to Lady
Coventry:—
We leave the rest to the Picayune's prophetic divination.

Adieu, Pico, l'in-cantatrice! A clear throat and a
plethoric pocket to you!

Madame Arnoult's Concert.—It looked very
queer (and a little wicked withal) to see opera-glasses
and ladies with their heads uncovered, in the pews of
the Tabernacle; and we are not sure that our “way
we should go” did not twitch us for a “departure,”
when we found ourselves applauding with kid gloves
in the neighborhood of the altar! We were applauding
Pico; and the next thought that came to us was,
a regret that such voices should not be consecrated to
church choirs; for (granting the opera to be a profane
amusement, as is thought by the worshippers at the
Tabernacle), “it is a pity,” as a celebrated divine once
said, “that the devil should have all the good music.”
And, apropos—was not this capital remark—(attributed,
we believe, to Wesley)—suggested by one, recorded
of the pope Gregory of the fifth century? Britain
at that time was, to Rome, what Africa is now to us
—a savage country they brought slaves from; and
the introduction of Christianity into that heathen land
is said to have been prompted by the pope's admiration
of the beauty of two or three young John Bulls
who were for sale in the market-place of Rome. On
inquiring of the merchant if they were Christians,
and being informed they were pagans, he exclaimed,
“Alas, what a pity that the author of darkness should
be in possession of men of such fair countenances!” He
commissioned Pelagius forthwith to send missionaries
to the handsome British pagans, and hence the church
of England—probably the only church, the members
of which owe their salvation to their personal beauty!
(Pardon this historical digression, dear readers!)

Madame Arnoult took New York by surprise—
she is so much better a singer than was supposed.
With less effort, and in a smaller room than the nave
of the Tabernacle, she would, however, appear to much
more advantage. Her voice, to our ear, lacked fledging,
or lining, or something to make it warmer or
more downy—but it is a clear and most cultivable
soprano, and she manages it with wonderful skill for a
beginner at public singing. We predict great popularity
for her. Madame Pico sang, with her, the
duet from Semiramide, and it was enough to steep
even the pulpit cushion in a this world's trance of
music.

Armlets.—We have observed that there is a late
fashionable promotion of the jewels of the arm to the
more lovely round above the elbow, where, it must
be confessed, a bracelet sits much more enviably imbedded.
We rather think this renewal of the fashion
of armlets is a clean jump from the rape of Helen to
1845, for the latest mention we can find of it is in the
account of the Trojan nymphs, who laid aside their
armlets to dance in the choirs on Mount Ida. It
takes an arm, plump and not too plump, to wear this
clasp with a grace, but where the arm is really beautiful,
no ornament could be more fitly and captivatingly
located. We were very much struck with the effect
upon the dazzling arm on which we lately noticed it.

Views of Morris's Concert.—There are few
buttons on the motley coat of human dependance, to
which the button-hole is not serviceably correspondent
—the button (conferring the favor) commonly drawing
the same garment closer by aid of the button-hole
(receiving the favor). There is one very striking instance
however, of constant services unreciprocated, in
what editors do for signers and actors. Our attention
has been called to this by a series of paragraphs—
(part silly, part malicious)—expressing surprise that
Ole Bull and others, who had never been in any way
benefited by Gen. Morris, should have been asked to
contribute their services gratuitously to his benefit
concert.

It is needful, of course, in a newspaper, to make
some mention and some critical estimate of all public
performers. It may be done favorably or unfavorably;
and there is a way of being abundantly paid for
either. “Black mail” is willingly paid where commendation
is sold in shambles, but the editor is better
paid, still, if, with skilful roasting and dissection of
the faults of public performers, he cruelly enriches
his paper (like a paté de foie gras with the liver of the
goose roasted alive), and so sends it, palatably spiced,
to the uninquiring appetite of the public. He who
has a hair of his head left undamned, to creep with
shame at the “black mail” sale of his approbation—
and he who has common human kindness to prevent
his murdering the hopes of strangers to make his
paper readable—both these are of classes that go unpaid,
and commonly unthanked, for services most
essential to others, and forbearance most costly to
themselves.

The editor's business is to make his paper readable.
The most difficult task he has to do is to be readably
good-natured. The easiest writing in the world is
criticism amusingly severe. If any one doubts, for
example, that with the same pains we have taken,
glowingly to interpret between Ole Bull and the public,
we could have ridiculed him into a comparative
failure—sending a laugh before him through the
country that would have armed every listener with an
impenetrable incredulity—if any one doubts our power
to have done this, as easily as we have ushered him
into hearts we made ready for a believing reception
of his music, he does not know either the press or the
public—neither the arbitrary license of the press, nor
the public's weak memory for everything but ridicule.
Where Ole Bull now stands, the press is comparatively
powerless. He is stamped with success. But,
when he stood on the threshold of this country's favor
—a musician, whose peculiarities at first seemed tricks,
and whom few heard for the first time with a confident
appreciation—if, then, ridicule had met him, boldly
and unsparingly, even though this one paper had alone
opened the cry, he would have had us to thank, we
believe, for the tide turned back on which he now rides
triumphantly onward. Certain as it is that we could
not, all alone, have made his present good fortune, it
is quite as certain that we could, all alone, have marred
it—and that, too, to the profitable spicing of our somewhat
praise-ridden columns. We need not stop to

tell the reader that we are describing the fiend Siamesed
to Liberty—an Irresponsible Press which can not
be chained without chaining Liberty too—but we wish
to show that there is some merit in not harnessing
this fiend to our own slow vehicle of fortune. There
never was an opportunity so ready as Ole Bull's advent
for amusing ridicule—but we were the first, or
among the first, to call for faith in him, and aid in his
appreciation. We did it from love of the man and
belief in his genius, and would as soon have been
marked on the brow with a hot iron as bargain for a
syllable of it. But—the unforeseen opportunity presenting
itself, when, apparently, he might return our
paper's service by a favor to our associate—he was
invited without scruple to do so. Suppose he had
played ten minutes on the violin for the benefit of the
proprietor of a paper devoted, for a year, invariably to
his interests? Would it have been the “act of charity”
for which a paragraphist says that “Ole Bull was
unreasonably called upon?” The high-spirited Norwegian
placed his regret, that he could not be here to
comply, upon no such footing.

While we are calling things by their real names,
we may as well change the label of another matter—
the motive of the benefit to Gen. Morris. As the
public know, our estimable associate, by twenty years
of literary labor, amassed a moderate fortune, which,
in the disasters of an era of bankruptcy, he suddenly
lost. A part of his property was invested in the
beautiful country-seat of Undercliff on the Hudson—
the residence of his family for several years. His
friends—with a provident hope, looking beyond the
clouds that enveloped him—fastened, to the transfer
of this lovely spot, a condition by which he might,
if able, repurchase it at a certain time, and at its then
reduced valuation. He has since been suffered to
tenant it for a trifling rent. He has improved it, embellished
it, increased its value. His children have
grown up in it. But, meantime, the limit came around
—(now only a short time off)—when the purchase
must be made or the home lost. His old friends came
to inquire into the probable result of their forethought
for him. We need not give the particulars of our
business—General Morris was partly prepared to redeem
the property. The lack was a sum that might
be covered by a benefit concert—so suggested by one
of the parties. It was urged upon him and declined.
He was told that Beranger had three subscriptions
(one of twenty thousand dollars)—that Campbell
had several—that Scott's children were relieved of
his debts by a posthumous subscription of two hundred
thousand dollars—and that private subscriptions
for literary men were of common occurrence in
England.

The public know the sequel. He refused, till the
concert was agreed upon by his friends without him.
The Italians, whom our paper had more especially
served, sprang, generously and with acclamation, to
reciprocate our constant advocacy of their company's
attraction. The musicians resident here were all
friends of General Morris, for he alone, more than all
other men in New York taken together, had served the
dramatic and musical profession. They, too, joyously
sprang to the chance of benefiting him. Never
was service more eagerly rendered than that by the
performers last night at the Tabernacle—never came
good purpose before the public, so lamely and disparagingly
construed.

In making up our mind to allow the public to be
intimate with us, we expect now and then to expose
the lining of our gaberdine. We conform to the exitgences
of the latitude we live in—but upon dishabille explanations,
we hope for dishabille constructions. What
we have written here, between five o'clock, A. M., and
breakfast (wholly without the knowledge of General
Morris), goes to press with the ink undried, and we
have no security against errors but that of writing as
we would talk to our confessor. If the time should
ever arise when really good intentions may be trusted
to stand, in public opinion:—

we may cease to explain “why our stocking is ungartered.”
Meantime, we expect to die.

The Opera Bereavement.—What is to become
of this widower of a town when it has lost its fairly-espoused
Pico, we must leave to the survivor's obituary
to record. We may as well have our ears boxed and
stowed away!—Their vocation is as good as gone!
No more Pico? Faith, it will go hard for the first
week or two! But—by the way—as those “lost from
us” are invariably supposed to be crowned in the next
place they go to, and as, of course, Pico will be
crowned in the presence of St. Charles and the brunet
angels of New Orleans, we must take upon ourselves,
as her New York “gold stick in waiting,” to summon
one at least, of her liege subjects to his duty. (We
happen, fortunately, to possess an autograph of
George the Fourth, signed to the necessary formula.)

“To G— W— K—, Marquis of `Picayune:'

“Right Trusty and Right Well-beloved
Cousin.—We greet you well. Whereas, the 1st day
of March next (or thereabouts) is appointed for our
coronation.—These are to will and command you (all
excuses set apart) to make your personal attendance
on us at the time above-mentioned, furnished and appointed
as to your rank and quality appertaineth.—
There to do and perform all such services as shall be
required and belong to you.—Whereof you are not to
fail.—And so we bid you heartily farewell.

“Given at our court at Palmo's, the 21st day of
January, 1845, in the first year of our reign.

“Pico Prima (donna).”

Star returning to its Meridian.—Pico has
changed her mind! Jubilate! She has declined to
go to New Orleans with the Borgheses, and will remain
here to be the nucleus for a new operatic crystalization.
We beg New York and Boston to shake
hands in felicitation! And now that it is settled (as
we understand it was, yesterday, by a decisive letter
to Signor Borghese), let us splinter a ray or two of
light upon the diamond that has so wisely refused resetting.
New Orleans is a French city, with a French
opera; and Mademoiselle Borghese is a French woman,
with lost laurels to win back from the Italian
Pico. This new arena, little likely to have been an
impartial one, is a great way off, the journey dangerous
and tedious, and, to go there, Madame Pico must
abruptly leave a wave of fortune, which she is now
riding “at the flood,” and give up three admiring cities
for one that might be dubious! A new opera-house
is about to be built here, of which she will be the first
predominant star; her concerts, in the meantime, in
the different cities, will profitably employ her; and,
as to the company, there is a substitute lying perdu
for Borghese, and a tenor might soon be found to replace
Perozzi. Out of these facts, the public can
pick the good reasons Madame Pico has for abandoning
her journey to New Orleans. Let us do our best
to show her that she has not made a mistake in preferring
us

Taking the White Veil.—The Undine of the
Bowling-green (Miss Undine W—g, if named after

the gentleman to whose liberality she owes her existence)
was shown last evening, with her radiant beauty
enveloped in glittering white, to the assembled
friends of the author of her being. To alight from
the poetry of the matter:—Mr. W—g invited, yesterday,
a party of his friends to see an illumination of the
superb fountain with which he has embellished that
part of the city. The rocky structure through which
it leaps, is completely encrusted with ice, and it looked
like—like more things than we have room to mention.
The colored light covered the fountain first
with a suffused blush of the tenderest pink, and this
deepened to crimson, and the glow upon ice and water
was really superb beyond any effect of the kind we
have ever witnessed. It made even a Dry Dock omnibus
(which chanced to be passing at the moment),
look rosily picturesque and fairy-like. The black sky
overhead; the delicate tracery of the naked branches
of the trees; the enclosure of architecture with lights
in the windows (which seemed completely to shut it
in like the court of an illuminated palace), were all
striking additions to the effect. We would inquire,
by the way, whether this couleur de rose could not be
adapted to the brightening of the ice with which the
fountains of the mind are sometimes crusted over.
Phlogistic chymists will please explain.

Improvements on the American Language.—
The making an improvement in one's mother's property
is, of course, a praise worthy filial service, and we
find that we have succeeded in enriching our “mother
language” by successfully breaking, to new and valuable
service, a pair of almost useless and refractory
terminations. “-Dom” and “-tricity” may now be
hitched by a single hyphen to any popular word, name,
or phrase, and, without the cumbrous harness of a
periphrasis, may turn it out in the full equipage of a
collective noun! Our first experiment in this economy
of parts of speech was the describing a charming
class of society by the single word Japonica-dom.
This musical substantive could hardly be displaced by
a shorter sentence than “the class up town who usually
wear in their hair the expensive exotic commonly
called a japonica.” The second experiment was the
word Pico-tricity—a condensation of “the power,
brilliancy, and electric effect of the singing of Madame
Rosina Pico.” We see by the papers that these
expeditig inventions (for which we liberally refrained
from taking out a patent) are freely used already by
our brother administrators of the mother language,
and we have only respectfully to suggest a proper
economy and fitness in their application.

Early-hours-dom.—We scarcely need explain, we
presume, that we have undertaken the wholesome
mission of giving interest, as far as in us lies, to the
more refined occupancy of that portion of the day comprised
between twilight and go-to-bed time—becoming,
so to speak, the apostle of fashionable early-hours-dom.
Of course we are entirely too practical to dream
of “reforming out,” by mere force of argument, the
four-hours' unprofitable yawn and the night's restitution-less
robbery of sleep. Every one knows that the
reasons for the late hours of European fashion are
wholly wanting in this country—but every one consents
to follow the fashion without the reasons. The only
way to diminish the attraction of late amusements
is to anticipate them by more attractive early amusements.
It will be remembered that we commenced
our vigorous support of the opera with this view of
the use of it. It was a well-put though unsuspected
blow to the habit of late hours, for many gave up par
ties they would otherwise nave gone to, from having
been sufficiently amused at the opera; and others
foud out, practically, that to dress and go to the opera
from seven till ten, gave all the relaxation they required,
and their natural night's sleep into the bargain!

It is with this ultimate view of making a fashionable
Kate

giving us a substitute that shall make late hours more
easily dispensed with—that we look upon the plan of
this new opera-house as a national benefit. If built
luxuriously, lavishly lighted, made to serve all the purposes
of a sumptuous festal saloon, and give exquisite
music besides, it will be a preferable resort to a ball-room;
and we believe that it is only from the lack of
a preferable resort in evening dress, that late parties
are any way endurable. Early parties on the off
nights of the opera, would soon follow, we think—the
habit of early hours of gayety, once relished—and so
would creep out this servile and senseless imitation of
foreign fashion.

Untilled Field of Literature in New York.
—The one country we have lived in, without loving
a native, is the country that, on the whole, gave us
the most to admire—France. We embroidered a
year and a half of our memory with the grace and wit
of the world's capital of taste, and we have left a heart
(travellers' pattern) in every other country between
Twenty-second street and the Black sea; but, that
we do not even suspect the color of a French heartache
we solemnly vow—and marvel. We admire the
French quite enough, however (perhaps there lies the
philosophy of it!) to leave no fuel for sentiment to
mourn over as wastage, and now—(apropos des bottes)
—why have we no vehicle for French wit in New
York—no battery for the friction and sparkle of French
electricity? How can the French live without a
“Charivari?” Twenty thousand French inhabitants
and no savor in the town, as if the gods had “dined
below stairs!” Ten thousand French women (probably),
and either no celebrity, of wit or beauty, among
them, or no needful newspaper-cloud in which the
thunder and lightning of such pervading electricities
could be collected!

We wonder whether the “Courrier des Etats Unis”
(the Anchises French paper which we read, as the
pious æneas carried his father on his back, to have
something to cherish, out of the city left behind—
something French, that is to say)—we wonder whether,
on their alternate days, the editors of that sober
tri-weekly paper could not give us something spiced
à la Parisienne—and whether such a vehicle, for the
French wit that must be here, benumbed or hidden,
would not be a profitable speculation! The “Courrier”
is the best of useful and grave papers, and entirely
fulfils its destiny, but it is small pleasure to the
ten thousand people in New York, who relish French
literature, to re-peruse the matter of the daily papers,
rechauffé in a foreign language. If the lack of Parisian
material, here, were an apparent objection, what a
delightful luxury it would be to have a paper made up,
at first, entirely, with the condensed essence of the
gay papers of Paris? A feature of New York charivari-ty
might be gradually worked in—but, meantime
a well-selected bouquet of the prodigal wit and fun of
the capital (made comprehensible by a correspondence
kept up with Paris, which should explain allusions,
etc.) would be, we should really suppose, most
attractive to the better classes of our society, and, to
the French of New Orleans and other more remote
cities, an indispensable luxury.

There is a natural homeopathy for everything French
in this city—much stronger than for the same things

a l'Anglaise. We would wish, too, that the barrier
of a different language were gradually broken down,
so that some of the delightful peculiarities of Paris
might ooze into out city manners through a conduit
of periodical literature. Heigho!—to think of the
brilliant intellectual lamps blazing like noonday in
France, while, with the material for the same brightness
about us, we sit by the glimmer of fire-light!
Oh, Jules Janin! “American in Paris!”—come over
with your prodigal brain and be a Parisian in America!
Ordain yourself as a missionary of wit, and Janin-ify
a continent by a year's exile beyond the Boulevards!
You'll laugh at us when you return, but
streams chafe the channels they refresh, and we will
take you with your murmur!

It would hardly be inferred—but we really sat
down to write the following paragraph, and not the
foregoing one:—

The Prima-donnas at Fault.—The “Courrier
des Etats Unis” has now and then an ebullition of national
spirituality, in the shape of a half column of
theatrical gossip, and we have had on our table, for
several days, a cut-out paragraph, very well hit off,
touching one or two of the town's pleasure-makers.
The editor is, of course, behind the curtain, as the
natural centre of the foreign circle of New York, and
he writes with knowledge. He gives as a fact that
Borghese cleared $550 by her benefit, but he disparages
the performance of that evening, and hauls the
ladies seriously over the coals for having exhausted
themselves at a private party the night before! He
detects an anachronism in Semiramide, and calls Pico
to account for appearing before the queen (as Arsace)
with his mother's crown on, when the good lady had
as yet only promised it to him! The first thing in the
succeeding duet, says the “Courrier,” should have
been a remark from Semiramide (who has promised
him the crown as a lover, not knowing it is her son)
to this effect: “Vous étes un peu pressé, mon bel
amoureux!” ou bien, “De quel droit portez-vous
cette couronne, que je n'ai fait que vous offrir?” The
crown given him by the high-priest, out of the paternal
box, was, of course, only symbolic, as the queen
was still on the throne.

Korponay's Fall, from a Faux Pas.—Another
matter touched in the same paragraph is the non-rising
of the new ballet-star promised for that evening.
The leader of the constellation chanced to be taken
ill (below the horizon) at Philadelphia, but the Courrier
states that the illness was owing to a fall, from a
faux pas, and that the faux pas was an engagement
by the tumbler (Korponay) to go to Philadelphia
once a week for twenty-four dollars, when his expenses,
wife and all, were twenty-six! The Courrier does
not state, what we think highly probable, that Korponay's
blood has come through too many generations
of gentlemen to be good at a dancing-master's bargains.

The new Danseuse.—A third topic of this same
pregnant paragraph is the contention between two
dancing-masters, Charruaud and Mons. Korponay, for
the honor of having given the finishing grace to the
“light fantastic toe” of Miss Brooks, the new wonder.
Monsieur Charruaud (Frenchman-like) declares
that she is not only his pupil, but by no means the best
of his pupils! Monsieur Korponay simply advertises
her as his; and the star, and the star's mamma, confess
to her Korponay-tivity. But—

What blood does the public think is running in the
veins of this same “fantastic toe?”—James Brooks—
the “Florio,” who, ten years ago, was the poetical
passion of this country—was the father of this dancing
girl! What would that sensitive poet have written
(prophetically) on the first appearance of his daughter
in a pas seul!

Longfellow's Waif.—A friend, who is a very fine
critic, gave us, not long since, a review of this delightful
new book. Perfectly sure that anything from that
source was a treasure for our paper, we looked up
from a half-read proof to run our eye hastily over it,
and gave it, to the printer—not, however, without
mentally differing from the writer as to the drift of
the last sentence, as follows:—

“We conclude our notes on the `Waif' with the
observation that, although full of beauties, it is infected
with a moral taint—or is this a mere freak of
our own fancy? We shall be pleased if it be so—but
there does appear, in this exquisite little volume, a
very careful avoidance of all American poets who may
be supposed especially to interfere with the claims of
Mr. Longfellow. These men Mr Longfellow can
continuously imitate (is that the word?) and yet never
even incidentally commend.”

Notwithstanding the haste with which it passed
through our attention (for we did not see it in proof), the
question of admission was submitted to a principle in
our mind; and, in admitting it, we did by Longfellow as
we would have him do by us. It was a literary charge,
by a pen that never records an opinion without some
supposed good reason, and only injurious to Longfellow
(to our belief) while circulating, un-replied-to,
in conversation-dom. In the second while we reasoned
upon it, we went to Cambridge and saw the poet's
face, frank and scholar-like, glowing among the busts
and pictures in his beautiful library, and (with, perhaps
a little mischief in remembering how we have
always been the football and he the nosegay of our contemporaries)
we returned to our printing-office arguing
thus: Our critical friend believes this, though we do
not; Longfellow is asleep on velvet; it will do him
good to rouse him; his friends will come out and
fight his battle; the charge (which to us would be a
comparative pat on the back) will be openly disproved,
and the acquittal of course leaves his fame brighter
than before—the injurious whisper in conversation-dom
killed into the bargain!

That day's Mirror commenced its

We expected the return mails from Boston to bring
us a calmly indignant “Daily Advertiser,” a coquettishly
reproachful “Transcript,” a paternally severe
“Courier,” and an Olympically-denunciatory “Atlas.”
A week has elapsed, and we are still expecting. Thunder
is sometimes “out to pasture.” But, meantime,
a friend who thinks it the driver's lookout if stones
are thrown at a hackney-coach, but interferes when it
is a private carriage—(has loved us these ten years,
that is to say, and never objected to our being a target,
but thinks a fling at Longfellow is a very different
matter)—this friend writes us a letter. He thinks as
we do, exactly, and we shall, perhaps, disarin the
above-named body-guard of the accused poet by quoting
the summing-up of his defence:—

“It has been asked, perhaps, why Lowell was neglected
in this collection? Might it not as well be
asked why Bryant, Dana, and Halleck, were neglected?
The answer is obvious to any one who candidly

considers the character of the collection. It professed
to be, according to the proem, from the humbler poets;
and it was intended to embrace pieces that were anonymous,
or which were not easily accessible to the general
reader—the waifs and estrays of literature. To
put anything of Lowell's, for example, into a collection
of waifs, would be a peculiar liberty with pieces
which are all collected and christened.”

It can easily be seen how Longfellow, and his
friends for him, should have a very different estimate
from ourself as to the value of an eruption, in print, of
the secret humors of appreciation. The transient
disfiguring of the skin seems to us better than disease
concealed to aggravation. But, apart from the intrinsic
policy of bringing all accusations to the light,
where they can be encountered, we think that the peculiar
temper of the country requires it. Our national
character is utterly destitute of veneration.
There is a hostility to all privileges, except property
in money—to all hedges about honors—to all reserves
of character and reputation—to all accumulations of
value not bankable. There is but one field considered
fairly open—money-making. Fame-making, character-making,
position-making, power-making, are privileged
arenas in which the “republican many” have
no share.

The distrust with which all distinction, except
wealth, is regarded, makes a whispered doubt more
dangerous to reputation than a confessed defect. The
deslike to inheritors of anything—birthrights of anything—family
names or individual genius—metamorphoses
the first suspicion greedily into a belief. A
clearing-up of a disparaging doubt about a man is a
public disappointment. “That fellow is all right
again, hang him!” is the mental ejaculation of ninety-nine
in a hundred of the readers of a good defence or
a justification.

P. S. We are not recording this view of things by
way of assuming to be, ourself, above this every-day
level of the public mind—too superfine to be a part
of such a public. Not a bit of it. We can not afford
superfinery of any kind. We are trying to make a
living by being foremost in riding on a coming turn of
the tide in these matters. The country is at the lowest
ebb of democracy consistent with its intelligence.
The taste for refinements, for distinctions, for aristocratic
entrenchments, is moving with the additional
momentum of a recoil. We minister to this, in the
way of business, as the milliner makes a crown-shaped
head-dress for Mrs. President Tyler. It has its penalty,
but that was reckoned at starting. We knew,
of course, that we could not sell fashionable opinions
at our counter without being assailed as assuming to
be the representative of fashion[2] —just as if we could
not even name a tribute of libertinism to virtue without
being sillily called a libertine by the Courier,
Commercial, and Express. However, there is some
hope, by dint of lifetime fault-culture, that, in the sod
over a man's grave, there will be no slander-seed left
to flower posthumously undetected.

Popularity of Madame Pico.—During the past
week we received a letter from a serious writer (a lady),
confessing to her own great delight in Madame Pico,
but wishing us to impress upon our religious readers,
by arguments more at length, the sacredness of good
music, even by an operatic singer. We remember a
passage in Burnet's Records, which shows that even
these operatic singers, if enlisted to sing in the choirs
of churches, would become the special subjects of
prayer. “Also ye shall pray for them that find any
light in this church, or give any behests, book, bell,
chalice or vestment, surplices, water-cloth or towel,
lands, rents, lamp or light, or other aid or service,
whereby God's worship is better served, sustained and
maintained in reading and SINGING.” It has long been
our opinion that to heighten the character of church
music would be aiding and giving interest and consequence
to religious service, and the inviting of professed
singers to the choirs, for the sabbaths they pass
in the city, would make them particularity (according
to Burnet) special subjects of prayer.

The four-feet precipice between the carriage wheel
and the side walk, and the back slope to the range of
racing omnibuses and drunken sleigh-riders, prevent
ladies from embarking in carriages at present, and this
is one thing that reconciles us to the opera people's
having chosen to

Madame Pico has found a rich oasis in Boston appreciation,
and we trust the snow will have melted away
before the Tabernacle so that it will not be an inaccessible
desert when she returns. Her concert there will
be like a dawn after a month's night of music.

Two or three new Fashions in France.—In a
French pamphlet handed in to our office a few days
ago, purporting to be Monsieur Grousset's justification
for having been shot down in Broadway by Mohsieur
Emeric, Mr. Grousset describes a previous affair with
the same gentleman, lately, in France. On that occasion,
he states, Mr. Emeric went to the field attended
by nine persons, one of whom was a lady!

We find, also, by a private letter from a friend in
Paris, that the now common FEMALE practice of SMOKING
CIGARS is considered (by connoisseurs in knowing-dom)
as a most engaging addition to the attractions
of some particular styles of beauty! “The play of the
mouth upon the cigar, the reddening of the lips by the
irritation of the tobacco, and the insouciant air, altogether,
which it gives to the smoker, adds to the
peculiar quality of a dashing and coquettish woman, as
much as it would detract from that of a retiring and
timid one.” The eyes (he adds) gleam with a peculiar
softness, through the smoke. Our correspondent had
just returned from a call on a charming American
lady, whom he found with a cigar in her rosy mouth!

Wellington boots have been sported during the
late bad weather for walking, by some of the fashionable
ladies of Paris. They are made of patent leather,
reaching to the knee, with a small tassel in front (at
least so exhibited in shop-windows) and the leg of the
boot rounded and shaped in firm leather, like the
fashion of boots twenty years ago. The high heel
(keeping the sole of the foot from the wet pavement),
is “raved about,” in Paris—the ladies wondering how
such a sensible thing as a heel should have been so
long disused by the sex most in need of its protection.
The relief of the ankles from contact with the cold or
wet edge of the dress in wet weather is dwelt upon in
the description, as is also the increased beauty of the
foot from the heightening of the arch of the instep by
the high heel.

Fashions for country belles.—The following
appeal to our gallantry pulls very hard:—

We have omitted the bulk of Miss Kate's letter,
giving rather too long an account of two or three expensive
disasters from being misguided by magazines
as to the fashions—but it is easily to be seen that it is
a matter that concerns outlay which “comes home to
business and bosom.” We shall take it into consideration.
Our present impression is, that we shall
set apart half a column, weekly, bi-weekly, or tri-weekly,
devoted to “the fashions by an eye-witness.”
This, however, immediately suggests a dilemma:
There are two schools of taste among the ladies!
Some women dress for men's eyes, and this style is
both striking and economical. Other women (most
women indeed), dress for ladies' approval only, and
this style is studiously expensive, sacrifices becomingness
to novelty, and is altogether beyond male appreciation.—
Which style should we shape our report for?

Canadian Gossip.—The chief of the Scotch clan,
McNab, has lately emigrated to Canada with a hundred
clansman. On arriving at Toronto, he called on
his newly illustrious namesake, Sir Allan, and left his
card as “The McNab,” Sir Allan returned his visit,
leaving as his card, “The other McNab.” The unusual
relish of this accidental bit of fun, has elevated
the definite article into a kind of provincial title, and,
in common conversation, the leading individual of a
family name is regularly the-ified. Among the officers
at Montreal there was lately a son of the late celebrated
“Jack Mytton,” the most game-y sportsman
in England. Meeting Sir Allan McNab at a mess-dinner,
young Mytton sent wine to him with the message:
“The Mytton” would be happy to take wine
with “The Other McNab.” We should not wonder
if this funny use of the definite article became the
germ of the first American title. The Tyler! The
Mrs. Tyler!

This same young Mytton, by the way, inherited his
father's adventurous temper, and though the first
favorite of Montreal society, be alone, of all the officers,
could find no lady willing to sleigh-ride with him.
They openly declared their fear of his pranks of driving.
One fine day, however, when all the town was on runners,
Mytton was seen with a dashing turn-out, and a
lady deeply veiled, sitting beside him, to whose comfort
he was continually ministering, and to whom he
was talking with the most merry glee. It was, to all
appearance, a charming and charmed auditor, at least.
The next day, there was great inquiry as to who was
driving with Mr. Mytton. The mystery was not
solved for a week. It came out at last, that in a
certain milliner's shop in Montreal had stood a wooden
“lay figure” for the exhibition of caps and articles
of dress. The despairing youth had bought this, had
it expensively and fashionably dressed, and still keeps
it at his lodgings (under the name of “Ma'm'selle
Pis-Aller”) for his companion in sleigh-riding!

WHO ARE THE UPPER TEN THOUSAND?

(In reply to a question of Fanny Forester's.)

Your postscript, asking “Enlightenment as
to the upper ten thousand” can not be answered with
a candle-end of attention. From the “sixes and
sevens” of our brain, we must draw a whole “dip,”
new and expensive, to throw light on that matter—
expensive, inasmuch as the same length of editorial
candle would light us through a paragraph. If adorable
“Cousin 'Bel” chance to be leaning over your
chair, therefore, beg her to lift the curtain of her
auburn tress-aract from your shoulder, and allow the
American public to look over while you read.

The upper ten thousand, all told, would probably
number one hundred thousand, or more: Not in England,
where the upperdom is a matter of ascertained
certainty, but in a republic, where every man has his
own idea of what kind are uppermost, and where, of
course, there are as many “ten thousands” as there
are different claims to position. Probably few things
would be funnier than for an angel suddenly to request
the upper ten thousand of New York to walk up
the let-down steps of a cloud, and record their names
and residences, for the convenience of the up-town
ministering spirits! A hundred thousand, we are sure,
would be the least number of autographs left in the
heavenly directory!

But, till we arrive at the “red-book” degree of definite
aristocracy, a newspaper addressed to the “upper
ten thousand” embraces a sufficient bailiwick for the
most ambitions circulation. There are all manner of
standards for “the best people.” The ten thousand
who live in the biggest houses would define New York
upperdom with satisfactory clearness, to some. The
ten thousand “safest” men would satisfy others. The
educated ten thousand—the religious ten thousand—
the ten thousand who had grandfathers—the ten
thousand who go to Saratoga and Newport—the
liberal ten thousand—the ten thousand who ride in
carriages—the ten thousand who spend over a certain
sum—the ten thousand “above Bleecker”—the ten
thousand “ever heard of”—are aristocracies as others
estimate them. And till the really upper ten thousand
are indubitably defined, there are ninety thousand,
more or less, who are in the enjoyment of a most desirable
illusion.

No! no!—republican benevolence—the “greatest
happiness of the greatest number”—would stop the
march of civilization as to aristocracy, where it is.
Its progress is through a reversed cornucopia, and the

extreme end is too small for the comfort of the “nation.”
Meantime, however, the standard of good
manners is rather loosely kept, and though the ten
“ten-thousands” are all seen to be tolerable, there is
a small class who go wholly unappreciated—those
who are unconscious of their own degree from nature,
and are only recognisable by the highest standards.
We speak of those who have “no manner”—simply
because they would be less refined if they had. There
are enchanting women in New York—we ourself
know a half-dozen—who are wholly unaware themselves,
wholly unsuspected by others, of carrying a
mark from nature that in Europe would supersede all
questions of origin and circumstances.—English aristocratic
society is sprinkled throughout with these
sealed packets of nobility from God—one of whom I
remember inquiring out with great interest, a single
lady of thirty-six apparently, but looking like a distilled
drop of the “blood of all the Howards,” simple
as a tulip on the stem, and said, though obscurely connected,
to have refused a score of the best matches
of England. These “no manners” that are better
than “good manners” walk a republic quite undetected
as aristocracy; but, as the persons so born are always
beloved (losing only the admiration that is due to
them) their benighted state scarce calls for a missionary!

We should not be surprised if there were a pair
from this Nature's Upper-dom—

—in your own village, dear Fanny Forester!

THE WEST IN A PETTICOAT.

(By way of declining a communication in hope of a
better one.)

We have been for years looking at the western
horizon of American literature, for a star to rise that
should smack of the big rivers, steamboats, alligators,
and western manners. We have the DOWN EAST—
embodied in Jack Downing and his imitators. There
was wanting a literary embodiment of the OUT WEST
—not, a mind shining at it, by ridiculing it from a
distance, but a mind shining from it, by showing its
peculiar qualities unconsciously. The rough-hewn
physiognomy of the west, though showing as yet but
in rude and unattractive outline, is the profile of a fine
giant, and will chisel down to noble features hereafter;
but, meantime, there will be a literary foreshadowing
of its maturity—abrupt, confiding, dashing writers,
regardless of all trammels and fearless of ridicule—
and we think we have heard from one of them.

The letter from which we shall quote presently, is
entirely in earnest, and signed with the lady's real
name. We at first threw the accompanying communication
aside, as very original and amusing, but
unfit for print—except with comments which we had
no time to make. Taking it up again this morning,
we think we see a way to compass the lady-writer's
object, and we commence by giving her a fictitious
name to make famous (instead of her own), and by interesting
our readers in her with showing her character
of mind as her letter shows her to us. She is
quick, energetic, confident of herself, full of humor,
and a good observer, and the “half-horse half-alligator”
impulses with which she writes so unconsciously,
may be trimmed into an admirable and entirely
original style by care and labor.

Miss “Kate Juniper,”[1] (so we name her), thus
dashes, western-fashion, in what she has to say
to us:—

“I hate formal introductions. I would speak to you
now, and I will see you, when I may, in the Palace
of Truth. I am in Godey's Lady's Book with decent
compensation, but I want to be published faster than
they can do it. I want to write for the Mirror without
pay, for the sake of `getting my name up.' I shall
ultimately `put money in my purse' by this course.
I have now three manuscript volumes, which good
judges tell me are equal to Miss Bremer's. I send you
a specimen. I have a series of these sketches, entitled
`The Spirits of the Room.' I can sell them to
Godey, but he will be for ever bringing them out. I
propose to give them to you, if you like them, in the
true spirit of bargain and sale, though not in the letter.
I will give you as many as will serve my purpose
of getting my name known; and then, if success
comes, you will hold me by the chain of gratitude, as
you now do by that of reverence and affection.

“Will you write me immediately and tell me your
thoughts of this thing? Truly your friend.”

We can only give a taste of her literary quality by
an extract from her communication, the remainder
wanting finish, and this portion sufficing to introduce
her to our readers. We give it precisely as written
and punctuated. She is describing an interview with
a travelling lecturer on magnetism, and gives her own
experience in neurological sight-seeing:—

“Mark the sequel. I had, on going into the room,
lost my handkerchief. A gentleman famed for his
wisdom, his powder of seeing as far into the future
without the gift of second sight, as others can with it,
lent me his, protem. I heard the wonderful statements
of the `New School in Psychology' relative to sympathy
established by means of magnetized or neurologized
handkerchiefs, letters, etc. I determined to
keep the handkerchief and see if there were enough
of the soul aura of my wise-acre friend imprisoned in
it, to affect me. I did so; I returned to my home in
the hotel—to my lonely room; evening shut in; the
waiter did not bring me a light; my authracite burned
blue and dimly enough; I bound the magic handkerchief
about my brow and invoked the sight of my
friend to aid my own. What I saw shall be told in
the next chapter.

1. CHAPTER I.

“I gazed into the dimness and vacancy that surrounded
me—I conjured the guardian spirit of the
room to come before me, and communicate some of
the secrets of his wards. How many hearts, thought
I, have beat with joy and sorrow, with hope, and with
anguish unutterable in this room. But no guardian
spirit appeared, and I began to think that the tee-total
pledge of this hotel had really banished all sorts of
spirits, neurology to the contrary notwithstanding. I
closed my eyes, laid my hand on the bewitching
point in my forehead, and lo! my eyes were opened,
not literally but neurologically. At first a figure was
revealed dimly and indistinctly—gradually its outlines
grew more defined, and a graceful young man stood
before me. He was enveloped in the folds of an ample
cloak, a jewelled hand held it in front, and he
stood as if waiting to be known and noted. While
gazing on him I found myself endowed with new and
marvellous powers—every line of his face had its
language, and told me a broad history. His attitude,
his hand, the manner in which the folds of his cloak
fell about him, constituted a library that I was skilled
to read, if I would. Here was the signatura rerum.
I looked and looked—it was like looking into a library
and determining what you shall read, and what you
shall leave unread. Some one has said that `the
half is greater than the whole.' This may be a physical,
yet not a metaphysical paradox. Here I saw the

last occupant of my room standing before me. I
said I will first look at one week of his life. In a
moment I beheld him pacing fitfully the room—
his thoughts came before me—they were such as
these,” &c., &c.

Miss Juniper goes on with an account of half a
dozen different characters, who (by a very natural
vein of revery) she imagines may have occupied the
room before her. The specimen we have given simply
shows the free dash of her pen, and we think we
see in it the capability of better things.

Female Stock Brokers, Etc.—A letter from
Paris to the London Times describes the stock exchange
of Paris (the Bourse) as thronged by female
speculators—not less than a hundred in attendance on
any one day. To do this, too, they are obliged to
stand in the open square in front of the building, as
they have been excluded from the interior by a special
regulation! Every five minutes during the sale
of stocks, two or three bareheaded agents rush down
the steps of the Bourse to announce to the fair speculators
the state of the market; and they buy and sell
accordingly.

Fancy a few of the customs of the “most polite nation”
introduced into New York! What would “Mrs.
Grundy” say of a hundred ladies standing about on
the sidewalk in Wall street, speculating in stocks, and
excluded by a vote of the stock-brokers from the floor
of the Exchange! When will the New York ladies
begin to smoke in their carriages, as they do in Paris?
When will they wear Wellington boots with
high heels? When will they frequent the billiard-rooms
and public eating-houses? When will those who
are not rich enough to keep house, use “home” only
as birds do their nests, to sleep in—breakfasting, dining,
and amusing themselves, at all other hours, out
of doors, or in cafes and restaurants? When will the
more fashionable ladies receive morning calls in the
prettiest room in the house—their bed-room—themselves
in bed, with coquettish caps and the most soignée
demi-toilet any way contrivable? Funny place,
France! Yet in no country that we were ever in,
seemed woman so insincerely worshipped—so mocked
with the shadow of power over men. We should
think it as great a curiosity to see a well-bred Frenchman
love-sick (when he supposed himself alone) as to
see an angel tipsy, or a marble bust in tears. This
condition of the “love of the country,” and the dissipation
of female habits, are mutual consequences—so
to speak. Men are constituted by nature to love
women, and in proportion as women become man-ified
they feel toward them as men do to each other—selfish
and unimpressible. We remember once asking a
French nobleman who was very fond of London, what
was the most marked point of difference which he (as
a professed love-maker) found between French and
English women. The reply was an unfeeling one,
but it will be a guide to an estimate of the effect of
the different national manners on female character.
“The expense of a love affair,” said he, “falls on the
man in France, and on the woman in England. English
women make you uncomfortable by the quantity
of presents they give you, and French women quite
as uncomfortable by the quantity they exact from
you.” We only quote this remark as made by a very
great beau and a very keen observer—the fact that a
high-bred man weighed women at all in such abominable
scales being a good argument (at least) against inviting
the ladies to Wall street and the billiard-rooms!

And now let us say a word of what made the letter
in the Times more suggestive than it otherwise would
have been—Miss Fuller's book on “Woman in the
Nineteenth Century.”

This book begins with an emblematic device resembling,
at first view, the knightly decoration called
by our English neighbors a star. On further examination,
a garter seems to be included in the figure;
but upon still closer view, we discover, within the
rays which form the outer border, first an eternal
serpent—then the deeper mystery of two triangles—
one of light, the other of darkness and shadow. We
should not have been thus particular in describing a
new decoration, but we conceive that the figure is
very significant of the tone and design of the book.
It belongs to what is called the transcendental school
—a school which we believe to have mixed up much
of what is noble and true with much of what is merely
imaginary and fantastic. Truth, freedom, love, light
—these are high and holy objects; and though they
may be sought, sometimes, by modes which we may
think susceptible of improvement, we honor those
who propose to themselves such objects, according to
their aims and not according to their ability of accomplishment.
The character and rights of woman
form naturally the principal subject of Miss Fuller's
book; and we hope it may have an influence in convincing,
if not “man,” at least some men, that woman
was born for better things than to “cook him something
good.”

The English Premier.—We see a text for the
least-taste-in-life of a sermon, in the following touch-up
of Sir Robert Peel by the London Examiner:—

“Wanted, a Premier's Assistant.—Our friend
Punch, who has written some excellent lessons for
ministers, `suited to the meanest capacity,' in words
from one syllable to three, by easy upward ascent,
should take Sir Robert Peel's education in hand, and
teach him how to write a decent note.

“Notwithstanding the proverb to the contrary, a man
may do a handsome thing in a very awkward way.

“It was quite becoming and right to give a pension
of £20 a year to Miss Brown, but what a note about
it is this, with its parenthetical dislocations, and its
atrocious style as stiff as buckram:—

“`Whitehall, Dec. 24.

“`Madam: There is a fund applicable, as vacancies
may occur, to the grant of annual pensions of very
limited amount, which usage has placed at the disposal
of the lady of the first minister. On this fund
there is a surplus of £20 per annum.

“`Lady Peel has heard of your honorable and successful
exertions to mitigate, by literary acquirements,
the effects of the misfortune by which you have been
visited; and should the grant of this pension for your
life be acceptable to you, Lady Peel will have great
satisfaction in such an appropriation of it.

“`I am, &c. Robert Peel.'

“If Punch had been over Sir Robert Peel when he
wrote this, he would have hit him several sharp, raps
on the knuckles with his baton, we are quite certain.
The model of the note may be in Dilworth, very
probably, or even in the Complete Letter-Writer, by
the retired butler; but, nevertheless, it is not a true
standard of taste.

“Not to mention the clumsy parenthetical clauses
so much better omitted, or the long-tailed words so
out of place in a note about a matter of £20 a year.
Sir Robert Peel has to learn that none but he-milliners
and haberdashers talk of their “ladies.” Sir Robert
Peel, as a gentleman and a prime minister, needs
not be ashamed of writing of his wife. He may rest
quite assured that the world will know that his wife is
a lady without his studiously telling it so.

“Foreigners will ask what is the distinction between
a gentleman's lady and his wife; whether they are
convertible terms; whether there are minister's wives
who are not ladies; or whether there are ladies who

are not wives; and why the equivocal word is preferred
to the distinct one; and why the wife is treated if
it were the less honorable.

“Formerly men used to have wives, not ladies; but
in the announcement of births it has seemed finer to
Mr. Spruggins and Mr. Wiggins to say that his lady
has been delivered than his wife, the latter sounding
homely and low.

“But Sir Robert Peel should not be led away by
these examples. He is of importance enough in the
world to afford to mention his wife in plain, honest,
homely old English.

“Any one who is disposed to give lessons in letter-writing
can not do better than collect Sir Robert
Peel's notes as warning examples. From the Velveteens
to Miss Brown's £20 a year, they have all the
same atrocious offences of style and taste. It is another
variety of the Yellow Plush school.

“It distresses us to see it. We should like to see
MissBrown's £20 a year rendered into plain, gentlemanly
English.

“As prizes are the fashion, perhaps some one will
give a prize for the best translation of Sir Robert
Peel's notes into the language of ease, simplicity, and
with them, good taste.”

Sir Robert's crockery not proves, not that his premiership
still shows the lint of the spinning jenny, but
that he employed one of his clerks (suitably impressed
with his duty to Lady Peel) to write the letter. We
wish to call attention, however, to the superior simplicity
of the taste contended for by the critic, and to
the evidence it gives that extremes meet in the usages
of good breeding as in other things—the highest refinement
fairly lapping over upon what nature started
with. The application of this is almost universal, but
perhaps we had better particularize at once, and confess
to as much annoyance as we have a right to express
(in “a free country”) at the affected use of the
word lady in the United States, and the superfine
shrinking from the honest words wife and woman.
Those who say “this is my lady, sir!” instead of
“this is my wife, sir!” or those who say “she is a
very pretty lady,” instead of “she is a very pretty
woman,” should at least know what the words mean,
and what they convey to others.

In common usage, to speak of one's wife as one's
lady, smacks of low-breeding, because it expresses a
kind of announcement of her rank, as if her rank
would not otherwise be understood. It is sometimes
used from a dread of plain-spoken-ness, by men who
doubt their own manners—but, as it always betrays
the doubt, it is in bad taste. The etymology of the
plainer words is a better argument in their favor, however.
In the Saxon language from which they are
derived, wœepman signifies that one of the conjugal
pair who employed the weapons necessary for the defence
of the family, and wif-man signified the one
who was employed at the woof, clothing the family by
her industry. (The terms of endearment, of course,
were “my fighter,” and “my weaver!”) instead of
this honestly derived word (wife), meaning the one
who has the care of the family, the word lady is used,
which (also by derivation from the Saxon) signifies
one who is raised to the rank of her conjugal mate!
But, in this country, where the males invariably burrow
in trade, while the females as invariably soar out
of their reach in the sunshine of cultivation, few women
are raised to the rank of their husbands. It is an
injustice to almost any American woman to say as
much—by calling her a lady.

It is one part, though ever so small a part, of patriotism,
to toil for improving the manners of the country.
If we can avoid the long round of affections,
and make a short cut to good taste by at once submitting
every question of manners to the three ultimate
standards of high-breeding—simplicity, disinterestedness,
and modesty, it might save us the century
or two of bad taste through which older countries
have found their way to refinement. Amen!

Madame Pico's Concert.—We should guess that
between two and three thousand persons were listeners
in the vast hall of the Tabernacle at the concert. The
five hundred regular opera-goers, who were apparently
all there, were scattered among a mass of graver
countenances, and Madame Pico saw combined her
two bailiwicks of fashion and seriousness. She seems
to be equally popular with both, and her “good-fellow”
physiognomy never showed its honest beauty to
more advantage. She wore a Greek cap of gold braid
on the right-side organ of conscientiousness, and probably
magnetized very powerfully the large gold tassel
that fell from it over her cheek. The English song
was the qui-vive-ity of the evening, however, and
English, from a tongue cradled in a gondola, is certainly
very peculiar? But, preserve us, Rossini-Bellini!
After hearing exclusively Italian music from a
songstress, the descent to Balfe is rather intolerable.
A lark starting for its accustomed zenith with “chicken
fixings” would represent our soul as it undertook to
soar last night with Balfeathered Pico!—What should
make that same song popular is beyond our divining.
Most of its movement works directly in the joint between
the comfortable parts of the voice, and nobody
ever tilted through its see-saw transitions, in our hearing,
without apparent distress.

Madame Arnoult made a very strong impression on
the audience last night. She sang with more dew in
her throat than when we heard her before, and we
fancy that the hard enamel of her tones, at that time,
was from the bracing up against timidity, and not from
the quality of the organ. She has only to draw a
check for what popularity she wants, we presume.

Town-Hunger for Poets.—The appetite for live
bards (like other scarce meats, commonly liked best
when pretty well gone) is probably peculiar to old
countries. We have stumbled lately on the following
letter touching Petrarch, written in 1368, by the
Seigneury of Florence, to Pope Urban V.:—

“The celebrity and talent of our fellow-citizen, M.
Francesco Petrarca, inspire us with a great desire to
attract him back to reside in Florence, for the honor
of the city and for his own tranquility; for he has
greatly harassed himself by bodily fatigues and scientific
pursuits in various countries. But as he has
here no patrimony nor means of support, and little
fancy for a secular life, be pleased to grant him the
favor of the first canonry vacant in Florence; and this
notwithstanding any previous promise, so that no one
may be appointed canon in preference to him. And
you will ascertain from Pitti in what manner this appointment
may be obtained for him in the most ample
manner.”

How long it will be before Newburyport will send
to the governor of Arkansas for Albert Pike—before
New Haven will send to Mayor Harper for Mr. Halleck—before
Portland will send to President Quincy
for.Longfellow—before other great cities will send
for the now peripatetic ashes of their future honorary
urns, and confer on them “appointments in the most
ample manner”—we are not prophet enough to know
—nor do we know what the locofocos would say to
such appointments. We suggest, however, that the
poets should combine to vote for Mayor Harper on
condition that he inquire what poets New York needs
to have back “for the honor of the city and their own
tranquillity.”

Japonica-dom in Italy.—We have often thought
that it would amuse, and possibly instruct, New-Yorkers,
to know exactly what class of Europeans
have, as nearly as possible, their own pretensions to
aristocracy, and where such persons “stand,” in the
way of go-to-the-devil-dom, from the titled classes.
There is scarce a man of fortune or fashion in New
York who is not what they call in Europe a roturier
—a man, that is to say, whose position is made altogether
by his money. The treatment which a
roturier gets, therefore, from those above him, presents
a fair opportunity for contrasting his value (measured
by this scale) with that of a rich, but grandfatherless
New-Yorker. Besides other profit in the comparison,
it is as well, perhaps, to form a guess as to what sort
of a sore the upper ten thousand will make, when they
come to a head in Manhattan.

A letter to the Foreign Quarterly Review from a correspondent
in Italy, gives an account of the celebration
of a scientific anniversary which draws together
the accessible celebrities of Europe, and which was
held this year in Milan. Incidentally the writer
speaks of Milanese society—thus:—

“Yes! the congress, whatever its other claims to
consideration may have been, was deficient in `quarterings,'
and was therefore, no company for Milanese
noblesse. Nowhere, in Europe, is the effete barbarism
of `castes' more in vigor than at Milan. The
result of course, and of necessity, is, that the exclusive
there are the least advanced in social and moral
civilization of all the great cities of Italy. Will it be

believed that these noble blockheads have a Casino
for themselves and their females, to whose festivities
the more distinguished of their non-noble fellow-citizens
are invited—after what manner does the civilized
nineteenth century Englishman think? Thus: A
gallery has been constructed, looking from above into
the ball-room. There such more distinguished roturiers
(men of low descent), with their families, as the privileged
caste may condescend to invite—not to share—but to
witness their festivities, being duly fenced in with an
iron grating, may gaze through the bars at the paradise
that they can never enter. It is at least something!
They may there see what it is to be `noble!' The
happy ones, thus permitted to feast their eyes, may,
at least, boast to their less fortunate fellow-citizens,
of the condescension with which they have been
honored, and thus propagated, in some degree the
blessings of exclusiveness among the ranks of the
swinish multitude! In their happy gallery, at the
top of the noble ball-room, they may at least inhale the
refuse breath streaming up from noble lungs—delicious
gales from Araby the blest. Surely this is something.
The wealthy citizens of Milan feel that it is; and they
value the so-condescendingly-granted privilege accordingly.

“Yes! the roturier citizens of Milan—incredible
as it may seem to those whose more civilized social
system has given them the feelings of men in the place
of those of slaves—do gratefully and gladly accept
these invitations. Yes for one of the curses most
surely attendant on the undue separation of a privileged
caste, is the degradation of both parties—the real
abasement of the pariah, as well as the fancied exaltation
of the noble.”

Our readers' imaginations will easily transfer this
state of things to New York (fancying one class of
rich men inviting another class of men, quite as rich,
but with not the same sort of grandfathers, to look at
a ball through an iron grating!) but, leaving our friends
to pick out the “customers” for the two sides of the
grate, we turn to another difference still, between the
nether-graters and the mechanics. There is even a
more impassable barrier between these, and it is almost
as impassable in England and France as in the more
monarchical portions of Europe. A letter from abroad
in the Ledger of yesterday, states this phase of social
distinction very clearly:—

“The present state of society in France presents,
therefore, a new and almost incurable evil—the entire
separation of the capitalists, the merchants and manufacturers,
from the laboring portion of the community;
and what is worse, a hostile attitude of these social
elements to each other. In Germany, and partly even
in England, the interests of the manufacturers and
capitalists are parallel with those of the laborers, and
kept so by the pressure of a wealthy overbearing aristocracy
in Great Britain; while on the continent the
industrious pursuits are not yet sufficiently developed
to effect the separation. Whenever the laborers (the
pariahs) of England make common cause with their
employers, or rather, whenever their demands coincide
with those of their masters, the aristocracy is generally
obliged to yield: but whenever, as in the case
of the chartists, the laborers or inferior orders of the
industrious section of society demand anything for
itself which does not agree with the views of their employers,
they are perfectly powerless—a mere play-ball,
tossed to and fro between the landlords and the cotton-lords.

“In France, as I have observed, the separation of
the higher bourgeoisie from those who help them by
their labor to amass wealth, is complete; but so powerless
is the latter section that it is not only not represented
in the chambers, but not even thought or spoken
of, except when it is thought necessary to teach
it a lesson by putting it down and teaching it obedience.
he misery of the laboring classes has not yet
found an orator.”

We have given, here-above, an attractive nucleus
for table-talk and speculation, and we leave it to our
friends.

Poets and Poetry of America.—An hour's
lecture on this subject by Mr. Poe is but a “foot of
Hercules,” and though one can see what would be
the proportions of the whole, if treated with the same
scope and artistic minuteness, it is a pity to see only
the fragment. What we heard last night convinced
us, however, that one of the most readable and saleable
of books would be a dozen of such lectures by
Mr. Poe, and we give him a publisher's counsel to
print them.

After some general remarks on poetry and the uses
of impartial criticism, Mr. Poe gently waked up the
American poetesses. He began with Mrs. Sigourney,
whom he considered the best known, and who, he
seemed to think, owed her famousness to the same
cause as “old boss Richards”—the being “kept before
the people.” He spoke well of her poetry abstractly,
but intimated that it was strongly be-Hemans'd, and
that without the Hemanshood and the newspaper
iteration, Mrs. Sigourney would not be the first
American poetess. He next came to Mrs. Welby as
No. 2, and gave her wholesome muse some very stiff
laudation. Mrs. Osgood came next, and for her he
prophesied a rosy future of increasing power and renown.
He spoke well of Mrs. Seba Smith, and he
spent some time in showing that the two Miss Davidsons,
with all their merit, were afloat “on bladders in
a sea of glory.” The pricking of these bladders, by-the-way,
and the letting out of Miss Sedgwick's
breath, and Professor Morse's, and Mr. Southey's,
was most artistically well done.

Of the inspired males Mr. Poe only took up the
copperplate five—Bryant, Halleck, Longfellow,
Sprague, and Dana. These, as having their portraits
engraved in the frontispiece of Griswold's
“Poets and Poetry of America,” were taken to represent
the country's poetry, and dropped into the
melting-pot accordingly. Mr. Bryant came first as
the allowed best poet; but Mr. Poe, after giving him
high praise, expressed a contempt for “public opinion,”
and for the opinion of all majorities, in matters
of taste, and intimated that Mr. Bryant's universality
of approval lay in his keeping within very narrow limits,
where it was easy to have no faults. Halleck, Mr.
Poe praised exceedingly, repeating with great beauty
of elocution his Marco Bozzaris. Longfellow, Mr.
Poe said, had more genius than any other of the five,
but his fatal alacrity at imitation made him borrow,
when he had better at home. Sprague, but for
one drop of genuine poetry in a fugitive piece, was
described by Poe as Pope-and-water. Dana found
very little favor. Mr. Poe thought his metre harsh
and awkward, his narrative ill-managed, and his conceptions
eggs from other people's nests. With the
copperplate five, the criticisms abruptly broke off, Mr.
Poe concluding his lecture with the recitation of three
pieces of poetry which he thought had been mistakenly
put away, by the housekeeper of the temple of
fame, among the empty bottles. Two of them were
by authors we did not know, and the third was by an
author whom we have been exhorted to know under
the Greek name of Seauton (“gnothi seauton”)—
ourself! (Perhaps we may be excused for mentioning
that the overlooked bottle of us contained “unseen
spirits,” and that the brigadier, who gave us twenty
dollars for it, thought it by no means “small beer!”)

Mr. Poe had an audience of critics and poets—
between two and three hundred of victims and victimizers—and
he was heard with breathless attention. He

becomes a desk, his beautiful head showing like a
statuary embodiment of discrimination; his accent
drops like a knife through water, and his style is so
much purer and clearer than the pulpit commonly
gets or requires, that the effect of what he says, beside
other things, pampers the ear. Poe's late poem of
“The Raven,” embroidered him at once on the quilt
of the poets; but as the first bold traverse thread run
across the parallelisms of American criticism, he
wants but a business bodkin to work this subordinate
talent to great show and profit. We admire him none
the less for dissenting from some of his opinions.

Asylum for Indigent Women.—A benevolent
friend surprised us, on Saturday, into one of the most
agreeable visits we ever made—a visit to an institution
of whose existence we were not even aware. We
presume that others have shared our ignorance, and
that the name we have written above will convey to
most readers an idea either vague or entirely novel.
Poetry alone would express truly the impression left
on our mind by this visit, but we will confine ourself
to a brief description in prose.

Our friend informed us, on the way, that an entrance
fee of fifty dollars was required, and that the claims of
the proposed inmate (as to respectability and such circumstances
as would affect the social comfort of the
establishment) were decided upon by the board of
management. Once there, she has a home for life,
with perfect command of egress, absence for visits,
and calls from friends, books, medical attendance, occupation.
&c. Each inmate commonly adds some
furniture to the simple provision of the room.

We entered a large building, with two spacious
wings, standing on Twentieth street, near the East
river. Opposite the entrance, the door opened into a
cheerful chapel, and we turned to the left into a
drawing-room, which had all the appearance of an
apartment in the most comfortable private residence.
We descended thence through warm corridors, to the
refectory in the basement, and here the ladies (between
fifty and sixty of them) chanced to be taking
their tea. We really never saw a pleasanter picture
of comfort. The several tables were scattered irregularly
around the room, and each little party had separate
teapot and table furniture, the arrangements
reminding one of a café in a world grown old. The
gay chatting, the passing of cups and plates, the nodding
of clean caps, and the really unusual liveliness
of the different parties, took us entirely by surprise—
took away, in fact, all idea of an asylum for sickness
or poverty. What with the fragrant atmosphere of
souchong, and the happy faces, it would have been a
needlessly fastidious person who would not have sat
down willingly as a guest at the meal.

We looked into the kitchen and household arrangements
for a few minutes, finding everything the model
of wholesome neatness, and then, as the ladies had
returned to their rooms, we made a few visits to
them, chez elles, introduced by the attendant. Here
again, the variety of furniture, the comfortable rocking-chairs,
the curtains, and pictures, and ornamental
trifles, removed all idea of hospital or asylum-life, and
gave us the feeling of visiters in private families.
The ladies were visiting from room to room, and those
we conversed with assured us that they had everything
for their comfort, and were as happy as they well
could be—though they laughed very heartily when we
expressed some envy of the barrier between them and
the vexed world we must return to, and at our wish
that we could “qualify” and stay with them. We
have rarely had merrier conversation in a call, and we
think that this asylum for age holds at least one or
two very agreeable women.

But what charity can the angel of mercy so smile
upon, as this waiting upon life to its gloomy retiring-door,
lighting the dark steps downward, and sending
home the weary guest with a farewell, softened and
cheerful! God bless the founder of this beautiful
charity! Who can hear of it and not wish to aid it?
Who has read thus far, our truthful picture, and does
not mentally resolve to be one (though by ever so
small a gift) among its blest benefactors.

We begged a copy of the last report, and we find
that the society, which supports the asylum, has some
eighty pensioners out of the house, and that there is
some fear entertained, from the low state of the funds,
as to the ability to continue these latter charities.
We can not conceive the treasury of such an institution
in want. We are not authorized to make any
appeal to the public, but those who are inclined to
give can easily find out the way.

Sacred Concert.—We have once or twice, when
writing of musical performers, given partial expression
to a feeling that has since been very strongly
confirmed—the expediency of addressing music, in
this country, to the more serious instead of the gayer
classes, for its best support and cultivation. The
high moral tone, this side the water, of all those strata
of society to which refined amusement looks for support,
gives music rather an American rebuke than an
American welcome—coming as a pleasure in which
dissipated fashionables are alone interested. Italian
opera, properly labelled and separated from its needless
association with ballet, would rise to the unoffending
moral level of piano-music, sight-seeing, concert-going,
or what the serious commonly call innocent
amusements.

Till lately it has been generally understood that the
only hope for patronage of fine music, in New York,
was the exclusive class which answers to the court
circles of Europe; and, so addressed, the opera has
very naturally languished.

The truth is, that the great mass of the wealthy
and respectable population of New York is at a level
of strict morality, or of religious feelings rising still
higher, and any amusement that goes by a doubtful
name among moralists, is at once excluded. But
music need never suffer by this exclusion, and as the
favor of these stricter classes, once secured, would be
of inexhaustible profit to musicians, it would be worth
while for some master-spirit among them to undertake
the proper adaptation of music to moral favor.

Why should the best singers be considered almost
profane—was the question that naturally enough occurred
to us the other night on hearing the Tabernacle
fill, to its vast capacity, with the voice of Madame
Pico giving entrancing utterance to Scripture! Here
were a thousand lovers of music sitting breathless together,
with their most hallowed feelings embarked
upon a voice usually devoted to profane uses. Many
whose tears flow only at hallowed prompting, listened
with moist eyes to the new-clad notes of familiar sacred
music—perhaps half-sighing with self-reproach
that the enchantment of an opera-singer should have
reached such sacred fountains of emotion. Why
should not the best musical talent, as well as the
more indifferent, be made tributary to religion? Why
should not sacred operas be written for our country
exclusively? Why should not the highly dramatic
scenes and events of Scripture be represented on the
stage, and seen with reverence by the classes who
have already seen them in their imaginations, during
perusal of the inspired volume. And why should not
the events of human life, as portrayed in unobjectionable
operas, be alternated with these, and addressed to
the moral approbation of our refined serious classes?

We believe that this (and not this alone of things commonly
delivered over to the evil spirit among us)
would be willingly taken charge of by the angel of
good influences.

We can not give a critical notice of the performances
at the sacred concert, as we were unable to remain
after the conclusion of the first part, but we heard a
single remark which seems to us worth quoting. At
the conclusion of Madame Pico's first air, a gentleman,
standing near us, observed that it was very odd
a foreigner should sing with perfect articulation, while
he could scarce understand a word from those who
sang in their native tongue! The instrumental music
was admirable, and the scenic effect of the female
choir (all dressed in white, and getting up with a
spontaneous resurrection for the chorus) was at least
impressive.

P. S. Just as we are going to press we have received
a critique of the concert, speaking very glowingly
of Madame Pico, and the

“as Aristophanes hath it,” of the “deep clear tones
of Brough, so long lost to us,” and “Miss Northall
and Mr. Meyer,” as having “given full satisfaction.”

The Famine at Washington.—The city is alive
with laughable stories of the distress for bed and provender
during the late descent upon the scene of the
inauguration.

the belles and beaux, politicians and travellers, are
crowding back to the regions of steady population,
aghast at the risks of famine run in the capital of a
land of proverbial abundance. The stories are mostly
such as would easily be imagined taking place in any
country, under the circumstances, but we heard of one
worth recording—a Yankee variation of an expedient
tried some years ago by an Englishman at Saratoga.
John Bull, in that instance (it may be remembered),
after calling in vain to the flying attendants at the
crowded table, splashed a handful of silver into his
plate and handed it to a waiter with a request for “a
clean plate and some soup.” A Massachusetts judge,
probably remembering this, drew a gold piece from
his pocket last week while sitting hungry at the stripped
table at Washington, and tapping his tumbler
with it till he attracted attention, laid it beside his
plate and pointed to it while he mentioned what he
wanted. He was miraculously supplied of course,
but, when he had nothing more to ask, he politely
thanked the waiter and—returned the gold piece to
his own pocket!

The German Concert.—The great wilderness
of Pews-y-ism—the boundless Tabernacle—was filled
to its remotest “seat for one” on Saturday evening,
and a more successful concert could scarcely have
been given. The nation cradled away from salt air,
showed their naturally fresh enthusiasm for the performances,
and it seemed to have an effect upon
Madame Pico, for her friends thought she never had
sung so enchantingly, as in the second of the pieces
set down for her—“la casta Diva.” She was applauded
to the utmost tension of Mr. Hale's roof and
rafters. The German chorus by a score of amateurs
was admirably given, and Schaffenburg's piano-music
was done to the utmost probable of excellence.

“Mine Host.”—Some time ago, in some speculations
on American peculiarities, we commented on the
hotel-life so much more popular in this country than
elsewhere, and the necessity, bred by the manners
and habits of our people, that hotel-keepers should be
well-bred men, of high character and agreeable manners.
The trusts reposed in them by their guests,
and the courtesy they are called on to exercise, make
it almost inevitable that such men should alone be
encouraged to assume the direction of hotels. This
tendency of fitness has lately put the Howard house
into the hands of one of our most courteous, capable,
and agreeable friends, Capt. Roe, and the public will
find that central hotel all that they can require.

The Geode.—We remember being pitched for a
week into Query-dom, while attending college lectures,
by Prof. Silliman's astounding story of the
mine in (we think) Meriden, Connecticut—a single
cave in which had been found a specimen of almost
every known precious stone. It was a kind of omnibus
geode, and with a boy's imagination, we speculated
endlessly on how so many rare gems could have
chanced to have come together in this world of loose
distribution. We have come, now, however, to the
astounding knowledge of a geode of poetesses—the
centre of which is Fanny Forester—and though there
are astonishing resemblances between the material
and spiritual world, we were not prepared for this!
Fanny herself, as a prose writer and poetess, has now
an assured fame. But, on St. Valentine's day, we
received an original Valentine from one of her intimate
friends, which was as beautiful poetry as fame
wants in her trumpet, and two or three weeks ago we
published a most delicious poem from another friend
of Fanny Forester's, and here comes a fourth gem
which seems to hint (and this is too sad a possibility
to trifle upon) that gifted Fanny Foresteris beckoned
to, from a better world. God send her health with
this coming spring—thousands will pray fervently.
Here follows a prayer for it, expressed in touching
verse by one who seems a familiar friend:—

Yankee-Parisian Aristocracy.—Our agreeable
neighbor of the “Etats-Unis” gives a letter from
Paris which states that “another rich American is
about taking the place of the retiring Col. Thorn.
Mr. Macnamara has opened a superb house in the
rue de la Madeleine, and is sending out invitations
par milliers. In the commencement of a fashionable
career as an entertainer, a thousand invitations will
hardly bring persons enough to form a quadrille.
Mr. Tudor, another American, is just now in that stage
where he has commenced weeding his saloons!”

The same agreeable letter states that two sisters of
the Hon. Mrs. Norton, Lady Seymour (the Queen
of Beauty at Eglinton), and Lady Dufferin (the Mrs.
Blackwood whose songs are well known in this country),
have been playing at the English embassy in
private theatricals. The characters were nearly all
personated by lords and ladies, yet one Baltimore
belle sustained the part of “Mary Copp” in the play
of Charles the Second—Miss Mactavish. The
two sisters of Mrs. Norton and the “Undying One”
herself, were by much the three most beautiful women
we saw abroad—magnificent graces between
whom it was hard to choose the most beautiful.

Newell's Patent Lock.—Mr. Newell's wonderful
lock (one of which costs as much as a pianoforte)
is not wholly original. On the world's first washing-day,
Monday No. 1, a human mind was created on
precisely the same principle. Without going into
the details either of this lock or a human mind (in
either of which we should lose ourself of course) we
will simply give the principle of Nature's patent and
Mr. Newell's, viz: that the lock is constructed not
only to be un-openable to all keys but the right one,
but to become just what that right one makes it. Newell's
lock is a chaos of slides, wards, and joints, till the key
turns in it; and it then suddenly springs into order,
simplicity, and beauty of construction. Another
resemblance to Nature's plastic lock, is this feature
of Newell's, that by the slightest change in the key
(provided for by bits inserted at will) the whole interior
responds differently; so that a bank director, like a
mind director, may change his key every day in the
year, and (preserving only the harmony between lock
and key) will find the lock every day responsive to the
change. Fair dealing required, we think, that the
proper credit should have been given to the original
inventor, and that the patent should be called “Newell's,
after Nature.”

Having shown the way the invention struck us,
however, we copy by request what was said of it by
the Journal of Commerce:—

“Mr. Newell denominates this new masterpiece of
ingenuity, the Parautoptic Toiken Permutation Lock.
Parautoptic, being a Greek word, signifying preventive
of an internal inspection, and toiken meaning
walled, hence the name. This lock has been named
after its peculiar properties. Phosphoric or other
light may be introduced into it in vain in order to
view its interior construction. The tumblers being
separated from the essential actional parts of the lock,
which constitute its safety, by a perpendicular wall of
solid steel forming two distinct and separate chambers
in the same, thus counteracting all burglarious designs.
The front chamber will, on close inspection, either by
phosphoric light or reflection, exhibit nothing but solid
walls of steel or iron. This lock is susceptible of an
infinity of changes from thousands to millions, enabling
the possessor to change or vary it at pleasure,
simply by transposing or altering the bits in the key,
before using it to lock the door, in a manner
which is truly surprising. It therefore follows that
a person may make himself a different lock every
moment of his life, if such be his disposition, thereby
frustrating the skill of the maker, and placing him on
a footing with the merest novice. We are, therefore,
fully persuaded of its being the ultimatum of lock-making,
and sincerely congratulate the inventor of
this admirable contrivance, in thus being able to
counteract so effectually the various plans and schemes
of burglars and pick-locks, and we feel warranted in
stating that after due inspection, all those connected
with banking institutions, and the public generally,
will adopt it at once as preferable to all others, for the
safe-keeping and protection of their property.”

The New York “Rocher de Cancale.”—To
dine tête-á-tête with a friend, in Paris, or to give a dinner
party, you must go to the above-named renowned
restaurant, where have dined, probably, all the gentlemen
now existing. Private room, faultless dinner,
apt and prompt service, and reasonable charges, constitute
the charm, and all this we are to have (or so
says that communicative “little bird in the air”) at
the corner of Reade st., in the new Maison Lafarge.
That “unrecognised angel,” Signor Bardotte, is to
be the chef des details, and, in partnership with him,
a gentleman well fatigued with travel and experience
is to act as partner. Of course we would much rather
record the establishment, at the same corner, of an
asylum for unavoidable accomplishments, but since
luxury will cut its swarth, we like to see the rake with
a clean handle.

The Misses Rice and the Bears.—The Portland
Advertiser states that in a secluded part of Oxford
county, called “The Andover Surplus,” there
reside two female farmers, who occupy a few acres,
and “do their own chores,” hiring male help only for
haying and harvesting. Out in the woods lately with
the ox-team, cutting and drawing winter's wood, one
of the Misses Rice was attracted by the barking of the
dog at a hollow tree. One of the young ladies was
absent for the moment, and the other chopped a hole
in the tree and came to a bear-skin! Nothing
daunted at the sight, she gave a poke, and out scrambled
bruin, whom she knocked down and despatched.
A second bear immediately made his appearance, and
she despatched him! A third bear then crept from
the tree, and the same axe finished him! This,
Miss Rice considered a good morning's work, for
there is a two-dollar bounty on bears, and the skins
and grease are worth five dollars, at least. We should
like to see Miss Rice, of the “Andover Surplus!”

Inconstancy made Romantic.—“The Countess
Faustina” (the new book now in everybody's hands)
is the first novel we remember to have read, the whole
burthen of which is a glorification of inconstancy in
love! The heroine is charmingly drawn—the model
of divine women—but after quite innocently using up
all that was most loveable in two men and deserting
them, she gets tired of a third, and goes into a convent
to finish the story! The lovers are all described
as worthy of a deathless passion, and the love on both
sides, while it lasts, is of the loftiest lift and devotion,
but the countess has the little peculiarity of liking no
love except love in progress, and she deserts, of course,
at the first premonishing of the halt of tranquillity.
The following passage, descriptive of her enlightening
her last love as to the coming break-off, will show how
neatly she wrapped up the bitter pill:—

“`Be silent,' she exclaimed, when I was about to
answer her, `be silent! Does not the water-lily

know its time, rises to blossom from the water, and
then returns back into its depths, satisfied, tranquil,
with a treasure of sweet recollections? Flowers
know when their time is passed, and man tries, all he
can, not to be aware of it. This year with you,
Mario, was the height of my blossoming!'

“`You love me no longer,' I exclaimed bitterly.

“`Fool!' she replied, with that ecstatic smile which
I never saw on any brow but hers, `have you not
touched the tabernacle of my heart? Is not my son
yours? No, Mario! I love you; I have loved
nothing so much; I shall never love anything after
you—but, above you, God! My soul has squandered
itself in such transports of love and inspiration with
yours, that all it can ever meet in this region will be
but a repetition, and perhaps an insipid one. We
have so broken up my heart in searching for its treasure,
that the gold mines are probably exhausted,
before the sad certainty comes upon us.'

“`Faustina!' I know not in what tone I said this,
but she sank trembling into my arms, and said very,
very softly,

“`Oh, if you are angry, I shall not have the courage
to open my heart to you!'

“I knew I ought not to alarm her, and I embraced
her tenderly, and inquired what she thought of doing.

“She replied, `I will close the mine! If there is
any valuable metal within, it may rest quietly in the
depths. And above I will plant flowers.'

“`But what can—what would you do?' I inquired
with terrible anxiety.

“`Belong entirely to God, and enter a convent!'
she replied,” &c., &c.

Six months of convent-life sufficed to finish the
Countess Faustina, who “discovered too late” (says
the narrator) “that, during our life, we can but look,
like Moses, toward the promised Canaan” (of a man
worth being constant to) “but never reach it!” It
strikes us this is a naughtyish book—at least, if, as we
read in Spenser:—

The book is a mark of the times, however. It
makes no mention of Fourierism, but we doubt
whether its sentiments would have been ventured
upon in print, if Fourier principles had not insensibly
opened the gates. It is no sign that principles are not
spreading, because everybody writes against them,
and because few will acknowledge them. We see by
various symptoms in literature, that the mere peep
into free-and-easy-dom given by the discussion of
Fourier tenets, has left a leaning that way. There is
no particular Fourierism, that we know of, in the two
following pieces of poetry, but they fell from that
same leaning, we rather fancy. We copy the first
from our sober and exemplary neighbor, “The Albion”:—

The next instance comes from the very heart of
holier-than-thou-dom—the exemplary state of Maine
The St. Louis Reveille declares it to be a “well-authenticated
fact which occurred at Holton, in Maine.”

Missionary Eyelids.—At No. 75, Fulton street,
a large emporium has lately been opened for the sale
of the plant propagated from the cut-off eyelids of the
first Christian missionary to China—in other words,
for the sale of tea! One of the partners of this establishment
(the Pekin tea company) has written a
charming little pamphlet, called a “Guide to Tea-Drinkers,”
in which he gives the following true origin
of the wakeful properties of tea:—

“Darma, the son of an Indian king, is said to have
landed in China in the year 510 of the Christian era.
He employed all his care and time to spread through
the country a knowledge of God and religion, and, to
stimulate others by his example, imposed on himself
privations of every kind, living in the open air, in fasting
and prayer. On one occasion, being worn out
with fatigue, he fell asleep against his will, and that he
might thereafter observe his oath, which he had thus
violated, he cut off his eyelids, and threw them on the
ground. The next day passing the same way, he
found them changed to a shrub (tea) which the earth
never before produced. Having eaten some of its
leaves he felt his spirits much exhilarated, and his
strength restored. He recommended this aliment to
his disciples and followers. The reputation of tea increased,
and from that time it continued to be generally
used.”

The pamphlet goes on to state the properties of the
different kinds of tea, describing Pekoe as the best of
teas (qu?—hence the prevailing of the Pico tease over
Borghese's), and declares it to be peculiarly agreeable
(Pekoe tea) to poets and ladies—as follows:—

“The warmth conveyed to the stomach of man by
tea-drinking at his various meals, becomes essential to
him, nor would the crystal steam of the poet suffice
for the healthy powers of digestion in the artificial
state of existence in which we are placed. A learned

writer declares that tea is particularly adapted for the
ordinary beverage of young women, and the individual
who, until the day of her marriage, has never tasted
wine or any fermented liquor, is the one who is
most likely to fulfil the great end of her existence—
the handing down to posterity a strong and well-organized
offspring.”

A visit to this emporium is well worth curiosity's
while, and tea can there be bought in large or small
quantities, and in prices much below those of grocers.

Women in their June.—The early decay of female
beauty, consequent on neglect of physical education
and the corroding dryness of our climate, has
given an American value to the immature April and
May of female seasons, and a corresponding depreciation
to the riper June. The article which we copy
below, from the Brooklyn Star, expresses, we believe,
the opinion of the best judges of these exotics from
a better world, and emboldens us to express a long-entertained
belief that the most loveable age of unmarried
woman's life commences, at the earliest, at
twenty-five, and lasts as long after as she shows no diminution
of sensibility, and no ravages of time. Women
improve so much longer than men (improve by the
loving and suffering that spoils men), that we wonder
they have never found an historic anatomist of their
later stages. We suggest it to pens at a loss. Here
follow our contemporary's opinions:—

“My dear sir, if you ever marry, marry an old
maid—a good old maid—who is serious, and simple,
and true. I hate these double-minded misses, who
are all the time hunting after a husband. I tell you
that when a woman gets to be twenty-eight, she
settles into a calm—rather she “anchors in deep waters,
and safe from shore.” There never was a set, or
class, or community of persons, so belied as these
ancient ladies. Look upon it as no reproach to a
woman that she is not married at thirty or thirty-five.
Above all, fall not into the vulgar notion of romances,
and shallow wits—unlearned in women's hearts, because
they never had the love of a true woman—that
these are continually lying in wait to catch bachelors'
hearts. For one woman who has floated into the
calm of her years, who is anxious to fix you, I will
find you fifty maidens in their teens, and just out, who
lay a thousand snares to entrap you, and with more
cold-blooded intent—for whether is worse, that one of
singleness of purpose should seek to lean on you for
life, or that one should seek you as a lover, to excite
jealousy in others, or as a last resort.

“Marry a healthy, well-bred woman, between
twenty-eight and thirty-five, who is inclined to love
you, and never bewilder your brains with suspicions
about whether she has intentions on you or not. This
is the rock of vanity upon which many a man has
wrecked his best feelings and truest inclinations. Our
falseness, and the falseness of society, and more than
all, the false and hollow tone of language upon this
subject, leave very little courage for a straightforward
and independent course in the matter. What matter
if a woman likes you, and shows that she does, honestly,
and wishes to marry you?—the more reason for
self-congratulation but not for vanity. What matter
if she be young or not, so she be loveable? I won't
say what matter if she be plain or not—for everybody
knows that that is no matter where love is, though it
may have some business in determining the sentiment.
I don't know what has led me into this course
of remark. The last thing I should have expected
on sitting down to write, is, that I should have fallen
into a lecture on matrimony. I am not an old maid
myself, yet; but I have a clearer eye to their virtues
than I have had, and begin to feel how dignified a
woman may be `in her loneness—in her loneness—
and the fairer for that loneness.' You may think it
is bespeaking favor and patience with a vengeance.”

Refined Charities.—Our readers were made
aware, a few days since, that we had received very
great pleasure from a visit to an institution hitherto
unknown to us—the “Asylum for Aged and Indigent
Ladies.” That so beautiful a charity, conducted
with so happy a method, should never have come to
our knowledge, struck us as probably a singular
chance in our own hearsay—but we find that others,
as likely to be interested in it as ourself, were equally
in the dark, and one lady (quite the most active Dorcas
of our acquaintance) took our account to be an
ingenious device to suggest such an institution! That
a large two-winged building, with a sculptured tablet
set in front, stating its purpose, and so filled that it
might be taken up to heaven by its “knit corners,”
like the sheet full of living things let down to the
apostle on the housetop—that such a building, with
such a purpose, should exist unsuspected in one of
the streets of New York, is somewhat a marvel. But
we were not prepared for TWO such surprises! We
have since discovered another charity that was wholly
unknown to us, as delicate, if not as poetically beautiful,
and we begin to think that the old saying is
true—ministering spirits do walk the earth, unrecognised
in their tender ministrations, and

Our second discovery is of an institution called the
“Ladies' Depository—intended for the benefit of
those persons who have experienced a reverse of fortune,
and who can not come before the public, while, at the
same time, they may, from necessity, wish to dispose of
useful and ornamental work, if it could be done privately,
and to advantage.” The institution supports
a store for the sale of needlework, &c., and any one
of its twenty-five managers may receive an application
and give a “permit” to the lady in want—this one
manager alone the possessor of the secret of the lady's
wants and mode of supplying them. Work, drawings,
&c., are thus purchased by the society's funds, and
sold by the hired saleswoman of the society, and a
veil is thus hung between delicacy and the rude contact
of open want—a veil which prevents more pain,
probably, than the food which prevents only bodily
suffering.

This beautiful charity has now been in existence
twelve years, and by its tenth report (we have no later
one) we find that fourteen hundred dollars were paid
out for work in the twelve months preceding. This
sum is not large, and it shows that the subscriptions to
the funds of the society are less liberal than could be
desired. We should think that the bare knowledge
of the existence of such societies as this and the one
beforementioned, would start streams of gift-laden
sympathy toward them, and we think they but need
wider publicity. We are not authorized to mention
in print the names of the treasurer or directresses,
but the report lies on our table, and we shall be happy
to give the information to any individual applying at
our office.

We copy the following astounding intelligence
from a Montreal paper:—

“Annexation of the State of Maine.—After
all that has been said of Texas and Oregon, and the
desire entertained by the people of the United States
to enlarge their territory by the acquisition of immense
tracts, it will surprise many, and add much to
the protocols that will be issued, to learn that the state

of Maine, disgusted with slavery and repudiation, and
feeling a community of interests with those of north of
forty-five degrees, has petitioned her majesty Queen
Victoria to readmit her to the old family circle of John
Bull, where property is respected, and where there is
neither vote by ballot, Lynch law, slavery, nor repudiation,

“It is generally surmised that his honor, Judge
Preble is charged with this delicate mission, and that
the petition will be sent through his excellency Lord
Metcalfe, by the next steamer, though the ostensible
ground of his honor's visit to Montreal is the railroad
to Portland; and it is evident that if the admission is
agreed on, and is prompt and immediate, all the stock
will be at once subscribed by the home government,
and presented to the new confederation.

“Part of New Hampshire, Vermont, and that portion
of New York bordering on the St. Lawrence,
will, it is thought, follow this laudable example.

“N. B. No state that has repudiated need
apply.”

We were born in Portland, and by annexation, as
above, are likely to turn out a “a Britisher from the
provinces!” President Polk is to lose us—Queen
Victoria is to have us! Lucky we were presented to
her majesty while we were a republican court-eligible
—before we sank, that is to say, from a “distinguished
foreigner” into a provincial editor! We should never
have had formal certainty of having lodged exclusively
for the space of a minute, in the queen's eye,
had Maine annexed herself before we were brought to
the notice of “Gold Stick in Waiting.” So much,
at least, it was better to have been temporarily a
Yankee!

There is one other difference to be considered,
while we are measuring the matter at the top—we
cease to be a competitor for the presidency! Our
glorious fifteen millionth of capability for “No. 1”
drops from us as treason to Victoria! We are reduced
to the prospect of dying the inferior of Louis
Philippe(!) without the benefit of a doubt. We become
also, doubtless, the inferior of all the title gentlemen
catalogued in the “red book,” many of whom,
till Maine was annexed, welcomed us to walk into
their houses, without mentally seeing us pass under
the yoke over the door. We are to unlearn “Yankee
Doodle,” and learn “God save the Queen.” We
are to call this half-savage country “The States,”
and keep the birthdays of the queen's annuals. We
are to glory in standing armies, national debt, and
London fog and porter, and begin to hesitate in our
speech, and wear short whiskers. The change in
our prayer-book is not much. We are to do our ciphering
in pounds, and that will plague us! We are
to be interested in Canada politics and Lord Metcalfe's
erysipelas. We are to belong to a country
where births are published, as the first sign that people
know all about you, and that you must stay put.
(This last strikes us as the worst part of it.) We are
to pass for an Englishman on our travels, in the states
and elsewhere, and that is agreeable, because our
suavity will be unexpected. The larger features of
our metamorphosis we omit for future consideration
—but, as far as these personal ones go, we fear we
had a better chance as a Yankee! We were what we
could make ourselves—we are to be what others make
us. Queen Victoria, on the whole, will oblige us by
not laying her hands on our Maine!

A Future Passion, in the Egg.—We have had a
book for some time, that is destined to be an American
passion. Once read, it infatuates—for it expresses
in a brief and beautiful figure every possible
poetic feeling, and will do for the heart, what the
single japonica does to the dress—give the finishing
expression, no way else so felicitously effective.
Those who make love before this book gets into use,
will work like savages with arrows before the discovery
of gunpowder. Those whose best thoughts die
in birth, for lack of recognition and ready-made clothing,
will wonder how they were ever comfortable
without it. Our Cumberland correspondent spent a
whole letter, wondering why we, who were constantly
quoting the book, had never written a critique upon
it. Our reason for not doing so—or rather for first
making our readers thoroughly alive to its beauty by
extract—is indirectly given in the book itself, in the
chapter called “Indirect Influences.” See how exquisitely
it is done:—

The book of which this exquisite passage is a part,
is called “proverbial philosophy.” It is by Martin
Farquhar Tupper, of Christ church, Oxford, and an
American edition of it has lain in the bookstores for
two years, wholly unsaleable! It can afford to “bide
its time,” and mean-time, we shall enrich our readers
with it, bit by bit.

ARGUMENT FOR SEDAN CHAIRS.

“Mr. Editor: You stand accredited as the ready
friend of luxurious elegance, the happy mingler of
those foreign ingredients, the utile with the dulci.
My dear sir, why have you never said a word in favor
of the Sedan-Chairs? The very name carries one
back to the days of Pope and Addison; to the routs,

and masquerades and Ranelagh of London, in the
`reign of wits.' Even Cowper celebrates it:—

“It is an Italian seggietta; and thus defined by an
old writer: `a kind of chaire used in Italy to carrie
men and women up and downe.' It seems to have
emigrated to London from Sedan, the birthplace of
Turenne. Dryden used it for the lectica of the Romans:—

“Were you ever in one? Then you will agree that
it is as necessary in Broadway as a gondola in Venice.
Think of Pope's `two pages and a chair.' Our
thousand and one idlers, who are too ragged to beg,
and too poor to keep a cab, might flourish their poles
to some purpose in front of St. Paul's—a better class
of chairmen than some we wot of.—They need not
have so heavy a load, nor so great a peril, as those
who, according to Swift, helped in the Trojan horse:—

“The new police would defend the glass from any
roystering blood, who, as Prior sings:—

Opposition may be expected: there was such at the
cab-epocha. But who can even name a cab, without
ignominy. Think of a trundling box—a packing-case
on wheels—surmounted by a top-heavy Milesian,
enthroned on a remnant of Chatham-street-great-coat,
forcing you along sidewise by a series of thumps, and
then, with a paroxysm that tries every ball and socket,
dumping you on the trottoir! Our semi-tropical
climate demands a protection from the sun: something
emulating the oriental palanquin; a parasol
which shall preclude fatigue and dust, as well as sunlight—which
shall transport the delicate woman with
the gentlest conceivable carriage, and into the very
hall of the stately mansion. What, prithee, can
answer these conditions but the sedan-chair? I already
see you in one, peering through the sky-blue
curtain, as you swim through your evening survey.
The corporation will at once adjust a bill of rates;
the thing is done. “Lunarius.”

We have been but in one city where sedans were
in use—Dublin. What struck us, in using them (and
that is what the reader cares most to know, we presume)
was the being shut up where it was warm and
dry, and let out where it was warm and dry. The
sedan is a small close carriage—an easy chair enclosed
by windows—carried on poles by two men.
They come into your drawing-room if you wish, shut
you up in a carriage by the fireside, and carry you,
without the slightest jar or contact with out-of-doors,
into the house where you are to dine or dance—no
wet sidewalk and no gust of cold wind, snow, or rain!
They are cheaper than carriages because men are
easier kept than horses, and as a sedan-chairman can
also follow some other trade in the daytime, we
should think it would be good economy to introduce
them to New York. Many a delicate woman might
then go to parties or theatres with a quarter of the
present risk—to lungs or head-dress!

Prince's Gardens.—We have received an immense
catalogue of the fruit-trees, plants, flowers,
vines, and berries, comprised in this ark of vegetation
at Flushing, and we should think from the account
of Prince's gardens, and the prodigal variety of this
catalogue, that the establishment would be better
worth visiting than any object of curiosity in the
neighborhood. It is now in the hands of the third
generation of descendants from the original founder—
no slight marvel of constancy of pursuit in this
country!

But we have found a singular pleasure in this catalogue—no
less than a perfect feast upon the names and
descriptions of the fruits and flowers! It reads like a
directory of some city of fairies, with a description of
the fairy-citizens written out against their names.
We can fancy a delightful visiting-list of people answering
to these descriptions of fruits and flowers.
Here are a few of the characters:—

Different APPLES are described as—“flesh stained
with red, perfumed;” “snow-white flesh, musky
sweet;” “fair, beautiful, pleasant flavor, sprightly;”
“tender, juicy, keeps well;” “remains juicy till
late;” “red flesh, a curiosity,” etc., etc. Different
pears are described as—“rich, sugary, delicious
aroma;” “most splendid, extra delicious, none more
estimable, grows vigorously, bears soon;” “beautiful,
aromatic, bears young, greatly esteemed;” “rich,
musky;” “excellent, slow to yield fruit;” “thin skin,
sweet, very good;” “new native variety, estimable,
handsome;” “very large, skin shining, flesh crisp,
agreeable flavor, excellent,” &c. Different peaches
are described as—“oval, splendid, luscious;” “estimable,
foliage curled, peculiar;” “waxen appearance,
globular, delicious flavor,” &c. Different grapes are
described as—“large, estimable, vigorous;” “sweet,
firm, thick skin, hangs long, monstrous clusters;”
“monstrous fox variety;” “Willis's large black;” (?)
“sprightly, pure for wine,” etc. Different roses are
called by name and described—“formidable red;”
“glory of the reds;” “insurmountable beauty;”
“new Dutch virgin's blush;” “sombre agreeable;”
“Watson's blush;” “red prolific;” “pale rose, deep
centre;” “deep rose, very robust;” “bluish violet,
superb, singular;” “bright pink, flaked with scarlet;”
“pubescent yellow flowering;” “white quilled;”
“extra magnificent;” “splendid, full, double-shaded
blush, monstrous size,” etc., etc.

Such names and definitions, of anything, were
enough to bring one to Flushing, and Mr. Prince
may look out for us very early in May, catalogue in
hand, to see beauties he has described so glowingly!
We trust the list of adjectives we have put so venturesomely
close together in our cool columns will not
explode in type, with spontaneous combustion!

Letters of Introduction.—The following query
may be answered briefly enough by quoting only European
usage, but the propriety of an American variation
occurs to us, and we will write a line on the subject—first
giving the suggestive note:—

“Sir: My friend N., usually a well-informed,
though rather an obstinate individual, is about to
travel, and asked me for a letter of introduction to a
friend abroad. The letter is written, and is submitted
to his perusal, after which he hands it back to be
sealed, insisting that the rule is inflexible that all letters
should be sealed. I refuse to affix the wax,
holding that a letter of introduction should be open.

“We leave the question to your decision. As my
friend N. can not sail until the question is decided, an
early decision will oblige him and your humble servant,
“B.”

With very ceremonious people, and ceremonious
notes of introduction, it is usual to affix a seal upon
the outside of the letter, leaving it to be read and

fastened by the bearer, before delivery. If the letter
extends beyond the mere stating of who the
bearer is, and the desire that he should be kindly received,
or if it treats of other matters, it is given
sealed. Either mode is perfectly allowable, for if the
bearer objects to a sealed letter, he can ask the contents
when he receives it. It is more common, however,
to give it unsealed.

Briefly, now, to the point we are coming to: letters
of introduction, in this country, should be addressed
to the women and not to the men, and should
go more into details of what the bearer is and what is
his errand of travel, and therefore should be sealed.
We have long been aware of a prevailing impression
that Americans treat letters of introduction with a
very uncivilized inattention, and so they do—because the
etiquetical and hospitable cares of American families
are in charge of the wife, and the husband is very likely
to stick the letter into a pigeon-hole of his desk, and
forget all about it. The wife in America does all the
ornamental. To see a rich man come down the steps
of his own house (almost anywhere “up town”) you
would take him to be a tradesman who had been in to
collect a bill. To see the wife follow, you would at
once acknowledge that she looked as though she lived
in the house, and fancy that she was probably annoyed
to see that man pass out by the front door!
From making himself a slave to keep his wife a goddess,
the American loses all idea of the propriety of
looking like a mate for his wife, and he unconsciously
ceases to take any care of the civilities to which his
own manners give so little value, and neglects all
persons who have not had the tact to be presented
first to the ornamental moiety. It should be an
American usage, therefore, growing out of the inferiority
of the husband's breeding to the wife's, that letters
of introduction should be addressed to the woman.

Of course, as she has no opportunity to inquire
into the bearer's position or habits, these should be
more minutely set down, and the letter should be
sealed.

“Findings.”—We see advertised continually certain
commodities called “findings,” which we understand
are what hatters and shoemakers require besides
peltry and leather. There are findings for
newspapers, too—what the editors require besides
leaders and news—and it may gratify our subscribers
to know, that out of the weary slip-slop which we
commonly scribble after making up the Mirror's leaders
and news, our contemporaries supply themselves
with the greater part of their ornamental “findings.”
Like every other editor, we are in the habit of giving
a line or two occasionally, in the body of our paper,
to the wares of our most liberal advertisers, and it appears
that even this wastage of business notices is
considered spice enough for other papers to be seasoned
with. The Boston Transcript spices its little
sheet very often with these parings of our daily apple.
Here is part of a letter which contains a touch:—

“The leading articles in the Mirror and Commercial
Advertiser for the last day or two have been devoted
to the all-engrossing topic, the spring style of
hats. After admitting that `knowingness could no
further go' than Beebe & Costar went, Willis winds
up thus: `For ourself and ten thousand other workies
whom we could name, the sadder model of Orlando
Fish—timid, proper, and thoughtful—is perhaps more
appropriate.' This passage has produced a great
sensation in dandy-dom. The Fish party are in raptures,
and could hug Willis to their very bosoms;
`the opposition' is in a fury. Nobody can tell what
the result may be. Willis dare not venture out, it is
thought without a body-guard of Fishites. There
are, moreover, many surmises with regard to the
character of the `ten thousand other workies' whom
Mr. Willis `could name.' Some think that he
means to be witty, and alludes ironically to the “upper
ten.” This is a great mystery.

“The constituent elements of `japonica-dom' and
`dandy-dom' may be seen daily in Broadway, between
the hours of twelve and three. All the beauty above
Bleecker street wanders at that time down as far as
the Park, hazarding even the contamination of the
vulgar crowd, in the hope of securing an appetite for
dinner. The liveried lacqueys, who oscillate upon a
black board behind the carriages of our republican
nabobs, sport their gayest trappings: I had the pleasure
of seeing one yesterday in a drab `cut-away' with
gold lace and yellow facings, and white silk stockings
with purple velvet smalls! What is this great country
coming to? We Gothamites do sometimes make
ourselves ridiculous, by aping what as a people we
profess to despise. It is rumored that a deputation
of English `small-potato' baronets may be expected
in this city next summer; and that the object of their
transatlantic mission is, to establish an aristocratic
nucleus among our `upper ten thousand.' A `herald's
college' has already been set on foot; and I have
heard that it enjoys considerable patronage. It is
proposed to build wings on either side of `the up-town
opera-house'—the one to be assigned to this `herald's
college,' and the other to the `university of fashion,'
of which Mr. Willis is to be president. Some say
that Colonel Webb has applied for the vice-presidency,
but I can not vouch for this.

“The chief feature of the Broadway Journal is a
defence by Mr. Poe of his attack upon Longfellow,
&c. It is as stupid as might be expected from a man
who used to `do up' such very small prosodial criticisms
for Graham's Magazine. Mr. Poe comes down
rather severely on Willis—he therefore has probably
discontinued his services at the Mirror office.”

One mistake in the above: Mr. Poe left us some
time before writing in the Broadway Journal, and to
edit that journal; and he never offended us by a criticism,
nor could he, except by personalities, in which
he never indulges.

Schiller and Goethe.—Mr. Calvert of Baltimore
has given us, as translator, a most agreeable
collection of gossippy letters—the undress of two
great minds, of the age just closed behind us. What
we most wish to comment on, however (the book
speaks for itself), is Mr. Calvert's own—the preface,
in which he indignantly and most properly rebukes
the last orator of the “Phi Beta Kappa Society,” for
a short-sighted and illiberal attack on the memory of
Goethe. We found it difficult, at the time, to restrain
an outbreak of disgust, but the oration was not published
for some time, and we were unwilling to take
ground upon a newspaper report of it. Meantime,
our natural alacrity at forgetting disagreeable things
dropped it out of memory. We are not sorry that a
condemnation of it is now recorded in a book that
must live.

Mr. Calvert puts the truth thus forcibly: “How
little outward testimony survives about Shakspere;
but whoso can read his poetry, may get a knowledge
of the man surer and more absolute than could have
been gotten even from the fullest contemporaneous opinions.
As the tree is known by its fruit, we know that
the parent of the Shaksperian progeny must have
been a man in whom, in close alliance with a kingly
intellect, dwelt, as well the virtues that ennoble, as
the graces that beautify and the affections that sweeten
life. Into whatever errors an ardent temperament
may have drawn him, they dim not the lucent image
of him, fixed in our minds by study of his works;
nay, we presume not to wish them uncommitted, lest

an attempt to better such a bounteous gift from God,
should mar, but by a little, the original proportions of
one, the sum of whose life has been to the world an unmeasurable
benefaction. When a bad man's brain
shall give birth to an Iphiginea, a Clara, a Mignon,
you may pluck pomegranates from Plymouth rock,
and reap corn on the sands of Sahara.

“On a formal public occasion (the Phi Beta Kappa
oration at Cambridge in 1844), a blind and
most rude assault has been made on one of the
mightiest of the dead, whose soul lives on earth, and
will for ages live in the exaltation of the loftiest
minds. Out of stale German gossip, out of shallow
wailings of prosaic critics, shallower clamors of pseudo-patriots,
uncharitable magnification of common failings,
were compounded calumny against one of the foremost
men of the world, and the most honored man of
a people rich in virtue and genius.”

Quite aside from the defence of Goethe, we think
there is an obvious presentment here of the continual
manner of treating all kinds of eminence and celebrity,
here, in our own country, and at this present hour.
As the proverb says:—

Stewart's Stable Economy.—We covet three
things in the Arab's condition—his loose trousers, his
country without fences, and his freedom to live with
his horse. That we have once had the centaur variety
in the human race, men-quadrupeds, and have once
known horseflesh as “flesh of our flesh,” the natural
longing to prance, when we first get into the open air
after long confinement, is but one of many evidences.
In a mere notice of a book, however, we have no
leisure to trace back a problem of physiology. We
merely wish to convey to such of our enviable readers
as can resume the centaur (by loving and living with a
horse in the country), the treasure they have in a book
which shows them how to make their life (the horse
half of it) a luxury instead of an endurance, and to give
our own five years' enjoyment in breaking, petting, and
improving horses, by aid of this same book, as experienced
commendation. We had the English edition
of Stewart's books on horses, but the Appletons have
republished the “Stable Economy,” with “notes
adapting it to American food and climate,” by Mr.
Allen, the able editor of the Agriculturist, and it is
now an invaluable vade-mecum, for all men who have
the luxury of a stable.

We can not help repeating that a visitable stable,
with friends in it in the shape of horses—with horses
in it one has himself broken and trained—a stable to
which the ladies like to go after breakfast, and where
a gentleman can throw on his own saddle and bridle,
and gallop off, without needing first to find his groom—
that this is the next best luxury our country affords,
after ladies' society. (Horses, that is to say, before
politics or stocks, under male discussion.)

The stable at Gordon castle (approachable by a
covered passage from the principal hall) was a frequent
resort for the ladies after breakfast; and we
have seen women, the highest in rank at the English
court, going in and out of the stalls, patting the favorites
they were to ride later in the day, and discussing
their beauty with the simplicity and frankness of
Arabs in the desert. While we are building country-houses
and forming habits in America, it is well to
know all the luxury we can enjoy in rural life, and no
one should build stable, or own horse, without consulting
the excellent directions for stabling and using
the horse, in this book of Stewart's.

Grund's Letters from Europe.—In Godey's
Lady's Book for April we find one of these best
epistles of the day, and (to tell the truth) we read
them with very little satisfaction, for they leave us
with a want to go where they are written. The April
number of Godey is principally the work of unwedded
quills (no less than ten misses numbered among the
contributors!), but we have read it with great satisfaction,
and felicitate our old friend upon the brilliancy
of his maiden troop. Godey is the pioneer of
magazines, and he has a tact at collection and selection,
which has put him where he is—safe at high-water
mark in enduring prosperity. Success to him.

By-the-way—though we have no room to expatiate
on the several papers in this number—the “Sketch of
Joseph Bonaparte” is capital. Is that by a “miss”
too?

And apropos, Godey! What a vile word “miss”
is, to express the sweetest thing in nature! Why
should the idol of mankind be called a “miss?”
Why should the charming word heifer be degraded to
the use of kine? We say “degraded,” for it once
served ladies as a synonym for the proudest of virgin
sweethearts. Ben Jonson, in his play of the “Silent
Woman,” thus writes a speech for his hero:—

“But heare me, faire lady, I do also love her whom
I shall choose for my heifer, to be the first and principal
in all fashions.”

The derivation of the word heifer is so complimentary!
It comes from two Anglo-Saxon words, which
signify “to step superbly,” as a young creature who
has borne no burthens. With this explanation, we
trust our friend Godey will no longer hesitate to advertise
his fair contributors as the bright lights of
HEIFERDOM—disusing henceforth, for ever, the disparaging
epithet of misses.

An Idea for Tattersall's.—There are luxuries
which rich men forego, not for the money but for the
mind they cost. Hundreds of people in this city, for
instance, could very well afford a carriage, but they
can not afford the trouble of buying horses, the care
of looking after grooms, nor the anxieties inseparable
from horse-owning in this country of perpetual new
servants. In England this want is provided for by the
system the livery-stable keepers call jobbing. Lady
Blessington's two or three different equipages for instance,
are allowed to be the prettiest and best appointed
in London. Yet she owns neither carriages,
horses, nor harness. She pays a certain sum per
annum to be provided with what she wants in the
way of equipages, and keeps only her own coachman

and footmen. A new carriage is furnished whenever
wanted, and of whatever style is wanted (the jobber
finding no trouble probably in disposing of the one
given up) and a sick or lame horse is replaced immediately
from a stable where the first blood and shape
are alone kept. Her ladyship thus knows precisely
what her driving is to cost her for the year, and
transfers to the jobber all the risk, anxiety, and
trouble.

A wealthy New-Yorker, a day or two since, made
a very handsome offer to a livery-stable keeper to
furnish him a carriage on this same plan, and the offer
was refused. But, though a single customer of
this kind might be troublesome, combination (that great
secret of luxurious, economies) might “make it answer.”
Twenty nice carriages, let out to private
gentlemen at $1,000, or $1,500 a year each, might be
looked after by one jobber well versed in horseflesh,
and his taste and experience would turn out better
equipages than could be got up by private individuals.
The twenty stables now kept up would be combined
in one (this in itself, no small saving) and the rich
man might be driven in better style, for less money
than it now costs him, and—better than all—without
the vexatious care, vigilance and anxiety of keeping a
private carriage.

P. S. We can safely say that we are entirely disinterested
in the proposed arrangement!

Graham for April.—The equinox brought us
such detestable weather, that instead of our usual two
hours' airing of brains under a hat, we lay on our
back yesterday afternoon and read “Graham.” How
does the man get so many good things! Grund,
Fanny Forester, Mrs. C. H. Butler, Wm. Lander,
Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Osgood, Mr. Peterson—all have
written their best for this number. Our friend Fanny's
story of “Nickie Ben” seems to us particularly fresh,
bright, and original. Mr. Grund's letter from Paris
is full of intelligence, and among other things, he thus
speaks of Eugene Sue and his two tasters:—

“He lives now, by the product of his industry, in
princely style; but his enjoyments are troubled by
the constant fear of being poisoned by his political
and religious adversaries. He has, therefore, contracted
an intimate friendship with two large, beautiful
Newfoundland dogs, who are his constant dinner and
breakfast companions, and who always eat first of every
dish that is brought on the table. If these judges of
gastronomy pronounce in favor of it, by first eating a
large quantity, with apparent relish, the author of
“The Mysteries” and “The Wandering Jew” himself
partakes of it without farther scruple. He believes
dogs much more faithful than men, and the
sagacious instincts of a regular Newfoundlander superior
to the science of chymists and physicians.”

Poor dogs! Considering that they would doubtless
have been wagging their tails in Paradise, but for
Adam's transgression, it seems hard to make them
die, for a human master, besides!

But, to turn to the first leaf—lo! the brigadier! There
he stands, looking as amiable as if he had just nabbed
a flying thought for a song, his smile a little more
rigid, however, and his phiz a little thinner than his
accommodating wont. The picture is enough like
him, notwithstanding, for all “business purposes.”
We think him better looking than the artist has
“done” him, and this we request the ladies (who sing
his songs) to allow for. The magazine opens with a
critical biography, exceedingly well done, and (the
brigadier below stairs playing salesman) we see nothing
to prevent our quoting a note of our own to the
writer:—

We get, from literary fledglings, at least one letter
per diem, requesting detailed advice on the quo modo
of a first flight in prose or poesy. We really suppose
we have, or are to have, an end to our life, and we like
to economise time. So we publish a letter, which we
once had occasion to write, and which must serve as
a circular—a letter which we recorded in our diary
when it was written—recorded with the following
preface:—

There lies before me now, upon my table, a letter
of three tolerably compact pages, addressed to a
young gentleman of — college, who is “bit by the
dipsas” of authorship. His mother, a sensible, plain,
farmer's widow, chanced to be my companion for a
couple of days, in a stage-coach, and while creeping
over the mountains between the Hudson and the Susquehannah,
she paid my common sense the compliment

of unburthening a very stout heart to me.
Since her husband's death, she has herself managed
the farm, and by active, personal oversight, has contrived
“to make both ends so far lap” (to use her own
expression), as to keep her only boy at college. By
her description, he is a slenderish lad in his constitution,
fond of poetry, and bent on trying his fortune
with his pen, as soon as he has closed his thumb and
finger on his degree. The good dame wished for the
best advice I could give him on the subject, leaving it
to me (after producing a piece of his poetry from her
pocket, published in one of the city papers) to encourage
or dissuade. I apprehended a troublesome
job of it, but after a very genial conversation (on the
subject of raising turkeys, in which she quite agreed
with me, that they were cheaper bought than raised,
when corn was fifty cents a bushel—greedy gobblers!),
I reverted to the topic of poetry, and promised to
write the inspired sophomore my views as to his prospects.
Need I record it?—that long letter affects me
like an unsigned bank-note—like something which
might so easily have been money—like a leak in the
beer-barrel—like a hole in the meal-bag! It irks me
to lose them—three fair pages—a league's drift to leeward—a
mortal morning's work, and no odor lucri
thence arising! I can not stand it, Mrs. —, and
Mr. Sophomore —! You are welcome to the
autograph copy, but faith! I must print it. There is
a superfluity of adjectives (intended, as it was, for
private perusal), but I will leave them out in the copy.

Thus runs the letter:—

Dear Sir: You will probably not recognise the
handwriting in which you are addressed, but by casting
your eye to the conclusion of the letter, you will
see that it comes from an old stager in periodical literature;
and of that, as a profession, I am requested
by your mother to give you, as she phrases it, “the
cost and yield.” You will allow what right you please
to my opinions, and it is only with the authority of
having lived by the pen, that I pretend to offer any
hints on the subject for your guidance. As “the
farm” can afford you nothing beyond your education,
you will excuse me for presuming that you need information
mainly as to the livelihood to be got from
literature.

Your mother thinks it is a poor market for potatoes,
where potatoes are to be had for nothing, and
that is simply the condition of American literature (as
protected by law). The contributors to the numerous
periodicals of England, are the picked men of
thousands—the accepted of hosts rejected—the flower
of a highly-educated and refined people—soldiers,
sailors, lords, ladies, and lawyers—all at leisure, all
anxious to turn a penny, all ambitious of print and
profit; and this great army, in addition to the hundreds
urged by need and pure literary zeal—this great
army, I say, are before you in the market, offering
their wares to your natural customer, at a price for
which you can not afford to sell—nothing! It is true
that by this state of the literary market, you have
fewer competitors among your countrymen—the best
talent of the country being driven, by necessity, into
less congenial and more profitable pursuits; but even
with this advantage (none but doomed authors in the
field) you would probably find it difficult, within five
years after you graduated, to convert your best piece
of poetry into a genuine dollar. I allow you, at the
same time, full credit for your undoubted genius.

You naturally inquire how American authors live.
I answer, by being English authors. There is no
American author who lives by his pen, for whom London
is not the chief market. Those whose books sell
only in this country, make scarce the wages of a day-laborer—always
excepting religious writers, and the
authors of school-books, and such works as owe their
popularity to extrinsic causes. To begin on leaving
college, with legitimate book-making—writing novels,
tales, volumes of poetry, &c., you must have at least
five years support from some other source, for until
you get a name, nothing you could write would pay
“board and lodging;” and “getting a name” in
America, implies having first got a name in England.
Then we have almost no professed, mere authors.
They have vocations of some other character, also.
Men like Dana, Bryant, Sprague, Halleck, Kennedy,
Wetmore, though, no doubt, it is the first wish of
their hearts to devote all their time to literature, are
kept, by our atrocious laws of copyright, in paths less
honorable to their country, but more profitable to
themselves, and by far the greatest number of discouraged
authos are “broken on the wheel” of the public
press. Gales, Walsh, Chandler, Buckingham, and
other editors of that stamp, are men driven aside from
authorship, their proper vocation.

Periodical writing seems the natural novitiate to
literary fame in our country, and I understand from
your mother that through this lies your chosen way.
I must try to give you as clear an idea as possible of
the length and breadth of it, and perhaps I can best
do so by contrasting it with another carcer, which (if
advice were not always useless) I should sooner
advise.

Your mother's farm, then, consisting of near a hundred
acres, gives a net produce of about five hundred
dollars a year—hands paid, I mean, and seed, wear and
tear of tools, team, &c., first subtracted. She has
lived as comfortable as usual for the last three or four
years, and still contrived to lay by the two hundred
and fifty dollars expended annually on your education.
Were you at home, your own labor and oversight
would add rather more than two hundred dollars
to the income, and with good luck you might call
yourself a farmer with five hundred dollars, as the
Irish say, “to the fore.” Your vocation, at the same
time, is dignified, and such as would reflect favorably
on your reputation, should you hereafter become in
any way eminent. During six months in the year,
you would scarce find more than an hour or two in
the twenty-four to spare from sleep or labor; but in
the winter months, with every necessary attention to
your affairs out of doors, still find as much leisure for
study and composition as most literary men devote to
those purposes. I say nothing of the pabulum of
rural influences on your mind, but will just hint at
another incidental advantage you may not have
thought of. viz.: that the public show much more
alacrity in crowning an author, if he does not make
bread and butter of the laurels! In other words, if
you are a farmer, you are supposed (by a world not
very brilliant in its conclusions) to expend the most of
your mental energies (as they do) in making your
living; and your literature goes for an “aside”—
waste-water, as the millers phrase it—a very material
premise in both criticism and public estimation.

At your age, the above picture would have been
thrown away on myself, and I presume (inviting as it
seems to my world-weary eyes) it is thrown away now
upon you. I shall therefore try to present to you the
lights and shadows of the picture which seem to you
more attractive.

Your first step will be to select New York as the
city which is to be illustrated by your residence, and
to commence a search after some literary occupation.
You have a volume of poetry which has been returned
to you by your “literary agent,” with a heavy charge
for procuring the refusal of every publisher to undertake
it, and with your pride quite taken out of you,
you are willing to devote your Latin and Greek, your
acquaintance with prosody and punctuation, and a very
middling proficiency in chicography (no offence—
your mother showed me your autograph list of bills
for the winter term)—all this store of accomplishment

you offer to employ for a trifle besides meat, lodging,
and apparel. These, you say, are surely moderate
expectations for an educated man, and such wares, so
cheap, must find a ready market. Of such stuff, you
know that editors are made, and in the hope of finding
a vacant editorial chair, you pocket your MSS., and
commence inquiry. At the end of the month, you
begin to think yourself the one person on earth for
whom there seems no room. There is no editor
wanted, no sub-editor wanted, no reporter, no proof-reader,
no poet! There are passable paragraphists by
scores—educated young men, of every kind, of promising
talent, who, for twenty dollars a month, would
joyfully do twice what you propose—give twice as
much time, and furnish twice as much “copy.” But
as you design, of course, to “go into society,” and
gather your laurels as they blossom, you can not
see your way very clearly with less than a haymaker's
wages. You proceed with your inquiries,
however, and are, at last, quite convinced that few
things are more difficult than to coin uncelebrated
brains into current money—that the avenues for the
employment of the head, only, are emulously crowded—that
there are many more than you had supposed
who have the same object as yourself, and that, whatever
fame may be in its meridian and close, its morning
is mortification and starvation.

The “small end of the horn” has a hole in it, however,
and the bitter stage of experience I have just
described, might be omitted in your history, if, by any
other means, you could be made small enough to go
in. The most considerable diminution of size, perhaps,
is the getting rid, for the time, of all idea of
“living like a gentleman” (according to the common
acceptation of the phrase). To be willing to satisfy
hunger in any clean and honest way, to sleep in any
clean and honest place, and to wear anything clean and
honestly paid for, are phases of the crescent moon of
fame, not very prominently laid down in our imaginary
chart; but they are, nevertheless, the first indication
of that moon's waxing. I see by the advertisements,
that there are facilities now for cheap living, which did
not exist “when George the Third was king.” A
dinner (of beef, bread, and potatoes, with a bottle of
wine) is offered, by an advertiser, of the savory name
of G— for a shilling, and a breakfast, most invitingly
described, is offered for sixpence. I have no
doubt a lodging might be procured at the same modest
rate of charge. “Society” does not move on this
plane, it is true, but society is not worth seeking at
any great cost, while you are obscure, and if you'll
wait till the first moment when it would be agreeable
(the moment when it thinks it worth while to caress
you), it will come to you, like Mohammed to the mountain.
And like the mountain's moving to Mohammed,
you will find any premature ambition on the subject.

Giving up the expectation of finding employment
suited to your taste, you will, of course, be “open to
offers,” and I should counsel you to take any that
would pay, which did not positively shut the door
upon literature. At the same wages you had better
direct covers in a newspaper office, than contribute
original matter which costs you thought, yet is not
appreciated; and in fact, as I said before with reference
to farming, a subsistence not directly obtained
by brain-work, is a material advantage to an author.
Eight hours of mere mechanical copying, and two
hours of leisurely composition, will tire you less, and
produce more for your reputation than twelve hours
of intellectual drudgery. The publishers and booksellers
have a good deal of work for educated men—
proof-reading, compiling, corresponding, &c., and this
is a good step to higher occupation. As you moderate
your wants, of course you enlarge your chances
for employment.

Getting up in the world is like walking through a
mist—your way opens as you get on. I should say
that with tolerable good fortune, you might make by
your pen, two hundred dollars the first year, and increase
your income a hundred dollars annually, for
five years. This, as a literary “operative.” After
that period, you would either remain stationary, a
mere “workey,” or your genius would discover “by
the dip of the divining rod,” where, in the well-searched
bowels of literature, lay an unworked vein
of ore. In the latter case, you would draw that one
prize in a thousand blanks of which the other competitors
in the lottery of fame feel as sure as yourself.

As a “stock” or “starring” player upon the literary
stage, of course you desire a crowded audience,
and it is worth your while, perhaps, to inquire (more
curiously than is laid down in most advices to authors)
what is the number and influence of the judicious,
and what nuts it is politic to throw to the groundlings.
Abuse is, in criticism, what shade is in a picture, discord
in harmony, acid in punch, salt in seasoning.
Unqualified praise is the death of Tarpeia, and to be
neither-praised nor abused is more than death—it is
inanition. Query—how to procure yourself to be
abused? In your chymical course next year, you will
probably give a morning's attention to the analysis of
the pearl, among other precious substances, and you
will be told by the professor, that it is the consequence
of an excess of carbonate of lime in the flesh of the
oyster—in other words, the disease of the sub-aqueous
animal who produces it. Now, to copy this politic
invalid—to learn wisdom of an oyster—find out
what is the most pungent disease of your style, and
hug it 'till it becomes a pearl. A fault carefully
studied is the germ of a peculiarity, and a peculiarity
is a pearl of great price to an author. The critics
begin very justly by hammering at it as a fault, and
after it is polished into a peculiarity, they still hammer
at it as a fault, and the noise they make attracts
attention to the pearl, and up you come from the deep
sea of obscurity, not the less intoxicated with the sunshine,
because, but for your disease, you would never
have seen it.

With one more very plain piece of counsel, I have
done. Never take the note of any man connected
with literature, if he will cash it for fifty per cent.

Breakfasts and the Quarterly.—Mr. Lockhart
can never do harm except indirectly. His assertions
and his criticisms are taken with more than the
“grain of salt.” Mr. Cooper may have a private
quarrel with him for some of his ungentlemanly
phraseology, but for the literary part of the criticism
on “England,” it will stand in the place of a good advertisement
to the book, and there ends all its good
and evil. In the following passage, however, a blow
(most unwise and most injurious) is struck at one of
the pleasantest usages of English hospitality:—

“We suspect that Mr. Cooper will not think Mr.
Rogers's breakfasts quite so admirable, nor the other
twenty so transcendantly agreeable, when he learns
that it is by no means usual to invite strangers to
breakfast in London, and that such breakfasts are
generally given when the guest is one about whose
manners, character, or social position, there is some
uncertainty—a breakfast is a kind of mezzo-termine,
between a mere visit and the more intimate hospitality
of a dinner. It is, as it were, a state of probation.”—
Quarterly Review for October.

As the great organ of the tory party in England,
the Quarterly might fairly be taken by a foreigner as
an authority upon a point of English manners. The
consequence follows, that he can not be invited to breakfast
without fair ground to presume it an insult. Shots
have been exchanged upon slighter ground. At the

best, a suspicion is thrown upon this mode of hospitality
which deprives it entirely of its easy and confidential
character; and that it is an injury to society
which could only be corrected by the publication of
a correct portrait of Mr. Lockhart. No one after
seeing it would credit any assertion he might make
upon a subject involving a knowledge of good-fellowship.

The editor of the Quarterly looks his vocation better
than any man it has been my fortune to see. In
his gait and voice there is a feline resemblance which
is remarkable. It is impossible for a human being to
be more like a cat. To aid the likeness, he is slightly
parry-toed, and when you see him creeping along
Pall Mall on his way to the club, you can not avoid
the impression that he is mousing. In his person he
is extremely thin, and, but for his mouth, Lockhart
would look like a gentleman. In that feature lies a
whole epitome of the man. The lips are short, and
of barely the thickness of the skin, and habitually
drawn in close against the teeth. To this feature,
which resembles somewhat the mouth of a small
purse, all the countenance seems subordinate. The
contraction pulls upon every muscle of his face, and
upon every muscle is stamped the malice of which
his mouth is the living and most legible type.

This description of the man is very apropos of his
opinions of breakfast. I presume he was never asked
to an unceremonious breakfast in his life. Would
any one in his senses begin his day by sitting down
opposite to such a face for a couple of hours? Not
willingly, I should think.

I presume every Englishman except the editor of
the Quarterly will agree that to ask a stranger to
breakfast is much more flattering than to invite him
to dinner. Engagements to breakfast, indeed, are
almost always made at dinner. The reply to a letter
of introduction is usually a card and an invitation to
dine. If your host is pleased with you, nothing is
more common than for him to say at parting, “You
have been so engrossed that I have scarce spoken to
you—come and breakfast with me to-morrow at nine.”
You accept, and you improve on acquaintance into a
friend. In a snug library, all ceremony put off, the
mind tranquil and sincere, you enter upon a different
class of subjects, more familiar, more confidential.
The attention of your host is more undivided, and
your conversation leads you to make engagements for
the day, or the evening; and thus a man with whom
you might have discussed the corn-laws or the new
opera, forty times, across the glare of a dinner-table,
and only known at last as a talker of commonplaces,
becomes a pleasant friend, perhaps an intimate companion.

I have not the Quarterly Review by me at this moment,
but, if I do not mistake, the breakfasts with the
poet Rogers, described by Mr. Cooper, furnish the
text for Mr. Lockhart's “new light” upon this subject.
I am happy to have it in my power to set our
countrymen right upon the estimation in which
Cooper is held by that polished and venerable amphytrion.
It was kindly and complimentarily done of
Mr. Rogers to talk a great deal of a compatriot,
of whose talents he justly supposed every American
should be proud. I was enjoying (according to
Mr. Lockhart) the equivocal honor of breakfasting
with him—an honor which, questionable or not,
I shared with one of the most distinguished foreigners
then in England. This latter gentleman professed
the highest enthusiasm for the works of Cooper,
and took pains to draw out the venerable poet on the
subject of his personal manners, conversation, &c. A
handsomer eulogium of an absent author I never
heard. Mr. Rogers admired the bold independence
of his cast of mind, and spoke in the highest terms of
him as a gentleman and a friend. I can not, if it
were proper, quote the exact words he used; but,
subtract from this praise all you please to fancy might
have been said in kindness or compliment to a compatriot,
there was still enough left to gratify the self-love
of the most exacting.

If Mr. Lockhart had ever been similarly honored,
he would have excused Mr. Cooper for dwelling complacently
on the “breakfasts in St. James's Place.”
Rogers has lived in the very core of all that is precious
or memorable of two ages of English wit, literature,
and politics, himself oftenest the bright centre
around which it gathered. His manners are amenity
itself, his wit is celebrated, his powers of narration
delightful. With all this he seems to forget his own
fame and himself, and never to have known envy or
ill-will. As he sits at that small breakfast-table, his
head silvery white, the bland smile of intellectual enjoyment
upon his lips, talking or listening with equal
pleasure, and with the greatest tact and delicacy, alternately
drawing out the resources of his guests, and
exhibiting modestly his own, he is a picture of tranquil,
dignified, and green old age, which it were a pity
to have travelled far and not seen. I felicitate Mr.
Cooper on the possession of his esteem and friendship.
I please myself with remembering that I have
seen him. I pity Mr. Lockhart that the class of entertainments
of which this is one, is reserved for those
whose faces will not “spoil the cream.”

Between butchering for Fraser and dissecting for
the Quarterly, Mr. Lockhart may have derived a sufficient
revenue to “give dinners;” but he forgets that
more amiable literature is not so saleable, and that his
brother authors are compelled to entertain strangers at
breakfast. Taboo that meal, and, good heavens!
what becomes of the “great army of writers” in London,
who, over “tea and toast,” in their quiet lodgings,
give the admiring pilgrim of literature a feast of
reason—one alone worth all the dinners of May fair?

What becomes of younger sons, and callow orators,
and lawyers in the temple, who, over red herrings and
coffee, let the amused guest into the secrets of their
menus-plaisirs, and trenching a half-crown, at the
most, upon their slender pockets, send him away delighted
with their gay hospitality. Breakfasts! What
would you know of authors and artists without
breakfasts? You see but half the man in his works.
Would you rather breakfast with Chantrey in his studio,
and hear him criticise his own marble, or dine
with him at Lord Lansdowne's, and listen to his bavardage
upon fly-fishing? Would you rather see gentle
Barry Cornwall, smothered and silent, among wits and
lordlings at “miladi's,” or breakfast with him in his
crammed library in St. John's Wood, and hear him
read one of his unpublished songs, with the tears in
his eyes, and the children at his knee, breathless with
listening? Would you rather meet Moore, over a
cup of tea, in the shop-parlor at Longman's, in Paternoster
row, or see him at one of the show-dinners
of this publishing Mecenas, at his villa in Hampstead?
Out upon the malicious hand that would sow
distrust and suspicion in these delightful by-paths of
hospitality!

An author is always a double existence, and it is
astonishing how different may be the intellectual man
from his everyday representative. Lockhart, the author
of Valerius, Adam Blair, and the Life of Sir
Walter Scott, is a splendid and delightful intellect—
no one can deny it. Mr. Lockhart, the gentleman
who looks as if he had a perpetual inclination to
whistle, and who does the bourreau for the Quarterly,
is an individual I should rather meet anywhere than—
at breakfast. Heaven send him a relaxation of his
facial muscles, and a little charity to leave the world
with.

A Spring Day in Winter.—A spring day sometimes
bursts upon us in December. One scarcely
knows whether the constant warmth of the fire, or the
fresh sunny breathings from the open window, are the
most welcome. At such a time, the curtains swing
lazily to the mild wind as it enters, and the light green
leaves of the sheltered flowers stir and erect themselves
with an out-of-door vigor, and the shuffled steps
and continued voices of the children in the street,
have the loitering and summer-like sound of June. I
do not know whether it is not a cockney feeling, but
with all my love for the country, fixed as it is by the
recollections of a life mostly spent in the “green
fields” I sometimes “babble of,” there is something in
a summer morning in the city, which the wet, warm
woods, and the solitary, though lonely haunts of the
country do not, after all the poetry that has been
“spilt upon them” (as Neal would say), at all equal.
Whether it is that we find so much sympathy in the
many faces that we meet, made happy by the same
sweet influences, or whatever else may be the reason,
cartes, I never take my morning walk on such a day,
without a leaping in my heart, which, from all I can
gather by dream or revelation, has a touch in it of
Paradise. I returned once, on such a day, from an
hour's ramble after breakfast. The air rushed past
my temples with the grateful softness of spring, and
every face that passed had the open, inhaling expression
which is given by the simple joy of existence.
The sky had the deep clearness of noon. The clouds
were winnowed in light parallel curves, looking like
white shells inlaid on the arched heavens; the smooth,
glassy bay was like a transparent abyss opening to the
earth's centre, and edging away underneath, with a
slope of hills, and spires, and leafless woods, copied
minutely and perfectly from the upper landscape, and
the naked elms seemed almost clothed as the teeming
eye looked on them, and the brown hills took a teint
of green—so freshly did the summer fancies crowd
into the brain with the summer softness of the sunshine
and air. The mood is rare in which the sight
of human faces does not give us pleasure. It is a
curious occupation to look on them as they pass,
and study their look and meaning, and wonder at the
providence of God, which can provide, in this crowded
world, an object and an interest for all. With what
a singular harmony the great machine of society goes
on! So many thousand minds, and each with its
peculiar cast and its positive difference from its fellow,
and yet no dangerous interference, and no discord
audible above the hum of its daily revolution. I
could not help feeling a religious thrill, as I passed
face after face, with this thought in my mind, and saw
each one earnest and cheerful, each one pressing on
with its own object, without waiting or caring for the
equally engrossing object of the other. The man of
business went on with an absorbed look, caring only
to thread his way rapidly along the street. The student
strided by with the step of exercise, his lips
parted to admit the pleasant air to his refreshed lungs,
and his eye wandering with bewildered pleasure from
object to object. The schoolboy looked wistfully up
and down the street, and lingered till the last stroke
of the bell summoned him tardily in. The womanish
school-girl, with her veil coquettishly drawn, still
flirted with her boyish admirer, though it was “after
nine,” and the child, with its soiled satchel and shining
face, loitered seriously along the sidewalk, making
acquaintance with every dog, and picking up every
stone on its unwilling way. The spell of the atmosphere
was universal, and yet all kept on their several
courses, and the busy harmony of employment went
steadily and unbrokenly on. How rarely we turn
upon ourselves, and remember how wonderfully we
are made and governed!

Evanescent Impressions.—I have very often, in
the fine passages of society—such as occur sometimes
in the end of an evening, or when a dinner-party
has dwindled to an unbroken circle of choice
and congenial spirits, or at any of those times when
conversation, stripped of all reserve or check, is
poured out in the glowing and unfettered enthusiasm
to which convivial excitement alone gives the confidence
necessary to its flow—I have often wished, at
such times, that the voice and manner of the chance
and fleeting eloquence about us could be arrested and
written down for others beside ourselves to see and
admire. In a chance conversation at a party, in the
bagatelle rattle of a dance, in a gay hour over coffee
and sandwiches en famille, wherever you meet those
whom you love or value, there will occur pieces of
dialogue, jeux d'sprit, passages of feeling or fun—
trifles, it is true, but still such trifles as make eras in
the calendar of happiness—which you would give the
world to rescue from their ephemeral destiny. They
are, perhaps, the soundings of a spirit too deep for
ordinary life to fathom, or the gracefulness of a fancy
linked with too feminine a nature to bear the eye of
the world, or the melting of a frost of reserve from
the diffident genius—they are traces of that which is
fleeting, or struck out like phosphorus from the sea
by irregular chance—and you want something quicker
and rarer than formal description to arrest it warm
and natural, and detain it in its place till it can be
looked upon.

The First Feeling of Winter.—How delightfully
the first feeling of winter comes on the mind!
What a throng of tranquillizing and affectionate
thoughts accompany its first bright fires, and the
sound, out of doors, of its first chilling winds. Oh,
when the leaves are driven in troops through the
streets, at nightfall, and the figures of the passers-by
hurry on, cloaked and stooping with the cold, is there
a pleasanter feeling in the world than to enter the
closed and carpeted room, with its shaded lamps, and
its genial warmth, and its cheerful faces about the
evening table! I hope that I speak your own sentiment,
dear reader, when I prefer to every place and
time, in the whole calendar of pleasure, a winter
evening at home—the “sweet, sweet home” of childhood,
with its unreserved love and its unchanged and
unmeasured endearments. We need not love gayety
the less. The light and music and beauty of the
dance will always breed a floating delight in the brain
that has not grown dull to life's finer influences; yet
the pleasures of home, though serener are deeper,
and I am sure that the world may be searched over in
vain for a sense of joy so even and unmingled. It is
a beautiful trait of Providence that the balance is
kept so truly between our many and different blessings.
It were a melancholy thing to see the summer
depart with its superb beauty, if the heart did not
freshen as it turned in from its decay to brood upon
its own treasures. The affections wander under the
enticement of all the outward loveliness of nature,
and it is necessary to unwind the spell, that their rich
kindness may not become scattered and visionary. I
have a passion for these simple theories, which I trust
will be forgiven. I indulge in them as people pun.
They are too shadowy for logic, it is true—like the
wings of the glendoveer, in Kehama, gauze-like and
filmy, but flying high withal. You may not grow
learned, but you surely will grow poetical upon them.
I would as lief be praised by a blockhead as be asked
the reason.

The Poet Shelley.—Shelley has a private nook
in my affections. He is so unlike all other poets that

I can not mate him. He is like his own “skylark”
among birds. He does not keep ever up in the thin
air with Byron, like the eagle, nor sing with Keats
low and sweetly like the thrush, nor, like the dove
sitting always upon her nest, brood with Wordsworth
over the affections. He begins to sing when the
morning wakes him, and as he grows wild with his
own song, he mounts upward,
and it is wonderful how he loses himself, like the
delirious bird in the sky, and with a verse which may
be well compared for its fine delicacy with her little
wings, penetrates its far depths fearlessly and full of
joy. There is something very new in this mingled
trait of fineness and sublimity. Milton and Byron
seem made for the sky. Their broad wings always
strike the air with the same solemn majesty. But
Shelley, near the ground, is a very “bird in a bower,”
running through his merry compass as if he never
dreamed of the upward and invisible heavens. Withal,
Shelley's genius is too fiery to be moody. He was a
melancholy man, but it was because he was crossed
in the daily walk of life, and such anxieties did not
touch his imagination. It was above—far, far above
them. His poetry was not, like that of other poets,
linked with his common interests; and if it “unbound
the serpent of care from his heart,” as doubtless
it did, it was by making him forget that it was
there. He conceived and wrote in a wizard circle.
The illiberal world was the last thing remembered,
and its annoying prejudices, gall him as they might in
the exercise of his social duties, never followed over
the fiery limit of his fancy. Never have we seen
such pure abstraction from earthliness as in the temper
of his poetry. It is the clear, intellectual lymph,
unalloyed and unpolluted.

An Author's Judgment of his own Works.—
It is a false notion that the writer is no judge of his
own book. Verses in manuscript and verses in print,
in the first place, are very different things, and the
mood of writing and the mood of reading what one
has written, are very different moods. We do not
know how it is with others, but we open our own
volume with the same impression of strangeness and
novelty that we do another's. The faults strike us at
once, and so do the beauties, if there are any, and we
read coolly in a new garb, the same things which
upon paper recalled the fever of composition, and
rendered us incapable of judgment. As far as I can
discover by others' experience and my own, no writer
understands the phenomena of composition. It is
impossible to realize, in reading, that which is to him
impassioned, the state of feeling which produced it.
His own mind is to himself a mystery and a wonder.
The thought stands before him, visible to his outward
eye, which he does not remember has ever haunted
him. The illustration from nature is often one which
he does not remember to have noticed—the trait of
character, or the peculiar pencilling of a line in beauty
altogether new and startling. He is affected to tears
or mirth, his taste is gratified or shocked, his fancy
amused or his cares beguiled, as if he had never before
seen it. It is his own mind, but he does not recognise
it. He is like the peasant-child taken and
dressed richly; he does not know himself in his new
adornments. There is a wonderful metamorphosis in
print. The author has written under strong excitement,
and with a development and reach of his own
powers which would amuse him were he conscious
of the process. There are dim and far chambers in
the mind which are never explored by reason. Imagination
in her rapt phrensy wanders blindly there
sometimes, and brings out their treasures to the light
—ignorant of their value, and almost believing that
the dreams when they glitter are admired. There
are phantoms which haunt the perpetual twilight of
the inner mind, which are arrested only by the daring
hand of an overwrought fancy, and like a need done
in a dream, the difficult steps are afterward but faintly
remembered. It is wonderful how the mind accumulates
by unconscious observation—how the teint of a
cloud, or the expression of an eye, or the betrayal of
character by a word, will lie for years forgotten in the
memory till it is brought out by some searching
thought to its owner's wonder.

Frost.—It is winter—veritable winter—with bona-fide
frost, and cramping cold, and a sun as clear and
powerless as moonlight. The windows glitter with
the most fantastic frost-work. Cities, with their
spires and turrets, ranks of spears, files of horsemen
—every gorgeous and brilliant array told of in romance
or song, start out of that mass of silvery tracery,
like the processions of a magic mirror. What a
miraculous beauty there is in frost! What fine work
in its radiant crystals! What mystery in its exact
proportions and its maniform varieties! The feathery
snow flake, the delicate rime, the transparent and
sheeted ice, the magnificent ice-berg moving down
the sea like a mountain of light—how beautiful are
they all, and how wonderful is it, that, break and
scatter them as you will, you find under every form
the same faultless angles, the same crystalline and
sparkling radiation. It sometimes grows suddenly
cold at noon. There has been a heavy mist all the
morning, and as the north wind comes sharply in, the
air clears and leaves it frozen upon everything, with
the thinness of palpable air. The trees are clothed
with a fine white vapor, as if a cloud had been arrested
and fixed motionless in the branches. They look, in
the twilight, like gigantic spirits, standing in broad
ranks, and clothed in drapery of supernatural whiteness
and texture. On close examination, the crystals
are as fine as needles, and standing in perfect parallelism,
pointing in the direction of the wind. They are
like fringes of the most minute threads, edging every
twig and filament of the tree, so that the branches are
thickened by them, and have a shadowy and mysterious
look, as if a spirit foliage had started out from the
naked limbs. It is not so brilliant as the common
rime seen upon the trees after a frozen rain, but it is
infinitely more delicate and spiritual, and to me seems
a phenomenon of exquisite novelty and beauty.

The Closing Year.—It is a melancholy task to
reckon with the departed year. To trace back the
curious threads of affection through its many-colored
woof, and knot anew its broken places—to number
the missing objects of interest, the dead and the neglected—to
sum up the broken resolutions, the deferred
hopes, the dissolved phantoms of anticipation, and
the many wanderings from the leading star of duty
—this is indeed a melancholy task, but, withal, a
profitable, and, it may sometimes be, a pleasant and a
soothing one. It is wonderful in what short courses
the objects of this world move. They are like arrows
feebly shot. A year—a brief year, is full of things
dwindled and finished and forgotten. Nothing keeps
evenly on. What is there in the running calendar
of the year that has departed, which has kept its place
and its magnitude? Here and there an aspirant for
fame still stretches after his eluding shadow—here and
there an enthusiast still clings to his golden dream—
here and there (and alas! how rarely) a friend keeps

his truth, and a lover his fervor—but how many more,
that were as ambitious, as enthusiastic, as loving as
these, when this year began, are now sluggish, and
cold, and false? You may keep a record of life, and
as surely as it is human, it will be a fragmented and
disjointed history, crowded with unaccountableness
and change. There is nothing constant. The links
of life are for ever breaking, but we rush on still. A
fellow-traveller drops from our side into the grave—a
guiding star of hope vanishes from the sky—a creature
of our affections, a child or an idol, is snatched from
us—perhaps nothing with which we began the race is
left to us, and yet we do not halt. “Onward—still
onward” is the eternal cry, and as the past recedes,
the broken ties are forgotten, and the present and future
occupy us alone.

There are bright chapters in the past, however. If
our lot is capricious and broken, it is also new and
various. One friend has grown cool, but we have
won another. One chance was less fortunate than
we expected, but another was better. We have encountered
one man's prejudices, but, in so doing, we
have unexpectedly flattered the partialities of his
neighbor. We have neglected a recorded duty, but a
deed of charity done upon impulse, has brought up
the balance. In an equable temper of mind, memory,
to a man of ordinary goodness of heart, is pleasant
company. A careless rhymer, whose heart is better
than his head, says—

It was a good thought suggested by an ingenious
friend of mine, to make one's will annually, and remember
all whom we love in it in the degree of their
deservings. I have acted upon the hint since, and
truly it is keeping a calendar of one's life. I have
little to bequeath, indeed—a manuscript or two, some
half dozen pictures, and a score or two of much-thumbed
and choice authors—but, slight as these
poor mementoes are, it is pleasant to rate their difference,
and write against them the names of our friends,
as we should wish them left if we knew we were presently
to die. It would be a satisfying thought in sickness,
that one's friends would have a memorial to
suggest us when we were gone—that they would
know we wished to be remembered by them, and remembered
them among the first. And it is pleasant,
too, while alive, to change the order of appropriation
with the ever-varying evidences of affection. It is a
relief to vexation and mortified pride to erase the
name of one unworthy or false, and it is delightful,
as another gets nearer to your heart, with the gradual
and sure test of intimacy, to prefer him in your secret
register.

If I should live to be old, I doubt not it will be a
pleasant thing to look over these little testaments.
It is difficult, now, with their kind offices and pleasant
faces ever about one, to realize the changes of feeling
between the first and the last—more difficult still to
imagine, against any of those familiar names, the
significant asterisk which marks the dead—yet if the
common chances of human truth, and the still more
desperate changes of human life, continue—it is
melancholy to think what a miracle it would be if
even half this list, brief and youthful as it is, should
be, twenty years hence, living and unchanged.

The festivities of this part of the year always seemed
to me mistimed and revolting. I know not what
color the reflections of others take, but to me it is
simply the feeling of escape—the released breath of
fear after a period of suspense and danger. Accident,
misery, death, have been about us in their invisible
shapes, and while one is tortured with pain, and
another reduced to wretchedness, and another struck
into the grave beside us, we know not why or how, we are
still living and prosperous. It is next to a miracle that
we are so. We have been on the edge of chasms continually.
Our feet have tottered, our bosoms have
been grazed by the thick shafts of disease—had our
eyes been spirit-keen we should have been dumb with
fear at our peril. If every tenth sunbeam were a
deadly arrow—if the earth were full of invisible abysses
—if poisons were sown thickly in the air, life would
hardly be more insecure. We can stand upon our
threshold and see it. The vigorous are stricken down
by an invisible hand—the active and busy suddenly
disappear—death is caught in the breath of the night
wind, in the dropping of the dew. There is no place
or moment in which that horrible phantom is not
gliding among us. It is natural at each period of
escape to rejoice fervently and from the heart; but I
know not, if others look upon death with the same
irrepressible horror that I do, how their joy can be so
thoughtlessly trifling. It seems to me, matter for
deep, and almost fearful congratulation. It should
be expressed in religious places and with the solemn
voice of worship; and when the period has thus been
marked, it should be speedily forgotten lest its cloud
become depressing. I am an advocate for all the
gayety that the spirits will bear. I would reserve no
particle of the treasure of happiness. The world is
dull enough at the best. But do not mistake its
temper. Do not press into the service of gay pleasure
the thrilling solemnities of life. I think anything
which reminds me of death, solemn; any time, when
our escape from it is thrust irresistibly upon the mind,
a solemn time; and such is the season of the new
year. It should be occupied by serious thoughts.
It is the time to reckon with one's heart—to renew
and form resolutions—to forgive and reconcile and
redeem.

Midnight.—The bell struck as the word was written!
Twelve—and how many-toned in the human
ear are the measured strokes that have proclaimed it.
The well and contemplative, the sick and restless, the
reveller hailing it as the empress of the hours, and the
patient and solemn watcher by the dead, counting it
on his vigil, and shuddering at the dreadful silence it
makes audible—sleepless ambition starting from its
waking dream, and sleeping guilt blessedly aroused
from its nightmare of detection—with what a different
voice and meaning do the tremulous and lengthened
cadences of that same bell fall upon the different ears
that listen to them! Yet it is so with everything
about us—and the boldest and best lesson of philosophy
is that which teaches us that outward circumstances
have no color of their own—that the universe
is within us—that the eye sees no light or shadow,
and the ear hears no music or jar, and the senses receive
no impression of pain or pleasure, but as the
inward eye is light or shaded, the inward ear attuned
or discordant, and the inward sense painful or pleasurable.
It is a glorious creed—for by it, he who
governs his own soul holds the key of the universe.
Its colors are put on at his bidding, its music wakes
at his desire, and its magnificent changes, arbitrary
and omnipotent as they seem, take form and pressure
from the small, still thought in his bosom! Yet how
difficult it is! How true, that “he who ruleth his
own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.”
To put down at will the maniform spectres of
thought—to suppress fear and discouragement, and
sadness that comes up uncalled—to lay a finger on
the lip of complaint, and seal up a tear in its cell, and
press down, with a stern fetter, the ungovernable
nerve of unrest—to “lay commandment” on a throbbing

pulse, and break the wings of a too earnest imagination,
and smother, in their first rising, the thousand
impatient feelings that come out of time and
season—this it is that the anchorite in his cell, and
the master spirit in his career, and the student, wasting
over his lamp, may pray, and wrestle, and search
into many mysteries for—in vain!

In my days of idleness (a habit, by-the-by, which
should be put down as a nervous complaint in the
books) I occupied, for some nine hours in the day, a
window opposite a city-clock. It was a tolerable
amusement, between breakfast and recitation, to watch
the passing of the hours, “hand over hand.” I thought
then, as I think now, that the great deficiency in the construction
of the human mind, is the want of something
on the principle of the stop-watch, to suspend its operations
at will—but it is no slight relief, since I must
think, to have a dial-plate, or a nail in the wall, or any
object that it is no trouble to see, to serve as a nucleus
to thought. By-and-by, with the force of habit,
the dial became necessary. I could not think
tranquilly without it. My pulses beat sixty in the
minute. My imagination built by the hour—nine—
ten—twelve castles a day, as the lectures interfered
more or less with my repose.

In the course of time, I fell into the habit of musing
on the circumstances dependant on the arrival of
the hours, and as my mood happened to be gay or
gloomy, I pondered, with the strong sympathy of unoccupied
feelings, on the happiness or misery they
brought. If it was a bright sunny forenoon in May,
and the eggs had been well boiled at breakfast, the
striking of the clock—say twelve—stirred a thousand
images of pleasure. The boys just leaping out of
school, the laborer released from his toil, the belle
stepping forth for a promenade, the patient in the interval
of his fever—all came up in my imagination,
and their several-feelings, with all the heightening of
imagination, became my own. If the weather was
hot, on the contrary, or the professor had bored me
at lecture, or if my claret was pricked at dinner, I
suffered the miseries of an hospital. There goes the
clock—say four! Some poor fellow now, at this very
moment, is baring his limb to the surgeon—the afternoon
is at the hottest, and the sick are getting restless
and weary—some hectic consumptive, fallen, perhaps,
into a chance sleep, is waked, by the trouble-some
punctuality of his nurse, to take his potion—it
is the hour the dying man is told he can not survive.
Every misery imaginable under the sun rose in phantoms
around me, and I suffered and groaned under
the concentrated horrors of them all. It serves to
show how the mind is its own slave or its own master.
And so, having arrived at the moral, with your leave,
dear reader, for it is “past one,” I will to bed. Good
night!

Snow.—The black, unsightly pavement, every
stone of which you know with as cursed a particularity
as the chinks in the back of your fireplace, covered
with white. The heavy-wheeled carts, which
the day before shook the ground under you, and split
your ears with their merciless noise, replaced by sleds
with musical bells, driven swiftly and skilfully past.
The smoked houses, with their provokingly-regular
windows and mean doors, that have disturbed the sentiment
of grace in your fancy every walk you have
taken for months, all laden, and tipped, and frosted
into lines and surfaces of beauty; faultless icicles
hanging from the eaves of the shutters, and sparkling
crystals of snow edging every projecting stone—
magic could not exceed it! If the horn of Astolpho
had been blown from the cupola of the statehouse,
and the whole city had run mad, things could
not have looked more strangely new and delightful.
And the sleighing—other people like it, and for their
sake I blessed Providence for another item. I like it
myself—for the first mile. But with the loss of sensation
in our feet and hands, I have a trick of growing
very unhappy. I am content, after one ride, with
seeing a sleigh through a parlor-window.

Eight o'clock—how merrily the sleigh-bells ring
to-night! One comes into hearing as another is lost,
and the loud, laughing, and merry voices of the gay
riders come up to my retired room in the veriest contrast
to my own quiet occupation. How more than
solitude it separates one from humanity, to live in the
midst of the gay world and take no part in its enjoyment!
An eremite in the crowd is the only contented
solitary. In the midst of the heaviest sadness
the heart feels in this wretched world, the form of
distant pleasure is beautiful. We must live near that
treacherous dame to know how sorrows lurk in her
shadow. Break down the imagination as you will, and
bind it by the most relentless memories to your sick
heart, it will steal away to scenes you had thought
forgotten, and come back fired with their false beauty,
to tempt you to try their winning flatteries once
more. It is only by knowing that you can call gayety
at any moment to your side, that you can quite
forget it; and the studious tenant of a garret, to
whose solitude the mingled murmur of a city comes
constantly up—who can abandon his books whenever
the fancy takes him, for the crowd, and enter and
throng on with it after its fleeting lure—is the only
man who, with youth and the common gifts of Providence,
can heartily despise it.

And he—if contrast is (as who will deny that has
followed after the impossible spirit of contentment, till
hope is dead within him)—if contrast is, I say, the
only bliss in life—then does he, the scholar in the
crowd, live with a most excellent wisdom. He is
roused from communion with a spirit whose immortal
greatness has outlived twenty generations, by the
passing mirth of a fool whose best deed will not live
in the world's memory an hour. He sits and pores
upon an eternal truth, or fires his fancy with heavenly
poetry, or winds about him the enchantments of truth-woven
fiction, or searches the depths of his own sufficient
heart for the sublime wisdom of human nature,
and from the very midst he is plucked back to this
every-day world, and compelled to the use of faculties
in which a brute animal equals or surpasses him!
One moment following the employment of an angel,
the next contending with meanness and cunning for
his daily bread—now kindled to rapture with some
new form of beauty, and now disgusted to loathing
with some new-developed and unredeemable baseness
in his fellow-men. What contrast is there like this?
Who knows so well as a scholar the true sweetness
of surprise? the delightful and only spice of this otherwise
contemptible life—novel sensation?

Change.—How natural it is, like the host in the
rhyme, to

How true a similitude it is of every change, not only
of time and season, but of feeling and fancy. I have
just walked from the window where I stood looking
upon the two elms that have refreshed my eye with
their lively verdure the summer long, and the adventurous
vine, overtopping our neighbor's chimneys, that
was covered but a week ago with masses of splendid
crimson and scarlet, and with the irresistible regret I feel
always at the decay of nature powerful within me, I have
seated myself at the fire, with a gladness in the supplanting
pleasures of winter, that brings with it, not
only a consolation for the loss, but an immediate forgetfulness
of the past. “Nothing,” says Goethe, “is
more delightful than to feel a new passion rising when
the flame that burned before is not quite extinguished,
as, when the sun sets, we turn with pleasure
to the rising moon.” Who would give a fig for
friendship! Who would waste golden hours in winning
regard! Who, with this lesson before him,
would do aught but look well to his reckoning with
heaven, and turn in upon his own soul what time and
talents are left to him after! It is a bitter philosophy
to learn. The outward world is my first love, and,
with all my disappointment, it is difficult at first to
set up a new altar for the inner. I would not be ascetic;
neither would I be so happy that, like Polycrates,
I must throw my ring into the sea that I may
have something to lament; but I believe he has the
true savoir vivre, who, believing fully in the world's
unprofitableness, is willing to be amused by it, and
who, conversant with its paths and people, has better
places and friends (solitude and his books) to which
he can enter and shut the door to be at peace.

Winter Trip to Nahant.—The old chronicler,
Time, strides on over the holyday seasons as if nothing
could make him loiter. It may be a hallucination,
but a winter's day, spite of the calendar, is as
long to me as two summer ones. I do not feel the
scene pass. There is no measure kept on my senses
by its evenly-told pulse. The dump morning, and the
silent noon, and the golden twilight, come and go;
and if I breathe the freshness of the one, and sleep
under the repose of the other, and gaze upon the
beauties of the third, why, the end of existence seems
answered. Labor is not in harmony with it. The
thought that disturbs a nerve is an intrusion. Life's
rapid torrent loiters in a pool, and its bubbles all break
and are forgotten. Indolence is the mother of philosophy,
and I “let the world slide.” I think with
Rousseau, that “the best book does but little good to
the world, and much harm to the author.” I remember
Colton's three difficulties of authorship, and Pelham's
flattering unction to idleness, that “learning is
the bane of a poet.” The “mossy cell of peace,”
with its

is a very Eden; and, of all the flowers of the field,
that which has the most meaning is your lily that
“toils not, neither does it spin;” and of all the herbs
of the valley, the
has the most medicinal balm. I am of the school of
Epicurus. I no longer think the “judicious voluptuousness”
of Godwin dangerous. Like the witch of
Atlas. I could “pitch my tent upon the plain of the
calm Mere,” and rise and fall for ever to its indolent
swell. And speaking of idleness (I admire Mochingo's
talent for digression—“Now thou speakest of
immortality, how is thy wife, Andrew”)—one of the
pleasantest ways of indulging that cardinal virtue
used to be by an excursion to Nahant. Establishing
myself unostentatiously upon the windward quarter
of the boat, to avoid the vile volatile oils from the
machinery—Shelley in one hand, perhaps, or Elia, or
quaint Burton—(English editions, redolent in Russia,
and printed as with types of silver)—with one of these,
I say, to refresh the eye and keep the philosophic
vein breathing freely, the panorama of the bay passes
silently before my eye—island after island, sail after
sail, like the conjurations of a magic mirror. And
this is all quiet, let me tell you—all in harmony with
the Socratic humor—for the reputable steamer Ousatonic
(it distresses me daily that it was not spelt with
an H) is none of your fifteen-milers—none of your
high-pressure cut-waters, driving you through the
air, breathless with its unbecoming velocity, and with
the fear of the boiler before your eyes—but with a
dignified moderation, consistent with a rational doubt
of the integrity of a copper-kettle, and a natural abhorrence
of hot water, she glides safely and softly
over her half-dozen miles an hour, and lands you,
cool and good-humored, upon the rocky peninsula,
for a consideration too trifling to be mentioned in a
well-bred period. And then if the fates will me an
agreeable companion (I wish we had time to describe
my beau-ideal), how delightful, as Apple island is
neared, with its sweep of green banks and its magnificent
elms—every foot of its tiny territory green and
beautiful—how delightful to speculate upon the character
of its eccentric occupant, and repeat the thousand
stories told of him, and peer about his solitary
cottage to catch a glimpse of his erect figure, and
draw fanciful portraits of his daughter, who, the world
says, for the sixteen years of her sweet life, has had
only the range of those limited lawns, which she may
ramble over in an hour—and, as the boat glides by, to
watch the fairy isle sleeping, if the bay is calm, with
its definite shadow, and looking like a sphere, floating
past in the air, covered with luxuriant verdure. It is
but a brief twelve miles from Boston to Nahant, and
the last four stretch out beyond the chain of islands,
upon the open sea. To a city-bred eye and fancy
there is a refreshing novelty, added to the expanding
influence of so broad a scene, which has in it a vigorous
and delightful stimulus. The mind gets out of
its old track. The back-ground of the mental picture
is changed, and it affects the whole. The illimitable
sky and water draw out the imagination to its remotest
link, and the far apart and shining sails, each covering
its little and peculiar world, and sped with the
thousand hopes of those for whom its lonely adventurers
are tracking the uncertain sea, win on the mind
to follow them upon their perilous way, and breathe
for them the “God speed” of unconscious interest.
It is a beautiful and magic sight to see them gliding
past each other on their different courses, impelled
by the same invisible wind, now dark with shadow,
and now turning full to the light, and specking the
horizon, like the white birds careering along the edge
of its definite line. The sea grows upon you as you
see it more. The disappointment felt at first in its
extent wears away, as you remember its vast stretch
under those blue depths, which your eye can not
search; and the waste of its “untrampled floor,” and
the different depths at which the different spoils of
the sunk ships have balanced and hung, and the innumerable
tribes who range their own various regions
of pressure, from the darkest caverns to the thin and
lighted chambers at its surface, all come step by step
upon the mind, and crowd it with a world of wondering
speculation. It is delightful to sit with the
agreeable companion spoken of, and with the green
waves heaving about us, to indulge in these wayward
and unprofitable imaginations. It is a splendid range
for a wild-winged thought—that measureless sea! I
love to talk of its strange mysteries. I love to go
down with one who will not check me with cold objections,
and number and shape out its inhabitants.
With such a fellow-wanderer, I have found palaces
that surpass Aladdin's, and beings to whom the upper
and uncondensed water has a suffocating thinness.
But these are idle speculations to the world's eye,
gentle reader, and should be reserved for your private
ear. We will go, some summer afternoon, and talk
them over together on the deck of that same deliberate
steamer. You have no idea how many things
are untold of the deep sea—how many dreams of it
an idler man than yourself will weave out of its green
depths in his after-dinner musings.

Sir Philip Sidney.—“Gentle Sir Philip Sidney,”
says Tom Nash, in two sweetly-flowing sentences
of his Pierce Penniless, “thou knewest what belonged
to a scholar; thou knewest what pains, what
toil, what travel, conduct to perfection; well couldst
thou give every virtue his encouragement, every art
his due, every writer his desert, 'cause none more
virtuous, witty, or learned, than thyself. But thou
art dead in thy grave, and hast left too few successors
of thy glory; too few to cherish the sons of the muses,
or water those budding hopes with their plenty,
which thy bounty erst planted.”—“He was not only
of an excellent wit,” relates, in his own confused and
rambling way, the eminent antiquarian John Aubrey,
who was born not more than forty years after Sidney's
decease, “but extremely beautiful; he much resembled
his sister, but his hair was not red, but a little inclining,
viz., a dark amber color. If I were to find fault
in it, methinks it is not masculine enough; yet he
was a person of great courage.”[1] “He was, if ever
there was one,” says another writer, “a gentleman
finished and complete, in whom mildness was associated
with courage, erudition mollified by refinement,
and courtliness dignified by truth. England will ever
place him among the noblest of her sons; and the
light of chivalry, which was his guide and beacon,
will ever lend its radiance to illume his memory. He
died at the age of thirty-two, and if the lives of Milton
and Dryden had not been prolonged beyond that
period, where would have been their renown?”

Glorious Sidney! It stirs the blood warmly about
one's heart to think of him. It is somewhat late in
the day, I know, to eulogize him; but his bright
honor and his beautiful career, are among my earliest
historical recollections, and I have remembered it
since with the passionate interest that in every one's
mind burns in, with an enamel of love, some one of
the bright images presented in boyhood. You have
some such idol of fancy. I dare answer for it, reader
of mine—some young (for young he must be, or affection
stiffens into respect)—some young and famous,
and withal courtly, and perhaps “beautiful,” winner
of a name. It is Gaston de Foix, perhaps, with his
fierce thirst for glory (the pictures of him by the old
masters are models of manly beauty), or the fourth
Henry, with his temper of romance (the handsomest
man in his kingdom), or (if you loved your classics)
Alcibiades (you forget, of course, that he was a voluptuary),
or the generous Antony (“Shakspere's” rather
than the historian's), or Hylas, or Endymion, or
Phæton (he cleared the first few planets in fine style),
or some other formosus puer adored and sung by the
glorious old bards upon the shores of Tiber or Ilissus.
He rises to your mind as I mention it—a figure of
graceful youth, the slight and elegant proportions of
the boy, just ripening into the muscular fulness of
manhood—his neck rising with a free majesty from
his shoulders, and his eye kindling with some passing
thought of glory, answered by the proud and deliberate
curving of his lip, and the animated expansion of
his nostril. You see him with your mind's eye—the
classic model and classic dream of your scholar-days,
when the sound of the leaves in the tree over you had
the swell of an hexameter in your ear, and your
thoughts came in Latin, and a line of Homer sprung
to your lips in your involuntary soliloquies. Ah!
those were days for dreams! Who would not let
slip the straining grasp of manhood—be it at wealth,
fame, power—anything for which he is flinging his
youth and gladness, and all his best treasures, behind
him—to be once more the careless dreamer that he
was—to lie once more upon a hill-side, and forget
everything in the unquestioned and unshadowed blessedness
of a boy!

Death-Love and Warning.—It was getting toward
midnight when a party of young noblemen came
out from one of the clubs of St. James street. The
servant of each, as he stepped upon the pavement,
threw up the wooden apron of the cabriolet, and
sprung to the head of the horse; but, as to the destination
of the equipages for the evening, there seemed
to be some dissensions among the noble masters.
Between the line of coroneted vehicles, stood a
hackney-coach, and a person in an attitude of expectancy
pressed as near the exhilarated group as he could
without exciting immediate attention.

“Which way?” said he whose vehicle was nearest,
standing with his foot on the step.

“All together, of course,” said another. “Let's
make a night of it.”

“Pardon me,” said the clear and sweet voice of
the last out from the club; “I secede for one. Go
your ways, gentlemen!”

“Now, what the deuse is afoot?” said the foremost,
again stepping back on the sidewalk. “Don't
let him off, Fitz! Is your cab here, Byron, or will
you let me drive you? By Jove, you sha'n't leave us!”

“But you shall leave me, and so you are not forsworn,
my friend! In plain phrase, I won't go with
you! And I don't know where I shall go; so spare
your curiosity the trouble of asking. I have a presentiment
that I am wanted—by devil or angel—

“And a very pretty hand it is, I dare swear,” said
the former speaker, jumping into his cab and starting
off with a spring of his blood horse, followed by all
the vehicles at the club-door, save one.

Byron stood looking after them a moment, and
raised his hat and pressed his hand hard on his forehead.
The unknown person who had been lurking
near, seemed willing to leave him for a moment to his
thoughts, or was embarrassed at approaching a stranger.
As Byron turned with his halting step to descend
the steps, however, he came suddenly to his side.

“My lord!” he said, and was silent, as if waiting
for permission to go on.

“Well,” replied Byron, turning to him without the
least surprise, and lookingly closely into his face by
the light of the street-lamp.

“I come to you with an errand which perhaps—”

“A strange one, I am sure; but I am prepared for
it—I have been forewarned of it. What do you require
of me? for I am ready!”

“This is strange!” exclaimed the man.—“Has
another messenger, then—”

“None except a spirit—for my heart alone told me
I should be wanted at this hour. Speak at once.”

“My lord, a dying girl has sent for you!”

“Do I know her?”

“She has never seen you. Will you come at once
—and on the way I will explain to you what I can of
this singular errand; though, indeed, when it is told
you, you know all that I comprehend.”

They were at the door of the hackney-coach, and
Byron entered it without further remark.

“Back again!” said the stranger, as the coachman
closed the door, “and drive for dear life, for we shall
scarce be in time, I fear!”

The heavy tongue of St. Paul's church struck
twelve as the rolling vehicle hurried on through the
now lonely street, and though so far from the place
whence they started, neither of the two occupants

had spoken. Byron sat with bare head and folded
arms in the corner of the coach; and the stranger,
with his hat crowded over his eyes, seemed repressing
some violet emotion; and it was only when they
stopped before a low door in a street close upon the
river, that the latter found utterance.

“Is she alive?” he hurriedly asked of a woman
who came out at the sound of the carriage-wheels.

“She was—a moment since—but be quick!”

Byron followed quickly on the heels of his companion,
and passing through a dimly lighted entry to
the door of a back-room, they entered. A lamp,
shaded by a curtain of spotless purity, threw a faint
light upon a bed, upon which lay a girl, watched by
a physician and a nurse. The physician had just removed
a small mirror from her lips, and holding it to
the light, he whispered that she still breathed. As
Byron passed the edge of the curtain, however, the
dying girl moved the fingers of the hand lying on the
coverlet, and slowly opened on him her languid eyes
—eyes of inexpressible depth and lustre. No one had
spoken.

“Here he is,” she murmured. “Raise me, mother,
while I have time to speak to him.”

Byron looked around the small chamber, trying in
vain to break the spell of awe which the scene threw
over him. An apparition from the other world could
not have checked more fearfully and completely the
worldly and scornful under-current of his nature.
He stood with his heart beating almost audibly, and
his knees trembled beneath him, awaiting what he
prophetically felt to be a warning from the very gate
of heaven.

Propped with pillows, and left by her attendants,
the dying girl turned her head toward the proud,
noble poet, standing by her bedside, and a slight blush
overspread her features, while a smile of angelic
beauty stole through her lips. In that smile the
face reawakened to its former loveliness, and seldom
had he who now gazed breathlessly upon her, looked
on such spiritual and incomparable beauty. The
spacious forehead and noble contour, still visible, of
the emaciated lips, bespoke genius impressed upon a
tablet all feminine in its language; and in the motion
of her hand, and even in the slight movement of her
graceful neck, there was something that still breathed
of surpassing elegance. It was the shadowy wreck
of no ordinary mortal passing away—humble as were
the surroundings, and strange as had been his summons
to her bedside.

“And this is Byron?” she said at last, in a voice
bewilderingly sweet even through its weakness.
“My lord! I could not die without seeing you—
without relieving my soul of a mission with which it
has long been burthened. Come nearer—for I have
no time left for ceremony, and I must say what I
have to say—and die! Beautiful,” she said, “beautiful
as the dream of him which has so long haunted
me! the intellect and the person of a spirit of light!
Pardon me, my lord, that, at a moment so important to
yourself, the remembrance of an earthly feeling has
been betrayed into expression.”

She paused a moment, and the bright color that had
shot through her cheek and brow faded, and her
countenance resumed its heavenly serenity.

“I am near enough to death,” she resumed—
“near enough to point you almost to heaven from
where I am; and it is on my heart like the one errand
of my life—like the bidding of God—to implore you
to prepare for judgment. Oh, my lord! with your
glorious powers, with your wondrous gifts, be not
lost! Do not, for the poor pleasures of a world like
this, lose an eternity in which your great mind will
outstrip the intelligence of angels. Measure this
thought—scan the worth of angelic bliss with the
intellect which has ranged so gloriously through the
universe; do not, on this one momentous subject
of human interest—on this alone be not shortsighted!”

“What shall I do?” suddenly burst from Byron's
lips in a tone of agony. But with an effort, as if
struggling with a death-pang, he again drew up his
form and resumed the marble calmness of his countenance.

The dying girl, meantime, seemed to have lost
herself in prayer. With her wasted hands clasped
on her bosom, and her eyes turned upward, the slight
motion of her lips betrayed to those around her that
she was pleading at the throne of mercy. The physician
crept close to her bedside, but with his hand in
his breast, and his head bowed, he seemed but watching
for the moment when the soul should take its
flight.

She suddenly raised herself on the pillow. Her
long brown tresses fell over her shoulders, and a
brightness unnatural and almost fearful kindled in her
eyes. She seemed endeavoring to speak, and gazed
steadfastly at Byron. Slowly, then, and tranquilly
she sank back again upon her pillow, and as her hands
fell apart, and her eyelids dropped, she murmured,
“Come to Heaven!” and the stillness of death was in
the room. The spirit had fled.

The breaking of the silver cord is the first tone from
the life-strings of genius, which is answered only in
vibrations of affection. This truth, indeed, is touchingly
shadowed forth in the accompaniments of death.
The dark colors in the drapery of life, are dropped in
the weaving of the shroad. The discords of music
are rejected in the melody of the dirge. The praise
upon the marble is the first tribute written without
disparagement, and the first suffered without dissent.
It is this new relation of the public to a great name—
this completed and lucent phase of a light in literature—which
seems to make a posthumous recast of
criticism one of the legitimate departments of a review.
Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of
criticism toward an author's fame, are essentially
changed by his death. His personal character, and
the events of his life—the foreground, so to speak, in
the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting
to the critical perspective; and when the hand to correct
is cold, and the ear to be caressed and wounded
is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all reserve
in comparison and final estimate, are done way.

It is time for the reviews to take up, on this ground,
the character and writings of Hillhouse. The author
of Hadad, the most finished and lofty poem of its
time, should have been followed, within a year after
his death, by a new and reverential appreciation, and
living, as he did, in a learned and literary circle of
friends, a biography, at least, was looked for, out of
which criticism might shape a fresh monument to his
genius. Such men as Hillhouse are not common,
even in these days of universal authorship. In accomplishment
of mind and person, he was probably
second to no man. His poems show the first. They
are fully conceived, nicely balanced, exquisitely finished—works
for the highest taste to relish, and for the
severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model.
Hadad was published in 1825, during my second year in
college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven
of imagination. The leading characters possessed me
for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious language
was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.
The author was pointed out to me, soon after, and
for once, I saw a poet whose mind was well imaged
in his person. In no part of the world have I seen a
man of more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn
dignity and elegance of address. His person was very

finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric and high-bred,
and his countenance purely and brightly intellectual.
Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high
courtesy on everything he uttered, and singular simplicity
and taste in dress, and you have the portrait
of one who in other days, would have been the mirror
of chivalry, and the flower of nobles and troubadors.
Hillhouse was no less distinguished in oratory.
There was still remembered, at the time of the publication
of Hadad, an oration pronounced by him at
the taking of his second degree—an oration upon
“the Education of a Poet,” gloriously written, and
most eloquently delivered. His poem of “the Judgement,”
delivered before the “Phi Beta Kappa Society,”
added in the same way to his renown, as did a
subsequent noble effort of eloquence, to which I listened
myself, with irresistible enchantment.

Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many
years of his life which he should have passed either
in his study, or in the councils of the nation, were
enslaved to the drudgery of business. His constitution
seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood,
however, and an old age of undiminished fire, and
when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired to
the beautiful and poetic home of “Sachem's Wood,”
his friends looked upon it as the commencement of a
ripe and long enduring career of literature. In harmony
with such a life were all his surroundings—
scenery, society, domestic refinement, and companionship—and
never looked promise fairer for the realization
of a dream of glory. That he had laid out something
of such a field in the future, I chance to know,
for, though my acquaintance with him was slight, he
confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a
series of dramas, different from all had attempted,
upon which he designed to work with the first mood
and leisure he could command. And with his high
scholarship, knowledge of life, taste and genius, what
might not have been expected from its fulfilment?
But his hand is cold, and his lips still, and his light,
just rising to its meridian, is lost now to the world.
Love and honor to the memory of such a man.

BACHELOR BOB'S DISCOVERIES.

“Come!” said Bachelor Bob, as he hitched his
chair closer to the table, “quite alone, half past
twelve, and two tumblers of toddy for heart-openers,
what say you to a little friendly inquisition into your
mortal felicity? You were the gayest man of my
acquaintance ten years ago; you are the gravest
now! Yet you swear by your Lares and Penates,
that (up to the lips as you are in care and trouble)
you never were so happy as in these latter days. Do
you swear this to me from a `way you have' of hanging
out trap for the world, or are you under a little innocent
delusion?”

Bob's hobby is the theory of happiness. Riches
and poverty, matrimony and celibacy, youth and age,
are subjects of contemplation to Bob, solely with reference
to their comparative capacity for bliss. He
speculates and talks about little else, indeed, and his
intercourse with his friends seems to have no other
end or aim than to collect evidence as to their happiness
and its causes. On this occasion he was addressing
a friend of mine, Smith, who had been a gay man
in his youth (a merry man, truth to say, for he was
in a perpetual breeze of high spirits), but who had
married, and fallen behindhand in his worldly affairs,
and so grown careworn and thoughtful. Smith was
rather a poet in a quiet way, though he only used poetry
as a sort of longer plummet when his heart got
off soundings. I am indebted to Bob for the specimens
of his verse-making which I am about to give,
as well as for the conversation which brought them
to light.

“Why,” said Smith, “you have stated a dilemma
with two such inevitable horns that argument would
scarcely-help me out of it. Let me see, what proof
can I give you that I am a happier man than I used
to be, spite of my chapfallen visage?”

Smith mused a moment, and reaching over to a
desk near his elbow, drew from its private drawer a
book with locked covers. It was a well-filled manuscript
volume, and seemed a collection of prose and
verse intermixed. The last page was still covered
with blotting-paper, and seemed recently written.

“I am no poet,” said Smith, coloring slightly,
“but it has been a habit of mine, ever since my callow
days, to record in verse all feelings that were too
warm for prose; sometimes in the fashion of a soliloquy
(scripta verba), sometimes in verses to the dame
or damsel to whom I was indebted for my ignition.
Let me see, Bob! we met in Florence, I think?”

“For the first time abroad, yes!”

“Well, perhaps that was my gayest time; certainly
I do not remember to have been anywhere more gay
or reckless. Florence, 1832, um—here are some lines
written that summer; do you remember the beautiful
Irish widow you saw at one of the casino balls? addressed
to her, flirt that she was! But she began all
her flirtations with talking of her sorrows, and, if she
tried you on, at all—”

“She didn't!” interrupted Bob.

“Well, if she had you would have been humbugged
with her tender melancholy, as I was. Here are
the verses, and if ever I `turned out my lining to the
moon,' they are true to my inner soul in those days
of frolic. Read these, and then turn to the last page
and you will find as true a daguerreotype of the inner
light of my moping days, written only yesterday.”

“What a precious hypocrite you were for the merriest
dog in Florence!” exclaimed Bob, as he laid the
book open on its back, after reading these lines.
“You feel that way! credat Judæus! But there are
some other poetical lies here—what do you mean by
'we met but yesterday, and we part to-morrow,'
when I know you dangled after that widow a whole
season at the baths?”

“Why,” said Smith, with one of his old laughs,
“there was a supplement to such an outpouring, of
course. The reply to my verses was an invitation to
join their party the next morning in a pilgrimage to
Vallambrosa, and once attached to that lady's suite—
va pour toujours! or as long as she chose to keep you.
Turn to the next page. Before coming to the verses
of my more sober days, you may like to read one
more flourish like the last. Those were addressed to
the same belle dame, and under a continuance of the
same hallucination.”

Bob gravely read:—

“What had that flirting widow to do with the gentle
name of Mary?” exclaimed Bob, after laughing
very heartily at the point blank take-in confessed in
these very solemn verses. “Enough of love-melancholy,
however, my dear Smith! Let's have a look
now at the poetical side of care and trouble. What
do you call it?”—

THE INVOLUNTARY PRAYER OF HAPPINESS.

Bob paused a moment after reading these lines.

“They seem in earnest,” he said, “and I will
sooner believe you were happy when you wrote
these, than that you were sad when you wrote the
others. But one thing I remark,” added Bob, “the
devout feeling in these lines written when you are
happiest; for it is commonly thought that tribulation
and sadness give the first religious tinge to the imagination.
Yours is but the happiness of Christian
resignation, after all.”

“On the contrary,” said Smith, “nothing makes
me so wicked as care and trouble. I always had,
from childhood, a disposition to fall down on my
knees and thank God for everything which made me
happy, while sorrows of all descriptions stir up my
antagonism, and make me feel rather like a devil than
a Christian.”

“In that case,” said Bob, taking up his hat, “good
night, and God prosper you! And as to your happiness?”

“Well, what is the secret of my happiness, think
you?”

“Matrimony,” replied Bob.