i\l 'i ' ' 95 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF 189X /i.%l5Si^5.. ^iS/zJif^y. Cornell University Library PS 2368.M8N8 1896 Nug litterariae ig III I Brief essays on ii 3 1924 022 499 077 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022499077 NUG^ LITTERARI^. NUG^ LITTERARI^: OK, BRIEF ESSAYS ON LITERARY. SOCIAL. AND OTHER THEMES. BY WILLIAM MATHEWS, AUTHOR OF "GETTING ON IN THE WORLD;" "WORDS, THEIR USE AND ABUSE;" "ORATORY AND ORATORS," ETC., ETC. Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout, — ^ la Frangaise. — Montaigne. Si on ne goute point ces Caractferes, je m'en 6tonne ; et si on les goQte, je m'en 6tonne le meme. — La Bruy^re, iLonlion: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, & CO., LIMITED. 1896. SSntoersitg ^xtse: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. PREFACE. Six of the papers in this volume, viz. " Luck in Literature," " If I " « Spite in Text-Books," "A Plea for Pedants," " The Advantages of Debt," and "An Ignominious Destiny," have been pub- lished in the North American Eeview, and are reprinted here with the kind consent of Mr. Lloyd Brice, proprietor and editor of that periodical. W. M. Boston, June 24, 1896. CONTENTS. Luck in Literature . . False Refinement . Is Woman "the Weaker Vessel"? .... If! The Virtues of Sunlight Old Women .... Evil chastises Itself Spite in Text-Books . Names vs. Things . . Greed of Praise . . . A Plea for Pedants English vs. American Man- ners How to Treat Satirists An Error Regarding John Milton "No Chance to Make Money Now " The Trials of Librarians Bolingbroke as a Writer Matter-of-Fact Men The Secret of Literary- Success .... A Goodly Heritage May One Laugh at His Own Jokes ? . . . . What is Truth to Nature? 10 13 16 18 19 21 23 24 28 29 30 31 31 36 36 40 42 44 45 Page Living by Proxy ... 47 Advancing Backward . . 49 Sensible Nonsense ... 50 "Phoebus, What a Name!" 51 The Plague of Satiety . . 52 " My Poor Memory " . . 54 Marvellous Memories . . 56 Self-Confidence and Success 57 Was it Suicide?. ... 59 Needless Noise .... 60 Eminent Haters of Noise 61 A Spiritual Enigma . . 62 No ! 63 The Advantages of Debt . 64 Some Modern Authors . 68 Church Sleepers ... 68 Proving Too Much ... 70 Politeness Pays .... 71 lU-UsedMen .... 71 Overcoming a Nickname . 75 Speculation and Practice . 76 The Origin of Some Popu- lar Phrases .... 77 Gothic Puddings ... 81 Is Wit Transient? ... 82 English and American Lecturers 83 An Ignominious Destiny . 87 VI CONTENTS. Conscience and Umbrellas 89 Ciueer Roads to Fame . . 93 Immortality in Law Re- ports 94 A Vivid Simile ..... 95 Why Go to College V . . 95 " A Little Knowledge " . 99 An "Old Field" School- master 103 KufusChoate .... 103 Self-Repetition .... 104 Petty Trials 105 College Degrees .... 107 The Society of Women . Ill Overworked Women . . 112 Big Houses 114 Newspaper Rivalry . . 115 "Smart "Boys .... 116 Contradictions in Character 117 Genius and Application . 121 Old English Lyrics . . 124 Illusions 125 Riches vs. Poverty . . . 126 Risibility amid Pain . . 129 Gibbon, the Historian . 130 A Rabble-Charming Word 132 Skinflints 132 A Social Nuisance . . . 133 " Going with the Grain " . 134 Strawberries . . . . 137 Pelting with Precious Stones 139 The Results of a Fall . . 140 A Poet's Inconsistency . 141 The Value of Iteration . 142 Pet Words . . . . 143 Wisdom after the Event . 145 Puzzling a Yankee . . . 148 the Horse-Jockeys . October . . . Oaths .... Antediluvian Life Jack-o'-Lanterns Passionless Men The "Dulness" of Pulpit Genius and Painstaking A Word for Grumljlers Paradoxes in Belief She did as Requested . Championing Christianity in the Pulpit . . . Being and Seeming Daniel Webster's R61es Adieu to Romance I Ptyalism A Tall Man's Troubles Coats, New and Old . Calmness under Provoca- tion Getting into Harness . Room to Swing a Cat . Sincere Milk .... Labor Pays .... A Happy Toast . . . Omnis Effusus Labor . Pulpit Elocution Have the Jews Humor '? Bells Reconversion of a Duke Long Sermons vs. Short The Art of Conversation Does Marriage "go by Des tiny"? .... A Popular Fallacy . Vulgarity .... Page 150 151 154 155 156 157 160 162 163 167 168 168 169 171 172 175 178 180 181 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 194 195 196 197 201 202 204 205 CONTENTS. VI 1 Page The Secret of Vitality . 207 The Secret of Longevity . 208 Laconic Letters .... 210 Sentimentalists .... 216 " Defend Me from My Friends I " 217 Classic Wit 220 A Safe Preacher ... 222 Little Sins 222 The Artificiality of Mod- ern Society .... 223 Criticism of "The Hub" Fathers 224 Slips of the Tongue and Pen 225 Hisses Silenced .... 232 Reasons for Marrying . . 233 " Revivals of Religion " . 237 " I Hae a Coo Noo " . . 238 Then and Now .... 239 Hazlitt on Quakers . . 240 Ugliness 241 Mrs. Browning and Small Talk 243 What are Superfluities? . 244 His "Nickels" .... 247 Wine-Bibbing Parsons . 248 Piety that " Pays "... 249 A Waggish Rogue . . . 250 Shelving Old Ministers . 250 Genius and Adversity . . 251 Sympathy with Scoundrel- ism 253 The Blessings of Poverty 256 Trials of a Country Editor 257 A Good Stoi-y-TeUer . . 250 Repeating Sermons . . 261 A Midnight Assassin . . 202 Mystery in Religion . . 264 The First Novel ... 265 A Fallacy Pricked ... 266 The Abuse of Newspapers 267 A Deathless Soldier . . 270 A Considerate " Cabby " . 272 What Are We Coming to? 272 The Antiquity of "Shoddy" 273 The Hollowness of Fame 274 The Profits of Authorship 276 The Advantages of Cool- ness 278 Our Schoolboy Days . . 281 The Credulity of Scepti- cism 283 The Pleasures of the Table 283 Eating an Index of Char- acter 285 A Caliph's Meals ... 286 Barbers ; their Wit and Forbearance .... 287 Legal Niceties .... 290 Religion for the Times . 291 Common Absurdities . . 295 Sticklers for Exactness . 296 Colored Malaprops . . . 298 The Poet of Home ... 298 Evils of Having One's Life Saved 299 Be Good without a Theory 300 Old Age 301 A Bad Bargain .... 301 The Classics in Education 302 Boys 302 The Hardening Process . 308 Mental Activity and Lon- gevity 308 Autobiography Revived . 309 Ancient Music and Modern 310 Vlll CONTENTS. Some Uses of Greek . . 312 The Fii-st Step .... 313 Proofs of Comage . . . 314 Thackeray 316 Literary Shipwrecks . . 316 Tlie Sycophancy of Litera- ture 317 Page The Value of Pi-aise . . 321 Two Men in One . . . 322 Long Intermissions . . 823 The Price of Excellence . 324 Genius and Enthusiasm . 326 The Poetry of Steam . . 327 Facts not Faculty . . . 330 Index 333 NUGJE LITTERAHI^. Lnck in Lit- It is curious to note in the history of litera- eratnre. ^^^g j^q^ many authors have owed their fame to a single thought, the chance inspiration of an hour. As there have been painters, not generally much above medi- ocrity, who have scaled the heights of excellence in a sin- gle picture, so there have been poets, ordinarily only second or third rate, whom a solitary ode or sonnet has lifted to the level of the masters of song. In some happy hour, some mental crisis, they have soared on the wings of fancy to a high heaven of invention ; but when, flushed with con- fidence by their success, they have plumed themselves for another not less daring flight, and essayed to " dally with the sun and sport with the breeze," they have " fallen flat, and shamed their worshippers." There is hardly any culti- vated man that has not at times brief visitations of fancy and feeling, when his mind is illumined by " thoughts that transcend his wonted themes, and into glory peep ; " and if he has a talent for versifying, it is not strange if, after a thousand failures, be chance to make one lucky hit, and embody his casual inspiration in " thoughts that breathe and words that burn." He must be a wretched marksman 1 2 NUG^ LITTEBARLiE. who in a lifetime of trials has never once put a ball in " the bull's-eye." Pouif ret was a poet of this ' ' single-speech-Hamiltou " class. Though endowed with one of the most prosaic of minds, he yet chanced one day to blunder upon a lucky theme, and to treat it in a true poetic style. Dr. Johnson and Southey both declared that his poem entitled " The Choice " was the most popular one in the language ; but, though it won boundless praise in the author's lifetime, who ever thought of wasting time on his other effusions ? The life of his intellect seemed to run itself out in one effort ; all the pure juice of the vine flowed into a single glass. The same was true of Lady Anne Barnard, who wrote the inimitable ballad, " Auld Robin Gray," but committed poetical suicide by a continuation ; and, again, of an Eng- lish nobleman, Lord Thurlow (not the great lawyer), who wrote early in this century a volume of verse, mainly dog- gerel, which was published with the title of " The Doge's Daughter," and ridiculed by The Edinburgh Review. Amidst the wilderness of nonsense there was a sonnet — addressed to a water-bird haunting a lake or stream< in the winter — which was so beautiful as, in the opinion of an acute critic, to merit a place in every anthology of English sonnets. Sir Egerton Brydges was another poet of this class. Had he written only his exquisite sonnet, " Echo and Silence," which Wordsworth and Southey so warmly praised, he might have been admired and envied, and all the world would have lamented that his muse was so chary of her favors. But his subsequent efforts dispelled the charm he had raised, and showed that he was indebted to fortune, not to a real poetic genius, for his success. Though he LUCK IN LITERATURE. 3 devoted all his life to the most patient courtship of the muse who had flirted with him for an hour, she never gave him another smile. Akin to this was the case of Wolfe, who produced an ode that provoked universal admiration, and was pronounced by Byron one of the finest in the lan- guage. Had the author of " The Burial of Sir John Moore " published only those memorable lines, which have been declaimed in schools and academies and parodied oftener than, possibly, any other English verse, who would have suspected his poverty of imagination? As it was, his succeeding failures betrayed the secret, and showed that his inspiration was fortuitous, and not the result of natural temperament, — a flash of fancy only, not the steady blaze of genius. The first shot struck the very centre of the ring ; the others could not be found. Similar remarks might, perhaps, be made of Collins, not the author of the ode on " The Passions," but of "To-mor- row," that "truly noble poem, . . . the climax of simple sublimity," as Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave, who places it in his " Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics," justly characterizes it. No one knows whether the author at- tempted to write any other songs ; but if he did, they have passed, like his Christian name and all knowledge of his birthplace, into oblivion. Of Sir William Jones as a poet, what do we know beyond the lines beginning, " What con- stitutes a state?" or of Herbert Knowles, what more than that he is the author of the sombre lines written in the church- yard of Richmond, Yorkshire, beginning, " Methinks it is good to be here " ? Joseph Blanco White was not a poet ; yet, though English was to him an acquired tongue, he wrote a sonnet on " Night" which Coleridge does not hesi- tate to pronounce the grandest and most finely-conceived 4 NUG^ LITTERAEI^. sonnet in our language or, at least, as he afterwards adds, only rivalled in Milton and Wordsworth. To these transatlantic poets may be added our own American poet, Woodworth, who had but one moment of inspiration, when the idea of " The Old Oaken Bucket " flashed upon his mind ; and Key, to whom the muse once lent her fire, when he electrified his countrymen with " The Star-Spangled Banner," but was ever afterward grudging of her fine frenzy. Some forty years ago a young law student in Maine contributed to a newspaper which I was publishing a beautiful poem entitled " The Life-Clock," which was republished for some years in many different journals, sometimes with the name of H. W. Longfellow, sometimes with "From the German," attached to it; but though the author wrote considerable other verse, there was hardly a spark of inspiration in it all. We have in this country scores of would-be poets who have each produced one or two creditable pieces which are to their other productions like Falstaff's " halfpenny worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack." What can be more cruel than for the friends of these rhymers to goad them on to further effort, after it has become evident that — " Calliope jamais daigne leur parler, Et Pegase pour eux refuse de Toler " ? Because, in a lucky moment, one has dashed off a few verses whose words are steeped in Castalian dews and " colored like the golden exhalations of the dawn," does it follow that he has ' ' the vision and faculty divine " of the inspired bard? Who knows that he has the strength of wing for a series of successful flights, that he has not ex- hausted himself by his happy efforts ? Carlyle says that FALSE REFINEMENT. 5 booksellers would get more for their money if they got less, — that is, if they paid for quality instead of for quan- tity. In like manner, it is better for a poet's fame to have produced a few good verses than a thousand mediocre ones ; better one brief poem, shorn of all excrescences and con- densed into power, than a myriad of diffuse ones, which are only " tolerable," and therefore " not to be endured." False Refine- ^^^ English words are oftener abused ment, than " refinement." Eastidious persons, who are disgusted with what pleases the generality of men, and who demand that life shall be thrice winnowed foi' their use, are apt to plume themselves upon their superior refinement. No doubt there are certain sensitive organi- zations which suffer where coarser ones escape unscathed ; but a tendency to magnify small annoyances is quite as common to little as to great minds. The Bible, speaking of certain Israelitish women, says that "they could not set the sole of their foot to the ground for delicateness and tenderness," — which is certainly not meant for a compli- ment. It is hard to see a true refinement in a selfishness which demands the best of everything, and is satisfied with nothing ; which lays waste whole fields for a pineapple, and crushes a thousand roses for one fragrant drop. Mrs. Kirkland, in an admirable essay on "Fastidiousness," observes that, like other spurious things, that quality is often inconsistent with itself: the coarsest things are done, the cruellest things said, by the most fastidious people. It was a perception of this which led Swift to say, that "A nice man is a man of nasty ideas." Horace Walpole was a proverb of epicurean particularity of taste, yet not one of the vulgar persons whom he vilified had a 6 NUG^ litteraem;. keener relish for a coarse allusion or a malicious false- hood. " Louis XIV. was insolently nice in some things ; but what was he in others?" Among the extraordinary instances of fastidiousness, that of Poppcea, who required a bath of asses' milk, and that of the princess who wept because in the lowest of half- a-dozen beds on which she was trying to rest a rose-leaf was doubled, are well known. It is told of one of the pupils of Verocchio, — Nanni Grosso, — that when dying in a hospital he rejected an ordinary crucifix presented to liim, demanding one made by Donatello, declaring that otherwise he would die uushrived, so disagreeable to him were ill-executed works of his art. Miss Tyler, Southey's aunt, with whom he lived in his childhood, was so fastid- ious that she once buried a cup for six weeks to purify it from the lips of a person whom she considered not clean, Mrs. Kirkland tells of a gentleman who would not sign his name till he had put on his gloves, lest possibly he should contaminate his fingers ; and of a lady who objected to joining in the communion at church, because the idea of drinking after other people was so disgusting. Some of the most celebrated literary men and musical composers have been noted for their fastidiousness. The poet Gray manifested a morbid and effeminate delicacy, which was, in a great degree, assumed for effect. In spite of sickness and age, he continued to the last a coxcomb in his dress, which was of a finical neatness. Disliking to seem old, he refused to wear spectacles when his sight began to be dim, though at considerable inconvenience. Nothing offended him more than vulgarity, either of man- ner or sentiment ; yet his own squeamish and overacted elegance was vulgarity likewise, but because it belonged FALSE REFINEMENT. 7 to an opposite extreme, and was that of the man-milliner instead of the rustic, he had no suspicion of the failing. Gray, however, was only one of many authors — from Aristotle to Bacon, and from Bacon to Buffon — who have been fastidious about their personal adornment. Buffon, in his study, was always arrayed in bag-wig and ruffles ; Eousseau could compose only on the finest gilt-edged paper ; and it was only in a laced suit, and with his finger spark- ling with a diamond, "that Richardson could portray Sir Charles Grandison. Of literary fastidiousness, the most pardonable form is that which makes an author shudder at a misprint in his writings ; yet this is sometimes carried to ridiculous ex- tremes. It is told of an Italian poet, who went to present a copy of his verses to the Pope, that finding, as he was looking them over in the coach on the way, a misprint of a single letter, his heart was broken with vexation and cha- grin. What if he had written for a daily newspaper, and found all his roses turned into noses, all his angels into angles, and his liappiness into pappiness f It has been justly said of fastidious people, that we need expect no delicate, silent self-sacrifice, no tender watching for others' tastes or needs, no graceful yielding up of privi- leges in unconsidered trifles, on which wait no "flowing thanks." " They may be kind and obliging to a certain extent, but when the service required involves anything disagreeable, anything offensive to the taste on which they pride themselves, we must applj' elsewhere. Their fineness of nature sifts common duties, selecting for practice only those which pass the test ; and conscience is not hurt, for unsuspected pride has given her a bribe." It is a fearful compensation of this form of selfishness, — for selfishness O NUGJE LITTERARIjE. it commonly i8, under whatever delicate phrases and lofty pretensions fastidiousness is veiled, — that the sensitive- ness thus indulged and petted becomes a tyrant, whose ever increasing exactions nothing can satisfy. The tor- ment they inflict is vividly depicted in an entry in Byron's diary for Nov. 22, 1813. Speaking of the refinement of the poet Rogers's taste, he says : "If you enter his house, his drawing-room, his library, you of yourself say, ' This is not the dwelling of a common mind.' There is not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his chimney-piece, his sofa, his table, that does not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor. But this very delicacy must be the misery of his existence. Oli, the jarrings Ids disposi- tion must have encountered through life ! " There is no doubt that delicacy is to the mind what fra- grance is to fruit ; and that the finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fcuits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. But extreme refinement is false delicacy, and that only can be properly styled refine- ment which, as Coleridge says, " by strengthening the in- tellect, purifies the manners." Is Woman Who was it that first called woman " the "the Weaker weaker vessel"? Unless the phrase was Vessel"' meant for irony, there never was a greater mistake. The very contrary is the fact. Not only is woman stronger than her fancied lord, but just in propor- tion to her seeming weakness is her real power. A little blond creature with dewy eyes and fragile form, whom physically you could crush like an egg-shell in your mas- culine grasp, is just the person before whom you find yourself crouching and trembling, without daring even IS WOMAN "THE WEAKER VESSEL"? 9 " to peep " in opposition to her will. She bends you to her ends with the merest minimum of effort ; she moulds you to her purposes as clay is moulded in the hands of the potter. Woman's control of man is the eternal theme of literature, — the burden of biography, lyric, and romance. In one form or another, it is always Samson laying his shaggy head in the lap of Delilah,— the old lion allowing the fair maiden to draw his teeth and clip his claws. " Did not the great Hercules lay down his strength, Spinning with Omphale, and all for love ? " Was not Achilles, — the terrible Achilles, impiger, ira- cundus, inexorahilis, acer, though he was ; he who ■' AH covenants would still disown, And test his quarrel by the sword alone ; " he whose mere shout alone made the horses of Troy tremble in their shoes, foreseeing the sorrows which that shout implied ; the Swift-footed himself, who slew the Horse- tamer ; was not even he conquered by the gentleness of the fair Briseis? And when he was robbed of her by the leader of the Greeks, did he not stalk ireful and moody by the shores of the many-sounding sea, and mingle his briny tears with " the ocean wave " ? There was possibly a time before man emerged from the savage state, when woman might have been "the weaker vessel ; " but to call her so to-day, when with absolute self- reliance she preaches in the pulpit, argues in the courts, performs surgical operations, harangues on the platform, wins" double-firsts" at universities, holds political con- ventions, organizes parties, and outwits and defeats even the Jesuits at the polls, — when a woman (Mrs. Livermore) 10 mJGM LITTERARI^. travels during a hot fortnight in August 4,500 miles, and delivers eleven lectures at Chautauqua, besides speaking during the same brief time at several conferences on tem- perance, woman suffrage, nationalism, and physical cul- ture, — to call such a being " weak " is to be guilty at once of an anachronism, a misnomer, and a libel. A NEWSPAPER writer, speaking of the late Thomas J. Potter, who as general manager of the Union Pacific Railway received an annual salary of $40,000, says that he began his career twenty-five years ago as a lineman on an Iowa railway at $45 per month. " He worked his way up," it is added, from the latter position to the former ; "and there is not a young man on any railroad in the United States for whom the same result is not possible, if he should put into his work the same amount of brains and zeal which Mr. Potter did." How inspiring ! What a trumpet-call to young railway employees to become, one and all, presidents of great lines, and the recipients of yearly salaries each one of which is in itself a fortune ! " i/ he should put into his work," etc. No doubt; and " i/ my aunt had been a man, she would have been my uncle." It is just and only that provoking " if," reader, that prevents a beggar from becoming a Eothschild, or you and me from rivalling AVehster at the bar, Gladstone in the senate, or Scott and Dickens in fic- tion. " If " is a very small word, a monosyllable of two letters only ; yet how immense is that " if " ! Thousands of persons who now languish in obscurity would astonish the world, were they not, like Mirabeau in his youth, con- fined in the castle of If. " If I but had an opening," sighs many a young man in IF! 11 these days of overcrowded professions and multiplying competitors for office and place, " the world should see what I can do." " If I but had an opening! " as if the very seal and sign of ability — the essential difference be- tween it, or genius, and dilettantism — were not a regal superiority to the " openings" and "opportunities" which so many aspirants to wealth or honor make a condition of success. The successful man is the one who made a way when he could not find one ; who made the adverse circum- stances, over which others were moaning, the ministers and aids to his advancement, instead of becoming their slave. The difficulties which disheartened them only stiffened his sinews ; the block of granite which was an obstacle in their pathway became a stepping-stone in his. A lad of twelve years of age, who already played the piano very skilfully, once said to Mozart : " Herr Kapellmeister, I should very much like to compose something. How am I to begin?" " Pho, pho," said Mozart, " you must wait." " But you," said the boy, " composed much earlier." " Yes," replied Mozart, " but I asked nothing about it. If one has the spirit of a composer, one writes because he cannot help it." On another occasion, writing in reply to a friend who had asked about his way of composing music, he names certain occasions when his ideas flow best and most abun- dantly, and adds : " Wlience and how they come I know not, nor can I force them. . . . Why productions take from my hand that particular form and style which makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so and so, large or aquiline, or, in short. 12 NUG^ LITTERARLffi. makes it Mozart's and different from those of other people, for I really do not study to aim at any originality." The letters of Dickens show that it was in a similar way that he wrote those wondrous novels of his that enchant the world. When a new creation was about to rise from the ocean-depths of thought, he did not go about asking advice, or gird up his literary energies by a prodigious effort of the will, but, to use his own language about " The Chimes," " all his affections and passions got twined and knotted upon it ; " he went wandering about at night into the strangest places, "possessed," spirit-driven, a prophet commissioned to utter the life-giving word to men's souls, and finding no rest until he uttered it. So, though rarely perhaps in the same degree, with the eminent men, the great leaders, in almost every calling : they chose their respective pursuits, if they can be said to have chosen them, not because those pursuits promised the most money, fame, or happiness, but unconsciously, because they could not help it; and they succeeded, not because they resolved with an intense, continuous act of voliticm to do such and such things, but because they were impelled by a great, prevailing, paramount desire, which engulfed all lesser desires, to do them. No doubt there is a will that makes the man ; but if it is not inborn, it cannot be put into him, and it needs no prompting. To tell a young man that he can become a millionaire, a railroad king, etc., if he will put into his work the same amount of brains and zeal as A or B did before he became a millionaire or railroad king, is the veriest drivel. It is equivalent to saying that he will be- come a Samson if he will only put forth a Samson's strength ; or that if an astronomical student will put into THE VIRTUES OF SUNLIGHT. 13 his work the mental energy, the spiritual force, of Newton, he will do as great things as Newton, — which is not a very stimulating statement, if it be true. How strangely men persist in regarding moral qualities as habits merely, and not gifts ! The will is a natural endowment as well as the mental faculties, and to want it is as bad as to want mental power. The Virtues Why is it that in this age of cures, — grape- 01 Sunlignt. Qureg^ movement-cures, faith-cures, etc., which ai"e lauded as panaceas for all the ills that flesh is heir to, — so few persons avail themselves of that best and cheapest antidote to disease, as well as cure of it ,in many cases, the sun-cure ? The love of sunshine is one of our strongest instincts ; yet cats and dogs, which have it also, follow it more intelligently than men and women. No man ever basked in the sunshine on a bright, sparkling morning, without feeling and being the better for it ; yet how few of us avail ourselves of the wealth of sunshine that is poured out so lavishly all around us ! We all understand the ef- fects of the withdrawal of sunlight from plants in winter ; but it is too often forgotten that through its short, gloomy days the human body suffers in the same way as vegeta- tion, and therefore requires the therapeutic agency of sun- shine to repair its wasted forces. Dr. Bell, in his work on Climatology, observes that the free action of light favors nutrition and regularity of development, and contributes to beautify the countenance ; while a deficiency of light is usually characterized by ugliness, rickets, and deformity, and is a fruitful source of scrofula and consumption. The sun-cure, we believe, is not found in rooms glazed with blue-glass (though even tb3.t craze had a truth under- 14 NUG^ LITTERARLE. lying it), but out of doors. If we cannot get it at home, we must seek it where the skies are blue and the breezes balmy, — in Florida, or Southern California, or the Riviera, or sunny Italy. With time and means, it is now as easy to bathe in delicious and vivifying sunlight all the year round as it was for Naaman to leave his leprosy in the waters of Jordan. Thanks to the iron horse and magnifi- cent steamships, we can follow the sun in his southward sweep, and compel him to a perennial summer. Thus Doc- tor Sunshine is always at call, and men the world over are becoming more and more disposed to put faith in his simple and natural remedies. Eome's charming lyrist, Horace, tells us in his address to his book (Epist. xx. 20) that he was " solibus aptus," — fond of basking in the sun, — • and therefore loved to live at Tarentum, in the extreme south of Italy, in the winter. The sun was always the poet Gray's physician, and without its "sovran vital lamp," life, he said, would often have been intolerable to him. It is said of Le Sage, the author of "Gil Bias" (that charming story of which Ma- caulay said that he was never tired), that in his declining years, when his faculties were fast dying out, he became singularly dependent upon the sun : when that luminary appeared, and so long as it was climbing to the zenith, the lively author grew brighter and brighter ; but from noon to sunset his powers underwent a gradual and percepti- ble obscuration. The biography of Brighton's brilliant preacher. Rev. F. W. Robertson, tells us that he basked and seemed to live more vividly in broad sunshine ; it made all the difference between rapidity of thought, ease of arrangement, in preparing his sermons, and laborious fail- ure, whether he wrote or not in a room facing the south. THE VIRTUES OF SUNLIGHT. 15 Joseph Denuie, the delightful " Lay Preacher," — of whom, as a native of this city, every Bostonian should be proud, — declared that " the sun is the poet's, the invalid's, and the hypochondriac's friend." A slave to gloom in winter, he in April and May, under the potent influence of sunshine, gave care to the winds. There are some persons who fully appreciate the benevo- lent agency of "old Sol" in winter, yet seem not to be aware that his vivifying beams are even more essential to health in summer. The exhalations from our bodies in warm weather are more copious than in cold, and the sun's rays are more needed, — just as disinfectants are more needed in the former season than in the latter. The magical effects of sunlight upon human health and spirits are felt by thousands who hardly think of the cause. The rays of heat quicken the vital powers, the chemical rays exert their mysterious and potent influence, and the illumi- nating rays, independently of the others, communicate mo- tion. To shut the light from our homes is to banish the most efficient of all agents in destroying what is detri- mental to health and life. The noxious vapors, which the free admission of air and sunlight would remove, are ab- sorbed by carpets, wall paper, and upholstery, and gen- erate disease. But why multiply proofs? "Who has not noticed the contrast of the pallid faces, flaccid muscles, and nerveless movements of those persons who live in dark and consequently damp rooms, with the rosy looks and bounding energy of those who pass their days in the open air? The owl loves the twilight and the night; the eagle delights in the sunshine. What a miserable mope is the one ; how strong-winged and exultant is the other ! More persons die, it is said, on the north than on the south side 16 NUG^ LIITERARI^. of hospitals, — more persons on the shady side of the street than on the sunny one. Typhoid and kindred dis- eases have sometimes raged on the former side, while the latter has been exempt. Who can wonder that the Persians once worshipped the sun? Why is Italy, with its shocking sanitation, so healthful? Because it is flooded with sunlight. Were it as sunless as England, it would be as unfit for human habi- tation as a pest-house. What a trumpet-tongued testimony is this to the poison-destroying, health-giving power of " old Sol "? It is now well known that the germs of those deadly diseases, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and typhoid, are utterly destroyed by vivid sunlight. Who can doubt that one of the prime benefits which invalids derive from a winter sojourn at Alpine or tropical resorts is due to the profuse sunshine enjoyed in them? mn w Coleridge is reported as saying that there were three classes into which all the women past seventy, that ever he knew, were to be divided : 1. That dear old soul ; 2. That old woman ; 3. That old witch. It must have been to the first-named class that a later writer refers, when he says, that with the exception of a young one, there is nothing in the world so charming as an old woman. We agree with him, — only, we would omit the exception, — provided she is a genuine old woman, without affecta- tion ; one who has grown old gracefully, and who does not try to hide " the sere and yellow leaf" by aping the dress, airs, and manners of the spring-time of life. Montaigne has said, alas! too truly, that old age is apt to impress as many wrinkles on the mind as on the body ; and there are few men or women advanced to that stage of life, " qui ne OLD WOMEN. 17 sent pas I'aigre et le moisi." Yet such a gray-haired woman as we have named may be a charmer, even though as old as the " Old Countess of Desmond," who, according to one tradition, lived to the age of one hundred and ten years, and, according to another, to one hundred and sixty- two, and might have lived a score or two more, so great was her genius for longevity, had she not fallen from a cherry-tree, as thus chronicled by a merry bard : — " Ay, as old As that Countess of Desmond, of whom I 've been told That she lived to much more than a hundred and ten, And was killed by a fall from a cherry-tree then ! What a frisky old girl ! " Is it not an interesting and noteworthy circumstance, that most of the ancient heroes, as well as most modern phi- losophers and poets, have manifested a predilection for the society of old women? The ancient heroes, as was the custom of their day, showed their veneration to their nurses ; the modern philosopher and poet, to an aged mother, sister, or friend, in whose wrinkled countenance they have beheld the reflection of eternity. Moliere's — the melancholy Molifere's — old woman will be forever associated with his name ; and so will Cowper's Mrs. Un- win, as well as the mother on seeing whose picture he wrote his most touching verse. Pope gloried in rocking the cradle of age for a parent who appears to have struck the Horeb-like rock of even his selfish soul, till the tender- ness gushed forth. Johnson, infirm and poor, had a com- panion still more infirm and poor, and blind withal, in old Mrs. Williams; Northcote had his sister; and Calvin, the rigid theologian, was always gentle and yielding to his old mother. Even De Maistre, the stern Ultramontanist, who 2 18 NUG^ LITTERARI^. championed the Inquisition, and maintained that war and the gallows are the two poles on which society revolves, worshipped his aged mother, — his sublime mother, as he called her, "an angel," he said, "to whom God had but lent a body; " and, to descend to later times, when did Wordsworth's genius ever pour more liquid music into the sonnet (of which, after Milton, he was the greatest mas- ter), than in these lines "to a lady in her seventieth year"? — " Such age, how beautiful ! O lady bright. Whose mortal lineaments seem all refined By favoring nature and a saintly mind To something purer and more exquisite Than flesh and blood ; whene'er thou meet'st my sight, When I behold thy blanched, unwithered cheek, Thy temples fringed with locks of gleaming white. And head that droops because the soul is meek, — Thee with the welcome snowdrop I compare. That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb From desolation toward the genial prime ; Or with the Moon, conquering earth's misty air. And filling more and more with crystal light As pensive Evening deepens into Night." Evil chastises That eminently thoughtful and suggestive Itself. writer, Henri Frederic Amiel, closes in his " Journal " some remarks on the purification of society from its corruptions, which resulted from the descent of that " scourge of God," Genghis Khan, and his yellow, flat-nosed Mongols, upon Europe, with the following strik- ing reflections, which appear to us singulailj' applicable to the recent anti-Italian outbreak of popular fury at New Orleans : " The Quakers will not see that tliere is a law of tempests in history as in Nature. . . . Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to vitiate the air. ' Nos SPITE IN TEXT-BOOKS. 19 patimur longae pads mala.' Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium ; they put the world bru- tally to rights. Evil chastises itself, and the tendency to ruin in human things supplies the place of the regulator who has not yet been discovered. No civilization can bear more than a certain proportion of abuses, injustice, cor- ruption, shame, and crime. When this proportion has been reached, the boiler bursts, the palace falls, the scaf- folding breaks down ; institutions, cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The evil contained in an organism is a virus which preys upon it, and, if it is not eliminated, ends by destroying it." Spite in Text- Intensely bitter as are some men's political Books. prejudices, it seems scarcely credible that they would find expression in scientific treatises and text-books ; yet so they have in several notable instances. Dr. Johnson could not refrain from letting his bile overflow into his dictionary, as we see by his definitions of " excise " and "pension." The former is defined to be " a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged, not by the com- mon judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid ; " and " pension," to be " an allow- ance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country." One of the last places in which one would expect to meet with such an exhibition of temper is among the dispassionate definitions of a dic- tionary ; and the Doctor would hardly have been betrayed into it had he dreamed tliat, only a few years later, he him- self would accept a pension from George III. But Johnson, " a good hater," though he was an ultra 20 NUG^ LITTERARI^. Tory, has been surpassed by William Cobbett. In his English grammar, Cobbett contrives skilfully to drag in his political opinions, not occasionally, but again and again, and makes his examples and illustrations subservient to his likes and dislikes on almost every page. Thus, as an example of the time of an action expressed by a verb, he gives this: "The Queen [Queen Caroline] defies the tyrants, the Queen defied the tyrants, the Queen will defy the tyrants." To illustrate the hyphen, we have: "the never-to-be-forgotten cruelty of the borough tyrants ; " under the possessive case: "Oliver the Shy's evidence, Edwards the government's spy." Nouns of number and multitude are thus grouped together: "Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Court of King's Bench, den of thieves, and the like." " You may use," he tells his pu- pil, " either a singular or plural verb with a noun of mul- titude, but you must not use both numbers in the same sentence. You may say, for instance, of the House of Commons, ' they refused to hear evidence against Castle- reagh, when Mr. Maddox accused him of having sold a seat ; ' or, ' it refused to hear evidence.' It is wrong to say : ' Parliament is shamefully extravagant, and tliey are returned by a gang of rascally borough-mongers.' " As a specimen of faulty syntax, Cobbett gives: "The Attor- ney-General Gibbs, whose malignity induced him to be extremely violent, and was listened to by the judges." But the bitterness of Johnson's, and even of Cobbett's, political prejudice pales before that of General Hill, the Confederate officer, as manifested in a text-book published by him just before the late Civil War. There are few per- sons whose ingenuity would not be puzzled and baffled in an attempt to introduce sectional feelings and personal NAMES VS. THINGS 21 spite into the neutral region of pure mathematics; but General Hill actually succeeded in conveying covert sneers by algebraical symbols, and insinuating contempt through mathematical problems. In a text-book called the " Elements of Algebra," strongly recommended by Pro- fessor Jackson of the Virginia Military Institute (afterward the famous rebel general, " Stonewall" Jackson), a num- ber of problems are given, of which the following are specimens : — " A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, ■which cost him one-fourth of a cent apiece, with real nut- megs worth four cents apiece, and sells the whole assort- ment for $45, and gains $3.75 by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there ? " " At the "Woman's Eights Convention, held at Syracuse, N. Y., composed of one hundred and fifty delegates, the old maids, childless wives, and bedlamites were to each other as the figures of 7 and 3. How many were there of the old maids ? " Names vs. The " Vermont Chronicle," a conservative Thuigs- orthodox journal, said some years ago, — with, we fear, too much truth, — that " there are a great many people who are more afraid of saying that hell is not eternal, than they are of the eternity of hell. You will find a man who, in his business all through the week, in his weights and measures, in his gossip and small talk, has not the least fear of justice and eternal retribution, but will shake in his shoes on Sunday at the saying that hell is not eternal." How full of such inconsistencies is poor human nature, regarding not only religion, but morality and politics ! It is said that there are political pedants 22 NUGiE LITTERARIiE. who are so enamoured of a name that they would fret at being subjects of a monarchy administered in the best spirit of a republic, and glorify themselves on being citi- zens of a republic administered in the worst spirit of a monarchy. So, again, in the religious world, there are sticklers for orthodoxy, who, like the dying artist that scornfully rejected the supreme rites of his church because the crucifix presented to him violated the rules of art, will scowl at doctrinal sentiments which are saturated with the orthodox spu'it because they are not couched in the techni- cal orthodox language. Like the good woman who deemed tartar emetic very bad for children, saying that she should not for a moment think of giving it to her own, but always gave them antimonial wine (the selfsame thing), these ultra-orthodox persons are horror-struck at the very theo- logical sentiments which they themselves cherish, when those sentiments are couched in any other language than an old, worn-out, effete, conventional technology, which was fit enough in its day, but out of which the meaning has long ago been emptied. A vivid example of this kind of human folly once oc- curred in the history of Rome. So long as Julius Cffisar, after he had reached the summit of power, refrained from assuming the insignia of kingly authority, the Romans allowed him as Imperator, Dictator, and Prsefectus Morum, to enjoy all its substantial prerogatives. But when, during the Circensian games, his statue was borne in the proces- sion with those of the divinities ; when he assumed the royal wreath and the regal buskins, and exhibited an armed Venus upon his signet, while guards attended upon his person, — the daggers were unsheathed against which his veteran bands and unequalled military genius could give GREED OF PRAISE. 23 him no protection. He had been suffered to shed with im- punity the best blood of Rome, and to trample on her laws and liberties ; but as men are roused and exasperated more by the symbols than by the substance of tyranny, it was only when he assumed the badges of kingly authority that his countrymen lost theii- patience, and plunged their dag- gers in his bosom. Greed of The greed of praise which some writers Praise. betray in our day is one of the most offensive features of literature. The excessive laudation which they bestow upon other authors for the sake of being paid back in kind, perhaps with compound interest, sickens the stom- ach of common honesty. It reminds one of the days of Queen Anne, when mutual puffery was as common among the wits as biting satire of those whom they envied or rivalled. Dr. Johnson told Mrs. Piozzi, who was an adept in the arts of adulation, that if Samuel Richardson could have lived till she could have added her incense to that which already smoked on his altar, she would have added two or three years to that novelist's life; "for," said the great Mogul of literature, " that fellow died for want of change among his flatterers. He perished for want of more [of them], like a mati obliged to breathe the same air till it is exhausted." (Is not that a piquant illustration?) What a contrast between this and Johnson's language concerning Milton, of whom he says that " from his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support ; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratifled, or favor gained, — no exchange of praise, nor solicitation of support." "Worthy was such a man to re- ceive the magnificent eulogium which follows : " His great 24 NUG^ LITTEKARL/E. works were performed under discountenance and blindness ; but difficulties vanished at his touch. He was born for whatever is arduous ; and his worli is not the greatest of heroic poems only because it is not the first." A Plea for Why is it that pedants are generally so ridi- Pedauts. culed? Is it not lucky for a man that he can contract an intense, even an extravagant, fondness of some pursuit, — some specific study, art, or science, — which he will consequently understand better than other men, and in solving whose problems he may become an expert? "What is a man good for without professional enthusiasm, — who does not give his whole soul to his calling, concentrating upon it all his energies, and loving it with an ardor that almost ignores the existence of any other? " No man," says Emerson, " can do anything well, who does not think that what he does is the centre of the visible universe." It is easy to declaim against " one-ideaism," "intellectual narrowness," and "a' that;" but, in spite of the cheap eloquence and fashionable cant of superficially-omniscient men who plume themselves upon their fancied oceanic breadth and depth, we love to see a man magnify his call- ing, even if he does overrate its relative importance. It is only thus that he can achieve excellence or eminence. Who are the men that make their mark on the world, and to what do they owe their celebrity and influence? Are they the men who have the most versatility and the most varied culture? No; they are those whose minds want balance, who have some giant faculty developed at the expense of the rest. The very deadness of perception thus induced promotes self-confidence and positiveness. Occasionally, at long intervals in the history of humahity, A PLEA FOR PEDANTS. 25 a person appears who wings his flight to the peaks of greatness by an equal flapping of his wings ; but all the rest gain tlieir motion like a mill-wheel, — by a continued fall of water on one side. The want of balance, it has been truly said, is the cause of most motion ; and there- fore the minds that stir the stagnant pool of common thought are out of equilibrium, and propelled by this very cause, like a pith figure loaded with a leaden foot, to spring with impatient yet effective force in some providentially- prescribed direction. Once in four or five centuries the world beholds a Leonardo da Vinci or a Leibnitz ; but few of their fellow-mortals can fully master more than one art or science, — all beyond is a miserable affectation and a downright waste of time. What Michael Angelo said of painting is true of every other art or craft : " It is jealous, and requires the whole man." The day of universal scholars is past. The measure of a man's learning to-day is the amount of his voluntary ignorance ; the measure of his practical force is the amount he is content to leave unattempted. We cannot, therefore, admire the man wlio, instead of being devoted to one great art, — "married to that immortal bride," — woos all the muses in turn; not content to be a paiuter, sculptor, or writer, unless he is also " chemist, statesman, fiddler, and buffoon." There is no end of acquisition, if one be- gins to dabble in all the ologies and isms which may be intrinsically valuable, or which, if possessed, may add a feather to his reputation. Give us a thousand times, rather, the glorious pedantry of Fielding's Parson Adams, who thought a schoolmaster the gi-eatest character in the world, and himself the greatest schoolmaster in it ! We smile when we are told of the French grammarian Daguesseau, 26 NUG^ LITTEEAEI^. who, when told that a revolution had broken out in Paris, replied, "Never mind! I have in my portfolio thirty-six conjugations, all completed ; " and, again, when we hear of Dr. George, who shrewdly suspected that Frederick the Great, with all his victories, could not conjugate a Greek verb in mi. But this very exclusiveness — this absorption in one pursuit — is the secret of all power. Was Vestris, the French dancing-master, guilty of coxcombry or false- hood in declaring that Voltaire and himself were the two greatest men in all Europe ? No, assuredly ; he but mani- fested a proper feeling of enthusiasm for his art, and it would have been downright hypocrisy for him to have pretended to think otherwise. Sydney Smith, iu satirizing the classical education at the English universities, says that " the Parr or the Bentley of his day would be scandalized to be put on a level with the discoverer of a neutral salt." And why not, prithee? Can we expect a great scholar, who has devoted a life to his call- ing, to deem any other of equal rank and importance ? Shall a painter be required to feel the same admiration for the works of Mozart and Handel as for those of Raphael and Titian ? Why should not the Greek or Latin scholar, who has " scorned delights and lived laborious days " to possess himself of those stubborn tongues, " glory in the detec- tion of an anapest in the wrong place, or in the restoration of a dative case which Cranzius has passed over, and the never-dying Ernesti failed to observe "? What if a gram- marian does " tower and plume himself," as Sir Thomas Browne saj's that he has known one to do, " over a line of Horace, and show more pride in the construction of one ode than the author in the composure of the whole book " ? We see nothing ridiculous in this ; it is but the natural result of a passionate and absorbing love for one's pursuit. A PLEA FOR PEDANTS. 27 "We are told of Baron Maseres, with whom the study of abstract arithmetic was a passion, that his leading idea seemed to have been to calculate more decimal places than any one could possibly want, and to print the^ works of all who had done the same thing. What mathematician ever signally distinguished himself whose devotion to his science was not thus exclusive? Who would employ in a great suit a lawyer who does not bristle all over with nolle prose- quis and certioraris and surrebutters, and shed tears of admiration over his Coke upon Littleton and his Fearne on "Contingent Remainders"? It is only the blockhead or hypocrite who never goes crazy with enthusiasm. " A London apprentice who did not admire the Lord Mayor's coach/' says Hazlitt, " would stand a good chance of com- ing to be hanged." In short, to excel greatly in any pro- fession there should be an exclusiveuess, a bigotry, a blind- ness of attachment to it, which will make every other seem insignificant in comparison. The world holds the same view. It will not believe in the depth of a many-sided man. To what but this were due the doubt and detraction which dogged Bulwer all his days? Had he been a novelist only, instead of being the "Admirable Crichton" of letters, — novelist, essayist, satirist, dramatist, poet, historian, orator, — he would have held a far higher and more undisputed place in the literary Walhalla. It was said by Jules Janin of Edouard Four- nier : " Cet homme Id, sait tout; il ne sail que cela; mais il le salt Men." Yet Fournier, in spite of his encyclopaidic culture, is an obscure man of letters. Even when it is shown in a reprehensible calling, one cannot but admire an absorbing enthusiasm. Froissart, in his " Chronicles," tells of a reverend monk who had been 28 NUG^. LITTERARIvE. a robber in his early life, and who, growing old, used pathetically to lament that he had ever changed his profes- sion. He said " it was a goodly sight to sally out from his castle, and to see a troop of jolly friars come riding that way, with their mules well laden with viands and rich stores ; to advance toward them ; to attack and overthrow them, returning to the castle with a noble booty." Even the veriest villain, if he be a consummate villain, must be more content and better pleased with himself than his half- faced counterfeit ; and this simply through his force and determination of character. We sliould have, too, more hope of reclaiming him and making him a blessing to the world than of reforming the cold, heartless block of a scoundrel in whom to kindle enthusiasm for anything, good or bad, would be like "creating a soul under the ribs of death." English vs Reader, have you ever visited Trenton American Falls, and had a chat with Mr. Moore, the Manners, proprietor of the pleasant, home-like hotel there? He used to have a fund of amnsing anecdotes, one of which we well remember. He was discussing one cfay with a guest from England the subject of American as compared with English m.anners. " There," said the guest triumphantly to his host, as he pointed to a pair of booted legs resting on the window-sill of an upper room, which greeted their eyes as they walked in the garden toward the house, — "there is a sample of American manners ! " " I don't know," replied Mr. INFoore, " who is the occu- pant of that room ; but I will wager a bottle of champagne with you that he is not one of my country-men." HOW TO TREAT SATIRISTS. 29 The challenge was instantly accepted, and on Inquiring of the clerk of the hotel, it was found that the owner of the protruding boots was a young English nobleman. ' ' Well," said the discomfited better, with ready wit, ' ' it is surprising how readily our people, when they come over here, acquire your habits ! " How to Treat What is the best way to treat a satirist, — Satirists, oue who has made you the butt of his ridicule, and the laughing-stock of the public? There are some persons of nervous temperament who feel as uneasy in the presence of such a jester as if they were shut up in a room with a fulminating shell, or an insecurely caged cobra capello. Henry I. of England, when ridiculed in a clever lampoon, could think of no more telling reply than to have the author's eyes put out. Ages before Henry, the noble Roman family of the Metelli fancied that the most pertinent answer to the well-known stinging line of Neevius was to cast him into prison. On the other hand, Nero, with all his cruelty, never punished his own libellers ; and Julius Caesar, when he was lampooned by Catullus, invited him to supper, and treated him with such magnanimous civility that he converted the poet-enemy into a life-long friend. One of the old kings of France was wont, when urged to avenge a satirical assault, to observe that " the ass which beareth the burden must be allowed to bray." Cardinal Mazarin replied to an attack by the learned Guillet by sending for and expostulating with him, — assuring him of his esteem, and shortly afterward conferring upon him agood abbey. This treatment had so happy an effect upon the libeller that he dedicated the second edition of his book to the Cardinal, after having expunged the offensive passages. 30 NUG^ LITTEEARLE. An Error Can a great poet be a moral iceberg? We regarding think not. One might as well talk of a cold- John Milton, blooded race-horse, a sedentary will-o'-the- wisp, or a lazy lightning. Apropos to this subject, we have just read a new critical biography of John Milton, by Richard Garnett, which invests a threadbare theme with really fresh interest. The author combats the popular idea of the poet, which regards him as a great, good, reverend, austere, not very amiable, and not very sensitive man. The author and his books are thus set at variance, and the attempt to conceive the character as a whole results in confusion and inconsistency. Milton, with aU his strength of will and regularity of life, is shown by Mr. Garnett to be as perfect a representative as any of his compeers of the sensitiveness and impulsive passion of the poetical temperament. In proof of this, his new biographer appeals to certain characteristics of the poet which we have never seen set in so -sivid a light before, — namely, his remarkable dependence upon external prompt- ing for his compositions ; the rapidity of his work under excitement, and his long periods of unproductiveness ; the heat and fury of his polemics, and the simplicity with which, fortunately for us, he describes small particulars of his own life side by side with the weightiest utterances on Church and State. Further proofs of his impressible and fervid temperament are the precipitancy of his first marriage and its rupture ; his sudden pliability upon appeal to his generosity ; his romantic self-sacrifice, when his country demanded his eyes from him ; above all, his splendid ideals of regenerated human life, such as poets alone either con- ceive or realize. To overlook all this, is to affirm that Milton wrote great poetry without being truly a poet. "NO CHANCE TO MAKE MONEY NOW." 31 "We thank Mr. Garnett for thus humanizing the great Puritan poet. Henceforth, he will cease to be merely a cold, statuesque idol of the intellect, and will have a shrine in our heart. " No Chance ^''^ i^ ^ common complaint in these days that to Make there are no good opportunities now, such as fflLoney Kow. tjjg^e once were, to make money. Com- petition, men tell you, is so keen that the profits of busi- ness are small, while the risks of loss are many and large. To do a profitable business requires now not only more brains, but a larger capital and in tenser activity than ever before. Trade tends to concentration in fewer and fewer hands ; the great houses are continually absorbing the small ones, or, by underselling them, driving them into bankruptcy. For every clerkship there are hundreds of applicants, which reduces wages so low that a young man who wishes to go into business by and by for himself can barely live, without laying up a dollar. Now, while there is a certain amount of truth in this, we believe it to be enormously exaggerated. We think we could show, had we space, that for a man who is abreast with the age, and has mastered the latest and best modes of doing business, the present is in many respects the best time in the world's history to win an independence or a fortune. Instead, however, of show- ing the truth of this opinion, we will tell an anecdote. About fifty years ago, we were chatting in a hotel in Maine with a shrewd old retired merchant, over eighty years of age, who, beginning life a poor boy in a village in Kennebec County, Maine, had accumulated from eight hundred thousand to a million of dollars, — a sum equiva- lent to more than twice as much to-day. " People," said 32 NUGiE LITTERARIiE. the old mau, " are always complaining that there are no chances now to make money. Thirty years ago, they tell you, there were plenty of such chances ; and, had you lived at that time, you would have heard the same croak- ings. I remember well that people then said the days for acquiring fortunes had gone by, — that the time for making money was just after the Kevolution ; and I have no doubt that during this last period there were plenty of unsuccess- ful men who asserted that there was no profit in business, — that the lucky men were those who lived a generation earlier. And so you might go back a hundred years, or more, and always you would hear from many persons the same despairing cry. Now, the fact is, Mr. Mathews," continued he, after pausing a moment to take a pinch of snuff, " that all times are good for making money, if you only know htiu- : and if you -don't know how, all times are bad." " But, Mr. G.," said we, " suppose that a young man is a clerk in a store in Boston, with a salary of only two hundred dollars a year, and he has to pay five dollars a week for his clothes and board : how is he to lay up any money? How is he to get a start in life, or find capital to go into any business for himself?" " I don't undertake," replied the old man, in his shrill, low voice, " to say how it can be done ; I only say that if he has the will to do it, it will be done. But, instead of arguing the matter, I will tell you a story. About fifty years ago there was a poor boy in Maine, whose father, once independent, had lost most of his property by indors- ing notes for friends, and who lived in a log-house. The boy used to pick strawberries and other fruits, and carry them two miles to a country village, where he sold them at three cents a quart. One day a firm of traders, thinking "NO CHANCE TO MAKE MONEY NOW." 33 he had a turn for business, asked him how he would like to be one of their clerks. His eyes sparkled at the proposal ; and on his saying that he would like the place, he was taken into the store. His salary for the first seven years was forty dollars a year and board. For the next two years he received one hundred dollars a year and his board. At the end of the nine years' clerkship, his employers took him into copartnership. How much money do you suppose he had at that time laid up ? " " Why," we replied, " if he had resembled some clerks that are employed to-day, he probably, if he could have got credit for such a sum, would have been about fifteen hundred dollars in debt." " Well," said the old merchant in a tone of triumph, " that is precisely the sum which he had laid up in clean cash. And now, if you don't believe the story, I will tell you who the boy was. He was your own father, and I was one of the firm that employed him as clerk and finally took him into copartnership." Surprised at this revelation, and conscious that we had been floored by an arguvientum, ad hominem, we were silent for a few minutes, and then added : " But the whole of your clerk's salary, Mr. G., for the nine years, put at compound interest, would n't have amounted to the fifteen hundred dollars which you say he had hoarded." " Oh," was the reply, " he kept his money turning over, of course. He fished at night in the Kennebec, — caught and sold salmon, and dickered with the farmers, etc. But he never neglected his employers' business. He dressed well, and always had a handsome extra suit of clothes to go a-courting in. He was my partner for thirty years, and the only one I did not lose money by." 3 34 NUG^ LITTER ARI^. The Trials of What an amusing book might be written, Librarians, jf jjg ^ould relate his experiences, by that much-abused and sorely-tried person, the librarian of a great public library ! What startling revelations of popu- lar ignorance, almost staggering one's credulity, a veteran like Mr. Cutter of the Boston Athenaeum, or Mr. Poole of the Newberry Library in Chicago, might make ! Think of a visitor making a furious complaint, book in hand, as did one at the National Library in Paris, against the careless- ness which has found a volume altogether different from the one he asked for, — namely, " Le Jardin des Racines Grecques," which is, in fact, the very volume he angrily brandishes! "If," says the official, courteously, "this vol- ume does not contain all the information you want, we have others which are completer and go deeper into the matter. For instance, there is the ' Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.' " " That, sir," replies the visitor, " is nothing to the pur- pose. I am a gardener, and what I want to know is, how the Greeks laid out their gardens." Think of a visitor asking, as did one at the British Mu- seum, to be allowed to see " the original samshrift," which he afterward explains " is the foundation of every lan- guage under the sun ! " Suspecting that a Sanskrit manu- script may be the thing desired, the librarian shows him a palm-leaf MS., which completely satisfies his curiosity. He evidently came expecting to find that " the original San- skrit " was a single document, which he might touch and handle. The seemingly intuitive sagacity, the result of long expe- rience, with which the employes in a great library divine the wants of visitors, who give only the vaguest and some- times wholly misleading hints of the books they wish for. THE TRIALS OF LIBRARIANS. 35 is extraordinary. I was told by one of the oflScials in the delivery room of the Boston Athenaeum that a lady called there one day, and said, " I want a work on nervous pros- tration." It seems incredible that, even with all her prac- tice in interpreting the imperfectly expressed wishes of visitors, the assistant librarian should have guessed, and guessed rightly, that the lady wanted a novel entitled " A Fashionable Sufferer." Another and more enigmatical visitor, an old lady, said, " I want a book that begins with C" — a request which, one would think, must have baffled the combined efforts of the officials to discover its refer- ence ; but the reference was rightly divined. Still an- other lady asked for " a book about something in your pocket," by which it was rightly guessed that she meant a work entitled " A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder," — the only clew being the little preposition in. A gentleman asked one day for. " a book by a person who lives in Waltham." Knowing that " A Humble Romance," by Miss Wilkins, of Waltham, was very popular. Miss R. asked if he meant that book, to which the reply was "Yes." When I was librarian of the Young Men's Library As- sociation in Chicago, some thirty years ago, a rich and fashionable lady sailed into the room one day with an air of conscious importance, and asked, " Have you any of David Copperfield's works?" Another fashionable lady asked, "Have you a page?" When I replied, " You mean a catalogue, madam, I presume? "she rejoined, "Well, page or catalogue either, — I don't care which ! " Per contra, — the visitors at libraries do not monopolize all the blunders. A lady from St. Paul, who asked at the Boston Public Library for " Evelyn's Diary," was told that 36 NUG-ffi LITTERAKIiE. she would find it " below, on the first floorj where all the novels are kept ! " Bolingbroke In speaking of the Chicago Young Men's as a Writer, ubiai.y Association, I am reminded of an amusing incident, quite different from the foregoing, which may be worth narrating. One day a young man from the Hi^ School called at the library when I was its librarian, and asked, " Have you any works on history? I 've got to write an essay on that subject, and I want some help." I handed to him Bolingbroke's "Letters on the Study of History,'' and said sportively, " It would be 'a good joke to copy a few pages from this book and see what the pro- fessor's criticism would be ! " Not dreaming of being taken seriously', I was not a little sui'prised, when, some weeks later, the young man returned the volume, saying, — " I have followed your suggestion. I copied several pages verbatim, and the professor corrected them with his usual care." " What general criticism did he make on the essay?" " Oh, he said that the thoughts were very good indeed, but that the style betrayed marks of youthful immaturity." Considering that the most salient characteristics of Bo- lingbroke as a writer are notoriously dearth of thought and brilliancy of style, — that, while his ideas are generally trite, he nevertheless, " at every turn," as Mr. W. Minto says, ' ' electrifies the reader with some felicitous stroke of criti- cism or happy adjustment of words to his meaning," — the professor's criticism must be deemed altogether original and unique. Matter-of- The celebrated philosopher and apostle of Fact Men. utility, Jeremy Bentham, despised poetry, and . MATTER-OF-FACT MEN. 37 once declared that the game of "pushpin "is of equal value with the poetical art. The only value he could see in poetry was as a means of amusement, — it being, with pushpin and other amusements, " an excellent substitute for drunkenness, slander, and the love of gaming." Male- branche thought that a good poet was " of no more service to the Church or the State than a good player at nine-pins." Locke and the elder Mill held an almost equally contemptu- ous opinion of this art, which Plato preferred to every other, which Wordsworth has called "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," and which Bacon superbly says, " was ever thought to have some participation of divine- ness, because it doth raise and erect the mind by submit- ting the shows of things to the desires of the mind." At a public meeting in England, the painter. Sir Joshua Rey- nolds, heard Dr. Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, assert that a pin-maker is a more valuable and useful member of society than Raphael ! What a dull, prosaic world would this be were it peopled by such utilitarians, in the narrowest sense of the word, — such cold-blooded, matter-of-fact men as these I As Fal- staff asked of Honor, they ask of Poetry, if it can set a broken leg, or cure the grief of a wound ; and when answered in the negative, they exclaim that it is "a word, air, a trim reckoning," and they'll have none of it. As there are literal, unimaginative minds to which all poetry is a sealed mystery, so there are others to which Nature makes no appeal except by the productive energies of her soil, the profitable uses of the vegetation of her forests, or the mechanical powers to which lier streams are converted in their descent from the mountains to the valleys or the sea. Charles Sprague did not exaggerate when, in his charming poem, "Curiosity," he spoke of men — 88 NUG^ LITTERARI-ffi. " Who, placed where Catskill's forehead greets the sky, Grieve that such quarries all unhewn should lie ; Or, gazing where Niagara's torrents thrill, Exclaim, ' A monster stream to turn a mill ! ' " Schiller sang truly, when he said of the Muse, — " To some she is a goddess great, To some the milch-cow of the field, — Their only care to calculate How much butter she will yield." Judas, when he demanded why the precious ointment poured on the head of our Saviour was thus wasted, in- stead of being sold and the proceeds given to the poor, showed himself — or would have done so if he had been sincere — a genuine utilitarian. To such persons, the elo- quent appeal of Beattie has no meaning, — " Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store Of charms which Nature to her votary yields 1 The warbling woodland, the resounding heaven. The pomp of groves, and the garniture of fields ; AU that the genial ray of morning gilds. And all that echoes in the song of even. And that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields, And all the dread magnificence of Heaven, — Oh, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven f " By the hard matter-of-fact man, " all the dread magnifi- cence of heaven " — " this firmament fretted with golden fires '' — is valued only for the light it gives. Such a man cannot understand why the tolling of an old cracked bell through the country should liave aroused such enthusiasm as did that of Indopendence II.ill recently, on its way to Chicago. Show him the coat iu which Nelson died at Traf- algar, or which Grant wore at Lee's surrender, and he would wonder whether the cloth was of "West of England MATTER-OF-FACT MEN. 39 or Bradford manufacture. If he had heard Hackett tell- ing, with all the fervor of Falstaff himself, how " the mis- begotten knaves in Kendal Green let drive at him," he would have wondered whether the green was fast-colored dye. Transport him to the plains of Marathon, and he would see in them only dirt and turf and stones. A jar of water from Jordan or from Helicon is to him not materially different from the water in his own well. He cannot un- derstand how, touched by the imagination, such earth is to other men magic earth, and such water enchanted water. A rose from the rose-bush which we once saw at HUdes- heim, Germany, planted behind the cathedral (as there is documentary evidence to show) nearly nine hundred years ago, is but a rose, of myriads on the earth. ■' A primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose is to him, And nothing more." A jest which sets other men in a roar is to such a man incomprehensible ; or if it be not absolutely incomprehen- sible, it hangs fire in the icy receptacle of his brain till it has been explained and all its aroma has evaporated. It was such a man — a country rector in Yorkshire by the name of Buckle — who sat silent at a meeting of the clergy, and when Sydney Smith gave his health, saying that he was " a Buckle without a tongue," sat grim over the jest, trying for fifteen minutes to extract its meaning, then nudging the wit, exclaimed, " I see now what you mean, Mr. Smith : you meant a joke," and nearly choked with laughter! It was another snob a man who, when his pastor. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, finding him sick and unable to attend church, proposed to bring one of his sermons and 40 NUG^ LITTERARI^. read it to him, replied, " Do so, for I have had no sleep since the attack began." England, the home of utilitarianism, abounds in such men, who, as Burke said a century or more ago, value ouly what they can measure with a two-foot rule, or count on their ten fingers. Henr^' Eussell, the celebrated vocalist, gives many striking illustrations of this literal phase of the British intellect. At one time he gave^ at Hanley, an en- tertainment for the benefit of the Staffordshire potters, who were in great distress. After he had sung, " There 's a good time coming, boys, wait a little longer," etc., a man in the crowd rose, greatly excited, and siiouted, " Muster Russell, can ye fix the toime?" At another time, as Mr. Russell was singing, "Woodman, spare that tree," an old gentleman cried out, ' ' Mr. Eussell, was the tree spared ? " "It was, sir." "Thank God for that! "he responded, with a sigh of relief. The Secret of ^^ Blackwood's Magazine for February, Literary 1892, there is a paper on the late Mr. King- lake which contains some observations upon the preparation of his first book, " Eothen," that merit the thoughtful consideration of all young writers. They reveal the secret of the immediate, brilliant, and exceptional success of that book, and of the strong hold which, in spite of many powerful rivals, it retains on public attention. It appears that the first casting into shape of Mr. King- lake's notes of Eastern travel was very far from that which was finally given to the world. It was kept in his desk almost as long as Wordsworth kept " The White Doe of Rylstone," and kept, like that, to be taken out for revision, condensation, and correction almost every day. THE SECRET OF LITERARY SUCCESS. 41 For many years the most fastidious and exacting taste was constantly at work upon it, blotting, expanding, and polishing with ceaseless care. After an interval which in most minds would have dimmed into vagueness the reminis- cences of the trip to the East, his record of it came forth so rich in color, so incisive in form, so finished in literary grace, that it almost instantly made its author famous. " Probably no book of travel," says Blackwood, " which does not depend for its interest on exciting adventure or absolute novelty of subject, ever gained more celebrity for its writer. . . . The book sparkles with fine points, like a brooch set with brilliants." The patient, unwearying toil which Mr. Kinglake be- stowed upon his epoch-making book (for such, as a book of travels, it was), reminds us of the prodigious painstaking of another literary worker a century and a half ago. Alex- ander Pope did some of his work rapidly, to gain a foot- hold in literature, — an independence. When translating Homer, he turned out fifty or sixty lines a day with not less regularity, and sometimes with not much more inspiration, than an artisan does his work in a factory, or than Babbage's calculating machine turned out its solutions of mathematical problems. Many pages of his translation read like " tours de force," or as if the poet had timed him- self, as one times a race-horse, with a stop-watch. But when the little diminutive bard wrote, as in his Satires, from a real afflatus, and to please himself, — above all, when he wrote to " feed fat an ancient grudge," — what a transformation his verse underwent ! Then he composed with care, and corrected with never-tiring patience ; he polished and repolished ; he grudged no pains to give a keener edge to some cutting epigram, or to improve the 42 NUG^ LITTERARI^. flow of his rhythm. It was not till after innumerable con- densations, blots, and erasures, and till it had been kept in his portfolio for many years, that he gave a satire to the printer. That masterpiece of wit and sarcasm, sparkling with keen epigram, and containing the immortal lines on Atticus, — the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," — is, as a critic has justly said, the quintessence of thoughts which have been refined in the crucible ; clear, bright crystals, which have been slowly precipitated from the turbid torrent of confused meditations, and fused together with the care of a skilled jeweller setting his most precious gems to the best advantage. A Goodly I* there a country on the globe the young Heritage, men of which have greater reason to be proud of their inheritance from the past than have those of America? What people has ever before advanced with such giant strides in the path of prosperity ? Marvellous indeed has been the growth of England, which from one little central point — a rock, as it were, in the midst of the ocean — has spread herself over the entire world ; but the same inherent energy which has enabled her with her morn- ing drum-beat to " follow the sun, and keep company with the hours," till she has encircled " the earth with one con- tinuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of Eng- land," — the same energy which drove the iron-armed Eoman to conquest, bringing the whole known earth under his dominion, — is urging on our people, not to military, but to peaceful, conquests, the effects of which are seen in far-stretching networks of railway, electric telegraphs and telephones, fields rich with grain and fruits, gardens filling the air with perfume, schoolliouses, colleges, churches. A GOODLY HERITAGE. 43 and happy homes. The creation of a State or a kingdom in the Old World is a great affair, which generally takes place amid convulsions and war ; but here a new State, with organization all complete, and working with the regu- larity of clock-work, is turned out as readily as a railway shop turns out a new locomotive. A country that has no castes, no primogeniture laws ; that requires no one to give the flower of his youth to service in its army ; that exacts no tithes for a state church, and requires no property qualification of the voter ; where every man has the opportunity to make the most of himself, and is eligible to every political office ; where $156,000,000 is spent annually for schools, which are open without charge to the poorest youth ; of whose population eighty-seven per cent over ten years old can read and write, — is surely a good country to live in. But when we consider that, besides all these blessings, our country is rich in gold, silver, iron, copper, coal, and other minerals, and abounds in the finest fruits ; that it is a country whose wealth, now increasing seven millions a day, has quintupled in seventy years ; that it possesses as much mechanical energy as Great Britain, France, and Germany united ; above all, that it is a country which has no grudges against other nations to feed, no "earth-hunger" to satisfy; whose people, instead of living, as so many other peoples do, on the " ragged edge " of revolution, enjoy a stable and orderly government, which is "of the people, by the people, and for the people," — what youth could covet a more goodly heritage? Add to all these distinctions an ever-varying scenery, vying with that of Switzerland in grandeur, and that of Italy in beauty ; and climates like those of Florida and southern California, enabling the 44 - NUGvE LITTERARL^. American with the aid of the iron horse to bathe in delicious and vivifying sunshine all the year round, — and say whether ours is not a country worth living in and living for ; nay, even dying for, if its liberties are imperilled ? May One Why not? Would you give none of the Laugh at His game to the dog that catches it ? Would you Own Jokes . jj^^^zle the ox that treads out the corn ? Does not everybody know how much the zest of a witticism or a good story is enhanced by the arch look that foretells it, by the facetious manner that accompanies its utterance, and by the contagious merriment of the humorist himself ? Dr. Johnson praised Beauclerk for the sobriety with which he brought out his sly, incisive retorts. " No man," he said, " was so free, when he was going to say a good thing, from a look which expressed that it was a good thing ; or, when he had said it, from a look which expressed that it had come." No doubt, there are occa- sions when the teller of a good story or the perpetrator of a good joke should maintain a solemn or subdued manner ; but generally the most mirth-provoking wits are those who enter most deeply into the spirit of their jests, and whose lungs crow like chanticleer over their merry conceits. It is not merely the dry jest, but the zest also with which it is uttered, — the relish which the narrator himself has of it, — that we sympathize with. Persons who hold to the old adage on this matter must be shocked when they learn that Burns, after he had completed that masterpiece of humor, the weird and wondrous tale of " Tam O'Shanter," which he dashed off in one day, was heard breaking forth into shouts of laughter as he walked home at night repeat- ing it to himself. Thomas Fuller's quips are perhaps WHAT IS TRUTH TO NATURE? ' 45 generally unconscious ; but sometimes when he dro[)8 a jest, it is accompanied with a merry twinkle of the eye, a quiet, subdued chuckle, a half-audible crow, which proclaims his consciousness that the jest is good. Sydney Smith did not hesitate to laugh at his own jokes, which he did with more glee than any of his hearers ; and when dining with a company of brilliant talkers, who were all so impatient to lead the conversation that no one of them would have leisure to eat, he would silently discuss the soup, the fish, and the roast, and then, when he had com- pletely dined, would deliver himself of some rib-tickling conceit, some irresistibly ludicrous jest, at which he would laugh till, infecting others with his mirth, he had set the whole table in a roar. Having thus obtained the lead of the conversation, he would triumphantly keep it for the rest of the evening. What is -^** English critic praises the descriptive Truth to powers of the poet Crabbe at the expense of Nature . Thomson, by saying that the descriptions of the English bard " are not, like the Scotch poet's, of imagi- nary but of real nature." "What strange ideas has this writer of poetic imagination ! He seems to think that it is opposed to truth ; whereas it is the very vividness of his imagi- nation, its superior force and delicacy, which enables the painter of external nature to catch its subtle hues and re- produce them with greater truth than other men. The test of truth in a picture, even in a portrait, is not its prosaic literalness, its minute and matter-of-fact copying of details, but the success with which it puts the soul of a landscape or a person on canvas. "I never see sunsets like yours," said a realistic old lady to Turner. " Don't you wish you 46 NUG^ LITTERARI^. conld, madam?" was the painter's quiet reply. Crabbe did not look on Nature with the eye of a poet. He was, by his elaborateness and minuteness, at once the Teniers and the Wilkie of British bards. Unique and original in his genius, he yet had little sympathy with the picturesque, and none whatever with the romantic ; so that, as one of his admirers has said„ Sir Philip Sidney must have been an enigma to him, and Don Quixote a stark lunatic. "Kealism," says that subtle and sensible critic, Amiel, " wishes to entrap sensation ; the object of true art is only to charm the imagination, not to cheat the eye. ... A work of art ought to set the poetical faculty in us at work ; it ought to stir us to imagine, to complete our perception of a thing. Mere copyists' painting, realistic production, pure imitation, leave us cold, because their author is a machine, a mirror, an iodized plate, and not a soul." AVill any one assert that the landscapes of Claude Lorraine — composed as they are of picturesque materials gathered from a hundred different points, united with con- summate taste and skill, and poetized or idealized by his exquisite imagination — are not as true to Nature as the most literal production, the exactest imitation, that ever came from the pencil of a Teniers, an Ostade, or any other Dutch artist? Claude was not less a student because his imagination was so powerful. He sat whole days watching a scene, and studying the effects of light at different hours. The result was, that by the enchanting play of his sun- light, the freshness of his dewy foregrounds, and the charm of his atmospheric distances, he obtained a tone of feeling which influences the mind like an eternal Sabbath rest. LIVING BY PROXY. 47 Living by Ralph "Waldo Emerson lias somewhere l^roxy. spoken of the heavy tax we pay for our modern civilization, which renders us more and more help- less for every advantage it brings us. The time seems to be rapidly coming, when men and women in our great cities will cease to do for themselves anything that de- mands toil, thought, or care, and will have everything but their breathing, eating, and sleeping done for them. In New York there are men who by yearly contract re- pair all the leaks, rents, and fractures that occur in houses ; there are others who daily wind up the clocks and keep them in order ; and there are girls of exquisite taste who relieve housekeepers of the trouble of entertaining com- pany. A girl of this profession, we are told, decorates the table, makes with her own hands one or two delicious dishes to add distinction to the feast, and directs the prepa- ration of the others by the servants ; she can tell at a glance how to make the most of the material at her dis- posal, and almost makes herself a necessity to the inex- perienced or careworn housekeeper. Again, there are half-a-dozen gentlemen, we are told, in New York, who earn a handsome living by holdiug conversation classes, and giving private lessons in that important and yet most difficult of arts. The majority of pupils are boys and girls just graduating from the schoolroom ; but elderly persons come, and insist upon a private coaching, — persons into whom it is almost impossible to instil courage or grace in their manner of talking. All these pupils are not only taught the art of selecting suitable topics, and of making happy comments on them, but are warned against long- winded anecdotes, dreary stories, tiresome personal and family details, risque allusions, sarcasms, and scandal. 48 NUG^ LITTERARI^. They also receive — most unique and wonderful of all — lessons in langhiiKj, including the proper modulation of the voice, and a stern suppression of the giggle. In Boston this "modern improvement" has advanced still farther. There are women who gain a livelihood by meeting companies of other women in private houses, and talking to them on the leading topics of the day, expound- ing special subjects, and ' ' posting up " their hearers re- garding the lives and works of German or Eussian writers, or French or Italian painters. The ladies thus instructed are enabled, it is said, to gain a knowledge of current events, literature, and art, with the slightest mental effort, and to be qualified, when in society, to take part, either in the drawing-room or at the dinner-table, in any conversa- tion that may spring up on art, the drama, and literature, social science or political events, without any of the weari- some research and drudgery, the brow-wrinkling thought, and the wear and tear of eye, nerve, and brain, to which cultivated men are everywhere subjected. No doubt, as there are always sceptics who have no faith in progress, there are cynical, old-fashioned persons who on reading the foregoing will sneer at such " improve- ments." They will suggest that the entertainment which costs the entertainer no trouble will lack individuality, one of its principal charms, and will not elicit much thankfulness. They will mock at the idea of laughing by rule, and will perhaps quote the Concord sage, who says that " laughing is to be avoided," and who cites the mot of Chesterfield, that, after he had come to the years of understanding, he never laughed. They will flout what they will call "the shallow Americanism " that knowledge can be gained by proxy, mastery without apprenticeship, familiarity with a ADVANCING BACKWARD. 49 subject without long-continued brooding over it, and ability to converse intelligently on it by skimmiug over its surface. They will declare that iteration is the secret of tenacious recollection, and that what is acquired hastily as hastily disappears. They will affirm with Pestalozzi, that '■'■think- ing only leads man to knowledge. He may see and hear, and read and learn, whatever he pleases, and as much as he pleases ; he will never know anything of it except that which he has thought over, that which by thinking he /las made the property of his mind." But who in these days of fast travel and fast living — of lightning express-trains, electric cars, and ocean greyhounds — of tunnels and short- cuts — -cares for the opinions of &pass& educator, who lived in the slow-coach times of a century ago? Advancing When Parry, the Arctic navigator, sought Backward. ^^ rg^cii the Pole with his pack of dogs, sledges and dogs apparently went forward. When, how- ever, the sun broke through the mist, and the latitudes could be ascertained, it was found, to the astonishment of the party, that, without being aware of it, they had actually gone several degrees backward. The ground on which they had moved forward was a detached field of ice, carried south by the current. Does not this incident remind one of some of the "advanced thinkers" of our day? While priding themselves upon their progress, how often would they find, if they could learn their actual situation, that they have been actually advancing backward : in other words, instead of discovering new objections to Christianity or to its cardinal doctrines, they have unconsciously gone back a century or centuries, and are actually repeating, without the slightest suspicion of the fact, the old exploded 50 NUG^ LITTERARIiE. arguments of Toland, Celsus, and other freethinkers who lived a century or centuries ago ! Sensible Archdeacon Hare expresses the opinion in Nonsense, tj^^t unique book " Guesses at Truth," that, as the next best thing to a very good joke is a very bad one, so the next best thing to a very good argument is one that is very bad. In both cases the extremes meet. The exquisitely good and the deplorably bad are each com- mendable ; it is only mediocrity which is " tolerable," and, therefore, '* not to be endured." For example, an Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosted him with this question : " Prithee, is that thy own hare, or a. wig? " It is impossible to excuse this, and it is impossible to help being tickled by it. Its very lameness — the limping in one leg — which would provoke the scorn of a carping, laughter-proof critic, constitutes its beauty. So also in argument, the selfsame result which a fine piece of logic accomplishes regularly by square, rule, and compass, is now and then reached by its misshapen brethren per salturm, as a piece of luck. Could any syllogism in mood and fig- ure be more convincing than the peasant's logic : " How good it was of God to put Sunday at one end of the week, for if He had put it in the middle He would have made a broken week of it ! " Hardly less admirable was the rea- soning of the Capuchin monk, who called upon his con- gregation to be especially thankful that Providence had mercifully placed death at the end of life, and not in the middle, " so that we might all have time to prepare for it." Again, who does not yield to the irresistible, though comical, reasoning of the tenant of a leaky house, who was "PHCEBUS, WHAT A NAME!" 51 asked, daring a heavy rainstorm, why he did not have it reshingled. "Because it is raining," he replied. "But why not repair the roof during the pleasant weather?" " Because there is no need of it then." Some of the finest lines in literature are those that thus limp in their logic, — indeed, are absolute paradoxes ; as when Story sings, — " Of every noble work the silent part is best ; Of all expression, that which cannot be expressed ; " or when Milton, not afraid of a double paradox, portrays certain pompous but shallow preachers of his time as ' ' wading out to their auditors, up to their eyebrows in deep shallows that wet not the instep." Shakespeare's dogmatic friend, Ben Jonson, asserted that when the former made Caesar say, — " Caesar never did wrong without just cause," the great dramatist made " the foremost man of all the world " utter nonsense ; and such it might be, falling from another man's lips. But conld anything else so fully ex- press the mighty self-centred ambition, the enormous self- reliance of the man, as this assumption that Caesar's needs had power to change the moral aspect of things ; so that an act which done by another would be wrong, would, if performed by Mm, thereby get an impress of right? "Phoebus -^ PERSON in Webster, Mass., advertises in What a ' the Boston " Herald " for sale or rent, fortj'- Name!" three acres of "valuable real estate" in the first-named town, " bounded on the east by Chargoggagogg- manchanggagoggagungamaugg Lake," which, we are told, " has become a favorite summer resort " of New Yorkers and others. 52 NUG^ LITTERARLiE. What a charming name that lake has! It is formed from nine different letters only, yet numbers thirty-eight, including repetitions. Who would not covet a rural home by a sheet of water with such a musical and expressive appellation, especially if the lake is ^s long as its name? How different from the " four sneezes of a Russian name," which bristles with consonants enough, De Quincey says, to splinter the teeth of a crocodile. How superior in euphony this Indian tongue to the Mexican, in which " I love you " is ni-mitstskikawaka-tlasolta, and a kiss is tetennamiguilitzli ! As a French writer who states this fact declares, " quand on a prononce le mot, on a bien merits la chose." The Plague A traveller in Italy, who many years ago of Satiety. ^^^ g^^g ^jjg j-cunds of its public and private picture-galleries, complained in his journal — the well- known "Diary of an Invalid" — that, exquisite as was the enjoyment they yielded, they began at last to pall on the taste. After feasting his imagination in the galleries of Florence and Rome with the masterpieces of the pencil, he found that it required extraordinary excellence to stimu- late his languid attention, and satisfy the increasing fas- tidiousness of his taste. Even famed paintings of Titian and Correggio detained him less than they deserved. What a cruel deduction is this from the enjoyment which we expect to derive from familiarity with excellence and from increase of knowledge ! Of course, in regard to merely sensual gratification, we know perfectly well that a time must come at last when the senses are sated, when the keen edge of the sensibilities is blunted, when the happiness ceases to satisfy, and the pleasures lose the power of pleasing. Wilberforce, in speaking of the Richmond villa THE PLAGUE OF SATIETY. 58 of the Duke of Qiieensbury, whose personal property ex- ceeded a million pounds, gives a vivid illustration of this : " I always observe that the owners of your grand houses have some snug corner in which they are glad to shelter themselves from their own magnificence." He adds that when a young man he once dined with the Duke, at his villa, along with a party of celebrated guests. " The dinner was sumptuous, the views from the villa quite en- chanting, and the Thames was in all its glory ; but the Duke looked on with indifference. 'What is there,' he said, ' to make so much of in the Thames ? I am quite tired of it ; there it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same.' " We can easily understand why the glorious scene was a sealed book to the worn voluptuary, why his spirit's eye was blind to it, and that the full enjoyment of natural beauty is reserved for men of nobler minds and purer lives. But is it not a sad reflection that often even the latter grow less happy as they grow wiser ; that those men who are at the most pains to see the best that is to be seen, to hear the best that is to be heard, and to read the best that is to be read, are only laboring, in most cases, to exhaust the sources of innocent gratification, and incapacitating themselves for future enjoyment, by approaching that condition which has been described as a state of — "Painful pre-eminence, yourself to view Above life's weakness, and its comforts too"? Fortunately, all men are not thus constituted. A few there are who, by a happy alchemy, are able to extract even keener and keener delijiht from each successive draught of the cup of innocent pleasure which they have found suited to their taste. Macaulay declared that he had 54 NUGiE LITTERARI^. no pleasure from books which equalled that of reading over for the hundredth time great productions which he almost knew by heart ; and what he said of books might doubtless be said by other persons of music, scenery, and many other sources of enjoyment. But how is fastidium to be avoided by those who are conscious of a tendency to the disease? Henri-Frederic Amiel has answered the question : ' ' By shutting our eyes to the general uniformity, by laying stress upon the small differences which exist, and then by learn- ing to enjoy repetition. What to the intellect is old and worn out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired. The natural preservative against satiety, too, is work. What we do may weary others ; but the personal effort is, at least, use- ful to its author. Where every one works, the general life is sure to possess charm and savor, even though it re- peat forever the same song, the same aspirations, the same prejudices, and the same sighs." A better antidote than this of the half-Christian agnostic to the satiety which " mocks the tired worldling " is, when his " pleasures cloy, To fill the languid pause with finer joy ; " to substitute for such luxuries one that has never been known to pall, — " the luxury of doing good." Of this cup of pleasure he can drink with no fear of surfeit ; on the contrary, the appetite "grows by what it feeds on," and the delight yielded by its gratification is the most exquisite which the true epicure can know. "My Poor One of the most foolish complaints a man Memory." q^h make, is that of having a poor memory. "MY POOR MEMORY." 55 Why is a man's memory weak? Simply because of bis lack of painstaking, — of attention. If your memory seems treacherous, and like a bag with holes lets everything slip through which you put into it, it is simply because you do not care to remember, or are too lazy to take the necessary steps to do it. So far from being treacherous, the memory is one of the most faithful of all our faculties. No other one is more surely or rapidly strengthened by exercise. It is doubtful if anything once lodged in the memory is ever forgotten. Knowledge, it has been beautifully said, may slumber there, but it never dies; it is like the dormouse in its home in the ivied tower, — that sleeps while winter lasts, but wakes with the warm breath of spring. In acquiring knowledge, time is a most important fact. There must be an incessant iteration of the newly-acquired ideas, till they are linked to the old by suggesting chains. The new knowledge must be brooded over, meditated upon, and turned over and over in the mind, till it is not only added to the old, but interpenetrates it. Lawyers under- stand this, and hence their " damnable iteration " of im- portant principles and testimony in addressing juries. Porson, who had a prodigious memory, and declared tliat he could learn by heart a copy of the London " Morning Chronicle " in a week, said that he had acquired his quick- ness and tenacity of memory only by intense labor. " Some- times," he added, "in order to impress a thing upon my memory, I have read it a dozen times, and transcribed it six." Dickens had a marvellous power of recollection ; but why? Because his powers of attention and obser- vation were marvellous. Don't say, therefore, that you would acquire this or that art or science, a knowledge of history or of literature, etc. , but for your ' ' wretched 56 NUG^ LITTERARLS. memory ; " but confess that while you would like to possess these laudable accomplishments, you do not covet them earnestly enough to pay the price. All you care for is the empty applause, not the substantial accomplishment. Marvellous Op course, memories differ naturally in Memories, tenacity and readiness. Seneca, it is said, could repeat two thousand names in the exact order in which they had been rehearsed to him. Scaliger could re- peat a hundred lines after one reading. He learned Homer in twelve days, and all the Greek poets in four months. Justus Leipsius had all Tacitus by heart, and pledged him- self to repeat word by word any passage called for, allow- ing a dagger to be thrust into his body if he made a single slip or false repetition. Mozart, whose musical com- positions, howe-^er long, "stood," as he said, "almost completely finished in his mind, so that he could survey them, like fine pictures or beautiful statues, at a glance," wrote out his matchless opera of " Don Giovanni" from memory in two hours on the morning preceding the evening of its first performance. Hardly a whit less marvellous than these feats of memory were those of a Boston boy (we call him such, for he was born in Boston), Lord Lyndhurst. In speaking at the bar, on the bench, or in the House of Lords, he never used notes. In the case, of " Small vs. Atwood," which lasted twenty-one days, the judgment he pronounced was entirely oral ; and, without referring to a note, he spent a long day in reciting complicated facts, in making complicated calculations, and in correcting the misrepresentations of counsel on both sides. Never once did he falter or hesitate, and never once was he mistaken touching a name, a figure, or a date. Evidently, had his SELF-CONFIDENCE AND SUCCESS. 57 lordship been a teacher he would not have found the slightest difficulty in complying with Juveual's test, — namely, that he should be able, if questioned at hazard on his way to the baths of Phoebus, to tell instantly the name of Anchises' nurse, the name and native land of the step- mother of Anchemolus, and how many flagons of wine the Sicilian king gave to the Phrygians. A memory so phe- nomenal must have been naturally tenacious, but by what enormous painstaking must it have been brought to its final perfection! Self-Confidence Dr. Johnson, in speaking of the complaint and Success, ^y^^^ ^ ^^^ ^^ j^g,,j(. jg ^^^gj^ neglected by the world, declares that the sentiment is unjust: "It is generally by his own fault that he fails of success. A man may hide his head in a hole." That this is a frequent cause of failure, who can doubt? It is a wise saying of Bacon, that to enter the kingdom of knowledge " we must put on the spirit of little children," — that is, we must sub- mit to be taught by any one who can teach us ; but to enter the kingdom of wealth or celebrity, a manly, self- reliant spirit is necessary. Of what use are the most brilliant abilities if they are continually hidden in a napkin, — secreted from observation and unused, instead of being made known to the arbiters of place and honor? We all dislike what is called " forwardness " in a young man ; yet it is far preferable to excessive timidity, as superfluity is preferable to penury. Time will correct the one, but it is exceedingly doubtful if it will ever infuse life and spirit into the other. " My own experience of life," says Sir James Stephen, "has taught me, that, much and frequently as the faults of self-confidence and self-conceit are denounced 58 nuGjE litterarle. by our teachers, they are faults far less widely diffused, and far less dangerous in their tendency, than a timid self-dis- trust and a craven self-depreciation." There is no doubt that a great deal of ability is lost to the world for want of a little courage and self-confidence. Every day sends to their graves obscure men who have been obscure only because their self-distrust has prevented them from making a beginning, — from ascertaining their strength by a fair trial. There was a time, in his early life, when even Daniel Webster, with all his transcendent abilities, was disposed to think meanly of himself. " My abilities," he wrote to a friend, " are small, very small." Had he continued to indulge this self-distrust, he would never have risen to be one of the greatest lawyers and statesmen in America, or to make that reply to Hayne which is the highwater mark of eloquence since Demos- thenes. " The pious and just honoring of ourselves," says John Milton, " is the radical moisture and fountain-head from whence every laudable and worthy enterprise issues forth." True as this was in the great Puritan's day, the lapse of two centuries has made it truer still. We live in an age of intense competition and loud, noisy self- assertion ; and the timid, sensitive man, who cannot cast aside his shyness and squeamishness and do a little violence to his feelings, who cannot say that he wants anything, or cannot say it with sufficient loudness and pertinacity, must expect not only to be outstripped in life's race, but knocked down and trampled under foot in the rush and roar of this nineteenth century. In spite of all the praises of modest merit, it is plain that the thick-skinned, loud-voiced, pushing man will always have an advantage over the diffident, retiring one in the WAS IT SUICIDE? 59 tiger-like struggles of life. It is not because the former qualities are more respected tban the latter, but because they are usually allied with others — such as decision, promptness, and energy — without which worth is inopera- tive. A barking dog is more useful than a sleeping lion. As Ulysses says in " Troilus and Cressida," — " A stirring dwarf we do allowance give Before a sleeping giant." We all, in the depth of our heart, esteem the men of fine feelings, refined tastes, and shrinking modesty, — the " Delicate spirits pushed away In the hot press of noonday ; " but the prizes of life are not won by such shy folk. " He who is silent," says Amiel, " is forgotten ; he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, dis- tanced, crushed ; he who ceases to grow greater, becomes smaller ; he who leaves off, gives up. ... To live is to achieve a perpetual triumph ; it is to assert one's self against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical being. It is to will with- out ceasing; or, rather, it is to refresh one's will day by day." Was it Is suicide less suicide when it is slow, — Suicide, -vyhen a man knowingly kills himself by a suc- cession of acts, instead of by one blow ? A great deal of sympathy has been expressed for an author, the late R. L. Stevenson, because he is supposed to have weakened his constitution by overwork ; but, according to a writer in the Chicago " Open Court," the main cause of his death was probably his consumption of tobacco. Two years 60 NUG^ LITTERARI^.. before his' death he confessed that his bill for cig^ara amounted to S450 a year ; and during the bist six months of his life he smoked an average of forty cigarettes per day, ;iud often as many as eirjhty in tia aty-fou r hours ! Can any one wonder that this friglitful habit induced chronic insomnia, to cure or lessen which he smoked all night, till narcosis of the brain brought on stupefaction and tem- porary loss of consciousness, — for weeks his nearest ap- proach to refreshing slumber? His physician warned him in vain that he was burning life's candle at both ends, for he tried to write in spite of his misery; but he stuck to nicotine as the only specific for his nervousness, with the result that was inevitable, — bis death a year afterwards. Needless One of the marks of advancing civilization Noise. ig yjg protest which men are beginning to make, in our large cities at least, against needless noise. Men are beginning to feel that it is a savage and barbarous taste which finds delight in it. Scientists affirm that the hundred noises in our large towns — even those of which we are not conscious when engaged in our daily occupa- tions — all do more or less injury to the fine texture of the nerves. In London the street-cries are ceasing, and silence is coming to be recognized as conducive to both comfort and health. In this country, though we still suljmit to the clang of church-bells, the shriek of locomotives, and the hideous discords of hand-organs and street-bands, we are beginning to feel that they are both a nuisance and need- less. The uproar of the night before the Fourth of July has been partially squelched, and possibly the bell-ringing on that day, and the 22d of February, and in Boston on Evacuation Day also, may ultimately be abandoned. Who EMINENT HATERS OF NOISE. 61 that loves quiet has not, for a moment, half wished on the last-named two days that Washington had been born on the 29 th of February, and that he had not planted his cannon on Dorchester Heights? In speaking of the peculiar conditions under which a man of rare genius perfects his creations, a recent writer compares the process to one of those delicate processes of crystallization so carefully watched over in the laboratory of the chemist, where an exactly even temperature must be preserved, and not so much as the lightest footfall jar the equilibrium of the liquid. Who can wonder that such men — or, indeed, that nearly all literary men, who have generally finely-strung and exquisitely-sensitive nerves — have a mortal antipathy to noise ? Schopenhauer — whom, pessimist as he is, we shall always respect for his senti- ment on this subject — declares that while ordinary men regard noise with stoical indifference, thinkers, and espe- cially men of true genius, find it insupportable. " I have ever been of opinion," he says, " that the amount of noise a man can support with equanimity is in inverse proportion to his mental powers, and may be taken, therefore, as a measure of intellect generally. If I hear a dog barking for hours on the threshold of a house, I know well enough what kind of brains I may expect from its inhabitants. He who habitually slams the door instead of closing it, is not only an ill-bred, but a coarse-grained, feebly-endowed creature." Eminent "^^^ biographies of many eminent men Haters of confirm the opinion of Schopenhauer. Julius Noise. Csesar shuddered at the crowing of a cock ; the poet Beattie suffered keenly from the same cause ; and 62 NUG^ LITTER ARI^. the great German philosopher, Kant, abandoned a pleasant house because he could not bear the shrill notes of a neigh- bor's clianticleer. ^Vallenstein, though accustomed to the thunder of artillery and the clash of arms, could not endure at home the barking of dogs, nor even the clatter of the large spurs then in fashion. His servants glided about the rooms of his palace at Prague like phantoms, and to keep all noises at a distance, twelve men patrolled round it night and day. The Rev. F. W. Robertson, whose ser- mons are instinct with the finest genius, could not hear without torture a piano playing in the adjoining house. Heine was so sensitive to noise that even a clock ticking at niglit rendered him sleepless, and, next day, ill. What would all these sensitive beings say and do, if they were alive to-day, residing in Boston, and " stretched on the rack of restless ecstasy," as some of us are, by the whistle of locomotives, the ding-dong of the fire-alarm, the daily and nightly rumbling and bell-ringing of electric cars, the wheezing and creaking of asthmatic hand-organs, the pre- prandial clatter of milk-carts, and all the other ear-tortur- ing and nerve-rasping sounds which engender suicidal thoughts in our Boston Babel? If the Roman lyrist, Horace, with all his poetic gifts, could not meditate or compose his verse in a street where a contractor was hurry- ing along, puffing and blowing, with his mules and porters, a machine whirling aloft ponderous stones or beams, and funeral processions clashing with unwieldy wagons, — what shall a modern scribbler do, with but a tithe of his genius, amidst noises tenfold more torturing and confusing ? A Spiritual Why is it that the children of very intel- Enigma. lectual parents, whose fathers and mothers NO! 63 are both endowed with geniu8 or remarkable ability, are often so dull, or at least mediocre, in ability? No satis- factory explanation has been given of this paiadox, which so contradicts our natural expectation. The phenomenon would surprise us less if we would reflect that as matter often acts paradoxically, — as when two cold liquids united become boiling hot, or when the mixing of two clear liquids produces an opaque mud, — so spirit may, analogically, play similar pranks. jjq j Sainte-Beuve, the celebrated French critic, says of Fenelon, in his admirable causerie on the good bishop, that he lacked that irritability of good sense and of reason which makes one say " No " with vehemence, — that direct, prompt, and somewhat blunt faculty which Boileau carried into literature, and Bossuet into theology. This inability to say "No" with vehemence, or at least unalterably, has been the rock on which thousands of men have been shipwrecked who might otherwise have made life's voyage victoriously. It makes " all the difference in the world " whether one contracts early a habit of uttering with facility and frequency the little monosyllable " Yes," or that yet more diminutive one " No." It may be an un- pleasant fact to recognize, but it is none the less true that the contracting of the one habit or the other often deter- mines the question whether one is to be a freeman or a slave ; whether he is to be a help or a clog on the world's progress ; whether he is to roll through life in a coach-and- two, or hobble along on crutches. The well-known conversationist, Richard Sharp, says of some noted man that his audible pronunciation of the two monosyllables " Ay " and " No " made his fortune. 64 mJGJE LITTERARI^. But most fortunes have been lost by the utterance of the former. Among the tributes to the hite editor of the North American Review, Allen Tborudike Rice, was one by his successor, Mr. Lloyd Bryce, who began it by saying that Mr. Rice knew how to say "No!" "When I was a child," Mr. Rice used to observe, " my mother would often stand me on a chair, and make me repeat ' No, no, no.' " Wise, terse teaching ! In our schoolboy days we used to observe that "clever" (good-natured) boys, who were lackeys to other boys, were always in trouble. There was our playmate Simpkins, for instance, who was so exces- sively obliging : he was flogged again and again by the pedagogue, simply because he could not say No when he was teased by other boys to join in some scrape or esca- pade, or because, when he was wrongly accused of perpe- trating their misdeeds, he was too tender-hearted to deny the charge and convict the real reprobates. Since Simp- kins arrived at manhood, he has been continually pestered by duns and dogged by constables, not on account of his own debts, but because he could not refuse when asked to indorse the notes of other men. Truly has Dr. Johnson characterized " No "as "a monosyllable the easiest learned by a child, but the most difficult to practise by the man ; which contains within it the import of a life, the weal or woe of an eternity ! " The Advantages Among the threadbare themes of moral- ofDebt. istg^ oQe of the most hackneyed is the misery of being in debt. Ever since the days of Addison and the Spectator, this has been a favorite and prolific topic of periodical essayists and writers on " Self-Help; " and if it be true of human afflictions that " they can paint THE ADVANTAGES OF DEBT. 65 them best who feel them most," we cannot doubt the ability of tliese writers to present the matter iu the most vivid colors. " I am astonished," says Sir Kichard Steele, whi)»e -ivliole lite was a race Nvitli bailiffs and catchpolls, and who excused himself for voting in flagrant contradiction to his professed principles by saying to one who reproached him, " Mr. Whiston, you can walk on foot, but I cannot," — "I am astonished that men can be so insensible to the danger of running into debt. One would think it impossible that a man who is given to contracting debts should not know that his creditor has, from that moment in which he transgresses payment, so much as that demand comes to, in his debtor's honor, liberty, and fortune." "Out of debt," echoes Douglas Jerrold, with the passionate eloquence of one tasting for tlif first time the luxury he describes, " and though you have a patch on your knee, a hole in your hat, and a crack in your shoe-leather, you are still the son of liberty, free as the singing lark above you. Out of debt, and what a nourishing sweetness may be found in cold water! what toothsomeness in a dry crust ! whatarabrosial nourishment in a hard egg ! . . . The debtor, what is he but a serf, out upon a holiday, — a slave, to be reclaimed at any instant by his owner, the creditor?" This, it must be confessed, is well put, and by writers who are entitled to say, " Experto crede." But there is another side to the subject ; and it is easy to show that if debt has its miseries, it has, by the never-failing law of com- pensation, its blessings too, which equal, if they do not more than counterbalance, them. If the condition of indebtedness is one of slavery, the long and splendid roll of men who have bowed to its yoke shows that it has a strange fascination. Lord Bacon wrote on " The Wisdom of Business," yet ran 5 66 NUG^ LITTERARI^. desperately in debt. William Pitt had an income of thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year, and died two hundred thousand dollars in debt. Sheridan spent the fortunes of two wives, and was always dodging creditors and bailiffs. Daniel Webster had a large professional income, yet lived and died amid a swarm of debts. Was not Fielding swamped all his life by debt, and yet did not Lady Montagu say of him " that he had known more happy moments than any person on earth " ? But, not to rely on great names, who does not love to be "an object of interest" to his fellow-men? And what surer or easier way of becoming such than by contracting " little bills " and large in all quarters? Who is the object of more watchful attention, of tenderer and more anxious solicitude, on the part of his fellow-citizens, than he whose promises to pay are held year after year? Whose move- ments are watched more closely, whose health is inquired after with more trembling solicitude, whose death is mourned over with more poignant sorrow, than his who owes many thousands more than his estate can pay? There is no man who does not love to hold some place in the memories of his fellow-men, who does not cling to the pleasing hope that he will not become entirely " to dumb forgetfulness a prey " when he shall have shuffled off his mortal coil ; and how can one more effectually guard against so painful a result than by leaving in the hands of his friends and neighbors, not a worthless lock of hair, but a more precious memorial in the shape of an unsettled bill or note-of-hand, the interest of which will be forever increasing? The memory of such a man will be cherished with the keenest interest ; while he who is scrupulous'to "pay as he goes " is doomed to hopeless obscurity while he lives, and when he THE ADVANTAGES OF DEBT. 67 dies, is forgotten or thought of without a pang of regret. " We are not fjreat people at all," said Sydney Smith when he went into a new neighborhood, audit was given out in the local papers that he was a man of high connections ; " we are only common, honest people, — people that pay our debts." How vivid were Horace Greeley's recollections of poor Poe, whose autograph he held on several bits of paper, compared with his memory of other and even greater poets ! There is another advantage of debt of even greater moment; it gives a zest to life which nothing else can impart. The man in debt is never tormented with that uneasy listlessness, that restless craving without an object, that mobility without an aim, that feeling of idleness, yet of disquiet, which is known as ennui. Of that wretched feeling which led Spinoza to pass his time in catching spiders and teaching them to fight, and which drove the master spirit of antiquity, the Stagirite himself, when his wine of life had run to the lees, to die as the fool dieth, by his own hands, the debtor knows nothing. The fire of existence never with him becomes caky or ashy ; his soul never preys upon itself; he experiences none of the miseries that steal in upon him whose life is free from anxiety or care. With the debtor, life is full of meaning and interest. He has a continual spur to exertion, and the pleasure of faculties kept perpetually on the stretch. While the minds of other men are drooping like a banner by a flag-staff for want of the wind of occasion to set them in motion, his is incessantly occupied with schemes to silence the importunate demands of creditors and to keep sheriffs from his door. Whether scouring the streets to borrow money or busied with schemes for earning it, he is thoroughly engrossed in the passing day, and has not a 68 NUG^ LITTERARI^. moment for the torture of excessive ease. Of the "blue devils '' he knows nothing ; he has never to contrive ex- pedients for killing time ; nor does he ever think of hang- ing himself, as many a debt-free rich man has done, lest he should one day come to want. Occupied continually with the care of meeting or dodging obhgations that are falling due, his " quick thoughts like lightning are alive; " all his hours are filled with excitement and action ; and if, as the author of " Festus " says, " he whose heart beats quickest lives the longest," then assuredly does the debtor " Live in one hour more than in years do some Whose fat blood sleeps as it slips along their veins." Some Modern Luther, in his "Table Talk," tells of a Auinors. certain lazy monk, too idle to say his prayers, who used to repeat the alphabet, and then add : " Take, O Lord, these letters, and then put them together even as thou wilt." Some of our modern hazy and obscure poets, with their chaotic tlioughts and half-told visions, seem to have imitated this labor-saving monk. Instead of spend- ing years of toil upon their verse, till happy conceptions are wedded to apt expression, they virtually say to their readers: "Take these poetical ideas and these poetical terms, and put them together to your fancy." Another class of writers, prose and poetical, who have a rare mastery of style, but only trivial or commonplace ideas, remind one of Thackeray's description of George IV. ; namely, " A waistcoat, an underwaisteoat, another under- waistcoat, and then nothing." Church What shall be done with church sleepers? Sleepers, jiany remedies have been tried, but all have CHURCH SLEEPERS. 69 proved but partially successful. A Scotch preacher once recommended snuff to some of his drowsy hearers, or rather pretended hearers, — to which one of them, who was evidently " up to snuff," retorted that he had better put the snuff in his sermons. The witty Dr. South tried a shrewd device when King Charles, before whom he was preaching, fell asleep. Stopping short, he called out three times in a loud tone, " Lord Lauderdale! " His lordship stood up and looked at the preacher, who addressed him with great composure: " My lord, I am sorry to interrupt your repose ; but I must beg of you not to snore so loud, lest you awake the king ! " An old and eccentric preacher in Newburyport, Mass., who died about fifty years ago, was noted for the shrewd ways in which he would rouse the sleepers in his congregation. He was once preaching, on a warm afternoon, when he saw a parishioner in the gallery, whose Christian name was Mark, fast asleep. Suddenly the preacher stopped in the middle of a sentence, and raising his voice to the highest pitch, exclaimed, " Mark ! " As if stricken by a thunderbolt, up jumped the awakened delinquent in the midst of the congregation, his mouth wide open, wondering who called him and for what, while the preacher, dropping his voice, went calmly on, and finished the following quotation from Scripture, as if it formed a part of his sermon: "Mark, I say, the perfect man, and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace." As prevention is better than cure, a method employed in an English country church to keep people awake may be recommended. During the service the beadle goes round the congregation with a long staff in his hand, at one end of which is a fox's brush, and at the other a knob ; when a female hearer begins to drowse, he tickles her face with 70 NUGjE LITTERAEI-ffi. the brush, while on the heads of the nodding men he inflicts with the knob a sensible rap. But the masterpiece of devices for waking and keeping awake sleepy parish- ioners was that of a clergyman, who, on a sultry afternoon, paused in his sermon, and said, " I saw an advertisement last week for five hundred sleepers for a railroad. I think I could supply at least fifty, and recommend them as good and sound ! " This is a better device than suddenly raising the voice, or letting it sink to a whisper ; or, again, than sitting down and weeping, as Dr. Young, author of the "Night Thoughts," once did. Proving The maxim, " Answer a fool according to too Much. ]jjg folly," has a deeper philosophy than strikes one at first hearing. The best way sometimes to confute a person who reasons incorrectly is to let him con- fute himself by giving him the full swing of his absurdities. Some arguments carry their own refutation with them : you have only to leave the logic-chopper to himself, and let him push his reasoning to the utmost, and his argument be- comes /eto de se, — cuts its own throat. Such reasonings have been compared to wheels, where half a turn will put everything upside down that is attached to their peripheries ; but if we complete the circle, all things will be just where we found them. Thus Hooker, replying to those who oppose the use of reason in judging of scriptural truth, says that they never make more use of reason than when showing that reason should not be eniploj'ed in the interpretation of Scripture. Again, Sydney Smith, replying to the objections urged against the higher education of women, says: "Now, we must really confess we have all our lives been so ignorant "ILL-USED MEN." 71 as not to know the value of ignorance." Some years ago, during a capital trial in Maine, an attempt was made by the prisoner's counsel to show that the death of the person whom the prisoner was accused of having poisoned might have been caused by prussic acid spontaneously evolved from the stomach. The counsel, therefore, asked a phy- sician, who appeared as a witness for the government, whether the poison did not sometimes act thus ; to which the prompt reply was : "I don't know ; but if such is the fact, it must be very dangerous to have a stomach ! " Politeness A good many anecdotes are told showing "^y^- that politeness is often rewarded by material as well as by moral advantages, — such as the story of the general, who, by bowing to an inferior, escaped the loss of his head by a cannon-ball, etc. ; but one of the best illustrations is the piece of good fortune which once befell Mrs. Dodd, wife of the well-known Dr. Dodd. In 1764 she attended an auction, where she bid for a cabinet, and was at once outbidden by another lady present. Mrs. Dodd immediately courtesied, and retired from the contest. The other lady, who had doubtless set her mind upon the article, and determined to capture it at whatever cost, was so delighted with the polite action of Mrs. Dodd that she expressed a desire for a better acquaintance, and shortly afterwards presented her with a lottery-ticket, which, upon the drawing, came up a prize of £1000. "lU-TJsed OxE of the most unfortunate things that ^^^- can l)efall a man who wishes to n;et on in the the world, is to appear to be ill-used. As a rule, the men of brains or wealth or good birth have no occasion to com- 72 NUGiE LITTERARLffi. plain of the treatment they receive ; it is the dull-witted and troublesome whom, nobody can endure, or the poor and lowly about whom few care, that complain of being ill- used. Hence, when a man makes this complaint, he is likely to be regarded as one belonging to one or more of the former classes rather than to the latter, — a circum- stance which may be no fault of his, or in any way dis- creditable to him, but is, nevertheless, damaging to his prospects in life. The reason of this is, that every man, however prosperous, has his own woes ; and, needing to be associated with what is cheering and inspiring rather than with the depressing, he is naturally attracted to the gay, the buoyant, and the self-helpful, even without any thought of tangible benefits from them, rather than to "the child of misery, baptized in tears," — the incompetent, gloomy " ne'er-do-weel." Another reason why frequent complaint is injudicious is, that, being associated in our minds with infirmity, it tends to weaken our respect; nay, more, it excites our pity, and pity is allied to contempt. Of all disagreeable men, none is more generally shunned than the fretful, the fault-finding, grumbling man, — in short, the man with a grievance. On the other hand, next to the successful man, we respect the self-reliant one, who in ill fortune never by a murmur or look betrays injury or defeat. The applicability of all this to professional men — to all who seek to gain a livelihood or to gratify their fellow- men by the brush, the chisel, or the pen — is evident. If such a man's productions are neglected by the public, is it wise for him lo complain? AYill it help his case to show, however conclusively, that the neglect is due to misrepre- sentation, to prejudice, to lack of taste, and in no respect "ILL-USED MEN." 73 to his lack of merit? Most certainly not. To rail at the stupidity of the public, to retort upon his critics, to assert that praise has been lavished on performances far inferior to his own, only brings down ridicule upon his head ; it is to put himself in the humiliating attitude of an ill-used man. When a merchant learns that a bank has declined discounting his note, or that a great house has refused to fill his order, does he rush upon 'Change and proclaim his grievance ? No ; instead of such a suicidal policy, which would only sap his credit still more, he maintains a dig- nified silence. To advertise his ill-treatment would be as foolish as for a lady to complain of the loss of a front tooth. Let no man, therefore, who wishes to gain or keep a respectable place in the world assume the character of a person who has been ill-used. Whatever the slights, in- juries, or neglects from which you have suffered, do not for a moment think of avenging or redressing them by trumpeting them to the world, and boring your acquaint- ances with long and wearisome recitals of the snubs and humiliations of which you have been the victim. Are you a business man, and have you been cheated or swindled in anyway? Hush the matter in the darkness of your own bosom. Are you an artist, and has the hanging committee at an exhibition put your picture up near the ceiling or down near the floor ? Do not rail against the ignorance or prejudice of the committee, for if you do you will appear to the world as ill-used. Are you an author, and do edi- tors or publishers reject the manuscript on which you have bestowed, perhaps, years of toil? Do not waste a minute's breath in trying to convince others of its merits, but work on to something which will need no vindication 74 NUG^ LITTERARI^. but itself. Are you a candidate for office or place of any kind? Do not, if unsuccessful, go about complaining of your rejection, for on such occasions, above all others, it is absolutely ruinous to appear ill-used. The English naval commander, Lord Cochrane (after- ward Earl of Dundonald) , was a striking example of the folly of complaints of ill-usage. As a naval commander, be exhibited a combination of daring and prudence which were not surpassed in Nelson himself. He did greater deeds with smaller means than any other naval hero re- corded in history. With a trumpery little vessel of one hundred and fifty-eight tons, throwing a broadside of shot that weighed but twenty-eight pounds, he won, in 1801, the most brilliant naval victory of the war with Napoleon, against sixfold odds, and in a thirteen months' cruise cap- tured fifty vessels, one hundred and twenty-two guns, and five hundred and thirty-four men. With such abilities he needed nothing but prudence and self-restraint to rise to the highest posts in the navy. Yet from early manhood to the close of his career he seems never to have been without a grievance. Exasperated at seeing mediocre men usurping, by the favor of powerful friends, places and honors which he felt belonged to himself, he got up a controversy with the Admiralty, and made himself, all his life, by his com- plaints, the chief impediment to his own success. Exposing the incompetency of commanders under whom he fought, he made them his deadly enemies ; and they contrived, by false accusations and court influence, to have him convicted of a crime of which he was guiltless, fined £1,000, sen- tenced to imprisonment for a year, and dismissed from the naval service. " We admit," says a British reviewer, " the justice of almost all his censures ; but why, oh, why, OVERCOMING A NICKNAME. 75 did he not hold his tongue until he had won a place from which he might speak so as to command attention?" Haydon, the painter, was similarly imprudent, and early got the name of an ill-used man. When his great picture of " Dentatus" was completed in 1809, it was hung in the octagon room of the Royal Academy, and he resented tlie act as an insult. The result was, that when he applied for admission as an associate he was refused. All his life he complained bitterly of public neglect, and finally, harassed by ever-increasing debts, committed suicide. The brilliant critic and essayist, William Hazlitt, injured himself by posing as an ill-used man. Some of his writ- ings, as an impartial critic remarks, "betray a pitiable sensitiveness to the little rubs and slights of life, — sore- ness about criticism, vexation about the superior social eclat of other literary laborers, — showing him to be ' raw ' all over." Not only individual men, but nations, sometimes acquire a chronic habit of complaining, and are ill-used only the more in consequence. Poland for sixty years proclaimed to the world the outrages of which she was successively being made the victim. Everybody admitted the iniquity of the "partitions" by the neighboring States; but it is not in human nature to endure a man or a State that is always telling of grievances, and so the wrongs of Poland became wearisome, and at last a bore. No power inter- posed to prevent her doom ; and the victim of Eussian, Prussian, and Austrian greed, " Sarmatia fell, unwept, witliont a crime." Overcoming a What is more vexatious than an offensive Nickname, nickname? A coarse pun made by Herder 76 NUG-iE LITTERARI^. on Goethe's name rankled for nearly half a century in the great poet's mind, though no man could better have afforded to despise such a jest. There is a refinement of cruelty in some nicknames which recalls the barbarity of the old pagan persecutors of the Christians, who wrapped them up in the skins of wild beasts so that they might be worried and torn to pieces by dogs. The worst thing about these appellations is, that when a man is ticketed with one — especially if it be one of those that are pre- eminently witty and come to their inventors in a flash of inspiration — it sticks to him like the shirt of Nessus to Hercules ; it is nearly impossible for the victim to throw it off. Nevertheless, such a feat has been performed, at least by a body of men. In our own late Civil "War, Stannard's Vermont brigade, which was mustered into service in 1863 and stationed at Washington, was dubbed "The Paper-Collar Brigade," be- cause some of the men were seen wearing paper-collars. But after the battle of Gettysburg, in which they had fought the rebels with great valor, and by an enfilading fire made fearful havoc on Pickett's right and on Wilcox's left during the famous charge on the third day of the fight, the insulting nickname was never flung at them again. They had wiped it out with blood. Speculation What a strange contradiction do the lives and Prac- ^f authors often present to their writings ! It tilCB was in the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, or in the marble palaces of Syracuse, while wallowing in wealth and luxury, and robed in purple and fine linen, that Theocritus, the father and inimitable model of all other pastoral poets, wrote tliose idyls which are regarded as the THE ORIGIN 0¥ SOME POPULAR PHRASES. 77 truest and most faithful pictures of that country life of which he kuew uothiog. Claudius, who tells us to crown the flowing bowl with* laurel, was a teetotaler. Johnson, who wrote admirable essays on politeness, interrupted his opponents in conversation with "You lie, sir!" "You are a vile Whig, sir ! " Rousseau, who died a martyr to his sensibility, betrayed each of his benefactors in turn, and sent his children to the foundling hospital. Sir Wil- liam Blackstone, who so ably expounded the laws of Eng- land, exceeded the powers of an assignment. Young, whose Parnassus was a churchyard, and who drew his inspiration from the river Styx instead of from Hippo- crene, was a place-hunter and a pleasure-seeker, who supped to satiety of worldly joys and then turned state's evidence against them. Colton, the epigrammatic moralist, who in his " Lacon " vehemently denounced self-murder, put a pistol-ball through his brain. Thomson, who sang the praises of early rising, used to lie abed till noon. Payne, who sang of " Home, sweet home," never had a home. The author of " There's a light in the window for thee " is reported to have died recently at the West in a prison. Brillat-Savarin, who wrote text-books for epi- cures, lived during the last ten years of his life on panada. The Origin of One of the most interesting and profitable Some Popu- gtudies is that of words, and especially of lar Phrases. , ■ « * j i * • popular phrases. A great deal of curious, recondite history is often wrapped up in them ; but, unfor- tunately, the metamorphosis which they undergo in the lapse of time is such that the most cunning word-hunter is often puzzled to trace their origin. Let us consider a few of these phraseS; 78 NUGiE LITTERARI^. "In spite of one's teeth" is said to date back to the time of King John of England, the violent and odious successor of Richard " the Lion-Heart," who was hated by all classes of liis subjects for his exactions and impositions. Early in his reign, he got a worthy Jew into his clutches, and drew out one of his teeth daily, until, after a fortnight of torture, the Jew yielded to the tyrant's demands for money. Similarly, the phrase, "hauling over the coals" refers to a period in the twelfth or thirteenth century, when feudal barons extracted money from the Jews by suspending them above slow fires till they paid a ransom or died. The political term " to rat," used far more in England than in this country, originated in the time of George I. His enemies reviled the adherents of the court as "Han- over rats." Not long after the accession of the House of Hanover to the English throne, some of the brown — that is, the German or Norwegian — rats were brought over to England; and, being much stronger than the black or common rats, they in many places quite extirpated the latter. At first, the word — both the noun and the verb "to rat" — was levelled at the converts to the govern- ment of George I. ; but gradually it obtained a wider meaning, and came to denote any sudden and mercenary change in polities. The expression "to smell a rat," meaning to conceive a suspicion, is said to come from the German phrase Un- rath wittern, to smell something objectionable. The Ger- man prefix un has passed into the English article a, and this and a perverted translation have given us the phrase in question. In the phrase " dowse the glim" (put out the light), the THE ORIGIN OF SOME POPULAR PHRASES. 79 word " dowse " is from the dialectic verb dout, — that is, to do out, or put out; and " gliui " is a modification of " glimmer," an uncertain light. " To sleep like a top " seems a very absurd phrase. It is a corruption of the French proverb, " dormir comme une taupe," to sleep like a mole. " Just the cheese " is an Oriental phrase. The word " cheese," from cheez, Hindoostanee, means " thing." In England, persons who fawn upon the aristocracy are called tuft-hunters, — a phrase which refers to the fact that at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, a student who is a nobleman's son wears, or at one time wore, a tuft or tassel on the square cap worn by under- graduates at the university. " The bitter end " refers to the end of a ship's cable fastened to the " bitts," — a frame of two strong pieces of timber fixed perpendicularly in the fore part of the ship, for the purpose of holding the cables. Tlie other end is fastened to the anchor. When the cable is out to " the bitter end," it is all out ; the extremity has come. A " toad-eater " ia one who does the most nauseous things to please his patrons, — as a mountebank's boy in the olden time ate toads in order to show his master's skill in expelling poison. " Stealing another man's thunder " dates back to Queen Anne's time, in England. John Dennis, a minor man of letters whom Pope satirized, wrote a tragedy entitled " Appius and Virginia." The ijieee is now recollected only by the circumstance that the author invented some new thunder for the performance, and by his piteous com- plaint against the actors for afterwards " stealing his thunder," an expression which became proverbial. 80 NUGiE LITTERARI^. The phrase " to toll a bell" has a very curious history. It is an incorrect way of saying, " to toll a knell on a bell." When an inhabitant of an English parish died, it was once customary to sound the church bell, for two reasons, — first, because it was supposed that the agitation of the atmosphere caused by the sound from consecrated bells tended to prevent evil spirits molesting the parting soul in its flight toward heaven ; and, second, to invite neigh- bors and friends to join in supplication for the person about to depart. At the end of the knell proper it was usual to indicate, by some peculiarity in the ringing, the sex and age of the deceased ; and this was done by a cer- tain number of strokes sounded apart, — usually three for a child, six for a woman, and nine for a man. These strokes were counted, and thus the knell at the conclusion was said to be told ; that is, counted, — as in the phrase " untold gold," or, " Here is the sum twice told." Grad- ually this idea was lost, and the participle told was referred to a supposed infinitive, to toll, instead of its natural infini- tive, to tell, or count. Again, the strokes told, or counted at the end of a knell, were called tellers, and this term was corrupted into tailors, from their sounding at the end or tail of the knell ; and as nine of these were given to announce the death of an adult male, this fact gave birth to the saying, " Nine tailors make a man." The phrase " Mind your P's and Q's " is generally, but erroneously, supposed to have originated in the score of P's and Q's (pints and quarts) chalked up in bar-rooms in the case of customers who did not pay down for their drinks. The phrase comes from the printing-office, and is due to the similarity in form of the lower-case or small p and q in a font of roman letter, leading a novice to mix them when distributing type into the cases. GOTHIC PUDDINGS. 81 " Turning the tables " on an opponent is an expression derived from the game of backgammou. " Back-gammon " i§ the game (gamon) of the trough (boc), but in early times it was called the game of tables. "To turn the tables," or backgammon board, is to reverse the relative position of tw6 antagonists ; and hence they are said to be turned upon a player whose fortune has been adverse. In Cornwall, England, smoked pilchards are called "Fair Maids," — a singular name, of which Prof. Max MuUer gives the following explanation: "These smoked pilchards are largely exported to Genoa, and are there eaten during Lent. They are called in Italian fumada, ' smoked fish.' The Cornish sailors picked up that word, naturalized it, gave it an intelligible meaning, and thus became, according to their own confession, exporters of fair maids. You see the Odyssey and the adventures of Ulysses are nothing, compared with the adventures of our words." " Going the whole hog," which is almost universally regarded as a characteristic American phrase, is said to be of Hibernian coinage. Before the year 1825 the silver shilling in Ireland was equivalent to thirteen pence, or one penny more than the English one. The former coin was sometimes called " a thirteen," and sometimes " a hog." AVhen an Irishman, not chary of expense, spent an entire shilling in entertaining a friend, he was said " to go the whole hog." Gothic How full the world is of one-idea people, — Puddings, (j^^rarfed specimens of humanity, of whom a dozen or more are needed to make a complete man ; clergy- men who have a white neckcloth idea of the world ; law- 6 82 NUGiE LITTERARLE. yers who are mere bundles of precedents, or walking digests of decisions in law and equity ; doctors who are incarnated pharmacopceias ; weavers who are but animated shuttles, and laborers who are little more than spades that dig, eat, and sleep ! Everybody has heard of the mathe- matician who read " Paradise Lost," and, hearing it praised, asked what it proved. But the most extraordinary case of one-ideaism that we have ever heard of was that of Pugin, the great English architect, whose Catholic conscience would not allow him to design or build a Protestant church, and who thought it astonishing that a friend of his — a man of extraordinary talents — should live in a house without mullion windows ! Accepting, once, by letter, an invitation to stay with a friend, he expressed himself as unable to eat puddings unless they were Gothic in form, and enclosed in his letter a design for a Gothic pudding. No wonder that, after building a score of Gothic churches in different parts of England, he died (in 1852) in a lunatic asylum. Is Wit Yes, says that acute thinker and polished Transient? writer, Mark Pattison. "No [other] product of the human mind is so transient as a jest. Taste, in the ridiculous, changes as rapidly as dress. The grandsons of those who had enjoyed the salt of Plautus, thought their ancestors stupid boors for having done so. We have all read of that old Earl of Norwich, whose conceits, brilliant in the court of Charles I., were found insufferable thirty years afterward in that of Charles II. Like perfume, the more subtile and ethereal a piece of humor is, the less it is portable." There is truth in this, but is it not greatly exaggerated ? The men who heard Hardcastle's story of ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LECTURERS. 83 " Old Grouse in the gun-room," in Goldsmith's play " She Stoops to Conquer," did not agree with Mark Pattison : " Your worship must not tell that story, if we are not to laugh. I can't help laughing at that ; we have laughed at it these twenty years." Is the wit of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Sydney Smith, or the humor of Chaucer, Cervantes, and Charles Lamb, less keenly appreciated and enjoyed than when they lived ? Is there any subtler wit in the whole range of lit- erature than the delicate and playful irony, the exquisite and inimitable pleasantry, with which that deadly contro- versialist Pascal exposed the sophistries and equivocations of the Jesuits, in the " Provincial Letters," and yet is not that wit as piquant to-day as it was two centuries ago ? Is the mocking satire of Voltaire, the brilliant pleasantry of De Maistre, or the stinging sarcasm of Swift, so fade that now after a hundred or more years we cannot feel its point? Could one possibly conceive of an age when the pungent witticisms of Douglas Jerrold, or the crushing retorts of Dr. Johnson, would fail to electrify the hearer? Of course, where the comprehension or appreciation of wit depends upon a knowledge of local customs or of the man- ners of a particular age or country, — as in the case of the satires of Erasmus and Hutten, or of Butler's " Hudi- bras," — the jest loses its charms ; we cannot laugli at jokes which require a perpetual commentary. But this the great works of humor do not demand. English and An accomplished English friend, who has American jjgard many of the best lecturers in his own country and America, asks us, " "Why are English lecturers generally inferior in attractiveness to 84 -mJGJE LITTERARLE. American?" That they are infei'ior, if not in the matter, yet in the manner, of their lectures, will be admitted, we think, by all impartial judges. Where is the English lec- turer that can at once instruct and fascinate an audience as did G. W. Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phil- lips, T. Starr King, Horace Mann, E. W. Emerson, and G. S. Hillard, in the days of their highest power? The gaucherie of some very able Englishmen on the platform is surprising to their American cousins. Some twenty j'ears ago, an eminent Professor from Oxford University very kindly addressed the faculty and students of the Univer- sity of Chicago on some of the differences between the methods of education at the English universities and those at the universities and colleges of the United States. Ad- mirable in substance and deeply interesting in matter, the address was delivered in the most frigid and unattractive manner, without force or emphasis. With his left hand in his trousers pocket, his right clenching the desk, and with his eyes directed to the floor rather than to his hearers, he spoke for about an hour in the tones of a worn and wearied curate. Matthew Arnold's lectures in this country were delivered with a similar stiffness and coldness, not to say awkwardness, of manner ; and in spite of the knowledge, insight, and acuteness of observation which they mani- fested, and their felicity of style, they would have proved a failure had he not, after his first appearance on the platform in New York, taken lessons in elocution. Some years ago we heard, at the AVorking Men's College in London, a brief address by an eminent English author, who stammered and floundpied and gesticulated all the way through, with the awkwardness and maladroitness of a country bumpkin. ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LECTURERS. 85 What is the cause of this infelicity ? Not lack of self- reliance certainly, for than the Englishman there is not a more self-reliant man on the globe. One explanation, we believe, is that inborn and ingrained shyness, of which he can no more rid himself than of his skin, — that mauvaise honte, bashfulness, reserve, call it what you will, of the Englishman, which makes him when travelling by rail seek an empty compartment in which to avoid companionship, and on entering the dining-room of his club to look out for an unoccupied table ; which made Charles Mathews take long circuits in the lanes or by-ways of London to avoid recognition ; which rendered G-arrick, when testify- ing as a witness at Baretti's trial, so perplexed and con- fused that the judge dismissed him from the witness-box as incapable of giving evidence ; which nearly drove Archbishop Whately, when at Oxford, to despair; which led Sir Isaac Newton to forbid the publication of his solu- tion of the theory of the moon's rotation round the earth, lest it might increase his acquaintance, — " the thing which I chiefly study to decline ; " and which appears to have been pre-eminently characteristic of Shakespeare himself. Washington Irving, who lived much in England, and was thoroughly English in his tastes, had the same trait, and could not give even an after-dinner toast without spasms of alarm. Another reason for the inferiority in question is the almost total, if not total, lack of elocutionary training in the English schools, large and small. Charles Astor Bristed, who was educated both at Yale College and at the University of Cambridn;e, England, in speaking, in his " Five Years in an English University," of the two great results of college education, which he says most Americans, 86 NUG^ LITTERAKLS;. including most of the students themselves, look to, — namely, excellence in public speaking and writing, — observes that he found among both the older and the younger men of the English University an utter undervaluation of, and almost a contempt for, rhetoric and oratory. They looked down upon the art of public speaking as something necessarily shallow, insincere, and ignoble, — in short, as charlatanism. Again, the education one receives at an English University, according to Mr. Bristed, is not only negatively, but positively, unfavorable to fluency. "The habit of weighing every word may be all the better in the end for a man who has real oratorical genius, but is certainly all the worse for an ordinary debater." Still another dis- advantage is an excessive fastidiousness produced in these great schools by hypercriticism, which paralyzes oratorical effort. Just the reverse of all this is the attention paid to public speaking in American schools. In nearly all the American colleges declamations of selected pieces are required of the students in the lower classes, and of original orations by the students in the upper classes, as regularly, though not as often, as attendance on recitations and lectures in other departments of education. In all the American academies and preparatory schools also, public and private, students are regularly drilled in elocution, and prizes are offered for the highest excellence at the public exhibitions. To win these prizes, students who are able to do so not infrequently employ at their own expense professors of elocution to instruct and drill them in their art. It is true, perhaps, that at Harvard University less attention is given to elocution than formerly ; but at Yale annual prizes have just been instituted for proficiency in the art. Even in the AN IGNOMINIOUS DESTINY. 87 exhibitions of the Sunday Schools, almost the very youngest pupils mount the rosti'um and " speak a piece." The result of all this is, that when the college graduate rises to speak in public, instead of being petrified by the " sea of upturned faces," and "throttling his practised accents in his fears," or manifesting a lack of ease and skill in the management of his voice, he speaks with much of the confidence, self-possession, and naturalness of the practised orator. That this readiness, ease, and fluency are often obtained at the cost of higher and more sterling qualities — that they are too apt to be preferred to that profound knowledge and thorough comprehension of a subject which, owing to the consequent embai-ras des rich esses, hems and stammers in struggling to condense itself into expression — is most true. But, on the other hand, is it not pitiful to see a man who has enjoyed all the educational advantages which a great university can give, standing dumb as a heathen oracle, or helplessly stumbling over his own words and gesticulating like a clown, whenever he is called upon to give utterance to his thoughts at a public meeting? An Ignomin- " To what base uses we may return, ions Destiny. Horatio ! " exclaims Hamlet ; and he proceeds to suggest that Alexander's noble dust might be found, if traced, stopping a bunghole, and that — " Imperial Ca'sar, Jcatl anrl turn'd to cl.ay. Might stop a hole to I^eop the wind away." But these base uses of great men's dust, imaginary though they are, hardly surpass the ignominy to which one of the monarchs of Egypt was actually subjected a few years 88 NUG^ LITTERARI^. ago. Think of the " father of the mighty line of Pharaohs " fio-uring aa dried fish in the customs entries in his own land ! Such, however, was the description under which the founder of the Pharaonic dynasty was suffered to pass through the land over which he once swayed the kingly sceptre. M. Maspero, leaving the Booklah Museum in view of the contingencies that might arise during the British campaign in Egypt, determined to take with him the mummy of Merenra, the most ancient of the Pharaohs. At the railway station the booking-clerk refused to pass the preserved monarch, unless his value was declared and a corresponding payment made ; this was not easy to do, and so it was arranged that first-class fare should be paid for his defunct majesty. But then there were the octroi, or city duties, to be paid at Alexandria ; so, looking over the lists, M. Maspero found that salt-fish paid but a mere trifle upon entry ; and accordingly, we are told, the first Pharaoh of Egypt entered the last city of his empire as dried fish, paying the corresponding tax ! What a vivid illustration of the well-known saying of Sir Thomas Browne : "Mummy is become merchandise, Misraim heals wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams ! " Merenra's descendants are no longer in their narrow sepulchres, or they would turn in them on learning that their great progenitor had been disgracefully smuggled through his own dominions as a package of dried and salted fish. Ignominious as was the fate of the Egyptian monarch, it was hardly more so than that of the Egyptians whose mummies, as Gibbon tells us, were deposited by their sons, as securities for loans, with monej'-lenders. Merenra's destiny has been paralleled in modern times by that of Richelieu, — the virtual monarch of France, — whose body. CONSCIENCE AND UMBRELLAS. 89 in 1793, was torn from the grave in the church of the Sorbonne and rudely trampled under foot, after the head had been cut off and exhibited to the bystanders. Passing into the possession of a grocer, the head was sold to M. Arniez ^je;'e, and transferred successively to several persons, till at last attempts were made, but made in vain. In 184G and 1855, by the Historical Committee of Arts and Monuments, to repair the profanation. " We accuse no one," says Feuillet de Conches, who relates these incidents in his " Varietes d'llistoire et d'Art;" "still, the fact is undeniable that this terrible head, the personification of the absolute monarchy killing the aristocratic monarchy, is wandering upon the earth like a spectre that has straggled out of the domain of the dead." In the same year the fine marble statue of the great Cardinal at the Chateau de Melraye was decapitated, and the head used by an ultra- republican of the district as a balance-weight for a roasting-jack ! Conscience Why is there so little conscientiousness and Umbrellas, regarding the appropriation of umbrellas ? Every man who has owned, or rather fancied he owned, an umbrella, must have discovered that there is something peculiar about this species of property which differentiates it from every other chattel or hereditament. "'Twas mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands," is a well- worn saying of Shakespeare, which is as true of almost every umbrella as of gold and silver coin. Umbrellas are a puzzle to us ; there is a mystery, an enigma, about them which we cannot penetrate. That they are actually sold, that people do buy and pay cash for them, under the fond illusion that they acquire in them an exclusive property, is 90 NUG^ LITTERARIiE. evident from the fact that shops are established, and kept open for years, where you see these volatile and inconstant articles exposed for sale. Besides, how often do you hear some confiding man or woman, who has cherished the ridiculous idea of property in these articles, lamenting most pathetically the loss, by abduction or exchange, of a treacherous fabric of silk and whalebone (which he solemnly protests that he had paid for) on the very day he had naively attempted to make it his own ! So umbrellas are bought by some persons, incredible as it may seem ; but what a purchase ! One might as well buy a will-of-the- wisp, a rainbow, a fata moi-gana, or a cubic acre of wind, in the hope of holding it permanently or selling it some day at an advance. Umbrellas have no adhesiveness, no tenacity. No sooner have you begun to cultivate their acquaintance — friendship is out of the question — than, like a pickpocket at sight of a constable, like a sailor's money on shore, or a five-dollar bill changed into silver, they vanish from sight. No man can ever safely say, "I own an umbrella," unless at that moment he grasps it in his hand. The man to whom you might safely intrust your diamonds, your watch, or your gold, proves false when, in a moment of unsuspecting con- fidence, you lend him your umbrella. Consciences that la other cases are tremblingly sensitive regarding the slight- est infringement upon the rights of property, are absolutely torpid when the property is an umbrella. Dean Buckland, an English prelate, was so convinced of this by his own bitter experience, that he had engraved upon his last para pluie these words: "Stolen from the Dean of West- minster." Even this lack of conscientiousness is not more amazing than the tameness with which men acquiesce in CONSCIENCE AND UMBRELLAS. 91 the robbery of an umbrella. He who would be furious, and who would seek instant redress, if robbed of a coat or a hat ; who would pursue the boy that had stolen fruit from his apple-tree, and raise an instant hue-and-cry against the thief who had snatched his watch, or even his walk- ing-stick ; will meekly submit to the appropriation of his "rain-screen," and redress his injury by a foolish invest- ment in another. It will, doubtless, be said that some of the vagrancy of umbrellas may be attributed to mistakes, especially at hotels. But — pardon us, reader — how happens it, in that case, that nobody ever mistakes a poorer one for his own? Why is it that only the old, worn-out, faded, and ugly ones are left in the rack? Why is it that cotton umbrellas are never taken by accident for silk? These are notable phenomena, which utterly upset the beautiful theory of mistakes, and awaken grave suspicions of design. Let your umbrella be exchanged twice or thrice in this way, and you will find yourself to have sunk from a light, elegant, ivory-handled, silk article, which cost you ten or twelve dollars, to a blue, brass-ringed dowdy, which turns inside out at the first gust of wind, and was worth when new hardly a tithe of that sum. In opposition to what we have said of the vagrancy of umbrellas, a Kansas editor asserted, some years ago, that there was an old gentleman in Booneville, in that State, who had carried the same identical umbrella every day in the week for sixteen consecutive years I (Jupiter Pluvius must have been in the ascendant there!) But this assertion, staggering to one's credulity as it is, sinks into insignificance when compared with an astounding statement made by the Salem (Mass.) " Register." The editor of 02 NUGiE LITTERARI^. that journal once had the hardihood to assert that a gentle- man in that city of marvels had an umbrella, still in good onhr, — mark that! — which he had used on all proper occasions for — what length of time do you guess, reader? For a month, six months, or, possibly, a year ? No, but iov forty-seven years! He "imported it from Liverpool, and it had been serviceable during nearly half a century ! " In all that long time it had not been damaged, exchanged, or stolen. That will do! Human credulity, we are aware, has depths which no line or plummet can fathom. History and biography show that the acutest and most sagacious men have been the victims of the most unaccountable hal- lucinations. Socrates believed in a prompting diemon, by wliom he was always attended; Luther, in a malicious imp, by whom he was always flouted. Dr. Johnson, as every- body knows, believed in the second sight and the Cock lane ghost ; De Quincey fancied he had a hippopotamus, or some other horrid creature, in his stomach ; Professor Hare believed in the rapping revelations of defunct Wash- ingtons and Websters ; Professor Huxley, who rejects Christianity, is said to be a devout believer in the existence of the sea-serpent, and declares that those who laugh at the idea of a monster of the deep, big enough to drag down whole ships and their crews, are both foolish and ignorant. But none of these delusions, absurd and ridiculous as they are, approximate in grossness to the hallucination of the man who tells, or the person who credits, the Salem umbrella-story. The man who can believe it will swallow all the stories of the Talmud and the narrations of Trenck and Munchausen with his eyes wide open. QUEER ROADS TO FAME. 93 ftueer Roads It is said that the Duke of Wellington once to Fame, u chaffed" Lord Brougham as a man who at one time bade fair to go down to future ages as a famous advocate of law-reform and popular education, but who, after all, would owe his renown to the name of the vehicle which had received his name. Brougham retorted by saying to the Duke that his name, which promised to de- scend to after-times as the hero of a hundred battles and the liberator of Europe, was to survive as the appellation of a certain kind of boots. The story is a good one, whether true or mythical, and suggests to us some of the strange ways in which men become famous. One person acquires celebrity by his giant intellect, as Webster or Calhoun ; another, by his dwarf stature, as Count Borowalski, or Tom Thumb. There are great men who are known to fame hardly less by their physical or moral eccentricities than by their intellectual might. Such was the case with Lord Brougham, who was long associated in men's minds with the queer twist of his nose, on which Punch hung so many conceits; and with Lord Peter- borough, who, walking from the market in a blue ribbon, with a fowl under one arm and a cabbage under the other, quite threw into the shade Lord Peterborough, the hero of Almanza. The same was the case with the great Duke of Marlborough, whose hagglings with the Bath chairmen and acts of petty avarice were talked of long after the con- queror at Blenheim and Malplaquet was forgotten. Again, we saw, some fifty years ago, a Member of Congress from the West acquire a transatlantic reputation by the- place and manner in which he chose to devour his luncheon of bread and sausages. 94 NUG^ LITTERARIiE. Immortality Queer as are all the above-mentioned ways m law ^Q fame, an English barrister, in a recent ' volume of essays, has suggested another, by ■which men have unconsciously acquired celebrity without for a moment dreaming of such a result. He suggests that it may be some comfort to distressed plaintiffs or de- fendants in law-suits to reflect that to them may fall the honor of " leading cases ! " " Perish all thoughts of costs in the presence of such a possibility ! Immortality ! Who was Twyne? "Who was Spenser? Who was Shelley? We could repeat a long roll of the noble army of legal mar- tyrs, most of whom would be absolutely wiped out of the memory of man but for the fact that fortune, or misfor- tune, drove them into litigation, whereby now and forever more they stand ennobled in Smith's or Tudor's ' Leading Cases.' Oblivion for them is an obsolete terror, a forgotten danger. A worthy old countrywoman remembered with satisfaction that the doctor had said that one of her grinders was the hardest tooth he had ever had to pull out in the whole country ; and would she not have rejoiced at the pain that was the mother of immortality?" Yes, doubtless ; still, to this mode of winning fame the expense must be considered a great drawback, as I found when I was thus immortalized twice in the reports of the decisions of the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine. The cheapest immortality ever won was that gained by Euty- chus, the young man noticed in the Acts of the Apostles, who went to sleep and fell out of a window while Paul was preaching. While all the other hearers of the apostle kept awake, and thus for doing their duty are forgotten, this drowsy fellow, this deaf dog, slept and snored himself into immortality ! WHY GO TO COLLEGER 95 A Vivid A WELL-KNOWN and well-worn excuse of oimiie. college students for tardiness at prayers, reci- tation, or lecture, is, or used to be, "I didn't hear the bell." It is not often that the members of the faculty have (or have had) occasion to make the same plea ; but many years ago the senior class of M University, New York, did actually complain to the board of trustees regarding the president's habitual lack of punctuality in meeting with them at the hour for lecture or recitation. Deeply aggrieved by this procedure, the "don," at the first subsequent recitation, gave expression to his feel- ings, and proceeded to state the causes of his tardi- ness, winding up his justification as follows: "And then, young gentlemen, our college bell, — who, with ordinary ears, can hear it? You know how faint and in- audible are its sounds, — that, in fact, it does n't make a whit more noise than a sheep's tail swinging about in an old hat!" Why go to Wht should a man go to Oxford or to College? Cambridge, to Harvard or to Yale, for a liberal education ? Is there no balm but in Gilead ; no classic culture but among the willows of the Isis, no mathe- matical save among the reeds of the Cam ; no mental training but on the banks of the Charles River, or under the elms of New Haven ? Are there not hundreds of pri- vate teachers as competent and faithful as those in the universities and colleges ? Yes ; but the knowledge and training got in the class-room, or through tutorial prepara- tion for " the Little Go " and " the Great Go," is but half — perhaps not even the most valuable half — of a college education. One of the chief advantages of that education 96 NUG^ LITTERARI^. is the commingling of young men from all parts of the country ; the attrition, the collision, of mind with mind ; the clash of wit, the stiugiug jest, and the prompt retort; the living in an intellectual and electric atmosphere, where a certain amount of knowledge and of inspiration is ab- sorbed unconsciously by the most heedless youth through the pores. A wise parent thinks his money well spent, if his son does but make at college the common, unavoidable use of well-bred companionship, — acquiring that most precious and uncommon thing, common-sense, current knowledge, the words that pass from lip to lip, the feelings that flow from heart to heart, the manners of good society, even though he acquires but a smattering, the thinnest varnish, of scholastic lore, and no more of mathematical than Horace gained at Athens — " Scilicet ut possem curvo dignoscere rectum." The signal advantage of education at college, where young men of high and of low birth mingle together for some hours daily, is that the keen but not ungenial breeze of ridicule takes the conceit, the nonsense, out of them, — nips their silly egotism, vaporous boastings, maudlin affec- tations, and shallow pretences in the bud. As President Robinson of Brown University (experto crede) said truly a year or two ago, in an address at Phillips Academy, An- dover: " None are quicker than students to detect shams; none more prompt to puncture pretence ; none more merci- less, and, as a rule, none more just in their criticisms ; and no criticisms are more wholesome." A young man who, if he had been educated at home, might have become an in- sufferable coxcomb, a prig, or a fool, will be bullied, WHY GO TO COLLEGE'? 97 snubbed, and jeered by his associates at college into a manly, modest, and sensible fellow. All this was forgotten by James Mill when he tried his grand experiment in private education with that prodigy of precocity, his sou, John Stuart. Readers of that son's autobiography will remember that, according to his own opinion of his early training, he was enabled thereby to start with an advantage of a quarter of a century over his contemporaries ; but even at the lowest estimate of the march he had stolen upon time, he had at the age of twelve a mental training and equipment equal to that of the most accomplished gentleman whom Oxford or Cambridge could hope to turn out at the age of twenty-two. Indeed, it was but a few years afterwards that a university man, loaded with honors and heralded by a blazing reputation, having boon tempted in an evil hour to measure swords with Mill, was run through and through by the youthful Titan, and sank into hopeless obscurity. But as the London " Times," in a paper on Mill, aptly suggested, when time is thus an- nihilated, and mortal man is privileged to overleap a part of his allotted term, a question arises like that which in the last century so sorely plagued the old women of England on the alteration of the style, — "What had become, they asked, of the eleven days struck out of the calendar? What had become of the ten years dropped by l\Ir. ]\Iill in his attempt to leap into manhood before his time? Trained by his father exclusively, separated and secluded from all companions of his own age, and from all common social influences, did he not lose an all-important part of educa- tion, without which the rest is often almost valueless, — the education imparted by the clash of minds and the pull- ing of rival oars, by the measuring of man with man, by 7 98 NUGiE LITTERARI7E. the intercourse of a youth -with his fellows? Was he not, in short, a machine-made man, a kind of intellectual Frankenstein of his father's creation? Of all popular delusions, there is none greater, we be- lieve, than the belief that thinking is better done, that mental growth is greater, in abnormal isolation than in the normal social state of man. The truth is, that intercourse is the best teacher. Our minds need the stimulus of other mhids, as our lungs need oxygen to perform their functions. Phi- losophers tell us that knowledge is precious for its own sake ; but experience tells us that knowledge is not knowl- edge until we use it, — that it is not ours till we have brought it under the dominion of the great social faculty, speech. In the intercourse of young men with each other ; in the argumentative walk, or disputatious lounge ; in the impact of young thought upon young thought ; in the in- terchange of views, the frequent discussions, the collision of mind with mind, the judgments upon one another, — there is a mental discipline and a knowledge of human nature acquired, which no amount of private study can ever impart. A keen, earnest, animated discussion is to undergraduates what some one has called a kind of mental Oaks or Derby Day, wherein their minds are excited to the utmost speed, and they get over more ground than in weeks of solitary study or mooning meditation. It is for want of this kind of discipline that self-educated men, so called, are generally so one-sided and so intolerant in argument, — an example of which we have in that " progeny of learning," as Mrs. Malaprop would call him, the late Mr. Buckle. An omnivorous devourer of books, he had received little tutorial education, and none whatever in other men's society. He had formed his mind almost "A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE." 99 exclusively by solitary, unguided study. Though he had swallowed a library, he was not a scholar ; many of the books he cited were not first-rate ; nor, as a thinker, did he engage in the special investigation of details, but rea- soned upon those, often inadequate, gathered by others. And what was the result? Sweeping generalizations and arrogant assertions; " dogmas on every page of his book, and brilliant fallacies in every chapter," — faults from which, as well as from an intolerant, unsympathizing tem- per and a magisterial tone implying that all men who differed from him were fools; from a narrowness which blinded him to " the other side" of a question, and led him to call cathedrals " trifles ; " from a disposition to exaggerate the importance of physical as contrasted with intellectual and moral^ agencies, — he would have been saved by an Oxford or Cambridge training. "A little EvEETBODT is familiar with Pope's apho- Knowledge." j.-^^^^ u j^ u^tig learning is a dangerous thing." The absurdity of the saying is so evident that it is a wonder that it has gained so general a currency. Mr. Cax- ton, in Bulwer's admirable novel, happily observes that students and abstract thinkers are too apt, in their early youth, to look at the depth of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to the surface it may cover. There may be more water in a flowing stream only four feet deep, and certainly more force and health, than in a sullen pool thirty yards to the bottom. The cant about profundity has provoked some biting sarcasm from Macaulay, who says that it never yet has been his fortune to prevail upon any person who pronounces superficial knowledge a curse, and profound knowledge a blessing, to tell him what makes 100 NUG^ LITTEEARI^. the standard of profundity. There was a time, ages ago, when the branches of linowledge were so few tliat it was possible for a man by incessant study to become, in a cer- tain sense, deeply learned ; but to-day, when a schoolboy knows more than the sage of those times, profundity in one department involves, of necessity, neglect of many others of which it would be shameful for any person, not a pro- fessor, to be ignorant. Again, if a little knowledge is to be shunned as dan- gerous, how is one ever to acquire a great deal? Shall one never go into the water till he has learned to swim? It seems to us that if a little knowledge is dangerous, no knowledge is more dangerous still. lu the latter case, the danger is aggravated with time ; whereas the former risk is sure to lessen, as hardly any person makes one acquisition of knowledge without being led by it to make another. A little knowledge of chemistry will enable one to distinguish the salts used in medicine from oxalic acid, with which, mistaking it for them, persons have been poisoned; and a smattering of the same science will teach a farmer whether his land needs animal or mineral dressing. A slight knowl- edge of botany will enable one to distinguish between cherries and the berries of the deadly nightshade, — tlie confounding of which has cost many lives. A little knowl- edge of geology will keep a man from digging for coal, a little knowledge of mineralogy from digging for gold, in formations where it is never found. A little knowledge of antidotes to poison may save a man's life. A little knowledge of law may save a man from financial ruin. An acquaintance with the domestic and medical uses of salt is but a small extent of information ; yet it may do much for one's health and happiness. To know that ice swallowed "A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE." 101 freely, in small lumps, is a remedy fOr inflammation of the stomach is comparatively a little thing ; but it may enable one to escape a severe illness and even death. It is better to know than to be ignorant that your chance of drawing a twenty thousand-dollar prize in a lottery is hardly greater than that of your being struck by lightning, even though you may not have mastered De Moivre's or Morgan's doc- trine of chances. It is well to know the multiplication- table, though you should never scale the dizzy heights of mathematics, where La Place and Newton dwell like stars apart. A little knowledge of biography or of history is better than Boeotian ignorance. It is well to know that Alexander Pope, the author of the contemptuous observa- tion in question, was fond of epigram, and ready at any time to sacrifice truth to a startling paradox or a brilliant antithesis, even though you may not have read all his works or his biography. The truth is, there is no objection to one's knowing a little about a great many things, provided his knowledge be clear and precise so far as it goes, and provided he is aware how little that knowledge is. " Nothing," say the Germans, "is so prolific as a little, known well." He is an intelligent man who is master of what he knows, how- ever little that may be ; and the most learned man in the world is not an intelligent man, if his learning has mas- tered him. When the School Board of London was de- bating whether elementary instruction in science should be given in the schools under their control, it was objected that the scholars would get only a smattering. " Who has more?" asked Sir John Lubbock in reply; "those who are the most advanced in knowledge will be the first to admit how slight that knowledge is." The view of such 102 NUG^ LITTERARLS;. men has been compared to that of an American forest, in vvliich the more trees a man cuts down the greater is the expanse of wood he sees around him. But with the great mass of persons the choice is not between what is comparatively profound knowledge and superficial; it is the choice between superficial knowledge and none at all. Yet though Pope's aphoi-ism is literally false, — as false as the metaphor that follows it, — " For shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, But drinking deeply sobers us again,'' — it may be so interpreted as to convey a truth ; a truth of which a happy illustration is given in " Guesses at Truth," a book full of wisdom, by Archdeacon Hare and his brother : " If you pull up your window a little, it is far likelier to give you cold, rheumatism, or stiff neck than if you throw it wide open ; and the chance of any ill conse- quence becomes still less if you go out into the open air, and let it blow equally upon you from every side. Is it not just the same with knowledge? Do not those exposed to a draught of it blowing on them through a crevice usu- ally grow stiff-necked? When you open the windows of your mind, therefore, open them as widely as you can, and let the soul send forth its messengers to explore the state of the earth." Here we have the secret of all one-sideduess, of exces- sive attachment to isms, in a nutshell. The best, the only way to escape the mischiefs that arise from teaching men a little, is to teach them more. Men stumble in the twi- light, not because it is half light, but because it is half dark. As Macaulay says of liberty, — the only remedy for the evils of knowledge is knuwledr/e. Knowledge, in EUFUS CHOATE. 103 short, is the true spear of Achilles : only itself can heal the wounds it has made. An " Old The state of education in many parts of rield jjjg South before the late war may be Schoolmaster. . , , „ , . . , judged of by an mcident in our experience while travelling on foot in Virginia in 1839. Reaching the inn at Stafford Court House, one evening, where we passed the night, we were introduced to the schoolmaster of the place, who was represented to us by the landlord as " a very learned man." In the course of a conversation with us, he commended to our reading "The Universal History of the World," by Charles RoUin ; "the greatest work," said he, ' ' ever issued from the modern press. The account the author gives of the downfall of the Greek and Roman republics beats all the stories I 've ever read. It 's very affecting, sir ; it 's enough to make you wear crape on your arm for thirty days ! " We asked whether he had made the work a text- book in his school. " Oh, no ! " said he, " it is too edifying, — too edifying." Here the conversation changed, and some allusion was made by a fellow-traveller to the river Susquehanna. " I know where that river is," said the pedagogue; "it empties into Lake Huron, near the State of Maine ! " Rufus A Boston literary friend gave us fifty years Choate. ^go the following report of an exchange of salutations with this famous lawyer : — " Quite cool this morning ! " remarked our friend to the great New England advocate, one biting cold morning in February, when everybody's nose, cheeks, and ears were tingling with the pinches of Jack Frost. 104 NUG^ LITTERARI^. " Why, yes, Sir," was the cool, nonchalant reply of the green-bag gentleman ; " the climate is not ab-so-lute-ly tropical ! " Just six months afterwards, the same persons met again, when the mercury was ranging in the nineties, and every- body felt like a mouse in an exhausted receiver. "Very warm to-day, Mr. Choate." "True, Sir, — one can hardly say that the climate is pos-i-tive-ly Arctic ! " Self- In visiting the picture-galleries of Europe Kepetition. ^^ ^g^ years ago, we were everywhere struck by the extent to which the "old masters" repeat them- selves. Knowing that they can do some one thing better than any other person, they do it over and over again, with few attempts at freshness or novelty. Claude Lorraine has a trick of painting atmospheric effects in a masterly way, and so in almost every picture of his you see the same combi- nation of objects, — a seaport with ships, boats, and classic buildings, and the rays of the setting sun streaming through mist and athwart tremulous waters. If you see the name of either Teniers in a catalogue, you are almost certain that the scene which is to greet your eyes will be a Dutch village festival, with rustics dancing, drinking, or dining in the open air, or a party of boors seated at table, gaming, smoking, and carousing, in a country inn. The most original genius has his favorite formula, his ever-recurring distinctive expression. In Titian it is a crimson cap; in Tintoretto, the lowering face of a Moor ; in Rembrandt, deep shadows ; in Foussin, the dark purple of a distance ; in Hobbema, the dewy lustre of trees. Wherever you see a Ruysdael, you may confidently look for a brook PETTY TRIALS 105 brawling over rocks, near trees with restless foliage, and under a sky full of wind-driven clouds. Salvator Rosa can portray only wild, rocky, gloomy landscapes, where you expect every moment to see bandits springing out of a ravine or from behind a tree ; and if any one invites you to look at a Wouverman, you know infallibly that there will be a troop of horsemen in it, — whether cavalry engaged in a deadly encounter, or a party hunting a stag. Even amid the inexhaustible fruitfulness of Rubens, Sir Joshua Reynolds recognized, it is said, one smooth, flat face con- tinually recurring. If painters are admired and applauded in spite of this monotonous mannerism, this perpetual imprisonment in self, why sliould authors be so sharply rated — accused of intellectual exhaustion and poverty — whenever they repeat themselves? Petty It is a trite remark that trifles make up the Inals. happiness and the misery of human life. There is probably no man who cannot recall occasions when the pettiest vexations have made as exhausting draughts upon his patience and equanimity as troubles and trial of the greatest moment. Even estimated by mere magnitude, the stress of lilliputian trials, harassing us day after day, may be as severe a test of fortitude as one giant trial wliose duration and intensity are limited. A shower of needle-arrows, such as those with which Gulliver was assailed in Lilliput, steadily poured in upon a man day by day, would be more galling than an hour's exposure to darts of ordinary size. Collect a thousand burning sticks into a heap, and you have a bonfire which may be seen many miles away. How often it happens that a man who has stood up bravely 106 NUG^ LITTER ARIiE. against apparently overwhelming misfortunes has been overcome by a series of little vexations, disappointments in the minor affairs of life, just as the ship that has breasted the fiercest storm, or survived the hardest thumps on a reef, is sometimes sunk by tiny insects boring through her timbers ! It is surprising how trivial are the annoyances which suffice to make some men miserable. A lump of soot falling on a man's linen ; a beefsteak overdone ; losing a railway train by forty seconds, after running himself out of breath ; a visit from a bore when he is overwhelmed with cares ; the rasping of his nerves by a hand-organ when he is weary, inclined to headache, or trying to sleep ; even the want of a pin, or a shirt-button flying off at an unlucky moment, as when he is dressing for a dinner-party and has scant time in which to do it, — all these are annoyances which sorely try a man's patience, and chafe and vex many a person more than a serious misfortune. Alexander Smith goes so far as to say, that, if during thirty years all the annoyances connected with defalcating shirt-buttons alone could be gathered into a mass and endured at once, it would be misery equal to a public execution. Hazlitt tells us, in one of his essays, that he has been disappointed of a hundred-pound job and lost half a crown at rackets on the same day, and been more mortified at the latter than at the former. The same writer tells of two persons play- ing at backgammon, one of whom was so enraged at losing his match at a particular point of the game that he took the board and threw it out of the window. It fell upon the head of a passenger in the street, who came up and de- manded instant satisfaction for the affront and injury he had "sustained. The losing gamester, in reply, simply COLLEGE DEGREES. 107 asked him if he understood backgammon, and being told that he did, said, that if upon seeing the state of the game he did not excuse the extravagance of the speaker's con- duct, the latter would give him any other satisfaction he might demand. The backgammon tables were accordingly brought, and the situation of the two contending parties being explained, the gentleman put up his sword and went away perfectly satisfied. One reason, perhaps, why petty trials are so hard to bear, is a feeling that there is little merit and no dignity in patiently enduring them. It flatters our vanity to confront heroically a great crisis, to do battle with a great tempta- tion, and we summon all our energies for the conflict; but who prides himself on his calm endurance of pin-pricks? Yet it must be remembered that, as an excellent Christian writer has said, " though there is no dignity in the thing achieved, there is great difficulty in the achievement. Character transpires in all circumstances, small as well as great ; and if by God's grace character takes a good shape in the minor circumstances of life, it is likely to retain that shape when it is keenly sifted." The man who can com- mand his temper amid the obscure, ever-recurring, and ex- asperating petty annoyances of life, will rarely fail to be cool and self-possessed amid its grand and more public trials. College " Since we cannot have fame ourselves," Degrees, gg^yg Montaigne, " let us have our revenge by railing at it." A similar feeling seems to actuate some persons who ridicule college degrees. That these badges of distinction have been, till recently, too lavishly bestowed in this country — so lavishly as to be a very untrust- worthy indication of intellectual superiority — m,ust be 108 NUG^ LITTERARI^. acknowledged. The glaring disproportion between the titles worn by some men thus honored and their actual attainments, is apt to suggest to one who knows their mental stature the good-humored chaff of Cicero, when he saw his diminutive son-in-law girt with a gigantic weapon, "Who has tied Dolabella to that sword?" Who has forgotten how Harvard College once cheapened its honors by conferring the degree of Doctor of Laws on Andrew Jackson? John Quincy Adams, an overseer of the college, not only voted against that procedure, but was so indignant when he was outvoted that he refused to be present at the conferring of the degree, saying that he " would not witness the disgrace of his Alma Mater, in conferring her highest literary honor upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar, and hardly could spell his own name.'' After the deed was done, the remonstrant used to amuse himself by speaking of " Doctor Andrew Jackson." So notoriously undeserved have been, in too many eases, the honors conferred by our colleges, that some men have shunned as earnestly as others have sought them. Judge Peters is authority for the statement that after Lafayette had been made a Doctor of Laws by one of our colleges. Baron Steuben was in deadly fear lest he should meet with a similar mishap. Having to pass with his troop through a college town, where the Marquis had been thus distinguished, the old warrior halted his men, and thus addressed them : " You shall spur de horse vel, and ride troo de town like de mischief, for, if dey catch you, dey make one doctor of you." The tough old soldier had no more respect for such a distinction than his countryman, the great musical com- poser Handel, who refused to accept the degree of Doctor of Music from Oxford. "Vat, trow my money away for COLLEGE DEGREES. 109 dat, — de blockhead's vish ! I no vant to be von Doctor." There is a story of the days wben college honors were scattered broadcast over the land, that an illiterate rich man, having been honored with a degree by a college which he had laid under obligation, made a wager that he could obtain a similar honor for his servant. Winning the wager, he was so flushed with success that he laid another wager that he could obtain a degree for his horse. But that he lost ; for the president wrote him a courteous note, saying that though they were very anxious to oblige so good a friend of the college, and though he had found, on examination of its records, that they had once conferred a degree on a jackass (naming the date of the gentleman's own diploma), they could really find no precedent for complying with his last request. Within the last twenty-five years there has been a very marked improvement in this matter, and it can no longer be justly asserted — as was asserted some fifty or sixty years ago by Rev. Dr. S. H. Cox, of New York, in his sarcasms on what he styled " this semilunar fardel " — that the honorary degrees conferred by American colleges are " no test of competency," and that " talents are scarcely a recommendation for them, ignorance seldom a protection, juvenility itself no disqualification." Our colleges — at least the leading ones, and many of secondary grade — are growing more and more chary of their honors ; and Father Taylor, the seamen's preacher, if living to-day, and asked why he had not been doctored, would hardly reply, as he once did to this question, "I suppose it is because my divinity has never been sick." It must be a delicate question, in some cases, for a clergy- man to decide whether to accept the honor of a doctorate. 110 NUGiE LITTERARI^. The minister who covets and courts such a mark of distinction seems hardly to obey his Master's command : "Be ye not called Rabbi ; " but to scorn or decline accept- ing such titles when bestowed unsought — and, especially, to do so in a way to attract attention — is often to betray as much vanity as that which prompts other men to parade them. It looks a little too much like trying to fill out a quartette of greatness with Moses Stuart, Albert Barnes, and Henry Ward Beecher. The affected humility of some such persons reminds one of the saying of Alexander the Great when some in his hearing praised Antipater, because he wore black while his colleagues wore purple: "Yes, but Antipater is all purple within." It must be confessed that the virtue of some persons is unpleasantly ferocious. When Pope Alexander VI., in order to silence Savonarola, offered him the Archbishopric of Florence, with the prospect of a cardinal's hat, the monk was, no doubt, sincerely indignant; but there was a shade of vainglory in his reply, thundered forth from the pulpit : " I will have no hat but that of the martyr, red with .my own blood ! " What could be more ridiculous than the flourish of trumpets with which the apostle of utility, Jeremy Bentham, re- fused the diamond ring sent to him by the Czar of Russia, pompously declaring that it was not his mission to receive diamond rings from emperors, but to teach nations the lessons of wisdom? Perhaps there would be no harm in a clergyman's receiv- ing the degree of D.D., if, as some one has suggested, he would remember that there are at least some scores of men who have forgotten more than he ever knew or ever will know, who yet will never receive a degree. A very sensible course for a sensitive or conscientious clergyman to pursue. THE SOCIETY OF WOMEN. Ill is that taken by Rev. R. F. Horton, of London, Eng., who recently lectured at Yale University on Preaching ; he said that while he did not see his way clear, without giv- ing ofifence, to refuse the degrees that had been conferred on him, he hoped his congregation would address him as formerly. As to the actual value of college and all other titles of distinction, it is equally foolish to overestimate and to despise them. What Bacon finely says of nobility hits the happy medium on this subject as well : Nohilitatem nemo contemnit, nisi cui abest; nemo jactitat, nisi cui nihil aliud est quo glorietur, — " No one contemns nobility but he who lacks it ; no one boasts of it but he who has nothing else to brag of." The Society Some one has said that " of all the means of Women, ^f recruiting the exhausted energies of the mind after the toils and vexations of the day, none is so admirably fitted to fill up the elegant leisure of the scholar as the society of woman.'' The observation is true. Conversation with men demands some exertion, exacts some labor ; it is too often a theatre in which the parties strive to outdo each other in argument, or to mortify their unread hearers by showing the depth of their knowledge and the acuteness or grasp of their minds. Even when free from all rivalry and contention, it is in many cases a mutual and incessant straining to say things which have an epigrammatic point and pungency, which are flavored with the salt of wit, — startle by their abruptness, or give a pleasant shock of surprise. Conversation thus conducted, in- stead of soothing the ruffled mind, only tasks anew the facul- ties that have toiled all the day long in the world's mill. In the society of women there is nothing of all this. 112 NUG^ LITTER ARI^. Nature has established a spirit of mutual concession between the sexes which forbids all contention ; while that delicate tact which discovers instinctively the tastes and habits of thought of another, and adapts itself to them, which slides gracefully over matters without dwelling upon them and without effort, extracts the delicate aroma and the volatile essence, and gives — as Dr. Donne said of Lady Anne Clifford — to every subject, "from predesti- nation to slea silk," a pungent flavor and a piquant relish, is rarely found but in the society of intelligent and accomplished women. Overworked The "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" Women, expresses the opinion that an overworked woman is always a sad sight, — sadder far than that of an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile in capacities for suffering than a man. Besides her neuralgias and her backaches and her fits of depression, there are all the varieties of headache, — "sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera into her temples ; some- times letting her work with half her bi-ain, while the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces ; sometimes tighten- ing round the brows, as if the cap-band were Luke's iron crown." But sadder far to our minds than all this misery, exquisite as it is, is the necessity to which woman is so often subjected of brooding day and night over the torment- ing problem of " how to make both ends meet," by perpetual pinching and self-denial, and by the thousand shifts and devices for sustaining life on the smallest possible expen- diture. The continual pressure of these small cares and anxieties exhausts as much as great ones ; and they have this added bitterness, that they are petty and humiliating. OVERWORKED WOMEN. 113 It flatters our vanity to demean ourselves well in a great crisis ; the lieroic string in our nature is touched, and we brace ourselves up for the trial ; but there is no dignity or honor in bearing up under a succession of mean and paltry vexations. Juvenal says truly, that poverty has ho sharper sting than that it makes its victim ridiculous ; and ridiculous does woman become, even to herself, when she is doomed by a limited income perpetually to think of sordid little economies, — of petty savings which become imperative when every meal, evei-y dress, every ride, every recreation, is a battlefield of ingenuity and self-denial against ever- menacing debt and difficulty. " He who drinks beer, thinks beer," said Dr. Johnson ; and it is equally true that those persons who occupy themselves with endless cares for small savings get to^think candle-ends for their reward. It is pitiful to think of the deterioration of mind and feeling, the loss of dignity and self-respect, which is almost sure to accompany the constant practice of beating down prices and screwing cents and nickels from expense-bills. Some of Eve's descendants, women of rare mind and heart, no doubt escape this result ; but the mass inevitably suffer. Among men, the evil of res angustce domi is genei-ally antagonized by vigorous efforts to earn, rather than to save; "it is but mounting a thousand additional steps," said Dr. Arbuthnot, when all his savings were swept away by the South Sea scheme. But " upon women," — as one of the most thoughtful ones of our day has said, — "to whom so few honest fields of industry are open, the necessity for a perpetual guard against the smallest freedom of ex- pense falls with all its cruel and soul-crushing weight ; and on the faces of thousands of them may be read the sad 8 114 NUG^ LlTTERARIiE. story of youthful enthusiasm all nipped by pitiful cares, anxieties, and meannesses, perhaps the most foreign of all sentiments to their naturally liberal and generous hearts." Biff Houses When one reads of the big houses which the Croesuses of our day are building in town and country, he cannot help recalling the words of Plutarch concerning the Rhodians. " They built their houses," he says, "as if they were to be immortal; " and then adds the words that seem irresistibly to follow, — " and furnished their souls as if they were but for a day." When fabulous sums are spent for the outer, sensuous life, the inner, spiritual life is apt to be starved. Of course, the fact that a man expends millions on his house, furniture, horses and carriages, dress and display, is not conclusive" proof that he gives little time to the culture of his mind and heart ; but we fear that to many such persons the retort of Ben Jonson to the vain king who jested upon the humbleness of his dwell- ing — the ornaments of which were the " rare " old drama- tist himself, the best minds of the age, and " plain living and high thinking " — is but too evidently applicable : "Tell his majesty that his soul lives in an alley." Strange, that in this age of " advanced ideas " and wide-spread " culture," when we plume ourselves so much upon our superiority to the men of bygone ages, we should need to listen to the admonition of a pagan philosopher of nearly nineteen hundred years ago. " You will confer the greatest benefit on your city," said the Phrygian Stoic, Epictetus, " not by raising its roofs, but by exalting its souls ; for it is better that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses." NEWSPAPER RIVALRY. 115 Newspaper The passion in the soul of an editor for Rivalry, special, exclusive news is, as all the world knows, intense and all-absorbing. Life to him is a drama or a farce with little interest, except for the " paragraphs" it may furnish. Disasters — the more appalling the bet- ter — are godsends ; shipwrecks are runs of luck ; cyclones (paradoxical as it may seem) are windfalls ; thefts, embez- zlements, and bankruptcies are ' ' grist to his mill ; " a murder is like rain in the drought season ; revolutions are fortunes. Especially is this true to-day, when the rivalry of daily newspapers is so fierce, unmatched in intensity by the competition in any other calling. Watch the necro- logical news-hunter of a great daily, when the life of an eminent invalid, whose "impromptu" biography he has had pigeon-holed for many weeks, is prolonged beyond all reasonable expectation. How unhappy the poor scribbler looks ! What disappointment elongates his lugubrious visage ! He feels aggrieved, almost insulted. But let him hear of the great man's decease, and how his eyes sparkle, how elastic his step, how jubilant his voice, attitude, and demeanor ! Signor Penseroso is transformed into Signor Allegro in a twinkling. There is a story of a provincial editor in England, who, discovering that one of his neighbors had hanged himself, would not cut him down, or mention the discovery to any one, but kept the body under lock and key for two entire days. Does this seem to you heartless, reader? To him the reason was simple and sufficient. His paper appeared on Thursday, his rival's on Wednesday; and "do you think," he triumphantly asked, " that I was going to say anything about the suicide, and let that scoundrel have the paragraph?" 116 NUG^ LITTERARI^. The foregoing example of newspaper enterprise may startle the reader; but, unique as it is, it has been sur- passed, as might be expected, in this fast country. The following story of American reportorial shrewdness and activity — which, like love, "laugh at locksmiths," and which, as Horace says of gold, "delight to penetrate through the midst of guards, and to break through stone walls, more potent than the thunderbolt " — was told some years ago in the Correspondents' Club at Washington : — At the funeral of General Baker, which was held at the White House, the correspondent of a New York journal, unable to get a ticket of admission, got down through a coal-hole, and, after groping about for some time, reached the East Room at last, directly in the rear of the oflBciat- ing clergyman. While the latter was engaged in prayer, the reporter observed a roll of paper in his hat. To seize it and fly was the work of a moment. When the unfortu- nate preacher turned to find his sermon, he found it not. He attempted to deliver it from memory, but made a morti- fying failure, much to the astonishment of the dignitaries addressed. The next morning he had the satisfaction of reading his oraison funibre in the New York " Herald." " Smart " What is more offensive than an excessively Boys. "smart" boy? Even downright dulness, which, if it never startles j'ou by its wit, never pesters you with its impertinence, is preferable to the excessive pre- cocity of these pert, saucy, prematurely wise youths, who know more at twelve or fifteen than their fathers or grand- fathers did ."it sixty. Miss Florence Marryatt, who visited this country in 1884, met with a youngster of this stamp — a boy of eight or nine years — on board of the steamship CONTRADICTIONS IN CHARACTER. 117 " Germanic." He was one day on deck handling tlie quoits, when the skipper, in passing, observed kindly: "That's not the way to handle a quoit, my boy." The little wretch looked up and said: "Look here, old man, are you bossing this game, or am I?" Contradic- ^^ i^ * truism to say that it requires the tions in highest acuteness and the largest acquaintance Character, ^j^jj jjjgjj ^^ j,gj^(j character correctly. Gall and Spurzheim, indeed, profess to make, comparatively speaking, child's play of it ; but, in spite of their carefully mapped "organs" and their "temperaments," they have failed to provide us with an anthropometer : man continues to be a puzzle and a mystery to his fellow-man, as baffling as any riddle of the Egyptian Sphinx. One cause of the difficulty is the inexplicable contradictions that are so often found in the same individual. Even when we have dis- covered the ruling passion, we have not always obtained a key to all the chambers and secret closets of the soul. In nothing is Shakespeare's profound insight more strikingly shown than in his knowledge of the infinite complexity of human nature. While all his leading characters have some primary, overmastering passion, a close study of them discloses a thousand other qualities, the mutual play and varying intensity of which go to make up the complex being that the poet has portrayed in Shylock, Falstaff, Timon, or Macbeth. The moral incongruities of men are, indeed, endless. Who, for instance, would suppose that a musical com- poser, — and that, too, of sacred music, — of the very highest order of intellect, could be a profane man, miserly, and in one respect grossly sensual? Yet such, we are 118 NUG^ LITTERARIjE. told, was the author of that sublimest of oratorios, " The Messiah," — whom an English admirer describes as a large, tall, heavy man, with clumsy hands and feet, sauntering about (in London) with an awkward "rocking motion," talking English in the most grotesquely uncouth of German accents and with the sublimest contempt for grammar and construction, and swearing heartily " a good mouth-filling oath " at any one or anything that did not please him. At his meals he appears to have been a perfect Justice Greedy, — a second caliph Soliman, or what Horace calls a perni- cies et tempestas barathrumque macelli, who gorged himself like an anaconda. No stranger who looked at him as he was cramming his skin with creature comforts would have believed that he was the author of the heavenly strains of which he was so prodigal. It is said that he used to order his dinner at an inn for two persons ; and when it was ready, and the waiter asked when the company would arrive, he was answered by Handel in a voice of thunder, " I am de company ! Pring de dinner, prestissimo ! " For fear of not getting enough when he was invited to dine out, he took care to make an enormous repast before he went ; and in the course of one of these antepasts he de- voured a couple of chickens, half-a-dozen mackerel, and a good part of a duck, yet two hours afterward went to com- plete his dinner at a nobleman's ! In apology for this it was urged (and we hope with truth) that probably, as in Goethe's case, who had also an abnormal appetite, Handel's large physique and generally rude health made it natural to him to eat more largely than average men. Of iiis miserly disposition, an illustration is the pecu- liarity that he would wear a shirt a month without change to save the cost of washing, — and that at a time when he was receiving £.50 a night for his musical compositions ! CONTRADICTIONS IN CHARACTER. 119 A German by birth, an Italian by sympathy and train- ing, an Englishman by residence and conformity, Handel belonged to no school, yet had a style as unmistakably his own as had Dante in verse, Angelo in sculpture, or Raphael in painting. Strong, egotistic, self-willed, the great com- poser was generally cheerful and good-tempered, but violent when irritated, and indomitably proud and inde- pendent. One who knew him well relates that when he was pleased with the way the music was going at one of his concerts, his enormous wig had always a certain nod or vibration, and that at the Carlton House concei-ts he would swear angrily if the ladies in waiting talked during the music, — upon which the Princess would check them, saying, "Hush! hush! Handel is angry." He did not hesitate even to scold the Prince of "Wales for being late at a concert and " keeping all these poor people [the per- formers] so long from their scholars and other concerns." His dealings with refractory singers were summary indeed. When Cuzzoni, the famous vocalist, insolently refused to sing, at a rehearsal of the opera of " Otho," the beautiful air "Falsa Imagine," Handel was instantly enraged, and cried out, — "Vat! you vill not sing my mooshic? I vill trow you out de vindow, if you vill not sing te mooshic." "You sal not vex me, Mr. Handel! I vill raise de dev-vel ven I sal be vex ! " replied the songstress. "You are te tevil," rejoined Handel; " but, madam, I am Beelzebub, te prince of te tevils ! and," seizing her by the waist, " I vill trow you out te vindow, if you vill not sing te mooshic ! " Hardly less autocratic was this Napoleon of composers with one of his poets. To the complaint that Handel's 120 NUG^ LITTERARI^. music did not suit the words the poet had written, the former replied with Spartan brevity, "Den de worts is bat ! " Hardly less paradoxical than that of this Shakespeare of the musical art, was the character of that universal genius, Leonardo da Vinci. The accounts given of the multiplied facets of this astonishing intelligence — so great in art, yet relatively less artist than physiologist, inventor, engineer, and mathematician — almost defy be- lief. " The disciple of practice," as he called himself, seeing and observing everything, — the fall of the wave, the motion of the bird, the duration of the echo, the veins of the leaf, the scintillations of the stars, the conditions of the moon, etc., — inventing everything, such as over thirty kinds of mills, windlasses, cranes, saws, drills, looms ; machines for plate-rolling, wire-drawing, file-cut- ting ; instruments for flattening and dressing cloth ; a sur- geon's probe, a universal joint, a spring to close doors, cowls for smoky chimneys, an artist's camp-stool, a roast- ing-jack moved by the hot air, the common wheelbarrow, and even a scheme for lifting the baptistery of Florence to a higher level, — he reminds one, by the force and flexi- bility of his intellect, of the elephant's trunk, which with equal facility can rend an oak or pick up a pin. Yet this many-sided and marvellous genius, though he lived in the days of Columbus and Savonarola, took no interest in the world around him, and to all appearance was utterly in- different to moral truth. Breathing contentedly the atmos- phere of the cowardly and profligate usurper Ludovico Sforza's court, he welcomed with him the packs of French wolves under Charles VIII., who first oveiTan the plains of Italy, and, on Ludovico's fall, built with equal readi- GENIUS AND APPLICATION. 121 ness triumphal arches for the entry of Louis XII. into Milan. Broad as was the sweep of Da Vinci's vision, wide as was the range of his surpassing intellectual gifts, the ex- tremes observable in his character were equally strange and rare. In his art, says one of his most intelligent critics, " he reaches from the subtlest and sweetest beauty to the inost unnatural and hideous deformity : in his writ- ings, from the grandest generalities to the most puerile particulars : in his daily habits, from the profoundest studies and application to (we are assured) the vainest extravagance and ostentation ; from the clearest methods of reasoning and closest accuracy of observation as re- gards cause and effect, to all the sure consequences of reckless expenditure, disorder, and social degradation, — debts, fawnings, unpaid salary, and humiliating beggings, even for clothes : in his life, from the illustrious philoso- pher who commands the wonder and admiration of all subsequent ages, to the hireling who knew not the mean- ing of the word ' patriot ; ' who shifted with every wind of fortune, executed chefs-d'muvre or invented toys equally to flatter the French invader or the Milanese usurper ; who placed himself, like the mercenary troops of the time, at the disposal of whomsoever happened to be in power, no matter how obtained, and principally served two of the most iniquitous princes of the age, Ludovico Sforza and Casar Borgia." Genius and An English reviewer, speaking of Arthur Application, doughy observes that " he was one of the prospectuses which never become works ; one of that class whose unwritten poems, undemonstrated discoveries, or un- 122 NUG^ LITTERARIjE. tested powers, are certain to carry everything before them when they appear, — only, they never do appear." How full the world alwaj's is of such foiled potentialities, " mute, inglorious Miltons," who are always very "promising" because they never do more than promise ! The late E. P. Whipple, in one of bis brilliant essays, finely ridicules the eulogists of these subjunctive heroes of literature, art, or science, who might, could, would, or should achieve great things, but whose persistence in not doing great things no- body can understand. These panegyrists will point to some lazy gentleman, — the prodigy, perhaps, of a country vil- lage, — and tell you that there is a protuberance on his fore- head or temple large enough to produce a Hamlet or a Prin- cipiaif heonlyhad an active temperament. "But," says Mr. Whipple, " the thing which produces Hamlets and Princi- pias is not physical temperament, but spiritual power.'' It is a principle which admits of few exceptions, that what men can do they will do ; and if they fail to do it, it is be- cause they are conscious of their inability. When a man appears to have great gifts, and yet accomplishes nothing, it is because he has no aptitude for any particular thing ; no consciousness of ability to push anything, through all obstacles and discouragements, to a conclusion ; in short, no potent will to attempt it. What a man does is the only true test of what a man is ; and to declare that he has great capacity, but nothing to set his great capacity in motion, is like saying how powerful a man would be if he only had great strength, or how swiftly a steamship would cross the Atlantic if she only had a bigger boiler and could move her propeller fast enough. Akin to this absurdity is that of deploring as a fault in a man of genius his want of equanimity and constancy, of GENIUS AND APPLICATION. 123 steady, dogged, unremitting application : men speak of it as a misfortune which he himself could remedy, as a matter wholly within his own control. But while we believe that genius will work, at its own appointed times and seasons; that nine-tenths of what men call genius is only a prodigious capacity for hard work, and only the other tenth is, the ability to do great things without hard work; that the disposition to intellectual labor is, in fact, just in proportion to the size and vitality of the thinking principle, — we yet do not believe that it will work regularly by square, rule, and compass, and at certain fixed hours, after the pattern of plodding mediocrity. That scorn of mathematical rules, that hatred of the shackles of regular systems of applica- tion, that intolerance of uniform thought and resentment of the mind against continuous toil, which we so often deprecate in men of genius, springs from the very sensitiveness of constitution which makes genius what it is. It is the natural compensation by which great things tend to an equalization with little ones. Sir William Temple felicitously says that the abilities of man must fall short on one side or the other, like too scanty a blanket when you are abed : if you pull it upon your shoulders, you leave your feet bare ; if you thrust it down upon your feet, your shoulders are uncovered. In other words, all desirable intellectual qualities are not to be found in any one character ; but as surely as we find a large degree of one quality, we must look for a deficiency of some other. He therefore, who, looking upon a wayward and unsteady genius like a Marlowe, a Coleridge, or a Poe, exclaims, " What great things he would have done, had he but been regular and methodical ! " is hardly wiser than he who, contemplating a dull, painstaking drudge, should say, 124 nugjE litterari^. " How rare a creature this had been, had he only been en- dowed with genius ! " Nature, which has ordained that the fleet greyhound shall have no scent, that the bird of paradise shall have ugly legs and the peacock a discordant voice, is too frugal of her mental gifts to heap together all kinds of shining qualities in one glowing mass. At long intervals of time — once in a century or two — she suffers the world to be dazzled by that phoenix, a man who unites the mental and moral powers, the intellectual and the spiritual thews, of greatness ; and then we recognize the giant in literature, art, or science, the idol of a nation, — a Dante, a Newton, or a Bacon. Old English Reader, have you a taste for song, — rich. Lyrics. full-throated song, in which music is " married to immortal verse " ? Then get a copy of Mr. A. H. Bullen's " Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age," published last year by J. C. Nimmo, London ; feast upon the " nectared sweets" of the volume, and thank us for calling your attention to it. How many exquisite gems of song, long forgotten, has the editor here exhumed from the dust of three centuries ! How dull, spiritless, and lacka- daisical, compared with them, are most of the songs that one hears in drawing-rooms to-day ! To our own mind, this book is one of the best pieces of work done by a literary resurrectionist since the days of Bishop Percy. What a witchery there is in some of Campion's songs, and how is divine music wedded to still diviner poesy in the charming lyrics of Dowland, Byrd, and Robert Jones! What a fine piece of fooling is "The frog's wooing of the crab," by an unknown lyrist ; and how Vautor, by his address to the owl, — " Sweet Suffolk owl, so trimly dight," — ILLUSIONS. 125 " Takes the wondering ear, And lays it up in willing prisonment ! " Why are no such songs written to-day ? Is it because the genius and sentiment requisite for such productions are wanting, or is it not rather because the oerugo et cura peculi of the age, and still more its din and tumult, its restless- ness, impatience, and hurry, are fatal to lyric excellence ? The lyrists of to-day are inferior to those of Elizabeth's time, not so much from lack of fancy or passion, as from impatience, — an unwillingness to wait until from a brood- ing half-idleness, poetic fancies arise in the mind like a gentle mist from a lake, delicately and of themselves, in- stead of being the product of "high pressure." Illusions " ^J'^^''" t^'y heart," says Longfellow, " and what the world calls illusions." A happy sentiment ! Happy, thrice happy — felices ter et ampliun — they who believe with a depth of conviction which no dis- appointments can disturb in the goodness, honor, and truthfulness of their fellow-men ; and wretched, inexpres- sibly wretched, is the man who sees a counterfeit in every coin, a thorn in every bunch of roses, a fly in every pot of ointment, and a hypocrite in every Christian. A sad word is that by which the French denote such a person, — desillusionne ; one who has outlived all his youth- ful ideals ; who has been behind the scenes of the theatre, and has seen the coarse pulleys, dirty ropes, and bare walls without the light and the paint, and has watched the ugly actors and gaunt actresses by daylight. Dreary and grim is the life of such a man ; Dead Sea apples are his joj's, and sadder than Styx or "dark Cocytus"runs the river of life to him between its stony banks ! How mourn- 126 NUGiE LITTERARIiE. fully expressive of that early loss of hope and belief, and of the birth of that consciousness of evil which once pro- foundly felt rarely deserts the soul, are the following lines which Walter Savage Landor in one of his "Imaginary Conversations " puts into the mouth of Spenser : — " How much is lost when neither heart nor eye Rose-winged Desire or fabling Hope deceives ; When boyhood with quiclc throb hath ceased to spy The dubious apple in the yellow leaves ; " When rising from the turf where youth reposed, We find but deserts in the far-sought shore ; When the huge book of Fairy-land has closed. And those strong brazen clasps will yield no more ! " Riches vs. How eager to day is the pursuit of riches ; Poverty, ^hat sacrifices of health, leisure, culture, happiness, and even honor and conscience, are men ready to make for them, — and yet how unenviable is their possessor's condition compared with that of him who " having nothing, yet hath all" ! Did you ever think, reader, when you were envying the rich man, of the cares and anxieties that tease and torment him, from which his neighbor, " with purse oftenest in the flaccid state, imponderous, which will not fling against the wind," is wholly free? "I have a rich neighbor," says Izaak Walton, "who is always so busy that he has no leisure to laugh : the whole business of his life is to get money, and more money, that he may still get more and more money." The impecunious man, on the other hand, snaps his fingers at care, because he has nothing to worry about or to disturb his repose. No creditor or tax-collector pesters him with bills ; no poor relation dogs him like a shadow, teasing him with calls for help. He escapes the whole swarm of "suckers," RICHES VS. POVERTY. 127 " diddlers," and parasites, and neither the beggar nor the chavitable-subscriptiou solicitor ever knocks at his door. No hideous dreams of stocks falling, or banks bursting, or notes payable on the morrow, ever disturb his nightly slumbers. Of "Atchison" and " C. B. and Q.," of "bulls" and "bears," he is blissfully ignorant; and rumors of failing Lombard or Winner Investment Com- panies, defaulting treasurers, and runaway cashiers, of watered stocks and over-issued bonds, send not a spasm through his anatomy. No dread of footpads or pick- pockets, of slung-shots or revolvers, haunts his mind as he perambulates the lonely road or dimly-lighted street at mid- night ; nor does the alarum of the fire-bell send an electric thrill through his frame, as it does through that of him who has costly dwellings or well-stocked warehouses to be burned. Devoid alike of cash and its equivalents, he has no fear of duns ; the ringing of the door-bell falls not a knell on his heart ; a footstep on the staircase does not make him quake with apprehension. At the rap on his door, he can crow forth, " Come in! " and his pulse beat healthfully, his heart sink not into his bowels. The law, with its fearful array of attachments, replevins, exe- cutions, and imprisonments, has no terrors for him ; for fi. fa. and ca. sa. he has a profound contempt, and puzzleth not his brain with their distinction. Having nothing upon which it can fix its grasp, he has run under the guns of the law, and its thunders roll innocuous over his head. The sheriff, with attorney's orders, may beat his door, but wliat carethhe? Blessed with an empty purse, he smiles at the command to appear in court, and laughs to scorn the threat of a jail. No days of precious time wasted in settling long, tedious accounts with those he owes ; no angry disputes 128 NUG^ LITTER ARI^. about the amount of his bill : the creditor has but to learn his impecuaiosity, when he recognizes the hopelessness of his claim, and blots the account from his ledger. In short, it is hardly more true that " Heaven tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," than that it provides a vast feather-bed at the foot of fortune's ladder for those who have tumbled from its slippery rounds. Such are some of the blessings of the moneyless man. On the other hand, to be rich — what is it? It is to be a poor rich man, instead of a rich poor man. It is to work like a galley-slave to take care of your riches, and in return get only your board and clothes. It is to be taxed for not only the property you possess, but for your income besides, and, perhaps, to be suspected of falsehood in stating the amounts. It is to have your name on every subscription list, yet get no credit for it, because you ' ' might easily have given more." It is to be pestered with duns, yet to excite unmixed astonishment by asking for payment of a debt due to yourself. It is to find it for the interest of your debtors not to pay the principal, and for their principle not to pay the interest. It is to be called an aristocrat if you wear finer clothes than other men, and a niggard if you do not. It is to be preyed on by sharpers, and get no sym- pathy when fleeced. It is to have every bankrupt, burnt- out, and thriftless man make a run upon the bank of your benevolence, and then curse you in his heart for the small- ness of the dividend. It is to be married for your money, or to have a wife perpetually easting in your teeth the dollars she brought you. It is to have Addition of dollars, Subtraction of comforts, and Multiplication of anxieties, end in lawsuits over your will, or in Division among spend- thrift heirs or ungrateful legatees. It is, finally, to en- RISIBILITY AMID PAIN. 129 counter more miseries and vexations in this world than other men, and, at last, to find admittance to a better more difficult than it is to the rest of mankind. Risibility It is well known that the essence of humor Amid Pain, jg incongruity, the conjunction of things that are opposite or dissonant, — as the mingling of manliness and gullibility in Fielding's Parson Adams, of honesty and knavery in Gil Bias, or of shrewdness and stupidity in Sancho Panza. The most laughable of incongruities is that which arises from the clash of dignity and meanness, eminence and vulgarity, the solemn and the comic. The sense of the comic is sometimes enhanced by suffering. When the soul is filled with gloom, a ludicrous incident becomes the more ludicrous by contrast. An Englishman who poisoned himself by mistake told one of his friends, that, when suffering agonies, he was deeply conscious of the grimly ludicrous aspects under which one circumstance succeeded another. The exquisite irony of the contrast between his own internal sensationa and the sunny indiffer- ence or stolid surprise of all around him, while he was in a galloping haste to escape death, made an impression upon him which rose above the pain, — as, for instance, when his porter asked for leave to change his shoes before he went for the doctor. Irresistible also was the bland and magnificent phrase in which the doctor, when found, inquired, " what might be the matter," and the cajoling smile and endearing question, after the administration of a monster emetic, whether " he did not feel a little sick yet." Similar to this was the experience of a friend of mine, a Chicago lady, who was taken suddenly and violently ill, 9 130 NUGiE LITTERARIiE. and was thought to be dying. A sister from New York — Mrs. C, a fashionable Fifth Avenue lady — was visiting her at the time ; and nothing, she afterward told me, could be more exquisitely ludicrous than Mrs. C.'s mingled groans and directions to the servants, which, though the sufferer was racked with pain and felt that her last hour had come, tickled her risibilities to a degree rarely expe- rienced in health. " Run for the doctor! " cried Mrs. C. " Here, Biddy, quick, — clear up the room! Oh, my poor, dear, dear sister ! — put away these things ! set the chairs in order ! Oh, dear, oh, dear I what if any of the neighbors should come in and see the room all in disorder ! Oh, my poor, dear, dear sister ! she is dying, I know ! " The dis- tress of the good woman about the disorder of the room in the very moments when she was deploring her sister's pains and probable decease must, indeed, have been comic enough " to move wild laughter in the throat of death." Gibbon, the I have just had a long feast of historical Historian, reading. I have read — need I say with what absorption of the mind and never-flagging interest? — Gib- bon's "Decline and Fall," Arnold's History of Eome, Rawlinson's of Phoenicia, Guizot's of France, Fyffe's of Modern Europe, — in all, twenty-five stout octavo vol- umes, of which the first has proved the most fascinate ing and profitable. What a masterpiece of genius and labor it is ! How wonderful that such a monumental work, bridging the gulf between the old world and the new, should have come, not from an academy of scholars, but from the brain and hand of a single man, — and that man the big-headed, little-limbed, double-chinned, button- mouthed, daintily-dressed, fastidious, smirking, snuff-box- GIBBON, THE HISTORIAN. 131 tapping man whom we see in the portraits and other pictures of Gibbon that have come down to us ! With what a mastery has he brought all his vast and incongruous material, gathered from the whole range of classical, Byzan- tine, mediiEval,and Oriental literature, into one consistent and luminous tableau! What weight, majesty, and splen- dor in his style, in spite of its occasional metallic ring, its grandiloquence here and there which slides into pompos- ity, its lack of terseness, suppleness, ease, and delicate nuances ! Emerson has pardonably exaggerated in declar- ing the reading of the " Decline and Fall" to be an education in itself. That this encyclopaedic history of thir- teen hundred years should ever be displaced, Mr. Freeman regards as impossible. Scores of books, pamphlets, and reviews have been written, exposing Gibbon's errors in his two chapters on the early spread of Christianity ; but as Paley pithily said of these covert misrepresentations, " Who can refute a sneer? " The great defect of the historian was moral : he lacked moral elevation, nobility of sentiment, loftiness of soul. Admire as we must the extraordinary flexibility, subtlety, and penetration of his intellect ; the fulness and accuracy of his knowledge ; the skill with which he ana- lyzes and marshals the most complicated parts of his sub- ject, — yet we cannot help feeling that he was of a frigid temperament, and never flushed with enthusiasm for a good cause. As Sainte-Beuve finely says, he never collects his materials at a startling point of view, and with a burst of genius. "He is more intelligent than elevated. . . If a great revolution were anywhere to occur in the human mind, he would not feel it; he would not announce it by lighting a beacon on the top of his tower, or by ringing the 132 NUG^ litterarm;. silver bell." In short, a true child of the lukewarm, scei> tical eighteenth century, the great historian was of the earth, earthy, and simply mirrored the moral spirit of his time. A Rabble- What strange ideas many persons have of ^^^"^i^S liberty ! What an amount of mischief has Word. been done to society by such "rabble-charm- ing words," as South calls them, — words " which have so much wildfire wrapped up in them," — as liberty, equality, and fraternity ! How many who " bawl for freedom " con- found it with license ! A republic presupposes a high state of morals ; but how can this be possible without the habit of subordination and respect, and how can these exist without humility? The true freeman is not only jealous of his own rights, but respects and cares for the rights of others, and is indignant when any man, even the meanest, is wronged or trampled under foot. The man who is always boasting of his freedom is probably a slave to the meanest and most tyrannical vices, passions, or prejudices. Apropos to this, in 1881 I made the acquaintance in Mu- nich, Bavaria, of a very intelligent German lady, who told me a very suggestive anecdote. At a pension in Switzer- land she met a Yankee, who one day at the dinner-table boasted that the United States was the freest country on the globe. "Why," said he, pulling a revolver from bis trousers pocket, and brandishing it before the company, "with tliat in my hand, I can travel in perfect safety from one end of the United States to the other 1 " Skinflints ^® there a sublime of meanness? We think there is. One of the most extraordinary ex- A SOCIAL NUISANCE. 133 amples of this trait that we have known, was the sharp practice many years ago of a bookseller in Maine, who, in making change, paid a customer his due dime and a half, then took them back and substituted a Spanish ninepence (12^ cents) and two cents, saying: "There, take that; I've a right to save half a cent when I can." This is cer- tainly the trijile extrait, the concentrated distillation or quintessence of meanness, and approaches the sublime ! Perhaps the celebrated English chief-justice. Lord Kenyon, may have paralleled it, of whom Lord EUenborough said, when asked for an explanation of the grammatical error in the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, Mors janua vita (instead of vitce) : "Don't you know that that was Kenyon's express desire, as he left it in his will that they should not go to the expense of a diphthong? " I have heard of a man who, when he was travelling in his private carriage, carried oats in it to feed his horse at the country inns, and also a hen to eat up the scattering oats and lay an egg for his dinner. But even he was an incar- nation of liberality compared with a miser who lived in Europe some years ago, and who, from fear of coming to want, hanged himself, but was discovered and cut down in time to save his life. Recovering his consciousness, and seeing the rope cut in two, he exclaimed: " Why spoil a new rope by cutting it? Couldn't you have untied it?" A Social Op all the disagreeable persons in society Nuisance, fg^ ^j.y one's patience more severely than loud- mouthed persons, — those who think that to be emphatic, they must address you in tones of thunder. There are persons who, apparently, are not content with making an observation tell upon your mind, unless it tells upon your 134 NUG^ LITTER ARIiE. nerves also. They drive the words through the conversa- tion like wedges ; and when they raise their voices, you feel a tingling at your fingers' ends like that on touching a galvanic wire. "When such persons have a controversial turn of mind, the misery they inflict is exquisite. The gentle, sensitive Cowper must have suffered keenly from these social pests : — " Vociferated logic kills me quite ; A noisy man is always in the right. I twirl my thumbs, fall back into my chair. Fix on the wainscoat a distressful stare, And when I think his blunders are all out, Eeply discreetly, ' To be sure, — no doubt ! ' " " Going with A great many essays have been written on the Grain." (.[jg ^^.^ ^f li^jng ^ith others ; but the whole philosophy of the subject may be condensed into four little words: "Go with the grain." This rule holds good equally of quadruped and biped. Stroke a cat against the direction of her hair, and she crooks up her back indig- nantly : you have developed the electricity from her back, and fire from her temper, and you are lucky if you escape a smart scratching. On the other hand, draw your hand with the hair, and what a change ! Pussy bends gently beneath the pressure, and falls into that purring song of hers which is so expressive of blissful feeling, and which seems to say: " Go on, my dear fellow; if you don't get tired, I shall not." Just so with that creature who is so apt to be cross-grained, mulish, and perverse, — man. To get along smoothly with him, to influence him for good, to reclaim him from vice, you must work in the line of his disposition. Yet, obvious as this is, we every day see persons failing to bend others to their purposes, and mak- "GOING WITH THE GRAIN." 135 ing them enemies instead of friends, merely because they are not careful to study their peculiarities of humor, and take them "with the grain." Parents stifle the affections of their children, employers lose the good-will or provoke the hostility of their workmen, teachers fill the hearts of their pupils with gall and wormwood, the happiness of married pairs is blighted, controversialists deepen and embitter the prejudices of their opponents, nations exasperate nations, and philanthropic schemes involving the happiness of thou- sands are blasted, because this one simple secret of moral management is wilfully neglected or carelessly overlooked. Depend upon it, reader, that however deeply you may delight to play the tyrant, no one of your fellow-men loves to be the subject of such despotism one whit better than yourself. Take our word for it, it is easier to coax, a man out of a thousand errors or bad courses than to flog, scold, or drive him out of one. It has been said that more flies are caught with molasses than with vinegar; the truth is, they are never caught with vinegar. There is noth- ing which renders the human biped so unmanageable as a piqued self-esteem. There is all the difference of heaven and hell between the feelings of one who has been affec- tionately requested to do a thing and those of one who has been imperiously ordered, as if he were a slave. Harsh words obstruct the progress of reason, blunt the keen edge of argument, and produce among the dearest and oldest friends that estrangement and sad separation so vividly described by Coleridge : — " Each spoke words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother ; They parted — ne'er to meet again ! But never either found another 136 NUG^ LITTERARI^. To free the hollow heart from paining ; They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder : A dreary sea now flows between. But neither heat nor frost nor thunder Shall whoDy do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been." " If I wanted to punish an enemy," says Sydney Smith, " I would fasten on him the continued trouble of hating somebody," — a saying full of philosophy. Immeasurably more painful, as well as harmful, to any one is it actively to dislike another person than to be disliked, — to hate than to be hated. On the other hand, the good-will we manifest to others reacts upon ourselves. Dr. Doddridge, in one of his letters, relates a saying of his daughter (who was blessed with an angelic disposition) which strikingly illustrates this. " Father," said she one day, " I do not know how it is that everybody loves me ; I suppose it is because I love everybody." Many persons are habitually unkind, because nobody has been kind to them. Ill-fa- vored or ugly in their personal appearance, they have been kept by their fellow-men in badgered and hopeless infe- riority ; and, denied the luxury of kind words to them- selves, they withhold them from others. Who can wonder at the result? Would you win the good-will of your fellow-men, or in- fluence them for good? Eespect their honest prejudices, however much they may clash with your own ; yield to their whims, where no principle is concerned ; lean to the trustful rather than to the suspicious side ; and speak gen- tle words rather than words of censure. An old legend, versified by Dr. Holmes, assures us that a man condemned to be beheaded had his head severed so neatly by the STEAWBERRIES. 137 stroke of a razor-edged scimitar, that he would not believe that the sentence had been inflicted until the executioner offered him a pinch of snuff, and he sneezed his head off. It has been happily said that graciousness can sugar-coat a "uo" so as to make it taste like "yes." The gracious manners of the Duke of Marlborough made it even more pleasing to be denied a favor by him than to receive it from another man. Wisely sings Tennyson, " Gentle words are always gain; " and a wiser than Tennyson has said that " a soft answer turneth away wrath." It is said that bees and wasps will not sting a person whose face is rubbed with honey. Remember ^sop's fable. It was not all the blus- tering violence of the tempest that led the traveller to throw off his cloak ; he was coaxed to do so by the mild and genial beams of the sun. Strawberries " ' ^'^^ ™^ ^ S^"* °^ strawberries ; ' and, lo ! Straight through my blood and very bones they go ! " A brilliant English poet, who sang the " Pleasures of Hope," tells us, — " My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky." We do not hesitate to say that ours leaps up at the an- nouncement that strawberries — ripe, luscious strawberries — will soon be in the market and on our tables. It is this dainty and delicious berry of which an old divine is said by good Izaak Walton to have observed, that "doubtless God might have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did." Some of the most celebrated physicians have commended this fruit for certain physical disorders, even 138 NUG^ LITTERARI^. the most obstinate, — as consumption, and as an antidote for tiie gout. Cheap as strawberries are in June and July, we hope to see them become cheaper, so that all men, even the poorest, may enjoy them. Strawberries are not only delicious to eat, but beautiful to look at and pleasant to smell. The noble Othello must have thought so, since his first gift to Desdemoua was a handkerchief " spotted with strawberries." What dish, in the whole round of epicurean delights, can one call up before the mind's eye, if he is unsophisticated in bis tastes, more luxurious than the sim- ple one of strawberries and cream? What a flood of agreeable recollections is conjured up by the very sound of the words ! " They seem to set one's page floating like a bowl." Fontenelle esteemed strawberries as the most tempting and satisfying of all " creature comforts," and in his last illness used to exclaim, " If I can but reach the season of strawberries ! " As he was then in his hundredth year, what an amount of healthful enjoyment they must in twenty lus- trums have yielded him ! He did not need to live in that " Plurality of Worlds " of which he wrote so charmingly, to extract from them all the satisfaction they are capable of yielding. Shakespeare makes Richard III. say to the bishop, in that scene of frightful calmness and smooth speaking which precedes his burst of thunder against Hast- ings : " My lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn, I saw good strawberries in your garden there : I do beseech you, send for some of them." The poets generally have lavished their most glowing praises on strawberries. Sir John Suckling, in his richly-colored portrait of a beau- tiful girl, has made the dying leaves of strawberries precious, — PELTING WITH PRECIOUS STONES. 139 " Eyes full and bright, With breath as sweet as double violets, And wholesome as dying leaves of strawberries." But of all the poets who have sung on this inspiring theme, an Italian bard, a Jesuit, takes precedence. That charming gossiper, Leigh Hunt, speaks of a poem of that writer in two cantos of nine hundred lines, which ends with the following bridal climax, considered by him, doubt- less, as the highest one possible, and the very cream even of strawberries and sugar. After apostrophizing two young friends of his, he concludes with this blessing, — " Around this happy pair may joy serene On wings of balm forever wind and play ; And laughing health her roses shake between, Making their life one long, sweet, flowery way. May bliss, true bliss, pure, self-possessed of mien, Be absent from their side, no, not a day. In short, to sum up all that earth can prize. May they have sugar to their strawberries ! " Pelting with A brilliant critic, in reviewing some years Precious g^g^ g^ lecture by an eminent New Englander, remarked that he overwhelmed the devotees of sensuality of all sorts with a shower of stones, and adds : " But what precious stones they are ! Diamond, ruby, and sapphire with him are ordinary missiles, and the mean- est among his projectiles is a carbuncle, or a Scotch pebble at the least. Our apprehension is, that the objects at which this brilliant artillery is aimed may take so much pleasure in the sight and sound as not to mind the sense. The danger is, that they may stand stock still to be shot at, in mute admiration of, the splendid weapons with which they are assailed, saying in their hearts with Phoebe, in 'As you Like it,' — 140 NUG^. LITTERAKI^.. " ' Sweet sir, we pray you chide a year together. We had rather hear you chide than another woo.' " Is not the effect of some "brilliant" sermons, denun- ciatory of sin or sins, similar to that here so felicitously described? Is not the dazzling fence of the rhetoric often enjoyed by men who remain insensible to the warnings of the preacher, — the glitter of the blade admired by many who, absorbed in this admiration, do not feel its point? Such spiritual weapons might be commended if their effects were like those of the magnificent ones used by the soldiers in Rome, when, in a. d. 537, it was besieged by the Goths under Vitiges, and defended by the heroic Belisarius. The mole or sepulchre of Hadrian, now the castle of St. An- gelo, was then converted for the first time to the uses of a citadel. It was covered with the white marble of Paros, and decorated with the statues of gods and heroes ; and these masterpieces of art, the works of Praxiteles and Lysippiis, were torn from their lofty pedestals and hurled into the ditch on the heads of the besiegers, who were defeated with great slaughter, and compelled to raise the siege. The Results In reading the biographies of eminent men, oiai