Saw her go into No. 32 a while ago."

"Into No. 32 ?" said I; and, as we passed that door, I saw, sure enough, a little pair of india rubbers set outside to be blacked. But, alongside of the rubbers, stood a tall pair of boots! I stood aghast!

"Are you sure?" said I feebly. "Those boots-"

"Yes, sure!" said my friend. "There was a good-looking young fellow with her, and so I suppose she is married.”

Still, a lingering hope, that my friend might have been mistaken in the room, flickered in my mind; but, at that moment, Colonel Bartillian himself came and rapped at the door.

Gone to bed already-and not eleven o'clock!" he muttered, as he received no answer and saw the boots. And then, as he caught sight of me, I heard him say, "Bless my soul and body! There's the young fellow whose feelings I hurt!" and he went off in the other direction like a flash.

I ascended to No. 783; and wisely considering that, as all was now over, it would do no harm to make the best of it, I resolved to become a man again. I sent for my friends, the poet

and the editor, who patronizes the poet, and we resolved to make a night of it. Cards were brought out, and we sat down to whist. Wine was brought, and we became merry. We laughed, and cracked jokes, and sang; and of all, my laughter and songs were the loudest, and my jokes the most frequent. And, after a little while, our neighbor, the German wine-importer, being attracted by the revelry, came to the room upon pretense of seeking a match, though I knew that he had plenty of his own. We invited him to sit down and join our party, to which, after a feeble resistance, he consented. Then he brought out some of his old Curaçoa for us to try; and then he sang, in a deep growl, a song purporting that women might deceive, but that wine, generous wine, was at all times man's best friend. And I am afraid that I acted upon the sentiment; for, about halfpast twelve, I just closed my eyes for one moment, and when I opened them the next moment, I found that my friends had departed, and that I was lying in bed with my clothes on, and that it was six o'clock, and that the rays of the sun were already streaming in at the windows of My Hotel.

ONE

NE can imagine a world in which there should be no bad books, and no indifferent authors-a paradise of critics and of readers, in which the writing of a review would be as exhilarating an occupation as the chanting of a pæan, and men would cut the leaves of a new volume with the same sweet certainty of anticipation with which they now pare a ripe round orange. A pleasant world, indeed, that would be for all of us, and the very thought of such delicious possibilities throws a momentary glow upon the page as we write. For what a very different world is this world of actual authorship and actual criticism, in which we live!

"To act," says Goethe, somewhere, (is it not in Wilhelm Meister" that he says it?) "to act is easy, to think is hard-to suit our action to our thought is troublesome." We paraphrase the form but preserve the meaning of this wise saying, when we aver that "to praise is easy, to judge is hard-to suit our praise to our judgment troublesome." And yet what is praise worth if it be not born of judgment? To the fool, doubtless, much-to the wise man, less than nothing! To the fool, praise is as pomatum is to the hair of man-it sleeks him and comforts him, makes him an agreeable sensation to himself, and, as he fondly believes, a pleasant and presentable being in the eyes of general mankind-while to the wise man praise is as wine which he takes to refresh himself withal, and to encourage his blood and to warm his wits, and, if the wine be not well-made and of a wholesome vintage, the multiplication of glasses is only the multiplication of headaches and dyspepsias.

When a young man has written a book, and judicious friends have cheered him on to the doors of a publisher, and the publisher has accepted his manuscript, and the publisher's printers have put the same handsomely into type, and the binders have bound the sheets fairly into volumes, and the volumes stand glittering in rows upon the shelves of the seller, something positive has been done which deserves to be dealt with vigorously if at all.

By the act which he has thus de

liberately performed, this adventurous youth has virtually advanced a claim to acquaintance with all mankind. He has left his card on the universe, and demands admittance into all societies. He says to every man, woman, and child who knows how to read and can spare fifty cents or a dollar, "I desire that we may be better acquainted. I wish to go with you into your private rooms; to sit with you of an evening; to talk with you alone; to modify your views; to influence your character; to help determine the course of your life on earth; and, for the matter of that, to take a share in settling your everlasting destiny."

This is a serious proposition, certainly! If the same young gentleman should come to your house, O respectable and responsible reader, and make advances to your sons and daughters, would you not take some pains to find out what his character and his probable intentions were? Would you not demand that he should be accredited by some trustworthy friend, before you ac corded him all the privileges which accompany the entrée to your home?

What you would do for your family, the critic is bound to do for the public at large, of which he is, in a literary sense, the father and friend. His duty to them requires him to examine very particularly into the purposes and intents of each new aspirant to the familiarities of the arm-chair and the study-lamp.

But the critic's responsibility is yet wider and more comprehensive. He has to concern himself for the welfare of the ambitious débutant also.

The first duty of a critic, then, is to remember that, behind every book, there is a man-or rather, that there is a man in every book. He is to reflect that the mighty names, which ring through the trumpets of foreign or of antique fame, and thrill his fancy with their sounding music, are the names of men, and indicate the measure of the concentrated influences of character and intellect upon the nations of which they are the boast. And when he considers the literature of his own times, he is to examine first into the value of the personali

ties which inspire that literature, and pass judgment upon the present, and prophesy for the future, according to the results of that examination.

The hopes of a literature hide in the measure of individual life which its makers possess. Those ages are rich in which a great many men appear, writing books because they are men and have something to say, not because books are to be written. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, English literature was barren of individuality to a degree which seems now almost incredible, and, therefore, although it was enormously prolific of books, it occupies less space in the history of letters than ten years of the Regency or of the reign of Victoria. You can swear

to the age of almost any English book that was produced between 1750 and 1800, from glancing over three sentences; for everybody wrote like every body else, and an author no more dreamed of individuality in the style of his sentences, than of individuality in the cut of his coat. To pass, on the contrary, from Lamb to Coleridge, from Byron to Scott, from Wordsworth to Keats; or to go from an essay of Macaulay's to a review of Sydney Smith's, from a dramatic lyric of Browning to an idyl of Tennyson, is like traveling from the moorlands to the meadows, from the hills to the downs, or from the smiling uplands to the sad sea-shore. Every writer of all these has his own charm, because every man of them had his own value. Not less remarkable is the contrast between the literature of France under the empire, and under the restoration and the monarchy of July. In the one case you have writers writing; in the other, men thinking, creating, protesting: in the one case you have dilettantism and virtuosism, uniformity of style, and triviality of substance; in the other, an infinite diversity of development, ardor, reality, and the thousand-fold beauty of reality.

How does our own literature bear the test of such criticism?

Writers we have always had, because we have been always in some degree, at least, an educated people, and education, if it cannot guarantee inspiration, at least continues the traditions of literary ambition, and the phantoms of an interest in literature. But of authors-of men who communicated themselves to manVOL. IX.-25

kind, because there was something in themselves to communicate-our nation has not been so abundantly prolific. From the settlement of the colonies, down to the epoch of our independence, only two men detach themselves from the multitude of cisatlantic scribes, as emphatic individualities, expressing themselves through the written word. Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin are, as it seems to us, the two permanent realities contributed by colonial America to the literary history of the English race.

The colonial position of our ancestors does not suffice to account for this fact; for the colonial Greeks enriched the literature of their language, in the course of a single century, with larger and more splendid contributions than have been made to the wealth of English letters by Anglo-American authorship in twice that period of time. A plausible explanation of the comparative poverty of American literature, through so many years, is to be found, we think, in the fact, that literature is an art, and can only flourish where it is cultivated as an art. The idea of beauty in form is coincident, in the mind of a genuine author, with the idea of truth in substance. He must not only have a purpose worth fulfilling, but he must take pleasure in the fulfillment of that purpose, and he must so fulfill it that the manner of its achievement shall give pleasure to others. Now, our forefathers in English America were extremely hostile to all the arts. Their ideas of education were analogous with those of the Spartans, who held, as Plato tells us, that a knowledge of letters for practical purposes should be common to all; but that no specific encouragement should be given to the cultivation of elegant or speculative literature." Even Jonathan Edwards, who was a great metaphysical author, was not of purpose an author, but simply by the necessity of his genius, which dictated, even to him, a Puritan, an artistic perfection of logical forms with which no Greek or Frenchman could have quarreled.

66

Franklin was more deliberately an artist. He had not made himself familiar with the French literature of this age without imbibing something of the literary temper, and he is fairly entitled, we think, to be considered the first of American authors.

His autobiography is as charming in

men manwise, to try these artists by the laws of art, and to take upon themselves the troublesome office of suiting praise to judgment.

We are notoriously an appreciative people. Nowhere will you hear the merit of good books more genially discussed, or more warmly recognized, than in the most cultivated circles of American society. The delicious criticism of sympathy is exquisitely dealt out, in many an American home, to the most passionate, profound, and earnest artists of the world of letters; and if the number of editions and of copies put into circulation be a fair criterion of the estimation in which an author is held by the public, our British cousins must own that they lag behind ourselves in their appreciation of, and admiration for, not a few of the greatest among those whom the voice of their own best criticism has pronounced the great of English literature.

But it must be confessed that our public criticism is not wholly worthy of our actual rank in the world of letters. Its defects are not sure to be of a mean or malicious kind. We are, happily, not cursed with much of that petty spirit of clique and starveling ill-will, which degrade and make worthless the minor criticism of the London press. But our criticism too commonly wants dignity and sincerity. We deal our praise out very lightly, with a kind of good-natured nonchalance, as if it didn't matter much after all, and it was better

for all parties, on the whole, to laugh than look sad." If life were only one long alternation of dinings and digestions, the philosophy of this jovial old adage would be as sound as it is cheery; but we must not be vexed if a man, who has a serious and intense interest in his art, grows rather sad than merry when all his efforts are rewarded with an undiscriminating salvo of applause, or a patronizing nod of encouragement. Welcome to the true author's soul is the strong, cordial voice which recognizes his honesty and his manliness, and mingles, with sincere praise of that which is beautiful in his work, sturdy reprobation of that which is not beautiful, and a distinct intimation of that which is less than beautiful.

Who can tell how much good Alfred Tennyson gained from that stout, straightforward, large-hearted paper in which old Christopher North took him

so smartly to task for his early follies, and commended, with such a fond and generous warmth, his immortal gifts— his works of real beauty already achieved? Heaven send you such a critic of that first book which you now profoundly meditate, dear and aspiring young friend! You will bless his memory when your laurels are greenest.

If there ever was an author who deserved such a critic, and needed such an one, alike for praise and blame, it is our old acquaintance and esteemed prosepoet, Herman Melville.

It is long, now, since we first sailed with Melville to Typee, but we shall never forget the new sensations of that delectable voyage. Over silent stretches of the sleeping sea it led us, and left us on a miraculous shore, to live there a miraculous life.

The tropic island, into whose delicious glades we wandered, was not, indeed, wholly new to us; for we had been there before, partly in the way of business, and partly on a pleasure trip, with Bougainville and La Perouse, with Foster and Cook. But the manner of our being there was intensely new. It was the dream of the passionate and despairing lover of "Locksley Hall," fulfilled in the spirit of Robinson Crusoe, and with all the "modern improvements." We had, indeed, burst all links of habit, and had wandered to a happy world of most unconventional bliss-to islets favored of heaven.

"Larger constellations burning, mellow moons

and happy skies,

Breadths of tropic shade, and palms in cluster, knots of paradise;

Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,

Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the crag; Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy fruited tree, Summer isles of Eden, lying in dark purple spheres of sea."

Love and balls, the opera and angling, boating and swimming, and the piquant delights of a highly original cuisine were none of them denied to us. Refreshing converse with our fellow-men alternated with the most bracing solitude and the deepest communion with the soul of nature. In fact, we tasted all the most refined pleasures of civilization, in a new and sublimated form, while we exhausted the primeval poetry of savage life. But for the slight and single drawback of cannibalism, making