Recent Literature

IN three works of fiction lately published we have some very faithful studies of American life in the principal phases which it once showed, and which the events of not many years have put quite out of sight if not out of being. In the Oldtown stories the Yankee world of tradition is revived ; in Mr. DeForest’s “ Kate Beaumont ” the high-tone Southern society of the times before the war, as it was with slavery and chivalry, with hard drinking and easy shooting, appears again ; and in Mr. Eggleston’s “ Hoosier Schoolmaster” we are made acquainted with the rudeness and ugliness of the intermediate West, after the days of pioneering, and before the days of civilization, — the West of horse-thief gangs and of mobs, of protracted meetings and of extended sprees, of ignorance drawn slowly through religious fervors towards the desire of knowledge and decency in this world. The scene of the story is in Hoopole County, Indiana, a locality which we hope the traveller would now have some difficulty in finding, and in a neighborhood settled, apparently, by poor whites from Virginia and Kentucky, sordid Pennsylvania Dutchmen, and a sprinkling of cute dishonest Yankees. The plot is very simple and of easy prevision from the first, being the struggles of Ralph Hartsook with the young idea in the district school on Flat Creek, where the twig was early bent to thrash the schoolmaster. He boards round among the farmers, starting with “ old Jack Means,” the school trustee, whose son Bud, the most formidable bully among his pupils, he wins over to his own side, and whose daughter, with her mother’s connivance, falls in love with him and resolves to marry him. But the schoolmaster loves their bound girl Hannah, and makes enemies of the mother and daughter ; and they are not slow to aid in the persecution which rises against him, and ends in his arrest for a burglary committed by the gang of the neighborhood, including some of the principal citizens of Flat Creek. Of course it comes out all right, though the reader is none the less eager because he foresees the fortunate end. The story is very well told in a plain fashion, without finely studied points. It is chiefly noticeable, however, as a picture of manners hitherto strange to literature, and the characters are interesting as part of the picture of manners, rather than as persons whose fate greatly concerns us ; yet they all have a movement of their own, too, and are easily known from each other, — which is much for characters. One of the best is old Mrs. Means, who is also one of the worst in another sense. Her talk is the talk of all Flat Creek; and we cannot suggest the dialect in which the conversation of the story is chiefly written better than by giving a speech of hers : —

“ Here Mrs. Means stopped to rake a live coal out of the fire with her skinny finger, and then to carry it in her skinny palm to the bowl — or to the hole — of her cobpipe. When she got the smoke agoing she proceeded:

“ ' You see this ere bottom land was all Congress land in them there days, and it sold for a dollar and a quarter, and I says to my ole man, “ Jack,” says I, “Jack, do you git a plenty while you ’re a gittin’. Git a plenty while you ’re a gittin’,” says I, “ fer ’t won't never be no cheaper’n ’t is now,” and it ha’ n’t been, I knowed’t would n’t,’ and Mrs. Means took the pipe from her mouth to indulge in a good chuckle at the thought of her financial shrewdness, ‘ “ Git a plenty while you ’re a gittin’,” says I. I could see, you know, they was a powerful sight of money in Congress land. That’s what made me say, “ Git a plenty while you ’re a gittin’.” And Jack, he’s wuth lots and gobs of money, all made out of Congress land. Jack didn’t git rich by hard work. Bless you, no ! Not him. That a’n’t his way. Hard work a’n’t, you know. ’T was that air six hundred dollars he got along of me, all salted down into Flat Crick bottoms at a dollar and a quarter a acre, and ’ t was my sayin’, “ Git a plenty while you ’re a gittin’,” as done it.’ And here the old ogre laughed, or grinned horribly, at Ralph, showing her few straggling, discolored teeth.

“ Then she got up and knocked the ashes out of her pipe, and laid the pipe away and walked round in front of Ralph. After adjusting the ‘chunks’ so that the fire would burn, she turned her yellow face toward Ralph, and scanning him closely came out with the climax of her speech in the remark, ‘ You see as how, Mr. Hartsook, the man what gits my Mirandy ’ll do well. Flat Crick land’s worth nigh upon a hundred a acre.’ ”

We should say the weak side of Mr. Eggleston’s story was the pathos that gets into it through some of Little Shocky’s talk, and the piety that gets into it through Bud Means ; and we mean merely that these are not so well managed as the unregeneracy, and not at all that they are not good things to have in a story. The facts about Shocky are touching enough, and the facts about Bud most respectable.

Mr. Eggleston is the first to touch in fiction the kind of life he has represented, and we imagine that future observers will hardly touch it in more points. Its traits seem to be all here, both the good and the bad ; but that it is a past or passing state of things is sufficiently testified by the fact, to which Mr. Eggleston alludes in his Preface, that the story, as it appeared serially, was nowhere more popular than in Southern Indiana. Flat Creek, Hoopole County, would not, we imagine, have been so well pleased thirty years ago with a portrait which, at any rate, is not flattered.

Some of the worst characteristics of the West have been inherited from the slaveholding South,—from Virginia and North Carolina and Maryland, —out of which the poor whites emigrated with their vicious squalor to the new Territories ; and there is no very great difference between some of the persons depicted in “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” and low-down people who figure in some chapters of “ Kate Beaumont,” except that the Western type, escaped from the social domination of the great planters, is full of a rude independence lacking in its ancestry. The FlatCreekers of Hoopole County, Indiana, are of the same race and lineage as the poor whites of Saxonburg, South Carolina, and the same system is responsible for both. But in spite of their bad instincts and their inherited vices, the Flat-Creekers take to the protracted meeting and the spellingschool for amusement, and the Saxonburgers to the fierce carouse which Mr. DeForest has so strongly painted ; after fifty years Saxonburg shall perhaps attain the level which Flat Creek reached twentyfive years ago. There is at least now an opportunity of change for the better in that which could hardly have changed for the worse, the conditions on which Mr. DeForest founds his story having vanished with slavery.

Those who followed the fortunes of Kate Beaumont from month to month in these pages will agree with us that the author did not present Southern people in an entirely odious light, whatever may have been his treatment of Southern life. On the contrary, there are few of his persons who have not some fascination that makes us almost forget their frailties, from Colonel Kershaw to General Johnson. Hitherto Southern character has been treated almost always in direct reference to slavery, and Mr. DeForest gains an immense advantage in refusing to deal with slavery except as a social fact. In this way we are brought nearer to his Southerners as men and women, and enabled to like or dislike them for purely personal reasons; though any one who supposed him indifferent to the question in abeyance would singularly mistake him, and would lose half his meaning. The whole effect of his story is so lifelike, that we are persuaded to believe it the first full and perfect picture of Southern society of the times before the war ; certainly it is the most satisfactory ; and if the duels and informal combats and debauches and difficulties of all kinds seem too frequent for the truth, we must not forget that our author is working artistically, with a right to assemble the dramatic points of his material, and we must remember also what the truth was about that bygone state of things. As we read Mr. DeForest we might fancy ourselves in the midst of such genteel Irish life as Thackeray touches in “The Luck of Barry Lyndon,” or among Florentine or Veronese gentlemen of the Middle Ages. The structure of that old South Carolinian society is none the less feudal because the supremacy of its aristocrats is a matter of personal quality and of sentiment rather than of legal force : and one of the nicest and most amusing points of Mr. DeForest’s study is that the young Beaumonts, educated in Paris and Berlin, come back to their native barbarism with an almost unshaken devotion. Frank McAlister, to be sure, returns from Europe with a profound contempt for this barbarism, and a particular scorn for the family feud of the Beaumonts and McAlisters : he means to develop the mineral resources of South Carolina and civilize her; but even he loves her above all other lands, and once happily married to Kate Beaumont he can do nothing but acquiesce in the local conditions, and become a model country gentleman after the best Carolinian fashion. The other McAlisters, with all their seriousness and coolness, are as ready for the duel and the rencounter as the Beaumonts, and in none of the many particulars touched do the proprieties of South Carolina seem to be violated. The elders — passionate, homicidal, affectionate old Peyton Beaumont, and his lifelong enemy Judge McAlister, urbane and canny and cold — are equally stiff-necked and besotted in their contempt of all the world outside of their native State, and in their love of her political and social traits.

The personage who rises above all in a peculiar beauty and nobility of character is old Colonel Kershaw, whose virtues are presented to us with a clearness and force worthy of them. It is so like a study from some actual character known to Mr. DeForest, that we hesitate to credit him with its invention. Serene, brave, peaceful, that good old man, the type of such Southern manhood as flowered into the tranquil and simple greatness of Washington, is one of most realistic figures in a novel abounding in diversely marked characters.

As we said in speaking of “ Overland,”Mr. DeForest has an uncommon success in the presentation of his personages. There is not one in this book that is feebly treated, and the range is great. Vincent Beaumont, somewhat cynical, Parisianized, quick-tempered, yet not bad-hearted ; Poinsett, fat, easy, persifleur, yet a Beaumont through and through when it comes to the family honor; Tom, the young drunkard, with his blackguard self-respect, and his boyish desire to excel in devotion to the family fend ; — how distinctly they are set before us in contrast to the McAlisters ! Among these, Bruce appears only subordinately, yet we know almost as from our own senses his tall, consumptive person, his winning manner, his husky voice ; as we do Bent Armitage with his game foot and his slangy talk. Those two ancients, Colonel Lawson and General Johnson, so opposite in their flatteries and their purposes, with a broad likeness in their eloquent habits, good as they are, are no better drawn than all the loafers and politicians of Hartland, or the wild low-downers of Saxonburg. Of the women, Nelly Armitage, as a character, is the best, and her courageous patience with her drunken husband is one of the best passages in the book; it is quite conceivable of her that she should first favor Frank McAlister’s love for Kate, then want him killed because he tied her brother Tom, and then again espouse his cause because he is so magnanimous and so miserable. It is not, we suppose, one of the least truthful strokes in the general portrayal of South Carolinianism, that both the Beaumonts and McAlisters are agreed that Frank might have killed Tom without giving just cause of complaint, but having tied him he has afforded him ground for a challenge.

Kate and Frank are interesting as the centre around which the rapid events move ; and for lovers they are very well indeed : she lovable and worshipful, he loving and worshipping her with a large, ceaseless, desperate, unquenchable devotion that is itself full of character. Yet we doubt if the old coquette, Mrs. Chester, and the drunken Randolph Armitage, are not more entertaining to middle-life. Mrs. Chester is made too much of, however, for a woman so simply selfish and disagreeable.

We say nothing of the plot of this excellent novel, for all our readers know it, and we feel that we have but scantly indicated its merits, which besides those of character - painting are humor, dramatic faculty, and a vigorous and agreeable style. With “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion” and “Overland,” “Kate Beaumont” forms, to our mind, strong proof that we are not so much lacking in an American novelist as in a public to recognize him.

A curious contrast to the kind of talk we have quoted from Mr. Eggleston’s story might be found on almost any page of “ Oldtown Fireside Stories.” Uncouth as the Yankee talk is, it is always glib and easy, and suggests the life of an old provincialized community, with its settled order and its intimacy and familiarity : it suggests the occupation of a new country by large companies of men of the same stock, creed, and education ; while the Hoosier talk, loath, languid, awkward, with its want of fixed character, hints a people of various origin, silenced, each man, by his solitary battle with the wilderness, and carrying his aguish stiff-jointedness into a dialect which shows upon a ground of Southern phrase the rusticities of nearly every part of the country. In everything the life of one book is a contrast to that of the other, though in both it is rural life. Sam Lawson, who tells these stories, is doubtless the most worthless person in Oldtown ; but compare his amusing streaks of God-fearing piety, his reverence for magistracies and dignities, his law-abidingness, his shrewdness, his readiness, with the stolid wickedness, the indifference and contempt of those backwoods ruffians for every one else, and you will have some conception of the variety of the brood that the bird of freedom has gathered under her wings. To be sure, the backwoods have long been turned into railroad-ties and cord-wood, and Oldtown is no more , but this only adds to the interest and value of true pictures of them. Mrs. Stowe, we think, has hardly done better work than in these tales, which have lured us to read them again and again by their racy quaintness and the charm of the shiftless Lawson’s character and manner. The material is slight and common enough, ghosts, Indians, British, and ministers lending their threadbare interest to most of them ; but round these familiar protagonists moves a whole Yankee village-world, the least important figure of which savors of the soil and “ breathes full East.” The virtues of fifty years and more ago, the little local narrowness and intolerance, the lurking pathos, the hidden tenderness of a rapidly obsolescent life, are all here, with the charm of romance in their transitory aspects,— which, we wonder, will the Hibernian Massachusetts of future times appreciate ? At least this American generation can, keenly, profoundly, and for ourselves, we have a pleasure in the mere talk of Sam Lawson which can only come from the naturalness of first-rate art.

Among other recent fictions is “ Richard Vandermarck,” by the author of “ Rutledge,” a book that made more talk in other days than we hope a novel of the same force would now. Yet it had prepared us to expect from Mrs. Harris’s writing not the highest intellectual joy, but a certain temperate amusement, which would be as innocent as agreeable. In this novel, however, which is clearly meant to be powerful, we have various crimes and casualties introduced, an extremely unpleasant plot, an unsatisfactory end, and all this without any charm in the telling of the tale or intelligence in the analysis of the persons of the story. There is an absurd disproportion between the heroine’s character and fate. As represented in the novel, she is the most ordinary, unripe school-girl that we remember having met in fiction ; she falls mildly in love with a mysterious foreigner who has a wife in obscurity. That is natural enough ; the loves of school-girls are seldom wise ; in fact, a story of wise love would not be lively reading. But here we have this poor girl’s infatuation and mad determination to “ sin ” exalted as a glorious proof of love’s power ; and the morality of the story is only preserved by the foreigner’s drowning himself. To the reader, however, the story is rather a proof of the silliness of ill-trained girls than of the majesty of love. The only excuse for her viciousness is her ignorance. Instead of being moved to say, “ Poor girl, there may be times when conventional morality is too austere. Fly with the foreigner to a lonely isle in the Mediterranean and be happy! ” we only think, “ Poor little girl ! What a pity it is you act in this way. What a greater pity that any one should be found to write about it. How ashamed you will be when you are grown up ! A strict governess would be the best person for you.” The reputation of the authoress will certainly bring her many readers, and especially inexperienced ones, and we regret to see her employed in fostering the frivolities of the ignorant young. It is a book which will only do harm.

One of the best novels which has appeared in a long time is Mrs. Edwards’s “ Ought We to Visit Her ? ” — that is, Jane, wife of Mr. Theobald, who before her marriage was a dancer, or about to be, and at any rate of origin and associations altogether Bohemian. The people who will not visit her are the relations of Mr. Theobald, and all the respectable people in Chalkshire, among whom he takes her to live after a free, happy, hap-hazard life on the Continent. It would be a pity to tell the story', further than to say that the pretty, goodhearted, witty, charming little victim, shunned for no reason by these good people, and deserted by her worthless husband, who takes up an old flirtation with an old reprobate fine lady to beguile the dulness of Chalkshire, comes near being driven into wickedness, but is saved on the way to elopement by one of those sudden fevers which lie in wait in novels, and is reconciled to her husband, and joyfully leaves Chalkshire with him and goes back to their free life on the Continent. Dull respectability and convention are too much for them, and they must fly or be crushed ; yet she has done no wrong. The merit of the story is in the clearness with which Jane’s character is portrayed as of that strength and simple goodness and fidelity which perhaps as often go with a fair face as with a plain one ; and in the evident reality of the pictures of society. Since Thackeray we do not know of better studies of social meanness and feebleness ; and all is done with a temperance and selfrestraint wonderful in a woman.

The “Muskingum Legends” are, to our thinking, by no means the best work the author could now show the public, and we speak of the book because we wish to recognize a real talent in him rather than because we find his excellence here. The “ Legends ” themselves seem a fruit of earlier years, and are few in number, the greater part of the volume being made up of sketches of Germany,—a very interesting account, among the rest, of the leading German newspaper, the Allgemeine Zeitung. In “Some German Characteristics” Mr. Powers mentions that curious fancy for denationalizing themselves which the Austrian Germans have, and becoming in name and language Magyars in Hungary and Italians in the Tyrol ; and otherwise he shows a good feeling for facts and an unusual tendency to philosophize them. “ Student Rambles in Prussia ” reveals a clear eye and quick thought, and will be found entertaining even after so much spiked helmet as the whole world has lately had. “ California Saved” and “The Freedman’s Bureau ” indicate what the author can do in observing our own affairs and generalizing upon them, and reveal more and more a temperate, solid, and unprejudiced disposition. It is not that he is always right, but that he always desires to be so, which makes us hope for much valuable work from him. In some Californian papers which he has printed in the “ Atlantic,” we suppose all our readers noticed a freshness and force of description, and a style that was very pleasant and quite Mr. Powers’s own.

We trust, also, since we respect our readers very much, and desire to think well of their perceptions and opinions, that they have felt the original quality of Mrs. Thaxter’s poems, which are now collected and given the general public in a very pretty volume. It seems a pity that all should not know how truly out of the sea is this verse, so full of the sea’s beauty and terribleness ; but we must not ask the poet to say more than she has chosen, and the wild shores, the lighthouse in calm and storm, the wrecks, and the graves of the shipwrecked men, must go without locality save to those who can read between the lines. A seriousness, almost a sadness, broods over the most peaceful pictures in the book, as if the poet were too deeply sensible of all the unrest and trouble held in abeyance in the scene to be gay ; and the course of nearly every poem is to seek relief from the peace, or tempest, or mystery in a religious aspiration or reassurance. This gives a monotony to the meditative poems, and the other pieces have an advantage that might not appear if both kinds were read singly. Still we believe that “ The Spaniards’ Graves ” is the best of all the poems, because having moved the reader’s heart with a just emotion, it leaves him to think his own thought. We do not mean, however, that “ The Wreck of the Pocahontas ” is not very fine, nor that any of the poems is less than good. They are singularly equal in their goodness, and there is none of them but has lines that distinctly picture what the writer has seen and felt. Notable for such lines are “ Rock Weeds,” “The Wreck of the Pocahontas,” “ Land-locked,” “ Off Shore,” “Twilight,”—nay, all, including the “Poems for Children,” which we are loath to give up to them.

We do not know that we can promise the reader of Mr. Piatt’s new volume any pleasure different in kind from that he must have felt in other books of the same poet; but we can assure him of the renewal of the charm they had. No one else has so well expressed one of the most characteristic sentiments of Western life, — that tenderness for the past, which, like the homesickness of the emigrant made perpetual in the new land, attends all its rapid changes with sad regret, and clings pensively to the “ landmarks ” of its near antiquity. The first poem in the book is full of this pathos, for it tells how, in the sudden Western city, a fond heart dreams of the paternal farm lost under its streets and houses; and four or five poems that follow are in the same mood, with the same mournful and pleasing music. The other pieces are of a sort which Mr. Piatt has taught us to expect from him ; the thought sometimes as fugitive and tricksy as faces seen by firelight on a window-pane, with here and there also strenuous lines that take the sense mightily, and always original feeling, grace, admirable skill in verse.

The town of Rye, situated within territory long under dispute, by Connecticut and New York, numbers among its citizens and ministers the Rev. Charles W. Baird, one of those diligent, painstaking, and inquisitive historical students, to whom, as a class, our towns, counties, and States are indebted for so much unrequited labor in searching out and presenting in an interesting and authentic way the annals of the past. The labor of six years of research on Mr. Baird’s part has resulted in the admirably told story of his native town as gathered from the fortunes of the community and the successive generations of its members. Mr. Baird makes, indeed, an exhaustive study of his subject. He relates the early settlement of the region whose scenery and natural features he describes : he searches out the names, character, and personal history of the first adventurers, and portrays for us the hard circumstances, some of them peculiar to the experience of that company, under which they had to struggle for life subsistence and the institutions essential to a municipal organization. He revives for us the old household life, the means of intercourse by old Indian trails, and hard, winding roads, and the embarrassments attending communication with other settlements ; he tells us of the Indians, the old physicians and lawyers, the slaves, and the schoolmasters and ministers, and the notable men and women of the early days. Very pleasant are his pictures of the peaceful times in that locality. But his pen has to be largely occupied with relations of times and occasions and scenes of strife. For each generation of its inhabitants Rye had matter of exciting and alarming experience. King Philip’s war, the war of the Revolution, in which Rye occupied the unenviable position of so-called neutral ground, and the war of the Rebellion, come in with their intenser panics to vary the long and vexatious course of controversy as to pre-emptory rights, territorial altercations, shifting allegiance between two States, and resistance to arbitrary measures on the part of New York governors. We do indeed miss from these pages those quaint passages in the delineation of domestic, municipal, and ecclesiastical affairs, and in the description of individuals of marked character with their romantic experiences, which are the charm of many histories of the old towns of a strictly New England planting and discipline. But this lack in the book before us is offset by some peculiar incidents in the annals of Rye connected with its position as a border town, the jurisdiction of which was contested,

Rye was first settled by the English, while the Dutch were still holding New York as the Province of New Netherlands. It embraced the territory called by its aboriginal occupants, the Mohegan Indians, Peningo, lying on the shore of Long Island Sound, with the small neighboring island, about a mile long, separated from it by a narrow channel, called Manussing. The settlers were a company of New England men, going from Greenwich in 1660. Three original purchasers, under the lead of Peter Disbrow, obtained a deed of the territory from the Indians. The company was afterwards extended to a body called “ The Eighteen Proprietors.” They considered themselves as owners of the land as far back to the unknown jumping-off place at which nature furnished a boundary. The company held the lands in common. Enough of it was immediately portioned off to its actual occupants for tillage, pasturage, and woodland, while the little band of partners were held to be owners with a right to sell, transfer, or bequeath their respective shares in the great undivided remainder, as the expansion of the settlement or the needs of the people should open the reserved wilderness. That word “ wilderness,” however, which we use to designate the soil occupied here by the original European colonists, was hardly applicable to very many of the patches of which our imported civilization availed itself. Wherever they could do so, the early settlers took possession of meadow lands covered only with a rank grass which yielded an arable field or a grazing pasturage after the fire had passed over it. Other patches, like those first improved by the proprietors of Peningo, had been cleared and tilled by the Indians. Had Rye remained undisturbed under the jurisdiction of Connecticut, it would have had, like the other New England settlements, a comparatively tranquil development, under like civil and religious institutions. But as it was claimed by New York even when it was not actually under that government, the proprietary rights of the settlers were always in peril. Both the Dutch and the English governors of New York were in the habit of giving away land most lavishly to their favorites. They thus bestowed unmeasured tracts of the size of dukedoms, and even gave the same regions to different parties, and had no regard to Indian deeds, squatter rights of possession, or the claims of those who had given lands nearly their whole value by improving them. In this way a certain John Harrison received, in 1695, a grant which included a great part of Rye. By the same arbitrary prerogative English governors of New York introduced and made compulsory the support of the English Church in that settlement, though the large body of the people had no sympathy with it.

Up to the year 1683 Rye had annually sent its deputies to the Court at Hartford, and the journey was not by any means one of ease or pleasure. Connecticut, after its fashion in those days, considered its authority available, and even under stringent obligation, for providing and insisting that every settlement under its control should be supplied with a learned, able, and devoted minister, — of course of the true faith, — and that the people should unite in his support, and maintain religious observances. The Court was greatly exercised by the seeming neglect and indifference of Rye about these essential matters appertaining to godliness. Repeated reminders and rebukes were administered to the people, and finally the Court declared that if they did not at once meet the requirements of the case, compulsory measures should be taken, and a fit preacher and pastor should be selected and set over them. Though it does not appear that Rye was a godless place, or that the people were in any way alienated from religion, it must be owned that they did not make such efforts and sacrifices in its cause as did neighboring settlements that were even sparser and poorer. It is evident that the zeal of the Puritan Court at Hartford was somewhat sharpened by the rumor that the actual wants of the people of Rye were fully satisfied by certain irregular ministrations of the Word without “ ordinances,” provided by a class of strolling or local volunteers, gifted brethren, or Quakers from Long Island. Such substitutes only aggravated the difficulty. But Rye was soon put upon a regular footing, in this respect, with the other settlements. The Court at Hartford afterwards proved its friendliness by granting a brief of solicitations for help, by which in all the churches of the jurisdiction valuable contributions were made to Rye to help its people, oppressed by the support of the Church of England, to build a meetinghouse for the Puritan worship.

Though Rye was ceded to New York in 1683, it “ revolted ” back again to Connecticut in 1697. When a New York sheriff came to the place at that time to serve a writ, “up comes Major Selliek of Stamford, with fifty Dragones, whom he called his life guard, with their arms presented ” in behalf of Connecticut. But the resistance was ineffectual. By command of the king, Rye was remanded to the Province of New York in 1700.

Rye, like all the other old New England towns, had just enough concern with negro slavery to realize its evils, and to make comparatively easy the work of abolition. The Duke of York, who held the Province of New York, was himself at the head of an English company chartered with peculiar privileges for carrying on the slavetrade. An extract from the Rye records, a hundred and thirty years after its settlement, is worth quoting, alike as recognizing the existence of chattel slavery and as a free experiment in the art of spelling. James Mott alienates to Humphrey Underhill “A Sartain neger named Jack aged about fortune yeres or thareabouts.” To all the other evils of shiftlessness and wastefulness attending the tolerance of negro slavery, New York and the towns under the jurisdiction of that Province were subject to all the harassing panics arising from apprehended negro insurrections. When a supposed plot for burning the city was detected in 1712, nineteen negroes were hung, on the charge of being concerned in it.

The sorest experiences of the people of this place were incident to its position during nearly the whole period of the Revolutionary struggle. Neutral territory it was, indeed, but the inhabitants and others in a wide neighborhood — such of them at least as did not belong successively to both sides of the combatants—were forced to an all the more intense espousal of the foreign or native interests which were under contest. Direful sufferings from lawlessness, treachery, and all the brutalities, havoc, and fierce passions of war were the lot of the people of Rye. But the place has its roll of heroes of either sex.

A town history, marked by such varieties of incident and experience as are recorded in this large and elegant volume, is a rich contribution towards what will prove to be the complex annals of our whole country.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.²

IN his Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale M. Renan has chosen no simple subject, although it is one that will recommend the book to every reader. He has a good right to speak, because, to a certain extent, he foresaw the danger into which France was running; and even when the country was apparently at the height of its prosperity, he was able to detect the ignorance

La Réforme Intel'ectuel'e et Morale. Par EaNEST RENAN, Membre de l’Institut. Paris, 1872.

Notes sur l' Angleterre. Par H. TAINE. Paris, 1872.

Tableaux de Siége. Par THÉOPHILE GAUTIER. Paris, 1871.

Le Drame du Vésuv?. Par M, BEULÉ, Membre de l’Institut. Paris, 1872.

Die grosses Piano-forten Virtuosen unserer Zeit. Von W. VON LENZ. Berlin, 1872.

Zehn A usgewählte Essays zur Einführung in das Studium der modernen Kunst von HERMAN GRIMM. Berlin, 1871.

and corruption that were preparing the government, and with it the country, for their defeat. What France has more especially needed is a healthy opposition ; the weakness of that which existed was clearly shown in the failure of the government of the 4th of September; and M. Renan, in the plan that he suggests for the remoulding of the country, shows often too much of the visionary enthusiasm of the scholar, and too little of a practical comprehension of affairs. Then, too, he is an aristocrat, and we are very far from the time when scholars and aristocrats shall arrange the method of government without the interference of the grimy-handed workman. What stands most in the way of his plan is democracy, and democracy is as selfish as despotism. Universal suffrage he would so far modify as to make two chambers, one of which should consist of members to be chosen by electors directly appointed by the people, and the other formed in such a way that every force in the state should have one or more representatives in proportion to its importance. Thus there would be a body consisting of professors, merchants, manufacturers, officers of the army and navy, members of the clergy, etc. The large cities, too, should have representatives. In regard to a question which is attracting more or less interest in the rest of the world, he thus expresses his opinion : —

“ I confess that I should prefer a system still more representative, in which women and children should be counted. In the primary elections I would have the husband vote for his wife (in other words, have his vote count for two), the father vote for his children under age ; I should likewise imagine that the mother and sister might intrust their power to a son or brother who should be of age.”

But, whatever may be thought of the practicability of M. Renan’s design, the wisdom of his views upon the urgent need in France of a sounder and wider system of education cannot be denied. Often before he has earnestly appealed in behalf of this. He would imitate the German universities, and, as far as possible, throw aside all the official formalities that have so hampered the educational advance of France. We have not space for a full discussion of the reforms he proposes ; his opinions are well worth reading, however. In addition, the volume contains some articles that had already appeared in the Re-vue, and two letters to M. Strauss upon the war. Both of these are good, but the second is a model of elegant, courteous ridicule. It has lines in it that must make M. Strauss blush in darkest midnights, in densest Theban solitudes. The best thing about the book is its seriousness. The author keenly feels, as every Frenchman must, the troubles of his country, and is earnest in his hopes for reform, and reform for its own sake, not for the purpose of revenge. He says, “With serious efforts a rebirth might be possible, and I am convinced that, if France were to walk for ten years in the way we have tried to sketch, the esteem and good wishes of the world would absolve it from the need of revenge. Yes, it would be possible that one day this terrible war might be blessed and regarded as the commencement of a regeneration. It is not the only time that a war would have been more profitable to the conquered than to the conqueror. If the stupidity, negligence, sloth, and improvidence of countries did not necessarily entail their defeat, it would be hard to say to what degree of degradation the human race might not descend. War is one of the conditions of progress, the lash that prevents a country from falling asleep, by means of forcing self-satisfied mediocrity to awake from its apathy.....The day when humanity shall have become a great pacified Roman empire without outside enemies will be the day when intelligence and morality will run the greatest risks.” Here, M. Renan speaks of human nature rather as it is than as we are told it is going to be in the improved future.

M. Taine’s Notes sur l' Angleterre, a translation of which is about to appear in England, is very entertaining, and, more than that, very good. For, however we may be affected by his philosophizing, no one can deny that he is a keen observer and lively narrator. In this volume he gives us only notes, made from day to day, on everything he saw, and the result is a picturesque representation of various sides of life in England. He follows the Englishman from his nurse’s arms to school, to the university, to his club, home, church, everywhere in fact, and jots down everything he sees. If he were a trained detective he could not be sharper eyed. Nor does he come with any prejudices to color what he sees. In fact, this book only adds to the proof given by his other works that M. Taine is not the most French of Frenchmen. He is rather a clever man, with admirably trained powers of observation, a cosmopolitan with a French education underlying all that he has done for himself in later years, and which has given him his tendency to arrange all the world in labelled compartments, so that the Englishman represents to him so much beef, a damp climate, Puritanism, a home, and insularity ; the Frenchman, theatres, the café, the boulevards, esprit, elegance, etc. But, while he draws these distinctions very sharply, he does not by any means hate and despise the Englishman for differing from the Frenchman. He notes the points of dissimilarity and tries to explain it ; if his explanations are often insufficient and superficial, they are always entertaining. Towards the end of the book he gives us the general impression that his observation had made upon him, and some lines of this may be quoted : “ In general, the Frenchman comprehends by means of classification and deduction, the Englishman by induction, by dint of attention and memory, thanks to the lucid and persistent representation of a quantity of individual facts, by the indefinite accumulation of documents brought from far and near.....In France there is nothing established that the young man can adopt; the Constitution, perpetually altered, has no authority; the religion belongs to the Middle Ages ; old forms are discredited, the new ones are only sketched. From the time he is sixteen years old, doubt seizes him ; he wavers , if he is at all intelligent, his most urgent need is to establish his own convictions, or at least his opinions. In England he finds established forms, the religion is almost reasonable, and the Constitution almost excellent ; the awakening intelligence finds beforehand the broad line of its future beliefs. It does not need to build for itself a complete habitation ; at most it conceives the enlargement of a Gothic window, the cleaning up of a cellar, the mending of a staircase.” If this is not profound philosophy, the descriptive parts are well done.

Théophile Gautier has published a volume of delightful sketches of Paris during the siege called Tableaux de Siége. We do not find here any bursts of patriotism nor serious propositions of reform. M. Gautier never shone as a sturdy moralist, and the war he has simply observed with the eye of an artist, watching the changes that it made in his beloved Paris. Unable to visit foreign parts, he makes the longest journey he can in one of the Seine boats, another day he strolls upon the ramparts, after the siege was ended he revisited his villa, which he found untouched, and everything he describes in his really inimitable style. The book is well worth getting, and may be particularly recommended to those who languished during the war for new French works, and since have grown tired of nothing but reports of campaigns and diaries of the siege. One page of his description is worth large numbers of such histories of the siege as we have received. It is an artist who writes, and not a bookcompiler.

In Le Drame du Vésuve, M. Beulé has collected a series of papers that appeared in the Revue just before the war upon the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and the results of recent excavations. He suggests that probably beneath the ashes and lava may still be found the ruins and remains of other cities of still older civilization than those we know about from history.

It is “with all reserves” that we venture to recommend here a book that perhaps belongs properly to another department, but we hope to be pardoned by those who may be persuaded to read it. It is Lenz’s Grossen Piano-forten Virtuosen unserer Zeit. Those he has chosen are Liszt, Chopin, Tausig, and Henselt. He speaks of them all from his personal acquaintance, mentions many valuable reminiscences, and, in general, his book will be found of interest to such of our readers as play the piano, if any such there be. As bits of biography they are invaluable. Indeed, in our opinion, the book might well be translated by some music-loving German scholar.

Herman Grimm has collected and published ten of his essays as an introduction to the study of modern art. Many of them will be found to be old acquaintances, others again will probably be new to most of his readers.