The Contributors' Club

I DOUBT if it is generally known that a Historical Manuscript Commission in England was organized by act of Parliament in 1869. Her majesty’s commission appointed a board of commissioners to inquire where papers and manuscripts, deeds and other instruments, are deposited, to visit those places, the muniment rooms in old castles and manors, the town-halls, libraries, etc., and to make abstracts and catalogues of the more important material that might be found. This board began its labors by issuing numerous invitations to persons in the kingdom who would be most likely to subserve the plan. They were asked for coöperation and for permission to search their collections. One hundred and eighty prominent men, earls, lords, and commoners, replied and gave cordial permission. Since that time many more, observing the interesting success of this commission, must have responded.

The first report of its labors was published in 1870. Since that time the reports have annually increased in bulk. The material thus brought to light depends for its value upon the specialty of the reader: the historian, lawyer, antiquarian, man of science and of letters, will find his separate satisfaction; but it is safe to say that the whole matter is surprisingly attractive. Here are a few specimens, taken at random during a careful search for new traces of Shakespeare.

In the second report there is a letter of Pope to Jacob Tonson, Jr., written in 1731. Pope hopes that in Theobald’s proposed edition of Shakespeare the editor will not publish any impertinent remarks on him. And on November 14, 1731, Pope writes to old Tonson: “ I am almost ready to be angry with your nephew for being the publisher of Theobald’s Shakespeare, who, according to the laudable custom of commentators, first served himself of my pains, and then abused me for ’em.” This Tonson was the famous publisher and founder of the Kit-Cat Club. Whatever Theobald did to make Pope touchy, it is certain that some of his readings, like that famous one, " babbled of green fields, throw clear lights on Shakespeare’s text.

In a large wooden ease containing many hundreds of ancient deeds relating to Warwickshire property, there was found a paper indorsed “John Weale’s note of the grant to me of Shakespeare’s house by Goodwifc Sharpe.” The date stands thus incomplete, " Mar. 4, 97.” In another paper we read that John Weale of Hatters bad given, granted, and assigned to Job Throckmorton of Huseley, in the county of Warwick, all his right, etc., in a certain cottage or tenement, with the appurtenances in Huseley aforesaid, wherein one William Shakespeare now dwelleth; and the date of this is 1697. The name was frequent in England. There is a bond, dated November 27, 1606, of Thomas Shakespearc of Lutterworth, County Leicester, to James Whiteloeke, for 26s. Sd.

. In Richard Orlebar’s collection at Hinwick House, in a quarto volume of letters, there is one from Mrs. Orlebar to a friend, dated April 22, 1742: “ Last Monday I saw a monument to Shakespeare made with many hundred of flower buds and grapes, opposite the Sign of the Castle in Fleet Street.” Apropos of what? In that month of April, Garrick, who had hardly been upon the stage more than a year, was playing Lear to the astonishment of the town. We venture to surmise a meeting of Garrick and his friends at the Castle.

We find John Florio, compiler of the celebrated Italian dictionary, contemporary with Shakespeare, and the original of Holofernes, praying hard to the lord treasurer for his arrears on work done for the crown. An account-book of the executors of Robert Nowell of Gray’s Inn, brother of Alexander Nowell who was dean at St. Paul’s 1560-1601, would rather startlingly make it out that the poet was a “ free scholar ” at the Merchant Taylor’s School, and passed thence to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge.

Among the MS. of the Rt. Hon. Earl de la Warr is .a petition from Sara Shakespeare to help her get the amount of executions recovered by her agent, Henry Leigh, and one Smith, his brother-in-law. Query, Was she the widow of a brother of the poet?

But iu another report we come upon definite traces. In 1603, the bounty of the city of Aberdeen was bestowed on " the kings servandis presentlie in this burght, quho playes comedies and stage-playes, be reason they are recommendit be his Majesties speciall letter, and hes played sum of tliair comedies in this burght; ” and “Laurence Fletcher, comediane to His Majestie,” was admitted a burgess. This is probably the same Laurence Fletcher who was associated with Shakespeare in the patent granted to them and others by James I., in 1603. From the above the commission surmise that Shakespeare was in Scotland with that company of players. In which case he might have visited the sites which he afterwards peopled with the characters of Macbeth; and that mooted point would be settled.

There is a letter from a Robert Haynes, sending somebody swans, a pair of which cost twelve shillings. But at the top of this letter is written “ Immanuel.” Now turn up 2 Henry VI. iv. 2, and read: “ Cade. Come hither, sirrah, I must examine thee; what is thy name ? Clerk. Emmanuel. Dick. They use to write it on the top of letters.”

A duodecimo volume of poems, by Sir P. Leycester, is very noticeable as containing an “ Epilogue to Taming of the Shrew, acted at Nether Tabley, by the servants and neighbors there at Christmas, 16 71.’Nether Tabley is a township in Chester, and Lower Tabley Hall, where the play was acted, is just south of the little village.

During the reign of Elizabeth there was a play called Bastard’s Libel. (Query, Wag it played at Oxford ?) Prologue begins as follows:,-

Among the MSS. of Earl de la Warr (Baron Buckhurst), at Knole Park, Kent County, are letters of Bacon, Tobie Matthew, etc. Also, notes of a conversation between William Lambarde and Queen Elizabeth, in which Lambarde mentions the play of Richard II. having been many times performed in public at the instigation of the Earl of Essex, with a view to bring Elizabeth into disfavor with the people. Lambarde referred to an attempt by an unkind gentleman (Essex), “the most adorned creature that ever your Majestie made.” The queen said this tragedy was played forty times in open streets and houses. This conversation is dated August 4, 1601.

The above notes of a conversation with the queen render much fuller the hint in Judge Holmes’s Authorship of Shakespeare, page 249.

We come upon a line trail in this letter from Sir Water Cope to Viscount Cranborne: “ Sir, I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players Juglers and such kinde of Creators, but fynde them hard to fynde. Burbage ys come, and saves there is no new playe that the Queen hath not scene, hut they have revyved an olde one, cawled Loves Labore Lost, which for wytt and mirthe he saves will please her exceedingly. And thys is appointed to be played to morowe night at my Lord of Southampton’s, unless you sende a wrytt to remove the Corpus cum causa to your bowse in Strande. Burbage ys my messenger ready attending your pleasure. Yours most humbly, Walter Cope. Dated from your library. Addressed : to the right honorable the Lorde Viscount Cranborne at the Courte.” Indorsed, 1604 (?), “ Sir Walter Cope to my Lord.” That undorsement was made by a highly unchrouologieal letter-filer, for the queen had been dead a year. But it is curious to notice the mistakes which used to be made in this matter. For instance, the Aberdeen record (if the commissioners did not transcribe wrongly, is dated 1601; but James did not reach the English throne till 1603. Plainly, it was in that year that he commended his players to the good people of the Scotch city. There is an entry of the playing of Love’s Labor Lost before James in 1605, between New Year’s Day and Twelfth Night.

Sir Walter Cope was in the confidential employ of the Earl of Salisbury, a member of Parliament, and one of the three knights, gentlemen of the earl, sent to represent him at Lord Bacon’s wedding dinner, May 10, 1606. Viscount Cranborne was Sir Robert Cecil, but at this time Lord Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, and Earl of Salisbury. Hepworth Dixon says that ihe three knights who attended the wedding feast were hard drinkers and men about town.

No doubt Burbage — probably Shakespeare’s favorite, and not the other actor of that name — was instructed to set up Love’s Labor Lost at Southampton House the following night.

—Perhaps some of your readers who are wont to regale themselves with a taste of the night’s treat at the playhouse by gazing at the posters may have observed on the dead walls in New York, this winter, a large wood-cut of Mr. Wallack on horseback, as Elliott Grey in Rosedale. Those who saw the performance itself found the admirable lancer afoot, and no sign of the steed of the bill-board. Again, freshly pasted on the fences, and hung in the druggist’s window, can now be seen the well-known figure of Mr. Boucicault as the Shaughraun, with uplifted finger, as in Rogers’s statuette, teaching tricks to his dog Tatters; whereas on the stage we find the matchless Con, to be sure, but neither hide nor hair of the dog — the actor talks Tatters, but uses none.

So, it appears, to the topmost round of the actor’s calling mounts the curious tradition of putting spectacular effects oil the placard that are not realized in the play. We all know the splendid fence pageantry of the circus and the moral menagerie — those poetic dreams of the artist in which elephants play at leapfrog and four lions at once spring upon the devoted skull of Herr Daniels, while Ramon yonder leaps fifteen feet, into the air to turn a somersault as he rides. Aloft at the entrance of the side-show are full-length portraits of the Fat Boy, weighing obviously 1347lbs.; of the Kentucky Giant, who must look into third story windows as he walks the street; of the Living Skeleton, too lean to cast a shadow. But while it is true that the giant and the fat boy dwindle, on sight, and the starveling becomes no lanker than a letter-carrier, in the plays just mentioned there is not so much as a set of liorse-shoes, nor the bark of Tatters.

Of course the spectator is content to miss the quadrupeds. Trained horses and dogs, though good in the ring, are not apt to shine, I fancy, in the comedy or melodrama; the disposition of the dog to bolt, and the humiliating rvay in which the charger has to be led about, are trying to the feelings of the audience. Still, accounting for the absence of the animals from the stage does not account for their presence on the poster. Are we, perhaps, to forecast from these incidents new reaches in the bill-board art, whereby the unseen will triumph over the seen? Dryden tells us that Zeuxis and Polygnotus handled their pictures as Homer did his poetry, feigning such things as they found not in the dark recesses of antiquity, for the pure sake of embellishment. It is quite certain that modern colorists have made vast strides, of late, in labels for pickle-jars and placards of yeast mixtures — enforcing, for example, on the popular mind, by a dance of airy sprites, some faint conception of the gossamer lightness that is lent to piecrust by Jones’s baking powders; and even as these floating Ariels are not literally to be germinated from the yeast, I suppose that the Poster of the Future may expect us simply to enjoy its art and its moral, without seeking to drag down its poetic license to prosaic fact.

— In the much vexed question as to who wrote the Saxe Holm stories, one thing seems to relieve Mrs. Jackson from the soft impeachment: and that is the utter ignorance the author betrays concerning the times and seasons of flowering plants, although she speaks of them with such apparent knowledge. In the very first, Draxy Miller’s Dowry, she has her heroine’s hair adorned for her wedding,_ in September, — with blossoms of the low cornel, which is a spring flower. Also in Hetty’s Strange Story, the church in Canada where the pair are remarried is dressed with dog-wood blossoms, Ayrshire roses, and carnations, flowers respectively of May, June, and July; and unless Canada has conditions of climate quite peculiar to itself, flowers impossible to combine in out-door culture. Mrs. Jackson is too acute an observer of nature to have made these mistakes, unless they were done purposely to mislead the public; besides I cannot think, with her wide knowledge of books, she would have taken the plot of the One-Legged Dancers bodily from a little story of Mary Howitt’s called Strive and Thrive, and not expected discovery. I myself believe her to be so far responsible for the Saxe Holm mystery that, with a coadjutor, she has written parts of them in an Erekman-Chatrian fashion, but I never will believe she herself wrote such stuff as “My snowy eupatorium came to-day,” — eupatorium being only boneset, a fluffy, dirtywhite blossom, like no snow but that which is long trodden under foot, and neither graceful nor beautiful. If one is allowed to “drop into botany ” as well as into poetry, it furnishes a wide field for celebrating plants of humble repute under stately aliases showing what’s in a name.

Just “hear to” this, “after” Mercy Philbriek: —

I forbear to interpret; let botanists do that.

— Here is a story which I consider too piquante to be lost. I ’ll “ put it where it will do the most good ” and send it to Boston. It is a short one, but I could easily make it long if I were to describe its main figure as fully as it deserves, for he is a character the like of which Dickens would have founded a fortune upon and made forever famous. He dwells in a little shop and lives by his trade, that of cabinet maker, and I doubt if a sweeter-natured, better-hearted old creature ever made a five o’clock tea-table, or painted and upholstered a work-stand. My heart melts with gratitude when I recall the tools, the varnish brushes, and the glue-pots he is willing to lend, and not only is he willing to lend them, but willing to forgive you when you borrow them for “ two minutes ” and forget to return them for two days. After this need I say that he enjoys the widest scope of feminine confidence and respect?

He makes lovely frames for screens, and is always glad and proud to uncover and display them to you, even though they be draped in the lace and mystery appropriate for wedding gifts. He knows when all the weddings are to take place, and very few brides begin housekeeping nn this small Canadian city without receiving some proof of his skill.

I can easily take his shop in upon my walks, so I frequently call there to look at the new things and hear him talk. He works as he talks, pausing in the latter occupation at times the more conscientiously to fasten a screw or varnish a board; then he resumes the gentle chat upon such society matters as have a bearing upon his trade. But not long since my national pride received a blow, most unconsciously dealt by this irreproachable old man, for I hasten to assure you that it has never dawned upon him that I am an American, He was telling me how busy he had been kept with holiday work, and said plaintively: " Mrs. — was quite vexed that I could not do more work for her, but I could not, you know, really I could not. — I ” — here he fastened on a piece of gilding, “ I was too busy, you know. She wants her tables gilded and I am very sorry for it, as gilded tables are quite out of fashion in our best houses, you know. It ’s a great pltv, a great pity. But then ” — stopping to polish for a moment, — “ but then she is from that United States—from Boston, where they do everything for show; 1 ‘m very sorry that she wants gilt tables, for people of good taste do not use them any more — though I dare say they are still fashionable in Boston, you know.”

Oh, Boston, Boston, in the future get what consolation you can from your “ earnest ” carpets, and “ sincere ” chairs!

— Until within a few days past I was the woman who had not read Helen’s Babies. Now I have lost my distinction, and I have not received anything in the way of pleasure as compensation. I am not going to break this butterfly or rather grub upon a wheel, and tell how and why I found it the silliest, shallowest, and vulgarest book I ever read. What I have to say about the book is this, — and I speak as a mother, — that the baby talk is poor. It is not natural, but on the contrary affected, an incongruous mess, the result of insufficient and inappreliensive observation and a perverted fancy. These children do exactly what children don’t do. They don’t fail in speech, with stammering lips, but they utter all the letters that they should, and more too. For example, : “I want to shee yours watch.” Now to pronounce those words in that succession requires a power of articulation which no toddling child possesses, unless it is an infant phenomenon in the way of speech. A little child instead of saying yours, thus adding s to the difficult r, leaves off the latter and for your says you. Nor does he pronounce the w under such circumstances. I leave it to any intelligent and observant mother whether such a little child as Toddie does not always say “ see you 'atch ” rather than “ shee yours watch. ” For although children have personal peculiarities in their speech, the peculiarities are generally of misapprehension, and they all of them in their talk conform, with very few exceptions, to certain rules of inability in articulation. So with regard to “I shed my blessin two timesh.” That a little child should say “ two timesh ” instead of “ two lime ” is so improbable as to make the speech not characteristic, even if it were a copy from nature. But it is not; for it will be seen plainly that a child that could say not " said ” but shed would and must say not “ blessin ” but blesshin. The baby talk of the book is full of such blunders as this, which is the more remarkable as some of the perversions are very characteristic. Toddie’s Bliaff for Goliath is highly satisfactory; and so is his lyned for “ learned.” But I must protest against some of the phrases, the thoughts, which these baby boys are made to use. Budge asks, “ Don’t you think the Lord loved my papa awful much for doin’ that sweet thing, Uncle Harry?” Now boys of five years old don’t talk about “that sweet thing” unless they have some kind of candy in mind. They leave that phrase to their sisters between twelve years of age and — Well, I shall not assign the other limit. Again, Budge tells Toddie that his uncle will “comfort” him, and prays for the lady that “comforted” him after the goat “was bad” to him, and that she may “comfort” him “lots of times.” I am sure that all the mothers will agree with me that little children don’t talk about comfort or being comforted. They have a lively appreciation of comfort, the thing, but the apprehension of the idea comes much later in life. A heart must have ached many times before it prays to be comforted. Perhaps this is trifling; but when more than one hundred thousand copies of a book have been sold, and we find that its only claim upon the attention of even the reading public of the nursery is unsound, it may not be amiss to say so.

— I have heard a good many pleasant things said about Mr. Moody religiously, but f remember no special encomium on his use of English. But after hearing him day after day, largely as an admirer of his use of our language, it seems to me that our people of “ culture ” who have sneered at him as illiterate have lost a point. We may either look at his terse, clear, Saxon sentences by themselves, and see in them “the well of English undefiled; ” or we may compare him with Bunyan and De Foe, and in either case he bears inspection. Turn from the complex, involved modern style, to his nervous, terse, and crystalline sentences, and you are conscious of a refreshing change. Macaulay has devoted one of his best essays to the praise of Bunyan, and there is something to be said for the style of the man whom Gladstone has called the Bunyan of the nineteenth century. And even his defects are those which now seem to make the very raciness of Sam Lawson’s speech and other heroes of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Whitney. That what we love to hear in the stories of Rose Terry Cooke should repel us in the speech of Mr. Moody is due to the unpopularity of the views he holds, rather than to anything naturally boorish in the man.

— Before the last scientific invention becomes as familiar as a humming-top, let me, in these pages which are so often devoted to the instruction of authors, make a suggestion to languishing playwriters. It is that they turn their back on the modern French drama and try some means of bringing the phonograph upon the stage. The other day it was the telephone that was filling every one with amazement, but that promises soon to be forgotten, or at least to lose its novelty, by the side of the greater wonders of the phonograph. This instrument consists of a diaphragm — this is of as much importance to these recent scientific inventions as it is to the inventors —bearing a little pin which is moved by the action of the voice against a thin plate of tin foil which is fastened upon a revolving shaft, so that the waves of sound, according to the different modulations and inflections of the voice, are converted into visible form. This is strange enough; but it is only part of the wonder. This tin-foil can be removed and placed in a mysterious apparatus, which in some inexplicable way by the turning of a crank will give back the sounds that produced the marks on the tin-foil. The description of the instrument that I have read says that this is accomplished by certain well known laws of acoustics. I do not know the laws of this system of bottling an echo, but they are doubtless familiar to my readers.

Now, the dramatic capabilities of this little machine are evident at a glance. In its present rude condition it is necessary that the words to be recorded should be spoken through a mouth-piece, but doubtless time will obviate this formality, and all that will be required will be to place the instrument in a room when it will receive and record the sounds uttered within it, the whispered plottings of conspirators, for instance, the soliloquies of villains, the frivolous conversation of young lovers, etc. A fertile imagination will grow dizzy with the whirl of startling possibilities. For example, it is only necessary for a “ live ” playwright to introduce two men agreeing to steal a will, to burn the church, to forge the check, who talk together in the familiar way; one of them sees the phonograph on the table, but he naturally takes it for a fly-trap, and thinks no more of it until Act V., Scene 3, when, all the dramatis persons being present, it is brought forward, the handle is turned, their conversation is repeated, and their wickedness exposed. This hint can be worked up by others, and doubtless it will be done. A fortune awaits, not the humble maker of the suggestions, but the energetic writer who will put together a play in which the instrument shall perform. Fastidious critics have grown tired of the omniscient detective; they would be the loudest to applaud the phonograph.

But there is a dark side to the cloud with the silver lining. We already foresee adventurers from remote regions who, with the phonograph under their arm, will enter the Music Hall and when the golden-mouthed orator begins his inimitable lecture will gently turn the crank so that every word, every inflection shall he registered by infallible science. No longer shall the once popular expounder of literature or photographs be called upon to travel from home. The sheets of tin-foil will be sent by express to Alaska, if need be; they will be introduced by the selectmen of some border town, who will again wind the crank, and the lecture will be repeated by machinery. This can go on indefinitely, because before the tin-foil wears out it can be replaced by new impressions from imperishable plaster.

But even before the mouthpiece is improved away, the phonograph can be put to use. Our great men who are, almost without exception, so bland, so affable to the reporter, would surely have no objection to uttering some of their remarks through the mouthpiece. At first, doubtless, their thoughts would move but sluggishly on account of the strangeness of the medium. A rational conversation is seldom held through a speaking-trumpet, but in time genius would overcome this, as it has greater difficulties. They might imagine it the mouth of an ear-trumpet, as it would indeed be, only reaching to unborn hearers. For, these sheets of tin-foil could be kept in a fire-proof museum so that instead of nursing our reverence for the past by gazing at our grandfathers’ old coats and snuff-boxes, we could hear for a trifling sum their own voices uttering words of wisdom. A hundred years hence the eminent humorist could he heard telling over his famous, funny story; in her own life-time a primadonna’s voice would no longer be a subject of our indisputable boast, it could be taken from the shelf and be put in comparison with that of some later favorite.

These are all outside of the serious uses, and yet they closely join them. Foreign sounds could he brought to the ears of learned societies; the finest French accent could be bought on as much tin-foil as would go round a bunch of cigars; depositions, dying - speeches, could he preserved; but this is enough. Certainly it is fancy nowadays that is becoming prosaic, and science outdoes fairy-tales.

— One of the evils of this age of railroads and telegraphs is that we are forced to know people as they are. Journeying. not like Bunyan, afoot, through the wilderness of this world, but in cars and steam-boats, I am every year reminded more frequently of that story from the Deccan, of the donkey who went on his travels with, a Rakshaz. Being in a town, they came to a street of palaces; the donkey brayed in admiration. “ Look inside,” said the Rakshaz; and behold, nothing but offal and dung! They passed by a crumbling old but; the donkey sniffed with contempt, but the Rakshaz saw within a comfortable house and people sitting down to supper. Presently appeared a pen for unclean beasts in the field, but, peeping through the windows, they saw a temple lighted and the priests singing psalms. The Rakshaz, no doubt, being a monster of culture, found a fine æsthetic significance in these surprises; but the donkey, we are told, declared that they made his head ache, and that he would go with the crowd in future, and stare at the palaces and sniff at the pig-pens, without asking what lay behind the door. It must be very comfortable to be wholly a donkey.

It is the people whom we pass every day, and not the houses, who show an incessant diabolical perverseness in proving that they are not at all what we think them. You may make up your mind, once for all, that the popular idea of any class of men, when you come to the individual Tom and John of the class, will turn out to be a gross libel. Just here, as we said before, our grandfathers had the advantage of us. They had the nations labeled and divided off: there was the stage Yankee, frog-eating Johnny Crapeau, scratching, praying Sandy, with the dim, vast Ultima Thule of the heathens behind, for whom nothing was to be done but to dribble out missionary pennies on a Sunday, and to consign them wholesale to perdition. Geese were geese, in those days, and swans swans. But the American to-day is a long, crooked thing that asks a question. A young fellow leaves college with these fixed ideas of his ancestors, but he knocks around a few years in Cunarders and Pullman cars — and where are they ? The so-called prying, garrulous Westerner, he lias proved to be the most reticent and grave of men; he finds that the ardent Southerner usually has really a keen eye for the pennies. Some of the gentlest gentlemen he knows are pagans. He goes to the house of a reformer whose name shines like a good deed all over the naughty world, and he turns out to be a niggardly little man nagging his wife because the tea is out; he seeks a great poet whose song has made his soul burn within him, and he finds him a monomaniac on beet-sugar; the artist whose weird fancies have risen like a nightmare before the public is a tippling, stout little Irishman. In a murderer in a condemned cell, I once found an honest, agreeable fellow, a tender father and loyal friend. It is no wonder the donkey’s head ached.

These Rakshaz eyes of the present generation are no acquisition to it, I assure you. My grandfather Thompson was always right, and he knew he was right, and he knew that you knew he was right, simply because he was a Thompson. I am a Thompson, too; but when I walked through the Centennial Main Building, in 1876, and found Turk and Chinaman and Jew from Tunis and Greenlander hoisting their umbrellas and carrying photographs of their babies and praying to the Man higher than themselves at night, just as I did, the shock to my conceit was mortal; and I protest that a man without conceit is as useless and wretched as a shivering pulpy crab when it has cast its skin. This Rakshaz view gives us, no doubt, a realizing sense of the universal brotherhood of man. But the sense of the brotherhood of man is bringing things to a dead level, veryfast. There are no downright sinners or saints any longer, it appears; and what religious energy can I put into my contribution to foreign missions when John Chinaman is teaching me half a dozen of the Christian virtues? As for literature, it will soon make an end of that. What picturesque effects can you get out of a world peopled with Thompsons ?

No; the donkey was in the right of it when he brayed with the crowd and refused to look in at the back doors.

— Here is a fact which might be worked by a skillful hand into a new psychological study. I give it to anybody who has a mind to write a melodrama with Soul and Body as leading parts; only let them remember what Hawthorne would have made of it, or even George Sand, in her own way. A certain American physician, a specialist in nerve diseases, has lately discovered a cure for Vampire Women, as Doctor Holmes somewhere calls them; women, that is, in whom all healthy bodily functions have given way, and only the nerves are left, to torture the souls of their owner and, what is much more important, the souls of her unfortunate family. You will find one of these gentle, selfish victims preying upon the life of many a poor New England household. She drains its vitality and its purse in true vampire fashion; her only tie to the world is through neuralgia, anæmia, or other intangible ailment; her almost freed soul is apt to revel in spiritualism, devout mysticism, or some other trade or profession belonging to the dim border land between us and the world beyond.

To one doctor comes one of these emancipated souls, caged but in the frailest possible cobweb of the flesh. Her religious raptures were full and ecstatic; her spiritual insight abnormal; her stomach, liver, and all the rest of the viscera had given up working long ago, and lay torpid; she did not sleep; she did not drink; she did not eat even the olive per day which Zeno allowed; talk of Hayes election, or the Russian war, or even of pottery passed her insensate ear as far winds on the hill-tops; she had dropped and forgotten all her old affections as she had the dolls of her childhood. In short, she was as far out of this world as Mickey Free’s father was from purgatory when he cleared the door, barring one foot and shoe. She shook her plumes hourly, on tiptoe for Paradise.

The doctor puts her raptures, plumes, visions, and all to bed. Her body, which she had been used to inveigh against as a dead weight, is treated actually as dead weight, which gives her a shock of surprise ; she is not permitted to move a muscle. Then be proceeds to feed it, to knead it, to batter it, to vivify it with electricity. Imagine this winged soul, veritable offspring of Margaret Fuller and radical clubs, pausing in its upward flight to linger curiously among its bars of muscles and nerves to see what this commonsensed body-cobbler will do to its old companion. Presently, he begins to stuff it with five solid meals per day, precisely as pigs are fattened in Pennsylvania, or geese at Strasburg. Think of the shudders, the horror of this soul as it is forced hack into the body, — made to sleep, to take a pleasure in growing fat, to eat terrapin, and smack its intangible lips! But I leave the playwright to explain the terrors of the courtship by which the soul was remarried to its carnal flesh. The curious facts are that when the woman rose from bed, fat and rosy, the saint and poet had vanished; she was a housekeeper, a zealous cook: she took an eager part in village politics; and finally, she is the mother of a stout boy, and, you may be sure, is wedded to this world and the things thereof as long as he is in it.

— I was greatly surprised and interested to find in the Contributors’ Club of Atlantic Monthly the story of the Dalmatian dog and Mr. Beach. I can vouch for the truth of the story, and I have to-day seen Mr. Beach and his canine friend walking past my house. There are only two mistakes in the story, as far as I can see, and that is the dog lives in Worthing, not Newhaven; and Mr. Beach lives at Findon, four miles from here, and is not a doctor, but a veterinary surgeon.

We have so few of the human species in this little town of ours who have a world-wide celebrity that we are naturally anxious to have what credit we deserve for grateful dogs. Thinking you might be interested to know that your article has been read in the town where the incidents you relate occurred, I take the liberty of addressing you thus, and trust you will pardon me the presumption. _ (32 South Street, Worthing, Sussex County, England, December 4, 1877.)