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"That death scene was more than singular; it was unexampled. The whole civilised world was gathered about it in the breathless suspense of anxious solicitude-listened to the difficult breathing-counted the fluttering pulse

amused complacency of the English grandiloquence, which is no honour, mind toward America, and friendly but rather a wrong in its unreality, desire to humour and please the to persons and things which dekindred nation, confirms and real- serve all esteem and sympathy. ises. By what right, for instance, He is speaking of the death of has Longfellow his place in the General Garfield, a most touching spot sacred to the flower of English event, which moved all nations, genius? Because he is an Ameri- and especially Britain, with incan!-not, surely, nobody will pre- terest and sympathy of the deepest tend it, because he is a great poet, and purest kind. But yet we canfit to stand in the presence of not but feel an uneasy touch of Shakespeare and Milton, of Dryden exaggeration almost ludicrous in and Pope, of Wordsworth and the terms which are used. Coleridge. The most fervid American cannot claim that place for the gentle and facile writer, whom simple minds love, but who has no more claim to the rank of the Sovran Poet than a hundred minor songsters. Our good-nature, and that desire to be gracious to our big cousin which is characteristic of the time, betrays us into the most insincere flattery, and betrayal of all standards of excellence in this way. Longfellow is no more the equal of our glorious dead than Washington Irving and — oh, bathos Mr N. P. Willis, are fit to be placed on the level of Addison and Montaigne. We will go further and say, that instead of chiming in with these absurd claims as it is now usual to do, out of an equally absurd amiability, we will not even admit the plea that though these heroes are not very great, they are great comparatively, as the product of

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was cheered by the momentary rally, and saddened by the inevitable relapse. And let us thank God and take courage, when we reflect that it was through the manliness, the patience, the religi ous fortitude of the splendid victim, that the tie of human brotherhood was thrilled to a consciousness of its sacred function. . It is no foundly touching spectacle of woexaggeration to say that the promanly devotedness, in its simplicity, its constancy, and its dignity, has moved the heart of mankind in a manner without any precedent in living memory."

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This might all be genuine enough in a moment of deep feeling, and the sight of the good plain man, who had no pretension to be a "splendid victim," fighting for his life through so many weeks, and of his wife's faithful nursing, did indeed touch everybody's heart; but not because of the unexampled sight: rather because it appealed to the fellow-feeling of humanity

young a country. No, we do not allow it. It is the more shame to America, in all her great ness and strength, and freshness and youth, with everything that ought to inspire, and enlarge, and give size and splendour to her to men who knew what it genius, that she has nothing greater to produce than these. And England, her old mother, is to blame for echoing the crow of satisfied vanity with which they are presented to us. Mr Lowell himself gives a specimen of this kind of

was to hold head against danger and death, and women who had nursed their husbands not less faithfully or long, without any applause, or thought of it. And, after all, these fine words, which were perhaps justified by the emo

tion of the moment, ring false now. General Garfield was not a splendid victim offering himself for his country: he was a brave and good man, the victim of one of those appalling accidents which sometimes make our human life appear as if it were the sport of fate or malignant demons. We gave our sympathy, our anxious hopes and fears, to the daily recorded struggle. But we cannot give now Our assent to these swelling words. The French archbishop who died upon the barricade was far more obviously a splendid victim; but no one empleyed such a phrase in respect to him. And it is really necessary, with America so much in the air, to make a protest on the subject. We are not going to be made to translate mediocre verse into deathless poetry, or honest excellence into greatness sublime, even to please America. The laws of magnitude and littleness are unalterable. They are not to be changed because the competitor belongs to a new country, any more than because he himself is young. The fate of Young Kirke White was as touching as that of young Keats, but we do not put them in the same class; neither can we put Longfellow by the side of even Lord Tennyson, not to speak of his great predecessors-or General Garfield among those heroes and martyrs whose fame belongs to the civilised world.

To step down a great deal lower in the scale-a descent from Mr Lowell which is like a tumble from the stars here is a bundle of three tolerably-sized volumes, produced in very nice print and binding by Messrs Douglas of Edinburgh, a firm of publishers who have done very good work by the

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series of pretty small books in which they have presented various American novelists to this country. The book before us is entitled Humorous Masterpieces.' There are some two hundred of these or more, and they are all the production of American writers of the present century-nay, of half of the present century. Two hundred (or more) humorous masterpieces! Imagine the exuberance of this new literature! We in the Old World could count our humorists capable of producing masterpieces upon the fingers certainly of both hands-perhaps of one, to be rigid: and in America they have already got fifty-five! This is a thing bewildering to the slower-going intellect on this side of the Atlantic. We have had two in our generation, and we think ourselves very well off: and in America we are aware there are doubts whether even these two have much claim to the name. But the great Republic, in this as in so many other ways, beats creation.

True, the humour is not always of a very exquisite kind. There is a good deal about the vagaries of the "help," Irish and black, which could not perhaps appear in a more carefully formed selection by the side of Sir Roger de Coverley; and several contributions concerning the difficulties of gardening, a mild subject which scarcely comes up to the 'Sentimental Journey,' and domestic incidents of various descriptions-courtships, bets, debts, oddities, and perplexities-none of which (though Mr Howells does not think so very much of him) could, we fear, stand competition even with those Sketches by Boz,' which were a poor introduction of Dickens. Now we have not the

1 Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature. T. Mason. Edinburgh: David Douglas.

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least objection to allow that American humour has a most distinct and racy flavour, and sometimes is admirable. The 'Luck of Roaring Camp' was a very fine and original contribution to our knowledge of the kinds of living that are possible in our own day, and had touches in it to produce both laughter and tears; and Uncle Remus' is exceedingly funny and worth trying to understand, which is saying a good deal: but does any man, even if he is an American, believe it possible that there are two hundred masterpieces of humour in the crude and voluble literary productions of any generation, much less one that lives from hand to mouth, and publishes and republishes, and selects and collects, as if they were jewels, the sketches of magazine and newspaper, the froth of the moment, which may swim upon the top of the stream for that moment, but should certainly die there, like the foam on the fountain and the bubbles on the river? Our complacency must stop here. We are very glad to give America credit for all she can do that deserves it. Many of her novels are admirable; she has produced some fine criticism and good historical compositions; and Mr John Bright recommends Bancroft's "History of the United States,' we believe, as the best reading for the intelligent working man. But above all, her humour, when it is genuine and not made to order, is often at once quaint and brilliant, full of distinctive character. The satire and sparkle of the Biglow Papers, and some other productions of a similar character, only want a completer understanding of their allusions to take as high a place--as is possible to any permanent literary work in

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which local allusions require to be understood. But she must understand that we cannot adopt all her little provincial names into the universal bead-roll; or believe that, if she were to burst in the effort, she could produce right off two hundred masterpieces of any kind. Let her produce one great, really great writer. son together: why now, oh why should it not be a Shakespeare? She has tout ce qu'il faut, and the principle of evolution to help her. Does not everybody who is worth listening to tell us that a great poet is, like every other great thing, the development of a chain of influences, the end of processes of development? Tocca à te, we cry: it is your turn, great Republic. Don't send us more groups of nobodies, to be taken as great upon your word.

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Send us something like a poet, and we will fall down and worship. Why in the fulness of the ages, and with such a full tide of power and vitality flowing, you should not startle us with a big Soul really of the Sovran class, instead of all these little persons, we are unable to divine.

Talking about American literature, however, before we change the subject, here is a very delightful little book from the hand of a lady who has done some fine and some doubtful things, which is, in its way, a little gem.1 It is the story of a fisherman and his family, and of his loss and recovery, and all the little tragedy of a temporary quarrel nearly turned into a great one. But for the interposition of a "summer boarder," that curiously and vulgarly fine, banal, and unmeaning person, who so often comes in to spoil the natural scene in American romances, the

The Madonna of the Tubs. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., Boston.

story of the hard-working wife, so tender and true, but with her spark of temper and quick impatience, and the rough but loving sailor-husband and all their brood, is at once charmingly told and full of pathos and humour, worth a hundred of the Masterpieces.' The rough little house, so clean and bright when all is well, so forlorn under the pressure of sorrow; the mother with her children, so faulty, and tender, and human; the big fisherman, with his rough ways and superstitions; the salt keen atmosphere of the sea, and even the special Americanism of "the instrument," are all delightful, natural, and true. We should have preferred to escape the inevitable fine lady, so superior to the other summer boarders in the ineffable fineness of Beacon Street, Boston; but that, perhaps, was too much to be hoped. We do not pretend that Miss Phelps's little book is a masterpiece, but it is very pretty, natural, and true.

The name of Mr Andrew Lang has recurred frequently in the publishers' lists for some time past, and we are always glad to meet that charming, graceful, and easy literary workman. We cannot, however, help feeling that when we meet him, as it were, in the dark, with his fencing-mask upon his intelligent countenance and his foil in his hand, he is more vigorous and ready than when he comes before us under his own name and character, with, perhaps, a little hesitation and less confidence in himself than becomes a person so accomplished. Nothing can be more admirable than Mr Lang's style-his wealth of allusion, his learning, his high culture, and what is not always associated with these fine gifts, his graceful wit and easy touch, make up a total of qualifications

not often to be met with. Whatever he has to say he says in the most agreeable and delightful way. The drawback is that he has not very much to say. What he wants is a subject. He is like an admirable piece of mechanism without fit use, turning its delicate wheels vainly in the air, and working weft and shuttle, which should spin us the finest of fabrics, without anything to fill the loom. It is a thousand pities, both for himself and us, for the faculties that have not sufficient exercise, and for the audience which is most willing to listen, but which is practically wasted by the absence of any object. The latest little book which this accomplished writer has put forth, has a title which seems to mean something, and which, somewhat disappointed by the last little book but one, we turned to with some eagerness, hoping to hear many pleasant things about books and the men that love them from one who is not only a maker of books, and an authority in literature, but a bookcollector and bibliomaniac. Well -yes: there is a little instruction, a little information, a good deal of pretty writing. There is, indeed, a collection of pleasant short magazine articles, very agreeable for their first and natural use. But, bless us all! is this everything we are to get out of one of the most accomplished of literary men, one of the leaders of opinion and guides of public taste? Mr Lang tells us very nicely how we are to distinguish an Elzevir, how wonderfully the prices of cherished editions have risen, with what daintiness the connoisseurs of a past generation bound their treasures: which is all very pleasant, but scarcely worth making a book of, to hand down his name to genera

1 Books and Bookmen. By Andrew Lang. London: Longmans & Co.

tions to come; unless, indeed, it had some curiosity of printing, some special excellence or singularity, like the Elzevirs of the good dates which he loves; but this Messrs Longmans have not taken any pains to provide him with. That the reader may see how pleasantly the information is given, and may judge how much it is likely to profit him, here is Lang's account of what an Elzevir worth calling by that name really is :

"Meantime, and before we come to describe Elzevirs of the first flight, let it be remembered that the 'taller' the copy, the less harmed and nipped by the binder's shears, the better. Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,' says Shelley; and we may say that most men hardly know how beautiful an Elzevir was in its uncut and original form. At the Beckford sale there was a pearl of a book, a 'Marot,'-not an Elzevir, indeed, but a book published by Wetstein, a follower of the Elzevirs. This exquisite pair of volumes, bound in blue morocco, was absolutely unimpaired, and was a sight to bring happy tears into the eyes of the amateur of Elzevirs. There was a gracious svelte elegance about these tomes, an appealing and exquisite delicacy of proportion, that linger like sweet music in the memory. I have a copy of the Wetstein 'Marot' myself, not a bad copy; though murderously bound in that ecclesiastical sort of brown calf an

of his court by almost the breadth of a nail, and that his altitude filled the minds of all with awe."

There is a good deal of writing of this pleasant kind, full of whimsical enthusiasm mocking itself, in Mr Lang's last book. The last but one-which, indeed, is not so much older, perhaps, as might be natural in two members of the same family Mr-consists of a number of stories made up with considerable care, and told in the same lucid, delightful style which we have already remarked upon, but all suffering from the same want of subject. The 'End of Phæacia' may indeed be supposed to have an object, in the way of conveying graphic impressions of the real aspect of life among the Greeks (as near as a nineteenth-century imagination can realise it)-but we doubt if this laudable and instructive intention was in Mr Lang's mind; that such a writer as Mr Rider or it may be intended to show Haggard can be matched with finer weapons in his own field—but neither do we suppose that to be Mr Lang's intention. May not we suggest to him tenderly that his intentions are too timid; that it is a pity he should be swayed by would be a great deal better for current suggestions; and that it us, and perhaps also for himself, if he would shake off this interesting timidity, and step out on his own legs? We feel forewarned that the boldness of this advice of ours is but too likely to bring us within reach of the exterminating sweep of a certain lash which has already played lightly, premonitorially, round our devoted head. If a distinguished organ of public opinion took the trouble to chastise our impudent style on behalf of a bystander, what will it not do to us when we thus gently and respect

tique which goes well with hymnbooks, and reminds one of cakes of chocolate. But my copy is only some 128 millimetres in height, whereas the Beckford copy (it had belonged to the great Pixérécourt) was at least 130 millimetres high. Beside the uncut example, mine looks like Cinderella's plain sister beside the beauty of the family. Now the moral of this is, that only tall Elzevris are beautiful, only tall Elzevirs preserve their ancient proportions, only tall Elzevirs are worth collecting. Lemuel Gulliver remarks that the King of Lilliput was taller than any

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1 The End of Phæacia. By Andrew Lang.

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