Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

"1666, March 17. To Hales's, and paid him £14 for the picture, and £1 5s. for the frame. This day I began to sit, and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture. He promises it shall be as good as my wife's; and I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder, to make the posture for him to work by."

"March 30. To Hales's, and there sat till almost quite dark upon working my gowne, which I hired to be drawn in; an Indian gowne."

"April 11. To Hales's, where there was nothing found to be done more to my picture, but the musique, which now pleases me mightily, it being painted true." [Footnote: Mr. Peter Cunningham has quoted these passages in his excellent catalogue of the gallery.]

And here is Kneller's familiar portrait of John Evelyn, the other diarist of the times. And Lely's portrait of Rochester, the _roué_, represented in the characteristic act of crowning his monkey with laurel,--laurel to which he sometimes aspired himself. And Kneller's portrait of Lord William Russell, with a face that answers better to the character of the man, as it appeared before he was brought face to face with death, and forced to exert and to display the manlier qualities of his nature.

The men of letters of the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century appear here in great force. With the faces of most of them the world is familiar. Here are six of the Kit-Kat Club portraits that were painted for Jacob Tonson. First in order Tonson himself, the very personification of the nourishing publisher and patron of authors, with the pleasant air of the happy discoverer of genius, and the maker of its fortune as well as of his own. He holds a folio copy of "Paradise Lost"; it is Tonson patting Milton on the back. Dryden, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Steele, Addison, and Lord Chancellor Somers are the other five of these celebrated portraits. What a congress of wits! But we have besides, Atterbury, and Pope, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Prior, and Tickell, and Swift. Pope's face, as given in Kneller's portrait, (which recalls the poet's stolen complimentary verse to the painter,) has a sad and weary look, and is marked by that pallor, and that peculiar hollowness of eye and cheek, which often accompany bodily deformity. Swift's face betrays but little of the bitterness of his soul; but it was painted in his best days, before the cloud of darkness had begun to settle down upon him. It is the portrait of him as he was in London, among his set,--not as he was in the half-banishment of his Irish life.

The end of the century brings us to other familiar portraits, and at length to portraits painted by great native artists. Gainsborough and Reynolds appear in full rivalry. Here are Gainsborough's Johnson, the well-known profile portrait, and Sir Joshua's Boswell; Gainsborough's Garrick, a most delightful portrait of Garrick's pleasantest expression, and Sir Joshua's Gibbon, which looks as ugly and as conceited as the little man himself. One of Reynolds's most pleasing portraits is his likeness of himself in spectacles. It has suffered from the fading of colors and the cracking of the paint, as so many of Sir Joshua's best pictures have done; but it still presents him amiable, cultivated, and unpretending, the accomplished artist and the kindly friend, and affords the best possible illustration of the character which Goldsmith drew of him in his "Retaliation."

We pass rapidly before the portraits of the present century. Every one knows by heart the faces of Scott and Byron, Southey and Coleridge. But there is one little portrait, hung at the end of the gallery, in front of which we pause. It has no remarkable merit as a work of art, but it is the portrait of Keats, painted in Rome by his friend Severn. The young poet is resting his head on his hand, as if it were heavy and tired. His face has a look of illness; his eyes are large, and the spaces around them are hollow. His wide and well-formed brow, and all the features, betray a temperament delicate, passionate, and sensitive to excess. This portrait was painted, according to tradition, in the little summer-house studio, at the corner of the Via Strozzi. The windows look out over the garden with its cypress walks, its old pine trees, its rows of cabbages and artichokes, its weather-stained statues and bits of ancient marbles. Beyond are the walls of Rome, and beyond these the Campagna stretches away in level lines of beauty to the blue billow of the Alban hills. On this view the eyes of the dying poet rested, while his heart gave no prophecy to him of coming fame. Would it have cheered him, during those last disheartened days, to have foreseen that so soon England would rank him among her honored children, and place his portrait in the gallery of the most worthy of her dead; while a line of his writing, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," should be emblazoned in glowing letters at the end of the great hall of her first great Palace of Art?

We come now to the northern aisle, the aisle which contains the works of the British school of painters. It is the most complete of the sections of this great collection of pictures, and the lessons which are to be learned from it of the present condition and prospects of Art are of the highest interest. Here are six hundred pictures, the English record of about a hundred years of painting. Never before has there been such a collection of the works of English painters, and never before has there been an opportunity of studying so fully and satisfactorily the course and progress of the English school.

The beginning of this school hardly dates before the first quarter of the last century. Public taste was then at its lowest level. The fall of Art in Italy, in the preceding century, had carried down with it both the appreciation and the feeling for what was truly good. A factitious taste had taken the place of honest and simple likings. The worst things were often preferred, the worst pictures bought. Artists, as a class, had given up the study of Nature as the foundation of Art; and in the place of Nature, they had put other men's pictures. They had substituted a system of conventional rules and traditional methods, for the infinite variety and the unceasing study of truth. They preferred falsehood, they liked imitation, and their patrons soon came to consider the feeble results of falsehood and imitation as better than honest work and strong originality. Of course, here and there was a man whose native love of truth or spirit of opposition would give him strength to break loose from the fetters of artistic convention and prevailing taste, and to exhibit the truth in his pictures. Such a man was the first great artist of the English school, Hogarth; the greatest humorist of a century rich in humorists, with a knowledge of human nature that reminds one sometimes of Fielding's in its clearness and variety, sometimes of Goldsmith's in its tender pleasantry. But Hogarth had to struggle all his life against the taste of his time, which was unable to appreciate his merit. He was too natural for an artificial age. Among the pictures exhibited here is one from his famous series of the Harlot's Progress. It is too well known by the engravings to need description; but when the eight masterly pictures which compose this series were sold at auction during Hogarth's life, they brought the sum of fourteen guineas each! The March of the Guards to Finchley, so admirable in composition, so full of incident and character, so rich in humor, could not be sold by the artist, and he disposed of it in a lottery, in which many tickets were left on his hands. And while this was the fate of works which still stand unsurpassed in their peculiar field, the amateurs were paying enormous prices for worthless pictures of second-rate Italian masters, and talking about their "Correggios and Raphaels and stuff."

From Hogarth to Sir Joshua Reynolds is a wide step. Sir Joshua is well represented here by some thirty pictures; and Gainsborough is at his side with perhaps half as many. If Sir Joshua had not been a man of genius, he would have been ruined by his academic principles. He laid down rules which he constantly violated. He praised the Bolognese masters, and advised all students of Art in Italy to study at Bologna; but he did not confine himself to the study of other men's works, but sometimes gave himself, with honest sincerity and affection, to the study of Nature; and thus it is that it becomes hard to draw the line of praise between some of his pictures and some of those by Gainsborough, and to say which are the best. Gainsborough was no academician; he did not believe in conventionalities. When Sir Joshua laid down as a rule that blue was bad as a prevailing color in pictures, Gainsborough painted his famous Blue Boy, and made one of the most charming portraits and pleasantest pictures that had ever been painted in England. Look at Sir Joshua's delightful, winning Nelly O'Brien,--what a happy picture of a girl!--and then look at Gainsborough's Mrs. Graham, with her exquisite, perhaps even too exquisite, beauty; and see, not which of the artists was the best, for that it is hard to see, but how great both were as students and renderers of human nature. One of the best of Reynolds's portraits is that of Foote, the actor. He is leaning over a chair, and his laughing face is looking out from the canvas, as if he were watching the effect of one of his own most brilliant and easy jokes. But Sir Joshua does not compare with Gainsborough in landscape; there the lover of Nature had the advantage over the lover of Poussin and Claude. The famous picture of Puck, which Lord Fitzwilliam lately bought at Mr. Rogers's sale for the extravagant sum of nine hundred and eighty guineas, is here for all eyes to see how far the imagination of the President of the Royal Academy differed from that of Shakspeare.

But the principles which Sir Joshua laid down, though they did not ruin his own works, did much to ruin those of the next generation of painters. There was still the struggle between the painters by rule and according to convention, and the painters of truth as found in Nature. But the painters of Nature were in a minority so small as to be powerless against the prevailing current. English Art seemed to be running down; cold formalisms, classicalities, extravagances, affectations, imitations, "high art," occupied the field almost to the exclusion of better things. West, Fuseli, Northcote, Barry, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Haydon, Maclise, and Sir Charles Eastlake form a famous line of painters who have been admired, but whose works have little value except as warnings, and as showing into what errors a false method and want of recognition of the foundation and the end of Art may lead men not destitute of ability.

But while these men had their day, the school of the lovers of Nature as seen in the external world was making irregular progress. The overwhelming pressure of conventional traditions is shown most forcibly, however, by the fact that the great leader of this school of the students of landscape nature, the man to whom was given the power to see and to represent Nature in all the changing glories and beauties of her ceaselessly varying moods, the man who knew the value of truth and set his desires upon it accordingly,--that this man should have been for years of his life kept down to the imitation of and competition with the works of painters of previous centuries who were supposed to have painted landscapes. But it was Pegasus running a race with cart-horses. He had reached the goal which they had never aspired after. There are nineteen pictures of Turner's here at Manchester; some of them among his noblest works. Here is his Cologne at Sunset; look at it, for the picture will fade before your eyes, and you will stand looking at the golden glow of evening over the church towers, and the gleaming river of the ancient city.

With the growth of Turner's power, and the commencement of a better period of public taste and feeling, as marked not only in Art, but in letters, the study of Nature became more manifest in the English school. In different directions, and with different degrees of success, many artists, but generally with more or less faltering, broke away from the old system. Wilkie, Etty, Constable, Collins, and others, often painted simple and sincere pictures, pictures that showed careful study and real love of Nature. All these artists may be seen to advantage here. But in looking at the mass of the collection, one sees that the true principles of Art have not even as yet been generally recognized by the majority of English artists. The last hall of the gallery, which is devoted to the works of living artists, gives especial proof of this fact. But at the same time, it gives proof of the rise of a spirit among a small body of the younger painters, whose influence promises to be of strong and beneficial effect. The artists among whom this spirit exists are the Pre-Raphaelites.

Great misconception exists with regard to the works and to the principles of Art of this school. The name by which it is known has in part occasioned this misconception. It was not happily chosen; for these Pre-Raphaelites, instead of being three centuries behind their times, are fully up with the day in which they live. Pre-Raphaelitism was not intended to mean, as it might seem to imply, the going back to worn-out and obsolete methods of painting, the resort to past modes of representation; it does not mean the adoption of the artistic forms, traditions, or rules of the old painters; it does not mean the seeking of inspiration from the works of any other men; but, in theory at least, it means the pursuit of Art in that spirit which the painters before Raphael possessed, the spirit which united Art with Religion; it means the pursuit of Art with the humility of learners, with the faith of apostles. It does not mean the reproduction of the quaintnesses, and awkwardnesses, and limitations of the early artists, more than it means the adoption of the errors of their creed as exhibited in their paintings; but it means that as those artists broke loose from the bondage of Byzantine captivity, and found in Nature the source of all true inspiration, the exhaustless fountain from which their imaginations might draw perpetual refreshment,--so these artists who took this name would free themselves from whatever they could discern to be false in the teaching and practice of Art in our times, and give themselves to the study of that beauty and that truth which are to be found in God's world to-day, whether in external nature or in human hearts, actions, and lives. Truth was to be their device; Nature was to be their mistress. And in the ardor of youth, they set forth for the conquest of new and untravelled lands.

It is greatly to be regretted that there should be but an inconsiderable number of pictures in this last hall of the English gallery by Pre-Raphaelite artists. A little private exhibition of seventy-two pictures and drawings, by some twenty artists of this school, which was held in a small house in London, during the month of June, gave a far better view of what had been already accomplished by them, of the practical working out of their principles of Art, and of their present tendencies. Three men stand as the prominent leaders of the movement,--Rosetti, Hunt, and Millais. There is not a single picture by Rosetti at Manchester; but two (if we remember rightly) by Millais; and although there are several by Hunt, there are none of his latest works, nor the most powerful and beautiful of his comparatively early ones, the well-known Light of the World. Rosetti has never, we believe, exhibited in public. But whether he paint Dante led in a vision by Love to see Beatrice lying dead,--or the Angel leading King and Shepherd to adore the new-born Saviour, while the angelic choir in white robes stand around the manger in the night, singing their song of Peace and Good-will,--or Queen Guinever and Sir Lancelot meeting in the autumn day at King Arthur's tomb,--or Mary of Magdala flying from the house of revels, and clasping the alabaster box of ointment to her bosom,--or Ophelia redelivering to Hamlet his gifts of remembrance, while he strips the leaves from a rosetree as he breaks her heart,--or the young farmer, who, having driven his cart to London, and crossed one of the bridges over the black river, finds in the cold, wet morning his old love, long lost, now fallen at the side of the street, fainting against the dead brick wall of a graveyard; whether he paint these or other scenes, in all are to be found such sense of the higher truths of Nature and such faithful rendering of them, such force of expression, and such beauty of conception, as place them as works of imagination among the first that this age has produced. With equal fidelity to Nature, with a more definite moral purpose, perhaps with a more consistent steadiness of work, but with less delicate sense of beauty, and with imagination of a very different order, Hunt stands with Rosetti in the front ranks of Pre-Raphaelitism. The earnestness and directness of moral expression in most of his pictures is such as has for a long time been rare in Art. Art is with him a means of enforcing the recognition of truths often avoided or carefully concealed. Their powerful dramatic character compels the attention of the careless to his pictures. He paints Claudio and Isabella in the prison scene, and it is not merely a vivid rendering of the scene in its external features, but also a true rendering of the character of Claudio and Isabella, of the weakness of the coward, of the strength that dwells with the pure. His Awakened Conscience is a scene from the interior of London life; a denunciation of the vice of which the world is so careless; a sad, stern picture of the bitterness of sin. Millais is less in earnest, and his pictures, with many great technical merits, with portions of very exquisite painting, have rarely possessed any great worth as works of imagination. One of the tenderest of them all is the Huguenots, the girl and her lover parting, which is now becoming generally known through the engraving that has recently been published. The Autumn Leaves, which is exhibited at Manchester, is one of his least satisfactory pictures.

But all these men are young, and what they have already accomplished is but as the promise of greater things to come. It is impossible, however, to look forward for these greater things, without a feeling of doubt and uncertainty as to their being produced. The times in which we are living are not fitted to develope and confirm the qualities on which the best results of Art depend. Ours is neither an age of composure nor of faith. It urges speedy results; it desires effective, rather than simple, truthful work. But the Pre-Raphaelites are exposed to especial dangers; just now to the dangers that come from success. And these are of two kinds; first, the undermining of that humility which is the secret of mastery; and secondly, the tendency to the development of peculiarities and mannerisms, to the exaggeration of special features that have attracted attention in their work, and which have a factitious value set upon them by the public, as they are taken to be the signs and passwords of initiation into the new school. But, lying deeper than these, there is a danger to Pre-Raphaelitism from the tendency to insist on too literal an application of its own principles. The best principles will not include all cases. The workings and ways of Nature are infinite, and the principles of Art are finite deductions from these infinite examples. As yet these deductions have been but imperfectly made. The most exact and truthful representation of Nature may be the rule of the artist, but it is not an easy thing to attain to an understanding of the truth of Nature. The actual is not always the real. Literal truth is not always exact truth; and the seeming truth, which is what Art must often represent, is very different from the absolute truth. And here there has been much stumbling in Pre-Raphaelitism, and there is likelihood of fall; likelihood of the actual being mistaken for the real, the show for the essence. It is, indeed, apparently, a tendency toward this error which has deprived most of the best pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites of the quality of _breadth_, a quality which Nature usually preserves in herself, which in painting takes the place of harmony in music, and which only the greatest painters have acquired.

But if Pre-Raphaelitism be true, not to the letter, but to the spirit of its principles,--if its artists remain unspoiled by flattery and success,--if they avoid mannerisms, conceits, and the affectations of originality,--if they can keep religious faith undimmed by the "world's slow stain"; then we may expect from the school such works of painting as have not been seen in past times,--works which shall be the forerunners of a new period of Art, and shall show what undreamed conquests yet lie open before it,--works which shall take us into regions of yet undiscovered beauty, and reveal to us more and more of the exhaustless love of God.

THE ROMMANY GIRL.

The sun goes down, and with him takes
The coarseness of my poor attire;
The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame
Of gypsy beauty blazes higher.

Pale northern girls! you scorn our race;
You captives of your air-tight halls,
Wear out in-doors your sickly days,
But leave us the horizon walls.

And if I take you, dames, to task,
And say it frankly without guile,
Then you are gypsies in a mask,
And I the lady all the while.

If, on the heath, under the moon,
I court and play with paler blood,
Me false to mine dare whisper none,--
One sallow horseman knows me good.

Go, keep your cheek's rose from the rain,
For teeth and hair with shopmen deal;
My swarthy tint is in the grain,
The rocks and forest know it real.

The wild air bloweth in our lungs,
The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,
The birds gave us our wily tongues,
The panther in our dances flies.

You doubt we read the stars on high,
Nathless we read your fortunes true;
The stars may hide in the upper sky,
But without glass we fathom you.

THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT.

Day! hast thou two faces,
Making one place two places?
One, by humble farmer seen,
Chill and wet, unlighted, mean,
Useful only, triste and damp,
Serving for a laborer's lamp?
Have the same mists another side,
To be the appanage of pride,
Gracing the rich man's wood and lake,
His park where amber mornings break,
And treacherously bright to show
His planted isle where roses glow?
O Day! and is your mightiness
A sycophant to smug success?
Will the sweet sky and ocean broad
Be fine accomplices to fraud?
O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray!
Back, back to chaos, harlot Day!

DAYS.

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb, like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts, after his will,--
Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

BRAHMA.

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula: 2 + 2 = 4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression _a + b = c_. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures.

They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation.--No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and you found it, _not in the original_, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.

--If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration?--I blush to say that I do not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired their teacher, and to some extent each other. Many of them deserved it; they have become famous since. It amuses me to hear the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray--

"Letters four do form his name"--

about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage of civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors, philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of Mutual Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred from admiring the same quality in another, nor the other from returning his admiration. They may even associate together and continue to think highly of each other. And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold so many. The being referred to above assumes several false premises. First, that men of talent necessarily hate each other. Secondly, that intimate knowledge or habitual association destroys our admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance. Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine and have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to glorify themselves and put down him and the fraction of the human race not belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it is an outrage that he is not asked to join them.

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who sits opposite said, "That's it! that's it!"

I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people's hating each other, I think a _little_ extra talent does sometimes make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual attempts and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working and playing together in harmony. He and his fellows are always fighting. With them familiarity naturally breeds contempt. If they ever praise each other's bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.

If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that alters the question. But if they are men with noble powers and qualities, let me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration. And what would literature or art be without such associations? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and as many more as they chose to associate with them?

The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he abuses this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries through the knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a medium for his popgun. Such a society is the crown of a literary metropolis; if a town has not material for it, and spirit and good feeling enough to organize it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a man of genius to lodge in, but not to live in. Foolish people hate and dread and envy such an association of men of varied powers and influence, because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the necessity of the case, exclusive. Wise ones are prouder of the title M.S.M.A. than of all their other honors put together.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "facts." They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no "facts" at this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine represent a hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my speech?

[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind. The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse in incompetent hands.]

This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There are men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day's fasting would do. Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as good as a working professional man's advice, and costs you nothing: It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to have a nerve tapped. Nobody measures your nervous force as it runs away, nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.

There are men of _esprit_ who are excessively exhausting to some people. They are the talkers that have what may be called _jerky_ minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence. They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death. After a jolting half-hour with one of these jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief. It is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.

"Do not dull people bore you?" said one of the lady-boarders,--the same that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a few original stanzas, not remembering that "The Pactolian" pays me five dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.

"Madam," said I, (she and the century were in their teens together,) "all men are bores, except when we want them. There never was but one man that I would trust with my latch-key."

"Who might that favored person be?"

"Zimmermann."

The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney, the great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his neck would swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he seemed on the verge of apoplexy. The hydraulic arrangements for supplying the brain with blood are only second in importance to its own organization. The bulbous-headed fellows that steam well when they are at work are the men that draw big audiences and give us marrowy books and pictures. It is a good sign to have one's feet grow cold when he is writing. A great writer and speaker once told me that he often wrote with his feet in hot water; but for this, _all_ his blood would have run into his head, as the mercury sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.

--You don't suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so many postage-stamps, do you,--each to be only once uttered? If you do, you are mistaken. He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, "Know thyself," never alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted existence! Why, the truths a man carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail? I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech twice over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer, after performing in an inland city, where dwells a _Littératrice_ of note, was invited to meet her and others over the social teacup. She pleasantly referred to his many wanderings in his new occupation. "Yes," he replied, "I am like the Huma, the bird that never lights, being always in the ears, as he is always on the wing,"--Years elapsed. The lecturer visited the same place once more for the same purpose. Another social cup after the lecture, and a second meeting with the distinguished lady. "You are constantly going from place to place," she said.--"Yes," he answered, "I am like the Huma,"--and finished the sentence as before.

What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine speech, word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished his conversation with the Huma daily during that whole interval of years. On the contrary, he had never once thought of the odious fowl until the recurrence of precisely the same circumstances brought up precisely the same idea. He ought to have been proud of the accuracy of his mental adjustments. Given certain factors, and a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product with the certainty of Babbage's calculating machine.

--What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out formulæ like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

I have an immense respect for a man of talents _plus_ "the mathematics." But the calculating power alone should seem to be the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three or four calculators, and better than any one of them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels clicking in a calculator's brain. The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which may be put into a mighty poor watch. I suppose it is about as common as the power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare endowment.

--Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about. Nature is very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many small talents and little accomplishments would be neglected! Talk about conceit as much as you like, it is to human character what salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable. Say rather it is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl's plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and the wave in which he dips. When one has had _all_ his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost _all_ his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.

So you admire conceited people, do you? said the young lady who has come to the city to be finished off for--the duties of life.

I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a saltwater plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual centre.

Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing. What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she did! What fine speeches are those two: "_Non omnis moriar_" and "I have taken all knowledge to be my province"! Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.

--What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything else;--long arguments on special points between people who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain _ultimata_ of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

--Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and _verbicide_--that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life--are alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is _primâ facie_ an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark; also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger than any modern inundation.

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, "When it begins to hum." Doe then--and not till then--struck Roe, and his head happening to strike a bound volume of the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued, with a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest so." The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted, and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

I will thank you, B.F., to bring down two books, of which I will mark the places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may say that this boy, our landlady's youngest, is called BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, after the celebrated philosopher of that name. A highly merited compliment.)

I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to listen. The great moralist says: "To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion."

And, once more, listen to the historian. "The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its Royal quibble. 'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.' The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon playfully declared himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man. A courtier, who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. 'Thou hast reason,' replied a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a two-legged animal _with_ feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the Stuarts."

Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the Macaulay-flowers of literature?--There was a dead silence.--I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If _I_ have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. We have done with them.

--If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic?--I should say that its most frequent work was to build a _pons asinorum_ over chasms that shrewd people can bestride without such a structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide span, that couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other. Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these are the true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I understand truth,--not for any secondary artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a good chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.

The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with truth as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good enough for him.

Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, _as you understand it_. We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our own minds, either of things or persons. A man who is willing to take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of things for one's self. On the whole, I had rather judge men's minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do one or the other. It does not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another man's thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but that does not necessarily change my opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy of every superior mind that held a different one. How many of our most cherished beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down! I have sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of _mora_, in which one player lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and the other matches or misses the number, as the case may be with his own. I show my thought, another his; if they agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest common factor, if we can, but at any rate avoid disputing about remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an instrument is to playing on it.

--What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a copy of verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any of the company can retire that like.

When Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another

To cheat the cunning tempter's art,
And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.

A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;
And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.

On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
Till western skies are burning.

Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.

But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown,
The lips of lying lovers,

They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavour
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.

What do _you_ think of these verses, my friends? Is that piece an impromptu? said my landlady's daughter. (Aet. 19+. Tender-eyed blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil-case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says, "Yes?" when you tell her anything.)--_Oui et non, ma petite_,--Yes and no, my child. Five of the seven verses were written off-hand; the other two took a week,--that is, were hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. _C'est le DERNIER pas qui coute_. Don't you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don't know how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched. I have contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their "native element," the great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, _day_, _ray_, _beauty_, _duty_, _skies_, _eyes_, _other_, _brother_, _mountain_, _fountain_, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as the above.--Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been highly commended. "Madam," I said, "you can pour three gills and three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside down for a thousand years."

One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that copy of verses,--which I don't mean to abuse, or to praise either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.

* * * * youth
* * * * morning
* * * * truth
* * * * warning

Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above musical and suggestive coincidences.

"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.

I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my next neighbour.

When a young female wears a flat circular side-curl, gummed on each temple,--when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against the back of hers,--and when she says "Yes?" with the note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the "feller" was you saw her with.

"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house, moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.