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paid by experts to the subject. Washington took grave counsel upon it, and Hamilton gave him some canons of behavior in writing, and there is alleged to be a more rigid system of social etiquette among official persons in Wash

where in the country. There are asserted to be due rules for the "first calling" of Senators' wives, and the wives of members of the cabinet and of Justices of the Supreme Court. Precedence at table is also a knotty point, involving great trouble of soul. Some years ago a Senator gave a dinner to which the Secretary of State was invited. When dinner was announced, the host turned to the senior Senator, the dean of the Senatorial Chamber, and asked him to take the lady of the house to table. The senior Senator hesitated, saying to his colleague that the Secretary of State was in the room. "Pshaw! we Senators make Sec

They restore the tranquil days, the almost pastoral days, when Kalm saw the town thickly shaded with trees. The Easy Chair raises its eyes, and looks from the huge building in which this Magazine is printed. It hums and throbs with various and immense industry; and acrossington than is to be found in any circle elsethe elevated railroad, with its thronged incessant trains darting along over the more slowly hurrying crowd below, the Easy Chair sees an old, shabby, neglected tenement-house or sailor's boarding-house, set in the midst of blocks of buildings stretching every way above the roaring street. That old house was once the finest mansion of the shaded town. Over the high walls at its side leaned the lustrous foliage of its secluded garden, that stretched with gentle lawns and box-edged paths to the river. Birds sang in that garden in the bright May morning. Famous guests passed in at the door, and lovely damsels looked out at the windows. It was a pleasant house in a plea-retaries of State," was the answer; and the sant little town. Eheu Posthume! This little town has become Babylon, and a delightful Babylon it is. But because you are virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale? Because there are delights in Babylon, will you deny that there were pleasures in the little tree-shaded town of which Babylon has no knowledge?

QUESTIONS of etiquette are sometimes very troublesome in Washington, and all the more because very many of the denizens of that city, who come from distant and rural homes, know and care nothing about etiquette. How little the honorable gentleman from Symmes's Hole suspects, as he is asked to take Mrs. Senator Red Velvet to dinner, that the chair in which he shall sit and the lady whom he shall hand out have been subjects of long and anxious deliberation. It is easy to call on Wormley, or Welcker, or Pinard, or some other chef, and order a dinner for twenty. But who shall sit where, and who shall hand whom?-these are the questions which cause vexation and anguish. A distinguished official gentleman in Washington gave a noble repast in honor of a noted guest. It was ordered of the proper purveyor. "Now," said the host, when he had bade no expense to be spared, "I don't know anything about the business of seating people correctly. You must attend to that too." The purveyor went straight to another distinguished man, who had not been invited to the dinner because it would not be agreeable to some other distinguished man who was invited, and distinguished man number one was immensely amused that he was called upon to seat the guests at a dinner to which he was not himself invited.

host insisted that in his house nobody should precede the dean of his own body.

Mr. Lossing, in a recent pleasant article upon this subject, recalls the famous "Merry" affair in Jefferson's time, which was fortunately less serious in its results than the Mrs. Eaton difficulty which broke up General Jackson's cabinet. Mr. Merry was the English Minister at Washington in 1809, and he was invited, with Mrs. Merry, to dine with President Jefferson. Whether the dinner was designed especially to honor them we do not know, but when it was announced, Mr. Jefferson, who was talking at the moment with Mrs. Madison, wife of the Secretary of State, offered his arm to her, and handed her to the table. The wrath of the English Minister and of Mrs. Merry, that any other lady should have been selected for this distinction, was great. Tom Moore was a guest at their house, and he wrote home that the President had treated them with "pointed incivility," and he added, with the excellent gravity of a man who "felt at home the moment his foot touched a carpet," that "it is only the precarious situation of England which could induce it to overlook such indecent, though at the same time petty, hostility."

The matter took air. Mr. Merry doubtless appealed to his diplomatic colleagues to remember that, like Majesty itself, they were but ceremonies, and if the Democratic potentate proposed to treat ceremonies with contempt, what would become of their Excellencies? The Federalists took it up. The President, they said, had needlessly insulted Great Britain and disgraced his own country. Secretary Madison wrote to Mr. Monroe, then Minister to England. Mr. Monroe had heard of the matter from a friendly Under-Secretary, who darkly hinted that he might hear of it official

It is all the more perplexing because, although Washington is always full of officially. But Mr. Monroe silenced him by humorpersons who are really indifferent to etiquette, and who greet it with a hearty democratic laugh, yet because of its official population there has been from the first especial attention

ously saying that his government would put in a rejoinder because his informant's wife had been accorded similar precedence to the wife of the American Minister. The ridiculous

tea-pot tempest bubbled and boiled and hissed. | most delicate devices of restraint. A distinThe English Minister coldly went to the White | guished foreigner says that no people have a House only on official business. The indig- profounder regard for rank. But he spoke nant Mrs. Merry declined to darken its insult- only of the Americans he saw in Europe, and ing doors. Jefferson at last intimated that the genuine bird of the free West does not they should be invited to dinner. Mr. Merry often fly so far. graciously acquiesced, and the invitations were sent. But madame sternly held out, like a Joan of Arc, or a Maid of Saragossa, or a Molly Pitcher. The honor of her country and its crown was at stake. The rock should fly from its firm base as soon as she. She carried the day. The British Minister asked if he was invited in a private or public capacity: if officially, he must have the consent of his sovereign; if privately, he must be assured that he should be treated with dignity. Secretary Madison replied that the President directed him to say that Mr. and Mrs. Merry should do just as they pleased. And the tempest ended in a laugh.

AN alumnus of any college always feels that he has a right to criticise his alma mater, and the old lady seldom has sharper critics than some of her own children. When we recently quoted the strictures of Dr. Tomes upon the collegiate asylum of his youth, it was with the knowledge that he threw down a glove which would be certainly taken up, and we are not surprised, therefore, by the receipt of a letter which arraigns the Doctor as a light-minded, if not recreant, son of Trinity. It asserts that even fifty years ago, or thereabouts, the college was not open to such gibing comments as the Doctor's; that Bishop Brownell-and no one Mr. Lossing also relates that when John will deny it—was rightfully called scholar and Quincy Adams was Secretary of State under gentleman; and that a faculty which counted Monroe, some of the Senators thought that the among its members Bishop Potter, Dr. Hawks, Secretaries ought to call or send cards upon and William Wolcott Ellsworth was worthy of the arrival of Senators at the capital, and they all esteem. The letter also insists that among complained that the Secretary of State had the students at that time preparing for the minnot done so, thus withholding from them a istry, and whose morning-gowns, or dressingproper homage, even if not implying that they gowns, were so peculiarly offensive to Alumwere to offer it to him. Whoever "assailed" nus Tomes, there were some men now exceedJohn Quincy Adams in any way and at any ingly eminent, and that their standing in the point was generally worsted. He heard of world should reprove the levity of their lauthis complaint, and he wrote one of his terri- reate. The writer of the letter concludes, with ble letters to the Vice-President, the presiding pungency, that among the graduates of the officer of the Senate, which showed that, as college, and presumably among the wearers of usual, he knew very much more of the matter the distressing dressing-gowns, are found eight than his censors. He said that from the be- bishops, numerous doctors of divinity, Governginning of Mr. Jefferson's administration there ors of States, learned judges, and members of had never been any fixed rules of official eti-Legislatures, upon many of whom even Columquette in social precedence, and that any such appearance was merely the unwritten law of common custom. He went into detail. He cited his own experience when a Senator, and stated that he had never heard of the rule said to have been agreed upon by Senators of the First Congress, that they would pay no first visits except to the President. Mr. Adams added: "I have invariably considered the gov-days upon the banks of the Connecticut, would ernment of the United States as a government cheerfully agree--as, indeed, he plainly states for the transaction of business, and that no in his book-that many of his fellow-students ceremonial for the mode of interchanging have become justly eminent. But the substance visits between the persons belonging to the of his story, nevertheless, remains sound. There respective departments in it had ever been esare too many poor colleges, and in every coltablished; that, as a member of the adminis-lege there are wearers of dressing-gowns who tration, I had no sort of claim to a first visit from any member of either House of Congress, but that neither had any member of Congress any claim to a first visit from me; that the interchange and order of visits was entirely optional on both sides, and that no rule of etiquette whatever existed which required that either party should pay the first visit, or indeed any visit, to the other."

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bia College has seen fit to confer degrees, from which we may conclude, says the writer, that Dr. Tomes's college "does not come under the designation of 'colleges which spring up in a day and disappear in a night.'"

We do not doubt that Dr. Tomes, smoking his meditative pipe upon the shores of the Rhine, and recalling his vanished academic

are a distinctive class open to the kind of criticism made by Dr. Tomes. President Barnard, of Columbia, in a capital paper upon college degrees, shows that there are more than four hundred institutions which confer degrees, and degrees which, as such, have the same official value as those of the colleges of highest character. An institution may spring up in a night, without endowment, without resources, without scholarship, and may live long enough only to graduate a single class, whose degrees shall yet be lawful certificates of proficiency, to be

accepted at their "face value" by professional | If any nation can afford to laugh good-naturedschools and other institutions throughout the ly at itself for some things, it is the universal country. President Barnard inclines to favor Yankee nation. the concentration of local interest and capital upon State institutions, and his argument is IT was the coldest day of the cold winter on lucid and forcible. Nothing is more evident which Dr. Chapin was buried, but there was than that a college dependent for its existence never a great assembly of persons more deeply upon tuition fees will not make its entrance moved than that which filled the great church steps very high, and that its discipline will which his eloquence has made famous. "I have an eye to the continuance of the college. have heard all kinds of men in all kinds of This is found to be an obstruction to every places speak of him admiringly," said Robert project of college co-operation for the purpose Collyer, "and I never heard one of them speak of raising the standard of the curriculum as of him with a 'but.'" His own heartiness inwell as of the entering examination. The pri- fused itself into the regard that was felt for mary object of a poor college must be to ob- him, and affection was naturally vigorous for tain as many students as possible by "making a man so full of vigor. He was perfectly simthings easy," without actually losing a reputa-ple, sympathetic, generous, but also perfectly tion which is necessary to attract students.

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steady and well-balanced. No man was more attentive to new thoughts, and he had a wide intellectual curiosity. He was an omnivorous reader. He read almost greedily; and with

He held them, as it were, under each arm, and stuffed them into his pockets, while his mouth was full. But when he preached or lectured, it was not a crude reproduction of reading that he poured out, but a smooth, clarified, musical stream of assimilated knowledge. He made his accumulations his own. His mind was a garden, not a cellar. What he put into it was transformed into beauty, like seed which is planted, and which grows and expands and flowers and ripens into blossom and fruit. This, which was obvious to all his friends, Mr. Beecher happily expressed by saying that his mind, like a net, gathered everything-bits of glass and of metal, old coin and beads, but, like a kaleidoscope, it transmuted them into exquisite colors and harmonious forms.

Now a true university is concerned with studies, not with students. It provides ample opportunities for the pursuit of every kind of study the ablest and most approved teach-books he was like a hungry boy with buns. ers; complete apparatus; full libraries--and these means are maintained for the advantage of professors who are constantly extending the area of investigation and of knowledge. Their work continues whether students come or stay away. The theory of the institution is that it is of the highest advantage to society to prosecute such studies, and that those who pursue them may be wisely supported either by the community or by individuals. If the support can be aided by those who wish to learn, the aid will not be refused; but it is not the condition or the dependence of the university. This, indeed, is but an amplification of the original principle of the common school. The support of the school was made obligatory upon the citizens, because elementary knowledge was held to be essential to the welfare of the state. The principle of the university is that the higher knowledge is also essential to the highest general welfare, and that it should be prosecuted, therefore, for its own sake.

and the lecturers.

"Have you ever heard Chapin ?"
"No."

"Well, there's nothing like it; he's the king of them all."

During the days of his lyceum lecturing, no man was more popular upon the platform; indeed, probably no one was so universally popular as he. Jones, who used to lecture in the same courses, said that he was proceeding one Practically, while the minor colleges will be evening to fulfill an appointment, and as he maintained throughout the country for the sat, dismal and homesick, in the cold car, he local convenience of those who desire a supe- heard two men, upon the seat before him, talkrior education to that of the common schooling, as they approached the city, of the lectures and the academy, there will be a few which, by reason of great endowments, will be true universities. The University of Berlin made Rückert professor of the Persian and Arabic languages and of Oriental literature. If no scholars came, he was still professor, and still pursued his own studies. Dr. Tomes has lived for many years in Germany, and looking back from the shadow of Göttingen, of Halle, of Heidelberg, of Bonn, and of Berlin to the beginnings of his own scantily equipped but well-meaning alma mater, he may be allowed to smile at the shabby dressing-gowns and the lounging untidiness of some of his old chums, and by depicting them with a sly smile, to prod the serene conceit that all things American, including the small days of a small college, are better than all other mundane things.

"Who lectures to-night ?"

"Jones."

"Oh, Jones. Ever heard Jones?"
"Yes."

"How is he?"

"Good speaker; but tedious, tedious."

Jones said that his head sank upon his bosom; but that when he afterward told the story to Chapin, the generous king of them all shook and shouted with glee, and cried, "Pshaw! he knew ye, Hal, he knew ye, and meant to have his joke."

Like Theodore Parker, Chapin undoubtedly

THE photograph and the illustrated magazines and papers have made the faces of all famous contemporary persons familiar, except the face of George Eliot. Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Disraeli, Bulwer, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and William Black are all well known to their readers and admirers by the counterfeit presentment; but George Eliot has been, to all but her personal friends, like Wordsworth's cuckoo, "an invisible thing,

felt his vitality to be so immense that it could | cible faith, their free and generous spirit, have not be overtasked. Parker came of a long-been emancipating influences. These were lived race, but he died of overwork at fifty. their most persuasive eloquence, their best serChapin seemed made for infinite endurance, mons and books and speeches. "How can I but he was shaken at sixty, and he died at mourn," said Mr. Beecher, "for this life well sixty-six. Some years ago, in the height of lived, for this battle nobly fought and won?” his prosperous lecturing career, the Easy Chair With men like Chapin, that battle does not met him at the Albany railroad station in the end with their lives. In the inspiration and early evening of a winter day. He was snatch- the power of excellent example, the contest ing" a bite" and a cup of coffee, and as the bell goes on in the lives of those who have felt rang, they hurried to the train, Chapin carrying their energy. The old tradition of the battle a lumbering bag and shawls, and laughing and of the Huns, of the warriors who, falling upon joking as they climbed into the car. He had the field, renewed the fight, invisible, high in been out all the week, starting early on Mon- air, is constantly renewed. In our better enday morning, after preaching twice on Sun- deavors, in our purer resolves, in our humaner day. He had lectured every evening during and more generous purpose and achievement, the week, travelling hard all day. "Up before though dead, they not only speak, but still light," he said, gayly, "eating tons of tough gloriously strive. steaks and bushels of cold apples, whizzing on in these stifling cars, and turning out just in time to swallow a cup of tea, and off to the lecture." It was tremendous work, as only the fully initiated know. But he made it all a joke, and his swift tongue flew humorously on from incident to incident, and presently began to discuss the new books and the new articles in the magazines, with sharp and just discrimination. Suddenly the train stopped, evident- | ly not at a station. The night was cold and stormy. Presently the conductor passed, and Chapin asked to know the reason of the delay. The conductor replied that there was some derangement of the locomotive; and Chapin said, quietly, "This is bad business for a man who has to preach at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning, and whose sermon is not begun." His companion remonstrated; but Chapin's eyes twinkled as he answered: "Oh, you | laymen know nothing about it. Burns sang the cotter's Saturday night, but the minister's Saturday night is yet unwritten. At least," he said, laughing, "this one is likely to be un-peared, and English ladies have gladly paid written." It was past midnight when the train reached the city. "Good-night," cried the hearty voice. "Go home, and go to bed; I'm going to work." The next time the Easy Chair met the preacher, it asked about that sermon. 66 Oh, that was all right. I went home, and | there was a bright fire in my study, and a brew of hot coffee, and I finished that sermon just as the sun rose." And the next morning probably he was off again for another week of the same kind.

It was at the same Albany station that, crossing in the bleak winter night over the frozen river, Theodore Parker was fatally chilled. He and Chapin were both stalwart men, with such ample and overflowing strength that it seemed to them to be exhaustless. But they worked bravely while it was yet day, and their works do follow them. Young and old, everywhere in the country, have been cheered and lifted up by their consoling and vivifying words. They strengthened others with their strength. Their upright lives, their boundless sympathy, their sweet humanity, their invin

A voice, a mystery." For some years, indeed, in London, her receptions have been an assembly of much that is most brilliant and renowned in the intellectual society of England, which recognized in her a true queen and leader, by whose side Beaconsfield's Zenobia is a red light and spangles Sadler's Wells imitation. There was a time, indeed, when George Eliot's receptions were attended mainly by gentlemen, while ladies held aloof. But more recently this distinction had disap

homage to the woman more eminent than any woman in English history for mental superiority and power.

George Eliot is known as an English novelist of the first rank, a peer of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Brontë, leaving no one of the same kind of eminence behind her. She was a very popular author toward the close of her life, and her works commanded great prices. But it is plain that her earnest moral purpose transcended all pleasure of the mere play of intellectual power and of the creative faculty. There is always an intellectual tension and abstraction in the midst of the story, and little trace of that simple joy of story-telling which belongs to Homer and to Walter Scott. But the distinction of her works is characteristic of the group of writers of which she was not the least. The moral purpose is as evident in Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë and in the best works of Charles Reade as it is in George Eliot. Thackeray, indeed, gayly said of himself that he was always stopping in the most critical

any such permanent and noble accession to their society since Jeanie Deans as Dinah and Romola? Dickens's women are amusing, Thackeray's Becky Sharp is an enduring figure of its kind, Jane Eyre is pathetic, and a lovely throng flutter through all the lesser novels; but for mingled dignity, intelligence, pathos, and supreme womanliness, the range of our imaginative literature shows no nobler forms than Dinah and Romola.

moments of his stories to preach a little sermon. This common characteristic was the result of what is called the dual spirit of the age, its humanity and its introspection. But while | in Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Brontë it is mainly the humanity which is paramount, in George Eliot it is the introspection. The tendency sometimes betrays her almost into philosophical essay writing and metaphysical speculation, and many a reader yawned and worried over Daniel Deronda as a pamphlet Miss Burney, Miss Austen, Charlotte Brontë, for the removal of the disabilities of the Jews. and George Eliot are the chief Englishwomen It is interesting to contrast this work with any among the novelists, and unquestionably the of Disraeli's which have the same burden. one of greatest power is she who lately died. There is an indefinable impression of gilt, taw- The distinctions among them are absolutely driness, insincerity, and shallow melodrama in marked. The first two conformed to Scott's Disraeli's Sidonias and Asian Mysteries, but in | assertion that the business of the story-teller George Eliot's treatment of the same theme is to amuse; the last two were inspired by the there is a forcible grasp and vigorous earnest-humane desire of great souls not only to amuse ness which make the matter real, and lodge the plea deep and permanently in intelligent thought and sympathy.

The author of Adam Bede, and Silas Marner, and Romola, and Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, was a woman of extraordinary insight and reasoning power, with a mental training and comprehensive acquirement which, without her imaginative genius, would have made her famous not only among women, but among all contemporaries. There is some disposition, accordingly, and naturally, to underestimate her high and beautiful imagination. But if the lofty company of "Shakespeare's women," as Shelley called them, received no real addition until Scott's Jeanie Deans, has there been

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but to assist mankind. How far this desire is a constituent element of creative genius, and whether, if the moral purpose be excluded severely from art, the moral result is not more surely attained, we need not now consider. It is very possibly true. It is possible that Scott will outlive the distinctively humane school, and that he and Shakespeare and Homer are moral only as nature is moral, and therefore more deeply and effectively moral than any other literary influence can be. But none the less the great genius which was lately withdrawn from us, and which will be always known in literary history as George Eliot, will be always honored also as one of the greatest literary forces in our common language.

Editor's Literary Record.

whelming cumulative array by Dr. Schliemanu of visible circumstantial evidence of the weightiest kind in support of his deductions, there are too many opportunities left for ingenious or hostile criticism to point out gaps and flaws, and possibly discrepancies and inconsistencies, in some of the details of his researches―to render it at all likely that the results assumed by him will be allowed to pass unchallenged, much less be accepted with general acquiescence by scholars. And yet his deductions are so natural and free from forced and violent con

per with which philological and classical | too seriously at venture; and despite the overscholars conduct their debates, or who has a tolerably clear idea of the inexhaustible fertility of their controversial resources, or who has witnessed their scissors-if-I-die-for-it pertinacity in adhering to the theories and opinions they have once espoused, will expect them to adopt, with any approximation to unanimity, Dr. Schliemann's conclusions concerning the site of Troy and its identity with the Ilium of Homer, as he has step by step unfolded them in his latest and very remarkable work, Ilios.' The problems involved are too complex, and have too passionately and largely divided opin-structions; his arguments are intrinsically so ion in the literary and scientific world; the partisans on either side have been and remain

Ilios: The City and Country of the Trojans. The Results of Researches and Discoveries on the Site of Troy and throughout the Troad in the Years 1871, 72, 73, '78, '79. Including an Autobiography of the Author. By Dr. HENRY SCHLIEMANN. With a Preface, Appendixes, and Notes by Professors RUDOLF VIRCHOW, MAX MÜLLER, A. H. SAYOK, J. P. MAHAFFY, H. BRUGSCH-BEY, P. ASCHERSON, M. A. PORTALAGOAS, M. E. BOURNOF, Mr. F. CALVERT, and Mr. A. J. DUFFIELD, With Maps, Plans, and about 1800 Illustrations. Royal 8vo, pp. 800. New York: Harper and Brothers.

tenable and so amply corroborated by unimpeachable mute witnesses-whose testimony, as far as it goes, is too significant to be explained or sneered away by the hypothesis of even the strangest coincidence; and his principal conclusions from the evidence adduced are so reasonable, and require for their acceptance an effort of the judgment or imagination so much less violent than would be required for their rejection, that if the matter were referred to a tribunal of clear-headed, intelli