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tore's statue. She, too, made much of her return, staggering aghast and horror-stricken across the hall, the guests flying with her in vague apprehension. The regular beat of the marble tread was more and more urgent. Leporello was again overwhelmed. Don Giovanni moved with restless forecast, which his bearing proudly scorned to acknowledge. He ordered Leporello to show up the terrible guest. But when the chattering and impotent servant could not stir for horror, the Don, seizing the candlestick, passed out with smiling scorn, erect, undaunted; but the next moment returned, tottering backward, bent, transfixed, holding the candle pointed toward the awful stranger, but still unyielding in soul, although with an overpowering sense of doom.

This remained to the end. When the statue planted itself in the centre of the hall, and began its strain, Don Giovanni swayed and fluttered around it, like a moth about a light. He | approached it from every side, as if to impose himself upon it, and sweep it away by audacious will. But every time, with the long, wailing swell of the music, on the very point of dashing himself against the statue, he recoiled with the shock of sound, and resumed his restless round. At last, still defiant, not an instant quiet during all the long act of the | Commendatore, the Don drew himself recklessly up as the inexorable marble hand was stretched out; and as he laid in it his own hand, the very marrow in his bones seemed to melt, and his heart to wither. It was an intensely passionate scene, and played with singular insight and ability.

It was many years ago, in Berlin. The name of the singer was unknown beyond that city, and probably no reader of these words has ever heard it. If we recall it correctly, it was Bötticher, a German, not an Italian name. His voice was not especially fine, and possibly there is some glamour of the prima gioventù in the backward glance. But Tamburini in his prime, upon the London opera stage, surrounded with Grisi and Persiani and Castellan and Lablache and Mario, was not so true a Don as the local singer who long since made his exit, but who re-appears with all the old fire and grace, to one spectator at least, whenever the curtain is rung up for Don Giovanni.

THE prospects of a good understanding regarding international copyright between England and this country were never fairer than now, and the general interest which has been manifested shows that the proposition of accommodation, of which we have formerly spoken, was made when the time was ripe. There are now very serious disadvantages to authors, to publishers, and to readers arising from the want of some equitable arrangement. In this country we are a newspaper-reading nation, but it would be unfortunate if all our literature of every kind should take the form of newspapers. English writers of books, however, may

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well wonder if that is not the obvious tendency of the present situation, and American readers of books, with equal reason, may ask whether it be a desirable tendency.

One of the most significant contributions to the discussion is a paper by Mr. Longman, a member of the distinguished London publishing house. He asserts, indeed, the right of the author to the same legal protection for his literary property that he receives for every other kind of property. This, however, he recognizes to be the abstract question of which the pending proposition is a waiver. If action should be deferred until this question was settled, there would be no action whatever. We know distinguished authors who do not agree with Mr. Longman, and Professor Huxley, in his evidence before the Copyright Commission, admitted that, however just the claim of absolute property might be, the immediate practical question was one of comparative advantage. Mr. Longman accepts the pending proposition as a compromise. That, however, is not precisely a correct statement as to the arrangement between the countries, because there is no right acknowledged on either side. England denies to Tennyson the right to property in his published "In Memoriam" or "Idyls." England says to him, “In order to encourage you to write poetry for our pleasure, we will allow you to control the publication of your poems during your life." America does substantially the same. If Washington Irving's gardener left a hoe to his heirs, the law of the land guarantees their ownership as long as the hoe lasts. But the law of the land permits anybody who chooses, after a certain period, to publish Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History, and pocket the profits. In other words, the copyright laws of England and of the United States grant the author a brief, limited control of the publication of his work, not for his benefit, but for the advantage of the public. The laws are not recognitions of right; they are concessions of privilege.

It will not do, therefore, for either country to assume an air of superiority as more careful of the rights of authors. England permits an American author first publishing in England to control the publication. The United States do not, under similar circumstances, grant the same control to English authors. But in both cases each country does what it believes to be best for its own interest. No property rights of the author in publication are conceded, and he is considered at all only as auxiliary to the public benefit.

Obviously, however, the more control and the longer control of publication the author can obtain, the greater is his advantage. Therefore Mr. Longman is in error in saying, as if that were all, that the pending proposition is designed to protect American publishers, printers, binders, and paper-makers from British competition, because it is equally designed to give the British author more and

can.

wider control of publication, and consequent- | that this should be done upon the same general ly to enhance his profits. Indeed, the propo- terms, in order that no one who contributes to sition is designed to relieve a situation in the common welfare should suffer. This is now which the English author can expect no prof- the practically common agreement of the auit whatever. If a guinea book in London is thors and publishers who write and who print to be reproduced for fifteen cents in New York, books in the English language, and the treaty the author can reap no advantage. Under the form of that understanding will not, we hope, principle of the copyright laws of both coun- | be long delayed. tries, the question then arises whether it is desirable that he should not have an advantage, WHEN John Stuart Mill published his essay and whether the very object of our own copy- upon Liberty, it was plain that free thought right law is not defeated by his not having it. and free speech were not exclusively AmeriThe basis of our copyright law is the consti- When Mr. Fitz-James Stephen published tutional grant of authority to Congress "to his book on Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, promote the progress of science and useful arts it was evident that a certain literary latitude by securing, for limited times, to authors and was permitted to Englishmen which is little inventors the exclusive right to their respect-known among us. Mr. Reverdy Johnson, or ive writings and discoveries." It is not here stated, but it is doubtless true, that the purpose of this grant is to promote American writ-ing their professional reputation. John Bull, ing and discovery. But how is American literary production to be promoted by reproducing foreign literature at the cost of the labor and material exclusive of the author? Evidently, for the purposes of our own copyright laws, a mutual understanding is desirable.

Mr. Evarts, or Mr. Stansbury, could hardly have written such a work without somewhat risk

from some points of view, seems to be the most grotesquely hide-bound of conservatives. The solemn tomfoolery of his Lord Mayor procession, for instance, illustrates it. He clings with solemn loyalty to ludicrous old shreds and patches of tradition; and great multitudes of people, Bagehot tells us, believe most piously that the Queen reigns by the grace of God, not by act of Parliament, and that there is some mystic, inexpressible authority by which she rules.

Indeed, the alternative question seems to be whether we shall have any books. It is now plain that, in the absence of any international understanding, literature in this country will consist largely of cheap English reprints. The tendency will constantly be to greater cheapness and flimsiness of form, and so far as unwise laws and unjust conduct can avail to suppress it, American literary expression will be suppressed. American authors, as a class, are not so reprobate that they deserve to be summarily destroyed. They may be an inconsiderable body of insignificant performance. But innumerable and important as the works which they have not written may be, their offenses are certainly not so much more heinous than those of their fellow-citizens that they should be practically outlawed. They ask only fair | play. They ask only that the laws of their country may not favor the foreigner more than they favor the citizen. They still hope that it is not wrong to have been born Americans, and although their presumption in being authors may be great, they urge that they were deceived by the words of the Constitution, which imply that authorship and inventioned child of the sunset, however, might be surare not unpardonable sins.

England and America speak a common language, and they have a common literature. Both countries have decided that the author shall not indefinitely control the publication of his works. But they have also decided that it is desirable to encourage him to write. erature, these laws concede, may wisely be tolerated. Chaucer and Shakespeare and Bacon and Newton and Scott and Gibbon and Darwin need not summarily be suppressed. They may be allowed for a time, and under certain conditions, to control the publication of their works. It is therefore for the welfare of both countries

This disposition doubtless produces much of the romance of England. A country of old houses and old habits and old traditions, with a far-reaching history mellowing into dim perspective, has all the elements of romance. Even immobility, as in Spain, may be picturesque and poetic. But these things do not chain the feet of England. The country which superficially appears to be all conservatism and conventionality, and which lends itself so felicitously to the satire of Yellowplush and of Podsnap, is also the most progressive. The other day in a company of American al- . dermen a proposition was introduced, and its feasibility maintained by British precedent. "England! England!" exclaimed one of the city fathers, with an air and a tone of ineffable contempt; "pshaw! they heat their railroad cars with hot-water jugs in England. Don't talk to me of England." This unfetter

prised to learn that the country which heats its cars with hot-water jugs has also just admitted women to the examination for degrees at Cambridge University.

The terrible question which agitates free and equal America, whether such a thing is Lit-compatible with the true sphere of women, seems not to have disturbed John Bull. The vote was 398 to 32. Perhaps the dons thought that they could hardly overthrow the sphere of woman by a majority vote. Perhaps they thought that as young women received university instruction, there could be no danger in certifying by a degree the diligence and

success with which they had studied. But | Bull saw what always moves contempt—an whatever the reason, the deed is done, and if some Mrs. Somerville proposes to contest the head of the mathematical tripos with any warrior of the other sex, let him look to his laurels! We doubt if mothers will love their children less because of this opening of the university gates, and we do not fear that even in this spring the young man's fancy will refuse to turn to thoughts of love because Cunigunda may be more devoted to Newton than to Worth, or more observant of a star in Lyra than of the solitaire in her own ears.

obsequious imitation of himself, resulting in the ludicrous inadequacy of all imitation. We are now supremely indifferent whether Cousin John likes our literature and manners or not, | but we have by no means escaped that fatal obsequiousness of imitation.

Why should not the Windsor have been the Manhattan, and the Brunswick the Hamilton, and the Westminster the Knickerbocker, and the Albemarle the Hudson? Or, to put it the other way, why should they have been given these English names with English associaThe feeling that somehow education and en- tions? Are our own names and historic assolarged intelligence will destroy the charm of ciations so poor and unsuggestive that they are women belongs to barbarism. It springs from unworthy of this kind of commemoration? the same root as the feeling that women are And why do we not see that if there be any more beautiful with rings in their cars and charm in such names in England, it is because noses. It assumes that the Mohammedan of their local historic association and meanhouri is the ideal of woman, and that she is ing? These are questions which James Freemore womanly the more dependent she is upon man Clarke, the distinguished clergyman, asks man. To propitiate his favor, therefore, she with great force and pertinence in his little must dress and smile. To please him, she pamphlet on giving names to towns and cities; must learn his whims. Her attitude must be and those about to name streets or hotels, or that of folded hands upon her breast waiting to plant towns, would do well to heed his wise for his smile. "What!" cries the indignant suggestions. Mr. Clarke says that on a board Major Pendennis, reading this article at the in front of a stage office in Buffalo he once window of his club, whence he is looking out read, "Stages start from this house for China, for the ladies-"what! does this scribbler Sardinia, Holland, Hamburg, Java, Sweden, mean to deny the exquisite feminine grace of Cuba, Havre, Italy, and Penn Yan." What self-sacrifice? Has he yet to learn that love does the thoughtful traveller say to that? transforms a woman, and makes the will of Lord Bacon says, as Mr. Clarke reminds us, her lover the law of her life? Avaunt, scrib- that "a name, though it seem but a superficial bler! and ye, kind heavens, vouchsafe me a and outward matter, yet carrieth much imsylph worthy of me-no, no, I mean give me pression and enchantment." A child is cruelno beard under a muffler, but a lovely beingly weighted, says our mentor, who is condemn-ha! ha! no mistress of arts, but queen of ed in baptism to bear the name of Praise-God hearts!" Barebones, or Be-Thankful Maynard, or La

These names are found in baptismal registers, and are not self-assumed.

Fortunately it is not the greatest foolsment Willard, or Search-the-Scriptures Marten. among women who are most womanly, nor is her own Astyanax less precious to the English mother because she knows Andromache. The action at Cambridge is merely the declaration that any English woman who wishes to pursue the highest studies shall find every barrier removed. It is simply saying that English women shall choose as freely as English men. Is it not rather mortifying that Cambridge must be congratulated upon having said what seems to be so obvious?

WHEN that celebrated traveller "the thoughtful stranger" arrives in New York, and is asked whether he will alight at the Windsor or the Westminster, at the Brunswick or the Albemarle, he naturally replies, "But, bless my soul, this is not London, ye know; I thought I had come to New York." Our fathers fifty and sixty and seventy years ago were very angry with John Bull because he patronized us or sneered at us, because he asked who read an American book, and told us to stop spitting. The indignation of those days is amusing when we reflect what American books generally were, and that the American claim to attention was neither literature nor manners. Besides, John

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Mr. Clarke, who is a Yankee, intrepidly carries the war into Boston, and supposing M. Salverte, the author of names of Men, Nations, and Places-in fact, the thoughtful travellerto come to Boston, he says that he would naturally ask, but ask in vain, for Sam Adams Street, Miles Standish Street, John Endicott Street, or Harry Vane Street; but the excellent Frenchman would find, and certainly with an amused shrug, that the newest streets on the new land are called Arlington Street and Berkeley Street and Clarendon Street and Marlborough Street-names of an exclusively English and not savory association. "In our day," says Salverte, "we in France have followed noble inspirations. The names of our streets have recalled our victories, our artists, our distinguished writers, our heroes who died fighting for their country......In London I would involuntarily ask for the street of John Hampden and of Algernon Sydney." In New York, alas! we have not followed noble inspirations, but a kind of poverty-stricken snobbishness, and the thoughtful traveller would be directed to the Tuileries, East Three-hundred-and

sixty-seventh Street, between Avenue X and Local association with Paul Revere's ride Avenue Y.

makes the Revere House significant and pleaThe qualities for a good name are, as Mr. sant in Boston, but impertinent in St. Louis. Clarke says, individuality, character, and agree- So Manhattan would be agreeable and fitting able associations. How can the heart swell in New York, but meaningless in San Franwith any emotion but comic disgust at names cisco. This inappropriateness was brought to like Rattlesnake Bar, or Gratis, or Scipio, or a grotesque pass when the famous engineer Ovid, or Miletus, or Petticoat Lane, Leg Alley, and surveyor shook his classical pepper-pot Stinking Lane, and Suore Hill, which are all and showered Central New York with Camillus genuine names of streets and places? Common and Marcellus, Pompey and Homer, Scipio and surnames like Smith, Jones, Williams, Brown, | Ovid. Utica and Syracuse "have conquered etc., can not be evaded by those who are born the ridicule," but Canandaigua and Cazenovia to them, except by a special legislative act, as and Canastota, Ontario and Onondaga, Moin the case of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Corn, who hawk and Oneida, are better names. invoked the Legislature to change him to Thomas Jefferson Bunyan. But why should the same name be imposed in the same country, or the same State even, upon many towns? There are one hundred and thirtyfour Washingtons in the Union, one hundred and twenty Jacksons, eighty-three Franklins, ninety-nine Unions, and sixty-five Libertys. At one time in Indiana alone there were thirty-nine towns named Jackson, thirty Unions in Ohio, and thirteen Unious in Arkansas.

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Doubtless we have passed the classical era in names as in architecture. We build Parthenons for city halls and railway stations no longer; and Rugby, instead of Hughesville, is at least a commemorative name which has a plain principle and reason. But we are in the mid-career of Buckinghams and St. Jameses, and we may expect to see Hampton Courts and Northumberland Houses. It is a very timely treatise which Mr. Clarke has prepared with the greatest good-humor and good sense.

Editor's Literary Record.

"T would be difficult to find anything of a controversial character so entirely controlled by good-nature and plain good sense, and yet so telling and incisive, as the ten Rhind Archæological Lectures, delivered in 1876 and 1878, by Dr. Arthur Mitchell, and now collected by him in a volume entitled The Past in the Present: What is Civilization? In the first six lectures, which are a quiet exposure of the credulity of science, and have for their theme the remains of the past in the present, Dr. Mitchell deduces from numberless common and familiar objects of ascertained modern and even contemporaneous origin, whose form, structure, and workmanship combine all the conditions that are necessary to assign them to remote and even prehistoric ages, the inconclusiveness of the evidence that has been relied upon by archæologists to establish the high antiquity of man and of the products of his hand. Taking successively the whorls, craggaus, querns, stone mills, stone houses and monuments, and various primitive domestic implements which are in use and are still produced at this day, in Shetland and elsewhere in the northern portions of Scotland, he shows not only that they have every intrinsic mark usually relied upon to prove remote antiquity, but also that those of these rude articles which are the most unquestionably recent and modern are far ruder and more primitive than were similar ones produced in the same localities at a much earlier date, when the demand for them

1 The Past in the Present: What is Civilization! By ARTHUR MITCHELL, M.D., LL.D. 8vo, pp. 362, New York: Harper and Brothers.

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had not been destroyed by modern discovery and invention, and when, in consequence, practice and competition elicited the utmost skill in their production. Dr. Mitchell further shows by indisputable evidence that in the same huts where these rude implements and articles are used are to be found other implements and products which are the result of the most recent civilization, and have been drawn from widely distant lands; so that, if one of these huts should be covered by some convulsion of nature, and hidden from sight for centuries, it would be as easy to determine from its contents that it had been inhabited by successive peoples of different periods or stages of civilization as it has been for Dr. Schliemann to determine the successive inhabitants of Troy, and the relative stages of their civilization, from articles found on its site. The conclusious to which Dr. Mitchell points are that many startling and precise judgments have been enunciated as to the rude and degraded condition of primeval man, and as to the immensity of his age upon the earth, upon premises that are the result of half-sight or of onesided examination, and that a well-founded skepticism will lead to stricter methods in archæological investigation, and a revision of much that has been assumed upon insufficient evidence. The four lectures devoted to a response to the query, What is Civilization? form a natural sequence to many of the positions advanced and conclusions arrived at in the foregoing lectures. By a variety of arguments and illustrations Dr. Mitchell defends the thesis that civilization is the complicated outcome

motives, characters, and abilities of the principal actors in them, of the parts borne by the nations in the struggle that rent Europe, and in the various adjustments and re-adjustments that accompanied or followed it, and of the great civil, social, political, military, and territorial changes that invest the memorable period described with a profound interest.

of a war waged with Nature by man in Society, | course of events, and a juster conception of the to prevent her from putting into execution in his case her law of Natural Selection; that all men-everywhere, and in all stages of progress, from the lowest to the highest stages of civilization are banded together, it may be unconsciously, to fight this fight, the measure of success attending the struggle of each band or association so engaged being the measure of the civilization it has attained; and that the defeat of the law of Natural Selection is attained by man in society, and is not attained by man acting singly or in isolation. The discussion involves a consideration of the follow- | ing interesting problems: The manner in which the law of selection affects man; whether brutes, or man in isolation, can be civilized; whether civilization can be lost, and man in a state of high civilization return to a ruder life; whether civilization may become suicidal; and whether civilizations are of different patterns, all of which are pointing to a higher civilization than any that has been yet reached. Dr. Mitchell's work is not only interesting for its pregnant and easily understood discussions of abstruse philosophical and archæological questions, but for its large fund of curious and en- | tertaining matter, descriptive of the rapidly vanishing primitive structures, remains, implements, customs, manners, and folk-lore that are peculiar to the north of Scotland and the adjacent islands.

MR. GUSTAVE MASSON, assistant master and librarian of Harrow School, has made an abridgment of Guizot's popular History of France,3 which is as admirable in its style and execution as it is unassuming in its pretensions. The period covered by the history extends from the time (about A.D. 587) when the Gauls and the Kymrians peopled the greater portion of what constitutes modern France, until the recall of Necker by Louis, and the meeting of the States-General, just before the outbreak of the Revolution, in 1789. All the principal events, social, military, political, and industrial, of this period of over twelve hundred years are succinctly outlined, with occasional pauses treating more fully upon critical events or conjunctures, and describing famous or historical characters. Mr. Masson has been very successful in preserving the continuity and interest of Guizot's relation, notwithstanding the constant effort at condensation that was necessary in order to reduce the work within its present modest dimensions. Prefixed to the history is a copious chronological table, giving a clear synoptical view of the most notable events of the period under review; and in an appendix Mr. Masson has prepared, for the benefit of historical readers who may desire a closer view of particular junctures, a valuable bibliography of memoirs, histories, documents, collections, laws, charters, etc., constituting the sources of the history of France, together with a list of the principal authorities for each epoch, and several useful historical and genealogical tables.

THE first installment of Mr. C. A. Fyffe's History of Modern Europe' forms a volume of conspicuous merit. The general plan of the author is to trace the great lines of European history for the period from 1792 until the present time; to sketch the condition of the principal Continental states-in particular of France, Austria, and Prussia-at the outbreak of the French Revolutionary war; to describe the origin and movement of the forces which have at length resulted in a united Germany and a restored and united Italy; and to recount the steps by which the Europe of 1792 has become the Europe of to-day. The installment now MR. CARLYLE has left no work more strongpublished embraces the period from 1792 until ly impressed with the peculiar characteristics the dethronement of Napoleon and the resto- of his style as a writer than his Reminiscences,* ration of the Bourbons in 1814; and if Mr. and none that so fully reveals the incidents of Fyffe is less elaborate in his recital than some his life or his idiosyncrasies as a man. Writother more voluminous historians have been, ten after considerable intervals, they display his work is very far from being a mere outline the transitions in his beliefs, and also the tranor summary of their labors. It is true he is sitions in his style till it settled down into obliged for the most part to accept the facts the marvellous Carlylese by which he is best that have been already chronicled, but in all known; and most vividly of all do they disother respects his compact history is emphat-play his mental habitudes and personal traits ically an original one, and gives the reader a clearer and more concentrated view than can be derived from more expanded histories of the influence of the facts recited upon the

2A History of Modern Europe. By C. A. FYFFE, M. A., Barrister at Law, Fellow of University College, Oxford. From the Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792 to the Accession of Louis XVIII. With Two Maps. 8vo, pp. 540. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

-his dogmatism, his hearty prejudice, his in

3 Outlines of the History of France. From the Earliest Times to the Outbreak of the Revolution. An Abridg ment of M. GUIZOT's Popular History of France. By GusTAVE MASSON. 8vo, pp. 613. Boston: Estes and Lauriat. • Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle. Edited by JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 84. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The same. 12mo, Cloth, pp. 332. New York: Harper and Brothers.

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