that the true Irish policy would be to put the island under water for twenty-four hours would become the purpose of England. The atrocities of the French Revolution are explicable. They were the mad outbreak of a misery and brutality which the government had fostered, and for which it promised no relief. But this kind of explanation is wanting to the dy namite terrorists. Their conduct might have been extenuated as at least not surprising during the height of the abominable oppression of the penal laws. But for nearly a century there has been a constantly advancing relief of Irish suffering and correction of injustice in Ireland, until now there remains no abuse or inequality for which constitutional agitation is not the surest remedy.

It is true, indeed, that the degradation and ignorance of a large part of Ireland are the logical result of English misconduct. George Mason truly said that Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. But this can not be pleaded in justification of the dynamite crimes. There is no people in the world that follow leadership more loyally than the Irish, and the Irish leaders, like Mr. Parnell and his associates, are neither ignorant nor degraded. Just so far as they yield to the brutality of their followers, they are guiltier than those followers, and the significant fact in the late crimes is not that they were committed, but that Mr. Parnell, speaking in Ireland at the very moment when the whole civilized world protested, said not a single word.

In protection against such attacks the cause of England is the cause of civilization. It is not a question of politics, or of a single national interest, it is that of orderly society against anarchy. But in the indignant pursuit of a crime of this kind there is always a pressure and a tendency to sacrifice general safeguards. This country and all countries will desire to prevent upon their own soil any complicity with the enemies of society, or the dispatch of any aid to them. Yet under the conditions of good government the method is not always obvious or adequate. The appeal for criminal aid may easily be made, and the assistance furnished in ways with which the law can not deal. Open and express incitement to specific crime may be restrained and punished. But

a general arraignment, for instance, of English injustice and crime in Ireland, and a demand for redress, and solicitation of money to procure the means of redress-all these may be put in a way which, in a free country, will not violate the law of a free press, and yet whose criminal intention will be perfectly understood.

66

THE strong, sad, homely" face which is shown in the vignette to this number of the Magazine is that which the country saw when Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President.

A sudden stir and hurry in Broadway by the New York Hotel was remarked by the Easy Chair, and as it looked to see the occasion, it observed an open carriage coming down the street, with a few persons stopping and cheering as it passed. But there was no enthusiasm among the people in the street, and Mr. Lincoln looked about him with the sad eyes and the serious aspect of the portrait.

It was nearly two years afterward that the Easy Chair saw him again, on a Sunday evening in his official room at the White House, He sat by the fire in slippers, talking of the war in the most interested manner, and referring, as he talked, to maps upon the table. As the visitor and his friend arose to leave, Mr. Lincoln arose also, and as he opened the door he stopped, and, laying his hand upon the shoulder of the visitor, he said, in a kindly, paternal tone, and with the same sad weariness in his eyes and manner, "Courage, my son; we shall beat them-we shall beat them."

Two years later it was this face, then no longer smooth, but overgrown with a beard, that the committee of the Convention which had renominated him saw as it stood before him in a semicircle in the East Room at the White House, and heard him read the brief address in which he accepted the nomination.

Another year, and along Broadway, at the same point where the Easy Chair had seen the open carriage, it saw a funeral car moving amid the universal affection and grief of the great city. It passed out of sight amid the love and sorrow of a nation which had taken the dead man into its heart with a tender reverence shared only by Washington.

I

may seem to savor of exaggeration, but it is saying no more than its merits warrant, to say that George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals,' arranged and edited

1 George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals. Arranged and Edited by her Husband, J. W. CROSS. With Illustrations. In Three Volumes, 16mo, pp. 348, 324, and 340. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The Same. Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 82, 76, and 75. New York: Harper and Brothers.

by her husband, J. W. Cross, is a work of transcendent interest, and one of the most perfect examples of mere biographical workmanship in English literature. Undoubtedly there have been lives that were fuller of incident. and richer in striking, imposing, romantic, or moving personal haps and mishaps, than befell George Eliot, although her life was by no means devoid of striking and interesting pas

sages; and therefore when we speak of this memoir as being a work of transcendent interest, we have regard to the fact that it is the record of the interior and spiritual, the intellectual and emotional, rather than of the exterior and strictly personal life of the most largely gifted English woman of her generation. Mr. Cross has done ample justice to his subject in this particular. His account of the life of this remarkable woman, and of her surroundings and companionships, is full and thoroughly sympathetic; and it includes a close and continuous view of her literary and intellectual tastes and of her inner. and spiritual nature, through all their transitions and perturbations, until they flowered in the ripeness of maturity. But if Mr. Cross does this well, he does more than this. He has employed a method in his work which, unless we greatly mistake, is destined to inaugurate a new era in biographical literature, and to render the old and more cumbersome methods distasteful. Justly recognizing the important part which letters play in displaying all the shades of character, and in introducing the reader to the most confidential and most carefully guarded phases of a life, Mr. Cross has made the largest use of them in his memoir, literally allowing the life of George Eliot, to use his own phrase, "to write itself" through her letters and journals, thus imparting to his work the peculiar charm that belongs to the best autobiography. But instead of following the usual course of those biographers who have had the good sense to make the largest use of letters, namely, that of introducing them separately and unabridged, with all their surplusage of immaterial jottings, and all their formalities of superscription, subscription, date, etc., and of bracketing them together as they are able, Mr. Cross has arranged George Eliot's letters and journals in a connected narrative with the least possible interruption of comment. Each letter has been pruned of everything that he deemed irrelevant to the purpose that he held steadily in view, of combining a continuous narrative of day-to-day life, with the play of light and shade which only letters, written in all moods and under various circumstances and environments, can give, the date and name of the person to whom it was addressed being given in the margin. Similar extracts with marginal dates are also given from George Eliot's journals, and these, together with extracts from her books and writings, which have an autobiographical interest as transcripts of her feelings, associations, and opinions, are interwoven with the narrative in the due order of time, and impart to it a rounded fullness and completeness that are very unusual in biography. Again, the slight thread of narrative or explanation-embodying particulars of which he has personal knowledge, or that he has derived from the recollections of some of George Eliot's more intimate friends-occupies an in

side margin, so that the reader will see at a glance what is correspondence, what journalizing, what reminiscence, and what narrative, without any interruption of the attention, and without being subjected to the inconvenience of changes of type and frequent marks of quotation.

It is highly interesting to trace in this admirable memoir the line of demarkation that separates George Eliot's girlhood and womanhood. The girl and the woman are so unlike in many of the aspects of their character, more especially in the sphere of religious feeling and conviction, as to seem two different beings. The girl was marked by a faith in the supernatural as ardent, as humble, and as receptive as the woman was characterized, not merely by the absence and negation of such a faith, but by its denial and complete eradication. The religious ideas, emotions, and convictions of the one had no place in the mind or the heart of the other; and what the one regarded with the most passionate and at times pathetic yearnings and the utmost solicitude, the other regarded at first with indifference, and finally with hostility and contempt. This change can scarcely be ascribed to the great intellectual superiority of the young woman over the young girl who was almost a woman, since there is no evidence of any such superiority. George Eliot was singularly mature at a very early age, and the sudden change to which we have adverted was probably the result of an unconscious reaction, assisted by intimacies and companionships which introduced her to new views, and gave a new bent to her thoughts and feelings, at a time when her mind was peculiarly susceptible to their influence. In one respect, however, there was no change or mark of difference: always and at all times, in girlhood, in young womanhood, and in old age, intense earnestness, absolute absorption in her ideals, and inflexible devotion and entire surrender to her convictions, were characteristics of George Eliot.

Yet more interesting to the general reader are the opportunities which Mr. Cross's memoir gives us of enjoying George Eliot's inimitable descriptions of Weimar, its associations, and its memories of Goethe; of Geneva, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Florence, Berlin, and other Continental tarrying places, whither she resorted in her intervals of rest and recreation; of dallying over her crisp impressions and incisive opinions and criticisms of men and books and things, and noting their gradual mellowing as she gained years and experience; of being admitted behind the scenes of her social and daily life, and of accompanying her in her current readings, literary occupations, and zoological and philosophical excursions; and, above all, of sharing her inmost thoughts as she is engaged in the evolution of the masterly portraits, and the production of the absorbing scenes and incidents, that adorn her magnificent gallery of novels, poems, and romances.

THERE have been few pieces of biographical writing more satisfactory than Mrs. Custer's unpretentious little book called Boots and Saddles. Much of the charm of the work is due to the writer's entire self-forgetfulness, her unusual absorption in another, her singular lack of selfconsciousness.

It may be said, indeed, and with perfect truth, that Mrs. Custer is really unconscious of what she is doing, unaware of the great worth of her own work as a literary performance. With a modesty of that genuine sort which is the rarest of all things in literature, she mistakes her own purpose, and informs us that she has written for the sake of telling other women how camp life is conducted, what makeshifts are employed to bring something like comfort and grace into garrison homes, what domestic problems are set by circumstances for officers' wives to solve, and what devices they resort to in solving them. Doubtless all this constituted her only conscious object in writing, but, unknown to herself, another and much higher purpose crept into her mind and determined the result. The life she undertook to describe had its sun and centre for her in the personality of the hero who fell fighting in the battle of the Little Big Horn. He was the life of that life, its occasion, its motive, its central figure, and its sole source of interest for her. In recalling the circumstances of her residence in garrison and the memories of her experiences on the march she sees everything in its relation to him, and whatever she has to tell is told with reference to its capacity to illustrate his character, his ways, his personality. The book thus becomes in essence and in fact a biography, though it lacks the biographical form, and touches only a segment of its subject's life, and that not the segment to which a formal biographer would have given his attention chiefly. If we are right in think ing that the real function of biography is not to set the facts of a life in orderly array, but to reveal as completely as possible the character, the inner nature, the actual personality, of its subject, then this is biography in its best estate.

The manner of it is not literary. Almost every page bears witness to the author's lack of literary training and of the merely literary temper. The book is franker than any trained literary hand would or could have made it, and therein lie both its fascination and the secret of its worth.

Here a distinction of some nicety presents itself. It is not unusual for a biographer to hold his subject in unmeasured regard, to assume an attitude of hero-worship, and to devote his efforts from first to last to the one purpose of exalting the character of the person of whom he writes. But commonly such a purpose defeats itself; there are concealments,

2 Boots and Saddles; or. Life in Dakota with General Custer. By Mrs. ELIZABETH B. CUSTER. 12mo, pp. 312. New York: Harper and Brothers,

suppressions, perversions, and explanations intended to save the subject from all possible discredit, and these, being apparent, operate to modify the reader's judgment and to temper his ardor in accepting his author's opinions. In the present case there is no trace of anything of the kind. The author's faith in her subject's nobility and wisdom is so absolute and unquestioning that utter revelation is her supreme desire. Her confidence is complete that the most unreserved statement of whatever her hero did or said or thought or was must command admiration, and she therefore sets all forth lovingly, and with a degree of confident candor which is hardly to be matched elsewhere in the literature of biography. Nothing that her hero did was ignoble or unworthy or of doubtful propriety; nothing that pertains to him is, in her eyes, too trivial to be recorded; nothing needs suppression, apology, or explanation. She is willing and even eager that her readers shall know the hero of her admiration with the intimate particularity of her own acquaintance with him. She takes us absolutely into her confidence, and tells us freely all that she remembers, trusting us to receive the story with perfect sympathy, and with interest equal to her own.

We have here in actual fact what the novelist most strenuously endeavors to create by simulation, namely, a human life shown as it was lived, a human soul laid bare to our inspection.

Fortunately the subject of the biography was one who could endure such presentation. General Custer seems to have been truly a man of perfect simplicity and nobility of character, a man whose impulses were toward the right, whose strength to follow the lead of such impulses was great, and whose mind was most earnestly given to the conscientious discharge of every duty, to the daily and hourly cultivation of the good that was in his character, and to the suppression and eradication of whatever he deemed weak or unworthy. With great strength and robust vigor of mind and body he combined the utmost gentleness of spirit; with the sternest resolution in the discharge of every duty he united unusual tenderness and a truly extraordinary capacity for sympathy.

Hardly less remarkable than the biographical excellence of the work is its worth as an autobiography. If it reveals to us the man of whom the author is constantly thinking, it also reveals, though quite unconsciously, the woman who shared and illumined his life with the glory of a perfect and utterly unselfish devotion. The revelation is not one to be critically commented upon. We advert to it reverently as a feature of the book quite unintended by the author, and wholly outside the proper limits of critical analysis, but one which no appreciative reader can fail to recognize as a source of infinite fascination.

If it were possible to forget or overlook the charm that lies in the biographical and auto

biographical aspects of the little book, it would be proper to commend it as a graphic and picturesque account of a woman's life in barracks, in camp, and on the march in our Northwestern Territories. It is in these respects all that it is meant to be, and if no other interest were in it, there would still be reason to read it with pleasure. But in its other aspects it rises so far above the level of mere picturesqueness that one easily forgets even to consider its qualities of that kind.

If we have made our meaning clear, it will be seen that the book impresses us as one of those rare, exceptional bits of work that, coming from a full heart and a perfectly sincere mind, far surpass in attractiveness and worth any possible result of merely intellectual effort. Such books owe nothing to literary art. They are expressions of nature, and their charm is almost wholly independent of the importance or auimportance of their themes. Those who have read Dr. John Brown's biography of a little girl will readily understand what we mean in saying this. Those who have not read that book will not have far to seek for our meaning when they shall have read Mrs. Custer's work.

ALTHOUGH unmistakable symptoms of that "goitre of egotism" which Emerson himself pronounced a prevalent ailment among certain of his followers and disciples are occasionally visible in some of the Lectures on the Genins and Character of Emerson3 that were read in the special course of 1884 of the Concord School of Philosophy, and although several of the lecturers and essayists have been led into some extravagances of statement and appraisal by their fervid admiration of Emerson and their own self-complacency, there can be no debate as to the ability displayed by their authors, or as to the value of their contributions to our Emersonian literature. The lectures comprise personal recollections of Emerson, recalling some of his most characteristic traits and habits, outlines and analyses of his philosophic and religious methods and opinions, encomiastic and elegiac memorials in prose and verse, and comparative estimates of his rank as a thinker, a philosopher, and in literature generally. The range of the lectures is a wide one, and their literary execution is admirable.

LADY JACKSON's new volume, The Court of the Tuileries, from the Restoration to the Flight of Louis Philippe, admits us to closer and more familiar views than are afforded by the graver and more elaborate histories of the period, of

3 The Genius and Character of Emerson. Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy. Edited by F. B.

Parisian and court life, and of French society in general, during the thirty-four feverish years that intervened between the overthrow of Napoleon and the entry of the Allies into Paris, and the flight of Louis Philippe and his family to England. Like her other compilations, Old Paris and The Old Régime, this later work, which is the complement of the others, leaves the severer paths of French history to professional or political historians, and is occupied with its lighter phases. From the larger histories, and from innumerable memoirs, recollections, letters, and diaries of distinguished personages, diplomates, men of letters, and others who were behind the scenes, and were familiar with the men and women who figured in politics and society, Lady Jackson has collected and grouped all the loose facts and floating gossip that throw light on the inner history of the times as reflected by the intrigues, ambitions, and rivalries of parties and individuals. The book abounds in racy anecdotes and entertaining reminiscences illustrative of public and private morals, and furnishes a key to the secret history of many important transactions which have been shrouded in mystery. Although it would have been impossible to give a picture of the French court and of society as represented in the salons and literary circles during the period described in her work without some allusion to the scandals that prevailed, Lady Jackson has exercised great discretion in her references to them, and while chronicling them with all the fullness that is necessary to show their influence upon men and events, she carefully tones down or suppresses whatever is indelicate or impure.

5

UNDER the title The Land of Rip Van Winkle, those portions of the Highlands of the Hudson in and around the Catskills which have been invested with a haze of romance and made classic ground by the genins of Washington Irving are made the subject of a crisp and sparkling itinerary, in which the scene of Irving's inimitable legend and the adjacent hills and woods and waters are described with delicious minuteness by A. E. P. Searing, and are illustrated by more than fifty fine engravings by Ernest Heinemann, from spirited designs by Joseph Lauber and Charles Volkmar. The legends and traditions associated with this romantic region are gracefully revived and retold, and its dreamy nooks and glades, its weird or fantastic or secluded haunts, its wilderness of rock and forest and mountain, and its panoramic landscapes, are reproduced in pictures of great artistic excellence. The volume is a superb quarto, printed on heavy

and Co.

The Court of the Tuileries, from the Restoration to the Flight of Louis Philippe. By CATHERINE CHARLOTTE, Lady JACKSON. Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 77. New York: Harper and Brothers.

5 The Land of Rip Van Winkle. A Tour through the Romantic Parts of the Catskills. Its Legends and Traditions. By A. E. P. SEARING. With Illustrations. 4to, pp. 147. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

THE author of The Wearing of the Green has the knack of blending romance and reality, love and Irish politics, in agreeable proportions. The heroine of his spirited tale is one of those charming creations with which we have been made familiar by the best Irish story-tellers-probably because they truly represent a prevalent type-who are at once bright and unsophisticated, vivacious and pensive, fearing no evil because thinking none, frank, courageous, a little hoydenish, or perhaps we should say audacious, and withal true gentlewomen, albeit they are ignorant or careless of the conventional proprieties by which polite society is ruled as with a rod of iron. Of course, as is the case with the generality of novels of Irish life, this captivating maiden is the only child of a decayed Irish gentleman, whose ancestral possessions have shrunk into exceedingly small proportions, their sole remnant being the dilapidated "Castle Rackrent" of his fathers, in which he, his sunbeam of a daughter, and a few faithful family servitors reside, and manage to dispense an openhanded hospitality quite disproportionate to their slender means. Of course, also, there is an accidental and very piquant meeting between the heroine and an educated and wellbred English tourist, who is smitten with her beauty and naïf simplicity, and falls in love with her on sight. Of course, once more, the country is in its usual state of chronic unrest caused by evictions for rent and other staple grievances; the peasantry, rendered desperate by their real distress and their real or imaginary wrongs, resort to the favorite national remedy of shooting down the landlords, their agents, and sympathizers; and having been mistaken for one or the other of these, the tourist is singled out as a victim, but his life is saved, at the risk of her own, by the courage and presence of mind of the heroine. This raises his passion to fever-heat, although its subject is unconscions of it, and has already given her heart to a life-long comrade, a gifted young Irish agitator, who contemns the cowardly and atrocious methods of his compatriots, and is devoting his talents and energies to the cause of Irish nationality by worthier methods, in which he has the hearty sympathy of his sweetheart. Unpleasant and dangerous complications, involving the safety of the heroine and her father, ensue in consequence of the service she had rendered the young Englishman, and in gratitude to her, as well as to take her out of harm's way till the storm blows over, he persuades the father and danghter to pay a visit to his family in England. The author's description of this visit is highly entertaining, and comprises a graphic statement of the gross misapprehensions that prevail in England among the wealthy middle class respecting the grievances and the char

The Wearing of the Green. A Novel. By BASIL. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 73. New York: Harper and Brothers.

acter of Irishmen. The visitors return home, after some comic and some semi-tragical experiences, with no pleasant impressions of England and its people, and with an increased love for Ireland with all its faults; and on reaching Ireland new trials and perplexities await them as the result of a new crop of Irish murders and outrages, in which the heroine's Irish lover is wrongfully implicated, and he barely escapes the hangman by exonerating testimony produced at the last and critical moment. The tale is one of sustained and varied interest, and in a series of ingeniously interwoven episodes presents a striking view of the present social and political state of Ireland and its unhappy people.

THE old and favorite theme with novelists, of a change of children in the cradle and the consequences that it entails, has rarely been as skillfully and agreeably handled as it is by Mr. Compton Reade in his vigorous romance, Under which King? At the outset of the story Mr. Reade lets us sufficiently into the secret to enable us to detect, or at least to strongly suspect, the substitution of the child of a sturdy peasant and day-laborer for that of a baronet of finer fibre and more delicate mould, while all the parties interested, except the immediate actors in the fraud, are held in ignorance of it; and he manages his narrative so cleverly that our enjoyment of the spirited drama that ensnes is in no wise abated by our partial knowledge of the transaction, or by the fact that we hold the clew to the labyrinth of cross-purposes and entanglements that result from it. Of all the involvements of interest and affection, and of all the social and family incidents and vicissitudes that belong to such a situation, Mr. Reade has made the most in his bright and changeful story; but aside from the entertainment of his reader, which as a true artist he has undoubtedly had in mind while tracing these to their consummation, he has also had the more serious purpose in view of exhibiting, in the persons of the two changelings, the influence of heredity on the one hand, and of education, training, and social habitudes on the other, upon character, manners, and physical conditions. The changeling who was the rightful son of the aristocrat, though brought up among rude and uncultured peasants, like his father is of a finer fibre, physically and intellectually, than they, and he is the possessor of latent tastes, talents, and qualifications to which they are strangers, and which strongly differentiates him from them, while at the same time, under the contagion of their example and associations, he contracts tastes, manners, habits, and modes of thought and action which belong to the class into which he has been transplanted. On the other hand, the son of Hodge,

Under which King? A Novel. By CoMPTON READE. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 89. New York: Harper and Brothers.