necks were swathed in ample white cravats, and their manly breasts were covered with the ample ruffle of the shirt. You can see those swells in the illustrations of Tom and Jerry in London, from which work one of the famous coats of the time was named. If a Senator should rise to address the Senate in a great debate in such a suit as Mr. Webster wore when he replied to Hayne, and earned his title of Defender of the Constitution, or on any other of his great days, the press from one end of the country to the other would ring with chaffing laughter at the Honorable Bob Logic or Colonel Sellers. Yet Mr. Webster wore only the traditional Whig colors, buff and blue, and he was clad only as Charles James Fox would have appeared had he been an American Senator.

Who has lowered that mighty coat collar, and abolished the ample cravat, and dismissed the blue dress-coat with brass buttons? Who, a little earlier, banished breeches, and drew the long trouser over the lower leg, and abjured top-boots? Who is it that makes coat sleeves tight this year and loose next year, and ordains that to-day the refinement of elegance shall be a white waistcoat at dinner, and that to-morrow a white waistcoat at dinner shall be ludicrously old-fashioned? What despot of absolute and unquestioned sway now expands the skirts of woman to the form and amplitude of a diving-bell, and anon draws them in so closely that my lady could only limp, not dance, over London Bridge? Was it last week that the young men were all in boots with toes as square as honesty, while this week they skim and saunter in shoes as pointed as somebody's innuendoes? Who does it all? Who is the magician? Who ever sees the waving of his wand? How is the transformation accomplished?

The American fashions, we used to be told, come from Europe. But who makes the fashion there? When all English and French dandies are wearing high collars, who is it that turns down his collar with such authority that two continents instantly turn down their collars? It was answered that the tailors made the changes. The tailors make the clothes, but a change in form or style by the tailor would not change the fashion. If he should change the cut of a coat for a lawyer's clerk, the fashion would not change, but the lawyer's clerk would be out of fashion. The tailor as an artist may have the highest taste and the utmost skill, and as a tailor he may wish that a new fashion would produce a demand for new clothes. But he has no social authority. He can only serve him who has. It was Prince Hamlet who was the glass of fashion and the mould of form. If D'Orsay, amid universal white cravats, should appear in a black satin scarf, all the dandies would hurry to wear black satin. Tens of thousands of loyal Britons may leave off gloves; but they are merely queer, and gloves are still essential. The Prince of Wales may saunter

along the street without gloves, and immediately glovelessness is the only good "form." This is the secret of fashion. It is the practice of a recognized social leader. The London World says that no instance can be mentioned of a social change or fashion introduced by the Prince of Wales which has not been instantly adopted by those around him, and gradually by the general mass of his future subjects. This is true of dress, manners, and social arrangements. Society," says the World, "can not organize itself without the standard of propriety furnished by Marlborough House." It is some prince or other social leader, then, who lowered those lofty bulwarks of collars of which grandpa's wedding coat offered so extraordinary an illustration. It was said that the dropping of a pebble in the ocean produced a movement which was continued to the utmost confines of the sea. The whim or the comfort of one exalted or dandiacal personage may likewise, in the cut of a coat or the form of a shoe, go round the world. Unconsciously even we republicans are subjects of a king, and the severe and scornful defier of the authority of the British crown defies it in a coat whose "cut" is a docile acknowledgment of that crown's resistless power. The influence of a social leader is shown in nothing so strongly as in his ability to make two continents wear clothes cut as he chooses.

HISSING is an old practice in the English theatre which is quite unknown in ours, and the question whether it shall be longer tolerated even in England is now discussed in that country. Charles Lamb is said to have joined in the general hiss that damned his Mr. H., and he was capable of enjoying the humor of such a situation, and he would have appreciated thoroughly the description of the scene as "the wild justice" of hissing. But generally the victim of such condemnation does not see the humor of it, and its wild injustice is the only thing of which he is conscious. We Americans are so good-natured that the practice never flourished here.

Matthew Arnold blames us for this trait. He finds us too indifferent to little impositions, and hints that it is a reprehensible selfishness which causes us to submit to mean little annoyances instead of enduring personal inconvenience and taking trouble to maintain the noble principle that people shall not be imposed upon. "Yes," says Timotheus, testily, "we are so confoundedly good-natured that we don't dare to assert our rights. When the omnibus is full, the dozen squeezed passengers squeeze closer to make room for the thirteenth, who has no business to get in. By Jove! we positively put a premium upon hoggishness," cries Timotheus. "Why don't we all shout together to the impudent intruder, 'This stage is full'? John Bull, under such exasperating circumstances, is not content with scowling and spreading himself upon the seat so that

there may be no possibility of further accommodation, but he writes a tremendous letter to the Times, appealing to Magna Charta and the Petition of Right, and adjuring all free Britons to rally for the rights of Englishmen, and he signs himself Aristides and Cato and Publicola, until the unhappy interloper is ready to forswear omnibuses for evermore." In fact, the thirteenth man in the English conveyance is like Mark Twain upon his recent visit to the Governor of New York. The crowd was large, and Mr. Twain, while waiting, seated himself upon a table, and unconsciously upon a line of electric bells, which instantly rang an alarm in every direction, and brought a crowd of messengers and call-boys scurrying in hot haste to obey the summons. The twelve Britons in the omnibus are twelve electric bells, and when the interloper tries to seat himself he rings an alarm in twelve reverberating newspaper offices, and brings all England about his ears.

But our patient good-nature is much more humane, and if there be more joy over one penitent than over a host of just persons, there should certainly be more satisfaction in the knowledge of one thirteenth man or woman or worn shop-girl for whom a seat is found, and who sorely needs the seat, than over the just wrath with the impudent interloper whose shocking crime of entering a full omnibus or car is remorselessly exposed in the newspapers. But a still stronger plea is to be made against hissing. Accommodation in a car or stage is not a matter of taste, but enjoyment of a play is wholly so. The drama that I do not like, my neighbor may greatly enjoy. If I do not like it, very well. Let me dislike it, and if it become aggressively disagreeable to my taste and judgment, let me quietly withdraw. I bought a ticket to the play; but I did not receive a guarantee of enjoyment. Of that I took the risk, and if in the lottery I have drawn a blank, let me face the loss like a man, and not cry and sputter like a child.

When a man hisses because he does not like the play, he is not merely expressing his opinion in a rude and offensive way, but he is disturbing the pleasure of his neighbor, who has paid for his pleasure and is entitled to receive it. The hisser bought no more right than his neighbor, and his ticket to a chance of pleasure is not a permit to revenge his disappointment upon another person. Long ago in Rome, the Easy Chair, when its wood was green and not fully seasoned, went with a comrade to hear Modena, the famous Italian tragedian. It docs not remember the play, but the house was very full and very enthusiastic. As the play proceeded and the action became more intense, the audience was more and more excited. But to the Easy Chair and its comrade the performance seemed to be so absurdly overwrought that it became immensely comical. They could not help laughing, and conscious of the angry reproof of the looks around them, the laughter became almost hysterical, until

the wrathful glances of their neighbors so plainly threatened trouble for what were supposed to be the insolent and insulting Inglesi, that they silently-and snickeringly-arose and left the theatre.

They had as much right to think the performance ludicrous as the others to enjoy it. But they had no more right to disturb the enjoyment of the others than the others to insist that they should admire the play.

If now some acute dialectician should ask why the Easy Chair and its comrade had not the same right to show their emotion with those who admired the performance and who loudly applauded, the reply is that undoubtedly the abstract right was the same; that is to say, the right to express disapprobation equally with approbation; but the exercise of the right in one case necessarily produced, and generally produces, disturbance, while that of the other does not. It is a question of expediency and good feeling, and resolves itself into the inquiry, How shall disapproval be best shown? Courtesy and humanity-for what can be a more painful plight than that of an actor who is hissed because the play which he did not write is not acceptable to the audience or to some part of it?-courtesy and humanity both dictate that if you are not pleased with the play which pleases others, you shall not clamor and hiss, but depart. If your impression is that of the public, it will not come to see the play, and absence is quite as significant and conclusive as hissing.

The right to hiss, like the right to rage against the thirteenth passenger, is, in the sense already explained, an undoubted right. But practical policy, expediency, good feeling, and the greatest good of the greatest number teach that in this case the celebrated position of the friend of the Maine liquor law is the true attitude. That worthy citizen was for the law, but "agin its enforcement." Hissing a play or an actor, or a singer or an orator, or-gracious heavens!-a preacher, may be a right, since a man may express disapproval and choose the method of doing it, but it is a right that should not be exercised except under extraordinary circumstances.

CLARISSA begs the Chair to say a word about smoking in public places. If, as she strongly urges, there is to be a movement to abolish poking and stabbing innocent pedestrians in the street with ill-carried umbrellas and canes, how much more imperative is an uprising to deal with "those coarse and careless creatures who parade the streets with cigars in their mouths. Must we forever submit to this intolerable, this sickening nuisance, without one word of expostulation?" These offenders, remarks Clarissa, "are persons in the form of men-ay, and many of them wear the garb of gentlemen, and verily believe themselves to be such."

These usurpers of the manly form declare that the street is public, and that they "have

the right" to smoke in public. By no means. They can not do in the public street what the public forbids to be done. It was a good story told by New York at the expense of Boston that in that sedate metropolis a stranger was wending his admiring way leisurely smoking a cigar. A policeman stopped him and told him that smoking was a finable of fense, and collected the dues. Presently the admiring stranger seated himself upon a doorstep to enjoy the scene more fully, and again the policeman admonished him, and collected the fine. The admiring stranger gazed solemnly at the officer of the law, and remarked, gravely, taking out his purse, "As I may desire presently to expectorate in the open street, I should like to settle now in full." The public decrees what may and what may not be done in the streets. But Clarissa has only to reflect how many most important matters in the streets affecting the public health and the universal convenience are neglected, to see that those which offend the tastes and personal comfort of a few will hardly be regarded. And has Clarissa done all her duty? Has she plainly apprised those gilded satellites of hers "who wear the garb of gentlemen, and

verily believe themselves to be such," that they must choose between her and a cigarette, and that they can not simultaneously enjoy smoking and her society? Has she taken occasion to intimate that in her opinion no gentleman, truly so called, smokes in the street, and that consequently her friend Piccolino has a double, because yesterday she saw her friend walking near Madison Square, until suddenly she saw-what proved that it was not her gentlemanly friend Piccolino!

Indeed, the problem that Clarissa propounds can best be solved by her and her friends. There are classes of offenders, indeed-those, for instance, who hang pipes from their mouths, and b'hoys who are natural offenders in this kind-whose smoke can be stayed only by stringent laws rigorously enforced. These may be described as "persons in the form of man." But that other large and in this respect sinful company "who wear the garb of gentlemen," they are amenable to the influences of Clarissa, and such smoke she and her sister sylphs can suppress. Why should they not form a club for this excellent purpose, known only to themselves, and call themselves mysteriously the Extinguishers ?

MR

"R. FROUDE'S labors as the biographer and literary trustee of Carlyle have at length been brought to a close. He had already published Carlyle's own autobiographical fragments, an account of Carlyle's early years derived from that portion of his letters and journals which brings his life down to the beginning of his permanent residence in London, and the letters and memorials of Mrs. Carlyle describing his London career from her stand-point. And he now completes the task that was assigned to him by Carlyle himself by a fuller and more circumstantial account' of Carlyle's life in London from his removal thither, in 1834, at the age of thirty-nine, till his death, at the ripe old age of eighty-five, in

1881.

There will doubtless be a diversity of opinion respecting this last performance, as between the enthusiastic admirers and the vehement mislikers of Carlyle, similar to that which greeted its predecessors; but the general verdict that will be reached by dispassionate readers will probably be that Mr. Froude has succeeded in producing an exceed ingly able and intensely disagreeable booknot lacking in interest, but so overlaid with unpleasant and belittling personal details as to disenchant the most fervent admirers of

Thomas Carlyle. A History of His Life in London. 1834-1881. By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A. Illustrated. Two Volumes in One. 12mo, pp. 282 and 297. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Carlyle's great intellectual gifts of any illu sions they may have indulged respecting the beauty or symmetry or real greatness of his character. There is no more unlovely figure in modern history than that of Carlyle as he is depicted by himself and Mr. Froude in these final pages. Cross-grained, ill-tempered, fretful, and easily upset by the merest trifles, he was also supremely selfish. Incapable of gov erning himself, he had no consideration for others, and in his intercourse with men he often manifested a coarse disregard for their feelings and their rights as members of society. Quick to take offense and morbidly sensitive of slights even where neither were intended, he was habitually and causelessly offensive and insulting, and sometimes brutally so. His irascibility was insufferable, and his "mangy discontent" made all who came in close contact with him miserable; so that his best and nearest as well as oldest friend, his brother John, found it impossible to live under the same roof with him, and his wife, despite her love and admiration for him, was often forced to confess, in terms half piteous and half indignant, that the atmosphere of their home was that of a "mad-house." In his unbounded self-conceit he rated his own powers as immeasurably greater than those of any of his contemporaries, and affected to believe that the subjects which occupied their minds and pens indeed, that all subjects lying outside his own range of studies and reflections-were

insignificant or worthless. His gaze was so intently fixed on whatever for the moment occupied his thoughts that he was mentally blind to much that was great or admirable or beautiful in history, in society, in the world, or in his fellow-men. He could not endure to listen to eulogy of which he was not himself the subject, and he never indulged in it, however greatly it might be deserved; on the contrary, there is scarcely a name in literature, politics, art, or philosophy among his contemporaries, which the world has since recognized as great, but that he refers to with some churlish, or sneaping, or contemptuous, or cheapening epithet. And finally his letters and journals are one long-drawn and monotonous whine over his work, his mental or physical conditions, his companionships and surroundings, magnifying mole-hills into mount ains, and suggesting to the reader that he must "have eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner." Of course another and more pleasing side of Carlyle's character is revealed by his letters and journals, and by the numerous passages introductory to or interlacing them that have been supplied by Mr. Froude. He was also an affectionate and dutiful son, a constant friend, and a loving if most irritating and trying husband. He was the possessor of grand intellectual gifts and powers, which he exerted conscientiously and honestly, according to his lights, and with a courageous independence of fear or favor, for the instruction and improvement of his countrymen, the reform of abuses, and the eradication of whatsoever he conceived to be error or falsehood. To men who, like him, must make or mar their own lives, his example of industry and manly independence, of honesty, frugality, and perseverance, and of diligence in the acquisition and verification of the material that he incorporated in his great and enduring works, is as full of instructiveness as his splendid literary triumphs are of encouragement. Mr. Froude's original contributions to this biography are large and important, and are comprised in the introductory and connecting passages to which allusion has been made. In these Mr. Froude introduces his own personal recollections of Carlyle, and sketches of his life, character, and associations in later years, together with acute analyses, criticisms, and estimates of his various works, and descriptions of his methods in preparing them, and of his real or imaginary agonies of mind and body at the period of their gestation and delivery. These are always able, as is everything that comes from the pen of this vigorous and independent thinker, although here, as elsewhere, he often expends his vigor in cynicism and paradox, and carries his independence to the verge of singularity and perverseness.

HAWTHORNE reveals himself so freely in his writings that, in the absence of all other materials, it would not be impossible to prepare

from them a reasonably full and interesting biography. His romances teem with matter illustrative of his spiritual and intellectual nature, and with allusions to incidents, experiences, and influences that exerted a potential effect upon his character; and in like manner his varions note-books abound in passages that throw light upon the general course and tenor of his daily life, and give us momentary glimpses of his movements, occupations, associations, companionships, and hopes and fears. But affluent as these are of biographical material, it is often of the kind that leaves much to deduction and inference, and fails to bring the reader as close as he would come to the purely personal and human side of the man. The impressions they give of him are either shadowy or incomplete, and not only vary with the methods and immediate stand-point of the observer, but are often and very largely coinages of his own intellect or fancy. In his Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife,' their son, Mr. Julian Hawthorne, has sedulously avoided the error of this method, and leaving those who are fond of speculative analysis and theory to indulge their fancies, has confined himself almost exclusively to the work of giving the reader a very real and unmistakable conception of Hawthorne's human and natural, as distinct from his merely imaginative and artistic, personality. And as the lives of Hawthorne and his wife were inseparably blended, on the imaginative and intellectual no less than on the human side, the biography becomes a joint one after having first briefly disposed of Hawthorne's ancestry and early years, and his youthful and bachelor characteristics, and thence on carries forward with equal step the history of the two lives and of the happiness that gilded and blessed them.

The biography is very largely made up of the letters of Mrs. Hawthorne to her mother and sisters, and to these we are indebted for a succession of remarkable familiar pictures of Hawthorne and his environments, as well when the bow was unstrung as when it was bent to its utmost tension, during the most active and fruitful period of his literary career. Second only in personal interest to the letters of Mrs. Hawthorne are a number from her mother and sisters, which are valuable not only for their own intrinsic grace and beauty, but also for the clearness with which they bring out some of the most expressive lines of Hawthorne's character. With these letters, and numerous others from Hawthorne to members of his family, or that passed between him and his literary and personal friends in England and America, the biographer interweaves and intersperses his own recollections of his father, introducing them most unobtrusively, but yet so appositely and graphically as to leave on the mind of the reader a clear

2 Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife. A Biography. By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. In two Volumes, 12mo, pp. 505 and 465. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.

perception of Hawthorne's moral and intellectual character, a vivid impression of his personal traits, disposition, and habits, as manifested in the alternations of work and play, in the study, in the family, and in society, and a singularly distinct and life-like image of his person. Save for an occasional exhibition of levity, and the needless obtrusion of small raillery on subjects of no moment, by the biographer, the memoir is worthy of its illustrious subject; and if it dispels some illusions as to Hawthorne's uniform amiability toward his contemporaries, and sometimes shows him in an unpleasant light with relation to those whose hospitality he enjoyed, it leaves us in no doubt as to the general symmetry of his character.

AMONG American men of letters there have been those who were more largely endowed with genius than Bayard Taylor. We have had greater poets, more perfect masters of prose, better novelists, deeper thinkers and critics, and more accomplished scholars; but there have been very few who have shown as great versatility, or who have accomplished so much really good work in so many widely different departments of letters. As an editor and letter-writer for the press, as an essayist, traveller, novelist, critic, translator, dramatist, and poet, he fills a large and honorable place in our literature; and the record of his varied career in all these branches, as displayed in the two recently published volumes of his Life and Letters, edited by Mrs. Taylor and Mr. Horace E. Scudder, is a wholesome and impressive memorial of struggle and achievement. It were faint and merely conventional praise to say that these are thoroughly readable volumes. They are that, indeed, but they are much more than that: they are inspiring and instructive, rich in encouragement and suggestive example to the young literary aspirant who, like Taylor, enters upon life with a modest educational equipment and with large odds against him, and who must go through a long apprenticeship to hard work-work, too, that is often uncongenial, and seems to lead no whither-before he can realize the smallest of his hopes and ambitions. Taylor was all his life a toiler, often an impatient and grudging toiler, but he never faltered or slackened his pace. In the earlier part of his life it was necessary that he should work hard and almost unremittingly in order that he might win a subsistence; but however exacting his labors, he even then made time, at the cost of his hours of sleep and recreation, for the study and practice of the art that was the dream and ambition of his life. What was a necessity in his early years became a confirmed habit in his mature manhood, and while devoting him

Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor. Edited by MARIE-HANSEN TAYLOR and HORACE E. SCUDDER. In Two Volumes, 12mo, pp. 784. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.

self to his routine or special newspaper duties with an assiduity and thoroughness that would have exhausted a less robust and less resolute man, he at the same time carried forward the numerous large literary and poetical undertakings that his fertile brain projected-undertakings which he persuaded himself would place his name high up among the worthies of English literature. Thus he was ever under a strain, and habitually overtasked his remarkably vigorous physical and mental powers. The multiplicity of the tasks that he undertook left him no hours of recreative or contemplative leisure; and there can be as little doubt that in this way he was prevented from reaching the literary excellence that his natural abilities made possible as that he thus prematurely impaired his health and materially shortened his life.

The manner in which the work describing this toilsome, energetic, and fruitful career has been executed is deserving of unqualified commendation. The large body of letters which are reproduced in it cover every period of Taylor's life, and in his own words describe his early associations and surroundings, introduce us to his friends, companions, and literary contemporaries, lay bare the inmost feelings of his heart, his hopes and fears, sympathies and antipathies, plans and ambitious, and disclose his cherished ideals and the dominant aims and motives of his life. Where there are gaps in the letters, such connecting links and comments are supplied by the editors as are necessary to give continuity and completeness to the narrative, and to render the portrait of the man more perfect and lifelike. How extensive and important are these additions and comments would hardly be surmised from the modest claim of Mrs. Taylor and Mr. Scudder to be considered only as editors of the Life and Letters. In reality they form a very large portion of both volumes, and are not only indispensable as connecting links, but abound in discriminating criticisms and judicious estimates of Taylor's works and workmanship, and in fine biographical touches illustrative of his character, and revealing many interesting personal incidents and happenings which the letters either merely hint of or pass over in silence.

COLERIDGE was so prominent a figure in English literature, his writings exerted so wide an influence upon thought and art, and his personality was invested with so much that challenged general interest and curiosity, that the study of his life and works has thus far lost scarcely any of its attractiveness or instructiveness by the lapse of time. It is therefore not a little remarkable that, notwithstanding all that has been written of him-in his own

Coleridge. By H. D. TRAILL. "English Men of Letters" Series. 16mo, pp. 199. New York: Harper and Brothers.