Chapter II (2)

"No," said the boy decidedly: "it is to ask you to dress yourself and go out for a walk."

To the astonished exclamation of M. Franz he replied that his master wished to practice, beginning early, and that it annoyed him to have any one hear him.

"Go to the devil, you and your master!" naturally shouted our composer.

The boy became purple. "What!" he said, "send him to the devil?--him, the great violinist, the successor of Czemak, of Bihary!"

"Is your master a gypsy?"

"No, but he is the only living violinist who possesses the authentic tradition of gypsy music."

"I love this music; therefore I will get up and go down to the garden."

"Oh no, sir: go into the fields. See!" and he opened the window, "every one has left the castle." And actually the master of the house and his guests were all defiling through the garden-gate, having had only three hours' sleep. M. Franz soon joined them, and heard from them the story of Remenyi.

At the age of seventeen he had been attached to the person of Görgey during the Hungarian war. Leaving his country with the emigration, he had shared the exile of Count Teleki, Sandor and others; then passed some time at Guernsey, where he knew Victor Hugo. He had afterward performed with brilliant success in London, Hamburg, etc., and his renown, after his return to Hungary, went on increasing. He traveled about the country in every direction, astonishing nobles and peasants, and playing with the same enthusiasm and poetry in barns as in palaces. On hearing this our author slipped back to the garden, where he hid himself to listen to Remenyi, who, to his great disgust, was playing a concerto of Bach's.

At breakfast, Remenyi appeared, a very commonplace-looking man, full of his own praises, and always speaking himself in the third person. "Remenyi practiced well this morning," said he.

"Yes, a concerto of Bach's!" Franz.

Thereupon Remenyi asked for his violin, and they heard a marvelous specimen of real Tzigany inspiration. Vanity disappeared--passion, nerve and sentiment took its place. He had all the qualities demanded by science, together with those of imagination. It was the passionate inspiration of genius. After his performance was over, he went gravely to the mantelpiece, stopped the clock, and said to the master of the house, "Let this hand mark for ever the hour when Remenyi played at your house."

M. Franz taking no pains to disguise; his admiration, Remenyi, gratified by it, invited him to accompany him home. Wherever he went he received a perfect ovation. At one place he ordered a pair of boots, which were sent home, paid for by the municipality. Art is a national glory in Hungary, especially that of the gypsies, which has taken root in the very heart of the soil.

Remenyi's house at Rakos-Palota, near Pesth, is a long, rambling building, the courtyard of which is given up to chickens, ducks and pigs. M. Franz says the poplars before the door look like exclamation-marks, and he thinks they are planted there to serve as such. There are heaps of rare and precious objects of every imaginable description--all gifts--but the ones which the owner shows with most pride are his Hungarian sabre and a pair of boots which Liszt wore when a child.

The question is often discussed in Hungary whether the national Hungarian music is the production of Tzigany genius, or whether the gypsies are only the exponents of what properly belongs to Hungary itself. The gypsies are proved to have been in Hungary as early as the thirteenth century, and their musicians were celebrated in the sixteenth, some of their names still living in the memory of the people. What has been preserved of genuine old Hungarian music (some melodies of Timody Stephens) has no charm save its antiquity. These and other facts--but, above all, the impression produced on him by the music itself--have convinced M. Franz that the gypsy faculty is one not only of execution, but creation. Gypsy art proceeds from the sentiment, the genius, of the Tzigany race. It is too strange, its elements are too wild, to be the exclusive product of a thoughtful, wise, believing, practical and civilized people; but the Hungarians have understood this art--they have surrounded it with love and respect. Gaining new life, warmth and vigor from the welcoming applause of Hungary, it belongs to her by virtue of her admiration and sympathetic tears.

E.C.R.

THE "GIORNO DEI MORTI."

We all know that the second of November is All Souls' Day, and that it is the day dedicated in the Roman calendar to the commemoration of all those who have departed "in the faith." And few who have traveled on the continent of Europe are not aware that the day is observed in all Southern countries with a degree of devotion which the greater part of the communities in question are not in the habit of according to any other of the ordinances of the Church. But to observe the manifestation of this devotion in its most striking forms, to seize all the more picturesque developments and presentations of it, the "Giorno dei Morti" must be passed at Rome.

It is a curious fact--one of the many of a similar order which illustrate the moral specialties of the Latin populations--that hundreds of thousands of people of both sexes, who neither believe, nor affect to believe, the doctrines of the orthodox Church, and who are in the habit of utterly disregarding all her prescriptions and teaching, should nevertheless, as often as this sad anniversary comes round, behave as if they were to all intents and purposes good Catholics. It will be said, perhaps, that the feelings to which the special character of the commemoration appeals are so common to all human hearts that the manifestation of them on any customary occasion is in no degree to be wondered at. But I do not think that this will suffice to explain the phenomenon--at least as it may be witnessed here in Italy. Other church ordinances might be pointed out of which the same thing might be said, but which are not similarly observed. The real cause of the phenomenon I take to be that this population is--as it was of old, and as it always has been through all outward changes--pagan. I put it crudely for the sake of putting it shortly, for this is not the place to trouble the readers of a few paragraphs of "Gossip" with a dissertation in support of the assertion. The innate paganism of these people, born of the beauty of the climate and of all external Nature, and of the sensuous proclivity to live and breathe and have their being in the present and the visible which results therefrom, first forcibly shaped their early Christianity into moulds which assimilated it to pagan observances and modes of thought, and still remains ready to resume more and more of its old empire as the authority of Church beliefs waxes feeble. The very striking and singular scene which was to be witnessed in the great Roman cemetery outside the Porta di San Lorenzo on the second day of November was to all intents and purposes pagan in its spirit and meaning. And it is curious to observe in this, as in so many other instances, how the use of words supplies illustrations of national peculiarities and specialties of character. The Church has dedicated the day in question to the commemoration "_omnium animarum"_--of all _souls_. And we others, people of a Teutonic race, have taken and used the phrase in its proper Christian sense: we talk of "All _Souls_' Day." But with the peoples of the Latin stock all thought or question of "souls" is very speedily lost sight of. With them the day is simply the "Giorno dei _Morti_"--the day of _the dead_. And their observance of it is to all intents and purposes what it might have been two thousand years ago.

The very ancient church of San Lorenzo, one of the four extramural basilicas, is situated some ten minutes' walk outside the gate of the same name on the road to Tivoli; and around and behind this church is the vast cemetery to which all the Roman dead are carried. It was first used as an extramural cemetery at the time of the first French occupation, but has been very greatly extended since that time. Clergy, nobles and monks were at first, and as long as Papal rule lasted, exempted from the decree which forbade interment within the city. Now all must be taken to San Lorenzo, and the greatly increased population of the city has already very thickly filled an immense area. The first thing that strikes the visitor to this huge necropolis is the very marked division between the poor and the rich quarters of this city of the dead. The _fashionable_ districts are quite as unmistakably divided and separated from those occupied by "the lower classes" as they are in any city of the living; as is perhaps but right and natural in the case of a population among which it is held that the condition and prospects of the dead may be very materially influenced by a _quantum sufficit_ of masses said for them, and where these can be purchased in any quantity for cash. A very large parallelogram, for the most part surrounded by cloisters, is first entered from the gates which open on the road. But this has been but little used as yet. Beyond it, to the right, is the vast space occupied by the graves of the multitude. Let the reader picture to himself a huge flat space extending as far as the eye can see, thickly planted with little black wooden crosses, with inscriptions on them in white letters. The sameness of all these fragile memorials produces a strange and depressing effect. The undistinguished thousands of them make all the space seem black spotted with white. They are ugly; and the poverty of these bits of painted stick, incapable of resisting the effects of the weather, seems sordid in the extreme. In the graves of this part of the cemetery all are in truth equal. To the left of the vast cloister-surrounded square which has been mentioned the scene is a very different one. There, immediately behind the eastern end of the basilica, the soil rises in a very steep bank to a height greater than that of the church. To the space on the top of this bank a handsome and garden-decorated flight of step leads; and there the "Upper Ten" take their dignified rest, and their dust is perfectly safe from all danger of being mingled with that of less distinguished mortality. This higher ground is called the _Pincetto_--as who should say the "Little Pincian"--a name adapted from that of the celebrated promenade of the gay and fortunate in life, with a suggestion of meaning so satirical that it might seem to have been given to the "fashionable" quarter of the dead city by the united sneers of all the ghosts who haunt the undistinguished graves below. In this aristocratic quarter there is of course no monotonous uniformity. The monuments, some of freestone and some of marble, are of every conceivable form and degree of splendor, and death is made to look pretty and coquettish by the introduction of numerous weeping willows and other such botanical helps to sentiment. The great majority of the inscriptions are in Latin, for Pius IX., so long as his power lasted, absolutely forbade the use of any other language; which was a measure of very questionable judiciousness, seeing that a large crop of Latinity by no means creditable to Italian scholarship has been the result. It would have been better to stick to good Della-Cruscan Italian, or to have employed some English school-usher to come here as resident reviser of Roman Latinity. Inelegant and even ungrammatical inscriptions, however, do not interfere with the general picturesqueness of the spot, or with its singular adaptation to show to advantage the remarkable scene enacted there on the last "Giorno dei Morti."

The cemetery had been visited by great numbers of persons, bringing chaplets and flowers, during the day, both in the aristocratic and the plebeian quarters, but it was at night that the crowd was greatest and the scene most striking. The night, as it so chanced, was a dark one, which did not make the scene by any means less strange and weird-looking. The greater number of visitors, especially in the poor quarter of the dead city, were women. Such is always the case, whether it be that the female mind is more generally accessible to gentle thoughts of and yearnings over their lost ones, or whether the explanation be simply that, as is especially the case here, women, having less to occupy their leisure either in the way of business or amusement, are more eager to seek any emotion or occasion which may serve to break the flat monotony of their lives.

Certainly the scene in the cemetery on the evening of the "Day of the Dead" was one calculated to make an impression not to be readily forgotten by any mere looker-on who witnessed it. Nor was that presented by the road from the gate to the cemetery less remarkable in its way. It is an ugly, disagreeable bit of road, between high walls, deep with mud in wet, and with dust in dry weather, as was the case on the present occasion, and without the smallest vestige of a pathway for foot-passengers; so that the motley crowd, with their lights and chaplets and flowers, had to make their way amid a cloud of dust and among the carriages of those bound for the "Pincetto" as best they might. But it was the general apparent mood and temper of mind in which these pilgrims, bound on so sad an errand, seemed to be performing their self-imposed task that was especially noteworthy. It might be supposed that a certain degree of reverential self-concentration, or at least of quietude, would have been the characteristic of a crowd bound on such an errand. There was not the smallest symptom of anything of the sort. It is true that many visit the cemetery on the evening in question who have not recently lost any relative or friend, going thither merely as performing an act of devotion or of amusement, or, as is usually the case with all devotion in this country, of both combined. But the greater number of the pilgrims is composed of those who have buried their dead within the preceding year. Yet, as I have said, there was observable in the bearing of the crowd not only no reverential feeling, but not even that amount of quietude which the most careless body of people of our race would have deemed it but decent to assume on such an occasion. Laughter might have been heard, though not perhaps very much. But the noise was astonishing--noise of incessant chatter in tones which bespoke anything but the tone of mind which might have been expected. The truth is, that he who expects to find in the people of this race the sentiment of awe or reverence under any circumstances whatever does not know them. It is not in them. The capacity for it is not in them. It is not a question of more or less education, or of this or that condition of life. The higher and the lower classes, the clergy and the laity, are equally destitute of the capacity for feeling or comprehending the sentiment which makes so large a part of the lives of the people of a different race. To me the observation, far from being suggested by what met my eye on the occasion in question, is the outcome of more than a quarter of a century's experience of Italian ways and thoughts. But the exhibition of the peculiarity on that occasion was very striking. Doubtless there was many a mother among that throng whose heart had been wrung, whose very soul had been struck chill within her, by the loss of the child on whose grave she was about to place the humble tribute of common flowers which she carried in her hand. No doubt many a truly-sorrowing husband and yet more deeply-stricken wife were on the way to visit the sod beneath which their hopes of happiness had been buried with their lost ones. But whatever might have been in their hearts was not manifested by any token of _reverential_ feeling. There were tears, there were even sobs occasionally to be heard, but there was neither reverence nor what we should deem decency of behavior.

Within the cemetery "distance lent enchantment to the view." As seen from the cloister which surrounds the great square, as has been mentioned, the outlook over the "poor quarter" of the vast burial-ground was very striking. Amid the wilderness of black crosses, which extends farther than eye could see, numerous figures were flitting hither and thither, many of them with lights in their hands. In the farther distance, where the figures were invisible, the lights could still be seen mysteriously, as it seemed, moving over the closely-ranged graves like corpse-candles, as the old superstition termed the phosphoric lights which may in certain states of the atmosphere be seen in crowded graveyards. In the foreground, where the figures could be distinguished, many were seen on their knees in the damp and malarious evening air at the graves of their lost relatives. But not even in the bearing these could anything of real earnestness be traced. They were performing a routine duty, of which no doubt their own consciences and their friends and neighbors would have disapproved the omission; and that was all. Nevertheless, the _picturesqueness_ of the general effect was perfect, and it appealed to the imagination of a looker-on in a manner which to many minds, more intent on sensational emotions than on discrimination of social characteristics, would have caused the above remarks to appear sadly ill-timed and out of place.

The scene which was meantime being enacted on the Pincetto, where the wholly separated resting-places of the "Upper Ten" protest so successfully against the leveling notion that in death all are equal, I might have suggested many a mordant epigram to the cynically-minded visitor. I fear that there is often something provocative of cynicism in sundry of the aspects of fashionable devotion, but on such an occasion as the present it could hardly be otherwise. Rachels in Parisian bonnets and sweeping silk skirts, muttering over their rosaries for their children on splendid cushions borne in due state by attendant plush-clothed ministers, were contrasted in these realms of the universal Leveler somewhat too strongly with the scene one had just left in the (physically and socially) lower regions of the cemetery. Of course hearts that beat beneath silken bodices may be wrung as bitterly as those that serge covers. I am speaking only of those outward manifestations which contributed to complete the strangeness of the general spectacle which I had come out to see. The better tending of the aristocratic portion of the cemetery, and the greater space between the graves and their monuments, made it of course easier and less disagreeable to pass among them and to note the bearing of individual mourners. If the former scene had presented much that was indecorously formal, here all was decorously formal. The routine, cut-and-dry nature of the duty being performed exercised in either case its property of numbing natural feeling, or at least the appearance of it.

On the whole, the experience offered by a visit to the great Roman cemetery on the evening of the "Giorno dei Morti" is a singular and curious one, as will be admitted, I think, by any one who may be tempted by my example to go and see it.

T.A.T.

MR. MILL'S MOTHER.

The publication of the late Mr. John Mill's _Theism_ (writes a correspondent from England) has again brought forward its author and his peculiarities as subjects of general conversation. Not content with having talked these matters pretty well over some months ago, people are at this moment discussing them with not a whit less of interest than if they were brand-new. But it is what Mr. Mill has omitted to tell us in his _Autobiography_, quite as much as what he has there told us, that excites popular curiosity about him. How came it that a man whose admiration of his wife was hardly distinguishable from idolatry should never once mention his mother? Thousands have asked, and have asked in vain, who she was, and whether she could have been so entirely insignificant as to deserve being passed over, without even so much as an allusion to her, by her very philosophic son. These questions, and others connected with them, I might answer at length. However, the few facts I shall here state will perhaps be no less welcome than a long detail. The wife of James Mill, and mother of John Mill, was a Miss Burrows, daughter of a Dr. Burrows who superintended an asylum for the insane at Islington. She died in London about twenty years ago, having outlived her husband not quite that period. Her children were nine in number, of whom four daughters are still living--two in England and two in France. She was not what would be reckoned a conspicuously intellectual woman, and yet she by no means deserved the heartless slight which was put on her memory by her son. Indeed, such a slight could have its justification in little short of utter worthlessness; and Mrs. James Mill was not only esteemed, but beloved, by a large circle of friends. On the appearance of the _Autobiography_ her daughters were, naturally enough, not a little indignant at finding their mother as much ignored in it as if she had never existed, and were inclined, at first, to supplement, publicly, their brother's account of himself by certain disclosures not exactly of a character to exalt him in the estimation of the world. Suffice it to say here that for many years before his death he had been estranged from his family; and this estrangement was attributed, by those who had the best opportunities of judging, to the sinister influence of his wife. This is all that I am disposed to communicate at present, but I should not be at all surprised if we were to know, by and by, much more of the private life of John Mill than we as yet know.

NOTES.

There has recently emerged into notice, from her hiding-place in one of the outskirts of London, an ancient woman whose surroundings forcibly illustrate the persevering vitality of even the insanest forms of religious belief. Joanna Southcott and her fanaticisms we are apt to associate with Dr. Faustus, alchemy, and persons and things of that kind, as belonging to an age with which we have no personal concern. Yet this is a mistake. The followers of the fatidical Joanna may still be counted by thousands in Great Britain, particularly in its metropolis; and their acknowledged head, in strict accordance with the fitness of things, is a woman. She is a very old woman, too, her age symbolizing, perhaps, the longevity to which her crazy superstition is destined. Elizabeth Peacock is the name of this relic of the past. For many years she itinerated as a preacher, and at the great age of one hundred and three her health is still vigorous. Modern priestesses, however, not unlike the prophets of antiquity, are subject to be scanted of due honor, or, at all events, of what is more essential than this as contributing to keep soul and body from parting company prematurely. The fact of her being in a state of destitution was notified not long ago to the magistrate of the Lambeth police-court, and that unappreciative functionary, while consenting to subscribe, with others, for her relief, openly expressed his conviction that she would be best off in the workhouse. Altogether, the old creature is a bit of a curiosity. She has had three husbands, and the last of them, whom she married in 1852, killed himself only the other day, possibly from finding the twofold burden of domestic predication and a helpmeet of five score too much for his nerves. If sane, the ungrateful fellow ought, in all reason, to have had the grace to survive her; for when he undertook matrimony, as he had nothing to turn his hand to, she instructed him herself in the art and mystery of cooperage. At that time, so robust a specimen of anility was she, she could pitch an empty cask across the street, and her credulity is as strong at this moment as her arm was of yore. We conclude, from her story, that the proper stuff for making prophetesses of the baser sort has, even in our day, only to be looked for to be discovered.

* * * * *

Our countrymen have lately learned to admire, in its Western transformation, the extremely clever _Rubáiyát_ of Omer Khayyám. And they are certainly much in the right in so doing. The sterling merits of the Persian original are preserved with striking fidelity in the English version of the poem, which, for the rest, has gone far to prove that the acceptableness among us of Oriental poetry may depend very largely on the skill with which it is transplanted into our language. The translator of the _Rubáiyát_ is Mr. Edward FitzGerald, of Woodbridge in Suffolk. Mr. FitzGerald's ancient family one may learn all about from Burke's _Landed Gentry_, and that he was born in 1809, and that he married Lucy, daughter of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where among his contemporaries and friends were the present poet-laureate and Mr. Spedding, the editor of Bacon. The _London Catalogue_ names three works as by Mr. FitzGerald. These, as we find from inspection of the works themselves, are as follows: 1. _Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth,_ 1851 (it reached a second edition, increased by an _Appendix_, in 1855); 2. _Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances_, 1852; 3. _Six Dramas of Calderon_, 1853. These dramas are translations, in prose and verse, of _The Painter of his Own Dishonor, Keep your Own Secret, Gil Perez the Gallician, Three Judgments at a Blow, The Mayor of Zalamea_, and _Beware of Smooth Water_. In none of these volumes, however, except the last is there any indication of its authorship but there Mr. FitzGerald's name is given in full. The date of his metrical translation of _Salámán and Absál_, from the Persian, we are not at this moment, able to specify. Add, as printed by him, but not published, two other small volumes of translations--one, of the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus; and the other, of two of Calderon's plays, _Life is a Dream_ and _The Wonderful Magician_. Finally, we have to mention an unprinted verse-translation, _The Bird Parliament_, from the Persian _Mantiq-ut-tair_ by Attár. Mr. Allibone knows nothing of Mr. FitzGerald, and he is similarly passed over in silence by the compiler of _Men of the Time._ Everything that he has produced is uniformly distinguished by marked ability; and, such being the case, his indifference to fame, in this age of ambition for literary celebrity, is a phenomenon which deserves to be emphasized.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The French Humorists from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century.
By Walter Besant, M.A.
Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Had Mr. Besant given us definitions of "humor" and "humorist," we might possibly not have been satisfied with them, but they would at least have enabled us to understand what sense he attaches to the words, and what principle determined him in selecting the writers embraced in his category. In the first page of his book he speaks of humor as "a branch" of satire; in the second he identifies French satire as the "esprit gaulois;" in the third he tells us that "the French type for satire and humor has preserved one uniform character from generation to generation;" and in his last page he claims superiority for the French over the English humorists, on the ground that "Rabelais has a finer wit than Swift," that "we have no political satire so good as the _Satyre Mènipée_," "no English humor comparable for a moment with that of the fabliaux," "no letter-writer like Voiture," "no teller of tales like La Fontaine," and "no _chansonnier_ like Béranger." Now, it is evident that this is a comparison not of French and English humorists, but of certain classes of writers in the two languages in reference to their manifestation of humor. We have no fabulist like La Fontaine, no song-writer equal to Béranger; but then we do not think of citing our fables and songs as the highest examples of English humor. It would be easy to array a list of names as a set-off against that of Mr. Besant. But this is needless. Humor, in the sense in which the word is commonly understood, may almost be said to be a distinctive quality of English literature, which is pervaded by it in a far greater degree than that of any other people. It is a leading trait in all the great English novelists, from Fielding to Thackeray and George Eliot, without excepting Richardson, in whom it is least conspicuous; it is the chief attribute of our finest essayists, from Addison to Charles Lamb; it is harmoniously blended with the fresh and simple pathos of Chaucer and with the passionate moodiness of Carlyle: it holds equal sway with the tragic element in the world created by Shakespeare. When Mr. Besant says that "there is no English humor comparable for a moment with that of the fabliaux," we are forced to suppose either that he uses the word "humor" in some unexplained and inexplicable sense, or that he leaves out of the account what would generally be considered the greatest of humorous productions. The puzzle increases when we find him omitting all mention of Le Sage, while excusing himself for the omission, from lack of space, of Rousseau! A list of humorous works which should exclude _Gil Blas_ to make room for _Émile_ or _Le Contrat Social_, might itself, one would think, act as a provocative on the _esprit gaulois_.

These mysteries are not the only ones in Mr. Besant's volume to which we have to confess our inability to discover a key. In closing his remarks on Montaigne he touches with undissembled irony the question whether he was a Christian, and, after contrasting the tone and sentiments of the _Essais_ with those of the Gospels, bids us "remember that we are not in the nineteenth century, but in the sixteenth, that Montaigne died in the act of adoration, and cease to ask whether the man was a Christian;" adding, "Christian? There was no better Christian than Montaigne in all his century." It appears, therefore, that the sixteenth century, instead of being, as we had supposed, one in which the Reformation had brought with it a revival of religious earnestness and a reaction against religious formalism, and in which on the battle-field, in the dungeon and at the stake, as well as through voluntary exile and the relinquishment of property, thousands in every country testified to the fervor and sincerity of their religious convictions, was in truth, like the eighteenth century, one in which a prevailing skepticism or indifference paid to dead but not yet dethroned creeds its light homage of affected "adoration." Mr. Besant informs us that "to the men of culture the rival parties were but two political sides." How many men of culture could be cited in support of this assertion? We grant him Montaigne, but it was precisely because the case of Montaigne was an exceptional one in the age of Erasmus and More, of Calvin and Coligny, that the question in regard to him has not seemed altogether idle.

It appears from another passage that Mr. Besant has an easy method of arriving at a judgment in regard to the character or general aspect of an historical epoch. From the details in regard to food, dress and furniture which he finds in the works of Eustache Deschamps, a satirical poet of the fourteenth century, he infers that the bourgeois life of that period was "comfortable, abundant and cheery." "History," he says, "paints this as the worst and most disastrous period that Europe had ever seen; yet here, in the most real poet of the century, we see how life, as a whole, went on in the usual way. For when a great pestilence strikes a country, it slays its thousands and goes away. Time quickly heals the wounds of grief, and the world goes on as before. Then come the English to sack and destroy. Nature heals their wounds, too, by the recurring seasons, and the world goes on as before. I am inclined to think that life, on the whole, was generally pleasant for a well-to-do Frenchman of the period." Mr. Besant, it will be seen, concedes that evils are evils while they last, that war and pestilence are not pleasant things to the victims, and that the comfortable and cheery life of the fourteenth century suffered some interruptions from these causes. But then it was still, he insists, an agreeable life "on the whole," since "the recurring seasons" healed the wounds and the grief, and left the survivors to enjoy existence "in the usual way." This, it must be owned, is a very comfortable and cheery philosophy--for those who preach it. We do not see that they need ever complain of "bad times," since they can always be sure that the recurring seasons will bring alleviation to the survivors. It may also be admitted that, as there is no age in which the recurring seasons do not bring relief, so there has been none when war and pestilence and similar evils did not interrupt the usual course of life. There is, however, this difference, that in some ages these evils last longer than in others, the wounds are deeper, the victims more numerous, the intermissions less frequent, the relief tardier, the survivors fewer. Such an age in France was the period of the English invasions, comprising a great portion of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That life was then, "on the whole," anything but comfortable and cheery is attested by records and evidence of all kinds, against which the mention of weddings and christenings, of gold-embroidered mantles and robes of silk, in the pages of a court poet will, we apprehend, count for very little, especially as the sufferers do not appear to have solaced themselves with reflections on the sure effects of the recurring seasons. Deschamps himself was unable, it seems, to get his pension paid; and if he died, as Mr. Besant tells us, about 1409, the chances, we think, are that however he may have denounced luxury as the "crying evil" of his time, his death was the result of starvation.

Mr. Besant, it will be perceived, is one of those writers who indulge in haphazard assertions without troubling their heads with the facts that conflict with them. A glaring instance of his tendency to exaggeration and wild speculation will be found in his estimate of Rabelais, whom he first vaunts as "a great moral teacher," "a teacher the like of whom Europe had not yet seen," and then denounces as having "destroyed effectually, perhaps for centuries yet to come, earnestness in France," declaring that "no writer who ever lived has inflicted such lasting injury on his country," and that "it would have been better for France if his book, tied to a millstone, had been hurled into the sea." These opinions are contradictory of each other, since it is impossible that a writer who so perverted men's minds should also have been, in any proper sense of the term, a great moral teacher; they are inconsistent with Mr. Besant's account of the "unbroken lines of writers," of whom Rabelais was one, but not the first, all having the same characteristics, all "irreverent," having "no strong convictions," "like children for mockery, mischief and lightness of heart;" and finally, they are so improbable in themselves, and so unsusceptible of proof, that, uttered as they are with the solemnity of communications from an unseen world, they produce much the same impression on us as the disclosures with which Mr. Robert Dale Owen is favored by his "materialized" visitants.

We might cite other examples to prove that Mr. Besant is not a safe guide either in his general speculations or in his critical judgments. He is an agreeable narrator, showing a close familiarity with the topics he handles, and an enthusiasm which, if it sometimes degenerates into mere fume, adds on the whole to the liveliness of his writing. His translations in verse are remarkable for their ease and finish. The book may be read with pleasure, but not, we fear, with equal profit. The chapters that deal with the least known works and writers are the most satisfactory. On Montaigne and Molière Mr. Besant has nothing to say which is likely to incite the reader to a fresh study of their works, which ought to be the effect of every fresh discourse on a great author.

* * * * *

Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland A.D. 1803.
By Dorothy Wordsworth.
Edited by J.C. Shairp, LL.D.
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The special charm of this book lies in the fact that it is not a book--that there was no thought in the writer's mind of printer's ink, no vision of publicity or fame, no solicitude to propitiate critics or win the sympathy of the "gentle reader." Or one might say it was a book of the primitive kind, written on the bark of trees by some shy dryad, unconcious translator into speech of the rustlings and whisperings of the woodland. It is, as the editor observes, an "effortless narrative," with "no attempt at fine or sensational writing, ... at that modern artifice which they call word-painting," but recording with "vivid exactness" what was seen and felt by the writer and her companions on a journey through regions then little frequented by tourists and unsmirched by the eloquence of guide-books. That the travelers were William and Dorothy Wordsworth and (for a part of the way) S.T. Coleridge, that scenes and incidents here first sketched in the sister's sober prose were afterward memorialized and moralized in the brother's verse, and that many of the spots described were about to become famous with and through Scott--a meeting with whom formed the fitting close to the tour,--these are circumstances that of course invest the journal with a deeper interest and have called wider attention to its unobtrusive beauty. But its chief attractiveness lies in the Doric simplicity not only of the style but of the matter. An outlandish Irish car was the conveyance; the appearance of the party was not such as to attract notice unless by the quaintness of their garb or their awkward management of the horse, "now gibbing and backing over a bank, now reduced to a walk, with one of the poets leading him by the head;" and they themselves were in search of nothing more notable than such wayside objects as might serve to feed contemplation. On one occasion, having turned aside to visit the duke of Hamilton's picture-gallery, they were told by the porter, after he had scanned them over, that they ought not to have come to the front door, and were directed to an obscure entrance at the corner of the house, where they seated themselves humbly on a bench while waiting for admittance, which was finally refused. They were mortified, but had a deeper pang in the grounds around Bothwell Castle, for here they were "_hurt_ to see that flower-borders had taken place of the natural overgrowings of the ruins, the scattered stones and wild plants." Sometimes at an inn they were made to perceive how little consideration they were entitled to by being lodged in inferior rooms while better ones were vacant; but to compensate for this, in the wilder parts of the country they were greeted with the hospitality which their mere condition as strangers was still sufficient to call forth. The descriptions given of the people have at least an equal interest with those of the scenery. We have a succession of pictures in which, as Principal Shairp remarks, "man is seen against a great background of Nature and solitude." The book is one not to be read and laid away, but to be kept near at hand, and made a frequent companion and familiar friend.

_Books Received_.

Sophisms of Protection.
By the late M. Frédéric Bastiat.
Translated from the Paris edition of 1863,
with Preface by Horace White.
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Select Notes on the International Sabbath School Lessons for 1875.
By a New England Pastor.
Boston: Henry Hoyt.

Notes in England and Italy.
By Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Illustrated Edition.
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

William Prince of Orange; or, The King and his Hostage.
By Rev. T.M. Merriman, A.M.
Boston: Henry Hoyt.

Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year 1873.
Washington: Government Printing Office.

Among the Trees.
By William Cullen Bryant.
Illustrated.
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Early English History.
By John P. Yeatman.
London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Poems.
By Stuart Sterne.
(Published for the Author.)
New York: F.B. Patterson.

The Frozen Deep.
By Wilkie Collins.
Boston: William F. Gill & Co.

A Lecture on the Protestant Faith.
By Dwight H. Olmstead.
New York.

FOOTNOTES.

[1] _Travel and Art-Study in Italy_, by C.E. NORTON.

[2] December, 1874, art. "Physical Effects of Emotion on the Heart."

[3] I have several times performed this experiment, and by a method, the explanation of which would require a separate article, have proved that the vaso-motor centre, as well as the respiratory centre, is situated in the medulla oblongata, and that paralysis of neither respiration nor of the vaso-motor nerves follows the operation.