seemed to have been making sketches of the earth | introduced; you must drink when you are asked, before the birth of Adam. and then ask the asker to drink, though I am bound to say that this strictly mathematical custom has, owing to the piteous protests of Europeans, somewhat declined of late.

This vacuous vastness is one of the provocatives of Form-sickness. To the European, and especially to the Englishman, a country without plenty of people, pigs, poultry, haystacks, barns, and cottages, is as intolerable as the stage of the grand opera would be if it remained a whole evening with a sumptuously set scene displayed, but not a single actor. New England is the state in which, perhaps, the accessories of life are most closely concentrated; but even in New England you traverse walks into which it appears to you that the whole of Old England might be dropped with no more chance of being found again than has a needle in a pottle of hay. But it is when you come to dwell in towns that Form-sickness gets its firmest grip of you. In a city of three or four hundred thousand inhabitants, you see nothing but mere flat surfaces, straight lines, right angles, parallel rows of boards and perpendicular paling. The very trees lining the streets are as straight as walking-sticks. Straight rows of rails cut up the roadway of the straight streets. The hotels are marble packing-cases, uniformly square, and pierced with many windows; the railway cars and street omnibuses are exact parallelopipeds; and, to crown all, the national flag is ruled in parallel crimson stripes, with a blue quadrangle in one corner, sown with stars in parallel rows. Philadelphia, from its rectangularity, has been called the "chess-board city"; Washington has been laid out on a plan quite as distressingly geometrical; and nine tenths of the other towns and villages are built on gridiron lines. There are some crooked streets in Boston, and that is why Europeans usually show a preference for Boston over other American cities; while in the lower part of New York a few of the thoroughfares are narrow, and deviate a little from the inexorable straight line. In most cases there is no relaxation of the cord of tension. There are no corners, nooks, archways, alleys; no refuges, in fact, for light and shade.

If you enter a barber's shop to be shaved, a negro hands you a check bearing a number, and you must await your turn. When your turn arrives, you must sit in a certain position in a velvet-covered fauteuil with high legs, and must put your feet up on a stool on a level therewith. The barber shaves you, not as you like, but as he likes, powders you, strains a napkin over your face, sponges you, shampoos you, pours bay rum and eau-de-Cologne on your head, greases, combs you out, and "fixes" you generally. The first time I was ever under the hands of an American barber, I rose as soon as he had laid down his razor and made a move in the direction of the washhand basin. He stared at me as though I had gone mad. "Hold on!" he cried, in an authoritative accent. "Hold on! Guess I'll have to wash you up." That I should be washed up, or "fixed," was in accordance with the mathematical code.

the better

This all but utter absence of variety of form, of divergence of detail, of play of light and shade, are productive in the end of that petulant, discontented frame of mind- of that soreness of spirit - with which almost every tourist who has visited the Great Republic has come at last to regard its civilization. As a rule, the coarser the traveller's organization, — the less he cares about art or literature, he will get on in America. I met a fellow-countryman once, the son of an English earl, at one of the biggest, most mathematical, and most comfortless of the New York hotels, who told me that he should be very well content to live there for ten years. "Why," he said, "you can have five meals a day if you like." This is the kind of traveller, the robust, hardy, strong-stomached youth, fresh from a public school, who goes to America and does not grumble. But do you take, not a travelled Englishman, but In the State of Virginia there is one of the larg-a travelled American, one who has been long in est natural arches in the world; but in American Europe, and has appreciated the artistic glories of architecture a curved vault is one of the rarest of the Continent,—and you will discover that he finds structures. The very bridges are on piers without it almost impossible to live in his own country, or arches. Sign-boards and trade effigies, it is true, "board" at an American hotel. Every continental project from the houses, but always at right angles. city has its colony of cultivated Americans, good This rigidity of outline makes its mark on the no- patriots and stanch republicans, but who are absomenclature and on the manners of the people. The lutely afraid to go back to their native land. They names of the streets are taken from the letters of dread the mathematical system. Those who, for the alphabet and the numerals in the Ready Reck- their families' or their interests' sake, are compelled oner. I have lived in G Street. I have lived in to return, live at hotels conducted, not on the AmerWest Fourteenth, between Fifth and Sixth Ave-ican, but on the European system, that is to say, Mathematical calculation is the basis of daily where they can dine, breakfast, or sup, not as the life. You are fed at the hotels at stated hours; and landlord likes, but as they themselves like. Those the doors of the dining-room are kept locked until who are wealthy, shut themselves up in countrywithin a moment of the gong's sounding. At some houses, or splendid town mansions, surrounded by tables d'hôte, fifty negro waiters stand mute and books, and pictures, and statues, and tapestry, and immobile behind the chairs of two hundred and fifty coins from Europe, until their existence is almost guests, and at a given signal uncover, with the pre- ignored by their countrymen. In no country in the cision of clock-work, one hundred dishes. These world are so many men of shining talents, of noble are not matters of opinion; they are matters of fact. mind, of refined tastes, buried alive as in the United Routine pursues you everywhere: from the theatre States. to the church; from the fancy fair to the public meeting. In the meanest village inn, as in the most palatial hotel, there is a travellers' book, in which you are bound to enter your name. You may assume an alias; but you must be Mr. Somebody. You cannot be, as in England, the "stout party in Number Six," or the "tall gent in the Sun." You must shake hands with every one to whom you are

nues.

That which I call the mathematical system is only another name for a very stringent and offensive social tyranny; and, did we not remember that humanity is one mass of inconsistencies and contradictions, it would be difficult to understand how this social despotism could be made compatible with the existence of an amount of political liberty never before equalled in this world.

Saturday

Until 1861 the American citizen was wholly and | settled parts of the United States, apart from the entirely free; and now that the only pretext for the Indian names of some towns and rivers, there recurtailment of his liberties has disappeared, he will mains not the remotest vestige to recall the existenter upon, it is to be hoped, a fresh lease of free-ence of the former possessors of the soil. There dom as whole and entire as of yore. How far the are yet outlying districts, millions of acres square, social tyranny spoken of has extended would be al- where Red Indians hunt, and fight, and steal, and most incredible to those who have not resided in scalp; but American civilization marches up, kills America. "Whatever you do," said an American or deports them,- at all events, entirely "improves " to me on the first day of my landing in the States, them off the face of the land. They leave no "don't live in a boarding-house where you are trace behind, and the bran-new civilization starts treated as one of the family. They'll worry you to up in a night, like a mushroom. Where yesterday death by wanting to take care of your morals." To was a wigwam, to-day is a Doric meeting-house, have one's morals taken care of is a very excellent also a bank, and a grand piano-forte; where yesterthing; but, as a rule, you prefer to place the cura day the medicine-man wove his incantations, totorship thereof in the hands of your parents and morrow an advertising corn-cutter opens his shop; guardians, or of your spiritual director, or, being of and in place of a squaw, embroidering moccasins, mature age, of yourself. "Taking care of morals" and cudgelled by the drunken brave her spouse, is apt to degenerate into petty impertinence and we have a tight-laced young lady, with a chignon espionage. and a hooped skirt, taking academical degrees, and talking shrilly about woman's rights.

One of the most eminent of living sculptors in New York told me that for many years he experi- A few years since, the trapper and pioneer race enced the greatest difficulty in pursuing the studies formed a transition stage between the cessation of incidental to, and indeed essential to, his attaining barbarism and the advent of civilization. The pioexcellence in his profession, owing to the persistent neer was a simple-minded man, and so soon as a care taken of his morals by the lady who officiated clearing grew too civilized for him, he would shoulas housekeeper in the chambers where he lived. It der his hatchet and rifle, and move farther out into must be premised that these chambers formed part the wilds. I have heard of one whose signal for deof a building specially erected for the accommoda-parture was the setting up of a printing-press in his tion of artists, and with a view to their professional settlement. "Those darned newspapers," he rerequirements. Our sculptor had frequent need of marked, "made one's cattle stray so." But railway the assistance of female models, and the "Jani- extension, and the organization in the Atlantic cittress," as the lady housekeeper was called, had a ies of enormous caravans of emigrants, are graduvirtuously indignant objection to young persons ally thinning the ranks of the pioneers. In a few who posed as Venuses or Hebes, in the costume of years, Natty Bumppo, Leatherstocking, the Deerthe period, for a dollar an hour. She could only be slayer, the Pathfinder, will be legendary. Civilizainduced, by the threat of dismissal from the proprie- tion moves now in block. There is scarcely any tor of the studio building, to grant admission to the advanced guard. Few skirmishers are thrown out. models at all; and even then she would await their The main body swoops down on the place to be ocexit at her lodge gate, and abuse them as they came cupied, and civilizes it in one decided charge. down stairs. Much more acclimatized to models was the good sister of William Etty, who used to seek out his Venuses for him; but a transition state of feeling was that of the wife of Nollekens, the sculptor, who, whenever her husband had a professional sitter, and the day was very cold, used to burst into the studio with a basin in her hand, crying, "You nasty, good-for-nothing hussy, here's some hot mutton broth for you."

It may be advantageous to compare such a sudden substitution of a settled community for a howling wilderness with the slow and tentative growth of our home surroundings. European civilization resembles the church of St. Eustache at Paris, in whose exterior Gothic niches and pinnacles, Byzantine arches, Corinthian columns, Composite cornices, and Renaissance doorways, are all jumbled together. Every canon of architectural taste is To recapitulate a little. Form-sickness is the un-violated; but the parts still cohere; a very solid satisfied yearning for those broken lines, irregular forms, and infinite gradations of color-reacting as those conditions of form invariably do on the manners and characteristics of the people-which are only to be met with in very old countries. However expensively and elegantly dressed a man may be, he is apt to feel uncomfortable in a bran-new hat, a bran-new coat and continuations, and bran-new boots and gloves; and I believe that if he were compelled to put on a bran-new suit every morning, he would cut his throat before a month was over.

The sensation of entire novelty is one inseparable from the outward aspect of America. You can sinell the paint and varnish; the glue is hardly dry. The reasons for this are very obvious. American civilization is an independent, self-reliant entity. It has no connections, or ties, or foregatherings with any predecessors on its own soil. It is not the heir of long entailed patrimony. It is, like Rodolph of Hapsburg, the first of its race. It has slain and taken possession. In Great Britain we have yet Stonehenge and some cairns and cromlechs to remind us of the ancient Britons' acts; but in the

façade still rears its head; and, at a certain distance, its appearance is not inharmonious.

At Cologne, in Germany, they will point out to you an ancient building, here a bit of Lombard, here a morsel of florid Gothic, here some unmistakable Italian, and here ten feet of genuine old Roman wall. There are many Christian churches in Italy whose walls are supported by columns taken from Pagan temples. The entire system, physical as well as moral, has been the result of growth upon growth, of gradual intercalation and emendation, of perpetual cobbling and piecing and patching; and although at last, like Sir John Cutler's silk stockings, which his maid darned so often with worsted that no part of the original fabric remained, the ancient foundations may have become all but invisible; they are still latent, and give solidity to the superstruc ture. We look upon the edifice, indeed, as we would on something that has taken root, that has something to rest upon. We regard it as we would that hoary old dome of St. Peter's at Rome. We know how long it took to build, and we trust that it will endure forever. The bran-new civilization we

are apt to look at more in the light of a balloon. It is very astonishing. We wonder, however, it contrived to rise so high, and how long it will be before it comes down again; and we earnestly hope that it will not burst.

"And we, poor King of England, are nobody. Go on. I cannot buy you to speak aught but truth, not with a hundred rings."

"When I come to compare Windsor," said the sturdy old gentleman, "with the palace of those two merchants at Venice, your Grace, this dear old palace where I have lived so long, and where I hope, by your Grace's mercy, to die, seems to me like a mean barn. I am no minstrel, -so little a one that my old tongue cannot tell all the magnificence of what I saw at the house of those two venerable men, still less can I invent aught. When I arrived at their house, the night I was bidden to supper, and stepped from the boat, I told my name and titles. There were some forty servants about the door, and when they caught my name, two beautiful youths, of a courtliness and a grace which "What are you looking at?" asked the King. "Herald," he roared, "tell those young bears' whelps, Percy and Seymour, to be still. It is monstrous, one's pages fighting before one's eyes. Two such beautiful and graceful youths, whose courtli

It is not necessary to avow any partisan kind of predilection for one phase of civilization against another. It is sufficient to note the fact: that Europeans the least prejudiced, and the most ardent admirers of the political institutions of the United States, very soon grow fretful and uneasy there, and are unable to deny, when they come back, that the country is not an elegant or a comfortable one to look upon. I attribute this solely to æsthetic causes. I do not believe that Englishmen grumble at America | because the people are given to expectoration or guessing or calculating, or trivialities of that kind. Continental Europeans expectorate quite as freely as the Americans, and for rude cross-questioning of strangers, I will back a German against the most inquisitive of New-Englanders. It is in the eye that the mischief lies. It is the bran-new mathematical outline of Columbia that drives the English-ness and grace my pages (Satan couple the young man into Form-sickness, and ultimately to the disparagement and misrepresentation of a very noble country. In many little matters of detail, American manners differ from ours; but in the aggregate we are still one family. They speak our language, very frequently with far greater purity and felicity of expression than we ourselves do, they read our books, and we are very often glad and proud to read theirs. They have a common inheritance with us in the historic memories we most prize. If they would only round off their corners a little! If they. would only give us a few crescents and ovals in lieu of "blocks"! If they would only remember that the circle as well as the rectangle is a figure in mathematics, and that the curvilinear is, after all, the line of beauty!

hounds, a thirsty ill-scenting day, on the top of Bagshot Heath!) had as well imitate. Yes, Sir Henry, I follow you. What said these youths to you?"

"They told me that they were detached for my service the whole of that evening, by Signor Nicolo and Senior Mathio, and they begged me to follow them to the banquet-hall. I, seeing by their manner that they were gentle, begged of them to walk slowly, that I might admire the wonders in the great galleries through which we passed. They pointed them out to me, but I did not notice them so closely as I might have done, for the largest part of my mind was given up to counting the paces which I stepped, so that I might gain, on my own authority, some idea of the length of the vast corridors which we were traversing. This puzzled my two youths considerably, for they ran on before me, and placed themselves before the most remarkable objects, to wait my coming; and they evidently wondered why I walked with my head down, and counted as I went. One of them thought I was doing my devo

SIR HENRY MULLORY'S STORY. "THE story must be told, Sir Henry, here, and at once, without delay or omission, or you will exchange Windsor for the Tower. On your allegiance!tions, and seeing I was without a rosary, offered me tell me something to make me forget these Scots, I pray you, of your love."

But, sire!"

Je ne moi parle pas de ça. Go on, sweet Sir Henry; I want to hear much how you saw this man, and what he was like. Why do you delay?" "The story is dull."

"Then both Mortimer and Despencer were liars. Go on, old friend. Such modesty does not become an old ambassador. Seneschal, y'ut il un armée du ours, a bas la. Assurez ces gentilhommes que nous ne sommes pas sourds. Je ne veux pas, silence, mais le tapage est abominable. Altogether villanous. If the men below the salt can't take their Christmas liquor without that noise they must have no more. If they are quarrelling, send a herald to them. Now, Sir Henry, as soon as you can hear yourself speak, go on. Drink from my cup first, finish the wine, and put that ring on your finger which you shall find at the bottom. Hey, Sir Henry, we have a jewel or two. Got you such a ring as that from your wondrous Venetian friends for the telling of a tale?"

"Your Majesty's generosity surpasses theirs, as their splendor surpasses yours. Well turned, but not true. I must unsay it. The men I speak of were as generous as they were splendid."

his, which was of large pearls; but the other said in a low voice, in his musical tongue, 'He is an Englishman, he is only mad,' and after that they wondered no more.

"Mad, you say!' said the first. But he is ambassador from the King of England.'

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My sweetest Antonio,' said the other, what should a madman, King of Madmen, do with a sane ambassador? What fearful political complications would arise if he were to send us any one but a lunatic; or even a lunatic whose lunacy does not exhibit itself openly, as this one's madness does. We might think him a sane man, and believe what he said. And what then?'

"I heard every word of this, though they did not think it. I amused myself with them."

"But," interposed the King, "can you tell me anything of the galleries which you passed through? Was your whole soul taken up with counting your steps?"

"I can tell your Grace this. I passed through three corridors, each one hundred and twenty feet long, before I came to the last and fourth, in which the supper was laid, and in which the guests were assembled. These three galleries, three hundred and sixty feet in length, were all lined with mirrors in golden frames, which reached to the richly-fretted

ceiling? excepting, of course, the windows, which, now it being night, were draped with crimson satin. Thus much I observed; but the other wonders, the statues, the tall vases of glass, banded and twisted of various colors, the great picture of the proud Cimabue, of Michael slaying the Dragon, many other things I hurried by, or only had them shown to me by my two guides, lest I should miss my counting. The floor was covered with the rich-speak out to Signor Nicolo, and ask him to show est cloths."

666

For the first reason,' he answered, 'because he | my wonder and excitement, I dropped the whole is very jealous of showing his talisman to any one thing rattling into my plate, to the great amusement but foreigners, and he never shows it twice to any of the brothers; but none of the other gentlemen at man; and, as I told you before, never speaks of his table took notice of the rattle, but only talked the son unless he shows it. I have seen it once, and you louder, almost as though they were brawling. were the only available foreigner. That is the first "The chain on which the talisman hung was the reason. For the second, we felt sure that you would handsomest and the thickest I have ever seen; but come kindly into the plot. Your gentle demeanor, it was the talisman itself which struck me with such and your beautiful and amiable face-' amazement. It was an oblong sapphire, close on chain by the slender thread of gold which went three inches in length, which was attached to the round it, and which could scarcely be called a setting. It was a water-worn sapphire, having over nearly the whole of its surface a frosted pale-blue color; in one place only had it been touched by the On one side only of it, a space of jeweller's wheel. some half an inch, had been cut flat and polished, and through this shining surface you could look down into the wine-dark depths of the greatest jewel which the world has ever seen."

At this point the King's fool was taken with an obstinate fit of coughing. The King looked up. "Sir Hubert Venables," he said. "Sweet friend, smite me my poor fool upon the back, I pray thee." He hath a cough, and the phlegm will kill him. I should be wood were my poor fool to die."

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Sir Hubert, nineteen stone of strength and goodhumor, moved towards the fool: but the fool was not fool enough to bide a slap from that terrible hand. He dived under the table and passed below the salt, where he revenged himself by telling a story very like Sir Henry's, but with a few utterly incredible incidents, caricaturing that most excel-drous good tale. I like much these great jewels in lent old pedant's voice and manner in a way which made necessary the presence of the seneschal, a herald, and lastly the order of royalty itself, to silence the uproarious laughter.

66

Twenty years ago, Sir Fool, I was handsomer than any man in this room, except, of course, your Majesty."

Exactly," said the King. "Now go on." “It was, it appeared," continued Sir Henry, "to take my opportunity to ask for Signor Nicolo's amulet, and to request him to tell me the story about it. To lead up to this result, Giovanni Doria left off speaking to me, and left me sitting silent. It was a long time before the dulled faculties of Signor Nicolo took notice of this. The main part of the supper had been cleared away, and nothing had been left on the table for some time but the fruits and the wine, but yet I sat still and silent, acting my part

the best way I could.

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sup

Signor Mathio was not in the secret, and he and his brother remained talking very eagerly together. The general buzz of conversation which went on along each side of the table made them think, I pose, that their guests were well entertained, and that they might speak together without breach of manners. At last, Mathio, who sat next to me, turned and saw me silent, and saw also that Doria was deeply engaged in conversation with the man beside him. He instantly nudged his brother, and said, 'Nicolo, we are poor hosts. I thought, Signor Mullory, you were in talk with Signor Doria.'

"I have been silent this half-hour,' I said. 'I have not spoken to a soul since Signor Doria entered into talk with yon Florentine gentleman.'

"This is a good tale," said the King, "a won

a tale. They cost the teller nothing, and the hearer feels as though they belonged to him, or, at least, that he had seen them. Give me jewels in a tale. They are better than dragons."

"But this is every word of it true, your Majesty," said Sir Henry.

"Did ever any one assure thee of being able to invent a tale for thyself? Thou hast no talent that way.. My grandsire sent no minstrels or jongleurs on his errands. That diamond on thy finger would show that these Venetians have jewels such as we have never seen. The story is a good story, but the worse for being true. Canst thou not invent aught? Go on."

I will

tale about this jewel, and he told it to me.
"I asked him, then," continued Sir Henry, "his
pass by that tale, and come to the end of mine."
ter tale than thine own for aught I know. Tell it."
"At thy peril," said the King. "It may be a bet-
and bowed his head gently, as though he would say,
Sir Henry Mullory put his hands slightly abroad,
If you choose to be bored, it is not my fault," and
after this courtier-like protest, went on to tell Sig-
nor Nicolo's story.

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"It is a mistake to suppose, dear Englishman,' said Signor Nicolo, 'that my friend, Kublai Khan, was the son of his predecessor, Hanlu. On the contrary, he was his youngest nephew.

"Mangu was son of Kheri Khan, and was left young with an only sister, to whom he was deeply attached; gave her in marriage to the Emperor of India, Conon the First, and took his, the Emperor's, sister, as his bride in exchange.

"He had never seen this lady until she arrived "They used great civility towards me at once, at Campion, the day before their nuptials. Mangu these two old gentlemen, asking my pardon many became deeply in love with her, and from all I could times. But I answered that I had been well enter-gather from those old men, who in my time were tained looking at the admirable beauty of their still about the court of Kublai Khan, and who reriches; but I said I had a favor to ask. If they membered her, there was no wonder at it. She was a thought they had erred in any way in courtesy to most peerless body. But beauty does not save from me, the granting of that favor would throw the bal-death, and before they had been married seven ance of debt on my side. I asked, would Signor months this beautiful lady died. Nicolo show me the great talisman, and tell me the story about it.

"He willingly acquiesced. He put back the collar of his dark-blue velvet and gold gown, and took from his neck, from underneath his clothes, the chain on which the talisman hung, and handed it to

me.

Your Majesty, it took away my breath. In

"Mangu was inconsolable. He made a vow before the small household idol, an idol which corresponds among the Tartars to the Lares or Penates of the Romans, Signor Mullory, that he would never look on the face of woman again. He kept his vow religiously, as religiously as any of our churchmen, with the hope of immortality before them, keep it.