philosophical questions the same kind of opinion calls itself eclecticism; and it is infinitely comfortable to people who dislike the responsibility of striking out an original line for themselves. The doctrine commends itself very strongly to the earnest-minded person generally; he is anxious to recognize every thing which is put forward with due solemnity; and, by placing himself at a central point between the various extremes, he can gain at a cheap rate a reputation for large-mindedness and width of sympathy. Moreover, he can thus reconcile deep convictions with facility for gradually shifting into any system of opinion that may be convenient. A generous recognition of the good that may be found on all sides is a fine, decorous virtue, almost indispensable to the preservation of a high moral tone. When you consider a theory to be altogether wrong, you are apt to laugh at it; and the truly earnest man should never laugh.

Now, it is as plain that this theory has something in it, as it is plain that it is far from being an accurate statement of the truth. If we endeavor to apply the principle of striking an average between extremes to any case in which there is a general agreement of opinion, we at once come upon the most palpable absurdities. One set of philosophers held that the sun went round the earth, and another that the earth went round the sun; and the only mode of reconciling the two opinions, is to be found in the answer of that distinguished candidate at a competitive examination, who said that it was sometimes one and sometimes the other body which revolved. Or, to leave questions in which the method is obviously inapplicable, we might take some of the political compromises that have been held at different times. For example, there were the theories about toleration. The extremists were absurd enough to say that every creed ought to be tolerated. Locke, though a very enlightened man for his age, felt that this was going a little too far, and, in order to maintain a character for common-sense, decided that a line must be drawn somewhere, and drew it at atheists and papists. Others adopted a theory conceived in the spirit of that ingenious Cornish juryman, who, when a man was accused on doubtful evidence of poisoning an old woman, remarked that he would "gie un month in the debtors' ward." They thought that burning a Dissenter was wrong, but did not object to a reasonable amount of imprisonment. The case, indeed, was one in which the extremists on one side or the other were obviously right. We must either grant absolute freedom, which is the conclusion generally adopted, or persecute so vigorously as to suppress the heresy. Any number of other cases might easily be suggested, in which the choice really lies between one of two diametrically opposed principles; and any kind of compromise, even if advisable in practice for a time, is obviously untenable in theory. Indeed, it may be doubted whether this does not more frequently hold true than the opposite. The truth of which the doctrine of the advantage of middle courses seems to be an imperfect expression is, in its genuine form, of a different nature. It is quite true, and it is highly important to remember, that when any large number of people hold a given opinion, there must be some general cause for it; but it does not at all follow that the cause is that the opinion contains any large element, or even any element whatever, of soundness. Mankind is foolish, and has frequently maintained a passionate belief in degrading superstitions of various kinds for many centuries together. Any such superstition must have had some reason for permanence; that is to say, it must have gratified some moral or intellectual instincts. A satisfactory explanation of the facts to which it refers must explain what was the nature of its influence; but it does not follow that the influence depended, even in the very smallest degree, upon the truth of the opinions held. It is an easy misapplication of this obvious truth, to assume that any two hostile opinions are always complementary, and that a complete theory may be reached by combining them. The method is attractive in proportion to its easiness; but, unluckily, it will not work. Genuine candor would force us to admit that no theory is sound which does not explain how it came to be generally misunderstood. When we know the real arrangement of the solar system,

we can easily account for the delusions which retarded its recognition; and it is perfectly easy to understand why toleration has made such slow progress in the world: but it would be the height of absurdity to attempt a discovery of the truth by combining the opposite doctrines. And thus it is well to remember that candor may sometimes compel us to say, not that everybody is more or less right, but that a large part of mankind is hopelessly stupid and ignorant, and has accepted many doctrines because a gross blunder is often much easier than a true solution of a difficulty.

THE NEW GULLIVER.

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It is obvious that we have amongst us a satirist of very remarkable literary power, as well as of a very cynical turn of mind. Since the days of Swift, nothing has been written abler, in its peculiar way, and certainly nothing more thoroughly bitter and contemptuous in its drift, than the little book called "Erewhon; or, Over the Range," - the reader will see that Erewhon is a very simple disguise of "Nowhere," - just published by Mr. Trübner. While Swift, however, in his voyage to the country of the Houynhyms and voyage to Laputa, directed his satire chiefly against the vices of man and the degradation of human manners and intellect, for in his admiration for the equine form of the Houynhyms, as compared with that of the Yahoos, he only expressed a coarse physical disgust for the human form in its degraded condition, the author of Erewhon," on the other hand, directs all the force of his satire, not against the practical life of men as they are, but against the morality and the religion of men and the higher workings of their intellect. His satire is, at bottom, a philosophical attack veiled in fable, on the prevalent notions of human responsibility, on the personal forms of human faith, and on the capacity for intellectual perversions. His objectif, as we feel no doubt, the book has an object beyond the fanciful exhibition of a topsyturvy sort of moral and intellectual world—is to make men blush, not for what they do, but for what they think and feel; and not for what they think and feel in their lowest, but in their highest moods. We conjecture that the author is a universal sceptic, who intends to illustrate strongly the absurdity (as he holds it) of treating men as at all more responsible for their moral than for their physical health; further, the absurdity of believing that any real being gives the law to our thoughts of what is fitting; and, finally, the absurdity of speculating too much, even as to the possible developments of what is already in existence. The author of "Erewhon" differs widely from Swift in directing all his satire against what would usually be called the highest morality, faith, and philosophy of the day. What he seems to want to impress on his readers is the hollowness of all the higher creeds, whether as to ethics, religion, or philosophy, the wisdom of quietly taking your notions of what is best from the society around you, without inventing fictions as to any power of the understanding to penetrate beneath or beyond them. In one page the author confesses that the "high Ydgrunites," i.e., the higher worshippers of Ydgrun (Mrs. Grundy), who always defer to her without ample reason for resistance, but then override her with due self-reliance, appeared to him to have got "about as far as it is in the right nature of men to go," a judgment which he only modifies by saying that they ought to speak out more clearly what they really think. Of course this, too, may be veiled satire; but, if it is, the book is without definite drift, which no one who reads it carefully will easily believe.

One of the most skilful parts of the book is the account of the adventures of the colonist of the fable, in his discov ery of the land of Erewhon; of the interview with the Indian Chowbok, in which the latter acts to him the terrors of the great mountain-chain he desires to cross between the pasture lands on the coast, and the unexplored interior, imitating the hideous faces of the stone giants whom the hero of the tale subsequently finds at the top of

the pass, and the unearthly sounds which the wind makes in blowing through them; of the three weeks' exploring with Chowbok, by which he reaches the foot of the pass, and his desertion by the terrified Chowbok before he attempts it; of his own dangers in the journey, and of his ultimate success. All this is told with a graphic minuteness that lends a good deal of external interest to the satire, but that we cannot stay to recount. When, at length, the adventurer descends into the land of Erewhon, his first remarkable experience is the approbation expressed of his physical health, after minute examination of his heart, lungs, and other organs, the praise of his light hair and complexion, and the exceeding disapprobation with which his watch is received, as though it were a kind of crime in him to be in possession of such an instrument. The hero speculates that the people, who present most of the features of European life with a difference, may, perhaps, be the Ten Lost Tribes; and one of the many bitter sarcasms directed at the Bible is introduced in reference to this suggestion :

"To restore the lost Ten Tribes of Israel to a knowledge of the only truth: here would be, indeed, an immortal crown of glory! My heart beat fast and furious as I entertained the thought. What a position would it not insure me in the next world; or perhaps even in this! What folly it would be to throw such a chance away! I should rank next to the apostles, if not as high as they; certainly above the minor prophets, and possibly above any Old-Testament writer except Moses and İsaiah."

Soon he remarks that the people are very compassionate to him when he is out of temper, or when they think him so; and one of his visitors tell him quite kindly that though she knows how impossible it is to prevent being sulky at times, he "ought to see some one, if it became more serious," just as we say that if cold takes further hold on a man, he ought "to see some one." On the other hand, when he tells the daughter of his jailer that he has taken cold, she fires up, and asks him what he means by it, and how he dare make such a statement, especially when he remembers that he is in prison; from all which he gradually elicits the view of the country to be, that illness is a crime to be seriously punished by the law; while what we call sins or vices are misfortunes, to be pitied and sympathized with, and removed only with the full consent of the patient, by the moral sagacity of the family "straightener" (or moral physician), whose prescriptions are followed as sedulously in Erewhon as those of our physicians of the body in Europe:

"There are subdivisions of illnesses into crimes and misdemeanors, as with offences amongst ourselves—a man being punished very heavily for serious illness, while failure of eyes or hearing in one over sixty-five, who has had good health hitherto, is dealt with by fine only, or imprisonment in default of payment. But if a man forges a check, or sets his house on fire, or robs with violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is either taken to a hospital, and most carefully tended at the public expense, or, if he is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all his friends that he is indisposed, just as we do when we are ill; and they come and visit him with great solicitude, and inquire with interest how it all came about, what symptoms first showed themselves, and so forth,- questions which he will answer with perfect unreserve; for bad conduct, though considered no less deplorable than illness with ourselves, and as unquestionably indicating something seriously wrong with the individual who misbehaves, is, nevertheless, held to be the result of either pre-natal or post-natal misfortune. I should add that under certain circumstances poverty is considered criminal."

Consequently, when people meet each other in the morning, they do not ask after health, which would be gross illbreeding, but after temper or character, hoping their friends are "good;" that they no longer feel greedy, or malicious, or snappish, but are recovered from these little indispositions. The hero's host is taken with premonitory symptoms of embezzlement, having twice or three times laid hands on money not his own, till at last he cheats a confiding widow out of the whole of her fortune, whereupon,

seeing he had neglected himself too long, "he drove home at once; broke the news to his wife and daughters, and sent off for one of the most celebrated straighteners of the kingdom to a consultation with the family practitioner," and "expressed his fears that his morals were permanently impaired." This vein of satire, its force depending, of

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course, on the many cases in which we make the opposite blunder, and treat as criminal, habits and dispositions which are, strictly speaking, moral maladies caught by contagion from evil parentage and evil circumstances, worked out very skilfully; young ladies, for instance, who are really weak in health, pleading dipsomania to conceal their weakness of health, just as in England similar young ladies sometimes plead hysterical or nervous weakness to conceal the dipsomania from which they are really suffering.

The other ideas of the day satirized in "Erewhon" are hardly as closely connected with this leading notion, — that we are really quite as responsible (or irresponsible) for our health of body as for our health of soul, as they ought to be. A people who held that vice was mere illness, and that disease was crime, would hardly be the people to worship the personifications of Hope, Justice, &c., as they are here made to do. They would rather have worshipped the personifications of Strength, Beauty, Activity, &c., which to them would be the moral qualities, and not mere gifts of fortune. However, the inner structure of satires of this kind must not be scanned too minutely. The attack of the author on these divine personifications is fierce, and but too evidently intended to go to the very roots of theism. Not that the author argues the question. It is the very danger of this sort of satire, that it throws ridicule on a faith without the slightest show of argument, except a faint argument from analogy, against it :

"They personify Hope, Fear, Love, and so forth, giving them temples and priests, and carving likenesses of them in stone, which they verily believe to be faithful representations of living beings who are only not human in being more than human. If any one denies the objective existence of these divinities, and says that there is really no such being as a beautiful woman called Justice, with her eyes blinded, and a pair of scales, positively living and moving in a remote and ethereal region, but that Justice is only the personified expression of certain modes of human thought and action, - on this they become disturbed, and call the objector every kind of ill name, saying that he denics the existence of Justice in denying her personality, and that he is a wanton disturber of men's religious convictions. They detest nothing so much as any attempt to lead them to higher spiritual conceptions of the deities whom they profess to worship. Arowhena and I had a pitched battle on this point, and should have had many more, but for my prudence in allowing her to get the better of me. I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position, for she returned more than once to the subject. Can you not see,' I had exclaimed, that the fact of Justice being admirable will not be in the least affected by the absence of a belief in her being also a living agent? Can you really think that men will be one whit less hopeful, because they no longer believe that Hope is an actual person? She shook her head, and said that with men's belief in the personality, all incentive to the reverence of the thing itself, as Justice or Hope, would cease; men from that hour would never be either just or hopeful again."

Arowhena might surely have replied, that, as a matter of fact, a just head of a family has a marvellous influence on the respect for justice in the minds of the children; and the disappearance of that just head of the family, or of the trust in him, if he be invisible, is necessarily a great loss to the characters of the children; but this side of the question it did not suit our author to suggest. The attack on our churches, under the thin veil of "musical banks,". places where the superstitious and chiefly feminine population of Erewhon go to hear music, and receive a kind of sacred currency not much used in the business of real life, but supposed to be all the more profitable on that account to the users, - will strike home much more to the minds of those who believe in the objects of Christian worship, than of those who believe, as the author evidently does, in the utter emptiness and folly of that worship. One of the most

telling and bitter touches of irony in the book is the author's attack on the feminine, wistful half belief and half unbelief in religious rites, in daily services, and the like. He puts it in the form of an observation on the manner of the ladies when going every morning to their "musical banks" to get some of the mysterious currency supposed to be especially profitable to them in a spiritual sense. He says that whenever he asked them where they were going, they answered with a certain air of reserve; but that there was always something wistful about the manner, "something of regret, something as though they would wish to take me with them, but did not like to ask me, and yet as though I were hardly to ask to be taken." These are the comments on the service after it was over:

"At last I ventured to remark that the bank was not so busy to-day as it probably often was. On this Mrs. Nosnibor said that it was indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious of all institutions. To this I could say nothing; but I have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do, on the whole, know where they get that which does them good. Mrs. Nosnibor went on to say that I must not imagine that there was any want of confidence in the bank because I had seen so few people there; the heart of the country was thoroughly devoted to these establishments, and any sign of their being in danger would bring in support from the most unexpected quarters. It was only because people knew them to be so very safe, that in some cases (as she lamented to say in Mr. Nosnibor's) they felt that their support was unnecessary."

Does the author really believe "that the greater part of mankind do, on the whole, know where they get that which does them good"? We doubt it. He only says so when it tells on the sceptical side. If he takes the emptiness of the churches as evidence on the one side of the case, he should take their fulness as evidence on the other; which he certainly shows no disposition to do. However, the assertion of one of the musical-bank managers that all would be right now that "they had put fresh stained-glass into all the banks of the country, and repaired the buildings, and enlarged the organs, and taken to talking nicely to the people in the streets, and to remembering the ages of their children, and giving them things when they were ill," is a happy enough caricature of the dim hopefulness of our High-Church clergy. The poorest thing in "Erewhon" is the account of the Colleges of Unreason, the equivalents for our universities, with regard to which almost every thing said is stale and conventional.

One of the cleverest elements in the satire is the account of "The Book of the Machines," - an elaborate argument by one of the learned men of Erewhon, to show that machinery was improving so much more rapidly than man, that, in the course of a few centuries, machinery would probably develop complete self-sustaining power, and reduce man to a quite secondary position in the universe; "machinery" being supported by "mannery," rather than man by machinery. The argument that machinery could not acquire a reproductive system is thus happily rebutted:

"What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive? and would not whole families of plants die out, if their fertilization were not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does any one say that the red clover has no reproductive system, because the humble-bee (and the humble-bee only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one would venture upon such an obviously absurd assertion. The humble-bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover. . . . .then why not we part of that of the machines?"

The argument had taken so much effect in Erewhon, that, after a great revolutionary agitation, it was decided to destroy all machines invented for the previous two hundred and seventy-one years, and never permit the introduction of any new machine; and this was the reason why the hero's watch brought him into so much danger when he

entered Erewhon. The drift of this part of the satire skilful beyond measure as it is is hardly so clear as that of the rest of the book; but its general intention evidently is, to discredit the confidence placed in long trains of intellectual reasoning, to suggest the danger that great scholastic institutions may lead a nation into the most absurd and ruinous conservatism, and to illustrate the writer's strong conviction that half the moral creeds of nations are mere arbitrary inheritances from the past, originating in the dominance of some powerful but prejudiced mind. "The Book of the Machines" is a sort of intellectual Bible of falsehood, which the writer wants to exhibit as exercising precisely the same kind of dominating authority as our own spiritual Bible, whose creed he clearly holds to be quite as false and more dangerous than that of his own imaginary "Book of the Machines." "Erewhon is intended to suggest that man's physical and moral being are equally subject to absolutely necessary laws; that responsibility and God are alike fictions; that the power of moral and intellectual tradition and authority is overwhelming, and that the true conduct-creed-it is a perversion of language to call it moral — would enjoin general conformity to a public opinion formed with reference to general interests, but constantly modified by the courage requisite to prevent it from petrifying or standing still. It is certainly quite true that if any one will accept the implied satiric teaching of the book, he will find himself morally and intellectually "nowhere," — i.e., in Erewhon, - when he has done.

YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS.

THIS Volume consists of a collection of articles that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly last year, containing Mr. Fields's personal reminiscences of authors, whose names are household words in both worlds. Every lover of books and their authors will thank Mr. Fields for this very pleasant volume. The matter is always interesting, and the manner of telling it always tasteful. The article on Charles Dickens will be especially relished by those whose appetites have been whetted by Forster's first volume. For this reason we will at once proceed to discuss its contents, with the prospect of many good things to follow, in the shape of Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Miss Mitford. Mr. Fields first saw Dickens at Boston in 1842.

"You ask me what was his appearance as he ran, or rather flew, up the steps of the hotel, and sprang into the hall. He seemed all on fire with curiosity, and alive as I never saw mortal before. From top to toe every fibre of his body was unrestrained and alert. What vigor, what keenness, what freshness of spirit, possessed him! He laughed all over, and did not care who heard him. He seemed like the Emperor of Cheerfulness on a cruise of pleasure, determined to conquer a realm or two of fun every hour of his over-flowing existence."

Some of Dickens's choicest bits of fun are to be found in his letters written at this time. In a letter of his, written to Mr. Felton, Greek Professor at Cambridge, he complains that two L.L.'s (see Chuzzlewit) were ambitious of a personal introduction to him; but he adds that he will draw a veil over his sufferings. From Niagara, he writes,—

"I have long suspected that oysters have a rheumatic tendency. Their feet are always wet; and so much damp company in a man's inside cannot contribute to his peace."

On his homeward voyage he established a club, called the "United Vagabonds," to the great amusement of the rest of the passengers. With two of his associates, dressed up like Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, Dickens went round to all the sick in the ship, bearing enormous rolls of plaster, and huge pairs of scissors. His man Topping is as good as Sam Weller.

"The aforesaid groom -a very small man (as the fashion is), with fiey red hair (as the fashion is not) — has looked very hard at me, ind fluttered about me at the same time, like a giant butterfly. After a pause, he says, in a Sam Wellerish kind of way, vent to the club this mornin', sir. There vornt no letter, sr. Very good, Topping.' How's missis, sir?' 'Pretty vell, Topping Glad to hear it, sir.' 'My missis ain't very wel, sir.' No?' 'No, sir; she's a going to have a hincrease very soon, and it makes her rather nervous, sir; and ven a young voman gets at all down at sich a time, sir, she goes down wey deep, sir.' To this sentiment I reply affirmatively; and then he adds, as he stirs the fire (as if he were thinking out loud), Wot a mystery it is! Wot a go is natur'!' With which scrip of philosophy he gradually gets nearer to the door, and so faces out of the room.'

Of Dickens's second visit to America Mr. Fields gives us his personal recollections. Dickens was not in good health; and he therefore put himself into training, as it were, for his public readings, by exercise and abstinence from dinner entertainments. His wonderful spirit kept him always ready for his evening work, though his appetite was so bad that Mr. Fields scarcely saw him eat a hearty meal during his whole stay in America. His letters of this date abound in the usual humor. He thus describes his adventures on the way to Albany :

"We had all sorts of adventures by the way, among which two of the most notable were,

"1. Picking up two trains out of the water, in which the passengers had been composedly sitting all night, until relief should arrive.

"2. Unpacking and releasing into the open country a great train of cattle and sheep, that had been in the water I don't know how long, and that had begun in their imprisonment to eat each other. I never could have realized the strong and dismal expressions of which the faces of sheep are capable, had I not seen the haggard countenances of this unfortunate flock, as they were tumbled out of their dens, and picked themselves up and made off, leaping wildly (many with broken legs) over a great mound of thawing snow, and over the worried body of a deceased companion. Their misery was so very human that I was sorry to recognize several intimate acquaintances conducting themselves in this forlornly gymnastic manner.'

K

Apropos of Dickens's readings, a famous actress, Mrs. said of the murder scene in "Oliver Twist," the question of reading which was under discussion, "Why, of course, do it; ... the public have been looking out for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and, by Heaven, they have got it!"

Mr. Fields gives us an interesting account of his wanderings through London, made in the novelist's company. They visited the room in Furnival's Inn where "Pickwick " was written; they heard the haggard old opium-eater of "Edwin Drood" keep repeating, "Ye'll pay up according, deary, won't ye?" in the opium dens crowded with Chinamen and Lascars; of penny lodging-houses, cheap theatres, and casual wards, Dickens must have been a perfect cicerone. Once they came across a little girl in a police-office, who had lost her way. She was between four and five, was dressed in a coalscuttle bonnet of her mother's, made ten or fifteen years ago. She could give no account of her home or parentage; but when asked if she would have any thing, answered gayly, "Cake and candy." Dickens held a conversation with her, which yielded much fun, but soon even the creator of Little Nell and Paul Dombey gave her p in despair. The child, they learned subsequently, was claimed by her parents.

The life at Gad's Hill, only twelve months before that sad 9th of June, will probably be thought the choicest scrap in the paper. Dickens was an excellent host:

"Every day we had out-of-door games, such as bowls, Aunt Sally, and the like, Dickens leading off with great spirit and fun. Billiards came after dinner, and during the evening we had charades and dancing. There was no end to the new divertissements our kind host was in the habit of proposing, so that constant cheerfulness reigned at Gad's Hill. He went into his workroom, as he called it, soon after breakfast, and wrote till twelve o'clock; then he came out, ready for a long walk. . . . Then Dickens was at his best, and talked. Swinging his blackthorn stick, his lithe figure sprang forward over the ground, and it took a practised pair of legs to keep alongside of his voice."

His practical jokes, with all their fun, were always harmless. As an instance we can only refer to the scene in the churchyard at Cooling, where, by the aid of a towel and napkin, he transformed himself into a head waiter (p. 225). Mr. Fields sums up Dickens's character in pages of the deepest interest. No writer ever lived who was more industrious, more exact, or more punctual, than was Dickens. He never shirked the labor necessary to make his creations lifelike. When he was writing "Hard Times," he used to spend many hours behind the scenes, with the riders and among their horses; and he banished himself for two years to France when the "Tale of Two Cities was in contemplation. His powers of observation and memory must have been enormous. During the composition of his earlier works, the characters he was engaged on never left him : he was, no doubt, as enraptured with them as Pygmalion was with his ivory statue, or as Gibson was with his colored Venus. He seemed to enjoy intensely the fun of his comic people. He was devoted to animals, and knew the whereabouts of every claw, foot, or fin in the Zoological Gardens. Among authors, Cobbett, DeQuincey, Sydney Smith, Carlyle, Pepys, and Smollett, were his favorites. He never composed a line of any speech he was to make, but considered his subject during a long walk into the country, and when he came back, was ready for the occasion. When the personal recollections of such a man are so interesting to those who love his works, how fraught with sadness must they be to those who loved the man!

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Whereas Dickens preferred Smollett to Fielding, Thackeray looked upon the author of "Tom Jones" as his exemplar; and said to Mr. Fields, "My English would have been very much better if I had read Fielding before I was ten." In many respects Thackeray was the exact opposite of his great contemporary. His habits were unmethodical and procrastinating; his maxim being to avoid doing to-day what could be postponed till to-morrow. Nearly all his stories were written in monthly instalments for magazines, with the press at his heels. . . As he wrote from month to month, and liked to put off the inevitable chapter till the last moment, he was often in great tribulation." On one occasion, after he had kept a party of friends waiting an hour or two for dinner, which he was to give at Greenwich, he burst in among his hungry guests with the exclamation, "Thank Heaven! the last sheet of The Virginians' has just gone to the printer." Again, unlike Dickens, he was a poor speaker; or rather, his attempts at speaking were woful failures. At the opening of the free library in Man. chester, when he was expected to deliver a great speech, after three minutes he sat down with a look of comic despair, his hands thrust into his pockets. He said to Mr. Fields, as soon as the meeting was over, "My boy, you have my profoundest sympathy: this day you have accidentally missed hearing one of the finest speeches ever composed for delivery by a great British orator." Thackeray never took any exercise, and thought that high living and high thinking was the correct reading of the proverb. When he was in America, the oysters seem to have struck him as much as they did Dickens. Once he rejected a large one because he said it resembled the high priest's servant's ear that Peter cut off; and when he had swallowed the smallest he could find, "opening his mouth very wide, he struggled for a moment, and then all was over. I broke the perfect stillness by asking him how he felt. 'Profoundly grateful,' he replied,' and as if I had swallowed

...

a little baby.' His playfulness was a marked peculiarity in his character, and knew no bounds when he was released from his work. In America Mr. Fields found it necessary sometimes to repress Thackeray's exuberant spirits. His departure from the New World happened in this wise: "He was to have visited various cities in the Middle and Western States; but he took up a newspaper one night in his hotel in New York before retiring, saw a steamer advertised to sail the next morning for England, was seized with a sudden fit of home-sickness; rang the bell for his servant, who packed up his luggage that night, and the next day he sailed. The first intimation I had of his departure was a card, which he sent by the pilot of the steamer, with these words upon it: Good-by, Fields; good-by, Mrs. Fields; God bless everybody, says W. M. T.;' Among other accomplishments, Thackeray reckoned calligraphy; and he once said, that, if all trades failed, he would earn sixpence by writing the Lord's Prayer and the Creed in the size of that coin. Mr. Fields is very happy in his estimate of Thackeray's powers, - "a master in every sense, having, as it were, in himself a double quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford seer. Whatever he chose to do was always perfectly done."

Nathaniel Hawthorne must have been a child of precocious powers, for when he was six years old his favorite book was the "Pilgrim's Progress.' As weigher and gauger in the custom-house, he performed his duties like a real man of business, rather than as a brimant romancer. He was a hearty devourer of books; and, in certain moods of mind, it made very little difference what the volume before him happened to be. An old play, the advertisement sheets in newspaper files, gave him great delight. De Quincey, Sterne's Sermons, Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia," and the novels of Scott, G. P. R. James, and Trollope, were especial favorites. We are told an interesting story about the origin of Longfellow's "Evangeline." A friend endeavored to persuade Hawthorne to write a tale on the subject of a legend of Acadie, but without success. Whereupon Longfellow said to Hawthorne, "If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you give it to me for a poem ? From this conversation sprang Evangeline." Of Hawthorne, Mr. Fields writes, "I do not remember a single slovenly passage in all his acknowledged writings. He was unlike any other author I have met; and there were qualities in his nature so sweet and commendable that, through all his shy reserve, they sometimes asserted themselves in a marked and conspicuous manner." His death, sudden at the last, was as peaceful as was that of Dickens and of Thackeray.

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Mr. Fields ends his volume with a series of letters written by Miss Mitford to himself during the last six years of her life. All who like well-written letters will enjoy these; for as Mr. Fields says, as a letter-writer, Mary Mitford has rarely been surpassed. One of her peculiarities was her power of admiration, and one of her most revered idols was Napoleon III. She called him the most graceful of European chiefs; in whom she confesses the interest that all women feel in strength and courage, and to see whom as Napoleon the First's heir- at the Elyseé, seemed to her a real piece of poetical justice." "If one did not admire Louis Napoleon, I should like to know upon whom one could as a public man fix one's admiration;" Ruskin and Béranger were other idols worshipped by her with an equal enthusiasm. During the last few years of her life, Miss Mitford was always cheerful, an excellent talker, with a vivid power of representing old actors and other celebrities, and as good a hater as admirer.

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Great writers have been called by one who was eminently a great writer, the friends and benefactors of their readers. We ought, then, to feel doubly grateful to all who can keep alive in us the sense of gratitude to those to whom we owe so much. We thank Mr. Fields most heartily for the pleasant "Yesterdays" we have passed in such good company.

PUNCH AND THE PUPPETS.

Of the once numerous race of puppets, Panch is by far the best known in England at the present time. He, in fact, alone of all the puppets which once used to amuse English audiences, retains his hold on the popular favor. Every one who has lived in a large town must be tolerably familiar with the shrill squeak and absurd appearance of the performers, going through their various parts in a comedy, which, when considered from a moral point of view, is contrary to all our previously-received ideas. A writer in All the Year Round, speaking of those who stop and thoughtlessly look, for a few minutes, at the performance of Punch, observes, "And then they walk away, to keep important appointments, and to transact important business, little reflecting that they have witnessed one of the most awful tragedies ever offered to the contemplation of mankind. They have, in fact, seen represented a series of murders, all perpetrated by brutal means, that would raise the horror of civilized Europe if brought before the notice of a legal tribunal, and all accompanied by reckless derision on the part of the murderer, an uncouth being, whose form and voice seem to separate him from the rest of mankind." Without adopting the ironical criticism of this writer, it must be admitted that its morality is not the highest recommendation of Mr. Punch's comedy.

It is a curious and interesting question, whence can have originated this odd little drama. Probably of the thousands who have looked on while it was being performed, very few, indeed, have been at all curious as to when and whence it arose, but have contented themselves with the vague general impression that it is the Italian Pulcinella in an English dress, if, indeed, they troubled their heads at all

about the matter.

Two theories only, as to the origin of Punch, appear to have any tinge of probability. The one is, that the idea of Punch first originated in the mind of an ingenious Italian in the city of Acerra, near Naples, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Three Italian authors, Riccoboni, Giunna, and Segniorelli, state this; and Giurna is so precise as to give the name of the ingenious inventor. He says, "Silvio Fiorelli, comedian, invented the Neapolitan Pulcinella, to which Andrea Calcese, by study and natural grace, added much." Mr. Payne Collier, in his work entitled "Punch and Judy," has adopted this account as the most probable, though even he admits that it is open to doubt whether Punch is not one of a family of far greater antiquity. The other theory as to the origin of the English Punch is that which Dr. Johnson was accustomed to support; namely, that he is not the invention of any particu far man or time, but the amalgamation of several charac ters, which were all well known in the puppet-plays of the Middle Ages, more especially of that one called the Vice, or Iniquity, of the morality plays, which took the place of the miracle plays of an earlier epoch.

But, in truth, puppet-plays, or plays by "motions" as they were called, were so common all over civilized Europe, and came into existence at so extremely early a date, that it seems far more probable that the small drama we are considering grew, or was developed, out of others that had preceded it, than that it should have been definitely invented by some person at a particular time. And this appears the more probable when we consider that one character, at least, in the old puppet-shows, had a part to play containing some of the very same incidents which are now thought to be the characteristics of our friend and favorite Punch.

of

Thus, the Vice of the miracle and morality plays always ended his wicked career in a combat with the Devil, by whom he was ultimately carried off. Now, although Punch, on the other hand, succeeds in vanquishing his satanic majesty, yet this novelty of reversing the parts these two performers had crept into the morality plays ve fore the earliest date to which the birth of Punch can be assigned. For the birth of Punch, in Italy, has never been fixed at an earlier period than the beginning of the seven