this object. This sentiment, indeed, which is but too natural to the heart of man, does not originate in the democratic principle, but that principle applies it to material objects. Many of those who had already contracted a taste for the fine arts are impoverished; on the other hand, many who are not yet rich begin to conceive that taste, at least by imitation; and the number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious consumers become more scarce. The productions of

artists are more numerous, but the merit of each production is diminished." This oracular writer, whose vaticinations on the New World are always worthy of respect, did not, could not, take into account circumstances which have arisen as unexpectedly and as much without precedent as the general condition of the people whose tendencies he analyzed with so much philosophical acumen twenty years ago. The increase of wealth since that time has been such as no theories had supposed, and foreign travel has become the every-day occurrence among people who do not even belong to the wealthy class. That proximity to Europe which M. de Tocqueville thought would tend to render the American satisfied with imported works of art, has but warmed his taste and increased

his knowledge of such productions to a point which will force him to attempt to become himself an artist. What he will originate, if originality be any longer possible, remains to be seen; what he has done is sufficient to prove that he is not going to be satisfied with an occasional view or an imperfect reproduction of the treasures of European galleries.

We must hardly quit the Federal City without mention of one of its most important central advantages, the National Observatory, which the country owes to that very original person, Mr. John Quincy Adams, who underwent, in his advocacy of it, an amount of dérision which was almost persecution, but which only incited his bull dog pertinacity to a more fixed determination. Up to his day, the Americans were entirely dependent on Europe for nautical data and meteorological observations. At present, under the care of Lieutenant Maury, the whole round of necessary instruments, and the skill required for their best use, are at home, and constantly occupied in valuable labors. The great equatorial telescope, in its revolving dome, is but one of the grand and costly appliances already collected in this great building, which scornful unbelievers used to call Mr. Adams' "lighthouse in the skies.'

HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM, philosopher, law- | reformer, statesman, and critic, has, in these various characters, drawn upon himself, perhaps, more public attention than any man of his times. Mr. Henry Brougham, father of his Lordship, was educated at Eton, England, and distinguished himself there as a classical scholar; his verses may be found in the "Musæ Etonenses." He was entered at Gray's Inn, and appears to have kept some terms, but was never called to the bar. While travelling in Edinburgh, he became acquainted with Miss Eleanor Syme, niece to Robertson, the historian, and having married that lady, he took up his abode in the house of the Earl of Buchan, No. 19, St. Andrew's Square, where the subject of this sketch was born.

The young Henry received his preliminary education at the high-school of his native city; and at the early age of fifteen entered its university. He devoted himself with great

ardor to the study of mathematics; and about a year after his matriculation transmitted to the Royal Society a paper on an optical subject, which that learned body adjudged worthy of a place in its "Transactions." After leaving the university, he made a tour in Holland and Prussia, and on his return settled down for a time in Edinburgh, practising till 1807 at the Scottish bar, and enlivening his leisure by debating at the celebrated Speculative Society.

While thus nerving himself for greater efforts, he was called to appear before the House of Lords as one of the counsel for Lady Essex Ker, whose family laid claim to the dukedom of Roxburgh.

In 1807, he permanently left his native city; was shortly called to the bar by the society of Lincoln's Inn, and soon acquired a considerable practice. In 1810, he addressed the House of Lords two days, as counsel for a body of English merchants, who were ng

courts now established. In June, 1830, he introduced a measure, the declared object of which was to bring justice home to every man's door, at all times of the year, by the establishment of local courts. By this bill the law of arbitration was to be extended; a general local jurisdiction established, and courts of reconcilement were to be introduced. A succession of bills for reforming proceedings in bankruptcy were afterwards introduced by Brougham, who, from his accession to the House of Lords to the last session of Parliament, has labored for the improvement of the law, with a zeal almost reaching enthusiasm. From 1830 to 1834 he shared the early popularity and subsequent discredit of the Whig Cabinet, but in the poor-law debate drew upon himself a peculiar measure of reprobation, by a frequent, minute, and evidently complacent iteration of the Malthusian doctrines embodied in the new bill, and was attacked with vigor and virulence by The Times. He denounced, in the most explicit terms, all establishments offering a refuge and solace to old age, because that is before all men; he thought accident-wards very well; dispensaries, perhaps, might be tolerable; but sick hospitals were decidedly bad institutions.

The energetic repressive policy pursued towards Ireland, and the prosecution and transportation of the Dorchester laborers, were defended by Brougham, and drew down much unpopularity upon the Whigs; and on Nov. 4, 1834, upon the death of Earl Spencer, the King took advantage of the altered public feeling to dismiss the Whig Cabinet.

On the construction of the Melbourne Cabinet, Brougham was left out of the ministerial combination, and has never since served the crown in the capacity of an adviser. His parliamentary career was henceforth one of desultory warfare; at one moment he was carrying confusion into the ranks of his old friends, the Whigs; at another, attacking the close Tory phalanx. He several times brought forward the subject of the corn-laws, whose iniquity he exposed with great power and fervency, and fought the battle of repeal with eagerness and irregularity to the last.

The session of 1850 exhibited his Lordship as the same eccentric, inscrutable speaker as

Inconsistency is the first feature in this statesman's character, which the brilliancy of his talents only makes more apparent. He has written to depreciate the negro's capacity for civilization, and yet toiled for years to procure his freedom. In 1816, he endorsed the protectionist fallacy, and wailed over the ruin resulting to agriculture from an abundant barvest; in 1835, he was opposing the cornlaws; and in 1845, again inveighing against the Anti corn-law League, and calling for the prosecution of its chief members. In 1823, he hurled the thunder of his eloquence upon Austria and Russia, "the eternal and impla cable enemies of freedom;" and in 1850 was praising their clemency, and even urging an alliance with the Czar. He is now the champion of aristocracies, but in 1848 sought to become a citizen of republican France.

His literary and scientific labors can only be slightly sketched. Having enrolled his name with scientific writers, in 1802 he became a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, then just started by Jeffrey and Smith, and continued for many years some of the most pungent criticisms in that renowned work. In 1803, he published his treatise on the colonial policy of the European powers, a brilliant performance, to which the progress of events has left but one utility, that of a way mark in the development of Brougham's opinions. In 1821, he took a very prominent part in the movement originated by Dr. Birkbeck for naturalizing the mechanics' institutes in England, speaking and writing in their favor. He was the principal founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and composed several of the treatises in the series, as well as articles for its Penny Magazine, with a special view to the wants of the million. On his loss of office in 1834, he bethought himself of making a reputation in metaphysical as well as natural science, and undertook to illustrate and expand Paley's great work on " Natural Theology," with less success than his talents had justified the world in expecting. He has further published "Lives of the Statesmen of the Reign of George III. ;" and also three or four volumes called " Political Philosophy." A volume of "Speeches at the Bar and in the Senate" belongs rather to oratory than to literature.

His Lordship, except during the sitting of Parliament, resides chiefly at Cannes, in the south of France, where he has a château. His last winter, however, was passed at Brougham Hall, where he was detained by the state of his health.

manent source of variety and beauty, as long | as the tender light and dewy freshness of morning affect us differently from the strength and brilliancy of the midday sun. And those delightful women of France, who, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the close of the eighteenth century, formed some of the brightest threads in the web of political and literary history, wrote under circumstances which left the feminine character of their minds uncramped by timidity, and unstrained by mistaken effort. They were not trying to make a career for themselves; they thought little-in many cases not at all-of the public; they wrote letters to their lovers and friends, memoirs of their every-day lives, romances in which they gave portraits of their familiar acquaintances, and described the tragedy or comedy which was going on before their eyes. Always refined and graceful, often witty, sometimes judicious, they wrote what they saw, thought, and felt, in their habitual language, without proposing any model to themselves, without any intention to prove that women could write as well as men, without affecting manly views, or suppressing womanly ones. One may say-at least with regard to the women of the seventeenth century-that their writings were but a charming accident of their more charming lives, like the petals which the wind shakes from the rose in its bloom. And it is but a twin fact with this, that in France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history.

Patriotic gallantry may perhaps contend that English women could, if they had liked, have written as well as their neighbors; but we will leave the consideration of that question to the reviewers of the literature that might have been. In the literature that actually is, we must turn to France for the highest examples of womanly achievement in almost every department. We confess ourselves unacquainted with the productions of those awful women of Italy who held professional chairs, and were great in civil and canon law; we have made no researches into the catacombs of female literature, but we think we may safely conclude that they would yield no rivals to that which is still

unburied; and here, we suppose, the question of preeminence can only lie between England and France. And, to this day, Madame de Sévigné remains the single instance of a woman who is supreme in a class of literature which has engaged the ambition of men; Madame Dacier still reigns the queen of blue-stockings, though women have long studied Greek without shame ;* Madame de Staël's name still rises first to the lips, when we are asked to mention a woman of great intellectual power; Madame Roland is still the unrivalled type of the sagacious and sternly heroic, yet lovable woman; George Sand is the unapproached artist, who, to Jean Jacques' eloquence and deep sense of external nature, unites the clear delineation of character and the tragic depth of passion. These great names, which mark different epochs, soar like tall pines amidst a forest of less conspicuous-but not less fascinating-female writers; and, beneath these again are spread, like a thicket of hawthorns, eglantines, and honeysuckles, the women who are known rather by what they stimulated men to write, than by what they wrote themselves-the women whose tact, wit, and personal radiance, created the atmosphere of the Salon, where literature, philosophy, and science, emancipated from the trammels of pedantry and technicality, entered on a brighter stage of existence.

What were the causes of this earlier development and more abundant manifestation of womanly intellect in France? The pri mary one, perhaps, lies in the physiological characteristics of the Gallic race-the small brain and vivacious temperament, which permit the fragile system of woman to sustain the superlative activity requisite for intellectual creativeness; while, on the other hand, the larger brain and slower temperament of the English and Germans are, in the womanly organization, generally dreamy and passive. The type of humanity in the latter may be grander, but it requires a larger sum of conditions to produce a perfect specimen. Throughout the animal world, the higher the organization, the more frequent is the departure from the normal form; we do not often see imperfectly-developed or ill-made insects, but we rarely see a perfectly-developed, well-made man. And, thus, the phy

Queen Christina, when Mde. Dacier (then MIle. Le Fevre) sent her a copy of her edition of "Callimachus," wrote in reply:-" Mais vous, de qui on m'assure que vous êtes une belle et agréable fille, n'avez vous pas honte d'être si savante?"