Doctor on that morning he would have been too eager to leliver himself of his own ideas to observe how the piety of Johnson expressed itself; and if he did observe it, he would never have written it in a biography. "Any one ould write this," he would think; "there is no fame to be got from such." If Boswell did not dabble in philosophy, or discourse in the style of Macaulay upon trade and morals in the abstract, he showed his sense by his abstience. Philosophy is a branch of intellectual endeavor requiring very peculiar gifts. Dr. Johnson kicking a huge stone before him by way of confuting Berkeley, or clamorously declaring that David Hume was only milking the bull, or that he would sign the death-warrant of Rousseau with far greater readiness than that of any criminal who had been hanged during his remembrance, shows himself to be wofully defective in the capacity for philosophical speculation. Our gifts are various. Goldsmith, who could hardly open his mouth without making people laugh at what seemed his ignorance and intellectual presumption, was able to write "The Deserted Village" and "She Stoops to Conquer." Boswell was neither a philosopher nor a great conversationist; but he could write the "Life of Johnson."

"Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the 'Dunciad' was written." Now Macaulay knew as well when he penned that sentence as does the author of this article the circumstance which afforded him a pretext for this dishonest blow, and he knew it was not such as the reader would surmise from the mode in which it is here set down. Boswell was not so described by the Doctor. Johnson in the post-prandial mood, sitting over wine with his friends, makes a good-humored hit at Boswell: "Ah, hadst thou been alive then!" This light sally thown out at a dinner-table is represented in the pages of the veracious Macaulay as a description.

In the next sentence we are told that Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. Now in the first place Beauclerk was one of those satirical men who sneer at everybody, and whose sneer means little or nothing; in the next, the sneer in question was only thrown out once Macaulay hints that it was frequent; and in the third, Boswell and Beauclerk were intimate friends, and Beauclerk was most zealous in getting him into the club. Thus, whenever it is possible to collate Macaulay's assertions with the original they turn out to be groundless and unjust fabrications.

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I have travelled through three sentences coming in their order at the commencement of Macaulay's famous Bill of Indictment, and in each one discovered the noble essayist playing fast and loose with truth. The remainder of the libel is of the same description. Wherever Macaulay mentions any fact as substantiating his sweeping and ruthless accusations, that fact is always distorted and warped to suit his purpose. The critic feeds with seeming joy upon every admission that Boswell, trusting to the good nature and generous forbearance of his reader, has seen fit to make to his own disadvantage. If Boswell tells a joke at his own expense, he is a common butt in the taverns of London. If in his genial way and in connection with Johnson he tells some little touching domestic incident, the amiable peer covers him with ridicule. "He was a man without delicacy and without shame, without sense enough to know when he was wounding the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision." Who that knows anything of Boswell's book does not recall unnumbered instances in which he refuses to relate some satirical sally of the Doctor's at the expense of another, or softens it down as well as he can if he is obliged to narrate it? Who does not long to know the particulars of that altercation between the Tory Johnson and the,old Laird of Auchinleck when Greek met Greek in battle-royal, but which, like the doings of the brave men who preceded Agamemnon, are without the sacred bard? Who does not remember the shame and anger of Boswell at the brutality with which he was treated by Johnson before some strangers, how he wandered dejected and indignant about London,

and the awkward flattery with which Johnson made peace? Boswell had delicacy and sensibility in abundance, but he was resolved that his biography should not be one of swelling platitudes and grandiose ephemeral ineptitudes.

All this shallow and fallacious criticism which the reading public has been perusing now for many years, and which has formed the opinions of two generations, has probably never met with an indignant public contradiction. Its violence and arrogance take the reader by storm. Its boisterous uproar and empty tempest of noise bend down the mind and overcome the very desire to resist. Boswell's talents are denied, his virtues degraded into vice, his vices exaggerated into crimes; his noble and passionate affection for the place of his birth and the seat of his ancestors, his feudal pride in a long and distinguished lineage, his sincere and manly admiration for talent and all forms of spiritual preeminence, his flowing and universal courtesy, his generosity, bonhommie, and conviviality, his frank and winning ways, his, at times, spirited and gallant behavior, his manly outspokenness and his no less manly reticence, the grand passion of his life, his high and heroic devotion to his type and ideal of moral and intellectual grandeur, Samuel Johnson, are all denied, or ignored, or ridiculed. If Boswell, delighted that his little Veronica does not shrink from the Doctor's seamed and ugly face, declares gayly that he will add five hundred pounds to her fortune, if Boswell sitting with Col and his rough Highland friends drinks too much whiskey-punch, and if, being a man of piety and principle, he makes atonement for his offence as religious men will, if he writes to Johnson that he is suffering from depression of spirits, he is assailed and condemned at every point by the boisterous invective of the critic.

This famous and yet infamous passage gives the snub direct to everything frank, open, and confiding, and a pat on the back and a 66 go on and prosper to secrecy, affectation, and intellectual pomposity. Everything in Boswell's character and literary style is bitterly denounced and scoffed at by Macaulay. So resolved is he to reduce Boswell's merit to zero that he even affects to scorn him because he describes Johnson as he was, and does not hesitate to relate his vices and shortcomings. Surely the noble writer's brazen eulogies, lavished so freely upon his own heroes, cannot be set up as models. Had Boswell concealed Johnson's defects, and his vicious and uncouth peculiarities, who could endure his book? The work would be false and the writer a sham. Boswell's book lives and has power because it is true. In proportion as men are themselves genuine they will admire and like the man. It was beyond the limit of possibility that either Macaulay or Carlyle should have any close and sympathetic relations with one who above all others calls a spade a spade, and never swells and foams in the vein of 'Ercles.

As a proof of his assertion that Boswell was a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect, Macaulay informs us that there are no disquisitions upon politics, religion, literature, etc., of any worth in Boswell's book. But Homer, and Dante, and Fielding contain no disquisitions on politics and philosophy. Everybody is not able to make a journey to Corinth, to pour forth sounding laudations over the British Constitution as exalted and elaborated by the Whigs, and to discourse with fervor with Adam Smith. Speculations upon money and merchandise, and the shuttlecock of trade kept up between them, do not require the highest order of intellect. There are such qualities as imagination and fancy, pathos and sympathy, delicate and subtle modes of feeling, enthusiasm for what is noble and beautiful, a love of the facts of our daily existence and a truthfulness of feeling concerning them. Homer knew presumedly little of philosophy, but he has drawn that picture of Andromache at the Scæan gate weeping with her baby on her arm, young and beautiful, like a star, the plumed hero of Troy bending over him;

Dante has told of that frozen sea in which the souls of unjust men are immured to all eternity—and these scenes will live forever in the souls of men, though Homer was a dunce in political economy and the lean Dante never fat

tened under the safe shadow of a constitutional Parliament. James Boswell, too, has drawn that picture of the young Scotch enthusiast trembling in the back parlor of the bookseller's shop in the Poultry, and the awful approach of genius preceded by Tom Davies. When will that scene be forgotten, or the rough sarcasms of genius and the meekness of young enthusiasm vainly endeavoring to turn away wrath? Constitutions are swept away by time, money changes its character and value, a day comes when Adam Smith is not heard of, philosophy babbles a new song and the old one is heard no more; but when will arrive a day when moral and intellectual grandeur is not, and when young enthusiasm does not feel its approach to be awful? That scene is perfect as anything in Homer or Fielding. It does not stand alone, it is one of many truthful and exquisite pictures of human life worthy of the great father of poetry himself, who, for all we know, had not "thunderous brows" at all, but a face unremarkable or bad, like Boswell's, or Dante's, or Goldsmith's. That book is full of sketches and scenes observed by the eye and with the keen penetration of genius, and drawn for us by a master hand. The meeting of Johnson and Wilkes, and the “too, too" of the sage, "one of his habitual mutterings" on discovering that he had fallen into a hornet's nest of patriots and Americans, and the gradual thawing of the stern moralist in the genial companionship of the gay and kindly Jack Wilkes; the behavior of the Doctor in St. Clement Danes, and his mode of repeating the awful passages in the Litany -all this is grand as the Iliad and the Odyssey. If not writ in the high epic style it treats of high epic matter, and treats thereof in the mode best suited to the times. To sympathize tenderly and deeply with character and with mental suffering, to humble one's self before greatness, to attach one's self to it with passionate devotion, and so to write in loose prose what is great as the greatest poem, has fallen to few, and it has fallen to James Boswell.

It is absurd to think of Boswell as a dwarf elevated upon the shoulders of a giant. That he rendered the conversation of Johnson is not his peculiar merit, though it is considerable, and its credit we should be always ready to acknowledge. How many others beside Boswell heard and were astonished at that masterly power of improvisation, yet were never sufficiently loyal to genius to endeavor to reduce it to writing! But it is precisely in those parts of the book where his mind, stimulated by the humor, ridicule or grandeur of a particular circumstance, sets by for awhile its usual task of recording Johnsoniana and delivers itself freely from its own wealth of humor and observation, that Boswell becomes really great. There is then in our language no such master of description. It is not merely the form and coloring of the circumstance that he brings before us. He penetrates into the spirit of the scene, and so his sketches are full of feeling. The event grows and changes upon the brain with the vividness and regularity of nature. Tom Davies advancing to announce the approach of the sage with the air of Horatio in "Hamlet," "Look, my lord, it comes;" Johnson taking up a book to compose his mind on learning the name of the gentleman in lace; Goldsmith lingering with his hat in his hand, waiting for an opportunity to cut in and shine before leaving the party; the unconscious sage shouldering down the porter in the street; that celebrated horse-laugh that resounded from Temple Bar to Houndsditch in the silence of the night; Johnson, puffing hard with passion struggling for a vent, or, with large gloves on his hands, dusting and arranging his books all are perfect. The perfection of these scenes is the perfection that genius is able to give to its work. The things described are the right things, the words used are the right words-truthful and simple and unconscious as the great father of poetry himself.

Yet it is not Boswell's literary so much as his moral worth that I feel pleasure in substantiating. The glimpses of his amiable and benevolent character seen in every page are such as should cure the spleen of the most hardhearted critic. The severe things said of himself which he has introduced out of respect for the system and reason of his book, and the many severe things said of others

which he has refused to set down, his habit in travelling of searching out even the remotest and poorest of his rela tions and ancestral friends, all reveal an amiable disposi tion and a manly spirit.

Macaulay has poured bitter scorn upon his record of his fears when sailing for the first time in his life through storm in and out between the Hebrides. Whether Macau lay, in a similar situation, would have shown greater prowess I cannot tell; but we may know that had he felt as Boswell did on the occasion, and as many brave and good men have felt, he would have concealed his panic in the depths of his soul, and if compelled afterwards to write upon the voyage, would have treated of it in a certain style of pompous self-complacency.

Beauclerk and Sheridan, Burke and Goldsmith, were proud and stiff-necked. They saw that Johnson's gauche ries and unfashionable ways gave them a chance of con peting with him in the eyes of the world; while they knew that, judged by a standard of genuine merit, they were immeasurably his inferiors. They were aware, too, that anything on their part that could be construed into heroworship and discipleship would render them ridiculous, and expose them to that derision which Boswell saw and dared. In Johnson's presence they were crushed and silenced bet fore the might of his genius, but in secret they rebelled ES against his authority. They would not give him their hearts, and they suffered for it. Genius and sense which they would not welcome and love, and before which they would not yield, impinged upon them each day, and their self-love was hurt. They kept sore places sore by diligent nursing. Their nightly pillows were acquainted with the bitter and devouring thoughts of mortified vanity. Even Goldsmith, a man of genius, who owed much to Johnson, and saw clearly his great merit, would not lower his proud head and accept him frankly and loyally as his superior. He, more than the rest, fed in his heart a brood of venomous thoughts that stung and devoured him in the dark, poisoning the springs of his spiritual life, torturing hist mind with the keen fangs of envy. Boswell alone of that da brilliant circle loyally accepted Johnson as his superior. He was young and untainted by the world. He was a patrician, and could afford to associate with an "auld dominie." He recognized Johnson's greatness at once. He clove to him throughout his life, and he had his reward. His association with Johnson was to him a life-long blessing. It was a pure and noble passion, as splendid an instance of self-sacrificing devotion as history affords. It was not to earn fame or consideration, or in any way to advance himself, that he loved and reverenced Dr. Johnson. No selfish motive mingled with that pure and ardent passion. The thought of Johnson was misery to Goldsmith: it was, in the soul of Boswell, a well-spring of goodness and joy. From his intercourse with Johnson his resolutions were strengthened, his virtues were confirmed, his piety was made deeper, his affections were purified and enlarged, his temper was enlivened, his happiness immensely increased. This was his reward. The praise or blame of men could not diminish that.

That brutal assault first published in the Edinburgh Review, and since reprinted with the rest of Macaulay's essays, will not hurt him. Carlyle's compassion and lofty sufferance cannot deprive him of the reward which nature gave him, or strike a pang into his generous and kindly heart. He sleeps at Auchinleck, hard by those ancestral trees beneath whose shadow he wandered with his great friend, to whom he confided the love that he felt for its fields and rocks even from boyish days. But though Boswell is dead, his reputation is abroad and living. It can be hurt by lies and calumnies, it can be tarnished by censure, it shrinks from foul words, for it lives in men's minds.

Boswell belonged to that class of men which produces poets. His work is full of poetic feeling and pathos. The moral grandeur of Johnson is seen through that book as might his material form through a sheet of the purest crystal. This book is a window through which we look upon that strange heroic figure, and it is such because Boswell was a great man, and not because he was small.

TWO CITIES TWO BOOKS.

Ir is a curious fate to have befallen towns which were once the most eminent and influential in the world, to have Decome "playgrounds of Europe," objects of holiday excursions, the scene of sight-seeing, the haunt of strangers. If London should ever fall into decadence and decay, it is consolation to think that there is nothing in it which will bring wandering hordes across the Atlantic, or tempt the Continental to dare the dangers of the Channel. The Florentines and Venetians have long been used to the fate which the splendor of their former existence has exposed them to in their downfall; and yet it is difficult to believe hat it has not given an additional pang to the patriotic citizen of either city, to know how much its present life is dependent upon hotels and lodging-houses; shops in which the relics of old houses are cheapened in every language under heaven; and dealers who are gradually transferring hese pictures and treasures to every corner of the earth. Nothing but Locandas, guest-houses, along the Lung-Arno: nothing but caravanseras of Forestieri in the palaces of the Grand Canal. It is very good for trade, no doubt; brings money to the country, helps a great many people to live, and so forth; but it is humbling to the great towns, once so regal, and still full of the traces of regnant power, wealth, genius, and strength. Genius, most independent, yet most dependent of all great things, must infallibly, alas! one time or another, come to the auction-room: but power, and wealth, and physical force, once so abounding and arrogant in these splendid abodes of a. great race, should, one might have thought, have preserved them from the fate of the slave whose beauty is for the pleasure of her master. But the power and the strength have gone, the wealth has disappeared - and we all rush to stare and peep, and gape and chatter, where a stern Signoria, or a great Doge, would soon have made short work with intruders. To think of the time when an incautious stranger was clapped suddenly in prison for having ventured to say that he had not thought there was in Florence wealth enough to erect such a great work as Giotto's Campanile ! - a mere extravagant utterance of admiration; and then to remember how every vulgar sight-seer pokes about, Murray in hand. Nay, not even with Murray. Cheap guide-books for the million now flutter about the insulted streets, all full of cheap jewelry and mosaics for the million also; and we stand aghast, gazing at the tourists who "do" Florence, wondering what strange wind blew that goose-flock thither, and what their cackling has to do with the great, serious, noble old town. Something of the same feeling of ludicrous inappropriateness came over the mind of the writer, whom-holding out to him a cheap copy of a great romance -a respectable bookseller in Florence exhorted to publish something about the City of Flowers. 66 We sell as many as five hundred copies of this in a season," he said, by way of encouragement. The book was "Romola;" and if there could be anything much more quaint and strange than the invasion of the jealous and proud old town by Mr. Cook's excursionists, it would be the vision thus suggested to us of an excursionist sallying forth with Romola" instead of Baedeker in his hand to "do" Florence. The very soul of Mrs. Malaprop is in this droll combination.

But the gentle reader is not one of those who go with the multitude to stare and gape. He (or she) is capable, always capable, of understanding the just affinities as well as the absurdities of such a conjunction; and accordingly We may be permitted to discuss Florence and Romola together to his sympathetic ear, and even to suggest another combination of a similar character, which, as it was made a number of years ago, has ceased perhaps to strike the imagination of the world. It would be perhaps a mistake to say that Consuelo was to Venice what Romola is to Florence. There is not much symbolic resemblance between the great and beautiful city of the waters so gay, 80 fair, so splendid, glorious in sunshine, still more glorious, costly, and magnificent in art — and the honest, pure, sin

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cere, and simple-hearted singer whom one of the greatest of French romancists has planted in her streets; not nearly so much as there is between the noble, serious, somewhat solemn town of Florence, and the equally noble, lofty, and still more solemn presence of the young Florentine who is our English novelist's ideal. But yet these two figures are each of them inalienably connected with their separate city. To ourselves we avow, having but a moderate appreciation even of the divinest marble, the daughter of the Bardi is more interesting than the Venus of the Medici, that stone woman who has inhabited Florence for ages, and awakened many artistic raptures; and even Titian's daughter, or his Flora, or his Bella Donna, lovely though these ladies are, are scarcely so attractive to us as Consuelo, threading her shells on the steps of the Piazzetta, living spotless in her garret, daughter of the people, opera-singer, zingarella - but yet as sweet, as noble, and as pure as any ideal woman ever created. The two figures are altogether unlike each other. They come from two different types of genius, different even in nationality, only alike in power-and they are curiously significant of a hundred differences of the most subtle character, in nature as well as in art. Consuelo is the elder of the two. Had she been intended to embody and represent the soul of Venice as Romola does that of Florence, she would no doubt have been, like Romola, a patrician, endowed with that natural magnificence which breathes through Venice, which impresses us in every palace front, and quenching one effect of art in another -leave us untouched by any individual Titian or Veronese, lost in a wonder of admiration over the splendor, vastness, and pomp of the halls in which these great painters are but as magnificent decorators, subservient to, not masters of, the princely place in which they worked. But here the real democratic soul of the French woman different thing altogether from the reflective and philosophical democracy with which we islanders play-has come in characteristically, selecting her heroine from the steps of the Piazzetta, as we have said; from the tumbledown tenements of the Corte-Minelli, not from the palaces, -making her, so far as she is a type at all, the type not of Venice magnificent, but of Venice poor, light-hearted, reckless, and joyous. This involves a great and fundamental difference of plan in the two works; but not less great in the difference of character. Consuelo belongs to yesterday-to an order of conception which, we fear, no longer holds the first place in the opinion of the world; while Romola, despite the extraordinary pains that have been taken to drape her according to the very fashion of the fifteenth century, embodies the last thought of art, the reigning ideal of the moment. No doubt this difference is no temporary but a perennial one, reappearing continually in all kinds of poetic creation, and indeed in all periods of artistic history. It is the same difference which exists between Shakespeare and Milton, between Raphael and Michael-Angelo. The one all sweetness, spontaneous movement, soft repose, unconscious grace; the other, conscious to the very fingertips, full of effort, thought, self-contemplation - noble effort indeed, a majestic strain of mind and muscles—but still a strain. Perhaps, however, this peculiarity makes Romola a better representative of the combatant, proud, self-conscious city to which she belongs, and which, if not more really great than Venice, has at least a more solemn self-assertion in its looks, a determination more marked and bitter, less easy, large, and natural, to be the first and greatest of cities. Venice, separated from all other towns by her very design and nature, alone in the world as it were- no rival possible to her beauty, whosoever might threaten her power reaps the adantage of her unique position in a certain ease of mind and leisure of procedure. But Florence, with so many rivals round her, had to hold her own at every moment, with that strain which begets arrogance in success, and self-regard at all times.

Florence, notwithstanding the brightness of the picture which strikes the traveller when he first enters the town, is not a gay city; everything that is characteristic to the Tuscan mind is of a grave and serious nature. The houses

which rise out of the Arno, bright with soft tints of color, irregular, picturesque, various, with roofs at every possible elevation, the one sole point necessary being, that no two should have the same level— the outline broken with loggias, balconies, projecting lines, quaint cupolas, and spires; the stream flowing full below, reflecting every salient point, every window on the high perpendicular line, every cloud on the blue overarching sky; this fair conjunction gives, at the first glance, that gleam of color, light, sunshine, and warmth, which is conventionally necessary to an Italian town- - the sunny South, as we all say with indiscriminate fervor. But there are many days in which Florence reminds the spectator of everything in the world rather than the sunny South; and neither the mind of her people nor the architecture of her streets is of a light description. Dante, Macchiavelli, Savonarola, Michael-Angelo, are names that give the mind no superficial sensation of pleasurableness, but represent to us perhaps the most serious men who have figured on earth – - men of a certain mountainous vastness and grandeur, with great light sometimes dwelling on their heads, but still oftener wrapped in great glooms, absorbed in contemplation of the saddest side of nature, their heads striking the stars, their souls engrossed with high questions, and problems such as have no easy solution. We have placed among these a name which some may think too highly honored; but the cynic philosopher and statesman is as characteristic of the people as the great poet, the great preacher, the great painter, all toiling in sorrow and pity and wrath between a sublime God and a miserable world lost in wickedness. Serious as death and life can make them, are all these great spirits, called gloomy by superficial spectators who cannot see beneath the gloom the pathetic humanity, the love and yearning within; and so are their houses serious, great walls, half fortress, half prison, with projecting Tuscan roofs, which, like a broad hat over a fair brow, veil the countenance of the city, so to speak, and convey a perpetual impression of brooding solemnity, if not of complot and conspiracy. The churches, except perhaps the warm, familiar, curtained elegance of the Annunziata, are, like the city, solemn, with a dim greatness of half-light, which adds to their size and effect, but somewhat chills the eye accustomed to Gothic variety of light and shade. They are places in which it is easier to imagine a great medieval audience listening, absorbed, to a great sermon - intent on the strain of burning words which came from lips such as those of Savonarola than to realize the presence of devout worshippers of a gorgeous ceremonial of devotion, celestial music, rich vestments, and clouds of incense. The oldest of Florentine churches indeed - Dante's "bel San Giovanni," the old Baptistery in which all the old Florentines, for hundreds of years, had their baptism-is scarcely beautiful at all without, a round strange erection, without either majesty or grace of outline; but within has a charm of solemnity, almost of sadness, like some old mother brooding over the memory of generations of her children who have passed away-old, old, meditative still, lost in a deep and silent mournfulness. The great round of the walls, so unimpressive outside, has within a severe and lofty grandeur. Standing at the door on a sunny summer morning not long ago, what thoughts gleamed across one's mind! The vast great walls rising up dimly in that twilight coolness which is so grateful in a warm country-the vast roof tapering yet further up, with one cold pale star of light in the centre, a few figures dwarfed by its greatness, standing like ghosts about the pavement below one or two kneeling in the deep stillness; while outside all was light and sound in the Piazza, and through the opposite doors a white span of sunny pavement appeared dazzling and blazing. Not much less impressive than the Pantheon at Rome, most eloquent of all sermons in stone, is the great silent round of the old Baptistery, with all its associations of birth and baptism, solemn as life and death.

And so is the Cathedral across the way, massive and grand, in large lines, like a royal Juno among buildings; but, like the Baptistery, dark and still and solemn, musing in mighty emptiness and sadness. To see those beautiful,

mournful places, and to remember how Michael Ange for one, with fine Florentine inflation, spoke of them, plau ning his dome for St. Peter's to be the sister of this dome which to his eyes was perfect, "piu grande ma non pin bella," and bragging of the Baptistery gates that they wer fit to be gates of Paradise, is of itself a most notable sign of the characteristic self-consciousness and self-assertion of the town. The palaces have the same effect as the churches: the Palazzo Strozzi, for example. How strong how self-contained (not in our Scotch sense of the worl dear northern reader), how invincible, in grave patience and stillness, stands that old house like a rock, under i deep roof, defying time, and storm, and war, and misfort une, yet sad as things eternal ever seem, with a strange realization of the transitoriness of everything around! The flowers they sell on the stone bench round its huge old wall, underneath the huge irons in which flags have flaunted and torches burned for hundreds of years on tri umphal occasions - the sheaves of lily of the valley, white lilac, white narcissus, already abundant and scenting all the air in the first cold days of April - seem scarcely more evanescent than the crowd of men and women who have bloomed and passed and gone into darkness while the old wall stood fast, without getting so much as a wrinkle, line chiseled by age upon its rugged stones. The Strozzi palace is pure Florentine; and so of a less gracious kind is the Pitti, not a benign or royal place, or in the least betraying by any smile or triumph the wonderful treasures it holds fast, but grim and strong in a sober greatness, self-concentrated, aware of its own wealth. The old pal ace of the Signoria in the great market-place is more picturesque, with its beautiful rugged old tower, stately and strong, so finely poised between the sky and Florence; but it also is grave to extremity - smileless and serious. The square below of a market morning is brimful of Tuscan figures, in great cloaks, brown and vast, with flaps of colored lining, green and blue, such as the old painters loved; peasants from the country, sunburnt, olive-colored. The Piazza has a curious significant appearance, quite novel to English eyes, with its crowd, almost entirely made up of men. The hum of this crowd as you stand and listen in the beautiful Orcagna loggia, with Benvenuto's Perseus, slim and splendid, slaying the monster, over your head, is as strange as the scene; a hum all male, deep and strong, with scarcely one piping treble in all its stern body of sound. The assemblage, and the strange, deep hum of it, strikes the unaccustomed eye and ear with wonder and half alarm, as if it must mean something. But it means nothing-except that so many contadini have come in from all the glimmering white villages between this and the Apennines, and are telling their news and hearing it, and transacting their business, in their deep voices. There, though you would not think it, in the middle of the great square, amid doubtless a deeper hum from a still more serious crowd, Savonarola was burnt in the face of day four hundred years ago -a notable recollect tion enough. Not a joyful sight for any city to see; her best offered up a sacrifice to her worst, the voice of righteousness quenched in flames and smoke, while the unrighteous sat high and uttered judgment. This, too, the old city has seen more than once in her career; and, like other places, has gathered up the relics of the men she slew, and worshipped them, and bewailed herself for their loss - after having slain them. But that, indeed, is not pecul iar to Florence as her gravity is, and self-love, and splendid self-sufficiency. The spectator feels how completely in the day of her splendor, while real strength remained to her, the proud old city stood upon her greatness, believing herself more noble, more beautiful, more richly decked, more full of might and genius, than any other city or naFlorence against the world.

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We can scarcely suppose that the resemblance of Romola to her city is entirely intentional on the part of the author of "Romola;" for there are points in this character, lofty as it is, which are not lovable, and which do not belong to the highest ideal. Romola is, the reader remembers, the daughter of an old philosopher, brought up

by him upon books and the pagan tradition, which those in lays, as a little in our own, had returned upon the tracks of Christianity to boast itself more perfect in high stoiism, courage, and moral greatness than the passionate and imperfect religion of the time. Old Bardo dei Bardi was one of the scholars of the age, devoted soul and life to the study of that great literature of the past which in his eyes was superior to anything of the present, to the foolish crowds of ordinary human creatures round, and all the vulgar transactions of living and dying. So, too, his young daughter was trained to think, brought up in a proud seclusion, a little leavened by the painful humility of knowing that she was but a woman and could never carry out her father's work as her brother could have done, who had declined to sacrifice his existence to the old scholar, and had been bitterly repudiated by the father, and scarcely less condemned by Romola herself. Thus Romola's attitude from the very first is one altogether separated from ordinary life, above it, innocently yet proudly contemptuous of it, and of common Christianity, common existence-raised upon a pedestal of seclusion, learning, and ignorance, knowing nothing, as is so often the case, of the world which she disdains. The character thus formed captivates many imaginations incapable of perceiving, or unwilling to perceive, that the loftiness of tone which may thus be attained can only be gained in conjunction with a parrowness which is fatal to true grandeur. Romola is beautiful, graceful, high-minded, and sweet in her reserved and maidenly calm - innocent herself as an angel, but without that fragrance of innocence which makes the childlike soul believe in others as in itself. She knows herself pure, noble, and true; but the world which she sees from the great barred windows of the old high prisonpalace, is not, she knows, true and noble and pure, but a common thing which she has been taught to despise, which is beneath her, a thing to be greatly contemptuous of. Here and there is one figure, who, like herself, is raised above it, keeping his skirts apart from its touch, disdaining the rascal multitude; but with that multitude itself the girl has no sympathy. It is not that she thinks too highly of her individual acquirements for in respect to these, indeed, she is kept on a safe level of humility or is vain of a beauty of which she is scarcely conscious. There is no vanity in her; but vanity itself is a venial and human imperfection in comparison with the lofty narrow sense of a vague but great superiority, which is in the very air she breathes. Strangely enough, though all the world appreciates the forbidding character of that spiritual pride which says, I am holier than thou, a great portion of the world are deeply impressed by the intellectual self-assertion which claims to be nobler, loftier than the rest of humanity; and the reader has no reason to suppose that the great writer who created Romola intended to suggest any defect in the nature so loftily limited, so proudly nar

row.

In the earliest scene which presents this beautiful creature to us, the key-note of her character is clearly struck and indicated. She is answering her father's bitter apprehensions of being forgotten, his scholarly petty murmurings and repinings over the probable substitution of some other name for his, and his assertion of his "right to be remembered." "Nevertheless, father," she says, "it is a great gift of the gods to be born with a hatred and contempt of all injustice and meanness. Yours is a higher lot never to have lied and truckled, than to have shared honors won by dishonor. There is strength in scorn as there is in the martial fury by which men become insensible to wounds." We might say this was strange lan guage for a girl of eighteen, were it not very certain that there are few things youth adopts more easily, or holds with more absolute faith, than this high doctrine of superior rights, and "the strength of scorn." But there is no tender amusement in the author's tone, as if she meant us to feel her beautiful Romola to be a victim to youth's delusive innocent grandeur of self-contemplation, but a gravity which precludes all possibility of humor, a stately setting forth of the position as most real and most noble.

She is Florence personified; proud, nothing doubting, if not her own, yet her father's "right to be remembered," feeling it natural that all things in heaven and earth should give way to that just ambition. This is the foundation upon which her character is built. She is never throughout the story on a level with any one she encounters, unless, perhaps, it is the sovereign presence of Savonarola. To all others she stoops-even in the first warmth of love, to Tito, who is her opposite, not her complement. She stoops to him, as long as he does well, with ineffable tenderness and self-subduing; but the moment he has committed his deadly sin against her, rises at once to her old attitude, fatally above him, clad as with invincible armor in that "strength of scorn" which had been her earliest conception of moral grandeur. Though she is temporarily brought under the influence of Savonarola, and for a while, recognizing even in spite of herself the greatness of his work and his aims, bows her proud head to his command, and even accepts, deeply against her will, the confessor he gives her, there is no real change wrought in her. She is proudly pitiful, tender, visiting like a queen the poor who want caring for, impressing all who cross her path, and receiving everywhere a visionary worship, but never once descending into any kind of human equality. So gravely and persistently is this attitude maintained, that we are compelled to believe that the author intended it so, and felt in the crushing loftiness and grandeur of her creation nothing that was not consistent with the highest ideal. Romola towers over everybody else as she moves through the streets of Florence, simple indeed, but with a simplicity which has nothing to do with the simpleness of ordinary humanity-a figure not angelic but Olympian, a daughter of the gods, conscious of her lineage; in her early stage as contemptuous of the common horde as a demi-god should be in her later, moved to such pity and lofty service of them as Pallas herself might condescend, in an emergency great enough to call forth her efforts, to afford.

Such is the noble, lofty, limited, narrow, and splendid being whom George Eliot has placed for us in those lofty streets of Florence, whom we can see passing to and fro in her veiled and stately beauty, attracting a reverential observation everywhere, never misconstrued or unappreciated as, alas! real greatness often is. How well she suits the arrogant, serious place, "with her way of walking like a procession," as poor Monna Brigida says! and when we see the forlorn noble figure, pitiless and comfortless, arrested in the wintry glory of the early morning, on her sombre flight out of Florence - turning her back upon the beautiful city, with all its spires and house-tops gilded by the rising sun — facing the blank road before her, upon which that early light has just burst forth, and feeling an awe in her desolate soul" of the impalpable golden glory and the long shadow of herself which was not to be escaped," it is as if the very soul of the grave, self-concentrated town were passing away from it. But Romola, in her Christianized state, under the influence of Savonarola, is not so perfect an image as in her previous development. She is not adapted for Christianity. Self-sacrifice, in the classic sense, like that of Iphigenia, would be completely natural to her; but self-renunciation is not natural, and there is a certain constraint in her labors, which ought to be of love, into which she enters, with only pity in her at best, not love. Indeed there is nothing more remarkable in the creation of this woman than the kind of love of which she is made capable. The fountains of divine charity are not in her; but those of a noble individual passion might and ought to have been, one would have imagined.

But Romola's love is never true love. It is a sudden, sur

prised, and passionate admiration for a creature unlike herself which seizes her an enthusiasm for the image of joy and brightness which suddenly lights up her life, in the person of the beautiful traitor, whose advent into the still, dim Florentine house, full of dry books and tedious studies, is as the coming in of Apollo himself, the god of sunshine and gladness. Her love is more like the love of man than of woman; it is scarcely loftier or deeper than