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and the days of Aurelian! Silk is now grown nigh as common as Wool, and become the cloathing of those in the Kitchen as well as the Court; we wear it not only on our backs, but of late years on our Legs and Feet, and tread on that which formerly was of the same value as Gold itself. Yet that magnificent and expensive Prince, Henry the Eighth, wore ordinarily Cloth Hose, except there came from Spain by great chance a pair of silk stockins. King Edward his son was presented with a pair of Long Spanish Silk Stockins by Sir Thomas Gresham, his Merchant, and the Present was taken much notice of.

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'Queen Elizabeth, in the third year of her Reign, was presented, by Mrs. Montague, her Silk woman, with a pair of black knit Silk Stockins, and henceforth she never wore cloth any more. Nine and thirty years after was invented the wearing of Silk Stockins, Wast coats, and divers other things, by Engines, or Steel looms, by William Lee, Master of Arts of St. John's College in Cambridge, a Native of Notingham, who taught the Art in England and France, as his Servants in Spain, Venice, and Ireland; and his device so well took, that now in London his artificers are become a Company, having a Hall and Master, like as other Societies. But this were an unpardonable digression, were it our custome to make the like."

No, old William Howel, not unpardonable, but very valuable, and well said. Your style is always readable, your spelling curious, imperfect, and quaint. You avoid dullness-that unpardonable sin-in whatever you say, and you deserve to have been better remembered.

We must do our old friend the justice to say that, after filling forty pages with denunciations of Justinian, he does then give a slant at Procopius and his possible misconceptions, and adds that "Sigonius, a man diligent in searching out the truth, says that he was a Prince, renouned both for War and Peace, a famous restorer of the ancient Roman Glory, and without doubt the last, as well of the Good, as of the Valiant Emperours of the East."

So there is hope for poor Justinian after all, particularly as his experience in building seems to have been what it has remained to

the present day, the bill considerably larger than he expected. Here is a reference to the famous church now called the Mosque of St. Sophia:

"His Buildings were vast and highly magnificent, and could not be the product of so base and ignoble a Spirit as the Secret Historian makes his to have been, however it be very true, that great Spenders must be great Scrapers, for nothing is more decietful than Building, wherein we see it commonly happen, and even to wise Men themselves, that the Expenses at length double and treble the value of what they first designed. Indeed he left infinite Monuments either of Piety or Magnificence, in this kind, and that first in Building new, or repairing old churches decayed. The Church called Sophia, built by him at Constantinople, was the mirror of all Ages. The Height of it mounted up to Heaven, the Splendour of it was such as if it received not light from the Sun, but had it in itself. The Roof was decked with Gold, the Pavement beset with Pearl. The Silver of the Choire alone mounted to four Myriads, and it was thought to have excelled the Temple of Solomon.'

you should you but view and consider one of them, you would think his whole reign to have been employed in building that alone."

No wonder that Mr. Boffin liked to hear Silas Wegg read the stories of the Roman emperors! Our modern romancers have a sorry time of it when one dips into these extraordinary histories. Poor Howel gives up Justinian with this lamentation: "Behold what a precipice!" he says. "We are now descending into low, mean, and narrow tracts, and shall find the Empire but short, and ourselves straightened, the farther we pass, little of Action, and less of Performance. Whatever thou wast, the Greatness of Empire, the Glory of Majesty, the Power of Arms, the Efficacy of Laws, the Renoun and Splendour of the Roman Name, in a manner died and was buried with thee! O Justinian!"

The fate of a book, and of an author, is a mystery which no philosopher can penetrate. Here is one, written by a scholar under royal patronage, a perfect mine of good reading, and of stories told in a most amusing and piquant manner. Yet it is utterly forgotten, while an unknown man, named Defoe, gets himself into jail, and writes an immortal romance, which no one dares confess that he has not read; and another, named John Bunyan, with a somewhat similar experience, produces the "Pilgrim's Progress" for future Macaulays to quote-one of the textbooks of the world.

We leave William Howel with regret, to look at other books, in the same forgotten and neglected library.

M. E. W. S.

A STRANGE PENANCE.

IKE most of the seaport towns on the

coast of Whitby can only

be seen to advantage when sailing into its harbor. As the vessel approaches the two fine piers that protect the shipping, the voyager sees before him a vast gully or ravine, through which the muddy river Esk sluggishly flows, and, down the steep slopes on either side of the river, a grotesque conglomeration of houses, of every variety of quaint, manygabled architecture, that look as if they had been dumped at random from the heights above. On the right, crowning the height, he sees a score of streets and squares of pretentious houses of the modern English watering-place type. On the left, perched on a towering sea-cliff, the pensive beauty of the desolate abbey rivets the eye, as it stands in lofty isolation amid the touching associations of wellnigh eleven centuries.

The ancient fane rears its majestic head a stone's throw from the edge of a beetling precipice of two hundred and ninety feet. In the clefts of the crag the sea - gull finds a home; and against its base, in calm, the North Sea billows leap with playful sportiveness, or, in tempest, fiercely hurl their thunders. The picturesque and beautiful ruin recalls to the student the memory of Cadmon the monk, who, within the ancient monastery, in the dim twilight of English literature, wrote, in sublime strains, the earliest so stately and sumptuous that Procopius tells | known poetical composition in the Saxon

Besides he built everywhere throughout the Empire so many Houses to the honour of the Blessed Virgin

tongue; while every one at all acquainted with Northern legend and poetry is familiar with the hallowed name of its earliest abbess, Saint Hilda.

Whitby still owns a few small coasting-vessels, and builds two or three fourth-class iron steamers per annum; but the town can no longer be ranked even as a fifth-rate English sea port. Newcastle-on-Tyne, Shields, Tynemouth, Sunderland, the Hartlepools, Middlesborough, and Hull, have grown into vast ports; while Whitby, partly from a lack of the natural features necessary to the formation of a great harbor, partly from constitutional apathy, has remained very much as it was a century since. With every natural advantage for a first-class watering-place, the same supineness has permitted Scarborough on the south, and Saltburn-by-the-Sea on the north, within a few years to develop into fashionable marine resorts; while Whitby bas remained satisfied with its few lodging-houses and crescent on West Cliff. Owing, however, to the fact that this old town is the exclusive seat of the jet-manufacture in Great Britain, it always commands a respectable, if sparse, summer patronage; and its five miles of sandy shore are eagerly scanned by tourists from all parts of the United Kingdom for "Saint Hilda's headless snakes," as the fossil Ammonites, common to the Oolite and Lias for

mations of the Yorkshire coast, are locally denominated. Then the jet-stores of the town form an inexhaustible attraction to strangers. Ladies, especially, never weary of inspecting and admiring the wondrous window-displays of exquisitely-polished and marvelously cut articles of ornament and virtu. Every season brings its change of fashion in the style of ornaments of jet. One season it is gold-mounted, another it is used as a setting for exquisite cameos; while another jet forms the bed wherein highly-polished specimens of Ammonite and Belemnite artistically repose.

The inhabitants of Whitby are truly sui gencris. Within the whole range of Great Britain there exists no such complacently self-satisfied and phlegmatic town. There are no absolutely indigent people in the place, and the inhabitants uniformly speak with drawling deliberation and supercilious pomposity of their town, their shipping, their abbey, their church, their piers, their beach, their bathing - machines, their Royal Hotel, their cattle-show, and their Eskdale-side Hermitage, as if each in its kind were unequaled within her majesty's dominions. The cattleshow in September, indeed, is the momentous event of the year, and it is customary to as sociate, as far as practicable, all occurrences with "last cattle-show," or "the cattle-show gone a year," as the case may be. To the curious visitor, however, by far the most interesting day in the Whitby calendar is Holy Thursday, or "Pancake Thursday," as Ascension-day is generally termed in the rural districts of England. On that day "the Penny - Hedge penance is annually performed; and on the anniversary last year, May 14th, I journeyed to Whitby for the purpose of witnessing the singular act of propitiating the manes of the old Eskdaleside Hermit.

The tradition conected with this most whimsical penance is highly romantic, and runs in substance as follows:

In the fifth year of the reign of Henry II., the Lord of Ugglebarnby, William de Bruce, the Lord of Sneaton Castle, Ralph de Piercie, with a gentleman of Fylingdales named Allatson, met in "a certain wood or desert, called Eskdale-side," to hunt wild-boar. The wood belonged to the abbot of the Whitby Monastery, who was called Sedman; and "the aforesaid gentlemen met with boarstaves and hounds, and found a great wildboar, and the hounds did run him very well near about the chapel and Hermitage of Eskdale-side, where there was a monk of Whitby who was an hermit. The boar, being sore wounded and hotly pursued and dead - run, took in at the chapel-door, and there laid him down and presently died. The hermit shut the hounds out of the chapel and kept himself within, at his meditations and prayers, the hounds standing at bay without. The hunters came to the Hermitage and found the hounds round about the chapel. They called the hermit, who opened the door and came forth, and within lay the boar dead; for the which the gentlemen, in a fury because their hounds were put from their game, did most violently and cruelly run at the hermit with their boar - staves, whereof he died."

When these fire-eating barons saw that they had done the business of the holy man, they were sore afraid, and, after the manner of slayers of the period, they fled to Searborough and took sanctuary. Meantime, however, the hermit temporarily rallied, and apprised Abbot Sedman of the outrage. "The abbot was in great favor with the king, and soon removed the assassins from sanctuary, and they were like to have been put to death." But the hermit, being a holy man, sent for the abbot, and on his death-bed desired him to send for the malefactors.

"I freely forgive them my death," said he, "if they be content to be enjoined to this penance for the safeguard of their souls."

The three hunters, glad to save their lives at any price, willingly agreed to perform any penance the saintly man might nominate. Whereupon, said he :

"You and yours shall hold your lands of the Abbot of Whitby and his successors in this manner: That, upon Ascension-eve, you or some of you shall come to the wood of the Stray Head, which is in Eskdale-side, the same day at sunrising, and there shall the officer of the abbot blow his horn, to the intent ye may know where to find him; and he shall deliver unto you, William de Bruce, ten stakes, ten stout-stowers, and ten yedders, to be cut by you, or those that come for you, with a knife of a penny price; and you, Ralph de Piercie, shall take one-and-twenty of each sort, to be cut in the same manner; and you, Allatson, shall take nine of each sort, to be cut as aforesaid, and to be taken on your backs and carried to the town of Whitby, and so be there before nine o'clock of the same day mentioned. And at the hour of nine of the clock (if it be full sea, to cease that service), as long as it is low water at nine o'clock, the same hour each of you shall

set your stakes at the brim of the water, performance of the rite on Ascension morneach stake a yard from another, and so yed-ing, 1874. der them as with your yedders, and so stake on each side with your stout-stowers, that they stand three tides without removing by the force of the water. Each of you shall make them in several (separate) places at the hour aforenamed (except it be full sea at that hour, which, when it shall happen to pass, that service shall cease); and you shall do this in remembrance that you did most cruelly slay me. And that you may the better call God for repentance, and find mercy and do good works, the officer of Eskdale-side shall blow his horn: Out on you! Out on you! Out on you!' for the heinous crime of you. And, if you and your successors do refuse this service, so long as it shall not be full sea, at that hour aforesaid, you and yours shall forfeit all your lands to the Abbot of Whitby and his successors."

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Whereupon," says the ancient chronicler, "the hermit died in the peace of God, December 18, A. D. 1160."

A story so romantic could not escape the pen of Sir Walter Scott; and accordingly, in "Marmion," canto second, there is the following reference to it:

"Then Whitby's nuns exulting told
How to their house three barons bold
Must menial service do;
While horns blow out a note of shame,
And monks cry, Fie upon your name!
In wrath for loss of sylvan game,

Saint Hilda's priest ye slew; '
That on Ascension-day, each year,
While laboring on our harbor-pier,
Must Herbert, Bruce, and Percy hear."

I reached Whitby on Tuesday, May 12th, and engaged quarters at the Angel Hotel, in Baxtergate a comfortable, old-fashioned, slow-going inn, much frequented at nights by smug store-keepers and florid-faced owners of shipping property, who drink "grog" and smoke long clay-pipes with awful solemnity. Respecting the planting of the Penny Hedge, I found these estimable personages about as communicative as clams; and, when I asked the landlord concerning the location of Eskdale-side Hermitage, he surveyed me with an expression of displeased astonishment, as who should say, "This chap mun be a lunatic!" After considerable "interviewing," which mine host met with a conspicuous lack of urbanity, I elicited the statement that "t' aud harmit leeved up t' Esk saide aboon Rus'arp yance, but he's been deead this mony a yeear, as ony feul ou't te knaw."

Next morning I started for the Hermitage, and, after a pleasant walk by the Eskside, reached Ruswarp, and called at the door of the school-house to inquire the best road to the ancient ruin. The teacher, an intelligent young lady, could give me no information on the subject. She was not acquainted with the legend, nor had she read "Marmion" or any ancient chronicle of Whitby. Yet, curiously enough, she had been "raised" within two miles of the scene of the story!

In the centre of a bosky dell, I found in the mouldering ruins of what appeared to have been a rude cottage the old Hermitage. The large, rough-hewn stones that had formed its walls lay strewed round in confusion, and were grown over with lichens and rank green The river stole peacefully past the margin of the dell. The trees were assum

moss.

The Bruce and Percy "homagers," by some process that has escaped the old chroniclers, purchased their exemption long ago; but the successive families who have possessed the property of the Allatsons in Fy-ing their summer dress. But, instead of the lingdales have annually performed the menial service down to the present time. At the date Scott wrote, and for a decade subsequently, the act of penance was known as the "Horngarth service," but in recent years it has been popularly characterized as planting of the Penny Hedge."

"the

The original story has been bitterly challenged and roughly handled by antiquaries. The celebrated Captain Francis Grose, sung by Burns, and the local historians of Yorkshire, are united in favor of its absolute authenticity; while, on the other hand, eminent members of the Society of Antiquaries pretend to show that the arguments which demonstrate the story to be fictitious are incontrovertible.

First and foremost, the iconoclasts assert that there never was an Abbot of Whitby named Sedinan; that the name in the tale is borrowed from Cædmon the poet; and that the abbot's name in A. D. 1159-'60 was Richard. Moreover, they allege that there was no Ralph de Percy, nor any other Percy, at that time, lord of Sneaton Castle; nor any Bruce that was lord of Ugglebarnby; nor, so far as can be discovered, any Allatson then in Fylingdales.

Leaving these learned Dryasdusts to settle the controversy among them, and hazarding no opinion on the subject, I proceed to record the result of my observations of the

peaceful seclusion suitable for a recluse, the busy sounds of manufacturing industry smote upon the ear. The hum of the fan-blast, the sharp puffs from the iron-smelting cupola, the jar and whizz of many-purposed machinery, and the familiar snort of the locomotive, now vexed the sylvan solitude.

As I mused on the drama enacted on the spot more than seven hundred years ago, I was joined by another pilgrim to the hermit's shrine. He intimated that he was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastleon-Tyne, and, like myself, he intended to witness the planting of the Penny Hedge on the morrow. As we conversed about the extraordinary nature of the incident and the penance enjoined, my companion shrewdly remarked that "it required no great skill to foresee that it would never be high water on Ascension-day at nine o'clock in the morning, inasmuch as the time of Ascension-day is determined by that of Easter, which is regulated by the moon, and the moon regulates the tides."

As my new acquaintance seemed to be au fait on the formula to be observed by Mr. Ralph Hanshell, the present owner of the Fylingdales property, I accompanied him to the wood of the Stray Head, where the stakes, stout-stowers, and yedders, are annually cut. He explained that it was not to be expected that for a penny a knife could be pur

chased equal to the task of cutting the wood. But, by a convenient arrangement with a hardware-dealer in the town, Mr. Hanshell contrives to satisfy his conscience and the requirements of the penance at the same time. In recent years it has not been considered imperative to have the wood delivered by the bailiff, nor for the Laird of Fylingdales to bear the burden on his own shoulders to Whitby. On this occasion a farm-servant performed this drudgery on Ascension-eve.

On the early morning of Thursday the usual greetings of the townspeople were generally supplemented by the remark, "Well, ye'll be gaun t' see 'im plant t' Peany Hedge?"

bailiff, who was present on behalf of his enployer, the present owner of Whitby Abbey, to see that the penance was duly performed.

At high water, the Penny Hedge was partially submerged, but it stood its ground. At low water, it was again left high and dry; but, although no guard was placed over it, no idle hand disturbed it, for even the boys of Whitby appear to be less profligate and abandoned than they are in other English

towns.

JAMES WIGHT.

MR. SWINBURNE'S PROSE.

There was no enthusiasm or curiosity ap. THE

parent. Instead of walking on the pier as usual, they would, that particular Ascensionday morning, as a mere matter of course, walk up the river above the bridge, and stolidly witness the nine stakes driven and yeddered," as they had done a score or two times previously.

The Penny Hedge is always planted on the south side of the Esk, toward the upper end of Church Street, near the ship-building yards and rope-walks. At low water a vast expanse of soft, muddy soil is here exposed, through the middle of which the narrow river tortuously creeps like a slimy snake. At high water this soft, greasy swamp is overflowed, and the inner harbor has a comparatively-respectable and extensive appearance. It was on this dark, spongy soil that the Penny Hedge was to be planted.

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A few minutes before nine o'clock Mr. Hanshell appeared in his shirt-sleeves carrying nine pointed stakes, each about five feet long and two inches in diameter. These he drove into the soil with a "penny wooden mallet" at the respective distances of a yard apart. Then he took the nine hazel yedders -which were, in fact, slender rods twelve or fourteen feet long-and laced these along the stakes as a basket-maker winds his peeled willow round the uprights or skeleton of his fabric. Finally he took the nine stout-stowers and placed each stower at an angle against each stake, to act as a prop, and nailed it with a pennyworth of nails" driven by a "penny hammer." Altogether it was a most ridiculous and insensate proceeding; and, but for the eccentric performances of the horn-blower, would have been about as cheerful as a funeral. But the trumpeter, upon whom devolved the solemn duty of blowing, "Out on you! Out on you! Out on you," was a character. There was a mischievous squint in his black, bead-like eye, a blandness in his smile, and a pimply purpleness in the principal feature of his face that indicated a proneness to dissipation and late hours. When the first stake was driven, Joe Dodds puckered his mouth, raised the trumpet, looked calmly around, smiled like a brigand, winked at his cronies, and began to "toot." His initial note was terrific, and he rose by distressing increments to a blare that curdled the blood.

Subdued applause rewarded Joe's brazen denunciation, and he repeated it at least a dozen times, to the manifest satisfaction of all present, not excepting Mr. Cholmley's

HERE are some things which at first blush seem palpably plain to the understanding, which nevertheless are not quite so easy of definition. The quality or combination of qualities which makes the difference between prose and poetry may be cited as one of these. Poetry has been defined from the days of Aristotle to those of Lowell and Stedman, and what single definition of it now remains unrevised or unrevisable? It has been felicitously said-and the statement is good, except that it lacks, like most others of its kind, totality—that good prose puts words in the best places, while poetry puts the best words in the best places. Perhaps, though, Matthew Arnold's distinction between morality and religion may be helpfully suggestive here. If religion, as he says, is "morality touched by emotion," poetry, equally, if not more than equally, may be said to be prose touched by emotion, except that the description omits all account of form. It is common enough to meet with poetical prose, and even so great a master and so matchless at his best as Wordsworth could execute the most prosy verse imaginable, not knowing, apparently, when he spoke pneumatically or otherwise.

Mr. Emerson, in alluding to Mr. Tennyson, lately said, "Nay, some of his words are poems" and one might well be able to say this of much that Emerson himself has written. Poetical power does not always assure us of power in the writer to produce poetry, yet I can recall no writer who has at any time written a really good poem who does not, by that very ability, impress some peculiar and felicitous qualities upon his prose. The æsthetic axiom asserts that the greater gift includes the less.

I have been interested of late while reading Mr. Swinburne's essays-which seem like the substance of his poetry moulded in another form-not more in observing his likes and antipathies than in noticing his method and manner in the easy freedom of prose. Its murmur and sonorousness tell at once its origin, and tell, too, the precise sort of critic the author is. You miss nowhere the poetic quality. Indeed, it would have been impossible for him to leave the poetry out; and he reminds you of his larger calling, suggesting Tennyson's description of the poet in being "drowned with the love of love, the scorn of scorn," if not "the hate of hate." What compels attention as a very prominent characteristic is his truly wonderful catholicity of taste, which accepts the wine from such

diverse vintages with such ready and indis. criminately exuberant praise. To like Victor Hugo's immensely electric and jerky style, and yet bestow hardly less fervor of encomi um upon the repose and icy classicality of Arnold's verse, is, to say the least, the exhi bition of two enthusiasms that are rarely twinned in a single critic. Not that he is to be censured for this-it is in some sense to his credit; and we are interested further in knowing that our critic considers Walt Whitman "the greatest of American voices."

It cannot be denied that his rose-water is of very delicious aroma; it is plentiful-exhaustless, even; and he throws it forth with an unsparing hand. He can also vituperate in the same high color and vein, and particu larly upon writers who have ventured to think and to say that moral canons should have some weight in the selection of topics for public and universal treatment. It is not to be expected that so fiery a particle as Mr. Swinburne's unique genius could easily fold itself up in moderate terms of expression. The fitness of a few words he rarely or never perceives, and his rhetoric goes on and on in most discursive and beautifully bewildering curves, very much like the roll and ricochetting of rockets. He makes nothing of calling up the flash of a conflagration for pur poses where a moderate illumination might suffice, so rich is he in resources of coruscation.

It is this redundancy of verbiage and fire that more than any thing else palls upon and tires the reader. His sense of and feeling for the picturesque are nearly measureless, and he dips his pen, for the most part, in his imagination, and that is to say in an element about as boundless and inexhaustible as the ocean. The small proportion of reason and moral sense that goes to make the rest of his equipment is vacuously apparent. In fact, we can think of no better remark on his style than this, which we borrow, that "it is without measure, without discretion, without sense of what to take and what to leave; after a few pages it becomes intolerably fatiguing. It is always listening to itself always turning its head over its shoulder to see its train flowing behind it. The train shimmers and trembles in a very gorgeous fashion, but the rustle of its embroidery is fatally importunate."

To repeat this mode perpetually, as Swinburne does going back over each period on purpose to taste his own words, and in such manner as to impress the author's self-conscious admiration of their sweetness-is necessarily to be tiresomely and helplessly prolix. And when a writer begins to posture in this way, he may go on doing it forever. There is absolutely no necessary pause for a luxuriance that has no necessary reason. It may show admirable dexterity, and provoke, in places, your wonder at such almost habitual affluence of fine tones and tints, but the one fatal objection to it is, if there were no other, that it tires. If the prolixity were an occasional blemish merely, it would be bad enough; but it is an organic trait. It is not something superimposed that we may hope added experience or culture will hereafter remedy in the author; it is the fundamental

basis of the style itself that is at fault. Its lack of force and genuineness, and its loss of persuasiveness and genuine sincerity, are but too evident. We see something arise now and then in the form of a great tidal thought, but you follow it until it grows fainter and fainter in outline, and finally lapses away in a feeble and limp swash on a still feebler and tasteless shore.

But to turn from the manner to the matter. It was said that to witness Kean's acting was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. To modify this figure a little to fit the perusal of Swinburne's criticism, we should say it is reading something of more or less interest by the aurora borealis. He does, of course, light up his theme, and on occasions when his mood, or the oscillation of his judgment, falls a-plumb with reason, he can give forth memorable and striking argument. It would be a phenomenon not easy of explanation if, with his delicate insight into the mysteries of poetry and of language, he should not acquire some right and power of speaking, for the poets at least, that few on like grounds can claim to possess. One might hesitate to dispute him in any opinion to the assertion of which this endowment is sufficient. We are, therefore, not at all surprised to find that his poetical estimates of Byron and of Shelley, apart from the moral discrimination involved, are justly pertinent and satisfactory, and real contributions to his theme.

There are bits of opinion in all his essays that successfully challenge acceptance, as well as gratify your admiration. When he does say the right thing, it is sometimes wonderfully said-but his whims and perversity run like a river through a text in which the illustrations of wisdom serve as widely-scattered islands. As an instance we would like to commend, it seems to us that the following is well worth saying, and is well said:

"All the ineffably foolish jargon and jangle of criticasters about classic subjects and romantic, remote, or immediate interests, duties of the poet to face and handle this thing instead of that, or his own age instead of another, can only serve to darken counsel by words without knowledge: a poet of the first order raises all subjects to the first rank, and puts the life-blood of an equal interest into Hebrew forms or Greek, mediæval or modern, yesterday or yesterage."

Here, too, is a judgment so rounded and well-considered, that it almost confutes, and would pretty nearly disprove-if such instances were common-all that we have just been saying. We take it from the final paragraph in the essay on "John Ford: "

"No poet is less forgetable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot shake hands with him and pass by; you cannot fall in with him and out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture forever; he signs himself upon you as with a seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is never the force of accident; the casual divinity of beauty which falls, as though direct from heaven, upon strong lines and phrases of some poets, falls never by any

such heavenly chance on his; his strength of impulse is matched by his strength of will; he never works more by instinct than by resolution; he knows what he would have and what he will do, and gains his end and does his work with full conscience of purpose and insistence of design. By the might of a great will seconded by the force of a great hand, he won the peace he holds against all odds of rivalry in a race of rival giants."

If

But any list of quotations would be incomplete without that remarkable and picturesque description of a thunder-storm at sea, with which the book opens, and which does duty as a metaphor for expressing the kind and quality of Victor Hugo's genius. one were to parody a similitude so huge, and so nearly grotesque, would it be proper to say of Mr. Swinburne's genius that it resembles an earthquake on land? The thunderstorm is one Mr. Swinburne witnessed when a boy, while midway in the English Channel:

"About midnight the thunder-cloud was right overhead, full of incessant sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have life, and a delight in its life. At the same hour the sky was clear to the west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank, as to music, a restless dance or chase of summer-lightnings across the lower sky-a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of shining oceanides along the tremulous flow of the

sea.

Eastward at the same moment the space of clear sky was higher and wider-a splendid semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of no color namable by man; and midway in it, between the storm and the sea, hung the motionless full moon; Artemis watching, with a serene splendor of scorn, the battle of Titans and the revel of nymphs from her stainless and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light. Underneath and about us the sea was paved with flame; the whole water trembled and hissed phosphoric fire; even through the wind and thunder I could hear the crackling and sputtering of the water-sparks. In the same heaven, and in the same hour, there shone at once the three contrasted gloriesgolden, and fiery, and white-of moonlight, and of the double lightnings, forked and sheet; and under all this miraculous heaven lay a flaming floor of water."

The single fragment of comment which we have quoted from an accomplished critic, in reference to Mr. Swinburne's style, may possibly be Mr. Lowell's-it is good enough to be; and from the same pen we have another quality of these essays acutely noted. The writer says: "We do not remember in this whole volume a single instance of delicate moral discrimination-a single case in which the moral note has been struck, in which the idea betrays the smallest acquaintance with the conscience." And this is notably true.

The book with which we are dealing,* though it is prose in form, is prose pervaded by the measureless force and lurid flicker of a picturesque and subtilely sensitive and poetical imagination. It affords fine glimpses of beauty, and splendor of expression; it has some almost ineffable visions; its eloquence -and it is eloquent, as eloquent for the wrong

* Essays and Studies. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. London, 1875.

as for the right-has all the delicacy and sweetness that rhythm and lyrical melody can hope to give in an unmetrical way; and it stirs the blood in places like the energy and shock of a breeze from the clear north. But for much that is simply true and trustworthy, for insight that is thorough as well as helpful, for correct perspective, for either fine aesthetical or psychological analysis, and, above all, for a monition of conscience, even of the un-Puritan kind, the reader who looks will meet with signal disappointment; and, as a help to an inexperienced reader, it is like the fire-flies of the night. As a literary pyrotechnic it is quite wonderful, and often entertaining; but one wishes, after going a little distance with the author, to look down to the earth, and give his feet a touch once more of the solid ground.

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On her sad errand-but could cross no door Where Death's dark shadow had not passed before.

One voice forever on her pathway flew :
"The dead are many, but the living few."

So, when Gotama asked if she had brought
The mustard-seed, so long and vainly sought,
She said: "I have it not-each way I sped
I found but few were living, many dead."
And Buddha answered: "True enough, most
true,

Death comes to all, as it has come to you."

So fled her grief, and seeing in the night,
At every house, a bright or fading light,

She said: "Our human lives are just the

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EDITOR'S TABLE.

TH

HE World has been lamenting "The Lost Arts of Civilization." It thinks that the "sewing-machine has already destroyed one of the most beautiful, one of the most humanizing of arts-the art of needle-work, in which our mothers and grandmothers excelled, and from which they had comfort as well as occupation." It also tells us that "the planing, turning, and mortising machines, with their various applications, have converted the skillful carpenter of forty years back into a commonplace joiner and framer. There are no carpenters any more," it goes on to say; "the nice skill in that once-instructive art is all monopolized by machinery; . . . all that delicate work which so exercised his eye and hand, which created grades in his métier, and made the skillful carpenter really a man of accomplishments, all this is now transferred from his hand to the jaws of the unreasoning, inexorable, brute machine." This lamenting critic, still casting his eye on the delights and results of bygone skill, assures us that "the mowing and reaping machines have made those beautiful arts of former time, mowing with the scythe and reaping with the grain-cradle, to be almost absolutely lost arts;" and he further says that "with photography and its developments must come the destruction of painting. Portraiture is already almost a lost art, landscape will soon follow, and the higher forms of historical painting will soon die. . . . The plastic arts and architecture must in the same way yield to machinery, just as inevitably as the Geneva watch-maker must give way before the Waltham works. When an artist can cast you a thousand copies of a moulding, cornice, or frieze, at once and of the same pattern, the chisel will not dare attempt to compete." The writer concedes that the revolution he describes is favorable to human progress; "it is itself progress," he says, "since the effect is to divert the more intelligent persons connected with any art from employment in it, and to drive them to seek employment in connection with some higher art. It is progress, too, in that it continually frees a larger number of persons from exhausting toil, and gives them increas ing time to seek culture."

We cannot quite accept the consoling theory of the last few sentences. While the revolution described will, no doubt, release certain energies from a lower in order to advance them to a higher plane of effort, it will tend also to throw upon the world hosts of men wholly ignorant of any form of skilled labor, and from this will result, not progress, but a great decay of intelligence, of worth, and of morals. Indeed, this consequence of the

substitution of machinery for the skill of the individual laborer is already evident. The number of men unfitted for any definite employment, unskilled in any of the arts or crafts, is on the increase, who in a vagabond way flow into the great cities, where they depend upon chance opportunities for employment, and help to swell the ranks of the idle and the vicious.

But, while we cannot assent to the idea that general progress is to come of this revolution, we are not without our consolation. This lies in the fact that a reaction has begun in favor of individual taste and skill as opposed to machine-made articles. In furtiture this revival is more noteworthy than in other things, but we may confidently expect it to extend to other branches of manufacture in which machinery has been replacing manipulation by the individual. The canons of the revived art in furniture are that household articles should be pure and simple in style, substantial in manufacture, and that each product should be stamped by the individual skill of the craftsman. A mania for this kind of furniture has already begun, so that in one direction at least the supremacy of duplication is gone. The "thousand copies of a scroll" and the facility of the gluebrush are understood, and are coming rapidly under a general detestation. Machinery, of course, will continue in use, if for no other reason than because it reduces cost; and fortunately even a "brute machine" is amenable to advanced civilization. The example of the purer style has already been followed, inasmuch as we see it modifying and improving the designs of the machine-made article; and this is no light service.

There is another direction in which all the efforts to find a substitute for the skill of the hand have come to little. This is in engraving. A great deal is said about new processes, ingenious methods of using the camera and acids whereby drawing is copied and lines in relief formed; but no device has succeeded in giving the tone, the feeling, the quality that come from the finger-ends of the man charged with art-feeling.

In one particular the World writer seems to us wholly wrong. Painting shows no sign of a surrender to photography. Miniaturepainting has been fairly killed by the sunpictures, and perhaps portrait-painting suffers; but the world of ideal art is full of vitality, of exultation, of growth, of expres sion. Art-taste is an appetite that grows upon what it feeds; those who begin with photographs, or who enjoy photographs, are only thereby stimulated into greater zeal for the products of the pencil. Not only is divine color beyond the reach of the sunshadow, but imagination, creation, poetical feeling, subtile sentiment, strange and won

derful harmonies of color, expression of pas

sion and emotion-these all lie without the reach of the camera and within the touch of that force in human nature called genius, which no machinery can imitate and no method of duplication supplant. As an historical fact, art is experiencing a great revival. It is taking possession of the world as it did four hundred years ago; an army of enthusiasts are enlisted in it, and everywhere we may see the signs of awakened public interest in this outcome of æsthetic culture. Painting and sculpture at least are possessed by the spirit of immortality.

THE recent introduction of elevators for carrying persons to the upper floors has already made a marked change in the new architecture of our city. It has been found that by making the top-floors of buildings easily accessible, they take preference even over those at a lower altitude for many kinds of business. The light is better, the air is purer, the situation is quieter, nine stories up than at three or four stories, and when the ninth story may be reached by a swiftmoving steam-elevator, every objection that might exist against this great height is removed. It seems strange that so simple a contrivance for utilizing upper stories and high spaces should not have come into vogue until within recent years. New devices for the substitute of steam, such as hydraulic power, are likely to greatly extend the use of this very comfortable way of "getting up-stairs."

There is an important change in our domestic architecture that is likely to come of the use of elevators. It is no new idea that the kitchen ought to be placed at the top of the house. At this point the disagreeable odors that now rise from the cooking-range and the laundry, and more or less permeate the whole house, would be carried off into the upper air. The healthfulness and the agree ableness of the living-rooms would evidently be greatly enhanced by the change of the kitchen base. Hitherto the great obstacle in the way has been, not only the labor of carrying supplies up the several pairs of stairs, and carrying refuse down them, but the dirt and litter certain to accrue there from. The elevator would remedy all this, fetching and carrying needed articles with facility and at little expenditure of time or energy. It would not be practicable, of course, to introduce steam or even hydraulic power into small residences; but elevators balanced by weights, after the manner of "dumb-waiters," now in many houses in use between kitchen and dining-room, would be sufficient for the purpose. As roofs of houses are now commonly built nearly flat, this space could be inclosed and used for the

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