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The reader of these romances very soon comes to love Porgy, and to look to him for the creation of a good many pleasant surprises. Indeed, for a fleshy man, as subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw," like Shakespeare's fat knight of Eastcheap, whom in so many harmless respects he resembles, his quickness of mind is no less remarkable than his agility of body. He is equally at home in the seriousness of some bit of worldly wisdom, or the humor of half-satirical sally or ponderous practical joke. Por gy loves to play the gourmand, but we speedily learn to see through his assumption of a part suggested by his size of person rather than his size of appetite. In truth, he is but an indifferent eater as to quantity, but makes up for it by the strenuousness of his demand as to quality. And when he boasts himself upon the distinction of having the best cook in the army, in the person of his colored man Tom, it is quite as much with a view to hospitality as it is in the interests of private indulgence. Nor do his gustatory propensities ever lead him to forget his higher function as a reformer of dietetics to the rest of the world; for long before the others at his mess have finished eating, he is looking about him in the pleased fancy that he is elevating the taste of his fellows in what he loves to consider the most important act of life. Thought and feeding go closely together, in his estimate; and perhaps no reader of the gentler sex can quite afford to ignore his summing up of what goes to the making of a good wife, 66 one who knows the difference between hash and haggis, and can convert a terrapin into a turtle by sheer dexterity in shaking the spice-box." There may still be bachelors to echo his somewhat despairing conclusion, "I feel that I could be happy with such a woman." Nor could anything well be more novel and convincing than his arguments in favor of widows as wives, especially in

cases where a knowledge of the first husband's tastes has made one feel sure of their proper education.

Altogether, Porgy is perhaps the best illustration of the gourmet, the intellectual feeder, in our literature: a man, as he himself puts it, “refined in soups and sublime in sauces; " whose abdomen and brains, we are told, seemed to work together, and who "thought of eating perpetually, and while he ate still thought."

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I perceive," remarks one of his companions, "that you are always sentimental after supper, lieutenant." "And properly so," is the reply. "The beast is then pacified. Then there is no conflict between the animal and the god. Thought is then supreme, and summons all the nobler energies to her communion." And again, as he finishes his repast: "So much of life is secure. I am satisfied, — I have lived to-day, and nothing can deprive me of the 22d of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty, enjoyed in the Cypress Swamp. The day is completed: it should always close with the dinner hour. It is then secure, -we cannot be deprived of it: it is recorded in the history of hopes realized and of feelings properly felt."

Patriot and epicurean at the same time, Porgy can serve his country even while occasionally grumbling at the scantiness of fare with which in turn she often served her defenders. But so admirable a philosopher is he that he suffers neither protest nor anticipation to disturb his equanimity. "Never do you hurry," runs his tutoring of the impatient Lance Frampton, as they once neared the home of the latter's sweetheart, "even if it be on the road to happiness. No man enjoys life who gallops through it. Take it slowly; stop frequently by the way, and look about you. He who goes ahead ever, passes a treasure on both sides which he never finds coming back. . . . Many a man, through sheer impatience, has swam for the

shore, and sunk just when it rose in sight. Had the fool turned on his back and floated for an hour, the whole journey would have been safe and easy. If you please, Master Lance, we'll turn upon our backs for an hour. I have an appetite just now. If I fail to satisfy it, I lose it till to-morrow, and the loss is irretrievable. There is some jerked beef in your wallet, I think, and a few biscuit. We will turn up this branch, the water of which is cool and clear, put ourselves in a close, quiet place in the woods, and pacify the domestic tiger."

But one must have an all-round knowledge of Porgy really to appreciate him; and although a volume might be made. of his pithy sayings, his apt criticisms of life, his playful thrusts at sentiment and by no means serious appeals to the "inner man," it would necessarily fail to do justice to his character as a whole. Perhaps the chief source of its charm lies in the fact of his being such an amiable compound of contradictory qualities. A moralist as well as man of humor, his convivial tendencies are often only the cover for a disposition to take life more seriously than he cares to do; while his bodily habit and capacity for sensuous enjoyment do not unfit him for nature's simplicity and the hardships of a trooper's existence. Truculent, yet good-humored, he has that large tolerance which is supposed to belong to the favored in flesh; and so he remains the friend even of those whom his logic confounds. A wag and an unsparing joker, no one sacrificed more personal comfort than he-for few had so much of possible comfort to sacrifice for the sake of country or companions. Listen to him as he placidly discourses in the shadow of the swamp thickets, his great body at rest, but his small eyes twinkling upon the scene with a gaze that omits nothing; and after the labors and excitements of such a day as he has participated in, you will declare with him,

"Ah, this is life!" although perhaps the full gusto of the original exclamation might be lost in the feebler responsiveness of our generation. With his figure, "made for state occasions and great ceremonials only," "his great beard, long and well sprinkled with gray, his expanse of abdominal territory well belted with leather and girthed with crimson sash," Porgy lives for us with a sort of Falstaffian grotesqueness, a big, unwieldy playfulness of temper which is not without its other side of agile resource. Indeed, we shall have to go far in fiction to find a character more original and unique; and one can easily credit the statement of the author that he is a portraiture from real life.

Nor

Not to go too far for a specimen of those amusing situations in which from time to time throughout this series of novels Porgy discovers himself to our acquaintance, take the account of his hunt for terrapin, in the thirtieth chapter of The Partisan. Some of us may be as ignorant as was the Goose-Creeker, John Davis, who witnessed the feat, of the succulent qualities of alligator terrapin when reduced to the form of stew. could we be expected to know better than he that the true manner of stalking the game is to find him asleep in the starlight upon some log hung across a lagoon, and then to draw near on all fours, imitating as best one may the grunts of his swamp neighbor, the hog. To have seen the ponderous lieutenant "cooning the log" with a skill and patience worthy of self-abnegation in a higher cause than that of soups would be an enjoyment second only to that produced by the author's description. The philosophy with which he fortifies himself against his own reflections, in this descent of the gentleman to the level of the swine, is inimitable. Truly, the "pleasures of a dinner are not to be lost for a grunt ;" and it only needed Porgy's idealization of that important ceremonial to inspire him with "as

good a grunt as ever echoed in Westphalian forests."

But Porgy's mission to a dull and unobservant world does not end with the mysteries of mock-turtle soup and terrapin pie. What a flavor does it leave in the mouth just to read of that sylvan feast which our partisan epicure spread for the captains, in the concluding pages of The Forayers. In a recent brush with the enemy, Porgy had managed to secure some delicacies intended for the table of the Tory officers, and he further proposes a raid upon the unoffending denizens of Caw Caw Swamp, "green jackets of the pond," our author calls them. Blissfully ignorant of what they may be eating, the guests are to be initiated into the merit of frog as an article of diet, and the result fully justifies the happy anticipations of the host. Soup, ball, and steak, his skill in woodland catering is acknowledged by all; but something like consternation follows the announcement of the secret, and the consciousness that they have actually partaken of a morsel hitherto tabooed by their uncultured tastes.

And what a company it was!-consisting of the then puissant Rhode Islander, General Greene, majestic alike in person and professional dignity; noble Governor Rutledge, the veritable father of the people who had chosen him to guide their troubled fortunes; the Swamp Fox himself, that famous guerrilla of Carolina, with his modest person and demeanor, even while he remained the sleepless master of every situation; the Game Cock, Sumter, with his dash and his sensitive pride, the one impelling him against the enemy, the other sometimes driving him against his friends; together with William Washington, the nephew of the commander-in-chief, and Lee and Horry and the rest.

One feels glad, also, that the poet was not left out, Geordie Dennison, the partisan troubadour, whom his companionsin-arms were so fond of heralding as

the Homer of a new epic. Porgy and Dennison go well together, as ought always to be the case with philosopher and poet; and when the latter brews a Jamaica punch, his friend and admirer declares, smacking his lips with unctuous commendation, "The proportions are good: the acid has yielded to the embrace of the sugar with the recognition of a perfect faith, and both succumb to the spirit as with the recognition of a perfect deity. Next to poetry, Geordie, you are an adept at punch." Perhaps we cannot do better than to transcribe in part one of his ringing martial lyrics :

"We follow where the Swamp Fox guides,

His friends and merry men are we;
And when the troop of Tarleton rides,
We burrow in the cypress-tree.
The turfy hammock is our bed,

Our home is in the red-deer's den,
Our roof, the tree-top overhead,

For we are wild and hunted men.

and show you the track of deer or turkey among the leaves, and tell you just how many hours have elapsed since the creature who made it went that way. So familiar do they become to us that we feel acquainted with even their belongings; we know Mossfoot and Button whom they ride to battle, and Polly Longlips, the rifle which the Scout apostrophizes in terms reserved by other men for their sweethearts. 666 "Yes, yes -Polly Longlips was always a famous talker,' murmured the landlord flatteringly, and moving to take in his hand the object of his eulogium. But Supple Jack evidently recoiled at so doubtful a liberty in such dangerous times, and drew the instrument more completely within the control of his own arm.

"She's a good critter, Muggs, but is sort o' bashful among strangers; and when she puts up her mouth, it ain't to be kissed or to kiss, I tell you. She's not like other gals in that pertic❜lar. Now, don't think I mistrust you, Muggs, for 't would be mighty timorsome was I to be afeared of anything you could do with a rifle like her, having but one arm to go upon. It's only a jealous way I have, that makes me like to keep my Polly out of the arms of any other man. It's nateral enough, you know, to a person that loves his gal.""

It is of such simple, out-of-the-way materials as this that Simms has constructed the series of novels which so vividly help us to realize the cost of our liberties. To freshly commend their charm is not to overlook their crudities, nor is it unduly to apologize for them. The kind of impression which he produces is sufficiently rare to include a good deal of incidental tolerance; and he who has once come to know the straightforward, manly qualities of his

art will not allow himself to be too much disturbed by its frequent want of proportion and finish.

Of Simms himself it would be interesting to know more than we do. We are told that he was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1806; that he attempted several rôles besides that of author, and in authorship itself did not confine his attention to less than half a dozen distinct fields of writing. A lawyer, journalist, politician, and planter, he yet found time to write nearly sixty volumes, the best of which have been republished many times, and are still being freshly issued in our own day. Several have been translated into the French and German. These include fifteen volumes of more or less respectable verse; a history and geography of his native State; biographies of Marion, Captain John Smith, Chevalier Bayard, and Nathanael Greene; together with lectures, pamphlets, and a considerable amount of Shakespearean criticism and general literary work. The three series of roBorder, Colonial, and Revolutionary embody a picture in orderly sequence of American life up to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the careers of most of the heroes who have made themselves famous during that time upon Southern soil. It is principally by the last series, however, that Simms will in future be known, not only because the nature of the subject will call attention to his work, but also because it was peculiarly fitted to display his best powers. For it is the

mances

honorable distinction of both the man and the writer that he identified himself with the annals and spirit of American life at its most critical period, and thus became in a graphic and delightful way an exponent of its history.

Edward F. Hayward.