she would not finish her "pas de seul." The manager was horrorstruck at her pride, and sent for her to lecture her on such a preposterous self-conceit. The indignant danseuse was ushered into the presence of Robert William, the great autocrat of the theatrical world. He received her with these words: “Madame, I hope you will allow me to say that an audience has a right to hiss as well as to applaud. Your pride is dreadful to contemplate. Are you aware that I myself have actually been hissed?"

The lady's reply was, "Indeed, sir, and I hope you liked it." To return to Dana's critique, he says very happily:

"The French tied up their writers, with the little inspiration they had, as if they were madmen, till well might Madame de Staël ask, 'Why all this reining of dull steeds?" At the same time they taught the world to hold as uncouth the movements natural to man, and to admire sudden, sharp, angular shootings of the limbs as the only true lines of beauty, yet the polite world not long ago read and talked nothing but French, and went to church in a galliard, and came home in a levanto.'

It is pleasant to meet with an American writer who has the courage to speak what he thinks right out, and this rare virtue belongs essentially to Dana. We hope the American public will receive patiently the expression of our firm belief that there is less freedom of opinion in the greatest of republics than in many of the greatest of despotisms.

"We must not forget, however, to make one exception from our general neglect of American authors, for therein is our boast-our

very liberal patronage of the compilers of geographies, in great and little, reading-books, spelling-books, and arithmetics. It is encouraging to our literary adventurers, that, should they fail to please the public in works of invention, they have at least this resort; and the consolation, that if they are not to rank with the poets and novel writers of the day, they may be studied and admired till Pike and Webster are forgotten."

All this, no doubt, is very encouraging to men of imagination, such as the author of "Kaloolah" and others of his genius for romance, but it is a very hard thing to be said of a great nation, who speak the language that Shakspeare spoke, and hold the faith and morals of Milton, to use the thought of Wordsworth—but it is undoubtedly true even at this minute to a certain extent, although we fancy we discern signs of a clearing up of this Boethian night of American literature.

A great portion of this crying injustice to native authors is founded in either the timidity or malice of some of the reviews. We are told that the editors of one of the leading critical papers in New York have not the courage to mention the name of a well-known American writer in their columns, although he is their personal friend, and a contributor to their paper. To make this the more startling, we are justified in adding that privately they esteem him as a writer of great and sterling merit. What a state! when men of independent fortune dare not in their own review honestly avow their own opinions! This "suppressio veri" has a name in the logic of Bacon, which would apply here very strongly. Dana is a gratifying contrast to the Adelphi above alluded to; he says very innocently:

"Mr. Irving's immediate success does not rest, perhaps, wholly

upon his merit, however great. Salmagundi' came out in numbers, and a little at a time. With a few exceptions, it treated of the city, and what was seen and felt, and easy to be understood by those in society. It had to do with the present and real, not the distant and ideal. It was pleasant morning or after-dinner reading, never taking up too much of a gentleman's time from his business and pleasures, nor so exalted and spiritualized as to seem mystical to his far-reaching vision. It was an excellent thing to speak of in the rests between cotillon, and pauses between games at cards, and answered a further convenient purpose, inasmuch as it furnished those who had none of their own with wit enough, for sixpence, to talk out the sitting of an evening party. In the end, it took fast hold of people, through their vanity; for frequent use had made them so familiar with it as to look upon it as their own: and having retailed its good things so long, they began to run of the notion that they were all of their own making."

This is a very fair brick of the Dana architecture, and exhibits how painstaking and candid a critic he is; it also shows up that elongation rather than that elaboration of criti cism, which so frequently wearies the reader, and spoils the effect of his own simple, earnest thought. He is, too, afraid of its not being understood in all its bearings. We are happy to be able to agree with Mr. Dana in praising Mr. Irving's "Salmagundi;" it was one of the favorite books of our childhood, and it will, with the "History of New York," probably be his chief passport to fame.

Notwithstanding Mr. Dana's manliness of sentiment, he is at little bitten with the classical Addisonian mania. An admi

ration of that agreeable writer seems to be a sort of literary measles, which most English and American writers are obliged to have once in their life, and then afterwards to be safe from further attacks.

In another essay, written many years ago, Mr. Dana shows a great advance upon the system of education then in vogue.

"We have become too officious in our helps to children; we leave not enough to the workings of nature, and to impressions and tints too exquisite and delicate for any hands but hers; but with a vain and vulgar ignorance disturb the character she was silently and slowly moulding into beauty, till it is formed to our narrow and false taste. Anxious lest the clearness of their reason should be dimmed, their minds are never left to work their own way through the obscure: but ever-burning lights are held up before them. They are not indulged in the conjectural, but all is anticipated and overdone. We do not enough consider that oftentimes the very errors into which they fall, through a want of thorough knowledge of what they see or read, bring the invention into action, and thus give a life to the mind, which will survive when these errors are removed and forgotten. Children may reason well, as far as their knowledge carries them along, and their reason may still preside over what their imagination supplies.

"An over-anxiety to make of babies little matter-of-fact men and unbreeched philosophers, will not add much to their sum of knowledge in after life, and nothing to that faculty which teaches them to consider and determine for themselves, and begets that independent wisdom without which their heaped up knowledge is but an incumbrance. A child now learns by heart how a shoe is made, from the flaying of an ox for the leather to the punching

the last hole, and can give the best of reasons for its being so made, when it had much better be chasing a rainbow. Such a system may make inquisitive, but not wide-ranging minds. It kills the poetry of our character, without enlarging our philosophy, and will hardly make us worthier members of society, or give us the humble compensation of turning out better mechanics."

All this is admirable, and shows that the truest practical wisdom is in the most poetical minds. The old system of education has many fine traits in it-we mean the old chivalric theory. Now utility is the Juggernaut before whose wheels everything noble or romantic is thrown down and crushed. The loftiest minds are those most required in the busy world; they are the salt that sweetens the earth, the yeast that leavens the whole. A poet should be encouraged to come out into the crowded haunts, and mingle familiarly with his fellow-men, and not, as is often the case, driven into his own solitary chamber, to turn his face to the wall and die. The great, the fatal evil of the present day is want of imagination. There is not enough to bring the human masses to that average idealism absolutely necessary to carry on the Christian government of the world. The New Testament is rapidly becoming practically obsolete, but, like all hypocrites, the respectable classes preach more in proportion as they practise less. Our Saviour would stand a poor chance in modern cities; destitution or a jail would be his fate, while possibly some benevolent men might suggest a lunatic asylum as a humane compromise.

Tested by the world, the Sermon on the Mount is an absurdity, and the actions of Christ those of a maniac. Hard as it may appear, the majority of respectable men are practical