Lighting his pipe, that was filled with sweet Natchitoches tobacco."

Whoever has observed a Tilly Slowboy with a wondering baby on her knee, which she is seesawing to and fro, and amusing with some great story all about nothing, must have experienced the feeling which this sort of writing cannot but excite. Suppose Tilly is entertaining her charge with a history of the war; she chants hexameters without knowing it, merely to chime with the motion of her knees:"President Polk is the crossest old man that ever was heard of,

Fighting and killing is just what he likes and he cuts people's heads off When they don't mind him, like aunty for teatable slicing the bread; and General Scott he went away off to conquer the

Mex'cans,

And he had a great sword, O! ever so long,

and he rode a stout war-horse-

Rode a horse that probably cost him I don't know how many dollars;

And his epaulettes, my dear me ! they shined like-anything shiny,

And in his cap were feathers enough to stuff

out a bolster

But when he come to the city, says he, 'I must put in a new one,'

And he did it-"

But no parody could be made colder and more remote from true poetic eloquence than the style of Evangeline. Nor would it be very easy to write so long a piece, intended to be so affecting, with so little manly thinking.

What shall be said of such an incident as this, and the advice which follows it: When Evangeline and Father Felician are going down the Mississippi in a cumbrous boat, they are one night moored under the boughs of Wachita willows. That very night, under the other bank of the river, a swift boat with Gabriel on board passes upward. The river being there something less than a mile wide, Evangeline feels by

some mesmeric attraction that her lover is near, and tells the father so, at the same time adding that it is only her fancy, and that he will not probably understand her

"But made answer the reverend man, and he smiled as he answered,"

(But should smile why the reverend man, we confess we do not perceive here.)

Most profound Father! so profound that a question arises as to his meaning. If it would please the poor girl to think that her Gabriel was near because she felt so, that was very well; but one does not see how her feeling could have any influence on the actual fact. She might have felt so had he not been passing, and the father's advice would have been just as pertinent; indeed, for aught he knew, he If the might be a thousand miles away. father really meant to say that her feeling was to the actual fact what the buoy is to the anchor, he is talking nonsense; if he meant, as he says, that her words were to her feelings what the buoy is to the anchor, and that therefore she should trust to illusions, he is talking worse nonsense. There is no sequitur. We can understand Defoe's feeling that he was urged by an overruling impulse to do a particular thing, and his advice in such cases to follow the supernatural guidance; Dr. Johnson's leaping over posts in London streets because he felt that if he could or did, something would turn out well, is no absurdity to those who are particular to see the new moon over the right shoulder; the sudden shooting forward of the memory by which for an instant the present and new seems old and familiar, all the occult dreams of poets and musicians, are easy to understand; but this passage is not. It does poem being almost wholly narrative, those not mean anything. Fortunately, the the necessity of remarking upon much of whose duty it is to criticise it are spared such thinking-thinking which it would never be necessary to notice with severity, did it not appear under a form of much pretension.

piece aside from what is wasted in such If we take the general thought of the nonsense as this, and in dressing what should have been an affecting story in such a masquerading costume that it is ridiculous; that is to say, if we consider the bare plot and the naked thread of the

description, there is nothing in them to be condemned. This is but negative praise, yet it is all they deserve. The story, in decent garb, might have told very well in the monthly magazines. Indeed, it is of a kind which would have borne quite a flowery style, and is perhaps sufficiently poetic for verse-reasonable verse, we mean, for no bard on earth could drag it or any other story safely over the quaking boggy syrtis of these hexameters. The characters, though faintly and unartistically drawn, are yet not wholly unnatural. The hero and the heroine love and wish to be together, as all true lovers should and must-Madame Sand's to the contrary notwithstanding. They have no particular life, being merely impossible combinations. of universal qualities; but all the best side of what they are, they are in a very proper and sensible way. Gabriel is simply a manly man, Evangeline a womanly woman, and each is thus not by a superior development but by a common one. They are so, we mean, because the poet tells us that they are so, and ascribes to them common traits which are universal, and nothing else. There is a wide difference between the great universal and the every day. If Evangeline were really the great "historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical," which it is sufficiently apparent from internal evidence it was intended to be, the hero and heroine would have been something more than a stout fellow and a handsome girl; they would have been all that they are and more beside, without being any the less types of humanity. The great names of epic story are by no means such fanciful good creatures. They are not so soft, but are more delicate. Their thoughts and emotions are no less un-individual, but are larger and deeper. They open to us more of the experience of life. Their joy is an exceeding great joy; in their sorrow the "waters come in unto their souls."

Or not to rank the piece with those with which its style and design provoke a comparison-if it be looked upon (that is) not as an artificial attempt to accomplish what it has not accomplished, and what, if it had, would not have been worth accomplishing, but simply as a pastoral poem of such a length-it is not of merit to deserve a place among the best compo

VOL. I. NO. II. NEW SERIES.

12

"Beside the boisterous brcok of Green-head -Ghyll."

For these are something. They are in a legitimate walk of art. They idealize the actual without departing from it. Evansible, till it ends in the incredible. The geline mingles the possible with the imposheroine is a farmer's daughter, and has a heifer of her own, and is not ashamed to "do the milking;" she has woven 'ample and high" clothes-press, with len stuffs, which are the precious dower spacious shelves" full of linen and woolshe is to bring to her husband in marriage, "Better than flocks and herds, being proofs of her skill as a housewife."

66

an

Rich

Can the reader suppose for a moment, that a sonsie lass like this ever "saw serenely the moon pass," etc.? Is she a young lady likely to have been troubled with such a mesmeric fancy as that which leads the good Father Felician to philosophize so profoundly? Of course not. She would have talked and thought differently. She might have had just as deep an affection, just as much constancy, delicacy and sensitiveness as are attempted to be ascribed to her, but she would have expressed herself quite otherwise. people have the same hearts as poor people, but they do not talk in the same way; and it takes a much larger experience than a young lady seventeen years old, betrothed to the son of a blacksmith, can be supposed to have had, to enable one in the low plains of poverty to assume the tone of his fellows who walk on the gilded summits of affluence. Characters should be consistent with themselves. If cottage damsels are to be depicted with the sentiments of ladies, we should see nothing of rural life but jessamines and honey-suckles. The whole should be invested with a harmonizing imaginative atmosphere. When we have "happy peasantry" scenes upon the stage, Mr. Barry has the Alpine mountains put into the slides, and over

these places such a sky as was never seen elsewhere since the second day of Creation. We cannot be, at the same time, awake and dreaming, in spite of Bunyan's promise.

This great fault of Evangeline, its want of keeping, more even than all its faults of style, forces us to deny it merit as a work of the IMAGINATION. It is radically defective as a great poem, in that it lacks a pervading tone. It blends extremes of hue as wide apart as those of the pastorals of Phillips and Wordsworth's Michael. It is too unreal to be real, and too real to be unreal. Like a familiar landscape, done in water colors by a young lady, we recognize just enough to be most intensely aware of the unlikeness. The characters remind one of Punch's designs of Bandits and Scotch Highlanders, worked by boarding-school misses in Berlin wool. The whole piece ought to rank as a work of art with those curious specimens of carv

ing exhibited in museums. It is a series of cubes and spheres and cones in open spaces, cut out of a single piece of soft wood, not for the purpose of producing an effect by its symmetry or beauty of · proportion, but to make us admire at the ingenuity of the carver. Or it is like a wonderful piece of inlaid work, which must have cost immense toil, but which, being irregular and formless, expresses nothing but its maker's patient skill. In brief, it is a most labored piece of fine writing. The words are melodiously arranged; the incidents are pathetic; there is much pleasing luxurious description; the natural feelings of the lovers are, in general, correctly, though incongruously drawn; but with all this, the vital spark is wanting. The piece does not display the depth of emotion, nor the height of rapture, necessary to a great poem. It does not burn or glow with heat, but only congeals and coldly glitters. G. W. P.

THE age of chivalry is gone;" and glad we are that it is, and very much prefer in the interest of human happiness and human freedom, the sway of what one of our own poets has happily designated as this "bank-note age."

In other words, the material interests of the masses, and not the sword of the soldier, now influence the destinies of nations and the course of political events. This is true even of countries where the will of one man controls, in the absence of any constitutional forms, the whole power of government; and it is yet more emphatically true of countries where the people are their own masters and rulers.

Even imperial Russia, with a foot on either continent of Europe and of Asia, and having in her grasp, moreover, a portion of this our continent-even imperial Russia, where soldiers and serfs make up so large a part of the whole nation, cannot set at naught, or disregard, the influence

of this "bank-note age"-when, (we quote at random, and without access to the admirable poem,)

"Feudal names, and titled land," Are powerless to the notes of hand

Of Rothschild and the Barings!

In this, our "model republic," we cannot, à fortiori, launch into bloody and costly war, and into a career of far-off for eign conquest, without feeling, full soon, the check of the spirit of the age. It were wise that this check should at once be heeded; and in the absence of any higher motives and it is sad for us to say that higher motives seem not to have influence with the Administration-the admonition of the empty reverberations of the strong iron chambers of the Sub Treasuries, cannot be without its influence in hastening the termination of the untoward war with Mexico.

The quo modo it is not now our purpose to consider, nor if it were, would it be an easy task to point it out; for as Mr. Calhoun, in his recent speech in favor of falling back behind a defensive line, well said, "One party can make a war, but it takes two to make peace;" and as yet the party of the second part shows no disposition thereto.

Our present purpose is, by contrasting the position in which this country stood at the commencement of the war with Mexico, and that in which it now stands, in special reference to its finances and its public debt, to ascertain at what direct pecuniary cost we have purchased the glories of conquest, and the renown of unsurpassed military skill and prowess.

This is an inquiry which concerns the present, and yet more concerns the future; for if there has been the highest order of manliness in the conduct of our armies in the field, there has been an entire absence of it in the conduct, counsels and policy of the Cabinet. Rushing, for their own purposes, and in pursuance of personal and party calculations, into this war, they did not dare call upon the generation which was to indulge in the expensive "luxury," and reap its contemporaneous harvest of excitement and glory, to pay for the entertainment; but by borrowing under the meanest and thinnest disguise of Treasury notes, the money necessary to carry on hostilities, and then, by the conversion of these notes into a stock for a long term, saddling the debt upon unborn generations, they shuffled upon times to come the burden which the men of the present day should bear, but which, if asked to bear, they would very soon lighten, by at once bringing the war to a close.

Let us now proceed to ascertain what thus far has been the direct and avowed cost of this war, leaving to future investigation the possible and probable amount of its indirect cost, in the shape of pensions, of claims for damages to property, of horses destroyed or lost-that inexhaustible reservoir of claims which, from the time of Amy Dardin's revolutionary stud-horse, to the yet unsatisfied claims for horses lost in the Florida war, has absorbed more public money, as well in the debates on the various propositions, as in the actual allowances made, than would pay for all the

horses in the United States-and of the many other et ceteras which follow in the train of war.

On the first day of July, 1846, there was a balance unappropriated in the Treasury of the United States of $9,126,439, as is stated in the Message to Congress of President Polk, of 8th December, 1846.

The receipts into the Treasury for the year ending 30th June, 1846, were $29,499,247, and for the same period the expenditures were $28,031,114, leaving a balance of $1,468,133; which, added to the balance in the Treasury on 1st July, 1845, $7,358,306, makes the above aggregate of $9,126,439.

The amount of public debt, including Treasury notes, which, according to the same Message, was outstanding on 1st December, 1846, was $24,256,494. Of that amount there was outstanding on 4th March, 1845, when the present Administration came into power, $17,788,799.

The President's last Message, of December, 1847, states the whole amount of the public debt, including Treasury notes, on 1st December last, at $45,659,659; from which deducting the amount outstanding on 4th March, 1845, we shall have for the addition to the debt up to that time under Mr. Polk's administration, the sum of $27,870,859.

When the loan of twenty-three millions of dollars was authorized, 8th January, 1847, it was estimated by the President and the Secretary of the Treasury that the amount thus to be added to the revenue of the Treasury, would "be sufficient to cover the necessary expenditures, both for the war and all other purposes," up to the expiration of the fiscal year, in June, 1848. But in the Message of last December, the President tells us that, in order "to meet the expenditures for the remainder of the present year "-(meaning the fiscal year to terminate on 30th June next!)" and for the next fiscal year to end on 30th June, 1849, a further loan in aid of the ordinary revenue of the government will be needed. Retaining a sufficient surplus in the treasury, the loan required for the remainder of the present fiscal year will be about eighteen millions five hundred thousand dollars!"

After the quasi pledge that no more would be wanted beyond the avails of the twenty