within its influence.

at once upon the mind in words that are things. Milton does not possess this poetic comprehensiveness of conception and combination; but he stands before us as the grandest and mightiest individual man in literature-a man who transmuted all thoughts, passions, acquisitions, and aspirations into the indestructible substance of personal character. Assimilating and absorbing into his own nature the spirit of English Puritanism, he starts from a firm and strong, though somewhat narrow base; but, like an inverted pyramid, he broadens as he ascends, and soars at last into regions so exalted and so holy that his song becomes, in his own divine words, "the majestic image of a high and stately drama, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a seven-fold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies!" It would

The exception to this statement, as far as regards universality, is found in that puzzle of critical science, "Nature's darling" and marvel, Shakspeare, who, while he comprehends England, is not comprehended by it, but stands, in some degree, not only for English but for modern thought; and Bacon's capacious and beneficent intellect, whether we consider the ethical richness of its tone or the beautiful comprehensiveness of its germinating maxims, can hardly be deemed, to use his own insular image, "an island cut off from other men's lands, but rather a continent that joins to them." Still, accepting generally those limitations of English thought which result from its intense vitality and nationality, we are not likely to mourn much over its relative narrowness, if we place it by the side of the barren amplitude, or ample barrenness, of abstract think-not become us here to speak of Newton-although, ing. Take, for example, any great logician, with his mastery of logical processes, and compare him with a really great reasoner of the wide, conceptive genius of Hooker, or Chillingworth, or Barrow, or Burke, with his mastery of logical premises, and, in respect to mental enlightenment alone, do you not suppose that the clean and clear, but unproductive understanding of the passionless dialectician will quickly dwindle before the massive nature of the creative thinker? The fabrics of reason, indeed, require not only machinery but materials.

As a consequence of this ready interchange of reflective and creative reason in the instinctive operation of the English mind, its poets are philosophers, and its philosophers are poets. The old English drama, from its stout beginning in Marlowe's

consistent mightiness" and "working words," until it melted in the flushed, wild-eyed voluptuousness of Fletcher's fancy, and again hardened in the sensualized sense of Wycherley's satire and the diamond glitter of Congreve's wit, is all aglow with the fire and fierceness of impassioned reason. Dryden argues in annihilating sarcasms and radiant metaphors; Pope runs ethics into rhythm and epigrams. In the religious poets of the school of Herbert and Vaughan, a curious eye is continually seen peering into the dusky corners of insoluble problems, and metaphysic niceties are vitally inwrought with the holy quaintness of their meditations, and the wild-rose perfume of their sentiments; and, in the present century, the knottiest problems of philosophy have come to us touched and irradiated with the etherial imaginations of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge, or shot passionately out from the hot heart of Byron.

But, reluctantly leaving themes which might tempt us to wearying digressions, we wish to add a word or two respecting the mental characteristics of four men who are pre-eminently the glory of the English intellect-Chaucer, Shakspeare, Milton, and Newton; and if the human mind contains more wondrous faculties than these exhibit, we know them not. The essential quality of Chaucer is the deep, penetrating, Dantean intensity of his single conceptions, which go right to the heart of the objects conceived, so that there is an absolute contact of thought and thing without any interval. These conceptions, however, he gives in succession, not in combination; and the supreme greatness of Shakspeare's almost celestial strength is seen in this, that while he conceives as intensely as Chaucer, he has the further power of combining diverse conceptions into a complex whole, "vital in every part," and of flashing the marvelous combination

in the exhaustless creativeness of his imagination, few poets have equaled him-except to note the union in his colossal character of boundless inventiveness with an austere English constancy to the object in view. His mind, when on the trail of discovery, was infinitely fertile in the most original and ingenious guesses, conjectures, and hypotheses, and his life might have been barren of scientific results had he yielded himself to their soft fascination; but in that great, calm mind they were tested and discarded with the same rapid ease that marked their conception, and the persistent Genius, pitched far beyond the outmost walls of positive knowledge,

"Went sounding on its dim and perilous way!"

In these remarks on the English Mind, with their insufficient analysis of incomplete examples, and the result, it may be, of a most "scattering and unsure observance," we have at least endeavored to follow it as it creeps, and catch a vanishing view of it as it soars, without subjecting the facts of its organic life to any rhetorical exaggeration or embellishment. We have attempted the description of this transcendent star in the constellation of nationalities, as we would describe any of those great products of nature whose justification is found in their existence. Yet we are painfully aware how futile is the effort to sketch in a short essay characteristics which have taken ten centuries of the energies of a nation to evolve; but, speaking to those who know something by descent and experience of the virtues and the vices of the English blood, we may have hinted what we could not represent. For this proud and practical, this arrogant and insular England,

"Whose shores beat back the ocean's foamy feet," is the august mother of nations destined to survive her; has sown, by her bigotry and rapacity no less than her enterprise, the seeds of empires all over the earth; and from the English Mind as its germ has sprung our own somewhat heterogeneous but rapidly organizing American Mind, worthy, as we think, of its parentage, and intended, as we trust, for a loftier and more comprehensive dominion; distinguished, unlike the English, by a mental hospitality which eagerly receives, and a mental energy which quickly assimilates, the blended lifestreams of various nationalities; with a genius less persistent but more sensitive and flexible; with a freedom less local, with ideas larger and more generous, with a past, it may be, less rich in memories, but with a future more glorious in hopes.

Editor's Easy Chair.

THERE have been of late some remarkable inci

for the glory of England than any other class of Englishmen.

It is ludicrous to think that William Shakspeare would not be "received" by Victoria Guelph.

The Queen, of course, as a Queen, is a mere form. Her state functions are simply ceremonies. But why should she live always in state ceremo

dents in the history of authors. We hinted at them last month. Béranger died, and the French army had to parade to protect Paris from a possible revolution over his grave. Dickens was in-nies any more than wear her crown and hold her vited to perform before the English Queen and court, and declined to appear unless he and his friends, being gentlemen, were treated as gentlemen-a natural courtesy which the Queen (being no gentleman) declined. Thackeray, running for Parliament in the city of Oxford, was defeated by only a few votes, and Mr. Macaulay is now Baron Macaulay.

The meaning of all this is, that as the world grows, and the troubadour, from a sweet singer in a hall, becomes a power in society, his words are continually ripening into deeds. And where the popular will makes the government, it naturally selects for governors men who have shown that they know human life and human nature.

Béranger was an idol in France. His name stood for the idea of popular freedom. It was a lyric of liberty, and its very mention carried music to the general heart.

sceptre in her nursery? May not the Queen of England be a lady, as she is a mother? Is it not etiquette for the Queen of England publicly to honor in her palace the most illustrious man in England? May she publicly "receive" the most distinguished roués in her kingdom-the Earl of Cardigan, for instance-and decline to notice the great successor of Walter Scott?

Poor little woman! You pity her for being im prisoned in all that state splendor. You can not believe that it was she who shut the door in Dickens's face, and the faces of his friends. The Queen of England may be a form, but why must Victoria Guelph be a snob?

The snobbishness should have been left entirely to the American gentlemen in Paris, who declined, a year or two since, to ask Dickens to a Washington ball, to which they did not hesitate to invite one of the most notorious women in Paris-the Prin

And Thackeray was defeated at Oxford.

He declined office under the Monarchy and Em-cess Mathilde. pire; so he did under the Republic. But, like most genuine men of letters every where, his heart was with the popular cause. He knew that, ideally, the will of the many would make the most practicable law for the many; and the French people reverenced themselves in honoring Béranger.

But it was a singular spectacle to see this simple, retired man-a singer not too choice in his life or in his verse-borne to his grave amidst the hushed expectation of an empire; the government, which feared his name might be the war-cry of a revolution, taking care to soothe with it the excitement of the populace. It made itself chief mourner. Imperial carriages followed the bier; imperial soldiers preserved "order," as the word is understood in despotisms, and with imperial honors the poet of the people was laid in his grave.

Such things are hardly possible elsewhere than in France. Douglas Jerrold was buried quietly by a group of famous men, his friends, on a soft summer afternoon. No army was called out; but England mourned one of the powers of England. No speech was made at either grave; but there was a very loud lesson at the grave of Béranger. It was this: that literature is no longer a dream; that an author is not a tumbler on tight-ropes and a dancer on bottles only, but that a poet may practically paralyze an emperor, and his song be more terrible to despotisms than an army with banners.

And so, in old times, courts had their buffoons and jesters, and ranked them with their servants. Now, the court is challenged to recognize the proper claim of genius-and, failing to do that, is compelled to seek its amusement elsewhere.

The Queen of England comes of a family notoriously dull, coarse, and illiterate. The Hanoverian court of England has never been renowned for a solitary thrill of sympathy with what is noblest and best in England. Her present fruitful Majesty frowned to death the Lady Flora Hastings, tied a garter around the leg of Louis Napoleon-the uncertain son of an uncertain mother-and now declines to receive as gentlemen the men who do more

Let us hope that Mr. Cardwell can serve Oxford better. Only it is no argument against Thackeray, as a member of Parliament, that he is a man of genius and a novelist.

Wellington was but a general-until he showed he could command the Commons as well as an army. That a man has not passed his tender years in sucking red tape is no disadvantage to him, and all governments gain by plain good sense.

Of course, we are all reconciled to Thackeray's defeat-regretting only that he should be beaten any how or any where, and remembering that Bayard Taylor writes of having seen some of the sketches for the new novel which has been so long coming-"The Virginians”—in which, let us hope that he will do for us and our life and society what he has already done for his native English. He was not long in Virginia; but he seems to have a kind of cavalier's sympathy for it, and has already touched its soil in "Henry Esmond." That was a splendid historical study-a book to read in its quaint old type, and believe that we were tasting the very times themselves in a delightful relic. But the historical novel that deals with historical facts, instead of the spirit of historical epochs, can never be more entertaining than a very good history. Macaulay's story of the Monmouth rebellion is quite as good as any novel that could be written upon the same subject. Besides, the same faculties which make a good novelist of society to-day do not necessarily make a good novelist of yesterday. A man may see well and clearly into the life around him, and yet be very blind when he throws his eyes further.

Happily, no author has a surer instinct of the scope of his own genius than Thackeray, and we may very safely leave ourselves in his hands.

WE have spoken of Béranger. We want to speak of one of his songs. They can no more be translated properly into English than Burns can be done into French. But that much may be done toward faithfully rendering their drift-but never

their wit, or pathos, or rhythm, or color-the ad- | measure, nor is it by any means literal, but it has mirable translations of Mr. Young show. the ring, the afflatus, of the original.

There is one of his most famous songs, Le Grenier-"The Garret❞—of which that quaint and

THE GARRET.

fascinating literary artist, Father Prout, has made "Oh, it was here that love his gifts bestowed

an exquisite paraphrase.

Who Father Prout is?

Long ago, then, in the remote antiquity of ten or a dozen years since, when Easy Chairs sportively took their pleasure about the world, the present Easy Chair, on the loveliest days of late October -or was it November? so transfigured is every thing in Italy-came to Rome.

"Where shall I now find raptures that were felt, Joys that befell,

And hopes that dawned at twenty, when I dwelt" in Rome!

The dear old city is full of quaint and curious things-men in strange costumes, and women in stranger; and monks, friars, popes, cardinals, and others of the third sex, in the strangest of all. To be strange in Rome is, therefore, to be very strange.

One day, idly sauntering along the Corso, we stopped to watch a small man, with spectacles on his nose, a baggy surtout enveloping his form, and enormous mocassins on his feet. There are all kinds of curious boots and shoes in Rome-the Russians, especially, wear surprising things at that end of the body; but mocassins were entirely new. The small man slid and shuffled along in them, as if he were navigating himself in a pair of scows, and his face had the gleam of inward humor which showed him to be a man of fancy and an Irishman. His eyes, seen behind the spectacles, had that peculiar watery, sea-green illumination—a superficial light which is quite enough to have given the descendants of King Brian the sobriquet "emerald," even if they had not received it from the "swate green oil" over which the family reigns.

The little man was hidden in his own thoughts as he sailed by us, and the friend who was leaning on one of our arms told us that the figure was that of a Jesuit manqué-a man who was not quite a Jesuit-an Irishman of talent, and valuable to his church, but, unhappily, too fond of what Sheridan loved. He was a suspended priest, or a priest out of place; his name, Father Mahony; his fame, that of Father Prout.

On youth's wild age!

Gladly once more I seek my youth's abode
In pilgrimage.

Here my young mistress with her poet dared
Reckless to dwell;

She was sixteen, I twenty, and we shared
This attic cell.

"Yes, 'twas a garret! be it known to all
Here was Love's shrine:

There read in charcoal traced along the wall
The unfinished line.

Here was the board where kindred hearts would blend.
The Jew can tell

How oft I pawned my watch to feast a friend

In attic cell.

"Oh, my Lisette's fair form could I recall
With fairy wand!

There she would blind the window with her shawl-
Bashful, yet fond!

What though from whom she got her dress I've since
Learned but too well?

Still, in those days I envied not a prince
In attic cell.

"Here the glad tidings on our banquet burst
'Mid the bright bowls.

Yes, it was here Marengo's triumph first
Kindled our souls!

Bronze cannon roared: France, with redoubled might,
Felt her heart swell!

Proudly we drank our consul's health that night

In attic cell.

"Dreams of my youthful days! I'd freely give,
Ere my life's close,

All the dull days I'm destined yet to live
For one of those!

Where shall I now find raptures that were felt,
Joys that befell,

And hopes that dawned at twenty, when I dwelt
In attic cell!"

The old man lived and died faithful to the recollection. His whole life was as simple and natural as this little song which tells one of its passages. The applause of a nation, and its fond idolatry, never elated or deceived him. No other man but Napoleon ever excited such enthusiasm in that most enthusiastic people; and, by the force of his own sincerity, the poet praised only what was noHe was an old magazinist in England; wrote ble and admirable in the Emperor, not sparing his in Frazer and elsewhere; was a friend of Ma- vanities and errors. He was not a poet onlyginn; turned Mother Goose's rhymes into Greek; he was a power in France. Among all modern wrote burlesques and grotesques; translated, par- poets he is one of those who truly fulfilled the aphrased; was full of knowledge, wit, poetry, pa- poet's office. He played upon the hearts of a peothos, facility; delighting every body, never get-ple as upon a harp, and his pen was more potent ting on, shiftless, uncertain, a beautiful bit of machinery wanting only the mainspring; just such a character as Dr. Shelton Mackenzie knows more about and writes better about than any body else -an Irish literary soldier of fortune, with his heart in his hand, doubtless; one of the best fellows in the world, and good for nothing-in fact, what right has Dr. Mackenzie to delay longer telling us about Father Prout?

than the most patriotic sword in the country. Béranger must be ranked among the few real poets in history. His claim is as indisputable as that of Shakspeare or Burns; although he was as different from each of them as they were from each other. His very name has already become a synonym of geniality and patriotism. Governments feared him, the people loved him: and so great was the fear of Government of the dead Béranger, that it affected to love him more than the people, that it might thrust them from his grave. From his grave they could do it--but not from his memory-not from his words. They will sing his songs and tell the simple story of his life until their own natures are changed. Béranger knew the genius of France, and nowhere is it so well justified as in his poetry.

shrugging his shoulders, or tossing his hair, or rolling his eyes; but if you have heard him play the Adelaide of Beethoven, or the fantasia from Don Giovanni, you will surely agree that he conceives the music and sympathizes with it, as it was intended by the composers. Does Mrs. John Jones do more? Then naturally when you go to a crowded room, and sit and suffocate as if you were in a vapor-bath combined with the stocks, and hear him play the same pieces you heard him

and warm, and don't care to come again. But you
must remember that he is giving concerts to make
money, and that he plays the music which he knows
is popular and pleasing. He is not performing to
you every evening; but if you knew him, and he
would come into your parlor, and with the same
grace, and elegance, and tenderness, play the mu-
sic that you most love to hear Mrs. John Jones
play, do you think he would do it any the less
skillfully and satisfactorily because he would do
it "perfectly ?" Is it the playing you do not like,
or the circumstances of his public playing? Pos-
sibly it is the latter-is it not probably so? Don't
agree if you can help it, dear Lady Urania; for
if you are still unconvinced, you will write once
more to your loyal
EASY CHAIR.”

WHEN steam first conquered the Atlantic, and the Sirius and Liverpool came puffing up the Bay, in the very face of the good Doctor Dionysius Lardner, who had conclusively demonstrated that it could not be done, we all threw up our hats and declared that the ocean was now really bridged, and that Europe was but a suburb or neighboring ally of the great, free, and enlightened republic. This was true-but it was a truth in the future tense at that time. Now it has become present. But being long used to the steam bridge, and busy-play the evening before, you are tired, and vexed, ing ourselves with "cutting under" it with a telegraph, we have failed to remark that the lines of the allies have at many points been blended-and that, thanks to the steam, many a luxury and delight has become common to both sides of the sea. Given to the contemplation of nature and the study of man as this Easy Chair is, it was impressed recently with the fact that New York-which our neighbors call us provincial for calling metropolitan-has yet several very substantial claims to that name of metropolis. There are London and Paris, for instance-which the most vindictive provincial will concede to be metropolises they have been growing and flourishing for how many years, and they have at this moment no better music, for instance the crowning grace of a metropolis-than this little Manhattan mushroom of ours, if that term shall be considered more faithfully descriptive than the other m. In one of the brightest and loveliest September nights we had in New York, at the same time, an opera company, of which Frezzolini was prima donna, Vieuxtemps and Thalberg, king, each, of his instrument; and we had the most airy, finished, and elegant of comedians, Mr. Charles Mathews. As we rolled up Broadway in the cheerful gaslight and bumped against the swarming mass of passengers, and beheld them pouring in, not only to the concerts and dramas of these famous people, but to the performances of Miss Heron, of Mr. Murdock, of the Ravels, of the many minstrels, foreign and domestic, we felt that the steam bridge had done its work, and had made the old and new worlds faubourgs of each other. Of one of the kings, Thalberg, we spoke when he was first here. When he came again, a paper said that he did the same old things precisely in the same old way. It might have added that the things were popular and the way was perfect. Urania writes to us, that after she had heard the great pianist three or four times, she did not care to go again-that it was perfect, but perhaps perfection is a little tiresome; and that on the whole she would rather have Mrs. Jones-Mrs. John Jones-come and pass an evening with her and play the domestic piano, while she darned the paternal stockings.

Who would not write to the lovely Urania if he could-if in any manner he could invent a pretext for doing so? But she requested an answer to this note. With her own ivory hand propelling a swan's quill, she asked that we would reply. What a happy morning that request gave this Chair! With a golden pen upon satin paper-as tenderly as if it had been writing happiness upon her heart, instead of advice in a letter-it wrote:

"DEAR YOUNG LADY: Your feeling is natural; but there is another side to think of. The great pianist seems to understand thoroughly the character of his instrument-to know what it can do, and what it can not do--and he plays accordingly. He does not try to help the "expression" by

OUR venerable friend Solomon Gunnybags returned several weeks since from his summer tour. The alarming aspect of "affairs" cut him short in a little progress he was making through his native land, and he gave cars and steamers no rest until, as he said, he "touched bottom again" in Wall Street. Fortunately he touched bottom without going to the bottom-a truth which it would be very difficult to our accomplished friend, Professor Roemer, to render into intelligent French or Chaldee, yet which is a truth nevertheless.

The family Gunny bags were chagrined and indignant at this precipitate return. "Going home in August," said Miss Gunnybags. "Oh! papa, papa!"

"And I haven't yet worn my new muslin à l'imperatrice," cried Miss Bell Gunnybags, bursting into sobs.

But both of the young ladies at once perceiving the enormity of the situation, met it bravely by asking in a breath,

"What will people say ?"

Who are "people," of whom we dwell in such eternal terror? Have you ever seen "people ?" Have you ever heard "people say" what we are constantly in a panic lest they should say? If you go to town in August whose business is it, except the cook's and chambermaid's-and the lover's, of course, Miss Bell, if he happen to be tied to town by business? What have "people" ever done for you that you should square all your conduct according to the view they may happen to take of it? Are "people" your particular friends? Are they a highly moral and exemplary, simple and honest class, whose judgment would be a real condemnation? Do "people" care for you, except as you care for ballet-dancers, and naughty novels, and the preaching of the Rev. Leek Todley, and other things that amuse and excite you for a moment?

No. Miss Gunnybags and Miss Bell Gunnybags, you know very well that "people" are just the men and women who are least worth attention. The women have small waists and no hearts at all; the men are dandies and dull. They are a set

of fashionably dressed, idle, vapid gossips, who | bloom of an English summer seemed to have floated haven't sincerity enough to be positively bad, but to these shores. Now among those red leaves and who sip sin at the edges, and die of the poison cool airs of autumn, let us repeat the comfortable without having tasted its sweetness. It is a mat- words of Goethe: ter of profound concern what such "people" think of you, isn't it? It is a sad misfortune if they should happen to "wonder why the Gunny bags went home in August."

Of course it is easy to say they haven't governed rightly; they have played the despot; they have not counted Sepoys as more than material for musket-bearing; their Superior Courts have not declared them citizens; the men of Oude and Cawnpore were little better than Dreds; white England gathered rice and rupees, and lived on curry and chicken, while copper India sweated and fumed, and gradually stole into the knowledge of a Tribune philosophy. And the philosophy taught them what it will teach all savages- -to slay their masLet that be your autumnal reflection as you set-ters and violate their mistresses, and spend a great tle into your Easy Chair to recall the summer's Bacchanal fête in blood. campaign.