into a national metropolis; the little, low houses of wood will be succeeded by huge buildings, palatial, vast, with towers, balconies, gilded railings, carriage-ways, and other appurtenances of wealth; the frequent vacant spaces will be filled with architecture of the large minded, cosmical- the profane will say promiscuous description peculiar to Washington; the long avenues will not be stretches of desolation; residences will not be confounded with shops, as in rural districts; stores will be enlarged and adorned; an immense city, unique, peculiar, different from any seat of government in the world, singular among American towns, will grow up on the shore of the Potomac.

In the years

Washington, it will be seen, is to be a creation of the future. that are coming, it will not be a cheap place to live in, as it is now, comparatively. Real estate will be more valuable; rents will rise; the cost of provisions will increase; taxes will augment; desirable situations will be more difficult to obtain; the price of building material will be enhanced; in a word, all the consequences of advanced civilization will be felt. It is a pity that some things were not differently done at the outset, - the design of the Capitol, for instance, the laying out of Pennsylvania Avenue above Fourteenth Street, the provision for a continuous line between the Capitol and the White House, the rounding of the corner near the treasury, with a wide sweep beyond; but every detail cannot be thought of at once. The ugly buildings in front of the treasury mausoleum will be removed one of these days; the huge, unsightly pillars that bar the street beyond the treasury grounds will be taken down; the grim iron fences will not be left to perplex or madden strangers forever; and one by one conveniences will be introduced. The city deserves all that can be spent or lavished on its embellishment, the love of

its citizens, the care of its public-spirited men and women. Its promise is of the fairest; its performance thus far errs on the negative rather than on the positive side, and can easily be mended as taste and elegance dictate. There is money enough, if it can be expended judiciously, in the right direction; not in heaping up granite and marble when ideas give out, not in buying bad pictures or horrible statues, not in paint and gilding where none is needed, not in tessellated floors on common corridors, not in stucco and frescoing, but in solid appliances for public comfort. There is room for satire, but more need of suggestion, on the part of critics who wish well to the capital of the nation. Ridicule has been poured out unstintingly and to excellent purpose, but the day is approaching when suggestions by competent minds will be demanded and the authority of the best judges will be sought. The uncomely features are many, but they are evident to observing eyes, and can be altered at an hour's warning. The permanent objects - buildings that cannot be disturbed, streets that cannot be straightened, squares that cannot be displaced· are not numerous. Even a fastidious taste finds little to be made over again, though much to alter and complete.

Washington is an interesting city, which naturally excites a good deal of comment. There has been much talk about it sometimes in derision of its art, sometimes in scorn of its claims, sometimes in disapproval of its management, sometimes in extravagant praise of its beauty. It is worth while to judge it fairly; remembering its history, bearing in mind its progress of late years, acknowledging the public spirit of its citizens, and holding it to the highest standard of attainment as the home of the republican idea. Too much cannot be written on the subject of its possibilities or its future, provided it is written wisely, with a sincere desire for its

The most free-gaited of talkers was apt to flag when strained to hold his own with a companion of such electric vivacity.

He was a dangerous friend to meet at a time when one's nervous energy was exhausted. His pungent talk was exhilarating when the listener was in good condition; too stimulating for moments of mental fatigue and collapse. One might as well handle a gymnotus after running a foot-race as brave the shower of sparks from his colloquial battery when the brain was tired and aching for repose. Whether his own brain ever rested or wanted rest those who never remember a dull moment in his company might well question.

Besides these remarkable and altogether exceptional gifts, we remember him for qualities which endeared him to many who knew him outside of the social circle where he shone with so much brilliancy. As a patron of art he was discriminating and generous. As an

amateur artist he had taste and skill enough to make his pleasing sketches and painted pebbles an ornament to his own walls and tables, and welcome gifts to the friends for whom he was glad to employ his pencil and his palette.

His warm heart betrayed itself in kind words and generous acts. He thought of the well-being and the enjoyment of all the members of his household as if they had been of his own blood. He felt and enjoyed the privilege of inherited wealth, honestly, heartily, but with no vulgar pretension and no selfish exclusiveness. His affectionate nature found delight in the companionship of his many relatives, among whom he counted that most lovable of men, as unlike him as the moonbeam is unlike the lightning, his brother-inlaw, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A little more than sixty years ago, if one could have looked in at the garden

or climbed up to the garret of No. 7

Walnut Street, he might have seen three boys, in mantles and doublets and other stage appurtenances, enacting the scenes of some truculent melodrama. One of these boys was our vivacious and inventive friend, who must, I think, have been stage manager and chief costumer. The second was a boy of striking beauty, with dark waving locks, who as a prince, or as a poet, or, with an inky cloak and suit of solemn black, as a youthful Hamlet, would have seemed the very ideal of his part. This was the future historian whose name is known and honored in all the academies of the world, whose books are read in all the most widely spoken tongues of Europe, — John Lothrop Motley. The third little boy, with the singular silvery thrill in his voice, I remember it well in the mother from whom it descended to him, this third little boy, the afterglow of whose more than auburn hair came from some ancestor whose sun had set before my day, was the embryo orator whose voice was so recently silenced, - Wendell Phillips.

These were the young companions and the lifelong friends of him over whom the grass is not yet green. Who was there among us worth knowing whom he did not know? Who that knew Boston on its higher levels did not know him?

We are not thinking now of the pleasant books in which his always active mind and happy nature show themselves in every page. We are not thinking of him in his relation to art and artists, though he gave so much of his time and thought and money to these. It is as a living presence in this Boston air which we breathe, in the bright saloon, under the elms of the Common, amidst the flower-beds of the Public Garden, in the noisy street, the silent library, the memory-haunted picture - gallery, everywhere, he comes before us. No man, no man of his generation certainly, pervaded the social atmosphere of this

breezy centre of life so completely. He was the favorite guest of every banquet. A day withered its flowers, but age could not wither him. The sparkle left

"The foaming grape of Eastern France," but his wit bubbled up inexhaustible.

The city seems grayer and older since he has left it. The cold spring winds come in from the bay harsher and more unfriendly. We feel as Emerson felt when he wrote,

"Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day."

Our friend has left a few well-remembered witty sayings of which he has not always had the credit. Now that he is dead and gone, it may be hoped that they will find their way back to the "onlie begetter" of the best sayings Boston has heard since the days of Mather Byles, all whose pleasantries put to

gether would count for nothing by the side of any one of our great wit's prose epigrams. By these he will be remembered as Bias and Periander are immortal among the seven wise men of Greece by a single saying. But how much of all that he was must die with the memory of those now living! I once heard him say that all we are and do is invisibly photographed, and that Heaven keeps the negatives. If all that he said worth recollecting was set down by the recording angel, the celestial scribe must have filled many of his great folios, and found occasion to smile much oftener than to drop a tear on the page before him.

Shenstone's epitaph on his lovely young relative is cruel to the living. I will not say,

"Quanto minus est cum reliquis versari,” but I can say with truth that to recall this friend who has left our companionship must be to many of us one of the sweetest pleasures of memory.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

ABOUT Balzac, the man and the artist, there is a fascination as enduring as his works; possibly more enduring. The spell is endless, and the thirst for further information concerning him, or rather for rearrangements of the old details and fresh utterances upon his quality and significance, is insatiable. Further justification is scarcely needed for the contribution which Mr. Edgar Saltus has recently made to the literature of the subject; but it has, besides, the special merit of presenting within a small space a variety of material taken from scattered sources. Besides the Life by

1 Balzac. By EDGAR EVERTSON SALTUS. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The Riverside Press, Cambridge. 1884.

Des Noiresterres, George Sand's biographical notice, the memoirs and letters prepared by Balzac's sister and Théophile Gautier, and the gossiping reminiscences of Léon Gozlan have been the principal sources open to readers; but Mr. Saltus has ransacked journals and magazines for additional odds and ends, and has brought into effective combination various points that, without such aid, must have remained invisible to the majority. A skillful first chapter carries one through a narrative of the life, so well diversified and helped for ward by picturesque anecdotes that it is freed from the restraints of formal biographizing. After this we have a review of the Comédie Humaine, an ac

ume.

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count of Balzac's experiments in writing for the stage, and a sketch of his harassed and harassing pursuit of wealth. A short collection of epigrammatic or reflective extracts, in translation, illustrating the tendency of Balzac as a thinker, followed by a careful bibliography, closes this attractive little volIt lays no claim to the character of a critical study, yet it is a little strange that the author should have made no allusion to the essays of Taine and Henry James. His own summary of the scope of the Comédie Humaine, however, contains some very good statement. Balzac, he remarks, by the conditions of his self-imposed task, obliged to offer in clear relief the almost imperceptible differences of the types of yesterday and to-day;" but with a peculiar intuition "he chose from among the physiognomies of his epoch an assortment of those fugitive traits which are imperceptible to the eyes of the vulgar," and while in the first part of his great series he presented "individual ities typified," in the second he showed "the same types individualized: ing, for example, the individual Grandet the type of a miser, while in Maître Cornélius the typical quality of avarice is concentrated and incarnated in an individual. This distinction, if subtile, appears to be valid, and brings out sharply the double method and exhaustive power of Balzac. Mr. Saltus's brief disquisition on realism and the present realistic school is also excellent in its concision, its clearness and facile grasp. Taine has declared that Balzac is, next to Shakespeare, "our great repository of documents on human nature;" and though Mr. Saltus admits that in some of the earlier works an influence may traced from Scott and Hoffman, he probably does not assert too much in saying that "Balzac was totally without literary ancestry." From what sources he drew his intellectual nutriment, and how he developed, the present writer explains,

mak

be

no doubt, as well as may be from the scanty data obtainable; but, after all, hardly more can be done than to recite the circumstances of his childhood and youth, and then to add that this particular person turned out very differently from others who had the same surroundings. The growth of supreme genius is endogenous. What the man wrote of himself in Facino Cane furnishes the only clue, and that a vague one, to the growth and action of a faculty like his: "Observation had become to me intuitive. It penetrated the spirit without neglecting the body, or rather it seized exterior details so clearly that it immediately went beyond them." Such a mind divines the presence of recondite values in whatever may lie around it, as the competent geologist reads on the surface of the ground an index to the precious metals hidden below. But, however we may fail to unriddle the secret of the imaginative seer, the interest of watching him in the process of his art and trying to understand the magic of his vision never ceases. Balzac, moreover, is unique among the greatest writers in that imagination, with him, had as great an effect upon daily life as it had in forming his creations. Not the least delightful portions of this monograph. are those which detail his eccentricities, at times almost involving hallucination; his schemes for gaining sudden wealth by cutting down a Norwegian forest and selling it in Paris, or digging for a buried treasure in the West Indies, or hiring a shop which was to be painted black and yellow, and devoted to the sale of pineapples from his garden at Ville d'Avray, when as yet not a single pineapple had been raised. Equally amusing are the efforts he made to escape interruptions, by living under the name of the "Widow Durand," and establishing a system of mysterious passwords, through the use of which alone his friends could gain admittance to his rooms. Some of Balzac's critics have