spirits, -not disembodied but more truly em- that a gentleman was lowered by ropes and His feat was celebrated by a poet of Ken was on sea or land.' Coming next to Washington Hall it is announced as the interesting spot where many exploring parties have taken their luncheon: whereupon our hamper is speedily opened and we soon stand with glasses of champagne in our hands ready to drink the toast which some one proposed To G. Washington, Esquire, his Hall!' So far as we were concerned this might have exchanged names with the Revellers' Hall. Going back a few hundred yards I enjoyed the fantastic looks and postures of the company, and their talk and laughter, wrought by the imps of echo into riotous noises, and I thought how easily such a scene would make the fortune of a manager could he reproduce it in some opera which has a revel of robbers or gipsies in it. After this we ascend the 'Rocky Mountains,' then descend into the Dismal Hollow'both names graphic-and pass on by an avenue which, bearing the name of Franklin, reminds us to be philosophical. We came to rest in a beautiful white-fringed 'Bridal Chamber,' which revealed a Mentor among us, who reminded a newly wedded pair present of the analogy to married life furnished by the Cave: We enter it with mirth, but soon feel the impression of its solemn revelations. We find that the torch of Hymen lights us on to deeper and ever deeper realms of our own hearts and of life; lights us on, let it be admitted, to hard trials, rocky mounts, dismal hollows, but at last we are sure to come to - — to' 'Fat Man's Misery," gently suggested the hopeless case of bachelorhood that we carried with us. There are many fine halls then to be passed through one which seems to have walls of jasper, another in which nitre most abounds, a third remarkable for flashing many brilliant colours, a fourth which has a ceiling made up of exquisite white rosettes, a fifth which in addition to the roses is entirely of a faint pink hue until, by what seems to be in the brilliancy of its crystals a Valley of Diamonds, we reach what is called the Maelström, and is the end of the long route. The guide told us that only one man had ever been rash enough to descend the Maëlström, and that he was never heard from again, though a dog that he took with him was found a week afterwards howling and almost famished near a village 15 miles distant. I have learned, however, lately, Down, down, down, Into the darkness dismal, Into the gulf abysmal, And the sepulchral chillness. Lower him prayerfully — Lower, and lower, and lower, Where mortal hath never been before; Till he shall tell us, till he shall show The truth of the tales of long ago And find by the light that his lamp shall throw If this be the entrance to Hell or no. On our return we were taken through some of the finest halls and domes of the other route. At one point our guide collected our torches from us, bade us farewell, and in an instant vanished, leaving us in a darkness absolute enough to make one question whether a human being would not be suffocated by unmitigated night. We felt each other's quickened pulses as hand nervously clasped hand, and listened for some movement of the guide; but for a full quarter of an hour heard nothing but our own breathings and saw nothing. At last, as upon a distant horizon, rose the evening star, and soon, as from behind a lifting cloud of blackness, star after star came forth, the Milky Way shimmered along the vault, planets darted red and gold, the constellations Pleiades, Orion, Cassiopeia's Chair, the Great Bear, shone out, a comet with curved and pink faint train appeared, and now and then flashed a falling star. For a time it seemed that we must have been brought out of the Cave into some ravine, and were gazing into the heavens. It could not be apprehended at once by any of us that even the powerful Maya herself could so cheat the eye, and with a few candles light up such splendour as we now witnessed. It was magnificent, it was thrilling beyond all the sights I had ever seen, and I do not wonder that under it. Emerson conceived his admirable Essay on 'Illusion.' The Star Chamber gives one a new idea of that word, and of the corresponding Power whom the East worshipped as Yoganidra-'the illusory energy of Vishnu,' traceable also in other mythologies. Even when it was announced that we were gazing on the most famous phenomenon of the Cave, we found it difficult to restrain our minds from an occasional suspi er. cion that we were being tricked by the guide | father of English humourists. It was his, instead of by the Cave, and that it was the first to raise and ennoble humour, and to real heaven of fires we were beholding. make it the vehicle of long trains of serious Impressive was the lesson of higher and low-ideas. The novelists of a later period, What I tread under-foot may be, it seems, a star-sown sky to some lower earth. The light of one whole day is much to pay for anything, but it was well laid out in secing that superb vault alone, with its crystal galaxies. And yet the loudest shout of surprise and joy evoked from our party that day was when were next greeted by the burst of sunlight at the Cave's mouth. Whether it was that our eyes had been so long adapted to the vapours and glooms of the grotto, that they struck from the light, those colours which, according to Goethe, are but the minglings of white and black, or whether the resplendence of the ferns and bushes just sprinkled by a light summer shower; certain it is that we seemed to be gazing upon a cascade of manyhued jewels; and grand as had been the scenes beneath, we acknowledged that the culminating transformation-scene was at last wrought by the light of the day. There are,' said Damodara, none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.' The eagerness with which we rushed into the sunshine once more, and our joy in it, seemed to hint at some old force in Nature leading the upward procession of forms, which through ever-refining senses have been in the ages emerging from under to upper worlds. From the London Review. taught by him, used it to solve social and THERE has been from the commencement of scciety a constant process of unseen husbandry going on in the world of mind. Seeds of thought are sown, harvests are reaped and gathered into garners. The fruit remains; and the value of the seed is estimated by its power of multiplication. Great husbandmen arise from time to time, and these fathers of distinct schools of thought and style, like founders of religious orders, pervade society with their disciples and institutions long after they have passed away. It is only as time goes on that the potency of their broadcast is found out. In their day, perhaps, they were small and mean. Their heads scarce rose above the furrows where they scattered their deathless seed; and even when they saw their work thriving, they little imagined how great would be its results. Men laughed and joked, no doubt, before the days of Queen Anne, yet Addison may fairly be styled the He with meditations among the tombs of Westminster Abbey, or a discourse on the Passion, for Good Friday. Lamb, on the contrary, never preached. He was even less religious in his essays than in his own mind. His aim was simply to amuse. left the moral of his stories to be inferred, eschewed the pedant, and depicted things as they are rather than as they should be. Addison wrote for a state of society less advanced, when much was to be learnt and much to be reformed. Sometimes he was a moralist, sometimes a schoolmaster. Amid all his playfulness he never forgot the wants of his age. He had always an ideal before him, and described things as they ought to be. He ridiculed the follies of his time with a view to their reformation, and never thought it enough to convulse his audience with laughter unless, at the same time, he conveyed to them some wholesome instruction. His wit, his versatility, and dramatic power of delineating character, were copied by a host of admirers, but some of his most successful imitators lost sight of his moral purpose and frustrated, in some measure, his noblest end. In Lamb's case this was impossible. He had no ulterior object in view. He did not set up for a teacher of mankind. He had no system of philosophy to propound; but the very simplicity of his aim threw a charm over his writings, and concurred with the Lake school of poetry in its tendency to produce nature-loving and nature-depicting writers in prose and verse. We do not say that Lamb was so unlike Addison that he never imitated him. It would have been impossible for an essayist so deeply imbued with English literature as he was to write in total forgetfulness of that great master. In the very commencement of " Elia," in his account of himself and of the clerks, his former acquaintances in the South Sea House, we are reminded of the first and second paper in the Spectator, where Addison gives so amusing a description of his own antecedents and of the different members of his club. But though Lamb imitated Addison in a degree, he did it like a master as Shakspeare copied Plutrarch, Cynthio, and Arthur Brookeand was most original when most a plagiarist. The essays of "Elia," indeed, were so peculiar, so unlike all that had gone before, and so influential on all that was to follow, so pregnant and aromatic, so deep and refined, that they warrant us in using the term Elianism, and regarding it as an active principle in the world of letters. The father of serials, Charles Dickens, stands foremost among its disciples. His earlier years, like Lamb's, were passed at a desk, and in the throbbing thoroughfares of the great city. Before him, novelists in general relied on the exhibition of high life for the reader's amusement, but he, following the steps of Lamb, delighted to dwell on the experiences of the poor. He made a boots as interesting as a duke, and found angels of purity and mercy among strolling players. His heroes were adventurers without birth or fortune, penniless clerks or workhouse boys. From crowds of ragamuffins and oddities he drew not only inexhaustible fun, but genuine pathos. He admired, he conned, he treasured up in his memory such sketches as those of the gag-eater in Christ's Hospital, Elias' Relations, his Cousin Bridget, Sarah Battle, the Chimney-sweepers, the Beggars, the Old Actors, and the Old China of Lamb's Essays; and in the "Sketches by Boz," the "Pickwick Papers," the American Notes," and " Pictures of Italy," with all his tales and novels, down to " Great Expectations " and the "Mutual Friend," he copied, without servile imitation, their broad outlines, rendering his figures, indeed, more grotesque than Lamb's, but ever jutting out in salient points, making humour and tender feeling run side by side, and often throwing in earnest protests against social abuses and wrongs. With all possible respect for that nobleman's good intentions, we maintain that Boz and bis prototype have done more for the poor than Lord Shaftesbury a hundred-fold. But Dickens resembled Lamb also in his fertile conception of varied characters, though he did not, like him, reproduce pictures of himself, and call up beings in different shapes to speak the sentiments and display the feelings of one deep and beautiful mind. He left this to Thackeray. In his writings we are continually reminded of Lamb. Elianism pervades them all, from "Vanity Fair" to the "Roundabout Papers." We see in every page the same affection for all animate, and most inanimate things, which dwelt in Lamb; the same love of old authors and imitation of their style; the same shrewd observation, keen wit, and delicate irony playing on the surface of philosophic meaning; and, above all, the same unfolding of his own heart and character in their peculiar gentleness and indulgence to the weaknesses of others. He is always autobiographical, and, like Elia in his essays, Thackeray gives us in each succeeding novel some fresh phase of his own life, experience, and thought. In the "Newcomes we see him in his connection with artists, and in "Pendennis" we trace several stages of his literary career. His Parisian experience comes to light in " Philip," and his German in the "Newcomes" and " Barry Lyndon." Pendennis," again, supplies us with pictures of his country and college life; while in the education of Pen, Clive, and Philip we are brought back to his schooldays at the Charter House. He cannot write a paper on the heroes and heroines of romance without describing the afternoon in July, on the day George IV. 66 out parity of lament. The insanity of Lamb's sister was the shadow of his existence; the loss of his wife was Thackeray's "rooted sorrow." The humour of each is tempered by incurable grief, and the wisdom that comes of sorrow tones down in both instances the wit that had else been too reckless and the colouring that had been too high. The pupil, it may be added, like his master, is a week-day, and not a Sunday preacher. He does not, meddle with the highest themes; he leaves mysteries to the pulpit and the Church, and is content to enforce social virtues. As with Dickens and Thackeray, so it is with other ingenius and popular humorists of latter days. They have all taken their cue from Lamb; and so far as their works contain humour without effort, and manifest feelings without disguise-so far as the moral lessons in them are implied rather than expressed- so far as the soul of things is extracted, the poor are sympathized with, and men, women, and children are painted to the life in that measure precisely are they subjects of that rare, delicate, and kindly influence which we venture to call Elianism. was crowned, when he lay, a little boy, in his great-grandmother's garden, reading the "Scottish Chiefs," amid the great clanging of bells. Of every picture he paints he must form the foreground or the background, and no one complains of this disposal as an intrusion, nor calls him an egotist on that account. We love to hear him talk of himself, for he can seldom find anything better to talk about. We admire his confessions, which are ample as St. Augustine's, and the transparency of his soul, which equals Lamb's. He commends and censures himself with freedom and naïveté; and whether his eye is turned inward or on external objects, he seems always intent on stripping off disguise and piercing to the very heart and core. If he examined paintings, it was not so much to trace their artistic results as to discover the character of him who drew them. In his "Lectures on the Humourists," he dwells more on the authors themselves than on their works; and in his historical papers he deals less with the facts than with the men. He evokes the spirit of the times, and invests it with form and colour. He chases Psyche over every meadow, and, without ruffling the down on her wings, he captures her as she soars from the lips of dying men. He has a kind word to say for every one- except George IV. With intense aversions, he is brimful of charity; abhors distinctions of caste, identifies all unworthy actions and sordid emotions with snobbery; and, like Swift and Lamb, practices with consummate art "the grave THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE. and logical conduct of an absurd proposition." Give him a character devoid of THE résumé of the President's Message some one good quality, and he will make flashed through the Atlantic cable by Reuevery action of that individual consonant ter's agency is an exceedingly bad one. with the defect, and also render the virtue That great concern could surely have affordthat is wanting conspicuous by its very ab- ed a thousand words for a document which sence. This negative painting is very char- affects England and France more than any acteristic of Lamb, nor could any one study other State paper, a document so important his "Popular Fallacies," or hear him de- that only its ipsissima verba are of any scribe the pleasures of poverty and sickness, practical value. What lawyer wants a sumwithout perceiving how exquisitely humor- mary of an Act of Parliament? The Presious a writer may be when saying persistent-dent either has, or has not, menaced his own ly exactly what he does not mean. Barry Congress, France, and England at one and Lyndon unites both these kinds of negative teaching. Barry himself is above the distinctions of vice and virtue, like the "Captain Dangerous" of George Augustus Sala, and the story is pervaded with grave irony very artfully concealed. It thus becomes a pungent satire, without losing the interest of a romance. Those who examine "Elia" carefully will find the germs of such conceptions neatly arranged as in the stores of a seedsman. Parity of suffering between Thackeray and Lamb only brought 66 From the Spectator, 8th Dec. the same time; and no one from simply reading this résumé could say confidently which. We presume the passage referring to Con. gress means that the President intends to remain impassive, to adhere to his own policy, to veto Bills against that policy, and then to see them passed into law by the two-third vote over his head, but this is only a presumption. The words may also mean that while he urges Congress to adopt his plan, he is still prepared to carry out another should Congress reject his, a very mate rial difference. Then, as to England, Mr. | single-handed, but if it is not, let us have Johnson says that "an early settlement of messages, as in America, addressed to an the Alabama claims is of the highest impor- Associated Press, and thus at least know tance," but only the context can show who is responsible for important information. whether this was a menace or not. It may If journalism had not lost much of its energy, have been, if the "importance" referred to the 1,000l. necessary to send 2,000 words the maintenance of friendly relations, and would have been paid at once, and recouped it may not have been if it referred only to by extra sale within three hours. the general principles of the neutrality laws. The paragraph may have meant, the "settlement is too important to international law to be long delayed,” and it may have meant, "settle up, Sir, or take the consequences," phrases of very different significance. The paragraph about France certainly suggests a very unpleasant suspicion, particularly when read by the light of an official statement in the Moniteur. That journal affirmed that Mr. Johnson had censured General Sheridan for occupying Matamoras out of deference to France, but Mr. Johnson says the French have announced that their troops will occupy Mexico till the spring, and that he has remonstrated, urging France "to conform to existing engagements, and thus meet the just expectations of America," a very disagreeable mode of exhibiting consideration for France. Apart altogether from the Emperor's amour propre and he is a Bonaparte, holding his throne by the tenure of success Frenchmen will not like the national forces being hurried out of Mexico in this fashion, will greatly dislike yielding to compulsion so visible and peremptory. M. Forcade himself, who detests the Mexican expedition and the Empire, has by anticipation called such conduct ungenerous," and the Imperialists will be apt to employ a harsher and stronger word. It is quite possible, is indeed very probable, that the context softens the phrases employed, telegrams being made snappish by their excessive condensation, but there is no proof in the bulletin that this was really the case. Any stock-jobber with a head who read this statement, but knew at the same time what Mr. Johnson had really said, could have made on Tuesday a fortune on the Paris Bourse alone, and the affairs of all Europe will be embarrassed for ten days by a doubt whether the President has not used words which a military nation could not honourably endure. We do not believe he has, but he may have done, and Frenchmen expect misfortune of some kind from this unlucky expedition. Messages of this kind turn the Atlantic cable into a European nuisance, and if repeated will, we trust, at last arouse the newspapers to abolish the monopoly of M. Reuter. The Times ought to be strong enough to protect the public 66 The Message contains, however, one distinct announcement, and it is to that we desire to call the attention of our readers. Liberals are told sometimes that they exaggerate the power of the American Union, that they are blinded, like its own people, by the mere vastness of its undeveloped resources. Well, ideas are stronger than armies, Bismarck notwithstanding, but still physical strength is an element in international politics, and what physical strength can rival that implied in the last line of this telegram? The surplus revenue of the Union for the year ending 31st May, the actual surplus of cash, half of it already collected, will amount to 31,600,000l. sterling. We English, who think ourselves the richest people in the world, whereas we only contain the richest middle class, are lucky when in an exceptionally prosperous year we have a surplus of one-tenth of that amount. It is actually more than the whole cost of our adminstration, civil, military, and naval, of our fleets, armies, dockyards, Courts, and educational system, more than the whole interest on our National Debt, more than the whole revenue of Prussia, a power which has just conquered an empire without raising a loan, This monstrous surplus, moreover, has been raised not at the end of a period of prosperity, but immediately on the close of a terrible war, which had lasted four years, and had called at least two millions of men into the field. It is the surplus raised after an expenditure at least equal to that of Great Britain, and probably, when the State expenditures are included, very far greater. There is, too, no proof that it is in any way exceptional, or intended to last only for one year. In any other country we should say the taxes were oppressively high, but the Americans seem quite cheerful under their burden, buy as many luxuries, build as many houses, clear as many acres as ever. There has been no fall in the rate of wages, no symptom of popular discontent, no angry protest against this or that particular tax. The Customs will, it seems certain, speedily be increased, and as yet we hear of no great movement against the internal taxation, either in the shape of excise or income-tax. Indeed we think it unlikely that we shall hear. Ameri |