uniformly treated me with respect, as I have them with justice. They are all perfectly satisfied with their year's work, and I expect to pursue exactly the same course next season, and have no doubt I shall get along just as well. I should not go into the field with my negroes myself if necessity did not compel me to it: it has compelled me to it; and it will compel me to it for many years to come, I expect. I have about eighty head of negroes. Of these, only some twenty odd work in the field; the rest are too old or too young, or house-servants. At fifty cents a-pound for cotton I can afford to support not only the negroes but their families. If cotton falls I shall explain to my hands, and they will comprehend me, that not receiving so much. I cannot afford to give them so much. I am willing always to make a fair division with them. If the blacks of the South are in a bad way, they are hardly worse off than their masters. This is from another private letter, by a South Carolinian: I doubt if you have any idea of the poverty of the people. The land may be restored, but where ean its ruined owner procure money to pay taxes, erect buildings, and hire freedmen? Our young men are gone to work in earnest. We are proud to see them engaged in teaching, ploughing, waggoning, keeping grocery-stores; in short, doing anything, and doing it cheerfully. Ours is a poverty of which no one is ashamed, and of which very few complain. We are willing to bear it, and its universality makes it more tolerable. When I know that the most refined and intelligent women in the State, deserted by their deluded servants, are doing all kinds of housework-sweeping, dusting, making beds, and even in some cases cooking and washing it is much easier for me to iron the towels my little son has washed, while I turn occasionally a laughing eye towards the fire place, where an invalid gentleman (son of a former Governor) is engaged in churning! I must confess that his attempt furnished us with more amusement than butter. For, believing this state of things to be only temporary, we make merry over it, compare notes with our friends, and boast of our success in these untried fields. But there are cases over which no one can laugh. I know of a family whose property was counted by hundreds of thousands, who have not tasted meat for months. A gentleman of high scientific attainments, formerly professor in a college, is literally trying to keep the wolf from the door by teaching a few scholars, one of whom, a girl of sixteen, pays a quart of milk per diem for her tuition Innumerable widows, orphans, and single women, whose property was in Confederate bonds, are penniless, and are seeking employment of some kind for bread. On the whole, our people are bearing their trials bravely and cheerfully; but so widespread is the ruin, that, even if the new system works well, it will take at least half a century to put us where we were. But that the Americans North and South, are coming nobly out of their sharp trials is clear to every one. The political strife is not followed by an instant calm; but seeing of what metal are its citizens, who shall despair of the Republic? From the Examiner. Familiar Words; an Index Verborum or Quotation Handbook, with Parallel Passages, of Phrases which have become imbedded in our English Tongue. By J. Hain Friswell. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged. Low, Son, and Marston. THIS second edition of Familiar Words is greatly enlarged and enriched. Errors of press have been corrected, and the book is by far the best of its kind in the English language. Every man who has made such a book has made some use of the similar work of his predecessors. The American Mr. Bartlett made very indiscriminate use of an English predecessor. Mr. Friswell has made inMany refugee ladies feed their families by His arrangement is thoughtful, is his own, discriminate use of nobody else's work. exchanging the contents of their wardrobes for articles of food. "How are your sisters?" and is the best that has been made; his said I last summer to a young man who had verifications and amplifications are his own; left home to become a tutor. "Their complex- and he has vastly added to the number of ions look badly," was the reply; "but that is the Familiar Quotations thus registered and not surprising, when you consider how long referred to their right source by labour that they have been eating old frocks." "Have we know, from its results, must have been they any lights?" was my next query. With close and unremitting. The new edition perfect gravity he replied, No; when the contains the same number of pages as its moon does not shine, they go to bed by light- predecessor, but the type is smaller, so that there is room made for very considerable additions. ning." But matters are mending. In this very family light wood has superseded lightning in the chambers, and in the parlour a small petroleum lamp (price one dollar) diffuses light and happiness around. Here is a specimen page that we take at random : ROD-ROME. Rod-He shall rule them with a rod of iron Rev. ii. 27 277 Men come by their own;" the quotation from Rochester, "If Rome can pardon sins;" and the citation from Jeremy Taylor's 'Ductor Dubitantitum,' added to the preceding note to the phrase," When at Rome, do as the Romans do." As the proportion of new matter allows about this average quantity to a page, we may safely say that the work involved in this retouching of one page, if multiplied by 370, will give a measure of the care and pains bestowed upon the new edition. And this still leaves a most painstaking revision of the index unaccounted for. Roderick - Art thou a friend to Roderick? SCOTT, The Lady of the Lake, can. iv. st. 30. Roques When rogues fall out, honest men get - In a case before Sir Matthew Hale, the two litigants unwittingly let out that at a former period they had in conjunction leased a ferry to the injury of the proprietor, on which Šir Matthew made the above remark. Roll I am not in the roll of common men. SHAKS. K. Henry IV., part i. act iii sc. 1. Roll-Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean — roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain ; Man marks the earth with ruin his control Stops with the shore. BYRON, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, can. iv. st. Romans well. Ibid, act v. sc. 3. Rome-If Rome can pardon sins, as Romans hold, And if those pardons can be bought and sold, It were no sin t' adore and worship Gold. ROCHESTER, On Rome's Pardon. Rome-When at Rome, do as Romans do."* Now let us put the book to a rough test by comparing that page with the corresponding part of the preceding edition. We find that, in addition to the quotations for merly accounted for, we have the origin of the saying, "When Rogues fall out, Honest *St. Augustine was in the habit of dining upon Saturday as upon Sunday; but, being puzzled with the different practices then prevailing (for they had begun to fast at Rome on Saturday), he consulted St. Ambrose on the subject. Now at Milan they did not fast on Saturday; and the answer of the Milan Saint was this: "When I am here, I do not fast on Saturday; when at Rome, I do fast on Saturday." "Quando hic sum, non jejuno Sabbato; quando Romæ sum, jejano Sabbato." - ST. AUGUSTINE, ep xxxvi. To Casulanus. In Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, 3rd edition, p. 25, we find the following paragraph on case of conscience: "He that fasted on Saturday in Ionia or Smyrna was a schismatick; and so was he that did not fast at Milan or Rome upon the same day, both upon the same reason; Cum fueris Romæ, Romano vivito more, Cum fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi: because he was to conform to the custom of Smyrna as well as that of Milan, in the respective dio ceses." any From the Saturday Review. IF the Civil Service Commissioners wished thoroughly to test the literary power of candidate who was at their mercy, they could not subject him to a more searching ordeal than by setting him down to write a model love-letter. The species of composition is one with which most men, in the course of a long and chequered career, become familiar. If they have not got to write love-letters of their own, the chances of life or of a profession bring them generally into contact with the love-letters of other people; and general experience agrees in this, that there is no branch of literature so universally cultivated to so very little pur pose or use. Love-letters ought, on theory, to be full of genius. They contain, or are supposed to contain, the young gushing of And it is very nature and of the heart. much in favour of the writers that they write in moments of considerable exaltation, and mean what they write to be seen only by one pair of liquid eyes. At such a task one would think only a very stupid man could fail; but, on the contrary, one finds that very few men succeed. Perhaps, at the time it is not of much consequence whether the author is fortunate in a literary point of view or not, as the only critic to whom his efforts are submitted is usually blindly partial, and perhaps not much of a literary judge. But as clever women every now and then are fascinating, and men do happen sometimes to fall in love with them, it is necessary to have some sensible views as to what a letter of the sort, directed to a competent critic, should contain. And inasmuch as, in the present condition of society and the law, nobody can be quite certain that a his love-letters may not hereafter be pub- Tennyson, and have sung a good deal about lished, either for the benefit of the newspa- it in connection with the moon, and with all pers or for posterity, it is important that sorts of angels and of flowers, at the piano. Englishmen should begin to give their minds As soon as the fated hour of a lifelong to doing their epistolary duties well, and in attachment comes, they settle themselves a manner calculated to bring no disgrace down to realize all that they have heard of, upon themselves or their education. What and a love which had not a good deal of ruins most love-letters is not the sentiment, moon and flowers and angels about it would or the unworldiness that underlies them, so not seem to them love at all. The first much as the adherence to a kind of common thing that a woman likes when she is being form which is not by any means based upon courted is to be called something like what the rules of the highest art. The love-let- amateur musicians are always calling one ters of tradesmen and half-educated people, another in duets. She is quite willing to be whenever they turn up in the papers, are a bee, or a bird, or a lily; but it is de rigueur always full of little commonplaces which the that she should be either in the ornithologiwriters appear to consider appropriate to cal or the botanical line. It is all very well the situation. They never seem able quite if the lover happens to have been a little in to make up their mind whether it is the the duet way too. He can in this case uncorrect thing to call the beloved object thou derstand the feeling, and nerve himself withor you; and the second person singular and out much difficulty to respond to it. But if the second person plural keep blundering up he is entirely ignorant about birds and against one another in a manner that must botany, his task becomes more serious. He be heartrending to any young tradesman's has the humiliation of being obliged to conmistress who is anything of a grammarian. fine himself entirely to calling his future There is something about the correspondence wife an angel or a goddess, according as he "of lovers who belong to this class of life that is most addicted to classical or to Christian reminds the reader of a valentine. It is mythology; while the mortifying thought the correct thing apparently among them to cannot fail to strike him that both appellations engage in a periodical correspondence, and are a little elevated and a little trite. If it the British tradesman does it without a mur- were not, indeed, for the penny post, writmur; but his share in it generally consists of ing love-letters might not be so exhausting assurance that when he got back to his shop to the intellect. In old times a gentleman after leaving the lady of his affections he could only indite epistles of the kind once a could not sleep a wink, but that even in the week or once a fortnight, and had plenty of dark watches of the night he is "thine, leisure to get up his literary steam and to fondly thine." The young milliner to whom select his illustrations. If at the moment it it is addressed is far better pleased that these did not occur to him what sort of plant he little common forms should not be left out. wished to call his fair correspondent, he had Love-letters, like a trousseau, a wedding at least seven days to think about it, and to breakfast, and a trip to Gravesend, are the consult bis dictionary. The penny post has proper incidents of courtship and of marri- altered all this, and a lover's imagination age. Other young milliners have had them, now has to undergo frequent and diurnal and it would be a painful thing to think they drains which it really is quite unfitted to were to be omitted. The happy tradesman support. Courtship has become a literary is bound to gratify so harmless a sentiment crisis in life. Men must write as long as of feminine dignity; and flourishes away women will read, and it is on this account with his thee's and his thou's in order to that the art of love-letter writing deserves keep pace with his and his fair mistress's to be seriously taught, and seriously recog conceptions of what a love-letter ordinarily nised, even by so prosy and sedate a tribuis, and what it is designed to be. nal as the Civil Service Commissioners. It is a sad thing to think how many attachés, Indian civil servants, and clerks in Government offices, are totally ignorant of the proper rudiments of a training which is sure to become necessary to them in the daily routine of their profession. The love-letters of educated people are doubtless less grotesque; but educated people have their own common forms, which to cold and rational observers would appear possibly little less ridiculous in the long run. The poetry of the times had a good deal to say to the love-letter of the period. Girls who are tolerably well read know by heart all the routine of love-making long before they ever come to be seriously in love. They have seen about it in Byron and in As it is too late now for society to go back upon its traces, and to put down that fatal institution, the penny post, the next best alternative would be perhaps to abolish love-letters altogether, and to substitute in their place all the antiquated machinery of love-making which the rapid and unsentimental ideas of the age have long since set aside. Why, if the truth must be spoken, should a young gentleman write frequent letters to his betrothed wife at all? The passion for so doing cannot be natural or universal, for it does not obtain among nations who are unacquainted with a postal system. If he has anything particular to say, he could usually come and say it in person. Love-letters, after all, are a lazy way of making love. They might be tolerated in the days when there were neither railways nor Hansom cabs, and when long journeys separated faithful lovers. But in a generation when a railway ticket carries us in less than twelve hours from London to Dublin, love-letters surely ought to be an anachronism. It may be said, in answer to this, that a lover has not always anything to say of so particulur and special a kind as to make it worth his while to travel twelve hours for the mere purpose of saying it. And nothing is more likely to be true. But this is a strange confession as to the inanity of the contents of a love-letter. On this hypothesis, a love-letter is solely and simply a document meant to contain things which are not worth telling at the cost of a long journey. No avowal could be more damaging to the cause which it was designed to uphold; and if lovers have nothing better to urge in favour of love-letters than this, they are out of court altogether. There may of course be exceptional and extreme cases, such as the case of poor lovers who cannot afford the expense of railways or of cabs, as there may be instances of faithful lovers separated by cruel parents. In the present condition of society, however, it is obvious that love-letters cannot be kept up as an institution merely for the sake of fostering and assisting improvident marriages. Lovers have no business to be too poor to travel. If they are, we are quite sure that they are far too poor to marry. Expensive as are railway fares, they are not so expensive as children; and the gentleman who cannot afford a Hansom cab certainly cannot afford a wife. As to the other case of love interrupted by stern and relentless parents, it is still easier to answer. Love-letters are not the proper remedy for this misfortune. Providence has not bestowed on England the penny post in order to promote clandestine attachments. Certainly Romeo wrote to Juliet, but he did not write to her every day; and though a secret love-letter now and then may be tolerated according to all the laws of ancient and modern romance, there is something singularly earthy, cockneyish, and unromantic in the notion of a daily penny correspondence between hearts that are beating for one another. Leander did not write to Hero by the post. He swam across to her. It is no doubt true that he was drowned; but the unfortunate end of an individual does not militate against the truth of a great principle. It may possibly be thought that, if loveletters are to be abolished, there may be a difficulty about finding something to replace them. There is not much force, if there is any force at all, in this reasoning. The great thing is to have a conventional means of communication between lovers; and we entertain no doubt but that one conventional form of intercourse in the long run will satisfy them quite as well as another. One change for the better which might be proposed in the interest of those whose minds, however cultivated, are not equal to the tension of daily love-letters, would be a return to the old classical practice of amatory poetry. A hundred things may be said in rhyme which look very badly in prose. The moon, for example-not to mention angels and goddesses does admirably in a sonnet. Nobody wants to use sonnets for anything else, and the medium or vehicle, and the imagery which is to fill it, thus become quite fitting and appropriate for one another. A vehicle like a penny letter, which is usually employed for business and pleasure, for accepting dinner invitations, and ordering bales of cotton, is not made to carry the moon and the stars, and all sorts of flowers and plants. The connection is incongruous, and a lover may well feel foolish when he reflects that the letter which contains all his rhapsodies lies on the breakfast-table of his lady-love in a heap of similar epistles filled with the latest tidings about bonnets and about crinoline. Let us make a bold effort, and go back to romantic poems. Rhythm and rhyme at all events are never profaned by trade or business. They remain dedicated still to sentiment and feeling. And we may be quite sure that what the communications of lovers lose in frequency, they will gain in strength and solidity. Love-letters are too easily composed to be composed well. Fifty things go into each of which any sensible scholar or man of taste may well be ashamed. Fortunately, rhyme is not so easily written; and it will be a pleasure and a gain to young Englishwomen to reflect that Angustus has not scribbed off the first nonsense that came into his head about roses and sunbeams in a hurry, but has sat down and laboured seriously to make his verses worth reading. And any young woman who likes (as all do who are in love) to be called extravagant names will gain indescribably by the amendment. It is twenty times as easy to call a beautiful person out of the way names in poetry as in prose. An "angel" is nothing the merest nothingin any lyric stanzas properly got up; while in a letter it seems flabby and stagey. Let us therefore abandon love-letters, and go back to poetry; and if lovers have any spare emotion to let off which is not absorbed in the process of making rhymes, let them take to serenades, if necessary, in addition. The English climate is not really too cold for serenading, though it may be the fashion to think so. Well wrapped up, a lover might hold out a whole winter; and after a crowded and heated evening party, a cool half hour at a guitar, with a cigar, would suit equally the serenader and the serenadee. The next love-letter that any young lady writes had better, therefore, like the celebrated letter of Penelope, ask to close the correspondence, except so far as it can be continued in person, or at least underneath a balcony. Nil mihi rescribas ut tamen; ipse veni. |