Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 by Various

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Mr. John Brown, the hero of the Autobiography before us, is no exception
to this unhappy rule. The son of a butcher, he became in boyhood a
sheep-driver, was then apprenticed to a shoemaker, got into trouble and
a prison, enlisted as a soldier, deserted, turned strolling player,
shipped on board a man-of-war, tried again to desert, was flogged at the
gratings, beheld Napoleon on board the Bellerophon, was discharged from
the navy, consorted with thieves and prize-fighters, appeared on the
London stage with success, married and starved, became the pet of the
Cambridge students, whom he assisted in amateur theatricals, started a
stage-coach line to London and failed, set up a billiard-room, got into
innumerable street-fights and always came off conqueror, was elected
town-councillor of Cambridge and made a fortune, which it is to be hoped
he is now enjoying.

Here was material for a book. From the glimpses of his _personnel_ which
we occasionally catch through all Mr. Brown's splendid writing, we
should say that he was a man of a strong, hearty nature, full of
indomitable energy, and possessed with a truly Saxon predilection for
the use of his fists. The number of physical contests in which he was
chief actor renders his volume almost epical in character. Invulnerable
as Achilles and quarrelsome as Hector, he strides over the bodies of
innumerable foes. If some of his friends, the Seniors, at Cambridge,
would only put his adventures into Greek verse, he might descend to
posterity in sounding hexameters with the sons of Telamon and Thetis.

The plain narrative portions of Mr. Brown's volume possess much real
interest. His adventures with the strolling players, the insight he
gives us into the life of a journeyman shoemaker, and his reminiscences
of his friends, the Jew old-clothes-men, the pick-pockets, and the
prize-fighters, are so many steaks cut warm from the living world, and
are good, substantial food for thought. But he seldom forgets himself
long, and is natural only by fits and starts. After he has been striding
along for a short time with a free, manly gait, he suddenly bethinks
himself that he is writing a book. The malign influences of Cambridge
University begin to work upon him. The loose stride is contracted; the
swing of the vigorous shoulders is restrained, and, instead of an honest
fellow tramping sturdily after his own fashion through the paths of
literature, we are treated to an imitation of Dr. Johnson, done by an
illiterate butcher's son. We are afraid that the Cantabs have been at
the bottom of John Brown's fine writing. How valuable, for instance, are
the following philosophical reflections upon Napoleon, which John Brown
makes when he beholds the dethroned Emperor standing sadly upon the poop
of the Bellerophon!

"Here, then," remarks John, "had ended his dream of universal conquest;
here he lay prostrate at the foot of the altar," (we are informed a few
lines before this that he had taken his stand on the poop,) "on which he
sacrificed, not hecatombs, but pyramids, of human victims." (Beautiful
antithesis!) "As his ambition was boundless, posterity will not weep at
his fall. But that he insinuated himself into the hearts of a generous
people is too true; they worshipped him as a demi-god, until," etc.
Farther on, we learn the startling intelligence, that "for a time his
adopted country was enriched by the spoils and plunder of other lands."
(Did Alison know this?) "He formed the bulk of the population into an
organized banditti, and led them forth in martial pomp to do the unholy
work of bloodshed and robbery.... All the independent states of Europe
leagued together to put down this infamous system of national plunder."
(Russia among the rest of the independent states, we suppose.)... "Had
he been desirous of establishing just principles on earth, and crushing
despotism, the sympathies of the entire human race would have been
enlisted on his side." Certainly, John. Two and two make four, and
things that are equal to the same are equal to each other.

After having in a street-fight pommelled an unhappy Cambridge student
into jelly, and reduced him to a state which he picturesquely describes
as resembling that of "a dog in a coal-box," he picks him up and
philosophically informs him that "all the different styles of fence were
invented and established for man's protection, not for his destruction.
Besides," he adds, with much profundity, "the laws thereto appertaining
are based on certain strict principles of honor, which you have
unquestionably violated in this case. Now, take my advice, never again
engage in fight without having some just cause of quarrel. Thus, at
least, you will always come off with credit, if not with victory." And
having delivered himself of this stupendous moral lesson, Dr. Samuel
Johnson Mendoza John Brown puts on his hat (he surely ought to have
had a full-bottomed wig under it) and walks off, leaving his opponent
doubtless more like a dog in a coal-box than ever. He sees Dr.
Abernethy, and rises into this inspired strain: "To me, who have ever
held genius and talent in veneration, as being

"'Olympus-high above all earthly things,'

the sight of this plain, unostentatious man afforded more pleasurable
feelings than could all the gilded pomp beneath the sun." One can fancy,
if John had communicated this reflection to the Doctor, what would have
been the reply of that suave practitioner. He goes to low dance-houses,
and the interesting result of his reflections on what he beheld there
is, "that vice, however gilded over, is still a hideous monster; in
which conviction, I resigned myself to that power that 'must delight in
virtue.'" When he speaks of his billiard-pupils, he loftily denominates
them "hundreds of the best gentlemen-players scattered over the earth's
surface," from which we draw the pleasing inference that none of John
Brown's scholars are addicted to subterranean billiards.

In spite of these rags of old college-gowns, in which John so funnily
arrays himself on occasions, his book is worth reading. If it has not
the muscular, unaffected morality of his namesake's unsurpassable
"School-Days at Rugby," it is at least the production of an honest,
hearty Englishman, and teaches an excellent lesson on the value of pluck
and perseverance.

_Colton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas and Descriptive Geography._ Maps by
G.W. COLTON. Text by R.S. FISHER. New YORK: J.H. Colton & Co. 4to. pp.
400.

This work meets an acknowledged want; it combines in one convenient
volume most of the desirable features of the larger atlases, being full
enough in detail for all ordinary purposes, without being cumbersome and
costly. It is prefaced by a clear and well-digested statement of the
laws of Physical Geography, "based," as the publishers say, "upon the
excellent treatise on the same subject found in the Atlas of Milner and
Petermann, recently published in London." The maps are one hundred and
sixteen in number, admirably engraved, and, what especially enhances
their value, they are draughted on easily-convertible scales,--one inch
always representing ten, twenty-five, fifty, one hundred, or other
number of miles readily comparable. They include the results of the
latest explorations of travellers, and the newest settlements made by
the English and Americans.

The descriptions are full and accurate, and the statistics of
population, trade, public and private institutions, etc., are convenient
for reference. This department is illustrated by over six hundred
wood-cuts.

This Atlas may, therefore, fairly claim rank as a Cyclopaedia of
Geography, and for the household and school it is one of the most useful
publications of our time. The attention now everywhere excited by
proposed or impending changes in the boundary-lines of European States,
by the inroads of Western civilization in the East, by the settlement of
the Pacific Islands, and by the growth of empire on the western coast of
our own country, renders the publication of a compendious work like this
very timely.

_Poems._ By OWEN MEREDITH. The Wanderer and Clytemnestra. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields. 18mo.

The author of these poems is Robert Bulwer Lytton, the son of the
eminent novelist. Though still very young, he has reached the honor of
being arrayed in Ticknor and Fields's "blue and gold," the paradisiacal
condition of contemporary poets; and his works occupy, in words, though
not in matter, as much space as Tennyson's. The volume includes all the
poems which Lytton has published up to the present time. The general
characteristics of his Muse are fluency, fancy, melody, and sensibility.
The diligent reader will detect, throughout the volume, the traces of
the author's sympathy with other poets, especially Tennyson, and,
amid all the opulence of expression and intensity of feeling, will be
sensible of the lack of decided original genius and character. There is
evidence of intellect and imagination, but they are at present tossed
somewhat wildly about in a tumult of sensations and passions, and have
not yet mastered their instruments. But the poems, as they are the
product of a young man, so they possess all the attractions which allure
young readers. It would not be surprising, if they obtained a popularity
equal to those of Alexander Smith; for they give even more musical
utterance to the loves, hopes, exultations, regrets, and despairs of
youth, and indicate the same hot blood. They are also characterized by
similar vagueness of thought and vividness of fancy, in those passages
where sensibility turns theorist and philosophizes on its gratified or
battled sensations,--while they generally evince wider culture, larger
superficial experience of life, a more controlling sense of the
beautiful, and an equal facility of self-abandonment to the passion of
the moment.

Leaving out those poems which are repetitions or imitations, a thin
volume might be made containing some striking examples of original
perception and original experience. Among these the charming little
piece entitled "Madame La Marquise" would hold a prominent place. After
making, however, all deductions from the pretensions of the volume, it
may be said, that the father, at the same age, did not indicate so much
talent as the son.

_Symbols of the Capital; or Civilization in New York._ By A.D. MAYO.
12mo.

This is a clear and forcibly written exposition of the tendencies of
American society, as surveyed from the point of view of an earnest,
practical, and dispassionate reformer. The essays on Town and Country
Life, those on Education, Art, and Religion, the Forces of Free Labor,
and the Gold Dollar, exhibit equal independence of thought and extent
of information. In the essay on the Position of Woman in America, a
difficult theme is discussed with candor and sagacity. We have rarely
seen a volume to which the conscientious adversaries of the reforms of
the day could go for a more lucid statement of the opinions they oppose;
and it is admirably calculated to effect the purpose the author had in
view, namely, "to aid the young men and women of our land in their
attempt to realize a character that shall justify our professions of
republicanism, and to establish a civilization which, in becoming
national, shall illustrate every principle of a pure Christianity."

_The Avenger, a Narrative; and other Papers._ By THOMAS DE QUINCEY,
Author of "Confessions of an Opium-Eater," etc. Boston: Ticknor &
Fields. 16mo.

This is the twenty-first volume of De Quincey's miscellaneous writings,
collected by the indefatigable American editor, Mr. James T. Fields.
It contains "The Avenger," a powerful story of wrong and revenge;
"Additions to the Confessions of an Opium-Eater"; "Supplementary Note
on the Essenes," in which the theory of the original paper is supported
against objections by some new arguments; a long paper on "China,"
published in 1857, and full of information in regard to that empire; and
"Traditions of the Rabbins," one of the most exquisite papers in the
list of the author's writings.

_The Life of George Herbert. _By GEORGE L. DUYCKINCK. New York: 1858.
pp. 197.

We have too long neglected to do our share in bringing this delightful
little book to the notice of the lovers of holy George Herbert,
among whom we may safely reckon a large number of the readers of the
"Atlantic." It is based on the life by Izaak Walton, but contains much
new matter, either out of Walton's reach or beyond the range of his
sympathy. Notices are given of Nicholas Ferrar and other friends
of Herbert. There is a very agreeable sketch of Bemerton and its
neighborhood, as it now is, and the neat illustrations are of the kind
that really illustrate. The Brothers Duyckinck are well known for their
unpretentious and valuable labors in the cause of good letters and
American literary history, and this is precisely such a book as we
should expect from the taste, scholarship, and purity of mind which
distinguish both of them. It is much the best account of Herbert with
which we are acquainted.

_Lectures on Metaphysics._ By SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, BART., Professor of
Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. Edited by the
Rev. Henry Longueville Mansel, B.D., Oxford, and John Veitch, M.A.,
Edinburgh. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 8vo.

Few persons, with any pretensions to a knowledge of the metaphysicians
of the century, are unacquainted with Sir William Hamilton. His articles
in the "Edinburgh Review" on Cousin and Dr. Brown, and his Dissertations
on Reid, are the most important contributions to philosophy made in
Great Britain for many years. The present volume contains his Course
of Lectures, forty-six in number, which he delivered as Professor
of Metaphysics; and being intended for young students, they are, as
compared with his other works, more comprehensible without being less
comprehensive. The most conclusive proof of the excellence of these
Lectures is to be found in their influence on the successive classes of
students before whom they were pronounced. The universal testimony of
the young men who were fortunate enough to listen to Hamilton has been,
that his teaching not only inspired them with an enthusiasm for the
science, and gave them clear ideas and accurate information, but
directly aided them in the discipline of their minds. Some of his
students became, later in life, champions of his system; others became
its opponents; but opponents as well as champions warmly professed their
obligations to their instructor, and dated their interest in philosophy
from the period when they were brought by these Lectures within the
contagious sphere of his powerful intellect. So numerous were these
testimonials, that they gradually roused public curiosity to see
and read what was so effective as spoken. That curiosity has now an
opportunity of being gratified, and we do not doubt that these Lectures
will have a greater popularity than usually attends philosophical
publications. The American publishers deserve thanks for the cheap,
compact, and elegant form of their reprint.

We have no space to present here an exposition of Hamilton's system, or
to discuss any of its leading principles. We can merely allude to some
characteristics of his mode of thinking and writing which make his
Lectures of especial value to those who propose to begin the study of
metaphysics, or whose knowledge of the science is superficial. Hamilton
has the immense advantage of being a scholar in that large sense which
implies the exercise, not merely of attention and memory, but of every
faculty of the mind, in the acquisition and arrangement of knowledge.
His erudition is great, but it is also critical and interpretative. He
knows intimately every philosophical writer from the dawn of speculation
to the last German thinker, including the somewhat neglected Schoolmen
of the Middle Ages; and in this volume, every important question that
arises is historically as well as analytically treated, and the names
are given of the thinkers on both sides. In the course of one or two
sentences, he often places the reader in a position to view a principle,
not only in itself, but in relation to the controversies which have
raged round it for two thousand years. Hamilton's erudition is
also displayed in the quotations with which his pages are
sprinkled,--fragrant sentences, which came originally from the
imagination or character of the writers he quotes, and which relieve his
own abstract propositions and reasonings with concrete beauty or truth.
Most of these quotations will be novel even to advanced students.

Hamilton is also admirable in statement. Confusion, vacillation,
obscurity, uncertainty, are as foreign to his style as to his mind. He
is almost rigid in his precision. Every word has its meaning, and
every idea its stern, sure, decisive statement. His masterly powers
of analysis, of reasoning, of generalization, are always adequately
exhibited by a corresponding mastery of expression. The study of such a
volume as the present is itself an education in statement and logic; and
that it will be studied by thousands, in the colleges and out of the
colleges of the country, we cannot but hope.

_Allibone's Dictionary of Authors._ Philadelphia: Childs & Peterson,
1858. Vol. I. pp. 1005.

Leigh Hunt, in one of his Essays, speaks of the wishful thrill with
which, in looking over an index, he wondered if ever his name would
appear under the letter H in the reversed order (Hunt, Leigh) peculiar
to that useful and too much neglected field of literary achievement. In
Mr. Allibone's Dictionary he would see his wish more than satisfied; for
if he turn up "Hunt, Leigh," he will find a reference to "Hunt, James
Henry Leigh," and under that head a list of his works, more complete,
perhaps, than he himself could easily have drawn up.

In glancing along the leaves of a collection like this, one's heart is
touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in a
graveyard. What a necrology of notability! How many a controversialist
who made a great stir in his day, how many a once rising genius, how
many a withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone
immortality of a name and date! Think of the aspirations, the dreams,
the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of himself and wife) in an
impartial and generous posterity;--and then read "Smith J.(ohn?)
1713-1784(?). The Vision of Immortality, an Epic Poem in Twelve Books,
1740, 4to. _See Lowndes._" The time of his own death less certain than
that of his poem, which we may fix pretty safely in 1740,--and the only
posterity that took any interest in him the indefatigable Lowndes! Well,
even a bibliographic indemnity for contemporary neglect, to have so
much as your title-page read after it is a century old, and to enjoy a
posthumous public of one, is better than nothing.

A volume like Mr. Allibone's--so largely a hospital for incurable
forgottenhoods--is better than any course of philosophy to the young
author. Let him reckon how many of the ten thousand or so names here
recorded he has ever heard of before, let him make this myriad the
denominator of a fraction to which the dozen perennial fames shall
be the numerator, and he will find that his dividend of a chance at
escaping speedy extinction is not worth making himself unhappy about.
Should some statistician make such a book the basis for constructing the
tables of a fame-insurance company, the rates at which alone policies
could be safely issued would put them beyond the reach of all except
those who did not need them. After all, perhaps, the next best thing to
being famous or infamous is to be utterly forgotten; for that, at least,
is to accomplish a decisive result by living. To hang on the perilous
edge of immortality by the nails, liable at any moment to drop into the
waters of Oblivion, is at best a questionable beatitude.

But if a dictionary of this kind give rise to some melancholy
reflections, it is not without suggestions of a more soothing character.
We are reminded by it of the tender-heartedness of Chaucer, who, in the
"House of Fame," after speaking of Orpheus and Arion, (Mr. Tyrwhitt
calls him Orion,) and Cheiron and Glasgerion, has a kind word for the
lesser minstrels that play on pipes made of straw,--

"Such as have the little herd-groomes
That keepen beastes in the broomes."

This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the _libra d'oro_ of the
_onymi-anonymi_, of the never-named authors who exist only in
name,--Parson Adams would be here, had he found a printer for his
sermons, Mr. Primrose for his tracts on Monogamy,--and not merely
such _nominum umbroe_ of the past, but that still stranger class of
ancient-moderns, preterite-presents, dead (and something more) as
authors, but still to be met with in the flesh as solid men and
brethren,--privileged, alas, to outstay cockcrow when they drop in of an
evening to give you their views on the aims and tendencies of periodical
literature. Will it be nothing, if we should be untimely snatched
away from our present sphere of usefulness, to those shadowy [Greek:
pleiones] who lived too soon to enjoy their monthly dip in the
ATLANTIC,--will it be nothing, we say, that our orphaned Papyrorcetes,
junior, will be able to read the name of his lamented parent on the
nine-hundredth page of Allibone,--occupying, at least, an entire line,
and therefore (as we gather from a hasty calculation) sure forever of
1/360,000th of the attention of whoever reads the book through? This
is a handy and inexpensive substitute for the _imagines_ of the Roman
nobles; for those were inconvenient to pack on a change of lodgings,
liable to melt in warm weather,--even the elder Brutus himself might
soften in August,--and not readily salable, unless to a _novus homo_ who
wished to buy a set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our enthusiastic
genealogists are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic
nursery-man skilled to graft a slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere
or Montmorenci. Contemporary glory is comparatively dear; it is sold by
the column,--for columns have got over their Horatian antipathies; but
the bibliographer will thank you for the name of any man that has ever
printed a book, nay, his gratitude will glow in exact proportion to the
obscurity of the author, and one may thus confer perpetuity at
least (which is a kind of Tithonus-immortality) upon some respected
progenitor, or assure it to himself, with little trouble and at the cost
of a postage-stamp.

The benignity of Providence is nowhere more strongly marked than in its
compensations; and what can be more beautiful than the arrangement by
which the same harmless disinterestedness of matter and style that once
made an author the favorite of trunk-makers and grocers should, by
thus leading to the quiet absorption of his works, make them sure of
commemoration by Brunet or Lowndes and of commanding famine-prices under
the hammer? Fame, like electricity, is thus positive and negative; and
if a writer must be Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to
the world at large, he must not less be Nobody--like Junius--to have his
namelessness embalmed by Mons. Guerard. Take comfort, therefore, all ye
who either make paper invaluable or worthless by the addition of your
autograph! for your dice (as the Abbe Galiani said of Nature's) are
always loaded, and you may make your book the heir of Memory in two
ways,--by contriving to get the fire of genius into it, or to get it
into the fire by the hands of the hangman. Milton's "Areopagitica" is an
example of one method, and the "Philostratus" of Blount (who pillaged
the "Areopagitica") of the other. And yet, again, how perverse is human
nature! how more perverse is literary taste! There is a large class
of men madly desirous to read cuneiform and runic inscriptions simply
because of their unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of
knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural
and conflicting information concerning their royal prototypes of an
antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. Were there only
a compensatory arrangement for this also in another class who should be
driven by a like irresistible instinct to unreadable books, the heart
of the political economist would be gladdened at seeing the substantial
rewards of authorship so much more equally distributed by means of a
demand adapted to the always abundant supply.

We should like Mr. Allibone's book better, if it were more exclusively a
dictionary of names, facts, editions, and dates, and allowed less
space (or none at all) to opinions. The contemporaneous judgments of
individual critics upon writers of original power are commonly of little
value, and are absolutely worthless when an author's fame has struck its
roots down into the kindly soil of national or European appreciation,
when his work has won that "perfect witness of all-judging Jove" which
cannot be begged or bought. When the criticism is anonymous, (as are
many of those cited by Mr. Allibone,) it has not even the reflected
interest, as a measure of the critic himself, which we find sometimes
in the incapacity of a strong nature to appreciate a great one, as in
Johnson's opinion of Milton, for instance,--or of a delicate mind to
comprehend an imaginative one, as in Addison's of Bunyan. In the article
"Carlyle," for example, (by the way, John A. Carlyle is omitted,) we
should have been better content, if Mr. Allibone (instead of letting us
know what "Blackwood's Magazine" thinks of a writer who, whatever his
faults of style, has probably influenced the thought of his generation
more than any other man) had given us the date of the first publication
of "Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," and had mentioned that the
original collection of the "Miscellanies" was made in America. (This
last we have since found alluded to under "De Quincey.") Sometimes the
editor himself intrudes remarks which are quite out of keeping with the
character of such a work. We will give an instance which caught our
eye in turning over the leaves. After giving the title of "The Rare
Trauailes" of Job Hortop, Mr. Allibone adds, "We trust that in the
home-relation of his 'Rare Trauails among wilde and sauage people' the
_raconteur_ did not yield to the temptation of 'pulling the long bow,'
for the purpose of increasing the amazement of his wondering auditors."
Now if Mr. Allibone knew nothing about Hortop, he should have said
nothing. If the edition of 1591 was inaccessible to him, he could have
found out what kind of a story-teller our ancient mariner was in the
third volume of Hakluyt. We resent this slur upon Job the more because
he happens to be a favorite of ours, and saw no more wonders than
travellers of that day had the happy gift of seeing. We remember he got
sight of a very fine merman in the neighborhood of the Bermudas; but
then stout Sir John Hawkins was as lucky.

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