His armies were buried amid the snows of Russia, and could not be restored. France lost her gallant defender. The sturdy veterans of Jena and Austerlitz and Eylan had perished, and there were none to take their place. The mighty usurper was defenceless. He lost the game in which were staked his hopes of universal empire. Then the nations rose a second time, and this time they were successful, for they fought a crippled hero, whom the elements, not man, had beaten. The battles of Dresden and Waterloo finished the military career of Napoleon, and he was sent to a lonely rock in the oceanto meditate and to die. The greatness of his fortunes was only exceeded by the bitterness of his humiliation. Never before, in the history of mankind, has mortal climbed so high, never before did hero fall so low. Yet he died, a proud pharisee, justifying his courses, without recognizing the arm which had visited him with its chastising rod. "A single step into the right had made This man the Washington of worlds betrayed; It is, however, one of the virtues of our humanity to forget injuries and remember services. Thus we palliate those great mistakes and crimes which Napoleon, intoxicated by unparalleled successes, committed against society in his latter days, and dwell on those early and magnificent feats of heroism which restored the glory of an afflicted nation. Napoleon, as a great man, claims to be judged by his services, not by his defects and faults. The question for us to solve is, whether his undoubted services should counterbalance the great crimes which must be laid at his door. And when we have settled this hard and knotty point, we may indulge in a few reflections such as philosophical history suggests. Napoleon's career teaches the vanity of military glory, when warfare is not carried on in defence of the great permanent rights of mankind, and also speaks volumes of the retributive justice of the overruling Power. But we will not dwell on these truths. The verdict of enlightened humanity is yet to be given, although we think that this verdict must have been anticipated by the lonely exile at St. Helena, when the curses of widows and orphans were wafted over oceans and continents to the rock on which he was chained. EDITORIAL NOTES. CURSIVE AND DISCURSIVE. DICKENS once 66 as a described us tongue-y people." The phrase was expressive. Our American Democracy is a gift of tongues. Our whole company prophecies in a Pentecostal outburst of intellectual, freedom which is quite inconceivable to the European mind, over-ridden as it is with despotism in government, fashion, intellect and business. Accordingly, everybody writes. In newspapers, magazines, or books, an astonishingly large proportion of the entire population aspires to speak to his or her fellow-men with the presumed emphasis of set publication; insomuch that print now being almost the rule, publication is not emphatic. Ninety in the hundred of books now published are such as do actually require to be read with strict watchfulness against remembering either their matter or their manner. There is a frightful eruption of literary humors upon us. Every person who has indited words enough to make a book, straightway makes a book. The thoughts may already have fluttered before the public eye, upon the wings of a magazine, or the more transient pinions of a newspaper. Perhaps the material is so vapid or so ragged that the author stultifies himself by broadly avowing carelessness or incompetence in his preface. Even farragos of disjointed newspaper paragraphs, with no more coherence or significance than the sandy ridges which the Scottish wizard set his troublesome servant-fiend to twist into ropes, must needs be concatenated into a book. If the words have been written, they must be worth printing. It would not do at all to have written them out for nothing. Therefore away they go to the printer. A literary friend had prepared for publication a short pamphlet, discussing the matter of which we complain, which, however, we persuaded him to withhold. We apprehended ill results to our friend's literary success, if he should be recognized as the utterer of such virulent and unjustifiable truths against literary men and literary things. Yet our friend spoke truth; except that he spoke it too bluntly. We have his permission to extract a few paragraphs, which we cull from the milder and more genial portions of his diatribe: "American literature is degenerating into a vast stream of milk and water. A Great Literary Apostacy is demoralizing it. Authors write, not because they have a true or a beautiful word to say, and because the estrus of their conception drives them to speak, but because they see with the sharp little eyes of business men that the popular throat is agape for such or such a morsel, and that they can prepare the morsel. A whole book to proclaim the Apotheosis of Humbug! A whole book whose staple is the unblushing narrative, by a discarded suitor, of the details of his chase! What a culmination of literary immorality! "It is no impertinent inquiry, whether publishers are justifiable in introducing such works to the public. Shall it be claimed that the question of morality is for the author to settle, and not for the publisher? No, indeed. If there is only one question for the publisher to ask (namely, Will it sell?'), then there is no other for any man to ask; and poison or rum, or printed filth may be manufactured and vended, provided only that somebody will buy. "The men who criticise books are the third person of this unlucky trinity. Read a criticism upon a book. Can you presume that the critic has read the book? Remember the recantations that set back in an absurd reaction, down the laudatory throats of great and small the critics who praised Hot Corn.' Never, in this world, were so many words eaten before in so small a time. There are publishers who prepare notices after their own hearts-not generally very condemnatory for their own books, and have them inserted bodily in compliant columns. Sometimes the gentleman upon the strength of whose recommendations a book was printed, has the privilege of writing the notices of it in an influential paper. These notices are usually not unfavorable. If a publisher spies an adverse verdict upon some work of his issuing, his first question-according to the trade-instinct-is, not whether the man criticised honestly, and what are his abilities, but, what was his motive for criticising unfavorably? What personal spite has he? How have we slighted him? What rival has hired him? What favor does he want? I proclaim to all the inhabitants of the land that they cannot trust to what the periodicals say of new books. Instead of being able by reading the criticism to judge of the book, it is now necessary to read the book in order to judge of the criticism. "Perhaps I may not unreasonably give a sly kick to another, but now dying imposition. This is the great blast of advertisements with which every successive book is driven forth to life; as if shot out of a prodigious wind-gun. Every book is The Greatest Book of the Age. Twenty Thousand Copies are Ordered in Advance of Publication. Fifty Thousand Copies are Sold in Two Weeks after Publication. There is a Tremendous Excitement. Everybody is Talking About It. Newspapers manufacture the peculiar little epigrammatic remarks that appear well in quotation; such as A Great Book ; Full of true Genius; The most Delightful Thing we ever Read; Should be on Every Table; Drawn with a Master Hand; and the like lingo. These pin-wheels of adulation, again, are worked off in the advertisements, and the 'pensive public' buys, whether it list or list not. "This factitious excitement is arranged somewhat as follows. First, advance copies' are sent to the papers. From among their notices, the available ones are picked out as above mentioned. Sometimes mysterious little announcements have been received in advance, to tickle curiosity. Then come the regular advertisements, blazing with recommendations. These little machinations usually secure a fair amount of orders. The advertisements immediately announce that, owing to enormous pressure of orders, publication day is unavoidably postponed. Country booksellers, hereupon, say to themselves, 'Must be something rich. Great book, undoubtedly. Must have some.' And they send new orders, or enlarge the old. Then, after the publication, this torrent of orders, so artificially raised and dammed, is let loose all at once, and glorified by the disingenuous brag that so many Thousand Copies were sold in a week. This again tends to make all the outsiders believe in the book, aud again the orders come in. "Thus it appears that the writers and publishers of books are leagued in a great company, who for their own selfish ends are cramming all sorts of trash into the public mouth, only provided that the foolish purchaser will pay for it. They do not hesitate to break down whatever of healthy tone remains in the American mind, or to degrade still further its already sufficiently low standard of morals. The sole and single desideratum is money. "And the equally disgraceful complementary truth must be stated; that the nation is not honest enough nor intelligent enough to choose between the good and the bad; even to that extent that a certain percentage of the claims of the advertisements, of overwhelming demand, are actually true. For these evils, perhaps there is no remedy. It may be that men of pure hearts and high aspirations must stand still and see their country-men and country-women go sliding down the gutter into which the authors and "the trade" have been decoying them. One is almost tempted to invoke the majestic interference of the law; to wish that the publication of a useless or ill-written book might be made a high misdemeanor against the State, and that a smart fine and imprisonment should be meted out to all concerned. That a Board of Censors should be appointed from among the facile principes of American literature, who should have heavy salaries, and much honor, as entrusted with the charge of the American intellect and morals; and who should make thorough prelibation of all compositions intended for publication, and give the exclusive authorization of such publication; any book published without it to subject the parties to condign punishment under the law." Our pamphleteering friend goes on to vary and amplify his statements and arguments in a manner much too spicy for our use. Yet no honest man can deny that there is a very large share of truth in what he says. He is quixotic, of course, and As for his Board of Cenimpracticable. sors and his legislation, we might as well have the Czar imported at once, with his "Thought is free," ever since the days of Caliban, that down-trodden man and brother. By the way, has any one investigated the morals of the relations between the foreign Prospero and his native subjects? Is not the Tempest the Epic of "Sam?" Speech is free, also, in our Democratic country, at least to any man who fears neither enmity nor contempt, and who seeks neither office nor influence. Perhaps we have as much free speech as heart could wish. For literary utterances, properly so called, we have. Yet it does by no means ▾ follow that every man has a right, by fair means or foul, with indiscriminate unscrupulosity, to gather other people's dollars for his words, or to waste their time in the examination of them. Consider the "poets of America"--that vast and undistinguishable throng. How many men and women are there who might write prose, both true and good; but who will aspire to rise into that high imaginative sphere, the bright poet-kingdom of the Vates, and who thereupon only utter nonsense. They can talk fair common sense; but they endeavor, with frantic efforts, to chant in the choir of the poets; but their effusions compare with the songs of the "bards sublime," as the nauseous contortions and gibberings of a high-tragedy rage, with the still and awful fire, the great waves of divine inspiration, and the mighty utterances, of the older and the later prophets. It is in vain to assert the Democracy of Genius. and to claim that because "all men are born free and equal," in some sense, that therefore they are free of the poets' guild, and equal in songful power. They may as well claim that they each have as much property as anybody. How useless! We know, because we see with our own eyes, that they have it not. If it has descended to them, or if they have earned it, they have it, and they are acknowledged to have it. Possession and use are the only evidence. sertion is needless with them, and without them. So of the crowd of rhymers in the land. If the heritage of power has descended upon them, or if intense labor has lifted them to the possession of it, be it so. But if not, why will they so baselessly assert it? As And there is a word which needs to be said to all authors, poets or prosemen. If the Author opens before the eye of his readers, old or young, the present strength or the future hope of our nation, a volume of extenuations of lying or cheating-if he or (shameful even to think of!) she opens before those eyes gaudy pictures of guilt or impurity-if he shall praise folly, or laugh the laughter of fools over a funny or a profitable wickedness, or a mean trick-then such author shoulders a burden which will one day gather a crushing weight, when responsibility for tainted souls and rotten lives shall be accumulated therein. It needs no long argument to exhibit that point. Argument would be misplaced with those who deny it. But there follows another, whose assertion may seem superfluous or useless, but which is, nevertheless, as true as the first. Literature should be cream. Weave enough and to spare, of new milk and skim-milk, and buttermilk and white-oak cheese. What a mass of printed matter there is in the land! By what hundreds of tons is it yearly increased! Handbills, circulars, dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, annuals, pamphlets, books. For how many hundred years have the strongest thinkers indited the best of their thoughts on every subject within the field of human investigation--and out of it -and eft them in print! Who has read a fraction of what is already printed, and worth reading? Not the enormously omnivorous bookworm Magliabecchi; not the athletic scholarly strength of Sir William Hamilton; not the indefatigable explorer Not that we would have no good new books. We have no desire to gag any living thinker or writer, foremost or hindmost, unless some good not anti-democratic gag could be found for the hindmost! Nor do we advise any one to refrain from reading new books until he is through with the old. Not any obstruction from without do we desire to impose upon written speech; we desire no Statute for the Prevention of Trash, nor the appointment of an intellectual Excise Board of Censors. We only demand that whatever is said shall be significant of something; and of something not bad. We only appeal to the consciences of the authorial band. To them only we cry. Perhaps, indeed, we might as well cry to everybody; for who knows how many in every village in the country, and in the solitary houses too-as from Henry Thoreau's seven dollar palace in the woods -have already written to publishers; or have by them, in secret nook, piles of scratched paper, their tickets for immortality--or at the very least are meditating, altá sub mente repóstum, what the coming years shall make known? Oh, eager friend! Have you, truly, anything to say? Be sure-quite sure; and if not, exercise the very utmost of your talent for silence. If you are not very sure that you have plenty of silver words for us, give us the golden silence which everybody has. But, if yea-and we most gladly admit that very many souls, in our bounding and superabounding American freedom, have a word to say-if yea, Give us the CREAM. There is an enormous pile of good matter to read. The thoughtful are wearied and discouraged at the mass. And oh, friend! do not superinject thereon any more of dilute value. Is it not already wretched enough to see so many who might be gathering golden crowns of thought from books of lofty beauty and truth, grubbing and scratching about among the muck below? Will you swell the turbid stream? Think, if you think at all, clearly and carefully. Speak, if you must speak, clearly and briefly. And as you have in your soul one single mustard seed of truth or selfrespect, don't buzz out before us and crynor let your publisher buzz and cry for you-Behold The Greatest Book of the Age! Unless false pretences and exaggeration are legitimate helps in selling horses, drygoods and real estate, they cannot be legitimate helps in selling books. Therefore it is right that publishers should be limited by public opinion to a fair and honorable statement of the merits of their books. Nor can a publisher be justified in issuing an unworthy publication as valuable, any more than a jockey in selling a spavined horse as sound. Lastly: The critic, by supposition, stands as an impartial judge, between the book and the reading community. His business is either to state the contents of the book, or to state the merits of the book, or (as we believe) to state both. We need not say more than that his work ought to be done honestly. He ought to read the book, and then tell what it is, and what is its value, honestly. That is all. CORRESPONDENCE.-A lady complains to us as follows: * "Perhaps mortals, and especially men, have a dispensation to be inconsistent. But Major Wherrey, who was horrified at Horripitts and grieved at the German, and nevertheless could find it in his heart to lade out strong punch to his friends, and to swig and tipple all the remainder of the bowl, in company with his anti-Teutonic sympathizer, Mr. Barnard, appears to me to transcend the allowable limits even of male aberrations. Is dancing worse than drinking? Is the dizziness of the waltz more wicked than the dizziness which our two old, masculine prudes discovered in the dregs of their liquor? Or was Major Wherrey vexed because Bessy Wacklestead and the narrator 'polked on his boots,' and was he covering his wrath in hypocrisy? My dear sir, do you propose in this tacit way to sanction, and even to recommend the everlasting and disgusting punch bowl, which reeks in the middle of Dickens' stories? It seems to me that our American writers, if they must copy, could select some better study than this. Punch and cigars are behind the age. We do not want any medieval follies in Putnam." * We became affected with secret grief. For, on careful reflection, we could not remember to have heard any American exult or admire at the physical strength or manly beauty of any other American, except the eulogist were a farmer, a mechanic, a boxing-master or a boy in a gymnasium. Thinking further, we failed to recollect that any of our leading intellects, this side of the Atlantic, have been enthroned in notably noble bodies. John Neal is, or was, we believe, athletic and active, and skillful at manly exercise. Theodore D. Weld, at one time well known as an energetic anti-slavery lecturer, was, until injured by an accident, one of the most herculean men in the United States. The incident, although it has been told before, will bear repeating, as an instance of great endurance. Mr. Weld was travelling in Ohio, during the winter, when, either by the upsetting of a coach, or by the stumbling of his horse, he was thrown, at midnight, into a torrent of ice, snow and water, of unknown depth and width. Down this he floated, swimming at right angles to the stream, and shouting for aid, until at last, but not before his hands were too helpless to permit him to climb, he reached a tree, by whose branches he just held his chin above water during an hour and a half, until help came. When taken out he was stiff and nearly senseless, and only recovered after a long and severe illness. Very few men would have been able to breast such an ice-flood, or to stir a muscle, or even whisper, after fifteen minutes immersion. But neither of these can be ranked among our leading writers. Over the water, people are stronger. Christopher North was one of the best wrestlers, boxers, runners and leapers in Great Britain. William Cobbett was as strong as a bull. Wordsworth was as good a walker as any man in England. Sir William Hamilton has been a man of most remarkable physical strength. Walter Scott was an uncommonly vigorous walker and rider. Lord Byron's powers of physical exertion and endurance are well known, although, like Sir Walter Scott, he was slightly deformed in one foot. Now there is a great truth in the old heroic notion of pride in physical strength and beauty. There is a positive and actual pleasure in the mere quiet consciousness of possessing a strong arm, a strong leg and a powerful chest. What man would not take |