"The embowering rose, the acacia, and the pine Will not unwillingly their place resign, If but the cedar thrive that near them stands, Planted by Beaumont's and by Wordsworth's hands." And for a stone on his own grounds of Rydal Mount the poet wrote--and the strain was like a rippling brook— "In these fair vales hath many a tree Was rescued by the bard. So let it rest; and time will come As one of the departed." So under Hamilton's trees the musing citizen may pace, and like the village maiden at her wheel, revolve the sad vicissitude of things. But, as Sir Boyle Roche might have said, if the Hamilton trees had been houses overtaken by the city, their fate would be different. One historic building, indeed, remains, and thus far defies the encroaching town. This is Fraunce's tavern, at the corner of Broad and Pearl streets, in which Washington took leave of his officers. It has the further interest that from its windows the guests gazed upon the procession that escorted Washington from Franklin Square through Pearl Street to Broad, and up Broad to Wall, to be inaugurated President. The old building is called Washington's headquarters, and externally is little changed from the time when, “with a heart full of love and gratitude," the commanderin-chief lifted his glass and drank to his comrades. Such buildings, however, are few in the city, and the city consequently loses the charm which is so constant in the great cities of Europe. One reason for the paucity, however, does not accuse our sentiment. The noted buildings were frequently of wood, and in themselves more perishable. The historic sense, too, was wanting in the people. Hereafter buildings of a real interest are more likely to be retained, both because of their more permanent material and of a finer national consciousness. In Washington, for instance, whatever provision may be made for the residence of the President, the White House would hardly be removed to make room for another official mansion upon its site. The loss of such buildings is, indeed, a sentimental loss. is the name of the deepest human emobut despite the disrepute of the word, it tions. It is a sentiment only which would be gratified by seeing the house in which John Jay was born, or Washington Irving. But what takes us to Rome? What is the spell of Venice, where "Silent rows the songless gondolier"? of Salamis? of Marathon? Long ago, in the golden days of the lecture lyceum, Ik Marvel read a delightful essay on the uses of beauty. Even Jeremy Bentham would agree that real estate does not depreciate in a region hallowed by sentiment, and that life is richer where, while the sense of comfort is placated, the imagination is pleased. Emerson says that nobody owns the landscape. But every land-owner knows that a beautiful and noble prospect enhances the value of an estate. whole city has an interest in the removal of Columbia College to its new home, because its settlement there will be its permanent foundation on a fitting and beautiful site, securing to the city always a delightful and studious resort, and an endless source of the purest intellectual association. The The whole power of association is a sentiment, and, meditating under the trees of Hamilton which the thoughtful care of Mr. Potter has preserved for us, we are now ready for the remark of Dr. Johnson which the patient reader has been awaiting, perhaps the most familiar of all his remarks-“That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona." The doctor differed from General Hamilton; he thought taxation without representation to be no tyranny, and it is doubtful whether Hamilton could have converted him. But if they could stroll together under Hamilton's trees to-day, contemplating the scene and considering the work of a century, perhaps the tough old Tory might concede that Hamilton was not altogether wrong. THE attitude of an Easy Chair is one of observation. It was the instinct of the ancestors of the modern colloquial essay that one called his lucubrations the Tatler, and the other the Spectator. As the Yankee rustic is said to have entered the shop of Messrs. Call and Tuttle, and to have remarked to the urbane clerk who awaited his commands, "Well, sir, I have called, and now I should like to tuttle," those fathers of the gossiping essay observed and tattled. But there is no fresher or more vital strain in literature, because it is the talk of literary artists of what they saw. The essays are fine examples of what has been called in the adjacent Study literary realism. If the Freeholder, the close kinsman of the Spectator, were observing our political life to-day as he observed that of England, and more especially of London, nearly two centuries ago, he would certainly have remarked a recent illustration of the power of public opinion in this neighborhood. The Freeholder made the best of the situation for the first George, and may have been suspected of some personal interest in the prosperity of the Whigs. But it is pleasant to see how the times with which he dealt live upon his page. Turning his glass upon this later day and its events, his conclusion would be that the great conservative force in a modern community, public opinion, was never more healthful and active than in ours. The sudden passage of a law devoting part of Central Park to a speedway--a phrase which describes a race-course as gently as sample-room describes what our plainer parents knew as a grog-shopits prompt Executive approval, and the immediate action by the municipal park authorities, startled and aroused the city very much as the arrival of the tea-ships in Boston aroused that sensitive and patriotic town more than a hundred years ago. New York is a good-natured community, and generally tolerant of public official excesses, because of its conscious helplessness, and of a public indolence which recoils from the labor and cost of perpetual conflict. Reversing the usual course of war, the city is beleaguered from within rather than from without, and now and then, pushed a little beyond the point of endurance, it tries a turn with the enemy, and is generally worsted and dispersed. But the city is fond of its Park, and prefers to retain it for the enjoyment of all the people; and the law, which proposed to sacrifice much of its beauty and convenience to the pleasure of a few, with consequences that promised to baffle and annul its original and essential purpose, produced a general and active protest, and for a few days the scene recalled the excitement of Boston hurrying to the town meeting, and finally to the tea-ships to throw the tea overboard. A law passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor is presumably the act of the people by their freely chosen representatives. But this was a law which affected chiefly the people not of the State, but of the city, and the protest was so strong and so universal that it was plain the representatives misrepresented the people. The press thundered against the project; committees were organized; subscriptions poured in; a great public meeting was electrified by eloquent appeals; a committee of eminent citizens was appointed to proceed to Albany and ask the repeal of the law. Simultaneously the Mayor, admonished by the impressive demonstration, called a halt; the park authorities reversed their action, and revoked the order to proceed with the work. The tea should not be landed. But whether it shall be thrown overboard, whether the law shall be repealed, is still unsettled as the Easy Chair is compelled to take down its glass. But it is a pleasant illustration of public opinion correcting the action of its own agents, even when that action has become invested with the dignity and force of law, but correcting it by entirely lawful methods. It is a demonstration of the spirit of prompt, intelligent, resolute action under law, which is the spirit of the history of liberty-the spirit which will not suffer institutions designed to promote the general welfare to obstruct and injure it. The Freeholder would see in this little incident the later action of the spirit which bowed the Stuarts out of England, and seated William, and at last the Hanoverians, upon the throne. Sam Adams would see in it the spirit which maintained English rights against English encroachment. Indeed, there is a cloud of witnesses who would testify to the good work done in preventing the depredation upon the Park not only in the rescue of a popular pleasureground from harm, but in proving the readiness of intelligent public opinion to assert itself. This little incident, and the similar protest of the same opinion two years ago against the diversion of the Park to the purposes of the World's Fair, are the conclusive proclamation by the intelligent public opinion of New York that it means to reserve its great pleasure-ground for the pleasure of all the people, and not to permit it to be misappropriated for a hundred projects, which may be perfectly proper and desirable in themselves, but W I. which do not belong to a park. Uncle Toby thought that there was room enough in the world for the fly and himself. There is plenty of room in the city of New York for race-tracks, or speed ways, or fairs without encroaching upon Central Park. This truth has now been stated so emphatically that every good cause is strengthened. Editor's Study. E have been accustomed to find in the English shepherds, rustics, and clowns drawn by Mr. Thomas Hardy counterparts of the simple folk depicted by Shakespeare. The artist who has made the illustrations of the rural scenes in Tess of the D'Urbervilles has in one picture put the milkmaid on the wrong side of the cow. We are sure that this could not have been done with the approval of Mr. Hardy, and equally sure that it was not done with the approval of the cow, who in this situation would have kicked over the milk-pail; but unfortunately the illustration imparts an air of cockneyism to the surrounding pages of text, and a slight shade of suspicion arises that we have here a literary milkmaid, or at least one created for a literary or a moral purpose. This impression is not lessened by a certain quaint and almost archaic tone which was so delightful in the author's Group of Noble Dames. Are Tess and Izz and Marion and old Durbeyfield really of this century? Mr. Hardy should know best. if not of artificiality. The story is palpitating with life--physical life, warm, insistent, the original force and impulse of nature itself. So obvious is this that the reader can fancy the novelist has said to himself, "We English are accused of cowardice in dealing with the relations of the sexes, with passion and the primary forces of nature; I will show that we understand life on this side of the Channel as well as they do on the other." The effort, which is entirely successful, has a little the air of a tour de force. A powerful novel, everybody says that, and unutterably tragic and painful. That were enough to say did not the author challenge a moral estimate by his sub-title"A Pure Woman, Faithfully Presented." We are little inclined to take it up, for Mr. Hardy's thesis is that we must be judged by the will, not by the deed. This standard is difficult to apply in human affairs, and discussion of it cannot be undertaken in a paragraph. The career of Tess involves us in an inextricable confusion of right and wrong. We assume that the reader knows her story. We are compelled by the author's pre- We accept Mr. Hardy's representation of vious performances to hold him to the her; we even understand what he means highest standard as a literary artist. In by a purity preserved in what he may call none of his former novels has he given conventional sins. Granting all this, we such exquisite landscapes-they are drawn must hold Mr. Hardy, and not Tess, to or painted rather than written-such blame for her conduct. A character in scenes of dawn, of night, of lush sum- fiction, as soon as it is conceived and acmer, and of the barren time of frost, such curately limned for the reader, has rights. absolutely vivid pictures of farm life. Whatever we think of the first misstep (There is, it may be said in passing, a of Tess in the immaturity of her girlhood, striking coincidence between the thresh- her character was afterwards so formed ing-machine incident and that described by experience and suffering, so enlightin Garland's Main Travelled Roads, ened was she by intelligence and by the with the balance of fidelity to nature in pure love for her husband, that the acts Mr. Garland's favor.) But there has crept she committed seem impossible. Certaininto his language a certain scientific jar- ly her return to the betrayer she loathed gon, which effectively meets the require- was not her act, but the wilful compulments of a scientific age, no doubt, but sion of her creator. And in the last has an odd effect-a slight effect of strain, moral insensibility to crime, which her husband shares with her, the happy pair seem walking in a dream, surely not in the reality of any sane world we recognize. II. Are there any old-fashioned readers left aboveground to enjoy a historical romance? Or are they all resting in the cemetery in which criticism has erected head-stones with the names of Walter Scott and Dumas and Hugo and Thackeray? Must one seek the protection of such a city of the dead in order to read, without consciousness of committing a literary impropriety, The Deluge, written as a sequel to Fire and Sword, by the Polish novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz? The story moves in the lurid atmosphere of war and slaughter in the years 1654-8, when the commonwealth of Poland was in death-throes, and the reader must be prepared for an amount of vigor and action which sweep away the analytic fancies of the period. Time he will also need, for the romance runs through two thick, compactly printed volumes, and he must live day after day and night after night with the stirring personages in these pages, until they will become realities of a period, recounted by the Polish wizard with marvellous art. So skilful is Sienkiewicz that the reader will never doubt that these characters once lived, and that these incidents, given in such detail, are historic verities. The Study can recall no other historical romance that carries with it more perfectly the air of verity. This is owing to the care with which all the scenes are painted and the individuality of the figures. We meet again here our inimitable knight of the Fire and Sword, Zagloba, and his comrades in prowess; and the old and lovely sinner has not lost his love of adventure or of bragging. We have had much less enjoyment in life in company of a better man. The novel gives us a picture of a land on fire with war, or, to change the figure, deluged with enemies, traitors having removed the barriers of invasion. It is a story of marchings and sieges, of burning cities, of battles and annihilating partisan encounters, of personal adventure, which the reader follows with the breathless interest of a spectator. And through it all runs a golden thread of love, pure and sweet, involving the development of character in the fire of experience that was an element wanting in the author's former story. When a critic wishes to commend a stirring romance without incurring personal responsibility, he says that it will please boys. The great sweep of this romance in its historic perspective cannot be measured by a boy's comprehension, but there are many who carry into manhood the boy's love of action, of vital force, of adventure, of deeds done splendidly, of lives offered to a cause in a grand manner and without self-consciousness, who will be obliged to Sienkiewicz for quickening their pulses, and giving them once more the thrill of primal heroism. They will believe, while they are with Sienkiewicz, that there is such a thing. III. Of course, in a way, romance has gone out of the West. The poor Ute Indian, whose name is Co-na-pi-ett, appears on the English rolls as Hannibal Hamlin, and the wily Too-car can scarcely recognize himself as Cyrus Crow. There is no longer much illusion in the Southwest border stories of William Gillmore Simms, whose life has just been written (in the "American Men of Letters Series") by William P. Trent, Professor of History in the University of the South. The Revolutionary romances of the Carolinas, of Marion and his men, have still a certain vitality which is not inherent in the poetry of the author, but the name of Simms is now chiefly useful as an illustration of a literary and social period gone by, and in a larger sense of the effect of isolation, want of discipline, and social surroundings upon a talent that might have been a very important one in the world. Simms was greater than his works. He had force, ambition, courage, manliness, immense industry, fecundity, and a born capacity for story-telling. His efforts were largely frustrated by want of training, and by an environment unfriendly to his art. Had Simms been born now, in an impulsive, generous society, which has dropped feudalism and slavery, and which sees as an inspiration of progress what John Van Buren used to call the "Northern Lights," there is every reason to believe that he would hold a front rank among American novelists. There never was such another demonstration in history of the effect of social emancipation upon literature as has been furnished by the band of brilliant Southern writers since the war of secession. Professor Trent illustrates this in his method of modern research and scholarship. His study of Simms is both critical and sympathetic, and he makes us see the man by pouring upon the institutions that both made and marred him the illumination of the modern day. Indeed, it may be doubted if the value of the volume as biography is not overshadowed by its value as a study of the limitations that slavery put upon literary performance, and by its service as a record of life and manners now become his toric. There was ambition enough to produce a Southern literature, but a withering blight fell upon effort, and even those who made it said that Charleston, with all its culture, was a graveyard of periodicals. Simms lived to see his idols shattered, the social fabric around him in ruins, stricken by bereavement, beggared by war and conflagration, and by the non-marketable quality of his oldfashioned wares; but he was never more heroic or more worthy of love and respect than in his brave struggles to assist others in the days of his extreme calamity. The story has personal as well as general interest, and will be read with pleasure, because Professor Trent has set it forth with vivacity, in a narrative the entertainment of which does not flag, and with a lucid and scholarly pen. We account it, indeed, considering all its relations, and the wholly admirable manner of its execution, one of the most important biographies of late years, and of great historic value. IV. The first impression made upon the reader by Mrs. Humphry Ward's His tory of David Grieve is that of abundant leisure at the command of the author. She has not been in haste. She has waited, after drawing off her first romance, until her reservoir filled again. She has written with unwearying patience and tireless elaboration. As a result of this care and leisure of mind, her work is of firmly knit fibre, woven in a style of singular compactness and brilliant lustre. This is a commendable example to other story-writers, and the result would need only praise if the author had not assumed that the reading public has as much leisure as she has, and can afford, for example, to read half a dozen pages in order to get a silhouette of a single fig ure in a winter landscape. If the author hoped to give us the impression of a lifetime in her story, she has succeeded, for we can readily believe that we have been with David Grieve a hundred years. The theme is the evolution of a human soul into peace through suffering, and the unrelenting creator of David spares him no calamity. From childhood to the end he is ground in every sort of adversity, and his companions in it are selected for their unpleasantness, for the most part. The reader will not, however, object to this company, sordid or disreputable as most of it is, for he is always conscious of being in good society, having the refined society of the author and of excellent literature, and the beauty of nature as a perpetual chorus and interpreter of the story. This power of the author to idealize her material gives her high rank as a writer. But she has made one hazardous experiment, and that is in trying to paint a character consistently bad--as difficult a feat as to make one perfectly good in human life. David's sister Louie is perhaps the most unremitting, unrelieved female devil ever created, an imp of selfishness and heartlessness from her childhood to her tragic death-so bad, indeed, that the Paris episode of un-Puritanic sin rather leaves a white mark on her. a sort of relief to the reader to have her go to the devil literally. She can only be accounted for on the supposition that she was "possessed." Her millinery interest in the Roman Catholic Church is a bold imagination of the author, and is perilously near a humorous conception. The Paris episode of David, at the same time, is generally regarded as the most readable portion of the book, and is, we hear, liked by readers who would not tolerate such an adventure if described by an American novelist. Nor would the English public be likely to relish it as much if the scene were London. But the writer has never done anything with a lighter hand or more artistic touch than the character of Elise Delaunay. It is not so new in fiction as Louie, but it is much truer. David Grieve is intelligently named a history-the rambling history of a life produced, so far as we can judge, in order to carry the author's ethical and religious speculations. It has not the unity of a novel. That is not saying that it has not distinctly drawn characters. One of them is Lucy, the It is |