F R O M T H E E A S Y C H A I R (continued 3)

In his lively book of travelling letters Dr. Bellows says that he went up the Nile in a steamer of seventy berths. An ancient mariner of the Nile cannot comprehend it. In a steamer? With paddles or screws whisking the water? And steam blowing off? Making innumerable miles a day? The round trip to Philæ in two weeks, or a week? But how could you see Egypt, or feel it? That slow floating southward upon white wings; the sinking deeper and farther from the world we knew; the sense of infinite strangeness and distance; the weeks passing with no sign of accustomed life; slowly, one by one, the temples, the tombs; in the still days the crew dragging the boat along and singing the wild minor refrain; a voyage of wonder and of dreams—is that Egypt to be seen in a steamer? It is useless to say that you may go in the old way if you choose. You cannot go in the old way, because it is no longer what it was, if there be a newer. You may drive from London to Oxford. But is that going by the old English stage-coach when it was the only way, when the guard wound his horn, and the cherry-nosed coachman threw down the ribbons at each relay, and the neat inns stood smiling with open doors, and tra-la-la sped the nimble team by the park gate and the hawthorn hedge? You may go by sloop from New York to Albany. But is that now the romantic Hudson voyage which it was when it could be made in no other way?

No sensible ancient mariner will quarrel with all this, nor desire to banish the steamer of seventy berths from the Nile. When he shakes a farewell hand with the youth who are going to run up to Rome by train, and are not going to stop at a certain point upon the Campagna, and run forward to the top of a hill whence they can see far away upon the horizon the faintly outlined dome of St. Peter's—and who are not going from Leghorn to Florence through the grape harvest, their carriage heaped with the luscious clusters, but are to whiz through Tuscany in an hour or so, the regret in his tone is not personal or selfish, it is for a whole order of things passed away.

Such an ancient mariner would, however, be indeed sorry if he supposed that anybody suspected him of a very common and very odious kind of remark, against which he kindly warns all the throngs of travellers of whom mention has been made. The remark in question may be called the capping remark. Thus one traveller says to another—as Marco Polo to George Sandys—

"You went to Jerusalem?"

"Yes."

"And to Jericho?"

"Yes."

"And to the Jordan?"

"Yes."

"Did you see the white stone on the bottom near where the river flows into the Dead Sea?"

"Well—let me see! I don't exactly seem to remember that I did precisely see that."

"Ah!" replies Marco Polo.

It is a very brief sound, but being interpreted it means, "Then, my dear George Sandys, you might just as well not have seen the Jordan at all." Not that the white stone was famous or worth seeing, but that Marco Polo wished to "rub in" upon George Sandys's mind the conviction that he, Polo, had seen more than he, Sandys, in the same direction.

This capping process sometimes leads to very droll results. Young Green heard Gray and Brown comparing their notes of travel. Each was naturally anxious to have seen and done rather more than the other; but it appeared that each had been in about the same places, and had had very much the same experience.

"Lago Maggiore is a lovely sheet of water," remarked Gray.

"Truly exquisite," replied Brown.

"And Isola Bella is most beautiful," suggested Gray.

"Dear me! dear me!" approvingly assented Brown.

"How high is the statue of San Carlo Borromeo?" asked Gray.

"About sixty feet," answered Brown.

"It's a wonderful prospect from his eye," said Gray.

"Whose eye?" asked Brown.

"San Carlo Borromeo's," replied Gray, whose mind instantly suspected that he had caught the adversary, and who followed up his advantage vigorously and suddenly. "Of course you went up San Carlo?"

"Up San Carlo? You mean the church at—"

"Oh no! the statue on Lago Maggiore."

"Went up the statue! what do you mean?" snapped Brown, foreseeing discomfiture.

"Oh! I thought you probably knew," retorted the triumphant Gray, "that the statue is hollow."

"Oh! ah! yes!" returned Brown, indifferently.

"And you didn't go up?" pressed Gray.

"Not exactly," feebly rejoined Brown.

"Nor sit in his nose?" continued Gray.

"Not exactly," muttered Brown.

"Nor look out of his eyes?" said Gray.

"I thought I wouldn't," murmured Brown, in full retreat.

"Oh!" smiled Gray, with the air of David holding the head of Goliath by the hair, and displaying it to mankind—"oh!"

Young Green heard all this, and he resolved that whatever he did not do when he went to Europe, he would at all hazards sit in the nose of San Carlo Borromeo. The next year he came to Lago Maggiore. He saw the statue. He remembered the conversation and his high resolve, and he essayed the deed. It was fearful. He tore his hands; he tore his clothes; he was half suffocated; and, wedging himself into the nose, he stuck fast, and was only rescued at the peril of his life. When he told Gray afterward, and reminded him of the colloquy with Brown, that experienced traveller laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. "My dear Green," said he, "I never went up the confounded thing; but it was necessary to take Brown down somehow, and I employed the good saint for the purpose." He laughed again to tears; but Mr. Green soberly resolved that he would eschew the capping talk of travel. And he chose the wiser course.

The truth is that Green should not trust too much the tales, nor indeed the regrets, of the ancient mariners.

"For travellers tell no idle tales,

But fools at home believe them."

Certainly when this one remarks that he feels in saying farewell that young Green will never see the Europe that he saw, he has not the remotest idea of dimming his bright hope nor of asserting an advantage. What is it, indeed, but a way of saying that he is no longer the same man he was? If he were, what would be the gain of travel? It is not only an enlargement of the scenery of the mind, not only a richer and more various memory that he has acquired, but a riper experience. He has grown wiser; and perhaps all that he feels when he shakes Green's parting hand is that Green is not so wise as he will one day be.

"EASY DOES IT, GUVNER."

ICKENS'S Rogue Riderhood, who says "Easy does it, guvner," was a very practical man. But there is no motto which is more susceptible of perversion. Mr. Seward said the same thing in his last great speech. "I early learned from Jefferson that in politics we must do what we can, not what we would." It is not only plausible, but it is true. Yet its truth can be most readily abused to defeat everything for which it is urged.

"'I weep for you,' the walrus said;

'I deeply sympathize.'

With tears and sobs he sorted out

Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

Before his streaming eyes."

It was necessary that the walrus should eat, and it was very sad that the oysters should satisfy the necessity. But it is obvious that wicked walruses who have no intention whatever of not eating oysters would sob aloud with heart-rending vehemence as proof of a virtue which they do not possess. The foes of progress are always anxious that its friends should go easily. "Easy does it, guvner." But meanwhile they are anything but easy in obstructing. In the race, the sly gentleman who bets on Tom whispers confidentially to the jockey who rides Jerry that he had better "go easy." The friends of the saloon hope that the true friends of temperance are aware that the only way of success is to avoid fanaticism. But they omit to hide their bodies as well as their heads, for they are unsparing fanatics on their own behalf.

When Gustavus, in deference to his dear Griselda, promised to begin to reform the baleful habit of smoking, his Griselda was jocund as the dawn. But at the end of a week she did not observe that there were fewer cigars consumed, and she pleasantly asked him if the good resolution had escaped his memory. "By no means," he answered; "quite the contrary. But you remember what Rogue Riderhood said, 'Easy does it, guvner.' We must move warily upon the intrenched enemy, dearest Grizzle. Remember that Rome was not built in a day." Griselda remembered faithfully. But still the cigars continued, and upon a further gentle remonstrance Gustavus rejoined: "Certainly; but we must be reasonable. There are many steps, my dear Griselda. In siege operations the great masters of war approach by parallels, after making ample and thorough preparation. That is what I am doing. I am beginning to prepare to begin. Easy does it, you know. Don't forget Rome."

Still Gustavus smoked, and still Griselda waited, and at the end of six months she asked with a smile how far he had advanced in abandoning the habit of smoking. "Dear Grizzle," he answered, "you remember the weeds that sprang up and soon withered because they had no depth of soil. I wish my reform of this naughty habit to be well rooted, that it may long endure. None of your spasmodic virtue, your superficial goodness, for me! Great reforms, even in personal habits, my dear Mrs. Gustavus, cannot be accomplished in a day. Even Rome was not built in that time. I am working for great results, to which all my tastes and habits must conform. I must lay the foundations broad and deep. Easy does it, my rose-bud."

Gustavus continues to smoke, and Easy continues to do it. But there is another saying quite as wise as that of Rogue Riderhood, which exhorts him who puts his hand to the plough not to look back. The trouble with Riderhood's apothegm is that it supplies an endless excuse for not doing it. If the habit is too strong, and will not budge, you can soothe your conscience and make the most plausible of pleas by insisting that human nature and long custom and uniform tradition and the honest doubt whether smoking is, after all, injurious, must all be carefully considered. That is what Dickens also calls the great art of how not to do it. "My son, if you wish a thing done, do it yourself; if not, send," said the wise father; and the pioneers, the men without whose one idea and uncompromising energy and conciliation nothing would be accomplished, say with Sumner. "There is but one side," and with Cato, "Delenda est Carthago."

It is true that everything cannot be done at once, but something must be done all the time; and you will observe that it is not when the work is advancing, but when it stops or goes backward, that we hear the familiar wisdom of the Rogue that Easy does it. That is what makes it a suspicious saying, "What are you doing, sir?" thundered the master to the boy. "Nothing, sir," replied the frightened pupil. "Just as I thought, sir. Don't you know that your business is to do something?" When a man says "Easy does it," he may be doing all that he can but the immense probability, the almost absolute certainty, is that he is doing nothing, or, like the amiable Gustavus, he is "beginning to prepare to begin."

SISTE, VIATOR.

T is still very difficult to discover where the bad people are buried. The cemeteries are still symbolically white with monuments to the departed. Shylock and Ralph Nickleby are still, upon their tombstones, the most respected of deceased citizens. Here lies Clytemnestra, a model of the wifely virtues, whom an inconsolable spouse deplores. Beneath this marble, in the tranquil hope of a joyful resurrection, repose the remains of Iago, who kept the noiseless tenor of his way. Beyond sleeps Solomon, most faithful of husbands; and under this turf of buttercups and daisies lie Paris and Lovelace, arcades ambo, too early lost. 'Tis pathetic to reflect how much worthier is the world under-ground than that which still cumbers its surface; and if we, whose lives are indifferent honest, had only had the good fortune to die a century ago, our memories would by this time have been upon our tombstones a very odor of sanctity to the sense of the age which knows us, perhaps, but too well.

In one of his terrible inscriptions suggested for the monuments of the Georges, Thackeray says, "He left an example for youth and for age to avoid. He never did well by man or by woman." Has there been only one such George in the world? And if more, and in every age, in what cemetery have you found their epitaphs? Catiline was a fascinating and accomplished man. He had many followers, and if his political views and projects were open to differences of opinion, he was certainly well-mannered. Has there been but one Catiline in history? Or is he confined wholly to a public sphere? Cicero described him as "a corrupter of youth," and no one has denied it. Where is Catiline buried? If you sought his grave by that epitaph, where would you find it? Is there no corrupter of youth now? Have there been none within the last century? None, if you may trust the epitaphs. How long will you abuse our patience, O Catiline, and be annually buried, like Cato the Censor, with crosses of white camellias laid upon your coffin, and wreaths of immortelles hung upon the weeping effigy of Virtue which guards your sleep?

But because a man was brutal and coarse and cruel in his life, must we needs insist upon it when he is gone? When Mawworm leaves us, must we write upon his grave, he lying below defenceless, "Hic jacet a hypocrite"? When old Sathanas departs to a sphere of light and truth, shall we carve upon his monument, "Father of lies"? Is it manly? Shall we have no mercy? Do we really know any man; and shall charity be forgotten? To be human is to be frail; and is not the fact that we must die at all, of which the grave is proof, itself sufficient comment upon our weakness? Here lies Colonel Newcome—tender, generous, noble, child-like heart! Shall we add that he was credulous and ignorant? Dear Uncle Toby is in the next grave. Shall we shout in marble, "Siste, viator, contemplate his foibles"? Sacred to the memory of Samuel Pickwick. Is the inscription incomplete if we do not chisel beneath it, "A wind-bag pricked by Death"?

Epitaphs are written more forcibly than upon tombstones. When old Silenus dies, and the white camellias and the lilies-of-the-valley and the rose-buds are strewn upon his bier, and the "universally lamented" is cut upon the monument, the satire is pathetic, but it is slight. But when the bloated old debauchee is cautiously and forgivingly praised in the papers, and everybody solemnly pretends not to know what everybody knows that everybody else does know, it is a sign not of charity, but of public demoralization. Catiline corrupts youth by his example. Then his own offences bring him to a sudden end, and the newspapers speak of him so deprecatingly, so gingerly, that as a good man being dead yet speaketh, so a bad man being dead yet corrupteth. His evil influence is not suffered to perish with him, but it is cherished and extended and confirmed, and his death, like his life, demoralizes.

Dick Turpin no longer rides in jack-boots upon Hounslow Heath, stopping my Lord Bishop and the Right Honorable the Earl of Garter; and no longer stands at the dock, the hero of St. Giles's; and goes no longer to the gallows in a blaze of glory, with a huge nosegay in his button-hole. Richard Turpin is a very different fellow in his costume of to-day, but he is the same Dick of the jack-boots and the heath, this vulgar robber who smirks and is called smart. He drives a fine equipage, and lives luxuriously, and keeps a harem, and frequents Wall Street, and beats everybody in the game of making money, and spending it profusely and splendidly. He dazzles the eyes of the widow's son, and bewilders his mind. The boy sees the money with which Richard surrounds himself by means which honorable men despise. He hears him called good-humoredly a great rascal, and sees that he buys judges, and steals vast properties, and procures laws to protect him. The boy hears that all men are fallible, and that some men are no worse than other men, and that money is a fine thing, and honor and truth and respect and all the rest of it are very well, but see what power, what pleasure, what luxury Turpin commands! Then the poor boy rushes for the same prizes, and fails, and ends in disgrace, the jail, suicide. And Dick Turpin tosses a hundred dollars to the boy's mother, and a generous press exclaims, "Not a model man, perhaps; but what noble generosity! The friend of the widow and the orphan! When he dies, how many poor homes will be darkened with grief!" Yes, and the hundred dollars probably pays the widow for her boy.

It is not difficult to be generous with the money of others. A year ago it was announced that Greed had given forty or fifty thousand dollars to the poor. "There," said the admirers of Turpin, "you may say what you will of Greed. He, too, is not a polished man; he is not a scholar nor a dainty gentleman; but he is one of the people; he is large-hearted and generous. Who else has given fifty thousand dollars to the poor?" Yes, and who else has stolen five millions? The politest gentlemen of the highway were notoriously gallant. The Marquis of Goutytoe they compelled to descend from his carriage, and sent the trudging market-woman home in it. They eased the pockets of the Spanish ambassador, and threw a doubloon to the leper hiding behind the hedge. It was a cheap munificence. So was Greed's. It was not his fifty thousand dollars, the giving of which caused such a burst of good feeling, and the exclamation, "There now!" It was only a little of the millions that were not his. He gave it to the poor dwellers in tenement-houses, and it was said that there was no wretched hovel to which he did not send a load of coal or a barrel of flour during the winter months. But he took them first from those wretched dens. Somebody paid the taxes that he stole, and it is the poor who at last pay taxes. Where be the bad people buried? When Turpin dies, we have Greed's opinion of him and his ways gravely paraded in a newspaper. Madame Brinvilliers's opinion of Lucrezia Borgia would be edifying reading!

Shall we have no charity, then? and when a man lies dead and defenceless, shall not warfare cease? Warfare may cease; but should death condone all offences? The malignant lover who denounced his rival to the Inquisition, and in the very moment of his rival's death by fire himself fell dead—shall we write over him, De mortuis? Shall we Romans, whose sons he corrupted, go dumb and sorrowing behind the corpse of Catiline? When a bad man dies, let us say that he was bad. Although he was very rich and very splendid, shall we remember only that he gave in charity one quarter of one per cent. upon the amount of his thefts? The Italian brigand chief, when his band had slaughtered the travellers, said, "There are twelve of us, and we will share equally; but the first equal share shall be for the mother of God." When we tell his story, shall we see only that share?

CHRISTENDOM vs. CHRISTIANITY.

T is remarkable that what is called the practical sense of Christendom virtually rejects the Christian ideals as impracticable. Its highest ideal is obedience to the Divine will, and its instinct, therefore, should represent the religious man as the perfection of vigorous manhood. The more manly, the finer the bloom of health, the sounder the body for the sound and purified mind, the truer and more satisfactory the type, the more symmetrically revealed the Christian man. This is the simple and natural ideal among living men of unthwarted and normal Christian excellence.

But so little is this the fact that the oldest traditions of Christian art depict the founder of Christianity Himself not as a blooming man, not as a figure of the inward and outward health that proceeds inevitably from complete and absolute conformity to the Divine will, but as a wan and wasted personality plainly worsted by the world. This conception extends to the constant and organized control of the Church, and the general feeling of Christendom regards the ministers of its religion either as official personages or as excluded from actual knowledge of life; not masters of the arena, but professionally unfit to cope with the world.

It may, indeed, be said that the traditions of Christian art show a misapprehension of the essential character of the Christian faith. But however that may be, it is certainly true that these traditions do not misrepresent the general conception of Christianity which is professed by those who practically reject its ideals. Here goes Solomon Gunnybags to Christian worship on Sunday morning. He "abashiates" himself in his pew, and his confession that he is a miserable sinner is so sonorous and impressive that the hearer sighs sympathetically with Solomon's consciousness of the enormous burden of wrong-doing that he carries.

Now what is Solomon doing in his pew? He is solemnly professing confidence in and reverence for certain principles of faith and conduct, not only as lofty in themselves, but as absolutely essential to his soul's salvation. Then, unless the whole universe is a farce, and religion and the soul impostures, they are the most practical and practicable of all possible principles, because otherwise the soul's salvation could not be made by beneficent Omnipotence dependent upon fidelity to them. But if some attendant spirit should say to Solomon Gunnybags, as he walks home with the happy consciousness of duty done, "Solomon, the golden rule and the Christian religion forbid you to 'unload' upon David the stock that you believe to be very shaky," he would unquestionably feel, if he did not say: "Stuff! Every man for himself. Of course Christianity is an excellent thing, but it doesn't mean that." Gunnybags does not expressly repudiate Christian principle as unpractical; he only believes it to be so.

The fundamental doctrine of the Christian life is love. The Christian millennium is peace. But it is Christendom that maintains the vast standing armies; and when the International Peace Congress meets in London and proposes disarmament, the good-natured reply of Christendom is, "Well—yes—perhaps—some time," with a smile of amused incredulity, as when a child seriously asks for the moon. Yet this is Christendom, and the Christian principles are entirely familiar, and every Sunday and saint's day in all the Christian churches we protest that the practice of them is essential to our soul's salvation. Then we wipe our eyes, and smile kindly upon any one who really insists that we should offer the other cheek, and forgive seventy times seven. Oh no, we say; that is an eccentric view. No man in this world—that is, in Christendom—can afford to allow himself to be imposed upon. If we don't look out for number one, who will take charge of that precious numeral?

So it is that on some bright July day, looking in imagination upon the respectable Universal Peace Congress in the Hôtel Métropole in London, and hearing the Bishop of Durham offer a resolution for international arbitration, and denouncing the folly, the waste, the woe and wickedness and wrong of war, we hear also, not the immediate and instinctive assent of Christendom, but its wistful prayer and half-despairing hope that some time Christianity may be found to be practicable, and something more than a pretty dream. Yet is there anything more certain than that the Christendom which actually rejects the Christian ideals and principles as impracticable, denounces most savagely those who practically illustrate them, even if they theoretically reject them?

The moral of this little sermon is altogether Christian, for it is charity. Since Christendom is in practice so universally unchristian, and holds its own fundamental principles in such practical contempt, every member of that vast fraternity should be very modest in judging others. Could there be a more radically unchristian figure in human history than Torquemada? If Christianity be what it declares itself to be, the least throb of sound Christian feeling in his bosom would have held his hand. The Inquisition, the fierceness of sects, the religious wars, offensive wars of any kind, are possible only among Christians who hold Christianity to be impracticable.

Yet when the Easy Chair saw a gentle lady going to morning prayers on a happy saint's day, and heard through the open window the murmuring music of the promise when two or three are gathered together, and marked during all the day and in daily conduct the unselfishness, the sympathy, the courtesy, the kindly care of old and young, the faithful doing of duty, the nameless charm of lofty character, the Christian ideal was no longer the mirage of an unreached and unattainable oasis in the desert; it was already come down to earth; it was here, a little heaven below.

FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW. 1882.

N beginning his tender and charming paper upon Washington Irving and Macaulay, Thackeray recalls the beautiful story of which he was so fond, of Sir Walter Scott's last words to his son-in-law Lockhart: "Be a good man, my dear; be a good man." It was a soft autumnal day. The windows were wide open. The low sound of the rippling Tweed stole into the chamber. The most renowned and the most widely beloved of living men lay dying, after a career of admiration and adulation, and of gratified ambition almost unexampled, and in the clear and serene light of the moment that shows things as they are, the one lesson and moral garnered by that marvellous life is spoken in the simple words, "Be a good man, my dear." ...

There are men whose simplicity and dignity and strength and purity of character, whose sound judgment and supreme common-sense, dispose of sophistry and artifice in all relations and pursuits, as surely and completely as the sun dries the dew. They are gentlemen, because they know other men only as men, touching electrically whatever of manhood there may be in them, and whose contact is a silent and consuming rebuke of pretence and falsehood. Whatever his own advantage or attraction or position or grace, the man of this quality takes hold of the reality in other men, man meeting man, as when the grave William of Orange, in his plain serge coat, met the brilliant Philip Sidney in his gold-flowered doublet, and neither was troubled by the clothes of the other.

Such a man lately died. The mingled strength and simplicity and sweetness of his nature, the lofty sense of justice, the tranquil and complete devotion to duty, the large and humane sympathy, not lost in vague philanthropic feeling, but mindful of every detail of relief—the sound and steady judgment, the noble independence of thought and perfect courage of conviction, the blended manliness and modesty of a life which was unstained, and of a character which seemed without a flaw, all belonged to what we call the ideal man.

Passing from college to the counting-room of a great commercial business, his sagacity, energy, and executive power were all brought into successful action. He went to Europe and to the West Indies, but much of the spirit of trade and many of its practices were uncongenial to him, and he quietly withdrew, despite wonder and affectionate remonstrance, to lead his own life in his own way. By taste and temperament an out-door man, he made his home in the rural neighborhood of Boston, busy with country cares and various studies, but interested chiefly in helping other men. He was allied by sympathy more than by much previous actual association with the founders of Brook Farm. But when they chose the site for their enterprise not far from his house, he was soon in the pleasantest relations with the leaders, for their spirit and purpose were in harmony with his own. He was a parishioner and warm personal friend of Theodore Parker, who lived near him, and his keen common-sense and mastery of practical affairs were most useful to Parker as to Ripley. Indeed, the hospitality of such a man for every generous endeavor and for all new and humane ideas was a happy augury for the philanthropic pioneers, because it seemed to promise the final approval and adhesion to their cause of the most conservative and substantial sentiment of the community.

Such a man was, of course, an abolitionist in the days when the name was as repugnant to what is called "society" as the name Christian was to the Jewish Sanhedrim or Methodist to the English Establishment a century and a half ago. He generously aided the cause, which seemed to him that of practical Christianity and of American patriotism, and he held most friendly relations with its chief representatives, who were ostracized and denounced. But his sympathy was not an abstract regard for man rather than for men, and his interest in the effort to help a race and to forecast a happier social organization did not dull his heart or close his hand to the necessities of his neighbor. His life, indeed, was a prolonged charity, but a charity directed by a singularly calm and shrewd judgment. His exhaustless generosity was not the sport of wayward impulse. It was not a well-meaning weakness, but a wise force which helped others to help themselves, but knew also when such self-help was impossible.

Yet the strength and reserve and independence of his character were such that the man was never lost in the reformer. His fine nature instinctively asserted his own individuality. He quietly shunned the wearisome artificiality of society, but he did not merge his own home in the general home of his friends and neighbors at Brook Farm, and his house was always a glimpse of the social refinement and grace, the mental and moral charm, to which the dreams of social regeneration and the elaborate fancies of Fourier pointed—fancies which greatly interested him as hints of a happier social order.

Long absence with his family in Europe, and a long and final residence upon Staten Island, only matured and developed the man, in whom not only was there no guile, but in whom even the most intimate eye could not note a fault. Clarendon might have studied from him his portrait of Falkland: "his inimitable sweetness of, and delight in, conversation; his flowing and obliging humanity; his goodness to mankind; and his primitive simplicity and integrity of life." Disinclined to public life of every kind, he was yet full of the highest public spirit, and it was but natural that his only son should have been selected by Governor Andrew to command the first colored regiment that marched from Massachusetts in the war. In his young person all that was best in the New England youth of his time, all the strength of the elder colonial and Revolutionary day, blended with all the grace and tenderness and gentleness of its modern life, the stern old Puritan softened into a humaner Bayard, was typified. It was the flower of Essex that two hundred years ago was withered in the fatal Indian ambush in the Deerfield Meadows. It was the flower of New England that fell upon a hundred redder fields within a score of years.

But no sorrow could fatally chill a faith which was reflected in the perpetual summer of the father's presence and temperament. The frank urbanity of his greeting, the hearty grasp of his hand, the lofty simplicity of his courtesy, were but the signs of that unwasting freshness of sympathy which held him true to the ideals and aims of earlier life. His helping hand reached invisibly into a hundred homes, and upheld a hundred faltering lives. But, besides this, as president of the Freedman's Aid Association his administrative skill and his wise benevolence enabled him to bear a most effective part in the great settlement of the war. His invincible modesty and scorn of ostentation veiled his beneficent activities, public and private. But nothing could veil the pure and steadfast and unwearying devotion to the well-being of other men. Kindly but firmly he protected his own seclusion, and he permitted no man, in Emerson's phrase, to devastate his day. The freshness of feeling which keeps the heart young was unwasted to the end. His full life brimming purely to the sea reflected heaven as clearly when at last it mingled with the main as when it ran a limpid rivulet from its spring. Young and old, man and boy, he was still the simplest, noblest, most devoted, best. How truly he was the man that every thoughtful man secretly wishes he might be, those only know who knew Francis George Shaw.

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PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

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☞ The above works are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent by the publishers, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price.