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REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

If, Yes, and Perhaps. Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations, with some Bits of Fact. By EDWARD E. HALE. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

IT is one of the sad offices of criticism oftentimes to say self-evident things, to discover obvious facts, to enforce undisputed opinions. We had an idea of referring to Mr. Hale as a most charming writer, with a gift of invention so original that it might almost be pronounced novel, and a verve and spirit that we do not know exactly where to match; but it has occurred to us that this can scarcely be a secret to the readers of the Atlantic; and we own that we should be very glad to let his little book speak for itself, except that we do not allow any one but the Reviewer to repeat himself in these pages, from which Mr. Hale has taken some of the best things in the present volume. Our readers need only to be reminded of "My Double, and how he undid me," "The Man without a Country," "The Last of the Florida," to be able to form a just notion of the quality of this collection, which includes papers from various sources, and of such remote dates as 1842, 1851, and 1852; and he need only look over the earliest of these "The South American Editor"-in order to see how real a gift is Mr. Hale's extraordinary power of utilizing the improbable, and of turning exaggeration to the best and pleasantest account. The charm in his things is as nearly as we can get at itthat the characters, in no matter what absurdity of attitude or situation they find themselves, always act in the most probable manner; the plot is as bizarre or grotesque as you like, but the people are all true to nature, and are exactly our friends and neighbors, or what our friends and neighbors would be if they were a little livelier. The Rev. Frederick Ingham and his man Dennis, so wildly fantastic in their relation to each other, are never anything but New England clergyman and Irishman in themselves; Philip Nolan, amidst all the sad impossibilities of his fate, was so veritable a man, that many have claimed to know his history apart from Mr. Hale's narrative. You have granted the author's preposter

ous premises almost before he asks you, and thereafter he has you quite at his disposal; you are to laugh or sigh as he bids you, and not to concern yourself with the probable or improbable. Perhaps. his peculiar gift is most skilfully employed in that lovely love-story, "The Children of the Public," in which every incident appears the most likely thing that could have happened in the circumstances. Carter is so truly and thoroughly an honest-hearted young adventurer, come to New York to attend the distribution of Mr. Burrham's cyclopædias, and Fausta-cast upon his poverty and ignorance by the theft of her trunk and all her money, and the address of the lady she is come to visit—is so sweetly and naturally trustful of him and fate, that it does not seem in the least strange that they should dine and sup together for six cents, should while away their time on the streets, in hotel parlors, and public libraries till night, and should sleep at the public charge, she in a church-pew, and he in a station-house, - or should next day both draw prizes in Mr. Burrham's gift enterprise, and get married shortly. You do not perceive till the end that these events belong, perhaps, to the range of fact, but not to that of probability; and the interest of the pretty love-story is so artfully thrown over all, that you do not understand at first what a lesson in modern civilization you have been taking. On the whole, though this paper lacks the daring and delightful humor of "My Double, and how he undid me," we are inclined to rank it first among those in the book, which is rating it very high. In some of the others, the conception being not so happy, the art is less, and the artifice is more: in "The Skeleton in the Closet" the construction is felt almost unpleasantly, even the humor of it does not save it from being a little scadente. “A Piece of Possible History," in which Homer and David are brought together, and “The Old and the New, Face to Face," in which Paul and Seneca are confronted, are not strongly wrought; but "Christmas Waits in Boston " is a very charming bit of cheerful and ingenious suggestion and invention.

Mr. Hale, indeed, after Dr. Holmes, is

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WE think this book may be accurately described as the book with which it is the easiest thing in the world to find fault. Every man has some passage of some author which, from long repetition and frequent quotation, he has come to consider a phrase in common use, and for him it is sufficient condemnation of Mr. Bartlett's work not to find in it that line from The Columbiad, or whatever. Besides, the field of literature being so vast, it might well happen that phrases really in common use have been now and then omitted from the collection, which, being vainly sought there, appear the only quotations worth remembering. We confess that we imagine this case, and that we have not tried to think of any one familiar quotation with the purpose of convicting Mr. Bartlett of its omission. He has had the help of Mr. Rezin A. Wright of New York, in editing the present edition, and has greatly enlarged it since the last issue of the work in 1863, through the researches of others interested in its completeness. He and his assistants must of course be the judges of the degree of use in which a quotation becomes familiar. Completeness, which in this compilation is the great desideratum, can only be attained by frequent revision and addition; but the editors of the book might do much to effect it by inviting contribution from every one who considers himself the proprietor or repository of a familiar quotation. A good deal of trash would thus be got together, but it would be worth going over.

In the mean time, the book is a peculiarly entertaining as well as useful one, and has much of the strange fascination belonging to unabridged dictionaries, which, we main

tain, are more agreeable reading than most modern romances and poems constructed from them. If there is a certain pleasant novelty in seeing for the first time a familiar quotation in the circumstances where its creator placed it, there is also something interesting in looking on a famous passage, hitherto known with the context, as a quotation. It is a very trifling enjoyment, but it is well not to reject any sort of small delight; and the pursuit of this may lead one to some comparative observation of the amount of quotation from different authors in Mr. Bartlett's ingenious volume. The passages are arranged chronologically, beginning with Chaucer and ending with Lowell, and including familiar quotations from a few un-English sources, though these are exceptional. Naturally, Shakespeare has the largest place, -a hundred and eighteen pages; next to him is Milton, then Byron, then Pope, then Wordsworth, then Dryden, then Cowper, then Goldsmith. Humanity has given the first of these his great vogue in parlance; but moods, sentiments, and conditions have had much to do with the familiarity of the others in quotation, and it is curious to find Milton and Wordsworth just holding their own against Pope and Byron. Cowper, Goldsmith, and Dryden are almost equally quoted, though the latter is probably far less read; and Butler has furnished many weapons to those who never penetrated to his armory of wit, -or museum of armor as it has now wellnigh become.

Tennyson is first among quotation-bearing authors of our own time, and first after him is Longfellow, neither being quoted at his best. We suppose it was in despair of representing Charles Dickens with any sort of adequacy that he was given only one page in this book. It is certain that he, more than any living author, perhaps more than Shakespeare himself,—has supplied current phrases and expressions. He has, indeed, become so habitually quoted, that his phraseology has modified that of the whole English-speaking world, and his sayings are in every mouth; a book of "Familiar Quotations," conscious and unconscious, could be gathered from his romances alone.

The usefulness of Mr. Bartlett's volume is greatly enhanced by the very complete index of subjects, and by the appendix, containing proverbial sayings and expressions, as well as the most-quoted passages from the Bible and Prayer-Book.

The Ever-victorious Army: a History of the Chinese Campaign under Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon, and of the Suppression of the Taiping Rebellion. By ANDREW WILSON. Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh. 1868.

THE Taiping rebellion, which was imagined to be opening China to Christianity, and which promised at one time to revolutionize the empire, grew out of the contact with foreigners and the loss of Imperial prestige by collisions with England. The distress of the rebels hurled their armies upon the neighborhood of the European settlements, and compelled the English and French to fence them out from the neighborhood of Shanghai by force of arms. Before the American adventurer, Ward, had organized the little army which, under Gordon, gave the finishing stroke to the civil war, the Taipings had proved their incapacity to hold their conquests, or to substitute a better government for that which they would overthrow. Great bands of marauders had swept over the Flowery Land, and marked their progress in the night by the glare of burning villages, in the day by the smoke of consuming towns. When the pretender died, at the capture of Nanking, he must have felt that he had changed busy cities into heaps of ruin, fruitful fields into utter wilderness. The success of the Europeanized army led by Colonel Gordon, after the fall of General Ward at the capture of Tseki, was due to its compactness, alertness, and enterprise, -its steamers and its artillery, -its taking the initiative everywhere, and the intuitive perception of its commanding officer. This remarkable man was no adventurer, but a regular officer of engineers, perfectly calm, thoroughly in earnest, and so absolutely disinterested, that he was discharged at his own request from the service poorer than when he entered. His genius multiplied his three thousand men tenfold without a commissariat; under a scorching sun, he burst through vast lines of fortification, utterly routed a relieving army of immense numbers, forced his steamers through every impediment; and displayed such gallantry to the resisting, and such mercy to the vanquished, such neglect of personal advantage, and such singular regard to the interests of the Imperial government, that the very highest honors the Chinese can bestow were heaped upon him.

No doubt this Taiping rebellion has worked for the development of China, and

led remotely to the liberal measures by which it is now entering into commercial and fraternal relations with the rest of the world. It is a sad reality, however, that the multiplication of free ports does not affect the tea question favorably at first. Since the opening of the Chinese ports tea has deteriorated in quality and expanded in price; so that the third rates fifteen years ago were equal to the first quality now. The quantity demanded by commerce has doubled; the old trees have been plucked too freely, and the same kind is not only one half dearer than ever before, but is raised by the intense competition to a higher rate at times in China than in London. Still, this must be only temporary; trade inevitably finds a healthy level; and increase of international intercourse ameliorates the condition of the world at large.

The Opium-Habit, with Suggestions as to the Remedy. New York: Harper and Brothers.

NOTHING from this book appears more certain than that if the burnt child does dread the fire, he cannot keep out of it. It is the unburnt child who shuns it; and reform is for the most part confined to those who have not gone astray. In other words, the chief, if not the sole use of the book, which recounts in many experiences, and in the moving language of its victims, the horrible effects of the opium habit, is to terrify from its formation, not to persuade to its relinquishment. Yet even here the good to be done is of limited degree, if we are to believe, as the compilation teaches, that in most if not in all cases the opium habit is formed upon the physician's prescription; that the drug is rarely or never taken in the first or even second place for the delight it gives, but for the relief it affords from intense physical pain. The remedy seems to lie in the substitution of some other alleviative for opium, or in strict warning from the physician to his patient that he must never prescribe opium for himself. It is of course possible that, with the habit of deceit and self-deceit which opiumeating creates in its victims, they romance the beginning of their ruin, and that they take the drug more for pleasure than they allow in their confessions. Southey suspected this of Coleridge. But whatever is the cause of the opium habit, the effect is ineffably tragic, no doubt. This book, where

so many dreadful facts are grouped, is to be read with thrilling nerves, and the excitement is not to be allayed even by Mr. Ludlow's "What shall they do to be saved?" though if anything could soothe the reader, that gentleman's gift of making truth appear stronger than fiction would do it. There is very much in his letter, which ends the book, sketching the outlines of an opium-cure to be operated in an opiumeater's asylum, which must strike every one as very sensible; but every one is not a judge of this part of the business. Inveterate opium-eaters generally cannot be cured; their attempts at reformation end in death, if persevered in beyond the capacity to resume the habit, which if resumed duly kills. Among the cases here presented at less or greater length there is one "Successful Attempt to abandon Opium" and one "Morphine Habit overcome." In the first, the patient succeeded in breaking the habit by gradual reduction of his potion of laudanum, after De Quincey's method; in the second, the drug seems to have been abruptly and totally relinquished. But in the one case, the writer addresses himself almost entirely to those who have only briefly and moderately indulged their fatal appetite, and, in giving advice for their cure, confesses that the best advice is never to begin the habit; in the other case, the cure is of but two months' standing.

John Ward's Governess. A Novel. By ANNIE L. MCGREGOR. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

FROM the life of a young gentleman, who marries an Italian singer of great beauty and unsettled principles, and survives her elopement and death, with two young children and a poor opinion of women, no surprising event is to be expected by the veteran novel-reader, and one understands almost from the title-page that John Ward's Governess will become John Ward's second wife. Incidents and most characters bear proof of evolution from inner consciousness, rather than experience of the world, in this little book; yet we see how it could have been made so much worse than it is that we are half inclined to praise it. At least one character is almost well done, the excellent, tender-hearted, loving, overanxious elderly sister. She does annoy and bore her brother in a natural way; if she sometimes also bores the reader, we

must concede so much to art, and suffer in patience. We mean to say something better than this, namely, that the character shows a real feeling for human nature, and gives us the hope that if the author would turn her attention to human nature as she sees it about her, and eschew it as she finds it in fiction, she could do something, after a while, that we should all read with pleasure. Even in this book there are great negative merits; the people are all in a pretty fair state of physical health; none, that we recollect, has any unpleasant personal blemish or defect; and we are legitimately asked to be interested in the fortunes of men and women whose individuality is not eked out by entire social disability or desperate pecuniary circumstances. This is a great step, a very great step, in the right direction.

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MR. PARTON, who always carries interest with him, has here the help of facts which carry conviction with them. We do not see how any one but a smoker could hold out against the arguments proving the unremunerative nature of his habit; and teetotalers, we think, must own that winebibbing is entirely bad, in spite of the fact that the one element of wine which makes it wine is of an indeterminable character, and may be so generous and wholesome as to counterbalance all its other evil properties. In fact, we have a faint hope that these admirable essays may persuade some user of alcohol and tobacco to abandon them; or if not that, then warn those whom it is not too late to warn never to indulge in these harmful pleasures. But it is a good deal to hope for even faintly. Mr. Parton does not, apparently, hold out a strong inducement of reform to a wicked world when he tells it that its bottle "enables us to violate the laws of nature without immediate suffering and speedy destruction." With vantage-ground like this given him, it would seem that the sinner must be greatly tempted to continue in his sin. Grant a misdoer time, and eternity is always an infinite way off. Nevertheless, we like Mr. Parton's candid fashion of treating these matters, which brings into their popular consideration something of the impartiality of science. The world is too old to be frightened into goodness and wisdom, and

must be approached as if it could be persuaded to give up what would probably result in evil. The strongest of all arguments against slavery was that it was in spirit compatible with all possible crimes.

Even if what Mr. Parton writes did not always make a vivid impression, we think the readers of the Atlantic could scarcely have forgotten the three essays, "Does it Pay to Smoke?" "Will the Coming Man drink Wine?" and "Inebriate Asylums and a Visit to One," which form this volume. We need not comment upon the excellent manner in which good material is utilized in them, or advert again to their author's well-known gift of making all his facts entertaining. But we can speak of the very sensible and felicitous Preface to their republication, near the close of which he strikes the key-note of all successful protest against vice. When the Devil suggests that perhaps evil-doing does n't hurt much, it is the triumphant answer of reason, that, if you refrain from a possible evil, you are not only absolutely safe, but more a man through your self-denial. "During those seven months," says our author of one who had given up tobacco for that length of time, "he was a man. He could claim fellowship with all the noble millions of our race who have waged a secret warfare with Desire all the days of their lives..... It is surprising what a new interest is given to life by denying ourselves one vicious indulgence. What luxury so luxurious as selfdenial ! . . . . The cigar and bottle are often replaced by something not sensual."

A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant, Пlustrated by Twenty-six Engravings; Eight Fac-similes of Letters from Grant, Lincoln, Sheridan, Buckner, Lee, &c., &c., and Six Maps. With a Portrait and Sketch of Schuyler Colfax. By ALBERT D. RICHARDSON, Author of " Field, Dungeon, and Escape," and "Beyond the Mississippi." Hartford: American Publishing Company. [Published by subscription.]

WE cannot find, from an examination of Mr. Richardson's book, that a Personal History of General Grant differs from most other histories of him, except in being a great deal more entertaining. To be sure, there is an effort made throughout to fix the reader's attention upon General Grant's character rather than his performance; but

the two are not to be separated, and the only perceptible result is the accumulation of anecdote. A larger proportion of the work is given to the record of his life anterior to the Rebellion than is usual in biographies of our matter-of-fact hero; but he is not more studied here than in his subsequent history. In fact, we get no fresh impressions of the man from his personal historian, except that the most and the worst has been made of those early lapses from sobriety, of which we hear less and less now every day. Commonly Mr. Richardson is frank enough in the treatment of all points in Grant's career, and we cannot suspect him of uncandor when he describes him as peculiarly susceptible to a little wine; but we are loath to be reminded in that way of the great public character whose innocent habits rendered him such an easy victim, and we prefer to believe that Grant's temperance is a virtue, that he may once have yielded to drink as other men do, and reformed as other men do. It appears to us that Lincoln set this whole affair right in the answer which Mr. Richardson says he made to a "persistent grumbler," demanding Grant's removal. "For what reason?" asked the President, "Because he drinks so much whiskey." "Ah, yes! " (thoughtfully). "By the way, can you tell me where he gets his whiskey? He has given us about all our successes; and if his whiskey does it, I should like to send a barrel of the same brand to every general in the field." We cheerfully accept Grant upon this method of valuation; and if the habit of taking strong waters breeds so much good sense, energy, modesty, and correct principle in prospective Presidents, we hope the coming man of the people will always drink wine- to excess.

A very interesting part of Mr. Richardson's work is that describing General Grant's boyhood, and the state of society in which he grew up. Here, however, the field of anecdote has been pretty well gleaned, and Mr. Richardson achieves new effects rather by the carefulness with which he gives circumstances and conditions than with novelty of material. We get a clear idea of Grant's home-life, and the local influences which went to form his character. Among the latter, a lack of local appreciation was doubtless useful to him. A boy from whom not much is expected has already a fair start in the world, and Grant always had the assistance of a good deal of neighborly doubt. His first advance in life

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