greater service, than to lead our audiences, step by step, into continually higher at mospheres of appreciation. She has in her the making of a really great actress, and a really great actress, we doubt not, that she will become.

Let the enthusiasm of the public for Miss Heron, founded, as it really is, in the veracious and vigorous quality of her acting, stimulate our managers and our actors generally. They may count upon the public of New York with perfect confidence, if they will but do their best to deserve the public interest. It is idle to charge our people at large with indifference to the Opera and the Theatre, when you see that every genuine and vivid appeal to their attention is answered so warmly and so rapidly.

“Organize ! organize! organize!” should be the cry of the critics to the caterers for the public amusement and instruction. Let those, who have such matters in charge, devote themselves to developing our resources of the kind, in the most thorough and fearless way, and they will find their reward.

Not less earnestly is the same advice to be pressed upon those who feel a real concern for the welfare of the "arts," so commonly called, in America.

We have on more than one occasion lamented the disregard of the interests of painting, which was indicated by the condition of the Academy Exhibition, and, now that the season of that annual display of the nakedness of the land is approaching, we might easily renew our Jeremiads. But we have no tears to spare for the painter, after wasting our sympathies on the sculptor, or, rather, on the only sculptor who is at present inviting the public neglect, by announcing that he has spent the best years of his early manhood in contriving beauty for the comfort and instruction of his fellow-men, instead of piling up dollars for his own delectation. Mr. Palmer's exhibition of sculpture, at No. 547 Broadway, is well worth visiting, in the first place, for the sake of the sculptor's works which you will see there, and, in the second, for the sake of the instructive solitude which the rooms offer to the meditative mind, overwearied with the converse of men. If you have found the society of your human friends unsatisfactory, or vexatious, we can assure you that

you will find the most agreeable dumb people in the world at these rooms, and that you will find there nobody else.

If you take the trouble to go there, that fact is a sufficient proof that you care enough for art to talk with us a little about those sweet and steadfast creatures of the chisel, and about their gifted maker.

You find in them all, do you not, a singular graciousness and delicacy of conception; not much force, to be sure, at least, not so much as should make you feel that the strength of life was balanced with its grace in them, and a fine smoothness of external manipulation, which makes you first remember Powers, and then forget him? When you ask this Indian Girl what she thinks about the cross she has found in road, she has not much to say, that indicates inward illumination, and you have to infer that she would not have looked very differently, nor spoken otherwise, had she found a silver crescent instead of a wooden crucifix; but, after all, what could you expect of an ignorant Indian girl, but Indian ignorance and girlish satisfaction in a new mystery? Nothing, of course; and if Mr. Palmer expected to find anything else in her, he was a misled man, and you cannot be surprised at his disappointment. Still, if he could not find a soul in that forest face, he cannot be blamed for dwelling with a patient artist's elaboration upon the graceful form, and wearying his hand out, until he had subdued the marble into such a semblance of firm, and soft, and living flesh, as few sculptors have ever won from it. So, too, you think of this Sleeping Peri. What a peri may be, you never very distinctly knew, and this Peri gives you no more insight into the nature and ways of Peris, than Mr. Thomas Moore's excepting, that while you look on her, you cannot help thinking it odd she shouldn't have been able to reach Paradise with these wings, if Paradise be, indeed, located somewhere in the blue empyrean-for a stouter, more substantial, more ornithological pair of wings, no angel could require for the most distant mission and the swiftest flight which an angel could be commissioned to take. Observe with what minute and felicitous touch the feathery substance of these very available pinions is reproduced! You would say they were soft enough for the repose of a

child's cheek. And here is a child whose cheek is soft enough to need such a downy couch! What wonderful truth of perception and force of touch there are, in the handling of this little creature's shoulders and head! Moreover, you find in this child something more than you have found in the others, of intellectual life. The "purple shadow" of "babyhood's royal dignities" lies about that small supreme brow, those firm, fearless eyes, the undaunted innocence of that chiseled mouth.

On the whole, you like the child's company best, though you may turn from him now and then, to wonder at the rich, wavy effect which the sculptor has given, by his peculiar handling, to the tresses of these spiritual young ladies near by. We fear they are allegorical as well as spiritual, but they are certainly lovely.

Would it not be a relief to you, now, if some human being would come in, to whom you might say what you have gathered from the dumb eloquence of the beautiful creatures around you? And should you not say to him something like this: "How plain it is that our sculptor here, endowed with so fine a sentiment of beauty, and so exquisite & facility of hand, would never have mistaken fancies for imaginations, and notions for ideas, had he been surrounded with great works really great works-that would have educated his inward intellect ual life, as the beautiful realities which he has seen have educated his external perceptions?"

And would you not further go on to say, that the works, which this self-taught servant of art has executed, are too lovely and too genuine, for us not to lament most sincerely that they are destined to be taken away from us, unseen by the multitude of our people, and unheeded by all save a few critics, who haven't faith or courage to say one-half of what they think about these things, or about anything else, because they have no assurance of the public concern or sympathy?

If these are your impressions, rich and fortunate reader, why will you not do your share towards stimulating the capable in our community into the establishment of some really efficient institution for the reception of all new works of art, the purchase of such as are excellent, and the exhibition of them to the people-to the

formation, in short, of a fine gallery of painting and of sculpture?

If we cannot have the thing in its purity, as in France, or Germany, or Italyand even in London they have it—let us take the most feasible opportunity which offers itself to us.

There is the Crystal Palace still standing, sad, and shivery, and desolate, but not cast down or utterly destroyed. To make, of this building, anything like the glorious and lovely wonder which the Sydenham Company have made of its English prototype, is, perhaps, impossible; but who can have seen the happy and humanizing place which the new palace has already become to the London population, without a sense of shame and vexation that we, in New York, should be suffering our pleasant temple of good weather and beauty to be going so fast to decay in uselessness!

It is a melancholy sight now. Cheered a little while ago by a prosperous fair, it has sunk again into silence and desertion. Machines are there, pleading vainly, for their inventors, to the empty air; beautiful marbles, the splendid product of our own hills, are there, reproving us for our extravagant recklessness of our own rich resources; and, saddest voice of all, there are the slowly-crumbling stairways and scaffoldings, that might be made forever gay with flowers, and bright with paintings, and noble with statues, and cheery with sweet music-a lounge more genial than Broadway in the winter's days, and, perhaps, not less profitable-a place of warmth and pleasant meditation, and the most meritorious and beneficial society.

When you have established the opera, dear reader, will you have the goodness to buy up the Palmer Marbles, and all the pictures of the coming exhibition, to organize a Crystal Palace Company, and so make yourself the most beneficent benefactor of the people whom these latter years have produced, and introduce a happier era into our public and our private life? If you manifest a good disposition in this respect, we will enter, hereafter, into fuller details of that which is, and that which ought to be, done, in regard to both the Crystal Palace and the opera, the theatres and the concerts, and all the means, employed and unemployed, of artistic culture, and of refined recreation, which are lying at our hands in this World of New York.

what he thought of Miss Heron, than I could do the very same, by any impulse of cosmopolitan affability, with Chu-JinSeng of the Forest-of-Pencils Society: "whose respectable, portly and pompous uncle, the Mandarin of the yellow button and several peacock feathers, had sent him hither to induct us outsidebarbarian Fifth-Avenuenians in the refinements and intricacies of celestial etiquette. His square frout-face presented, gravity might be possible; but the least wag of his tail, ever so slight a glimpse of his eccentric occiput, just the faintest hint of the arc described by the national hairy pendulum, at the small of his back, upon the perpendicular of his spinal column-and a guffaw were irrepressible. And I defy you wholly to lose sight and thought of it, even in your most philosophic contemplations of his mind. Though he display the profundity and sententiousness of a Bacon and a Johnson, equally in his axioms and his antitheses will you detect a trace of tail.

It is somewhere related by Leigh Hunt, I think, that once, in London, a chimney-sweeper came unawares upon a Chinaman. Both presently rolled on the ground in twisting convulsions of laughter, to the great alarm of by-standers; each saw, in the other, seven wonders of the funny.

My own earliest idea of a Chinaman was derived from the Siamese Twins. While yet an urchin, I had the rare honor to be admitted to personal intimacy with that famous lusus naturæ, which erst inspired Lytton Bulwer with bad poetry, and foreshadowed the best successes of Barnum's Museum, in the Joyce Heth, Feejee mermaid, and Tom Thumb line. Wonder-eyed and thoughtful, sitting on my stool, suppressed in a corner by the fire, I have watched them by the hour, as they ate, or smoked, or laughed, or talked, or even - heaven save the key!-sang. From all they said, or did, or were, I derived notions, droll or shocking, as the occasion was, of three hundred millions of pig-eyed people, whose souls are none the less immortal, because their God's name, as I understood it, was Josh-notions that have not altogether left me to this day. I was not yet so nice in my geographical and ethnological distinctions as to appreciate their points of difference from the Peter Parley type of Chinaman. True, I was at first puzzled by the apparent discovery that they had no tails on the

are

backs of their heads in the place where the tails ought to grow, but when, graciously, to help along my researches, they untwisted the coronal that encircled their dingy brows, and showed me that the appendage, in all its genuineness, was there. I saw in the fact merely an individual peculiarity of coiffure, even more remarkable and personal than the link of gristle which united them like a pair of human sausages. At once their nationality ceased to perplex me. I overcame that doubt as easily as a fly crossed the hair line which divided Siam from China on my Malte-Brun map. And therefore, deduced I, all Chinamen are born double; all Chinamen Chang-Eng. [The reader will recollect that the twins were called Chang and Eng, but by a pretty amalgamation of their names, for the sentiment of it, they joined the two with a sort of gristlehyphen, and called themselves ChangEng.] When Chang is hungry, thought I. Eng eats; when the nose of Eng is titillated, Chang sneezes; when Chang lifts up his voice in wiry song, Eng makes diabolical faces; if you cut off Eng's tail, the tail of Chang will bleed; should Chang have the colic, a mustard poultice to the pit of Eng's stomach would relieve him; the tea that Chang imbibes, cheers Eng; the rice which disappears down Eng, fattens Chang; Chang thinks Eng, and Eng think; Chang-therefore no occasion to speak to each other; Eng is Chang, and Chang is Eng-therefore neither is in the other's way. When Chang said to Eng once, "My brother, go up to our room, if you please, and bring down the fan I painted for Johnny," I thought it an uncommon good joke, as though one should say, Sit there, myself, while I go for me." In three years that I knew Chang-Eng, I never, saving that once, heard either speak to the other-I never once heard either of them say “ We,” meaning themselves.

From the case of the Siamese Twins the inferences I drew, in regard to those three hundred millions of my fellow-creatures, were prodigious inferences for such a small boy to draw; I had my foregone conclusions as to the duplicity of the race, which a closer acquaintance with them, even on their native soil, has not proved to be utterly at fault-at least in one sly sense. Had the succession of events been more rapid, during the period of my inti

macy with Chang-Eng, my ideas of Chinamen would, no doubt, have presented some refreshing points of resemblance to the views of American manners and habits afforded by those veracious, clear sighted, fair and philosophic observers Mons. Léon Beauvallet of the Rachel Corps Dramatique, and the London Times in the Arrowsmith case -and I should have made a note on't, that all Chinamen, being double, make their fortunes in Museums by twentyfive cents admittance, retire to farms in North Carolina, marry eccentric sisters, and have nine children between them.

My next encounter with John Chinaman was at San Francisco, where I derived new views from the contemplation of purer types, marked by all the enforced characteristics of the Manchu dynasty. In these exotics from the Flowery Kingdom each specimen was single. Now my tails hung down as straight as a cow's, and my eyes were less on a plane than ever. "All Chinamen," I noted, Timeswise and Beauvalletishly, "are either carpenters, cooks, washerwomen or gamblers; their names invariably begin with Ay, or Kin, or Fu, and end in Cow, or Fung, or Tien; with every Chinaman, in the matter of shooting-crackers, it is Fourth of July all the year round; any Chinese woman can procure plenary indulgence for her indiscretions by offering the cheap incense of joss-stick at the shrine of some cowtailed Diana; and any Chinaman may perjure his soul without fear of fiends by burning some yellow paper before the Recorder; every Chinaman belongs to a secret society whose peculiar object is to squeeze out of him extortionately much cash, and to strangle him outright if he tells; every bankrupt Chinaman disembowels himself for the satisfaction of his creditors, and every Chinese lady who cannot pay her dress-maker poisons herself with opium for a receipt in full; then the defunct is interred in some Yerba Buena Cemetry to a salute of shooting-crackers, and they feed the grave for a whole moon with roast pig.

Then I sailed away to Honolulu, in the Sandwich Islands; and after a stay of three months in that amphibious Paradise, if one had asked me, What are the habits and customs of the Chinese? I should have answered: The Chinaman lives on Kamehameha street, or the King's road, where he keeps a shop for the sale of Madras handkerchiefs, Turkey

red, teapoys, rattan furniture, and chowchow sweetmeats in blue jars; he buys a great many Manilla cheroots at auction, has his horse-race every Saturday afternoon, and snubs Kanakas continually.

Away I went, with this my latest ethnological fact, to Hong-Kong, where I was soon prepared to assert that the pure Chinaman was either comprador--that is, a ship's agent-pawnbroker, opiumsmuggler, beggar, retired pirate, or active assassin; he sold cash by the string, like onions, in front of smoky dens at the end of the Victoria Road; or he played Simon-says-wiggle-waggle for samshu at midnight, in the loft of a cut-throat den, brazenly published with paper lanterns; or he waylaid sentimental ensigns returning late at night, in a state of beer, from a visit to a "Kumpny's widow" who received a select party to loo and gin-and-water, every evening, on the heights above the Bishop's Palace.

Away again, to Singapore and Penang, where I found the Chinaman making shoes, coining bad dollars, waiting on table at " British" hotels, nursing halfcaste babies, cheating Malays, and getting himself devoured by an occasional enterprising and unceremonious tigress with a large family in a famishing condition.

Next to Calcutta; and there I found the old familiar tail wagging, with added vivacity and wide-awakeness, among the turbans and breech cloths of the Black Town bazaars. At the periodical opium sales, my pig-eyed friend was smartest in the bidding, and in the everlasting processions, from Doorga Pooja to a turn-out of Triads, his gong banged loudest.

Home again, at last-and there sat the scamp on the lowest step of the Astor House, in all the picturesqueness of woeful desolation and home-sickness, cunningly playing on that harp of a thousand strings, the sympathies of a Broadway crowd, with a trick of instrumentation which was, to me, a familiar and amusing reminiscence of San Francisco "Please buy something from this poor Chinaman!"-he buried all the while in jacket sleeves and profound inconsolability: Begging considered as one of the Fine Arts.

One day, certain celestials of the better class, concerned for the national character, exposed this dodge in a morning paper. For several months after