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race known by the kindling gray eye, and the fallible sureness of Attic taste. Sometimes light, stubborn, crisping hair,-discloses the his head gets a little hot with the fumes of rapture of instant fight." How glittering patriotism, and then he crosses the line, he that is, but how perfectly frosty! "There loses perfect measure, he declaims, he raises was a salient point of difference between the a momentary smile. France condemned “à boulevards and the hill-sides of the Alma. être l'effroi du monde dont elle pourrait être The Russians were armed." How trenchant l'amour"— Cæsar, whose exquisite simplicity that is, but how perfectly unscrupulous! M. Thiers so admires, would not have writThis is the Corinthian style; the glitter of ten like that. There is, if I may be allowed the east with the hardness of the west; "the to say so, the slightest possible touch of fapassion for tinsel," some one, himself a tuity in such language,-of that failure in Corinthian, said of Mr. Kinglake's style,- good sense which comes from too warm a self"of a sensuous Jew, with the savage spleen satisfaction. But compare this language with of a dyspeptic Englishman." I do not say Mr. Kinglake's Marshal St. Arnaud disthis of Mr. Kinglake's style,-1 am very missed from the presence " of Lord Raglan or far from saying it. To say it is to fall into Lord Stratford, "cowed and pressed down " just that cold, brassy, over-stretched style under their "stern reproofs," or under “the which Mr. Kinglake himself employs so far majesty of the great Elchi's Canning brow, too much, and which I, for my part, repro- and tight, merciless lips!" The failure in bate. But when a brother Corinthian of Mr. good sense and good taste there reaches far Kinglake's says it, I feel what he means. beyond what the French mean by fatuity; A style so bent on effect at the expense of they would call it by another word,—a word soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so lit- expressing blank defect of intelligence, a word tle studious of the charm of the great models; for which we have no exact equivalent in so far from classic truth and grace, must surely English,-bête. It is the difference between be said to have the note of provinciality. a venial, momentary, good-tempered excess, Yet Mr. Kinglake's talent is a really eminent one, and so in harmony with our intellectual habits and tendencies, that, to the great bulk of English people, the faults of his style seem its merits; all the more needful that criticism should not be dazzled by them, but should try closely this, the form of his work. The matter of the work'is a separate thing; and, indeed, this has been, I believe, withdrawn from discussion, Mr. Kinglake declaring that this must and shall stay as it is, and that he is resolved, like Pontius Pilate, to stand by what he has written. And here, I must say, he seems to me to be quite right. On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called history, a foam-bell more or less is of no consequence. But he may, at any rate, ease and soften his style.

in a man of the world, of an amiable and social weakness,-vanity; and a serious, settled, fierce, narrow, provincial misconception of the whole relative value of one's own things and the things of others. So baneful to the style of even the cleverest man may be the total want of checks.

In all I have said, I do not pretend that the examples given prove my rule as to the influence of academies; they only illustrate it. Examples in plenty might very likely be found to set against them; the truth of the rule depends, no doubt, on whether the balance of all the examples is in its favor or not; but actually to strike this balance is always out of the question. Here, as everywhere else, the rule, the idea, if true, commends itself to the judicious, and then the examples We must not compare a man of Mr. King- make it clearer still to them. This is the lake's literary talent with writers like M. de real use of examples, and this alone is the Bazancourt. We must compare him with purpose which I have meant mine to serve. M. Thiers. And what a superiority in style There is also another side to the whole queshas M. Thiers from being formed in a good tion,-as to the limiting and prejudicial operschool, with severe traditions, wholesome re-ation which academies may have; but this straining influences! Even in this age of Mr. James Gordon Bennett, his style has nothing Corinthian about it; its lightness and brightness make it almost Attic. It is not quite Attic, however; it has not the in

side of the question it rather behoves the French, not us, to study.

The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the establishment of an academy in this country, and perhaps I shall

hardly give him the one he expects. But Mr. Forster's about the one primeval lannations have their own modes of acting, and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated, when great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced Shakspeare and Milton, when it has even produced Barrow and Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin, at this late time of day, with an institution like the French Academy. I think academies with a limited, special, scientific scope, in the various lines of intellectual work,-academies like that of Berlin, for instance, we with time may, and probably shall, establish. And no doubt they will do good; no doubt the presence of such influential centres of correct information will tend to raise the standard amongst us for what I have called the journeyman-work of literature, and to free us from the scandal of such biographical dictionaries as Chalmer's, or such translations as a recent one of Spinoza, or, perhaps, such philological freaks as

guage. But an academy quite like the French
Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest
literary opinion, a recognized authority in
matters of intellectual tone and taste, we
shall hardly have, and perhaps we ought not
to wish to have it. But then every one
amongst us with any turn for literature will
do well to remember to what shortcomings
and excesses, which such an academy tends
to correct, we are liable; and the more liable,
of course, for not having it. He will do
well constantly to try himself in respect of
these, steadily to widen his culture, severely
to check in himself the provincial spirit;
and he will do this the better the more he
keeps in mind that all mere glorification by
ourselves of ourselves or our literature, in
the strain of what, at the beginning of these
remarks, I quoted from Lord Macaulay, is
both vulgar, and, besides being vulgar, re-
tarding.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.

THE PHOSPHATES USED IN AGRICULTURE.-It | ammonia, besides containing about twenty-two or was probably the introduction of guano from South twenty-three per cent. of phosphate of lime. But America that brought certain practical minds to in localities which are frequently visited by hurriconsider more attentively the best means of re- canes and much rain, the organic constituents storing fertility of exhausted soils and of keeping and salts of ammonia are washed out, and the up the fertility of those not yet exhausted. This mineral constituents increase in proportion: the extraordinary and powerful manure, the enor-guano becomes less valuable as a manure, by loss mous supplies of which appear to have been stored of its ammoniacal compounds, but constitutes a up by Providence for the actual wants of agri- plentiful source of phosphate of lime. Such are culture, as the endless supplies of coal have ac- the phosphates known as "West India phoscumulated in bygone ages to supply the wants of phate,' "Bolivian guano," etc. These contain our manufactories, was brought to Europe in 1804 from forty to sixty per cent. (and sometimes by Alexander von Humboldt as a scientific curi- more) of ordinary phosphate of lime, whilst their osity. Its valuable nature was not entirely appre-percentage of nitrogen (ammonia) dwindles down ciated by the public at large until about 1838, to 2, 1, or even .5 per cent., as the phosphate when large quantities of it began to be imported increases. Here, then, is an abundant source into England as a manure. Two years later of phosphate of lime.-Intellectual Observer. (1840), Liebig brought out his well-known work on agricultural chemistry, making known the THE late renewed attention to Shakspeare, beprinciple of the manufacture of superphosphate of sides giving books, reviews, lectures without lime, and, in 1842, Mr. Lawes began to manufac- number, relating to the great dramatist, has ture this superphosphate manure. Guano being, even influenced the sermons of the pulpit. We as is well known, the accumulated excrement of learn from the London Review that the Archsea-fowl (and, consequently, having the same bishop of Dublin and the Bishop of St. Andrews composition as the excrements of pigeons and preached at Stratford-on-Avon on the 24th of other domestic birds), is abundant in many parts | last April, and that their sermons, which have of the globe. In certain tropical regions (Peru, | been printed, "are very eloquent, and happily Chinca Isles, etc.), where it never rains, this guano combine criticism on Shakspeare's genius with a is very rich in urate oxalate, and phosphate of due amount of religious teaching.”

JOSIAH QUINCY.

dence that was no small element among the

BEMARKS OF R. H. DANA, JR., BEFORE THE HIS- causes of our Revolution. Remember, breth

TORICAL SOCIETY.

MR. PRESIDENT,-I have received from the Standing Committee a request to say a few words on this occasion, a privilege which I suppose I owe rather to a family friendship with the honored deceased than certainly to any personal claims. It is hardly for me to speak of one who had lived nearly his halfcentury before I was born, in the presence of so many who knew him so much longer and more intimately than I can claim to have done, though he honored me beyond my deserts. Before such an assembly as this, sir, I shall attempt no more than to notice one characteristic of Mr. Quincy; and, as to that, rather to speak of the effect he always produced upon me than to offer an opinion or analysis of his mental constitution.

ren, that we were provincials, governed by a class of crowned, coroneted and mitred men, living in another hemisphere, in whose privileges and dignities we could have no part. I can conceive of men with little or no aversion to such dignities in their own State, and with little confidence in political equality, rising in indignant resistance to such a subordination as that. It was that proud devotion to independence that Burke said united the holders of slaves in a common cause with the free North. After our independence was secured, when the conflict raged over half the world between the radical philosophy of the French revolutionists and the conservative philosophy of Burke and England, the sympathies of many, of most of our highest patriots in New England, were with the latter.

Mr. Quincy told me, not long before his death, that he had the means of proving, from the private letters and journals of the patriots who formed our constitution and eet it in motion, that their chief apprehension for its permanency was from what they feared would prove to be the incompatibility between the two classes of men, the two systems of society they would represent, who must control its policy and patronage. They feared an antagonism, in a republic of equals, between what was substantially an oligarchy founded on slavery, and the free mixed class

Mr. Quincy was a nobleman. He filled out our ideal of what the nobleman should be where nobles or conscript fathers rule in society and in the state. He had the merits and he partook somewhat of the defects of that character. He was favored by nature with the front, the station, the voice, the manner that should belong to the nobleman, and-still more -he had in his soul the true temper of nobility. His was a lofty, high-toned character,-some perhaps would say, a proud and rather highstrung temper. Honored members have just told us, brethren of the Historical Society, and told us with eloquence and fulness of de-es of the North. It was the more dangerous tail, of his fidelity to all duties, his integrity, because it was sectional and absolutely restrictand his laboriousness. It is for me only to ed. There was a sectional class, an aristoctread a narrower path, not without diffi- racy, or whatever else you may call it, with culties, and to recall to myself and to which the people of the Northern States could you the high-spirited, chivalrous gentleman. take no part, excluded by their moral conThackeray says that the "grand manner "victions and by geographical laws. That has gone out. It had not gone out with us, while Mr. Quincy lived. A boy at school, when he came to Cambridge, I met a man in the street who I felt sure from his style must be Mr. Quincy,-and raised my hat to him, and received a most gracious bow in return. It was he, and he could be recognized anywhere by any one on the lookout for a high character among the highest.

this slavery, which met their intellectual disapproval and their moral aversion, was a matter of State control and responsibility, was not enough. They feared it would generate an aristocratic spirit which would tell on the national life and national politics. They saw that it tended to foster an arrogating political class. They knew that oligarchal classes, with their interests, maxims, and symA good deal has been said to-day, and well pathies, had often governed the world. They said, of the spirit of liberty that inspired feared that the antagonism, the incompatibilhis father and rested on the son. I do not ity between these classes and interests would doubt or mean to disparage devotion to the lead to a separation, the weaker section, liberties of all human beings; but there was, whichever that might prove to be, striking in the men of that day, a love of indepen- | for its independence, a separation made the

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one result he could not bear. Against that he would have been willing to rebel. Rather than that, he would have seen the Union, much as he loved and valued it, rent in twain, or severed into as many parts as it might please God to divide it.

easier by the fact that the systems were sep-ims and interests, should gain a permanent arated by a geographical line. When I told social and political ascendency over the free, him that I did not remember this in the pub-mixed classes of the North. That was the lished writings of that day, his answer was that they earnestly desired a union, for our strength and preservation, and kept out of public discussion the tender points, but that I would find it in their letters and journals. I allude to these subjects, Mr. President and brethren, I beseech you to believe, in an assembly of gentlemen of all shades of opinion, only because they explain the political course of Mr. Quincy,—at least, in my opinion, throw some light upon it.

You will remember, brethren, that I am not presenting the entire view of Mr. Quincy's character. I know he loved the largest liberty. He not only advocated, that is cheap,-he labored for, the greatest good of the greatest number. He saw in the present struggle far more and greater things than the political emancipation of the North from the control of a sectional dynasty.

It was Mr. Quincy's belief,—I do not wish to say here, on this occasion, and before you, whether it was a true or an unsound opinion, -take it either way,-it was his opinion that such an antagonism, such a growing incom- Mr. Quincy loved public life, public duties, patibility, existed from the first, and culmi- and public station. It is the more to his nated gradually to the end. It was his belief credit that he never bowed, never swerved,— that the struggle between the Federal and nay, was never suspected of bowing or swervDemocratic parties was, to no small degree, a ing,-to mere popular opinion. He paid litstruggle between these interests. True, the tle respect to mere numbers, on a question of lines were not drawn; many such questions, right and wrong. His creed admitted no such and the issues framed were purely political; blasphemy as that the voice of the majority is but he believed the overthrow of the Federal the voice of God. Perhaps, indeed, his galparty and the installation of the Virginia dy-lant spirit took a little secret, unacknowledged nasty, was a success to the slaveholding class, satisfaction in being in a brave minority. To since which the education and property of no one may both parts of Lord Mansfield's New England have never had their share in celebrated declaration be better applied than the government, unless in exceptional cases, to him: "I love popularity; but it is that and sometimes upon what may be called spe- popularity which follows, not that which is cial terms. run after."

Mr. Quincy thought that the contest of 1820, on the admission of Missouri, was substantially a contest between these classes and interests, and ended as before, in a substantial success of the sectional, oligarchal system. Such, too, he believed to be, and with similar results, the struggle of 1850, on the admission of California; and such the final struggle of 1860, the first political defeat of that class.

Now, sir, Mr. Quincy, so believing, so feeling, to the depth of his being, was not of a temper to acquiesce in that subordination. His independent spirit was enforced by the moral aversion he had for the system on which that dominant class founded its power. He could not bow to it. No! He feared, in the critical winter of 1860-61, but one result; that was not peaceable dissolution; it was He feared only some compromise by which the slaveholding class, with its max

not war.

I do not know, Mr. President, what may be the custom of this society on occasions like the present. I do not know whether you ever present to yourselves here the reverse of any picture of a deceased brother,-whether you examine ever here the weaving of the tapestry behind, by which the best effects are produced. But as I am, and have always been, an unfeigned, devoted admirer of the heroic qualities of Mr. Quincy, perhaps I can the better touch upon what may have been brought forward elsewhere, in his lifetime, as defects.

I do not know what is the definition of bigotry. We ordinarily associate it with inquisitions and tortures. But I suppose it may mean only an undue confidence in and devotion to our opinions; and is consistent with entire kindness and desire to do justice. In that restricted sense, if any one who has differed from Mr. Quincy and has felt the shock of his collision, the congressus Achilli, should

complain that he was severe, and even big- | them. But with Mr. Quincy, opinions on oted, I should say that the manliest course vital questions were convictions. They took was to admit that, in this sense, there might deep root in his nature. They were inseparbe some ground for the charge, and to set it able from all he valued or feared in himself, down as one of the infirmities of a great and all he respected or distrusted in others. character,—one of those terms upon which They might turn out to be right or wrong, alone, in our imperfect condition here, we but they were drawn from the past and bore can obtain such a fellowship and example. upon the highest duties of mankind in the The denominations known among us as Or- present, and the destinies of mankind in the thodox Congregationalists have objected that future. They might be right or wrong at his history of Harvard University has not last, but to him they were truths, and he done them and their colleges justice, in their treated them accordingly. To his final conrelations to Harvard. I have never read victions on vital questions, he was ready to either side, and have no opinion on the ques- sacrifice all,—even life. How could he treat tion; but I have been told by good judges, them lightly? With such a character, on partial to Mr. Quincy and his side, that the such questions, we need not fear to meet comcomplaint is not without foundation. Such plaints from those who have encountered him was his affection for Harvard and its support- front to front, that he was severe or even ers, such his convictions in its favor, that he bigoted. We have little sympathy with those did not see readily any limitations and objec- complaints, when they come from men who tions. Was it not so, too, in political con- met his scorn or rebuke for civil cowardice or tests? I am inclined to think we must ad- dereliction of duty. mit that it sometimes was. But, having been thus frank and candid, I claim the right in return, to remind you what these imperfections were, and from what they sprung. They sprung from no ill nature, no indifference to the rights or feelings of others, but from the depth and heartiness of his convic-I confess I should not like to have promised tions.

It has been said that he was not a wise political leader. He certainly showed wise forecast in his own affairs, and in those of the city and university. In politics, he saw clearly into general principles, and, in many respects, divined remote consequences. Still,

myself or my party unreservedly to his guidance on the policies of the day and hour. Perhaps the combination of qualities in his nature, not easy to analyze, made him far

his temperament did not admit of his dealing with men and measures as the policy of political management requires.

Burke would not see,-he could not see,Charles James Fox, though on his death-bed, much as he loved him. Why? Burke was so convinced that the French political phi-sighted and not good at near sight. Perhaps losophy, to which Fox had lent the aid of his great influence, was dangerous to social morals, and the very existence of any respectable body politic, that he could not dissever the man from the opinion. It is easy to say that we must separate ourselves and others from our and their opinions. Perhaps superhuman beings would do so. If opinions are mere intellectual tenets, or, if they are the cards with which we play the game of life, it were easy. Those men will find no difficulty in doing that, with whom opinions on vital questions of our relations to God and man, and the welfare of all here and hereafter, are no more than opinions on natural science or geographical statistics. If men are conscious that in themselves there is no connection between their souls, their characters, their entire natures, and their opinions, it is inexcusable in them not to make the distinction in dealing with other men. who differ from

If I have erred in noticing these qualifications or deficiencies in his constitution, it is a great gratification to believe that in them I have noticed all the objections that have ever been made against him. What brighter eulogy could I pass upon Mr. Quincy than to say that after a life spent in the severest conflicts of municipal, academical, state, and national life, in which he was always earnest and sometimes severe, in which he had much ungracious work to do, no charge has ever been made against him I honestly say I never heard of any,-affecting in any way his private or public character, which I have not touched upon to-day, and before you, his friends!

I would not underrate or gloss over, still less, try to render attractive, imperfections

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