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sciousness of the conditions and limitations

of his faculty.

Nothing can be more agreeable than the career of a successful artist. His employment does not force upon him the solitude of an author; it is eminently companionable; from its first design, through all the processes that bring his work to perfection, he is not shut out from the encouragement of sympathy; his success is definite and immediate; he can see it in the crowd around his work at the exhibition; and his very calling brings him into pleasant contact with beauty, taste, and (if a portrait-painter) with eminence in every department of human activity.

Leslie's passage through the world was of that equal temper which is happiest for the man and unhappiest for the biographer. With no dramatic surprises of fortune, and no great sorrows, his life had scarce any other alternation than that it went round with the earth through night and day, and would have been tame but for his necessary labor in an art which he loved wisely and with the untumultuous sentiment of an after-honey-moon constancy. We should say that his leading characteristic was Taste, an external quality, it is true, but one which is often the indication of more valuable ones lying deeper. In the conduct of life it insures tact, and in Art a certain gentlemanlike equipoise, incapable of what is deepest and highest, but secure also from the vulgar, the grotesque, and the extravagant. Leslie, we think, was more at home with Addison than with Cervantes.

The

His autobiographical reminiscences are very entertaining, especially that part of them which describes a voyage home to America, varied by a winter in Portugal, during the early part of his life. Scotch captain, who, with his scanty merchant-crew, beats off a Bordeaux privateer, and then, crippled and half-sinking, clears for action with what he supposes to be a French frigate, but which turns out to be English, is a personage whose acquaintance it is pleasant to make. The sketches of life in Lisbon, too, are very lively, and the picture of the decayed Portuguese nobleman's family, for whose pride of birth an imaginary dinner-table was set every day in the parlor with the remains of the hereditary napery and plate, the numerous covers hiding nothing but the naked truth,

while their common humanity, squatting on the floor in the kitchen, fished its scanty meal from an earthen pot with pewter spoons, is pathetically humorous and would have delighted Caleb Balderstone. In afterlife, Leslie's profession made him acquainted with some of the best London life of his time, and the volume is full of agreeable anecdotes of Scott, Irving, Turner, Rogers, Wilkie, and many more. It contains also several letters of Irving, of no special interest, and some from a sort of Lesmahago of a room-mate of Leslie's, named Peter Powell, so queer, individual, and shrewd, that we are sorry not to have more of them and their writer. Altogether the book is one of the pleasantest we have lately met with.

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MR. TROWBRIDGE's previous works have made him known to a large circle of appreciating readers as a writer of originality and promise. His Father Brighthopes" we have never read, but we have heard it spoken of as one of the most wholesome children's books ever published in America, and our knowledge of the author makes us ready to believe the favorable opinion a just one. Parts of 66 "Neighbor Jackwood" we read with sincere relish and admiration; they showed so true an eye for Nature and so thorough an appreciation of the truly humorous elements of New England character, as distinguished from the vulgar and laughable

ones.

The domestic interior of the Jackwood family was drawn with remarkable truth and spirit, and all the working characters of the book on a certain average level of well-to-do rusticity were made to think and talk naturally, and were as full of honest human nature as those of the conventional modern novel are empty of it. An author who puts us in the way to form some just notion of the style of thought proper to so large a class as our New England country-people, and of the motives likely to influence their social and political conduct, does us a greater service than we are apt to admit. And the

power to conceive the leading qualities that make up an average representative and to keep them always clearly in view, so as to swerve neither toward tameness nor exaggeration, is by no means common. This power, it seems to us, Mr. Trowbridge possesses in an unusual degree. The late Mr. Judd, in his remarkable romance of "Margaret," gave such a picture as has never been equalled for truth of color and poetry of conception, of certain phases of life among a half-gypsy family in the outskirts of a remote village, and growing up in the cold penumbra of our civilization and material prosperity. But his scene and characters were exceptional, or, if typical, only so of a very limited class, and his book, full of fine imagination as it is, is truly a romance, an ideal and artistic representation, rather a poem than a story of manners general and familiar enough to be called real.

Mr. Trowbridge, we think, fails in those elements of (we had almost said creative) power in which Mr. Judd was specially rich. If the latter had possessed the shap ing spirit as fully as he certainly did the essential properties of imagination, he would have done for the actual, prosaic life of New England what Mr. Hawthorne has done for the ideal essence that lies behind and beneath it. But, with all his marvellous fidelity of dialect, costume, and landscape, and his firm clutch of certain individual instincts and emotions, his characters are wanting in any dramatic unity of relation to each other, and seem to be "moving about in worlds not realized," each a vivid reality in itself, but a very shadow in respect of any prevailing intention of the story. With the innate sentiments of a kind of aboriginal human nature Mr. Judd was at home; with the practical working of every-day motives he seemed strangely unfamiliar. It is just here that Mr. Trowbridge's strength and originality lie; but, with that not uncommon tendency to overvalue qualities that we do not possess, and to attempt their display, to the neglect, and sometimes at the cost, of others quite as valuable, but which seem cheap, because their exercise is easy and habitual, — and therefore, we may be sure, natural and pleasing, he insists on being a little metaphysical and over-fine. What he means for his more elevated characters are tiresome with something of that melodramatic

sentimentality with which Mr. Dickens has infected so much of the lighter literature of the day. Here and there the style suffers from that overmuchness of unessential detail and that exaggeration of particulars which Mr. Dickens brought into fashion and seems bent on wearing out of it, a style which is called graphic and poetical by those only who do not see that it is the cheap substitute, in all respects equal to real plate, (till you try to pawn it for lasting fame,) introduced by writers against time, or who forget that to be graphic is to tell most with fewest penstrokes, and to be poetical is to suggest the particular in the universal. We earnestly hope, that, instead of trying to do what no one can do well, Mr. Trowbridge will wisely stick close to what he has shown that no one can do better.

"The Old Battle-Ground," whose name bears but an accidental relation to the story, is an interesting and well-constructed tale, in which Mr. Trowbridge has introduced what we believe is a new element in American fiction, the French Canadian. The plot is simple and not too improbable, and the characters well individualized. Here, also, Mr. Trowbridge is most successful in his treatment of the less ambitiously designed figures. The relation between the dwarf Hercules fiddler and the heroine Marie seems to be a suggestion from Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and Esmeralda, though the treatment is original and touching. Indeed, there is a good deal of pathos in the book, marred here and there with the sentimental extract of Dickens-flowers, unpleasant as patchouli. Generally, however, it has the merit of unobtrusiveness, - -a rare piece of self-denial nowadays, when authors have found out, and the public has not, how very easy it is to make the public cry, and how much the simple creature likes it, as if it had not sorrows enough of its own. But it is in his more ordinary characters that Mr. Trowbridge fairly shows himself as an original and delightful author. His boys are always masterly. Nothing could be truer to Nature, more nicely distinguished as to idiosyncrasy, while alike in expres. sion and in limited range of ideas, or more truly comic, than the two that figure in this story. Nick Whickson, too, the good natured ne'er-do-well, who is in his own and everybody's way till he finds his nat

ural vocation as an aid to a dealer in horses, is a capital sketch. The hypochondriac Squire Plumworthy is very good, also, in his way, though he verges once or twice on the "heavy father," with a genius for the damp handkerchief and long-lost relative line.

We are safe in assigning to Mr. Trowbridge a rank quite above that of our legion of washy novelists; he seems to have

a definite purpose and an ambition for literary as well as popular success, and we hope that by study and observation he will be true to a very decided and peculiar talent. We violate no confidence in saying that the graceful poem, “At Sea,” which first appeared in the "Atlantic," and which, under the name of now one, now another author, has been deservedly popular, was written by Mr. Trowbridge.

JULY REVIEWED BY SEPTEMBER.

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THE Editors of the "Atlantic," of course, have universal knowledge (with few exceptions) at their fingers' ends, - that is, they possess an Encyclopædia, gapped here and there by friends fond of portable information and familiar with that hydrostatic paradox in which the motion of solids up a spout is balanced by a very slender column of the liquidating medium. The once goodly row of quartos looks now like a set of mineral teeth that have essayed too closely to simulate Nature by assaulting a Boston cracker; and the intervals of vacuity among the books, as among the incisors, deprive the owner of his accustomed glibness in pronouncing himself on certain top ics. Among the missing volumes is one of those in M, and accordingly our missinformation on all subjects from Mabinogion to Mustard is not to be entirely relied upon. Under these painful circumstances, and with the chance of still further abstractions from our common stock of potential learning, we have engaged a staff of consulting engineers, who contract, for certain considerations, to know every useless thing from A to Z, and every obsolete one from Omega to Alpha. these gentlemen we repose unlimited confidence in proportion to their salaries; for a considerable experience of mankind has taught us that omniscience is a much commoner and easier thing than science, especially in this favored country and under

In

MISS-INFORMATION. A higgledy-piggledy want of intelligence acquired by young misses at boarding-schools. - Supplement to Johnson's Dictionary.

democratic institutions, which give to ev ery man the inestimable right of knowing as much as he pleases. Everything was going on well when our Man of Science unaccountably disappeared, and our Æsthetic Editor experienced in all its terrors the Scriptural doom of being left to himself. This latter gentleman is tolerably shady in scientific matters, nay, to say sooth, light-proof, or only so far penetrable as to make darkness visible. Between science and nescience the difference seems to his mind little, if n e, and he would accept as perfectly satisfactory a statement that "the ponderability of air in a vitreous table-tipping medium (the abnormal variation being assumed as x-b .0000001) is exactly proportioned to the squares of the circumambient distances, provided the perihelia are equal, and the evolution of nituretted carbogen in the boomerang be carefully avoided during evaporation; the power of the parallax being represented, of course, according to the well-known theorem of Rabelais, by H.U.M. Hemsterhuysius seems to have been familiar with this pretty experiment." The above sentence being shown to the Esthetic Editor aforesaid, he acknowledges that he sees nothing more absurd than common in it, and that the theory seems to him as worthy of trial as Hedgecock's quadrant, which he took with him once on a journey to New York, arriving safely with a single observation of the height of the steamer's funnel.

This premised, it naturally follows that the Esthetic Editor (the July number

falling to his turn) must take advantage of the absence of his Guardian Man of Science to publish an article on Meteorology. A condition of things in which the omne scibile was left entirely at his disposal, to be knocked about as he pleased, appeared to him no small omen of a near millennium; and what subject could be more suitable to begin with than the weather, a topic of general interest, (since we have no choice of weather or no,) in which exact knowledge is comfortably impossible, and in which he felt himself at home from his repeated experiments in raising the wind in order to lower the due-point? (See The Weathercock, an Essay on Rotation in Office, by Sir Airy Vane.)

Meanwhile, after the mischief was all done and a Provisional Government of Chaos Redux comfortably established in Physics, the Man of Science turns up suddenly in the following communication. [A council was called on the spot, the Autocrat in the chair, and it was decided, with only one dissenting voice, that the communication should be printed as a lesson to the peccant Editor, who, for the future, was laid under a strict interdict in respect of all and singular the onomies and ologies, and directed to consider the weather a matter altogether unprophetable, except to almanacmakers, the said Editor to superintend such publication, and to be kept on a diet of corn-cob for the body and Sylvanus Cobb (or his own works, at his option) for the mind, till it be done. The chairman added, that for a second offence he should do penance, according to ancient usage, in a blank sheet of the Magazine, (a contribution of his own being to that end suppressed,)-a form of punishment likely to be as irksome to himself as grateful to the readers of that incomparable miscellany.]

"Abercwmdwddlum Mine, 28th July, 1860. "WELL-MEANING, BUT MISGUIDED, FRIEND! "AN unexpected opportunity of personally investigating a highly nauseous kind of mephitic vapor drew me and Jones suddenly hither without time to say farewell or make explanations. I made the journey in 10' by electric telegraph, and am delighted that I came, for anything more unpleasant never met my nostrils, and I am almost sure of adding a new element to the enjoyment of the scientific world.

I have already secured several bottles-full, and shall exhibit it at the next meeting of the Association: of course you shall have a sniff in advance. I should have returned before this, but unhappily the chain by which we descended gave way a few days ago near the top, in hoisting out the first series of my observations, and as yet there has been no opportunity of replacing it. Communication with the upper world is kept up by means of a small cord, however, and in this way we are supplied with food for body and mind. As good luck would have it, our butter came down wrapped in a half-sheet of your last volume of poems, containing my old favorites, "Modern Greece," and the "Ode to a Deserted Churn." These I read aloud several times to the miners, and their longing to return sooner to a world where they could get the rest of the volume became so strong, that, as I was about to begin my fifth reading, they consented to an expedient of escape which I had already proposed once or twice in vain. This was to blow us out by means of the fire-damp. The result of the experiment I cannot yet fully report, as some confusion ensued. Jones has disappeared, having been, as I hope and believe, discharged upward, and I have found the remains of only one miner, so that it seems to have been a tolerable success, though I myself was blown inward, owing to the premature explosion of the train. In one respect the result was highly satisfactory to me personally. Jones had all along insisted that the vapor was antiphlogistic. Whichever way he went, I think (fair-minded as he is) he must be by this time convinced of his error, and I shall accordingly enter him in my Report as discharged cured. I may add, as an interesting scientific fact, that his ascent was accompanied by such a sudden and violent fall of the barometer (which he had in his lap) that the instrument was broken. This would seem to prove a considerable decrease in the weight of the atmosphere at the moment of explosion. The darkness was oppressive at first; but a happy thought occurred to me. You know Jones's poodle, and how obese he is? Well, he was shot into my lap, where he lay to all appearance dead. I had some matches in my pocket and at once kindled the end of his tail, which makes a very good candle, quite as good as average dips.

tales, quales. By the light of this I proceed to note down my first series of comments as a tail-piece to your meteorological article in the July "Atlantic," of which we received a copy in due course, as the magazine has a large circulation among our friars miner down here.

"METEOROLOGY MADE EASY.'

"In glancing at the article on 'Meteorology' in the July number of the 'Atlantic Monthly,' I was so struck by the dashing style in which the writer presents what he calls the leading principles' of the science, that, in spite of portentous errors, I was tempted to follow his diversified flight to its very close. Reading pencil in hand, I gathered up a long list of mistakes in fact and in philosophy, of which the following specimens, although but the first fruits of a not very critical examination, may serve to illustrate the carelessness-shall I not say ignorance?—of the writer on the topics in regard to which he proposes to enlighten the general reader.

"1. According to our essayist, the weight of the atmosphere is about 8ths that of the globe, in other words, d part. Now a simple calculation, or a reference to one of the standard works on Physics, should have taught him that the weight of the entire air is less than one-millionth part of that of the earth,—that is, fifty thousand times less than he states it to be."

[We are quite sure that our (tor-)Mentor is mistaken in assuming a uniform weight for the atmosphere. It differs in different places. During our lecturing-tours, we have frequently observed an involuntary depression of the eyelids (producing almost an appearance of sleep) in a part of the audience, which we were at a loss to attribute to anything but the weight of the atmosphere. Water varies in the same way. It is hardly necessary to say that Lake Wetter derives its name from the superior quality of its dampness.]

"2. Of the specific gravity of the air he seems to be amusingly uncertain,-making it first 833 times and afterwards 770 times less than that of water; and in the same connection he says, in chosen phrase, that 'density, or closeness, is another quality of the atmosphere,'—as if it were its characteristic, and not common to all ponderable

matter."

[A very neat way of arriving at specific

gravity in its densest form is to distil the "funny column" of a weekly newspaper. To arrive at the desired result in the speediest way, let the operation be perforined in what is known among bucolic journalists as a "humorous retort." Density and closeness should not be spoken of as equivalent terms. The former is a common quality of the human skull, rendering it impervious; whereas a man may be very close and yet capable of being stuck,—with bad paper, for example.]

"3. In mentioning the constituents of the atmosphere, he adopts without explanation the loose statement of some of the books, placing carburetted hydrogen on the same footing as to constancy and amount with carbonic acid, and making no allusion to nitric acid. Yet chemistry has shown, that, except in special localities, carburetted hydrogen occurs only as a slight trace, the existence of which in most cases is rather inferred than actually demonstrated, and that it has no important office to perform, -while nitric acid shares with ammonia in the grand function of the nourishment of plants. In a later paragraph the error is aggravated by the assertion, that no chemical combination of oxygen and nitrogen has ever been detected in the atmosphere, and it is presumed none will be,'-as if every flash of lightning did not produce a notable quantity of this compound, which, washed down by the rain, may be detected in almost every specimen of rain-water we meet. What would Johnstone, Boussingault, Liebig, and the other agricultural chemists say to this?"

[For complete proof on this head, be struck by lightning. For ourselves, we are convinced, and would rather have some other head taken for an experiment by way of illustration. But any of our readers who is unsatisfied has only to place himself in front of a lightning-express-train with an ordinary conductor. To insure being struck, let the experimenter provide himself amply with patent safety-rods. At least, this result is pretty sure in houses, and is worth trying out of doors.]

"In the same connection he characterizes nitrogen as a substance 'not condensible under fifty atmospheres,' leaving the reader to infer that the preceding ingredient on the list, oxygen, is condensible (liquefiable) within that limit of pressure, and that nitrogen becomes liquid at or above it;

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