and of pious duty, which they are now compelled to undertake almost single-handed. Even now it is believed that things are not so bad as they were; in the towns the improvement is manifest; in the remotest villages a generation is growing up, whose training in the national schools will have in some measure secured them from the assaults of coarse and vulgar fanaticism, and who cannot so entirely forget the fostering care and patient labours of their minister, which they witnessed in the schoolroom from day to day, as to take him much longer for a mere monster of selfishness and godless pride. The author of the 'Clerical Papers' we have so often cited is a judicious and a moderate man, with abundant means of observation, and a temperament the reverse of sanguine; yet his vigorous style rises almost to eloquence, as he contemplates the prospect he sees before him :

'If we will scrutinize a little closely the signs of the times, we cannot but be convinced that the moral and religious influence of Dissent, rampant as it may appear to be, is even now upon the wane. The religious man is already beginning to be disgusted with its worldliness; the honest man with its duplicity; the liberal man with its intolerance; the intelligent man with its pretentious ignorance; the inquiring man with its uncertainty of sound; and the benevolent man with its bitterness of spirit. The day, then, cannot be far distant, we may rest assured, when Dissent will be weighed in a juster balance-when, no longer protected by the veil of prejudice or the mask of hypocrisy, it will be thoroughly understood, and as thoroughly despised.-Clerical Papers, p. 10.

God grant that these anticipations may be realized before the eyes of some of us that have witnessed the humiliation of Christ's Church in Cornwall! May her clergy be found worthy ministers of the Word and sacraments to a united people, their joy and their crown in the day of the Lord!

165

ART. VIII.-Our Old Home. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Two Vols. Smith and Elder.

THE wish to know what others think of us, and say about us, brings to the individual as little satisfaction in its indulgence as any of our natural desires can possibly do. By chance and unsought-for, we may now and then hear something pleasant and gratifying to our self-love; but an honest opinion, which we lay ourselves out to hear, is perfectly certain to have some bitterness in it, some qualification, turning the sweet of even seeming commendation to sour. The praise is not the praise we care for, while the blame or disparagement is quite certain to hit some peculiarly sensitive place and to rankle in the memory. This experience is so universal, that a very moderate degree of sense, judgment, and manners, suffices to suppress displays of this curiosity in the individual, while a further moral advance really quenches it: we know that there is no happiness or even untainted amusement to be got in that direction. But the wisest amongst us still shows his sympathy with this inherent curiosity of our nature by the desire he evinces to learn what is thought of the family, the circle, the class, the nation, of which he is a member, and by the excitement which any new declaration of opinion always awakes in him. No doubt this interest in what others say and think of our country may be explained on quite other grounds than vanity or egotism; but apart from any idea of improvement, of profiting by the remarks of foreigners or strangers, he wants to know what they have said; and this, with a touch of the same motives which prompts the inexperienced individual to listen to tales of a directly personal interest. When the opinion is favourable, something in each particular unit that makes up the whole is flattered; when it is adverse or contemptuous, a sense of personal injury pervades every member of the community. The work before us has, in a very particular degree, excited this aggregate of personal feeling. We have been flattered now and then, and insulted very often, by Mr. Hawthorne's impressions of England and the English, and each time our individuality has been touched. In one sense, the particular frame of mind of the reader is a great advantage to an author; it invests what he says with more point and meaning than a perfectly disinterested, unconcerned reader might see in it, and makes epithets stick, and contract force half through the quick perception and irritable consciousness of the reader. There is, for instance, the epithet 'bulbous.' We might easily pass it over if

་

applied to Frenchmen or Germans, but when affixed to the ideal Englishman it makes an impression. It may be repelled and disowned, but there it is: somebody has called us bulbous, and we shall remember it, and see an appropriate rotundity in the word, whether fairly or not applied to the typical British form. As a rule, the English reader's quarrel with Mr. Hawthorne will not be with his wording. He has, in fact, a very happy vocabulary; and the pleasure in his pages is often derivable, not from agreement with his sentiments, but from the neat turn with which they are given, and that fullness and expressiveness of diction which makes him one of the most agreeable of American writers on whatever subject he chooses to dilate.

Mr. Hawthorne stigmatises the English as a one-eyed generation. He attributes our success to this quality: we never see both sides, and are, therefore, the more ready for action. Dr. Johnson was an essentially English moralist for this reason; his very sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed clear-sightedness; and we are to suppose that this defect assisted his efforts at good. For it is but one-eyed people who love to advise. When a man opens both his eyes, he generally sees about as many reasons for acting in one way as in any other, and quite as many for acting in neither. For himself and his countrymen Mr. Hawthorne claims two eyes, in opposition to the blinking Old World; and in his case, at any rate, we will not dispute it; though it is the mere truth, without a grain of spite in it, that these eyes have a knack of obliquity, and are always undoing one another's conclusion. Thus, we are constantly left to our own judgment, to decide which is his real opinion between two opposite ones, set down with an equal air of conviction, in defiance or forgetfulness of the other. For ourselves, we do not dislike this, and would rather have an observer's impressions as they arise, however absolutely conflicting, than mere conclusions of the mature judgment. Nobody can be keenly, sensitively observant amid new scenes, and always consistent, especially if his fancy is an active part of himself. The more faculties his observation represents the more unlikely it is that they should uniformly act in harmony-the more certain, in fact, that they should show themselves at odds. In the case before us, the conclusions are constantly at direct variance with immediate impressions, and we deliberately prefer the impressions, and find ourselves always more offended when Mr. Hawthorne generalizes than when he gives us the actual effect upon mind of any particular incident, or scene, or English characteristic. When he sets himself to record what he sees, and what he thinks of what he sees at the very time of seeing it,

his

takes pains to be exact. He feels all the delight of per

petuating a momentary or, at least, a temporary posture of his own mind. He aims at being fair-as seeing with his own eyes. He is upon honour with himself not to let other men's judgments obscure his own clearness of vision. In all this he is the practised writer whose business it is, whose duty and credit alike, to convey effects in the very likeness in which he receives them. But away from this immediate contact, he is the American and the patriot; and it is in these characters that he draws his conclusions. His own impressions, whether favourable or unfavourable, have a reality about them, and a personal character which the others want: they are the real thoughts of a man of talent, and as such deserve our patient and candid attention, the rather, because he is more careful to be faithful to his own idea than to seem consistent-an appearance which very often cannot be maintained but at the cost of truth. In his conclusions we seem to see a relapse into prejudice and foregone trains of thought, not only in indulgence to his own nationality, but from willingness to please and propitiate his countrymen, whose self-love may now and then have been wounded by the candour with which certain good things in England are pronounced to be good, and beyond the reach of the New Country.

In one point, the position of first impressions and conclusions has been reversed; and that point is one most certain to excite the curiosity, and stimulate-shall we call it the passions of -the English reader. We mean that question which has evoked by far the greater amount of comment from our press and universal quotation-the good looks of the English people. Mr. Hawthorne found us, on first landing, so very far short of those good looks assumed amongst ourselves as a national characteristic, that his opinion can scarcely be expressed by other terms than as the very reverse of our own. He seems to have really thought us ill-looking; unpleasant objects for the eye to rest upon. Not only bulbous, as we have already said, but otherwise misformed-long-bodied, short-legged, with faces red and mottled, and with double chins; our heavy-wittedness expressed in our stolid, earthy, material aspect and deportment; the toute ensemble, heavy, homely, rough, coarse-grained, and abominably ill-dressed. Ever since his ancestors, the Puritan fathers, carried off the spirit and adventure and genius of the nation, these gross qualities have had the ascendant-an ascendancy that grows with the ages-so that in course of time the Englishman will be the 'earthiest creature on the world's surface.' And as if this was not enough-which would, in fact, be endurable alone-he descends with a heavier sledge-hammer; he exercises himself in viler terms of disparagement; he insults with more

elaborate and deliberate vituperation the exterior of the Englishwoman. We use figuratively the expression to cut up' when we would describe a merciless onslaught; but this man, when he cuts up the British female, means what he says. It irks him to see her with whole skin and bones compact; he owns that he cannot contemplate, without sanguinary ideas and horrible suggestions of his fancy, the calm, weighty face and form of an English dowager. Even when he would be civil, or, at least, free from extremes, he is full of offensive phrases, expressive of unwieldiness, homeliness, and large physical endowments. The white skin has a heavy substratum of clay beneath. The English girl is comely rather than pretty, and her roses are too damask. Even if a violet in her youth, she develops too surely into a peony. The charms of the humbler class are few indeed, and the 'female Bull,' as it is elegantly put, though not ill-suited to John Bull himself, comes below him in all physical advantages. Now, when we read all this, we are at first of course indignant; but beneath all is a consciousness-an awkward consciousnessthat while we would stand up for English beauty as a national quality, which we have a just right to assert, because it has hitherto been pretty invariably granted, we have perhaps taken it more on faith than we knew we had till we come to face the matter. If every man, or the majority of men, in New York or Boston are tall and well-formed, intelligent and spiritual-looking-if every young woman there is beautiful, and every middle-aged and old one retains unmistakable traces of that beauty, in an ethereal cast of features, we own we must give it up. Truth to tell, we do not very often see an absolutely beautiful woman-not many men of the Antinous type. We may walk through long streets and busy thoroughfares, and, especially if the wind be at east, be forced to admit that a cold, unexcited crowd, intent on homely cares, has, just on the surface of it, not much beauty to boast of. We are ashamed to say as much; but we have just been commending Mr. Hawthorne's honesty when he speaks of what he sees, and we would not come short of it. And yet we shall find we have seen in the human forms and faces our eyes have rested on, in the impressions they have left on us, an idea of beauty. We know from them, as a whole, what man and woman ought to look like, and how the nobler nature should show itself through feature and expression, and we firmly believe that no other country will furnish us with a higher idea-not only in its higher ranks, but taking the people through-of what beauty is in form, colour, and expression, in the perfect type. We have no desire to avenge ourselves on American writers by a retort. Strangers in America are very ready to allow beauty to American women,