The natural result of permitting such topics is to produce a lively competition in inventing a series of ingeniously varied plots, all turning upon the violation of the marriage law, which can in the long run be healthy neither for readers nor writers, especially as in such a competition it is not the purest method of treatment which generally wins the prize. If art suffers from our stricter system, there are higher considerations even than the welfare of art; but it may be doubted whether the restriction of the field is necessarily so great an evil as it seems, for there is room enough for descriptions of life and character without running foul of the Seventh Commandment; and it is not always the worse for a writer to be compulsorily debarred from the easiest way of snatching an illegitimate success. Books which, on the whole, show a polluted mind, or which pander to corrupt tastes in their readers, will generally soon be recognized. It is, or should be, unpleasant to accuse a good writer of being foul-minded, and the more so as the accusation is an easy one to make, whether false or true. There manding more liberty than the great majority are disposed to grant. Nothing is more essential than that every theological or political creed should be tried in the fire of the freest criticism; and there is nothing from which the faithful are more disposed to shrink. The only limit is that such attacks should be as free as possible from the desire to give pain, or wantonly to shock honest believers. Voltaire's influence would have been almost entirely good if he had not been possessed by this substantially irreverent spirit, for his attacks upon orthodoxy by themselves could only end in fuller investigation of the truth. He used poisoned weapons, and so far his warfare was unfair. Till people understand liberty better than they do, we should be slow to draw the present restrictions tighter. From the Saturday Review. fore, there is always a strong tendency on THE LIFE OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.* the part of generous critics to avoid making it. Like similar accusations in actual It is probable that very few of our readlife, it should not be made unless fully sub-ers ever heard of James Gates Percival, stantiated; and, as we must add, it is not often sustained for any time, unless there is some truth in it. Indeed, the fact that a great many average people denounce a book as immoral raises a presumption that it does harm to the morals of average persons which is, as we have argued, the real meaning of the accusation. It is very different with those books which are accused, not of obscenity, but of political or theological iniquity. If they have any success, it is as the expression of a strong revolutionary sentiment; and the question of their morality depends upon the justification of that sentiment. As a large part of mankind and especially of educated mankind will always regard revolutionary sentiments with horror, there is little doubt that the critical laws will generally err on the side of strictness. Many persons of tolerable intelligence still look upon the French revolution as an outbreak of diabolical malignity. They fail to recognise the immense benefits which, in the opinion of all enlightened men, have been its net result; and therefore they continue to look with simple horror upon the echo which the revolutionary ideas called forth in poetry. The whole thing is a mystery of iniquity, at which they may hold up their hands in pious indignation. In this case, therefore, we are seldom wrong in de and that still fewer have ever read his works. Mr. Julius H. Ward, however, believes that Percival was "a wonderful genius," and has for nearly ten years been putting together a memoir of the object of his admiration. The method in which the book has been compiled is simply detestable. Mr. Ward has arbitrarily tacked together a number of letters, partly written by Percival and partly by his friends, mixing occasional fragments of magazine articles and bits of his own composition. The book, in consequence, requires as a malicious critic said of Percival's own poetry, "a vigorous moral effort to read it." It is not so much that the book is long, as that it is totally wanting in art. Tedious stories about squabbles with booksellers, given in wearisome detail, fill a most disproportionate space. Like many other biographies of more pretension, it gives us less a picture of its victim's life than a panorama in which all the events are drawn to the same scale. Fortunately, materials were not very plentiful; and some of the incorporated fragments rise considerably above the general level. Moreover, the biographer gives us every view of his hero with perfect impar The Life and Letters of James Gates Percival. By Julius H. Ward. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. London: Tribüner & Co. 1866. tiality. We are thus able to discover that, life. He was, however, although the term has in the hand of a more skilful writer, the story acquired an awkward connotation, really of Percival's life might have been made inte- a remarkable man; and his life might be resting as well as instructive. He was really recommended for the study of young poets, a very original figure, especially amongst our if only because he decidedly gave up poerestless, pushing, and practical cousins. Of try. As may be supposed from his suicidal his poetry, indeed, by which we are told tendencies, be possessed the morbid temperhe is principally to be remembered, we ament generally productive of second-rate cannot express any high opinion. Mr. verses. One of the innumerable authors of Whittier exclaims enthusiastically, "God this book tells us that he was actually "depity the man who does not love the poet ranged," but this seems to be an over-strong ry of Percival." "It is not enough," expression. He was, however, sensitive, resays another gentleman, "to say of these tiring, and unworldly after a fashion very productions that they glow with the fire of uncommon amongst his countrymen. On Eschylus and Pindar." "In manners," the occasion of an early disappointment in adds a third critic, "he resembles Addison, love, we hear that, on once accidentally in disposition the eccentric and excellent touching the lady's hand, he became so conGoldsmith, and in mind he possesses the her- fused as to be unable to speak; and that he culean vigour of Johnson combined with finally retired in confusion. In later life, the tuneful equability of Pope." He is fur- he lived in habitual fear of ladies' conther compared, on apparently equal terms, versation. Indeed for some years he hid with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and himself in almost complete seclusion in some Byron, to each of whom, as well as to Moore, rooms allowed to him in a hospital at New he had certain points of likeness; and, as a Haven, Connecticut, No stranger was ever mathematical proof of his remarkable pow- allowed to enter them. He used to buy his ers, we are told that, "in the poem called food for himself in the evening when he had 'Maria,' there are seventy-eight lines of money, and to go without when he had none. continuous poetic association without a pe- His library of ten thousand volumes and his riod." These praises, we should add, for the collection of minerals filled one of his three credit of American criticism, were for the rooms (it must have been a spacious apartmost part bestowed upon Percival on the ment); another contained a bed without publication of his first poems, not long after sheets, and with a block of wood for a pil1820; when we may presume that a very low, the dirty blankets marked by his shoes, little poetry would go a very long way. which, we are solemnly told, he never blackThe conclusion of most persons would doubted throughout his life; the rooms were unless be that Percival was a humbug; and, so far as his poetry is concerned, we have no reason to think that they would be very far wrong. From the specimens given we should infer that he was a very fluent and very dreamy writer, whose more serious poetry resembled a bad imitation of Shelley. The only lines quoted which have any force are called the "Suicide," and have the merit of being apparently a genuine expression of feeling. Percival had, in fact, attempted to kill himself by throwing a large cobble-stone at his own head, and afterwards by taking opium. This is a fair proof of sincerity, though the cobble-stone savours of the melodramatic; and the verses in the "Suicide" are as good as most young men of ability would write on their passage through the Byronic stage. His other poetry will, we should imagine, only interest the few who are anxious to trace the rise of a national literature in America from its earliest beginnings. If Percival were merely one of the justly forgotten versifiers of forty years ago, it would scarcely be worth while to notice his swept; "there were probably two inches of rolling lint on the floor; there was a beaten path from his bed to his stove, to his writing. table, to his library, and to the door." His dress, we are told, was neat, but the value of his entire wardrobe was "not above fifty dollars"; his hat was worn for years, and his only outer garment, was a thin brown camlet cloak. This strange Yankee hermit used, however, to venture forth at times among his friends, and to talk; he would stand with his eyes on the ground, rubbing two fingers of his right hand across the palm of the left, and hold forth in a tone just above a whisper for hours together, regardless of times and seasons; he would collar his friends in the middle of a street to let off one of these strange discourses; and if accidentally interrupted, he would begin again the next day he met them with, "As I was saying." Some of his friends talk in the proper terms of their attention having been riveted by this marvellous flow of learning and eloquence; but the only discourses whose subjects are reported to us are one upon hickory-trees, and another upon a peach-tree. No notes of his conversations, or rather monologues, survive, except from one of his hearers, who gives us such quotatious as this: "Dr. Percival seems to doubt (in 1848) the capacity of the French to establish a republic; says they are substantially the same people they were in the days of Tacitus. He also thinks the watercure system pretty much a humbug." If these are fair specimens of Percival's talk, we should consider a stream of it flowing for hours to be superfluous. He had a very queer trick of playing upon divers musical instruments so gently that, if they made any sound, it was audible to himself alone (a desirable accomplishment for amateurs), he being meanwhile convinced that every one heard him. He once sung a song to a large party, really in dumb-show, but, as he believed, to the delight of his audience. And yet he certainly was a man of ability, and one whose ability was not quite thrown | away. Besides his poetical gifts, he was a man of science. He knew, it is said, all the European languages, down to the most remote dialects, and especially the Slavonic, and had also studied the modern languages of India accomplishments which were certainly remarkable in Connecticut in his youth. He was, moreover, a good geologist and botanist, and a man of extensive reading. In early life he attempted, but without success, to settle in his native State as a surgeon. The death of some of his first patients, or complaints by the survivors of his bills, seemed to have frightened him out of the profession. He was exceedingly annoyed after this, as young poets are apt to be, by finding that he could not live by the sale of his poems. Calhoun, however, gave him the appropriate reward of the post of assistant-surgeon at West-Point, with, as it seems, some eye to his future poetry being on the Government side. He soon became disgusted with the labour of the place, and took, after a time, to that pursuit which all Americans appear to follow for part of their lives-that of editing a newspaper. describes it as "the most degrading and disgraceful of all occupations"; and, either for this reason, or because he was totally incapable of understanding business, he soon gave it up. He had a theory indeed that, when he made made any agreement, it was binding only upon the other person, which was found to work very ill in his relations to booksellers and newspaper proprietors. He was thus compelled for some years to lead a sort of Bohemian life, part of which was spent in the hermitage already described. He did not, however, sink into the He utterly morbid state of mind which might be inferred. When he was in great dificulties his friends raised money to prevent the sale of his library, and, before he died, he succeeded in paying off the debt. He supported himself at one time by acting as assistant to Webster in bringing out a new edition of his dictionary, and afterwards by superintending a new edition of MalteBrun's Geography. His earnings at this hack-work were naturally low enough; but he was made comparatively comfortable by employment in making a geological survey of Connecticut, and, some years later, of Wisconsin. He died in 1856, whilst engaged in this last piece of work. The reports which he produced are said to be proofs of very great skill and of an extraordinary amount of labour. It is also said that they are totally unreadable, except for purposes of reference. The geology and the poetry will probably sleep together, or, if either is to survive, a collection of dry facts is better than a collection of bad verses. Still there is enough in the story to make us wish that it had been told by an abler writer. Percival was a victim to a very common mental disease — . the morbid sensibility which persuades the man himself that he is a poet, and his friends that he is a madman. But, amongst all his misfortunes, he shows certain good qualities which retain our sympathies. He paid his debts, as if he had not been a man of genius; he was ready to make his bread by the lowest kind of work when he had failed in the highest; and, after breaking down as a poet, he became, in later life, a hard-working geologist. Although the hardships of life made him eccentric, and drove him into himself, they do not seem to have made him morose or utterly useless. And such negative praise is rarely deserved in similar cases. From Blackwood's Magazine. THE POPE. We have most of us heard of that singular traveller who followed Van Amburg all over Europe that he might not fail to witness the evening on which the lions should eat poor Van Amburg, an event of whose certainty he never so much as entertained a doubt. There are in every country and in every sonally, or to his immediate followers, than to the rest of Europe. class sensation-loving people of this sort, d it is strange to see how such persons cling to whatever in any way pertains to a finale. To be in at the finish is with them everything. Of course there is a completeness in this that there is no gainsaying, and he who has heard le dernier mot of an adventure has no more to learn from anybody. It is, I am persuaded, this morbid eagerness, and not any cruelty of disposition, that impels men to be present at executions. There is no hard heartedness, no pleasure- is either a source of material wealth, or of able sense of human suffering, in these people; they are simply the victims of a craving desire for excitement; their dull temperaments cannot be moved by the light breezes of ordinary pleasures; they want the hurricane force of actual passions to stir them into activity. The lower we go in the social scale the more of this element we shall find. The stories of the Family Herald' are famous for their horrors, and there is nothing so intensely, thoroughly sensational as servantgalism. Comedy, except in the very broadest farce, is totally banished from every minor theatre of Europe, and none but the most bloody-minded of dramas can find audience with what are called the people. There is, however, a great deal more of this sentiment in the educated and well-todo ranks than we might at first blush admit. Jestingly treated, laughingly acknowledged, or veiled by conventionalities, it exists and gives a strong and not very healthy flavour to the whole of our society. To instance what I mean, look at Rome. The word has gone out over Europe that this is to be the fast winter of the Papacy that over the grand drama of two thousand years the curtain is at last about to fall, and that Pio Nono will make his positively last appearance at the Vatican before his retirement from the boards altogether. This announcement, now made with all the force of a logical argument-now dimly shadowed forth in the language of prophecy-now eagerly declared in the words of hope, is widespread over Europe; and the consequence is, the whole world is flocking this winter to the Holy City, all madly eager to witness the great catastrophe to be "in at the death." There are three questions now which men are asking on every side: Will the Pope go? If so, why? And lastly, where will he go to? The first is the only really important one to the world at large, for, as regards his reasons, or his future destination, they are in reality more interesting to his Holiness per All Italy says he will go; that the departure of the French troops will leave him no alternative, and that he himself has long prepared for that event. Of course the wish may be father to the thought; but, somehow, I greatly doubt, if I were myself an Italian, if I could so regard the question. As we cast our eyes over Europe, we see that each nation has some specialty, which power and prestige. France asserts her military glory; Germany her race of profound thinkers and scholars; England has her coal fields; and Italy has the Popedom. Assail Catholicism as men may; let them rail at the dogmas of the Church, revile its superstitions, and ridicule its mock miracles, there is an inherent grandeur in a monarchy of nigh two thousand years, and which, at various periods within that time, swayed the destines of all Christendom. That there is no denying. It has often been said that the Italians were the worst Papists of Europe; but still, few expected to see them actually forgetful of what gave them their greatest attraction in the eyes of ths whole Christian world, and endowed them with a prestige of which all the cities of the earth could not produce the equal. As a grand spectacle, what was ever like it? Where were ever such accessories as that glorious church and that noble palace, as rich in memories as in art-treasures? What train of courtiers could compare with that line of princes of the Church on whose thoughtful brows were stamped the signs of intellectual vigour, and an ambition that soared far beyond the bounds of ordinary aspiration? Around what other throne were ever grouped, not alone the devotion of loyalty and the homage of fidelity, but the deeper homage and the purer faith that link this life with eternity, and impart to the spirit of earthly obedience all the fervour of Christian love and worship? I maintain that the Pope was the best thing Italy had, and would "draw," while Victor Emmanuel, and even Garibaldi, will play to empty benches. This may not be the very highest ground to take in the matter; nor am I sure that Cardinal Paul Cullen will accept me as his ally on such showing; but I am looking at the question in a very speculative spirit. Here is a country with an embarrassed exchequer, a heavy taxation, and undeveloped resources, which must so continue till capital be forthcoming to promote them. With a large public debt, costly engagements, the funds at fiftyfour, and credit nowhere, what are they to do? They have vast tracts of corn-growing land, but no roads to convey the produce; they have mines, but are without money to work them; they are, in a word, pretty much in the condition in which the Times' lately, pictured Ireland, as a country with great natural resources, in which few people would like to risk their capital, and which must be satisfied to be interesting to tourists, without, for the present at least, attracting to it the attention of traders and merchants. Rich in monuments, abounding in treasures of art, and stored with objects of interest on every side, Italy has no rival in the world as a great gallery of curiosities, amongst which there was no gem could compare with the Pope. He was the Koh-i-noor of the collection, and I cannot conceive for an instant how Italians could have overlooked the fact. Bear in mind, it was not alone to the true believers that his Holiness extended the attraction of his presence. The people who sought admission to the Vatican were often stern platform men of Exeter Hall. There came to his audience Calvinists from the north, and Quakers from Philadelphia. All that was rugged and self-asserting in Protestantism desired the blessing of him they were ready to call Antichrist. Bishops of the Establishment bent reverently before him; and in the very newspaper under my eyes I see that the historian of Poerio has been paying his court to infallibility. Why surrender all this, I say? Will Garibaldi or Mazzinists, think you, be more picturesque features in the landscape than these gorgeous groupings? or will the grand monuments of Catholicism evoke the wonderment and worship of Europe when their living centre has left them, and the spirit that animated the whole departed? There is nothing which so sternly arraigns the cruelty of annexation as the sight of the empty palace where royalty once dwelt. How will it be here when it is not merely the prince has departed, but where it will be the shrine without the saint, the throne without him whose breath gave hope and comfort to many, and blessing to all? Remove the Pope from Rome, and you take away the great cicerone who made the joys of eternity intelligible to millions. And do not imagine he can ever be as effective in exile at Avignon, or Seville, or Malta; he will ever need the grand scenic illustrations of the Eternal City. The noble vault of St. Peter's, half-dimmed with incense, the Sistine Chapel, vibrating with seraphic music, were splendid adjuncts to the voice of him who sang out, per orbes et terras, his peace to mankind. Italians are intensely sensitive to all external impressions; and how is it that they have overlooked all this? Nor is it as if the Papacy was to cost them dear; they are not going to pay it either in liberty or in power. The Pope can no more menace them with Austrians nor crush them with concordats. Even his bulls are tamed. The question resolves itself into this, Can Italy, with an empty treasury and an overtaxed people, not only divest herself of one of the greatest attractions of the nation, but assume all the liabilities of the Papacy? Speaking commercially, Venice may pay, but there is a great doubt if Rome will. The contributions of true believers went largely in aid of the budget; and he would be a sanguine man that thought Peter's pence would drop as freely into Victor Emmanuel's hat as into the Pope's tiara. For the whole complex machinery of Rome there is but one machinist in all Christendom- the Pope. To convert this ecclesiastical hive into a modern capital is an anachronism and a political blunder. It is like turning a cathedral into a cottonmill. The Popedom was the great specialty of Italy. It was the one thing no other country could rival. I am not going to break a lance with Exeter Hall. I am not assuming to even advert to the doctrines of the Church; I am alone speaking of that marvellous rule which was felt in the most remote parts of the universe, and which had its centre at Rome. Call it superstition, idolatry, Antichrist, what you will there it was, and there it drew hundreds of thousands to do it homage. If I were Baron Ricasoli, I would do anything rather than drive the Pope out of Italy. It would not be very easy to convert him to liberal ideas, all the less so that he got a surfeit of them in '48, and has never recovered from it since. If I were an Italian minister, I would strain any point to make what the French call a 66 transaction" with him. Surely if what they style the Leonine City was secured to him, and a wide liberty as regards allocutions, something might be done. There are plenty of schismatics to be cursed out of Italy; let him have his will of them. Russia is likely to torment the Poles for many a day to come, and there are eighty odd millions to be anathematised a banquet of malediction that might satisfy even gluttony. With clever management, the whole poli |