years so interesting, none has been more unostentatious than that of Channing, and none could be more sincere in feeling. It may have apprised some habitual summer loiterer at Newport of an interest hitherto unknown to him in the beautiful island, and it may invest it for him in the future with a higher value to know that it was the birth-place of one of the greatest and most modest of Americans. in determining by intrinsic evidence the authorship of an article. It is easy enough to transcribe answers to sums from a key. But the "well-spent hour" is that which is devoted to working them out for yourself. Moreover, it is a humane grace to the young author not to crush him by his own obscurity, and to save him from his own failures. Suppose our correspondent to have sent us a poem, which we had published with his name, and it had been ONE of the correspondents whose communi- the product of one of his nodding moments, so cations are always welcome, because they be- that the reader would have said, "Adolphus gin their letters by saying that they have a Y. Jones; exactly: I shall give Mr. Jones a complete set of the Magazine from the begin- | wide berth hereafter." Would it not have ning, bound, that they have always taken it, been humaner to veil the name until the susand mean always to take it, because of the tained superiority of his subsequent verse had perpetual pleasure which they derive from it- aroused a public demand to know the author, one of these discriminating and most intelli-and the Magazine, by merely uttering the name gent correspondents ("may his tribe increase!") Jones, had crowned him with fame? calls us to account for some remarks which These and such as these were among the we submitted a few months since, "with great self-confidence," upon the great question of giving the names of contributors with their articles. It was a very flimsy fabric of reasons that you piled together, says our excellent correspondent, and before it was well up, you knocked it all down again by printing the names. Why this change? Why are the reasons not as good as ever? They were very poor, indeed, but if they satisfied you, why do you not persevere in ill-doing? Here in my last number, or one of the last, I had marked | half of the names of the authors, which I knew by my mother-wit and my remarkable perceptive powers, before I discovered that you had surrendered. What is the meaning of it? demand an explanation. I This he says, or words to this effect. But his remarkable perceptive powers have already assured him, of course, of a hundred reasons that we might offer, and he is only waiting curiously to see which of the many valid explanations we shall put forward. He knows that we might say-and the wily but honored permanent subscriber probably anticipates our saying-with the fat knight, "I knew ye, Hal." It was to give those fine perceptive powers a monthly chance. We wished to give a greater pleasure to our friend by furnishing him the opportunity and the gratification and pride of stripping away the thin veil of anonymity, and of saying to the poet, storyteller, traveller, or philosopher, "In vain; you can not hide from me." Or we might say that our object was one of the truest conservatism-to show the reason of a venerable and respected tradition, and to remind eager reformers like our friend that established practices have often good grounds, and that even when the time may have come when it is desirable to change, it is still expedient to recognize why it has not always been desirable. There is a zest in anonymity. There is a distinct pleasure in the speculation about a writer. There is a fine test of one's own perceptions, and an excellent education of them reasons which formerly led the great Quarterlies and other periodicals to veil the names of authors. Pressed as this Magazine was to depart from the tradition, what was its duty, and what comported with its dignity? If, upon the calm and mature reflection which it gives to every subject, the Magazine had finally reached the decision that the spirit of the age required a change in its practice, a due regard for its dignity demanded that it should not hurriedly surrender, as if it had been caught napping behind the times. Its duty was first to assert the reason of the position it had held, and then to acknowledge gracefully the new situation by yielding. Indeed, our permanent friend will have observed that the secret of the ever-fresh charm which he is pleased to remark in the Magazine is due to its constant, but not hasty, conformity to the changing spirit of the time. Having decided to be on with the new love, the Magazine made its very best bow to the old. The arguments that we had the honor to submit are as sound as ever, but the spirit of the time has changed, and the Magazine, which is the child of its time, acquiesces. It has no policy but the pleasure and profit of its readers; and satisfied that, upon the whole, they did not desire anonymity, the Magazine, stating the good reasons for keeping the shutters up, took them down. Could there be more polite and accommodating conduct? IT was a very brilliant and beautiful audience which assembled in the great hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art upon the occasion of its formal opening to the public. The new building is but a part of the contemplated whole, and it is now a little remote from the centre of the city, but not more so than the South Kensington Museum from London. stands upon the extreme eastern side of Central Park, above the Lenox Library, and on the day of the opening there was a steady current of carriages toward it through the Park as the hour approached. The occasion was It distinguished by the presence of the President | great object of the Museum, and to achieve and two members of the cabinet, with that that result is to diminish taxation, and make of the most conspicuous citizens, and nothing life happier. could have been more fitting and fortunate than the opening exercises. In the South Kensington Museum the young apprentice can follow the structure of a vessel from the first step to the completion, and all the degrees of pottery fabrics in the same way. So in many of the Italian galleries the student may trace the development of the art of painting from its earliest stages to its prime. These are schools indeed, and of inestimable value. In our own museum let the student or the artist look carefully at the Ces The great hall is roofed with glass like a huge conservatory, and it is full of light. On one side is the Cesnola collection from Cyprus, and upon the other the Avery collection, and the front of the galleries, for this occasion, was draped with old and most valuable and interesting tapestries. Upon a platform conveniently raised sat the President and the invited guests, with the trustees, and in the gal-nola collection, and he will understand why leries the ladies of the President's party and other guests. The mass of ladies in the seats upon the floor of the hall, clad in their gay spring toilets of every color and brilliancy, was a beautiful spectacle; and although the hall is peculiarly trying to the voice, Mr. Choate, who, after the prayer and the addresses of the presidents of the Park Commission and of the Museum, delivered the inaugural oration, was able to make himself heard everywhere. His discourse was in every way felicitous, and was heard with the greatest pleasure and satisfaction. It pointed out that this was a Museum collected by private liberality, not by public aid, and that its great purpose is educative. It is to introduce beauty into the useful arts of common life, and is, in fact, a free college of art education. The economical and financial value of beauty in the common arts, and the desirability of depending upon our own rather than upon foreign artisanship for all that is beautiful, were admirably stated, and the orator's humorous exhortation to the millionaires to turn pork into porcelain and fleeting stocks into imperishable stones was as wise as witty. One phrase of the oration will be remembered by all who heard it, for they can never again see the Venus of Milo without agreeing that it is indeed "Queen of the Marble Goddesses." | Mr. Gladstone said to the General that he had the body in his collection, while the British Museum had only the head and feet. He meant that the student of sculpture would find in the British Museum specimens of the earliest and latest works, the primitive Eastern and Egyptian with the perfect Greek, while in the Cesnola museum the development and progress of the art could be studied, and the growth of the exquisite Greek from the primitive rudeness of the art be clearly traced. The same thing must be made true of all the domestic decorative arts, and that is the great hope and purpose of the Metropolitan Museum. There is no nobler or more practically useful object of endowment among all the educative opportunities which abound in the country, and we hope soon to announce the arrival of the long procession of public benefactors of this kind. LORD LYTTON's resignation, says an English paper, with pungent sarcasm, was placed in the hands of his "brother novelist" in case of his defeat. This is the veil of a profound contempt for Lord Beaconsfield as a mere "littery feller," and a fling at literature as a suitable preparation for practical politics. It was published when the unexpected catastrophe In a few well-chosen words the President of the "brother novelist's" administration was declared the Museum open; and it is an added evident, and the "Jingo" ministry had been pleasure of association that it will be remem- dismissed by the country. Lord Beaconsfield bered not merely as the act of the Chief Mag- has been for a long time too picturesque and istrate of the republic, but of a Chief Magis- conspicuous a figure not to have often arrested trate sincerely respected and justly honored the attention of an Easy Chair quietly observfor his private virtues and for the purity ing men and things. During all his eminence, of his administration. Nothing, indeed, was when he has seemed to contest with Bismarck wanting to the felicity of the occasion. But the attention of Europe and the world, it has it would have been a gilding of refined gold been impossible to forget that the solemn noand a painting of the lily if the excellent bleman who liked to look the Sphynx, and to president of the Museum had been able to an- be deemed inscrutable, was still Vivian Grey nounce that some Knickerbocker Mæcenas had grown old, still the flashy and melodramatic given a hundred thousand dollars or more for author of Codlingsby, in Thackeray's stinging the development of the institution. How far Prize Novelists. Indeed, with all the lurid glasuch a little candle would throw its beams! mour of his ministerial career, there has seemA generosity which gives a more graceful formed to be nowhere real faith in his sincerity or to every household article would be a refining his convictions; and not to speak uncourteousinfluence pervading the whole community. It would be akin in result to that of the noble liberality which endows libraries and founds schools and colleges. To bring art and beauty home to the daily life of the people is the | | ly of a distinguished man, and a very prominent actor in most important public affairs, it is still undeniable that he has seemed to a large and sagacious class of Englishmen to be, after all, under the earl's ermine and coronet, 144 and amid the huzzas of the street as he return- | it is a quality of his character, and has noth- ing to do with his "littery" calling. He did not rise to the chief political post in England because of his novels, nor has he fallen from it and ability which he showed in literature he because of his novels. The kind of resolution has displayed in politics. But they have been greatly assisted by his literature, and it is unwise to forget it. The sneer at education and intellectual training as a preparation for public life which was hidden in the laugh at "lit But the sneer at the brother novelist, as if it were folly to expect a "littery feller" to be a practical statesman, is rather pointless when it is remembered that Disraeli's great and victorious opponent, the greatest of living English statesmen, and the peer of the most illustrious English political leaders, is also a "lit-tery fellers" does not reveal a spirit which it is tery feller." The most famous political figure in England at the close of the century was a "feller" of the same kind named Burke, who not only represented most truly the sincere and dominant sentiment of his country, but was able to give it the most resplendent and enduring expression. Indeed, most of the more eminent political English chiefs of the century have been of the same "littery" stamp. If not authors, they were proud of scholarship. Fox, Pitt, Canning, Brougham, Mackintosh, | fell under this ban. Peel was fond of his Latin; Lord Derby translated Homer; and the two rival leaders of to-day are distinctively men of literature. desirable to cultivate in this country. We do ican public life and affairs than we have alnot need less education and training in Amerready. A few more men both of the character and the literature of Charles Sumner, for instance, would not imperil our institutions. Indeed, it may be fairly questioned whether they would not be as serviceable to the interests of liberty and good government as the same number of men of the kind that laughed at the “littery” joke. head of the English government, who will be Lord Beaconsfield was an author at the now replaced by a greater author, if Mr. GladIt is not the "littery" quality which inca- Liberal administration, as he is confessedly stone should become officially the head of the pacitates a man for public affairs. Indeed, the head of the Liberal party. As for us, we if experience be the school of practical busi- shall have as our representative to the govness, the statesman can acquire it upon the ernment which passes from one literary man great scale only through literature. Do the to another, one of our most distinguished lit"statesmen" who have no literature succeed so erary men. Upon the whole, although Lord admirably in the conduct of affairs that liter-Lytton may have resigned his place to a ature is to be contemned as a disadvantage? brother novelist, the "littery fellers" have no Let the doubting inquirer spend a few weeks reason to complain. in any capital in the country and answer. was objected to Mr. Sumner that he could not It manage his learning. But however that may have been, Mr. Whipple showed conclusively, in his admirable paper in this Magazine, that next to his indomitable moral energy, that which gave the highest value and the widest influence to Mr. Sumner's speeches was what he owed to literature, to his extensive study. When Mr. Gladstone rises in the House of Commons to take part in a sudden and important debate, his shafts are feared because they are feathered and weighted and tipped with the knowledge that comes from a general familiari-made his offering to the common stock. Many ty with history-in other words, with the experience of his own country and that of all others, with the views and arguments of all the leaders of parties and opinions and administrations, and with statistics and details. This makes his rising formidable, and this is possible only through literature. Of course if the objector means by literature poor novel writing and reading, there is nothing to be said. People whose occupation is writing and reading poor novels are not in question. Lord Beaconsfield, as his most stringent opponents will agree, has done something more than write poor novels. If there is a feeling of flash and unreality in his novels, which is also perceived in his statesmanship, and doubtless it is as observable now-remarkTHE traveller in Germany a few years agoed a spirit which made society delightful, and which manifested itself by a willingness to contribute to the common enjoyment, even if the contribution were not the best of its kind. It might, indeed, be poor, but it was freely and simply offered. If a young woman could not play like Liszt or sing like Jenny Lind, she still did not refuse to sing some little song play; and in the same way everybody gladly in her little way, or to play as well as she could individual talents and accomplishments of a little makes a mickle, and this clubbing of every degree made a charming result. Easy Chair in this picture prefers the middle There was, perhaps, at that time-for the distance to the foreground-a kind of selfwhich made the social gathering somewhat consciousness among our fellow-countrymen bare and dry. In city circles, for instance, if the young woman sang, she was very apt to undertake something that Sontag or Steffanone had sung the evening before at the opera, and the inevitable result of the encompany, having buzzed and whispered while forced comparison was not agreeable. the song continued, cried-being native to the The English tongue-" Bravo!" "Brava!" "Char- | cians in the city. Si monumentum-if you ask mante!" when the song ended, and beamed the proof of his skill, listen to the English and nodded, but nobody supposed that he had Glee Club, or to the Staten Island Vocal Socibeen listening to Sontag or Steffanone. In- ety. This last is an association of musical deed, cynics of twenty-five smiled meaningly neighbors upon that "lovely but exposed" islin corners, and quoted Thackeray's sketches and, as Kossuth called it, whom Mr. Aiken has of "a little music," and "thés musicales." instructed, and who have given two concerts How different was it from the evenings on thy so pleasing and satisfactory that if a citizen shore, O Tyrolean lake, where friendly voices, of any other suburb, or of any town or village without a Jenny Lind, or a Mario, or a Tam- in other parts of the country, has heard them, burini among them, united in Volkslieder, the he must have hastened home to collect his native melodies and simple songs of the coun- neighbors and do likewise. try, and filled the summer moonlight with a music that Titania would have lingered to hear! The Germans, to whom we owe many things, have brought with them to America not only the songs and the music and the musical talent of their native land, but also the habit of doing the most possible for the common pleasure. They have shown that without remarkable voices, or the possibility of a striking solo, it is possible to have delightful singing. Snch voices, indeed, are not to be excluded, nor is their absence essential to the pleasure. Far be the thought! Far be the suggestion, for instance, that the Mendelssohn Club in New York is not composed of Rubiuis and Lablaches and Tamburinis! Undoubtedly it is; but even if it were not so composed, that careful training, that thorough sympathy and feeling, that resolute study and good taste, although they might be lavished upon ordinary voices, would produce music to which the most musical would gladly listen. The object of the Museum of Art, as we have been saying, is to make common objects beautiful. The spirit which the traveller remarked in Germany, and which the Germans have brought with them, makes music from the careful mingling and training of common voices. We have learned that any neighborhood, even if it have no Catalani or Farinelli, can provide for itself the highest musical pleasure by merely organizing and practicing what voices it has. A man travels thousands of miles to eat a pomegranate, when he may have luscious peaches and aromatic strawberries in his own garden. The society is one of amateurs, and their surprising success is an illustration of the comparative ease with which the most refined musical pleasure can be provided by wisely clubbing the material at hand. It is a pleasure that would be found in many a little German town, and which, in this form, we owe to Germany, which has quickened so strongly our own musical impulses. The music, however, is by no means exclusively German. Among the most charming "numbers" are quaint old English madrigals, some of them composed three centuries ago; some are the English glees; others the elaborate part-songs of contemporary English composers, such as are sung by the Mendelssohn Club, and with these the rich and moving German songs. The largest hall upon the island is filled by invitation, and the expenses are paid by memberships entitling to tickets. "Why," said an enthusiast and a philosopher to the Easy Chair as they came from the concert-"why does not every town and village do this thing? I pay my homage to this company of ladies and gentlemen as public benefactors. No wonder Mr. Choate talked of the good economy of applying the beautiful arts to common life! This Vocal Society raises the price of property upon this happy island. Real estate must necessarily rise in a community which provides such musical evenings. Let the Mendelssohn Club look to its laurels!" THE series of "English Men of Letters" has proved to be so popular and pleasant that it will continue to appear probably for a long time; and the similar enterprises that are undertaken show that the time has arrived for the middle-man in literature, whose faculty is that of brief and accurate statement, and the reduction of many volumes to one. When Goethe entered his friend's picture-gallery he There is a suburb of the city-we hope there are many of the same kind-in which the neighbors have happily discovered that their own fruit is quite as toothsome as figs or pomegranates. In other words-that we may get down to terra firma out of these flow-said, "Show me the best." Every reader of ery trees-they have combined their voices, such as they are, even if they could be supposed to be "parlor voices," "thin voices," "poor voices," or any other kind of voice than St. Cecilia's own, to which tradition says the angels listened, and with diligence and spirit and intelligence they have become a choir worthy to sing with St. Cecilia. What they have done any community can do, supposing, indeed, that they could obtain Mr. George E. Aiken to instruct and drill and inspire them. Mr. Aiken is one of the most thorough musiVOL LXL-No. 361.-10 books is now Goethe in the picture-gallery. He wants to see only the best. Time is inexpressibly precious, and there is so much to read and to know that no literary gift is more desirable than that of comprehensive concise. ness. It is almost fifty years since Macaulay published his review of Professor Nares's Burleigh and his Times, and the critic begins with an amusing deprecation of the enormity of the book. "We can not sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before na better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto pages, | safed in measure so copious to any human bethat it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic ing-the faculty of believing without a reason, measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoir- and the faculty of hating without a provocadupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, tion......In the mind of Mr. Southey reason has have been considered as light reading by Hilpa no place." Macaulay then throws a sweeping and Shalum. But unhappily the life of man glance at his chief works, praising the life of is now threescore years and ten, and we can Nelson and of Wesley. But "The History of not but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares the Peninsular War is already dead," and "The to demand from us so large a portion of so Book of the Church contains some stories very short an existence." Macaulay proceeds in prettily told. The rest is mere rubbish." But this stinging strain to describe the labor of the critic admits that he had always heard that reading the book, while he acknowledges the Southey was an amiable and humane man; and indefatigable industry of Dr. Nares in accumu- now that critic and author are gone, and their lating material. The object of the series of form of the old contention has passed away, it "Men of Letters" is to make the best use of is more possible for us than it was for Macauthe research of such investigators and accu- lay to see how amiable and humane a man mulators, and to serve up their two thousand Southey was. pages in two hundred without serious loss to the general reader. The success of the series is the proof of the sagacity of the enterprise. No volumes in the collection have more fully justified its title than the first and one of the later issues, the Johnson and the Southey. They are both to be defined as especially English | men of letters. Southey was ten years old when Johnson died, and when he was twenty- | nine he settled at Keswick, and began that career of unflagging literary labor which continued for forty years. In the history of literature there is no more devoted and pathetic figure-pathetic because the dreams of his youth so soon vanished, and because, after that long and faithful literary service, only his name survives, but practically none of his works. Very few of the readers of these words, probably, have any knowledge of Southey. They may remember that the "Holly-Tree" and the "Battle of Blenheim," which they read in classbooks at school, were his poems; and they may know his Life of Nelson-a model biography. But the only distinguished man of letters whom we have ever known who read Southey as other people read Wordsworth and Tennyson was Hawthorne. In the little upper study of the Old Manse which he has graphically described, in which Emerson wrote the first modest volume that announced the appearance of an original and exquisite genius, and from whose window Emerson's clerical ancestor saw the immortal fight at Concord bridge, and caught the flash of" the shot heard round the world," there were a few books upon some hanging shelves, one of which was a bulky volume of Southey's poems in an American edition. Hawthorne said that he read him with pleasure. There are few readers who would say so to-day. Macaulay, again, fifty years ago, had pronounced the severest judgment upon Southey; but the Edinburgh could be hardly expected to speak kindly of one of the strongest supports of the Quarterly, just before the Tory catastrophe in the passage of the Reform Bill of '32. "Mr. Sonthey," says Macaulay, in his most ex cathedra tone, "brings to the task two faculties which were never, we believe, vouch | To show us this is the pious and pleasant duty which Mr. Dowden has discharged in the volume of the series upon Southey. He was a professional man of letters. In a sense he was a publisher's "hack," supporting not only his own family, but at times the family of his brother-in-law Coleridge, and that of the other brother-in-law Lovel, by patient persistence in literary labor: no day without a line; no year without a book: his sequestered life gliding gently away in the midst of fond domestic affections, a recluse in his library dealing only at a distance with men and affairs. He was the Tory laureate of George the Third, and the ruthless Whig Macaulay says that his official odes were worse than Pye's, and as bad as Cibber's. But Whig or Tory, Macaulay or Milton, Chaucer or Shakespeare, any man of great or little fame in any degree might well be glad if the story of his life were as pure and blameless as that of Southey. It was absolutely devoid of incident, and yet, as Mr. Dowden tells it, following, of course, the copious biography by Cuthbert Southey, it is full of interest, and a charming picture-perhaps the most charming in literature-of the professional man of letters. It would not be so if it were a tale of mere literary drudgery. But fortunately Southey's profession coincided with his taste. Books were his chief pleasures. He loved a library more than any other place, and he was a tireless reader as well as writer. It seems to be a queer freak of fate that a student of tastes so exclusively literary, and drawn, as in his poems, to remote branches of literature, should have become such a doughty political warrior. He was the toughest of Tories and the stanchest of Churchmen, and the polemic was unsparing. He would not have hesitated to free his mind about Macaulay as plainly as Macaulay freed his about Southey. But he was very patient and sweet with the young Shelley, and he had endless patience with the multitude of hapless and hopeful and disappointed writers, who are always attracted to a conspicuous anthor. Charlotte Brontë appealed to him long before her fame, and he gave her most friendly counsel. All his bitterness was in the ink of |