their devotion to the religion of Christ may be counted by thousands. Lord Elgin confirms these eulogies of the Japanese.*

Yeddo may be reached from Yokohama by land as well as by sea: it is far better to take the former route; the journey is delightful after crossing the river Logo, which is accomplished in an immense ferry-boat. It is fancied in Europe that there is still danger in making this excursion; this is a great mistake, for every day the native population is becoming more and more accustomed to the presence of Americans and Europeans. A halt is usually made half-way, at Kava saki, the name of a charming station; it is presided over by graceful mousmées, or Japanese women, whose kind offices cause travellers to imagine themselves in the most hospitable inns of Europe. A throng of sprightly children gathered about us as soon as we stopped, saluting us with their pleasant ohaio: the intelligence of these children, which is clearly indicated in their black eyes, too round to my mind, appeared to me very keen, and they were quite as well-behaved as European children. They sing more than they talk, and nothing could be pleasanter than the prattle of a whole school of them. One of us had in his hand an illustrated Japanese book; in order to see if the little ones about us knew how to read, he motioned to one of the smallest to come to him, and to read in a loud voice the description of one of the pictures. He accomplished his task very nicely, and all the children did the same thing, not one of them hesitating to undertake it. This is less astonishing when it is known, as I afterwards learned, that in Japan public instruction is almost obligatory. Their home education, also, seems to differ from that which many children in Europe receive; no one in Japan ever saw a child struck, or heard the painful cry of distress, which often strikes the ear in the more populous quarters of our own cities, when some disobedient child is punished by its parents. One of our number having bought some articles in lacquered ware in the presence of the group of children we had been examining, and a dispute

*La Chine et le Japon. Mission of Count Elgin, described by Lawrence Oliphant: Paris,

1860.

having arisen with the Japanese vendor, he, to our great surprise, and with a comical seriousness, submitted the settling of the question to this jury of children, who, after they had solemnly listened to his story, and as solemnly discussed the case, decided in our favor, the dealer conforming with good grace to their verdict.

On

After refreshment and rest at Kavasaki, travellers should continue on to Yeddo, following the sea-shore all the way. one side the sea foaming up to our horses' feet, on the other strange-looking houses, hills covered with cedars and larches, flowering camelias and fragrant camphor trees, we made a pleasant journey to the capital. Two hundred and seventy years ago, when the Spaniard Don Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco came from Manilla to Yeddo, this city had only 70,000 inhabitants; now the population is 1,000,000 of souls. It would seem as if it had degenerated since the period when our policy placed the Tycoon under a cloud. The Daimios, who were his supporters, also have withdrawn to their fiefs, and the spot where once all was animation, where nothing was heard but the clash of arms, and the songs of war and of love of the Japanese warriors, is now grown over with weeds, and the silence of death reigns; but let it not be understood that this is the condition of the whole of Yeddo. A few steps from the fine European hotel, activity is found again, and the same bustle and confusion as in the streets of the great cities of Europe, without even excepting London and Paris, at times of great popular excitement. Foreigners are not molested or inconvenienced in any way; on the contrary, they are everywhere most cordially received, and the women always return a salute with a gracious smile. Some of their customs are unfortunately lax, although adultery is punished with death. This is the only shadow in the picture I have tried to sketch of this brave, courteous, and intelligent people.

Since 1859, admirers of Japanese works of art, and especially of bronzes, have been able to get some beautiful specimens. The Dutch had especial advantages, thanks to their establishment at Décima, but it is well-known at what a cost. Long before the modern curiosity-hunters arrived upon the ground, the spoliation of the treasures of this country had begun on a

vast scale, but with this difference-that lacquered ware, stuffs, porcelain, magots, did not satisfy them. The Portuguese and the agents of the Dutch government aimed at more solid treasures than these. Kaempfer says on this subject: "It is thought that if the fellow-countrymen of Camoëns had possessed the Japan trade for twenty years longer, they would have carried away to their colonies of Macao so much wealth from this empire, that there would have been accumulated in this city treasures of gold and silver in as great abundance as those which, according to the sacred writers, Jerusalem possessed in the time of Solomon. Was it from disgust at this greed that the government of Japan suddenly closed its ports to all foreigners for more than two centuries, after having first massacred, by the aid of the Dutch, 40,000 Christians within the walls of Simabarra, and having thrown into the sea, from the great rock of Pappenberg, many of these miserable creatures? The Jesuits say yes, and the Portuguese say no. In these days, however, things go on very smoothly there. This beautiful country furnishes to Europe silks, silk-worms, and tea. Japan in return exports our cotton goods, woollens, arms, and steamships, which are run by the natives, who themselves begin to manufacture them at home.

When, after leaving the far East, I took passage for Europe upon the fast-sailing steamer" China," and rehearsed in my mind all that I had learned and heard about this beautiful land of Japan, I resolved that on my arrival in France I would recommend to that class of the youth of my country who, with courage, aim to rise above a mediocrity without horizon, to emigrate thither. With enterprise, courage, and honesty, they could not fail to succeed in this Scotland of the East. Success would be all the more probable because Japan, as compared with the other colonies, has been but little explored. The messageries françaises have an agency there; the steamers of

this line, as well as those of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, bring every week comparatively recent news from France, averaging two months old. In going to Japan it is impossible to find a more rapid and advantageous way, or one that has more comforts or more varied scenery.

The return to Europe by the Pacific Ocean is a complete change of scene. The route via Central America and the Atlantic Ocean, however, is far from offering the same variety. With the exception of the trip from San Francisco to New York, which is made by railroad in six days and twenty hours, the whole of the trip is by sea.

My notes stop here, for I cannot adequately speak of the United States in so short an article. Although, so late as the 10th of May, 1869, the date of the opening of the Pacific Railway, there were serious perils connected with the trip, especially in the Sierra Nevada, where, as at Summit, the road is 2,000 metres above the sea, today, happily, there is no longer any danger. Now the clumsy wagons that travellers were at first obliged to put up with are replaced with luxurious cars, with beds, restaurants, and elegant parlors, as thoroughly warmed and lighted as our best European hotels. As there are especial trains at reduced prices reserved for laborers, the traveller is no longer obliged to come in contact with the rough miners of the Sierra or the road builders of those new railroads, which, like little tributary streams hastening to empty themselves into the main rivers, are each day added to the Grand Central Pacific. Let the traveller who is discouraged at the prospect of riding in the cars for seven consecutive days, study his guide-book, for there are plenty of cities, as for instance Ogden, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Chicago, which will well repay a visit.

It is in these young cities,

far better than in New York, that it may be learned how, with freedom allied to enterprise, great Republics are reared. EDMOND PLANCHUT.

NEARLY four-and-twenty years ago, Dickens chose his biographer. "I desire no better for my fame," he wrote to and of Mr. Forster, in 1848, "when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic." "You know me better," he wrote in 1862, "than any other man does, or ever will." The work thus assigned to him has been begun by Mr. Forster in the volume before us, and the memoir promises, when completed, to be as delightful and as valuable an one as can be found in our language. "The Life of Oliver Goldsmith" is a masterpiece; but “The Life of Charles Dickens” is likely to be in every way its equal as a literary production, while the theme is of far greater interest to readers of our day, and the writer is able to bring to it that personal knowledge which the most diligent bookstudy, even of such a book student as Mr. Forster, cannot replace. All the thousand touches that can only be inspired by close intimacy and the hearty sympathy of friend with friend are here, by one of the subtlest and most powerful literary artists of the time, given to a marvellously vigorous picture of a man whose real portrait all the world will be glad to see, and will be better for seeing.

The story of Dickens's life till he was thirty is here chronicled. The last six years fill nearly four-fifths of the volume; but what is told about the first four-andtwenty years is its most welcome portion. The three chapters in which Mr. Forster recounts the early life of his hero-far more of a hero than his heartiest admirers ever supposed him to be--contain, indeed, as pathetic a narrative of child-life as is to be found in "The Old Curiosity Shop" or in "Oliver Twist "-and what more can be said than that? Everybody knew that Dickens worked bravely up from humble life by his own exertions, and that the genius by which he has brightened the lives of millions was quickened amid hardships that might well have stifled it, if it could have been stifled; but few in

deed could have guessed how great was the strain, how bitter were the hardships, put upon his young life. Mr. Forster's story of this early heroism-partly told in the way of extracts from an autobiographical fragment, portions of which were used, with hardly an alteration, by the author himself in "David Copperfield "-is not only strangely interesting in itself, but is also of the greatest value in that it furnishes the key to all Dickens's later history. It tells us how the lad who was to be "the most popular novelist of the century and one of the greatest humorists that England has produced," born at Portsea on the 7th of February, 1812, living at Chatham between 1816 and 1821, had to fight his own way in the world, with very little help from others, after he was nine years old. He had not much help from others before that. His father, a poorly-paid clerk in the Navy Pay Office, could do but little for him, and that little seems to have been grudged. He was, as he described himself to Washington Irving, "a very small and not-over-particularly-taken-careof-boy," barely taught to read, and then left to practise reading, and to give a tone to his disposition through life, by revelling over a cheap lot of books in a lumberroom, "Roderick Random," "Tom Jones," "The Vicar of Wakefield," "Don Quixote," and "The Spectator" being among the number. From these treasures he was taken at the age of nine, when his parents, coming to live in London, took a shabby house in Bayham-street, Camdentown, a washerwoman living next door, and a Bow-street officer over the way. His father had been in money difficulties all along, and now he did not mend matters by making a composition with his creditors. Dickens always spoke well of his father. (6 'But," ," he said, "in the ease of his temper, and the straitness of his means, he appeared to have utterly lost, at this time, the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. So I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning, and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger

brothers and sisters, and going on such poor errands as arose out of our poor way of living." Presently that drudgery was exchanged for a worse. His father was arrested and lodged in the Marshalsea. Young Dickens, living with his mother, now in Gower-street North, had to pawn all the books and nearly all the furniture, and, at last, to save money, his mother and the other children went to live in the Marshalsea, and he himself was handed over as a lodger to the Mrs. Pipchin of "Dombey and Son," then living in Little College-street, Camden-town. Before that, from the time of his father's incarceration, he began to earn his own living. For six shillings a week, afterwards raised to seven, he worked at Jonathan Warren's blacking factory in Old Hungerford Stairs, covering the pots of blacking with paper, and tying them up with string as fast as he could all through the day. He afterwards told how he used to make his luxurious breakfast off a penny loaf and a pennyworth of milk; and, before going to his work, to put another penny loaf in a cupboard to serve, with a bit of cheese, for his supper when he came home at night. His dinner he generally bought in town:

It was commonly a saveloy and a penny loaf; sometimes, a fourpenny plate of beef from a cook's shop; sometimes, a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house over the way: the Swan, if I remember right, or the Swan and something else that I have forgotten. Once, I remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and going into the best dining-room in Johnson's alamode beef-house in Charles court, Drury lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition, coming in all alone, I don't know; but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn't taken it.

slice of pudding. There were two pudding shops between which I was divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St. Martin's church (at the back of the church), which is now removed altogether. The pudding at that shop was made with currants, and was rather a special pudding, but was dear: two penn'orth not being larger than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther-arcade is now. It was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it, stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon every day; and many and many a day did I dine off it.

We had half-an-hour, I think, for tea. When I had money enough, I used to go to a coffee-shop, and have half-a-pint of coffee and a slice of bread and butter. When I garden market, and stared at the pine-apples. had no money, I took a turn in CoventThe coffee-shops to which I most resorted were, one in Maiden-lane, one in a court (non-existent now) close to Hungerfordmarket; and one in St. Martin's-lane, of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass-plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I coffee-room now, but where there is such an ever find myself in a very different kind of inscription on glass, and read it backward on the wrong side—MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do then, in a dismal reverie), a shock

goes through my blood.

I

ly and unintentionally, the scantiness of my I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciousresources and the difficulties of my life. I know that if a shilling or so were given me by any one, I spent it in a dinner or a tea. know that I worked, from morning to night, with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I tried, but ineffectually, not to anticipate my money, and to make it last the drawer I had in the counting-house, wrapped week through; by putting it away in a into six little parcels, each parcel containing the same amount, and labelled with a different day. I know that I have lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

After a time, to be nearer the blackingshop and the Marshalsea, the lad went to lodge in a back attic in Lant-street, "where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards." Then he breakfasted and supped "at home" with his parents, and they were waited on by a good-hearted work-house servant, who is now immortalized as the Marchioness. These were

happier times, for there was once more some faint sense of homeliness for him in his bitter loneliness.

Seeing how much Dickens gained by these experiences, how his heart was widened and his sympathies were quickened for all the sufferers in the world, it is impossible to regret them altogether; but they made his young life very wretched, and Mr. Forster found traces of their effect in, "at intervals, a stern and even cold isolation of self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost feminine, and the most eager craving for sympathy." "I must entreat you," wrote Dickens himself, in 1862, "to go back to what you know of my childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier circumstances, should have reappeared in the last five years. The never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time bred a certain shrinking sensitiveness in a certain ill clad, ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the neverto-be-forgotten misery of this later time." But what, one is hard-hearted enough to think, were these personal miseries in comparison with the good service they have done to others? "With the very poor and unprosperous." says Mr. Forster, "out of whose sufferings and strugglings, and the virtues as well as vices born of them, his not least splendid successes were wrought, his childish experiences had made him naturally one. They were not his clients whose cause he pleaded with such pathos and humor, and on whose side he got the laughter and tears of all the world, but, in some sort, his very self."

We have been tempted to repeat some parts of the very touching story of Dickens's boyish life that Mr. Forster has told. But it is not for us to repeat what follows. The outline of his later history is known; but Mr. Forster fills up the details with minuteness and vividness that render every page of his book most welcome reading. Here we see how the young blacking maker's drudge, put to school at last, came to be once more a boy like other boys; how he got on as a lawyer's clerk, and afterwards as a newspaper reporter; and how suddenly, from being a very skilful transcriber of other people's platitudes, he showed that he had in himself the power of uttering such

wit as the world can rarely hear; how then, the publishers discerning his merits before he himself did, he entered into engagements by which he was pledged to write his first books at hack wages, and with a speed that would have put many a weaker man out of gear for life; and how at length he freed himself from this bondage and began to enjoy the fruits of his genius, and to receive the friendship of the foremost men of the time. Mr. Forster's narrative extends to the close of Dickens's visit to America in 1842, of which it gives an especially minute account, based upon letters and journals not incorporated in the "American Notes."

Many of the most interesting passages in this volume describe the personal relations between Dickens and Mr. Forster during their long and close friendship. Thus he is described as he was in 1837:

Very different was his face in those days from that which photography has made familiar to the present generation. A look of youthfulness first attracted you, and then a candor and openness of expression which made you sure of the qualities within. The features were very good. He had a capital forehead, a firm nose with full wide nostril, eyes wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humor and cheerfulness, and a rather prominent mouth strongly marked with sensibility. The head was altogether well-formed and symmetrical, and the air and carriage of it were extremely spirited. The hair, so scant and grizzled in later days, was then of a rich brown and most luxuriant abundance, and the bearded face of his last two decades had hardly a vestige of hair or whisker; but there was that in the face as I first recollect it which no time could change, and which remained implanted on it unalterably to the last. This was the quickness, keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books, and so much of a man of action and business in the world.

Light and motion flashed from every part of it. It was as if made of steel was said of it, four or five years after the time to which I am referring, by a most original and delicate observer, the late Mrs. Carlyle. "What a face is his to meet in a drawing-room!" wrote Leigh Hunt to me, the morning after I made them known to each other. "It has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings." In such sayings are expressed not alone the restless and resistless vivacity and force of which I have spoken, but that also which lay