"O stranger, its strength is a secret of the state."

The stranger was not dismayed, and after much entreaty, his pertinacity overcame the reluctance of the King, who finally said, with solemnity: "O strauger, when my ancestor began to build this temple, it was laid upon insecure foundations. Thereupon he sent for another builder, and said to him: "The present corner-stone will be raised, and the present builder placed under it alive, and upon the stone laid upon the body, you will proceed to erect the wall. Should it be weak or insufficient, it will be taken down; the corner-stone again raised, you will be placed under it alive, the stone will be again laid, and the building | proceed once more.' My ancestor said nothing further; and you now know, O stranger, the secret of these massive walls, and why this building does not tumble down."

The stranger, says the Crim-Tartar legend, went his way much meditating the marvellous government which was able to prevent flimsy building.

NEWSPAPER manners and morals hardly fall into the category of minor manners and morals, which are supposed to be the especial care of the Easy Chair, but there are frequent texts upon which the preacher might dilate, and push a discourse upon the subject even to the fifteenthly. Indeed, in this hot time of an opening election campaign, the stress of the contest is so severe that the first condition of a good newspaper is sometimes frightfully maltreated. | The first duty of a newspaper is to tell the news: to tell it fairly, honestly, and accurately, which are here only differing aspects of the same adverb. "Cooking the news" is the worst use to which cooking and news can be put. The old divine spoke truly, if with exceeding care, in saying, "It has been sometimes observed that men will lie." So it has been sometimes suspected that newspapers will cook the news.

no more pardonable to misrepresent other facts than to distort the opinious of the victim of an interview. Yet it has been possible at times to read in the newspapers of the same day accounts of the same proceedings of-oflet us say, as this is election time-of a political convention. The Banner informs us that the spirit was unmistakable, and the opinion most decided in favor of Jones. True, the convention voted, by nine hundred to four, for Smith, but there is no doubt that Jones is the name written on the popular heart. The Standard, on the other hand, proclaims that the popular heart is engraved all over with the inspiring name of Smith, and that it is impossible to find any trace of feeling for Jones, except, possibly, in the case of one delegate, | who is probably an idiot or a lunatic. This is gravely served up as news, and the papers pay for it. They even hire men to write this, and pay them for it. How Ude and Carême would have disdained this kind of cookery! It is questionable whether hanging is not a better use to put a man to than cooking news. Sir Henry Wotton defined an ambassador as an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth. This kind of purveyor, however, does not lie for his country, but for a party or a person.

It is done with a purpose, the purpose of influencing other action. It is intended to swell the pæan for Jones or for Smith, and to procure results under false pretenses. Procuring goods under false pretenses is a crime, but everybody is supposed to read the newspapers at his own risk. Has the reader yet to learn that newspapers are very human? A paper, for instance, takes a position upon the Jones or Smith question. It decides, upon all the information it can obtain, and by its own deliberate judgment, that Jones is the coming man, or ("it has been observed that men will sometimes lie") it has illicit reasons for the success of Smith. Having thus taken its course, it cooks all the news upon the Smith and Jones controversy, in order that by encouraging the Jonesites or the Smithians, according to the color that it wears, it may promote the success of the side upon which its opinion has been staked. It is a ludicrous and desperate game, but it is certainly not the honest collection and diffusion of news. It is a losing game also, because, whatever the sympathies of the reader, he does not care to be foolishly deceived about the situation. If he is told day after day that Smith is immensely ahead and has a clear field, he is terribly shaken by the shock of learning at the final moment that he has been cheated from the beginning, and that

A courteous interviewer called upon a gentleman to obtain his opinions, let us say, upon the smelt fishery. After the usual civilities upon such occasions, the interviewer remarked, with conscious pride: "The paper that I represent and you, sir, do not agree upon the great smelt question. But it is a newspaper. It prints the facts. It does not pervert them for its own purpose, and it finds its account in it. You may be sure that whatever you may say will be reproduced exactly as you say it. This is the news department. Meanwhile the editorial department will make such comments upon the news as it chooses." This was fair, and the interviewer kept his word. The opin-poor Smith is dead upon the field of dishonor. ions might be editorially ridiculed from the other smelt point of view, and they probably were so. But the reader of the paper could judge between the opinion and the comment.

Now an interview is no more news than much else that is printed in a paper, and it is

Everybody is willing to undertake everybody else's business, and an Easy Chair naturally supposes, therefore, that it could show the able editor a plan of securing and retaining a large audience. The plan would be that described by the urbane reporter as the plan

of his own paper. It is nothing else than truth-telling in the news column, and the peremptory punishment of all criminals who cook the news, and "write up" the situation, not as it is, but as the paper wishes it to be. This is more than an affair of the private wishes or preferences of the paper. To cook the news is a public wrong, and a violation of the moral contract which the newspaper makes with the public to supply the news, and to use every reasonable effort to obtain it, not to manufacture it, either in the office or by correspondence.

hill and meadow and the far undulating country are all submerged in the ethereal splendor. "Pretty pastoral walks"-in the country there are then no other. The season was in the heart of June when Lamb, in later years, returned to Mackery End, and he was so exclusively a citizen, a denizen of streets, that he apparently cared very little for the landscape, and probably knew little of trees and flowers. It was the romance of the old house, and a certain higher family association, which gave his imagination a vague contact with grandeur, causing "very Gentility" to pass CHARLES LAMB, in a felicitous turn of words into his consciousness, which made the charm that makes everybody wish to do what he de- of the place to him. It was yesterday, and scribes, speaks of taking "those pretty pasto- not to-day. But the pretty pastoral walks ral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in about the Easy Chair in the month of May Hertfordshire." Who would not take one of are rich with the glory of the present moment. those walks? What quaintness in the words Indeed, from day to day, in that teeming seaMackery End! What rural melody in the son, the eye must be on the alert to mark each word Hertfordshire! Lamb says that he was step of the swift progress. One morning the once detected by a familiar damsel reclining ground is all violets, the next the lilacs are upon the grass on Primrose Hill, reading Pa- everywhere in full flower, and the simultanemela, and he wishes that it had been any oth-ous efflorescence of tree and shrub and creeper book. But if any loiterer were detected sitting by a stream or under a tree in this delightful season, reading Lamb's very essay from which we quote, he could not wish the situation to be different.

ing plant is bewildering.

From the hill your eye looks down the brilliant fresh green of the springing rye in the long upland field to the trees below, the orchard trees and the dogwood, with the bright young grass beneath, and, far beyond, the grad

gleams of silver in a solitary land. The bland air breathes softly as the loiterer gazes; it is perfumed beyond the air of Araby. That glittering sheet of silver is not the familiar strait; it is the poet's

As we write, it is the season for those pretty pastoral walks. There is one week in May-ual slope of the plain, with houses and gardens the dogwood week, when the dogwood is in and spires and groves to the water, and on the blossom-which is the most beautiful in the other side the same varied luxuriance receding year. All the trees and shrubs are then bud- to the misty hills. In the hazy afternoon the ding and bursting. The cherry-trees are be- landscape itself becomes a mist, in which the ginning to lose their blossoms, and the apple-water lines shine with intense brightnesstrees, at a little distance, are rounded mounds | of bloom. The warm puffs of air-wafts, as the young poets call them-are aromatic with the richness of the orchards, and the gardens of the Hesperides were not more exquisite in color and fragrance. There among the dark pines is the pink cloud of the Judas-tree, and under the forest trees, before they have fairly started, the shad-blossom herald of the azalea, | the swamp honeysuckle. The brilliant yellow Forsythia, which comes before the lilac dares, and almost takes the winds of March, leads in the flowery train in garden beds and along the edges of lawns.

But what suddenness, and what profusion! An early warm day reminds you that the time of the singing of birds has come, and that you must begin to peer after the vines and the young grapes, and you are amazed to find that you have been caught napping, and that while you were wondering how much longer fires would be necessary, the myriad firstlings of the year were already quickening, and that there were crocuses and violets and the trailing arbutus ready for the finder. From that moment a kind of Bay of Fundy floral tide swells and rises and pours all around the busy and delighted spectator. It is not a high tide of Lincolnshire only, but another deluge, of verdure and bloom, tender and beautiful, and

"Broad water of the West";

it is the sluggish stream of the Arthurian legend along which slide the slow barges-the river of Paradise.

"Give me health and a day," says Emerson, in his earliest book, "and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria, the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faery; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams." Let the day be a day of spring, the midmost week of May in this latitude, and the pretty pastoral walk in the suburbs will not be about Mackery End, but about the garden of Eden.

LOOKING, the other day, at the photographs which hung at Bogardus's door, the Easy Chair saw a venerable head, of strong features and of rather foreign aspect, which, upon a closer inspection, turned out to be that of Ole Bull. A few evenings afterward he played at a concert, and there was great enthusiasm, the pa

pers said, even if the performance was what it always was. What it always was! Does the critic remember Hans Christian Andersen's account of Ole Bull's first playing in Italy, in Rome? He had come down from Norway with his violin, and the violin was pretty much all that was left to him. He had reached the last crust, but he had youth and his violin. A great concert was announced in Rome, at which De Beriot was to play, and princesses and grand dames of every degree were to attend, and at the last moment De Beriot was ill, or was in a "huff," and said that he was ill; in any case, he would not play, and there was universal consternation until some one thought of the Norwegian youth with his violin. So a messenger was sent in hot haste, who found the hero of hope and the last crust, and summoned him to come at once to the concert and play. The Norwegian was very shabbily dressed, but he took his violin, as the son of the miller took his legacy, and set forth to try his fortune.

when his tall, manly figure emerged from the wings, and advanced to the foot-lights, the coat buttoned across his breast, and his smooth, handsome face above the broad shoulders-a young Apollo in evening dress-there was a freshness and simplicity of impression, and a personal fascination, wholly unknown to the full-bearded and mustached and finical artists whom we were accustomed to see. There was a cool repose of ample strength in his Northern aspect, and the entire audience was ready to admire and enjoy before a sound was heard. As he stood erect while the orchestra played the introduction, he bent his ear to his violin with an air of communion with a conscious spirit, and at the proper moment he dashed off into some polacca guerriera, to which he gave prodigious effect, and at once captured the audience and secured his American success.

Vieuxtemps was here at the same time, an exquisite master of the violin; but he was wholly eclipsed by this "phenomenon" from Norway. There was immense enthusiasm about The theatre was brilliant with the distinc-| Bull, and the papers gushed with sentimenttion and the fashion of Rome, and presently al rhapsodies; but the musicians smiled, and the Norwegian came forward in his shabby shrugged their shoulders, and were denounced clothes holding his violin-this is Hans An- by the true believers as narrow-minded infidersen's story-wondering what he should dels, green with jealousy. It would be interplay. He resolved to improvise the fantasia esting to recur to the remarks then made upon that was floating through his mind, snatches Ole Bull's playing, and the young persons of and reminiscences of melodies of his native to-day, who are persuaded that there never land, and, as the rider who brought the good was and never can be so perfect a musical hero news from Ghent to Aix patted the neck of as Campanini, who is fitted to kindle overpowhis good horse Roland to magnetize him withering enthusiasm in the breast of the most obsympathy, the youth bent his ear to his violin, durate parent, would be amazed could they turn and touched the strings gently with his fin- back for a generation, and behold that obdugers. Then he drew the bow, and the min-rate parent shouting and violent with admiragled music of hope and memory, of aspiration tion of Ole Bull. Fortes vixere ante Campanini. and resolve, vibrated and rang through the great building. A roar of applause followed, and the artist was compelled to come forward again. He asked for themes upon which to improvise, and three were given him from which to select. They were melodies from three operas, and instead of selecting, he took them all, and combined them in an extraordinary and captivating improvisation, which ended in a universal acclamation, the forerunner of his fame. He was attended to his room with torches and music, and from that moment Ole Bull has been one of the noted virtuosos of his time.

It was nearly forty years ago that he first came to this country, and appeared at the old Park Theatre. The house was very full; and

MR

It is possible to see something of the youthful fire and energy of the Norwegian Apollo of those old days in the photographic head that the Easy Chair saw at Bogardus's door. But what was it that the Chair saw in the next morning's paper about the same old tricks and h-mb-gs and blunders? Is the world awry? Does that green jealousy survive? Because Campanini is the hero of the hour, shall there have been no Ole Bull? Let those laugh that win. In a later paper it is recorded that Ole Bull has bought some ponies for a great sum of money; and the Easy Chair, gratefully recalling the delight of other years, rejoices to think that the hope and violin of the brave Norwegian youth in Rome have changed the crust into comfort.

Editor's Literary Record.

R. SYMONDS'S Sketches and Studies in | arly taste, and especially by those who are inSouthern Europe1 form a repast that will be relished by all persons of cultivated or schol

1 Sketches and Studies in Southern Europe. By Joun ADDINGTON SYMONDS. In Two Volumes. Post Svo, pp. 393 and 388. New York: Harper and Brothers.

terested in Italian literature and art, or who have enjoyed and are familiar with Italian life and scenery. Mr. Symonds's descriptionswhich, we should say, are not exclusively descriptive, but are enriched by fine classical and

The

medieval allusions, both poetical and legend- may have been no waving of banners or blare ary, and sparkle with brilliant though sponta- | of trumpets around these unobtrusive heroes, neous criticism-embrace picturesque views but neither were their footsteps marked by of Mentone, Ajaccio, Florence, Perugia, Orvie- broken hearts and desolated homes. to, Amalfi, Pæstum, Capri, Rome, Syracuse, tears which they caused to flow were tears of Palermo, Rimini, Ravenna, Canossa, Parma, gratitude-tears which, like the early and the Fornova, the old towns of Provence, etc., and latter rains, brought a harvest of blessings in the country around each; and are so many their train. Of this bracing and wholesome shifting scenes, glowing with warmth and col- kind are the biographies of Elihu Burritt and or, in which the past and present, the distant Mary Carpenter-two philanthropists, moving, and near, are linked together, their artistic and indeed, on widely differing planes, whose lives architectural beauties described, and their men are worthy of study as examples of the effect and women made to pass before us in agreeable of steadfast effort, directed by noble disinterprocession. His rural descriptions are genuine estedness to worthy ends, to command success idyls, and his account of Florence and the Medi- in spite of incommensurate means, and in the ci is a brilliant outline sketch of the most brill- face of the most disheartening apathy. Mr. iant period in Florentine history. As with | Northend's Life of Burritt has little attractFlorence, so with the other cities to which Mr. iveness from the merely literary point of view. Symonds takes us, along with fine pictures of Its account of him for the first thirty years of them as they exist to-day he revives glowing his life-the period that is usually most fully historical memories and life-like biographical freighted with attractive instruction for youth portraits, and interposes subtle art sketches-occupies less than half a score of pages, and and criticisms. Thus his accounts of Palermo, of Syracuse, of Rimini, of Canossa, and of Parma are successively enriched with a vivid comparative description of the architecture and interiors of the Sicilian churches (the work of Saracen builders, assisted by Byzantine, Italian, and Norman craftsmen), and the architecture and interiors of Gothic churches and cathedrals, with historical portraits of the great dukes of the house of Hauteville, of the heroic and all-accomplished Alberti, of the warlike Countess Matilda and the iron-hearted Hildebrand, and with a sympathetic estimate of the characteristics of the genius of Correggio. The scholar will find that his special tastes have not been overlooked. At the close of the second volume are two elaborate essays of great interest to the student of English meters, the first being a history of English blank verse, comprising an examination of the earliest examples of it, from Surrey and Marlowe down to Milton, and the other a critical study of Milton's blank verse, in which its structure is analyzed, and some of the mistakes that have been made about it are corrected. Among his lighter sketches Mr. Symonds has introduced several severer but not difficult studies; for instance, on Antinous and the "mild mystery" that environs him, on Lucretius, as representing the Roman character in its most perfect literary incarnation, on the debt of English to Italian literature, on the popular Italian poetry of the Renaissance, and on the popular songs of Tuscany. The lover of poetry will find a rich treat in the numerous examples of Italian poetry, in various forms, which Mr. Symonds has collected, and rendered into our vernacular with flowing ease and grace.

ONE can not read without a sense of invigoration the lives of those who have devoted themselves steadily, with a fixed and resolute purpose, and with a total abnegation of self, to the welfare of their fellow-men. There

is exceedingly meagre. What there is of it, however, is of substantial value. The biographical portion of the volume is principally devoted to the large philanthropic schemes to which he devoted the energies of his life. Among these were his plans for ocean or international penny postage, for universal brotherhood, and for the suppression of war through the medium of arbitration and international treaties. Although, as we have intimated, the volume lacks the fullness of personal incident that is the essential excellence of all biography, it can not be read without profit being derived from the fine example it records of difficulty overcome and good accomplished. More than half of the volume is made up of readable and characteristic selections from Burritt's correspondence, journal, and published writings. Of a very different quality as a literary performance is the Life of Mary Carpenter. Gracefully and elegantly written, and copiously illustrated by selections from her own large and felicitous correspondence, it is the rounded record of the life of a worthy representative of the philanthropic women of England, following her closely in her career from the cradle to the grave-in the domestic circle that she refined and elevated; in all her social and public efforts for the moral and physical, the religious and intellectual, improvement of the lower classes; in her enterprises for the establishment of ragged, reformatory, and industrial schools; in her noble crusade, extending from England to America, for the amelioration of prison, work-house, and factory abuses; and in her self-sacrificing missions to India for the evangelization and education of the women of that distant land. The work forms a most reassuring chapter in the history of woman's

2 Elihu Burritt. A Memorial Volume. Containing a Sketch of his Life and Labors. With Selections from his Writings, etc. Edited by CHARLES NORTHEND. 12mo, pp. 477. New York: D. Appleton and Co.

3 The Life and Work of Mary Carpenter. By J. ESTLIN CARPENTER. 12mo, pp. 490. London: Macmillan and Co.

work for the distressed, the ignorant, the needy, | outline of the life of Channing, the chief facts and the vile, and will be read with perpetual of which are gleaned from the more extended encouragement by the Christian philanthropist. biography to which we have referred, supEven those who have no special philanthropic plemented by some interesting reminiscences leanings will be charmed by the intellectual | drawn from original sources not hitherto pubgrace, the prevailing sweetness, and the sym-lished. Together with these reminiscences metrical beauty of the life of this true gentle

woman.

4

Mr. Brooks has collected and ranged in appropriate connection many of Channing's own utterances, gathered from his epistolary and other writings, which enable the reader to see and hear the man himself as he is imaged in his own words. The book is illustrated with fine artotypes of places associated with incidents of Channing's life, and with fine portraits of his mother and himself. The volume of Reminiscences, by Miss Peabody, is a more distinctively original work than Mr. Brooks's memorial. Its object is to transfer to the mind of the reader such an impression of Dr. Channing as was derived by the author herself from an intimate acquaintance with him during the last twenty years of his life—in the years between 1816 and 1842. During this period Miss Peabody frequently acted as an amanuensis for him, was perfectly familiar with his every

THE application of the literary-critical method to the life of Lord Beaconsfield, or the study of the career of the statesman in the light of his works as a novelist, is no new idea. Consciously or unconsciously, intelligent Englishmen and Americans have habitually turned to the pages of Disraeli for the interpretation of the motives or the policy of Beaconsfield, and have fancied that they found a more or less substantial agreement between the two sides of the Sphinx-like character they pondered. It has been reserved, however, to Mr. Georg Brandes, a German scholar, to reduce this idea to concrete form in his study of Lord Beaconsfield, and he has done so with an attention to details that gives an air of striking verisimili- | tude to his performance. Ingenious, howev-day life, discussed with him most of the more er, as are his comparisons and parallels, the query often suggests itself while reading them whether they are indeed real or only ingenious, and what Lord Beaconsfield himself would say about them; for, after all, he only can decide the extent and the reality of the insight into his political acts that may be derived from his literary vaticinations. Although the study of the statesman in the mirror of the novelist is the leading and most attractive problem of Mr. Brandes's book, it is not exclusively confined to this, but also embraces a series of acute criticisms and analyses of Lord Beaconsfield's purely literary productions, and a thoughtful outline and estimate of his public career. The volume is as suggestive as it is entertaining.

important public, social, and religious questions that occupied his thoughts, and consulted him on subjects of similar concernment that agitated her own mind. Thus the work has a triple character; it is at once a collection of reminiscences bearing upon the personal life of Chanuing, a psychological study of his moral and intellectual characteristics, and an exposition of his moral and religious beliefs as they hardened into convictions. Throughout her intimate and semi-confidential association with Dr. Channing, Miss Peabody copied into her journal her daily conversations with him; and her reproduction of these contemporaneous records forms a valuable addition to our knowledge of him, more especially since they afford freer revelations of his mind than he THE Occurrence in April last of the hun- was wont to make in his published writings. dredth anniversary of the birth of Dr. Chan- They introduce us, as we fail to be introduced ning has prompted the preparation of two in his sermons, essays, and other works, to the brief memorial volumes, which are valuable as processes of mind by which he arrived at his contributions, in a popular and convenient conclusions, the intellectual methods he emform, to a more intimate knowledge of the ployed in search of the truth for which he so man, and to closer views of his mental, moral, earnestly yearned, and which so often eluded social, and religious characteristics, than have his grasp, and the transitions and perplexities been generally accessible hitherto. The very he experienced in his unceasing search. The extent and elaborateness of the able biography, general impression we derive from this close in three large volumes, by his nephew, William view of the man is somewhat disappointing. H. Channing, conspired to make it "caviare to Dr. Channing's intellect seems to have been the general"; and its copious extended ex- | quick, active, agile, and lithesome, rather than tracts from Channing's letters and sermons in- | robust, vigorous, and masculine. He was so terrupted the attention of the reader, and, un-intellectually fastidious, and his religious less he were a practiced thinker, disabled him opinions were so greatly colored by his æsthetfrom securing a connected view of the growth ic tastes, that he rarely secured a firm and teand transition stages of his mind and opinions. nacious grasp of religious truth. His religious Mr. Brooks's Centennial Memory is a succinct

4 Lord Beaconsfield. A Study. By GEORG BRANDES. Translated by Mrs. GEORGE STURGE. 12mo, pp. 382. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

5 William Ellery Channing. A Centennial Memory.

By CHARLES T. BROOKS. With Illustrations. 16mo, pp. 259. Boston: Roberts Brothers,

6 Reminiscences of Rev. William Ellery Channing, D.D. By ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY. 16mo, pp. 459. Boston: Roberts Brothers.