in as our share of the contribution, and my wondering what be came of it (are those figures in existence now? and does the General still hold forth the eleemosynary cap?) Thence we proceeded to Cox's Museum in Spring Gardens, and saw and heard a little bird, who seemed made of diamonds and rubies, who clapped his wings and sang. There, too (it was a place full of strange deceptions), I sat down upon a chair, and the cushion forthwith began to squeak like a cat and kittens, so like a cat and kittens that I more than half expected to be scratched. And then to the Leverian Museum in the Blackfriars Road, a delightful abode of birds and butterflies, where I saw dead and stuffed with a reality that wanted nothing but life, nearly all the beautiful creatures that little girls see now alive at the Zoological. The promised visit to the Haymarket Theater formed a fit conclusion to this day of enchantment. We saw another capital comedy (I think Colman's "Heir at Law") capitally acted, and laughed until we could laugh no longer. And then the next day we drove home without a moment's weariness of mind or body. Such was my first journey to London. Upon looking back to that journey of nearly sixty years ago, what strikes me most is the small dimensions to which the capital of England was then confined, compared with those which it now covers. When I stood on the topmost gallery of St. Paul's, I saw a compact city, spreading along the river, it is true, from Billingsgate to Westminster, but clearly defined to the north and to the south, the West End beginning at Hyde Park Corner, and bordered by Hyde Park on the one side and the Green Park on the other. Then, in spite of my mistaking the stones of Brentford for the stones of London, Belgravia was a series of pastures, and Paddington a village. Now squares and terraces are closing round the terminus of the Great Western, and the stateliest mansions of the metropolis cover the green fields which separated Sloane-street from Pimlico. People wonder at the size of the Great Exhibition, but the town of which it forms a part, that throbbing heart of a great nation, seems to me more wonderful far. To describe London as it is, or even in a few pages to enumerate the sights which we should show to a child now, would be as impossible a task as to crowd into the same space the marvels contained in Mr. Paxton's wonderful house of glass. Far more impossible! for a very few lines would comprise the chief impression produced upon me when escorted by iny excellent friend Mr. Lucas, and guided by the fine taste of that most tasteful of painters, I walked through the Great Exhibition this summer. Next perhaps to the building itself, with the statues and hangings to which it owes its distinctive character, and the fountains and people who give to it movement and life;-next to the vastness, the lightness, the exquisite fitness of the building; and excepting perhaps only that triumph of modern sculptureKiss's bold, expressive, impassioned group-that which most filled the eye and the mind seemed to me to be the Indian tissues, however called, with their delicious harmony of color, and their strange power of interweaving the precious metals with their silken textures. There is one shawl where upon a white ground the same pattern is repeated now in gold and now in silver, which seems to me actually to emit light. Those Indian draperies are poems which have no need of words, forms invented thousands of years ago, and repeated from dynasty to dynasty, from empire to empire. So are those Tunisian vases, forms of ineffable grace such as may have been carried to the fountain or the well by the captive queens of Grecian fable or the Hebrew maidens of sacred history. Is it that those ancient nations of the East and of the South have in them the great principle of permanence which is a sort of earthly immortality? that having once seized the Beautiful, they are content to abide by it and to produce and reproduce the same grace of form and harmony of color, just as nature herself is content to produce and reproduce her marvels of vegetable life, her lotus on the river, her magnolia in the wood? If so, let us strive to copy them, not in such a combination of hues, or such lines of contour, but in the greater wisdom of loving and admiring beauty because it is beautiful, and not because according to the caprice of the hour it happens to be new or to be old. It is now full time to come to Dr. Johnson. The London which I saw sixty years ago was not materially different from that in which he had lived and reigned-the king of conversation and almost of literature. One proof of this supremacy was afforded at that very time when my father, by no means a bookish man and a most ardent Whig, stopped the coach two or three times during our drive to the Bank, to show me Bolt Court and various other courts distinguished by the residence of the great lexicographer. Boswell's inimitable life had of course its share in this interest; but independently of that remarkable book the feeling was deep and was general; and when we consider that the society of which he was the acknowledged head comprised such names as Burke, and Fox, and Reynolds, and Goldsmith, we can not doubt but in spite of his virulent prejudices, his absurd superstition, and his latinized English, Samuel Johnson was not only a good man but a great man. One who was pre-eminently both, Dr. Channing, Republican by nation and opinion, Unitarian by creed, has a passage relating to Johnson, which, while alle ging nearly all that can be said against him, always struck me as admirable for justice and for candor-the candor of an adversary and an opponent. It occurs in a "Review of the Writings and Character of Milton," in which the American author had, as matter of course, controverted the decisions of the English critic. He says I omit much that relates only to Milton-he says: "We wish not to disparage Johnson. We could find no pleasure in sacrificing one great man to the manes of another. He did not and he could not appreciate Milton. We doubt whether two other minds, having so little in common as those of which we are now speaking, can be found in the higher walks of literature. Johnson was great in his own sphere, but that sphere was comparatively of the earth, while Milton's was only inferior to that of angels. It was customary in the day of Johnson's glory to call him a giant, to class him with a mighty but still an earth-born race. Milton we should rank among seraphs. Johnson's mind acted chiefly on man's actual condition, on the realities of life, on the springs of human action, on the passions which now agitate society, and he seems hardly to have dreamed of a higher state of the human mind than was then exhibited. *** In religion, Johnson was gloomy and inclined to superstition, and on the subject of government leaned to absolute power, and the idea of reforming either never entered his mind but to disturb and provoke it. How could Johnson be just to Milton? The comparison which we have instituted has compelled us to notice Johnson's defects: but we trust we are not blind to his merits. His stately march, his pomp and power of language, his • strength of thought, his reverence for virtue and religion, his vigorous logic, his practical wisdom, his insight into the springs of human action, and the solemn pathos which occasionally per vades his descriptions of life and his references to his own history command our willing admiration. That he wanted enthusiasm and creative imagination and lofty sentiment was not his fault. We do not blame him for not being Milton. We would even treat what we deem the faults of Johnson with a tenderness approaching respect; for they were results to a degree which man can not estimate of a diseased, irritable, nervous, unhappy, physical temperament, and belonged to the body more than to the mind." So far the great American. Would that all critics had his charity! In none of Dr. Channing's praises of Johnson do I join more cordially than in the admiration with which he speaks of his occasional references to his own history. I subjoin the letter to Lord Chesterfield which comprises so many of the distinguishing characteristics of his style, together with a pungency, a truth, and a pathos which belong even more to personal character than to literary power. It explains itself: "My Lord, "I have lately been informed by the proprietor of 'The World,' that two papers in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honor which, being very little accustomed to favors from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge. 66 When upon some slight encouragement I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre, that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little. "Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word Such treatment I did of encouragement, or one smile of favor. not expect, for I never had a patron before. The Shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and can not enjoy it; till I am solitary, and can not impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. Having carried on my work, therefore, with so little obligation to any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation, My concluding extract is of a very different description-as different as the character and situation of the two persons to whom the letter and the stanzas relate. These verses again tell their own story, though they do not tell the whole, for Johnson, poor himself, was to the poor apothecary a generous patron and an unfailing friend. The poem has much of the homely pathos, the graphic truth of Crabbe, and is so free from manner, that it might rather pass for his than for Dr. Johnson's. ON THE DEATH OF ROBERT LEVETT. Condemned to Hope's delusive mine, |