From Household Words.

THE LONG VOYAGE.

WHEN the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel. Such books have had a strong fascination for my mind from my earliest childhood; and I wonder it should have come to pass that I never have been round the world, never have been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten.

He

and he tempts one other prisoner away, seizes
another boat, and flies once more-necessarily
in the old hopeless direction, for he can take no
other. He is soon cut off, and met by the pur-
suing party, face to face, upon the beach. He is
alone. In his former journey he acquired an un-
appeasable relish for his dreadful food.
urged the new man away, expressly to kill him
and eat him. In the pockets on one side of
his coarse convict-dress, are portions of the man's
body, on which he is regaling; in the pockets on
the other side, is an untouched store of salted
pork (stolen before he left the island) for which
he has no appetite. He is taken back, and he is
hanged. But I shall never see that sea-beach on
the wall or in the fire, without him, solitary mon-
ster, eating as he prowls along, while the sea
rages and rises at him.

This time of year is crowded with thick-coming fancies. Sitting on my ruddy hearth in the twilight of New Year's Eve, I find incidents of travel rise around me from all the latitudes and longitudes of the globe. They observe no order or sequence, but appear and vanish as they will come like shadows, so depart." Columbus, Captain Bligh (a worse man to be entrusted alone upon the sea with his disaffected crew, with arbitrary power there could scarcely be) is looks over the waste of waters from his high handed over the side of the Bounty, and turned station on the poop of his ship, and sees the first adrift on the wide ocean in an open boat, by order uncertain glimmer of the light, rising and falling of Fletcher Christian, one of his officers, at this with the waves, like a torch in the bark of some very minute. Another flash of my fire, and fisherman," which is the shining star of a new "Thursday October Christian," five-and-twenty world. Bruce is caged in Abyssinia, surrounded years of age, son of the dead and gone Fletcher by the gory horrors which shall often startle him by a savage mother, leaps aboard His Majesty's out of his sleep at home when years have passed ship Briton, hove to off Pitcairn's Island; says away. Franklin, come to the end of his unhappy his simple grace before eating, in good English; overland journey- would that it had been his and knows that a pretty little animal on board is last!-lies perishing with hunger with his brave called a dog, because in his childhood he had companions: each emaciated figure stretched heard of such strange creatures from his father upon its miserable bed without the power to rise: and the other mutineers, grown gray under the all, dividing the weary days between their pray-shade of the Bread-fruit trees, speaking of their ers, their remembrances of the dear ones at home, lost country far away.

and conversation on the pleasures of eating; the See the Halsewell, East Indiaman, outward last-named topic being ever present to them, like-bound, driving madly on a January night towards wise, in their dreams. All the African travellers, the rocks near Seacombe, on the island of Purwayworn, solitary, and sad, submit themselves beck! The captain's two dear daughters are again to drunken, murderous, man-selling despots, of the lowest order of humanity; and Mungo Park, fainting under a tree and succored by a woman, gratefully remembers how his Good Samaritan has always come to him in woman's shape, the wide world over.

A shadow on the wall in which my mind's eye can discern some traces of a rocky sea-coast, recalls to me a fearful story of travel derived from that unpromising narrator of such stories, a parliamentary blue-book. A convict is its chief figure, and this man escapes with other prisoners from a penal settlement. It is an island, and they seize a boat, and get to the main land. Their way is by a rugged and precipitous sea-shore, and they have no earthly hope of ultimate escape, for, the party of soldiers despatched by an easier course to cut them off, must inevitably arrive at their distant bourne long before them, and retake them if by any hazard they survive the horrors of the way. Famine, as they all must have foreseen, besets them early in their course. Some of the party die and are eaten; some are murdered by the rest and eaten. This one awful creature eats his fill, and sustains his strength, and lives on to be recaptured and taken back. The unrelatable experiences through which he has passed have been so tremendous, that he is not hanged as he might be, but goes back to his old chained gang-work. A little time,

aboard, and five other ladies. The ship has been driving many hours, has seven feet of water in her hold, and her mainmast has been cut away. The description of her loss, familiar to me from my early boyhood, seems to be read aloud as she rushes to her destiny.

About two in the morning of Friday the sixth of January, the ship still driving, and approaching very fast to the shore, Mr. Henry Meriton, the second mate, went again into the cuddy, where the captain then was. Another conversation taking place, Captain Pierce expressed extreme anxiety for the preservation of his beloved daughters, and earnestly asked the officer if he could devise any method of saving them. On his answering with great concern, that he feared it would be impossible, but that their only chance would be to wait for morning, the captain lifted up his hands in silent and distressful ejaculation.

At this dreadful moment, the ship struck, with such violence as to dash the heads of those standing in the cuddy against the deck above them, and the shock was accompanied by a shriek of horror that burst at one instant from every quarter of the ship.

inattentive and remiss in their duty during a great Many of the seamen, who had been remarkably part of the storm, now poured upon deck, where no exertions of the officers could keep them, while their assistance might have been useful. They had actually skulked in their hammocks, leaving the

working of the pumps and other necessary labors | assist the partners of his dangers to escape. But, to the officers of the ship, and the soldiers, who observing that the poor ladies appeared parched had made uncommon exertions. Roused by a sense of their danger, the same seamen, at this moment, in frantic exclamations, demanded of heaven and their fellow-sufferers that succor which their own efforts timely made, might possibly have procured.

Mr. Rogers, the third mate, remained with the captain and the unfortunate ladies and their companious nearly twenty minutes after Mr. Meriton had quitted the ship. Soon after the latter left the round-house, the captain asked what was become of him, to which Mr. Rogers replied, that he was gone on deck to see what could be done. After this, a heavy sea breaking over the ship, the ladies In addition to the company already in the round-exclaimed, "Oh poor Meriton! he is drowned! house, they had admitted three black women and two soldiers' wives; who, with the husband of one of them, had been allowed to come in, though the seamen, who had tumultuously demanded entrance to get the lights, had been opposed and kept out by Mr. Rogers and Mr. Brimer, the third and fifth mates. The numbers there were, therefore, now increased to near fifty. Captain Pierce sat on a chair, a cot, or some other movable, with a daughter on each side, whom he alternately pressed to his affectionate breast. The rest of the melancholy assembly were seated on the deck, which was strewed with musical instruments, and the wreck of furniture and other articles.

Macmanus, a midshipman, and Mr. Schutz, a passenger, asked Mr. Rogers what they could do to escape. "Follow me," he replied; and they all went into the stern-gallery, and from thence to the upper-quarter-gallery on the poop. While there, a very heavy sea fell on board, and the round house gave way; Mr. Rogers heard the ladies shriek at intervals, as if the water reached them; the noise of the sea at other times drowning their voices. Mr. Brimer had followed him to the poop, where they remained together about five minutes, when, on the breaking of this heavy sea, they jointly seized a hen-coop. The same wave which proved fatal to some of those below, carried him it!-forget this child. The captain stops exand his companion to the rock, on which they were violently dashed and miserably bruised.

From which time forth, this child is sublimely made a sacred charge. He is pushed, on a little raft, across broad rivers, by the swimming sailors; they carry him by turns through the deep sand and long grass (he patiently walking at all other times); they share with him such putrid fish as they find to eat; they lie down and wait for him when the rough carpenter, who becomes his especial friend, lags behind. Beset by lions and tigers, by savages, by thirst, by hunger, by death in a crowd of ghastly shapes, they never-O Father of all mankind, thy name be blessed for hausted, and his faithful coxswain goes back and Here on the rock were twenty-seven men; but is seen to sit down by his side, and neither of the it now being low water, and as they were' con- two shall be any more beheld until the great last vinced that on the flowing of the tide all must be day; but, as the rest go on for their lives, they washed off, many attempted to get to the back or take the child with them. The carpenter dies the sides of the cavern, beyond the reach of the re- of poisonous berries eaten in starvation; and the turning sea. Scarcely more than six, besides Mr.steward, succeeding to the command of the Rogers and Mr. Brimer, succeeded.

party, succeeds to the sacred guardianship of the

Mr. Rogers, on gaining this station, was so near-child. ly exhausted, that had his exertions been protracted only a few minutes longer, he must have he cheerfully carries him in his arms when he sunk under them. He was now prevented from joining Mr. Meriton, by at least twenty men between them, none of whom could move without the imminent peril of his life.

God knows all he does for the poor baby; how himself is weak and ill; how he feeds him when he himself is griped with want; how he folds his ragged jacket round him, lays his little worn face They found that a very considerable number of with a woman's tenderness upon his sunburnt the crew, seamen, and soldiers, and some petty breast, soothes him in his sufferings, sings to him officers, were in the same situation as themselves, as he limps along, unmindful of his own parched though many who had reached the rocks below, and bleeding feet. Divided for a few days from perished in attempting to ascend. They could yet the rest, they dig a grave in the sand and bury discern some part of the ship, and in their dreary their good friend the cooper- these two companstation solaced themselves with the hopes of its re-ions alone in the wilderness and then the time maining entire until day-break; for in the midst of their own distress, the sufferings of the females on board affected them with the most poignant anguish; and every sea that broke inspired them with terror for their safety.

comes when they both are ill and beg their wretched partners in despair, reduced and few in number now, to wait by them one day. They wait by them one day, they wait by them two But, alas, their apprehensions were too soon re- days. On the morning of the third, they move alized! Within a very few minutes of the time very softly about, in making their preparations that Mr. Rogers gained the rock, an universal for the resumption of their journey; for, the shriek, which long vibrated in their ears, in which the voice of female distress was lamentably distinguished, announced the dreadful catastrophe. In a few moments all was hushed, except the roaring of the winds and the dashing of the waves; the wreck was buried in the deep, and not an atom of it was ever afterwards seen.

The most beautiful and affecting incident I know, associated with a shipwreck, succeeds this dismal story for a winter night. The Grosvenor, East Indiaman homeward bound, goes ashore on the coast of Caffraria. It is resolved that the officers, passengers, and crew, in number one hundred and thirty-five souls, shall endeavor to penetrate on foot, across trackless deserts, infested by wild beasts and cruel savages, to the Dutch settlements at the Cape of Good Hope. With this forlorn object before them, they finally separate into two parties. -never more to meet on earth.

child is sleeping by the fire, and it is agreed with the last moment. The moment comes, the fire is one consent that he shall not be disturbed until dying-the child is dead.

His faithful friend, the steward, lingers but a little while behind him. His grief is great, he staggers on for a few days, lies down in the desert, and dies. But he shall be reunited in his immortal spirit-who can doubt it!-with the child, where he and the poor carpenter shall be raised up with the words, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me."

As I recall the dispersal and disappearance of nearly all the participators in this once famous shipwreck (a mere handful being recovered at last), and the legends that were long afterwards revived from time to time among the English officers at the Cape, of a white woman with an infant, said to have been seen weeping outside a savage hut far in the interior, who was whisper

missing ladies saved from the wrecked vessel, and who was often sought but never found, thoughts of another kind of travel come into my mind.

There is a solitary child among the passengers a little boy of seven years old who has no re-ingly associated with the remembrance of the lation there; and when the first party is moving away he cries after some member of it who has been kind to him. The crying of a child might be supposed to be a little thing to men in such great extremity; but it touches them, and he is immediately taken into that detachment.

Thoughts of a voyager unexpectedly summoned from home, who travelled a vast distance, and

could never return. Thoughts of this unhappy in his face? The representatives of different wayfarer in the depths of his sorrow, in the bitter- States may have different modes of wearing their ness of his anguish, in the helplessness of his self-reproach, in the desperation of his desire to set right what he had left wrong, and do what he had left undone.

gold. The monarchical wear it outside, the republican carries it inside. The plain black coat is typical of the nation whose resources are not squandered in appearances, but husbanded so as to make a mighty power in reserve available

For, there were many things he had neglected. Little matters while he was at home and sur-whenever occasion may arise. rounded by them, but things of mighty moment when he was at an immeasurable distance. There were many, many blessings that he had inadequately felt, there were many trivial injuries that he had not forgiven, there was love that he had but poorly returned, there was friendship that he had too lightly prized; there were a million kind words that he might have spoken, a million kind looks that he might have given, uncountable slight easy deeds in which he might have been most truly great and good. O for a day (he would exclaim) for but one day to make amends! But the sun never shone upon that happy day, and out of his remote captivity he never came. Why does this traveller's fate obscure, on New Year's Eve, the other histories of travellers with which my mind was filled but now, and cast a solemn shadow over me! Must I one day make his journey? Even so. Who shall say, that I may not then be tortured by such late regrets: that I may not then look from my exile on my empty place and undone work? I stand upon a sea shore, where the waves are years. They break and fall, and I may little heed them: but, with every wave the sea is rising, and I know that it will float me on this traveller's voyage at last.

It is to be regretted that the American Minister did not stand upon his right to admission in the dress diplomatically assigned to him by his Government. Upon the Lord Chamberlain would then have been thrown the absurd difficulty of defining what is or what is not a diplomatic dress, and a new boundary question would have arisen in the provinces of tailoring and embroidery. After all, gold lace is not identical with dignity. A savage chief, who desired to equip himself completely in the English fashion, went to choose a hat, and could not be persuaded that the fittest choice was not the livery-hat with the very broadest gold-lace band and binding. All others appeared mean and unsuitable to him. There may be the same sort of distinction between the servants of nations in and out of livery, as there is between the servants of private establishments, and the lace may not always express the highest pretensions and dignity.

Court etiquette may be a thing of great worth, but of greater value still, according to our notion, is the cultivation of a good feeling between this country and the people of the United States, a cordial alliance with whom, always important, was never so vitally important as now. Ministers are profuse and loud in their professions of anxiety for peace, but earnest of this feeling should be given in deeds, and every needless occasion of offence should be scru

Our

From the Examiner, 4 Feb. DIPLOMATIC COSTUME. THE American Minister was excluded from the House of Lords on the occasion of the open-pulously avoided, especially towards a people ing of Parliament, by the rule requiring diplo- peculiarly sensitive and tenacious. Questions matic costume, the relaxation of which to meet between this country and the United States lie his peculiar case was, it is said, refused. It will before us, the difficulty of managing which sucbe remembered that some months ago the Gov- cessfully may be incalculably increased by afernment of the United States issued a circular to fronts to the national pride, disposing the people its diplomatic agents, directing them to abstain to seize opportunity for quarrel. The real lovers from show and finery, and to observe strictly a of peace are to be distinguished, not by their republican simplicity in appearances and estab-protestations of attachment to it when it is in lishments. It was consequently impossible for danger, but by their seduolus cultivation of inthe American Minister to comply with the Lord ternational good will and kindly sentiment at Chamberlain's rule of dress in the understood all times and upon all occasions, small as well sense of it, our Court etiquette requiring what as great. his own Government has peremptorily forbidden. But what, let us ask, is diplomatic costume? It is not necessarily blue and a blaze of gold embroidery. It varies with the habits of nations and tastes of courts. The Persian does not appear like a blue-bottle fly. The Turk has his peculiar dress. And the American also has his appointed diplomatic costume in a plain black

coat.

His uniform is the uniform of simplicity. The plainness may be in very bad taste; but if, instead of a black coat, it was the pleasure of the American Government that its diplomatic agents should clothe themselves in smock frocks, it would be incumbent on our Court to receive them in that apparel. What right can we have to force the representative of another power into a particular costume, or in default to slap the door

Mr. Buchanan knows the respect in which the nation he represents is held in this country, and cannot but have observed that there is no member of the diplomatic body to whom more court is paid, more attention or more honor shown; and we are quite certain that the exclusion from the ceremonial of the 31st ult., for the ridiculous cause assigned, is the only cause of umbrage that has occurred during his residence here; but in America the circumstance will be regarded apart from all that mitigates and limits its offensiveness in the mind of the Minister, and it will be considered as a studied slight or determined insult. It is but a nonsense after all; a place at a show, may be superficially observed; but how many of the worst quarrels have sprung from the feelings excited by trifles.

Acts and Monuments of the Muse of History. Hear her apostrophized by a " Popular Lecturer." "O venerable daughter of Mnemosyne, I doubt every single statement you ever made since your ladyship was a Muse! For all your grave airs and high pretensions, you are not a whit more trustworthy than some of your lighter sisters on whom your partisans look down. You bid me listen to a general's oration to his soldiers. Nonsense! He no more made it than Turpin made his dying speech at Newgate. You pronounce a panegyric of a hero; I doubt it, and say you flatter outrageously. You utter the condemnation of a loose character; I doubt it, and think you are prejudiced and take the side of the Dons. You offer me an autobiography; I doubt all autobiographies I ever read, except those, perhaps, of Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Mariner, and writers of his class."

MANY a magnificent ideal of the Historian has been put on paper. Sièyes could not fabricate a constitution more easily than the Critic will limn you a fancy portrait of the possible Historian. To transfer the Constitution from its pigeonhole to practice, was quite another matter; and so is the flesh-and-blood fulfilment of the idealized writer of history. Nevertheless, it is well to refer sometimes to some such ideal, however lofty-indeed the loftier the better-if only to restrain a too implicit confidence in, and plenary indulgence towards, some favorite author in this line of things. The true historian must possess, according to an "Able Editor," many of the faculties of an epic poet; aiming at his severe Cold comfort, my masters, for aspiring histopurpose, his cumulative interest, his conjunction rians, whether nearing the arctic ideal of the of grandeur in the whole with simplicity in the "Able Editor" or the antarctic real of the "Popparts the solemnity of his spirit, the general ular Lecturer"-wide as the poles asunder, alike gravity of his tone, the episodes in which he icebound, unnavigable by common seamanship. gathers up, as in baskets, the fragments of his The model historian is a being of whose faultless story, the high argument, or moral, less stand-proportions Thucydides is but a fractional type, ing-up from, than living through, the whole Herodotus but a first rude daub, Livy but a prostrain-his union of imaginative and intellectual lix hint, Tacitus but an abrupt reminder. The power, and his perspicuity, power, and clear en- actual historian is a pretentious driveller, who, in ergy of language. "Besides all this, the histo- historicizing, ipso facto takes out a license to tell rian must do the following things: he must be lies; black lies by the gross, and white lies carte able to live in and reproduce the age of which he blanche; who is to be coughed down as an imwrites; he must sympathize with its ruling pas- postor, and accounted a reckless importer of sions and purposes, without being swallowed up fictions, albeit he write of Florence and subscribe or identified with them; he must understand the himself Machiavelli, or follow the madcap points, alike of agreement and of difference, be- Charles of Sweden as Voltaire, or be shelved tween the past age and his own time; he must among "standard" authors under the names of exercise a judicial impartiality in determining Sismondi, Guizot, Mueller, Niebuhr, Hallam, the deeds, motives, purposes, and pretexts of Grote, Macaulay, Bancroft,-or among "clasvarious parties; he must make the proper degree sics," of high-and-dry, highest-and-driest eminof allowance-nor more nor less-when judging ence, as Robertson and his respectable congeners. of dubious or criminal conduct, for diversities of The doctrine, one may say, teaches immaculate moral codes, national customs, and states of pro- conception; the fact, absolute depravity. The gress; he must practise the power of severe precept requires a nature not a little lower than selection of facts, looking at them always in the angels, but their fellow, their peer, their equal; their representative character; he must unite the performance argues a creatureship oscillating broad views of the general current of events, between knave and fool, quack and dolt, charlaand of the advance of the whole of society, with tan and clown. intense rushing lights, cast upon particular points and pinnacles of his subject; he must have a distinct and valid theory of progress; he must map out the under-currents, as well as the upper streams of his story; he must add a love of the picturesque, the beautiful, and the heroic, to an intense passion for truth; he must give to general principles the incarnate interest of facts, and make facts the graceful symbols of general principles; he must, in fine, be acquainted not only with the philosophy, science, statistics, and poetry, but with the religion of his art, and regard Člio not as a muse, but as a goddess." Such, an historian of the Scottish Covenanters professes to be his ideal, "in part," of a historian after the "own heart" of truth, love, and beauty; such the perilous preface to his own essay in historical composition. Rasselas would say to him, Thou hast convinced me it is impossible to be an historian.

Turn from the magnificent ideal to the extant

Meanwhile, and in the set teeth of this fierce antithesis of ideal and real, of à priori sublimity and à posteriori degradation, we count ourselves happy to be old-fashioned enough and credulous enough, to retain a quantum of faith in the world's canonized histories, and of simple gratitude towards the world's favorite historians. Notwithstanding the brilliant Frenchman's mot, that all history is founded on a general conspiracy against truth, we somehow shirk the idea of a man like Mr. Prescott being among the conspirators. And on the whole we find ourselves accepting without much demur, without much jealous misgiving or infidel distrust, the elaborate and erudite stories he gives us, of the lives and deaths of Ferdinand and Isabella, of the doughty emprise of Cortes and his braves, and the bloody progress of Pizarro in Peru. Mr. Prescott is, to use a Coleridgean epithet, a highly "reliable "historian, at least with those who have not wholly lost the faculty of reliance. He is confessedly eminent in research, and careful in the