insane woman is brought in to be laughed at, and to teach the professed but questionable moral of the story, we have reason, we think, to doubt the quality of the author's humor. It is at best the broadest fun of the ordinary farce; and in the ordinary farce the spectator has this vast advantage over the reader of "Miss Van Kortland," that he knows and sees the instruments of torture to be merely stuffed clubs, and ludicrously harmless. His pity, at least, does not stand in the way of his laughter.

Paris in December, 1851, or the Coup d'État of Napoleon III. By EUGENE TÉNOT, Editor of the Siècle (Paris), and Author of "La Province en Décembre, 1851." Translated from the Thirteenth French Edition, with many Marginal Notes. By S. W. ADAMS and A. H. BRANDON. New York: Hurd and Houghton.

AT any other moment than the present it would be hardly endurable to read of the accumulated crimes of Louis Napoleon; but now, when by the blessing of Heaven he has worked out his own ruin, we may with some patience turn to the story of his guilty success. M. Ténot tells it in the best manner, which, in the circumstances in which he wrote, was the only possible manner; for his book had to be published by permission of the usurper himself,-and confines himself to the effective representation of facts, and while he never leaves his own feeling to conjecture, his comment is sparing and unimpassioned. Compared to Mr. Kinglake's history of the same events, - which people now perceive gave not only the most terrible but the most subtile and truthful characterization of Napoleon, — M. Ténot's work is as a diagram to a finished picture; but the reader easily supplies the passion which the author represses; and we hardly know whether it is better to have help in one's indignation or not. Whichever history you read, you cannot fail to see that if Louis Napoleon had bestowed upon France all the material happiness which his admirers (they have dwindled of late) claim that she has received from him, the first process towards these benefactions was a crime for which nothing could atone; for which, humanly speaking, there is no forgiveness. There is nothing to say in expression of your feeling about this crime, if you happen to believe that the prosperity of

the Empire was as great a fraud upon the imagination of mankind as its military effi ciency, or the generalship of its head; if you believe that the Emperor was, as far as action went, in great degree the guilty instrument of St. Arnaud, Morny, Persigny, and the rest, whose death left him a badly puzzled automaton; if you believe that the spectacle of his success has had the most disastrous and demoralizing effect, has every. where offered a premium to falsehood and unscrupulousness, and has tended to make the whole world vulgar, vicious, and expensive.

The translators' notes usefully supplement M. Ténot's work with biographical sketches of all the principal persons named, and with explanations of events incidentally referred to.

London Lyrics. By FREDERICK LOCKER. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co.

THE various sentiments, in fact

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame,”— seem to go a great deal further in the shape of vers de société than in any other. The tinkle of the rhyme, and the brisk clatter of the light, poetic foot, when moved to a lively and variable measure, please the sense so well that vapidity does not appear the sin it is in most cases; and a capricious fancy, if it is at all airy, becomes almost a virtue. We like to have our ordinary moods and feelings represented in the fine dress usually reserved for their betters amongst the emotions, and the novelty of the attempt we willingly accept for skill in accomplishing it. In this thing, as in some other self-indulgences, it is plain that we are not so wise as we might be; and having now put our general reader down, we ought to go on and put our particular writer down. But we forbear, because we are so weak as to own it—we have run through Mr. Locker's little volume without positive discomfort of the nerves, and with something like an occasional delight to them. We think the sensation went no further than this,

"I heard how you shot at The Beeches,
I saw how you rode Chanticleer,

I have read the report of your speeches,
And echoed the echoing cheer.

There's a whisper of hearts you are breaking,
I envy their owners, I do!
Small marvel that Fortune is making
Her idol of you.

"Alas for the world, and its dearly

Bought triumph, and fugitive bliss!
Sometimes I half wish I were merely
A plain or a penniless miss;
But, perhaps, one is best with a measure
Of pelf, and I'm not sorry, too,
That I'm pretty, because it's a pleasure,
My dearest, to you.

"Your whim is for frolic and fashion,
Your taste is for letters and art,
This rhyme is the commonplace passion
That glows in a fond woman's heart.
Lay it by in a dainty deposit

For relics, we all have a few!
Love, some day they 'll print it, because it
Was written to you."

Mr. Locker is no such writer, to be sure, as William Mackworth Praed or Dr. Holmes, who are masters of their art; but he reminds us agreeably of them, in the way that shows a kindred faculty as well as a cordial appreciation. Dr. Holmes's insurpass able little poem, "The Last Leaf," has been of great profit to him, more than he will himself be to his readers in any one poem; but he is sufficiently graceful; he is

wicked only to a blameless degree; he is sprightly, not to say witty; and space, if nothing else, forbids him to be tedious. So we do not see why we should not praise him.

The Genial Showman: being Reminiscences of the Life of Artemus Ward, and Pictures of a Showman's Career in the Western World. By EDWARD P. HINGSTON. New York: Harper and Brothers.

MR. HINGSTON was the agent of Mr. Charles F. Browne during that humorist's career as a comic lecturer in this country, and here is what he remembers of him. It is not much, nor particularly worth knowing. Mr. Hingston is an Englishman, and enjoys in a high degree the national disqualification for understanding or reproducing any other type. His Americans talk the conventional Americanese of the English tourists, a dialect which no one else ever heard, and they are pretty nearly all fig ures of the cockney fancy. If he ever saw the finer and better side of "Artemus Ward's " nature, he does not let us see it; and here again we think his nationality disabled him. His "genial showman" is a vulgar bore, not at all like the real Browne; who, in spite of evident defects, had yet ever so much good in him, and always considerably more good-humor than humor. About the quality of his humor it does not seem worth while to dispute: as written and as spoken it was fatally dependent upon manner. More amusing than anything he said or did was the fact that he became quite identified in the popular imagination with his own grotesque invention; but Browne's best things were not said in Artemus Ward's person. A pathos, from the circumstances of his early death, rests upon his memory; and this vaguely pensive association is more desirable than any information which his exagent has it in his power to give.

perhaps no one can say that a pill may not be sugared, and permitted to please the palate, at least; that beauty may not adorn use; that amusement may not agreeably blend with instruction. Let it be far from us, at any rate, to say this; we concern ourselves with other points. To tell the honest truth, Mr. Peterson, if no great af fair as a poet, is neither a very startling philosopher; and if it is wrong to "justify the ways of God to man" in the form of drama, the author has not sinned greatly, for it is not much of a drama. His Job is a resident of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and is, like Job of old, in very comfortable circumstances at first; but he loses his whole family by a fever, and is obliged to sell his homestead; and, being afflicted with boils, has to go live in the cottage of a hideous dwarf, with whose misery and wickedness his own former prosperity and goodness had once formed a striking contrast. In this condition he is visited by two ministers (terribly dull, bigoted fellows they are), who talk evangelical Christianity at him, and go off thinking his soul in a very bad way, — in fact, telling him as much. Then the doctor has his say, which is the say of modern scientific thought, and gives little quarter to the doctrine of special providences, or the interference of God with his own laws. Then in a dream comes the Archangel Michael, the celestial regent of the universe, and discusses the coexistence of evil and an omnipotent God, and ends, like a wise archangel, by confessing that he does not know how it is. Job is so much comforted by this dream, that he gets well of his boils and lives to be seventy years old.

The tendency of the whole drama is to teach charity and the acceptance of truth in every form, and we do not observe anything in it which is not familiar to the reader of the current discussion of such topics, as well as to the thoughts of nearly every educated man. But the author is supported against the adversity here offered him by the good opinion of three distinguished poets and four distinguished poetesses, whose praises he sends in a printed slip by way of intro

duction, to the critic, and "not for publication." We assure him that we have read these with profound sorrow, but no great surprise.

They are dreadfully good-naturel, those distinguished poets and poetesses, and we warn the literary aspirant against their flatteries. Would that we could warn them against him!

The author may not believe us, but it is nevertheless true, that his versification is often clumsy, and that there are as few evidences of artistic power in his poem as of novel thought. Yet we think he will be lieve us, though we may be wrong, there is at least one fine stroke of imagina tion in it, namely, this by which Satan is portrayed: :

"Who is this

Coming this way?- so large and vast, but yet
So mean and misproportioned. And his face,
Handsome, it may be, once, but now so gross,
Rapacious, ugly, cruel. Can this be he
Whom all men fear? Yes, it is he. The lord
Of disproportion and excess,— the foe
Of harmony and moderation wise."

The American Annual Cyclopædia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1869. Vol. IX. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

THE ninth volume of this useful work does not differ from former ones in method, and there is little to say about it. There are the usual records of progress in different directions and different localities, the necrology of the year, and notices of politica and religious events. A defect is the absence of the customary article on fine arts; but there is a very full review of all matters of literary interest, which is not wiser in ap pearance, nor less so in fact, perhaps, thaa most criticisms. The narrative of events in France during 1869, with the account of the Emperor's advance towards constitutional government, has already become very cunous historical reading. Among the longer articles on persons deceased is a very satisfactory one on Lamartine, - rather el quent in places, but on the whole satisfactory.

LL round the shores of the island where I dwell there runs a winding path which is probably as old as the settlement of the country, and which has been kept open with pertinacious fidelity by the fishermen whose right of way it represents. In some places, as between Fort Adams and Castle Hill, it exists in its primitive form, as an irregular track above rough cliffs, whence you look down upon the entrance to the harbor and watch the white-sailed schooners that glide beneath. Elsewhere the high-road has usurped its place, and you have the privilege of the path without its charm. Along our eastern cliffs it runs for more than two miles in the rear of beautiful estates, whose owners have seized on it, and graded it, and gravelled it, and made stiles for it, and done for it everything that landscape-gardening could do, while leaving it a footpath still. You walk there with croquet and roses on the one side, and with floating loons and wild ducks on the other. In other places the path grows wilder, and has ramifications striking boldly across the peninsula through rough

moorland and among great ledges of rock, where you may walk for hours out of sight of all but some sportsman with his gun, or some truant-boy with dripping water-lilies. There is always a charm to me in the inexplicable windings of these wayward tracks; yet I like the path best where it is nearest the ocean, where one only looks upon blue sea and snowy sails and floating gulls, but where one hears on the landward side the melodious and plaintive drawl of the meadow-lark, most patient of summer visitors, and, indeed, lingering on this island almost the whole year round.

But who cares whither a footpath leads? The charm is in the path itself, its promise of something that the highroad cannot yield. Away from habitations, you know that the fisherman, the geologist, the botanist have been there,

or that the cows have been driven home and that somewhere there are bars and a milk-pail. Even in the midst of houses, the path suggests school-children with their luncheon

baskets, or workmen seeking eagerly the noonday interval or the twilight

rest. A footpath cannot be quite spoiled, so long as it remains such; you can make a road a mere avenue for fast horses or showy women, but this humbler track keeps its simplicity, and if a queen comes walking through it, she comes but as a village maid. On Sunday, when it is not etiquette for our fashionables to drive, but only to walk along the cliffs, I am struck by the more innocent and wholesome look imparted by that novel position; I have seen a fine lady pause under such circumstances and pick a wild-flower; she knew how to do it. A footpath imparts its own character, while that of a street or road is imposed upon it by those who dwell beside it or pass over it; indeed, roads become picturesque only when they are called lanes and make believe that they are but paths.

The very irregularity of a footpath makes half its charm. So much of loitering and indolence and impulse have gone to its formation, that all which is stiff and military has been left out. I observed that the very dikes of the Southern rice plantations did not succeed in being rectilinear, though the general effect was that of Tennyson's "flowery squares." Even the country road, which is but an enlarged footpath, is never quite straight, as Thoreau long since observed, noting it with his surveyor's eye. I read in his unpublished diary: "The law that plants the rushes in waving lines along the edge of a pond, and that curves the pond shore itself, incessantly beats against the straight fences and highways of men, and makes them conform to the line of beauty at last." It is this unintentional adaptation that makes a footpath so indestructible. Instead of striking across the natural lines, it conforms to them, nestles into the hollow, skirts the precipice, avoids the morass. An unconscious landscape-gardener, it seeks the most convenient course, never doubting that grace will follow. Thus Mitchell, at his "Edgewood” farm, wishing to decide on the most picturesque avenue to his front door, ordered

a heavy load of stone to be hauled across the field, and bade the driver seek the easiest grades, at whatever cost of curvature. The avenue followed the path thus made.

And when a footpath falls thus unobtrusively into its place, all natural forces seem to sympathize with it, and help it to fulfil its destiny. Once make a well-defined track through a wood, and presently the overflowed brooks seek it for a channel, the obstructed winds draw through it, the fox and ! woodchuck travel by it, the catbird and robin build near it, the bee and swallow make a high-road of its convenient thoroughfare. In winter the first snows mark it with a white line; as you wander through you hear the blue-jay's cry, and see the hurrying flight of the sparrow; the graceful outlines of the leafless bushes are revealed, and the clinging bird's-nests, "leaves that do not fall," give happy memories of summer homes. Thus Nature meets man half-way. The paths of the wild forest and of the rural neighborhood are not at all the same thing; indeed, a "spotted trail," marked only by the woodman's axe-marks on the trees, is not a footpath. Thoreau, who is sometimes foolishly accused of having sought to be a mere savage, understood this distinction well. "A man changes by his presence," he says in his unpublished diary, "the very nature of the trees. The poet's is not a logger's path, but a woodman's, -the logger and pioneer have preceded him, and banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized nature for him. For a permanent residence, there can be no comparison between this and the wilderness. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodsmen and rustics; that is, a selvaggia and its inhabitants salvages." What Thoreau loved, like all men of healthy minds, was the occasional experience of untamed wildness. "I love to see occasionally," he adds, "a man from whom the usnea (lichen) hangs as gracefully as from a spruce."