The feelings of the French religious world don houses, all built and furnished on exwith respect to heretics are amusingly illus-actly the same model, and that a most untrated:

"X. Y. Z. was one of the best men that I have known, but an unbeliever. The Archbishop of tried in his last illness to reconcile him to the Church. He failed. X. Y. Z. died as he had lived. But the Archbishop, when lamenting to me his death, expressed his own conviction that so excellent a soul could not perish. You recollect that Duchess, in St. Simon, who on the death of a sinner of illustrious race, said, "On me dira ce qu'on veut, on ne me persuadera pas que Dieu n'y regarde deux fois avant de damner un homme de sa qualité." The archbishop's feeling was the same, only changing qualité into virtue. There is something amusing,' he continued, when, separated as we are from it by such a chasm, we look back on the prejudices of the ancien régime. An old lady once said to me, "I have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove that Jesus Christ descended from David. Ca montre que notre Seigneur était gentilhomme." We are somewhat ashamed," I said, 'in general of Jewish blood; yet the Levis boast of their descent from the Hebrew Levi.' They are proud of it,' said Tocqueville; because they make themselves out to be cousins of the blessed Virgin. They have a picture in which a Duke de Levi stands bareheaded before the Virgin. "Couvrez vous donc, mon cousin," she says. "C'est pour ma commodité, madame," he answers.'

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6

6

interesting one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads the same dull books, and contributes to society the same little contingent of superficial information. When a young lady comes out, I know beforehand how her mother and her aunts will describe her. "Elle a les goûts simples, elle est pieuse, elle aime la campagne, elle aime la lecture, elle n'aime pas le bal, elle n'aime pas le monde, elle y va seulement pour plaire à sa mére." I try sometimes to escape from these generalities, but there is nothing behind them.' And how long,' I asked, does this simple, pious, retiring character last? ' Till the orange flowers of her wedding chaplet are withered,' he answered. 'In three months she goes to the Messe d'une heure.' What is the Messe d'une heure?' I asked. A priest,' he answered, 'must celebrate mass fasting, and in strictness ought to do so before noon. But, to accommodate fashionable ladies who cannot rise by noon, priests are found who will starve all the morning and say mass in the afternoon. It is an irregular proceeding, though winked at by the ecclesiastical authorities Still to attend it is rather discreditable; it is a middle term between the highly meritorious practice of going to early mass, and the scandalous one of never going at all.' What was the education,' I asked, of women under the ancien régime?' The convent,' he answered. It must have beeu better,' I said, 'than the present education, since the women of that time were superior to ours.' It was so far better,' he answered, that it did no harm. A girl at that time She came from the was taught nothing. convent a sheet of white paper. Now her mind is a paper scribbled over with trash. The women of that time were thrown into "They have lost it,' said De Tocqueville, a world far superior to ours, and with the partly in consequence of the gross vulgar- sagacity, curiosity, and flexibility of French ity of our dominant passions, and partly women, caught the knowledge and tact and from their own nullity. They are like Lon-expression from the men.""

The loss of the influence formerly possessed by women in France is accounted for in the annexed passage, with which our illustrations end:

:

BALLAD FROM BEDLAM.

THE moon is up! the moon is up,
The larks begin to fly,
And like a breezy buttercup

Dark Phoebus skims the sky:
The elephant with cheerful voice
Sings blithely on the spray,
The bats and beetles all rejoice,-
Then let me too be gay!

Last night I was a porcupine,

And wore a peacock's tail,
To-morrow, if the moon but shine,
Perchance I'll be a whale :
Then let me, like the cauliflower,
Be merry while I may,
And, ere there comes a sunny hour
To cloud my heart, be gay!

6. An Old Man's Story,

PAGE.

Fraser's Magazine,

259

Ladies' Companion,

274

Chambers's Journal,

283

Spectator,

286

Eclectic Review,

289

St. James' Magazine,

292

306

7. Death and Character of Prince Albert, London Review, 296; Saturday Review, 298; The Press, 303; Economist, 305; Independent,

Thou art the Way, 258. Land of the

Life's Question, 282. Mare Mediterraneum,

POETRY.-The Wind amid the Trees, 258. Living, 258. What a Child said, 258. 282. Frosty Weather, 282.

SHORT ARTICLES.-The King and the Potter, 273. Poor Richard's Maxims, from Punch, 273. Negroes and Bourbons, 281. A Dish of Lava, 288. Indigo, Substitutes for, 291. Bursting of Fowling-Pieces, 291. Saving the Octoroon, 295. The Celestial Army, 310. New Uses of Prayer-Meetings, 313. The Blackbird, 315. Letter of Washington, 320.

NEW BOOKS.

The Tribune Almanac and Political Register for 1862. New York Tribune Association.

CORRECTION.-In No. 915 we copied from, and credited to, The Philadelphia Press, a spirited poem, "The Countersign," giving the name of Frank G. Williams as the author. We are now informed that this is part of a larger poem, by Fitz James O'Brien,-published in Harper's Magazine for August.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON.

For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded free of postage.

Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handBomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume.

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ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have. and thus greatly enhance their value.

From Fraser's Magazine.
COWPER'S POEMS.

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and be amused-as by no means indifferent to the events of the day or the opinions of COULD William Cowper, when he inscribed the world—as creating, when he did not find, his name on the title-page of Table-Talk occupation, and as vigilantly guarding, so and other Poems, have known that within ten long as his health and strength permitted, years from that time he would be the most against the approaches of that malady which popular poet of the age, and that after his blighted his earlier manhood and was desdeath he would be accounted one of the best tined to wrap in a shroud of woe his closing of letter-writers, he might have ranked the years. Unconsciously to be the painter of prophecy among such delusions as often his own life was the business of Cowper, and clouded his brain. The success of the Task he has drawn himself to the life as vividly proved to him that one-half of the prediction as Gray or Gibbon or even Walpole himself. was correct; but could he also have foreseen He portrayed himself equally in prose and in his epistolary reputation he might have reck-verse. His hymns are like Petrarch's sonnets oned it among his infelicities and recoiled pictures in little" of his personal emofrom it with dismay. That what he wrote of tions. His Task is a poetical narrative of himself in secret chambers should be pro- his daily habits and customary meditations ; claimed upon the housetops would have his letters are prose sketches of them, often seemed to his sensitive spirit inconsistent wanting only the accomplishment of rhyme to alike with friendship and delicacy. Perhaps be as poetical as his occasional verses. he might have recalled his letters in alarm, no writer, indeed, is the verse less separable and foregone a principal alleviation of his from the prose. We should have known solitude-correspondence with friends whom Cicero just as well if every verse he wrote he had never seen or whom he was never had perished. We should have known Pemore to see. Fortunately the veil was never trarch just as well if the folio of his prose lifted. No profane Curll, by surreptitiously writings had never issued from the printingpublishing his letters, visited him with a new house of Aldus. But we understand the terror of death. In his matted greenhouse, verse of Cowper better because his Letters by his fireside, summer and winter saw him are before us, and his Letters better because unconsciously chronicling the simple annals of the light reflected upon them from his of his life; and in these letters, so evidently poems. cherished because so generally preserved, we possess one of the most interesting of autobiographies.

Nor is it less fortunate that these records of a life spent in "the cool retreat the silent shade" are so numerous and diversified. Had only his correspondence with Newton survived, though it would still be clear that the writer possessed no ordinary powers of humor, yet the general impression must have been that Cowper and Mary Unwin were a pair of moping personages whose society it were desirable to shun. Had only his letters to Hayley come down to us, we might fairly have set him down for a fine gentleman complimenting another fine gentleman with some of the ostentation but without the finished style of the Younger Pliny. But the letters addressed to Lady Hesketh and Unwin, to Mr. Bull and Mrs. King, to Rose and Norfolk Johnnie, prove Cowper to have been as nearly inclined to mirth as to melancholy-as content, if not happy, in his seclusion, and willing to amuse

Of

With materials so abundant at hand, the temptation to become a biographer of Cowper has been frequently indulged; yet with one exception he has not been happy in his limners. For the most part they have selected one or two features of his character, and omitted others no less essential to a good likeness of him. He has been drawn as a suffering saint, as a latter-day hermit, as one literally complying with the apostolic precept to flee from the world, as one who purposely reformed the poetic diction of his day, as one whose proper place was Bedlam, as one who was only as mad as all serious Christians who pondered rightly on time and eternity should desire to be. In the following remarks we shall be able to show that although health and circumstances rendered seclusion from the world unavoidable, Cowper did not cease to feel interest in its movements; that if his will bent before the iron will of John Newton, he displays little or no sympathy with Newton's narrow creed; and that so far from making a hermitage of

Olney or Weston, he gladly greeted every | lins was mad. Johnson, again, could poin occasion of surrounding himself with the genial society of his kindred and neighbors, provided always they were not hard riders or hard drinkers; that is to say, neither the ordinary squires nor parsons of Bedfordshire in the middle of the eighteenth century.

a moral and beat out a text into a stanza; but he thundered at Geneva discipline, and fasted and did penance like a shaveling friar. Of devotional poetry there was more than enough; but Doddridge, Newton, and Toplady were in verse mere cobblers in respect of fine workmen ;" and if Isaac Watts were a genuine poet, he was one of the feeblest and most tedious of the laureate band.

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About the author of the Task, Expostulation, Charity, and the Olney hymns there could be neither doubt nor demur. He had sat at the feet of Gamaliel; he had been a lay curate to Newton. He had put on record his escape from the Vanity Fair of London life, the contamination of literary associates, the profane contact of drums and routs, of Ranelagh and the playhouse. If less sublime, he was more sound in doctrine than Milton. If in no one of his devotional pieces he had reached the dignity of the "Veni Creator" of Dryden, he had not pleaded for Rome in the "Hind and Panther," he had not defiled literature with the "Spanish Friar." Here indeed was at length a sweet singer for the English Israel; here was a poet to be read, marked, and learned virginibus puerisque, by the young ladies who filled the pews of St. Mildred's in the Poultry, by the young men who called Shakspeare unclean and Plato's Republic

It was at one time the fashion to call Hayley an elegant biographer. To us he appears to have been most forcibly feeble. That he loved Cowper there can be no doubt, for Hayley, though a coxcomb, had a generous nature, and at least knowledge enough of his art to see that the Task was worthy a dozen Triumphs of Temper, and John Gilpin better than any or all of his own Comedies in Rhime. He rendered homage equally to Cowper's genius and character. But he was infelix opere in toto-he has drawn the portrait of a mere littérateur. The poet's religious biographers, however, have been even less successful than Hayley. Calvinism is little less adverse to poets generally than Plato himself. Of Dante's theology in verse the disciples of Newton, Scott, and Venn had never probably heard, or if it had reached their ears, rumor whispered into them that the poet was a papist born out of due season and given over to Antichrist. Of Spenser and the Fletchers as religious poets they had perhaps heard as little, for between our early literature and the saints of the eighteenth century there stood a wall" foolishness." In this track have nearly of partition as impervious as that fabled all Cowper's later biographers walked, until wall of brass which Friar Bacon is said to Southey came to the rescue with a narrative have built in one night round the palace of scarcely less excellent than his lives of NelSigismund the emperor. Milton was a son and John Wesley. Mr. Robert Bell's doubtful prize. He had indeed sung of careful and graceful sketch of the poet will either Paradise, but then he was an Arian; suffice for many readers; but all who desire and if his prose writings were liberally stud- to know Cowper as he lived, thought, and ded with texts, he for the last twenty years wrote, the causes of his melancholy, the of his life, had never entered church or character of his humor, the positive and relchapel. Dryden had composed some of the ative merits of his writings, his position in noblest hymns in the language, but he had literature at the time and now, will resort to also composed some of the most abominable Southey's pages. He had a true sympathy plays. Addison had occasionally sung the with the poet; his vision was unclouded by songs of Sion, but the Spectator's morals theological mists; he had no theory to sussavored more of Seneca and Epictetus than tain or prop up; he discerns amid the acciof Paul, of the covenant of works more than dents of disease the genuine nature of the of the covenant of grace. Cowley had writ- man; he displays his weakness and his ten an epic on the story of David, and Prior strength, and exhibits William Cowper as he on that of Solomon, but both Addison and appeared to Joseph Hill, to Thornton and Prior were utter worldlings; and if Collins Thurlow, to Harriet and Theodora his cousread latterly "no book but the best," it was ins, to his co-mates at Westminster, the notorious, lippis tonsoribus atque, that Col- Inner Temple, and the Nonsense Club, "ere