No mere size, however stupendous, or expression of face, however singular, could have up-lifted a common man to the giddy height on which Irving stood for a while, calm and collected as the statue upon its pedestal. It was the correspondence, the reflection of his powers and passions upon his person; independence stalking in his stride, intellect enthroned on his brow, imagination dreaming on his lips, physical energy stringing his frame, and athwart the whole a cross-ray, as from Bedlam, shooting in his eye! It was this which excited such curiosity, wonder, awe, rapture, and tears, and made his very enemies, even while abusing, confess his power, and tremble in his presence. It was this which made ladies flock and faint, which divided attention with the theatres, eclipsed the oratory of Parliament, drew demireps to hear themselves abused, made Canning's fine countenance flush with pleasure, as if his veins ran lightning;" accelerated in an alarming manner the twitch in Brougham's dusky visage, and elicited from his eye those singular glances, half of envy and half of admiration, which are the truest tokens of applause; and made such men as Hazlett protest, on returning half squeezed to death from one of his displays, that a monologue from Coleridge, a recitation of one of his own poems from Wordsworth, a burst of puns from Lamb, and a burst of passion from Kean, were not to be compared to a sermon from Edward Irving.

His manner also contributed to the charm. His aspect, wild, yet grave, as of one laboring with some mighty burden; his voice, deep, clear, and with crashes of power alternating with cadences of softest melody; his action, now graceful as the wave of the rose-bush in the breeze, and now fierce and urgent as the motion of the oak in the hurricane. Then there was the style, curiously uniting the beauties and faults of a sermon of the seventeenth century with the beauties and faults of a parliamentary harangue or magazine article of the nineteenth - quaint as Browne, florid as Taylor, with the bleak wastes which intersect the scattered green spots of Howe mixed here with sentences involved, clumsy, and cacophonous as the worst of Jeremy BenVOL. XI.-8

tham's, and interspersed there with threads from the magic loom of Coleridge. It was a strange amorphous Babylonish dialect, imitative, yet original, rank with a prodigious growth of intertangled beauties and blemishes. inclosing amid wide tracts of jungle little bits of clearest and purest loveliness, and throwing out sudden volcanic bursts of real fire, amid jets of mere smoke and hot water. It had great passages, but not one finished sermon or sentence. It was a thing of shreds, and yet a web of witchery. It was perpetually stumbling the least fastidious hearer or reader, and yet drawing both impetuously "thick and slab,' on. And then, to make the medley there was the matter- a grotesque compound, including here a panegyric on Burns, and there a fling at Byron; here a plan of future punishment, laid out with as much minuteness as if he had been projecting a bridewell, and there a ferocious attack upon the Edinburgh Review; here a glimpse of the gates of the Celestial City, as if taken from the top of Mount Clear, and there a description of the scenery and of the poet of the Lakes; here a pensive retrospect to the days of the Covenant, and there a dig at the heart of Jeremy Bentham; here a ray of prophecy, and there a bit of politics; here a quotation from the Psalms, and there from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Such was the strange yet overwhelming exhibition which our hero made before the gaping, staring, wondering, laughing, listening, weeping, and thrilling multitudes of fashionable, political, and literary London.

He was, in fact, as De Quincey once called him to us, a "demon of power." We contemporaries might equal him in preaching, but none approached to the very hem of his garment while rapt up into the heaven of devotion. It struck you as the prayer of a great being conversing with God. Your thoughts were transported to Sinai, and you heard Moses speaking with the Majesty on High, under the canopy of darkness, amid the quaking of the solid mountain and the glimmerings of celestial fire; or you thought of Elijah praying in the cave in the intervals of the earthquake, and the fire and the still small voice. The solemnity of the tones convinced

you that he was conscious of an unearthly presence and speaking to it, not to you. The diction and imagery showed that his faculties were wrought up to their highest pitch, and tasked to their noblest endeavor, in that "celestial colloquy sublime. And yet the elaborate intricacies and swelling pomp of his preaching were excharged for deep simplicity. A profusion of Scripture was used, and never did inspired language better become lips than those of Irving. His public prayers told to those who could interpret their language of many a secret conference with Heaven they pointed to wrestlings all unseen, and groanings all unheeded - they drew aside, involuntarily, the veil of his secret retirements, and let in a light into the sanctuary of the closet itself. Prayers more elegant and beautiful and melting have often been heard; prayers more urgent in their fervid importunity have been uttered once and again (such as those which were sometimes heard with deep awe to proceed from the chamber where the perturbed spirit of Hall was conversing aloud with its Maker till the dawning of the day); but prayers more organ-like and Miltonic, never. The fastidious Canning, when told by Sir James Mackintosh, of Irving praying for a family of orphans as "cast upon the fatherhood of God," was compelled to start, and own the beauty of the expression. -Literary Portraits.

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ILMAN, ARTHUR, an American historian and editor; born at Alton, Ill., in 1837. He was educated in New York, and entered upon commercial life, which he relinquished for literature. Among his works are First Steps in English Literature (1870); Seven Historic Ages (1876), republished under the title of Kings, Queens, and Barbarians; First Steps in General History (1876);

Shakespeare's Morals (1879); Poets' Homes: Pen and Pencil Sketches of American Poets and Their Homes (1879); History of the American People (1883); Story of the Saracens (1886); Short Stories from the Dictionary (1886); The Story of Rome (1887); The Story of Boston (1889).

The London Academy, speaking of Gilman's contributions to The Story of the Nations series, and particularly of his Saracens, said that it was "decidedly one of the best of the series;" and a recent writer says of him that in writing history he "enters into the real life of the peoples, and brings them before the reader as they actually lived, labored, and struggled as they studied and wrote, and as they amused themselves."

LEGEND OF THE FOUNDING OF ROME.

The proverbs say that Rome was not built in a day. It was no easy task for the twins to agree just where they should even begin the city. Romulus thought the Palatine Hill, on which he and his brother had lived, was the most favorable spot for the purpose, while Remus inclined no less favorably to the Aventine, on which Numitor had fed his flocks. In this emergency, they seem to have asked counsel of their grandfather, and he advised them to settle the question by recourse to

augury.

Following this advice the brothers took up positions at a given time on the respective hills, surrounded by their followers; those of Romulus being known as the Quintilii, and those of Remus as the Fabii. Thus in anxious expectation, they awaited the passage of certain birds. We can imagine them as they waited. The two hills are still to be seen in the city, and probably the two groups were about half a mile apart. On one side of them rolled the muddy waters of the Tiber, from which they had been snatched when infants, and around

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them rose the other elevation over which the hilled" city of the future was destined to spread. From morning to evening they patiently watched, but in vain. Through the long April night, too, they had their posts, and as the sun of the second day rose over the Cœlian Hill, Remus beheld with exultation six vultures swiftly flying through the air, and thought that surely fortune had decided in his favor. But Romulus, when he heard that Remus had seen six asserted that twelve had flown by him. His followers supported this claim, and determined that the city should be begun on the Palatine Hill. At the proper moment Romulus began the Etrurian ceremonies, by digging a circular pit down to the hard clay, into which were cast with great solemnity some of the first-fruits of the season, and also handfuls of earth, each man throwing in a little from the country from which he had come. The pit was then filled up, and over it an altar was erected, upon the hearth of which a fire was kindled. Thus the centre of the new city was settled and consecrated. Romulus then harnessed a white cow and a snow-white bull to a plough with a brazen share, and holding the handle himself, traced the line of the future walls with a furrow. - The Story of Rome.

ILMAN, CAROLINE HOWARD, an American poet; born at Boston, Mass., October 8, 1794; died at Washington, D. C., September 15, 1888. In 1819 she married the Rev. Samuel Gilman, pastor of a Unitarian congregation in Charleston, ton, S. C. Mrs. Gilman, both before and after her marriage, wrote much for the press. At sixteen she published a poem entitled Jephtha's Rash Vow; and, not long after, Jairus's Daughter, which was printed in the North American Review. Her principal writings after her marriage are Recollections of a New