66 classes, was the desire to uphold the Union. | sisted, the right of search. And, what is esses more refined and intellectual, and, as an indispensable condition, laborers more intelligent, who must be had either by the introduction of free labor, or by the mental improvement of the slaves. The masters must resign themselves to become efficient men of business, personal and vigilant overseers of their own laborers; and would find that in their new circumstances successful industry was impossible without calling in T other motives than the fear of the lash. The part, emigrate if the North were successful. immediate mitigation of slavery, and the Even if the negroes were not admitted to the education of the slaves, would thus be cer- suffrage, or if their former masters were able tain consequences, and its gradual destruc- to control their votes, there is no probabiltion by the consent of all concerned, a prob-ity, humbled and prostrated as the Slave able one, of the mere restriction of its area: Power would be, that in the next few years whether brought about by the subjugation of it would rally sufficiently to render any use the Southern States, and their return to the which it could make of constitutional freeUnion under the Constitution according to dom again dangerous to the Union. When its Northern interpretation, or by what Mr. it is remembered that the thinly peopled Cairnes regards as both more practical and Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and some parts more desirable, the recognition of their in- even of the South-Eastern States, have even dependence, with the Mississippi for their now so few slaves that they may be made western boundary. entirely free at a very trifling expense in the way of redemption; and when the probable great influx of Northern settlers into those provinces is considered, the chance of any dangerous power in the councils of the United States to be exercised by the six or seven Cotton States, if allowed to retain their constitutional freedom, must appear so small that there could be little temptation to deny them that common right. as con Either of these results would be a splendid, and probably a decisive and final, victory over slavery. But the only point on which we hesitate to agree with Mr. Cairnes is in preferring the latter to the former and more complete issue of the contest. Mr. Cairnes is alarmed by what he thinks the impossibility of governing this group of States after reunion, unless in a manner incompatible with free institutions It may, however, prove impossible to requered countries, and by military law. Weduce the Seceded States to unconditional are unable to see the impossibility. If re- submission, without a greater lapse of time, duced by force, the Slave States must sub- and greater sacrifices, than the North may mit at discretion. They could no longer be willing to endure. If so, the terms of claim to be dealt with according to the Con- compromise suggested by Mr. Cairnes, which stitution which they had rebelled against. would secure all west of the Mississippi for The door which has been left open till now free labor, would be a great immediate gain for their voluntary return, would be closed, to the cause of freedom, and would probably it is to be presumed, after they had been in no long period secure its complete tribrought back by force. In that case the umph. We agree with Mr. Cairnes that whole slave population might, and probably this is the only kind of compromise which would, be at once emancipated, with com- should be entertained for a moment. That pensation to those masters only who had re- peace should be made, giving up the cause mained loyal to the Federal Government, or of quarrel-the exclusion of slavery from the who may have voluntarily returned to their territories-would be one of the greatest caallegiance before a time fixed. This having lamities which could happen to civilization been done, there would be no real danger in and to mankind. Close the territories, prerestoring the Southern States to their old vent the spread of the disease to countries position in the Union. It would be a dimin- not now afflicted with it, and much will alished position, because the masters would no ready have been done to hasten its doom. longer be allowed representatives in Con- But that doom would still be distant if the gress in right of three-fifths of their slaves. vast uncolonized region of Arkansas and The slaves once freed and enabled to hold Texas, which alone is thought sufficient to property, and the country thrown open to form five States, were left to be filled up by free colonization, in a few years there would a population of slaves and their masters; be a free population in sympathy with the and no treaty of separation can be regarded rest of the Union. The most actively dis- with any satisfaction but one which should loyal part of the population, already dimin- convert the whole country west of the Misished by the war, would probably, in great sissippi into free soil. From The Saturday Review. | and decorous, and would perhaps have borne THE GRAVE OF CHARLES LAMB. the thought of a neglected grave as well as IN the churchyard of Edmonton the in- any one. His life is quite as interesting as quiring traveller may, after considerable his writings are; and much of the attachment search, find the grave of Charles and Mary which he has inspired, even in those who Lamb. The churchyard is large, and has an never knew him, except in print, arises from air of neglect and desolation, and one of the the sympathy which his story excites. He most neglected parts of it is the grave of the had not much outward prosperity, nor did man whose memory gives the whole scene he live a life of much ease. Without coman interest. The grave is a little way back plaint, and without pretension, he went on from a side path, and is overgrown with net-plodding through a routine he hatedtles and long grass, while over it towers a wounded in his affections, liking humble hideous erection of the fluted order of vil-pleasures, and devoted to a small circle of lage architecture, designed to perpetuate the fame of a certain Gideon Rippon, of Eagle House. On the tombstone, between the dates recording that Charles Lamb died December 27, 1834, aged fifty-nine, and that Mary Anne Lamb died May 20, 1847, aged eighty years, are inserted twelve of the very worst verses that the ingenuity of friends could have struck out. In the beautiful and touching lines in which Wordsworth sketched the character and history of his friend, he tells us that he meant the earlier portion of the piece to be placed on Lamb's tombstone, but that other arrangements had been made. The visitor to Edmonton may see what was the effusion that was preferred to Wordsworth's. It begins by declaring that Lamb's meek and harmless mirth "no more shall gladden our domestic hearth." It goes on to assure the deceased that he is not all lost and that his writings shall "win many an English bosom pleased to see that old and happier vein revived in thee." Everything is in a sort of rude harmony-the nettles, the shrine of Gideon Rippon, and the doggrel. We go out to see the grave of one of the most charming and original English writers of the nineteenth century, and we find a bank of weeds and a supereminent mass of stone or stucco in honor of a bank clerk, and a set of verses for which the schoolboy of Lord Macaulay's Essays would have been deservedly flogged. friends and intimates. It is because he got so much out of a life, shadowed over by so many clouds, that he delights us. To have a neglected grave in an ugly suburban village was at least a congruous end to such a career. He was not a trim man in life, nor one made much of by strangers. His poetry was all beneath the surface, and he was not the man, metaphorically or literally, to wear flowers in his button-hole. Death was, in external respects, to him pretty much what life was; and he might feel, in a strange way, at home if he could realize that he lay under a thick mat of weeds, with no traces of footsteps near, and under the immediate shadow of the mausoleum of a bank clerk. We can fancy that the fitness of the thing would have tickled him, and afforded matter for the playfulness, half sportive, half melancholy, with which he saw visions of odd personal accidents occurring to himself. Those who remember his letter on an Undertaker, and the serious drollery with which he describes himself attracted by the little trappings of a cheap funeral, will easily persuade themselves that his humor would not have refused to find some satisfaction in this Edmonton grave. But probably the vicar, and the churchwardens, and the other people of Edmonton would pay a little more attention and respect to his grave, if only they had the slightest notion who he was. We suspect that the At first the sight may awaken a little dis- number of Englishmen who are acquainted appointment, and even indignation. If only with his works is exceedingly small. With the vicar, or the churchwardens, or some all his great and genuine powers, he can other local dignitary would but spend a scarcely be called a popular writer. There shilling a year, the nettles, at least, might is nothing he has left behind him which be uprooted. But as we get a little accus- every one knows as every one knows Wa tomed to the sight, we find it fits, not in- verley, Childe Harold, or Campbell's seaaptly, into our associations with Charles pieces. A dry humor, and a subtlety of Lamb. He had no great sense of the solemn style, and a command of pure English words, and a vein of delicate exaggeration, | moulded the thoughts of succeeding genera are things which, if once seen and appreciated in a writer, are appreciated very highly, but which very few persons give themselves the trouble to appreciate. We are all very apt to overrate the influence and reputation of authors whom we ourselves admire; and this is especially the case if the writer requires, in order to be admired, not only a relish for a certain kind of intellectual effort, but also a sympathy with a certain sort of moral excellence. Charles Lamb was one of the brightest wits and one of the noblest characters of the generation that has just passed away. But his fun is rather recondite, and might easily have no charms for those whose notions of fun are of a broader kind. He was, as Wordsworth said of him, "good, if e'er a good man lived." But his goodness was not of the sort that the run of men take much heed of. The goodness of a man who has a strong sense, among many personal distresses, of the value of life, who has a horror of phraseology that he would consider unmeaning or sectarian, and whose good deeds have all been done at home, hardly answers to the popular estimate of a good man. We cannot expect all the world to care about such a character, and it is, perhaps, better that when feeling is absent its absence should be undisguised. At any rate, there is no nonsense or hypocrisy about the Edmonton authorities. They have no artificial enthusiasm for the man resting in their churchyard. They do not trouble their heads about him, and they do not pretend to. All this is, however, in a great degree, a matter of chance, and some day probably there will be a vicar, a beadle, or sexton at Edmonton who is devoted to his Essays of Elia, and will clear the nettles tions in a way so distinctly their own that we cannot lose the sense of their personal eminence in the contemplation of the general history of human thought. But, with most writers, this is not so. They are but part of a general movement. They carry the thinking world some little way in a particular direction, and then that which they have done becomes absorbed in the general way of thinking which is habitual to the men and the nations that come after them. The Lake Poets and their friends stood apart from the generation in which they lived. At first their writings were abused and ridiculed by the many, and admired with something of the exaggeration of contradiction by the few. Then they were for a few years supreme. A generation of young men grew up to whom Wordsworth was the source of all that was definite in poetical feeling, and to whom Coleridge opened a vision of a new Christian philosophy. They knew no wit like the wit of Charles Lamb, and honestly tried, if they failed, to find comfort in the laborious pedantry of The Doctor. Now Wordsworth is little read by the young. They prefer mourning imaginary friends in the metre of In Memoriam, or indulging in those combinations of lines of various lengths and those mysteries of phraseology which Mr. Browning has suggested as the secret of poetry. They would, indeed, think in a different way from what they do if Wordsworth and his friends had not written; but this may be said of writers that lived much longer ago. All the past affects us. As we look round the churchyard, we find the memorials of laborers in a hundred fields of labor, and in each field the laborer that is dead has done something. Even the bank clerk whose shrine overshadows the resting-place of Charles Lamb probably kept some books and accounts that, without him, might have been kept less well. The officer in an adjoining grave did something to keep up the reputation and success of the British army. The Bank of England of the present day, and the army of the present day, are the creations of numberless efforts in time past. But the officers and the clerks of other days have faded out of memory, and the living institutions they have left behind them exist without any definite traces of those who set them on foot or kept them in activity. It is This churchyard, or indeed any churchyard-only that the Edmonton churchyard is a little more neglected than most others -may also awaken in us a few reflections as to literary influence generally. Literary workers, like all others, are gathered into the common grave, not only in the sense that they themselves perish, but that their work ceases, except in rare instances, to have any great prominence, and is lost in the general influence of the past on the present. There have been few writers, such as Luther and Bacon and Voltaire, who have really the same with almost all writers. The gen- | merit. Distinguished writers like this general thought which they have helped to mould erally, and have no wish to go out of the or expand remains, but they and their influ- limits of their home. They wish to be prience are lost in it. vate men, and to live and die as private men. This grave of a great writer, overgrown They desire to be buried where they have with nettles and unnoticed by the living, also lived. Wordsworth lies at Grasmere, and typifies the place which literature holds in Southey at Crosthwaite, and Charles Lamb English life. There is no fictitious promi- at Edmonton, and their graves have met nence given it. A man who can may write with the treatment they themselves met with a book if he pleases, and the book may have in their lives. Wordsworth's grave is kept a reputation for more than six months if it with simple and affectionate reverence at deserves it. But the writer is left very much Grasmere, because he was well known to his friends. If he pleases, he may go to there, and much respected, and because the a few London dinner-parties, and if he likes friends he has left there honor his memory. to show himself in public places, he may Charles Lamb's grave is neglected, because have the satisfaction of being stared at as if his lot in life was cast in London and its he were a wild dog. But he receives no na- suburbs, and no one notices his neighbor tional honors or recognition. It is no longer much, or has any great care for literature, the custom to bury him or to raise a memo- in a suburban town. In each case, that has rial tablet to him in Westminster Abbey. happened which might have been expected, Lord Macaulay was only buried there be- and we may perhaps lose the wonder which cause he was Lord Macaulay. He is left to the sight of Charles Lamb's grave provokes, his family and his circle of friends, and if his in the general satisfaction produced by the circle of friends is large, and his friends are thought that this is really only a sign of the warm and sincere, that is only a blessing wise way in which literature is treated, and which he shares with men of every kind of loves to be treated, in England. COATING THE HULLS OF IRON SHIPS.The fouling, by incrustation of barnacles and sea-weeds on their bottoms, is one of the evils of iron ships which requires remedy at the present time. Wooden vessels were once subject to the same annoyance, until it was found that a sheathing of copper prevented the adhesion of shell-fish and afforded a remedy. Coppersheathing cannot, however, be employed on iron ships, because, by the contact of the two metals, a galvanic action is set up which decomposes the iron with great rapidity. At present the hulls of all iron vessels are merely painted, and the common paints used for the purpose are ineffective; iron vessels have, therefore, often to be put in dock to be scraped. This frequent docking is not the only evil, for when the bottom is foul the speed of the ship is diminished, and in the tropics cases are recorded in which, after one year's running, this has been to the great extent of reducing a ship from twelve to seven knots per hour. The best experiments as yet made on the subject are those of Mr. Mallet, C.E. By him it is stated that iron in water, not exposed to air, does not corrode. Iron in contact with platina does not corrode. The rate of corrosion of average iron from natural causes is six-tenths of an inch in a century. Iron could be protected in the mass by zinc in the proportion of one hundred and twenty square feet of iron to one of zinc. Dutch metal, which is an alloy of four atoms of copper to one of zinc, is very good, for a vessel so coated is relatively as forty-nine and one-half to eighty-four. Of the effect of metallic poisons on shell-fish Mr. Mallet found that, commencing with small doses of sulphate of copper, oysters would live in a highly poisonous fluid, and on running a penknife into one thus dosed for two years, the blade came out coated with copper. The red lead generally used in England for coating the hulls of iron vessels is a very ineffective remedy, but the Americans speak highly in favor of zinc-white. Arsenic and antimony have been tried as paints, but with no sufficient results.-London Review. THE Government of Greece is making great efforts to accomplish valuable works of internal improvement. It has repaired the disasters of the recent insurrection; is constructing a port on the western coast of the Peloponnesus, the necessity of which previous administrations had limited themselves to simply admitting; and is completing the system of telegraphic communication, which will put the different parts of Greece in communication with each other, and with the rest of Europe. |