Mrs. Delany's correspondence except to have some record made of their sicknesses or death. The "ague" seems to have been considered an inevitable ailment of childhood, precisely as whooping-cough and the measles are now; and no child of the period appears to have failed of its duty in this regard, though how either patient or disease survived the treatment to which it was subjected must always remain a mystery and a marvel. Bark was administered in quantities sufficient to have tanned the interior of their little stomachs, and when bark failed these two "infallible receipts" were recommended: "1. Pounded ginger, made into a paste with brandy, spread on sheep's leather, and a plaster of it laid over the navel. 2. A spider put into a goose-quill, well sealed and secured, and hung about the child's neck as low as the pit of the stomach."

Such children as were perverse enough to survive the ague and the bark sometimes had worms, but there was another "infallible receipt" for the cure of these, and it was confided (in italics) by Mrs. Delany to her sister, whose little boy was so troubled: "A pound of quicksilver boiled in a gallon of water till half the water is consumed away; to be constantly drunk at his meals or whenever he is dry." To be effective, it is added, this remedy "must be continued constantly for a year." Nearly as inviting, and doubtless equally efficacious, was the remedy for coughs: "Does Mary cough in the night? Two or three snails boiled in her barley-water or tea-water, or whatever she drinks, might be of service to her; taken in time, they have done wonderful cures. She must know nothing of it-they give no manner of taste. It would be best nobody should know it but yourself, and I should imagine six or eight boiled in a quart of water strained off and put into a bottle would be a good way, adding a spoonful or two of that to every liquid she takes. They must be fresh done every two or three days, otherwise they grow too thick."

It may seem incredible that any children should have survived both the diseases and the remedies; nevertheless, we have testimony to the fact that some actually did, and those who were unlucky enough to do so were speedily introduced to the small-pox. This, like the ague, appears to have been numbered among the inevitable visitations of Providence, and, so far from any attempt being made to escape the infection, particular pains were taken when one member of a family was stricken down to give the rest an opportunity to enjoy the same distinction. Even in such a family as the Duke of Portland's, where, presumably, the best medical advice would be had, no attempt seems to have been made to keep the sick from the well; and, the eldest son being absent at college when his sisters were taken sick, he was allowed to come home and take his chances with the rest-the result in his case being an especially malignant attack of the disease.

People at all familiar with earlier medical practice are aware of the frightful amount of bloodshed to which sick and feeble folk were subjected. The correspondence of Mrs. Delany in this particular is as

sanguinary at times as the gazette of a battle. There can be little doubt that the lancet was once a far deadlier weapon than the sword. People were bled before a fever, during a fever, and after a fever; they were bled as soon as the symptoms of disease presented themselves, and they were bled to help forward convalescence; sick or well, some pretext was found for bleeding them, and, whenever a doctor could think of nothing else to do, he bared his lancet and began to feel around for a vein. Sweet Anne Granville, the sister of Mrs. Delany-a pale, frail, delicate creature, who evidently stood in need of the most nourishing possible diet-was literally (as it is easy to see now) bled into a premature grave; and Lord Tichborne, a boy of seventeen, eldest son of the Duke of Portland, being sick with the smallpox, had fifty-six ounces of blood taken from him within forty-eight hours!

Some of the passages in Mrs. Delany's letters are really too monstrous and sickening to quote; and, in view of all we have cited, well may the editor of the correspondence say that "the constant agues which children suffered from in the last century and the incessant course of drugs which they imbibed inwardly and outwardly give cause for wonder that anybody survived to be bled when they were grown up, or that, having thus survived, any one ever arrived at old age!"

MADAME DE RÉMUSAT.

THE large public of readers who are now enjoying the perusal of Madame de Rémusat's revelations of social and court life, under the Consulate and the First Empire, would doubtless be glad to know something of the rather remarkable woman who wrote these piquant and entertaining memoirs. Madame de Rémusat may be said to have been almost entirely unknown in this country previous to the publication of this work, and yet we find her included in the "Portraits of Celebrated Women," which SainteBeuve, the French essayist and critic, gave to the world years ago. From this sketch we learn that Madame de Rémusat had made essays in literature which attracted the attention of some of her contemporaries, but which are probably little known now. "She had written early with facility and grace," says Sainte-Beuve (we make our extracts from the translation of H. W. Preston, published by Roberts Brothers); "short essays of hers have been discovered, composed at the age of fifteen or sixteen, as well as novelettes and attempted translations of some of the odes of Horace. Every night for years she committed to paper a graphic narrative of the day's events. All her life she wrote many and long letters, the greater part of which have been preserved and may yet be collected." She wrote two romances: the first, entitled "Charles and Claire ; or the Flute," was published in 1814, of which SainteBeuve says the plot was "graceful and peculiar"; the second, under the title of "The Spanish Letter; or the Minister," was begun in 1805, but not completed until 1820. Another work, published by her

son after her death, consisted of letters on Female Education. "I shall not examine in detail," remarks Sainte-Beuve, "a book which any reader will appreciate. The whole aim and spirit of the work are moral, earnest, graceful. We feel the presence in it of a peculiar inspiration, a kind of secret muse. One must be a mother to yearn thus tenderly over coming generations; and when she drew her ideal wife she was thinking of her son."

Madame de Rémusat was Claire Elisabeth Gravier de Vergennes, and was born in Paris in the year 1780. She was grand-niece to that minister of Louis XVI. who bore the same name. Her father, at the time of the breaking out of the Revolution, held at Paris an important post, amounting to a kind of general directorship. He took part in the administration of the Commune in 1789, but was soon set aside, and perished on the scaffold in 1794. Soon after, in her seventeenth year, Mademoiselle de Vergennes was married to M. de Rémusat, a former magistrate of the Supreme Court. "In this bridegroom of double her own age," says Sainte-Beuve, “she found an accomplished guide and friend; and with him, her mother, and her sister, she continued for some years after her marriage to live a life of retirement, quiet enjoyment, and intellectual culture." Madame de Rémusat's mother had long been acquainted with Madame Beauharnais, and their acquaintance continued after the latter became Madame Bonaparte. When the First Consul had firmly established the new government, Madame de Vergennes applied for a position for her son-in-law, and Madame Bonaparte then conceived the idea of taking Madame de Rémusat for one of her ladies in waiting, making M. de Rémusat Prefect of the Palace. The readers of the "Memoirs" know the rest.

Ma

She

pened, Bonaparte inadvertently thought aloud. could hear, comprehend, and follow him. He was very quick to detect this sort of intelligence, and had an unbounded admiration for it, especially in a woman.... Different causes and circumstances soon checked the early communicativeness, and put a stop to the conversations of the hero with the woman of intelligence-first, her own realization of the uncertainty of her position, then the increasing stringency of imperial etiquette. Madame de Rémusat's was undoubtedly too free and active a mind for her to hear politics discussed without subsequent reflections. This the Emperor perceived, and it made him suspicious. She was attached by affection as well as position to the Empress Josephine, and she felt it to be her duty to follow the fortunes of the latter. M. de Rémusat continued near the Emperor, fulfilling the functions of his office with more of precision and conscientiousness than of ardor. After the divorce there was a marked and definite withdrawal of patronage, and their close connection with M. de Talleyrand during the last years of the Empire caused the shadow of his disgrace to fall upon them.

Sainte-Beuve published this essay in 1858, and Madame de Rémusat had even then long lain in the grave. She died in 1821, nearly sixty years before her descendants have thought fit to give her remarkable reminiscences to the world. The "Memoirs" must have been known in part at least to SainteBeuve, for he declared that he had not the right to appropriate them, and he describes the circumstances of her destruction of the first manuscript as follows: "In 1815, during the hundred days, some peculiar circumstances, which she doubtless exaggerated, excited her alarm on the score of these papers, teeming as they were with items and with names. Veracity is almost always terrible. She sallied forth to place them in the keeping of a friend,

and Sainte-Beuve describes her as follows:

Her classic face was animated most of all by the expression of her very beautiful black eyes. The rest of her features, though not striking at first, rather gained upon inspection, and her whole person seemed to improve the longer you regarded it....I should have too much to say, and I should say too little, were I to follow Madame de Rémusat through that court-life into which she found herself thrust at twenty-two, after her sober and solitary youth. Gifted with prudence and maturity beyond her years, her upright soul avoided danger, and her vigorous mind gathered instruction from what she saw. . . . Madame de Rémusat was one of those who talked most with the Consul during these first years. To what did she owe this privilege? She herself has accounted for the fact in a half-bantering tone. She brought a frank simplicity and easy habits of conversation into that world of etiquette and watchwords, the greater number of whose denizens were at first both ignorant and timid. She admired Bonaparte, and had not yet learned to fear him. To the abrupt questions and rapid monologues with which he addressed them, the other women generally replied by monosyllables only, while she sometimes had a thought, and ventured to express it. At first this caused something very like scandal, and awakened extreme jealousy; and she was obliged to purchase forgiveness by silence on the morrow. But she could do better even than respond, when, as often hap

threw them into the fire. Before an hour had elapsed, she regretted what she had done. It was not until the publication of Madame de Staël's work on the French Revolution that she felt the courage to undertake once more the collection of her reminiscences. In default of the first incomparable narrative, those will be partially indemnified who shall one day read the second."

THE SPELLING REFORM.

AN article in the last "Princeton Review," by. Professor Francis A. March, entitled "Spelling Reform," is noteworthy not so much because of its arguments as for the reason that it is printed in part in conformity with the theory it upholds. Alphabet is spelled alfabet; are is ar, have is hav, learn is lern, philosophy is filosofy, and so on. The arguments continually advanced by the spelling reformers are that many letters in English words are silent, and should therefore be excised; that it is possible in many instances to advantageously substitute one letter for another; that our system of spelling, which is now so conflicting, ought to be more uniform. There is no denying these assertions: there are silent let

ters; there are instances where a word would be spelled nearer to the sound by the change of a letter; and there is irregularity in our system of orthography. But the extent of these evils is greatly exaggerated by spelling reformers; and certainly we should only add confusion to confusion if every writer may at his pleasure set up a system of spelling, and every printer print books according to his notion of a reformed orthography. Already there are differences in spelling between English and American books, and even between Boston and New York books, that are vexatious to scholarly readers, and doubtless perplexing to others; and one can but wonder what sort of spelling reform that is which begins by widening differences and intensifying the existing confusion. Reformers who prematurely force new divergences into common practice simply show that they are very much more enamored of their theories than intent upon rendering practical service in the cause they espouse. To our mind it is very desirable that the English-speaking world should unite upon a uniform method of spelling and pronunciation. Whether there are a few more or less silent letters in use, or whether an occasional word is spelled contrary to established analogies, seems to us unimportant beside the question of uniformity. American spelling is already so distasteful to English readers that they are repelled from our literature; and, if books are now to be printed in the manner of Professor March's article, our authors would be set down by English readers as writers in a barbaric tongue, and their books shut out altogether. And then a very large number of books read here are published in England, while in many instances those published here are printed from stereotype-plates made from the English originals, giving,, of course, the English spelling. Inasmuch as readers thus fairly divide their attention between British

and American books, it is almost imperative for a uniform system of spelling to be adopted. Whether men shall spell have hav, or philosophy filosofy, seems to us very much less urgent than for such cooperation between English and American printers as will render books from either land equally easy to comprehend and equally agreeable to read by Eng. lish-speaking peoples everywhere. There ought to be prepared an international dictionary under the joint supervision of English and American scholars, having the sanction of the great seats of learning in both countries, which should be accepted as the final standard everywhere. If our spelling reformers would labor to bring this about, they would do the Anglo-Saxon world an immense service. But it is hopeless to expect this so long as people entertain an exaggerated idea of the defects of English spelling. We sometimes hear of the enormous saving to writers and printers the exclusion of silent letters would make, but, according to our estimate, these silent letters are not more than five per centum, which does not strike us as so great a matter. And it will be found that the words which perplex foreigners so greatly constitute but a very small group. The main obstacle to foreigners and pupils is the identity in sound of words that have different meaning, such as hear, here, there, their, and for this difficulty phonetic spelling provides no remedy. The notions that the present irregularity in our spelling is a fatal obstruction to learning to spell and that "one of the causes of excessive illiteracy among the Englishspeaking peoples is the difficulty of the English spelling" seem to us very absurd. In fact, all those people who habitually read and write know how to spell, and those whose habits are unliterary are very apt to be bad spellers; and the spelling reformers will never be able to invent a short road to orthography that will obliterate this distinction.

records of the life of Hawthorne are singularly deficient. All the facts that are known about him might easily be compressed within the limits of a magazine article, and even these facts will be found for the most part curiously impersonal and inconclusive. Partly for this reason, and partly because the industry of Mr. Lathrop had already brought to gether all accessible details, Mr. James's little book on Hawthorne * has taken the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. Mr. Lathrop's "Study of Hawthorne" is also chiefly critical,

critical the difference between

two essays is, that in Mr. Lathrop's the attention is mainly concentrated upon Hawthorne the man, while in Mr. James's the principal aim is to define the quality and measure the value of Hawthorne the author. In the one case, the writer is an arden! and enthusiastic devotee and hero-worshiper; in the other, he is a cool and impartial analyst and dissector.

and his saying that Hawthorne “came to Europe"; but the "foreign" tone, so to call it, is revealed in much more subtile and pervasive touches, and it is difficult to escape the suspicion that an ever-present motive in the author's mind was the fear of appearing "provincial" in English eyes-the word "provincial," by the way, fills a curiously conspicuous place in Mr. James's vocabulary. It may be conceded at once that Mr. James's European culture and cosmopolitan experiences give him a great advantage in defining Hawthorne's position as an artist, and it is hardly to be expected that he should be influenced by the patriotic bias in the same manner as Mr. Lathrop, for example; but there is something more than the mere aloofness of the critic in his work, and, if our senses do not deceive us, his air is slightly patronizing not only toward Hawthorne but toward everything American. No doubt it is essential in criticism that what M. Taine calls the milieu of the artist should be recognized and allowed for; but surely-leaving wholly out of consideration the circumstances and conditions under which they were produced, and regarding them as works of art pure and simple - Hawthorne's romances will compare favorably with anything of the kind produced in England either at the time or since. It is the consciousness of this that causes one to resent the slightly apologetic air with which Mr. James assures his readers that his praise of Hawthorne is to be construed in a "relative" (not to say "Pickwickian") sense. And, furthermore, it is difficult to avoid feeling that this cautious, mincing, grudging criticism, is peculiarly out of place when exercised upon one who was the most modest and least exacting of authors; and of whom it can hardly be said that he was ever either over-praised or over-rewarded.

Another fault which results from what seems to

us Mr. James's hypercritical method is that his portrait of Hawthorne has the precise defect which he complains of in Hawthorne's fictitious characters: it lacks reality-it does not bring a concrete and living person before us. The analysis is so subtile and exhaustive as to defeat its own object; for there is a mystery in personality which eludes the most resolute interpreter, and the attempt to lay it entirely bare is apt to dissolve it into a mere fortuitous aggregation of qualities.

It must be admitted, however, that criticism of a criticism is apt to degenerate into mere refining upon words; and, having indicated what appear to us to be the more noteworthy faults of Mr. James's otherwise admirable work, we can please our readers better by reproducing a few passages which shall serve to convey an idea of its merits. Here is one from the very beginning of the essay which defines very happily the limitations under which a biographer of Hawthorne must necessarily labor:

Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can have led, on the

whole, a simpler life. His six volumes of Note-Books illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an unagitated fortune. Hawthorne's career had no vicissitudes or variations; it was passed, for the most cial, rural community; it had few perceptible points of part, in a small and homogeneous society, in a provincontact with what is called the world, with public events, with the manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbors. Its literary incidents are not numerous. He produced, in quantity, but little. His works consist of four novels and the fragment of another, five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for children. And yet some account of the man and the writer is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's private lot, he has the importance of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but, at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but Hawthorne was in his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer to whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a claim to have enriched the mother-tongue, and, judging from present appearances, he will long occupy this honorable position.

This is a cordial recognition of Hawthorne's preeminent position in our national literature, and there is

finely true and discriminating insight in Mr. James's suggestion that there was for Hawthorne in this very eminence something cheerless and dreary:

He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honor of a representative attitude-perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the large conditions of American life. Hawthorne, on the one side, is so subtile and slender and unpretending, and the American world, on the other, is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author of "The Scarlet Letter" and the "Mosses from an Old Manse," portions with those of a great civilization. But our authat we render him a poor service in contrasting his prothor must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is, that the flower of an art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about.

As the biographical portions of Mr. James's work are confessedly drawn solely from Mr. Lathrop's Study" and from the published Note-Books, the reader will search it in vain for any novel discoveries or revelations; but Mr. James's estimates of Hawthorne's character and writings are always fresh and individual, and therefore interesting. We have seen no better analysis of Hawthorne's more prominent characteristics than is contained in the following passage:

He was not expansive; he was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse; he was not personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking

side of his character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him as a somber and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault. He was silent, diffident, more inclined to hesitate to watch, and wait, and meditate-than to produce himself, and fonder, on almost any occasion, of being absent than of being present. This quality betrays itself in all his writings. There is in all of them something cold, and light, and thin-something belonging to the imagination alone-which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side of his life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, and, above all, that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. The qualities to which the Note-Books most testify are, on the whole, his serenity and amenity of mind. They reveal those characteristics, indeed, in an almost phenomenal degree. The serenity, the simplicity, seem in certain portions almost childlike; of brilliant gayety, of high spirits, there is little; but the placidity and evenness of temper, the cheerful and contented view of the things he notes, never belie themselves. I know not what else he

may have written in this copious record, and what passages of gloom and melancholy may have been suppressed; but, as his Diaries stand, they offer in a re

markable degree the reflection of a mind whose develop

ment was not in the direction of sadness.

Apropos of this latter remark, Mr. James refutes the too commonly received idea that Hawthorne was "a dusky and malarious genius," and takes a French critic (M. Emile Montégut) to task for calling him "Un Romancier Pessimiste":

As I have already intimated, his Note-Books are full of this simple and almost childlike serenity. That dusky preoccupation with the misery of human life and the wickedness of the human heart, which such a critic as M. Emile Montégut talks about, is totally absent from them; and if we may suppose a person to have read these Diaries before looking into the tales, we may be sure that such a reader would be greatly surprised to hear the author described as a disappointed, disdainful genius. "This marked love of cases of conscience," says M. Montégut; "this taciturn, scornful cast of mind; this habit of seeing sin everywhere, and hell always gaping open; this dusky gaze bent always upon a damned world, and a nature draped in mourning; these lonely conversations of the imagination with the conscience; this pitiless analysis resulting from a perpetual examination of one's self, and from the tortures of a heart closed before men and open before God-all these elements of the Puritan character have passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or, to speak more justly, have filtered into him, through a long succession of generations." This is a very pretty and very vivid account of Hawthorne, superficially considered; and it is just such a view of the case as would commend itself most easily and most naturally to a hasty critic. It is all true indeed, with a difference: Hawthorne was all that M. Montégut says, minus the conviction. The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster-these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them-to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and æsthetic point of view, the point of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of conviction marks the difference; but the difference is great.

Next to his delineation of Hawthorne's personality, the reader will probably be most interested in Mr. James's estimates of Hawthorne's writings; but these are detailed and elaborate, and we must content ourselves with mentioning his conclusions. "The Scarlet Letter," then, he regards as Hawthorne's masterpiece, and thinks that "it will continue to be, for other generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame." "The House of the Seven Gables," he says, "is a rich, delightful, imaginative work, larger and more various than its companions, and full of all sorts of deep intentions, of interwoven threads of suggestion. But it is not so rounded and complete as The Scarlet Letter'; it has always seemed to me more like the prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself." Of "The Blithedale Romance" he says that, in spite of "a certain want of substance and cohesion in the latter portions, .. the book is a delightful and beautiful one"; and he had previously observed that it is "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest of this comFaun" he says: pany of unhumorous fictions." Of "The Marble "It has a great deal of beauty, of interest, and grace; but it has, to my sense, a slighter value than its companions, and I am far from regarding it as the masterpiece of the author, a position to which we sometimes hear it assigned. The subject is admirable, and so are many of the details; but the whole thing is less simple and complete than either of the three tales of

...

American life, and Hawthorne forfeited a precious advantage in ceasing to tread his native soil." And, finally, summing up the personal and literary qualities of Hawthorne in a single paragraph, he writes:

He was a beautiful, natural, and original genius, and his life had been singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations and vulgar efforts. It had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated as his work. He had lived primarily in his domestic affections, which were of the tenderest kind; and then-without eagerness, without pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion—in his charming art. His work will remain; it is too original and exquisite to pass away; among the men of imagination he will always have a niche. No one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in a sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems. Man's conscience was his theme: but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its own substance, an interest, and, I may almost say, an importance.

This is the concluding paragraph of the book, and, if all that the book contains had been as delicately discriminating and appreciative, we should have had nothing to say of it but praise.

AMONG those traveling Englishwomen whose adventures in various parts of the world are one of the most startling phenomena of the times, a high