mate destruction of slavery; but he had just returned from Washington, where he and other Bostonians had vainly urged the President to dismiss Seward from the Cabinet as an obstructive, and his view of the immediate future was somewhat despondent (Lib. 33: 19, 26).
From England came cheering reports of the revolution in public sentiment caused there by the Proclamation.
F. W. Chesson to W. L. Garrison. London, January 9, 1863.
Ms. and Lib. 33.19.
I send you a copy of the Saturday Review, which contains an article on the Emancipation Society's address to the clergy.
Do not, however, mistake this, or any similar, ebullition for an expression of the real opinion of the English people on the slavery question, or on the issues between the North and the South.
The great meetings which have been held in London and various parts of the country, during the last six weeks, to express sympathy with the anti-slavery policy of the American Government, indicate what is the true s
Arthur Dimmesdale, so may the other have borne upon his own brow the trace of Martha Corey's grief.
No, it does not seem to me that the obstacle to a new birth of literature and art in America lies in the Puritan tradition, but rather in the timid and faithless spirit that lurks in the circles of culture, and still holds something of literary and academic leadership in the homes of the Puritans.
What are the ghosts of a myriad Blue Laws compared with the transplanted cynicism of one Saturday Review ? How can any noble literature germinate where young men are habitually taught that there is no such thing as originality, and that nothing remains for us in this effete epoch of history but the mere recombining of thoughts which sprang first from braver brains?
It is melancholy to see young men come forth from the college walls with less enthusiasm than they carried in; trained in a spirit which is in this respect worse than English toryism,--that it does not even retain a hearty fait
n, have a right to appeal from their degradation to their dreams.
It is something if they are sublime in these.
Tried by such a standard, the Greeks placed woman at the highest point she has ever reached, and if we wish for a gallery of feminine ideals we must turn to them.
But we must not seek these high visions among the indecencies of Ovid, nor among the pearl-strewn vulgarities of Aristophanes, any more than we seek the feminine ideal of to-day in the more chastened satire of the Saturday Review.
We must seek them in the remains of Greek sculpture, in Hesiod and Homer, in the Greek tragedians, in the hymns of Orpheus, Callimachus, and Proclus, and in the Anthology.
We are apt to regard the Greek myths as only a chaos of confused fancies.
Yet it often takes very little pains to disentangle them, at least sufficiently to seize their main thread.
If we confine ourselves to the six primary goddesses, it needs little straining of the imagination to see what they represented to
es against England, from the time of the French Revolution.
It is most desirable, and important, that this tone in our newspapers should be kept up, and that it should be met in a similar spirit by yours.
On this point, both sides have heretofore behaved badly enough, and done more, I suspect, than all other causes, to keep up an ill — will between the two countries.
Formerly, we were most in fault.
Latterly,—allow me to say it,—you have been most in fault, especially the Times, the Saturday Review, and. the Quarterly; whose occasional blunders about the most obvious things only vex us the more, that men, so ignorant of what they discuss, should undertake to pass judgment upon our character and doings.
Now is the time to change all this.
We are in the best possible temper for it, and are likely to continue so, if nothing comes from your side to cross and disturb us. . . . . Our people are now in excellent humor with themselves, and with you; such, so far as England is concerne<
inest, is the nineteenth, on Grandmothers' Houses.
This is painting from the life, and with a minuteness and finish worthy of the most accomplished of the Dutch or Flemish masters.
Whittier's Snow-Bound is not more complete in its kind. From the Christian Register.
It consists of twenty short, sensible, witty, and vigorous essays, directed chiefly against the follies of the sex.From the Boston Globe.
She writes so keenly at times as to suggest comparison with the author of the Saturday Review papers on woman; with this marked difference, that, while the criticisms — of the latter are bitter and unsparing, those of Mrs. Woolson, however sincere, evince always the generous purpose which underlies them, and show the author's appreciation of woman's real worth and the opportunities within her reach.From the Boston Journal.
There is that in it that needed to be said, and had not been said before, in any writing that had come under our observation, so well as she has expressed
tc. But the most repellent things one sees in English books, in the way of language, are the coarsenesses for which no American is responsible, as when in the graceful writings of Juliana Ewing the reader comes upon the words stinking or nigger.
This last offensive word is also invariably used by Froude in Oceana.
Granting that taste and decorum are less important than logic and precision, it seems as if even these last qualities must have become a little impaired when we read in the Saturday Review such curious lapses as this: At home we have only the infinitely little, the speeches of infinitesimal members of Parliament. . . . In America matters yet more minute occupy the press.
More minute than the infinitely little and the infinitesimal!
It will be a matter of deep regret to all thoughtful Americans should there ever be a distinct lowering of the standard of literary workmanship in England.
The different branches of the English-speaking race are mutually dependent; they re
andard, and censures what he thinks the vanity of our nation.
But those who think with me that behind that apparent vanity there is a real self-distrust, which is a greater evil,—those who think that timidity, not conceit, is our real national foible,—can easily see how these very criticisms foster that timidity; so that meek young men grow up in libraries, in Emerson's phrase, who feel that what they can say can claim no weight in either continent, so long as they do not say it in the Saturday Review. So some rather impulsive remarks in a New York newspaper as to the large number of persons in this country, as in all countries, who assume a clean shirt but once a week, probably did little or no good to the offending individuals, while it has winged a fatal arrow for Matthew Arnold's bow, as for many others.
Comparisons are often misleading.
David Urquhart, the English traveller, was always denouncing his fellow-countrymen as exceedingly dirty when compared with the Mohammedan race
ether as if to force the scathing words out faster and still more forcibly.
As his voice died on their ears, the first impulse moved everyone to a long breath of relief.
Such stinging words, such terrible denunciation, put with so much of real eloquence, are rarely heard, and could not but have moved the most stolid auditor.
Brown was censured by the Speaker, and wore it as a badge of honor.
He is the only man who ever pierced the rhinosceronian hide of Ben Butler.
The London Saturday Review, of June 14, 1862, said:
The proclamation of General Butler, at New Orleans, has been read in England with a horror which no other event in this deplorable Civil war has created.
The attention it has excited in Parliament inadequately represents the general feeling of indignation among us. It is difficult to conceive that a civilized man can have written it, or that civilized man can have been fouud to carry it out. This is not a generation in which men shudder at the ordinary horro
its price to threepence, all these journals are sold at four pence each.--The circulation of the penny newspapers is much more considerable.
According to some, the Daily Telegraph issues daily 40,000 copies' or, according to others, 50,000 or 65,000; the Standard, from 25,000 to 30,000; the Star, from 20,000 to 30,000.
The Weekly Observer issues about 5,000 or 6,000 copies; Weekly Dispatch, about 40,000; Bell's Life in London, about 28,000.
These Journals are sold at five cents. The Saturday Review, price sixpence, has a circulation of from 5,000 to 6,000; the Athenaeum, sold at four pence, nearly 12,000.
The London Illustrated News, which sells at five pence, has a circulation of nearly 100,000.
Of the weekly papers sold at two-pence, the Weekly Times (an entirely distinct paper from the London Times,) has a circulation of nearly 85,000; the News of the World, of more than 100,000; Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper and Reynolds' Newspaper, of 160,000 to 180,000 copies.
Nevertheless, th
ge.
Quite possibly such movements are the very height of Southern breeding — further North, in the land of Yankees and wooden clocks, a woman who would perpetrate an act of this kind, under similar circumstances, would be regarded — well, to use a convenient everyday expression, as "no better than she should be"--a somebody closely skin to, if not the identical, scar;et feminine spoken of in Revelations.
American Brigadiers.
The following is from a recent number of the London Saturday Review:
Mr. Lincoln deserves compassion for the difficulty which he experiences in finding suitable candidates for the different offices in his gift.
Mr. Cameron, after becoming too notorious at home, is made a Minister Plenipotentiary, and Mr. Cassites Clay, whom he
supersedes, having made himself unusually absurd at St. Petersburgh, is to be consoled with the commission of Brigadier-General.
Americans seem not to understand the comic impression which is produced on the minds of
