"Go on, Sheila, go on," he said with a resigned air. "What else did I do?"

"Oh, a great many rude things. You should not have contradicted Mrs. Kavanagh about the color of an amethyst."

"But why? You know she was wrong; and she said herself a minute afterward that she was thinking of a sapphire."

"But you ought not to contradict a person older than yourself," said Sheila sententiously.

"Goodness gracious me! Because one person is born in one year, and one in another, is that any reason why you should say that an amethyst is blue? Mr. Mackenzie, come and talk to this girl. She is trying to pervert my principles. She says that in talking to a woman you have to abandon all hope of being accurate, and that respect for the truth is not to be thought of. Because a woman has a pretty face she is to be allowed to say that black is white, and white pea-green. And if you say anything to the contrary, you are a brute, and had better go and bellow by yourself in a wilderness."

"Sheila is quite right," said old Mackenzie at a venture.

"Oh, do you think so?" Ingram asked coolly. "Then I can understand how her moral sentiment has been destroyed, and it is easy to see where she has got a set of opinions that strike at the very roots of a respectable and decent society."

"Do you know," said Sheila seriously, "that it is very rude of you to say so, even in jest? If you treat Mrs. Lorraine in this way—"

She suddenly stopped. Her father had not heard, being busy among his pipes. So the subject was discreetly dropped, Ingram reluctantly promising to pay some attention to Sheila's precepts of politeness.

Altogether, it was a pleasant evening they had, but when Ingram had left, Mr. Mackenzie said to his daughter, "Now, look at this, Sheila. When Mr. Ingram goes away from London, you hef no friend at all then in the place, and you are quite alone. Why will you not come to the Lewis, Sheila? It is no one there will know anything of what has happened here; and Mairi she is a good girl, and she will hold her tongue."

"They will ask me why I come back without my husband," Sheila said, looking down.

"Oh, you will leave that all to me," said her father, who knew he had surely sufficient skill to thwart the curiosity of a few simple creatures in Borva. "There is many a girl hass to go home for a time while her husband he is away on his business; and there will no one hef the right to ask you any more than I will tell them; and I will tell them what they should know—oh yes, I will tell them ferry well—and you will hef no trouble about it. And, Sheila, you are a good lass, and you know that I hef many things to attend to that is not easy to write about—"

"I do know that, papa," the girl said, "and many a time have I wished you would go back to the Lewis."

"And leave you here by yourself? Why, you are talking foolishly, Sheila. But now, Sheila, you will see how you could go back with me; and it would be a ferry different thing for you running about in the fresh air than shut up in a room in the middle of a town. And you are not looking ferry well, my lass, and Scarlett she will hef to take the charge of you."

"I will go to the Lewis with you, papa, when you please," she said, and he was glad and proud to hear her decision; but there was no happy light of anticipation in her eyes, such as ought to have been awakened by this projected journey to the far island which she had known as her home.

And so it was that one rough and blustering afternoon the Clansman steamed into Stornoway harbor, and Sheila, casting timid and furtive glances toward the quay, saw Duncan standing there, with the wagonette some little distance back under charge of a boy. Duncan was a proud man that day. He was the first to shove the gangway on to the vessel, and he was the first to get on board; and in another minute Sheila found the tall, keen-eyed, brown-faced keeper before her, and he was talking in a rapid and eager fashion, throwing in an occasional scrap of Gaelic in the mere hurry of his words.

"Oh yes, Miss Sheila, Scarlett she is ferry well whatever, but there is nothing will make her so well as your coming back to sa Lewis; and we wass saying yesterday that it looked as if it wass more as three or four years, or six years, since you went away from sa Lewis, but now it iss no time at all, for you are just the same Miss Sheila as we knew before; and there is not one in all Borva but will think it iss a good day this day that you will come back."

"Duncan," said Mackenzie with an impatient stamp of his foot, "why will you talk like a foolish man? Get the luggage to the shore, instead of keeping us all the day in the boat."

"Oh, ferry well, Mr. Mackenzie," said Duncan, departing with an injured air, and grumbling as he went, "it iss no new thing to you to see Miss Sheila, and you will have no thocht for any one but yourself. But I will get out the luggage—oh yes, I will get out the luggage."

Sheila, in truth, had but little luggage with her, but she remained on board the boat until Duncan was quite ready to start, for she did not wish just then to meet any of her friends in Stornoway. Then she stepped ashore and crossed the quay, and got into the wagonette; and the two horses, whom she had caressed for a moment, seemed to know that they were carrying Sheila back to her own country, from the speed with which they rattled out of the town and away into the lonely moorland.

Mackenzie let them have their way. Past the solitary lakes they went, past the long stretches of undulating morass, past the lonely sheilings perched far up on the hills; and the rough and blustering wind blew about them, and the gray clouds hurried by, and the old, strong-bearded man who shook the reins and gave the horses their heads could have laughed aloud in his joy that he was driving his daughter home. But Sheila—she sat there as one dead; and Mairi, timidly regarding her, wondered what the impassable face and the bewildered, sad eyes meant. Did she not smell the sweet strong smell of the heather? Had she no interest in the great birds that were circling in the air over by the Barbhas mountains? Where was the pleasure she used to exhibit in remembering the curious names of the small lakes they passed?

And lo! the rough gray day broke asunder, and a great blaze of fire appeared in the west, shining across the moors and touching the blue slopes of the distant hills. Sheila was getting near to the region of beautiful sunsets and lambent twilights and the constant movement and mystery of the sea. Overhead the heavy clouds were still hurried on by the wind; and in the south the eastern slopes of the hills and the moors were getting to be of a soft purple; but all along the west, where her home was, lay a great flush of gold, and she knew that Loch Roag was shining there, and the gable of the house at Borvabost getting warm in the beautiful light.

"It is a good afternoon you will be getting to see Borva again," her father said to her; but all the answer she made was to ask her father not to stop at Garrana-hina, but to drive straight on to Callernish. She would visit the people at Garra-na-hina some other day.

The boat was waiting for them at Callernish, and the boat was the Maighdean-mhara.

"How pretty she is! How have you kept her so well, Duncan?" said Sheila, her face lighting up for the first time as she went down the path to the bright-painted little vessel that scarcely rocked in the water below.

"Bekaas we neffer knew but that it was this week, or the week before, or the next week you would come back, Miss Sheila, and you would want your boat; but it wass Mr. Mackenzie himself, it wass he that did all the pentin of the boat; and it iss as well done as Mr. McNicol could have done it, and a great deal better than that mirover."

"Won't you steer her yourself, Sheila?" her father suggested, glad to see that she was at last being interested and pleased.

"Oh yes, I will steer her, if I have not forgotten all the points that Duncan taught me."

"And I am sure you hef not done that, Miss Sheila," Duncan said, "for there wass no one knew Loch Roag better as you, not one, and you hef not been so long away; and when you tek the tiller in your hand it will all come back to you, just as if you wass going away from Borva the day before yesterday."

She certainly had not forgotten, and she was proud and pleased to see how well the shapely little craft performed its duties. They had a favorable wind, and ran rapidly along the opening channels, until in due course they glided into the well-known bay over which, and shining in the yellow light from the sunset, they saw Sheila's home.

Sheila had escaped so far the trouble of meeting friends, but she could not escape her friends in Borvabost. They had waited for her for hours, not knowing when the Clansman might arrive at Stornoway; and now they crowded down to the shore, and there was a great shaking of hands, and an occasional sob from some old crone, and a thousand repetitions of the familiar "And are you ferry well, Miss Sheila?" from small children who had come across from the village in defiance of mothers and fathers. And Sheila's face brightened into a wonderful gladness, and she had a hundred questions to ask for one answer she got, and she did not know what to do with the number of small brown fists that wanted to shake hands with her.

"Will you let Miss Sheila alone?" Duncan called out, adding something in Gaelic which came strangely from a man who sometimes reproved his own master for swearing. "Get away with you, you brats: it wass better you would be in your beds than bothering people that wass come all the way from Styornoway."

Then they all went up in a body to the house, and Scarlett, who had neither eyes, ears nor hands but for the young girl who had been the very pride of her heart, was nigh driven to distraction by Mackenzie's stormy demands for oatcake and glasses and whisky. Scarlett angrily remonstrated with her husband for allowing this rabble of people to interfere with the comfort of Miss Sheila; and Duncan, taking her reproaches with great good-humor, contented himself with doing her work, and went and got the cheese and the plates and the whisky, while Scarlett, with a hundred endearing phrases, was helping Sheila to take off her traveling things. And Sheila, it turned out, had brought with her in her portmanteau certain huge and wonderful cakes, not of oatmeal, from Glasgow; and these were soon on the great table in the kitchen, and Sheila herself distributing pieces to those small folks who were so awestricken by the sight of this strange dainty that they forgot her injunctions and thanked her timidly in Gaelic.

"Well, Sheila my lass," said her father to her as they stood at the door of the house and watched the troop of their friends, children and all, go over the hill to Borvabost in the red light of the sunset, "and are you glad to be home again?"

"Oh yes," she said heartily enough; and Mackenzie thought that things were going on favorably.

"You hef no such sunsets in the South, Sheila," he observed, loftily casting his eye around, although he did not usually pay much attention to the picturesqueness of his native island. "Now look at the light on Suainabhal. Do you see the red on the water down there, Sheila? Oh yes, I thought you would say it wass ferry beautiful—it is a ferry good color on the water. The water looks ferry well when it is red. You hef no such things in London—not any, Sheila. Now we must go in-doors, for these things you can see any day here, and we must not keep our friends waiting."

An ordinary, dull-witted or careless man might have been glad to have a little quiet after so long and tedious a journey, but Mr. Mackenzie was no such person. He had resolved to guard against Sheila's first evening at home being in any way languid or monotonous, and so he had asked one or two of his especial friends to remain and have supper with them. Moreover, he did not wish the girl to spend the rest of the evening out of doors when the melancholy time of the twilight drew over the hills and the sea began to sound remote and sad. Sheila should have a comfortable evening in-doors; and he would himself, after supper, when the small parlor was well lit up, sing for her one or two songs, just to keep the thing going, as it were. He would let nobody else sing. These Gaelic songs were not the sort of music to make people cheerful. And if Sheila herself would sing for them?

And Sheila did. And her father chose the songs for her, and they were the blithest he could find, and the girl seemed really in excellent spirits. They had their pipes and their hot whisky and water in this little parlor; Mr. Mackenzie explaining that although his daughter was accustomed to spacious and gilded drawing-rooms where such a thing was impossible, she would do anything to make her friends welcome and comfortable, and they might fill their glasses and their pipes with impunity. And Sheila sang again and again, all cheerful and sensible English songs, and she listened to the odd jokes and stories her friends had to tell her; and Mackenzie was delighted with the success of his plans and precautions. Was not her very appearance now a triumph? She was laughing, smiling, talking to every one: he had not seen her so happy for many a day.

In the midst of it all, when the night had come apace, what was this wild skirl outside that made everybody start? Mackenzie jumped to his feet, with an angry vow in his heart that if this "teffle of a piper John" should come down the hill playing "Lochaber no more" or "Cha till mi tualadh" or any other mournful tune, he would have his chanter broken in a thousand splinters over his head. But what was the wild air that came nearer and nearer, until John marched into the house, and came, with ribbons and pipes, to the very door of the room, which was flung open to him? Not a very appropriate air, perhaps, for it was

But it was, to Mr. Mackenzie's rare delight, a right good joyous tune, and it was meant as a welcome to Sheila; and forthwith he caught the white-haired piper by the shoulder and dragged him in, and said, "Put down your pipes and come into the house, John—put down your pipes and tek off your bonnet, and we shall hef a good dram together this night, by Kott! And it is Sheila herself will pour out the whisky for you, John; and she is a good Highland girl, and she knows the piper was never born that could be hurt by whisky, and the whisky was never yet made that could hurt a piper. What do you say to that, John?"

John did not answer: he was standing before Sheila with his bonnet in his hand, but with his pipes still proudly over his shoulder. And he took the glass from her and called out "Shlainte!" and drained every drop of it out to welcome Mackenzie's daughter home.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

MR. E. LYTTON BULWER.

In looking over, not very long since, a long—neglected, thin portfolio of my twin-brother, the late Willis Gaylord Clark of Philadelphia, I came across a sealed parcel endorsed "London Correspondence." It contained letters to him from many literary persons of more or less eminence at that time in the British metropolis; among others, two from Miss Landon ("L.E.L."); two from Mrs. S. C. Hall, the versatile and clever author of Tales and Sketches of the Irish Peasantry, cordial, closely—written and recrossed to the remotest margin; one from her husband, Mr. S.C. Hall; three or four from Mr. Chorley; and lastly, five or six elaborate letters from Mr. E. Lytton Bulwer, sent through his American publishers, the Brothers Harper, by Washington Irving, then secretary of legation to the American embassy "near the court of St. James." Enclosed with these last-mentioned letters was a communication from Miss Fanny Kemble, to whom they had been sent for perusal, and who, in returning them, did not hesitate to say that she did Not share his young American correspondent's admiration for the author of Pelham. She had met him frequently in London society, and regarded his manners as affected and himself as a reflex of his own conceited model of a gentleman—a style which Thackeray perhaps did not too grossly caricature when he made Chawls Yellowplush announce, from his own lips, his sounding name and title to a distinguished London drawing-room as "Sa-wa-Edou-wah'd-à-Lyttod-à-Bulwig!"

The poems which my brother had written for two London journals at the time of their first appearance and sudden popularity, the London Literary Gazette and, I believe, the Athenæum, led to the correspondence I have mentioned; and from the letters of Mr. Bulwer I have extracted a few passages, as somewhat personal in their nature, besides being characteristic of his tone of thought and manner of expression at that period of his career:

"An author who has a just confidence in his attainments and powers, who knows that his mind is imperishable and capable of making daily additions to its own strength, is always more desirous of seeing the censures (if not mere abuse) than the praises of those who aspire to judge him; and any suggestions or admonitions thus bestowed are seldom disregarded. But if he is to profit by criticism, the motive must be known to him. It is by no means natural to take the advice of an enemy. When the critic enters his department of literature in the false guise of urbanity and candor merely to conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object of his fear or envy."

"Seldom indeed is it that injustice fails to be seen through, or that the policy of interested condemnation escapes undetected. They first produce the excitements, then furnish the triumphs, of genius."

"There is a charm in writing for the pure and intelligent young worth all the plaudits of sinister or hypocritical wisdom. At a certain age, and while the writings that please have a gloss of novelty about them, hiding the blemishes that may afterward be discovered as their characteristics,—then it is that the young convert their approbation into enthusiasm. An author benefits in a wide and most pleasing range of public opinion by this natural and common disposition in the young; and the only cloud thrown athwart the rays of pleasure thus saluting his spirit is flung from the thought that they who are thus moved by the movings of his own mind may come in a few years to look upon his pages with hearts less ardent in their sympathies, and with altered eyes, which have acquired additional keenness by looking longer upon the world."

"The competent American littérateur has a glorious career before him. So much is there in your magnificent country, hitherto undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all may be wells from which he may be the first to drink. Yet it cannot be expected—for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature—that there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are commonly regarded with eyes of invidious jaundice by the elders, whose waning reputations they may through industry either supplant or explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success, and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit. Yet these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance its inevitable conquests."

"It is a sight of gratification and pride to behold a laborer in the vineyard of letters escaping from the envy, the jealousy, the rivalry, the leaven of all uncharitableness, with which literary intercourse is so often polluted. The writers of England have been tardy in their justice, not only to the progress, circumstances and customs of America, but to her intellectual offspring; and the time is not remote—nay, has already dawned—when, in this regard, the spirit of Change wields his wand and finds obedience to his prerogatives."

"'No hostility between nations affects the arts:' so said the old maxim, but it has rarely been found a truism. They who feel it, feel also the virtue which dictated the aphorism. Men whose object is to enlighten the nations or exalt the judgment or (the least ambition) to refine the tastes of others—men who feel that this object is dearer to them than a petty and vain ambition—feel also that all who labor in the same cause are united with them in a friendship which exists in one climate as in another—in a I republic or in a despotism: these are the best cosmopolites, the truest citizens of the world."

The foregoing extracts will make it obvious that Mr. Bulwer was at that time sore at the treatment he had received at the hands of certain of his critics, who were by no means unanimous in their estimation of his genius. He was very sensitive at all times of adverse comment upon his writings. Thackeray wounded him woefully when he made "Chawls Yellowplush" review him characteristically in Punch. These most amusing papers ought to have been included in Thackeray's published miscellaneous writings, but they were not, although Bulwer is humorously travestied in Punch's "Prize Novelists," together with Lover, Ainsworth, and Disraeli. The subjoined will show the style of the "littery" footman, who, as a critic, "sumtimes gave kissis, sumtimes kix":

"One may objeck to an immence deal of your writings, witch, betwigst you and me, contain more sham sentiment, sham morallaty and sham potry than you'd like to own; but in spite of this, there's the stuf you; you've a kind and loyal heart in your buzm, bar'net—a trifle deboshed, praps: a keen i, igspecially for what is comick (as for your tragady, it's mighty flatchulent), and a ready pleasn't pen. The man who says you're an As, is an As himself. Dont b'lieve him, bar'net: not that I suppose you will; for, if I've formed a correck opinion of you from your wuck, you think your small beear as good as most men's. Every man does—and wy not? We brew, and we love our own tap—amen; but the pint betwigst us is this steupid, absudd way of crying out because the public don't like it too. Wy should they, my dear bar'net? You may vow that they are fools, or that the critix are your enemies, or that the world should judge your poams by your critikle rules, and not by their own. You may beat your brest, and vow that you are a martyr, but you won't mend the matter."

After these general remarks, the critic-footman takes up the subject of style, and argues with a good deal of ingenuity and force in favor of simplicity and terseness, especially in his performance of The Sea-Captain:

"Sea-captings should not be eternly spowting, and invoking gods, hevn, starz, and angels, and other silestial influences. We can all do it, bar'net: no-think in life is easier. I can compare my livery buttons to the stars, or the clouds of my backr pipe to the dark vollums that ishew from Mount Hetna; or I can say that angles are looking down from them, and the tobacco-silf, like a happy soil released, is circling round and upwards, and shaking sweetness down. All this is as easy as to drink; but it's not potry, bar'net, nor natral. Pipple, when their mothers reckonise them, don't howl about the suckumambient air, and paws to think of the happy leaves a-rustling—leastways, one mistrusts them if they do...Look at the neat grammaticle twist of Lady Arundel's spitch too, who in the cors of three lines has made her son a prince, a lion with a sword and coronal, and a star. Wy gauble, and sheak up metafers in this way, bar'net? One simile is quite enuff in the best of sentences; and I preshume I need not tell you that it's as well to have it like while you are about it. Take my advice, honrabble sir: listen to an umble footman: it's genrally best in potry to understand perffickly what you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning clearly affterward: the simpler the words the better, praps. You may, for instans, call a coronet an 'ancestral coronal,' if you like, as you might call a hat a 'swart sombrero,' a glossy four-and-nine, a 'silken helm, to storm impermeable,' and 'lightsome as a breezy gossamer;' but in the long run it's as well to call it a hat. It is a hat, and that name is quite as poeticle as another."

The remarks of Mr. Yellowplush upon some of the segregated passages are amusing enough. Take the following, for example:

Igsplane this, men and angles! I've tried every way; backards, forards, and all sorts of trancepositions:

or—

or—

or—

or—

All witch are as sen sable as the ferst passadge. Sir Mr. Bullwig, ain't I right? Such, barring the style, was the tenor of many of the critiques upon Bulwer's writings which appeared about that period, and which, as is now well known, "wrought him much annoy," versatile and powerful as his genius has since proved itself.

L. GAYLORD CLARK.

SALVINI'S OTHELLO.

It might have been supposed that whatever the fate of the stage among other races, it would always maintain its position as one of the great instruments of popular culture with the English-speaking nations, linked as it is inseparably with the immortal name of Shakespeare in his double capacity of author and actor, and possessing as it does in his works a body of dramatic literature supreme alike in all intellectual qualities and in fitness for scenic representation. Yet it is but the other day that we were reminded by the announcement of Macready's death of the long interval that had elapsed since the last of the English tragedians had dropped a sceptre which there was no one to take up; and now it is an actor of another race, speaking a different language, who presents himself to fill the vacant place, and to interpret for us anew creations which we study indeed more closely than ever in the printed page, but of which we had ceased to ask for any adequate palpable embodiment. Our impression, however, of a drama is and must be incomplete until we have seen it on the stage: it must be put in action before our eyes ere we can hope fully to understand it. The amount of thoughtful and learned criticism to which Shakespeare's plays have been subjected makes us forget at times that the ultimate test of their excellence is to be found on the boards, and that they were meant, above all things, to be acted.

Taking Othello as Salvini presents him to us, and merely in the light of a dramatic performance, having cast from out our minds the recollection of all that we have ever heard, read or thought about the character—more than this, forgetting our native English and knowing Shakespeare only through the libretto in our hands (of which, however, we must forbear to speak slightingly, for from it, we are told, Salvini himself has gained his knowledge of the part),—putting ourselves in this mental attitude, the performance may safely be said to defy criticism, or rather to be above it, except such criticism as accords with enthusiastic admiration. It is absolutely without a shortcoming, seen from this standpoint. His majestic bearing, his beautiful elocution, his pure voice, his graceful, expressive gestures, and above all his perfect freedom from affectation or self-consciousness, delight us throughout; and when to these qualities are added the marvelous vigor of expression and force of passion with which he shakes his audience from the middle of the play on, one feels as if there were nothing more to ask of acting. No description, in fact, can do justice to the perfect consistency and harmony of his conception, or to the marvelous delicacy of his points, which are yet as penetrating as they are subtle, and which never fail of their effect, whether rendered by a gesture whose power of expression seems to make words superfluous, as when in reply to Iago's hypocritically sympathetic "I see this has a little dashed your spirits," which is answered in the play by "Not a jot, not a jot," Salvini tries to speak, but chokes with the words, and lifting his hand with a motion of denial and deprecation, tells us what he would fain say, but cannot; or by an intonation of voice, as when in answer to Iago's "You would be satisfied?" he replies, marking the difference between conditional and imperative with a tone that would of itself betray him born to command—

And when in his desperate pain and fury, maddened by the poison working within, he drags Iago to the front of the stage, and holding him by the throat speaks Shakespeare's meaning, if not Shakespeare's words, thick and fast, as if he were not an actor, but Othello himself, and while his audience listen with bated breath and quick-beating hearts, he hurls him to the ground, and in the uncurbed fury of his mood raises his foot to spurn him like a dog,—then he rises far above ordinary dramatic effect: his art does "hold the mirror up to Nature." We feel that we have seen Othello.

Again, in the fourth act, when Iago brings home to him the realization of his wife's infidelity, what can be finer than the sharpening of his voice from stress of pain, changing from the full roundness of its usual masculine robustness to a high womanish key, as he asks the fatal questions, "Che disse? Che? Che fece?" What words could have said so much as the dumb show with which he signifies that terrible fact of which he can neither ask nor hear in words? And who can doubt when he hears that cry of agony that bursts from his lips at Iago's gross confirmation of his suggestion that it is the cry of a man stabbed to the heart? His suffering is as real to us as the agony of a lion would be if we stood by and saw some one drive a knife into the beast up to the hilt. It equals in reality any exhibition of simple unfeigned bodily pain, with all its intensity of violence. The word "rant" never once comes into our minds.

Salvini expresses everything. He demands nothing from his audience but eyes and ears; he acts the part in every detail; he does just what he aims to do. His motion is as unconscious and unfettered as that of a deer or a tiger: whether he paces with a stealthy, restless tread up and down the back of the stage, reminding us irresistibly of a caged wild beast, or whether he half crouches, then drags himself along, and then darts upon Iago in the last scene, it is always plain that his body is the servant of his mind: he moves in harmony with his mood.

Despite, therefore, the natural tendency to scrutinize closely the claims of a foreigner seeking to rule over our hearts as the vicegerent of Shakespeare's sovreignty, there has been, and happily can be, no question in regard to one essential point. That Salvini is a born actor, a great tragedian, none will be bold enough to dispute. In that rare combination of intellectual and physical qualities without which no particular gift would justify his pretensions—intensity of emotion, subtlety of perception, a power of impersonation implying of itself the union of all the natural requirements with a mastery in their display attainable only by consummate art—it is hard to believe that he can ever have been excelled; though doubtless the mingled fire and pathos of Kean transcended in their effect any like exhibition ever witnessed on the stage. Except for the few—if any still survive—who can remember the Othello of Kean, living recollection affords no opportunity for a judgment founded on comparison.

The only question therefore which it is possible to raise relates to Salvini's conception of the character—a question such as must always exist in the case of any representation of Shakespeare, with whose creations no actor can ever hope to identify himself, however he may modify our former impressions. Let it be remembered, too, that an actor's conception of a character must never be vague, undefined or shadowy, as that of a mere reader may well be, and probably will be in the exact degree in which he is a keen and appreciative student. The actor must not strive to suggest all possible solutions, but must hold firmly to one, and that the most dramatic; he must seize upon the salient points; his subtleties must not be too subtle for gesture, glance and tone to express; he must choose which meaning out of many meanings he shall enforce, which mood out of many moods he shall make predominate.

The exceptions which have been taken to Salvini's performance all rest upon the notion that he has misconceived the character. It is superb, we are told, but it is not Shakespeare. It is a representation not of Othello the Moor, but of a Moor named Othello. The idea that dominates throughout is that of race: the character loses its individuality and becomes a mere type, an embodiment of the tropical nature, an illustration of Byron's lines:

The unbridled passion, the revengeful fury, is that of a savage. The anguish and indignation of a noble spirit believing itself outraged and wronged are transformed into the blind rage and capricious fury of a wild beast.

This objection seems to us to spring from the state of mind often induced by long familiarity with a subject, in which the gain of minute knowledge is accompanied by a loss of the force and vividness of the first impression. People study Shakespeare as they study the Bible, softening whatever they find revolting until they have convinced themselves that it does not exist. Actors in general share in this sentiment or strive to gratify it. Othello's complexion is forgotten in the reading, and becomes in the representation such that the spectator feels no repugnance to his marriage with the fair Desdemona. Betrayed through the mere openness and generosity of his nature, he acts only as a sensitive and vehement nature would be compelled to act in so terrible a complication, and the emotions kindled by his demeanor and conduct are never those of horror and repulsion, but only of pity and admiration.

But, however noble and pathetic such a rendering may be, it consorts better with the ideas and demands of the present time than with those of the Elizabethan age. The dramatist who began by writing Titus Andronicus had at least no instinctive distaste to repulsive subjects, no fear of shocking his audience by an exhibition of untamed barbarity. Othello is "of a free and open nature," he is "great of heart," he is above doing wrong without provocation, real or supposed. But his nature admits no possibility of self-control, of reason in the midst of doubts, of patience under injury. His temperament betrays itself in physical exhibitions wild and portentous. "You are fatal then when your eyes roll so," is the suggestive cry of Desdemona. In his perplexity and fury he swoons and foams. He overhears an insult to Venice and slays the traducer. His language to the wife whom he still loves while believing himself dishonored by her is such that "a beggar, in his drink, could not have laid such terms upon his callet." He outrages her kinsman and a throng of attendants by striking her in their presence. Her protestations of innocence serve only to inflame him, and he cuts short her last pleadings with his murderous hand in a way which would have forced M. Dumas fils himself to cry out, "Ne tue la pas!"

How are this fury and this credulity, both equally insensate, to be explained, how are they to be reconciled with traits that compel sympathy and admiration, except as the workings of a nature essentially uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but while subject to those fiery tests under which all that is foreign or acquired melts away, and the primal components of the character are revealed in their bareness and in their depths. Othello's race is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. It throws a fatality on that marriage which seems unnatural even to those who yet do not suspect that the discordancy lies deeper than in the complexion. It makes him the easy victim of a plot which would otherwise only have ensnared its concoctor. It sweeps away all impediments to the catastrophe, making it swift, inevitable and dire. And it is by seizing upon this central fact that Salvini has been enabled to render his performance artistically perfect. Were the conception radically false, there could not be the same unity in the execution, the same harmony in the details. We shall not assert that his is the ideal Othello, or that such an Othello is possible. Shakespeare's creations cannot be bounded by the limit of another idiosyncrasy. But we hold that, if he does not put into the character all that belongs to it, he puts nothing into it that does not belong to it. We may miss in the accents of his despair a pathos capable of assuaging our horror; but this latter emotion, equally legitimate, is commonly stifled altogether, leaving us more disposed to linger lovingly beside the dead than to shudder and exclaim with Ludovico, "The object poisons sight;—let it be hid."

A.F.

A LETTER FROM NEW YORK.

I have come from the country. I have seen Salvini. All emotion has to be expressed now in the above form, for Salvini rules. He is simply the greatest actor since Rachel, and his troupe the most perfect ever seen in this country. The whole plane of their acting is forty steps higher than we are accustomed to; therefore it has been slow of gaining appreciation, and the panic having burst over the devoted city just as Salvini opened, the houses have been poor. He should play, too (all actors should), in a smaller house than the Academy of Music. His first great success may therefore date from a matinée at Wallack's, where he had the most distinguished audience I have ever seen in New York, on Saturday, October 11th. Salvini lunched while here with Madame Botta, and expressed himself surprised that any one should care to go to hear him who could not understand the language. "I am sure I should not go," said the great actor. He thinks he has not had a success, but he will not think so after he becomes accustomed to his audiences. He is in private one of the most cultivated and intelligent of men, and has brought to the practice of his art a scholar's study, a soldier's experience and a gentleman's taste. I say a soldier's experience, for Salvini has been a soldier, and fought for united Italy in 1857 and earlier.

Nilsson is much improved by marriage. Her beauty is softer, she has gained flesh—not to the detriment of that girlish outline, but to the improvement of those somewhat aggressive cheek-bones. She sings better than ever, with rounded voice. Never since the days of Salvi and Steffanoni have we had such opera in New York. The orchestra is better, Maurel is superb, Capoul is still better, and Campanini is very admirable. We miss Jamet very much in Mephisto, but every one else is better than before. The house is not gay—it misses many of its old habitués. Five empty boxes in a row tell of the financial troubles. It was the fashion to laugh at the Wall street men, but they gave gayety and life and movement up town as well as down town. Many of those whose names are recorded on the wrong side of the list were our most generous givers and most amiable hosts. Their misfortunes cause nothing but regrets.

The races at first felt the effects of the panic, but the crowd on Saturday, the 11th of October, was immense. Somebody must get the money that everybody loses; therefore somebody can still afford to go to the races, and the last day was also very full. Two drags set the English example of having the horses taken off and dining on the top of the coach. The notes of a key-bugle from one of them seemed to suggest Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Ben Allen; but whether those young gentlemen were of the party or not I did not hear. With our delicious sky, and particularly this golden autumn, there seems to be no reason why we should not adopt the fashions of Chantilly and Ascot. We are, however, a gregarious people, and the tendency is to gather together under the protection of the grand stand.

Poor Maretzek is always the first to go, and it is understood that his opera is among the great unpaid. Every one is sorry for the poor singers, always excepting Lucca, whose jealousy of Nilsson is so aggressive that she has declared that she would sing her off the boards of the Academy of Music. She is driven like a bad angel out of Paradise, while the starry Nilsson in magnificent triumph sings on superbly to constantly increasing houses at the Academy, and is lunched and fêted to her heart's content.

The Evangelical Alliance has gone, and left behind it nothing but animosities. It was really a vast movement of the Presbyterian Church: Geneva and Calvin were the exclusive proprietors. Episcopalians, Unitarians and Baptists, Methodists and Universalists, were requested to stand aside. The communions were always at some Presbyterian church. Perhaps they thought the Episcopal Church exclusive, as some one said an Englishman carried his pride into his prayers, and said, "O Lord, I do most haughtily beseech thee," and that the Unitarians felt "that any man who had been born in Boston did not see the necessity of being born again."

Every one is extremely well dressed, in spite of the panic. The hair is worn plain and off the brow, let us thank the genius of Fashion, so that every woman has a purer, better look. Nothing destroys the expression of a good woman like breaking over that line which Nature has made about the forehead. Our women have made themselves into wicked Faustinas and vulgar Anonymas long enough with their frizzes and short curls and "banging," as the square-cut straight lock on the forehead is called. Let us see the Madonna brow once more. The high ruff, the sleeve to the elbow, the dress cut to show the figure, all bring-back the days of our great-grandmothers: the opera is filled with Copley's portraits. The bonnets, too, are delightfully large, with long feathers. Every new fashion brings out a new crop of beauties, but I could not see what beauties were brought out by those bold bonnets of last year, which were hung on at the back of the head.

We expect great fun from Dundreary rehearsing Hamlet for private theatricals. Mr. Sothern has been asked to write down Dundreary, that so great an eccentric conception may not be lost to the world. He answers that he has twelve volumes of Dundreary literature! That shows how much industry goes to even an "inconsiderate trifle." This fine actor and most accomplished and agreeable man has been playing in two of the poorest plays ever presented to a New York audience. Nothing but a capital "make up," resembling one of the most fashionable men in town, who is Sothern's particular friend, has given them point—even then only to New Yorkers. Sothern's fondness for practical joking has brought about so many false charges that he is getting very tired of being fathered with every stupid trick which any one chooses to play, and will probably drop that form of wit, so really unworthy of his great genius and true refinement, for the man who could invent Dundreary and who can play Garrick is a genius.

I assisted with four thousand others at the first representation of the Magic Flute at the Grand Opera House, where the late James Fisk's monogram is decently covered up by Gothic shields, hastily improvised after that distinguished actor met the reward of his crimes. I heard lima di Murska for the first time. She is an unpleasant miracle, compelling your reluctant astonishment. Such vocal gymnastics I never heard. The flute and the musical-box are left in the background, but her voice is nasal and disagreeable at first. Lucca's splendid, rich, full organ rang out gloriously by contrast, although her constitutional jealousy showed itself unpleasantly in some parts of the opera where Murska was so deliriously applauded. Lucca, little woman, conquered herself at last, and handed the flowers up to her rival with a pretty grace which was loudly applauded. It is strange that the tact of woman, usually so apprehensive, does not more often see the good effect of generosity.

One effect of the panic, it is to be hoped, will be to make the dinners less magnificently heavy. I am sure every lady in New York who was last winter constrained to sit from seven o'clock until eleven at those monstrously elaborate and expensive dinners which have become so much the fashion, will be glad to dine in a more simple manner, in a shorter time, with less display, and with fewer courses, and fewer excitements. One entertainer last winter introduced live swans and small canaries to enliven his dinner. The swans splashed rather disagreeably.

"Do you know why he had the swans?" said a lady to a gentleman.

"I suppose, he wanted the Ledas of society," said the gentleman.

"Well, yes," said the lady, "but I did not know, although he is as rich as a Jew, that he was a Jupiter."

The faces of the "panicstricken" seem to look brighter, although everybody talks of "shrinkage" and ruin. Meanwhile the beautiful weather keeps the carriages going and Fifth Avenue looking gay. "I shall fail, but my wife need not give up her horses," said a young broker the other day. The old days of commercial morality, when people reduced their style of living because they had failed, seem to have gone out of fashion.

A letter from New York, this Queen of Commerce, is almost necessarily mercantile, as is our conversation.

"How you all talk stocks and money!" said a gentleman just arrived from a ten years' sojourn in Europe. "When I went away you were talking of books, of art, of social ethics, of fine women, of good dinners, of whist and bezique: now you are all talking of longs and shorts, bulls and bears, a fraction of per cent., etc. etc.—all of you, men, women and children."

We have a beautiful collection at the Art Museum in Fourteenth street of jewelry, objets d'art, and a good ceramic display, all clustered round the Di Cesnola sculptures and pottery. This collection, founded on the idea of the South Kensington Museum, makes a most agreeable lounging-place in the Kruger mansion, and is, in the absence of most of the opulent owners of private picture-galleries and the closing of the National Academy, almost our only artistic amusement at present. But the first of December will throw open many hospitable doors, and the new pictures and statues which have been accumulated during the past summer will become in one sense the property of the gazing public.

MARGARET CLAYSON.