The facilities of modern travel and its vast increase, while they have modified the characteristic features of the inn, have given it new economical importance; and, not long since, the American hotel-system was earnestly discussed in the English and French journals, as a substitute for the European: the method by which all the wants of the traveller are supplied at an established price per diem, instead of the details of expense and the grades of accommodation in vogue abroad. In Paris, London, some of the West India Islands, and elsewhere, the American hotel has, in a measure, succeeded. But it is in its historical and social aspect that we find the interest of the subject; as regards convenience, economy, and comfort, the question can perhaps only be met in an eclectic spirit, each country having its own merits and demerits as regards the provision for public entertainment of man and beast. The inns of Switzerland will bear the test of reminiscence better than those of any other part of the Continent; the solitary system of the English inn is objectionable; discomfort is proverbial in Havannah hotels; the garden-tables and music in the German hostels are pleasant social features; and, with all their frugal resources, the farm-stations in Norway boast the charm of a candid and naïve hospitality which sweetens the humble porridge of the weary traveller. ‘It is scarcely credible,’ says an ‘unprotected female,’ in her record of travel there, ‘that such pre-adamite simplicity of heart still exists on earth.’ In pictures and diaries, the German landlord is always light-haired, and holds a beer tankard; and the hotels in the British West Indies, according to a recent traveller, are always kept by ‘fat, middle-aged, coloured ladies, who have no husbands.’ Rose, writing to Hallam from Italy, hints the union of romantic and classical associations which some of the inns conserve and inspire; that of ‘Civita Castellana,’ he remarks, ‘is on the classic route from Rome to Florence, and is a type of the large Italian inns, such as one finds in romances: balconies, terraces, flowers of the south, large courts open for post-chaises—nothing is wanting.’ When Heine visited Germany, he tells us how the conservative habits of his fatherland newly impressed him in the familiar and old-fashioned dishes, ‘sour-krout, stuffed chestnuts in green cabbages, stockfish swimming in butter, eggs and bloaters, sausages, fieldfares, roasted angels with apple-sauce, and goose.’

In mediæval times, in that part of Europe, from the isolation of inns they were emphatically the places to find an epitome of the age—soldiers, monks, noblemen, and peasants surrounded the same stove, shared the contents of the same pot, and often the straw which formed their common bed; the proverb was, ‘Inns are not built for one.’ The salutations, benisons, and curses; the motley guests, the lack of privacy, the trinkgeld and stirrup-cup, the murders and amours, the converse and precautions, the orgies and charities thereof; were each and all characteristic of the unsettled state of society, the diversities of rank, the common necessities, and the priestly, military, and boorish elements of life and manners. But the rarity of any public-house, as we understand the term, is more characteristic of those times than the incongruous elements therein occasionally exhibited. ‘There seems,’ says an ancient historian, ‘to have been no inns or houses of entertainment for the reception of travellers during the middle ages. This is a proof of the little intercourse which took place between different nations. The duty of hospitality was so necessary in that state of society, that it was enforced by statutes; it abounded, and secured the stranger a kind reception under any roof where he chose to take shelter.’[4]

On first entering an inn at Havre-de-Grace, I found the landlady taking leave of the captain of an American packet ship. He had paid his bill, not without some remonstrance, and his smiling hostess, with true French tact, was now in the act of bidding so pleasing a farewell as would lure him to take up his quarters there on the return voyage. She had purchased at the market a handsome bouquet, and tied it up jauntily with ribbons. The ruddy sea-dog face of the captain was half turned aside with a look of impatience at the idea of being inveigled into good-nature after her extortion; but she, not a whit discouraged, held her flowers up to him, and smiling, with her fair hand on his rough dread-naught overcoat, turned full to his eye a sprig of yellow blossom, and with irresistible naïveté whispered,—‘Mon cher Capitaine, c’est immortel comme mon attachement pour vous.’ It was a little scene worthy of Sterne, and brought the agreeableness and the imposition of the innkeepers of the Continent at once before me. One evening, in Florence, I was sent for by a countryman, who lodged at the most famous hotel in that city, and found him perambulating his apartment under strong excitement of mind. He told me, with much emotion, that the last time he had visited Florence was twenty years before, with his young and beautiful wife. The belle of the season that winter was the Marchesa ——. She gave a magnificent ball, and in the midst of the festivities took the young American couple into her boudoir, and sung to them with her harp. Her vocal talent was celebrated, but it was a rare favour to hear her, and this attention was prized accordingly. ‘You know,’ added my friend, ‘that I came abroad to recover the health which grief at my wife’s death so seriously impaired; and you know how unavailing has proved the experiment. On my arrival here I inquired for the best inn, and was directed hither; upon entering this chamber, which was assigned me, something in the frescoes and tiles struck me as familiar; they awoke the most vivid associations, and at last I remembered that this is the very room to which the beautiful Marchesa brought us to hear her sing on that memorable evening; the family are dispersed, and her palace is rented for an hotel; hence this coincidence.’

Among the minor local associations to be enjoyed at Rome, not the least common and suggestive are those which belong to the old ‘Bear Inn,’ where Montaigne lodged. Not only the vicissitudes but the present fortunes of European towns are indicated by the inns. I arrived at ancient Syracuse at sunset on a spring afternoon, and dismounted at an inn that looked like an episcopal residence or government house, so lofty and broad were the dimensions of the edifice; but not a person was visible in the spacious court, and as I wandered up the staircases and along the corridors, no sound but the echo of my steps was audible. At length a meagre attendant emerged from an obscure chamber, and explained that this grand pile was erected in anticipation of the American squadron in the Mediterranean making their winter quarters in the harbour of Syracuse: a project abandoned at the earnest request of the King of Naples, who dreaded the example of a republican marine in his realm; and then so rarely did a visitor appear, that the poor lonely waiter was thrown into a fit of surprise, from which he did not recover during my stay.

To the stranger, no more characteristic evidence of our material prosperity and gregarious habits can be imagined than that afforded by the large, showy, and thronged hotels of our principal cities. They are epitomes of the whole country; at a glance they reveal the era of upholstery, the love of ostentation, the tendency to live in herds, and the absence of a subdued and harmonious tone of life and manners. The large mirrors and bright carpets which decorate these resorts are entirely incongruous—the brilliancy of the sunshine and the stimulating nature of the climate demand within doors a predominance of neutral tints to relieve and freshen the eye and nerves. It is characteristic of that devotion to the immediate which De Tocqueville ascribes to republican institutions, that these extravagant and gregarious establishments in our country are so often named after living celebrities in the mercantile, literary, and political world. This custom gives those who enjoy this distinction while living ‘the freedom of the house.’ It greatly amused the friends of our modest Geoffery Crayon, when, encouraged by his affectionate kinswoman and his friend Kennedy to ‘travel on his capital,’ under the pressure of necessity he once thus desperately claimed the privileges of his honoured name, wherefrom his sensitive nature habitually shrunk. ‘I arrived in town safe,’ he writes from New York to his niece, ‘and proceeded to the “Irving House,” where I asked for a room. What party had I with me? None. Had I not a lady with me? No; I was alone. I saw my chance was a bad one, and I feared to be put in a dungeon as I was on a former occasion. I bethought myself of your advice; and so, when the book was presented to me, wrote my name at full length—“from Sunnyside.” I was ushered into an apartment on the first floor, furnished with rosewood, yellow damask, and pier-glasses, with a bed large enough for an alderman and his wife, a bath-room adjoining. In a word, I was accommodated completely en prince. The negro waiters all call me by name, and vie with each other in waiting on me. The chambermaid has been at uncommon pains to put my room in first-rate order; and if she had been pretty, I absolutely should have kissed her; but as she was not, I shall reward her in sordid coin. Henceforth I abjure all modesty with hotel-keepers, and will get as much for my name as it will fetch. Kennedy calls it travelling on one’s capital.’

The extravagant scale upon which these establishments are conducted is another national feature, at once indicating the comparative ease with which money is acquired in the New World, and the passion that exists here for keeping up appearances. It would be useful to investigate the influence of hotel life in this country upon manners: whatever may be the result as to the coarser sex, its effect upon women and children is lamentable—lowering the tone, compromising the taste, and yielding incessant and promiscuous excitement to the love of admiration; the change in the very nature of young girls, thus exposed to an indiscriminate crowd, is rapid and complete; modesty and refinement are soon lost in over-consciousness and moral hardihood. But, perhaps, the most singular trait in the American hotel is the deference paid to the landlord: instead of being the servant of the public, he is apparently the master; and a traveller who makes the now rapid transition from a New York to a Liverpool hotel, might think himself among a different race; the courteous devotion, almost subserviency, in the one case, being in total contrast with the nonchalance and even despotism of the other. The prosperous security of the host with us, and the dependence of his guest for any choice of accommodation, is doubtless the most obvious reason for this anomaly; but it is also, in a degree at least, to be referred to the familiarity with which even gentlemen treat the innkeepers. To use a vulgar phrase, they descend to curry favour and minister to the self-esteem of a class of men in whom it is already pampered beyond endurable bounds. No formula of republican equality justifies this behaviour; and it usually reacts unfavourably for the self-respect of the individual. Some foreigner remarked, with as much truth as irony, that our aristocracy consisted of hotel-keepers and steamboat captains; and appearances certainly warrant the sarcasm. It was not always thus. When Washington lodged at the old Walton Mansion-house, which had been converted to an inn, the old negro who kept it was the ideal of a host; an air of dignity as well as comfort pervaded the house; through the open upper half of the broad door played the sunshine upon the sanded threshold; at the head of the long easy staircase ticked the old-fashioned clock; full-length portraits, by Copley, graced the parlour wall; the old Dutch stoop looked the emblem of hospitality; no angular figures were ranged to squirt tobacco-juice; no pert clerks lorded it from behind a mahogany barricade; but the glow of the windows at night, the alacrity of the sedate waiter, the few but respectable guests, and the prolonged meals, of which but two or three partook, gave to the inn the character of a home. Lafayette wrote to his wife in 1777, while descanting with enthusiasm upon the simplicity of manners in this country: ‘The very inns are different from those in Europe; the host and hostess sit at table with you, and do the honours of a comfortable meal; and, on going away, you pay your fare without higgling.’ An English traveller, who visited this country soon after the Revolutionary War, speaks of the ‘uncomplying temper of the landlords of the country inns in America.’ ‘They will not,’ says another, ‘bear the treatment we too often give ours at home. They feel themselves in some degree independent of travellers, as all of them have other occupations to follow; nor will they put themselves into a bustle on your account; but with good language they are very civil, and will accommodate you as well as they can. The general custom of having two or three beds in a room, to be sure, is very disagreeable; it arises from the great increase of travelling within the last few years, and the smallness of their houses, which were not built for houses of entertainment.’

It is a most significant indication of our devotion to the external, that ovations at which the legislators of the land discourse, and eulogies that fill the columns of the best journals, celebrate the opening of a new tavern, or the retirement of a publican. The confined and altitudinous cells into which so many of the complacent victims of these potentates are stowed, and their habits of subserviency to the rules of the house which are perked up on their chamber-walls, induced a Sicilian friend of mine to complain that sojourners at inns in this land of liberty were treated like friars. The gorgeous luxury of the metropolitan inns is reversed in the small towns, where, without the picturesque situation, we often find the discomfort of the Continent.

Under date of March 4, 1634, John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts, records in his journal: ‘Samuel Cole set up the first house of common entertainment’ in Boston. According to the famous literary ruse of Irving and Wirt, Knickerbocker’s facetious history and the Letters of a British Spy were found in the inn-chamber of a departed traveller. Of old, the American inn, or tavern as it was called, subserved a great variety of purposes. One of New England’s local historians says:—

‘The taverns of olden time were the places of resort for gentlemen; and one consequence was, good suppers and deep drinking. They also performed the office of newspapers. The names posted on the several tavern-doors were a sufficient notice for jurors. Saturday afternoon was the time when men came from all quarters of the town to see and hear all they could at the tavern, where politics and theology, trade, barter, and taxes, were all mixed up together over hot flip and strong toddy.

‘The taverns served also as places for marketing. During most of the winter they were filled every night with farmers, who had brought their pork, butter, grain, seeds, and poultry to market. Most families supplied themselves through these opportunities, and purchased the best articles at moderate prices.

‘Landlords could not grow rich very fast on country custom. The travelling farmer brought all his food for himself in a box, and that for his horse in a bag. He therefore paid only twelve cents for his bed, and as much for horse-keeping. It was not uncommon to have six days’ expenses amount only to two dollars. Auctions, theatricals, legerdemain, caucuses, military drills, balls, and dancing-schools, all came in place at the tavern. Especially, sleigh-riding parties found them convenient.’[5]

‘You will not go into one,’ wrote Brissot in 1788, ‘without meeting with neatness, decency, and dignity. The table is served by a maiden, well-dressed and pretty, by a pleasant mother whose age has not effaced the agreeableness of her features, and by men who have that air of respectability which is inspired by the idea of equality, and are not ignoble and base, like the greater part of our own tavern-keepers.’ In 1792, Wansey, the commercial traveller already cited, tells us he lodged at the ‘Bunch of Grapes,’ in Boston, and paid five shillings a day, including a pint of Madeira. He had an interview with Citizen Genet and Dr. Priestley at the ‘Tontine,’ near the Battery in New York; and saw Frenchmen with tricolour cockades at the ‘Indian Queen,’ on the Boston road;—trivial data for his journal then, and yet now suggestive of the political and economical condition of the land, whereof even tavern bills and company are no inadequate test. A sagacious reminiscent informs us that ‘the taverns of Boston were the original business exchanges: they combined the Counting-house, the Exchange-office, the Reading-room, and the Bank; each represented a locality. To the “Lamb Tavern,” called by the sailors “sheep’s baby,” people went to “see a man from Dedham”—it was the resort of Norfolk County; the old “Eastern Stage-house,” in Ann Street, was frequented by “down-easters,” captains of vessels, formerly from the Penobscot and Kennebec; there were to be seen groups of sturdy men seated round an enormous fireplace, chalking down the price of bark and lumber, and skippers bringing in a vagrant tarpaulin to “sign the articles.” To the “Exchange Coffee-house” resorted the nabobs of Essex County; here those aristocratic eastern towns, Newburyport and Portsmouth, were represented by shipowners and shipbuilders, merchants of the first class. Dealers in butter and cheese went to the “City Tavern,” in Brattle Street—a favourite sojourn of “members of the General Court,”—its court-yard crowded with teams loaded with the best pork from Vermont and Western Massachusetts, and the “wooden notions” of Yankee rustics. The last of the old Boston taverns was the once famous “Elm-street House,” a rendezvous of stage-coaches, teams, and transient boarders, which was kept up in the old style until fairly drawn from the field by “modern improvements.”’ Indeed, this slight mention of the functions and fortunes of inns in the New England metropolis hints, more than a volume of statistics, the progress of her growth and the cause of her social transitions; locomotion has completely done away with the local affinities of the past, and emigration modified the individuality of class and character which of old gave such special interest to the inn; we are too gregarious, luxurious, and hurried to indulge in these primitive expedients.

At the old ‘Raleigh Tavern,’ in Virginia—not long since destroyed by fire,—Patrick Henry lodged when he made his memorable début, as a patriotic orator, in the House of Burgesses; and it was in a chamber of this inn that he prepared his speeches, and that the great leading men of the Revolution, in that State, assembled to consult. Some of the inns in Canada are named after the Indian chiefs mentioned in the earliest records of exploration by Cartier. At the ‘Frauncis Tavern,’ in New York, Washington took leave of his officers, and the ‘Social Club,’ still famous in the annals of the city, met. Military men appreciate good inns; Washington wrote to Frauncis, and Lafayette praised him. One of the latest of memorable associations connected with the inns of New York, is that which identifies the ‘City Hotel’ with the naval victories of the last war with England. No one who listened to the musical voice of the late Ogden Hoffman, as he related to the St. Nicholas Society at their annual banquet his personal memories of that favourite hotel, will fail to realize the possible dramatic and romantic interest which may attach to such a resort, even in our unromantic times and in the heart of a commercial city. Visions of naval heroes, of belles in the dance, witty coteries and distinguished strangers, political crises and social triumphs, flitted vividly before the mind as the genial reminiscent called up the men, women, fêtes, and follies there known. A recent English traveller in the United States, in alluding to the resemblance he discovered to what was familiar at home, speaks of one relic which has caught the eye of few as suggestive of the old country. ‘There is,’ he observes, ‘in Baltimore an old inn, with an old sign, standing at the corner of Eutaw and Franklin streets, just such as may still be seen in the towns of Somersetshire; and before it are to be seen old wagons, covered and soiled and battered, about to return from the city to the country, just as the wagons do in our own agricultural counties.’[6]

How near to us the record of ‘baiting at an inn’ brings the renowned! ‘After dinner,’ writes Washington in the diary of his second visit to New England, ‘through frequent showers we proceeded to the tavern of a Mrs. Haviland, at Rye, who keeps a very neat and decent inn.’ Mendelssohn, ideal as was his tone of mind, wrote zestfully to his sister:—‘A neat, civil Frenchwoman keeps the inn on the summit of the Simplon; and it would not be easy to describe the sensation of satisfaction caused by its thrifty cleanliness, which is nowhere to be found in Italy.’ Lockhart, when an assiduous Oxford scholar, found his choicest recreation in ‘a quiet row on the river, and a fish-dinner at Godstow;’ and there is not one of his surviving associates, says his biographer, ‘who fails to look back at this moment, with melancholy pleasure, on the brilliant wit, the merry song, and the grave discussion which gave to the sanded parlour of the village alehouse the air of the Palæstra at Tusculum, or the Amaltheum of Cumæ.’

It is impossible to conceive any house of entertainment more dreary than some of the stage-houses, as they were called in New England; the bar-room with an odour of stale rum, the parlour with its everlasting sampler over the fireplace, weeping willow, tombstone, and inscription; the peacock’s feathers or asparagus boughs in the chimney, as if in cheerful mockery; the looking-glass that reflects every feature awry, the cross-lights of the windows, inquisitive loungers, pie-crust like leather, and cheese of mollified oak,—all defied both the senses and digestion, and made the crack of the coachman’s whip a joyful alarum.

The inns near famous localities identify themselves to the memory with the most attractive objects of travel; thus the inn, so rural and neat, at Edensor, with the marvels of Chatsworth; the ‘Red Horse,’ at Stratford-on-Avon, with Shakspeare’s tomb; and the ‘Nag’s Head,’ at Uttoxeter, with Johnson’s penance. It was while ‘waiting for the train,’ at an inn of Coventry, that Tennyson so gracefully paraphrased the legend of Godiva; and the sign of the ‘Flitch’ is associated with the famous bequest of the traditional patron of conjugal harmony. ‘A wayside inn at which we tarried, in Derbyshire, I fancied must have sheltered Moreland or Gainsborough, when caught in the rain, while sketching in that region. The landlady had grenadier proportions and red cheeks; a few peasants were drinking ale beneath a roof whence depended flitches of bacon, and with the frocks, the yellow hair, and the full, ruddy features we see in their pictures; the windows of the best room had little diamond-shaped panes, in which sprigs of holly were stuck. There were several ancient engravings in quaint-looking frames on the wall; the chairs and desk were of dark-veined wood that shone with the polish of many a year’s friction; a great fire blazed in the chimney, and the liquor was served in vessels only seen on this other side of the water, in venerable prints. It was an hostel where you would not be surprised to hear the crack of Tony Lumpkin’s whip, or to see the Vicar of Wakefield rush in, in search of Olivia—an alehouse that, you knew at once, had often given “an hour’s importance to the poor man’s heart,” and where Parson Adams or Squire Western would have felt themselves entirely at home.’[7]

Goldsmith has genially celebrated the humble, rustic inn in the Deserted Village, and his own habits confirmed the early predilection. ‘His favourite festivity,’ says one of his biographers, ‘his holiday of holidays, was to have three or four intimate friends to breakfast with him at ten, to start at eleven for a walk through the fields to Highbury Barn, where they dined at an ordinary, frequented by authors, templars, and retired citizens, for tenpence a head; to return at six to “White’s,” Conduit Street, and to end the evening with a supper at the “Grecian,” or “Temple Exchange Coffee-house.” The whole of the expense of the day’s fête never exceeded a crown, for which the party obtained “good air, good living, and good conversation.”’ ‘He, Goldsmith, however,’ adds Foster, ‘would leave a tavern if his jokes were not rewarded with a roar.’ One of Ben Jonson’s best comedies is the New Inn, and Southey’s most popular ballad is Mary of the Inn. Chaucer makes his Canterbury pilgrims set out from an inn at Southwark. We all remember the inns described by Scott. Elliston’s ‘larks’ at the ‘White Hart’ and ‘Red Cow’ were comical episodes, that read like a vaudeville. She Stoops to Conquer, L’Auberge Pleine, and The Double-bedded Room, are a few of the countless standard plays of which an inn is the scene. ‘What befell them at the Inn,’ is the heading of Don Quixote’s best chapters, for the knight always mistook inns for castles. Grammont’s adventures frequently boast the same scene, and it was ‘in the worst room of the worst inn’ that the accomplished, and dissolute Villiers died. Foote frequented the ‘Bedford’ in Covent Garden, and old Macklin doffed the buskin for the apron and carver. Philosophers, from Horace at the inn of Brundusium, to Montaigne noting the furniture, dishes, and prices at the inns where he rested on his journey into Italy, have found this a most suggestive and characteristic theme.

In German university towns, the professors frequent the ‘Hereditary Prince,’ or some other inn, at evening, to drink beer, smoke pipes, and discuss metaphysics. The jocose reproof which Lamb administers to the sentimental donor of Cœlebs was—

Quaintly pious is the allusion of John Winthrop, in a letter—more than two centuries old—to his father, the first governor of Massachusetts, when the project of immigration was about to be realized: ‘For the business of New England, I can say no other thing but that I believe confidently that the whole disposition thereof is from the Lord; and, for myself, I have seen so much of the vanity of the world, that I esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveller that hath lodged in the best or in the worst findeth no difference when he cometh to his journey’s end.’[8]

It has been said of Socrates that he ‘looked upon himself as a traveller who halts at the public inn of the Earth.’ ‘Was I in a condition to stipulate with death,’ writes Sterne, ‘I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends, and therefore I never seriously think upon the mode and the manner of this great catastrophe, but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it, that it happen not to me in my own house, but rather in some decent inn.’ Aaron Burr realized in a forlorn manner Yorick’s desire when, after years of social ostracism, he expired at a tavern on Staten Island.

The beautiful significance of the first incident in the life of Christ is seldom realized, offering, as it does, so wonderful and affecting a contrast between the humblest mortal vicissitudes in the outward circumstances of birth and the highest glory of a spiritual advent: they ‘laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.’ It was to an inn that the Good Samaritan carried the traveller who had ‘fallen among thieves.’ Joseph’s brethren rested at an inn on their way to Egypt; and it was at the ‘Three Taverns,’ in the suburbs of Rome, that Paul was met by the brethren. Venerable as are these allusions in sacred history, the visible token of the antiquity of inns that strikes our imagination most vividly is the wine-stains on the marble counter in Pompeii.

Falstaff absolutely requires the frame of an inn to make his portrait intelligible, with the buxom figure of Mrs. Quickly in the background; and it may safely be asserted that no public house of entertainment has afforded such world-wide mirth as the ‘Boar’s Head,’ Eastcheap. The freaks of Tony Lumpkin have their natural scope at an alehouse; and Goldoni’s Locandiera is a fine colloquial piece of real life; even the most eloquent of England’s historians cites the superior inns that existed in the range of travel there, during the early part of the seventeenth century, as a reliable evidence of the prosperity and civil advancement of the nation. These inns are, in fact, the original retreats for ‘freedom and comfort,’ whence our pleasant ideas on the subject are derived; they still exist in some of the rural districts of the kingdom; and the cleanliness, good fare, and retirement of the old-fashioned English inn, as well as the freshness and urbanity of the host, wholly justify their renown. The exigencies of the climate, and the domestic habits of the people, explain this superiority; where so much enjoyment is sought within doors, and the national character is reserved and individual, better provision is naturally made both for the physical well-being and the privacy of the wayfarer than is required under less inclement skies, and among a more vivacious and social race.

A most characteristic note of Boswell’s is that which records his idol’s hearty encomiums on a tavern, while dining at one in London. Both the man and the place then combined to realize the perfection of the idea, for that dim and multitudinous city invites to secluded conviviality; and that irritable, dogmatic, yet epicurean sage required the liberty of speech, an absolute deference, and the solid physical comforts so easily obtained at a London tavern. There he could make ‘inarticulate, animal noises over his food’ without restraint; there he could bring only such companions as would bear to be contradicted, and there he could refresh body and mind without fear of intrusion from a printer’s devil or needy author. Bores and duns away, a good listener by, surrounded with pleasant viands and a cheerful blaze, a man so organized and situated might, without extravagance, call a tavern-chair the throne of human felicity, and quote Shenstone’s praise of inns with rapture. Beneath this jovial appreciation, however, there lurks a sad inference; it argues a homeless lot, for lonely or ungenial must be the residence, contrast with which renders an inn so attractive; and we must bear in mind that the winsome aspect they wear in English literature is based on their casual and temporary enjoyment; it is as recreative, not abiding places, that they are usually introduced; and, in an imaginative point of view, our sense of the appropriate is gratified by these landmarks of our precarious destiny, for we are but ‘pilgrims and sojourners on the earth.’ Jeremy Taylor compared human life to an inn, and Archbishop Leighton used to say he would prefer to die in one.

AUTHORS.

Some of the fondest illusions of our student-life and companionship were based on literary fame. The only individuals, of the male gender, who then seemed to us (indiscriminate and mutual lovers of literature) worthy of admiration and sympathy, were authors. Our ideal of felicity was the consciousness of distributing ideas of vital significance, and causing multitudes to share a sentiment born in a lonely heart. The most real and permanent sway of which man is capable we imagined that of ruling and cheering the minds of others through the medium of literature. Our herbals were made up of flowers from the graves of authors; their signatures were our only autographs. The visions that haunted us were little else than a boundless panorama that displayed scenes in their lives. We used continually to see, in fancy, Petrarch beside a fountain, under a laurel, with the sweet penseroso-look visible in his portraits; Dante in the corridor of a monastery, his palm laid on a friar’s breast, and his stern features softened as he craved the only blessing life retained for him—peace; rustic Burns, with his dark eye proudly meeting the curious stare of an Edinburgh coterie; Camœns breasting the waves with the Lusiad between his teeth; Johnson appalling Boswell with his emphatic ‘Sir;’ Milton—his head like that of a saint encircled with rays—seated at the organ; Shakspeare walking serenely, and with a benign and majestic countenance, beside the Avon; Steele jocosely presiding at table with liveried bailiffs to pass the dishes; the bright face of Pope looming up from his deformed body in the cool twilight of a grotto; Voltaire’s sneer withering an auditor through a cloud of snuff; Molière reading his new comedy to the old woman; Landor standing in the ilex path of a Tuscan villa; Savage asleep on a bulk at midnight, in one of the London parks; Dryden seated in oracular dignity in his coffee-house arm-chair; Metastasio comparing notes with a handsome prima donna at Vienna; Alfieri with a magnificent steed in the midst of the Alps; Swift stealing an interview with Miss Johnson, or chuckling over a chapter of Gulliver; the funeral pyre of Shelley lighting up a solitary crag on the shores of the Mediterranean; and Byron, with marble brow and rolling eye, guiding the helm of a storm-tossed boat on the Lake of Geneva! Such were a few only of the tableaux that haunted our imagination. We echoed heartily Akenside’s protest against the sermon on Glory:

In our passion for native authors we revered the memory of Brockden Brown, and detected in his romantic studies the germs of the supernatural school of fiction; we nearly suffocated ourselves in the crowded gallery of the old church at Cambridge, listening to Sprague’s Phi Beta Kappa poem; and often watched the spiritual figure of the ‘Idle Man,’ and gazed on the white locks of our venerable painter, with his ‘Monaldi’ and ‘Paint King’ vividly remembered. We wearied an old friend of Brainard’s by making him repeat anecdotes of the poet; and have spent hours in the French coffee-house which Halleck once frequented, eliciting from him criticisms, anecdotes, or recitations of Campbell. New Haven people that came in our way were obliged to tell all they could remember of the vagaries of Percival, and the elegant hospitality of Hillhouse. We have followed Judge Hopkinson through the rectangular streets of his native metropolis, with the tune of Hail, Columbia! humming in our ears; and kept a curious eye on Howard Payne through a whole evening party, fondly cognizant of Sweet Home. Beaumont and Fletcher were our Damon and Pythias. The memorable occurrence of our childhood was the advent of a new Waverley novel, and of our youth a fresh Edinburgh Review. We loved plum-colour because poor Goldy was vain of his coat of that hue; and champagne, partly because Schiller used to drink it when writing; we saved orange-peel because the author of The Rambler liked it; and put ourselves on a course of tar-water, in imitation of Berkeley. Roast pig had a double relish for us after we had read Elia’s dissertation thereon. We associated goldfish and china jars with Gray, skulls with Dr. Young, the leap of a sturgeon in the Hudson with Drake’s ‘Culprit Fay,’ pine-trees with Ossian, stained-glass windows with Keats (who set one in an immortal verse), fortifications with Uncle Toby, literary breakfasts with Rogers, waterfowl with Bryant, foundlings with Rousseau, letter-writing with Madame de Sévigné, bread and butter with the author of Werther, daisies with Burns, and primroses with Wordsworth. Mrs. Thrale’s acceptance of Piozzi was a serious trouble to our minds; and whether ‘little Burney’ would be happy after her marriage with the noble emigré was a problem that made us really anxious until the second part of her Diary was procurable and relieved our solicitude. An unpatriotic antipathy to the Pilgrim Fathers was quelled by the melodious pæan of Mrs. Hemans; and we kept vigils before a portrait of Mrs. Norton, at an artist’s studio, with a chivalric desire to avenge her wrongs.

This enthusiasm for authors was not altogether the result of a literary idiosyncrasy or local influences; it grew out of a consciousness of personal obligation. Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Porter, and Maturin were the clandestine intimates of childhood; the English poets became the confidants of youthful sentiment, which met but a cool reception from those by whom we were surrounded; and when judgment was enough matured to discriminate the charms of style, a new world opened under the guidance of Mackenzie and Sterne, Lady Montagu and Sir Thomas Browne. Books are endeared, like people, by the force of circumstances; ideal tendencies, a spirit of inquiry, a thirst for sympathy, will often drive minds whose environment is uncongenial to seek therein what is elsewhere denied; and when in early life this resource becomes habitual, it is not surprising that a deep personal feeling should be gradually engendered, and that we should come to regard favourite authors as the most reliable and dearest of our companions; and this without an inkling of pedantry or a title to scholarship, but from a thoroughly human impulse intellectually vindicating itself. To such a pitch did the feeling once possess us that we resented any imputation cast upon our chosen authors as if they were actual friends. We honoured the critic that defended Bacon from the charge of meanness, and longed to applaud his prowess; we disliked to admit the evidence that Johnson was dogmatic, and ascribed his arrogance to a kind of excusable horse-play; we contended that Thomson was not lazy, but encouraged ease to escape ambition; we grew very warm if any one really believed Shelley an atheist, and argued that his faith transcended that of the majority of so-called Christians; we never would admit that Sterne was heartless, or Moore a toady. We could have embraced Dr. Madden after reading his Infirmities of Genius, and thought the most brave of Sidney’s deeds his Defence of Poesy. How we longed to go a-fishing with Walton, to walk in Cowley’s garden, to see Roscoe’s library, to hear Coleridge talk, to feel the grasp of Burns’s hand, to drink whisky with John Wilson, to pat Scott’s dogs, to go to the theatre with Lamb, to listen to D’Israeli the elder’s anecdotes, to look on the lakes of Westmoreland at the side of Wordsworth, and to ride through ‘our village’ in Miss Mitford’s pony chaise!

The first time we saw an author was an epoch. It was in a church. Some one whispered, just as the sermon began, that a lady in the next pew was the writer of a moral tale then rated high in our little circle. We did nothing the rest of the service but watch and speculate upon this, to us, wonderful personage. We were disappointed at her every-day look and attire; there was no fine frenzy in eye or gesture; there she sat, for all the world like any other lady—mild, quiet, and attentive. We were somewhat consoled by noting the extreme paleness of her complexion, and a kind of abstraction in her gaze. Her habiliments were dark and faded; in fact, as we afterward discovered, she was poor, and her book had been printed by subscription. Thenceforth, for a long time, we imagined all female authors were dressed in black, looked pensive, and had no colour. This illusion, however, was banished, some years later, when we were taken to a literary soirée where all the female authors were fat, dressed in a variety of colours, and, instead of being melancholy, had an overwhelming vivacity that made us realize how the type had changed. By degrees we became enlightened, and our authormania cooled. In the first place, we were shocked by seeing a pathetic writer, whose universal tribute was tears, in a flashy vest; then we encountered a psychologist, whose forte was sublimity, enacting the part of a mendicant; it was our misfortune to conduct a bard, whose highly-imaginative strain had often roused our aspirations, home from a party in a state of inebriety; one author we were prepared to love turned out a disagreeable egotist; another wearied us by the exactions of his vanity; a third repelled by intense affectation, and a fourth by the bitterness of his comments; one, who had written only the most refined sentiment, proved, upon acquaintance, an acute Yankee; one, who had sung the beauty of nature, we found to be an inveterate dandy; and another, whose expressed ideas betokened excess of delicacy, grossly violated the ordinary instincts of gentle blood.

On one of our earliest visits to ———, the illusive charm attached to the idea of a female author became, indeed, changed to a horror from which we have never wholly recovered. We were requested to escort a lady to what we understood was an ordinary social gathering. After entering a rather small and somewhat obscure drawing-room, saluting the hostess, and taking the proffered seat, we were struck with the formal arrangement of the company. They formed an unbroken row along the walls of the room, except at one end, at which stood a table surmounted by an astral lamp; and in an arm-chair beside it, in studied attitude, like one poséd for a daguerreotype, sat a woman of masculine proportions, coarse features, and hair between yellow and red, which fell in unkempt masses down each side of her broad face. She was clad in white muslin of an antiquated fashion. We noticed that the guests cast looks, partly of curiosity, partly of uneasiness, upon this Herculean female, who rolled her eyes occasionally, and smiled on us all with a kind of complacent pity. We ventured, amidst the silence, to ask our neighbour the name of the gigantic unknown. She appeared extremely surprised at the very natural question. ‘Why, don’t you know? We’re invited here to meet her, and, I assure you, it is a rare privilege. That is Mrs. Jones, the celebrated author of the Affianced One!’ At this moment a brisk little woman in the corner, with accents slightly tremulous, and a manner intended to be very nonchalant, broke the uncomfortable hush of the room. ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ said she, ‘as one of your earliest and most fervent admirers, allow me to inquire if your health does not suffer from the intense state of feeling in which you evidently write?’ The Amazonian novelist sighed—it was funny to see that operation on so large a scale,—and then, in a voice so like the rougher sex that we began to think she was a man in disguise, replied: ‘When I reach the catastrophe of my stories, it is not uncommon for me to faint dead away; and, as I always write in a room by myself, it has happened more than once that I have been found stretched, miserable and cold, on the floor, with a pen grasped in my fingers, and the carpet littered with manuscript blotted with tears!’ The Siddonian pathos of this announcement sent a thrill round the circle; glances of admiration and pity were thrown upon the self-immolated victim at the shrine of letters, and other inquiries were adventured, which elicited equally impressive replies, until the psychological throes of authorship—particularly in the female gender—assumed the aspect of an experience combined of epilepsy and nightmare. The tragic egotism of these revelations at length overcame our patience; and, leaving our fair companion to another’s escort, we slipped out of the room. A thunder-storm had arisen; the rain was pouring down in torrents; upon the door-steps we encountered a very pale, thin, little man, with an umbrella under his arm and a pair of overshoes in his hands. As we passed, he addressed us in a very meek and frightened voice: ‘Please, sirs, is there a party here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Please, sirs, is the celebrated Mrs. Jones here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Please, sirs, do you think I could step into the entry? I’m Mr. Jones!’

Hastening to our lodgings in another metropolis at twilight, we passed a dwarf standing on a threshold, who leaped down and caught us by the arm, eagerly pronouncing our name, and requesting a moment’s interview. He led the way to a little room lighted by a single candle, closed the door, and, with a quivering impatience of gesture, introduced himself. We remembered his name at once. He was the author of a feeble imitation of Pope. We never beheld such an ogre. His little green eyes, ape-like limbs, and expression indicative of sensitiveness and conceit, in that lone and dusky cabinet, were appalling. From a cupboard he took down what we supposed to be a ledger, and, placing it on the table, gave an emphatic slap to the worn brown cover. ‘There,’ said he, ‘is garnered the labour of years. I have heard of your enthusiasm for authors, and I will read you specimens of a poem destined to see the light a twelvemonth hence. Listen!’ It was an epic in blank verse—dreary, monotonous, and verbose. His recitation was like the refrain of a bull-frog; it grated on the ear and made the nerves shrink. The candle burned thick; the air seemed mephitic, and in a little while we were oppressed and fevered as by a glamour cast over our brain; we looked toward the door and moved uneasily; the green eye was cast fiercely up from the page, and the tone of the deformed became malicious. We had heard of his vindictive spirit, and felt as if in the cave of an imp spellbound and helpless. The complacent hardihood with which he read on made us inwardly frantic. We thought of the fair being who waited for us at a neighbouring fireside, of the free air we had quitted, and we writhed under the infliction. Hours passed; a numb, half-unconscious sense of misery stole over us, and still the little demon glared and spouted. ‘Words, words, words’—how detestable seemed they then! At last, in a fit of desperation, we clapped our hand to our forehead, and murmuring something about a congestive tendency, sprang up, ran through the hall and out at the door, and looking back, after hurrying on a few yards, beheld the dwarf, with his enormous book clasped to his heart, gazing after us with the implacable look of a disappointed savage.

Literature is no more regulated by accident than nature; lucky hits and the tricks of pencraft are as temporary as all other artificial expedients. The authors truly remembered and loved are men in the best sense of the term; the human, the individual informs and stamps their books with an image or an effluence not born of will or mere ingenuity, but emanating from the soul; and this is the quality that endears and perpetuates their fame. Hence Goldsmith is beloved, Milton reverenced, and the grave of Burns a ‘Mecca of the mind.’ At the commencement of the last century there appeared in the London Gazette the offer of a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of a certain person thus described: ‘A middle-sized, spare man, about forty years of age, of a brown complexion and dark brown hair, though he wears a wig, having a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mouth.’ This was Daniel Defoe, the victim of partisan injustice, for whose rights every schoolboy would fight now, out of sheer gratitude to the author of Robinson Crusoe. Let the writers who debase authorship into a perversion of history, a sickly medium for egotistical rhetoric, a gross theft of antecedent labours, a base vehicle for spite, or a mechanical knack of book-making, realize that they are foredoomed to contempt, and that character is as little disguised by types as by costume. The genuine author is recognized at once; his integrity is self-evident.

It was sunset on the Arno. Far down the river, over mountain ranges where snow yet lingered, a warm tint, half rose and half amethyst, glowed along the horizon; beside the low parapet that bordered the street people were loitering back from their afternoon promenade at the Cascine: here a priest, there a soldier, now an Englishman on horseback, and then a bearded artist; sometimes an oval-faced contadina, the broad brim of whose finely-woven straw hat flapped over his eyes of mellow jet; and again a trig nurse, with Saxon ringlets, dragging a petulant urchin along; and over all these groups and figures was shed the beautiful smile of parting day; and by them, under graceful bridges, flowed the turbid stream, its volume doubled by the spring freshets. I surveyed the panorama from an overhanging balcony, where I stood awaiting the appearance of a friend upon whom I had called. Hearing a movement behind, I stepped back into the salon, and found a middle-aged gentleman seated on a divan near the window. We exchanged salutations and began to converse. He alluded, in unexceptionable English, to the beauty of the hour. ‘I came here from Geneva,’ he said. ‘There I work—in Italy I recreate; and it is wonderful how this country ministers to intellectual repose, even by the very associations it excites. We feel a dream-like relation with the past, and enter readily, for a time, into the dolce-farniente spirit of the people; and then return to task-work invigorated and with new zest.’ There was a bland, self-possessed, and paternal look about this chance acquaintance that insensibly won my confidence and respect. He was the image of a wise and serene maturity. His ample brow, his strong physique, his affable manner, and kindly eye, suggested experience, intelligence, and benignity. I was certain that he was a philosopher of some kind, and fancied him an optimist; but the utter absence of pretension and the simple candour of his address gave no hint of a man of renown. Accordingly, I soon found myself engaged in a most pleasant, and to me instructive colloquy. Following up the hint he had thrown out, I spoke of the difficulty of combining mental toil with health—reverting in my own mind to our American race of scholars, a majority of whom are confirmed invalids. ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘there is vast error on this subject. Be assured that we were intended for intellectual labour, and that there is a way of making it subservient to health. I will tell you a few rules founded on experience. Vary the kind of work—let it be research one hour, meditation another; collation to-day, and revision to-morrow. Do this on system; give the first part of the day to the hardest study, the afternoon to exercise, and the evening to social intercourse; let the mind be tasked when the brain is most vigorous—that is, after sleep; and woo the latter blessing, not in the feverish hour of thought and emotion, but after the gentle exercise of the mind, which comes from pastime and friendliness.’ I looked at the hale, contented face of the speaker, about whom no sign of nervous irritability or exhaustion was discoverable, and asked myself what experience of mental toil could have led him to such inferences. He looked like a temperate country gentleman, or unambitious and well-to-do citizen. He then spoke of the changes he observed upon each successive visit to Italy, of the climate of Switzerland, and the society of Geneva; then he referred to America, divining at once that it was my country, and exhibiting entire familiarity with all that had been accomplished there in literature. He betrayed a keen sense of enjoyment, recognized a genial influence in the scene before us, and gradually infected me with that agreeable feeling only to be derived from what poor Cowper used to call ‘comfortable people.’ I led him to speak of his own method of life, which was one of the most philosophical order. He considered occasional travel and prudent habits the best hygiène for a man of sedentary pursuits; and the great secret both of health and successful industry the absolute yielding up of one’s consciousness to the business and the diversion of the hour—never permitting the one to infringe in the least degree upon the other. I felt an instinctive respect toward him, but at the same time entirely at home in his company; the gentleman and the scholar appeared to me admirably fused in, without overlaying, the man. Presently the friend we mutually expected came in, and introduced me to Sismondi. I was fresh from his Italian Republics and Literature of the South of Europe, and he realized my ideal of a humane and earnest historian.

Quite in contrast with this tranquil and robust votary of letters was the appearance and manner of Silvio Pellico. No one who has ever read the chronicle of his imprisonments can forget the gentle and aspiring nature just blooming into poetic development, which, by the relentless fiat of Austrian tyranny, was cut off in a moment from home, intelligent companionship, and graceful activity, and subjected to the loneliness, privation, and torments of long and solitary confinement; nor is the spirit in which he met the bitter reverse less memorable than its tragic detail—recorded with so much simplicity, and borne with such loving faith. When I arrived in Turin he was still an object of espionage, and it was needful to seek him with caution. Agreeably to instructions previously received, I went to a café near the Strada Alfieri, just at nightfall, and watched for the arrival of an abbé remarkable for his manly beauty. I handed him the card of a mutual friend, and made known my wishes. The next day he conducted me through several arcades, and by many a group of noble-looking Piedmontese soldiers, to a gateway, thence up a long flight of steps to a door, at which he gave a significant knock. In a few moments it was quietly opened. He whispered to the old serva, and we tarried in an ante-chamber until a diminutive figure in black appeared, who received me with a pensive kindliness that, to one acquainted with Le Mie Prigioni, was fraught with pathos. I beheld in the pallor of that mild face and expanded brow, and the purblind eyes, the blight of a dungeon. His manner was subdued and nervous, and his very tones melancholy. I was unprepared to find, after years of liberty, the effects of his experience so visible, and felt almost guilty of profane curiosity in having thus intruded upon his cherished seclusion. I had known other victims of the same infernal tyranny; but they were men of sterner mould, who had resisted their cruel fate by the force of will rather than the patience of resignation. Pellico’s very delicacy of organization barbed the arrows of persecution; and when at length he was released, loneliness, hope deferred, and mental torture had crushed the energy of his nature. The sweetness of his autobiography was but the fragrance of the trampled flower—too unelastic ever again to rise up in its early beauty. A smile lighted up his brooding expression when I told him of the deep sympathy his book had excited in America, and he grasped my hand with momentary ardour; but the man too plainly reflected the martyr. The stifling air he breathed under the leads of Venice and the damps of his Spielberg cell seemed yet to weigh upon his soul; no glimmer of the patriotic fire which beams from Francesca da Rimini, no ray of the vivacious observation that beguiled his solitude and quickened his pen, redeemed the hopeless air of the captive poet; the shadow of the power he had braved yet lay on his form and face; and only the solace of filial love and the consolations of religion gave hope to his existence.

That is but a vulgar idea of authorship which estimates its worth by the caprices of fashion or the prestige of immediate success. Like art, its value is intrinsic. There are books, as there are pictures, which do not catch the thoughtless eye; and yet are the gems of the virtuoso, the oracles of the philosopher, and the consolations of the poet. We love authors, as we love individuals, according to our latent affinities; and the extent of the popular appreciation is no more a standard to us than the world’s estimate of our friend, whose nature we have tested by faithful companionship and sympathetic intercourse. He who has not the mental independence to be loyal to his own intellectual benefactors is as much a heathen as one who repudiates his natural kin. Indeed, an honest soul clings more tenaciously to neglected merit in authors as in men; there is a chivalry of taste as of manners. Doubtless Lamb’s zest for the old English dramatists, Addison’s admiration of Milton’s poetry, and Carlyle’s devotion to German favourites, were all the more earnest and keen because they were ignored by their neighbours. In the library, an original mind is conscious of special and comparatively obscure friends; as the lover of nature has his pet flower, and the lover of art his favourite old master. It is well to obey these decided idiosyncrasies. They point, like the divining-rod, to hidden streams peculiarly adapted to our refreshment. I knew an old merchant that read no book except Boswell’s Johnson, and a black and hump-backed cook whose only imaginative feast was the Arabian Nights.

No one really can, indeed, love authors as a class without a catholic taste. If thus equipped, how inexhaustible the field! He is independent of the world. Is he retrospective in mood? Plutarch will array before him a procession of heroes and sages. Does he yearn for conviviality? Fielding will take him to a jolly tavern. Is he eager for intellectual communion? Landor is at hand with a choice of ‘imaginary conversations.’ Would he exercise causality? Bishop Butler will put to the test his power of reasoning. Is he in need of a little gossip by way of recreation? Horace Walpole will amuse by the hour. Is the society of a sensible woman wanted? Call in Maria Edgeworth or Jane Austin. Is the bitterness of a jilted lover in his heart? Locksley Hall will relieve it. Would he stroll in the forest? Evelyn or Bryant will take him there in a moment. By the sea-shore? Crabbe and Byron are sympathetic guides. Are his thoughts comprehensive and inclined for the generalities of literature? Open De Staël or Hallam.

The relation of authorship to society varies with political influences and average culture. The class of degraded penwrights so often alluded to by Fielding, the ferocious quarrels recorded of and by Pope and Johnson with critics and publishers, are phases of literary life, which, if not extinct, have become essentially modified with the progress of civilization. Yet a quite recent quarterly reviewer speaks of this class of men as ‘a kind of ticket-of-leave lunatics;’ and modern experiences, if less dark than old annals of Grub Street, include some quite as remarkable instances of reckless extravagance in prosperity and barbarous neglect in adversity. The Bohemian class is confined to no epoch or country. Yet charming is the group of authors that illustrate and signalize every period of British history—an intellectual alleviation to the monotony of fashionable, and the rancour of political life. Every era of French government also has its brilliant salon of philosophers and poets. Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Montagu assembled, in their day, as exclusive a coterie as used to cluster about Dryden’s chair, dine with Sir Joshua Reynolds, keep Burns’s birthday at Edinburgh with Scott at the head of the table, rally at Jeffrey’s call, dispute with Hume, chat over Rogers’s breakfast, fraternize with the lakers at Keswick and Grasmere, or pass an evening with Lamb. From the days of Shakspeare to those of Evelyn and Sydney Smith, from La Fontaine to Lamartine, from Klopstock to Goëthe, and from Mather to Channing, every cultivated city abroad and at home has boasted its author circle, to which kindred tastes ever revert with zest, and whose traditions as well as ‘works’ prolong a spell more refined and memorable than any other social prestige. Weimar, Bordeaux, Florence, Edinburgh, and Boston, as well as London and Paris, are thus consecrated by reminiscences of Goëthe, Schiller, Montaigne, Alfieri, Wilson, Mackenzie, some Concord Sage, or Spanish Historian, some Autocrat, Wizard of the North, or Ettrick Shepherd of the pen. To have seen Niccolini on the ‘Lung’ Arno; Elizabeth Browning at a Casa Guidi window; Rossini, the historical novelist, at a bookstore in Pisa; Hillhouse under the New Haven elms; Hawthorne at the Athenæum; Elia at his India-house desk; poor Heine on his ‘mattress grave,’ or Freiligrath at his bank-counter, requires but the perspective of time to be as impressive or winsome an experience as the first survivors of Pope, Chatterton, Milton, or Burke realized in rehearsing their personal cognizance of these famous authors. Such is the instinctive attraction of congenial or eminent authorship. If this subject were nomenclated and analyzed in the naturalistic way, there is scarcely a sphere of humanity or a form of character which might not be identified with or illustrated by authorship; the mad, the mendicant, the charlatan—combative, contemplative, heroic, and sybarite,—are but a few of the varieties which literary biography reveals. Their amours, diseases, profits, calamities, triumphs, quarrels, personal tastes and habits, domestic life, and most individual traits and fortunes, have been minutely recorded, so as to form, on the whole, the best and most accessible psychological cabinet for the student of human nature. Of no other class of men and women with whom we never had personal acquaintance, do we know so many details; Chatterton’s despair, Young’s skull-light, Milton’s organ, Berkeley’s tar-water, Coleridge’s opium, Swift’s lady-loves, Cowper’s hymns and hares, Rogers’s table-talk, Scott’s dogs, Steele’s debts, Lamb’s folios, are as familiar to us as if they appertained to some neighbour or kinsman. The prisons of Cervantes, Raleigh, Pellico, Hunt, and Montgomery, have a pathetic charm which no other record of captivity boasts. Even the self-delusions of authors awaken a considerate interest; the mistaken judgment of Petrarch and Milton, in regard to the comparative merit of their writings; and the exaggerated estimate of their own verses by such able statesmen as Frederic and Richelieu, tend to enhance the mysteries of the craft and sanction its illusions. But it must be confessed that the romance of authorship is fast disappearing in its reality; so numerous have become the votaries of a once rare pursuit, so common the renown, so universal the practice, that the individual and characteristic, the curious and interesting elements thereof, are more and more merged in the commonplace and familiar.

A distinction has often been insisted on between the critical and the creative in literature; but modern criticism, in its best development, is essentially reproductive; so intimate, deep, and affluent is its dealing with authors, that they often are restored in all their vital worth; and the process has endeared such writers as Lamb, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Arnold, and St. Beuve, as true intellectual benefactors. Such philosophical and æsthetic interpreters of authorship have engendered an eclectic appreciation and enjoyment of authors, and made us what Allston calls ‘wide likers.’ Hence the prevalence and promise of what may be called a cosmopolitan, in distinction to a provincial taste, whereby we learn to value the greatest diversities of style, subject, and character in literature. Fastidious and severely disciplined minds, indeed, coldly ignore certain authors, and warmly espouse others; but to a spirit at once generous and cultivated, sympathetic and intelligent, though a special charm will invest favourite authors, all of the fraternity who are genuine have a recognized claim to grateful recognition; and even the unequal and incongruous development of modern English literature, incident to the absence of what Matthew Arnold calls ‘any centre of intelligent and urbane spirit,’ like the French Academy. Desirable as such a discipline and standard is in quelling eccentricity and incorrectness, the free and energetic development, the honest, though sometimes rude, exercise of authorship in our vernacular, is no small compensation. We confess a partiality for the richly-diversified phases of mental life thus induced—an eclectic relish for the varieties of national and personal characteristics. The artistic French, the meditative German, the practical English writers, have each their attraction and use; the desultory style of Richter, the quaint individuality of Lamb, the verbose dignity of Johnson, the mosaic finish of Gray, the grotesque eloquence of Carlyle, the flowing rhetoric of Macaulay, Wordsworth’s pastoral isolation, Scott’s feudal enthusiasm, Byron’s intense consciousness, Shelley’s disinterested idealism, the homely images of Crabbe, and the sensuous luxury of Keats, are all, in their way and at times, accordant with our mental wants, congenial to our receptive moods. Why should not we tolerate and enjoy the various elements of literature as fully and fondly as those of nature and society? Does it not argue a narrowness of mind inconsistent with genuine intellectual and moral health to perversely confine our appreciation of authorship to certain schools, forms, and individuals? Are not the philosophical, the piquant, the earnest, the playful, the solemn, gay, impressive, winsome, acute, wise, and humorous traits and triumphs of written thought as legitimate, in their infinite variety, as means of human culture, discipline, and pleasure, as the myriad tints and tones of nature, and the diversities of character and manners? A true lover of authors will not only find something to enjoy and appropriate in the most diverse forms of expression and qualities of genius, both in the literature of power and in that of knowledge as finely discriminated by De Quincey; but will separate the inspired and the journeyman work of each author, and do justice to what is genuine while repudiating the conventional. If what Goëthe maintained is literally true, and genuine authorship is the reflex of consciousness upon outward life, then all its spontaneous products must have a vital element of human life, love, and truth, more or less congenial to all readers of candid, clear, and humane instincts: for we agree with a liberal and acute critic, when he says that the gift of literary genius ‘lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere—by a certain order of ideas; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations, making beautiful works of them.’

It is a new and glorious era in our experience of books when the vital significance of authorship is heartily realized; dilletantism, excusable in the novice, gives place to the worship of truth. To write for the mere sake of writing, to amuse with the pen, becomes in our estimation what it is—a thing of less interest than the most simple and familiar phenomena of nature. As life reveals itself, and character matures, we long, above all, for reality; we perceive that growth is our welfare, and that earnestness, faith, and new truth are the only joy of a manly intellect. Then we read to nerve our moral energies, to extend the scope of perception, and to deepen the experience of the soul: the butterflies of literature allure no longer; the imitators we pass by; but the deep thinkers, the original, the brave, lead us on to explore, analyze, and conquer. ‘Literature,’ says Schlegel, ‘according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infamy, a pastime, a dry labour, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue;’ and this diversity is true, not only of authors in general, but sometimes of the same individual. Many a poet, whose early utterance was inspired, has degenerated into a hack, a truckster, and a mercenary penman; and many a youthful dabbler in letters, by some deep experience, has been matured into the bold advocate or heroic pioneer in the world of thought.

We soon learn heartily to sympathize with one of the unfortunate originals of Goëthe’s Werther, and declare with him,—‘I have resolved in future to take good care how I write anything to an author, save what all the world may see;’ only extending the prudential resolve to conversation,—for whatever advance has been made in refinement in the use of language, in the abuse of confidence modern writers are so destitute of scruples, that the sanctities of life and social intercourse have no greater or more profane intruder than the author.