in purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and government." He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity, but mere vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip, and opened letters, and delighted in his infamous police, and rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and women about him, boasting that "he knew everything;" and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women; and listened after the hurrahs and compliments of the street, incognito. His manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears, and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at key-holes, or, at least, that he was caught at it. In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue: and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. 30 * WHIPPLE. EDWIN P. WHIPPLE was born at Gloucester, Massachusetts, March 8, 1819. He early removed to Salem, and was edu. cated at the High School of that place. His bent, and alsc ability, for literary work manifested themselves at the early age of fourteen, at which time he contributed articles to a Salem newspaper. Whipple's introduction to the public as a lecturer took place in 1840, on the occasion of his delivering a satirical poem before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston. Since then he has charmed and roused audiences in almost all the great cities of the East and North by his critical lectures, and has been a prominent contributor to the leading magazines of the country. These lectures and articles, together with others, have found their way into the following volumes: Essays and Reviews-two volumes (1848– 49), Lectures on Literature and Life (1849), Character and Characteristic Men (1866), The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1869), Success and Its Conditions (1871), Literature and Life (1871). His articles are marked by their astute characterization and fertility of illustration. His lectures are philosophical in their texture, marked by nice discrimination, occasionally pushing a favorite theory to the verge of paradox; and when the reasoning faculties of his audience are exhausted, relieving the discussion by frequent picked anecdote, and pointed thrusts of wit and satire."* "For faculty of pure criticism we know not Mr. Whipple's equal. The judgment-seat shines in his eye. We seem to be hearing all the time the kindly sentence of an infallible sight. We should be afraid of the decree which * Duyckinck's Cyclopædia of American Literature. such knowledge, intuition, imagination, and logic combine to pronounce, but that no grudge provokes, or bribe can ever bias the court; and, while its just conscience cannot acquit hollow pretensions, over its own decisions preside an absolute purity and the loftiest ideal of human life."* "He enters deeply into the spirit of the work he examines, is peculiarly sensitive to its beauties and excellen cies, and writes of them with keen discrimination, cheerful confidence, and unhesitating freedom. . . . His style is sensuous, flowing, and idiomatic, abounding in unforced antitheses, apt illustrations, and natural graces."+ BOOKS. (From a lecture on "Authors in their Relations to Life," delivered before the Literary Societies of Brown University, September 1, 1846.) What words can declare the immeasurable worth of books.— what rhetoric set forth the importance of that great invention which diffused them over the whole earth to glad its myriads of minds? The invention of printing added a new element of power to the race. From that hour, in a most especial sense, the brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, books and not kings, were to rule the world; and weapons, forged in the mind, keen-edged and brighter than the sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and the battle-axe. The conflicts of the world were not to take place altogether on the tented field; but Ideas, leaping from a world's awakened intellect, and burning all over with indestructible life, were to be marshalled against principalities and powers. The great and the good, whose influence before had been chiefly over individual minds, were now to be possessed of a magic, which, giving wings to their thoughts, would waft them, like so many carrier doves, on messages of hope and deliverance to the nations. Words, springing fresh and bright from the soul of a master-spirit, and dropping into congenial hearts like so many sparks of fire, were no longer to lose this being with the vibrations of the air they disturbed, or moulder with the papyrus * Atlantic Monthly, December, 1866. † Griswold's Prose Writers of America. on which they were written, but were to be graven in everlasting characters, and rouse, strengthen, and illumine the minds of all ages. There was to be a stern death-grapple between Might and Right-between the heavy arm and the ethereal thought-between that which was and that which ought to be; for there was a great spirit abroad in the world, whom dungeons could not confine, nor oceans check, nor persecutions subdue-whose path lay through the great region of ideas, and whose dominion was over the mind. Books-lighthouses erected in the great sea of time-books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius -books, by whose sorcery times past become time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes,-these were to visit the firesides of the humble, and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor. Could we have Plato, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in our dwellings, in the full vigor of their imaginations, in the full freshness of their hearts, few scholars would be affluent enough to afford them physical support; but the living images of their minds are within the eyes of all. From their pages their mighty souls look out upon us in all their grandeur and beauty, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time. Precious and priceless are the blessings which books scatter around our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits through the most sublime and enchanting regionsregions which, to all that is lovely in the forms and colors of earth, "Add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream." A motion of the hand brings all Arcadia to sight. The war of Troy can, at our bidding, rage in the narrowest chamber. Without stirring from our firesides, we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth, or soar into realms where Spencer's shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us, where Milton's angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, philosophy-all that man has thought, all that man has done-the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations,—all are garnered up for us in the world of books. There, among realities, in a "substantial world," we move with the crowned kings of thought. There our minds have a free range, our hearts a free utterance Reason is confined within none of the partitions which trammel it in life. The hard granite of conventionalism melts away as a thin mist. We call things by their right names. Our lips give not the lie to our hearts. We bend the knee only to the great and good. We despise only the despicable, we honor only the honorable. In that world no divinity hedges a king, no accident of rank or fashion ennobles a dunce or shields a knave. We can select our companions from among the most richly gifted of the sons of God, and they are companions who will not desert us in poverty, or sickness, or disgrace. When everything else fails-when fortune frowns, and friends cool, and health forsakes us-when this great world of forms and shows appears a "two-edged lie, which seems but is not"-when all our earthclinging hopes and ambitions melt away into nothingness, "Like snow-falls on a river, One moment white, then gone for ever,”— we are still not without friends to animate and console us-friends, in whose immortal countenances, as they look out upon us from books, we can discern no change; who will dignify low fortunes and humble life with their kingly presence; who will people solitude with shapes more glorious than ever glittered in palaces; who will consecrate sorrow and take the sting from care; and who, in the long hours of despondency and weakness, will send healing to the sick heart, and energy to the wasted brain. Well might Milton exclaim, in that impassioned speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, where every word leaps with intellectual life," Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a inan lives a burden upon the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond life!” GENIUS. EXTRACT FROM A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE BOSTON MER CANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, FEBRUARY, 1848. INDEED, genius has commonly been incompletely defined, because each definition has been but a description of some order |