land circle. It was that circle which compelled the world to acknowledge that there was an American literature. Of most of these authors the house at the corner came to be the publishers, and to the end they maintained the warmest relations with Fields, who was not their publisher only, but their appreciative and sympathetic friend. His kindred taste made him a faithful student of English literature, and almost as a boy he read poems of his own upon public occasions, and published a volume or two, which were his credentials to membership in the guild. Later, his lectures upon English authors, many of whom he personally knew, were very entertaining and suggestive, like the charming conversation of one who has seen with observing and sympathetic eyes those of whom all men gladly hear. tained nook at the old corner, and the kind heart and generous hand that made it so memorable. THE great musical festival of this spring in New York recalls the story of such events in this country. They began in the German Saengerfests in Cincinnati, the first of which was held in 1849, which consisted of one concert, for which four hundred tickets were sold for fifty cents each. There were one hundred and eighteen voices in the chorus, and the music was mainly part-songs. Another Fest followed in Louisville the next year. The good impulse was not relaxed, and in 1870 a festival took place in Cincinnati, in a building erected for the purpose, with nearly two thousand singers in its chorus; and a little later Theodore Thomas came to the city with his orchestra, stimulating the feeling already awakened, and in May, 1873, the first of the four festivals of '73, '75, '78, and '80, all of which he conduct The singular attraction of Fields for widely different natures was shown by the affection entertained for him by two men so different as Hawthorne and Dickens. In his later years, Hawthorne's home in Boston was generallyed, was held in Cincinnati. Fields's house, and Dickens would hardly have To the Western city, therefore, belongs the made his second and most triumphant and honor of beginning these noble entertainments profitable visit to this country except for in the United States. But New York may Fields, who was his "next friend" throughout justly plead that it had no proper place comthe tour. Dickens speaks of him most kindly mensurate with the city for such a festival in one of the "Uncommercial Traveller" papers, until this year. Old Castle Garden, on the after his return to England. It was certain- Battery, was a huge hall before it was changed ly remarkable that Dickens, who, twenty-five to an immigrant dépôt, and fifty or sixty years years before, had gone home from his first vis- ago, when State Street was a Fifth Avenue, it indignant because we would not pay him and Bunker's was a favorite retreat for select copyright upon his works, which we univers- strangers, and the City Hotel was the chief ally read and enjoyed-and his complaint was caravansary, a festival might have been held most just should have gone home from his at Castle Garden, and it would have served the second visit with more money made in a short-purpose well. Thirty years ago, indeed, when er time than any foreign author ever collected | Jenny Lind came—and Sir Julius Benedict, the from us before. Fields's service to him was immense, and Dickens was sincerely grateful. Alas! such talk is but a reminiscence of "yesterdays with authors." Fields himself was sixty-four years old when he died; but there was such essential and indefeasible youth in his feelings and temperament that even a fatal and painful malady could not quench it. On the very day, or the day before, he died, he went over to see Aldrich-for he was the friend of the younger as of the older authors-and it is a deep satisfaction to know that the end was as painless as it was sudden, sitting in his chair at evening, in the midst of friends, and listening to the voice that was the sweetest of all music to his heart. Long before, he had left the old corner and the curtained nook, and had gone to more stately publishing quarters. From these also he had withdrawn some years ago, leaving business altogether, and devoting himself thenceforward to lecturing. But the hospitable heart made his beautiful home what that curtained nook had been. Younger men were taking the places of those that loitered in the old book-store, but they found in the home the old corner welcome, and they will understand why their elder brethren recall with such fond and regretful affection the cur conductor of her concerts, has recently published some pleasant reminiscences of her and her tour-she "opened" in Castle Garden, and after her triumphant career in this country she sang her farewell to America in the same great bare space. Jullien, too, gave his summer concerts there, and on a warm moonlight evening the bucks of the last generation did not disdain to sit smoking on the balcony overlooking the glittering bay, while the welldrilled orchestra played waltzes and pot-pourris within. But those were the days when New York was down town, and the young people strolled out toward Canal and Broome streets to pick spring flowers, when the gay street promenade was along the lower part of Broadway, and the original New Amsterdam was still the nucleus of the city. With the swift and magnificent progress of the town, however, one thing has not kept pace. There are not the noble public halls which would be naturally looked for in such a city. The Cooper Union, Steinway, and Chickering, with two or three more, less familiar, are the only convenient rooms for the ordinary purposes of halls, and for many occasions they are ample. But for the great occasions which are constantly re THERE is something comical as well as outrageous in the position in which the city of New York has recently found itself. The citizens have been unable to clean the streets of the city in which they live, because other people who do not live there decided that they should not clean them. There were great popular meetings, and meetings of physicians, which declared emphatically that the streets must be cleaned, or a pestilence might follow; and a few airy gentlemen called politicians replied that the streets should not be cleaned except in the way that would be most profitable to the airy gentlemen. At the same time the Mayor of the city, its responsible chief executive officer, called the negligent streetcleaners before him to show why they should not be removed from a position whose duties they would not discharge; and the negligent street-cleaners sent some persons called counsel, who insulted and browbeat the Mayor in the most cowardly way, because they knew that the Mayor could not arrest them, as a Court would have done, and committed them to jail for contempt, as every decent citizen wished that he could have done. curring in a metropolis they are not adequate. The proposition of a musical festival in any of them would have been ludicrous. Boston, indeed, put up a temporary building, where Mr. Gilmore's trumpets could blare and his anvils clang with verge enough. But New York has had no "new land" close to some of her finest squares and streets upon which to pitch a musical camp, and challenge the world for supremacy in a huge festival. The very name is full of inspiring associations. Malibran sang at the Birmingham festivals, and the exquisite art of Caradori Allan illustrated them. But the spacious armory of the Seventh Regiment, the vast hall which the President came from Washington to open in state, far up on the elevated land of the Fourth Avenue, between Central Park and the Third Avenue, where the street is broad and open, and where access is easy, at last offers a hall worthy of the metropolitan character of the city, and of the unrivalled excellence which should distinguish a musical festival in New York. That has evidently been the feeling of those most closely concerned in arranging the festival of this year. Their preparations seem to have been adequate and thorough. The labor of Dr. Damrosch, the conductor, can not be imagined by those who do not think of the infinite detail of such an enterprise, and of the temperament of musicians. But, so far as the public could see, the work went steadily forward, and on a beautiful starry evening in early May the doors were opened, the vast throng was seated quickly and quietly, every solo singer was present, and as they came in and took their places in front of the enormous chorus, and the conductor at last appeared, and the great work was about to begin, there was a thunder of acclamation, followed by the performance of Handel's Dettingen Te Deum by a chorus of 1200 | voices, an orchestra of some 220, and the organ. The effect was most impressive, and One of the amusing aspects of it is the inthe audience of 10,000 persons burst into an- tense gravity with which a few politicians, swering applause. Miss Cary, Signor Cam-whose business it is to feather their own nests, panini, and Mr. Whitney were greeted most warmly; and when Rubinstein's sacred opera The Tower of Babel followed, there was equal enthusiasm; and the first concert of the festival ended with the general conviction that it was worthy of the anticipation and of the city. Already another festival is designed for next year, under the conduct of Theodore Thomas, who conducted triumphantly the great festi- | vals at Cincinnati. The interest and success of this year will but stimulate those of another year, and there is no reason to doubt that the same "continental" character-to use a favorite word of our fathers-will be given to them which belongs to all great American enterprises. Indeed, it is fast becoming unnecessary for America to cross the sea to hear the finest music, but we shall endeavor to make it necessary for Europe; and the festival of this year and the promise of that of next year are the earnest that we shall do so. The situation, in a certain ludicrous imbecility and helplessness, has recalled the days commemorated by Diedrich Knickerbocker. It has been a kind of practical satire in which Swift would have delighted—a parody of popular government. Farmers and lawyers from the rural interior voting that the inhabitants of a city shall not clean their streets as they wish, and voting so, not because they know or care anything about it, or have any objection to permitting people to dispose of their own dirt, but because a knot of politicians tell them that if they do allow it, it will be impossible to buy some votes for some other purposeall this, indeed, is beyond Swift. It is the reductio ad absurdum of a popular system. talk of the party and their obligations to it, the party being represented to the precious group by each other. The city, they say, must not be cleaned in a manner to injure the party. "But how if, while you are wrangling, the dirt deepens and the public health is affected?” "Dunno: but nothing must be done to hurt the party." "But how can it hurt the party to clean the streets ?" "Dunno: but if our men don't have the job, the other side's men will have it." "Well, suppose they do, what then?" "Dunno: but we should lose their votes." "Why?" "Dunno: but they vote for the side that gives them a job." "Do we, then, keep in power by buying votes with jobs ?" "Dunno: but we should be darned fools to let the other side have the job when we have the church is officered by Fleet parsons it is in the power to keep it for ourselves." a bad way. Politics, then, is a fight for jobs ?" "Dunno." "Does our side stand for any principle?" "Dunno: what I want is for our side to get what it can, and to keep all it gets." This is the reasoning which persuades farmers and rural lawyers to vote that what the citizens of New York, irrespective of party, desire, shall not be granted except in a way to benefit a party. If the cleaning of the streets can be arranged so as to help a side, they shall be cleaned. If not, the city may go to the plague. The same reasoning extends to filling purely professional offices. The physician of a seaman's retreat, for instance, is elected for four years by a board of trustees. He is an excellent and experienced medical man, and no fault is found with him. But he is on one side in politics, while a majority of the board is on the other. It is a good place, and it would be ridiculous, says this reasoning, to give it to the other side by re-appointing this physician. So he is turned out for the benefit of a side; or, if he be retained, those of the majority who do not vote to turn him out are denounced as traitors to their side. The result will be that the supplest political tool, with a smattering of medicine, will get the place. There is not a drunken nurse or attendant in any public hospital or asylum who owes his place to the influence of a side, who, when he abuses his charge with one hand, does not snap the other in contemptuous defi- | ance of protests, so long as he is sure of the favor of the boss of his side. The life-saving service, Professor Baird in the fish-culture service, every self-respecting specialist and upper officer in every department, earnestly asks that the question of political sides may not be considered in manning their force, because it is fatal to the efficiency of their service. "I hope that my clerks may not be turned out, sir," said the head of an important bureau, who had held his place for thirty years because he was indispensable. The party chief listened grimly, and when the head left the room, the chief muttered, savagely, "If you don't mind, I'll turn you out." It is as sensible to apply the rule of the side to professors in a college as to physicians of a seaman's retreat. To fill the Greek chair or the chair of chemistry, the fundamental inquiry must be, Is he on the right side? Is he a Boxite or a Coxite? In the case of the retreat, the argument was that the physician on one side was as good a medical man as the incumbent, who was on the other side. But there were two retorts: one, that he was not as good, because he lacked the special experience; the other, that such a system of selection is fatal to professional excellence. A Fleet parson may have taken orders, but when One thing, however, is plain: so long as we consent to appoint physicians and professors upon this preposterous plan, the airy gentlemen will snap their fingers at the endeavors of citizens to clean their streets in their own way. But when we select physicians because they are medical experts, and professors of chemistry because they understand chemistry, and postmasters because they are specially qualified for the postal service, we can get our streets cleaned without trying to make the cleaning buy votes. "I DON'T wish to go down to posterity talking bad grammar," said Lord Beaconsfield, as he corrected the report of his last speech in the House of Lords, a few days before his death. Probably no man's ambition was ever so completely gratified as his. Every prize that he coveted he had won. One posthumous ambition, indeed, so to speak, will be gratified. Even the last triumph that he could have expected, however ardently it may have been desired, that is, popular affection and regard, was his before the end. He was called "Dizzy," half contemptuously, a generation ago; he was "Beaky" in the kindly feeling of the streets when he died. We have spoken of him often during the last few years, for he was one of the most conspicuous figures in the English, and even in the European, world. There were two men known to everybody in England before Lord Beaconsfield died, said the Saturday Review, and now there is only one. The one who is left is Gladstone, who will be always mentioned with Disraeli as Pitt and Fox are familiarly associated. Beaconsfield will probably have a monument in Westminster Abbey. But the London News, which speaks for the sentiment which instinctively distrusted Disraeli, says that while it would not stint any expression of personal regard, it is certainly questionable whether his career should receive the national approval which would be attested by a monument in the great national commemorative gallery of England. The objection that such a plea has not been raised in other instances is not conclusive, when the question is once raised. When a tomb in St. Paul's was opened to Nelson, it expressed a universal sentiment of pride and patriotism. It was not an act of condonation or approval of Nelson's private irregularities of life. But his service to his country had been so eminent and so undoubted, his name had become such a part of England's heroic story, that if anybody was to be properly honored in that way, it was Nelson. The same argument can not be made for Disraeli. He was a Prime Minister of singular popularity and prestige, but what great service has he done for his country which would be universally and glad❘ly acknowledged? Agile, adroit, audacious, brilliant, and assuming to renew the renown and the power of the British name, would any impartial historian allege that he had done it? The great achievement of his political primacy, for which he was crowned with roses upon his return, was the Berlin Treaty. How did that treaty increase the renown of England? and what is posterity likely to remember but the trick of the secret preliminary understanding and the unhappy Cyprus protectorate? Are those feats which should be rewarded with a monument in Westminster Abbey ? But if his name should not be written in the Abbey, the Queen has made a pilgrimage to his grave, and his manes may be soothed. The warm feeling for him entertained by the Queen was no secret, and his deference to her is reported to have been that of a perfectly accomplished courtier. "To her Majesty he was the most consummate flatterer," says an eminent | Englishman. He did not hesitate, adds the same critic, to offer her an adulation which few men offer any woman, but it was only as sincere as everything else he said and did. This last remark has the sting which is felt in much that was said while Disraeli lived, and which has not been less said since he died. The News means, of course, that the late Prime Minister was an insincere man-that is, not a man of principle-and that his influence upon the national life was not elevating, and therefore that neither by public service nor by private character does he merit a national commemoration so distinguished as a monument in Westminster Abbey. His position, indeed, was much of the same kind in politics that it was in literature. As a writer, as an author, no claim for a national N memorial would be urged. A place might be asked in the Abbey for the author of Amelia, of the Vicar of Wakefield, of the Heart of MidLothian, of Pickwick, and of the Newcomes, and a certain fitness would be conceded, but hardly for the author of Vivian Grey and Endymion. His world of fiction was glitteringly unreal. Was his world of politics less so? For No doubt it was a dazzling career. more than half a century Disraeli had been in various ways one of the notabilities of England. Before Dickens or Thackeray was heard of, before Carlyle came to live in London, Disraeli was a popular author. As an author, however, he had long since had his day, but his political distinction prolonged his literary prestige. His personality was so unique and picturesque that people turned to his books to see what such a man had written. His last story, Endymion, published last year after his fall from power, and at the age of seventy-six, was bought by the publishers for an unprecedented price, and has had an enormous sale. But five years hence it will not be read except from curiosity. Such will be the feeling about its author's political career when the future student looks back to the extraordinary Jingo epoch. But the pleasant qualities of the great Jingo chief, his urbanity and good-humor with all men and women, including his strongest political opponents, his talent for surprises and effects in public affairs, and all the myriad phenomena of a genius so essentially alien to that of his country, will long be the tradition of clubs and of drawing-rooms. The bitterness of contemporary judgment will disappear, but Disraeli will not be named among great Englishmen. Editor's Literary Record. O scientific writer has been more successful than Élisée Reclus in popularizing the results of scientific research without any recourse to charlatanry or any sacrifice of scientific precision and accuracy. His latest production, The History of a Mountain,' is one of his happiest efforts in this direction. Abso- | lutely free from technical phraseology, couched in language that may be readily comprehended by any intelligent boy or girl of fifteen or sixteen, and written in the strain of a narrative whose captivating facts seem like the embellishments of fancy and imagination, it yet maintains the scientific standard so rigidly as to satisfy every requirement of the most advanced scholar. Imagining himself led almost by chance to the dizzy heights of a great mountain whose jagged crests penetrate the blue ether or are robed in clouds or snow, in the 1 The History of a Mountain. By ELISEK RECLUS. Translated from the French by BERTHA VAN NESS and JOHN LILLIE Illustrated by L. BENNETT. 12mno, pp. 193. New York: Harper and Brothers. ascent passing by the lesser hills and forests and streams that diversified its bosom, and looking out from its top over the plains that lay at its feet, and the towns and habitations he had left behind, he is led to investigate the natural phenomena by which he finds himself surrounded, and to become acquainted with the present life and past history of the mountain on which he stands, and which he assumes to be a type of all others. His studies included the enormous mass in its rock formations, in the irregularities of its surface and the diversity of its aspects under the changes wrought by the hours and seasons, in its snow and ice, in the atmosphere and clouds that invested it and the tempests that assailed it, in the plants and animals that gradually came to inhabit its surface, and the minerals that penetrated or were lodged in its veins or crevices, in the causes that contributed to its origin and that produced the changes it underwent, in its influence upon the poetry and history of the adjacent nations, and in the part it had as well as to zoology generally and to biology, he presents the results of his elaborate study of the zoology of the cat, treating the subject so as to give the student of biology such a knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and the kindred sciences as may enable him to study profitably the whole class to which it belongs. Concluding that the study of the anatomy and physiology of the cat might be best pursued by investigating the function of each organ and set of organs, and their structure, in the performance of his task Dr. Mivart has treated of these in successive chapters, in the following order: the skeleton, the muscles, the organs of alimentation, of circulation, of respiration and secretion, of generation and reproduction, the nervous system and the organs of sense, the development of the body, and psychology. Having thus disposed of the facts of structure and formation, he then proceeds to consider the various affinities of the cat to other animals (in this chapter including a full and interesting account of all the different kinds of cat, wild and domesticated), and its played in the life of man and other creatures, he intends as an introduction to the natural and in the movements of peoples and the prog-history of the entire group of backboned animals, ress of mankind. The results of these investigations are given in brief chapters, each of which is invested with the attractiveness of a romance and the interest of a personal or historical narrative, describing the peaks and valleys of the mountain, and their relation to it and one another, the rocks, crystals, and fossils of which it is composed, and the agencies that formed them, the influences-such as land-slips, clouds, fogs and storms, sunshine and snow, avalanches, glaciers, moraines, and torrents that have perpetually operated to change its features and to give it its present form, the plants, forests, and pastures that clothe it, the birds, beasts, and people that inhabit it, the gradations of climate that envelop it, and the traditions, legends, and folklore that have had their birth in its awful heights and chasms, or on its mysterious boMr. Reclus invests the mountain with the individuality of a human being, and he pictures the history of its origin, growth, change, and present condition, and reveals the causes that have been influential in each of these stages with the same enthralling partic-relations to space and time, or, in other words, ularity with which a skillful biographer delineates the life and career of an individual man. som. its place in nature. In following out this plan, Dr. Mivart treats elaborately upon the anatomy, physiology, psychology, taxonomy, and hexicology of the cat, unfolding the processes of individual development, or the series of changes gone through by each individual of the cat species in reaching maturity; and in a concluding chapter he considers the development of the species, and gives his conclusions as to the pedigree and origin both of the cat considered as a species and of the whole family of Felidæ. In arriving at his conclusions on this head he rejects as a crude and inadequate conception the theory that the origin of species is due to natural selection, and maintains that the genesis of new species is due mainly to an internal cause, which may be stimulated or aided, or may be more or less restricted, by the action of surrounding conditions; that all our knowledge being derived from experience, we can only judge (apart from revelation) of things as they have been by things as they are; that as every animal is now the product of a parent organism more or less like it, so any antecedent animal also was the product of a parent organism more or less like it; that we do daily see the origin of con THE great advances that have been made in biology-the science which treats of all living organisms from man to the lowest plant -and the important changes that have been wrought in men's minds in consequence, have impressed Dr. Mivart with the conviction that the natural history of animals and plants needs to be rewritten, and the field of nature surveyed from a new stand-point. In the preparation of such a history two ways were open -either to begin with the lowliest and most simply organized of living creatures, and gradually ascend to the highest and most complex in structure, or to begin with the latter, and from thence descend to the consideration of the lowest kinds of animated beings. Dr. Mivart gives the preference to the last-named course, and deviating in its execution from the historical practice of beginning the study of animals and plants with man, as the type of the highest class, for various reasons, which he states with great cogency, has preferred to select for examination and comparison some other animal, easily obtained, of convenient size, belonging to man's class-that of mam-crete embodiments of ideas which are not only mals-and not so different from him in the structure of its limbs and other large portions of its frame but that analogies between it and him may readily suggest themselves. He has selected the common cat as most fully satisfying these conditions, and in an exhaustive treatise, which he entitles The Cat, and which 2 The Cat. An Introduction to the Study of Backboned Animals, especially Mammals. By ST. GEORGE MIVART, Ph.D. With 200 Illustrations. 8vo, pp. 557. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. as distinct as one species from another, but are distinct as genera, families, orders, classes, and even kingdoms; that according to our present experience any new specific form would make its appearance during the period of embryonic life, and that such variations are capable of being transmitted to the offspring of the animals in which they first arise; that at various stages of individual evolution, sudden changes, caused by an acceleration or by an arrest of the development process, or even by some retrogres |