belief, for which not one of all these thousands has anything like a reason to offer?

NOTE 5. Page 88.

'A folly.' We English limit the application of this term to buildings but the idea might as fitly be illustrated in other objects. For instance, the famous galley presented to one of the Ptolemies, which offered the luxurious accommodations of capital cities, but required a little army of four thousand men to row it, whilst its draught of water was too great to allow of its often approaching the shore; this was a folly' in our English sense. So again was the Macedonian phalanx the Roman legion could form upon any ground: it was a true working tool. But the phalanx was too fine and showy for use. It required for its manœuvring a sort of opera stage, or a select bowling-green, such as few fields of battle offered.

NOTE 6. Page 88.

There is, however, a

mighty,' but quite as

I had written the 'Empress Catherine;' but, on second thoughts, it occurred to me that the mighty freak' was, in fact, due to the Empress Elizabeth. freak connected with ice, not quite so autocratic, and even more feminine in its caprice, which belongs exclusively to the Empress Catherine. A lady had engaged the affections of some young noblemen, who was regarded favorably by the imperial eye. No pretext offered itself for interdicting the marriage; but, by way of freezing it a little at the outset, the Czarina coupled with her permission this condition that the wedding night should be passed by the young couple on a mattress of her gift. The mattress turned out to be a block of ice, elegantly cut, by the court upholsterer, into the likeness of a well-stuffed Parisian matOne pities the poor bride, whilst it is difficult to avoid laughing in the midst of one's sympathy. But it is to be hoped that no ukase was issued against spreading seven Turkey carpets, by way of under-blankets, over this amiable nuptial present. Amongst others who have noticed the story, is Captain Colville Frankland, of the navy.

tress.

NOTE 7. Page 92.

Bergmann, the German traveller, in his account of his long rambles and residence amongst the Kalmucks, makes us acquainted with the delirious vanity which possesses these demi-savages. Their notion is, that excellence of every kind, perfection in the least things as in the greatest, is briefly expressed by calling it Kalmuckish. Accordingly, their hideous language, and their vast national poem, [doubtless equally hideous,] they hold to be the immediate gifts of inspiration: and for this I honor them, as each generation learns both from the lips of their mothers. This great poem, by the way, measures (if I remember) seventeen English miles in length; but the most learned man amongst them, in fact a monster of erudition, never read farther than the eighth mile-stone. What he could repeat by heart was little more than a mile and a half; and, indeed, that was found too much for the choleric part of his audience. Even the Kalmuck face, which to us foolish Europeans looks so unnecessarily flat and ogre-like, these honest Tartars have ascertained to be the pure classical model of human beauty, — which, in fact, it is, upon the principle of those people who hold that the chief use of a face is-to frighten one's enemy.

7

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.*

THIS book accomplishes a retribution which the world has waited for through seventy and odd years. Welcome at any rate by its purpose, it is trebly welcome by its execution, to all hearts that linger indulgently over the frailties of a national favorite once wickedly exaggerated-to all hearts that brood indignantly over the powers of that favorite once maliciously undervalued.

A man of original genius, shown to us as revolving through the leisurely stages of a biographical memoir, lays open, to readers prepared for sympathy, two separate theatres of interest : one in his personal career; the other in his works and his intellectual development. Both unfold together: and each borrows a secondary interest from the other: the life from the recollection of the works the works from the joy and sorrow of the life. There have, indeed, been authors whose great creations, severely preconceived in a region of thought transcendent to all impulses of earth, would have been pretty nearly what they are under any possible changes in the

* The Life and Adventures of Goldsmith, by John Forster.

dramatic arrangement of their lives. Happy or not happy-gay or sad — these authors would equally have fulfilled a mission too solemn and too stern in its obligations to suffer any warping from chance, or to bend before the accidents of life, whether dressed in sunshine or in wintry gloom. But generally this is otherwise. Children of Paradise, like the Miltons of our planet, have the privilege of stars -to dwell apart.' But the children of flesh, whose pulses beat too sympathetically with the agitations of motherearth, cannot sequester themselves in that way. They walk in no such altitudes, but at elevations easily reached by ground-winds of humble calamity. And from that cup of sorrow, which upon all lips is pressed in some proportion, they must submit, by the very tenure on which they hold their gifts, to drink, if not more profoundly than others, yet always with more peril to the accomplishment of their earthly mission.

Amongst this household of children too tremulously associated to the fluctuations of earth, stands forward conspicuously Oliver Goldsmith. And there is a belief current that he was conspicuous, not only in the sense of being constitutionally flexible to the impressions of sorrow and adversity, in case they had happened to occur, but also that he really had more than his share of those afflictions. We are disposed to think that this was not so. Our trust is, that Goldsmith lived upon the whole a life which, though troubled, was one of average enjoyment. Unquestionably, when reading at midnight, and in the middle watch of a century which he never reached, this record of one so amiable, so guileless, so upright, or