Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.

A CHILD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A quaint and charming volume, which has fallen in our way, is Little Charlie's Life, "the autobiography of a child between six and seven years of age, written with his own hand and without any assistance whatever." It was at the urgent request of the gentleman who acted as editor, Rev. W.R. Clark—thus rescuing an inimitable little work from comparative oblivion—that the parents of the youthful author reluctantly consented to the publication of this curious delineation of child-life. From the date of his birth (1833), Charlie must have written his work some forty years ago. How long he was engaged in its composition is not stated, but from the internal evidence yielded by the spelling and the handwriting (for the work is lithographed in exact imitation of the manuscript) we should infer that it occupied two or three years, the handwriting of the first seven chapters being in imitation of ordinary printing, while the remaining chapters appear in an ordinary schoolboy's hand. We may add that it is copiously illustrated by himself, and that the illustrations are worth their weight in gold, supplementing as they do, in a superfluously exact and curiously quaint manner, this most unique work.

He starts with this account of himself: "My name is Charles John Young, and I was born in Amfort, a pretty village in Hampshire, 1833 in July, that pleasant time when the birds sing merrily and flowers bloom sweetly. My father and mother are the kindest in the world, and I love them dearly and both alike. I shall give a description of them by and by. In the mean time I shall just say that my papa is a clergyman."

The earlier chapters describe the various migrations of the family from one parish to another, and from them we have no difficulty in recognizing in "papa" the Rev. Julian Young, who possessed no small share of the talents that distinguished his father, the celebrated tragedian, Charles Young, and which seem to have been transmitted to our author, who, we understand, has honorably served his country in Her Majesty's army. From his earliest years Charlie seems to have been strongly influenced by religious feelings. His creed was a bright and trustful one, a realization of God's presence and of the need of speaking to Him as to one who could always hear and help. When he was about three years old, we are told in the editor's interesting preface, he was often heard offering up little petitions for the supply of his child-like wants. Once, when, his nurse left him to fetch some more milk, his father overheard him saying, "O God, please let there be enough milk in the jug for me to have some more, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen." Many quaint little religious reflections and scriptural allusions are interspersed throughout the book. In one place he declares that "without papa and mamma the garden would be to me what the wilderness was to John the Baptist;" while again he offers up a pathetic prayer for a baby-brother; and throughout we are struck by the fact that his religion was pre-eminently one of love. Charlie's educational advantages were of the noblest and best, home-training largely predominating. In the ninth chapter he refers in a simple matter-of-fact way to his early studies: "Mamma devotes her time in teaching me and in reading instructive books with me. Papa tells me about the productions of the earth, rivers, mountains, valleys, mines, and, most wonderful of all, the formation of the human body." Further on we read: "Nothing of any great importance occurred now for some time. My life was spent quietly in the country, as the child of a Wiltshire clergyman ought, mamma devoting her time in teaching me, and my daily play going on the same, till at last papa and mamma took me to the splendid capital of England." However much this brilliant transition may have dazzled him, he still prefers his quiet country home, arguing thus: "As to living there [in London], I should not like it. The reason why—because its noisy riots in the streets suit not my mood like the tranquil streams and the waving trees I love in England's country.... 'Tis true—oh, how true!—in the poetic words of Mr. Shakespeare, 'Man made the town, God made the country.'"

Despite the stilted style and absurdly pompous descriptions, with an occasional terrible breakdown, Charlie's love of Nature, and especially of the animal creation, seems to have been most genuine. He speaks of "the wide ocean which when angry roars and clashes over the beach, but when calm crabs are seen crawling on the shore and the sun shines bright over the waves," and of "the billows rolling over each other and foaming over the rough stones," with an apparently real enthusiasm. The softer emotions of his nature were engrossed in this way, as we infer from the negative evidence afforded by his autobiography that he reached his seventh year without any experience of the tender passion.

His physiological ideas in the speculations regarding the origin of a baby-brother are naïvely expressed: "One day I was told that a baby was born [this was when he was three years and a half old], and upon going into mamma's bedroom I saw a red baby lying in an arm-chair wrapped in swaddling-clothes. It puzzled me very much to think how he came into the world: it was mysterious, very, and I cannot make it out now. My first thought was, that he must have had airy wings, and after he had come they had disappeared. My second thought was that he was so very little as to be able to come through the keyhole, and increased rapidly in size, just as it says in the Bible that a grain of mustard-seed springs to be so large a tree that the fowls of the air can roost upon it."

In his sixth year Charlie evinced poetic tendencies. We have in one of his poems a description of his grandpapa, "a venerable old gentleman with dark eyes, gray hair, noble features, and altogether very generous aspect." Here is "a song appropriate to him:"

At the head of this poem is a picture of the old ancestor, consisting of a hat, a head, a walking-stick, one arm and two legs, one of which—whether the right or left is doubtful, as their origin is concealed by the aforesaid arm—is much longer than the other, and walking in a contrary direction. The most wonderful feature of this sketch is the "hair streaming in the wind," the distance from the poll to the end of the flowing locks being longer than the longest leg.

We cannot conclude without an extract describing a "dreadful accident" which happened to our youthful author; "perhaps," as he solemnly says, "for a punishment of my sins, or to show me that Death stands ready at the door to snatch my life away:" "One night papa had been conjuring a penny, and I thought I should like to conjure; so I took a round brass thing with a verse out of the Bible upon it that I brought into bed with me. I thought it went down papa's throat, so I put it down my throat, and I was pretty near choked. I called my nurse, who was in the next room. She fetched up papa, and then my nurse brought the basin. Papa beat my back, and I was sick. Lo! there was the counter! Papa said, 'Good God!' and my nurse fainted, but soon recovered. Don't you think papa was very clever when he beat my back? Papa then had a long talk afterward with me about it—a very serious one."

The above pathetic story is accurately illustrated, but we especially regret that we cannot transfer to these pages some of the marvellous delineations of the animals in the Clifton Zoological Garden.

WANTED—A REAL GAINSBOROUGH

I am an unmarried man of twenty-four. After that confession it is hardly necessary to add that I am in the habit of thinking a great deal about a person not yet embodied into actual existence—i.e.. my future wife. I have not yet met her—she is a purely ideal being—but at the same time I so often have a vivid conception of her looks, her air, her walk, her tones even, that she seems to be present. My misery is that I cannot find her in real life.

No one need fancy that I am an imaginative man: quite the contrary is the fact. I am a lawyer, and have an office in Bond street. Every morning at eight o'clock I take the Sixth Avenue horse-cars and ride down to Fourteenth street. I have a fancy for walking the rest of the way, and toward evening I saunter back homeward along Broadway and Union Square.

Prosaic as these journeys may seem, they are nevertheless the inspiration of my hopes, the feeders of my visions. It is at such times that I enjoy my glimpses of the lady I long to meet. I jostle gentle creatures at every step: feminine shapes and feminine tones are on every side presented to eyes and ears. I trust nobody will be prejudiced against me when I confess that I see the fair one of my dreams in the shop-windows. Once having seen her, I become immeasurably happy, and go on dreaming about her until we meet again. It may seem a curious admission, but this beautiful although impalpable being is suggested by the charming dresses, hats and bonnets displayed on the milliners' blocks. None of our artists can paint portraits now-a-days: Art seems to have withdrawn her gifts from them and endowed the dressmakers and milliners instead.

It was at first difficult for me to decide on the personality of my beloved. My earliest fancy was for a blond: at least the dress was of pale blue silk with a profusion of lace trimmings. Her hat was of straw faced with azure velvet, and the crown surrounded by a long plume, also of ciel blue. I knew by heart the features of this fair young creature, invisible although she was to others. They seemed to belong more to a flower than to a face: her eyes were large and blue, full of appealing love; her hair was of course golden; her smile was angelic; and her whole expression was one of sweetness and goodness. She was my first dream: little although she belonged to actual life, she used to trip about by my side and sit with me in my room at home. Suddenly, however, I became enamored of a different creature, and my dream changed. I began to think of my lovely blond regretfully as of a beautiful creature too good for earth who died young. It is the habit of the shopkeepers to change the figures in their windows, and one morning I fell in love with quite a different creature. She wore when I first saw her a long dress of black silk and velvet sparkling with jet; over her shoulders was thrown carelessly a mantle of cream-colored cloth; on her head was a plush hat—what they call a Gainsborough—trimmed with a long graceful plume, also of cream-color. Although only her back was toward me, I knew by instinct exactly what her face was. She was dark of course, with a low broad forehead, about which clustered little short curls; her eyes were superb, at once laughing and melancholy; her features suggested rather pride than softness; but her smile was enchanting, open, sunny, like a burst of light from behind a cloud. Nothing could be more real than this vision. At first the discovery of this magnificently-endowed woman rendered me happy: I used to walk past the shop half a dozen times a day to look at her. Her costumes varied, but they always suggested the same dark but brilliant lineaments, the same graceful movements, the same peculiarly lovely tones. She often looked back at me over her shoulder, but had an air of evading me. All at once, with surprise and delight, I remembered that she might be found in actual existence, in real flesh and blood. I deserted the image for a week in the hope of finding the reality. I paced Fifth Avenue; I went to the dry-goods stores; I attended the theatres. Often I seemed to see her before me—the picturesque hat, the long plume, the rich mantle and dress. At such moments while I pressed forward my heart beat. When the cheek turned toward me and the eyes lighted up with surprise at my disappointed stare, it was easy enough to see that I had made a mistake. There was the hat, the cloak, the bewitching little frippiness of lace and net and ribbon about the bust. She had, however, copied the masterpiece without investing herself with its soul: her face was vague and characterless, her whole personality void of that eloquent womanliness which had so wrought upon me. This experience was so many times repeated that I was frightfully tormented by it. The familiar dress seemed to reveal with appalling truthfulness the lack of those qualities of heart and soul which I demanded. Those lovely, picturesque outlines suggest not only rounded cheeks colored with girlish bloom, but something more; and the graceful draping is not a meaningless husk.

I have gone back to my shop-window image. She never disappoints me. She is as beautiful, as magnificently endowed, as full of fascinating life and spirit, as ever. I sometimes think, unless I find her actual prototype, of buying that Gainsborough hat, that cloth mantle and velvet dress, and hanging them up in my room.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

History of the English People. By John Richard Green. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Most readers interested in English history have long felt the need of such a work as this, in which the results of recent research among original sources and of the critical examination of earlier labors are gathered up and summarized in a narrative at once clear and concise, free from disquisition, minuteness of detail and elaborate descriptions, without being meagre or superficial, devoid of suggestiveness or of animation. In calling his work a History of the English People, Mr. Green has not undertaken to deviate from the beaten track, devoting his attention to social development and leaving political affairs in the background. What he has evidently had in view is the fact that English history is in a special sense that of the rise and growth of free institutions, exhibiting at every stage the mutual influence or combined action of different classes, permeated even when the Crown or the aristocracy was most powerful by a popular spirit, and contrasting in this respect with that of France and Spain, in which during many centuries the mass of the people lost instead of gaining ground, representative bodies analogous to the English Parliament were deprived of their rights or swept out of existence, and liberty was sacrificed to national consolidation and unity. Whence this difference came need hardly be pointed out. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were neither freer nor more enterprising than the Franks and other Teutonic families; but the fortune which carried them to Britain saved them from inheriting any onerous share of the great legacy of the Roman Empire—with the task of absorbing and transmitting its language and civilization—secured them against the risk of being either merged in a more numerous race or submerged by a new influx, and thus preserved an identity and continuity which link their latest achievements with their earliest exploits, and stamp their whole career with the same character.

With such a subject, Mr. Green has had no difficulty in so marking its divisions as to concentrate attention on successive epochs without dropping the thread that runs through the whole. The earlier portions of his work are naturally the most instructive and the fullest of interest. The last volume, indeed, which covers the ground from the Revolution to the battle of Waterloo, besides including the index to the whole work, gives far too rapid a survey of momentous and familiar events to afford profit or satisfaction. One feels that, while the style retains its fluency, the tone has lost its warmth, and that much of the writing must have been perfunctory: the reading, at all events, cannot but be so. But scarcely any one, however well acquainted with the ground, can follow without pleasure and an enlargement of view Mr. Green's account of "Early England," "England under Foreign Kings," "The Charter" and "The Parliament" (from 1307 to 1461), which form the subjects of the first four books; while the next four, occupying the second and third volumes, and entitled "The Monarchy," "The Reformation," "Puritan England" and "The Revolution," are marked by a grasp of thought, a fine sense of proportion, a thorough knowledge and well-balanced judgment of men and events, and not unfrequently a dramatic force, which sustain the interest throughout, and which make them a valuable addition, and sometimes a necessary corrective, to the fuller and more brilliant narratives in which the same periods and subjects have been separately treated.

Mr. Green does not appear to have gone deeply into the study of original sources, but it is only in his incidental treatment of continental history that his deficiencies in this respect become palpable. Here he is often inaccurate, and even when his facts are correct his mode of stating them shows that he is not master of the whole field, and has little appreciation of mingled motives and attendant circumstances. Such a sentence as this: "The restoration of the towns on the Somme to Burgundy, the cession of Normandy to the king's brother, Francis, the hostility of Brittany, not only detached the whole western coast from the hold of Lewis, but forced its possessors to look for aid to the English king who lay in their rear," could not have been written with any clear ideas of either the political or the geographical relations of the places mentioned. What is meant by the "western coast"? Not, certainly, the towns on the Somme, which lie in the north-east, nor Normandy, which has indeed a western coast of its own, but cannot be said to form part of the western coast of France. Nor does Brittany include "the whole western coast," or even the larger portion of it, while it could not have been "detached from the hold of Lewis," inasmuch as he had never held it. As little will that remark apply to the other provinces on the western coast, as these were still in his possession. Who are meant, therefore, by the "possessors" of this misty coast, and why the English king is said to have lain "in their rear," can only be conjectured. It is a small blunder that the French king's brother is called "Francis" instead of Charles, since we must not suspect Mr. Green of confounding him with the duke of Brittany, who bore the former name. But the whole passage, in connection with what follows it, indicates that the author has mixed up the state of affairs at two very close, but very distinct, conjunctures. Many similar instances of defective knowledge might be cited, nor are they confined to this early period. The remark, in regard to Charles of Austria (the emperor Charles V.), that "the madness of his mother left him next heir of Castille" is nonsense: he was her heir in any case, while through her madness he became nominally joint, and virtually sole, ruler of the kingdom. His son Philip had not been "twice a widower" when he married Mary of England, and the assertion that "he owed his victory at Gravelines mainly to the opportune arrival of ten English ships of war" is patriotic, but foolish. That "Catholicism alone united the burgher of the Netherlands to the noble of Castille, or Milanese and Neapolitan to the Aztec of Mexico and Peru," would be an incomprehensible statement even if Peru had been inhabited by the Aztecs. Such errors, however, cannot seriously impair the value of Mr. Green's work. Its merits, as regards both matter and form, are solid and varied. The scale on which it was planned adapts it admirably to the gap which it was intended to fill, and, except in the latter portions, its comparative brevity of treatment excludes neither important facts nor modifying views. No shorter work could give the reader any adequate knowledge or conceptions in regard to English history, and no longer work is needed to make him fully acquainted with its essential features.

White Wings: A Yachting Romance. By William Black. New York: Harper & Brothers.—Roy and Viola. By Mrs. Forrester. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.—The Wellfields. By Jessie Fothergill. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Holt & Co.—Troublesome Daughters. By L.B. Walford. (Leisure—Hour Series.) New York: Holt & Co.—Brigitta. By Berthold Auerbach. (Leisure—Hour Series.) New York: Holt & Co.

There is a time appointed to read novels—a time which belongs, like that of other good things, to youth, when the real and the ideal merge into each other, and even the most practical beliefs turn upon the notion that the world was created for ourselves, and that the general system of things is bound to furnish circumstances and incidents which shall flatter our unsatisfied desires. It seems a pity that it should not fall to the lot of the critic to write down his impression of new books at this epoch, when he is most fitted to enjoy them. When romance and other delights have blankly vanished—" gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were"—he is scarcely fitted to trust the worth of his own impressions. Reading from mere idle curiosity or with critical intentions, and reading with delight, with eager absorption in the story and an eager desire to know how it turns out, are two different matters. The loss of this capacity for enjoyment of the every-day novel is not a subject for self-gratulation, coming as it does from our own absence of imagination and from narrowing instead of increasing powers. That period of our existence when we could read anything which offered should be looked back upon with a feeling of purely admiring regret, and in our efforts to master the novel of to-day we should endeavor to bring back the glory and the sweetness of the early dream.

It is not so very long ago that Mr. William Black's novels began to charm us. He did not take Fame at a single leap, but wooed her patiently, and suffered many a repulse. His first book, Ion; or, Marriage, was probably the very worst novel ever written by a man who was finally to make a great success. The Daughter of Heth achieved this result, and The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton, A Princess of Thule and Macleod of Dar deepened, one by one, the witchery the first threw over us. The author's power was especially shown in investing his maidens with glamour and piquancy: Coquette and Sheila led their captives away from the suffocating dusts and the burning heats of life. Then his backgrounds were so well chosen—those mysterious reaches of the far northern seas, the slow twilights over the heaving ocean, the swift dawns, the storms and the lightnings, and the glad blue skies. Even the music of the bagpipes inspired lamentations only less sweet than notes of joy. Mr. Black still has lovely girls; his yachts still pitch and roll and scud over the tossed and misty Hebridean seas; there are the same magical splendors of air and sky and water and shores; the wail of the pibroch is heard as of yore—

Why, then, is it that his last book fails to do more than arouse dim memories of some previous enjoyment? Why are his violets without perfume? Why is his music vacant of the old melodies?

In Roy and Viola, on the contrary, Mrs. Forrester is seen at her best, and has given us a book of lively interest. The situation in some respects suggests that of Daniel Deronda: D'Arcy is a sort of Grandcourt cheapened and made popular, acting out his instincts of tyranny and brutality with more ostentation and less good taste. What is subtly indicated by George Eliot is given with profuse effect by the present writer. Viola, if not a Gwendolen, is yet an unloving wife. Sir Douglas Roy plays a somewhat difficult rôle—that of friend to the husband and undeclared lover to the wife—without losing our respect. He is in many ways a successful hero, and acts his part without either insipidity or priggishness. A genial optimist like Mrs. Forrester, as her old readers may well believe, sacrifices to a hopelessly unhappy marriage no lot which interests us. Disagreeable husbands die at an auspicious moment, and everybody is finally made happy in his or her own way, which includes the possession of plenty of money. The conversations are piquant, and the interest of the story is well kept up.