strosity in other ways,-an inability to enter at all into half the world of human belief and experience.

Again, even admitting that his conscience were absolutely independent of social opinion, the volitional powers of Paul Ferroll's mind are a feminine chimera. It is not assumed that he ever did perfectly justify to himself his own act. He thought it more or less justifiable, and had at all events determined upon it as a "working hypothesis," and was resolved to abide by his own programme with respect to it. But the determination with which he holds back his own imagination from ever dwelling upon it, when it is once irrevocable, to the destruction of his own peace and enjoyment of the blessings which he had thus purchased, is entirely feminine idealism. No man's power of will could control the intellectual craving to consider, reconsider, and justify to himself, his own deed. It is possible that the memory might act as an intellectual stimulus to work and think on other subjects with the intensity delineated. But on the enjoyments of life it could not but encroach, and eat away all their truth. The force of volition which could push the spectre into the background, and 'relish' the whole of life with the fulness and depth indicated in the sketch of Paul Ferroll, is altogether the myth of an aspiring imagination in love with a gigantic energy. No man could enjoy, and, of all things in the world, enjoy purity, tenderness, angelic love, as Paul Ferroll does, with blood on his secret soul. It was an audacious and magnificent flight of idealism to venture on such a picture.

With respect to the poems of this author, we have not very much to say. They indicate the same peculiarity of powers which this remarkable story shows, but in a very much less perfect form. Poetry cannot bear the constant nervous tension, -the bias to a certain preternaturalism, if we may be allowed the expression,-which is native to this author's genius-at all events, without some much greater force of inspiration to carry it off. The sense of awful contradictions, the sundering of soul and spirit, the disrobing of unrealities, the free use of the spiritual dissecting-knife, these things may no doubt be themes for poetry, when handled by a powerfully-constructive and yet satirical genius; but if handled with the slightest weakness in a poem, they are merely rhetorical. The bare outline of Paul Ferroll's story would be a piece of rhetoric merely. It is the wonderful skill of the detail, the fulness of observation with which it is dressed up, that hides the tremendous impossibility of the assumption from our eyes. This minute detail and close observing humour cannot be easily embodied in a poem; and hence the poems of "V." are only eloquent. Indeed, the imagination of this author is essentially rhetorical, though it is under

the control of a strong will and perfectly cultivated taste. For instance, she is struck by a passage in a friend's letter about the Queen's ball: "I hear that one hundred and fifty dead people were invited to the ball, last Friday," and writes a poem on the fancy that the ghosts attended. It is eloquent only, but conventional. And so are almost all these poems, which seem to spring, not from the growth of some whole conception in the imagination, but from the vividness of sentiment which the knowledge of life and death, and the great contradictions in the human spirit and destiny, arouse in any thoughtful mind. Our author's greatest power is certainly adapted to the world of fiction; for there the exigencies of the story rouse her imagination to the utmost, and the wonderful detail and subtlety of her store of observations clothe, if they do not conceal, the spiritual deficiencies of her imagination.

ART. XII.-THREE MEN AND THREE ERAS: WASHINGTON, JACKSON, BUCHANAN.

Washington. Par Guizot. Paris, 1851.

Life and Writings of Washington. By Jared Sparks. Boston, Massachusetts.

Life and Correspondence of Jefferson.

Life of Andrew Jackson.

Annuaire des deux Mondes. Paris, 1856-1860.

Constitution of the United States. By H. S. Tremenheere. London, 1854.

The Impending Crisis of the South. By H. R. Helper. New York, 1860.

Democracy in America. By Alexis de Tocqueville. Paris, 1835-1840.

THERE is no sadder spectacle to be seen on earth than the degeneracy of a great nation. And this sadness is the greater when the degeneracy is not mere political decay and descent from a position of supremacy and power, but involves all the higher elements of a nation's life; when mind, morals, manners, and physical condition have alike shared in the downward progress; when the deterioration is scarcely more visible in the citizen than in the man. But the sadness reaches its culminating point when this degeneracy is observable in a new state and among a young people; when they are rotten before they are ripe; when they display a marvellous vigour of constitution even in the very speed of the consuming malady; when their

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corruption is the result, not of the feebleness and decrepitude of age, but of energies directed to no noble aim, consecrated by no lofty purpose, and controlled by no dominating and venerated law. And the spectacle grows strange as well as sad when it appears that all this grievous and disheartening retrogression has taken place in spite of perhaps partly in consequence of a combination of advantages and facilities such as never before were accumulated round the favoured path of any nation; all the powers of a high civilisation brought to bear upon all the resources of primeval nature; all the learning, science, and experience of the world's maturity placed unreservedly at the disposal of the world's earliest and freshest youth; boundless territory; boundless freedom; perfect security from all control or interruption from without; an inheritance of vast intellectual wealth and of no intellectual fetters; a genial spirit of chivalry in the South, blending with and tempering an earnest and somewhat stern spirit of religion in the North ;and the whole in possession of a people sprung from the choicest race that in modern times has dwelt upon the earth.

This perplexing and melancholy phenomenon has been presented to us by the United States of North America at the close of Mr. Buchanan's administration, and no Englishman who is not meanly malignant can dwell upon the picture without grief and shame. It offers few temptations to the journalist; and the sketch which we propose to give would be too painful for us to have undertaken, but for two considerations. First, the history of the rapid deterioration of American character and institutions is full of warning and instruction, especially to Englishmen; for we share many of their faults and are exposed to many of their dangers; what they were we were, and what they are we may become, unless we study their career and avoid their mistakes: it is impossible for our statesmen and political philosophers to delve in any richer mine. And, secondly, we are inclined to believe that the great Republic of the West has reached and passed its lowest point; that henceforth its citizens and its public men will turn over a new leaf and retrace their false steps; that-by what means, at what rate, and through what vicissitudes of prosperity and tribulation, we cannot tell-they will finally attain a social and political condition of which they may be justly proud; that their severance will be their salvation, and the date of 1861 their new Era and their Year of Grace; for we do not believe in the permanent decay and degradation of any modern nation, least of all a nation of the Anglo-Saxon race. For seventy years they have had their own way; they have rejoiced, perhaps insolently, in their youth and strength; they have walked in the way of their heart and

in the sight of their eyes; and they now find that God has brought them into judgment for their wilfulness, as He said he would. Now, just when they are able to see all the steps which have brought them to their present pass, a golden opportunity, arising out of their very errors, is afforded them of recovery and redemption; and it cannot be but that so sagacious and resolute a people will seize it and turn it to account.

In the year 1790 Washington, the first President of the United States, had just been unanimously elected to guide and work the new federal constitution. That constitution had been carefully framed by a convention comprising all the wisest and purest patriots of the country, and had, in the judgment of every one, been rendered necessary by the confusion and almost anarchy into which the liberated provinces had fallen, for the want of some strong government and some adequate bond of union, very shortly after the acknowledgment of their independence in 1783. At this period the confederated states were thirteen in number; their aggregate population was as nearly as possible four millions; and of this amount 700,000 were African slaves. All the states held slaves, with the single exception of Massachusetts; but all regarded slavery as an institution full of danger and discredit, sincerely to be deprecated and quietly to be got rid of, as soon as circumstances should permit. The constitution was, to all appearance, as sagacious a one as could have been devised. Its framers foresaw most of the political dangers to which the state would be exposed, and guarded against them with great anxiety, and apparently with great skill. They endeavoured to secure the supremacy of law and purity in the administration of justice by the extraordinary and paramount powers conferred on the Supreme Court, and by ordaining the irremovability of the judges both in that and in all inferior tribunals. They hoped to provide against the consequence of too sudden and simultaneous a change in the governing body by appointing the election of the chief of the executive and the members of the legislative assemblies for different terms and at different epochs. They provided a legitimate time and means for the introduction of such changes as experience might show to be desirable in the constitution or as altered circumstances might necessitate, by enacting the assembling of a Convention for the purpose of revision, at certain distant intervals and under certain specified formalities. They fancied they had secured the choice of the President by the wisest heads of the nation and in the most dispassionate manner, by arranging a system of double election, in virtue of which the nation's decision as to its ruling head was vested in

a small body of men chosen ad hoc by the whole mass of the enfranchised people. They endeavoured to give as much strength to the Federal executive as the jealous susceptibilities of democratic temper in the several states would permit,—well aware that herein lay the real weakness and the chief danger of the new organisation,-by making the President supreme over all appointments, and able to select and to retain his ministers in defiance of hostile majorities in Congress. Finally, they attempted to supply such barriers as seemed feasible under republican institutions against the excessive preponderance of the democratic element, by the adoption of those electoral qualifications which existed at the time in the several states, which in some of them were stringent enough, and in all were a very decided and effectual negation of universal suffrage. A property qualification, or the payment of direct taxes, and usually a certain length of residence, was necessary to constitute a man an elector either for the Presidential Colleges, or for the Congress, or for the State Legislature. In every state, with three exceptions, as we shall hereafter see, these sagacious provisions and securities have been swept away, so that of the constitution framed by Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Randolph, little remains except the shell.

In Washington's hands the new political organisation worked well, and the Executive seemed almost strong enough. Such difficulties as arose even at that early stage of the experiment were easily surmounted by his promptitude, resolution, and prestige. But Washington was a man in a million. He achieved success in the two most arduous enterprises which can try the faculties of statesmen: he conducted a revolutionary war to a triumphant issue, with the smallest conceivable means and against the most powerful nation in the world; and he inaugurated and administered for eight years a constitution peculiar, unprecedented, and in some points unavoidably and incurably defective from its origin. His embarrassments and the scantiness of his resources as a revolutionary chief have seldom been done justice to. Wellington's difficulties in the early days of his Peninsular campaigns, though analogous in some respects and formidable enough, were trivial in comparison. The American Revolution presented many features which distinguished it from most other movements of a similar nature, and added enormously to the obstacles and complications with which its leaders had to contend. In the first place, during all its earlier stages, it was not a revolution at all, or even a rebellion. It was merely a resistance in the name of law and constitutional right to an illegal exercise of power. For many years the colonists had no idea of assailing, much less of over