try has a proper application. A law of international copyright would do something to give America a national literature, the natural outcome and feeder of a vigorous national life.

Before speaking briefly of the work which is named at the head of this article, we must say a few words of Dr. Holmes himself. If, as some advocates of the doctrine of hereditary transmission maintain, it is impossible to understand a man without having known his ancestors up, at least, to the second generation backwards, it is as impossible thoroughly to appreciate a work of art without knowing something of the artist. There are few cultivated English readers to whom The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table requires an introduction. The book so named, with its successor, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, has been widely read and much admired in this country. They have, we believe, achieved an unbounded popularity at home, not without reason. Dr. Holmes is indisputably and above all an entertaining writer. He thinks, and he can express his thought articulately. He flashes upon you an ingenious suggestion, or a whimsical paradox, clothed in fantastic guise, and without giving you time to pause upon the truth it contains, or to reflect even whether what seems so plausible is true, presents you with another and another in endless sequence. The general effect is somewhat kaleidoscopic. It suits, we suppose, the rapid hurry of the American mind, which cannot delay upon any thing, but which glances quickly over a thousand things; which is curious, but has its curiosity easily sated; which propounds countless questions, and is contented with the first plausible reply. Another source of Dr. Holmes's American popularity lies, no doubt, in the circumstance that he is a man of varied culture, accomplished in no ordinary degree; and that he addresses a people among whom a certain low average of education is universal, but among whom a high order of cultivation is rare. His writings abound in pleasant hints, stimulative to curiosity, of regions of thought and literature into which his readers have never penetrated; and they agreeably enlarge, though by fitful glimpses, which rapidly close in, the mental horizon of the great body of subscribers to the Atlantic Monthly. But though enriched with European culture, Dr. Holmes is essentially an American. Rub the varnish off the Russian, and the Tartar is seen beneath. There is the exaggerated provincialism of sentiment, the confusion of extent of territory with national greatness, of democratic equality with personal freedom, which characterise the typical American. There are few Englishmen who will be able to read such passages as the following without a smile. The professor speaks at the breakfast-table.

"A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly

civilised portions of these United States of America, bred in good principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease every where, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without taking away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with good opening in some honourable path of labour, is the finest sight our private satellite has had the opportunity of inspecting on the planet to which she belongs."

After pointing out the great superiority of the young American over the young Greek, much in the spirit in which Mr. Hannibal Chollop combated the assertion of the Spartan Portico (a tri-weekly journal) that the ancient Athenians went a-head of the present Loco-foco Ticket, Dr. Holmes proceeds with almost lyrical enthusiasm:

"Never since man came into this atmosphere of oxygen and azote was there any thing like the condition of the young American of the nineteenth century. Having in possession, or in prospect, the best part of half a world, with all its climates and soils to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke that fly with him day and night, so that he counts his journey, not in miles, but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees them in his annual flight; with huge leviathans always ready to take him on their broad backs, and push behind them with their pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or separate the hemispheres ; heir of all old civilisations, founder of that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not lies, is to be the noblest as it is to be the last; isolated in space as from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his opinions on almost* every subject, and assured that he will soon acquire the last franchise which men withhold from men-that of stating the laws of his Spiritual Being, and the beliefs he accepts without hindrance, except from clearer views of truth, he seems to want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life. In fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities left in the débris of the Old-World civilisation which deserve a a respectful treatment at his hands."

We grant the young American "the wings of fire and smoke" and "huge leviathans" with "broad backs" and "pectoral or caudal fins," that is, ill-made railroads and explosive steamboats, and a vast territory to traverse in these insecure conveyances. We may also grant that his "chief danger," as with all half-educated persons, lies in that boastful self-exaggeration, which is the result of complete ignorance, or only superficial knowledge of past history and foreign lands. But we deny the justice of the advantage attributed to America in the following passage.

"I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they The italics are our own.

have in England,' I said. 'An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion and politics. Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr. Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.'

'Sir,' said he, 'it isn't what a man thinks or says, but when, and where, and to whom he thinks and says it. A man with a flint and steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking them over a tinder-box is another. The free Englishman is born under protest; he lives and dies under protest,—a tolerated but not a welcome fact. Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England? The same idea in the soul of an Englishman, who struggled up to it and still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognised save as an element blended with all his thoughts,—a natural movement like the drawings of his breath, or the beatings of his heart,-is a very different thing.""

A quasi-conservative like Mr. Seward is certainly not an appropriate parallel to Mr. Bright. Mr. Sumner would be more to the point. If Mr. Bright, after one of his tirades against the aristocracy in the House of Commons, were smitten down from behind with a leaded cane,-say by Lord John Manners,-we might admit that liberty of speech in England and America were on the same level. Mr. Martineau speculates a great deal more freely than ever Dr. Channing did. To step outside the recognised sects, we doubt whether Professor Newman has ever experienced that same complication of petty annoyances and persecutions which Theodore Parker describes in the sermons in which he gives "Some Account of his Ministry," as directed against himself in that oupaλòs yns, that centre of the universe, Boston, Mass. Mr. Holyoake, on the whole, has had an easier time of it than Elijah Lovejoy. The two thinkers who have most widely influenced cultivated English society in all ranks, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, are certainly not remarkable either for political or for theological orthodoxy. But our purpose is not to discuss this question with Dr. Holmes, but simply to establish, and illustrate, the ultra-Americanism which characterises him. So far from admitting with him, however, that "America is the only place where man is full-grown," we contend that in America we have not the full-grown man, but only the over-grown boy. There is the boastful self-exaggeration, the inability of taking fair measure of its capacities and attainments as compared with those of its contemporaries and predecessors, which mark a people that has not yet cut its wisdom-teeth. The products of the American mind have no mellowness; there is a crude acidity about them. With all his intensely American feeling, however, Dr. Holmes is unable to make any advance towards the creation of a specifically American literature. He no sooner puts pen to paper than he

becomes imitative. As in Washington Irving we have the revivication of the Spectator school of literature, as in Cooper we see only the pale and watery reflexion of Walter Scott, so in Dr. Holmes we have an American edition (expurgated) of Montaigne and Rabelais and Sterne. The modern work of English literature which the "Aristocrat" and the "Professor" at the breakfast-table at once call to mind,-as much, perhaps, in the way of contrast as in the way of resemblance,-is the Noctes Ambrosiana. The broad rollicking humour and strong sense of the Scotch professor, however, are in contrast as remarkable with the somewhat thin intellectual wit of the American, as the dry toast and tea of a Boston boarding-house are to the "strong waters" and meat-suppers of Ambrose's. The divinity student and school-dame and vexed female in bombazine are the proper hearers of the wisdom of the Autocrat, as the Shepherd and Tickler are the fitting interlocutors of North. The entire absence of dramatic powers in Holmes is, however, what chiefly differentiates him from Wilson. The boarders at his breakfast-table are only so many points to which the Autocrat attaches the threads of his conversation, so many mirrors in which he is variously reflected. They exist only as they are shone upon by him. We are sorry to speak in what appears disparagement of a writer for whom we entertain a very sincere admiration; from whom the reader is sure of entertainment and of a certain amount of mental stimulus; in whom we acknowledge wit, humour, fancy-real, if not of the highest order, shrewd observations of life, if not deep insight into character, ingenious if somewhat superficial criticism on art, literature, and philosophy. We are glad to add, without any qualification, that Dr. Holmes's sympathies are always large and humane; and that the most odious of tyrannies, always associated in those who indulge it with a deep underlying scepticism, which suspects its own truth of being a cunningly disguised lie that may be found out, the tyranny which would suppress free thought on the most stupendous of all themes, is thoroughly hated and despised by him. Seeing life by snatches rather than seeing it whole, apprehensive of the salient points of a character rather than grasping it in its living unity, endowed, in a word, with susceptible fancy rather than with a sterling imagination, Dr. Holmes's vocation would appear not to be towards fiction. It is in fragmentary "guesses at truth," rather than in completed delineations of life and character, that his strength hitherto has seemed to lie. Whether Elsie Venner confirms this pre-supposition, or rather the author's doctrine, that every man has at least one novel in him, and “that he (Dr. Holmes), as an individual of the human race, could write one novel, or story, at any rate, if he would;"-which of these

alternatives is true, remains to be seen. If he has succeeded, he has furnished the best refutation of Mr. Hawthorne's notion that American life and manners do not afford materials for a romance, by doing what was pronounced impossible. Solvitur ambulando.

The "destiny" which is referred to in the title-page is not, we may premise, the "manifest destiny" of which we used to hear so much in connexion with America,-romance though that appears now to have become. It refers to the doctrine, very prominent in all Dr. Holmes's writings, that character, mental and moral, is largely dependent on organisation; that transmitted and congenital qualities form a determining force in life. This opinion is not peculiar to Dr. Holmes. Every man, not only of science, but of sense, holds it, with more or less limitation; and Dr. Holmes himself does not hold it altogether without limitation. In many cases, however, the limitation is held so strongly as practically to reduce the original truth to nothing; in others so slight a limitation is admitted as virtually to leave the doctrine unchecked, to drift into a materialistic fatalism. Apart from the nicely-balanced judgments of physiologists and psychologists, in the matter of truths admitted into any mind, there are some which, from a natural affinity, become operative in it, and are always present with it; they form the key by which it unlocks the secrets of character, the light in which it views nature and life, the interpretation of all mysteries. There are other truths, different of course in different persons, which, admitted in words, are practically ignored. To the former class, in the case of Dr. Holmes, belongs the doctrine of congenital qualities, coming to us by hereditary transmission. It is the clue by which he finds his way through the labyrinth. He deduces from it, as he well may, many lessons of practical wisdom, and of tender and enlarged charity. Not denying, occasionally in a sort of moral compulsion conceding, that the mind has a self-determining power, operative under fixed conditions, he soon loses sight of the self-determining power, and remembers only the fixed conditions. Character, he allows, is destiny; but organisation is character, and organisation is an affair of race and parentage and external influences, moulding the individual as clay is moulded. This is the "destiny," the "romance" of which is told in Elsie Venner. It is there put in a very bold and startling, and what will be to some minds repulsive, shape.

Elsie Venner is the daughter of a gentleman of wealth and culture, belonging to what the author calls the Brahmin caste of New England, and resident in the flourishing town of Rockland, lying at the foot of a mountain, which forms an important part of the scenery of the story.

"The one feature of The Mountain that shed the brownest horror