succeeded. My first efforts were limited to a small district in Pennsylvania. Soon, nearly all Ohio was mine. I realized anew the miracles of the first Christian monasteries. Among my many adepts, some brought me fortune, others credit, and all power. Our force was in union, and every day, our group, grown more compact, contrasted more with the feebleness and enervation which surrounded us. Now, I am master of nearly all Missouri, and I form vast plans. On the very edge of the wilderness there are Morions, men whose hearts beat in union with mine. I have given them unity, discipline, zeal, habits of order; now, all that we want to be strong is persecution-one single persecution, and the number of my followers will be centupled. You do not know how much liberty of action weighs upon the majority of men; how necessary despotism is to them. It is one of the great causes of my success. Few have the courage to begin; few know how to use their independence. I am a despot, and all obey me. The territory which separates us from Mexico is filled with 'savage tribes, which only want to be rallied. The Irish laborers, who suffer and die of hunger; the European exiles, of whom there are more every year, will come to me; the Comanches, the Patagonians, the mingled races which live on the borders of civilization, will one day be mine. I have harmony and order for me. I unite the divided elements; the future must be mine. While democracy isolates individuals, I group them; and sooner or later you will see me raising the cupolas and domes of my capital city above the forests which surround us.

"There is a future empire in the still little civilized pro-. vinces of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Indiana. Would you know why I address myself to you? Your uncle commands the miners of this district, is the principal magistrate, and one of the richest proprietors. Do you and he

We will pass the

You see that the

men are equal;

come with us, and our power is assured. northern lakes, and go even to the Pacific. words liberty and equality are but words; no the rest is political fraud. I will not treat you as I do my vulgar subjects. I tell you the truth; I do not hide my ambition. Come then with me."

If the popular books published by certain Americans are badly written; if the form be imperfect and the diction careless or insufficient; at least they intorest by the facts which they give and the experience which they teach.

CHAPTER III.*

SECTION I.

HERMAN MELVILLE AND HIS REAL VOYAGES.

MR. MELVILLE lived for four months, absolutely like a primitive man, in Noukahiva, a Polynesian island, and it is his adventures while there that form the subject of his first books, the narratives of his actual voyages. He lived in an unknown valley in one of the Marquesas Isles, in the midst of an inland tribe, scarcely visited by the missionary, and which has not yet undergone that half-civilization which is imposed upon the savages of the coast by their contact with Europeans. These latter have, as we know, become strange samples of pretentious barbarism, and coquettish ignorance. Mr. Melville, who lived very little among the half-civilized, knew well the savages who ate up his comrade, and intended to eat him.

Unfortunately, Mr. Melville's style is so ornate, his Rubens-like tints are so vivid and warm, and he has so strong a predilection for dramatic effects, that one does not know exactly how much confidence to repose in his narrative. We do not take except cum grano salis, his florid descriptions.

Like all travellers, he is an enthusiast for Noukahiva. Since Doctor Saaverde described these scenes, down to the aphrodisiac narratives of Bougainville, these latitudes have had the singular property of warming the traveller's pen. Mr. Melville has felt the same influence; he writes like his predecessors, except that Don Christoval Saaverde de Figueroa was more mystic, that is, more a man of his age; Cook moro simply, naïve, and sailor-like; Bougainville more ornate, more eighteenth-century-like and refined; while our cotemporary, Mr. Melville, is hardy, violent, and brusque, with a tendency to the terrible, the interesting, the unforeseen. It is, however, for him, not for us, to answer for the truth of his story.

Certainly he tells rather romantic stories; but the violence of his coloring, natural in a sailor, takes its source from the force and variety of his impressions. The sailor does not proceed gently and gradually from one degree of latitude to a neighboring one; there are no shades for him; nothing prepares his imagination to receive the shock of those energetic oppositions which shake it incessantly; he passes without preparation from the activity of a European port, Liverpool or Brest, to the flowering and silent solitudes of Noukahiva; from the charms of Mexico to the Polar ices which beat his ship and imprison it in their silent desolation. Thus no one can more closely resemble an Arabian Night's story-teller, than a genuine sailor. Mr. Hernan Melville, endowed with a strong taste for the marvellous, found himself on board of the Dolly; he does not say in what rank; perhaps he was making for his special diversion one of those voyages to which Americans willingly consecrate their pocket-money.

Be it as it may, he had accompanied the Dolly in her previous voyages. Turn by turn, with her, he had visited the ioy coasts of the Atlantic regions, the scenes of mad cannibalism

at the Viti Islands, the Spanish Tertullias and Alamedas at Manilla, strange strand, where the guitar of Seville resounds beneath the fingers of women, barely clothed; and finally he he had seen the lake festivals of Soulou, draped in muslin and leading the indolent life of a Rajah of Hindostan.

Then the Dolly carried Mr. Melville to New South Wales, whose ferocious tribes made the crew associate in their warceremonial and their death-dances. The Dolly's relaxation. at Noukahiva succeeded to so many and various impressions and emotions, to six months of danger and fatigue.

[Note. This is followed in the original by the complete substance of Typce, which we do not of course reproduce here, but give only the criticism of Mr. Chasles.]

Taipce is a work in which we find most abundant details, new and circumstantial of the Pacific archipelago, a world held in reserve for future civilization. In reading it, one cannot avoid being surprised at the immensity of the margin still left for the development of the human race.

A fiftieth part of the globe is nearly civilized. Already wo see, in certain groups, in the zones of which we speak, some germs, rather grotesque, of imitation of Europe; by the side of the entirely savage chiefs of Ambao, the king of the Sandwich Isles, Kamehameha III., in his capital of Ilonolula, wears the slight Spanish moustache, the uniform à la française, the beard close shaved, yellow gloves, and no shoes nor stockings. The Kanakas of Sandwich, and the habitants of Tahiti, the most advanced in their social education, are amusing models of an incomplete sociality. As for the Typees of Noukahiva, among whom Mr. Melville has lived, they preserve the ancient characteristics of their race; they are very lazy, simple, and limited of intellect, adroit with their hands, voluptuous and fond of eating their fellow creatures-in other respects, the best fellows in the world.