the two men at the outset, we should have said that all the chances were on Haydon's side. If he had not genius, he had at least the temperament and external characteristics that go along with it. He had what is sometimes wanting to it in its more purely æsthetic manifestation, the ambition that spurs and the unflagging energy that seemed a guerdon of unlimited achievement. Yet the ambition fermented into love of notoriety and soured into a fraudulent self-assertion, that grew boastful as it grew distrustful of its claims and could bring less proof in support of them; the energy degenerated into impudence, evading the shame of spendthrift bankruptcy to-day by shifts that were sure to bring a more degrading exposure tomorrow; and the whole ended at last in a suicide whose tragic pang is deadened to us by the feeling that so much of the mixed motive that drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodra matic effect, the last throb of a passion for making his name the theme of public talk, and his fate the centre of a London day's sensation. Chatterton makes us lenient to a life of fraud by the dogged and cynical uncomplainingness of the despair that drove him to cut it short; but Haydon continues his self-autopsy to the last moment, and in pulling the trigger seems to be only firing the train for an explosion that shall give him a week longer of posthumous notoriety. The egotism of Pepys was but a suppressed garrulity, which habitual caution, fostered by a period of political confusion and the mystery of office, drove inward to a kind of soliloquy in cipher; that of Montaigne was metaphysical,-in studying his own nature and noting his observations he was studying man, and that with a singular insouciance of public opinion; but Haydon appears to have written his journals with a deliberate intention of their some day advertising himself, and his most private aspirations are uttered with an eye to the world. Yet it was a genuine instinct that led him to the pen, and his lifelong succession of half

successes that are worse than defeats was due to the initial error of mistaking a passion for a power. A fine critic, a vivid sketcher of character, and a writer of singular clearness, point, and eloquence was spoiled to make an artist, sometimes noble in conception, but without sense of color, and utterly inadequate to any but the most confused expression of himself by the pencil. His very sense of the power which he was conscious of somewhere in himself harassed and hampered him, as time after time he refused to see that his failure was due, not to injustice or insensibility on the part of the world, but to his having chosen the wrong means of making his ability felt and acknowledged. His true place would have been that of Professor and Lecturer in the Royal Academy. The world is not insensible or unjust, but it knows what it wants, and will not long be put off with less. There is always a public for success; there never is, and never ought to be, for inadequacy. Haydon was in some respects a first-rate man, but the result of his anxious, restless, and laborious life was almost zero, as far as concerned its definite aims. It does not convey the moral of neglected genius, or of loose notions of money-obligations, ending in suicide, but simply of a mischosen vocation, leading sooner or later to utter and undeniable failure. Pas même académicien! Plenty of neglected geniuses have found it good to be neglected, plenty of Jeremy Diddlers (in letters and statesmanship as often as in money-matters) have lived to a serene old age, but the man who in any of the unuseful arts insists on doing what Nature never asked him to do has no place in the world.

Leslie, a second-rate man in all respects, but with a genuine talent rightly directed, an obscure American, with few friends, no influential patrons, and a modesty that would never let him obtrude his claims, worked steadily forward to competence, to reputation, and the Council of the Academy. The only blunder of his life was his accepting the Professorship of Drawing at West Point, a place for which he was unsuited. But this blunder he had the good sense and courage to correct by the frank acknowledgment of resignation. Altogether his is a career as pleasant as Haydon's is painful to contemplate, the more so as we feel that his success was fairly won by honest effort directed by a contented con

sciousness of the conditions and limitations

of his faculty.

Nothing can be more agreeable than the career of a successful artist. His employment does not force upon him the solitude of an author; it is eminently companionable; from its first design, through all the processes that bring his work to perfection, he is not shut out from the encouragement of sympathy; his success is definite and immediate; he can see it in the crowd around his work at the exhibition; and his very calling brings him into pleasant contact with beauty, taste, and (if a portrait-painter) with eminence in every department of human activity.

Leslie's passage through the world was of that equal temper which is happiest for the man and unhappiest for the biographer. With no dramatic surprises of fortune, and no great sorrows, his life had scarce any other alternation than that it went round with the earth through night and day, and would have been tame but for his necessary labor in an art which he loved wisely and with the untumultuous sentiment of an after-honey-moon constancy. We should say that his leading characteristic was Taste, an external quality, it is true, but one which is often the indication of more valuable ones lying deeper. In the conduct of life it insures tact, and in Art a certain gentlemanlike equipoise, incapable of what is deepest and highest, but secure also from the vulgar, the grotesque, and the extravagant. Leslie, we think, was more at home with Addison than with Cervantes.

The

His autobiographical reminiscences are very entertaining, especially that part of them which describes a voyage home to America, varied by a winter in Portugal, during the early part of his life. Scotch captain, who, with his scanty merchant-crew, beats off a Bordeaux privateer, and then, crippled and half-sinking, clears for action with what he supposes to be a French frigate, but which turns out to be English, is a personage whose acquaintance it is pleasant to make. The sketches of life in Lisbon, too, are very lively, and the picture of the decayed Portuguese nobleman's family, for whose pride of birth an imaginary dinner-table was set every day in the parlor with the remains of the hereditary napery and plate, the numerous covers hiding nothing but the naked truth,

while their common humanity, squatting on the floor in the kitchen, fished its scanty meal from an earthen pot with pewter spoons, is pathetically humorous and would have delighted Caleb Balderstone. In afterlife, Leslie's profession made him acquainted with some of the best London life of his time, and the volume is full of agreeable anecdotes of Scott, Irving, Turner, Rogers, Wilkie, and many more. It contains also several letters of Irving, of no special interest, and some from a sort of Lesmahago of a room-mate of Leslie's, named Peter Powell, so queer, individual, and shrewd, that we are sorry not to have more of them and their writer. Altogether the book is one of the pleasantest we have lately met with.

The Old Battle-Ground. By J. T. TROWBRIDGE, Author of "Father Brighthopes," "Neighbor Jackwood," etc. New York: Sheldon & Company. 1860. pp. 276.

MR. TROWBRIDGE's previous works have made him known to a large circle of appreciating readers as a writer of originality and promise. His "Father Brighthopes" we have never read, but we have heard it spoken of as one of the most wholesome children's books ever published in America, and our knowledge of the author makes us ready to believe the favorable opinion a just one. Parts of "Neighbor Jackwood" we read with sincere relish and admiration; they showed so true an eye for Nature and so thorough an appreciation of the truly humorous elements of New England character, as distinguished from the vulgar and laughable

ones.

The domestic interior of the Jackwood family was drawn with remarkable truth and spirit, and all the working characters of the book on a certain average level of well-to-do rusticity were made to think and talk naturally, and were as full of honest human nature as those of the conventional modern novel are empty of it. An author who puts us in the way to form some just notion of the style of thought proper to so large a class as our New England country-people, and of the motives likely to influence their social and political conduct, does us a greater service than we are apt to admit. And the

power to conceive the leading qualities that make up an average representative and to keep them always clearly in view, so as to swerve neither toward tameness nor exaggeration, is by no means common. This power, it seems to us, Mr. Trowbridge possesses in an unusual degree. The late Mr. Judd, in his remarkable romance of "Margaret," gave such a picture as has never been equalled for truth of color and poetry of conception, of certain phases of life among a half-gypsy family in the outskirts of a remote village, and growing up in the cold penumbra of our civilization and material prosperity. But his scene and characters were exceptional, or, if typical, only so of a very limited class, and his book, full of fine imagination as it is, is truly a romance, an ideal and artistic representation, rather a poem than a story of manners general and familiar enough to be called real.

Mr. Trowbridge, we think, fails in those elements of (we had almost said creative) power in which Mr. Judd was specially rich. If the latter had possessed the shaping spirit as fully as he certainly did the essential properties of imagination, he would have done for the actual, prosaic life of New England what Mr. Hawthorne has done for the ideal essence that lies behind and beneath it. But, with all his marvellous fidelity of dialect, costume, and landscape, and his firm clutch of certain individual instincts and emotions, his characters are wanting in any dramatic unity of relation to each other, and seem to be "moving about in worlds not realized," each a vivid reality in itself, but a very shadow in respect of any prevailing intention of the story. With the innate sentiments of a kind of aboriginal human nature Mr. Judd was at home; with the practical working of ev ery-day motives he seemed strangely unfamiliar. It is just here that Mr. Trow bridge's strength and originality lie; but, with that not uncommon tendency to overvalue qualities that we do not possess, and to attempt their display, to the neglect, and sometimes at the cost, of others quite as valuable, but which seem cheap, because their exercise is easy and habitual,—and therefore, we may be sure, natural and pleasing, he insists on being a little metaphysical and over-fine. What he means for his more elevated characters are tiresome with something of that melodramatic

sentimentality with which Mr. Dickens has infected so much of the lighter literature of the day. Here and there the style suffers from that overmuchness of unessential detail and that exaggeration of particulars which Mr. Dickens brought into fashion and seems bent on wearing out of it, a style which is called graphic and poetical by those only who do not see that it is the cheap substitute, in all respects. equal to real plate, (till you try to pawn it for lasting fame,) introduced by writers against time, or who forget that to be graphic is to tell most with fewest penstrokes, and to be poetical is to suggest the particular in the universal. We earnestly hope, that, instead of trying to do what no one can do well, Mr. Trowbridge will wisely stick close to what he has shown that no one can do better.

"The Old Battle-Ground," whose name bears but an accidental relation to the story, is an interesting and well-constructed tale, in which Mr. Trowbridge has introduced what we believe is a new element in American fiction, the French Canadian. The plot is simple and not too improbable, and the characters well individualized. Here, also, Mr. Trowbridge is most successful in his treatment of the less ambitiously designed figures. The relation between the dwarf Hercules fiddler and the heroine Marie seems to be a suggestion from Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and Esmeralda, though the treatment is original and touching. Indeed, there is a good deal of pathos in the book, marred here and there with the sentimental extract of Dickens-flowers, unpleasant as patchouli. Generally, however, it has the merit of unobtrusiveness, -a rare piece of self-denial nowadays, when authors have found out, and the public has not, how very easy it is to make the public cry, and how much the simple creature likes it, as if it had not sorrows enough of its own. it is in his more ordinary characters that Mr. Trowbridge fairly shows himself as an original and delightful author. His boys are always masterly. Nothing could be truer to Nature, more nicely distinguished as to idiosyncrasy, while alike in expression and in limited range of ideas, or more truly comic, than the two that figure in this story. Nick Whickson, too, the good natured ne'er-do-well, who is in his own and everybody's way till he finds his nat

But

ural vocation as an aid to a dealer in horses, is a capital sketch. The hypochondriac Squire Plumworthy is very good, also, in his way, though he verges once or twice on the "heavy father," with a genius for the damp handkerchief and long-lost relative line.

We are safe in assigning to Mr. Trowbridge a rank quite above that of our legion of washy novelists; he seems to have

a definite purpose and an ambition for literary as well as popular success, and we hope that by study and observation he will be true to a very decided and peculiar talent. We violate no confidence in saying that the graceful poem, "At Sea," which first appeared in the "Atlantic," and which, under the name of now one, now another author, has been deservedly popular, was written by Mr. Trowbridge.

THE Editors of the "Atlantic," of course, have universal knowledge (with few exceptions) at their fingers' ends,- that is, they possess an Encyclopædia, gapped here and there by friends fond of portable information and familiar with that hydrostatic paradox in which the motion of solids up a spout is balanced by a very slender column of the liquidating medium. The once goodly row of quartos looks now like a set of mineral teeth that have essayed too closely to simulate Nature by assaulting a Boston cracker; and the intervals of vacuity among the books, as among the incisors, deprive the owner of his accustomed glibness in pronouncing himself on certain topics. Among the missing volumes is one of those in M, and accordingly our miss information on all subjects from Mabinogion to Mustard is not to be entirely relied upon. Under these painful circumstances, and with the chance of still further abstractions from our common stock of potential learning, we have engaged a staff of consulting engineers, who contract, for certain considerations, to know every useless thing from A to Z, and every obsolete one from Omega to Alpha. In these gentlemen we repose unlimited confidence in proportion to their salaries; for a considerable experience of mankind has taught us that omniscience is a much commoner and easier thing than science, especially in this favored country and under

• MISS-INFORMATION. A higgledy-piggledy want of intelligence acquired by young misses at boarding-schools. - Supplement to Johnson's Dictionary.

democratic institutions, which give to every man the inestimable right of knowing as much as he pleases. Everything was going on well when our Man of Science unaccountably disappeared, and our Æsthetic Editor experienced in all its terrors the Scriptural doom of being left to himself. This latter gentleman is tolerably shady in scientific matters, nay, to say sooth, light-proof, or only so far penetrable as to make darkness visible. Between science and nescience the difference seems to his mind little, if n e, and he would accept as perfectly satisfactory a statement that "the ponderability of air in a vitreous table-tipping medium (the abnormal variation being assumed as x-b .0000001) is exactly proportioned to the squares of the circumambient distances, provided the perihelia are equal, and the evolution of nituretted carbogen in the boomerang be carefully avoided during evaporation; the power of the parallax being represented, of course, according to the well-known theorem of Rabelais, by H.U.M. Hemsterhuysius seems to have been familiar with this pretty experiment." The above sentence being shown to the Esthetic Editor aforesaid, he acknowledges that he sees nothing more absurd than common in it, and that the theory seems to him as worthy of trial as Hedgecock's quadrant, which he took with him once on a journey to New York, arriving safely with a single observation of the height of the steamer's funnel.

This premised, it naturally follows that the Esthetic Editor (the July number

falling to his turn) must take advantage of the absence of his Guardian Man of Science to publish an article on Meteorology. A condition of things in which the omne scibile was left entirely at his disposal, to be knocked about as he pleased, appeared to him no small omen of a near millennium; and what subject could be more suitable to begin with than the weather, a topic of general interest, (since we have no choice of weather or no,) in which exact knowledge is comfortably impossible, and in which he felt himself at home from his repeated experiments in raising the wind in order to lower the due-point? (See The Weathercock, an Essay on Rotation in Office, by Sir Airy Vane.)

Meanwhile, after the mischief was all done and a Provisional Government of Chaos Redux comfortably established in Physics, the Man of Science turns up suddenly in the following communication. [A council was called on the spot, the Autocrat in the chair, and it was decided, with only one dissenting voice, that the communication should be printed as a lesson to the peccant Editor, who, for the future, was laid under a strict interdict in respect of all and singular the onomies and ologies, and directed to consider the weather a matter altogether unprophetable, except to almanacmakers, the said Editor to superintend such publication, and to be kept on a diet of corn-cob for the body and Sylvanus Cobb (or his own works, at his option) for the mind, till it be done. The chairman added, that for a second offence he should do penance, according to ancient usage, in a blank sheet of the Magazine, (a contribution of his own being to that end suppressed,)—a form of punishment likely to be as irksome to himself as grateful to the readers of that incomparable miscellany.]

"Abercumdudellum Mine, 28th July, 1860. "WELL-MEANING, BUT MISGUIDED, FRIEND! "AN unexpected opportunity of personally investigating a highly nauseous kind of mephitic vapor drew me and Jones suddenly hither without time to say farewell or make explanations. I made the journey in 10 by electric telegraph, and am delighted that I came, for anything more unpleasant never met my nostrils, and I am almost sure of adding a new element to the enjoyment of the scientific world.

I have already secured several bottles-full, and shall exhibit it at the next meeting of the Association: of course you shall have a sniff in advance. I should have returned before this, but unhappily the chain by which we descended gave way a few days ago near the top, in hoisting out the first series of my observations, and as yet there has been no opportunity of replacing it. Communication with the upper world is kept up by means of a small cord, however, and in this way we are supplied with food for body and mind. As good luck would have it, our butter came down wrapped in a half-sheet of your last volume of poems, containing my old favorites, "Modern Greece," and the "Ode to a Deserted Churn." These I read aloud several times to the miners, and their longing to return sooner to a world where they could get the rest of the volume became so strong, that, as I was about to begin my fifth reading, they consented to an expedient of escape which I had already proposed once or twice in vain. This was to blow us out by means of the fire-damp. The result of the experiment I cannot yet fully report, as some confusion ensued. Jones has disappeared, having been, as I hope and believe, discharged upward, and I have found the remains of only one miner, so that it seems to have been a tolerable success, though I myself was blown inward, owing to the premature explosion of the train. In one respect the result was highly satisfactory to me personally. Jones had all along insisted that the vapor was antiphlogistic. Whichever way he went, I think (fair-minded as he is) he must be by this time convinced of his error, and I shall accordingly enter him in my Report as discharged cured. I may add, as an interesting scientific fact, that his ascent was accompanied by such a sudden and violent fall of the barometer (which he had in his lap) that the instrument was broken. This would seem to prove a considerable decrease in the weight of the atmosphere at the moment of explosion. The darkness was oppressive at first; but a happy thought occurred to me. You know Jones's poodle, and how obese he is? Well, he was shot into my lap, where he lay to all appearance dead. I had some matches in my pocket and at once kindled the end of his tail, which makes a very good candle, quite as good as average dips,