should a majority, in such a case, where there is evidently no obligation, but a mere fancy, insist on its own course of conduct, at the hazard of losing the approbation and countenance of multitudes whose favor were well worth courting, by no sacrifice of principle.

Not questioning the sincerity of the Managers, nor abating an iota from their patriotism, we could wish that, even now, they would nobly announce to the country a reversion of their decision. It would ennoble them, thus to sacrifice opinion to charity and beneficence, and secure a whole-souled and universal interest in the glorious and Christian aims of the enterprise.

to pour out the full price into the treasury of the Sanitary Fair.

Thus should they best meet the applause of the world, secure to themselves a lasting fame, and leave, untarnished with a blot, and distinguished for its purity, the great Sanitary Fair of the Metropolitan City.

And should the receipts not be so large, as by the process of raffling, which, to say the least, is doubtful; if many withhold their contributions from the Fair, and pour them out through another channel; yet should we all have reason to bless Gop, that our beneficence was not blotted with a single stain, nor the treasury of the Fair rusted with the mammon of unrighteousness. Thus, too, might it be hoped that the GOD of purity and of peace would give us His most benignant smile, and render the charity a more grateful offering to

I WIPED my honeyed lips after reading 'Say and Seal,' saying within myself: 'Surely this is the ne plus ultra of silly sweetness.' But now I am an amber hemisphere of quince preserve, embalmed in sticky, fragrant syrup, saturated out of all memory of sun or breeze or fiery trial. I have read The Old Helmet.' It is a cunning book, a siren book, that disarms the most vindictive critic, that laps Mephistopheles in a lotus-lethargy. Suppose you are told to drive a cat from the room; you know that she is vicious and impertinent, that she dips her pretty pink tongue into your water-pitcher, that with one graceful bound she lands in the immediate vicinity of the butterplate or cream-jug, that she leaves mottled hairs on your ruffled pillow-case, that she breathes unwholesomely in the

baby's face; yet, when you grasp broom, poker, or other feminine weapon, she brushes so tenderly against your skirt, hugs your feet with trusting love, looks up, purring pleadingly, eyes darkening in a 'divine despair,' that hand and foot falter. You gently push her away, broken-hearted she returns; you give a considerate poke with your broomhandle, her supple body caresses the rod. So the contest ends in your lifting the culprit daintily and carrying her out to the warmest streak of sunshine the 'season affords.

Now for cat, substitute book-for housekeeper, critic. Impelled to punish (in a feeble way perhaps) by a sense of offended truth, a hundred good, pretty, and tender things rise up to appease disgusted reason, and unnerve a would-be sarcastic pen, threatening to leave the

condemned basking in praise, instead of being thrust away into oblivion, there to hide richly merited blows and scars. How some books ever got written is one of life's mysteries. Did mortal woman's pen distil such cloying drops? some houri, fresh from the emerald tents and singing-trees of Paradise, must have hung above the muse's shoulder, and whispered in her dreams. Tom Moore, feminized, Christianized, Americanized, speaks again. And the poor wretches who set up the type! could they have had hands of flesh? I verily believe a phantom press, a phantom printer did the work for Carter.

We may so far gratify this charitable age as to forgive Arnold, to admire Burr, to canonize the great regicide, to let Jeff Davis alone; but it is the touch of humanity which distorts our vision. 'We are poor critters, Cilly,' more apt to pity than condemn great, gifted, vicious, unhappy men. But take from perfidy, vice, regicide, treason, the charms of individuality and association, dwell upon them in the abstract as lovely and desirable qualities; and, unless the black drop be thickly wrapped in sweets, the same public will turn away in horror and disgust.

Now, the most sensational of yellowbacks slightly ennobles itself by teaching, on almost every page, the beauty of constancy, the sacredness of a promise between man and woman. What a faroff, cast-iron hero is Ivanhoe till the last page; his weakness and strength are revealed in one sentence, and we love him because he loved Rebecca and was loyal to Rowena.

'The Old Helmet' lays down a platform of the newest plank. Jilting is classed among the moralities. The heroine, from the moment when she murmurs 'Robert Macintosh!' till she pens her final letter in peaceful Plassy, courts treasonable thoughts, pricks on her heart to revolt with Gospel weapons, and pleads religion in the place of another love. The book begins with 'a gleam of teeth,' a 'frank, free upper lip;'

ends in tropical moonshine, and between the two are variated lips and moonshine. Other feeble essences are used, the strongest being 'old ruins' and 'fern leaves.' The scene opens in an old ruin, where the fern-leaf man and the heroine converse, in what an American girl would call 'humdrum style.' She is English, (let Columbia's daughters be thankful,) remarkable for her hair, and a way she has of advancing into a room with "slow, uncertain steps.' She says little, but has the dialect peculiar to her fine-natured family, Ellen Montgomery, Fleda, Kate Howard, Elizabeth Hay, and others. Glances, arch curvings of the lip, blushes of every shade and degree, all of which are sufficiently eloquent when you have priced the glances-one of them, we are told, being worth just five hundred pounds! - geometrized the curves, and applied latitude and longitude to the blushes, for the nature of the emotion is ascertained by the height to which the crimson wave swells.

Mr. Rhys, her vis-a-vis, is what we would call the Circuit Rider,' a gentlemanly personage, with the most wonderfully searching eyes that were ever heard of this side of Dante's Inferno. His remarks have a strong Pecksniffian flavor, such as would lead one of us to say, again applying the home-gauge: 'A villain or a fanatic.'

A theatrical storm came up directly, and Eleanor has a wétting, which causes a serious illness, though she is 'sound as a nut and sweet as Cape Jessamine.' Her mother is altogether unworthy of such a daughter, by reason of her good looks, fair curls, weak affection, and worldly ambition. She is given to saying, 'I never could manage Eleanor,' which, we understand, was highly creditable to the young lady. Nevertheless, it is probable she was lifted and soothed and smoothed, through weary nights and days, by the hands to which she would never yield in health, that under the undisturbable curls was a head that ached for her, in the Merdle bosom a heart that beat for her. But

True, her father is gouty and addicted to the use of tobacco and classical oaths; Julia, the love-medium, an inconvenient creation; poor Alfred living but to have s'tutor written or spoken after his name; but could she not have pardoned them for presuming to exist, by remembering how the whole dull constellation revolved in stupid devotion about her own clear star?

But coming to the real wrong of the book, jesting must be laid aside, though what farther sacrilege could be committed than the deliberate mingling of love and religion? such a subtle compound, that the girl herself cannot tell where the one begins and the other ends, nor separate the love of Mr. Rhys from the love of holiness. It is an easy thing to impose, with tales of wondering ignorance, on Sunday-school children, but it is hard for full-grown men and women to believe that an educated, mature mind could grope for months in darkness with open BIBLES on every side. Suspicion will suggest that she willingly wove the cobweb doubts, that Mr. Rhys' 'white hands' might clear them away. That he might do this, she did not scorn to employ such servants as falsehood and impropriety, but called them to her aid as often as she could succeed in worrying herself into a 'troubled conscience.' Her mother and betrothed were repeat edly deceived, disobeyed, mortified, that her wayward fancy might be amused, that her conviction might be deepened by the magnetism of the young minister's presence. At chapel her thoughts were not fixed on sins past, forgiveness present, amendment in the future. It was

With this false and indelicate beginning her religion is made to anger her parents, banish her from home, break her troth, resign her heart before it was sought; to encourage, by her own confession, her first lover to a second proposal and a second refusal; to be discarded by her justly indignant father; and, finally, to leave entirely the highway of conventionalities, and wander off across the ocean to an island of cannibals, there to marry a man who has never looked or spoken a word of love. We do not wonder that Mrs. Powle separated Julia from her erratic sister; we can keep her company when she shudders over Methodism; we can blush for her shame, when she faintly suggests to the crazy Eleanor that it would be better for Mr. Rhys to come for her.

Critics have been very gentle with the children of this family. It is hard to strike the cat. But indignant womanhood must have mutinied in many instances, and longed to cover with disgrace a sister who could ask the world to admire such spiritless ideals as Fleda, Faith Derrick, Eleanor Powle, creatures whose lives are passed in constant but fruitless efforts to resist the influence of strong, still-eyed Carletons, Lindens, Carlisles, Spiritual Hercules, who subjugate by touch, or glance, or smile, or eighteen kisses in a row.

Gentlemen, I know you are not indigenous to our soil, but should you happen to become exotic, do not take this school of novel for a guide-book. American girls recognize no Salic law. They are brave as they are refined, gentle as they are firm, with fearless natures, upon which your royal touch, your eyes of blue or dazzling hazel, your self-assured tones, would strike as sun and wind on granite. You must run the

gauntlet of reason to get to their hearts, and only touch their hands after years of strategy.

What Mr. Woodbury, in Hannah Thurston, says of poetry, applies equally well to fiction, when we change 'moral purpose' to 'religious purpose.'

'We may find sermons in poems, as we find them in stones; but one should be as unconscious of the fact as the other. It seems to me that all poetry which the author designs, in advance, to be excessively moral or pious, is more or less a failure. Poetry is the blossom of literature, not the fruit; therefore, that while it suggests the fruit-while its very odor foretells the future flavorit must be content to be a blossom and nothing more. The meaning is this: That a moral may breathe through a poem from beginning to end, but must not be plumply expressed.'

Miss Edgeworth contracted with her infidel father, that if he would write nothing against the Christian religion, she would write nothing for it. And yet the sincerest professor might find more pleasure and profit in a review of 'Helen' than of The Old Helmet.' Some minds shrink more from these 'nice talks about JESUS' than they do from blasphemy. Renan's is not the only Life of Jesus, which were best unwritten. We keep from the eyes of the children coarse wood-cuts of the SAVIOUR; is not this elaborate wordpainting of His manifestations to His disciples, equally pernicious and repul sive?

If 'Hannah Thurston' is American life, and 'The Old Helmet' English life, then, indeed, is the new home healthier, wiser, happier, than our old.