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ness of manner and mind. Mrs. Browning used to sit buried up in a large easy-chair, listening and talking very quietly and pleasantly, with nothing of that peculiarity which one would expect from reading her poems . . . her eyes small, her mouth large, she wears a cap and long curls, very unaffected and pleasant and simple-hearted is she, and Browning says "her poems are the least good part of her."

Later on the families are together for long periods, at the Baths of Lucca, for instance, and at Siena and Rome. Browning, his wife writes, has taken to modelling under Story at his studio, and "is making extraordinary progress." That was in the autumn before her death, of which Story writes to C. E. Norton in language that shows how deeply he was affected. "Never did I see any one whose brow the world hurried and crowded so to crown, who had so little vanity and so much pure humility." Touching Mrs. Browning's passion in the cause of Italy, Mr. James asks how it is that it should not leave us in a less disturbed degree the benefit of all the moral beauty, and answers himself in this searching passage:

We wonder at the anomaly, wonder why we are even perhaps slightly irritated, and end by asking ourselves if it be not because her admirable mind, otherwise splendidly exhibited, has inclined us to look in her for that saving and sacred sense of proportion, of the free and blessed general, that great poets, that genius and the high range of genius, give us the impression of even in emotion and passion, even in pleading a cause and calling on the gods. Mrs. Browning's sense of the general had all run, where the loosening of the Italian knot, the character of Napoleon III., the magnanimity of France and the abjection of England were involved, to the strained and the strenuous-a possession, by the subject, riding her to death, that almost prompts us at times to ask wherein it

so greatly concerned her. It concerned her of course as it concerned all near witnesses and lovers of justice, but the effect of her insistent voice and fixed eye is to make us somehow feel that justice is, after all, of human things, has something of the convenient looseness of humanity about it-so that we are uneasy, in short, till we have recognized the ground of our critical reaction. It would seem to be this ground, exactly, that makes the case an example. Monstrous as the observation may sound in its crudity, we absolutely feel the beautiful mind and the high gift discredited by their engrossment. We say, roughly, that this is what becomes of distinguished spirits when they fail to keep above. The cause of Italy was, obviously, for Mrs. Browning, as high aloft as any object of interest could be; but that was only because she had let down, as it were, her inspiration and her poetic pitch. They suffered for it sadly-the permission of which, conscious or unconscious, is on the part of the poet, on the part of the beautiful mind, ever to be judged (by any critic with any sense of the real) as the unpardonable sin. That is our complaint: the clear stream runs thick; the real superiority pays; we are less edified than we ought to be. Which is, perhaps, after all, not a very graceful point to make (though it must stand).

With Browning himself the Storys kept up a close friendship until his death, and their later correspondence echoes the "felicities and prosperities" which attended the rich and ample period of his life "that cast the comparatively idyllic Italian time into the background, and seemed superficially to build it out." One of his letters to them full of London news tells of Thackeray's resignation of the editorship of "The Cornhill" and that it has been offered to himself. Mr. James is nowhere else so felicitous as in his explanation of this transformation to "the wonderful Browning we were so largely afterwards to know-the ac

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complished, saturated, sane, sound man of the London world and the world of culture":

The poet and the "member of society" were, in a word, dissociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been; so that, for the observer impressed with this oddity, the image I began by using quite of necessity completed itself: the wall that built out the idyll (as we call it for convenience), of which memory and imagination were virtually composed for him, stood there behind him solidly enough, but subject to his privilege of living almost equally on both sides of it. It contained an invisible door through which, working the lock at will, he could softly pass, and of which he kept the golden keycarrying the same about with him even in the pocket of his dinner-waistcoat, yet even in his most splendid expansions showing it, happy man, to none. Such at least was the appearance he could repeatedly conjure up to a deep and mystified admirer.

In these earlier years came excursions into Austria and Germany, visits to Paris and London, and to the old Bostonian circle, all fruitful in entertaining records. Story's pen illustrates his roving interests and the keenness of his romantic sense. It can turn off a comical portrait, too, with a few strokes in the grotesque. One of Neander, in a letter to Lowell from Berlin, has a story attached of how the German great man arrived home one day complaining of being lame and of having had to hobble along the streets. He had no pain, but he was lame, for he had hobbled all the way home. His sister and next a physician examined him, finding nothing wrong. Still, he insisted that lame he was, for he had hobbled. All were in perplexity, till some one who had seen him returning solved the mystery by stating that he had walked home with one foot in the gutter and one on the sidewalk!

Mrs. Story's pen as well as her husband's is busy with great effect about their London experiences. There is a morning concert at the Opera, with Pasta, Castillan, Viardot, Tamburini, Mario, Ronconi, and Grisi-surely an incomparable constellation. Story dines with John Forster, and meets Talfourd, a man "with the keenness of polish and education," but not elegant at all -he ate with his knife! Hardwick tells a story about Turner eating shrimps out of the lap of an old woman, with his back turned upon a glorious sunset, which his companions are watching with delight. Nature was creeping up, he, too, might have explained. An "evening at Mrs. Proctor's" is the signal for one of Mr. James's most successful evocations. "Perpetuator, for our age, of the tone of an age not ours," that lady is for him historic, not merely in the superficial sense of her associations and accretions, "but in the finer one of her being such a character, such a figure, as the generations appear pretty well to have ceased to produce. It was her tone that was her value and her identity, and that kept her from being feebly modern; her sharpness of outline was in that in the absence there of the little modern mercies, muddlements, confusions and compromises." But the reader must go to Mr. James's pages themselves to see how this ghost walks again at his summons.

One other shade among the many called up from these earlier years must not slip by unobserved. When Browning, as has been often told, found Walter Savage Landor in a Florence inn, a broken-down, poor, houseless old man, it was to Siena, beside the Storys, that he brought him. Mrs. Story jotted down her recollections of their neighbor and of his table-talk, from which, with a regret that we may not extract more, we take these two plums, not the juiciest by any means:

"I once sat next Lady Stowell at dinner [Landor is speaking], and I asked her to take wine, after trying to engage her in talk. 'For the love of God let me alone and don't bother me so, Mr. Landor,' says she; 'I don't know what I'm eating.' 'Well, my lady,' said I, 'you're a long time making the acquaintance': for she ate like a tiger and in great quantity. . . . I met Tom Paine once at dinner-his face blotched and his hands unsteady with the wine he took. The host gave him a glass of brandy, and he talked very well; an acute reasoner, in fact a monstrous clever man. I went at that time into very grand company, but as I was a young man some of my relations who wanted to put me down said, 'Well, we hear you know Tom Paine-Citizen Paine we suppose you call him, with your ideas.' “Το persons with your ideas I call him Mister Paine,' says I."

We are left little space in which to follow Story through the second stage of his career; but that matters less, because it was one of general serenity, and a general serenity, as Mr. James says, gives small advantage to the biographer. "Happiness eludes us, and Story was as happy as a man could be who was doing on the whole what he liked, what he loved, and to whom the gods had shown jealousy but in the one cruel occasion of the death of his eldest boy." The English public, (with its objection to the nude, on which Mr. James descants divertingly) had surrendered to his interesting gift in sculpture, and had readily proclaimed it genius; and he was, in time, to overcome the American view of himself as "only a poetaster, dilettante, and amateur," which he complains of in his earlier letters. That view was entirely erroneous, no doubt, yet there were in Story's case elements that make the error at least understandable. It was, after all, by an accident that sculpture became his particular work, and not engaging in it, seriously at least, as we have seen, un

til he was nearing middle life, he suffered in never having served an apprenticeship. A plain power of hard work, among other things, assisted him to make up to some extent for the rigor of technical education which he had missed; but, again, his energy was dissipated over a too varied field of interests. It drove him into every kind of literary experiment and speculation. He used to say: "Sculptors profess much admiration of my writings, and poets amiably admit that my great talent lies in sculpture." Such, ever, is the fate of the Admirable Crichton, and that Story was likely to play that rôle, without pose, indeed, and unconsciously, except in the intense consciousness of his interest in everything, Lowell appears to have detected in their college days together. "Full of all sorts of various talent" is Mrs. Browning's description of him in one of her letters to Mrs. Martin. "Not with the last intensity a sculptor," says his present biographer, and continues: "he was as addicted to poetry as if he had never dreamed of a statue, and as addicted to statues as if he were unable to turn a verse. . . . It was, æsthetically speaking, a wonderful sociability."

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We are getting nearer the "rather odd case," Story's particular exhibition of the "famous 'artistic temperament,' which, as we have remarked earlier, Mr. James sifts so shrewdly, and with such an interest as one of his own creations might inspire in him. The results, taken together, are an admirable contribution to criticism, at which we can do no more than hint. Insistence, he says, meaning by that the act of throwing the whole weight of the mind, and of gathering it at a particular point (when the particular point is worth it) in order to do so-is on the part of artists who are single in spirit an instinct and a necessity, and the principal sign we know them by. "They

feel unsafe, uncertain, exposed, unless the spirit, such as it is, is, at the point in question, 'all there.'" And Story, restlessly and sincerely æsthetic, was yet constitutionally lacking in this insistence. It is the biographer's point too, that, in regard at least to the want of it in his literary work, it was of all places least likely to be supplied in "the golden air" of Italy. "Subjects float by, in Italy, as the fish in the sea may be supposed to float by a merman, who doubtless puts out a hand from time to time to grasp, for curiosity, some particularly irridescent specimen. But he has conceivably not the proper detachment for full appreciation." In an air less golden, so little golden even as Story found that of Boston to be when he revisited it, the picturesque subject might more readily have yielded all its inspiration. This latter stage of the career we have been following was one of entire felicity; but there exists regarding it the question whether the felicity had not to be paid for. "It is for all the world as if there were always, for however earnest a man, some seed of danger in consciously planning for happiness, and a seed quite capable of sprouting even when the plan has succeeded. Such at any rate is the moral, not too solemnly expounded, which the biographer finds suggested by the artistic "case" which he so intimately displays to us.

Our intention, we hope not entirely unrealized, has been to indicate the variety of these fascinating volumes, which we believe will take a high place among Mr. James's works. Story, with his relish of life, his good talk, on the topic of the day or on any other, his powers of mimicry, his notable prejudices, his stores of knowledge and especially of impressions of Rome, an altogether charming and sprightly personality, appears in the circle of his friends, themselves in many cases among the finest spirits of their time.

A loyal but wonderfully intimate and searching critic is at our ear as we watch him at work. The evoked group is placed against the background of the Italy of a departed golden age; "the vanished society," in its pride and pathos, and the air in all the goldenness of its appeal to Mr. James himself, are recovered by him with all his art of suggestion. The whole canvas is brushed with extraordinary delicacy and finesse. We cannot resist anticipating the pleasure of the reader with one more passage; especially as it touches on a subject to which the writer constantly returns,-the fluctuation of taste. Story in his German diary records having seen a ballet at the Berlin opera, “in which Marie Taglioni, a woman whose ankles were as great as her name, flung herself about clumsily enough."

"But for this untoward stroke [Mr. James comments] we might have invited Marie Taglioni to flit across our stage, on the points of those toes that we expected never to see compromised, as one of our supernumerary ghosts: in the light, that is, of our own belated remembrance, a remembrance deferred to the years in which, as a very ugly and crooked little old woman, of the type of the superanuated 'companion,' or of the retired and pensioned German governess, she sometimes dined out, in humane houses in London, and there indeed, it must be confessed, ministered not a little to wonderment as to what could have been the secret of her renown, the mystery of her grace, the truth, in fine, of her case. Her case was in fact really interesting, for the sensitive spectator, as a contribution to the eternal haunting question of the validity, the veracity from one generation to another, of social and other legend, and it could easily, in the good lady's presence, start a train of speculations-almost one indeed of direct inquiry. The possibilities were numerous-how were they to be sifted? Were our fathers benighted, were ravage and deformity

only triumphant, or, most possibly of all, was history in general simply a fraud? For the Sylphide had been, it appeared, if not the idol of the nations, like certain great singers, at least the delight of many publics, and had represented physical grace to the world of her time. She had beguiled Austrian magnates even to the matrimonial altar, and had acquired, as a climax of prosperity, an old palace, pointed out Blackwood's Magamino.

to the impressed stranger, in Venice. The light of testimony in the London winter fogs was, at the best, indirect, and still left the legend, at the worst, one of the celebrated legs, so often in the past precisely serving as a solitary support, to stand on. But to read, after all, that she flung herself about, with thick ankles, 'clumsily enough,' is to rub one's eyes and sigh-'Oh history, oh mystery!'-and give it up."

OLD-FASHIONED ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

A "Woman's Paper" of a few weeks ago contained a complaint that the modern girl, on leaving school, is not "accomplished as were women of the upper classes in older generations," and more than hints that hockey and other games are responsible for this unaccomplished condition. Perhaps it may be worth while to inquire a little into the real nature of the accomplishments thus regretted. The word at once recalls a conversation that occurs in Pride and Prejudice.

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''It is amazing to me,' said Bingley, 'how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are. . . . They all paint tables, cover screens and net purses. I scarcely know anyone who cannot do all this.' . . . 'Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,' said Darcy, ‘has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen.'"

The accomplishment of netting purses has unquestionably died out; and the home-covered screen has been for the most part superseded-not unhappilyby the painted or embroidered one. These, however, are not the only obsolete accomplishments once practised by

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English girls; and persons who look back so regretfully upon the ways of "older generations" may perhaps be restored to cheerfulness by a little study of The Girl's Own Book, as that work appeared in early editions. The volume was originally compiled in America by Mrs. Child, the Abolitionist, and contains internal evidence of having been, for its time, "advanced." edition before me is the eighth, published in London by Thomas Tegg-a piratical person, it is to be feared, who probably paid Mrs. Child nothing-in the year 1835. It contains, by way of frontispiece, a portrait of the Princess Victoria, wearing a very large hat and very small sandal shoes, and is "embellished with 144 woodcuts." The British Museum has nothing earlier than the thirteenth edition, with a new editress and many alterations.

This little square volume, the corners of whose pages are worn to roundness by the fingers of two generations, is divided into several sections, and, sad to say, the first of these is-Games! But let the lover of the past take courage; the games of 1835 are not the games of 1903. The leading feature of these pastimes is the "paying of forfeits," and on page 95 directions for

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