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wrong door. Thus the autobiographies and
sent them all as victims of mistakes.
personal revelations of literary men repre-

when a new or bizarre suggestion presents work. They are almost as certain, too, to itself, it comes with the force of a command.overvalue their own judgment, and thus to Why not? why shouldn't they?--and there lay the cause of their mischances at the is no counteracting stay of habit to provide an answer, or stand against the delirious joy of novelty, the gambler's excitement of putting the happiness of his future on a chance for the mere thrill of seeing it imper

illed.

But all people who are not men of action are not therefore men of thought. Mistakes are a very prolific subject with all who judge of things, as so many do, solely by the event. There are persons who live in the belief that they are wise till something happens wholly when they spring as suddenly to the concluirrespective of their own conduct or motives, sion that they have been fools. It is wonderful what steps will be regretted-what natural, proper, nay, inevitable steps-where the event does not vindicate a course of action. It is imperative on many tempers to blame

After all, we shall not often get the actor and the looker-on to be of the same mind as to what are mistakes. As the epicure lays the account of his indigestion to the few drops of cream in his after-dinner cup of tea, so the repiner over his own destiny sets his misfortunes down to trifling indiscretions, or even to what others might consider exceptional exhibitions of good sense; while the decisive somebody-anybody-when things do not go failures, the incontrovertible mistakes, are defended to the death. Some of this school have only one mistake to reproach themselves with, but this recurring, as we are given to understand, at various turning-points of life, —that of not having taken their own way, but having allowed themselves, at some critical juncture, to follow the advice, the exam-series of mistakes from a mere over-estimate Many people attribute to themselves a ple, the opinion of others.

Persons of a speculative cast can scarcely escape this habit of mind. Their own experience is much like Mr. Clough's :

"How often sat I poring o'er

My strange, distorted youth,
Seeking in vain in all my store
One feeling based on truth;"

as they would have them. Thus a man meeting with a railway accident is bent on proving it a great mistake that he went by that train at all. The irrevocable, with all unreasoning natures, is forever prompting this illusory, deceitful form of self-blame, which issues in nothing; for it has not taught them any new principle of conduct.

of their powers. It is their only method of accounting to themselves why they were not where their deserts should place them. It is soothing to their vanity to lay their failure to the charge of some defect in policy or judgment. They are at the foot of the ladder instead of the top, and find a feeble, vapid consolation in counting up a series of isolated blunders. It all comes from not embracing for a certain intellectual activity prompts to that opening, from stopping short on the way a perpetual review and suspicion of the past. to success a day too soon, from an ill choice Authors, the picked men of this class, who of advisers at some important crisis, and so are driven by their calling to utilize the ac- such mistakes always. No man can get on on. But the truth is, everybody is making tions and proceedings generally of so much without the power, not of avoiding mistakes, of mankind as come in their way, may be but of nullifying and mastering them when said to constitute themselves the authority on made. Yes! no doubt every life is full of all questions of cause and effect, and to pro- mistakes, and it is a further argument against nounce ex cathedrâ on what are the mistakes morbid dwelling upon them that we can of others; though their attitude of critics of rarely find in our own case which of them has the human race diverts them from personal told lastingly against us. Going by analogy, vigilance, and makes them crying examples-observing what sort of mistakes press and of mistakes in their own persons. Thus we gnaw on the minds of others,-our own senmay see them very much alive to the world's mistakes toward them, and very blind to the real cause, often to the real facts, of their own. It is next to impossible but that writers, as a class, should be discontented men; for human nature craves for action, and, in the long run, the observer, whatever his success in his own field, will feel it a mistake that he has not been an active worker instead of a chronicler and speculator on others'

sitiveness is far from being an infallible judge. We may then be attaching mighty consequences to some indiscretion which has really served us well, while the mistake which has damaged us may lurk altogether out of our cognizance. Especially we may take for granted, of every man who sits and murmurs over the mistakes of others towards him, that, in fact, he is suffering infinitely more from the consequences of his own.

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THE SATURDAY REVIEW UPON O'CONNELL., its intended effect, it is difficult to see how the two There is no good reason why the Irish people races could have continued to live together in the should be enthusiastic about O'Connell. If same island. Altogether, it is no exaggeration Erin refuses to weep at the Liberator's urn, it only shows that Erin has a very sound judgment and is not half so green as the world supposes. The deceased agitator cannot be pronounced either an estimable character or a distinguished public benefactor; and it is satisfactory to believe that good tears are not wasted on a decidedly spurious patriot. Such displays of posthumous party rancor as that which took place at Belfast on the same day with the Dublin demonstration are both foolish and indecent; but the mere reproach of ingratitude to the immortal Liberator is one which Ireland can well afford to bear. The name of O'Connell is prominently associated with one undoubted service to the cause of civil and religious liberty; but, with the solitary exception of his THE Book of the week is the collected edition share in obtaining Catholic Emancipation, his of the Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed. career must be considered both discreditable and Praed, christened Winthrop after his mother's mischievous. With the abolition of the unjust family, and Mackworth after that of his father, disabilities which affected more especially the which had changed its name some generations class to which he himself belonged, all that was earlier, was born in 1802, and died in 1839. His useful and honorable in his public life began and father was sergeant-at-law, and for many years ended. We do not recollect a single other in- Chairman of the Audit Board. At Eton young stance in which he devoted his confessedly great Praed was the leading spirit of "The Etonian," powers, whether successfully or otherwise, to and the founder of the "Boys' Library." At any object calculated to benefit his country, ma- Cambridge he won medals for Greek, Latin, and terially or morally. He left Ireland as miserable English verse, and was a chief in the Union Deas he found it, and no one of the measures which bating Society, excelled only in reputation by of late years have contributed to ameliorate the Macaulay and Charles Austin, and at this time condition of the finest but most wretched peasant- he became a foremost writer in Mr. Charles ry on the face of the earth can be traced even re- Knight's Quarterly Magazine. In 1825 Praed motely to his influence. After the passing of the was at Eton again as private tutor for two years Emancipation Act, he took to sedition as a trade; to Lord Ernest Bruce, and it was then that he and his talents were thenceforth almost exclu- began writing for the magazines and annuals. sively employed in stirring up the passions of In May, 1829, he was called to the bar at the the ignorant masses for an object which no man Middle Temple. In November, 1830, he came knew better than himself to be a sheer impossi- into parliament as member for St. Germains, bility. No public man of our time has been more and was returned again in 1831. The Reform shamelessly insensible to the responsibilities which Bill deprived St. Germains of its franchise; accompany popular influence and oratorical power. Praed stood for St. Ives in 1832, and was reHe debauched and demoralized the minds of his jected, but in 1834 was returned with Mr. T. countrymen with stupid and mendacious adula- Baring, for Yarmouth, after a contest by which tion. Lazy and improvident peasants, with a he was believed to have laid the foundation of his turn for murdering their landlords, were accred- fatal disease. He obtained the friendship of the ited with all the virtues under heaven, and credu- Duke of Wellington, and held under Sir Robert lous mobs were taught to believe that the British Peel's government, in 1834-5, the office of SecArmy and the British Empire existed only by retary to the Board of Control. In 1837 he left their permission. He was habitually and osten- Yarmouth for Aylesbury, for which borough he tatiously insincere, and never hesitated to repeat, was member when he died. His mother had year after year, with undiminished effrontery, died in his childhood. He lost his father, and the same impudent hoax which experience, had he married, in the year 1835, and when he died, periodically detected. Mr. Seward has for some in 1839, he left his widow with two infant daughtime left off predicting the "suppression of the ters. It was the intention of his widow to pubrebellion" within ninety days at furthest; but lish her husband's poems, with an introductory we do not recollect that the Irish agitator ever memoir by his friend the Reverend Derwent dropped the stereotyped fiction which amused Coleridge. But the widow also is now dead, and and gratified a succession of monster meetings. for the complete fulfilment of her wish the pubTo say that he was recklessly abusive is to men- lic is indebted to the poet's daughters. How tion one of his most venial failings. He was not much the public gains by its fulfilment we hope only coarse, but malignant. "Law" and "or- partly to show when we discuss the poems. der" were eternally on his lips; but the spirit and Winthrop Praed was a true individual poet, the essence of his teaching was the perpetuation of best writer of vers de societe in all our literapolitical feuds and class hatreds. If his incendi- ture, and something more than that. -Examary nonsense about Celt and Saxon had produced iner.

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3. Walter Savage Landor,

1. Mountaineering,

2. The Clever Woman of the Family,

4. Skeletons in the Closet,

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5. Jomini's Life of Napoleon-Translated by General Halleck,

6. Husbands,

7. Supposed Hoarding of Precious Metals in India, . 8. American Esthetics-Mr. Jarves's Art Idea, 9. Day-Dreams of a Schoolmaster, 10. A Word with Spain,

POETRY.-Red Riding-Hood, 194. The Slave Singing at Midnight, 194. The Lesson of the Hour, 194. Hymn of Triumph, 204. Truth's Conflict, 204.

SHORT ARTICLES.-The Spectator on Gen. McClellan, 203. Dr. Huntington's Sermons for the People, 203. The Spectator on President Lincoln, 218. Russian Plan of War, 218. Railway in Brazil, 239. Sir Charles Lyell, 240. Essays on English Subjects, 240.

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prow and sail,-who is deaf to the thundering charge of waters, or the ripple round the trenchant keel, who does not rejoice in all sea sights and sounds, the answered cheer, the quaint, quiet speech of the old salt,who has not glowed with the true fellowship of the deep. All manners and ways in which men move upon the waters are good and not to be despised; the very thud of the drenched fisherman's bow,-the fierce pulsation of contending oars,-the plunge into the still pool,

Yet though he were a very degenerate Briton who could gainsay the glories of the ocean, in the Alps men may find these and more. In them earth, air, and water all join to give fresh mystery and beauty. The Alpine solitudes are more lonely and terrible even than those of the sea, the shapes and forms of all things stupendous beyond all comparison, the loveliness more bewitching and multiform, the awfulness even yet more deep. Billows of ice yet wilder than those of any tempest-driven sea dash themselves to fragments on Alpine peaks loftier tenfold than those of any coast; and from an Alpine summit may be watched skies yet more golden, vaulting a far more various horizon.

THERE are few people nowadays who have ever left England at all that have not seen something of the Alps, and still fewer of these who have not felt something of the mountain fever in their veins. As a natural result, we have been bored to death with every form of the wreathed circles of the skate,-all are Alpine narrative,-serious, comic, scientific, good to fill the mind and nerve again the poetical, semi-pseudo-scientifico-poetico-per- heart. sonal. Men (to say nothing of women) have come back from the mountains as gushing over with their adventures as children from a fair, and have prosed about their hairbreadth escapes or the contents of their carpetbags with odious earnestness. All this is very silly; but a far sillier affectation is that of the very refined people who have come to the conclusion that the Alps-the pathless, infinite Alps-are as good as hackneyed. No doubt the frisky impertinences of a few braggart scramblers are hard to bear; and the boisterous glee with which they recount their deeds of daring recalls the dreary fun of the prize-ring. But all this is no excuse for the rank profanity of those who make light of the noble art of mountaineering in itself. We believe that so far from too much having been said about it, its real title to honor has never been recognized,―caret quia vate sacro. The Alps will be worn out only when the ocean and the firmament are stale, flat, and unprofitable; and Alpine climbing may be reckoned the folly of boys only when the sap is withering up in men, and the fibres of their natures are growing coarse. It is rather our belief that of all the modes in which men may refresh themselves from work, this is the worthiest, most reasonable, most adapted to our times. Love for the mountains is yet but in its egg; and mountain walking has yet to take rank as the noblest, the happiest, and the most popular of all our national pursuits.

Let us be just. There are many things good, even though but one thing is best. Dull of spirit, but weak of stomach, is he who does not know the thrill which stirs all English blood upon the sea,-who does not love it in its every mood, its gayest and its wildest, who is blind to the curves of

May it also be long before the pride of our horse-taming race is forgotten, and Englishmen cease to love every pace of the noble brute,-the throb of the gallop, the bounding leap, the stately tread, and all the proud, delicate ways, the fire, the grace, the trust and patience of the first of the animals. Nay, but all rational delight in the horse, that comes of honorable using of his gifts, is a right and gallant thing, very cheering to the healthy spirits, and very bracing to the wellgrained muscle. Sunt quos curriculo,—and he must be a pedant that grudged men their delight in the horse and in every sort of skill which he can call out. Be it, however, remembered that the practice of climbing mountains breeds a still keener use of hand and eye,-pursuit still fiercer, resolves yet readier, and the higher concert of man with man. Can any man seriously compare the chase of a poor vermin-fox with the zest of the attack on some untrodden pass, or the rapture of the race with that of conquering a new mountain-top? No gallop warms the blood like the whirl down a slope of snow;

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