tude, in almost all parts of the civilized world. Sir Arthur Helps ingeniously entraps his readers into a rapid survey of the catalogue, by placing it in the middle of his book, with an intimation that he does this on account of the skipping propensities of even diligent readers, who would never glance at such a series of names and places if relegated to an appendix at the end of the volume. The list itself fills six closely-printed octavo pages. Nevertheless, we desiderate more statistical information as to capital employed, and more methodical summing up of figures than it provides; and are reminded by this, as well as other parts of the execution of the work, how much more of a moralist than a man of business the biographer really is.

One great element of Brassey's success in life was his magnanimous way of conducting business. Having once chosen his subordinates, it was his habit to trust them implicitly; and as a rule he was amply rewarded. Then, again, his system was to avoid all litigation and all sharp practice of every sort, preferring rather to incur losses sometimes to an enormous extent. At some periods of his life, owing to his immense liabilities, his whole savings were for a time in danger. But he weathered every storm, on the principle of going through every work without drawing back at moments of the extremest risk. Allowing for occasional losses, he cleared no more than about 3 per cent. on all the sums of money that passed through his hands. But those sums amounted to seventy-eight millions.

Sir Arthur says that during his business career Mr. Brassey laid out seventy-eight millions of other people's money, and upon that outlay retained about two millions and a half. The rest of his fortune consisted of accumulations. But this is a defective statement. The sum of two and a half millions earned by professional exertion has little or nothing to do with the capital which may chance to be employed, except as forming a part of the expenditure. On the large capital which he invested in his undertakings Mr. Brassey must have made far more than 3 per cent. In many of his works the contractors accepted a large portion of their payment in shares, finding, to that extent, all the capital required. During the financial crisis of 1866, of which he was, among the great contractors, one of the few solvent survivors, Mr. Brassey was subject to liabilities on the Victoria Docks for 600,000l., on Danish railways for 800,000l. He held unsalable bonds of the Lemberg and Czernowitz Company to the amount of 1,200,0007., and he had taken shares, which were for the moment worthless, in payment of works from several other companies. On the Lemberg line he had to pay from 40,000l. to 50,000l. a month for wages, and interest to shareholders at the rate of more than 120,000l. a year. The war between Austria and Prussia added to his difficulties; and one of his agents had once to run the gauntlet on an engine between the sentries of the hostile armies. Nevertheless he contrived to finish the line four months before the agreed time; and consequently he was immediately able to place upon the market bonds of which he held more than a million. A trader who conducts business on this gigantic scale is primarily a capitalist; and the fortune which Mr. Brassey, after many heavy losses, is reputed to have left, was not more than an adequate return for his outlay and for his skill and labour. He was in the habit of expressing his determination not to retire from business, because, as he said, "It requires a special education to be idle, or to employ the twenty-four hours in a rational way without any particular calling or occupation. To live the life of a gentleman, one must have been brought up to it."

Although a punctual and voluminous letter-writer, Mr. Brassey's correspondence naturally related to matters of business, and a few letters which are inserted in the biography are entirely without interest. Sir Arthur Helps has not been able to preserve any record of his conversation, and consequently, notwithstanding all his efforts, the portrait which he has drawn remains vague and indistinct.

Among the biographical works most eagerly hailed this year has been the second volume of Mr. Forster's "Life of Charles Dickens." It has been said that it should more properly be called the history of Mr. Dickens's relations to Mr. Forster. Undoubtedly the Boswell is too prominent, and his Johnson sinks too much into the position of a subordinate in the motive forces of life. For all that would appear, Dickens never took a step in life without consulting Forster as his oracle. Was the matter in question a pecuniary one, a convivial one, or literary one," Advise, advise, advise," is the constant burden of his letters. And Mr. Forster lets the world see this as much as he possibly can, giving, we presume, a very unfair impression of the degree in which he really was Dickens's mentor. Had some proportionate number of the great writer's letters to his other friends been allowed to see the day, we should probably find that the impulsive cry "Advise, advise!" was a sort of mannerism with which Dickens was wont to throw off his burthen of the moment, and that he did not rely wholly and solely on the inspired wisdom of his subsequent biographer. We wish on more grounds than one that Mr. Forster had viewed his task from a less egotistical point of view. The work would have gained so vastly in variety and interest if more sides of Dickens's sympathies than the Forsterian had been elaborated. No doubt it is a fascinating book for the moment, and a very amusing one; and if one friend alone was the prism through which Dickens is to be seen, Mr. Forster is better than any other. Whether, however, owing to the one-sidedness of the aspect, or to the limited nature of Dickens's culture and sympathies, we suspect that superficiality and essential monotony are rather the prevailing impressions which will be left after perusal.

Dickens's anxiety about his own books, the amazing importance which he attaches to them, his apparent conviction that the central figure of this universe is the "inimitable Boz," becomes unduly conspicuous; for Dickens naturally dwells upon such topics to excess in correspondence with a gentleman who appears to have acted as his right-hand man in all literary enterprises. It is amusing to see how thoroughly Dickens remains himself throughout, and how, when sketching with a marvellously quick eye the external oddities of life in Italy or Switzerland-with which much of the present volume is concerned he always remains the inimitable Boz, and sighs for London streets amidst the palaces of Genoa and under the snows of Mont Blanc. Mr. Forster, as a critic is bound to do, sees the influence of the Alps and Italy in the works written at this time. We confess that our acuteness is not sufficient to enabl us to follow him. Everywhere, as it seems to us, Dickens is pursued by the great British public, whose sentiments he expressed with such amazing fidelity, and regards foreigners from the outside as much as Sam Weller or Mrs. Gamp would have done. And everywhere, too, he is thinking, rather more than is good for him, of the tremendous sensations he is going to produce, and of his importance to the general system of things.

However, it is an ungracious task to dwell on shortcomings in dealing with

so popular a subject; and we prefer to direct attention to one or two episodes in Dickens's life, within the period narrated, where the powers of observation or the animal spirits of the great humourist give a peculiar zest to his correspondence.

66

Soon after his return from America, Dickens, with three friends, Maclise, Stanfield, and Forster, set off for a tour in Cornwall. It was on this outing that “Martin Chuzzlewit" was conceived, and Dickens's first intention was to have made the story open in a lighthouse or a mine in Cornwall, instead of a Wiltshire village forge. "Sometimes we travelled all night," says Dickens, describing the journey, "sometimes all day; sometimes both. Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their immense varieties of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the postboys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters!" Then, after describing the "old churches," the " strange caverns," 'the deep mines," and "the giddy heights" below which the "unspeakably green water was roaring," he goes on to say that they sat up far into the night in the big rooms of ancient inns by bright fires, and ends by declaring that he had never laughed in his life as he did on that journey. "It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock all the way. And Stanfield got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the body with portmanteaus before we could recover him. Seriously, I do believe there never was such a trip. And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our haltingplaces, that you would have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us as well as the Spirit of Fun."

Dickens wrote his second Christmas book, "The Chimes," at Genoa, at the end of 1844. It was an uncongenial locality for the working of his Cockney brain, and the effort of writing it seems to have been great. "This book,"

he

says, when speaking of the third part, "whether in the Hadji-Baba sense or not I cannot say, but certainly in the literal one, has made my face white in a foreign land; my cheeks, which were beginning to fill out, have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large, my hair is very lank, and the head under the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at the end of the third part. I would not write it twice for something." All the time "The Chimes" were in progress the weather was dreadful. "Wind, hail, rain, thunder, and lightning, weather worse than any English November weather I have ever beheld, or any weather I have had experience of anywhere." He owns that he longs for Devonshire-terrace, and that all the fountains in Genoa would not please him half so much as the West Middlesex Waterworks.

As soon as "The Chimes" were finished, he declared he would visit London. It was not that he cared to see the proofs and the plates, but he wanted to try the effect produced on a select circle of friends by reading "The Chimes" to them. "Shall I confess to you, I particularly want Carlyle, above all, to see it before the rest of the world, and I should like to inflict the little story on him and on dear old gallant Macready with my own lips, and to have Stanny and the other Mac sitting by. Now, if you was a real gent, you'd get up a little circle for me one wet evening, when I come to town, and would say, 'My boy, would you give us that little Christmas

book--and don't slur it, now, or be too fast, Dickens, please.' I say, if you was a real gent, something to this effect might happen." Of course this desire was complied with. On the 4th of November Dickens writes that "the brave courier was measuring bits of maps with a carving fork and going up mountains on a teaspoon. Now, you know my punctuality. Frost, ice, flooded rivers, steamers, horses, passports, and Custom-houses may damage it, but my design is to walk into Cuttriss' coffee-room, in the Piazza, on Sunday, the 1st of December, in good time for dinner. I shall look for you at the farther table by the fire-where we generally go—and when I meet you what a week we will have!" Dickens parted from his disconsolate wife, as he wrote to Forster, on the 6th of November, leaving her "shut up in her palace, like a baron's lady in the time of the Crusades.' Aided by the courier and his own impatience, Dickens used such despatch in the last part of his journey home that he arrived a day before his time, and flashed suddenly on his old friend on that wintry Saturday night. Hardly did he seem to have come than he was gone, but the end of his visit was accomplished. It was on Monday, the 2nd of December, 1844, when "The Chimes" were read to a select circle of friends, of whom all except twoCarlyle and Forster-are now dead. He wrote "Dombey and Son" when in Switzerland, in 1846; and, apropos of that work, there is a curious letter of his to Forster on the difficulties he sometimes experienced in composition. "You can hardly imagine," he wrote on the 30th of August, "what infinite pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on fast. Invention, thank God, seems the easiest thing in the world; and I seem to have such a preposterous sense of the ridiculous, after this long rest (it was now over two years since the close of "Martin Chuzzlewit"), as to be constantly requiring to restrain myself from launching into extravagances in the height of my enjoyment. But the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace is prodigious; it is almost an impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years' ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can't express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magiclantern is immense! I don't say this at all in low spirits, for we are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed, and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before. My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only "The Chimes "), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence there-but Lord! I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night, to walk about in, and a great theatre to repair to every night."

The volume before us ends with the year 1851, the last of his abode in Devonshire-terrace.

Mr. J. R. Planché, Somerset Herald, gives us, at the age of seventy-six, his "Recollections and Reflections." They belong chiefly to the dramatic world; but Mr. Planché is also an accomplished archæologist; and his specialty has consisted in bringing archæological taste to bear on dramatic

subjects, and originating the reformation of theatrical costume so conspicuous in modern theatrical management. Mr. Planché tells us that he was born in Old Burlington-street on the 27th of February, 1796. His parents were the children of French Protestant refugees, and he was originally intended to pursue his father's vocation of watchmaking. This plan failing, he was articled to a bookseller, under whose rule his theatrical propensities were soon developed. He acted at amateur theatres, and, with the view of creating for himself an original part, wrote a burlesque of the old "Bombastes Furioso" school, entitled "Amoroso, King of Little Britain." Falling into the hands of Mr. Harley, this piece, to the surprise of its author, found its way to the boards of Drury Lane Theatre, where it was performed by an excellent company, with great success, in April, 1818, being the first of upwards of a hundred and fifty acted works from the same prolific pen. By this success Mr. Planché did not gain a shilling, but it encouraged him to become a regular writer for the stage, and in August, 1820, his melodrama, "The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles," the first piece which gained him a permanent reputation, was brought out at the Lyceum, with Mr. T. P. Cooke as the Monster-a part in which the celebrated actor, who had not yet commenced his nautical career, seems afterwards to have created a furore in Paris. In 1822 Mr. Planché was introduced to Mr. Charles Kemble, who had just succeeded to the management of Covent Garden, to which theatre he attached himself for six seasons. Here he produced his first opera, "Maid Marian," to which Bishop composed the music. His acquaintance soon afterwards with Sir Samuel Meyrick formed the commencement of his real antiquarian education. He had long chafed against the existing anachronisms in theatrical costume. He now saw his way to reforming them. In 1823 he superintended the bringing out of Shakspeare's "King John" at Covent Garden Theatre, and applied his new principles with great success. Of the allegation that this reform in the article of costume has caused a subjugation of the drama to its accessories, Mr. Planché is well aware, and he grasps the difficulty with a firm hand. If it is understood that in a dramatic performance, as in a dramatic reading, the costume of a period is not to be shown, then by all means, he argues, let the performers wear modern evening dresses; on the other hand, if there is to be some show of costume, let the representation be correct.

Mr. Planché's originality came out in another department of the stage. We have spoken of his early burlesque, "Amoroso." He afterwards introduced this species of composition in the Christmas performances at the Olympic, beginning with the "Olympic Revels," in January, 1831. Upon this followed a long series of rhymed travesties, either of ancient mythology or of French fairy tales, interspersed with music, and acted by first-rate performers, such as Madame Vestris, Mr. C. Mathews, Mr. C. Bland, Miss Priscilla Horton, and Mr. F. Robson. The burlesque was terribly vulgarized afterwards by tasteless imitators, and has become a nuisance and a mischief; but Mr. Planché is hardly answerable for this deterioration. In 1829 Mr. Planché was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. To his industry and zeal as an archæologist it is chiefly owing that the Tower of London has been cleared of chaos and fiction, and converted into a respectable national museum. We can make only general reference to the many new and entertaining anecdotes which the book contains.