Some of the fondest illusions of our student-life and companionship were based on literary fame. The only individuals, of the male gender, who then seemed to us (indiscriminate and mutual lovers of literature) worthy of admiration and sympathy, were authors. Our ideal of felicity was the consciousness of distributing ideas of vital significance, and causing multitudes to share a sentiment born in a lonely heart. The most real and permanent sway of which man is capable we imagined that of ruling and cheering the minds of others through the medium of literature. Our herbals were made up of flowers from the graves of authors; their signatures were our only autographs. The visions that haunted us were little else than a boundless panorama that displayed scenes in their lives. We used continually to see, in fancy, Petrarch beside a fountain, under a laurel, with the sweet penseroso-look visible in his portraits; Dante in the corridor of a monastery, his palm laid on a friar’s breast, and his stern features softened as he craved the only blessing life retained for him—peace; rustic Burns, with his dark eye proudly meeting the curious stare of an Edinburgh coterie; Camoens breasting the waves with the Lusiad between his teeth; Johnson appalling Boswell with his emphatic ‘Sir;’ Milton—his head like that of a saint encircled with rays—seated at the organ; Shakspeare walking serenely, and with a benign and majestic countenance, beside the Avon; Steele jocosely presiding at table with liveried bailiffs to pass the dishes; the bright face of Pope looming up from his deformed body in the cool twilight of a grotto; Voltaire’s sneer withering an auditor through a cloud of snuff; MoliÈre reading his new comedy to the old woman; Landor standing in the ilex path of a Tuscan villa; Savage asleep on a bulk at midnight, in one of the London parks; Dryden seated in oracular dignity in his coffee-house arm-chair; Metastasio comparing notes with a handsome prima donna at Vienna; Alfieri with a magnificent steed in the midst of the Alps; Swift stealing an interview with Miss Johnson, or chuckling over a chapter of Gulliver; the funeral pyre of Shelley lighting up a solitary crag on the shores of the Mediterranean; and Byron, with marble brow and rolling eye, guiding the helm of a storm-tossed boat on the Lake of Geneva! Such were a few only of the tableaux that haunted our imagination. We echoed heartily Akenside’s protest against the sermon on Glory:

In our passion for native authors we revered the memory of Brockden Brown, and detected in his romantic studies the germs of the supernatural school of fiction; we nearly suffocated ourselves in the crowded gallery of the old church at Cambridge, listening to Sprague’s Phi Beta Kappa poem; and often watched the spiritual figure of the ‘Idle Man,’ and gazed on the white locks of our venerable painter, with his ‘Monaldi’ and ‘Paint King’ vividly remembered. We wearied an old friend of Brainard’s by making him repeat anecdotes of the poet; and have spent hours in the French coffee-house which Halleck once frequented, eliciting from him criticisms, anecdotes, or recitations of Campbell. New Haven people that came in our way were obliged to tell all they could remember of the vagaries of Percival, and the elegant hospitality of Hillhouse. We have followed Judge Hopkinson through the rectangular streets of his native metropolis, with the tune of Hail, Columbia! humming in our ears; and kept a curious eye on Howard Payne through a whole evening party, fondly cognizant of Sweet Home. Beaumont and Fletcher were our Damon and Pythias. The memorable occurrence of our childhood was the advent of a new Waverley novel, and of our youth a fresh Edinburgh Review. We loved plum-colour because poor Goldy was vain of his coat of that hue; and champagne, partly because Schiller used to drink it when writing; we saved orange-peel because the author of The Rambler liked it; and put ourselves on a course of tar-water, in imitation of Berkeley. Roast pig had a double relish for us after we had read Elia’s dissertation thereon. We associated goldfish and china jars with Gray, skulls with Dr. Young, the leap of a sturgeon in the Hudson with Drake’s ‘Culprit Fay,’ pine-trees with Ossian, stained-glass windows with Keats (who set one in an immortal verse), fortifications with Uncle Toby, literary breakfasts with Rogers, waterfowl with Bryant, foundlings with Rousseau, letter-writing with Madame de SÉvignÉ, bread and butter with the author of Werther, daisies with Burns, and primroses with Wordsworth. Mrs. Thrale’s acceptance of Piozzi was a serious trouble to our minds; and whether ‘little Burney’ would be happy after her marriage with the noble emigrÉ was a problem that made us really anxious until the second part of her Diary was procurable and relieved our solicitude. An unpatriotic antipathy to the Pilgrim Fathers was quelled by the melodious pÆan of Mrs. Hemans; and we kept vigils before a portrait of Mrs. Norton, at an artist’s studio, with a chivalric desire to avenge her wrongs.

This enthusiasm for authors was not altogether the result of a literary idiosyncrasy or local influences; it grew out of a consciousness of personal obligation. Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Porter, and Maturin were the clandestine intimates of childhood; the English poets became the confidants of youthful sentiment, which met but a cool reception from those by whom we were surrounded; and when judgment was enough matured to discriminate the charms of style, a new world opened under the guidance of Mackenzie and Sterne, Lady Montagu and Sir Thomas Browne. Books are endeared, like people, by the force of circumstances; ideal tendencies, a spirit of inquiry, a thirst for sympathy, will often drive minds whose environment is uncongenial to seek therein what is elsewhere denied; and when in early life this resource becomes habitual, it is not surprising that a deep personal feeling should be gradually engendered, and that we should come to regard favourite authors as the most reliable and dearest of our companions; and this without an inkling of pedantry or a title to scholarship, but from a thoroughly human impulse intellectually vindicating itself. To such a pitch did the feeling once possess us that we resented any imputation cast upon our chosen authors as if they were actual friends. We honoured the critic that defended Bacon from the charge of meanness, and longed to applaud his prowess; we disliked to admit the evidence that Johnson was dogmatic, and ascribed his arrogance to a kind of excusable horse-play; we contended that Thomson was not lazy, but encouraged ease to escape ambition; we grew very warm if any one really believed Shelley an atheist, and argued that his faith transcended that of the majority of so-called Christians; we never would admit that Sterne was heartless, or Moore a toady. We could have embraced Dr. Madden after reading his Infirmities of Genius, and thought the most brave of Sidney’s deeds his Defence of Poesy. How we longed to go a-fishing with Walton, to walk in Cowley’s garden, to see Roscoe’s library, to hear Coleridge talk, to feel the grasp of Burns’s hand, to drink whisky with John Wilson, to pat Scott’s dogs, to go to the theatre with Lamb, to listen to D’Israeli the elder’s anecdotes, to look on the lakes of Westmoreland at the side of Wordsworth, and to ride through ‘our village’ in Miss Mitford’s pony chaise!

The first time we saw an author was an epoch. It was in a church. Some one whispered, just as the sermon began, that a lady in the next pew was the writer of a moral tale then rated high in our little circle. We did nothing the rest of the service but watch and speculate upon this, to us, wonderful personage. We were disappointed at her every-day look and attire; there was no fine frenzy in eye or gesture; there she sat, for all the world like any other lady—mild, quiet, and attentive. We were somewhat consoled by noting the extreme paleness of her complexion, and a kind of abstraction in her gaze. Her habiliments were dark and faded; in fact, as we afterward discovered, she was poor, and her book had been printed by subscription. Thenceforth, for a long time, we imagined all female authors were dressed in black, looked pensive, and had no colour. This illusion, however, was banished, some years later, when we were taken to a literary soirÉe where all the female authors were fat, dressed in a variety of colours, and, instead of being melancholy, had an overwhelming vivacity that made us realize how the type had changed. By degrees we became enlightened, and our authormania cooled. In the first place, we were shocked by seeing a pathetic writer, whose universal tribute was tears, in a flashy vest; then we encountered a psychologist, whose forte was sublimity, enacting the part of a mendicant; it was our misfortune to conduct a bard, whose highly-imaginative strain had often roused our aspirations, home from a party in a state of inebriety; one author we were prepared to love turned out a disagreeable egotist; another wearied us by the exactions of his vanity; a third repelled by intense affectation, and a fourth by the bitterness of his comments; one, who had written only the most refined sentiment, proved, upon acquaintance, an acute Yankee; one, who had sung the beauty of nature, we found to be an inveterate dandy; and another, whose expressed ideas betokened excess of delicacy, grossly violated the ordinary instincts of gentle blood.

On one of our earliest visits to ———, the illusive charm attached to the idea of a female author became, indeed, changed to a horror from which we have never wholly recovered. We were requested to escort a lady to what we understood was an ordinary social gathering. After entering a rather small and somewhat obscure drawing-room, saluting the hostess, and taking the proffered seat, we were struck with the formal arrangement of the company. They formed an unbroken row along the walls of the room, except at one end, at which stood a table surmounted by an astral lamp; and in an arm-chair beside it, in studied attitude, like one posÉd for a daguerreotype, sat a woman of masculine proportions, coarse features, and hair between yellow and red, which fell in unkempt masses down each side of her broad face. She was clad in white muslin of an antiquated fashion. We noticed that the guests cast looks, partly of curiosity, partly of uneasiness, upon this Herculean female, who rolled her eyes occasionally, and smiled on us all with a kind of complacent pity. We ventured, amidst the silence, to ask our neighbour the name of the gigantic unknown. She appeared extremely surprised at the very natural question. ‘Why, don’t you know? We’re invited here to meet her, and, I assure you, it is a rare privilege. That is Mrs. Jones, the celebrated author of the Affianced One!’ At this moment a brisk little woman in the corner, with accents slightly tremulous, and a manner intended to be very nonchalant, broke the uncomfortable hush of the room. ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ said she, ‘as one of your earliest and most fervent admirers, allow me to inquire if your health does not suffer from the intense state of feeling in which you evidently write?’ The Amazonian novelist sighed—it was funny to see that operation on so large a scale,—and then, in a voice so like the rougher sex that we began to think she was a man in disguise, replied: ‘When I reach the catastrophe of my stories, it is not uncommon for me to faint dead away; and, as I always write in a room by myself, it has happened more than once that I have been found stretched, miserable and cold, on the floor, with a pen grasped in my fingers, and the carpet littered with manuscript blotted with tears!’ The Siddonian pathos of this announcement sent a thrill round the circle; glances of admiration and pity were thrown upon the self-immolated victim at the shrine of letters, and other inquiries were adventured, which elicited equally impressive replies, until the psychological throes of authorship—particularly in the female gender—assumed the aspect of an experience combined of epilepsy and nightmare. The tragic egotism of these revelations at length overcame our patience; and, leaving our fair companion to another’s escort, we slipped out of the room. A thunder-storm had arisen; the rain was pouring down in torrents; upon the door-steps we encountered a very pale, thin, little man, with an umbrella under his arm and a pair of overshoes in his hands. As we passed, he addressed us in a very meek and frightened voice: ‘Please, sirs, is there a party here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Please, sirs, is the celebrated Mrs. Jones here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Please, sirs, do you think I could step into the entry? I’m Mr. Jones!’

Hastening to our lodgings in another metropolis at twilight, we passed a dwarf standing on a threshold, who leaped down and caught us by the arm, eagerly pronouncing our name, and requesting a moment’s interview. He led the way to a little room lighted by a single candle, closed the door, and, with a quivering impatience of gesture, introduced himself. We remembered his name at once. He was the author of a feeble imitation of Pope. We never beheld such an ogre. His little green eyes, ape-like limbs, and expression indicative of sensitiveness and conceit, in that lone and dusky cabinet, were appalling. From a cupboard he took down what we supposed to be a ledger, and, placing it on the table, gave an emphatic slap to the worn brown cover. ‘There,’ said he, ‘is garnered the labour of years. I have heard of your enthusiasm for authors, and I will read you specimens of a poem destined to see the light a twelvemonth hence. Listen!’ It was an epic in blank verse—dreary, monotonous, and verbose. His recitation was like the refrain of a bull-frog; it grated on the ear and made the nerves shrink. The candle burned thick; the air seemed mephitic, and in a little while we were oppressed and fevered as by a glamour cast over our brain; we looked toward the door and moved uneasily; the green eye was cast fiercely up from the page, and the tone of the deformed became malicious. We had heard of his vindictive spirit, and felt as if in the cave of an imp spellbound and helpless. The complacent hardihood with which he read on made us inwardly frantic. We thought of the fair being who waited for us at a neighbouring fireside, of the free air we had quitted, and we writhed under the infliction. Hours passed; a numb, half-unconscious sense of misery stole over us, and still the little demon glared and spouted. ‘Words, words, words’—how detestable seemed they then! At last, in a fit of desperation, we clapped our hand to our forehead, and murmuring something about a congestive tendency, sprang up, ran through the hall and out at the door, and looking back, after hurrying on a few yards, beheld the dwarf, with his enormous book clasped to his heart, gazing after us with the implacable look of a disappointed savage.

Literature is no more regulated by accident than nature; lucky hits and the tricks of pencraft are as temporary as all other artificial expedients. The authors truly remembered and loved are men in the best sense of the term; the human, the individual informs and stamps their books with an image or an effluence not born of will or mere ingenuity, but emanating from the soul; and this is the quality that endears and perpetuates their fame. Hence Goldsmith is beloved, Milton reverenced, and the grave of Burns a ‘Mecca of the mind.’ At the commencement of the last century there appeared in the London Gazette the offer of a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of a certain person thus described: ‘A middle-sized, spare man, about forty years of age, of a brown complexion and dark brown hair, though he wears a wig, having a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mouth.’ This was Daniel Defoe, the victim of partisan injustice, for whose rights every schoolboy would fight now, out of sheer gratitude to the author of Robinson Crusoe. Let the writers who debase authorship into a perversion of history, a sickly medium for egotistical rhetoric, a gross theft of antecedent labours, a base vehicle for spite, or a mechanical knack of book-making, realize that they are foredoomed to contempt, and that character is as little disguised by types as by costume. The genuine author is recognized at once; his integrity is self-evident.

It was sunset on the Arno. Far down the river, over mountain ranges where snow yet lingered, a warm tint, half rose and half amethyst, glowed along the horizon; beside the low parapet that bordered the street people were loitering back from their afternoon promenade at the Cascine: here a priest, there a soldier, now an Englishman on horseback, and then a bearded artist; sometimes an oval-faced contadina, the broad brim of whose finely-woven straw hat flapped over his eyes of mellow jet; and again a trig nurse, with Saxon ringlets, dragging a petulant urchin along; and over all these groups and figures was shed the beautiful smile of parting day; and by them, under graceful bridges, flowed the turbid stream, its volume doubled by the spring freshets. I surveyed the panorama from an overhanging balcony, where I stood awaiting the appearance of a friend upon whom I had called. Hearing a movement behind, I stepped back into the salon, and found a middle-aged gentleman seated on a divan near the window. We exchanged salutations and began to converse. He alluded, in unexceptionable English, to the beauty of the hour. ‘I came here from Geneva,’ he said. ‘There I work—in Italy I recreate; and it is wonderful how this country ministers to intellectual repose, even by the very associations it excites. We feel a dream-like relation with the past, and enter readily, for a time, into the dolce-farniente spirit of the people; and then return to task-work invigorated and with new zest.’ There was a bland, self-possessed, and paternal look about this chance acquaintance that insensibly won my confidence and respect. He was the image of a wise and serene maturity. His ample brow, his strong physique, his affable manner, and kindly eye, suggested experience, intelligence, and benignity. I was certain that he was a philosopher of some kind, and fancied him an optimist; but the utter absence of pretension and the simple candour of his address gave no hint of a man of renown. Accordingly, I soon found myself engaged in a most pleasant, and to me instructive colloquy. Following up the hint he had thrown out, I spoke of the difficulty of combining mental toil with health—reverting in my own mind to our American race of scholars, a majority of whom are confirmed invalids. ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘there is vast error on this subject. Be assured that we were intended for intellectual labour, and that there is a way of making it subservient to health. I will tell you a few rules founded on experience. Vary the kind of work—let it be research one hour, meditation another; collation to-day, and revision to-morrow. Do this on system; give the first part of the day to the hardest study, the afternoon to exercise, and the evening to social intercourse; let the mind be tasked when the brain is most vigorous—that is, after sleep; and woo the latter blessing, not in the feverish hour of thought and emotion, but after the gentle exercise of the mind, which comes from pastime and friendliness.’ I looked at the hale, contented face of the speaker, about whom no sign of nervous irritability or exhaustion was discoverable, and asked myself what experience of mental toil could have led him to such inferences. He looked like a temperate country gentleman, or unambitious and well-to-do citizen. He then spoke of the changes he observed upon each successive visit to Italy, of the climate of Switzerland, and the society of Geneva; then he referred to America, divining at once that it was my country, and exhibiting entire familiarity with all that had been accomplished there in literature. He betrayed a keen sense of enjoyment, recognized a genial influence in the scene before us, and gradually infected me with that agreeable feeling only to be derived from what poor Cowper used to call ‘comfortable people.’ I led him to speak of his own method of life, which was one of the most philosophical order. He considered occasional travel and prudent habits the best hygiÈne for a man of sedentary pursuits; and the great secret both of health and successful industry the absolute yielding up of one’s consciousness to the business and the diversion of the hour—never permitting the one to infringe in the least degree upon the other. I felt an instinctive respect toward him, but at the same time entirely at home in his company; the gentleman and the scholar appeared to me admirably fused in, without overlaying, the man. Presently the friend we mutually expected came in, and introduced me to Sismondi. I was fresh from his Italian Republics and Literature of the South of Europe, and he realized my ideal of a humane and earnest historian.

Quite in contrast with this tranquil and robust votary of letters was the appearance and manner of Silvio Pellico. No one who has ever read the chronicle of his imprisonments can forget the gentle and aspiring nature just blooming into poetic development, which, by the relentless fiat of Austrian tyranny, was cut off in a moment from home, intelligent companionship, and graceful activity, and subjected to the loneliness, privation, and torments of long and solitary confinement; nor is the spirit in which he met the bitter reverse less memorable than its tragic detail—recorded with so much simplicity, and borne with such loving faith. When I arrived in Turin he was still an object of espionage, and it was needful to seek him with caution. Agreeably to instructions previously received, I went to a cafÉ near the Strada Alfieri, just at nightfall, and watched for the arrival of an abbÉ remarkable for his manly beauty. I handed him the card of a mutual friend, and made known my wishes. The next day he conducted me through several arcades, and by many a group of noble-looking Piedmontese soldiers, to a gateway, thence up a long flight of steps to a door, at which he gave a significant knock. In a few moments it was quietly opened. He whispered to the old serva, and we tarried in an ante-chamber until a diminutive figure in black appeared, who received me with a pensive kindliness that, to one acquainted with Le Mie Prigioni, was fraught with pathos. I beheld in the pallor of that mild face and expanded brow, and the purblind eyes, the blight of a dungeon. His manner was subdued and nervous, and his very tones melancholy. I was unprepared to find, after years of liberty, the effects of his experience so visible, and felt almost guilty of profane curiosity in having thus intruded upon his cherished seclusion. I had known other victims of the same infernal tyranny; but they were men of sterner mould, who had resisted their cruel fate by the force of will rather than the patience of resignation. Pellico’s very delicacy of organization barbed the arrows of persecution; and when at length he was released, loneliness, hope deferred, and mental torture had crushed the energy of his nature. The sweetness of his autobiography was but the fragrance of the trampled flower—too unelastic ever again to rise up in its early beauty. A smile lighted up his brooding expression when I told him of the deep sympathy his book had excited in America, and he grasped my hand with momentary ardour; but the man too plainly reflected the martyr. The stifling air he breathed under the leads of Venice and the damps of his Spielberg cell seemed yet to weigh upon his soul; no glimmer of the patriotic fire which beams from Francesca da Rimini, no ray of the vivacious observation that beguiled his solitude and quickened his pen, redeemed the hopeless air of the captive poet; the shadow of the power he had braved yet lay on his form and face; and only the solace of filial love and the consolations of religion gave hope to his existence.

That is but a vulgar idea of authorship which estimates its worth by the caprices of fashion or the prestige of immediate success. Like art, its value is intrinsic. There are books, as there are pictures, which do not catch the thoughtless eye; and yet are the gems of the virtuoso, the oracles of the philosopher, and the consolations of the poet. We love authors, as we love individuals, according to our latent affinities; and the extent of the popular appreciation is no more a standard to us than the world’s estimate of our friend, whose nature we have tested by faithful companionship and sympathetic intercourse. He who has not the mental independence to be loyal to his own intellectual benefactors is as much a heathen as one who repudiates his natural kin. Indeed, an honest soul clings more tenaciously to neglected merit in authors as in men; there is a chivalry of taste as of manners. Doubtless Lamb’s zest for the old English dramatists, Addison’s admiration of Milton’s poetry, and Carlyle’s devotion to German favourites, were all the more earnest and keen because they were ignored by their neighbours. In the library, an original mind is conscious of special and comparatively obscure friends; as the lover of nature has his pet flower, and the lover of art his favourite old master. It is well to obey these decided idiosyncrasies. They point, like the divining-rod, to hidden streams peculiarly adapted to our refreshment. I knew an old merchant that read no book except Boswell’s Johnson, and a black and hump-backed cook whose only imaginative feast was the Arabian Nights.

No one really can, indeed, love authors as a class without a catholic taste. If thus equipped, how inexhaustible the field! He is independent of the world. Is he retrospective in mood? Plutarch will array before him a procession of heroes and sages. Does he yearn for conviviality? Fielding will take him to a jolly tavern. Is he eager for intellectual communion? Landor is at hand with a choice of ‘imaginary conversations.’ Would he exercise causality? Bishop Butler will put to the test his power of reasoning. Is he in need of a little gossip by way of recreation? Horace Walpole will amuse by the hour. Is the society of a sensible woman wanted? Call in Maria Edgeworth or Jane Austin. Is the bitterness of a jilted lover in his heart? Locksley Hall will relieve it. Would he stroll in the forest? Evelyn or Bryant will take him there in a moment. By the sea-shore? Crabbe and Byron are sympathetic guides. Are his thoughts comprehensive and inclined for the generalities of literature? Open De StaËl or Hallam.

The relation of authorship to society varies with political influences and average culture. The class of degraded penwrights so often alluded to by Fielding, the ferocious quarrels recorded of and by Pope and Johnson with critics and publishers, are phases of literary life, which, if not extinct, have become essentially modified with the progress of civilization. Yet a quite recent quarterly reviewer speaks of this class of men as ‘a kind of ticket-of-leave lunatics;’ and modern experiences, if less dark than old annals of Grub Street, include some quite as remarkable instances of reckless extravagance in prosperity and barbarous neglect in adversity. The Bohemian class is confined to no epoch or country. Yet charming is the group of authors that illustrate and signalize every period of British history—an intellectual alleviation to the monotony of fashionable, and the rancour of political life. Every era of French government also has its brilliant salon of philosophers and poets. Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Montagu assembled, in their day, as exclusive a coterie as used to cluster about Dryden’s chair, dine with Sir Joshua Reynolds, keep Burns’s birthday at Edinburgh with Scott at the head of the table, rally at Jeffrey’s call, dispute with Hume, chat over Rogers’s breakfast, fraternize with the lakers at Keswick and Grasmere, or pass an evening with Lamb. From the days of Shakspeare to those of Evelyn and Sydney Smith, from La Fontaine to Lamartine, from Klopstock to GoËthe, and from Mather to Channing, every cultivated city abroad and at home has boasted its author circle, to which kindred tastes ever revert with zest, and whose traditions as well as ‘works’ prolong a spell more refined and memorable than any other social prestige. Weimar, Bordeaux, Florence, Edinburgh, and Boston, as well as London and Paris, are thus consecrated by reminiscences of GoËthe, Schiller, Montaigne, Alfieri, Wilson, Mackenzie, some Concord Sage, or Spanish Historian, some Autocrat, Wizard of the North, or Ettrick Shepherd of the pen. To have seen Niccolini on the ‘Lung’ Arno; Elizabeth Browning at a Casa Guidi window; Rossini, the historical novelist, at a bookstore in Pisa; Hillhouse under the New Haven elms; Hawthorne at the AthenÆum; Elia at his India-house desk; poor Heine on his ‘mattress grave,’ or Freiligrath at his bank-counter, requires but the perspective of time to be as impressive or winsome an experience as the first survivors of Pope, Chatterton, Milton, or Burke realized in rehearsing their personal cognizance of these famous authors. Such is the instinctive attraction of congenial or eminent authorship. If this subject were nomenclated and analyzed in the naturalistic way, there is scarcely a sphere of humanity or a form of character which might not be identified with or illustrated by authorship; the mad, the mendicant, the charlatan—combative, contemplative, heroic, and sybarite,—are but a few of the varieties which literary biography reveals. Their amours, diseases, profits, calamities, triumphs, quarrels, personal tastes and habits, domestic life, and most individual traits and fortunes, have been minutely recorded, so as to form, on the whole, the best and most accessible psychological cabinet for the student of human nature. Of no other class of men and women with whom we never had personal acquaintance, do we know so many details; Chatterton’s despair, Young’s skull-light, Milton’s organ, Berkeley’s tar-water, Coleridge’s opium, Swift’s lady-loves, Cowper’s hymns and hares, Rogers’s table-talk, Scott’s dogs, Steele’s debts, Lamb’s folios, are as familiar to us as if they appertained to some neighbour or kinsman. The prisons of Cervantes, Raleigh, Pellico, Hunt, and Montgomery, have a pathetic charm which no other record of captivity boasts. Even the self-delusions of authors awaken a considerate interest; the mistaken judgment of Petrarch and Milton, in regard to the comparative merit of their writings; and the exaggerated estimate of their own verses by such able statesmen as Frederic and Richelieu, tend to enhance the mysteries of the craft and sanction its illusions. But it must be confessed that the romance of authorship is fast disappearing in its reality; so numerous have become the votaries of a once rare pursuit, so common the renown, so universal the practice, that the individual and characteristic, the curious and interesting elements thereof, are more and more merged in the commonplace and familiar.

A distinction has often been insisted on between the critical and the creative in literature; but modern criticism, in its best development, is essentially reproductive; so intimate, deep, and affluent is its dealing with authors, that they often are restored in all their vital worth; and the process has endeared such writers as Lamb, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Arnold, and St. Beuve, as true intellectual benefactors. Such philosophical and Æsthetic interpreters of authorship have engendered an eclectic appreciation and enjoyment of authors, and made us what Allston calls ‘wide likers.’ Hence the prevalence and promise of what may be called a cosmopolitan, in distinction to a provincial taste, whereby we learn to value the greatest diversities of style, subject, and character in literature. Fastidious and severely disciplined minds, indeed, coldly ignore certain authors, and warmly espouse others; but to a spirit at once generous and cultivated, sympathetic and intelligent, though a special charm will invest favourite authors, all of the fraternity who are genuine have a recognized claim to grateful recognition; and even the unequal and incongruous development of modern English literature, incident to the absence of what Matthew Arnold calls ‘any centre of intelligent and urbane spirit,’ like the French Academy. Desirable as such a discipline and standard is in quelling eccentricity and incorrectness, the free and energetic development, the honest, though sometimes rude, exercise of authorship in our vernacular, is no small compensation. We confess a partiality for the richly-diversified phases of mental life thus induced—an eclectic relish for the varieties of national and personal characteristics. The artistic French, the meditative German, the practical English writers, have each their attraction and use; the desultory style of Richter, the quaint individuality of Lamb, the verbose dignity of Johnson, the mosaic finish of Gray, the grotesque eloquence of Carlyle, the flowing rhetoric of Macaulay, Wordsworth’s pastoral isolation, Scott’s feudal enthusiasm, Byron’s intense consciousness, Shelley’s disinterested idealism, the homely images of Crabbe, and the sensuous luxury of Keats, are all, in their way and at times, accordant with our mental wants, congenial to our receptive moods. Why should not we tolerate and enjoy the various elements of literature as fully and fondly as those of nature and society? Does it not argue a narrowness of mind inconsistent with genuine intellectual and moral health to perversely confine our appreciation of authorship to certain schools, forms, and individuals? Are not the philosophical, the piquant, the earnest, the playful, the solemn, gay, impressive, winsome, acute, wise, and humorous traits and triumphs of written thought as legitimate, in their infinite variety, as means of human culture, discipline, and pleasure, as the myriad tints and tones of nature, and the diversities of character and manners? A true lover of authors will not only find something to enjoy and appropriate in the most diverse forms of expression and qualities of genius, both in the literature of power and in that of knowledge as finely discriminated by De Quincey; but will separate the inspired and the journeyman work of each author, and do justice to what is genuine while repudiating the conventional. If what GoËthe maintained is literally true, and genuine authorship is the reflex of consciousness upon outward life, then all its spontaneous products must have a vital element of human life, love, and truth, more or less congenial to all readers of candid, clear, and humane instincts: for we agree with a liberal and acute critic, when he says that the gift of literary genius ‘lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere—by a certain order of ideas; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations, making beautiful works of them.’

It is a new and glorious era in our experience of books when the vital significance of authorship is heartily realized; dilletantism, excusable in the novice, gives place to the worship of truth. To write for the mere sake of writing, to amuse with the pen, becomes in our estimation what it is—a thing of less interest than the most simple and familiar phenomena of nature. As life reveals itself, and character matures, we long, above all, for reality; we perceive that growth is our welfare, and that earnestness, faith, and new truth are the only joy of a manly intellect. Then we read to nerve our moral energies, to extend the scope of perception, and to deepen the experience of the soul: the butterflies of literature allure no longer; the imitators we pass by; but the deep thinkers, the original, the brave, lead us on to explore, analyze, and conquer. ‘Literature,’ says Schlegel, ‘according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infamy, a pastime, a dry labour, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue;’ and this diversity is true, not only of authors in general, but sometimes of the same individual. Many a poet, whose early utterance was inspired, has degenerated into a hack, a truckster, and a mercenary penman; and many a youthful dabbler in letters, by some deep experience, has been matured into the bold advocate or heroic pioneer in the world of thought.

We soon learn heartily to sympathize with one of the unfortunate originals of GoËthe’s Werther, and declare with him,—‘I have resolved in future to take good care how I write anything to an author, save what all the world may see;’ only extending the prudential resolve to conversation,—for whatever advance has been made in refinement in the use of language, in the abuse of confidence modern writers are so destitute of scruples, that the sanctities of life and social intercourse have no greater or more profane intruder than the author.

Nor is the ‘heart of courtesy’ the only high quality risked by the vocation; it almost seems, in vain and unchivalric natures, to sap manhood itself. Some one has said,—‘The man who has learned to read has lost one portion of his courage; if he writes verses, he has lost a double portion.’ There is a fatal fluency, an arrogant expressiveness, whereby the robust and honest material of character is, as it were, evaporated in words; for nothing characterizes the genuine author more than a reticent tone, an integrity of utterance, which makes it apparent that his authorship, instead of a graft, is a growth of his best humanity. So proverbial is the social barrenness of the craft, in its average conventional scope, that a facetious Florentine barber, in one of the best of modern historical novels, Romola, is quite appropriately made to say,—‘I am sorely afraid that the good wine of my understanding is going to run off at the spigot of authorship, and I shall be left an empty cask, with an odour of dregs, like many other incomparable geniuses of my acquaintance.’ All meanness is disenchanting; but selfish economy of intellectual treasures, and egotistical insensibility to the merit of others, not only robs the author of all sympathetic charm, but almost invariably signalizes his essential mediocrity or unfounded pretensions.

Under the two diverse aspects of an inspiration and a career, authorship thus offers the extremes of attraction and antagonism to candid and earnest souls; if the spontaneous gift and charm of the former are justly endeared to all lovers of humanity, the artificial conditions, worldly motives, and forced relations of the latter, often dispel the illusions of fame in the realities of vulgar notoriety and mercenary zeal. We can well understand how a reverent, delicate, and true nature, like Maurice de GuÈrin, shrinks from professional authorship, when the original beauty and truth of his utterances led his friends to urge that vocation upon him: ‘The literary career,’ he writes, ‘seems to me unreal, both in its own essence and in the rewards one seeks from it; and, therefore, fatally marred by a secret absurdity.’

At this moment our vernacular is the only tongue in which men can express themselves fearlessly; it appropriately enshrines the literature of freedom. We seldom realize this noble distinction of the English language. I was half-asleep one afternoon, in the cabin of a steamer in the Bay of Naples, when suddenly the violent pitching of the vessel ceased, and I hastened on deck to learn the reason of the change, and found, to my surprise, that we were returning into the harbour, the captain having decided that it was too great a risk to venture to sea in such a gale. Pleasant as was the transition from tossing waves to smooth water, every traveller in that region who has gone through the business of a departure—the passport signatures, the tussle with porters, drivers, and boatmen, the leave-takings, packing-ups, directions at post-office and banker’s, an embarkation in the midst of cries, rushings to and fro, disputes for gratuities, beggars, missing baggage, attempts to secure a berth, wringing of hands, waving of handkerchiefs, and, it may be, embraces at parting,—every traveller, cognizant of this experience, will understand how vexatious it was, within an hour after this tantalizing process, to find one’s self, in travelling costume, once more in the city for the afternoon, with no lodging, no appointment, and no sight-seeing to do. I was not long in resolving to visit once more my old dining-place, the ‘Corona di Ferro.’ At the opposite table to that at which I was seated, appeared a handsome young man, with a dark, intelligent eye, and a bearing indicative of spirit and courtesy. Seeing me hesitate over the carte, he suggested a dish which had proved molto buono that day, and having followed the kindly counsel, we engaged in a desultory chat about the weather, the opera, the last news from France, &c., and by the time dessert came on, had established quite a pleasant understanding. At length he made an inquiry based upon the idea that he was addressing an Englishman. I corrected the error, and his politeness at once warmed into enthusiasm at the discovery that he was talking with an American. After dinner he invited me to his apartments. I found the sitting-room adorned with pictures and littered with books. Having ordered coffee, we were soon engaged in a serious discussion of literary subjects, in which my new friend proved a tasteful votary. He wished for a definite statement as to the extent of the liberty of the press in the United States. I explained it; and he became highly excited, paced the room, quoted Alfieri, sighed, pressed his brow, and at length flung himself into a chair, declaring that, if it were not for kindred who had claims upon him, he would emigrate at once to America. To account for his feelings, he showed me a pile of MSS., the publication of which had been prohibited by the government censors on account of their liberal sentiment. He then exhibited several beautiful poems founded on scientific truths, yet mystically involving great and humane principles—a ruse he had been compelled to resort to in order to express publicly his opinions. As I recognized the evidences of genius, watched his chafed mood, and noted his manly spirit, I felt deeply the crushing influence of despotism upon authorship, and realized the natural antagonism between poets and kings.

There is no greater fallacy than that involved in the notion of an essential diversity between an author and his books. Professed opinions do not reveal the truth of character, but unconscious phases of style, habits of thought, and tones of expression, like what is called natural language, make us thoroughly acquainted with the man. Is not Jeremy Taylor’s religious sentiment manifest in the very method of his utterance? Can we not see at a glance the improvidence and the fascination of Sheridan in the tenor of his plays? Who would not avouch the honesty of John L. Stephens after reading his travels? What reverent heart is not magnetized by the genuineness of devotion in Watts, however crudely expressed? Is not prudence signified in the very style of Franklin? Are we not braced with the self-confident frankness of Cooper in the spirit as well as the characters of his nautical and forest tales? Critics betray their arrogant temper under the most courteous phrases; a gentleman is still a gentleman, and a puppy a puppy, on paper as in life; the sham and the true are equally discernible in print and in society. Montaigne exhibits his worldly wisdom as plainly in his essays as he ever did in his acts. It is not, therefore, the insidious but the obvious perils of authorship that threaten the novice. Lamentable is it to see mediocre men take up as a vocation either literature or art, for in both a certain amount of character alone insures respectability; and this is less requisite in pursuits that do not so openly challenge observation.

One day, I was told a gentleman had called and waited for me in the drawing-room. As I entered, he was gazing from the window in the shadow of a damask curtain, which threw a warm tint upon as strongly moulded a face as I remembered to have seen in one so young. His forehead was compactly rounded, his hair curly and raven, and his eye dark and luminous. As I approached, he handed me a note of introduction from a friend, refused the proffered seat, and wore so earnest and grave an expression that I almost thought he was the bearer of a challenge. ‘Sir,’ he began, ‘I have come to you for sympathy in a great undertaking. I wish to be cheered in a mission, encouraged in a career, advised in an experiment.’ There was a certain wildness in the manner of this sententious address which breathed of an excited fancy. I expressed a willingness to aid him to the extent of my humble ability. He drew a thick packet from his coat, and proceeded: ‘I am a native of a little village in a neighbouring State. My father is an agriculturist, and has endeavoured to render me content with that lot; but there is something here’—and he laid a large red hand on his capacious breast—‘that rebels against the decree. I aspire to the honours of literature. I long to utter myself to the world. Here is a tragedy and some lyrics; and I have come to town to test my fortune as an author.’ I saw that he was an enthusiast, and calmly pointed out the obstacles to success. He became impatient. I enlarged on the healthfulness and wisdom of a country life, on the precarious subsistence incident to pencraft. His eye flashed with anger. I urged him to consider well the risk he incurred, the danger of failure, the advantages of a reliable vocation, the comfort of an independent though secluded existence. He advanced toward me with an indignant stride. ‘Sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I have been misinformed; you are not the man I took you for; farewell, for ever!’ and he rushed from the house. Six months had elapsed, and I was sitting over a book in my quiet room one day, when a terrific knock at the door aroused me, and an instant after the stranger entered and impetuously grasped my hand. ‘Sir—my dear friend, I mean,’—he said, ‘I have done you injustice, and I have come to apologize. For a month after my former interview, I passed a feverish novitiate, hawking my manuscripts around, deceived by plausible members of the trade, snubbed by managers, frozen out of the sanctums of editors, yawned at by casual audiences, baffled at every turn, until worn out, mortified, and despairing, I went home. The feel of the turf, the breath of the wind, the lowing of the kine, the very scent of hay was refreshing. I thought over your counsel, and found it true. I now farm the paternal acres on shares, write verses during the long winter evenings, lead the choir on Sundays, am to marry the pride of the village next week, and am here to beg your pardon, and invite you to my wedding.’

The delectable quality of authorship is its impersonality. Consider a moment the privilege and the immunity. If we address a multitude or an individual, the impression may be pleasing or wearisome, but courtesy requires that it be endured with equanimity. A book is unobtrusive, silent, objective. It can be taken up or let alone. In it, if genuine, there is a thought that craves hospitality to be caught in a favourable mood, as the fallow hillock receives the seed borne on the vagrant wind. It may take root, and the originator thereof has unconsciously given birth to an undying impulse or yielded spiritual refreshment. The whole process is like that of nature,—unostentatious, benign, and of inestimable benefit; and yet how latent, beyond observation, secreted in consciousness! All power of expression—whether by means of pen, colour, or chisel,—all artistic development, is but a new vocabulary that reveals character. The author and the artist differ from their less gifted fellows simply in this—that they have more language; the endowment does not change their natures; if coarse, artificial, vain,—if brave, truthful, or shallow,—they thus appear in books and marble, or on canvas; and hence it is that character is the true gauge of authorship, and wins or repels confidence, respect, and love, in the same proportion as do living men. ‘By their fruit shall ye know them.’ Therefore authors themselves most effectually disenchant readers. They are disloyal to their high mission; they compromise their own ideal, write gossip instead of truth, describe themselves instead of nature, dip their pens in the venom of malevolence, corrupt their style with vulgarity, keep no faith with aspiration, truckle to power and interest, and so bring their vocation itself into merited disdain.How charming, on the other hand, is the spontaneous bard, who sings from an overflowing and musical nature! There is a court in one of the most populous quarters of London which rejoices in the name of Spring Gardens. Doubtless the spot, at one time, was a rural domain; at present, a few trees peering over a wall, and a retired and quaint look about some of the brick domiciles that line the street, alone justify the pleasant name it bears. In one of these houses is the office of the Commissioners of Lunacy; and there, one winter morning, I had the satisfaction of a brief tÊte-À-tÊte with Procter. His plainly-cut frock-coat, long and black, his white hair and quiet bearing, made him appear a curate such as Goldsmith portrayed. It is a curious vocation for a poet—that of testing the wits of people suspected of being out of their mind,—and a painful one for a sensitive nature, to inspect the asylums devoted to their use. But I remembered that Procter’s early taste drew him into intimate love and recognition of the old English dramatists, whose natural element was the terrible in human passion and woe; I considered the profound tenderness of his muse, and I felt that even the tragic scenes it was his duty to witness and to study, were not without a certain sad affinity with genius. Kean visited madhouses to perfect his conception of Lear; and he who sings of human weal and sorrow is taught to deepen and hallow his strain by the misery as well as the amenities of his life. The heart of courtesy, the mood of aspiration, have not been quelled in Procter by the stern professional business which is his daily task. They loomed up even in that dusky office, and kept faith with my previous ideal; but it was especially in the poet’s eye that I read the spirit of his muse; ineffably mild and tender is its expression, deepening under the influence of emotion like the tremulous cadence of music that is born of sentiment. I saw there the soul that dictated ‘How many summers, love, hast thou been mine?’ ‘Send down thy pitying angel, God!’ and so many other lays of affection endeared to all who can appreciate the genuine lyrics of the heart identified with the name of Barry Cornwall.

With all its occasional disenchantment, my love of authors imparted a singular charm to the experience of travel; the lapse of time and new localities united then to revive the dreams of youth. What a new grace the first view of the hills of Spain derived from the memory of Cervantes, and the gleanings in that romantic field of Lockhart and Irving; how rife with associations was the dreary night-ride beyond Terracina, near the scene of Cicero’s murder; and what an intense life awoke in desolate Ravenna, at the sight of Dante’s tomb! The rustling of dry reeds in the gardens of Sallust had an eloquent significance; the figures on Alfieri’s monument, in Santa Croce, seemed to breathe in the twilight; the rosemary plucked in Rousseau’s old garden at Montmorency had a scent of fragrant memory; in the cafÉs at Venice, Goldoni’s characters appeared to be talking, and Byron’s image floated on her waters like a sculptor’s dream; in the Florentine villa Boccacio’s spirit lingered; in the Cenci palace Shelley’s deep eyes glistened; in the shade of the pyramid of Cestus the muse of Keats scattered flowers; on the shores of Como hovered the creations of Manzoni, and a cliff in Brittany rose like a cenotaph to Chateaubriand; while the cadence of Virgil’s line chimed with the lapsing wave on the beach at Naples. I thought, at Lausanne, of Gibbon’s last touch to the Rise and Fall, and his reverie that night; sought the tablet that covers Parnell’s dust at Chester, craved Montgomery’s blessing at Sheffield, looked for Sterne’s monk at Calais, and beheld the crown on Tasso’s cold temples beneath the cypresses of St. Onofrio. Defoe lighted up gloomy Cripplegate, Addison walked in the groves of Oxford, Johnson threaded the crowd in Fleet Street, and Milton’s touch seemed to wake the organ-keys of St. Giles. But it is not requisite to wander from home for such experiences.It was a delicious morning in June. I had passed the previous night at a village on the Hudson; a violent thunder-storm just before dawn had laid the dust, freshened the leaves, and purified as well as cooled the sultry air. Attracted by the sweet breath and vivid tints of the landscape, I determined to walk to a steamboat-landing four miles off, and on my way make a long-meditated visit to Sunnyside. Taking an umbrageous path that wound through a shady lane, I sauntered along, sometimes in view of the crystal expanse of Tappan Zee, sometimes catching a glimpse of the hoary and tufted Palisades, and again pausing under a majestic elm on whose pendent spray a yellow-bird chirped and swung, or from whose dense green canopy a locust trilled its drowsy note. The breeze was scented with clover and woodbine; sleek cattle grazed in the meadows; amber clouds flecked a heaven of azure; fields of grain waved like a shoreless lake of plumes; the maize stood thick and tasselled; the lofty chestnuts shook their feathery bloom; now and then a solitary crow hovered above, or a brown robin hopped cheerily by the wayside. It was one of those clear, serene, luxurious days of early summer which, in our capricious climate, occasionally unite the gorgeous hues of the Orient with the balm and the softness of Italy; pearly outlines stretched along the hills, the broad river gleamed in sunshine, and every shade of emerald flashed or deepened over the wide groves and teeming farms. As I drew near to Irving’s cottage, the bees were contentedly humming round the locusts, and the ivy-leaves that clustered thickly about the old gables were dripping with the tears of night; every bugle of the honeysuckle was a delicate censer, and the turf and hedge wore their brightest colours; even the old weathercock, trophy of an ancient colonial Stadt-house, dazzled the eye as it caught the lateral rays of the sun; the fowls strutted about with unwonted complacency, and the house-dog bounded through the beaded grass as if exhilarated by the scene. On the veranda that overlooks the river, from which it is divided by a little grove, sat our favourite author, with a book on his knee, the embodiment of thoughtful content. His home looked the symbol of his genius, and his expression the reflex of his life. They harmonized with a rare completeness, and fulfilled to the heart the picture which imagination had drawn. Here was no castle in the air, but a realized daydream. Sleepy Hollow was at hand; an English cottage, like that to which poor Leslie brought his angel wife; a Dutch roof such as covered Van Tassell’s memorable feast; the stream up which floated the incorrigible Dolph; the mountain range whose echoes resounded with the mysterious bowls, and where Rip took his long nap—all identified with the author’s virgin fame,—gave the vital interest of charming association to the silent grace of nature; and, above all, the originator of the spell was there, as genial, humorous, and imaginative, as if he had never wandered from the primal haunts of his childhood and his fame. That he had done so, and to good purpose, however, was evident in his conversation. News had just arrived of a new French Émeute, and that led us to speak of the first Revolution; and Irving gave some impressive reminiscences of his visits to the localities of Paris which are identified with those scenes of violence and blood. He recurred to them with keen sensibility and in graphic details. It was delightful thus to commune with a man whose name was associated with my first conscious relish of native authorship, and detect the same moral zest and picturesque insight in his talk which so long ago had endeared his writings. I felt anew the conservative power of a love of nature and an artistic organization; they had kept thus fresh the sympathies, and thus enjoyable the mind. Retirement was as grateful now as when he sought it as a juvenile dreamer; the noble river won as fond a glance as when first explored as a truant urchin; and the kindly spirit beamed as truly in his smile as when he mused in the Alhambra, or walked to Melrose with Scott for a cicerone. My authormania revived in all its original fervour; here were the mellow hues on the picture that beguiled my boyhood; and the man, the scene, and the author blended in a graceful unity of effect, without a single incongruity.