The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 25, November, 1859

The History of the Whig Party. By R. Mackintosh Ormsby. Boston. Crosby, Nichols, & Co, 12mo. pp. 377. $1.00.

Rills from the Fountain of Life; or, Sermons to Children. By Rev. Richard Newton, D. D., Rector of St. Paul's Church, Philadelphia. New York. R. Carter & Brothers. 12mo. pp. 220. 75 cts.

Life in Jesus; a Memoir of Mrs. Mary Winslow, arranged from her Correspondence, Diary, and Thoughts. By her Son, Octavius Window, D. D. New York. R. Carter & Brothers. 12mo. pp. 426. $1.00.

Almost a Heroine. By the Author of "Charles Auchester," "Counterparts," etc., etc. Boston. Ticknor & Fields. 12mo. pp. 399. $1.00.

Life in Tuscany. By Mabel Shaman Crawford. From the London Edition. New York. Sheldon & Co. 12mo. pp. 339. $1.00.

Germaine. By Edmond About. Boston. J. E. Tilton & Co. 12mo. pp. 341. $1.00.

The Puritans; or, the Church, Court, and Parliament of England, during the Reigns of Edward Sixth and Queen Elizabeth. By Samuel Hopkins. 3 vols. Vol. I. Boston. Gould & Lincoln. 8vo. pp. 549. $2.50.

The New American Cyclopaedia; a Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge. Edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana. Volume VII. Edward—Fueros. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. pp. 786. $3.00.

The Poetical Works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed. New and enlarged Edition. 2 vols. New York. Redfield. 12mo. pp. 310, 304. $2.00.

notes

1

It is to be lamented that Foresti had not anticipated our purpose with that consecutive detail possible only in an autobiography. "Le Scene del Carcere Duro in Austria," writes the Marquis Pallavicino, "non sono ancora la storia del Ventuno. Un uomo potrebbe scriverla e svelare molte infamie tuttavia occulte del governo Austriaco. Quest' uomo è Felice Foresti. Il quale abbandonò gli agi Americani per combattere un' altra volta, guerriero canuto, le gloriose battaglie dell' Italico risorgimento. Il martire scriva: e la sua penna, come quella d' un altro martire,—Silvio Pellico,—sarà una spada nel cuoro dell' Austria."—Notes to Spielbergo e Gradisca.

2

Spielbergo e Gradisca: Scene del Carcere Duro di GIORGIO PALLAVICINO. Torino. 1856.

3

"Mémoires d'un Prisonnier d'Etat." Par ALEXANDRE ANDRYANE. Paris.

4

Copyright secured by the Author in Great Britain and France.

5

See "Climenole" in The Portfolio, 1803.

6

Compare, for instance, Judge Drayton's Independence Charge to the Grand Jury of Charleston, delivered April 23, 1776, with "Common Sense."

7

They generally spell it "nomme."

8

This Beaumarchais claim was kept alive until the beginning of the present generation. In 1794, Gouverneur Morris, Minister to the French Republic, obtained from the Minister of Finance a receipt to the Crown for a million of francs, signed by Beaumarchais, and sent it home to meet the claim which had again been presented. In 1806 it reappeared, urged by the Imperial Ambassador. In 1816, the Duc de Richelieu, minister of Louis XVIII., sustained it, and declared, on the strength of Gerard's assertions, that the million receipt did not in any way concern the United States. In 1824, the daughter of Beaumarchais came to this country to solicit Congress in person, with no better success. But at last, in 1835, when our claim of twenty-five millions on France was settled, eight hundred thousand francs were allowed to the heirs of Beaumarchais, and the business closed forever,—not creditably to us. The claim was probably unfounded; but our government admitted its validity by the fact of payment; and the money, if due, ought to have been paid forty years before, or a suitable compensation made for the long delay. To be Liberals in borrowing and Conservatives in repayment is not a desirable financial character for a nation to obtain.

9

The calker's dog had probably never read Olaus Magnus, though that worthy Archbishop wrote something very like dog-Latin; but, as dwellers on the margin of the "Atlantic," we have too great a respect for a prelate who believed in the kraaken and the sea-serpent, not to refer our valued Cynophilist to the Thirty-Ninth Chapter of the Eighteenth Book De Gentibus Septentrionalibus, where he will find the same story told of the fox.—Eds. Atlantic.

10

This, perhaps, was to be expected; for he calls Dr. Latham's English Language "unquestionably the most valuable work on English philology and grammar—which has yet appeared," (p. xxx., note,) and refers to the first edition of 1841. If Mr. Bartlett must allude at all to Dr. Latham, (who is reckoned a great blunderer among English philologers,) he should at least have referred to the second edition of his work, in two volumes, 1855.

11

We remember once hearing a man say of something, that it was written in a "very grand delinquent [grandiloquent] style,"—a phrase certainly not without modern application. We have heard also Angola-Saxons and Angular-Saxons,—the latter, at least, not an unhappy perversion.

12

Gedrängtes Handbuch der Fremdwörter, etc., etc., Leipzig, 1852.

13

Take, for instance, the "negro so black that charcoal made a chalk-mark on him," or the "shingle painted to look so like stone that it sank in water,"—itself overpersuaded by the skill of the painter. We overheard the following dialogue last winter. (Thermometer,—12°.) "Cold, this morning."—"That's so. Hear what happened to Joe?"—"No, I didn't."—"Well, the doctors had ben givin' him one thing another with merc'ry in't, and he walked out down to the Post-Office and back, and when he come home he kind o' felt somethin' hard in his boots. Come to pull 'em off, they found a lump o' quicksilver in both on 'em."—"Sho!"—"Fact; it had shrunk clean down through him with the cold." This rapid power of dramatizing a dry fact, of putting it into flesh and blood, and the instantaneous conception of Joe as a human thermometer, seem to us more like the poetical faculty than anything else. It is, at any rate, humor, and not mere quickness of wit,—the deeper, and not the shallower quality. Humor tends always to overplus of expression; wit is mathematically precise. Captain Basil Hall denied that our people had humor; but did he possess it himself? for, if not, he would never find it. Did he always feel the point of what was said to himself? We doubt, because we happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain. The Captain was walking up and down the piazza of a country tavern while the couch changed horses. A thunderstorm was going on, and, with that pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in condescending to American merit, which is so conciliating, he said to a countryman lounging near, "Pretty heavy thunder, you have here." The other, who had taken his measure at a glance, drawled gravely, "Waal, we du, considerin' the number of inhabitants."