The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864

Madame Récamier, with a Sketch of the History of Society in France. By Madame M–. London. 1862.

2

Causeries de Lundi.

3

Coppet et Weimar: Madame de Staël et la Grande Duchesse Louise.

4

Madame de Châteaubriand.

5

This term designated a larger class of young men than that to which it is now confined. It took in the articled clerks of merchants and bankers, the George Barnwells of the day.

6

Since writing this article, we have been informed that the object of our funeral oration is not definitively dead, but only moribund. So much the better: we shall have an opportunity of granting the request made to Walter by one of the children in the wood, and "kill him two times." The Abbé de Vertot, having a siege to write, and not receiving the materials in time, composed the whole from his invention. Shortly after its completion, the expected documents arrived, when he threw them aside, exclaiming, "You are of no use to me now: I have carried the town."

7

Cornhill Magazine, June, 1864, Vol. IX. p. 654.

8

Gates was an Englishman, and has a damaged reputation. Lee was another, who has no reputation at all. Conway was an Irishman, and the same is true of him. But these men all did something to forfeit esteem. Jones never did. Montgomery died in the full flush of his deserved honors. He was Irish by birth.

9

Not bound to the Baltic, as Mr. Thackeray supposes. Cf. Beatson's Naval Memoirs, Vol. IV. pp. 550-553.

10

The bad character that is commonly given to the Athenian polity by the enemies of popular government is by no means deserved if we can trust the definition of that polity by Pericles, as reported by Thucydides, and translated by that eminent scholar and great historian, Mr. Grote. "We live under a constitution," says Pericles, in the famous funeral speech, "such as noway to envy the laws of our neighbors,—ourselves an example to others, rather than mere imitators. It is called a democracy, since its permanent aim tends toward the Many and not toward the Few: in regard to private matters and disputes, the laws deal equally with every man: while looking to public affairs and to claims of individual influence, every man's chance of advancement is determined, not by party favor, but by real worth, according as his reputation stands in his own particular department: nor does poverty, or obscure station, keep him back, if he really has the means of benefiting the city." This wellnigh makes a political Arcadia of Athens. Yet there is no good reason, after making due allowance for the imperfection of human action, when compared with the theory of a given polity, for doubting the correctness of the picture.

11

One of our English Friends, a man of well-earned eminence, says that "extracts from the contemporary literature of America seem to show, that, if the result of the Presidential election of 1860 had been different, separation would have come, not from the South, but from the North." (See Essays on Fiction, by Nassau W. Senior, p. 397.) Mr. Senior is mistaken, as much so as when he says that "a total abstinence from novel-reading pervades New England," where there is more novel-reading than in any other community of the same numbers in the world. With the exception of "the old Abolitionists," there were not five hundred disunionists in all the Free States in 1860; and the Abolitionists would neither fight nor vote, and, though possessed of eminent abilities, they had no influence. If Mr. Senior were right, we do not see how the South could be blamed for what it has done; for, if we could secede because of Mr. Lincoln's defeat, it follows that the South could secede because of his election.