a curious attestation. The comedian being expected on a certain occasion to sing a popular song, the curtain arose and displayed Mr. Drake; but he uttered no song or word. The audience waited, then hissed; the curtain rose a second time, showing the motionless singer, who, it was then concluded, must be drunk. It had to be announced that it was a wax Drake. The fame of this figure was so great as to lead a severe art-critic of the place to visit it. Whereupon a ruse, which Mr. Reade has since made familiar in Peg Woffington, was practised. The critic admired the general truthfulness of the figure, but thought the nose one-sided and the head somewhat larger than the original's. When the criticism was over, Drake stepped forth, and the young artist had a triumph. Mrs. Trollope, then a handsome and blooming lady, came to Cincinnati, where she resided some years. One of her compagnons du voyage, a Frenchman, named Hervien, I believe, had made and began to exhibit there a large and sufficiently terrific transparency of Dante's hell. But the lamps did not work well, and the exhibition proved a failure. Young Powers, however, caught at the idea, and constructed an ingeniously horrible exhibition, in which some of Hervien's materials were used, representing flames, serpents, devils, and other infernal paraphernalia. His Infernal Regions' constitute, to this day, a popular exhibition in that city. A current of electricity sent along the iron railing, which the spectators naturally clutch as they lean over to gaze into the pandemonium beneath, adds to the thrilling impressions of the scene, which, it is alleged, has in its day converted many a sinner. Mr. Longworth was interested in the early manifestations of ability by Powers; and, finding that he was ambitious of becoming an artist, became his patron, and furnished the means by which he was enabled to go to Italy and receive instruction. Mrs. Frances Trollope came to Cincinnati about the year 1828, and resided there two years. How deep was the impression made upon the entire country by her subsequent book about it, may be judged by the fact that she has added a characteristic word to the American vocabulary, it being quite common in any part of the United States to hear mothers threaten to trollop their children if they do not behave. She has thus become as potent a name to conjure the young generation of America with as the Black Douglass was in Scotland. And, indeed, this new verb, whose significance my reader, doubtless, already knows, most aptly expresses the good part that Mrs. T. performed for the then infant West. The squall that followed was natural; but no other book about America has ever done so much good as hers. Mrs. Trollope brought good companions with her, and cared little for making acquaintances in the most cultivated circle that existed in Cincinnati-a circle by no means insignificant even at that time; and, consequently, only the coarser traits of the people appeared in her book; but she had the good sense to feel that what her people at home would wish to hear about was the new world, and not so much of the old world as had managed to survive in the new. The coarse traits were the most distinctive. Nevertheless, there is a possible opal in every flint. It would seem that Mr. and Mrs. Trollope went to Cincinnati with some idea of settling there, or at least of leaving one of their sons, Master Adolphus, I believe. (What if T. A. T. had remained there! and what if Arthur Hugh Clough, who tried to obtain a situation in one of the famous High Schools, had remained there! If all the wits who have visited that place with an idea of settling permanently had done so, I might now be writing of a classic city.) England and Florence are indebted to an attack of ague which seized on Master Adolphus and determined his parents against leaving him in the West. Mrs. Trollope made a considerable investment in the purchase of a piece of ground in the centre of the city, and in building thereon a Bazaar, a good part of her motive in which was, I believe, philanthropic, or to employ young women and encourage others to employ them as shopkeepers, no woman having, at that time, ever been so employed there. The scheme was an utter failure. The Bazaar building has since been successively used as an Eclectic, a Hydropathic, and, I believe, a Female Medical College; has been once or twice, if I mistake not, the home of varieties of socialistic reformers; and, in each case, has been pursued and haunted by Failure, until it became a home for invalided and convalescent Federal soldiers, for whom it was found admirably adapted. The ruddy-hearted and eupeptic Englishwoman has left in the West an impression favourable to herself. Frank, generous, and with the nerve for any experience, she explored the neighbourhood until she knew not only the Indians, the camp-meeting revivalists, and the market-women, who insisted on walking arm-in-arm with her, but the races immediately anterior to these imbedded in the soil,-to such an extent indeed that she foretold the discovery of the bones of the mammoth which was found there recently. One reads her book now, however, with somewhat the same feeling that one looks at those blurred stereoscopic views which have aimed at photographing the rapids of Niagara. She was almost indignant that even so gifted an oratress as Fanny Wright was not welcomed by the Queen of the West, because she was a woman; that her bazaar, designed to enlarge the sphere of occupation for woman, failed in a region where, as she said, 'women are guarded by a shield of sevenfold insignificance; and her satire is keen on the dismay and horror excited by the performances of two French figurantes who visited the city. Yet the witty authoress lived herself to see the day when women were not only in general employment, but several of them in regular medical practice, in Cincinnati; when its court decided that a woman was admissible to practice at law in it; when the female lecturer was an ordinary institution; and, had she lived a little longer, might have found blasé London itself slightly scandalised by a figurante Mazeppa' from the same city. One may indeed trace there, in certain transformations, Mrs.Trollope's portraits,-as the innkeeper who, in response to her wild idea of having a separate dinnertable for herself and family, says, Our manners are very good manners, and we don't wish any changes from Europe;' and the art-critic, who, on being told that a certain picture shown him is Hebe and the bird of Jove, asks, 'What the devil is Hebe doing with the American eagle?'- but they are forgotten beside the mighty cartoons which Destiny has thrown, is throwing, upon that vast canvas. Figures can but very inadequately indicate the new stratifications that have supervened since that first European book about the domestic life of America was produced, but here are some that may well be pondered. In the year 1800 Cincinnati had but 400 inhabitants; in 1810 it had 2,540; in 1820, 9,602; in 1830, 24,851; in 1840, 46,338; in 1850, 115,436; in 1865, it has 230,000. In 1831 the city of Chicago had twelve families; it has now about 200,000 inhabitants. So late as 1850 there were but 40 miles of railway lines around Chicago; now 5,000 miles centre there; and in the one year 1865 the value of the commerce that passed over the St. Clair flats was 22,700,0551. In 1849 when organised as a territory, Minnesota had 4,000 inhabitants; by the census of 1860 it had 170,000. The growth of the cities of California and Petrolia,'* (which now contribute $70,000,000 to the internal revenue of the United States) are within the memories of young men and boys. The westward march has become a rush; it is as if some Pied Piper were charming away from the East all but the aged and crippled. How smooth now is the way that was once so hard and perilous! One leaves New York, and sweeps over the great still land-ocean of prairie in a comfortable hotel on wheels, -stretching on his couch at night, rising to his hot breakfast in an adjoining car,' and taking his cigar and the daily newspaper of the last town in another. The Indians have yielded their tomahawks to be made into railway sleepers. On the great rivers one sees them hovering in little bayous and swamps, and gazing with sullen wonder on the thousand floating palaces that pass by on waters, which fifty-seven years ago knew none but their canoes and the rafts. 6 Behind the squaw's light birch canoe The steamer rocks and raves; I hear the tread of pioneers, The first low wash of waves where soon 'I sincerely believe,' wrote Mrs. Trollope, as the result of her observations in the West, that if a Fireworshipper, or an Indian Brahmin, were to come to the United States, and could preach and pray in English, he would not be long without a respectable congregation.' This is certainly true. The old social and theological ties, still strong on the Eastern coast of America, are made rotten by the western winds, and break very easily. The West is hospitable to every new creed or social experiment, whilst its practical necessities furnish the severest test of each. an early day it was felt by the religious and social theorists of Europe to be the great field for the embodiment of their ideas, and their voyages and efforts there remind one of the pilgrimages of the early gold-hunters and north-west-passage explorers. With similar devotion and energy did they seek Golden Ages, Social Eldorados, and Arcadias, in those far-off isles and At * In December, 1752, Major George Washington, of the Virginia militia, was sent by Gov. Dinwiddie to the French commander of that day, who was establishing a line of military ports between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. In his route he passed up the Valley of the Alleghany and across the County of Venango, then the habitation of Indians and wild animals. A hundred years later, and all that could be seen among those barren hills was a couple of sleepy Dutch towns, with very little to sell to the outer world and still less to buy from it. Within the past five years the discovery of an illuminating oil beneath the surface of the earth has transformed the face of nature with magical rapidity. The whole country for miles is dotted with derricks, steam-engines, and shanties; new cities have sprung up, with their hotels, stores, banks, and theatres. In a circuit of 30 miles around Oil City are over 200,000 inhabitants. Meadville, the neck of the oil regions, through which is poured the oil outgoing and the thousand supplies ingoing, has risen from a population of 3,000 in 1860 to 15,000. Places like Franklin, Titusville, Oil City, Pithole, which scarcely existed, now boast of their daily newspapers, their hotels, banks, stores, and theatres. In the circuit of 30 miles around Franklin there are not less than 200,000 energetic people. The whole country is dotted with derricks, engines, houses, and the increase is rapid and steady.-New York Tribune, Oct. 6, 1865. 1866] The Queen of the West. streams of Humanity. Thither in the year 1814, when not yet three thousand souls dwelt on the site of the largest city of the West, came the shoemaker of Wurtemburg, George Rapp, bringing his company of Harmonists' with him. Not content, like that other shoemaker, Boehme, with mystic air-castles, he went to build in Ohio the ideal structure for which Wurtemburg furnished neither materials nor toleration. He established himself with his followers in the centre of Indiana, then almost a wilderness; but they all became wretchedly poor, and were glad to sell New Harmony to Robert Owen, when he came following his mirage. Rapp repaired to Pennsylvania, where he founded the village of 'Economy,' and where, taught by twenty years of failure, the Rappites succeeded better, though they are still poor. Rapp died in 1847. He was a good, gentle soul. The greater number of Germans who went to America remained in the West to mingle with the general community. They always maintained their reverence for the inspired shoemaker, however, and held that not he but Nature failed. I remember to have visited once at a German residence in Cincinnati, the lady of which, though surrounded by every comfort, still so cherished the remembrance of him for and with whom she had suffered so many privations, that she had a large shrine, of the old Catholic kind, in her drawing-room, where the portrait of Rapp, with evergreen around it, took the place of the Madonna and child, and where she and her children worshipped Before New like true Comtists. Harmony came into the hands of Owen, a French socialist, whose name I have forgotten, tried to establish a community there, which failed immediately. It was about the year 1823, or soon after the death of his patron, the Duke of Kent, that Robert Owen came to hall, and was an important event. Campbell was by no means a match either in education or temper for his English antagonist, and his failure to sufficiently meet Owen's points left a kind of animosity toward the heretic in the minds of the orthodox believers. This certainly made his social experiment more difficult, and he went away, somewhere about 1828, to Mexico. The heresies which he inculcated did not pass away,however, with his socialistic projects; and those who agree with him in the former have to this day a large and important organisation there in the form of a Sunday Institute.' A friend of the writer, who met and conversed with Robert Owen at the Brook Farm Community in Massachusetts, more than twenty years ago, when he must have been seventy-three or four, tells me that failures in Scotland, England, the United States, and Mexico, had not quenched his faith in or enthusiasm for his idea, that his locks were still chesnut, without a touch of grey, and that he moved about Brook Farm as a patriarch whom all honoured. Another year, and that place too was in the landmarket. As for New Harmony, it is at present noted as the village where more corn is turned into pork and into whisky than any other of its size in the Union! Robert Owen left two sons in America, both of whom have had somewhat distinguished careers. David Dale Owen was, perhaps, the most serviceable practical geologist that the country ever had. Edu cated in good Swiss colleges, he returned and made a valuable reconnoissance of the geological features of Indiana, of which he became state geologist. His ability being recognised he was employed to make surveys of their mineral wealth and geological structure by the states of Iowa, Winconsin, Minnesota, and Kentucky. His reports were invaluable, and will form the basis of all subsequent explorations of this vast region. His work on the geology of Indiana is especially valuable. He was a few years ago elected the state geologist of Arkanzas, and he had nearly completed his surveys of that region, when the exposures to which he had been subjected in the prosecution of his work brought on the disease of which he died, at the age of fifty. Robert Dale Owen, his brother, entered upon the career of a democratic politician, and was elected to the Congress of the United States, where he served in the term from 1843 to 1847. For some reason, probably because of the extreme pro-slavery tendencies of the Democracy, he turned his attention to other things, and wrote two books— New Views of Society and Hints on Public Architecture-both of which have considerable merit. He partook of the spiritistic excitement, and produced the work which has become a text-book of the 'circles' -Footfalls on the Boundaries of Another World. Since the late civil war began he has devoted his attention to politics again, and written influential arguments in favour of a proclamation of emancipation before one was issued by Mr. Lincoln, and, recently, in favour of negro-suffrage. Nearly fifty years ago the beautiful and gifted Fanny Wright, a Scotch girl of a family well known in the world of letters, just out of her teens, but fully indoctrinated by those who had charge of her orphaned life with French materialistic philosophy, visited America. Then she left, and wrote an enthusiastic book about that country. Afterwards the Epicurean Philosophy fascinated her, and she wrote her Few days in Athens,' defending the same. She had made several attempts at lecturing in England, once at the Freemasons' Tavern, but was coldly repulsed by the English public. Then again the great West arose before her as the land for the realisation of all visions, |