humor, his quaint rough talk and gushing affection; no touching revelations of the foibles, doubts, struggles, triumphs of a great but tried spirit, all warm from the throbbing heart. Nothing of this in Calvin. All hope and fear, all joy and anguish, are concealed behind the sober and formal drapery of public life. Yet perhaps we do him in this respect imperfect justice. Within a narrow circle of friendship he seems to have displayed warm and even tender feelings, and to have attached men to him. Beza, a man of large powers, cherished for him a respect which bordered on idolatry. And few things could be more touching than the sight of Farel in his old age, just trembling on the verge of the grave, insisting upon coming to Geneva to look once more into Calvin's face, and to grasp once more Calvin's hand. In some of his familiar letters, in his counsels to the erring, in his condolence with the suffering, there is found a grave sincerity and honest kindness, revealing another aspect of his character which we regret that we are not permitted to contemplate more frequently.

He was a man of godly sincerity; a very stern man; a man utterly regardless of what we call human rights; a most unlovely man in some respects, but not a man devoted to selfish aims, as appears from his honorable poverty and stainless purity of life; a man of great virtues and great faults, — faults which in part were the errors of the time, in part the excess of an austere nature and bodily disease, in part, too, springing from the frailties and passions of our common humanity; a great man, whose power for good or evil was larger than belongs to ordinary manhood, and whose signature was written with an iron hand upon his age. As we gaze upon the features which art has preserved, those features worn by disease, ploughed by thought and care, and on every lineament bearing the traces of an inflexible will, if we cannot feel sympathy, we feel respect. We cannot call him saint, we cannot sympathize with the opinions for whose diffusion he labored, or approve the methods by which he sought to compel assent; we must hope that his influence will continue to grow less in the future, as in the past; but while remembering his reverence toward God, his allegiance to conscience, his fidelity in labor, his moral purity, we can with the Church. Universal rejoice in his virtues.

ART. VII. INTERCOURSE WITH JAPAN.

1. Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan, in the Years 1857, '58, '59. By LAWRENCE OLIPHANT, Esq., Private Secretary to Lord Elgin. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1860. 8vo. pp. 645.

2. Japan as it was and is. lips, Sampson, & Co. 3. Correspondence with Her [Britannic] Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in Japan. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. 1860. Lon.don: Printed by Harrison and Sons.

By RICHARD HILDRETH. Boston: Phil1855.

THERE is no longer any pretence that Japan is an unknown country, and the Japanese an unknown people to us. There is more danger among well-educated people-somewhat overwhelmed by the fresh information offered to them on this subject, and the fresh arrangements of the old stories that our fathers were familiar with of the opposite pretence, that we already know all about this land and people that we ought to know, or should know if we had only improved our opportunities of reading the narratives of Pinto, Kaemfer, Thunberg, Titsingh, Gulownin, Siebold, and the rest, or even paid proper attention, when they came to us, to the elaborate works of Dr. Hawks and Mr. Hildreth. Everybody now knows that the Japanese are not Chinese, is quite familiar with the theory of the "happy despatch," and considers it a perfectly. natural, or at least commonplace affair, that the Japanese ladies who have had children blacken their teeth with dye-stuffs, while those who have not like to make their teeth look whiter by keeping their lips red by chewing the betel-nut. Those who are more business-like in their inquiries know that it is forty-nine hundred miles on a great circle from San Francisco to Simoda, and less than a thousand from Hakodadi to the mouth of the Amoor; and have settled according to their own views of financial economy the question of dollars and itzebous. There is, too, a very general impression, growing out of this extent of very general knowledge, that a great thing has been done in "opening the ports" of Japan,

so long closed, and connecting her, by ties of reciprocal benefits, with such a progressive country as our own.

The amount of this knowledge is gratifying, but the resulting impression is a true one only about to the extent that this knowledge is accurate, definite, and practical. The " great thing" is begun, but it is not done. What this great thing is, we shall have hereafter to examine. At present it is enough to say, that the co-operation of two different forms of civilization for a common purpose, much more their amalgamation into a common civilization, is a work not of a day, or even of a generation. We have got far enough to see and acknowledge that the Japanese are a civilized people in some sort, if not in our sort. We find that they are a civilized people, probably numbering more than thirty million souls. We see that it would be a "great thing" to make this people work together with our thirty millions, where our civilization is the more perfect, and to let them teach us to work as they do, and with them, where theirs is the more perfect. We do not however see habitually, as yet, how slow a process that must be by which the mass of either population is to be affected by the limited contact now connecting the edges, so to speak, of the two. We may make some estimate, without statistics, of the degree and amount in which our own people have thus far been affected by the intercourse of the two nations, and may calculate what that effect will probably be in a series of years. If we suppose, then, on the other hand, that our influence upon Japan, resulting from the same intercourse, is, or may become, even tenfold greater than this, it must be confessed that we should still leave the Japan of 1866 very much where we found it in 1856. Our own feelings with regard to their habits and customs may show us how little likely they are to take ours for law and gospel, and we shall begin to see that a practical union of the nations must be born of time rather than treaties.

Writing just at the moment that all our readers are either seeing the Japanese Embassy, or expecting to see it, or reading in the newspapers the accounts of its progress, we may be excused for asking how the two civilizations compare, as mere civilizations. Our nation meant to be civil to these dis

tinguished visitors. We submit to little compulsion, but, so far as it could compel, our government has tried to make us civil. But what have we done about it, whether as matter of discipline for ourselves, or example to our guests, over whom we are in the habit of assuming a superiority in cultivation, while we sneer at the same assumption on their part? We have had reporters in their bedchambers; we have jostled them in the streets; we have cheated them in the shops; we have crowded in front of them at entertainments made in their honor, so that they could not see the insignificant shows given them in places of comfort and repose; we have treated them like a raree-show, instead of treating them like a company of gentlemen, who desire to see rather than to be seen, accredited to us by a sovereign prince who represents a nation of as many people as

our own.

Now, all this-the cheating aside - does not arise from a want of respect, and it is a mark of interest, and an expression of popular recognition which has doubtless been appreciated by the ambassadors. But it does arise from a want of civility. Like the donkey that jumped into his master's lap because that was a thing for which the spaniel was petted, we have "overwhelmed" our guests with "civilities," such as our rude taste has dictated. We need not say what treatment a real and true civility would have suggested as proper for such guests, because we believe that there is scarcely an individual among those who have been the most annoying to them who would not be able to indicate its general character, and who would not have managed to achieve it, if he had been offering the hospitality of his own house. As individuals, the people who thronged upon the privacy of the nation's guests, stared at them, fingered their dresses, talked about them before their faces, and surrounded them in chattering groups during their solemn meeting with the chief magistrate of the nation, individuals these people are civil enough, and will beg pardon if they brush against the hem of the garment even of those whom they think inferior in social position to themselves. It is as "the people" that we have claimed the right to be uncivil. McDonald, a young son of Oregon, attempted to explain this right to the Japanese some time ago. They had taken

as

him prisoner, and, while questioning him about the rank of Commander Glynn of our navy, told him to give "the order of succession from the highest chief." He replied that the highest chief was the people; but he adds in his account of the matter that this they "could not comprehend." They may now find it difficult to comprehend the relative rank of people and President, and to discriminate between "populace" and "people"; but we trust that they may not carry away the opinion, which would surely be an erroneous one, that people, any more than President, intended them any discourtesy. But whatever they may think, we must confess to ourselves that we have not shown off our civilization to any great advantage, and we may judge from the event how difficult it will be for us to study and understand their civilization, where in its nature and mode of expression it differs from our own.

And so, leaving the consideration of what the visit of the Embassy may have taught either nation of the civilization of the other, with the comforting reflection that we may yet grant them, in our judgments of them, the charity we so much need for ourselves, we may return to the general proposition that the "Japan question" offers us the problem of two distinct and separate civilizations, each properly called so, as having emerged from barbarism in its own way and to a certain extent, which under our recent treaties and present hopes are to be drawn into closer relations and combinations, with the hope of producing mutual good. In any attempt to solve this problem by declaring what the new relations and combinations ought to be, and defining beforehand their probable results, it must not be forgotten that the experiment has been tried, and pretty thoroughly tried, by Christian nations before. Indeed, perhaps history has never more perfectly exhibited to us a repetition of the same motives, applied to the same purposes, by the same parties, upon the same scene of action, after the first effort had been completed and its results had become insignificant for more than two centuries of years. The Portuguese trade with Japan began about 1548, and soon became very active. The Dutch trade began in 1609, and the English, although their trade with the islands, for various reasons, was never very large or profitable, obtained a much more favorable