thought by which the mind escapes from a seemingly hopeless dilemma is worth all the vestments of dignity which the world holds. It was this readiness in repartee which continually saved Voltaire from social overturn. He once praised another writer very heartily to a third person. "It is very strange," was the reply, "that you speak so well of him, for he says that you are a charlatan."-"Oh!" replied Voltaire, "I think it very likely that both of us may be mistaken." Robert Hall

did not lose his power of retort even in madness. A hypocritical condoler with his misfortunes once visited him in the mad-house, and said, in a whining tone, “What brought you here, Mr. Hall?" Hall significantly touched his brow with his finger, and replied, "What'll never bring you, sir,-too much brain!" . . It was this readiness which made John Randolph so terrible in retort. He was the Thersites of Congress,- -a tongue-stabber. No hyperbole of contempt or scorn could be launched against him but he could overtop it with something more scornful and contemptuous. Opposition only maddened him into more brilliant bitterness. "Isn't it a shame, Mr. President," said he one day in the Senate, "that the noble bull-dogs of the administration should be wasting their precious time in worrying the rats of the opposition?" Immediately the Senate was in an uproar, and he was clamorously called to order. The presiding officer however sustained him; and pointing his long skinny finger at his opponents, Randolph'screamed out, "Rats, did I say?—mice, mice." (Pp. 148, 149.)

Another marked excellence of the Lectures is, the independence and manliness of their tone. Mr. Whipple is a selfeducated and self-made man, from which circumstance he derives some peculiarities and some advantages. Not that it is any advantage either to have educated or made oneself, unless it has been well done. The peculiarity in Mr. Whipple's case is, that he has made and educated himself well. The advantages which he might have received from birth or fortune or the university he has not despised or despaired of, but put himself resolutely at work to supply from his own resources. And so completely has he supplied them, that a careless eye would hardly detect in his writings any evidence of the want of a scholastic education. Of course you will find in him nothing of that flippant conceit and ludicrous over-estimate of the importance of his opinions and powers so common in self-educated men; and yet there is in some cases a certain air of smartness and positiveness in his views, which we feel persuaded that a wider and deeper culture would somewhat abate. But, perhaps, what is lost in this way is more than made up by the freshness and independence which his views acquire from being worked out and expressed in his own way. His thoughts seem to partake of the elasticity and vigor of a laboring man. Many of them come out with such a jerk that they fairly ring. Every sentence is replete with life and joy. The views of "literature and life" are always manly and wholesome. There is not

a word of pretending cant, of mawkish sentimentality, or effeminate whining at the hardships of life in the whole book. Milton and Dante and Wordsworth are his greatest literary heroes; and as much as he abhors scamps, he seems to abhor flats more, as in the following passage:

But about the beginning of the present century a new order of fictions came into fashion. As novelties commonly succeed with the public, some enterprising authors tried the speculation of discarding indecency. Sentimentality, the opposite evil, was substituted, and the dynasty of rakes was succeeded by the dynasty of flats. Lady Jane Brazenface, the former heroine, abdicated in favor of Lady Arabella Dieaway. The bold, free, reckless libertine of the previous romances now gave way to a lavendered young gentleman, the very pink and essence of propriety, faultless in features and in morals, and the undisputed proprietor of crushed affections and two thousand sterling a year. The inspiration of this tribe of novelists was love and weak tea; the soul-shattering period of courtship was their field of action. (P. 50.)

But the most striking feature of these Lectures is the astonishing command of language which they evince. It is so great as to be almost marvellous. Nothing seems to be too subtle, too remote, or too evanescent to be expressed by their copious and pliant dialect. Mr. Whipple has singular ability in tracing out and expressing those hidden connections of things and those slight, ethereal, and fugitive notions, which float as mere glimpses or visions in most men's minds. His keen, delicate, agile, genial, jubilant mind plays around and through his subject, threading its way along every vein of gold, like electricity. It is not the least of the merits of his Lectures that they are nearly all upon subjects which, though of very considerable importance, are so evanescent in their nature, that they are generally overlooked by writers, or treated of in the loosest or meagerest manner possible. There is scarcely one of these subjects on which a writer of no more than ordinary subtlety and ingenuity of thought, and aptness and copiousness of expression, would not say all that he has to say in a very few pages. But under the magic touch of Mr. Whipple, thought rises on thought, and word treads on word, till what in less affluent hands would be poor and unsatisfactory, grows into a rich, instructive, and extended discourse. In addition to those already quoted, we can give but a single short specimen of his light, brisk, exuberant style, and which is scarcely better than forty others that might be selected from the volume:

There is probably no literature equal to the English in the number and variety of its humorous characters, as we find them in Shakspeare, Jon

There

son, Fletcher, Fielding, Goldsmith, Addison, Scott, and Dickens. is nothing so well calculated to make us cheerful and charitable, nothing which sinks so liquidly into the mind, and floods it with such a rich sense of mirth and delight, as these comic creations. How they flash upon our inward world of thought, peopling it with forms and faces whose beautiful facetiousness sheds light and warmth over our whole being! How their eyes twinkle and wink with the very unction of mirth! How they roll and tumble about in a sea of delicious fun, unwearied in rogueries, and drolleries, and gamesome absurdities, and wheedling gibes, and loudringing, extravagant laughter,-revelling and rioting in hilarity,—with countless jests and waggeries running and raining from them in a sun-lit stream of jubilant merriment! How they flood life with mirth! How they roll up pomposity and pretense into great balls of caricature, and set them sluggishly in motion before our eyes, to tear the laughter from our lungs! (P. 115.)

Amid these excellences, and others which might be named, we find some defects also. The style, always neat, graceful, and nimble, rather than condensed and massive, occasionally appears prim and finical;-witness especially the uncom monly frequent use of the possessive case of a noun, instead of making it dependent upon the preposition of, as in such expressions as, "earth's industrial and political sovereigns," "earth's proudest palaces," "the world's fortunes," which are all found on the first three pages of the first lecture. With much too that is serious, and wholesome, and sound in Mr. Whipple's views and feelings, we must think that the general tone of his mind is too light and gamesome. His wit often runs away with him, and his hatred of canters and flats is too often directed, or at least hits, weak it may be, but benevolent laborers in the holiest of causes,-causes which are of more value to our race than all the wit and witlings in the world. As Christian reviewers, also, we should observe that Mr. Whipple's moral and religious principles, though generally sound, appear to rest too little upon revelation, and are measured too much by worldly standards.

With these remarks we pass from this most agreeable writer and lecturer to another of a very different character. RALPH WALDO EMERSON has long been known to the public as a propounder of strange doctrines, and a maker of brilliant sentences, both in poetry and prose. He has published several volumes of Essays, Poems, &c., of which the general character may be indicated by saying that the poetry is prosaic, and the prose poetic. Mr. Emerson was educated for the priesthood; but, were we to judge from his writings, we should say, rather for the Mahometan or Brahminical than for the Christian priesthood. He quotes the Koran or the Vedas quite as often as the Bible, and with full as much respect. Be

sides, he has that peculiar quietistic, dreamy, mystic tone of mind which belongs to the Oriental character. In the midst of the brisk, practical, utilitarian society of New-England, he appears more like the resurrection of an Egyptian mummy or an Indian Fakir than one of their own number. Self-poised, self-possessed, viewing everything from his own stand-point, and spinning everything out of his own bowels, he moves about in his stilted elevation, a standing wonder to the mass, a rapt prophet to a chosen few. He seems to have attained the highest ideal indifferentism and isolation of the sage, so as to look at everything in the white light of a passionateless philosophy. Nothing can be cooler than the measured, oracular tone in which he pronounces upon vexed questions, or the heedlessness with which he dashes against this or that system or institution, however venerable, as though he moved with all the impersonality and weight of philosophy itself. If we understand him, and we are not at all certain that we do, Mr. Emerson's system of nature and man is quite outside of, and independent of the established science and religion of civilized society, and rests on a basis peculiarly its own. Symbolism is more to him than science, and consciousness than revelation. He keeps sidereal time, and holds his magnet ever pointed directly towards the north pole, irrespective of the varying force of terrestrial magnetism. He is an idealist of the most ideal stamp, having sublimated the ideal till it has become wholly divorced from the real.

This general character is preserved throughout Mr. Emerson's works, and is as applicable to the one under consideration as to his others, except, perhaps, this is as a whole a little less objectionable in spirit and doctrine than the rest. We attribute this slightly less obnoxious tone to the fact that these essays were prepared to be spoken in the presence of living assemblies of men, and not merely to be read; just as one will meditate alone, or pronounce, perhaps, to another in the dark, or with his face turned away, many things which he would never think of uttering to men when looking them fully in the eye. However, the book possesses substantially the same features as his others. There is the same vein of mysticism running through it. This lurks even in the very title, "Representative Men." The Scriptures exhibit Adam and Christ as in some sense representative to the human race, though even this our theologians, of late, are fast explaining away. Aside from these, we know of none who, in any intelligible sense, can be called representative men. By representative men, Mr. Emerson seems to mean men who

personate or reflect the spirit and image of a class. This doubtless many men do more or less perfectly, but none, we contend, so perfectly as to give them an exclusive right to be considered representative above all others. To take his own examples, why should Plato be made the representative philosopher rather than Aristotle or Bacon? Plato represents one philosophic tendency, and Aristotle and Bacon another. Or why should Goethe be made the representative writer more than Scott or Voltaire? And on what sound principle can Shakspeare be made the representative poet, rather than Homer, or Milton, or many others? He is pre-eminent, it may be, above them all, but not simply as a poet, and certainly not in every species of poetry.

We dwell thus upon this mere title, because it is a specimen of that vague, mystical generalization both of men and races, which is so common in many writers of the present day. It is presumption enough to set up one man as a representative of a class in his own nation, much more as the representative of that class throughout the world. Our creed on this point scarcely goes further than that of Lady Montague, that "God has created men, women, and Herveys," and these in all races alike. Eminence is not confined to any one age or nation, nor is any one race, in our opinion, so pre-eminent above all others as to deserve to be regarded as the representative or model race. They have all both great and small men and women, and are none of them, perhaps, without their "Herveys." Nearly all the principal races have been prominent in turn, and, in the revolution of ages, those which are now depressed will come up again in the progress of that spiral motion through which the world is constantly passing. Men and races differ, it is confessed, but it would be much more edifying to point out the circumstances which have contributed to make this difference, than to claim for some a natural preeminence by right divine.

But to pass to another point-for we must speedily bring our article to a close. Mr. Emerson has the same measured, oracular, prophet-like manner of delivering himself in this book, as in his others. This is his standing device for giving weight and importance to common thoughts. A person not understanding the trick, on reading one of these Lectures for the first time, or listening to it as pronounced in the impressive manner of its author, would take it for a very tissue of profundities. To test this question of profundity, let us give a synopsis of all the thoughts contained in one of the lectures, say the first, on the "Uses of Great Men,"