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bocker," applied to the early colonists of New York, which city, it is not generally known, was first peopled by the Dutch, whom the English expelled. The Dutch councils, held where the members were invisible for the clouds of tobacco-smoke, and could only be heard, the gravity and laboured profundity of their deliberations, with side-blows at certain political philosophers, render the work one of universal interest. The satire is much of it from the school of Cervantes. The first two or three chapters might be read as a sort of Sunday morning service to the society which itinerates once a year in England from place to place, to imbibe fresh stimulants to scientific grace, and returns as wise as it set out. The description of the world upon various existing theories, ancient and modern, is admirable. Professor von Puddingcoft and the untowardness of nature towards some teachers of philosophy; the account of the cosmogony, from the earliest period down to Buffon and Hutton; the history of Noah the first sailor, and the difficulty he had in peopling America; the justice of the claims of all men, save the inhabitants, to appropriate newly discovered nations, by means of gunpowder, slavery, or chains, for the purpose of Christian conversion, or of exterminating the natives to put better men in their place; as well as the power of the popes, claimed by divine charter, to bestow pagan, Mohammedan, or heretical countries upon crowns that are obedient to the Church, proving the right of the Dutch to New York in a way somewhat similar, render this work a humorous satire of the first order. Some of the similes are admirably illustrative. How excellent is the assumed magnitude of power to effect nothing ridiculed, when the author stops to breathe, he says, after a passage is completed, like the Dutch tumbler who took a start of three miles for the purpose of jumping over a hill, but having got out of breath by the time he reached its foot, sat quietly down for a few moments to blow, and then walked over it at leisure." But enough; our present purpose is not to describe works so well known, which will be read here and in America with zest by the children's children of both countries, but simply to recal attention to those two earlier productions of Irving which differ much in character from his subsequent works. It is rarely that we find Irving's early humour outdone afterwards. In the "Sketch Book," it is true, we have Rip van Winkle, which is a touch of the past, as well as Sleepy Hollow, but the author seems to have quitted humorous for graver studies, and perhaps, if with less claim in his subsequent works to originality of a unique character, at least under a more perfect consonancy with his later feelings. It is true "Bracebridge Hall" is humorous, but it wants the zest of "Knickerbocker."

The "Tales of a Traveller" possess less merit than his preceding works at least, in our view. Their author seemed desirous to show his skill in the serious as well as the humorous. He seemed to feel as if he had achieved all he well could achieve in the lighter branch of literature, and desired to take a high and durable station in another walk-to exhibit his ability as well in the serious as the comic. His "History of the Life and Voyages of Columbus," an abridgment of which, by himself, followed the longer work in 1830, carried with it at once the stamp of endurance, or, in other words, took its station among those lasting literary labours which honour the age of its author, and confer lasting celebrity upon a name-works rare in the most palmy state of a nation's

literature. There is a beauty of colouring, novel description, and a conviction of truthfulness in Irving's "Life and Voyages of Columbus.” The work comes home to the bosom of the reader independently of the sympathetic effect produced by the sufferings and ill-usage from courts and princes sustained by the discoverers of the New World. Here we find a sorry example of the ingratitude exhibited towards great men and great minds by those of small dimensions, to which last, as if it were to humble the loftiest human aspirations, the rule of nations is continually committed. Irving has left in the character and toils of Columbus, in the details of his unconquerable perseverance, his inexhaustible patience, and unmerited ill-treatment, a monument to the memory of the great Genoese navigator more durable than brass or marble. To what an immortality of renown was not the son of the poor wool-comber Columbo destined, and who so fit to aid in its extension as a native of the land revealed through his faith and audacity!

We have observed that Irving leaned to the Federalist party in America, and that party including the policy of Washington, was what might be designated as the British in contradistinction to the French during the time of the contest between England and France. Notwithstanding the deep-seated hatred of George III. to colonial freedom, and its consequent results, the Federalist party was a strong party long after the death of Washington. British principles-those, at least, which did not in any way sacrifice the interests of the United States-ruled the Federalists, and some of them, in their contests with their opponents, carried their old prejudices before the quarrel with the parent country into those political disputes afterwards. Irving now and then dealt a blow at the extent to which his own friends carried their arguments, by making one of his characters declare, that since the yoke of the mother country had been thrown off, the seasons had been backward in the United States, and the corn had not ripened so early by a month.

Many comic touches scattered through the lighter works of Irving are directed against the social frivolities of America, England, and France alike, and tell to great advantage. Nor have they lost their effect in the time which has elapsed since they were written. A great part of the satire in which they deal is as applicable now as it ever was to the former existing state of society.

There was apparent in his writings an inclination-perhaps it should be called a fondness-for retrograding to old times and objects. Some of those who disliked the Americans in general could tolerate Irving, because with his agreeable and gentlemanly manners, and recorded respect for departed things of the times of his own as well as our ancestors, he seemed to show a regard for the antique and chivalric—that indefinable regard which links the human heart with the past, however unworthy of the present-that phenomenon in the human constitution which makes the perished object, the worthless dust of the past, more precious than the perfect thing within the grasp. Irving's native land, and all, except what of manners it inherited, was comparatively a thing of the present; England, of the past. Every old dwelling in England, every baronial hall, all our ecclesiastical buildings, standing or ruined, were in his view hallowed objects, things of mystery which touched his heart; and thus he described them, and the way in which they affected

him. Among them he held converse with antiquity; at home, in the oldest American city, the scene belonged to the passing hour. Imagination could not invest it with the grey tint of antiquity without doing itself violence. In England he had before him the reality, venerable and hoary, for which he was indebted to the sense of vision alone. He came, saw, and touched the carvings and stone tracery worked out and placed in their site by forgotten hands. The heart of the son of genius never tolerates a preference for the gaudiness of the noontide colours when compared with the sober tints of early morn or the richness of the evening heaven. It is the same, more or less, with all in regard to past and present things. The sobriety and mellowness of departed objects take captive the spirit. We felt this ourselves on the field of Crecy and at the romantic Fontarabia. Irving spoke of the singular feeling with which he first saw Warwick Castle, once tenanted by the Nevills and Beauchamps, overhang the classical Avon, and how he lingered about Kenilworth, and how the stories of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth enchained him at the castle when he had again and again scrambled over the ruins. His works continually show with what a feeling difficult to define he saw these structures, and to what use he applied them. On no British mind could the impression made be deeper than that on the mind of the American writer. He expressed as much to his friends, and said that at times they appeared too engrossing. Most of those who mingled in the literary circles of London and Edinburgh when he was in England are gone where the " weary rest," as well as himself. He won the goodwill of all. Even the snappish Gifford of the Quarterly Review, who in those days reviled America, tolerated one so unoffending and amiable, though it is possible that Mr. Murray's interest as publisher might have softened the sordid Cerberus of a publication whose antipathy towards America was unrelenting.

Besides the works already mentioned as from the pen of Irving, he wrote a Life of Goldsmith, a Life of Mahomet, and a Biography of the Poet Campbell, prefixed to an edition of his works; "A Tour in the Prairies," "The Companions of Columbus," "The Adventures of Captain Bonneville," "The Successors of Mahomet," "Astoria," and "The Conquest of Florida." We cannot recal any other of his works, but they will no doubt be collected in his native land into a series of volumes. It will be perceived that several of them are purely American in character, tending to increase and adorn its native literature, while all possess a considerable interest for the English public.

Irving introduced to the world by far the best, though not the most pretending, of the American poets in William Cullen Bryant, whose works he dedicated to the late Samuel Rogers, in 1832. Bryant is preeminently American in the character of his poetry, and as such was especially recommended by Irving.

At one time Irving, contemplating the great future for his country, thought of employing his imaginative power upon a story that should forestal coming events, but found it a better and more useful employment to labour for the improvement and gratification of the existing age. After all, to grope into the ignorance of the past, conscious of its defects, and to deteriorate the present, as is the custom with the purblind advocates of medieval barbarism in faith and art, in order to

stay progress, is an obliquity of mind to be deeply lamented. Irving, in his writings, never exhibited that deplorable lack of perspicacity, that contempt for sound philosophy, which sets aside wholesome expectation for impossible retrocession, preferring darkness to light, and barbarism to civilisation. It is the poetry in the past alone that we may safely enjoy. Departed things can never be objects of trust, and seldom of example, when we come to judge to the letter. The American has a great field of hope before him—justifiable hope-and if he has, politically speaking, but a short past to claim, he has fewer of the crimes to lament and errors to correct which attach to older countries, sharing as much as he pleases of the good doings of his British fathers and repudiating their faults. Irving used to express his wonder at the increasing adaptation of his countrymen to the vastness of the surface they inhabited, and attributed many of the errors charged upon them, when founded in fact, upon the novelty of their position, and the youth of an empire that seemed to have sprung at once, like Pallas from Jove, into the full vigour of existence in place of following the slow growth of other empires.

But enough, to terminate our mention of this Transatlantic writer. The last time we met him was in company with half a dozen distinguished characters, by a winter fireside, not one of whom now respires among breathing men. So passes away the comedy or tragedy of life. Tell us, reader, which is its true denomination ?

RESOURCES OF ESTATES.

MR. J. LOCKHART MORTON, civil and agricultural engineer, and known in the farming world, or, at least, in the portion of it that read, as author of a valuable volume on Soils, and of several agricultural essays of great merit, has recently further served the latter section of that world, and such of our landed proprietary as may be included in the category of readers of books treating of agriculture, by a much-wanted and excellent work, entitled "The Resources of Estates."*

Sooth to say, the literature of this important theme is far from abundant. More than half a century ago, one Marshall published a meagre quarto "On the Landed Property of England:" but most of its teachings are as out of date and obsolete as the mode of winnowing Cuddie Headrigg preferred to the new-fangled method by which the Lady of Tillietudlem, in providing a winnowing machine, wished him to raise the necessary amount of wind. Forty years afterwards a book came out entitled "Landed Property, and the Relation of Landlord and Tenant," by David Low, Esq., professor of agriculture in the University of Edinburgh an admirable volume, so far as it goes, but, in our view of its

*The Resources of Estates; being a Treatise on the Agricultural Improvement and General Management of Landed Property. By John Lockhart Morton. Large 8vo, pp. 637; with many admirable lithograph plans of farmsteads. 1858. Longman and Co.

Feb.-VOL. CXVIII. NO. CCCCLXX.

general applicability, reaching little further south of "The Heart of Mid-Lothian" than the peculiar practice of the Scottish Border. It smells thoroughly of this special system, being racy of the soil, if the term raciness can be fitly applied to a combination of Scottish shrewdness, business energy, and absence of heart, or, at least, sentiment. On the other hand, the main fault we incline to find with the bulky book before us is, that the writer, a first-rate authority on most of the topics he handles, has filled some of his pages with out-of-place touches of sentiment and jocularity. It would take a powerful, critical winnowing machine to separate the chaff, dust, and dirt he has mixed with his heap of good grain. Not content to spread his manure, like old Virgil, with the air of an enlightened agriculturist, he parades his feelings on certain political points, which are rather exotic than indigenous to his field of labour, and on which he is not merely inadequately informed, but is so pugnacious, that he occasionally wields his pitchfork as if it were a weapon. "How to make the most of Landed Property" is his important thesis, and he has done his work very well indeed, especially in the practical departments he is most versed in, such as "The Soil: its Nature, and the Treatment it should receive;""Drainage of Land;" and "Farm Buildings." But our engineer is sometimes not a civil one in his style of treating landlords, some of whom are obliged to be a stiff sort of soils by reason of heavy mortgages; and he ceases to be an authority when he breaks out on such topics as "The Law of Entails," and "The Game Laws." Ne sutor ultra crepidam is perhaps the reason why Mr. Morton, who is quite alive to the use of "Live Hedges" and the "General Importance of Good Hedges," does not see why proprietors of land not merely delight in preserving a fair head of game, for the recreation of themselves, their relations, and friends, but also rejoice in preserving their estates for the benefit of themselves and their posterity, by entailing it, so as to prevent themselves from selling it, and by making other serviceable provisions, all which are secured by the legal hedge called a marriage settlement. Not being ourselves of the French, or American, or Manchester schools of political economy, that say, "Posterity has done nothing for us, so let us eat, drink, and enjoy what we have," but holding that every man, whose ancestors have obliged him by bequeathing him an estate, is reasonably bound to transmit it to his descendants, and that if another, not so obliged, purchases one, the best thing he can do is to settle it according to custom, we incline to look jealously at the new breeds of foreign opinions exhibited by our agricultural author, and to point out that such starvelings will make bad crosses with the stock of John Bull's political traditions.

Mr. Morton's long practical experience and observation of good and bad Estate Management, and good and bad Farming, have, he says, léd him to form very decided opinions on some of the points he discusses. Certainly, he is entitled to be heard with respect on most of them, but we consider him not worth listening to on others. Since, however, no expression than the following, of his readiness to listen to criticism, can be fairer and more pleasing, we quote it, and shall proceed to take him at his honest word: "If I am mistaken," Mr. Morton writes in his preface, "in any of my views, I am perfectly open to correction. My

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