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assuming a strange expression-while I trembled at each syllable she uttered; all the worse, indeed, because Hartley was coming toward us and would be sure to hear every thing.

"The truth is you have been so good to me to-day that I can't help hoping" [here her voice seemed tremulous] "you like me, because" [at this crisis I felt as if I should go mad, for Hartley was within ten feet, and must surely hear all] "because I am-Hartley's wife."

"As you very surely are," joined in the gentleman thus alluded to, and emphasizing the assertion by a very singular breach of the proprieties.

"Well, George ?" presently interrogated the scapegrace, with unblushing impudence.

"Well, George ?" chimed in the other, her face tinged with blushes enough for two.

The inordinate raptures which followed upon the disclosure enabled me to somewhat recover my equanimity.

"It is not at all well, your impertinences. So absurdly transparent a stratagem too! Of course I understood it from the first."

"Of course you did, George. And that was why you let me run up that little yacht bill."

“And took me out to walk, too," chimed in the pitiless Beatrice. “Sans merci, each one of you. I shall—”

Ever more like "Trice-for Hartley's sake- -now say it." And the bewitching creature caught my left hand, while her scapegrace husband seized the other.

It was positively embarrassing, and it was getting fearfully late. "We ought to be sailing home, you silly ones. How about the tide, Hartley?"

"You shall be tied here till you answer," was the peremptory

response.

"And you are happily tied here, and elsewhere," said I, surrendering at discretion.

Concerning the amiabilities and the gentle nonsense that followed upon this compulsory avowal, it becometh myself not to speak, nor my readers to trouble themselves. Hartley confided to me that the champagne affair was a hoax, while Beatrice agreed to be Gloriana henceforth in my vocabulary.

Just then the old gentleman came up, and, as we walked down to the shore, he proved himself so unexpectedly entertaining and hearty that I forgave him for his part in the plot forthwith.

And so we went sailing home laughing over the luck of the day, and voting to put it on our calendar for future due observance. The next day we did not go to Boston. With which crumb of a fact the present narrative shall close.

HORACE GREELEY.

THERE is a story to the effect that Mr. Seward once described Horace Greeley as a great man, so full of genius and power that if he had common sense he would be dangerous. The errant tendencies of Mr. Greeley's mind have been so remarkably illustrated during the past five or six years, that Mr. Seward's epigram has point. A great man and a great fool, combined in one person, certainly presents an incongruous picture, which has the effect of caricature; and perhaps it is proper, in describing Mr. Greeley, to adopt the mild euphemism of "a great child." The conjunction of childish (not child-like) qualities with great mental capacity is the key to his character, and it is singular that, in the numerous biographies which have been published, this view has never been expressed.

Every reader of American newspapers has seen, at intervals, ridiculous caricatures of Mr. Greeley-burlesques of the kind to which all public men are subjected, and which possess some degree of humor or appositeness. The caricaturist aims to bring out the leading traits of the man; in excess, it is true, but the salience is not successful unless it is readily and generally recognized as significant. The caricatures of Horace Greeley invariably represent him as an overgrown child. His callow simplicity of look and manner at once strike the artist as peculiar to himself.

Physically, these characteristics are very palpable. There is the looseness of the bony structure, which belongs to immaturity. The flesh is flabby, like a child's. The features lack the strong outline of manliness. The eye is soft and wavering, and has none of that mandatory energy which fires the look of maturity. The gait is loose and shambling-a falling along, instead of a deliberate progress. If such a body be typical of the mind which inhabits it, and its motions correspondent, we may readily understand how easily such a man might become the victim of his own ponderosity, and merely stagger along the road of thought, according as one faculty or another temporarily moved him by its activity. In fact, the human being is far more of a machine than most are willing to admit. Nor is it enough

to say the body affects the mind. It is its purpose to represent the indwelling soul. Men have to learn of each other through the body: they also judge by the body. As Swedenborg expresses it, there is a "correspondence" between the two.

Horace Greeley grew up rapidly to nearly six feet in height, at an early age. This hasty growth of the skeleton left the organic development lagging behind. Naturally of a nervous temperament, and of large brain, his mental activity served to still further exhaust his store of vitality, and thereby retard physical maturity. There is some analogy between this impetuous growth of his body and the operations of his mind. He generalizes and theorizes, freely and largely, but is very slow in filling out the practical details of a plan. He skeletonizes, but never completes. Now, the organic development of a man is that which gives him both his passive and active powers-endurance as well as strength. Greeley's peevishness, nervousness, cowardice, are due chiefly to his immaturity. His nerves never had a proper masculine covering. When a boy of eleven, he was thrown into an agony of terror by the delusion that he saw a wolf's eyes shining in the dark by the roadside, and he allowed two girls to escort him home. He could not bear the sight of blood; consequently he disliked hunting, and stopped his ears while others fired the guns.

His inability to control the bodily impulses extended to its desires as well as its fears, its pleasures as well as its pains. His mental life, indeed, usually absorbed his attention, often to utter forgetfulness of physical wants; but, when the appetites were given rein, they would take the bit in their teeth at once, and run away with propriety. Both in childhood and in adult years, Mr. Greeley is described as eating with the voracity of a famished man. When there is no work pressing him, he sleeps with equal facility and regardlessness of time or place. In fine, the physical life of Mr. Greeley is characterized by the twin faults of childish impatience of pain and childish eagerness for gratification. The only reason he is not more sensual is because the body, with him, is a beast hard ridden, and rarely turned out to feed. His early liking for childish food, and his later advocacy of it, is consistent with his own physical immaturity. Of late years, and indeed for all his life, except two or three years spent at a boarding-house kept on the plan of Sylvester Graham-the apostle of bran bread-Mr. Greeley has eaten more or less meat. With mature years, he has probably felt the need of it, and learned to like it. But in 1858 he wrote that it was "still his deliberate judgment that in the temperate and torrid zones, where a great abundance and variety of vegetable food is easily

procured, a diet which includes no flesh meat is preferable. If I were to live leisurely, as I should choose, I would say, Give me the best productions of grains, of fruits, with abundance of milk, cream, &c., and let me never again see animal flesh presented for human food. Not having time nor means to make a world for myself, I try to accommodate my habits to the world that is, and eat meat, which is often the best food within reach." At that time, Mr. Greeley was forty-seven years of age, and weighed one hundred and eighty-four pounds. Since then, he has had nine years of comparatively light work, less care, and good living, and must weigh at least two hundred. His personal appearance justifies the opinion expressed by him in 1858, that "with light daily tasks, little responsibility, and an active out-door life, I think I might attain the physical proportions and oleaginous rotundity of an alderman.” The mental life of Mr. Greeley is not unlike the physical. There is the same complete absorption in the occupation of the moment, the same childish disregard of circumstances, the same intolerance of whatever is unpleasant. His mind does not work calmly and considerately, but very passionately and intently. He fastens on his own view of a subject like a blood-sucker. You cannot tear him from it till he has sucked all the life out of it, and falls off from satiety. Then he may discover that others have thought truly as well as himself, though he had called them "fools," "liars," and "villains," for seeking to controvert his views. Even his benevolence partakes somewhat of the same selfishness. He gives because it is painful to refuse. For a long time, his heart could not restrain its careless gifts to whomsoever came, regardless of the proprieties of the case. could not bear the sight of suffering. He gave freely and inconsiderately, to be rid of it. But when experience taught him that this system of giving only multiplied the number of beggars, it was stopped. This almsgiving had been incited, not so much by considerate kindliness for the object of it, as by impatience of the feelings which the sight of want awakened. In a word, it was a childish benevolence, which the man gradually outgrew. One day (before the war), a negro woman came into Mr. Greeley's room and told her tale of distress. He threw her five dollars-a gift liberal enough, truly, to rid the room at once of the applicant. But the negress was so astounded and so grateful, that she fell upon her knees, and began to call down blessings innumerable on the giver's head. This pained Mr. Greeley even more than her story, and he hastily silenced her. "Now, don't," said he, in his whining tone; "don't do that. Get up, and go 'way!"

In his theology, also, Mr. Greeley illustrates his illogical way of disregarding unpleasant facts when they disagree with his sentimental theories. He denies a hell, on the ground of God's beneficence. But transient pain is no more reconcilable with that idea than eternal misery, nor is the misery of the individual for the sake of the race logically consistent with it. If Mr. Greeley is able to argue suffering out of eternity, because it is unpleasant to him, why not also out of this world, for the same reason?

It would appear, indeed, that physical, mental, and moral qualities alike unfit Mr. Greeley for dealing with practical life. He willfully absorbs himself in what pleases him, and insists upon shutting out every thing else from his vision. Especially does he shrink from the idea of violence, in connection with any reform in the individual, or in society. Ardent and persistent as he has been in advocating many a good cause, the proposition to use force never came from him. He would never have made the mistake of St. Peter, and cut off an ear. He has none of that masculine, mature, and energetic Christianity, which the author of "Ecce Homo" describes as "not the emasculate sentimental thing it is sometimes represented to be." "War," he adds, "for example, and capital punishment, are frequently denounced as unchristian, because they involve circumstances of horror; and when the ardent champions of some great cause have declared that they would persevere, although it should be necessary to lay waste a continent, and exterminate a nation, the resolution is stigmatized as shocking and unchristian. Shocking it may be, but not therefore unchristian. The Enthusiasm of Humanity does indeed destroy a great deal of hatred, but it creates as much more. Selfish hatred is indeed charmed away, but a not less fiery passion takes its place." And the writer goes on to say that even the spirit which inspired the Crusaders and others, zealous to do violence for what they believed to be the cause of religion, was not unchristian. "At any rate, the ostensible object of such horrors was Christian, and the indignation which professedly prompts them is also Christian, and the assumption they involve that agonies of pain, and blood shed in rivers, are less evils than the soul spotted and bewildered with sin, is most Christian."

It is obvious that a character so childish, and a mind so self-absorbed as Mr. Greeley's, must have been more or less the sport of circumstances. The superficial observer may start at this, and ask whether Mr. Greeley is not, then, an exemplar of what man can do in spite of unfavorable surroundings? Not remarkably so. Constitutional qualities, good and bad, have made him what he is; circumstances,

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