These changes in the value of greenbacks have affected all the transactions, those represented in the year 1873 by the movement over railroads only being ten thousand million dollars in value if values are measured in paper dollars, or nine thousand million dollars in gold. We will not attempt to compute the rest of the exchanges by water, by carriage, and by hand.

Consumers have paid since 1861 the monstrous tax involved in the fluctuations of our vicious currency, in the additional price above the mere premium on gold which the risk of these changes has made imperative; and the enormous fortunes of a few men which on an honest specie basis no single life-time could ever have sufficed to accumulate, the extravagant and wasteful expenditures that mark our time, the gradual sorting into classes of very rich and very poor, the greater and greater difficulty

for honest labor to secure a fit and abundant support, are the results and consequences of this subtle, dishonest, infamous tax.

Let us be thankful that the end can be seen, and that we have escaped the worst disasters which ensued from the issue of Continental money. Yet though we shall have avoided repudiation and its dire consequences, it may still be truly written of our legal tender note, as Pelatiah Webster wrote of the legal tender paper money of the Revolution:

"If it saved the state, it has also polluted the equity of our laws; turned them into engines of oppression and wrong; corrupted the justice of our administration; destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had the most confidence in it; enervated the trade, husbandry, and manufactures of our country, and gone far to destroy the morality of our people."

Edward Atkinson.

Alice Williams.

ALONG with the enormous and steady increase in the number of new books, there has been felt very keenly of late years the need of such convenient abstracts as shall enable readers and students to determine which of the latest works on the subjects that interest them it is best to read, and this want criticism undertakes to supply by condensing the information and by giving a trustworthy opinion. Since, however, a conscientious critic has as keen an eye for the inferences which the author may draw from the facts he has collected as for the accuracy of the facts themselves, there is always a possibility of a very serious difference of opinion between an author and his critic. A faultless critic will probably not be found until the time when he is not needed, when there are only faultless books written. Meanwhile, his position is a most useful one from the opportunity it gives him of pointing out errors of taste and fact, as well as of helping the author by bringing another practiced mind to the discussion of the same problem. To the reader he can suggest tempering the praise to the level it would naturally fall to in the space of a fortnight or so, he can show that the egg which has just been laid is not a roc's egg, or he can call attention to those merits which might have otherwise escaped notice. He can be useful, or by his errors he can be most mischievous.

In reading criticisms as well as the books discussed, so far at least as they concern general literature, what we especially care for is that the writer should give us a great deal of himself; that is, that we should be able to see the working of his mind, the reasoning he follows, and, as far as possible, the grounds of the impressions he receives and defends. His mere word is not sufficient; before we can trust him we must know his method. At times he will be able to explain to us the causes of our like

or dislike; by showing us the application of a general principle to which we assent, he may give us the means of comprehending what has embarrassed us; but if we swallow his judgments without conviction, his influence is bad, although the blame is ours.

No critic has held so high a place as Sainte-Beuve. His wonderful insight, the result of his great sympathy, strengthened by wide experience; his extreme accuracy in matters of fact; his rare candor and readiness to be convinced that he was wrong in matters of opinion; and his charming manner, which enabled him to reprove as if he were paying a compliment, made a rare combination of the qualities most needed by a critic. He shows, too, how important is study for the proper discharge of the duties he undertook. He is well known to us in this country. Another critic, a German, Julian Schmidt, is less well known, and this is probably due in great measure to the fact that although a respectable knowledge of German is by no means rare here, there are yet comparatively few who do not content themselves with having read so many of Schiller's plays and so much of Goethe and Lessing, but who are deterred by the difficulty of the language from reading German except as so much taskwork; as they read Paradise Regained, for instance. Time will alter this, and although many besides these dilettanti read German books in the course of professional study, the general literature is too meagre to tempt the multitude. It is not, however, that we would call attention to Mr. Schmidt on the ground of his being a popular writer, although, as we shall try to show, he has many of the qualities which may attract almost any reader, but it is as a deep thinker and a wise critic that he demands consideration.

His principal writings are the Geschichte des geistigen Lebens in Deutsch

land von Leibnitz bis auf Lessing's Tod, 1681-1781, in two large volumes; the Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur seit Lessing's Tod, in three volumes; and the Geschichte der Französischen Literatur seit Ludwig XVI., 1774, in two volumes.

The history of a literature is by no means easy to write; and most of those which have been written it is even harder to read. Until within a few years, those of us who were interested in English literature found for our only guides those meagre collections of extracts, with dates and certain biographical facts, which were styled histories of English literature, but were of no use except as convenient books of reference when we were in doubt about the year of some author's birth, or some such matter. As for criticism, there was none, or if there was any, it was of the wildest kind; as, for example, in one used as a text-book a few years ago, in a notice of Mrs. Browning, she was said to have married "Robert Browning, himself no mean poet;" and that was all the notice he received: and as for any comprehensive view of literature, the influences that affected writers, their effect on their times, a complete account of their work, there was nothing of the sort. Nowhere, in such histories, is there any other opinion apparent than that literature is the publication of books. Taine's History of English Literature has done our own work for us in a way that is a great improvement on even the best that preceded him. In the first place, his book is exceedingly interesting, and although there are radical objections to the theory which the history is written to confirm, his broad views can do service at least by arousing the student's independent thought. Then there is in his judgments less echoing of the universal opinion than we English-speaking people would be likely to show, and yet he avoids many of the errors into which, as a Frenchman, he would be most likely to fall. The great fault of the book is that it explains everything except the great writers, and it is just the great writers

who have made English literature what it is. Sainte-Beuve put his finger on the weak spot when he said: 1" In general, there is only one mind, one particular form of intelligence to create this or that masterpiece. As for historical witnesses, there may be others of equal value, but I cannot conceive of any in matters of taste. Imagine one great talent less, imagine the mold or, better, the magic mirror of a single real poet broken in the cradle at his birth, there will never be another which will hold exactly the same place. Of every true poet there is but a single copy.

"I will take another example of this unique quality of talent. Paul and Virginia certainly bears the traces of its epoch; but if Paul and Virginia had never been written, it might have been maintained by all sorts of special and plausible reasoning that it was impossible for so innocent a book to appear amid the corruption of the eighteenth century; Bernardin de Saint Pierre was the only man who could write it. There is nothing, I say again, so unexpected as talent, and it would not be talent if it were not unexpected, if it were not alone among many, alone among all.

"I may not explain myself clearly; but that is just the point which M. Taine's method and process does not explain. There is always something left over, eluding all the meshes of his net, however fine it may be, and that is what is called the individuality of talent, of genius. The wise critic attacks and surrounds it like an engineer; he incloses it, and goes all around it under the pretext of establishing all the indispensable conditions; these conditions, it is true, have their influence on the personal individuality and originality; they excite it, and call it out, enable it to act or react, but they do not create it. That particle which Horace calls divine (divinæ particulam aura), and which is indeed so, at least in the primitive and natural meaning of the word, has so far baffled science, and still remains unexplained."

In Germany there has been no lack of 1 Nouveaux Lundis. Tome huitième, pp. 86, 87.

literary histories, from the compendium of dates, names, and titles of books, to the philosophical, thorough treatises of Gervinus and others. On the whole, we can, without decrying his rivals, give the palm to Julian Schmidt. His first merit is one which is peculiar to his nation, and that is the power of patient attention even to what might seem like petty details. In Taine we find great omissions; there is hardly a word, for instance, said about Keats; but no such charge can be brought against Schmidt. In many German writers there is the same trait, which, like every other virtue, if it is not controlled is apt to run into excess; mole-hills and mountains assume equal value, and the result is a landscape without perspective. While this fault is conspicuous in almost everything the Germans write, and in another light is the groundwork of their excellence, it is nowhere more noticeable than in their writings about their literature.

For this there are several secondary reasons, in addition to the universal tendency of the German when he takes his pen in his hand; among these is the small compass of their literature, which leads to a disproportionate estimation of every line that has been written by the great authors, and to the undue prominence which has been enjoyed by the writings of inferior men, who, if they had written in English, would have been completely forgotten, and their books left to the dusty obscurity of large libraries. Especially is this true of the period between Leibnitz and Lessing's death, when the German mind was in leading-strings. None but the most thorough students, if thoroughness is the right term for those who are tempted to do their work by a wish for pedantic accuracy rather than for the good they are to derive from it, will be able to give much time and attention to that dreary waste. So much, it should be understood, may be said of foreigners, we should be unwilling to direct the course of any one studying his own literature; but no English or French speaking man is likely to be tempted by the dull beginnings of German literature. Their VOL. XXXIV. —NO. 202.

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work reads like the enforced school exercises of boys, which even the most enthusiastic biographers generally omit, and which have but little merit in comparison with what they write later, when they really have something to say. There was none of the lightness of an independent school, none of the naïve charm of beginners, but, when we glance at the rest of Europe, rather the clumsiness of raw recruits in comparison with the ease of practiced soldiers. If there is anything iconoclastic in this denunciation, there is also superstition in praising books no one can read.

It

Those writers who brought Germany into line with the rest of the world stand out higher above the general low level, and, of course, derived the impetus in great measure from foreign sources. is important, however, to know their relation to their predecessors, and this task Schmidt performs most admirably. He is like an entertaining guide who makes one forget the monotony of the dusty highway. For us all the interest of the first-named history, that covering the time from Leibnitz to Lessing's death, centres about Lessing. About most of the book-makers who preceded him we can feel no more curiosity than about the sign-painters of the time; they are like our often-mentioned epicwriters of the last century, who serve as examples of tiresomeness, but whom we are careful never to read. With Lessing the history of what may fairly be called German literature begins, and it is at this point that most readers will care to open Schmidt's volumes. Whether it is an interesting period, however, or one of dull monotony, that he is discussing, he is equally imperturbable, never impatient, and never indiscreet. The effect of training could not be better exemplified. He has undertaken to write the history of a literature, and he does his work conscientiously; it is not merely a presentation of the agreeable places, it is a fair, impartial record, which also avoids the other fault, that of pedantry. If there were dull expanses in the literature, it is not his fault; he does not waste too much time

over them, but he does not pass over them with a word, in order to make his books more readable.

Since the history of literature is closely connected with that of the politics, the religion, and the general development of the country, all these matters are brought in, so far as they are of importance to the especial subject the author is treating. The chronological order is adopted, and although this has the bad effect of diverting the reader's attention from the consideration of one man to the examining of the influences which helped produce another's book, which appeared at the same time, it keeps us from the danger of making up our minds too hastily about the verdict, which we are apt to give in a very brief form when it is our ancestors whom we are studying. These qualities, themselves the result of great patience on the part of the author, require the exercise of the same virtue on the part of the reader. This distraction is a noticeable hindrance to forming speedy opinions; we prefer to have our way made easier, to find all the important adjectives underlined. If, however, we are willing to take the trouble, it is in our power to form a fairer judgment in this way; the difficulty is due to the constant necessity of revising our opinion, but it is only by such revision, by constant correction and addition, that we can hope to get at the truth. Schmidt avoids accumulating unnecessary details, but he also is careful not to leave out anything of importance. We are all familiar with the fault, so common among the Germans, of giving the reader all the information that the most careful industry can accumulate, and leaving to him the task of arranging it and drawing the lesson to be learned. It is as if a carpenter were to heap up planks and beams and mortar and bricks, and call it building a house. For the collecting of facts nothing can equal the energy of the Germans, but we cannot help feeling how well it would have been if some judicious selection had been made, and a great deal of the material rejected. With the French, With the French,

on the other hand, there is often the tendency to sacrifice inconvenient facts to the symmetry of the result. Mr. Schmidt cannot be said to be wholly free from the fault of his race; we are conscious at times of unnecessary thoroughness; when a word would do, he utters a whole sentence. He has the faults of his virtues, like all the rest of us. Mr. Schmidt lacks the lightness of touch so conspicuous in Sainte-Beuve; he does not flatter the reader by letting him make the discoveries; in other words, he is not a Frenchman: he is, however, one of the most readable of the Germans. While he has this deficiency which indeed is so common that the reverse may be considered a luxury, we find he has many other excellent qualities besides those we have mentioned. He keeps more nearly at the same level than almost any critic; nothing deprives him of his presence of mind. The same phlegm which keeps him patient when he is plowing his way through some dreary morass, helps him to be cool when he comes to anything he admires. We do not remember a single case where he loses his head with the intoxication of lavish praise, which has to be withdrawn a month or two later when the object of it has taken its proper position of unimportance in the scale of things. It is not mere timidity, hiding behind a mask of cynical severity, which is the cause of this accuracy, but rather the hard-won determination to submit everything to those tests which time and experience have established. This is the only way to be proof against error; and the cautious man will hold his peace until he has fairly considered the matter in this light. As for Sainte-Beuve, it was by no means rare for him to sound a note of praise one day which was wholly disproportionate to the worth of the object. Such a mistake was very human; what was rarer was his willingness to acknowledge his error. His exaggerated recommendation of Feydeau's Fanny is an example of this.

What has been said in the comparison between Schmidt and his great French