and respected because they were trustworthy and respected themselves, that a higher law than he seemed able to comprehend was the guide of their life, that they were virtuous upon principle, not upon compulsion, as were the Arab women, who were shut out from the company of all men but that of their husband and near relatives, and were watched day and night. Upon which he waxed angry, and exclaimed :-"I do not believe you; I believe what I see. We know that the Christian man is not a good man; your newspapers tell me that the Christian woman is not a good woman. You say that only a few are not good; if a few are bad why not many? if many do wrong why not all? all have the same opportunities, and the few are as much Christian as the many. They may be good, they may be bad; you don't know, for they go where they please, do what they please, see whom they please. You think them good, I think them bad: which is right? You cannot say, you cannot know until what you call the day of judgment. But that is too long a time for me to wait before I know what my wife is, I like to be quite sure now." And again he chuckled over his own jest.

He was an utter disbeliever in any life higher than he could realize from his own observations and personal experience, and I pursued the vexed question of English and Arab customs and their effects upon woman no further; but before we took our departure I asked him if his wives could read.

"Read!" said he in unfeigned astonishment. "No! we never teach our women to read, they know too much already."

Our visit must have been a strange episode in the lives of these three ladies, the Prince's wives. I do not think they I do not think they were consciously unhappy; they had not sufficient knowledge of a higher state of life to be other than contented with their lot. They knew of no other than "the custom of their people," and they evidently accepted it as though no other custom could be.

As we left, we were exhorted by the mother of the Prince to inform her admiral on our return to England that she had not forgotten him, and should forget him And yet she had seen him but once; and that was many years before;

never.

he had been introduced to her as we had been introduced to her son's wives, and she had cherished him in her memory ever since.

The Prince accompanied us back to the ship; and during the time of our sojourn at Muzumudu, I saw him repeatedly. On one occasion he brought an Arabic translation of the English Bible, and asked me to point out the passage in which the mother of Moses was mentioned by name. This led to a conversation upon the Christian and Mahometan religions. The Prince was a shrewd assailant of Christianity, attacking it through the sins and follies of its professors with no mean intelligence.

He admitted, however, that the power of all Mahometan nations was fast waning, but, said he, "Mahomet is coming again, and then all you Christians will become Mahometans. He may come soon; in a few years; five, ten; at the utmost, twenty-five. If he do not come at the end of twenty-five years, I promise you I will become a Christian."

On the next day we proceeded to Pomoney to re-victual from the naval storeship there stationed, previous to our making for the Zambezi. The thunder raged the greater part of the day, and very grandly; the lightning, as it flashed from the dense black clouds that rested on the island, gave it the appearance of a volcano, ejecting streams of liquid fire far into the sky. It was the period of the change of the monsoon, and storms, therefore, were of almost every-day occurrence. This fact was a source of anxiety to some of us, for the naval officer who had hitherto been in charge of the Pioneer withdrew from that position, and Dr. Livingstone had resolved upon assuming the command of her himself; not that he had any qualifications for such an office, beyond the ability to fix the latitude and longitude of any place, but because he had a firm belief in himself. Had it been any other man than Livingstone who had so determined, I should certainly have declined to venture with him, but, as it was, I did not hesitate. "Bon voyage," said the Consul, as he took farewell of us; but he owned afterwards, that so desperate did he think our position, that he never expected to hear of us again in any other place than at the bottom of the sea. reached our destination in safety, never

We

theless, and remained in the interior of Africa nearly three years. When I came away I left behind me in their graves several of the noble men who had been my companions; they were pioneers and martyrs of a noble cause.

Of Prince Mahomet and his belongings I had no further information until quite lately. I was staying with a gentleman in the West of England, and turning over a photographic album one day, I saw the portrait of the Prince in that semi-European costume which certain Orientals affect when they come to England. My host had lately married a widow lady, who, during her widowhood, had principally resided in London. Then, as always, she went about doing good; and one day, when on an errand of mercy to some people who occupied the ground-floor of a third-rate house in one of the third-rate streets of southwest London, she heard that the first-floor was tenanted by two foreign princes who were in great distress; and she discovered Prince Mahomet and a Prince Abdallah, his cousin, one of the most amiable, because weakest, of the Johannese gentry, in a state of absolute starvation. She saved them from death, and did for them all that a noble-hearted Christian lady could do for the suffering strangers. And she made me acquainted with the story with which the Prince supplied her, of the cause of his departure from Johanna, and his appearance in England.

From the dates given it would seem that soon after we left Johanna an estrangement took place between the King and the Prince. The King suspected the Prince of conspiring against his authority, and my own opinion is that his suspicions were well founded; but this the Prince denied, and affirmed that he only wanted for himself and his cousin, Prince Abdallah, that position in the administration of affairs which was theirs by the right of a family compact, made when the King began to reign, but of which they had been deprived by the machinations of Sidi Abdramman, and others who had gained and abused the King's confidence. Any how his position became more and more

uncomfortable, and at last he was obliged to fly from Johanna to save his life. Prince Abdallah and two slave-boys accompanied him. They resolved to come to England and make their case known to the British Government, praying that they might, the King notwithstanding, be reinstated in all the honor to which their birth entitled

But the ear of the Foreign Minister was not open to them; time passed, and their position became desperate, for they had brought with them but little money, and a few jewels of no great worth, and their means were exhausted. In a few days they would have died of hunger, had they not been opportunely relieved by my friend's wife. She did more than relieve their immediate wants. What they could not do of themselves, she did for them through the influence of friends. The Foreign Minister took their case into consideration, and though he did not grant their prayer to be reinstated in all their family honors, he franked them back to Johanna. They left England with the avowed purpose of returning, and the last news of them which my hostess received came from Prince Mahomet at Aden. I saw his letter; it expressed, in highly inflated language, his great gratitude to the good lady who had done so much for him, and his high opinion of all English women. There was no land on earth where such good women were to be found as in England. He was not a Christian, he might never be a Christian, but he should always think and say that the Christian women excelled all other women in all that was kind, and pure, and true, and noble.

From subsequent information I learnt that Prince Mahomet had not returned to Johanna, and of his whereabouts none of his old friends seemed to know anything ; that on his flight from the island his property had been confiscated, and his wives given to other men, the beauty going to that crafty old fellow Sidi; and that his mother had died of cholera, which had found a congenial abiding-place in the filth of Muzumudu and other settlements on the island, and had carried off a fifth of the whole population.

WHICH is the most mortifying to a man of genius who cares for fame--to be totally unknown or wofully misknown? Probably the second of the two cases is the least agreeable. When Thackeray was canvassing Oxford, he introduced himself to some college don or other as the author of "Vanity Fair." "Something in the Bunyan way, I presume?" innocently inquired the great man. At Wimbledon camp, last year, a gentleman, seeing an officer reading aloud under a great tent to a large number of people, asked of a policeman who was keeping order what the officer was reading. "Dickens' 'Penny Picnic,' sir," said the policeman. This was simply laughable, and no one would have enjoyed the man's harmless misknowledge more than Dickens himself. But it must have been rather a different case when, at a party at Oxford, a gentleman in no way distinguished by any look of peculiar stupidity, asked Hawthorne if he was not the author of "The Red Letter A." It would weaken the interest some writers take in literary glory, if they would only keep their eyes open to the fact that the greater part of the knowledge of them which is possessed by the great body of the public is mere misknowledge. Very few, indeed, of the people who read a book which is popular know more about it after a month is over than the gentleman who could not remember the title of "The Scarlet Letter." There was a time when “The Scarlet Letter" had some claim to be considered a popular book; but it owed a large part of its general diffusion to the fact that it could be and was sold in this country for a shilling. And it is undoubtedly true that Hawthorne is essentially a writer for select readers. Beyond the inner circle there is a pretty considerable public who turn over his books, or, at least, "The Scarlet Letter;" but to the majority of these good people he is of necessity a man so much misknown that he might himself have preferred not being read at all by them. At least one would say so, if it were not for the strong proofs afforded by his memoranda posthumously published of the pleasure he took in being widely, if remotely, known. He could not have missed seeing the frequent declarations of English critics, that he was,

on the whole, the most original man of genius America had produced. When we bear in mind the names which this verdict placed second to him-Bryant, Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson, and Poe-we cannot wonder that he took pleasure in the verdict; though he undoubtedly did so in a shy way that had a smack of humor in it. It was a verdict that might be a little disputed in favor of Emerson; some people would say, in favor of Poe; but, after all, there was something mechanical about the movement of the fine faculties of the latter, and, as Lowell says of him, in his writings "the heart is all squeezed out by the mind." There are, no doubt, critics at present who would affirm that the advent of Walt Whitman has changed the conditions, and that he is now the most original man of genius that America has produced. There is something to be said for this last claim; for whether we decide that Whitman is a great poet who will live, or only the splendid Apollo of rowdies, he is the most truly American of the writers of merit that America has produced. Emerson, indeed, is American; so, in a way, is Lowell, under the persona of Hosea Biglow; so, in a way, is Longfellow, in the "Song of Hiawatha;" so, again, is Cooper in his novels. But, indeed, the whole question of "Americanism" involves some curious matters that are well worth looking at.

To begin with, it is exceedingly difficult for us English to catch in a new literature the distinct impress of another nationality when the language employed by the writers is our own, written idiomatically and with perfect purity; as, for example, Poe, Hawthorne, Prescott, Longfellow, and Bryant wrote. The first accents of nationality that strike our ears are usually such as relate to scenery and minor circumstances. We perceive that a writer is an American (the title is not exhaustively accurate as a definition) if he writes squash instead of pumpkin, and talks familiarly of the blue-bird and the hickory-pole, or of caucuses and mass-meeting, dollars and dimes, and so on. These are accidents of a kind which may turn up in literature of any quality, in America or elsewhere. But when a writer like Lowell seizes a peculiar type of character which we at

once recognize as national, or when Hawthorne describes the scenery of the Assabeth (in the introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse"), or Emerson paints a landscape such as we can nowhere see on this side of the Atlantic, we find him American in another and a higher sense. He is American just as a man who is always letting out about the Rhine (and, perhaps, his grandmother) is German. But there are other ways yet of being American.

Hawthorne painted American scenery beautifully, but he painted that of Italy with equal beauty, and sometimes that of England. Only he seems to have been the first of his countrymen whose literary self-consciousness, so to speak, was American. It was almost irritably so. His mind stands back, and looks around, and realizes its traditions, and the relation of his people to the parent people, and deliberately formulates itself as American. He always shows himself distinctly wideawake to the particulars in which America has broken with the old traditions; and yet he hardly appears resigned to her privations to the absence of the wall-flower, the ivy, and the lichen on the walls of her civilization, for example; or, again, to the absence of a supremely cultured and "leisured" class in America; or to that of "the untouched and ornamental" in general in her social fabric. In "The House of the Seven Gables" he has very vividly, and evidently with only partial consciousness of what he was about, shown us the way in which his mind had been at work upon the old problems in the new forms in which they appear to him in the growth of his country under the shadow of English tradition. He writes as if he

resented the fact that he could not be an American and an Englishman all at once. People may deny this as long as they please, and maintain that it is our national conceit which makes us think these things; but Hawthorne would not have denied it if it had been pressed home to him in a quiet hour by an Englishman of genial humor and true love of American freedom. There are perpetually recurring traces in his writings of a sense that the "go-ahead" spirit seemed, for the present at least, to involve a kind and degree of impermanence which was painful. In "The House of the Seven Gables," which we now know he preferred to "The Scarlet Letter"-a

very significant fact--we have a striking embodiment of all this. The young "Red Republican" daguerreotypist, descendant of Maule, who baffled and mesmerized the ancient Pyncheon, is the representation. of Labor and Progress, and he marries Phoebe Pyncheon. Here is the reconciliation of the aristocratic spirit with the spirit of modern equality. But though the young man has been not long previously quarrelling with the kind of permanence which is symbolized by antiquated houses like that of the Seven Gables, he is no sooner betrothed than he, too, contemplates the permanent, and proposes a new wing to the Pyncheon house.

This is one instance, too, out of a hundred that could be cited to illustrate the way and the degree in which Hawthorne, without becoming cynical, so often seems to approach the confines of cynicism,the hazy border-land in which we so often find him stealing along, softly, with his face towards the light, but with a slant look at the gloom beyond. Another instance occurs at the opening of "The Scarlet Letter," where the author notices, quite unnecessarily as it appears, the fact that wherever men go and sit down in large numbers, there are two things which they are compelled to set up—namely, a prison and a graveyard. Take, again, the remark of the sexton when he hands to Arthur Dimmesdale, on the pulpit-stairs, the minister's glove which he had picked up on the pillory. Again, the various readings which different people give to the letter A said to be seen in the sky in the night upon which Arthur mounts that place of shame in the dark by himself. Again, the different versions which tradition gave of the wonderful closing scene of the story, and of the minister's dying speech to the people. Again, the sudden confession at the end of "The Blithedale Romance," that the narrator of the story was himself in love with Priscilla—an announcement which throws backward upon the narrative a most peculiar coloring. Again, the story of Goodman Brown. In all these and in many other instances, we feel the presence of a fine genius which flies, and mounts heavenwards, but which yet looks as if it might have singed its wing at some time. There are two ways, and only two, in which such awkward corners as his mind is always running against can be, in military phrase, "turn

ed;" by a very dogmatic moral faculty, or by a much stronger sense of humor than Hawthorne possessed. Richter, Sterne, or Molière would have wrapped up that touch about the prison and the graveyard in such a nice, warm laugh that we should not have been stung by it. When some Yankee "jokist" the other day told us that a certain district was so healthy, that when they "inaugurated" the cemetery they had to shoot a man on purpose, we were reminded of the inevitableness of that institution; but the humor took away all possibility of pain. It is not Hawthorne's fault that he had not humor adapted to the effort in question, though he had a fine, quiet humor of his own. Nor is it his fault that he has not dogmatic or intellectual force enough, or even sufficient depth of passion, to enable him to "turn" the corners which yet he appears unable to avoid. "The Scarlet Letter" is the most intense of his writings, or, at least, it can only be rivalled in that particular by "Transformation;" but in neither is the passion quite strong enough to communicate to the reader that sense of absolute and final moral victory which, after so much pain, the heart craves. It by no means follows that a picture of the very last despairs of the human soul, with only just light enough to exhibit them, should depress. If the picture be only strong enough, it may ensure a reaction of triumph in the soul of the spectator. But the strength is essential; and of that has Hawthorne quite enough, even for purposes of passion? "There is Hawthorne," writes Lowell in his brilliant Fable for the Critics"There is Hawthorne with genius so shrinking

and rare

and in Hawthorne there really is a true and effective force. But is it quite sufficient for the desperate ground through which he so often makes the reader travel?

The defect is no doubt partly of the intellect. His writings, with small exceptions, start the deepest difficulties, and then rather worry them than shake the life out of them. Nowhere is the statement of a problem complete, or even as complete as it might be. In "The House of the Seven Gables," if Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, must needs

start that question between the old and the new, he should have more to say about it than what he delivers with a sad smile. In "The Blithedale Romance," the question of the relation of what may be called vocational philanthropy to the exercise of the private affections is left in a highly unsatisfactory condition, and the book closes with the most dismal picture of a man of noble aspirations utterly bro ken down by remorse-morally crushed because he could not at any time rally his conscience into action after having caused the suicide of the beautiful Zenobia. Generally speaking, indeed, remorse and failure play too prominent a part in these writings. It is not well to exhibit remorse as having power to kill, or almost to kill, the soul of a man, and there to leave the matter. Nor, as we shall see in a moment, can we wholly admit the plea that Hawthorne was primarily an artist, not a moralist. In "The Scarlet Letter," the climax of the story is grand indeed, and the general result more wholesome. But even here we occasionally feel stifled. Remorse is not allowed to kill the soul of Arthur Dimmesdale; but, again, we have an immense problem started, and a most lurid exhibition of its difficulties, and then we are put off at the end with a hint that some day "a new truth" will be disclosed which will put the whole relation of man and woman on a better footing. (I may incidentally mention that in F. W. Robertson's Diary, this passage is quoted at length, and attributed to Mr. Arthur Helps.) This puts one in mind of the advice of, I think, Quintus Fixlein, in Jean Paul-"There are important conclusions to be drawn from this, and I advise you to draw them." Still less hopeful is the state of the case at the close of "Transformation." In that story, Donatello, the Faun, is supposed to have risen to a higher moral life in consequence of a crime, and Kenyon, the painter, puts the question whether sin may not be a necessary condition of moral and spiritual growth. Hilda flinches with horror from the notion, Kenyon utterly disavows it, and there the matter ends. But we all perceive that "Transformation" was written for the very purpose of putting some such question, and we naturally ask that if such problems are to be dealt with at all they should at least be stripped bare and boldly grasped. As it is, we are not