grave, his observation minute, and his experience of life singularly painful, but conscience and intelligence were profoundly active; and to these causes we can easily trace both the individuality and the attraction of his genius.

Robinson Crusoe is a thoroughly English romance. It has none of the southern glow of the Italian novelle. Sentiment is in abeyance to sense in its hero. The interest is derived chiefly from external adventure, and not from impassioned scenes; and the amusing and melodramatic elements, so conspicuous in French stories, are entirely ignored. It has the severity, the strong individuality, of the Anglo-Saxon mind. The chapter descriptive of domestic life in the household of a pious citizen of the middle class, is a most characteristic introduction; the passion for sea-life is a national trait; the religious feeling that struggles in the wanderer's breast, at the outset, with his own perverse desires, is also, both in its form and expression, singularly true to the character of the English dissenters. The inventive talent which Robinson exhibits is a source of peculiar interest to a thrifty and commercial race; his self-dependent, methodical, and industrious spirit was but a type of his nation; his recognition of conscience and providence, the absence of imagination, and the multiplicity of facts, are phases of the story in strict accordance with the English mind. The very problem of the book-that of a human being thrown entirely upon his own resources - is one remarkably adapted to the genius of an Englishman, and it is worked out with equal significance. Solitude has been made the basis of novels and memoirs in many notable instances; but how diverse the treatment from that of De Foe! The biography of Trenck, the "Prisons" of Pellico, and the "Picciola" of De Saintine, borrow their moral interest from the isolation of their heroes; but it is affection and fancy that lend a charm to such narratives. Poets, the most eloquent of modern times, have sung the praises of solitude; Byron, Foscolo, and Chateaubriand, have set it forth as the sphere of imaginative pleasure; Zimmerman has argued its claims; St. Pierre and Humboldt have indicated how much it enhances the enjoyment of nature. But in these and similar instances, the idiosyncrasy of the writers, and not human nature in general, is alive to the experiment. De Foe gives a practical

solution to the idea. He describes the physical resources available to a patient and active hermit. He brings man into direct contact with Nature, and shows how he, by his single arm, thought, and will, can subdue her to his use. He places a human soul alone with God and the universe, and records its solitary struggles, its remorse, its yearning for companionship, its thirst for truth, and its resignation to its Creator: Robinson is no poet, mystic, or man of science, but an Englishman of average mind and ordinary education; and on his desert island he never loses his nationality. Fertile in expedients, prone to domesticity, fond of a long ramble, mindful of the Sabbath, provident, sustained by his Bible and his gun, a philosopher by nature, a utilitarian by instinct, accustomed to introspection, serious in his views, — against the vast blank of solitude, his figure clad in goat-skins stands in bold relief, the moral ideal and exemplar of his nation and class.

Writings that thus survive a miscellaneous group will be found to contain a vital element of the author's nature or

experience. They triumph over the oblivious influence of change and time, because created "in the lusty stealth of nature; " and are more vigorous by virtue of this spontaneous origin. De Foe's life was a moral solitude. If he knew not the discipline of an uninhabited island, he was familiar with that deeper isolation which the tyranny of opinion creates. He was separated from his kind, not indeed by leagues of ocean, but by the equally inexorable sea of faction. Prejudice, in an uncharitable age, divided him as effectually from society as a barrier of nature. Nor in his case did the sympathy of those for whom he thought and suffered relieve the grim features of solitude. He was too independent, and too much in advance of his time, not to be essentially apart from those who were ostensibly near and around him. He was driven into the intrenchments of consciousness. Like all bold and individual thinkers, he was often alone. From his earliest years his lot was cast and his choice made with a despised minority; and not until his head was bleached did the party and the class with which he acted hold the balance of power. As Bunyan was the spiritual prophet of the people, De Foe was their practical expositor. He espoused their cause

before philanthropic organizations and public opinion had won respect for it. Oberlin had then regenerated no poor village; Penny Magazines were undreamed of; Burns had not set to undying music the cottager's life; the vulgar were divided by an immense gulf from the educated. Heroic then was it to brood over the dark problems of civilization. Literature was the privilege and the ornament of the few. Pope translated the Iliad, and celebrated the graces of Belinda; Swift did a courtier's taskwork; Addison, with scholarly zest, described his Italian journey; but De Foe pleaded for the rights of Dissenters, expounded the principles of trade, and wrote manuals for the religious, political, and domestic guidance of the masses. He was an intellectual pioneer, the herald of utility in letters, the advocate of practical truth. Instead of social distinction and the pleasures of taste, he aimed at reform. Ignored by the elegant, despised by the gay, persecuted by those in authority, he sternly rebuked corruption, boldly announced principles, and incessantly advocated humanity.

The brutal injustice of party spirit in England is signally illustrated in the life of her most characteristic author. The ferocity of her baronial era seems transferred to her literary and political annals. The same inhuman and relentless cruelty, insensate prejudice, and dogmatic will, reign in the world of opinion, as in the scenes of the ring, the duel, the criminal law, the domestic tyranny, and other barbarisms that deform her social history. Genius enjoys no immunity from this instinctive exercise of arbitrary power. The robbers of Italy spared Ariosto when they discovered that their captive was the author of the Orlando; the French mob that besieged the Tuileries and decapitated the king, protected from mutilation the beautiful statues that adorned the palace-garden; but no sentiment checks the rabid pen or melts the bigoted judge that sought, in De Foe's age and country, to awe or vanquish obnoxious writers. The terms in which they are assailed are those of execration or contempt; all sense of justice, honor, truth, and humanity, is repudiated; and the victim is coolly neglected, or heartlessly crushed, without an emotion of pity or a scruple of remorse. Even the comparatively liberal criticism of a later day is tinctured with

this savage arrogance. The impertinent sarcasm with which the fashionable reviews treated Keats and Wordsworth, the faint praise with which Reynolds kept the merits of Gainsborough in the shade, the fanatical calumnies heaped upon Shelley, the coarse ridicule that drove Byron into satire, and the imprisonment of Hunt and Montgomery, attest an identical tyranny of opinion. Happily De Foe vindicated and endeared his own memory by the legacy he bequeathed in his unrivalled fiction. But it serves not only to make him remembered with gratitude; it is a nucleus for the indignation and sympathy of subsequent generations. Think of that inventive mind, that heart overflowing with manly emotion, that reason ever exercised for the honor of his country and the advancement of his race, tortured, darkened, and baffled, throughout a long and heroic life, by the falsehood, the scorn, and the cruelty, of mankind. Swift denied him learning; Oldmixon declared that his vocation was espionage; Prior pronounced his pen venal; Pope put him into the Dunciad; the courts of London doomed him to the pillory and a felon's cell; one writer charged him with prefixing a De to his name to escape the reputation of an English origin; another insinuated that he appropriated Selkirk's papers, and stole the materials of his famous story; one day he is advertised as an absconding debtor, the next published as the author of a vile tract that he never saw; now the stupidity of his own party misinterprets the satirical intent of a pamphlet, which is essentially promoting their cause; and now the Bill of Rights is openly violated by the ministers of justice, in order to wreak upon him their vindictive fiat. And all this time De Foe was the most thorough Englishman and writer of his day, a model of integrity, and as consistent, sincere, and brave, as he was gifted.

THE ORNITHOLOGIST.

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON.

A PECULIAR charm invests the lives of naturalists. The path of the military conqueror is blood-stained, that of the statesman involved and tortuous, while the pale legions of avarice usually beset the goal of maritime discovery, and associate the names of its heroes with scenes of anarchy and oppression; but the lover of Nature, who goes forth to examine her wonders, or copy her graces, is impelled by a noble enthusiasm, and works in the spirit both of love and wisdom. We cannot read of the brave wanderings of Michaux in search of his sylvan idols; of Hugh Miller, while at his mason's work, reverently deducing the grandest theories of creation from fossil of the "old red sandstone;" or of Wilson, made an ornithologist, in feeling at least, by the sight of a red-headed woodpecker which greeted his eyes on landing in America, without a warm sympathy with the simple, pure, and earnest natures of men thus drawn into a lifedevotion to Nature, by admiration of her laws, and sensibility to her beauty. If we thoughtfully follow the steps and analyze the characters of such men, we usually find them a most attractive combination of the child, the hero, and the poet, with, too often, a shade of the martyr. An inkling of the naturalist is, indeed, Cowper loved hares; Gray, gold-fish; Alfieri, horses; and Sir Walter Scott, dogs; but, when pursued as a special vocation, ornithology seems the most interesting department of natural history.

characteristic of poets.