No one need fancy that I am an imaginative man: quite the contrary is the fact. I am a lawyer, and have an office in Bond street. Every morning at eight o'clock I take the Sixth Avenue horse-cars and ride down to Fourteenth street. I have a fancy for walking the rest of the way, and toward evening I saunter back homeward along Broadway and Union Square.
Prosaic as these journeys may seem, they are nevertheless the inspiration of my hopes, the feeders of my visions. It is at such times that I enjoy my glimpses of the lady I long to meet. I jostle gentle creatures at every step: feminine shapes and feminine tones are on every side presented to eyes and ears. I trust nobody will be prejudiced against me when I confess that I see the fair one of my dreams in the shop-windows. Once having seen her, I become immeasurably happy, and go on dreaming about her until we meet again. It may seem a curious admission, but this beautiful although impalpable being is suggested by the charming dresses, hats and bonnets displayed on the milliners' blocks. None of our artists can paint portraits now-a-days: Art seems to have withdrawn her gifts from them and endowed the dressmakers and milliners instead.
It was at first difficult for me to decide on the personality of my beloved. My earliest fancy was for a blond: at least the dress was of pale blue silk with a profusion of lace trimmings. Her hat was of straw faced with azure velvet, and the crown surrounded by a long plume, also of ciel blue. I knew by heart the features of this fair young creature, invisible although she was to others. They seemed to belong more to a flower than to a face: her eyes were large and blue, full of appealing love; her hair was of course golden; her smile was angelic; and her whole expression was one of sweetness and goodness. She was my first dream: little although she belonged to actual life, she used to trip about by my side and sit with me in my room at home. Suddenly, however, I became enamored of a different creature, and my dream changed. I began to think of my lovely blond regretfully as of a beautiful creature too good for earth who died young. It is the habit of the shopkeepers to change the figures in their windows, and one morning I fell in love with quite a different creature. She wore when I first saw her a long dress of black silk and velvet sparkling with jet; over her shoulders was thrown carelessly a mantle of cream-colored cloth; on her head was a plush hat—what they call a Gainsborough—trimmed with a long graceful plume, also of cream-color. Although only her back was toward me, I knew by instinct exactly what her face was. She was dark of course, with a low broad forehead, about which clustered little short curls; her eyes were superb, at once laughing and melancholy; her features suggested rather pride than softness; but her smile was enchanting, open, sunny, like a burst of light from behind a cloud. Nothing could be more real than this vision. At first the discovery of this magnificently-endowed woman rendered me happy: I used to walk past the shop half a dozen times a day to look at her. Her costumes varied, but they always suggested the same dark but brilliant lineaments, the same graceful movements, the same peculiarly lovely tones. She often looked back at me over her shoulder, but had an air of evading me. All at once, with surprise and delight, I remembered that she might be found in actual existence, in real flesh and blood. I deserted the image for a week in the hope of finding the reality. I paced Fifth Avenue; I went to the dry-goods stores; I attended the theatres. Often I seemed to see her before me—the picturesque hat, the long plume, the rich mantle and dress. At such moments while I pressed forward my heart beat. When the cheek turned toward me and the eyes lighted up with surprise at my disappointed stare, it was easy enough to see that I had made a mistake. There was the hat, the cloak, the bewitching little frippiness of lace and net and ribbon about the bust. She had, however, copied the masterpiece without investing herself with its soul: her face was vague and characterless, her whole personality void of that eloquent womanliness which had so wrought upon me. This experience was so many times repeated that I was frightfully tormented by it. The familiar dress seemed to reveal with appalling truthfulness the lack of those qualities of heart and soul which I demanded. Those lovely, picturesque outlines suggest not only rounded cheeks colored with girlish bloom, but something more; and the graceful draping is not a meaningless husk.
I have gone back to my shop-window image. She never disappoints me. She is as beautiful, as magnificently endowed, as full of fascinating life and spirit, as ever. I sometimes think, unless I find her actual prototype, of buying that Gainsborough hat, that cloth mantle and velvet dress, and hanging them up in my room.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
History of the English People. By John Richard Green. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Most readers interested in English history have long felt the need of such a work as this, in which the results of recent research among original sources and of the critical examination of earlier labors are gathered up and summarized in a narrative at once clear and concise, free from disquisition, minuteness of detail and elaborate descriptions, without being meagre or superficial, devoid of suggestiveness or of animation. In calling his work a History of the English People, Mr. Green has not undertaken to deviate from the beaten track, devoting his attention to social development and leaving political affairs in the background. What he has evidently had in view is the fact that English history is in a special sense that of the rise and growth of free institutions, exhibiting at every stage the mutual influence or combined action of different classes, permeated even when the Crown or the aristocracy was most powerful by a popular spirit, and contrasting in this respect with that of France and Spain, in which during many centuries the mass of the people lost instead of gaining ground, representative bodies analogous to the English Parliament were deprived of their rights or swept out of existence, and liberty was sacrificed to national consolidation and unity. Whence this difference came need hardly be pointed out. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were neither freer nor more enterprising than the Franks and other Teutonic families; but the fortune which carried them to Britain saved them from inheriting any onerous share of the great legacy of the Roman Empire—with the task of absorbing and transmitting its language and civilization—secured them against the risk of being either merged in a more numerous race or submerged by a new influx, and thus preserved an identity and continuity which link their latest achievements with their earliest exploits, and stamp their whole career with the same character.
With such a subject, Mr. Green has had no difficulty in so marking its divisions as to concentrate attention on successive epochs without dropping the thread that runs through the whole. The earlier portions of his work are naturally the most instructive and the fullest of interest. The last volume, indeed, which covers the ground from the Revolution to the battle of Waterloo, besides including the index to the whole work, gives far too rapid a survey of momentous and familiar events to afford profit or satisfaction. One feels that, while the style retains its fluency, the tone has lost its warmth, and that much of the writing must have been perfunctory: the reading, at all events, cannot but be so. But scarcely any one, however well acquainted with the ground, can follow without pleasure and an enlargement of view Mr. Green's account of "Early England," "England under Foreign Kings," "The Charter" and "The Parliament" (from 1307 to 1461), which form the subjects of the first four books; while the next four, occupying the second and third volumes, and entitled "The Monarchy," "The Reformation," "Puritan England" and "The Revolution," are marked by a grasp of thought, a fine sense of proportion, a thorough knowledge and well-balanced judgment of men and events, and not unfrequently a dramatic force, which sustain the interest throughout, and which make them a valuable addition, and sometimes a necessary corrective, to the fuller and more brilliant narratives in which the same periods and subjects have been separately treated.
Mr. Green does not appear to have gone deeply into the study of original sources, but it is only in his incidental treatment of continental history that his deficiencies in this respect become palpable. Here he is often inaccurate, and even when his facts are correct his mode of stating them shows that he is not master of the whole field, and has little appreciation of mingled motives and attendant circumstances. Such a sentence as this: "The restoration of the towns on the Somme to Burgundy, the cession of Normandy to the king's brother, Francis, the hostility of Brittany, not only detached the whole western coast from the hold of Lewis, but forced its possessors to look for aid to the English king who lay in their rear," could not have been written with any clear ideas of either the political or the geographical relations of the places mentioned. What is meant by the "western coast"? Not, certainly, the towns on the Somme, which lie in the north-east, nor Normandy, which has indeed a western coast of its own, but cannot be said to form part of the western coast of France. Nor does Brittany include "the whole western coast," or even the larger portion of it, while it could not have been "detached from the hold of Lewis," inasmuch as he had never held it. As little will that remark apply to the other provinces on the western coast, as these were still in his possession. Who are meant, therefore, by the "possessors" of this misty coast, and why the English king is said to have lain "in their rear," can only be conjectured. It is a small blunder that the French king's brother is called "Francis" instead of Charles, since we must not suspect Mr. Green of confounding him with the duke of Brittany, who bore the former name. But the whole passage, in connection with what follows it, indicates that the author has mixed up the state of affairs at two very close, but very distinct, conjunctures. Many similar instances of defective knowledge might be cited, nor are they confined to this early period. The remark, in regard to Charles of Austria (the emperor Charles V.), that "the madness of his mother left him next heir of Castille" is nonsense: he was her heir in any case, while through her madness he became nominally joint, and virtually sole, ruler of the kingdom. His son Philip had not been "twice a widower" when he married Mary of England, and the assertion that "he owed his victory at Gravelines mainly to the opportune arrival of ten English ships of war" is patriotic, but foolish. That "Catholicism alone united the burgher of the Netherlands to the noble of Castille, or Milanese and Neapolitan to the Aztec of Mexico and Peru," would be an incomprehensible statement even if Peru had been inhabited by the Aztecs. Such errors, however, cannot seriously impair the value of Mr. Green's work. Its merits, as regards both matter and form, are solid and varied. The scale on which it was planned adapts it admirably to the gap which it was intended to fill, and, except in the latter portions, its comparative brevity of treatment excludes neither important facts nor modifying views. No shorter work could give the reader any adequate knowledge or conceptions in regard to English history, and no longer work is needed to make him fully acquainted with its essential features.