This great change extinguishes a tribe of agents as numerous and troublesome as any that roams the Upper Missouri or the Lower Colorado. As numerous, did we say? It outnumbered all the septs of the Sioux—did more travelling and peopled more lodges. It had its peculiar literature and its peculiar vehicles. We have known a single contract made with a Western carriage-factory for five hundred sewing-machine wagons, for the use of one out of the fifteen or twenty companies. All these gay and jaunty equipages go into quod, like the tumbrils and ambulances left over in 1865, and with them, into yet more helpless disuse, a mass of literature, written, printed and oral, great beyond computation. It is a fossil industry whereof even the bones have suddenly perished. To its credit, be it said, it died game, struggling to the last, its battlefield the lobbies of Congress and the halls of the Patent Office. Gold and greenbacks were shed like water, but not much blood save the blood of the grape. All was in vain. The little needle, with an eye near the point, the sharp steel weapon of Howe that so long held at bay all assailants, puzzled a succession of judges of first and second instance, original and appellate, and enriched a generation of attorneys, was forced finally to succumb. All the world and his wife—his wife especially—may make and use a needle with any style or position of hole without paying a cent of royalty for the inestimable privilege. That historic implement has the largest liberty, and may disport itself in an infinity of scrolls and intricacies over the raiment of male and female. The befrogged officer is no longer limited in the arabesques of braid and tinsel that make gay his manly breast. He commands all the resources of Snip's imagination, and whirligigs beyond what hath entered the mind of man to conceive will shortly meander over the cerulean expanse.
KATERFELTO IN REPOSE.
Is there not a lull in the quack-medicine business? Its advertisements do not appear to us to shine with the brilliancy of old. Those astonishing portraits of Old Doctor So-and-So, and the gorgeous perspective view of the interior of Professor Snooks's laboratory, all alive with forty 'prentice-power pill-machines and tincture-vats like the pools of a swimming academy, have ceased to illustrate the condition of modern art and medicine.
Possibly, the sensational style has been found to have lost its force, and a more quiet and stately tone to be more promotive of the popularity of bread-pills and root-bitters. It looks more professional. Mountebankery in physic has been overdone, as it has in a great many other things. The quacks, if they successfully inculcate this lesson and bring in a corresponding reform, will have been useful public servants. Others have been forcing the pace as well as they, and may well slacken speed, if not call a halt. The blatant and dogmatic has been increasingly predominant in the announcement of new theories, notions and "missions." We are all concerned in seeing it checked, and simple truth and plodding inquiry once more given a chance. Repeated disappointments have made the world distrustful of startling discoveries and sweeping panaceas—a fact which should commend itself to the attention of all the charlatans, and of those who, not charlatans, have caught from them the fashion of violent and premature trumpeting. Political and social cure-alls will have to work their way slowly and painfully into notice. They must submit to the rules of trade, and not look for success until they have demonstrated that what they offer in the market is what it pretends to be. The world is tired of being taken by storm. Just now it is in a more than usually distrustful mood—in a state of marked disillusionment. It declines to have a creed of any kind slammed into its face—so many new ones have palpably failed, and so many old ones have proved themselves possessed of forgotten virtues. Good and evil have proved to be omnipresent, and to pervade everything, like iron and sulphur.
E. C. B.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Madame Gervaisais. By Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. New Edition. Paris.
This is in many respects a remarkable book. It shows unusual talent and thought—skill in the morbid anatomy of the soul. It is out of the common line in having but one character, the heroine, and not a word about love. It is, in fact, the biography of a woman during her conversion to Roman Catholicism: the incidents are merely the successive steps by which she is brought within the pale. The interest lies in the mental and moral fluctuations through which she passes while under the influence to which she is subjected, and which in one way or another does not cease to act upon her for an instant. The book is a complement to Madame Craven's pictures of conversion and the devout life, but differs from them in the point of view.