Nevertheless, in spite of our logical content with "Liffith Lank," we are very glad to find "St. Twel'mo" much better, and we only doubt whether the game is worth the candle; but as the candle is Mr. Webb's, he can burn it, we suppose, upon whatever occasion he likes. He has here made a closer parody than in his first effort, and has lost nothing of the peculiar power with which he there satirized ideas. That quality of the Bronté sisters, of which Miss Evans of Mobile is one of the many American dilutions,—that quality by which any sort of masculine wickedness and brutality short of refusing ladies seats in horse-cars is made lovely and attractive to the well-read and well-bred of the sex,—is very pleasantly derided, while the tropical luxuriance of general information characteristic of "St. Elmo" is unsparingly ridiculed, with the help of frequent extracts from the novel itself.
Mr. Webb appears in "St. Twel'mo" as both publisher and author, and, with a good feeling significant of very great changes in the literary world since a poet toasted Napoleon because he hanged a bookseller, dedicates his little work "To his best friend and nearest relative, the publisher."
The Literary Life of James K. Paulding. Compiled by his Son, William I. Paulding. New York: Charles Scribner and Company.
James K. Paulding was born in 1778 at Great-Nine Partners, in Dutchess County, New York, and nineteen years later came to the city of New York to fill a clerkship in a public office. His family was related to that of Washington Irving by marriage; he was himself united to Irving by literary sympathy and ambition, and the two young men now formed a friendship which endured through life. They published the Salmagundi papers together, and they always corresponded; but with Irving literature became all in all, and with Paulding a favorite relaxation from political life and a merely collateral pursuit. He wrote partisan satires and philippics, waxing ever more bitter against the party to which Irving belonged, and against England, where Irving was tasting the sweets of appreciation and success. He came to be Navy Agent at New York in 1823, and in 1838 President Van Buren made him his Secretary of the Navy. Three years later he retired from public life, and spent his remaining days in the tranquil and uneventful indulgence of his literary tastes.
Dying in 1859, he had survived nearly all his readers, and the present memoir was required to remind many, and to inform more, of the existence of such works as "The Backwoodsman," a poem; the Salmagundi papers in a second series; "Koningsmarke, the Long Finne, a story of the New World," in two volumes; "The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham," satirizing Owen's theories of society, law, and science; "The New Mirror for Travellers, and Guide to the Springs," a satire of fashionable life in the days before ladies with seventy-five trunks were born; "Tales of the Good Woman," a collection of short stories; "A Life of Washington"; "American Comedies"; "The Old Continental," and "The Puritan and his Daughter," historical novels; and innumerable political papers of a serious or a satirical sort. As it has been the purpose of the author of this memoir to let Paulding's life in great part develop itself from his letters, so it has also been his plan to spare comment on his father's literary labors, and to allow their character to be estimated by extracts from his poems, romances, and satires. From these we gather the idea of greater quantity than quality; of a poetical taste rather than poetic faculty; of a whimsical rather than a humorous or witty man. There is a very marked resemblance to Washington Irving's manner in the prose, which is inevitably, of course, less polished than that of the more purely literary man, and which is apt to be insipid and strained in greater degree in the same direction. It would not be just to say that Paulding's style was formed upon that of Irving; but both had given their days and nights to the virtuous poverty of the essayists of the last century; and while one grew into something fresher and more original by dint of long and constant literary effort, the other, writing only occasionally, remained an old-fashioned mannerist to the last. When he died, he passed out of a world in which Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne had never lived. The last delicacy of touch is wanting in all his work, whether verse or prose; yet the reader, though unsatisfied, does not turn from it without respect. If it is second-rate, it is not tricksy; its dulness is not antic, but decorous and quiet; its dignity, while it bores, enforces a sort of reverence which we do not pay to the ineffectual fire-works of our own more pyrotechnic literary time.
Of Paulding himself one thinks, after reading the present memoir, with much regard and some regret. He was a sturdy patriot and cordial democrat, but he seems not to have thought human slavery so very bad a thing. He is perceptibly opinionated, and would have carried things with a high hand, whether as one of the government or one of the governed. He was not swift to adopt new ideas, but he was thoroughly honest in his opposition to them. His somewhat exaggerated estimate of his own importance in the world of letters and of politics was one of those venial errors which time readily repairs.
History and General Description of New France. By the Rev. P. F. X. de Charlevoix, S. J. Translated, with Notes, by John Gilmary Shea. New York: J. G. Shea. Vol. I.
Charlevoix's "History of New France" is very well known to all who study American history in its sources. It is a well-written, scholarlike, and readable book, treating of a subject which the author perfectly understood, and of which he may be said to have been a part. Tried by the measure of his times, his research was thorough and tolerably exact. The work, in short, has always been justly regarded as a "standard," and very few later writers have thought it necessary to go beyond or behind it. Appended to it is a journal of the author's travels in America, in the form of a series of letters to the Duchesse de Lesdiguières, full of interest, and a storehouse of trustworthy information.
Charlevoix had been largely quoted and extensively read. Not to know him, indeed, was to be ignorant of some of the most memorable passages in the history of this continent; but, what is certainly remarkable, he had never found an English translator. At the time of the Old French War, when the public curiosity was strongly interested in everything relating to America, the journal appended to the history was "done into English" and eagerly read; but the history itself had remained to this time in the language in which it was originally written. This is not to be regretted, if it has been the occasion of giving us the truly admirable work which is the subject of this notice.
The spirit and the manner in which Mr. Shea has entered upon his task are above all praise. It is with him a "labor of love." In these days of literary "jobs," when bad translating and careless editing are palmed off upon the amateurs of choice books in all the finery of broad margins and faultless typography, it is refreshing to meet with a book of which the mechanical excellence is fully equalled by the substantial value of its contents, and by the thorough, conscientious, and scholarlike character of the literary execution. The labor and the knowledge bestowed on this translation would have sufficed to produce an original history of high merit. Charlevoix rarely gives his authorities. Mr. Shea has more than supplied this deficiency. Not only has he traced out the sources of his author's statements and exhibited them in notes, but he has had recourse to sources of which Charlevoix knew nothing. He is thus enabled to substantiate, correct, or amplify the original narrative. He translates it, indeed, with literal precision, but, in his copious notes he sheds such a flood of new light upon it that this translation is of far more value to the student than the original work. Since Charlevoix's time, many documents, unknown to him, though bearing on his subject, have been discovered, and Mr. Shea has diligently availed himself of them. The tastes and studies of many years have made him familiar with this field of research, and prepared him to accomplish an undertaking which would otherwise have been impracticable.