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A generation ago Sir Benjamin bowed and danced and supped at Mrs. Malaprop's ball with all the gay world of that time, which is now in wigs, caps, turbans, or heaven; and the next day, dining with Mrs. Candour, Sir Benjamin told, with infinite relish and to the great amusement of the table, the story of his hostess's verbal trips and stumbles. It did not seem to be conduct essentially base, because this sparkling summer realm by the sea is like Charles Lamb's conception of the artificial comedy of the eighteenth century: "I confess, for myself, that, with no great delinquencies to answer for, I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience--not to live always in the precincts of the law courts--but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions, to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot follow me--

"'secret shades Of wooded Ida's inmost grove, While yet there was no fear of Jove.'"

To take permanent lodgings beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, however, is a critical enterprise. If you take a house in Capua, you must needs breathe the Capuan air. The magnetic rock in Sindbad's story drew out the nails of the ships that ventured too near. Old Mithridates fed on poisons until they "became a kind of nutriment," as Dr. Rappaccini fed his daughter, until, too late, he discovered that she was doomed. The graybeards who drive out to see the coach parade, and recall the days, before the ocean drive, when the rocks beyond Lily Pond were a glimmering land of Beulah, may prattle of the golden age of Newport as of a happy past in which the graybeards were born. But will they seriously contend that the age of Croesus and Midas is not the golden age of Newport?

While they are gossiping, the coaches approach. They have been through the town, and are driving out by the Fort road; and as they appear, the vast throng of carriages which have driven out to meet them pull to the side of the road to allow a free course. A multitude of spectators awaiting a festal procession, which at last is coming, naturally suggests applause. But there is profound silence. There is no cheer for every spectator to catch up and pass on. The first coach is at hand, and gravely passes at a deliberate pace, and the great world in carriages gravely looks on. The second coach deliberately follows, and is surveyed with equal gravity. The next perhaps will strike a spark of applause. But the next passes deliberately amid a silence profound. One friend, perhaps, in the stately procession gravely nods to another gravely gazing from a carriage. The "function" proceeds. Far out at sea the white sails flash, and the summer surf breaks gently along the shore. Every coach rolls slowly by. The moment for cheering has not yet arrived. Indeed, it does not arrive before the pageant has passed, and the reviewing carriages are turning and following on in its wake. It is truly a solemn function. Graybeard recalls nothing like it for multitude and display in the old drives on "beach days" along the beach in what he calls the golden age. But does he doubt that old Newport would have done it gladly if it could have done it?

If the ghost of Heliogabalus haunts the villa'd shore, it is with no hope of resuming the imperial crown. His court merely makes a pretty summer spectacle when the opera ends. The coach and the stately equipage and the flashing splendor of busy idleness are the pageant which is kindly displayed gratis for the passengers in the omnibus, for the pedestrians and the nurses. They sit and stroll and stare at their ease while the gay play proceeds before their eyes. Nowhere more constantly than in the summer Newport does the remark of the little child watching the march of the soldiers recur--"Mamma, how good they are to make such a show!"

THE LECTURE LYCEUM.

The singular success of the lyceum lecture of that time was due, undoubtedly, to two causes--the simultaneous appearance of a remarkable group of orators, and their profound sympathy with the question which absorbed the public mind. The weekly lecture was not merely a display of oratory, not only an amusing recreation, but it brought wit and accomplishment and eloquence to strengthen the public feeling and arouse the public conscience, and to confirm the earnest spirit which was universal, and which forecast the great events and the noble elevation of the public mind that followed. Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Starr King, Theodore Parker, could of themselves carry any course of lectures, and each in his own way was thoroughly in accord with the truest American life of that time. The situation and the condition of the public mind would not have availed, indeed, without the happy chance of such orators to create the lyceum, but with that chance the lyceum of that day was as remarkable a continuous display of various and effective eloquence as has been ever known.

If the faithful diary of any lecturer who went the grand rounds twenty-five years ago, from Maine to the Mississippi, could be published, it would be full of the most amusing stories. The lecturers all had them to tell, and they were all men of a singularly fine perception of humor. James T. Fields, the publisher in Boston, was the friend of all the lyceum orators, and towards the close of his life he was himself a popular and attractive lecturer upon literary subjects. His little cell or private office in the old corner book-store in Boston was an exchange of lecturers for that neighborhood, which teemed with lyceums, and no similar space has ever heard fresher stories better told, or has ever echoed with gayer laughter.

It was the pleasant company in that little retreat which first heard, the day after it occurred, the tale of the belated lecturer who, hurrying from the cars in a carriage to the hall in Boston, long beyond the hour, dinnerless, and with no chance to dress, opened his travelling-bag, and proceeded, to the consternation of the lady who had taken a seat in the same carriage, and whose pardon he politely and briefly invoked, to change his collar and his coat. As he began to pull off his coat, having pulled off his collar, his amazed and terrified fellow-passenger began to pull at the door, and to call loudly upon the driver, who was furiously whipping his horses into a pace that increased both the noise of the carriage and the conviction of the terrified lady that she was the victim of some dreadful conspiracy, or the hapless victim of a maniac. The maniac's earnest but interjectional explanation as he proceeded in his toilet, begging his companion to be pacified, as he was merely going to lecture, was an unintelligible asseveration, which only made his madness more indisputable and awful, and what might have befallen the poor lady, if the carriage had not suddenly stopped at the hall, and the lecturer, in his clean collar and black coat, had not begged her pardon for frightening her, with a fervor that frightened her all the more, and disappeared from the vehicle with his travelling-bag, shawl, and umbrella, he was not prepared to say. But the tale, as he told it the next morning with infinite humor in Fields's corner, was received, as he ruefully admitted, with louder shouts of laughter than had greeted the brightest witticisms of his lecture.

TWEED.

There are many persons who wonder why Tweed did not evade justice by forfeiting his bail. He had every chance to escape, they say; why did he stay? His chief confederates are safe in Europe, where he might easily have been, yet he was foolish enough to take the risk of a trial, and he is imprisoned, probably for the rest of his life. The explanation, however, is very obvious. He did not believe there was any risk. Tweed was the most striking illustration of a very common faith--belief in the Almighty Dollar. He is the victim of a most touching fidelity to the great principle which every good American will surely be the last to flout. His creed was very simple: it was that money would buy everything, and he reposed upon his belief with the sweet security of the Mussulman who sees by faith a heaven of houris. Certainly his confidence was not surprising. He had proved his creed. He had seen money work miracles. He had seen himself, a man of no cleverness and of no advantages, rising swiftly by means of it from insignificant poverty to the control of a great party. It had made him master of one of the great cities of the world. It had secured for him Governors, Legislatures, councils, and legal and executive authorities of every kind. He invested in land and judges. He bought dogs and lawyers. He silenced the press with a golden muzzle, and money made his will law.

Here was a man who wanted nothing that money could not buy: was it strange that he had unbounded faith in it? Every form of virtue was to him mere affectation, a more or less ingenious and tenacious "strike" for money. If a man spoke of honesty, patriotism, self-respect, the public welfare, public opinion, truth, justice, right, Tweed smiled at the fine phrases in which the auctioneer, anxious to sell himself, cried, "Going! going!" Argument, reason, decency--they were meaningless to him. If an opponent held out, he simply asked, "How much?" The world was a market. Life was a bargain. He felt himself with pride to be the largest operator in his way, as Vanderbilt in his, or Stewart in his.

In Albany he had the finest quarters at the Delavan, and when he came into the great dining-room at dinner-time, and looked at all the tables thronged with members of the Legislature and the lobby, he had a benignant, paternal expression, as of a patriarch pleased to see his retainers happy. It was a magnificent rendering of Fagin and his pupils. You could imagine him trotting up and down in the character of an unsuspicious old gentleman with his handkerchief hanging out of his pocket, that his scholars might show their skill in prigging a wipe. He knew which of that cheerful company was the Artful Dodger and which Charley Bates. And he never doubted that he could buy every man in the room if he were willing to pay the price. So at the Capitol, where sits the Legislature of a noble commonwealth of four millions of souls, he moved about with an air of fat good-nature, like the chief shepherd of the flock. If he stood at the door of the Assembly looking in, it is easy to fancy him saying to himself, The State pays these men two or three hundred dollars for four months' service; I will give them better wages. He did not doubt that it was a fair transaction. What is the State? It is only four millions of people, he thought, who are all trying to be rich--struggling, cheating, by hook or by crook, every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost, to be rich. These men would be fools not to take my money. And he smiled his fat smile, and paid liberally for all that was in market.

There were some papers, whose price he could not ascertain, which persisted in speaking ill of him and his pals. If the fools did not know their own interest enough to be content with a good price--say, of corporation advertising--they must be silenced. The conceit of virtue must not be pushed too far. So one day his Legislature passed a bill virtually giving his judges power to imprison editors at their pleasure. But virtue--that is, in the Tweed theory of life, obstinacy in holding out for a higher price--mustered such a really respectable protest that the public project of coercion failed, and private methods were tried. Tweed had no doubt that reputation could be bought as well as power. Peter Cooper builds an institute for the education of the poor, does he? You mean, said Tweed, a monument to his own glory. He pays a certain number of thousands of dollars for the reputation of philanthropy. And Mr. Stewart builds a working-woman's palace. Ah! And Mr. Astor founds a library. Indeed! And they are benevolent gentlemen and benefactors of their kind? Not at all. They merely invest money in a certain kind of fame. That pleases their taste, as fast horses and yachts and pictures please the taste of other people. I will show you how 'tis done, says the faithful believer in the Dollar. And he gives fifty thousand dollars to the poor just as winter is beginning. "Let the cavillers say what they will," exclaim a myriad voices, "that shows a good heart." Tweed, as it were, tips a wink. I told you how it was done, he seems to say: what is there that money will not buy?

Is it surprising that such a man did not try to evade justice? Justice in his view was a commodity like legislative honor, like newspaper independence, like the reputation of benevolence. The reform movement was to him a sudden and confusing flurry, in which strikers, to whose terms he would not yield, had somehow gained a momentary advantage. He had perhaps made a mistake in not buying them at their own price. Success had possibly put him off his guard. He was sure that if an indictment were found, that would be the end of it, and he had no feeling of shame. His friend Fisk had shown what lawyers were made of, and he himself would buy lawyers and judges, sheriffs and juries. He knew that the one thing that in a needy and greedy world cannot fail is money. He came to his first trial, and the jury disagreed: naturally, for he had bought some of them. The evidence is, of course, moral only, but it is conclusive. If justice, facetiously so called, wanted another bout, he would "come up smiling." There was no trick or quibble that lawyers could devise for which he had not made munificent preparation, even to asserting that the judge who obstinately refused to name a price was disqualified from sitting at the trial. Money had never failed before; it certainly would not at this last pinch.

But it did, and the bewilderment and consternation of this simple devotee were pitiful. He had but one article in his faith, and that was now destroyed. He had staked everything upon the certainty of the Almighty Dollar, and he had lost. But there was something not less noticeable than his unquestioning faith. It was that his faith was so generally held. For what gave the universal and intense interest to the Tweed trial? Here was a common thief, except in the amount of his theft, of whose guilt nobody had any doubt, against whom, as the judge said, the evidence was a mathematical demonstration, and his conviction was hailed as a kind of national deliverance and vindication of human justice. There was but one reason for this, and it was the feeling that money would free him. Of course it was known that the judge could not be bought, nor the Attorney-General, nor the prosecution. Tweed might as well have offered to buy the moral law. But public knowledge ended there. And in the degree of the universality of the belief that somehow, by actual bribery, or by legal quirk or shift or sham, money would buy him off, is the value of the lesson of his conviction, which is that the utmost power of money fails before firm, sagacious, and intelligent honesty. There is not a saloon in New York in which the Tweed contempt of honorable motives is the sole faith which has not had an astounding revelation, and learned that money is not omnipotent.

Those saloons have learned one other thing--that stealing is the same crime, whether it be the theft of public or of private property. The Robin Hood jollity that surrounded Tweed, his familiar name, the "Boss," the laughing stories that were told of him, showed that he was held in very different estimation from an ordinary thief. The baser newspapers evidently regarded him as the French nobleman regarded himself who was firmly convinced that the Almighty would think twice before condemning such a gentleman as he. So when Tweed went to the Tombs the same feeling attended him. The officers could not believe that it was really meant so rich a man, who had lived in so fine a house, and had spent money so profusely, should be treated as a common offender. The wretch who steals a loaf to feed his starving children must have short shrift, and Black Maria despatches him at the earliest moment. But a "statesman" who steals millions of dollars from the people--really the law must think twice before handling him impolitely! A day or two after he had been taken to jail, on his way to the penitentiary, the papers said, as if he had been a beloved prisoner of state whom cruel governments might torture, but whom the people would still honor: "A great many improvements have been made in his cell by his friends, and it has now quite a cosey, comfortable appearance. The floor is covered with a carpet of a dark green ground. The walls are hung with dark green cloth, and the panes in the windows, opening on Centre Street, which were cracked and broken a few days ago, have been newly glazed. In the centre of the room is a large round table, at which the 'Boss' takes his three regular meals, served up in the best manner from the prison restaurant. There is a luxurious leather-covered lounge in one corner, and five chairs, including a large, comfortable rocking-chair. Besides these few articles of furniture are a wash-stand and a book-case. The prisoner is plentifully supplied with reading matter; and as for creature comforts, the solicitude of his friends and relatives leaves nothing to be desired except liberty. Crowds of people have called to see him for the past two days, but none were admitted without passes from the Commissioners."

This feeling was akin to that which inspires the proverb and the practice that "all's fair at the Custom-house." When Robin Hood stepped politely to the door of my Lord Bishop's carriage and requested him to alight under the greenwood tree, and proceeded to rifle the carriage of all the treasure that his lordship was conveying, he was not felt to be a common thief. Far from it; he was the people's tax-gatherer in green. He scattered with a free hand among the poor the money which the rich man could lose without feeling it. Nobody suffered. My Lord Bishop was admonished that he had the poor always with him, and the poor rejoiced in his involuntary largess. So "the boys" thought of Tweed. While the "Boss" was king there was always money about, as they said; and when did Robin Hood himself ever bestow fifty thousand dollars in a lump upon the poor? Besides, who could say that he was robbed? The rich could not feel it; and was any poor orphan defrauded by him, any poor widow pinched, any honest laborer burdened?

Yes, they were. It was public money that he stole. And what is public money? It is the taxes. And who pay the taxes--the rich? No, the poor, the producers. They come out of the rent of the tenement-house; out of the price of tea and sugar and coal; out of the pittance of the widow and orphan, and the small wages of the laborer. It was from the poor who cowered gratefully over the coal that he gave them that he stole the coal. His confederate, Sweeny, planted hyacinths in the city parks, and for every flower some poor soul was pinched. Gay Robin Hood strips the baron, and the poor bless him as he flings them the gold. Then the baron goes home to his castle and wrings teeth out of the jaws of Isaac of York, to force him to give money. Then Isaac of York advances at a more ruinous rate than yesterday the interest upon the money he lends. So when Tweed steals from the public treasury he picks every private pocket. Every stroke of his hammer, if he hammers stone with other thieves, refreshes in the public mind these familiar truths. It is humiliating that the conviction of an evident offender in a court of law should be a cause of public congratulation. But, on the other hand, it is cheering that shameless crime intrenched in every way, and defying the course of law, should by that course be quietly convicted and surely punished.

COMMENCEMENT.

It is a changed college world since Nat. Willis's Philip Slingsby was the hero of many a maiden's dream, and the stories of Willis reflected the modest gayety of the society of his time. Nahant was then a summer resort of importance, and had not become, as one of its denizens said in later years, only "cold Boston." Willis's heroes, like Byron's, were largely himself, and it was but a thin veil that covered in them persons familiar in the society that he knew, and incidents drawn from his own experience.

He was the college hero of his time. But his Scripture poems, which had great vogue and were printed in all the "classbooks" and "readers," and his "Burial of Arnold," a young and brilliant Senior at Yale, and his bright and blithe "Saturday Afternoon," are quite passed out of current knowledge. They are not the kind of verse which is produced in college now. Their Byronic sentimentality is not to the taste of the college club and Greek Letter Society man of to-day; and Charles Coldstream, who looks on listlessly at the college athletic games, leaves enthusiasm to "the Fresh," and has "really never read those things of Willis's."

Yet the dominant emotions of Commencement this year were very much what they were when Philip Slingsby dared the waltz, and even the more emancipated belles shuddered a little as they slid into the charmed circle. Youth and hope and the passion which "is not all a dream" are forever renewed, and if the fashion changes, the substance remains. In the crowded church at Commencement this year, with the gay dresses and the flowers and the music and the soft summer air breathing in at the open doors and windows, there are still palpitating bosoms, and a color that comes and goes, and glances that meet and mingle--"read the language of those wandering eye-beams--the heart knoweth."

There is not one of the young heroes of the Commencement hour whom those elders do not scan with knowledge. These wise young judges carry no secrets which the elders do not share. Is it a strange world that of Willis and his Philip Slingsby? It is the world of the moment and of this Commencement.

But there is something else in Commencement besides this romance of feeling and tradition. It is the celebration of the intellectual life. The eloquence, indeed, is sometimes rather copious. An oration in the morning before one literary society; in the afternoon before another; and a sermon in the evening before the Missionary Association, is good measure heaped up and running over. There is some jealousy also even in academic groves. In the older day, if the Melpomene had its oration in the morning and the Euterpe in the afternoon, and you read on the following Sunday, scrawled on the blank page of the hymn-book in the pew, "Words, words, words, oration of Cicero," and "Genius, eloquence, common-sense, oration of Demosthenes," you knew that you read the comment upon the rival orator of a Melpomenean or a Euterpean, as the case might be. But if the orator was not always wise or eloquent, there were also discourses which have profoundly influenced the lives of those who heard or read them, giving a direction and inspiring a fidelity which, like Wordsworth's thoughts of his past years, breed perpetual benediction.

It is a recollection blended of many feelings, that which the recurring Commencement brings to the alumnus. But the deep and permanent charm is the consciousness of the infinite worth and consolation of letters. Theoretically the college course was a series of years devoted to making acquaintance with the treasures of human genius. Possibly there was in fact some divergence from the theory. But that was the opportunity. The gates were set ajar, and if the neophyte did not choose to enter, he lost--as the teacher said to his pupil who went fishing rather than to hear Webster's eulogy on Adams and Jefferson--he lost what he can never regain.

Is there some fatality which makes the pen that treats of Commencement hortatory and didactic? Is there some secret charm which still allies the college to the pulpit, so that to talk about it is presently to begin to preach? The Easy Chair asks because it feels that it is about to take the sacerdotal tone, and remind the youth who is leaving or entering college that, like every other epoch in life, college is an opportunity. It is what you make it. Fate, as the older times would have said--life, as we prefer to say--gives us a chance. But the improvement of it we give ourselves. The tragedy of the refrain, "Too late, too late; ye cannot enter now," is that of the man who, in our simple phrase, wasted his college years. The tender spell of Whittier's "Maud Muller" lies in its saddest words of tongue or pen. But the memory of what might have been is so profoundly pathetic because it might not have been, and we were the arbiters of fate and did not choose to turn upward.

Kind sir of the college, who lend to the preacher of the moment your listening ear, the preacher himself may be a wearisome chaplain, but you are the young judge of the summer afternoon, smelling the meadows sweet with hay, and stopping at the cool spring where Maud Muller hands you the refreshing draught. Do you follow the allegory, and see in that maid what really she is? To you she is a maiden who rakes the hay; to Numa she was Egeria by the other fountain. It is a sweet illusion, for the maid is not Egeria nor Maud Muller, but under those gentle forms she is the nymph of opportunity. Woo her and win her, and all the happiness that might have been will be yours.

There is nothing more touching than the inability of the chooser to comprehend the choice. Why did not the judge yield to the soft persuasion of that simple loveliness? Why did he not embrace the opportunity, and fold his happiness to his heart? Well, sir, that is always the question. But if he did not know that in that fair figure opportunity stood before him, you do know it. Don't be satisfied to hum "in court an old love tune." You remember the legend of the Sibyl's books. Was it interpreted to you in the class-room? Do you interpret it to yourself?

The most inspiring tradition in every college is not that of the boat or the ball, of copious gold and flowing wine, of Milo or Sardanapalus or Midas; it is not that of the "dig" or the "prig," of Dryasdust or Casaubon; but it is that of the youth, by whatever name he was called in your college, who did not, like the judge, "closing his heart," ride on--who knew that four such years as yours in college would never return, and that they offered him the golden keys which, polished by his labor, would open the heaped treasures of genius in all ages and lands. It is he who in taking the keys did not grudge the labor, and to whose life those treasures have been wide open.

No, the inspiring personal tradition of college was not the pleasant Philip Slingsby; it was rather Philip Sidney, who rode with the best and was a man in every manly enterprise, but who had so used his opportunities in study and affairs that Hubert Languet, most accomplished of scholars, called him friend, and William of Orange called him master.

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK.

Even the Pan-Americans protest that the streets of New York are dirty. It is very comical, but it is true, that all our marvellous prosperity, our genius of invention, our quickness of wit, and profusion of resource; all our patriotism and pride, our great traditions of liberty and heroism, our free soil, free speech, and free press; and all the force and intelligence of our free government--cannot keep the streets of New York clean. Miss Edwards, the most courteous and friendly of visitors, is compelled to say: "I found on all sides nothing but holes of mud, gutters, and dirt piles, an endless rush and a block of street traffic. There are so many dangers and the state of the highways is such as to make it incomprehensible to English people that enterprising Americans would long endure it."

Miss Edwards is familiar with the dirt of Egypt, which is universal and intolerable, but even that does not mollify or alleviate the awful impression of dirty New York. Then a Pan-American, perhaps from Bogota, from Callao, from Lima, from Santiago, from Buenos Ayres, from Rio de Janeiro, from Guayaquil--cities in which we had not supposed impeccable highways to be--politely flagellates us, and ignominiously discrowns Broadway. "It was impossible not to notice the deplorable condition of the streets. Our carriages plunged terribly into the holes which at frequent intervals were met with, and the wheels at every turn sent whirls of mud, which compelled the passers-by to keep at a respectful distance."

We may indeed reply that this is the fling of a Pan-American. And who, forsooth, is a Pan-American? Is he the superior--nay, does he presume to be the peer--of a North American? Are we not notoriously the greatest nation in the world? Does not our population reduplicate incalculably? Have we not carried civilization from sea to sea? Have we not the largest lakes, the longest rivers, the broadest prairies, the greatest cataract, in the world? And shall the minions of monarchies and the pigmies of tuppenny temporary republics snap their ridiculous fingers at us, and presume to say that the streets of New York are dirty? The idea is preposterous. It is contemptible. Moreover, it is insulting, and the streets of New York are--

It is plain sailing--or slipping, as chance may determine whether we go in the water or the mud--so far, but it is a little difficult to end that sentence in the same key. Let us try another, possibly a little less perfervid. The population of the United States is some sixty millions. Taken altogether they form undoubtedly the most intelligent community, with the highest average well-being, in the world. They are self-governing down to aldermen and coroners. More than in any country at any time in history, the will of the majority of the adult male population determines the government. The city of New York is one of the three or four chief cities of the world. It is confessedly the metropolis of this blessed and absolutely self-governing country, and the streets of New York can't be kept clean.

Is there any possible method of describing the unquestionable greatness and undoubted glory of the country, its resplendent history and its miraculous achievements, in an ascending and cumulative series of epithets and epigrams which shall end truthfully in the resounding allegation, "and the streets of New York are kept clean"? Indeed, is not this little joker worse than that of the thimble? Does he not grin at us from every pile of mud, and laugh out of every hole, and snicker and sneer on every side of the unremoved and apparently irremovable dirt and disorder?

It is absurd, as the boys say, to "blame" this situation upon somebody else--some street commissioner, or scavenger, or other officer, or employ?. Nobody is ever guilty of misrule in this country but the rulers, and the rulers are the people. The citizens of New York elect the city officers who are to do the city work which the citizens pay for. They give some of those officers authority to dismiss others who are derelict in their duty, and the governor can deal with the chief officers who do not obey the command of the people. If the taxes are outrageously heavy, if the money is squandered, if the streets are dirty and city government a farce, nobody is to blame but the citizens. They have as good a government as they choose, and the kind of government they desire.

Then they desire dirty streets? Certainly. That is to say, they don't desire clean streets strongly enough to secure them. Then popular government has failed in cities? Rather there are some things in cities in which popular government is not especially interested. If there are two hundred and fifty thousand voters in the city of New York, how many of them really care enough for clean streets and proper municipal administration to spend time and trouble to secure them?

Consider the lilies of the field--that is to say, look at the aldermen and the municipal officers, the representatives in the State Legislature and in Congress that the city of New York elects. Do they represent what we call its intelligence and character? Yet undeniably they are representatives of the majority of the voters, and if that majority be corrupt or stupid, it is either because there are more knaves and fools than intelligent and honest citizens among the voters, or because such citizens do not care to take the trouble to vote and to be represented; in which case the Aldermen and Co. that we see are, morally speaking, true representatives of the city. The minions of monarchies and the pigmies of tuppenny temporary republics, as they bump and wallow and flounder, bespattered and contemptuous, through the streets of New York, may truly say that they are such streets as the citizens desire, because if the people desired clean streets, unless popular government be a failure, they would have them. If the mayor did not appoint officers who would clean the streets, they would require the governor to deal with the mayor.

Does it necessarily follow, because popular government is, upon the whole, the best government, that the governing people desire all good things that government can supply? Liberty they want, and equality, and fair play; but do they, because they are self-governing, desire beautiful buildings and clean streets? Might not a good-natured despot of fine taste and sanitary enlightenment and a sense of order give his dominions nobler public works and a better municipal administration than a republic which is neither tuppenny nor temporary, but in which there is easy and indolent indifference to public beauty and public order?

"Above all," said the English bishop to the young catechumen, "don't mistake zeal for knowledge." Above all, says the good genius of America, don't confound national bumptiousness with patriotism.

THE MORALITY OF DANCING.

The gravity of the discussion of the morality of dancing is exceedingly amusing. The dancing of young people is as natural and instinctive as their laughing and singing, and the old Easy Chairs about the wall might as wisely quarrel with the song of the bobolink in the fields as with the dance upon the floor. But the grave censors who condemn it must be heard. There is reason in the way in which they often put their objections. Excitement, late hours, exposure of health, all these are bad. But, on the other hand, exercise, cheerfulness, friendly conversation, all these are good. The zealous censors confound uses and abuses. The Easy Chair has seen a worthy temperance apostle ingulfing cups of coffee in the pauses of an exhortation to abstinence, until it marvelled at the capacity of the apostolic stomach. Could there be no intemperance in coffee-drinking? But was coffee not to be drunk? The Easy Chair has seen such frantic gobbling at a railway eating-room that it could only gaze in wonder at the sottish and, so to speak, drunken eating. But is food not to be eaten? The Easy Chair has seen little children, extravagantly dressed and decorated, dancing in great hotel parlors on hot summer nights at an hour when they should all have been sound asleep in their beds, while their parents should have been soundly chastised for not putting them there. But is the dancing of young persons therefore wrong?

Let him select an act which he would approve. Let him be reading a serious book, or thinking in his study, or going upon a visit of charity when he is summoned, and he would say that he could go with perfect composure and the utmost propriety. But how if he were peevish as he read the serious book, or if he were thinking angrily in his study, or if he were mentally reproaching the duty that drew him from his comfortable room to pay a visit of charity, could he then more properly hasten to console the dying than if he had been cheerfully dancing, his mind full of pleasant thoughts and the delight of the music and the measured movement? It is not the thing that he is doing, but the spirit in which he is doing it, that should be considered.

How different a view of the pleasant recreation of dancing may be taken by an intellectual man, from that of one who thinks the waltz a device of Satan, is shown by a passage of De Quincey, the beginning of which the Easy Chair will quote, and which will find an echo in many a memory: "And in itself, of all the scenes which this world offers, none is to me so profoundly interesting, none so affecting, as the spectacle of men and women floating through the mazes of a dance; under these conditions, however, that the music shall be rich and festal, the execution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous action. And whenever the music happens not to be of a light, trivial character, but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, and the performers in the dance so far skilful as to betray no awkwardness verging on the ludicrous, I believe that many persons feel as I feel in such circumstances, viz., derive from the spectacle the very grandest form of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatsoever."

THE HOG FAMILY.

It is a good sign of the times that the crusade against the large and omnipresent family of Hog which the Easy Chair long ago preached has been vigorously renewed. Public manners are a common interest. The private conduct of the most famous personages is of small concern beyond their domestic circle. But the conduct of the person in the next room at a hotel, or in the next seat in a railroad car, is of great interest to us. Yet the remedy is not obvious. Even if we should propose a school of manners, it is not certain that the pupils for whom it would be especially designed would attend.

If a fellow-guest at the Grand Hotel of the Universe comes in at two in the morning, and going humming along the corridor to his room, flings his boot down upon the floor at his door with a resounding blow that awakens all neighboring sleepers, you may cover him with expletives, and consign him in imagination to a hundred direful dooms, but nevertheless he goes unpunished. Or you may suddenly confront him in all the majesty of nocturnal dishabille, and admonish him severely of the wicked selfishness of his ways. But the probability is that you will have either an extremely amused audience, who will "guy" your appearance without mercy, or receive a surly rejoinder in the form of a boot or a volley of vituperation. In any event, the school of manners will not be honored by the exercises.

Yet the Hog family is not American, nor is it by any means peculiar to this country. The Lady Mavourneen who said with enthusiasm that she could travel without insult from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that every American of the other sex seemed to make himself her protector, said only what is generally true of the American. He is naturally courteous and invincibly good-natured. Indeed, it is his good-nature which has permitted the family Hog to develop to such proportions. A man enters a hotel "as if it belonged to him." Will he not be forced to pay for his accommodation--and roundly? Shall he not take his ease in his inn? Is he not willing to settle for all the food, drink, comfort, trouble, that he may require or occasion? Shall he put himself out for others? If number one does not look out for itself, who will look out for it?

And to all this Jonathan good-naturedly assents. If number one takes more than his share of the sofa, Jonathan moves up. If number one puts his feet on a chair, Jonathan does not stare. If number one still more grossly demonstrates his porcine lineage, Jonathan dislikes to make trouble--until number one comes to despise those whom he insults, and plainly expects every circle to bow to the sovereignty of selfishness. This is a fatal form of good-nature, but it has a not unkindly origin. It springs from a social condition in which everybody is expected to help everybody else, because everybody needs help as in a frontier community. Indeed, in many a rural neighborhood still, this spirit of lending a hand is supreme. Everybody expects to submit to inconvenience, because he knows that he will require others to submit.

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