Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - "Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v8"

Mitzi Perdue - "The Perdue Chicken Cookbook"

E. A. Allen - "The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races"

Gouverneur Morris - "Aladdin O'Brien"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




Let Imperialism, legitimist or democratic, match that! Florence, too,
had her political vices, many and grave, she tyrannized over Pisa and
other dependants, there was faction in her councils, anarchy, bloody
anarchy, in her streets, for her, too, the hour of doom arrived, and the
conspiracy of the Pazzi was as much an anachronism as that of the
republicans who slew Caesar. But Florence had that heart composed of the
united spirits of many citizens out of which came all that the world
admires and loves in the works of the Florentine. She produced, though
she exiled Dante. That which followed was more tranquil, more orderly
perhaps, materially speaking, not less happy, but it had no heart at
all.




AUSTEN-LEIGH'S MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN

[Footnote: "A Memoir of Jane Austen. By her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh,
Vicar of Bray, Berks." London: Richard Bentley; New York: Scribner,
Welford & Co.]


The walls of our cities were placarded, the other day, with an
advertisement of a new sensational novel, the flaring woodcut of which
represented a girl tied down upon a table, and a villain preparing to
cut off her feet. If this were the general taste, there would be no use
in talking about Jane Austen. But if you ask at the libraries you will
find that her works are still taken out; so that there must still be a
faithful few who, like ourselves, will have welcomed the announcement of
a Memoir of the authoress of "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park,"
and "Emma."

If Jane Austen's train of admirers has not been so large as those of
many other novelists, it has been first-rate in quality. She has been
praised--we should rather say, loved by all, from Walter Scott to
Guizot, whose love was the truest fame. Her name has often been coupled
with that of Shakespeare, to whom Macaulay places her second in the nice
discrimination of shades of character. The difference between the two
minds in degree is, of course, immense; but both belong to the same rare
kind. Both are really creative; both purely artistic; both have the
marvellous power of endowing the products of their imagination with a
life, as it were, apart from their own. Each holds up a perfectly clear
and undistorting mirror--Shakespeare to the moral universe, Jane Austen
to the little world in which she lived. In the case of neither does the
personality of the author ever come between the spectator and the drama.
Vulgar criticism calls Jane Austen's work Dutch painting. Miniature
painting would be nearer the truth; she speaks of herself as working
with a fine brush on a piece of ivory two inches wide. Dutch painting
implies the selection of subjects in themselves low and uninteresting,
for the purpose of displaying the skill of a painter, who can interest
by the mere excellence of his imitation. Jane Austen lived in the
society of English country gentlemen and their families as they were in
the last century--a society affluent, comfortable, domestic, rather
monotonous, without the interest which attaches to the struggles of
labour without tragic events or figures seldom, in fact rising
dramatically above the level of sentimental comedy, but presenting
nevertheless, its varieties of character, its vicissitudes, its moral
lessons--in a word, its humanity. She has painted it as it was, in all
its features the most tragic as well as the most comic, avoiding only
melodrama. "In all the important preparations of the mind, she (Miss
Bertram) was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home,
restraint and tranquillity, by the misery of disappointed affection and
contempt of the man she was to marry; the rest might wait." This is not
the touch of Gerard Douw. An undertone of irony, never obtrusive but
everywhere perceptible, shows that the artist herself knew very well
that she was not painting gods and Titans, and keeps everything on the
right level.

Jane Austen, then, was worthy of a memoir. But it was almost too late to
write one. Like Shakespeare, she was too artistic to be autobiographic.
She was never brought into contact with men of letters, and her own fame
was almost posthumous, so that nobody took notes. She had been fifty
years in her grave when her nephew, the Rev J. E. Austen-Leigh, the
youngest of the mourners who attended her funeral, undertook to make a
volume of his own recollections, those of one or two other surviving
relatives, and a few letters. Of 230 pages, in large print, and with a
margin the vastness of which requires to be relieved by a rod rubric,
not above a third is really biography, the rest is genealogy,
description of places, manners, and customs, critical disquisition,
testimonies of admirers. Still, thanks to the real capacity of the
biographer, and to the strong impression left by a character of
remarkable beauty on his mind, we catch a pretty perfect though faint
outline of the figure which was just hovering on the verge of memory,
and in a few years more would, like the figure of Shakespeare, have been
swallowed up in night.

Jane Austen was the flower of a stock, full, apparently, through all its
branches, of shrewd sense and caustic humour, which in her were combined
with the creative imagination. She was born in 1775, at Steventon, in
Hampshire, a country parish, of which her father was the rector. A
village of cottages at the foot of a gentle slope, an old church with
its coeval yew, an old manor-house, an old parsonage all surrounded by
tall elms, green meadows, hedgerows full of primroses and wild
hyacinths--such was the scene in which Jane Austen grew. It is the
picture which rises in the mind of every Englishman when he thinks of
his country. Around dwelt the gentry, more numerous and, if coarser and
duller, more home-loving and less like pachas than they are now, when
the smaller squires and yeomen have been swallowed up in the growing
lordships of a few grandees who spend more than half their time in
London or in other seats of politics or pleasure. Not far off was a
country town, a "Meriton," the central gossiping place of the
neighbourhood, and the abode of the semi-genteel. If a gentleman like
Mr. Woodhouse lives equivocally close to the town, his "place" is
distinguished by a separate name. There was no resident squire at
Steventon, the old manor-house being let to a tenant, so that Jane's
father was at once parson and squire. "That house (Edmund Bertram's
parsonage) may receive such an air as to make its owner be set down as
the great landowner of the parish by every creature travelling the road,
especially as there is no real squire's house to dispute the point, a
circumstance, between ourselves, to enhance the value of such a
situation in point of privilege and advantage beyond all calculation."
Her father having from old age resigned Steventon when Jane was six and
twenty, she afterwards lived for a time with her family at Bath, a great
watering-place, and the scene of the first part of "Northanger Abbey;"
at Lyme, a pretty little sea-bathing place on the coast of Dorset, on
the "Cobb" of which takes place the catastrophe of "Persuasion;" and at
Southampton, now a great port, then a special seat of gentility.
Finally, she found a second home with her widowed mother and her sister
at Chawton, another village in Hampshire.

"In person," says Jane's biographer, "she was very attractive. Her
figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her
whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion, she
was a clear brunette, with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks,
with mouth and nose small and well formed; bright hazel eyes (it is a
touch of the woman, then, when Emma is described as having _the true
hazel eye_), and brown hair forming natural curls close round her
face." The sweetness and playfulness of "Dear Aunt Jane" are fresh after
so many years in the memories of her nephew and nieces, who also
strongly attest the sound sense and sterling excellence of character
which lay beneath. She was a special favourite with children, for whom
she delighted to exercise her talent in improvising fairy-tales. Unknown
to fame, uncaressed save by family affection, and, therefore, unspoilt,
while writing was her delight, she kept it in complete subordination to
the duties of life, which she performed with exemplary conscientiousness
in the house of mourning as well as in the house of feasting. Even her
needlework was superfine. We doubt not that, if the truth was known, she
was a good cook.

She calls herself "the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever
dared to be an authoress;" but this is a nominal tribute to the jealousy
of female erudition which then prevailed, and at which she sometimes
glances, though herself very far from desiring a masculine education for
women. In fact, she was well versed in English literature, read French
with ease, and knew something of Italian--German was not thought of in
those days. She had a sweet voice, and sang to her own accompaniment
simple old songs which still linger in her nephew's ear. Her favourite
authors were Johnson, whose strong sense was congenial to her, while she
happily did not allow him to infect her pure and easy style, Cowper,
Richardson and Crabbe. She said that, if she married at all, she should
like to be Mrs. Crabbe. And besides Crabbe's general influence, which is
obvious, we often see his special touch in her writings:

"Emma's spirits were mounted up quite to happiness. Everything wore a
different air. James and his horses seemed not half so sluggish as
before. When she looked at the hedges, she thought the elder at least
must soon be coming out; and, when she turned round to Harriet, she saw
something like a look of spring--a tender smile even there."

Jane was supremely happy in her family relations, especially in the love
of her elder sister, Cassandra, from whom she was inseparable. Of her
four brothers, two were officers in the Royal Navy. How she watched
their career, how she welcomed them home from the perils not only of the
sea but of war (for it was the time of the great war with France), she
has told us in painting the reception of William Price by his sister
Fanny, in "Mansfield Park." It is there that she compares conjugal and
fraternal love, giving the preference in one respect to the latter,
because with brothers and sisters "all the evil and good of the earliest
years can be gone over again, and every former united pain and pleasure
retraced with the fondest recollection: an advantage this, a
strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the
fraternal." It was, perhaps, because she was so happy in the love of her
brothers and sisters, as well as because she was wedded to literature,
that she was content, in spite of her good looks, to assume the symbolic
cap of perpetual maidenhood at an unusually early age.

Thus she grew in a spot as sunny, as sheltered, and as holy as do the
violets which her biographer tells us abound beneath the south wall of
Steventon church. It was impossible that she should have the experiences
of Miss Bronte or Madame Sand, and without some experience the most
vivid imagination cannot act, or can act only in the production of mere
chimeras. To forestall Miss Braddon in the art of criminal
phantasmagoria might have been within Jane's power by the aid of strong
green tea, but would obviously have been repugnant to her nature. We
must not ask her, then, for the emotions and excitements which she could
not possibly afford. The character of Emma is called commonplace. It is
commonplace in the sense in which the same term might be applied to any
normal beauty of nature--to a well-grown tree or to a perfectly
developed flower. She is, as Mr. Weston says, "the picture of grown-up
health." "There is health not merely in her bloom, but in her air, her
gait, her glance." She has been brought up like Jane Austen herself, in
a pure English household, among loving relations and good old servants.
Her feet have been in the path of domestic and neighbourly duty, quiet
as the path which leads to the village church. It has been impossible
for strong temptations or fierce passions to come near her. Yet men
accustomed to the most exciting struggles, to the most powerful emotions
of parliamentary life, have found an interest, equal to the greatest
ever created by a sensation novel, in the little scrapes and adventures
into which her weakness betrays her, and in the process by which her
heart is gradually drawn away from objects apparently more attractive to
the robust nature in union with which she is destined to find strength
as well as happiness.

With more justice may Jane Austen be reproached with having been too
much influenced by the prejudices of the somewhat narrow and somewhat
vulgarly aristocratic, or rather plutocratic, society in which she
lived. Her irony and her complete dramatic impersonality render it
difficult to see how far this goes; but certainly it goes further than
we could wish. Decidedly she believes in gentility, and in its intimate
connection with affluence and good family; in its incompatibility with
any but certain very refined and privileged kinds of labour; in the
impossibility of finding a gentleman in a trader, much more in a yeoman
or mechanic. "The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I
feel I can have nothing to do; a degree or two lower, and a creditable
appearance, might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their
families in some way or other; but a farmer can need none of my help,
and is, therefore, in one sense, as much above my notice as in every
other he is below it." This is said by Emma--by Emma when she is trying
to deter her friend from marrying a yeoman, it is true, but still by
Emma. The picture of the coarseness of poverty in the household of
Fanny's parents in "Mansfield Park" is truth, but it is hard truth, and
needs some counterpoise. Both in the case of Fanny Price and in that of
Frank Churchill, the entire separation of a child from its own home for
the sake of the worldly advantages furnished by an adoptive home of a
superior class, is presented too much as a part of the order of nature.
The charge of acquiescence in the low standard of clerical duty
prevalent in the Establishment of that day is well founded, though
perhaps not of much importance. Of more importance is the charge which
might be made, with equal justice, of acquiescence in somewhat low and
coarse ideas of the relations between the sexes, and of the destinies
and proper aspirations of young women. "Mr. Collins, to be sure, was
neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his
attachment to her must be imaginary; but still he would be her husband.
Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always
been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated
young women of small fortune; and, however uncertain of giving
happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This
preservative she had now attained; and at the age of twenty-seven,
without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good-luck of it."
This reflection is ascribed to Charlotte Lucas, an inferior character,
but still thought worthy to be the heroine's bosom friend.

Jane's first essays in composition were burlesques on the fashionable
manners of the day; whence grew "Northanger Abbey," with its anti-
heroine, Catharine Morley, "roving and wild, hating constraint and
cleanliness, and loving nothing so much as rolling down the green slope
at the back of the house," and with its exquisite travestie of the
"Mysteries of Udolpho." But she soon felt her higher power. Marvellous
to say, she began "Pride and Prejudice" in 1796, before she was twenty-
one years old, and completed it in the following year. "Sense and
Sensibility" and "Northanger Abbey" immediately followed; it appears,
with regard to the latter, that she had already visited Bath, though it
was not till afterwards that she resided there. But she published
nothing--not only so, but it seems that she entirely suspended
composition--till 1809, when her family settled at Chawton. Here she
revised for the press what she had written, and wrote "Mansfield Park,"
"Emma" and "Persuasion." "Persuasion," whatever her nephew and
biographer may say, and however Dr. Whewell may have fired up at the
suggestion, betrays an enfeeblement of her faculties, and tells of
approaching death. But we still see in it the genuine creative power
multiplying new characters; whereas novelists who are not creative, when
they have exhausted their original fund of observations, are forced to
subsist by exaggeration of their old characters, by aggravated
extravagances of plot, by multiplied adulteries and increased carnage.

"Pride and Prejudice," when first offered to Cadell, was declined by
return of post. The fate of "Northanger Abbey" was still more
ignominious: it was sold for ten pounds to a Bath publisher, who, after
keeping it many years in his drawer, was very glad to return it and get
back his ten pounds. No burst of applause greeted the works of Jane
Austen like that which greeted the far inferior works of Miss Burney.
_Crevit occulto velut arbor oevo fama_. A few years ago, the verger
of Winchester cathedral asked a visitor who desired to be shown her
tomb, "what there was so particular about that lady that so many people
wanted to see where she was buried?" Nevertheless, she lived to feel
that "her own dear children" were appreciated, if not by the vergers,
yet in the right quarters, and to enjoy a quiet pleasure in the
consciousness of her success. One tribute she received which was
overwhelming. It was intimated to her by authority that His Royal
Highness, the Prince Regent, had read her novels with pleasure, and that
she was at liberty to dedicate the next to him. More than this, the
Royal Librarian, Mr. Clarke, of his own motion apparently, did her the
honour to suggest that, changing her style for a higher, she should
write "a historical romance in illustration of the august house of
Cobourg," and dedicate it to Prince Leopold. She answered in effect
that, if her life depended on it, she could not be serious for a whole
chapter. Let it be said, however, for the Prince Regent, that underneath
his royalty and his sybaritism, there was, at first, something of a
better and higher nature, which at last was entirely stifled by them.
His love for Mrs. Fitzherbert was not merely sensual, and Heliogabalus
would not have been amused by the novels of Miss Austen.

Jane was never the authoress but when she was writing her novels; and in
the few letters with which this memoir is enriched there is nothing of
point or literary effort, and very little of special interest. We find,
however, some pleasant and characteristic touches.

"Charles has received L30 for his share of the privateer, and expects
L10 more; but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the
produce in presents to his sisters? He has been buying gold chains and
topaz crosses for us. He must be well scolded."

"Poor Mrs. Stent! It has been her lot to be always in the way; but we
must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents
ourselves, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody."

"We (herself and Miss A.) afterwards walked together for an hour on the
Cobb; she is very conversable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or
genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are
very engaging. _She seems to like people rather too easily."_

Of her own works, or rather of the characters of her own creation, her
Elizabeths and Emmas, Jane speaks literally as a parent. They are her
"dear children." "I must confess that I think her (Elizabeth) as
delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able
to tolerate those who do not like _her_ at least I do not know."
This is said in pure playfulness; there is nothing in the letters like
real egotism or impatience of censure.

At the age of forty-two, in the prime of intellectual life, with "Emma"
just out and "Northanger Abbey" coming, and in the midst of domestic
affection and happiness, life must have been sweet to Jane Austen. She
resigned it, nevertheless, with touching tranquillity and meekness. In
1816, it appears, she felt her inward malady, and began to go round her
old haunts in a manner which seemed to indicate that she was bidding
them farewell. In the next year, she was brought for medical advice to a
house in the Close of Winchester, and there, surrounded to the last by
affection and to the last ardently returning it, she died. Her last
words were her answer to the question whether there was anything she
wanted--_"Nothing but death."_ Those who expect religious language
in season and out of season have inferred from the absence of it in Jane
Austen's novels that she was indifferent to religion. The testimony of
her nephew is positive to the contrary; and he is a man whose word may
be believed.

Those who died in the Close were buried in the cathedral. It is
therefore by mere accident that Jane Austen rests among princes and
princely prelates in that glorious and historic fane. But she deserves
at least her slab of black marble in the pavement there. She possessed a
real and rare gift, and she rendered a good account of it. If the censer
which she held among the priests of art was not of the costliest, the
incense was of the purest. If she cannot be ranked with the very
greatest masters of fiction, she has delighted many, and none can draw
from her any but innocent delight.




PATTISON'S MILTON

[Footnote: "English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley Milton. By
Mark Pattison B.D., Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford." London,
Macmillan, New York: Harper & Bros., 1879]


John Bright once asked a friend who was the greatest of Englishmen and
the friend hesitating answered his own question by saying, "Milton,
because he above all others, combined the greatness of the writer with
the greatness of the citizen." Professor Masson in his Life and Times of
Milton, has embodied the conception of the character indicated by this
remark, but he has run into the extreme of incorporating a complete
narrative of the Revolution with the biography of Milton, so that the
historical portion of the work overlays instead of illuminating the
biographical, and the chapters devoted specially to the life seem to the
reader interpolations, and not always welcome interpolations, in an
intensely interesting history of the times. But now comes a biographer
in whose eyes the life of Milton the citizen is a mere episode, and not
only a mere episode but a lamentable and humiliating episode, in the
life of Milton the poet. Milton's life, says Mr. Pattison "is a drama in
three acts. The first discovers him in the calm and peaceful retirement
of Horton, of which 'L'Allegro,' 'Il Penseroso,' and 'Lycidas' are the
expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul and heated
atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid
fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets.
The three great poems--'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and
'Samson Agonistes'--are the utterance of his final period of solitary
and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he
testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, alone
before a fallen world." As to the struggle to which Milton, with
Cromwell, Vane Pym, Hampden, Selden, and Chillingworth, gave his life,
it is in the eyes of his present biographer, an ignoble "fray," a
"biblical brawl," and its fruits in the way of theological discussion
are nothing but "garbage." To write his Defence of the English People
Milton deliberately sacrificed his eyesight, his doctor having warned
him that he would lose his one remaining eye if he persisted in using it
for book work. "The choice lay before me," he says, "between dereliction
of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight. In such a case I could not
listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his
sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what,
that spoke to me from Heaven. I considered with myself that many had
purchased less good with worse ill, as they who gave their lives to reap
only glory, and I thereupon concluded to employ the little remaining
eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the greatest service to the
common weal it was in my power to render." Mr. Pattison has quoted this
passage, and no doubt he silently appreciates the heroism which breathes
through it; but the "supreme duty" of which it speaks appears to him
only a "prostitution of faculties" and a "poor delusion." Milton, he
thinks, ought to have kept entirely aloof from the brawl and remained
quiet either in the intellectual circles of Italy or in the delicious
seclusion of his library at Horton, leaving liberty, truth, and
righteousness to drown or to be saved from drowning by other hands than
his. In "plunging into the fray" the poet miserably derogated from his
superior position as a literary man, and the result was a dead loss to
him and to the world. We are sure that we do not state Mr. Pattison's
view more strongly than it is stated in his own pages.