million of livres. In the emergency of the very rapid success that attended these banking schemes, the company had either not experience enough, or perhaps not time enough, to open a simple set of transfer books; they simply issued their notes in the form of a certificate, as easily transferable as a bank bill, and good only to the actual holder. Cartouche had only to dip his hands in the pocket of a stock-jobber in the throng of the street, and become the unquestioned possessor of thousands; "for now," says De Foe, "to get the paper of a stock was to get the stock, let it amount to what sum soever; to pick a pocket and draw out a pocket-book, was to get an estate, and it was a frequent thing to have some gentlemen in the crowd whose very pocket-books were worth many millions. Hence, nothing was more frequent in the middle of the hurries in the Quincampoix street, than to see men running and staring from one to another, confounded, and, in a manner distracted; one having lost his pocket, others their letter-cases, others their table-books with their papers in them; and whenever such things happened, it was a million to one, odds, that they ever heard of them again." When Cartouche had thus acquired a sufficient principal, he let the stock advance in his hands, till it rose to two thousand per cent., when he called for the ready money and retired. But worse scenes than these light-fingered operations grew out of the speculation; the pocket-books began to be better protected, when the rogues followed the fortunate stock-holder homeward; they would call him out of the Café from his dinner, on pretence of business, and rob him in a private room; they would waylay him in the street; they would secrete themselves in his lodging, or get admission by treachery, and rob and murder in the night. Bargains at length had to be made in whispers, and the initiated walked about with their hands in their pockets. Then the magnificent bubble burst. Cartouche, in the midst of the disaster, was broken on the wheel, and his followers took again to the highway, and after many murders and desperate acts, the worst of them met with a like fate. Thus endeth a chapter in the history of France; a memorable lesson to all corrupt financiers and defalcators. LESTER'S GLORY AND SHAME.* This is not exactly the kind of publication a good man or a sound thinker would desire to see at this time, upon the peculiar domestic relations of England. It is a vain-glorious declamation upon a very serious subject. There has been a period among American readers, when a book set forth with such a title might have passed current by the sheer force of assumption; but we would remind the author, if he ever intends to write again, that this day has passed. American literature has outlived its early poverty; it has been cultivated by at least a few genuine authors, who have set before the public models of excellence, and taught them to discriminate. The worth of a sound education, a classic style, and just sentiments, is, we believe, as properly appreciated here as anywhere. When Joel Barlow was thought an epic poet, Mr. Lester might have passed for a patriotic tourist; alas! that he has fallen on these evil days of light and knowledge. There is always a certain quantity of heated declamation, illogical argument, and incongruous small talk afloat in society; we cannot always escape it in the best cultivated drawing-rooms; it is spouted at clubs, it is familiar to juries, it is heard at lectures, and far too often in the pulpit. It has always been so, and we presume it always will be. A more perfect system of youthful education, the increase of classical studies, the promotion of discipline in colleges, might indeed be expected to advance mature thinking, and render society less of a bear-garden; but the evil will remain. Youths who neglect timely instruction, when they grow up to be men must sharpen their wits upon one another, and we may expect to hear the clangour of their dull weapons. These are impertinent from necessity; others are impudent from choice ; they talk without reading, and argue without reflection, and prefer at any time a brawling disputation to the calm voice of truth. These are social evils, and may to some extent be pardoned. Time hangs heavy on the hands of the illiterate and the vain; the anxiety for distinction is always in inverse ratio to the merit of the party; a wise man will hence avoid these inconsequential talkers, and an indulgent man will laugh at them. It is a greater misfortune when one of these characters undertakes to write a book. A book is a more sacred thing than a man; it has access to our hours The glory and the Shame of England: by C. Edwards Lester. 2 vols. 12ino. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841. of privacy, to the retirement of leisure, to the simplicity and earnestness of our fireside. The most loquacious talker can be known but to very few out of his unhappy circle; a book of very bad manners, by the press, puffery, and the imprint of the Harpers, may in a fortnight be introduced all over the land. Mr. Lester has undertaken to write a melo-dramatic book in the style of popular eloquence affected at public meetings, and addressed to uncultivated audiences at the minor theatres. Mr. Lester composes throughout at fever-heat. He is an ultra specimen of the exaggerating class; men who deal in superlatives, and talk hyperboles over the table; emphatic, noisy, small-beer politicians, whose eccentricities are restrained by no modesty, who brow-beat by loudness and gesture; the pertinacious and the dogmatic. The title of the book is sufficiently indicative of its general spirit. There is great pretence, exaggeration, and excitement, and very little worth listening to after all. To hearken to the clamour, one would think the North river, so often proverbially mentioned, were actually on fire; the newspapers and engines run down with clatter and criticism, and find that it is but the reflection of a straw heap, the vapouring of a book-maker, the kindling of a New Jersey swamp. Mr. Lester has aided his readers in the interpretation of his volume, by a very extraordinary frontispiece. In the distance, tower St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey; the sun is obscured by the smoke of innumerable factories; on the left are the wooden walls of England with flag and pennant; on the right a crowded mass of heads diminishing from a few full-lengths to mere pin-points; in front, on a rock, stands Britannia, resplendent with spear and shield; and on a projecting headland, in this confusion of air, earth, and sea, a majestic lion with his paw on the back of a prostrate human being in a slashed doublet and Turkish cap. This all indicates something very alarming,-the lion is shaggy and ferocious; but what it all means we are at a loss to conjecture, unless the lion be a merely typical figurative lion, in the literary sense, an emblem of Thomas Campbell's pawing and trampling upon the genius of American poetry in the great abolition "meeting of the world" at Exeter Hall. The portions of the work devoted to literature are the most odd and entertaining. For the serious parts, the exhibition of the evils of the Corn Laws, the suffering under the factory system, the details of calamity alleged, the eager defence of the oppressed and unfortunate, we have too great a respect for the sorrow hid under all these things, to question in aught the discretion or the facts of the author, lest in so doing we should seem to detract from a sympathy too rarely felt and expressed in a world where power and prosperity are always too much worshipped: we should be inclined to think, however, that the remarkable cases related by the traveller are single ones; it cannot be usual for beggars, even in the streets of London, to fall down on their knees for alms, and leave the tracks of blood on the pavement; and one may ride in omnibuses for many years without meeting with so sad an adventure as befel Mr. Lester in his journey to the East End. For the rest, we could catalogue as many woes near at hand in the streets of this city; crime and misfortune are not the curses of England more than they are the common evils of humanity. In every family we may find some tale of grief; in every breast, the seeds of sin; in every man's history, the climax of all disasters--death. The chief literary characters introduced to the reader in these pages, are Dickens and Thomas Campbell. The first is by far the most novel and refreshing lion of the two, though the author of Wyoming, in spite of many tourists, is not so hackneyed in his paces, but he can yet give a very courageous whisk of his tail, and frighten away the lookers-on, particularly those of them who have any participation in American poetry. To exhibit these lions chronologically, Mr. Lester first became acquainted with Campbell, at the great abolition meeting. The poet undertook a speech on the occasion, wherein he hinted at a great deal of concealed displeasure, at the silence of American authors on the subject of slavery. In the warmth of the moment, forgetting his position, before "the world" in the cheers and laughter, and doubtless thinking himself in the presence of friendly after-dinner port and mahogany, he ventured a few colloquial remarks on the American poets. As reported in Mr. Lester's book, he went on the Americans have noble heads for prose; among them they have the very first prose writers in the world; but in verse -ah! I will say nothing-it may do very well to run upon all-fours, but it cannot rise. (Laughter.) It puts me in mind of the old story of the dying man. A friend was preaching to him, and painting all the joys of Paradise, when the poor fellow said, Oh, say no more about the joys of Paradise; your bad style makes them disgusting.' Here was a nation offended at a stroke, and the poet set about to amend the error by a written apology, and a commission to Mr. Lester to set the matter right with his countrymen. But Campbell excited, was not half so insane as Campbell in his right mind. The apology is less flattering than the speech. The latter was a mere jeu d'esprit, somewhat misplaced, but more laughable than mischievous, and only to be found fault with by the vainest of all vain people; and in this position Mr. Lester placed himself and his countrymen, by admitting, for an instant, an apology from glorious Tom Campbell, whom all America loves, and will love, let him laugh and joke about the poets as he please. The affair was perfectly ridiculous. Delegates had assembled from all parts of the world, and women were knocking at the doors in vain, for admission: the meeting was charged with sorrow and denunciation towards slave-holding America, when a pleasant dinner companion turned the tide of indignation, and mirthfully substituted a few harmless poets for the dread men-stealers of the South. Mr. Lester is a poet, and if ever Campbell reads his book, he will beg his next countryman who comes along, to expunge the apology. A dinner and a breakfast followed the interview with Campbell, at Freemason's Hall. The dinner was given by a Dr. Beattie, the author of the letter-press to a widely circulated series of views of Scotland. Mr. Lester told a pathetic story of the woods of Wyoming, and Campbell, now on his good behaviour, after the abolition speech, exclaimed, "Sir, you make me happy, although you make me weep. I can stand before my enemies, and no man ever saw me quail there; but, sir, you must forgive me now, this is more than I can bear." They all sat in silence, till Dr. Beattie exclaimed "If this is not the feast of reason and the flow of soul, there is no such thing on earth." Whereupon, Campbell said it was the flow of soul; doubtless a very pleasing confirmation to the gaping tourist. The conclusion of the whole of this matter is, that it is sometimes a breach of confidence in a guest to make people ridiculous, by reporting after-dinner conversations. Campbell appeared to more advantage afterward in the breakfast scene. "He was dressed in a blue coat, white pantaloons and waistcoat, and light blue cravat,” and he talked as a man dressed in such cheerful habiliments should talk. Mr. Lester tells a really charming anecdote of a lion's skin, which lay before the fire for a hearth rug. "That rug, sir!" said Campbell," why, I think more of that rug than I should of a Devonshire estate. Why, sir, when I sit down to my old table here, I find a never-failing source of inspiration in that tiger skin. I prize it almost as highly as I do my own." There is a genuine animation about this, worth a dozen bottles of that after-dinner flow of soul and claret. Campbell, besides, gave a fine motto for the future editions of Channing out of Chatterton "The man is right-he speaks the truth- Campbell gave our traveller a letter of introduction to Dickens, which he very disingenuously put in his pocket, and introduced himself to Boz, at his house, merely as an American who would be greatly obliged if he could see Mr. Dickens." The request was granted, and the visiter introduced to the study, where the author sat in an arm chair, with a sheet of Master Humphrey on the table. Then ensued a philanthropic declaration on the part of the author, and some very sensible remarks from Dickens. Boz was pressed for a reply to the demand for answers to questions, and had recourse to the declaration of Independence to help him out. "Oh, sir, ask as many questions as you please; as an American, it is one of your inalienable rights." The first question was what is familiarly termed a dead-set. "Allow me to ask, if the one-eyed Squeers, coarse but good John Brodie, the beautiful Sally Brass, clever Dick Swiveller, the demoniac and intriguing Quilp, the good Cheerbly (misquoting an author to his face) Brothers, the avaricious Fagin, and dear little Nelly, are mere fancies?" Boz replied good-naturedly and satisfactorily enough, as Mr. Lester might have known from what he had already published in the preface to Nickleby, that they were so partly; but that Dickens ever uttered the long declamation recorded against him we doubt. It would appear indeed, from the innate evidence of the book, that the machinery of conversation is somewhat apocryphal. A Colonel Manners is introduced, making long speeches and quotations in Westminster Abbey, who is admitted to be a mere lay figure; and we have doubts of the reality of a very remarkable Irish lord, in the Liverpool rail-cars, whom from his stale anecdotes, statistics, and moralizing, we believe to have been no one else but James Grant. Be this as it may, these two volumes have perplexed us not a little. Sometimes we have been inclined to think the author writing a work of pure fiction, and conveying his moralities in a new style of allegory; at others, we have thought Mr. Lester literal, and what appears invention, to be merely an exhibition of his own peculiar idiosyncrasies. The speeches reported are very extraordinary, so much so, that if genuine, we may strongly suspect the writer to have been frequently the victim of a species of deception, popularly known as gammon; if not, the author has fairly succeeded in gammoning himself. Mr. Lester appears to have gone abroad as a tourist, eager both to admire and censure; he probably arranged his theory and his book beforehand, for many of his facts and illustrations are drawn from a period twenty years back. Espriella's Letters are not the best evidence against the year eighteen hundred and forty-one. When Mr. Lester appeared in England, his mental pores were wide open for the reception of his favourite ideas, and he seems to have believed whatever was told him. But enough. We might have condemned this book on more serious grounds than the weakness of the author. It is bad in principle, for it seeks to confirm in the minds of the uneducated a feeling of hostility toward a foreign country," with whom at no distant day," as the agitating Mr. Lester observes, "they may be brought into collision," and fosters a vain sense of superiority at home, equally fatal to the true well-being of the people. WAKONDAH; THE MASTER OF LIFE. "We have already noticed the superstitious feelings with which the Indians regard the Black Hills; but this immense range of mountains (the Chippewyan or Rocky mountains) which divides all that they know of the world, and gives birth to such mighty rivers, is still more an object of awe and veneration. They call it 'The Crest of the World,' and think that Wakondah or the Master of Life, as they designate the Supreme Being, has his residence amongst these aerial heights.”—Astoria, Vol. I., p. 265. Filled with the glory thus above him rolled- Transcendent Shape! But hark, for lo a sound No mightier shadow of a strength gone by The Spirit lowers and speaks: "Tremble ye wild Woods! Deep Crags, in earth by massy tenures bound, Your power, |