sister, Catherine, in the conduct of a school. On the settlement of Dr. Beecher in Cincinnati, his daughters opened a similar establishment in that busy and flourishing town. We are ignorant of the date of Harriet Beecher's marriage to the Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, professor of Biblical Literature in the institution over which her father presided. Of Professor Stowe it is needless to write. His name is familiar in this country, and is held in high repute. Mrs. Stowe has known the sorrows as well as the blessedness, of a mother. Five of her children, we are informed, yet survive, between the education of whom and contributions to periodical literature her time has been divided. Such, in brief, is the history, such are the present circumstances, of the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.' As to her views on the slave question, it is not difficult to trace their formation. What she had seen at Cincinnati was enough to fix in her sensitive and noble breast, the sentiments avowed throughout her work. Those sentiments were suppressed for many years, during which, according to her own statement, she ' avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would live down.' This suppression, however, could not be continued. The inward fire burned more and more brightly, and has at length forced for itself a vent. " Uncle Tom's Cabin,' as Fraser' truly says, 'is the agonizing cry of feelings pent up for years in the heart of a true woman.' Terrible scenes occurred at Cincinnati between 1835 and 1847, and to the fact of her having witnessed them, we attribute much of the vivid coloring of Mrs. Stowe's volume.

'That city was the chief battle ground of freedom and slavery. Every month there was some event to attract attention to the strife: either a press destroyed, or a house mobbed, or a free negro kidnapped, or a trial for freedom before the courts, or the confectionary of an English abolitionist riddled, or a public discussion, or an escape of slaves, or an armed attack on the negro quarter, or a negro school-house razed to the ground, or a slave in prison and killing his wife and children to prevent their being sold to the south. The abolition press, established there in 1835, by James G. Birney, whom, on account of his mildness and firmness, Miss Martineau called 'the gentleman of the abolition cause,' and continued by Dr. Bailey, the moderate and able editor of the National Era,' of Washington city, in which Uncle Tom's Cabin' first appeared in weekly numbers, was destroyed five times. On one occasion, the mayor dismissed, at midnight, the rioters, who had also pulled down the houses of some coloured people, with the following pithy speech: "Well, boys, let's go home; we've done enough." One of these mobs deserves particular notice, as its victims enlisted deeply the sympathies of Mrs. Stowe. In 1840, the slave-catchers, backed by the riff-raff of the population, and

urged on by certain politicians and merchants, attacked the quarters in which the negroes reside. Some of the houses were battered down by cannon. For several days, the city was abandoned to violence and crime. The negro quarters were pillaged and sacked; negroes who attempted to defend their property were killed, and their mutilated bodies cast into the streets; women were violated by ruffians, and some of them afterwards died of the injuries received; houses were burnt; and men, women, and children were abducted in the confusion, and hurried into slavery. From the brow of the hill on which she lived, Mrs. Stowe could hear the cries of the victims, the shouts of the mob, and the reports of the guns and cannon; and could see the flames of the conflagration. To more than one of the trembling fugitives she gave shelter, and wept bitter tears with them. After the fury of the mob was spent, many of the coloured people gathered together the little left them of worldly goods, and started for Canada. Hundreds passed in front of Mrs. Stowe's house. Some of them were in little wagons; some were trudging along on foot after their household stuff; some led their children by the hand; and there were even mothers who walked on, suckling their infants, and weeping for the dead or kidnapped husbands they had left behind. This road, which ran through Walnut Hills, and within a few feet of Mrs. Stowe's door, was one of the favourite routes of the "underground railroad," so often alluded to in Uncle Tom's Cabin.'-Fracer, November, pp. 523, 524.

It is not necessary that we should detail the course of the fiction. Its wide circulation renders this inexpedient. We need not trace its narrative, unravel its plot, or furnish illustrations of its style. These things are already familiar to our readers, and will therefore engage only a subordinate measure of our attention. The all but universal applause with which the work has been greeted supersedes the ordinary functions of criticism.

It is scarcely necessary to say that the work consists, in fact, of two tales, between which only a momentary and very partial connexion exists. The one presents us with the fortunes of George Harris and his wife Eliza, and the other with those of Uncle Tom. Eliza and Uncle Tom are slaves of Mr. Shelby, a Kentuckian proprietor, while George Harris belongs to a neighboring estate. So slight is the link between these parties that, from the moment of their separation, which occurs early in the narrative, they never cross each other's path, or exercise the slightest influence on one another's destiny. So far an artistic objection may be advanced against the work, but it is more than counterbalanced by the additional illustration of the slave system thus obtained; while the skill with which both narratives are maintained, heightens our estimate of the writer's power, and gives an insight into facts which could scarcely have been worked into one story. George Harris, a bright and talented young mulatto man,' scarcely distinguishable in color

from a white, and vastly superior in mental and moral qualities to most of the dominant race about him, is driven by hard usage to attempt an escape to Canada, while his wife, Eliza, having overheard her master reluctantly consent to the sale of her child, looks distractedly on the slumbering boy, exclaiming, with an agony which only a mother can know:-'Poor boy! poor fellow! they have sold you! but your mother will save you yet! And she does so. Addressing herself to the task with desperate energy, she acted with promptitude and decision. Her strong maternal love, the hardships endured, her arrival at the Ohio river, her discovery by Haley who had tracked her flight, and her desperate passage across the floating ice, are sketched with masterly power, combined with exquisite tenderness, and profound knowledge of a mother's heart. On recovering her self-possession, she found a man helping her up the bank on the Ohio side.

'Yer a brave gal, now, whoever ye ar!' said the man, with an oath. 'Eliza recognised the voice and face of a man who owned a farm not far from her old home.

'Oh, Mr. Symmes!-save me-do save me-do hide me!' said Eliza. Why, what's this?' said the man. 'Why, if 'tant Shelby's gal!' 'My child-this boy-he'd sold him! There is his mas'r,' said she, pointing to the Kentucky shore. O Mr. Symmes, you've got a little boy.'

'So I have,' said the man, as he roughly but kindly drew her up the steep bank. Besides, you are a right brave gal. I like grit wherever I see it.'

'When they had gained the top of the bank the man paused.

'I'd be glad to do something for ye,' said he, but then there's nowhar I could take ye. The best I can do is to tell ye to go thar,' said he, pointing to a large white house which stood by itself, off the main street of the village. 'Go thar; they're kind folks. Thar's no kind o' danger, but they'll help you they're up to all o'thing.'

The Lord bless you,' said Eliza, earnestly. 'No 'casion, no casion in the world,' said the man. done's of no account.'

'And oh, surely, sir, you wont tell any one!'

that sort

'What I've

'Go to thunder, gal! What do you take a feller for? In course not,' said the man. 'Come, now, go along like a likely sensible gal as you are. You've arnt your liberty, and you shall have it, for all me.'

"The woman folded her child to her bosom, and walked firmly and swiftly away. The man stood and looked after her.

'Shelby, now, mebbe wont think this yer the most neighbourly thing in the world; but what's a feller to do? If he catches one of my gals in the same fix, he's welcome to pay back. Somehow I never

could see no kind o' critter a starvin' and pantin', and trying to clar theirselves, with the dogs arter 'em, and go agin 'em. Besides, I don't see no kind of 'casion for me to be hunter and catcher for other folks, neither.'

'So spake this poor, heathenish Kentuckian, who had not been instructed in his constitutional relations, and, consequently, was betrayed into acting in a sort of Christianized manner, which, if he had been better situated and more enlightened, he would not have been left to do.'-Vol. i. p. 94.

Uncle Tom, the real hero of the tale, is sold by Mr. Shelby to Haley. The sale was a reluctant one; for the character of Tom was unexceptionable, and he was a great favorite both with his master and mistress, and with the other negroes on the plantaHe was a noble-hearted, faithful fellow,' whom nothing would have induced Mr. Shelby to part with, but great pecuniary difficulties. We shall presently advert to his character, and to the charge of exaggeration advanced against it. Our present object is to note the illustration which his sale affords of the working of the slave system. Viewed in this light, it furnishes a favorable specimen of the skill with which Mrs. Stowe has combined her materials, so as to accomplish her avowed purpose. Had the character of the negro been other than she has represented, had he been less docile or trustworthy, had his master been other than humane, or his mistress less solicitous for the welfare of all about her, his sale would not have taught the moral it now enforces. As it is, however, we see the tendency of slavery to subvert the order of the moral world, to dissever between good conduct and happiness, and to subject its victims to the disruption of social ties, and the endurance of unutterable miseries, not as the penalty of their own misconduct, but as the consequence of pecuniary embarrassment on the part of their proprietors. The statement of Mr. Shelby to his wife is a withering condemnation of the system. Let men prate as they may of the good intentions of the planters, their kind-heartedness, and generous consideration for their dependents. Admitting all this for a moment, what does it avail? The system is inexorable, whatever individual slave-holders may be; and its iron rule frequently converts the very virtues of its administrators into instruments of torture. The petted slave of to-day may be seized to-morrow in payment of his master's debts, or be sold by that master under a pressure from which he would gladly escape, were it in his power. There is no choice,' said Mr. Shelby to his wife, in reference to the sale of Uncle Tom and Eliza's boy, between selling these two and selling everything. Either they must go or all must. Haley has come into possession of a mort

gage, which, if I don't clear off with him directly, will take everything before it. I've raked, and scraped, and borrowed, and all but begged, and the price of these two was needed to make up the balance, and I had to give them up. Haley fancied the child; he agreed to settle the matter that way, and no other. I was in his power, and had to do it. If you feel so to have them sold, would it be any better to have all sold?'

And yet this is the system for which Scripture warrant is pleaded, and in support of which, the example of the first preachers of our faith is appealed to. Shame on the men who prostitute their sacred functions to so detestable a purpose! We need not wonder at the charges advanced against them, or at the suspicions with which their faith is viewed, by those whose hearts are alive to the horrors of slavery. We have mourned over many things said and done by William Lloyd Garrison; but when we think of the horrid things he has heard from ministerial lips; when we call to mind the truculency, the unfaithfulness, the mean cowardice, the desperate perversions of holy writ, and the impious sanctions-expressed or implied -awarded to gross violations of the law of God, by the official expounders of Christian truth, our censures are arrested, and we stand mute and sorrowful. Oh, there must be something marvellously vital in Christianity for it to have survived such wrongs! Were it other than divine, it could scarcely fail, in many parts of the earth, to be entombed amidst the reproaches and contempt of mankind. Its worst enemies are emphatically those of its own household. I tell ye what, stranger,' said honest John Van Trompe, and his case is that of thousands, it was years and years before I'd jine the church, 'cause the ministers round in our parts used to preach that the Bible went in for these ere cuttings up; and I couldn't be up to 'em with their Greek and Hebrew, and so I took up agin 'em, Bible and all. I never jined the church till I found a minister that was up to 'em all in Greek and all that, and he said right the contrary; and then I took right hold, and jined the church.' Great skill is displayed by Mrs. Stowe in her delineations of character. They are strikingly discriminative. Her portraits are individualized, doing justice to the subordinate, as well as to the more prominent features. The light and the shade are so disposed as to bring out distinctly the one figure she designs to represent. It is not a class merely that she delineates. We see, it is true, class features-it could not be otherwise with a true likeness. But in addition we trace the peculiarities of the individual, see not the abstract but the concrete man live and move before us, and are in consequence pervaded by a deeper, more thrilling sympathy than would