was hardly American enough for England, olis and the neighboring university, the coland that Cooper was too American, he went lege-boys who had welcomed him as a fellowon to say that Prescott was really the first student were reddening the trampled soil of writer who broke the tyranny of British crit- Virginia and staining the turbid waters of icism. His nationality was as unquestiona- the Potomac with their pure and generous ble as that of Bunker Hill, but his subjects blood. Instead of the anthems and shouts of involved no angry debate; his style was pure welcome of the last year's bright October, we enough for Oxford and Cambridge; his schol- had the hoarse rumors, the blasting telegraph arship was genuine and not ostentatious, and messages that told us of our individual share his personal history was of special interest in the miserable disaster of Ball's Bluff, where from the infirmity which he shared, though all was lost excepting honor. At that dark in a less degree, with Homer and Milton, period of our history we had been cheated by with Huber and Thierry. With Prescott conspirators, we had been robbed by traitors, began the true era of our literary indepen- we had been attacked and discomfited by dence, which has been kept up by a succession of men and women of unquestioned genius, on whose merits Europe, and not the British Quarterlics alone, re-affirmed the judgment already passed by our own nation. The literary intercourse between the two countries went on with increasing cordiality. English and American authors introduced each other to their several publics, and fraternized in a way hitherto unknown. But the Old World still kept the upper hand with the Colonies. The brass-kettle thunder of the London Times sounded in our ears as if it came from Olympus. The flashing epigrams of Macaulay seemed to carry a judicial authority even when they struck at the good name of the New England Puritan or the Pennsylvania Quaker. The savage utterances of Carlyle had for us an oracular solemnity, even when they insulted the common feelings of humanity. The entente cordiale was at its height when the Prince of Wales made his visit among us. It is pleasing to recall the simple enthusiasm of the welcome he received. There are sentiments in nations as in individuals, and this family meeting after so protracted a political estrangement seemed like the kiss of a brother and sister, long alienated, at last fully reconciled. We did all we could to please the slight boy who was our guest. Our harmless infantry, whose ranks had never fired anything worse than powder from their muskets, deployed before him in all their splendor. Our civic cavalry, clattering their bloodless sabres and wincing in their galling saddles, amazed him with their imposing evolutions. Our maidens smiled for him, our poets sang for him, our mayors made speeches and our aldermen ran up bills in his honor. A year from the very week of the Prince of Wales's visit to our New England metrop rebels. Taken at a disadvantage by a great host of organized desperadoes, whose first plot involved the assassination of the man whom the whole nation had solemnly elected as its chief magistrate; struck and stunned before it could rise and defend itself, according to the memorable precedent of that earlier act of treacherous violence,-for Preston S. Brooks was the John the Baptist of a revelation which claims Alexander H. Stephens as its Messiah, the nation reeled in its seat, blinded, bewildered, ready to fall, as it seemed, if some friendly arm were not extended as a support until the blood had time to rally at the heart and the sudden faintness should have passed away. Then was England's hour. Never, never, though she wait until the name she bears is obsolete on the map of Europe, and her present golden civilization is buried with that of the ages of iron and bronze and stone, will that hour come again. A cup of cold water was all we asked for in the dread extreme of our national agony. She filled a sponge with vinegar mingled with gall, and held it out to us upon the end of her spear. It was not so much anger as deep sorrow that filled the souls of those Americans who had loved her best. They had overrated the civilization of the mother country-that was all. They had believed in her Christian sincerity-nothing more. They knew that however right and wrong might be confused on lesser points, two things were perfectly clear. One was that a friendly Government, not even pretended to have violated its Constitution or laws, was defending its property and its life against a series of unprovoked assaults. The other was that the assailants had as their avowed object the establishment of a new power, based upon slavery as its corner-stone. After considering the change of sentiments We to make our local differences the subjects of you in your national capacity, must always and intellectual relations between the two | pathetic, homogeneous nationality. We are countries, Dr. Holmes went on to draw not all alike, and never shall be. It is easy some practical results as to our own duties. The first thought which he would urge was hardly, perhaps, what might have been anticipated from the length at which he had dwelt upon the hard treatment we had a right to complain of. It is not revenge that we are" The name of American, which belongs to to cherish. It is not by war that we are to seek to convert the Old World to our theories and practice in government. Let us not, therefore, waste our strength in threats of vengeance against those misguided governments who mistook their true interest in the prospect of our calamity. We can conquer them by peace better than by war. When the Union emerges from the battle-smoke, her crest towering over the ruins of traitorous cities and the wrecks of rebel armies, her eye flashing defiance to all her evil wishers, her breast heaving under its corselet of iron, her arm wielding the mightiest enginery that was ever forged into the thunderbolts of war, her triumph will be grand enough without her setting fire to the stubble with which the folly of the Old World has girt its thrones. and The Union has been a rock resting on so broad a base that it seemed as if the world could not stir it from its position. The problem of its enemies has been to undermine it, Who can doubt that she will fulfil her skilfully at first, violently by and by, so that magnificent destiny? We may or may not it should come at last to rest upon a narrow live to see the subsidence of the long ground- edge,-its mighty weight equally distributed swell that must follow so terrible a storm as on either side of the support upon which it that through which we are passing. But the was balanced. Thus it would become the coming generation will spring from the loins rocking-stone which every baby-prince could of heroes, and none will love peace and free-hand, and the mountain mass which defied set swinging with the pressure of his little dom so well as those who remember what it the united forces of earth's oppressors be degraded into the toy of idle despots. So, they said, shall the land of Washington share the fate of the miserable realm of Montezuma, where Liberty lies prostrate for the moment at the foot of the Sierra Madre, waiting till its silent volcanoes rekindle their slumbering fires and the earthquake delivers the land from its second Cortez and his legions! cost their fathers and their mothers. The cares and trials of peace will succeed the demands and sufferings of war. We must begin betimes to educate our children to a deep sense and thorough knowledge of their political duties; we must teach them that it is a part of the moral code of every true American to take his share in the government of his country. It is not a little knowledge spread thinly over a great slice of the continent-like boarding-house bread and butter -that is to content us. We have done well, so far, by the common_mind—now let us try for the maximum developments in every form of letters, science, and arts, by encouraging in all practicable ways the talent and genius which are born among us, and welcoming whatever the Old World may send us. One more lesson, the last which he should commend to their thought, was nobler, holier than all the rest. The little mean provincial rivalries and jealousies between different sections of the loyal Union, he said, must give place to a complete, absolute, generous, sym We must disappoint our enemies—we will disappoint them! Our triumphant civilization will engulf and bury over its barbarisms, we may hope and believe, as rapidly as those of the haughty mountain clansmen of Scotland were swallowed up in the last century. The first word of our State motto is the Sword, but the two last are Liberty and Peace. He closed his lecture by repeating some lines written many years ago, before the terrible experience of War had given point to the lesson he then attempted to enforce. The many admirable points in the lecture were fully appreciated by the audience, who frequently manifested their pleasure in bursts of applause. From The Spectator. sical furore such as were matters of common occurrence up to a recent date. In proportion as this tendency is developed, the position of the "queen of song" of the day is relatively lowered, and we may hope in the future to find brilliant gifts of nature less frequently associated with wild and romantic careers ending in misery and obscurity. Such, at least, is too often in substance the melancholy tale of the pages before us. WithUNDER the above somewhat fanciful title, in the limits of the present generation many the authoress of the volumes before us has things have changed, and lessened the dangiven to the public the results of much re-gers as well as the excessive brilliancy of the search in a neglected but highly interesting prima donna's dominion. Professional culfield of biography, judiciously compiled, and tivation is increasing in extent, at least pari enhanced in value by considerable brilliancy passu, with popular taste in music. The of style. She has laid down a definite and tendency of modern opera is not in favor of well-marked plan, and carried it out with undue exaltation of one brilliant star to the singular felicity in detail as well as compre-exclusion of all others; and there seems hensiveness in design. Her work, though slight probability of again witnessing a muconfined to a strictly limited subject, appeals not exclusively to the musical public, or even to the larger class who take an interest in musical gossip and tradition, but to the general reader in the widest sense of the term. The operatic prima donna forms a class absolutely unique in special character as well as special genius. There is nothing in the least analogous in any other art or profession, and if the "queen of song" rises apparently Out of the large number of female vocalwithout an effort, often in a single bound, ists who have flourished since the establishto the utmost height of fame, fortune, and ment of the lyric drama, thirty-eight reprerank, there are inherent dangers and draw-sentatives have been chosen by the authoress, backs in her career which a study of the class and, on the whole, the selection has been shows that she but too rarely escapes. Ris- admirably made. Without losing sight of ing, as a general rule, from the humbler ranks of society, after a childhood of severe training, with vanity stimulated on one hand by the admiration of friends, and on the other by the criticism of rivals, she suddenly finds herself in the receipt of enormous sums, courted by the highest, and talked of by all. With an almost unvarying fatality, she is dazzled by her success, her vanity develops into the wildest caprice, and often profusely generous, she always becomes extravagant to the last degree; with suitors of the highest classes, and yet constantly brought in contact with all the strange characters who crowd the outskirts of operatic life, she rarely contracts a marriage in which disparity of rank, or her own caprice in one case, or the brutality or avarice of her husband in the other, does not prove a fatal bar to happiness. Seldom, too, does good judgment attend her brilliant talents, and rarely retiring from the scene in the full tide of popularity and fortune, her career of brilliant success is too often closed amidst the bitter mortification of finding her failing powers unable to prevent all her empire passing away. to a younger rival. "The Queens of Song." By Ellen Creathorne Clayton. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. her main object, the illustration of as many different types of the same class as possible, she has contrived in reality to weave the separate biographical sketches into what amounts very nearly to a history of the opera. Personal anecdote, of course, prevails, but it is always cleverly associated with à substratum of interesting operatic events. The second volume is, principally occupied with great singers, cither still alive, or whose lives are still in the memory of the present generation. We cannot, therefore, employ our limited space better than by as briefly as possible running through one or two of the eighteen eventful lives which are contained in the first volume. The first English vocalist who may fairly be called a "queen of song" was Katherine Tofts, a lady who first attained celebrity in Arsinoe, a strange medley of scraps of Italian operas strung together by Clayton in 1703. The fashion thus set was followed for some years, and so crude was the English notion of opera in those days that in Camilla, the most successful piece of the day, Mrs. Tofts sang in English, while her great rival, Margerita de l'Epine, and others, sang in Italian. The latter was a Tuscan, tall, ugly, and swarthy, who yet possessed a power of | she asked even more so. The Emperor of fascination which formed one of the wonders Russia, astounded at her unheard-of deof the day. After rejecting admirers of all mands, and contrasting them with the pay classes, she bestowed her hand on Dr. Pe- of a field-marshal, was met with the cool repusch, with whom she appears to have lived ply, "Then your majesty may get your fieldhappily, even answering readily to her hus- marshals to sing for you." In Paris, a litband's playful mode of addressing her as tle later, we find Rameau in the height of his "Hecate." Poor Mrs. Tofts met with a far success, boasting that he could set the words different fate; her success as Camilla proved of a Dutch gazette to music, if required. the overthrow of her reason, and she died in Among the most successful singers of the a madhouse. The history of Anastasia Rob- day was Sophie Arnould, whose sparkling inson and her long concealed marriage with wit and estimation in Parisian society would the Earl of Peterborough is already well alone have rendered her celebrated. Anknown, and in its termination forms a pleas-toinette St. Hubery, the idol of Europe just ing exception to that of many of her compan- before the French Revolution, was the next in " queens of song." The next in our list really great singer, though her career is is Lavinia Fenton, whose fascinations as the principally remarkable for its tragical terfirst of the long series of Polly Peachums of mination. She was assassinated, together the day ultimately won her the title of with her husband, the Count d'Entraigues, Duchess of Bolton. The history of La Mau- in their own house at Barnes, in 1812. Next pin, the favorite French singer in the days come Mara and Todi abroad and Mrs. Billingof Lulli, reads like a romance by Dumas. ton in England. It is difficult to imagine a With great personal charms, a splendid stranger life than that of Mara, tied to a voice, but no cultivation, she enchanted the drunken and brutal husband, while her perParisians as a singer, while in private life formances were the object of contention to she figured in the wildest and strangest all the crowned heads of Europe. Her esscenes of those wild days. Dressing habitu- capes from the power of Ferderick the Great, ally in man's clothes, she broke into and set who once had her dragged out of bed by a fire to a convent, was condemned to be detachment of soldiers, to sing, his grim burnt, fought more than one duel, beat and pleasantry in sentencing her husband to beat robbed a fellow-singer in the streets of Paris, a military drum for a month, as he was so and finally retired from the world to spend fond of beating her, and her strange conduct the remaining years of a short life in ascetic in England, all unite to form one of the seclusion. We now return to London, and strangest even of these strange stories. find the scene occupied by Francesca Cuzzoni Grandly as she sang Handel's music, the and Faustina Bordoni, whose desperate ri- English never quite forgave her obstinacy in valry shared the attention of the public with sitting down during the solos, and her freaks that of Handel and Farinelli. Bordoni was at Oxford, when she threw her book at a muoriginally introduced by Handel himself, who sician in the orchestra because he played a found it absolutely requisite to have some note out of tune. Mrs. Billington was then check on the caprice of Cuzzoni, whom he the favorite of the day in London, and was once actually seized and threatened to throw receiving the before unheard-of terms of £3,out of the window, unless she promised to 000 for three nights a week for six months, sing a certain passage correctly. After a and a benefit insured at £500 more. She brilliant career, she died in misery in Hol- accumulated more property from her earnland. Caterina Gabrielli, “La Cuochetina," ings than any English singer, but did not was the next singer of any great note in Eu- escape an even worse fate than that of the rope. Her splendid voice and great beauty haughty Mara. Her second husband, a were accompanied by caprice almost border- French scoundrel named Felican, was pubing on insanity. On one occasion when com- licly flogged in Italy for cruelty to her in the mitted to prison by the Viceroy of Sicily for first week of their marriage, and after years deliberately singing badly, she gave magnifi- of separation and extortion of money on his cent banquets every day to her fellow-pris-part, she died from the effects of a blow from oners, besides loading them with presents. him. Her income was enormous, and the terms We now come to days within the memory of the present generation, and Catalani is, | Malibran, there are none of the strange and perhaps, the last of the old school of "queens romance-like stories to which the reader of of song." One can scarcely realize now-adays so romantic a courtship as that of M. Vallebrecque and the youthful Catalani, or still less a vocalist being so far overwhelmed with popular worship as to gravely declare it profanity to depreciate the gifts of Heaven, when God had given to a mortal such an extraordinary voice as that she possessed. The second volume is occupied with the lives of singers either still living or but recently passed from the scene of their triumphs. The authoress has freely availed herself of contemporaneous criticism, and the consequent preponderance of technicalities renders it less interesting to the general reader, as well as the fact that, with the exception, perhaps, of that of the unfortunate the first has become accustomed. The bright career of Madame Goldschmidt-Lind, as one of the latest and most brilliant of the series of songstresses, affords hopeful augury for the future, and we sincerely hope that the title of " queen of song may cease to imply, as it too often has done, ill-assorted unions, reckless extravagance, heads turned by vanity, and obscure or miserable deaths. In conclusion, we can only remark that few more readable books have been issued for some time. The style of the authoress is always clear and vivid, and occasionally even brilliant. We ought not, either, to omit to notice the valuable chronological list of every known opera which closes the second volume. A NEGRO PHILOSOPHER.-A correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette, writing from the Cumberland River, gives the following humorous colloquy with a philosophic darkey : I noticed upon the hurricane deck to-day an elderly darkey, with a very philosophical and retrospective cast of countenance, squatted upon his bundle, toasting his shins against the chimney, and apparently plunged into a state of profound meditation. Finding, upon inquiry, that he belonged to the 9th Illinois, one of the most gallantly behaved and heavy-losing regiments at the Fort Donelson battle, and a part of which was aboard, I began to interrogate him upon the subject. His philosophy was so much in the Falstaffian vein that I will give his views in his own words as near as my memory serves me: "Were you in the fight? "Had a little taste of it, sa." "Stood your ground, did you?" "No, sa; I runs." "Run at the first fire, did you?" "Yes, and would hab run sooner, had I know'd it war comin'." "Why, that wasn't very creditable to your courage. "Dat isn't my line, sa-cookin's my profession." Well, but have you no regard to your repu "Yes, sa, I does, more than all dis world, more than a million ob dollars, sa; for what dat would be wurth to a man wid the bref out on him? Self-preserbashum am de fust law wid me." "But why should you act upon a different rule from other men?" "Because different men set different values upon dar lives; mine is not in the market." "But, if you lost it, you would have the satisfaction of knowing that you died for your country.' "What satisfaction would dat be to me when de power of feelin' was gone?' Then patriotism and honor are nothing to you?" "Nuffin whatever, sa; I regard dem as among de vanities." "If our soldiers were like you, traitors might have broken up the Government without resistance." "Yes, sa; dar would have been no help for it; wouldn't put my life in the scale 'ginst any government that ever existed, for no government could replace de loss to me." "Do you think any of your company would have missed you if you had been killed?" |