people. Each has done his best, and many have surpassed themselves. There has been an intellectual rivalry among these masters of the pen. Who will not cherish the glorious effusion of the New York World on Friday, December 1, 1872, the fervent eulogy of the New York Herald, and the splendid homage of Theodore Tilton in the Golden Age, Sam Bowles in the Springfield Republican, William Cassidy in the Albany Argus, W. F. Storey in the Chicago Times, and their contemporaries, North and South, East and West? Preserved, as they will be, in one or more volumes, they will be a monument to Horace Greeley more enduring than the loftiest column of bronze or marble, though covered with bass-reliefs, and gorgeous in compliments carved by cunning hands.

The last time I saw Mr. Greeley was at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, several weeks before the Cincinnati Convention. The interview had been arranged by one of the gentlemen of The Tribune at Mr. Greeley's request, and we had a long and confidential talk. I am quite sure he did not then entertain the remotest idea of his nomination against General Grant, and though he was earnest in expressing the belief that the man could be found to defeat Grant, he listened patiently to my earnest appeal to him. I told him that both of us owed allegiance to the Republican mission, that General Grant deserved re-election, that there was not the slightest prospect of defeating his renomination, and that I longed to see the great Tribune in the lead of what would be an assured victory. He was unusually genial and kind, and I have always believed that, when we parted, he was carefully reconsidering his course. He used no harsh words in speaking of the President, and seemed to be animated only by solicitude for the country, and never once referred to himself as a possible Presidential candidate,

As I sat, Wednesday, December 4, in the Church of the Divine Paternity, New York City, and noticed the multitude of representative men-Thurlow Weed's aged form; Chief Justice

GREELEY'S FUNERAL RITES.

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Chase, with bare and bending head; William Evart's spare figure and mobile face; General Dix, the Governor elect of New York-among the pall-bearers; the President, his secretaries, and part of his Cabinet; the crowds of editors from all parts of the country-and heard the sacred music and the magnificent discourse of Dr. Chapin, I thought of the death and burial of the great Frenchman, Mirabeau, April, 1791. Very different were the two men, but their lives were equally eventful and their last hours equally dramatic. Mirabeau was exhausted by his frequent public speaking. Five great orations in one day finished him; and when brought to his final hour, he exclaimed, "To-day I shall die; envelop me in perfumes; crown me with flowers, and surround me with music, so that I may deliver myself peaceably to sleep." Our poor friend did not call for odors or roses or sweet strains; they came from the spontaneous love of his saddened friends. Like America with him, however, Mirabeau's death extinguished all the envies and enmities of the French. Party feuds dissolved in tears over his body, and he passed to his rest through an avenue of hundreds of thousands of former foes. Says the historian:

"The proceedings of the Assembly were immediately suspended, a general mourning ordered, and a magnificent funeral prepared. 'We will all attend!' exclaimed the whole Assembly. In the Church of Saint Geneviève a monument was erected to

his memory, with the inscription:

'A GRATEFUL COUNTRY TO GREAT MEN.'

"It was situated next to that of Descartes. His funeral took place the day after his death. All the authorities, the departments, the municipalities, the popular societies, the Assembly, and the army accompanied the procession; and this orator obtained more honors than ever had been conferred on the pompous funerals which proceeded to Saint Denis. Thus terminated the career of this extraordinary man, who has been greatly

blamed, who effected much good and much evil, and whose genius was equally adapted to both. Having vanquished the aristocracy, he turned upon those who contributed to his victory, arrested their course by his eloquence, and commanded their admiration even while he provoked their hostility."

But how different the recollection of these two men! Mirabeau is rarely recalled, and only as an impassioned tribune—a man of sentiment rather than of action, with few fixed convictions. Greeley will live as a marvelous aggregate, strong in good works, his fame growing riper with the increasing fruits of his gigantic labors for humanity.

[December 15, 1872.]

XCII.

I AM reading, with infinite zest, John Forster's second volume of the Life of Charles Dickens. Every page is a new pleasure, every chapter a new revelation of the better side of the truest friend of humanity in the literary world. Neither Shakespeare, nor Byron, nor Walter Scott, nor Tom Moore, nor Alfred Tennyson, deigned to show so honest a devotion to the poor and the unfortunate as Charles Dickens. He always seized the holidays, and especially Christmas, to extend his warnings to the rich and his encouragement to the poor. "Blessings on your kind heart," wrote the great Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review, in 1842, after he had read "The Christmas Carol;" "you should be happy yourself, for you may be sure you have done more good by this little publication, fostered more kindly feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom." "Who can listen," exclaimed Thackeray, "to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit,

and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness." "It told," says Forster, his biographer, "the selfish man to rid himself of his selfishness; the just man to make himself generous; the good-natured man to enlarge the sphere of his good nature. Dickens had identified himself with Christmas fancies. Its life and spirit, its humor in riotous abundance, of right belonged to him. Its imaginations, as well as kindly thoughts, were his; and its privilege to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest places he had made his own." "With brave and strong restraints, what is evil in ourselves was to be subdued; with warm and gentle sympathies, what is bad or unreclaimed in others was to be redeemed. The Beauty was to embrace the Beast, as in the divinest of all those fables; the star was to rise out of the ashes, as in our much-loved Cinderella; and we were to play the Valentine with our wilder brothers, and bring them back with brotherly care to civilization and happiness."

After the "Christmas Carol" came 66 The Chimes," for the holidays, in 1844. This beautiful story was written in Genoa, Italy. The argument here, as in the first, was to induce the rich to help the poor, and the poor to forget their miseries. It is curious how he found the title of "The Chimes." He had the subject, but not the name of his book, in his mind, and, says Forster, "sitting down, one morning, resolute for work, such a peal of ‘chimes' arose from the city as he found to be maddening. All Genoa lay beneath him, and up from it, with some gust of wind, came in one fell sound, the clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration, that made his ideas spin round and round till they lost themselves in a whirl of vexation and giddiness." "Only two days later came a letter, in which not a single syllable was written but ‘We have heard "The Chimes” at midnight, Master Shallow ;' then I knew he had discovered what he wanted." His one

great idea was always that the poor should be led out of their poverty; the vicious out of their vices; the unfortunate out of their misfortunes, and that Christmas was the season to enforce the moral. In Venice he said, "Ah! when I saw those palaces, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift one's self above the dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon the giant's staircase that Samson could not overthrow."

In 1845 he conceived that splendid Christmas ideal, "The Cricket on the Hearth." When he was deliberating it he wrote to Forster that his new story should contain "Carol philosophy, cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, jolly good temper, and a view of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in every thing to home and fireside; and I would call it, sir, 'The Cricket; a Cheerful Creature that Chirrups on the Hearth'-natural history." "It would be a delicate and beautiful fancy for a Christmas book, making the cricket a little household god-silent in the wrong and sorrow of the tale, and loud again when all went well and happy." Those of us who recollect the wonderful charm of the "Cricket on the Hearth," with its weird and simple characters, will not need to be told by Forster that "its sale at the outset doubled that of all its predecessors."

Christmas always inspired him. The holidays were his season of joyful thoughts and magnetic writing. And now, as we recall him in the glowing pages of his confidential biographer, why should not we remember those who are so well and gratefully remembered during this immortal interval-the parenthesis, so to speak, between the old year and the new-the pleasant porch in which we take leave of the one and enter upon the other? A benefactor of his species, like William W. Corcoran, of Washington, D. C., fortunate in his active life, and still more