Johnson's Garrison, and Other Biographies
THE younger generation is practically ignorant of the real historical character of the antislavery movement. They look on that cause through transforming childhood and boyhood memories of the civil war, and see it as a cause in triumph. Mr. Johnson, who gave it many
years of self-denying service, remembers most vividly its abasement, and in this book,1 which is a valuable contribution to the history of the period, he tells in a plain-spoken, vigorous, and manly fashion what he himself saw in those earlier days, when the upholders of order struck hands with the incendiaries of disorder, forgot the inviolability of freedom of speech, and imperiled the lives of the reformers. In these pages church, state, and society, college and press, present themselves ignobly ; but, from the congregated forces of evil, the church is here singled out for signal condemnation that derives its sting and fire from the facts. No part of the story has so fallen into oblivion as this ; for it is the native habit of the mind to regard the church as the champion of moral causes, and therefore, though the evidence be adduced as it is in this volume, young men will feel something of Garrison’s incredulity when they are told that the church was against the slave.
At all times the church, as the most conservative institution in society, has been on the side of the established order. The American church was not singular in this ; but it was singular in the darkness of its mind and the venom of its spirit. Ignoble the times were, throughout the nation, and tile church held the most ignoble, place. The attempt has lately been made to reverse the record, but no attempt can succeed in accrediting organized religious bodies with what was done by the few, who, though in the church, remained faithful, and performed services that the hostility of their fellowChristians made heroic.
It is true that the church would not pray that the slave might go free ; it is true that it based slave-holding on the Word of God; it is true that it denounced abolition as a silly and an infidel cause. The reproach cast by the pagans on the early church that it was made up of slaves was forgotten, as well as the glorious boast of that church that it freed the slaves. The spirit of Christ was subordinated to the law of Judaism and a few words of St. Paul. Fortunately, from the first, some kept the purer faith ; and, at last, the body of the church, in spite of its leaders, was drawn into the current of the mighty forces that streamed from Garrison; but this fact does not blot out what went before. Commerce may plead that in ordinary human life the legally secured rights of property and the prospects of trade (both of which would have been disturbed by immediate emancipation) are controlling motives ; politicians may find some excuse, perhaps, for discountenancing the objects and methods of the agitators in that politics is woven of compromises, and that the master of the art, dealing with present possibilities, must judge of objects to be aimed at by the forces at his command, and of methods to be adopted by their apparent efficacy; but, when brought before the bar, that church, which had met with bitterness and denounced with hatred a movement made necessary by Christian thought and grounded in conscience, must stand with the shame of its obloquy upon it, unless, indeed, it borrows for defense the shielding garment of Garrison, through whom it was at last forced, when the shadow of war fell upon the nation, to make some atonement for its long desertion.
How brightly over against this degradation of the institutions and leaders of the country shines the inbred integrity of human nature ! For, next after the position of the church, what will most strike those of the younger generation who may chance to read this volume is the number of obscure names it chronicles. Once more is it proven that man is better than any institutions he can create, and the voice of his heart clearer and truer than the voice of any whom he can exalt to speak for him: in this fact lies the hope of real progress as distinguished from that change of civilization which is a mere adaptation to varied external circumstances. The antislavery movement was a step of such real progress ; youths and women, the poor, the unrespected, the nobodies, as they were then often called, began the agitation, brought on the conflict, and secured the triumph. Unawed by the consecrated anathema of the pulpit, unperplexed by the puzzles of politics and trade, they clarified the confused brains and cleansed the vitiated consciences of their fellows, until, after many days, the restoration of the Union with slavery became impossible. This is not a detraction from the rightful fame of the great leaders whom the movement afterward produced, for they were borne forward on a tide of popular feeling that nameless persons had let loose from its sources as by the stroke of the prophet’s rod; the statesman’s fame will not suffer, though due honor be given to these unknown men, who, meeting by the dozen in the cities, by twos and threes in the villages, without the shelter of a name like Brougham’s or of a genius like O’Connell’s, enlisted in a righteous cause while it was held in despite and hedged about with peril.
Nevertheless, these, too, are forgotten; one name survives, — a Luther, a Hampden, a Wilberforce; the rest perish. So Garrison survives, the shining example of the men he quickened. In this book he is the principal figure, as he needs must be : the facts of his life are set down, for they were the facts of the movement; but it is yet too early to draw his portrait, either as a man in his individuality, or as a leader absorbing into himself the totality of a great movement. The promised biography of him by his sons must be waited for. Meanwhile, truth has nothing to take away from Wendell Phillips’s words (eloquent even for him) spoken over Garrison’s body, though it may be that truth will have much to add thereto. There is no need to restate here that admirable estimate; what is recorded in this book bears out every word of it. Throughout these pages Garrison appears as the soul of the cause, the inspiration of the great plea then made before the conscience of America. His insight revealed the way, his forethought avoided the danger; his courage tempered the weapon, his conviction drove home the steel. As it was from him that the movement had being, so he preserved it in vigor and ever refreshed it with fuller life. The great personal traits, however, which as a moral reformer he displayed both in supplying resources and resisting hostile powers, are perhaps less impressive to the ordinary mind than the vastness of his achievement within the limits of his own life. Seldom does a great man’s work tell so immediately upon mankind. Measure the distance between the mob of Boston hunting him to the jail walls and the breakfast at St. James Hall, where what was noblest, wisest, and most refined in England met to ascribe to him his rightful praise; or, better, measure the distance between Baltimore, with the unfriended boy there imprisoned, and Charleston (the newly unfurled flag then floating over Sumter), with the old man there standing, the gift of flowers in Ids hands, amid thousands of the freed blessing him: by such marvelous contrasts the imagination gathers some faint conception of the work he did. Ever as the antislavery movement recedes into the past, it becomes more plainly the cardinal fact in the spiritual life of this people ; in giving freedom to all mankind within our borders Lincoln was the hand, but Garrison was no less the heart, of the regenerated nation.
Dr. Hodge, the eminent Princeton divine,2 by common consent the protagonist of the Presbyterian church, was one of the men who threw their influence against Garrison. His position was logical, — nay, it was (which means much more) theological. He writes, “ If the Scriptures under the old dispensation permitted men to hold slaves, and if the New Testament nowhere condemns slave-holding, but prescribes the relative duties of masters and slaves, then to pronounce slave-holding to be in itself sinful is contrary to the Scriptures. . . . The doctrine that slave-holding is in itself a crime is antiscriptural and subversive of the authority of the Word of God.” He recommended the reform of the slave laws, and thought that this would result in freeing the slaves; but, meanwhile, slave-holding was not wrong, and the abolitionists were “ silly.” He was thus, in opinion, contemporary with Seneca and Justinian, although he seems behind the former, at least in sentiment. There is no need to dwell upon this ; it is referred to only as a passing illustration of the truth of the foregoing remarks.
Dr. Hodge was led to take this position by his regard for the Bible, which was for him the last court of appeal both for doctrine and conduct. “ Nothing that the Bible pronounces true can be false ; nothing that it declares to be false can be true; nothing is obligatory on the conscience but what it enjoins; nothing can be sin but what it condemns.” That was his creed, and it explains not only his opposition to emancipation, but his whole theory of life and his whole body of doctrine. He declared that marriage with a deceased wife’s sister was wrong. But, not to make too long a catalogue, let this single searching ray suffice to throw light on all his opinions at once : “ It is as much contrary to our allegiance to the Bible to make our own notions of right or wrong the rule of duty as to make our own reason the rule of faith.” So blank a denial of the rights of private conscience it would be hard to find outside of Catholic writings. Those who wish to know what was the theology which Dr. Hodge extracted from the Bible can read it in his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, which, although not free from errors of statement and not corrected by an exhaustive knowledge of the schools opposed to him, has taken high rank among works of its kind ; it is enough to say here that he was an Augustinian, and, more narrowly, a defender of that special form of Protestantism which — although the name has lost much of its propriety —is termed Calvinism. In dealing with this theology, Dr. Hodge was conservative ; the word hardly expresses the thing, but its meaning is indicated by the fact that, as editor of the Biblical Repository and Princeton Review for over forty years, he boasts, “ It is believed to be true that an original idea in theology is not to be found in its pages from the beginning until now ” (1868) ; and, again, as a founder of the Princeton Seminary and a controller of its policy throughout his active life, he says, “ A new idea never originated in this seminary.” His son also writes, “ He had precisely the same doctrines in his age as in the early controversies of his youth, and the same principles as to the relation of government to moral and religious questions and as to temperance and slavery after the war as he did years before.” Certainly, in Emerson’s words, he ‘‘ obeyed the voice at eve obeyed at prime.”
Holding the Bible thus as good Catholics hold the Pope, treating it in the same spirit as ultramontanists treat the papal prerogatives, Dr. Hodge did such work as was to be expected. The most distinguished quality of his mind was the logical power that has characterized many American divines. He also possessed in an eminent degree the quality of piety; partly from his natural temperament, and partly, perhaps, in consequence of his early association with Tholuck and other Germans of the same pietistic school. Beside these intellectual and emotional qualities, he was marked by a third that is rare among theologians : he was amiable. The most pleasing revelation made in this biography is his relations to his family and friends ; the connections he formed were ardent and life-long, and his strong affections, which easily mastered him and were openly expressed, won return from those intimate with him, and so tempered his nature with friendliness that he gained the kindly regard of his pupils and of passing acquaintances. This personal feeling, let us hope, accounts somewhat, in connection with other obvious reasons, for the fulsome eulogy to which he listened for hours on the fiftieth anniversary of his being installed professor, on which occasion many distinguished men and representatives of educational institutions in flattering him piled Pelion on Ossa. He said that they seemed to him to be talking of some other man. We confess to having felt the same impression.
Dr. Hodge deserved praise, but not after this indiscriminate fashion. He apparently utilized all his mental vigor and acquired learning, and, in spite of long - continued and painful illness, he accomplished a vast amount of work ; he put his mark on the Princeton Review and the Princeton Seminary; he influenced much the theology of his day by drawing it toward older interpretations and defending it from novelties. What he did and wrote will, no doubt, long continue to be valued, at least by that sect to which he gave his life. But the laic mind in general, so far as it remembers him, will look on him as a man who, with great mental powers and with remarkable benevolence of nature, holding a position of great authority and controlling important influences, was the unalterable and often bitter foe of every liberal movement of his age, from the establishment of unsectarian public schools to the union of the kindred branches of the Presbyterian church.
Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin,3 was, like Dr. Hodge, a great theologian, an Augustinian, and the leader of his church. The Irish prelate, however, offers a strange contrast to the Protestant divine. Born in Ireland in 1786, he was educated at the university of Coimbra in Portugal, where as a youth he received offers which might well have tempted him to remain in that country; preferring, however, to serve God in his own persecuted church, he returned home and joined the Augustinian friars. His abilities and acquirements attracted notice, and in 1813 he was appointed professor in Carlow College, where he won such distinction that, six years after, at the remarkably early age of thirty-three, he was made bishop. In that office he performed the illustrious services for his church and his country by which he eclipsed all his brother prelates.
He began his career with a vigorous effort to reform the discipline of the clergy. During the long period of persecution that was then approaching its end, although the nation, exemplifying most marvelously the vitality of Catholicism, had remained in the faith, religion had suffered ; carelessness had crept into the routine of church duties, and looseness into the habits of the country clergy. But the farming and horse-racing priest soon felt the rod of the bishop, the tippling and slovenly mended their ways, decorum was restored to religious observances, and the service of the church increased in dignity as the clergy in sober living. Rigorous and watchful the bishop had to be, but as he was the first to undertake this task, so lie succeeded the best; and if he here showed the severest aspect of his character, the impression is softened by his conduct and tone toward the faithful priests and the religious associations under him, and especially by the attractive spirit of his letters to the nuns under his care. He did not, however, limit his activities to his sphere as head of a mere ecclesiastical organization. In his care for his fold he was exemplary : by continual visitation he became acquainted with the conditions and needs of his people ; he addressed them in simple, direct, and elevated pastorals, and frequently by sermons from his own lips, teaching them the gospel of a clean and orderly life. They heard him with thanksgiving and joy; sometimes, too, with terror, if, by joining any of the secret organizations that have been the bane of Ireland, they had fallen under his wrath. Toward these societies the bishop was a bitter foe. In dissuading the people from uniting with them, he employed all the arts of lucid explanation, of entreaty and denunciation; he even went so far as to excommunicate. In these eloquent appeals he appears singularly impressive, as if he were one of the earlier fathers who held all spiritual power in their hands. More than once he turned the tide ; but he could not affect the conditions of life out of which the Blackfeet and Whitefeet sprang, and at last, it is said, the failure of his efforts to bring about any permanent change in this direction shortened his life. “ Men of the Queen’s County,” he said, erect and awful, “ my blood is upon you! ” And again, toward the end, standing at the altar before the gray-coated peasantry, and supporting his trembling frame on the crozier, in his clear, solemn, slow, and hollow tones, " Ah, my people, you have broken your bishop’s heart! ” While his strength remained, he also discharged with great ability the duty of defending his faith against the intermingled insult and argument of the Established Church, Here he appears, perhaps, most able, and his extraordinary theological learning, his knowledge of history, and his close reasoning made more than one Protestant mitre bow before him.
Though he exhibited such fidelity in all his pastoral duties, it is not as the bishop that he claims attention from the world at large. He was, perhaps, even a better patriot. The letters and volumes he published from time to time to stir up and maintain agitation would have gained honorable remembrance for a man who did no more; but he exercised his most powerful influence by the examinations that he underwent in Parliament between 1825 and 1833, before the committees upon the Catholic Relief Bill, the education inquiry, the tithes inquiry, and the inquiry into the state of the Irish poor. The volumes that contain this evidence are treasuries of historical fact in respect to the condition of Ireland, of clear exposition of its causes, and of wise suggestion for its remedies. He was well fitted to speak on these topics: he was no stranger to the mother sitting without food by the father who ate to work; to him the peasant losing to the tithe-collector the last support from his store, the clothes from his back, and the blanket from his bed, and all the oft-told scenes of wretched Irish life were a vivid reality. He knew ignorance and its danger, oppression and its iniquity, poverty and its misery; he had daily before his eyes the habits of character engendered by the state of law and life in Ireland, and the revolution smouldering in suffering. He was competent, too, not only to bear witness, but to defend and advise. Familiar with the history and the constitutional and legal principles involved, he discomfited even the law officers of the crown. These examinations were the most powerful single cause of the reforms effected; they instructed the public mind of England in the actual state of affairs, and removed much misapprehension in respect to the belief of Catholics and their relations to the temporal power. The ministers sought the bishop’s counsel, and often fixed his ideas in legislation. In his life-time, it is true, he saw only portion of his plans consummated; he was obliged to see O’Connell, whose hands he had held up, oppose him in his projects to relieve the poor, as he opposed, or rather did not aid, O’Connell in his agitation for the repeal of the union; but the event has now justified him. The cause of education, especially, he had at heart, and, although he saw little profit from his work, he did not labor in vain. Thackeray, writing in the Irish Sketch Book of Carlow Cathedral, states the truth: “ Bishop Doyle, the founder of the church, has the place of honor within it; nor, perhaps, did any Christian pastor ever merit the affection of his flock more than that great and high-minded man. He was the best champion the Catholic church and cause ever had in Ireland ; in learning and admirable kindness and virtue the best example to the clergy of his religion ; and if the country is now filled with schools, where the humblest peasant in it can have the benefit of a liberal and wholesome education, it owes this great boon mainly to his noble exertions and to the spirit they awakened.”
The bishop’s personality, also, was striking. He was tall, erect, and large in build, of impressive presence, and dignified in demeanor; imperious, perhaps, at times, as such men are apt to be ; inclined to pride, too, from his consciousness of strength, but ever striving to be humble; capable of tenderness, even, and able to be a good companion. Marked by these main traits, we see him grow old in daily life ; for the biographer, notwithstanding the interminable detail and explanation necessary in an account of such varied and important activities, has yet had the skill to keep the man always before us. It must not be forgotten that the scene is laid in Ireland ; the book savors of the soil. Anecdotes strew these pages, and the footnotes often hide a good joke in their nutshell of wretched print. The humor, however, only plays about the bishop: the laugh does not interfere too rudely with the main impression we have of him as the youthful prelate holding confirmations where none had been held for a score of years, gathering gray-haired men and children by hundreds into the church ; as the able disputant writing by the candle that glimmered the night through, year after year ; as the faithful pastor exercising his office amid scenes almost mediæval in character, in the collieries and the country fields, among picturesque surroundings of shadow, group, and garb, stirring the rough peasants into the transports of heartfelt repentance, and calming them into peace ; or, lastly, as the patriot meeting with dignity and persuasion the enmity, distrust, and bigotry of Parliament. In such deeds his life was soon eaten away ; the cheek grows pallid, the flesh shrinks, the muscles are unstrung; we see him going from the swoon to the pulpit, grasping it with both hands that he might not fall, preaching, like St. Augustine, until the death. “ We must preach, brethren,” he began, “ and woe to him that does not preach.” It was the final effort of a dying man. When the moment comes, he remembers how Christ died on the hard cross, and asks to be taken from his straw mattress and laid upon the floor; there he expired. The disposition of his mind toward penance is revealed in this last request; to him. life seemed given for the laceration of the flesh ; this is the heart of Catholic piety. His work was but half done ; he had dreamed of reconciling the Anglican to the mother church, but in this, as in most other of his plans, he hardly made a beginning. His learning, even, he had no time to embalm in books. His life alone is left: as the exemplary bishop he enforces respect; as the sincere, fearless, and wise patriot he stirs a warmer feeling.
Mr. Murdock has selected passages from his lectures, and put them together in a somewhat disconnected way, but he has made an entertaining and really valuable book.4 Acting is the most perishable of the arts ; indeed, it might almost be said that actors have no biographies. A few anecdotes of them remain, some reminiscences of their striking traits, an echo from the applause of their great nights; but probably the imagination never succeeds in gleaning sufficient material from what is recorded of them to reconstruct the outward gesture, much less to inform the hollow shape with tone and glance. The tradition of their style lives on in their pupils and imitators only ; but Mr. Murdock, by attempting to give some account of this tradition and of his own observation, particularly with reference to their modes of speech, does present to us something of the reality of their acting. The portion of the volume that treats of the management of the voice is the most important, but it is not unduly large; the rest is filled with reminiscences, and with critical quotations relative to acting and plays, which are as rich in sense as the anecdotes often are in wit and humor. So good a general view of the English and American stage could hardly be got elsewhere in the same space.
Mr. Congdon served his apprenticeship to journalism in his native town of New Bedford, bustling with its earlier whaling business, and in Providence, where he edited the organ of the agitators of the Dorr rebellion ; his active years were spent in the editorship of the Boston Atlas just before its adversity, and afterwards on the staff of the New York Tribune. If what Horace Greeley wrote of him be true, that “ in the protracted, arduous struggle which resulted in the overthrow and extinction of American slavery ” it was “he who most skillfully, effectively, and persistently wielded the trenchant blade of satire,” Mr. Congdon has deserved no little gratitude for his service to his day and generation. He saw the rise and establishment of American journalism as a liberal profession, and he gives to young aspirants for its honors much good advice ; but one looks in vain for any philosophic account of the causes and character of the new power that has so markedly changed the conditions of political life in this country. Mr. Congdon seems to have no philosophic bent; he writes in a light and colloquial manner of what he has seen, as a cultivated reporter would do. His reminiscences 5 fall into two divisions : those that deal with older town life in Southern New England and New York, and those that deal with the notabilities of the region and with the few great men of the country whom he met or heard of, clergymen, scholars, journalists, actors, and statesmen. Of the latter, however, he does not increase our knowledge, but gives his own estimates, always moderate, usually just; although, perhaps, the coldness with which he treats Webster might better have tempered his warmth toward Seward, and personal feeling colors his portrait of Horace Greeley.
It will be seen that this volume is a side-light only, the flash of a passing lantern upon events and the actors in them. Of himself the author tells next to nothing, but he had the fortune to live amid minor circumstances that are of interest to all who take pleasure in the remembrance of the New England life already traditional, and to be in the immediate presence of a great period of history which will be of absorbing interest to men unto a distant future ; the knowledge and impressions that he has recorded are therefore of value, and they are, moreover, entertaining. Mr. Wikoff’s book 6 is an unfinished autobiography. It is fitly entitled, for it is filled with commonplace and small talk, and is sometimes really gossipy. Its interest lies in what it tells us of the distinguished people whom the author saw; but, as he seems to have been intimate with none except Edwin Forrest, he adds little to our knowledge; an agreeable caller, which is the part he apparently filled, even at Lady Blessington’s, can have nothing new to tell after this lapse of time. The letters from Mrs. Grote and Lady Bulwer will not increase the reputation of either; the glimpses of Countess Guiccioli form the pleasantest part of the book.
The series of biographies 7 which Mr. Adams has written, though he has mingled with it a strand of literary criticism, is designed to instruct our youth in good morals; this is of course a very laudable purpose, and perhaps it is furthered by placing before them great examples of wickedness as well as of virtue. The essential requisite of the best literary criticism, and of all valuable criticism of life whatever, is, it is needless to say, sympathy ; and an author can hardly be expected to show much sympathy with men whose example he is holding up as a warning to all youth well disposed toward morality and orthodoxy. The easiest charge for an unsympathetic critic to make is that of insincerity. Mr. Adams thinks Burns was insincere in his love of highland lassies, and Heine in his love of freedom. The most natural conclusion for such an author is that the “ wrecked ” man did nothing worth doing ; so Mr. Adams, writing of Swift (after defending him from the “ organized hypocrisy ” that Thackeray puts upon him by saying that he was a skeptic, and yet “his was a reverent and pious spirit; he could love and could pray”) remarks, that “he has contributed nothing to the world’s treasures of love and truth and wisdom.” And, again, Mr. Adams unhesitatingly asks, respecting Heine, “ Has he furthered the progress of any good and great cause ? Has he given to the world any thoughts for which it is the better or the happier ? ” Indeed, Mr. Adams leaves the impression that the result of Burns’s life would have been better had he followed the plow-tail, a sober peasant, without any poetic vagaries of fancy. There is something so irrelevant as to be funny in his criticism of Poe’s line, " ' a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore,’ — which, by the way, the angels would certainly not do.” The statement that Savage was probably happiest during his last few weeks at Newgate, because he was relieved from anxiety for the morrow, and that the same poet might have lived on £50 a year, would be, were it not for Mr. Adams’s seriousness, the grimmest satire. There is something ludicrous in the following sentences about Heine : “ If he did not make a very good Christian, it seems certain he would have made a worse Jew. . . . He was too indisposed to observe the commonplaces of life. . . . A young man of erratic habits, and, I fear I must add, of loose morals. . . . There was a good deal of Bohemianism in him,” etc., etc. The obviousness of these remarks is not against them, but their tone is supremely ridiculous. To make one more extract from a rich field, this defies characterization : “ that world of fashion and excitement, whose temptations Johnson shrunk from essaying, perhaps because he was doubtful of his Strength to resist them.”
But though one may find amusement in such criticism of life and in the results of such absence of the imaginative faculty, which rebuilds the house of circumstances and summons its old guest to live there once more, it may be doubted whether the volume reaches the standard of sound teaching, or rather follows sound modes of inculcating good morals. On finishing the perusal one has an impression that charity is no longer to be reckoned among Christian virtues. Take for a crucial instance the essay upon Chatterton. The story, the most touching tragedy in the history of English men of letters, we all know. The precocious boy, misled into a literary imposture by the success of a clever joke, freeing himself from his apprenticeship by injurious devices, went up to London to make a name. There was no impurity in his life, no instability in his aim or weakness in his will. The most that Mr. Adams can say of him (and he takes a slight provocation to say it) is, " It is painfully evident that Chatterton’s want of intellectual and moral discipline had given free scope to the meaner passions of his nature, to his petulant arrogance and diseased vanity.” But at London he did his best to earn his bread, and when, at last, he could no longer obtain the single stale loaf that was his whole week’s food he retired to his room, where, the next morning, were found the torn and scattered manuscript, and the dead body. Surely, if in days of weak suicide any one has left life in the “ high Roman fashion,” it was this boy. He
had worked with enthusiasm, diligent to sleeplessness, resolute and frugal, and he quitted the field only when there was nothing left for him but to starve. Is it fit to recall his memory, which has far different lessons, in order to place him among the rogues of a Newgate calendar for the edification of the Sunday-school ? As with him, so with the rest: the fault of these volumes is that they disregard the temptation offered to poetic natures, with the greater susceptibility of which no greater force of will is given ; that they disregard the debt of gratitude the world owes these great men of letters, and refuse the charity of silence ; and, most of all, that they present some of the finest natures in English biography in an ugly and repulsive phase, and thus falsify them. The youth who is taught to look on Burns mainly as a drunkard, on Chatterton mainly as a forger, on Heine mainly as a libertine, on Poe mainly as a debauchee, receives no good lesson, especially when the reason of their failure is reduced to the simple formula of the lack of orthodoxy. He may by later knowledge come to know the truth about these men, but meanwhile the direct influence of these sketches of them is to breed in him the arrogance of uncharitable piety, and to lead him to the selfpluming of moral mediocrity.
- William Lloyd Garrison and His Times ; or, Sketches of the Anti-Slavery Movement in America, and of the Man who was its Founder andMoral Leader. By OLIVER JOHNSON. With an Introduction by JOHN G. WHITTIER. Boston B. B. Russell & Co. 1880.↩
- The Life of Charles Hodge, D. D., LL. D., Professor in the Theological Seminary, Prince-ton, N. J. By his son, A. A. HODGE. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1880.↩
- The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin. By W. J. FITZPATRICK, LL. D. New edition, greatly enlarged and enriched. Two volumes. Dublin: James Duffy and Sons, M. H. Gill and Son. 1880.↩
- The Stage; or, Recollections of Actors and Acting from an Experience of Fifty Years. A Series of Dramatic Sketches. By JAMES E. MURDOCK. With an Appendix. Philadelphia: J. M. Stoddart & Co. 1880.↩
- Reminiscences of a Journalist. By CHARLES T. CONGDON. Boston : James R. Osgood & Co. 1880.↩
- The Reminiscences of an Idler. By HENRY WIKOFF. New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert. 1830.↩
- Wrecked Lives or Men Who Have Failed. BY W. H. DAVENPORT ADAMS. First Series. Second Series. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. New York: Pott, Young & Co. 1880.↩