idiomatic, and his narrative power remarkable. If he does continue Macaulay's History, it will be the best continuation in literature-better than Martin Farquhar Tupper's completion of "Christabel."

In these stirring times many persons have very crude ideas of what it is to break the peace. Why should people fight? they ask. Hasn't the world got beyond fighting? Isn't peace the most desirable of all things? And ought we not to sacrifice a great deal for the sake of peace?

Certainly we ought. But it is the question of cowardice and baseness as well as of a sincere desire. It very readily degenerates into a cry for peace every where, at all hazards, and at every cost. But is there a noble man or nation any where that would take such ground?

Peace can always be bought if you will pay the price. If a robber stops you upon the road, if a burglar stands over your child and threatens, you need not break the peace, you have only to give them all they ask and there need be no blows, no disturbance. You may have peace if you will pay the price. A man leads you by the nose through the street-you have only to go quietly. A man kicks you you have only to wait for more. A man grasps your throat-you have only to stand still. He throttles you-you have only to drop dead.

In all these cases there need be no breach of the peace if you cheerfully submit. But now see-if a man assaults you in your person or your rights, who is the breaker of the peace if you defend yourself? There is no need of serving the devil with the Lord's weapons. No man is called upon to favor anarchy under the plea of preserving peace. In fact, if you

would have peace, be ready to maintain and defend it. Peace is a good thing-but only an honorable and manly peace. There is the peace of industrious activity, and there is the peace of death; a tree in a windless summer day is peaceful, so is a stagnant pool. When a man buys peace with dishonor does he not buy it too dearly?

IN Dickens's novel of "Great Expectations," which is now appearing in Harper's Weekly, the novelist returns to his earlier manner. There is more of his peculiar humor in the work than in any he has recently written. The characters are singularly original, and the plot striking and entirely new. The extravagance is a Dickens extravagance, bearing the same relation to life as the portraits of which it is said that they are more like the sitter than he is to himself. The extravagance of Dickens is like a tune played an octave above. It is the perfect melody, although nobody can sing it so high. Pip, the hero of the book, is a youth suddenly promoted from the smithy of his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery, upon the edge of the marshes somewhere in England, to the position of a young gentleman of great expectations. But neither Pip nor the reader suspect, until they are told, whence these expectations are derived, and then Pip and the reader are equally surprised. Joe Gargery is one of the uncouth beings with a heart as huge as his body, of whom Dickens is so fond, whose simplicity of nature confounds the worldly sagacity of shrewd men. And Dickens makes his readers no less fond of him. The great, blundering, ungrammatical, overgrown Joe, a kind of domestic Titan, helpless in speech, and of no education, is pathetic from his affectionate fidelity, and sublime through the naked instinct of duty. Miss Havisham is the next most emphatic sketch

of character. nuptial disappointment, and in her gray age her crazed brain holds her the prisoner of that tragical moment. She lives in her chamber garnished for the bridal, wearing her nuptial veil and dress which have grown yellow with time, tottering upon her cane about the table upon which the bride-cake moulds and the ghastly candles burn the whole year round. The object of her life is to destroy the peace of men-to break their hearts in revenge for her own grief. She is old and withered, and can inflame no heart with her own beauty, so she cherishes a young and superb girl, whom she has educated to be her avenger. A young, superb girl, Estella, like Maud, "Passionless, pale, cold face, star sweet on a gloom profound;

She was the victim of some bitter

Woman-like, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong."

Her part in the story, thus far, has been to insnare the affections of Pip, but without effort. She evidently does not wish that he should love her, and for some reason spares him the intentional torture of her charms. But for all that, Pip is hopelessly enamored.

The convict is a bold picture in Dickens's most vigorous vein; and Wemmick, the clerk of the criminal lawyer, who is a lawyer's clerk in town and a quaint, simple human being in the country, is one of those exquisitely humane touches which show the master of his art. Mr. Jaggers, the criminal lawyer, who knows all the evil-doers and who seems capable of all their crimes, is curiously contrasted with his clerk, suggesting, without any especial resemblance, the relation of Ralph Nickleby and Newman Noggs.

The plot of the story is thus far capitally concealed. The breadth and humor of the style are in the old manner. The richness of imagination, the affluence of invention, are as remarkable as ever. In these days of little new reading "Great Expectations" is peculiarly welcome.

SEVERAL of the best known and most benevolent of the men and women of Boston have been interesting themselves in the foundation of an Institution for Homeless and Outcast Women. "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more." Upon the list of names are merchants, lawyers, poets, clergymen, and people of all pursuits, with women who are to be found wherever the unfortunate are.

Of course the first emotion of all who read such a statement is that the project is amiable enough, but wholly impracticable. If a sin can only contrive to become monstrous enough it is finally regarded as a part of the natural order of things; and any attempt to remove it, or to obviate its effects, is looked upon like the effort to dig away a mountain. But this is always understood by those who have a little experience of any kind of reform. The nuisance is so comfortably intrenched, the world has become so used to it, that really it seems a very gratuitous task to try to abate it. If it be a profitable nuisance, the course of reform is like that of true love.

Let us suppose a bone-boiling shop which poisons a neighborhood with its noisome breath. When the question is first asked, the shop, which thinks that mild concession is the best way to paralyze the hostile movement, says plaintively, "Well, unluckily, I probably am a nuisance; I suppose I do smell rather strong. Pity, pity! Since bones must be boiled, it were to be wished that they could be boiled without smell. But, alas! in this world," sighs the fetid old shop, "what is perfect?"

The opposition is staggered by this courteous reception and confession. After all," bleat some of the weaker brethren, "the old shop puts it very reasonably. It does smell. It confesses it. "Tis the nature of boiling bones. Now bones must be boiled, and they will smell; but certainly this shop smells badly with the utmost politeness and regret. It would be very ill-natured to trouble such a courteous nuisance."

So at last it is kicked out.

Moral nuisances follow the same law. If the pressure against them is strong they usually succeed by a compromise: "Regulate us-don't abate us." Society, as a whole, capitulates under that name of compromise. But a few are unwilling still, and as they are entirely in earnest, they finally carry the day. It is a good rule, therefore, when you wish to do men service, to seek some unblazoned, struggling, apparently hopeless movement for relief, and help that. It is never difficult to follow the fashion. To set the fashion is quite another thing. John Howard is a heroic philanthropist whom we are inclined to undervalue, because prison reform is one of the accepted fashions of charity. (It is not said unkindly; and there is plenty more work to do in that direction.) But when Howard plunged into the dungeons of Europe, and brought the sunshine of human sympathy with him, his coming was like his whose feet are beautiful upon the mountains.

Our charity is languid so long as it is skeptical of any reform. The methods may be matters of difference and debate, but not the object.

It was not more a matter of course, a century ago, that debtors should be imprisoned than it is now that the friendless and outcast women of our society should be utterly lost. But we have grown wiser about imprisonment for debt: why should we indulge any foolish skepticism or despair of any other enlightenment?

It is proposed to found a self-sustaining and industrial institution for forsaken and homeless women. There have been many attempts to help this unhappy class, but they have failed for many reasons. Placing them in families is a method defeated by the prejudice of society. Then many kinds of employment devised for them are chosen regardless of their inevitable restlessness. "In work-rooms and female associations generally, the scorn of the untempted and the suffering of the fallen stamp every attempt to employ them with mortification and fail

ure."

The general plan of this movement contemplates the culture of fruits, vegetables, and flowers; the care of the dairy and of poultry; of green-houses and nurseries; the preparation of seeds and herbs, of pickles, preserves, and jellies, etc.; the cutting and making of common garments. Ten thousand dollars are wanted to begin with, which is to be raised by voluntary subscriptions in various ways.

The persons who are interested in this movement are precisely those who understand the peculiar difficulties of any such effort. They are neither Utopians, nor infidels, nor Sybarites. They are of the kind by which the work of the world is done. The least we can do is to cheer them by our hope, if we

A war can not be properly compared to a duel, because it is based upon denial of necessary rights or invasion. National honor, justly speaking, is the national loyalty to the principles of its Government. A nation may dishonor itself, as an individual may, by recreancy to principle, whether political or moral; and it is the most deadly of errors for the citizen of any Government to suppose that peace at all hazards is the duty of that Government; and equally unjust to assume that the war it wages is merely a quarrel upon a perilous point of honor.

F. B. will not have forgotten how well Tennyson puts this in his abused poem "Maud." He was charged with betrayal of the vocation of the poet because he denounced peace. But he did not. In the passages quoted against him he does not denounce peace. But he insisted, as every clearsighted man must, that there may easily arise an occasion in which war is the noblest and most peaceful part. He knew when the savage has raised his tomahawk over your child, that he who cries to you "Peace, hold your hand!" is a more mortal foe than the murderer. He knew that under the name and form of peace the most annihilating war may be waged upon all that makes society tolerable.

Let us refresh our remembrance of the closing lines of the poem in which, during the Crimean war, the poet laureate of England sang his hopes and fears of his country. There is no citizen in any land in our day who may not be warned by the words. True to his duty as a poet, a creative singer, Tennyson unfolds the eternal law of human nature and human society, that storm is better than stagnation, and that the spiritual laws of this world are just as resolute and sure in their operation as the laws of Ichemistry or the stock market. He insists that a seed planted in the ground is not so sure to germinate as wrongs and corruptions in society to rend and tear it at last like departing devils. And in saying it the poet only echoes the lesson of all history. The poet dreams. The vision

"Spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars.

And as months ran on and rumor of battle grew, 'It is time, it is time, O passionate heart,' said I (For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to be pure and true) 'It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye, That old hysterical mock-disease should die.' And I stood on a giant deck, and mixed my breath With a loyal people shouting a battle cry Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames
Horrible, hateful, monstrous-not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll'd!
Though many a light shall darken and many shall weep
For those that are crushed in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God's just doom shall be wreaked on a giant liar:
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
And noble thought be freer under the sun,
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the long, long canker of peace is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire."

EASY CHAIRS have a natural sympathy for Loungers. They seem almost made for them. Loiterers, lazy people, vagabonds, have all a kinship with the expansive arms and the comfortable cushions of the Chair. This Chair, of course, is no exception. So strong is the fellow-feeling that he always feels self-reproached if he rolls by an organ-grinder without giving him something for his melodious vagabondage-easy enough to others, but so wearisome to himself. A man is always so naturally suspicious that his virtuous indignation with a beggar is only an ingenious swindle of selfishness-a kind of Mr. Jenkinson of an emotion. You remember that Mr. J. was the moral scoundrel in green spectacles in "Pelham." And there are so many of those sleek, green-spectacled, ex-officio virtuous, scoundrels among our emotions!

I am trying to smooth the way to say that I am consciously and outrageously humbugged four times a year, once a quarter, by the most abominable Italian mendicant that ever went unwashed from Monte Rosa to Tarentum. It was about four years ago, one summer afternoon, hazy and languid as Capri in July, that I first saw this dreadful sinner. I was sitting quietly, as Easy Chairs do on warm afternoons, with all my four feet extended, and smoke exuding from where a mouth should be, if Easy Chairs had mouths. As I sat dreaming, I saw a seedy, utterly filthy, and obsequious figure approaching; an old man, evidently, and with his remnant of a hat in his hand, bowing almost to the ground, as he caught my eye, and leering upon me with fawning servility, as if wondering whether I should think him worth spitting upon. His hair was a mass of white bristles, and the combination of age and servility inspired a feeling of curious and painful loathing. The man's clothes hung tattered about him, and as he came near enough to speak he leered at me, his body still bent, and the head turning restlessly and appealingly toward me like that of an abject animal; and still grimacing, I saw his lips move and heard the words:

"Per amor' di Dio, Signore." What I was to do for the love of God he did not say, and there was no need of saying. The man actually squirmed as he spoke it; but the words came out full and clear and crisp, and his knee seemed longing to touch the ground that he might worship me.

I looked without speaking, and he handed a piece of paper that had the complexion of small-pox, cholera, and the plague. There was no mortal or disgusting disease that might not have been taken from that paper. However, I glanced at it, and saw that it was one of the certificates which are issued by some bureau of Mendicancy, and which solemnly attest innumerable absurd lies.

Still, I could not help feeling that however the paper might lie, and the man's tongue lie, and his beastly sycophancy lie, they did all tell the most tremendous truth. The man as he stood there could not lie. He could not prevaricate, nor hide the fact that he was an utterly disgusting and deplorable Italian beggar; and not only that, but a professional beggar, and a skillful but still hackneyed artist in his melancholy and miserable vocation. It was clearly up-bill with him in the world. He may have been in the country thirty years instead of the two which his paper set forth; he may never have lost his wife and children by something or other, as was also stated in his diseased credentials. It might be all a lie in the details; but the truth was undeniable, he was having a rough passage over the great ocean that we are sailing, and if any man probably had excuses for lying he was the man.

Probably there was something of this faint touch of sympathy in the sound of my voice, when I replied to him-mustering the best Italian I could recall, and asking him what he wanted.

There was a little less grimace as he answered, "A little money."

"But you are lying; and this paper is a lie: and you are a regular old vagabond and beggar."

I said it blandly, and it sounded like a musical compliment in my vaguely reminiscent Italian. He relapsed instantly into cringing depreciation : "No, Signore! Per l'amor' di Dio!"

I gravely asked him how long he had been in the country, and he instantly departed from the statement of the certificate, while his head gradually rose and his voice whined much less. He gave me a mouthful of ringing Italian, and ended by asking "Had the Signore been in Italy?"

Yes, the Signore had been there.

Sicuro: nothing could be plainer from the wonderful fluency and classic purity with which the dearest Excellency spoke Italian. He must have been every where in Italy! In Genoa? Yes.

Gia! In Florence?
Yes.

Wonderful! In Rome?
Yes.

Dear saints! But not in Naples?
Yes.

Gran' Dio! It is a miracle!

I said the old reprobate was an artist. He managed the details of his profession with perfect skill. At the least hint of familiarity his head rose and his voice began to lose its obsequious whine. At the least tone of superiority down went the head, out came the leer at the eyes, and the voice canted back again into the treble drawl. At some time of his life the man may have done some work. He said that he had once been a vine-dresser in Tuscany. He said so; but talking with some men is like walking upon quicksand. He was an idler by nature; a minion of the sun. He was ready to cringe and squirm his way through life, but not to work his passage. Yet he was such a thorough lazarone, such a demoralized Edie Ochiltree, that beside the