The French romancers pretend to see deeper than others into the sources of sin and error; and have discovered the cause of the misery they produce, in legal and moral restraint. They accordingly argue that it is the duty of philanthropists to remove these restraints; and invite all men and women to commence the enterprise, and not be disheartened by the martyrdom it calls for at first. To assail prejudice naturally draws down obloquy upon the assailant. Great souls must not mind such annoyances. We perceive in this the French tendency to extremes. From the defects or imperfection of social institutions, such writers argue for their total overthrow. Marriage, for instance, is often a fertile source of misery to husband and wife. If either party chooses to break the connection, let the act, they would say, not be stigmatized as adultery, but hailed as indicating a mind superior to common prejudices. It is the same with other institutions. Because they are abused, they would dispense with their use. But robbery, adultery, blasphemy, and the like, are disrespectable; being under the social ban, they occasion other vices; make them respectable, and you make them beneficent. The object of these French romances is to exhibit characters who practise all that society calls sin, and yet are better than the society by whom they are denounced. This is the perfection of sentimental rascality.

Now, this literary compound of English ruffianism and French ethics has invaded the United States in large force; and it comprises at present a considerable portion of the literature which the people read. This literature would not be read unless it were attractive; and what is attractive is influential. Its effect upon character can hardly be estimated. Doubtless such matters as cheap

literary rascalities may be of small moment to the smooth scholar; but they should be of more importance than any other form of literature to the patriot and statesman. Good books are the most precious of blessings to a people; bad books are among the worst of curses. The romance of rascality in the imagination will be followed by the reality of rascality in the conduct. It contains in itself principles of demoralization which will inevitably be felt in action. This country is the only country where everybody reads. It is of much importance to know what everybody is reading. How much of this reading is ninepenny immorality, ninepenny irreligion, ninepenny stupidity, ninepenny deviltry? It might not be gratifying to the national pride of "the most enlightened people on earth" to answer this question.

THE CROAKERS OF SOCIETY AND LIT

66

ERATURE.

SO

In modern society there are innumerable obstacles in the way of obtaining or preserving a healthy condition of the heart and brain. The ten thousand prejudices, resulting from peculiarities of individual constitution, or those which are insensibly imbibed in social life, are apt to distort the mind, and vitiate the judgment and feelings. Society is cursed with so much deep-seated mental disease, and such a number of psychological epidemics, that it has been petulantly fleered at by some as a huge Hospital of Incurables." There is no nonsense transparent, no crotchet so ridiculous, no system so unreasonable, that it cannot find advocates and disciples. The maladies of the body, produced by artificial modes of living, reäct upon the mind, and infect the reason and sentiments; and many a spurious philosophical system is the product, not of induction, but dyspepsia; and many a plan of reform, assuming to come from the brain, has its true origin in the bile. A sickening feebleness covers its imbecile elegance, under the name of refinement, and the energy of disease and madness struts and fumes in the habiliments of power. Nothing is rarer than to see, among the vast mass of men, a healthy, strong-minded, simple man. From amiable weaknesses down to unamiable insanities, there are unnumbered dis

orders and infirmities which stunt the free growth and development of our natures.

One of the most melancholy productions of this condition of life is the sniveller, - a biped that infests all classes of society, and prattles from the catechism of despair on all subjects of human concern. The spring of his mind is broken. A babyish, nerveless fear has driven the sentiment of hope from his soul. He cringes to every phantom of apprehension, and obeys the impulses of cowardice as though they were the laws of existence. He is the very Jeremiah of conventionalism, and his life one long and lazy lamentation. In connection with his maudlin brotherhood, his humble aim in life is to superadd the snivelization of society to its civilization. He snivels in the cradle, at the school, at the altar, in the market, on the death-bed. His existence is the embodiment of a whine. Passion in him is merely a whimper. He clings to what is established as a snail to a rock. He sees nothing in the future but evil, nothing in the past but good. His speech is the dialect of sorrow; he revels in the rhetoric of lamentation. mind, or the thing he calls his mind, is full of forebodings, premonitions, and all the fooleries of pusillanimity. He mistakes the tremblings of his nerves for the intuitions of his reason. Of all bores he is the most intolerable and merciless. He drawls misery to you through his nose, on all occasions. He is master of all the varieties of the art of petty tormenting. He tells you his fears, his anxieties, his opinions of men and things, his misfortunes and his dreams, as though they were the most edifying and delightful of topics for discourse. Over every hope of your own he throws the gloom of his despondency. He is a limping treatise on

His

ennui, who invades sanctuaries to which no mere book could possibly gain admittance.

It must be confessed that all snivellers do not attain this height of their ideal, and that there are many degrees of foolery among the class. It requires a peculiar mental and bodily constitution, and an uncommonly bad experience of life, so to pervert the object of our being and the laws of our nature as to produce a finished whimperer. But still there is no community free from a multitude of croakers and alarmists, who display with greater or less completeness the qualities we have pointed out, and who afflict the patience and conscience of all good Christians within the reach of their influence. They are of various kinds, and exercise their miserymaking propensities in manifold ways. We find them. among lawyers, physicians, politicians, merchants, farmers, and clergymen, as well as among poets and old Wherever man, sin, and the gallows are, there is the sniveller. As a citizen and politician, he has, for the last three hundred years, opposed every useful reform, and wailed over every rotten institution as it fell. He has been and is the foe of all progress, and always cries over the memory of the "good old days." He is ever fearful of the present. His slough of despond of to-day is his paradise of to-morrow. As a clergyman, he has no force of reasoning or unction, but whines dubious y about the sin of the world, and the impossibility

women.

checking it; he tells his congregation that the earth is a vale of tears, that they should do nothing but lament over their degeneracy, and hints the probability that few of them can be saved from the fire that is not quenched. He makes the house of mourning more mournful, and